Asian stocks were mixed on Thursday, with only Taiwan seeing a slight increase among South Korea and Japan. Stocks in Tokyo fell 3.8% during morning trading after Tokyo's governor requested its residents to stay at home this weekend and urged companies to let employees work from home.

Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 closed the morning session at, 18,803.29 down 743.34 points.

Tokyo's Governor Yuriko Koike made the request at an evening news conference on Wednesday after the city reported 41 new cases of t he coronavirus on Wednesday - the highest single day increase so far.

South Korea's market opened slightly lower than the previous day's closing.

The benchmark Korea Composite Stock Price Index fell by 0.38% within the first 90 minutes of the trading.

Taiwan stock market rose slightly as Taiwan's main stock index rose 12 points or 0.12% to 9656.75.

Overnight on Wall Street, stocks scored their first back-to-back gains Wednesday since a brutal sell-off began five weeks ago, but much of an early rally faded late in the day as a last-minute dispute threatened to hold up a $2 trillion economic rescue package in Congress.
32 new cases of infection were detected for the day

The number of coronavirus infected in Ukraine has increased to 145 people, as Ministry of Health reports.

During the day, 32 new cases of infection were detected.

Five people died from Covid-19 in Ukraine on Wednesday evening. The last message about death from coronavirus came from Sumy region.

As we reported, first cases of coronavirus recorder in Volyn and Sumy regions.

Also, in Vinnytsia, first case of coronavirus infection was recorded.

Today, almost 90 thousand people have returned to Ukraine due to the spread of Covid-19 across European countries.

According to Prime Minister Denys Shmygal, any passenger movement across the border of Ukraine will be blocked, starting from March 27.

Meanwhile, the Cabinet of Ministers has extended a lockdown across the country for 30 days.

The government also has made the decision to introduce an emergency situation in Ukraine for a period of 30 days. Thus, it is expected to end on April 24, 2020.

"Statistics show that cases have been identified. Unfortunately, these statistics continue to worsen," Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmygal stated.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 21:50:05|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- A leading group of China's COVID-19 response on Thursday stressed measures to prevent the rebound of the epidemic within the country and called for stepping up prevention of imported cases by land and water.

The group, led by Premier Li Keqiang, called for comprehensive and scientific study and judgment on both domestic and overseas epidemic situation development, stressing that the complexity and severity of the epidemic situations should be fully recognized and should not be taken lightly.

Li, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, presided over the meeting.

The meeting stressed measures to target both imported cases and possible domestic epidemic rebound, calling for improving measures and mechanisms for emergency response and routine prevention and control.

The domestic epidemic prevention and control should be carried out in a precise manner, the meeting said, urging firm, solid and meticulous prevention and control efforts to prevent cross-border COVID-19 transmissions.

The meeting also called for orderly promoting the resumption of work and production while preventing and controlling the epidemic in a scientific and precise manner.

The achievements of the epidemic prevention and control work in Hubei Province and its capital city of Wuhan, the former epicenter of the outbreak, should be consolidated, said the meeting.

The meeting pointed out that Wuhan should still have a strong team of high-level medical professionals specialized in intensive care to increase the cure rate and reduce the fatality rate.

The meeting stressed preventing a rebound of the epidemic domestically, adding that once a case is found, measures should be exercised immediately over the people and places where the virus may be transmitted.

Noting the rapid growth of the epidemic overseas, the meeting called for stricter management on people entering the country and continuous efforts to further prevent importing and exporting the virus at airports.

The meeting also urged to strengthen cooperation with neighboring countries and border control to battle the outbreak.

Wang Huning, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and deputy head of the leading group, attended the meeting.
The whole of sporting world has been thrown into scare following report that Nigerian born British boxer, Anthony Joshua has gone into isolation over coronavirus pandemic.

The move became necessary after Joshua met with the Prince of Wales who tested positive for the deadly virus.

Read Also: DJ Cuppy, Anthony Joshua Mock Each Other As They Try To Speak Yoruba (Video)

According to Joshuas spokesman, he is currently well and wishes everyone affected a speedy recovery.

His words: He wishes everyone affected a speedy recovery and a huge thank you to all the front line key workers.
Theres a point in my moms drive from her job at a small-town emergency room in Louisiana to her house a few miles away where her phone signal drops out. Over the past few weeks, Ive come to know exactly when its about to happen  after she describes how tired she is from her shift, but just before she notices the new indentations on her nose and cheeks left by a protective mask she has worn for the previous 12 hours.

As of Monday, Louisiana had the highest growth in new coronavirus cases of any place in the world. Lately, my mom is at work more often than shes home. Since the virus is spreading quickly, the state is now under a shelter-in-place order, just like the Bay Area. People back home are social distancing, just as we are here, and nonessential businesses are closed while restaurants are doing only delivery and takeout orders. From here, it all looks familiar.

I want to say Im homesick for Louisiana. But Louisiana doesnt look like the home I know and love. It looks like California. And Georgia. And New York. As of Tuesday afternoon, 17 states had issued similar shelter-in-place orders, meaning more than 175 million people were encouraged to stay home and away from each other. Everywhere seems like everywhere else.

Thats what a global pandemic does  it strips away your geographical identity and sense of place. Point anywhere on a map and youll land on communities struggling with emotions as much as they are with crumbling economics. Theres a commonality to everyones suffering, and within it, an unwelcome feeling of familiarity.

The act of calling my dad these days feels familiar, but instead of talking about crawfish boils and barbecue sauce recipes as wed normally do this time of year, hes giving me Creole recipes best suited for cabinets filled by pandemic shopping, when only the bare essentials  rice, beans, a cache of spices  are available.

Catching up with my mom as she drives home from an E.R. shift isnt new to me, but paying attention to how shes breathing, whether shes coughing and constantly asking if her hospital has enough masks definitely is.

Everything seemed to change overnight for Louisiana. The state recorded its first COVID-19 case on March 9. Within 12 days, 20 people had died from the virus and there were hundreds of new cases. According to reports, some state officials believed the virus spread in the state may have been jump-started by the Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans in February, which attracts people from all over the world.

Theres an added level of helplessness when your family  and every part of your adult identity  is more than 2,000 miles away from you, as mine is. The data show Im not alone in this feeling in the Bay Area. According to a five-year sample of U.S. Census Bureau data released in 2017, only 30 percent of San Francisco and Alameda County residents were born in California. The data showed that in South Louisiana, nearly 75 percent of the residents were born in the state.

So many folks in San Francisco and Oakland are stuck watching their hometowns cope with an unprecedented pandemic. But instead of feeling solidarity, its hard not to feel youre alone.

Maybe establishing a sense of place can come from simply embracing the fact that were all going through this together. The thought process is similar to what I used during natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Storms and floods dont know economic boundaries, or race or social status. The struggles in their aftermath are identical for all, and the same can be said about this pandemic.

After Hurricane Katrina, there were physical barriers that kept families separated. Social distancing during the coronavirus is doing the same, on a global scale. Were all in the same predicament. And though my home state of Louisiana may not look like home again for a long time, at least there are thousands of other folks in the Bay Area who just might be saying the same thing about where they grew up. That may not be much of a reprieve from our collective sense of isolation, but maybe its enough.

Justin Phillips is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @JustMrPhillips
On the website of the nations largest car-title lender TitleMax and its Florida subsidiary InstaLoan, a letter from Otto Bielss, company president, reassures customers that 1,176 locations nationwide are being sanitized daily and are being cleaned like never before to ensure that your financial needs continue to be met quickly and effectively.

Nowhere in the full-page letter or on the website is there an offer to defer payments or similar measures to help existing customers tossed out of work because of the coronavirus.

Title loan companies are the bottom of the financial food chain. They offer small, high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers, referred to as the unbanked because these borrowers often lack a conventional checking account and are desperate enough to offer up the title of their car as collateral.

The companies provide a type of rolling loan that consumer advocates call a debt trap, while the lenders themselves say they provide an important service by supplying credit to those who otherwise would not qualify.

A $2 trillion economic stimulus passing through Congress seeks to get cash into the hands of working Americans to help recover lost wages and to significantly boost unemployment insurance. But those temporary patches are designed to ease the pain in hopes that the virus will be contained in the weeks ahead and the economy will return this summer to something approaching where it was.

For millions of low-wage workers and the unbanked, companies sometimes viewed as predatory lenders  cash advance firms, car-title lenders and payday loan companies  may fill the void.

Heres why consumer advocates are so worried. Labor Department statistics released on Thursday showed that more than 74,000 Floridians filed a first-time claim the prior week for unemployment insurance. That was a tenfold increase from the prior filing period but is a number seen as a sliver of the tip of a much larger iceberg.

Florida boasts giant hospitality, travel and tourism sectors, and all are getting crushed by the nationwide closures of businesses and public spaces to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

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It means that notwithstanding government stimulus funds people are going to need cash, and fast.

I can say that already at the payday loan shop near my house, the parking lot has been packed. Its already happening, people are desperate, and they arent looking at the costs they are incurring by using these types of predatory loans, said Alice Vickers, a longtime consumer advocate in Tallahassee. The failure of the state and federal government to address this quickly enough is pushing consumers towards loans they shouldnt take.

Densely populated Miami and neighbors are likely to see more layoffs and more people in need of cash, she said.

We know South Florida has been hit hardest for those who have tested positive for the virus, and we know that Miami-Dade has more stringent local regulation around being able to go to work, so I wouldnt doubt that you are going to see a bigger impact there, Vickers said.

Several alternative loan outlets in South Florida expect an increase in business with the local economy in a partial shutdown and unemployment spiking.

But for now its akin to watching an approaching hurricane.

Right now, its normal, said Delia Cancel, who works behind a plexiglas counter at Payday Solution, at 11655 NW Seventh Ave. near North Miami. A lot of my customers just got their income tax [refund] checks so they dont need to borrow.

It was a similar situation a few blocks up the road at Easy Cash, 13300 NW Seventh Ave. It sits on a thoroughfare dotted with storefronts offering fast cash.

Maurice Martinez stood behind the bulletproof partition wearing blue rubber gloves. He was alone in the store.

We are calling customers to see what their situation is. Can we give you a hand? 

So far there is no rush to borrow, but it is not clear how long that will last.

Who knows? said Martinez. Its day to day.

At least one Miami lender to the unbanked, recently opened Presto Payday, has temporarily halted certain types of loan products for fear desperate borrowers will get in trouble.

The business has suspended its cash advance loan product to prevent borrowers from building up debt they cannot repay, owner Bernie Navarro, founder of the Benworth Capital Partners, said in a statement.

Cash advance loans usually have a duration of one or two weeks and steep fees.

Although they are not conventional lenders like banks and credit unions, title loan and cash advance companies in Florida are being treated as providers of financial services and thus as essential businesses, allowed to stay open while restaurants, many big box retailers and thousands of small shops in strip malls are closed.

Non-bank loan sizes tend to range from $100 to $2,500, repayable in periods of two weeks to a month. Rather than an interest rate, they charge fees, and at the end of the period the amount due can become a new loan, subject to new fees on a now-larger balance. The hole being dug can get deeper and deeper.

Unlike the essential banks and credit unions, non-bank essential lenders are nowhere to be found in the guidance released Thursday by the nations five regulators that oversee banking and lending. They called on banks and credit unions to offer small loans to consumers and businesses hurt during the shutdown.

Such loans can be offered through a variety of structures, including open-end lines of credit, closed-end installment loans, or appropriately structured single-payment loans, they wrote. The agencies state that loans should be offered in a manner that provides fair treatment of consumers, complies with applicable laws and regulations, and is consistent with safe and sound practices.

To consumer advocates, that sounded dangerously like promoting the kinds of lending done by cash advance, payday and title loan lenders.

Essential consumer protection measures are absent from this guidance. By saying nothing about the harm of high-interest loans, regulators are allowing banks to charge exorbitant prices when people in need can least afford it, said a statement from six national advocacy groups, including the NAACP. They have also lent credibility to single balloon-payment structured loans, which have been shown to trap people in a cycle of repeat re-borrowing and crushing debt.

The advocacy groups, led by the Durham, N.C.-based Center for Responsible Lending, said banks were getting interest-free loans from the federal government during the crisis and should be required to cap annual rates of lending to consumers and small businesses at no higher than 36 percent. They noted during the crisis of 2008-2009 some banks offered creative loans that stuck some borrowers with effective annual interest rates as high as 200 percent.

We will be monitoring whether banks offer loans that help or loans that hurt, the groups said.

One of the five federal regulators giving guidance Thursday was the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, created in the aftermath of the Great Recession to protect borrowers from predatory and misleading lending.

The agency in January 2017 proposed new regulations that would force unconventional lenders to come up with a measure of a borrowers ability to repay. But that plan was soon afterward put on ice by the incoming Trump administration, which later proposed to broadly water down that rule and pushed off a final decision until November at the earliest. The CFPB has not issued any public guidance specifically for title loan and payday lenders during the unfolding COVID-19 crisis, and was silent about them in a new consumer tip sheet.

That potentially leaves the unbanked at risk, especially in South Florida.

Florida has been a place where generally the high-interest loans for those people who need money have been available, and the state generally has resisted federal protections when theyve come down, said Jose Javier Rodriguez, a state senator from Miami and vice chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. There is obviously a real need for people to be able to access money, and I think this is highlighting the issue of people taking on debt. It does raise a lot of concerns.

The InstaLoan outlet at 11686 NW Seventh Ave., near North Miami.

Advocacy group Georgia Watch has fought to cap loans at reasonable rates, not the triple digits presently allowed in that state. It proposes a usury cap of 60 percent, but pending legislation to accomplish that is on hold as the state legislature is closed during the crisis. Berneta Haynes, senior director of policy for the group, expects a rise in complaints in months ahead as unbanked Georgians get caught in debt traps offered by companies loosely regulated only on the local level.

Id be surprised if there is not a spike in calls, Haynes said, noting that in Georgia these lenders cluster in low-income, predominantly minority neighborhoods and lend primarily to females, many of them single parents.

Casey Frank in Miami contributed.
The Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (EPRA) will revoke licences of traders found to have hiked prices of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG).

In a statement, the Authoritys Director-General Pavel Oimeke warned LPG traders not to exploit consumers in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. This follows reports that some traders have hiked gas prices at retail points.

In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak and the financial strain it has caused majority of Kenyans, EPRA requires all LPG traders to behave responsibly and not result to any actions that will be construed as exploitative to consumers, Oimeke said.

The Authority further urged customers to ensure they are issued with receipts for all LPG transactions, clearly indicating the name, address and telephone number of the retailer as well as the name and telephone number of the consumer.

The receipt should also include the date of the transaction, the cylinder brand, the serial number of the cylinder, the net weight of the cylinder in kilograms, the unit price and the total price of the LPG sold, said EPRA.

Through our enforcement and consumer protection framework, we will work closely with relevant authorities to take firm action, including revocation of licenses, against any LPG traders who will be found culpable of hiking prices of LPG and generally not adhering to the guidelines issued.

Consumers can report any cases of price hikes or non-compliance with the above mentioned guidelines through EPRA hotline numbers 0708 444 000 or 0709 336 000 or through email to [email protected]
Across the country, schools are closed  many of them indefinitely. But child care centres are open, and offering extended hours.

Ontario committed to offering free 24-7 child care to essential workers 10 days after the province had decided to close schools, and only then, after outcry from doctors, nurses and police officers who couldnt find care for their children. Municipalities are scrambling to get emergency child care centres opened and operational, with most, including Toronto, saying they wont be able to open their doors before Friday.

In other words, it wasnt until workers from other sectors raised the alarm, that Ontario noticed it had a child care problem.

This pandemic has shone a light on the indispensability of child care to our society and exposed how child care workers  97 per cent of them women  are taken for granted.

Contrast Ontarios response with Quebecs, where the government announced school and child care closures at the same time it promised free child care would be available for essential workers. Quebecs first emergency child care centres opened on March 16, the same day Ontario said it would close all its licensed centres, offering nothing in their place.

This difference in approach is telling of a wider gulf in how these provinces value child care. Quebecs low-cost, universal child care has been in place for over 20 years, and its a big reason why Quebec women are employed at a rate that is five percentage points higher than women in Ontario.

Without parent fees coming in, its hard to know what options will remain for parents wanting to return to work once this pandemic has ended. Child care centres are low-margin and often non-profit organizations that will struggle to keep up with overhead costs such as rent. Many are likely to close their doors in the weeks ahead, which will worsen an already gaping shortage of spaces.

In hard-hit British Columbia, child care centres that remain open are eligible to receive seven times their average monthly government funding, while those that choose to close will receive support for fixed operating costs, like rent or lease payments.

Governments have been at a loss for how to support child care workers, who will be in harms way during this pandemic. Early studies suggest children are at less risk of serious illness from COVID-19, but they are likely invisible carriers and key spreaders of the virus.

The Ontario government has said it will be implementing as yet unspecified safety protocols in its temporary centres, but this should raise the eyebrows of anyone who has tried to maintain proper public health procedures around a toddler with a runny nose.

Even as their role in fighting the pandemic has become clear, child care workers remain an afterthought. Minister of Education Steven Lecce and Toronto Mayor John Tory were careful to praise the heroic efforts of our essential workers and thank the civil servants working overtime to open the new emergency child care centres, but neither of their statements thanked the child care workers who will staff these centres.

This is largely par for the course. Despite a growing body of research that links structured education in the early years to long-lasting benefits to the child and to society overall, the truth is that we have long undervalued child care as babysitting or womens work, even as we ask child care workers to nurture those most important to us. This social perception is changing, but progress is slow, and we have not yet seen the kind of sea change that countries like Denmark have worked hard to create.

Today, child care workers in Ontario are paid barely more than minimum wage. They have few benefits, little job security, and work long hours in a stressful work environment.

Unfortunately, the current pandemic is likely to undermine what little gains child care workers have made in recent years. One day soon, governments will again decide they are out of money, and that quality, universally accessible child care is a too-expensive frill that we cant afford right now.

Maybe this time, when the pandemic is behind us, we will remember the contribution that child care workers are making, at great personal risk to themselves and their families, and we will treat them and the child care system as something else  as essential.

Alexi White is the former director of Policy to the Ontario Minister of Education and co-host of the political podcast Ontario Loud.Monica Lysack is professor of Early Childhood Education at Sheridan College and former special adviser to the Ontario Minister responsible for Early Years and Child Care and the Status of Women.
On Monday 23 March the Prime Minister announced that we will be freezing residential rent increases and providing greater protections for tenants against having their tenancies terminated.

Why are we doing this?

We are doing this because in the wake of Covid-19, its more important than ever to ensure that tenancies are sustained and tenants do not have to face the prospect of homelessness during a global pandemic.

Its also critical from a public health perspective that we enable people to self-isolate in their own homes by ensuring that they can remain in their rental properties for the duration of this crisis.

What exactly do these changes mean?

The rent freeze is simple. Increases in rent are prohibited for the next six months for any reason.

The protections against terminations are a little more complicated. Landlords will be unable to terminate existing tenancies unless limited and specific, justified, reasons apply. The Tenancy Tribunal will act as a check to ensure that the limited and specific termination grounds are being used lawfully. These reasons are where the tenant:

 substantially damages the premises; or

 assaults or threatens to assault the landlord, their family, or the neighbours; or

 abandons the property; or

 engages in significant antisocial behaviour (defined as harassment; or any intentional act, if the act reasonably causes significant alarm, distress, or nuisance); or

 is 60 days behind in rent, which is increased from 21 days (and the Tribunal will need to take into account fairness and whether the tenant is making reasonable efforts to pay the rent)

Tenancies will also be able to be terminated upon the death of a sole tenant, or where the premises are uninhabitable.

Tenants will still be able to terminate tenancies as usual, although we encourage them not to unless absolutely necessary and to think carefully about whether they are managing the risk of spreading Coronavirus in doing so . If youre a tenant and youve given notice yourself but now need to stay in your current rental property, you can withdraw your notice.

Fixed-term tenancies will also convert to periodic tenancies upon the expiry of the fixed term, unless the parties agree otherwise or the tenant gives notice. This means that if your fixed term expires during lockdown, youll be able to stay in your tenancy.

When do the measures come into force?

The measures take effect within the next 24 hours.

However, if a landlord had already given a rent-increase or termination notice that will come into effect after this bill comes into force this notice is of no effect.

That means that if youre a tenant and youve been served a termination notice other than for the reason set out in the Bill, before this Bill comes into effect your tenancy will continue, if you want it to. You will be able to self-isolate in your rental property. If the Tribunal has made an order terminating the tenancy that will come into effect after this Bill comes into force, that order is suspended until the 15th day after the time period that the protections against termination apply (initially three months).

Increasing rent within the relevant timeframe or purporting to terminate a tenancy without grounds

are new unlawful acts with the Tenancy Tribunal able to order exemplary damages of up to $6,500 in

each case.

How long will this last for?

The rent freeze applies for an initial period of six months.

The protections against terminations will apply for an initial period of three months.

At the end of both initial periods, well evaluate whether they need to be extended.

What about boarding houses?

Boarding houses will also be subject to the rent freeze and similar protections against terminations.

However, in most cases a landlord will be able to issue a boarding house termination by notice in

order to to manage the safety and security of tenants in a shared boarding house tenancy. A

boarding house landlord will still need to go to the Tribunal to terminate a tenancy because of rent

arrears or anti-social behaviour.

Can landlords evict tenants so they can move into the home?

We need to ensure that people have certainty in their living situation as we go through these

unprecedented times. For this reason tenants cannot be evicted because the landlord or family wish

to move in. Our focus at this stage is to ensure as little disruption as possible and keep everyone in

stable housing regardless of tenure.

The Tenancy Tribunal

The Bill also provides that the Tenancy Tribunal has the power to have hearings on the papers,

without attendance from parties, if necessary. The Tribunal may also have hearings by telephone or

videoconference. This amendment is to give the Tribunal some flexibility in its proceedings during

this period. It will be up to the Tribunal how it manages this flexibility.
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low 27F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low 27F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph.
The family of Robert Levinson, a CIA contractor who disappeared on Irans Kish Island in 2007, confirmed Thursday that the US government informed them that the former FBI agent had died at some point prior to the coronavirus pandemic.

The United States had long pressed Iran to release Levinson, believing that Tehran was at least aware of his whereabouts if not actively detaining him. Iran has repeatedly denied knowledge of Levinsons whereabouts throughout the saga  a claim Iran repeated today.

2007: Levinson travels to Irans Kish Island in the Persian Gulf while working as a contractor for the CIA.

2008: The CIA reaches a $2.5 million settlement with Levinsons family to avoid a lawsuit.

2010: Levinsons family receives a hostage video indicating that hes alive. The video is not released until 2011.

2011: Levinsons family receives a series of photographs featuring the hostage, but do not release the photographs until 2013. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicates that theres evidence Levinson is alive somewhere in southwest Asia.

2012: The FBI offers a $1 million reward for Levinsons safe return. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies any knowledge of Levinsons whereabouts.

2013: President Barack Obama raises Levinsons case with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who continues to maintain that Iran has no knowledge of his whereabouts.

2015: The FBI increases the reward for Levinsons safe return from $1 million to $5 million.

2016: Obama vows to deepen our coordination with Tehran on Levinson after securing the release of four other US prisoners in a swap with Iran.

2017: The Levinsons files a lawsuit against Iran in a US district court.

2019: The State Department offers a $20 million reward for information leading to Levinsons safe return. Days later, the United Nations announces that Iran acknowledged having an open case against Levinson. Iran later clarifies that the open case relates to his disappearance.

2020: The Levinson family announces that the US government found that he died prior to the coronavirus pandemic. President Donald Trump acknowledges that Its not looking promising, but goes on to say, I wont accept that hes dead. They havent told us that hes dead. But a lot of people are thinking that is the case.

If not for the cruel, heartless actions of the Iranian regime, Robert Levinson would be alive and home with us today, his family said in a statement.

Know more: Trump arranged an Iran prisoner swap in December that did not include Levinson, reports diplomatic correspondent Laura Rozen. And be sure to follow her coverage regarding the medical furlough Iran has given to another US prisoner, Navy veteran Michael White, on account of the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the country.
No doubt this virus is going to teach numbers of lessons to humanity. It has made humanity to kneel in front of divine power. It has shocked world leaders.





by Dr SLM Rifai





Humanity is stunned with an exponential growth of corona virus across the globe. This pandemic has created chaotic situations across the globe. It has become a major health hazard to humanity. so many conspiracy theories are coming out about this deadly virus. It is reported this virus is deliberately created for some financial and political domination. We do not know if humanity could know the truth about this mysterious virus. According to David ICKE, one of the famous conspiracy theorists, this virus is created by some politico and technocratic cults to control worlds economic and financial powers. Yet, now, it has misfired and created unprecedented consequences. (please see the full interview of David ICKE on London Real: (The truth behind the coronavirus pandemic covid-19: lockdown and economic crash). Im not an economist to gauge the financial impacts of this tragedy and yet, what lessons humanity could learn from this uncontrollable epidemic disease? Whether we like or not this world is ruled today by some greedy economic thugs and cults. These political mafia will do any thing to protect their political and financial power. They do not mind how many million people are being killed in their geopolitical hegemony. Today, there is not any moral or ethical value in modern politics. I do not know whether this is a man-made disaster or natural disaster and yet, it has created a huge amount of suffering and hysteria among public.









No doubt this virus is going to teach numbers of lessons to humanity. It has made humanity to kneel in front of divine power. It has shocked world leaders. It has stunned medical professionals. It has made world economies to crumple. It has brought bustling world into a standstill. A tiny invisible army of corona virus is endangering entire humanity with its magic power. Modern man has been boasting with his technological and scientific advancement in recent decades. Yet, today, he cannot stand in front of this tiny invisible divine creature. What does it tell us? It tells us that there is a super-power behind all universal events in this world. No, a big or small event take place without divine wisdom and divine plan. This virus has been inflicting people indiscriminately. It does not discriminate between rich and poor, between old and young, between males and females and between weak and strong. No one is immune from the merciless attack of this tiny virus. The rulers and public are equally affected. This invisible creature teaches humanity so many lessons. It tells that man is weak and feeble in front of divine power. It tells us humanity depends on some supernatural or divine power for its protection and survival. It tells us humanity needs divine mercy and divine grace. It tells us humanity is always in needs of divine help. It tells us that life and death are in the hands of God. It tells us what doctors can do and what they can not do in time of emergency like this. More than 16000 people perished but doctors could do little to save them. More than 300 hundred thousand people are inflicted with this deadly virus and yet, doctors could do little to prevent people from inflicting with this virus.





It teaches world leaders a bitter lesson not to be arrogant. So called veto powered countries have been arrogant with their nuclear and high-tech weapons. In fact, some countries have been spreading corruption and creating trouble in many parts of the world, all those leaders should know that there is a super-divine power (God) to take them into account. This virus has made them realise that their power and their technologies can not stand in front of divine power. We see a widespread of injustice, mass killings, corruption, exploitation, and transgression. Innocent people are being killed for no reasons in thousands and yet, world leaders did nothing to prevent the mass murders across the globe. Now these leaders should realise there is a God to take them into account.





How many million people may have been affected by wars in all these third world countries? How many million people may have cried for help? How many thousand children may have been killed in all these wars? Some world leaders have behaved with arrogance in many international affairs. People of Palestine have been suffering for 70 years. Yet, US, Russian, China and all western countries have been supporting aggressive Israel. Similarly, India has been persecuting innocent Kashmir people and yet, no one dared to question India. This tiny virus may be a divine warning to all these pharaohs to amend their mistakes.





So called rationalists and atheists have been mocking and ridiculing divine power and super-natural powers. Europe is full of these rationalists and atheists. They have been challenging divine power and divine existence. I think that this contagious virus is teaching a bitter lesson for all those who deny divine existence. More recently, Yuval Noah Harari: an Israel historian and atheist has been mocking divine power and he has claimed that AI will conquer divine power and religion. He has claimed that AI will fulfil all human needs and man no longer in need of religious and divine guidance. Yet, with the spread of this deadly virus, God has demonstrated his power and we saw how people are begging divine intervention to protect them from this deadly disease.





Today, many world leaders are arrogant with their political power and they do not follow any religious guidance or any moral or ethical value. Chinese ruling elites do not respect religious values of its own people. The Chinese government cares only about its material gains at the expense of moral and ethical values. It has been persecuting its own people for its grip on power and likewise, the Russian government has been persecuting its own people for its grip on people. Contrary to this, people in western countries enjoy freedom and democratic values and yet, their leaders are trapped in geopolitical cold wars between world powers. Behind the scene, so many geopolitical cold wars take place between all these powerful countries. unfortunately, innocent people have become victims of all these hidden cold wars.





World leaders must stop stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Rather they must act swiftly to protect humanity from poverty, starvation, and famines. People are going to die out of this panic across the globe. Millions of people struggle to make end meets each day in the world. Yet, rich countries do not have any remorse on these poor people who die across the globe out of poverty and starvation. God has given humanity a golden opportunity to amend its past mistake. 1% of supper rich have been controlling 90% of world wealth, while million of people live on one dollar to survive. This disparity can not go for a long time in this modern world. Humanity should be united to encounter these capitalistic pharaohs of modern world.





This tragedy has united entire humanity beyond all religious, racial, national, linguistic differences to work for one goal. That is to protect humanity from this deadly virus. Today, entire global population is united in its fight against this deadly virus. This sense of unity among humanity should prevail all times to fight so many other global issues that post existential threat to human family. May God guide world leaders to work for the unity of humanity.
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Introduction:

Guava fruit is indigenous to Latin American countries such as Mexico and Peru. Due to its high nutritional value and varied use in processed products, guava is considered an important fruit in tropical and subtropical countries including India and Pakistan. Guava paste/puree is guava that has been cut, pulped, deseeded, refined and homogenized into a creamy liquid. In Europe and the U.S., guava is most popular as a flavoring ingredient and beverages industry in these regions have the high focus of guava puree, while the consumption of fresh guava fruit remains low. Most of the trade that occurs is in processed guava form namely puree and concentrate. The pink variety of guava is often preferred for nectars preparation and the white variety preferred for blends. Both puree and concentrate form may be found in sweet and sour format and can range from white to deep pink color. Overall, guava puree/pulp is used to produce guava nectar, juice, concentrate jam, and jelly.

To Get Free Sample Request Visit @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/20257

Guava Puree Market Segmentation

Production of guava is majorly concentrated in India, Pakistan, Brazil, and Mexico. Other producing nations include China, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Cuba, Israel, Sri Lanka, Sudan, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela. Most of the fruit that is produced is being consumed in the country of origin as fresh fruit. The majority of trade that occurs is in the form of puree and concentrate form. The processed form of guava is mainly traded from countries such as Mexico and Brazil, where most of the processing is destined for juice production. US Imports of guava paste/puree have been relatively stable in the last five years the flow of trade is mostly from Brazil and Dominican Republic. Ecuador is the top supplier of guava prepared/preserved to the U.S. and European markets, though its market share has slowly declined with an increase in competition. Mexico the main supplier of fresh guavas has recorded growth in demand in the processed guava puree segment, this significant growth is mainly fuelled by European demand for paste/puree. Costa Rica and El Salvador exports processed guava product to the U.S and Europe have also reported an increase.

Guava puree is segmented on the basis of source and end use. Based on the source guava puree is segmented as organic guava puree and conventional guava puree.

On the basis of end use, guava puree is segmented as; infant food, beverages, bakery & snacks, ice-cream & yogurt, dressings and sauces and others.

Guava Puree Market Global Market Trends and Market Drivers:

A lack of supply, failing to meet the demand for guava puree in the late 2015 lead to an increase in guava puree prices. These prices remained high with very little deviation in early 2016. The majority imports took place in form of guava pulp/puree and concentrate.

Food companies are producing snacks made from purees, for kids and infants. These snacks usually have a high quantity of grains or sugar with a hint of puree, which gives the snack its color and taste. For instance, Clif Bar & Company, a U.S.-based food company, has launched a new snack under the name Zbar, which is made of grain, fruit puree, and vegetable powder. The company claims that this fruit bar is organic and does not contain any GMO products. In APAC countries, processed food products demand is growing with a massive increase regarding growth rate. Many processed food products are produced from purees, which give an edge to the puree market against other fruits. People living in urban areas have a fast-paced life and tend to buy prepared foods and beverages from stores which are convenient and time-saving. Lifestyle itself is creating a strong market for the processed food and beverages market and is thus helping the food ingredients market grow, which includes purees.

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Guava Puree Market Key Players:

Some of the key manufacturers of guava puree include; ITC Limited, Dohler GmbH, Kiril Mischeff, Capricorn Food Products India Ltd., Aditi Foods India Pvt. Ltd., Superior Foods, Inc., Citrofrut S.A. de C.V., among others.
W ith the whole country being asked to stay inside, its not surprising that people have been flocking to Netflix to keep them occupied.

But while some people have been trying to distract themselves from the coronavirus pandemic, others have chosen to lean into the constant sense of dread, with films such as The Platform being one of the most watched items on the streaming service.

The 2019 Spanish-language film is set in a unique prison called The Hole, which sees cells stacked vertically on each other.

At mealtimes, food is sent down to prisoners on a platform, which is lowered down through the cells. Prisoners at the top of The Hole get to each first, while prisoners further down in this literal food chain are left with the scraps.

The best films to watch during self-isolation 1 /13 The best films to watch during self-isolation Bridget Joness Diary "If working here means staying within 10 yards of you, frankly, Id rather have a job wiping Saddam Husseins arse." Who knew that Bridget Jones was the original social distancing icon? The beauty of Bridget, Samuel Pepyss main rival for Britains greatest ever diarist, is she knows how to amuse herself just as much when she stays in as when she goes out. As we all lock ourselves in our flats, we can all follow the wise example set by our favourite singleton: choosing vodka and Chaka Khan. JT Available to buy on Amazon Prime Video Pride If the world ever needed a reminder of the good in people, its now. Pride is one of the most powerful British films ever made, and it has the feel-good factor by the bucket load. It follows the LGBTQ+ activists who joined forces with the Welsh miners during the strikes of 1984, with fantastic performances from George MacKay, Andrew Scott, Dominic West, Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, and plenty more. The films central message is the power people can have when they come together and mobilising as one. It's the exact opposite of staying home alone in self-isolation, but the spirit of triumphing over adversity is something everyone can get behind. HF Available to buy on Amazon Prime Video Wallace and Gromit A particular happy place of mine is the Films for ages 8 to 10 section of Netflix. Forget your true crime, or your mob epics, or your delicately assembled cinematic masterpieces  give me Matilda, Shrek or (the original) Jumanji. A recent browse led me to the four Wallace and Gromit shorts. Delightfully simple, slyly intelligent and with no shortage of nostalgia, theyre perfect for some comfort viewing. And theyre barely half an hour long, which means the ones on Netflix (A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out, A Matter Of Loaf and Death, and, best of all, The Wrong Trousers) are perfect for a back-to-back session. JE Available on Netflix The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro's well-mannered novella is beautifully rendered here, in a film that was nominated for eight Oscars. It is a quiet, polite film; it moves slowly, the frames gliding. And yet its entirely absorbing, a film to be lost in. It is a story of war, of corrupt power, of misguided gentility, of the changing of the world and those who commanded it. It is a story of fading social graces, of quiet reserve, of inner pain. It is also, really, a love story. An unrequited love story, in fact, those being the most painful and poignant of all. Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins captivate. A film to watch over and again. DE Available to buy on Amazon Prime Video Cool Hand Luke Thought self isolation was bad? It has to be better than being trapped in a Florida prison camp in the 50s, paving the roads on a chain gang. Here, Paul Newman delivers a career-defining performance as Lucas "Luke" Jackson, a war veteran imprisoned for drunkenly breaking parking metres; despite his army background and the way of the prison camp  submit, submit, submit  something in Luke refuses to bend. Watching him stand strong against the stinging lash of authority is inspiring, a reminder of just how much people can endure. That he stays laughing is better, a reminder of just how much people can survive with good humour. The end is a blunt instrument, but Newman is glorious. DE Available to buy on Amazon Prime Video Paddington 2 Watched The Godfather Part II too many times? Plump for Paddington 2 instead, which gives Michael Corleone and family a run for his money in the best sequel stakes. Being stuck at home with the kids (or without) is an excellent excuse to indulge in the utterly joyous jaunts of Ben Whishaws Paddington, Hugh Grants self-skewering, pompous actor, and Brendan Gleesons marmalade sandwich-making prison cook. AB Available to watch on Amazon Prime Video Ticks So-bad-theyre-good horror films are the eternal guilty pleasure. Recent additions to my watchlist are Unfriended, The Pyramid and Evil Aliens (all heartily recommended) but one I keep coming back to is Ticks. It tells the story of some troubled inner-city kids who are taken on a well-intentioned wilderness retreat, only to be plagued by a swarm of mutated ticks. The dialogue is hilariously awful and the ticks themselves are distinctly unscary. But the best thing is a genius bit of casting in which Alfonso Ribeiro, aka Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, plays a try-hard bully named Panic (They call me panic, cause I never do.) Its all ridiculous. Need we say more? JE Available to watch on Amazon Prime Video Legally Blonde At a time when all the odds feel stacked against us, who better to teach us how to cope than the fabulous and indefatigable Elle Woods. Admittedly, were trying to overcome a global pandemic and she was just trying to win back her snobby ex-fiance Warner, but the sentiment is the same. After Warner dumps her, she will not be immobilised by the crisis it brings to her life. Instead, she bags herself a place at Harvard Law School where he is also studying. He spots her in the corridor and incredulously asks: YOU got into Harvard Law? Her response? What, like its hard? An inspiration to us all. JT Available on Netflix Groundhog Day Is this day eight of self-isolation, or day nine? If the sunrises and sunsets are starting to merge, Phil Connors knows how you feel. Groundhog Day tells the story of a weatherman seemingly bound to relive the events of February 2 over and over and over again  sound familiar? Bill Murrays exasperation may ring a little truer than ever before. AB Available on Netflix Sony Pictures A Quiet Place We, like millions of movie fans, were devastated by the news that A Quiet Place Part II is being postponed from March 18 until further notice. Luckily, the original dropped onto Netflix over the weekend, and theres no better time to enjoy a cathartic scare and rewatch the horror hit of 2018. Director John Krasinsky achieved something remarkable with the first film, managing to produce a horror which isnt overly gory and doesnt rely on cheap jump scares to keep audiences interested. The central premise  make a sound and you die  is as simple as it is effective, and Emily Blunt delivers one of the strongest performances of her career as family matriarch Evelyn Abbott. Even when the future of the industry is in doubt, its a comfort to return to modern classics like this one  even if it does make us jump out our skin. HF Available on Netflix Jonny Cournoyer

The film, which is a metaphor for capitalism, greed and hope, has been eerily prescient in more recent times.

If you found yourself fascinated by The Platforms gloomy themes, here's what you should watch next...

Snowpiercer

The 2013 thriller, by the Oscar-winning Parasite director Bong Joon-ho, shares similar dystopian themes surrounding class divides. The film, with an all-star cast, is set after an attempt to stop global warming via climate engineering catastrophically backfires  and results in Earth plunging into another ice age.



The remaining members of humanity are now trapped on The Snowpiercer  a train that circumnavigates the globe. However, 20 years after the ice age first began, the train becomes increasingly divided between the wealthy elite at the front, and the poor in the squalid carriages surrounded by armed guards. When a revolt breaks out, it leads to disastrous consequences

Circle

The 2015 American psychological horror film sees 50 strangers suddenly awake in a darkened room  with someone out of the group being killed every two minutes or whenever someone attempts to leave.

After several deaths, the group soon realise that they can select who can die  which results in divisions emerging based on personal values and beliefs. Much like The Platform, Circle dips its toes into similarly tricky themes, such as class divides.

Ex Machina

The 2014 sci-fi thriller follows Caleb (played by Domhall Gleeson) after he wins the chance to spend a week at the luxury estate owned by the CEO of his tech company.

However, it transpires that Caleb is there to test the human capabilities of his robot Ava (Alicia Vikander). Similarly to The Platform, Ex Machina explores beliefs, morality and the ability to break free from established systems.

Bird Box

Sandra Bullock stars in the dystopian Netflix horror which sees a mother try and protect her children from an evil, corrupting force that drives people to suicide should they look at it. In order to try and find sanctuary, they must complete a trip down the river  blindfolded. Similarly to The Platform, Bird Box is thought to also be a wider metaphor for depression and other mental illness in society.

Black Mirror

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch - In pictures 1 /12 Black Mirror: Bandersnatch - In pictures Fionn Whitehead in Black Mirror, Season 5 Fionn Whitehead in Black Mirror, Season 5 Black Mirror, Season 5 Black Mirror, Season 5 Fionn Whitehead in Black Mirror, Season 5 Fionn Whitehead in Black Mirror, Season 5 Stuart Hendry/Netflix Fionn Whitehead in Black Mirror, Season 5 Stuart Hendry/Netflix Fionn Whitehead in Black Mirror, Season 5 Black Mirror, Season 5 Stuart Hendry/Netflix

Those who have yet to take a glimpse inside the warped mind of Charlie Brooker are in for a (dark) treat. The dystopian anthology series explores a new story in each episode, with The Entire History of You, Be Right Back and Metalhead being stand outs in the series. While the overall series outlook is grim, Black Mirror bare similarities to The Platform with episodes such as San Junipero and Hang the DJ, with offer a more hopeful outlook.

The OA

The psychologically twisted series centres around Prarie Johnson, who returns after having gone missing several years earlier. Now able to see after previously being blind, and with deep scars all along her back, Prarie says she should now be known as The OA, short for Original Angel). Mind-bending and metaphorical, fans of the series were left gutted after the series was cancelled, seeing the hashtag #SaveTheOA trending on Twitter.

The Rain

Another survival horror, The Rain is eerily prescient to modern times as it follows a group of children who are abandoned after a brutal virus wipes out the majority of the Scandinavian population. The virus is meant to be carried in the rainwater  which sees the young survivors desperately trying to avoid getting caught in a downpour. The young cast echoes similarities to The Platforms child, who was meant to symbolise hope.

Money Heist

If The Platform got you hooked onto Spanish language thrillers, TV series Money Heist may appeal. The story follows eight thieves, each with different abilities, attempt to rob from the Royal Mint of Spain as they take hostages and lock themselves inside the heavily guarded building. With series 4 coming next week, theres plenty for viewers to binge on during self-isolatio.

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The Finance Ministers package announced on Thursday must be viewed as the second in the series of measures to be announced by the government to address the negative impact of the Covid-19 virus. The first announced was in the area of compliances regarding time lines, which were relaxed by three months to June.

The same is being done now for the poor in what can be called the second package, which is again looking at a three-month horizon. The outlay is to be Rs 1.7 trillion - around 0.75% of gross domestic product (GDP) and can be taken to be a fiscal stimulus. The variety of ...
Bill Ackman had started the hedge on 3 March. He has claimed to have made $2.6 billion after betting that the markets would crash due to coronavirus.

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has claimed to have made $2.6 billion after betting that the markets would crash due to coronavirus.

The owner of Pershing Square Capital Management appeared on television a few days ago and called for the markets to close.

The 53-year-old wrote a note to his investors on Pershing Sqaure funds website and said that they had completed the exit of their hedges generating a profit of $2.6 billion.

He had made a bet saying the coronavirus outbreak would crash the market. The American investor had started the hedge on 3 March, and it had cost him about $27 million.

On 18 March, Ackman had tweeted to US President Donald Trump, asking him to declare an extended spring break and shutting down the country for the next 30 days and close the borders.

Follow LIVE updates on the coronavirus outbreak here

After this Twitter bombardment, Ackman appeared in a CNBC interview to say that he had locked down his office in mid-February and sent his employees home in anticipation of the rapid spread of the virus.

He also said that American companies should stop share buybacks so that they can save cash as hell [was] coming. His views changed in the upcoming days as his firm started to relax on its bet and later used the money to buy shares in major firms such as Starbucks and Hilton Hotel Chain.

According to The Guardian, if this profit goes on to be confirmed, it will become one of the most profitable trades ever to be disclosed by a hedge fund.
By PTI

KATHMANDU: Nepal has reported its third case of coronavirus in a 31-year-old man who returned from the Gulf as the government has announced a week-long nation-wide lockdown to battle the pandemic.

As of now, it remains unclear when the man entered Nepal, said the National Public Health Laboratory spokesperson Rajesh Kumar Gupta.

"Our laboratory confirmed the positive case yesterday night," Gupta said on Wednesday.

The man is currently in isolation at the Sukraraj Tropical and Infectious Disease Hospital here and the laboratory has informed the Ministry of Health and Population about the result, the Kathmandu Post reported.

ALSO READ: Coronavirus outbreak - Nepal seals borders with India, China

This is Nepal's third confirmed case of COVID-19 and the second active case.

Earlier, on Sunday, a 19-year-old Nepali student who had returned from France via Qatar had tested positive for the coronavirus.

In January, a 31-year-old Nepali student who had returned from Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei province in China had tested positive.

CLICK HERE TO READ CORONAVIRUS LIVE UPDATES

The man recovered and was subsequently discharged from the hospital.

The government mandated week-long nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of the virus came into effect on Tuesday.

The markets remained closed and roads wore a deserted look barring the vehicles of security personnel and medical facilities.

The government has already closed its borders with India and China for a week starting Monday.
With nine coronavirus cases already confirmed, Gazas medical facilities are gearing up for the pandemics onslaught.

Scarcely two years ago Gazas border with Israel was a deadly front line, with black smoke swirling around thousands of Palestinian protesters as they faced off against Israeli troops firing live ammunition.

The border fence is much quieter now in the run-up to the second anniversary on March 30 of The Great March of Return  protests by Palestinians seeking to regain access to land, now in Israel, from which their ancestors fled or were forced to flee during the countrys creation in 1948.

And with the highly contagious coronavirus spreading, organisers and Palestinian armed factions are discussing whether to cancel or scale down commemorative events.

Whatever they decide, Gazas medical facilities have already switched their focus from protest casualties to the pandemic.

With nine coronavirus cases already confirmed in the Gaza Strip, hospitals that were once overwhelmed by gunshot wounds and amputations are now gearing up for a very different challenge in a densely populated, coastal enclave of two million Palestinians, many living in refugee camps.

A new quarantine centre has been set up in Rafah, near the border with Egypt, and 42-square-metre (452-square-feet) tents donated by the World Health Organisation that once served as trauma stabilisation points have been moved to tackle the new threat.

All of the tents and medical supplies that had been used during the marches of return have been employed in the ministrys measures to protect our people against coronavirus, Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said.

WHOs head of the office for the occupied Palestinian territories, Gerald Rockenschaub, toured the new Rafah facilities last week as his team delivered lab-testing supplies and personal protective equipment.

Measures have been put in place but Gaza is a very challenging environment, it is a very crowded environment, he said. There are shortages everywhere, in medication, in electricity and in supplies. We are trying to address this.

Deadly protests

It is not yet clear what will happen to the weekly border protests that came to redefine the modern era of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But the incompatibility of crowded protests with new health realities is not lost on march organisers. There is a debate and it is more likely large gatherings that had been planned will be cancelled, one senior organiser said.

Gaza medical officials say 215 Palestinians were killed in the two years of border protests, with another 8,000 suffering gunshot wounds, 88 percent to the limbs.

During that period, one Israeli soldier was killed on the border during the demonstrations by a sniper.





In 2019, UN Human Rights Council investigators said Israeli forces may have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, with children and paramedics among the fatalities.

Israel defended its response, describing the protests as riots and saying it faced attacks instigated and organised by Hamas that rules Gaza.

Last week, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said soldiers remained vigilant against attempts to breach the fence.

We continue to assess the situation and continue to monitor what Hamas and other terrorist organisations in Gaza are doing, he said.

The stated aims of the protests were an end to the Israeli-led blockade on Gaza and for its refugees to have the right to return to land in Israel where their ancestors once lived.

Israel refuses any such right of return, fearing it would lose its Jewish majority. It cites security for the blockade after the takeover of Gaza in 2007 by Hamas, which is regarded as a terrorist organisation by Israel and the United States.

In Gaza, the scars of the protests are everywhere, and remain a source of controversy.

I dont think they achieved anything, said Mohannad al-Aswad, 30, who says he lost his right leg after being struck by an Israeli bullet in 2018. Once a construction worker, he now sells hot drinks at a street stall.

I ruined my life, that of my wife and of my children, al-Aswad said at his home in Sheikh Radwan. They tell us to be strong  but my life was destroyed, I cant fool myself.

But Hamas official Ismail Radwan said the protests forced a relaxation of the blockade of Gaza. The occupation wouldnt have agreed if it wasnt because of the marches, he said.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday his government has told the Trump administration that it is not in favor of the U.S. putting troops at the U.S.-Canada border amid the pandemic.

Trudeau said government has been in discussions with the White House about convincing the U.S. not to put troops on the the border.

"Canada and the United States have the longest un-militarized border in the world and it is very much in both of our interests for it to remain that way," Trudeau said.

It is something that has benefited our two countries and our both economies tremendously and we feel it needs to stay that way, he said.

Few people cross into the border into the U.S. from Canada illegally. And COVID-19 cases are surging more in the U.S. than in Canada.

Canada has 3,409 cases, 35 deaths and has tested over 158,000 people.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Gov. Noem lauds state economy, but big legislative fights are coming

Noems speech flowed between business and economic development, lifestyle issues and social issues that were united by their conservative themes.
ATLANTA, March 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- With concerns about germ transmission at an all-time high and businesses increasingly concerned about public health, pest control leader Orkin, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rollins Inc. (NYSE: ROL), announced today a new service that will help businesses quickly and thoroughly suppress a wide variety of serious pathogens.

In dense places where people congregate, if high-touch surfaces such as countertops, fixtures and public seating are not disinfected, harmful viruses such as the novel coronavirus can spread rapidly. Just like frequent, careful handwashing is a basic measure for humans to stave off virus transmission, large-scale sanitization is imperative to keeping establishments where people shop, eat and work as sterile as possible. Orkin VitalClean is an effective option for reducing risk and helping restore a safer and healthier business environment.

Currently, no service or product has received approval from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for killing the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) because it's too new. However, Orkin's VitalClean service uses an EPA-registered disinfectant labeled for use against a wide variety of pathogens, including other known coronaviruses (specifically feline coronavirus and canine coronavirus) and the influenza strains that caused two other global outbreaks  swine flu and avian flu. When applied at full strength in accordance with the product label by trained Orkin technicians, this powerful disinfectant will kill 100 percent of bacteria and viruses on hard, non-porous surfaces.

"The disinfectant product we use is incredibly effective against other coronaviruses, has almost no toxicity and has been approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for fast-track review by the EPA for specific use against the SARS-CoV-2 virus," said Judy Black, Vice President of Quality Assurance and Technical Services, Rollins, Inc.

Beyond its sanitizing and disinfecting strength, the disinfectant Orkin uses for VitalClean treatments is rated by the EPA as Toxicity Category IV, their lowest toxicity rating, defined as "practically non-toxic and not an irritant," contains no ozone-harming volatile organic compounds and is mild on skin, hard surfaces and fabrics.

"We have been using this product for years to sanitize commercial facilities after pest cleanouts," said Black. "Now we are pleased that it can serve a broader public health purpose as well."

"Orkin's longstanding priority is to help protect and ensure the safety of our customers and co-workers," said Freeman Elliott, President, Orkin, LLC. "During this unpredictable and stressful time, for businesses especially, we want to do our part to help. There's no silver bullet for stopping COVID-19 yet, but this powerful cleaning treatment should prove to be a very important step in helping to remove pathogens from facilities."

For more information, visit vitalclean.orkin.com.

About Orkin, LLC

Founded in 1901, Atlanta-based Orkin is an industry leader in essential pest control services and protection against termite damage, rodents and insects. The company operates more than 400 locations with almost 8,000 employees. Through Orkin's Points of Service process  Investigate, Protect, Fortify, Keep Watch, Report and Follow Up  Orkin provides customized services to approximately 1.7 million homeowners and businesses in the United States and has nearly 100 international locations in more than 65 countries. Orkin is committed to studying pest biology and applying scientifically proven methods. The company collaborates with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and eight major universities to conduct research and help educate consumers and businesses on pest-related health threats. Learn more about Orkin at Orkin.com. Orkin is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rollins Inc. (NYSE: ROL). Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram.

CAUTION CONCERNING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This release contains statements that constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements include the Company's claims that Orkin VitalClean will help businesses quickly and thoroughly suppress a wide variety of serious pathogens; provide an effective option for reducing risk and helping restore a safer and healthier business environment; will kill 100 percent of bacteria and viruses on hard, non-porous surfaces; can serve a broader public health purpose than its current commercial use; and should prove to be a very important step in helping remove pathogens from facilities. The actual results of the Company could differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements because of various risks and uncertainties, including without limitation, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the potential impact on global economic conditions and on capital and financial markets, changes in consumer behavior and demand, the potential unavailability of personnel or key facilities, modifications to the Company's operations, and the potential implementation of regulatory actions; economic and competitive conditions which may adversely affect the Company's business; the degree of success of the Company's pest and termite process, and pest control selling and treatment methods; the Company's ability to identify and integrate potential acquisitions; climate and weather trends; competitive factors and pricing practices; the Company's ability to attract and retain skilled workers, and potential increases in labor costs; uncertainties of litigation; changes in various government laws and regulations, including environmental regulations; and the impact of the U. S. Government shutdown. All of the foregoing risks and uncertainties are beyond the ability of the Company to control, and in many cases the Company cannot predict the risks and uncertainties that could cause its actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements. A more detailed discussion of potential risks facing the Company can be found in the Company's Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the year ended December 31, 2019.

SOURCE Orkin, LLC
After Prince Charles tested positive for coronavirus, a video of his son Prince William joking that he and Kate Middleton were "spreading" it went viral.

In the video dated March 3, 2020, Prince William joked about the deadly coronavirus outbreak while he was on a royal visit to Dublins Guinness Storehouse in Ireland.

Prince William, the son of Prince Charles and the Duke of Cambridge, during his first official tour to Ireland, asked the emergency workers if the coronavirus was being given the importance it didn't deserve.

William spoke to a paramedic from the National Ambulance Service during the visit and made flippant comments about the novel coronavirus.

I bet everyones like, Ive got coronavirus, Im dying and youre like, No, youve just got a cough, he said. The Duke of Cambridge is heard saying this in a joking tone before adding, It does seem quite dramatic about coronavirus at the moment. Is it being a little hyped up, do you think, by the media?

Here's well-known virologist and epidemiologist Prince William saying people are being dramatic about #COVID19 and anxiety has been "hyped up" by the media.



In other news, Prince Charles (first in line to the throne) now has it pic.twitter.com/26oWVkgpes  Will Black (@WillBlackWriter) March 25, 2020

Prince Williams comments came the same day that his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, was seen wearing gloves during an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace which was believed to be a precaution against the coronavirus.

Soon after the video went, people were shocked with the distasteful comment and couldn't help but point out the irony of it all:

#1

Appalling, what school did he go to?  Gary and Margaret Whipp (@WhippGary) March 25, 2020

#2

Rich people speak  tanglewood lion (@tanglewood1234) March 25, 2020

#3

Not the brightest bulb on the tree.  Rosamond Bovey (@Francophile_66) March 25, 2020

#4

Cringy.

Just like when he said he was bored with racism..  Out of the royal plantation (@Adios_yuckTeeth) March 5, 2020

#5

Cringy.

Just like when he said he was bored with racism..  Out of the royal plantation (@Adios_yuckTeeth) March 5, 2020





While Prince Charles tested positive, it is reported that his symptoms are relatively mild at present and all the members of the Royal Family are self-isolating in different locations.



Reuters

Charles and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall  who does not have the coronavirus  are self-isolating in Scotland. The Prince had reportedly been occupied with a few social engagements in recent weeks. The royal statement also ruled out the possibility of ascertaining 'from whom the Prince caught the virus owing to the high number of engagements he carried out in his public role during recent weeks.


Barbara Ramsey grew up in a small northwest Iowa town whose only claim to fame was having the Worlds Largest Popcorn Ball.

Now the 1st Congressional District candidate is hoping to earn a spot representing the district for the U.S. House. The position is currently held by incumbent Jeff Fortenberry.

This is the first time Ramsey has run for an elected position. Even though shes never run for office before, Ramsey said she has a strong background in government.

Ramsey graduated with a degree in Information Technology, which led to a job as a Technical Sales Engineer. Through that job, Ramsey gained experience working in budget design, network implementation and has designed courthouses, sheriffs offices and city halls. She also has experience working with a federal contractor.

Ramsey currently lives in Bellevue, where she works at CHI Health.

Ramseys policies center around healthcare, trade and equal rights for women and the LGBTQ population.

Ramsey said healthcare has been a key talking point between herself and voters during the campaign. She said she plans to invest in Medicare-For-All. Implementing the system would lower costs to the American healthcare system and would cover everything from physical to mental healthcare.

I dont care what we call it, but we must recognize universal healthcare as a right and join the rest of the world in applying it, she said.

Ending the current trade war remains one of Ramseys main talking points as she moves forward throughout her campaign. On her website, Ramsey notes a Nebraska Farm Bureau figure which estimated that Nebraska farmers would lose $943 million in revenue in 2019 due to tariffs enacted by President Donald Trump.

She said she will fight to repeal a section of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 that would allow the current and future administration to impose tariffs or a trade war without going through Congress first.

No further administration can enact a trade war without going through Congress. Thats one of my big things, she said.

Ramsey also discussed her belief in focusing on equality for women and the districts LGBTQ population, a cause that she said is close to her heart as she identifies as a trans woman.

Ramsey was a strong supporter of the Equality Act, which passed the House in May 2019. The act would amend the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on ones sex, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Congressman Jeff Fortenberry voted against the bill.

Its really hard for us to maintain a job or get hired because of who we are, she said. Its something that has happened to me. Finding a job has been difficult as a trans woman and its the same story for several other people.

Ramsey added that she was the only pro-choice candidate running in the field.

Its important to me to advocate for womens rights, she said. As a trans woman, Im able to understand that. We have a ways to go through society and its important to stand up for those rights.

Ramsey said one of the key differences between her and Fortenberry doesnt lie in policy. She said shes made an effort to focus on approachability, while Fortenberry has done the opposite.

He has the habit of not talking to voters and being there for them, she said. He has no rural history at all.

Ramsey said her background growing up on a farm and stacking hay, combined with her local and federal government background, make her an approachable and experienced candidate.

People really want a representative, she said. What people love most about me is that Im just like them.

Ramsey said she shies away from political speak, focusing on the importance of sharing a conversation with the members of her district.

Out in Wahoo, I met a couple of farmers and they said they were expecting just another politician and they appreciated how down to earth I was, she said. I think thats important. Even though Ive worked with the government I know what its like to live paycheck to paycheck. I have all this experience and knowledge that I relate to them.

She said her life experience has given her a strong advantage throughout the campaign.

I think its huge to my campaign, she said. Ive traveled the district and met with people one-on-one and talked for hours on end. They think Im a real person and our job is to make peoples lives better for them.

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Calculate how much you would get from the $1,400 (or more) coronavirus checks

A third round of stimulus checks, part of the Biden administrations American Rescue Plan, has been signed into law.

Use the calculator below to see how large a check youll receive. If youve already filed your 2020 taxes, the check will most likely be based on that income. If you havent, it will be based on your 2019 taxes.

The $1.9 trillion bill looks a little different from the legislation originally approved by the House. Provisions for increasing the minimum wage to $15 were struck down by the Senate parliamentarian, and the income eligibility for stimulus payments was narrowed.

[Whats in the Senates $1.9 trillion covid bill: Checks, unemployment insurance and more]

Americans with income below a certain threshold  $75,000 for individuals, $112,500 for heads of household and $150,000 for couples filing jointly  will each receive $1,400 per person as a direct deposit or mailed check. Households will receive an additional $1,400 for each dependent claimed on their most recent tax filings.

Whats different this time

At $1,400 per individual, this will be the largest stimulus check yet for most Americans. The first round paid $1,200, and the second paid $600. Before the Georgia Senate runoff, Biden pushed for a $2,000 stimulus payment. His administration now considers the latest bill and the December checks to be part of the same round of stimulus, for a total of $2,000.

[Calculate how much you would get from the expanded child tax credit]

As with the last two payments, some Americans will get a partial check if their income is above the threshold. However, these amounts will phase out much faster than in the past two coronavirus relief bills. That means that some Americans who received money in the first two rounds of checks wont get anything this time.

Stimulus check phaseout for single tax filers

[Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty in defining move of presidency]

The narrowed eligibility was a concession from Biden to moderate Democrats, whose votes were needed for passage of the bill in a closely divided Senate.

Dependents will get the same amount as adults. The first round gave just $500 per child dependent vs. $1,200 for adults, while the second round gave $600 checks to both. Dependents that are 17 or older are also included in this round of stimulus.

In addition to the stimulus checks, the massive economic package extends unemployment benefits into September, increases the child tax credit, and reserves billions for state and local aid, coronavirus testing and vaccinations, and other provisions such as rental aid and food assistance.

correction A previous version of this page miscalculated how stimulus checks for dependents would phase out.
UN chief Antonio Guterres on Thursday warned that the world is not winning the war against the deadly novel Coronavirus and needs a war-time plan to fight it as the number of infected cases across the world grow exponentially every day.

The UN Secretary-General was speaking at the G20 Virtual Summit on the COVID-19 pandemic hosted by Saudi Arabia, which holds the G20 presidency this year.

We are at war with a virus and not winning it. It took the world three months to reach 100,000 confirmed cases of infection. The next 100,000 happened in just 12 days. The third took four days. The fourth, just one and a half, Guterres said.

This is exponential growth and only the tip of the iceberg. This war needs a war-time plan to fight it, Guterres said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also taking part in the virtual summit along with leaders from the group comprising 19 industrialised countries and the European Union.

The UN chief said solidarity among the G-20 and with the developing world, including countries in conflict, is essential to deal with the crisis.

Recalling his appeal for a global ceasefire, Guterres said the first critical area for concerted G-20 action is to suppress the transmission of COVID-19 as quickly as possible.

That must be our common strategy. It requires a coordinated G-20 response mechanism guided by World Health Organisation, he said, adding that all countries must be able to combine systematic testing, tracing, quarantining and treatment with restrictions on movement and contact aiming to suppress the transmission of the virus.

He said nations also have to coordinate the exit strategy to keep the virus suppressed until a vaccine becomes available.

There is also need for massive support to increase the response capacity of developing countries.

It is also essential to work together to minimize the social and economic impact.

"The G-20 came of age in the 2008 financial crisis. The challenges before us dwarf those of 2008. And what we face today is not a banking crisis; it is a human crisis, he said.

Underlining that while the liquidity of the financial system must be assured, emphasis must be on the human dimension and nations must concentrate on people, keeping households afloat and businesses solvent, able to protect jobs.

This will require a global response reaching double-digit percentages of the global economy, he said, adding that he welcomes infusions of liquidity and social and economic support in developed countries with direct transfer of resources to people and businesses.

Noting that a stimulus package to help developing countries with the same objectives requires a massive investment, Guterres said there is need for greater resources for the International Monetary Fund and other International Financial Institutions, a meaningful emission of Special Drawing Rights, coordinated swaps between central banks and steps to alleviate debt, such as a waiver of interest payments.

Guterres also appealed for the waving off of sanctions that can undermine countries' capacity to respond to the pandemic.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  The Supreme Court on Thursday confirmed that a staff member of Associate Justice Amy Lazaro-Javier has been diagnosed with the coronavirus disease.

"We immediately informed and got in touch with all court personnel who may have had contact with the said staff of Justice Amy Lazaro-Javier. So far, they are all ok and in good health," the high court's spokesperson, Brian Hosaka, said in a statement.

Lazaro-Javier in a separate statement said the staffer last reported for work on March 12, and left at around noon when she started having fever. The office was sanitized the following day.

The staff member's fever persisted from March 12-18 so she got tested on March 19, the magistrate said. The result came out positive on March 24, according to the city health office of Bacoor, Cavite.

To help with the contact tracing, Lazaro-Javier said the staffer regularly took SC Bus no. 8 to and from work and had no recent travel history overseas.

"All our staff have been observing proper health and hygiene measures and self-quaarntine since [Chief Justice's] announcement regarding modified work schedules," Lazaro-Javier said.

Chief Justice Diosdado Peralta earlier suspended work at the judiciary from March 16 to April 15 to prevent any spread of COVID-19. Only the courts and court offices handling urgent matters and cases were allowed to operate.

Peralta on March 19 tested negative for COVID-19 after exhibiting some symptoms upon returning from the Netherlands. He ordered the closure of all courts nationwide starting March 23 amid rising cases of COVID-19.

The Philippines now has 636 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Of this number, 38 have died while 26 have recovered.

CNN Philippines' Anjo Alimario contributed to this report.
Shelley Davies waits for her delivery at Plants and Friends./Douglas Zimmerman/SFGate

Confirmed coronavirus cases are increasing faster than initially expected, California officials said, indicating the much-anticipated surge may be on the way.

"We originally thought that it would be doubling every six to seven days. We see cases doubling every three to four days," California Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Mark Ghaly said at a news conference Wednesday. Ghaly said at that rate, he expects hospitals will see a surge in one to two weeks.

As of Thursday morning, California has over 3,000 confirmed cases, far behind the U.S. coronavirus epicenter of New York. New York City alone has over 21,000 cases and the state is reporting nearly 400 deaths as hospitals reportedly face "apocalyptic" conditions. Ghaly said, at this rate, California now is on pace to match New York's numbers.

Preparing for the worst-case scenario is on the minds of California politicians, who are warning residents to stay vigilant.

"The worst days are still ahead," Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said on Wednesday.

In a press conference yesterday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Dr. Grant Colfax, the city's public health director, said San Francisco hospitals need 1,500 more ventilators and 5,000 additional hospital beds to prepare for a potential influx of serious coronavirus cases in the city.

Breed said she reached out to Vice President Mike Pence and the Trump administration about securing additional resources.

"I hope they will deliver for the people of this state and the people of this country," she said. "Time cannot be wasted on interactions that don't lead to the kinds of results we need."

Colfax spoke to the measures San Francisco has already taken, noting that the city has hired 80 new nurses, begun preparing non-hospital locations for patients, continued to obtain additional personal protective equipment supplies, and decreased the number of in-hospital visits for non-critical cases.

The city is preparing for "a scenario like what is playing out in New York this very day," Colfax said.

Where cases have been confirmed in the greater Bay Area:

ALAMEDA COUNTY: 164 confirmed cases, 4 deaths*

Fore more information on Alameda County cases, visit the public health department website.

*Number excludes infected patients in City of Berkeley, which has its own health department and 14 cases.

CONTRA COSTA COUNTY: 108 confirmed cases, 1 death

For more information on Contra Costa County cases, visit the public health department website.

LAKE COUNTY: 0 confirmed cases

For information on Lake County and coronavirus, visit the public health department website.

MARIN COUNTY: 60 confirmed cases

Fore more information on Marin County cases, visit the public health department website.

MONTEREY COUNTY: 24 confirmed cases

For more information on Monterey County cases, visit the public health department website.

NAPA COUNTY: 3 cases

For more information on Napa County cases, visit the public health department website.

SAN BENITO COUNTY: 9 confirmed cases, 1 death

For more information on San Benito County cases, visit the public health department website.

SAN FRANCISCO COUNTY: 223 confirmed cases, 2 deaths

For more information on San Francisco County cases, visit the public health department website.

SAN MATEO COUNTY: 195 confirmed cases, 5 deaths

For more information on San Mateo County cases, visit the public health department website.

SANTA CLARA COUNTY: 459 confirmed cases, 17 deaths

Fore more information on Santa Clara County cases, visit the public health department website.

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY: 32 confirmed cases

For more information on Santa Cruz County cases, visit the public health department website.

SOLANO COUNTY: 31 confirmed cases

For more information on Solano County cases, visit the public health department website.

SONOMA COUNTY: 34 confirmed cases, 1 death

For more information on Sonoma County cases, visit the public health department website.

In California, 67 coronavirus-related deaths have been reported, according to Johns Hopkins University.

SFGATE digital editor Alyssa Pereira contributed to this report.

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

Sign up for 'The Daily' newsletter for the latest on coronavirus here.

Katie Dowd is a digital editor with SFGATE. Email her: katie.dowd@sfgate.com.
With Italy in dire need of medical equipment, an economic superpower stepped in to help.

No, not the United States.

It was China.

Beijing last week promised Rome a thousand ventilators and 2 million masks, part of a global outreach effort that includes massive donations across Africa and a $20 million gift to the World Health Organization earmarked to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, proposed slashing the U.S. contribution to the WHO last month and has said very little about international cooperation to stop the spread. Instead of providing aid abroad, Trump has been soliciting it. According to a readout by the South Korean government, Trump on Tuesday asked that countrys president if he could provide medical equipment to the U.S.

It was an extraordinary request from a U.S. president and a jarring contrast to the role America usually plays in a global crisis. Meanwhile, international observers have watched as American governors have squabbled with the president over whether he is properly managing the response in his own country.

As those scenes play out daily, China senses a moment of opportunity to portray itself as a powerful and competent player on the world stage, former officials and experts told NBC News.

Were bungling this in a fairly open and transparent manner, said Jude Blanchette, who holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Beijings push for global leadership is able to get so much tailwind by virtue of the relative absence of any U.S. leadership.

Image: (AFP - Getty Images)

To be sure, there is broad consensus among health experts that Chinas initial efforts to cover up the virus outbreak fueled what has become a global contagion. The U.S. remains the largest funder of the WHO and most international organizations, and the Trump administration ponied up $14.7 million for the WHO coronavirus fund.

In interviews, Trump administration officials strongly rejected the idea that China had any chance of exploiting the outbreak, saying Beijings international assistance was limited and politically motivated, and that the rest of the world would not forget where the virus came from.

Story continues

They lit the fire and they are only selectively providing firefighting equipment to those they want to save, a senior administration official said, citing the assistance to Italy as an example.

China scholars consulted by NBC News dont disagree, but many also say that what counts most now is not how the outbreak started, but how it ends.

China is now working very hard to position itself as the country that got out ahead on this virus, took extraordinary measures to contain it and that saved a lot of lives abroad  and that is now willing to share its capabilities and its knowledge and its finances to help others around the world deal with it, Kenneth Lieberthal, senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution, said.

Trumps message has been that America is going to look out for its own interest, not for the interest of others, former CIA Director John Brennan, an NBC News contributor and frequent Trump critic, said. Thats why China and Russia are stepping in. They see the U.S. retreat in many respects from its traditional leadership role as presenting opportunities to them to demonstrate that they are an available alternative.

Chinese leaders saw the 2008 financial crash as a historic shift in the global order, a telltale sign of decline in American power and influence. Now they see the U.S. response to the coronavirus in a similar light, and they have ramped up their propaganda in an attempt to seize the initiative, Ely Ratner of the Center for a New American Security think tank, said.

Beijing is going for the knockout punch. There's no hiding what they're doing here, said Ratner, who served as the deputy national security adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden.

The Trump administration's incompetence at home and its lack of leadership abroad is creating a completely open field for them to run down, he said.

Image: U.S. President Trump, with Pence, leads the daily coronavirus response briefing at the White House in Washington (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters)

Six years ago, the U.S. led an international effort to combat the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, deploying thousands of troops and medical teams, setting up treatment centers and mobile testing units. But this time, Trumps America First outlook, and the scale of the crisis in the U.S., has created an international vacuum that Beijing is eager to fill, experts said.

To make its case, China has unleashed a stream of propaganda, touting its delivery of medical supplies from Serbia to Indonesia to Ethiopia, and dismissing the U.S. response as a failure. Beijing is even spreading brazen disinformation suggesting without evidence that the U.S. military somehow was behind the outbreak, despite all signs pointing to the epidemic starting in the city of Wuhan in Chinas own Hubei province.

Washington has the most to lose here because the U.S. has more moral credibility, Blanchette said. Beijing doesnt have to win  it just needs the U.S. to lose.

The Trump administration and its allies say China is trying to distract attention from its own failures in handling the outbreak, including silencing doctors and others who tried to alert the world to the gravity of the epidemic.

Since the virus started in China in December, the Chinese Communist Party has retaliated against its citizens and journalists in China for making information public, launched disinformation campaigns around the world, and limited the international communitys access to valuable public health information, a senior administration official said.

The official said China "started the pandemic" and yet provided a "paltry" $20 million into the WHO's coronavirus response fund, less than 3 percent of the $675 million the world body hopes to raise by April.

"Thats shocking and a disgrace," the official added.

Dan Blumenthal, of the American Enterprise Institute think tank, dismissed the idea that China could replace the U.S. as a credible international leader, and said he's convinced that once the crisis passes, Washington would resume its traditional role.

Sending out masks and attacking the U.S. through a disinformation campaign is not taking the reins of global leadership, Blumenthal, who served in the Pentagon under the George W. Bush administration, said.

China also will be hounded by questions over missteps in its initial response and the regimes reported attempts to cover up the extent of the outbreak, he said.

But the world will not soon forget the image of a U.S. president asking for basic supplies from the leader of a country, South Korea, it once liberated in war, former U.S. officials and foreign affairs experts said.

Its too early to predict how the coronavirus outbreak will shape the global order, but it is clear the U.S. at a minimum will suffer a black eye to its reputation, Michael Green of the Center Strategic and International Studies, said.

Were going to take a huge soft power and PR hit over the next two months, partly because were an open society, said Green, who oversaw Asia issues on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush White House.

In the longer run, the U.S.-China competition could depend on which nation develops a successful vaccine or how quickly either country bounces back from the coming global recession. Then its a question of how do we recover, and what does it take? Green said.

China could prove more vulnerable to the recession caused by the outbreak, as its economic might is heavily tied to foreign markets, particularly in the U.S., Green said. China cannot grow without the global economy, he added.

When it comes to providing material assistance in the current crisis, China enjoys an advantage over the U.S. China is a leading manufacturer of surgical masks, N95 respirators needed by health workers and pharmaceutical ingredients used to make antibiotics  all crucial for the public health challenge produced by the pandemic.

Image: Boxes of N95 protective masks for use by medical field personnel are seen at a New York State emergency operations incident command center during the coronavirus outbreak in New Rochelle (Mike Segar / Reuters)

That competitive edge has prompted renewed calls in Washington to reduce Americas dependence on supply chains linked to China, particularly for strategic or critical goods such as medical equipment or sensitive technology. White House trade policy adviser Peter Navarro said earlier this month the administration plans to introduce a buy American executive order intended to decrease U.S. reliance on Chinese-produced medicine and supplies.

Another consequence of the jockeying by Beijing, and the response from Washington, is that the two global powers are not working together to solve the crisis. Instead, they have been sniping at one another.

Tensions were running high between Washington and Beijing even before the epidemic. But the two sides have engaged in a bitter war of words in recent days that has raised the specter of a new cold war.

Trump and his deputies repeatedly have referred to the Wuhan virus or the China virus, infuriating China. Critics say the Trump administrations finger-pointing has been counterproductive, at a time when the world needs both countries to find common ground to combat the virus.

After national security adviser Robert OBrien said Chinas response to the epidemic may have cost the world two months time, Beijings foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian fired off a tweet in English, suggesting the U.S. could be behind the outbreak, without citing evidence.

"When did patient zero begin in U.S.? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be U.S. army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan, Zhao wrote.

I keep thinking weve reached the nadir for U.S.- China relations and we keep finding there is a new trough just around the corner, Blanchette said. An existing low level of trust has exacerbated a public health disconnect between the two countries at the very center of this global pandemic.

Lawmakers in Congress have expressed outrage at Chinas disinformation efforts. Republican Rep. Mike McCaul of Texas and others have called on Twitter and other social media companies to purge their platforms of Chinese propaganda.

In recent days, both sides have pulled back. The Chinese ambassador to Washington gave a conciliatory interview this week to Axios, distancing himself from the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus started in America, drawing praise from the Department of State.

Trump, in turn, appeared to dial back his tone in the past few days, dropping his reference to the China virus.

Administration officials said Trumps change stemmed from a decision at the White House to ease up on the rhetoric, which was in part driven by a recognition that the U.S. needed key medical supplies from China, including protective equipment and drugs.

But Trump said Tuesday that he started calling it the Chinese virus because Beijing was falsely saying it came from U.S. troops, and hes stopped using that label now because its clear to the world where the virus came from. Look, everyone knows it came out of China, but I decided we shouldnt make any more of a big deal out of it, Trump said during a town hall with Fox News.

The U.S. and China should find a way to work together, experts said.

There are some issues that are simply transnational and to treat them otherwise is to display a level of ignorance that is profoundly damaging to everyone, Lieberthal said.
Workers at Northern Ireland's biggest private sector employer walked out yesterday after a dispute over measures in place to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Around 100 out of 1,000 workers at the Seagoe, Portadown, site of Moy Park walked out. Trade union Unite said it took place after the company failed to agree union proposals for safer working.

With a total workforce of 13,000 across the UK, France and The Netherlands, Moy Park is Northern Ireland's biggest private sector employer and one of the UK's biggest poultry processors.

Meanwhile, 80 workers at meat processor ABP also walked out in a row over conditions in its Lurgan factory.

A spokeswoman later said: "The safety and wellbeing of our colleagues is paramount and the company has introduced a variety of additional measures at all sites in recent weeks in response to Covid-19... the company is taking guidance from the relevant public health authorities and is continually reviewing the situation to take additional steps where necessary."

Businesses such as food factories have been allowed to stay open because they provide an essential service.

A spokeswoman for Moy Park said: "The health and wellbeing of our team is our most important consideration and we have put new, robust measures in place to keep them safe... we had already identified seven areas to enhance social distancing.

"These measures include staggering breaks, re-spacing workstations and communal areas, as well as installing screens on appropriate production lines.

"We also continue to make provisions for those who can work from home to do so using remote technology as well as increased cleaning and the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE)."

Angela McGowan, the Northern Ireland director of employers' body the CBI, said businesses were trying to do the right thing.

"Many firms in critical sectors have implemented huge changes in the workforce to keep their employees safe, while simultaneously ensuring that essential products and services keep flowing...

"Both businesses and people must make every effort to follow social distancing guidance in very difficult circumstances."

One person raised concerns about generator manufacturer Caterpillar's Larne site and its adherence to social distancing.

It is understood Caterpillar's work in making generators for organisations including hospitals qualifies it as an essential business which can remain open.

A spokesman for Caterpillar said: "Caterpillar continues to operate its Larne facility while adhering to government guidance. Our employees' safety, health and wellbeing remain a top priority."

One man at a smaller firm claimed he had requested paid leave as his own health - and that of a family member - placed them both in 'at risk' categories. However, the employee was refused paid leave, including payment at 80% of salary as per the government's employee retention scheme.
March 26 (Reuters) - Airasia Group Bhd:

* TO TEMPORARILY SUSPEND SOME INTERNATIONAL & DOMESTIC FLIGHTS OPERATED BY AIRASIA BHD

* AIRASIA INDIA TO TEMPORARY SUSPEND ALL FLIGHTS FROM 25 MARCH 2020 FOR 21 DAYS

* AIRASIA MALAYSIA TO TEMPORARY SUSPEND ALL INTERNATIONAL & DOMESTIC FLIGHTS FROM 28 MARCH 2020 TO 21 APRIL 2020

* AIRASIA THAILAND (FD) TO TEMPORARILY SUSPEND ALL INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS FROM 22 MAR-25 APRIL; DOMESTIC OPERATIONS CONTINUE AT REDUCED FREQUENCY

* PREPARED TO REINSTATE SERVICES AS SOON AS SITUATION IMPROVES, SUBJECT TO NECESSARY REGULATORY APPROVALS

* AIRASIA INDONESIA SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS FREQUENCY; DOMESTIC OPERATIONS CONTINUE AT REDUCED FREQUENCY

* AIRASIA PHILIPPINES TO TEMPORARILY SUSPEND ALL INTERNATIONAL, DOMESTIC FLIGHTS FROM 20MARCH-14APRIL DURING LUZON COMMUNITY QUARANTINE

* AIRASIA PHILIPPINES TO TEMPORARY SUSPEND ALL INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC FLIGHTS FROM 20 MARCH 2020 TO 14 APRIL 2020 Source text https://bit.ly/3dvpAbb Further company coverage:
Experts say vulnerable populations such as the Rohingya will likely be disproportionately affected by COVID-19.

Experts and activists have warned that about one million Rohingya refugees living in the crowded and cramped camps in Bangladeshs Coxs Bazar are vulnerable to coronavirus infections.

The wretched conditions in the camps, where most of the Rohingya Muslims arrived in 2017 to escape a Myanmar military crackdown across the nearby border, are fertile ground for any disease, experts say.

The public in other countries is being told to keep two metres (six feet) apart. That is the width of most paths in Kutapalong, the worlds biggest refugee camp with 600,000 Rohingya, that are clogged each day with people out on the daily hunt for food and fuel.

Masks that have become a daily essential in much of the world are rarely seen. Sanitiser is unheard of.

Each shack is barely 10 square metres (12 square yards) and they are overcrowded with up to 12 people.

You can hear your next-door neighbour breathing, said one aid worker.

Social distancing

Social distancing is virtually impossible in the camps, Bangladesh head of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) Paul Brockman said

The scale of the challenge is immense. Vulnerable populations such as the Rohingya will likely be disproportionately affected by COVID-19, the illness caused by new coronavirus, he told AFP news agency.

Bangladesh has reported only a handful of coronavirus deaths and less than 50 cases but the public and experts fear there are many more.

The Rohingya barely know about the disease as the government cut off most of their access to the internet since late last year under measures to clamp down on the refugees.

Fears have mounted, though, since a Rohingya family of four who returned from India last week was quarantined at a UN transit centre for testing, officials said.

A Bangladeshi woman in nearby Coxs Bazar has also tested positive for new coronavirus, adding to the numbers.

We are extremely worried. If the virus reaches here, it will spread like wildfire, said Rohingya community leader Mohammad Jubayer.

A lot of aid and local community workers people enter the camps every day. Some diaspora Rohingya have also returned in recent days. They may be carrying the virus, he said.

Camp resident Lokman Hakim, 50, expressed deep concern at the lack of preventive measures in the camps.

We have received soap and been told to wash our hands. And thats it, Hakim said.

Relying on the mercy of Allah

Another community leader, Sayed Ullah, said there was much ignorance and misinformation about the virus because of the internet shutdown.

Most of us dont know what this disease is about. People have only heard it has killed a lot of people. We dont have the internet to know what is happening, he said.

We are relying on the mercy of Allah, he added.

The United Nations, which has used volunteers and aid workers to launch hand-washing and hygiene campaigns in the camps, has urged the government to restore normal internet services.

Life-saving health interventions require rapid and effective communication, said Louise Donovan, UN spokeswoman at the camps.

Communication is key to the timely and effective management of this situation, she told AFP.

The Bangladesh refugee commissioners office refused to say whether authorities would restore the internet.

Authorities have concentrated on cutting outside access to 34 refugee camps.

We have minimised aid activities in the camps. Only food, health and law-related work will continue, said Bimol Chakma, an official from the commissioners office.

Rohingya living in countries hard-hit by coronavirus have been trying to warn people in the camps through phone calls from abroad.

Many expatriate Rohingya have returned to the camps without being screened.

If they carry the virus and mingle with crowds, it would be another massacre, much bigger than what happened in 2017, said Australia-based Rohingya activist Mojib Ullah, referring to the deadly clampdown in Myanmar that UN investigators said amounted to genocide.
By Sanjeev Miglani and Nivedita Bhattacharjee NEW DELHI/BENGALURU (Reuters) - India's 1.3 billion people were under lockdown on Wednesday to prevent an explosion of coronavirus cases as the government struggled to deliver essential goods and calm nerves. Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered everyone indoors for the next three weeks, saying it was the only way to avoid a disaster and effectively shutting down Asia's third-largest economy. Crowds of people thronged shops to stock up on milk, rations and medicines in the hours before the restrictions went into effect at midnight on Tuesday even though Modi said these would be available throughout the lockdown

By Sanjeev Miglani and Nivedita Bhattacharjee

NEW DELHI/BENGALURU (Reuters) - India's 1.3 billion people were under lockdown on Wednesday to prevent an explosion of coronavirus cases as the government struggled to deliver essential goods and calm nerves.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered everyone indoors for the next three weeks, saying it was the only way to avoid a disaster and effectively shutting down Asia's third-largest economy.

Crowds of people thronged shops to stock up on milk, rations and medicines in the hours before the restrictions went into effect at midnight on Tuesday even though Modi said these would be available throughout the lockdown.

Others including labourers and day workers headed home to the countryside from cities such as Delhi, many walking because public transport also stopped.

"My daughter needs allergy medicines regularly. The medicine shops are open but how do we reach there?" said Yash Goswami in the northern town of Moradabad. "Who wants to risk a run-in with the police?"

Reuters photographers witnessed several cases of Indian police officers hitting people out on the street with sticks. One rickshaw driver, who showed bruises on his calf, said he was defying the lockdown because he was unable to feed his four children otherwise.

The Home Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some medical companies said the lockdown was complicating their operations, with workers struggling to get to work and products stuck.

India's tally of 606, including 10 deaths seems tiny compared with those in China, Italy and Spain, but health experts have warned that the world's second most populous country faces a tidal wave of infections if tough steps are not taken.

The lockdown comes after evidence indicated it was spreading out into India's countless small towns after a first wave in Delhi, the commercial hub Mumbai, and other big cities.

That has raised the prospect of a cash-strapped public health sector being overwhelmed. India has just 0.5 hospital beds for every 1,000 people, compared to 4.3 in China and 3.2 in Italy.

"The only way we can save ourselves is by social distancing, and staying inside our homes," said Information Minister Prakash Javedkar. "A little bit of inconvenience now will save so many lives."

India's population is even more densely packed than China's, raising the risk of rapid transmission of the virus.

In New Delhi, Modi met his cabinet at his residence, with ministers sitting apart from each other in a large room.

STIMULUS

The government is considering an economic stimulus package of more than 1.5 trillion rupees ($19.6 billion) to fight the downturn, two sources said. The economy was already growing at its weakest pace in more than a decade.

"Asking people to stay at home is necessary but the majority of the population can't afford to sit at home without work and pay," said Madhura Swaminathan, head of economic analysis at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bengaluru.

British bank Barclays pegged the loss to India at $120 billion or 4% of GDP.

"We are shaving down our calendar year 2020 (January- December) GDP forecast from 4.5% to 2.5% and for financial year 2021( April 2020-March 2021) forecast to 3.5%," Rahul Bajoria, chief India economist, said in a report.

Other countries in South Asia - home to a quarter of the world's population - are also struggling as they try to put up defences against the coronavirus.

Pakistan's tally of cases rose to 1,022, with eight deaths, its Health Ministry said.

Authorities have shut down Sindh province, home to its largest city Karachi, even though Prime Minister Imran Khan said he was opposed to a full lockdown because the poor would suffer the most.

Sri Lanka has sealed itself off from the outside world, suspending all flights in and out of the island nation.

India, the world's main supplier of generic drugs, on Wednesday banned the export of a malaria drug that is being tested as a coronavirus treatment, saying it had to meet domestic demand.

Bangladesh, the second-largest apparel producer in the world, unveiled a $588 million package for its export sector, asking companies to use the money to pay workers.

(Additional reporting by Aditya Kalra, Neha Dasgupta, Sankalp Phartiyal in New Delhi, Nupur Anand and Alexandra Ulmer in Mumbai; Ruma Paul in Dhaka; Editing by Clarence Fernandez, Angus MacSwan and Alison Williams)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
A former Government chief scientist has said that coronavirus patients over the age of 90 should consider not going into hospital to avoid being a 'burden' on the health service.

Professor Sir David King suggested that patients could choose to stay at home rather than risk dying in hospital to help the NHS cope.

'I certainly would advise anyone in the region of 90, 95 years old who is susceptible for whatever reason, not to go into hospital for two reasons,' Sir David said, according to BBC Radio 4.

'One is, you go into hospital at that age with problems and you may never come out, but of course the second reason is you are overburdening the NHS.'

Caroline Abrahams, from Age UK, said some would have already come to the same decision, but 'in the end, it's not a question for individuals and families, it's a question for doctors'.

Sir David was the permanent Special Representative for Climate Change from September 2013 until March 2017, and had previously been the Governments Chief Scientific Advisor from 2000 to 2007.

The Government is asking 1.5 million of the country's most vulnerable people - including the elderly - to self-isolate for at least 12 weeks as they face a far greater risk from Covid-19.

The Government is now under pressure to provide more protective equipment for doctors and nurses, with the number of positive UK tests rising to 9,529 at 9am on Wednesday, up from 8,077 at the same point on Tuesday.

Professor Sir David King suggested that patients should choose to stay at home rather than risk dying in hospital to help the NHS cope

A total of 97,019 people had been tested with 87,490 negative results, while the number of deaths of UK patients who tested positive for Covid-19 increased from from 422 to 465 is a jump of 43.

The British Medical Association (BMA) warned doctors and patients would die without adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) across the NHS.

It said said there was 'growing evidence that thousands of GPs and hospital staff are still not being provided with the kit they need to properly protect themselves and their patients', despite Government assurances.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said millions of items of PPE had been sent out in recent days, with a hotline set up so staff could report shortages.

The Government is now under pressure to provide more protective equipment for doctors and nurses, with the number of positive UK tests rising to 9,529 at 9am on Wednesday, up from 8,077 at the same point on Tuesday

BMA council chairman Dr Chaand Nagpaul said: 'A construction worker wouldn't be allowed to work without a hard hat and proper boots.

'Even a bee-keeper wouldn't inspect a hive without proper protective clothing.

'And yet this Government expects NHS staff to put themselves at risk of serious illness, or even death, by treating highly infectious Covid-19 patients without wearing proper protection. This is totally unacceptable.'

Asked about the latest death toll figures, business minister Nadhim Zahawi told BBC2's Newsnight: 'Well, at this stage I wouldn't interpret anything into the figures.

The country is now facing coronavirus lockdown - with Britons only permitted to leave their homes under certain circumstances

'I think the Prime Minister is right to say that the message is very clear - stay at home, make sure we protect the NHS and save lives.'

Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick told ITV's Peston: 'We need to get more PPE out to people working on the frontline, that's in hospitals, it's in social care, it's in pharmacies and GPs' surgeries.

'We are doing that, we are ramping up efforts very significantly, we're taking very large stocks now, over 10 million masks for example in the last few days.

'Every social care provider in the country will get deliveries this week. We now have a PPE hotline so that those people on the front line can ring up, get the order that they desperately need.'

The economic impact of the outbreak has also brought a large spike in the number of people applying for Universal Credit.

Ministers are being urged to step-up testing for coronavirus, especially among health workers.

But the UK's Chief Medical Officer dismissed suggestions a coronavirus antibody test will be ready to buy online next week.

Professor Chris Whitty said the accuracy of the tests needed to be properly tested before they were made available, and he stressed that frontline NHS workers would need them first so they could get back to work if they have already had the virus.

A national salute is set to take place to honour the hardworking NHS staff who are trying to battle coronavirus.

In a gesture of thanks to the frontline healthcare heroes, everyone across the nation has been invited to join a a mass round of applause from their doorsteps, windows and balconies on Thursday at 8pm.
Festus Keyamo, the Minister of State for Labour and Productivity, has issued a warning to pastors in Nigeria to follow directives from National Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, so they can curb the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the country.

On Thursday, the NCDC confirmed five new cases with Rivers State recording its first case. Two of the new cases were confirmed in Abuja, and another two in Lagos State.

Taking to Twitter, Keyamo advised pastors to play their part in curbing the spread of the virus.

Read Also: Coronavirus: Bill Cosbys Legal Team Demands His Release From Prison

He pointed out that God can only help those who put in the effort to help themselves.

He wrote: Aside the spiritual angle to this scourge, we must all work and pray; God can only help those who help themselves. Those our recalcitrant Pastors must realise this.

All the directives of NCDC must be followed to the letter by all and sundry before it can quickly end in praise.
" " Valerio L. M. talks with his grandfather Remigio, 91, via a WhatsApp video call on March 19, 2020 in Bologna, Italy, during the nationwide lockdown to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Massimo Cavallari/Getty Images

In the United States, texting via the app or software that comes loaded with your phone is the usual way for people to stay in touch with friends and family. This is called SMS (abbreviation for Short Message Service) texting. Throughout most of the rest of the world, however, people use a separate third-party app.

The biggest one of these is WhatsApp. Since its launch in 2009, it has remained the texting app of choice in countries as diverse as Spain, South Africa, Brazil and India, with penetration rates of over 50 percent to over 90 percent of mobile phone users. (In the U.S., just 12 percent of mobile phone users had downloaded WhatsApp, according to Statista.) In all, more than 2 billion people in 180 countries have used WhatsApp to text, send audio clips, and make audio and video calls. That enormous user base made it an irresistible target for Facebook, which purchased WhatsApp in 2014 for a mind-warping $19 billion.

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It's certainly not the only messaging app around. Others, like WeChat (over 1 billion users in China), Viber (big in Eastern Europe), Facebook Messenger (North America's favorite) and others are all vying for the same users. These messaging apps aren't just child's play. Some experts believe they will overtake social media giants like Facebook and Twitter in the next few years as a means for communicating with others.

The Appeal of Text MessagingApps

So why does the rest of the world favor these apps over using SMS?

"Free, unlimited SMS messaging is more common in the U.S. than many other countries and that has limited the need for over the top mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp that can offer consumers a cheaper alternative to regular mobile services," says eMarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg via email. "iPhones are also more commonly used in the U.S. than most countries worldwide, so the widespread use of iMessage has also held back WhatsApp adoption. In short, there has been less need for an app like WhatsApp in the U.S. than in the rest of the world."

WhatsApp has several characteristics that help explain its widespread appeal. For one, it's free, and unlike so many other apps, it doesn't have ads, nor do you have to log in to an associated social media account to use it. The app identifies users through their phone numbers, so after you install the app, your phone contacts become your WhatsApp contacts, without extra steps like asking for your friends' usernames or info.

In the U.S., carriers often include text messages as part of a flat monthly fee, but in other places, like Europe, cell phone carriers often charge per-text fees that can quickly add up  meaning messaging apps can help users save a bundle on their cell phone bills.

The fact that WhatsApp is an independent, freestanding app is also to its advantage.

"OTT (over-the-top) messaging apps that aren't linked to an operating system, like WhatsApp, also allow smartphone users with different operating systems to message each other using mobile data or WiFi, which can bring down mobile service costs and allow users to communicate when there is no cell signal," says Enberg. "That also enables smartphone users in different countries to message each other without incurring additional international charges."

Of course, it's still possible to accumulate obscene data charges using WhatsApp. If you video chat or send huge files via your cell signal instead of WiFi, you could be in for a surprise when you see your phone bill.

WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber, and other apps are superior to SMS with regard to the kinds of messages you can send. There are no limits on the number of characters in your messages, and of course, you can make voice and video calls, even internationally, for free. You can also attach documents of all kinds, as well as video and audio clips. And if your cell phone service is cut off because you haven't paid the bill, you can still communicate with people if you're near a WiFi hot spot.

Notably, WhatsApp also uses strong end-to-end encryption which ensures that your messages are confidential and fairly secure. (Your typical SMS message is not encrypted.) Many experts have lauded the app's commitment to privacy. Government agencies, however, say the app makes it easier for criminals and terrorists to communicate their wretched plans with one another without getting caught.

Security issues aside, it remains to be seen whether WhatsApp will retain its huge lead on other messaging competitors. The company has unveiled a business version (for which it charges subscription fees), which will undoubtedly grow the app's footprint. But the fact that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook has rubbed some privacy-focused users the wrong way, and they've continued their search for alternatives. These apps have names like Telegram and Threema.

NOW THAT'S INTERESTING WhatsApp has a read receipt feature that shows two blue checkmarks after the recipient sees your message  unless, of course, they turn off read receipts for privacy reasons. You can work around this issue with a simple hack. Just send them a short voice note (even one second will do) and even if they have read receipt turned off, you'll see those two blue ticks that show they've listened to the audio. You didn't hear that from us.
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By AFP

TEHRAN: Iran on Thursday announced 157 new deaths from coronavirus, raising the official number of fatalities to 2,234, as it slapped a ban on intercity travel to try to curb the spread.

Health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour also said that 2,389 new cases have been confirmed in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of declared infections in one of the world's worst-hit countries to 29,406.

"Fortunately, until today 10,457 of those infected have recovered and been discharged from hospitals," he told a news conference.

Jahanpour said that the spread of the new coronavirus and its rate of infection was "growing steadily" in Iran.

The Islamic republic imposed strict new containment measures Thursday, after weeks of public appeals largely failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of Iranians taking to the roads to visit family for the Persian New Year holidays.

ALSO READ | World leaders to hold crisis talks as coronavirus death count crosses 21,000

"Those who were planning to travel, cancel it right from this moment," said Hossein Zolfaghari, a senior official at Iran's anti-coronavirus committee.

"Those who are out travelling should return home quickly," he added in a televised announcement while announcing details of the new measures.

Zolfaghari said non-residents will not be allowed into cities based on their car plates and drivers' IDs, and violators will be fined and their cars impounded.

"All official and non-official gatherings... are also banned," the official said, without elaborating further.

President Hassan Rouhani said in a cabinet meeting he hoped the "more strict measures" would help to curb the virus.

He added the government was going to ask Iran's supreme leader for permission to draw $1 billion from its national development fund to address "the coronavirus' complexities and issues, especially the medical sector's needs".

The country will also provide businesses which have not laid off workers during the outbreak with low-interest loans, Rouhani said.
Downing Street has blamed an administrative error for the UKs failure to sign up to an emergency EU scheme to help procure vital medical equipment to fight coronavirus.

After an outcry about the refusal to take part in the programme, a government spokesperson claimed that initial communication problems meant the UK was confused about whether it could take part.

The claim from No.10 comes despite EU officials being clear in public from early on that the UK could be involved, with a spokesperson stating on 19 March that Britain was eligible to participate because it was in the Brexit transition period and is thus being treated like a member state.

Critics accused Boris Johnson of taking an ideological stand against participating in the EU scheme, a charge which No.10 denies.

Earlier on Thursday the prime ministers official spokesperson appeared sanguine about the UKs lack of participation, telling reporters when questioned: We are no longer members of the EU. We are doing our own work on ventilators and we have had a very strong response from business. We have sourced ventilators form the private sector and international manufacturers.

But after mounting criticism of the PM and calls to join the EU scheme, a spokesperson appeared to change the governments story. He said the UK would consider joining future schemes.

The programme, initiated by the European Commission, uses the bulk-buying power of the 500 million person single market to get priority for ventilators and protective equipment  which doctors have warned are in short supply in the UK amid a time of extreme global demand.

The first tranche of orders, which will go to 25 of the 27 member states, covers masks type 2 and 3, gloves, goggles, face-shields, surgical masks and overalls  all of which are needed in the UK.

A UK government spokesperson said: Owing to an initial communication problem, the UK did not receive an invitation in time to join in four joint procurements in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

As the Commission has confirmed, we are eligible to participate in joint procurements during the transition period, following our departure from the EU earlier this year.

As those four initial procurement schemes had already gone out to tender we were unable to take part in these, but we will consider participating in future procurement schemes on the basis of public health requirements at the time.

Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Show all 20 1 /20 Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Top: Nabi Younes market, Mosul Bottom: Charles Bridge, Prague Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Grand Mosque, Mecca Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Sagrada Familia, Barcelona Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Nabi Younes market, Mosul Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Basra Grand Mosque, Iraq Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Charles Bridge, Prague Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Taj Mahal hotel, India Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Dubai Mall, UAE Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Beirut March, Lebanon Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Gateway of India, Mumbai Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Cairo University, Egypt Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Amman Citadel, Jordan Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Beirut March, Lebanon Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Cairo, Egypt Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Cairo University, Egypt Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Victoria Memorial, India Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Amman Citadel, Jordan Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Amman Citadel, Jordan Reuters Before and after photos show impact of coronavirus around the world Sidon, Lebanon Reuters

We are working round the clock with industry, the NHS, social care providers and the army to ensure the supply of PPE over the coming weeks and months and will give our NHS and the social care sector everything they need to tackle this outbreak.

Jonathan Ashworth, Labours Shadow Health Secretary, said: Given the huge need for PPE, testing capacity and crucial medical equipment including ventilators, people will want to know why on Monday ministers were saying they chosen other routes over joint EU procurement initiatives but now they are claiming that they missed the relevant emails. We need an urgent explanation from ministers about how they will get crucial supplies to the frontline as a matter of urgency.

Layla Moran, Lib Dem MP told The Independent: It is almost unbelievable that this was an email mix-up. Ill be checking to see that the Government has now contacted the EU to declare its willingness to opt in, to clear up the matter once and for all. I look forward to seeing the UK opt-in to this and similar schemes.

Commenting on the first order of the EU scheme, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: All over the world, theres right now a tremendous need for protective clothing and medical equipment. It is therefore a success that the Joint European Procurement Initiative has been able to secure on the world market concrete offers of considerable scale on shortest notice.

This is EU solidarity in action. It shows that being part of the Union pays off. This material should soon provide considerable relief in Italy, Spain and in 23 more member states.

A government spokesperson said: Of course, our top priority as a Government is to slow the spread of the coronavirus, protect the NHS and keep people safe.

We remain committed to negotiating a comprehensive free trade agreement with the US in line with our manifesto commitment to have 80 per cent of UK trade covered by free trade agreements within the next three years.

This is why we are looking at options to conduct trade negotiations in a way that respects the public health advice as set out by the Prime Minister and Public Health England.

In parallel, UK-EU negotiations are ongoing. Last week we exchanged draft legal texts and informal discussions with the Commission continue. The transition period ends on 31 December 2020, as enshrined in UK law.
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In the U.S., the share of adults who live alone has nearly doubled over the last 50 years. This rise of living alone started in early-industrialized countries over a century ago, then accelerated around 1950.

This fact is especially relevant in a coronavirus-compelled day of social distancing and sheltering at home.

New Yorker writer Robin Wright adds her perspective: Psychologists note the difference between living alone and loneliness. I live alone and have no family, and usually dont think much about it. But, as the new pathogen forces us to socially distance, I have begun to feel lonely. I miss the ability to see, converse with, hug, or spend time with friends. Life seems shallower, more like survival than living.

The internet is filled with advice on making the most of these days. I heard Dr. Phil on television suggesting that couples use this time to deepen their marriages and play games with their children. Schools and educational resources are offering unprecedented options for children. We can visit more sites around the world through virtual technology than ever.

One way of redeeming social distancing I have not seen in the media, however, is countercultural in the extreme: lets embrace the solitude, at least for periods of time and seasons during this season. And lets use it as a time to grow closer to our Father than ever before.

What comes first with God

The strategy I have in mind comes from God himself.

The book of Exodus includes a series of instructions from the Lord to His people as they are journeying toward their Promised Land. In chapter 31, he concludes a long set of instructions regarding ethical guidelines, the consecration of the high priest, and the construction of the tabernacle.

Then he concludes with the phrase, Above all (v. 13a). What would come above all that he has revealed to them? What would he list as their highest priority? Would he remind them of the prohibition against idolatry? Would he warn them again regarding murder or adultery?

Heres the answer: Above all you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations (Exodus 31:13a).

Why is keeping a Sabbath so vital to our souls?

Why to keep a Sabbath

The Lord continues: that you may know that I, the LORD, sanctify you (v. 13b). We cannot sanctify ourselves. Only a holy God can make an unholy people to be holy.

However, we can position ourselves to receive what Gods grace intends to give. Thus we must keep a Sabbath and walk with Jesus in the Spirit so that he can sanctify us and then work through us to extend His Kingdom in the world.

Frederick Buechner offers two reasons why connecting with the spiritual is so vital for our souls.

One is that the spiritual world is real: We are in constant touch with a world that is as real to us while we are in it, and has as much to do with who we are, and whose ultimate origin and destiny are as unknown and fascinating, as the world of waking reality.

The other is that, whether we know it or not, our lives are a great deal richer, deeper, more intricately interrelated, more mysterious, and less limited by time and space than we commonly suppose.

How to keep a Sabbath

How can we keep a Sabbath today?

The principle of Sabbath extends beyond a day of the week without work. It calls us to time spent alone with our Lord, a commitment to be with Him and no other.

Lets focus on one vital dimension of such a communion with our Creator: listening to God. How can we do this?

In a recent First15 devotional, Craig Denison describes four ways God speaks to us: through creation, others, Scripture, and His Spirit. He notes: To have conversation with God might sound strange to some, but that doesnt mean it doesnt happen. Rather, to have conversation with God available to us and to not take advantage of it is strange.

He adds: God longs to speak to you. The Creator of all longs to have dialogue with you. The King of kings and Lord of lords is inviting you to meet with Him that you might have true relationship.

So, Seek God with all your heart. Look to Scripture and the lives of biblical believers as your source of truth and normalcy. Because of Gods heart to speak to you, you can live your life in constant conversation with a God who is both near to you and loves you.

When will you next keep a Sabbath with your Lord?

This article was originally published at the Denison Forum here.
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This article originally appeared on the Upper West Side Patch

UPTOWN, MANHATTAN  Brooklyn-based moped company Revel is bringing its fleet of electric vehicles to Manhattan for the first time to help healthcare workers get around during the coronavirus pandemic, the company announced Thursday.

Revel, which lets users sign up for rides on the mopeds via their app, will open a service area from 65th Street to the top of Manhattan and let riders use the mopeds to get to several hospitals in the bottom half of the borough.

The ride-sharing app previously was only available in parts of Brooklyn and Queens, an area that it expanded last week partly in response to the need to get healthcare workers around during the coronavirus pandemic. The Manhattan rides, like those in the outer boroughs, will be free for healthcare workers.

During this crisis, we want to do everything we can to help New York City recover, and right now, that means helping health care workers get to work safely, said CEO and co-founder Frank Reig. We encourage everyone who is not an essential worker to stay at home, but we are here to support those that are desperately needed at work.



The Revel expansion comes as New York City is under a statewide stay-at-home order, which only allows essential services, like hospitals, to stay open. There were more than 20,000 coronavirus cases in the city as of Wednesday evening.

The moped company said that hundreds of healthcare professionals had signed up to use the mopeds since they launched the free ride option in the outer boroughs last week.

They have also upped cleaning measures for the electric vehicles and equipment, like helmets, used to ride them, because of the coronavirus pandemic, Revel said.



In Manhattan, the Upper Manhattan service area will stretch over Mount Sinai Medical Center, Lenox Hill Hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Story continues

Service areas will also be set up in smaller slices around the Javits Center, Bellevue Hospital Center, Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, Veterans Affairs New York Harbor Healthcare System, and NYU Langone Tisch Hospital.

(Provided by Revel).

The mopeds cannot be used to travel from Brooklyn or Queens to Manhattan or vice versa, the company said. Riders cannot end their rides outside of the service area, though they can pause their ride as long as the Revel is parked legally.

To receive free rides, employees of any health care provider can visit Revels website and upload a photo of their employee ID cards.

The expansion was welcomed by both elected officials and doctors who say they can use them to get around more easily.

"We're all working day and night shifts, covering colleagues who are sick, forgoing time off and extra hours doing our best to care for our patients," said Dr. Moshe Miller, a physician at Maimonides Medical Center. Your scooters allow me to shorten my travel time to work and make it so I don't have to worry about the cost of transportation. A shining example of what companies can do to help out in unconventional ways.
Hong Kong and most other Asia-Pacific stock markets fell Thursday, as jittery investors took profits after two days of run-ups and worries grew about the economic and human toll of the coronavirus pandemic.

Singapores gross domestic product for the first quarter fell far more than expected. It was the first Asian economy to publish GDP data, and shows what others can expect as the outbreak of coronavirus hits economic activity.

Meanwhile, Japans planned stimulus package could lead to a currency free fall eventually, its policymakers fear.

Benchmarks fell in both Tokyo and Singapore, which on Thursday unveiled a US$33.7 billion package to try to deal with its coronavirus challenge.

Meanwhile, with about one-third of the worlds population under lockdown, the US Senate passed the US$2 trillion stimulus bill, sending it to the US House for approval. President Donald Trump has said he will sign it immediately.

The package  far bigger than the US$800 billion thrown at the financial crisis in 2009  aims to provide a lifeline to keep American workers and businesses afloat during the health catastrophe. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called it a wartime level of investment into our nation.

But global investors worry that the kitchen sink so far thrown at the virus by governments and their central banks isnt enough.

The Hang Seng Index closed down 0.7 per cent.

On Wednesday, it posted its first back-to-back gain in more than five weeks. But analysts expect volatility will continue and that a bottom for stock prices has not been reached.

Profit taking and sector switching were behind Thursdays decline in Hong Kong, said Alan Li, portfolio manager at Atta Capital.

Such a rapid rebound is likely finished, Li said of the regions two days of gains. The progress of further recovery depends on the effect of quarantine policies against the virus spread.

A paramedic in protective gear stands outside the Alvaro Cunqueiro hospital in Vigo, northwestern Spain. As the global death toll soared past 20,000, Spain joined Italy in seeing its number of fatalities overtake China. Photo: Agence France-Presse

The Shanghai Composite Index finished down 0.6 per cent. (For in-depth markets coverage, sign up for the Stocks Blog newsletter to be delivered to you via email each trading day.)

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China  the original epicentre of the outbreak  has the only major stock markets that are not in bear territory. It is returning to something akin to normalcy, with factories firing back up, after unprecedented lockdowns to reduce the spread of the virus.

Ultimately, all roads lead back to the fact investors need conclusive evidence of coronavirus infection curves flattening, bringing an end to lockdowns in sight before pressing that buy button with some conviction, said Stephen Innes, chief global market strategist at currency trading platform AxiCorp.

Sure, the US Congress has agreed on a stimulus package worth more than US$2 trillion, supporting oil prices and broader markets. While this is good news, its impossible to gauge the ultimate economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic for weeks, possibly months, and until that point, the sustainability of any rally in oil or equity markets is questionable ... The current high level of volatility will likely extend, he added.

The global death toll topped 20,000, with Spain reporting 3,434 deaths, surpassing the toll in China. But in one good piece of news, infection rates declined for a fourth day in Italy, which has seen the most deaths in the world, at more than 7,500.

The US, where California and New York are among states in lockdown, is only at the start of its wave of coronavirus infections, as governors warn hospitals will not be able to handle the expected spike in patients.

US hospitals are reporting a shortage of protective gear, such as surgical masks and gowns, as well as ventilators, which may be rationed according to survival likelihood, putting those who are obese, elderly, or with heart or lung problems, for example, at risk of not getting assigned the potentially life-saving devices. Its apocalyptic, a doctor was quoted by The New York Times as saying of the situation unfolding at one New York City hospital.

Meanwhile, Tokyos Nikkei 225, which jumped 8 per cent on Wednesday, closed down 4.5 per cent.

Japans planned US$137 billion stimulus package over the coronavirus could lead to a currency free-fall eventually, policymakers fear.

Finance ministry officials say the government will be forced to issue more bonds to fund stimulus measures, which is adding to an already bloated public debt, Reuters reports.

Some officials warn that further spending could strain the industrial worlds heaviest debt burden, more than twice the size of its 551 trillion yen economy, and cause a run on Japanese assets and erode the yens value in the long-run.

A strong yen is a problem, but now were more worried about a weakening of the yen. If we do something wrong [in managing our finances], that could cause a yen free fall, a senior finance ministry official told Reuters. If we end up issuing huge amounts of debt, market sentiment could change abruptly. That would be problematic, he said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Seouls Kospi closed down 1 per cent, after its 5.9 per cent jump on Wednesday. The tech-heavy Kosdaq, which shot up 5.3 per cent on Wednesday, rose 2.2 per cent.

Australias S&P/ASX200, closed up 2.3 per cent, after its 5.5 per cent increase on Wednesday.

New Zealands S&P/NZX50, which shot up 7.2 per cent on Tuesday and rose 4 per cent on Wednesday, jumped 4 per cent.

Meanwhile, Singapores Straits Times Index fell 1 per cent.

Singapores gross domestic product fell an annualised 10.6 per cent in the first quarter, compared to the previous three months. It is far worse than the average forecast of a 8.2 per cent decline, by economists surveyed by Bloomberg, and the biggest contraction since 2010.

When compared to a year ago, the economy was down 2.2 per cent in the biggest drop since the 2009 financial crisis.

As the global Covid-19 situation is still evolving rapidly, there remains a significant degree of uncertainty over the severity and duration of the global outbreak, and the trajectory of the global economic recovery once the outbreak has been contained, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) said in a statement. The balance of risks, however, is tilted to the downside.

The Singapore government now expects the economy to contract up to 4 per cent in 2020, worse than previous predictions of an up to 1.5 per cent fall.

MTI said it expects worsening impacts from the coronavirus outbreak  like the spread to more countries, Singapores tightened border controls and safe-distancing measures  to hit retail, food and drink sectors.

More from South China Morning Post:

This article Hong Kong, Tokyo stocks fall along with most of Asias markets as investors weigh destruction of coronavirus pandemic first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2020.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that the country's NHS risks becoming "overwhelmed" by the coronavirus outbreak and that the situation in Britain is just two or three weeks behind Italy.

"The numbers are very stark, and they are accelerating. We are only a matter of weeks -- two or three -- behind Italy," Johnson said, as reported by CNN.

"The Italians have a superb health care system. And yet their doctors and nurses have been completely overwhelmed by the demand. The Italian death toll is already in the thousands and climbing.

He added, "Unless we act together unless we make the heroic and collective national effort to slow the spread -- then it is all too likely that our own NHS will be similarly overwhelmed,"

"That is why this country has taken the steps that it has, in imposing restrictions never seen before either in peace or war." He said.

The problem reached a crunch point in the UK, which has dramatically increased its response to the virus outbreak this week.

Food banks that provide a lifeline for some of the estimated 14 million in poverty are running low on volunteers, many of whom have been forced to self-isolate, as well as the food itself, which is in short supply following panic-buying.

The UK has confirmed more 9,600 cases of the deadly virus with 460 deaths.

The global tally of cases has crossed 487,000 as on Thursday with 22,030 deaths globally as per the data presented by the Johns Hopkins University.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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New Delhi, March 26 : Amid Covid-19 epidemic and the 21-day nationwide lockdown, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief J.P. Nadda continues to interact with the party leaders through audio or video link, to keep an eye on the situation.

On Thursday, Nadda interacted with state party presidents and General Secretary (Organization) B.L. Santosh and called for scaling up the 'Feed The Poor' programme for migrant workers and construction labourers, daily wagers and those working in the unorganised sectors.

On Wednesday, a resident of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Lok Sabha constituency Varanasi, asked him through video link about the poor's fate during this 21-day lockdown. Nadda assured him of all help and urged the rich to feed 9 poor families each for the next 21 days.

On Tuesday, Nadda discussed with select party leaders ways the BJP could use its large number of workers for the benefit of over 133 crore Indians locked in their homes.

Since there is a total clampdown, party units have been asked to offer help to state governments who can use them as they deem fit. The Delhi BJP was the first such unit that earlier wrote to Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal offering its help to fight Covid-19 in the national capital.

Through audio link, Nadda also discussed with party workers in North India the BJP's role in fighting coronavirus. He urged them to remain pro-active in the fight against coronavirus and cancel all meetings or agitations for the next one month.
SYM logo Our SYM Team is thrilled we were able to continue to grow after having a huge growth year prior. We love that so many people and companies trust SYM to help them buy and sell their Apple devices.  Brian Burke, Chief Mac Man

Inc. magazine today revealed that SellYourMac.com (SYM) is No. 110 on its inaugural Inc. 5000 Series: Midwest list, the most prestigious ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Born of the annual Inc. 5000 franchise, this regional list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the Midwest economys most dynamic segmentits independent small businesses.

Our SYM Team is thrilled we were able to continue to grow after having a huge growth year prior. We love that so many people and companies trust SYM to help them buy and sell their Apple devices.  Brian Burke, Chief Mac Man

The companies on this list show stunning rates of growth across all industries in the 12 Midwest states. Between 2016 and 2018, these 250 private companies had an average growth rate of 360 percent and, in 2018 alone, they employed more than 27,000 people and added $13 billion to the Midwests economy. Companies based in the Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati areas brought in the highest revenue overall.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000 Series: Midwest, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, metro area, and other criteria, can be found at inc.com/inc5000-series-midwest-2020 starting March 25, 2020.

The companies on this list demonstrate just how much the small-business sector impacts the economies of each Midwest state, says Inc. editor in chief Scott Omelianuk. Across every single industry, these businesses have posted revenue and growth rates that are beyond impressive, further proving the tenacity of their founders and CEOs.

CONTACT:

Website: SellYourMac.com

Facebook: facebook.com/sellyourmac

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sellyourmac/

SellYourMac LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/sellyourmac.com

Brian Burke LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianburke4

address: 11101 Kenwood Rd, Blue Ash, OH 45242

contact name: Brian Burke

phone number: 844-SELL-MAC

More about Inc. and the Inc. 5000 Regional Series

Methodology

The 2020 Inc. 5000 Regional Series is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2016 and 2018. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2016. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independentnot subsidiaries or divisions of other companiesas of December 31, 2018. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2016 is $100,000; the minimum for 2018 is $1 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons.

About Inc. Media

The worlds most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit http://www.inc.com.
Asia India Struggles with Coronavirus Shutdown; Pakistan Cases Top 1,000

A police officer wields his baton against a man as punishment for breaking the lockdown rules after India ordered a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of coronavirus disease, in New Delhi, India on March 25, 2020. / REUTERS

NEW DELHI/BENGALURUIndias 1.3 billion people were under lockdown on Wednesday to prevent an explosion of coronavirus cases as the government struggled to deliver essential goods and calm nerves.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered everyone indoors for the next three weeks, saying it was the only way to avoid a disaster and effectively shutting down Asias third-largest economy.

Crowds of people thronged shops to stock up on milk, rations and medicines in the hours before the restrictions went into effect at midnight on Tuesday even though Modi said these supplies would be available throughout the lockdown.

Others including laborers and day workers headed home to the countryside from cities such as Delhi, many walking because public transport also stopped.

My daughter needs allergy medicines regularly. The medicine shops are open but how do we reach there? said Yash Goswami in the northern town of Moradabad. Who wants to risk a run-in with the police?

Reuters photographers witnessed several cases of Indian police officers hitting people out on the street with sticks. One rickshaw driver, who showed bruises on his calf, said he was defying the lockdown because he was unable to feed his four children otherwise.

Indias Home Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some medical companies said the lockdown was complicating their operations, with workers struggling to get to work and products stuck.

Indias tally of 606 COVID-19 cases, including 10 deaths, seems tiny compared with those in China, Italy and Spain, but health experts have warned that the worlds second most populous country faces a tidal wave of infections if tough steps are not taken.

The lockdown comes after evidence indicated it was spreading out into Indias countless small towns after a first wave in Delhi, the commercial hub Mumbai, and other big cities. That has raised the prospect of a cash-strapped public health sector being overwhelmed. India has just 0.5 hospital beds for every 1,000 people, compared to 4.3 in China and 3.2 in Italy.

The only way we can save ourselves is by social distancing, and staying inside our homes, said Information Minister Prakash Javedkar. A little bit of inconvenience now will save so many lives.

Indias population is even more densely packed than Chinas, raising the risk of rapid transmission of the virus.

In New Delhi, Modi met his cabinet at his residence, with ministers sitting apart from each other in a large room.

Stimulus

The government is considering an economic stimulus package of more than 1.5 trillion rupees (US$19.6 billion) to fight the downturn, two sources said. The economy was already growing at its weakest pace in more than a decade.

Asking people to stay at home is necessary but the majority of the population cant afford to sit at home without work and pay, said Madhura Swaminathan, head of economic analysis at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bengaluru.

British bank Barclays pegged the loss to India at $120 billion or 4 percent of GDP.

We are shaving down our calendar year 2020 (January-December) GDP forecast from 4.5 percent to 2.5 percent and for financial year 2021 (April 2020-March 2021) forecast to 3.5 percent, Rahul Bajoria, chief India economist, said in a report.

Other countries in South Asiahome to a quarter of the worlds populationare also struggling as they try to put up defenses against the coronavirus.

Pakistans tally of cases rose to 1,022, with eight deaths, its Health Ministry said. Authorities have shut down Sindh Province, home to its largest city of Karachi, even though Prime Minister Imran Khan said he was opposed to a full lockdown because the poor would suffer the most.

Sri Lanka has sealed itself off from the outside world, suspending all flights in and out of the island nation.

India, the worlds main supplier of generic drugs, on Wednesday banned the export of a malaria drug that is being tested as a coronavirus treatment, saying it had to meet domestic demand.

Bangladesh, the second-largest apparel producer in the world, unveiled a $588 million package for its export sector, asking companies to use the money to pay workers.

You may also like these stories:

India to Lock Down Whole Country to Battle Coronavirus

One Fifth of American Companies in China Back to Normal Operations: Survey

Thai Prime Minister to Invoke Emergency Powers as Virus Infections Climb
While she is known for her down to earth personality, rumours have started to swirl that radio host Jackie 'O' Henderson can also be quite the diva.

Kyle and Jackie O's executive producer Sonia Jahshan, who goes by the nickname of Palestine on the radio program, has revealed she was once told not to 'look Jackie in the eye' when she first started working at KIIS FM.

She said she was instructed to quickly drop off Jackie's O News to the millionaire radio personality, and immediately leave.

Is Jackie O a diva?! KIIS FM's executive producer Palestine revealed on Friday that she was once told she 'wasn't allowed to look the radio star (pictured) in the eye'... and you won't believe Kyle Sandilands' demand!

'Jackie, did you know when I first started I was told that I wasn't allowed to look you in the eye?' Palestine said with a laugh.

'I was told drop the O News off and immediately leave the studio,' she added.

A shocked Jackie, 45, immediately demanded to know who had told Palestine the supposed rules.

Say what?! Jackie, 45, was shocked and asked who had told Palestine the supposed rules. Palestine is pictured left with Jackie

Diva rumours: 'I was told drop the O News off and immediately leave the studio,' Palestine said

She then denied the diva rumours and said it was 'such a lie!'

Palestine then went on to reveal Kyle's diva demands, which is said to include an 'emergency Kit Kat drawer'.

Kyle, 48, hilariously declared this to be true.

It comes after TV host Ellen was blasted on Twitter earlier this week, by former employees and fans for her alleged 'mean' behaviour.

Comedian Kevin T. Porter kicked the entire social media movement off on Friday, when he sent out a tweet urging people to message him 'the most insane stories [they've] heard' about Ellen in an effort to raise money for the Los Angeles Food Bank.

He's got a sweet tooth! Palestine went on to reveal Kyle's diva demand, which is to have to an 'emergency Kit Kat draw.' Kyle (pictured) hilariously declared the rumour to be true

Shortly after posting, Kevin was flooded with written accounts by various Twitter users who claimed to have had less than savory interactions with Ellen - who he labeled as 'notoriously one of the meanest people alive' - over the years.

According to one user, former head writer for The Ellen DeGeneres show Karen Kilgariff was 'fired' because she 'wouldn't cross the picket line' during a writer's strike.

TV writer Benjamin Siemon decided to provide the thread with some stories of his own, that included Ellen having an irrationally 'sensitive nose' and often picking 'someone different to really hate' each day on set.

'Everyone must chew gum from a bowl outside her office before talking to her and if she thinks you smell that day you have to go home and shower,' he alleged.

'A new staff member was told 'every day she picks someone different to really hate. It's not your fault, just suck it up for the day and she'll be mean to someone else the next day. They didn't believe it but it ended up being entirely true.'
(This March 25 story corrects paragraph 11 to show Sean Kennedy represents the National Restaurant Association)

By Diane Bartz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump wants America to get back to business by Easter, suggesting some efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus outbreak will no longer be needed by then, but Corporate America is taking its lead from health professionals.

The president, who is concerned about the economic repercussions of an extended shutdown of nonessential business, said in a television interview on Tuesday that he wanted to see businesses returning to normal by Easter, or April 12.

I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter, he said on Fox News Channel.

But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Retail Federation and National Restaurant Association pointed to less optimistic recommendations by public health officials. Many of these have urged that Americans stay in their homes as much as possible for weeks to prevent the virus spread.

Its a tough one. I think it would be easier to accept that as something that I would feel comfortable doing if I thought it werent going to cost lives, said Melanie Krautstrunk, who owns a brew pub in Tennessee, about re-opening by Easter.

A total of 53,541 Americans have tested positive for the virus, and 730 have died. State governors, primarily in the northeast and west coast, have ordered schools and non-essential businesses closed to prevent the diseases spread.

As a result, the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits surged by the most since 2012 to a 2-1/2-year high, as companies in the service sectors laid off workers, the Labor Department said last Thursday.

Even so, the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it was following the advice of medical professionals.

We urge all businesses and the public to listen to the public health officials when it comes to social distancing. We believe we should return to work as soon as we safely and responsibly can, said Neil Bradley, U.S. Chamber of Commerces chief policy officer, in an email statement.

The National Retail Federations David French described the situation as highly fluid and of undetermined length. They are encouraging retailers to follow the CDCs and other health experts guidance.

National Restaurant Association official Sean Kennedy said, The challenge really is going to be whether restaurants can even open at this point if we dont have a public that wants to go out.

Krautstrunk, of Chattanooga, expected 2020 to be the year the 5-year-old brewery she founded with her husband would become profitable.

Hutton & Smith Brewing Co drew orders from Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. But coronavirus struck a death blow to the company, Krautstrunk said, forcing her to shutter the taproom, lay off five employees and cut pay for the remaining 17, as orders cratered.

When asked whether she would reopen if Trump issues guidance suggesting they open by Easter, Krautstrunk said the decision would not be easy.

Personally, Im more concerned about the economy than my health at this point. But Im not at risk for dying. Im definitely concerned about my mother. And I dont want to just recklessly try and open a business and see something terrible happen to her if this disease gets out of control, she said.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  Another lawmaker has tested positive for the coronavirus disease according to a congressman, bringing the tally of infected House members to two.

On Wednesday evening, Isabela Rep. Antonio "Tonypet" Albano said in a Facebook post that the House now has two congressmen who have contracted the virus, just days since the lower chamber held a special session. 

Albano refused to name the lawmaker apart from House Committee on Appropriations chairperson Eric Yap, who had just disclosed Wednesday that he tested positive for COVID-19.

Albano told CNN Philippines that the congressman wished to be anonymous and has since been recovering after he initially tested positive for the virus.

Another source bared that the unnamed lawmaker is also awaiting confirmatory results.

"Cong. Eric Yap, who was with us last Monday for 20 hours straight, tested positively for [COVID-19]!" Albano's post read.

"We bravely went to work and two of our congressmen are now positive with COVID-19, two congressional staff have died, many more are PUIs (persons under investigation) and PUMs (persons under monitoring)," he added.

Last Monday, it took the lower chamber 17 hours to deliberate on the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act granting President Rodrigo Duterte special powers to address the outbreak. Yap was present in the session hall to deliver the sponsorship speech himself.

Prior to that, he also attended a meeting in Malacanang last Saturday with other officials even after he already had his swabs taken on March 15.

Yap issued an apology to the public following his admission.

"Humihingi ako ng patawad at pag-unawa mula sa mga taong nakasalamuha ko. I was paranoid dahil may kaunting ubo akong naramdaman but I felt it was nomal for me," Yap said.

"Mas nag-ingat tayo dahil wala pang resulta ang test ko. Those who know me personally know that I practice good personal hygiene. But it didn't spare me from this virus," he added.

Meanwhile, other lawmakers who worked closely with Yap announced that they have already placed themselves under self-quarantine.

A congressional staff and an employee of the lower chamber's Printing Services have previously succumbed to the virus.

To date, the Philippines now has 636 cases of COVID-19, with 38 deaths and 26 recoveries.
DALY CITY (BCN)

Daly City's Seton Medical Center began accepting novel coronavirus patients Wednesday as the California Health and Human Services Agency attempts to bolster the state's health care capacity.

Seton Medical Center can accept up to 220 coronavirus patients, according to the state HHSA. Verity Health System, which filed for bankruptcy in 2018 and announced plans to close Seton Medical Center earlier this year, will operate the facility on the state's behalf.

"California will continue to do our part to expand our capacity to respond to a potential surge in (coronavirus) patients," Gov. Gavin Newsom said. "It is also important that each and every Californian do their part by staying home and practicing social distancing. We can get through this together if we all do our part."

Newsom announced the lease last week to the applause of state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, who had argued that closing the hospital would make it harder for the roughly 27,000 people who use Seton Medical Center each year to access health care.

The closure would have also left the facility's roughly 1,500 workers without a job. The state plans to lease the facility for three months.

Copyright  2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
Tori Spelling's bank is asking the Los Angeles Sherrif's Office to help them recover the $89k the star owes them.

American Express Bank is hoping to get help making Spelling and husband Dean McDermott pay back their five-figure credit card debt, which they were originally ordered to pay back in October 2016.

The bank filed the court papers requesting the Sheriff's Office force the couple to pay up back on March 5, according to documents obtained by The Sun.

Pay up! Tori Spelling's bank is hoping to get the help of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office to make her pay a $89k credit card debt

Celebrity spendthrift Spelling owes $88,731.25 and has accrused $330.30 in interest.

American Express Bank has previously asked for the Sheriff's intervention, requesting they seize Tori's debt in January 2019 as well as August 2019.

In addition to her trouble with AMEX the former 90210 star is in hot water with Cavalry SPV I, a debt-buying company working on behalf of Citibank.

She owes Cavalry a little over $5k for another unpaid credit card bill which was ordered to be paid in September 2018.

Drastic measures: American Express Bank filed papers requesting the Sheriff's Office force the couple to pay the debt they were originally ordered to pay back in 2016

Fancy: Spelling and husband Dean McDermott live with their five kids in Southern California's exclusive Hidden Hills neighborhood, above

The LA Sherrif was also asked to help 'enforce the judgement' in that case.

Spelling and McDermott - who live with their five kids in Southern California's exclusive Hidden Hills neighborhood - also owe City National Bank a whopping $400k for failing to pay back a loan.

In May 2017, they were ordered to shell out $202,066.

After failing to pay this debt, a bench warrant was issued to Tori for failing to appear in court.

The warrant was dissolved in April 2019, however.
Pakistani troops violated ceasefire along the Line of Control in Uri sector of Jammu and Kashmir by resorting to unprovoked firing, officials said on Thursday.

The Pakistani troops fired small arms and mortar shells towards Indian positions in Hajipeer area of the Uri sector in Baramulla district, the officials said.

They said the Indian Army gave a befitting reply to the unprovoked aggression and retaliated in adequate measure.

There was no loss of life or property reported so far, the officials added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Photograph: Ahmad Al-Basha/Getty

Aisha al-Temmimi, 21, has never adjusted to the dust and heat of the Yemeni desert city of Marib. Her family are from the lush green highlands of Hajjah in the countrys north, but were forced to leave after fighting between the Iran-backed Houthis and government forces reached their village two years ago.

Marib, already rich in oil and gas reserves, has become something of a boom town since Yemens war broke out, a place where those displaced by violence elsewhere in the country have found relative safety. Even Maribs stability, however, has proven fragile after fierce new battles to the north and west of the city.

We thought wed be safer here, al-Temmimi said. Sometimes they fight just for the sake of fighting.

Related: 'Now it's just ghosts': Yemenis living under the shadow of death by airstrike

At the beginning of this year, the UNs special envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths, praised the countrys warring parties for largely sticking to a 2018 de-escalation agreement: hopes were high that months of relative quiet could lead to more substantive talks. Just two months later, as the fifth anniversary of the Saudi and Emirati coalition intervention in the war dawns, the prospect of peace is further away than ever.

Yemens civil war escalated on 26 March 2015 after the president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, fled to neighbouring Saudi Arabia and a coalition of 20 Arab nations intervened to try to drive the Iran-backed Houthis out of the capital, Sanaa.

Since then the conflict has morphed into the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, killing an estimated 100,000 people and leaving 80% of the population  about 24 million people  dependent on aid to survive.

Both sides have been accused of indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets, but according to the Yemen Data Project, at least 30% of more than 20,000 coalition bombing raids are estimated to have hit civilian infrastructure.

The coalition, which is supported by the UK, US and other western nations, has also imposed a blockade of Houthi territory that has pushed around half of the total civilian population to the brink of starvation and led to outbreaks of cholera and diphtheria. Yemen is now facing a potentially devastating new crisis in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Story continues

The latest round of violence erupted after Hadis forces tried to advance along the highway from Marib to the rebel-held capital, Sanaa, but the attempt backfired spectacularly after the Houthis responded with counterattacks on several fronts, advancing to seize al-Hazm, the capital of al-Jawf province, earlier this month.

Heavy fighting in al-Jawf, which is north of Marib, has sent at least 1,750 families fleeing, overwhelming local aid agencies already working in displacement camps on the outskirts of Marib city, where around 70,000 people are now in need of daily help.

A total of 35 civilians, including 19 children, were killed by coalition airstrikes on al-Jawf in a single day in February. In one of the single bloodiest attacks of the war to date, 116 soldiers loyal to exiled President Hadi died in a missile attack on a mosque at a Marib military camp that was blamed on the Houthis.

Those fighting and suffering in the latest violence are Yemeni, and new alliances currently being formed between local tribes and the Houthis are shifting the local balance of power even more strongly in the rebels favour. Yet the derailment of the three-year-old ceasefire in the area and the resulting new setbacks to the peace process appear to reflect the ever-diverging interests of the Saudi and Emirati elements of the coalition.

After the fall of al-Hazm to the Houthis, Mohammed Jumeh, Yemens permanent representative to Unesco, tweeted that the loss was the result of a betrayal that reflected the interests and side-battles of political and military leaders from outside the country.

The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are already in competition for the upper hand in Yemens south, where the UAE supports a separatist movement which says it wants renewed independence for South Yemen.

The Saudis, struggling with their limited military capabilities and the financial strain of the conflict, have engaged with the Houthis in backchannel talks facilitated by Oman over the last few months, an apparent recognition of the fact that the Houthis are stronger than ever after five years of war.

Instead, it is believed the Emiratis, who back Yemens new chief of staff, Lt Gen Sagheer bin Aziz, pushed for the offensive, in part to curb the ambitions of Saudi-backed clients such as the Islah party, the Muslim Brotherhood-linked bloc of the Yemeni government, which is strong in Marib.

It is no secret at this point that in Yemen Saudi Arabia only cares about securing its borders and distancing Ansar Allah [the Houthis] from Iran, said Abdulghani al-Iryani, an analyst at the Sanaa Center thinktank.

What gets underestimated is how high the level of antagonism is between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, particularly when it comes to support for Islah. The personal rapport between [Saudi crown prince] Mohammed bin Salman and [ruler of Abu Dhabi] Mohammed bin Zayed is what keeps the relationship together. If it were left to institutional channels the coalition would collapse.

Related: In the rubble of Taiz, all roads to a normal life are blocked

With university classes cancelled thanks to the looming threat of coronavirus, al-Temmimi says she has had plenty of time to think about the recent clashes and what they mean for Yemens future.

If the Houthis and the Saudis are talking, you would think we could get back to peace talks, she said. Instead, we get more fighting. The rest of the world argues about the war and what ordinary Yemenis want doesnt seem to matter any more.
Istanbul prosecutors said yesterday they had prepared an indictment against a close aide to Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and a former deputy head of general intelligence over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The prosecutor's office accused the two men of instigating Mr Khashoggi's murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and named 18 suspects it said actually carried out the killing, which caused a global uproar.

Mr Khashoggi was last seen entering the consulate on October 2, 2018, where he had gone to obtain documents for his impending wedding.

Turkish officials said his body was dismembered and removed from the building, but his remains have not been found.

Some Western governments, as well as the CIA, said they believed Prince Mohammed had ordered the killing - an accusation Saudi officials have denied.

The indictment accuses former deputy head of Saudi Arabia's general intelligence Ahmed al-Asiri and former royal court adviser Saud al-Qahtani of having "instigated premeditated murder with monstrous intent", the prosecutor's office said.

It says the others suffocated Mr Khashoggi, a columnist for the 'Washington Post' who had grown increasingly critical of Prince Mohammed's actions, after agreeing in advance that he should be killed if he did not return to Saudi Arabia with them.

The list of 18 suspected killers includes a 15-strong team which flew to Turkey to carry out the operation, and three intelligence officials.

Saudi Arabia's media ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Both Mr Qahtani and Mr Asiri were dismissed from their positions after Mr Khashoggi's killing.

Mr Asiri was subsequently tried in Saudi Arabia but released due to insufficient evidence, a Saudi prosecutor said.

Mr Qahtani was investigated but was not charged.

Sources have said that he remained active in state matters.

In December, a Saudi court sentenced five people to death and three to jail for Mr Khashoggi's killing in a trial which a UN rapporteur described as a mockery of justice because it did not target those who she described as being the masterminds of the operation.

The court did not identify those sentenced to death.

Yesterday's indictment was based on analysis of suspects' phone records, their entry and exit into Turkey and presence at the consulate, witness statements and analysis of Mr Khashoggi's phone and computers, the prosecutor's office said.

Mr Khashoggi's killing, which Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said was ordered at the "highest levels" of the Saudi government, has strained ties between Ankara and Riyadh.

Turkey accused Saudi officials of obstructing investigations at the consulate, while the Saudis have repeatedly said that the Istanbul prosecutor has not complied with their requests to share information.

Prince Mohammed has denied ordering the killing but said he bore ultimate responsibility as the kingdom's de facto leader.

Saudi Arabia initially denied any involvement in or knowledge of Mr Khashoggi's death but later changed its position multiple times.

The killing shone a light on the extraordinary crackdown on dissent carried out by Saudi authorities under Prince Mohammed's leadership and soured relations between Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Mr Erdogan's government first publicised details of the Saudi plot and has continued to accuse the Saudi leadership of shielding senior officials from blame.

The Turkish indictment was the latest sign that Mr Erdogan's government would continue to highlight Mr Khashoggi's case.

The indictment charged both Mr Qahtani and Mr Assiri with having "instigated premeditated murder with monstrous intent".

The two men "gave the other suspects the necessary instructions to fulfil the action of killing" Mr Khashoggi, the statement said.

In addition to Mr Assiri and Mr Qahtani, Istanbul prosecutors charged the 18 other men in the killing.

It came after investigators had collected evidence from surveillance footage, phone logs and Mr Khashoggi's laptop and cellphones, the statement said.
Defence Forces veterans wishing to re-enlist to help in the battle against Covid-19 will be asked to submit online applications from early next week.

The Irish military are critically short of some specialists and are particularly anxious to fill those vacancies by re-employing experienced veterans.

They will be paid and it is understood that if they are in receipt of a pension it will not be affected.

Defence sources say that when applications are made, which will most likely be through military.ie, they will be assessed by the Chief of Staff, Vice Admiral Mark Mellett, and his senior officers.

The chief of staff will then submit the name of candidates he wants to rejoin the Defence Forces to the minister with responsibility for Defence, Paul Kehoe, for his approval to re-hire them.

It is not yet clear if there will be an upper age limit. However, one source said that if somebody was fit and over 60 and their technical expertise was sorely needed then age was unlikely to be a barrier to re-enlistment.

There are many members of the Defence Forces who could have retired on full 31-year pensions and still be as young as 50.

This special recruitment drive will only be open to former enlisted personnel.

The Department of Defence is in discussions with PDForra, which represents enlisted personnel, to iron out the terms and conditions of their re-employment.

In particular the Defence Forces need marine engineers, logistics experts, aircraft technicians, firefighters and fitters.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced a multibillion package of support for up to 3.8 million self-employed people suffering a financial hit from coronavirus  but told them they will have to wait until June to get it.

The announcement of a taxable grant worth 80 per cent of average profits, up to a maximum of 2,500 a month, was greeted with relief by business organisations, who said builders and other workers had until now been forced to ignore advice to stay at home if possible in order to put food on the table.

But others warned the June date for the payment of three months backdated support would come too late for many self-employed and freelance workers who are already feeling the pinch.

And the chancellor also sparked concerns by hinting that preferential tax arrangements for the self-employed may be withdrawn in a future budget in return for the help being offered now.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said: My worry is that if people cannot get access to the scheme until June it will simply be too late for millions. People need support in the coming days and fortnight.

Recommended The rise of Rishi Sunak is as fascinating as it is unexpected

Unveiling the plans at the daily Downing Street press conference, Mr Sunak reassured self-employed workers such as hairdressers, childminders and cleaners concerned about losing their livelihoods: You have not been forgotten.

The new scheme, which Mr Sunak described as one of the most generous in the world, is expected to pay out an average of 940 per person and will initially run for three months at a cost estimated by the Treasury at around 3bn a month.

Some 200,000 self-employed people reporting profits above 50,000 a year will not be eligible, along with 1.7 million who earn less than half of their income from self-employment and an unknown number who have been trading for less than a year and have therefore not submitted tax returns for the years 2018-19 and before on which their entitlement could be calculated.

Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Show all 15 1 /15 Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A rose is delivered by drone to a woman on Mother's Day in Jounieh, Lebanon AFP/Getty Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Women dance on their balcony as a radio station plays music for a flash mob to raise spirits in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A skeleton stands on a balcony in Frankfurt, Germany AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies The film Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna is projected on a building in Rome AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman uses a basket tied to a rope to pull a delivery of groceries up to her balcony in Naples, Italy EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Francesco Cellini plays for his neighbours from the rooftop terrace of his flat block in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman gestures from her balcony in Barcelona EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Cellist Karina Nunez performs for her neighbours at the balcony of her flat in Panama City Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Nash Petrovic live streams a set from his roof in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies People applaud medical workers from their balconies in Modiin, Israel Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A Brooklyn resident relaxes in a hammock hung on their balcony Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Residents toast during a "safe distance" aperitif time between neighbours in Anderlecht, Belgium Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Musician Adam Moser plays for neighbours from his balcony in Budapest, Hungary Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man and his son on their balcony in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man sits alone on a roof terrace in Rome Reuters

Mr Sunak said payments would be made only to businesses which have been adversely affected by coronavirus, with HM Revenue and Customs contacting businesses directly if they are eligible.

He said that those facing immediate financial difficulties can also access business interruption loans and may benefit from the deferral of VAT and income tax payments and the business rates holiday.

Self-employed people are a crucial part of the UKs workforce whove understandably been looking for reassurance and support during this national emergency, said Mr Sunak.

The package for the self-employed Ive outlined today is one of the most generous in the world that has been announced so far. It targets support to those who need help most, offering the self-employed the same level of support as those in work.

Together with support packages for businesses and for workers, I am confident we now have the measures in place to ensure we can get through this emergency together.

In an apparent signal to future moves to equalise the tax treatment of employed and self-employed people, he added: I must be honest and point out that in devising this scheme in response to many calls for support, it is now much harder to justify the inconsistent contributions between people of different employment statuses.

If we all want to benefit equally from state support, we must all pay in equally in future.

Recommended Listen to the latest episode of The Independent Coronavirus Podcast

The package was widely welcomed by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) for providing essential support to those facing significant uncertainty and loss of income, while the British Chambers of Commerce said it offered a lifeline to the vast majority of the UKs 5 million self-employed people, many of whom have seen their livelihoods vanish overnight.

The chairman of the Federation of Master Builders, Brian Berry, said construction workers across the country would be taking a collective sigh of relief and said building companies will now be able to close sites to protect workers and public health without having to worry about the losses faced by self-employed workers on those sites.

But Matt Dowling, CEO of the Freelancer Club, said: The key question is why did this support take so long? Ive spoken to thousands of freelancers over the last week and the collective despair has been palpable. Some have already had to make heartbreaking decisions to stay afloat.

Waiting for this announcement has set freelancers apart from the rest of the country and moved them closer to the precipice by a whole week. Not having the system up and running until June could prove critical.

Mr McDonnell voiced relief, but questioned how the self-employed will get by while they wait for their grants: Asking people to rely on universal credit when more than 130,000 people are queueing online will be worrying to many people, so there is a real risk that without support until June the self-employed will feel they have to keep working, putting their own and others health at risk.

Liberal Democrat acting leader Ed Davey said: I am hugely concerned about how long this will take to deliver.

Many sole traders like taxi drivers, hairdressers and cleaners will not be able to wait until June. I also worry about people who have been self-employed for less than a year who seem to be forgotten by this scheme. Many will have risked their savings to get started and it looks like they will get nothing from the package.

TUC general secretary Frances OGrady said it was a welcome step, but added: Its vital that support reaches workers as soon as possible. Many are already dealing with severe hardship.
Dear Atiku,

Your latest post of Medium is a hat trick. That is how to score a free kick. You just put the ball through the net. Its a goal.

This is presidential.

I think it makes so much sense though. N10k for every single Nigerian is a good thing.

You have dropped N50m.

If Dangote, Otedola, Adeleke, Papa Adeboye, Bishop Oyedepo, Pastor Chris, Dr Olukoya, and Prophet T.B Joshua drop N50m each.

Then we may as well officially declare the stay home gig.

Here, I reproduce your piece below:

***

Coronavirus: Nigerians Deserve Palliative Measures.

By Atiku A.

As the coronavirus pandemic ravages the world, I applaud the various Nigerian state governments who have proactively taken measures, such as issuing stay at home orders, and shutting down non-essential markets and other places of mass gatherings, while also giving guidelines for social distancing.

However, we must accept the fact that much of the Nigerian public have a subsistence existence. A large percentage of our people do not have the financial capacity to withstand long periods of self-isolation and even lockdown. It is, therefore, incumbent on the Federal and state governments to provide palliatives to the Nigerian people to enable them to survive, even as they abide by these necessary measures put in place for their safety.

At an approximate 30 million households or thereabouts, the government should devise modalities to distribute N10,000 as a supplement for foodstuff to each household, among other palliative measures, with no one left behind.

It is thus time for the National Assembly to reconvene in an emergency session, perhaps by teleconference (in line with the demands of social distancing), to legislate a Stimulus Package Act that will cater for all Nigerian citizens.

I also call on all Mobile Telephony Companies in Nigeria to urgently develop mobile money platforms so that the government can reach the unbanked with financial assistance. I also urge these telecommunications firms to offer each of the 100 million mobile phone lines in Nigeria free credit of at least 1500 per mobile line, so that Nigerians who show symptoms, or those who just want information, can call the nearest available health facility, or even an ambulance service, as the case may be.

I commend all individuals and corporate organisations who have one way or the other provided some form of relief for the Nigerian people. In essence, this is what makes Nigeria great, when we help each other at such crisis times as this, irrespective of any differences. I further call on more corporations and individuals with capacity, to assist the public in these trying times.

To this end, Priam Group pledges N50 million on my behalf as my humble contribution to a relief Fund that will form part of the stimulus package.

***

Wow.

Knowing how this affects 2023. I wont be surprise to read Tinubu donating N100m.

Let the donation party start!

Your Good Job spotter,

Ediale

#ForTheCulture

PS: So now Nigerians your prayers are answered. Now for those asking for Quarantine Money. The money has landed.
The death toll due to COVID-19 rose to 16 in the country and 80 fresh cases were reported, taking the tally to 694, the Union health ministry said on Thursday, but asserted that the rate of increase in the positive cases was 'relatively stable' in India.

IMAGE: A policeman gives hand sanitiser to a child as a group of migrant labourers are made to stay under a flyover on the Hapur Road by the administration for their safety, during the complete lockdown in view of the novel coronavirus pandemic, in Ghaziabad, on Thursday. Photograph: Arun Sharma/PTI Photo

The Union health ministry officials also said India was at the second stage as there is still no 'hard evidence' to say that there has been community transmission of the fast-spreading coronavirus, remarks which may provide anxious citizens with much needed assurance and hope.

As the virus kept extending its footprint, the central and state governments unleashed measures on a war-footing.

IMAGE: A worker with a child on his shoulder walks to his village amid a nationwide complete lockdown, on the NH24 near Delhi-UP Border in Ghaziabad, on Thursday. Photograph: Ravi Choudhary/PTI Photo

While the Union finance ministry unveiled a Rs 1.70 lakh crore economic package involving free foodgrain and cooking gas to poor for the next three months, one-time doles to women and poor senior citizens among other benefits, and the health ministry announced that 17 states have started to earmark hospitals for dedicated treatment of COVID-19 patients.

IMAGE: A police person baton charges a commuter, who had come out of his house during Day 2 of the nationwide lockdown, in Nagaon, Assam, on Thursday. Photograph: PTI Photo

Addressing a media briefing on the COVID-19 situation, health ministry joint secretary Lav Agarwal said, 'there is still no hard evidence to say there has been community transmission of coronavirus in India' and assured that the country was geared to tackle the coronavirus challenge.

IMAGE: A policewoman provides grocery items to a poor family at a slum in Patiala. Photograph: PTI Photo

While the numbers of COVID-19 cases are increasing, 'there appears to be relatively a stable trend or even little bit reduction in the rate at which they are increasing', Agarwal said.

"This, however, does not establish a clear trend. We are hopeful that by following social distancing policy, conducting a proper contact tracing and by ensuring all people at home quarantine are monitored, we will be able to combat the disease," he said.

IMAGE: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee distributes masks during her visit to various markets in Kolkata. Photograph: PTI Photo

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a nationwide lockdown for 21 days, in a desperate measure to contain the spread of the virus.

Globally, the death toll from the coronavirus has risen to 21,293 with more than 471,518 cases reported in over 170 countries and territories, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

IMAGE: UP Police personnel spray hand sanitiser on a commuter's palms at NH-24 in Ghaziabad. Photograph: Ravi Choudhary/PTI Photo

As per the ministry data, out of 16 COVID deaths in the country, Maharashtra reported three deaths, Gujarat three, Karnataka two, while Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Punjab, Delhi, West Bengal and Himachal Pradesh reported one death each.

Jammu and Kashmir also reported its first COVID-19 fatality.

IMAGE: Police personnel ask citizens to wear mask during the second day of the lockdown in Bengaluru. Photograph: Shailendra Bhojak/PTI Photo

The number of active COVID-19 cases in the country stood at 633, while 44 people were either cured or discharged and one had migrated, the ministry said, adding the total number of 694 cases also includes 47 foreign nationals.

IMAGE: Volunteers of Siddhivinayak Temple Trust distribute food and bottled water to police and traffic police personnel deployed on duty during Day-2 of the lockdown, at Mahim in Mumbai, on Thursday. Photograph: Kunal Patil/PTI Photo

Maharashtra has reported the highest number of COVID-19 cases so far at 124, including three foreign nationals, followed by Kerala, where the number of cases has climbed up to 118, including eight foreign nationals, according to the ministry data.

The number of cases in Telangana has gone up to 44, including 10 foreigners.

IMAGE: Workers spray disinfectants on a street, during day-2 of a nationwide lockdown, in Mamallapuram. Photograph: PTI Photo

Karnataka has reported 55 COVID-19 cases, while the number of cases in Gujarat has climbed to 43, including a foreigner.

The number of cases in Rajasthan has increased to 41, including two foreigners.

Uttar Pradesh has reported 41 cases, including a foreigner, while the number of positive cases in Delhi has gone up to 36, including a foreigner.

IMAGE: People queue standing in circles drawn to maintain safe distance as they wait to buy grocery items during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of Coronavirus disease in Kolkata. Photograph: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

Punjab has reported 33 cases, while 30 COVID-19 cases have so far been detected in Haryana, including 14 foreigners.

The number of cases has climbed to 26 Tamil Nadu, including six foreigners. Madhya Pradesh has recorded 20 cases, Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir 13 each, Andhra Pradesh has reported 11 cases each, while West Bengal has 10 COVID-19 patients.

Chandigarh has reported seven cases, Bihar and Chhatisgarh have registered six cases each while Uttarakhand has five, including a foreigner.

IMAGE: A woman covering her face with a mask walks in a crowded market place, as nationwide lockdown continues over highly contagious novel coronavirus in New Delhi. Photograph: Yawar Nazir/Getty Images

Himachal Pradesh have reported three cases each, while two cases have been detected in Odisha.

Goa has reported three coronavirus cases.

Earlier, the ministry had wrongly attributed 33 cases to the coastal state. Subsequently, the figure was revised.

IMAGE: Members of Sakhi Mandal working long hours to stitch face masks in Ranchi. Photograph: ANI Photo

Puducherry, Andaman and Nicobar, Mizoram and Manipur have reported one case each.

According to experts, there are four stages of the infection -- stage 1 or imported and sporadic cases :When only those who have travelled to virus-hit countries test positive, stage 2 or local transmission: When the source of the transmission is known and can be located, usually with ones close to the patient such as family or people s/he have come in contact with.

IMAGE: Security personnel sanitise their hands during the nationwide lockdown in Guwahati. Photograph: ANI Photo

Those who test positive at this stage are those who have a history of travel to affected countries or are in close contact with those who have.

Stage 3 or community transmission :When the source of the infection cannot be located.

This happens when a patient tests positive despite no exposure to an infected person nor any history of travelling to an infected country.

Many countries, including Italy and Spain have reported such cases and stage 4 : When the disease is termed an epidemic, or an outbreak so severe with no clear end point for the ongoing transmission.
For more coverage, visit our complete coronavirus section here.

Theres good news and bad news in the United States efforts to test the public for the COVID-19 virus. Testing has gone up dramatically in recent days, but there is still catching up to do  and states arent doing it equally.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. had tested 433,545 people for the coronavirus, according to the unofficial COVID Tracking Project, which aggregates available state data. Thats up from only 103,000 people tested six days ago, when much of the country was already sheltering in place.

However, nearly one-quarter of those tests were conducted in one state: New York. By contrast California, with double New Yorks population, had reported tested only 27,000 people until Wednesday, when Gov. Gavin Newsom announced 66,800 total had been tested. It was unclear how many of those new tests were still pending.

California largely attributed the spike in testing to "commercial, provider and academic labs that have increased testing capacity and are now reporting that data to the state." The most recent numbers included 2,535 positive cases and 53 deaths.

As recently as Tuesday, President Trump and others had called New York the epicenter of U.S. infections  its nearly 31,000 cases make up almost half of the nations positive tests. But with many states lagging far behind it in per capita testing, health experts can only guess what the virus national impact really is.

We have no systematic strategy to do the kind of surveillance necessary to understand the chain of transmission, Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale School of Medicine, told the Washington Post this week. Were basically flying blind because we have so little idea about its penetration into our society and the number of people affected.

Up to now, coronavirus has been mostly equated with urban, coastal states. But Louisiana is an example of a more rural state that may be facing far more infections as testing ramps up. It reported 1,800 positive cases Wednesday, 400 more than a day earlier.

Sixty-five Louisianans, out of 11,000 tested, have died just two weeks after the states first positive test. By contrast, California had reported 40 deaths after almost 28,000 tests before Wednesday.

Reasons why the U.S. fell far behind nations such as South Korea in testing for the virus include faulty tests initially sent by the Centers for Disease Control, and private companies not being tasked with developing their own tests.

Reporting state-by-state testing data is imperfect because each state reports it differently and not all report negative test results. But what follows are the states that have tested the most and least for coronavirus on a total and per-million basis, as March 25 in the afternoon, using the COVID Tracking Projects data.

New York: 103,479 tests (5,322 per 1M)

California: 66,800 tests (1,672 per 1M)

Washington: 34,181 tests (4,383 per 1M)

Florida: 18,289 tests (831 per 1M)

Ohio: 14,764 tests (1,256 per 1M)

Massachusetts: 13,749 tests (1,970 per 1M)

Texas: 13,494 tests (457 per 1M)

Pennsylvania: 12,320 tests (961 per 1M)

New Jersey: 12,045 tests (1,347 per 1M)

Illinois: 11,485 (907 per 1M)

Minnesota: 11,475 tests (2,012 per 1M)

Louisiana: 11,451 tests (2,465 per 1M)

Tennessee: 11,184 tests (1,621 per 1M)

North Carolina: 10,489 tests (988 per 1M)

Wisconsin: 8,694 tests (1,485 per 1M)

Colorado: 7,701 tests (1,317 per 1M)

New Mexico: 6,842 (3,263 per 1M)

Georgia: 6,179 tests (575 per 1M)

Utah: 5,823 tests (1,774 per 1M)

Virginia: 5,370 tests (622 per 1M)

Connecticut: 5,300 tests (1,487 per 1M)

Nevada: 4,572 tests (1,456 per 1M)

Oregon: 4,559 tests (1,059 per 1M)

Michigan: 3,860 tests (384 per 1M)

Hawaii: 3,666 tests (2,595 per 1M)

Indiana: 3,356 tests (497 per 1M)

Maine: 3,326 tests (2,471 per 1M)

Kentucky: 3,022 tests (671 per 1M)

Alabama: 2,812 tests (572 per 1M)

Iowa: 2,723 tests (856 per 1M)

New Hampshire: 2,530 tests (1,845 per 1M)

South Carolina: 2,470 tests (474 per 1M)

Kansas: 2,184 tests (750 tests per 1M)

Montana: 2,001 tests (1,841 per 1M)

Idaho: 1,960 tests (1,073 per 1M)

Mississippi: 1,943 tests (649 per 1M)

North Dakota: 1,773 tests (2,327 per 1M)

Alaska: 1,733 tests (2,361 per 1M)

Vermont: 1,712 tests (2,725 per 1M)

District of Columbia: 1,609 tests (2,232 per 1M)

Rhode Island: 1,463 tests (1,385 per 1M)

Nebraska: 1,365 tests (699 per 1M)

Arkansas: 1,286 tests (423 per 1M)

South Dakota: 1,128 tests (1,249 per 1M)

Oklahoma: 969 tests (245 per 1M)

Wyoming: 930 tests (1,640 per 1M)

West Virginia: 804 tests (452 per 1M)

Arizona: 736 tests (99.7 per 1M)

Missouri: 624 tests (101 per 1M)

Maryland: 517 tests (84.9 per 1M)

Delaware: 151 tests (153 per 1M)

Greg Keraghosian is an SFGATE homepage editor. Email: greg.keraghosian@sfgate.com
By Trend

Iran's Minister of Health and Medical Education Saeed Namaki said that as many as 47.5 million people in Iran have been tested for coronavirus as part of the National Mobilization Campaign against Coronavirus, Trend reports via IRNA.

He expressed hope that Iran's 'social distancing plan' to be announced by the president, would be accepted and followed by the public.

Namaki went on to add that this plan will be implemented to prevent the second outbreak of COVID-19.

The implementation of this plan has been reviewed by the country's Interior Ministry, Namaki said.

Iran is one of the countries heavily affected by the rapidly-spreading coronavirus. According to recent reports from the Iranian officials, over 24,800 people have been infected, 1,934 people have already died. Meanwhile, over 8,900 have reportedly recovered from the disease.

The country continues to apply strict measures to contain the further spread. Reportedly, the disease was brought to Iran by a businessman from Iran's Qom city, who went on a business trip to China, despite official warnings. The man died later from the disease.

The Islamic Republic only announced its first infections and deaths from the coronavirus on Feb. 19.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
POLICE in Rukwa have arrested a Milundikwa Secondary School teacher in Nkasi District for allegedly raping a Form Two student aged 17.

Impeccable report from the school indicated that the teacher was arrested while teaching.

Narrating the incident, Rukwa Regional Police Commander (RPC), Mr Justine Masejo said on 15th March, this year, shortly after midnight, the suspect sneaked into the room, where the girl was sleeping and raped her, adding: The 37 year old school teacher allegedly raped his student and fled shortly after committing the crime.

However, Police arrested him and are grilling him....he will be arraigned in court after investigations are complete.

However, Mr Masejo declined to reveal name of the suspect, saying investigations are ongoing.

Reached for a comment, Milundikwa Village Executive Officer (VEO), Mr Benazir Kalamba, confirmed the allegation, saying that it was reported in his local office.

"Then I reported the incident to Nkasi District Council Education Officer for further determinations he added.

On their part, Milundikwa Secondary School Second Master, Mr Charles Mwamengo confided to the "Daily News" that their management after learning of the report, also notified the relevant state organs.

"The law enforcers acted swiftly, because last week, the school management had a meeting with the staff following the rumors and the school teacher was arrested.

We strongly warned and urged our staff to refrain from such evil practices, and whoever would be caught will be dealt with severely, said Mr Mwamengo.
(CNN)  Spain has now seen more deaths from the coronavirus pandemic than any other country except Italy, with officials warning that the peak of its outbreak has still not been reached.

The nation has recorded 3,434 deaths from COVID-19, the Ministries of Health and Science announced Wednesday, pushing it above China in total fatalities. The numbers are up 27% on the day before.

Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo is among those to test positive , the Prime Minister's office said in a statement. She is quarantined in a hospital and is making good progress, the statement said.

Spain is under a countrywide lockdown, and top health official Fernando Simon predicted the nation had still not reached the crest of its outbreak. The number of cases will continue to rise in the coming days, he said. Earlier this week, he had suggested that the peak of the infections could come "in a matter of days."

The total number of positive tests in the country rose to 47,610, putting it fourth in the world, behind China, Italy and the United States.

Elsewhere, Health Minister Salvador Illa said the government had agreed to buy 432 million euros' ($467 million) worth of masks, tests, gloves and respirators from China, which will start arriving in weekly shipments from the end of this week.

The nation has appealed to NATO for international humanitarian assistance, requesting both medical and personal protective equipment.

Spain has been locked down and in a state of emergency since March 13. The period was initially expected to last 15 days, but Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Sunday that the state of emergency could be extended for a further 14 days. The parliament has been debating the motion on Wednesday.

Emergency hospitals have been set up across the country, while residents have been ordered to stay indoors apart from for essential trips, and normally busy streets are deserted.

Troops have disinfected about 500 of the nation's residential homes for seniors, said Gen. Miguel Villarroya, chief of Spain's defense command.

Officials resorted to turning a Madrid ice rink into a morgue as its deaths piled up. Bodies of people who die of Covid-19 are now transported by the country's emergency military unit to the Palacio de Hielo, or Ice Palace, in Madrid's Hortaleza neighborhood, the Madrid regional president's office told CNN on Tuesday.

The regional government said this was a "temporary and extraordinary measure" designed to "lessen the pain of the families of the victims and the situation that's being recorded in Madrid's hospitals."

China, where the outbreak began, has had 3,281 deaths, according to its National Health Commission. Italy has the most, with at least 6,820, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The number of coronavirus infections closed in on a half-million worldwide Thursday, with both Italy and the US on track to surpass China, and a record-shattering 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in a single week in a stark demonstration of the damage to the world's biggest economy

The number of coronavirus infections closed in on a half-million (five lakh) worldwide Thursday, with both Italy and the US on track to surpass China, and a record-shattering 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in a single week in a stark demonstration of the damage to the world's biggest economy.

Health care systems in Europe and New York buckled under the strain, with Spain's death toll climbing to more than 4,000.

In the US, an unprecedented $2.2 trillion economic rescue package to help businesses, hospitals, and ordinary Americans make it through the crisis cleared the Senate and is expected to be voted on in the House on Friday. The plan would dispense checks of $1,200 per adult and $500 per child.

At least 2.8 billion people, or more than one-third of the Earth's population, are under severe travel restrictions. But the head of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, scolded world leaders for wasting precious time in the fight against the virus that has already killed more than 22,000 people and infected over 480,000, thrown millions out of work and ravaged the world economy.

The time to act was actually more than a month ago or two months ago, he said Wednesday. We squandered the first window of opportunity. ...this is a second opportunity, which we should not squander and do everything to suppress and control this virus."

A divided US debates over measures to follow

In the United States, where deaths passed 1,050 and about 70,000 people were infected, the damage from the widespread economic shutdown was made plain when the number of people applying for unemployment benefits last week was nearly five times the old record, set in 1982.

A political battle, meanwhile, raged between those demanding urgent action for a long siege against the pandemic, like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and President Donald Trump.

Trump has expressed hope churches could return to normal by Easter on 12 April, and grumbled that our country wasnt built to be shut down  apparently concerned that the outbreak's devastating effects on financial markets and employment will harm his re-election chances. Democrats say Trump is putting the economy ahead of the health and safety of Americans.

"Id like to say, lets get back to work next Friday, said Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Thatd be wonderful. But it cant be arbitrary.

New York has emerged as a virus hotspot. The city's mammoth convention centre is being turned into a hospital. The state recorded more than 350 deaths.

Europe's health systems buckle

Spain has become the country in Europe where the outbreak is spreading the fastest. On Thursday, the country's Health Ministry reported nearly 8,600 new infections and 655 deaths, bringing the total cases to over 56,000 and more than 4,000 fatalities  second only to Italy's toll of about 7,500.

Health Minister Salvador Illa sought to assure Spaniards that government measures to slow the virus were working, telling the Parliament that the rises had been smaller than in previous days and indicate a changing trend that brings us to think that we are entering a phase of stabilisation".

In Italy, doctors and nurses begged the government to provide more masks, gloves and goggles and urged the public to understand how important onerous social distancing measures really are.

Scientists say stopping just one person from getting the virus means scores of others will not become infected down the road.

Help us help you," Dr Francesca De Gennaro, who heads a small medical clinic in Italy's hard-hit Bergamo region, wrote in an open letter.

The rate of increase in Italy has slowed slightly, noted Dr Hans Kluge, the head of the WHO's European office. He said officials hope to soon figure out whether lockdown measures in numerous countries have worked.

Germany has had a high number of infections at more than 39,000 people, but just 222 deaths  which has widely been attributed to early and aggressive testing, among other factors.

On Thursday, Lothar Wieler, the head of Germany's Robert Koch disease control centre, said the country now has the ability to test 500,000 people a week, perhaps the greatest capacity in the world.

European Union leaders were holding their third summit in three weeks on the virus to manage the havoc it is wreaking on their 27 economies. As the number of deaths in Europe soared past 12,000, Spain extended a state of emergency that will allow it to impose broader lockdowns, while French president Emmanuel Macron launched Operation Resilience, a military-backed response to the crisis.

France began evacuating infected citizens from the northeastern hotspot of Alsace using a special high-speed train.

Britain ordered 10,000 ventilators, working with engineers from Dyson. The government wants to increase its supply of the breathing machines from 8,000 to 30,000.

Governors in Brazil defy Bolsonaro's call to reopen schools, businesses

In Brazil, the country's governors are defying President Jair Bolsonaro over his call to reopen schools and businesses, dismissing his argument that the cure of widespread shutdowns is worse than the disease. As of Thursday, the country had more than 2,500 cases and 59 deaths.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.

So far, more than 115,000 people have recovered from the virus, according to a running count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

China's cases have slowed, with only 67 new cases reported, all recent arrivals.

The leaders of the Group of 20 largest economies held a special video conference to better coordinate a response to the outbreak, amid criticism that the world's wealthiest countries have not taken cohesive action. The conference was chaired by Saudi Arabia's King Salman.
WhatsApp has partnered with the UK Government to provide a 'coronavirus chatbot' to offer official guidance to people for free.

The service will easily connect millions of WhatsApp users in the UK with information directly sourced from the authorities.

It is hoped that the new chatbot service will help reduce the burden on the NHS when it launches, which will be live as soon as the technology can get online.

People can use the service by messaging 'hi' to the number 07860064422.

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WhatsApp has partnered up with the UK Government to provide a 'coronavirus chatbot' to offer official guidance to people for free. People can use the service by messaging 'hi' to the number 07860064422

WHO said that is has recorded 16,000 deaths associated with the virus and there are almost half a million reported cases.

The service will provide information on topics such as coronavirus prevention and symptoms and the latest number of cases in the UK.

It will also offer advice on staying at home, travel advice and dispel myths around the virus.

The messaging platform, which has more than two billion global users, has also launched a website to help combat misinformation surrounding the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The 'WhatsApp Coronavirus Information Hub' sees the Facebook-owned company partner with the WHO and UNICEF to provide reliable information to users.

It claims the service provides 'simple, actionable guidance' for various people most affected by the ongoing crisis.

This includes health workers, educators, community leaders, nonprofits, local governments and businesses.

Professor Yvonne Doyle, medical director for Public Health England, said of the chatbot: 'This service will help us ensure the public has a trusted source for the right information about coronavirus, updated with the latest public health guidance and providing assurance that they are not misled by any of the false information circulating.'

WhatsApp's chief operating officer Matt Idema added: 'At difficult times like these, people are using WhatsApp more than ever to connect with and support their friends, family and communities.

'We are pleased to be able to provide the UK Government with the communications tools to help them respond to the public's questions about the virus with reliable, timely health advice, in order to keep people safe.'

The messaging platform, which has more than two billion global users, has also launched a website to help combat misinformation surrounding the ongoing coronavirus pandemic (pictured)

Earlier in the week, the Government texted British mobile phone users to remind them of the new lockdown rules (pictured)

Earlier in the week, the Government texted British mobile phone users to remind them of the new lockdown rules.

Meanwhile, researchers have called on the public to help them track the disease through a symptom-checking app.

By self reporting symptoms through the app  which can be found through https://covid.joinzoe.com/  experts will be able to monitor the spread of the disease in the UK.

The public is being encouraged to download the app, and take a minute a day to report on how they are feeling, even if they are well.

This will help experts from King's College London, among others, to identify high-risk areas in the UK, how fast the virus is spreading and who is most at risk.

The project was launched as part of a study into twins, with the general public also invited to take part.

Professor Tim Spector from King's College London said: 'These are worrying times for everyone. Our twins are fantastically committed, enthusiastic health research participants who have already been studied in unprecedented detail, putting us in a unique position to provide vital answers to support the global fight against Covid-19.

'The more of the public that also use the app, the better the real-time data we will have to combat the outbreak in this country.'
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 08:55:44|Editor: Liu

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TOKYO, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Tokyo stocks opened sharply lower Thursday on increasing concerns about the spike in coronavirus cases in Tokyo with people in the capital being requested to stay at home this weekend.

As of 9:15 a.m., the 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average dropped 570.98 points, or 2.92 percent, from Wednesday to 18,975.65.

The broader Topix index of all First Section issues on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, meanwhile, fell 30.73 points, or 2.16 percent, at 1,393.89.

All industry categories retreated into negative territory, with retail, real estate, and iron and steel issues comprising those that declined the most in the opening minutes after the morning bell.
EU leaders on Thursday gave the finance ministers of the 19-member eurozone single currency bloc two weeks to come up with a strong economic response to the coronavirus crisis.

The call was agreed after what officials said was a difficult video summit at which hard-hit Italy and Spain pushed their reluctant northern partners to do more.

"At this stage, we invite the Eurogroup to present proposals to us within two weeks," the leaders said, in a statement released after the talks, held at a distance to protect participants from infection.

"These proposals should take into account the unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 shock affecting all our countries and our response will be stepped up, as necessary, with further action in an inclusive way, in light of developments, in order to deliver a comprehensive response.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An employee at a New York City hospital where nurses are forced to wear garbage bags as gowns has died of coronavirus.

Kious Kelly, 48, died at Mount Sinai West hospital in Manhattan on Tuesday night, a week after he was admitted upon testing positive for coronavirus, according to the New York Post.

Kelly was an assistant nursing manager at Mount Sinai West, which like other hospitals in New York and elsewhere has been hit by an urgent shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as masks and isolation gowns.

A shocking photo posted to Facebook shows three nurses at Mount Sinai West wearing black garbage bags as makeshift protective gowns.

Assistant nursing manager Kious Kelly, 48, died at Mount Sinai West hospital in Manhattan on Tuesday night, a week after he was admitted upon testing positive for coronavirus

A shocking photo posted to Facebook shows three nurses at Mount Sinai West wearing black garbage bags as makeshift protective gowns

'NO MORE GOWNS IN THE WHOLE HOSPITAL,' the caption on the photo reads.

'NO MORE MASKS AND REUSING THE DISPOSABLE ONESNURSES FIGURING IT OUT DURING COVID-19 CRISIS.'

In a statement to DailyMail.com, Mount Sinai Health System wrote: 'We are deeply saddened by the passing of a beloved member of our nursing staff.'

'The safety of our staff and patients has never been of greater importance and we are taking every precaution possible to protect everyone,' the statement continued.

'But this growing crisis is not abating and has already devastated hundreds of families in New York and turned our frontline professionals into true American heroes. Today, we lost another hero - a compassionate colleague, friend and selfless caregiver.'

At least four staffers who worked with Kelly have also tested positive for the coronavirus, and there are nine coronavirus patients being treated in the telemetry monitoring unit where he worked, according to the Post.

'Today, we lost another hero - a compassionate colleague, friend and selfless caregiver,' Mount Sinai said in a statement when asked about Kelly's death

Mount Sinai West has about 40 coronavirus patients scattered throughout the building, sources said.

New York, now the U.S. epicenter of the outbreak, has at least 30,811 confirmed cases, nearly 18,000 in New York City alone. The statewide death toll is nearing 300.

Kelly's nursing school classmate Annie K. Lee expressed her sorrow at his death in a moving Facebook post.

'I still remember hugging Kious on graduation day. I am at a loss for words and cannot even begin to describe how sorry I am, that the world has lost a flame as bright as you, in this unforgiving Coronavirus worldwide pandemic,' she wrote.

Lee issued an urgent plea to the public to support healthcare workers, writing: 'GIVE your unnecessarily stocked masks, N95s, N99s, gloves, isolation gowns, and Medical Protective Gear to your local hospitals.'

On Wednesday, officials in New York City were taking grim steps to prepare for a potential public health disaster, new cases continued to emerge at an alarming rate and hospitalizations spiked.

A makeshift morgue was set up outside Bellevue Hospital, and the city's police, their ranks dwindling as more fall ill, were told to patrol nearly empty streets to enforce social distancing.

Armed military personnel and NYC Medical Examiner's Office set up white tents and refrigeration trucks for a makeshift morgue outside Bellevue hospital Wednesday

National Guards are seen inside the Jacob Javits Center on Monday in New York City. The massive convention center is being converted into a field hospital

Public health officials hunted down beds and medical equipment and put out a call for more doctors and nurses for fear the number of sick will explode in a matter of weeks, overwhelming hospitals as has happened in Italy and Spain.

New York University offered to let its medical students graduate early so that they could join the battle.

Mayor Bill de Blasio predicted on Wednesday that half of all New Yorkers will eventually contract coronavirus.

New York City has a population of about 8.6 million. If the current statewide mortality rate held true, deaths could exceed 40,000 in the city alone if half of all residents contracted coronavirus.

De Blasio said: 'It's a fair bet to say that half of all New Yorkers and maybe more than half will end up contracting this disease.'

People make their way inside nearly empty Grand Central Terminal, Wednesday in Manhattan

Health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, added: 'We think 50 percent by the end of this epidemic, this pandemic, so by the time September rolls around likely 50 percent, but it could also be much higher.'

De Blasio also told New Yorkers not 'cling to the false hope' of reopening by Easter after President Donald Trump suggested that date for lifting lockdowns.

And he slammed Mitch McConnell for 'standing in the way' of the funding 'we need' as the $2 trillion economic rescue package continued to hit snags in Washington.

Meanwhile, Governor Andrew Cuomo, again pleading for help in dealing with the onslaught, attributed the cluster to the city's role as a gateway to international travelers and the sheer density of its population.

'Our closeness makes us vulnerable,' he said. 'But it's true that your greatest weakness is also your greatest strength. And our closeness is what makes us who we are. That is what New York is.'
New Delhi: The Indian Embassy in Kabul is in touch with family members of the victims of the dastardly terror attack at a gurudwara in the Afghan capital, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Thursday.

Twenty-five people were killed after gunmen stormed the gurdwara in Kabul and opened fired at the people inside on Wednesday.

One of the deceased was Tian Singh, a 71-year old Delhi resident.

The Islamic State terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attack which came weeks after a historic deal between the US and the Taliban to bring lasting peace to Afghanistan.

Understandable grief and anger at the cowardly terrorist attack on Gurudwara in #Kabul. Our Embassy @IndianEmbKabul is in continuous touch with the families of those killed and injured.  Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) March 26, 2020

"Understandable grief and anger at the cowardly terrorist attack on Gurudwara in #Kabul. Our Embassy @IndianEmbKabul is in continuous touch with the families of those killed and injured," Jaishankar tweeted.

The external affairs minister said efforts were on to bring back mortal remains of Singh from Kabul.

"Medical opinion against moving injured at this stage. Embassy @IndianEmbKabul is working on the return of mortal remains of Shri Tian Singh. Will keep you updated," he said.

India on Wednesday strongly condemned the terror attack, saying targeting of a religious place in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic reflected the "diabolical mindset" of the perpetrators and their backers.

"Such cowardly attacks on the places of religious worship of the minority community, especially at this time of COVID-19 pandemic, is reflective of the diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers," the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said.

The MEA said India stands in solidarity with the people, the government and the security forces of Afghanistan in their efforts for bringing peace and security to the country.

The Indian Embassy in Kabul is in touch with family members of the victims of the dastardly terror attack at a gurudwara in the Afghan capital, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Thursday.

Twenty-five people were killed after gunmen stormed the gurdwara in Kabul and opened fired at the people inside on Wednesday.

One of the deceased was Tian Singh, a 71-year old Delhi resident.

The Islamic State terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attack which came weeks after a historic deal between the US and the Taliban to bring lasting peace to Afghanistan.

"Understandable grief and anger at the cowardly terrorist attack on Gurudwara in #Kabul. Our Embassy @IndianEmbKabul is in continuous touch with the families of those killed and injured," Jaishankar tweeted.

The external affairs minister said efforts were on to bring back mortal remains of Singh from Kabul.

"Medical opinion against moving injured at this stage. Embassy @IndianEmbKabul is working on the return of mortal remains of Shri Tian Singh. Will keep you updated," he said.

India on Wednesday strongly condemned the terror attack, saying targeting of a religious place in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic reflected the "diabolical mindset" of the perpetrators and their backers.

"Such cowardly attacks on the places of religious worship of the minority community, especially at this time of COVID-19 pandemic, is reflective of the diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers," the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said.

The MEA said India stands in solidarity with the people, the government and the security forces of Afghanistan in their efforts for bringing peace and security to the country.
By Idrees Ali and Jonathan Landay

WASHINGTON, March 26 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to send troops to the border with Canada to support border operations amid the growing coronavirus crisis, two U.S. government officials told Reuters.

Under the plan, the Pentagon would send less than 1,000 troops to the U.S. northern border to support U.S. Customs and Border Protection efforts and several additional hundred troops to the border with Mexico, one of the officials said.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Jonathan Landay in Washington; Additional reporting by Ted Hesson and Steve Holland; Writing by Ted Hesson Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
Pakistan has sought USD 3.7 billion additional loan from three multilateral creditors to cope with the economic crisis being posed by the coronavirus outbreak, as the pandemic spread further in the country, infecting over 1,100 people and killing eight so far.

In addition to USD 1.4 billion loan from the IMF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank will extend loans of USD 1 billion and USD 1.25 billion respectively to the country, Adviser to the Prime Minister on Finance Abdul Hafeez Shaikh said at a conference on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Imran Khan had earlier announced a Rs 1.2 trillion economic relief package.

The number of coronavirus patients in Pakistan has reached to 1,102, according to the latest official data.

There were 417 patients in Sindh, 323 in Punjab, 131 in Balochistan, 121 in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), 84 in Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), 25 in Islamabad and 1 in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, according to the website of ministry of health services.

So far eight people have died while 21 have recovered.

Balochistan government spokesperson Liaquat Shahwani said 12 more coronavirus cases were reported, taking the total provincial tally to 131.

KP health official reported 41 new cases as the provincial tally rose to 121. Its worst hit area was Manga village of Mardan district where the virus spread when a man returned from Saudi Arabia after performing pilgrimage (Umra) and invited 2,000 villagers to celebrate it. Reportedly, he hugged everyone.

Later, he was tested positive and incidentally was the first to die in Pakistan due to the coronavirus.

Pakistan President Arif Alvi has urged religious scholars to stop all congregational prayers to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The move came following a 'fatwa' (edict) issued on Wednesday by the Grand Imam Shaikh of Jamia Al Azhar and the Supreme Council in Egypt, saying that head of the state is empowered to stop collective prayers in the current situation.

Prime Minister Imran Khan on Thursday paid a visit to an isolation centre in Islamabad, where he was briefed about the arrangements by the chairman of National Disaster Management Authority.

Meanwhile, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) announced that it will be operating exclusive premium flights for those passengers who need to return home immediately.

The flights will be operated only one way from Pakistan. The decision is effective from March 26 till April 2.

Other domestic flight operations will remain suspended.

Pakistan has already suspended international flights this week. However, cargo flights are exempted from the flight suspension ban.

Despite increase in the number of positive cases, Khan was still ambivalent on the issue of complete curfew like lockdown, which he said would hit hard the daily wagers and those living below the poverty line.

He asked the provinces to continuously reassess the lockdown as it may have serious impact on the economy.

The novel coronavirus - which originated in the central China city of Wuhan towards the end of last December - has now spread to all over the world. The COVID-19 has so far killed over 21,000 of people and infected close to half a million others across the globe.

COVID-19 cases witnessed a sharp surge in Pakistan after hundreds pilgrims, who returned from Iran, one of the worst-affected countries, tested positive.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
MATTOON -- Judith Stearns Parker, PhD, peacefully left her long-time home on Longboat Key, Florida to meet her Lord and Savior on the evening of Thursday, March 19th. Doctor Parker was born on August 6, 1940 in Burnham City Hospital in Champaign, Illinois to only children Captain Lewis F. and Flora Gene (Myers) Stearns, a direct descendant of Champaign County pioneer Moses Argo on her mother's side. Judy was raised by her grandparents (especially her beloved Papaw Waldo A. Slim Stearns) as well as her and her father's godmother, Mary Trost, initially in Urbana, then in Champaign.

While attending college, Judy met and married Ernest Kumerow of Chicago, a union which produced a son and a daughter. They later divorced. She then met and married the love of her life, Robert N. Parker of Mattoon, Illinois, on Valentine's Day 1972, a 25-year union which produced a further son. Bob lost his life in a plane crash at Tampa International Airport in October 1997, an incident in which Doctor Parker was the sole survivor of four on board, suffering 32 fractures and many surgeries and recoveries in the years ahead, all while grieving Bob's loss. She later married William F. Pillsbury of Chariton, Iowa, from whom she was estranged at the time of her passing.

Judy earned her bachelor's degree and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a master's degree from Eastern Illinois University. She taught in the Mundelein and Mattoon public schools, and at the time of her retirement was an associate professor at EIU, placing and supervising student teachers throughout Illinois. She raised her family in Prospect Heights, Champaign and Mattoon, Illinois, and enjoyed the company of the many friends and colleagues she met along the way. Judy was clean and sober at the time of her passing, and a longtime friend of Bill W. and Dr. Bob. She was sad the many aftereffects of the plane crash and her Lyme Disease robbed her of those friendships over the last 20 years.

Judy is survived by her estranged husband; her children Kirk Kumerow (Fauziah) of Rochester, Illinois; Kari Parker of Katy, Texas; and Brett Parker (Enza) of Bradenton, Florida; as well as her seven grandchildren: Sara and Maryam Kumerow of Rochester, Illinois; Annisa Kumerow (Alex Wacker) of St. Peters, Missouri; Robert Kyrion Parker and Faith Ann Davis of Longboat Key, Florida; and Isabella and Giuliana Parker of Bradenton, Florida, as well as her recent canine companion Louie. She was preceded in death by her parents, grandparents and godmother, and her previous husbands.

Judy was a secret St. Louis Cardinals and more open Chicago Bears and Kansas City Chiefs fan, because all three of her husbands were Cubs fans, and above all she loved her Illinois Fighting Illini. Judy enjoyed AA meetings, times with her grandchildren and children; teaching and giraffes; and was forever grateful she made two trips the length of the east side of Africa.

Doctor Parker's family is being assisted by the Robert Toale and Sons Funeral Home  Wiegand Chapel in Sarasota, Florida, with cremation rites accorded. Due to the COVID-19 response measures in Florida and Illinois, private family internment of her and Bob's ashes in Woodlawn Cemetery in Urbana, with a separate memorial service for Judy, will occur at later dates.

Donations in her memory may be made to a Lyme Disease charity; AMVETS; or a local American Legion or VFW post, or a hug to the grandma of your choosing.

For online condolences for Judy, please visit www.wiegandbrothers.com
More than 100 hospital workers in Boston have tested positive for coronavirus, officials at three facilities in the city told CNN.

That news comes as medical officials around the country express fears that hospitals will run short on staff as workers contract the virus from ill patients, even as the rate of sick people going to hospitals still is increasing.

The 100-plus workers who tested positive are at three Boston hospitals.

"Employees who have tested positive are not working until after they have been cleared by occupational health services," Brigham and Women's Hospital spokeswoman Serena Bronda told CNN.

Massachusetts General Hospital believes most of its coronavirus-positive employees contracted the virus somewhere other than the hospital, representative Terri Ogan said.

That belief comes from "hospital data, our broad implementation of CDC-guided infection control procedures throughout the hospital, and the extent of community spread now ongoing in Massachusetts," Ogan said.
As a retired doctor living alone in Switzerland, Marie-Claude was concerned about how to minimize her exposure to COVID-19. Then the phone rang. It was her friend Shadi Shhadeh, a Syrian refugee, asking how he could help.

When the coronavirus started, he immediately called me: Do you need anything? He almost became a son, says Marie-Claude, in her late sixties, whose grown-up children live hundreds of miles away in Germany and Austria.

Seeking practical ways to help others, in the country that gave him safety, Shadi swiftly mobilized a network of volunteers in Geneva and Lausanne to shop and run errands for the elderly, the infirm and others at greatest risk in the pandemic.

The Syrian refugee community swung into action, drawing on a deep sense of responsibility for those in greatest need and years of experience surviving danger and uncertainty.

We lived, and we are still living, a crisis as refugees, says Shadi, 34, who is originally from Daraa, south of Damascus, and came to Switzerland in 2013. That makes us probably in a better position to understand that there is a crisis and how to help.

Switzerland, with a population of 8.5 million, has over 11,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, making it one of the 10 most-affected countries worldwide.

We are a group of Syrian refugees, ready to help you stay at home by doing your shopping.

When the pandemic was declared, Shadis wife, Regula, who is Swiss and has elderly parents, realized that many people would need help. She turned to Shadi to enlist his Syrian friends, who began putting up flyers in apartment block lobbies and supermarket foyers.

We are a group of Syrian refugees, ready to help you stay at home by doing your shopping, reads the colourful poster, which provides an email contact  [email protected]  for those who need help. Shadi screens the emails and assigns neighbourhood volunteers, who head out several times a day to shop on demand.

"A woman called and said, Im not a refugee, can I still use this service? I said, Of course, we are all refugees now, says Shadi, who works for a Geneva humanitarian organization.

To minimize the chance of contracting or spreading the virus, he insists that the volunteers follow the strictest public health guidelines.

The objective of this campaign is to help people to remain in their protected zone. In this case, the protected zone is their home, he says. Thats why its important to stress  safety.

He adds: These people are protecting themselves, but they are also protecting our medical system from breaking down. We need to support that.

Breakdown of health services is something that millions of Syrians have experienced in the course of nine years of civil war, especially as hospitals became targets.

So we know what is a medical system being down, Shadi says. We know people who died from little injuries because they received no treatment, and we dont want to reach that. If we stand together now, we will support the medical system.

The groups volunteers are instructed to wash their hands thoroughly, wear protective gloves, disinfect shopping bags, observe a minimum distance and limit social chat with those they are helping to phone calls.

Everyone can do this ... invite people to copy this idea and implement it.

The network comprises 26 volunteers, 18 of them Syrian. So far the group estimates it has shopped for 100-200 people in Geneva and Lausanne, and their volunteer network is growing by the day. Regula, a communications specialist who came up with the idea, hopes the initiative will inspire others.

I hope that the people who are able to do something can help, so that those who really shouldnt have any social contact stay at home, she says.

Everyone can do this. All you have to do is print the flyer and hang it in your building or in the supermarket.

Shadi wants all those who read this story to act in their communities. I support, and I encourage and I invite people to copy this idea and implement it, he says.

If we have in every building one person who can help, it will be remembered decades later.

With additional reporting by Sylvie Francis and transcription by Haude Morel.
Curious developments took place in Chhattisgarh on Thursday as the state government issued an order to take control of all private hospitals. However, the order issued by the Directorate of Health Services was rolled back just a few hours later.

"This was a typo. An order to take over a private medical college was to be issued. The Directorate mistakenly issued the order," Niharika Barik Singh, Health Secretary, Chhattisgarh government told BusinessToday.In.

The government had decided to take over private medical college Raipur Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) in Chattisgarh to treat COVID-19 patients. However, in a goof up within the directorate, the notification that was issued said the government wants to take over all private institutions in the state. The erronous order was withdrawn immediately.

The flip-flop comes amid coronavirus outbreak in the country; Chhattisgarh has so far reported six cases, while the total cases in India have crossed 600.

State governments are scrambling to set up healthcare facilities to treat coronavirus patients. Odisha has announced that it will set up two dedicated hospitals within a fortnight to treat only coronavirus patients.

ALSO READ:COVID-19: Bhilwara district authorities take over 5 private hospitals, guest houses, resorts

Chhattisgarh government too seems to be gearing for a situation where it needs many more beds and isolation centres than it currently has. Roping in the private hospitals could be a strategy in that direction.

"Exercising the powers conferred under Clause 3 of the Chhattisgarh Epidemic Diseases COVID-19 Regulations, 2020, all private hospitals and nursing homes are acquired along with all human resources and available medical resources from the date of March 26, 2020 until further orders. The managers of concerned organisations will fully cooperate in running them in accordance to the guidelines issued by the government. This order will be immediately effective," Directorate Health Services, Chhattisgarh said in a statement on Thursday.

However, the state government rolled back its decision to take over private medical facilities due to a clerical error.

ALSO READ:Coronavirus lockdown: Brokers' body ANMI seeks closure of markets

On Wednesday night, three new cases of coronavirus were identified in the state, taking the total count of patients to 6. One case each was reported from state capital Raipur, as Durg and Bilaspur. Earlier on Wednesday, two persons, a 26-year-old woman from Raipur and a 26-year-old man from Rajnandgaon, with recent foreign travel history, were found positive for the deadly virus. Last week, the state reported its first case of COVID-19 as a 24-year-old woman who had returned to Raipur from London.

Of the six cases, four have been admitted in AIIMS, Raipur whereas two others are undergoing treatment at different government hospitals.

Meanwhile, death toll in the country due to the respiratory infection reached 13, and total number of active case climbed to 649 on Thursday, according to Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Of these, 593 patients are still undergoing treatment.

ALSO READ:Coronavirus relief: Finance Ministry urges RBI to pause EMI, loan repayments
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A fee of Rs 60 crore.

That is what airlines in India may have to cough up for parking their grounded fleet at airports across India. The fee includes both parking and housing charges that an airline has to pay the airport to park its planes.

There are about 650 aircraft belonging to the likes of IndiGo, Air India, SpiceJet and GoAir that have been grounded following the government's notification to suspend domestic flights on March 23.

Also read: Indias airlines have grounded over 650 planes. Where are they parked?

While the initial suspension was till March 31, it has been extended after the Prime Minister announced a complete lockdown for 21 days.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

It may not look like a huge amount, but for companies who aren't making earning any revenue and were already facing the prospect of incurring losses since the COVID-19 outbreak, the parking fee is substantial. For many, the fee can be used to pay employees.

To catch all live updates on the coronavirus pandemic, click here

Thankfully, there could be some respite in store.

Airlines have approached the government to waive off these parking charges, sources told Moneycontrol. And they may in their right to do so.

Since the grounding is not attributable to an airline but due to government orders, this charge should be waived off and only normal monthly charges that an airline was paying should apply. To be fair, airports too need revenue to cover housing costs," said Shakti Lumba, an aviation veteran and former Executive Director Airline Operations at Alliance Air, and Vice President Operations at IndiGo.

How much do the airlines otherwise pay for parking an aircraft?

The charges are laid down by the Airports Authority of India and depend on the weight of the aircraft and also the airport. Usually, there are two rates - one for aircraft weighing up to 100 tonne and the second for heavier ones.

For instance, at the Kolkata airport, airlines have to pay a parking charge of Rs 9 per tonne fee and a housing fee of Rs 17.60 per tonne. This is for aircraft weighing up to 100 tonne. Heavier ones incur parking fee of Rs 11.80 per tonne and a housing fee of Rs 23.60 per tonne.

All the rates, are hourly.

Most single aisle aircraft, including A320, weigh about 70 tonne. The bigger ones, like a Boeing 777, weighs over 200 tonne.

"On an average, the parking charges would range from Rs 30,000 to Rs 50,000 for the smaller aircraft. The bigger ones have to pay as much as Rs 1 lakh a day," said a senior executive.

The airlines though hope that these charges will be waived. "This is where the Ministry of Civil Aviation has to step in," said an executive.
Sheriff's deputies continued to scour rural plains in Alabama on Thursday, searching for a 4-year-old girl who went missing with her dog, authorities said.

Evelyn Vadie Sides, age 4. (Alabama Law Enforcement Agency)

Lee County Sheriff deputies, a helicopter, dogs and volunteer firefighters concentrated their search for Evelyn Vadie Sides near Lee Road 66 north of Lee Road 65, officials said.

That rural area is just west of the city of Loachapok and Auburn University.

Evelyn was reported missing at 2:45 p.m. on Wednesday. The girl is about 3-feet tall, 40 pounds and could be with her hound dog, which is "reddish in color with a collar," according to a sheriff's statement.

"Foul play is not suspected," according to the Lee County Sheriff's Department.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza says US drug trafficking charges against Maduro are a new form of coup.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said on Thursday that drug trafficking charges by the United States against President Nicolas Maduro announced earlier in the day showed the desperation of the Washington elite.

Arreaza said the decision by the administration of US President Donald Trump to offer rewards for the capture of Maduro and other high-ranking officials accused of drug trafficking show the administrations obsession with Venezuela, which he said was due to its desire to reap electoral returns in the US state of Florida.

Trump was once more attacking the Venezuelan people and its democratic institutions, using a new form of coup detat based on miserable, vulgar and unfounded accusations, Arreaza added.

In an extremely rare criminal case against a foreign head of state, the US Department of Justice indicted Maduro and several of his top ministers after accusing him of leading a cocaine-trafficking group called The Cartel of the Suns.

The US Department of State offered a reward of up to $15m for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Maduro, whose country has been convulsed by years of a deep economic crisis and political upheaval.

The indictment marks a serious new phase against Maduro by Washington at a time when some US officials have privately said Trump is increasingly frustrated with the results of his Venezuela policy.

US Attorney General William Barr, announcing charges that include narco-terrorism conspiracy, corruption, and drug trafficking, accused Maduro and his associates of colluding with a dissident faction of the demobilised Colombian armed group, the FARC, to flood the United States with cocaine.

While the Venezuelan people suffer, this cabal lines their pockets with drug money and the proceeds of their corruption, Barr said of Maduro and the others who were indicted.

Maduro is already under US sanctions and has been the target of a US effort aimed at pushing him from power. He took office in 2013 after the death of his mentor President Hugo Chavez, a staunch foe of the US.

Other Venezuelan officials whose indictments were announced on Thursday include Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, senior socialist leader Diosdado Cabello, and the chief justice of the countrys supreme court, Maikel Jose Moreno Perez, who was charged with money laundering. The US government is offering $10m for information leading to Cabellos arrest.

The US and dozens of other countries have recognised opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuelas legitimate president, regarding Maduros 2018 re-election as a sham. But Maduro has remained in power, backed by the countrys military and by Russia, China and Cuba.

US officials have long accused Maduro and his associates or running a narco-state, saying they have used proceeds from drugs shipped from neighbouring Colombia to make up for lost revenue from a Venezuelan oil sector hit by heavy sanctions by the US.
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NB Private Equity Partners Announces Increase to Existing Credit Facility

26 March 2020

NB Private Equity Partners Limited (NBPE or the Company), a closed-end private equity investment company, today announced that it has agreed to exercise the accordion feature of its existing credit facility with Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual). As announced on 24th December 2019, the ten year credit facility was originally $200 million in size, or up to $250 million inclusive of a $50 million accordion feature. Following this exercise the facility is now $250 million in size and all other terms and conditions of the facility remain as previously announced.

For further information, please contact:

NBPE Investor Relations +1 214 647 9593

Kaso Legg Communications +44 (0)20 3995 6673

Charles Gorman nbpe@kl-communications.com

About NB Private Equity Partners Limited

NBPE invests in direct private equity investments alongside market leading private equity firms globally. NB Alternatives Advisers LLC (the Investment Manager), an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Neuberger Berman Group LLC, is responsible for sourcing, execution and management of NBPE. The vast majority of direct investments are made with no management fee / no carried interest payable to third-party GPs, offering greater fee efficiency than other listed private equity companies. NBPE seeks capital appreciation through growth in net asset value over time while paying a bi-annual dividend.

LEI number: 213800UJH93NH8IOFQ77

About Neuberger Berman

Neuberger Berman, founded in 1939, is a private, independent, employee-owned investment manager. The firm manages a range of strategiesincluding equity, fixed income, quantitative and multi-asset class, private equity, real estate and hedge fundson behalf of institutions, advisors and individual investors globally. With offices in 23 countries, Neuberger Bermans diverse team has 2,200 professionals. For six consecutive years, the company has been named first or second in Pensions & Investments Best Places to Work in Money Management survey (among those with 1,000 employees or more). The firm was awarded an A+ in every category in the latest 2019 PRI report for our approach to ESG integration across asset classes. The firm manages $356 billion in client assets as of December 31, 2019. For more information, please visit our website at www.nb.com.
Chances, amounts of weekend snow still up in the air
Filming has been suspended on the upcoming season of The Block due to the coronavirus pandemic.

A Nine spokesperson said on Thursday: 'The current production of The Block brought five teams from across Australia to Melbourne to compete in its 16th season.

'Due to increasing travel bans, border shutdowns and additional measures, The Block has made the decision to suspend filming and send contestants home, while it is still possible to do so.'

The Block SHUTS DOWN due to coronavirus: It was revealed on Thursday that filming has been suspended and teams were sent home as a safety precaution. Host Shelley Craft is pictured on set last Friday

The spokesperson added that professional tradespeople were still working at the site in Brighton, Melbourne.

'Separately from contestants, The Block employs many tradespeople and freelancers, who rely on income earned from The Block for a living,' they said.

'The Block remains an active construction site with tradespeople, who live locally, completing building works that provide the framework of some homes.

'The Block looks forward to returning contestants back to Melbourne and resuming production when practicable to do so.'

Carrying on: A Nine spokesperson said that professional tradespeople were still working at the site in Brighton, Melbourne. Pictured: host Scott Cam

'The Block is scheduled to air on Nine later this year,' they concluded.

It comes after hosts Shelley Craft, 43, and Scott Cam, 57, were seen looking on edge last Friday while on set.

The duo appeared frazzled as they strode around the busy construction site, surrounded by tradespeople and production staff.

Safety first: Channel Nine said earlier this week, that they were taking things 'day by day' when it came to filming amid the pandemic. Pictured is the boarded up site next to a unit

At one stage, Scott looked like he was having a tense phone call in between filming scenes.

Channel Nine said earlier this week they were taking things 'day by day'.

A spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday the safety and well-being of contestants and staff was of the 'utmost concern'.

On-site photos taken last weekend showed several hand sanitiser stations and a sign that read 'you must wash your hands using the sanitiser provided'.

Precautions: On-site photos taken last weekend showed several hand sanitiser stations and a sign that read 'you must wash your hands using the sanitiser provided'

In photos obtained by Daily Mail Australia earlier this year, five houses dating from the 1930s to 1960s could be seen on the building site.

Last year, it was reported that some elderly residents near the site were 'selling their homes' amid fears the show would 'ruin' their quiet street.

The Andrina Nursing Home was based at the address until 2014, before it was knocked down with developers hoping to build 13 luxury townhouses.

After these plans eventually fell through and the site was left empty for years, Nine's MicJoy Pty Ltd purchased the spot in April 2019 for $14.96million.

According to Domain, the company's application mentioned 'relocating five homes to the site' - similar to the show's 2017 season in Elsternwick.

As of Thursday afternoon, there are 2,725 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia and 12 deaths.

Concerns: Last year, it was reported that some elderly residents near the site were 'selling their homes' amid fears the show would 'ruin' their quiet street
By PTI

WASHINGTON: China's ruling Communist Party poses a substantial threat to Americans' health and their way of life, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday, blasting Beijing for the intentional "disinformation campaign" and trying to deflect from its handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Pompeo, a known critic of China, said China's delay in sharing information about the virus had created risks to people worldwide.

Coronavirus has claimed 1,031 lives in the United States as of Wednesday, with New York being particularly affected as it recorded over 300 deaths. The total number of cases rose to 68, 572.

"The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses a substantial threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus outbreak clearly has demonstrated," Pompeo told reporters at a State Department news after video conference with his counterparts from G7 countries.

CLICK HERE TO READ CORONAVIRUS LIVE UPDATES

"The CCP also threatens to undermine the free and open order that has underpinned our mutual prosperity and safety in the G7 countries," he said.

Pompeo said, during the meeting, the US urged every country to work together to protect the UN and other organisations from China's malign influence and authoritarianism.

"We G7 countries must promote our shared values of freedom, sovereignty, good governance, transparency, and accountability, and push the UN to uphold these principles as well," he said.

ALSO READ: New York struggles with coronavirus as US death toll crosses 1,000

There was a discussion among the G7 countries about the intentional disinformation campaign that China has been and continues to be engaged in, he said.

"You see it. You see it in the social media. You see it in remarks from senior people inside the Chinese Communist Party talking about whether this was a US brought to China. This is crazy talk," he said.

"Every member of the G7 today saw this disinformation campaign. China now making small sales of product around the world and claiming that they are now the white hat in what has taken place here.

"This isn't a time for blame; this is a time to solve this global problem. We are focused on that today," Pompeo said.

Every nation that was at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place here, he alleged, amidst the brewing of an anti-China sentiment in the US on the latter's handling of coronavirus.

There are talks in Congress to hold China responsible for the coronavirus outbreak because it hid information.

Some of the lawmakers are also calling on China to pay damages to the US and the world.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik introduced a Resolution in the House of Representatives and Senator Josh Hawley in the Senate calling for an international investigation into the Chinese Communist Party's cover-up of the early spread of the coronavirus outbreak.

The Resolution calls on China to pay back all nations impacted due to its intentional, early coverup of the deadly virus.

"The Communist government of China knowingly withheld critical information needed to combat the spread of the Chinese-born COVID-19 and to this day continues to spread lies and disinformation on the origin of the deadly virus," Stefanik said.

"There is no doubt that China's unconscionable decision to orchestrate an elaborate coverup of the wide-ranging and deadly implications of coronavirus led to the death of thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans and climbing.

This Resolution calls for China to provide compensation for the harm, loss, and destruction their arrogance brought upon the rest of the world. Simply put, China must, and will, be held accountable," she said.

"Since day one, the Chinese Communist Party intentionally lied to the world about the origin of this pandemic.

The CCP was aware of the reality of the virus as early as December but ordered laboratories to destroy samples and forced doctors to keep silent," said Hawley.

"It is time for an international investigation into the role their cover-up played in the spread of this devastating pandemic.

The CCP must be held to account for what the world is now suffering," he said.

Congressman Matt Gaetz introduced legislation to prevent any funds appropriated by the US Congress, including coronavirus relief funds, from being distributed to businesses owned by the Chinese government.

"'No CHINA Act' prevents appropriated money, including coronavirus relief funds, from being disbursed to businesses owned by the Chinese government.

Chinese corporations operating in America must not be eligible for the upcoming trillion-dollar bailout, now or ever," he said.

Senator John Barrasso said that China had been exposed.

"We cannot allow ourselves ever again to be in any way dependent on China for medicines, for materials, or for minerals," he said.
(Natural News) Can you imagine being in blinding pain for weeks, constantly gasping for air as you feel like you are being suffocated, and screaming for mercy because you are in so much constant torment? As you will see below, coronavirus survivors are telling us about their hellish ordeals, and they are warning us to do everything that we can to avoid this virus. Of course they are the lucky ones. As I detailed in another article, the global death toll has doubled over the past six days, and so far the very high death rate in the United States is extremely alarming. So those that survive should consider themselves to be very fortunate, but many of those same individuals will be left with permanent lung damage. This virus attacks the respiratory system with a ferocity that is shocking doctors, and those that are still attempting to claim that COVID-19 is just like the flu need to stop, because they are just making things worse.

(Article by Michael Snyder republished from TheMostImportantNews.com)

Researchers have found that this virus has an incubation period of up to 24 days, and people can spread it around long before they are showing any symptoms.

And you dont even have to encounter someone with the virus to catch it. According to Bloomberg, new research has discovered that this virus can remain on surfaces for as many as 17 days

Traces of new coronavirus were found on surfaces in cruise-ship cabins for as many as 17 days after passengers left, researchers said, though it wasnt possible to determine whether they caused any infections. Researchers looked at the rooms of infected passengers aboard the Diamond Princess, both those who showed symptoms and those who didnt, according to a study Monday in the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

When you combine those two factors, it makes COVID-19 nearly impossible to contain.

This is a major emergency, and it makes me angry that there are prominent voices out there that are still trying to downplay this pandemic. As a result, many people are not taking proper precautions, and a lot of them are going to end up catching the virus.

If you are reading this and you still dont think that COVID-19 is a big deal, please take a moment to consider the following five stories about coronavirus survivors

#1 26-year-old Fiona Lowenstein

That night I woke up in the middle of the night with chills, vomiting, and shortness of breath. By Monday, I could barely speak more than a few words without feeling like I was gasping for air. I couldnt walk to the bathroom without panting as if Id run a mile. On Monday evening, I tried to eat, but found I couldnt get enough oxygen while doing so. Any task that was at all anxiety-producing  even resetting my MyChart password to communicate with my doctor  left me desperate for oxygen.

#2 55-year-old Kevin Harris

Imagine your lungs turning solid. Its like suffocating without holding your nose, said Harris, who owns an auto body shop and typically runs 5 miles every day. Every time I lay down, my breathing gets lower and lower. I thought my lungs would fail me. I was screaming for mercy and praying to God.

#3 25-year-old Connor Reed

A Welshman who caught the coronavirus in China has described how the deadly disease hit him like a train leaving him suffocating and in blinding pain for weeks. Connor Reed, from Llandudno, got ill while working as an English teacher in Wuhan.

The 25-year-old described how it started as just a sniffle on November 25  a month before authorities officially announced the virus  but over the next three-and-a-half weeks he got increasingly ill and was unable to move.

#4 39-year-old Tara Jane Langston

Its like having glass in your lungs, its hard to explain, but every breath is a battle. Its absolutely horrible and I wouldnt want to go through anything like this ever again. Id been ill for about five days before I was taken to hospital in an ambulance. Id originally been diagnosed with a chest infection and given antibiotics and advised to take ibuprofen and paracetamol. I was taking about eight ibuprofen a day and they now think that that exacerbated the problem.

#5 A 12-year-old girl in Georgia named Emma

Emma, a 12-year-old girl, is fighting for her life in an Atlanta hospital after testing positive for the coronavirus, according to her cousin. Justin Anthony told CNN that Emma was diagnosed with pneumonia on March 15 and tested positive for coronavirus on Friday night. As of Saturday, she was on a ventilator and is currently in stable condition, Anthony said.

As you can see, this virus is not just hitting old people extremely hard.

But if you are above the age of 60, please understand that you at very high risk, and you need to stay away from public places for the foreseeable future.

I know that it can be hard to stay home day after day, but this is truly a very, very deadly virus.

At this point, even doctors and nurses are scared to go to work

Doctors and nurses on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus in the United States say its the first time theyve been scared to go to work. With a shortage of personal protective equipment, some have resorted to using bandanas to cover their faces. Its the first time weve ever been truly scared to come to work, but despite being scared we are trained to save lives and were committed to doing that, Dr. Cornelia Griggs, a surgeon in New York City, told CBS This Morning. Im embarrassed to say, but prior to this, my husband and I had never gotten around to writing a will, but this weekend that became one of our to-do list items.

As I have been writing this article, over 2,000 more confirmed cases were added to the rapidly growing total here in the United States. And as I discussed yesterday, it looks like the U.S. is going to have a very high death rate just like we are seeing in western European countries such as Italy and Spain.

So please take this pandemic very seriously. A lot of Americans are going to die, and it is going to be a great national tragedy.

Please pray for those that have caught the virus and are deeply suffering. It is in our darkest moments that we need a miracle the most, and there are a whole lot of people out there that need one right now.

Read more at: TheMostImportantNews.com
(GETTY)

U.S. President Donald Trump is in a tough spot if he intends to broker peace in the raging oil price war that has delivered a gut-punch to North American producers and compounded the impact of the COVID-19 virus.

Doing so would mean walking back his hatred of OPEC, and his long-held preference for cheap oil, according to one analyst. Trumps intervention to support prices, if successful, would also have the dual effects of pushing gasoline prices higher as the U.S. economy sits on the brink of recession, while also winning political support in energy-dependent regions in an election year.

Its a really interesting challenge for him, said Helima Croft, RBC Capital Markets managing director and global head of commodity strategy, on the banks podcast.

He essentially has to do a 180 and appeal to the Saudis to play the regulator role, to work with the other sovereign producers to cut production to shore up U.S. oil producers. Its not an easy balance.

Trump has been a vocal critic of OPECs role in regulating output. He has lashed out in tweets predating his presidency, accusing the group of ripping us off and branding it a monopoly.

More recently, he has encouraged Saudi Arabia to keep the market well supplied, and touted low gasoline prices as a signature achievement of his presidency.

Its interesting to think about what leverage the U.S. has when the administration has spent three years being highly critical of [OPEC] playing the role of the central banker of oil, Croft said.

On a recent trip to Western Pennsylvania, Trump celebrated the oil and gas boom in the region, calling the resources under his feet our gold.

Last week, Trump said he would intervene in the price war at the appropriate time, adding the downturn hurts a great industry, and a very powerful industry. He also noted that low gas prices are helpful to consumers.

Trump recently ordered U.S energy officials to purchase large amounts of oil to top up the nations emergency reserve and absorb some of the glut in crude markets. The plan, backed by oil industry lobbyists, was quashed on Thursday when the U.S. Department of Energy said it lacked funding from Congress.

North American benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI)(CL=F) fell about four per cent on Thursday morning after showing signs of strength on Wednesday. The price of WTI has declined about 60 per cent year-to-date, falling well below the break-even price for nearly all North American producers.

Story continues

On Tuesday, G7 leaders appealed to oil producing countries to support international efforts to promote global economic stability.

The spat between Saudi Arabia and Russia started at the March 5 OPEC meeting in Vienna. Russia balked at a plan to restrain production to stabilize the global crude market in response to COVID-19. Saudi Arabia promptly responded by slashing its official selling prices for April deliveries to between US$6 and US$8 per barrel. With the previously agreed upon OPEC production cuts expiring at the end of March, Saudi Arabia and Russia can theoretically pump as much as they want.

Croft said while Saudi Arabias actions were likely designed to force Russia back the table, the June OPEC meeting is probably the earliest point at which the two sides could bury the hatchet. She said Russia is probably betting the Kingdom cannot sustain such low prices for long.

Jeff Lagerquist is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance Canada. Follow him on Twitter @jefflagerquist.

Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android.
Megxit has been stressful for everyone, which is an open secret at this point. It has taken months of conversations, planning, and negotiations in order to finalize Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harrys split from the royal family. There is no doubt that it has been stressful for everyone involved. Although we know that the queen is sad that her grandson and his wife have chosen to resign from royal duties, she has made it clear that she will always care about them deeply as beloved members of her family. A royal source is claiming that Queen Elizabeth II wants Prince Harry and Meghan to feel welcome and loved.

Queen Elizabeth made a statement after Megxit was announced

Queen Elizabeth II | Mark Cuthbert/UK Press via Getty Images

Early in the year, it came as a huge shock to people around the world when Meghan and Prince Harry announced their plans to take a step back from royal life. Even though the queen said she was disappointed to see Prince Harry and Meghan leave the royal family, she also said that she wants the best for them.

According to MarketWatch, she let the public know that the couple will not use public funds for their new, independent life. There is no doubt that Megxit is hard for the entire royal family, the queen included, but she is doing whatever she needs to do in order to move forward and ensure that everything continues to run as smoothly as possible.

What has the queen done to show her support to Meghan and Prince Harry?

Most people are focusing on all of the stress and tension that Megxit has caused. While it very well may be true that there is some friction among some of the family members, especially senior royals, the queen has also been making an effort to support Meghan and Prince Harry the best that she can.

How so? Well, as we know, Meghan and Prince Harry have been spending the majority of their time in Canada since the news broke that they were resigning. Recently, they returned to the United Kingdom to carry out the last of their royal duties, where they joined the queen at Westminster Abbey for Commonwealth Day.

According to Town & Country, Prince Harry had a one-on-one lunch with his grandmother while he and Meghan were in the United Kingdom, just another sign that tells us that in light of all that is happening behind palace doors, they still remain extremely close. Apparently, the lunch meeting was relaxed and casual  the two chatted and enjoyed each others company rather than discussing business or anything to do with Megxit.

Queen Elizabeth II wants Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to feel welcome and loved

It may have been thought originally that the queen was upset with Meghan and Prince Harry, and that their relationship would take a while to get back to normal. However, that is not necessarily the case.

The queen recently invited the couple to a church service in Windsor, where they happily greeted fans and enjoyed spending time with Prince Harrys grandmother. How wonderful that Queen Elizabeth will continue to show Meghan and Prince Harry her love and support during this time.

Now, a source close to the royal family says that her majesty wants Meghan and Prince Harry to feel welcome and loved even though they will no longer be carrying out duties on her behalf. One way shes turning her attempts into action is by inviting them to a church service.

The queen has also vocalized these sentiments. She reportedly even told Prince Harry: You are very much loved. Whats more, she told her grandson that he and Meghan are welcome to return whenever they want.

This level of support from the queen isnt surprising. Earlier in their marriage, at the height of Meghans drama with her family, the queen reportedly showed the same supportive sentiment. What may surprise some is just how supportive Her Majesty has been during the problems Meghan has faced with her family, a source revealed to Us Weekly. Meghan is in a tough place, and the queen knows its completely out of Meghans hands. She has only sympathy for whats been a difficult and distressing situation for her.

Most recently, the queen invited Meghan and Prince Harry to spend part of their summer with her at Balmoral estate. According to a new report in the Sunday Times, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have accepted her invitation.
LINCOLN  Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts will answer questions during a one-hour NET News town hall meeting about COVID-19 and the states response at 7 p.m. CT Thursday.

Speaking of Nebraska: COVID-19 Town Hall with Governor Ricketts will be carried on TV and radio by NET. It will also be streamed on the NET website, the NET Nebraska app and on Facebook, according to a NET press release.

Viewers and listeners may ask questions during the town hall program by calling 1-800-676-5446 or 402-472-1212. Both before and during the broadcast, questions can be emailed to news@netnebraska.org or submitted to the Facebook pages for NET Nebraska, NET News or NET Radio. Questions can also be submitted via Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #COVID19Nebraska.

Along with Gov. Ricketts, questions will be answered by Dr. Gary Anthone, chief medical officer for the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services and Dr. Matthew L. Blomstedt, commissioner of education for Nebraska.

Nebraskans can follow the latest news on COVID-19 in Nebraska, plus get information on the coronavirus disease and resources for reducing risk of infection at netnebraska.org/coronavirus.

A recording of Speaking of Nebraska: COVID-19 Town Hall with Governor Ricketts will air at 11 p.m. Thursday on NET and at 8 a.m. Friday on NETs World television channel.
LOBAMBA  Does the Government of the Kingdom of Eswatini care about the lives of its citizens or it is only concerned about the economy?

This is the question that was posed by Hosea Member of Parliament (MP) Bacede Mabuza as he, together with his colleagues, criticised the partial lockdown which was announced by government in the fight against the spread of the deadly coronavirus. During a sitting in the House of Assembly yesterday, the Prime Minister, Ambrose Mandvulo Dlamini, watched in dismay as MPs took turns to blast some of the guidelines which have been outlined in the partial lockdown strategy which he announced on Tuesday.

Economy

At the beginning of his debate, MP Mabuza wanted to know if the current government was one for the people or the economy. I am asking this question because government said the safety of the people was of utmost importance but then the same government says the people should use kombis and go to work in the textile firms. As of now, it is like our government only cares about money. I am a businessman, I have many people employed in my companies. I can safely say that their lives are not safe, Mabuza submitted. Elaborating, Mabuza said he wanted to know from the PM and government as a whole as to who would suffer in the event that all firms were closed. He said as a businessman, he knew the strategy that was used by government through the Ministry of Labour and Social Security.

According to Mabuza, the ministry had a tendency of sending about three or more inspectors and all they did was get inside offices of the bosses and then come out to say all was well when it was not the case. Furthermore, he revealed that he had received several calls from suppliers in other countries informing him that they had closed. And then government has the guts to say it is my choice to close. It is clear that government is running away from the responsibility of paying the employees, he submitted. Also making a submission on the ministerial statement was Hhukwini MP Nkhanyeti Ngwenya, who first enquired if a government gazette authorising the guidelines had been issued. Ngwenya then asked why government had not issued a directive for civil servants to stay at home. In his view, keeping the workers at home would save costs.
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A bit before midnight on January 20, a Harvard epidemiologist named Eric Feigl-Ding posted a long, terrifying Twitter thread mostly summarizing, and in a few places contextualizing, a new, pre-publication paper on the infectiousness of the novel coronavirus that had, at the time, forced Wuhan into a total lockdown but had not yet been detected outside of China. The context he added was, mostly, alarmism.

Holy mother of god, the thread began, the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! That figure referred to whats called the reproduction number, or R0, of a disease: how many people would be infected by a single sick person. I really hate to be the epidemiologist who has to admit this, but we are potentially faced with  possibly an unchecked pandemic that the world has not seen since the 1918 Spanish Influenza. Lets hope it doesnt reach that level but we now live in the modern world  with faster +  than 1918. @WHO and @CDCgov needs to declare public health emergency ASAP!

The thread has since been deleted, though you can still read a preserved version of it here. It was, for many Americans, if not the first time they had heard of coronavirus, perhaps the first time they had seen a global alarm raised over it. And in doing so, it produced what is by now a sort of predictable backlash: other scientists and science journalists taking issue with it, en masse, pointing out that the paper had not yet been published; that Feigl-Dings comparison to the infection rate of SARS was inaccurate; that most estimates of the R0 number were now lower than 3.8. Feigl-Dings tweets got more readers than those of his critics. But those credentialed in epidemiology and public health were much more likely to see the criticism as sober and responsible, Feigl-Ding himself as an irresponsible alarmist, and the impulse to raise alarm a deeply reckless one. An Atlantic story about it was headlined How to Misinform Yourself About the Coronavirus.

Two months later, we are, inarguably, in the midst of a global pandemic. It took three months for COVID-19 to reach 100,000 confirmed cases globally; ten more days to reach 200,000; just four more to reach 300,000, and three to reach 400,000. And while the true R0 number is hard to pin down in the real world, where it reflects social practices and cultural mores (and can be dramatically reduced by social distancing), an authoritative recent report from the Imperial College (the one that alarmed Boris Johnson enough to back off of his herd immunity plan and Donald Trump enough to stop dismissing the coronavirus and start using it to sell himself, laughably, as a wartime president) suggested that the R0 value of COVID-19 could be as high as 3.5  proposing a likely range of 1.5 to 3.5. Other estimates are as high as 4.08 and above. Those estimates are probably too high, at least as models to predict the spread of the virus in a world now belatedly awake to it and taking at least some precautions against it. But the same Imperial College report suggested that even with efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus in the U.S., more than a million Americans may die. In just two months, what sounded like hysteria to scolding experts has become conventional wisdom among even cautious epidemiologists. Were looking at something thats catastrophic on a level that we have not seen for an infectious disease since 1918, Dr. Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia professor projecting the spread of the virus, told the New York Times on Friday. Where had I read that before?

There may be particular questions, in other words, about particular data points and comparisons contained in Feigl-Dings rushed thread  though its worth pointing out that even in the initial thread, he suggested the true R0 might be closer to 2.5, and in subsequent tweets corrected the other points. And the broad message? The purposeful incitement of public alarm? If the question is whether Feigl-Ding was right to be alarmed by what he was reading, whether alarm was an appropriate response to what we knew even then about the infectiousness and lethality of this disease, and whether it was therefore responsible to induce panic in the public, we can say  with the benefit of hindsight, yes, but also definitively  it was. And if the question is whether, on January 20, the world as a whole should have freaked out considerably more about the coronavirus, initiating emergency planning and launching medical preparation on a war footing immediately, the answer, eight weeks later, is blindingly obvious: Yes, of course we should have, and we would all be in a much better, safer, and probably more prosperous place if we had.

Today, the world is almost a controlled experiment in pandemic response, and the returns are already unmistakable: The nations that took the most aggressive actions, most quickly, have fared best, and those that have moved cautiously, waiting for undeniable prompts to action, have done worst. In South Korea, the implementation of what is effectively a medical surveillance state means that life in most of the country has continued mostly undisrupted, at least by the standards of Wuhan or the lockdowns now in Lombardy and New York and San Francisco; in the U.K. a strategy to stand down and let the virus pass through the population proved so disastrous that, within a few weeks, it was abruptly reversed; in Iran, they are digging mass graves big enough to be seen from space.

These divergent approaches are explained by more than just divergent levels of alarm, of course. The political authority of Xi Jinping and the CCP made it somewhat easier to impose a citywide shutdown in China than in the U.S., though the swift shutdowns of the last week here makes the difference seem less dramatic than Americans would have assumed before the coronavirus panic. The experience of many Asian countries with SARS beginning in 2002 meant that they were already used to handwashing and social distancing as preventive measures, and could turn to a public-health infrastructure (mass testing, fever hospitals) that had been developed in response to SARS in ways countries like the U.S. couldnt. But the American failure to respond and prepare properly cannot be explained by differences like those  nor can the failure of nations from Iran to Italy and the U.K. to Spain. And if Eric Feigl-Ding, or anyone with his level of alarm, had been running pandemic response in any of those countries on January 20, every single one of them would be, today, immeasurably better off, having initiated (at the very least) the same social-distancing approaches, testing protocols, and personal protective equipment and ventilatory production we are now hoping for and scrambling to produce, but six weeks or more earlier  choking off six additional weeks of pandemic growth. A recent report suggested that if China had acted aggressively to contain the outbreak when it first appeared in late fall, 95 percent of the countrys cases could have been avoided  as well as, possibly, the international outbreak that followed. In other words, a Feigl-Ding level of alarm, enacted into public-health policy at the right time, could have prevented the entire global pandemic crisis, and kept COVID-19 a regional health story in just one country of the world.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and there are surely plenty of situations where we would want to guard against overreactions as zealously, or more zealously, as we would underreactions. But in a time of good governance, this is a central function of government: to prepare for the risks that the public cant process rationally. And though we often feel, on social media especially, that we live swimming in a sea of alarm, it may be the case, instead, that the general din prevents us from hearing real cries of alarm by teaching us that almost anybody raising their voice above the crowd is a nut, or a narcissist, or a troll.

This is bad. As Ive written before about climate change, when the news is alarming, the only responsible response is to be alarmed  and raise alarm. And like runaway climate change, the threat of a global pandemic, which graybeards have been warning about for years, is a reminder that we should always build public policy around the precautionary principle, rather than waiting until uncontestable and inarguable evidence arrives that action is necessary. If we wait that long, it will always be too late. Would it have been better if Feigl-Dings tweet thread had made a more precisely accurate comparison to SARS, and included some more caveats around the R0 3.8 figure? Perhaps. But science proceeds by increments, and in times of rapid, onrushing crisis the direction is important, too, not just the degree. The fact that we are now living more or less precisely through the situation Feigl-Ding warned us about in January suggests that two months ago we should have understood that this outcome was, at the very least, a possibility, and therefore worth planning for  rather than dismissing it as irresponsible fearmongering.

This is not a story of a single whistle-blower, of course, not a David and Goliath story in which Feigl-Ding was positioned across from Donald Trump. Anyone who looked closely at the emerging science of the disease or understood long-standing public-health fears about global pandemics was alarmed. But that alarm was almost entirely unheard by the powers that be, and not just in Washington, D.C. The fact that the White House didnt prepare the country for the assault of this disease beginning in January is a catastrophic failure that has led to a moral and medical horror that will continue to mount, body by body, in the weeks and months ahead. But the fact that the U.S. is not at all alone in failing to heed the call of alarm suggests that the problem is deeper  and broader  than the president in charge of our government or the bureaucracy he oversees. Among European countries, only Germany could claim to have mustered even a satisfactory response, and none an exemplary one. Last week, the Washington Post reported on all the intelligence warnings about coronavirus President Trump received, and dismissed, over the winter. Given that much of the substance of those warnings was also being reported simultaneously in the worlds newspapers, it is safe to say the leaders of Italy, and France, and Spain were also given briefings in which the alarm was unmistakably sounded, but refused to hear it.

So, what happened? Why were so few sufficiently alarmed about the threat as it emerged, and why were those raising the alarm largely dismissed or sidelined? Aside from perhaps some amount of heightened personal anxiety and a few more fights in supermarket aisles over bundles of toilet paper, its hard to see a meaningful cost that heightened public anxiety about this virus would have produced over the last few months. But as I often say about the question of climate anxiety, if you are worried about the psychic cost of contemplating a bleak future, surely you should be more worried about the psychic cost of living through it, should we do nothing to avoid it. And, especially in the absence of public leadership, with the country and indeed much of the world operating in a vacuum of guidance that forced individuals to make possibly dangerous social choices entirely on their own, its very easy to see what benefit more public alarm about COVID-19 would have produced: more handwashing, and of a more vigorous kind; more temperature-checking; more isolation by those who felt a little sick; more voluntary social distancing, and then, when public shelter in place orders began finally to arrive, more complete honoring of those orders. Instead, almost everywhere in Western Europe and the U.S., we have chosen to be less alarmed. Already, that has proven a deadly choice.

It was also a needless one. And, unfortunately, unsurprising. Writers and thinkers often use the phrase wicked problem to describe the challenge of climate change, driven by so many divergent interests and actors it can seem impossible to untangle even at a conceptual level, let alone a practical one. The philosopher Timothy Morton has coined the related term hyperobject  a conceptual fact so large and complex that, like the internet, it can never be properly comprehended. The present pandemic crisis takes all of those hard-to-wrap-your-head-around features and adds another  hyperspeed. Along with everything else, the pace of this pandemic has been dizzying. Patient zero was less than six months ago. Three months ago, you had probably never heard of the disease, and now, in the space of just a few weeks, it has completely upended your life and the lives of billions of others.

But there are more quotidian explanations for our indifference  indeed, these are probably the most powerful explanations. We are selfish, and dont want to even entertain the possibility that what we take to be our needs could be threatened or taken away. As recently as a few weeks ago, even the most apocalyptic among us probably didnt truly believe that devastation at such a scale was possible, that the little fortresses of our modern lives could be so assaulted by a distant virus. A virus! That was the sort of thing that threatened the global south, we thought, or was limited to the wet markets and exotic-animal-cuisine cultures of Asia we felt so culturally superior to. It is a cruel irony, if possibly a temporary one, that this pandemic, which promises to be the most deadly in a century, emerged not out of the tropics or the global south but was passed around the world along vectors of globalization and cosmopolitan wealth, and has not yet even passed into the parts of the world which, for centuries, Westerners regarded as diseased and pestilent. Instead its our imperious cities incubating this virus, and which may well unleash it soon on the impoverished nations of the world. (Its not quite clear, from the biology and epidemiology, why the disease hasnt yet spread much toward the equator and into the southern hemisphere).

Indeed to judge from our preparation, we still felt invulnerable just weeks, or even days, before lockdown. The bias wasnt just cultural, but cognitive. We didnt believe anything could happen that didnt have a precedent in recent memory, having built up conceptual models of what was possible over periods of just a decade, in some cases less. Wed lost so much esteem for experts over the last few decades that we found it more comfortable to substitute our own nonexistent expertise and common-sense heuristics (how much worse than SARS could it really be?) than to trust those telling us this was different. Other relevant cognitive biases are familiar from behavioral psychology: whats called the bystander effect (our tendency to wait for others to act rather than acting ourselves); confirmation bias, by which we seek evidence for what we already understand to be true, such as the promise that everything will be fine, rather than endure the cognitive pain of reconceptualizing our world; and the default effect, or tendency to choose the present option over alternatives, which is related to the status quo bias.

Many of the leaders who failed to move quickly enough to contain COVID-19 suffered from some number of these cognitive problems; they seemed also to assume that life couldnt be scrambled this dramatically, certainly not in such a short amount of time; and they also seemed to be, in ways that may not surprise, especially focused on the economic trade-offs of public-health action, such that aggressive measures were seen as too expensive or disruptive, even despite the number of lives they would have saved.

But the experience of Eric Feigl-Ding suggests two additional, related problems. First, and less significant, a culture of sanctimonious concern-trolling on elite social media, smaller of course than the problem of disinformation and yet problematic precisely because it suggests any kind of alarmism is disinformation. Second, and more important, a widespread cultural conviction that keeping your cool and trusting the political and social status quo is preferable to a radical response, any radical response  in all ways, at all times, and in the face of all kinds of threats. Indeed, that the ideal political and social response, no matter the particular crisis, is not responding to the threat but just grinning and bearing it. This is a conviction that serves those people and institutions in power, of course, since its a defense of the status quo, but also one which we may have been formed in part by some almost accidental cultural legacies, perhaps chiefly the experience of the British, under Churchill, facing the Blitz. The stiff upper lip has a certain theatrical, patrician appeal in the face of great catastrophe, but it is probably worth keeping in mind, when thinking about the coronavirus or climate change or any number of other potentially devastating threats to stability and prosperity and justice in the world, that we may well have learned the wrong lesson from the Blitz, since ultimately the most important directive was not keep calm and carry on, but win the war, however you can.

The question is not just academic now. Millions of lives are potentially at stake, globally, and the path forward seems uncertain again. Over the last week, after a brief flurry of universal-seeming focus on controlling the outbreak, the dont panic directive has emerged again  in New York Times columns by Bret Stephens and Tom Friedman; in a controversial, viral Medium post  downplaying the risks of the disease and indicating a growing desire on the right, the Chamber of Commerce center-right, and the right-adjacent Intellectual Dark Web to trade the deaths of a million or more Americans for a relatively healthy economy. It might go without saying in more humane times, this calculus  that the deaths of 1 or 2 percent of the population are insignificant, or at least less significant, than the well-being of the 98 or 99 percent of survivors  is short-sighted, even accepting the unacceptable terms of the debate: Tens of millions infected, many critically ill, is not a trivial problem for a society or an economy, but a crippling one.

Then again, its another line of thinking that echoes aspects of our response to climate change, which has prompted a horrifying, complacent Darwinian response among many of those who understand themselves as members of the contemporary elite  why does the suffering of millions in, say, South Asia, matter when Ill be okay? (I recently had a representative conversation with a businessman who asked me, about climate, How bad will it get? and when I responded, Even in a best-case scenario, 150 million will die, he replied, smugly, But out of 8 billion.) The stark, Darwinian brutality of a pandemic doesnt much faze them either, it seems, to judge from the comments of Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who suggested we needed to worry about the well-being of 97 to 99 percent of survivors rather than the 3 or more million who would die, or Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who said plenty of grandparents would gladly perish to see the American economy preserved for their grandchildren. Arguments like these suggest those making them already tend to see the world in survival-of-the-fittest terms, and they have convinced themselves that because they see themselves as the winners of our brutally competitive society, they need not fear any additional competition, which they would inevitably survive. Some of them even seem to welcome it.

But thats not how viruses work. There are advantages to wealth in our health system of course, indeed in any health system  early tests, concierge doctors, large homes in which to wait out lockdowns, ventilators for purchase. But the disease itself is basically indiscriminate, which means, as uncomfortable as it might make those folks pushing to relax public-health measures today, we are all in this together.

The president is one of them, saying hes now inclined to cut short the national experiment in social distancing in as little as two weeks, two months after it probably should have begun and well before any national testing program could be instituted to plausibly replace it. Perhaps thats because he caught sight of Goldman Sachs projection of a Q2 GDP decline of 24 percent, more than twice as bad as the worst quarter in recorded American history. Or perhaps he saw the more recent projection on Monday, from Morgan Stanley, that the decline would be even steeper  30 percent. Thats fully twice as deep as global estimates for the Great Depression.

Which is all to say: President Trump is not the only person who wants the world to go back to normal. I do, too, and Im sure you do, as well. But what would normal be, right now? We cant return to a world resembling the one we knew before the coronavirus without incredibly aggressive public health, quarantine, and testing measures  at the very least. Quite possibly until the disease has spread through the population, infecting perhaps a couple of hundred million Americans. Which means the choice isnt between alarmism and normal, but two varieties of alarming reality: one in which society is shut down in order to limit (but certainly not eliminate) devastation from the virus, and one in which the measures are less disruptive but as a result much less effective in limiting the toll. Neither of these choices are good ones, or happy ones, and the cries of alarm about the state of the economy are worth taking seriously, too  though its also the case that the overwhelming consensus among economists is that, even taking a hard-eyed look at the trade-off, the costs of public-health complacency dwarf the benefits of reopening the economy. But it was not inevitable that we faced this devils bargain  at least the grim form we face today, as the experience of South Korea shows. Instead we chose to dismiss the voices of alarm and carry on as though we didnt need to change anything. Look where thats gotten us.
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HERAT, Afghanistan  Afghanistan has already imported its epidemic. And each day it adds to it, as thousands more displaced Afghans continue to flow across the border from Iran, which has reported among the worlds highest numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths.

The returnees, some surely infected with the coronavirus when in Iran, cluster shoulder to shoulder in massive crowds on both sides of the crossing, where toilet facilities are primitive and soap and potable water are scarce.

Later, they climb aboard overloaded taxis, buses and minivans for the two-hour trip to Herat city, the sprawling and crowded hub of western Afghanistan, where they sleep in packed hostels and cramped rooms behind restaurants.

From Herat, tens of thousands of the new arrivals have boarded more overloaded buses and vans en route to Kabul, the capital. From there, they have returned to crowded homes in Kabul or traveled onward to outlying provinces  potential vectors for spreading the virus nationwide.
The remains of a Kentucky teen who went missing in 2010 have been found in Ohio, police said.

Paige Johnson was reported missing on Sept. 23, 2010, according to police in Covington, a northern Kentucky city across the state border from Cincinnati.

Paige was 17 when she vanished after going to a party with friends, NBC affiliate WLWT in Cincinnati reports.

Image: Paige Johnson (Kentucky State Police)

On Sunday, authorities in Ohio got a call from a couple who had been hunting deer in the woods that they found what they believed to be burnt human skull, according to local media.

Covington police said they found additional human remains at the scene where the hunters found the skull and were able to positively identify the remains as Paige's on Tuesday.

Her family were informed Wednesday.

Ive been wanting to bring my baby home for so long." Donna Johnson, Paige's mother, told WLWT. "This is a day I was worried I would go to my grave without ever getting this day."

Paige had a daughter, who Donna and other family members have been raising since her disappearance, according to WLWT.

Her cause of death has yet to be determined and the investigation, which for the past decade produced almost no results, will continue with the new evidence, according to police.

"We want to be hopeful that this will lead to more information," Covington Police Chief Robert Nader said. "We still have work to do."
Huge numbers of people are tuning in to watch live webcam footage of Mass from Derry churches as they self-isolate in a bid to slow the spread of coronavirus.

For many older people in the city going to church is a pivotal part of their daily routine and may be the only time they get to socialise with friends.

The essential lockdown announced by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week put a stop to all social events, including weddings, baptisms and other ceremonies, but excluding funerals. He did however add that places of worship should remain open for solitary prayer.

Speaking to the Derry News yesterday, Bishop of Derry Donal McKeown said the first priority of the Catholic Church is the people who are worried, lonely, feeling abandoned and people whose timetable has been turned upside down.

Were looking for ways to reach people with materials that are going to be fulfilling to them. How can we help people who are in a very different situation than the one they were in a month ago, he explained.

There was a sense in the community that coronavirus hadnt reached Northern Ireland yet, he said, and when it did people would hunker down but the stark Westminster warning made it clear that unless we clamp down now it will hit us in the not too distant future.

Bishop McKeown said that some people have been of the opinion that churches were never closed before and shouldnt be told to by the state now.

But I think were all clear in churches across Europe that bringing people together in groups on a regular basis for extended periods of time is deadly.

During Lent St Eugenes Cathedral would have 600 people through the doors every day for daily Mass and 2,000 every weekend so the adjustment has been difficult for many.

The Bishop was also conscious that priests themselves are used to providing services for people and they need support at this time in finding new ways of ministering after decades of ministering in one way.

Four daily Masses are being live streamed, a series reflecting on the stained-glass windows have been posted online, interesting stories and Anne Marie Hickey sang one afternoon.

Its a challenging time for everybody, in secular society and in church society, but what really is encouraging is that there has been such a huge uptake on webcam and Facebook streaming services.

WEBCAM

Mass and a range of other devotions take place throughout the day from 7.30am until 9.30pm.

For example, on Monday there were 8,589 hours of watching the webcam which accounted for 15,000 views and over 5,000 sessions of more than five minutes.

The bulk of these viewers would be UK and Ireland based while others tuned in from the United States, South Africa, Malaysia, Peru and elsewhere.

An Instagram page has also been set-up to engage with young people in the city.

People want to see the familiar, they could follow Mass at the Vatican or New York but want the reassurance of a local voice and it is helping people in their time of fear, recognising that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, Bishop McKeown concluded.

CHALLENGING

Father Michael Canny of the Waterside Parish said that when the gravity of the coronavirus became apparent that his own parishioners, who would be in the older age bracket, found it hard to break away from their routine.

As time progressed and the penny dropped, most realised that they were in a very vulnerable category and I think that even before isolation was enforced a lot of them had been in lockdown to look after their own health.

They found it strange at the start and talked about not having masses but when the enormity of the situation dawned on them they very, very quickly took precautionary measures.

But I think they will find the latest regulations very challenging because before they could come out for a while and sit apart from other people.

The parish webcam has become more popular during the coronavirus outbreak but Father Canny said that people prefer to attend when they can to receive Holy Communion.

I understand that, theyve lived through terrible times in the Troubles, some of them through the War times but they have never been deprived of going to Mass. Its very, very strange.

Around 70-80 people would be watching Mass online but he believes church is all about community and once the current crisis passes he would like to see people coming together to celebrate Mass again.

Theres no substitute for actually coming out and meeting each other face to face and that has to be encouraged when this is all over.
Malaysia's king and queen are under quarantine after seven palace staff members tested positive for coronavirus.

King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah and his wife Tunku Azizah Aminah Maimunah Iskandariah have both tested negative for the infection, but will isolate for 14 days out of an abundance of caution the palace said.

Meanwhile the infected staff have been taken to hospital as officials try to work out the source of the infection. The palace is also being disinfected.

Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah and wife Tunku Azizah Aminah Maimunah Iskandariah will isolate themselves for 14 days after at outbreak of coronavirus at Malaysia's royal palace

Seven palace staff have been confirmed to have coronavirus and have been taken to hospital, while an investigation is underway into the source of the infection

The palace say the king and queen have tested negative but will isolate out of caution, while the palace is also disinfected (file image, hygiene workers in Malaysia)

Malaysia has more than 2,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus with 235 reported on Thursday, making it the hardest-hit country in Southeast Asia.

Some 21 people have died from the disease.

The majority of the country's infections have been linked back to an Islamic conference that happened at the Sri Petaling mosque back in February.

The event was attended by around 20,000 people, three quarters of whom were from Malaysia.

Other attendees were from Bangladesh, Brunei, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, and went on to spread the infection in their own home countries.

Last week Malaysia entered full lockdown to try to slow the spread of the virus, with people banned from leaving homes except for urgent needs.

Malaysia has the highest number of coronavirus cases of any Southeast Asian country, with most linked to an Islamic gathering last month with 20,000 attendees (file image)

Schools were shut, all but essential businesses closed, while foreign visitors were banned from coming into the country and Malaysian barred from leaving.

Police were initially tasked with keeping the lockdown in place, but soldiers were brought in after people began flouting the rules.

The measures were expected to last until the end of March, but were extended Wednesday until mid-April.

More than a third of the world's population - or 3billion people - are now thought to be under some kind of lockdown to help slow the spread of the virus.

India enacted the most widespread shutdown this week when it ordered all of its 1.3billion people to remain at home and only venture outside for emergencies.

Malaysia entered full coronavirus lockdown last week with all-but essential shops closed and people told to stay at home unless they need to venture out for emergencies

Police were initially deployed to deal with the outbreak but the military was brought in to help after people began flouting the rules. The lockdown is due to last until mid-April

China also locked down some 760million people as the virus spread, but is now starting to ease restrictions as new infections subside.

Globally, infections have topped 450,000 while deaths have topped 20,000 - with the World Health Organisation warning that we have not yet reached the peak.

Coronavirus first emerged in China towards the end of last year, before sweeping East to West across the globe.

Europe and the US are now the new epicentres of the virus, with more combined infections than anywhere else including China.

Italy alone, the hardest-hit western nation, has recorded more than 7,500 deaths - more than the whole of China.
The United States has imposed sanctions on 15 Iranian individuals and five companies in Iran under a counter-terrorism program, according to a post on the Treasury web site on Thursday.

The sanctions were tied to shipping, trading and construction companies, as well as a chemical firm, according to the post.
(Bloomberg) --

Amazon.com Inc. says its returns warehouse in Kentucky where three workers tested positive for Covid-19 has been closed by the order of the states governor, and the online retailer aims to reopen the facility next week.

Amazon on Monday evening had informed employees of the Shepherdsville, Kentucky, warehouse that the facility would be closed for 48 hours for cleaning after it identified three workers sickened by the disease caused by the coronavirus. On Wednesday, hours before the warehouse -- called SDF9 -- was scheduled to reopen, Amazon told workers it would be idled until further notice for more cleaning, the first known case of Amazon shutting a U.S. facility due to the pandemic without a scheduled end date.

In an emailed statement on Thursday, Amazon said that the facility remains closed at the order of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. At the order of the Governor the site is closed until April 1st, the company said. We will continue to work closely with health department and the Governor to reopen the site.

An executive order taking effect Thursday evening requires all businesses in Kentucky to close unless they provide life-sustaining services, or meet certain other exceptions. Amazon, however, said SDF9 was closed by a separate order specific to the site. The governors office didnt immediately return messages seeking comment.

Amazon is dealing with unprecedented strain on its logistics network. A surge in online orders from people hunkered down at home arrived just as some workers in its own buildings began to get sick or stay home out of fear. Many Amazon warehouses in the U.S. stock a wide variety of goods, and are capable of easily shifting their work toward in-demand items like toilet paper, diapers and dry goods. The company this month cut off restocking shipments of non-essential goods.

But SDF9, a former Zappos.com warehouse before Amazon acquired the footwear retailer, almost exclusively handles non-essential goods, workers say.. Instead, workers inspect, clean and restock returns of apparel and sneakers. Employees interviewed this week by Bloomberg said they worried about the risk of contracting or transmitting the virus in the service of processing used customer shipments. Some raised concerns with Amazon management and state officials that the company was putting workers at risk unnecessarily, according to two people who made such complaints.

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New Delhi, March 26 : First teachers' strike, and now COVID-19 -- the final year students of the Delhi University who still await result of the previous semester, now fear losing a year.

Last year in December when final year students of Delhi University sat for 5th semester examination, they hoped the results would come by January-end like every year. But, three months later, the results of most of the course are yet to be announced.

"While we were writing our exams, our seniors had told us that results would come by second week of January. But now it's March-end and there are no signs of results being announced anytime soon," Isha Agarwal, a second year student of B.A. Economic (hns.) told IANS.

The delay in announcing results was then attributed to the indefinite strike of Delhi University's teachers who demanded absorption of the ad-hoc teachers. They said answer sheet evaluation will not be done until the demand was met.

And now with the entire country into lockdown mode due to the coronavirus threat, the students fear losing out the last semester also.

Akshita Gupta, who is a student of B.A. English (honours) in PGDAV College of Delhi University, says the delay in the 5th semester's result and the lockdown have left the process of filing of examination forms for the last semester uncertain.

"First of all, we cannot fill the form for the last semester because of the awaited results and, second, due to the ongoing lockdown, the colleges are also closed leaving us in a dilemma," Gupta said.

For Divya Singh who was planning to fill forms of competitive exams after her graduation, the future looks uncertain.

"We are still waiting for the 5th semester's results, even if the country overcomes the loss of lockdown, our university would have to clear the backlogs of the teachers' strike," Singh said.

After several rounds of meetings between the DU administration and the teachers, some courses have announced results for the final year students, but with the ongoing lockdown, the students' still remain uncertain about their future.

Anukriti Sachdeva, a student of B.A.Journalism in Delhi College of Arts and Commerce, told IANS, "We are now reading from the resources that our faculty has uploaded on the college's website, but their is no communication for the way semester will proceed from now on." Sachdeva has already got a job during her campus placements, but with semester running behind schedule, she fears if she would be able to join on time.

(Rohan Agarwal can be contacted at Rohan.a@ians.in )
HONOLULU, March 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Central Pacific Financial Corp. (NYSE: CPF) (the "Company"), parent company of Central Pacific Bank, today announced that its Board of Directors has approved a change in the location of its 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders to a virtual-only shareholder meeting. The change for this year's annual shareholder meeting follows the issuance of a Stay at Home/Work from Home Order by Honolulu City and County Mayor Kirk Caldwell, and proclamation by Hawaii Governor David Ige prohibiting generally the public and private gathering of people in response to the COVID-19 virus.

Virtual meeting date: Thursday, April 23, 2020

Virtual meeting time: 11 a.m. Hawaii Time

Virtual meeting link: www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/CPF2020

Shareholders of record at the close of business on February 21, 2020, are invited to vote their shares and register for the meeting at proxyvote.com using the instructions provided with their proxy materials that were issued beginning on or about March 10. Shareholders may submit questions in advance when they register for the meeting, and they also will have the opportunity to submit questions during the virtual event using the directions on the meeting website that day. All shareholders will need their control number to vote or ask questions; that number can be found on the proxy cards, voting instruction forms or other notices they received previously. Those without a control number may attend as guests of the meeting, but they will not have the option to vote their shares or ask questions during the virtual event.

Technical assistance will be available for those attending the meeting.

A replay of the shareholder meeting will be available on the Company's website at http://ir.centralpacificbank.com.

About Central Pacific Financial Corp.

Central Pacific Financial Corp. is a Hawaii-based bank holding company with approximately $6.0 billion in assets. Central Pacific Bank, its primary subsidiary, operates 35 branches and 77 ATMs in the state of Hawaii, as of December 31, 2019. For additional information, please visit the Company's website at cpb.bank.

SOURCE Central Pacific Financial Corp.

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https://www.cpb.bank


Srinagar, March 26 : The Chief Justice of J&K and Ladakh High Court on Thursday ordered closure of all courts in the two UTs during the national lockdown period.

The J&K High Court has jurisdiction over both the Union Territories of J&K and Ladakh.

The Registrar General of the High Court issued a circular ordering that the High Court and all subordinate courts in J&K and Ladakh will remain closed during the period of lockdown till April 14.

Judicial officers of the High Court and the district courts shall remain available at their homes in order to deal with matters of emergent nature.

The circular has also advised all judicial officers and staff to strictly follow the instructions detailed for control and prevention of coronavirus.
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Marco A. Alva, Sr. cant wrap his mind around how his coworker, who he considered a brother, succumbed so quickly to COVID-19.

He was a healthy person, a very strong guy, Alva said in a phone interview from his home Thursday, where he is in isolation because he was in close quarters with Carlos Consuegra, 52, of Union City, who died Tuesday and tested positive for the coronavirus.

The two men worked at Newark airport for United Airlines; Consuegra, as a ramp service employee in Terminal B, and and Alva in Terminal C. But they spent all their downtime at work and a lot of free time together after work.

Consuegra showed Alva the ropes when he started at United, 12 years ago.

He was a good worker, Alva said. If you didnt know how to do something, he would teach you.

The two would go out after work for a few beers and shots of Hennessy or grab something to eat. And, as a perk of the job, they traveled together -- to Consuegras home country, the Dominican Republic, as well as Peru and Colombia.

Consuegra loved to play softball and worked out regularly.

He was a blessing to me from the first day I met him, said Jose Colon, a fellow softball player, in a social media post, always had a smile on his face, jokes for days and the most humble friend that I lost. (W)e played softball for many years and I dont think Ill ever play again because the last conversation that we had, he told me that we were going to play together again this year. ... Im just heartbroken and devastated"

Consuegra was at work up until last Tuesday, March 17. A coworker told him he didnt look good, Alva remembered. And then he fell asleep on a company tug.

Consuegra was sent home from work and he went to Trinitas Medical Center in Elizabeth, Alva said, where he passed out and then was diagnosed with an ear infection and sent home. He tried to go back to work the next day, since he didnt have sick time, Alva said, but the company made him stay home for two days, per doctors orders. He never returned.

On Friday, Consuegra was having trouble breathing so his family called 911 and he was taken to Palisades Medical Center where he was given a test for COVID-19.

Alva last spoke to Consuegra on Sunday. He told me, I have the virus, Alva said, adding that Consuegra told him to let work know.

Without a positive test result, United didnt notify employees, Alva said.

Monday I spoke to his daughter and he had a fever, was weak and had shortness of breath, Alva said. When I was talking to him, he was coughing a lot.

The family told Alva they probably wouldnt have the COVID-19 test results until Wednesday. Its unclear if they got them before Consuegra died Tuesday.

United sent out a memo to workers at Newark airport on Wednesday announcing Consuegras death.

Carlos Consuegras passing is a loss for all of us. His team described him as their big brother, who would always take care of them. He was known for his dry sense of humor and always going to the gym, according to the memo obtained by NJ Advance Media.

Consuegra, who began working for United in 2007, is survived by a wife, two children, three grandchildren, eight siblings and his parents, the company memo said.

A United spokesman told NJ Advance Media, We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of one of our employees at Newark Liberty International Airport. The thoughts of the entire United family are with his loved ones.

United told employees, according to the memo, that it was working closely with its Corporate Medical Department, the Centers for Disease Control and local health authorities to keep employees protected against the virus.

We know that Carlos was admitted to the hospital at the end of last week and then diagnosed with COVID-19 shortly after, the memo says. The spread of the virus is difficult to identify and its unknown where or how Carlos contracted the virus.

United told workers its been taking additional precautions, such as deep cleaning and thoroughly sanitizing areas, increasing hand-sanitizer stations, providing disinfectant spray and making sure each bathroom has ample soap.

They said, we deep cleaned. But you can tell if a place has been cleaned. You can smell it, said Virgilo Dominicci, a ramp agent who was working in Terminal B Thursday night.

He doesnt think United is being transparent with its employees, Dominicci said.

Consuegras belongings are also still in his locker. And if Dominicci -- who saw Consuegra on his last day at work -- wants to isolate, because he fears that he was exposed, he would have to use sick or vacation days, he says he was told.

This isnt a safe environment, he said.

Alva, who, like Consuegra, is 52 years old, said hes worried about his own health. He called his doctor to see if he could get tested but was told he has to wait until he develops symptoms.

He told me to stay put and dont be scared, Alva said. But I cant stop being scared because I lost someone.

Hes also scared for his coworkers, who he described as a wolf pack. United sent home 12 workers from Terminal B because they may have been exposed to the virus, Alva said.

Like I always tell my friends at work, we are a family away from home, he said. Losing one is bad enough. Losing more would be devastating to me.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share.

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Allison Pries may be reached at apries@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AllisonPries. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Baghdad: There has been an attack in the High-Security Area of Iraq. At least two rockets have been fired near the US embassy in the Green Zone of the capital Baghdad. An Iraqi security source told AFP that the target of the rocket appears to be the US embassy because the embassy complex is a few hundred meters from where the rocket fell.

Britain getting ready to battle Corona, making adequate arrangements for ventilators

Since October last year, this 26th attack has been carried out targeting foreign forces, foreign army bases and embassies in Iraq. According to the Baghdad report, rockets were dropped in the green zone, but there was no damage. No terrorist organization has taken responsibility for this attack yet.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange denied bail amid coronavirus fears

According to information received from the sources, the Iraqi army had informed about the attack on the military base a few days ago. The attack took place at the site of deployment of NATO troops. However, no one was killed in this case. It is also being said that in the meantime, the coronavirus crisis is also hovering in Iraq. The Iraq Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that new cases have resulted in 9 cases in the capital Baghdad, 6 in Sulaimaniya, 4 in Karbala and two each in Najaf, Erbil and Muthanna and one each in Basra, Kirkuk and Divaniyah provinces. According to a statement, so far a total of 346 cases have been confirmed in the country, out of which 29 have died.

UP police shares Dhoni's picture, says, "Stay home and win the match"
LUDLOW - With area hospitals, doctors offices and first responders reporting critical shortages in face masks and gowns, the Hampden County Sheriffs Department has stepped in to fill the void.

Hampden Sheriff Nick Cocchi said on Thursday that inmates at the Hampden County Correctional Center in Ludlow and the Western Massachusetts Regional Womens Correctional Center in Chicopee have begun making their own masks and gowns.

Were making 500 masks and 35 gowns per day, Cocchi said.

In less than a week, the work under the York Street industries program has produced enough personal protective equipment to meet the internal need at all sheriffs department facilities. After that, Cocchi said it was only logical to look at the external needs of doctors, nurses and first responders, he said.

Im so proud of our staff for the work they are doing, and our offender population has been tremendous, Cocchi said. I am grateful for the work the staff and offenders are doing every day.

The York Street industries program provides inmates with vocational skills that they can use for employment after release.

In the months since the emergence of COVID-19, demand for personal protective equipment has only increased, to the point where it outpaced supply. Members of the public snapped up any they could find, leaving hospitals and emergency responders to face a dwindling supply.

When the start of the state of emergency, the Sheriffs Department had on hand more than 15 days worth of protective masks and gowns.Once we started to deplete our supply, we decided to start to self-produce, he said.

Inmates at the mens facility in Ludlow and the womens facility in Chicopee quickly began making enough masks and gowns to replenish their own stores, Cocchi said.

It was only natural from there to look to supply masks and gowns where they were needed, he said.

The Sheriffs Department has supplied masks so far to the Ludlow Fire Department, and the sheriffs departments for Barnstable, Franklin and Worcester counties.

It has also supplied masks and gowns to the Caring Health Center in Springfield. The move allowed the center to reopen after a shortage of masks and gowns forced it to close, he said.

They sent a thank you letter, and it was read out loud on the floor of the shop to the inmates, Cocchi said.

They were so proud of themselves and proud of being productive and helping in the community, he said. Theres very positive morale in the facility. The climate has been nothing short of outstanding.

Roughly 15 inmates in two shifts at the Ludlow jail and around 5 inmates at the Chicopee jail will be producing masks for as long as the crisis continues and there is a need for them.

The plan is to provide them for doctors and nurses, and for fire and police departments, and emergency medical staff. Any agency in need needs only to contact the sheriffs department, he said. Well put them on the list.

The masks and gowns are designed according to specifications set by the Centers for Disease Control, he said. They are also durable enough to be sanitized for reuse, instead of being one-shot disposable gear.

The jails are in a unique position being able to produce personal protective equipment in the vocational shops, he said. But it also has heavy-duty industrial washing machines in the laundry services unit. We have these melt-away bags. You put them in and seal them and then take them to laundry services.The laundry is exposed to temperatures high enough to melt the bags and to kill any germs or viruses that may be on the material, he said.

Since Massachusetts declared a state of emergency for COVID-19, Cocchi took a number of steps to stop the virus from entering jail facilities.

Visitation was curtailed, and all new inmates entering the facility are given masks and kept apart from the general population for at least 14 days.

Employees who could work from home were sent home, and all other staff reporting are also being screened and have their temperature taken before they can enter the jail facility.

Visiting lawyers coming to see clients are also screened the same way, and are handed a mask.

As a result of such precautions, Cocchi said, no Hampden County Sheriffs facility has reported a single case of anyone testing positive for coronavirus.

Not one case, he said.

Related content:
NORRISTOWN  The lawyer for a Hatfield man accused of fatally beating and strangling his live-in girlfriends 4-year-old daughter in October 2016 wants a judge to prohibit prosecutors from presenting what he says are inflammatory autopsy photographs of the child to jurors.

It is nearly impossible to fathom evidence more prejudicial than photographs of a dead child. The photographs are, in and of themselves, inflammatory, defense lawyer Matthew W. Quigg wrote in court papers filed on behalf of accused killer Marquis Lamont Thomas. Moreover, the need of these photographs fails to clearly outweigh the undeniable likelihood that they will inflame the passions of the jurors against Mr. Thomas.

Quigg asked Montgomery County Judge Risa Vetri Ferman to preclude prosecutors from using the photographs at trial, or in the alternative, require that the photos be published to jurors in black and white and with redactions to limit the prejudicial impact.

The photographs are so inflammatory and so gut-wrenching and heart-wrenching that jurors are invariably just going to look for somebody to blame and its going to lead them to wanting to seek revenge as opposed to justice and thats our fear, Quigg added during a recent interview.

Attached to his motion, Quigg included copies of news articles that recounted jurors reactions to seeing images of homicide victims during other trials in the county. One 2014 article published during the trial of convicted Upper Merion killer Raghunandan Yandamuri reported jurors wept openly and pleaded with the judge for a break after viewing a photo of a murdered 10-month-old girl.

Its unclear if Ferman will hold a pretrial hearing on the request.

Jury selection for Thomas trial was to begin this week but the trial has been postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak in the county. Its unclear when Ferman will hold a hearing on Quiggs pretrial request, given that county courts are closed until further notice.

Earlier this month, county President Judge Thomas M. DelRicci signed an emergency declaration order halting all jury trials. The courthouse is open only for emergency matters and access to the courthouse is limited to individuals who are filing an emergency matter or who are appearing for a scheduled emergency matter.

On Monday, Governor Tom Wolf also issued a stay-at-home order for county residents to combat the spread of COVID-19. While the order is effective through April 6, officials said it will be re-evaluated and may be extended. The duration of the public health emergency is uncertain.

Thomas, 33, of the 1300 block of Needham Circle, faces life imprisonment if convicted of first-degree murder in connection with the alleged Oct. 18, 2016, death of 4-year-old Kailee Bunrout, who was the daughter of Thomas girlfriend.

Thomas also faces charges of third-degree murder, endangering the welfare of a child, aggravated and simple assault and unlawful restraint in connection with the alleged crimes against the child. A conviction of third-degree murder, a killing committed with malice, carries a possible maximum sentence of 20 to 40 years in prison.

Additionally, Thomas faces charges of criminal attempt at murder, endangering the welfare of a child, strangulation, aggravated and simple assault and unlawful restraint in connection with the alleged physical abuse suffered by Kailees 8-year-old brother in September 2018.

First Assistant District Attorney Edward F. McCann Jr. and co-prosecutor Brianna Ringwood are handling the case.

Thomas has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Quigg has not revealed any potential defense strategies.

Thomas is being held in the county jail without bail pending trial.

While the cause and manner of Kailees death originally was listed as undetermined, investigators took another look at the case when the little girls brother was treated at Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia on Sept. 15, 2018, for alleged child abuse injuries, court papers indicate.

When the boy was taken to CHOP by his mother with similar injuries as Kailees, it raised a red flag with medical personnel and with detectives, leading to the reopening of the investigation, county District Attorney Kevin R. Steele previously explained.

Thomas initially was arrested on March 9 on charges related to the alleged physical abuse of the 8-year-old boy and failed to post $500,000 cash bail and has been in jail since that time.

The investigation of Kailees death began about 7:51 a.m. Oct. 18, 2016, when Towamencin police responded to a residence at Forge Gate Apartments on Snyder Road for a report of an unresponsive 4-year-old girl. Upon arrival, police were directed to a bedroom by the childs mother and there they observed Thomas performing CPR on Kailee, according to the criminal complaint filed by county Detective Gregory Henry and Towamencin Detective Patrick Horne.

The little girl was later pronounced dead at Abington Health Lansdale Hospital at 8:33 a.m., according to court papers. Court documents indicate authorities noticed bruising on the little girls torso.

During an investigation, Kailees mother told detectives that she did not observe any bruising or other injuries on the child when she bathed her and put her to bed the night before, Oct. 17. The woman told detectives she went to work at 3:50 a.m. Oct. 18, and around 8 a.m. she received a text message from Thomas indicating Kailee wont wake up, according to the criminal complaint.

When Kailees mother arrived home she tried to awaken the child and then called 911 after learning Thomas had not called to request assistance, according to the arrest affidavit. The woman noticed Kailees skin was cold and she described red saliva on the little girls shirt and bed.

At the request of a 911 dispatcher, Thomas began performing chest compressions on the little girl until police and emergency medical officials arrived.

When Thomas was interviewed he told detectives he awoke about 7:44 a.m. and went to Kailees room and she would not wake so he sat on the bed and tried to wake her by shaking her shoulder, according to the arrest affidavit. Thomas allegedly told detectives he noticed Kailees skin was cold.

Thomas claimed he observed bruising on Kailee when his girlfriend was changing the child for bed on Oct. 17, according to the arrest affidavit.

A review of Kailees medical history revealed that on Sept. 4, 2016, she was evaluated at CHOP by doctors who identified hemorrhages in both eyes, a bruise below her left eye, injuries to her tongue consistent with bite marks, two healing rib fractures and multiple scars on her torso, according to the criminal complaint.

An Oct. 19, 2016, autopsy by the Montgomery County Coroners Office identified contusions, abrasions and scars of the skin, a hemorrhage of the right eye, soft tissue hemorrhage in the neck, lacerations of the heart and liver and hemorrhages of the stomach and urinary bladder, according to court documents.

The cause and manner of Kailees death, at that time, was listed as undetermined.

On Sept. 15, 2018, Kailees brother was admitted to CHOP and an examination identified hemorrhages in both eyes and bruising under his right eye and an evaluation identified no underlying medical or accidental cause to explain the boys condition, according to the criminal complaint.

Doctors opined the boys injuries were consistent with inflicted trauma/child physical abuse. At the time, the little boy was living with his mother and Thomas in Hatfield. Thomas and the victims mother also share a younger daughter, court papers indicate.

In February 2019, authorities interviewed the 8-year-old boy and he disclosed that Thomas choked him on multiple occasions. At that time, the little boy also disclosed that on the night before Kailees death he observed Kailee walking to the bathroom with Thomas and that the little girl was crying, according to the arrest affidavit.

Detectives reopened the investigation of Kailees death and on June 19 a doctor who reviewed the 2016 autopsy and other materials concluded Kailee died as a result of blunt impact trauma and strangulation and listed the manner of death as homicide.

Detectives concluded that Thomas had care, custody and control of Kailee immediately prior to when she was found dead.

The injuries she sustained at that time are consistent with inflicted trauma, specifically, blunt force trauma and strangulation, Henry and Horne wrote in the arrest affidavit.

Detectives further alleged that when Thomas did not call for medical assistance for the girl on Oct. 18, instead advising his girlfriend in a text that Kailee was unresponsive, suggested that this inaction was an attempt by Thomas to distance himself from the event and evade answering prompt questions by a 911 operator.
[March 26, 2020] Pear Therapeutics Obtains FDA Authorization for SOMRYST, a Prescription Digital Therapeutic for the Treatment of Adults with Chronic Insomnia

Pear Therapeutics, Inc. today announced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted authorization for Somryst, the first prescription digital therapeutic (PDT) intended for use in the treatment of patients 22 years of age and older with chronic insomnia. Somryst treats patients with chronic insomnia by improving a patient's insomnia symptoms. Somryst is the first product submitted through FDA's traditional 510(k) pathway while simultaneously reviewed as part of FDA's Software Precertification Pilot Program to help build and test FDA's Digital Health Precertification Working Model 1.0 [1]. Somryst is intended to provide tailored neurobehavioral interventions, specifically Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia (CBTi) and sleep restriction driven by algorithms designed to improve the symptoms of insomnia. Somryst includes features that allow for personalization including the patient's ability to set a sleep window. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the American College of Physicians clinical guidelines recommend CBTi as first-line treatment for people with chronic insomnia [2-3]. Somryst is the only FDA-authorized therapeutic that delivers guideline recommended first-line treatment for chronic insomnia. "More than 30 million adults suffer from chronic insomnia, which can seriously impact one's quality of life and can lead to depression, suicidality, hypertension and even heart attacks. Treatment options for chronic insomnia are limited as most available sleep medications are only recommended for short term use, can lead to problems with tolerance, and can have unwanted side-effects, including next-day cognitive impairments," said Dr. Charles M. Morin, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Director Sleep Research Centre at Universite Laval in Quebec City. "The authorization of Somryst by the FDA provides patients suffering from chronic insomnia with a digitally-delivered CBTi therapeutic, where CBTi is the guideline recommended long-term, first-line treatment for chronic insomnia." The FDA submission was supported by two randomized controlled trials evaluating the effectiveness of the therapeutic [4]. Together, these studies enrolled more than 1,400 adults with chronic insomnia. In a trial of 303 patients with chronic insomnia, those on treatment demonstrated clinically meaningful improvements in insomnia severity, sleep onset latency (time to fall asleep) and wake after sleep onset (time awake at night) at the end of treatment, as well as at 6 and 12 months follow-up compared to active control. Results of the study were published in JAMA Psychiatry [5]. In a second study of 1,149 adult patients with chronic insomnia and depressive symptoms, those on treatment for 9 weeks saw a significant reduction in insomnia severity measurements compared to controls. These benefits persisted for over a 12-month period. The majority of patients randomized to the treatment arm for the PDT candidate no longer met clinical criteria for insomnia at the end of the 9-week treatment. Results of the study were published in Lancet Psychiatry [6]. "The FDA's authorization of our third PDT, Somryst, demonstrates our ongoing commitment to redefine disease treatment through the development of PDTs," said Corey McCann, M.D., Ph.D., President and CEO of Pear Therapeutics. "Now, more than ver, easily-accessible treatment options are imperative for patients suffering from chronic conditions. Pear has built the capabilities, pipeline, and platform to allow us to build PDTs that help patients across a variety of disease areas."



Somryst is the third PDT to receive authorization from the FDA, following Pear's reSET, and reSET-O. Somryst was submitted, reviewed and cleared through the traditional 510(k) pathway and was the first product reviewed through FDA's Software Precertification Pilot Program, as part of the 2019 Test Plan released by the FDA in January 2019. Pear Therapeutics is one of nine companies taking part in the FDA's Digital Health Software Precertification Pilot Program. As part of the program, Pear has been working closely with the FDA and volunteered to undergo the first-ever Excellence Appraisal in May 2019, consisting of an onsite evaluation of the company's commitment and execution across product quality, patient safety, cybersecurity responsibility, clinical responsibility, and a proactive culture[3]. About Somryst

Somryst is a 9-week Prescription Digital Therapeutic (PDT) for chronic insomnia. Somryst can be used on a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet. Somryst is available by prescription only. A licensed Health Care Provider (HCP) must prescribe Somryst and use of Somryst should be undertaken only under the supervised care of a Health Care Provider. Somryst Indications for Use and Important Safety Information Somryst is a prescription-only digital therapeutic intended to provide a neurobehavioral intervention (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia - CBT-I) to patients 22 years of age and older with chronic insomnia. Somryst treats patients with chronic insomnia by improving a patient's insomnia symptoms. This press release does not include all the information needed to use Somryst safely and effectively. Please see the full Clinician Brief Summary Instructions for Somryst for more information. Safety Information and Warnings Somryst is not for everyone. Please use your clinical judgement to determine whether Somryst is right for your patient. Somryst is not for emergency use. Please instruct patients to dial 911 or to go to the nearest emergency room in the event of a medical emergency.

Patients should be clearly instructed not to use Somryst to communicate severe, critical, or urgent information to their Health Care Provider.

Somryst is not meant to be used as treatment without supervision of a Health Care Provider.

Somryst is not meant to be a substitution for any treatment medication.

Somryst contains sensitive medical information. Please instruct patients to protect their information by password-protecting their smartphone and tablet, and ensuring no one else may access their device.

Sleep Restriction (and Consolidation) within Somryst can cause sleepiness, especially in the early stages of using the PDT. Somryst should not be used if the patient needs to be alert or cautious to avoid serious accidents in their job or daily life. Examples include: Long-haul truck drivers Long-distance bus drivers Air traffic controllers Operators of heavy machinery Some assembly line jobs

The usage data collected in therapy lessons by Somryst are not intended to be used as a standalone assessment of treatment progress. About Pear Therapeutics Pear Therapeutics is the leader in prescription digital therapeutics. We aim to redefine medicine by discovering, developing, and delivering clinically validated software-based therapeutics to provide better outcomes for patients, smarter engagement and tracking tools for clinicians, and cost-effective solutions for payers. Pear has a pipeline of products and product candidates across therapeutic areas, including severe psychiatric and neurological conditions. Our lead product, reSET, for the treatment of Substance Use Disorder, was the first prescription digital therapeutic to receive marketing authorization from the FDA to treat disease. Pear's second product, reSET-O, for the treatment of Opioid Use Disorder, received marketing authorization from the FDA in December 2018. For more information, visit us at www.peartherapeutics.com. ________________________________ [1] https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/digital-health/digital-health-software-precertification-pre-cert-program [2] Schutte-Rodin S, Broch L, Buysse D, Dorsey C, Sateia M. Clinical guideline for the evaluation and management of chronic insomnia in adults. J Clin Sleep Med. 2008;4(5):487-504. [3] Qaseem A, Kansagara D, Forciea MA, Cooke M, Denberg TD. Management of Chronic Insomnia Disorder in Adults: A Clinical Practice Guideline From the American College of Physicians. Ann Intern Med. 2016; 165:125-133. [4] Somryst Regulatory Submission (K191716), 510(k) Regulatory file [5] Ritterband LM, Thorndike, FP, Ingersoll, KS, et al. Effect of a Web-Based Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Insomnia Intervention With 1-Year Follow-up: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry. 2017;74(1),68-75. [6] Christensen H, Batterham PJ, Gosling JA, et al. Effectiveness of an online insomnia program (SHUTi) for prevention of depressive episodes (the GoodNight Study): a randomised controlled trial. Lancet Psychiatry. 2016;3(4):333-341. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005278/en/

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Nothing like the pressure of a deadline to get the creative juices flowing. At least that was the case for designer-couple Tobia and Afra Scarpa, who received an urgent call from furniture maestro Cesare Cassina in November 1969: Could the Italian architectson of a famous architect father, Carloand his wife come up with a radical new sofa in time for the Cologne trade show in January? The Scarpas set to the task, inspired to use the material of the moment, expanding polyurethane.

Photo: Courtesy of 1stdibs

They proposed a seat at its most rudimentary. At the beginning, the workers did not understand that the leather covering was not supposed to be taut . . . but to appear like a soft, creased fabric curled around this soft mass and held together by a sort of giant metal spring, Tobia later explained. In no time, versatile seats called Soriana were produced and taken to the fair, where the chair won the prestigious Compasso dOro award for what Barbara Lehmann, head of Cassinas historical archives, calls its visual complexity achieved with simplicity.

Photo: Douglas Friedman

The lumpy, lounge-worthy seats suited the 70s, but in the decade that followed, Soriana fell out of favor, causing Cassina to end production in 1982. In recent years, its been making a comeback.

Photo: Nick Hudson

Its like if Claes Oldenburg made a chair; or a beanbag with more structure, says Rodman Primack, from AD100 firm RP Miller, who lives with a family of Sorianas that his husband, Rudy Weissenberg, inherited from his grandmother in Guatemala. (She parked them around a brass firepit.) Fellow AD100 honoree Kelly Wearstler has a suite of Sorianas sheathed in flaxen fabric at her Malibu beach house. And Shanan Campanaro, founder of Brooklyns Eskayel textile studio, recently redid her beat-up set in her brands Medina jacquard. It updates the pieces, making a classic feel supermodern.

Photo: Francois Halard. Artwork: Lucio Fontana.  2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
Governor Bill Lee, as part of the effort to ease contact requirements on citizens during the coronavirus crisis, has suspended the requirements for vehicle emissions testing until further notice.

But that does not mean the vehicle emissions centers, including those in Chattanooga, have not been open and taking money.

State Air Pollution Control officials said they had no control over whether the stations are open.

However, after Rep. Mike Carter spoke out, an order went down to close the emissions centers.

The order from TDEC's Stephen L. Foster says, "Due to Gov. Lees Executive Orders and for the safety of our employees and motoring public, we will cease testing operations at all Metro and TDEC locations effective close of business today. Our employees are currently being notified and additional information will be communicated to them shortly. As I understand, a target date of reopening May 1st is being discussed. I am available if you have any questions or concerns.

"Thank you for your patience during this unprecedented event."

Rep. Carter, who has worked toward a permanent closure of the emission stations, had earlier said, "This is a reminder that VEHICLE EMISSIONS TESTING IN TENNESSEE IS SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. You DO NOT have to take your car through emissions to renew your tag. Hamilton County residents can renew on-line at www.CountyClerkAnytime.com



"Despite Governor Lee suspending testing by executive order last week to fight the spread of covid-19, opus testing centers remain open, misleading residents into thinking they are still required to go through emissions.



"You are not. Please spread the word."

The earlier order from Governor Lee says:

In order to facilitate the treatment and containment of COVID-19, Governor Lee issued Executive Order No. 15 on March 19th that extends motor vehicle registrations that expire between March 12, 2020 through May 18, 2020. The new expiration date, for registrations that expired between these two dates, is now June 15, 2020. Therefore, the requirements for vehicle emissions testing are suspended until further notice. The Division of Air Pollution Control will update this notice with details as to when vehicle emissions testing services will resume in the near future. The Division of Air Pollution Control will work to ensure that testing services are available in enough time for vehicles to be tested prior to the extended registration due dates. Please call 866-329-9632 with any questions.
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang's Regular Press Conference on March 26, 2020

2020/03/26

I'd like to share some figures with you first. March 25 saw 401 patients cured and discharged from hospital in China's mainland, bringing the tally to 74,051.

The Paper: At a press availability after the Virtual G7 Ministerial on March 25, US Secretary of State Pompeo renewed his attacks on China's political system and once again referred to the coronavirus as "the Wuhan virus". What's your comment?

Geng Shuang: We strongly condemn these remarks by Secretary Pompeo.

As China has repeatedly pointed out, origin-tracing of the virus is a complicated matter, where we should rely on professional views from the science community. WHO and the international community explicitly object to linking the virus with specific countries or regions, or seeking stigmatization. They have commended China's response. However, this American politician continues to defy global consensus, stigmatize China and discredit its epidemic response. The sinister intention behind his attempt is to deflect attention at home and shift the blame to the innocent.

I have to point out that the COVID-19 pandemic is spreading across the globe and the situation in the US is getting worse. Under such circumstances, if a politician keeps provoking political disputes and disrupting international cooperation in combating the virus, instead of focusing on containing the spread at home and contributing to global cooperation, what morality does he have?

People of the world have all witnessed that it is under the leadership of the CPC that the Chinese people achieved independence, freedom and liberation and made enormous progress in national development. It is also under the leadership of the CPC that the Chinese nation united as one and speedily fought against COVID-19, buying precious time for the global response. These are plain facts for all to see.

We advise this politician not to go further down the wrong path, otherwise his hypocrisy and malign intentions will be further exposed, prompting more indignation and objection among the Chinese people and the international community.

AFP: Just one follow-up question on Secretary of State Pompeo's comments. He mentioned that the G7 foreign ministers agreed with him that China was waging a disinformation campaign about the coronavirus pandemic. So we wanted to ask what is China's comment?

Geng Shuang: I have just elaborated on China's stance in my response to The Paper.

Since you asked about it again, I can say a few more. Since the pandemic broke out, China has taken the most comprehensive, thorough and rigorous measures against it and such measures have produced great results. This is our contribution to the global fight against the pandemic. All along, China has been open, transparent and responsible in sharing information, staying in close communication and carrying out cooperation with relevant countries and international organizations including G7. What we have done has won us applause from the international community.

We urge the US side to respect facts and the public opinion of the international community and stop politicizing the pandemic and stigmatizing China. As we said repeatedly, the top priority for the US is to put its own house in order, do its level best to halt the spread of COVID-19 and play a constructive role in the international cooperation against the pandemic. Trying to muddy the water and divert responsibility at this moment will not help solve any problem.

NHK: The whereabouts of Yuan Keqin, a professor of the Hokkaido University of Education who returned to China, is still unknown. Some people are worried that he might be arrested. Do you have more details on that?

Geng Shuang: Yuan Keqin is a Chinese citizen. He is suspected of spying and has been investigated by China's national security authority in accordance with law. He made a full confession. All the facts are clear and evidence irrefutable. His case has been transferred to the procuratorial authorities for investigation and prosecution. Yuan Keqin's litigation rights have been fully guaranteed along the way.

Reuters: President Trump yesterday made comments about the WHO being biased in favor of China. Does China have a response?

Geng Shuang: Since the outbreak of COVID-19, WHO, as the most authoritative and professional institution in global public health security, has made tremendous efforts to coordinate response and cooperation worldwide. Its work has been recognized and commended by the international community. China supports it in continuing to play an important role in this global fight against the pandemic.
Singapores plan is the largest in Asia, drawing US billion from the countrys national reserves. The local economy contracted 2.2 per cent in the first quarter of this year. Japan is considering a US0 billion stimulus. China plans investments but has not provided details.

Singapore (AsiaNews/Agencies)  Singapore has unveiled an economic stimulus plan worth S billion (US.7 billion) to counter the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. This follows the S.4 billion (US.5 billion) announced in February to deal with the COVID-19 crisis.

Major think tanks expect world GDP to contract in the first two quarters of 2020, followed by a slow economic recovery in the second half of the year.

In the first quarter of this year, Singapore's economy shrunk by 2.2 per cent over the same period last year. Now the island nation plans to draw S billion (US billion) from its national reserves, estimated at around US trillion,

The last time Singapore tapped its reserves was in 2009, during the US subprime crisis, when it drew S billion (US.8 billion).

As part of its action, the government will offset up to 50 per cent of wages in the food services sector, whilst the aviation and tourism sectors will receive up to 75 per cent in co-funding.

With todays announcement, Singapore has the biggest support package in the region, and it is not alone.

In Thailand, the government approved a US.7 billion plan. South Korea already unveiled measures worth some US.8 billion, Indonesia announced a US.1 billion target, and Vietnam wants to spend US.16 billion, whilst Malaysia will make public its plan in the coming days.

Among the bigger players, Japan is considering a 30 trillion (US0 billion) economic stimulus to boost spending. In 2008-2009 crisis, it injected 15 trillion (US5 billion).

So far China injected trillions into the financial system, but has not unveiled a targeted economic plan.

In February, it announced huge spending in infrastructure investment to jumpstart the economy. The new spending will be backed by as much as RMB 2.8 trillion (US4 billion) of special local government bonds.

In 2008, in the middle of the subprime crisis, Beijing responded with an RMB4 trillion (US6 billion) stimulus package, which overheated the Chinese economy, increasing the level of indebtedness of local governments.
Turkey Indicts Saudi Nationals in Khashoggi Murder, Demands Life Sentences - Reports

Sputnik News

15:29 GMT 25.03.2020

ISTANBUL (Sputnik) - The Daily Sabah newspaper reported, citing Istanbul's Chief Public Prosecutor Irfan Fidan, that the investigation into Khashoggi's death had been completed.

The Istanbul Chief Prosecutor's Office has charged 20 Saudi citizens for the premeditated murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and demanded life sentences for 18 of them, media reported on Wednesday.

According to state news agency Anadolu, the other two defendants have been charged with incitement of first degree murder.

The Daily Sabah newspaper reported, citing Istanbul's Chief Public Prosecutor Irfan Fidan, that the two men are former deputy head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence services Ahmed al-Asiri and former royal adviser Saud al-Qahtani.

Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post, went missing in October 2018 after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Riyadh initially denied any knowledge of the journalist's whereabouts but eventually admitted that Khashoggi was killed and dismembered inside the embassy.

In December, a Saudi court sentenced five suspects in Khashoggi's murder to death and jailed another three for a total of 24 years in a trial that many, including governments and human rights advocacy groups, have criticized as covering up the incident. Notably, both al-Qahtani and al-Asiri were cleared of any wrongdoing.



A Sputnik

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La Paz Chattanooga is working to ensure the Latinx community remains informed and empowered during the COVID-19 crisis, said officials.

The office remains operating during regular business hours at this time, however remotely. Clients are encouraged to contact it via phone, email, text, whatsapp and social media.

La Paz will also work directly with the United Way of Greater Chattanooga and their Restore Hope Fund to ensure that individuals and families financially impacted by COVID-19 have access to financial resources.

All educational workshops, classes and peer-led activities have been suspended, but the organization continues to guide, connect and strengthen the Latinx community, said officials.

The office phone and hours are 624-8414, Monday-Friday from 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

In order to reach the Latinx community with important information regarding COVID-19 and its impact, La Paz has implemented the following resources:

Spanish COVID-19 Resource Page

Spanish Blog with all local media releases

Spanish COVID-19 Facebook Support Group (Apoyo Comunitario Chattanooga COVID-19)

Daily radio spot at 11:30 a.m. on Que Buena Radio 101.9 FM

Interpretation services for Hamilton County Press Conferences

The organization is also working with local partner organizations to ensure all resources and documentation regarding COVID-19 are available in Spanish for the Latinx community.

Reaching out to local Latino pastors, business owners and community members is also an engagement strategy and La Paz is organizing a bilingual phone bank to assist in reaching the community.

"The most important thing we can do as an organization during this crisis is continue to advocate for inclusion of the Latinx community and ensure access to services and important information, said Stacy Johnson, executive director. "Our La Paz team is working alongside so many amazing community partners and we ask you to join us and share this important information so that no one is uninformed.

To volunteer and/or donate to La Paz Chattanooga and help ensure the Latinx community continues to receive access to services and information, please visit www.lapazchattanooga.org.


ACCRA, GHANA. 26 March 2020/ - Mr Herbert Mensah, businessman and President of Ghana Rugby, has launched a passionate appeal to businesses in Ghana to stand up and be counted in the fight against the novel Coronavirus, COVID-19.

Mensah, in conjunction with Sunda International, made a substantial contribution to the Legon Hospital with products such as detergents and soaps that are manufactured locally in Ghana.

Mr. Isaac Hu, Sunda Internationals Manager for Africa, has been supporting Mensah with various ventures such as Ghana Rugby, May 9th Remembered and other charitable products that Mensah has been involved in over the years.

In the appeal, Mensah referred to many cases of businesses and business people who stood up to be counted and who made substantial contributions.

Alibaba Founder Jack Ma pledged to donate medical equipment, including 1.5 million laboratory kits for the novel coronavirus, to member states of the African Union.

In South Africa billionaires Johann Rupert and Nicky Oppenheimer are each giving away R1 billion (US$ 57million) to help South African small businesses and their workers cope with the economic carnage wrought by Covid-19 and the impending lockdown.

Mensah also initiated a COVID-19 information service for the Ghana Rugby Family in which his message is, Everything will be fine if we all play our part!

The appeal from Mensah is also aimed at all the people who may have an influence on businesses in Ghana.

Stop sitting around and just rely on the government to make big decisions. They are already making big decisions. Now the question is, 'Where do we go?'

Mensah continued to say that we already have guidelines and regulations on how to protect ourselves and others against the spread of Covid-19 but that there are many less-fortunate people who find it difficult to ride out this storm.

We have many Regions in Ghana and every Region must have one or a few wealthy people who can afford to help others. This is the time to stop thinking about yourself, but to rather think about Ghana Mensah said.

Mensah ended his appeal with, All Im saying is that Im appealing to you, middle classes. Come together, go to the people you benefit from and put pressure on them to support the cause.
Projectiles struck near the Baghdad Operations Command, a few hundred meters away from the US embassy.

Two rockets landed inside the Iraqi capitals heavily fortified Green Zone, the seat of Iraqs government and home to the US embassy, the Iraqi army said in a statement.

The two projectiles struck on Thursday near the Baghdad Operations Command, which coordinates Iraqs police and military forces, the statement said.

The command centre is a few hundred meters away from the US Embassy, which is a regular target of rocket attacks.

It was not immediately known if there were any casualties.

The statement said the rockets were launched from the al-Nahda area of Baghdad. It was the latest rocket attack to target the Green Zone since three rockets hit an area near the embassy last Tuesday.

An Iraqi security source told AFP news agency the intended target appeared to be the US embassy.

The latest attack is the 26th since late October targeting installations where foreign troops or diplomats are based across Iraq.

The attacks come as the US-led coalition announced plans to draw down its presence from bases across Iraq and consolidate in Baghdad and Ain al-Asad in western Iraq. The plan was in the works since late last year, a senior coalition military official said last week, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Troops have already pulled out from al-Qaim, on the border with Syria.

France said on Wednesday that it will pull out its military forces from Iraq, citing the need for French forces to help fight the coronavirus pandemic at home.
BEIJING, Mar. 26 -- China strongly opposes separatist attempts for "Taiwan independence" in any form, Ren Guoqiang, spokesperson for the Ministry of National Defense, said Thursday in response to a news report that a U.S. warship had sailed through the Taiwan Strait on March 25.

Ren said the U.S.'s recent actions concerning Taiwan, such as dispatching warships across the Taiwan Strait and passing of the TAIPEI Act, were tantamount to interference in China's internal affairs and undermined cross-strait peace and stability.

"The Chinese armed forces have firm will, full confidence and sufficient capability to thwart any form of separatist acts and will take all necessary measures to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity," Ren said.
The Irishman

On Nexflix

(R)

Grade: A

If a generous friend offered us free tickets to see Sir Simon Rattle conduct the Berlin Philharmonic with Hilary Hahn as the soloist would we even bother to ask what theyre playing? Maybe, but be it Brahms or Beatlejuice, were going! Sue would have dragged me.

Thats how I felt going to see Martin Scorsese direct Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci in The Irishman. I got lucky. I was in Baltimore for a convention when the film was playing during its short theatrical run.

Like many people, I wasnt entirely happy with the 210-minute running time  not long enough!

Yes, both Godfather and Godfather II may be better sustained stories, but The Irishman has a sweeping epic flow coupled with some very provocative and even tender insights into complex moral beings. This is the ninth time DeNiro and Scorsese have teamed up. Im sure Scorsese can say any two words and DeNiro will finish the sentence  and the scene.

This is, of course, a family film  weddings, christenings and relatives helping each other out. The bond is born at a gas station where blue collar Franks truck breaks down and mob boss Russell wanders over and gets it going.

Russell likes Frank. Frank likes Russell. Whaddya say? Shall we paint some houses together?

Frank is a hitman, who has so many notches in his belt that his pants are barely held up. Frank loves his daughter Peggy so very much. Franks friend Jimmy Hoffa liked to treat little Peggy to ice cream sundaes  when he wasnt wielding his union power like samurai swords.

As for mob king Russell Bufalino, he is unconditionally loyal to those who are unconditionally loyal. He offers Frank a job, painting houses, and a lifelong friendship, painted in splattered shades of red, is born.

Let me assure you, its not violence that draws this Quaker critic into this tale. Its the juxtaposition of gentleness and compassion with ruthlessness and greed. Perhaps our morality is a puzzling patchwork quilt of the good, the bad and the ugly?

Some have found this film boring, because its slower than the Corleone tales. I was mesmerized.

Why do I love The Irishman? Let me count the ways.

First, its a thoughtful study of a Faustian bargain in which a good hard-working man sells his soul to a mob boss. Frank repays Russells faith in him by doing anything hes asked to do. On a few occasions we see Frank try to refuse, because he does not want to harm someone. But, in the end, Frank will finally nod and silently tuck the gun into his back pocket. Franks hesitations suggest still waters running deep.

In one chilling scene, Franks asked to kill Hoffa, whom Franks daughter loves. Frank balks, but eventually nods. A drive. A flight. A little house painting. Time for dinner.

We had no choice, says Russell softly, as Frank nods sadly.

Time and again we see Franks conscience speaking to him, but loyalty always wins out. DeNiro shows Franks conscience through his eyes. The performance is deep, penetrating, puzzling, contradictory.

Frank asks for a priest after picking out a coffin that wont make death seem so final. Holy Mary in the hour of our death, says Frank softly. Not bad for being away so long, eh?

Do you feel anything, remorse, for what you have done? the priest asks.

Franks offers something less than a confession.

Well, its water under the bridge. But maybe talking to you is an attempt?

Despite the virtuoso performances by DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci  who delivers the best performance of his life  the two actresses who play Franks daughter Peggy are every bit as powerful.

Young Peggy (Lucy Gallina) watches her dad mercilessly beat up a shopkeeper who pushed Peggy when she knocked over something on his shelves. Peggy never trusts her dad again. Peggy has only seven lines of dialogue in the whole film, yet she dominates the narrative.

When Jimmy Hoffa dies, Peggy (Anna Paquin) stares into her dads soul, ripping him apart. Frank wants his daughter to love him, and cant understand her distance. How can one man love gently and kill callously? Is there room in a soul for both?

Peggy is the Irishmans conscience. She wont be at his side when he dies.

Finally, there were many times in The Irishman when I didnt care what was happening. I just wanted to watch Scorsese paint houses.

As Frank days run out, he asks the priest to leave the door open just a little.

Scorseses long final shot peeks through that opening.

Frank is sitting in his wheelchair  missing his daughter, water still running under his bridge.

A truly chilling final moment  in a life and in a movie.

Love 3 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0
Australian citizen Brenton Harrison Tarrant has pleaded guilty of killing 51 people during last year's attacks on mosques in the city of Christchurch, Sputnik reported citing local media on Thursday.

Tarrant has admitted his guilt in a televised address to the court's hearing, Sputnik reported citing New Zealand's Herald newspaper.

He was charged with 51 counts of murder and 40 charges of attempted murder and one charge under the Terrorism Suppression Act, the first time such a charge has been used inside the country.

On March 15, Tarrant, a 28-year-old suspected white supremacist from Australia, stormed into two mosques during congregational prayers and indiscriminately opened fire on the assembled, as per the police.

He was then arrested within 21 minutes of the first emergency call received by police.

The attacker live-streamed the massacre on Facebook, and the video later appeared on other online platforms.

The act of terrorism left the entire Muslim community shaken, with the international community and locals showing their solidarity with the affected.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Pastor Again Defies State Order Not to Hold Large Gatherings. He Says 1,000 People Came to His Church Sunday

Remember the Louisiana pastor who defied the governors order not to hold gatherings larger than 50 people?

He held services again on Sunday, and he plans to do so yet again on Tuesday night.

On Sunday, Pastor Tony Spell said, his Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge drew about 1,000 people to its services, in part by busing people in from across five parishes.

On Tuesday evening, the pastor plans to hold services again, despite the governors stay-at-home orders, a petition seeking his arrest and a flood of criticism from fellow Christians.

If they close every door in this city, then I will close my doors, Spell told CNN on Tuesday. But you cant say the retailers are essential but the church is not. That is a persecution of the faith.

Spell has told CNN he believes the pandemic is politically motivated.

Chief Roger Corcoran of the Central Police Department in Baton Rouge told CNN that the matter is under investigation.

Corcoran also disputed Spells claim last week that the police department told the pastor that the National Guard would be brought in to disperse the church assembly.

That was never told to the pastor by my officer, Corcoran said.

Spell stands by his account. A spokesman for the Louisiana National Guard said they have not been tasked with breaking up large gatherings.

The Pastor Says Hes Heard From The White House

As the CCP virus spreads across the world, nearly every faith group has closed its holy sites and houses of worship. But there remain a defiant few pastors and religious leaders who refuse to close their doors, accusing the government of overreach and imposing on their religious freedom.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

Earlier in March, Lousiana Governor John Bel Edwards issued an emergency order barring gatherings of larger than 50 people to stop the spread of COVID-19.

On Sunday, Edwards went even further, asking residents statewide to only leave home for essential needs like shopping for food, going to the pharmacy or caring for a family member.

Louisiana has the fastest growth rate of virus cases in the world, Edwards said during a news conference on Sunday, citing a University of Louisiana Lafayette study.

The governors office did not respond to repeated requests from CNN for comment about Spells church services. On Sunday, Edwards told CNN affiliate WVLA that he would would urge that faith leaders and all faith leaders to heed this directive and not necessarily engage in mass gatherings where this coronavirus can spread.

For his part, Spell said he is following social distancing guidelines, including instructions from Washington. The pastor said someone from the White Househe declined to say whocalled him last week.

The official, according to Spell, asked him to hold services outside, make his congregation stand six feet apart and prevent non-family members from touching.

According to the Washington Post, Spell spoke with Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and a member of President Trumps informal body of evangelical advisers. A spokesman for Perkins said the conversation took place but that Perkins was not immediately available for comment.

In a statement, the White House said, During this public health crisis, the Trump Administration has been extremely proactive in reaching out to leaders from the faith community, hosting several calls last week with more than 1,200 inter-faith leaders.

The White House has strongly recommended that all Americans, including pastors, follow CDC guidelines by limiting groups to 10 people and practicing social distancing. President Trump encourages Americans of all religious backgrounds to do their part to stay healthy and stop the spread.

Despite Criticism, Spell Remains Undeterred

A video of the Sunday service, posted on Spells Facebook page, shows his congregation singing, praying, touching and otherwise worshiping in close proximity, mostly under a tent. The 1,000 congregants were spread across the churchs seven buildings, Spell said.

The pastor said hes heard a flood of criticism from fellow Christians urging him to close his doors. Many, Spell said, cite Romans 13, the passage in which the Apostle Paul urges Christians to submit to governing authorities. Others ask him to consider the greater good.

On Monday, the influential evangelical magazine Christianity Today published an editorial asking pastors and church leaders to consider the consequences of their actions.

We are being asked temporarily to convene remotely, not to deny our faith or to cease worshiping God, said the editorial, which was co-written with Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

It is one thing to risk your own life in order to worship together in person, the editorial continued, it is quite another to risk the lives of countless others, when so many churches are finding creative and compelling ways to carry on in worship and community from a distance.

An online petition from The People of Greater Baton Rouge asks that Edwards be arrested and charged with reckless endangerment.

Spell, though, remains undeterred.

The pastor told CNN that people been cured of HIV-AIDS and cancer at his worship services, which feature faith-healing, speaking in tongues, and other spiritual hallmarks of Pentecostalism.

Asked what he would do if a member of his congregation contracted coronavirus, Spell shifted the blame.

Did they contract it at Walmart or Target? he asked. They have more people in their parking lot than we get here in a week.

The-CNN-Wire

 &  2020 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.
The United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA) on Thursday announced a donation of over $14 million (over N5 billion), through the UBA Foundation, to catalyse a comprehensive pan-African response to the fight against the coronavirus (COVID-19) global pandemic.

The donation will provide significant and much-needed support to Nigeria and 19 other African countries, by supplying relief materials, critical care facilities, and financial support to Governments.

The UBA support programme will be allocated as follows:

N1 billion (USD2.8 million) to Lagos State Government in Nigeria

N500 million (USD1.4 million) to Nigerias Federal Capital Territory, Abuja

N1 billion (USD2.8 million) to the remaining 35 states in Nigeria

N1.5 billion (USD4.2 million) to UBAs presence countries in Africa

N1 billion (USD2.8 million) for Medical Centres with equipment and supplies

Free Telemedicine call centre facility

The pan-African bank will fund a medical centre immediately in Lagos, Nigeria, with beds for isolation and ICU facilities, managed and operated in partnership with Heirs Holdings healthcare subsidiary, Avon Medical Hospital.

In addition, UBA is providing a free telemedicine platform, that is physician-led, to provide direct access to medical advice to citizens, in compliance with social distancing requirements.

READ ALSO:

UBA Group Chairman Tony Elumelu, stated: This is a time when we must all play our part. This global epidemic must bring citizens, governments and business leaders together  and quickly. As we see a rapidly increasing number of cases of the coronavirus in Nigeria and Africa, the private sector has to work hand in hand with various Governments, in stemming the spread of the global pandemic.

We commend the efforts of governments and we are keen to partner and contribute our resources to the collective effort, that will ensure the response to the pandemic is swift and effective.

Operating in 20 African countries and globally in the United Kingdom, the United States and France, the United Bank for Africa has a strong record of supporting its communities, through challenging times.
[March 26, 2020] Raytheon, Aerojet Rocketdyne strike $1 billion strategic sourcing deal for Standard Missile programs

TUCSON, Ariz., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Raytheon Company's (NYSE: RTN) Missile Systems business has reached a $1 billion, five-year strategic agreement to purchase propulsion systems from Aerojet Rocketdyne for Standard Missile products. The deal represents a supply chain centerpiece of multi-year Standard Missiles contracts that Raytheon recently received. "Moving to multi-year, rather than annual-year contracting enables Raytheon and its supply chain to deliver even more value to our Missile Defense Agency and U.S. Navy customers, and the taxpayer," said Eugene Jaramillo, Raytheon Missile Systems vice president of Global Supply Chain Management. "These multi-year agreements also allow our suppliers to transform the way they do business with Raytheon." Aerojet Rocketdyne provides propulsion systems spanning Raytheon's Standard Missile family. For the SM-2 missile, SM-3 interceptor and SM-6 missile, Aerojet Rocketdyne supplies the majority of the solid rocket motors for these systems. Also, for SM-3, the company produces the Divert and Attitude Control System, a high-precision, quick-reaction propulsion system that positions the interceptor to defeat incoming ballistic missiles.



"Aerojet Rocketdyne has supported one or more variants of the Standard Missile program for more than three decades; we are proud of our contributions to these vital defense products," said Eileen Drake, Aerojet Rocketdyne CEO and president. "This significant agreement on multi-year contracts strengthens our current relationship and positions Aerojet Rocketdyne favorably for future business opportunities and continued growth." Work on the programs will be spread across Aerojet Rocketdyne sites in Orange County, Virginia, the Solid Rocket Motor Center of Excellence in Camden, Arkansas, and at its Advanced Manufacturing Facility in Huntsville, Alabama. Raytheon produces SM-2 in Tucson, and SM-3 and SM-6 in Huntsville.

About Raytheon

Raytheon Company, with 2019 sales of $29 billion and 70,000 employees, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, civil government and cybersecurity solutions. With a history of innovation spanning 98 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration, C5I products and services, sensing, effects, and mission support for customers in more than 80 countries. Raytheon is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. Follow us on Twitter. Media Contacts

Raytheon

John Patterson

+1.520.440.2194

Aerojet Rocketdyne

Eileen Lainez

+1.703-650-0291 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/raytheon-aerojet-rocketdyne-strike-1-billion-strategic-sourcing-deal-for-standard-missile-programs-301030437.html SOURCE Raytheon Company

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Today we'll look at Want Want China Holdings Limited (HKG:151) and reflect on its potential as an investment. Specifically, we'll consider its Return On Capital Employed (ROCE), since that will give us an insight into how efficiently the business can generate profits from the capital it requires.

Firstly, we'll go over how we calculate ROCE. Then we'll compare its ROCE to similar companies. Finally, we'll look at how its current liabilities affect its ROCE.

Understanding Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)

ROCE is a metric for evaluating how much pre-tax income (in percentage terms) a company earns on the capital invested in its business. Generally speaking a higher ROCE is better. In brief, it is a useful tool, but it is not without drawbacks. Author Edwin Whiting says to be careful when comparing the ROCE of different businesses, since 'No two businesses are exactly alike.

How Do You Calculate Return On Capital Employed?

Analysts use this formula to calculate return on capital employed:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT)  (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

Or for Want Want China Holdings:

0.21 = CN4.8b  (CN29b - CN6.3b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to September 2019.)

So, Want Want China Holdings has an ROCE of 21%.

Check out our latest analysis for Want Want China Holdings

Does Want Want China Holdings Have A Good ROCE?

When making comparisons between similar businesses, investors may find ROCE useful. In our analysis, Want Want China Holdings's ROCE is meaningfully higher than the 9.6% average in the Food industry. We consider this a positive sign, because it suggests it uses capital more efficiently than similar companies. Putting aside its position relative to its industry for now, in absolute terms, Want Want China Holdings's ROCE is currently very good.

The image below shows how Want Want China Holdings's ROCE compares to its industry, and you can click it to see more detail on its past growth.

Story continues

SEHK:151 Past Revenue and Net Income March 26th 2020

It is important to remember that ROCE shows past performance, and is not necessarily predictive. ROCE can be misleading for companies in cyclical industries, with returns looking impressive during the boom times, but very weak during the busts. This is because ROCE only looks at one year, instead of considering returns across a whole cycle. What happens in the future is pretty important for investors, so we have prepared a free report on analyst forecasts for Want Want China Holdings.

Do Want Want China Holdings's Current Liabilities Skew Its ROCE?

Short term (or current) liabilities, are things like supplier invoices, overdrafts, or tax bills that need to be paid within 12 months. Due to the way ROCE is calculated, a high level of current liabilities makes a company look as though it has less capital employed, and thus can (sometimes unfairly) boost the ROCE. To check the impact of this, we calculate if a company has high current liabilities relative to its total assets.

Want Want China Holdings has current liabilities of CN6.3b and total assets of CN29b. Therefore its current liabilities are equivalent to approximately 21% of its total assets. The fairly low level of current liabilities won't have much impact on the already great ROCE.

What We Can Learn From Want Want China Holdings's ROCE

Low current liabilities and high ROCE is a good combination, making Want Want China Holdings look quite interesting. Want Want China Holdings shapes up well under this analysis, but it is far from the only business delivering excellent numbers . You might also want to check this free collection of companies delivering excellent earnings growth.

If you like to buy stocks alongside management, then you might just love this free list of companies. (Hint: insiders have been buying them).

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
Scientists demonstrated how the conversion of a plant derivative into fuels and other valuable chemicals can be achieved by loading single atoms of platinum onto titanium dioxide

UPTON, NY--Scientists have designed a catalyst composed of very low concentrations of platinum (single atoms and clusters smaller than billionths of a meter) on the surface of titanium dioxide. They demonstrated how this catalyst significantly enhances the rate of breaking a particular carbon-oxygen bond for the conversion of a plant derivative (furfuryl alcohol) into a potential biofuel (2-methylfuran). Their strategy--described in a paper published in Nature Catalysis on Mar. 23--could be applied to design stable, active, and selective catalysts based on a wide range of metals supported on metal oxides to produce industrially useful chemicals and fuels from biomass-derived molecules.

"For a molecule to generate a particular product, the reaction has to be directed along a certain pathway because many side reactions that are not selective for the desired product are possible," explained co-author Anibal Boscoboinik, a staff scientist in the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) Interface Science and Catalysis Group at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory. "To convert furfuryl alcohol into biofuel, the bond between carbon and oxygen atoms on the side group attached to the ring-shaped part of the molecule must be broken, without producing any reactions in the ring. Typically, the metal catalyst that breaks this bond also activates ring-related reactions. However, the catalyst designed in this study only breaks the side group carbon-oxygen bond."

Aromatic rings are structures with atoms connected through single or double bonds. In molecules derived from plant waste, aromatic rings often have oxygen-containing side groups. Transforming plant waste derivatives into useful products requires the removal of oxygen from these side groups by breaking specific carbon-oxygen bonds.

"Biomass contains a lot of oxygen, which needs to be partially removed to leave behind more useful molecules for the production of renewable fuels, plastics, and high-performance lubricants," said co-first author Jiayi Fu, a graduate student at the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI) at the University of Delaware (UD). "Hydrodeoxygenation, a reaction in which hydrogen is used as a reactant to remove oxygen from a molecule, is useful for converting biomass into value-added products."

In this study, the scientists hypothesized that adding noble metals to the surfaces of moderately reducible metal oxides--those that can lose and gain oxygen atoms--would promote hydrodeoxygenation.

"Removing oxygen from the oxide surface forms an anchoring site where molecules can be held in place so the necessary bonds can be broken and formed," said co-first author and UD CCEI graduate student Jonathan Lym. "Previous studies in the catalysis and semiconductor communities have shown how much impurities can influence the surface."

To test their hypothesis, the team selected platinum as the noble metal and titanium dioxide (titania) as the metal oxide. Theoretical calculations and modeling indicated that the formation of oxygen vacancies is more energetically favorable when single atoms of platinum are introduced onto the surface of titania.

After synthesizing the platinum-titania catalyst at UD, they performed various structural and chemical characterization studies using facilities at Brookhaven and Argonne National Labs. At the CFN Electron Microscopy Facility, they imaged the catalyst at high resolution with a scanning transmission electron microscope. At Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), they used the In situ and Operando Soft X-ray Spectroscopy (IOS) beamline and the Quick X-ray Absorption and Scattering (QAS) beamline to track the chemical (oxidation) state of platinum. Through complementary x-ray spectroscopy studies at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source (APS), they determined the distance between atoms in the catalyst.

"This work is a great example of how scientific user facilities provide researchers with the complementary information needed to understand complex materials," said CFN Director Chuck Black. "The CFN is committed to our partnership with NSLS-II to enable these sorts of studies by scientists from around the world."

Back at Delaware, the team performed reactivity studies in which they put the catalyst and furfuryl alcohol in a reactor and detected the products through gas chromatography, an analytical chemistry separation technique. In addition to these experiments, they theoretically calculated the amount of energy required for different steps of the reaction to proceed. On the basis of these calculations, they ran computer simulations to determine the preferable reaction pathways. The simulated and experimental product distributions both indicated that negligible ring-reaction products are generated when a low concentration of platinum is present. As this concentration is increased, the platinum atoms begin to aggregate into larger clusters that incite ring reactions.

"The complementary experimental and computational framework allows for a detailed understanding of what is happening on the surface of a very complex material in a way that we can generalize concepts for the rational design of catalysts," said Boscoboinik. "These concepts can help in predicting suitable combinations of metals and metal oxides to carry out desired reactions for converting other molecules into valuable products."

"This multimember teamwork can only be enabled by center-like activities," added corresponding author Dionisios Vlachos, the UD Allan & Myra Ferguson Chair of Chemical Engineering.

###

This research was supported by CCEI, a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center led by Vlachos at UD. The APS, CFN, and NSLS-II are all DOE Office of Science User Facilities. The experiments conducted at the IOS beamline relied on the ambient-pressure x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy instrument operated as a partnership between NSLS-II and CFN. The QAS beamline is one of the partner beamlines of DOE's Synchrotron Catalysis Consortium, a group that provides support to the catalysis user community.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.

Follow @BrookhavenLab on Twitter or find us on Facebook.
This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Most Fridays, Yezenia Guzman knows where her incarcerated mother-in-law is: at a hospital near the Central California Womens Facility in Chowchilla, receiving treatment for the melanoma in both her legs.

But now, as the coronavirus spreads in the state, Guzman is worried. She hasnt heard from her mother-in-law in over a week. Prison visits are suspended to reduce exposure to the virus, but she hasnt received any word if visits to the hospital are canceled too. She fears that her mother-in-law, who is 65 with a weakened immune system from the cancer treatments, is at a higher risk of contracting the coronavirus and infecting other women in the prison.

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We are panicking, Guzman said in a phone interview.

With the threat of coronavirus looming large over the nations prisons, the Marshall Project emailed a list of people with family and friends behind bars to understand how they are weathering the crisis. Nearly 450 people in 32 states responded. They fear for their relatives physical and emotional health, and they are scrambling to get even basic information about preventive measures the facilities are taking to keep their loved ones from becoming infected.

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As reports of coronavirus crop up in prisons and jails, families say they are left in the dark about facilities plans to contain and treat the virus, sending their ever-present anxiety to new heights. They get no or only spotty information from prison authorities. Visitation is suspended at all state and federal prisons, so families cannot see their loved ones for themselves to determine if they are safe. If the prison is on lockdown or if their loved ones are in quarantine, even phone calls cannot get through.

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Many facilities have offered additional phone minutes and video calls in place of in-person visits. But, while a limited number of calls are free in some facilities, many families say they still have to pay for the extra time. Federal prisons, for example, are offering 200 extra minutes each month, which can cost up to 21 cents a minute for long distance calls.

Laurie Shenk says she was 30 minutes away from the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, last weekend when her husband, who is incarcerated there, called to say visits were canceled. She had already driven five hours from her home in Iowa with her 2-year-old granddaughter in tow.

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Shenk, like many family members whose relatives have health issues that could put them in high-risk categories for the virus, is worried about her husband. She says he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and had a heart transplant. Prison officials say they will call her if something were to happen to him, she says, but she fears that means theyll only call if he is dead.

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I just have to keep faith, she said. Its the only thing thats keeping me going.

Even in the days before the pandemic, it was a struggle to reach prison officials, family members say. A few months ago, Guzman made the four-hour trip to visit her mother-in-law, but when she arrived at the womens prison she wasnt there. Prison staff took her to the hospital unexpectedly. Officials told Guzman it was just a routine visit, but when her mother-in-law called a week and half later, she told Guzman she was hospitalized because of a dangerously high temperature.

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Guzman says she tries to keep in touch with phone calls and emails, visiting in person when she can. But when she hasnt heard from her mother-in-law, Guzman says the prison medical staff rarely return her calls. And when they do pick up, she says, officials often transfer her from one voicemail box to another.

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Its always just up in the air, she said.

A representative for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said staff are working around the clock to provide information to families, but that it is entirely impossible to keep every single inmates support system updated without redirecting the staff who are working to keep their loved one safe. The department has posted their coronavirus precautions online, noting that routine medical visits and appointments with specialists may be delayed or rescheduled.

Many corrections systems across the country have used Twitter or Facebook to notify the public about the steps they are taking to prevent the transmission of coronavirus within their facilities. But many of the families and friends who responded to the callout say they havent received the messages and lack a direct line into the prison to find out more.

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Some friends and family members arent surprised by prison officials lack of communication during this crisis. For others, the experience is eye-opening.

Before last year, Debbie Sessa didnt believe the horror stories shed heard about prison. She didnt know anyone behind bars until her friend and former coworker was sent to Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut in January. Her friend, who is 62, stays in a dorm with more than 30 other women. Sessa says her friend called a few days ago to say that two women in her dorm went to the hospital for a routine test, but when they returned to the prison, they were placed in isolation.

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Her friend doesnt know why they were moved out of the dorm. But Sessa is worried that if they were exposed to the virus at the hospital, her friend and all the other women living in her proximity could be at risk.

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I cant relax. I cant sleep, Sessa said. I used to hear things about prison and think: Thats not really happening. And now I am hearing things and I am like: Oh my God! 

The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which oversees several of the facilities included in this article, did not respond to requests for comment.

Providing incomplete information or downplaying the threat the coronavirus poses could

have unintended consequences, some family members say. Many respondents noted their loved ones and other prisoners are watching the news, seeing entire cities shut down around them as governors across the country issue shelter-in-place orders to prevent the spread of coronavirus. As the stress mounts, and the threat of an outbreak or lockdown intensifies, many say theyre worried about violence erupting.

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Thats Hannah Benjamins biggest fear. Her boyfriend is incarcerated at McKean Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania. I am concerned the lack of adequate attendance will incite panic and a riot, which will do far more violence to the prison population than the COVID-19 will, she wrote.

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We cant see each other and support each other now, wrote another respondent, Lacona Darrah, whose husband is incarcerated at North Central Correctional Facility in Ohio. I am concerned about him being hurt by violence breaking out due to pent up emotions and stress.

Aminah Elster spent 15 years in prison in California. Shes been out since 2007, but she still keeps in touch with some of the women she left behind at Central California Womens Facility. She says officials have passed out flyers on the importance of hand-washing and are attempting to practice social distancing by sending smaller groups to the dining hall and only allowing two women per table.

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But Elster says such measures may well be in vain because the women are still expected to work in the prison industries, where they interact with workers from the outside. And, she says, the prison hasnt provided the incarcerated workers with face masks or gloves.

They are confused, she said. They are piece-mealing a lot of information together. A lot of folks may not understand the gravity of the situation.

A representative for the California Corrections Department did not specifically address questions about whether incarcerated workers have gloves and masks.

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Several respondents noted the facilities have supplied bleach as a cleaning supply for the first time in yearsnormally such potentially toxic materials are not distributed.

Hes part of the shower washing team, wrote Cherly Floyd, whose son is incarcerated at Bent County Correctional Facility in Colorado. The facility has been spraying the showers with bleach water and my son and another inmate wipe the surfaces down.

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Imagining the havoc the coronavirus could wreak on their friend or family member in prison is terrifying, respondents say. And many say they have added reason to worry: If there is one thing theyve learned in their collective years of dealing with the prison system, its that when their loved ones behind bars are sick or in need, families on the outside are often the last to know.

Anne Weiss hasnt heard from her boyfriend at Butner Federal Correctional Facility in North Carolina for a month. The two are usually in regular contact, but their relationship came under strain when her boyfriend was diagnosed with lymphoma.

As the days pass and the coronavirus spreads, Weiss mind races. I dont know whats going on, she said. Is he sick again? Is he on lockdown? What are they doing for him in terms of the virus outbreak? Are they testing people in this condition?

Her boyfriend is in remission, but hes still at risk of serious health complications should he become infected. The only information she has comes from a bulletin on the Bureau of Prisons website announcing a temporary suspension of visitation. After decades of unanswered phone calls and letters, Weiss says pressing for more details is pointless.

Nobody talks to you, she said, because you are just another loved one of a criminal.

They dont care, she added. They just dont care.
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Jefferson County Judge Jeff Branick confirmed to The Enterprise Thursday that there was a coronavirus-related death in Hardin County after talking with Hardin County Judge Wayne McDaniel.

It is the first death in the region, and there were only two cases last-reported in Hardin County, one in Silsbee and one in Lumberton.

Neither could confirm the name of the patient; however Lumberton Police Chief Danny Sullins told The Enterprise that the victim was a beloved Southeast Texas band director, educator and Symphony of Southeast Texas member.

Michael Westbrook has worked for Lumberton, Port Neches-Groves and Hardin-Jefferson school districts.

I worked with him when I was the assistant principal at Hardin-Jefferson for 8 years, said Gretchen Scoggins, communications director at Lumberton ISD. Everyday with Mike - he is a hilarious bubbly personality, who absolutely adores kids.

Scoggins, who has been in contact with those close to the Lumberton man, said Westbrook had to be revived early Thursday morning.

The last thing I said to him was, I love you brother. And then I got the call from a mutual close friend to him. At 1 this morning, his heart had stopped. They had done CPR, she said.

Alex Wells, who is the current band director at Port-Neches Groves said he has known Westbrook since he was in college.

As a teacher it is our hope that we impact kids lives, and I know he has, Wells said. He has taught at Lumberton, Hardin-Jefferson and PN-G  he has impacted lives all over Southeast Texas.

Wells said the case makes the global pandemic much more real for him and the community.

Before I saw it really as an inconvenience, and now it hits home, he said. You dont just see it on the news anymore, it is now part of your life.

Hardin County currently has had four patients with coronavirus. Jefferson County has eight, and Orange County has one.

He always had a joke. He has been a friend for about 15 years. Very dedicated to music both in the public school classroom, and in our community, Scoggins said. Hes always willing to help. He is a great guy.

Scoggins said the last update she received was at 8 a.m., and she was told his organs were failing.

Our school folks are our families. And we are just hurting because one of our family members is struggling.

Shelly Vitanza, a spokesperson for Lamar University, said Westbrook was a grad of LU and a well-liked and respected musician among our faculty.

In a statement, Hardin-Jefferson ISD said that an employee was diagnosed with COVID-19, but opted not to identify them out of respect for the privacy of the individual and their family members.

The district declined to comment further, but said in the release that the individual was on campus on Monday March 16, Tuesday March 17, Thursday March 19 and Friday March 20.

Any individuals who were present at the high school on those dates should take necessary precautions for their health and safety of themselves and their families, the statement said.

The district also said they were working with local health department officials to identify and notify those who may have come into contact with the employee.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

isaac.windes@hearstnp.com
CHENGDU, March 26 (Xinhua) -- A hospital in Suining, southwest China's Sichuan Province donated 7,000 surgical masks to two medical institutions in Spain and the Netherlands Thursday, according to the hospital.

After hearing of these institutions' shortage of medical protective materials, Suining Central Hospital donated the masks to Mutua De Terrassa University Hospital in Spain and Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands. The hospital also shared its novel coronavirus treatment experience with these institutions via video chat and mail.

In 2016, the hospital established a cooperative relationship with Mutua De Terrassa University Hospital in the fields of medical treatment, teaching and scientific research. The two sides have sent experts and scholars to each other for academic exchanges and cooperation.

The hospital also started cooperation with Maastricht University Medical Center in 2019.
Authorities threatened to shut The Guardians bureau in Cairo if it refused to retract the story and run an apology.

Egypt expelled a correspondent for The Guardian over a report citing a study that challenged the official count of coronavirus cases in the Arab worlds most populous country.

The British daily reported on Thursday that its correspondent, Ruth Michaelson, left the country last week after Western diplomats informed her that Egyptian security services wanted her to leave immediately, the daily said.

Michaelson reported on unpublished research by Canadian infectious diseases specialists estimating an outbreak size of more than 19,000 cases in Egypt. The scientists used data from early March when Egypt officially had only three confirmed cases, according to Michaelsons report published on March 15.

The following day, Michaelson, along with a New York Times reporter who tweeted her story, was summoned by Egyptian officials and told they were accused of misreporting and spreading panic, The Guardian said.

A day later, Egypts State Information Services, the government-body overseeing foreign correspondents, revoked Michaelsons press credentials and released a statement accusing her of citing a misleading study based on false conclusions and speculation.





Egyptian authorities threatened to shut The Guardians bureau in Cairo if the paper refused to retract the story and run an official apology, the statement said.

Egypt on Wednesday said there have been 456 cases of the new coronavirus in the country, including 21 deaths. In recent weeks, the government has beefed up precautionary measures to contain the pandemic by shutting down schools, restaurants and recreational facilities, reducing the workforce in public and private businesses and eventually imposing an 11-hour daily curfew. State-run media have called on people to observe social-distancing and stay home.

Rebuttal offer

Michaelson, who lived in and reported on Egypt since 2014, boarded a Germany-bound flight along with stranded foreign nationals last Friday, a day after Egypt suspended all commercial flights to stop the spread of the virus.

The Guardian said it offered to publish a rebuttal by Egyptian authorities of the Canadian study but received no response to the offer.

We regret that the Egyptian authorities have chosen to revoke accreditation from a reporter working for a trusted, independent media organisation like the Guardian, a spokesperson for the paper said.

Egypt remains among the worlds worst jailers of journalists, along with Turkey and China, according to the US-based watchdog the Committee to Protect Journalists. Authorities have imprisoned dozens of reporters and occasionally expelled some foreign journalists.

Trumped-up charges

Al Jazeeras Mahmoud Hussein has been imprisoned without trial in Egypt for more than three years over allegations of producing fake news, accusations the network vehemently denies.

The Qatar-based network last week urged authorities in Egypt to immediately release Hussein and other jailed journalists.

It is unacceptable that Mahmoud has been held by the Egyptian authorities for nearly 1,200 days for merely being a journalist with baseless accusations and trumped-up charges, the acting director-general of Al Jazeera Media Network, Mostefa Souag, said.

Under current circumstances, with the spread of the coronavirus and the health hazards associated with it, Mahmoud and other journalists are exposed to extreme risks, Souag added.

As fears of an outbreak keep mounting, Egyptian authorities are seeking to suppress any attempts to challenge the official narrative. Earlier this month, police arrested three people for Facebook posts about the coronavirus, saying they spread rumours and fake news about reported cases in the country.
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A hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is healing and in turn reversing changes it caused to the flow of winds over the southern hemisphere, a study discovers.

Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder say this is due in part to a ban on ozone depleting substances (ODS) in the 1980s.

The biggest impact can be seen in the southern hemisphere jet steam - it had been moving further south due to ozone depletion, but that appears to be reversing.

Antara Banerjee, lead author, says this is likely only a temporary change due to the impact of rising carbon dioxide levels and more ODS coming from China.

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This image made available by NASA shows a map of a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica on Sunday, Oct. 20, 2019. Last year the hole had its smallest peak since 1987

Before 2000 the mid-latitude jet stream had been gradually shifting towards the South Pole and another hurricane-causing jet stream was getting wider.

This was changing rainfall patterns and ocean currents in the southern hemisphere and causing countries like Australia to suffer severe drought.

Researchers used a range of computer simulations to show the jet stream stopped moving south at the same time as the ozone hole began healing.

In Australia changes to the jet stream led to an increased risk of drought by pushing rain away from coastal areas.

If the jet stream reverses its southwards movement it could bring those rains back to the country.

Last year the Antarctic ozone hole hit its smallest annual peak on record - since it was discovered in 1982 - but it's a temporary fix.

Scientists say this may be due to unusually mild temperatures in that layer of the atmosphere.

The moving of jet streams further south, caused by the ozone hole, was leading to increased droughts in places like Australia but the reverse could see rains return

There has also been a surge in ozone-depleting chemicals coming from industrial regions of China, the team confirmed.

'We term this a "pause" because the poleward circulation trends might resume, stay flat, or reverse,' says Banerjee.

'It's the tug of war between the opposing effects of ozone recovery and rising greenhouse gases that will determine future trends'

She said the biggest discovery from their study was the proof that a global protocol like the one in Montreal that banned ODS can pause or reverse environmental harm.

The study was published in the journal Nature.
Before she turned seven, Sarah Ripoli lost her mother to domestic violence. The 27-year-old Hoboken resident co-founded Angel Energy last year, a clothing line from which 25% of the proceeds go to a different charity that helps victims of domestic violence each month.

Ripoli loves fashion, and part of Angel Energy inherently seems to be to encouraging people to use what you love to elevate yourself.

Ripoli recently collaborated with Miss New Jersey USA Gina Mellish on a Wing Span sweatshirt for which all the proceeds go to One Love, a nonprofit organization which educates students on relationship abuse and is also Mellishs platform charity.

Amid cancellations of both their slates due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ripoli and Mellish are shifting even more of their energy onto social media to continue working on the causes near and dear to them.

Obviously Im sure any small business is experiencing a slowdown in sales, but our main goal during this whole coronavirus crisis is to seize this as an opportunity to really raise awareness for those that are in quarantine right now with an abuser, Ripoli said yesterday, just providing them the National Domestic Violence Hotline number ( 1-800-799-7233) to call. Typically we donate to smaller global charities. But now given these unprecedented times, we wanted to donate to a national charity.

Angel Energy is making the National Domestic Violence Hotline (https://www.thehotline.org/) its chosen charity for April, because it is the only 24-7 center in the nation that has access to service providers and shelters all across the country, Ripoli said. (We want) to provide a little extra support to those that are quarantined with abusers, because quarantine is scary as it is, so I can only imagine what its like with an abuser.

The loss of Ripolis own mother has made her very aware of what that might be like.

I think for a lot of women who are in domestic violence relationships, work is a huge outlet for them, and now having that taken off the table, due to the coronavirus and everybody being in this situation, I can only imagine how horrible it is for them, Ripoli said. For the everyday person you feel like going crazy because you cant leave house, but for them, if that was the only reason to leave their house and now they cant leave at all, its scary.

Ripoli and Mellish connected because of their similar missions.

Before Mellish was Miss New Jersey USA, shed already been working with One Love for some time.

One Love is an organization that was founded by a mother whose daughter was actually killed by her boyfriend two weeks before she was going to graduate college, Mellish said.

Not knowing anything about it, Mellish discovered One Love when she was rushing for a sorority as a freshman in college. The nonprofit was having an escalation workshop (which explores the signs of relationship abuse), and it was almost like a blessing in disguise, Mellish said.

Because at that time, I was a victim of relationship abuse for like three years. As you can imagine, as a college freshman there was a lot of weight on my shoulders. I worked with (One Love) on getting an escape plan and eventually finding my way out of the abusive relationship.

A few years later, Mellish said, she was hosting those escalation workshops to teach other young men and women the signs of unhealthy relationships and designs on how to love better.

"Right now the statistics are one in every three women and one in every four men will be affected by relationship abuse in their lifetime, so were really working to minimize those statistics and actually this year One Love has reached educating a million students.

Mellishs references to who is affected by relationship abuse always includes men. I think theres also like a stigma that it can only happen to women, Mellish said.

Physical abuse is the most recognizable form of abuse, but emotional abuse is even more prevalent, so I really think its important to do what Im doing with One Love  really educate people on what the signs of emotional abuse are, because its harder to recognize, where as physical is so much easier to recognize the signs," Mellish said. "People dont really talk it about happening to men because most of the time with it being female to male, or male to male, its emotional, its not physical.

Mellish and Ripoli have both been spending these days posting resources, specifically noting online chatrooms (like http://loveisrespect.org) are an option as well.

Because if you are quarantined with an abuser, you dont often have the physical capability to call and voice whats going on  so weve also posted resources so that, in that situation, you can reach out online.

Mellish has also been busy on her @MissNJUSA platforms trying to keep people up to date with thats going on as it relates to the coronavirus. I really think that social media is really what everyone is leaning on right now, she said.

Learn more about Sarah Ripoli, Angel Energy and see their collaboration with Mellish at https://shopangelenergy.com -- which is still thoroughly open for business.
A woman who breached quarantine regulations after returning from Bali is one of five people in New South Wales who have finally been fined for flouting coronavirus public health orders.

Officers from Thursday had the power to hand out fines of $1,000 to individuals and $5,000 to businesses that breach public health orders or ministerial directions.

The 65-year-old tourist returned to Sydney from Bali on Saturday and was told she was subject to a public health order and was required to quarantine for 14 days.

Officers from Thursday had the power to hand out fines of $1,000 to individuals and $5,000 to businesses that breach public health orders or ministerial directions

But when police received information the woman contravened the public health order and visited her home in Redhead, south of Newcastle, she was issued with a warning for breaching the order.

Officers received further information she had left her home on Thursday morning and was in breach of the order.

About 1.45pm on Thursday officers returned to the woman's home and issued her with a $1,000 penalty infringement notice.

A massage parlour on Sussex St in Sydney's CBD was identified on Thursday as still operating and defying a public health order.

The female owner of the business was issued with a $5,000 penalty infringement notice.

Three female staff members were also given $1,000 notices.

'No one is above the law. If you decide to ignore a direction, you will be caught, and you may very well find yourself slapped with a hefty fine,' Minister for Police and Emergency Services David Elliott said in a statement on Thursday.

'The fact that people are still not complying is the reason why we have police out in full force enforcing these directions.

'This behaviour is not only reckless and stupid, but potentially deadly.'

People in the firing line include returned travellers who contravene the requirement to self-quarantine for 14 days and those diagnosed with COVID-19 who similarly don't follow the rules

People in the firing line include returned travellers who contravene the requirement to self-quarantine for 14 days and those diagnosed with COVID-19 who similarly don't follow the rules.

Fines will also apply for breaches of the prohibition on outdoor gatherings of 500 people and indoor gatherings of 100 people.

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

It follows the passing of legislation in the NSW parliament on Tuesday to help tackle the spread.

Under the bill, police are able to arrest people reasonably suspected of breaching COVID-19 public health orders and return them home or to a place of detention.

It comes as a two-month-old boy and a seven-year-old girl became the first children under 10 to contract COVID-19 in NSW.

The children both had contact with people with coronavirus, NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said on Wednesday.

They are among the 1,219 confirmed coronavirus cases in the state. Of those, about 500 people contracted the disease while overseas.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the public needs to step up to slow the spread of the virus which has so far killed nine people in Australia, including seven in NSW.

She backed new public restrictions announced by the prime minister on Tuesday night to control the spread of COVID-19.

'This is a time that all of us have to step up,' Ms Berejiklian said.

'We need to make sure the community does the right thing by yourself, your family and others.'

The premier said there will be thresholds in place allowing NSW to take further action, separate to other states, once the number of community transmissions reaches a set amount.

Planning Minister Rob Stokes on Wednesday said usual planning controls restricting trading hours had been scrapped to allow for round-the-clock trading for supermarkets and pharmacies to make it easier for consumers to buy food and medical supplies.

State Opposition Leader Jodi McKay said NSW must be placed in full lockdown.

'We are losing control of COVID-19 and if we don't lock down NSW the current spike will turn into a full-blown explosion,' the Labor leader said in a statement.
3 1 of 3 Kevin Winter Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle Show More Show Less 3 of 3





Bay Area rapper G-Eazy is giving back to his hometown with the help of a food truck.

In partnership with Larkin Street Youth Services, he will pay for a Mi Morena food truck to serve lunch seven days a week at the nonprofit organization's drop-in centers with the support of his Endless Summer fund.
A 58-year-old Colorado man was found dead near Dinosaur National Monument while on an apparent hunt for a million-dollar treasure buried 10 years ago by antiquities dealer Forrest Fenn.

The man and his 65-year-old companion set out on snowmobiles last week in the Wild Mountain area along the border of Utah and Colorado, the National Park Service said in a press release on Sunday.

After several days of searching, authorities found the men on Saturday in a remote area of Dinosaur using helicopter surveillance.

The 58-year-old, from Deer Trail, Colorado, was found dead, while the 65-year-old was alive and taken to a nearby hospital, according to the release.

The men had previously  and unsuccessfully  attempted to scour the area twice before to find the treasure hidden by Fenn, an art and antique dealer from Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to KCNC.

Its tragic and heartbreaking that some searchers have been lost while they looked for my treasure, Fenn tells PEOPLE. I didnt anticipate that happening.

He adds that when he initially hid the treasure it was an easy trip for him  but now that a decade has passed, itd be impossible for him to go back and retrieve it.

In late February, the men reportedly had to be rescued after they became stuck in deep snow.

RELATED VIDEO: Body Found in River Confirmed as Missing Treasure Hunter Eric Ashby

Body Found in River Confirmed as Missing Treasure Hunter Eric Ashby

A body found in the Arkansas River has been confirmed as Eric Ashby who disappeared after he went on a treasure hunt for $2 million in Colorado

The treasure hunters had water bottles, candy bars and a copy of Fenns 2010 book The Thrill of the Chase on them, the outlet reported.

The book contains a 24-line poem that Fenn, 89, has said contains nine clues as to the location of the treasure, which is allegedly worth millions of dollars and is hidden somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.

Lt. Chip McIntyre of the Moffat County Sheriffs Office told KCNC that the men were not dressed properly for the cold, and wore only light coats and blue jeans.

Story continues

The 58-year-old man is the fourth person from Colorado to die searching for the treasure since 2016, according to the outlet. An Illinois man died doing the same in 2017, the Washington Post reported.

RELATED: Author Forrest Fenn Opens Up About Missing Treasure Hunter: I Dont Feel Responsible, but I Want to Be Part of the Rescue

Fenn told PEOPLE in 2016 that he hid the treasure to get people to go out into nature, and to give working class Americans a shot at instant wealth.

Ive had so much fun over the last 75 years looking for arrowheads and fossils and strange things out in the forests and along the river banks, why not give others the opportunity to do the same thing? he said.

At the time, a 54-year-old man had recently gone missing and was presumed dead amid a search, though Fenn said he had repeatedly warned seekers not to look during the winter, when the snow could pose problems.

Fenn said that despite suggestions he remove the treasure and stop the search due to the tragedy, he had no plans to do so.

RELATED: PEOPLE Explains: All About the Elusive $2 Million Treasure Hunt That May Have Claimed Another Life

Searchers have spent money and vacation time looking for the treasure, and I dont feel I could do that, even if I wanted to, he said. I certainly did not anticipate anyone was going to get killed, but I answer those people this way: If a hunter goes into the mountains looking for deer, and is lost, does that mean we should stop deer hunting? If someone drowns in a swimming pool, should we drain the pool, or should we teach people to swim?

Fenn has never placed an exact dollar amount on the treasure, and told PEOPLE he would never try to guess. He said that some hunters have gotten within 200 feet of the prize, but ultimately walked away empty-handed.

He previously told CBS This Morning that the treasure contains hundreds of gold coins and gold nuggets, among other things.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo is rising in the national spotlight and earning praise for his response to the coronavirus pandemic in New York. Could he be destined for higher office someday?

WAMCs Alan Chartrock told Cuomo during an interview Thursday afternoon that he thinks the governor should be Joe Bidens running mate in the 2020 election.

Youre kind, but I dont want to be vice president, Cuomo replied to the Albany radio host. I told the people of the state of New York that I wanted to be their governor and I said I would serve as governor, and thats what I want to do.

Cuomo recalled his father, the late former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, getting similar national praise after a convention speech in the 1980s but said the elder Cuomo didnt think it was merited because he hadnt done anything different from previous speeches. Gov. Andrew Cuomo told WAMC that he doesnt think his leadership performance in response to COVID-19 is any different from how he handled Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and other events that affected the Empire State.

Its just the audience and the time has changed," Cuomo said.

I want to be the best governor I can be, and I want to make a meaningful difference in this state. Thats my ambition."

While campaigning for his third term as governor in 2018, Cuomo similarly said that he wasnt interested in anything but being governor and repeated his promise not to run in 2020 after he was re-elected. Cuomo said the only way he wouldnt finish the four-year term would be "if God strikes me dead.

But Chartrock isnt the only one to suggest Cuomo has a future in the White House.

New York has become the epicenter for coronavirus in the U.S., with nearly half of the countrys 79,785 confirmed cases as of Thursday, and Cuomos press briefings have become must-see TV on national news and social media. His daily updates include facts, clear messages and compassion for those most affected by the crisis, while urging people to take the coronavirus seriously but not to panic.

On Monday, U.S. News & World Report called him Americas governor"; on Tuesday, #CuomoForPresident became a trending topic on Twitter, according to CBS. Jezebel even posted an article titled Help, I Think Im In Love With Andrew Cuomo??? and past critics, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro, a Republican who ran against Cuomo in 2018, have applauded him.

Its uncharted waters, and hes providing the leadership necessary in what is a very trying time for us all, Molinaro told the Wall Street Journal.

Former Vice President Biden is currently the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, with Bernie Sanders behind by more than 300 delegates. Neither has named a possible VP candidate, but Biden said hed pick a woman.

Could Cuomo have his sights on running for president? He hasnt been afraid to clash with President Donald Trump on a number of issue, including repeatedly urging him to provide New York with more federal help amid the coronavirus pandemic; Trump, a Republican, has criticized Cuomo, a Democrat, for complaining.

"Happy to do your job, too, Cuomo wrote on Twitter earlier this week. Just give me control of the Army Corps of Engineers and Ill take it from there.

According to Newsweek, Cuomo technically could be elected president in November as pledged delegates are not required to vote for the candidate they are tied to based on state primary and caucus results. Campaigns are unlikely to choose delegates who might not be loyal, but they still could back any person that they choose at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in July.

But 2024? That could be a different story.

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The spread of coronavirus in Iran has reached terrifying levels: more than 29 thousand infected, more than 2200 dead. The virus exacerbated Irans already difficult geopolitical position, weakening its economy, which has resisted sanction pressure for many years. Measures taken by the highly infected countries have a negative economic impact, including the impact on international flights and the presence of citizens abroad.

Coverage of the epidemiological situation in international media also adversely affects Irans image, forcing emergency measures to be taken in three strategic directions at once.

The first is finance

The decline in oil prices will hurt the Iranian economy, which is under sanctions. However, Iranian oil exports will continue, as its main importer, China, does not intend to suspend cooperation, despite the epidemiological situation. Much will depend on whether the Iranian leadership is capable of non-standard actions. Traditionally, the Iranian economy supports state or semi-state companies, since the republics leadership is involved in pricing and is a major economic player in the domestic market. If the authorities support the traditional vector, they risk leaving small and medium-sized businesses out, which have been reviving with great difficulty over the past few years. It will affect the most vulnerable and poor segments of the population, among which the spread of the virus is mostly observed. People will not even be able to purchase protective equipment. Therefore, it is important for the Iranian authorities to choose the sector of the national economy to apply rescue measures in the first place.

The second direction is coronavirus

The leadership of the republic is criticized for the fact that in the first weeks of the outbreak it controlled information, not the virus. Obviously, it is not up to politics during a pandemic, because it is important how the information about the epidemic is provided. Now, the Iranian leadership needs to decide what is more important: not to be inferior to its foreign opponents in the information war or choose the most correct format for presenting information within the country. This decision is needed due to the fact that it has much more serious consequences than separate statements by politicians and health officials who are trying to influence public opinion.

The third area is tightening of the sanctions pressure

The threat of coronavirus is unlikely to be the reason for smoothing U.S.-Iranian contradictions. The U.S. State Department has already hastened to accuse the Iranian leadership of a disinformation coronavirus campaign. In turn, the Iranian authorities accused the U.S. authorities of creating obstacles to the delivery of necessary medical equipment to those infected. Indeed, many foreign pharmaceutical companies are afraid to cooperate with the leadership of Iran, because they do not want to fall under the U.S. sanctions, despite the fact that medical equipment, as well as necessary drugs cannot be sanctioned, as this is contrary to WHO standards.

The Iranian authorities will not completely refuse international assistance, as their own forces may not be enough. However, it should be borne in mind that in late February, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wanted to petition the UN for a snap-back of sanctions on Iran. By toughening anti-Iranian sanctions, the U.S. intends to push Tehran to uncontested "cooperation" with Washington. For this reason, the Iranian leadership fears that U.S. assistance may turn out to be testing coronavirus vaccines on Iranians.

One way or another, the fight against the pandemic can mobilize the Iranians, who are accustomed to survive under the conditions of sanctions and adapt to them. Today, civilian organizations provide free assistance to the population, but in the current conditions it is difficult to predict with what losses Iran will suffer during a series of crises and how this will affect the political atmosphere in the republic.
Amid the national lockdown in India due to the Coronavirus crisis, Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi on Wednesday revealed how he is spending his time at home. Taking to Twitter, he shared a picture of jigsaw puzzles and stated that his son has upped his game.

In this lockdown my 3 year old son has really upped my jigsaw game. pic.twitter.com/CDE1f3aRxg  Gaurav Gogoi (@GauravGogoiAsm) March 25, 2020

India under lockdown

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country effective from midnight of March 25 to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly. The 21-day curfew is applicable to all states, districts, and villages - irrespective of whether they were earlier under curfew or not.

Read: COVID-19: Govt suspends toll collection on national highways to ease emergency services

The Coronavirus Crisis

Presently, there are around 468,577 confirmed cases of COVID-19 which has led to the death of around 21,185 people. Meanwhile, around 113,817 have reportedly been recovered.

Read: COVID-19 lockdown: J&K LG approves series of support measures for poor and needy

Along with it, as of date, India has reported over 600 confirmed positive cases of COVID-19. Out of all the states, Maharashtra has crossed a total of 115 positive cases becoming the highest number of cases detected in the country. Meanwhile, twelve people have died so far due to the deadly virus. Due to the outbreak, India has been put under a national lockdown for 21 days. Further, India has also closed the India-Pakistan border and restricted passenger movement at the border with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Myanmar.

Read: Coronavirus Outbreak: 85-year-old dies in Ahmedabad; 37 positive cases in Gujarat

Read: Haryana's anti-Coronavirus move: Healthcare staff due for retirement get extension
Startups across the nation and around the world are looking for ways to relieve shortages of much-needed personal protective equipment and sanitizers used to halt the spread of COVID-19.

While some of the largest privately held technology companies, like SpaceX and Tesla, have shifted to manufacturing ventilators, smaller companies are also trying to pitch in and relieve scarcity locally.

Supplies have been difficult to come by in some of the areas hardest hit by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, and the shortfalls have been made worse by a lack of coordination from the federal government. In some instances local governments have been bidding for supplies against each other and the federal government to acquire needed personal protective equipment.

On Sunday, New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo* pleaded with local governments to not engage in a bidding war. In fact, Kentucky was outbid by the federal government for personal protective equipment.

"FEMA came out and bought it all out from under us," Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear told a local newspaper. "It is a challenge that the federal government says, 'States, you need to go and find your supply chain,' and then the federal government ends up buying from that supply chain."

Against this backdrop local startups and maker spaces are stepping up to do what they can to fill the gap.

Alcohol brands are turning their attention to making hand sanitizer to distribute in communities experiencing shortages. 3D-printing companies are working on new ways to manufacture personal protective equipment and swabs for COVID-19 testing. And one fast fashion retail startup is teaching its tailors and seamstresses how to make cloth masks for consumer protection.

AirCo, a New York-based startup that developed a process to use captured carbon dioxide to make liquor, shifted its efforts to making hand sanitizer for donations in communities in New York City.

Now, new alcohol brands Bev and Endless West are joining the manufacturing push.

Story continues

Endless West announced this morning that it would shift production away from its distillery to begin making hand sanitizers. The World Health Organization approved their sanitizers, which the company will produce in its warehouse in San Francisco.

The two-ounce bottles will be donated to local restaurants and bars that remain open for delivery, so that employees can use them and distribute them to customers. Bulk quantities will be distributed to healthcare organizations and facilities that need them.

Endless West also put out a call for other companies to provide supplies to hospitals and health organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We felt it was imperative to do our part and dedicate what resources we have to assist with shortages in the healthcare and food & beverage industries who keep the engine running and provide such important functions in this time of immense need throughout the community, said Alec Lee, CEO of Endless West, in a statement.

Los Angeles-based Bev is no different.

"As an alcoholic beverage company, Bev is very lucky in that we are licensed to purchase ethanol directly from our suppliers, who are doing their part by discounting the product to anyone licensed to purchase it," said Bev chief executive, Alix Peabody. "Community underscores everything we do here at Bev, and as such, we will be producing hand sanitizer and distributing it free of charge to the homeless and elderly communities here in Venice, populations who largely have insufficient access to healthcare and essential goods like sanitizer."

Hand sanitizer is one sorely needed item in short supply, but there are others -- including face masks, surgical masks, face shields, swabs and ventilator equipment that other startups are now switching gears to produce.

(Photo by PAU BARRENA/AFP via Getty Images)

In Canada, INKSmith, a startup that was making design and tech tools accessible for kids, has now moved to making face shields and is hiring up to 100 new employees to meet demand.

I think in the short term, were going to scale up to meet the needs of the province soon. After that, were going to meet the demands of Canada, INKSmith CEO Jeremy Hedges told the Canadian news outlet Global News.

3D-printing companies like Massachusetts-based Markforged and Formlabs are both making personal protective equipment like face shields, as well as nasal swabs to use for COVID-19 testing.

Markforged is pushing ahead with a number of efforts to focus some of the benefits of 3D printing on the immediate problem of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers most exposed to COVID-19.

"We have about 20 people working on this pretty much as much as they can," said Markforged chief executive, Gregory Mark. "We break it up into three different programs. The first stage is prototyping validation and getting first pass to doctors. The second is clinical trials and the third is production. We are in clinical trials with two. One is the nasal swab and two is the face shield."

The ability to spin up manufacturing more quickly than traditional production lines using 3D printing means that both companies are in some ways better positioned to address a thousandfold increase in demand for supplies that no one anticipated.

"3D printing is the fastest way to make anything in the world up to a certain number of days, weeks, months or years," says Mark. "As soon as we get the green light from hospitals, 10,000 printers around the world can be printing face shields and nose swabs."

Formlabs, which already has a robust business supplying custom-printed surgical-grade healthcare products, is pushing to bring its swabs to market quickly.

"Not only can we help in the development of the swabs, but we can manufacture them ourselves," says Formlabs chief product officer, David Lakatos.

Swabs for testing are in short supply in part because there are only a few manufacturers in the world who made them -- and one of those primary manufacturers is in Italy, which means supplies and staff are in short supply. "There's a shortage of them and nobody was expecting that we would need to test millions of people in short order," says Lakatos.

Formlabs is also working on another piece of personal protective equipment -- looking at converting snorkeling masks into respirators and face masks. "Our goal is to make one that is reusable," says Lakatos. "A patient can use it as a respirator and you can put it in an autoclave and reuse it."

In Brooklyn, Voodoo Manufacturing has repurposed its 5,000-square-foot facility to mass-produce personal protective equipment. The company has set up a website, CombatingCovid.com, where organizations in need of supplies can place orders. Voodoo aims to print at least 2,500 protective face shields weekly and can scale to larger production volumes based on demand, the company said.

STAMFORD, CT - MARCH 23: Nurse Hannah Sutherland, dressed in personal protective equipment (PPE) awaits new patients at a drive-thru coronavirus testing station at Cummings Park on March 23, 2020 in Stamford, Connecticut. Availability of protective clothing for medical workers has become a major issue as COVID-19 cases surge throughout the United States. The Stamford site is run by Murphy Medical Associates. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Finally, Resonance, a startup launched by the founder of FirstMark Capital, Lawrence Lenihan, is using its factory in the Dominican Republic to make face masks for consumers on the island and beyond.

"To contribute to the Dominican health efforts, Resonance is acting to utilize their resources to manufacture safety masks for distribution to local hospitals, nursing homes, and other high-risk facilities as quickly as possible. They have provided user-friendly instructions and material and will pay their sewers who can to make these masks from the security of their homes," a spokesperson for the company wrote in an email. "Resonance is currently working to share this downloadable platform and simple instructions to their website, so anyone in the world can contribute to their own local communities."

All of these efforts -- and countless others too numerous to mention -- point to the ways small companies are hoping to do something to help their communities stay safe and healthy in the midst of this global outbreak.

But many of these extreme measures may not have been necessary had governments around the world actively coordinated their response and engaged in better preparation before the situation became so dire.

There are a litany of errors that governments made -- and are still making -- in their efforts to respond to the pandemic, even as the private sector steps in and steps up to address them.

*This article has been updated to indicate that Andrew Cuomo made the plea to the Trump Administration. Not Mario Cuomo who was New York's governor from 1983 to 1994.
An easy and quick guide to the figures of the Coronavirus pandemic in Italy is supplied by a cloud-based mapping solution, called arcGIS Online.

Its maps, figures and easy-to-understand graphs are based on data provided by Italy's Protezione Civile, the organisation that deals with the prediction and management of the country's emergencies, whether earthquakes, floods, landslides or epidemics.

The site provides graphs of the total number of Coronavirus cases in Italy, the new cases each day, the numbers of those who have recovered and the deaths. It also provides data from each region and province.

It is therefore possible to see the increases and decreases in the numbers at a glance. The site also provides printable .pdf downloads of the regional, provincial and national data.

The graphs show the steep upward curve since the countrywide lockdown on 9 March, when there were 7,985 cases to the 62,013 on 26 March.

They also show that the number of people who have recovered is now just ahead of the number of deaths. On 26 March there were 10,261 recovered compared with 8,165 dead.

It also indicates that the daily number of new cases. On 26 March the numbers had increased again (4,492) since the slight downward trend between 22 March (3,957 new cases) and 25 March (3,491 new cases), although this is still lower than the daily peak of 4,821 on 21 March. This is almost entirely because of the increase in cases in the south.

The central map illustrates the way in which the Covid-19 infections are moving down the Italian peninsula, from the north where it first hit to the central and southern regions.

The province of Rome with its 1,567 cases is now almost on a par with Modena in the north where there are 1,676 cases, and now has more cases than Bologna with 1,253.

There are still very few cases in the regions of Molise (103) and Basilicata (134). However in Sicily they are now at 1,164, about 300 more than two day ago. But figures for Campania, the region for Naples, are particularly worrying because they have not been updated since 18 March, when they were at 1,310 cases.

These figures are updated every day at 18.30 local time and this is the data the government will be looking at in order to calculate future policies regarding the virus.

Ph: LifeCollectionPhotography / Shutterstock.com
GENESEE COUNTY, MI -- The Genesee County Health Department has reported the areas first deaths in connection with COVID-19.

Both deaths -- elderly males with underlying health conditions -- occurred Thursday, March 26, per the health department.

State figures released at 2 p.m. show one death in the county, but the county health department confirmed two.

Our heartfelt condolences go out to the families who have lost their loved ones, said John McKellar, Genesee County Health Officer, in a prepared statement. These tragic deaths are an urgent reminder to all of us that we must act now and act together to protect everyones health during this time of national crisis.

Updated case figures Thursday afternoon by the state Department of Health and Human Services show 63 in Genesee County, 4 in Bay County and 10 in Saginaw County.

Tuscola County also reported its first COVID-19 death Thursday.

Total statewide COVID-19 cases stand at 2,856, with 60 deaths.

Michigan coronavirus numbers now at 2,856 cases, doubling in three days

There is evidence of community spread of COVID-19 locally, noted McKellar. Everyone needs to take precautions, practice prevention, and assume potential exposure in public locations.

The Genesee County Health Department recommends that all residents:

-Stay at home - Do not leave home except for essential tasks such as getting groceries or seeking medical care.

-If you are out, stay at least 6 feet away from others and avoid any gatherings.

-Wash your hands often and well, especially after being away from home.

-Do not touch your face, mouth or eyes, especially when out.

-Cover coughs and sneezes.

Read all of MLives coverage on the coronavirus at mlive.com/coronavirus.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

Related:

Bay County woman with coronavirus: Save yourself and save others health as well'

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer requests federal major disaster declaration for coronavirus response

Thursday, March 26: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan
YEREVAN.  Three servicemen of the Armenian Armed Forces tested positive for coronavirus, Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan said in a statement.

Despite preventive actions in the army, it was impossible to prevent the spread of virus in the army as contract servicemen are in a daily contact with civilians.

Three servicemen tested positive for COVID-19. One of family members of one of the servicemen tested positive earlier. The confirmed cases are interconnected and are related to one of the virus hotbeds in the country. According to epidemiological studies, the servicemen were previously isolated, which significantly reduced the risk of further spread of the infection, the minister said.

All three servicemen are hospitalized, they do not have pneumonia. One of them has a slight increase in body temperature, two others do not have any symptoms.

At the same time, the circle of contacts of military personnel has been clarified. Those who contacted them are isolated. They also have strict daily controls and the necessary conditions. In order to test the virus, 32 more servicemen were tested, he said.

Anti-epidemic measures are underway at a military unit that is located at a considerable distance from the front line, he added.

At the same time, I consider it necessary to emphasize once again that the Defense Army [Artsakh Defense Army] has not yet recorded a single case with a symptom of coronavirus disease.

Strict restrictions are applied to prevent infection, and daily monitoring of the health status of military personnel is held in the army, he assured.

The minister added that the number of cases of other equally dangerous infectious diseases has decreased sharply, which clearly indicates the effectiveness of the preventive measures.
Are social media stocks a sound strategy in this market environment?

That's something many on Wall Street are likely wondering as stay-at-home orders are put in place nationwide and millions of U.S. workers keep the corporate engines running from quarantine.

Facebook reported Wednesday that it has seen a spike in activity on its platform during the coronavirus outbreak but that the pandemic's economic impact has also taken a toll on ad sales. The announcement came a day after Twitter withdrew its first-quarter outlook, citing an anticipated softening in advertiser demand.

For Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak, and Michael Binger, president of Gradient Investments, one stock appeared to be the best of the bunch, they told CNBC's "Trading Nation" on Wednesday.

"On a technical basis, anyway, Facebook looks like the best of the lot," Maley said, pointing to its stock chart.

"If you look at its 200-week moving average, it has dipped below that line," he said. "It did the same thing back in the deep correction of 2018, but it was able to regain it rather quickly. And even though it's seen a little bit of a deeper drop below that line this time around, it is creeping back up to that level. So, if it can break back above it, that's going to be positive."

Facebook's 200-week moving average was just above $164 as of Wednesday. The stock closed at $156.21, down nearly 3%.

Facebook has also demonstrated strength in that it has performed in line with the broader market during the recent decline, Maley said. Facebook is down about 24% year to date, while the S&P 500 is down just over 23%.

"Usually, when these high flyers really see a big ramp up, when they roll over, they get absolutely clobbered. So, the fact that it's not tells me that investors are a little bit more confident about the long-term prospects for the stock," Maley said. "So, as we come out of this, hopefully come out of this thing somewhat soon, this stock should do quite well."

Binger said the social media theme "couldn't fit any better" in the current environment and predicted that it would "increase the stickiness of some of these social stocks."

"I happen to like Facebook. It's no surprise that their advertising is seeing a little weakness in this pretty dramatic shutdown of the economy here. I mean, most companies are going to put a pause, but, in my opinion, that'll be temporary," Binger said, calling the stock "cheap."

"I think user numbers are a forward indicator of advertising that'll come down the road," he said. "I think advertising will come back strong and probably stronger than it was before."

While Binger said he preferred Facebook over Twitter, one other social stock caught his eye as well.

"It's the up-and-comer in the social space, and I think that's Snap," he said. "I see a lot of people are new users to Snap. Their revenue growth is much higher than the bigger social stocks. They are inflecting to profitability right now, and I think their user engagement is going to go up a lot with all these kids that are staying home and college students that aren't going to college anymore for the rest of this school year."

In short, "I think Snap is the one to really own here," Binger said. "So, in the large-cap space, love Facebook, good balance sheet, but I really think you can make some money on Snap. I think that the stock has been punished more than what the fundamentals are going to reflect."

Investors shouldn't try to play the space by buying Global X's Social Media ETF (SOCL), however, the two agreed. The fund, which climbed by over 1% on Wednesday, has its biggest weightings in the stocks of Tencent, Facebook and South Korean social media platform Naver.

"People obviously like to try the ETFs nowadays. The social media ETF is a pretty illiquid one, and it has nothing to do with what's going on with the health-care crisis right now," Maley said. "It was illiquid before, and it only trades about 16,000 shares a day, so, ... once it gathers more steam someday, it may be a better one to play, but right now, you're going to want to stay away from that."

Snap shares gained over 2% in Wednesday's trading session. Twitter's stock climbed by less than half of 1%.

Disclaimer
More than 3 million jobless Americans asked the United States government for financial assistance last week.

That is a record number for one week, the U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday. The old record had been 695,000 from 1982.

This is the beginning of the really bad numbers we are going to see for the next few months, said Subadra Rajappa. She is head of U.S. Rates Strategy at Societe Generale in New York City.

Also on Thursday, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, told NBC television that the U.S. may already be in recession, as many companies have suspended operations. Schools, movie theaters and other businesses have closed as Americans turn to social distancing to slow the growth of coronavirus.

The central bank chair added that progress in controlling the spread of the coronavirus will decide when the economy can fully reopen.

Wednesday night, the U.S. Senate approved a $2 trillion bill to help people and businesses during the coronavirus pandemic. The measure is the largest stimulus bill in American history. The House of Representatives is expected to pass it on Friday.

Once signed into law, it will provide direct payments to many Americans as well as provide money to businesses that are hurting.

Lawmakers hope the bill will prevent the economy from heading into a long economic depression, such as the one the United States experienced in the 1930s.

U.S. President Donald Trump said this week that he would like to see Americans go back to work by Easter, April 12. He suggested that efforts to slow the virus may no longer be needed at that date. However, several companies and business groups are listening to health officials who say Americans need to stay home for a much longer amount of time.

We urge all businesses and the public to listen to public health officials when it comes to social distancing, says Neil Bradley of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But some business leaders agree with the president. Former Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankenfein wrote: Crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue. His comments appeared on Twitter.

The Ford Motor Company announced Thursday it will open its factories as early as April 6. Ford said it will include new safety measures for its workers.

In Europe, government officials and industry leaders are still discussing the need for a full shutdown. Italy, which has the most coronavirus deaths of any country, is adding new restrictions. French President Emmanuel Macron has urged some workers to continue reporting to work. Spain is in a complete shut down. The country has the second largest number of deaths from the virus, more than 4,000.

In China, where the virus was first identified three months ago, economic conditions are just beginning to improve.

In the United States, New York City is now the epicenter of the virus. New York has more than 17,000 confirmed coronavirus cases. Hospitals in the city are running out of room to store the bodies of the dead, one worker told news organizations.

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday the peak of the infection is still about three weeks away. He said he expects as many as 140,000 cases and nearly 40,000 people will need hospitalization.

I'm Bryan Lynn.

The Associated Press and the Reuters News Agency reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

_________________________________________________

Words In This Story

strategy - n. a plan or system to accomplish something

stimulus - n. to inject money into an economy

shutdown - n. closing down a society, company or organization
Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Dubai Chamber) said that it is suspending its Customer Happiness Centre operations at its main headquarters and its branches across the emirate as of March 26.



It is encouraging customers to use its smart services that can be accessed via the organisations digital channels.



In addition to halting the operations at its Customer Happiness Centre at its main office in Deira, Dubai Chambers Jebel Ali branch will be implementing the same measures, as will its offices in Dubai Airport Free Zone and Al Aweer Dry Port. The closures are part of the precautions undertaken in collaboration with relevant entities to combat the spread of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19).



Dubai Chamber invited its customers to make use of the comprehensive bundle of smart digital services that cater to their needs, tend to the requirements of the business community, and enable investors to complete all their transactions remotely.



Dubai Chambers smart services include: Certificate of Origin service; attestation service; membership; business research and intelligence; legal information service; issuance of ATA Carnet; Dubai Chamber CSR Label; credit rating; business groups and councils; and many other services available for economic and business organisations.



The membership services comprise the issuance, renewal and amendment of memberships, while the ATA Carnet services cover the issuance, amendment, and replacement of a lost Carnet. The Certificate of Origin services include issuing, amending and requesting an additional certificate, while the legal information service provides legal representation and information.



The business research and intelligence service includes research studies and the issuance of reports and recommendations. The business groups and councils service includes the issuance of authorisations and renewal permits for councils and business groups, while the attestation service covers ratification of signatures, copies and stamps.



Dubai Chamber is working to transform its customer happiness centres into smart centres this year, introducing smart services and setting up smart kiosks all around the emirate, particularly in areas that attract businesses, such as free zones.  TradeArabia News Service
Thousands of photos were taken before the Duke and Duchess of Sussex decided to step down from their senior royal duties, but one photo is standing out and it was captured during this year's Endeavor Awards.

THE ICONIC PHOTO

With the beauty, fame, and popularity that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle embody, it is to no surprise that they always stand out from the crowd. It is also not a question as to why they are always in the headlines and the apple of the media's eye.

This time however, it is not related to their decision to step down from their royal duties that put them in headlines all over the world. It is all about a photo that was captured and stood out among the thousands of photos taken during their appearance last week.

In a recently published article, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle appeared during the Endeavor Awards. The royal couple will leave their royal duties days from now, hence it was an opportunity for media to see the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and capture photos of them before they exit the spotlight this coming April 1.

The photo shows how happily Prince Harry and Meghan Markle looked at each other as they walked together under an umbrella. The camera lights that flashed added extra effects to the photo. It seems that the photo is more likely to be a movie poster rather than a couple walking along the streets of London.

The photo immediately caught the attention of netizens and picked up significant traction on social media. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex each have roughly 11 million followers on Instagram and they have even surpassed Prince William and Kate Middleton.

THE MAN BEHIND THE ICONIC PHOTO

The man behind the iconic photo is Samer Hussein. He is an award-winning photographer for Getty Images and has been following and covering the British Royal family for 12 years. Hussein shared in a news outlet just how he managed to capture the iconic photo.

He said, "It was pouring down with rain, which can be very tricky when shooting flash photography. [It] also meant Harry and Meghan would be under an umbrella, which usually means it's hard to get clean photos of the couple."

He thought that it could be a very bad day for him because it was raining and it could be very challenging for him to have a beautiful shot for the couple. However, the rain, the flocking crowds, hundreds of media, and all the challenges he encountered were all blessings in disguise.

He added in his statement, "Little did I know these elements would come together so spectacularly to produce a timeless image."

HOW DID HE CAPTURE THE ICONIC PHOTO?

Hussein talked to the Sussexes' press officer and he learned that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would be dropped off 30 feet from the entrance of the mansion where the Endeavour Awards was held. He immediately positioned himself in the photographer's pen.

Hussein recounted: "As they walked toward me, I noticed a flash going off from a camera in the crowd behind them. I knew that if that light could be lined up to be right behind as they walked, then it could create a dramatic photo, acting like a backlight in a studio shot. I managed to maneuver myself to line up the flash behind them and then had to work quickly, with just a second or two to get the shot as they smiled wonderfully at each other."

While taking photos of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, ha had no idea that he had captured the rain and camera flashes that add extra scenes in the photo. He only realized how poignant his photo was when uploaded it onto his laptop.

He concluded when he saw the picture, "It's a one in a million, when all the elements you could wish for as a photographer come together-perfect timing, great lighting, strong symbolism, and amazing subjects."

Read related articles:
New York: U.S. deaths from the coronavirus pandemic have topped 1,000, in another grim milestone for a global outbreak that is taking lives and wreaking havoc on economies and established routines of ordinary life.

In a recognition of the scale of the threat, the U.S. Senate late Wednesday passed an unparalleled $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems.

The unanimous vote came despite misgivings on both sides about whether it goes too far or not far enough and capped days of difficult negotiations as Washington confronted a national challenge unlike it has ever faced. The 880-page measure is the largest economic relief bill in U.S. history.

Worldwide, the death toll climbed past 21,000, according to a running count kept by Johns Hopkins University. The number of dead in the U.S. rose to 1,041 as of late Wednesday, with nearly 70,000 infections.

The Spanish parliament voted to allow the government extend strict stay-at-home rules and business closings until April 11.

Such measures are becoming increasingly common in the U.S., where New York is the current epicenter of the domestic outbreak, accounting for more than 30,000 cases and close to 300 deaths, most of them in New York City.

Public health officials in the city hunted down beds and medical equipment and put out a call for more doctors and nurses for fear the number of sick will explode in a matter of weeks, overwhelming hospitals as has happened in Italy and Spain.

A makeshift morgue was set up outside Bellevue Hospital, and the citys police, their ranks dwindling as more fall ill, were told to patrol nearly empty streets to enforce social distancing.

In Washington, President Donald Trump has called for Americans to dedicate themselves for 15 days to social distancing, including staying home from work and closing bars and restaurants to help try to stall the spread of the disease.
As soon as he heard announcements about school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Max Zhu got worried.

For the past three years, Zhu has been involved with Time to TalkUncovering Youth Experiences, a Scarborough-based youth organization that works to build skills, mentorship and inspiration for young people in the area. He has seen first-hand how many families are poverty-stricken and knew the pandemic would impact them much harder.

Food insecurity is exacerbated during times of economic hardship, he said.

School closures mean children and youth who relied on school food programs no longer have access to healthy breakfasts and snacks.

Layoffs and reduced working hours for parents across industries mean that children and youth will not have access to nutritious food they need to be safe and healthy during this time, he said.

Zhu, 26, and other members of the group decided they wouldnt just sit back during the crisis but would help ease the burden of some families, many of whom are new immigrants and rely on precarious jobs for their upkeep. Last week they launched the Hearty Food Initiative, an effort to address food insecurity at the grassroots and community levels, and support the youngest members of the community and their families during the outbreak.

Just two days after announcing their intentions on Facebook, the group had raised $1,200 through small individual donations. The funds were used to place dozens of orders through FoodShare for fresh food boxes and snacks to be donated to families in the Oakridge and Taylor-Massey neighbourhoods of Scarborough.

Zhu said the areas were chosen based on city data that shows high levels of unemployment there. The majority of residents are recent immigrants and many of those who work have household incomes way below the citys average.

The group has also heard directly from many of these families how the outbreak is affecting their ability to get what they need for their survival: those who are in self-isolation and cant get out; those taking care of older parents; those with sick family members, those whose workplaces have closed due to the pandemic.

These are urgent tales for help and we prioritized them over others, said Zhu.

Affordable food for residents has always been challenging in the area. There are no large grocery stores in Oakridge or Taylor-Massey and the closest one, Metro, is priced much higher than the deep-discount supermarkets in which many residents shop.

According to the Toronto Foundation for Student Success, more than 200,000 kids get nutritious breakfasts and snacks everyday through its Students Nutrition Programs across the city. The foundation announced this week its working to provide each of these students with a $50 food card, to help buy breakfast for a period of 30 days.

Despite their focus on Scarborough neighbourhoods, Zhu and Time to TalkUncovering Youth Experiences have received applications from as far as Ottawa and Hamilton  demonstrating how dire the situation is getting for people across the country.

The group hopes to continue raising funds and delivering fresh produce to families during the pandemic, but it also wants to highlight the need to tackle food insecurity in a much more serious way going forward.

While COVID-19 has heightened food insecurity in our community, it has been a prevalent challenge that requires more attention and collective intervention, said Zhu.

With our lived experiences and deep connections with our communities, we can mobilize support and develop targeted initiatives to tackle community-specific social challenges.

Read more about:
The government's economic package to ease the impact of the 21-day lockdown due to the coronavirus was welcomed by opposition parties, though they described it as "too little" and "inadequate".

Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the package as one that will go a long way in ensuring food and livelihood security of the poor.

"It is our firm resolve that the poor and vulnerable get all possible help to cope with the testing times," he tweeted.

While Congress leader Rahul Gandhi welcomed the Rs 1.70-lakh crore stimulus, saying it is the first step in the right direction, CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury said it is was inadequate.

"The Govt announcement today of a financial assistance package, it is the first step in the right direction.India owes a debt to its farmers, daily wage earners, labourers, women & the elderly who are bearing the brunt of the ongoing lockdown," Gandhi said on Twitter.

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala urged Modi to reconsider the package, saying "is it not too little".

"But, for heaven's sake, please, reconsider the package as also incorporate the suggestions that we are giving to you, not in a bipartisan or political fashion, but, in a spirit of cooperation and unity," he said.

The government announced the stimulus that included free foodgrain and cooking gas to the poor for three months, and cash doles to women and senior citizens as it looked to ease the economic impact of the nationwide lockdown which came into force on Wednesday.

"The Rs 1.75 lakh crore package announced today missed out on a crucial issue of the migrant workers returning to their own states," Yechury said in a statement.

"We have airlifted Indians from many countries abroad, surely our own brethren should have been provided with food and shelter, to either stay where they are currently or to be transported to their home states," he said.

Yechury pointed out that while some proposals in the package, such as provision of doubling food grains, free gas cylinders for three months, a one-kg of pulses per family, have some merit, but they were "thoroughly inadequate".

"The key to resist COVID-19 is good nutrition. This does not serve the purpose. The announcement to give Rs 1,000 to aged widows and the disabled is too little," he said.

The BJP hailed the relief package saying it will help the poor, farmers and other needy sections of the society when the nation is on a 21-day lockdown to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Party president J P Nadda said the prime minister has announced a "huge relief" for the poor in this hour of crisis, and asserted that it is the ruling party's resolve that nobody is left hungry.

Home Minister Amit Shah said the announcement shows the sensitivity of the government towards the poor and other vulnerable sections of society.

However, the Trinamool Congress said the Centre's financial package announced in the wake of a countrywide lockdown to combat coronavirus has taken a "cue" from the one offered by the party-led dispensation in West Bengal.

"Centre takes cue from relief plans already rolled out by state government's like Bengal a week ago -- free 6 months ration for the poor, health insurance for champion frontliners fighting corona and Rs 1000 for daily wagers under new Prochesta scheme. Will supplement State efforts," tweeted TMC MP Derek O'Brien.

Congress' Surjewala said the farmer has been offered Rs 2,000 through 'PM Kisan' accounts on April 1, but farmers are supposed to be paid a sum of Rs 6,000 under the PM Kisan Yojana.

"Why cut Rs, 4,000 now? Kisan (the farmer) should be paid all Rs. 6,000 now on 1st April, 2020 and Sonia Gandhi had suggested a payment of Rs. 7,500 over and above the Rs. 6,000. We humbly request to consider it and how should the standing crop of the farmer be harvested is the principle question," he said.

Surjewala claimed that 334 lakh hectare of wheat is now ready to be harvested in India, including about 130 lakh hectare in Punjab, 93 lakh hectare in Haryana, 37 lakh hectare in Uttar Pradesh, about 68 lakh hectare in Madhya Pradesh and in other states, but all the grain markets are shut.

The Food Corporation of India has not come forward with procurement, he said, adding that no gunny bags are currently available for the farmers.

"Please declare harvesting and procurement operations as part of essential services...,"he said.

Surejwala also called for measures for the salaried class, demanding relief in EMIs by deferring them up to June 30 and waiving interest.

"Please give a sector wise package to them so that some relief come only then the health crisis of Corona and the economic pandemic of Corona, both need to be addressed simultaneously," he said.

Earlier Congress chief Sonia Gandhi also wrote to prime minister extending support to the lockdown but made several suggestions protection of doctors, easing supply chains and deferment of loans.

Congress leader Anand Sharma welcomed the relief package and urged the prime minister to increase the MGNREGA wages to Rs 300 as the hike announced is very little to give the desired benefit.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
I would encourage voters to check out the respective websites and review the law enforcement endorsements of the respective candidates. Kelly is at justicedanielkelly.com, Karofsky at jillforjustice.com. As of March 22, Justice Kelly had the endorsement of 44 county sheriffs out of 72 Wisconsin counties. Judge Karofsky had five. A nearly ten-to-one overwhelming endorsement of Justice Kelly by those boots on the ground in law enforcement.

Karofskys television ads have tried to paint Kelly as an extremist who opposes abortion and favors school choice. Kellys positions on those topics arent really a part of the rationale for a Supreme Court justice, but there are certainly millions of Wisconsinites that would take those stances as far less than extreme, to the point of offering their support for Justice Kelly.

Its also a grave matter of concern when you hear the words social justice used by any judge at any level. The role of the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin is to simply apply the law as it is currently written. In depictions of the judiciary, the scales of justice are always pictured with a blindfold.
CHISINAU (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th March, 2020) Gatherings of more than three people are prohibited in Moldova starting Friday because of the COVID-19 threat, Prime Minister Ion Chicu said on Thursday.

"People on the street will have to have proof of identity with them.

Starting March 27, gathering in groups with more than three people is prohibited, this does not concern family members," Chicu said following a meeting of the national commission on emergencies.

The prime minister noted that the government had refrained from introducing a curfew, although it might reconsider the issue in the near future.

On March 17 the Moldovan parliament declared an emergency for 60 days. The republic has suspended air traffic with all countries and also closed all land borders. Starting Wednesday, people over 63 years old are prohibited from unnecessarily going outside.
Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee urges people to stringently follow social distancing on Day 2 of the 21-day nationwide lockdown imposed by the Narendra Modi government over the coronavirus pandemic; in Kolkata on March 26, 2020. ( Image Source: IANS News

Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee distributes masks among people on Day 2 of the 21-day nationwide lockdown imposed by the Narendra Modi government over the coronavirus pandemic; in Kolkata on March 26, 2020. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee distributes masks among people on Day 2 of the 21-day nationwide lockdown imposed by the Narendra Modi government over the coronavirus pandemic; in Kolkata on March 26, 2020. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee marks a street with chalk urging people to stringently follow social distancing on Day 2 of the 21-day nationwide lockdown imposed by the Narendra Modi government over the coronavirus pandemic; in K Image Source: IANS News

Kolkata, March 26 : West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday paid surprise visits to markets, pulling up police officers for shutting shops selling essentials and marking circles to denotie how people should queue up in markets and before retail and wholesale outlets to maintain social distance amidst the ongoing lockdown to prevent spread of Covid-19.

Accompanied by city Police Commissioner Anuj Sharma, Banerjee - with a hankerchief covering her mouth and nose - first reached the wholesale market at Posta in Burrabazar of central Kolkata.

She spoke to the traders and asked them to keep their shop open. However, some of the traders complained that police were forcibly closing down shops by beating up buyers and sellers.

An angry Banerjee asked Sharma why they were not allowing the wholesalers to do their business, and received assurance that everything will be taken care of.

Then some more traders stepped forward and complained about police highandedness. Clearly peeved, the Chief Minister asked for the police officer concerned and gave strict instructions to let the traders do their business smoothly.

The next stop was the market on Free School Street. There Banerjee stressed on social distancing and drew circles to denote how the buyers should stand in queues by maintaining proper social distancing.

From central Kolkata, Banerjee's convoy headed to Gariahat market. There she asked the traders to use hand santizers frequently and gave live demonstration on how they can conduct their business while adhering to safety norms.

Banerjee's last halt was at Lake Market. There she was not satisfied with the distance maintained between two circles for buyers in queue. She took a small brick and started drawing the circles before a shop selling potatoes and onions.

"This is how you should do it. There must be adequate distance between two people," she told the trader.
Russian hacking group Digital Revolution has discovered the existence of a secret FSB program dubbed the Fronton Program that reportedly points to the creation of an IoT botnet. Reported by SC Media, the hackers breached subcontractor ODT (Oday) LLC. ODT was working with frequent Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs contractor InformInvestGroup CJSC.

The project behind the reported botnet was reportedly contracted by FSBs unit 64829, or FSB Information Security Center.

Now, the breach itself occurred back in April of 2019. The botnet techniques applied specifically to FSB marshaling devices, at least in this instance. Reports indicate that means it was linked up with internet security cameras and digital recorders linked to the FSB. But the program more directly centered around bypassing default login credentials or easy-to-crack user names and passwords for the creation of a botnet.

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This is the first confirmed case of a state-sponsored IoT botnet

According to vice president of research at Armis Ben Seri, the discovery of the FSB IoT botnet represents a first in the world of cybersecurity. Namely, Mr. Seri says that this is the first instance that such an attack by nation-state actors has been effectively confirmed.

But attacks on IoT devices, in particular, are not uncommon at all. In fact, the wide range of potential IoT problems has been known since at least 2018. Mr. Seri goes on to point out that this confirmation is just the beginning. To begin with, it showcases how other actors can and do carry out these attacks. Especially in terms of government-sponsored entities. It also highlights how those entities can create distance between their core operation, effectively hiding in plain sight.

The IoT, by the very nature of its need to interconnect with a wide array of other gadgets and the rapid clip of expansion, is extremely vulnerable. Mr. Seri is cited as indicating that it represents the easiest route into a business. But, with the rise of smart speakers and other smart home innovations, it also represents an easy in for use against individuals.

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What threat do botnets present?

Botnets represent an interesting intersection of risk types as well. In the case of the Front Program, reports indicate the primary goal was to instantiate DDoS attacks. That hinged on the fact that the IoT devices utilized offered up large communication channels for video and other recording devices.

The purpose of a distributed denial-of-service attack is to fundamentally disrupt access and connectivity for targets. Modern militaries and other government agencies rely heavily on technology. So a state-sponsored IoT-driven DDoS tool would be a highly-effective tool for cyber warfare.

More importantly, botnets are not limited in scope to DDoS attacks at all. They can also be utilized to steal data, send spam or false information, and more.

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As noted above, the botnet being tested in the FSBs project accessed cameras and recording devices. A fully-fleshed botnet would also enable direct access for an attacker to connected devices and connections. That potentially means the botnet could present a risk of more real-time spying and remote feed viewing as well.
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced a Rs 1,70,000 crore economic package for the poor, migrant workers and for those sections of society who need help to tide over the challenge of the nationwide lockdown and job losses during the outbreak of the coronavirus.

Called the Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Scheme, it will address the concerns of the poor and all those medical and paramedical staff who are in the frontline of the coronavirus crisis tackling the pandemic.

Besides food, the package includes a cash component that is divided into eight heads that cover all sections of society, including pensioners, women and the specially abled, Sitharaman said. Heres all you need to know about the Centres economic bailout package:

* The Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Yojna will be applicable for the next 3 months.

*It will cover an estimated 80 crore poor people about two-thirds of the Indian population.

* In addition to already allotted 5 kg of rice/wheat per person, an additional 5 kg will be free. An additional 1 kg of pulses (according to regional preference) will be given, the finance minister announced.

*A special Rs 50 lakh medical insurance cover is being offered to the frontline medical workers working to avert the huge health crisis - the doctors, nurses and their support medical staff.

*Increase of wages in MGNREGA: Five crore families will be benefited and it will translate into an increase of Rs 2000 per worker on average as additional income.

*The government has increased the wages under the rural job guarantee programme MGNREGA to Rs 202 from Rs 182. This will be for five crore workers.

*There will be Rs 50 lakh insurance per health care worker as a medical insurance cover for them for three months.

*Around 8.69 crore farmers will be immediately benefited through Direct Cash Transfers. An instalment of Rs 2000 will be sent in the first week of April.

*Women Jan Dhan account holders will get ex-gratia payment of Rs 500 per month for the next three months. This will benefit over 20 crore women who have Jan Dhan accounts.

All over the country, three crore widows, pensioners and the specially abled would receive a one-time ex-gratia payment of Rs 1,000.

*Nearly 8.3 crore families who are below poverty line will get free cooking gas cylinders for the next three months.

*Those under the women self-help groups under the Deen Dayal Yojana who are eligible for collateral-free loans of up to Rs 10 lakh can now get Rs 20 lakh.

*For the organised sector, Sitharaman announced a hike in provident funds and withdrawal limits.

*The Centre will pay PF for both the employee and employer for the next three months for firms that have up to 100 employees and 90 per cent of the employees earn less than Rs 15,000 per month. These employees would be able to get non-refundable advance to 75 per cent from the fund or three months wages -- whichever is less -- from their EPFO.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is heading the task force which is evaluating the financial fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. The Central government on Thursday outlined an initial bailout package for the people and industry as the number of positive coronavirus cases touched 649 with India reporting 10 deaths so far.
New Delhi, March 26 : Delhi Lt. Governor Anil Baijal on Thursday said the core committee on coronavirus has decided to encourage the grocery and essential supplies stores to operate 24 hours all through the week, and also there will be no restriction on e-commerce companies.

Speaking to the media, he said the Sub Divisionl Magistrates (SDMs) have been asked to ensure that essential items shops are opened and also that there are enough stocks in them.

"As a special measure, grocery and essential supplies stores to be allowed to operate 24 by 7. This will help in staggering customer visits and help in maintaining social distancing norms. All those who wishes to open 24 by 7 will be encouraged," the LG said.

This will help in avoiding mass gatherings.

Baijal said this will not be forced upon the shop owner, but anyone who wishes to do it is most welcome.

Biajal aso said that it has been decided to allow food home delivery services.

"There will be no restriction on e-commerce companies." Baijal said all police officers and district in-charges have been asked to ensure that all shops and stores dealing in essential items are fully-stocked.

Baijal also asked the District Magistrates (DM) in the city to ensure social distancing is maintained at the dispensing points, monitor functioning of helplines and compliance of home quarantine.

"DMs to coordinate provision of food for the homeless and destitute." Baijal interacted on video conference with the DMs and DCPs.

The DMs/DCPs were asked to ensure lockdown is observed as per the instructions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

They were also asked to keep vigil on prices of essential items and check hoarding.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
The first large private company will produce, as of 15 April, a number of 500,000 FFP2 and 100,000 FFP3 masks per day, and is going to then reach a production of 16 - 17 million masks per month, Economy, Energy and Business Environment Minister Virgil Popescu said on Thursday, in the beginning of the Executive meeting.

"Just before attending the Government meeting, I have talked with, probably, the first large private company which will start the production of masks. Currently, it produces protective suits in a production of 1,000 pieces daily. As of next week, once installed, in the beginning of this week, the first automated masks production line, it will produce 150,000 masks per day, meaning, it will reach around 4 million masks per month and, as of 15 April, it will produce 500,000 FFP2 and 100,000 FFP3 masks per day," the Economy Minister mentioned.According to him, the company will reach a monthly production of 16-17 million masks in accordance with the standards of the National Agency for Medicines and Medical Devices of Romania.In respect to the energy companies, Virgil Popescu gave assurances that no investment has been stopped."Moreover, Romania will continue the investment programme and, in addition, today, in the Romarm Board of Directors, it has been approved to include some equipment on the investment list, precisely to produce essential materials and to remain in the country's strategic reserve, so that we won't encounter these problems," the Economy head mentioned.
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Linkedin Ganug Nugroho Adi (The Jakarta Post) Surakarta/Jakarta  Fri, March 27 2020

Last farewell: President Joko Jokowi Widodo (left) stands next to a coffin carried by members of the Presidential Security Detail during the funeral of his mother Sudjiatmi Notomihardjo in Surakarta, Central Java on Thursday.(Courtesy of Presidential Palace/Agus Suparto)

President Joko Jokowi Widodo and his family gathered on Thursday to pay their final respects to Jokowis late mother, Sudjiatmi Notomihardjo, who was laid to rest at family cemetery in Mundu, Gondangrejo district, Karanganyar, Central Java.

Despite being bereaved, Jokowi participated in a video-conference summit with Group of 20 leaders on Thursday evening from Bogor Palace, West Java.

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Toilet paper has been sparse on store shelves throughout North Iowa in recent weeks as consumers have depleted supplies in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But for those who plan on using paper towels, wipes, washcloths or other items to take care of business instead, sanitary officials urge them to think before they flush.

Being self-quarantined at home can be tough. Being self-quarantined at home with a backed-up sewer is much, much worse, said Mitch Hanson, Clear Lake Sanitary District superintendent.

The cities of Clear Lake and Mason City posted a reminder on their social media pages last week informing residents what items shouldnt be flushed.

According to their posts, the following items are not flushable and should be disposed of in the trash:

 Hand wipes

 Disinfecting wipes

 Baby wipes

 Paper towels

 Napkins

 Feminine hygiene products

 Dryer sheets

 Cloth items

Flushing such items  even those deemed flushable  can clog local sewer systems, resulting in costly problems for homes, businesses and communities, officials say.

If theres a clog in a sewer line, pumps stop working and sewer system backups occur.

Even when packaging says, Flushable, it still takes a while to dissolve in the system and could plug the sanitary lines should a buildup occur, said Paul Vanous, Mason City Water Reclamation operations supervisor. There have been municipalities throughout the state that have had clogging issues, so yes, it does happen.

Mason City hasnt had any issues with plugging in the sanitary collection system or at the Water Reclamation facility, Vanous said on Wednesday.

He said the city of Mason City posted the reminder on Facebook in hopes of avoiding future issues.

Clear Lake Public Works Director Joe Weigel said a pump at the North Shore Drive lift station was pulled after it failed because it was plugged with paper towels.

We were lucky we caught it before sewage backed up into homes, he said.

Hanson said the Clear Lake Sanitary District has not had any clogged pipes or pumps due to the flushing of non-flushable items, but he has seen an increase of such items in its pre-treatment head that screens out rags and other large items before it enters the treatment system.

The only things that should be flushed down the toilet are human waste and toilet paper, he said.

Reach Reporter Ashley Stewart at 641-421-0533. Follow her on Twitter at GGastewart.

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When the EU followed Taiwans lead and banned export of all personal protective equipment last week, it sent Canadian hospitals, governments and businesses scrambling to fill the void.

Hospitals in Toronto and Southwestern Ontario had relied on one 3M plant in the UK for masks and the EU ban (which still applies to the UK despite Brexit) shut down that source, according to executives at two southern Ontario hospitals.

The U.K. plant under the European Union, they will not give North America the masks, said Premier Doug Ford during his daily press conference Tuesday. So, were doing everything we can to make sure we have a supply on hand. 3M did not provide a comment by Wednesday afternoon.

While breweries and distilleries were able to rapidly convert their equipment to produce hand sanitizer, its not going to be as easy to make face shields, respirators and ventilators, said Guillaume Laverdure, president of Medicom, an infection control product manufacturer based in Montreal.

You have some products which are not specifically difficult to make, but the capacity is limited, said Laverdure, who has been approached by several companies looking to tap into Medicoms production expertise.

Garment industry insiders also point to medical grade certification as a potentially-insurmountable barrier to quickly converting plants to manufacture specialized items like masks and respirators.

The overwhelming majority of the worlds supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) is made in China and southeast Asia, and because the coronavirus pandemic started there, the supply was redirected to local needs months ago.

Taiwan imposed an export ban on all PPE in January and Chinas government has been purchasing virtually all local production of PPE before it can be exported, severely hampering Canadas access to N95 masks and other PPE. When the EU implemented a ban on all PPE exports on March 15, Canada went from concerned to desperate.

The federal government has started distributing PPE from the national emergency strategic stockpile to the provinces and territories, Eric Morrissette, a spokesperson for the Public Health Agency of Canada, told the Star.

Calls went out earlier this week from both the federal and provincial governments to local businesses for any lingering supplies of PPE that can be commandeered for medical use.

Universities, tattoo parlours, dentists offices, hairdressers and non-emergency medical facilities including fertility and plastic surgery clinics, all have inventories of PPE that could be pressed into use.

While both calls received massive responses, they may not be enough to face the expected surge in coronavirus cases in the months ahead.

Currently, hospitals are not reporting any shortages. But stockpiles are only expected to last another two weeks and resupply is uncertain, said Mitze Mourinho, president of the Michael Garron Foundation.

This leaves Canada no other option than producing new supplies, quickly, and in unconventional ways.

Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced federal aid for Canadian manufacturers of PPE to massively scale-up production. There would also be federal support for companies looking to retool their production lines to make medical supplies.

Getting a production line rolling takes months and months of capacity investment, Medicoms Laverdure said.

Auto parts manufacturers, including Ontario-based Martinrae International, said last week that they will work with governments to retool factories for PPE production, though they cited the difficulty of needing technical guidance.

Beyond know-how, there is also the question of securing enough raw materials  the plastic and paper products as well as the specialized impermeable fabrics necessary to make masks and gowns.

Without the material itself, so you could add 50 factories to make mass (amounts of PPE) in Canada tomorrow, and they wont be able to run, said Laverdure.

Bob Kirke, executive director of Canadian Apparel Federation, said the real issue preventing Canadian manufacturing from producing PPE is certification, which cannot be quickly achieved in non-certified plants.

There are very big challenges to converting factories from making t-shirts to making certified medical garments, Kirke said. There are certifications for a reason: You dont want blood or other liquids to go through the fabric.

While in the face of a looming crisis the U.S. FDA has relaxed standards so that non-compliant masks can be used, no similar change has been made in Canada, said Kirke.

We know we cant do a 100-per-cent compliant mask, but could we make one that is adequate for some purposes, like giving to patients in waiting rooms, said Kirke.

Relaxed standards would allow hospitals to not worry about the legal implication of using non-conforming supplies.

Is it time for Health Canada to relax some of the requirements to allow for a greater supply? asked Kirke.

This week, several North American auto manufacturers announced they would start producing PPE to meet the unprecedented demand.

On Monday, Fiat Chrysler put out a statement saying it would begin manufacturing one million protective face masks per month and donating them to police, paramedics, firefighters and hospital workers.

Asked where the masks were going to be produced, company spokesperson Kevin Frazier told the Star the first plant to be converted is in China.

While the company is evaluating other plants, Frazier said he would not speculate on any difficulties getting the masks out of China to the North American market.

Ford Motor Company announced Tuesday that it would convert local plants in Michigan to produce respirators and face shields in partnership with 3M.

The company said it could produce 75,000 face shields this week, before scaling up to 100,000 a week by April.

Ford would also work with General Electric to increase production of ventilators and use in-house 3D printing technology to make respirator masks.

Were talking about producing hundreds of thousands of these ventilators in the future, Ford CEO Jim Hackett said in an interview with CBS. The problem is that the lines that have been in place produce hundreds or thousands. Were talking about needing hundreds of thousands.

It will take time to reach this level of production volume, Hackett said.

Were talking about early June where we dont think it is a problem, but between now and June, it is about ramping up.

Luxury Parka maker Canada Goose announced Wednesday that it would start making scrubs and patient gowns at its facilities in Toronto and Winnipeg next week.

The initial run will be 10,000 units, with the potential to expand production to other facilities if needed, the company said in a statement. The gowns will be donated to local hospitals.

While it remains to be seen if the initiative from individual businesses will meet the expected surge of infections, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed a long-term weakness in Canadas preparedness.

The main issue is how do we make sure that every single country on the long term has a local supply source that they can rely on, said Medicoms Laverdure, who noted his company was founded in 1988 to meet the shortage of latex gloves amid the AIDS epidemic.

We understand manufacturing locally may not be the cheapest option. There is always a cheaper option somewhere (else). But there is a price to pay to have guaranteed local supply, he said.

Its not all about lean inventory and low cost, he said. Yes, its more expensive than buying from China. But it serves a purpose. I hope everybody would remember that.
HAMILTON, N.Y. -- Hamilton Village Mayor Ruthanne Loveless has tested positive for coronavirus, she announced today in a message to the community.

Loveless said she is in isolation at home.

"Fortunately, my present symptoms are not severe. I am at home, and will continue to remain confined there as I rest and recover,'' she said.

Loveless told Syracuse.com | The Post Standard earlier this week she had been in contact with a good friend and devoted village volunteer who died last weekend. The man was Central New Yorks first death from coronavirus.

The man, in his early 80s, tested positive for coronavirus after his death, she said. He had a high temperature and developed pneumonia. She did not identify the man, nor has Madison County.

Loveless said she attended a reception for volunteers recently where the man was present.

His death, coming so suddenly only four days after he went to a Syracuse hospital, illustrates how seriously we must take the threat posed by this virus, she said in her letter.

"We must all continue to be as diligent as possible in following the recommended practices of cleanliness and social distancing for the foreseeable future,'' she said.

Because of her contact with village department heads, most of them will remain quarantined until April 3, she said.

She also told residents she know they are concerned about who may have the virus in the community, but said she doesnt have information related to this.

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Sonam Kapoor treated her fans with a picture on Instagram to share her current mood on social media. She posted a glamorous photo of herself where she is seen dressed in a black off-shoulder bodycon dress as she tucks her hands in her hair to pose. "Mood," reads the caption.

Soon after, her husband Anand Ahuja, awestruck with the photo, wrote "Wowowwwwww" in the comments.

Sonam also uploaded multiple stories on the photo-sharing platform. In the images, we see Anand doing headstands with zeal.

A day before, the actress had also posted a time-worn photograph to express her love for mother Sunita Kapoor on her birthday. In the two images she added on her Instagram timeline, we see nostalgic moments from Sonam's childhood days.

"You've guided me with love and patience all through life. Your passion, intelligence and creativity is simply inspiring and I'm lucky to call myself your daughter! Whoever I am today is because of you and I thank you for that! Happy birthday mom! Miss you sooo much! @kapoor.sunita," reads her caption.

Sunita soon commented on the post saying, Love you my beta , love you to the moon and back.

As the world witnesses a scary rise in the Coronavirus pandemic, people experience extended period of quarantine. Sonam is in New Delhi with her husband Anand Ahuja. The couple is in isolation after returning from London.

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Linkedin Nandita Bose (Reuters) Washington  Thu, March 26, 2020 09:03 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d710ba 2 Business COVID-19,coronavirus,price-gouging,US,Amazon,Walmart,Facebook,e-commerce Free

A group of 32 US states have a message for the nations leading online platforms: You are not doing enough to stop price gouging amid the coronavirus crisis.

In a letter sent on Wednesday to Amazon.com Inc, Walmart Inc, Facebook Inc and eBay Inc a bipartisan group of US attorneys general outlined specific steps it wants the online platforms to take to end this practice.

Pennsylvanias Josh Shapiro is leading the effort along with attorneys general from the states of Connecticut, Vermont and New Mexico.

The steps include triggering price-gouging protections prior to emergency declarations in a state, being proactive in setting policies and restrictions on sellers instead of playing catch up and creating a fair pricing page where consumers can report incidents.

They should use their data and analytics tools to stop price spikes, not play whack-a-mole when they find something on their platform...We are seeing them handle this on a case-by-case basis, which is really not practical, Shapiro told Reuters in an interview.

The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Read also: E-commerce platform Tokopedia shuts down COVID-19 profiteers

Shapiro said his office has received approximately 2,900 tips of price gouging on online platforms and brick-and-mortar stores in the past eight to nine days and issued 90 cease-and-desist orders to sellers engaged in the activity. He said if these orders fail to deter merchants, his office can fine them up to US$10,000 per violation.

The issue of price-gouging on online platforms has become a hot topic among law enforcement agencies, officials and lawmakers as panicked consumers look to stock up on essential items during the outbreak.

It also reflects the intense pressure online platforms are under to protect consumers while delivering goods during a pandemic.

Earlier this week, Amazon said it had removed 3,900 seller accounts involved in this activity. In early March, the company said it is working with state attorneys general to identify and prosecute third-party sellers.

A report by the US Public Interest Research Group released March 11, found nearly 1 in 6 of the products sold directly by Amazon had prices spike 50 percent higher than the 90-day average.

Even new protections by your company including heightened monitoring, bans on certain advertisements, and bans on selling certain items, have failed to remove unconscionably priced critical supplies, the letter said.
India's Ambassador to Afghanistan Vinay Kumar on Thursday visited the Sikh gurdwara where at least 25 worshippers were killed after it was attacked by a heavily armed suicide bomber and offered condolences to families of the victims of the horrific attack.

At least 25 worshippers were killed and eight others injured when a heavily armed suicide bomber stormed a prominent gurdwara on Wednesday in the heart of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, in one of the deadliest attacks on the minority Sikh community in the strife-torn country.

The Islamic State (IS) terror group, which has targeted Sikhs before in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack in Shor Bazar area.

"Amb @vkumar1969 visited the gurudwara and met community leaders, elders and families of the victims of terrorist attack. He shared their grief and offered condolences. He was told that the injured are receiving satisfactory treatment," the Indian embassy in Afghanistan said in a tweet.

The embassy also said it was working for the return of the mortal remains of Tian Singh, one of the deceased from Delhi, whose family wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help them bringing back the mortal remains.

"@IndianEmbKabul is working for the return of the mortal remains of Shri Tian Singh. @IndianEmbKabul will continue to provide all assistance to the community and families as may be required in these difficult days," it said.

Prime Minister Modi said on Wednesday that he was "saddened" by the attack on the gurdwara when 150 worshippers were inside the building.

"I am saddened by today's terror attack at Gurudwara in Kabul. I express my condolences to the families of all the deceased," he said in a tweet.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) also condemned the attack that lasted for about six hours, terming it cowardly and reflective of a "diabolical mindset".

"Such cowardly attacks on places of religious worship of the minority community, especially at this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, is reflective of the diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers, it said in a statement.

The MEA said India stood in solidarity with the people, the government and the security forces of Afghanistan in their efforts for bringing peace and security to the country.

"We commend the brave Afghan security forces for their valorous response to the attack and their exemplary courage and dedication to protect the Afghan people and secure the country," it said.

Photos from the blast scene showed security forces carrying wounded people away on stretchers. Some Afghan media outlets shared videos of the family members of victims waiting outside a city hospital in tears.

Police in Kabul said that at least 11 children were rescued from the gurdwara.

Sikhs have been target of attacks by Islamist militants before in Afghanistan.

In July 2018, ISIS terrorists bombed a gathering of Sikhs and Hindus in the eastern city of Jalalabad, killing 19 people and injuring 20.

Awtar Singh Khalsa, one of the country's best-known Sikh politicians then, was among those killed in the attack.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) leaves the Senate floor at the Capitol in Washington on March 25, 2020. (Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images)

House Plans Friday Vote for Virus Relief Package Passed by Senate

The House of Representatives plans to vote on Friday for a $2 trillion emergency relief package passed by the Senate late Wednesday.

Directing representatives to the text of the bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told them at 11:21 p.m. on Wednesday night that the House would convene on Friday morning to consider the bill.

Pelosi aims to pass the bill by voice vote because of limited flight options, Members participating in self-quarantine, and several states mandating stay-at-home orders.

Two representatives have tested positive for the CCP virus and others have entered quarantine or live in states where governors have ordered or advised people to stay at home unless theyre taking essential trips.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speaks to news reporters ahead of a vote on the CCP virus relief bill on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 25, 2020. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)

Pelosi said in a statement late Wednesday that amid the pandemic, urgent action continues to be needed to address this threat to the lives and livelihood of the American people.

On Friday, the House will take up the legislation with strong bipartisan support, she wrote.

House Republican leaders are also recommending passage of the bill, which passed 96-0 in the Senate, as is President Donald Trump.

The package is bigger than anything, I believe, ever passed in Congress, Trump told reporters in Washington.

The voice vote comes with potential complications because one lawmaker could call for a recorded, or roll call, vote, forcing lawmakers to vote in person.

Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), a critic of the bill, said on Wednesday he wouldnt block it if both parties supported the legislation.

If they have majorities to pass it, then objecting to unanimous consent merely delays the inevitable, Amash wrote in a statement on Twitter.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) speaks during a campaign event with Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at La Poste in Perry, Iowa, on Jan. 26, 2020. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Other critics signaled they might act, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).

Im open to asking for a recorded vote if necessary, Ocasio-Cortez told CNN.

The 880-page piece of legislation, called the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act or the CARES Act,' includes one-time payments of $1,200 to any American making less than $75,000 a year and $2,400 to married couples making up to $150,000.

Parents would receive $500 per child.

Individuals or couples making over the limits will still get money, but payments will be reduced by $5 for each $100 over the threshold they make.

The limits are tied to 2019 tax returns or, if theyre not available, 2018 tax returns. People who didnt file returns can use other forms such as a Social Security Benefit Statement.

The bill designates $250 billion for extending unemployment insurance, both to more workers and for more time.

Other aspects include $349 billion for loans for small businesses, $200 billion in tax assistance to small businesses, and $58 billion for airlines.
A County Derry couple whose original wedding date was cancelled due to the spread of coronavirus have managed to get married against the odds.

Rosemarie and Sean Lynn from Dungiven tied the knot in a simple ceremony at St Columbas Church, Long Tower after their original date fell victim to Covid-19.

The couple were married last Tuesday evening at 8:30pm, just hours before government regulations banned weddings were due to be introduced.

Rosemarie told the County Derry Post they were determined to go ahead with the ceremony.

She said: We got engaged in November and decided wed get married on the 20th of April this year.

A few weeks ago, our venue rang and said with coronavirus, they werent going to be open.

It was important for us to get married and have family and friends back at the house, so we brought it forward to Saturday the 28th of March.

Boris Johnson and the British government had other ideas, however, and Mondays announcement that weddings were banned left the couple numb.

Things changed when Sean and Rosemarie rang their driver to inform him of the developments.

Brian, our limousine driver and he said: Why dont you ring the council and see what they can do?

So I rang and said we had the papers, we were getting married in the church and the priest was willing to marry us, but we needed the go-ahead from the council. She said to leave it with her.

I was praying to St Anthony when the lady from the council rang back and said we had the go-ahead until 12 oclock that night to get married.

The short time frame became even tighter as Rosemaries fiance Sean finished a shift as an emergency medical technician with the Ambulance Service.

Rosemarie rang and said: youd better come home quickly because were getting married tonight, said Sean.

I rang the duty control manager and was shocked when they gave the go-ahead for special circumstances.

I had to come home, lift the wean, scrub up quickly and get into the chapel. Of course, she was 25 minutes late.

Denied the luxury of time that most brides have to prepare for their wedding, Rosemarie was forced to improvise.

She said: I got ready, did my own nails, my own make-up, put the fake tan on, did the whole thing myself.

I had a wee dress I got last year that I just loved. It wasnt even meant to be for a wedding, I just bought it because I liked it.

It felt like I was in a film. I wasnt nervous, I was excited, but it was almost an out-of-body experience.

The couples faith was central to their decision-making, and both were delighted with the simple ceremony.

Sean said: Im over the moon, I really am.

The big day would have been great to have, but the sacrament between me, her and God was the main thing.

The ceremony was beautiful, said Rosemarie.

It was the two of us, the priest, two witnesses and Seans wee boy and we all had to stand six feet apart and sit six feet apart in the limousine because of the regulations.

Although the couple were able to celebrate with a few drinks at Seans house, the honeymoon is on hold as he helps battle the threat of Covid-19.

He said: We have a few days to spend together and keep life simple. Im going out to C19 every day, so Im glad for a few hours of something positive.

Rosemarie is hugely proud of her husbands role.

She said: Hell be back out in a few days saving lives, thats what he loves to do.

He always was that kind of person who cares for people, and thats what its all about now.
Kabul [Afghanistan], Mar 26 (ANI): Indian ambassador to Afghanistan Vinay Kumar on Thursday visited the Sikh shrine that was attacked by terrorists in Kabul yesterday and left at least 27 dead.



"Amb Vinay Kumar visited the gurudwara and met community leaders, elders and families of the victims of terrorist attack. He shared their grief and offered condolences. He was told that the injured are receiving satisfactory treatment," the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan wrote on Twitter.

India also expressed condolences to the Sikh community in Afghanistan following the massacre.

"We convey our sincerest condolences to the immediate family members of the deceased and wish a speedy recovery to the injured. India stands ready to extend all possible assistance to the affected families of the Hindu and Sikh community of Afghanistan," the Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement.

"Such cowardly attacks on the places of religious worship of the minority community, especially at this time of COVID 19 pandemic, is reflective of the diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers," it read.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also expressed condolences to those killed in the ghastly incident.

"I am saddened by the terror attack at the Gurudwara in Kabul. I express my condolences to the families of all the deceased," the Prime Minister said during his interaction with people of his Lok Sabha constituency, Varanasi, via video conferencing on the same day. (ANI)


Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

A New Mexico district attorney says he was held in contempt of court after heeding the governors declaration of a public health emergency and failing to attend a hearing in Carlsbad earlier this month.

Timothy Rose is asking the state Supreme Court to require Judge Lisa Riley to rescind the contempt order, which was issued after Roses request to attend the hearing by phone was denied.

Tenth Judicial District Attorney Rose had agreed to take on a case in the 5th Judicial District, which prosecutors there were unable to accept because of a conflict of interest. The case was set for a dispositional hearing in Carlsbad on March 16, and because he is based nearly 250 miles away in Tucumcari, Rose asked Riley for permission to call in to the hearing. That request was denied, and the prosecutor planned to attend the hearing.

Everything changed dramatically on March 11, 2020, Rose wrote in the petition. On that day, the first New Mexicans tested positive for COVID-19 and the governor declared a public health emergency.

The Supreme Court would soon issue measures intended to reduce public health risks, including ordering judges to hold hearings in a way that would minimize contact among people, including the use of telephone and technology. Justices have since amended that order to require that hearings be held by phone and video to the fullest extent possible.

The prosecutor then filed a second motion asking to appear by phone, this time pointing out the Supreme Courts new directives regarding the virus. It was also denied.

He says he submitted documents to the court, believing in good faith that they satisfied the states obligations at the hearing, which he believed would take less than 10 minutes. Rose wrote that he did not disobey the court but determined that public health interests would be best served by presenting his position by phone or with documents.

The hearing was held without a prosecutor, and the judge reset it for the next morning after the defense raised new requests. This time, the prosecutor received permission to attend by phone. But after the hearing, the judge ordered him to pay a $250 fine, finding him in contempt for failing to appear.

Rose says the order conflicts with the Supreme Courts directives and the spirit of cooperation that is needed to combat a deadly disease in this time of crisis.
Each test costs as little as 4 or around Rs 350, while the testing devices themselves cost 100 or less than Rs 9,000.

Chennai: The biggest question perhaps in the minds of the millions under lockdown in various countries is this: Should I risk going to a hospital to test for the coronavirus COVID-19 if I have a fever or cough? Now, with a new home test kit developed by researchers in the UK, individuals can test themselves at home, once the device is made commercially available.

The test kit consists of a battery-operated handheld device which processes nasal or throat swabs inserted into it and delivers the results within just 30 minutes on a smartphone app that it connects to.

The test was developed by teams from three universities in the UK, Brunel University London, Lancaster University and University of Surrey.

Cost

The cost of each individual test, the researchers say, would be around 4 or around Rs 350. Initial reports in India pegged the cost of tests available here at Rs 4,500, whereas more recently it has come down to Rs 500.

As for the device itself, the cost is pegged at 100 (a little less than Rs 9,000), if produced commercially. The team has approached manufacturers to be able to mass produce the test kit, subject to approval from regulatory authorities such as the United States FDA (Food and Drug Administration), the European Medicines Agency, and UKs Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

Research

The researchers modified existing test kits to make it suitable to test for the SARS-Cov-2 virus which causes COVID19. The technology is based on a test that has been used for checking the spread of viruses in chickens in the Philippines.

Existing tests already approved for use from companies such as Cepheid and Mesa Biotech need the support of healthcare facilities, where their micro-labs can be set up. They are not suitable for home use. The test kit produced by the UK scientists has that advantage over the existing ones. It is inexpensive to boot, with each device having the capability to test up to six people or a large family at once.

Normally, anything like this (test kit) would have to go through clinical trials, Brunel University Londons Professor Wamadeva Balachandran was quoted as saying on the Brunel University website. But this is not a normal situation. According to the Imperial College model, this (coronavirus pandemic) might last for 18 months. And cases will rise over the next few months.

The researchers say the test kit can be made available to the public after regulatory approval within just a few weeks.

Speed is essential. With local hospitals help, we aim to do a limited amount of tests with available positive and negative samples, Professor Balachandran was quoted as saying.

Science

How does the test work? The UK test is more advanced than the tests already in use in the EU and China, which look for antibodies in the nasal and throat swabs. The antibodies indicate the presence of the virus in the body.

The UK test looks for the viral DNA itself in the samples. That is, it recognises the DNA structure of the virus to identify its presence. Its a direct test, rather than an indirect one where the presence of antibodies points to the presence of the virus.

In this way, it is more important diagnostically, as it can detect the virus in even individuals who show no symptoms at all.

This is especially significant given that we are now learning of community transmissions that have occurred in people with no history of contact with an infected person.

For example, this test could be used first and foremost by doctors. As doctors examine hundreds of patients every day, they are at the highest risk of contracting COVID-19. However, some of them may not show symptoms. If all the doctors test themselves with this device, the infected persons among them can be identified before the onset of symptoms and treated in isolation. This would prevent patients from potentially catching the infection from the doctors.

Whats more, if this test kit becomes widely available, thousands of people under lockdown could test themselves. It would not only give a truer picture of the number of infections in a country, but also bring out the extent of community transmissions.
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Samsung has officially launched the Galaxy Tab A 8.4 (2020) in the US. This is an affordable tablet designed for the masses. It offers LTE connectivity, strong battery life, and more all under $300.

Priced at $280, the Galaxy Tab A 8.4 (2020) features an 8.4-inch TFT display of 1920 x 1200 resolution. The system runs on the Exynos 7904 octa-core chipset paired with 3GB of RAM. The 32GB internal storage capacity can be expanded by up to 512GB via a dedicated microSD slot.

The new tablet packs a 5,000mAh battery which Samsung rates for up to 99 hours of music playback or 12 hours of video playback or 11 hours of internet use time on a single charge.

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The battery charges via a USB Type-C port and supports fast charging. Samsung claims up to 10 hours of battery life on typical use.

The new tablet is equipped with an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with autofocus and a 5-megapixel front-facing sensor. It supports FHD (1920 x 1080) video recording and UHD 4K (3840 x 2160) video playback at 30fps.

For connectivity, it has Bluetooth 5.0 LE and dual-band 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz Wi-Fi. This single-SIM tablet also offers LTE connectivity. Theres also a 3.5mm headphone jack and dual-speakers with Dolby Atmos.

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The Galaxy Tab A 8.4 (2020) has a full metal design with dimensions of 7.95 x 4.93 x 0.28 inches and weighs 10.9 oz (309 grams). Sensors onboard include GPS and accelerometer.

While Samsung isnt detailing the OS version, this tablet appears to be shipping with Android 9 out of the box. Thats disappointing considering how long Android 10 has been out. Hopefully, itll be upgraded to the latest Android version soon.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 19:04 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da3a34 1 National National-Police,Densus-88,JAD,Islamic-State,terrorism,Central-Java,argo-yuwono Free

The National Police have arrested four individuals allegedly affiliated with the Islamic State-linked Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD) terror network in Batang regency, Central Java.

The police's Densus 88 counterterrorism squad raided a house in Subak subdistrict of the regency on Wednesday afternoon, during which the personnel made the arrests, National Police spokesperson Brig. Gen. Argo Yuwono said.

They are allegedly members of the Semarang and Temanggung chapters of JAD in Central Java as well as the Makassar chapter of the group in South Sulawesi, Argo said during a press conference on Thursday.

Densus 88 personnel initially found five alleged terrorists at the house, but one of them had tried to retaliate by attacking the officers with a samurai sword, prompting the police to take lethal action against the person, Argo claimed.

Read also: Pro-IS deportees played major role in radicalizing West Sumatra groups: IPAC report

The police later carried the attacker's dead body to Bhayangkara Hospitals mortuary in Semarang, Central Java.

Therefore we only detained four alleged terrorists in the operation. They are now under interrogation, Argo added.

The police also gathered a machete, a samurai sword, several jerry cans containing suspicious liquid, 10 boxes of matches, 10 electrical resistors, four smartphones and 24 small bottles as evidence from the operation. (glh)
A British newspaper said Thursday its correspondent in Egypt was forced to leave the country after authorities revoked her credentials over a report on coronavirus infections there.

"Ruth Michaelson, who has lived in and reported from Egypt since 2014, was advised last week by western diplomats that the country's security services wanted her to leave immediately," The Guardian newspaper said.

Earlier this month, the journalist published an article citing Canadian epidemiologists who estimated Egypt's COVID-19 infections could have surpassed 19,000.

Egypt's health ministry has declared 495 coronavirus cases. Speculation has circulated on social media that the real figures are higher. Egyptian authorities accused Michaelson of "intentional bad faith to harm Egyptian interests".

The Guardian said the authorities demanded a retraction or an official apology.

It said it offered to publish a written response from Egypt to the article or the epidemiologists' study but received no reply to that offer.

Michaelson left Egypt on March 20, according to the British daily. New York-based watchdog the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) deplored Michaelson's "expulsion".

"Accurate information about the COVID-19 pandemic... should not be stifled for political convenience," the CPJ's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, Sherif Mansour, said in a statement.

On Sunday, Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said his government had dealt with the novel coronavirus pandemic with "full transparency" and denied the true infection rate was being suppressed.

Egypt has increasingly targeted journalists in an ongoing crackdown against government dissidents since the 2013 military ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

The country ranks 163rd out of 180 countries in the 2019 Reporters Without Borders world press freedom index.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Australia's internet capacity is feeling the strain of the escalating coronavirus outbreak as the National Broadband Network struggles to cope with the overwhelming demand of those working from home.

Popular online streaming services Netflix and Stan were asked by the federal government last week to reduce data amounts for streaming videos as the number of Australians working remotely due to the coronavirus lockdown grows.

Netflix has since reduced its traffic by 25 per cent across its entire service for the next month by removing its highest bandwidth streams to ease internet capacity.

Some subscribers are already feeling the effects where it's taking up to 24 hours in regional areas to download shows.

Netflix has also reduced its traffic in other areas worldwide where it's needed, including New Zealand, Europe, India, Israel, Argentina and Chile.

Australia's internet capacity is feeling the strain of the escalating coronavirus outbreak as the National Broadband Network struggles to cope with the overwhelming demand of those working from home

'We are living through a global crisis, and we all have a responsibility to help where we can,' Netflix vice-president of content delivery Ken Florance said in a statement earlier this week.

'If you are particularly tuned into video quality, you may notice a very slight decrease in quality within each resolution. But you will still get the video quality you paid for,'

Among those frustrated with Australian's crippled internet capacity is ABC News presenter Jeremy Fernandez.

'Is anyone else experiencing incredibly bad home internet? I'm still (wilfully) on ADSL, which is better than my neighbour's NBN - but we may soon need to resort to carrier pigeons,' he tweeted on Thursday afternoon.

Mr Fernandez was inundated with comments.

'I'm in a regional area. You have no idea... took 24 hours to load Netflix,' one woman replied.

Among those frustrated with Australian's crippled internet capacity is ABC News presenter Jeremy Fernandez

Last week, the NBN announced it was responding to the shift in Australia's internet usage patterns in the wake of the pandemic.

It plans to limit non-essential maintenance to minimise planned outages in the weeks ahead to maintain network availability.

'These are unprecedented times and we are already seeing a steady increase in demand on the NBN, and this is set to continue,' chief executive officer Stephen Rue said.

'We are actively working with retailers and have the complete support of our government stakeholders to ensure we do everything possible to optimise the NBN to support the expected increase in residential use.'

This week, the NBN unveiled new measures to support increasing capacity and data demand for satellite services in regional and remote Australia.

This week, the NBN unveiled new measures to support increasing capacity and data demand for satellite services in regional and remote Australia (stock image)

IPSTAR Broadband is educating regional and rural customers on how to best use their internet when working from home so they can remain connected.

The internet provider has published several e-books and blog posts covering topics such as optimal internet performance and saving data when streaming videos.

'It is more difficult for people in regional and rural locations to make this transition as they often have satellite internet plans with a limited monthly data allowance,' managing Director, Shannon Fisher said.

A spokesman for Stan said it was working with the federal government on last week's request.

'Stan is engaged with the government and NBN Co to ensure that our content is delivered to consumers with the most efficient use of bandwidth while continuing to deliver the quality levels that are consistent with each of our plans,' he told the Guardian.

A Foxtel spokesman added: 'We are working with government and will make any changes necessary to support the national effort. That said, much of Foxtel's broadcast service operates independent of the internet using satellite and customers with an HD subscription will be able to continue enjoying uninterrupted HD and Ultra HD broadcasts regardless of any decisions.'
Grass Valley, California therapist Dr. Lin Jovanovic just launched a new online counseling service for couples that need help to move forward through some of the obstacles they may face during the Coronavirus crisis.

GRASS VALLEY, CA / ACCESSWIRE / March 25, 2020 / Dr. Lin Jovanovic, a couples therapist in Grass Valley, California, announced the launch of an updated range of online counseling services for couples struggling with their relationship during the Coronavirus crisis. Dr. Jovanovic is an experienced therapist who specializes in online counseling or online therapy and online teaching.

More information can be found at https://www.relationshipexplorations.com

The outbreak of COVID-19 can take a major toll on relationships with many couples suddenly being forced to spend days or weeks together at home. The newly launched online counseling services by Dr. Lin Jovanovic aim to help couples restore their strong bond and love their relationship again.

During the Coronavirus crisis, the increasing time that people are now forced to spend at home is likely to create tension in their marriage or relationship. The involuntary extended period of time that couples are spending at home with their children and the uncertainty of one's health and financial situation can lead to stress, anxiety, and increased levels of arguing.

In difficult situations, it is extremely important to get help for one's relationship, and online couples therapy could be a solution.

Dr. Lin Jovanovic offers online couples therapy to help couples improve their relationship and quality of life during the Coronavirus crisis. She provides a caring, supportive and non-judgmental environment to help couples find a way through any difficulties they may be facing in their relationship.

Dr. Jovanovic is a world expert in Couples and Relationship Therapy. She has over 25 years of Clinical therapy experience and is one one of the pioneers of distant learning, online teaching, and e-learning.

Story continues

The therapist said: "I believe that therapy is not something done to treat you. It is something you do to improve yourself. I work with individuals and couples to achieve their goals. You deserve quality couples therapy! I am uniquely trained to deliver that to my clients, whether traditional and polyamorous couples."

Interested parties can find more by visiting the above-mentioned website or accessing https://plainspokenparenting.com

Contact Info:

Name: Lin Jovanovic

Email: Send Email

Organization: Dr. Lin Jovanovic

Address: 204 West Main Street, Grass Valley, California 95945, United States

Phone: +1-530-446-1930

Website: https://www.relationshipexplorations.com/

SOURCE: Dr. Lin Jovanovic





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Rebel Wilson may be one of the most popular comedians in Hollywood.

But in a hilarious new trailer for the Bridesmaids star's new Channel Seven show Pooch Perfect, her mother Sue Bownds is left unimpressed by her jokes.

Rebel, 40, shared the clip on Instagram on Thursday, and it showed her mother giving her a 'celebrity slap down'.

Giving her a 'celebrity slap down!' Rebel Wilson's mother Sue hilariously rolls her eyes at her daughter after being left unimpressed by her jokes on Pooch Perfect in a new promo clip for the show

'I hope when you watch this show that you'll like some of my jokes,' Rebel says in the promo for the program.

Her mother remains silent, but rolls her eyes.

In a caption for the clip, Rebel explained that it was 'classic mum', adding that the show will be aired at 8pm on Thursday due to a news special on the coronavirus.

'Classic': In a caption for the clip, Rebel explained that it was 'classic mum', adding that the show will be aired at 8pm on Thursday due to a news special on the coronavirus

Family program: Pooch Perfect follows ten professional pet stylists who perform dog grooming challenges

Sue is a professional dog handler, so her involvement in the show is no surprise.

Pooch Perfect follows ten professional pet stylists who perform dog grooming challenges.

Previously speaking about her childhood, Rebel said her family would travel around Australia for dog shows.

'My childhood was full of weekend adventures at dog shows all around Australia and my family had a business selling pet products out of a caravan - such as leads, treats and the best styling equipment available,' she recently said in a statement.

Interesting past: Previously speaking about her childhood, Rebel said her family would travel around Australia for dog shows

Despite Rebel's passion for the dog grooming industry, Pooch Perfect has struggled in the ratings.

Earlier this month, one episode drew in just a measly 388,000 viewers in its prime time slot.

After losing almost half of the viewers that tuned into the show's premiere, industry commentator and Mediaweek editor James Manning told The Daily Telegraph earlier this month that the disappointing results might be down to Rebel.

'Despite reasonable figures for the first episode, the audience drop off has been dramatic for weeks two and three,' he said.

'The series indicates that Rebel Wilson is yet to prove herself a major drawcard for Australian TV audiences.'

The program launched on February 27 with 624,000 viewers.
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / March 25, 2020 / The Law Offices of Vincent Wong announce that class actions have commenced on behalf of certain shareholders in the following companies. If you suffered a loss you have until the lead plaintiff deadline to request that the court appoint you as lead plaintiff. There will be no obligation or cost to you.

Westpac Banking Corporation (WBK)

If you suffered a loss, contact us at: http://www.wongesq.com/pslra-1/westpac-banking-corporation-loss-submission-form?prid=5805&wire=1

Lead Plaintiff Deadline: March 30, 2020

Class Period: November 11, 2015 to November 19, 2019

Allegations against WBK include that: (1) contrary to Australian law, the Company failed to report over 19.5 million international funds transfer instructions to the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre ("AUSTRAC"); (2) the Company did not appropriately monitor and assess the ongoing money laundering and terrorism financing risks associated with movement of money into and out of Australia; (3) the Westpac did not pass on requisite information about the source of funds to other banks in the transfer chain; (4) despite being aware of the heightened risks, the Company did not carry out appropriate due diligence on transactions in South East Asia and the Philippines that had known financial indicators relating to child exploitation risks; (5) the Company's Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Policy Program was inadequate to identify, mitigate and manage money laundering and terrorism financing risks; and (6) as a result, Defendants' statements about its business, operations, and prospects, were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times.

Becton Dickinson & Company (BDX)

If you suffered a loss, contact us at: http://www.wongesq.com/pslra-1/becton-dickinson-company-loss-submission-form?prid=5805&wire=1

Lead Plaintiff Deadline: April 27, 2020

Class Period: November 5, 2019 to February 5, 2020

Story continues

Allegations against BDX include that: (1) certain of Becton's Alaris infusion pumps experienced software errors and alarm prioritization issues; (2) as a result, the Company was investing in remediation efforts to address these product issues, rather than a software upgrade to "make enhancements;" (3) the Company was reasonably likely to face regulatory delays in connection with the software remediation; (4) as a result of the foregoing, Becton was reasonably likely to recall certain of its Alaris infusion pumps; and (5) as a result of the foregoing, Defendants' positive statements about the Company's business, operations, and prospects were materially false and/or misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis.

XP Inc. (XP)

If you suffered a loss, contact us at: http://www.wongesq.com/pslra-1/xp-inc-loss-submission-form?prid=5805&wire=1

Lead Plaintiff Deadline: May 20, 2020

Class Period: or otherwise acquired XP's securities pursuant and/or traceable to the registration statement and related prospectus issued in connection with XP's December 2019 initial public offering.

Allegations against XP include that: (1) XP engaged in undisclosed related party transactions; (2) XP failed to disclose its common and large system failures and connected losses; (3) XP's aggressive IFA strategy was and is tenuous; (4) XP had material weaknesses; (5) XP fired its previous accounting firm due to that firm finding and disclosing material weaknesses; and (6) as a result, Defendants' public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

To learn more contact Vincent Wong, Esq. either via email vw@wongesq.com or by telephone at 212.425.1140.

Vincent Wong, Esq. is an experienced attorney who has represented investors in securities litigations involving financial fraud and violations of shareholder rights. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

CONTACT:

Vincent Wong, Esq.

39 East Broadway

Suite 304

New York, NY 10002

Tel. 212.425.1140

Fax. 866.699.3880

E-Mail: vw@wongesq.com

SOURCE: The Law Offices of Vincent Wong





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Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy will supply 25 SG 4.5-145 for one of Vietnam's largest wind farms.

With a total capacity of 113 MW, the Hoa Thang 1.2 wind farm will generate enough electricity to meet the demands of over 240,000 Vietnamese following its commissioning in 2021.

The deal also marks the largest order in the country for Siemens Gamesa. Additionally, the company has secured a long-term 10-year service contract.

The project, located in the Bac Binh district, Binh Thuan province, on the South-Central coast of Vietnam, is developed by Hoa Thang Energy Joint Stock Company, a special-purpose vehicle of Vietnams construction group Trading Construction Works Organization (WTO) which has close to 60 years construction experience.

Hoa Thang Energy is a pioneer of renewable energy in Vietnam, where the fast-growing economy has seen electricity demand rise by around 10% annually. The Vietnamese government estimates that total power generating capacity will reach 125-130 GW by 2030, up from 46 GW in 2018. In order to mitigate climate concerns, the government also aims for renewable energy to account for 15-20% of its total energy output by 2030 and has established a target of developing 6 GW of wind power capacity by 2030.

With an accumulated installation of 101 GW, Siemens Gamesa can leverage its global expertise and footprint to partner with Hoa Thang Energy to develop one of the largest wind farms in Vietnam. As market scale and financing are helping to unlock potential in Vietnam, we are committed to supporting our Vietnamese customers to accelerate the penetration of renewable energy and bring clean power for generations to come, said Richard Paul Luijendijk, CEO of Siemens Gamesas Onshore business unit in APAC.

With deep rooting in Vietnam, we are pleased to partner with Siemens Gamesa and leverage its industry-leading experience and reputation to develop renewable energy in the country. We selected Siemens Gamesa as the most appropriate supplier for our first wind farm project. This first ever cooperation between the two companies will lay a good foundation for us to further explore the wind market in Vietnam, said Nguyen Thanh Oai, CEO of Trading Construction Works Organization.

Siemens Gamesa has been expanding in the Asia Pacific markets since the 1980s and has installed more than 8.4 GW of onshore turbines in China, Pakistan, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand. In the offshore segment, the company successfully completed the installation of Taiwans first offshore wind power project in 2019 (128 MW) and in addition reached close to 2 GW of firm orders. The company also signed preferred supplier agreements for an additional 755 MW combined volume in Japan and Taiwan.-TradeArabia News Service
The Conroe City Council will go against the Texas Constitution and push its special election to fill the unexpired term of Councilman Jody Czajkoski back to November in light of the new coronavirus crisis.

Additionally, the council agreed to push its general election back to November as well.

The elections were originally slated for May 2.

Gov. Greg Abbott issued a proclamation March 16 allowing municipalities to postpone upcoming May 2 elections until November. The move came after Abbott issued a disaster declaration which helped in him issuing the proclamation.

As of Wednesday, Montgomery County had logged 31 cases of COVID-19.

However, according to Texas Constitution, special elections must be held within 120 days after a resignation. Czajkoski triggered the special election when he resigned from his position to challenge Mayor Toby Powell who is seeking reelection.

City Attorney Marc Winberry said the 120 days expires June 13. Winberry said while going past the 120 could trigger litigation, he said it was unlikely.

I believe, as the governor has deferred to local authorities to assess the situation, that if the city council makes a determination that because of the current health and safety emergency that is it just not safe to conduct the election within 120 day window, the (Texas Attorney General and Secretary of State) will honor the city council determination on that.

Council members agree.

I think it is what we need to do, said Czajkoski, who first pitched the idea to postpone the elections March 16.

As of Wednesday, Montgomery County had logged 31 cases of COVID-19.

According to information from the city of Conroe, former Councilwoman Marsha Porter, who first filed to run for Place 2 but withdrew from that race to file for Place 5, Frank Jackson, Clarence Lewis Jr., Frances McDougal, Keith Armstrong and Kelley Inman have tossed their hat in the ring for the unexpired Place 5 term.

In the May 2 general election, Todd Yancey and Brandon Polk had filed to challenge incumbent Duane Ham for Place 1 and Carl White and Curt Maddux have filed for Place 2 which is being vacated by term-limited Seth Gibson. Czajkoski and Powell will go head to head for the mayors seat.

cdominguez@hcnonline.com
Sweeping changes are to be made to the health service in the coming days and weeks as the response to the Covid-19 pandemic steps up.

It was just three weeks ago that I interviewed the medical director of the Northern Trust about the impending challenges facing the health service in the face of this new virus.

At the time, he warned that doctors in Northern Ireland could be faced with rationing intensive care beds.

As unbelievable as it was that a senior health official was making such an admission, it now appears that the warning was the tip of the iceberg.

According to Richard Pengelly, permanent secretary for the Department of Health, Northern Irelands existing hospital estate may not have sufficient capacity to provide critical care to the number of patients who will require it at the peak of the outbreak.

As a result, the entire structure of the health service is to be overhauled, with emergency departments, day case and outpatient units, and minor injury units all earmarked for closure.

Large regional respiratory hospitals are to be set up and resources will be shared across Northern Ireland.

Under ordinary circumstances, such changes to the health and social care system would only come after months of consultation.

We do not have that luxury when it comes to dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic that is threatening the future of the health service and the lives of up to 15,000 people in Northern Ireland.

The peak of the outbreak, as referred to by Mr Pengelly, is almost upon us, so changes to the health service must be done urgently - there is no time for consultation with the public.

Of course, there are concerns that some of the measures being put in place may become permanent.

The future of the emergency departments at Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry and the Downe Hospital in Downpatrick were already uncertain before all of this happened.

Health Minister Robin Swann provided no reassurance this morning when he refused to give Stormont health committee members a guarantee that all services will resume after the Covid-19 pandemic comes to an end.

Just as no-one could have predicted the devastation that would be wreaked across the globe by coronavirus in a matter of months, it is impossible to predict its impact on the health service in years to come.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- As New York Citys teachers and students continue to adjust to remote learning during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, the city is still working to distribute necessary technology to the estimated 300,000 students who currently lack an internet-connected device.

The Department of Education (DOE) is in the early stages of distributing 300,000 LTE-enabled iPads, provided by Apple and T-Mobile, to students who lack the necessary technology in this new learning environment, which began on Monday. The first batch of 25,000 iPads -- reserved for a priority group of students in temporary housing, such as students in shelter and foster care -- is being delivered this week.

The city expects another 50,000 iPads to be delivered to student homes via FedEx next week and each following week on a rolling basis, with priority given to students most in need.

Families looking to obtain a device should fill out the Remote Learning Device Request form on the DOE website.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***

While the DOE estimates that 300,000 students citywide lack access to an internet-enabled device in their home, the department could not provide borough-specific data regarding the number of such students on Staten Island.

In addition to the iPads, the DOE has loaned families available school-based laptops, tablets, and Chromebooks across the city, with paper packets distributed to supplement online learning for students waiting to receive the necessary technology.

The department is also working with internet providers like Charter and Altice to provide families with free WiFi during the remote learning period.

FAMILIES SCRAMBLE TO SECURE LAPTOPS

Last week, Staten Island parents were scrambling to secure electronic devices to allow their kids to participate in online learning.

Nikkeya Gulley told the Advance that she desperately needed a computer that would be used by her five children, including three at PS 44 in pre-K, kindergarten and first grade. She explained that the only device her children would be able to use currently to log in for schoolwork is her cell phone.

I have to do my own schooling online because its closed, so how are they going to do their stuff online because my phone is overloaded? she asked. Truth be told, I think this whole thing should be shut down until they figure out what theyre doing and how things will be working correctly for these kids.

A staff member at PS 44 told parents waiting outside the school last week that there were very minimal amounts of laptops" for students, and asked that parents who genuinely need the technology to take one, depending on availability.

Some of the parents who arrived at PS 44 early to pick up other resources were able to snag one of the limited laptops available onsite.

Dyan Wyler, who has two children in third grade at PS 44, said she was lucky to get one of the few laptops that the Mariners Harbor school had available. She was one of the first parents to enter the school when the doors opened at 8:30 a.m.

Jackie Campbell, who has a fifth-grader at PS 44 and an eighth-grader at Markham Intermediate School (I.S. 51) in Graniteville, said she was also able to get one of the few laptops. When asked how both of her children will be using the laptop, she said: Well figure it out.

***

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The Uttarakhand government said Thursday it will make hoarding of essential items by shopkeepers a criminal offence and ensure that there is an adequate supply of food and essentials during the lockdown over Covid-19.

Subodh Uniyal, minister for agriculture in the state said that chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat will soon announce steps to check the hoarding of essential items by shopkeepers.

We are trying everything possible to check that there is ample supply for food grains in the state As a step towards this, the chief minister who also holds the portfolio of food and civil supplies will soon issue an order making hoarding or overpricing by shopkeepers a criminal offence, said Uniyal.

The Assembly session ended yesterday and Uniyal did not say whether the government will issue an ordinance.

Pointing out challenges in ensuring food supply in the Himalayan state amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Uniyal said that initially when the state announced a lockdown till March 31, trucks with essential food items were being stopped at the Uttar Pradesh border.

After the janta curfew, trucks carrying essential food supplies entering the state from Udham Singh Nagar district were being stopped by officials at the Uttar Pradesh border. The matter was then raised at the chief secretary level and then orders were given to the concerned district magistrates to coordinate. Trucks are now being allowed to enter the state, added the minister.

Officials from the department of food, civil supplies and consumer affairs said that the state has enough rice for the next three months.

Distributing items like rice, wheat, pulses to 23 lakh ration card holders among other things, the state approximately needs 1,83,000 quintal of wheat and 2,34,000 quintals of rice and around 18,000 quintals of pulses (lentils and split Bengal gram) for one month.

At present, the Uttarakhand government has around 7,70,000 quintals of rice which is sufficient for three months, while there is enough wheat for one month.

A senior official from the department of food, civil supplies and consumer affairs who did want to be named, said, We have enough rice and pulses for the months of April-June. We also have enough wheat for the month of April and order and payment has been done with the Food Corporation of India to procure more wheat for May and June. The wheat will be delivered to the state within one week.

Chief minister Rawat took stock of the situation from all district magistrates on Thursday and asked them to ensure the availability of essential goods for common people in the lockdown period.

People should be assured that there is no shortage of any essential items. The common people should be motivated to stay at home and follow social distancing, Rawat said.

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European stocks turned choppy again yesterday with bourses across the region wiping off most of their early morning gains as a sharp rise in the coronavirus death toll brought back panic. (stock photo)

European stocks turned choppy again yesterday with bourses across the region wiping off most of their early morning gains as a sharp rise in the coronavirus death toll brought back panic.

World markets enjoyed their best one-day percentage gain since the 2008 financial crisis on Tuesday, adding roughly $3.4 trillion (3.13 trillion), as the US readied to approve a massive stimulus package to curb the pandemic's economic toll.

Irish shares outperformed the European market generally, led by a huge 21pc swing higher for hotel chain Dalata and strong support for Irish banks with Bank of Ireland up 7.94pc and AIB up 7.82pc versus the previous close.

However, fears returned to the markets after Spain reported 738 fatalities from the coronavirus in the past 24 hours, the steepest increase since the epidemic hit the country. The pan-European Stoxx 600 index was up just 0.5pc, retreating from a more than 4pc jump in the morning.

Cyclical sectors such as energy and travel and leisure were still the biggest boosts to the index.

European airlines, one of the worst hit sectors from travel restrictions and evaporating passenger numbers over fears of contagion, have appealed to governments for bailout packages to prevent an industry collapse.

Air France-KLM, Aer Lingus owner IAG , Ryanair and EasyJet gained between 1pc and 8pc amid the broader rebound.

A London-based trader said the change in sentiment during the day was in part due to a sharp rise in the European death toll from the coronavirus and also reflected that investors were nervous ahead of US Senate's vote on the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package.

European stocks surged in recent days on stimulus measures but are far from covering their steep 25pc-plus losses from a February peak as analysts continue to take a red pen to their estimates.

With the pandemic still far from contained in Europe, companies have warned of lower profits, layoffs and a halt in business activity amid widespread national lockdowns.

UBS said it expects a deep recession which will see Europe's earnings fall by a third in 2020.

Additional reporting Reuters
Nepal has decided to to reopen its key border points with China to ease the supply of essential goods in the wake of coronavirus pandemic.

A high-level committee led by Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Ishwar Pokhrel has decided to reopen two border points with China -- Tatopani and Rasuwagadhi -- by completing the necessary protocols at the earliest, the officials said on Thursday.

The border points were closed due to the devastating earthquakes of 2015.

The decision to open the key border points comes at a time when the country is facing a total lockdown amid fears of coronavirus spread.

So far, three persons have tested positive for coronavirus in Nepal, all foreign returnees.

The government on Monday announced a week-long nationwide lockdown to battle the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the government airlifted 59 tourists stranded due to lockdown at Pokhara, the tourist hub of westen Nepal.

Most of them are French nationals.

Similarly, on Wednesday 40 tourists and 20 Nepali mountain guides stranded at Jomsom, a mountain destination in North-West Nepal, have been rescued.

The government had stopped issuing trekking permits on March 20 as part of the preliminary measures to control the flow of tourists into the country amid coronavirus scare.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
CHICO, Calif. - A Chico solar business donated 120 unused N95 masks to Enloe Medical Center. They also donated sanitizing wipes.

Alternative Energy Systems (AES), a North Valley-based solar installer and servicer, donated the masks to help the healthcare workers who need them during this time of potential shortage.

Company officials said they were adhering to the California Governor's stay-at-home mandate, so do not need the masks for their own business right now.

The company laid off over 60 percent of its staff by canceling all of their installation work, which was not deemed to be "essential." The business is maintaining its solar/storage consultations appointing and planning for specific solar, battery storage and generator needs. These appointments are now all being conducted virtually instead of in person at home or in their retail showroom.

Tim Hamor and Lance McClung, who started the Chico-based company in 2003, said to properly help the community, it was best to limit their public-facing activities, even though many other companies are still using what they call the "construction" loophole in the executive order.

We are looking forward to being out in the public installing our products as soon as it is safe to do so, the owners said.
I have a lot of friends at school that count on me. Im more than just a therapy dog to a lot of children; Im also a best friend and something they can lean on during times like this. Check out this video of my drive by visits. Stay positive as the sun will rise again and we WILL get through this. Please share for the world to see. #Takethatcorona #Coronachallenge #LittleCoronaChallenge Posted by Cole the Deaf Dog- The Team Cole Project on Saturday, March 21, 2020

When Vineland schools closed in mid-March due to growing coronavirus concerns, music teacher Chris Hannah had to figure out a way to continue to reach his students who relied on daily visits with his deaf therapy dog, Cole.

I left Dr. William Mennies School very sad today, Hannah, writing as if he was Cole, said in a Facebook post on March 16. Our school is closed for a month which means Im not going to be seeing all my friends each and every day... Many students rely on me to help them overcome daily obstacles of anxiety and emotion, but I believe in my heart that we can all persevere through this.

Since the schools closing, Hannah and Cole have been doing virtual Cole visits and bedtime stories via YouTube to help the kids cope with not only this sudden change in their daily routines, but missing out on one-on-one time with one of their best friends.

Recently, The Team Cole Project did a drive-by visit to many of the students so they could see him in person. Some of the kids made posters, which were hung on doors and mailboxes, and others decorated their driveways to welcome Cole.

"During the school day there are so many children that rely on Cole and his inspiration to get them through the school day," said Hannah. "At a time like this, I wanted to do what I could to help their minds be at ease. It was very humbling to see the spark that it generated for my students."

Cole, who was adopted by Hannah in April 2017 from the South Jersey Regional Animal Shelter, spreads a message to students here, and beyond: a disability is not an inability.

Lori M. Nichols may be reached at lnichols@njadvancemedia.com. Follow Lori on Instagram at @photog_lori and Twitter @photoglori. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Officials at Elizabethtown College put their Educate for Service motto in action recently to help combat the fallout of the coronavirus crisis.

Dining services, under the direction of Eric Turzai, donated more than 500 pounds of fresh produce, dairy and dessert items on Friday to the Water Street Mission in Lancaster.

The items were surplus to the colleges needs with the campus shutdown to all but essential personnel.

It prompted Executive Chef Tate Morgan and other staff members to take action.

You can only send back so much food, so each day after the students went home we were tweaking our inventory. Some food we could store and some was taken home by staff, Morgan said.

Ultimately, we had an abundance. [Catering sous chef] Kristen Meckley had a connection with donation centers through her experience at Hotel Hershey. We just started sorting through it.

Morgan said a typical day on campus translates to between 800 to 1,000 students being served per meal, mainly at the Marketplace on the second floor of Baugher Student Center.

Thats in addition to any food earmarked for gatherings like teachers meetings.

 PennLive looks to spotlight coronavirus heroes

 PennLives complete coronavirus coverage

Morgan, who grew up near Pittsburgh and worked in executive dining for Bank of America, Hershey Foods and others, said the remaining volume was too large to donate to other non-profit organizations that the college routinely works with.

We only send things that were sealed. Theres nothing like giving back and doing this kind of stuff, Morgan said. We have huge box trucks here, so we just started piling it in.

Keri Straub, Senior Director of Marketing & Communications at Elizabethtown College, applauded the effort by all members of dining services, including catering manager Samantha Brant.

They looked at what aspects of the community we can assist. Who is in need right now and how can we help? said Straub.

How can we serve them immediately? Our dining crew is really a group of tremendous people. In these challenging times, it is these acts of generosity that define the E-town Colleges Educate for Service motto.

Straub estimated that the donations would serve more than 1,400 local community members per day.

Follow Eric Epler on Twitter -- @threejacker
This is a global crisis affecting the whole world. Africa, however, will be hit harder with a heavy and durable economic toll, which will threaten progress and prospects, widen inequalities between and within countries, and worsen current fragilities.

African countries need support in preparing for the health crisis, and for the economic fallout. The measures being taken in Asia, Europe and North America such as physical (social) distancing and regular hand washing will be a particular challenge for countries with limited internet connectivity, dense populations, unequal access to water and limited social safety nets.

In line with the steps being taken across the globe, African countries are preparing for the worst effects of this pandemic.

Here are the three things the G20 must do:

1. Support for immediate health and human response

a. G20 leaders should support and encourage open trade corridors, especially for pharmaceuticals and other health supplies, as well as support for the upgrade of health infrastructure and provide direct support to existing facilities. This will enable countries to focus on prevention as much as possible and start building curative facilities. Support should be provided to WHO and CDC Africa with funds channeled through the Global Fund, GAVI and others.

b. G20 leaders should support public health campaigns and access to information including through an expedited private sector partnership for internet connectivity to enable economic activity to continue during social distancing measures and to support the effective sharing of information about the pandemic.

2. Deliver an immediate emergency economic stimulus to African governments in their efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic

a. G20 leaders should announce a US$100 billion (in addition to the $50bn already committed) to fund the immediate health response, social safety nets for the most vulnerable, feeding for out of school children, and to protect jobs. As a proportion of GDP this is consistent with measures taken in other regions. To ensure immediate fiscal space and liquidity, this package should include a waiver of all interest payments, estimated at US$44 billion for 2020.

b. G20 leaders should support a waiver on principal and interest for African Fragile States such as the Sahel, Central African Republic and others who are already struggling with the burden of debt and have limited fiscal space.

c. G20 leaders should endorse for enhanced predictability, transparency and accountability of financial flows so finance ministers can plan effectively and civil society stakeholders can help track flows to ensure reach those most in need.

3. Implement emergency measures to protect 30 million jobs immediately at risk across the continent, particularly in the tourism and airline sectors.

a. G20 leaders should take measures to support agricultural imports and exports, the pharmaceutical sector and the banking sector. An extended credit facility, refinancing schemes and guarantee facilities should be used to waive, restructure and provide additional liquidity in 2020.

b. G20 leaders should support a liquidity line available to the private sector operating in Africa to ensure essential purchases can continue and all SMEs dependent on trade can continue to function.

c. G20 leaders should ensure that national and regional stimulus packages covering private and financial systems include measures to support African businesses through allowing for the suspension of leasing, debt and other repayments to global businesses.
The move comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson implemented a nationwide lockdown at the beginning of this week as part of ramped up efforts to enforce social distancing measures and contain the spread of Covid-19.

Under the extraordinary measure, people are only permitted to leave their homes to buy basic necessities such as food and medicine "as infrequently as possible", take one form of exercise in public a day and access medical help or provide care to a vulnerable person.

Those designated as key workers - including NHS staff, teachers and postal, transport and utility workers - are also permitted to travel to and from work and to take their children to school using necessary modes of transport.

Police have been granted the power to impose fines on people found contravening the new rules and disperse group gatherings.

The Government has committed to reviewing the lockdown measures in three weeks and relaxing them if possible.

Meanwhile, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK has passed 9,500. The death toll nationwide now stands at 463, three weeks after the first coronavirus-related death in the UK was reported on March 5.
More restrictions on visits to prisons in Portlaoise and other parts of the country prisons have been announced by the Irish Prison Service and the Government.

The restrictions are effective from yesterday Wednesday March 25, confirmed in a Government press statement this morning.

"To prevent the spread of coronavirus in a prison system, restrictions are being introduced. One adult per visit and each visitor will have to fill out a questionnaire. Visits will be time-limited to 15 minutes per visit, and visitors who appear to have flu-like symptoms may be refused entry," a spokesperson said in a live broadcast this morning.

The Irish Prison Service Service has detailed the restrictions in a statement on its website.

"Please be advised that in consideration of Public Health advises the following further restriction is to be introduced across the Prisons Estate from Wednesday 25 March, 2020 namely  All visits to prisoners are to be restricted to one adult per visit.

"The other previously announced restrictions in relation to social distancing etc., remain in place.

"The measures listed below are necessary to reduce risk of the virus spreading to visitors, prisoners, prisoners families, staff and the wider community," they said.

Visits will be restricted to 1 visit per prisoner per week.

A limit of 1 adult per visit will apply.

No under 18s will be admitted.

Normal social distancing as advised by public health to apply including:no kissing

no handshaking

sneezing and coughing into elbow sleeve

all visits conducted at a distance of 1 meter

Visits will be time limited to 15 minutes per visit.

Prisons will operate to a daily maximum of 80% of their visiting capacity.

Visitors that appear to have flu like symptoms may be refused entry.

"We recognise that such a step may be challenging for families and friends, but we are also cognizant of our priority and responsibility to protect the well-being of those in our care and those in our employment within the prison. The virus can be spread through community transmission and, within the confines of a prison, there is obviously an increased risk of a rapid spread of infection."

The Irish Prison Service are appealing that members of the public carefully consider visiting the prison and refrain from visiting the Prisons unless absolutely necessary," they said.

They say no prisoner will be granted early or temporary release if it compromises public safety.

""The primary factor in the consideration of any prisoner for early release is public safety and no prisoner would be granted temporary release who poses an undue risk to public safety".

The measures are in line with the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) and Government recommendations, and in the interests of the public health and the health and safety of prisoners in our care.

"These are pre-emptive measures to contain and decrease the likelihood of a potential spread of COVID-19 into the prison. The unique environment of a prison and the sheer numbers and diversity of people who pass through our prisons make vigilance around infection prevention and control absolutely necessary," the service said.

"The confirmation of a case of COVID-19 in a prison setting would present significant challenges for prison management in terms of controlling the spread of the virus amongst staff and prisoners, and the provision of appropriate medical treatment to affected persons. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation." they said.
spacex is manufacturing its own hand sanitizer and face shields to help combat an ongoing coronavirus pandemic according to a new report.

An internal memo reviewed by CNBC suggests the company is making supplies and donating them to hospitals and businesses.

CNBC reports that the memo, which was circulated to employees, states that SpaceX delivered 75 face shields over the weekend to Cedars Sinai, a health facility near the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Unlike respirator masks, shields cover the whole face from the top down in a suspended layer of plastic.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (pictured) has directed the aerospace company to begin making face shields and hand sanitizer to bolster supplies for medical workers

The company also reportedly donated 100 'tyvek' protective suits to medical workers there and is currently working on making hand sanitizer that 'complies with CDC guidelines and is effective at killing the COVID-19 coronavirus,' according to CNBC.

The decision to supply medical workers with protective equipment and disinfectants marks a shift in attitude by SpaceX's founder Elon Musk who recently tweeted that the coronavirus panic was 'dumb.'

In spite of that early comment, the billionaire also delivered 50,000 face masks to the Seattle home of a University of Washington where the coronavirus pandemic has spread rapidly.

Musk, who is also the CEO of the electric and self-driving car company, Telsa, has also said on Twitter that 'if there is a shortage' he would step in to make ventilators so patients in intensive care can breath as their bodies battle against the illness.

'We will make ventilators if there is a shortage,' Musk tweeted in response to a fan's suggestion the billionaire should repurpose his factory for the task.

As noted by CNBC, SpaceX employees who are able to go to work have continued to do so as the company is exempted from a shutdown for being an 'essential' business.

The company recently sent home a dozen employees after two were diagnosed with novel coronavirus, COVID-19.

Shortages of masks, disinfectants, and ventilators have plagued states across the US as the numbers of people infected by novel coronavirus continue to climb.

As of Thursday, the US approached 70,000 confirmed cases with 1,035 total deaths.
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The daily coronavirus update from Gov. Phil Murphy and other state officials on the latest number of coronavirus cases is scheduled to start around 2 p.m on Thursday.

It will be streamed on the governors YouTube channel.

Murphy will be joined as usual by state Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli, State Epidemiologist Dr. Christina Tan, and State Police Superintendent Colonel Patrick Callahan at the Trenton War Memorials George Washington Ballroom.

Persichilli and Murphy will provide updated coronavirus numbers and each of the officials will entertain questions from the media.

Murphy will again likely make a public plea to the federal government for additional personal protection equipment for doctors and nurses in addition to ventilators as he did during an appearance on MSNBCs Morning Joe early Thursday.

The federal government has been working with us quite well, Murphy said. We were on (a call) with FEMA and Vice President Pence yesterday and well be on with the vice president and the president again today. Were turning over every stone - weve gotten two allocations out of the federal stockpile but we need more. Were still way short.

The governor again emphasized its highly unlikely New Jerseys non-essential businesses will be open by Easter. President Trump has targeted April 12 as the date hed like to re-open the nations economy even as the number of coronavirus cases and deaths continue to spike.

If that were to happen, Id be the happiest guy in New Jersey, if not America but were not looking at that (as being realistic) Murphy said Thursday morning. Well base our decisions on medicine, health, data and science. If we go too early, Im afraid wed be throwing gasoline on this fire."

On Wednesday, Murphy said the number of coronavirus deaths increased to 62 from 44. The total coronavirus cases rose to 4,402.

If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share. If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Mark Ford was a guest on the ESPN In the Gate podcast produced and hosted by Barry Abrams. Ford discussed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on harness racing, particularly the deaths of John Brennan and four members of the Fusco family, including trainers Carmine and Vincent.

Ford, a trainer with more than 3,900 wins, is on the U.S. Trotting Association Board of Directors and is the president of the Standardbred Breeders & Owners Association of New Jersey. He was a close friend of Brennan and the Fuscos and shared his thoughts about their passing as a result of COVID-19.

The discussion with Ford, which can be accessed below, begins at roughly the 9:50 mark and runs until the 19:00 mark.

Excerpted comments from the podcast, edited for clarity and length, appear below.

Ford said he talked with Brennan in the hospital the day before his passing on March 10. Brennan also was a USTA director and on the board of the Standardbred Owners Association of New York. He was the horsemens representative at Yonkers Raceway.

It really put things into perspective and it really shook me up because he was such a dear friend, Ford said. He was such a dear friend to the industry, too. John was always there to fight for the horsemen. He was not only a real good friend, but a really, really good guy. Well certainly miss him.

He didnt have a big family, he didnt have any kids, but he spent a lot of time with the horsemen and more or less adopted a lot of their kids. He had lots and lots of friends around.

When I first came to New York, he was one of the first people that you met on the backstretch. He always had, not a big stable, but 10 or 12 (horses) all the time and was always there. He was just a good guy and its a terrible shock.

Ford said the passing of Carmine Fusco as well as Vincent, their mother Grace and sister Rita, was a devastating blow for a family that was almost synonymous with Freehold, N.J.

You cant imagine Freehold, N.J., without the Fusco family, Ford said. Its one thing to lose a member of their family, theyre very tight-knit  (but) now, you lose Carmine and his mother and sister and it just keeps going. Vinny was another one. Theyre New Jersey horsepeople that have been around forever, you dont ever expect them to be anywhere else.

You look around, its hard to believe that Carmine Fusco is not going to be here anymore, or five or six of the people we deal with, literally on a daily basis, arent going to be here anymore. Its just devastating.

How do you understand this? It wipes out a big part of your population and theyre all good friends, too. Personally, its been a terrible week. Life must go on, but its not going to be near as easy as it was.

He added about the impact to the harness racing community, This has happened so fast. I know that its been two weeks now since its happened, but people are walking around in a daze. Its just rocked our whole world. Its one thing to cancel the racing, where none of us have any income, but this is real.

With this stuff, it could be one of us tomorrow. People Im sure didnt take this very seriously at all, or maybe theyre still not taking it seriously enough, but these are things we have to deal with. This is a tremendously big deal because it could be anyone of us tomorrow or the next day. Its serious stuff and I dont think weve seen the end of it yet.

(USTA)
office buildings

If you thought the stock market took a big hit to the chin over the past month, wait until you see what happened to the Canadian REITs, which got utterly obliterated amid the everything sell-off sparked by the coronavirus crisis.

Sure, REITs are lowly correlated to the broader equity markets, but as Ive warned in many prior pieces, this low correlation (or low beta) is essentially nullified during times of extreme market turmoil. Real estate is seen as a safe haven by many, but when theres a panic-induced crisis and a rush for cash, all bets are off the table with the REITs, leaving conservative income investors exposed to amplified downside in a market meltdown.

Many Canadian REITs have large distribution yields, and their shares tend to be less prone to less volatility relative to equities. That is, until the market crashes, and REITs are tossed out alongside everything else.

After the REIT wreck, theres now a huge opportunity for income investors to get more yield for less.

Which Canadian REITs are being more impacted by COVID-19?

As the pandemic continues dragging on into April, some landlords are bound to have a bit of difficulty collecting their monthly rent from some of their more financially stressed tenants. Canada saw one million EI applicants last week, and with many Canadians living paycheque to paycheque, its not a mystery as to why shares of residential REITs like Canadian Apartment Properties REIT (TSX:CAR.UN), also known as CAPREIT, nosedived.

CAPREIT has exposure to some of the frothier areas of the Canadian market like Vancouver and Toronto, both of which are in a rental state of emergency. Rents are so ridiculously high in the Greater Vancouver or Toronto Areas such that deferred rent payments will be more of a concern relative to other residential Canadian REITs, even with timely stimulus provided by the federal government.

If youre renting a $2,200 two-bedroom apartment in Vancouver, a $2,000 monthly COVID-19 relief cheque from the government isnt going to allow you to pay your full rent when you take into account other living expenses at this most critical time. As such, Id say shares of CAPREIT, which only fell 38% from peak to trough, will take more of a hit compared to the likes of a diversified office-weighted REIT like H&R REIT (TSX:HR.UN), which plunged over 65% from peak to trough.

Story continues

Id argue that CAPREIT is going to have a much harder time collecting rent from individual residential tenants in expensive markets like Vancouver or Toronto than H&R, which collects its rent primarily from office, retail, and industrial tenants.

Yes, small- and medium-sized retail businesses are being shut down, and many are at risk of going under, as everybody looks to self-isolate at home. But some of the larger office and retail clients (like Canadian Tire) have more access to liquidity and a greater capacity to continue paying their rents through these tough (and likely temporary) times. It will be the H&Rs tenants, I believe, that will absorb most, if not all, of the blow from the disruption caused by COVID-19.

Moreover, when the pandemic ends, and Canada becomes fully open for business, the cash flows of the retail and office tenants would be first to bounce back. As for the residential tenants financially affected by COVID-19, their cash flows may not return to normal nearly as fast.

As such, I see H&R as one of many severely undervalued Canadian REITs that allows investors to lock in a colossal yield (currently yielding 16.3%) alongside what could be sizeable capital gains once the coronavirus dies down. As for CAPREIT, I think its shares could stand to pullback further given the minimal damage shares have endured and an arguably greater vulnerability to the disruption caused by COVID-19.

Foolish takeaway

H&R is one of those Canadian REITs that provides income investors with an opportunity of a lifetime, whereas CAPREIT still leaves a lot to be desired following after the violent REIT wreck. The REITs present compelling value at this juncture, but make sure you pick your spots wisely!

Stay hungry. Stay Foolish.

The post Opportunity of a Lifetime to Buy Canadian REITs appeared first on The Motley Fool Canada.

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Fool contributor Joey Frenette has no position in any of the stocks mentioned.

The Motley Fools purpose is to help the world invest, better. Click here now for your free subscription to Take Stock, The Motley Fool Canadas free investing newsletter. Packed with stock ideas and investing advice, it is essential reading for anyone looking to build and grow their wealth in the years ahead. Motley Fool Canada 2020
Malawian Vice President Saulos Chilima has filed a lawsuit against President Peter Mutharika after he refused to fire the electoral commissioners who oversaw last year's failed election, his lawyer said Thursday.

A battle has been raging for months between the opposition and head of state over the May 21 vote, which was tainted by irregularities.

Mutharika has refused to promulgate laws to hold the new ballot and to fire members of the Malawi Election Commission (MEC), which was requested by the constitutional court in its historic judgment.

Parliament's public appointment committee also found that the commissioners were incompetent to manage fresh elections.

"Following the judgment by the constitutional court, the MEC commissioners' continued presence in the office is both unconstitutional and illegal," Chilima's attorney, Chikosa Silungwe, told AFP.

Chilima has also sued the commissioners for their refusal to resign and is seeking a stay order to stop them from working.

Silungwe said the court is yet to give a date for hearing the case.

The rerun of the election has



been scheduled for July 2, but it could be delayed by a petition that Mutharika has filed to the Supreme Court of Appeal, contesting the cancellation.

His appeal will be heard from April 15.

In its landmark ruling, the Constitutional Court last month said the poll results were fraught with widespread irregularities -- in particular the "massive" use of correction fluid on tally sheets -- and ordered a rerun within 150 days.

Mutharika has refused to give his assent to electoral law amendments that require a more than 50 percent majority to secure a second term.

The threshold is a major sticking point for the incumbent, who had been declared winner with just 35.8 percent of the vote.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Linkedin Emal Haidary (Agence France-Presse) Kabul, Afghanistan  Thu, March 26, 2020 15:00 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d90096 2 World Afghanistan,temple,attack,Islamic-State,IS Free

At least 25 people were killed Wednesday in an attack on a Sikh-Hindu temple in Afghanistan's capital where worshippers were offering morning prayers, the latest brutal assault claimed by the Islamic State group.

The incident, highlighting the country's ongoing violence, came several hours before Afghanistan's National Security Council announced that the Taliban and government officials would hold a historic meeting face-to-face over a prisoner exchange.

Along with a raging insurgency, impoverished Afghanistan is reeling from a massive cut in US aid while it struggles with political deadlock and rising coronavirus cases.

The Taliban denied any involvement in the latest attack, for which the Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility, according to the SITE intelligence group.

Witness Raju Singh Sonny told AFP a man in a police uniform burst into the temple in central Kabul, shot a guard and started attacking worshippers in the main hall.

"Several other attackers also entered the building and they were going from room to room shooting people," Sonny said.

Only a few thousand Sikhs and Hindus are estimated to reside in what is an overwhelmingly Muslim nation.

There were conflicting accounts about how many gunmen were involved, with security sources giving differing numbers, between one and four.

At least one attacker was subsequently killed by security forces in an hours-long clearing operation.

Anarkali Kaur Honaryar, a Sikh member of the Afghan parliament, told AFP about 150 people had been inside the temple, where several families also live and worshippers gather for morning prayers.

"Some people inside the temple are hiding and their phones are off," Honaryar said while the attack was ongoing.

Interior ministry spokesman Tariq Arian said 25 civilians had been killed and eight others wounded, while 80 people had been rescued. Graphic images posted online showed several bodies as well as terrified people who appeared to be Sikhs running from the scene.

"Such cowardly attacks on the places of religious worship of the minority community, especially at this time of [the coronavirus] pandemic, is reflective of the diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers," the Indian foreign ministry said in a statement.

Sikhism and Hinduism are rooted in India.

Afghan leaders' 'failure'

IS has a history of targeting Afghan Sikhs and Hindus.

In recent months, the jihadist group has suffered mounting setbacks after being hunted by US and Afghan forces as well as Taliban offensives targeting their fighters, but it still retains the ability to launch major assaults on urban centers.

To add to Afghanistan's woes, Washington slashed the amount of aid to the country this week after President Ashraf Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah, who has also proclaimed himself president, failed to resolve their standoff.

Following a visit to Kabul, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the US would immediately cut $1 billion and was prepared to pull another $1 billion in 2021.

The US and the Taliban signed a deal last month that was supposed to pave the way for talks between the Afghan leadership and the insurgents, but with Kabul unable to agree who is in government, the talks stalled.

The issue of the prisoners has been a major sticking point in the weeks since the signing.

But on Wednesday Afghanistan's National Security Council said the Taliban and Ghani's government would meet to discuss an initial release of 100 insurgent prisoners by March 31.

It is believed that it will be the first time ever that the Islamist extremist Taliban and Ghani's government have met in an official capacity.

"To carry out these further discussions, a Taliban team will meet with the government face-to-face in Afghanistan in the coming days," the NSC said.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the US negotiator who brokered the US-Taliban deal, confirmed on Twitter that "prisoner releases by both sides will start March 31."

"This is a positive development," he said.

The United States, hoping to pull its thousands of remaining troops out of Afghanistan to end 18 years of involvement, has said the coronavirus pandemic makes prisoner releases urgent.

In Washington on Wednesday, Pompeo called the temple attack "horrific" and reiterated his frustration at the failure to bridge the divide between Ghani and Abdullah.

But he said both -- plus Taliban negotiator Mullah Baradar -- were committed to a peaceful solution to end Afghanistan's years of war.

Pompeo said it's time for the political process to begin "with all the Afghans coming together around the table."

He added: "I'm still optimistic that we can get there."
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UW Students, Professor Help with Wyoming COVID-19 Testing

UW scientists helping conduct COVID-19 testing at the Wyoming Public Health Laboratory in Cheyenne include, from left: recent microbiology graduate Taylor (Cortez) Fearing, international trainee Matios Lakew, undergraduate Samyr Wissar, graduate student Chris Anderson, Associate Professor Dr. Brant Schumaker, undergraduate Meagan Soehn and undergraduate Kelsie Bowcutt. (Jim Mildenberger Photo)

Not many college students can say they spent spring break on the front lines of the pandemic battle, but four University of Wyoming students and two recent graduates can.

They, along with Dr. Brant Schumaker, a veterinary epidemiologist and UW associate professor, answered the call to help the Wyoming Public Health Laboratory in Cheyenne with novel coronavirus COVID-19 testing.

Microbiology senior Meagan Soehn, of Casper, conducts undergraduate research in Schumakers laboratory in the Department of Veterinary Sciences at UW and already had experience with the type of extractions needed in the state lab.

I had a bonus week of spring break, so I felt like I should help out during this crazy time, she says.

That meant spending her spring break working long hours at the state lab.

The experience has been great, Soehn says. It really helps to show things I learned in my classes, especially as a microbiology student. We talk about outbreaks in infectious diseases but, to be able to see all this up close, is something you cant get in the classroom.

It also gives her a sense of purpose during these stressful days: Its nice to help out. It feels important and worthwhile, she says.

With UW courses going online Monday after the extended spring break, Soehn believes shell have the flexibility in her schedule to continue helping.

Schumaker is one of two epidemiologists at UW. His co-workers and team at the Wyoming State Veterinary Laboratory have a long-standing relationship with the Wyoming Public Health Laboratory.

Most of the team have been trained to deal with sample processing and RNA extraction, which is the method by which were trying to detect the coronavirus, Schumaker says. I am serving in a logistic support role managing sample triage so that high-priority samples are getting to the front of the line. Were getting the samples in and results out.

As of the evening of March 25, the lab had tested 758 samples, with many more coming in.

So, the testing is ramping up for sure, he says. For each positive test result, well have more demand for more tests as well.

Wyoming Public Health Laboratory Director Cari Roark Sloma credits the team from UW for helping the lab respond to the unprecedented demand.

The help we've been receiving from our colleagues at the state veterinary lab has been critical for the Wyoming Public Health Laboratory to help us maintain and expand testing for COVID-19, Sloma says.

When spring break ends, Schumaker will have less time to give to the effort, but he plans to continue to help as much as possible.

At the state vet lab, were all trained to respond to emergencies in infectious disease, Schumaker says. I felt very strongly that, if there was an opportunity to help in any way, it was important for me to be involved if I could make a difference. If we can find new cases and get other people tested more efficiently, we might have an effect on stemming the tide of this pandemic.

The UW students helping with the effort, listed here by hometown, include:

Becker, Minn. -- Chris Anderson, graduate student, animal and veterinary sciences.

Casper -- Meagan Soehn, undergraduate student, microbiology.

Cheyenne -- Kelsie Bowcutt, undergraduate student, molecular biology.

Laramie -- Samyr Wissar, undergraduate student, molecular biology.

Recent UW graduates helping with the effort, both from Cheyenne, are Taylor (Cortez) Fearing, microbiology; and Chayse Rowley, microbiology/family and consumer sciences.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 02:41:16|Editor: yan

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WASHINGTON, March 26 (Xinhua) -- U.S. government on Thursday designated 20 individuals and companies based in Iran and Iraq, accusing them of supporting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) and other Iranian-backed militias.

The Department of Treasury said in a statement that the designated individuals and entities provided support to or act on behalf of the IRGC-QF, as well as transferred lethal aid to Iranian-backed militias in Iraq such as Kata'ib Hezbollah (KH) and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH).

According to the designation, all property and interests of the property of designated persons and entities in the United States have been blocked and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in any transactions with them.

The sanctions came after two successive rocket attacks on Iraq's Camp Taji military base earlier this month, which caused casualties of U.S. service members.

The United States claimed that KH was responsible for numerous attacks against U.S. and Coalition Forces in Iraq, including a rocket attack on an Iraqi base near Kirkuk (the K1 base) in late December 2019 that had killed a U.S. civilian contractor and injured four U.S. service members.

The rocket attack on the K1 base led to the U.S. airstrike against senior Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani and the subsequent Iranian missile strike retaliation.
Property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang is under investigation by the ruling Chinese Communist Party after he apparently penned an article highly critical of President Xi Jinping.



A source in Beijing told RFA that Ren is under investigation by the municipal branch of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), which has far-reaching powers to detain ruling party members pending investigations.



Ren, 69, could be stripped of his Communist Party membership after writing an open letter about Xi's responses to the coronavirus epidemic, the Sino-U.S. trade war and the Taiwan elections.



The source said investigators are handling the letter -- in fact a long and highly critical article -- as an instance of "internal strife" within the ruling party.



Xi was reportedly furious at the article, saying Ren was "incorrigible," the source said.



He then designated Ren's letter as an "act of defiance against me," and sent in a team of prosecutors to set up shop in Ren's Hua Yuan Property Co, the source said.



An employee who answered the phone at Hua Yuan Property declined to comment when contacted by RFA.



"I don't know anything about this," the employee said. "My department doesn't deal with such things."



A second source said Ren had been indiscreet lately in his criticisms of Xi, but that his views are shared by many among the Communist Party's financial and political elite.



'Clown'

The source also said that Ren has expressed similar views to those in the letter, including calling the president a "clown."



"Ren Zhiqiang has been going round telling lots of people that [Xi] is a clown," the source said.



"As for the letter, Ren's points were very reasonable, and all [Xi] can do now is find some kind of financial pretext to charge him with," the source said. "But Ren isn't greedy for money; he's a princeling and he is very well-connected."



"So [Xi] has to consider whether the princelings represent the greater threat," the source said.



A Germany-based current affairs commentator surnamed Fan said Ren's detention could herald a huge split in the highest echelons of the Chinese Communist Party.



"This tells us that there is already a huge backlash against Xi Jinping among certain interest groups within the Chinese Communist Party, and they have been bringing about divisions behind the scenes," Fan said.



"People like Ren Zhiqiang have already realized that Xi Jinping is accelerating the demise of the Chinese Communist Party," he said. "This is as far as you can take this model of governance."



"Xi Jinping actions remind one of the Emperor Chongzhen trying to salvage the Ming Dynasty; nothing good can possibly come of this for him," Fan said.



Princeling faction unhappy?

Beijing historian Zhang Lifan also said there are rumors in the capital of a high-level power struggle, as the coronavirus epidemic was widely seen as throwing the legitimacy of Communist Party rule into question.



"Ren Zhiqiang's ideas may represent the views of a considerable number of officials within the system, as well as those of the princeling faction," Zhang said, referring to the wealthy and powerful offspring of elite Communist Party revolutionaries.



"If [Xi] really wants to go after Ren, he needs a pretext ... a lot of people are watching this now."



The letter attributed to Ren doesn't mention Xi by name, but criticizes his policies, including the president's insistence that the media are part of the same family as the ruling party, and must always represent its interests.



"When the media have the same name as the party, it's the people who are left out," the letter, titled says. "The coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan has shown us just how true that is."



The article, titled "The lives of the people are ruined by the virus and a seriously sick system," doesn't mention President Xi, but it takes aim at decisions made under his direct command, nonetheless, including the decision to go ahead with a mass Lunar New Year banquet for thousands of people that resulted in a huge cluster of COVID-19 cases in the weeks that followed.



"The emperor is holding up a piece of cloth, trying to cover up the fact that he is wearing no clothes at all, although his ambition to be a strong leader is naked enough," the article quipped.



"No criticism of the mass assembly of 170,000 people has emerged, and the truth has never been uncovered, nor the cause of the outbreak discovered," the article said.



Ren has been targeted by the CCDI before, for criticizing President Xi Jinping's insistence that the media serve only the Communist Party's agenda.



Xi has ordered China's media to follow the party line, focus on "positive reporting", and "speak the party's will and protect the party's authority and unity."



Ren was berated by state media in 2016 for causing chaos and for failing to stand up for the party, and for "pursuing Western constitutionalism."



Reported by Ng Yik-tung and Sing Man for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Qiao Long for the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Earlier this month, vodka maker Titos urged customers to stop using its booze for homemade hand sanitizer, because it doesn't meet the CDCs required minimum of 60 percent alcohol content. But Mike Pierce, owner of Oakland Spirits Company, realized he made something that did.

Osco Glasshouse 153 Proof Brandy is named for the old auto-glass factory the distillery has operated out of for the past four years in Uptown Oakland. With more than 75 percent alcohol content, it provides a neutral base for homemade bitters and liqueurs, and Pierce said he usually keeps a couple of bottles around at work to help sterilize the equipment.

But just as he was considering the idea of using it for a homemade hand sanitizer, he received an email from a customer who told him she already had. She mixed the brandy with aloe vera gel and a touch of glycerin  and suggested he do the same.

Were kind of the nerdy, plucky cocktail and spirit makers for all of the craft bartenders that like to invent new things, said Pierce. We make gins that are kind of wacky, distilled through ingredients like oysters, cilantro and lemongrass.

So they started to tinker with the unconventional formula: one that would potentially save lives.

His 13-year-old-daughters helped him design a label, and Pierce came up with the name: Hand Sanity.

It didnt take long for requests to start pouring in from public agencies with health care workers on the front lines. Last Tuesday, he donated nine liters to the Oakland Fire Department. The next day, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau announced it would loosen regulations, allowing distilleries and other spirits producers to make ethanol-based hand sanitizer in order to address the high demand amid the current public health crisis. They will be able to do so through June 30.

Pierce made three more batches, about 10 or 15 gallons, he said, and the Oakland Police Department helped him sort it out into smaller bottles to distribute to local agencies. Its now an industry-wide movement spanning the Bay Area: Hangar One in Alameda began to ramp up production, as well as Richmonds Falcon Spirits Distillery; Wright & Brown in West Oakland; Hanson of Sonoma Distillery; Heretic Brewing Company in Fairfield; and Seven Stills in San Francisco.

Seven Stills co-owner Tim Obert said he joined the effort when he asked the distillerys newsletter base whether they knew of specific hospitals, nonprofits and homeless shelters in need of donations.

We had a huge response, said Obert. At least 30 different organizations reached out to him in just a couple of hours. Now, Seven Stills is in the process of curating ingredients: The company will receive a shipment of ethanol this Friday and plan to move into production over the weekend.

On Seven Stills website, Obert plans to set up an online platform for people to choose an organization theyd like to donate to with a five-gallon pail of hand sanitizer. His goal is to help Kaiser provide it to all of its centers in Northern California.

Its turning into a national issue, so Kaiser is potentially ordering for the entire country, he said.

In the meantime, Seven Stills is offering an Apocalypse Menu with food and spirits available for takeout or delivery, a service that was launched at noon on Wednesday. Obert said business is about 10 percent of what it normally is, but its not concerning him for the time being.

Its not really about the money for me right now  its about getting more hours for our staff, he said. People in the service industry are getting absolutely screwed. Four hundred fifty dollars coming from the government once a week for unemployment is not enough, especially in a city like San Francisco.

Hes also troubled by the lack of access to 500-milliter or 1-liter pump-top bottles, which hell need to distribute the hand sanitizer to health care providers. To be sure, its stress-inducing, but serving communities during a time of need is a priority that drives distilleries like Oberts.

All of us in the food and beverage industry have lived our whole lives serving people, said Pierce. This is just a pivot.

Obert has requested that individuals with access to pump-top bottles contact him at tim@sevenstillsofsf.com

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

Sign up for 'The Daily' newsletter for the latest on coronavirus here.

Amanda Bartlett is an SFGATE associate digital reporter. Email: amanda.bartlett@sfgate.com | Twitter: @byabartlett
Pilot of helicopter that crashed heralded for 'miracle' landing

The crew of a Hagerstown-based helicopter and the juvenile patient they picked up in Chambersburg, Pa., are OK after a crash near Philadelphia.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 15:53:36|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend a virtual summit of the Group of 20 (G20) leaders on responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing Thursday.

The summit will be hosted by Saudi Arabia, the G20 Presidency in 2020. Here is a brief introduction of the group and its summits.

Created in 1999, the G20 is a main forum for international cooperation on financial and economic issues. It comprises 19 countries plus the European Union. The countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, Britain, and the United States.

The group, home to almost two-thirds of the world's population, accounts for about 86 percent of the gross world product and 75 percent of global trade.

In 2008, against the backdrop of the global financial crisis, the meetings of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors were raised to the level of heads of state and government for better crisis coordination, with the first summit being held in Washington, the United States in the same year.

As an informal forum, the G20 does not have an administrative council or permanent body. Instead, G20 countries take turns to assume presidency and host the summit.

Altogether, a total of 14 G20 summits have been held since 2008. G20 leaders met twice in London and Pittsburgh in 2009, and Toronto and Seoul in 2010. Starting from 2011, the summits have been held once a year in the following places: Cannes, Los Cabos, St Petersburg, Brisbane, Antalya, Hangzhou, Hamburg, Buenos Aires and Osaka.

Tackling economic recession, regulating international financial market, combating tax evasion, and boosting development policy have been some of the main topics of these summits.
 Updated, Monday, March 30, 2020.

The Woodlands Township Board of Directors hosted the first virtual online meeting in township history Wednesday night with the seven directors using a video conferencing computer program called Zoom to conduct about a 90 minute meeting.

Aside from actions such as approving the cessation of all incorporation planning studies and extending the work-agreement with township President and General Manager Don Norrell, the board also took action on several other items.

Here is a quick look at some of the other agenda items discussed and acted upon Wednesday.

Board forms COVID-19 response team

Board Chairman Gordy Bunch recommended appointing several board members to special, newly created roles to cope with the COVID-19 novel coronovirus pandemic as well as making a new budget preparation task force to tackle economic issues stemming from the pandemic. The moves were approved unanimously by the board.

Director Ann Snyder, who has an extensive personal and professional background in charitable organizations, was tabbed as the boards nonprofit liaison.

Director Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, who is a retired physician specializing in dermatology, was appointed to be the townships liaison with various governmental public health entities.

A new budget planning task force was also created in an effort to begin the difficult work of sorting through the economic impacts of COVID-19 that have emerged from the closures of businesses across the township and loss of sales tax and hotel occupancy tax revenues. The township normally begins their budget planning in late July with several meetings before hosting an entire week of planning meetings in August to finalize the next years budget.

Related: Woodlands officials express concerns over COVID-19 effects on tourism revenue

To get a head start on that process, Bunch appointed directors Bruce Rieser, John Anthony Brown and Bob Milner to the task force, which will begin work immediately to plan for contingencies as revenue from sales and HOT taxes drops. Rieser is also a member of the townships long-standing Ad Hoc Economic Development Committee and has a lengthy career in the private sector dealing with economic issues in the airline industry. Milner is a professor of experiential business at San Houston State University and owns multiple successful car dealerships across Texas and in several other states.

Anadarko tax abatement canceled

The board voted 6-1, with Director Ann Snyder a vigorous no, to cancel a 10-year tax abatement agreement with Anadarko three years earlier than planned. Anadarko, which was acquired by Occidental last year, had more than 4,300 employees working in two towers in The Woodlands, however after the merger, Occidental officials decided to not move their headquarters to the township and in turn, removed an estimated 2,800 staff from their facilities in The Woodlands.

Because the current 1,500 employees are less than the tax abatement agreement had originally mandated (2,000), the township worked with Occidental and Anadarko officials to come to a mutual, voluntary agreement to cancel the tax abatement. As part of the deal, Occidental and Anadarko will repay the township an estimated $2.2 million in back sales tax that has previously been waived.

Township board Chairman Gordy Bunch said the extra $2.2 million in revenue will be a big help to the township as budget planning to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic begins.

Our community desperately needs these funds, Bunch said of the back sales taxes the township will receive.

Snyder had argued unsuccessfully to have the item tabled or deferred to a future date, but she was over-ruled by other directors and township legal counsel Robin Cross, who explained the township does not operate under Roberts Rules of Order and he procedural move was not valid. Snyder said she did not understand why Occidental has decided against relocating their headquarters to the township, citing prior meetings where the companys leaders had seemed to be leaning toward choosing the township.

Director Bruce Rieser said he hoped in a few years, Occidental may change its plans and move its headquarters to The Woodlands, but for now, ending the abatement was the proper thing to do.

We do have a hole in the budget, Rieser said, referring to COVID-19 economic calamity. We had a contract with Anadarko that they did not fulfill.

Board OKs contract for YMCA Dragon Boat races

The board did not act on a possible five-year contract renewal with the Ironman Triathlon, but they did vote to approve an agreement with the YMCA Greater Houston to allow the YMCA to use Lake Woodlands, where the wildly popular YMCA Dragon Boat Challenge races are hosted each year. The new deal, however, removed township funding of more than $4,000 a year that was part of a previous host-venue sponsorship agreement.

The YMCA will now have to foot the bill for the usage of NorthShore Park, where the races are hosted over a four-day period each fall.

Norrell has contracted extended

The board approved unanimously a two-month extension of the employment contract with township President and General Manager Don Norrell, who was originally slated to retire on April 30, but will now stay on the job until June 30. Norrell had been asked to remain on the job to help the township cope with the COVID-19 pandemic responses. He said after consultation with his wife and family, he would remain on the job to help the community he said he cherishes.

Related: Woodlands general manager Norrell delays retirement due to COVID-19 crisis

The process to find Norrells replacement is also in limbo due to the COVID-19 crisis, with plans to have interviews of potential candidates temporarily on hold. The township hired an executive search firm in late 2019 to manage the search for Norrells replacement, however the process has been secretive and no names of possible candidates have been released.

jeff.forward@chron.com
DURHAM  A town resident between the ages of 70 and 80 who recently tested positive for coronavirus is in isolation as health officials begin contact tracing to determine who may have been exposed to the individual.

This is the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Durham, according to First Selectman Laura Francis.
A great restaurant is constructed like a theatre show  behind the scenes, raising the curtain, showtime, the finale and the reviews  says Fergal Lee, general manager of The Wolseley, London.

Mr Lee was guest speaker at the (pre-lockdown) March 2020 Firm Talks event, an invite-only series hosted by Micheline Corr of hospitality recruitment specialist The Firm. The event entertained 70 hospitality leaders in the RDS Members Club in Dublin.

Micheline said Fergal began his career with renowned restaurateurs Chris Corbin and Jeremy King for the 2003 opening of the now-iconic Wolseley Restaurant in Piccadilly. The trio have now been working together for 17 years.

I have special memories of The Wolseley, Micheline said. My late husband, a man of obvious good taste, said breakfast there was an essential part of any trip to London.

Last time I was there, Cat Deeley was at the next table and on the other side were two elderly ladies who were quite upset that the bowl of cafe au lait with toasted baguette was missing from the menu. They mentioned this to the server, who replied, It may not be on the menu, but we are happy to make it for you. Pure class!

Fergal Lee thrilled the Firm Talks guests with first-hand secrets of the Corbin and King theatrical dining experience, which started with Le Caprice and The Ivy in the heart of Londons theatreland.

That was 1990 and it transformed the way people ate out in London, said Fergal Lee. There was a one-year waiting list and it created the whole concept of celebrity dining.

The Wolseley was followed by The Delaunay, Brasserie Zedel, The Colbert, Fischers, Soutine, and Cafe Wolseley near Oxford, the groups first venture outside London.

A restaurant is not just a place to eat. It should be much more than that. The first ingredient is the people. Who are the most important? he asked. The customers? To a point. Front of house?

I really want to focus on the teams in the restaurant  the kitchen, finance, procurement, training, and development, staff welfare, your external partners including your suppliers, who get the quality ingredients you need. If you dont pay them on time, you wont get deliveries when you need them.

His talk then moved onto the first act  the maitre d, the best of whom have their own unique tricks of the trade.

I know a maitre d who keeps a notebook with sketches of high-profile customers, said Fergal.

He also told the tale of when a very famous English author arrived into an unnamed restaurant and the maitre d was forced to confess that he couldnt remember her name. She responded witheringly: Go find someone who does!

Five top tips for restaurant success

He left the gathering with his five top tips for a successful restaurant:
Apple CEO Tim Cook has taken to Twitter to share his and the tech companys gratitude to the medical and essential services community. For the same, he announced 10 million masks procured by Apple Inc for the medical workforce in the US.

As per a recent tweet by Cook, Apple was able to source 10 million masks for the medical workforce in the US. In addition, the Cupertino based tech giant procured millions of more masks for the worst COVID-19 hit regions in Europe.

(Representative Image: Reuters)

The procurement is still ongoing, as the Apple ops team is still helping the governments around the world to find and purchase masks from Apples supply chain. In addition, Apple earlier also announced a total of $15 million in donations to the cause.

In the video posted on Twitter, Cook starts off by mentioning how he is working from home, as should all of us. He then leads on to another recommended practice of maintaining at least a six feet distance from everyone if you are outside.



Post the recommendations, Cook mentions how Apple has supplied 10 million masks to the medical workforce in the US, also taking the time to thank them for their service on the frontlines. The Apple CEO does not forget to thank those who are still expected to work like warehouse workers, delivery people to those stocking the shelves in the local supermarkets.

Cook rounds off the video on a positive note, saying It is in these toughest times that we show our greatest strength and I know that we will rise to the occasion.

Proud to share weve been able to source 10M masks for the US and millions more for the hardest hit regions in Europe. Our ops teams are helping to find and purchase masks from our supply chain in coordination with governments around the world. pic.twitter.com/uTsA6eA5ks  Tim Cook (@tim_cook) March 25, 2020

Tech majors have been going way out of their regular manufacturing and business practices to help the government agencies fight the ongoing pandemic. Just like Apple, companies like Facebook, Alibaba, SoftBank Group, Goldman Sachs and countless others have stepped up to provide medical supplies including face masks, testing kits and even ventilators to the US medical workforce already struggling with a lack of such equipment.

With the number of COVID-19 cases seeing a new high around the globe everyday, such equipment will be of utmost importance and will act as the most important tools against the COVID-19 pandemic. In case you want to contribute to the cause sitting at your home, here is a way for you to make masks fir the masses.
CNBC's Jim Cramer has spent recent weeks outlining publicly traded companies that are performing well, moderately well and poorly since the onset of the coronavirus outbreak.

On Wednesday, the "Mad Money" host revealed a new faction within the stock market: laggards that are waiting to break out.

"Right now, we've also got a fourth category: companies that are currently stinking up the joint, but should thrive when things get back to normal," he said.

Some of the titans in tech are included in Cramer's new bunch. The corporations that are struggling now but that he expects to return to form are Apple and Facebook.

China, ground zero of what has now become a global health pandemic, was the first country and economy to be hit by the virus. Businesses operations there, where many American enterprises such as Apple assemble products, were either forced shut or lost productivity as the Hubei province, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China, was shut down in late January. Apple also decided to close its store outside of Greater China for much of the month of March to help combat the virus's spread.

Two months later, Chinese authorities say restrictions will be lifted on the Hubei capital of Wuhan next month. Meanwhile, American companies such as Starbucks and Hormel have restored their China operations.

On Tuesday night, Deutsche Bank upgraded stock in the iPhone maker to a "buy" from "hold." Apple stock is down nearly $82 from its Feb. 12 close.

"China's coming back online, and sooner or later the same thing is going to happen in Europe and the United States," Cramer said, adding that he expects "Apple to come back stronger than before."

As for Facebook, the social media giant warned earlier in the day that its advertising business is taking a hit due to the fast-spreading virus, despite an increase in traffic on its platforms.

Facebook shares are down $67 from its record high close Jan. 29. At $156.21 per share, it's up 14% from its lowest trade during the outbreak.

"It's not as strong as Apple, but it might be worth owning if the stock gets driven low enough," Cramer said. "Turns out, Facebook's a lot more cyclical than most people thought because, at the end of the day, it's advertising, and the ad industry is cyclical."

Among Cramer's winners are Zoom Video, Zscaler, Crowdstrike, Teladoc Health and Nike. He identified Johnson & Johnson as among the drug and consumer staple stocks that are "slow-and-steady" growers.

The cruise lines, he added, are in extreme danger, even with government aid to keep the companies above water. Their ships were an initial focal point of the epidemic as multiple vessels and passengers were forced into quarantine after riders tested positive for COVID-19.

Shares in both Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Line shot up 23% in Wednesday's session.

"The cruise lines can't recover until people stop being scared. That won't happen until we beat this thing and then people put it out their memory," Cramer said. "That's the opposite of Zoom, so if you still own any cruise stocks ... you've got to use this strength to get out of them, even if the government does its best to save them."

Disclosure: Cramer's charitable trust owns shares of Facebook, Apple and Johnson & Johnson.

Disclaimer
Now that their royal duties are behind them, Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussexs Instagram posts have a much different angle  according to one royal expert, the focus is not about them anymore, as they use their platform to draw attention to worthwhile causes and whats happening in the world.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle | Samir Hussein/WireImage

Prince Harry and Meghan left the royal family

Prince Harry and Meghan announced in January their plans to take a step back from their royal life in an attempt to escape the constant media scrutiny that had overwhelmed them. Queen Elizabeth gave her blessing, working with the couple to iron out the details in order for them to pursue a more relaxed life in Canada.

At the time, the queen released a statement in support of their decision. Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved members of my family. I recognise the challenges they have experienced as a result of intense scrutiny over the last two years and support their wish for a more independent life, she shared, in part.

Their Instagram is showing a different side of the couple

While Prince Harry and Meghan took the first day of each month to highlight causes and charities on Instagram to raise awareness among their huge following, much of the posts still focused on their royal engagements.

With their move away from their royal duties officially beginning on Mar. 31, the couple finished up their final engagements and were expected to be quieter on social media.

With the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the Sussexes are using their Instagram account to promote the need to stay home and practice social distancing as well as providing information about resources that people may want to reach out to for help.

These are uncertain times. And now, more than ever, we need each other. We need each other for truth, for support, and to feel less alone during a time that can honestly feel quite scary, the Sussex Royal account shared last week.

During the HeirPod podcast, royal expert Omid Scobie commented on their recent statement. In the post they talk about uncertain times and we need each other more than ever, Scobie shared. It goes on to speak about the importance of empathy and compassion.

He continued, I thought it was really interesting that this was a post was so not about them. It was just them utilizing the 11.3million people following their account where they can create a positive atmosphere they can share content in.

Theyre offering some much-needed support

The Sussexes post further shared, There are so many around the world who need support right now, who are working tirelessly to respond to this crisis behind the scenes, on the frontline, or at home. Our willingness, as a people, to step up in the face of what we are all experiencing with COVID-19 is awe-inspiring. This moment is as true a testament there is to the human spirit.

They continued, We often speak of compassion. All of our lives are in some way affected by this, uniting each of us globally. How we approach each other and our communities with empathy and kindness is indisputably important right now.

In another post, they addressed the anxiety some may be feeling during this challenging time, providing information about resources that can help us all through this process, and ways that YOU can become one of those resources.
A north Queensland man has been charged with serious assault after allegedly spitting in a police officer's face during a random breath test.

Police say the 42-year-old man left a Townsville pub and mounted a kerb in a four-wheel drive about 9pm Wednesday.

The man was refused bail and was due to appear in Townsville Magistrates Court on Thursday. Credit:File image / Queensland Police Service

After intercepting the vehicle and requesting the driver give a breath test, the officer was allegedly spat on after the Condon man became aggressive.

He was arrested and taken to Townsville Hospital for medical assessment.
People walk by an election campaign billboard for the Blue and White party, the opposition party led by Benny Gantz, left, in Ramat Gan, Israel, Thursday, Feb. 20, 2020. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud party is pictured at right. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty) Read more

Early last year, Daniel Ziblatt coauthored a New York Times op-ed titled Why Autocrats Love Emergencies.

His thesis now has great relevance in the time of the coronavirus. Crises offer  would-be authoritarians an escape from constitutional shackles, Ziblatt argued with fellow Harvard prof Steven Levitsky (with whom he wrote the influential book How Democracies Die).

Think of the autocrat wannabes among todays democratic leaders who have shown great impatience with checks on their power, such as Donald Trump, Israels Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu, and Hungarys Viktor Orban. With emergency measures in place, its easy to imagine their temptation to expand personal power at the top.

 READ MORE: To restart the economy Trump should pay attention to the Korea model I Trudy Rubin

And yet, a few months into the crisis, the picture is far more complicated. Rather than veer toward authoritarianism, many Western leaders  including Trump  have been surprisingly passive. Others like Netanyahu and Orban have used the virus as an excuse to continue their longtime assault on democratic norms.

Israel is a particularly fascinating case, where three elections in a row had failed to produce a viable majority to form a new government, despite the health crisis. Facing trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, with opposition leaders calling on him to step down, Netanyahu used the coronavirus as an excuse to shut courts, in the dead of night. This conveniently delayed his trial for two months.

He also authorized Israels internal security services to use massive amounts of cellphone data secretly collected to combat terrorism to track coronavirus carriers for 30 days, without the approval of parliament. While many countries are using cellphone data to track the virus, Israel is apparently the only democracy using its security forces to do so.

However, it looked until this week as if there was political pushback against Netanyahus machinations: The opposition had cobbled together a bare majority coalition and was set to take control of parliament, despite efforts by leaders of Netanyahus party to defy the green light from Israels High Court.

It seemed that democracy had prevailed.

Yet, with the skill that has kept him in office since 2009, Netanyahu managed on Thursday to split the opposition and remain in power. Benny Gantz, the opposition leader, was neatly outmaneuvered, agreeing to serve under Netanyahu. Bibi said he was acting at a time of health crisis that demanded unity under his leadership.

In Israel, we see a case of a complex democracy with a leader who regularly breaks democratic norms and has shown he will use the virus crisis to obtain his goals.

Hungary is a simpler case  one of several countries in central and southeastern Europe that have yet to fully adopt democratic norms. Foremost among their leaders, Orban has taken control of courts, parliament, and media. Now he is pushing through a draft law that will give the executive branch dictatorial powers for an unlimited period. It would be known as the law to protect against the coronavirus. Other troubled democracies could follow his lead.

And then we come to the United States, where the president sees checks and balances as an annoyance and constantly attacks the courts, the fact-based media, and Democratic political leaders.

At a time of crisis, and health emergency, what might happen? Civil liberties advocates were concerned when news broke that the Justice Department had asked Congress for permission to ask senior judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies  as part of a push for new powers during the epidemic.

But lo and behold, a bipartisan group of legislators rejected this idea. The chief strategist for Rand Paul (R., Ky.) tweeted in agreement with a strong critique from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) tweeted, OVER MY DEAD BODY.

 READ MORE: Chinese propaganda says we can't stop coronavirus. We can - but can Trump? I Trudy Rubin

And despite his insistence that he is a war president, Trump has been resistant to acting like one. He has set no national strategy, left states mostly to fend for themselves, and refused to make serious use of the Defense Production Act to force private and defense industry to produce desperately needed health equipment. He has deferred to health experts even as he has disdained expert advice for the last three years.

National crises, including epidemics, provide opportunity for leaders who want to consolidate power to do that, Ziblatt told me. Whats puzzling is why Trump responded by being quite passive.

His thesis: It reflects a strong democratic opposition, with a small d, and constraints built into the system. Federalism is a kind of constraint on the ability to consolidate power.

Id add that it reflects a president who is more adept at reality TV than leading the country, and a civil society that is providing brave first responders even as the national government fails to provide them with masks.

The story is not over, especially if the health crisis gets worse. The coronavirus could provide an excuse for voter suppression in the 2020 election. But bottom line: While COVID-19 exacerbates existing problems in democracies, it doesnt provide the formula for a takeover  provided the public and the system push back.
The Port of Rotterdam has revealed that it will be explicitly expanding to further strengthen the position of the port and in the offshore wind segment.



Joost Eenhuizen, Business Manager Maritime and Offshore Industry at the Port of Rotterdam Authority recently spoke on the matter during a recent meeting of Offshore Community Rotterdam.



Eenhuizen stated: "Work is underway on a large number of offshore wind farms. When they become operational, this will amount to a major step forward in terms of sustainable electricity production."



In the past, shipbuilding played a far more important role than today and coal handling has come under pressure. But offshore and activities in the area of sustainable power are becoming more and more important, and you need to respond and take advantage of developments like these.





Thanks in part to the entrepreneurs in this region, the port of Rotterdam is very well equipped to serve as a hub for the assembly, installation and maintenance of these large-scale farms.







Eenhuizen believes that wind power and the Port of Rotterdam Authority are a great match. And not just in terms of economic growth: It is our duty, both today and in the years ahead, to consistently recognise where the best opportunities lie for entrepreneurs in our region. And preserve the vitality of our port  by constructing new infrastructure, formulating policy or facilitating contacts between clients and entrepreneurs together with organisations like RPPC.





In this undertaking, the Port of Rotterdam Authoritys role is allocating and redeveloping sites, supporting smooth operational settlement in the port, matchmaking and strengthening the existing cluster  through the establishment of Offshore Community Rotterdam, for example, in partnership with the Rotterdam Port Promotion Council.







The Port of Rotterdam is currently host to the world's largest offshore wind turbine, GE Renewable Energy's 12MW

Haliade-X

. It features 107m long blades and GE claims that the new model has a gross capacity factor of 63% and will be able to generate up to 67 GWh in gross annual energy. It estimates that each turbine could power 16,000 European households and save 24 million tons of carbon dioxide. GE plans to obtain a type certificate by mid-2020 and to commercialise the wind turbine by 2021.

For more information on offshore wind farms worldwide,

click here

.
Gerlinde R. Van de Walle, DVM, Ph.D., co-lead for the study.

Researchers have potentially made a breakthrough in the war on antibiotic-resistant superbugs  including MRSA, which kills an estimated 20,000 people in the United States alone each year  with a new discovery whose details are published today in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine. The study, by researchers at The Baker Institute for Animal Health, at Cornells College of Veterinary Medicine, demonstrates for the first time that mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) are an effective weapon against bacteria in biofilm.

Biofilms are thin, slimy films made up of bacteria that can attach to skin wounds, teeth and other surfaces, creating the opportunity for infections to flourish. These highly structured cellular communities offer bacteria shelter from harmful factors, helping them resist antibiotics, mutate rapidly and evade the immune system.

MSCs help kill the bacteria through the secretion of enzymes, called proteases, that break the peptide bonds of proteins and cause biofilm to destabilize. This in turn increases the effectiveness of antibiotics that previously werent working, as the bacteria are no longer being protected by the biofilm, explained Gerlinde R. Van de Walle, DVM, Ph.D., who led the study along with Charlotte Marx, DVM, Ph.D.

Other recent studies, including one by the Cornell team, have shown that MSCs can inhibit the growth of bacteria associated with chronic infections by secreting antimicrobial peptides. But these studies were conducted primarily on planktonic bacteria, which are individually floating bacteria cells. Thus, information on the effects on biofilms was largely lacking, Dr. Marx said.

The current study explores how MSC secretome, delivered as conditioned medium, performs against various wound-related bacterial pathogens. It also looks at the mechanisms that affect bacterial biofilms. The experiments were performed in vitro, using equine MSC. We use equine MSC in our work since the horse represents a physiologically relevant model for human wound healing and offers a readily translatable model for MSC therapies in humans, Dr. Van de Walle explained.

The researchers began by showing that equine MSC secretome inhibits the growth of four types of planktonic bacteria that commonly colonize skin wounds. Encouraged by the results, they next sought to determine the effect of the MSC secretome on these same bacterial strains in biofilms, which is the predominant way bacteria invade wounds. They looked at how the MSCs affected biofilm formation, then repeated the experiments on biofilms that were already established. Finally, they turned their attention to the bacteria strain responsible for MRSA.

Dr. Marx reported the results. Our salient findings, she said, were that factors secreted by equine MSC impaired both planktonic and biofilms  including MRSA  as well as disrupted mature biofilms generated by these bacteria. Importantly, we found that these effects resulted from a protease-dependent mechanism.

Dr. Van de Walle added, We also found that MSC-secreted factors allowed previously ineffective antibiotic treatments to become more effective at reducing bacterial survival. In light of the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains as an increasing global health threat, our findings provide the rationale for using the MSC secretome as a complementary treatment for bacterial infections.

Outcomes from this study highlight for the first time that the secretome from mesenchymal stem cells significantly reduces the formation of bacterial infections, including the antibiotic resistant MRSA, said Anthony Atala, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of STEM CELLS Translational Medicine and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Antibiotic resistance has long been a concern and this research highlights some promising new tactics.

###

The full article, The mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC) secretome impairs methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) biofilms via cysteine protease activity in the equine model, can be accessed at https://stemcellsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/sctm.19-0333.

About STEM CELLS Translational Medicine: STEM CELLS Translational Medicine (SCTM), co-published by AlphaMed Press and Wiley, is a monthly peer-reviewed publication dedicated to significantly advancing the clinical utilization of stem cell molecular and cellular biology. By bridging stem cell research and clinical trials, SCTM will help move applications of these critical investigations closer to accepted best practices. SCTM is the official journal partner of Regenerative Medicine Foundation.

About AlphaMed Press: Established in 1983, AlphaMed Press with offices in Durham, NC, San Francisco, CA, and Belfast, Northern Ireland, publishes two other internationally renowned peer-reviewed journals: STEM CELLS (http://www.StemCells.com), celebrating its 38th year, is the world's first journal devoted to this fast paced field of research. The Oncologist (http://www.TheOncologist.com), also a monthly peer-reviewed publication, entering its 25th year, is devoted to community and hospital-based oncologists and physicians entrusted with cancer patient care. All three journals are premier periodicals with globally recognized editorial boards dedicated to advancing knowledge and education in their focused disciplines.

About Wiley: Wiley, a global company, helps people and organizations develop the skills and knowledge they need to succeed. Our online scientific, technical, medical and scholarly journals, combined with our digital learning, assessment and certification solutions, help universities, learned societies, businesses, governments and individuals increase the academic and professional impact of their work. For more than 200 years, we have delivered consistent performance to our stakeholders. The company's website can be accessed at http://www.wiley.com.

About Regenerative Medicine Foundation (RMF): The non-profit Regenerative Medicine Foundation fosters strategic collaborations to accelerate the development of regenerative medicine to improve health and deliver cures. RMF pursues its mission by producing its flagship World Stem Cell Summit, honouring leaders through the Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Action Awards, and promoting educational initiatives.


EAST HAVEN  A New Haven man faces a slew of charges after he allegedly fled the scene of a collision and took out a gun when police showed up, according to officials.

On March 20 around 9:35 p.m., officers were dispatched to the 600 block of Laurel Street for a report of a crash where the responsible vehicle fled the scene, Lt. Joseph M. Murgo said.

When the officers got there, the complainant said he was stopped at the intersection of Laurel and Bradley streets when he was rear-ended by another vehicle that fled.

The complainant was not injured during the incident and was transported to the hospital.

The officers found a front bumper of the evading vehicle with a license plate on it in the middle of the intersection.

While officers were on scene talking with the complainant, a passing driver pulled over and said the evading driver had just hit a utility pole in the area of Bradley and Lindberg streets. The vehicle was disabled off the road, that person told officers.

Police found the vehicle and its driver  later identified as 24-year-old Quinnipiac Avenue resident Luis Montanez  off the road.

When officers made contact with Montanez, he allegedly reached into his waistband and pulled out a gun, Murgo said.

The police officers gave Montanez verbal commands to drop the gun and took him into custody when he complied without incident. Officers seized the loaded handgun, Murgo said.

Montanez was taken to Yale New Haven Hospital for evaluation and was later released back in to police custody to be processed.

The New Haven man was charged with criminal possession of a pistol, carrying a pistol without a permit, weapons in a motor vehicle, evading responsibility, operating a vehicle without insurance, operating a vehicle with a suspended license, failure to maintain proper lane and following too closely.

At the time of his arrest, Montanez had two active warrants on file out of New Haven and adult probation. With those additional warrants, and the charges from East Haven, Montanez was held on a $300,000 bond.

Montanez is scheduled to appear in court on April 20.
March 26, 2020 / 11:07 PM IST

The novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, pandemic has spread across 190 countries. The outbreak is having a major impact on global economy and the stock market. FM Nirmala Sitharaman has announced Rs 1.7 lakh crore PM Gareeb Kalyan scheme aimed at reaching out to the poorest.

The total number of confirmed cases in India is 649. The Union Health Ministry has said that 43 people have recovered

so far, but 13 have died. Today is the second day of the 21-day nationwide lockdown.Globally, there have been over 4.74 lakh confirmed cases of COVID-19. At least 21,350 people have died so far. Infections are rapidly rising in the US, Italy, Spain, France and the United Kingdom. Catch the latest updates here:
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says aid is needed to protect people in poorer nations from COVID-19.

The United Nations is pleading for $2bn in international humanitarian aid to tackle the coronavirus pandemic in poorer countries, UN chief Antonio Guterres said while launching a major donation appeal.

In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera on Wednesday, Guterres said COVID-19 was threatening the whole of humanity and the only war necessary today is the war against the coronavirus.

The secretary-general stressed the needs of vulnerable people living in slums and refugee camps around the world.

There are dramatic humanitarian needs for these people even without this pandemic. But now, with COVID-19, we need to do everything possible to prevent the disease from coming to these areas, Guterres told James Bays, Al Jazeeras diplomatic editor.

It is very difficult for these people to be living in self-isolation. There, households often dont have water, no soap, and healthcare facilities are extremely rudimentary.

So we need to boost the response capacity in those areas, Guterres said.

Thats why we mobilised all UN agencies and NGOs to work together with these funds, these $2bn, to make sure that we are able to make a strong push for prevention in those vulnerable areas, and at the same time to bring the equipment that is required; ventilators, tests, suits for staff to allow for contact with people on the ground.





To counter the pandemic in warring countries, the UN has called for a ceasefire in major conflicts around the world, including in Syria, Yemen and Libya.

Yemens warring parties welcomed the call for an immediate truce on Thursday as the country entered its sixth year of a conflict that has unleashed a humanitarian crisis, rendering it more vulnerable to the coronavirus outbreak.

Late on Wednesday, a Saudi-led military coalition said it backed the Yemeni governments acceptance of the UN appeal.

Their foe, the Houthi movement, welcomed that stance but said it wants to see implementation on the ground.

The most important sides in Yemen have declared that they would accept the ceasefire. Other powers in the world say that they are ready to abide by it, Guterres told Al Jazeera.

Diplomats around the world are pushing for this appeal to be translated into diplomatic action. We have initiatives in Syria, Libya and Yemen and many other parts of the world.

I hope that the appeal will be heard and that people understand that there is only one war that is necessary today and that is the war against the virus, Guterres added.
HUMANS are social beings. We are social creatures by nature. However, social distancing, self-isolation or quarantining are all necessary public health guidelines to help control the spread of COVID-19. An ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates, once wrote, For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable. That is, desperate times call for desperate measures. Given our current situation in T&T it is necessary that these public health guidelines be closely adhered to, to flatten the curve.
Its been just over two weeks since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus outbreak, which first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late December, a global pandemic.

To date, more than 510,000 people have been infected worldwide, with more than 22,900 people dying from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Infections, the rates of which have accelerated since the outbreak began, have touched nearly every corner of the world and prompted unprecedented and widespread travel restrictions and business closures that threaten a global recession. At least three billion people, including Indias 1.3 billion population, have been ordered to stay home.





Even as new cases in China have dropped dramatically, leading to the easing of many restrictions, places such as Italy, Spain, Iran, and the United States have become new hot spots for the virus, for which there is no vaccine or proven treatment.

The speed and severity with which the virus has swept across the planet have left international organisations, governments and individuals reeling.

But the last few months have not been without developments that offer reasons for hope.

Here are six positive stories to watch:

WHO launches global trial of possible treatments

The WHO launched a global trial to quickly assess the most promising treatments for the virus and the disease it causes. The organisation is currently looking at four drugs or drug combinations that were developed for other illnesses and are already approved for human use and could be made widely available.

The simplified study will rely on data generated from thousands of patients at participating hospitals in countries around the world, while requiring little extra time and effort from already overwhelmed medical personnel.





As of March 20, Thailand, Argentina, Bahrain, Canada, France, Iran, Norway, South Africa, Spain and Switzerland had signed on to participate in the trial.

During the global study, according to Science magazine, a physician can enter the information of a hospitalised infected person, who has signed a consent form, into a WHO website. The physician will tell the WHO website which of the possible treatments are available at the hospital, and the website will randomly assign the patient to one of the drugs available or to the local standard of care.

Physicians will record the day the patient left the hospital or died, the duration of the hospital stay, and whether the patient required oxygen or ventilation, Ana Maria Henao Restrepo, a medical officer at WHOs Department of Immunization Vaccines and Biologicals, told the magazine.

The massive data set it yields could quickly indicate which treatments are the most effective.

We are doing this in record time, Restrepo told Science.

UK call for volunteers exceeds expectations

United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Tuesday night called for 250,000 volunteers to help deliver groceries and medicine to the most vulnerable citizens who have been ordered to self-isolate.

Within 24 hours, more than 400,000 people had signed up. That number soon rose to more than half a million, according to the BBC  larger than Britains armed forces, which currently stand at just over 192,000.





Under the National Health Service volunteer plan, healthcare professionals and some charities will be able to request help for their at-risk patients, who will then be matched with volunteers who live near them.

Any adults who are fit and healthy can apply to help deliver medicine from pharmacies, drive patients to appointments, or make regular phone calls to check on people.

About 11,000 former medics also agreed to return to the health service, while more than 24,000 final-year student nurses and medics will also aid the health system.

Air pollution drops

A silver lining of countries locking down across the planet, grinding transport and most industry to halt, has been a marked decline in air pollution.

Satellite imagery has shown pollution in China plummeting as large swaths of the country shut down at the height of the outbreak there.

The European Environment Agency (EEA) on Wednesday confirmed that the concentration of pollutants, in particular nitrogen dioxide, which is largely caused by road transport, recently massively declined in Europe especially in major cities under lockdown measures.

In Milan, the industrial capital of Italy, the average concentrations of nitrogen dioxide for the past four weeks have been at least 24 percent lower than four weeks earlier in the year, according to EEA.

COVID-19 forced closure of coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities inevitably leading to a drop in pollution, as shown in this satellite map [AFP]

In Bergamo, the average concentration of the pollutant during the week of March 16 to March 22 was 47 percent lower than for the same week in 2019. And in Rome, the average nitrogen dioxide concentrations for the past four weeks were between 26 and 35 percent lower than for the same weeks in 2019.

The trend can be seen beyond Italy: In Spain, Barcelonas average nitrogen dioxide levels went down by 40 percent from one week to the next. Compared with the same week in 2019, that reduction was 55 percent.

In Madrid, the average nitrogen dioxide levels went down by 56 percent from one week to the next. Compared with the same week in 2019, the reduction was 41 percent.

Italy coronavirus outbreak peak may soon be reached

Experts have urged patience in awaiting the outbreak of coronavirus in Italy, the worlds largest hot spot, to reach its peak. Scientists have been forced to learn about the new virus in real time as it spreads, making predictions particularly difficult.

Italy has so far recorded more than 8,000 deaths and over 80,000 infections.





On Saturday, Italy recorded its highest daily death toll of 793 new fatalities from COVID-19.

However, since then the daily toll, while remaining high, has not surpassed that number. Daily new cases have also leveled off.

The numbers are grounds for tentative optimism, WHOs Assistant Director-General for Strategic Initiatives, Ranieri Guerra, told Italian radio station Radio Capital, Italian newswire ANSA reported on Wednesday.

The slowing in the pace of growth is an extremely positive factor, and in some regions, I believe we are close to the drop-off point of the curve, therefore the peak may be reached this week and then fall away, Guerra said.

Guerra also told the radio station that the effect of Italys nationwide lockdown  which began on March 9 and was tightened in the following days  could soon be reflected in the number of cases.

I believe that this week and the first days of the next will be decisive because they will be moments in which the governments measures of 15 to 20 days ago should find an effect.

US hospitals prepare to use blood plasma as treatment

US hospitals are gearing up to test a century-old treatment used to fight off flu and measles outbreaks in the days before vaccines, and tried more recently against Ebola and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). This treatment might also work for COVID-19.

The US Food and Drug Administration said it is expediting approving the use of recovered patients plasma to treat the newly infected.

When a person gets infected by a particular virus, the body starts making specially designed proteins called antibodies to fight the infection. After the person recovers, those antibodies float in survivors blood  specifically in the plasma, the liquid part of blood  for months, even years.

The Empire State Building and the skyline of New York City are seen while a man walks around a local park in Weehawken, New Jersey [Eduardo Munoz/Reuters]

Injecting the plasma into another infected patient could boost the bodys ability to fight the infection, lessening the severity of the disease and freeing up hospital resources.

Every patient that we can keep out of the ICU [intensive care unit] is a huge logistical victory because there are traffic jams in hospitals, Michael Joyner, an anesthesiologist and physiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told Nature scientific journal.

We need to get this on board as soon as possible, and pray that a surge doesnt overwhelm places like New York and the West Coast.

Doctors in China attempted the first COVID-19 treatments using donated plasma from survivors of the new virus, but studies done there have only yielded preliminary results.

Cuban doctors sent to help overwhelmed Italian health system

Cuba has dispatched a brigade of doctors and nurses to Italy to aid in the fight against coronavirus, following a request from the worst-affected Lombardy region.





While the UN has called on international cooperation to battle the pandemic, many countries have been forced to focus on their own populations, as healthcare systems across the world face supply and staffing shortages.

Cuba has sent its armies of white robes to disaster sites around the world since its 1959 revolution. However, the 52-strong brigade of medical personnel represents the first time Cuba has sent an emergency contingent to Italy, which has been brought to its knees by the pandemic, despite being one of the worlds richest countries.

We are all afraid but we have a revolutionary duty to fulfill, so we take out fear and put it to one side, Leonardo Fernandez, 68, an intensive care specialist, told Reuters news agency shortly before his brigades departure.

He who says he is not afraid is a superhero, but we are not superheroes, we are revolutionary doctors, he said.
Hospitals throughout Alabama would only supply ventilators to patients with the best chance of survival under a controversial state plan that lays out the worst-case scenario for a mass-casualty respiratory emergency like the coronavirus pandemic.

The 18-page plan, created in 2009, advises doctors on which patients should receive access to the states reported 1,344 ventilators during an event in which a sudden influx of critically ill patients causes a severe shortage of life-saving medical supplies.

Patients suffering from end stage organ failure due to a wide range of underlying health conditions, from severe burns to metastasised cancer and Aids, would not be offered ventilator support under the plan.

Experts have warned the states supply of ventilators may not be enough to handle a potential surge of Covid-19 patients in the coming weeks, as the number of total confirmed cases nationwide soared to nearly 75,000 on Thursday.

The plan, reviewed by The Independent, should be used by state hospitals during a mass casualty event characterised by frequent, widespread cases of respiratory failure occurring in sufficient volume to quickly exhaust available mechanical ventilator resources, according to its guidelines.

Those guidelines specifically indicate that an example of a case in which the state plan should be used might include a virulently aggressive form of pandemic influenza.

Instead of receiving ventilator support, many patients under the plan would be moved to home palliative or in-patient care.

The coronavirus pandemic has already forced doctors in other countries to make the harrowing decision of which patients should receive ventilator assistance, including in Italy, where hospital staff have said they chose people based on their age and other health conditions.

The state plans guidelines also said it should only be used in the event of a public health emergency, which Alabama Governor Kay Ivey declared on 13 March.

Its meant to serve as a measure of last resort with the goal of providing aggressive treatment to those with the greatest chance of survival even if that requires removal of supportive care from others, the document stated.

The little-known plan was detailed in an Al.com report on Tuesday, as the state confirmed nearly 450 cases of the novel virus.

Experts have said those figures are likely far higher, however, citing significant issues the federal government had with distributing testing kits during the initial weeks of the outbreak in the US.
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia will expand coronavirus testing, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Wednesday, as Canberra struggles to contain an outbreak that it said has killed nine people in the country.

After a gradual spread in January, the number of cases in Australia appears to be tracking sharper spikes seen elsewhere, prompting warnings that hospitals could be overwhelmed.

As the number of cases topped 2,500, Morrison said Australia will expand testing to include people if they present with fever or an acute respiratory infection, as part of a move to help hospitals ready for an expected influx of new patients.

Australia had previously limited testing to people displaying symptoms who had recently returned from overseas. This has been widely criticized and the expansion of testing came as authorities signaled a more aggressive approach.

Morrison said high-risk groups to be tested include health workers, employees in care facilities for the elderly, prisoners, boarding school pupils and military base personnel.

Doctors will also be allowed to test hospital patients who display coronavirus symptoms.

Every extra bit of time allows us to better prepare our health system and put measures in place to protect Australian lives, Morrison said in an emailed statement.

Australia also said it would force passengers on a ship into quarantine and refused entry to another vessel amid concern that cruise ships have been a breeding ground for many of the new coronavirus cases in Australia, including it ninth fatality.

Queensland state said on Wednesday a 68-year-old man had become Australias youngest person to die from coronavirus.

The MV Artania, owned by Germanys Phoenix Reisen, was scheduled to dock in Perth and called ahead for medical assistance after 25 of its 800 passengers reported respiratory problems, the West Australian state government said.

The authorities refused to let it dock and sent local health professionals onto the ship, which had no Australians onboard.

Another cruise ship, the Vasco da Gama, was due in Perth on Friday with 800 Australians and 109 New Zealanders on board.

It will now be forced to dock at Rottnest Island, a former prison outpost, where a makeshift quarantine station was being set up. Foreigners would be flown home, while Australians would be let back into the country after 14 days of quarantine.

Phoenix Reisen, the MV Artania owner, was not immediately available for comment.

About 2,700 cruise passengers entered Sydney this week without health checks, and more than 130 have been confirmed as having coronavirus.

SOCIAL DISTANCING

Australia has extended restrictions across the country, including limiting the size of weddings and funerals and closing non-essential businesses such as bars, restaurants and cinemas.

But Australian lawmakers have been frustrated that some have disregarded warnings to increase social distancing and to self-isolate if returning from overseas.

Victoria state premier Daniel Andrews said 500 police officers will be checking to ensure people are complying.

In neighboring New South Wales (NSW), police will fine people A$1,000 ($604) for breaching rules that include limits of 10 people in outside gatherings, spaced 1.5 meters apart.

Western Australia will impose a limit on alcohol home purchases to lighten the law enforcement load for alcohol-related offences and minimize any health impact.
For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.

Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest warscreating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire.

Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III.





to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever.





Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation.





View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union.

Never before has a documentary assembled all the pieces of the globalists' dark agenda. Endgame's compelling look at past atrocities committed by those attempting to steer the future delivers information that the controlling media has meticulously censored for over 60 years. It fully reveals the elite's program to dominate the earth and carry out the wicked plan in all of human history.

Endgame is not conspiracy theory, it is documented fact in the elite's own words.




Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 23:56:42|Editor: yan

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MAPUTO, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The Ministry of Health of Mozambique (MISAU) said on Thursday that the number of people infected with COVID-19 rose to seven in the country.

The National Director of Public Health Rosa Marlene told a press conference that the latest two positive cases were two men both over 40 years old.

"One of the positive cases is that of a man of foreign nationality, residing in the city of Maputo, who returned from France this month," said Marlene.

The second case, she said, is a Mozambican male who also returned to Mozambique from abroad.

"It is important to say that all cases have a mild symptom and are in home isolation, in accordance with the recommendations of the World Health Organization," said the director.

Marlene said a total of 98 suspected cases were tested so far, of which 21 were tested in the last 24 hours.

She urged everyone to be active in observing preventive measures.

"One of the recommendations is discipline, it means that we learn from China," she said.

Currently, all the seven cases are found in Maputo, with six imported and one transmitted locally.
A new study conducted by the American Academy of Opthalmology has found that tears from a COVID-19 patient do not spread the coronavirus

A new study has found that tears from a COVID-19 patient do not spread the virus.

While researchers are convinced that coronavirus spreads through mucus and droplets expelled through coughing and sneezing, the new study clarifies that not all bodily fluid spread the virus.

The study was conducted by the American Academy of Opthalmology.

The study authors, however, added that 1-3 percent of those with coronavirus develop conjunctivitis.

Ivan Seah and his colleagues conducted the study at the National University Hospital in Singapore where they collected tear samples from 17 patients with COVID-19 from the time they showed symptoms until they recovered about 20 days later.

The study authors did not detect any virus in the tears throughout the two-week course of the disease.

The lead author of the study, Dr Seah also took samples from the back of the nose and throat during the same time and found that they were full of the COVID-19 virus.

As per studies, COVID-19 spreads when an infected person coughs or talks and the virus particles get sprayed from their mouth.

People can also get affected if they touch a surface that has the virus on it and then go on to touch their eyes, nose or mouth.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

The World Health Organisation says the best way to prevent the spread of coronavirus is to wash hands frequently with soap and water or to use a sanitiser.

Dr Seah hoped the study will help future researchers in seeking ways to prevent transmission of COVID-19 through the fecal-oral spread.
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Its lunchtime in Saginaw on Tuesday, March 24, the first day of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmers COVID-19 stay-at-home order.

Only designated essential workers or residents seeking essential items, like food, groceries and medication, are supposed to be outside their homes through April 13 with the intent of limiting spread of the coronavirus.

The essential designation is wide-ranging. It includes gas station attendants, marijuana retailers, hardware and auto part store employees, grocery stock workers, and line cooks alongside police, doctors and nurses.

Employees of Tonys Original Restaurant on State Street in Saginaw say vehicle traffic outside seemed the same as usual, even if they were extra desolate that morning. Take-out orders were steady and tips larger on average, although much less prevalent since dine-in services were eliminated by the governor March 16.

These people have to be open, David Hilbrandt, the 40-year Tonys owner, said of the myriad of business still operating. Its going to come down to economics. People have to make a living. Its a fine line. Its really hard to say whats essential and whats non-essential.

Hilbrandt said his restaurant will maintain the same business hours and employee shifts for take-out orders whether its one customer or 100 customers.

Next door, Pennzoil oil change employees are visible through garage windows.

Id rather be here than laid off, said one technician as as he reached up toward the chassis of an elevated car. I cant really talk to you right now. I have customers to take care of.

Around the corner, a bay window converted for coronavirus-distancing sales slides up at Intermission Deli in Saginaw, a 38-year mainstay sandwich shop in the community.

Whats up, man, 35-year-old Dan Stoney, the rubber-gloved cashier and son of owner Scott Stoney, says to a customer whos just walked up to place an order.

Half 19, light lettuce, Dan Stoney yells back to his 67-year-old father, whos slapping meat and veggies on white bread behind a sneeze-guarded sandwich station without the regular customers on the other side.

It just doesnt seem like a total shutdown, Scott Stoney said. Some are working. I mean Meijer still has people in there not doing six feet apart ... Something is kind of hokey about it.

I agree we have to do out part, so Im doing my part ... "

He said hes shortened hours, eliminated Saturday shifts and only takes orders by phone or through the window.

Scott Stoney said none of his five employees have complained about having to work during the stay-at-home order, even as the deadly coronavirus quickly spreads.

Not as of yet, his son interjects. "I mean, if it gets worse ... "

As of Wednesday, Michigan health officials had recorded 2,295 coronavirus cases and 43 related deaths, an increase of 504 cases and 19 deaths since the day prior.

Numerous leaders, including Gov. Whitmer, President Donald Trump and Centers for Disease Control officials, have emphatically asked people to stay inside their homes or at least six feet away from anyone while in public. But public economic health seem to be at odds and inconsistent, Dan Stoney said.

Liquor stores are still open," he said. I guess everyone has got to have their booze.

About 90 miles south of Saginaw, just off Interstate 75 at Beaumont Health hospital in Metro Detroits Royal Oak, there is a different class of essential worker.

Anesthesiologists are inserting breathing tubes down the throats of patients throughout the hospital, some of those patients confirmed to have or suspected of having the coronavirus.

The CDC has suggested that those who are best at intubations do intubations, and so that happens to be the anesthesiologists, said Dr. Roy Soto, an anesthesiologist, president of the Michigan Society of Anesthesiologists and a professor. For a couple weeks now, the anesthesiologists at Beaumont have done all the intubations in the entire hospital.

While many patients may need ventilators for various medical procedures unrelated to coronavirus or other contagious diseases, Soto said all patients are treated as if they have tuberculosis.

The anesthesiologists wear two layers of face protection with a translucent shield that covers the eyes, an impenetrable gown and two pairs of gloves.

Remember, when youre putting a breathing tube in somebody, my hand is pretty much touching their face and my face is a foot or two away from their face, Soto said. And these are people that are breathing and theyre coughing and theyre gasping an so there are a lot of viral particle being spread in that little room.

Oakland County, where the hospital is located, had 543 confirmed cases of coronavirus with 10 deaths, as of Wednesday, second in Michigan only to Wayne County, where there had been 1,122 cases and 21 deaths.

Despite the statistical danger, Soto said anesthesiologists arent asking to partake in the stay-at-home order.

As a profession ... I think were the type of folks who tend to run towards a fire, Soto said. "I dont think any of us are wanting to stay home. Ive heard none of that, whatsoever ...

Theyre well-educated and well-trained and theyre taking the appropriate precautions.

Upon issuing the stay-at-home order Monday, Whitmer asked businesses not to play fast and loose with what is essential and whats not."

Dont try to skirt the rules," she said. "If youre not an essential business you need to close and you need to protect your employees. Were confident that the vast majority of people are going to do the right thing.

Businesses that fail to comply with the governors executive order could face a misdemeanor, $500 fine and 90 days in jail for each violation. The Attorney Generals Office -- which initially fielded tips on its consumer hotline -- now urges workers who feel their employer is violating the governors order to contact local law enforcement.

CORONAVIRUS PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

Complete coverage of coronavirus in Michigan

More on MLive

Coronavirus developments, March 25

2,295 cases, 43 deaths; latest coronavirus case data

Michigan unemployment system overwhelmed

Congress reaches $2 Trillion coronavirus aid deal

Local law enforcement to handle non-essential business complaints

How to report non-essential businesses
Every year, Womens History Month is recognized throughout the month of March, highlighting the accomplishments and innovations of women. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

While the stereotypical image of the suffrage movement consists of white women rallying for the right to vote, several suffrage groups were created and led by African American women right here in Indiana.

Anita Morgan, professor of history at IUPUI, wrote about the suffrage movement extensively in her upcoming book, We Must Be Fearless.

The [most notable African American suffragist in Indiana] is Carrie Barnes, Morgan said. She did the bulk of her work right here in the state  and became the president of what is believed to be the first African American suffrage meeting in Indiana.

The Indianapolis News published an article on June 25, 1912, describing the meeting of Branch #7, organized initially by F.D. Ransom, the namesake of Ransom Place.

Between thirty and forty colored equal suffrage enthusiasts met last night at the home of Mrs. C.J. Walker, the paper wrote.   Five or six men were present. Miss Barnes, who was elected chairman of the branch, is a school teacher of this city.

According to Morgan, many African American women who were teachers in Indianapolis Public Schools were active in the suffrage movement. Throughout the state, there were several African American suffrage groups, and several integrated groups. While many of the issues both white and Black suffragists were fighting for were similar  the vote, conditions for workers in factories and fighting child labor laws  there may have been more of a sense of urgency for Black activists.

African American suffragists were working women in addition to everything else, Morgan said. They wanted the vote, but were aware of the fact that the vote took a lot of guts, because there was still harassment of some African American male voters in Indianapolis. They were worried about child labor laws, and temperance. The issues are really pretty much the same. Its just  employment issues and labor regulations might be a little more urgent because it affected them a bit more directly.

As president of the colored branch of the Equal Suffrage League, Barnes organized meetings and, according to The Crisis, a quarterly magazine published by the NAACP, met with other branches of the Equal Suffrage League once a month to go over pressing issues. Among these issues, Barnes felt African American women could have greater benefit from the vote than white women.

We feel that colored women have need for the ballot that white women have, Barnes wrote, and a great many needs that they have not.

Barnes moved with her husband to Boston in 1916, where she worked extensively with the local chapter of the NAACP there. According to the Indianapolis Star, she died in Boston in 1918 after giving birth to her only child, two years shy of the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Her work in Indianapolis was not in vain, however. After women got the right to vote, several states did not change their registration laws for the 1920 presidential election, making it impossible for women to actually vote that year. Indiana, however, made it possible for women to register, and there was a large turnout for women throughout the state.

At that time, African Americans made up about 10% of the population in Indianapolis, Morgan said. The political parties were very competitive in Indiana at the time and were actively vying for [the Black] vote.

While many newspapers throughout the state recorded the percentage of votes among various populations, including immigrants, Germans, and colored voters, there is no information about possible oppression of the vote for marginalized groups, despite it being likely there was voter suppression taking place due to the prevalence of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana at the time.

According to Morgan, one of the reasons it is difficult for Indiana historians to find information on voter suppression in the 1920s is because the Recorder archives are missing the years from 1917-1925, which are key years when the Klan controlled much of Indianas state government.

I think its amazing and really brave, Morgan said of high African American turnout in Indiana elections. Considering the Klan was holding parades through downtown Indianapolis. I dont see any kind of active suppression [in research],  Im sure there were attempts, but if you look at the newspapers you still see a good turnout.  Its difficult to know without these missing issues. If we had those, it might change a lot of what Im saying.

However, the information Morgan found implies that African American voters were aware of what was going on in the state, as the majority voted for Republican presidential candidates in 1920, 1924 and 1928, but split their tickets to vote for state Democratic candidates, as Indianas Republican Party was heavily controlled by the Klan, led by convicted murderer D.C. Stephenson.

Carrie Barnes was one of many African American women who dedicated their lives to suffrage and equality. Despite going largely unrecognized, their work made the upcoming 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment possible.

Contact staff writer Breanna Cooper at 317-762-7848. Follow her on Twitter @BreannaNCooper.

Carrie Barnes
Prominent leaders of the industry have come together to set up a platform (Supported by the Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture- MCCIA) to assess the potential gaps in the demand and supply of provisions in the Pune region, under the current lockdown period.

Under the Pune Platform for Covid-19 response, with MCCIA anchoring it and Pradeep Bhargava, president, MCCIA and Sudhir Mehta, MD, Pinnacle Group, steering it, they have been able to raise Rs 6.5 crore, half in cash and half in kind. A total of 27 ventilators have been given to the government and private hospitals in Pune with another eight on the way and will be given in the next 48 hours. This has been possible due tot he help of more than 20 corporates and philanthropists who have donated in cash and kind.

MCCIA has appealed for companies to support for an adequate supply of medical equipment. While the current Covid-19 situation in India appears to be not out of control, it is essential to stay ultra-cautious. The government and private healthcare facilities are putting in their best efforts. However, in the spirit of a heightened level of preparedness, it is crucial that these facilities have a more than adequate supply of medical equipment and relevant consumables (e.g. N95-masks, protective gear, among others), said Prashant Girbane, director general, MCCIA.
LOS ANGELES, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Levine Leichtman Capital Partners ("LLCP"), a Los Angeles-based private equity firm, announced that it has invested in Blue Ridge ESOP Associates ("Blue Ridge" or the "Company") in partnership with the existing owners and management team. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Blue Ridge is the leading provider of technology enhanced solutions and services for the administration and recordkeeping of Employee Stock Ownership Plans ("ESOPs") and associated 401(k) plans. Blue Ridge's comprehensive service offerings and highly experienced professional administrators address the complex and mission-critical needs of ESOP businesses, which has provided the Company with an unmatched reputation as the highest-quality service provider in the market. The Company serves a large and diversified client base of over 700 ESOP and 401(k) Plan Sponsors with over 175,000 total plan participants. Founded in 1988, Blue Ridge is headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia and has offices throughout the country.

Josh Kaufman, a Managing Director at LLCP, stated, "Blue Ridge's consistent growth and sterling reputation are a testament to its unique domain expertise in the ESOP and 401(k) industry, and to its specialized, comprehensive product suite. We are excited to partner with the existing owners and management team and to support them in accelerating growth and enhancing the product offering."

Tom Roback, CEO of Blue Ridge, added, "We are very excited about partnering with LLCP as Blue Ridge seeks to further strengthen its market position and product offering, and fuel its next stage of growth. LLCP has a long history of being a value-added partner to its portfolio companies and we look forward to leveraging their strategic, financial and acquisitions expertise."

Marie Minton and Greg Washburn, co-owners of Blue Ridge, stated, "We are delighted that our dedicated management team and LLCP are taking ownership in Blue Ridge. We have all been working with LLCP over the last several months and they have provided thoughtful insight into our professional services in a highly collaborative way. We are excited to continue to lead the industry with best-in-class services and technology."

The investment in Blue Ridge follows a number of prior investments made by LLCP in the business services industry, including Trinity Consultants, Revenew International, Smith System and Law Business Research. It will be the eighth investment from LLCP Lower Middle Market Fund, L.P.

Honigman served as legal advisor to LLCP. Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. served as financial advisor to Blue Ridge.

For more information, visit www.BlueRidgeESOP.com and www.llcp.com.

About Levine Leichtman Capital Partners

Levine Leichtman Capital Partners, LLC is a middle-market private equity firm with a 36-year track record of successfully investing across various targeted sectors, including franchising, professional services, education and engineered products. LLCP utilizes a differentiated Structured Equity investment strategy, combining debt and equity capital investments in portfolio companies. This unique structure provides a less dilutive solution for management teams and entrepreneurs, while delivering growth and income with a significantly lower risk profile.

LLCP's global team of dedicated investment professionals is led by seven partners who have worked together for an average of 21 years. Since inception, LLCP has managed over $10.8 billion of institutional capital across 14 investment funds and has invested in over 80 portfolio companies. LLCP currently manages $6.9 billion of assets  including its most recent flagship fund, Levine Leichtman Capital Partners VI, L.P., which closed in 2018 with $2.5 billion of committed capital  and has offices in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Chicago, Charlotte, Miami, London, Stockholm and The Hague.

Media Contact:

Mark Semer or Ross Lovern

Kekst CNC

[email protected], [email protected]

(212) 521-4800

SOURCE Levine Leichtman Capital Partners

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A supermarket has been forced to throw away $35,000 worth of produce after a woman was filmed "deliberately" coughing on food during the coronavirus pandemic.

The customer was at Gerrity's supermarket in the Hanover township of Pennsylvania when she reportedly started to deliberately cough on food in the store's produce, bakery and meat section.

She was chased out of the store and police were called.

The store had to extensively clean the areas coughed on and had to dispose of more than $35,000 (29,260) worth of food.

Gerrity's chief executive Joe Fasula said: "While there is little doubt this woman was doing it as a twisted prank, we will not take any chances with the health and wellbeing of our customers.

"Working closely with the Hanover Township health inspector, we identified every area that she was in, disposed of the product and thoroughly cleaned and disinfected everything.

"Although we have not yet quantified the total loss, we estimate the value to be well over $35,000."

The store is checking to see if its insurance company will cover the loss but Mr Fasula said: "Rates will surely go up next year."

Police have launched an investigation and, according to local officers, the woman is a known "pest" in the community.

Supermarkets around the world have to had introduce new safety measures to ensure staff and customers are safe from the spread of the coronavirus.

"While it is always a shame when food was wasted, in these times when so many people are worried about the security of our food supply, it is even more disturbing," said Mr Fasula.

"The only silver lining to this travesty is that it gave us the unfortunate opportunity to test our protocols and demonstrate how seriously we take your safety.

"At one point, we had over 15 employees involved in the disposal and clean up."

The news comes after a Dagenham man admitted in court to coughing over police while claiming he had Covid-19.

Darren Rafferty, 45, admitted three counts of assaulting an emergency worker at Snaresbrook Crown Court on Wednesday and he will be sentenced in April.

Anyone claiming to have coronavirus who deliberately coughs at emergency workers faces being jailed for two years, Britain's Director of Public Prosecutions said on Thursday.
Putting together a solid rum offer

Todays rum category already seems vast. Couple that with ever-changing consumer trends and assembling a decent rum selection can seem like navigating a labyrinth in a blindfold.

Here, DR explores the key trends in rum styles outside of spiced rum. We look at how the industry has reacted to classification attempts and explore what effective measures can be taken to put together a solid rum offer.

TREND WATCH

The trend towards premiumisation in rum is the result of several other consumer shifts, including a maturing interest in the category, increased cocktail knowledge and a desire to drink less but better.

Consumers have become extremely knowledgeable with which spirits they choose when ordering a drink, says Ruben Maduro, founder & chief executive of Amsterdams Spirited Union Distillery, saying they tend to move away from mainstream brands and instead know which brands to choose and what to mix them with.

He adds: We have seen consumers being selective with their gin and flavoured tonic. This is now also happening with rum.

Martamaria Carrillo, global brand manager & co-founder of Colombian aged rum brand La Hechicera, says premiumisation is evolving.

More and more consumers are experiencing what we like to call true rums, meaning there are no added sugars or colourings, and they are enjoying these rums neat or over ice, Carrillo says. As consumers trade up and discover the nuances of rums and the depths of flavour, they are slowly moving away from traditional cola and rum and opting for simple, classic cocktails.

Hand-in-hand with premiumisation comes the trend towards quality and provenance, believes Liam Hirt, director and co-founder of Bristols Circumstance Distillery. In terms of what that means for retailers, Hirt suggests taking the time to research brands credentials as well as focusing on bottlers of vintages and blends.

Maduro concurs. As consumers become more knowledgeable, he also describes an increase in the number of rum crusaders. At the same time, there are more brands setting out to make an impact and add more transparency to the rum category.

At The Whisky Exchanges sister company, Speciality Brands, managing director Chris Seale expands on the provenance trend, highlighting that geographical origin has become a key purchase driver for consumers.

This has encouraged the emergence of new quality rums from Latin America, the Caribbean and even Japan, he says. Our premium rum brands, from Venezuelas Diplomatico and Jamaicas Hampden to Haitis Clairin, are all fully benefiting from this trend and building strong followings as consumers are keen to explore their stories but also their various tasting profiles.

Innovation around flavour is an important trend, Hirt adds, highlighting coffee infusions. Spirited Union has hit upon more sophisticated flavour offerings with its botanical rum line-up.

CLASSIFICATION DEBATE

In May 2019, The Whisky Exchange, led by buyer Dawn Davies MW, introduced a new classification system for rum, placing more emphasis on flavours and production than colour. The system is inspired by the technically-based Gargano Classification for rums devised by Luca Gargano, of the Italian-based Velier rum brand, and Richard Seale of Foursquare in Barbados.

The move has received a mixed reception. La Hechiceras Carrillo applauds the initiative: One obstacle the category faces is consumer confusion, Carrillo says. Consumers are confused about age statements, colour and flavour - what a true rum should taste like.

Jonathan Welch, co-founder of Brand Harbour, which represents organic, single estate rum Copalli also believes that making it easy to choose between different styles and rums with clean ingredients versus other types can only aid consumers in finding the product that fits their needs and aligns to how they feel products should be made.

In the new world of rums, Spirited Unions Maduro agrees that the fundamental reason behind the classification of rum is great. However, there are limitations.

In practice it will be difficult to live by these rules as rum is a vibrant and global category, he says, highlighting his own botanical rums.

But Circumstances Hirt is not a fan. He says distillers such as Circumstance and Empirical Spirits have moved to producing spirits outside of traditional categories. He believes the old guard of rum is desperately trying to impose their views of what rum is allowed to be on consumers and the entire industry, under the guise of protecting the consumer.

He points out that even Scotch whisky has begun to relax its rules by allowing tequila casks for maturation.

I am an advocate of transparency rather than classification. he adds.

PUTTING TOGETHER A RUM OFFER

Whether retailers use the classification system as a tool to organise their offer or not, it seems the rum consumer is as diverse as the rum category.

Master of Malt editor Kristiane Sherry describes the level of rum education as varying from genuine expert to first-time drinker. She says retailers have to meet the needs of everyone on that scale.

Having clear navigation is helpful  but also incredibly challenging to get right, she says. You need a balance between accuracy and accessibility; a system that does not get too technical

and that everyone can use. While a typical consumer might not understand the difference between typically pot and column distilled styles, for example, they may understand the differences in character and flavour between light and heavy marks.

Sherry also believes retailers need to have a clear demarcation between sugar cane-based and molasses styles. This is an essential area to get right, as consumers, especially in the UK, remain largely unexposed to cane-based expressions. We need to make sure we present a product accurately and build an understanding to ensure the bottling meets their expectations, she adds.

Nick Bell, spirits buyer at Harvey Nichols, advocates balance. He says it is easy to get carried away with lost distilleries and finding the rarest rum. He adds: Keeping the range diverse and interesting is always more rewarding than buying rums youd like in your own personal collection, and consumers will respond in kind.

When it comes to helping consumers understand different styles of rum, education has to start with staff. We keep our store staff informed as they are the direct point of contact for our customers, says Bell. Where possible, we always insist our staff try every bottle we sell, often through presentations from the brands. This is to ensure they are knowledgeable when advising customers on our rum range.

Copallis Welch also believes it is important to offer brands that talk to the big trends driving consumer choices, including respect for the environment, sustainability and activism on one hand, great stories, great tastes and openness about product ingredients and origins on the other.

As rum continues to capture the hearts and minds of consumers, innovation will continue to drive both premiumisation and debate around classifications. For those retailers staring at a well- stocked gin display, all this will feel very familiar.

Related articles:
ALBANY  New York Oncology Hematology this week announced it will temporarily vacate its Albany Medical Center office and treatment space so the hospital can use it to care for COVID-19 patients.

The 19,000-square-foot office will help Albany Med achieve a state directive mandating hospitals to boost their bed capacity by at least 50 percent as New York attempts to nearly triple its bed capacity statewide in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Beginning Monday, April 6, all NYOH patients who are typically seen and treated at the Albany Med location will be rescheduled at the cancer treatment provider's Patroon Creek location about 15 minutes away. Patients are being contacted about the change.

It's just the latest shuffle for NYOH, which earlier this week announced it is temporarily merging its Troy office into its Patroon Creek and Clifton Park locations as it works with a smaller staff and patient load.

Latest coronavirus-related cancellations, postponements

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All non-urgent appointments have been canceled across all six of its Capital Region locations, resulting in fewer patients arriving to the offices. Additionally, most staff who do not provide direct patient care are working remotely from home in order to reduce risk to patients, physicians and other staff.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

"By shifting patients in Troy to our Patroon Creek and Clifton Park offices, we can fully utilize our staff, physicians and other resources to continue providing the best possible care to all of our patients," said Sabrina Mosseau, the provider's executive director.

NYOH is also screening all patients upon arrival to its offices for COVID-19 symptoms and travel history. It's also restricting visitors and guests, allowing just one guest for regular exams and no guests into its infusion and radiation treatment area. Guests under 16 years old will not be allowed, according to its website.

"We know that is hard for patients, but we also know it reduces the risk of infection to cancer patients from the general public," Mosseau said. "The good news is that we have front-door drop-off at all of our office locations, so family members and caregivers can stay close by and be there as soon as patients are done."

Cancer patients can be more susceptible to viruses, including COVID-19, because of weakened and compromised immune systems. Some cancer treatments, such as targeted therapies, steroids, as well as some cancer types, like blood cancers, can result in an impaired immune system.
Landra Gould, widow of senator Harry M. Reid, pays respects at his casket at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll/Bloomberg News)

The former Senate majority leader was remembered as a pragmatic dealmaker who became a political force across two presidencies.
The Haryana Police has arrested 547 people for flouting the lockdown orders enforced to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, an official said on Thursday.

The country, which has 649 coronavirus positive cases and has recorded 13 deaths due to it till now, is under a 21-day lockdown from Tuesday midnight.

"Till 4 pm on March 26, 318 FIRs have been registered, 547 people arrested and 1,934 vehicles seized, and fines of Rs 10.20 lakh have been imposed (on violators)," Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Navdeep SinghVirk said.

Director General of Police, Haryana, Manoj Yadava is monitoring the situation and is in constant touch with commissioners of police and superintendents of police to ensure strict compliance of the lockdown orders, a police spokesperson said.

Essential and emergency services are exempted under the orders, officials said.

Police made a group of youths in Jhajjar to do sit-ups as punishment for violating lockdown orders, while in Kaithal's Guru Teg Bahadur Chowk, police personnel could be seen persuading a few people who were out for non-essential work to return home.

In a village in Fatehabad district, police swung into action after it got reports that a group of 30 to 40 people could gather for a marriage function.

The function did not take place after the man who was organising it was told that section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (prevents assembly of five or more people at one spot) was imposed across the state in view of the lockdown, a police official said.

From a few places, including Panipat, there were reports that people were not following social distancing at shops selling essential items like groceries.

The government has said it will be arranging delivery of essential items at doorsteps so that people stay indoors.

On Thursday, Chief Minister M L Khattar appealed to the people to follow social distancing to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

In a televised address, he said, "Corona Haryana say harega, bharat say bhagega (corona will be defeated in Haryana and the virus will be eliminated from India), this is our pledge."



"Everyone should cooperate with the administration and volunteers. Together we have to rise to fight it," Khattar said.

The government has set up helpline numbers '1075' and '1100' to address queries on the lockdown.

Haryana Governor Satyadeo Narain Arya has directed authorities to ensure that the homeless, daily-wagers, street vendors, beggars and other needy people receive cooked food.

He has also issued directions to ensure dry ration is delivered wherever it is necessary.

Red Cross officials have been asked by the governor to coordinate with the district administration and provide all possible assistance to the people.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 15:22:12|Editor: huaxia

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China sent a team of medical staff with experience in fighting COVID-19 to Serbia on March 21 to help with the Balkan state's battle against the virus. Click to have a look at where they stay in Serbia. #FightVirus #COVID19
Sydney's eastern suburbs have become the epicentre of the battle to contain the spread of coronavirus in NSW, with Waverley and Woollahra local government areas accounting for nearly 15 per cent of confirmed cases in the state.

NSW Health has revealed that Waverley has 105 cases and Woollahra 66 cases. Sydney City has 69, the Northern Beaches 68 and the Central Coast has 44.

NSW Health released the locations of the state's coronavirus clusters nearly a week after pictures of thousands of revellers defying authorities to spend the day on Bondi Beach went around the world.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian warned on Thursday that if the number of new COVID-19 cases do not start dropping, NSW will have to introduce tighter lockdown measures.




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Syncback's SBTV Streaming Platfrom Launches Dedicated COVID-19 Channel, Aggreggating Local TV Coverage from Across the U.S.

Viewers Are Able to Tap into A Curated 24/7 Channel Featuring COVID-19 Segments from Local Stations Across the Country  Enabling an Inside Look at How Coronavirus Impacting Communities Across the Country

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Syncbak, the worlds leading platform for live local OTT, today announced it has launched a new channel within its SBTV streaming platform specifically dedicated to covering COVID-19. The COVID-19 aggregates and curates news content from local TV broadcasters in more than 115 markets across the U.S., with content refreshed hourly, 24 hours a day. Although SBTV generally carries advertising, which has been a great ancillary revenue source for the local broadcasters, the newly launched channel will run advertising-free on SBTV, as both Syncbak and the local stations carried on SBTV believe it is important to bring this content to viewers without interruption. You can check out the newly debuted channel here. The SBTV app is free to viewers anywhere and is available via web and mobile browsers, the SBTV app on the App Store and Google Play, Apple TV, Fire TV, and Roku.

Jack Perry, CEO of Syncbak, said, Now more than ever people want to know whats happening on the ground not only in their local communities, but also the local communities of friends and loved ones across the country. Working with the local news broadcasters that are part of SBTV, the new channel will provide citizens with an inside look at what is happening in towns across the U.S., which they wont get just watching their national news. The channel also lets us spotlight some of the great work of local reporters working hard on the ground.

The new COVID-19 channel further enhances how SBTV is both providing audiences with better insight into the impact of COVID-19, and enabling local stations to super serve audiences  even beyond what they see on their linear networks. Over the past couple of weeks, SBTV stations have livestreamed several exclusive to SBTV COVID-19 long form programs that did not fit into their regular TV schedules. One such station, WWTV in Cadillac, Michigan has uploaded full length press conferences from the governor, as well as a special on COVID-19 filmed with local health authorities, onto the service to keep audiences more deeply informed. And viewers are tuning in, with WWTV seeing a 131% week-over-week increase in unique viewers and 149% increase in minutes viewed of their SBTV streamed content.

Kevin Dunaway, VP and GM at Heritage Broadcasting and WWTV said, SBTV has enabled us to deliver critical content to our viewers during this unprecedented time. We've streamed local press conferences in their entirety and answered viewer questions about COVID-19 in a Q and A format with a local Doctor. In each instance, we were not restricted in time due to the flexibility of the SBTV platform and we've seen a notable jump in viewership by doing so. Most importantly, we've kept our community connected and informed when they've needed it most."

Even though local broadcasters will not revenue from the specific COVID-19 channel, Syncbak believes spotlighting their content in this way will likely drive audiences to the streams of the stations of most interest to them  through which broadcasters will share in the advertising revenue.

During the current crisis, SBTV has seen its viewership grow, and in doing so has enhanced an ecosystem for local TV stations to further drive audience and revenue in the streaming era. In addition to being able to stream their linear TV content through the app, broadcasters are increasingly using the platform to stream SBTV exclusive events and specials and financially benefit from the advertising through Syncbaks adSync technology. Recently, Gray Televisions KTUU in Anchorage streamed key segments of the iconic Iditarod race, which Anchorage station KTUU broadcasted to a global audience. The event was so popular that the Alaskan station saw a 744% increase in out-of-market views on SBTV.

SBTV is part of Syncbak, which was started by one of the foremost media technology trailblazers of his generation, Jack Perry, with backing by major investors like ViacomCBS, Gray Television, Northwest Broadcasting, Morgan Murphy Media, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and Consumer Technology Association (CTA).

About Syncbak founder Jack Perry

Syncbak CEO Jack Perry has always been focused on technologies that can keep audiences entertained, but also in the know, especially at the local level. His company currently powers over-the-top delivery of live broadcast signals for the biggest streaming players including Hulu, CBS All Access, Fubo, and the NFL among others. His pioneering achievements include creating the first geo-fencing and subscriber authentication technologyGenevawhich enabled satellite companies like Dish to deliver local TV signals to subscribers across the country; an antennaweb.org, an online tool that helped consumers migrate from analog to digital TV; and TitanTV, the first-ever web based electronic program guide with built in DVR capabilities. Perry's SimpleSync technology is the first-ever broadcast-to-OTT platform.
Even in the most extreme scenarios, no one in Israel could have imagined that the Knesset speaker would refuse to obey a High Court ruling. But this is what happened yesterday morning.

Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein resigned, claiming that morally, he could not follow the directive of the court to convene the parliament and hold a vote to replace himself. Edelstein explained that he is staying put for a chance to establish an emergency national unity government to confront the coronavirus crisis.

The drama peaked shortly after midnight, when the High Court Justices, in a historic move, appointed a temporary Knesset speaker, tasking Knesset veteran Amir Peretz of Labor with holding the vote. This means that two House speakers will serve simultaneously at least for one day, as Edelsteins resignation goes into effect on Friday, while Peretz received authority to convene the Knesset today.

President of the High Court Esther Hayut criticized Edelsteins conduct, stating that his refusal to adhere to the courts direction damaged the rule of law. "There has never been such an occurrence in this country where a leadership figure publicly and defiantly refused to uphold a court order, saying that his conscience does not allow him to carry it out.  This is a situation that we cannot acquiesce to; unprecedented harm to the rule of law demands an unprecedented remedy, she wrote.

The latest developments are yet another peak in the constitutional crisis that has mired Israel for the last year. Blue and White leader Benny Gantz has been tasked with forming the next government, yet despite leading a Knesset majority he cannot fulfill his mission. At least two of his own faction refuse to be part of a government backed by the Joint List. The Blue and White leadership is now focusing its efforts now on taking over the Knesset and its committees.

But not everyone agrees with the court. Many lawmakers, especially on the right, argue that the justices exceeded their authority in taking control over the legislative branch. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked tweeted, "The High Court bypassed the system, bypassed the law, bypassed Basic Law. Thats what the left has taught us; democracy dying out slowly."

This afternoon, once Peretz convenes the Knesset plenum, well know whether Blue and White will appoint a permanent new speaker or give another chance for the establishment of a unity government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and with an agreed-upon election of a new speaker. Blue and White had planned to propose one of its members to the job, but other possibilities are also being discussed, including the option of Gantz himself taking up the speaker position.
Travelers from New York City to Florida are reportedly not being screened for the coronavirus as they enter the Sunshine State despite Gov Ron DeSantis demanding that all passengers undergo testing.

Earlier this week, DeSantis announced that he will require coronavirus testing of all air travelers arriving in his state from New York City and New Jersey after a 'huge amount' of people, who were given stay at home orders, began showing up in his state.

But on Thursday, the Sun-Sentinel revealed that some travelers arriving to Florida from the New York area were not screened at local airports.

One Florida resident told the newspaper that there was 'no screening' when he got on or off planes during his trip.

Travelers from New York City to Florida are reportedly not being screened for the coronavirus as they enter the Sunshine State despite Gov Ron DeSantis demanding that all passengers undergo testing. A passenger from New York is seen arriving in West Palm Beach on Tuesday

On Thursday it was revealed that some travelers arriving to Florida from the New York area were not screened at local airports. Passengers arrive from Newark New Jersey to West Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday

The traveler, who landed at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on Thursday, also said no one took his temperature or asked him any questions.

Two other passengers arriving at the same airport reportedly told the Sentinel the same thing.

Greg Meyer, the spokesman for the Broward County Aviation Department, said that the screening process was much less aggressive than what DeSantis described.

'We dont have the resources to be at every gate,' he said, adding that passengers traveling from eight New York City areas were given forms to fill out before boarding their flights to Florida, but that doesn't mean they completed the forms.

DeSantis, speaking at a news conference on Monday in Sumter County, noted that there are more than 190 direct flights from New York's airports, which includes Newark Liberty across the river in New Jersey.

He also speculated that 'every flight has someone on it that is positive for COVID-19'.

Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis (pictured Tuesday) announced that he will require coronavirus testing of all air travelers arriving in his state from the New York City region

But some travelers (pictured at JFK) said they were not screened at any time during their trip. Greg Meyer, the spokesman for the Broward County Aviation Department, said that the screening process was much less aggressive than what DeSantis described

DeSantis said the move to test travelers was necessary as part of his state's effort to slow the spread of the deadly pandemic.

The governor also said he still doesn't want to lock down the state and place residents under a shelter-in-place order due to the coronavirus.

He pointed to New York's experience as further evidence that efforts to contain people, even at the urging of top health officials, can backfire.

'If you look at what happened in New York, when they did the stay at home order, what did people do?' DeSantis told the Tampa Bay Times. 'Well, a lot of people fled the city. ... We're getting huge amounts of people flying in.'

DeSantis said he spoke to President Donald Trump about the rise in travel on Sunday night, when New York City went into a lockdown and asked all non-essential workers to stay home.

He said he also asked the president about limiting domestic flights more than a week ago.

There are more than 83,000 confirmed cases in the US of the coronavirus, which has been blamed for more than 1000 deaths.

As of Monday, Florida had 2,355 cases, resulting in 28 deaths.

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

The number of cases in the US has rocketed over the last two weeks

'For every action, there's a reaction,' DeSantis said. 'We're going to consider what makes sense for Florida.'

DeSantis touted a new drive-thru testing lab that was set up in partnership with the University of Florida.

While the school live-streamed the news conference on Facebook, viewers posted a flurry of comments pleading with DeSantis to severely restrict travel within the state.

'The longer you wait to shut us down, the longer it will take for our state to recover from all of this!' one woman wrote.

Trump left it up to each state to choose how they respond to the coronavirus outbreak, prompting governors to issue local lockdowns which have impacted residents and non-essential businesses and services.

Only 21 states have issued shelter in place orders for residents.

Florida has experienced a community spread of the infection, as images of Spring Breakers defying beach closures have created a backlash across the country.

Florida has experienced a community spread of the infection, as images of Spring Breakers defying beach closings have created a backlash across the country. A skateboarder passes a 'Beach Closed' sign on the boardwalk in Miami Beach Sunday

Rather than move to close the state off at this point, DeSantis argued that he and other officials have responded to the outbreak by following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Among the state's counties, only Miami-Dade and Broward have ordered all non-essential businesses to close.

DeSantis warned anyone who did not heed coronavirus warnings to immediately start social distancing, as recommended by health officials to help contain the outbreak.

'At the end of the day, you're going to have a group of people that are not going to comply, that are going to put themselves first,' he said Monday.

'I would just say for those folks, you need to cool it.'
Church services evacuated, pastors arrested in several countries over gathering bans

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Authorities in countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Greece have evacuated church services and arrested pastors in recent days as governments have prohibited large gatherings in an attempt to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.



As governments across the globe have taken measures to ensure that citizens engage in social distancing so that they dont spread a virus that has already killed at least 21,000 people worldwide as of Thursday, some religious leaders have continued to hold worship services anyway.

In Nigeria, authorities in the states of Lagos and Ogun shut down several church services in the past week.

We had to shut down a few services today as some pastors have not complied with the order, Bala Elkana, spokesperson for the Lagos Police Command, told Bloomberg.

We cannot allow the virus to spread beyond the level that the health facilities can handle. We will continue to enforce the ban until we have full compliance.

As there are over 480,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide, Nigeria has only had 51 cases of the coronavirus as of Thursday morning, according to the Johns Hopkins University & Medicines Coronavirus Resource Center.

Despite bans on large gatherings, The Daily Trust reports that there was an influx of people who attended church services across several states in southern Nigeria on Sunday.

Last week, the Lagos state government ordered schools to shut down and temporarily banned gatherings of more than 50 people, a figure later reduced to gatherings of more than 20 people. The ban comes as a good chunk of Nigerias coronavirus cases is in Lagos, the countrys largest city.

Lagos Deputy Commissioner of Police Mohammed Ali confirmed for the News Agency of Nigeria that three pastors were arrested for disobeying the governments ban on large gatherings of over 20.

The pastors were not detained but were warned to comply with the governments order, according to Nigerias Daily Post newspaper.

In the Ogun state, the state government deployed an enforcement team to ensure compliance with the states temporary ban on gatherings of over 50 people. The enforcement team was tasked with checking social gatherings across the state including parties, clubs, lounges, schools and religious assemblies.

Video posted online by the Ogun state government shows security personnel disrupting church services to enforce the ban. The video also shows one pastor arguing with a security officer outside of his church.

According to The Guardian, security agents also dispersed hundreds of worshipers from the Winners Chapel in Abeokuta on Sunday morning.

One pastor from the Ogun town of Ota reportedly said that the Christian Association of Nigeria called on churches to hold Sunday church services as planned to help raise awareness of the coronavirus pandemic.

So we can describe yesterdays service as public awareness service, the church leader told The Guardian. Very few people as expected were not aware and they were properly educated.

Many African governments have passed restrictions on gatherings as experts fear that the coronavirus pandemic could devastate healthcare systems across the continent.

In Ghana, where there are now 68 confirmed cases, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on March 15 banned all public gatherings including church activities, funeral services and outdoor events.

Last Wednesday, a pastor was arrested for defying the ban. According to GhanaWeb, Apostle Kofi Nkansah-Sarkodie of Open Arms Ministry in Kumasi was arrested after officers were dispatched to the church over reports of ongoing activity.

On Sunday, the pastor of the Kingdom of God Church in a suburb of Nkawkaw, John Jeremiah Addo, was reportedly arrested for unlawful assembly.



According to GhanaWeb, Addo told police that he did not understand why the government banned religious services but is allowing traders to sell products in markets.

On March 18, authorities reportedly shut down a prayer camp in the village of Pokrom and arrested the camps founder along with an elder.

In Uganda, where there are at least 14 cases of the coronavirus, several pastors have been arrested for defying a presidential directive temporarily banning gatherings.

According to the Daily Monitor, the pastors arrested include Alfred Mubangizi of God is Able Church in Nabukalu and Gerald Kalumba of the Kampala Archdiocese. Both pastors were later released.

The Daily Monitor also reports that two pastors were arrested at the Christian Witness Church in Kampala.

A pastor and 30 churchgoers at the Blessed Feelings Church International in Kajjansi were arrested for participating in a church service Wednesday morning, according to PML Daily. While the churchgoers were released, the pastor was detained.

In Greece, where there are 821 confirmed cases of coronavirus, Greek Orthodox Priest Metropolitan Seraphim was arrested last Saturday after he held a worship service on Friday despite a government ban on gatherings.

Seraphim told police that he was not informed of the ban, as reported by the Greek City Times. He was later released and told to comply with the order.
A Mexican security official who allegedly took millions in bribes from drug lord Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman has offered to post a $2million bail bond to a US court because he fears catching coronavirus in jail.

Genaro Garcia Luna has begged New York federal court to move him to house arrest and claims he is at risk of dying if he catches the pandemic virus due to a respiratory illness.

Garcia Luna has been held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan since December, following his arrest in Florida, where he had been living.

On Wednesday, the 51-year-old's attorney said told the court his client's current medical condition could worsen if he is exposed to the deadly virus.

The corrupt official's petition came on the same day the Bureau of Prisons announced that an inmate at the facility was moved to isolation after he tested positive to the virus, which has killed more than 23,000 and sickened over 511,600 globally.

Concerns have been mounting for prison officers and inmates across the US amid the coronavirus pandemic, as high prison populations, confined spaces and poor hygiene could make facilities hotbeds for the disease.

Genaro Garcia Luna is increasing his bail bond offer to $2million in exchange of being transferred to home confinement by a New York federal court. His lawyer presented a letter which indicated that the 51-year-old suffers from respiratory issues and could die if he is exposed to the coronavirus at Manhattan Correctional Center, where he is being held

Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman (center) transnational organization reportedly bribed Genaro Garcia Luna during his time as a top official in Mexico. Federal U.S. prosecutors charged Garcia Luna with accepting several million dollars in exchange for surveillance information that allowed the cartel to operate

'Garcia Luna is at risk of dying if he contracts the COVID-19 virus. He is 51 years old and has a history of respiratory problems,' lawyer Cesar de Castro wrote in a letter that was given to the trial judge, Brian Cogan.

The request also includes a letter from Garcia Luna's doctor in Mexico, who first confirmed the former security official's respiratory illness in June 2015.

Garcia Luna has been charged with drug trafficking conspiracy and making false statements, and faces up to life in prison if convicted.

Garcia Luna led that country's Federal Investigation Agency from 2001 to 2005 and was secretary of public security from 2006 to 2012.

But prosecutors said the Sinaloa Cartel bribed Garcia Luna throughout his time in government to ensure safe passage for its drugs, and to obtain intelligence information about rival cartels and Mexican probes into its activities.

A $1million bail bond proposal was rejected in February by U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Levy, who said amount was not sufficient enough to ensure his future court appearances

Prosecutors have been against Garcia Luna's release because they believe he could go back to Mexico or flee to country that does not have an extradition treaty with the U.S.

Genaro Garcia Luna wants to be placed under house arrest instead of awaiting trial at Metropolitan Correctional Center, where an inmate tested positive for the coronavirus

He was arrested December 9 in Dallas but waved his extradition to face the charges in Brooklyn, where El Chapo was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole last year for trafficking tons of drugs to the United States.

Garcia Luna had been the subject of testimony at El Chapo's trial by Jesus Zambada, the son of the jailed drug kingpin's partner Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada.

Zambada, who once married El Chapo's daughter and has two children with her, said he had given Garcia Luna a suitcase containing $3 million in 2005 or 2006, and paid him another $3 million to $5 million in 2007.
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Thousands of workers would be needed to build the plant in southeast Ohio.



By MARK GILLISPIE

Associated Press

CLEVELAND  A partnership of two Asia-based companies proposing to build an ethane cracker plant along the Ohio River announced Wednesday it had reached economic development agreements that would pay a school district and a township more than $47 million in coming years.

In return, the companies would receive a 15-year property tax exemption for the plant through a state enterprise zone program.





. . .
Former US president Barack Obama has urged his Twitter followers to continue practising social distancing in an effort to tackle Covid-19.

Mr Obama has been using his Twitter platform over the last two weeks to raise awareness of the work being done across the country to help stop the spread of the virus.

On Wednesday he shared an article by the New York Times detailing the work medical professionals are doing to treat patients who have contracted the virus, asking people to stay at home in order to help them.

These are the burdens our medical heroes already face in NYC. Its only going to get harder across the country. Another reason to maintain social distancing policies at least until we have comprehensive testing in place. Not just for our sake  for theirs, he tweeted.

Earlier in the month, Mr Obama declared his admiration for health professionals, praising their dedication during the pandemic.

We owe a profound debt of gratitude to all our health professionals and everybody wholl be on the front lines of this pandemic for a long while. Theyre giving everything. May we all model our own behaviour on their selflessness and sacrifice as we help each other through this. he tweeted.

The former president has also shared advice during the pandemic, telling his followers to remember to check up by phone on elderly or vulnerable friends and neighbours who may need our help.

This week saw the ten year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, which has helped increase healthcare coverage for millions of Americans since Mr Obama signed it into law.

The act, which is often referred to as Obamacare has been repeatedly attacked by current president Donald Trump, and Mr Obama tweeted about why he thinks it is needed now more than ever.

Ten years ago today, I signed the Affordable Care Act into law. It protected pre-existing conditions, cut the uninsured rate in half, and lots more. But its still under political attack right when we need care the most. We have to protect it, build on it, until we cover everyone, tweeted the former president.

During a virtual Fox News town hall on Wednesday, Mr Trump suggested that measures to tackle the pandemic might be eased as early as next week.

I guess by Monday or Tuesday, its about two weeks. We will assess at that time and give it more time if we need a little more time. We have to open this country up.

According to a tracking project hosted by Johns Hopkins University, upwards of 62,086 people have tested positive for coronavirus in the US. The death toll has reached at least 869.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended a two-week ban on gatherings of more than 50 people as part of the battle to contain the spread of the contagion.
[March 26, 2020] Hebrew University Researchers Submit Proposals to Israel Innovation Authority to Investigate Diagnostics, Treatments, and Cures for Covid-19

JERUSALEM, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Researchers at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as several Yissum start-up companies are exploring a variety of methods to combat the COVID-19 virus, through investigations into AI drug discovery, biochemical detection tools and diagnostic capabilities. A number of researchers submitted proposals to the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) today under the IIA's program to fast track Covid-19 related research. "We are reaching out to industry to help bring these ideas to fruition," said Dr. Itzik Goldwaser, CEO of Yissum, the technology transfer company of the Hebrew University. "Among the early stage technologies currently being developed are creative ideas spanning drug discovery, MedTech and medical equipment as well as systems to better diagnose and treat coronavirus. Our researchers have proposed a large number of ideas that include repurposing current drug treatments, face masks that can actively kill the Covid-19 virus, and even plant-based diagnostic tools and treatments." In addition to the research proposals submitted to the IIA, many Yissum subsidiaries have also rapidly adjusted to use their established core technologies to fight against th deadly virus.



Notable among them are: Pepticom: Pepticom is implementing its proprietary core AI technology on various Coronavirus proteins and the ACE2 to identify novel inhibitors that can fight Sars Cov2. They are currently looking for partners to validate and develop these peptide drug candidates.

Enlivex: Has developed a medication that could help treat severe symptoms of covid-19 including catastrophic organ failure. For further details on how to partner with Yissum on these emerging technologies, please contact us through our website at www.yissum.co.il

About Yissum Yissum is the technology transfer company of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Founded in 1964, it serves as a bridge between cutting-edge academic research and a global community of entrepreneurs, investors, and industry. Yissum's mission is to benefit society by converting extraordinary innovations and transformational technologies into commercial solutions that address our most urgent global challenges. Yissum has registered over 10,750+ patents globally; licensed over 1050+ technologies and has spun out more than 170 companies. Yissum's business partners span the globe and include companies such as Boston Scientific, Google, ICL, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Microsoft, Novartis and many more. For further information please visit www.yissum.co.il Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/704545/Yissum_Logo.jpg Media Contact: Estee Yaari, Media Relations, Yissum, [email protected] View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hebrew-university-researchers-submit-proposals-to-israel-innovation-authority-to-investigate-diagnostics-treatments-and-cures-for-covid-19-301030387.html SOURCE Yissum

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A woman yoga trainee from Poland stranded at a bus stand here after being asked to vacate from a hostel in the backdrop of the COVID-19 lockdown got timely help from officials who accommodated her at a hotel here, police said.

The woman was found at the otherwise deserted Singanallur bus stand by police on Wednesday evening following which they helped her to overcome the problem.

She told the police that she had come to learn yoga at the Isha Yoga Centre on the city outskirts and was staying in a private hostel since January last.

However, she was asked to vacate the hostel following the coronavirus scare and she came to the bus stand.

Senior police and district officials, after consulting the Collector, guided her to a private hotel where she was saying now, police said.

Meanwhile over 100 people were arrested for violating the lockdown in various parts of the city and released on bail on Wednesday evening, police said.

In neighbouring Tirupur district, police registered cases against 83 people for violations and seized five cars and 26 motorcycles. In Nilgiris district, a total of 31 cases were registered, reports from the districts said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Multiple periods of social distancing will be needed to beat coronavirus, Harvard researchers say

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Multiple periods of controlled social distancing measures will be necessary into 2022 to beat the new coronavirus if there are no other treatments implemented to fight it, such as a vaccine or expanding critical care capacity, according to a group of Harvard researchers studying the pandemic.

In a pre-print of Social distancing strategies for curbing the COVID-19 epidemic posted on the medRxiv pre-print server Tuesday, authors Stephen Lissler, Christine Tedijanto, Marc Lipsitch and Yonatan Grad of Harvards Chan School of Public Health argue that "a single period of social distancing will not be sufficient" to stem the onslaught of the pandemic.

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams explained in a message to churches on Thursday that the essence of the federal governments 15-day plan to slow the spread of the coronavirus nationwide is social distancing in the absence of any known cures.

The Harvard researchers add in their study, which hasn't been peer-reviewed, that if a vaccine or other interventions such as increasing Americas critical care capacity is not included as a part of the response to the pandemic, the country will likely need multiple periods of social distancing, turning on and off, until 2022, allowing people to build up immunity over time and preventing a strain on healthcare resources.

The periods of social distancing will also require widespread surveillance to monitor when the prevalence thresholds that trigger the beginning or end of distancing have been crossed.

The researchers made their recommendations using a longstanding epidemiological model known as "SEIR," which means the "susceptible," "exposed," "infectious," and "recovered" individuals in a community.

Using differential equations, the researchers were able to forecast how fast a disease might spread based on how many people are in a community and how many are already sick or who have gotten better or died.

They suggest a threshold to be maintained of no more than 37.5 cases of the disease per 10,000 adult people in the population before turning the "on" switch for social distancing. They also estimate that this threshold would keep the number of patients needing critical care at 0.89 persons for every 10,000 people in the population, which should be adequate to not overwhelm the healthcare system.

A single period of social distancing will not be sufficient to prevent critical care capacities from being overwhelmed by the COVID-19 epidemic, because under any scenario considered it leaves enough of the population susceptible that a rebound in transmission after the end of the period will lead to an epidemic that exceeds this capacity, the researchers note.

This resurgence could be especially intense if it coincides with a wintertime rise in R0. Intermittent social distancing can maintain the prevalence of critical COVID-19 illness within current capacities, but this strategy could prolong the overall duration of the epidemic into 2022, they said.

By increasing critical care capacities they argue, the overall duration of the pandemic can be decreased while ensuring adequate care for the critically ill.

Our findings agree with observational and modelling studies that find that early implementation of strong social distancing is essential for controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and that, in the absence of the development of new therapies or preventative measures, such as aggressive case finding and quarantining, intermittent distancing measures may be the only way to avoid overwhelming critical care capacity while building population immunity, they argue.

The observation that strong social distancing can lead to especially large resurgences agrees with data from the 1918 influenza pandemic in the United States, in which the size of the autumn 1918 peak of infection was inversely associated with that of a subsequent winter peak after interventions were no longer in place, the researchers explain.
To think that it is not in refugee and displaced populations is a bit naive, Mr. Coutts said.

If the virus is present, the camps are profoundly ill-equipped to handle it.

Many camp clinics are already struggling to fight outbreaks like dengue and cholera, leaving them without the resources to treat chronic conditions, such as diabetes or heart disease. The coronavirus, which has no vaccine or agreed upon treatment regimen for Covid-19, the respiratory disease it causes, could be even more devastating, medical experts warn.

We are preparing for the worst, said Avril Benoit, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders in the United States, which has deployed teams to work with refugees around the world. We know that in the places where we work we are underequipped and understaffed.

Daily life in a refugee camp is an ideal incubator for infectious disease. Many lack running water and indoor sanitation. People often stand in line for hours to get water, which is insufficient for frequent showers, much less vigilant hand washing.

If it came into the camp, it would be a disaster, said Ahmadu Yusuf, a community leader in the Bakassi camp in northeastern Nigeria, most of whose residents fled Boko Haram, the militant group. It would be more devastating than the insurgency that brought them here.

Refugee life also makes social distancing, the health mantra in the West, impossible.

In crowded, poor places like Gaza or the urban slums of Indonesia and India, which began the worlds largest lockdown in response to the virus this week, keeping six feet away from everyone else is difficult. Refugee settlements are often even denser.

A refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, was built for 3,000 people but now has 20,000 and almost no sanitation.
But for some retired doctors, nurses and other health care workers, deciding whether to come back to work at this time could be difficult. Many of the retirees are in their 60s or older, which puts them at higher risk of becoming seriously ill if they become infected with the new coronavirus.
Euronews

In the town of La Reole, in the south of France's Gironde region, locals helplessly await the peak of floods, even if water levels are expected to be lower than those registered almost a year ago.View on euronews
With modes of public transport shut for 21 days and economic activities at a standstill, migrant daily wage workers have been one of the worst-hit as India began a total lockdown to counter coronavirus.

From Wednesday onward, a mass exodus of migrant workers began as many took to walking the long roads home. On March 25, hundreds of migrant workers from Ahmedabad, Gujarat, were seen walking back to their homes in Gujarat as jobs, even as jobs ran dry in cities.

What started as a trickle became a torrent. Tribal migrant workers from south Rajasthan started walking back to their home from Ahmedabad at the onset of lockdown. Kids on shoulder, toddlers by their side, they intend to make a journey not less than 180 km on foot 1/2 pic.twitter.com/v0ikE9SusD  DP (@dpbhattaET) March 24, 2020

Another journalist, Anumeha, shared a video of migrant workers from Surat, some of whom were planning to walk for 500 kms to Una.

Groups of Adivasi workers walking back from Surat in #Gujarat to their homes hundreds of kilometres away  video by Prayas, NGO working with construction workers. A few of the workers here say they are trying to reach Una, over 500 km away pic.twitter.com/Adv9lVBfnx  Anumeha (@anumayhem) March 25, 2020

Journalist Alok Pandey shared a video of a young migrant worker from Unnao in Uttar Prades, walking over 80 km to his village in Barabunki.

The tragedy of #Lockdown21 - this 20 yr old labourer is walking from his factory in unnao to his village in barabanki , 80 kms ! He cannot stay put at his place of work , as @narendramodi has appealed , because his factory owners won't permit him and others to stay on ! Pls hear. pic.twitter.com/ewkGPg1uwi  Alok Pandey (@alok_pandey) March 25, 2020

Long distances are not the only impediment faced by workers, many of whom are also tormented by police officers for being in violation of lockdown. A video from UP went viral after Badaun Police beat up migrants walking home from Gwalior.

THIS-Heartbreaking! Video from Badaun, UP Poor boys whore on foot from Gwalior, WERE MADE TO CRAWL by UP Police Cops been asked to help distressed migrants, not ill treat them like this. Many cops doing good work but this is unacceptable! @pranshumisraa #CoronavirusLockdown pic.twitter.com/YPllyphTO7  Zeba Warsi (@Zebaism) March 26, 2020

Similar scenes were sene in Delhi, home to thousands of migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. NDTV reported on workers starting two-day journeys on foot to cover the nearly 200 km distance to their homes along with their families including toddlers.

                        ?                        pic.twitter.com/xNrETsRrNl  Ravish Ranjan Shukla (@ravishranjanshu) March 25, 2020

Journalist Somesh Jha pointed out that nearly 81 percent of India's workforce was in the unorganised sector and that these people remained largely uncovered by social security schemes or relief packages.

With all businesses & transportation grinding to a halt during the lockdown, millions of migrant workers hardly have any choice on how to isolate themselves from the deadly coronavirus. I met Shiv who was walking on foot from New Delhi railway station to Anand Vihar (11 km). pic.twitter.com/a8dKQvPyIi  Somesh Jha (@someshjha7) March 26, 2020

Journalist Barkha Dutt also tweeted images of migrant workers with their families walking back to Morena, as did journalist Anindyo Chattopadhyay who captured long queues of migrant labourers walking to their homes in various UP villages.

The lockdown needs to factor in the plight of the poor, the homeless, the Labourers who can't stay here and can't get to their villages. This family holding their belongings and wondering how to reach Morena. Just walking. #Corona pic.twitter.com/Bq2hxYUrm7  barkha dutt (@BDUTT) March 24, 2020

No interstate buses,no trains.Migrant labourers asked to leave for home and they march on for Amroha, Aligarh,Badayun,Buland Shahar and many places from Delhi N.C.R pic.twitter.com/5ZajIjwbq5  Anindya Chattopadhya (@ANINDYAtimes) March 24, 2020

Migrant and daily wage workers have been some of the worst-hit as the coronavirus pandemic sent incomes for a toss with even welfare schemes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme affected by the lockdown, Bloomberg Quint reported.

In wake of rising panic, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a Rs 1.7 trillion relief package to help the migrant workers left in a lurch as the country shut down for 21 days. The Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan scheme is set to be rolled out in two parts - cash transfers Direct Benefit Transfer scheme and boosting food security.

Nevertheless, a majority of India's migrant workers may have a tough future ahead, even as India recorded 649 positive cases on Thursday.
COUNTRYWIDE Regional Commissioners (RCs) must see into it that governments vehicles in their areas are used according to the States duties and not otherwise.

The directive was given by the Minister of State in the Presidents Office, Regional Administration and Local Government, Selemani Jafo here yesterday, while officially handing over 448 new motorcycles to Divisional Executive Officers.

The minister said that it was important for the Regional Commissioners to supervise all uses of the vehicles and motorcycles in their areas.

I want to tell you that all Regional Commissioners who have received these motorbikes should use them in their official designated duties and matters and not otherwise, he noted.

The minister said that the motorbikes were part of the presidents pledges, when he met the local leaders at the Dar es Salaam State House.

The motorbikes have been bought by the government in the implementation of the presidents directive he issued in Dar es Salaam, when he met all local leaders on 4th June, last year, where he also insisted that he would solve the challenges they raised to him then, said Mr Jafo.

The minister added: These motorbikes have the governments number plates, so, it is prohibited for anyone to use them as an economic entity, if you do so, you will be going against the presidents wish, again for distribution, they should be taken to 24 regions.

On his part, the minister of State in the Presidents Office, Public Service Management and Good Governance, George Mkuchika, speaking at the occasion said that the motorbikes will help the public officials especially in the coming General Elections to manage their duties
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 01:59:22|Editor: zyl

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Russian President Vladimir Putin attends the G20 Extraordinary Virtual Leaders' Summit on COVID-19 via video link at Novo-Ogarevo residence, outside Moscow, Russia, on March 26, 2020. Russian President Vladimir Putin urged Thursday the leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) to lift all sanctions on supplies of essential goods until the COVID-19 pandemic is under control. (Sputnik via Xinhua)

MOSCOW, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin urged Thursday the leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) to lift all sanctions on supplies of essential goods until the COVID-19 pandemic is under control.

"It is important for the period of crisis to create the so-called green corridors, free from trade wars and sanctions for the mutual supply of medicines, food, equipment and technology," Putin said, addressing the G20 virtual summit, according to an official Kremlin transcript.

According to Putin, ideally, a joint moratorium should be introduced on restrictions on essential goods, as well as financial transactions for their procurement.

Putin said that problems associated with the new pandemic may result in more widespread shocks than the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and trade conflicts and sanctions exacerbate the recession.

He said G20 countries need a common plan of action to stabilize the situation, support economies and restore confidence in world markets.

Global international organizations do not have a mechanism for automatic stabilization in the event of a crisis, so it is necessary to reorganize them efficiently and as soon as possible, Putin said.

He said that it is necessary to ensure access to financing for countries that are hit by the pandemic and experiencing resource shortages.

For this purpose he proposed to create a special fund under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), financed primarily by the central banks, which are issuers of currencies included in the IMF basket.

Then the right may be granted to any IMF member to borrow from this fund in proportion to its share in the world economy at a zero rate for the long term, Putin said.

He said that the key risk is long-term unemployment, the peak of which in any scenario will exceed the level of 2009.

The dynamics of unemployment will be a key indicator of the effectiveness of anti-crisis measures taken by G20, Putin said.

In the field of healthcare, joint research by G20 countries could also seriously accelerate the development of vaccines and medicines, he said.
More than 150 employees across four Boston hospitals have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Forty-one employees at Massachusetts General Hospital, 45 staff members at Brigham and Womens Hospital and 52 workers at Tufts Medical Center have COVID-19, according to the hospitals.

Fifteen employees at Boston Medical Center were also diagnosed with the viral respiratory infection, a spokesperson at the hospital said.

A total of 1,838 cases in Massachusetts and 15 deaths due to the virus have been reported as of Wednesday, according to the state Department of Public Health.

Middlesex County continues to be the area with the highest number of cases, with a total of 446 as of Wednesday. Suffolk County, where Boston is located, has 342 positively diagnosed patients.

Sign up for free text messages about important updates on coronavirus in Massachusetts

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MCU fans might welcome a new member of the family soon -- and it is Keanu Reeves!

After his appearance in "Toy Story 4," Keanu will be gifting his fans with movie sequels this year, including "Bill & Ted Face the Music," "The Matrix 4," and "John Wick: Chapter 4."

But the list of his projects does not end there, as Marvel Studios' Kevin Feige is reportedly trying to cast him as a Marvel hero.

According to the report by We Got This Covered, though there is no contract signing yet, Keanu might play the incarnation of the role of Ghost Rider's Johnny Blaze for Marvel Studios.

MCU fans started to theorize that the update and information about the collaboration are just being held off due to the COVID-19 crisis.

Despite these conflicts, the 55-year-old actor is said to be interested in the offer, and the said role is just one of the multiple potential characters the Marvel Studios might offer him soon.

Aside from that, MCU fans have also been eyeing for him to be the actor in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" next to Benedict Cumberbatch.

DC is also reportedly trying to cast the actor back for the sequel of "Constantine." However, whatever role he might receive in the future, Reeves' schedule is undoubtedly full-packed as of this moment.

What Feige Told Him Before

In 2019, the 46-year-old Marvel Studios' president opened up to ComicBook.com about his efforts to invite Keanu to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

"We talk to him for almost every film we make," the MCU big boss revealed. "I don't know when, if, or ever he'll join the MCU, but we very much want to figure out the right way to do it."

Feige reportedly started to try bringing him since the 2000 film "X-Men."

He went on and compared the studio's interest in Reeves to Jake Gyllenhaal -- who the president talked to "multiple times" before he joined "Spider-Man: Far From Home" as Mysterio since it was indeed the perfect fit for him.

It was not the first time fans have heard Keanu's name being associated with the MCU.

Previously, there were reports saying that the actor was up for the role of Yon-Rogg in "Captain Marvel." However, his scheduling conflicted with "John Wick 3," eventually led him to quit the film and let Jude Law take the available role.

In addition, he became a potential actor for "The Eternals" casting along with Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden, and Kumail Nanjiani. He also once became very vocal about his interest in joining the team by playing the role of Wolverine.

For now, Keanu is focused on his upcoming films. He will also be producing a female-led spin-off of "John Wick" which they first announced in 2017. According to Variety, the current action script by 25-year-old Shay Hatten, who is the same writer behind the previous John Wick film, is being compared to the 1990's "La Femme Nikita."
Several positive cases of COVID-19 were reported from different parts of the country on Thursday.

Five more people tested positive for COVID-19 in Rajasthan, taking the total positive cases in the state to 43, according to Rajasthan Health Department. Curfew has been imposed in one km radius of the person who tested positive in Ramganj area of Jaipur as it is a highly congested area.

According to Rajasthan Health Department Additional Chief Secretary Rohit Kumar Singh, intense contact tracing has started.

Meanwhile, a COVID-19 positive person has died in Bhilwara, Rajasthan. He had comorbid conditions including diseases relating to kidney and blood pressure.

Earlier on Thursday, one more person tested positive for coronavirus in Andhra Pradesh, taking a total number of cases in the state to 11.

According to the Andhra Pradesh Health Department, the latest person to have tested positive has a history of travel to Stockholm, Sweden. He is currently admitted to the Government General Hospital in Vijayawada.

On the other hand, five people in Madhya Pradesh's Indore have been tested positive for COVID-19 while one in Ujjain.

According to the Odisha Department of Health & Family Welfare, one more sample has tested positive for COVID-19 in the state. The number of positive cases in Odisha is now 3 and all of them were reported from Bhubaneswar.

In Maharashtra, five more people tested positive for COVID-19 out of which three were reported from Sangli and one each from Kolhapur and Pune, taking the total number of confirmed cases in the state to 130.

The first COVID-19 positive case in Amritsar, Punjab who was placed in isolation at Guru Nanak Dev hospital has tested negative now and will be discharged on March 27, Shivdular Singh Dhillon, Amritsar Deputy Commissioner said. The person had a travel history to Italy.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had earlier on Thursday reported 88 new COVID-19 cases, which is the highest in a single day, taking the total countrywide tally to 694.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi, March 26 : Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced that doctors, paramedics, nurses, 'Asha' workers, cleaning workers involved in the fight against coronavirus pandemic and treating affected patients would be extended medical insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh each.

Addressing the media here, Sitharaman said that the scheme will help 20 lakh health professionals and wrokers across the country, in case they want to avail it.

She applauded the role played by doctors and other workers in the health sector and said that they are being called 'gods in white attire' by the public and coronavirus- affected patients alike.

The measures may come as a major relief for the health workers who put their lives at stake while treating coronavirus patients. Several doctors across the world, including India, have been infected by the deadly virus.

The Minister also announced an economic relief package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore for the poor and migrant workers under the Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Yojana.

The package focuses on providing food to the poor and money in their hands to overcome the problems in the wake of Covid-19 spread.

She said that the scheme involves direct cash transfer and food security.

-- Except for the title, this story has not been edited by Prokerala team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed
The United States has publicly hailed its agreement with the Taliban as a "historic opportunity" to end the nearly 19-year war in Afghanistan.

But several crucial issues are either vague or entirely absent from the accord, prompting fears that the deal will not achieve a lasting peace in the country, which has been consumed by conflict for more than 40 years.

The deal signed on February 29 would allow U.S. President Donald Trump to fulfill his campaign pledge to stop "endless wars" and bring home thousands of U.S. troops during an election year.

But some experts have warned Washington made too many concessions to the Taliban without getting much in return. Many say the U.S.-negotiated agreement also undermines the Western-backed government in Kabul, which was not a party to the deal.



The agreement lays out a timetable for the full withdrawal of U.S. forces -- currently numbering around 12,000 -- out of Afghanistan by July 2021.

The pullout is dependent on the Taliban fulfilling its pledge to prevent terrorist groups from launching attacks against the United States and its allies.



The Taliban is also committed under the deal to hold direct negotiations with the Kabul government over a power-sharing arrangement. But it has thus far refused to do so.

No Explicit Taliban Renunciation Of Al-Qaeda



The deal falls short of a core U.S. demand: the Taliban publicly cutting its ties with the Al-Qaeda terrorist group.



The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and ousted the Taliban after it refused to hand over Al-Qaeda leaders who were behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people.



But the agreement only states that the Taliban "will not allow any of its members, other individuals, or groups, including [Al-Qaeda], to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies."



It also says the Taliban must "send a clear message" to Al-Qaeda that they "have no place in Afghanistan," not to "cooperate" with them, to "prevent them from recruiting, training, and fundraising," and to "not provide visas, passports, travel permits, or other legal documents" allowing them to enter Afghanistan.

But the deal does not include an explicit Taliban commitment to break off ties with Al-Qaeda.



"Unlike the U.S., the Taliban wasn't in a rush to get a deal, and it could easily say no to demands it didn't like," Michael Kugelman, South Asia associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, tells RFE/RL. "For the U.S., which badly needed a deal, getting the Taliban to agree to deny space to Al-Qaeda, without actually compelling the Taliban to sever ties with Al-Qaeda, was likely the best outcome it could get."



Al-Qaeda is a largely diminished force, with only several hundred fighters in Afghanistan, but remains a crucial part of the Taliban insurgency. The two groups have been longtime partners and are co-dependent, according to experts.



"In many Taliban units, it is often difficult to distinguish Taliban commanders from Al-Qaeda ones," wrote Javid Ahmad, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and Husain Haqqani, director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson Institute. "The two groups enjoy multiple layers of top-down linkages," they wrote in The Washington Post. "The alliance is further tightened by intermarriages, and Al-Qaeda members often serve as religious mentors and instructors to the Taliban fighters."



General Kenneth McKenzie, head of the U.S. Central Command, said the Taliban had yet to show they are willing to take on Al-Qaeda. "That's something they're going to have to demonstrate that has not yet been demonstrated," McKenzie said on March 10.



U.S. Pullout Not Contingent On Peace



The United States has not tied its military pullout to the success of intra-Afghan peace talks over a permanent cease-fire and a power-sharing arrangement.



Instead, the withdrawal depends on the Taliban meeting its commitment to fight terrorism and the Islamic State (IS) extremist group.

U.S. officials have said the 14-month timetable for the withdrawal is "aspirational." U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the pullout was "conditions-based."



"If progress on the political front between the Taliban and the current Afghan government continues, then the United States and its partners will further reduce our presence toward a goal of zero in 2021," he wrote in The Washington Post on February 29. "If progress stalls, then our drawdown likely will be suspended as well."

But this point does not appear in the U.S.-Taliban agreement. According to the deal, the United States can withdraw even if the war between the Afghan government and the Taliban continues.

Considering the sensitivity of the issues and the chronic divisions among the Afghan political elite, many predict intra-Afghan negotiations to be complex and protracted, possibly taking years.



The talks were expected to start on March 10 but have been delayed due to disputes over the release of Taliban prisoners and the formation of Kabuls negotiating team.

Ashley Jackson, a research associate at the Overseas Development Institute, a London-based think tank, says the U.S.-Taliban deal has the potential to be either the beginning of the end of the war in Afghanistan, or merely just the end of the U.S. military role in the war.



That depends, she says, on the process moving forward and intra-Afghan talks finally starting. "If not, and U.S. troops withdraw anyway as the agreement suggests they will, then it is little more than a withdrawal deal," Jackson says. "But it could also force all of the Afghan parties to get serious about talking to one another and support that process."

Nine former U.S. ambassadors and special envoys in Afghanistan penned a joint statement in September, warning that Afghanistan could collapse in a "total civil war" if the United States withdrew its forces before a "real" peace deal involving the Kabul government is reached with the Taliban.

No Mechanism to Verify Compliance



There is nothing in the agreement about how the United States will monitor and verify if the Taliban is sticking to its commitments, though the mechanism for verifying compliance may have been included in two classified annexes.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there were two "military implementation documents" that were classified to "protect our soldiers." The documents are only available to members of the U.S. Congress.

The documents reportedly include military steps that should be taken over the next 18 months, what kind of attacks are banned by both sides, and how the United States will share information about its troop locations with the Taliban to prevent attacks during the withdrawal.



U.S. lawmakers who have reviewed the documents said there were insufficient mechanisms to verify if the Taliban is abiding by the deal and have accused the Trump administration of hiding details of the agreement from the public.



"If it's true that the secret annexes provide information on how the Taliban's obligations to the agreement will be monitored, it could be that the Trump administration fears the monitoring regime, if made public, would be perceived as too vague or weak and hence could provoke harsh criticism of the agreement," Kugelman of the Wilson Center says. "So long as the annexes remain secret, there will be fodder for conspiracy theories and concerns about transparency that will only heighten suspicions about the agreement and its intentions."



Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee and its Foreign Relations Committee, has reviewed the documents. He said the "security guarantees are so vague as to be effectively void. It's not clear how we will track whether they are indeed renouncing terrorist groups."



Even Liz Cheney (Republican-Wyoming), a Trump ally, said the deal failed to provide mechanisms to verify that the Taliban was keeping its promises. "My concerns still remain," she said, after studying the classified annexes.



No Reduction Of Violence



A weeklong reduction of violence preceded the signing of the U.S.-Taliban deal, with a significant drop in militant attacks.



But days later, the Taliban ordered its fighters to resume operations against Afghan forces, although not against foreign troops. The militants have since carried out scores of deadly attacks.



The warring sides are locked in a dispute about allowable levels of violence and attacks.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has said that Taliban attacks "violate" the U.S.-Taliban deal. The U.S. military has said it expects the violence to remain low and that violence escalation goes against the "spirit of the deal."



But the Taliban has said a reduction in violence was only a temporary confidence-building measure. And most importantly, the text of the U.S.-Taliban deal makes no mention of a Taliban commitment to reduce violence.



Jackson says the Taliban would not gain anything by reducing violence, the militants main source of leverage. "The Taliban may at some point agree to intra-Afghan talks and a more sustainable violence reduction in exchange for a legitimate stake in a national government," she says. "But until then I fully expect them to continue waging war."
The Indian rupee surged by another 78 paise to 75.16 (provisional) against the US dollar on Thursday after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced various welfare measures to tide through the coronavirus crisis. The government on Thursday unveiled a Rs 1.70 lakh crore economic package involving free foodgrain and cooking gas to poor for the next three months, higher wages to workers and measures to boost liquidity of employees as part of measures to ease the economic impact of lockdown.

Forex traders welcomed the government initiatives and said the revival of the economy though welfare measures was very much needed as the slowdown in demand was further hit by COVID-19 pandemic.

The rupee, which opened on a positive note at 75.90, settled for the day with gains of 78 paise at 75.16 against the American currency.

During the day, the domestic unit touched a high of 75.10 and a low of 75.94.

On Tuesday, rupee had gained 26 paise to settled at 75.94 against the US dollar.

Forex market was closed on Wednesday on account of Gudi Padwa.

"Rupee rallies, playing catch-up with Asian currencies, amid a stock rally after the US Senate passes virus rescue plan. India also announced Rs 1.7 trillion spending plan as part of measures to ease the economic impact of lockdown," said VK Sharma, Head PCG & Capital Markets Strategy, HDFC securities.
Lennox International Inc. (NYSE:LII) shareholders might be concerned after seeing the share price drop 27% in the last month. Looking further back, the stock has generated good profits over five years. Its return of 61% has certainly bested the market return!

View our latest analysis for Lennox International

To quote Buffett, 'Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace...' One flawed but reasonable way to assess how sentiment around a company has changed is to compare the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price.

Over half a decade, Lennox International managed to grow its earnings per share at 19% a year. The EPS growth is more impressive than the yearly share price gain of 10% over the same period. So it seems the market isn't so enthusiastic about the stock these days.

You can see below how EPS has changed over time (discover the exact values by clicking on the image).

NYSE:LII Past and Future Earnings March 26th 2020

We know that Lennox International has improved its bottom line lately, but is it going to grow revenue? You could check out this free report showing analyst revenue forecasts.

What About Dividends?

When looking at investment returns, it is important to consider the difference between total shareholder return (TSR) and share price return. The TSR incorporates the value of any spin-offs or discounted capital raisings, along with any dividends, based on the assumption that the dividends are reinvested. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. We note that for Lennox International the TSR over the last 5 years was 70%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.

A Different Perspective

We regret to report that Lennox International shareholders are down 31% for the year (even including dividends) . Unfortunately, that's worse than the broader market decline of 11%. Having said that, it's inevitable that some stocks will be oversold in a falling market. The key is to keep your eyes on the fundamental developments. Longer term investors wouldn't be so upset, since they would have made 11%, each year, over five years. It could be that the recent sell-off is an opportunity, so it may be worth checking the fundamental data for signs of a long term growth trend. I find it very interesting to look at share price over the long term as a proxy for business performance. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. For instance, we've identified 2 warning signs for Lennox International that you should be aware of.

Story continues

But note: Lennox International may not be the best stock to buy. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies with past earnings growth (and further growth forecast).

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on US exchanges.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
Justin Trudeau revealed Thursday that Donald Trump is planning to send U.S. troops to the border with Canada.

The Canadian prime minister and his government called it unnecessary because of the coronavirus outbreak and warning it would damage relations between the two countries.

Trump is expected to send fewer than 1,000 troops to the Canadian border, two U.S. government officials told Reuters. They would help enforce the ban on non-essential crossings due to the coronavirus pandemic, one of the officials said.

The border, the world's longest at 5,500 miles, was temporarily shut as of Saturday to all non-essential travelers on both sides, but not cross-border trade.

An estimated 400,000 people and $2 billion worth of goods normally would cross the border each day.

Disapprove: Justin Trudeau said that he objects to any militarization of the 5,400-mile border, which is currently closed

No access: This is the Canadian border with the U.S. near Lansdowne, Ontario, which borders Wellsley Island, New York

Global News said less than 1,000 American troops would be stationed within 30 kilometers (20 miles) of the Canadian frontier, between official border checkpoints, and use sensor technologies to detect irregular crossers.

Under this proposal, the US military - which shares continental defense responsibilities with their Canadian counterparts -- would advise American border agents who would be sent to intercept them.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau discouraged militarizing the border.

'Canada and the United States have the longest unmilitarized border in the world and it is very much in both of our interests for it to remain that way,' Trudeau said.

'We have been in discussions with the United States on this,' he told a news conference, without giving details.

It would be 'an entirely unnecessary step that we would view as damaging to our relationship,' Canada's Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters at a news conference.

She said she had first heard about plans to deploy troops 'a couple of days ago,' and said Canada had made its position clear to various members of the U.S. administration.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Gen. James McConville, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, told Pentagon reporters during a press conference that the Army has not gotten any directive to go to the border.

Southern deployment: U.S. troops have been sent to the southern border but never to the border with Canada

Few people cross into the border into the U.S. from Canada illegally. And COVID-19 cases are surging more in the U.S. than in Canada.

Canada has already closed the border to non-essential travel from the United States as part of a bid to combat coronavirus.

The state of New York, which shares a border with Canada, has been an epicenter of the U.S. outbreak.

Canada has more than 3,400 cases, 35 deaths and has tested over 158,000 people.

Trudeau said Ottawa was in constant touch with U.S. authorities and would adjust border security measures if needed.

Separately, one of the U.S. sources said several hundred more troops would also be deployed along the border with Mexico in addition to the ones already there.
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Three persons are presently quarantined in Cameroons South West Region  one in Limbe and two in Buea  after showing symptoms akin to those of the novel coronavirus.

Speaking Tuesday, March 24, 2020, the South West Regional Delegate for Public Health, Dr. Ebongo Zacchaeus Nanje said the suspects manifested majority of the symptoms of Coronavirus. He adds that samples were collected from the suspects and sent to Yaounde for examination.

With results now awaited, the people of the South West are holding their breath given that the three suspects, two in Buea and one in Limbe, are known to have recently travelled to COVID-19 hit countries. Their contacts are now being traced.

Dr. Ebongo told local tv, HiTV Cameroon that plans are far advanced to secure a 3,000 metres square piece of land near the regional hospital where there will construct a COVID-19 patient camp. It is here that suspected cases and patients will be quarantined.

With no fewer than 70 known positive cases, one death and hundreds of suspected cases under quarantine, Dr. Ebongo says we are heading towards a potential disaster given that the restrictive measures rolled out by government are not being respected by the population.

The South West Regional Delegate of Public Health says the region is just from handling cases of cholera in the Bakassi area and is battling with 51 other cholera cases in Tiko Subdivision. As such, he calls on government departments to ensure that potable water is made available to the entire population.

I have been talking to the municipal authorities to ensure that water is made available to the people, Dr. Ebongo said.

In the meantime, the Governor of the South West Region Bernard Okalia Bilai has called for greater vigilance and increased physical hygiene from everyone in the region.

With confirmed cases in Africa rising at a rate of approximately 26 percent per day, time is of the essence if Africa is to avoid the worst effects of the pandemic. While nearly two-thirds of affected African countries thus far have reported only imported infections, slowing the exponential expansion of the virus will increasingly rely on reducing in-country transmissions, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies says.

Cameroon has however ramped up measures to contain the COVID-19 outbreak, including closing its borders, schools and restricting gatherings of more than 50 persons among other restrictions for a 15-day period renewable.
With many states banning all but the most essential business in order to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, booksellers are making the case that they, too, are essential. The effort is paying off. Bookstores in numerous states are facing a crush of online sales, offering delivery and pickup to customers, and applying for waivers to keep doing so as public health orders grow more strict.

Riverstone Books in Pittsburgh, Pa., applied for an exemption from a March 19 statewide order to close all businesses that are not life-sustaining. On Monday, the bookstore received that exemption and is continuing to take orders while offering curbside and home delivery, along with free shipping.

We believe books are essential to life, owner Barbara Jeremiah wrote to customers, informing them of the exemption. Jeremiah said employees remain healthy and are practicing social distancing while fulfilling orders during store hours.

East City Bookshop owner Laurie Gillman and a handful of employees were taking enough online orders at the Washington, D.C. bookstore to keep the business going early this week when a similar closing order came through. On Wednesday, Gillman applied for an exemption from the mayors office and her staff was hurriedly preparing to be able to add sidelines to their website and continue online sales.

Navigating health orders in each state is essential for many bookstores long-term survival. Early this week, Words Bookstore in Maplewood, N.J. was considering a switch to deliveries while evaluating a statewide order to see if an exemption request was necessary. We have been flooded with internet orders, said managing principal Jonah Zimiles.

Like virtually all bookstores, we dont have a lot of financial reserves so being closed for any amount of time would impact our ability to survive, said Eileen McGervey, owner of One More Page books in Arlington, V.A. The store is a co-sponsor of the NoVa Teen Book Festival, which it was forced to cancel earlier this month, but McGervey said online orders have been so substantial that they are helping to offset the loss in sales.

It is a whole change to the way we do business, as it is for all bookstores, McGervey said of the influx of onlines sales. The challenge is how to maintain and communicate with our community when we cannot interact with them in the store. Thus far, the stores digital outreach has been a success. 2,000 people viewed an online video posted by the store and McGervey said photos of specific puzzles and games immediately caused a spike in sales.

At Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., owner Janet Geddis is also seeing a jump in online sales, but is already preparing in case circumstances change. I'm not sure how long business will be brisk so I am sketching out various scenarios depending on what happens in the coming days, weeks, and months, Geddis said. "I will be emailing my landlord todayhe's great but, like me, is a local business owner who is likely feeling pain right now.

Geddis credits local government with being the linchpin to the stores initial ability to respond to the crisis. Our local leadership in Athens-Clarke County has been strong and responsive, she said. On March 14, she e-mailed her mayor to ask for a meeting and received an immediate response. The two met two days later. I feel very thankful to have him and our commission here in town, said Geddis.

Alice Hutchinson of Byrds Books in Bethel, Ct., lives above her store and it is remaining closed for the time being, in accordance with a statewide order. She will continue to ship books. Like Geddis, Hutchinson said local government has been critically important, providing much-needed guidance.

I feel the local and state governments are working very hard on our behalf, and deeply care for their communities. The First Selectman (mayor) here in Bethel is a friend of mine and I know he will do whatever he can - he is a responsive, educated and professional leader. I trust him, said Hutchinson.

Bookstore owners are less praiseworthy of the federal government, and in particular, President Trump. I am hopeful that scientists keep voicing their concerns and directives because our president goes on feelings and does not appear to care if he kills all of us, said Hutchinson. She was particularly concerned that the federal stimulus package passed by the U.S. Senate would provide support for small businesses and individuals.

As he transitioned his store to online sales this week, Gibsons Bookstore owner Michael Hermann said his Concord, N.H. store was looking for robust federal action. What we need most right now is a strong and clear federal plan to cover small businesses payroll and rent and allow us to close to the public for as long as it takes to flatten the curve. said Hermann, who bookstore is a frequent stop for presidential candidates during primaries.

Until then, Hermann said he would look instead to fellow booksellers for inspiration. Booksellers are some of the smartest and most nimble people in retail, so its no surprise that many stores are responding to the crisis in creative ways.
Tiles and wood flooring retailer Topps Tiles says it should be able to maintain its financial strength even if its stores remain shut for twelve weeks,

The Leicestershire-based firm expects the closure of its stores from the coronavirus pandemic to cut its revenues and profits in the second half of the financial year.

But the tile specialist says it has enough cash reserves to give it 'good levels of liquidity' for the rest of the ongoing financial year even if its shops shut down for nearly three months and sales diminish for a further quarter.

Topps Tiles has struggled recently with its sales performance. Its retail business saw a like-for-like sales decline of 3.1 per cent in the twelve weeks to March 21

But due to the government's coronavirus aid package and its high cash reserves, the firm believes it is 'well-positioned' to recover from the disruption caused by the pandemic. The business' online operations also remain open, which should mitigate the drop in sales.

It hopes to save an estimated 9.5million from the 100 per cent year-long business rates holiday announced by the UK government last week, as well as 3.1million from VAT deferrals and 2million per month from the Job Retention Scheme.

Topps Tiles has struggled recently with its sales performance. Its retail business saw a like-for-like sales decline of 3.1 per cent in the twelve weeks to March 21. This was not as bad as the last quarter of 2019 though when the group recorded a 5.4 per cent fall in like-for-like sales.

The firm blamed that quarter's performance on political and economic uncertainty arising from the UK general election. Its CEO Matt Williams resigned from his post in November after two decades at the business, including twelve in charge.

Topps Tiles says it has enough cash reserves to give it 'good levels of liquidity' for the rest of the ongoing financial year even if its shops shut down for nearly three months

Currently, the group says it has completely drawn down its 39million revolving credit facility, has 20million in cash liquidity immediately available and an 11million accordion facility that is dependent on lender approval.

Due to the pandemic, it is also not publishing financial guidance for the 2020 fiscal year at this time and is unlikely to make interim dividend payments. But the firm expects its liquidity to remain robust for the foreseeable future.

'Topps remains in a good financial position, with a robust balance sheet,' the company writes.'

It adds: 'While the immediate outlook is challenging and uncertain, Topps remains a resilient, market-leading business with good levels of cash liquidity and a strong management team and the Board is confident that the Group is well-positioned to recover once the situation normalises.'

Shares in Topps Tiles rose 12.75 per cent to 38.9p on the announcement.
UN environment chief Inger Andersen on Wednesday (March 25) said that the nature is sending a clear message to billions of people across the world with the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis.

Talking to Guardian, Andersen said that too much pressure has been put on the nature through human actions with damaging consequences. Andersen added that failing to protect the planet meant human are not taking care of themselves.

Referring to the coronavirus outbreak across the globe, Andersen noted that the COVID-19 outbreak was a clear warning shot that todays civilisation was playing with fire.

Andersen noted that the immediate priority for everyone now is to protect people from the coronavirus and curb its spread. But our long-term response must tackle habitat and biodiversity loss, she added.

Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people, she told the Guardian, adding that around 75% of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife.

Our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbour diseases that can jump to humans, noted Andersen.

The UN scientists also remarked that other environmental impacts, such as the Australian bushfires, broken heat records etc are sending us a message that we need to protect the environment.

At the end of the day, [with] all of these events, nature is sending us a message. There are too many pressures at the same time on our natural systems and something has to give. We are intimately interconnected with nature, whether we like it or not. If we dont take care of nature, we cant take care of ourselves. And as we hurtle towards a population of 10 billion people on this planet, we need to go into this future armed with nature as our strongest ally, Andersen noted.

The emergence and spread of Covid-19 was not only predictable, it was predicted [in the sense that] there would be another viral emergence from wildlife that would be a public health threat, said Prof Andrew Cunningham, of the Zoological Society of London.
India on Thursday expressed deep concern over reported blasts near the cremation site of those killed in a dastardly terror attack on a gurudwara in Kabul.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said the Indian embassy in Kabul has been in touch with Afghan security authorities and asked them to ensure adequate security to families of the victims of the attack as well as their safe return to their homes.

Twenty-five people were killed and at least eight others wounded in the attack on the gurudwara in Shorbazar area of Kabul on Wednesday. One of the deceased was Tian Singh, a 71-year-old Delhi resident.

"Deeply concerned at the blasts reported near the cremation site of those killed during the attack on Gurudwara Sahib in #Kabul," Jaishankar tweeted.

He said the embassy is in touch with family members of the victims.

"Understandable grief and anger at the cowardly terrorist attack on Gurudwara in #Kabul. Our Embassy @IndianEmbKabul is in continuous touch with the families of those killed and injured," Jaishankar said in another tweet.

He said efforts were on to bring back mortal remains of Singh from Kabul.

"Medical opinion against moving injured at this stage. Embassy @IndianEmbKabul is working on the return of mortal remains of Shri Tian Singh. Will keep you updated," he said.

India on Wednesday had strongly condemned the terror attack, saying targeting of a religious place in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic reflected the "diabolical mindset" of the perpetrators and their backers.

"Such cowardly attacks on the places of religious worship of the minority community, especially at this time of COVID 19 pandemic, is reflective of the diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers," the MEA said.

It said India stands in solidarity with the people, the government and the security forces of Afghanistan in their efforts for bringing peace and security to the country.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
"The cutoff date for contagion has been estimated at the 13 March, and as far as is known, the queen is extremely well," Royal Family expert Richard Fitzwilliams told VOA.

Prince Charles last met his mother, Queen Elizabeth, on March 9. She has left London to stay in Windsor Castle outside the capital, with her husband, Prince Philip.

The prince's official London residence, Clarence House, issued a statement saying it was impossible to ascertain where he caught the virus, owing to the high number of engagements he carried out in his public role during recent weeks.

The palace said the prince, 71, had only mild symptoms and was otherwise in good health. The future British king was self-isolating at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, with his wife, Camilla.

Queen Elizabeth issued a statement on the coronavirus pandemic last week, saying that "we all have a vitally important part to play as individuals -- today, and in coming days, weeks and months."

There have been calls from the British public for the royal family to offer greater support. With Britain in lockdown possibly for months, the timing is important, added Fitzwilliams.

"It would certainly be appropriate for the queen, as a symbol of national unity, to address a country whose basic freedoms suddenly have vanished with the onset of this terrible virus, and we obviously just wait for what the government would consider an appropriate time, I think," he said.

There is some anger in Britain that Prince Charles has been tested for the virus, whereas most of the public -- and even front-line health workers -- are finding it difficult to access testing. The prince's spokesperson said he was tested at the expense of Britains National Health Service because of his age.

Prince Charles' diagnosis also will raise some concerns about the health of his father, Prince Philip, who also holds the title of the Duke of Edinburgh. COVID-19 particularly affects older people whose immune systems might not be that strong. Prince Philip is due to turn 99 in June, while Queen Elizabeth will be 94 next month.

Outside the queen's official residence of Buckingham Palace, the usual crowds are absent as Londoners heed calls to stay home, and tourists have all but disappeared from the capital. Some Britons say it's time the royal family broke the silence at a time of deep distress for the nation.


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Linkedin Editorial Board (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 08:14 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d6fda0 1 Editorial COVID-19,coronavirus,Jokowi,COVID-19-lockdown,rapid-testing,pandemic,#Editorial Free

Devastating news emerged Wednesday, the Hindu Day of Silence, that President Joko Jokowi Widodos mother, Sujiatmi Notomiharjo, has died. The President faces the extra burden of mourning even while battling the raging pandemic.

With an already overwhelmed healthcare system, the government has imported test kits, which are vital for detecting many more cases as quickly as possible across the country.

However, the mass testing, which starts this week in the capital  the epicenter of the pandemic in Indonesia  and adjacent provinces of Banten and West Java, which have recorded the second highest number of cases, will not be on the scale nor as sophisticated as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing in South Korea.

The mass testing will employ rapid test kits, which use blood samples to detect if patients have the antibodies to the pathogen. The tests require less laboratory work to produce results, but are also reported to be less accurate than PCR tests.

It is expected that many more cases will be discovered and it is hoped this earlier detection will help prevent further transmission. Jokowi has dismissed the idea of a national lockdown, likely out of fear of the devastating impacts it would have on the economy, and is instead pinning his hopes on the targeted rapid testing to track down cases, especially among medical workers and at-risk citizens, such as those returning from overseas or those who have had close contact with confirmed cases.

However, given the lack of accuracy of rapid testing, the real scale of the pandemic in Indonesia will remain unknown. As of Wednesday, the country had recorded 790 cases, with 58 deaths and 31 recoveries. Experts fear the growth in the number of cases will follow the exponential spikes seen in Iran and Italy.

Therefore, while the President and his officials are right to reiterate the importance of preventive measures, such as physical distancing, remaining healthy and staying home, a lockdown is still necessary. Under the 2018 law on health quarantines, the government is obliged to provide for the basic needs of the poor. If they follow the Presidents call to work from home, they will have no way to feed their families.

There is also only so much officials can do to remind people to wash their hands and maintain a safe distance from others, such as on public transportation.

According to the governments spokesman for COVID-19-related matters, Achmad Yurianto, many of the elderly people who have contracted the virus lived with younger family members who continued to go to work.

There is no silver bullet in the fight against the pandemic. Countries need to tailor their strategies according to their conditions and available resources. China shut down the worst-hit cities and provinces. South Korea conducted mass PCR testing to ensure early detection and ordered people to self-isolate. Both countries have seen fruitful results.

Indonesias challenging geography and the lack of mobility and access to transportation in many areas may be an advantage at the moment. However, road, sea and air travel must be further restricted and discouraged.
Kerala Gov shoots off letter to CM Vijayan: 'You personally assume the position of Chancellor'

19 new confirmed coronavirus cases reported in Kerala, 1.20 lakh under observation

India

pti-PTI

Thiruvananthapuram, Mar 26: Kerala reported 19 more positive cases of coronavirus on Thursday, taking the total number of infected people under treatment to 126, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said.

Kannur accounted for the highest number cases on Thursday with nine, while three cases each were from Kasaragod and Malappuram districts, followed by two from Thrissur and one each from Idukki and Wayanad, he told reporters here after a COVID-19 review meeting.

He said more than 1.20 lakh people are under observation in the state.

The Chief Minister welcomed the relief package announced by the central government to mitigate the sufferings of people in the wake of coronavirus outbreak.
One of the big challenges (among many) with the coronavirus pandemic is that overwhelmed health services do not always know how best to deploy the limited resources they have to meet the demand of people falling ill with COVID-19. For example, we know that more ventilators and beds will be needed, but where specifically are the outbreaks happening and how can those local areas be served better?

Now, an app in the U.K. called the C-19 COVID Symptom Tracker, developed out of an unlikely corner of medical research -- looking into the progression of medical conditions by tracking twins -- is asking people to self-report their symptoms in an effort to start to gather more of that detail.

In line with how the public is trying to step up its efforts to get involved in the fight to contain the disease (some 405,000 people have also volunteered to help the NHS deliver medicine and other supplies to quarantined people, and help people home from the hospital) the Covid-19 app has itself gone viral, with 750,000 downloads since being launched on Tuesday morning. The app now is the third most popular app overall in the UK on the Apple App Store, and the number-one in the medical category, according to figures from App Annie.

Developed by a startup called Zoe in partnership with researchers at Kings College Hospital in London, the plan is to bring the app next to the U.S., where the latter group had already been working with colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford on a previous project (more on that below).

To be very clear, the app itself is not a diagnostic tool -- these are being developed on a national level, linking people through to local services. Nor is it designed to give the public any clarity on where COVID-19 symptoms are cropping up. (As we reported earlier, there are a number of those being built and used already, too, providing maps and other data.)

Instead, it's a research app designed to bring together information that could be useful to medical professionals to better plan their responses.

Story continues

At first, the plan was to build an app to figure out where there were clusters of cases in order to better determine where testing kits, in short supply, might be better allocated.

"We were actively speaking to a multitude of companies that are making or have testing kits, and originally the idea was that if we identified people who were expressing symptoms, maybe we could get a testing kit to them faster," said Sara Gordon, a spokesperson for the company. That proved to be too difficult, she added, because the testing arena is very fragmented and so it's not clear whether they all reliably and consistently work the same (and work well).

Then, attention turned to where the data could be useful, and providing support to the NHS, the U.K.'s National Health Service, in determining the shape and evolution of the virus, in order to research it better and figure out how to deploy NHS resources, was where the team landed.

The ExCel conference center in the Docklands in East London is being set up as a field hospital now, "but there are many other places that will need hospitals opened," she said, "and this could help figure out where."

The app has a somewhat unlikely origin. It was created by Zoe, a spin-out from Kings College Hospital that is now backed by some $27 million in funding -- investors include Daphni in France and Accomplice (formerly Atlas Venture) in Boston, among others -- in partnership with a research group at Kings College that has been tracking twins.

"Were a healthcare startup that has been running the worlds largest nutrition study," Gordon said, spanning some 25 years (predating the startup materialising or getting spun out) and 8,000 groups of twins, and covering not just people through Kings, but also Stanford and Mass General.

Researching food intake as well as blood and stool samples, the idea was to "understand everything about how genes determine how we metabolise food, our immune responses, and more," using twins with nearly identical DNA to do this, and using that input to determine new insights into cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other chronic conditions.

Last week, Zoe's co-founder, Tim Spector, who is also Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at Kings College London and director of the Twins UK study, spoke to the Zoe team about creating an app to reach out to the 8,000 twins in the study (who had already been using Zoe to track other parts of their lifestyles) to see how many of them were expressing signs of the novel coronavirus. It could have been a useful test pool also for determining what role age plays in this, as the long-term study means many of the people involved are older.

Events overtook those plans, too:

"From the conversations we were having with Kings" -- the inner-city hospital (which happens to be my local hospital) has been very much at the front lines of the coronavirus response in London and the U.K. -- "we decided that if we're making this available to twins, maybe we should open it up to more people," Gordon said. "One of the main issues here in the U.K. and other countries has been that governments haven't been able to get good enough data about where the virus is spreading or how bad symptoms are."

There are some major caveats with the app, which it seems are still a work in progress.

The biggest of these is that the app itself is self-reporting. That means that you are putting a lot of trust into people to be accurate and also consistent with each other in how they are describing their symptoms. (Is my idea of a continuous, unproductive cough the same as yours? And are our coughs even a reliable enough indicator of what is going on?)

"Were relying on the public to be honest about their symptoms," Gordon said more than once during my conversation with her. That would have been one reason too why tying the surveys to testing kits (the original idea) might have been problematic: so many people want some assurance that I'm guessing a lot would have reported just to get the kits.

The other is that it requires regular, habitual use: a person reporting one day is only really useful if that person reports for the rest of the days subsequent to that to get a picture of how and if symptoms progress. On the other hand, that could be a boost to self-reporting too: even if my version of a continuous cough is different from yours, at least I'll now be showing how and if anything else gets added to that cough over time.

"What were trying to do is scale what we see and what scientists are classifying as severity of symptoms," she said. "If someone has fever over a certain period, then thats logged as red. Amber is feeling ill."

Over the next few days she said the team is hoping to separate COVID-19 symptoms apart from those associated with a common cold. "Were working to make sure that in reporting were being able to divide which are common cold or flu and which are COVID-19."

A third issue is the data usage on the app. The privacy terms on Zoe note that the data is only there to be used by the researchers, but it also notes that it could travel outside of the EU not just for analytics but to be shared with other research partners.

Indeed, privacy experts and others are still debating the implications of how crowdsourced services like this one, built quickly for the crisis, are really walking a grey line when it comes to questions of privacy and data protection. For now, Zoe defends its position.

"The data policy we have is the one we have had legal advice on," Gordon said. "Its compliant with GDPR, and if and when we pass to others, people's names are anonymised and switched to code. We feel we have super-strict data rules on our side." She added that the compliance in the U.S. is even more strict because any research they do there has to go through a clinical process to make sure it is protected, "so there should be absolutely no concerns about data privacy."

All the same, even with all the best intentions, there could also be a risk of your data getting misappropriated when handed off from one party to another and no longer under local jurisdictions.

That skepticism is possibly not helped by the fact that the co-founder and CEO of Zoe, Jonathan Wolf, is the former chief product officer of Criteo, the adtech company that happens to be getting investigated by France's data protection watchdog for how it uses personal data (Wolf left the firm in 2016 before co-founding Zoe in 2017). Criteo is described simply as a "machine learning company" -- no mention of advertising -- in Wolf's bio on the Zoe site.

(The third co-founder is George Hadjigeorgiou, who also doesn't have any direct links to the medical industry, having been the CEO of HouseTrip and the co-founder of efood, a delivery startup.)

On a more positive note -- and there is a lot to see that is positive here -- Zoe itself is a business, but this project specifically was built without that in mind.

"Building this to meet the current need was just a decision we made," Gordon said. "The team switched from the commercial product to this for the next few weeks, and the plan is to make it open source and to hand it off to the right people eventually. We just want to get the ball rolling."

Remember to stay two meters apart from others when you go out, and stay at home when you can. Keep well, TC readers.
McFly have become the latest artists to push back their tour dates due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Five Colours In Her Hair hitmakers - comprised of Tom Fletcher, Harry Judd, Dougie Poynter, and Danny Jones - were due to head out on an 11-date tour of the UK in April and May.

They will instead be hitting the same cities at the end of the year, in October and November.

Postponed: McFly have become the latest artists to push back their tour dates due to the coronavirus pandemic

They have postponed the shows as the UK government has temporarily banned all gatherings of more than two people, unless they are from the same household.

In a message posted to Twitter, the band wrote: 'Following the latest government advice we are very sad to announce that we are rescheduling our upcoming April / May UK 2020 tour.

'The safety and health of our fans is our utmost priority. Look after each other & see you very soon.

'Love Tom, Danny, Harry & Dougie (sic)'

No longer: The Five Colours In Her Hair hitmakers - comprised of Tom Fletcher, Harry Judd, Dougie Poynter, and Danny Jones - were due to head out on an 11-date tour of the UK in April

Following the announcement, drummer Harry shared a similar message on his own Twitter account, along with the rescheduled tour dates.

McFly's rescheduled 2020 tour dates OCTOBER 18 - Newcastle - Utilita Arena 19 - Leeds - First Direct Arena 21 - Liverpool - M&S Bank Arena 22 - Brighton - The Brighton Centre 23 - Manchester - Manchester Arena 25 - Bournemouth - Bournemouth International Centre 26 - Nottingham - Motorpoint Arena 27 - Glasgow - The SSE Hydro 29 - London - Wembley The SSE Arena NOVEMBER 01 - Birmingham - Resorts World Arena 02 - Cardiff - Motorpoint Arena Advertisement

In a second tweet, he then also added: 'We can't wait to see you in Oct/Nov, only 6 months away. Until then, keep yourselves safe and look after each other. X (sic)'

McFly announced their original tour dates in September last year.

It came shortly after they released new original material in the form of The Lost Songs, which was a compilation of material from the McFly vaults,

It was accumulated after the release of their last album, Above The Noise, and before the launch of collaborative project McBusted.

The Lost Songs - which is comprised of songs originally intended for their unreleased sixth album - was made freely available on Spotify and all major platforms, after the band released one song per week.

Fellow UK act Harry Styles was due to head out on his Love On Tour before the pandemic but revealed on Wednesday that he decided to push back his shows.

They were due to begin in Birmingham on April 15, until February and March 2021, due to the global health crisis.

Taking to Twitter, he announced to fans: 'Anyone who knows me, knows that performing has always been my favourite part of working in music.

'However, during times like these, the safety and protection of touring crew, fans, and everyone else around the world is an immediate priority...

'For obvious reasons, the upcoming tour in the UK and Europe will be rescheduled to 2021. Tickets already purchased will be valid for these shows.

'In the meantime, we will be closely monitoring the situation around the world and will continue updating you in the months to come. (sic)'
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 16:18 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d95bde 1 City COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,kemayoran-athletes-village,Wisma-Atlet-Kemayoran,COVID-19-Indonesian-patients,virus-corona Free

After opening on Tuesday, Jakartas makeshift emergency hospital for COVID-19 has so far received 208 patients, according to the hospital head.

The hospital, which has the capacity to treat 3,000 people, utilizes four out 10 towers of the Kemayoran athletes village in Central Jakarta. Two towers are currently being used to treat patients.

Jakarta Military commander and hospital head Maj. Gen. Eko Margiyono said the hospital would not accept patients younger than 15 years old. The facility also prioritizes COVID-19 patients, elderly suspects and suspects with mild to moderate breathing problems.

However, he said patients with severe and worsening symptoms would be referred to another hospital.

Read also: COVID-19: Ministry studies plan to use hotels as accommodation for medical staff

There were some patients who came here and [we] referred [them] to other referral hospitals later because [their initial] examinations showed severe symptoms, Eko said at a press conference on Thursday.

Patients who have mild symptoms but carry other complications would also be referred to other hospitals because the [makeshift] hospital is not designed to handle other diseases, Eko added.

He explained that patients who wanted to be examined at the hospital could come and register themselves. Alternatively, patients who cannot go to the hospital by themselves can also call the COVID-19 hotline on 199, where they can request a transfer service to the hospital.

The other way is by referral. Private hospitals that are no longer able to accommodate patients can refer some of them to our hospital, but we hope that there is an initial examination so that when we receive the patients, we already have preliminary data, Eko said.

Read also: COVID-19: Ministry to develop temporary hospitals in several regions

As of Wednesday, Indonesia had recorded 790 cases of COVID-19 with 58 fatalities and 31 recoveries. Jakarta has the large majority of the cases with 463, including 31 in the region who have died and 23 who have recovered.

The makeshift hospital uses the former athletes village, which was used during the 2018 Asian Games.

The makeshift facility is aimed at increasing the capitals healthcare capability, as Jakartas regional leaders communication forum (Frokompimda DKI Jakarta) estimated that, in a worst-case scenario, as many as 8000 people in the capital city would be infected by the coronavirus.

Since it was opened on Tuesday, patients from Greater Jakarta have been lining up for examination at the makeshift COVID-19 hospital, but Eko said the hospital even received patients from outside the region.

The hospital was originally designed to accommodate patients in Greater Jakarta, but in reality, on the first day, there were patients who came from Surabaya and Semarang. But still, we accepted them, he added. (mfp)
GREENWICH  Theyre headed for the hills  the hills and seashores of southern Connecticut in particular.

A wave of New York City residents, along with affluent second-home owners from southern Connecticut, are on the move, looking to ride out the coronavirus pandemic in remoter sections of the northeast with some green space and room for outdoor play. For them, escaping the hot zone in New York City and its environs means finding luxurious circumstances in the Nutmeg State and other refuges.

Greenwich real estate agent Stefanie Lacoff said her phone has been ringing off the hook, with some 100 inquiries from New York City residents in a week seeking short-term home rentals in Greenwich.

Youre seeing a lot of people trying to get out of New York City, they feel trapped, the Realtor said.

Lacoff said the callers are all looking for the same thing.

They want a backyard for their kids to run around and play, and they want to just get outside, she said, One family contacted me, and they said, Weve been in our apartment for 12 days, and we havent left. They have a young child, the kid is bouncing off the wall, they havent had fresh air, they just need to get out. Theyre desperate to get out of the city.

Some of the calls have been emotional  Lacoff has spoken to two pregnant women who were deeply anxious about delivering their babies in New York City hospitals while the coronavirus pandemic is crowding medical facilities.

Unfortunately, Lacoff hasnt been able to offer much assistance. Short-term houses for rent in Greenwich are very rare below the $10,000-a-month range, and thats beyond what most of her callers can afford. Lacoff does a lot of work on social media, and posting on a New York group site drew extensive calls to her office, she said.

Tammy Felenstein, executive director of sales at at Halstead, based in Stamford, said shes also seen a rise in interest in lower Connecticut from city dwellers.

We are definitely seeing activity especially in the higher end rental market coming from New York City. Its not a mass exodus, but it is happening, she said. I think people are reevaluating small space urban living, now that we are living through this crisis.

Others have seen signs of movement away from Gotham.

Trey Kelsey, owner of Greenwich Hardware, said its been a very busy time for his truck-rental business. Many owners of second homes have been coming into the store, which is also a U-Haul outlet, to rent trucks and buy supplies, as they head out to dwellings outside the tri-state region.

Its been very busy, a lot of movement, he said.

Westport broker Cyd Hamer, a real estate agent working out of William Pitt Sothebys office, has been getting calls like shes never gotten before.

Ive never had people call me for short-term rentals in March, for April and May, Hamer said. People have been looking at summer rentals starting now and theyre willing to pay what they need to get out.

The clientele is exclusively from New York City, she said, and proximity to hospitals is also a concern for the prospective renters with whom shes spoken.

A broker in New Haven is seeing interest from New Yorkers in seaside towns on Long Island Sound that were usually just too far away for the summer crowd.

Lower Fairfield County, theres a lot of interest, thats what Im hearing, said Michael Barbaro, of HMP Compass Northeast, And the shoreline area, Branford, Guilford, Madison. Historically, that tends to be, for people in the city, a little too far. In these times, not anymore.

Staff reporters Paul Schott and Justin Papp contributed to this report. rmarchant@greenwichtime.com
More than a year after 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, were gunned down, the man accused of carrying out the massacre has unexpectedly pleaded guilty to the crime.

Brenton Tarrant pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder, 40 charges of attempted murder and one charge of terrorism Thursday during a hearing Thursday at the Christchurch High Court. Tarrant entered his plea via video link from his prison cell in Auckland instead of in person, as New Zealand begins a four-week nationwide lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

The imams from the Al Noor and Linwood mosques, the targets of Tarrants rampage, were among the handful of people in the courtroom for the surprise hearing.

Hours before carrying out the March 15, 2019, shootings -- the worst mass shooting in New Zealands history -- the now 29-year-old Australian white supremacist published a long manifesto online explaining his reasoning for the attack. Tarrant live-streamed the attack on Facebook, which was viewed by scores of people around the world before it was taken down.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Tarrants decision to change his plea would relieve the survivors of the burden of having to endure a trial.

Tarrants next court appearance is scheduled for May.
Telangana reported four more positive cases for Sars-Cov-2 virus  none with travel history to foreign countries, taking the total number of cases of secondary infection to nine and overall number of positive cases to 45 in the state on Thursday.

On the other hand, Andhra Pradesh reported one more positive Covid-19 case on Thursday  that of a 28-year old man who returned from Stockholm in Sweden to Vijayawada on March 18 and was admitted to the local government hospital with symptoms on Wednesday. The total number of positive cases in AP went up to 11 by Thursday night.

The detection of four more cases of secondary infection on Thursday kept the Telangana government on tenterhooks. One of the four new cases was that of a 49-year old man from Qutbullapur of Medchal district who returned from Delhi in Sampark Kranti Express on March 14, along with 13 Indonesians, 10 of whom tested positive for the virus.

low coronavirus live updates here.

The other two cases are that of a 36-year old female doctor and her 41-year old husband from Domalguda in Hyderabad. And the fourth one was a 45-year old man from Boudhanagar in Secunderabad who also tested positive for Sars-Cov-2 virus on his return from Delhi recently.

Telangana had already reported five such cases of secondary infection in the last one week. Two of these cases include a deputy superintendent of police of Bhadradri Kothagudem district who contracted the virus from his Australia-returned son and an old female cook in his house.

Health minister Etala Rajender, who reviewed the alarming rise of secondary infections of Covid-19, declared that the virus had already entered the second stage in Telangana and directed the authorities to take all possible steps to see that it did not enter the third phase.

The minister directed the Telangana Vaidya Vidhana Parishad authorities to take steps to convert the entire Gandhi Hospital at Secunderabad into an exclusive hospital to deal with only Corona virus-related cases and all the other departments should be shifted to Osmania Hospital.

Already, all major surgeries in Gandhi Hospital have been referred to Osmania. In the next few days, all the other departments, too, should shift to Osmania Hospital, so that Gandhi Hospital can be dedicated only to Corona virus patients, he said.

Rajender also asked the medical infrastructure development corporation to acquire as many equipment as possible, including ICU facilities and ventilators, at the earliest to brace for the situation in the event of the disease enters the third phase.

Meanwhile, the situation turned tense at the Telangana-Andhra borders, where hundreds of students and employees evicted from hostels in Hyderabad, found themselves following a categorical announcement by Andhra chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy that it was not possible to allow the stranded travellers to enter the state.

It is very painful to see so many people being held up at borders and I am not in a position to welcome my own states people. But I am helpless in allowing them into the state because of the grave situation prevailing on account of Coronavirus, he said, and appealed to the people to stay wherever they were.

At Vadapalli check-post on Telangana-Andhra border on Nalgonda-Guntur state highway, scores of people who had been waiting to get into AP border since Wednesday night, turned violent and pelted stones at the police, injuring at least five constables. The police resorted to lathi charge to disperse the protestors.

The AP government told them that they would be allowed into the state only if they agree to be quarantined for 14-days.

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By Qaisar Sajjad

Air Commodore Qaisar Sajjad has held numerous command and staff positions in Pakistan air force and has undergone training courses in various countries around the globe. With over three decades of military exposure, he bears a keen insight on national and international security related issues.Currently he is undergoing Defence and Strategic Studies Course in International College of Defense Studies, National Defense University of Chinas Peoples Liberation Army. Throughout the period of breakout and subsequent containment of COVID-19he has been in China and enumerated his personal experience and insight on the subject. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of chinamil.com.cn.

The start of year 2020 witnessed a challenging outbreak of Corona virus, termed as COVID-19 by the WHO, in the city of Wuhan, China. In containment of the outbreak, Chinese national crisis management mechanism has been put to the real test. Upon the detection of a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown etiology in Wuhan, China launched national emergency response. A Central Leadership Group for Epidemic Response and the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council were established. Following four measures were immediately put into effect by Chinese government and military to contain the epidemic as close to the source as possible:

First, improving public health awareness. During the early phase of the outbreak, the main focus was on the spread of disease from Wuhan and other priority areas of Hubei Province to other provinces and areas. The overall aim, therefore, was to control the source of infection, block transmission and prevent further spread. All sources of media were utilized to enhance public awareness on the extent of threat and initial prevention measures without creating undue fear and panic. However, a few international media groups even utilized such a catastrophe to target Chinese handling of crisis in negative connotations in baseless and irresponsible manner.

Second,implementing emergency medical response. The government made coordinated efforts to make the emergency medical response effective, especially at the epicenter of Wuhan City and Hubei province. Diagnostic testing kits were developed, and wildlife and live poultry markets were placed under strict supervision and control measures. Two 1000- bed hospitals were built within days to reduce the intensity of the epidemic and to provide the Medicare to maximum number of affected people. The focus was on actively treating patients, reducing deaths, and preventing spread. In other provinces, the focus had been on preventing influx, curbing the spread of the disease and implementing joint prevention and control measures.

Third, coordinating utilization of national resources. All the possible resources including development of medical infrastructure and placement of medical personnel, including those from PLA at and close to the epicenter were mobilized. Such measures enabled reducing clusters of cases, thoroughly controlling the epidemic, and striking a balance between epidemic prevention and control and scientific evidence-based policy implementation. The outstanding speed with which Chinese scientists and public health experts isolated the virus, established diagnostic tools, and determined key transmission parameters, such as the route of spread and incubation period, provided the vital evidence base for China's strategy, gaining invaluable time for the response.

Forth, beefing up national resolve in fighting the outbreak. At the individual level, the Chinese people have responded to this outbreak with audacity and conviction. They accepted and adhered to the national containment measures with great patience, including the suspension of public gatherings, stay at home advisories or travel restrictions. Chinese people have made arduous efforts, and the nation has always stayed optimistic and resilient, and carried a conviction that it will achieve the final victory over the epidemic. The positive mindedness and resilience of the Chinese people truly demonstrated the spiritual power of a community with a shared future for mankind.

What we can learn from Chinese response in fighting COVID-19 epidemic

Containing such a large population in respective areas to alleviate the chances of the epidemic spread was praiseworthy.China has undertaken bold and effective campaign in containing COVID-19, thereby setting a viable example for other countries to emulate. A few of suggested ways forwarded for all the countries around the globe, while considering such an epidemic a considerable threat to their national security, are enumerated as follows:

First, strengthening emergency management mechanisms. All countries need to remain prepared to immediately activate the highest level of emergency response mechanisms to trigger focused approach, essential for early containment of COVID-19 outbreak.

Therefore, all measures must be put in place beforehand to ensure the safety of healthcare personnel as initial responders. Remarkably, more than 40,000 health care workers (HCW) have been deployed from other areas of China to support the response in Wuhan.

It was due to the hectic efforts of the medical hierarchy under CPC direction in China that transmission within health care apparatus and amongst health care professionals did not appear to be a major problem of COVID-19.

Therefore, for any country around the globe, emergency diagnostic measures, backup scientific research methods, standby medical teams and apparatus and requisite medicine and equipment stocks need to be reconciled with during the peacetime for immediate deployment.

Second, generating cohesive national response mechanism. China had been extremely efficient in concentrating all required national resources to fight the disease as close to the epicenter as possible. Cohesiveness of the regional governments, national departments and wholesome response mechanisms need to be tailored and tested beforehand to remain effective in the time of need.

China's national preparedness plans including knowledge on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical measures against COVID-19, including rapid detection, large scale case isolation and respiratory support capacities, and rigorous contact tracing and management remains the efficient precedent for all countries to emulate against such catastrophe.

Third, enforcing rigorous infection prevention and control measures. In order to alleviate the prospects of epidemic entering the healthcare systems, countries should enforce rigorous application of infection prevention and control measures in all healthcare facilities, especially in emergency departments and outpatient clinics. Scientific research methodology needs to be robust in order to facilitate response and risk management decisions including household and health care facility studies, epidemiologic surveys and rigorous investigation of the animal-human interface.

A centralized research program must be established beforehand to fast-track the most promisingly quick diagnostics, testing of potential antivirals and vaccine protocols, and coordinated engagement in selected multi-country trials. Lead of Chinese expertise in this context had better to be solicited by multi-national medical consortiums.

Forth, plug-in knowledge gaps. Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, there have been extensive attempts to better understand the virus and the disease in China. It is significant that how much knowledge about a new virus has been gained in such a short time. However, as with all new epidemics, key knowledge gaps exist. Such gaps have to be eradicated by an all-inclusive strategy.

Transmissibility, risk factors for infection and disease progression, surveillance, diagnostics, clinical management of severe and critically ill patients, and the effectiveness of prevention and control measures must be clearly spelled out. The timely filling of these knowledge gaps is imperative to enhance control strategies.

Fifth, ensuring transparency among masses. Magnificent efforts by Chinese Government, in this regard, which enabled the masses to take self-prevention measures to help contain the epidemic must be taken as a role model. Recognizing the fact that COVID-19 has been a new disease, it has been proven without doubt in China that outbreaks can be managed with the right response and that the vast majority of infected people will recover. Rapid assessment of the public understanding of COVID-19, adjustment of national health promotion materials and integration of medical response hierarchy with the media sources remained a lynchpin in ensuring transparency in China.

Sixth, undertaking coordinated global research in tackling epidemics. A huge array of COVID-19 studies, scientific research projects and R&D efforts are ongoing in China and globally. This needs to be coordinated and prioritized worldwide,to alleviate any prospects of attention or resources lapse so as to cut precious timelines. While progress is underway, the urgency of the COVID-19 situation demands an even more accurate prioritization of targeted research in the areas of diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccine development. It needs to be recognized by all countries that true solidarity and collaboration is essential among nations to tackle this common threat that COVID-19 and other such like epidemics.

So far, over 22,000 people have died with over 502,000 cumulative confirmed cases worldwide, and the numbers are still rising each passing day. With the first case reported from China, the pandemic has now spread to other countries like, Iran, South Korea, Italy and the US, while Chinese figures being reduce dsignificantly. The efforts taken by China in containment of this epidemic have been praised by all the World leaders and media. Every country has to be a part of this war against this virus to eliminate fear and unrest in respective societies.
Port-Louis, Mauritius (PANA)  The Mauritian Government on Thursday announced the setting up of a COVID-19 Solidarity Fund to provide support to the population and the community at large who are being affected by the pandemic
The Department of Health of Ho Chi Minh City has requested that health workers refrain from attending events that draw large crowds after dozens of employees at a district hospital were placed under quarantine due to contact with family members of a novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patient at a funeral.

The request was made in an urgent circular in compliance with COVID-19 prevention measures for healthcare workers sent to relevant units on Wednesday.

Accordingly, the municipal health department has asked healthcare workers and people living with infected patients to refrain from participating in crowded events such as weddings, funerals, and dining parties at restaurants and eateries.

Healthcare workers should also refrain from entering public areas.

In emergency situations that require more than one healthcare professional, no more than three are allowed to gather at once and all must wear face masks and maintain a distance of two meters apart.

Meanwhile, healthcare facilities have been asked to revise their disease prevention plans in order to eliminate the ability of cross infection among health workers and prevent crowds by rearranging their medical examination and treatment facilities.

Hospitals boards of directors were told to leverage technology to conduct online meetings and that all in-person professional briefings should be limited to ten attendees in rooms with ample space for each person to maintain a safe distance of two meters apart.

The health department also requested that healthcare units strengthen epidemiological investigations, closely monitor patients and visitors, and minimize contact between outsiders and health workers and patients in their facilities.

People who come into contact with hospital staff for work purposes, as well as non-medical employees such as janitors, security guards, and parking attendants, should also be closely monitored.

The circular was released after 53 health officials and medical employees, including members of the board of directors at Binh Chanh District Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, were placed under quarantine due to contact with family members of COVID-19 patient No. 142 at a funeral on Monday.

Patient No. 142 is a 26-year-old Vietnamese student who had been studying in the U.S. before returning to Ho Chi Minh City on March 10.

While in Vietnam, he visited Binh Dan Hospital in District 3 and the U.S. Consulate General in District 1.

He had also been in contact with temporary residence registration officers in Tan Tuc Commune, Binh Chanh District.

The student tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday and is now being treated at a field hospital in Can Gio, an outlying district of Ho Chi Minh City.

There have been 36 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection in Ho Chi Minh City, three of whom have recovered and been released from the hospital.

Four additional cases have tested positive for the novel coronavirus once and will soon be announced by the Ministry of Health, according to the municipal Department of Healths director Nguyen Tan Binh.

Vietnam has confirmed a total of 148 COVID-19 cases with an additional 1,643 suspected infections. Suspected cases are defined as people who have come in close contact with a confirmed case or have developed symptoms of the illness.

Seventeen of the confirmed cases have made full recoveries and been discharged from the hospital as of last Friday.

About 30,400 people had tested negative for the virus by Thursday, according to Ministry of Health statistics.

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Rajesh Kumar Thakur By

Express News Service

PATNA: The Bihar government on Thursday released Rs 100 crore from the Chief Minister's Relief Fund to assist Bihari migrants who have returned to the state or are stuck in other states amid the Covid-19 lockdown.

Migrants who returned to Bihar from other states will be provided food with the money sanctioned by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

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Officials of the state government are contacting the governments of Delhi, Punjab and other states to ensure food and safe accommodation for Bihari migrants.

Apart from this, the Bihar government has also directed officials to set up disaster help centres across the state to help people affected by the coronavirus outbreak.

Meanwhile, the leader of opposition in the state assembly Tejashawi Yadav requested CM Nitish Kumar to help 250 daily labourers from West Champaran who are struck in Mohali in Punjab for the last two days and facing a starvation like situation.
Senate Democratic and Republican leaders reached agreement with the Trump administration early Wednesday on an economic rescue package of unprecedented dimensionsan estimated $2 trillion. The bill was passed late Wednesday night by a 960 margin, despite the effort of a handful of Republican senators to block it for providing too much money for those thrown out of work by the coronavirus crisis.

Vermont Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders voted for the bill, despite its unprecedented transfer of taxpayer funds to corporations and limited benefits for workers.

The bills overall terms were negotiated between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and two White House officials, Legislative Affairs Director Eric Ueland and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. McConnell and Schumer announced the deal about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) talks with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) talks with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) (Erin Schaff/Pool via AP)

The major change from the first version proposed by McConnell and the Republicans last week involved an expansion of unemployment benefits for the rapidly escalating number of workers being laid off as lockdown orders are issued in state after state to try to head off the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

The number of workers filing new applications for unemployment compensation was expected to jump to more than three million this week, a more than tenfold increase over the previous week but only the beginning of what is expected to be a virtual shutdown of large parts of the US economy over the coming weeks.

Faced with the prospect of levels of unemployment that could exceed those of the Great Depression of the 1930sand massive social unrest that would resultboth Republicans and Democrats agreed on two stopgap measures to stave off an explosion of social struggle by the working class.

The first is immediate and direct federal payments to most Americans, amounting to $1,200 per adult and $500 per child. The payments are to be distributed by the Internal Revenue Service to anyone who filed an income tax return in 2018 or 2019, as well as some of those who were too poor to file, although the exact details of eligibility depend on the final language of the bill, not yet publicly available.

The second measure is a substantial temporary federal supplement to unemployment compensation benefits, which are administered by the states. The federal government will add up to $600 a week to the benefits set by the states, which themselves range on average from under $200 in Mississippi to a high of $515 in Massachusetts. The federal supplement is to last for four months, ending in early August for workers filing claims this week.

The total cost of these two measures is $550 billion$300 billion for the direct payments and $250 billion for the increase in unemployment benefits. The still leaves the biggest share of the $2 trillion package for corporate and business interests.

Those provisions include $500 billion for corporate bailouts, with about $75 billion earmarked for specific industries, including $50 billion for passenger airlines, $8 billion for cargo airlines, and $17 billion for Boeing (although the company is not named).

Democrats objected to the $500 billion being under the sole control of Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, with even the names of the companies receiving aid to be kept secret for at least six months. They accepted a compromise under which auditing is to be carried out by an independent inspector-generalthe same method employed during the 20082009 bailout of Wall Streetand oversight by a five-member panel appointed by congressional leaders.

While corporate borrowers are to be prohibited from stock buybacks and the payment of dividends for a year after the loans are repaid, and will have minor limitations on executive compensation, Mnuchin will have the power to waive those restrictions upon a determination that such a waiver is necessary to protect the interests of the Federal Government.

Corporate borrowers will have to commit to maintaining until September 30 the employment levels in place on March 24, but only to the extent practicable, another gigantic loophole. They will be barred from cutting employment by more than 10 percent.

More importantly, the $500 billion does not really represent an adequate measure of the scale of the bailout. Besides the $75 billion for transportation, the remaining $425 billion will be used to underwrite lending by the Federal Reserve to companies approved by Mnuchin on a much larger scale, estimated by various analysts as ranging from $2 trillion to $4 trillion.

Another $367 billion is set aside to aid small business, although these firms can employ up to 500 workers, a ceiling that will allow many hedge funds and private equity firms to qualify. Trumps personal holding company, the Trump Organization, would likely have qualified but for a special provision inserted in the bill to make companies owned by the president, vice president or members of Congress ineligible.

Another $50 billion is allocated for an employee retention tax credit for businesses that keep workers on the payroll rather than laying them off. The details of this, including which companies will benefit, remain to be clarified.

Nearly $500 billion is to be distributed for the front-line costs of fighting the coronavirus epidemic and other social needs. That sum includes $207 billion for state, local and tribal governments, school districts and public transit agencies; $130 billion for hospitals and public health facilities; $45 billion for the Disaster Relief Fund of the Federal Emergency Management Agency; and $41 billion to pay for additional personal protection equipment for health care workers and to replenish the national emergency stockpile of such materials.

There are lesser amounts for bailouts of farmers hit by Trumps trade war with China and for other social services, including food stamps, child nutrition, allowing students to defer loan payments for six months with interest waived, and waiving Pell grant restrictions for students forced to leave school because of coronavirus-related closures. There is even $100 million for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a provision that set off howls from the ultra-right media, although it represents 0.005 percent of the massive bill.

In sum, the spending breaks down into three major components: about $1 trillion for corporate and business interests (although with the Feds lending, this could climb to $2.5 trillion); about $500 billion to keep the US population from starving over the next four months; and about $500 billion more directly linked to the effort to contain the pandemic.

The money to support state governmentshit by huge drops in tax revenues just at the point when they must spend more to fight the coronavirusis not distributed according to need, but according to a political formula that reflects the intrinsic inequities of the Senate, where every state has two votes, regardless of population.

The bill distributes $60 billion in the form of $1.2 billion for each of the 50 states, with the remaining $90 billion distributed based on population, so that New York receives less than Texas, even though it has 30 times as many coronavirus cases.

This slap in the face to the people of New York did not faze Senate Minority Leader Schumer, one of two senators from New York state. In remarks just before the final series of votes, Schumer praised the bill, claiming it would save millions of small businesses and tens of millions of jobs. His real concernlike that of all the other senatorswas that the corporate bailout and the temporary relief checks to millions of workers would help safeguard the wealth and power of the US financial aristocracy.

One event before the bills passage illustrated the vast class divide between the ruling elite and the working people who are the vast majority of the American population. Four Senate Republicans began howling that the price of the bonanza for corporate America was too great. They did not object to the $500 billion for big companies. What stuck in their craw was the unemployment compensation payments to workers whose jobs have been wiped out by the lockdown of half the United States, which they regarded as excessive.

At a remarkable press conference Wednesday afternoon, the four RepublicansBen Sasse of Nebraska, Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Rick Scott of Floridainveighed against the unemployment compensation payment of $600 a week. They issued a statement declaring that the payment was a strong incentive for employees to be laid off instead of going to work.

Graham and Scott said that with their states average unemployment compensation of $360 a week, workers laid off because of coronavirus would be entitled to $960 a week in combined state and federal aid, the equivalent of $24 an hour for a 40-hour work week. They complained that South Carolina employers would be unable to find workers who would take jobs at the usual pay level for the state, a notorious low-wage haven.

Ben Sasse, of a more philosophical bent, declared that the unemployment compensation provision threatened to disrupt the employer-employee relationshipKarl Marx called it wage slaveryand was therefore un-American.

But the most revealing comments came from Rick Scott of Florida, a former corporate CEO in the health care industry, who claimed that small businesses could not survive if workers were unwilling to work for low wages because they could make more on unemployment pay. One reporter apologized for asking him, Do you understand how bad the optics are to have probably the wealthiest person in the Senate potentially holding up this bill for a couple hundred bucks for some of the poorest people in this country?

The four threatened to use procedural obstacles to slow passage of the bill, thus giving Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders the opportunity for a bit of left demagogy. He threatened that if they objected to the unemployment compensation section of the bill, he would raise objections to the corporate bailout. In the end, the four settled for a recorded vote on an amendment by Sasse, which was defeated, and Sanders joined in the bipartisan vote to approve the bill.
Richwood, TX (77531)

Today

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 43F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 43F. Winds light and variable.
Factories are shutting down owing to a shortage of labour and raw materials, and a lack of logistical support amid the ongoing nationwide lockdown against the coronavirus pandemic.

IMAGE: Migrant workers and their families board a truck to return to their villages after India ordered a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of coronavirus disease, in Ahmedabad. Photograph: Amit Dave / Reuters.

Manufacturing in key sectors in the country has virtually stopped, with more and more companies announcing that they are shutting down their factories owing to a shortage of labour and raw materials, and a lack of logistical support amid the ongoing nationwide lockdown.

The lockdown, aimed at containing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, is also impacting their plants overseas.

The Aditya Birla group-owned Hindalco announced that it had temporarily shut down or scaled down operations at some of its aluminium and copper manufacturing facilities in line with the governments directives. Operations are being managed with minimal staff as part of the effort to practise social distancing, it said.

In the US, Hindalcos subsidiary, Novelis, has also partially shut down some of its plants as a result of the temporary shutdown measures of US automakers in response to the covid-19 crisis. Aditya Birla groups Grasim and UltraTech also said some of their plants were closed following the government orders.

While Novelis has temporarily ramped down aluminium supply for the automotive market during this period, it will continue to produce aluminium for the beverage can and specialty markets, Hindalco said. Similarly, Jindal Stainless said its manufacturing facility at Jajpur, Odisha, had been closed with immediate effect.

Universal Cables announced that operations at its manufacturing units in Satna had been temporarily suspended with effect from the midnight of March 24, and from the morning of March 22 at the Goa unit.

Among MNCs, P&G Health said due to the lockdown orders issued by the central and state governments, its operations had been disrupted across different sites, facilities, and distribution centres in India.

CEOs said the lockdown was hitting the supply of goods from one state to the other.

For instance, Emami Agrotech, part of the Emami group, has plants in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal, and supplies edible oils to nearly all major markets in North and South India. On account of the lockdown, the Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh governments have ordered Emami to shut down plants, leaving only West Bengal operational till somet ime back.

The processing (in West Bengal) was on till some time back, but due to a shortage of labourers to pack products and the unavailability of trucks to despatch material, we are in the process of shutting it down, said Aditya V Agarwal, director at the Emami group.

As trucks are being held up at the state borders, the scarcity of drivers within the state is limiting supplies to stockists and distributors.

Even if I accept an order from a distributor, I will be facing major issues with logistics as truck drivers are not available. It is thus affecting cash flow as well, a promoter of a consumer products firm said.

The situation is no better for core industries. A leading steel producer said, on average, the company needed 500 trucks. This has now come down to 20.

Truckers don't want to go for long-haul as dhabas (roadside restaurants) are shut, the steel company executive said. The plant has already cut production by 40-50 per cent on account of low demand from user industries and curtailed logistics.

On Tuesday, Steel Secretary Binoy Kumar wrote to the chief secretaries of all states that several steel plants across the country were facing problems with regard to the entry of workers, supply of raw materials, and despatch of finished steel.

The Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA) 1981 lists any service in any establishment or undertaking dealing with the production, supply and/or distribution of coal, power, steel or fertilisers as an essential service, Kumar pointed out in the letter.

He has requested that no restrictions be imposed on operations of steel plants (both integrated steel plants, as well as induction furnace or electric arc furnace based steel plants), entry-exit of workers, movement (both rail and road, as well as through waterways/sea) of raw materials (iron ore, coal, limestone, dolomite, ferro-alloys, scrap, sponge, iron ore etc) and intermediate or finished products to and from plants.

The cement sector too is staring at the suspension of operations owing to the dearth of workers and unavailability of trucks to ferry cement.

There is no point storing cement at factories and dealers. Moreover, movement is affected as trucks are unavailable to ferry the cement, said Sandip Ghose, chief operating officer at Birla Corporation.

Most cement companies have either stopped or are in the process of shutting down plants in the northern region, namely clusters in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

At Vedantas iron ore plant in Goa, all operations have been suspended, including the closure of its blast furnaces until March 31.

With inputs from Dev Chatterjee & Aditi Divekar
T he Government has been accused of putting "Brexit over breathing" by refusing to take part in an EU ventilator scheme as the coronavirus crisis worsens.

No 10 has outlined its refusal to take part in the bloc's initiative, which sees nations buy ventilators in bulk together in order to reduce cost.

The bloc indicated it would be open to the UK taking part but Boris Johnson's official spokesman has ruled this out.

"Well, we are no longer members of the EU, he said when asked why the UK was not using the scheme.

He pointed towards other efforts to secure ventilators, stating 8,000 had been ordered and are set to arrive in the coming weeks.

Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures 1 /81 Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures A deserted Westminster Bridge PA A man wearing a face mask or covering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, walks past customers sat outside a restaurant AFP via Getty Images Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the Coronavirus lockdown Andrew Parsons Runners pass cardboard cutouts of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William during the London Marathon in London AP An empty escalator at Charing Coss London Underground tube station Jeremy Selwyn Electronic bilboards displays a message warning people to stay home in Sheffield PA A sign is displayed in the window of a student accommodation building following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Mancheste Reuters People take part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions, in Londo AP People sing and dance in Leicester Square on the eve on the 10PM curfew Reuters Hearts painted by a team of artists from Upfest are seen in the grass at Queen Square, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Bristol Reuters Graffiti reads 'good luck and stay safe', as the number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases grow around the world, under a bridge in London Reuters A sign is pictured in Soho, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London Reuters Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures, during a coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, London AP A person runs past posters with a message of hope, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Manchester REUTERS Riot police face protesters who took part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions in London AP An image of The Queen eith quotes from her broadcast to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the Coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images Durdle Door in Dorset Reuters Captain Tom Moore via Reuters Mia, aged 8, and Jack, aged 5, take part in "PE with Joe" a daily live workout with Joe Wicks on Youtube to help kids stay fit who have to stay indoors due to the Coronavirus outbreak PA An NHS worker reacts at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital during the Clap for our Carers campaign in support of the NHS Reuters Goats which have taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno @AndrewStuart via PA Tobias Weller PA Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed London Landscapes: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, central London. Matt Writtle A newspaper vendor in Manchester city centre giving away free toilet rolls with every paper bought as shops run low on supplies due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus PA Theo Clay looks out of his window next to his hand-drawn picture of a rainbow in Liverpool, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continue Reuters A young man cuts another man's hair on top of a closed hairdresser in Oxford Reuters General view of the new NHS Nightingale Hospital, built to fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London via Reuters Jason Baird is seen dressed as Spiderman during his daily exercise to cheer up local children in Stockport, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters A woman wearing a face mask walks past Buckingham Palace Getty Images A man holds mobile phone displaying a text message alert sent by the government warning that new rules are in force across the UK and people must stay at home PA Medical staff on the Covid-19 ward at the Neath Port Talbot Hospital, in Wales, as the health services continue their response to the coronavirus outbreak. PA Prime Minister Boris Johnson taking part in a virtual Cabinet meeting with his top team of ministers PA A shopper walks past empty shelves in a Lidl store on in Wallington. After spates of "panic buying" cleared supermarket shelves of items like toilet paper and cleaning products, stores across the UK have introduced limits on purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have also created special time slots for the elderly and other shoppers vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Getty Images People on a busy tube train in London at rush hour PA Mia, aged 8 and her brother Jack, aged 5 from Essex, continue their school work at home, after being sent home due to the coronavirus PA Children are painting 'Chase the rainbows' artwork and springing up in windows across the country Reuters Social distancing in Primrose Hill Jeremy Selwyn A general view of a locked gate at Anfield, Liverpool as The Premier League has been suspended PA Homeless people in London AFP via Getty Images A piece of art by the artist, known as the Rebel Bear has appeared on a wall on Bank Street in Glasgow. The new addition to Glasgow's street art is capturing the global Coronavirus crisis. The piece features a woman and a man pulling back to give each other a kiss PA The Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, London, for Windsor Castle to socially distance herself amid the coronavirus pandemic PA A general view on Grey street, Newcastle as coronavirus cases grow around the world Reuters Matt Raw, a British national who returned from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China, leaves quaratine at Arrowe Park Hospital on Merseyside PA Britain's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news conference inside 10 Downing Street Reuters The ticket-validation terminals at the tram stop on Edinburgh's Princes Street are cleaned following the coronavirus outbreak. PA Locked school gates at Rockcliffe First School in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear PA A sign at a Sainsbury's supermarket informs customers that limits have been set on a small number of products as the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases grow around the world Reuters Jawad Javed delivers coronavirus protection kits that he and his wife have put together to the vulnerable people of their community of Stenhousemuir, between Glasgow and Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" Getty Images A man who appears to be homeless sleeping wearing a mask today in Victoria Jeremy Selwyn A pedestrian walks past graffiti that reads "Diseases are in the City" in Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images Staff from The Lyric Theatre, London inform patrons, as it shuts its doors PA A quiet looking George IV Bridge in Edinburgh PA A quieter than usual British Museum Getty Images A racegoer attends Cheltenham in a fashionable face mask SplashNews.com A commuter wears a face mask at London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn A empty restaurant in the Bull Ring Shopping Centre Getty Images A deserted Trafalgar Square in London PA Passengers determined to avoid the coronavirus before leaving the UK arrive at Gatwick Airport Getty Images

Asked if the decision was related to Brexit ideology, the spokesman said: No, as I say, this is an area where were making our own efforts.

Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran said: "We can't put Brexit over breathing; lives must come first."

She called upon the Government to rethink its decision.

Labours shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth also criticised the decision not to take part in the EU scheme.
All health care workers in the national capital who are attending to Covid-19 patients will be tested for the deadly, fast-spreading infection, the Delhi government has instructed.

All health care facility workers/doctors who are directly involved in the treatment of Covid-19 positive patients and staff or doctors directly involved in drawing samples at the designated sample collection centre will be tested in the next 24 hours, according to an order issued late Wednesday night.

Also, the order directed that samples of all persons admitted across government hospitals with severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) be tested within the 24 hours.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (IMCR) changed the testing protocol last week to include all SARI patients  even those without a history of travel or contact with a positive case  to track any silent, possible community transmission.

Community transmission takes place when a person tests positive for the disease but doctors are not able to trace the source of the infection. It indicates undiagnosed and often asymptomatic people are unknowingly causing infection, which makes it difficult to break the chain of transmission.

So far, 36 people have tested positive for Covid-19, caused by the Sars-Cov-2 virus, in Delhi and one has died. All of them either had a history of travel or of coming in contact with someone who has tested positive.

The samples of health care workers from Delhi government hospitals and those of SARI patients will be collected by five designated facilities  Lok Nayak, Rajiv Gandhi, Deen Dayal Upadhyay, Guru TEg Bahadur, and Baba Saheb Ambedkar hospitals.

This is a one-time exercise as of now, but the testing of health care workers may be done again as and when required, said an official of Delhis health department who did not want to be named.

For central government-run hospitals such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and Safdarjung hospital, samples will be collected by the National Centre for Disease Control, the order said.

All hospitals under the government of India like AIIMS, Safdarjung, Ram Manohar Lohia, Lady Hardinge Medical College, and Army Research and Referral hospital are requested to contact NCDC to collect the samples and test it at their facility. It is again reiterated that the samples of all these categories be sent to NCDC within 24 hours, the order said.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Anonna Dutt Anonna Dutt is a health reporter at Hindustan Times. She reports on Delhi governments health policies, hospitals in Delhi, and health-related feature stories. ...view detail
In the past week alone, more than 3,000 people have died in Italy after contracting the coronavirus. Among the dead, there have been at least 60 priests this month, according to local sources.



I pray to the Holy Spirit to give us the gift of light and strength. Everyday I do the Via Crucis asking the Lord  to carry this cross with us, Bishop Gianni Ambrosio of Piacenza-Bobbio said in an Italian interview.



Avvenire, the newspaper owned by the Italian bishops conference, published the names of 51 diocesan priests who died after contracting COVID-19, and noted that religious communities in Italy had also reported nine coronavirus related deaths.



The majority of the deceased were over the age of 70 years old, and some of these priests had underlying health conditions.



The youngest priest to die from COVID-19 in Italy was Fr. Paolo Camminati, who died in the hospital on March 21 at age 53.



Fr. Camminati was known for his dynamic youth ministry, service to the poor, work with Catholic Action, and passion for the mountains. He was the parish priest of Our Lady of Lourdes in Diocese of Piacenza, where five other priests with COVID-19 have died.



Among the dead in Piacenza is Fr. Kidane Berhane, a Cistercian monk originally from Eritrea, who resided in the historic Chiaravalle Abbey in Lombardy, and 87-year-old twin brothers, Fr. Mario Boselli and Fr. Giovanni Boselli, who died within a day of each other.



It is a tough trial. We are dismayed. We feel great suffering, Bishop Ambrosio told Avvenire.



It is a darkness that we must face, but with the hope that God never abandons us, that he himself has gone through all the suffering to overcome it, the bishop added.



Other priests who have died of COVID-19 in Piacenza include Fr. Giuseppe Castelli, 85, and Fr. Giovanni Cordani, 83.



The Diocese of Bergamo has reported the deaths of 20 diocesan priests and two religious. Fr. Fausto Resmini, a former prison chaplain and minister to the homeless, died on March 23 at the age of 67. He had been treated in intensive care since March 5.



In these days I am listening to the voices of many people, feeling pain for the loss of their loved ones, Bishop Francesco Beschi of Bergamo said March 19.



In response to this suffering, the Diocese of Bergamo has opened a telephone service that offers free psychological and spiritual counseling and support.



Other Italian dioceses that have lost priests to coronavirus include Parma, Cremona, Milan, Lodi, Brescia, Casale Monferrato, Tortona, Trento, Bolzano, Salerno, Ariano Irpino, Nuoro, and Pesaro.



Italy has the highest coronavirus death toll in the world. The Italian Ministry of Health reported March 23 that 5,476 people have died. More than 59,000 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in Italy since February.



The Bishop of Pinerolo has tested positive for COVID-19. Bishop Derio Olivero was hospitalized March 19 with breathing complications. He is 59 years old and remains in stable condition.



Bishop Antonio Napolioni of Cremona has recovered after being hospitalized for 10 days with severe respiratory symptoms after contracting COVID-19. He returned to his home March 16.



Four diocesan priests and one Passionist missionary, Fr. Edmondo Zagano, have died after contracting COVID-19 in the Diocese of Cremona.



I experienced minute by minute the dramatic crescendo of problems in the situation and the workload on doctors, nurses and all the staff, Bishop Napolioni recalled of his time in the hospital.



It is an absurd Lent, he said. But in a certain sense perfect. Jesus is in the desert for forty days, fighting with the devil. Lent is not about the beauty of custom, but the profound mystery of the evil, death and despair that exist. But also of the Lord who is there. We must recognize His presence.

Source: catholicherald.co.uk









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/ -- With the rising number of coronavirus cases in India, there has been an explosion of conversations related to Covid-19, largely centered on how to treat, contain and suppress it. The volume and the velocity through which these messages are shared can sometimes lead to uncertainty, stress, and panic. To address this, it becomes even more important that information shared should be verified and comes from a reliable source. In a mission to share best practices and knowledge related to the global pandemic, Pristyn Care - a healthcare company that specializes in elective surgeries through the latest technologies - has launched a digital campaign #MakeSpaceForSafety. The campaign highlights the importance of social distancing and to foster realization and motivate people to practice the same. The company is also running a special series of blogs addressing all subjects related to coronavirus which are extremely crucial and essential to 'flatten the curve'.

Pledging solidarity, the campaign also salutes doctors and other medical professionals who are working tirelessly in an unprecedented environment to treat patients succumbing to this outbreak.

Pristyn Care founders, associated doctors, surgeons, and employees who normally write their name on LinkedIn in tightly connected Myriad Pro script have changed and added - space between each letter. The underlying message here is, 'Staying apart is the best way to flatten the curve and break the chain'.

On the campaign launch, expressing gratitude to the medical fraternity and reiterating the imperative safety measures, Harsimarbir Singh, Co-founder, Pristyn Care, said, "We owe a huge thanks to the heroes on the front line of the coronavirus pandemic. As a consumer Internet company in healthcare, we often find our associated doctors, surgeons and employees battling hard to keep up the promise to deliver. Dr. Vaibhav Kapoor and Dr. Garima Sawhney, Co-founders of Pristyn Care who are surgeons themselves, are courageously treating emergency cases to ensure that no patient is deprived of quality healthcare even in such trying times. But the hard work of these professionals is wasted if the country's citizens do not follow social distancing, which is, undoubtedly, the need of the hour. We applaud the government's decision of a nationwide lockdown and urge people to stay at home."



Pristyn Care has over 80 clinics and 250 partner hospitals across 17 cities (7 Tier-1 and 10 Tier-2 cities), with surgeons who have expertise across General Surgery (Laser and Laparoscopic specialists), Vascular surgeries, ENT, Gynaecology, and Urology. The procedures are performed using advanced laser and laparoscopic techniques and the company has successfully performed over 12,000 surgeries till date.

About Pristyn Care



Pristyn Care is a healthcare startup, founded in late 2018 by Harsimarbir Singh, Dr. Vaibhav Kapoor, and Dr. Garima Sawhney, with a vision to provide a seamless surgical experience by offering patient-centric healthcare services. The brand offers treatments across General Surgery (Laser and Laparoscopic surgeries), Vascular surgeries, ENT, Gynaecology, and Urology. The company has over 80 clinics and 250 partners across 17 cities (7 Tier 1 and 10 Tier 2 cities) with a presence across cities of Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, Chennai, and Hyderabad as well as Lucknow, Kanpur, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Indore, Bhopal, Ludhiana, Patna, and Bhubaneswar.

Website link - https://www.pristyncare.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Is There a Right to Health Care?

Commentary

It is the considered, not to say vociferous, opinion of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that health care is, indeed, a human right.

He sees sick people. His heart, commendably, goes out to them. He emerges from this vista with medical care as a human right. He and all those others who feel the Bern apply the same logic to food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities of modern life.

The poor need these things; they must have them if they are to lead decent lives let alone survive. Therefore, and there seems to be no other justification for this conclusion, they have a right to them.

Oh, wait, theres one more premise in the argument: other leading countries have installed a right to these benefits; therefore, all people have a right to them.

But a right implies at least the possibility of a rights violator. For our friends on the left, the exploiter is necessarily a wealthy person. If billionaires didnt have so much of the economic pie, thered be more left over for their poverty-stricken victims.

It cannot be denied that under crony capitalism, there is, indeed, a zero-sum game going on. But under laissez faire capitalism, every commercial interaction, without exception, is necessarily mutually beneficial, at least in the ex ante sense.

Bill Gates, Ray Croc, and Henry Ford amassed great wealth by enriching pretty much everyone else, not by impoverishing them. (These three economic heroes didnt enrich their respective competitors, but thats another story; all entrepreneurs, unlike government bureaucrats, take the risk theyll be supplanted by even more efficient alternative suppliers.)

Consider Robinson Crusoe who is marooned on an island poorly provided for, with but few provisions. Very little food, clothing, and shelter is available, and no health care at all. He has a right to all these things, just like anyone else, according to those who do not understand what a right is. But theres no one else on the island who can be blamed for his plight. Theres not a single solitary billionaire to be found anywhere within 500 miles of this island. Theres only Crusoe.

So, who is violating his rights? No one. Therefore, his rights are not being violated by the absence of all these economic goods since the very existence of a right implies a rights violator. And here there is none; there can be none.

Suppose Crusoe was previously a well-to-do landowner on the island, and a hurricane swept all of these consumer durables, food, clothing, etc., of his out into the sea. According to the logic of this rights doctrine, these bad weather conditions violated his rights. But this is rather problematic, to say the least.

Does this mean theres no such thing as a right? Not at all. There is, indeed, such a thing as a negative right. We all have a right not to be murdered. If we are dispatched unjustly, there was a rights violator, the murderer. Similarly, we all have a right not to be raped, kidnapped, stolen from, assaulted, battered, threatened, etc. These are all negative rights, and are totally legitimate. Others are obligated not to perpetrate these crimes upon us. They must refrain from doing so.

It is only so-called positive rights, to food, clothing, shelter, medical care, etc., that are invalid, since we simply have no right to the hard-earned possessions of other people, which alone can provide them for us; and, without stealing from such other people, these things cannot be provided to us.

Bernie et al. incoherently claim we have a right to pretty much anything anyone desires. Well, then, we might as well have a right to friendship, to true love, to human organs for transplant, to other peoples time, to rubber bands and paper clips.

Rights are as timeless as they are irrelevant to geography (Crusoes Island). The cave man had as much right not to be kidnapped or murdered as does modern man, as will the spaceman of the future. But to say that all three have a right to present-day medicine in a philosophical howler.

The spaceman from the future will presumably be able to enjoy far more sophisticated medical care than is now available to us. Does this mean our rights are presently being violated, even when we are served at present by the best doctors in the most up-to-date hospitals?

Consider the poor cave man. Not only can he not avail himself of better future care, even our present level was not available to him eons ago when he was alive. His rights were doubly violated at that time? This is the conclusion to which we are led by the doctrine of positive rights, but it is fallacious.

Ought implies can. It would be impossible to provide the cave man with modern medicine, or us with health care from the future. For that reason alone, neither of us can have a right to any such thing.

What would it take to provide everyone with all their negative rights? It would be sufficient if all criminals ceased from their acts of murder and rape. If all such predators had a change of conscience, in one fell swoop all negative rights violations would cease. But, no such possibility exists for positive rights. They require the possessions, not just a change of heart, of other people.

When a doctor goes on vacation, is he violating our right to medical care? When a farmer retires, does he violate our right to food? This is the sort of nonsense that emanates from the positive rights doctrine.

Bernie has a right to utter these philosophically invalid fallacies. Free speech is a negative right, not a so-called positive one. No one has a right to shut him up, provided he speaks on his own property, or with the permission of the owners of the premises from which he speaks.

But that doesnt mean his claim is anything other than nonsense on stilts.

Walter Block is the chair in economics at Loyola University in New Orleans. He is also an adjunct scholar at the Mises Institute and the Hoover Institute.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
A funeral procession emerges from the pitch-black center of a walled cemetery outside of Lisbon. Mourners move past the camera, but no one speaks of the deceased or of anything else. For the first 10 minutes of Pedro Costas latest, Vitalina Varela, wordless sound design and an immersive darkness settle in, the storytelling restricted to the aftermath of sickness and an unknown mans last days.

Costas films often star first-time or other nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves, with storylines reflecting their real lives, elements of fiction and documentary forming a seamless whole; as such Vitalina Varela plays herself. And as the film opens, and Vitalina arrives, shes three days too late. The funeral was for Joaquim, the husband who abandoned Vitalina years earlier, and this three-day passage amounts to an anti-resurrection. Here, the dead stay dead.

Vitalina positions herself in the shadowy, crumbling hovel where Joaquim lived and died, and whispers her true story via sporadic monologues to, if not his ghost, then to his lingering atmospheric presence. Decades earlier, they were together in Cape Verde, built a home there side by side, until the day he fled for Portugal and a dissolute life, one spent chasing street women, one that also included an unspecified amount of time in prison.

Also Read: Former 'Fox & Friends' Host Clayton Morris Moves to Portugal Amid Legal Battle Over Fraud Accusations

Meanwhile, Vitalina waited for a reunion that never came. You turned your face to death, she scolds the darkness, often fixing her stern gaze on a makeshift altar of candles and photographs, We could have stayed in Cape Verde here there is only bitterness, here we are nothing.

Breaking the long, patient silences between Vitalinas memories, Joaquims fellow impoverished Cape Verdeans wander into the frame, some muttering their own reminiscences. The chorus of mourners echo narrative themes of displacement, loneliness, and the brutal legacy of their immigrant status and treatment by the ruling Portuguese, all motifs found in Costas earlier films In Vandas Room, Colossal Youth, and especially 2014s Horse Money, where an abbreviated version of Vitalinas story first appeared.

Story continues

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Costa and his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Leonardo Simoes, physically immerse these characters in near total darkness  including a show-stopping moment in which Vitalina tries to repair the roof of Jaoquims destroyed home during a storm in the middle of the night  allowing only the most indirect light elements into the frame. The result is a staggeringly beautiful and simultaneously stricken chiaroscuro, appropriating the Divine light of classical painting for the purposes of spiritual disaffection.

In keeping with this, an actor named Ventura  a member of Costas company of players and star of Colossal Youth and Horse Money  arrives playing a physically disabled priest. Ventura performs Mass in an empty, decaying chapel, and hes burdened with the need to tend to as many of his fellow Cape Verdeans as possible by any means he can summon. Hes the only person to have an extended conversation with Vitalina, and to further illuminate the misery of colonization, even after death, he informs her that in order to speak to Joaquims spirit, shell have to do so in Portuguese.

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By centering the real-life experiences of his actors, Costas conscientious cinema lives in a fully humane space. Material deprivation and unrelenting night provide a blackened backdrop for quiet intimacy and dignity. Costa rejects voyeurism and condescension in favor of a form of storytelling solidarity with his actors, one where theres no buffer of irony, no distancing effects. There may be nothing to soften his characters pain, but theres still great evidence of mutual care.

In the final moments of director Bela Tarrs last film, The Turin Horse, the sun extinguishes itself, a reversal of the biblical creation story, and the films nearly silent characters wait out their lives in a suffocating void. Here, the existential stakes are the same, but Vitalina, Ventura, and the other unnamed mourners engage with the seemingly endless night by speaking their grief directly into it, looking to dig meaning out of their mutually inherited personal and historical trauma.

As they do so, Costa allows for an ambiguous physical daylight to return  whether its from a memory of better days or the signal of a future built on renewed comradeship is open to interpretation  but it brings a whisper of hope to the enveloping grief.

Vitalina Varela will stream on GrasshopperFilms.com beginning Friday, March 27.

Read original story Vitalina Varela Film Review: Pedro Costa Summons a Dark Night of Grief At TheWrap
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(Kitco News) - McEwen Mining Inc. (NYSE, TSX: MUX) reported early Thursday that operations at the Black Fox and Gold Bar mines will be scaled back for 14 days as a part of the global effort to combat the spread of COVID-19.

Certain production and exploration activities will continue at Gold Bar in areas where social distancing can be observed, including ore crushing, irrigation of the heap leach pad, and operation of the process plant, the company said in a prepared statement. At Black Fox, we expect to continue development activities related to the Froome access ramp.

Both sites will continue to be minimally staffed to ensure safety, security and environmental compliance. Our projects in Mexico are continuing to operate normally.

Last week, the company withdrew all previously announced production guidance as operations were curtailed at the San Jose mine, which is 49% owned by McEwen Mining, in response to rules in Argentina to deal with the virus.

Output in 2019 at Black Fox, located in northern Ontario, was 35,721 gold-equivalent ounces. Gold Bar, located in Nevada, produced 30,712 gold-equivalent ounces. San Jose provided the company with 91,654 gold-equivalent ounces.
A drug used to treat hepatitis C is safe to use in coronavirus patients and could help them to recover, according to a study.

The medication danoprevir, sold as Ganovo, was given to 11 people with 'moderate' COVID-19 infections, in combination with the HIV drug ritonavir.

Scientists found it was safe and did not cause severe side effects, raising its prospects as a 'promising therapeutic option', they said.

If doctors decide to trial the medication it could become one of a variety of existing drugs which are being touted as possible therapies for people with the coronavirus.

But experts have cautioned against reading too much into small trials at a time when researchers are desperate to make a breakthrough - one called this study 'unreliable'.

Others include HIV-suppressing medicines, treatments for lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, and one that was developed to fight Ebola.

But people who rely on such medicines to keep them health in normal life fear that linking them to coronavirus will lead to shortages, as has happened in the US.

Various medications are being trialled in a bid to find one that works against the coronavirus (stock image)

Researchers from a Chinese biotechnology company and a hospital in Jiangxi, China, published the results of their trial without them being reviewed by other scientists.

They had given 11 patients a combination of danoprevir and ritonavir for between four and 12 days.

All of them recovered and took around two days to produce a negative test result - the fastest negative test came just one day after treatment started and the last one eight days after.

They were discharged from hospital after their body temperatures returned to normal, their breathing improved, their lungs looked healthier in scans and they tested negative twice.

TUBERCULOSIS VACCINE TO BE TRIALLED AS CORONAVIRUS PROTECTION A vaccine that protects against tuberculosis (TB) and naturally improves a person's immune system is being trialled on 4,000 healthcare workers in Australia to see if it can protect against coronavirus. The Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine is used to give children immunity to TB  a bacterial infection  but it is known to have other benefits. Trials have previously discovered people that receive the jab have improved immune responses and are better able to protect themselves from various infections. These so-called off-target effects include enhanced protection against respiratory diseases,and have been recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO). Scientists are now deploying the vaccine to thousands of people to see if it offers extra protection against SARS-CoV-2 and reduce COVID-19 symptom severity. The trial will be led by Researchers at Melbourne's Murdoch Children's Research Institute and involve 4,000 health workers in various hospitals across the country. To date, Australia has reported almost 3,000 cases and 13 deaths, with the global toll of infections approaching half a million. Similar trials are being conducted in other countries including the Netherlands, Germany and the UK. Professor Kathryn North AC, Director of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, said: 'Australian medical researchers have a reputation for conducting rigorous, innovative trials. 'This trial will allow the vaccine's effectiveness against COVID-19 symptoms to be properly tested, and may help save the lives of our heroic frontline healthcare workers.' Advertisement

The study did not look at how well the drug worked, nor compare it to any other treatments, but assessed whether it was safe to take.

Professor Stephen Evans, a statistics expert at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: 'This is an uncontrolled non-randomised study.

'Its results are therefore somewhat unreliable and difficult to interpret. While this drug could be useful, proper randomised trials are required.

'It is a pity that companies may be doing less than good science, and hence promoting their products on what may be flimsy evidence.'

Ritonavir is being tested elsewhere, including an Oxford University trial in the UK, and some Chinese doctors claimed it had worked well for them.

The researchers, led by Dr Jinzi Wu, CEO of Ascletis Pharmaceuticals, which produces the drug, said: 'Our findings suggest that repurposing danoprevir for COVID-19 is a promising therapeutic option'.

Other drugs being trialled on coronavirus patients include Japanese flu remedy favipiravir; an Ebola drug called remdesivir; and HIV suppressing medication lopinavir/ritonavir, also known as Kaletra.

One potential remedy has been touted in the form of an anti-malarial drug called chloroquine, which is also used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

But people who rely on the drug - who suffer those conditions - fear there will be a shortage if people are given hope that it will protect them from the coronavirus.

Just this week a man in the US died after drinking aquarium cleaner which contained another version of the deadly chemical.

RAIRDA, the Rare Autoimmune Rheumatic Disease Alliance, is now calling for the UK Government to act early to prevent prolonged shortages.

One chloroquine drug, hydroxychloroquine, is used to control autoimmune conditions such as lupus.

If patients stop taking this medication their disease can flare up, which can be a life-threatening situation in itself and also raise the risk of getting severe symptoms of coronavirus.

India is currently the only country which manufactures a key ingredient for the drug approved for use in the UK.

However, it recently imposed export controls, meaning manufacturers for the UK cannot make more of the drug for this country.

Paul Howard, LUPUS UK chief executive and RAIRDA member said: 'Patients are already experiencing difficulties getting hold of hydroxychloroquine.

'About 90 per cent of the 50,000 lupus patients in the UK take this medication and, for them, there is no alternative which has the same effect.

'We do not know what it does against COVID-19 but we do know that patients with lupus need this drug. Many patients who take it, with lupus and similar conditions, are already classified as at high or very high risk of severe illness from COVID-19 infection and any shortage could increase their vulnerability.'

Sue Farrington, chair of RAIRDA said: 'This drug is used by tens of thousands of patients in the UK to control serious rheumatological conditions.

'Whilst many of these are labelled as "rare" they still affect tens of thousands, meaning the health service would experience a significant burden if these patients lost the ability to control their condition.

'We cannot allow this to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.'
Bilal (22), a porter at Mall Road here, has been cooped up in a small room at Jama Masjid for days now, stepping out only buy food from a dhaba within the mosque complex.

Amid the spiralling number of COVID-19 cases in the country, tourism in Shimla, like other parts of the state.

Future appeared more uncertain for Bilal when the Himachal Pradesh government announced a complete lockdown across the state on Monday to contain the spread of COVID-19. Then came Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement on Tuesday of a 21-day nationwide lockdown starting midnight to break the chain of transmission of coronavirus.

A native of Jammu and Kashmir's Anantnag district, Bilal has been spending most of his time worrying how he will manage to make ends meet when his savings run out.

"I used to earn Rs 500-1,500 daily but I have not earned even a single penny for the last 10-12 days. Work had started drying up days before the Himachal Pradesh government imposed a lockdown," Bilal, who has been working at Mall Road for five years, told PTI.

"I had some savings which I am using now to buy food and other eatables from a dhaba located in the Jama Masjid complex.

"I don't know how I will buy food after I run out of money in the next few days and there is no possibility of getting any work at least till the 21-day lockdown ends on April 14," he said.

Bilal is not the only one facing an uncertain future. There are many other labourers in the unorganised sector across the state who are sailing in the same boat.

In Hamirpur district, Jagat Ram, a native of Bihar, is worried that his dream to build a better life for himself and his family will be cut short if he is unable to find work soon.

"It will be a very grim situation for me and my family," Ram said. Mantran Devi and Simrto Devi, labourers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh respectively, are also living off their savings from the past six months.

When contacted, Deputy Commissioner Harikesh Meena said, "There is no shortage of essential commodities in the district and if need be all sorts of help would be provided to the people.

On Monday, the Himachal Pradesh government announced a one-time financial assistance of Rs 2,000 each to about 1.5 lakh labourers registered with the Building and Construction Workers Board.

It also announced a Rs 500-crore relief package for the poor but did not announce any help for labourers in the unorganised sector.

Leader of Opposition Mukesh Agnihotri has sought the creation of a Rs 1-crore fund for deputy commissioners of all 12 districts in the state on the lines of Punjab to meet any eventuality.

He has also demanded that arrangements be made to provide meals to labourers in unorganised sectors at Rs 20 as done by the Kerala government.

CPM MLA Rakesh Singha has said food items should be provided to labourers in unorganised sector at their doorsteps after identifying them in this time of crisis.

The total number of coronavirus cases in the country has risen to 649. Himachal Pradesh has reported three cases so far, according to the Union health ministry.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In an effort to protect frontline health workers from coronavirus, researchers are turning to a vaccine unused in Australia since the 1980s.

Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne will join a global trial using the tuberculosis vaccine to counter the symptoms of coronavirus.

The six-month trial will involve 4000 healthcare workers in Australia, lead researcher Nigel Curtis told reporters on Thursday.

Half of the workers will not be given the vaccine with researchers hoping to get some sign of its effectiveness in three months.

It's hoped the vaccine will bolster the medical professionals' immune systems. Pictured: Two nurses at the Mount Barker Hospital in Adelaide

There have been 3,112 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia with 13 deaths as the country braces for the outbreak to gather pace.

Professor Curtis said besides combating tuberculosis, the vaccine boosts the body's immune system, reducing the symptoms of coronavirus.

'It's really the first time the vaccine has been used in this way,' Professor Curtis said.

'The vaccine has the ability to 'train' the immune system to respond more strongly to infection.'

He said healthcare workers were particularly vulnerable to infection, pointing to deaths of frontline workers overseas.

4,000 Australian healthcare workers will receive the tuberculosis vaccine to counter symptoms of COVID-19. Pictured: A view of the COVID-19 Clinic at the Alfred Hospital on March 26

Similar trials are starting in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK but the Australian trial will be one of the largest.

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

Unlike the northern hemisphere, Australia will be facing coronavirus into winter's flu season, which would provide more data for researchers.

But he said it was still important for countries to be developing a coronavirus vaccine.

'This has really alerted to the world that we are always just a few weeks away from a pandemic,' Prof Curtis said.

'Even if we make a vaccine against this particular virus, if a different one pops up, it's very good for us to have an off-the-shelf vaccine that works against the number of different viruses.'

Prof Curtis said people who had already had coronavirus or were unwell would be excluded from the trial.

He said the initial rush of people to get chloroquine - a malaria vaccine which was unsuccessful in combating coronavirus - showed the need for intense studies.

'If I didn't think (the tuberculosis vaccine) would work, I wouldn't have been here seven days a week for the last month with a team of 20 people,' he said.

Unlike the northern hemisphere, Australia will be facing coronavirus into winter's flu season. Two women wearing masks are seen in Sydney on Wednesday
It took sacrifices and determination to continue two murder trials to the end as the COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented shutdown in a Toronto courthouse over the last two weeks  an effort that revealed a rarely seen human side to the justice system.

Nobody wanted to let go even a little bit. Everyone held so tight to the end. And I think that is about humanity in a system that very rarely shows humanity, said Becky McFarlane, who has been the support person for Tess Richeys mother Christine Hermeston during the seven-week trial of her daughters killer.

McFarlane works for The 519, a community centre in the Church and Wellesley neighbourhood located right opposite where Hermeston found her 22-year-old daughters body on Nov. 29, 2017. As part of the centres commitment to support Richeys family, McFarlane attended every day of the trial  including Monday evening, when a jury found Kalen Schlatter guilty of first-degree murder.

For McFarlane, sitting in court has meant she hasnt been able to see her child, who has asthma, just in case she gets COVID-19 and passes it on.

It has meant worrying constantly about the safety of Richeys mother and family, who had to keep coming to court to see the outcome of the trial, more than two years after the murder.

But after the court almost entirely shut down on March 15, she was moved by the work of the court staff, the Crown prosecutors, the defence lawyers, the judge, the jurors and the courthouse cleaners who all worked to keep the trial going as safely as possible.

Getting to the end is a testament to the humanity of everyone in that courtroom, McFarlane said. And maybe it is a good reminder that very impersonal systems are really made up of human beings who want to do the right thing.

For the past two weeks, it often did not seem like the trial would be able to end.

Zaira Gaudio-Fry said she began to worry on March 10. She came to watch Schlatters cross-examination because her friend Rachel Richey, Tess Richeys sister, had asked for support. She had also been watching the increasingly alarming developments in Italy closely.

I could see what was coming and even leaving the house that day I had a lot of anxiety, she said.

A friend suggested getting lunch at the Eaton Centre and she said no.

At the time it seemed almost silly, but we know now it wasnt, she said.

The next day, March 11, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, and by the end of the week, all future jury trials had been suspended for months. Discussions were underway to close the courts to only essential functions like bail and pleas.

Then, that Sunday night on March 15, the Superior Court of Justice announced a near-total shutdown until June  a decision that left many including the Richey family uncertain and anxious about what would happen to the trial.

Would all 12 jurors want to continue? Could the courts remain even open? Would the trial be postponed for months? Would there be a mistrial, only to have to start all over again at some later date?

The longer the trial went on, the more chances there would be for a crisis. Lawyers observing the proceedings privately said it was dangerous and foolhardy that judges had decided to continue two jury trials  Richeys and another Toronto murder case  and the courts were under intense pressure to further reduce operations.

In the other case, it was around the time of the WHO declaration, as Aruran Suthakarans trial for second-degree murder was almost over, that prosecutor Paul Kelly said things started to get weird.

Brian Kolman, Suthakarans defence lawyer, agreed. We didnt really know from Thursday until Monday what was going to happen, he said. The trial was 95 per cent done. For us, it made sense to try and forge on.

The other options  postponing until June or having a mistrial  both came with downsides. Some of those cross-examinations could only be done once, Kolman said, you dont want to do that again.

Ultimately, just the two jury trials in Toronto were granted a special exemption to continue after the court shutdown.

Both were almost over, about to hear closing arguments and begin deliberations.

Its not that I didnt think this could happen I just didnt think it would happen so quickly, Kelly said. There seemed to be a couple of huge leaps. This is closed, that is closed  then suddenly the court is closed.

On Monday, March 16, both sets of 12 jurors came into a suddenly quiet Toronto courthouse, with the option to use taxis rather than public transit to travel to and from their homes. They sat side-by-side in their jury box  a level of proximity that now seemed surreal and uncomfortable.

After brief discussions, both juries decided to continue their civic duty until the end.

Their reasons were not shared publicly. Maybe it was the understanding that it would be difficult to postpone or do these trials over. Maybe it was the mental and emotional investment that the jurors had already made after hearing often deeply disturbing evidence. Maybe it was seeing Tess Richeys mother and four sisters sitting in the courtroom every day, waiting for justice.

Schlatters jury was given the option to start deliberations a day earlier, but chose to proceed on Friday, March 20, as originally planned.

Still, with the news changing daily, sometimes hourly, four days seemed a very long time away.

Under the circumstances, Kolman and Kelly said they were surprised that none of the 12 jurors in the Suthakaran case wanted to stop. But they were very engaged throughout, Kelly said.

Suthakarans jury began deliberations on the morning of Tuesday, March 17  using one of the buildings large, now-empty courtrooms rather than their normal small jury room.

Kolman said it didnt feel so different from doing a trial in the summertime, when the courthouse slows down. And while he wondered if they might rush to a decision, the jury was out for two days.

They came back on the Wednesday evening, and found Suthakaran guilty of second-degree murder.

The judge thanked them for doing their duty, more than perhaps any other jury before, Kelly said.

Last week, during closing arguments in Schlatters trial, the courtroom would normally have been packed with more than 100 friends of Richeys family, observers and reporters, just as it was the week before when Schlatter testified. Only about half that filed into the public gallery.

Among them were a handful of regular court watchers who remained undeterred. Liz Greaves, a 68-year-old recent retiree, who had attended Schlatters trial from the start. She came because she is fascinated by the process of a murder investigation and lives near the neighbourhood where Richey was murdered, she said.

Its a social event too, I meet so many people, she said.

She said she wanted to see the trial through to the end, even though her husband and sisters have told her to stop coming, given her age, and that she is a cancer survivor.

In an interview on Friday, she said she is being very careful and taking precautions. I feel very safe, she said, adding that she is more worried about what to do once the trial is over.

Ill have to take up a new hobby, she said.

On Friday, Schlatters jury returned to court to hear the judges legal instructions. That morning Schlatter was brought into court in a mask and gloves because there was a chance hed come into contact with a jail guard who was being tested for COVID-19. He had to be moved to a different jail, court heard, because that jail was now on lockdown, and he wouldnt be able to come back to court.

The jury began deliberations that night. Over the weekend  other than the eerily empty downtown streets outside and the sharp smell of disinfectant inside the courthouse  it could have been any other deliberation.

The jury, sequestered at a hotel and banned from seeing the news, did not see the daily briefings from politicians and public health officials or the climbing numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases.

Both Richey and Schlatters families waited at the courthouse each day until the jury broke for dinner, brought into their courtroom because the hotel restaurant theyd usually eat at was closed.

On Monday evening they returned with their verdict: guilty as charged.

Gaudio-Fry said she is glad the jury chose to see the trial through, so that Richeys family did not have to wait any longer.

I that was an incredibly empathetic and brave move on their part. I can only assume they are dealing with their own anxiety around this as well and being sequestered in a hotel away from your family, trapped in courtrooms while this is playing out with no access to the news, she said. That takes some guts and I am very proud of them for choosing that.
A violent offender who tattooed Islamic State on his arm has won his fight to go unchecked upon his release from prison later this year, even though a judge says he's a 'dangerous menace' who's likely to reoffend.

The State of NSW on Thursday failed in its Supreme Court bid to have Issam Alam placed on a three-year supervision order under the Terrorism High Risk Offenders (THRO) Act when he is let out of jail.

Justice Helen Wilson said Alam, who has been in custody for most of the last decade and has a long criminal history, is 'highly likely' to reoffend and posed a risk to the community.

A violent offender who tattooed Islamic State on his arm has won his fight to go unchecked upon his release from prison later this year, even though a judge says he's a 'dangerous menace' who's likely to reoffend. An ISIS flag is pictured

However, it couldn't be proven that he was probable to commit a terrorism offence, she said, and dismissed the state's application.

'Whilst I think it is highly likely that the defendant will continue to engage in criminal conduct when released to the community, to the jeopardy of others, I am not able to conclude that he may pose an unacceptable risk to the community by engaging in the commission of a serious terrorism offence,' Justice Wilson said.

NSW Attorney General Mark Speakman said he was seeking advice and considering appealing the decision.

'NSW makes no apology for having the toughest post-sentence detention and supervision laws in Australia,' he said.

The State Parole Authority is scheduled to consider Alam's release on parole next week.

His two-year sentence for leading police on a car pursuit, a string of driving offences and assaulting a prison officer, will expire on May 26 when he must be let out.

The state's case was based on Alam's long criminal history and what it said were his links to Islamic State and violent extremist ideologies.

Alam disavowed having links to terrorism despite having 'Da'ish' or 'Daesh' - a name used to commonly refer to Islamic State - tattooed on his right forearm in Arabic script.

He told a psychologist he got the tattoo 'after a dare from a friend' and had since altered the D to an R so it no longer had the same meaning.

In December 2018, police received a photograph of Alam with a raised index finger - a gesture known as 'tawhid' or 'oneness of God' - which has been co-opted by violent jihadists.

He is also a known friend of terrorist Talal Alameddin, who is serving a 14-year sentence for providing the gun used to kill NSW Police employee Curtis Cheng.

However, Alam stated they were just friends and had never discussed ideology or politics.

The court heard details of the western Sydney man's lengthy criminal history which included being jailed in 2010 after his fourth conviction for driving while disqualified.

He was also sent to prison for the same offence on another three occasions in 2016 and 2017.

He received further jail terms for firearm offences in 2012, assault in 2013 and stalking and intimidation charges in 2016.

Four months later, he had his sentence extended for three counts of common assault for throwing milk cartons full of human waste on custodial officers.

While locked up, he was accused of threatening to rape and behead a female corrections staff member after he was one of several inmates who discovered her address.

Justice Wilson said Alam was 'highly likely to commit crime, and even violent crime, if released from prison without a regime of close supervision.'

She also described him as a 'dangerous menace' to police and prison authorities and his ability to acquire firearms was 'deeply troubling, and presents as a significant cause for concern'.

However, she said it wasn't able to be proven that he was a high risk of committing a terrorism offence.
The COVID-19 pandemic has so far hurt many businesses in the country, except the insurance industry.

People wait in front of social insurance agency in Ba Dinh District to register for a voluntary health card. The number of people who buy insurance increases as the pandemic of COVID-19 spreads

The COVID-19 pandemic has so far hurt many businesses in the country, except the insurance industry.

On Friday Viet Nam confirmed 91 positive cases of coronavirus infection and isolated about 42,000 people for health monitoring since March 20. A month before that local insurers have started to provide services insurance related to coronavirus.

Speaking with Viet Nam News, Nguyen Minh Ngoc, an employee from Manulife Insurance Firm said: "Normally, I have most deals signed at the end of the year. This time, I have signed more and more deals in the first quarter due to COVID-19.

The pandemic had increased demand for insurance products, said Ngoc.

Initial data showed the outbreak had increased local demand for insurance by around 40 per cent.

Coronavirus packages

A week before the 17th positive case was announced on March 6, insurance firm FWD had introduced a package called "FWD Coronavirus Insurance and hospital assistance".

According to the insurance firm, the coronavirus insurance doesnt cover for cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, hepatitis, stomach ulcers, hypertension, arthritis, and mental illness, but it does pay out for those testing positive for COVID-19, with a total amount of VND20 million or a maximum compensation of VND100 million to VND300 million in case of death caused by the virus.

As a local insurer, PVI also announced two packages related to the virus at a cost of VND195,000 and VND330,000 per year, respectively. LIAN, from Vien Dong Insurance Joint Stock Company (VASS), also offers its customers a similar package at VND200,000.

Joining the coronavirus-shields, there were non-life insurers like Saigon- Hanoi Insurance Corporation (BSH), Military Insurance Corporation (MIC), VietinBank (VBI) as well as life insurers of Manulife Vietnam Insurance, Prudential and Chubb Life

Unlike other insurance products, Corona Shield by VietinBank Insurance (VBI) has a term of only three months. However, the participation fee is also cheaper with three packages worth VND33,000, VND66,000 and VND99,000, respectively.

The customer or beneficiary will receive the sum insured in case of a COVID-19 positive result or death. The level of treatment allowances in hospitals may be up to VND3 million and the payment for deaths due to epidemics may be up to VND150 million.

In addition, customers who buy Corona Shield at risk of death from traffic accidents are also covered by the company.

Do Duy Long, from Thanh Xuan District, Ha Noi said: I just bought a Lian insurance product for each member of my family.

Paying VND200,000 for protection in such a case is reasonable and economical, Long said mentioning the quick spread of the pandemic in China, Italy and South Korea and other places in the world.

Ngoc, the Manulife insurance employee, told Viet Nam News: It normally takes a lot of time to advise customers to buy products. Sometimes, it takes a year. But in the case of the virus, most of the customers decide very quickly. They do not only buy for themselves and their family but also suggest others to buy them.

According to Sai Gon Securities Inc, the pandemic could cause compensation costs to rise moderately because most medical expenses will be covered by social insurance. "The actual compensation payment may occur 1-2 months after the incident, so this impact will not show much in this quarter," SSI said.

Data from the General Statistics Office, the insurance premium revenue of the whole market increased by 20.3 per cent higher than 2018 of which life insurance premiums increased by 25.1 per cent and non-life insurance increased by 11.6 per cent. VNS

VN should use unemployment insurance fund to train labourers Vietnam should use part of its sizeable VND67 trillion (US$2.9 billion) unemployment insurance fund to train workers in professional skills.
Words of the Week  Go Home

Scripture: Isaiah 26:20-21

I know many of you are asking, Why has God allowed the coronavirus to ravish the world? You are wondering, Why am I confined in my house? Why does God allow houses of worship to be impacted?

If youre not asking these questions, I am asking them for you. I dont claim to know the answers to these questions. In my search for answers to these questions, I did find it on television. The CNN pundits didnt know the answers. I didnt hear it on the radio. The answers were not found in astrology. In my opinion, certainly, our elected ocials didnt know.

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The answers to our deepest questions can be found in Gods Word. If we search long enough and seek Gods voice, God will speak. The Lord showed me Isaiah 26:20-21, Living Bible Version: Go home, my people, and lock the doors! Hide for a little while until the Lords wrath against your enemies has passed. Look! The Lord is coming from the heavens to punish the people of the earth for their sins. The earth will no longer hide the murderers. The guilty will be found. Go home.

Isaiah 26 is a prophetic word from the Lord, through the prophet Isaiah, to Gods people  Israel. In this three-part prophetic word of prophecy, Isaiah delivered a word of hope to the people.

Part 1, Isaiah 26:1-15, is a song of praise for Gods deliverance. It is preceded by another song of praise in chapter 25. A song of praise celebrates Gods deliverance from judgment. This was a prophecy to assure the people of Gods future blessings. This song of praise assured the people that they would be delivered.

That right there ought to say something to someone. No matter what you are going through, if you are a child of God, you ought to have a song of praise for Gods deliverance.

The three Hebrews boys (Daniel 3) in the fiery furnace had a song of praise for Gods deliverance. King, O king, we will not bow down and worship your idol. Our God is able to deliver us from the fiery furnace. But, even if God doesnt, our God is still able.

Daniel, in the lions den (Daniel 6) had a song for praise for Gods deliverance. The Lord sent an angel to shut the lions mouth. He sang a lullaby to the lions and made a pillow out of them.

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Queen Esther (Esther 4) had a song of praise for Gods deliverance of her people: If I perish, I perish! You must have a song of praise for Gods deliverance.

Part 2, Isaiah 26:16-18, Isaiah spoke to the Lord on behalf of Gods people. Isaiahs case for the people to the Lord in verse 16 reads, Lord, in their distress they sought for you. When your punishment was on them, they poured forth a whispered prayer.

In Judges 6:6, Israel cried out to the Lord for help because of the Midianites oppression. Israel lived in caves and dens in the mountains. When Israel planted crops, the Midianites, Amalekites and other eastern neighboring nations came and destroyed their crops and plundered the countryside. They took all their sheep, oxen, and donkeys. These enemy hoarders stayed until the land was completely stripped and devastated. Israel lived in abject poverty.

This same thing is happening to Black America. We are losing our neighborhoods. Is it gentrification or greed? Our people live in the streets. We cant even buy toilet paper and bottled water.

Only 10 at a time can assemble in our houses of worship. We could lose our church buildings and the land they sit on. If churches cant pay the mortgage or rent, the lending institutions will foreclose on the buildings and landlords will evict tenants. If church members cant work, tithes and oerings wont come into the church.

Gods church is not the building. Its the people in the building. Doors to the church will remain open because we will continue to worship the Lord our God!

But, the Lord not only wants our worship, God wants our work. The church  the people of God -are called to serve others. When people are hungry, give them something to eat. When people are thirsty, give them something to drink. When people are homeless, invited them in. When people are naked, clothe them. When people are sick, looked after them. Call them. When people are in prison, visit them. This is what the church looks like!

We dont want to lose our building. So, please pay your tithe and oerings  whatever you can. We dont want anyone to go without food, so let your church family know your need. Let the church be the church!

Isaiahs continued to present Israels case to the Lord in verse 16 and 18: How we missed your presence, Lord! We suered as a woman giving birth who cries and writhes in pain. We too have writhed in agony, but all to no avail. No deliverance has come from all our eorts.

But, the Lord allowed the Midianites to harass Israel because the people of Israel began once again to worship other gods. Church people  bishops, popes, presiding elders, pastors, ministers, stewards, deacons, trustees, choir members, ushers, pew members  we better check ourselves before we wreck ourselves!

If we want God to do something in this situation, the church better obey the word of God found in 2 Chronicles 7:13-14: When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

Then, Gods eyes will be open and Gods ears will be attentive to our prayers. Go home!

Part 3, Isaiah 26:19-21, Isaiah spoke a word of reassurance to Gods people. Yet we have this assurance: Those who belong to God shall live again. Their bodies shall rise again! Restoration will come! O people, God is going to open our graves and bring us up from them.

God is going to restore our land  starting with the family, friends, church family, community, city, state, United States, the world, humanity! This is our hope!

Those who dwell in the dust shall awake and sing for joy! For Gods light of life will fall like dew upon them! It is Gods desire to always be in covenant relationship with His people.

Isaiah called the nation to repentance and to faith in a holy, all-powerful God. Go home, my people, and lock the doors! Hide for a little while until the Lords wrath against your enemies has passed. The Lord will punish the rulers, the authorities, the powers of this dark world and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. The Lord will punish and the kings on the earth below. They will be herded together like prisoners bound in a dungeon; they will be shut up in prison.

No matter what youre going through, (1) reprise: sing a song of praise for Gods deliverance, (2) repent: cry out to the Lord; pray and ask for forgiveness, and (3) relax: relax your body, mind and soul.

Go home. Stay home. Rest. Stop worrying. Listen to your to your body. Listen to the Spirit saying, The battle is not yours. Its the Lords!

Go home. Stay home. Be at home. Read your Bible, relate to your family, renew old friendships, reconnect with neighbors, live righteously before God and let God restore your soul.

The Rev. Dr. Mary S. Minor is the senior pastor of Brookins-Kirkland Community AME Church, 3719 W. Slauson Ave., in Los Angeles, (323) 296-5610.
Businesses across Harris County have had to close due to tightened restrictions such as the stay-at-home order issued to combat the coronavirus pandemic, leaving many small business owners to question their future.

One possible solution rolled out for these business owners is disaster loans provided by the Small Business Administration to help them recover.

Related: COVID-19 reverses employment trend

Its a three-step process for businesses to apply, either online at disasterloan.sba.gov, by mail or in-person at a disaster center. Small businesses may borrow up to $2 million for economic injury, SBA guidelines state.

Following application, SBA reviews the business owners credit and determines their eligibility. Upon approval, loan closing documents will be prepared and sent for the owner to sign, with the initial loan disbursement delivered within five days, the guidelines detail. A case manager will also work with the owners to ensure they meet all loan conditions.

The Houston Northwest Chamber of Commerce has the SBA disaster loan listed as a resource, its President and CEO Bobby Lieb said, but has yet to have any businesses come forward about applying.

Lieb said the chamber is looking for ways to offset costs and find solutions for businesses, such as funding sources. One concern Lieb said he had about the shelter-in-place order was the classification of essential businesses.

My concern is though the supply chain for those essential businesses, Lieb said.

Related: Coronavirus hits Houston: What you need to know

While home builders can continue to operate, Lieb said, if they cant get the lumber or drywall needed, it may be hard for them to continue to operate. So, certain construction or landscaping companies may buy from nurseries, but nurseries arent listed as essential businesses.

To allay concerns and try and reduce any level of panic or anxiety, I think its upon us to try and provide to our area businesses, Lieb said.

Tomball Economic Development Corporation Executive Director Kelly Violette said the EDC is trying to work with local financial institutions, calling with several banks to figure out what they are concerned about economically.

I think a lot of it is trying to figure out what is available and how soon and will it be a resource for our businesses, because some may not qualify, Violette said.

Violette said Frost Bank is currently doing local disaster loans themselves for current customers, as well as loan deferments on existing loans. The EDC is also looking at how they can help with capital.

We deal with public funds so were trying to make sure were being as careful with those funds as possible and not put in a situation where were out thousands of dollars and not being able to recoup any kind of return, she said.

One thought the EDC had was to work with someone to act as a community liaison for local businesses to help them through the SBA process, Violette said, but nothing has been formalized yet.

Several of the restaurants weve talked to, theyre trying to keep as many employees as they can and transitioning their jobspainting the building, disinfecting, Violette said. But at some point, if theyre not having business and customers, that will dwindle. I think thats the industry thats hit the hardest and also the most challenging to finance.

The EDCs two primary roles right now are listening to local businesses and what they need and to continue to stay informed on the resources as they become available.

Because this is changing so quickly for us, its trying to get a game plan, but as soon as we get a game plan together, something else changes, Violette said. At least with the disasters were used to, like a hurricane, we know its a short-term situation.

One resource the EDC and Greater Tomball Area Chamber of Commerce set up is tomballtogether.com, she said. Its a one-stop website featuring info on loans, grants and other government resources so business owners dont have to search through multiple websites.

The city of Jersey Village is also looking at the possibility of offering loans to local businesses affected by the pandemic, and has set up an application page on their website for potential loan opportunities.

paul.wedding@hcnonline.com
Federal Homeland Security officials extended the Oct. 1 deadline by one year for travelers to get a Real ID drivers license that would be accepted as identification for domestic air travel.

The one-year extension to Oct. 1, 2021 was announced by Acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf on Thursday, following statements by President Donald Trump on Tuesday that the deadline should be extended due to the current coronavirus outbreak.

I have determined that states require a twelve-month delay and that the new deadline for Real ID enforcement is October 1, 2021, Wolf said in a statement. The federal, state and local response to the spread of the coronavirus here in the United States necessitates a delay in this deadline.

Trump called for an extension because people waiting in line at DMVs to get Real ID licenses was contrary to calls for social distancing to reduce spread of coronavirus. He did not specify a time period.

The Real ID license carries more security features than standard drivers licenses and will be the only license accepted as identification for domestic air travel after the new deadline, under federal law. Passports will also be accepted.

Gov. Phil Murphy also wrote to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in mid-March about pushing the Oct. 1 deadline back to reduce crowds at Motor Vehicle Commission agencies.

It would be a good result to do it in an orderly fashion, he said of Trumps announcement.

By delaying the October 2020 Real ID deadline, DHS has given states time to ride out the epidemic, recover and resume our normal functions, and issue REAL IDs to all those who need them in a reasonable time frame, said Sue Fulton, MVC chief administrator, in a statement.

The MVC was processing many thousands of people in Motor Vehicle agencies, but officials realized with the COVID-19 outbreak, the large numbers of customers at agencies represented an unacceptable risk, she said, which lead to Murphy closing agencies.

Travel industry officials had been calling for an extension before the coronavirus pandemic struck, contending that most travelers were unaware of the change. A Homeland Security report said only 35% of travelers had a compliant license as of February.

With many departments of motor vehicles closed to the public, it was prudent to postpone implementation ahead of the October 1, 2020, deadline, said Kevin M. Burke, Airports Council International North America President and CEO. The health of the aviation system must be considered when establishing the deadline for implementation of Real ID.

New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission agencies have been closed for almost two weeks. Before then, drivers were starting to see lines at agencies, despite the MVCs efforts to meter the flow of drivers by requiring appointments and then allow walk-ins on a limited basis.

Drivers have to apply for Real IDs in-person and bring nine points of identification. New Jersey started issuing Real ID licenses last September by appointment in limited numbers of agencies. Other locations were brought on-line after beta testing of equipment and training employees.

Before the coronavirus hit, available appointments to get a Real ID were booked three months in advance.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share. If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

Sign up for text message alerts from NJ.com on coronavirus in New Jersey:





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Oil prices crashed on Monday when the US Senate failed to reach a deal on the Stimulus Bill over the weekend. The idea was to quickly pass legislation that would help the healthcare systems, small businesses, industries, and Americans struggling in the face of the coronavirus. Unfortunately, the two parties could not come together on the terms over the weekend, with one of the points of contention being green legislation that the Democratic leadership proposed during the final stretch of the bill's negotiation.

Those green initiatives are, in large part, precisely what stymied the deal.

While some in the Senate called for every item in the bill to be specific to coronavirus issues, others naturally got greedy, hoping to capitalize on the desperate need to pass the bill by trying to squeeze their own hard-to-pass agendas onto the hot button bill.

But such efforts proved too ambitious.

It's Not Easy Being Green

The Democrat Party has put green initiatives such as renewable energy and greenhouse gas legislation in a prominent position in their campaigns. Still, legislation in this arena has been difficult to pass, as it remains a partisan issue with a sharp divide.

It was logical, therefore, to try to get legislation in the bill that may otherwise stagnate into infinity.

"Democrats won't let us fund hospitals or save small businesses unless they get to dust off the Green New Deal," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, simplifying the position into a snappy soundbite.

Related: Oil Climbs As U.S. Pushes For An End To The Price War So what were the specific environmental issues that sprung up in the 11th hour?

Greener Airlines

There was no question that airlines would get some tideover money to keep the industry afloat after overseas travel restrictions went into effect that were to last for weeks or months, and domestic travel dropped off considerably. But eight Democratic Senators, including those from some of the hardest-hit states including Michigan's Debbie Stabenow and New Jersey's Cory Booker, wanted to attach strings to the money given to the sector. The strings would increase environmental requirements to address the considerable pollution stemming from the industry. The rationale? Addressing the carbon footprint of the airlines would help prevent future economic collapse that may be triggered by climate change, according to a press release from the supporting senators.

The proposal was for airlines receiving federal money to reduce carbon emissions by 50%. But that's a hard pill to swallow for an industry that isn't even in the air at all right now and losing money hand over fist.

"We can both stimulate the economy ... and we can lay the foundation for a lower-carbon future," economist Michael Greenstone, who served as the Chief Economist for President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, tweeted in response to suggestions that the bill shouldn't attempt to address non-coronavirus issues.

But Republicans held their ground, and they didn't make those concessions over the weekend just to pass the bill.

The Sierra Club was lobbying hard to attach green initiatives on the coronavirus bill's coattails, referring to the stimulus money that will be handed out to airlines as "money that would see the industry's future. Let's insist that the future be a lower-emissions one." But regardless of where you stand on the environmental issue, the stimulus money was never meant as a seed for the future, but as a life raft for today.

Green Tax Credits

Senator Mitch McConnel alleges that the Democrats were filibustering the bill on other grounds, too, such as extending tax credits for the solar and wind energy industries. The solar and wind industries have been hit by the coronavirus, too, and have claimed that they will lose as much as half of the solar jobs this year due to the virus. For wind specifically, an estimated 25 GW of wind projects and $43 billion in investments and payments to rural communities will be in jeopardy, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). That is, unless they get help.

"To best protect these jobs and the health of our existing workforce, we are asking Congress to immediately extend the schedule and improve the liquidity of our existing tax credits," the AWEA said in a plea to Congress.

Other tax credits proposed for inclusion into the bill was an extension of the electric vehicle tax credit for which GM and Tesla - both of which have already hit the limit for available tax credits - have been lobbying.

Green With Fossil Fuel Envy

The oil and gas industries are part of the rescue package, and green energy advocates argue that the renewables industry, cup in hand, should get a piece of the stimulus pie too. The difference, however, is that the fossil fuel industry - for better or for worse - is today an essential part of America's national security. The oil and gas industry has increased in prominence in recent years, ramping up production from 8.9 million bpd at the beginning of 2017, to more than 13 million bpd today. This surge has distanced the United States from its dependence on foreign - notably OPEC-derived - oil.

Finally, a Deal?

On Tuesday, the Senate announced it had finally reached a deal. With the specifics of the bill not yet available, it will now go to the House. But the House on Tuesday said it would not vote immediately on the bill.

Related: Not Even The $2 Trillion Stimulus Package Can Save Oil Markets

The delay, according to a senior Democratic aid who spoke to CNN, was because lawmakers would need at least 24 hours to review all the ins and outs of the bill and discuss it before approving it, suggesting that further changes could be in the works. To some, this seems to lack some sense of urgency. Others see taking the time to review details of a bill before approving it fiscally responsible.

Without seeing the full text, we can only assume the oil and gas industry will, as initially planned, get a chunk of the money as they have been hit not only by the virus but by an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. Also, workers from every industry - including in the renewables industry - will benefit from increased unemployment compensation that will last months, as well as one-time checks, at a minimum.

It is unlikely, though, that more strict regulations for airlines with regards to their carbon footprint or other green deal initiatives would have survived the final cut, regardless of the pressure put on both parties to get the deal done.

Oil prices received a bump on the news that the stimulus deal had succeeded in the Senate, with WTI increasing by 2.5% on Wednesday but then falling back significantly on Thursday.

By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
(Newser)  The Trump administration has been controversially referring to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 as the "Chinese virus" or "Wuhan virus," and three officials from G7 countries tell the Washington Post that Mike Pompeo's insistence on using the term "Wuhan virus" led to a rift at Wednesday's Group of Seven meeting, which was held via video conference. Per ABC News, foreign ministers were planning to issue a joint declaration on the virus, but Pompeo insisted the term "Wuhan virus," which has been decried by world leaders and health organizations, be included. Because of that, the ministers failed to agree on a joint statement, and no statement specifically referencing the pandemic was issued. Meanwhile, the president himself has stopped calling it the "Chinese virus" because, he says, "Everyone knows it came out of China, but I decided we shouldn't make any more of a big deal out of it."

story continues below

"We tried, youll remember, from the opening days to get our scientists, our experts on the ground there so that we could begin to assist in the global response to what began there in China, but we werent able to do that. The Chinese Communist Party wouldnt permit that to happen," Pompeo said at the meeting. "The Chinese Communist Party poses a substantial threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus outbreak clearly has demonstrated." After the meeting, Pompeo downplayed the role of the term in the group's discussions, saying there were simply "tactical differences" in how ministers wanted to approach the situation. "Make no mistake about it," he said, per Fox News, "everyone in that meeting this morning was very focused on making sure that we not only solve the health crisis associated with the Wuhan virus but also the economic challenges that face the globe as we confront it as well." (Read more coronavirus stories.)
Earlier this week, Kevin Nursick, the director of communications for the state Department of Transportation, had a question for a colleague who works on road-construction sites.

I asked him how he would classify the reduction [of vehicles] now that people are staying home because of the coronavirus, Nursick said. He said he thought it was down by about one-third from typical rates.

That was an underestimate.

Connecticuts daily traffic volume was down more than 38 percent (from the same date last year) for the most recent six-day stretch (March 19-24) measured by 21 automated traffic counters that operate continuously at various sites on state roads, including I-95, I-84, I-91, and the Merritt Parkway.

Traffic volume was lower by more than 43 percent on three consecutive days (March 21-23) before increasing to negative-38.6 percent on March 24, the most recent day for which statistics were available.

If you look at the numbers you see that the trend really started on March 13, when traffic volume was down 12.3 percent, Nursick said. A few days later it was down by a little more than 20 percent, and then it really got lower after that.

Its pretty obvious that the reduced traffic volume coincides with people working from home and only going out when they really need to, Nursick added. March 13 looks to be the day people began staying off the roads.

Many schools and businesses have closed temporarily during the last two weeks, and an executive order issued by Gov. Ned Lamont that went into effect Monday night requests that all non-essential businesses have their employees work from home.

Its likely that the traffic volume will remain much lower for a while, Nursick said. People are heeding the warnings about coronavirus and not leaving the house.

The break in traffic is allowing the DOT to facilitate construction work on its Route 8/I-84 Interchange (Mixmaster) rehabilitation project in Waterbury, with lane closures extended to weekdays and weekends.

Thats the irony of the situation, that more work can be done without causing traffic delays, Nursick said. We are looking into whether we could do the same with some of our other projects.

Less traffic has also meant a workload reduction for AAA Northeast, which services three counties (Fairfield, New Haven, Litchfield) in Connecticut.

Weve seen a 40 percent drop in volume, said Fran Mayko, a Triple A Northeast spokesperson. That is for our region, which also includes Rhode Island, Massachusetts, parts of New York, including New York City and Long Island, and a portion of northern New Jersey. But its probably safe to say that the service calls are down around 40 percent in Connecticut. Most of the calls are for cars with dead batteries in peoples garages, driveways or parking spots.

Mayko said that AAA (which is considered an essential business) has installed protocols for its service calls.

If someone is stranded, the tow driver cant give that person a ride, which is something we were able to do previously, Mayko said. We will help the person find a ride  we are not going to leave them on the side of the road  but we cant drive them home.

For those drivers who still must commute to work, a silver lining awaits at the pump. Thursdays state average price of $2.22 per gallon (of regular gas) is the lowest in Connecticut since Aug. 16, 2016, according to Mayko.

It dropped two cents overnight and is down 33 cents from this time last month and 48 cents from this time last year, Mayko said. Its a good time if you need to fill the tank.
Like most Australians, Tom Burgess and his fiancee Tahlia Giumelli are currently in lockdown mode with their children.

And on Thursday, the couple moved from the house to their car for a change of scenery.

In an Instagram post from the comfort of their vehicle, Tahlia also revealed her clever coffee hack to avoid beating queues at cafes.

'Were really mixing it up a bit today and self-isolating in the car as a family!' Tom Burgess and his fiancee Tahlia Giumelli shared a selfie from their car on Thursday

'Were really mixing it up a bit today and self-isolating in the car as a family,' she captioned the photo.

'We are still trying to support our small local businesses and have taken to ordering our coffees over the phone to avoid standing in cafes so we can run in and run out when they are ready.'

Tom and Tahlia became engaged in December last year while they were holidaying at a farm to celebrate their three-year anniversary.

Happy couple: Tom and Tahlia became engaged in December last year while they were holidaying at a farm to celebrate their three-year anniversary

In August last year, the pair welcomed their first child together, daughter Sophie.

Tom, 27, arrived in Sydney from the UK eight years ago, but only expected to stay for one year.

'Who would've thought?' the sportsman told the Sunday Telegraph in January.

Baby joy: In August last year, the pair welcomed their first child together, daughter Sophie

'I'd only signed a one-year deal at the time and I wanted to give it a go, but back then I couldn't have imagined how my life would unfold.'

Fast-forward eight years, and Tom is still signed with the Rabbitohs and is planning a wedding with Tahlia, 26.

'I'm so proud to be an Australian, getting married to an Aussie girl and having our beautiful Sophie,' he said, adding that by 2018 he had 'fallen in love' with Australia.
The Donald TrumpFox News feedback loop has been on a terrifying kick this week about how you cant make the cure for the coronavirus pandemic (staying home so you dont get infected/infect others with a deadly respiratory virus) worse than the disease itself, because having too many people at home harms the economy, and so everyone needs to get back to work at the end of a 15-day social distancing period, which Trump claims began last week. This is such a shortsighted reading of whats good for the economy that even hard-line Republicans are disagreeing with it. Lets rank those disagreements from the most to least polite.

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1. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine. Heres what DeWine, who has been ahead of the curve in shutting down public spaces, said on Twitter: Let me talk about our economy. Every single day I think about those of you who are unemployed. I think about the small businesses. I know that each day that goes by that you dont have income is very, very tough. And I fully understand that. Ive been asked if I had a reaction to the Presidents statements yesterday. I think we are aligned. We want to get this over with ASAP. We want people back at work. The frustration he has, I share it. Each day we cant move forward is frustrating. Were all in this together. The truth is that protecting people and protecting the economy are not mutually exclusive. In fact, one depends on the other. We save our economy by first saving lives. And we have to do it in that order.

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Claiming youre totally aligned with Trump when youre really saying something completely opposite, but in a way that he wouldnt understand unless he bothered to learn the details about what your specific state is doing, is a masterpiece of Trump management, because he is not going to learn those things.

2. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton. Cottons behavior has long suggested that he is planning to run for president as a younger version of Trump who is less personally embarrassing but just as hatefully nationalist. His current take is that China may have engineered the coronavirusand that, even if it didnt, the countrys government let things get out of control because of the incompetence and dishonesty inherent in a communist system. The U.S. must do whatever needs to be done to eradicate the coronavirus, Cotton believes, in order to prove the superiority of our way of life. His take on the back-to-work issue: This is the stark truth: we have to arrest the spread of the China virus to get the economy back on its feet & get life back to something like normal. The good news is that no country at no other time in history is better poised to act quickly than our great American nation. Our docs, our scientists, our inventors, our workersall hands are on deck! This is an interesting split-the-difference approach: disagree with Trump, but do it while using USA #1 rhetoric that might persuade him to change his mind.

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3. Faux-intellectual racist Steve Bannon. Bannon has fit the virus into his long-standing civilizational warfare schema by suggesting that its being used as a weapon by China. (This overlaps with Cottons view, but Bannons spin is less about patriotic posturing and more about paranoid geo-strategic bombast. Its also worth noting that Bannon is currently a paid consultant/partner of a fugitive Chinese billionaire involved in a legal dispute with the Chinese government.) Heres his take, on Fox: My recommendation would be to drop the hammer, dont mitigate the virus, dont spread the curve, shatter the curve. And go full hammer on the virus right now with a full shutdown, use the stimulus to bridge the economic crisisit may take $2 trillion, it may take $3 trillion to force cash into the little entrepreneur and the little guy. Bannon uses Trump-like rhetoric here, but it seems likely to be less effective than what Cotton is doing, given that the Dow-fixated president forgets a little more each day that he ran for office on the premise that he would support the little guy rather than major stockholders in large corporations.

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4. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. Said the senator on Twitter: When it comes to how to fight #CoronavirusPandemic, Im making my decisions based on healthcare professionals like Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and others, not political punditry. Try running an economy with major hospitals overflowing, doctors and nurses forced to stop treating some because they cant help all, and every moment of gut-wrenching medical chaos being played out in our living rooms, on TV, on social media, and shown all around the world. There is no functioning economy unless we control the virus. Graham is one of the finest sycophants working today, and this is unusually confrontational for him. He even linked to a Washington Post article that was directly critical of Trump and Fox. Does he know something the rest of us dont about which way the political winds are blowing?

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5. Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney. Said Cheney: There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do whats necessary to stop the virus. Low marks for president-pandering on this one. Doesnt compliment Trump, doesnt insult Democrats or the Chinese. It seems like Liz Cheney is getting dangerously close to letting her personal fear of dying from a respiratory virus overwhelm her political self-interest.

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6. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. Maryland is a heavily Democratic state, and Hogans political survival depends on not being one of those kinds of Republicans, so he gets to be honest in situations like this, and on Tuesday he was very honest, telling CNN that we dont think that were going to be in any way ready to be out of this in five or six days or so, or whenever this 15 days is up from the time that they started this imaginary clock.

Larry Hogan is not going to get invited to the big Easter party at the White House that is going to cause a new outbreak of the coronavirus!

For more on the impact of the coronavirus, listen to What Next.
By Kim Se-jeong





Sohn Seok-hee

Cho Ju-bin, 24, accused of blackmailing women and minors to make sexually abusive videos, is also facing fraud allegations involving two journalists and a former politician, according to police Thursday.



Outside Jongno Police Office in Seoul, Wednesday, Cho mentioned Sohn Seok-hee, a former journalist and CEO of cable news channel JTBC; Yoon Jang-hyeon, a former Gwangju mayor; and Kim Woong, an independent journalist, in his public apology.



The unexpected statement by Cho made many speculate that these three mentioned have some involvement in his crimes. The police quickly dismissed the speculation, saying the three had nothing to do with the sex crimes, briefly adding that the three could be fraud victims of Cho and that the police force was investigating.



Details of fraud involving Sohn was made public the same day, as the CEO released a statement explaining what had happened.



According to the statement, "Cho approached me through Telegram, saying he was running a private detective agency and one of his clients was K, with whom I had a legal fight. He told me that K had paid him to harm me and my family. I asked Cho to send the picture of the bank transaction as a proof and he demanded money for it. I sent the money and Cho never got back to me. I didn't report this to the police because we weren't sure if that could keep us safe. Later I learned that the private detective agency owner was apprehended for making sexual videos and distributing them."



The "K" mentioned in the statement refers to journalist Kim Woong, against whom Sohn filed a criminal complaint for attempted intimidation. Kim's trial is ongoing.





Yoon Jang-hyeon
Calaveras County Office of Education View Photo

Angels Camp, CA Calaveras County schools under the advice of the health officer are extending school closures indefinitely.

In a notice found here: Public Health on School Closure and issued on Wednesday afternoon by Calaveras County Health Officer Dr. Dean Kelatia, it recommends extending the closure of all schools within the county until the governors stay at home order is lifted.

In response, the Calavera County Office of Education Superintendent of Schools Scott Nanik released a letter acknowledging that all county schools will adhere to the health officers request. It states, Based on Governor Newsoms comments, parents and students should approach school closures more as a long-term situation rather than short term. Also noting that it remains very important for students to complete assigned material and to work closely with their schools to ensure they are academically on track.

Naniks notice can be read below:

Based on the recommendations from Dr. Dean Kelaita of the Calaveras County Public Health Department, the Calaveras County superintendents have made a unified, regional decision to extend school closures for at least as long as California Governor Gavin Newsoms Stay at Home Order is in effect.

The safety and wellness of students, families and school personnel continues to be the highest priorities of Calaveras County schools and districts. The Calaveras County Office of Education is working closely with local agencies and will provide updated information as it becomes available.

Based on Governor Newsoms comments, parents and students should approach school closures more as a long-term situation rather than short term. Students and families should reach out to their schools for instructional materials and support. It remains very important that students complete their assigned work and work closely with their schools to ensure they are academically on track.

Schools play a vital role in community, we will provide what is needed to support distance learning for our students and serve the families to ensure critical learning opportunities and resources are available, said Calaveras County Superintendent Scott Nanik. We would like to get our students and staff back into the classroom as soon as possible, we understand how challenging this is for our students, families and faculty.

In order to slow the spread of novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) we ask that our community continue to adhere to the Stay at Home Order and stay at home except for essential activities until further notification. We urge you to keep practicing the guidance provided by Public Health including:

-Social Distancing

-Washing hands often with soap and water

-Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth

-Staying home if you are feeling sick

-Contacting your health provider if you are experiencing any symptoms such as fever, cough, or difficulty breather.

-Engaging in regular exercise or physical activity

Education officials also updated that a wireless network has been set up for staff and students to access the internet from several school locations to get need the needed materials for students. Click here: Calaveras County Schools wireless network for details on the network, locations and how to connect.
Merkel's second coronavirus test also negative

German Chancellors spokesman said that Merkel was still continuing to work from home.

The results of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's second coronavirus test also returned negative, her spokesman said on Wednesday.

3RD TEST DUE NEXT WEEK

Steffen Seibert told German news agency DPA that Merkel will continue to work from home and undergo another test at the beginning of next week.

The German chancellor entered self-quarantine this past Sunday due to earlier contact with a doctor who had later tested positive for coronavirus.

On Monday, she took part in her weekly Cabinet meeting by telephone.

Seibert stressed that Merkel will continue to perform her official duties while staying at home.
With India, the world's second-most populous nation, going under a complete nationwide lockdown the next 3 weeks due to COVID-19, Tata Motors (NYSE:TTM) is bound to be hit hard. The nation's largest automaker previously planned to shut down a key plant in Pune, Maharashtra -- the worst hit coronavirus state in India -- for one week.

Tata Motors has now suspended operations until further notice , as per reports from the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM). This comes after India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has ordered a "a total ban" on people "venturing out of homes" for the next three weeks.

The unprecedented lockdown in India comes right after Tata Motors announced a month-long suspension of production at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) facilities in the UK on March 20. Until then, its JLR manufacturing facilities in India and Brazil were operating, but the latest developments in India will disrupt the company's plans.

Coronavirus Could be Tata Motors' Biggest Challenge Yet

Tata Motors' Pune facility, also its largest, manufactures a full-range of commercial and passenger vehicles, with capacity to produce 730 vehicles per day.

The shutdown comes at a time when the automaker was already facing severe macro headwinds. During the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2019, Tata Motors' stand-alone revenue slumped 33% year over year due to declines in sales of both commercial and passenger vehicles, although JLR reported 3% higher revenue.

In fiscal year 2019, JLR contributed 74.6% to Tata Motors' total automotive revenues. The company reports three other segments, including Tata commercial vehicles, Tata passenger vehicles, and vehicle financing.

Tata Motors reported a staggering 85% slump in JLR sales for February. As of the end of the third quarter, Tata Motors expected JLR to end full year with an operating margin of 3%, but expectations soon dropped to 1% after the February shock.

With JLR, as well as domestic vehicle production in India, now suspended for several weeks and India's apex automotive body projecting a painfully slow recovery in demand, Tata Motors is staring ahead at what could be one of its toughest times in recent history.
In what comes across as shocking, heavily armed gunmen and suicide bombers attacked a Sikh gurdwara in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, on Wednesday. The terror attack left over two dozen people dead and wounded many others.

Bollywood celebrities like Sonam Kapoor, Raveena Tandon and others took to social media to condemn the ghastly act and offered prayers for the victims and families of the deceased.

Sonam Kapoor shared a news report and tweeted, "So heartbreaking and inhumane. Which god asks you to kill." (sic)

Raveena Tandon took to her Twitter page and wrote,  condolences to his entire family. #tiansingh. Can't imagine the grief,all the families of our Sikh brothers who were massacred, must be going through. God give them strength at this hour of tragedy." (sic)

Swara Bhaskar's tweet read, "Prayers for the victims and families of the deceased in #Kabul #gurudwaraattack and curses and hell awaits the monsters who perpetrated this attack. Only the most toxic evil people prey upon minorities in their temple! #Shame #isisterror These terrorists are not human!"

According to media reports, four terrorists, including suicide bombers, attacked Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib in Kabul at around 7.45 am local time (8.45 IST). There were around 120 people inside the gurudwara, including 20 families, when the attack began. The Islamic State claimed responsibilty for this terror attack.

Sonam Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor And Others Mourn Chef Floyd Cardoz's Death Due To Coronavirus!

Veteran Actress Nimmi Passes Away; Rishi Kapoor, Mahesh Bhatt Condole Her Death
It looks like Addis Ababa wants to waste time before reaching an agreement on its controversial Renaissance Dam

Almost a month after walking out of US-brokered tripartite negotiations, Addis Ababa is working on another proposal for an agreement it said it will deliver to Egypt and Sudan soon.

We wont subscribe to an agreement just because the US and the World Bank came forward with it. We need to take time and sort out sticking points, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedu Andargachew told AP last week.

Asked when the negotiations would resume, Andargachew said in another interview with The Reporter Ethiopia that the Ethiopian side does not believe the negotiations have stopped. Therefore, after Ethiopia finishes the discussions it is conducting internally and when the Egyptians fully recognise that Ethiopia has the right to use its water resources, the negotiations will resume without any third party involved, he said.

This is not new for Ethiopia, according to Mohamed Hegazi, former deputy to Egypts foreign minister. It has repeatedly adopted the strategy of playing for time, negotiating for concessions and withdrawing at the last minute. Hegazi described this step as another delaying tactic.

It had previously suggested that South Africa mediate to resolve the differences. Then, it called last week for holding a summit for the Nile Basin countries to resolve the dam issue. Finally, now it claims that it is working on its own proposal; more time wasting and a manifestation of lack of seriousness, bad intention and willingness to spoil whatever is reached in Washington, Hegazi said.

A final agreement on the filling and operation of the dam was supposed to be signed by Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia in Washington at the end of last month. While Ethiopia refused to attend that round of talks, Egypt initialed the agreement. Sudan preferred to wait until Ethiopia signs the accord.

As a result, the tripartite negotiations that started in November last year in Washington came to a halt. In the meantime, the dam is more than 70 per cent built.

Ethiopia wants to fill the dam within three years, allowing it to generate power for domestic consumption and export. Since the filling of the dam will reduce flows downstream, Cairo wants the process extended to as long as 15 years to minimise the reduction in flow to Egypt during the fill.

According to a former diplomat who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly on condition of anonymity, it was very important that Egyptian diplomacy use the time to explain to the world the impact of the latest developments on Egypt and the region.

Now, explained the diplomat, Egypt is using all diplomatic means to break the present deadlock in the negotiations. The US should also push for signing the agreement that was reached after four months of discussions between the technical teams of the three countries, he said.

Hegazi agreed that the Washington agreement should be the basis for resolving the present situation. Whatever Ethiopia needs to put on the table should be presented in Washington. If not, the international community should carry out its responsibility and move to contain the situation that could harm Egypt and the whole region, he said.

March witnessed several diplomatic initiatives on the part of Egypt to clarify to the world the present situation concerning the stalled tripartite negotiations on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).

Egypts Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri delivered messages from President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi to the leaders of Burundi, South Africa, Tanzania, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Niger.

Shoukris tour included South Africa, the current president of the African Union as well as some Nile Basin countries in the hope that they will be able to convince Ethiopia to sign the final agreement on the filling and operations of the dam, the diplomat said.

The tour came a few days after his two-legged European tour that included Belgium and France.

Shoukri called on the EU to urge Ethiopia to sign the agreement on the filling and operation of the GERD in order to preserve security and stability in the Horn of Africa.

Shortly before his European tour, Shoukri visited several Arab countries to update them on the current situation.

During his tours, Shoukri also sought to explain what happened during negotiations with Ethiopia and Sudan that started in March 2015 after the signing of the Agreement on Declaration of Principles as well as the consequences and repercussions that may result from any unilateral Ethiopian decision to fill the GERD without signing the agreement with Egypt and Sudan.

Meanwhile, a delegation from the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, headed by Assistant Minister for African Affairs Ambassador Abu Bakr Hefni visited Somalia and Djibouti last week to brief their leaders about the latest development on the Renaissance Dam.

Another delegation headed by Assistant Minister for Arab Affairs Yasser Othman visited Algeria, Tunisia and Mauritania for the same purpose.

Last week, President Al-Sisi discussed the dam with Deputy Chairman of the Sudanese Sovereign Council Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo during his two-day visit Cairo.

Dagalo said Khartoum will be a mediator between Egypt and Ethiopia in the hope of bridging their differences. No more details were disclosed.

The US and the World Bank were brought into the dam talks after Al-Sisi last year called on the international community to help find a solution to the long-running dispute.

Several rounds of talks were held in the presence of officials from the US Treasury Department and the World Bank as observers.

The US had set mid-January as the deadline for reaching an agreement.

The deadline was later extended to the end of February, but in the last round of talks Addis Ababa failed to attend.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Director Lee Sung Han () says no to special effects and yes to raw action in the 2008 martial arts action film, which was touted as the Korean version of Guy Ritchie's crime caper. The film employs a mix of Korean and Japanese actors, including newcomer Lim Joon Il (), Jung Woo () and Japanese martial artist Koga Mitsuki ().

Harassed by loan sharks, Gwang Tae (Lim Joon Il) decides to sell his liver to pay the money back. He asks his friend Gil Do (Jung Woo) to help arrange the deal with Japanese yakuza Sato (Koga Mitsuki), who buys the liver for his dying boss. However, Gil Do takes all the money and disappears. Gwang Tae and the yakuza try to hunt down Gil Do, while the loan shark (Kim Su Hyeon) chases after Gwang Tae.
[March 26, 2020] Organizations Worldwide Move Fast to Utilize ServiceNow's COVID-19 Emergency Response Apps to Support Their Fight Against the Pandemic

The four COVID-19 emergency response apps released March 16 at no charge by ServiceNow (News - Alert) (NYSE: NOW), the leading digital workflow company that makes work, work better for people, are being rapidly adopted by companies and agencies worldwide to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, the company announced today. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005185/en/ ServiceNow Customer Care Plan (Photo: Business Wire) "We are humbled by the extraordinary and rapid response to these apps in an effort to help the world flatten the curve on COVID-19 as fast as possible," said Bill McDermott, ServiceNow's CEO. "These ServiceNow applications enable emergency outreach, self-reporting and exposure management, which are precisely actions that organizations can take right now to help people get through this crisis." "Local, state and federal agencies, hospitals and healthcare organizations, financial institutions, and the list goes on. Customers in different sectors around the world are utilizing these apps. We are truly putting technology in the service of people, everywhere," McDermott continued. The City of San Francisco is one government entity putting the apps into production. Linda Gerull, CIO of the City of San Francisco, said: "Unlike emergencies that impact physical infrastructure, this pandemic crisis targets people. The City of San Francisco is committed to continued high quality service to residents and must now ensure the city workforce is available and working on prioritized response initiatives. ServiceNow's community apps for emergency self-reporting and emergency exposure management will deliver mission critical information to resource managers to assess and manage organizational readiness in key areas of healthcare, law enforcement and fire as well as city essential services." Partner support To further support customers, ServiceNow is working closely with its partners, including Accenture (News - Alert), Deloitte, DXC Technology, EY and KPMG. These partners are helping their customers to quickly deploy the ServiceNow community apps. They also are working with customers to quickly develop other emergency response apps on the Now Platform that address specific industry and customer needs. Accenture "We have been working closely with ServiceNow and our many other technology partners to help governments, businesses and communities around the world at this most critical time of need," said Paul Daugherty, group chief executive of Accenture Technology and chief technology officer. "We remain committed to these partnerships and to bringing the full strength of our technology, systems and industry expertise in assisting organizations as they work to navigate this unprecedented and evolving situation." Deloitte (News - Alert) "Right now it's more critical than ever that we work together to bring our experience, innovation and agility to serve organizations who are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic," said Den Roenfeldt, principal and ServiceNow alliance lead, Deloitte Consulting LLP. "We are proud to work with ServiceNow to apply our technology applications and experience to help clients better track the spread of the virus internally, provide employee outreach and share knowledge quickly." DXC Technology "In response to the current crisis, organizations worldwide are doing their utmost to address the needs of their people, customers and partners. DXC Technology and ServiceNow are committed to proactively deploying these new apps quickly, efficiently and securely to help manage crisis response workflows and risk to the business," said Dan Stoks, Vice President, Global ServiceNow Practice, DXC Technology. "The development of our new Corporate Incident Response applicatin - which allows clients to quickly respond to critical events by orchestrating response teams and plans, while maintaining a 360-degree view of the situation - is an example of that commitment."



EY "In times of crisis, organizations need reliable solutions to ensure critical operations are running smoothly and efficiently," said Paul Webb, EY Global ServiceNow Practice Leader. "Leveraging the Now Platform, EY rapidly developed a digital solution that provides businesses with the ability to swiftly connect with EY payroll advisors, operations teams and professionals as they cope with the impact of COVID-19. The close collaboration with ServiceNow puts the urgent needs of EY clients first, providing them with technologies and guidance to prioritize employees while focusing on sustaining normal business operations."

KPMG "As we face unprecedented business disruption, KPMG is pleased to work with ServiceNow to help organizations quickly maneuver through this challenging time. As our clients are faced with meeting the critical needs of their employees and customers, it's imperative that we work together and continue to innovate," said Mitch Kenfield, ServiceNow Executive Sponsor and US Practice Lead Partner at KPMG US. "Through the power of ServiceNow and KPMG, we can continue to support organizations with real solutions, while easing cost challenges during this difficult time." Available at servicenow.com/crisisresponse, the four community apps - Emergency Response Operations, Emergency Outreach, Emergency Self Report, and Emergency Exposure Management - are designed to help ServiceNow's customers and non-customers, including government agencies and enterprises, manage complex emergency response workflows. The Emergency Response Operations app is available for no charge to government agencies. The other three community apps are available for no charge to companies and agencies through September 30, 2020. Emergency Response Operations app for government agencies Washington State's Department of Health, a ServiceNow customer, initially created the Emergency Response Operations app on the Now Platform to manage their own response to COVID-19. Working with ServiceNow, the Department of Health is making the app available to all government entities at no charge. "As the epicenter for COVID-19 in the U.S., the State of Washington's agencies, emergency responders and public health professionals had to rapidly assemble an incident management structure to lead outbreak response and mitigate the spread and impact," said Jennifer McNamara, Chief Information Officer, Washington State Department of Health. "Leveraging ServiceNow's Now Platform, we were able to digitize processes that allowed us to quickly resource critical Incident Management Team positions. This automated a manual and labor-intensive process that was fraught with errors while also providing real-time visibility into resource allocations. Improved accountability will allow us to secure the maximum federal reimbursement for incident expenditures. We are building on the success of this phase with automation of the other Incident Management Functions such as resource demobilization, planning, logistics, and finance." "Given the complexity and importance of community within this crisis, we believe it's our duty to share our approach and the application we were able to quickly develop on the Now Platform. That's why we have worked with ServiceNow to make our application freely available to other governmental entities. By digitizing these processes, responding to an emergency does not have to create an emergency to coordinate," McNamara concluded. Customer care plan In addition to the State of Washington's Emergency Response Operations app, ServiceNow developed and introduced these three, no charge community apps: Emergency Outreach: during a crisis, this app leverages the Now Platform to help companies connect with employees to assess the impact. Employers can reach out by email to provide information and safety measures and request a response to confirm if employees are safe and where they are located.?Employers can also leverage the ServiceNow Now Mobile App to send push notifications to employees via mobile to get response. Emergency Self Report: this app helps an employee notify their employer that they are self-quarantined and when the employee will return to work and provides workflow support for the employer. Emergency Exposure Management: when a company becomes aware that its employee is diagnosed with an illness, this app helps the employer identify other people who might have been exposed based on the employee's meetings history and job location. These community apps are part of a broader Customer Care Plan launched by ServiceNow to support its customers as they focus on maintaining business operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes a commitment to maintaining virtually 100% uptime for ServiceNow instances; and launching a Now Community forum where customers and partners can interact with other customers, as well as an Apps Suggestions portal, where customers and partners can provide their ideas for COVID-19 related apps or features. More information about ServiceNow's customer care plan, including accessing the community apps, can be found at servicenow.com/crisisresponse. About ServiceNow ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is making the world of work, work better for people. Our cloud-based platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. For more information, visit: www.servicenow.com. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of Deloitte legal structure.  2020 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005185/en/

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We see that in last many years China has been very successful in deepening its ties with the regional states particularly with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.





by Ali Sukhanver writing from Islamabad





According to various media reports, the Indian Air Force has recently commissioned the 222 Tiger Sharks Squad of Sukhoi Su-30 MKI fighter jets in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu. The Sukhoi Su-30MKI is a twin-jet multirole air superiority fighter, developed by Russia and built under license by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) for the Indian Air Force. It is a heavy, long-range all-weather fighter equipped with the supersonic BrahMos cruise missiles that have a range of over 300 km. A very high-profiled ceremony was arranged at the occasion which was attended by the Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Bipin Rawat and Air Chief Marshal Rakesh Bhadauria. This extraordinary military-move is being taken as a serious message to China whose entry in the Indian Ocean region is continuously and significantly altering regional dynamics. This entry is being observed through economic investments and military presence along the Maritime Silk Road; no doubt resulting in Chinas increasing political influence too in the region.













We see that in last many years China has been very successful in deepening its ties with the regional states particularly with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. These ties are specifically in shape of the influx of Chinese capital into construction projects. According to a media report somewhere in the mid of 2019, during her visit to China, the Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina signed nine different types of accords covering a range of sectors including power, culture, tourism, and technology. A Letter of Exchange was also signed under which China would provide Bangladesh with 2,500 metric tons of rice as aid for Rohingya refugees. She was promised that China would provide extension of loans worth $1.7 billion for Bangladeshs power sector. Reports say that during that visit, Beijing also assured Dhaka that it would better align its projects under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with Bangladeshs development priorities. Same is the case with Sri Lanka; China has invested a lot in different development projects in Sri Lanka too; these projects include Colombo International Financial City, Colombo International Container Terminals and Hambantota Port. At private and personal level, Chinese investors are investing a lot in the field of hotel construction, agricultural product processing, manufacturing, warehouse and logistics.

Myanmar, formerly Burma, is a country situated in Southeast Asia and is bordered on the north and north-east by China. The two countries are having a very close diplomatic relationship since June 8, 1950 when a treaty of friendship and mutual non-aggression was signed between them. This January, Chinese President Xi Jinping had been on a two-day state visit to Myanmar where he signed more than 33 different agreements with the Myanmar government in the fields of information, industry, agriculture, security and the resettlement of internally displaced people in Myanmars war-torn Kachin State, which borders China. During President Xi Jinpings visit the most emphasized topic had been Kyaukphyu Special Economic Zone on the Bay of Bengal which is the terminus of the 1,700-kilometre long China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. Experts say that it is a major link in Beijings Belt and Road Initiative whose other end is in Chinas Yunnan province.





Last but not the least comes Pakistan; a country with the decades old trusted friendship with China. From the making of JF-17-Thunder Aircraft to the marvelous CPEC; the tale of love and care between the two countries is never-ending. Recently a Pakistani doctor who volunteered to treat corona virus patients in Chinas Wuhan epidemic area got warm official as well as public appreciation and admiration for his services to the corona-infected patients. Dr. Usman is a Pakistani medical teacher at Changsha Medical College and he is the first foreign doctor who stepped forward to treat infected people in Wuhan as a volunteer.





In short this whole scenario is not very much favourable for the countries like US and India. These countries are frightened of Chinas increasing influence in the region and are sure that in near future, China would emerge to the surface as an undefeatable World Super-Power with the support of its Allied countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. In this whole strategic game, the Indian Ocean might be the playground. The point to be kept in mind is that the Myanmar corridor provides China with a shortcut to the Indian Ocean. The Star said commenting upon the situation, An outlet to the Indian Ocean allows Chinas sizable oil and gas imports from the Persian Gulf to bypass going through the Strait of Malacca, and could conceivably serve a future military purpose. It must also be kept in mind that the US and India are very well aware of the fact that China is going to be a very serious threat to their combined interests in the region and that is the reason that India has recently deployed the 222 Tiger Sharks Squad of Sukhoi Su-30 MKI fighter jets in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu just 65 miles from international maritime boundary between India and Sri Lanka. Let us see what way China responds to this military action. From stratagem of countering the Corona-virus to the strategy of combating different regional military threats, we have a lot to learn from China.





(The writer is an Associate Professor of English at Govt. College of Science Multan, Pakistan. He is a free-lance columnist on Pakistan related defence affairs.)
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Legendary Houston rapper Scarface, who had been battling an illness for weeks, was told he tested positive for coronavirus.

Scarface, whose real name is Brad Jordan, made the announcement in an interview on Willie D's YouTube channel on Thursday. Willie D and Scarface were members of the rap group Geto Boys.

AT HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Coronavirus reccovery fund to benefit residents hurt by pandemic

The 49-year-old Jordan recently ran for Houston City Council, losing the District D election in a runoff.

Jordan, who said he hasn't traveled recently, said he wanted to talk publicly about the coronavirus because he thinks it can save lives.

"You need to relay and convey that message to everybody that this (stuff) is not fake," Jordan told Willie D in the interview. "It is not fake."

AT HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Brad Jordan puts his Geto Boys past behind him to run for city council

Jordan said he first felt an itch in his throat a few weeks ago and started taking some medicine. A few days later, he developed a fever that got as high as 103 and he went to the emergency room. After he was treated and released, Jordan said he didn't feel any better and went back to the emergency room after a few days and was tested for coronavirus.

Jordan, who also has asthma, said he was struggling to breathe and it felt like an "elephant was sitting on my chest."

"This whole three weeks has been an ordeal," Jordan said. "It's the craziest (stuff) I've ever seen in my life. I've been to the point where I felt I was gonna die."

Jordan said he's feeling better than he had been but "I'm not all the way out of the woods yet."

Jordan is the second local rapper to test positive for coronavirus. Slim Thug announced he also had the virus Tuesday.
(Updates first paragraph, adds context)

By Kate Duguid

NEW YORK, March 26 (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury yields slipped on Thursday, with the short-dated slipping further to record lows, trading below zero for the second day after a report showing weekly jobless claims surged to a record because of the impact of coronavirus on the economy.

Still, the action was relatively muted after the data, suggesting the market had already priced in expectations for an abysmal number.

The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits surged to a record of more than 3 million last week as strict measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic ground the country to a sudden halt, unleashing a wave of layoffs that likely brought an end to the longest employment boom in U.S. history.

The Labor Department's jobless report is the clearest indication yet of the effects of the coronavirus on the economy. But bond yields had already fallen dramatically since the start of February, taking cues from the Federal Reserve's extraordinary steps to bolster markets and the U.S. Congress' $2 trillion stimulus package.

The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yield was last 2.9 basis points lower to 0.830%, with the long bond roughly flat at 1.418%. At the short end, the two-year yield was 3.9 basis points lower at 0.287%. Yields move inversely to price.

"Jobless claims were terrible. I think the market thought it would be terrible so they got their number here," said Stan Shipley, macro research analyst at Evercore ISI.

"You'll probably get a bad number  maybe not as bad  next week and April payrolls will be terrible. We're still several months away from this turning higher."

The spread between the three-month and 10-year yields, the Fed's preferred measure of the yield curve, flattened by about 4 basis points to 86 basis points on Thursday. A flatter yield curve is an indication of lower expectations for future growth. In this instance it also reflects a three-month Treasury bill trading at a negative yield.

Continued strong demand for the safe and highly liquid short-term debt sent the three-month yield to minus 0.058% on Thursday, and the one-month yield to minus 0.117%, both all-time lows. On Wednesday the bill yields fell below zero for the first time since 2015.

Also on Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury sold $32 billion of new seven-year notes to strong demand. The bid-to-cover ratio, a metric of overall demand, was 2.76 versus an average of 2.45. But primary dealers, who must absorb any supply not bought by direct and indirect buyers, took a higher than average percentage of the pool at 28.6%.

The "auction was very strong considering all the dislocations and volatility in the markets. But the Fed's backstops and some ongoing demand for safety and yields helped underpin," wrote Kim Rupert, an analyst at Action Economics. (Reporting by Kate Duguid; Editing by David Gregorio, Marguerita Choy and Daniel Wallis)
Bengaluru, March 26 : Grocers and supermarkets can stay open 24 hours a day for business across Karnataka despite the lockdown, a top official said on Thursday.

"For the convenience of citizens, grocery shops and supermarkets selling food articles can be open 24x7 all over the state," tweeted Karnataka Police chief Praveen Sood.

The top cop, however, appealed to the people to avoid crowding.

On Wednesday evening, the Bengaluru Police Commissioner met 300 food and medicine aggregators regarding passes for individuals and vehicles.

"Interacted with over 300 food and medicine aggregators. Persons and vehicles passes will be issued on Aadhar card and organization request letter," tweeted Rao.

He said the application process will be available physically initially. Later it will be extended online and will have transferable passes as well for essential services suppliers to move during the lockdown.

Eight deputy commissioners of police will endorse the passes in Bengaluru.

Hemant Nimbalkar, Assistant Commissioner of Police (Administration) shared the passes format.

Police are issuing passes for two-wheelers, four-wheelers and individuals.

Meanwhile, Sood exempted people requiring medical attention from carrying a pass.

"Patients requiring medical attention are allowed to and from hospital without any need for curfew pass," he said.

According to the Police chief, people misusing curfew passes will be dealt with strictly.

"The purpose is only to maintain essential services and food supply chain. Please help us maintain social distancing," Sood said.
March 26 : Bollywood actress Tara Sutaria has once more set the internet on fire with her drool-worthy pictures. She posed away as a dreamy bikini babe, setting fans into a whirlpool of ecstasy. With nature giving us a great time to relax, love our mind and body  Bollywood celebs are also finding ways to entertain us. Today, right after the festivals of Gudi Padwa and Ugadi celebrations are over, why dont you start off your Thursday morning with a sexy twist?

The Marjaavaan actress showcased her bikini photoshoot that she had worked on for the Global Spa Magazine. She could be flaunting her enviable curves in a white and black two-piece bikini. It had stripes all over, which sort of resembled the zebra design. The vibrant orange cape that hugged on to her waist was certainly a first-class sizzler for the eyes. Her alluring pose in this sun-soaked picture set off major beach fashion goals for her fans.

She also shared another of her Bikini shoots for the same magazine. In this, she had worn a rusty polka-dotted bikini. The millennial styled bikini design, along with a high waist could be worn for by women of all sizes and shapes. She teasingly looked away at the camera, which could fire up anyones adrenaline levels in one shot.

After her performance in Marjaavaan, we can soon see this sexual delight in Tadap along with an upcoming star Ahah Shetty. Further on, she will be working with hot guys like Aditya Roy Kapur and John Abraham, in an action thriller Ek Villian 2.
Fraudsters have hijacked official Government communications to try and scam people. The first text is legitimate, the second is not

Callous fraudsters are spoofing official government phone numbers and impersonating the taxman in a bid to coax worried Britons into handing over money or their bank details.

One screenshot posted on social media platform Twitter by Sky News political reporter Tamara Cohen, showed scammers had managed to hijack the thread of a genuine official UK Government coronavirus alert service, which sent out a text message earlier in the week.

The message - appearing to be from the genuine number - told the recipient that they needed to pay a 35 fine, after being 'recorded as leaving their home on three occasions'.

There are then two links that the recipient could open. These are likely to go through to dodgy websites looking to steal personal information or install malware.

Given the current climate, many may be panicked by the message and click the link without processing the contents properly.

Fraudsters are able to send messages that appear to come from genuine numbers - such as the Government, or banks - with inexpensive services available online offering 'number spoofing,' which we explain in more detail further below.

Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police shared a text message claiming to come from a line labelled 'coronavirus', telling the recipient they were owed a 258 'goodwill payment' from HMRC, and that they needed to follow the link to get it.

Following the link would have likely resulted in victims handing over their bank details to fraudsters, who could subsequently use it for identity theft or to simply steal money from bank accounts.

The Metropolitan Police warned people to be extra vigilant of fraudsters at the moment

It posted a screenshot of another fake text claiming the recipient was due a goodwill payment from the taxman. Following the link would likely lead to fraudsters harvesting bank details

And a third message shared by Trading Standards tells recipients all UK residents have been issued payments of 558 as part of the government's fight against coronavirus.

A scam message seen by Trading Standards

Trading Standards' Katherine Hart said: 'While the coronavirus pandemic is bringing out the best behaviour from the majority of the public, it is also leading to a sharp rise in scams.

'Opportunists have unleashed a barrage of different scams to try and defraud the public out of money during this vulnerable time.

'The government are not issuing lump-sum payments, and anyone who receives these texts should ignore them and not tap the link.'

The fraud messages come less a week after the UK's official fraud reporting service Action Fraud revealed 970,000 had been lost in coronavirus-related scams since the start of February.

While the majority were related to online shopping scams, with people ordering masks or hand sanitiser which never arrived, there were over 200 reports of phishing emails.

The Metropolitan Police wrote on Twitter: 'We are aware of scammers sending text messages such as the below to take advantage of unsuspecting members of the public at this time.

'Never click on links that are included in a text or email unless you are 100 per cent sure it's verified.'

People may be caught out in these number spoofing scams, especially if they are part of a string of otherwise legitimate text messages and given the worried state many are in over the coronavirus pandemic.

Number spoofing or smishing scams can also ask recipients to call a phone number, this is usually done when fraudsters impersonate banks and query customers about suspicious transactions; which is something banks actually do.

Because the number is successfully spoofed, these texts often look like they've come from a legitimate number, whether it is a bank, the taxman, the police, or in this case the Government's official coronavirus warning line.

Jake Moore, a cybersecurity specialist at anti-virus provider ESET, said: 'Number spoofing is a very clever trick that adds authenticity when masqueraded as a legitimate text message  especially if you already have a message in your inbox from that sender.

'The technique works by creating an SMS account which matches a genuine sender ID. SMS sender IDs don't have to be numerical, so once it matches a genuine sender as alphanumerical text, it can sometimes populate further messages in earlier threads.'

Tips to avoid number spoofing scams 1. Do not click on any link or open an attachment on any e-mail or SMS you receive which is unsolicited 2. Don't rely on the caller display on your phone or SMS messages  fraudsters can manipulate these. If the text does appear to warn you of a genuine security concern, call the company on a trusted number. 3. Protect your computer and mobile devices with the most up-to-date security software 4. Do not transfer any funds unless you know and trust the person, and have checked in person that the details are correct and have come from a trusted source. 5. The bank, police, HMRC or government will never contact customers and ask them to click on a link to provide information or move money to a 'safe account'

HMRC has sought to crack down on the practice, telling This is Money last June it was working with Ofcom and the telecoms industry to prevent spoofing of 1,050 numbers used by scammers.

It said it received nearly 105,000 reports of phone scams in 2018-19.

The technology needed for these scams is relatively inexpensive to obtain, and one person at a major high street bank last year expressed dismay that the practice had still not been stamped out.

In the meantime, people are being warned to be doubly vigilant at a time when people are likely to be even more stressed than usual and more information, and disinformation, is circulating.

Jim Winters, head of fraud at Barclays said: 'Sadly, fraudsters are taking advantage of the current situation and are trying to trick people into providing sensitive information or making payments.

'If you receive a text or email, don't click on any links or provide personal information, such as your bank account password and financial details. This is a troubling time for everyone and it's easy to let your guard down on scams  stay vigilant and think before you click.'
Nimmi, the doe-eyed star of 1950s and '60s Hindi movies such as "Aan", "Barsaat" and "Deedar", has died after prolonged illness. She was 88.

The actor was brought to a suburban Juhu hospital on Wednesday after she complained of breathlessness. She died in the evening, family sources told PTI.

"She was admitted to the hospital on Wednesday afternoon after she complained of breathlessness. She passed away this evening. She had been unwell for quite sometime. She had been in and out of hospital this year," the source added.

Nimmi will be buried at a cemetery in Reay Road in Mumbai on Thursday afternoon.

The actor, born as Nawab Banoo, came to be known by her screen name 'Nimmi', which was given to her by filmmaker Raj Kapoor, who first spotted her as a shy teen on the sets of his film "Andaz".

Raj Kapoor cast her as the second lead in "Barsaat" in 1949. The film had three popular songs -- 'Barsaat me hamse mile tum', 'Hawa me udta jaye' and 'Meri Patli qamar hai' -- picturised on her.

After the success of "Barsaat", there was no turning back for Nimmi.

Though the actor often played the second fiddle to the popular heroines of her era, she established herself in the roles of ill-fated lover or the feisty village belle.

Such was her popularity that an extended dream sequence was added in "Aan" as distributors felt her character dies too early in the film.

Inspired from William Shakespeare's play "Taming of the Shrew", the film had Nadia and Dilip Kumar in lead roles but Nimmi as village belle Mangala left a lasting impression on viewers mind.

The film released with the title 'Savage Princess' in England and in France as "Mangla, fille des Indes" (Mangla, the daughter of India).

The actor had created headlined at the London premiere of the film by refusing to let actor Errol Flynn kiss her hand. According to reports, Nimmi told Flynn, 'You cannot do that, I'm an Indian girl", which led to headlines like 'unkissed girl of India' in the British papers.

Nimmi worked with top actors of her era, including Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Ashok Kumar in films "Sazaa", "Aan", "Uran Khatola", "Bhai-Bhai", "Kundan", "Mere Mehboob", "Pooja Ke Phool", "Akashdeep", "Love and God", which was her last film.

She left movies to get married to writer-director S Ali Raza, who passed away in 2007.

Mourning her death, Saira Banu said it was a personal loss to her and Dilip Kumar, who worked with Nimmi in five movies.

"Dilip sahab and I are feeling a deep sense of personal loss at the passing away of our beloved Nimmi ji. She was my elder. She had always maintained close contacts with sahab and I through her beautiful, loving prolific, hand-written personal letters in Urdu.

"Nimmi ji spent good time with my mother Naseem Banu and through my mother and my husband, I built a bond with her. Such stalwarts are rare. Nimmiji will be missed. May Allah bless her with Jannat," Banu tweeted.

Actor Rishi Kapoor wrote, "RIP. Thank you Nimmi aunty for all the blessings and love for Bobby on its premiere release. You were part of the RK family. Barsaat was your first film. Allha aapko Jannat naseeb kare. Ameen."



Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt said, "You may win your hearts desire, but in the end you are cheated of it by death. Goodbye Nimmiji".

"A beautiful and extremely talented actress and a beautiful and humble human being passes on. #RIP #Nimmi ji," tweeted Jaaved Jaaferi.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Egypts Education Minister Tarek Shawki has said that final year exams for third preparatory grade students have been cancelled and replaced with a research paper, to be prepared by students from the curricula studied in each course until 15 March, when schools were suspended nationwide due to the coronavirus.

In televised statements broadcasted on Thursday, Shawki said that all students will be awarded the full mark for the second term, subject to succeeding in their research, and that their final grades will be an average of marks for both terms.

Scores determine if the student will proceed to the secondary stage or switch to a technical study track.

The minister also announced that thanaweya amma (third year of secondary school) students will take their final year exams as scheduled in schools in June, also on the curricula studied until 15 March.

Third secondary grade students will take the final year exams as scheduled in June at school, with full consideration for health precautions and cooperation with all entitled state authorities to protect students, he added.

Every year, nearly 600,000 high school students take the highly competitive thanaweya amma exams in a number of subjects.

Scores in the exams determine whether students can attend university and which institution and subject they are eligible for.

Shawki gave his statements to announce the ministry's upcoming plans, given the current closure of schools and universities.

Egyptian pupils from third primary to second preparatory will not take final year exams this term but will instead prepare an online research paper for every course and submit it from curricula studied until 15 March, the minister announced.

"The students in these grades [third primary to second preparatory] will be able to contact class teachers via the ministry's electronic platform for every course for assistance to prepare research, Shawki said.

Students in the first secondary grade will take online exams at home on 5 April covering curricula studied until 15 March.

The second secondary grade will also take their final year tests online covering curricula studied until 15 March.

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Tawanda Zvakada of the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association said on Wednesday that Zimbabwean doctors and nurses have embarked on strike.

According to him, the strike was due to the lack of protective clothing in dealing with suspected coronavirus cases.

Our members are being exposed to the virus in their line of duty. We have just downed tools demanding protective clothing from the government, Zvakada told dpa.

The Zimbabwe Nurses Association also said that all nurses are withdrawing their services until their demands are met.



These include allowances, protective clothing, and water for hospitals.

Zimbabwe has recorded three coronavirus cases and one death.

The ailing countrys lack of preparedness has been exposed by the family of the deceased, prominent broadcaster Zororo Makamba.

According to the family, the hospital where the deceased was admitted had no running water and we were told to bring our own ventilator and power socket.

Follow Us on Facebook  @LadunLiadi; Instagram  @LadunLiadi; Twitter  @LadunLiadi; Youtube  @LadunLiadiTV for updates
The family of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson said on Wednesday that U.S. officials have concluded that Levinson has likely died while in the custody of Iran.

In a statement, Levinsons family said that it had no information about how or when the former FBI agent died, but that it happened before the COVID-19 outbreak. The family said that U.S. officials had received information that led the officials to determine that Levinson is likely dead.

White House national security adviser Robert OBrien said in a statement on Wednesday: While the investigation is ongoing, we believe that Bob Levinson may have passed away some time ago.

Iran must provide a complete accounting of what occurred with Bob Levinson before the United States can fully accept what happened in this case, he added.

President Donald Trump said that while he had not been told that Levinson was dead, things did not look good given Levinsons deteriorating health.

Its not looking promising  we feel terribly for the family, Trump said.

Its not looking great, but I wont accept that hes dead. They havent told us that hes dead, but a lot of people are thinking that thats the case.

Statement from the Levinson Family pic.twitter.com/0t3YLvGJIc  Help Bob Levinson (@HelpBobLevinson) March 25, 2020

It is impossible to describe our pain, the familys statement read. Our family will spend the rest of our lives without the most amazing man, a new reality that is inconceivable to us. His grandchildren will never meet him. They will know him only through the stories we tell them.

If not for the cruel, heartless actions of the Iranian regime, Robert Levinson would be alive and home with us today, the family said in their statement, noting that they have spent 13 years waiting for answers.

Thirteen years since we last saw him or had any contact with him. How those responsible in Iran could do this to a human being, while repeatedly lying to the world all this time, is incomprehensible to us. They kidnapped a foreign citizen and denied him any basic human rights, and his blood is on their hands, Levinsons family said.

Levinson disappeared from Irans Kish Island on March 9, 2007, after meeting a source, Daoud Salahuddin, an American Islamic militant who fled to Iran while facing charges in the murder of an Iranian embassy official based in Washington.

U.S. officials say that Levinson was working independently as a private investigator, seeking information on alleged corruption involving former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his family, said sources familiar with his work.

The family received proof-of-life photos and a video in late 2010 and early 2011, but Levinsons whereabouts and fate were not known.

A 2013, an Associated Press investigation revealed that Levinson had been sent on a mission by CIA analysts who had no authority to run such an operation. They were later forced out of the agency and several more were disciplined after an internal agency investigation.

Those who are responsible for what happened to Bob Levinson, including those in the U.S. government who for many years repeatedly left him behind, will ultimately receive justice for what they have done, the family statement said.

The family thanked Trump and his administration in their statement, saying that they have done all they could to make our family whole again. We are so grateful for their efforts.

The Trump administration on Nov. 4, 2019, offered a reward of up to $20 million for information about Levinson. This, combined with a $5 million reward that the FBI already had on offer, made a total of $25 million. At the time, Trump called for Iran to turn over Levinson, whom he said was kidnapped.

Later in November 2019, Iran responded to a United Nations query by saying that Levinson has an ongoing case in the Public Prosecution and Revolutionary Court of Tehran. Iran later clarified that the case was an investigation into his disappearance and not that Levinson was being prosecuted.

Trump said on Twitter on Nov. 10: If Iran is able to turn over to the U.S. kidnapped former FBI Agent Robert A. Levinson, who has been missing in Iran for 12 years, it would be a very positive step.

At the same time, upon information & belief, Iran is, & has been, enriching uranium. That would be a very bad step! he added.

Levinsons familys latest announcement comes just weeks after a federal judge in Washington held Iran liable for his disappearance, saying the country was in no uncertain terms responsible for Levinsons hostage-taking and torture.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

From The Epoch Times
Two victims of the typhoid epidemic in the Cheltenham-Moorabbin area died on Saturday. They were the first cases to terminate fatally since the outbreak was reported. One was a girl, aged 16 years, a resident of Beaumaris, who became ill while staying with her grandparents at Mount Evelyn, and was removed to Fairfield Hospital. The other was a youth, aged 15 years, from Cheltenham. He was admitted to Royal Melbourne Hospital on Friday.

During the week end 33 new cases were reported - 20 on Saturday and 13 yesterday, bringing the total to 255. The patients included three children from one family whose ages range from 3  to 15  years, and a member of the family of the dairyman who supplied milk in the affected area.

The town clerk of Moorabbin (Mr. W. B. Thomas) stated yesterday that a man and a woman employed on a dairy farm supplying the local distribution were to go into hospital to-day for observation as suspected carriers.

At the week end Mr. Thomas was advised that hospital accommodation for typhoid patients was fully taxed, and only urgent cases were admitted yesterday. He expected that further accommodation would be provided. About twenty cases were awaiting transfer to hospital.

Dairyman's Wife

One of the cusses admitted to hospital at the week end was the wife of a dairy farmer in the Narre Warren area. She had visited the Moorabbin district several times recently, and her sickness was made known to the medical officer of the Fern Tree Gully shire during his tour of the district. The supply of milk from this farm has been suspended. A warning was issued to all residents of the shire to be particularly careful to boil all milk and water in the unsewered areas. To-day the council will commence a campaign for greater cleanliness, and issues of phenyle [a disinfectant] and kerosene will be made available.
Unions have joined with employers to agree on extraordinary changes to their working conditions in an effort to stem the fallout from the dreaded coronavirus.

As millions of workers joined unemployment queues across Australia this week, unions and business leaders got together to agree on changes to awards that only weeks ago would have been laughed at.

On Thursday, just days after the hospitality industry agreed on a range of changes to its workers' awards, employers and unions struck a deal to allow hundreds of thousands of office workers to work from home, whatever time of the day, without penalties.

Airport workers and unionists protest at Melbourne Airport in Melbourne last November. They had called on airports and airlines to address the low wages, lack of full-time secure jobs and safety issues. Now they would be happy just to have a job

Unions and workers protested at the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne in April last year. The Change The Rules rally called for for better wages and increased job security. Now they have neither

Unoccupied dining tables and chairs at a restaurant in the central business district of Melbourne during lunch last week. It is even worse now

A little over a month ago, unions were preparing to line up outside the employment watchdog over disputes surrounding work hours.

In the hospitality industry, work hours, penalties and other entitlements had been under scrutiny for years.

The underpayment of salaried chefs and front-of-house staff at prominent restaurants last year saw hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fines dished out and big employers go under.

No bigger was former Masterchef judge George Calombaris, whose MAdE Establishment business  with its 14 restaurants  collapsed in February.

As angry Melburnians took out their anger on Calombaris' restaurant empire in July last year, those who were victims of his wage theft at the Hellenic Republic remained hopeful he was not run out of business for the sake of those who still worked there.

'It would be a shame if workers were to suffer even more over this whole sorry saga,' one worker said at the time.

It is not hard to imagine that under today's circumstances, Melburnians would have rallied to save Calombaris' skin - for the sake of his staff earlier ignored.

On Monday, thousands of hospitality staffers who had lost their jobs joined massive queues outside Centrelink offices across the country.

With even tougher stage 3 restrictions expected to be introduced by the Prime Minister any day, unions and employers are making previously unthinkable deals.

On Tuesday the hotel industry and unions reached an agreement to cut minimum work hours and suspend restrictions on duties to save jobs during the coronavirus crisis.

The move by the Australian Hotels Association and the United Workers Union was rushed through to try and save the jobs of the almost one million workers in the sector.

The parties applied and were allowed to suspend workplace rules in the hospitality award for up to three months, with a view to push it out for the remainder of the year should the crisis continue.

People line up outside a Centrelink office in Frankston, in Melbourne's south east, earlier this week. Many had never been unemployed in their lives until coronavirus hit

Former Masterchef judge George Calombaris was effectively run out of business by an unsympathetic Melbourne public after he was caught ripping off his staff. They, like most of the hospitality industry, are unemployed

George Calombaris' flagship restaurant Hellenic Republic was shunned by diners after a wage scandal broke out. His staff feared they would lose their jobs if his venues lost support. They did and then coronavirus finished them off

Changes to basic work conditions The hotel industry and unions reached an agreement to cut minimum work hours and suspend restrictions on duties to save jobs Changes to the hospitality award will last for three months Full-time employee's minimum ordinary hours drop to 22.8 hours a week Part-time employee can work an average of 60 per cent of their guaranteed hours per week Staff will be able to work across classifications Employers can also direct employees to take annual leave with 24 hours notice Changes to the clerks award will reduce the minimum hours of permanent and casual staff, Allow staff to work across classifications Provide employers' powers to direct staff to take annual leave and provide double leave at half pay Advertisement

Under the agreement pushed through the Fair Work Commission, a full-time employee's minimum ordinary hours will drop to 22.8 hours a week while a part-time employee could work an average of 60 per cent of their guaranteed hours per week.

Staff will be able to work across classifications, provided it is safe to do so and they have the necessary qualifications, such as a Responsible Serving of Alcohol certificate, while higher duties would still entail higher rates.

Employers can also direct employees to take annual leave with 24 hours notice, and provide flexibility for leave such as half-pay.

On Wednesday, Woolworths announced it was cutting back some store hours indefinitely, as it sought to fill orders during the coronavirus outbreak.

The changes kick-in today at 41 stores, which will only be open to customers from 11am to 6pm each day throughout the crisis.

UWU national president Jo-anne Schofield told the AFR its hospitality members wanted job security and certainty above all else.

'We hope this variation will help to deliver this,' she said.

'We have moved quickly to ensure the temporary changes provides a measured response that supports equity so that as many workers as possible can access hours of work.'

Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter described the developments as a 'common-sense' agreement and 'exactly what we need right now'.

'This could be the difference between survival and closure for some businesses and for some workers, the difference between staying employed or not,' he said.

With the ink from that deal hardly dry, other unions and industry leaders are scurrying to join minds to save businesses and jobs.

The hospitality industry has been destroyed overnight with the effective closure of businesses across the country due to the coronavirus outbreak

Ilias from Slate Restaurant Bar in Melbourne was continuing to trade through the coronavirus nightmare with deliveries

Melbourne quickly turned into a ghost town when coronavirus hit. Unions and employers are now working to save what jobs and businesses they can

On Thursday, employers and unions struck a deal to allow hundreds of thousands of administrative staff to work irregular hours without extra penalties while working from home.

Changes to the clerks award will also reduce the minimum hours of permanent and casual staff, allow staff to work across classifications, and give employers powers to direct staff to take annual leave and provide double leave at half pay.

The deal was reached after days of negotiations between the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Australian Industry Group and the Australian Services Union.

If approved by the Fair Work Commission, employers and employees will be allowed to agree to change the ordinary hours of work while working from home so that employees can manage their jobs around schooling their children without an employer facing additional costs and penalties for out-of-work being conducted outside of business hours.

AFR reported the provision will allow nine-to-five staff to do a standard eight-hour day but choose to work at night if convenient without normally related penalty rates.

Employers will also be able to engage casuals and part-time workers on two-hour shifts and only provide 75 per cent of a part-time and full-time employees' usual hours.

The changes are expected to affect about one million clerical, payroll and call centre staff.

No food outlet has been left untouched with even McDonald's forced to lock diners out

Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox praised the Australian Council of Trade Unions' co-operation and said he was seeking award changes to last the rest of the year to keep businesses operating and employees in jobs.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions has predicted between one and two million jobs will be lost over the coming weeks, including in retail, transport, hospitality, arts and personal services.

While industry leaders have praised the united front to the coronavirus crisis, the dire situation for all concerned remains obvious.

'Employers and employees in the hospitality sector face an invidious choice,' Fair Work president Justice Iain Ross said.

'The retention of as many employees as possible in employment, albeit on reduced hours, is plainly a priority.'

Both unions and employers remain hopeful the government will introduce 80 per cent wage subsidies similar to those introduced in the United Kingdom.

But Prime Minister Scott Morrison had said that Australians are unlikely to see a British-style wage subsidy here.

If changes to the clerks award are accepted, other industry groups are expected to seek changes to their awards over the coming days.
It seems all anyone wants to talk about this week is the coronavirus  and Joe Exotic.

As were all home self-distancing, the latest Netflix docuseries to commandeer the pop-culture consciousness is Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness," which dives deep into the bizarre underworld of exotic pets and barely legal roadside zoos.

The seven-part series, which premiered March 20, chronicles the antics of Joe Maldonado-Passage, the self-described Tiger King known as Joe Exotic, face of the G.W. Zoo in Oklahoma. The show follows Maldonado-Passages quest to take out  literally  Carol Baskin, an animal rights activist who has her own exotic animal sanctuary in Tampa, Florida. Lion-sized heaps of drama and criminal activity unfold  you need to watch this train wreck.

But long before Tiger King was a thing, New Jersey had its own Tiger Queen. Her name is Joan Byron-Marasek, infamously known as the Tiger Lady, after a 431-pound Bengal tiger escaped from her Jackson compound in 1999.

For eight hours on Jan. 27, 1999, the tiger terrified residents, who spotted it lurking in the woods. Rescuers tried to tranquilize it, but efforts were unsuccessful. The tiger was eventually shot dead in a driveway not far from its home, the 12-acre Tigers Only Preservation.

Tigers and dead deer are seen in a pen , as authorities investigate the property and the home in Jackson where the local resident known as the Tiger Lady lives. 1/29/99. (Star-Ledger file photo)SL

Initially, the origin of the tiger was a mystery. Speculation surrounded the nearby Six Flags Great Adventure Safari Park, also located in Jackson. After officials eliminated Great Adventure  employees were able to account for all nine of their tigers  suspicions immediately turned to Byron-Maraseks sanctuary, which was home to 20 big cats.

We only have one suspect: Joan Byron-Marasek, David Chanda, a wildlife biologist with the New Jersey Division of Fish, Game and Wildlife, said at the time.

The state said DNA tests proved the tiger came from Tigers Only, but Byron-Marasek denied it, touching off a lengthy legal battled that would stretch on for years.

''I want to assure everybody, especially our neighbors, that the tiger that was shot was not ours," she told reporters in July 1999, nearly six months after the tigers escape. "It did not escape from our property. I have no knowledge as to where that tiger came from.

I have devoted my entire adult life to the preservation of tigers," she continued. "All I ask is that I be allowed to continue my life's work in peace."

But officials didnt back down.

For nearly five years, Byron-Marasek waged legal battles to prevent the state from shutting her down. She ultimately was forced to stand aside and watch as dozens of animal rescue workers loaded her tigers into two large transportation vans and took them away to the Wild Animal Orphanage in San Antonio, Texas, in 2003.

Adding salt to the wound, the Tiger Lady was ordered by an Ocean County judge in 2004 to reimburse state wildlife officials for more than $144,555 expenses in relocating her Bengal tigers.

Workers at the Wild Animal Orphanage unload some of the South Dakota tigers after their arrival in Texas. The cage in which the large tiger is reclining is the same type of traveling pen the orphanage plans to use to remove the big cats at the Tigers Only Preservation Society in Jackson Township. (Star-Ledger file photo)SL

The Maraseks, who are now in their 80s, lost their property on Monmouth Road in Jackson to foreclosure in January 2017, records show. They had filed for bankruptcy in 2008. The last known addresses for them are P.O. boxes in Clarksburg, Monmouth County, and in New York City.

A story in the Asbury Park Press late last year said the property had been sold and is the future site of an industrial park.

NJ Advance Media has unsuccessfully tried to reach the Maraseks for an interview.

Their story is immortalized in newspaper archives around the country, some of which you can still find online with a quick Google search.

Still, its tough to captivate an audience like Joe Exotic, who, along with basking in the fur of his dozens of tigers, loves explosives, guns and making country music videos. Again, you just need to watch it.

Vinessa Erminio contributed research to this report.

Alex Napoliello may be reached at anapoliello@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexnapoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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People wearing face masks walk at the Olympic park in Beijing on March 24, 2020. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)

Beijing Censors Photo of Wuhan Locals Lining Up at Funeral Home

Chinese netizens are angry after internet censors deleted a picture circulating on social media of people lining up to pick up their family members ashes from a funeral home in Wuhan, ground zero of Chinas virus epidemic.

On March 25, health officials in Hubei Province lowered the risk level for Wuhan from high to medium, based on a three-tier system that corresponds to different levels of quarantining. The same day, some funeral homes began to allow locals to pick up ashes of their relatives who have died since the city was placed under lockdown in late January.

A Chinese netizen, who goes by the online moniker Mao Daqing, posted on Weibo, a social media platform similar to Twitter, a photo of a long line outside the Hankou Funeral Home in Wuhan, one of the citys seven government-run funeral parlors.

According to his personal description, Mao is from Beijing and the president of a Chinese firm.

Maos original post was soon deleted by authorities, drawing outcry from many Weibo users. Some successfully saved Maos original photo and reposted the picture on their accounts, while questioning why the photo was being censored.

Photo posted by Weibo user @ . Some wuhan ppl, after months of shelter-in-place, are waiting in line at Hankou Funeral Home to pick up family members ashes. This is heartbreaking. pic.twitter.com/pceIslxpa9  Tony Lin (social distancing aka introverting) (@tony_zy) March 25, 2020

One netizen from Beijing wrote: They [Chinese state-run media] only report on the dire situation [of the outbreak] in other countries. But talking about [Chinas outbreak] is forbidden.

Another netizen with the moniker Player Name 721 from Beijing sarcastically wrote that the picture must have been taken somewhere outside of China, such as Italy or the United States, since according to the Chinese regime the country has successfully combated the virus.

A Chinese netizen with the moniker Sha Qiu 2046, who describes himself as a reporter from southwestern Chinas Sichuan Province on his Weibo, said he also saw a long line of cars parked along the road to the Hankou Funeral Home. According to his Weibo posts, he arrived in Wuhan in early February.

In a March 26 post, he said there was tight security at the facility when he arrived at around 10 a.m. local time.

The entrance was under tight security, and there were plainclothes officers everywhere. Basically, whenever somebody raised their cellphones, they were immediately told to stop what they were doing, he wrote.

Earlier in February, The Epoch Times conducted an undercover investigation, calling funeral homes in Wuhan in order to understand the true death toll of the epidemic.

At the time, the Hankou Funeral Home confirmed that its crematorium was using 20 furnaces to cremate bodies 24 hours a day, the sudden rise in intake suggesting that more people were dying of the CCP virus than officially reported.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

Overseas, Chinas coverup of the CCP virus outbreak has been heavily criticized by officials, most recently by U.S. Secretary of the State Mike Pompeo at a G-7 meeting, in which he said the Chinese regime has and continues to withhold information about the virus, endangering peoples lives.

In a statement, the European Unions top diplomat also highlighted Beijings attempts to divert global attention away from its initial coverup of the CCP virus outbreak by presenting itself as a global leader in fighting the pandemic.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), in a statement on March 24, outlined how Chinese authorities censored key information during the initial days of the outbreak.

RSF demonstrates, based on the events in the early days of the crisis, that without the control and censorship imposed by the authorities, the Chinese media would have informed the public much earlier of the seriousness of the epidemic, saving thousands of lives and possibly avoiding the current pandemic, the rights group stated.
Welcome Guest! You Are Here:
To help keep you up to date, we have brought together in one place some useful links to the latest government updates, data analysis, policy changes and decisions by other agencies involved in the COVID-19 response.

The main updates from the government can be found HERE

Safety first

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has issued its principles for investigating workplace deaths linked to COVID-19. The guidance provides further information on how police services can strike the balance between their operational and health and safety duties. You can read it HERE

Note: it does not set out when equipment should be used or whether it can be reused.

College of Policing Guidance

The updated advice on using the emergency legislation is available HERE

It remains unchanged but clarifies the reasons people may have for being in public.

Data tracking on numbers and location

Public Health England is updating daily a tracker on the number of cases and where they are. GO HERE

Domestic abuse

The government has updated its guidance on accommodation for domestic abuse situations during this period HERE

Legal basis for action

The government has now passed the COVID-19 emergency bill setting the powers for police and when they can be used.

A police officer may issue a fixed penalty notice for 60 (reduced to 30 if paid within 14 days). If someone has already received a fixed penalty notice, the amount will increase to 120 and double on each further repeat offence. You can read the full guidance HERE

This Parliament briefing also reminds officers that existing legislation, including PACE, can also be used. READ IT HERE

The formal letter of designation sets out the business closure regulations and which businesses are affected HERE

Public Health England

Public Health England has also shared its contacts for regional and local centres and emergency contacts GO HERE

HR leads

There are updates from Public Health England on guidance for employees and employers GO HERE

Communications leads

Coronavirus Public Information Materials have been created for communications with the general public. These resources align with the national public information campaign that is running across the United Kingdom. This public health advice informs the general public about how they can

Practice good respiratory and hand hygiene.

Home Isolate if they have symptoms.

Please be aware that this is an evolving situation and public advice may change. Materials will be updated and changed as appropriate so please check daily for the latest version. All guidance documents currently in circulation GO HERE

Councils in England and Wales

Local authority leads for civil resilience are council chief executives and their lead organisation is SOLACE.

SOLACE is in contact with Public Health England (PHE), the Department for Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government regarding the emerging situation with the outbreak of the Coronavirus.

To view their latest statements on COVID-19 you can either visit the Solace News section of the website or go HERE

Police Oracle will update this page as further developments happen.

Want to help improve our hub? Contact chris.smith@policeoracle.com
A day after the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak



Committee offered its hospitals for the treatment of coronavirus patients, the Christian Coalition for Health on Thursday said its over 1,000 hospitals across the country with more than 60,000 beds can be availed for medical services pertaining to the pandemic.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the organisation offered all facilities in Christian hospitals across India for coronavirus treatment.

Fr Dr Mathew Abraham, C.Ss.R, President of the Christian Coalition for Health and Director General of the Catholic Health Association of India, expressed the solidarity of the coalition with the government as it faces the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his letter dated March 26, Abraham stated that the coalition will work in the best way possible for the health and wellbeing of the people of the nation to fight the pandemic.

The Christian Coalition for Health has over 1,000 hospitals with more than 60,000 inpatient beds across the country.

The letter, which was also signed by Dr. Priya John, General Secretary Christian Medical Association of India and Dr. Sunil Gokavi, Executive Director Emmanuel Hospital Association, informed the PM that preparations were already underway by the member hospitals to face the challenges posed by the contagious disease.

"Over the past weeks the member organisations have been holding coordinating meetings and webinars to help the hospitals for disaster preparedness for any eventuality of the spread of COVID-19 to the areas where the hospitals are situated," the letter said.

"The hospitals are already working with local government healthcare officials in this effort against this pandemic. Member hospitals that are situated in remote areas are preparing handmade masks out of cloth and PPE made out of large plastic bags as protective gear for their healthcare workers," it said.

COVID-19 has claimed 16 lives in India so far and the total number of positive cases has reached 694, the Union health ministry said on Thursday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
BEIJING, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- On March 25, Shandong Linglong Tyre Co., Ltd. donated 300,000 disposable surgical masks, 2,000 sets of medical protective clothing, and 10,000 COVID-19 antibody test kits to the Serbian government through the Embassy of the Republic of Serbia in the People's Republic of China. These medical supplies will arrive in Serbia soon. This is also the first time that Linglong Tire has donated to a country outside of China since the global spread of COVID-19.

On March 30, 2019, the project launch ceremony of Linglong's second overseas manufacturing base, Linglong International Europe D.O.O. Zrenjanin, was held in Serbia successfully. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic also made his appearance at this ceremony and delivered his speech. As an important foreign investment project in Serbia, the completion of this project will offer job opportunities to local people, raise their income and living standards and promote local economic development.

Meanwhile, since the construction of its project in Serbia, Linglong actively fulfills its corporate responsibilities and gives back to the local government and people through the sponsorship of Serbian SuperLiga and Sino-European Chess Elite Tournament in Serbia, which could better strengthen the culture exchanges between China and Serbia and improve Linglong's brand awareness in Serbia.

As a tire maker focusing on its international development, Linglong always actively fulfills its corporate responsibilities to the countries where its overseas manufacturing bases are located. The donation of medical supplies demonstrates Linglong's responsibility to work together with Serbian people to overcome this crisis.

Currently, the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic has come to a critical period. In response to the call of building community with shared future for mankind, Linglong Tire will pay close attention to the global epidemic development and make its contribution to the victory of the battle against the COVID-19.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1137846/Linglong_Tire.jpg
It is perhaps a less-known fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modis political career was dramatically transformed by a natural disaster. The alleged mishandling of relief operations during the 2001 Kutch earthquake by the Keshubhai Patel government in Gujarat forced the central Bharatiya Janata Partys hand. Modi was sent to Gandhinagar. The rest is history.

Covid-19 is not a natural disaster but a once-in-a-century global pandemic. Modi could bring an element of order to relief and rehabilitation efforts in Kutch because it was a controllable situation. By contrast, a medical emergency such as Covid-19 is a crisis plagued with extreme uncertainty. From autocracies like China to open societies like the United States (US), almost every country is struggling to bring the virus under control. In that sense, the pandemic poses the biggest challenge to modern-day leadership, including that of Modi.

Modis leadership style has been built around his image as a political strongman; his demagoguery and muscularity has a cult-like following. His transformation from a Hindutva hero to a governance guru has revolved around a 24*7 image-making machine and is best exemplified by a highly successful one liner during the 2019 campaign: Modi hai toh mumkin hai (anything is possible if Modi is there). That notion of seeming political invincibility has ensured a larger-than-life image where the lines between myth and reality are blurred. A pandemic like Covid-19 has no place for myth-making to control the narrative. The viral infection cannot be countered with sharp rhetoric or glitzy events. An election can be won by a high-pitched presidential-style campaign but a disease can only be conquered by medical-scientific discovery. To that extent, the virus exposes the limitations of the strongman cult.

Compare, for example, the 21-day national curfew announcement (deshbandi) to control Covid-19 with Modis previous dramatic decision to demonetise high value currency in 2016 (notebandi). The latter, arguably, was a self-goal, one that was driven not as much by necessity as hubris, a conviction that massive State intervention would end the menace of black money. It was a decision based on individual judgment and not built through any form of consensus-building with the key stakeholders. By contrast, the current lockdown is adhering to an accepted global playbook that views social distancing as an imperative to limit the casualties. While notebandi could be justifiably criticised for chaotically disrupting the economic cycle, no one can quarrel with the intent or need for a three-week deshbandi to mitigate the impact of Covid-19.

Where the problem arises is when a coercive step is taken without any matching degree of compassion towards those most-affected by unbridled State power. Clamping down on the publics right to move freely is understandable. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures or, as the prime minister put it, jaan hai to jahaan hai (when you have life, you have the world). But to impose a clampdown without an effective social security safety net for the most vulnerable groups is a recipe for a potential disaster. Indias affluent, for example, may well have recovered from the demonetisation blip in their fortunes. But those living on the margins in the informal sector have not. Likewise, it is small and microbusinesses and daily wage labourers who stand to lose the most from an extended clampdown on economic activity. Only a massive, well-directed financial package for the poor, especially the urban poor, can at least partly soften the inevitable social and economic costs of deshbandi. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharamans announcement on Thursday is a welcome first step, but much more needs to be done.

The Covid-19 challenge calls for not only strong, decisive leadership but also one with a human touch. backed by intelligent policymaking. It demands a new citizen-State engagement where the mighty arms of the State  be it the police or the local bureaucracy  are trusted more than feared. Social distancing requires a high measure of individual and collective discipline from the citizenry, but also obliges governments to deliver on their promises of ensuring that essential services supply links are not broken in any manner. The lockdown is the greatest-ever test of the efficacy of last-mile delivery systems in this country.

Moreover, a demonetisation order could be issued like a firman from an imperious power at the Centre; a national lockdown calls for genuine Centre-state coordination where cooperative federalism is practised in letter and spirit. Indeed, this is as much a test of Modis ability to influence people as it is of chief ministers to connect with the masses. This is not a moment for political one-upmanship. The Oppositions arguments over whether the government could have been better prepared to deal with the coronavirus outbreak can wait. Nor is it a time for celebratory nationalistic fervour where self-styled vigilantes roam the streets to enforce a lockdown or revel in a janata curfew (peoples curfew) with triumphal public processions. Yes, we need decisive leadership but also a more dignified, empathetic one.

Post-script: When the Parliament session was pushed into the third week of March, I asked a minister why the houses had not been adjourned much earlier in the wake of Covid-19. He looked at me grumpily: Do you journalists think you know more than us! VVIP conceit must have no place in the age of the coronavirus.

Rajdeep Sardesai is a senior journalist and author. His latest book is 2019: How Modi Won India

The views expressed are personal

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In thinly veiled criticism on social media, China's envoy in Kazakhstan recently seemed to ridicule the U.S. government's initial reaction to the coronavirus crisis and its "inability" to contain it.

Ambassador Zhang Xiao hit out at an unnamed country on Facebook earlier this month for wasting "valuable time" in the early days of the crisis while "China was winning the battle" against the virus in an effort to save the world from the pandemic.

Zhang continued that the unnamed country was, instead, probably engaged in "geopolitical games" and mud-slinging against China, calling it the "Chinese virus" until the coronavirus "spread to all its states," Zhang wrote.

U.S. President Donald Trump has used the term "Chinese virus" several times during White House briefings on the coronavirus, despite China's objections to use of the term. And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called it the "Wuhan virus" to cite the city where the pandemic first broke out in December.

Zhang also accused the unnamed country on his personal account of lying and hiding the real numbers of coronavirus infections as it faced "a shortage of masks and equipment" and "its stock markets crashed."

The same post also appeared on the Chinese Embassy's Twitter account.

'No Americans Here'

The Chinese Embassy in Kazakhstan is known for frequently using social media to attack the United States on various subjects, from Washington's stance on the plight of ethnic Muslims in China to problems along the U.S.-Mexican border.

But Zhang's latest post sparked unprecedented, angry reactions from many Kazakhs on social media, who hit back at him by calling the comments "misplaced" and "undiplomatic."

"This is the account of an embassy in Kazakhstan...Americans dont read it," Assem Zhapisheva, an activist and journalist, replied to the ambassador's critical post against the United States. Zhapisheva went on to say that such a post was inappropriate for a diplomat to share with the public.

She later posted a screenshot showing that the ambassador had blocked her account. Zhapisheva wrote that she stood by her criticism. "He is a diplomat, he should exercise some self-restraint," she wrote. "The words he uses remind one of the Soviet-era propaganda."

Zhapisheva wasn't the only one whose account was blocked by Zhang for condemning him. At least 40 people in Kazakhstan said the Chinese ambassador -- or those who handle his social-media accounts -- had blocked them after they posted their critical responses.

'Stop Killing Muslims'

Twitter user @kamaluga tweeted a screenshot of his reply to the ambassador's post and said he was blocked too. The reply said: "Your statement is disgusting and, moreover, it doesnt do any justice to Chinas image. Besides, stop killing Muslims in China."

The latter comment was an apparent reference to reports about Chinas crackdown on hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, forcing them to live in "reeducation camps." China says the camps in the western Xinjiang Province are used for "vocational education and training."

Twitter user @qoshpendi wrote that his account was blocked for this reaction: "So much hysteria on an official account, perhaps it's been hacked."

Another user, Elmira, also posted a screenshot of her reply, after which her account was blocked by the Chinese diplomat. "I don't get it why the ambassador would share such a post. As far as I know, ambassadors are always very diplomatic and carefully choose their words not to provoke conflicts."

Twitter user @anubeck wrote that he was blocked for replying, "Isnt it clear where the virus came from?"

Twitter Tirades Against Washington

As pointed out by Kazakhs on social media, the Chinese Embassy in Nur-Sultan frequently targets the United States, a topic many find irrelevant for the Chinese Embassy in Kazakhstan and the host country.

In December, the embassy shared a post about how much money the United States owes to the United Nations' budget as a member state. "See for yourself. The United States today owes the United Nations $491 million.... The United States, the largest developed world power remains the UN's largest debtor, forcing the organization to curtail its activities to save money.

In November, the Chinese Embassy's account went on a Twitter tirade against the United States, criticizing Washington's stance on the plight of Muslim minorities in China and several other random issues.

In a series of tweets, the embassy mentioned the crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border, including the time when U.S. border agents separated some children from their parents after they were detained for illegally crossing the border.

The embassy went on to claim that gender inequality in the United States is rampant and increasing.

It is not clear why the Kazakh ambassador and embassy in Nur-Sultan are so active in their public criticism of Washington. But the embassy attacks don't spare foreign media, either.

On March 5, the embassy's Twitter account accused Western media of spreading misleading information about China and the coronavirus.

Foreign media...is full of prejudice and its not the first time its spreading misinformation. They always cover certain events in an arrogant and biased manner. They have long lost the trust of the public, it wrote.

The following day, Zhang took to Facebook to criticize the U.S. State Department for presenting the Women of Courage Award to Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh from China whose testimony has helped expose the so-called "reeducation camps" in northwestern China.

The embassy's Twitter account shared the link to the post, captioning it: "USA, the biggest source of the ideological virus."

But both the ambassador and the embassys accounts have avoided U.S. criticism in recent days after the backlash from Kazakhs.

Instead, the ambassador has been focusing on bilateral cooperation between China and Kazakhstan and Beijing's progress in battling the new coronavirus and helping others.
Border guards note that the detection rate of passengers with high temperature is too low

During the month of temperature screening, more than 2.7 million citizens were checked at the borders of Ukraine, and only 52 of them had fever. This was reported by the press service of Interior Ministry on its Facebook page.

According to the head of the State Border Guard Service, Serhii Deineko, the detection rate of passengers with high temperature is too low.

"This indicates that people are taking antipyretic drugs before crossing the border, and we cannot detect people who do not have clear symptoms," Deineko said.

In total, according to the head of the State Border Guard Service, about 200 thousand compatriots have returned to Ukraine during March.

As we reported earlier, as of Thursday morning, on March 26, 156 cases of coronavirus were officially confirmed in Ukraine.

"According to the Center of Public Health, as of 10:00, on March 26, there are 156 laboratory-confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ukraine, including five deaths, one patient has recovered and has already been discharged from hospital," the message reads.
New Book by WSU Professor Addresses Utahs Air Quality Problems and Solutions

March 26, 2020

OGDEN, Utah - A newly released collection of edited essays titled Utahs Air Quality Issues: Problems and Solutions, provides an easy-to-understand overview of challenges to the state caused by pollution.

The volume, edited by Hal Crimmel, Weber State University English department chair, is a collaboration among scholars from a variety of fields. It outlines the causes, impacts and possible solutions to Utahs air-quality concerns.

Utah has an air-pollution problem, Crimmel said. Were not alone; many cities across the country and around the world do as well. Citizen activism, enlightened public policy and technological advances can make a real difference in improving things.

According to Crimmel, Utahs Air Quality Issues: Problems and Solutions is the first book to focus exclusively on the states poor air quality. Specific areas throughout Utah have been ranked among the worst in the nation, including the metropolitan Wasatch Front.

The authors provide easy-to-adopt life-style changes that could have a big impact on improving air quality. They advise that residents keep thermostats turned down and lights off when not at home. Drivers should not let a vehicle idle, and Utahns should not burn wood, which contributes a disproportionate percentage of pollution in winter months. Voters should also elect candidates who support clean-air legislation.

I would characterize what I do in the classroom as the environmental humanities  blending the insights of multiple disciplines and focusing them on issues having to do with water, land and air, Crimmel said. As an English professor, my skill is helping students see there are multiple ways to address environmental issues. Communicating these issues to the public is of utmost importance. As a writer, my goal is to focus on environmental issues from an interdisciplinary perspective and make these insights accessible to the general reader.

Crimmel earned a bachelor of arts from Colby College, a masters and doctorate in English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is a Rodney H. Brady Distinguished Professor and was the co-chair of WSUs Faculty Senate Environmental Issues Committee. He also has presented regularly at national conferences, published five books and contributed to numerous articles and several films. Crimmel has been a Fulbright Scholar and a visiting professor in Germany, China and Austria.

Utahs Air Quality Issues: Problems and Solutions is available for purchase in multiple book stores and sites.

Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University.
A delivery driver in Missouri was arrested Wednesday after he broke into a womans home where hed delivered groceries earlier in the day, police say.

A 29-year-old woman in Maplewood was asleep on the couch when police say she woke up to Anthony Thomas, 22, calling her name., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. He then demanded to have sex with her, according to the newspaper.

Anthony Thomas, 22, is charged with first degree burglary after police say he returned to a womans Missouri home and broke in after delivering groceries there earlier in the day.

Thomas ran away after the woman screamed and she quickly called police, the Post-Dispatch reported.

The woman told officers that she recognized Thomas because he had delivered groceries to her home earlier that day, KSDK reported.

Police were able to determine the mans identity through the grocery delivery service, according to the outlet. Thomas ultimately admitted to sneaking into the womans home through a bathroom window, KSDK reported.

Police say Thomas delivered the womans groceries around 4 p.m. then returned with an item he said he forgot to deliver around 7 p.m., KMOV reported. Officials believe the second trip was an attempt to determine if anyone else was in the home.

The woman identified Thomas in a police line-up, KMOV reported. He was arrested and charged with first degree burglary and his bail is set at $50,000, according to the outlet.

The name of the grocery delivery service was not released.
The coronavirus crisis caught Israel with its political system at a prolonged impasse. Israel is currently ruled by an interim government endowed with limited authority, as it has been for the past 15 months, and its newly elected Knesset is barely functioning since being sworn in earlier this month.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick off the mark in responding to the question of who should manage the coronavirus crisis. He surrounded himself with a team of advisers and close associates and started making decisions in what has turned into an almost one-man show. Sources well-versed in the decision-making process tell Al-Monitor that from the very start, the prime minister has been running a hub consisting of representatives from relevant government agencies, chief among them the ministries of Health and Finance.

On the side of the Ministry of Health, two people have the lead: Director-General Moshe Bar-Siman-Tov, an articulate economist who has become the public face of the crisis management, and head of Public Health Services Sigal Sadetzki, an expert in radiology and epidemiology. The ministry sets the professional tone in handling the crisis and is also the most hard-line agency in demanding radical steps to tackle it.

To Netanyahus credit, he is also open to hearing the views of former senior health officials, scientists and experts from other disciplines who are invited to internal discussions. For example, following the advice of external experts, Netanyahu decided to greatly increase COVID-19 testing, a policy the Ministry of Health was reluctant to adopt.

Finance Ministry officials also hold sway over Netanyahu in trying to minimize various lockdown measures to avoid a complete shutdown of the economy, arguing that the heavy economic toll is more severe than that of the epidemic.

One of the aides with the most influence over Netanyahu in this crisis is his national security adviser, Meir Ben-Shabat. The two enjoy a close relationship, and Ben-Shabat has become the uber crisis CEO, making tough decisions such as rejecting a proposal by Interior Minister Aryeh Deri to delay by a month the move to daylight saving time, which goes into effect on the night between March 27-28.

As mentioned, the professional teams around Netanyahu are the ones tasked with many crucial decisions. Netanyahu only convened the politicians  his government ministers  to obtain their required approval of legal measures, such as the adoption of emergency regulations. The few government sessions have been conducted by phone or video conference.

One of the ministers closest to Netanyahu tells Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that the political chaos and the incumbency of an interim, transitional government allow Netanyahu greater control and leeway in decision-making than he would have enjoyed under normal circumstances. To his credit, he hears different views and enables complex discussions, said the minister. However," the minister added, "his powers are far more extensive than those of a prime minister in a regular government, perhaps also because of his strong personality. And maybe thats a good thing. We are not in China where authorities have far greater powers, but a strong ability to govern is needed these days.

Those not enamored of this approach are members of the political opposition who fought Netanyahu when he authorized the Shin Bet security agency to electronically track coronavirus carriers violating their self-isolation requirement or those who unwittingly came into contact with a known carrier. The Shin Bet, it should be recalled, is under the prime ministers direct purview and oversight.

Knesset member Gabi Ashkenazi of the opposition Blue and White party, a popular former army chief of staff who headed the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in the previous Knesset, demanded an emergency discussion of the decision. However, Netanyahu authorized the surveillance even before the lawmakers had time to form a new Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Ashkenazi claims the government overstepped its authority, dubbing the move political thievery. In an interview with Israel's Channel 11, Ashkenazi argued, It is unfitting that the use of such measures be approved in this manner without appropriate public and parliamentary oversight.

At the same time, pressure has been exerted to hand over management of the crisis to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and other defense agencies. Defense Minister Naftali Bennett has been convening discussions with various teams and military forums, chief among them the Homefront Command, which is tasked with the protection of the population in times of war and other emergencies. He has also instructed top defense and security officials to be prepared for immediate activation. Bennett also calls press conferences every two to three days. In the latest one on March 25, he presented data contradicting senior Health Ministry officials, expressing indirect criticism over the governments reluctance to declare an official state of emergency.

A senior Defense Ministry source told Al-Monitor that the National Emergency Management Authority is the agency authorized to deal with national crises, but it is unprepared and lacks real powers  yet another factor explaining the ease with which Netanyahu took over full control.

At a seminar on the coronavirus crisis and Israels national security held March 16 by the Institute of National Security Studies, one of the participants whose name was not noted argued that "the demand that the security system should participate in the civilian efforts against the coronavirus outbreak  may turn out to be mistaken due to the unknown duration of the epidemic, during which organizations will be diverted from their primary tasks. In other words, the experts raised concerns that the preparedness of the IDF and other agencies to address regional threats could be impaired if they divert resources to handle the fight against the epidemic.

Former head of the National Security Council Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland tells Al-Monitor that Netanyahu is unwilling to hand over control to Bennett for political reasons alone, and harshly criticizes the handling of the crisis by the government and its leader. Netanyahu, he says, is wrong in appointing himself the sole arbitrator who knows everything and can deal with anything.

On the other hand, Netanyahu has won points for his frequent television appearances assuring the people that the management of the crisis is in reliable and capable hands, even if it entails tough, unpopular decisions. Is Netanyahu taking advantage of the political imbroglio to consolidate control and test the boundaries of democracy? It would appear so, but some argue that given the unprecedented emergency, that is exactly what the nation needs.
MBABANE - Foreign nationals who entered the country through the border gates were given only 24 hours to sort themselves out and leave the kingdom.

This was evident yesterday at the Ngwenya Border Gate.



Foreign nationals, who consisted mostly of South Africans, were allowed to enter the country for only 24 hours, sort out their business and make their way back to their native country.

Normally, if one spends a day extra from the given ones, their passports are revoked for two years and if its more than 30 days, the blacklisting escalates to five years.



Some of them were spotted on the Eswatini side of the border frustrated on how they would go back to SA.



Informal



Some of them said they were planning to cross the border back to South Africa and then find informal crossing areas to re-enter the kingdom so that they could spend as much time as they wanted in Eswatini.

It was noted that some of them were emaSwati who owned SA passports.



They cited visiting relatives as their reason to enter the country, however, they were still given one day.

Worth noting, however, is that the lockdown in South Africa became effective at midnight which means they were not going to make it back to SA.

Some of those interviewed stated that they were fleeing from the full lockdown in South Africa and felt the one announced in the kingdom was more accommodative.



While at the screening point at the border, details of where they were headed, particularly foreign nations to and their cellphone numbers were taken.

This was said to be part of the precautions to keep tabs on their whereabouts and where they were going to.



Meanwhile, the Royal Eswatini Police Service flooded the Ngwenya Border Gate to assist people who were entering in the country to do so smoothly.

They were seen calling upon the travellers to maintain a one metre distance between themselves while standing in a queue to the Immigration officers to stamp their passports.



Also, some were assisting the people to sanitise before they proceeded to screening and to stamp their passports on the Eswatini side of the border.

When called for comment, Acting Chief Immigration Officer Makhosi Simelane said it was the same situation with emaSwati who were travelling to SA in that they were also given 24 hours.



He stated, however, that those who were given a day in the country were going to be assisted at the Immigration Offices in the Ministry of Home Affairs.

He said there was no new regulation that was directed to them for the duration of the lockdown hence they were going to assist those who needed additional days in the country as they did on normal basis.



He further mentioned that they were aware that some of the SA passport holders were emaSwati and had homes in the kingdom.

They should come to the Immigration office to be assisted with additional days, he said.



Simelane said he was not aware if the same services were availed by their SA counterparts in as far as giving extra days was concerned.
CHISINAU (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th March, 2020) Moldovan Prime Minister Prime Minister Ion Chicu on Thursday declared the week from March 30-April 3 non-working for public sector employees due to the coronavirus disease outbreak.

Earlier in the day, Moldovan President Igor Dodon proposed granting public sector workers paid leave for the entire next week in a bid to curb the spread of COVID-19.

"Next week in Moldova is declared non-working for public sector employees, with the exception of medical institutions, as well as law enforcement agencies. In fact, for nine consecutive days, starting on Saturday, everyone should stay home. These days will be worked after the state of emergency period ends," Chicu said at a press briefing following a meeting of the national emergency commission.

All workers and services engaged in fighting COVID-19 in Moldova will also be exempt from paid leave, Chicu said.

According to the Moldovan prime minister, if the spread of the disease continues unimpeded, there will be some 2,000 infected people in the country by April 10 - he said this figure would become a serious challenge for the national healthcare system.

The latest update on COVID-19 toll in Moldova from the health ministry stated 177 confirmed cases, including one fatality.

Since March 17, a 60-day state of emergency has been in place in Moldova. The country has suspended air traffic entirely and closed its land borders. All public gatherings were banned, including for cultural and religious purposes; schools were closed, along with public food services. Effective Wednesday, all citizens aged over 63 have been banned to leave home for non-essential reasons.
YEREVAN, MARCH 26, ARMENPRESS. No death case from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been registered in Armenia, Healthcare ministers spokesperson Alina Nikoghosyan said on Facebook, urging media outlets not to spread unconfirmed news that contradicts the official information.

Up to now the ministry of healthcare has worked openly and transparently, and fortunately, no death case has been reported in Armenia so far. We assure you that any information, be it good or bad, will be officially published by the healthcare ministry, she said.

On March 16 Armenia declared a 30-day state of emergency to fight against the spread of the novel coronavirus. The state of emergency is effective until April 14, at 17:00.

According to the latest data, the number of coronavirus cases in Armenia is 290, 18 patients have recovered.

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
Payments to Social Security beneficiaries will go out automatically

According to the IRS, Social Security recipients and railroad retirees who werent required to file federal tax returns for 2018 or 2019 will receive $1,200 stimulus payments automatically based on information contained in their 1099 benefit statements. No additional paperwork is required, per the latest guidance from the IRS.

The IRS reversed an earlier decision and now says it will look at 1099 benefit statements (Form SSA-1099 and Form RRB-1099) to get the information it needs to send out the $1,200 payments automatically in the same manner monthly benefits are received. The vast majority of Social Security recipients receive monthly benefits by direct deposit.

"AARP fought hard to ensure these payments would go to people who rely on Social Security and aren't required to file taxes, said Bill Sweeney, AARP's senior vice president for government affairs. It was just wrong to ask them to fill out extra paperwork, especially in the middle of this crisis, to get the benefits they need. We are very thankful the IRS reversed course and agreed to work with Social Security to get these checks out automatically without extra paperwork or red tape."

SSDI disability beneficiaries also to get payments automatically

Stimulus payments will also go out automatically to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) recipients who were not required to file tax returns for 2018 or 2019. Like Social Security beneficiaries, SSDI beneficiaries also receive SSA-1099 benefits statements every January, which the IRS will use to send the payments.

SSI recipients and VA beneficiaries will get automatic payments

On April 15, the Social Security Administration announced that SSI recipients without dependent children will receive their stimulus payments automatically without having to file any additional forms. The stimulus payment will be sent to these SSI recipients the same way they get their normal benefits, either through direct deposit, Direct Express debit card, or paper check. The Treasury Department says it expects payments for SSI recipients to go out no later than early May.

The IRS also has announced that people who receive Compensation and Pensions (C&P) benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs will receive their stimulus payments automatically even if they have not filed tax returns for 2018 or 2019. The IRS, which made the announcement on April 17, did not say when the stimulus payments would be sent to VA beneficiaries.

People who receive VA benefits, Social Security retirement, SSDI or SSI benefits, and railroad retirement benefits who also have dependent children under the age of 17 who qualify for stimulus money should complete the IRS online form for non-filers in order to get the additional $500 per child payments for these dependents. Beneficiaries in these group who do not provide this information to the IRS soon will have to wait until later to receive the payments for dependents. On April 24, the IRS announced the SSI and VA beneficiaries had until May 5 to use the non-filers web tool to provide information about their eligible child dependents. Otherwise, they will receive $1,200 automatically and, by law, the additional $500 per eligible child would be paid in association with a return filing for tax year 2020.

The IRS also said that Direct Express account holders may use the IRSs Non-Filer tool, but they cannot receive their and their childrens payment on their Direct Express card. They may only enter non-Direct Express bank account information for direct deposit, or leave the bank information empty to receive a paper check by mail.

For everyone else who was not required to file 2018 or 2019 tax returns, and who are not Social Security recipients, SSDI recipients, VA beneficiaries, or railroad retirees, the IRS has created a free, online tool you can use to quickly register to receive your stimulus payment if you dont typically file a tax return due to your income level. People who may fall into this category include some low-income workers.

The tool is available only on IRS.gov. You can access the registration by clicking this link or going to the IRS website and looking for Non-filers: Enter Payment Info Here. The tool will ask you for some basic information including your name, address, Social Security number, and dependents. The IRS then will confirm your eligibility, calculate how much you should receive, and send a stimulus payment. If you enter your bank account information, the IRS will deposit your payment directly in your account. Otherwise, your payment will be mailed to you. Using the tool will not result in any taxes being owed.

May 13 was the deadline for people to use the online tool to enter their bank account information in order to receive their stimulus payments via direct deposit. Those people who did not include their banking information on either their 2018 or 2019 tax returns and also did not submit that information using the online tool before the May 13 deadline will receive their stimulus payments as paper checks in the mail rather than direct deposits.

The IRS says it will continue looking for ways to send stimulus payments automatically to people who did not file a tax return in 2018 or 2019. The agency says people in this group can either use Non-Filers: Enter Payment Info option now or wait as the IRS explores possible automatic payment options for these groups.

AARP urged the IRS to make automatic stimulus payments to SSI and VA beneficiaries without the burden of filing any additional paperwork.

The IRS started sending out stimulus payments in mid-April. You may check on the status of your stimulus payment by using this IRS website.
A pple is donating millions of masks to healthcare workers battling the coronavirus around the world.

CEO Tim Cook took to Twitter to announce that Apple had sourced 10 million masks for medical staff in the US alone.

He added that "millions more" would be sent to the regions hardest hit by Covid-19 around the world.

Apple closed all of its stores outside of China in response to the virus on March 14.

Tim Cook made the announcement on Twitter / Getty Images

Tim Cook tweeted: "Proud to share weve been able to source 10M masks for the US and millions more for the hardest hit regions in Europe. Our ops teams are helping to find and purchase masks from our supply chain in coordination with governments around the world.

"Our teams at Apple have been working to help source supplies for healthcare providers fighting COVID-19. Were donating millions of masks for health professionals in the US and Europe. To every one of the heroes on the front lines, we thank you.

"Its never been more important to support each other. Were making a substantial donation including medical supplies to Protezione Civile in Italy, to help the heroic first responders, medical personnel & volunteers working tirelessly to protect & save lives."

In the video, Mr Cook thanked the medical staff and key workers for the work they are doing on the frontline of the pandemic.

Mr Cook said: "Hi It's Tim, I'm working from home like I know many of you are doing and I just wanted to take a moment to encourage you to do what the experts are suggesting that we all do, to stay at home whenever possible, and when not possible make sure you're placing six feet of distance between you and anyone else out there.

"I am very pleased to tell you this morning that Apple has sourced, procured and is donating 10 million masks to the medical community in the United States.

"These people deserve our debt of gratitude for all of the work they're doing on the frontlines.

"I also want to take a moment this morning to recognise the people that we're all counting on to work from the warehouse workers to the delivery people to the people that are stocking the shelves at our local supermarkets and pharmacies, these people also deserve our debt of gratitude.

He added that that he believed that we would "rise to the occasion".

US Senate passes 2.2 trillion dollar aid package to fight coronavirus

It came as the United States Senate passed an unparalleled $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems engulfed by the coronavirus pandemic, on Wednesday evening.

The unanimous vote came despite misgivings on both sides about whether it goes too far or not far enough and capped days of difficult negotiations as Washington confronted a national challenge unlike it has ever faced.
Sampling sites to be established in front of all hospitals.

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Coronavirus testing should change significantly as of Friday, March 27.

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While currently there are some 300-400 samples tested every day, this number is expected to increase significantly due to the involvement of private labs. The ambition is to test as many as 3,000 samples a day soon, PM Igor Matovic told the press on March 26.

Peter Lednicky of the Slovak Laboratories Association said that the private labs can carry out some 1,200 tests a day, with that number projected to increase. Next week, there may be as many as 2,000 tests, he added.

Experts consider the mass taking of samples and their testing the best weapon against the coronavirus disease, the Sme daily reported.

New sampling sites

The system of taking samples will also change. There should be a sampling site established in front of every hospital. Until now, the samples have been taken by just three or four hospitals, Matovic said.

The sampling sites will be established not only by the state and private labs, but also the army, according to Sme.

Moreover, the private labs should secure the collection for all labs, regardless of them being state or private.

The private labs will receive 48 for taking and testing a sample. This price includes collection and transport to the labs, Sme wrote.

People will be notified of both positive and negative results. This information will also go to general practitioners.

We want trained people to notify of a positive result, Matovic said, as quoted by the TASR newswire.

Testing of risk groups will start

Related article

Related article Despite a daily capacity of 1,000, only 300 tests are being carried out Read more

The samples will be taken only from people suspected of being infected upon identification by doctor.

Testing of individuals without symptoms has been suggested by several private labs, including Alpha Medical and Medirex. This is not an option for now, though.

At the same time, the state will launch coordinated mass testing of all risk groups in order to reveal the potential infection as soon as possible, said Health Minister Marek Krajci of the Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OLaNO).

We need to test medical staff and people who need to undergo urgent surgery, he said, as quoted by TASR.

Currently, only people who met the criteria have been tested, and they had to wait for the results for several days. One of the reasons was that the responders lacked protective equipment, according to Matovic.

Chief hygienist Jan Mikas expects that after these changes come into force, the waiting time will shorten and the capacity of tested samples will increase, TASR reported.

Red zones to be established

The so-called red zones in hospitals where patients positively diagnosed with the coronavirus will be treated, will very likely be ready in seven days, Krajci said.

While in Bratislava there will be pavilion blocks, in Kosice it will be one hospital and in Martin two pavilions.

We will adjust to the situation, Krajci said, as quoted by TASR, adding they may be gradually extended.

No sanctions for not wearing the masks yet

No sanctions have been given so far for violating the order to wear masks outside ones home, Mikas said.

Weve adopted measures to make people realise how important it is to wear a mask, he added, as quoted by TASR. If the number violating these measures increases, well find ways to sanction these people.
Keep your distance. Its probably not feasible to keep a six-foot radius at all times in a grocery store, but try for at least three feet, as recommended by the World Health Organization. The majority of respiratory droplets we produce while breathing and talking fall to the ground  and onto our hands  within a few feet from us, so even a little bit of distance helps, Dr. Winetsky said.

Limit your trips to the store. Most people dont have the freezer space or the funds to stock up on two weeks of groceries. But try to get enough food so you dont have to shop more than once a week. Every trip to the grocery store is a small exposure event, said Dr. Robert Amler, dean of New York Medical College School of Health Sciences and Practice and a former chief medical officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You dont want to do it too often or spend too much time there.

Have a flexible plan. To minimize your time in the store, have a shopping list that allows for alternatives. Dont fret if your store has run out of chicken or salmon fillets. Just find a substitute protein  other meats, eggs, tofu, canned tuna, beans  and move on.

Shop for long-lasting foods. Frozen fruits and vegetables are great to have in a pinch, but you can also buy longer-lasting fresh produce. Root vegetables such as potatoes or carrots, as well as squash, onions, celery, apples or oranges, can last for weeks. Taste of Home has a useful guide on how long fruits and vegetables will keep. Regular yogurt, hard cheese and nondairy milk can last a while. Whole-wheat tortillas can be frozen and are a great substitute for sandwich bread, which takes up more space in the freezer.

Dont hoard. Panic-buying has prompted some people to fight over toilet paper and pilfer from others shopping carts. Take what you need for the week; leave food for others. Be reassured that while there may be some empty shelves and temporary shortages of some items, food makers are confident in the supply chain and that well have plenty to eat.

Really, really dont touch your face. We know its hard, but if there ever was a time to not touch your face, its in a grocery store filled with people touching everything before you put it in your cart. Sanitize your hands while shopping and after touching high-contact areas like freezer doors. Absolutely dont touch your face," said Dr. Amler. Dont touch your mouth, dont touch your eyes, dont rub your nose until youve been able to sanitize your hands.
A public health impact- especially in rural areas- awaits if local newspapers are allowed to close.

That is according to the Green Party spokesman on communications, Brian Leddin, who called for a commission to be set up to examine options to make sure local media is sustainable in the medium to long-term.

His calls were echoed by his Sinn Fein communications counterpart, David Cullinane, who called for 5 million in funding under the Sound and Vision scheme to be released to local media outlets reeling from a collapse in revenue.

Mr Cullinane also called on Government departments to take out more advertisements in local publications.

This will provide much needed revenue while also aiding in disseminating important Covid-19 related information.

"Local print and broadcast media provide an extremely important service and it is vital that information is disseminated through trusted sources and that these companies are properly supported, Mr Cullinane said.

The Green Partys Mr Leddin said local news was needed more than ever in unprecedented times.

We have already seen the worrying reports of fake news being spread online and through messaging platforms like WhatsApp. Local newspapers are trusted in this country. There is a public health need for there to be trusted local news outlets to ensure that people receive

information that is accurate, fair and accountable, he said.

There will be a public health impact, especially in rural areas, if local newspapers are allowed to close.

"In the immediate term, I would encourage everyone to buy a copy of their local paper, to support a trusted source of local news, the Limerick TD added.

Dozens of reporters, photographers, sales and other staff were let go by regional publisher Iconic Newspapers Group this week at a number of its titles around the country.

Iconic Ltd, headed by UK businessman Malcolm Denmark, owns over 20 regional newspapers in Ireland, including the Limerick Leader, the Longford Leader and the Kilkenny People.

It came days after the Celtic Media Group, which employs about 90 people, said it would have to suspend employment for some staff and reduce pay and hours for others.

Irish Secretary of the NUJ, Seamus Dooley, described the layoffs as a devastating bolt from the blue.

He said: There has been no prior consultation and a number of loyal, experienced editorial executives and long serving reporters have been told they are to be laid off.

"The criteria for selecting who is laid off has not been explained. The NUJ is consulting with our members and we will be asking the company to reconsider its actions.

The amalgamation of editorial posts across titles and the diminution in editorial resources at a time when local communities need local newspapers could have damaging long term consequences for the titles.

"We would have strong concerns for the health, safety and welfare of small teams left to produce titles in such adverse circumstances.

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that the Group of Seven powers were united in opposing China's coronavirus "disinformation," but European allies emphasized cooperation to fight the global pandemic. Foreign ministers from the major industrialized democracies spoke about the crisis by videoconference, scrapping a meeting scheduled in Pittsburgh, but any hope of showing a common front was eroded by the absence of a joint statement. Pompeo, a sharp critic of Beijing who has gone on the offensive over what he calls the "Wuhan virus," said he shared a common view with the top diplomats of the other G7 countries -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. "Every one of the nations that were at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place," Pompeo told reporters. Pompeo said that China "has been and continues to be engaged in" a social media campaign that has included conspiracy theories of US involvement. "This is crazy talk," he said. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman infuriated President Donald Trump's administration by suggesting on Twitter that US troops brought the virus to Wuhan, the metropolis where it was first detected late last year. A spokesman from China's foreign ministry said Thursday that China strongly condemned Pompeo's comments, including his use of the term "Wuhan virus". "This US politician moves counter to the international consensus and continues to stigmatise China, smearing China's efforts, trying to use this to shift attention and blame with extremely malicious intent," said Geng Shuang at a press briefing Thursday. The virus has killed more than 21,000 people globally, but Beijing has appeared to bring it under control and has sent aid overseas -- including 40 tons of medical supplies to US ally Italy, which has the world's highest death toll. On Wednesday, Pompeo minimized China's efforts and pointed to a US Air Force cargo plane's aid delivery to Italy as well as private US charity efforts. China is "now making small sales of product around the world and claiming that they are now the white hat in what has taken place," Pompeo said. But he also said the United States sought cooperation, including with China. The two countries' leaders are set to take part in a virtual summit on the crisis Thursday of the Group of 20 major economies. "We desperately want to work with every country around the world. This is a global pandemic," Pompeo said. - France warns not to 'exploit' crisis - German magazine Der Spiegel, quoting anonymous diplomats, said that the joint statement was scuttled by Pompeo's insistence that it use the term "Wuhan virus" -- a formulation frowned upon by medical professionals who say it is stigmatizing. Pompeo did not deny the report when asked about it, saying that each minister would speak separately but that they had a "common understanding" on the health and economic crisis caused by the "Wuhan virus." France and Germany issued statements on the G7 talks that made no mention of China. Canada said China was raised in "broader discussions." French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian "underscored the need to combat any attempt to exploit the crisis for political purposes," a statement said, in likely a veiled response to Pompeo. Le Drian "expressed the view that the unity of all in order to effectively combat the pandemic must now take precedence over any other considerations," it said. France called for the G7 to find ways to assist Africa, warning that both the continent's healthcare system and economies were ill-equipped for the global crisis. Pompeo has accused China of putting the world at risk by initially suppressing news of the virus. Beijing in turn has accused the Trump administration of seeking a scapegoat for its own failures.
Manitoba reported a surge in presumptive COVID-19 cases on Wednesday while an unquantified test-processing backlog persisted at the Cadham Provincial Lab.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba reported a surge in presumptive COVID-19 cases on Wednesday while an unquantified test-processing backlog persisted at the Cadham Provincial Lab.

The province announced 14 new coronavirus cases, including a Winnipeg girl under 10 years of age, bringing the total to 35.

A city woman in her 60s has been admitted to hospital in critical condition, chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin said. She's in intensive care.

The province's health minister refused to answer specific questions about the case  including when and how she came to hospital or whether she had been previously tested for the coronavirus, citing privacy legislation.

Help wanted Health Minister Cameron Friesen called on businesses and individuals who want to help with the COVID-19 pandemic response to sign up online. An online portal opened Wednesday to allow companies to register to provide goods and services needed to respond to COVID-19, he said during a teleconference. They're looking for everything from N95 masks and the reagents used in testing for the virus to nursing and IT services, security guards and pet care, said Friesen. click to read more Health Minister Cameron Friesen called on businesses and individuals who want to help with the COVID-19 pandemic response to sign up online. An online portal opened Wednesday to allow companies to register to provide goods and services needed to respond to COVID-19, he said during a teleconference. They're looking for everything from N95 masks and the reagents used in testing for the virus to nursing and IT services, security guards and pet care, said Friesen. "We're not out of supplies  we're doing this out of an abundance of caution," he said. The online portal will remove barriers to companies so the province can more quickly procure supplies and services to prepare for the pandemic as infections rates rise, he said. Supplies purchased through a $35.2-million bulk buy of personal protective equipment with other provinces are starting to arrive in Manitoba, Friesen said, but more is needed. An additional 16 ventilators have been ordered and are on their way after after the province recently purchased 27 new ventilators. The search has "intensified" for 10 chest compression systems to be distributed across the province, he said. A submission form is available at gov.mb.ca The Manitoba government also announced a new tariff to cover virtual visits to doctors. The fee-for-service is the same amount as the tariff paid for a doctor to see a patient in their office so there is no negative consequence to the provider for seeing a patient remotely by telephone or online, said Friesen. The province has enlisted the help of Dynacare  the private lab company that provides testing services to the province  to phone Manitobans who've tested negative for COVID-19 and have been waiting for their test results. The company is expected to be helping with those calls within days, Friesen said. Close

While officials were preparing for a jump in numbers, Roussin said "it's too early to tell," how to interpret the one-day increase. He noted that in recent days, there have been either no new cases or only a single new case to report.

The new coronavirus cases include men and women in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s.

"The age range that we see is to be expected," Roussin said.

While investigations are still underway, the new cases are believed to involve either returning travellers or their contacts.

He said he has no evidence yet of any "pop-up" or community transmission cases that are neither directly or indirectly linked to out-of-province travel.

As the number of positive cases swelled, Manitoba's health minister called on the private sector Wednesday to pitch in to equip the health system for what is looking like a lengthy pandemic battle.

Cameron Friesen called on businesses to help supply such products as hand sanitizer, surgical/procedure masks and N95 respirators, while asking Manitobans to pitch in to provide security, laundry, food, pet care and IT support services.

Meanwhile, neither Friesen nor Roussin could quantify the size of the test-processing backlog for COVID-19 at the provincial lab, when asked by reporters on Wednesday.

"I'm told we are looking to clear the backlog within days, and we should be back to 500 tests a day within days," Friesen said.

I'm told we are looking to clear the backlog within days, and we should be back to 500 tests a day within days.  Health Minister Cameron Friesen

Roussin said he had not received any reports on the size of the backlog, describing the process of test requisitions and completions as fluid.

"I received the amount of tests performed, and, of course, the positive tests come to me," he said.

On Tuesday, 352 tests were completed at the lab, although in recent days that number had fallen to between 200 and 250 due to a global shortage of "reagent," the COVID-19 testing material that extracts viral RNA (ribonucleic acid) from the nose swab samples, Roussin said.

He said the lab has since been able to make its own "viral transport medium," to work around the reagent shortage, and it is now ramping up test numbers.

Roussin was unable to say whether the identification of some of the new postive test results may have been delayed due to delays at the lab.

He reiterated that testing is only one of the tools the province has in fighting the coronavirus.

Manitobans can do their part to "interrupt the transmission of this virus," by adopting social distancing and other provincial orders and guidelines, he said.

The province is also looking at further restricting the size of public gatherings, now limited to groups of 50 people or less. (Saskatchewan is restricting groups to 10 people.)

A city woman in her 60s has been admitted to hospital in critical condition, chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin said Wednesday. (John Woods / The Canadian Press)

"These are things that are currently evolving very quickly, and so I would expect news on that in the very near future," Roussin said.

The chief public health officer said he's been concerned about reports of people going to health facilities without disclosing recent visits outside the province. He said it's vital that patients inform health providers so they can take precautions.

"You must be honest about your recent travel," he said. "You will not be denied care but we need to be able to take those precautions if necessary."

So far, health officials say they're not seeing an increase in visits to Winnipeg hospital emergency rooms for respiratory problems.

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You must be honest about your recent travel. You will not be denied care but we need to be able to take those precautions if necessary.  Chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin

Roussin was unmoved by calls for the government to release the results of any studies it has done on the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths that could occur in Manitoba.

He said the province is using the information for planning purposes, and the numbers themselves are "very prone to misinterpretation."

Asked Wednesday to predict how long Manitobans will be battling the health emergency, Roussin said: "I think we're looking at many, many weeks of this. We're not looking at three weeks from now and we're out of this, for sure."

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

Carol Sanders

Legislature reporter After 20 years of reporting on the growing diversity of people calling Manitoba home, Carol moved to the legislature bureau in early 2020. Read full biography
(TNS)  Nine days before the World Health Organization announced that it had identified the novel coronavirus, a Toronto-based startup called BlueDot, which uses artificial intelligence to track the spread of diseases, picked up a local news article about an unusual cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China.Researchers at Boston Childrens Hospital who have been using similar technology to scrape disease-related chatter from social media and chat rooms since 2006 also flagged the news story. A third machine learning tool picked it up too: The WHOs own Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources project, which is now scraping information on the global spread of COVID-19 from up to 120,000 articles each day.The promise of melding artificial intelligence with digital epidemiology, which is the study of how diseases spread using the collection and analysis of large amounts of online data, has long since been established. But most of the information currently available to health researchers falls under the category of open-source data, meaning its publicly available.The largest sets of nonpublic data  things like search queries, website access logs, private social media posts and location data  belong to large technology companies such as Facebook and Google. According to a new report from Duke Universitys Center on Science and Technology Policy, online platforms hold a gold mine of data that could help digital epidemiologists track the coronavirus more accurately.Unfortunately, getting data from the internal servers of some of Silicon Valleys biggest companies into the hands of government and academic researchers isnt so simple. The primary obstacle is a set of concerns over the privacy of social media users whose data might be handed over by the companies. And the companies themselves must ensure they arent jeopardizing the trade secrets of their own technology.This data is a public good that should be shared, Sarah Rispin Sedlak, one of the Duke researchers who on March 19 published the report on information sharing during an epidemic, told CQ Roll Call. But something like that has to be done within a framework that ensures protections for both the companies and the individual users.You need a legal and ethical framework that allows the company to share data in a way that is sufficiently protective of individual privacy and that the digital epidemiologists agree not to use that data for other purposes or send it elsewhere, Rispin Sedlak said.In 2008, Google unveiled a tool called Google Flu Trends that aggregated specific search queries related to flu-like symptoms to estimate how many people throughout the United States were infected at a given time, promising an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza. But the tool never fulfilled its own promise  its estimates for the 2013 flu season were off by 140 percent, according to WIRED  and it was the subject of complaints by privacy advocates.Since then, data privacy has become a hot-button political issue. On Capitol Hill, members of both parties are working on comprehensive data privacy legislation, which could include provisions allowing better information sharing with the aim of improving public health. But those efforts have stalled because of the coronavirus emergency and the vagaries of an election year.I dont think what we want to do is wade into the waters of broad privacy legislation, Rispin Sedlak said.However, as the coronavirus spreads and deaths from COVID-19 continue to increase, lawmakers could be spurred to action on a more narrowly focused measure related to public health.Anonymized dataLast week, Facebook said it would begin sharing aggregated, anonymized location data and high-resolution population density maps with researchers at Harvard Universitys School of Public Health, the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, the Gates Foundation and others trying to understand how the coronavirus is spreading around the world.A Google spokesperson told CQ Roll Call that Google has not shared any location data but that the company is exploring ways that aggregated anonymized location information could help in the fight against COVID-19.One example could be helping health authorities determine the impact of social distancing, similar to the way we show popular restaurant times and traffic patterns in Google Maps, the spokesperson said. This work would follow our stringent privacy protocols and would not involve sharing data about any individuals location, movement, or contacts.But Rispin Sedlak says that search data, the likes of which powered Google Flu Trends, remains the most promising data for tracking diseases like COVID-19. But without establishing rules for how companies should anonymize it and researchers should keep it secure, it may not be shared anytime soon.Some sort of framework enabled by laws about how this exact type of data would be used for this exact type of purpose would be very helpful, Rispin Sedlak said. It would give the tech companies the rules of the road and some comfort that if they shared the data while following the rules, they would be safe from criticism over privacy concerns.
Two fresh cases of COVID-19, including a three-year-old boy, have been reported in Telangana, taking the total number of people infected with the virus in the state to 41, according to a government bulletin on Wednesday.

The other case is a 43-year-old woman from Hyderabad city who is "the family/primary contact of a previous positive case", it said. The woman "does not have any history of international travel. She is presently admitted and stable. She is a contact of another patient in Telangana," the bulletin said.

The child, who has a travel history to Saudi Arabia, had also been admitted to a hospital and was in a stable condition, it said. Late on Tuesday night, three people, including two women, had tested positive for COVID-19. None of the three had any foreign travel history but came in contact with previous positive cases, a government bulletin had said.

Also read: Coronavirus Live Updates: Total cases cross 600-mark; 5 test positive in Indore

With the two fresh cases on Wednesday, the total number of positive cases in the state has risen to 41, including one person who has been discharged after recovery, the government bulletin said. Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao said the lockdown was being successfully implemented all over the state and instructed officials to ensure that it remained so in the days to come.

The state health officials said containment process has been initiated in places where the latest confirmed cases have been detected. State Health Minister E Rajender held a meeting with officials on the measures taken to check the spread of coronavirus.

Meanwhile, ruling TRS public representatives, including ministers, have pledged to contribute Rs 500 crore from various sources such as their salaries and constituency development funds to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund for the ongoing fight against coronavirus, an official statement said. The chief minister appreciated the gesture of his party representatives, the statement said.

Also read: Coronavirus outbreak: India bans export of hydroxylcloroquine

Also read: Govt postpones Census 2021, NPR updation amid coronavirus crisis
Representative image

With the lockdown period in India being extended to three weeks in a bid to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, several companies are hiring counsellors and psychiatrists to help employees cope with working from home.

Various big corporates such as Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, and Deloitte have already sought assistance from professionals to help their employees tide over the emotional distress associated with social distancing.

Younger employees of companies are reportedly the most affected by social distancing and are not being able to cope with the enforced working from home culture. Companies are afraid that the millennials would slip into depression or witness other psychological turmoil. That is where counsellors and experts are stepping in, to help them navigate through this phase of crisis and focus better at work, while away from the office.

Microsoft has already roped in counsellors who will speak to both managers and employees for around an hour to explain the need for emotional wellbeing in todays time, The Economic Times reported. They would also converse on the perils of COVID-19 and how to take care of oneself to avert any chance of being infected by the deadly novel coronavirus.

Humans are hard-wired for connection. So, in a world where work is becoming more remote, we have been working on technology that bridges the gap between our digital and physical worlds, the article quotes Ira Gupta, the Head of Human Resources at Microsoft India, as saying.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Meanwhile, Deloitte has set up a helpline for counselling, and HR executives are in regular touch with employees to assess if they are in emotional turmoil. In case they feel an employee is in need of assistance, he or she is referred to a counsellor.

P&G, on the other hand, has been holding web seminars where experts are being invited to help out employees.
Donald Trump railed against "abuse" from Nato and complained about the US spending more on its military than European allies during a briefing on the state of the coronavirus pandemic in the US.

He said: "They're all playing games against us. They're been playing games against us for years."

The president claimed that "some of the people that took the biggest advantage of us are our allies" as he raged against the European Union "not taking" US medical equipment.

His daily White House briefings on the administration's response to Covid-19 often stray from the health crisis to the president's gripes, much like his campaign rallies, as he swats at members of the press in front of him and complains about "unfair" treatment as he touts his platform.

On Thursday, as the US death toll climbs closer to 1,000, the president not only ripped Nato but also doubled down on attacks against the media, telling one reporter that "some people in your profession" want to see the economy fail to prevent his re-election.

He called out "fake news" and said that if it wasn't for him and his administration, "you wouldn't even have a country left."

Last year, the president said he would punish Nato members with trade blocks if he has determined those countries aren't "fulfilling their commitments" to military defence spending.

The president also failed to confirm that the US would defend those countries if they're attacked.

During the 2019 Nato summit, he said that the US will "deal with" countries "from a trade standpoint" or "in a different way" if they're "delinquent" in their defence spending commitments.

Mr Trump added that "it's not fair" that Nato allies help defend countries that haven't committed at least 2 per cent of their spending on defence.

"If something happens, we're supposed to protect them? It's not really fair", he said. "If they don't want to, I'll have to do something with respect to trade. With trade, I have all the cards."
As the world continues to practice ways to guard themselves against contracting the coronavirus, 95 year-old Carmela Ascioti is self-quarantined in her New Springville home, where she resides with her daughter, Maria and son-in-law Franco.

Each day, "Nonna Mela, as shes affectionately called by her six grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren, patiently awaits visits from her little loves, brothers John Luca, 5, and Joseph, 8  all through a sliding glass door that leads to her backyard.

Maria Carmela Ascioti and her great-grandsons, Roman and Antonio on Thanksgiving 2019. (Courtesy/Maria Carmela Ascioti)

The boys, who live downstairs from Nonna Mela with their parents and younger brother, Antonio, 1, know being near their great-grandmother has now taken on a whole new meaning.

The expressions of love and joy on those young, innocent faces mean the world to the fastidious nonagenarian, and for now that will have to serve as a substitute for in-person visits  the price for keeping safe.

Maria Carmela and Michele Ascioti on their wedding day in 1947. (Courtesy/Maria Carmela Ascioti)

A source of solace and the answer family members were hoping for, it has become a highly anticipated part of the day  a meeting place of sorts for sharing smiles, blowing kisses, or even just a spot to gaze into the eyes of innocent children.

The kids get a kick out of their new mode of communication, and Carmela can finally share some quality time thats she has so longed for.

On one recent occasion Carmela stepped out on her front balcony with her daughter and son-in-law, and down below was the littlest of all the great-grands, Roman Michael sitting in his infant seat, looking up at them. But, she says, Nothing beats the closeness of the backyard glass door, because the little ones feel as though they can reach out and touch her.

Whats more, shes thankful for social media, since it allows her to be in virtual contact with all of her kids as many times as she can.

Maria Carmela Ascioti is flanked by her daughters from left, Rosanna and Maria at a family wedding in Canada in 2010. (Courtesy/Maria Carmela Ascioti)

A LITTLE ABOUT CARMELA

Because of her bright and personable nature, as a child Carmela was selected to recite a poem to Victor Emmanuel III, the King of Italy, and has retained that love of poetry. She has that poem memorized and often recites it to her family.

The backbone of her family, amazing and selfless in so many ways, before the virus took over New York, each morning by 9, Carmela is ready to greet the world, preparing breakfast and sharing in household chores with daughter, Maria.

During the week, and prior to the Corona virus, she would babysit her three great-grandchildren and when possible, traveled to New Jersey to babysit her youngest great-grandchild.

A native of Rizziconi, Reggio Calabria, Italy, the former Maria Carmela Anastasi is the youngest of six children. In 1947 she married Michele Ascioti, and they became the parents of Maria and Rosanna. Enterprising and ahead of her time, she was always sure in the conviction that a woman could be as productive and vital in the workforce as a man.

Maria Carmela and Michele Ascioti visiting the picturesque mountains of La Sila, Calabria, in 1958. (Courtesy/Maria Carmela Ascioti)

Carmela and her husband became owners of a bar-cafe in the center of town, where she perfected the art of handcrafting Italian gelato. The bar-cafe not only served luscious gelato, quality espresso, and Southern Italian pastry, but her warmth and sweetness created a warm, hospitable atmosphere for enthusiastic patrons.

Never ones to shy away from opportunities, the Asciotis were offered the chance to operate a large-scale restaurant in a thriving industrial complex in the adjoining town of Gioia Tauro, where Michele was the manager, and she the chef. They prepared daily meals for 70 workers at the industrial plant.

THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY

However, in 1959, the young family left their native Italy to begin a new life in the land of opportunity. So the young family set sail on the Cristoforo Colombo to the shores America and settled in Brooklyn.

The Ascioti family stressed the value of education to their girls, instilling a strong work ethic. The husband and wife team shared a dream: They wanted their girls to attend college, and be the best in whatever field they chose.

Possessing a keen eye for fashion and designing skills, Carmela entered the work force as a seamstress before she and her husband, together with her sisters, established Casa-Miro, a clothing business in Bensonhurst. The factory sold world-class suits, gowns and dresses with labels from designers like Donald Brooks, Oscar de la Renta and Geoffrey Beene.

Now since Micheles passing, life is a bit different than it once was. But Carmela is busier than ever, cooking traditional Calabrese dishes for her large family, baking bread, making homemade pasta, knitting, designing, and sewing dresses for special events for her great-granddaughters.

STILL GOING STRONG

"Nonna Mela," seated, is surrounded by her 17 great-grandchildren in her daughter Maria's New Springville home. during Christmas, 2019. (Courtesy/Maria Carmela Ascioti)

Today, at 95, she keeps her mind sharp not only by utilizing her creative talents, but by reading, and following both the American and Italian political scene. To this day she insists on speaking Italian to her family to ensure that even the youngest develop an ear and a love for her native tongue and that the bilingual family tradition continues.

She exercises often to keep her lower back strong, and is a staunch believer in eating healthy foods; junk foods are a no-no and she stresses those principles.

QUITE A COOK

Enjoying the spontaneity of life, she often makes pizza for the little ones, kneading dough to make fresh bread  and whipping up something traditional on the spur of the moment.

This week she decided to bake cookies for the little ones, and bake an apple pie. Family members wait anxiously for her Pollo Dissossato (stuffed chicken), her signature dish, thats reserved for special holidays. She makes the best of any difficult situation, and her keen sense of humor is her guide.

STILL GETS AROUND

Though she hasnt driven a car in 10 years, it never stopped her from getting around and believes in keeping her body as active and healthy as her mind. So for her, walking is the answer. And Marshalls is one of her happy places.

She recites the Rosary with her family, asking for world peace, and the eradication of this horrific pandemic.

And as for that dream that she and her husband shared, she couldnt be more pleased that her girls went on to further their education, and that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are following in their footsteps.
Wuhan, the epicentre of the pandemic, on Wednesday resumed bus services within the city for the first time since the start of the nine-week lockdown even as 47 new imported cases were reported from the country.

China on Tuesday decided to lift the lockdown on more than 56 million people in Hubei province. The lockdown of Hubeis capital Wuhan will end on April 8.

Huge crowds jammed trains and buses in Hubei on Wednesday as people seized their first chance to travel after two months. Strict curbs on daily life are being lifted, allowing people to head home and see loved ones after weeks of separation.

While the province did not report any new Covid-19 case, four people died in the city taking the death toll in China to 3,281. China on Wednesday said that no new domestically transmitted case was reported on the Chinese mainland on Tuesday.

A total of 47 new imported cases were reported in the country on Tuesday, taking the total of such cases to 474.

Meanwhile, bus services began in Wuhan for the first time since January 23. The city resumed a total of 117 bus routes starting Wednesday, around 30% of the citys total bus transport capacity.

Apart from the driver, a safety supervisor is also present on each bus whose duty is to make sure all passengers are healthy as their health code is being checked before boarding.

People in Wuhan will be allowed to leave the city and Hubei province, if they hold a green health code, meaning no contact with any infected or suspected Covid-19 cases.

From Saturday, six metro lines are expected to reopen to the public. The service timings will be put up at the stations.
When asked if COVID-19 could have been a biological weapon, one Israeli expert told me, Do you really think that someone would develop a virus to kill people 70 and older?





by Yossi Melman





On January 24, The Washington Times quoted Dany Shoham, who raised the possibility that the coronavirus was created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Hubei Province, where the epidemic began. Shoham is a researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University and a former lieutenant colonel in Military Intelligences research department, where he specialized in chemical and biological warfare.









In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility, Shoham told The Washington Times. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isnt evidence or indication for such.





He noted that the virology institute operated under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but some of its laboratories have linkage with the PLA or BW-related elements within the Chinese defense establishment  the PLA is the Chinese military; BW stands for biological weapons.





Based on his remarks, American attorney Larry Klayman, a right-wing Republican activist who has been called a serial litigant  he once sued his own mother  filed a class-action suit in federal court against the Chinese government for $20 billion.





As far as is known, Shoham is the first and one of the few observers to raise the possibility that a leak or work accident released the coronavirus. No official source, intelligence service or covert biological research institute has made such an assessment.





Most experts believe that this is a natural virus, not one that was genetically engineered in a lab. They accept the thesis of the Chinese virologists who the day before Shohams interview was published announced that they had cracked the genetic code of the virus responsible for the current pandemic. The research into the code showed that this virus is related to the one that caused the SARS epidemic and is similar to the one that caused MERS, which was spread by camels.





According to experts, the sources of the coronavirus infection were bats and snakes that were sold at seafood markets in China. According to this assessment, the virus underwent a mutation before it infected humans.





Some researchers believe the virus originated in pangolins, a type of anteater common in Asia. But these scientific explanations havent stopped the groundless speculation that has morphed into conspiracy theories.





Overexcited journalists





The spreading of baseless assumptions, lies and conspiracy theories is hardly a new phenomenon, but it has become much more widespread in the internet era. Over the past decade, especially since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump and the growth of neo-populism, it has made its way from the margins to the mainstream.





Even prominent people who ostensibly are supposed to base their arguments on logic and scientific data occasionally fall prey to conspiracy theories to explain political and cultural developments. This paranoia has infected the coronavirus coverage and is being spread by prominent journalists in Israel and elsewhere.





Most conspiracy-theory lovers accuse China of spreading the virus to collapse the world economy, particularly that of the United States, so it can establish itself as the sole world power.





On the other hand, in China the government disseminated a claim that the United States had created the virus in its military labs at Fort Detrick in Maryland, which in the past has developed viruses, toxins and bacteria for biological warfare. According to this conspiratorial logic, the Americans aimed to damage the Chinese economy a la Trumps trade war.





Again, none of this holds water. Last week the journal Nature reported on a study by the Scripps institute in California, which said: Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.





The coronavirus genetic code is very similar to the SARS virus yet there is still a small difference between them. Computer simulations showed that these genetic changes do not make the novel coronavirus more infectious.





The researchers also reason that if someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness, which is not true of COVID-19. Nature, it appears, is smarter, as the virus found a way to mutate in a more effective way.





I also contacted an Israeli expert for his opinion. Do you really think that someone would develop a virus to kill people 70 and older? said the expert, who asked not to be named.





Polio for sale





Biological warfare  the use of toxins, bacteria, viruses and more to hurt or kill humans and animals  has been around since the dawn of history. In the 14th century, Mongol warriors hurled the corpses of their comrades who died in the Black Death at their enemies.





In 1763, the British tried to spread smallpox among Native Americans. In the 20th century, many armies and intelligence agencies used biological weapons; for example, during World War II, Japan conducted experiments on POWs and attacked China with bacterial weapons. And there are many more examples.





Most countries are signatories to two conventions on the prohibition of the development, production, stockpiling and distribution of biological and chemical weapons. Israel is a signatory to the chemical weapons convention but did not ratify it, and has declined to become a signatory to the biological weapons convention.





There are also countries that are signatories to both conventions but do not adhere to them entirely. For epidemiologists and public health specialists, the smallpox virus is clearly part of the biggest nightmare scenario. Years ago the World Health Organization declared that this disease had been defeated. People are no longer vaccinated against it, but it is a particularly lethal virus with a mortality rate of up to 30 percent. Several years ago, some countries including Israel renewed their stock of smallpox vaccine.





Another area that has been gaining popularity in recent years and could prove equally problematic is DIY synthetic biology. In 2002, with the help of a Pentagon grant, Stony Brook University in New York developed a synthetic polio virus. But there are people trying to develop viruses in private labs  call them pirate labs, if you like. They operate without oversight and safety regulations, usually for commercial and financial purposes, and acquire biological material on the open market.





In 2002, several pirate labs were discovered to be producing the virus. These DIY biologists may be likened to computer hackers. Some have criminal aims and seek financial gain or just want to cause harm, while others do it to repair breaches and security lapses.





In the realm of non-pirate biological research, 50 laboratories around the world have the highest safety classification, including the Israel Institute for Biological Research in Nes Tziona, and hundreds more labs also have a solid record, albeit with lower safety classifications.





This week I asked Shoham if he had changed his mind in light of the studies that have been published in recent months. As of now there are still no unequivocal findings that clearly tell us what the source of the virus is, he said.





Now we can only wait to see if the conspiracy theorists once again cite his words to further their cause. Either way, its clear that when discussing the circumstances that led to the coronavirus outbreak, theres no convincing people who have already made up their minds.





Yossi Melman is an Israeli writer and journalist. He was an intelligence and strategic affairs correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper, where this piece first appeared.
Kim Brent / The Enterprise

Southeast Texas organizations and companies operating in the region have announced several aid initiatives over the past few days to help support local aid organizations during the coronavirus outbreak.

Lamar State College Port Arthur donated medical supplies from its Allied Health Program to Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth Hospital on Wednesday, including 200 of the highly-sought-after N95 respiratory masks.
The owner of a travel agency in Bray has told of the problems facing the industry as a result of Covid-19.

Linda Jones, proprietor of the Travel Boutique which employs five people, told RTE radios Today with Sean ORourke show that even when borders reopen it will be a long time before people feel confident enough to travel.

I kept saying they cant shut the world down, but they did.

Ms Jones said every single holiday is suddenly gone.

Her agency has had to write off holidays in March, April, May and into the summer.

People are looking for refunds, but all of our suppliers cannot give refunds, there is not enough liquidity.

This is a pandemic, there were no laws written to take this into account.

Ms Jones called on the government to bail out the travel industry as it is in a unique situation.

It is one of the hardest hit industries. No one has been looking at the impact on travel agents.

The public is going to have to be very patient in their dealings with all travel agents, she said, adding the warning that it was unlikely that people would get the full amount they paid for a holiday refunded.

Meanwhile, Ireland South MEP Deirdre Clune is reminding consumers of their right to a full refund or to change their flight, in the case of airlines cancelling flights.

Ms Clune said EU passenger rights guarantee that any passengers, who have their flights cancelled by the airline, are entitled to choose between a refund or changing their flight date.

This is a worrying time for our citizens and many elements of our normal routines have been disrupted, including travel plans.

The travel restrictions and health and safety warnings must be adhered to and we should follow the guidelines issued by the Irish government and authorities to protect everyones well-being.

However, in case of confusion, I want to remind air passengers that EU rules are clear on cancelled flights, whereby the airline must provide a clear choice between a refund, changing to a new flight at the earliest convenience or at a later date at the passengers convenience", said Ms Clune, a Member of the European Parliaments Committee on Transport.

In the context of the coronavirus outbreak and resulting travel restrictions and warnings, the EU Commission issued new guidelines on how passenger rights should be interpreted.

"But the rules for cancelled flights remain the same.

Passengers who would prefer to have a refund instead of changing their cancelled flight to a later date can request the same from the airline.

"If they do not receive a satisfactory response, they can contact the national body responsible. In Irelands case, this is the Commission for Aviation Regulation.

Ms Clune underlined that the coronavirus impact has caused enormous difficulties for the airline industry: It is a very difficult time for the airline industry and it is understandable that there may be delays in terms of customer service, so we need to be patient in terms of customer service delays as many companies are dealing with this unprecedented situation with limited staffing.

Additional reporting by Digital Desk

[snippet1]987600[/snippet1]
Aviation Gin, a Portland-based distillery, is donating 30% of proceeds from online orders to benefit out-of-work bartenders.

Aviation might be best known for two things: its viral spoof of a crazy Peloton ad, and its partial ownership by actor Ryan Reynolds. The distillery was purchased by the New York wine and spirits company Davos Brands in 2016, but Reynolds has an ownership stake. He frequently appears in ads for the London-style gin.

Until May 1st, for every bottle of Aviation ordered online, well donate 30% of proceeds as a tip to your bartenders - who REALLY miss you btw. Visit https://t.co/elT2zrCgE0 #TipYourBartenders #StayHomeSaveLives pic.twitter.com/77tVacDGBM  Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) March 24, 2020

The company says 30% of proceeds from gin sales on their website, through May 1, will go to the United States Bartenders Guild. With the spread of coronavirus, several states, including Oregon, have ordered bars and restaurants to close. The guild has created a Bartender Emergency Assistance Program to help bartenders in need.

Aviation Gin started their promotion Tuesday by announcing a $15,000 donation to the Bartenders Guild.

People magazine reports that Reynolds and his wife, actress Blake Lively, also donated $1 million to be split between food bank nonprofits in the U.S. and Canada.

-- Samantha Swindler; sswindler@oregonian.com; @editorswindler

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy has defended emergency measures such as a rent freeze and ban on evictions.

"These are emergency measures because of the exceptional circumstances we find ourselves in, he told RTE radios Morning Ireland.

These are things we couldnt do in normal times, he explained when asked about constitutional restrictions on such measures.

The most important thing now is to keep people safe in their homes today.

Mr Murphy also said that 30 tonnes of personal protection equipment (PPE) will arrive in the country on Sunday.

There will also be new supply lines within the country as manufacturers adapt to produce such equipment.

On the formation talks underway between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, Mr Murphy has said that any new government needs a working majority and not a confidence and supply agreement.

If were going to put together a government it needs a working majority. It cant be a confidence and supply agreement. It will need to make decisions quickly, thats why a majority is important, he told RTE radios Morning Ireland.

We are all making decisions now that we wouldnt have made one and a half months ago.

Mr Murphy said it was incumbent on all parties to come together to have a stable government to take the necessary measures at this time of crisis.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are taking these talks seriously because we need a government to pass emergency legislation.

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(Ross May / Los Angeles Times; Getty Images)

The push to organize began in earnest early last week with two meetings: one held at the Atwater Village pizzeria Hail Mary, the other a conference call organized by Ann Hsing, chief operating officer of Santa Monica restaurants Pasjoli and Dialogue.

A few days earlier, Mayor Eric Garcetti had ordered dine-in service suspended at Los Angeles restaurants to curtail the spread of the novel coronavirus. The directive effectively shut down thousands of sit-down restaurants. With revenue from takeout and delivery unlikely to keep businesses afloat, a handful of chef, owners, and other restaurants workers gathered to assess the situation.

Originally it was just a forum for chefs and owners to express their concerns, share knowledge, get everyone on the same page because we're all reeling," said Kristel Arabian, a former chef and owner of the hospitality recruitment company Kitchen Culture Recruiting who attended the meeting at Hail Mary. "We talked about rent concerns, taking care of employee payroll, business interruption insurance.

Arabian said the attendees realized that a centralized hub of communication was badly needed, a place where workers could easily share info and available resources.

Afterward, Arabian and Konbi chef-owner Akira Akuto launched @cahospitalitycoalition, an Instagram account that provides links to resources for employees and organized early efforts to contact lawmakers about a restaurant relief bill.

The duo reached out to nearly everyone they knew to spread the word, expanding what began as a loose affiliation of Eastside restaurants into a network of a few thousand people in two days.

Meanwhile, Hsing gathered a group of roughly 120 restaurant operators on the Westside to share info and resources among restaurants struggling to figure out how to cover employee health care or negotiate with landlords. An open letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom asking for financial relief for restaurants was drafted and widely distributed, and later folded into the California Hospitality Coalition's social media account.

Story continues

Arabian and Hsing soon realized that similar restaurant coalitions were popping up in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. A larger coalition began to form.

On Saturday I had so many calls with so many different people and so many groups, it was hard to keep track of who was who, Arabian said. By Sunday, though, it felt like everyone was forming bridges and getting on track together.

The newly united front, at least in L.A., emphasized outreach at three levels: city, state and federal.

Eddie Navarrette, a longtime restaurant design and construction consultant, used his contacts with the Los Angeles planning department to connect with local officials. Others drafted letters to state representatives about extending unemployment benefits for laid-off or furloughed workers. A restaurant advocacy group at the federal level called the Independent Restaurant Coalition, backed by chefs including Tom Colicchio, Marcus Samuelsson and Naomi Pomeroy, advocated for a large-scale income-replacement program that would cover restaurant workers and rent costs for at least six months.

Akuto said that although federal action is important, focusing on city and state is more vital in the near future. We cant wait two months or four months or whenever help from the Senate bill might arrive, he said. Right now the city and the state have been most effective in getting our employees covered, which is the main concern.

As coalitions combine resources and scramble to figure out assigned roles, Arabian insists that the larger goal is not to speak on behalf of every restaurant but to make sure concerns and issues are communicated in ways that have the most effect.

Were trying to put everything under one banner, in an open-source way, because that is what makes it easy to share the message," she said. "Theres a majority of opinion of what needs to be done and what our industry needs help with. We're trying to make the big movements on behalf of small businesses.

Akuto said the industrys most dangerous enemy at this point is inaction.

Every day that help is stalled, it gets exponentially worse. Theres no way to quantify it. No one can wrap their head around a trillion dollars, they just need actual money to give their staff so that people can have lives, he said. In cities like Paris and London, restaurants are shutting down completely because they know the government will provide health care for the workers or will help offset their expenses. We dont have that here.

Arabian said that last week was a flurry of action  she worked 16-hours days as information flooded in  but this week has been empty and scary. The Los Angeles City Council delayed its meetings for two weeks, which means a longer lag until potential relief arrives.

On the California Hospitality Coalition Instagram account, Arabian has turned to posting tips on mental health and links to charity groups feeding undocumented workers.

Were trying to push any content that can help workers, Arabian said. For her, that means connecting people to places where they can donate or assist with causes that are immediate and actionable, and that help get essentials like groceries to people who need them now.

As for what lies ahead, Akuto says hes prepared for the worst. Its a war for survival, basically. Because most businesses are not going to make it. Its deteriorating to a situation none of us have ever seen before.

Over the last few days, Arabian said, more people have become aware of the restaurant worlds specific crisis. I get that other industries are hurting right now, but most of them dont involve millions of employees and 8% of the GDP. Most of them dont survive on a 5% to 10% profit during normal times. It's not just restaurants, its bars, bakeries, coffee shops. Everyone is suffering, she said.

At this point, we will definitely take a Band-Aid for a gunshot wound. I know it's not going to solve everything, but at least I can put it on until the ambulance arrives.

Until then, thousands of restaurant operators are doing what they can to find any semblance of a solution for themselves and their workers  negotiating with landlords, insurers and vendors, and jamming the inboxes of every elected official who will listen. Any success, no matter how trivial, will be passed along the communication chain in the hope that it will help another business survive.

Were not only doing this as owners, were trying to cover everyone under the umbrella  dishwashers, servers, cooks, everyone, Akuto said. Thats how to get through this.

People who work in restaurants, theyre so used to fighting for survival, Arabian said. We dont want to come across as desperate or broadcast how dire things actually are.  [But] restaurants are shutting down for good. They cant support their employees. Theres a shame that comes with saying that, but word needs to get out that this is happening.




[March 26, 2020] Digital Payment Market Size is Projected to Reach USD 70640 Million by 2026 Growing at a CAGR of 10.2% | Valuates Reports

BANGALORE, India, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- One of the major reasons expected to drive the digital payment market (Online payment market) size during the forecast period is the increased use of smartphones, coupled with high internet penetration. In 2019, The Global Digital payment market size was USD 35510 million and was forecasted to hit USD 70640 million by the end of 2026, with a CAGR of 10.2 percent in 2021-2026. Digital payment includes payment gateways, payment processing solutions, mobile wallet solutions, mobile protection, fraud detection solutions, and POS solutions. Digital payment systems are divided into managed and professional services. During the forecast period, the payment gateway solutions subsegment is projected to rise at the highest CAGR. Get Free Sample: https://reports.valuates.com/request/sample/QYRE-Auto-9U1275/Global_Digital_Payment_Market FACTORS AFFECTING DIGITAL PAYMENT MARKET SIZE : The emergence of global digitalization has had a significant impact on the demand for digital payment services. The growing need to provide enhanced customer service at the Point of Sales (POS) terminal is expected to drive the demand for digital payment systems in the coming years.

Developing safe and reliable gateways to payment is expected to drive market growth. Innovation in payment systems utilizing blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and real-time payments would also drive the sector. Security technology advances such as tokenization of card data to prevent fraud are expected to generate growth opportunities in the coming years.

Another major factor accounting for rising the global digital payment market size is the substantial steps taken by government bodies across the globe to facilitate digital payments. Furthermore, a significant development in the e-commerce field also leads to the growth of the digital payment industry worldwide. View Full Report: https://reports.valuates.com/market-reports/QYRE-Auto-9U1275/global-digital-payment-market-size DIGITAL PAYMENT MARKET SHARE ANALYSIS BY REGION : Over the forecast period, Asia Pacific is projected to emerge as the fastest-growing regional market. The industry is being fuelled by the rise of digitalization, combined with government policies to use digital payments in developed countries.

is projected to emerge as the fastest-growing regional market. The industry is being fuelled by the rise of digitalization, combined with government policies to use digital payments in developed countries. The growing digital economy, coupled with the proliferation of the mobile commerce industry, is expected to drive the North American market share for the digital payments market. DIGITAL PAYMENT MARKET SEGMENTATIONS Digital Payment Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report covers North America

Europe

China

Japan

Southeast Asia

India

Central & South America Inquire for Regional Report: https://reports.valuates.com/request/regional/QYRE-Auto-9U1275/Global_Digital_Payment_Market Digital Payment Market segment by Type, the product can be split into Payment Gateway Solutions

Payment Wallet Solutions

Payment Processing Solutions

Payment Security and Fraud Management Solutions

POS Solutions

Other. Digital Payment Market segment by Application, split into MNOs

Financial Institutions (Banks)

Payment Network

Intermediaries Merchants

Customers.



The key players covered in this study Alipay

Tencent

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Adyen

Aliant Payment Systems

Aurus

Net

Bluesnap

Chetu

Dwolla

Financial Software And Systems

First Data

Fiserv

Global Payments

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Novatti

Paypal

Paysafe

Payu

Six Payment Services

Stripe

Total System Services

Wex

Wirecard

Worldline

Worldpay

Yapstone

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Similar Reports: 1. Online Payment Gateway Market Research Report Online payment gateways are the merchant service that helps with a smooth transaction when shopping online. The Global Online payment gateway market size was USD 1570 million in 2018 and is forecast to hit USD 4740 million by the end of 2025, with a CAGR of 14.8 percent in 2019-2025. Any financial service provider of a commercialized bank may provide the payment gateways services. Digital payment gateway, for example, enables information transfer between front end processor, bank, and payment platform. This report focuses on the global status of the Online Payment Gateway, future outlook, opportunities for growth, key market, and key players. The aims of the study are to present the creation of the Online Payment Gateway in the United States, Europe, and China. View Full Report: https://reports.valuates.com/market-reports/QYRE-Auto-39O85/global-online-payment-gateway-market 2. Mobile Wallet Market Research Report The Global Mobile Wallet Market size is projected to rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.03 percent from USD 84120.24 million in 2018 to USD 268452.24 million by the end of 2025. Rising smartphone penetration and the acceptance of smart devices and digital payment options are among the factors largely attributable to the growth of the Global Mobile Wallet Market. Other factors attributable to market growth are the growing availability of net banking and online financial services, e-commerce, and rising mobile penetration. However, other factors, such as credit and debit card competition, can hinder the market growth. View Full Report: https://reports.valuates.com/market-reports/360I-Auto-0S46/global-mobile-wallet-market 3. Mobile Payment Market Research Report Mobile payment market size was valued at USD 601 billion in 2016, and is projected to reach USD 4,574 billion by 2023, at a CAGR 33.8% Mobile payment refers to payment services that are made remotely via messages or mobile apps. Various mobile payment technologies have been developed, such as Near-field Communication (NFC), to enable rapid money transfer. Due to shifts in consumer preference from cash to digital payments and technological advances, e-payment methods have been widely used in China. Additionally, a rise in smartphone adoption and an increase in internet penetration has prompted many banks in the country to introduce mobile payment services. View Full Report: https://reports.valuates.com/market-reports/ALLI-Auto-1O247/-mobile-payment-market 4. Online Payment Solutions Market Research Report The Online or Digital payment solutions market size is expected due to the increased use of smartphones, coupled with high internet penetration. Moreover, the easy accessibility of digital payment mobile applications is also predicted to increase the market size. This report studies the market size of Digital Payment Solutions by players, countries, product types and end industries, historical data for 2014-2018, and forecast data for 2019-2025. Furthermore, this study also analyses the global market competition landscape, market drivers and patterns, opportunities and challenges, risks, and barriers to entry, distribution channels, distributors, and Porter's Five Forces Analysis. View Full Report: http://reports.valuates.com/market-reports/QYRE-Othe-2D253/digital-payment-solutions-market 5. Digital Wallets Market Research Report The digital or E-wallet is an Internet or electronic payment system that stores both financial value and personal identity information on a mobile or computer. The Digital Wallets Market report provides exhaustive research and detailed player revenue estimates for the 2015-2020 period. It also provides quantitative analysis by players for the period 2015-2020 backed by accurate revenue statistics (global and regional level). View Full Report: https://reports.valuates.com/market-reports/QYRE-Othe-2Z254/digital-e-wallets-market ABOUT US: Valuates offers in-depth market insights into various industries. Our extensive report repository is constantly updated to meet your changing industry analysis needs. Our team of market analysts can help you select the best report covering your industry. We understand your niche region-specific requirements and that's why we offer customization of reports. With our customization in place, you can request for any particular information from a report that meets your market analysis needs. Valuates is curating premium Market Research Reports from the leading publishers around the globe. We will help you map your information needs to our report repository of Market research reports and guide you through your purchasing decision. We are based out of Silicon Valley of India (Bengaluru) and provide 24/6 online and offline support to all our customers and just a phone call away. CONTACT US: Valuates Reports

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The UK government has purchased 3.5 million coronavirus antibody tests, raising hopes the kits could soon be rolled out to NHS staff and the public.

Professor Sharon Peacock, director of Public Health Englands National Infection Service, told MPs on Wednesday the tests were being checked for accuracy in laboratories this week and could be ready to use within a matter of days. She said they would be distributed to the public through Amazon and pharmacies.

But the UKs chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, later dismissed suggestions the kits could be available to buy online as soon as next week. He stressed frontline NHS workers would be prioritised for tests once they are available.

So what are the tests bought by the government and when can we expect them to be rolled out in the UK?

What are antibody tests?

The tests are designed to detect Covid-19 antibodies in a persons blood. Antibodies are proteins made by the immune system to fight invaders such as bacteria and viruses. Their presence in the blood indicates that the body has fought off the disease and is therefore very likely to be immune from reinfection.

The testing kit looks similar to a pregnancy test and involves pricking a finger to produce a drop of blood, which is then analysed for two types of antibodies - with results available in just 15 minutes.

Will it tell you if you have coronavirus?

No. The antibody test can confirm whether someone has previously had Covid-19, but does not detect whether someone currently has the disease and remains a risk to others.

This means the kits will not address a key pressing concern of many hospitals, where a lack of coronavirus tests means NHS staff have been forced to isolate at home with undiagnosed symptoms and are unable to work.

The government has vowed to increase real-time tests for coronavirus to 25,000 a day, but on Wednesday only 6,491 were carried out - up from 5,605 on Monday.

So why would they be useful?

If they work, the tests would allow doctors and nurses who have had symptoms to know whether they had Covid-19, enabling them to return to work sooner and treat patients without fear of infecting them. Members of the public who learn they have had the virus would be able to stop social distancing and return to a relatively normal life.

Widespread testing could also allow Public Health England to build up a better picture of the spread of the disease, including by identifying people who were infected but showed no symptoms.

Can we be sure theyre accurate?

Not yet. Health chiefs are mindful that a test that does not work would be worse than no test at all, and the antibody kits are currently being checked at a laboratory in Oxford to ensure they are accurate before roll-out.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the governments chief scientific adviser, has said accuracy is key, even if it meant the tests are available later than planned.

He told Wednesdays Downing Street press conference: If you tell somebody theyre immune from it, and theyre not, that is not a good position to be in. We must make sure that we get the quality of this absolutely right.

Will the public be able to buy them?

Prof Peacock suggested the tests would eventually be available to the public through Amazon and high street pharmacies, telling the Science and Technology Committee: "In the near future people will be able to order a test that they can test themselves, or go to Boots, or somewhere similar to have their finger prick test done."

But Prof Whitty downplayed the prospect of that in the near future, stressing that making the tests available to frontline NHS workers was the priority.

He said: I do not think - I want to be clear - that this is something we will suddenly be ordering on the internet next week.

"We need to go through the evaluation, then the first critical uses, and then stretch it out from that point of view."

He added there was a "global bottle neck" on the supply of the tests as other countries also look to obtain them, meaning shortages were likely.
The Ham radio operators in West Bengal are helping police in tracking down mass gatherings and sending vagabonds to the shelters during the nationwide lockdown imposed in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, officials said on Thursday.

Police in various districts have received inputs from licenced amateur radio operators in identifying spots and places where social gatherings have been taking place, a senior officer said.

"This helps us taking swift action against those who are defying the 21-day lockdown," the police officer said.

The Ham operators have licences to conduct such communications under specific radio frequencies by the Union Ministry of Communications.

West Bengal Amateur Radio Club secretary Ambarish Nag Biswas said around 280 Ham operators are working round the clock in tracking down spots of social gatherings and also helping people, who are in distress, during the lockdown.

"After discussion with police, we have opened a helpline number and are using our network to track areas of social gatherings and rescuing people in distress. There is a chain through which the network is working," Biswas told PTI.

Elaborating about their activities through the network, Biswas said there are around 10-12 Ham radio operators in each district, barring Darjeeling.

The operators use their local network to get information about social gatherings or vagabonds in their locality, Biswas said.

"They send their verified information to the West Bengal Radio Club. As soon as we get the message, we inform the specific district police control with the details of location. The police control rooms passed the information to patrolling van in and around the area through radio messages. And suitable action is taken immediately," Biswas explained.

Since Tuesday evening, around 60 cases of gatherings were reported by Ham radio operators across the state and around 17 vagabonds have been rescued and sent to shelters, he said.

Earlier this week, Ham radio operators helped police in rescuing an elderly woman who was staying alone at her home in Sodepur area in North 24 Parganas.

State Disaster Management Minister Javed Khan welcomed the initiative but emphasised on community counselling to stop violation of the lockdown.

More than 1,800 people were arrested in Kolkata since Monday evening for violating the lockdown guidelines, police said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
P ulling out. The withdrawal method. Coitus interruptus. The Catholic way. Or, as Dr Anita Mitra describes it, Russian roulette but with a penis instead of a gun.

I see a huge number of young women who tell me that they use withdrawal at least occasionally, or as their sole method for preventing pregnancy, says Mitra, an NHS gynaecologist working at a London hospital and author of The Gynae Geek. The official figure from the UN is that 8 per cent of couples prefer it to any other method, but in reality Id say its much, much higher. In the US, the pull-out method is even more widespread  a 2014 study from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) found that 60 per cent of women have used it at least once  leading to journalist Ann Friedman coining the term, The Pull-out Generation.

Indeed, with the entire globe self-isolating and with no other option but to Netflix and chill, many are predicting a corona baby boom, which doctors often see nine months after natural disasters or big sporting events. And if youre on lockdown with less access to condoms or your usual contraception, coitus interruptus might seem unavoidable.

But even before coronavirus changed the world, contraceptive use in London was looking lax. Millennials holistic approach to wellness  if youre vegan and shunning parabens in your beauty products then you might well baulk at taking a synthetic hormone like the Pill  has meant that oral contraceptive use is going down. Although its still the most commonly used method (an estimated 3.5 million women in the UK are on it), where once the Pill was a byword for sexual liberation, now its approached with caution. A 2016 NHS study found that use of the Pill had dropped by more than 13 per cent between 2005 and 2015.

Ive seen a huge decrease in women using hormonal contraception, says Mitra. I get messages all the time from women asking if they should stop taking the Pill. The use of LARCs (Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives, such as the coil and the implant) is less popular among younger women (only 30 per cent of under-20s compared with 55 per cent of those aged 35 and over, according to NHS data). I think theres a worry that these methods might affect fertility further down the line, or that its something not natural in your body, says Mitri. For various reasons from lack of spontaneity to embarrassment, condom use is also down.

When I worked at a sexual health clinic in Lewisham, people would describe using the withdrawal method to me a lot, says Dr Alex George, host of The Waiting Room podcast and a former Love Island contestant. But even if people think its reliable for preventing pregnancy  which its not  it doesnt protect against STIs. Were seeing rising STIs in the 16-25 age group. Its seriously worrying.

Women have shouldered the burden of contraception for too long  its about time men stepped up / Vera Lair / Stocksy United

But STIs aside, just how likely is it that a woman will get pregnant if a man pulls out in time? The failure rate for the withdrawal method is 18 per cent if used over a 12-month period, according to a study published in the international reproductive health journal, Contraception  so if 100 couples use it, 18 could get pregnant. Condoms are almost as unreliable, with a failure rate of 17 per cent over a year. Many people dont use condoms properly, which is why that failure rate is so high, says Mitra. I often hear of people using condoms almost like the withdrawal method, so they have sex without protection and then put the condom on right at the end. Thats almost just as bad.

The big problem is that the pull-out method is rarely done perfectly. If youve been drinking, Id say your ability to pull out in time is compromised, says George. Women are placing a lot of trust in men to get it right, and Id urge women to take control over their own bodies. Research published in the journal Human Fertility showed that 37 per cent of pre-ejaculatory fluid contains healthy, mobile sperm  ie, the type that will make it to an egg to fertilise it.

Tom, 37, an engineer who lives in London Bridge, has been using the withdrawal method on and off (and, er, out) for 20 years. With a one-night stand, unless they say otherwise I dont ever use a condom, so Ill always pull out, he says. It doesnt detract from my experience because its not something I have to think about. Its like a train coming out of a tunnel  you can see the light from quite a way back  so I can keep going right up to the last second. I dont worry about STIs because I think most people get tested regularly.

For Georgia, 27, the fact that her male partner has to concentrate during sex makes using the withdrawal method something of a feminist act. I spent years on hormonal contraception, with side-effects ranging from full-blown weeping in supermarkets to sore boobs. Women have shouldered the emotional and physical burden of contraception for too long  its about time men stepped up, she says. Im in a long-term relationship and I use a period-tracking app and I always make sure I use a condom right before and when Im ovulating, or normally we just dont have sex at that time because condoms sacrifice so much pleasure for me.

The transition from the Pill to the pullout-plus-fertility-tracker method is becoming increasingly popular with many of the women I speak to for this article. But its not foolproof, as Alice, 31, a yoga teacher from Seven Sisters, discovered. Im very attuned to my body and use this method when Im sleeping with someone whos good at pulling out properly, she says. I believed I wasnt very fertile. But a few years ago I found out I was pregnant and had to have an abortion, which was extremely traumatic and stressful for me. I know the pull-out method is risky, but I dont want to use hormones or condoms.

Men are worried about the popularity of pulling out, too. Harry, 29, a trainee doctor from Peckham, says he used the withdrawal method with his former girlfriend, but it gave him anxiety. We agreed that wed try it because the Pill was killing her sex drive, but it felt like a lot of pressure on me, he says. I was worried that Id pull out at the wrong time and it made me very nervous about sex.

But many pull-out proponents vigorously defend their choice and dont like accusations that its irresponsible. Ive definitely felt shame from other people and had friends look at me like Im an idiot when I tell them we use it, says Eloise, 34, a market research consultant from Clapham. But Im in a long-term relationship, Im good at knowing when Im ovulating. Weve done this for seven years and never had a slip-up. It doesnt require doctors appointments or hormones or remembering to take a pill. I feel like loads of people are doing this, theyre just sheepish to admit it.

If you are using the pull-out method, there are things you can do to make it safer. Its imperative that you know your STI status and your partners, says George. Also make sure youve had an open conversation about consent to use this method, that the man feels confident that hell be able to pull out in time, and that when the moment comes, so to speak, youre having sex in a position where pulling out is possible. If youre a woman, make sure youre tracking your cycle and not relying on this method around ovulation.

Mitra says even if youre happy using this method, its worth knowing all your options. Have a frank conversation at a family planning clinic, she says. Therell be no judgement about using the withdrawal method  for many people it suits them and they wouldnt be devastated if they got pregnant. But there are so many methods of contraception out there  over 20 types of Pill alone.
Number of Coronavirus Cases Rises to 77 in Georgia - GeorgianJournal
WYOMING MI -- A 39-year-old man was shot following an altercation in a parking lot off Waldon Woods Drive SW on Thursday, March 26.

The shooting was reported about 3:45 p.m.

The area is near Waldon Woods Independent Living Community.

Wyoming police said a physical altercation happened in a parking lot and that ended with the shooting.

Police said the alleged shooter was cooperative with police and taken into custody. The persons name is not being released pending possible charges.

Police noted the shooting had no relation to the coronavirus crisis. Living communities for the elderly have been among some of the news stories involving coronavirus because family members are not allowed access to personally see their loved ones.

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Third Michigan law enforcement death attributed to the coronavirus

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While canine coronavirus is not directly transmittable to humans, outbreaks of newly mutated infectious diseases in China such as the novel coronavirus strain, along with a devastating epidemic of swine flu, are stark reminders about the risk of importing pets from regions lacking transparency on public health issues.

China is one of several countries regularly exporting tens of thousands of dogs to U.S.-based rescues for adoption here, with insufficient health checks overseas or upon entry into the United States. In short, we are importing dogs from a country whose government, as Foreign Policy magazine pointedly remarked about the outbreaks, defaults to habits of opaqueness, concealment and distrust of the public.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that of the estimated 1 million dogs imported annually into the United States, 113,000 originate from countries with high risk for rabies and other diseases, several of which can jump species and infect humans. High-risk regions include China and countries in the Middle East, South America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia.

Many dogs are bred irresponsibly in large numbers in puppy mills overseas, where the risk of congenital abnormalities and disease is high, said a CDC blog. Importers then fly them as cargo in large batches, claiming them as rescue dogs, valued at $0 on their paperwork, (thereby) allowing the importers to evade entry and broker fees.

Because of lax laws in the country of origin, some of the dogs will not have received necessary vaccinations and may harbor undetected illnesses such as rabies or dangers such as antibiotic-resistant MSRA, the bacteria-born disease Brucellosis or foreign parasites. Health certificates accompanying imported dogs from these regions are commonly invalid or forged.

U.S. rescues place these dogs into foster homes, onto adoption websites or include them in adoption events at local pet stores within days of their arrival. Numerous people may have contact with the dog before any symptoms appear.

As border officials and experts in animal disease have documented, the dangers are anything but theoretical.

In early 2019, for example, one of 26 so-called rescue dogs imported from Egypt to a rescue organization in Topeka, Kansas, had rabies. All the dogs companions had already been placed in foster care or adopted before the illness emerged. U.S. officials suspect that the Egyptian vaccination certificates were forged. By last May the concern was so great that the CDC announced a temporary ban on dogs from that Egypt, citing multiple instances of dogs that contracted rabies in Egypt being brought to the U.S. in recent years.

Imported dogs threaten the health of our domestic dog population, introducing viruses that are expensive to diagnose and treat. Scientists at Cornell Universitys Animal Health Diagnostic Center identified a strain of Asian canine distemper virus never before reported in North America, determining that the source was likely a dog rescued from a Korean livestock market.

Similarly, the American Veterinary Medical Association cautioned last November about the importation of foreign dogs from certain regions, including China. Veterinarians with state governments are concerned that dogs and their carriers could bring with them pathogens, especially the African swine fever virus responsible for killing whole pig herds in China and Eastern Europe, the group said.

The pressure on rescues to import dogs has been fueled by Adopt Dont Shop-style campaigns, with as many as 44 percent of Americans choosing rescue-sourced dogs.

The problem has been intensified by misguided state legislation that foments a black market for rescue dogs from unregulated breeders in high-risk countries. A California law forces pet stores to sell only rescue or shelter dogs, eliminating dogs sourced from regulated professional breeders. A similar law is on the books in Maryland, and anti-breed interest groups are pushing more in other states.

Congress could be getting involved in a big way, with lawmakers considering a measure that would ensure valid health certificates for all dogs coming into the United States and allow for specific, region-appropriate vaccination requirements for dogs. This is a start, but much more needs be done. Federal agencies tasked with checking for imported disease risks sorely need more resources to meet the challenges they face daily, and Congress and the Trump administration should work to address this worrisome deficit.

A house is not a home until it has a dog, the British naturalist Gerald Durrell observed.

That is a guiding principle for millions of Americans as they consider acquiring a dog. But lets ensure that dog is a healthy one.

Sheila Goffe is vice president of government relations for the American Kennel Club. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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A young IAS officer who was in isolation in Kollam after returning from the United Kingdom earlier this month, jumped his quarantine and headed for Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, a senior Kerala government spokesman said late Thursday evening.

The spokesman described the officers conduct as a serious lapse on part of an IAS officer. The Kerala government which is in touch with its Uttar Pradesh counterpart will also bring it to the notice of the Union ministry of personnel, he said.

Kollam Sub Collector Anupam Mishra is said to have left on for Kanpur on March 21, a few days before a three-week countrywide lockdown began to check the spread of coronavirus that has affected close to 700 people in the country and claimed almost a dozen lives so far. In Kerala, 126 people have tested positive .

Follow coronavirus live updates here.

He had returned from the UK in the first week of this month.

The Kollam administration put his driver, personal security guard and secretary in isolation after his disappearance came to light.

His disappearance has also embarrassed the government which is hard pressed to enforce quarantine norms.

A captain cant leave the ship like this. Action would be initiated against the officer, the spokesman said.

Kollam district collector Abdul Nasser said he has brought the issue in the notice of the government and said he was not informed about Mishras trip. His absence came to light when health officials came to his house after two days to check.

A phone call he made was traced to Kanpur, the spokesman said.

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Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma has urged the people of Meghalaya to cooperate with the administration and adhere to the Centre's directive to tackle coronavirus.

"Our markets around #WestGaroHills district practising #SocialDistancing. We appeal to our citizens to cooperate with the Administration and adhere to the Govt directives," the CMO tweeted and shared pictures of people practising social distancing in the markets around the West Garo Hills.

Expressing thanks towards the administration and Meghalaya Police, the tweet added: "Thanks to the District Administration and @MeghalayaPolice for their efforts to ensure everyone's safety."

In his address to the nation on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day lockdown in the country beginning Tuesday midnight to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

The number of coronavirus cases in the country now stands at 649 according to the Union health ministry update on Thursday morning.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Kateryna Handziuk died in hospital following an acid attack.

The Shevchenkivsky District Court of Kyiv on Wednesday extended until July 29, 2020, the term of pretrial investigation in the case of the murder of Kherson-based activist Kateryna Handziuk.

That's according to Handziuk family's lawyer Yevhenia Zakrevska.

"The prosecutors petition had been granted. The investigation into Katias case where Manger and Levin are being charged was extended to July 29, 2020," the lawyer wrote on Facebook.

It should be noted that the hearing on the petition began yesterday, March 24.

The defense team's appeal was overruled.

As UNIAN reported earlier, UNIAN memo. Kherson activist, advisor to the Mayor of Kherson and acting manager of affairs at Kherson City Council's executive committee Kateryna Handziuk, 33, on July 31, 2018, survived an acid attack.

She suffered burns to more than 35% of her body and underwent 11 operations in Kyiv. Handziuk died on November 4, 2018. The immediate cause of her death was a severed blood clot resulting from the acid attack. Police originally qualified the attack as an attempted murder committed with extreme cruelty, then its status was changed to completed murder.

Read alsoHandziuk murder: Raids underway in Kherson region in deadly acid attack probe

Six suspects were detained, one of whom, Mykola Novikov, was later released from custody as charges against him had been dropped. On May 7, 2019, the Prosecutor General's Office sent an indictment against five defendants in the case of the murder: Mykyta Hrabchuk, Volodymyr Vasyanovych, Vyacheslav Vishnevsky, Serhiy Torbin, and Viktor Horbunov.

On June 6, the court announced their sentences. Torbin, the organizer of the murder, was sentenced to six years and six months in prison. Hrabchuk, the actual perpetrator of the crime, was sentenced to six years in prison. Accused of aiding, Vasyanovych and Horbunov were sentenced to four and three years in prison, respectively; accomplice Vishnevsky's sentence is four years' imprisonment.

Oleksiy Levin, who has a criminal record, as well as Chairman of Kherson Regional Council Vladyslav Manger and Ihor Pavlovsky, who was an assistant to MP Mykola Palamarchuk, are also targeted in the Handziuk murder case. Moreover, public activists believe that former Chairman of Kherson Regional State Administration Andriy Gordeev and former Deputy Chairman of Kherson Regional State Administration Yevhen Ryshchuk were involved in the crime.

Read alsoUkraine's PGO chief on Handziuk murder: Prosecutors didn't want to probe case

On January 27, Levin was put into custody in Bulgaria's Burgas for a 40-day term after being detained on January 24. On February 22, the court of the city of Burgas (Bulgaria) ruled to extradite Levin to Ukraine. He was extradited on March 16 and is now being held in custody.
The number of coronavirus patients continued to surge in Punjab with two more persons testing positive for the infection, taking total cases to 33 in the state.

Among fresh cases, a woman, a resident of Nawanshahr, contracted infection from already positive patient while a Jalandhar resident, who had visited aborad recently, also tested positive and admitted to Ludhiana hospital, according to an official media bulletin.

The health authorities have collected 722 samples so far, of which 346 were found negative for the coronavirus infection, the bulletin said.

The result of 376 samples was still awaited.

In Punjab, there were 19 positive cases in Nawanshahr, five in Mohali, four in Jalandhar, three in Hoshiarpur and one each in Amritsar and Ludhiana, as per the bulletin.

Out of them, one person, tested positive in Nawanshahr, had died.

All remaining 32 cases have been under hospital isolation and they were stable, said the bulletin.

Close contacts of these cases have also been put under quarantine and surveillance, it said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Disinformation may be making the COVID-19 crisis much worse, with online groups attempting to spread false narratives, incorrect health information and other propaganda while governments rush to lock down communities and treat the sick.That's according to a new study out by Blackbird.AI , a vendor that uses artificial intelligence and data analysis to provide insights into online media.In recent weeks, governments have struggled to mitigate a swell of factually incorrect information related to the ongoing pandemic  and some of this has been intentionally created and promoted, according to the report.The company collected and analyzed nearly 50 million tweets from some 13 million unique users, with its AI-based algorithms looking for suspicious patterns of propagation or sharing. They found what appeared to be multiple campaigns that were intentionally crafted to push divisive or destabilizing narratives throughout online communities between the period of Feb. 27 and March 12, 2020.Coordinated networks of fake profiles, bots and online actors spread the disinformation through social media, the report shows.For instance, one recent campaign attempted to spread negative sentiment about congressional Democrats, characterizing them as fear mongers who were exaggerating the severity of the virus, said Wasim Khaled, CEO of Blackbird.AI, speaking withThat campaign was made up of something like 84,000 manipulated tweets. ...They were pushing stuff like conspiracy theories ... there were all types of narratives that got pulled into this specific messaging, just to make people think coronavirus is fake. Telling them it's not a concern, he said.Other campaigns that were pushed included attempts to delegitimize the news media as an accurate source of information about COVID-19, as well as conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus  namely, that it is some sort of escaped bio-weapon created either by China, Iran or the U.S.Traditionally, there have been three types of threat actors that might engage in this sort of behavior, Khaled said. Those include state-backed groups, who have a relationship to a specific government; enterprise groups, that peddle disinformation-as-a-service often hired by companies to take down corporate rivals; or a lone wolf, who just wants to create havoc for their own amusement.While Khaled said his company doesn't really deal with attribution, he shared that Blackbird.AI will frequently pass their findings off to federal intelligence agencies, who are better suited to tracing the origins of such activity.We pass off our information to various agencies who have an interest in finding out where this comes from, he said, explaining that his company is more focused on the intent of a specific narrative, how it affects an online media ecosystem and what might be done to mitigate it.While Khaled didn't comment on attribution, some recent reports seem to indicate that actors from Russia and China are attempting to spread such campaigns in the West.As disinformation is injected into online communities, members of those communities pick it up and spread it organically, said Khaled: "These people don't actually know that they're being manipulated. They don't know that what they're seeing is real."Combating this type of informational attack is difficult and requires the ability to trace and analyze large amounts of data.Part of the problem is surely that social media is largely an unregulated market where this type of fraudulent activity is allowed to flourish. Big companies like Twitter and Facebook recently announced their commitment to fighting these kinds of campaigns , but it's unclear if these efforts will be enough.
Deputy Mayor Kevin Donahue said the District has made efforts to reduce the jails population. D.C. police have been given the option of issuing citations, as opposed to making arrests, depending on the alleged crime. Both federal and local prosecutors have increased the number of cases they have dismissed. And new emergency legislation passed by the D.C. Council allows jail inmates to earn double credits for taking various life classes offered by the jail in an effort to speed up their release. A jail spokeswoman said 20 inmates have been released as a result of the restructuring.
A government hospital here is putting a robot through its paces to see if it can help in the fight against coronavirus, delivering food and medicines to patients admitted there.

If the trial works out, the humanoid robot could make its way to assigned patients with a tray carrying food or medicines.

Potentially, this would reduce the chances of the hospital staff contracting the infection.

Nurses now need to approach such patients wearing protective gear like masks and gloves.

SMS Hospital superintendent Dr D S Meena said a private firm had approached them, offering a robot which could carry food and medicines to patients, a job normally done by the nursing staff.

We are conducting a trial and a committee has been formed to see its efficiency, he said. The committee will submit a report.

Robot made by the company, Club First, have also been tried out at restaurants, the firm said.

The robot at SMS Hospital uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) to do its job. It doesn't need to follow lines on the floor and can navigate its own way, according to developer Bhuvnesh Mishra.

It can supposedly use the lift and reach a particular bed in a specific ward. When it starts running out of power, it heads towards the charging point, the manufacturers claim.

Dr Meena called it a good step. Doctors and the nurses have higher chances of getting infected with the virus, he reminded. According to him, the nursing staff likes the idea.

Mishra told PTI that the company provided the robot under its corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative, and can supply more of them.

We have manufactured the robot under the Make in India initiative in Jaipur, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
People arrive at Noi Bai Airport in Hanoi from overseas, March 13, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Ba Do.

All flights carrying Vietnamese citizens to Hanoi are suspended starting Thursday until March 31 as isolation facilities in the capital city are full.

The Transport Ministry said Wednesday that quarantine facilities in Hanoi can no longer admit new people. It asked the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam to direct incoming flights to land at Van Don airport in the northern province of Quang Ninh.

On Wednesday, the Noi Bai airport received 500 Vietnamese in four flights arriving from Russia, Japan, and Thailand. A Vietnam Airlines flight from Germany with 165 passengers was directed to land at the Van Don airport. All passengers were sent to centralized quarantine facilities.

Also starting Wednesday, all Vietnamese carriers had suspended international flights in the Covid-19 containment bid. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc had earlier ordered the suspension of all international flights to Vietnam as the country restricted entry by air, road and sea.

A few foreign carriers were still carrying Vietnamese passengers home.

Flights carrying Vietnamese home to Saigons Tan Son Nhat airport were also suspended for the same reason from Wednesday. Such flights are being directed to Can Tho airport in the Mekong Delta.

Before the suspension, HCMC's Tan Son Nhat and Hanoi's Noi Bai airports, the largest in the country, had been receiving a large number of Vietnamese passengers returning home from foreign countries amidst escalating fears over the Covid-19 pandemic, overloading local quarantine facilities.

Earlier, on Sunday, Vietnam suspended entry for all foreign nationals, including those of Vietnamese origin and family members with visa waivers.

Only Vietnamese nationals and foreigners carrying diplomatic and official passports such as business managers, experts and high-skilled workers will be allowed to enter the country at this time, with all entrants quarantined for 14 days, the government said.

The country has recorded 148 infections, including 17 people who had been treated and discharged. The majority of the active cases are returnees from Europe and the U.S. and those passing through pandemic-stricken areas.

The Covid-19 pandemic has killed so far over 20,000 people globally.
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts' is now accepting students for its new health sciences bachelors degree with a concentration in radiologic technology.

MCLA Offers Health Sciences Degree With Concentration in Radiologic Tech

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts' is now accepting students for its new health sciences bachelors degree with a concentration in radiologic technology for the fall 2020 semester.

The program has been approved through the MCLA governance process and the Joint Review Committee on Education in Radiologic Technology, and students completing the degree are eligible to sit for the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists Radiography examination.

MCLA now offers one of only ve accredited programs in the Northeast in a eld that demonstrates 100 percent job placement. MCLA will also be able to provide students in health sciences and radiologic technology programs with the most up-to-date equipment to prepare them for careers in radiology through a $421,546 Skills Capital Grant awarded by the Baker-Polito Administration to update equipment and expand student enrollment in programs that provide career education.

In fall 2019, MCLA became the official teach-out partner for the radiologic sciences program of Southern Vermont College following its closure. MCLA partnered with Berkshire Health Systems and its North Adams Berkshire Medical Center Campus to ensure that students in the program were able to complete their degrees without interruption.

"There is high demand for qualified candidates in the health care industry, including in radiology, and the demand is only growing," said MCLA President James F. Birge. "By offering a radiologic technology program at MCLA, students will benefit from being well trained for an in-demand industry, and the local community will benefit by having highly skilled health care providers close to home."

According to the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission's Blueprint, health care is the largest and fastest-growing industry sector in Berkshire County. This new concentration will prepare students for careers in radiology and a variety of specialty modalities, and provide students with the most up-to-date equipment, including a digital direct X-Ray system, an Anatomage table, and upgraded online technology to support distance learning.

Further developing relationships with Berkshire Health Systems, the largest employer in the county, will create an academic environment positioned for excellence, with clinical rotations and internships for students to put their knowledge to work right here in our community.

"Highly trained radiologic technologists are essential to Berkshire Health Systems as we provide comprehensive, state-of-the-art imaging throughout the Berkshires," said David Phelps, president and CEO of Berkshire Health Systems. "We are proud to be collaborating with MCLA on the development and implementation of a radiologic technology major, providing local access to this critical training program at MCLA and our North Adams campus of BMC.

"Radiologic Technology is a growing field and this program can help to fill the vital need for technologists to serve our patients. Our community will also benefit greatly from the addition of these skilled positions in the Berkshire workforce," he said.

According to the 2017 staffing survey completed by the American Society of Radiologic Technologists, mammography and MRI will continue to have consistent growth, as 63 percent of all technologists today range from age 40 to 65. This shortage is not predicted to peak for another 10 to 15 years.
FOR most people in Tanzania, blockchain, bitcoin and cryptocurrency are just complicated technological concepts not worthy bothering about.

They are just fantasies!! It is not the case for Sandra Chogo. She is obsessed with these technological progressions, and has already taken measures to sensitise fellow Tanzanians via social media platforms, television, meetings and conferences.

She is worried that Tanzania is being left behind by these technological developments brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The advancements are evolving very fast.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Sandra says, is already knocking at our doors, and experts say it will digitalise almost everything and change the world as we know it today.

It is not a thing of the future, it is already here with us, Sandra likes to tell people.

In simple terms, Blockchain is the platform that digitalization is taking place, whereas Bitcoin is digitalization of money, and it is the first application to the platform, while Cryptocurrency include Bitcoin and alternative coins (Altcoins). Other experts explain Bitcoin as a form of electronic cash.

It is a decentralized digital currency without a central bank or single administrator that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries.

She was introduced to Blockchain and Cryptocurrency in 2016 while almost everybody in the country was saying those were bad things, and whoever was involved with them was seen as a conman.

But, thanks to her science background which made her to reason everything she hears or read; she decided to dig deeper into those new concepts.

She has gone further. She is now taking a master of science in Digital currency from the University of Nicosia.

As part of her efforts to sensitise fellow Tanzanians, in February 2018 she collaborated with the Institute of Accountancy Arusha and conducted a three-day short course on Blockchain awareness, and issued the first certificates.

She has had sessions with University of Dar es Salaam BCom and Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) students.

She has talked to diverse audiences on Blockchain awareness in Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa and Morocco. Why should we bother about these things?

According to Sandra, we are now in the 4th Industrial Revolution, where digitalization of systems and processes is taking place globally, and that individuals, institutions and governments should take this very seriously.

In the 1st Industrial Revolution, humans started using water infrastructure and stem engines. In the 2nd Industrial Revolution, people started using electricity.

In the 3rd Industrial Revolution, people started using electronic equipment and internet (Phase 1). According to the scientist, countries worldwide are trying to regulate blockchain and cryptocurrencies, with Africa being left behind.

In Dubai, it is envisioned that by the end of 2020, all government documents will be already digitalized.

In this region, she explains, Kenya and Uganda have formed taskforces for the implementation of technologies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Kenya has already launched her Digital Economy Blueprint, whose vision is stated as: A digitally empowered citizenry, living in a digitally enabled society.

The blueprint comprises five pillarsDigital Government, Digital Business, Infrastructure, Innovation-driven entrepreneurship and Digital skills and values.

Rwanda is implementing a lot of things, including making Kigali a centre of excellence for Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence.

Experts agree that Africas economic transformation and prosperity are hinged on the mastery of technology, and that time is now to build the necessary infrastructure and skills in Africa for the continent to benefit from the digital economy as brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

According to Prof. George Magoha who is the chair for the Partnership for Skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology (PASET) governing council, the African continent has to promote digital jobs.

He is of the opinion that there is also need for universities to carry out research that responds to African problems.

Jaime Saavedra, senior Director for World Bank Global Practice, says new jobs will demand a combination of three different kinds of skills, namely fundamental skills, social motion skills, and digital skills.

Blockchain, according to her, is disrupting many industries globally, and it will affect careers, business functions, economy, management style, governance systems among others, and it will result into absolute new jobs.

Sandra strongly thinks that Blockchain education should go up to universities. Universities abroad are changing their syllabus to accommodate it, she notes.

Her liking to science has roots from her family. Sandra was born in Arusha in 1976, to a father who was a chemist and a mother who was a pharmacist. She was a poor performer in primary school, and most of the time she was among the five bottom students.

But things improved later, while in Arusha Secondary School, she got division One and took Physics, Chemistry and Biology (PCB) at her A Level studies, where she got division

Three. It is her father who forced her to do science subjects, and had to enrol for a medical course and later work at Wasso Hospital in Loliondo as an Assistant Medical personnel, but she was not happy because of low salary and poor working environment, which was worse when she moved to Dar es salaam after getting married. It was difficult to grow, and I wanted to be somewhere where I can be recognized, she says.

In 2004, she decided to join IFM College for a three-year advanced diploma course in Accountancy, where she emerged the best student in Auditing.

In 2009, she joined the National Audit Office, where she works until now as an auditor. Sandra doesnt have a role model.

Her driving force was always asking herself the following: If others can do it, why not me? If men can do it, why not women? If Europeans can do it, why not Africans?

She says that women should make sure that they plan their time wisely, otherwise they might end up concentrating on their careers at the cost of their families.

Girls empowerment She advocates for exposing girls to the outside world as a way of empowering them. I am who I am after I got exposed and saw what other women/girls out there are doing.

The courage and confidence which they have changed my mind, she notes. She is of the opinion those lowering girls qualifications as a way to empower them to become future women scientists is a wrong approach.

Such favours continue to make girls weak, she says, adding that women are underrepresented in scientific fields because of Fear of the unknown.

Parents should encourage their girls and tell them that they are able to do everything. If they will do so, they will give them the power to try.

Sandra believes in selfawareness, self-motivation, seeking for knowledge and persistence for a woman to become a renowned scientist.

She notes that in order to survive, young people should be aggressive to seek for knowledge that is beyond their careers as this will enable them either to employ themselves or have a competitive advantage over other candidates.

She further advises them that they should not put money first, because if someone has competence, money will automatically follow him/her.

They should focus on global employment, and not just local employment, Sandra, a mother of two boys and a girl, says.
British coronavirus patients are able to receive promising blood therapy which works by injecting sick people with the immune cells of those who have recovered.

Convalescent plasma therapy has been approved by medical regulators in the UK and is already being used to treat critically ill patients in the US after it was given the green light there two days ago.

It involves injecting patients with the blood plasma of a COVID-19 survivor who has the antibodies necessary for fighting the infection.

Leading British scientists say the therapy could 'make a life or death difference' for patients in the most critical states, as recorded cases in the UK creep up to 10,000.

It is unclear whether any doctors are using it yet in Britain but it has been used already in China and the US.

Infusing patients with blood plasma has also been used to tackle the similar coronaviruses SARS and MERS, as well as the deadly infection Ebola.

A key advantage to the blood based therapy is that its available immediately and relies only drawing blood from a former patient, and it could help to plug a treatment gap while scientists race to discover a wonder drug or vaccine.

Almost 500,000 people around the world have now caught the coronavirus, with more than 21,000 patients known to have died since the outbreak began.

British coronavirus patients are able to receive a promising blood therapy after health regulators approved its use two weeks ago. It has been used in China since February. Pictured, a person who has recovered from COVID-19 donates their blood in Zouping, China

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said it had approved the use of blood plasma treatment two weeks ago. Pictured, ambulances outside a London hospital

At this point there is no large clinical data to prove that convalescent plasma successfully treats COVID-19. But it's been rushed through approval because it is promising. Pictured, a person who has recovered from COVID-19 donates plasma in Zouping, China

Blood plasma therapy - known formally as convalescent plasma - has been around for centuries. Doctors in China, where the COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019, were the first to attempt treating patients this way. Pictured, Dr Zhou Min shows his plasma

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said in a statement: 'We have been working with the National Blood Service in anticipation of this issue, and in early March, we agreed to this procedure.

'This will mean that patients who are recovering from COVID-19 can receive plasma from another patient who has recovered.

'We have used this approach before, with SARS, influenza, Ebola and MERS.'

Convalescent plasma is a blood component and is therefore not classed as a medicinal product.

However, the MHRA still has a role in the regulating blood products in the UK.

Plasma is a clear fluid which makes up around 55 per cent of all blood volume and provides the liquid for red and white blood cells to be carried around the body in.

By injecting this into patients it can provide their bodies with immune system substances which can only be created by people who have already been infected and learnt how to fight it.

The Food and Drug Administration - the US equivalent of the MHRA - has also allowed for the use of convalescent plasma, it said on March 23.

The body said it was 'facilitating access' for the treatment to be used on patients in the US with 'serious or immediately life-threatening COVID-19 infections'.

HOW ARE COVID-19 PATIENTS IN THE UK BEING TREATED? There are currently no guidelines from The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) on which drugs to use to treat patients with COVID-19. Therefore it's a case of testing to see which works for each patient's needs. Some hospitals are going through clinical trials of drugs. For example in Southampton, doctors are trying a formulation called SNG001 to see if it can prevent worsening symptoms in those most at risk. Queen University Belfast is studying some 1,000 drugs on the new coronavirus. While the official list of drugs has not been made public, it is thought to include chloroquine, and hydroxychloroquine. Meanwhile, Oxford University are trialling lopinavir/ritonavir, an anti HIV medicine combination. Hundreds of patients - including some in the UK - are taking part in a European mega-trial of a drug called remdesivir. All of these clinical trials are still not completed, so no conclusions have been reached on the safety and effectiveness of such drugs to treat or prevent COVID-19. The MHRA have been contacted by MailOnline to ask what approved drugs are being used in UK hospitals. Advertisement

The classification - 'investigational new drug' - means it is not yet approved but scientists are allowed to submit proposals to test it in clinical trials and use it to treat patients if they need to.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that plasma would be tested there to treat the sickest of the state's coronavirus patients.

The treatment works by bolstering a patient's own immune system to fight the virus.

It may be the best hope for COVID-19 patients while scientists work to develop new, specific treatments for the disease.

It is significantly cheaper than developing a new drug, which costs millions of dollars to take through trials and regulation before mass production.

Dozens of existing drugs - including remdesivir and chloroquine - are being tested as researchers around the world are scrambling to find a cure for the disease.

Doctors in the UK have not yet been told what drugs to use on patients by The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), therefore it's a case of testing to see which works for each patient's needs.

At this point there is no large clinical data to prove that convalescent plasma successfully treats COVID-19. But it's been rushed through approval because it is promising.

A top World Health Organization (WHO) expert said 'it is a very important area to pursue', according to Retuers.

Dr Mike Ryan, head of WHOs health emergencies program, said using convalescent plasma was a 'very valid' approach.

He said: 'It must be given at the right time, because it mops up the virus in the system, and it just gives the new patients immune system a vital push at the time it needs it. But it has to be carefully timed and its not always successful.'

Researchers say it could work as a temporary shield for the most vulnerable or frontline healthcare workers by protecting them if they catch the virus, almost like a vaccine, which has not yet been developed.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Monday that plasma would be tested there to treat the sickest of the state's more than 25,000 coronavirus patients. Pictured, a recovered patient donating blood for convalescent plasma treatment in Wuhan

A top World Health Organization (WHO) expert said 'it is a very important area to pursue', according to Retuers. Pictured, Dr Kong Yuefeng, a recovered COVID-19 patient, donates plasma at a clinic in Wuhan, Hubei province, China on February 18

Recovered patients in China, including in Wuhan and Beijing, have been donating their blood in hospitals since February. Pictured, a recovered patient prepares to donate his blood

WHAT IS CONVALESCENT PLASMA AND WHERE HAS IT BEEN USED? Convalescent plasma is a type of therapy has been used to treat infections for at least a century. Use of convalescent plasma has been studied in outbreaks of respiratory infections, including the 2009-2010 H1N1 influenza virus pandemic, 2003 SARS epidemic, and the 2012 MERS epidemic. Convalescent plasma was used as a last resort to improve the survival rate of patients with SARS whose condition continued to deteriorate despite treatment. Convalescent plasma has been proven 'effective and life-saving' against other infectious diseases, including rabies and diphtheria, said Dr Mike Ryan, head of WHOs health emergencies program, according to Reuters. 'It is a very important area to pursue,' Dr Ryan said. Although promising, convalescent plasma has not been shown to be effective in every disease studied, the FDA say. Is it already being used for COVID-19 patients? Before it can be routinely given to patients with COVID-19, it is important to determine whether it is safe and effective through clinical trials. The FDA yesterday said it was 'facilitating access' for the treatment to be used on patients with serious or immediately life-threatening COVID-19 infections'. It came after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo the day before said that plasma would be tested there to treat the sickest of the state's coronavirus patients. COVID-19 patients in Beijing, Wuhan and Shanghai are being treated with this method, authorities report. Lu Hongzhou, professor and co-director of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre, said in February the hospital had set up a special clinic to administer plasma therapy and was selecting patients who were willing to donate. 'We are positive that this method can be very effective in our patients,' he said. Meanwhile, the head of a Wuhan hospital had said plasma infusions from recovered patients had shown some encouraging preliminary results. The MHRA has approved the use of the therapy in the UK, but it has not been revealed which hospitals have tried it. How does it work? Blood banks take plasma donations much like they take donations of whole blood; regular plasma is used in hospitals and emergency rooms every day. If someone's donating only plasma, their blood is drawn through a tube, the plasma is separated and the rest infused back into the donors body. Then that plasma is tested and purified to be sure it doesn't harbor any blood-borne viruses and is safe to use. For COVID-19 research, people who have recovered from the coronavirus would be donating. Scientists would measure how many antibodies are in a unit of donated plasma - tests just now being developed that aren't available to the general public - as they figure out what's a good dose, and how often a survivor could donate. There is also the possibility that asymptomatic patients - those who never showed symptoms or became unwell - would be able to donate. But these 'silent carriers' would need to be found via testing first. Japanese pharmaceutical company Takeda is working on a drug that contains recovered patients antibodies in a pill form, Stat News reported. Could it work as a vaccine? While scientists race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, blood plasma therapy could provide temporary protection for the most vulnerable in a similar fashion. A vaccine trains peoples immune systems to make their own antibodies against a target germ. The plasma infusion approach would give people a temporary shot of someone elses antibodies that are short-lived and require repeated doses. If US regulator the FDA agrees, a second study would give antibody-rich plasma infusions to certain people at high risk from repeated exposures to COVID-19, such as hospital workers or first responders, said Dr Liise-anne Pirofski of New York's Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. That also might include nursing homes when a resident becomes ill, in hopes of giving the other people in the home some protection, she said. Advertisement

Doctors in China, where the COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019, were the first to attempt treating patients this way.

Recovered patients in China, including in Wuhan, Shanghai and Beijing, have been donating their blood in hospitals since February.

Special units for blood donation have been set up in hospitals in China with leading doctors claiming to have had encouraging early results with COVID-19 patients.

Dr Derek Gatherer, of Lancaster University, added there is every reason to believe blood plasma therapy can save lives during the global coronavirus pandemic.

He told MailOnline: 'Plasma therapy is a promising avenue... for really critical cases, it could make a life or death difference.'

'Recovered patients will normally have a lot of antibodies, and transferring those directly into acute cases ought to help.

'We've seen plasma-derived antibody therapy work in Ebola, so there is a good rationale for believing it would work for COVID-19.'

Although the treatment isn't proven to work for COVID-19 yet, the 'historical evidence is promising', Dr Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins Universitys school of public health said.

Blood plasma therapy has been around for centuries, and has been used to fight off flu and measles outbreaks in the days before vaccines, and more recently against coronaviruses SARS and MERS, and Ebola.

A paper in the Journal of Clinical Investigation earlier this month cited evidence that 1918 flu patients given the infusions were less likely to die.

And a 1935 medical report detailed how doctors stopped a measles outbreak from sweeping through a boarding school using 'serum' from prior patients.

There are still questions around the safety and efficacy of convalescent plasma. While regular plasma transfusions are a mainstay of medicine, very rarely they can cause a lung-damaging side effect.

It's also not clear the extent to which the really severe pneumonia symptoms are due to the virus, and the body's own immune response.

Any therapy that attacks the virus directly won't be much use when there is a cytokine storm  when the immune system goes into overdrive and produces a lot of inflammation and therefore symptoms, Dr Gatherer explains.

One obvious downside to the treatment during a global pandemic  in which almost 475,000 have been infected with the coronavirus  is figuring out how to get it to the masses.

'There is a lot of work involved in production. It's all a bit more complicated than a drug in pill form would be,' said Dr Gatherer.

'You need to get recovered patients to volunteer, then you need to plasmapherese them, the antibody product has to be kept cold and will have limited fridge life, the antibody will need to be administered in hospital.'

Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist from Warwick Medical School, said one solution is to extract the blood of people who have had an asymptomatic infection, those who have fought of COVID-19 without having symptoms.

'This is called passive immunisation and works very well in the management of infections where a vaccine is not yet available or difficult to produce,' Dr Young said.

These 'silent carriers' account for around 30 per cent of all COVID-19 positive cases, according to research from China.

They could be fast-tracked to donate blood through services such as NHS Blood and Transplant, Dr Young said.

But first, these people need to be sought out. This is unlikely to happen any time soon because the Government insist on only testing people for the virus if they are receiving medical help.

Dr Young said: 'To do this we urgently need serological testing  it's on its way, according to Matt Hancock in last night's press conference, and is really important in allowing us to identify and trace all who have been infected in the community as once infected, people are safe from subsequent infection.'

The government has purchased 3.5million antibody tests that will show if people have already had the coronavirus, according to Health Secretary Matt Hancock.

Known as serological testing, the antibody test would also allow officials to understand exactly how many of the population have been affected. This would help with strategies to reduce transmission.

All the coronavirus treatments that are being tested, from HIV pills to an Ebola drug and a malaria medication

Favipiravir

What are the brand versions of the drug?

Avigan

What does it treat?

Flu

Who makes it?

It is made by a subsidiary of the company Fujifilm Holdings, which is better known for producing cameras.

What have studies shown?

In a trial of 80 patients in China, those given the drug tested negative for the virus after an average of four days, while it took 11 days for those not treated with it, according to Japanese public broadcaster NHK.

How does it work?

The drug - known as an RNA polymerase inhibitor - stops viruses from making copies of themselves to spread through the body.

Is it being tested in the UK?

In the UK it is not licensed or recommended, according to a document released by Public Health England last September. No trials are thought to be taking place in the UK at the moment.

What are its side effects?

Animal studies have suggested the drug may be harmful for pregnant women, with it linked to birth defects and death.

What do the experts think?

Robin May, professor of infectious disease at the University of Birmingham, said: 'It looks encouraging.

'And this drug appears to significantly speed up recovery from coronavirus, which is a step forward.

'However the reports so far seem to suggest it may not work as well for more severe cases of coronavirus.'

He added the data from the Chinese trial suggests that it might not be as effective 'for the severely ill people we are really worried about'.

Remdesivir

Remdesivir is an anti-viral drug that works in essentially the same way as favipiravir  by crippling the RNA polymerase enzyme, stopping a virus from reproducing

What are the brand versions of the drug?

Remdesivir - no brand name currently exists because it is only experimental.

What does it treat?

It was developed around 10 years ago with the intention of it destroying the Ebola virus. It was pushed aside, however, when other, better candidates emerged.

Who makes it?

California-based pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, the firm behind the life-changing HIV-preventing pill Truvada, or PrEP.

What have studies shown?

Lab tests of remdesivir have shown promise against coronaviruses - but human trials are still in their early days.

Doctors in the US have tried it on patients and it managed to speed up the recovery of the first person to be treated for the virus there.

The a 35-year-old man in Washington state, close to Seattle  whose infection was announced on January 20  recovered after being given the drug.

A Californian woman who doctors 'thought was going to pass away' also recovered in the US after being given the drug.

Four American passengers on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship treated with the drug in Japan also recovered.

Officials in Liguria  a coastal region of Italy  also announced an infected man in his 70s had recovered and could go home after 12 days in hospital.

How does it work?

Remdesivir is an anti-viral drug that works in essentially the same way as favipiravir  by crippling the RNA polymerase enzyme, stopping a virus from reproducing.

Is it being tested in the UK?

It is not prescribed on the NHS because it hasn't been approved.

Hundreds of patients - including some in the UK - taking part in a European mega-trial will get chance to take the drug to prove if it can fight the coronavirus.

The drug is also being trialled on coronavirus patients in China and at the University of Nebraska.

What are its side effects?

Scientists are full of hope because the drug is proven to be safe in humans. Its side effects are still not well understood.

What do the experts think?

Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, hailed remdesivir as 'one of the most promising antivirals' being investigated.

While Dr Alfredo Garzino-Demo, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said evidence shows it has the ability to treat COVID-19 patients.

Lopinavir/ritonavir, marketed under the brand names Kaletra and Aluvia, is an anti-HIV medicine

Lopinavir/ritonavir

What are the brand versions of the drug?

Kaletra and Aluvia.

What does it treat?

It is an anti-HIV medicine given to people living with the virus to prevent it developing into AIDS.

Who makes it?

Illinois-based manufacturer AbbVie donated free supplies of the drug to authorities in China, the US and Europe for tests.

What have studies shown?

Chinese media reported that the drug was successfully used to cure patients with the coronavirus, but the reports have not been scientifically proven.

A separate Chinese study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the lopinavir-ritonavir combination did not improve survival or speed recovery of COVID-19 patients.

However, the authors noted they had enrolled a 'severely ill population' of patients.

In a clinical trial submission, scientists in South Korea said lab studies have: 'In vitro [laboratory] studies revealed that lopinavir/ritonavir [has] antiviral activity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).'

How does it work?

It is a class of drug called a protease inhibitor, which essentially stick to an enzyme on a virus which is vital to the virus reproducing.

By doing this it blocks the process the virus would normally use to clone itself and spread the infection further.

Is it being tested in the UK?

It is not prescribed on the NHS for coronavirus because it hasn't been approved - but it is being trialled by Oxford University.

But it is available on the health service for HIV treatment and was prescribed around 1,400 times in 2018, either as Kaletra or ritonavir on its own.

The drug is also being trialled on coronavirus patients in China and at the University of Nebraska.

What are its side effects?

Known side effects include diarrhea, headaches, upset stomachs, drowsiness, dizziness, a bad taste in the mouth, and trouble sleeping.

What do the experts think?

The drugs have been described as 'promising' by experts. But there has been some hesitancy about the drug combination due to the NEJM study.

One drug being used by doctors fighting the coronavirus outbreak is chloroquine phosphate, an anti-malarial medication. It is sold under the brand name Arlan

Chloroquine phosphate

What are the brand versions of the drug?

Aralen.

What does it treat?

Doctors have used the generic drug for 70 years to treat malaria.

Who makes it?

French drug giant Sanofi.

Where has it already been tested?

China recommended the drug to treat COVID-19 patients, after tests showed it could help them recover and keep the disease at bay.

South Korea has already tried the drugs on COVID-19 patients.

A trial at the University of Minnesota is scheduled to take place in the US next month.

Officials in the Netherlands are already suggesting doctors treat critically-ill patients with the drug.

What have studies shown?

Chinese officials claimed the drug 'demonstrated efficacy and acceptable safety in treating COVID-19 associated pneumonia'.

South Korea and China both say the drug is an 'effective' antiviral treatment against the disease.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology  in the city where the crisis began  claimed the drug was 'highly effective' in petri dish tests.

How does it work?

It has the power to stop viral molecules replicating in red blood cells, and taking hold in the body.

Is it being tested in the UK?

Chloroquine was prescribed around 46,000 times in 2018 in the UK  but a form of it is also available over-the-counter from pharmacies without a prescription.

It is thought to be among 1,000 drugs being tested against coronavirus in a lab as part of a Queens University Belfast study.

What are its side effects?

Doctors say the medicine is generally safe, but it can cause a number of mild side effects including headaches, loss of appetite, upset stomach and skin rashes, to more severe ones such as hair loss and depression.

What do the experts think?

Professor Robin May, an infectious disease specialist at Birmingham University, said the safety profile of the drug is 'well-established'.

He added: 'It is cheap and relatively easy to manufacture, so it would be fairly easy to accelerate into clinical trials and, if successful, eventually into treatment.'

Professor May suggested chloroquine may work by altering the acidity of the area of cells that it attacks, making it harder for the virus to replicate.

Hydroxychloroquine, sold under the brand name Plaquenil, may treat COVID-19

Hydroxychloroquine (Malaria)

What are the brand versions of the drug?

Plaquenil.

What does it treat?

Malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. It is a less powerful and, by some experts' accounts, less toxic, version of chloroquine phosphate.

Who makes it and where has it already been tested?

Drug giant Sanofi carried out a study on 24 patients, which the French government described as 'promising'.

French health officials are now planning on a larger trial of the drug, which is used on the NHS.

What have studies shown?

Results from the French study showed three quarters of patients treated with the drug were cleared of the virus within six days. None of the placebo group were treated.

How does it work?

It interferes with viral molecules replicating in red blood cells.

Is it being tested in the UK?

It is thought to be among 1,000 drugs being tested at Queens University Belfast.

What are its side effects?

Skin rashes, nausea, diarrhoea and headaches.

What do the experts think?

Chinese scientists investigating the other form of chloroquine penned a letter to a prestigious journal saying its 'less toxic' derivative may also help.

In the comment to Cell Discovery  owned by publisher Nature, they said it shares similar chemical structures and mechanisms.

The team of experts added: 'It is easy to conjure up the idea that hydroxychloroquine may be a potent candidate to treat infection by SARS-CoV-2.'

Sarilumab, a rheumatoid arthritis drug which is marketed as Kevzara in the US, is set to be trialled on patients in the US

Sarilumab

What are the brand versions of the drug?

Kevzara

Who makes it?

Kevzara was developed by Sanofi and New York-based Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.

What does it treat?

Rheumatoid arthritis. The condition sees the immune system attack healthy parts of the body, such as the joints by mistake and causes inflammation.

This can cause tiredness, anaemia, and damage to bones, cartilage and soft tissues.

Where has it already been tested?

It was given to 21 patients with severe COVID-19 in a study by the University of Science and Technology of China in February.

Sanofi, which makes the drug, says it is also launching trials 'rapidly in Italy and the US in a matter of weeks.

What have studies shown?

According to the Chinese researchers, fevers returned to normal and all other symptoms 'improved remarkably' within a few days.

Additionally, three quarters of patients had lowered their oxygen intake and one patient no longer needed breathing support.

Nineteen patients were discharged after an average of 13.5 days following treatment, with the remainder 'recovering well' as of the time of the study's release, the researchers wrote.

How does it work?

The drug works by blocking part of the immune system which can cause inflammation, or swelling, which is overactive in people with rheumatoid arthritis.

Inflammation is the body's natural response to infection but, in patients with coronavirus, it can get out of control, making symptoms significantly worse and even trigger multiple organ failure.

Is it being tested in the UK?

It is likely to be included in Queen University Belfast's study of 1,000 drugs on the new coronavirus.

While the official list of drugs has not been made public, the university said it was testing medicines that may be able to reduce virus infection or replication and virus-induced inflammatory responses.

What are its side effects?

A cough or sore throat, blocked or runny nose, cold sores, urinary tract infections and redness and itching at the site of the injection.

What do the experts think?

Dr Cassandra Calabrese, a rheumatologist at the renowned Cleveland Clinic, said there is a 'growing body of reports showing the benefit' of the drug in COVID-19 patients.

Interferon beta-1b/SNG001

What are the brand versions of the drug?

The drug is still in development and goes by the name of SNG001.

What does it treat?

Interferon beta-1b (IFN-beta) is a naturally occurring protein that orchestrates the body's anti-viral responses.

SNG001 is a formulation of IFN-beta developed by Synairgen to prevent severe lower respiratory tract illness caused by cold and flu infections.

A different formulation using the protein is used to treat patients with multiple sclerosis (MS).

The drug called Extavia is self-injected every two days and works by slowing down the damage to the nervous system and by reducing the number of relapses.

Where has it already been tested?

Synairgen is a UK-based company, and it appears their formulation hasn't crossed overseas yet.

But it does say has been approached by, and is in discussion with, a number of scientific and governmental bodies in the US and internationally since the COVID-19 outbreak began.

What have studies shown?

Laboratory studies have shown IFN-beta can protect cells from infection by a range of respiratory viruses.

These include the MERS and SARS coronavirus strains, leaving scientists expecting IFN-beta to also protect against the COVID-19 strain.

It has already been shown to improve the recovery of asthma and COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) patients who have other lung infections, such as flu.

Richard Marsden, CEO of Synairgen, said: 'SNG001 has been well tolerated in clinical trials in over 200 respiratory patients to date and has accelerated lung function recovery in two Phase II asthma trials in patients with a cold or flu infection.'

How does it work?

SNG001 is inhaled with a nebuliser, which helps deliver drugs to the lungs.

Scientists believe it will prevent the coronavirus from taking over lung cells to replicate. This would prevent patients deteriorating until the point they need ventilation to survive.

Viruses, including coronaviruses, can evolve the ability to suppresses IFN-beta production in the body, thereby helping the virus evade.

Is it being tested in the UK?

Southampton researchers are conducting a Phase II SNG001 trial on COVID-19 patients to see if it could prevent worsening symptoms in those most at risk.

The trial, led by Professor Tom Wilkinson at University Hospital Southampton, will involve 100 patients at Southampton and up to ten other NHS hospitals.

Those patients will receive the best current COVID19 care, whilst inhaling either a placebo or SNG001 for 14 days.

What are its side effects?

Doctors are currently clueless. Side effects will be reported with the findings of the clinic trial.

Other forms of interferon beta can cause headaches, vaginal bleeding and diminish libido.

What do the experts think?

Tom Wilkinson told Sky News: 'We are hoping that the drug will increase the rate of recovery from infection, that it will increase the protection in the bit of the lungs that are not infected yet and will reduce the number of patients that decline significantly and require intubation and ventilation.'

Mr Marsden said: 'A successful outcome from this trial [at Southampton] in COVID-19 patients would be a major breakthrough in the fight against this coronavirus pandemic.'

Dexamethasone

What are the brand versions of the drug?

Ozurdex and Baycadron.

What does it treat?

The steroid drug is used to treat allergies and asthma, as well as some types of cancer.

Who makes it?

Baycadron is made by Wockhardt Usa, Llc, while Ozurdex is made by Allergan, the manufacturer of a commonly used textured breast implant.

What have studies shown?

No studies have yet to prove dexamethasone can treat SARS-CoV-2 - but it has been tested on patients with MERS and SARS, two different coronaviruses.

One retrospective study of critically-ill patients with MERS found that almost half of the people that received steroids needed additional treatments such as assistance in breathing, drugs to increase blood pressure, and a form of dialysis.

Those given steroids were found to take longer to clear the virus from their bodies.

Other studies found that the virus was still present in SARS patients who took the drugs up to three weeks after infection.

How does it work?

Steroids are often used by doctors to reduce inflammation, which is present in the lungs of patients with the coronavirus.

However, steroids also impair the immune system's ability to fight viruses and other infections that often develop in patients with life-threatening illness.

Is it being tested in the UK?

Researchers from the University of Oxford have launched a new clinical trial to test the effects of potential drug treatments, including dexamethasone, for patients admitted to hospital with the virus.

What are its side effects?

The drug is known to cause an increase in appetite and heartburn, as well as muscle weakness and insomnia.

What do the experts think?

In a piece in prestigious medical journal The Lancet, three experts warned: 'No unique reason exists to expect that patients with 2019-nCoV infection will benefit from corticosteroids.

'And they might be more likely to be harmed with such treatment.

'We conclude that corticosteroid treatment should not be used for the treatment of 2019-nCoV-induced lung injury or shock outside of a clinical trial.'
[March 26, 2020] Nu Skin Recognized For Excellence In Environmental And Social Responsibility

PROVO, Utah, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Nu Skin, a global leader in premium-quality beauty and wellness products, received a Communitas Award for outstanding Corporate Social Responsibility, Ethical & Environmental Responsibility, and Green Initiatives. The Communitas Awards program is an international effort to recognize the spirit of communitas, or people helping people for the benefit of their community. The award recognizes Nu Skin's comprehensive sustainability initiatives during the past year, including holding a global sales conference that was energy neutral across multiple facilities, announcing several new commitments and tracking the progress, and taking additional steps at its global facilities to reduce waste. "This honor is particularly meaningful because it recognizes our desire and efforts to elevate our mission to be a force for good in the world," said Ritch Wood, CEO. "Whether it is responsibly sourcing ingredients, reducing our carbon footprint or utilizing more environmentally friendly packaging, we are looking at the impact we have on the planet and want to ensure the footprint we leave in everyhing we do is a green one."



About Communitas Awards

The Communitas Awards is an international effort to recognize the spirit of communitaspeople helping peoplein exceptional businesses, organizations and individuals that are unselfishly giving of themselves and their resources, and those that are changing how they do business to benefit their communities. The awards are an outgrowth of the pro bono recognition program of the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP). Past Communitas winners include MasterCard, Honeywell, Dow Chemical, Toyota and Vonage. More information is available at www.communitasawards.com. About Nu Skin

Founded 35 years ago, Nu Skin develops and distributes innovative consumer products, offering a comprehensive line of premium-quality beauty and wellness solutions. The company builds upon its scientific expertise in both skin care and nutrition to continually develop innovative product brands that include the Nu Skin personal care brand, the Pharmanex nutrition brand, and most recently, the ageLOC anti-aging brand. The ageLOC brand has generated a loyal following for such products as the ageLOC LumiSpa skin cleansing and treatment device, ageLOC Youth nutritional supplement, the ageLOC Me customized skin care system, as well as the ageLOC TR90 weight management and body shaping system. Nu Skin sells its products through a global network of sales leaders in Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Pacific. As a long-standing member of direct selling associations globally, Nu Skin is committed to the industry's consumer guidelines that protect and support those who sell and purchase its products through the direct selling channel. Nu Skin International is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc., which is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol (NYSE: NUS). More information is available at nuskin.com.

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nu-skin-recognized-for-excellence-in-environmental-and-social-responsibility-301029909.html SOURCE Nu Skin

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Here are todays top news, analysis and opinion curated for you at this hour. Know all about the latest news and other news updates from Hindustan Times.

More than 1,000 stuck at Telangana-Andhra border over Covid-19 lockdown

More than 1,000 people who set off from Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana, to various districts in Andhra Pradesh were stranded on Wednesday at the Garikapadu border check-post as the police refused to allow them passage due to lockdown to check the spread of coronavirus disease Covid-19.

Read More

Covid-19 lockdown: Essential services allowed, mohalla clinics wont be shut, says Kejriwal

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday said that all the essential services will remain open during Covid-19 lockdown, and assured that people who are involved in delivering these services will be allowed.

Read More

For IPLs young aspirants, a cancelled season is a great loss

Many young players, or those just looking to be noticed, dream of taking the IPL route to national selection. This year, they fear missing out, with no guarantee what the next season will bring up.

Read More

Zomato employees take deep salary cuts amid COVID-19 lockdown

The coronavirus outbreak has forced a lockdown in countries across the globe. All but essential services have been suspended in order to contain the spread of coronavirus. Amid the present circumstances, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal has announced that hundreds of employees have taken a deep voluntary salary cuts to help the company maintain a steady cash flow. Read more

PM Modi asks bal sena to ensure adults stay home, shares this video

Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a complete nation-wide lockdown during an address to citizens on Tuesday. He said that the lockdown will be in place for 21 days and has advised everyone to follow it in order to fight coronavirus. Read more

How to cope with lockdown: Fix routine, stay connected

Living in lockdown can expose people to stress, anxiety and boredom, especially when the lockdown period is a few weeks long, shows research on the psychological impact of pandemics. Read more

Books, shows, films that chillingly predicted coronavirus pandemic, from Big Bang Theory to creepy K-drama

From a novel that spoke of a severe pneumonia-like illness that would sweep the globe in 2020 to an episode of a Korean drama in which the characters speak about weaponising coronavirus, multiple pop-culture works are seeing a resurgence for unwittingly predicting the ongoing pandemic. Read more

How to cope with lockdown: Fix routine, stay connected

Living in loc
ICE Using Deportation Flights to Bring Home US Citizens Stranded in Central America

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using its deportation flights to bring home hundreds of U.S. citizens stranded in Central America due to travel restrictions amid the CCP virus pandemic.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

In a statement on March 25, ICE said that along with the State Department, it has worked to bring back a total of 209 United States citizens on the return leg of two deportation flights to El Salvador and Honduras, both of which have closed their borders to stop the spread of the virus. The flights took place on March 22 and 24, allowing Americans stuck in these countries to occupy available seats and return home.

ICE and the State Department will continue to work together to facilitate the safe return of U.S. citizens on future removal flight returns from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador throughout the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic and these return operations could also potentially expand to other countries outside of the Northern Triangle, ICE noted.

According to the agency, ICE performs temperature screening on all detainees boarding all deportation flights. Any detainee with a temperature of 100.4 degrees or higher will be immediately referred to a medical provider for further evaluation and observation.

However, the agency did not comment on whether the U.S. citizens being returned from Central America recently are being screened before boarding the flights back to the United States.

The Department of State this week said it has launched an unprecedented global effort to bring home our citizens from every corner of the globe, so far repatriating more than 9,000 Americans from 28 countries. That total includes more than 800 from Wuhan, China, where the CCP virus was first discovered, and more than 1,000 Americans from Morocco and Peru, where U.S. officials are working to secure authorization for further flights, as well as authorization for U.S. citizens in more remote parts of Peru to travel to Lima by land or by air.

Another 66 flights are planned over the next nine days with roughly 9,000 Americans scheduled to fly on them, although this number may increase, the department said.

Earlier this month, ICE confirmed a 31-year-old Mexican national being detained by the agency had tested positive for the CCP virus and was being placed into quarantine at the Bergen County Jail in Hackensack, New Jersey, marking the first confirmed case of COVID-19 infection in ICE detention.

The agency said in a statement that those who had come into contact with the detainee have been identified and were being monitored, and no new inmates would be accepted into the facility until further information is available.

ICE, which currently has over 37,000 detainees, said it has taken steps to slow the spread of CCP virus among detainees and is working closely with the Department of Homeland Security and other federal, state, and local agencies to facilitate a speedy, whole-of-government response in confronting Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), keeping everyone safe, and helping detect and slow the spread of the virus.

Tom Ozimek contributed to this report.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 01:48:44|Editor: huaxia

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BRUSSELS, March 26 (Xinhua) -- As the coronavirus pandemic looms large, China and the European Union (EU) need to work together to champion and facilitate international solidarity, Zhang Ming, Head of the Chinese Mission to the EU, wrote in an article carried on Thursday by European media.

The two sides should also cooperate in strengthening the weak links and seeking a long-term solution to defend global health security, according to the signed article entitled "To fight the pandemic, put trust and cooperation before politics," which appeared in the Brussels Times as well as in Euractiv and EUobserver.

Zhang pointed out that "a friend in need is a friend indeed. When China's fight against the outbreak was in a most difficult stage, the EU, its member states and their citizens extended a warm and helping hand, for which China is deeply grateful. As the situation is getting more serious in Europe, we share your worries and woes as our own and extend our deep sympathies. We are also providing support in the best way we could, despite China's own high demand for medical supplies at home and production challenges."

According to the ambassador, the Chinese central government has provided to the EU and its member states medical protective equipment in large quantities, including respirators, face masks, goggles, protective gowns and ventilators. Chinese local governments, charity organizations and business communities are also making contributions through various channels, so are the Chinese communities living in Europe. Former Italian prime minister and former president of the European Commission Romano Prodi told China that "Your donation is a signal of friendship and solidarity that we will never forget. I do hope that the world will understand that we are really in the same boat."

Zhang wrote that "In fighting the virus, China has made huge sacrifices and gained valuable experience. Such experience is a common asset, which we hope could help save other countries from further sacrifices. Chinese and European health specialists are working closely together, both online and on the ground. The two sides share good practices via video conferences. Chinese medical teams are fighting the pandemic shoulder to shoulder with their European colleagues in Italy and other countries, offering their experience and expertise."

He argued that "viruses do not discriminate on the basis of race or nationality. The best way to help oneself is to help others. Any attempt to put a Chinese or European label on the coronavirus is to despise science and life. Our fight against the virus has nothing to do with social system or geopolitics."

According to the ambassador, "to politicize the outbreak or view China's efforts with suspicion is nothing but parochial and detrimental. When people's lives and health are at stake, the only right thing to do is to put politics and prejudice aside and join the global fight against the virus."

He also noted that "the response to the outbreak is like a mirror, which well reflects that China-EU relations are essentially about cooperation and partnership ... The mirror also reflects the global significance of China-EU relations. Both supporting and upholding multilateralism, China and the EU share the belief that, in face of global challenges at a trying time, it is important to rise to the occasion together rather than blame others, pass the buck or adopt beggar-thy-neighbor policies."
In a bid to encourage social



distancing and not violate the COVID-19 lockdown, people in Gujarat's Punsari village chose to hold a digital 'besna' or mourning for one of the locals who died.

The 'besna' was arranged on Facebook on Thursday to enable family and well wishers of late Jayantibhai Darji (60) to pay their tribute from the confines of their homes.

As many as 300 persons, including close relatives and Darji's children, paid their tributes using Facebook Live, former sarpanch of Punsari Himanshu Patel said.

Punsari is generally termed as India's first smart village for implementing various technological measures, such as free WiFi and CCTV surveillance.

"Darji died on Wednesday. In view of the lockdown in the country to stop the spread of coronavirus, I urged his younger brother Natubhai not to arrange a mourning meet, but instead hold a digital besna," Patel said.

As decided, only five men from Darji's family sat in front of his photo outside his home and a laptop with camera was placed on a table nearby, he said.

"We asked his family and well-wishers to pay homage using Facebook Live between 11 am and 12 pm. As many as 300 persons living in different parts of Gujarat and Mumbai paid tributes using technology," Patel said.

Both Darji's son, who lives in Mumbai and daughter from Ahmedabad paid tribute to their father on Facebook, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Is your portfolio as good as gold? The precious metal has gained in price this year, as the coronavirus epidemic hit economies hard and investors went seeking a safe store of value. Gold, of course, is the traditional financial safe haven, and the price rose above $1,600 per ounce this month. It showed a deep dip in last weeks market crash, but rose again sharply in yesterdays general market rally. The Comex price is now $1,650.

Of course, precious metals are not the only investment. We may be in a bear market, and COVID-19 may have shuttered large sections of the economy, but many investors still want to stay in stocks. That was clear from this week's surge, when the S&P 500 gained 16%. The rally has raised a question, though  where to invest?

This is where TipRanks comes to the rescue. Using an array of accurate, updated market data, along with the tools to search the database, investors can find the right answer to that question. To get the process started, weve pulled up three stocks that deserve a second look.

All three are gold miners  because simply buying metal is not the only way to invest in gold. These companies offer investors a way to tie their fortunes to the metal by getting into the gold industry at the source. The mining companies offer a unique combination of traits: an especially low cost of entry, a Buy rating, and a pronounced upside potential, in excess of 35%.

In a report for H.C. Wainwright, analyst Heiko Ihle lays out the prospects for each of these companies, and several others. Ihle takes into account current conditions, as well as the impact of COVID-19 on operations. Let's take a closer look:

Golden Star Resources (GSS)

First on our list is a Canadian-based company with operations in the African nation of Ghana. Golden Star has two mines, Wassa and Prestea, in the southwestern area of Ghana. The mines production last year reached 203,800 ounces, in the upper end of the companys guidance, at a price per ounce ranging from $560 to $1,000. The lowest market price for gold last year was approximately $1,300 per ounce, making the Golden Star innately profitable.

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That was borne out by the companys quarterly reports through the year. GSS returned positive EPS each quarter in 2019. In Q4, the company reported 52,700 ounces production, 8% higher year-over-year. For the full year, GSS showed cash flow of $22.8 million, nearly triple the 2018 figure, and finished the year with $53.4 million cash on hand.

Golden Star also has an active exploration program, with a $13.4 million budget. The companys exploration operations aim to expand the current mining areas, rather than open new ones.

In his comments on GSS, Ihle states his belief that the company is undervalued, after falling 36% in recent months. He goes on to say, We  highlight the firms large cash and cash equivalent position of $53.4M, which is roughly 22% of the companys current market cap. While Golden Star has endured some operational hardships over the past year, we nonetheless believe that management is taking the necessary steps to improve future performance at its sites through the reduction of mining costs and thereby ultimately drive returns...

As a result, Ihle reiterates a Buy rating on GSS shares, while his $4.70 price target suggest a strong upside of 73%. (To watch Ihles track record, click here)

GSS has an even split between Buys and Holds, with two of each, giving the stock a Moderate Buy rating from the analyst consensus. Shares are priced in the penny range, at $2.58, and the average price target of $3.86 implies room for a 50% upside growth potential. (See Golden Stars price targets at TipRanks)

Asanko Gold (AKG)

This is another Canadian-based company. With its large natural resources, Canada has a great deal of mining experience, and it is not unusual for Canadian mining companies to operate overseas. Asanko, like GSS above, has active mines in Ghana, along with nearly 4.8 million ounces of proven and probable gold reserves in its areas of operations.

The most recent fiscal quarter, Q4 2019, was good for AKG, as the company reported record quarterly production of 66,112 ounces at a cost well below the market price per ounce. The company sold 66,095 ounces of gold during the same period, generating $96.8 million in revenues. For the full year, AKG total production was 251,044, also a record, and sales of 248,862 ounces, at an average price of $1,376 per ounce, generated record sales revenue of $342.4 million.

Looking ahead, Asanko guides toward 225,000 to 245,000 ounces in total production for 2020, slightly lower than this past year. The company is setting aside an exploration budget of $10 million.

Ihle believes that AKG is another highly undervalued stock. In his comments, he points out the companys solid foundation for further growth: the mine is expected to produce 2.1M oz of gold over an expected 10-year mine life. We further highlight steady cash flow from the site, which should permit the firm to pursue additional cost reductions through investment, while allowing for regional exploration of Asankos 21,000 hectare land package.

With a large reserve of recoverable gold available underground, and the resources available to exploit it, AKG gets a Buy rating from Ihle. The analyst sets a $2.40 price target, indicative of a 173% upside potential. (To watch Ihles track record, click here)

At just 87 cents per share, AKG is a true penny stock. But it may be a gold mine for investors, as the average price target of $2.14 suggests room for a sky-high 146% upside in the coming 12 months. AKG has 2 recent analyst reviews, and both are Buy-side, giving the stock a Moderate Buy consensus rating. (See Asankos stock-price forecast at TipRanks)

Gold Resource Corporation (GORO)

For our last gold penny stock, we move to the Americas. Gold Resource, based in Colorado Springs, has active mines in Mexicos Oaxaca state, in the southern part of the country, as well as the US state of Nevada, which has long been known for precious metal production and is even nicknamed the Silver State.

GOROs active mines gave record production in 2019, putting out a total of 40,318 ounces of gold and 1,732,604 ounces of silver for the full year. The bulk of that production came from Oaxaca; the Nevada operations are not yet at full development. GOROs net sales in 2019 totaled $135.4 million, and brought in $5.8 million in net income, for an EPS of 9 cents. It was the companys ninth consecutive profitable year.

During 2019, GORO returned $113 million to shareholders through its dividend. The company pays out 4 cents per share monthly, making the yield a modest 1.41%. The payout ratio, however, is also low, at just 9.6%, showing that GORO can easily sustain the dividend and increase it at current income levels.

Looking ahead, GORO clearly expects income levels to remain intact. The company guides toward 2020 production of 54,000 gold ounces and 1,700,000 silver ounces, with a plus/minus of 10%. This is in-line with achieved 2019 production.

Heiko Ihle is bullish on GORO, as seen in his Buy rating and $8 price target. That target implies an upside for the stock of 170%. (To watch Ihles track record, click here)

Commenting on GORO, Ihle wrote, shares continue to be undervalued despite maintaining two strong precious metal operations in top tier mining jurisdictions. Additionally, the firm continues to enhance both its Nevada and Oaxaca operations through successful exploration drilling at site.

GORO stock has a Moderate Buy rating from the analyst consensus, with both of the recent reviews rating the stock as a Buy proposition. GORO shares are selling for $2.96, and the average price target of $7.38 indicates that there may be room here for 148% upside share appreciation. (See Gold Resources analyst ratings at TipRanks)
Press Release

26 March 2020

Shift4 Payments, the leader in integrated payment processing solutions, has announced the launch of Shift4Cares.com, a round-the-clock online resource for government agencies, news outlets and businesses affected by COVID-19. The website offers a wealth of valuable information on the economic impact of this pandemic and is part of Shift4's initiative to raise over $200 million for restaurants and other small businesses  including up to $10 million contributed directly from the company.

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Valuable Transaction Data Highlights Economic Impact of COVID-19

As the leading payment processor for the hospitality industry, Shift4 Payments is in a unique position to assess the economic impact COVID-19 is currently having on restaurants, bars, hotels and various other business types. Shift4 securely processes over 3.5 billion transactions annually for more than 200,000 businesses nationwide, representing over $200 billion in payments each year. This amount of transaction data is a powerful tool in assessing the impact of COVID-19 on business communities across the country.

Data on the site for the last seven days shows that hospitality industry transactions are down significantly when compared to the week of February 2, with restaurant transactions down 74%, hotels down 86% and all other industries down 64%. While the impact has been felt across the country, the states leading the declines are California (91%), Pennsylvania (89%), Texas (89%) and New York (88%. Nationally, restaurant transactions declined from 42 million to 11 million during this time period, while hotel transactions declined from 144 million to 20 million. Nationwide and state-by-state data is available at Shift4Cares.com.

Photo: Shift4 Corporation

"Given the tremendous scale of our payment platform, the transaction data we have made available offers valuable insight into the effects that this pandemic is having on U.S. businesses," said Jared Isaacman, CEO of Shift4 Payments. "The data is truly staggering, and our hope is that making it widely available will encourage the U.S. government to act on behalf of the country's hospitality business community and provide the relief that these industries desperately need as a result of COVID-19."

Shift4 to Raise Over $200 Million for Small Businesses

In addition to this transaction data, Shift4Cares.com includes the ability for consumers to support local hospitality businesses greatly affected by the Coronavirus crisis by purchasing gift cards, with Shift4 contributing an additional 5% of the amount spent to each merchant. Shift4 is working to raise over $200 million for the small business community through this gift card initiative  with Shift4 donating up to $10 million of the company's own money.

Consumers can go to Shift4Cares.com to purchase gift cards for their favorite local restaurants and other businesses to provide their favorite establishments with much needed revenue during this difficult time. For every gift card purchased through the site, Shift4 Payments will contribute an additional 5% to the business  up to $10 million. For example, a $100 gift card purchase on the site would result in $105 for the merchant.

"While COVID-19 is impacting every aspect of the economy, restaurants and other hospitality businesses have been hit especially hard. As a company that serves the small business community, Shift4 wants to do everything in our power to help support these merchants. This is why we are kicking off this campaign to put over $200 million back into these businesses during this critical time," said Isaacman.
Australia's coronavirus hotspots have been laid bare in alarming maps showing which areas have been worst affected by the pandemic, as the national infection count climbs to 2,810.

Waverley, which includes Bondi, Bronte and Queens Park in Sydney's eastern suburbs, leads all areas in New South Wales with 105 recorded cases of COVID-19.

Stonnington Council in Melbourne - which presides over lush inner-city suburbs including Toorak, Prahran and South Yarra - was the highest in Victoria with 57 infections.

Central Sydney, Woollahra, Waverley and the city's northern beaches have been revealed as hotspots for the coronavirus in New South Wales. The virus has infected more than 1,200 people across the state

Stonnington (in red) is Melbourne's eastern suburbs is Victoria's largest hotspot for the disease

Crowds are seen on Bondi Beach ahead of its closure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus on March 21

The Waverley count would include the 'several' backpackers who tested positive to the respiratory illness in the Bondi area between Friday and Sunday of last week.

Other clusters of cases in and around Australia's two biggest cities are the Mornington Peninsula south-east of Melbourne with 36 infections and Sydney's northern beaches with 68.

NSW's Central Coast, Woollahra and central Sydney also feature in the top five most infected areas of the state.

Central Melbourne, Booroondara and Glen Eira in the city's eastern suburbs sit in third, fourth and fifth place in Victoria.

Broader data of positive coronavirus cases in Sydney show 319 people in the city's southeast have contracted COVID-19, while there are 247 cases in the city's north.

Sydney's west and south west have 98 and 88 cases respectively, while the Hunter New England region has 117.

Of the state's cases, seven people have died and 16 are currently in intensive care.

Broader data of positive coronavirus cases in Sydney show 319 people in the city's southeast have contracted COVID-19, while there are 247 cases in the city's north

Pictured is an aerial photo of Toorak - which sits within the Stonnington local government area

THE COUNCILS WITH THE MOST CASES New South Wales Waverley - 105 Sydney - 69 Northern Beaches - 68 Woollahra - 66 Central Coast - 44 Canterbury-Bankstown - 41 Sutherland Shire - 35 Ryde - 33 Randwick - 32 Hornsby - 31 Blacktown - 30 Inner West - 29 Ku-ring-gai - 28 Newcastle - 26 Penrith - 25 Victoria Stonnington - 57 Mornington Peninsula - 36 Melbourne - 32 Boroondara - 29 Glen Eira - 26 Port Phillip - 25 Moreland - 23 Greater Geelong - 21 Bayside - 17 Banyule - 16 Casey - 16 Yarra Ranges - 15 Wyndham - 14 Monash - 13 Moonee Valley - 13 Source: NSW Health and Victoria's Department of Health and Human Services Advertisement

A near-deserted Flinders Street train station in Melbourne is pictured on March 18

Some of the cases involving the Bondi backpackers came from two parties at the Boogie Wonderland at the Bucket List Bondi on March 15, and a party at Club 77 on the same date.

The new cases in tourists came a day after Scott Morrison was forced to close the iconic beach when thousands of sunseekers ignored social distancing measures.

Chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant on Thursday morning said an additional 190 people had tested positive in NSW since 8pm on Wednesday.

Cruise ship passenger - a man in his 70s - dies from coronavirus, taking Australia's death toll to 13 A cruise ship passenger has died from coronavirus, taking Australia's death toll to 13. The man in his 70s died in Joondalup Hospital in Perth on Thursday. It was initially reported that he had been on board the Ruby Princess cruise ship that docked in Sydney, however Daily Mail Australia understands that is not the case. A cruise ship passenger has died from coronavirus, taking Australia's death toll to 13 He is the third passenger on board the ship to die of coronavirus, after a woman in her 70s passed away on Tuesday and a man in his 60s died on Wednesday. The man is the second Australian to die from coronavirus in Western Australia. Advertisement

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian praised people for 'stepping up and following the various decision we have had to take in the last few days regarding shutdowns'.

'But I do also want to say to the community that if we don't see things shifting in the numbers because of those actions, NSW will have to go further,' she said.

'NSW is different to the other states. If I feel the curve is not going the way we want it to, I will go further in NSW, there will be further shutdowns.'

Dr Chant said she was expecting the state's number of infections to continue rising due to Australians returning from overseas.

New South Wales is the hardest hit state, with coronavirus cases surging by 190 overnight

'We'll be particularly looking at those cases where we don't find any links to either overseas travel or known clusters or other confirmed cases,' she said.

'And that will give us an indication of the success of the strategies.'

Meanwhile three people in their 70s have died from COVID-19 in Victoria, as the state's total number of confirmed cases has also risen to 520.

Another man in his 70s has died in Western Australia from the disease.

Their deaths comes after a 68-year-old cruise ship passenger died from COVID-19 on Wednesday.

Several backpackers based in Bondi, in Sydney's east, tested positive to COVID-19 between Friday and Sunday. Pictured: thousands ignoring social distancing on Bondi Beach last Friday

Garry Kirstenfeldt was on board a Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Seas that docked in Sydney on March 18.

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

He died in Toowoomba Hospital in Queensland, where he was being treated in intensive care, on Wednesday afternoon.

Queensland Health confirmed the man's death on Wednesday evening and said he had 'serious underlying medical condition before contracting the virus.'

Ms Berejiklian said police will be ramping up their presence around Sydney's ports as well as in regional and rural areas.

'Nobody will be getting off a ship until further notice. I don't want any action taken releasing passengers off boats in Sydney until all authorities have ticked it off,' she said on Thursday morning.

'We are telling people not to be overly concerned or panicked but just to know that the NSW government will go further if we have to because it is in the interests of public safety.'

Garry Kirstenfeldt, 68, died from COVID-19 on Wednesday. He was on board a Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Seas that docked in Sydney on March 18

Officers from Thursday will have the power to issue fines of $1000 to individuals and $5000 to businesses that breach public health orders or ministerial directions.

People in the firing line include returned travellers who contravene the requirement to self-quarantine for 14 days and those diagnosed with COVID-19 who similarly don't follow the rules.

Federal border authorities have blamed NSW Health for the Ruby Princess cruise ship fiasco, where infected passengers were allowed into Sydney before test results were known.
Chief fire officer calls on public to support the emergency services during coronavirus pandemic

This article is old - Published: Thursday, Mar 26th, 2020

We all have a part to play in this time of coronavirus crisis.

That is the message from Simon Smith, chief fire officer at North Wales Fire and Rescue Service.

Whilst the service will continue to work to maintain the staff and communities across the region during the coronavirus crisis, Mr Smith is calling on the public to play their part and help reduce the strain on emergency services during this time.

He said: Stay at home. Whilst you are at home the biggest favour you can do for us right now is to take extra care, so that you reduce the demand on our services.

From experience, we know that when people spend more time at home the risk of fire can increase.

So, I am urging everyone to take extra care to help us to prevent incidents from happening in the first place.

This will help to take pressure off all our emergency services and our partner organisations.

The following safety advice has also been issued to the public:

 Test your smoke alarm  look after your alarm so that it can look after you

 Many fires start in the kitchen  just one distraction is all it takes

 Smoking is a common cause of fires  so put it out, right out

 With a full house, make sure your electrical sockets are not overloaded

 Switch off everything before you go to bed  many house fires start at night.

 Farmers and landowners are urged to avoid burning on their land  if you absolutely must, please notify our control room on 01931 522 006.

He added: I am also making an urgent appeal for people to think hard about the consequences of their actions  it is extremely disheartening to hear of our crews called to deliberate fires at this time of national emergency when we all need to pull together.

Such behaviour is completely unacceptable. We need residents to help reduce demand on our firefighters at this crucial time  actions like this do not help us keep our community safe. Parents in particular should please ensure their children stay home.

We are still here for you when you need us in an emergency  call 999 if you have a fire in your home or business.

We know that times are tough for businesses  we are still here if you need advice about protecting your business and reducing fire as you deal with new challenges.

Together we can get through this crisis. Together we can stay safe.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday postponed a nationwide vote on proposed constitutional amendments that include a change potentially allowing him to stay in office until 2036.

Citing the coronavirus, Mr Putin didn't set a new date for the plebiscite, which was originally scheduled for April 22. He said it would depend on how the pandemic develops in Russia. The country reported its first two deaths from the virus yesterday.

He also announced during a televised address to the nation that the government doesn't want Russians to go to work next week, except for those in essential sectors. Stores, pharmacies and banks will stay open, he said.

"Health, life and safety of the people is an absolute priority for us," Mr Putin said. "That is why I believe that the vote should be postponed. We will assess how the situation in the regions and the country as a whole develops, and will set a new date for the vote based exclusively on professional opinion and advice from doctors and experts."

Under the current law, Mr Putin wouldn't be able to run for president again in 2024 because of term limits. A new measure would reset his term count, allowing him to run for two more six-year terms if he chooses. The 67-year-old has been in power since 2000, longer than any other ruler in the country since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Other constitutional changes further strengthen the presidency and emphasise the priority of Russian law over international norms.

Officials reported 163 more virus cases in the country yesterday from a day earlier, bringing the national total to 658. That marked a significantly bigger daily increase from previous days, when the number of new infections grew only by several dozens.

Russia's comparatively low number of cases given its size and shared border with China raised questions and doubts about the veracity of official statistics.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin told Mr Putin on Tuesday that the low number could reflect insufficient screening in Russia rather than the actual scale of the outbreak and said the situation was "serious".
THUMB AREA -- The effort of Brown City School District Superintendent Neil Kohler shows there is power in numbers.

Kohler spearheaded a consortium effort to write a grant for 18 area schools and one intermediate school district.

His effort was rewarded with a Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) Fuel Transformation Program grant.

The grant for the consortium was $1,894,648, which help fund the purchase of 44 diesel and 20 propane buses that will assist in removing older model diesel buses and replacing them with much cleaner options.

Among those 18 schools were some in the Thumb.

"With that money, we are looking to buy two new buses in July this year and two buses in October," said Cass City School District's Chief Financial Officer Allison Zimba.

"We are going to buy them from Hoekstra at a cost $351,256. The grant money covers 25% of the cost of the bus."

Zimba said the district will purchase 71 passenger buses.

"I cannot express how excited I am for all the members of our consortium, on being awarded this grant," Kohler said. "For our group to cover a large portion of the lower peninsula and have a positive environmental impact on so many areas is just amazing. I want to commend all of our members on their work in this process and for sharing in my vision to work together to save our schools money while also improving air quality for our communities."

He noted the consortium was made up of small and large districts working together.

"Many of the districts had never worked together in any capacity, but this consortium proves that districts across the state can work together to create better opportunities and financial savings for all involved," he said. "It is my hope that the relationships built through this grant can extend to future projects, or encourage other districts to think 'Big Picture' in how districts need to work together for success."

Other school districts in the Thumb area that will receive funding for buses include: the Unionville-Sebewaing Area School District which will purchase one diesel bus. The Croswell-Lexington Community School District will purchase three diesel buses.

The North Branch Area School District will purchase seven propane buses, and the Brown City School District will purchase two propane buses.

Districts will receive a 25% reimbursement on the purchase of new diesel buses or a 40% reimbursement on new propane buses. Part of the requirements for the grant funds is the the districts must disable buses that are 2009 or older model diesel bus that is in their current fleet.

Overall school districts will replace 300 older diesel buses with models powered with clean diesel or propane engines with the $8.7 million from the EGLE grant program.

Fuel Transformation Program grants are supported with dollars allocated to Michigan from the Volkswagen settlement. The settlement was a result of Volkswagen's Clean Air Act violations related to the installation of emissions control defeat devices on thousands of diesel engine vehicles. As part of the settlement, Michigan was allocated a total of $64.8 million and will use 21.5% of that total to replace old diesel school buses.

The new buses will operate in 36 counties, and will reduce oxides of nitrogen, greenhouse gases, particulate matter and other harmful emissions.
Author

Mark Van Amerongen is the Chief Operating Officer for Prism Hotels & Resorts, where he brings more than 25 years of professional hospitality leadership experience to an award-winning full-service hotel management, investment and advisory services company. Mark began his career in hospitality with Hyatt Hotels and quickly progressed through several flagship full-service hotels. Shortly after, he joined Marriott International, where he held several executive committee and general manager positions for the full-service hotel division throughout the U.S. Mark moved from single property positions to multi-property assignments, including the Regional Director of Operations on the West Coast for Marriott and Renaissance full-service hotels, before heading to Las Vegas as Marriotts Area General Manager overseeing the Marriott Managed Hotels in that market. Prior to joining Prism, Mark spent eight years as Executive Vice President with Western International in Dallas overseeing the growth of the management company from start-up to more than 45 hotels.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  At least nine doctors have succumbed to COVID-19 while helping patients who have contracted the highly-infectious disease, the Private Hospitals Association of the Philippines Inc. (PHAPI) said on Thursday.

PHAPI President Dr. Rustico Jimenez told CNN Philippines the doctors were exposed to the virus due to the shortage of protective gear.

"Wala tayong mga PPE (personal protective gear). Kaya nga po siyam na, tingin ko sampu na ang namatay na doktor because wala tayong protection sa mga frontliners, especially the doctors," he said in an interview.

[Translation: We don't have PPEs. That's why nine, possibly 10, of our doctors have died because we cannot provide protection for our frontliners, especially the doctors.]

Among the frontliners who passed away during the COVID-19 war are Pampanga health chief Dr. Marcelo Jaochico, cardiologist and internist Raul Jara, young cardiologist Israel Bactol of the Philippine Heart Center, anesthesiologist Gregorio Macasaet III of Manila Doctors Hospital, and oncologist Rose Pulido of the San Juan de Dios Hospital.

Of the 38 deaths in the Philippines, nine were doctors.

He said the deaths could have been avoided if the Philippines prepared before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the country's shores.

Jimenez appealed to the public to donate more PPEs to hospitals so the medical workers risking their lives will be more protected. Similar appeals have been made by several other hospitals. Several fashion designers have also started donating PPEs to address the shortage.

"Mask, gown, goggles, para sa sapatos para protektado ang ating mga tao, para hindi nababawasan 'yung mga ating tao na nagsesebisyo sa ating mga pasyente," he said.

[Translation: Donate masks, gowns, goggles, cover for the shoes so your frontliners are protected, so we don't lose more people who are serving the public.]

The number of people who tested positive for the coronavirus disease in the Philippines climbed to 636. The number of patients who have recovered is now at 26.
Mendoza, who works as a community liaison for a school district, is worried about how schools being closed will affect the school year and her paycheck, because although shes being paid now, she hasnt gotten information about what happens after April 8. Shes single and lives with her parents, who are older than 60 years old and speak limited English. She is concerned about her family getting sick as well as the quality of care they would receive.
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By Online Desk

As the COVID-19 cases crossed 900-mark, the state of Telangana reported its first death after a 74-year-old Khairatabad resident passed away on Saturday.

Sixty days after Kerala reported the first COVID-19 case when a Thrissur native was diagnosed with the deadly disease, Kerala reported the first casualty of the outbreak on Saturday morning. The 69-year-old patient, a native of Chullikkal in Ernakulam district had returned from Dubai on March 16.

However, he did not show any symptoms when he arrived. He was admitted to the isolation ward of Ernakulam Medical College at Kalamassery on March 22 with symptoms of acute pneumonia.

Meanwhile, the health disaster has led to a humanitarian crisis as thousands of migrant labourers try to return to their villages on foot due to lack of public transport amid the lockdown.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday set up a public assistance fund to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, the Tatas have pledged Rs 1,500 crore to fight the health crisis.

COVID-19: CHECK THE STATUS OF YOUR STATE HERE
WHO concluded in February that virus originated in a wildlife market in Wuhan

Lijian Zhao is fronting a propaganda campaign to shift the blame for coronavirus

A New Mexico mother who pondered whether COVID-19 could have been present in the United States months before the disease was detected there has described how her tweets were hijacked by China to spread misinformation.

Beatrice, from Albuquerque, posted a series of tweets which she referred to as her 'shower thoughts', where she pondered whether coronavirus could have arrived in the US earlier than it was believed to have.

The new mother, who admitted she is no medical expert, considered how 'sick everyone was' during the Christmas holidays and early January, and recalled people saying how the flu jab didn't seem to work.

Beatrice, from Albuquerque, (pictured) posted a series of tweets which she referred to as her 'shower thoughts', where she pondered whether coronavirus could have arrived in the US earlier than it was believed to have

She was shocked when a week later, Lijian Zhao (pictured), a Chinese public official serving as deputy director of the Foreign Ministry Information Department reshared her tweets

She was shocked when a week later, a Chinese public official serving as deputy director of the Foreign Ministry Information Department reshared her tweets in an apparent attempt to shift the blame for the worldwide coronavirus away from China.

Meanwhile the Trump administration has leveled blame at China, with President Trump insisting on referring to the illness as the 'Chinese virus'.

One press photographer took a photo of the president's notes, where he crossed out 'coronavirus' and wrote 'Chinese virus'.

A White House staffer faced backlash for dubbing the virus 'kung flu' in a conversation with an Asian reporter.

One press photographer took a photo of the president's notes, where he crossed out 'coronavirus' and wrote 'Chinese virus'

The Trump administration has leveled blame at China, with President Trump insisting on referring to the illness as the 'Chinese virus'

Beatrice, who goes by the name 'the lizard king' on Twitter, wrote on March 14: 'This isn't a conspiracy tweet but I really think COVID-19 has been here in America for awhile. Do you guys remember how sick everyone was during the holidays/early January? And how everyone was saying they had the 'flu' and the flu shot 'didn't work'?'

She continued: 'Most people did have flu-like symptoms combined with respiratory infections. Also I remember a lot of healthcare workers (both here and on Facebook) posting about how awful RSV was this year and how there were lots more respiratory cases than in years past.'

Zhao's resharing of Beatrice's tweets on March 22 made her posts go viral, and her first tweet has received over 310,000 likes. The sudden attention saw her Twitter account skyrocket from just a few hundred followers to over one thousand.

Lijian Zhao is fronting a propaganda campaign to attempt to frame other countries including the US and Italy for the global pandemic which has killed 21,000 people worldwide.

His latest action was an apparent attempt to push forward his message that COVID-19 originated elsewhere, and could even have been deliberately cultivated by the US.

It's not the first time China's foreign ministry spokesman has accused the US of harboring the virus. Two weeks ago Zhao tweeted in both Mandarin and English that the virus might have come from the United States - not the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan.

'It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation,' tweeted Mr Zhao, who is known for his provocative statements on social media, on March 12.

An investigative report conducted by the World Health Organisation in February decisively concluded that COVID-19 had originated in China. Specifically, at a wildlife market in Wuhan, Hubei province, in November.
Now that Joe Biden has pledged he'll select a woman as his running mate, one of the questions being asked is why not a Latina for vice president?

Latinas are about half of the 60 million Latinos in the country and 18 percent of all women in the U.S. They have held a number of local, state and federal offices even though they are underrepresented at all levels, including in Cabinet-level appointments.

"Latina American public servants across the country have an unparalleled track record of getting things done for their communities, states and the country. It's about time we see that leadership in the White House," said Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Calif., chair of Bold PAC, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus' political action committee. The committee has backed Latinas to help get them elected to Congress or other public office.

Image: Catherine Cortez-Masto, Michelle Lujan Grisham, Veronica Escobar (Getty Images file)

By 2060, Latinas will be more than a quarter of the population, according to Catalyst.

After the former vice president's pledge during the last debate, the names that quickly emerged in media and political circles were those of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., former Georgia legislator Stacey Abrams, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. It took a few days for some Latinas to become part of the discussion.

Asked whether a Latina is being considered, the Biden campaign told NBC News in an emailed statement that Biden would run a vigorous vetting process, having been through it himself in 2008.

Although he has not yet sealed the nomination as the Democrat's candidate for president, Biden has said he's considering at least seven women.

"They have to be prepared," he said about the vetting process, saying he's spoken to former President Barack Obama about it. "Once I pick someone, God willing if I'm the nominee, that there's not going to be any snafu."

Latinas have long shown their capability when elected or appointed to high-level government office, often as pioneers in their positions. These currently include the first Latina Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor, and arguably one of the nation's most prominent progressives, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. There were 13 Latinas in total in the House and the Senate, six in statewide executive offices and 144 in state legislatures as of last year.

Story continues

The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials tallied 2,632 Latinas in elected public office last year, under 1 percent of all elected officials nationally.

Angry that some of the Latinas were not included as names of potential running mates emerged, Latino Victory Fund tweeted a few suggestions: New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, the only Latina governor in the country; Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., the first Latina elected to the Senate and chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which is responsible for gaining the party seats in the Senate; Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, one of two of the first Latinas elected to Congress from Texas in 2018; and Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., the first Puerto Rican woman elected to the House.

"The reason we posted that tweet is with Latinos being the largest nonwhite ethnic bloc in 2020 and the fact that Sen. (Bernie) Sanders has been more robust in engaging young Latinos, it is essential we have a Latina in the conversation as a potential vice presidential pick," said Mayra Macias, executive director of Latino Victory Fund, which endorsed Biden and promotes Latino candidates for elected office.

A boost for Biden?

Some 32 million Latinos are eligible to vote this year, making them the largest nonwhite racial or ethnic voting bloc.

Biden lost the Latino vote to Sanders in some key primary states, including Iowa, Nevada and Texas, and needs to shore up that part of the base to improve his chances of winning the White House in some key states.

By pledging to nominate a woman, Biden eliminated the possibility of a Latino running mate such as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, a former presidential hopeful, or California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a former member of Congress. With limited numbers of Latinas in elected office, that makes seeing a Latino in the position even less likely.

BOLD Pac's Cardenas added as possible for consideration Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, chair of the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee and author of the House version of the DREAM Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship to many immigrants who arrived or stayed in the U.S. as children but lack legal resident status.

He also named Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, one of the first two Latinas elected to Congress from the state, who served as a House manager during the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, and Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., vice chairwoman of the House Democratic Caucus.

While Ocasio-Cortez is arguably the most recognizable Latina, her age, 30, precludes her from the vice presidential short list. The constitutionally required minimum age is 35.

The progressive group Way to Win, a women-led network, surveyed likely voters to test support for Harris, Abrams, Warren, Klobuchar and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. The survey concluded Abrams would be Biden's best pick.

Cecilia Munoz, the highest-ranking Latina to serve in the Obama White House, as director of his Domestic Policy Council, said having a woman in one of the two highest offices is overdue. With women of color set to be the majority in 40 years, "it is more than time for us to lead," she said.

"I remember when much of the country was convinced we couldn't elect an African American man as president, and I remember the country's astonishment when we did it anyway. We need to let go of old notions of what we are and are not ready to do," said Munoz, who next month will release her book "More Than Ready," which provides lessons for women of color on achieving success in white-dominated arenas.

High profile enough?

In a 2017 University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll asking Latinos to name the country's most important Latino leader, about 38 percent said "no one" or "don't know."

Justice Sotomayor had the highest consensus, 32 percent, though she cannot advocate and act on political issues as a Supreme Court justice.

"Who is a prominent Latina he could realistically consider?" asked Stella Rouse, University of Maryland political scientist and associate director of the poll. "This speaks loudly about the fact that Latina women have had trouble rising to the level of prominence, and it's a huge issue."

Four Latinas have served in Cabinet positions, three serving as head of the Small Business Administration and one as secretary of labor. African American women have been secretaries of the Housing and Urban Development, Labor and State departments, as well as EPA administrator and attorney general.

A running mate would also have to help the Democratic ticket raise money, and that has been a big obstacle for Latinas, although Ocasio-Cortez has broken through some of that.

Name recognition will be key for Biden, 77, someone whom voters know a bit and feel comfortable with, especially considering Biden's age, Rouse said.

But inclusion of a Latina in the search would show the community it hasn't been pushed aside, Latino Victory Fund's Macias said.

"At the very minimum, Latinas should be a part of this conversation," she said.

Follow NBC Latino on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
A Hanoi woman ordered to self-quarantine at home in order to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was caught sneaking out of her residence and attempting to board a flight to the United Kingdom.

V.T.H., a 25-year-old resident in Long Bien District, was attempting to flee the country through Noi Bai International Airport on Wednesday morning, said Nguyen Manh Ha, chairman of Long Bien District, adding that that the womans home-quarantine period was set to end in just two days.

H. had already boarded a UK-bound flight when local police officers were made aware of the incident and promptly escorted the woman from the aircraft shortly before its departure.

She is expected to be sent to a centralized quarantine camp for an additional 14 days, chairman Ha said, adding that she also faces an administrative fine of VND5-10 million (US$213-427).

Chairman of the Hanoi administration Nguyen Duc Chung previously ordered competent authorities to strictly monitor individuals who are under home quarantine after reports that many potential COVID-19 carriers have been disregarding their mandated isolation.

He also tasked the municipal Department of Police and the Department of Justice with imposing strict penalties on such violators and ordered the city's police department to initiate legal proceedings against those ignoring the rules and putting others in danger.

The novel coronavirus, which first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, has infected over 468,300 and killed more than 21,100 globally as of Thursday morning, according to Ministry of Health statistics.

Vietnam has confirmed 148 COVID-19 cases, with 17 having already been discharged from the hospital. No deaths related to the disease have been recorded in the country.

Hanoi has so far confirmed 48 cases of the virus.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
With the economy cratering due to novel coronavirus, renting families worry how theyll make payments.

Theres been a lot of talk at all levels of government about evictions. Heres a breakdown of where we stand:

Whats the current Texas policy?

The Supreme Court of Texas passed an emergency order suspending all evictions until April 19. Translation: You cant get kicked out of your house, and no eviction court cases will move ahead. (Cases can proceed, depending on your judge, if the landlord signs a sworn complaint that theres a serious threat or severe cause to evict).

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: Stay informed with accurate reporting you can trust

But heres the fine print: Landlords can still file for eviction. The case just wont be heard in court until April 19. Theres no special carve out for tenants who are unable to pay rent because of problems related to the novel coronavirus.

Is anywhere making an exception for people who cant pay because of coronavirus?

Yes. Marylands governor signed an executive order prohibiting evictions of any tenant able to show they couldnt pay because of COVID-19  whether they missed work because an employer close, they got laid off or had to care for a child suddenly out of school.

But President Donald Trump said on Thursday the Department of Housing and Urban Development would suspend evictions through April. So wasnt that already covered?

No. That order only applied to homeowners who cant pay a mortgage insured by the Federal Housing Administration (part of HUD), Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Individual public housing authorities  like the Houston Housing Authority  halted evictions already.

Neither order covers other HUD-backed properties, like privately owned properties that get HUD subsidies. In those buildings, tenants pay what they can based on their income, and HUD makes up the difference. However, the Texas Supreme Court order covers these.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Flood of applications for unemployment benefits overwhelming Texas website

What else are people saying?

Advocates worry that tenants unable to pay because of coronavirus will be evicted when these orders lift, and slapped with a bill for March and April rent. Landlords worry how theyll pay their own bills.

Got questions?

Shoot me an email: Im at sarah.smith@chron.com (reporting on housing, homelessness, poverty and mental health).

sarah.smith@chron.com
SIOUX CITY -- A drive-thru COVID-19 testing site opens Friday in Sioux City, but tests will be limited to local residents referred by a doctor.

Although Siouxland District Health Department Director Kevin Grieme said the site will increase local testing capacity, he said testing will continue to only be ordered for individuals who meet the symptom criteria for COVID-19. The main symptoms of the novel coronavirus are fever, cough and shortness of breath.

"We will not be able to test all 103,000-plus of Siouxland residents. We're looking at doing this in an organized fashion," Grieme said at a news conference Thursday. "All testing done at this new clinic location must be ordered by an individual's primary care physician."

Grieme said patients must call their primary care physician who will assess their symptoms either in-person or through telehealth. The physician will then issue an order for eligible patients to receive testing. The order will be submitted to a central collecting entity that will schedule testing appointments. Patients will be notified of the testing location and time they are to report via text message or another means of communication, Grieme said.

"We ask that the public cooperate in the aspect of not bogging down our location by showing up without the appropriate authorization," he said. "I want to reemphasize that only individuals with appropriate orders will be allowed into the testing queue."

District health officials declined to identify the location of the drive up, saying they feared public disclosure would cause many sick individuals without a doctor's order to show up there, potentially overwhelming the testing site.

The local health department announced one additional confirmed case of COVID-19 Thursday afternoon, which brings Woodbury County's total to three. A man, age 61 to 80, tested positive. He is currently recovering at home, according to the health department.

At the county supervisors meeting Tuesday, Grieme said 200 people in the county had been tested for coronavirus. During the news conference, Grieme said the health department is working to "clarify" the number of tests that have been conducted within the community.

"With the addition of private labs that can do the test, the total number of tests done in Iowa and Woodbury County specifically have not been something that we've had readily available," he said. "We apologize. We know that's data you'd like to have. We just don't have it available at this time. Anything that we would share would only be estimates and not specific numbers."

Grieme said drive-thru testing is now possible because of a partnership with Family Health Care of Siouxland, MercyOne Siouxland, Prairie Pediatrics, Siouxland Medical Education Foundation, Siouxland Community Health Center and UnityPoint Health -- St. Luke's.

"If we do individual tests at every clinic, that consumes one full garb of what we call personal protective equipment. If we do this joint testing, there are parameters they can use so that they're able switch that out upon the safety of the health care provider and also upon the safety of the patient," he said.

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The Health Ministry has directed that Covid-19 tests are done by Sunday for nearly 4,000 medical staff and 1,000 patients being treated at Hanois Bach Mai Hospital.

The move came after at least three confirmed cases and two other cases that tested positive once for novel coronavirus were linked to the hospital. Two nurses of the hospital became the first members of the medical fraternity in the country to test positive for the virus last week.

On Tuesday night, a 66-year-old woman from Lai Chau Province in northern Vietnam was confirmed positive for coronavirus after staying for three weeks at the hospital to get a heart condition treated.

Meanwhile, an 88-year-old woman and a 63-year-old woman in the northern province of Hung Yen are awaiting the heath ministrys official announcement on their infection status.

Deputy Health Minister Nguyen Truong Son directed that Bach Mai, one of the largest hospitals in Vietnam, to coordinate with the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology and the Hanoi Medical University Hospital to organize the collection of samples for Covid-19 tests for all those present at the hospital, including officers, medical staff, patients and caregivers.

Hanoi Chairman Nguyen Duc Chung said at a meeting Wednesday that the Bach Mai Hospital was at high risk of becoming a new Covid-19 outbreak center like the Daegu Hospital in South Korea, given the factors like a nursing home, heavy patient load and large crowds.

Those who had visited the hospital from March 10 onwards will be subject to Covid-19 tests and be quarantined at home, Chung said.

The hospital receives 6,000 to 8,000 people from many provinces and cities every day. After the infections were detected, the daily influx reduced by 50 percent but it is still a crowded place. Therefore, the risk of coronavirus infection spreading from the hospital is very high, Chung said.

As a preventive and protective measure, the Bach Mai Hospital had earlier suspended medical examinations and was only treating emergency cases or patients needing to receive continuous treatment.

The hospital disinfected all related areas and began checking the body temperatures of all people at the entrance gate and other areas in the hospital.

So far, the nation has confirmed 148 infections, 131 of them active and other 17 cases having been discharged after treatment. Of the active cases, 26 have tested negative at least once.

Most of the active cases are Vietnamese nationals returning from Europe and the U.S. and foreigners visiting from the same regions. Starting March 22, Vietnam has suspended entry for all foreign nationals, including those of Vietnamese origin and family members with visa waivers.

The Covid-19 pandemic has killed more than 19,700 people globally after spreading to 198 countries and territories.
Harbor Springs school board authorizes May bond proposal

During Monday's meeting, the board unanimously adopted a resolution to authorize the bonding proposal, with the election scheduled for Tuesday, May 3.
In a bid to contain the spread of coronavirus in jails, the Haryana government has decided to release convicted prisoners with up to seven years of sentence on parole or bail.

This move is taken in order to de-congest prisons, said state Jail Minister Ranjit Singh Chautala on Wednesday.

Before releasing the prisoners, the authorities will check the track record of their good behaviour in jail and they should also be not facing any trial in other cases, added Singh while speaking to media here.

As per the government decision, convicts above 65 years of age (except those involved in multiple cases or convicted for recovery of large quantity of drugs under the NDPS Act or convicted under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso), under Section 379-B (snatching) and convicted for rape or acid attack shall be granted six-week special parole.

Prisoners who are foreign nationals would not be entitled to this relief either.

The decision by the government is taken in accordance with the Supreme Court's instructions to decongest crowded jails to halt them from becoming fertile grounds for the spread of COVID-19.

"The prisoners would be released subjected to the grant of the bail or parole for a period of 45 to 60 days by courts. Prisoners already on parole or furlough will also get a four-week special parole," Chautala added.

Similarly, prisoners who have returned to jail after only one parole or furlough on time and not violated any rule during such parole or furlough will also be given six- week special parole, he added.

This decision was made after a meeting was held on March 24 via video conferencing under the chairmanship of Justice Mr. Rajeev Sharma. The meeting was attended by Additional Chief Secretary, Home, Jails, Vijai Vardhan and Director General, Prisons K. Selvaraj.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Japan was preparing a special coronavirus headquarters on Thursday, which could set the stage for a state of emergency over the outbreak, Kyodo news agency reported, after the capital of Tokyo saw a sharp rise in cases this week.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference it was a "very critical time" for Japan to prevent a surge in the spread of the virus.

Under a law revised this month to cover the coronavirus, the prime minister can declare a state of emergency if the disease poses a "grave danger" to lives and if its rapid spread threatens serious economic damage. The virus has increased Japan's recession risk.

Follow live updates of coronavirus cases in India here

Japan has had 1,313 domestic cases of coronavirus as of Thursday morning, separate from 712 from a cruise ship that was moored near Tokyo last month, broadcaster NHK reported. There have been 45 domestic deaths and 10 from the cruise ship, it said.

If a state of emergency is declared, governors in hard-hit regions would be able to take steps such as asking people to stay home, closing schools and other public facilities and cancelling large events.

The International Olympic Committee and the government on Tuesday agreed to put back the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to 2021 over the outbreak.

Also Read: Coronavirus India update: State-wise total number of confirmed cases

On Wednesday, the governor of Tokyo warned of the risk of an explosive rise in coronavirus infections in the capital and asked residents to avoid non-essential outings through April 12, especially over the weekend.

The city has become the centre of Japans coronavirus epidemic, with 212 cases as of Wednesday, more than any other region after increases this week.

"The government and local authorities will cooperate based on the awareness that this is a very critical time to prevent the spread of the virus," Suga told a news conference.

Tokyo's neighbouring prefectures of Saitama and Chiba were considering asking their residents to refrain from travel to Tokyo over the weekend, media reported. A Saitama official said a decision would be made depending on the situation.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has already told schools to close - although many are now preparing to reopen - and asked organisers to refrain from large-scale events, but his instructions had no formal legal basis.

Even if a state of emergency is declared, legal experts have noted there are no penalties for ignoring most of the local authorities' instructions. But the declaration would put added pressure on people and businesses to obey.
Thunder Bay, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - ZEN Graphene Solutions Ltd. (TSXV: ZEN) ("ZEN" or the "Company") has commenced scale-up and engineering studies on processes for the production of Albany Pure Graphene products at the Company's research and development facility in Guelph, Ontario. The priority is to increase graphene production in anticipation of future demand as the Company launched graphene product sales in early March 2020. ZEN will also commission the recently purchased purification autoclave to commence the production of high-purity Albany graphene precursor material.

ZEN's graphene products will now all have the Albany Pure Seal of Authenticity which represents that the material was sourced from unique Albany Graphite and meets the Company's high-quality standards. Albany Pure Graphene products can be purchased online at https://shop.zengraphene.com/.

The Company will be working with leading university researchers to help facilitate the GO process scale-up at its Guelph facility. The research and engineering team will also be developing and testing custom functionalized graphene formulations as requested by industrial collaborators for product performance enhancement.

The Company has also reviewed operational expenses and eliminated non-core expenditures in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic and its global economic fallout. This will ensure that scaled up graphene production operations can move forward while the Company remains focused on developing industrial partnerships. ZEN has also eliminated all business-related air travel for employees as well as in-person meetings until further notice.

About ZEN Graphene Solutions Ltd.

ZEN is an emerging graphene technology solutions company with a focus on the development of graphene-based nanomaterial products and applications. The unique Albany Graphite Project provides the company with a potential competitive advantage in the graphene market as independent labs in Japan, UK, Israel, USA and Canada have independently demonstrated that ZEN's Albany PureTM Graphite is an ideal precursor material which easily converts (exfoliates) to graphene, using a variety of mechanical, chemical and electrochemical methods.

For further information:

Dr. Francis Dube, Chief Executive Officer

Tel: +1 (289) 821-2820

Email: drfdube@zengraphene.com

To find out more on ZEN Graphene Solutions Ltd., please visit our website at www.ZENGraphene.com. A copy of this news release and all material documents in respect of the Company may be obtained on ZEN's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.ca.

Forward Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements. More particularly, this news release contains statements concerning the acceptance of the engagement of Storyboard by the TSX Venture Exchange and the anticipated monthly fees payable to Storyboard. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Although ZEN believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking information in this news release are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information, which only applies as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. ZEN disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, other than as required by law. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/53825
The British choreographer Liam Scarlett on Tuesday left his position as the Royal Ballet's artist-in-residence, after an investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct with dance students.

Mr Scarlett will "no longer work with, or for, the Royal Ballet," the company said in a statement, which added that a seven-month, independent investigation the company commissioned "found there were no matters to pursue in relation to alleged contact with students of the Royal Ballet School".

Choreographer Liam Scarlett. Credit:Julian Anderson

A spokesman for the Royal Ballet said the company would not comment further on the announcement. Mr Scarlett did not immediately answer an email requesting his response.

Mr Scarlett, once heralded as a "choreographic wonder boy of British ballet" by The New York Times, has created works for dance companies worldwide, including Australia's Queensland Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre. This month, the Royal Ballet was forced to end the sold-out run of his Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House after the coronavirus pandemic shut down the venue.
The Whiting Foundation has announced its 35th annual Whiting Award winners.

Those winners are:

Fiction

Genevieve Sly Crane, author of Sorority. The judges called Crane's debut an unflinching examination of the kinds of cruelty women perpetrate against another and against themselves, with clear-eyed, razor-sharp sentences...[and] scenes [that] are taut, sliced through with dark humor, and dialogue that crackles with electricity.

Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. The judges called Lawlor's writing mythic and gritty, lyric and witty, brazenly dirty and teeming with life, and her debut novel at once a bacchanalian celebration of outlaw living and an old-fashioned bildungsroman, following its seductive, shape-shifting antihero at a gallop on the path to self-discovery.

Ling Ma, author of Severance. The judges called Ma's debut novel a marvel of form... a hybrid supergenre in which she considers the troubled American present, including end-stage capitalism and especially cultural nostalgia, brilliantly conceived as a fatal epidemic.

Nonfiction

Jaquira Diaz, author of Ordinary Girls. The judges called the book a devastating memoir is built on the helical structure of memory itself... packed with indelible images of violence and tenderness that evoke landscapes and neighborhoods, families and strangers, drink and drugs and junk food and beach sand and the bodies of lovers and friends.

Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. The judges called the New Yorker staff writer's debut a marvel that captured what seems unknowable about the internet and what it is to grow up in its orbit, to become misshapen and seduced by it, defined by it, with essays that are compulsively readable [and] shot through with surprise, offering us the delights of eloquence and the satisfactions of her deep, inquiring mind.

Poetry

Aria Aber, author of Hard Damage. The judges called Aber's debut a riotous meeting place where Rilke, pedicures, lamb kebabs, Proust, and the goddess Artemis cross paths, with poems that evoke worlds lost and found with glowing intensity and multiple languages [that] braid and teach each other what words can mean.

Diannely Antigua, author of Ugly Music. The judges said Antigua's poems layer lyricism, religious language, and the tactile materials of daily life to build altars of affection for the people and things of her world, each meticulously shaped by a formal and aesthetic vision that already feels authoritative.

Jake Skeets, author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers. The judges called Skeets a fierce observer of the world who assembles lives and landscape with such measured precision that the poems themselves begin to breathe, counting among his notable gifts... a lush and surprising imagery, formal dexterity, and an imagination that goes far beyond the borders of the self to extend empathy to everything it touches.

Genya Turovskaya, author of The Breathing Body of This Thought. The judges called Turovskaya's poems spare and haunting... exquisitely wrought works that refuse the business and noise of contemporary life in order to clear a space for whats most deeply interior, private, and elusive about the world of the mind.

Drama

Will Arbery, playwright and author of Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Plano, Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, and Wheelchair. The judges called Arbery intellectually audacious [and] formally sly, [with] the courage to let [his] characters seize the stage with impassioned arguments about morality and meaning, and added, of his writing , that it moves to the beat of multiple metronomes: the rhythms of thought, the counterpoint of competing logics, the heartbeat of human longing.

The Whiting Awards, established by the Whiting Foundation in 1985, come with a prize of $50,000, one of the largest available to emerging writers and awarded "on the criteria of early-career achievement and the promise of superior literary work to come." To date, the Foundation has awarded a total of $8 million to more than 300 fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, and playwrights to date.

On its 35th anniversary year, the Whiting Foundation was forced, like most other organizations with public-facing events scheduled for this time, to call off its traditional Whiting Awards ceremony in order to avoid possible Covid-19 transmission. That said, the Foundation intends to reschedule a celebration of the winners once restrictions on public gathering have been lifted. Pulitzer Prize finalist, MacArthur Fellow, and Whiting Award winner Sarah Ruhl will share the judges citations and her own remarks with the winners and the public at that time.

We wish to celebrate extraordinary writers, but we find ourselves in extraordinary times, ones where we are all reinventing how to gather, exchange ideas, and deepen our connections with each other across a necessary distance, Courtney Hodell, director of the Foundation's literary programs, said in a statement. As long as literature has existed, it has served this purpose, and we look to writers for their uncanny ability to sift raw experience for its poetry and truth. What we are living now, Whiting writers will reflect back to us in time, with depth and clarity and heart.

Looking Back on 35 Years

The list of Whiting Award recipients reads as something of a who's who of contemporary American literary and cultural history. Included in these ranks are poets laureate, winners of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, accomplished bestsellers, Broadway stars, and beloved cult figures. Numbered among them are Tracy K. Smith, Colson Whitehead, Sigrid Nunez, Tony Kushner, Susan-Lori Parks, Yiyun Li, Deborah Eisenberg, Elif Batuman, Jeffrey Eugenides, Lydia Davis, August Wilson, Alice McDermott, Jericho Brown, Victor Lavalle, Tyehimba Jess, Z.Z. Packer, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Darryl Pinckney, Jorie Graham, Ben Fountain, Terrance Hayes, Adam Johnson, Lucas Hnath, and John Jeremiah Sullivan. More recent winners include Ocean Vuong, Esme Weijun Wang, and Michael R. Jackson.

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of the awards, four of its winners over the past three and a half decadesMary Karr, Suketu Mehta, Alexander Chee, and Lisa Hallidaytold Publishers Weekly in their own words what winning the prize meant to them.

Mary Karr, class of 1989

"The early blessings [from winning a Whiting Award] count more than what comes latercash and invites to shining isles and honorary this and thats. You get spoiled. No one likes to admit this, but its true. But before the Whiting, there was much disappointment. At the reception, I met many literary editors whose names Id only read, and I weaseled my way into a dinner with the agent who represented not a few of them. 'You should write a memoir,' she said to me. And I went home and started to knuckle down on the story Id been jamming into fiction and poetry with little success for more than a decade. Six years later, it had turned into The Liars Club. It all started with that phone call."

Suketu Mehta, class of 1997

"The Whiting Award came at a time in my career when very few people believed that I, an Indian-American man from Bombay and Jackson Heights, Queens, with no literary pedigree, would make it as a writer. And I got the award for both my fiction and nonfiction, thus demonstrating the judges' keen awareness that there are no border walls when it comes to writing. It was instrumental in supporting my first book, which matters so much more than all the support that comes later."

Alexander Chee, class of 2003

"The Whiting changed the course of my career, allowing me to turn a corner on my professional life at a critical time. I dont know what my career would look like if I hadnt had the time and support the Foundations award offered. And I made friends in my

cohort I still have. It is one of the great honors of my life to be a part of the tradition."

Lisa Halliday, class of 2017

"In the beginning, a Whiting Award is wind in your sails just when you need it. You dont know youve been nominated, so the news of having received one is the purest pleasure and surprise. In my case, the financial component of the award covered the cost of childcare and a place to work during the first two years of my daughters life. But the true value of a Whiting is so much more than that, because its not given for a single work; its given for potential. And somehow the exceptionally smart, diligent, and delightful people who work at the Foundation really do make you feel that they are looking out for you, that they are on your side. On the days riddled with self-doubt, it helps to remember this: at the Whiting Foundation I have friends. On those days, I write for them."
Monacos Prince Albert is addressing rumors that he may have caused Prince Charles positive coronavirus diagnosis.

Speaking to RTL radio on Thursday, the 62-year old prince, who also tested positive for cornavirus, spoke about the speculation in the British and French press that one of the royals may have caused the other to come down with the virus following a London meeting they attended earlier this month.

Both royals were in attendance at the Water Aid event on March 10, Albert told interviewer Stephane Bern. I was at a roundtable for his foundation, but we never shook hands. I was at the other end of the table, way far away, he said.

We nodded hello to one another, so I dont think I can really be accused of contaminating him, he added with a laugh.

There were a lot of other people around at the congress center and I know he continued his schedule afterwards for a number of days, Albert continued, adding that Britains heir to the throne had a number of other opportunities to catch it.

RELATED: Prince Albert Speaks Out About His Coronavirus Diagnosis: It Can Hit Anybody of Any Age

Kevin Winter/Getty; Karwai Tang/WireImage

Courtesy Prince Albert of Monaco Exclusive selfie of Prince Albert in isolation in his palace apartments on March 25

According to sources, Albert first developed signs of the disease after his return from London, which caused him to be tested on Monday, March 16.

Royal sources in London tells PEOPLE that the cautious estimate of Charless doctors is that he wouldnt have been contagious before March 13. He last saw his mother Queen Elizabeth, 93, on March 12  when he carried out an investiture on her behalf at Buckingham Palace.

A spokesperson for Clarence House confirmed Charles diagnosis on Wednesday in a statement, saying, The Prince of Wales has tested positive for Coronavirus. He has been displaying mild symptoms but otherwise remains in good health and has been working from home throughout the last few days as usual.

Story continues

RELATED: Camilla Is Concerned for Husband Prince Charles Amid Coronavirus Diagnosis But Upbeat

Tim P. Whitby/Getty Prince Charles on March 10

Speaking exclusively to PEOPLE last week, Albert  who has been extremely involved in organizing Monacos defense against the disease, which has ravaged neighboring Italy and France  says where he contracted the virus was unknown.

It could have been from a number of other people. For weeks now, Ive tried to be cautious, using hand sanitizers and all that, but you never know, he said. I couldve caught it talking to someone three, even four feet away. And it could have happened at any point in the last 10 days or so. You never know.

I could even have caught it when I went to London for Prince Charles Water charity forum. It could have been there, he added. You never know.

The prince, whose wife Princess Charlene and children are at another residence, has been in quarantine at the palace for over a week.

Tim P. Whitby - WPA Pool/Getty Prince Albert on March 10

Its getting better, he told Bern. I no longer have fever. I cough a little still. I hope its the end of the tunnel that Im starting to see.

According to a statement released on Thursday morning from Monacos palace, Alberts doctors are pleased with his progress and have no concerns about the development of his state of health.

Despite his enforced isolation, Prince Albert continues to work from the office of his private apartments and remains in permanent contact with members of his cabinet, his government as well as with his closest collaborators.
A chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Cross River, Yibala Inyang, has rejected his appointment as a special assistant to Governor Ben Ayade on agriculture.

Mr Inyangs appointment, which was among the many made recently by the governor, would have been restricted to Yakurr Local Government Area where he hails from if he had accepted it.

Mr Inyang told PREMIUM TIMES, Thursday evening, he wholeheartedly rejected the appointment because it was too demeaning for him. He said he was disappointed with Mr Ayade because of that.

I have a lot I can depend on as a private person, said Mr Inyang who runs a security consultancy firm which, according to him, has about 26 employees.

My boys from Obudu, people I mentored are commissioners, special advisers maybe because they are from northern Cross River. And if you see the trend of appointments that have been released, everybody who has benefited majorly is from the north.

I felt I should be singled out not because I feel special but because of my pedigree. I reject it and I may not need any other appointment. I have already been shown that no matter what I do, I wont be recognised.

READ ALSO:

Mr Inyang said he sent a text message to Mr Ayade asking him to give him a better appointment but that the governor did not respond.

Some of the governors political associates called me and said I should be humble and wait till maybe the governor would change it (the appointment) one day, I told them my image was at stake.

We are supposed to sue him but because I am a party man I just rejected it politely.

Mr Inyang, however, said that Mr Ayade has done well for Cross River State and the people.

When PREMIUM TIMES contacted Governor Ayades spokesperson, Christian Ita, he declined comment on the issue.
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Linkedin Samira Shihab (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 16:21 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d962da 3 Lifestyle declutter,self-isolation,quarantine,lockdown,COVID-19,home-and-living,social-distancing,GDP-Ventures Free

For about a week now, most of us have been in self-imposed quarantine because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, theres not much we can do to control the coronavirus except to stay at home. That said, one thing we can do to make ourselves more comfortable and productive is to keep our home tidy and make it a place where we enjoy spending our time.

Being at home all day is the perfect time to make room for a clean and happy home by doing the simple act of decluttering. Taking back control of your home through decluttering will lighten up your mood and give you a positive mindset.

The art of decluttering has been buzzing around the world, but what does it mean? Lets break it down: Decluttering is an action or a process to decide whether items in your house are valuable or not. Decluttering is part of a minimalist lifestyle that has long been popular in Japan.

Read also: How to clean your house to prevent the spread of coronavirus and other infections

Decluttering became mainstream when we were introduced to Tidying Up With Marie Kondo. Kondo is a Japanese cleaning consultant who believes in the revolutionary idea of organizing category by category, instead of room by room. The prime goal of decluttering is not just neatness but a restart in life. The process is about actively selecting items that spark joy in your life and removing what isnt worth the space. To declutter requires patience and discipline, yet it will be one of the most productive and rewarding activities you can do during your time of self-isolation.

Clutter is the baggage that keeps you from living the life you want to live. Past emotions can be slowly let go by removing physical items. According to a study from UCLA, there is a direct link between the stress hormone cortisol and clutter. When your surroundings are messy, it tends to increase stress levels, as living in a cluttered home can impact your inner self and raise negative emotions. With this virus leaving us uncertain about many aspects of our lives, decluttering is a great way to put things back into our control and make us ready to strive forward.

Living in a neat and clean environment is an act of self-care impacting your wellbeing and quality of life. You continually focus on whats important and prioritize things of real value. Its a lesson on future decision-making, as you differentiate between what you need and what you want.

Read also: Already Marie Kondoed your house? Try the FlyLady technique now

Additionally, decluttering has financial perks. You can sell items you choose to let go of to earn some money on second-hand online marketplaces. For now, only engage with ones that offer free pick-up services directly to your home. For the items you cant sell now, simply store them in a box and have them ready to be removed at a later date.

In these weeks ahead, while youre at home and wondering how to spend your time, rather than binge-watching the next Netflix series, start sorting out and decluttering your space to make room for positive energy and space to breathe. Maximize your happiness by narrowing down what really matters to you. By following this exercise, youll be grateful for the most important things that you already have around you. Wake up in a place where you enjoy being, so you continue the positive and happy mindset through the days of self-isolation. (wng)

***

The writer is the CEO & cofounder of Tinkerlust, a resale e-commerce platform for branded and luxury fashion in Indonesia. Samira aims to grow a profitable and sustainable business to contribute to the fashion-sharing economy in the Indonesian retail ecosystem.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
MANILA, Philippines  The Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (Philhealth) on Thursday said it will shoulder the medical bills of Filipinos who will get hospitalized due to novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

Philhealth President and CEO Ricardo Morales said the agency will pay for the medical expenses of COVID-19 patients confined in public and private hospitals, especially health workers who are on the frontline of the fight against the viral disease.

He, however, clarified that COVID-19 patients who are under self-quarantine are not covered by the program since the agency could not compute their medication expenses.

Mayroon tayong mga naka-quarantine sa bahay, hindi natin masasagot yun dahil unang-una, hindi naman natin alam kung ano yung kanilang ginamit na gamot o yung kanilang ginamit na process, he said in a televised briefing.

Yung lang nako-confine yung lang ang masasagot ng Philhealth kasi prescribed yung mga gamot at saka yung ginamit na process sa pasyente, he added.

Morales said the state health insurance agency has so far released P1.6 billion to hospitals as prepositioned fund in response to COVID-19 pandemic. This amount is part of the P30 billion budget that the agency earlier allocated for the public health crisis.

The government earlier ordered the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes to transfer more than P420 million to Philhealth to be used for its COVID-19 packages.

For more information, Philhealth may be reached through its Action Center at 02-84417442.  RRD (with details from Correspondent Dante Amento)

The post Philhealth to shoulder medical expenses of hospitalized COVID-19 patients appeared first on UNTV News.
US Attorney General William Barr on Thursday announced that the US is pressing criminal charges against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for allegedly facilitating drug trafficking into their country and offered a reward of USD 15 million for information leading to his arrest.

"Today's announcement is focused on rooting out the extensive corruption within the Venezuelan government - a system constructed and controlled to enrich those at the highest levels of the government," Attorney General Barr said, as quoted by the Voice of America.

"The Venezuelan regime, once led by Nicolas Maduro Moros, remains plagued by criminality and corruption," Barr said.

The Justice Department said in a press release that each defendant is charged with four narco-terrorism and drug trafficking-related charges that carry sentences of a minimum of 50 years in prison and a maximum life sentence.

The State Department is offering a reward of USD 15 million for any information leading to the arrest of Maduro and up to USD 10 million for the arrest of each of the other officials. Barr declined to comment on whether the United States will deploy the military to apprehend Maduro and the other defendants.

Moreover, other indicted officials include National Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello Rondon, former director of Venezuela's military intelligence Gen. Hugo Carvajal Barrios, former Venezuelan Army general Cliver Alcala Cordones as well as several members of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (RAFC).

In 2016, the revolutionary forces signed a peace deal with the Colombian government, ending more than 50 years of conflict. However, the US officials have alleged that several dissenting members of the group, backed by the Maduro regime, are still involved in drugs trafficking.

Barr said the indictment accuses Maduro and the other Venezuelan officials of collaborating with FARC to smuggle cocaine into the US for over two decades. The US Attorney General further accused Maduro of intending to "flood" the country with cocaine in order to undermine the country's well being.

Barr said the United States expects and is exploring all options to gain custody of Maduro and the other indicted officials.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
'X' Marks the Spot for Florida Tech

By Maurice Nagle - Web Editor

Virtual classrooms and elearning are not new, but today, it is no longer an alternative. It is the reality. Institutions of higher learning have sent students home and moved entire course loads online, putting implemented technology to the test.

Florida Institute of Technology Office of Development is now leveraging the 8x8 X Series cloud communications solution to support students and faculty safety during the coronavirus pandemic.

As a proud alum of Florida Tech, departments like the Office of Development play a critical role in helping institutions of higher learning stay nimble, efficient and well-funded to ensure students continue to receive a high quality, affordable education, noted Vik Verma, Chief Executive Officer at 8x8, Inc.

With the X Series deployment, the Office of Development was able to integrate all communications on one platform, and better engage with parties critical in driving the advancement of student success, research and programs through philanthropic support. With overhead cost minimal, rapid deployment and a robust omnichannel cloud communications platform, university efforts can continue without interruption from anywhere.

Students will find video quality improved for the universitys Sococo virtual reality online workplace. Connecting with colleagues is via video is now powered by 8x8 Video Meetings and just a couple clicks away.

Our mission is to engage all of our philanthropic constituents in ways that are meaningful and impactful, and we continually seek to maintain communication and accountability to our donors, said Gary Grant, Senior Vice President for Development at Florida Institute of Technology. Given the current public health situation, our top priority was ensuring safe interactions between staff, alumni, students, parents and friends of the University. 8x8 helped us get up and running quickly using 8x8 Virtual Office desktop and mobile applications, enhancing our agility and resiliency to collaborate and meet on the fly from anywhere, on any device.

Are your communications in the cloud, yet?

Please enable JavaScript to view the

Edited by Maurice Nagle
The amphibious assault ship USS Boxer (LHD 4) arrives at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam following a Western Pacific deployment, Nov. 13. As of March 23, 2020, two sailors stationed on the ship have tested positive for the virus that caused COVID-19. (DoD/Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Aja B. Jackson)

COVID-19: Pentagon Freezes Overseas Movements of 90,000 Troops, Afghanistan Withdrawal Unaffected

The Pentagon has ordered a freeze on overseas troop movements, affecting around 90,000 military personnel, in order to stop the spread of COVID-19.

The 60-day stop movement order on March 25 affects both those slated to return home to U.S. shores, and those who would have deployed overseas.

Currently, this order is not expected to impact the continued drawdown of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, which is scheduled to be complete within 135 days following the signed agreement, according to a Pentagon statement.

Exceptions will be made for medical treatment of troops and their families, and for troops on Navy ships which have been in transit for more than 14 daysor have effectively been in quarantine.

Other exceptions can also be made on a case-by-case basis, if a journey is mission essential, due to humanitarian needs or another extreme hardship.

Among troops, 227 have so far tested positive for the CCP virus, commonly referred to as the novel coronavirus.

Together with civilians, dependents, and contractors, those cases make a total of 453 cases in the department of defense.

On Wednesday the Department of Defense announced the first identified CCP virus case at the Pentagon headquarters buildinga Marine who had last worked in the building on March 13.

The Marine followed U.S. Centers for Disease Control guidelines and DoD directives by isolating himself when an immediate family member began to show symptoms, said the Pentagon in a statement. Once he became ill, he contacted his assigned medical facility.

The Department of Defense had already restricted some foreign travel and permanent change of station.

This stop movement order will also impact exercises, deployments, redeployments and other global force management activities, according to a statement from the Department of Defense. Approximately 90,000 service members slated to deploy or redeploy over the next 60 days will likely be impacted by this stop movement order.

The purpose is to make sure that were not bringing the virus back home, infecting others, that were not spreading it around the military, Esper said of the move, reported Reuters.

Pentagon modeling of the spread of the virus is not yet robust enough to determine where the next outbreak of the virus will occur, according to senior officials.

Right now, the modeling that were able to do is for planning, but it has not yet sufficiently firm to say that its predictive in nature, Air Force Brig. Gen. (Dr.) Paul Friedrichs told reporters. Weve not tried to predict that were going to see a hotspot here, or were going to see X number there. We used it for broad planning. Like in the community, if the outbreak occurs and X percent of people are infected over time, what does that mean as far as health care requirements?

Predictive models may soon be possible thanks to data sharing from countries already afflicted by the virus, he said.

The good news is our allies in Korea and in Italy and in Europe are sharing data very transparently with us, and were building a much more robust database, he said. I think in another few weeks well have better fidelity on that data.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China before it was transmitted worldwide.
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Mupa is regarded as Hungary's top cultural brand, and the most modern cultural institution in the capital. It opened its doors in 2005 to provide events of international quality to a diverse audience, bringing together all the varied disciplines of the arts in a unique fashion. To this day it provides a cutting-edge home for classical, contemporary, popular and world music, jazz and opera, as well as contemporary circus, all types of dance, literature and film.
National Cadet Corps (NCC) volunteers have joined policemen to assist them in maintaining curfew in the city.

They are helping the police personnel in barricading roads, deterring people from breaching the curfew, while guiding residents left in the lurch.

The Ludhiana police in one of their Facebook posts had requested residents to come forward and help them as traffic marshals, curfew enforcement officers, door-to-door delivery executives and suppliers of food packets to the economically weaker sections of society.

One such cadet, Barjesh Kumar, said their corps has always helped the society, police and administration in case of any emergency.

He said that more than 50 cadets have come forward to ensure compliance with the curfew and streamline the operations.

We start in the morning and work till seven in the evening, he added.

Amarjit Kumar, another volunteer, said they were also advising people about precautions to be taken against coronavirus. We are teaching them how to maintain social distance and cover their mouth, nose and eyes. Our parents are proud of us, he added.

Assistant sub-inspector (ASI) Parminder Singh said the cadets are of great help. They are assisting us in barricading roads and guiding people, he added.

According to the police, there already are at least 700 volunteers, but they need to enrol more. The police have invited healthy people below the age of 50 for the purpose.

Special masks for turbaned cops

Various NGOs are helping the police personnel on duty by providing them food, water, sanitisers and masks.

Prince, a member of NGO Feeding India, said they saw turbaned cops facing problems while wearing masks as the strings attached to masks are to be fastened with the ears.

As turban covers both ears, cops wearing them cover their faces with a piece of cloth or handkerchief. We have designed special masks that can be worn over the turbans. We are distributing them for free, he added.
Russia sent a lot of equipment and means of disinfection, while China helps with masks and lung ventilators

About 80% of the humanitarian aid supplied by Russia to Italy for the fight against coronavirus is useless and has military and political components as La Stampa reported.

Prime Minister of Italy Giuseppe Conte accepted this aid for the strengthening of personal relations with Russia.

Russia sent a lot of equipment and means of disinfection, while China helps with masks and lung ventilators.

The Russians also sent to Italy a lot of military specialists on biological protection at senior ranks: generals, colonels and majors. All of them are enabled to freely move around the country, which is a NATO member.

Besides, the operation in Italy is coordinated by the Defense Ministry of Russia, not the Health Ministry.

As we reported, in Italy, 20% of doctors have become infected with coronavirus since the epidemic began to spread in the country. In Russia, where mortality from coronavirus is much lower, the authorities decided to help Italy in the fight against the epidemic.

According to RBC, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu gave instructions to create a Russian Aerospace Forcesair group, which will begin supplying Italy with aid on March 22. Eight mobile teams of Russian military doctors and virologists, automotive complexes of aerosol disinfection of transport and territory, as well as medical equipment, will be delivered to the country.

As of March 26, over 470,000 cases of infection with the coronavirus Covid-19 were registered in the world.
New Delhi, March 26 : In this hour of crisis when India is battling one of its worst nightmares - COVID-19, there are a few chief ministers whose work seem to stand out as far as fighting the virus is concerned.

Uddhav Thackeray:

Well before the pan-India shutdown, like many state chiefs, Maharashtra's Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray on March 20 announced that from Friday midnight all workplaces will remain closed till March 31. His order was also applicable to Mumbai, MMR Region, Pune, Pimpri Chinchwad and Nagpur.

Well before that, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation had announced that all shops located in several localities of Mumbai will remain shut on alternate days indefinitely.

He had said, "There has been a drastic difference in the crowd in public places, however, we still need to do this for 15 days. We don't have any option but to have a social distancing. You may not like it, but we have no option for it." After a nationwide lockdown announcement, he soothed the nerves by assuring Maharashtra has enough supply of essentials. "I appeal to employers not to cut wages of their workers or stop their services....don't flock the markets. To purchase essential commodities, go to market alone and maintain distance (with one another). We will win this war and celebrate Gudi Padwa as usual," he said.

Ashok Gehlot:

Just as Thackeray, Gehlot announced a lockdown in Rajasthan till March 31, soon enough. He also demanded a Central relief package for the state's tourism and hospitality industry, MSMEs and all the weaker sections of the society.

He in fact wrote a letter to Prime Minister Naredra Modi asking for such a relief package.

Way before that he tried to build a political consensus. The Rajasthan Chief Minister called for an all-party meeting to discuss the situation related to the novel coronavirus in the state. He also called a meeting of religious leaders.

Pinarayi Vijayan:

Kerala was the first state that reported a coronavirus infection in India and a state with one of the highest infection rates from corona. That said, the approach of the state government has been coordinated and clinical.

Apart from building isolation facilities, what drew a lot of attention was the economic package announced much before that of the Centre. Though sceptics question its viability, but Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan attempted to kickstart the badly hit economy with a Rs 20,000-crore package. It came ahead of Modi's announcement of economic task force.

A total of 72,460 persons are under observation in Kerala, the CM said on Wednesday, out of them only 466 in hospitals. Kerala was among the states that declared a statewide lockdown ahead of the nationwide shutdown.

He regularly spoke to people via media or Twitter to skirt any panic.

Bhupesh Baghel:

To prevent the spread of coronavirus infection, several important decisions were being taken by the Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel. Even before the announcement of lockdown in the entire country, the government had issued instructions for the lockdown in the state. Instructions were given to seal the boundaries only after the first positive case came in the state.

Along with this, a banner with photo of the CM has been installed in the entire state, including the capital Raipur, which is becoming viral on social media. The banner says, 'Return home'.

Famous filmmaker Sudhir Mishra has tweeted a picture with this banner. On the afternoon of March 25, Sudhir Mishra tweeted : "Good work is being done by Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel for awareness about Corona virus. So far, only 1 positive case has been received in the state."

Hemant Soren:

At a time when everyone is battling with rising cases, Jhharkhand health department flaunted zero in his state on Wednesday.

According to health officials, samples of 77 coronavirus suspect cases have been tested, out of which 61 samples have turned negative.

Samples collected from different districts were sent for testing in Jamshedpur. The health ministry is keeping an eye on about 450 people who have returned to Jharkhand from Italy, China and other countries.

Chief Minister Hemant Soren had expressed satisfaction on Thursday that so far no coronavirus case has been found in the state. Soren also made appeals to the citizens to abide by the lockdown order, and not to move outside unnecessarily.

Amarinder Singh:

As 90,000 NRIs returned, Punjab had an uphill task, preparing for an alarming rise in cases. Hence, gauging the situation, Punjab became one of the first states to clamp curfew to prevent the spread of the virus. The timely decision was taken by the Punjab chief minister after reviewing the situation with the Chief Secretary and Director General of Police (DGP).

It was a practical decision in two senses -- it curbed the massive spread to other states and contained the unruly citizens of the state, many of whom gave sleepless nights to the administration, violating social distancing calls.

But amid this, CM Singh didn't forget the humanitarian crisis that loomed. "I have directed the provision of free food, shelter and medicines for those in need and 20 crore has been sanctioned out of CM relief fund for same. Additionally, DCs and SDMs have been asked to extend all assistance to those in need," Amarinder Singh tweeted.

V. Narayanswamy:

When the crisis is serious, the law enforcement machinery needs to be tougher -- V. Narayanswamy's government in Puducherry seems to be guided by this principle.

This Tuesday, police resorted to lathi charge when vendors who were refusing to go home and hence attracting more buyers on the streets. With Ugadi festival around, that massive public jostling was a deadly health hazard in terms of the coronavirus outbreak.

Well before that, the Puducherry Chief Minister announced last Wednesday, closure of all bars in the union territory as part of steps to prevent spread of coronavirus.

Last week itself, Narayanasamy sent his Health Minister Malladi Krishna Rao to visit the Mahe region, an enclave of Puducherry in Kerala, to review steps taken there to prevent the spread of the infection.

As India is into the second day of the nationwide lockdown, early work by these seven Chief Ministers made it easy for all Indians.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- Syndicated from IANS
In a welcome move among reports of panic buying across India, the governments of Uttar Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab, and Haryana have begun home delivering essential food supplies.

Starting March 25, the administration of these states have also earmarked spots to sell grocery, dairy products, fruits, and vegetables as long as the coronavirus lockdown continues.

This is aimed at avoiding panic among consumers for essential food items, said officials.

The Uttar Pradesh government has roped in 12,000 vendors to home deliver these essential commodities, reported The Economic Times. Devesh Chaturvedi, Principal Secretary of Agriculture, Uttar Pradesh, has informed that they will keep increasing the number of vendors as and when the district authorities increase their coverage.

In Delhi and the National Capital Region, where Mother Dairy has 310 stores, the supply of fruits and vegetables has been doubled to 330 tonnes, to ensure they can keep up with the surge in demand for essentials amid the nationwide lockdown.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Coronavirus India Lockdown LIVE

Imran Hussain, Delhi's Food and Civil Supplies Minister, has informed that ration cardholders will be given free ration along with 50 percent extra quantity; homeless persons at night shelters will also be given free food.

In Jammu & Kashmir, the ration will be home delivered to 1.60 lakh families starting March 28. Shahid Choudhary, the district magistrate of Srinagar has informed that a total of 2.61 lakh families residing in Srinagar will benefit from this.

Similarly, in Ahmedabad, the district administration has tied up with Amul to home deliver milk cartons.

The administration in Chandigarh and Haryana have also begun home delivering vegetables, milk, grocery, etc.

Commenting on this, Chandigarhs Senior Deputy Mayor Ravi Kant Sharma said: Vegetable and grocery vendors have been issued curfew passes and consumers have been sent messages sharing the contact of vendors and delivery time in their area. It makes no sense if the consumer steps out of the home, so home deliveries is the only solution.
Hays County has issued a "stay at home" order and a nightly curfew, starting Thursday night, in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19.

The order comes after a 10th and 11th Hays County resident was diagnosed with the disease on Wednesday.

The county-wide order will begin at 11 p.m. on March 26 and remain in effect until 4 a.m. on April 10. In addition, a curfew will be implemented during that timeframe from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. daily.

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Essential businesses may remain open, including grocery stores, gas stations, hardware stores, news media, restaurants offering to-go and/or delivery, and others.

Public and private gatherings are prohibited with the exception of family households or living units. Residents may also go outside and exercise.

I have been working with the mayors in Hays County to design a Stay at Home, Work Safe Order that everyone is comfortable with, and worked tirelessly with our General Counsel to make the Order easy to understand, said Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra.

Hays County is just one of several Texas cities, including San Antonio, that have declared a stay at home order this week.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Syria has risen, after three people were identified after flying into Damascus International Airport reports Al-Masdar.

The Syrian Ministry of Health announced the registration of three new cases of the emerging coronavirus, bringing the total to four inside the country.

The coronavirus cases were reportedly discovered among recent travelers that returned to Syria via the Damascus International Airport.

Earlier this week, the Syrian Ministry of Health announced its first coronavirus case after receiving testing kits from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Currently, Syria has approximately 1,000 testing kits, despite fears that the virus has already spread.

This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
New Delhi: China has decided to temporarily suspend the entry of foreign nationals holding valid Chinese Visas or residence permits, and the same would be effectove from Saturday (March 28, 2020), according to a statement by China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"Entry by foreign nationals with APEC Business Travel Cards will be suspended as well," the statement added.

It further said, "Policies including port visas, 24/72/144-hour visa-free transit policy, Hainan 30-day visa-free policy, 15-day visa-free policy specified for foreign cruise-group-tour through Shanghai Port, Guangdong 144-hour visa-free policy specified for foreign tour groups from Hong Kong or Macao SAR, and Guangxi 15-day visa-free policy specified for foreign tour groups of ASEAN countries will also be temporarily suspended."

However, the "Entry with diplomatic, service, courtesy or C visas will not be affected," it said, adding "Foreign nationals coming to China for necessary economic, trade, scientific or technological activities or out of emergency humanitarian needs may apply for visas at Chinese embassies or consulates. Entry by foreign nationals with visas issued after this announcement will not be affected."

The suspension is stated to be a temporary measure that China is compelled to take in light of the outbreak situation and the practices of other countries.

"China will stay in close touch with all sides and properly handle personnel exchanges with the rest of the world under special circumstances. The above-mentioned measures will be calibrated in light of the evolving situation and announced accordingly," it added.
Shauna Polly (left) from Downpatrick with her friend Stephanie Kidd from Bournemouth

Families in Northern Ireland have demanded that the government acts to bring home loved ones stranded abroad.

Shauna Polly (27) from Downpatrick is currently stuck in lockdown at a hostel in Peru with hundreds of other tourists.

The UK Government is working to arrange a flight home from Lima, but Shauna is 19 hours away and has no access to public transport.

Shauna's mother Claire has been in constant contact, but says they feel "isolated and vulnerable" while they wait for information.

Travelling with her friend Stephanie Kidd (30) from Bournemouth, Shauna is only allowed to leave the hostel every few days for food.

Claire said: "Their supplies are very limited, the food is very basic. She texted me last night to ask what she could make for dinner with just pumpkins and peppers.

"They're living a lot more meekly than the stupidity of people here who are stockpiling.

"She can manage with what they have, but the issue is the lack of information from the government."

She added: "It's not a question of money or paying for the flight, it's when is the flight to get them out? We just don't know if it will be two weeks or if they'll be stuck there till August or September." A Foreign Office spokesperson said a British Airways flight departing Lima for Heathrow yesterday was prioritising places for the most vulnerable British nationals.

"We continue to work around the clock with the Peruvian authorities, international governments and airlines to arrange further flights to the UK for remaining British nationals.''

They added that work was continuing with the Peruvian authorities on how to transport British passengers to the flights.

In Australia, Nathan from Antrim and his girlfriend Emma Craig (both 23) had their flight home cancelled this week.

They arrived at the UK embassy in Sydney for help, but were only given phone numbers which rang for hours. They now face at least another month in Australia with no work visas.

This week they saved money by walking for two hours to the UK embassy but were left frustrated by the lack of help.

"Once they arrived they wouldn't even let them inside, it was just Australian security guards giving them leaflets with phone numbers," said Nathan's father Michael.

"Luckily an American couple who are stuck in Melbourne have allowed them to use an apartment until they get home."

The Foreign Office said: "Consular staff are supporting those with urgent needs while providing travel advice and support to those still abroad."
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 11:08:47|Editor: huaxia

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by Xinhua writer Tu Yifan

RIYADH, March 26 (Xinhua) -- What the world is facing amid the COVID-19 outbreak is a global crisis that needs global response, a leading economist from a Saudi think tank told Xinhua in a recent interview.

"The biggest risk for the global economy is that if we don't act in unity ... it could go into a recession," said John Sfakianakis, chief economist at the Gulf Research Center.

"The world was sleeping for a very long time before they understood that this is a global pandemic," he said.

Sfakianakis said that the Group of 20 (G20) needs to be activated like it was in 2009 to bring global support and unity.

Saudi Arabia, which holds the presidency of G20 this year, will host via video a G20 extraordinary virtual leaders' summit on COVID-19 on Thursday.

As for the upcoming G20 summit, Sfakianakis believes the meeting needs to go beyond its 20 members and be all inclusive to push for a global response.

"China has great scientists, so do Europe and the U.S. They all need to work together to find a solution. This is not the time to think just of one country," he said.

"The world should see that the virus does not see borders and flags. There has to be a global solution, rather than a national solution," said the expert.

As China has basically contained the spread of the novel coronavirus, the world "need to see how Chinese people did it," he said.

"China has been doing a great job, providing medical support and experience to Italy and many other countries," he said.

He stressed the role of the World Health Organization in promoting global cooperation in fighting the pandemic.

"The way forward, there has to be a global system of pandemic center that watches these things at an earlier stage" as the world might face similar situations in the future, said Sfakianakis.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday reviewed the Ministry of Defence's action plan to deal with COVID-19 and urged armed forces, Defence Public Sector Undertakings and other organisations to gear up preparedness and provide all required assistance to civilian authorities.

Officials briefed the minister on various measures and assistance provided so far. The Indian Air Force has made several sorties and evacuated Indian nationals from affected areas in China, Japan and Iran.

Various quarantine facilities of the Armed Forces have so far handled 1,462 evacuees and discharged 389 persons.

At present, 1,073 persons are being provided care at the facilities in Manesar, Hindan, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Mumbai.

A Defence Ministry release said that additional quarantine facilities with a capacity of 950 beds were on standby.

The meeting was attended by Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat, Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Karambir Singh, Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal RKS Bhadauria and Chief of Army Staff General M M Naravane.

Rajnath Singh appreciated the "proactive role" played by armed forces and various departments of Defence Ministry in evacuating Indian nationals as well as foreigners from COVID-19 affected countries.

"e urged the armed forces and other departments to gear up their preparedness and provide all required assistance to the civilian administration at various levels.

The release said Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) laboratories have manufactured 20,000 litres of sanitiser and supplied to various organisations, including 10,000 litres to Delhi police. DRDO has also supplied 10,000 masks to Delhi police personnel," it added.

It said that DRDO is tying up with some private companies to make personal protection equipment such as bodysuits and ventilators.

Ordnance Factory Board has also ramped up production of sanitizers, masks and body suits. Bharat Electronics Limited is also engaged in manufacturing of ventilators.

The release said that Army medical teams deployed in the Maldives have since returned after completion of their mission.

It said Army medical teams and two ships of Navy are on standby to provide the required assistance to friendly countries in the neighbourhood.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
"These fleets of supersonic assets highlight the dedication to fulfilling combat readiness training objectives at Nellis and Air Force bases across the U.S."

Draken International, the global leader in advanced adversary air services, has successfully commenced supersonic radar equipped F1M missions in support of USAF combat readiness training at Nellis AFB. The fully modernized Mirage F1Ms, predominately flown by the Spanish Air Force in the past, now challenge US and coalition 4th & 5th Generation fighters over the skies of the Nevada Test and Training Range in the development of warfighters tactics, techniques, and procedures.

Draken remains the only commercial air service provider to have purchased, imported, certified, and executed sustained flight operations with threat-representative fighter aircraft. These critical capabilities inherent to the Draken F1 fleet, are essential for supporting the Nellis ADAIR II contract, which provides adversary training for the prestigious USAF Weapons School, Red Flag exercises, operational test support, Formal Training Unit support, and Combat Air Forces abroad.

Over the past two years, the collaborative efforts between Draken International and Paramount Aerospace Systems has resulted in the reassembly, restoration, and certification of the fleet of Mirage F1s. This extensive project was accomplished at Drakens maintenance facility in Lakeland, FL. Draken has also begun the acceptance of the fleet of Denel Cheetahs from the South African Air Force; a 4th Generation supersonic radar-equipped fighter that joins Drakens operational fleet.

Sean Gustafson, VP of Business Development at Draken stated, Draken is fully committed to enhancing adversary support for the USAF. These fleets of supersonic assets highlight the dedication to fulfilling combat readiness training objectives at Nellis and Air Force bases across the U.S. Our ever-growing fleet of advanced fighters enrich our capabilities and challenge Airmen, Sailors, and Marines alike.

Draken International is the worlds largest operator of ex-military aircraft. The company is based out of Lakeland Linder Regional Airport in Lakeland, FL. The organization sets a new standard in airborne adversary support, flight training, threat simulation, electronic warfare support, aerial refueling, research, testing, as well as other missions uniquely suited to their fleet of aircraft. With over 100 tactical fighter aircraft incorporating modern 4th generation capabilities, the company is ideally positioned to answer the growing global demand for commercial air services. Draken employs world class, military training fighter pilots including USAF Weapons School Instructors, Fighter Weapons School Graduates, TOP GUN Instructors, Air Liaison Officers, and FAC-A Instructors, For additional information, visit http://www.drakenintl.com.
Joining the fight against coronavirus, scientists of Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K) have proposed to develop portable ventilators and affordable testing kits.

According to senior professor at the Bioscience and Bioengineering Department of IIT-K professor Amitabh Bandhopadhyaya the institute would be soon sending a proposal regarding the same to the Centre for approval.

It has been observed that most corona patients died as they could not breathe due to infection and they required ventilators for respiratory support. Therefore we decided to develop portable ventilators and affordable testing kits. Since the institute is closed till March 31 there are no students to assist in the project. But our team consisting of professor Sameer Khandeka, professor Arun Saha, prof J Ramkumar and professor Vishakha Bhattacharya have already started the work, Bandhopadhyaya said.

He said the work of developing the ventilators will be carried out in collaboration with Benagluru-based Narayana Institute of Cardiac Sciences and the prototype will be ready within 7 days.

Later a company floated by IIT-K alumni Nikhil Kureley and Harshit Rathore would produce 1000 portable ventilators in a month. The duo had set up NOCCA Robotics at the incubation centre here, he added.

He said since both the students were in Maharashtra efforts were being made to seek permission from the government to let them come here for the project.

Due to lockdown the Pune team had difficulty going to their shed and fabricate it. A crowd sourcing platform setup by a group of young professionals from all parts of India called Caring Indians came forward, contacted officials at Pune and now the team secured the necessary permissions. It is a combine effort and this is the time where collaboration will succeed. Lets us hope that our effort bears fruit and we can save lives, Bandhopadhyay said.

Director of IIT-K, prof Abhay Karandikar said, We are making efforts with one startup incubated by IIT Kanpur which has a plant in Pune. IIT Kanpur is helping with technological aspects, mechanical aspects. We are seeking intervention from doctors.

He said, Prof Bandyopadhyays team is making an effort and we hope that some positive results will come out of it. It will be a big contribution on our part to fight back this pandemic. We are already in touch with the department of science and technology Government of India. The testing work is on during this lockdown period.

Also, the government defence factories too have pitched in to do their bit in dealing with the deadly virus.

The government ordnance factories have decided to produce various necessary protective gears said national president of All India Defence Employees Federation SN Pathak and general secretary C Kumar.

The Ordnance Factory Avadi in Tamil Nadu and in Shahjahanpur would produce face mask while the Ordnance Factory in Kanpur would produce overall safety dress and tents.

Similarly, Ordnance Factory at Medak in Telangana will develop ventilators.

Sanitizers would be produced at defence factories in Khamaria and Itarsi in MP, Pathak said.

The process for producing necessary protective agents has begun on war footing, Pathak said.
: A doctor couple are among the three persons who tested positive for coronavirus on Thursday taking the total number of COVID-19 cases in the state to 44.

According to a media bulletin on COVID-19, the three new confirmed cases on Thursday were contact (of previous positive cases).

The three cases includes a 49-year old man, a resident of Qutbullapur in Medchal district, who is a contact. He travelled to Delhi and the patient is stable and admitted at the designated hospital, it said.

The two other confirmed cases are of a doctor couple from Hyderabad city pertaining to a 36-year old doctor and her 41-year old husband, also a doctor. Both are contact cases.

"Both the patients are stable and admitted at the designated hospital," the bulletin said.

State Health Minister E Rajender also held a meeting with health officials on the measures taken up to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Kansas City Hipster Transit Freebies Amid Coronavirus

RideKC offers free bike, scooter rides during COVID-19 pandemic KANSAS CITY, Mo. - RideKC is offering people and businesses free bike and scooter rides during the coronavirus pandemic. According to the nonprofit, riders can use bikes and scooters free for 20 minutes with each ride.

Calling Out KCK

KCK Police launch hotline to report businesses not complying with 'stay-at-home' order KANSAS CITY, Kan. - Kansas City, Kansas Police launched a new hotline Thursday for residents to report businesses that are not complying with the "stay-at-home" order that went into effect for the city and all of Wyandotte County on Tuesday, March 24. Residents should call (913) 225-4788 if they believe a business or individual is [...]

Show-Me Jailbird Freedom To Protect Against Coronavirus

Missouri Parolees Should Be Released Immediately To Help Prevent Spread Of COVID-19, Lawyers Argue Amid concerns that prisoners face a heightened risk of exposure to the coronavirus, a public interest law firm wants Missouri to release prisoners whose parole has been revoked - in many cases on technicalities.

Kansas COVID-19 Consequences

Kansas sees 1,250% increase in initial unemployment claims TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - The number of jobless workers in Kansas who filed initial unemployment claims last week was 12 times as high as it was the week before as measures to control the spread of the new coronavirus took their toll on the economy. The U.S.

Olathe Precaution Worker Fight

Local woman says she was fired for wearing a mask to work OLATHE, KS (KCTV) - At KCTV5 News, we continue to hear from viewers concerned about their jobs. We know many of you have lost your jobs, but others are concerned about how their employers are handling this crisis.

Disinfecting Downtown

CID Ambassadors are essential to a clean, safe community "Stay at Home" may be the new normal in Kansas City beginning Tuesday (March 24), but that has only inspired the Downtown and River Market Community Improvement Districts to double-down on their daily mandate to keep its neighborhoods clean and safe. Mayor Quinton Lucas ordered Kansas Citians to stay-at-home now through April 24, except for "essential activities."

Locals Boozehounds Start Functional Alcoholism Support Group Via Social Media

Kansas City Facebook group confronts COVID-19 with beer | KTSA Efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic have left people all across the U.S. to come up with... More "

Quick roundup of how locals are reacting to the pandemic that's starting to hit this cowtown . . . Checkit:Developing . . .
Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV BUD is facing the heat of the novel coronavirus, which has killed thousands of people sending jitters across the global economy. To curb its spread, authorities are ordering shutdown of manufacturing facilities, implementing social distancing and travel bans. Such preventive measures have dealt a big blow to many companies, including beer makers like AB InBev.

Keeping in these lines, AB InBev withdrew its 2020 outlook due to the unprecedented impact of COVID-19. In February, when the virus was confined to China alone, management estimated core profit (EBITDA) to decrease 10% in the first quarter and 2-5% in 2020.

During its fourth-quarter earnings call, management highlighted that the coronavirus outbreak has led to a significant decline in demand across China in both on-premise and in-home channels. Further, it witnessed soft demand during the Chinese New Year, which was lower than that in the prior years, as it coincided with the coronavirus outbreak. The company stated that the outbreak has caused nearly $285 million of lost revenues and $170 million of lost EBITDA in the first two months of 2020.

Additionally, in a recent move, the company has drawn $9 billion from its revolving credit facility to bolster its cash balance. Per sources, AB InBev is already reeling under high debt levels of $95 billion due to its aggressive acquisition strategy. However, it decided to tap into the credit facility to prepare for the crisis.

In the past three months, shares of this Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell) company have slumped 45.2% compared with the industrys decline of 39.8%. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Moreover, the divestiture of AB InBevs Australian business to Asahi Group Holdings is on track. The company is awaiting regulatory approvals for the deal to close by the second quarter of 2020. Previously, the deal worth $11 billion was expected to conclude by the first quarter.

Story continues

Amidst all negativities, the brewing company remains committed to play its part and serve the society in fighting the pandemic. Hence, management recently donated million liters of alcohol to make hand sanitizers and disinfectants. Moreover, it has produced roughly 50,000 liters of ready-to-use alcohol disinfectant, made with surplus alcohol from its alcohol-free beers, for several European hospitals as Europe has emerged to be the new epicenter of COVID-19. Particularly, the company will send shipments of 5 liters to Belgium, Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands. In addition to this, 26,000 bottles of hand sanitizers coupled with 1,000 Beck's disinfectants are ready for use by pharmacies and healthcare workers in Germany.

Other alcohol companies, including Diageo DEO, Loius Vuitton LVMUY and Pernod Ricard PDRDY, have also stepped forward to combat this hurdle. Pernod Ricard is one of the first companies to have announced to donate 18,500 gallons of pure alcohol for making sanitizers. Also, Louis Vuitton is producing sanitizers and expected to source 40 million face masks from a Chinese supplier. Further, Diageo is donating 2 million liters of grain neutral spirit to make hand sanitizers for various countries facing a shortage of supplies.

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A great-grandfather who shot his daughter in the head is to be freed after 15 months behind bars because a judge found his age put him at risk of contracting coronavirus and it was better he self-isolate at home.

Rodney Charles Madex, 69, served 449 days after he shot his daughter, Tammy, with a shotgun from close range at their home in Glengarry North, in Gippsland, on January 2 last year.

Rodney Madex arrives at court on Thursday. Credit:AAP

Madex wanted to scare his daughter from self-harming, the Supreme Court heard on Thursday and did not mean to shoot her when he fired about 10.30pm, after the pair spent the afternoon drinking.

Tammy, who was then 44, had almost 30 pellets removed from her forehead and was lucky to avoid serious injury.
We are told that everything, as we knew it just three months ago at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, will never be the same and I can only hope that will include a many heaping shovels of barnyard waste removed from our nations Capitol. Suddenly we are facing the most fiendish invader our country has ever known and our leaders, Republican and Democrat, intoxicated by their self-worth, have fallen prey to some other novel disease that has caused a mental blight. It has also completely robbed them of duty to purpose, country, and to the very God upon whom this nation was founded.

We knew what we were getting when we, the people assailed this political witch  Nancy Pelosi -- to the throne of Speaker of the House but what we didnt foresee were the bumbling idiots, who would become her accomplices in an outrageous $2 trillion heist from which it is doubtful this country will ever recover.

I mean it. In less than two weeks, over one million in California have applied for unemployment!

When Mitch McConnell, hardly a gem as the Senate Majority Leader, gave us an early peek: Tax credits for solar energy and wind energy. Provisions to force employers to give special new treatment to Big Labor. And listen to this  new emissions standards for the airlines. Are you kidding me? said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the 78-year-old antique from Kentucky with an estimated $22 million in the bank, this after a long 36 years in Washington.

A CNN reporter asked Pelosi about the Stimulus Bill on Tuesday and she said with the cameras twirling, Everything we're suggesting just relates to COVID-19," Pelosi claimed. "It's not changing policy except as it applies here." Oh gracious mercy.

My first big problem in the land of transparency is the notion that over the weekend a 1,432-page bill was written by somebody. The second problem I have with what weve been shown is integrity took a vacation the same weekend, and the third is that the final version was hardy written in the best interest of the people for whom it was originally intended.

John Hirschauer, a Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute, has just written a marvelous synopsis of Nancy Pelosis 1,400-Page Coronavirus-Relief Boondoggle and you need to read several choice excerpts to truly understand the articles sub-headline: The speaker of the House offers a thoroughly unserious proposal to address a deadly serious crisis.

* * *

SELECTED EXCERPTS FROM NANCY PELOSIS 1,400-PAGE ... BOONDOGGLE

[NOTE: The following are excerpts from an article that appeared on nationreview.com on March 24, 2020. It was written by John Hirschauer and to read a complete version go to the website.]

The coronavirus-relief package proposed by House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) is 1,432 pages long. Many of those pages have nothing whatsoever to do with abating the pandemic that has ground our nation to a halt, nor with aiding industries forced to lay off workers due to frozen demand. Instead, the package spends a shocking amount of ink on the arcane ideological projects of the most progressive members of Pelosis caucus.

Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.) told fellow his fellow House Democrats last week that COVID-19, which has killed more than 17,000 people around the world and is threatening to leave the country in financial ruin, represented a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.

Pelosi and her caucus apparently took note, as the latest proposal from House Democrats reflects a deliberate attempt to restructure everything from corporate boardrooms to the diversity of businesses supply-chains. Here is a sampling of the bills most egregious provisions.

* * *

Diversity Initiatives

To Protect Financial Institutions Operated by Women -- Section 308 of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 instructs the Treasury secretary to consult with the chairman of the FDICs board of directors to preserve the number of minority depository institutions owned by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals. That vague category has, according to the FDIC, historically included banks and other financial institutions owned by African Americans, American Indians, and members of other minority groups. Pelosis bill would expand Section 308 to cover banks and financial institutions in which at least half of outstanding shares are held by one or more women, or whose board of directors are majority-female.

* * *

Establishment of a Minority Bank Deposit Program, -- This section obliges the head of each federal department or agency to develop and implement standards and procedures to ensure, to the maximum extent possible as permitted by law, the use of minority banks and minority credit unions to serve the financial needs of each such department or agency. (Whatever the merits of this idea, it, like the above proposed changes to Section 308 of FIRREA, does not belong in a coronavirus-relief package.)

* * *

Diversity Reporting Requirements -- All publicly traded corporations receiving federal aid would, under the Pelosi proposal, be required to file quarterly disclosures to the SEC detailing their demographic composition, including data on diversity (including racial and gender composition) and any policies and audits related to diversity. All companies, publicly traded and privately held alike, that receive federal aid related to COVID-19 would be required to release a report no later than one year after the disbursement of funds disclosing the demographics of their employees, and including breakdowns by seniority and managerial status. They would also be required to report the demographic breakdowns of their supply chains, disclose data on the diversity of their corporate boards, and issue a pay equity report that disaggregates compensation data by race and gender. And any corporation that receives Federal aid related to COVID19 must maintain officials and budget dedicated to diversity and inclusion initiatives for no less than 5 years after disbursement of funds.

* * *

Restructuring Corporate Boards -- Aid Recipients Must Allow Labor to Appoint One-Third of Corporate Board Members. All companies that receive federal aid related to COVID-19 would be required, under the House proposal, to appoint at least one-third of their board members through a one-employee-one-vote election process. In other words, if companies accept aid from the federal government at a moment when, because of a completely unforeseeable global catastrophe, demand has cratered in response to a lethal pandemic, the House bill would force them to completely upend their boards of directors to no conceivable end other than the fulfillment of a longstanding progressive wish.

* * *

Requiring States to Allow Same-Day Voter Registration  (Amending the Help America Vote Act to Require States to Accommodate Same-Day Registrants) The Help America Vote Act was signed by President Bush in 2002. It helped to modernize the nations voting infrastructure by calling for the creation of computerized voter-registration rolls at the state level, constructing federal accessibility guidelines to accommodate voters with disabilities, and setting up the Electoral Assistance Commission to certify state voting systems. Pelosis coronavirus-relief bill, which ostensibly is intended to provide relief to businesses and individuals affected, directly or otherwise, by the coronavirus, inexplicably seeks to amend the Help America Vote Act, and, in so doing, upend state election protocols by requiring states to allow same-day voter registration. Twenty-nine states do not allow such registration. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia do. It is not clear that this divide need be resolved at all, much less that it ought to be resolved at the federal level. And it is completely unclear why such a provision has any place in an emergency economic-stimulus package.

* * *

Prohibiting Institutions of Higher Learning from Disclosing the Immigration Status of Students -- In a portion of the bill addressing the contingency protocols for the administration of the 2020 U.S. Census, the House bill includes a section on institutions of higher learning. The bill proscribes colleges and universities from disclosing any information to the Bureau on the immigration or citizenship status of any individual enrolled there. What this has to do with the coronavirus crisis, no one knows.

* * *

Deinstitutionalization (Reauthorization of Money Follows the Person) -- The House Bill extends the Money Follows the Person (MFP) program in Medicaid. A darling of deinstitutionalization exponents in Congress, MFP is a federal program designed to incentivize states to move the elderly and persons with intellectual disabilities out of institutions, such as Intermediate Care Facilities (ICF) and nursing homes and into community settings, such as group homes. The program is controversial, because despite its presentation as a voluntary initiative, it incentivizes states to close institutions that those with the most profound disabilities rely upon through an enhanced federal-matching arrangement. In Wisconsin, for instance, state officials began identifying ICF-MR facilities to be downsized or closed and created a bureaucratic morass to promote alternatives to ICF-MR facilities. Twenty-eight such facilities have been closed in the state since the start of the program, and more than 900 individuals they served have been relocated. When such closures are pushed from the state level on down  when state-run ICFs are closed or private ICFs are coaxed to convert their facilities into community-based settings with the guarantee of federal funds  individuals with disabilities and their families are left with little choice but to move. ( The renewal of Money Follows the Person deserves to be debated properly. It should not be smuggled into an emergency appropriations bill of this sort.)

* * *

Environmental Regulations

Grant Program for Sustainable Aviation Fuel -- Title VII of the House bill is devoted entirely to environmental protections. The titles opening section calls for the institution of a Sustainable Aviation Fuel Development Program. The Transportation secretary would be given the power to disburse grant monies based upon the potential greenhouse gases emitted from an applicants project and the potential the project has in reducing United States greenhouse gas emissions associated with air travel. Two hundred million dollars would be appropriated annually to the grant program. The programs relevance to the global pandemic is left unaddressed.

* * *

Mandatory Carbon Offsets for Airlines -- Every airline receiving federal aid would be required to fully offset [its] annual carbon emissions [from] domestic flights beginning in 2025. Airlines would also be required to submit an annual report detailing their fealty to a binding commitment to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions attributable to the domestic flights of such air carrier in every calendar year, beginning with 2021, on a path consistent with a 25 percent reduction in the aviation sectors emissions from 2019 levels by 2035, and a 50 percent reduction in the sectors emissions from 2019 levels by 2050. These are radical proposals that would never pass the current Congress, but House Democrats are intent on leveraging a global pandemic to sneak them across the finish line.

* * *

All ll emergency bills are going to have pork, of course. And yes, the coronavirus-relief package that ultimately makes it to President Trumps desk isnt likely to include many of the above proposals. But it remains astounding that House Democrats would, at a moment of perhaps-unprecedented national crisis, propose an emergency-spending bill full of progressive projects unrelated to COVID-19, projects that they knew were a non-starter with their colleagues across the aisle, and thus likely to slow down a process in which time was of the essence. The New York Times editorial board wailed yesterday that the urgency of the moment does not justify the egregious misuse of public resources.

Someone should tell Nancy Pelosi the news.

* * *

Among other absurdities, the stimulus bill includes $25 million for The Kennedy Center in Washington, which is somewhat odd. A $250 million renovation was just completed last fall.
Italy has become the first western nation to shut down most of its factories to help slow the spread of coronavirus, following in the footsteps of China which brought its industries to a halt months ago as the infection raged there.

Ministers extended an order to shutter nonessential businesses to heavy industry on Thursday - a big step in a country that relies heavily on exports of machinery, textiles and other goods for income.

It also puts other western nations following in the footsteps of Italy on notice that similar measures may be coming - including the UK, Germany and US.

Italy has extended an order shuttering all non-essential businesses to heavy industry, a move that is expected to cost the country up to 90billion per month

The move comes as Italy leads the world in numbers of deaths caused by the disease - more than 7,500 - and despite the fact that its economy was almost in recession even before the pandemic started.

The industrial lobby Confindustria estimates 64billion to 90billion will be knocked off GDP per month if two thirds of firms close.

Though some big companies had already suspended activities, thousands of smaller manufacturers had continued after adopting new safety regulations, but will now be forced to shut down.

'We are entering a war economy,' said Confindustria President Vincenzo Boccia.

Economists grow dizzy speculating on the possible economic drag in a country that never fully recovered from back-to-back recessions the last two decades.

UniCredit bank's chief economist, Erik Nielson, expects the economy to shrink by a staggering 5 per cent to 15 per cent this year.

That assumes a recovery toward the end of 2020 and takes into account a 25 billion-euro aid package and 350 billion euros in credit lines.

The Italian Treasury has put the virus hit at 5 per cent to 7 per cent of GDP in 2020.

'The economic consequences of the suspensions risks to be unsurmountable, because the continuity of companies is being interrupted for a substantially undetermined period,' Il Sole 24 Ore, the respected business daily of the Confindustria lobby, wrote Thursday.

Many factories had already been re-purposed to make essential items - such as this high-fashion warehouse that now makes masks - but all others will be forced to close

A view of the Cifra factory which typically makes clothes for high-fashion brands, but now makes protective equipment including masks

The government decree mandates the industrial shutdown for one week, but as with the rest of the harsh containment measures they are likely to be extended depending on the pace of contagion.

It's a sobering prospect for other countries in Europe and for the United States, where President Donald Trump has said he aims to have commercial businesses reopen by mid-April, despite warnings from health experts that that is unlikely.

There has been no discussion of closing U.S. manufacturing as a nationwide measure.

Unions in Italy have fought especially hard to have more sectors considered nonessential in order to protect workers.

They won limits on activity at call centers as well as the production of wood and plastic packaging, paper and chemical products.

The powerful CGIL union confederation had said the government's initial list counted 800,000 companies as essential, with workers numbering 7.5 million, or 57% of the workplace.

Italy's moribund car industry has already been idled voluntarily, with Fiat Chrysler shutting down most of its Italian production and Ferrari converting a part of its factory to help make respirators.

Italian patients with coronvirus were flown out of the country after hospitals there were overwhelmed and will now be treated in Germany, which has a much lower death rate

A patient with coronavirus is wheeled out of an aircraft and into a waiting ambulance at an airport in Dresden, Germany, which has more ICU beds

The tourism industry has been at a standstill for a month, and struggling Alitalia is virtually shut down. All non-essential commercial and retail activity was shuttered more than two weeks ago.

Premier Giuseppe Conte announced the new industry closures this weekend, citing the biggest emergency the country has faced since World War II.

Industrial activities allowed to continue include any activity related to health care, agriculture and food production.

Under the measures, fashion house Prada said it will start producing 80,000 medical overalls and 110,000 masks for health care workers.

Work on a Genoa bridge to replace the one that fatally collapsed in August 2018 - considered of strategic importance - continued, while that on the Italian side of the Brenner Base Tunnel, which will be the longest rail tunnel in the world when completed, was suspended along with work on the Italian side of a high-speed rail tunnel to France.

In all, hundreds of thousands of small, medium-sized and large companies will be closed, with workers receiving partial salaries under short-term unemployment schemes that have been extended to even the smallest businesses.

They include Pirelli tiremaker, with Italy accounting for just 6% of global production, and Luxottica, the largest eyewear manufacturer in the world whose brands include Ray-Ban and Oakley.

The big concern for the small and medium-sized company owners that power Italy's economy is how long the shutdown will last, and how hard that will hurt cashflow and hinder a smooth return to business.

'If the shut-down is two or three months, it might be as simple as turning a light back on, because supply chains and logistics are very efficient,' said Carlo Salvato, an expert in small and medium business at Bocconi University.

Italian soldiers and Carabinieri police block one of the roads leading to the small town of Nerola, near Rome, after residents were banned from leaving

'But if the shutdown is longer and precipitates a deep slide in wealth, the patterns of consumption could change dramatically.'

Olivari is a family-run maker of door handles based in northern province of Novara that survived two world wars, during which it was converted to munitions production due to its expertise with brass and aluminum.

But in this shut down - despite the war metaphors - there is no war machine to balance losses from the forced closure.

Antonio Olivari, head of research and development, said the business, which counts 80 workers and annual revenue of 15 million euros, can bounce back from two weeks or a month of a shut down.

'It makes no sense to produce now anyway, with hardware stores and other channels closed,' he said. But if it drags on for months, issues emerge, like salaries.

And people's priorities and habits could be different after this crisis, Olivari said.

'Will people still want to invest in finishing or remodeling a home? There may be other priorities. It will be an anomaly that we have never experienced.'
Tesla vehicles stand outside of a Brooklyn showroom and service center on August 27, 2018 in New York City.

Two Tesla employees have tested positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus, according to an e-mail sent to employees on Thursday and shared with CNBC.

Bloomberg and Buzzfeed reported on the Tesla cases earlier.

The infected employees had been working from home for "nearly two weeks," wrote Tesla's vice president of environmental health and safety, Laurie Shelby, in the e-mail. The message did not disclose the workers' locations or job functions.

Shelby also informed employees that both of their colleagues were home and recovering well. She added:

"Their direct coworkers, who were already working from home for nearly two weeks as well, were immediately notified so they can quarantine and watch for symptoms. CDC guidelines for sanitation and disinfection have been followed."

The disclosure comes after Tesla tried to keep its California operations going despite a shelter-in-place order covering the county where its factory is located. The county sheriff later confirmed Tesla's car factory would not be considered an "essential business" and would be required to only maintain "minimum basic operations" under the order.

Tesla announced last Thursday it would temporarily suspend production at the Fremont, Calif., plant by the end of the day on March 23. It also said it would temporarily suspend production at its Buffalo, New York, factory besides for parts "necessary for service."

Musk tweet 1

After initially claiming the "panic" over coronavirus was "dumb," and making a mis-statement that children are "essentially immune" to COVID-19, Tesla CEO Elon Musk more recently offered to make ventilators at Tesla in Buffalo, New York for hospitals that need them.

Musk tweet 2

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted at Musk last Thursday that he would take him up on the offer, saying there was in fact a shortage. While Musk said he procured a supply of ventilators from China, the status of Tesla's efforts to manufacture them is not entirely clear.

Musk tweet 3

Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak said on CNBC on Wednesday that some of his company's ventilators would be made by Tesla. Musk tweeted yesterday they were "Making good progress."

Tesla did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

WATCH: Tesla to suspend production at Fremont, CA, & Buffalo, NY, facilities due to coronavirus
Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday requested access to interest-free federal loans to help Texas pay unemployment claims.

The funds, known as Title XII funds, allows states to receive advances from the federal government to continue to cover unemployment benefits without disruption.

Texas has less than six months of reserves to pay unemployment insurance at recession-level rates, according to U.S. Department of Labor data from the second quarter of 2019, the most recent available. Thats well below the federally recommended level of one year, and the seventh-lowest reserve level among states.

The Governors office said in a press release that the Texas Workforce Commission has issued bonds in the past to pay off the loans and that the agency has never missed making a payment to an eligible claimant.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Everything you need to know about unemployment benefits in Texas

More than 150,000 Texans filed for unemployment benefits last week, state officials said, in a surge that is overwhelming the states website and call centers and leaving hundreds of thousands of other jobless workers unable to get past busy signals to file their claims.

The Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) is committed to ensuring all Texans who are eligible receive unemployment funds, said Bryan Daniel, chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission in a statement. This approach, which has served Texas well during hurricane recovery and the recession of 2008, should do so again.

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A 'fit and healthy' banker from Wales has died at his home while in self-isolation with coronavirus symptoms - after refusing to call an ambulance because they would be 'too busy dealing with other people'.

Tim Galley, who is understood to have had no underlying health conditions, had to remain separated from his

girlfriend Donna Cuthbert after he became unwell last Sunday.





His illness began with a small tickle in his throat which he developed after going on a stag do on Saturday.

Britain has now seen more than 9,500 confirmed cases of coronavirus, with 465 dead.

Mr Galley, 47, decided not to go into work on Monday and started to develop a fever, heartbroken Ms Cuthbert, 46, told North Wales Live.

She had been unable to see him because he decided to remain on his own, but Ms Cuthbert said messages from him grew less frequent.

Tim Galley, from Wrexham, who died in self-isolation after developing coronavirus symptoms, pictured with his partner Donna Cuthbert

Britain has now seen more than 9,500 confirmed cases of coronavirus, with 465 dead

Mr Galley's body had to be taken away from his Wrexham flat by paramedics in protective clothing on Tuesday.

Ms Cuthbert said: 'Of course I was very worried about when he developed the fever, as I was worried about the coronavirus.

'But as he wanted to protect me I couldn't go and visit him,' she said.

The mother from Old Colwyn, north Wales, added: 'As he was getting steadily worse I asked him to phone for an ambulance but he kept on saying to me that he was fine, that he had no underlying health conditions and that they would be too busy dealing with other people.'

Mr Galley's death is revealed today as:

One of the government's top coronavirus advisers, Professor Neil Ferguson, said the UK's epidemic will get worse before it gets better but the peak of it could pass by Easter;

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is set to finally unveil a coronavirus bailout for millions of stricken self-employed workers - with signs they could get cash payments of up to 1,700 a month;

Mother-of-three Kayla Williams is revealed to have died in her flat after calling 999 and being told she was not a priority despite displaying symptoms of coronavirus;

Dyson has been handed an order of 10,000 ventilators from the Government to save the lives of Britons floored by coronavirus despite the engineering giant never making them before;

The Government has admitted it has no idea if the 3.5million antibody tests it has ordered work - despite a senior official saying they would available in Boots or on Amazon within days

Military personnel arrived at the ExCel London which is going be turned it to the Nightingale Hospital to help in the fight against Covid-19

On Monday night Ms Cuthbert messaged her partner of four years, worrying that she wasn't going to see him for a couple of weeks because they would both have to self-isolate.

His reply was: 'Don't be silly, or course you will.'

Ms Cuthbert, who runs a wedding business, added Mr Galley was 'adored by her children'

Pictured: An Army truck arrives at the ExCel London which is going be turned it to the Nightingale Hospital to help in the fight against Covid-19

Military personnel arriving at the ExCel centre in east London today as the emergency hospital preparations get underway

The coronavirus pandemic is taking its toll on the country - which is now on lockdown as more and more Britons are infected and, tragically, die with the virus.

Kayla Williams, 36, died of suspected Covid-19 at her apartment in Peckham.

Her life was cut short on Saturday, when paramedics came to her south London address.

Husband Fabian Willams told the Guardian his wife was suffering a cough, high fever and severe chest and stomach pains on Friday.

Documents say she was being treated as a suspected coronavirus case when she was told to stay at home.

Chloe Middleton, a 21-year-old woman with no pre-existing medical conditions, died from the coronavirus, her family has said.

She is thought to be the youngest victim in the UK to have no underlying medical conditions.

Her mother Diane Middleton posted a heartbreaking tribute to her daughter today on social media.

Writing on Facebook Mrs Middleton, who lives in Buckinghamshire said: 'To all the people out there that thinks it's just a virus please think again speaking from a personal experience this so called virus has taken the life of my 21 year old daughter.'

Just days ago it was announced that an 18-year-old man had also died from the virus.

Chloe Middleton (pictured above) is believed to be the youngest coronavirus victim in the UK - she is thought to have had no underlying health conditions

Mr Galley, who worked at the M&S Bank, didn't return any of Ms Cuthbert's calls after that.

She added: 'On Tuesday morning I was panicking as Tim didn't return my calls. I asked his neighbour to check on him as they had a key. They found him in bed.

'Paramedics in protective clothing came, and I just can't bare the thought he was all alone.'

Ms Cuthbert, who runs a wedding business, added Mr Galley was 'adored by her children'.

'He just had such a massive heart and we had such a wonderful life together.

'We were supposed to be attending my daughter Danielle's wedding but that has also been cancelled because of the coronavirus.

'We went on so many holidays and had so many things planned. He was my future.'

She added: 'Tim gave me so much love happiness and amazing times.

'He was so very special to my daughter Danni, and my other children and was ''pops'' to Olivia and Ariyah and won't get to meet Ryan and Maxine's baby.'

Ms Cuthbert said she hoped people would take coronavirus advice from the government and health professionals seriously.

She said: 'Please, please will you all take the advice and stay indoors and follow the rules this virus is serious and taking our loved ones.

'I just want everyone to stay safe and stay home.

'Tim took all the precautions but still this virus got him, my heart is shattered into tiny pieces.'

Is it working? UK records 43 coronavirus deaths in past 24 hours compared to 87 yesterday... and new infections level out

Footage shows police dispersing members of the public intent on flouting the government's lockdown rules

Police dispersed members of the public soaking up the sun in Shepherd's Bush in West London

Groups of people were pictured enjoying the good weather in part of Cheltenham on Wednesday

On Monday, Boris Johnson addressed the nation and ordered a lockdown for at least three weeks

Shoppers have also been pictured continuing to squeeze together at supermarkets across the country

The Prince of Wales has tested positive and is in self-isolation at his home on the Balmoral estate, Scotland

By Chantelle Edmunds and Joe Middleton for MailOnline

The UK has recorded 43 coronavirus deaths in the past 24 hours compared to 87 on Tuesday, but new infections have increased by a record 1,452 to 9,529 as Britons continued to flout the lockdown.

Twenty-eight more patients died in England, six more patients died in Scotland, five in Wales and four in Northern Ireland - bringing the total death toll to 465 in Britain.

They included a 47-year-old who did not have an underlying health condition. The others who died, including one person aged 93, did have underlying health conditions.

In contrast, eighty-seven infected Brits died the day before. Despite the death rate falling by half, the country saw a record spike in cases on Wednesday, with 1,452 more patients known to have caught the deadly virus, bringing the total number of cases to 9,529.

The Department of Health and Social Care late on Wednesday evening confirmed a total of 97,019 people have been tested with found 87,490 negative. The update said that 463 people had been killed by the virus, but it added that the data did not cover a 24 hour period.

The update for the previous death toll on Tuesday was at 1pm, so the data only covers from then until 9am Wednesday, which would explain some if not all of the difference in the death rate.

Scotland only announced two deaths on Tuesday, while Wales confirmed just one. Both countries have now had 22 coronavirus victims.

Northern Ireland this afternoon announced two more fatalities as well as two last night, taking their total to seven deaths.

British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, announced strict lockdown measures on Monday urging people to stay at home and only leave the house for basic food shopping, exercise once a day and essential travel to and from work (groups pictured in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester)

The true size of the outbreak is unclear because only patients in hospital are routinely tested. The true size of the outbreak is likely to be closer to the 400,000 mark, experts have said.

Despite clear government guidance, members of the public are continuing to the rules by heading out to sunbathe on the second day of the coronavirus lockdown.

Footage has emerged showing police dispersing Britons gathering in parks and other public places, with people gathering despite strict advice to stay at home yo avoid the outbreak overwhelming the NHS.

In Shepherd's Bush in West London, people soaked up the sun, seemingly oblivious to the tight restrictions imposed by the government on Monday. Police were seen telling the sun worshipers to leave and go home.

Others were seen enjoying the weather at Battersea Park in South West London, on the beach in Portsmouth and in the sea off Eastbourne today despite the Prime Minister urging people to stay at home.

Meanwhile in Manchester, officers today dispersed groups, some of which greeted each other with a hug, along with sunbathers in Piccadilly Gardens. Police also used megaphones to tell people to stay at home unless absolutely necessary, saying 'this is serious, we need to beat corona.'

Professor James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, University of Oxford, said: 'Every one of the deaths is, for the families and friends, a tragedy. That the number of deaths is less than yesterday is a relief.

Charles was last seen with the Queen on March 9 at the Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey and saw her again on March 12 - 24 hours before his doctor claims he became contagious. Her Majesty is well but taking appropriate medical advice and is with Philip at Windsor with a skeleton team of just eight

'However, just as the headlines of death toll 'worse than Italy' were misguided and based on over-interpretation of a single day, a lower number today on its own is not a reliable guide. The Government's measures will take time both to have their effect and to be confirmed as working.

'I would urge people neither to panic nor celebrate on the basis of the numbers on any single day, rather we all need to focus on social distancing and kindness. We have the best epidemiologists in the world, only their complex mathematical analysis of the data can tell us what is happening.

'No-one has ever claimed that the virus would leave apparently healthy younger people completely untouched, the sad death of the 47-year-old confirms what the Chinese data had told us - no-one is entirely safe. We must all follow the Government advice on social distancing, not just for the benefit of the vulnerable but for all our sakes.'

Earlier, Boris Johnson said the Government was 'massively ramping up' testing for coronavirus, as he announced that 405,000 people have now signed up as volunteers to help vulnerable people.

He said it was hoped that 'very soon' 250,000 tests would be carried out each day.

Speaking at the daily press conference inside Number 10, he added that he wanted to offer a 'special thank you to everyone who has now volunteered to help the NHS.

'When we launched the appeal last night, we hoped to get 250,000 volunteers over a few days.

'But I can tell you that in just 24 hours, 405,000 people have responded to the call.

'That is already, in one day, as many volunteers as the population of Coventry.'

The figure was given as the Foreign Office announced that Steven Dick, 37, the deputy head of mission at the British Embassy in Budapest, had died after contracting coronavirus.

It comes after an expert government adviser said NHS hospitals are expected to just about cope with the thousands of coronavirus patients, even at the peak of the outbreak, according to an expert government adviser.

Despite fears over a lack of intensive care beds and staff going off sick, Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, yesterday told MPs that he is confident the health service will remain 'within capacity'.

That is because of the current lockdown, which could also mean the worst of the outbreak in intensive care units is likely to be over in two-and-a-half to three weeks' time.

Deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries agreed yesterday that the peak of the virus could be finished by Easter.

Earlier this month Professor Ferguson, a key member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), produced a report suggesting more than 20,000 people might die from coronavirus.

But yesterday he told the Commons science and technology committee the death toll could be 'substantially lower than that'.

In even more hopeful news, Andrew Pollard, professor of paediatric infection and immunity at the University of Oxford, who was also called before the committee, said a vaccine could potentially be available within six months.

It came after Prince Charles today revealed he has tested positive for the deadly disease.

The Prince of Wales, 71, has a 'mild' form of the illness and is on the Balmoral estate with his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, who has tested negative and is without any symptoms of the virus, which has killed 435 and infected 8,200 more in the UK so far.

The Queen and Philip had already travelled to Windsor Castle before the announcement from Clarence House today, after moving to the royal estate last Thursday.

A royal source said Charles' doctor's most conservative estimate was that the prince was contagious on March 13 - 24 hours after 'briefly' meeting his 93-year-old mother the Queen.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman said: 'Her Majesty remains in good health. The Queen is following all the appropriate advice with regard to her welfare'.

It is not known if the monarch has been tested for coronavirus but she is said to be on lockdown and not even close family members can see her.

Last week, the Government announced an unprecedented plan to underwrite the wages of millions of workers who face being laid off as activity dries up - but it has been criticised for doing nothing for the country's five million freelancers, contractors and other self-employed workers.

Dottie and Lulu went for a brief swim in Eastbourne today with local pools and gyms currently closed due to the outbreak

People enjoy the sun in Battersea Park in South West London while the UK is in a coronavirus lockdown

Members of the public on the seafront in Portsmouth today after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown

A man and a woman embrace in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester on Wednesday despite the strict lockdown

Two men greet one another with a high five in Piccadilly Gardens on March 25, 2020 in Manchester seemingly oblivious to the new lockdown rules

Police had to disperse sunbathers in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester on Wednesday as people continued to flout lockdown rules

On Monday the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson addressed the nation and told Britain's 66million people they must stay at home unless they are front-line workers, need to shop infrequently to buy food or medicine or are helping a vulnerable person.

He also said one form of exercise was permitted each day, such as dog-walking - but not sunbathing or merely sitting outside.

Mr Johnson ordered the immediate closure of all non-essential shops and threatened people with fines or even arrest if they did not 'stay at home'.

The Prime Minister's shutdown will last for a minimum of three weeks and the UK's new state of emergency is unprecedented in modern history.

These young people in Cheltenham gathered in a group not appearing to adher to social distancing rules

Gatherings of more than two people are banned in the most dramatic curbs on freedom ever seen in Britain in time of peace or war, as the government goes all out to stop the spread of the killer disease.

The footage showing brazen sunbathers comes as families who have lost loved ones after testing positive for coronavirus have appealed on social media for people to stay inside as the outbreak tightens its grip across the UK.

Twitter user, @mollyacejay, paid tribute to her grandmother on Tuesday and urged members of the public to stay indoors.

'please please please stay indoors. I will forever be grateful for the love my grandma had for all of us, for the kindness she showed. we sadly lost her to covid19 earlier today. please stay inside,' she wrote.

Twitter user, @mollyacejay, paid tribute to her grandmother and urged members of the public to stay indoors

Underneath her Tweet @mollyacejay retweeted a message her grandmother had sent her earlier in the year.

'my grandma crocheted a pride blanket for me after I finally spoke to her about being gay at christmas. lucky, blessed, loved.'

The UK's coronavirus death toll stood at 437 on Wednesday with more than 8,200 cases.

Mark Foran took to Twitter to pay tribute to his dad who was one of those who died yesterday.

'After suffering a brain hemorrhage back in November and being in hospital ever since fighting to survive, our Dad got diagnosed with Covid-19 last week and he sadly passed away today. Rest In Peace Dad x'

The humanitarian cost of the pandemic continues to mount globally as more than 415,000 people have been infected with the deadly disease, and more than 18,000 have been killed.

Meanwhile Prince Charles has tested positive for coronavirus and is self-isolating at his home on the Balmoral estate, it was revealed today.

The Prince of Wales, 71, has a 'mild' form of the illness and is with his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, who has tested negative and is without any symptoms of the virus, which has killed 435 and infected 8,000 more in the UK so far.

A royal source said Charles' doctor's most conservative estimate was that the prince was contagious on March 13 - 24 hours after 'briefly' meeting his 93-year-old mother the Queen.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman has said: 'Her Majesty remains in good health. The Queen is following all the appropriate advice with regard to her welfare'.

Shoppers have also been pictured squeezing together at supermarkets Wednesday morning, ignoring social distancing rules and raising fears that stores could become the new superspreaders of coronavirus.

Under government guidelines, people are supposed to stay 6ft apart from others if they have to go outside, but shoppers at several supermarkets all over the UK this morning have been flouting the rules while stocking up on essentials.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday ordered Brits to stay at home to halt the spread of the virus, imposing curbs on everyday life without precedent in peacetime.

However, people are still allowed to leave their homes to shop for basic necessities, leading to supermarkets being flooded with customers and fears that they will become hotbeds of the virus.

Several major chains are now introducing new measures to try and enforce social distancing and protect staff.

Morrisons, Lidl, Aldi, Iceland and Sainsbury's have brought in protective screens for staff, and Waitrose - which is introducing 'two-metre marshalls' who will manage queues outside shops - has ordered screens and visors for its workers.

Waitrose calls its policies 'a set of strong, new measures' to help its customers shop safely.

The company said the number of customers allowed in at any one time will be limited so that social distancing can be observed, and a 'one in, one out' policy will be operated when it is judged that the shop is at capacity.

Customers coming to Waitrose will see marshals who will help to manage queues outside shops and if necessary remind people to respect the two-metre social distancing rule.

Waitrose will also dedicate the first opening hour to elderly and vulnerable customers and those caring for them, while NHS staff will continue to be given priority checkout service.

There will also be 'safe distance' floor signage, protective screens at checkouts, and additional security.

Morrisons, which has already put up perspex screens, is introducing signage in stores to support social distancing, including floor stickers, posters and banners which will ask customers to keep one trolley distance apart, as well as giving guidance on where to wait and where to queue.

Asda has also announced similar measures, saying it will introduce floor markers and directional barriers to help customers keep their distance, and will install perspex screens at its checkouts.

Hand sanitiser will be available for customers to use when entering and departing.

A number of self-service machine will also be shut in order to enforce the two-metre rule, a spokesperson told MailOnline.

Mark Foran took to Twitter to pay tribute to his dad who was one of those who died yesterday

Sainsbury's said it is 'working through the detail' but expects to restrict the number of people allowed in stores at any one time, and will also be introducing barriers outside to ensure people queue at a safe distance when waiting to get in.

The supermarket said it will also have reminders to keep two metres apart displayed throughout stores, screens at manned checkouts, and will close every other payment point to help keep people apart.

On Tuesday afternoon, Marks & Spencer said its 31 outlet stores selling only clothing and homeware will be temporarily closed.

M&S said when customers arrive at its food stores, they will see a 'greeter' who will ensure the number of customers in the store at any one time is managed.

Lombardy, Italy, replaced Wuhan in China, as the most badly impacted region in the world, with authorities in the European country announcing that 743 more people had died in the country on Tuesday, bringing the total dead to 6,820.

Italian authorities believe some of the restrictive measures taken may be beginning to have an impact after officially registered new infections rose by just eight percent, the same percentage increase as Monday- the lowest level since Italy registered its first death on February 21.

Early morning shoppers queue outside waiting for the Sainsbury's supermarket to open in Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne on Wednesday

The trajectory of the rapidly spreading virus shows that Madrid and London could become the next hotspots of the disease, with deaths now doubling every two days in the respective capital cities.

In the UK, 87 more patients died overnight in England, including 21 at the one NHS trust in London. The UK's death toll has risen almost six-fold in the space of a week, with just 71 fatalities recorded last Tuesday.

And in Spain the armed forces asked NATO for humanitarian assistance to fight the novel coronavirus as the national death toll touched 2,700 and infections soared towards 40,000.

The Madrid region has suffered the brunt of the epidemic with 12,352 infections - just under a third of the total - and 1,535 deaths, or 57 percent of the national figure.

Outside of Europe, in the United States, the death toll has risen quite slowly compared to other nations so far, but the trajectory for New York's mortality curve is much steeper, suggesting it could overtake Madrid.

More than 12,000 people have tested positive in the city and 125 have died. A state-wide lockdown took effect on Sunday night.
Anyone flying into Texas from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut or the city of New Orleans will be subject to a mandatory self-quarantine for 14 days or the duration of their stay, per a new executive order Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday meant to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

The order is in line with new federal guidelines, Abbott said, and will be enforced by the Texas Department of Public Safety. Violators will be subject to a $1,000 fine or 180 days in jail or both. It applies only to those traveling by air, not by road.

This is intended simply to achieve the goals that have been articulated by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and by the White House organization focused on reducing the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S., Abbott said.

Other states could be added in the future  potentially California and Washington, he said.

The latest: Interactive maps, charts show spread of coronavirus in Texas

Speaking from the Texas Capitol, Abbott said Texas is on a very good trajectory in terms of its testing for the coronavirus even though the state is well behind others.

As of Thursday, 1,424 Texans had tested positive for COVID-19, up from 97 on Friday, and 18 have died from the disease, compared with five Friday. About 100 patients are hospitalized in Texas for COVID-19, Abbott said.

But as of Thursday morning, Texas has tested only about 21,000 people since the outbreak began. California has tested more than 66,000, Florida over 27,000 and New York over 120,000.

We are administering every test that we get, Abbott said when asked why Texas is testing less per capita.

Abbott said the state is relying on the federal government for testing supplies and that it has prioritized states with more fatalities.

The federal government has triaged this in a way that prioritizes New York for obvious reasons; California and Washington for obvious reasons, he said.

New York has had more than 385 deaths. Washington has had more than 132, and California has had 65. Texas had reported 18 deaths as of Thursday.

There is good news in some of the testing in Texas so far, Abbott said.

Less than 10 percent of the people who test positive need to be in a hospital as of this time, Abbott said. Our goal in this whole testing process is to test as many people as possible, to see those numbers grow and then to see a leveling off of the increase of those numbers in Texas.

Abbott said one of his top priorities has been assessing the capacity of Texas hospitals as they anticipate an influx of COVID-19 patients.

Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

He said that as he has instituted executive orders over the last week, such as postponing elective surgeries and waiving certain facility licensing requirements allowing recently closed hospitals to come back online, more than 3,000 beds have become available in Texas.

Our job is not to deal with the situation where we are but to be constantly looking forward to the worst-case scenario of where we may be, Abbott said. We dont want to be in a situation like what New York is in right now.

Abbott said that as for ventilators, the state is trying to get a good tally of how many it can access and how many could be needed when the virus hits its peak in Texas.

Some early information shows that we have some supplies to make sure that we will be able to respond to the immediate need, he said without detailing how many the state could need or how many are available.

New York officials have complained that they will be nearly 30,000 ventilators short when the number of COVID-19 patients peaks over the next three weeks.

Abbott held his briefing Thursday shortly after President Donald Trump sent a letter to governors saying he is preparing to issue new, potentially more relaxed social distancing guidelines. Trump has also said publicly that he wants to start lifting restrictions by Easter.

Asked about Trumps push, Abbott acknowledged that a lot of people want to get back to normal living after being confined. But he made clear the decision to lower the restrictions in Texas will be based on medical advice.

Everyone understands we will all be working off of the best advice from medical professionals, Abbott said. We wouldnt want to suddenly open schools or businesses only to have to shut them down again.
On its emergence in Wuhan, China, the novel Coronavirus outbreak sounded like a science fiction movie, but as it spread to 147 countries  soon to be declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO)  it turned out, tragically, to be all too real. With Iran, and then Italy the hardest hit, and Europe seeing the highest mortality rate, procedures to stem the contagion have varied, with many European cities and US states instating complete lockdown.



England, France, the Netherlands and other European countries took the initiative to shut down schools and universities, banning public gatherings and public transport and, of course, museums, galleries, cinemas, theatres and other venues. Google Arts and Culture, the online platform through which Google has partnered with over 1200 leading museums around the world, responded by stacking up its interactive experiences with comprehensive virtual tours of such venues as the British Museum, showing artefacts through the ages starting from BC 2,000,000.



Such tours have since been offered by institutions all over the world: the Guggenheim in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Musee dOrsay in Paris, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea, Berlins Pergamon Museum (home of such relics as the Ishtar Gate of Babylon and the Pergamon Altar), Amsterdams Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum, Florences Uffizi Gallery, the MASP in Sao Paulo and the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. The Metropolitan Opera in New York too offers a daily streaming through its website featuring such classics as Carmen, La Boheme and La Traviata.



Starting this month, the Egyptian authorities have taken measures to control the spread of the virus, cancelling gatherings and closing venues. The decision took place during the ninth Luxor African Film Festival, where screenings were discontinued and the closing ceremony cancelled, while juries had to see the movies in their hotel rooms.



The same fate befell the fourth Cairo Cinema Days at Zawya Art House, headed by filmmaker-producer Marianne Khoury, which was to take place in 4-30 March but was discontinued on 14 March. Zawya pioneered social-distancing alternatives by managing to provide filmmaker Hady Zaccaks 104 Wrinkles for free through the Vimeo platform. Khourys own Dhilal (Shadows, 2010) was next on the virtual programme, starting on 24 March. For its part the global online film platform Mubi, supported by Creative Europe Media and co-founded by the European Union, offered a three-month subscription for one dollar.



After the Cairo Opera House too closed, Minister of Culture Ines Abdel-Dayem launched an initiative named Al-Thaqafa Bein Edek (Culture in your hands), providing online events to replace the Operas activities, with shows like Swan Lake, Carmen, The Nutcracker and Zorba the Greek, Arab Music Festival concerts by, among others, Omar Khairat, and stage plays like the Art House for Theatres Qahwa Saada (Black Coffee) as well as film screenings provided online.



The rock band Masar Egbari too gave an online concert. The phenomenal Disco Misr duo (DJ mixers of oriental sounds with funky disco beats) also gave a live-streamed concert entitled Wahshny wel Corona Hayeshnui (I Miss You But Corona Is Holding Me Back), hash-tagging it #stay_home. It was seen by nearly 5,000 viewers. Room Art Space and Cafe are hosting live-streamed concerts daily at 10pm.



For bookworms, the original Arabic texts of all NYU Abu Dhabi Library of Arabic Literature publication are available as free PDFs. Al-Rabei Publications is also offering readers the opportunity to read its publications for free through Rufoof application for 14 days.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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The Pentagon has released new details on an expanded halt-movement order that will force tens of thousands of troops deployed overseas to stay there until the spread of a deadly global pandemic begins to slow.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Wednesday enacted a 60-day overseas travel prohibition for troops, their accompanying family members and Defense Department personnel. The new rules, which expand on existing travel bans, essentially bar all U.S. personnel from any international travel.

This means those scheduled to return from deployments or overseas tours, rotations and exercises could be stuck in place until late May.

In a statement announcing the new order, defense officials said the move is meant to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, the illness caused by the highly contagious coronavirus, and ultimately protect U.S. personnel and "preserve the operational readiness of our global force."

"Building upon previously enacted movement restrictions governing foreign travel, permanent change of station moves, temporary duty and personal leave, this stop movement order will also impact exercises, deployments, redeployments and other global force management activities," it states. "Approximately 90,000 Service Members slated to deploy or redeploy over the next 60 days will likely be impacted by this stop movement order."

Related: SecDef Orders 60-Day Halt to Overseas Travel for All Troops and Families: Report

Reuters first reported Esper's new order on Wednesday. He told the outlet the unprecedented restrictions had to be taken to help stop the spread of the virus, which has already affected 227 service members across the four military branches.

"The purpose is to make sure that we're not bringing the virus back home, infecting others -- that we're not spreading it around the military," Esper told Reuters.

There will be some exceptions to the policy, including for military units scheduled to leave Afghanistan. As part of the agreement to drawdown U.S. forces there, defense officials said troops will still be allowed to leave that country.

Other exceptions will include troops returning from a deployment aboard a Navy ship, those traveling for medical treatment and those already in transit. Service members or Defense Department civilians who are currently on a temporary duty assignment will also be allowed to return, according to the release.

Units embarked on Navy vessels will have to have been in transit for at least 14 days since their last stop, the policy adds.

As coronavirus cases continue to spread among the ranks, top health leaders told reporters on Wednesday the military must take steps to help stop it. That includes new health-protection conditions on every base, which were raised to the second-highest level worldwide on Wednesday.

"Our curve is not flattening," Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, said of the rising coronavirus cases across the force.

The military has also restricted travel for most troops inside the U.S. and its territories. Those rules, which affect families' permanent change of station moves and other policies, remain in effect.

-- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins.

Read More: Here's What the Coronavirus Travel Ban Means for Military Families
ST. PAUL, Minn., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- KnectIQ Inc., an innovator in cybersecurity, announced today that they have entered into a contract with Oakleaf Solutions, a Silicon Valley-based military contractor.

"Leveraging a unique and proprietary approach, KnectIQ provides a Trust Environment that enables the secure movement of critical data. By eliminating threat surfaces associated with current approaches, our patented technology provides secure authentication for trusted communication between devices, including those in wartime theaters," states KnectIQ CEO Ken Morris.

Led by retired Admiral Mark Heinrich, Oakleaf Solutions provides comprehensive and scalable solutions to customers seeking to secure and account for their workforce, data and assets. "Our aim is to engineer innovation technologies to further elevate and empower our clients and increase operational efficiencies. KnectIQ is an important cybersecurity partner and will become an integral component in our military and private sector offerings," states Oakleaf CEO Mark Heinrich.

By working together, KnectIQ will add world-leading enterprise class security to the critical inflight data that is the backbone of Oakleaf's heralded GRID ME NOW geo-locating enterprise platform.

"We are proud to be an important component of Oakleaf's industry leading tools, helping to safeguard not only assets, but personnel on the ground throughout the world," comments Ken Morris.

KnectIQ, Inc. is a privately held provider of innovative cybersecurity tools. Headquartered in St. Paul, MN since 2018, the firm is also registered to conduct business in the EU with an office in Luxembourg.

Editors Notes

Retired Admiral Mark Heinrich and CEO Ken Morris are available for interviews on this important collaboration.

CEO Ken Morris is available to discuss recent media reports on vulnerabilities with the increased use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

If you would like more information about this announcement, please contact Paul Jaeb at [email protected].

Contact: Paul Jaeb

Telephone: 612-867-3111

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.knectiq.com

SOURCE KnectIQ Inc.

Related Links

https://www.knectiq.com


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New York City officials have said that 177 people died from coronavirus on Thursday, bringing the total number of deaths to 365 as of early Friday morning.

City health officials also said late Thursday that there were an additional 1,239 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the total across the five boroughs to 23,112.

New York State continues to report the bulk of coronavirus infections that have so far been confirmed in the United States.

Health officials in Albany said on Thursday that the statewide tally of infected people reached 39,140.

The state also recorded 457 deaths as of late Thursday.

New figures released on Thursday show that there are now 86,038 confirmed cases across the United States.

The US has now overtaken both Italy and China with the number of confirmed cases.

As of early Friday morning, 1,300 Americans have died from the pathogen.

Louisiana is now emerging as the possible next epicenter of the US outbreak after infections rose by 30 percent in 24 hours.

That state recorded 2,305 infections and 83 deaths by Thursday. Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans has been blamed for the outbreak there.

New Jersey has 6,876 confirmed cases and 81 deaths, while California has 3,899 cases and 81 deaths. Washington state, which was initially the epicenter following an outbreak at a Seattle nursing home, now has 3,207 confirmed cases and 150 deaths.

It comes as new research showed the outbreak could lead to more than 80,000 deaths in the US within the next four months and overwhelm hospital capacity nationally as soon as early April even if social distancing measures are respected.

Forecasters at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington's School of Medicine have predicted that during the epidemic peak - set for some point in April - as many as 2,300 patients could die every day.

This was the case even if the population adhered to strict social distancing measures.

Their predictions came after analyzing the latest COVID-19 data, includ hospitalisation and mortality rates, as well as patient date in terms of age, gender and pre-existing health problems.

The analysis warned that based on current trends, demand for both ICU beds and ventilators would far exceed capacity for COVID-19 patients as early as the second week of April.

Meanwhile, the number of coronavirus infections was set to top a half-million worldwide on Thursday as both Italy and the US appeared poised to surpass China, where the pandemic began.

The US currently remains third behind China and Italy with the number of confirmed coronavirus cases.

Health care systems in both New York and Europe buckled under the weight of caring for seriously ill victims as officials desperately searched for enough ventilators to keep them alive.

Few cars travel along the FDR Drive in Lower Manhattan on Thursday as New York City reels from the large number of cases of coronavirus

Bicyclists and a pedestrian pass through a quiet Manhattan street on Thursday as most of New York City remained on lockdown

A commuter enjoys the sunset alone on the upper deck of a Staten Island Ferry during the outbreak of the coronavirus on Thursday

Two people sit and chat on a bench in a quiet Central Park in New York on Thursday

Jovan Figueroa plays basketball alone and wears a protective face mask as a precaution in Manhattan on Thursday

New York City's convention center is now being turned into a temporary hospital and a makeshift morgue was set up outside Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital on Wednesday to cope with a possible surge in victims.

Public health officials in New York hunted down beds and medical equipment and put out a call for more doctors and nurses for fear the number of sick will explode in a matter of weeks, overwhelming hospitals as has happened in Italy and Spain.

In a preview of what might be ahead for the US, Spain has converted hotels into makeshift hospitals and turned an ice rink in Madrid into a temporary morgue. The curve of infections has not slowed in Spain, which now has more than 4,100 deaths, second only to Italy's death toll of 7,503.

Faced with the exponential spread of the pandemic, the US Senate passed a $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems.

Millions of Americans hoped the measure would give them a lifeline as they lost jobs, income and child care due to the social-distancing rules needed to slow the spread of the virus.

At least 1.5 billion people across the world are now under severe travel restrictions.

But the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, scolded world leaders for wasting precious time in the fight against the virus that has already killed more than 21,000 people, thrown millions out of work and ravaged the world economy.

He called it 'public enemy No. 1.'

It comes after the WHO this week revealed a grim outlook for the United States, saying that the country could quickly become the global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic given the 'very large acceleration' of confirmed infections.

Across the US, roughly half of the population have been affected by stay-at-home orders in at least 18 states.

The sweeping orders are aimed at slowing the spread of the pathogen but have upended daily life as schools and businesses shutter indefinitely.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Trevali Mining Corporation (Trevali or the Company) (TSX: TV, BVL: TV; OTCQX: TREVF, Frankfurt: 4TI) today announced the temporary suspension of operating activities at its Caribou mine near Bathurst, New Brunswick.



The global zinc market has deteriorated, and this has been exacerbated by the continued challenges presented by COVID-19. These market conditions, combined with high concentrate treatment charges, make mine operations at Caribou uneconomic at this time. The mine will be put on a care and maintenance program immediately to preserve the value of the mineral resource and mine assets. No timeline for a potential restart of operations has been defined. Trevalis operations centre in Bathurst, which serves the Companys global mine portfolio, will continue to operate.

Ricus Grimbeek, Trevalis President and CEO stated, This is a difficult but necessary decision given the market and operating circumstances. We have a capable and engaged team at Caribou, and in the last 12 months we have made incremental improvements to increase production and reduce the cost structure. During the past year we demonstrated that the Caribou mill can achieve higher throughput than nameplate capacity while at the same time increasing metallurgical recoveries leading to higher production, however the significant recent drop in the zinc price limits our ability to generate positive cash flow. This decision is no reflection on the quality of our team or the operating conditions in New Brunswick, and while the operation is paused, we will study a multitude of options in the Bathurst region to maximize value and reduce the overall cost structure of Caribou. This includes the potential to supplement the Caribou mine ore feed from ore deposits within trucking distance of the Caribou mill, metallurgical opportunities which may lead to commercial benefits around copper and gold, and potential for joint ventures with third parties.

Story continues

Added Mr. Grimbeek: This was not a decision made lightly and we are sensitive to the impact this will have on the community and on our team. We will be providing transition assistance to our workforce in addition to severance. I thank the entire Caribou team for their efforts to enhance the competitive position of the mine.

One-time costs to place the mine on care and maintenance over the course of April and May are estimated to total approximately US$5 million with the ongoing costs expected to be approximately US$0.5 million per month on a cash basis to ensure that the mine, mill, and associated infrastructure are safe and secure, and positioned to restart efficiently when conditions might allow. The Company will be examining the carrying value of Caribou and will provide an update as part of its Q1 2020 financial and operating results.

OUTLOOK UPDATE

Trevali is withdrawing its current 2020 guidance due to the suspension of operations at Caribou as well as the resulting uncertainty caused by COVID-19. Trevali is currently implementing proactive and reactive mitigation measures to minimize any potential impacts COVID-19 may have on our people, communities, operations, supply chain, and finances. This also includes preserving capital and deferring capital programs where appropriate. The Company expects to provide an update on its future outlook in due course.

Aligned with the strategy of preserving capital, Trevali also announced that it has cancelled the Normal Course Issuer Bid ("NCIB") commenced December 2, 2019, as the Company no longer intends to repurchase its common shares. No common shares were purchased by the company under the renewed NCIB, though under the original NCIB in place from November 19, 2018 to November 18, 2019, a total of 28.6 million common shares were repurchased for cancellation.

ABOUT TREVALI

Trevali is a global base-metals mining company, headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. The bulk of Trevalis revenue is generated from base-metals mining at its four operational assets: the 90%-owned Perkoa Mine in Burkina Faso, the 90%-owned Rosh Pinah Mine in Namibia, the wholly-owned Caribou Mine in northern New Brunswick, Canada and the wholly-owned Santander Mine in Peru. In addition, Trevali owns the Halfmile and Stratmat Properties and the Restigouche Deposit in New Brunswick, Canada, and the past-producing Ruttan Mine in northern Manitoba, Canada. Trevali also owns an effective 44%-interest in the Gergarub Project in Namibia, as well as an option to acquire a 100% interest in the Heath Steele deposit located in New Brunswick, Canada.

The shares of Trevali are listed on the TSX (symbol TV), the OTCQX (symbol TREVF), the Lima Stock Exchange (symbol TV), and the Frankfurt Exchange (symbol 4TI). For further details on Trevali, readers are referred to the Companys website (www.trevali.com) and to Canadian regulatory filings on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Investor and Media Relations Contact:

Brendan Creaney  Vice President, Investor Relations

Email: bcreaney@trevali.com

Phone: +1 (778) 655-6070

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information and Statements

This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation and forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (collectively, forward-looking statements). Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, expectations and opinions of management of the Company as of the date the statement are published, and the Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required by law. Forward-looking statements relate to future events or future performance and reflect managements expectations or beliefs regarding future events including, but not limited to, statements with respect to the Companys operations, including the suspension of operations at Caribou and the anticipated costs associated therewith, the impact on the Companys operations of current and future actions taken by governmental authorities, counterparties and others to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Companys growth strategies and planned development activities. By their very nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, risks related to changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; future prices of zinc, lead, silver and other minerals and the anticipated sensitivity of our financial performance to such prices; possible variations in ore reserves, grade or recoveries; dependence on key personnel; potential conflicts of interest involving our directors and officers; labour pool constraints; labour disputes; availability of infrastructure required for the development of mining projects; delays or inability to obtain governmental and regulatory approvals for mining operations or financing or in the completion of development or construction activities; counterparty risks; increased operating and capital costs; foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations; operating in foreign jurisdictions with risk of changes to governmental regulation; compliance with governmental decrees and regulations, including any new or ongoing decrees and regulations issued by a governmental authority in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; compliance with environmental laws and regulations; land reclamation and mine closure obligations; challenges to title or ownership interest of our mineral properties; maintaining ongoing social license to operate; impact of climatic conditions on the Companys mining operations; corruption and bribery; limitations inherent in our insurance coverage; compliance with debt covenants; competition in the mining industry; our ability to integrate new acquisitions into our operations; cybersecurity threats; litigation and other risks and uncertainties that are more fully described in the Companys annual information form, interim and annual audited consolidated financial statements and managements discussion and analysis of those statements, all of which are filed and available for review under the Companys profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com . Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Trevali provides no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events may differ from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Source: Trevali Mining Corporation
JOHNSTON, Iowa  Gov. Kim Reynolds said Wednesday theres no need to impose stringent shelter-in-place restrictions as long as Iowans continue to abide by voluntary measures intended to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic that has claimed one Iowans life and hospitalized at least 23 others.

The Iowa governor said she did not want to interrupt the supply chain for Iowa businesses and put additional stress on workers in essential areas beyond the emergency steps she has already taken by issuing an order like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz did in his state Wednesday and Illinois did last week that directs residents to stay at home and limit movement outside of their homes beyond essential needs.

Every day we are assessing our mitigation efforts to slow the spread of the virus and determining whether or not its time to turn the dial up or turn the dial down, Reynolds told an afternoon news conference at the states emergency operations center.

Were seeing some states issue shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders causing Iowans to ask why not Iowa? she noted. In fact, many of the steps that we have already taken are equivalent to the stay at home orders that we are seeing in several of these states  like closing schools and some businesses, implementing work from home and distance learning and reducing gatherings to 10 people.

The significant steps that we have taken will help mitigate the spread of the virus, protect the most vulnerable Iowans and reduce our risk of overwhelming our health care system. Its important also that we keep Iowa open for business in a responsible way that protects the health of our people and our economy.

The governor said current measures  to have Iowans work and stay in their homes as much as possible; to seek medical help if necessary but treat minor illnesses themselves; and to practice social distancing  have succeeded at a time when other states are enlisting tougher controls.

Reynolds praised Iowas front-line, health care employees for their steadfast work but noted hospital supply challenges.

Only 280 ventilators are available and not in use but more are being ordered.

Also, the State Hygienic Laboratory, in Coralville, has 1,270 kits available for COVID-19 testing.

And the Iowa National Guard has been enlisted to run nearly 50 missions in the last two days to deliver personal protective equipment supplies statewide to locations with prioritized critical needs.

Federal declaration

President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening declared that a major disaster exists in Iowa and ordered federal assistance to supplement state, tribal and local recovery efforts in the areas affected by the coronavirus pandemic that began on Jan. 20. The presidents action also extends to local governments and certain private nonprofit organizations for emergency protective work.

Update on cases

During her news conference, Reynolds said the Iowa Department of Public Health has confirmed 21 additional positive cases of Iowans with COVID-19, bringing the statewide total of 145 positive cases in 31 counties since the viral outbreak began earlier this month.

Burgess Public Health in Onawa, Iowa, on Wednesday announced a case of COVID-19 in Monona County. This case is not yet reflected in the state total maintained by the IDPH.

Twenty-three Iowans were hospitalized for coronavirus symptoms Wednesday, state officials said.

Some 2,578 people tested negative for the virus, a total that includes testing reported by the State Hygienic Lab and other labs.

One death was reported  a Dubuque County resident between the ages of 61 and 80, who died Tuesday. No additional information about the individual will be provided.

In fielding questions from reporters, Reynolds conceded that her legislative priority  the Invest in Iowa Act  is kind of on hold right now with the 2020 legislative session suspended at least into April.

Her focus, day in and day out, is now on mitigating the spread of COVID-19, she said.

School closures

Reynolds also told reporters shes not ready to recommend Iowas K-12 school closures of up to four weeks be extended.

But she said a state task force is constantly reassessing and evaluating whether and what additional steps might need to be taken.

Currently, schools are not required to make up any missed days through April 10 under legislation the governor signed last week.

The discussions with educators and administrators are fluid, in examining online learning options that must take into account equity and access issues.

The numbers

According to state health officials, the locations and age ranges of the 21 individuals added to Wednesdays list of positive cases are:

 Allamakee County, one middle-aged adult (41-60 years)

 Benton County, two middle-aged adults (41-60 years)

 Hancock County, one middle-aged adult (41-60 years)

 Johnson County, four adults (18-40 years), one middle-aged adult (41-60 years), one older adult (61-80 years)

 Linn County, one middle-aged adult (41-60 years)

 Muscatine County, one adult (18-40 years)

 Polk County, three older adults (61-80 years)

 Poweshiek County, two older adults (61-80 years)

 Scott County, two middle-aged adults (41-60 years)

 Washington County, two adults (18-40 years)

A status report of monitoring and testing of COVID19 in Iowa is provided by the Department of Public Health on its website.

In addition, a public hotline has been established for Iowans with questions about COVID-19. The line is available 24/7 by calling 2-1-1 or 1-800-244-7431.

The state of Iowa has started sharing the number of negative tests conducted at outside labs and is providing additional information on the conditions of those infected with COVID-19.
Help.org, a trusted online resource for individuals who struggle with addiction and their loved ones, has announced the Best Rehab Facilities in Durham, North Carolina for 2020. The informational guide recognizes the top 16 rehab facilities based on cost, treatment options, location, accompanying services and more.

According to recent studies, drug overdose is the leading cause of death among people under age 50. In Durham, deaths related to opioid abuse increased significantly from 2011 to 2015. Substance abuse among adolescents is also escalating in Durham with 55 percent of high school students reported using alcohol, 38 percent reported using marijuana, 8 percent reported using prescription drugs without a valid prescription, and 2 percent reported using heroin. With the growing need for accessible and high-quality rehab programs, Help.org has developed a unique ranking process to help connect individuals with treatment providers that meet their needs.

The Help.org research team analyzed thousands of facilities across the country and then identified the most cost-effective and highest rated programs in larger cities like Durham. Each facility was evaluated based on rehabilitation services, treatment approaches, cost, special programs for unique demographics and ancillary services. The website also provides information about drug use and side effects as well as educational articles. For a detailed listing of the Best Rehab Facilities in Durham, North Carolina please visit https://www.help.org/drug-and-alcohol-rehab-centers-in-durham-nc/

2020 Best Rehab Facilities in Durham, North Carolina (in alphabetical order)

BAART Community Healthcare

800 North Mangum Street, Suite 400

Durham, NC 27701

919-683-1607

Carolina Community Support Services, Inc.

2634 Durham Chapel Hill Boulevard, Suite 216

Durham, NC 27707

919-682-5777

Community Alternatives, Inc./Community Choices Cascade at Durham

3325 Chapel Hill Boulevard

Durham, NC 27707

919-490-6900

Crest View Recovery Center

90 Asheland Avenue

Asheville, NC 28801

866-327-2505

Durham Rescue Mission

P.O. Box 11858

Durham, NC 27703

919-688-9641

Durham Treatment Center

1913 Lamar Street

Durham, NC 27705

919-286-1509

El Futuro

2020 Chapel Hill Road, Suite 23

Durham, NC 27707

919-688-7101

Fellowship Hall

5140 Dunstan Road

Greensboro, NC 27405

800-659-3381

First Step Services LLC

211 East Six Forks Road, Suite 117

Raleigh, NC 27609

919-833-8899

Freedom House Recovery Center

104 New Stateside Drive

Chapel Hill, NC 27516

919-942-2803

Genesis SA/DWI/MH Services

118 East Main Street

Durham, NC 27701

919-321-6643

Healing with CAARE, Inc.

214 Broadway Street

Durham, NC 27701

919-683-5300

Holly Hill Hospital

3019 Falstaff Road

Raleigh, NC 27610

919-250-7000

Insight Human Services

665 West Fourth Street

Winston-Salem, NC 27101

336-725-8389

Trosa

1820 James Street

Durham, NC 27707

919-419-1059

Wilmington Treatment Center

2520 Troy Drive

Wilmington, NC 28401

910-758-2023

ABOUT HELP.ORG

Help.org is an online resource for individuals who struggle with addiction and their loved ones. The website provides the latest research through scientifically proven methods, community recovery resources as well as information about local financial assistance. Help.orgs team of researchers, activists and writers work together with addiction counselors and other professionals to offer useful and accurate resources to help individuals seeking recovery. To learn more, visit https://www.help.org/.
Armenia reported its first fatality from a coronavirus infection on Thursday ten days after declaring a state of emergency to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

A spokeswoman for the Armenian Ministry of Health, Alina Nikoghosian, said the 72-year victim suffered from multiple medical conditions, including a heart disease, and died one day after being transferred to an intensive care unit of Yerevans Nork hospital.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to save the latters life because of the accompanying diseases, she wrote on Facebook.

Nikoghosian did not identify the victim.

Other Armenian officials said earlier in the day that two elderly persons infected with coronavirus are in extremely grave condition. One of them is a U.S. citizen, according Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian.

As of Thursday morning, Armenian health authorities confirmed a total of 290 cases of coronavirus in the country, up from 265 cases reported the previous day. Health Minister Arsen Torosian said on Wednesday night that 36 infected persons are suffering from pneumonia at the moment.

Almost 100 of those cases were registered in the last four days. Even if this pace of growth remains the same [in the days ahead] it will still be a favorable pace, Torosian told a news conference held a few hours before the announcement of the first coronavirus-related death.

Torosian insisted that the COVID-19 infection rate in Armenia is slowly declining thanks to confinement orders issues by the authorities to thousands of people who have been in contact with coronavirus patients. He also stressed the importance of a nationwide lockdown imposed by the government late on Tuesday.

We hope that the restriction of peoples movement for [at least] seven days  will help to restrain the increase in those numbers, said the minister.

Pashinian likewise stated that Armenia has so far avoided a worst-case scenario for the spread of the deadly virus.

As we can see, in other countries the numbers are growing in geometrical progression, he said during a weekly cabinet meeting in Yerevan. We dont have such a thing. We have a certain rise [in coronavirus cases], and in order to keep the situation under control we must strictly maintain the [lockdown] regime set for this week.
Several Australian companies are reviewing or even terminating takeover deals by using a legal escape route because of the devastating impact of the coronavirus, a template that some lawyers expect to be replicated in other countries.

Three listed companies this week have triggered so-called material adverse change (MAC) clauses that can be invoked to end or renegotiate deals, as the COVID-19 pandemic has paralyzed businesses and sent markets crashing.

Companies invoking the Material Adverse Change clauses to call off deals is a question of when not if, said Nandakumar Ponniya, Asia Pacific head of Baker McKenzies international arbitration practice.

On Thursday fund manager Centuria Capital Group said it had withdrawn its A$174.8 million ($103.15 million) offer to buy New Zealand property fund Augusta Capital, terminating a takeover agreed in January and for which it had raised A$80 million. The deal was due to close on March 31.

The deals documentation included an MAC clause with specific provisions that protected the bidder if financial markets deteriorated, Chief Executive John McBain told Reuters.

Since entering into the bid implementation agreement on Jan. 29 there has been an unquestionable deterioration of almost unrivaled magnitude in markets and this and only this caused the clause to be invoked, McBain said.

Dentist chain owner Abano Healthcare, which has operations in Australia and New Zealand, told the stock exchange on Wednesday that a government order to close its network in New Zealand for four weeks could trigger the restructuring or even ending of an NZ$300 million ($174.39 million) takeover deal with private equity firm BGH.

Abanos shares, at NZ$5.4 when the deal was announced, were trading at NZ4.4 before it made the announcement.

As a result of the four-week lockdown, Abano has now given formal notice  that there are circumstances that may give rise to a Material Adverse Change (MAC), the company said.

Earlier this week, Australian credit score provider Pioneer Credit, which is being acquired for A$120 million by Carlyle Group Inc, said the U.S. private equity firm had asked for information about its business operations and performance.

Although the takeover has been signed, the deal  which values the companys shares at A$1.82, almost five times their current price  is yet to be approved by shareholders and court-stamped.

More to Come

Bankers and lawyers say they have seen a jump in inquiries about MACs in the region in recent weeks.

Im sure there will be deals where the sellers or the buyers feel like they have an ability to not do it at that price and theyll have to cut, said a Hong Kong-based M&A banker who declined to be named for the story.

In Asia-Pacific alone, there are some 88 deals worth $1 billion or more  totaling $252.8 billion combined  that have been agreed to since 2019 but not yet completed, according to Refinitiv data as of March 17.

If the MAC clause is drafted broadly enough, an epidemic like the current COVID-19 situation could constitute an MAC and therefore entitle the buyer to refuse to complete the transaction, Ponniya of Baker McKenzie added.

($1 = 1.6946 Australian dollars) ($1 = 1.7203 New Zealand dollars) (Reporting by Paulina Duran in Sydney and Kane Wu in Hong Kong; editing by Jennifer Hughes and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Topics Mergers COVID-19 Australia
Mozambican authorities in the countrys western province of Tete have buried the bodies of Ethiopian migrants discovered dead in a shipping container of a truck that had just crossed the border from Malawi.

Herminio Jose  Maputo & English Africa Service -Vatican City

In the early hours of Tuesday, this week, a container truck was stopped by Mozambiques immigration authorities in the province of Tete. It carried 78 people, 64 of whom were found lifeless. They had died of asphyxiation, as they were inside a metal shipping container, with no ventilation.

Victims buried in Tete

The remains of the 64 illegal immigrants, were buried Wednesday, at a cemetery within the city of Tete, Mozambique. The Ethiopian embassy was said to have been in touch with the Tete provincial migration office.

The 64 Ethiopian victims are believed to have boarded the shipping container in Malawi headed for the Mozambican city of Tete. 14 persons were said to have survived the ordeal. It is not uncommon for illegal Ethiopian migrants to be smuggled to South Africa via Mozambique in such circumstances.

The 14 survivors were also screened for the deadly coronavirus and are now quarantined in the city of Tete.

Inhumane and senseless deaths

Speaking to Vatican News Portuguese Africa Service, the Bishop of Tete Diocese, Diamantino Guapo Antunes, I.M.C., described the tragic deaths as senseless and inhumane. He decried the fact that traffickers would transport human beings in such deplorable conditions. The young people who died, said Bishop Antunes, still had much to give to humankind.

Diocese will ensure assistance to survivors

In the meantime, the Bishop of Tete has said this diocese is coordinating with the Episcopal Commission for Migrants, Displaced People and Refugees-CEMIRDE, in assisting the 14 survivors.

Two Mozambicans have been arrested in connection with the deaths and human trafficking offences.
An investigation is underway after a homicide in Walker County.

Few details are being released at this time, but the slaying happened Wednesday off of Highway 269, said sheriffs spokesman T.J. Armstrong.

The public in not believed to be in any danger, Armstrong said, and a suspect is in custody. Sheriff Nick Smith will release more details in a press conference scheduled for Thursday morning.
Some investors rely on dividends for growing their wealth, and if you're one of those dividend sleuths, you might be intrigued to know that Swiss Prime Site AG (VTX:SPSN) is about to go ex-dividend in just 3 days. If you purchase the stock on or after the 30th of March, you won't be eligible to receive this dividend, when it is paid on the 1st of April.

Swiss Prime Site's next dividend payment will be CHF3.80 per share, and in the last 12 months, the company paid a total of CHF3.80 per share. Calculating the last year's worth of payments shows that Swiss Prime Site has a trailing yield of 4.0% on the current share price of CHF95.85. If you buy this business for its dividend, you should have an idea of whether Swiss Prime Site's dividend is reliable and sustainable. So we need to check whether the dividend payments are covered, and if earnings are growing.

Check out our latest analysis for Swiss Prime Site

If a company pays out more in dividends than it earned, then the dividend might become unsustainable - hardly an ideal situation. Fortunately Swiss Prime Site's payout ratio is modest, at just 47% of profit. That said, even highly profitable companies sometimes might not generate enough cash to pay the dividend, which is why we should always check if the dividend is covered by cash flow. It paid out 78% of its free cash flow as dividends, which is within usual limits but will limit the company's ability to lift the dividend if there's no growth.

It's positive to see that Swiss Prime Site's dividend is covered by both profits and cash flow, since this is generally a sign that the dividend is sustainable, and a lower payout ratio usually suggests a greater margin of safety before the dividend gets cut.

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

SWX:SPSN Historical Dividend Yield March 26th 2020

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Stocks in companies that generate sustainable earnings growth often make the best dividend prospects, as it is easier to lift the dividend when earnings are rising. Investors love dividends, so if earnings fall and the dividend is reduced, expect a stock to be sold off heavily at the same time. Fortunately for readers, Swiss Prime Site's earnings per share have been growing at 11% a year for the past five years. The company paid out most of its earnings as dividends over the last year, even though business is booming and earnings per share are growing rapidly. We're surprised that management has not elected to reinvest more in the business to accelerate growth further.

Story continues

Many investors will assess a company's dividend performance by evaluating how much the dividend payments have changed over time. In the last ten years, Swiss Prime Site has lifted its dividend by approximately 0.8% a year on average. Earnings per share have been growing much quicker than dividends, potentially because Swiss Prime Site is keeping back more of its profits to grow the business.

The Bottom Line

Has Swiss Prime Site got what it takes to maintain its dividend payments? Earnings per share have grown at a nice rate in recent times and over the last year, Swiss Prime Site paid out less than half its earnings and a bit over half its free cash flow. Swiss Prime Site looks solid on this analysis overall, and we'd definitely consider investigating it more closely.

On that note, you'll want to research what risks Swiss Prime Site is facing. Be aware that Swiss Prime Site is showing 6 warning signs in our investment analysis, and 2 of those are significant...

A common investment mistake is buying the first interesting stock you see. Here you can find a list of promising dividend stocks with a greater than 2% yield and an upcoming dividend.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
New Delhi, March 26 : Zafarul-Islam Khan, Chairman of the Delhi Minorities Commission (DMC), on Thursday urged the Muslims to strictly obey the curfew restrictions, adhere to social distancing norms and approach hospitals if symptoms of the coronavirus infection are detected.

He was reacting to the information that the Muslims in some minority-concentration areas like Old Delhi, Zakir Nagar, Seelampur, Jafarabad, and Old Hyderabad, were lax about the restrictions imposed by the government to control and contain the corona epidemic, the DMC said in a statement.

A noted Islamic scholar, Khan appealed to the Muslims to strictly obey the curfew restrictions.

He also urged people to "approach hospitals if symptoms of the coronavirus infection are seen in any person who must be tested and quarantined if found positive or even suspect. Mingling of such persons with others poses great risk to others." "Imams and mosque committees must strictly adhere to the current restrictions and restrict congregational prayers to a maximum of four persons, including the imam and muezzin while others must pray at home. Preservation of human life is a primary duty of all. People must not pay attention to fake videos offering doubtful advice and cures," he said.

Khan said the authorities, especially police, must deal firmly with violators of curfew for non-essential work.

Khan added that he has written to the Delhi Police Commissioner to strictly enforce curfew in the minority-concentrated areas of Delhi while allowing people to procure essential supplies or to go to chemists and hospitals.

"Action, in particular, must be taken against imams and mosque committees members who are adamant to flout the current restrictions." India is under a 21-day lockdown from Tuesday midnight as a preventive step against coronavirus.
Steve Sisolak, the leftist governor of Nevada, decided to play doctor by banning the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, two drugs that are being used elsewhere to treat COVID-19.

"While these drugs serve necessary medical purposes, this regulation protects the Nevadans who need them and prevents unnecessary hoarding," Sisolak wrote on Twitter.

Unnecessary hoarding? The hoarding thing is a smokescreen; his real reason was to slap at President Trump, who touted these medications as showing promise and even mistakenly said they had been approved for use by the FDA. That's his real reason for the limit on the unproven drug, which goes against the "right to try" and the current national mobilization effort to get everyone well by suspending burdensome regulations in the medical community to encourage experimentation and swift solutions. What Nevada needs, see, is more administrative-state regulation, which is showing all signs of going badly for him.

According to the Reno Gazette-Journal, here was Sisolak's originally stated reason, which has a clear reference to President Trump:

Sisolak announced an emergency regulation prohibiting the drugs' use in a statement that said there was "no consensus among COVID-19 experts or Nevada's own medical health advisory team" that the medications were an effective treatment for the virus.

Tellingly, this semi-prohibition comes right on the heels of the death of an Arizona man who tried to self-medicate, fatally taking a fish tank cleaning additive with a similar name, and killing himself as well as sickening his wife. She has since blamed President Trump.

Sen. Ted Cruz could tell what Sisolak's ban was really about  Getting Trump  and he said something. According to the Reno Gazette-Journal:

On Wednesday, Cruz wrote on Twitter: "During this crisis, we should listen to the science & the medical professionals," Cruz tweeted on Wednesday. "The opposite approach: the Governor of Nevada, practicing medicine w/o a license  trying to score political points against Trump  & prohibiting NV doctors from prescribing medicines to treat COVID19."

Sisolak hollers about "no consensus" as reason for his move, but now looks like Sisolak has decided the consensus, limiting the availability of the drug on the market as bad stuff, and never mind that portion of the medical community that thinks it does work.

Sisolak has since clarified that he hasn't totally banned the use of the drug  he's allowing it for hospital use, which is for COVID-19 patients at death's door. It's sad stuff because the drug reportedly shows the most promise in early-stage COVID-19 patients. But Sisolak's the doctor now, so late-stage can have his exception.

Where he really gets into the playing doctor thing, though, is by permitting it for prescription by doctors for outpatient use, but only with only a 30-day supply.

What happens to the guy who needs a 40-day supply to get well? People are different, and one-size-fits-all works badly in medicine.

With the drug banned for the forty-day guy, he's going to be looking into the black market, or, in a worst-case scenario, under the kitchen sink, for what he needs. So is the uncertain guy who forgot to pay his big Obamacare insurance premium. So is the slightly sick guy who can't get an appointment because the doctors are too busy with more urgent cases. The whole thing interferes with doctors' ability to practice medicine and patients' "right to try." Too bad if you're sick  no hydroxychloroquine for you!

All of them  and anyone else who thinks he might get sick  have in fact just been incentivized by the Nevada governor's stupid micromanaging move to...hoard up.

It's ironic, because Sisolak couldn't do anything better to incentivize hoarding than to initiate bans and conditions and prohibitions. In his current "hoarding" justification, he now admits that the drug has some promising medical applications for COVID-19, just as Trump says, as well as for treatment of lupus and malaria, so now he's limiting availability to help non-COVID-19 patients, he says. A normal person in normal market would ramp up production to accommodate everyone who wants it. This guy likes the "divide it up and ration it out" model instead  a feature, not a bug, of socialized medicine.

If you wanted to encourage hoarding, there probably isn't a better way to do it than to cut off access. Just ask any surge of travelers after an entry ban is introduced, or a pot stash house owner in the face of some new prohibition, gun- and ammo-buyers after gun- and ammo-buying limits are introduced, or a stock market participant after the switch breakers are introduced. Prohibitions are precisely what encourage hoarding. Ramping up production to accompany higher demand is what ends the impulse for hoarding.

It's nothing but Democrat administrative-state mentality at work here  first, the slap at Trump, and second, the move to crush the wreckers and hoarders  all coming at a time when the private sector is stepping up production of necessary things in a pandemic, the innovators are going gangbusters with new solutions, doctors are experimenting in uncertainty as never before and the regulators in Washington are getting out of the way in a bid to hasten solutions.

What Nevada needs, he seems to be saying, is more bureaucrats, more enforcers, and more regulations, because there's just too much freedom and in a pandemic, people are escaping "all proper control." He's moving against the Zeitgeist, led by President Trump. Expect a lot more self-justification and backtracking from him, he's not making himself popular.

Image credit: Pxhere, public domain.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  Cebu province is now under enhanced community quarantine or lockdown to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.

"There is an urgent need to put the entire Province of Cebu under a state of enhanced community quarantine to allow the more stringent measures to be implemented," Governor Gwen Garcia said in Executive Order No. 5-N signed on March 25.

By Friday, entry of all travelers on international flights in Cebu province will be banned.

"As of 12:01, we will no longer be accepting passengers arriving via international flights from any point of the world," Garcia told CNN Philippines on Thursday.

Garcia clarified that movement of all cargo in airports and seaports in the province during the quarantine period will not be restricted, adding delivery of basic and essential goods will be prioritized.

The province so far has one positive case, in Mandaue City. According to DOH, there are a total of nine "presumptive" positive cases in the province: seven in Cebu City and one each in Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu.

However, Department of Health Region 7 Director Jaime Bernadas said there are eight "presumptive" coronavirus cases in Cebu.

Swab samples have been sent for confirmatory tests to the Research Institute of Tropical Medicine in Muntinlupa City. Initial testing was done at the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in the province.

Garcia said she has already asked the Provincial Board to hold an emergency session on Thursday to declare Cebu under a "state of emergency." This would allow local authorities to access emergency funds for COVID-19 response.

The official noted that there are several factors that need to be prepared before a lockdown can be enforced, like food supplies, transportation, quarantine passes, among others.

Duterte earlier placed the entire country under a state of public health emergency as more COVID-19 cases have been confirmed earlier this month. This was upgraded to a "state of national emergency" by Congress when it passed the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act this week.
Mixed messages hinder US federal coronavirus response

People's Daily Online

By Xian Jiangnan (People's Daily Online) 17:57, March 25, 2020

With the US now dealing with more than 55,000 infections and 790 deaths from the coronavirus outbreak, mixed messages from the government regarding the threat from the disease continue to create uncertainty and panic among the public.

US president Donald Trump said on Monday that he wanted to reopen the country for business by Easter, just a few weeks away, as continued closures could lead to more deaths than the coronavirus itself, despite warnings from public health experts that social distancing remains necessary.

"Life is fragile, and economies are fragile," Trump said, and tweeted on Tuesday morning in capital letters: "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF."

Trump also told reporters that he was targeting Easter to issue such an order because it is "a beautiful time and a beautiful timeline" that he thinks is right.

Echoing Trump, the White House coronavirus task force announced that the country should expect new CDC guidance that might suggest more Americans with exposure to the coronavirus return to work more quickly by wearing masks.

"The guidance we're looking for unpacking is how the people who may have come into contact with someone who tested positive for coronavirus, if they have no symptoms, [may] be able to return to work [and] wear a mask for a certain period of time," Vice President Mike Pence said.

The proposal was immediately blasted by US media and experts as a dangerous one that might put more Americans at risk.

American news website Daily Beast pointed out that the idea, if it came to fruition, would surely raise eyebrows considering the widely reported nationwide shortage of key supplies for medical professionals, including surgical masks.

William Haseltine, president of the global health think tank ACCESS Health International, slammed the plan as "deadly advice". "If you want to really spread this infection like crazy, that's what to do. It's near insanity," Haseltine said, adding that this would kill hundreds and thousands of Americans.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina warned that there was no functioning economy unless the virus is controlled. "Try running an economy with major hospitals overflowing, doctors and nurses forced to stop treating some because they can't help all, and every moment of gut-wrenching medical chaos being played out in our living rooms, on TV, on social media, and shown all around the world," he said on Twitter.

The potential guidance also inspired the new hashtag #NotDying4WallStreet on Twitter Tuesday, with the public accusing US officials of putting profits over public health. "The economy should serve the well-being of all Americans, not vice versa," one Twitter comment read.

Critics have long blamed the White House for downplaying the disease and feeding the public inconsistent messages, which has crippled the federal response to the outbreak.

According to US media reports, the US is still falling short in terms of testing capacity, and getting results back often takes a week, partly due to the fateful decision of US officials to develop their own test even though China had long before shared the virus' genetic makeup with the world and the WHO recommended the use of German tests in mid-January.

Trump said earlier this month that the test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is "perfect" and promised that "anyone who wants a test can get a test", but many people still can't get tested even now.

"In the critical month of February CDC data shows government labs processed 352 COVID-19 tests  an average of only a dozen per day," AP News reported on Tuesday.

According to AP News, four primary issues together hampered the national response, including the early decision not to use the test adopted by the World Health Organization, flaws with the more complex test developed by the CDC, government guidelines restricting who could be tested and delays in engaging the private sector to ramp up testing capacity.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow blasted Trump for spreading false information, suggesting that viewers should inoculate themselves against the "harmful impact of these ongoing false promises and false statements by the president".

"All of us should stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it's going to cost lives," she told MSNBC viewers on her broadcast.

Dr. Ashish K. Jha, director of the Global Health Institute at Harvard, told AP News that the messaging from the White House was always "this is not a big deal, this is no worse than the flu", which basically created no sense of urgency within the FDA or the CDC to fix it.

"There were many, many opportunities not to end up where we are," Ashish said.

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Linkedin Jan Strupczewski and Francesco Canepa (Reuters) Brussels/Frankfurt  Thu, March 26, 2020 07:50 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d6a3ef 2 Business ECB,Europe,bonds,financial-market,debt,coronavirus,COVID-19 Free

European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde asked euro zone finance ministers during a videoconference on Tuesday evening to seriously consider a one-off joint debt issue of coronabonds to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, four officials said.

She said that we should seriously think about it, next to the use of the ESM (bailout fund) instruments. The Eurogroup did not discuss debt mutualization at this stage, one official involved in the meeting said.

A second official confirmed that Lagarde put forward the idea, but said it ran into opposition from Germany, the Netherlands and other northern European countries that have long been against any joint debt issuance.

She clearly said it should be a one-off issuance, the second official involved in the meeting said.

There was opposition from the usual corners, but also a lot of support beyond Club Med, the official said, referring to southern European countries.

The rebuff from northern countries shows how the 19-country currency bloc is still divided on sharing the burden of the crisis.

Officials said Lagarde did not go into details of the suggested one-off joint debt issue such as an amount, or the legal way in which such borrowing could be set up.

The ministers instead expressed broad support for the possibility that the euro zones ESM bailout fund would extend precautionary credit lines, worth some 2% of a countrys GDP, to member states that would like such a safety cushion.

A decision on whether to go ahead with that option will be taken by European Union leaders on Thursday.

The ESM credit line, kept in reserve, would allow governments to keep financing themselves in the markets at low rates and pave the way for unlimited ECB bond buying under the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program, if it is needed.

Officials said Lagarde considered the idea of a blanket ESM program as good insurance policy  a phrase also used by the chairman of euro zone finance ministers Mario Centeno after the videoconference.

But officials noted Lagarde considered the banks own pandemic emergency bond purchases with 750 billion euros as a more flexible instrument to calm markets, given it was not linked to any conditions like OMT purchases were.

But it was clear the OMT option  a tool announced at the height of the blocs debt crisis in 2012 and as yet unused  was very much in the arsenal and could be deployed as and when needed, officials said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 03:11:42|Editor: ZD

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A citizen shows a candle placed at the window in Paris, France, March 25, 2020. France has confirmed 25,233 coronavirus infection cases, among which 1,331 people have died, Director General of Health Jerome Salomon announced on Wednesday. (Photo by Aurelien Morissard/Xinhua)

PARIS, March 25 (Xinhua) -- France has confirmed 25,233 coronavirus infection cases, among which 1,331 people have died, Director General of Health Jerome Salomon announced on Wednesday.

A total of 11,539 people are now hospitalized, including 2,827 in intensive care, said Salomon, adding that 3,900 are considered recovered and discharged from the hospital.

"The crisis will be long and the next few days will be difficult," said the health official, calling on the public to "stand together".
For most her life, Kim Outlaw didnt even believe women could be senior pastors.

Thats what Paul seemed to say in 1 Timothy when he said he doesnt allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.

After much prayer and convincing from God, Outlaw eventually moved on from that belief and, not long afterward, felt a calling to start her own church.

Outlaw has now been the senior pastor at Living Water Fellowship Church for a little more than 11 years. Her husband Steve Outlaw is the co-pastor.

Twenty-five years ago, the prospect of starting a church and serving as its senior pastor would have seemed preposterous.

Outlaw worked at the old Navistar International plant in Indianapolis. She was on the assembly line, making diesel engines. As a young woman in her early 20s making good money, Outlaw spent those days in the streets: selling drugs, partying, being promiscuous.

I had a temper, and I was just an unruly person, she said.  I just lost my way for a while.

Outlaw had always believed in God. She grew up attending Good Samaritan Baptist Church on the corner of East 22nd Street and Park Avenue. The foundation was there, but it took decades to build on it.

A friend invited her to Eastern Star Church in 1996. She wore a short dress, no pantyhose or stockings. It was uncomfortable.

But Outlaw remembered a young boy extending his hand to her during the altar call. The congregation was singing one of those hymns that seems like its meant to call out to someone in particular: The Jesus in me loves the Jesus in you.

I have nothing to lose, she told herself, because Im losing. I know I need to make my way back to God and give him my life.

So she did.

That led to doing outreach work at Eastern Star  working with children and checking in on new members  before feeling the call in 1998 to join the ministry.

Outlaw remembered Eastern Star Church Pastor Jeffrey Johnson Sr. asking people to stand if they felt called to ministry, but she wasnt certain at the time.

Then, he added something Outlaw didnt remember him saying before: Even if youre not sure.

Its like the Holy Spirit just made me stand, she said.

Steve Outlaw has been there to witness the entire transformation, from selling drugs to where his wife is today, because he also worked at Navistar International.

People questioned it, he said of his wifes newfound commitment to her faith. It was like, Aw, she aint for real, but I seen it firsthand because I went home with her every single day.

Outlaw took two classes in ministry at Eastern Star and even dealt with a meningitis diagnosis at the time, an experience that made her believe it is the enemys job to try to stop you from making progress.

Outlaw joined New Life Worship Center, an Eastern Star church plant, in early 2000 and began working as a guest preacher after Navistar International closed in 2009. She was getting ready to preach at another church when she got the sudden calling to start a church and name it Living Water Fellowship Church.

I go all over this country, Johnson said. What God is doing with Living Water and Kim Outlaw, you just dont see it all the time.

Outlaw began her journey not knowing who she was or who she wanted to be. After years of climbing out of her spiritual slump and now more than a decade as the senior pastor at her own church, Outlaw cant help but think of the oft-cited Bible verse in Philippians: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

I dont say that just to quote a Bible verse, she said. I now know that I have been empowered by God to succeed. I know who I am.

Contact staff writer Tyler Fenwick at 317-762-7853. Follow him on Twitter @Ty_Fenwick.
Public health officials in Ontario confirmed 100 new cases of COVID-19 with five more deaths announced on Wednesday, bringing the total number of cases in the province to 688.

The number of dead reported as a result of the virus in the province now stands at 13. Eight cases are considered resolved.

Dr. Barbara Yaffe, the province's assistant chief medical officer of health, said as of Wednesday afternoon, 17 COVID-19 patients are in intensive care units and all but two of those patients have been put on ventilators.

Nearly half of the province's cases are in the City of Toronto. Local health officials now say at least 16 per cent of 309 cases are the result of community spread of the virus.

The new data also shows:

At least five of the new cases resulted in people being hospitalized, including a Peel Region woman in her 20s.

There are also people who had travelled to the U.K, U.S., Egypt, Peru, Spain and the Bahamas.

Details for dozens of other cases are listed as pending.

Some 10,489 people are still awaiting test results, while 35,635 have been approved for testing since the start of the outbreak, now considered a global pandemic.

Yaffe also confirmed that people with mild illness are no longer being tested, and instead being told to self-isolate for 14 days.

Nurses demand governments provide more protective equipment

The Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario is calling on the provincial and federal governments to supply frontline healthcare workers with more personal protective equipment, including masks, warning there's already a shortage at hospitals across the province.

"The evidence of asymptomatic infection of COVID-19 necessitates that all health-care workers facing patients, residents and clients wear a surgical mask at all times," the organization said in a news release on Wednesday.

"We are in a war and the enemy is the COVID-19 virus."

The Ontario government has repeatedly said it's working hard to ensure healthcare workers have the protection they need. As of Tuesday, the government said it had secured 12 million sets of surgical gloves, a million N95 respirators and nearly six million more surgical masks.

Story continues

It's also looking at deploying a stockpile of some 55-million expired N95 masks that it acquired during the SARS crisis.

"Under consideration is using expired N95 respirators for fit tests or training (preserving non-expired N95s for patient care), as well as in lieu of surgical masks," said Hayley Chazan, a spokesperson for Health Minister Christine Elliott, in an email.

Brampton MP tests positive for COVID-19

Among the new cases is Brampton Liberal MP Kamal Khera.

Khera, who represents the riding of Brampton West, said in a statement posted to social media that she began developing flu-like symptoms while isolating at home. She said she was tested Monday morning at Peel Memorial Centre and learned that she was infected last night.

Khera said she is experiencing symptoms but remains in "good spirits." Her office remains operational and her staff are working from home, Khera added.

Meanwhile, a Brampton bus driver has also tested positive for COVID-19, the city said.

In a statement, the city said it learned of the case on Monday evening. The driver is at home in self-isolation, it added.

It marks the first COVID-19 infection in a Brampton Transit employee, the city said.

The driver worked on the following routes:

11 Steeles.

51 Hereford.

53 Ray Lawson.

57 Charolais.

Peel Public Health is reaching out to other employees who would have had close contact with the driver and they will be directed to self-isolate for 14 days.

The city said that public health officials informed it that "there is no additional risk to the riders on the Transit bus than there would be in the general community."

1st day of 2-week shutdown

All non-essential businesses in Ontario are closed as of today.

Premier Doug Ford's order to shut shop for at least 14 days took effect just before midnight.

But many companies will still be doing business after being designated as essential by the government.

They include construction firms, utilities, health-care professionals, veterinarians, grocery stores and pharmacies.

Drone video shot by CBC News on Tuesday shows relentless pleas for people to stay at home are having a dramatic effect on life in Toronto.

The video captured empty parks and eerily quiet streets in parts of the city that are usually bustling. Even the Gardiner Expressway, normally packed with vehicle traffic, was mostly an open road.

WATCH: Drone video from high above Toronto shows the impact of anti-coronavirus measures

Hotline for businesses

The provincial government said Wednesday it has launched a toll-free telephone line for business owners with questions about the premier's order to close at-risk workplaces.

The "Stop the Spread Business Information Line" can be reached at 1-888-444-3659.

The province said it will be staffed from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., seven days a week until the order is lifted.

Paul Smith/CBC

Fiscal update coming today

Ontario's finance minister is set to release a fiscal update later today.

Rod Phillips was originally supposed to present a full budget, but opted not to in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Phillips says the update will contain a one-year outlook based on the new economic realities caused by COVID-19 and will also serve as an important signal to the many groups the province funds such as municipalities, school boards and hospitals.

"It's also going to make clear to Ontarians we've got the money to support our health-care system, we're going to be supporting jobs and people as well and that their government has a plan," he said.

The outlook won't contain any long-term fiscal projections, something normally seen in a provincial budget. The unpredictable circumstances surrounding the pandemic make things too uncertain, Phillips added.

"What we won't be doing tomorrow is providing any multi-year projections," he said Tuesday. "That's because it would be impossible to do so at this time. We'll do that, hopefully, when the dust has cleared and we have a better sense of things."

Philips is set to deliver the update starting at 4 p.m.

Evan Mitsui/CBC

Tenant rights groups call for help

Tenant advocacy groups across the country are expected to formally ask governments for help paying rent today as an April first deadline looms.

Many renters have been left scrambling as the COVID-19 outbreak shuts down businesses and causes thousands of job losses.

Landlords say they still have to worry about paying mortgages, taxes and other expenses during the pandemic.

But Geordie Dent, the executive director of Toronto's Federation of Metro Tenants Associations, says many renters won't be able to make their payments without help.

He says that tenant associations across the country plan on issuing a joint statement today seeking some kind of government relief.
Every day, since late last week, the emails have been landing in my inbox. New Sale Markdowns! Enjoy an additional 20% off! Flash 40% Off Sale!

They are discomfiting and tempting, catnip to boredom and cabin fever. Id rather look longingly at clothes I am no longer wearing, imagining a time when they are once again a part of my life (parties! work events! restaurants!) than face reality (stories of trauma, hospital shortages, businesses on the brink of bankruptcy).

Id rather consider the allure of a fleece and silk knit  so much cheaper than normal!  and how they make me feel swaddled and safe (maybe theyre worth it?) than consider the stock market plunges and the fact I probably should be saving everything I can right now.

Yet shopping during a pandemic seems just the other side of wrong.

There are people who are terribly sick and dying because of the new coronavirus. People losing family members. People losing jobs. Shopping is so  self-indulgent. So unnecessary. So, as one reader wrote to me, shameful.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo today urged President Bashar al-Assad to release all arbitrarily detained Syrians and US citizens amid fears that the coronavirus pandemic is primed to rapidly take hold and spread throughout the war-torn country.

We have asked the Syrians to release all those who are wrongfully detained  not only Americans, but others as well, Pompeo told a small group of reporters. Were calling on the Islamic Republic of Iran to do the same at this time, where there is enormous health risk to these individuals, on a purely humanitarian basis.

Pompeo also noted that he discussed Syria on a teleconference call today with fellow foreign ministers from the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations  a group that comprises the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

We also spent time discussing Syria, where the Russians, the Iranian regime, Hezbollah and the Assad regime are strengthening Europe with a humanitarian disaster and preventing a political solution, said Pompeo.

Why it matters: Syria is believed to detain at least two Americans: the journalist Austin Tice, who went missing in 2012, and Majd Kamalmaz, a psychotherapist detained since 2017. Syria has confirmed five coronavirus cases so far, prompting fears that the countrys dense prison population, displaced populace and the ongoing war has created a volatile situation rife for the pandemic to spread.

"In light of threats posed by COVID-19, the United States reiterates its calls for the Assad regime to take concrete steps to protect the fate of thousands of civilians, including US citizens, being held arbitrarily in overcrowded and inhumane conditions in regime detention centers, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in a statement.

President Donald Trump himself called on Syria to free Tice at a coronavirus press conference last week.

Weve gotten rid of the [Islamic State] caliphate in Syria, said Trump. Weve done a lot for Syria.  It would be very much appreciated if they would let Austin Tice out immediately.

Whats next: Tices whereabouts have remained unknown for years, and the United States recently lost track of Kamalmazs whereabouts because he has been transferred to an unknown location inside Syria. The United States and Damascus also do not maintain a direct line of communication, making negotiations difficult.

Know more: To learn about Kamalmazs relocation and his three-year detention, read Elizabeth Hagedorns in-depth story here.
The Trump administration is pressing Saudi Arabia to dial back its plan to flood the oil market after a price war with Russia sent crude prices crashing to their lowest levels in almost two decades.

While its status as the worlds biggest producer means the U.S. is sheltered in part from the collapse, the administration wants Saudi Arabia to hold back on a plan to supply a record 12.3 million barrels a day next month, people familiar with the situation said. Its asking for the Saudis help in bringing oil prices back to where they were before the market cratered in early March, one of the people said.

Oil prices have plummeted since Russia and Saudi Arabia failed to reach a deal to cut back production in response to an unprecedented decline in crude demand brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. The market collapse has imperiled hundreds of thousands of jobs, wiped out tens of billions of dollars in capital spending and is threatening to force as many as 70% of U.S. shale drillers into bankruptcy.

RELATED: U.S. intervenes in Saudi-Russia oil war with call for restraint

Earlier on Wednesday, the U.S. made its most direct intervention yet, with Secretary of State Michael Pompeo urging Riyadh to rise to the occasion and reassure energy markets at a time of economic uncertainty. Futures pared losses with Brent crude little changed near $27 a barrel.

Pompeo spoke with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on the eve of a conference call between the leaders of the Group of 20 on the global pandemic and its economic fallout.

A Real Opportunity

The secretary stressed that as a leader of the G20 and an important energy leader, Saudi Arabia has a real opportunity to rise to the occasion and reassure global energy and financial markets when the world faces serious economic uncertainty, the State Department said on Wednesday.

The U.S. view is that the oil glut aggravates an already difficult economic outlook, and it wants all nations to work together to reassure energy markets, according to an official who asked not to be named. Several discussions have already taken place with senior Saudi officials, the person said.

This diplomacy matters, said Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former oil official at the White House. Both Republican and Democrat White House administrations have asked Saudi Arabia to help the global economy during crises, and in the past theyve responded.

Oil is expected to be discussed on the G20 call, at least as part of discussions on the wider economy, according to a person familiar with the situation.

FUEL FIX: Now more than ever, you need our energy news in your inbox

Saudi View

The price war was unleashed after Saudi Arabia failed to convince Russia to agree on deeper production cuts for the OPEC+ alliance. So far, the thinking in Riyadh remains that only a collective output cut, rather than unilateral action by the Saudis, can turn the market around.

Despite the pressure, Saudi Arabia currently has no intention of changing course, people familiar with the situation said, especially since Trump has publicly celebrated the plunge in gasoline prices and has yet to show a willingness to help cut oil production flowing from U.S. shale formations.

The magnitude of the oversupply is such that Russia and Saudi Arabia would need to completely stop all their output to balance the market. Top oil trading house Vitol Group puts the glut right now at about 20 million barrels a day.

Even as policy makers committed trillions of dollars to offset the harm from the pandemic, recent price recoveries have been short-lived as large parts of the global economy shut down. Both sides show no signs of giving up their race to flood the world with crude and grab market share.

The U.S. also tried in 1986 to convince Saudi Arabia to abandon a price war. At that time, President Ronald Reagan dispatched then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in an effort to persuade the kingdom to change course as the oil industry in Texas and Oklahoma was hammered. Bush was unable to convince Riyadh and the oil price war went for another six months.

U.S appeals didnt work then, even less likely to work now, tweeted Suzanne Maloney, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. diplomat.

2020 Bloomberg L.P.
A statewide family law panel on Wednesday issued guidance to parents who share custody or parenting time, hoping to clear up questions that have emerged since the governor ordered Oregonians to stay home except when traveling for essential work, buying food and similar critical supplies or returning to their own homes.

The Oregon Statewide Family Law Advisory Committee said the goal of its recommendations is to encourage the parties to follow their parenting plan as closely as possible, as doing so will ensure a level of consistency and stability that is in the childrens best interests.

The committee is made up of 16 members, including judges, trial court administrators, mediators and evaluators, attorneys, family court service providers and representatives from state agencies. Members are appointed by the chief justice of the Oregon Supreme Court. The panel advises the state court administrator on family law issues in the courts.

The recommendations:

Definition of Spring Break, Summer Break/Vacation or Holidays: While the schools are closed, parenting time shall continue as if the children are still attending school in accordance with the school calendar of the relevant district. Spring break, summer break/vacation or other designated holidays, means the regularly calendared breaks/vacations or holidays in the school district where the children are attending school (or would attend school if they were school aged).

The closure of the school for public health purposes will not be considered an extension of any break/vacation/holiday period or weekend.

Denial of Parenting Time: COVID-19 is not a reason to deny parenting time.

Unless otherwise ordered by the court, parents are considered fit to care for their children and make decisions regarding the day-to-day aspects of parenting while the children are in their care. This day-to-day care includes following the Oregon Health Authority and your County Public Health directives regarding social distancing and sanitation-related measures (such as frequent hand-washing).

Parenting Time in Public Places: Governor Brown has forbidden all nonessential gatherings, regardless of size. If the parenting plan states that parenting time will occur in a public place, parenting time should continue at locations that are permitted under the health and safety guidelines for the state, such as a large park or nature hike.

Public places where people routinely touch common contact surfaces (such as parks and play equipment) should be avoided. However, activities where parents and children can maintain social distancing and avoid such surfaces are encouraged. If that is not possible, then the parenting time should be conducted virtually via videoconferencing or by telephone.

Supervised Parenting Time: If parenting time is ordered to be supervised, and the supervisor is unavailable due to COVID-19-related issues or government orders, the parties should work collaboratively to ensure parenting time continues to occur in a manner that promotes their childrens safety and wellbeing, such as finding an alternative supervisor. If that is not possible, then the parenting time should be conducted virtually via videoconferencing or by telephone.

Governors executive orders regarding travel: The governor has issued executive orders that restrict travel except for essential activities, which generally include caring for minors, dependents and/or family members. Therefore, unless otherwise directed by the governor or other executive order, the parties should continue to follow the parenting plan as written while such orders are in effect.

Exchanges: During the exchange of the children, all parties should follow the CDC guidelines for limiting the spread of the virus, which may mean choosing an alternate location for the exchanges that has less people congregating and less touching of public items (changing from the restaurant to the grocery store parking lot for example).

Safety-Related Issues: Our first responders must remain available for true emergencies and for support related to the COVID-19 outbreak. Please do not call them for parenting-related disputes but rather only in the circumstances of real, immediate, and significant safety-related reasons.

Transparency: Unless the parties are restrained from communicating, parents are encouraged to communicate about precautions they are taking to slow the spread of COVID-19. A parent is not permitted to deny parenting time based upon the other parents unwillingness to discuss their precautionary measures taken, or belief that the other parents precautions are insufficient.

Makeup Parenting Time: If parenting time is missed due to COVID-19-related issues or government orders, parents are encouraged to work collaboratively to schedule makeup parenting time that promotes their childrens safety and wellbeing. Local courts are strongly encouraged to order makeup parenting time, when appropriate.

-- Noelle Crombie; ncrombie@oregonian.com; 503-276-7184; @noellecrombie

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
More Than 3 Million Americans Lost Their Jobs Last Week. See Your State. Official statistics have revealed how severely coronavirus has hurt the job market. But it may take several months before we know whether this economic disaster will resemble a storm or a long winter. Note: Official figures are seasonally adjusted. Source: Department of Labor

The Department of Labor reported on Thursday that 3.28 million people filed for unemployment insurance last week, confirming that the economy is rapidly transitioning from strong activity to an unwelcome hibernation because of the coronavirus.

That eye-popping number  more than four times higher than ever recorded, and a sharp rise from 282,000 the previous week  reflects the peculiar nature of this crisis.

This downturn is different because its a direct result of relatively synchronized government directives that forced millions of stores, schools and government offices to close. Its as if an economic umpire had blown the whistle to signal the end of playing time, forcing competitors from the economic playing field to recuperate. The result is an unusual downturn in which the first round of job losses will be intensely concentrated into just a few weeks.

By contrast, a typical recession plays out over a period of many months, or even years. The usual delay reflects the reality that it takes time for businesses to calculate their latest revenue numbers, then to recognize that theyre facing something worse than just a few bad months, and then to decide whether to respond by trimming their work forces.

Todays very different dynamics mean that comparisons of this latest number with previous recessions wont yield much insight into the economys future.

Some simple numbers make the point. In the last recession, which began in December 2007, initial unemployment claims rose above their long-run average level (of 345,000) for five years. Summing up these extra spells of unemployment  that is, adding up the number of claims above 345,000 each week  suggests that the financial crisis led to around 26 million extra jobless claims in total.

Its possible that these latest numbers signal that the United States is on the cusp of a similarly painful downturn in which an extra 26 million job losses will also occur, but this time at a more rapid rate of roughly 3.25 million per week spread over only eight weeks. But of course it could be far worse or, with fast progress on coronavirus, wind up being far better  its simply unknowable at this time.

According to a forecast driven by Google searches, jobless claims this week may be as high as 4.7 million, according to an analysis from the economists Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham from Yale and Aaron Sojourner from the University of Minnesota. The forecast is based on higher search volume at the state and national level.

Its an economic hurricane, not a typical recession

Perhaps a better analogy for the current downturn is not past recessions, but rather a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Like the coronavirus, it caused an almost immediate shutdown of one economic region.

Note: State level figures are not seasonally adjusted.

In the couple of weeks after the hurricane made landfall, initial jobless claims in Louisiana spiked to a level 20 times higher than the norm. The jobless claims numbers were at least five times higher than typical for seven weeks, and they did not return to earlier levels until 14 weeks after the hurricane hit.

Over this 14-week span, Hurricane Katrina led to a total of roughly 350,000 extra jobless claims in Louisiana. The overall United States work force is roughly 75 times larger than Louisianas. So if the nationwide coronavirus shutdown were to follow a similar trajectory, it would produce an extra 26 million jobless claims.

That would be on par with the effects of the 2008 financial crisis.

Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas (and Louisiana) in 2017, offers a more optimistic comparison. Initial unemployment claims in Texas rose fivefold in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, stayed high for an additional week, then over the next two weeks came down toward earlier levels. Within a month, the hurricanes impact on these numbers had virtually disappeared. If the national economy were to follow that trajectory, the current surge in jobless claims would be very temporary, and the recession relatively mild.

As these two cases illustrate, early data from a highly synchronized economic catastrophe provide extremely imprecise signals about the depth of the ensuing recession.

Policymakers are flying blind

Economic policymakers will have very little reliable data with which to track the current downturn over the coming weeks. Thats because the rapidity of this downturn amplifies the importance of idiosyncrasies in how economic data are collected.

The closely watched employment report  which yields the official estimate of the unemployment rate and nonfarm payrolls growth  is to be released April 3. But that report will look at surveys asking firms and workers about their labor market activity in the second week of March, which is before many job losses occurred. The first post-shutdown employment report wont be available until six weeks from now, when the numbers for April will be reported on May 8.

Instead, policymakers will continue to focus on the initial jobless claims numbers produced by the Labor Department. But the governments fiscal rescue package includes major changes to the unemployment insurance system, which will distort these numbers in hard-to-assess ways.

On the one hand, increasing the size of weekly unemployment checks will probably make some employers more inclined to furlough their workers, which could inflate the initial claims count. On the other, some parts of the rescue package are available only to employers who commit not to cutting staff, which could reduce the number of unemployment claims. It is also not yet clear how the Labor Department will report numbers from the newly created Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which offers benefits to some groups of workers who are not eligible for regular unemployment insurance.

All this will make it hard to compare initial claims numbers in coming weeks with recent data. Claims counts could fall even as the downturn intensifies, or they could rise even as the crisis abates.

Our official economic statistics simply arent set up to track a downturn that plays out over days and weeks, rather than months and years. Instead, policymakers will have to rely on scraps of real-time information, collected from credit card processors; sales and earnings numbers from individual firms; or even Google searches. It gets worse. The changes in economic life wrought by social isolation render even these relatively untested data less reliable, as it will be hard to disentangle shifts in how we shop from shifts in how much we shop.

Find your state below

As you look at whats happening in your state, be aware that these numbers come with some pretty important caveats. In particular, this spike in joblessness is so large that many unemployment offices had trouble keeping up, and in some cases their phone lines and websites have been overloaded. These official numbers reflect the number of claims successfully filed, but the true number of people newly out of work and attempting to file may be much larger. Those who failed to file last week but successfully did so this week will increase the next set of numbers, due out next week.

In addition, when unemployment offices dont file their numbers on time  and given the surge in applications, its likely that data collection is particularly chaotic at the moment  the Labor Department treats these missing data as if there were no jobless claims from that office. Therefore many of these numbers may be undercounts. (Keep all this in mind when looking at the vast swings between the big numbers from Pennsylvania, for example, and the low figures from Utah and Georgia.)

Furthermore, counts of the number of people claiming benefits are affected by the number who are eligible, and this may be changing rapidly, as the impact of Covid-19 has led some states to expand who can claim unemployment insurance.
A pregnant woman, on the way to a hospital along with her family members, was rescued by police after her car broke down midway around midnight, officials said on Thursday.

Itisha Das, a resident of the Pragati Maidan area, was on the way to the hospital with her husband as labour pain started. Their car broke down near the GK Road-Christopher Road cross around 12.05 am, said a senior officer of the Kolkata Police.

Unable to find a taxi or any other vehicle due to the lockdown, her husband Subhas Das approached officials at the nearby police kiosk.

"The on-duty constable informed senior officers at the Tangra police station and a vehicle was arranged and the expecting mother was taken to the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, the officer said.

Thanking the officials, Das said his wife was doing fine at the hospital.

Firstly, it was quite late and also because of the lockdown we were not getting any vehicle after our car broke down. We thank the police for helping us in such an emergency. Im truly grateful to them, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
More than 4,000 prisoners will be released in Ethiopia as the government continues to take measures to control the spread of coronavirus.



The countrys attorney general said on Wednesday that prisoners convicted of minor offences and women with babies were among those who would be freed.



Foreigners charged with involvement in with smuggling and drug trafficking would also be released and deported to their countries of origin.



Among those to be released is journalist Fekadu Mahtemework.



The magazine editor returned to Ethiopia after Prime Minister Ahmed Abiy came to power in 2018 at a time when thousands of political prisoners were freed, a state of emergency ended and numerous political parties unbanned.



But the charges of tax evasion he faced in absentia were not dropped and he was sentenced to seven years in jail last October.



Hotel quarantine for travellers



Other measures to curb coronavirus that have been announced by the government include ordering most its employees to work from home from Wednesday and closing all land borders.



All passengers travelling to Ethiopia are being quarantined for 14 days in eight hotels selected by authorities.



Ethiopian citizens who cannot afford to pay will have their expenses covered by the government.



More than 400 travellers have started their mandatory quarantine, according to a statement by the Ethiopian Public Health Institute.



Ethiopia has 12 confirmed cases of Covid-19, the respiratory illness caused by coronavirus.

Source: BBC









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Worldwide infections from the new coronavirus were set to top half a million people on Thursday as both Italy and the United States appeared poised to surpass China, where the pandemic began.

Health care systems in Europe and New York buckled under the weight of caring for seriously ill victims as officials desperately searched for enough ventilators to keep them alive.

Faced with the exponential spread of the pandemic, the US Senate passed a USD 2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems. Millions of Americans hoped the measure would give them a lifeline as they lost jobs, income and child care due to the social-distancing rules needed to slow the spread of the virus.

At least 1.5 billion people are now under severe travel restrictions. But the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, scolded world leaders for wasting precious time in the fight against the virus that has already killed more than 21,000 people, thrown millions out of work and ravaged the world economy.

He called it public enemy No. 1.

The time to act was actually more than a month ago or two months ago, he said. We squandered the first window of opportunity ... this is a second opportunity, which we should not squander and do everything to suppress and control this virus."



In the United States, where virus deaths passed 1,050 and some 70,000 people were infected, a fierce political battle raged between those demanding urgent action for a months-long siege against the pandemic, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and President Donald Trump.

Trump has expressed hope churches could return to normal by Easter, only 17 days away, and grumbled that our country wasn't built to be shut down apparently concerned that the outbreak's devastating effects on financial markets and employment will harm his reelection chances.

Democrats say Trump is prioritizing the economy over the health and safety of Americans.

"I'd like to say, let's get back to work next Friday, said Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. That'd be wonderful. But it can't be arbitrary.

New York has emerged as a global virus hotspot and the governor says infections are doubling nearly every few days. The city's convention center is being turned into a temporary hospital and the state has hit 280 deaths, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University.

In a preview of what might be ahead for the United States, Spain has converted hotels into makeshift hospitals and turned an ice rink in Madrid into a temporary morgue. The curve of infections has not slowed in Spain, which now has more than 3,600 deaths, second only to Italy's death toll of 7,503.

We are collapsing," said Lidia Perera, a nurse who works at Madrid's Hospital de la Paz. We need more workers.

She said watching patients die alone is killing all of us inside.

Physically this is extremely complicated, but psychologically it is appalling, said colleague Patricia Nez, a nurse who is recovering from being infected herself.

In Italy, doctors and nurses have been begging the government daily to provide more masks, gloves and goggles and urged the public to understand how important onerous social distancing measures really are. Scientists say stopping just one person from getting the virus means scores of others will not become infected down the road.

Please don't leave us alone. Help us help you," Dr. Francesca De Gennaro, who heads a small medical clinic in Italy's hard-hit Bergamo region, wrote in an open letter.

European Union leaders were convening Thursday for their third summit in three weeks as they battled to contain the spread of the coronavirus and manage the havoc the disease is wreaking on their 27 economies.

As the number of deaths in Europe soared over 12,000, Spain prolonged a state of emergency that will allow it to impose broader lockdowns while French President Emmanuel Macron launched Operation Resilience, a military-backed response to combat the pandemic.

France began evacuating infected citizens from the northeastern hotspot of Alsace using a special medicalized high-speed train that its health minister called a first in Europe.

Around 20 patients were being taken from Strasbourg to hospitals in the Pays-de-la-Loire and other regions.

Britain ordered 10,000 ventilators to grapple with the COVID-19 crisis, working with engineers from Dyson. The government wants to increase its ventilators from 8,000 to 30,000.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.

So far, more than 115,000 people have recovered from the virus, and health care experts say the key to fighting it is to flatten the curve slow the spread of the outbreak so that hospitals aren't overwhelmed with seriously ill patients all at once. Slowing the rate of infections will also cut the eventual death rate.

China's cases have slowed, with only 67 new cases reported, all recent arrivals.

The leaders of the Group of 20 largest economies were holding a special video conference to better coordinate a response to the pandemic, amid criticism that the world's wealthiest countries have not taken cohesive action.

The conference was being chaired by Saudi Arabia's King Salman.

As the virus spreads into new territories, many countries were taking drastic measures.

As cases start to rise in Russia, President Vladimir Putin ordered the military in to help. The government announced it would halt all international flights starting Friday and will have troops build 16 new medical centers to treat virus victims by mid-May.

Russia says it has 658 cases, but experts say those figures underreport the crisis there and may be due to the lack of testing.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
After temporarily suspending all of its operations and services during the COVID-19 lockdown, e-tailer Flipkart on Wednesday said it will resume its grocery and essentials services post assurance from the government.

There were massive disruptions on Day 1 of the 21-day lockdown as local authorities including police did not allow delivery boys to move around  even harassed and beat them up.

Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO Flipkart Group, said that the government has given the company assurance to resume its essential services.

"We have been assured of the safe and smooth passage of our supply chain and delivery executives by local law enforcement authorities and are resuming our grocery & essentials services later today," Krishnamurthy said in a statement.

"We are very grateful for the clarification provided by the government and local state authorities on the functioning of e-commerce as essential service' during the lockdown," he added.

There were multiple reports of delivery boys being beaten up. Twitter users posted photos of some delivery boys with bruises on their bodies.

An Amazon spokesperson said that the company appreciates that the government has recognised ecommerce as essential to help citizens remain at home and maintain social distancing.

"We are working with the central government and local authorities, asking them to help us urgently with detailed on-ground operating procedures, to ensure delivery of priority goods like household staples, health and hygiene products, sanitizers, baby formula, and medical supplies safely across the country to our customers' homes without any disruption," the spokesperson said.

Millions of people across cities were left helpless at homes as essential items like fruits and vegetables, dairy and milk, meat and fish etc did not reach their doors despite placing orders well in advance.

Later, the orders went dry.

In a message to customers, grocery and milk delivery website MilkBasket said it was forced to dump 15,000 litres of milk and 10,000 kg of vegetables.
Q: My partner and I are freelancers in creative fields. We suddenly have no work or income because the response to the coronavirus has effectively shut down our industries. The rent is due on our Brooklyn market-rate apartment on April 1 and if we pay it, we will rapidly deplete our very modest savings. What are we supposed to do?

A: A survey published on March 23 by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy found that 29 percent of New York City residents had at least one member of their household lose a job because of the coronavirus pandemic in the previous two weeks. In a city where two-thirds of residents rent, the sudden spike in unemployment will have an enormous and immediate impact on households that have to pay the rent April 1.

For now, New Yorkers cannot get evicted if they dont pay their rent. On March 20, Gov. Andrew Cuomo implemented a 90-day moratorium on evictions for residential and commercial tenants, a day after he suspended mortgage payments for three months for homeowners in financial distress. Because holdover and nonpayment proceedings are not considered emergencies, landlords cannot even file such cases in housing court until April 19, at the earliest. So if you are facing a choice between paying for food and paying the rent, know that you will not lose your apartment for nonpayment, for the time being.
Within the first hour of announcing it, we had about 1,000 people sign up to host, he said. Thats similar to what we saw in France and Italy. So many people out there are looking for ways they can be helpful.
Unofficial bishop from 1983 to 2005, he was interred in a forced labor camp from 1958 to 1969 for his refusal to bow to the Patriotic Association. From 1969 to 1979 he worked as a laborer at a water depot. He translated the Roman Missal into the Mongolian language, but it did not receive approval because no one knew the Mongolian language at the Vatican.

Rome (AsiaNews)  Msgr. Giuseppe Ma Zhongmu Tegusbeleg, the only Mongolian bishop, died yesterday at the age of 101. Bishop Ma was an unofficial bishop, not recognized by the Chinese state, which considered him a simple priest. For the Holy See he was bishop of Ningxia, a diocese that embraces part of the autonomous region of Ningxia, part of northern Shaanxi and part of northern Inner Mongolia.

Bishop Ma retired in 2005 and lived as a pastor in his hometown parish of Chengchuan (Inner Mongolia).

His diocese has provided little biographical information. He was born in Chengchuan on November 1st 1919; he studied theology in Datong (Shanxi) and was ordained a priest on July 31, 1947. After a few years of study at the Fu Ren Catholic University (then in Beijing), he carried out his priestly ministry in Zhongwei and Hohhot.

In 1958, after refusing to join the Patriotic Association, he was sentenced to forced labor and branded as a "counter-revolutionary". Released in 1969, he returned to his hometown, where he worked as a laborer at a water conservation facility. Rehabilitated in 1979, in 1980 he returned to his ministry. On November 8, 1983 he was consecrated as the unofficial bishop of Ningxia, retiring in 2005.

According to the obituary of his diocese, Msgr. Ma translated the Roman Missal into Mongolian and had submitted it to the Vatican for approval. But unfortunately as "no one in the Vatican knew the Mongolian language" the translation has never been approved.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 16:15:29|Editor: huaxia

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TAIPEI, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The total number of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases in Taiwan has increased by 17 to 252, the island's epidemic monitoring agency said Thursday.

Among them, 15 people were believed to have contracted the virus during their trips overseas, including trips to Britain, the United States, New Zealand, Malaysia and Mexico, the agency said in a press release.

The other two patients were believed to have contracted the virus through close contact with those who were diagnosed with COVID-19, the statement said.

Among the island's confirmed COVID-19 cases, 212 were imported. Twenty-nine of the confirmed patients have recovered, and two died of the disease. The rest are in stable condition.
FLINT, MI -- People may have distanced themselves from one another, but a Flint DJ is keeping them dancing.

Peter McFray held a virtual dance party on Facebook Live Saturday, March 21, that raised $10,000 in donations for the Greater Flint Urgent Relief Fund. The day before, he raised $516 for the Food Bank of Eastern Michigan.

Im still kind of beside myself on the whole deal," he said. "Its not something I ever set out to do but its obviously something that turned out incredible.

The live streams run on his own personal Facebook page. They have received thousands of views and up to 300 people tuned as the event was going, he said.

I think people missed looking outside of their homes and seeing that the world is still moving, McFray said.

Because DJing is his primary job, McFray said he found himself at a loss on what to do Friday and Saturday nights. All events had been canceled and people were holing up at home to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

So McFray decided to try out a Facebook Live party in his own living room Friday.

We have to find something within the confines of our own normal to make our confines as normal as we can, he said.

As people tuned in to join the virtual dance party, McFray said a friend suggested he take tips through Cash App. Jokingly, he added a link to his account.

Tips started streaming in. When they reached over $200, I said Im going to donate this. Somebody tell me where I can donate. Whos feeding kids out of school right now?" McFray said.

A man suggested the food bank, offering to match $100 and by the end of the first night, he had raised over $500.

McFray said he worked with Isaiah Oliver with the Community Foundation of Greater Flint and local attorney Matt Norwood to come up with a plan.

Community organizations and local businesses helped match donations. One community member offered to match dollar to dollar donations, resulting in the second dance party raising $10,000.

Just the sheer activation of the community in such a strange situation where were not sure how to deal with it yet -- I think were all locked in our houses not sure how were doing, he said.

Anything that helps bring the community together is worth continuing, he said.

Its super cool to see the broad scope of people that are tuned into this thing -- from my mother who is 67 years old and her friends are tuned in, then my niece who is 21, her friends are tuned in, he said. Theres not a physical place I think that really exists where all of these people would be sitting here being entertained by the same thing.

He hopes to continue the events as long as people are social distancing to prevent the spread of the virus. Donations are not required.

McFray said hes planning on holding another virtual DJ session this Friday and Saturday. Funds raised this weekend will go toward Whaley Childrens Center. People can tune in here.

Andre McGee Jr, 25, tuned into the livestream Saturday.

I was there, but I wasnt there, he said with a laugh.

He said the event is an example of how Flint can rise to the challenge of supporting each other through crisis.

(McFray) is really all about Flint. Hes always talked about Flint in high regard, McGee said.

McGee keeps coming back to the saying, Theres no such thing as small change. A community makes it through times of crisis by using the resources to be on the front lines while keeping people safe, he said.

Hes just one of many who are part of this Flint rebuild, McGee added.

Read more here:

Complete coverage at mlive.com/coronavirus

How you can donate medical supplies to mid-Michigan hospitals

Wednesday, March 25: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

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Manaure Quintero/Reuters

The Department of Justice on Thursday unveiled narco-terrorism charges against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and other senior government officials, alleging they participated in the countrys illegal drug trafficking system and collaborated with a leftist Colombian guerrilla group to export cocaine to the United States.

The president, along with five other Venezuelan officials, were all slapped with narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and weapons charges by the Southern District of New York for allegedly facilitating the importation of tons of cocaine into the U.S. with the Cartel of the Suns, Attorney General William Barr said Thursday.

The highly unusual charges mark only the second time the U.S. government has brought criminal charges against a foreign head of state.

Venezuela allowed Colombians tied to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombiathe Peoples Army, known as FARCto fly cocaine north through the country and ultimately to North America, Barr said at a press conference.

The scope and magnitude of the drug trafficking alleged was made possible only because Maduro and others corrupted the institutions of Venezuela and provided political and military protection for the rampant narco-terrorism crimes described in our charges, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman said in a statement. As alleged, Maduro and the other defendants expressly intended to flood the United States with cocaine in order to undermine the health and wellbeing of our nation.

At the press conference, Barr also announced a $15 million reward for information leading to Maduros arrest and lesser amounts for information leading to his alleged co-conspirators arrests.

Was a Russian Plot Behind the Venezuela Coup?

More than a dozen other officials were charged in four separate indictments, including Diosdado Cabello Rondon, former speaker of the National Assembly, who was once considered the second most powerful man in Venezuela; Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino Loquez; Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, former director of the countrys military intelligence agency; and two leaders of the FARC terror group, one of the largest producers of cocaine worldwide.

Story continues

Prosecutors allege the Venezuelan officials conspired with the Cartel of the Suns, which was under Maduros leadership, to take bribes in exchange for allowing the South American country to be used for narcotics shipments, according to one of the indictments unsealed on Thursday. The financial gains from the shipments were then allegedly used to finance a decades-long civil war in Columbia.

The charges also designate Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism, a distinction that the U.S. has only bestowed on four other countriesNorth Korea, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. The move, which states the country repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism, will allow the U.S. government to implement further sanctions against Venezuela and the Maduro regime.

Thursdays charges escalate the feud between the U.S. and Maduro over the South American countrys extensive alleged corruptiona deteriorating relationship that began in 1999 when former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez assumed power. The Trump administration has even publicly backed Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaido, in his efforts to unseat Maduro.

During his State of the Union address last month, President Donald Trump slammed Maduro, calling him an illegitimate ruler and a tyrant who brutalizes his people, vowing that his power would be smashed and broken. Guaido was a guest of Trumps at the address.

One of the indictments filed in the Southern District of New York states Maduro allegedly helped manage and ultimately lead the criminal organization, even allegedly personally negotiating multi-ton shipments of cocaine while cultivating relationships with other South American countries for drug trades.

Maduro and other cartel members prioritized using cocaine as a weapon against America and importing as much cocaine as possible into the United States, the indictment says, adding that the Cartel of the Suns sought not only to enrich its members and enhance their power but also to flood the United States with cocaine and inflict the drugs harmful and addictive effects on users in this country.

The indictments are rare; the U.S. government has only brought charges against a foreign head of state twice. In 1989, Miami federal prosecutors indicted Manuel Noreiga, the former dictator of Panama, on drug trafficking charges. Noreiga, who served as the countrys ruler for six years, was convicted in Miami. He later died in 2017 in Panama.

Maduro condemned the charges on Twitter, accusing the U.S. and its ally Colombia of trying to fill Venezuela with violence.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Our crews are taking several precautions during #COVID19 so that we can all stay safe while maintaining reliable service. #Westchester pic.twitter.com/lhci1jXd6c  Con Edison (@ConEdison) March 23, 2020

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Fifty Con Edison employees have tested positive for coronavirus (COVID-19), as of Thursday.

Of the 14,000 employees across New York City and Westchester County, about 6,500 are working from home, while many workers still are needed in the field and at manned substations, said Con Ed spokesman Allan Drury.

Almost every day Human Resources is notifying us about a new case, he said.

Con Ed provides electricity on Staten Island and both electricity and gas in other parts of the New York City area.

A video posted Monday on the companys Twitter account offered a peek into the new normal for workers in Westchester County, where crews are taking several precautions."

When a worker tests positive for the virus, we determine who had direct, prolonged contact with (them), Drury said.

Everyone identified then is instructed to quarantine at home for 14 days.

53 Fighting the coronavirus: NYC on pause

SERVICE CHANGES

Service updates in light of the pandemic were posted Monday on the Con Ed website.

They include:

Continued shut-offs when there is a safety issue.

A temporary stoppage in shut-offs due to non-payment resulting from the health crisis.

New late-payment charges waived for all customers.

Temporary closures of customer service walk-in centers.

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Kanye West has reaffirmed his support for Donald Trump.

In a new interview with the Wall Street Journal, West compares the backlash he faced for wearing a Make America Great Again hat to racial profiling. It reminded me of how I felt as a black guy before I was famous, the musician said.

When I would walk in a restaurant and people would look at you like you were going to steal something, he continued. This is your place, Ye, dont talk about apparel. This is your place, Ye, youre black, so youre a Democrat.

The Yeezus rapper has had a varied political past. When New Orleans was yet to receive substantial federal assistance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, West announced on TV: George Bush doesnt care about black people.

West has also faced criticism in the past for his support of conservative black activist Candice Owens, and also for suggesting that slavery was a choice. He would later apologise for his wording.

In the Wall Street Journal interview, the Yeezy CEO also opened up about working closely with Trump to help free the rapper A$AP Rocky from a Swedish jail, after he was detained on aggravated assault charges last summer.

Trump tweeted about the case following discussions with West.

Just spoke to @KanyeWest about his friend A$AP Rockys incarceration, Trump wrote. I will be calling the very talented Prime Minister of Sweden to see what we can do about helping A$AP Rocky.

West previously earned headlines this week (24 March) after his long-time conflict with Taylor Swift resurfaced. An extended version of their infamous phone call concerning the lyrics of his Famous was leaked, leading to Wests wife Kim Kardashian to defend her husband.
The accident occurred hours after Egypts two-week nighttime curfew came into effect to slow the spread of coronavirus

At least 18 people were killed and around two dozen others injured when a trailer-truck plowed into a string of vehicles on a highway in Cairos province of Giza late Wednesday, Ahram Arabic news website reported.

The accident occurred hours after Egypts two-week nighttime curfew came into effect to slow the spread of coronavirus.

The truck, loaded with construction material and traveling at high speed, smashed into a group of 15 vehicles lined up at a checkpoint on a road linking Giza to Ain Sokhna, east of Cairo.

At least 20 people have been wounded. They were sent to El-Saff Central Hospital in Giza for treatment.

The truck driver has been arrested and is currently being investigated by prosecutors.

Deadly road accidents take place near daily in Egypt due to poor road safety, badly maintained infrastructure, and loosely enforced traffic regulations.

Over 3,000 people were killed in traffic accidents in Egypt in 2018, according to the countrys official statistics agency CAPMAS.

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Extending school and workplace closures till April, rather than March in the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese city of Wuhan, can likely delay a second wave of cases until later in the year, relieving pressure on health services, according to a new study.

The research, published in The Lancet Public Health journal, says the closure of schools and workplaces in Wuhan have reduced the number of COVID-19 cases and substantially delayed the epidemic peak - giving the health system the time and opportunity to expand and respond.

In the study, researchers, including those from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK, used mathematical modelling to estimate that by lifting these control measures in March, a second wave of cases may occur in late August.

However, they said, maintaining these restrictions until April, may delay a second peak until October, relieving pressure on the health services in the intervening months.

The scientists also said given the large uncertainties around how many people an individual with the virus is likely to infect, and how long a person is infected on average, the true impact of relaxing physical distancing measures on the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic cannot be precisely predicted.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

"The unprecedented measures the city of Wuhan has put in place to reduce social contacts in school and the workplace have helped to control the outbreak", said Kiesha Prem from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who led the research.

"However, the city now needs to be really careful to avoid prematurely lifting physical distancing measures, because that could lead to an earlier secondary peak in cases. But if they relax the restrictions gradually, this is likely to both delay and flatten the peak," Prem said.

When the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019, schools and workplace were closed as part of the Lunar New Year holidays, the scientists said.

These closures, they said, were then extended to reduce person-to-person contact and prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

The researchers developed a transmission model to quantify the impact of school and workplace closures using information about how often people of different ages mix with each other in different locations.

They assessed the effects of these measures on bringing the outbreak under control.

Using the latest data on the spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan, and from the rest of China on the number of contacts per day by age group at school and work, the scientists compared the effect of three scenarios.

In one scenario, they assumed no interventions and no holidays were in place.

In another, the study assumed no physical distancing measures, but school winter school break and Lunar New Year holidays as normal.

In the third, the researchers modelled intense control measures with school closed and only about 10 per cent of the workforce - eg, health-care personnel, police, and other essential government staff - working during the control measures.

They also estimated the impact of lifting control measures in a staggered way, and during different stages of the outbreak in March and April.

Based on these analyses, Prem and her team suggest that the normal school winter break and Lunar New Year holidays may have had little impact on the progression of the outbreak had schools and workplaces opened as usual.

But they said putting these extreme measures in place to reduce contacts at school and workplaces may reduce case numbers and the size of the epidemic peak, while also delaying it.

The researchers noted that the effects of the distancing measures may vary by age, with the greatest reductions in new cases among school children, and the elderly.

The least effects, they said, were among working-aged adults.

However, when these interventions are relaxed, the scientists said case numbers are expected to rise.

On further analysis, the scientists suggested that physical distancing measures may be most effective if the staggered return to work commences at the beginning of April - potentially reducing the median number of new infections by 24 per cent up to the end of 2020, and delaying a second peak until October.

"Our results won't look exactly the same in another country, because the population structure and the way people mix will be different," said study co-author Yang Liu from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

"But we think one thing probably applies everywhere: physical distancing measures are very useful, and we need to carefully adjust their lifting to avoid subsequent waves of infection when workers and school children return to their normal routine.

If those waves come too quickly, that could overwhelm health systems," Liu said.

The researchers, however, noted that the study came with some limitations, including that it assumed no difference in susceptibility between children, and that the extreme distancing measures used in Wuhan may have increased the transmission within households.

"The study by Kiesha Prem and colleagues in The Lancet Public Health is crucial for policymakers everywhere, as it indicates the effects of extending or relaxing physical distancing control measures on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in Wuhan, China," said Tim Colbourn from the University College London in the UK, who was not involved in the study.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - Ynvisible Interactive Inc. (TSXV: YNV) (OTCQB: YNVYF) (FSE: 1XNA) (the "Company" or "Ynvisible") is pleased to announce that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with NxtGen Nano, Inc. DBA NXN Licensing (NXN) to expand the range of colors for electrochromic inks. The parties engage to bring NXN's electrochromic polymer (ECP) technology into global product platforms by utilizing Ynvisible's electrochromic systems, and its comprehensive portfolio of design and manufacturing services. In turn Ynvisible will utilize NXN's ECP technology to expand its portfolio of electrochromic inks for printed interactive graphics.

NXN and Ynvisible are also pleased to further announce the sale of a prototyping project to a Fortune 500 medical and diagnostics devices company. The name of the client company and the product application for which the multi-color electrochromic devices are intended are bound by confidentiality agreements.

Ynvisible has demonstrated the ability to combine NXN's ECP technology into Ynvisible's electrochromic devices. The companies have earlier experience in working together and commercially prototyping new color electrochromic devices to select Fortune 500 premium consumer brand product companies.

"Ynvisible provides our customers with a unique level of expertise and follow up production capability that accelerates their ability to enter new markets with innovative products while transferring the know how they need to create new product categories building evergreen revenue opportunities through team collaboration," said John Coyne, CEO, NxtGen Nano, Inc. DBA NXN Licensing.

"This client order is further evidence that companies with global footprints have needs for interactive printed graphics in their smart products. Color and color changes are a critical part of visual communication. New electrochromic colors increase the value and performance of ultra-low power electrochromic displays and devices," commented Jani-Mikael Kuusisto, CEO Ynvisible Interactive Inc. "It is exciting to combine NXN's electrochromic polymers colors into the inks we are developing and introduce this capability into our printed electrochromics technology platform. These new colors can help further leverage business with other Global Fortune 500 companies, and excite the product design community."

Ynvisible to Organize a Webinar on Printed Electrochromics

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic several industry conferences and seminars this spring have been cancelled. In place of these, Ynvisible will be hosting a webinar series titled "Making Things Alive with Printed Electronics".

One of the events postponed, is the 14th International Meeting on Electrochromism - organized this year by Georgia Tech in Atlanta Georgia, USA. Both NXN and Ynvisible are sponsors of this event. To partly make up for this missed opportunity, Ynvisible's first webinar session will focus on advances in designing and producing with printed electrochromics. The webinar will be held Thursday April 2, 2020 12:00 pm EST, 9:00 am EDT. Included are talks from NXN, Georgia Tech, University of Lapland (EU co-funded DecoChrom project), and Ynvisible. More data and registration to the webinar can be found via Ynvisible's web-site: https://www.ynvisible.com/events

Dates and agendas of the second and third webinars will be announced shortly.

About NxtGen Nano, Inc. DBA NXN Licensing

NXN based in Florida USA is the sole global licensee of its unique color palette of Electrochromic Polymers. NXN is expanding its portfolio of ECP intellectual properties through investment in new chemistry. The company also works with its customers to produce specific technologies to meet their proprietary needs and maintain full confidentiality and exclusive field of use licenses.

About Ynvisible Interactive Inc.

Ynvisible is a leading company in the emerging printed and flexible electronics sector. Given the cost and power-consumption advantages over conventional electronics, printed electronics are a key enabler of mass adoption of the Internet of Things ("IoT") and smart objects. Ynvisible has experience, know-how and intellectual property in the field of electrochromic materials, inks, and systems. Ynvisible's interactive printed graphics solutions solve the need for ultra-low power, mass deployable, & easy-to-use electronic displays and indicators for everyday smart objects, IoT devices, and ambient intelligence (intelligent surfaces). Ynvisible's full suite of services and partner ecosystem help designers and brands integrate Ynvisible's electrochromic inks and devices into their smart objects and IoT products, and scale-up to industrial production.

For additional information regarding Ynvisible Interactive and other corporate information, please visit the Company's website at ynvisible.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/ynvisible @ynvisible

Facebook: www.facebook.com/ynvisible

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/ynvisible/

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

"Jani-Mikael Kuusisto"

CEO

For further information, please contact:

Elyssia Patterson

Investor Relations

+1 778-683-4324

ir@ynvisible.com

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

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Glenn Beck and other far-right GOP members call for older people to sacrifice themselves to the coronavirus pandemic. Would Beck take an unsubstantiated remedy recommended by his buddy, Trump for his brain ailment? I think not!





OPINION By James DiGeorgia,

To make sure President Trumps country clubs and hotels dont go bankrupt and expose his lie about his wealth Trump needs to re-open his businesses by Easter. So to keep Trump and his clan in luxury, hes enlisted his peanut gallery to push the concept of refusing treatment to older Americans and re-opening the countrys businesses.

If people die as a result of his allowing nonessential businesses to open up too early -- so what?

As one psychiatrist recently commented, hes a sociopath and would just walk over the dead bodies without hesitation.

So when I heard Tuesday night, that right-wing Glenn Beck was joining Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patricks to suggest that older people should risk their lives and potentially expose themselves to coronavirus for the sake of the economy.

I sincerely hope that we are not at a place, as Americans, where we are going to let the Democrats jam down the Green New Deal because were at home panicked, said Beck. I want to have a frank conversation with you and ask you where you stand. I mean, Im in the danger zone. Im right at the edge; Im 56. In Italy, theyre saying if youre sick and your 60, dont even come in. So Im in the danger zone.

I would rather have my children stay home, and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working.Even if we all get sick, Id rather die than kill the country, because its not the economy thats dying, its the country.

 I instantly agreed, Texas Lt. Governor and Glenn Beck should go right ahead and go straight to the nearest Emergency Room to help the brave members of the medical community handle the onslaught of coronavirus patients. Their sacrifice of getting infected and refusing any treatment would be a testament to their love of our dear leader John J. Trump.

Then I realized this is the same Glenn Beck, who in 2014 was in hysterics after he was tested for a traumatic brain injury. After discovering, according to Beck, physicians told him he scored in the bottom 10% and would most likely be unable to function normally in five to 10 years.

Hes brain dead already, ahead of schedule.

Just in Time to Validate Trump! CHLOROQUINE THE CORONAVIRUS MIRACLE CURE? Patient healed using chloroquine. A MIRACLE!




Maintaining its streak of hilarious journalism, in recent reportage, a correspondent on a Pakistani media channel was seen distributing anti-bacterial handwash to people. In the wake of Coronavirus, which has already claimed 7 lives in Pakistan, the reporter claimed that the anti-bacterial handwash would keep the infection at bay.

"We are fighting a war against Coronavirus. We are giving this anti-bacterial handwash as a gift. One should let this handwash be for 20 mins and then wash it later with water, Coronavirus won't even come close," the reporter said.

If India did Go Corona Go, Pakistan had to do something.



This will leave you in splits. #COVID2019 pic.twitter.com/MP9vXDYiWq  Ahmer Khan (@ahmermkhan) March 26, 2020

In the wake of the global Coronavirus outbreak, the Governor of Pakistan's Punjab in a preposterous claim last week stated 'hot water' to be a remedy to 'kill' the virus. Addressing a large gathering, the Pakistani Governor Chaudhry Mohammad Sarwar made the false claim as the country's coronavirus cases sharply rose to 448 on Thursday.

READ| Pakistan Opposition netas walk out of Coronavirus meet after Imran Khan walks out on them

"If you drink hot water regularly Coronavirus won't damage your lungs, it will go in your stomach and get killed," Pakistan's politician said. Pakistan last week reported its first two casualties due to the coronavirus that has spread to more than 160 countries, killing over 9,000 people.

'Go Corona Go'

Meanwhile in India, an absurd video of Union Minister Ramdas Athawale, Chinese consulate General in Mumbai Tang Guocai and Buddhist monks chanting 'Go Corona, Go Corona' at a prayer meet had gone viral on social media. The video was reportedly shot at Gateway of India on February 20 during a prayer session to stop the spread of Coronavirus in China in mid-March.

BJP activist Narayan Chatterjee was arrested by Kolkata Police for organising cow urine (Gau Mutra) consumption party amid the outbreak. The BJP leader claimed that the Gou Mutra enables the immunity to fight Coronavirus, which has killed over 8,900 across the globe. During the party in West Bengal, the BJP leader allegedly forced a Police officer to drink Gau Mutra as a 'vaccine', who then fell ill.

WATCH: After 'Tauba Tauba Tamatar', now a Pakistani anchor wearing a bullet proof vest while reporting goes viral

WATCH: "Goats, Eggs And Hens... Naya Pakistan" Video Of Imran Khan Getting Roasted By His Own Countrymen Goes Viral

(with PTI inputs)
EDWARDSVILLE  A Wednesday night shooting in Alton was the first such incident handled by police since the closure of area schools and businesses because of coronavirus concerns.

A 25-year-old man was shot at 7:15 p.m. Wednesday during an apparent dispute in Hellrung Park in Alton, according to Alton Police, and is expected to survive his injuries. Police radio traffic indicated officers had located a possible suspect vehicle in the area and took it to their department. It was not clear if police had any suspects in custody.
A market in Sanaa on the fifth anniversary of the Saudi-led military campaign on Yemen. (ANSA)

Peace and human rights organizations of Europe are protesting against arms exports from Europe that are fuelling the war in Yemen.

By Robin Gomes

As the conflict in Yemen entered its 6th year on Wednesday, human rights, peace and humanitarian groups from 10 European countries launched an online protest against those fuelling the war.

Pax Christi Germany, together with over 30 non-governmental peace and human rights organizations of Europe, are protesting against arms exports from Europe fuelling the "forgotten" war in Yemen.

Among the protesters are the Italian Network for Disarmament and the UK-based Campaign against arms trafficking (CAAT).

The conflict in the Arab world's poorest country was sparked by the Shia-led Houthi rebels taking control of Yemen's capital Sanaa in 2014, which sent the internationally recognized government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi fleeing to exile.

Since March 25, 2015, a Western-backed Saudi-led Sunni Muslim coalition that includes the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has been fighting the Houthis.

The conflict has killed at least 12,000 people. With some 2 million children under the age of 5, about 1 million pregnant and lactating women and 24 million people in desperate need of humanitarian aid, the United Nations has described it as "the worst humanitarian catastrophe caused by man".

Europes arms supply

According to Pax Christi Germany, Europe bears a heavy responsibility for the war. It said that between 2015 and 2018 European countries exported an estimated 40-billion worth of arms to the Saudi-led coalition.

Germany alone is reported to have approved arms exports worth over 6.3 billion.

In the last 2 years, numerous countries have cut down on their exports to the coalition because of court orders. However, several arms manufacturers and governments are pressing for an end to the restrictions, despite the fact that the war continues to claim victims, as Pope Francis has repeatedly recalled.

Social media campaign

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Pax Christi suggested the protest be online. European citizens have been invited to post and share selfie photos on the social media with the appeal: Stop arms exports for war in Yemen!" or "No support for the coalition led by Saudi Arabia!

A glimmer of hope for peace appeared on Thursday as Yemen's warring parties welcomed a United Nations call for an immediate truce in the country where a coronavirus outbreak could exacerbate the already deep humanitarian crisis.

The Saudi-led coalition said late on Wednesday that it backed the Yemeni government's acceptance of the U.N. appeal. The Houthi rebels welcomed the stance but said it wants to see implementation on the ground.

Pax Christi International, based in Brussels, Belgium, is a Catholic peace movement with 120 member organisations worldwide that promotes peace, respect for human rights, justice and reconciliation throughout the world.
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Linkedin Minh Nguyen and Thinh Nguyen (Reuters) Hanoi, Vietnam  Thu, March 26, 2020 14:03 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d89950 2 Food Vietnam,burgers,coronavirus,COVID-19,novel-coronavirus,pandemic,health,food,food-business Free

You've got to eat it, to beat it: That's the philosophy of one Hanoi chef who is attempting to boost morale in the Vietnamese capital by selling green, coronavirus-themed burgers.

Laughing in the face of the global pandemic, Chef Hoang Tung and his team now spend their days molding dozens of green-tea stained burger buns complete with little "crowns" made of dough to resemble microscopic images of the virus.

"We have this joke that if you are scared of something, you should eat it," said Tung, at the Pizza Home takeaway shop in downtown Hanoi.

"That's why the coronavirus isn't scary anymore after you eat a burger in the shape of the virus itself. That way of thinking spreads joy to others during this pandemic," said Tung.

The shop has sold around 50 burgers a day, despite the growing numbers of businesses in Vietnam which have been forced to close because of the virus.

In mid-February, Vietnam said all known 16 COVID-19 cases at the time had recovered, but that changed after an influx of overseas visitors and returning Vietnamese citizens brought an uptick in cases.

There are now 148 recorded cases of the virus in Vietnam, but no reported deaths, according to the health ministry.

Authorities in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have ordered that all non-essential businesses should close although some food outlets, including Tung's takeaway shop, are still open.

Taking his grandson out for a Coronaburger, Dang Dinh Quy, 66, viewed the luminous green burger as a morale-boosting treat.

"This coronavirus is very dangerous. But if we eat a burger in its shape, in our minds its like we are already victorious," said Quy.

"If you want to beat it, you've got to eat it first".
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Linkedin Arya Dipa (The Jakarta Post) Bandung, West Java  Thu, March 26, 2020 12:54 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d8207c 1 National closed,malls,Bandung-West-Java,tutup,COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,virus-corona Free

At least six shopping malls in Bandung, West Java, have announced temporary or partial closures starting on Wednesday due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The first shopping mall to make the announcement was Miko Mall, on Tuesday, although several outlets offering basic goods and ATM centers remain open.

"To support the government's efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19, we are announcing the temporary suspension of our operations to April 10, except for outlets on the lower ground floor, the ATM center and tenants [offering] delivery services," the Miko Mall management announced on its official Instagram account on Tuesday.

Cihampelas Walk followed suit on its social media account, announcing its temporary closure from March 27 through April 9.

"To support maintaining the health of all Bandung residents, we will stop our operations from March 27 to April 9 -- except for Yogya Supermarket, Watsons, Century, Guardian, BJB Bank, and the ATM center. While we are closed, we urge all customers to stay home," it said.

Meanwhile, Paris Van Java Mall has announced on its Instagram account that it will be closing its doors from March 27 to April 2.

"However, Carrefour Paris Van Java [remains open] and can be accessed through the Concourse Level entrance. The supermarket is open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.," it noted.

Three other Bandung shopping malls suspending operations are the King Shopping Center (March 27-April 2), Paskal (March 28-April 10) and BTC Mall (March 27-April 5).

Earlier on March 14, Bandung Mayor Oded M. Danial issued several preventive measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the city, although closing shopping malls was not one of them.

"I urged all markets, shopping malls, shopping centers and modern outlets to continue [to offer] their services while implementing maximum health standards and preventative measures for COVID-19," Oded said at the time.

The mayor also shut down schools and several public facilities for two weeks starting March 16.

He also advised the city's residents to remain alert, follow a healthy lifestyle, avoid crowded areas and stay at home. (nal)
Its such a bizarre time were in, Brooks Crayton said. Kids look forward to their birthday all year. This was as much for me and my husband as for them. Even the feedback from the neighbors, it was a feel-good experience for everybody. Its spreading joy and kindness. It was an hour away from everything.
Uh-oh! It could be you, or it could be us, but there's no page here.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Just as soon as I was happy with Congress for striking a major deal to help the U.S. cope with the economic devastation brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, we get news that the Senate is eager to run away:

This is nuts. The Senate should say in Washington. The House of Representatives should return to Washington. And both should stay in Washington for the duration of the crisis.

In normal times, Im the first to defend the practice of giving members of Congress time to work in their districts. Congressional recess isnt vacation. Lawmakers meet with constituents and with district groups, facilitating the communication that is essential to healthy representation. It allows them to explain, in person, what theyve been doing in Washington, and it gives citizens the chance to tell their representatives about their grievances and their demands on the government. Yes, a lot of that can happen remotely and through district staff, but direct one-on-one time in the district remains meaningful. Its also a bit of an equalizer. Wealthy and well-organized constituents and interest groups can either travel to Washington themselves or pay someone to represent them directly to members of the House and Senate. District time gives everyone else an opportunity.(1)

And yes, Ill defend overseas travel during normal recesses, too. Junkets can be a perk of the job for those who like travel, but they really do educate Congress members about the rest of the world, so they  and their constituents  dont have to rely only on the president and the executive branch.

Needless to say, little or none of that will be happening over the next month.

No, Congress shouldnt be meeting in normal session. Members should be practicing the same distancing measures that the rest of us are subject to. But they need to be in Washington anyway.

For one thing, theres no way of knowing when some emergency measure will be needed. Congress can act without an actual quorum if everyone agrees to do so, but its certainly possible that they wont be able to get unanimous consent for something that almost everyone thinks is urgently needed. If thats the case, more members of Congress would have to return rapidly, something that may be difficult to do depending on just how dire circumstances get.

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Its not just about passing emergency bills, but also about shaping them. Leaders of the House and Senate are always going to have a lot to say about the content of these kinds of bills, but when the bulk of the membership is out of town, then the leadership will have even more unsupervised leeway. That can help things happen fast, but it can also yield less responsible, and less democratic, bills.

Congresss job is to hear whats happening in all 50 states and all 435 districts (plus Puerto Rico, Washington D.C, and a few other jurisdictions with nonvoting representation) and to put it on the national agenda. There will eventually have to be additional relief bills on top of the $2 trillion stimulus package thats expected to pass this week. Now is the time for individual members to start working on what will need to be done. Its also the time for the various congressional committees to gather information about the next round of problems and needs. They probably wont be able to hold regular hearings, but they can figure out how to substitute for that. It will be easier to do that if everybodys in Washington instead of scattered around the U.S.

Theres also an urgent need for oversight on implementation and administration of the three emergency relief bills that have been passed so far (that is, once the current deal becomes law). Thats trillions of dollars thats being spent, and its the job of Congress to devise ways to make sure its being spent well. A handful of congressional leaders cant do that; it takes the committees and subcommittees who know their particular areas. Its also more important than ever to oversee the executive branch as a whole. Not just because some officials might try to take advantage of the current situation to act corruptly, but mainly because many bureaucrats and many presidential appointees just arent going to know how to handle their normal responsibilities during a crisis of such historic proportions, and congressional oversight can help spread best practices and deter mistakes.

Congress should have prepared better long ago for keeping the government going during extraordinary national disruptions. But now, with the emergency here, is no time to disperse for who knows how long. Yes, it may be a hardship for some lawmakers to stay in Washington (and Id support spending money to help those members if needed), but thats what they signed up for. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should keep Congress in session and tell their members to stick around until the emergency is over.

(1) Of course, it's still not exactly egalitarian; members of Congress don't exactly meet with a random subset of all constituents at home, either. But they do interact personally with plenty of people who can't hire a lobbyist or travel to Washington themselves. And most of them do hold at least occasional events that are open to everyone who wants.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion

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This article originally appeared on the Fairfax City Patch

CENTREVILLE, VA  The restrictions put in place to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus are wreaking havoc on workers in all business sectors, with many getting furloughed or let go. The crisis is hitting day laborers, many of whom are recent immigrants, particularly hard as they see demand for their services decreasing by the day.

The Centreville Labor Resource Center, a program of the Centreville Immigration Forum, serves as a safe place where recent immigrants can get matched up with homeowners who need odd jobs done around the house or contractors who need workers for one- or two-day jobs. But fewer employers are coming into the center seeking workers as they put off projects until the coronavirus, or COVID-19, crisis begins to subside.

Although the Labor Resource Center remains open, the organization is temporarily shifting some of its resources to helping residents in the community  whom the center calls its members  get food and health care services. Many members and their families are struggling to pay the rent and pay for food.

Founded in 2011, the Centreville Labor Resource Center, located in a Centreville shopping center near the corner of Centreville Road and Lee Highway, connects its members with homeowners and contractors who need help with landscaping, painting, moving and similar types of work. Most of the center's members are immigrants from Guatemala who moved to western Fairfax County because they had family or friends who already lived there.

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"Our whole philosophy is we try to find people jobs so they can provide for themselves," said Terry Angelotti, executive director of Centreville Immigration Forum, which oversees the Centreville Labor Resource Center.



But with the spread of the coronavirus, fewer homeowners and small contractors are hiring people through the labor center. Springtime is typically when requests for workers begin to increase, with employers looking for help on landscaping jobs and other types of work. But the number of jobs has dropped off considerably, according to Angelotti.

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Last Thursday, only three workers were hired at the labor center. The next day, the center wasn't able to find any jobs for workers. And on Saturday, five members were able to find jobs. For all of last week, 23 people were hired through the Labor Resource Center compared to 43 people who were hired during the same week in 2019, Angelotti told Patch.

Members of the Centreville Labor Resource Center paint the sign used on the front of the center. (Courtesy of Terry Angelotti)

Prior to the opening of the center in 2011, large numbers of workers would wait in front of the Centreville Public Library, located down the street from the center, hoping for contractors to drop by and hire them for a one-day or two-day jobs. The library is still used as a gathering place for workers to connect with contractors. But residents also are using the Centreville Labor Resource Center because it's safer and its formal structure makes it harder for employers to renege on their signed agreements to pay workers.



Local residents who use the Labor Resource Center typically find most of their work in the warmer months before jobs begin to dry up in the winter. If the coronavirus crisis had hit in the autumn, the impact on the Labor Resource Center's members would not have been as drastic, Angelotti said.



"Our members make most of their money in the spring, summer and early fall and then live off those wages in the winter," Angelotti said. "But now their resources are depleted. They budgeted to make it to spring when the jobs would pick up. This is the worst time it could have happened, quite honestly.

With fewer employers using the Labor Resource Center, Angelotti said her group is now is looking at how it can help connect its member with food supplies and health care.



The Centreville Immigration Forum partners with Western Fairfax Christian Ministries in Chantilly and is hoping to deepen its relationship with the group. Last week, Western Fairfax Christian Ministries prepared 22 bags of emergency food and handed them out to members at the labor center.

With its Labor Resource Center less busy, Angelotti is trying to determine how the center could be used during the crisis. She said the center is considering becoming a distribution spot for food or delivering food to its members' homes.

Along with helping local residents find jobs, the center has an "accompaniment program" where volunteers agree to drive the center's members to medical appoitments, legal appointments, or getting their children registered for school.



Angelotti said the center was forced to suspend the accompaniment program because most of the volunteers are retired people who are sheltering at home to avoid coming into contact with the coronavirus.

Some of the center's volunteers are so dedicated to the work that they do not seem to be as nervous about the coronavirus as they should be, Angelotti said. For some of the elderly volunteers, she has instructed them to stay at home. Some can do their work remotely on a computer, she said.

The Centreville Immigration Forum has only four paid employees, including Angelotti. The group does have an open position for a community organizer for which it is accepting applications and resumes. And by the end of the year, the group wants to hire a second community organizer who would focus on reaching out to the growing number of recent immigrants who are women and are in need of day jobs.

The Centreville Immigration Forum holds drop-in English classes and training classes where members can learn skills such as how to lay tile as well as painting and lanscaping.



Angelotti said the Centreville Immigration Forum has had a good relationship with Fairfax County since it started almost a decade ago. The forum relies almost exclusively on private donations, many of which are from churches in the area. However, over the past two years, the group has received funding from Fairfax County.

The group also has a positive relationship with the Fairfax County Police Department, particularly the Sully district police station near where the labor center is. The Fairfax County police have made it clear that they do not view immigration enforcement as part of their job, Angelotti said.

"I would say the police are the ones who value us the most because it gives them a way to build relationships with the immigrant, low-income community," she said.

Police officials will attend Centreville Immigration Forum fundraising events such as its annual Fourth of July picnics and Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. "They are very supportive of what we do," she said.

The Fairfax County Police Department has many officers who also speak Spanish. But many immigrants in the area are indigenous people from Guatemala who don't know Spanish and instead speak a Mayan language.

"That was really helpful for the police to learn that some of these Guatemalans may not even speak Spanish," Angelotti said.

Aside from helping its members find jobs and food, the Centreville Immigration Forum also is working on ensuring the members are getting proper health care because most of them dont have health insuranace.

"Were worred about whats going to happen to the worker community if someone gets sick. They live in close quarters. Were afraid the coronavirus could spread quickly," she said.



Because they must stay at home, the group's older volunteers can no longer drive members to HealthWorks facilites in Herndon or Reston where free comprehensive health care is provided.

The coronavirus crisis has created new dilemmas for Angelotti and her group's members. "How are they going to get to medical care? What kind of medical care thats within walking distance?" Angelotti asked, although she sounded confident she would find a way.

To hire labor through the Centreville Labor Resource Center, visit its website. The Centreville Immigration Forum also welcomes donations. In these difficult times, the group also is in need of volunteers.

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BANKS and vulture funds are going to profit from the coronavirus outbreak and it's "not acceptable" the Dail has been told.

Sinn Fein finance spokesman Pearse Doherty made the claim as TDs debate emergency legislation to deal with the crisis.

A three month payment break for mortgages was announced by banks last week, but Mr Doherty said financial institutions are still seeking to profit on interest payments.

He told the Dail: "The banks came out with great fanfare and said a moratorium or three-month break would take place.

"The reality is that these banks are going to profit on the back of the pandemic and its not acceptable."

He said Bank of Ireland's website "shows this very clearly" and that "somebody with a 30-year mortgage of 200,000 will pay 1,804 extra because of this three-month break to the bank.

"That is how much extra the bank will take from that customer. This is not acceptable."

"It is absolutely scandalous and you need to call them to task," Mr Doherty told Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe.

Mr Doherty also accused the insurance industry of "trying to wriggle out of the commitments they have made to policyholders" who have paid "an arm and a leg" over the years.

Mr Doherty made his remarks during the debate on economic measures in the legislation, including the play to pay wage subsidies to employers whose businesses have been impacted by coronavirus but retain their staff.

Independent TD Denis Naughten also raised the issue of the three-month mortgage breaks which he said had been a "very welcome development".

But he said it had been brought to his attention that Ulster Bank are implementing it in a "different manner" to the other mainstream banks.

He said a constituent who has a mortgage with the bank has claimed that "rather than putting the three-month freeze to the end of the mortgage, Ulster Bank are actually adding it on to the existing mortgage term, which means there's an increase in payments."

That means the principal and the interest has to be paid on top of the existing mortgage, Mr Naughten said.

He said additional financial pressure should not be put on families.

Mr Naughten said: "There is an agreement there to put the repayments to the end and extend the lifetime of the mortgage by three months.

"That should be implemented across the board."

Earlier Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe told the Dail that the cost of the economic interventions being made come to an estimated 300m per week.

"That cost could grow, depending on the challenge we face, or it could diminish if we are successful," he said.

Mr Donohoe picked up on comparison made by Fianna Fail TD Michael McGrath to the response to the crisis being like a wartime effort.

The Minister said: "He is correct because what we are looking to do is defeat something that poses a risk to so many"

He also said the effort "can bring people together".

Mr Donohoe said it's "vital" that there be a collective EU response.

He added: "I do understand that concerns about moral hazard sometimes play a very prominent role in those kinds of debates, such concerns have to be seen in the light now that we have European neighbours and friends who are experiencing a loss of life on a daily basis that is truly comparable to what sometimes happens in wars."

He said that's what Ireland is devoting resources to "try to stave off and reduce in our own country."

This comes after Taoiseach Leo Varadkar suggested that the freeze on all creche fees for three months under emergency measures to deal with Covid-19 may not be rolled back entirely once the crisis is over.

Mr Varadkar said that while some measures like the moratorium on rent increases and evictions would be temporary and hopefully only for 12 weeks, the actions taken in the childcare sector may not be.

Under measures secured by Children's Minister Katherine Zappone at a Cabinet meeting earlier this week childcare workers are to be paid in full and parents won't have to pay creche fees for three months while keeping their child's place.

This is to ensure creches can reopen once the crisis has passed and to provide assurance to parents and workers in the sector.

Opening a special Dail debate on emergency legislation on Thursday, Mr Varadkar said some emergency policy changes could make sense as longer term policies.

He added: "When it comes to childcare, our plan had always been to expand ECCE [Early Childhood Care and Education], and to expand the National Childcare Scheme incrementally, thereby reducing the amount parents have to pay.

"In some ways we've done that in one fell swoop, an incremental measure done very quickly. We might decide, perhaps as a House, not to rollback that entirely."

He has introduced the latest raft of emergency legislation in saying the Dail is meeting to take unprecedented action to deal with an unprecedented emergency.

He said Ireland is in a better position to respond to the threat posed by coronavirus due to preparations for a no-deal Brexit.

He said plans were made to protect supply chains were and money was set aside in prudent economic planning and all of this will help with the crisis posed by the virus.

Mr Varadkar said it means some plans can simply involve rubbing out Brexit and writing in coronavirus.

He added: Were in a much stronger position as a result.

Mr Varadkar praised the Opposition for the constructive role it has played and said the government is grateful for the goodwill and cooperation

Mr Varadkar said: When face with a common foe we can put aside our differences to work together for the good of the country to protect livelihoods and save lives.

The laws that will be debated today provide strong new powers to temporarily ban evictions and freeze rents.

The wide-ranging Bill also allows for the Governments planned wage subsidies and includes measures to make it easier for health care professionals to re-register and return to work.

Another section of the law deals with mental health tribunals.

The law also allows former soldiers to re-join the Defence Forces at the same rank at which they left.

Visit our Covid-19 vaccine dashboard for updates on the roll out of the vaccination program and the rate of Coronavirus cases Ireland

Read More

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald is missing the special Dail debate on the Covid-19 emergency legislation because she is sick with a head cold.

Ms McDonald said she woke up with a head cold, would be talking to her doctor later in the day and is now lying low, staying home.

In a tweet on Thursday morning, she said: Woke up this morning with a head cold. Talking to my GP later. For now lying low, staying home. Over to @PearseDoherty to lead the charge at todays Dail sitting. Stay safe everyone.

A Sinn Fein spokesman said Ms McDonald was staying away from Leinster House as a precautionary measure as she does not want to put anyone at risk. The party will disclose later if the Dublin Central TD has to be tested for Covid-19 or not.

Sinn Fein finance spokesman and the partys deputy leader in the Dail Pearse Doherty will lead the party in the 12-hour debate on emergency measures to freeze rents, ban evictions, and provide emergency income support to workers laid off because of the public health restrictions.

Earlier this month, Ms McDonalds children were forced to self-isolate at home after their school had one of the first confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Ireland.

Speaking in the Dail at the time said it has been no craic whatsoever for her son and daughter.

I can assure the Dail that their initial delight at the gift of two weeks off school has well and truly passed, and they have really learned the meaning of that saying be careful of what you wish for," she said.

Its no visitors, no sports, no trips out with friends, no craic whatsoever and reality has dawned on them pretty quickly.

So its a trying time and our family and our school community has been thrown a bit of a curve ball to say the least.

All primary and secondary schools in the State have since been closed as part of measures aimed at restricting the spread of the virus.
Southeast Texas grocery and other retail stores are now required to patrol and limit large groups attempting to enter their businesses for shopping  or face a $1,000 fine or 180 days in jail.

But exactly how the authorities will enforce this new regulation is unclear.

After spending much of Tuesday night and Wednesday morning debating a stay-at-home order, judges in the six counties that make up the Southeast Texas Regional Operations Center decided instead to add a one-page addendum to their current orders.

Jefferson Countys was signed just after 2 p.m. Wednesday and the other coalition counties  Jasper, Hardin, Newton, Orange and recently added Tyler  are expected soon to follow suit.

Related: SE Texas residents could soon be asked to stay home

Hardin County Judge Wayne McDaniel told members of local media during a Wednesday afternoon briefing that the stay-at-home order the judges were building had many proposed exceptions, such as allowing students to feed animals being raised for extracurricular activities and allowing the logging industry to continue normal operations.

Ultimately, he said, this change was determined to be more efficient and easier to understand.

The addition will limit households to sending one adult to stores and retail establishments  grocery stores, warehouse stores, big-box stores, any store within a strip center or mall, liquor stores, service stations, convenience stores and farmers markets  with a few exceptions.

More Information Helpful numbers (409) 550-2536: Hotline for residents of Jefferson, Hardin, Jasper, Orange and Newton counties who have symptoms that could be coronavirus and want to be tested. The hotline is active Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. In off hours, callers will be directed through an automated menu to their county's health department. 211, option 6: For general coronavirus inquiries. See More Collapse

We want businesses to continue to serve our citizens and to continue to keep their employees working and receiving paychecks, a news release from the Southeast Texas Regional Emergency Operations Center said. We are asking all businesses to direct their management to enforce these orders as well as the appropriate social distancing requirements.

McDaniel said the judges intention was never to implement a 24-7 lockdown of residents.

The order does not apply to individuals who require assistance due to physical or medical needs or parents of children for whom there is no alternative care.

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Jefferson County Judge Jeff Branick said, prior to issuing this order, that judges were getting reports from law enforcement about large families  a father, mother and seven children in one instance  making group trips to the grocery store.

Thats not practicing good social distancing, Branick said, adding that this was one of the main situations the judges were trying to prevent.

West of Houston on Wednesday, Waller County Judge Trey Duhon said an address from President Donald Trump emphasizing getting Americans back to work influenced his decision not to issue a stay-at-home order. But McDaniel said the White House comments were not weighed when making the decision locally. He said he didnt know what Trump had said about the issues in the past few days.

However, McDaniel acknowledged that Texas Gov. Greg Abbotts decision not to issue a stricter statewide order did factor into the decision.

Branick said Wednesdays amendment makes Jefferson County emergency order very similar to stay-at-home orders issued for Houston, Austin and San Antonio.

Youre just trying to thread the needle on the difference between public safety and public health and the livelihood of single mothers that depend on working in the store to pay their rent and raise their children, Branick said.

Related: Southeast Texas ports keep moving in pandemic

To follow the order, Branick said he requested stores use loss-prevention officers or members of management to watch entrances to the stores and break up large groups.

They didnt want to self-enforce, so thats why we had to pass this order, he said. The order will serve more to tighten existing regulations and impose a stiffer penalty for violating them, rather than add any new precautions.

Market Basket President Skylar Thompson said he first heard about the order through local news and as of Wednesday evening already put up signage saying only one adult per family can come into the store.

We started with putting up signs and making people aware, but its a challenge to tell people they have to leave if they didnt hear about it, he said. It will be challenging to enforce that on a store level.

He said his Louisiana stores already had to work under nearly shelter-in-place policies, but a limit on groups of people was not included in that order.

A violation of the amendment is punishable by a fine of no more than $1,000 or up to 180 days in jail.

As for shopkeepers who may be worried about the penalty, McDaniel encouraged them to please use common sense.

Jefferson County Sheriff Zena Stephens said she anticipates deputies will respond to this order in a similar way to those that already limit the number of people who can congregate.

What were practicing right now is were riding around and patrolling the community but telling folks we want them to be outside but keep safe distances, she said. Well have to start doing the same things in terms of how many people are in grocery stores. Its going to be an endeavor, its not going to be easy.

McDaniel said he anticipates members of law enforcement will make random stop-ins at certain stores.

Related: Beaumont ISD votes to pay all employees during coronavirus closures

Stephens anticipates grocery stores and other included businesses will be issued citations for violating the order.

Officials on Wednesday afternoon also released an updated number of positive cases, calls and tests conducted. As of Wednesday afternoon, no new cases were announced in any of the five counties, keeping the total number at 10.

Orange County Judge John Gothia said the counties have received negative test results.

One of these on Wednesday was the wife of Jefferson County Judge Jeff Branick, who was tested early Sunday morning after the pair spent four hours in a local hospital emergency room as she was exhibiting symptoms that could be consistent with COVID-19.

As a result, Branick, who had been self-quarantining but had no symptoms, will be allowed to return to work.

So far, the screening and testing hotline has received 832 calls, and 187 people have been referred for testing.

Just under 30 people were tested at Jefferson Countys drive-thru testing site Wednesday and tests still were averaging about 5 minutes per patient.

The drive-thru testing site was first opened Tuesday. Only individuals who have been screened and given a unique number and appointment time will be allowed into the area.

The testing site has more than 200 test kits and more were expected to be delivered on Thursday.

Three people scheduled for a test did not show up. McDaniel said, if it hadnt already been done, he would make sure those people were called for more details, just as if they are or should be self-quarantining.

Jacob Dick contributed to this story.

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US Army leaders said Thursday that two field hospitals are on their way to New York City and will be able to begin treating patients at the Javits Center on Monday.

The Army combat units from Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Campbell, Kentucky, will include as many as 700 personnel and almost 300 beds. Those medical personnel will also be able to help staff additional beds and medical equipment that are being brought in by state and local authorities.

Gen. James McConville, chief of staff of the Army, said they will begin setting up the units this weekend at the center. Officials expect there will be a couple thousand beds in the center to treat patients that do not have the virus.

An Army combat hospital from Fort Carson, Colorado, will be heading to Seattle. McConville said advance staff are already there, and are working with local officials to review several potential locations to set up the unit.

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One more person from Haryana's Panipat district tested positive for coronavirus on Thursday, taking the total number of COVID-19 cases in the state to 18, officials said.

The total number of positive cases from Panipat have reached three, the state's health department said.

The number of positive cases reported from Gurugram stand at 10, two cases are from Faridabad and one each has been reported from Palwal, Panchkula and Sonipat.

The test reports of 120 samples are still awaited.

Earlier, a 21-year-old nurse from Panipat, who works in a private hospital in Gurugram, had tested positive for coronavirus.

The nurse had travelled to her hometown Panipat over a week ago from Gurugram.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bengaluru: Making it the second coronavirus death in Karnataka, COVID-19 test results of a 75- year-old woman who had died on Wednesday has come out as positive, Medical Education minister K Sudhakar said.

"I regret to inform that the COVID-19 test result has come out as positive for patient, who had succumbed to death yesterday. The govt stands committed to curb the spread of Corona Virus in the state. Please stay home, stay safe," Sudhakar tweeted on Thursday.

I regret to inform that the COVID-19 test result has come out as positive for Mallika Bai, who had succumbed to death yesterday. The govt stands committed to curb the spread of Corona Virus in the state. Please stay home, stay safe   Dr Sudhakar K (@mla_sudhakar) March 26, 2020

Health and Family Welfare minister B Sriramulu too said the lab reports regarding the death on Wednesday have come and it has come out as positive, and death was due to COVID-19.

The exact cause of her death would be known only after the final report comes, both ministers had said on Wednesday.

The woman from Gauribidanur in Chikkaballapura district, had returned from Mecca in Saudi Arabia recently.

Sharing details about the woman, Sriramulu in a tweet on Wednesday had said, she died at Bowring hospital here at 1 am, and was suffering from diabetes, chest pain and hip fracture.

The patient was undergoing treatment in isolation ward at a hospital in Gauribidanur, later for more treatment she was shifted to Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases in Bengaluru, from where she was shifted to Bowring hospital on Tuesday," he had said.

This is the second coronavirus fatality in the state.

Earlier this month, a 76-year old Kalaburagi man died "due to co-morbidity and was also tested positive for COVID- 19", becoming the country's first coronavirus death.

According to a bulletin by state health department last evening, a total of 51 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed in the state, which included one death and three discharged.
Why many passengers grounded by COVID-19 aren't getting refunds for cancelled flights

Would-be travellers are being denied refunds from major Canadian airlines for trips cancelled by the carriers because of COVID-19.

That wasn't the case until recently. Now, anyone without travel insurance will only get a travel credit, good for 24 months.

Grounded passengers who spoke with CBC News are angry the airlines are keeping their money for trips not taken and services not delivered.

In one case, a group that was heading to the Dominican Republic for a destination wedding on March 25 is out about $80,000, said bride-to-be Jillian Wilson of Stratford, Ont.

She said Sunwing initially told the group of 43 people it would refund the money but then changed its policy, saying only travel credits would be issued.

The travel credits are good for 24 months after the original travel date. WestJet and Air Canada have implemented the same policy.

"I don't think it's fair," said Wilson, who points out many of the people who had booked have since been laid off or could be in the coming weeks.

"We paid for a trip and they are the ones who cancelled. We don't really understand where our money is being used when we haven't been on an airplane, we haven't been at the resort, we haven't eaten the food. So why can't they give us our money back?

Submitted by Jane Henderson

On March 15, Jane Henderson of Victoria booked a trip home for herself and her husband from Manzanillo, Mexico. The next day, WestJet cancelled the flight.

"They took my booking and my money at a time when it seemed really clear to me that they had to know the flight I paid for was going to be cancelled," Henderson said.

CBC News asked why WestJet was taking bookings a day before cancelling. In a statement, the airline simply said: "We did not announce the suspension of our transborder and international flights until March 16."

Air Canada passenger Sandra Noronha of Toronto says she, too, was left with lots of questions but no refund.

Story continues

In January, she and her husband paid $1,900 when they booked a trip to Paris for April 30. Air Canada cancelled the flight a few days ago.

"How can you say if I can't make it, I lose my money, but if you can't make it, I lose my money again?"

Air Canada

Air Canada's website says the airline is issuing travel credits instead of refunds because "those cancellations that are caused by COVID-19 are beyond control."

"This continues to be a very dynamic situation," the airline wrote in an email to Go Public.

It says customers can get more information on the company's website.

'It's all a question of cash'

Dozens of people have contacted Go Public with similar complaints.

Consumer lawyer Jeff Orenstein says airlines can't force travellers who want refunds to take credit, because businesses have a legal responsibility to refund customers in the same method they paid.

Travel credits don't have the same value as a cash refund, he said, since the airlines are not offering price guarantees and because they force passengers to book with a specific airline  instead of being able to shop around for the best price when they plan to fly again.

"I think [travel credits] are considerably less valuable than what people paid with. By not offering the cash back, the airlines are going to get unjustly enriched because of it, and I don't think that is what the law requires them to do in these circumstances," Orenstein said.

To date, the federal government hasn't addressed financial support for airlines to deal with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Transport Minister Marc Garneau's office told CBC News "any proposed relief measures will be announced by the government in due course."

For now, it all comes down to money as the airlines try to stay afloat, said retired Air Canada executive John Gradek, who is now a faculty lecturer on airlines at McGill University in Montreal.

Airlines have little to no revenue coming in, yet still have significant expenses to cover, he said.

"It's all a question of cash."

Francois Sauve/CBC

WestJet says it is being as flexible as it can in a situation that's changing rapidly.

"This situation evolved and continues to evolve rapidly as new announcements are made by various governments, organizations and agencies," spokesperson Morgan Bell wrote in an email to Go Public.

WATCH | How to fight for a refund for your cancelled flight:

Sunwing said it initially offered customers a choice between a future travel credit valid for 12 months and a full cash refund. But after the federal government announced its non-essential travel advisory on March 13, Sunwing adjusted its policy "to be aligned with all other Canadian airlines and tour operators, so that all customers are treated consistently," spokesperson Jacqueline Grossman wrote in an email.

There are two avenues of recourse for customers, according to both Gradek and Orenstein.

Grounded travellers can try to dispute the charge through their credit card company or take the airlines to small claims court.

Passengers can also file a complaint with the Canadian Transportation Agency, but chances are those complaints will go nowhere.

The CTA has issued a statement siding with the airlines on the issue of travel credits, raising questions on whether passengers who complain will get a fair hearing.
The United Nations has condemned the terrorist attack on a Gurudwara in Kabul that killed at least 25 people, with the UN chief calling for the perpetrators of such crimes to be held accountable and the world body emphasising that there can be no justification for the killing of civilians at a religious house.

At least 25 worshippers were killed and eight others injured when a heavily armed suicide bomber stormed his way into a prominent Gurudwara on Wednesday in the heart of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, in one of the deadliest attacks on the minority Sikh community in the strife-torn country.

The Islamic State (IS) terror group, which has targeted Sikhs before in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack on the Gurudwara in Shor Bazar area at about 07:45 (local time) as 150 worshippers were inside the building.

High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) Miguel Angel Moratinos expressed his "dismay" at the terrorist attack at the Gurudwara, which killed 25 victims, including a child.

The "despicable attack comes at a time when the world is facing a pandemic which adversely impacts all of us, requiring us to stand together as "One Humanity', Moratinos said.

He stressed that attacks targeting sacred sites and worshippers are intolerable and have to stop. Recalling the UN Plan of Action to Safeguard Religious Sites, he called on all governments and relevant stakeholders to support the implementation of the plan to guarantee the sanctity of worship places and the safety of worshipers.

Moratinos said the latest attack adds to an expanding number of attacks targeting various faith communities around the world. He reiterated that such outrageous acts of terror should not dissuade us from working together to promote solidarity, respect, and peace globally.

On behalf of the UNAOC, the High Representative expressed his condolences to the victims' families and conveys his solidarity to the people and the Government of Afghanistan

The Secretary-General condemns the attack in Kabul on a Sikh-Hindu temple in which dozens of civilians were killed and injured.

He expresses his deepest sympathies to the families of the victims and wishes a speedy recovery to those injured, Secretary General Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement on Wednesday.
BRUSSELS - EU ambassadors reached a deal Thursday to start the EU military operation Irini to monitor the UN arms embargo on Libya, ANSA was told by several diplomatic sources. The mission will take the place of the current anti-trafficking operation Sophia, the mandate of which will end at the end of March. Several unresolved issues have been resolved over the past weeks but that of ports at which to disembark migrants rescued at sea and how to redistribute them afterwards was still under debate. Irini will have air, naval, and satellite means at its disposal and though rescuing migrants will not be part of its mandate, on the basis of international law the ships taking part in the operation will be obliged to rescue any at risk of growing at sea.
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Linkedin Namira Samir (The Jakarta Post) London  Fri, March 27 2020

The informal economy is home to many high-risk jobs that attract people neither for their salary nor security. Such jobs draw many with limited choices and resources.



As the sector employs over 60 percent of Indonesias workforce, with their struggle and courage, they should be hailed as economic heroes.



Yet, many remain a shadow in official figures. And it is at a time like this, when a pandemic shakes up the globe, that we can truly see the consequence of ignoring the informal economy in our countrys statistics.



In developed countries with a small informal economy, it is fairly easy to cope with employment issues during this pandemic.



In Britain, the government agreed to pay 80 percent of wages of those not working due to the coronavirus crisis if their employer is unable to afford to pay them.



Meanwhile, the Indonesian government is still emphasizing social/physical distancing, as it attempts to focus on both keeping the economy afloat and protecting the lives of its citizens.



The livelihood of the low-income workers appeared to be a main concern in deciding against mimicking Chinas nationwide lockdown. What makes it even harder is the spatial distribution of the informal economy.



The International Labor Organization in 2018 found that people living in rural areas worldwide were twice as likely to work in the informal economy as urban populations.



Its still too early to make a correlation between geography and the risk of getting the coronavirus. However, there are significantly fewer healthcare facilities in rural areas than in urban areas.



When the virus reaches rural areas and infects low-income people in the informal sector they will have far less chance to heal.



The damage that the coronavirus continues to cause will eventually worsen conditions in the informal economy and Indonesia is ill-equipped to take care of this matter.



In the cities, while adequate healthcare facilities are just a stones throw away, the virus can spread easily due to dense areas and crowded public transportation. Whats more alarming is the increased area of overcrowded urban slums inhabited by most of the poor and informal workers.



The pandemic shows we cannot take the informal economy for granted. It is understandable for the state to invest in large-scale projects such as tourism that can increase the countrys economic growth, with the benefits somehow reaching informal workers, whose sources of income crisscross with the tourism industry.



However, if it is possible to make the grand gestures of strengthening economic growth, why is it so hard to document the informal economy?



Data unavailability prevents informed policy. But as clear as it gets, data also allows for saving of lives. Whatever choice the Indonesian government makes is a double-edged sword for the informal workers.



It can either ensure that their lives are protected or their jobs are secured, but there is no way that both things can be achieved.



Learning from this tragedy, the government can find ways to measure the economic activities, make them much better accounted for in the national statistics, and most importantly, design a sound social protection mechanism for the informal workers.



If the pandemic passes, our first reaction is to be grateful. But can such catastrophic impacts be avoided in the future?



Its not about just trying to get back to normal. In the Indonesian case, regarding the bulk of its economy, its about acknowledging some of the policy failures on the informal economy and ensuring the problem will not be repeated.



This pandemic is a nightmare for all, but its especially hard for those of the undocumented economy. They face difficult choices that most of us will never encounter in our lives. So the least we can do is to purchase daily necessities from those small, unregistered shops close to our homes.



And when this is all over, hopefully we will see a rebirth of the informal economy. Not in terms of how they operate, but in changed perspectives of how the informal economy should be defined.



It is an alternative, not a secondary economic sector. Most importantly, policymakers should finally start to work on redesigning the informal sector, starting with documenting the actors, their work and contribution.

______

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Police have been given the power to arrest people or fine them up to 960 for breaking coronavirus lockdown rules in England.

The government said the unprecedented measures were needed to reduce the spread of coronavirus, protect the NHS and save lives.

New public health regulations  which will expire in six months  allow police to instruct people violating the guidelines to go home, leave an area or disperse, and to ensure parents stop their children from breaking the rules.

Any adults who commit an offence under the new regulations will be handed 60 fines, reduced to 30 if payment is made within two weeks.

But if anyone has been fined for breaking the coronavirus lockdown before, the fine will be doubled to a maximum of 960.

People will not be convicted of an offence if they pay the money within 28 days, after which enforcement action will start.

Individuals who do not pay a fixed penalty notice under the Regulations could be taken to court, with magistrates able to impose unlimited fines, a Home Office spokesperson said.

If an individual continues to refuse to comply, they will be acting unlawfully, and the police may arrest them where deemed proportionate and necessary.

However, in the first instance the police will always apply their common sense and discretion.

Under the rules, people can only leave their homes for infrequent shopping for basic necessities, one form of exercise a day, medical needs, caring for a vulnerable person or going to work if necessary.

 Police Federation chair says it's not 'realistic' for officers to enforce all lockdown rules

Gatherings of more than two people in public spaces are banned, unless they are members of the same household or carrying out permitted work.

The full regulations also enforce the closure of non-essential shops and services.

Following the prime ministers lockdown announcement on Monday, British Transport Police announced the deployment of 500 officers at railway stations to ensure only those making essential journeys were catching trains.

The head of the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, previously said it was not realistic for stretched officers to check how many times people had exercised in a day or what they were shopping for.

Recommended People to be jailed for coughing on emergency workers

Certainly the police will get involved with more than two people gathering in the same place, but as far as policing the bread aisles in the supermarkets, or checking how many times people are going to the shops, thats simply impractical, John Apter told BBC News.

Forces across England and Wales have already drawn up contingency plans for losing significant numbers of staff in the outbreak, which will see them prioritise emergency response, serious crimes and threat to life.

Last week, senior officers told the Home Affairs Committee they will enact a graduated withdrawal of service if the situation worsens, in order to maintain basic functions and support the NHS.

Police recruitment centres have closed because of coronavirus, and leaders are appealing for voluntary special constables to leave their normal jobs and for retired officers to return.

The Home Office said 1,500 additional police officers had joined forces across England and Wales since September as a result of Boris Johnsons 20,000 pledge.

The government is allowing civil servants who are special constables to assist in the national effort to the greatest extent possible and will relax tax and pensions rules that deter retired officers from returning to the frontline.

Officials are speaking to the Security Industry Authority, which licences private security workers, about helping the national response to coronavirus.

Priti Patel, the home secretary, said: All our frontline services really are the best of us and are doing an incredible job to stop this terrible virus from spreading.

Thats why Im giving the police these new enforcement powers, to protect the public and keep people safe.

The announcement came hours after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said people who deliberately cough on emergency workers during the coronavirus outbreak will be jailed for up to two years.

Coughing will be charged as an assault on an emergency worker, or common assault if used against other key workers or members of the public.

The intervention came amid numerous reports of police and shop workers being deliberately coughed at by people claiming to have coronavirus.
Iraqi military on March 26 confirmed that two rockets hit inside Baghdad's highly fortified Green Zone, the base of Iraq's government and the US Embassy. According to the news agency AFP, the two rockets hit near the Baghdad Operations Command, which coordinates Iraqs police and military forces. In a statement released by the Iraqi military, the command centre is a few hundred metres away from the US Embassy, which has faced regular attacks of this magnitude in the past.

Read: UK Soldier, 2 Americans Killed After 15 Small Rockets Hit Iraqi Base

The statement further added that the rockets were fired from the al-Nahda area of Baghdad and were the latest attack to target Green Zone since three rockets hit an area near the embassy last March 17. According to reports, no casualties have been reported so far from the area. The US interests in Iraq have been hit by several rockets in this month alone with the most notorious being the Basmaya training camp and two separate attacks on Camp Taji.

Read: US Targeted Again, 3-5 Rockets Hit Near Embassy In Iraq's Baghdad

Attack on US interests

The Iraqi military on March 17 reported that two rockets hit a base hosting US-led coalition forces in Baghdad. A statement released by the military said that the rockets hit Basmaya base south of Baghdad late Monday night, without reporting any casualties. According to reports, the base at the time of the attack was also housing Spanish troops who are fighting ISIS in Iraq as part of US-led NATO forces.

Read: Multiple Rockets Hit Iraqs Military Base Where US, UK Troops Were Killed: Report

Read: Rockets Hit Iraq Base Housing Foreign Troops, Third Attack In A Week
Last week, in an escalating tit for tat with the United States, China announced the expulsion of more than a dozen American journalists working for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. The top editors of the three papers immediately issued statements condemning Chinas decision, and on March 24 they followed up by publishing a jointly written open letter to the Chinese government, calling the expulsions uniquely damaging and reckless in a time of global pandemic, a struggle that will require the free flow of reliable news and information.

American journalists werent the only ones affected, however. What has been left out of the news coverage and international condemnation of Beijings action are the job losses of at least six Chinese nationals employed at US news outlets: two Times news researchers, one Journal researcher, one Voice of America news assistant, and two CNN staffers. The Chinese government revoked their press credentials and forced them to sign an agreement that voluntarily terminated their employment. On March 19, a spokesperson for Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that the Chinese staffers have been managed per Chinese laws and regulations.

The workers havent spoken publicly about being forced out; Chinese authorities warned them about their future job prospects if they didnt comply or if they spoke to the press, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.

PREVIOUSLY: China expels American journalists at the worst possible time

The forced resignations have sent a distressing signal to the approximately two hundred Chinese nationals who work for foreign media bureaus in China. They worry their jobs could be on the line. There doesnt appear to be a logic to whom the Chinese authorities targeted; while four of the six individuals worked for the outlets designated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as foreign missions (in addition to the Times, the Post, and the Journal, Voice of America and Time magazine were listed), two were employees of CNN, which the ministry didnt target.

Its not like you say, Okay, I have all these pieces of evidence that suggest that my risk level is 90 percent or 10 percent or whatever, says Yuan Yang, a Beijing correspondent for the Financial Times. We just dont know, because it seems to be so inexplicable. What is frontline US media? What is second-line US media? After the US, what other countries might be next?

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An American journalist who was affected spoke on condition of anonymity about the larger repercussions of losing Chinese media workers. Its part of a broader campaign to dismantle foreign media in the country, and the effect is actually bigger than the expulsions, he said. The US media will, down the line one day, be able to replace its staff. But the entire Chinese staff system is on the breaking point. Who will want to still work for foreign media? Thats irreplaceable.

These staffers cant officially call themselves journalists. The Chinese government bars its citizens from working under that title for foreign media outlets. Instead, they are hired only as assistants, researchers, or for other auxiliary work, and must register with an agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Though these workers are on the payrolls of the news bureaus, the agency is technically their employer.

Despite these restrictions, many do work in the full capacity of journalists. A lot of the work behind the scenes is done by the Chinese staff, many of the interviews are done by Chinese staff, and even many stories are written by Chinese staff, says Maria Repnikova, a political scientist at Georgia State University. She notes that even with the experience of long-term foreign correspondents, the loss of bilingual Chinese staff will have significant consequences for the quality of coverage. Many China correspondents, she says, especially those new to the country, may not have the language skills or the cultural and political knowledge to independently carry out reporting work.

Without [Chinese staff], international news organizations will not be able to operate their China coverage, says Keith Zhai, a Reuters special correspondent covering Chinese politics. You can write about China from Washington, DC, or Sydney, but you are likely to report based on inaccurate information.

Chinese staff also often guide foreign correspondents toward necessary nuances in coverage. I am afraid that by losing these Chinese assistants, some US journalists will rely more on their preexisting frames about China, many of which are more or less biased, or at least are cliche, says Fang Kechang, a journalism professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chinese colleagues, he says, bring new perspectives in understanding China.

As an example, Fang says, international journalists commonly cast Chinese sources in one of two roles in their stories: the obedient masses brainwashed by the Communist Party, and the brave dissidents fighting against the governments authoritarian control.

Though their importance to foreign bureaus is widely acknowledged, many Chinese employees are paid just a fraction of what foreign correspondents in China earn. And because of risks to their safety, their work is under-credited, or sometimes anonymous. Sources and family members accuse them of being traitors; within their own companies, they feel like they are second-class citizens.

Zhai worries that operations in China for all international media companies could take a step backward if US news outlets dont stand up for their Chinese staff this time. A CNN spokesperson told me that the company is working to help the affected staff and to ensure that its China coverage is not compromised. Voice of America stated that it is committed to aiding its news assistant in every way available. The Wall Street Journal declined to comment, and the New York Times did not respond to a request for comment.

In the 1980s and 90s, Zhai says, foreign media bureaus couldnt freely hire Chinese citizens; they were assigned researchers by the government.

This could just be the beginning, he warned.

THE MEDIA TODAY: How metro papers are dealing with the pressure of COVID-19

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Shen Lu is a journalist based in Boston covering the Chinese diaspora, culture, and technology.
Food delivery prices have returned to normal levels after a short increase due to increased demand as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic. In early March, food delivery fees were 16.3% higher compared to early February. Since then, fees have returned to pre-quarantine levels and in some cases lowered as third-party food delivery companies and restaurants continue to work to provide an essential service.

FoodBoss, the largest online food ordering search engine in the U.S. that aggregates multiple food delivery services in one place, today released data demonstrating the impact the Coronavirus pandemic has had on the demand for food delivery.

The governors of Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, Washington, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and others, as well as numerous Mayors across the country, officially shut down dine-in options at restaurants and bars within their jurisdiction over the last few weeks. However, delivery and carry-out options are still permitted.

This comes weeks after many people already started practicing social distancing techniques, like staying indoors and avoiding crowds at restaurants. During this time, demand for food delivery has risen dramatically as one of the few options people can turn towards for a basic necessity.

FoodBoss found consumer demand for food delivery jumped 23.1% nationwide from February to March. On a city by city level, demand for food delivery increased:



19.6% in Chicago

12.7% in Philadelphia

9.0% in New York City

61.5% in Los Angeles

128.7% in Boston

As officials take more aggressive measures to fight the spread of COVID-19, it is likely more cities and states will follow suit and limit restaurants to delivery or carry out options only.

After an Initial Spike, Fees for Consumers Have Dropped

The increased demand initially caused a rise in food delivery fees. In early March, food delivery fees were 16.3% higher compared to early February. Since then, fees have returned to pre-quarantine levels and in some cases lowered as third-party food delivery companies and restaurants continue to work to provide an essential service in the face of the novel COVID-19 outbreak. An example is one food delivery service waiving delivery fees for consumers.

FoodBoss aims to help consumers. Users can compare food delivery prices and time estimates across multiple different food delivery services in one place. In cities where dine-in options have closed, there has been a rise in consumers searching based on estimated delivery times. In Chicago, the percent of users searching based on estimated delivery times jumped from 12.2% in February to 32.1% in March. Users are valuing faster delivery times more while in quarantine than previously before.

Ordering at off peak hours is the best way to get your food delivered faster. According to FoodBoss data, the least busy times to order food is 2pm on weekdays, before 12pm on Saturday, and before 11am on Sunday, though demand is fluid and could vary by day-to-day conditions in different cities.

Food delivery is in demand now more than ever before as a tactic to contain the spread of Coronavirus. As demand rises, expect consumer behaviors within the food delivery industry to evolve and adapt.

About FoodBoss

FoodBoss (foodboss.com) is a Chicago-based, venture capital funded online food ordering search engine. Their service allows consumers to search, compare, and select the best food delivery option from any restaurant available on their site. What makes FoodBoss unique is they enable users to see all restaurants that offer online ordering along with helping 3rd party delivery companies (Postmates, Caviar, UberEats, DoorDash, Delivery.com etc.) find hungry, eager consumers intent on ordering food. FoodBoss provides complete information to consumers by aggregating over 165,000 restaurants nationally, always finding the best deal on food delivery.
We are in the process now of testing 100 percent of the crew of that ship to ensure that we were able to contain whatever spread might have occurred there on the ship, Modly said in a briefing at the Pentagon. But I also want to emphasize that the ship is operationally capable and can do its mission if required to do so.
On Tuesday, a data collection company took smartphone location data and used it to publish the world's first Social Distancing Scoreboard. This is the first, admittedly rough, attempt to virtually estimate how well states and counties in the US are complying with the official guidelines to stay at home.

The company called Unacast is using anonymous GPS data collected from millions of smartphones to evaluate social distancing scores through this interactive project. While admitting that the current measures are only crude attempts based on the distance traveled by the phone user, the company says it is refining its technology to offer a more accurate picture. This could help enforce social distancing amidst the current coronavirus pandemic. Unacast obeys the EU's General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) as well as the California Consumer Privacy Act.

After founding the music streaming service TIDAL in Norway, Thomas Walle and Kjartan Slette wanted to understand where users went to concerts to create better playlists and recommendations. As there were no such insights available, or insights of how people move around in the world, in general, the pair built Real World Graph, and Unacast was born. With the arrival of COVID-19 Unacast adapted their product to create the Interactive Scoreboard, to measure and understand the efficacy of social distancing initiatives at the local level.

The Social Distancing Scorecard

The Unacast Scoreboard is simply a set of maps that show how much the average individual movement has decreased after the lockdown. The use of smartphone GPS-mediated location data can reflect such a decrease by measuring the total distance traveled before and after the first case of COVID-19 in each county.

According to Unacast, scores are calculated by combining "tens of millions of anonymous mobile phones and their interactions with each other each day" with further extrapolation of the results. This comparison was intended to tell how well people are following the lockdown norms  the social distancing score.

These scores are compared with the number of cases reported in each county and state, to generate a grade. The resulting analysis is projected as a map of the US with good social distancing success being represented in green and poor compliance as orange.

Currently, the Unacast Scoreboard is based on the overall reduction in the distance traveled per phone user. If people are staying at home except for occasional trips to buy food or medicine, there should be a sharp dip in the distance covered.

The company says it chose to focus on average distance traveled over other scoring metrics because it best matches the number of cases confirmed, and provides reliable measures even with changing data and many unknowns like home locations.

However, at present, this system does not have the capacity to assess how many people the user meets on the way or at the end. The company aims to look into how they can assess the number of people met by the smartphone user within any given area, as well as counting how many locations are visited by the user.

American scores only 'satisfactory'

The Scoreboard displays grades to reflect how well each state or county has been following social distancing measures effectively.

The social distancing scores are based on tracking the current GPS location data to that on any typical weekday, from millions of phones in any locality. Such data comes from the numerous apps on a typical smartphone that tracks one's location.

Overall, the USA gets a 'B' grade. The District of Columbia (D. C.), Alaska, Nevada, New Jersey, and Rhode Island are among the states with proper compliance (shown as an 'A'), as is Illinois, including Cook County, home to bustling Chicago. On the other hand, Wyoming earned the worst score, 'F'. Montana, Oregon, New Mexico, and Idaho are just ahead, but not by much, with a 'D'.

Overall, Northwestern States appear to be the least concerned about social distancing, while the Northeastern States are more compliant, as well as, to some extent, California and Texas.

'A' grades are assigned if the distance traveled within that location has come down by 40% or more. If there is less than a 10% reduction, or if people are traveling more than before, the location gets an 'F'.

The most significant reductions in distance come from heavily hit areas like New York City, where the distance traveled has gone down by 57%.

The benefits and limitations

The advantage is that such comparisons are detailed enough to allow a county-wise view of movements. On the flip side, this is not a scientific assessment, nor has it been reviewed by medical or public health specialists. Neither does it help to tell how far people stay away from each other when they do go out of their homes.

Recognizing the limitations of this early attempt, Unacast says it wishes to help experts judge how far people are complying with shelter in place orders, and whether they are going to work despite advice to the contrary. In the words of the company CEO Thomas Walle, "We can start to see and learn what states are getting this right."

Time trends important says Unacast CEO

Walle emphasizes that the learning from this Scorecard can only be measured as it shows travel trends over a series of weeks, signaling which states and counties are actually taking measures to restrict personal contact between people who are not staying together. This can also be correlated with the change in the number of COVID-19 cases to judge whether such measures are productive.

The US government is already discussing with technology-heavy monoliths like Facebook and Google to try and roll out a way to see if location data from these giants can be used to track and limit the spread of the illness. Such data would be anonymous, enabling the preservation of privacy. Rather than following the movements of individual users, which could be construed as 'spying' or 'infringement of privacy rights', the location data can be processed to yield movement patterns and group gatherings.

In this way, it could supply health and government officials with crucial information, such as whether people in groups are keeping their distance from one another.
By PTI

CHANDRAPUR: Amid travel restrictions due to the lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus, a 26- year-old daily wager walked over 135 km without food from Nagpur in Maharashtra to reach his home in Chandrapur.

As panic built up over the lockdown and poor people started returning to their homes, Narendra Shelke, who worked as a labourer in Pune, also decided to go back to his native Jambh village in Saoli tehsil of Chandrapur district.

He managed to catch the last train from Pune to Nagpur, but as the government later enforced restrictions on all sorts of travel, he got stranded in Nagpur.

READ| Government announces Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief package for poor

Unable to find any assistance and left with no other option, Shelke started a foot march on the Nagpur-Nagbhid road on Tuesday to reach his village in Chandrapur.

He walked for two days without food and survived only on water.

On Wednesday night, a police patrolling team spotted an exhausted Shelke at Shivaji square in Sindewahi tehsil, located around 135 km from Nagpur.

When the police asked Shelke the reason for violating the curfew, he narrated his ordeal and told them that he was walking since the last two days to reach his home, Sindewahi police station's assistant inspector Nishikant Ramteke said.

Shelke was immediately taken to a rural hospital in Sindewahi. After his medical checkup was done, a police sub- inspector brought a dinner box from his house for Shelke.

Later, after getting the nod from doctors at the hospital, the police arranged a vehicle to take the man to Jambh village, located around 25 km from Sindewahi, Ramteke said.

Shelke has been home-quarantined for 14 days as a precautionary measure, the official added.
By Online Desk

With the number of coronavirus cases in the country increasing at an alarming rate, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) have authorised 35 private labs to conduct the COVID-19 test. Seven labs in Maharashtra have been given the authorisation -- the most among all states while Delhi and Telangana have 6 and 5 facilities respectively.

Check out the full list here:
By Jan Strupczewski and Francesco Canepa BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde asked euro zone finance ministers during a videoconference on Tuesday evening to seriously consider a one-off joint debt issue of 'coronabonds' to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, four officials said. 'She said that we should seriously think about it, next to the use of the ESM (bailout fund) instruments. The Eurogroup did not discuss debt mutualisation at this stage,' one official involved in the meeting said

By Jan Strupczewski and Francesco Canepa

BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde asked euro zone finance ministers during a videoconference on Tuesday evening to seriously consider a one-off joint debt issue of "coronabonds" to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, four officials said.

"She said that we should seriously think about it, next to the use of the ESM (bailout fund) instruments. The Eurogroup did not discuss debt mutualisation at this stage," one official involved in the meeting said.

A second official confirmed that Lagarde put forward the idea, but said it ran into opposition from Germany, the Netherlands and other northern European countries that have long been against any joint debt issuance.

"She clearly said it should be a 'one-off' issuance," the second official involved in the meeting said.

"There was opposition from the usual corners, but also a lot of support beyond Club Med," the official said, referring to southern European countries.

The rebuff from northern countries shows how the 19-country currency bloc is still divided on sharing the burden of the crisis.

Officials said Lagarde did not go into details of the suggested one-off joint debt issue such as an amount, or the legal way in which such borrowing could be set up.

The ministers instead expressed broad support for the possibility that the euro zone's ESM bailout fund would extend precautionary credit lines, worth some 2% of a country's GDP, to member states that would like such a safety cushion.

A decision on whether to go ahead with that option will be taken by European Union leaders on Thursday.

The ESM credit line, kept in reserve, would allow governments to keep financing themselves in the markets at low rates and pave the way for unlimited ECB bond buying under the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) programme, if it is needed.

Officials said Lagarde considered the idea of a blanket ESM programme as good insurance policy -- a phrase also used by the chairman of euro zone finance ministers Mario Centeno after the videoconference.

But officials noted Lagarde considered the bank's own pandemic emergency bond purchases with 750 billion euros as a more flexible instrument to calm markets, given it was not linked to any conditions like OMT purchases were.

But it was clear the OMT option -- a tool announced at the height of the bloc's debt crisis in 2012 and as yet unused -- was very much in the arsenal and could be deployed as and when needed, officials said.

(Reporting by Jan Strupczewski, Editing by Louise Heavens and Catherine Evans)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Video surveillance captures him dragging her away just as the bus passes. Soon the freed hero is a wanted man again, once more suspected of murder. He goes on the run, insisting he is innocent, that the video is faked, all the while troubled by flashbacks that suggest maybe he's suffering PTSD-induced blackouts.

Assigned to the case is a young detective who has moved from the counter-terrorism unit to serious crime, specifically because it will help her career prospects. Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger, who is superb in the role) is clearly a good detective, but she is not popular; her colleagues mutter darkly that she's a "fast-track girl", and the suspicion that her rapid advancement may owe something to her closeness to former boss Danny Hart (Ben Miles) is not entirely misplaced.

There's a lot going on here, with nods to racism and the glass ceiling in the force, the complicated dynamics of a consensual sexual relationship with a superior (who also happens to be married), the pros and cons of having our every move (or close to it) tracked in the name of "safety" and the compromises that entails.

Laura Haddock as Hannah Roberts, barrister-turned victim.

There are also plot complications that come perilously close to contrivances, except they so closely echo what's happening in the real world that they aren't. The extensive use of facial recognition technology, a key element in the plot, has recently surfaced as a concern in many jurisdictions, including our own. The interconnectedness of police forces and security agencies and the Five Eyes intelligence community is similarly a real-world factor.
US reports more than 82,400 COVID-19 cases as Italys death toll surges past 8,000.

The United States now has more coroanvirus cases than any other country with over 82,400, according to Johns Hopkins University.

There were more than 81,700 known cases in China and 80,500 in Italy.

Over 120,000 people worldwide have recovered from COVID-19, while more than 23,000 people have died.

Italy reported the highest death toll with more than 8,200 deaths.

Here are the latest updates:

Thursday, March 26

22:00 GMT  US overtakes Italy, China in number of virus cases

Confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States reached 82,400 on Thursday, more than any other country, overtaking both Italy and China, the Johns Hopkins University tally showed.

China had 81,782 cases, and Italy had 80,589 cases.

20:41 GMT  G20 pledges $5 trillion to defend global economy against COVID-19

Leaders of the Group of 20 major economies pledged on Thursday to inject $5 trillion in fiscal spending into the global economy to blunt the economic impact of the coronavirus and do whatever it takes to overcome the pandemic.

Showing more unity than at any time since the 2008-2009 financial crisis that led to the G20s creation, the leaders said they committed during a video conference summit to implement and fund all necessary health measures needed to stop the viruss spread.

Read more here.





20:27 GMT  Control pandemic first, then open economy, Fed chairman says

The United States may well be in recession, but progress in controlling the spread of the coronavirus will determine when the economy can fully reopen, US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in a rare network television interview on NBCs Today Show.

Powell spoke just about an hour before federal data showed a record-breaking spike of unemployment claims to 3.28 million, evidence that social distancing to fight the pandemic has taken hold, and may have ended the countrys more than decade-long economic expansion.

Read more here.

20:19 GMT  Fox News slammed for talking hair, nails during pandemic

A Fox News host sparked a firestorm of outrage Thursday by voicing concern over how women are going to get their hair and nails done during the coronavirus pandemic.

This is not a priority, but women have to get their hair done, Ainsley Earhardt told viewers of US President Donald Trumps favorite conservative-leaning morning talk show, Fox and Friends.

Earhardt said she was talking about trivial everyday worries rather than the life-or-death issues which are of much larger importance.

Social media users described her complaint about the lockdowns and social distancing as vapid and vain.

20:13 GMT  HRW slams reckless Mexican leader over COVID-19

Human Rights Watch accused Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of setting a dangerous example amid the coronavirus pandemic by failing to respect social distancing.

Lopez Obrador had initially maintained his routine of public appearances and contact with supporters despite health authorities calling on Mexicans to take more precautions.

President Lopez Obradors behavior in the face of the COVID-19 crisis is a profoundly dangerous example that threatens Mexicans health, said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.

Late in February, after Mexicos first case had been confirmed the president blatantly misinformed the Mexican public, saying: According to the information available, it is not terrible or fatal. It is not even as bad as the flu,' HRW said.





19:52 GMT  As world struggles to stop deaths, far right celebrates COVID-19

A leader of the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), a neo-Nazi movement based in northern Europe, said that he welcomed the pandemic as a necessary step to help create the world that his group wants to see.

Read more here.

19:26 GMT  Italy rejects EUs draft on economic coronavirus response

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said he rejected draft proposals prepared by sherpas at a summit of European Union leaders intended to tackle the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus outbreak.

In a statement released by his office while the video conference between the leaders was still ongoing, Conte said the proposals were too timid and he gave the EU 10 days to come up with adequate solutions.

In a speech to the Italian Senate before the summit, Conte called for the launch of European recovery bonds aimed at financing a courageous economic response to the outbreak that has spread across the world.

19:22 GMT  Costa Rica confirms 30 new coronavirus cases, 231 total

Costa Ricas Health Minister Daniel Salas said that there are 30 new confirmed coronavirus cases in the Central American nation, bringing the total number or cases to 231.

19:08 GMT  Italys latest coronavirus deaths data omits 50 from Piedmont

Italys northern Piedmont region said that 50 people had died there from coronavirus in the last 24 hours, numbers which were omitted from the national tally released by the Civil Protection Agency.

The omission means that daily deaths amounted to 712 rather than the 662 officially reported earlier in the day, and marked an increase from the 683 registered the previous day.

18:54 GMT  France reports 365 more coronavirus deaths

France reported that 365 people, including a 16-year-old girl, had died from the coronavirus pandemic over the last 24 hours, the countrys highest daily toll.

Top French health official Jerome Salomon told reporters that a total of 1,696 people had died in hospital in France from the virus, emphasising that the toll does not include those who died at home or at retirement homes.

Salomon added that 29,155 people had tested positive for the virus so far in France, adding that the real number of cases was likely far higher as testing was reserved for high-risk patients.





18:30 GMT  South Africas coronavirus cases climb to 927

South Africas coronavirus cases rose sharply to 927 from 709 the previous day on the eve of a three-week lockdown.

As of today, the confirmed cases of COVID-19 in South Africa have risen by 218. This brings the total number of confirmed cases to 927, the health ministry said in a statement.

The continents most industrialised country goes under a 21-day military-patrolled total lockdown starting midnight Thursday in a bid to control the spread of the virus.

Addressing police officers just before they started deploying, President Cyril Ramaphosa warned people who try to violate the lockdown they will meet the full might of the law.

18:00 GMT  Nursing home deaths make up a third of Spanish coronavirus toll

A total of 1,307 elderly residents of Spanish nursing homes have died from coronavirus, roughly one-third of the countrys total death toll, radio network Cadena Ser.

In the Madrid region alone, nursing home deaths totalled 855 since the start of the epidemic, the radio network said, citing data collected by its local stations across Spain.





Nursing homes, whose elderly residents are highly vulnerable to the disease, have been particularly hard hit.

The Spanish government said it was still collecting data from all regions about nursing home deaths and could not confirm or deny the report. The Madrid regional government said the report was not official data, which it would share when it was are ready.

17:49 GMT  Coronavirus cases top 500,000 globally

More than 510,000 people around the world have now reported cases of coronavirus.

The total number of deaths from the disease are over 23,000, with nearly 123,000 reoveries reported.

17:40 GMT  India unveils $23bn package to help poor hit by COVID-19 lockdown

India has announced a $22.6bn economic stimulus plan that provides direct cash transfers and ensures food security measures, offering relief to millions of poor people hit by a nationwide lockdown to withstand the coronavirus pandemic.

The package was announced two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered a 21-day lockdown to protect the countrys 1.3 billion people from the new coronavirus. That has triggered supply constraints for essential items and panic buying, leaving the poor and daily labourers most vulnerable.

Read more here.

17:13 GMT  Italy death toll from coronavirus outbreak rises by 662 to 8,165

The death toll from an outbreak of coronavirus in Italy has grown by 662 to 8,165, the Civil Protection Agency said.

However, there appeared to be an error in the agencys data because it reported no deaths on Thursday in the third-worst-affected region, Piedmont, which would be unprecedented in recent days.

Separately, Piedmont authorities said their death toll had risen by 50 in the last 24 hours.

On Wednesday 683 people died. That followed 743 deaths on Tuesday, 602 on Monday, 650 on Sunday and a record of 793 on Saturday  the highest daily figure since the contagion came to light on February 21.

16:55 GMT  As COVID-19 rages, US slaps new sanctions on Iranian individuals

As Iran struggles to battle the spread of COVID-19, the United States heaped more economic pressure on the country by slapping a fresh round of sanctions on more than a dozen Iranian individuals and five companies.

The sanctions were announced by the US treasury after the family of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing more than a decade ago, said they believed he had died while in custody Iran, citing information from US officials

Read more here.

16:47 GMT  Sweden not closing metropolitan areas amid coronavirus outbreak, for now

Swedish health officials were not currently considering action that would close off main metropolitan areas to stem the coronavirus spread, an approach adopted in neighbouring Finland.

Although most of Swedens 2,800 diagnosed cases have affected the main metropolitan areas, the dissemination has affected all parts of the country, Public Health Agency epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said.

It appears that Sweden is coming into a phase where case numbers are rising, he added.

Compared to its neighbours, Sweden has adopted far less stringent measures to stem the spread of the virus.





16:40 GMT  Honduras registers first death in country from coronavirus

Honduras has registered its first death from the coronavirus outbreak, said on Thursday Francis Contreras, spokesman for the National Risk Management System.

There are 52 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Honduras.

16:35 GMT  First death from coronavirus reported in Kenya

Kenya confirmed its first coronavirus death, government spokesman Cyrus Oguna said, without providing further details.

Earlier the ministry of health reported three more cases of coronavirus, bringing the total number of infected people in the East African country to 31.





16:28 GMT  US virus deaths may top 80,000 despite confinement: study

COVID-19 could lead to more than 80,000 deaths in the US and overwhelm hospital capacity nationally as soon as early April even if social distancing measures are respected, new research has showed.

The US death toll for the pandemic has already soared past 1,000, with 68,000 confirmed infections.

16:22 GMT  Coronavirus death toll in Italys Lombardy rises by more than 385 in a day  source

The death toll from an outbreak of coronavirus in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italys contagion, has risen by more than 385 in a day to around 4,860, a source familiar with the data said.

The figure is up steeply compared to 296 deaths on Wednesday.

16:10GMT  China bars most foreigners to curb imported virus cases

China says it is temporarily barring most foreigners from entering the country as it seeks to curb the number of imported coronavirus cases.

The foreign ministry announced that even foreign citizens with residence permits will be prevented from entering starting on Saturday.

All visa-free transit policies will also be temporarily suspended.

People hike along a section of the Great Wall in Badaling in Beijing, on its first day of re-opening after the scenic sites coronavirus related closure [Thomas Peter/Reuters]

15:50 GMT  Tennis star Nadal calls on Spains athletes to raise 11m euros to fight coronavirus

Rafael Nadal has issued a rallying cry and called on Spanish athletes to help raise 11 million euros ($12.07 million) to help fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Spain is one of the most badly affected countries in the world with over 56,000 cases and the parliament voted to extend the coronavirus lockdown to at least April 12 after the death toll rose to over 4,000.

15:26 GMT  Bangladesh troops on streets to enforce lockdown

Bangladesh on Thursday deployed its army to enforce a nationwide lockdown, asking people to stay at home to stunt the spread of the new coronavirus.

On Wednesday, Bangladeshs Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina announced that the government will provide free food and cash for the poor for the next six months.

Hasina also declared an incentive package for the countrys export-oriented garment industry to help pay millions of workers.





15:16 GMT  Russias Putin proposes lifting sanctions on essential goods amid coronavirus

Russian President Vladimir Putin told the G20 video-summit on Thursday that participating countries need a common plan to support their economies amid the coronavirus outbreak and he proposed a moratorium on sanctions related to essential goods.

Putin also proposed creating a special fund under International Monetary Fund control to fight the spread of the virus.

15:03 GMT  IATA urges G20 to support airline industry

The International Air Transport Association urged the G20, a group of the 20 major economies, to act quickly to prevent irrecoverable damage to the airline industry that has been shaken by the coronavirus crisis.

In an open letter, on the day G20 leaders were meeting, the worlds largest airline body asked governments to provide, or facilitate financial support for the industry.

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic around the globe and the resulting government-mandated border closings and travel restrictions have led to the destruction of air travel demand, IATA Chief Executive Alexandre de Juniac wrote in the letter.

14:43 GMT  Anyone coughing at UK police, shop workers faces two years in jail

Anyone claiming to have coronavirus who deliberately coughs at emergency workers faces being jailed for two years.

Britains Director of Public Prosecutions Max Hill said there had been reports in recent days of people coughing in the faces of police, other emergency workers and shop staff. Those responsible could face charges of common assault, he said.

Emergency workers are more essential than ever as society comes together to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, Hill said in a statement.

14:39 GMT  Nine doctors die from coronavirus in Philippines

Nine doctors have died in the Philippines from the coronavirus, the countrys top medical association said, as hospitals were overwhelmed and medics complained about a lack of protection on the frontlines.

The announcement of the doctors deaths heightened fears that the scale of the health crisis in the Philippines is much worse than is being officially reported, with the confirmed virus death toll at just 38.

The Philippine Medical Association said a ninth doctor had died of the virus, and that health workers were not getting enough protection.

14:28 GMT  US jobless claims soar beyond 3 million as COVID-19 layoffs hit

More than three million Americans filed new claims for unemployment insurance last week, shattering the previous record as the first wave of coronavirus layoffs hits the United States economy.

Some 3.283 million people filed initial jobless claims for the week ending March 21, the US Bureau of Labour Statistics said on Thursday. The tsunami of layoffs swamped the previous record of 695,000 newly jobless set in October of 1982.

Read more here.





14:16 GMT  Polish priest offers drive-thru confessions to beat coronavirus

A parish priest in western Poland is offering his flock the possibility of Easter confessions from the comfort of their own car as social distancing to fight the coronavirus becomes the new norm.

Weve already done a practice run I have an appointment with a family of five tomorrow and next week Im due to hear a parishioner confess every sin from his entire life, Father Adam Pawlowski told AFP news agency.

The priest from the western village of Rogalin plans to park his car in an alley by the church and will roll down his window for the parishioner parked at least 1.5 metres (five feet) away to avoid any potential coronavirus infection.

14:10 GMT  Germany aims to speed up virus diagnosis, treatment

The German Ministry of Education and university hospitals have come together to share knowledge about the new coronavirus and advance new strategies for diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19.

The alliance aims to carry out work on tests, drugs and a possible vaccine. The initiative is based on a proposal by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Germany has increased its ability to test for the new coronavirus to 500,000 a week.

14:03 GMT  Lebanon to impose overnight shutdown to confront coronavirus pandemic  minister

Lebanon will begin an overnight shutdown from 7 pm to 5 am, with some exceptions to be announced later, as it steps up measures to combat coronavirus, Information Minister Manal Abdel Samad said.

Finance Minister Ghazi Wazni has requested that all public institutions suspend work until further notice as part of stricter measures, a Finance Ministry statement said.

Lebanon has so far recorded 368 cases of coronavirus and six deaths [File: Mohamed Azakir/Reuters]

13:58 GMT  Norways wealth fund has lost $125bn this year: directors

Norways sovereign wealth fund, the worlds biggest, has lost 1.33 trillion kroner ($125 billion) since the start of 2020 as markets collapse under the COVID-19 pandemic, the funds management said.

As of March 25, the fund was valued at 10.1 trillion kroner ($949 billion) after registering a negative return of 16 percent since January.

Its a strange time for society, its a strange time for the economy, and its also a strange time for global financial markets, the outgoing head of the fund, Yngve Slyngstad, told reporters.

13:54 GMT  India outlines $23bn stimulus to help poor hit by lockdown

India announced a $22.6bn economic stimulus plan that provides direct cash transfers and food security measures, offering relief to millions of poor people hit by a nationwide lockdown withstand the coronavirus pandemic.

The package was announced two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered the 21-day lockdown to protect the countrys 1.3 billion people from coronavirus. That led to supply constraints for essential items and panic buying, leaving the poor and daily labourers most vulnerable.

The government aims to distribute 5kg of wheat or rice for each person free of cost, with 1kg of pulses for every low-income family, helping to feed about 800 million poor people over the next three months.

It also intends to hand out free cooking-gas cylinders to 83 million poor families, a one-time cash transfer of $13.31 to 30 million senior citizens and $6.65 a month to about 200 million poor women for next three months.

We do not want anyone to remain hungry, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told a news briefing.

13:30 GMT  Israeli leaders open up nuclear bunker in war on coronavirus





The Israeli government has opened up a war bunker in the Jerusalem hills to help coordinate its campaign against the spread of the coronavirus.

The bunker, called the National Management Centre, was built more than a decade ago because of concern about Irans nuclear programme and missile exchanges with Lebanons Hezbollah or Palestinian group Hamas.

According to Israeli officials, it includes living quarters and command facilities and can be accessed from the government complex in Jerusalem and the western foothills leading to Tel Aviv.

This [bunker] is another tool for managing, controlling, oversight and tracking the coronavirus, said an Israeli official who requested anonymity. We understand that this crisis will accompany us for an extended period of time yet.

13:05 GMT  Saudi king urges effective G20 response to virus crisis

Saudi Arabias King Salman urged G20 leaders to take effective and coordinated action to combat the global crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, and called on them to assist developing nations.

We must have an effective and coordinated response to this pandemic and restore confidence in the global economy, the king said in his opening remarks as G20 leaders began an emergency online summit.

It is our responsibility to extend a helping hand to developing countries and least developed countries to enable them to build their capacities and improve their infrastructure to overcome this crisis and its repercussions, he added.

Hello, this is Usaid Siddiqui in Doha taking over from my colleague Tamila Varshalomidze.

12:46 GMT  US weekly jobless claims surge to a record 3.28 million

The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits soared to record of more than 3 million last week as strict measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic ground the country to a sudden halt, unleashing a wave of layoffs that likely brought an end to the longest employment boom in US history.

Initial claims for unemployment benefits rose to 3.28 million in the latest week from a revised 282,000 the previous week, eclipsing the previous record of 695,000 set in 1982, the US Labor Department said on Thursday.

Economists polled by Reuters news agency had forecast claims would rise to 1 million, but estimates ranged to as high as 4 million.

Nearly every state cited COVID-19 for the jump in initial jobless claims, with heavy impacts in food services, accommodation, entertainment and recreation, healthcare and transportation





Read more

12:37 GMT  Unanswered questions as Nigeria braces for lockdown

Nigerians are bracing for a partial lockdown from Thursday as authorities try to contain the spread of coronavirus cases in the country of about 200 million people.

Read more here.

12:05 GMT  Swiss coronavirus cases top 10,000, with 161 deaths

Switzerland has 10,714 confirmed coronavirus infections and 161 people have died of the disease, the Federal Office of Public Health said.

The numbers were up to date as of 07:15 GMT, it said.





11:48 GMT  Coronavirus tally rises to 840 in Russia

The number of the coronavirus cases in Russia rose to 840 with 182 confirmed diagnosis over the last 24 hours, authorities said.

Overall, two people, both in Moscow, have died while 38 recovered, according to the latest figures on the official online portal for COVID-19 information.

Moscow also takes the lead in the number of cases as more than half of all the coronavirus patients reside in the capital. Similarly, 136 of 182 new infections were reported there.

11:29 GMT  Five things to watch in lockdown

From the woman hunting Boko Haram to the children of the US opioid crisis  films to take your mind off coronavirus.

Read more here.

11:06 GMT  UK flight brings back stranded citizens from Peru

The first British-government chartered British Airways flight from Peru landed, bringing back stranded citizens, Foreign Minister Dominic Raab said.

A Saudi man walks past a poster depicting Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz in Riyadh [Ahmed Yosri/Reuters]

11:04 GMT  Saudi Arabia releases 250 immigration offenders

Saudi Arabia has released 250 foreign detainees held on non-violent immigration and residency offences as part of efforts to contain the spread of coronavirus, the state-backed Human Rights Commission (HRC) said.

Releasing them for eventual repatriation will help decrease the threat for inmates of the detention centres without compromising public security in any way, HRC President Awwad al-Awwad said in a statement, adding that more releases were expected.

10:56 GMT  WHO Europe sees encouraging signs

The World Health Organizations (WHO) European office said it saw encouraging signs as Italy reported a lower rate of infections of the new coronavirus, cautioning it was too early to say whether the worst had passed.

While the situation remains very serious, we are starting to see some encouraging signs. Italy, which has the highest number of cases in the region, has just seen a slightly lower rate of increase, though it is still too early to say that the pandemic is peaking in that country, Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, told a press conference.

A Spanish police officer stands guard outside an ice rink, being used as a morgue, in Madrid [Susana Vera/Reuters]

10:54 GMT  Spain reports 655 more deaths

Spain registered 655 fatalities from the coronavirus over the past 24 hours  down from over 700 on Wednesday, the health ministry reported as the total death toll from the epidemic in the country rose to over 4,000.

The overall number of coronavirus cases soared to 56,188 from 47,610 on Wednesday. The number of reported deaths from the virus rose to 4,089 from 3,434 on Wednesday, the ministry said.

10:51 GMT  Iran death toll rises to 2,234

A total of 157 people in Iran have died of coronavirus over the last 24 hours, pushing the death toll up to 2,234, said Iranian health authorities.

Health Ministry spokesperson Kianoush Jahanpour said 2,389 people were confirmed to have contracted the virus in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 29,406.

Also, 10,457 people have recovered from COVID-19, according to health officials.

09:48 GMT  Japan PM Abe sets up coronavirus task force

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has established a task force under the countrys revised emergency law to deal with the rise in coronavirus infections and deaths.

It is necessary for people to act as one to overcome what can be described as a national crisis, Abe said in Tokyo.

Japan will ban entry from 21 European countries as well as Iran, to take effect from March 27, Abe said.





09:47 GMT  Uzbekistan locks down two more cities

Uzbekistan is locking down the cities of Namangan and Andijan to prevent the spread of coronavirus, the two cities municipal authorities said.

Uzbekistan, which has already locked down its capital Tashkent, has reported 65 cases of the disease, including some in the densely populated Fergana valley where Namangan and Andijan are located.

09:37 GMT  Ugandas Bobi Wine releases song raising awareness about coronavirus

Ugandan musician-turned-politician Bobi Wine has released a song to raise awareness about the coronavirus pandemic as his country imposes new restriction in a bid to stem the spread of the virus.

Read more here.

Residents line up outside a wet market during the movement control order outside of Kuala Lumpur [AP Photo]

09:18 GMT  Malaysia reports 235 new cases

Malaysia reported 235 new coronavirus cases in its biggest daily jump, bringing the total number of cases to 2,031.

The number of deaths from coronavirus rose to 23, the health ministry said.

Malaysias total number of cases has now doubled in a week. On Wednesday, the government extended curbs on travel and movement to until April 14th to contain the spread of the virus.

08:52 GMT  Indonesia reports 103 new cases, 20 more deaths

Indonesia has confirmed 103 new coronavirus cases, bringing the Southeast Asian countrys total to 893, Health Ministry official Achmad Yurianto said.

The number of new deaths due to coronavirus rose by 20, taking the total number of deaths to 78, he said, adding that a total of 35 people had recovered from the virus.

Officers bury the dead infected with the coronavirus in Jakarta, Indonesia [Eko Siswono Toyudho/Anadolu]

08:36 GMT  Philippines reports 7 new deaths, 71 more cases

The Philippine health ministry reported seven new coronavirus deaths and 71 new confirmed infections.

It brings the countrys confirmed cases to 707 and deaths to 45 so far, among them six doctors, Health Secretary Francisco Duque told a regular news conference.

He said case numbers would rise in the coming days as more tests are carried out.

08:20 GMT  China says no new cases confirmed locally

Chinas National Health Commission (NHC) said six more people died of the virus and 67 new cases were confirmed, but all of them were imported.

Hubei reported no new cases of confirmed infection, no new cases of suspected infections, and 6 deaths, 5 in Wuhan, the NHC said.

People wearing face masks line up outside Xianning Central Hospital in Xianning [Aly Song/Reuters]

08:09 GMT  South Korea: 97-year-old recovers from coronavirus

A woman, 97, has recovered from the coronavirus after a two-week treatment in South Koreas Pohang Medical Centre.

She was discharged and placed in self-isolation at home to protect her from re-infection, The Korea Times reported.

The oldest patient on the course of recovery in the same hospital is a 104-year-old woman, the report said.

07:52 GMT  Moscow to close all non-essential shops

Moscow will close all shops except for pharmacies and grocery stores, the citys mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.

This measure, which also includes the closure of restaurants, cafes and bars, will last from March 28 until April 5, Sobyanin said in a statement.

07:43 GMT  Nine doctors die from coronavirus in Philippines

Nine doctors have died in the Philippines from the coronavirus, the countrys top medical association said, as hospitals were overwhelmed and medics complained about a lack of protection on the front lines.

The Philippine Medical Association said health workers were not getting enough protection.

If it were up to me, test the front-liners first and test them again after seven days. Doctors could be carriers themselves, Benito Atienza, vice president of the Philippine Medical Association, told AFP news agency.





07:37 GMT  UK says 560,000 volunteers signed up to help NHS

Britains Health Minister Matt Hancock said 560,000 people had volunteered to help the National Health Service during the coronavirus crisis, more than double the number he had hoped to recruit.

Britain had on Tuesday issued a call for 250,000 volunteers to sign up to help the NHS and vulnerable people hit by the coronavirus crisis.

Writing on Twitter, Hancock called the news fantastic.

07:25 GMT  Tokyo reports more than 40 new cases

The Japanese capital of Tokyo reported more than 40 new cases of coronavirus infections for the second day running, Jiji News reported.

Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike held an emergency news conference to warn of the risk of an explosive rise in infections, asking residents to avoid non-essential outings until April 12.

The city has become the centre of Japans coronavirus epidemic, with more than 250 cases.

07:15 GMT  Kashmir registers its first COVID-19 death

A 65-year-old man, who had a recent travel history outside the region, became the first COVID-19 fatality in Indian-administered Kashmir, sparking fear and causing a stricter lockdown.

Rohit Kansal, spokesman for the regions government, said the first death due to coronavirus is a 65-year-old man from Srinagar, he said. The Srinagar man had tested positive two days ago.

Kansal said four of his contacts have also tested positive for the virus.





07:08 GMT  Russias Gazprom says 20 workers in isolation at gas field

Gas giant Gazprom said 20 workers have been quarantined at Bovanenkovo gas field, one of its largest in northern Russia, after contact with a person who has coronavirus.

It said the contact occurred on March 16 and the isolation will last until March 30. Production has not been affected.

06:47 GMT  Iran intercity travel ban begins

An intercity travel ban has begun, an Iranian official said in a televised news conference, amid fears of a second wave of coronavirus infections in the Middle Easts worst-hit country.

Those who have travelled for the Iranian New Year holidays should immediately return to their cities without making any stop in the cities on their way back home, said Hossein Zolfaghari, a member of Irans national headquarters for fighting the coronavirus.

The closure of universities and schools as well as suspension of gatherings has been extended, he said, adding that violators of the measures would face legal consequences.

05:45 GMT

Ill be handing over this blog to my colleague in Doha shortly.

Here are the main developments this morning:

It was a bit touch and go for a while, but the US Senate has finally passed a $2 trillion relief bill for businesses, workers and healthcare systems affected by the coronavirus. Now it goes back to the House of Representatives.

A number of countries are preparing to impose emergencies (Thailand) or extend them (Spain).

South Korea says it will deny entry to people travelling from overseas who refuse to download an app that tracks their self-isolation, while China says all its new cases continue to be imported  most of them Chinese nationals returning home.





05:35 GMT  China shifts narrative on coronavirus outbreak

With Chinas own outbreak of coronavirus appearing to have calmed, the countrys state media is devoting considerable space to championing Chinas efforts to help Italy, Iran and other countries that are now struggling to control the disease.

Shawn Yuan, who is in China, has been following the shifting narrative.

05:25 GMT  Russia to suspend all international flights from March 27

The Russian government has ordered the civil aviation authority to suspend all regular and charter flights to and from Russia from March 27, the government said on its website.

Russian airlines will still be allowed to fly to other countries to bring Russian citizens back or if they are authorised by special government decisions.

05:10 GMT  The $2tn US coronavirus stimulus package: Who benefits?

A relief bill worth a little more than $2 trillion finally made its way through the US Senate on Wednesday; it should receive final approval later this week. Here is more detail on its measures:

$500bn for a Treasury Department lending facility to support US companies, including airlines, with public oversight

$350bn for small businesses.

$100bn for hospitals, nurses and doctors to battle the outbreak

$150bn for state and local governments

$300bn in direct payments to most Americans of up to $1,200 per adult and $500 per child within about three weeks.

$250bn in federal unemployment benefits of $600 per week for individual employees as well as gig workers and independent contractors

You can find out more about whats at stake in this story from Al Jazeeras William Roberts.

05:05 GMT  Nigerian army preparing for strict lockdown, forced transfers of sick

The Nigerian army is preparing to forcibly transfer the sick to hospital and enforce strict controls on movement to curb the spread of the coronavirus in Africas most populous country, according to Reuters news agency.

A memo from army headquarters seen by the news agency outlines measures to protect government food storage from looters and says the military is also leasing equipment for possible mass burial.

04:25 GMT  Thailand announces 111 new confirmed cases

Thailand has announced 111 new confirmed cases of coronavirus, after declaring a state of emergency to come into effect at midnight (17:00 GMT).

The measures will include the closure of border crossings to everyone except Thai nationals, diplomats and their families, and people with permission to work in Thailand.

The total known cases of the virus now stands at 1,045.

Migrant workers from Myanmar began crossing the border at Mae Sot as Thailand prepared to implement emergency measures [Stringer/Reuters]

03:30 GMT  US Senate passes $2 trillion coronavirus package

After a series of last-minute hiccups, the US Senate has finally passed a $2 trillion package to support the health system, workers and business hurt by the coronavirus outbreak.

More on that story shortly.

03:30 GMT  Spanish Parliament votes to extend state of emergency until April 11

Spains parliament has voted in favour of the governments request to extend the state of emergency  and a nationwide lockdown  by two weeks.

The emergency was first declared on March 14 and includes strict stay-at-home rules.

More people have died in Spain from COVID-19 than any other country except for Italy.

02:50 GMT  Cases in US near 70,000, with more than 1,000 dead

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the US is nearing 70,000, with more than 1,000 people now reported to have died from COVID-19, according to AFP news agency.

More on how each state is handling the outbreak here.

02:45 GMT  Japan to set up coronavirus HQ, possible emergency declaration

Japans government is preparing to set up a special headquarters on coronavirus as early as Thursday afternoon, in a move that could set the stage for declaring a state of emergency over the outbreak, the Kyodo news agency reported.

The prime minister can declare a state of emergency if the disease is seen as posing a grave danger to lives and if its spread threatens the economy.

02:30 GMT  Overseas arrivals to South Korea to be refused entry without app

Yonhap news agency is reporting that South Korea will deny entry to people arriving in the country from overseas if they refuse to install an app to monitor them while they are in self-isolation.

02:25 GMT  Border closures, flight suspensions leave people stranded

Countries around the world have advised their citizens overseas to return home as quickly as they can as lockdowns accelerate, borders are sealed off, and even transit travel is banned.

But that is easier said than done.

Al Jazeeras Ian Neubauer spoke to people stuck in limbo at Kuala Lumpurs international airport.

01:50 GMT  Mexico to suspend all non-essential activity from Thursday

Mexicos Deputy Health Minister Dr Hugo Lopez-Gatell says all non-essential activities in the country will be suspended from Thursday.

Mexico has reported 475 confirmed cases of coronavirus and six deaths.

01:20 GMT  South Korea cases rise by 104, five more deaths

South Koreas just given its latest update, confirming 104 new cases, bringing the total to 9,241, with five more deaths.

Some 414 people were discharged from hospital after making a full recovery. In all, 4,144 people in South Korea have been cured of the virus.

00:10 GMT  China cases climb again; all from overseas

Mainland China has reported a further increase in coronavirus cases  all of them in people returning to the country from overseas.

The National Health Commission reported 67 new cases as of the end of Wednesday, compared with 47 a day earlier.

The number of deaths rose by six to 3,287.

No new domestically transmitted cases of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) were reported on the Chinese mainland on Wednesday https://t.co/ZZLSqg8hKL pic.twitter.com/M23YwzsTYM  China Xinhua News (@XHNews) March 26, 2020

00:00 GMT  Trump administration cut CDC China staff

Reuters news agency is reporting that the administration of US President Donald Trump cut the staff of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) working in China by two-thirds in the two years before the coronavirus emerged.

Most of the reductions were at the Beijing office. The CDCs headcount in China had dropped from about 47 when Trump took office in January 2017 to about 14 now, Reuters said.

21:59 GMT (Wednesday)  $2 trillion virus rescue bill hits delay in Senate

The $2 trillion economic rescue package to provide aid to American businesses, workers and healthcare systems strained by the coronavirus outbreak has run into last-minute delays in the Senate.

The measure is the largest economic relief bill in US history. More on that story here.

Im Kate Mayberry in Kuala Lumpur with Al Jazeeras continuing coverage of the coronavirus pandemic/

Read all the updates from yesterday (March 24) here.
OVAL independent Data Safety Monitoring Committee (DSMC) reviewed un-blinded data and determined that the study has met the interim pre-specified criterion, of an absolute percentage advantage of 10% or higher in CA-125 response in the VB-111 treated arm compared to control. The DSMC recommends that the study proceed without modification.

Overall CA-125 response rate in the first 60 randomized evaluable patients is 53%. Assuming a balanced randomization, the response rate in the treatment arm (VB-111 in addition to weekly paclitaxel) is 58% or higher.

In patients with post-treatment fever, the CA-125 response is 69%. Fever is frequently observed after VB-111 treatment.

The CA-125 response rate observed in the Phase 3 interim analysis is at least as good as the response rate seen in Phase 2, which enrolled similar population of patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer.

TEL AVIV, Israel, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- VBL Therapeutics (VBLT) today announced an encouraging outcome of the planned interim analysis in the OVAL study, a double-blind controlled potential-registration study in patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. The OVAL independent Data Safety Monitoring Committee (DSMC), reviewed un-blinded data and assessed CA-125 response, measured according to the GCIG criteria, in the first 60 enrolled subjects evaluable for CA-125 analysis. The DSMC confirmed that the study met the interim pre-specified efficacy criterion, of an absolute percentage advantage of 10% or higher CA-125 response rate for the VB-111 treatment arm, and recommended the study continuance.

The overall CA-125 response rate in the first 60 randomized evaluable patients is 53%. Assuming a balanced randomization, the response rate in the treatment arm (VB-111 in addition to weekly paclitaxel) is 58% or higher. In patients who had post-dosing fever, which is a marker for VB-111 treatment, the response rate is 69%.

The encouraging interim readout in this randomized controlled study, together with the promising data seen in the earlier VB-111 Phase 2 are signals for the potential of VB-111 in platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, an indication with a major unmet need," said the Chairman of the OVAL study Steering Committee, Bradley J. Monk, M.D., FACS, FACOG, CoDirector of GOG Partners, Arizona Oncology (US Oncology Network) and Professor, Gynecologic Oncology at University of Arizona, Creighton University, Medical Director of US Oncology Research Gynecology program in Phoenix, Arizona.

Story continues

We are very pleased by the outcome of this interim analysis, which demonstrates the potential benefit of VB-111 over standard-of-care in a randomized-controlled study, said Dror Harats, MD, Chief Executive Officer of VBL Therapeutics. The OVAL Phase 3 interim data are at least as good as the CA-125 response results observed in our VB-111 Phase 2 study, which enrolled a similar patient population. This encouraging interim result adds to the promising data seen with VB-111 across our Phase 2 studies in multiple indications.

In the previously reported Phase 2 study of VB-111 in platinum resistant ovarian cancer, 58% of the patients treated with VB-111 and paclitaxel demonstrated a CA-125 response. Those patients with a CA-125 response demonstrated a median overall survival of 808 days, versus 351 days for those patients without CA-125 response. The DSMC recommendation that the OVAL trial proceed is not assurance that the trial will meet its primary endpoint. The primary endpoint of the OVAL Phase 3 study is overall survival, which currently approved therapies for platinum-resistant ovarian cancer have thus far failed to demonstrate.

Conference Call Information

VBL will host a live KOL and Update Call on the OVAL Phase 3 trial at 2:00 p.m. ET today. The conference call may be accessed by dialing 1-877-407-9208 (domestic, toll-free) and 1-201-493-6784 (toll/international) or Israel Toll Free 1-809-406-247 and referring to conference ID 13700764. A webcast of the conference call will be available by clicking here . The archived webcast will be available in the Investors Relations section of the VBL Therapeutics website at http://ir.vblrx.com/ after the conference call.

About the OVAL study ( NCT03398655 )

OVAL is an international Phase 3 randomized pivotal potential registration clinical trial that compares a combination of VB-111 and paclitaxel to placebo plus paclitaxel, in patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. The study is planned to enroll approximately 400 patients. OVAL is conducted in collaboration with the GOG Foundation, Inc., an independent international non-profit organization with the purpose of promoting excellence in the quality and integrity of clinical and basic scientific research in the field of gynecologic malignancies.

About VB-111 (ofranergene obadenovec)

VB-111 is a first-in-class, targeted anti-cancer gene-therapy agent that is being developed to treat a wide range of solid tumors. VB-111 is a unique biologic agent that uses a dual mechanism to target solid tumors. Its mechanism combines blockade of tumor vasculature with an anti-tumor immune response. VB-111 is administered as an IV infusion once every 6-8 weeks. It has been observed to be well-tolerated in >300 cancer patients and demonstrated activity signals in an all comers Phase 1 trial as well as in three tumor-specific Phase 2 studies.VB-111 has received an Orphan Designation for the treatment of ovarian cancer from the European Commission. VB-111 has also received orphan drug designation in both the US and Europe, and fast track designation in the US for prolongation of survival in patients with rGBM. VB-111 successfully demonstrated proof-of-concept and survival benefit in Phase 2 clinical trials in radioiodine-refractory thyroid cancer and recurrent platinum-resistant ovarian cancer ( NCT01711970 ).

About VBL

Vascular Biogenics Ltd., operating as VBL Therapeutics, is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of first-in-class treatments for areas of unmet need in cancer and immune/inflammatory indications.

About The GOG Foundation, Inc.

The GOG Foundation, Inc. (GOG-F) is a not-for-profit organization with the purpose of promoting excellence in the quality and integrity of clinical and basic scientific research in the field of gynecologic malignancies. The GOG-F is committed to maintaining the highest standards in clinical trials development, execution, analysis and distribution of results. The GOG-F is the only group in the United States that focuses its research on women with pelvic malignancies, such as cancer of the ovary, uterus, and cervix. The GOG-F is multi-disciplinary in its approach to clinical trials, and includes gynecologic oncologists, medical oncologists, pathologists, radiation oncologists, nurses, statisticians, basic scientists, quality of life experts, data managers, and administrative personnel.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, which are often indicated by terms such as anticipate, believe, could, estimate, expect, goal, intend, look forward to, may, plan, potential, predict, project, should, will, would and similar expressions. These forward-looking statements may include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our programs, including VB-111, including their clinical development, therapeutic potential and clinical results. These forward-looking statements are not promises or guarantees and involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Among the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described or projected herein include uncertainties associated generally with research and development, clinical trials and related regulatory reviews and approvals, the risk that historical clinical trial results may not be predictive of future trial results, that our financial resources do not last for as long as anticipated, and that we may not realize the expected benefits of our intellectual property protection. In particular, the DSMC recommendation that the OVAL trial proceed is not assurance that the trial will meet its primary endpoint of overall survival once completed. A further list and description of these risks, uncertainties and other risks can be found in our regulatory filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including in our annual report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2019, and subsequent filings with the SEC. Existing and prospective investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. VBL Therapeutics undertakes no obligation to update or revise the information contained in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or circumstances or otherwise.

INVESTOR CONTACT:

Michael Rice

LifeSci Advisors

mrice@lifesciadvisors.com

(646) 597-6979
Mumbai, March 26 : Close on the heels of Sir H.N. Reliance Foundation Hospital's 100-bed centre for Covid-19 patients, other corporate groups and industry organisations have joined hands to help the Maharashtra government tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

The Pune-based, 130-year old Bajaj Group has pledged Rs 100 crore to upgrade key healthcare centres and provide the necessary infrastructure to tackle COVID-19, said Group Chairman Rahul Bajaj.

This would include government and private-sector hospitals for upgrading their intensive care units, get additional equipment like ventilators and personal protection gear, enhance testing, and set up quarantine wards in Pune district including the second-worst hit Pune city and Pimpri-Chinchwad.

The Bajaj Group will also work with organisations in different areas and sections of badly hit people like daily wage earners, homeless and street children with food and shelter, sanitation and healthcare initiatives, Bajaj added.

In view of the 'reverse migration' to villages, the Group will support an economic aid programme with a direct survival grant and a livelihood intervention using a revolving fund model.

Nationalist Congress President Sharad Pawar lauded the initiatives. "Grateful to my friend Rahul Bajaj as always, taking the values and legacy of the very generous Bajaj family tradition for the nation," he said, in a message.

In Mumbai, the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) pledged Rs 50 crore for the welfare of the industry's daily wage earners who are badly affected by the state and national lockdowns, besides funding government initiatives to tackle Covid-19.

GJEPC Chairman Pramod Agrawal said that there is a workforce of over five million in the industry which contributes 7 percent to the national GDP but is in dire straits, and all the members have been asked to adopt a humane approach by looking after their employees during the unprecedented lockdown period.

GJEPC Vice Chairman Colin Shah added that the money will be utilised for funding specific government initiatives related to public health or medical facilities, and appealed to other industries and trade bodies to donate generously to the 'war against virus'.

Maharashtra currently has the highest number of Covid-19 positive cases totalling 125 and at least four fatalities.
On 20 March 2020, in the light of the recent global challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Kunio Mikuriya, Secretary General of the World Customs Organization (WCO), sent a letter encouraging Contracting Parties to the Conventions on temporary admission[1] to provide sufficient facilities for ATA Carnet holders and representatives to re-export temporarily imported goods, without unexpected additional costs, in cases where delays in re-exporting were due to preventive measures taken by governments of the Contracting Parties against the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

This measure was carried out in consultation with Mr. John W.H. Denton AO, Secretary General of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), given that many National Guaranteeing Associations (NGAs) have recently raised concerns about the fact that preventive measures implemented to limit the spread of COVID-19 might cause delays in the re-exportation of goods imported using ATA Carnets.

As many countries and cities are currently under strict quarantine and lockdown measures, Carnet holders and representatives in these affected areas are experiencing challenges in re-exporting temporarily imported goods within the requisite time period. Some holders and representatives are unable to leave their homes or hotels, making it impossible for them to complete Customs clearance formalities and have their goods leave the country on time. The delivery of replacement Carnets is also proving challenging, given the potential suspension of, or delays, in postal services. More importantly, some Customs administrations do not accept replacement ATA Carnets for extension purposes. By way of example, the ATA Convention only makes reference to the replacement of Carnets in case of destruction, loss or theft, but not for extension purposes.

Indicating that the Conventions do not preclude Contracting Parties from providing greater facilities, at their own discretion, to Carnet holders and representatives, Dr. Mikuriya asked Contracting Parties to consider ways of enhancing facilitation of ATA Carnet procedures, bearing in mind that some delays in re-exportation are entirely attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Such facilitation measures would be regarded as consistent with World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations for international traffic in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as with the WCO Communique on the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, seeking to minimize trade restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks.
By Associated Press

BAGHDAD: Iraq's military on Thursday said at least two rockets hit inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, the seat of Iraq's government and home to the U.S. Embassy, according to an Iraqi military statement, the first attack following a brief lull in violence from earlier this month.

The two projectiles struck near the Baghdad Operations Command, which coordinates Iraq's police and military forces, the statement said.

The command center is a few hundred meters (yards) away from the U.S. Embassy, which is a regular target of rocket attacks. It was not immediately known if there were any casualties.

The statement said the rockets were launched from the al-Nahda area of Baghdad.

It was the latest rocket attack to strike the Green Zone since three rockets hit an area near the embassy last Tuesday.

That attack was the fourth to target U.S. interests in Iraq in the span of a week following assaults on the Basmaya training camp and two separate attacks on Camp Taji. Both bases are near the Iraqi capital.

The first attack on Camp Taji killed three coalition servicemen including two Americans. That prompted U.S. airstrikes against what U.S. officials said were mainly weapons facilities belonging to Kataib Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Iraqi militia group believed to be responsible for the attack.

However, Iraqs military said those airstrikes killed five security force members and a civilian, while wounding five fighters from the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella organization including an array of Iraqi militias, including some Iran-backed groups.

Iran-backed Iraqi militias have vowed revenge for the attacks.

The attacks come as the U.S.-led coalition has announced plans to draw down its presence from bases across Iraq and consolidate in Baghdad and Ain al-Asad in western Iraq.

The plan was in the works since late last year, a senior coalition military official said last week, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Troops have already pulled out from al-Qaim, on the border with Syria.

France said Wednesday that it will pull out its military forces from Iraq, citing the need for French forces to help fight the new coronavirus at home.
President Trump said Thursday that he planned to 'kiss' the USNS Comfort goodbye as it sets sail for New York City to aid the city with the coronavirus crisis.

'I think I'm going to go out and, I'll kiss it goodbye, I'll go to - it's in Virginia as you know, and I will go and we'll be waving together, because I suspect the media will be following,' Trump told reporters at the White House briefing.

Several moments after the president made the comments, the White House announced that he was serious and would travel to the Norfolk Naval Station on Saturday to 'bid bon voyage to the hospital ship,' a release to the press said.

President Trump announced Thursday that he would go 'kiss' the USNS Comfort goodbye on Saturday, as the White House confirmed he would travel to Norfolk, Virginia to watch the hospital ship set sail to New York City

The hospital ship Comfort will set sail for New York City on Saturday and should arrive Monday, a little under two weeks since President Trump announced he would utilize Comfort and the west coast anchored Mercy

Judd Deere, a spokesman for President Trump, confirmed the president would be leaving Washington, D.C. for the first time since March 9. All planned travel in March was cancelled due to coronavirus concerns

Supplies are being loaded onto the deck of the USNS Comfort in Norfolk, Virginia on Tuesday as the ship is readied to deploy to New York City to offload non-COVID-19 patients from the city's hospitals

The trip will mark the first time since the president has left Washington since March 9, when he hopped over to the suburbs of Orlando, Florida from his Palm Beach estate Mar-a-Lago to raise funds for his re-election campaign and then headed back to the White House.

A subsequent trip scheduled for that week - to Las Vegas for fundraising and a Republican Jewish Coalition speech - was canned due to coronavirus concerns.

Trump has been in D.C. ever since.

The president initially announced that hospital ships Comfort and Mercy would be used during the pandemic on March 18.

At the time Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman said that Comfort could take two weeks to deploy because maintenance was being finished up.

Trump said in the briefing room that the Comfort was way ahead of schedule.

'So it's going to be leaving on Saturday instead of three weeks from now,' the president said.

The ship will depart four days ahead of schedule, according to the Pentagon's two-week initial estimate.

The ships won't be used for patients who have COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, but will instead provide beds for other sick patients to clear room in the cities' hospitals.

The USNS Mercy is sailing to Los Angeles from Naval Station San Diego and is expected to arrive Friday.

In the briefing room, the president invited the press along with him on the trip to Virginia.

'If you want to go, I'll see you there, and if you don't, that's OK,' Trump said.
26.03.2020 LISTEN

Parliament on Wednesday joined other Ghanaians to offer prayers for God's intervention to halt the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in the country.

The programme is in line with President Nana Akufo-Addo's declaration of Wednesday, March 25, 2020 as a National Day for Fasting and Prayer.

The Speaker, Professor Aaron Mike Oquaye who participated in the National Day for Fasting and Prayer urged both Christians and Muslims to seek God's intervention and forgiveness for the nation.

Mr Emmanuel Kwasi Bedzra, MP for Ho West and Head of the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship in his exhortation stated that as the elected representatives of the people it was important for them to seek the face of God in this difficult time of the coronavirus pandemic.

He quoted 2 Chronicles 7:14, which states If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and forgive their sins and heal their land.

He then prayed to the Almighty God to forgive the people for their sins in the area of idolatry and fornication, shedding of innocent blood, false accusation, backbiting corruption, greed, steeling among others.

Mr Bedzra also urged Christian to humble themselves in this period of fasting and prayer and turn to the Lord God Almighty to protect them from the deadly coronavirus disease.

Even as we confess our sins in this period of fasting and prayer, we besiege our Lord God Almighty, Father of all nations that this plague of COVID-19 will pass us by and even healed those who tested positive he added.

He continued to pray for the health workers and those in self-quarantine for God to preserve their lives. He committed Ghana, Africa and the world into the hands of God for his protection.

Mr Ebenezer Ahumah Djietror, a Principal Assistant Clerk called on Christians to pray in times of affliction for that is the best means of producing in them patience and humility.

He said the country was in extraordinary times, hence the need to observe fasting and prayer and challenged believers in Christ to employ themselves in such communal religious exercises from time to time.

Mr Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, the Majority Leader prayed for speedy recovery of victims of the disease, unity and strength, God's healing power and total deliverance of the nation from the snare of the corona virus affliction.

Mr Haruna Iddrisu, the Minority in his prayers requested God's cure for people with the coronavirus disease in the midst of the global spread of the pandemic so that people can experience his healing love.

He prayed for speedy recovery for those who are sick with the virus so that they regain their strength and health through quality medical care.

Some MPs also took turns to offer Christian and Muslim prayers for God's cleansing, healing, mercy, love and forgiveness of iniquities.

GNA
While restaurants try to combat fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, a much different battle has erupted at Jack in the Box locations in the San Antonio area.

San Diego-based Jack in the Box Inc. last summer terminated franchise agreements with the operator of its roughly 50 San Antonio-area restaurants, saying the operator failed to address numerous shortcomings at the locations.

Yet that hasnt stopped franchisee San-Tex Restaurants Inc. of Katy from continuing to run those locations as Jack in the Box restaurants.

Jack in the Box Inc., or JIB, this month sued San-Tex and its principals in San Antonio federal court alleging they failed to de-identify themselves with Jack in the Box and cease using trade secrets and trademarks.

On ExpressNews.com: Whataburger faces wrongful death lawsuit by workers family

A franchise cant identify itself as a Jack in the Box or use related trademarks once the franchise agreements are terminated, according to contract terms.

San-Tex counters that the restaurants are in better shape now than when it took over their operation from JIB. San-Tex contends it was wrongfully terminated as a franchisee and alleges the lawsuit is in retaliation for its participation in the National JIB Franchisee Association Inc., which is suing JIB.

In the latest version of that complaint filed this month in San Diego, the association alleges JIBs mismanagement and cost-cutting measures have caused pervasive and systematic operational problems. As a result, franchisees have suffered significant losses.

It is unfortunate that the franchiser, Jack in the Box, would choose to retaliate against a long-standing, highly respected operator such as Anil Yadav and his partner Atour Eyvazian, considering the number of years that they have spent in trying to turn around under-performing restaurants (previously) owned and operated by the company, said Robert Zarco, a Miami attorney representing San-Tex and its principals.

Zarco also is representing the franchise association in the lawsuit against JIB.

Both sides beefs are enough to paint a frown on the face of the perpetually beaming Jack in the Box pitchman clown.

JIB officials and one of its San Antonio lawyers didnt respond to requests for comment.

Some 2,200 restaurants

The publicly traded JIB has about 2,240 restaurants in its system. About 240 are operated by JIB or affiliates. The company earned $94.4 million on about $950 million in revenue in its last fiscal year. Between company-owned and franchise locations, Jack in the Box generated $3.5 billion in sales in fiscal 2019.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio man sues H-E-B after cashier allegedly whacked him with cucumber

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, JIB says franchise operators are directly responsible for the operations of the restaurants, including product quality, service, food safety, cleanliness, inventory, cash control, and the conduct and appearance of employees.

We focus on attracting, selecting, engaging and retaining employees and franchisees who share our passion for creating long-lasting, successful restaurants, JIB says.

San-Tex has operated 49 Jack in the Box restaurants; all but seven are in San Antonio. The others are in Castle Hills, Seguin, New Braunfels, Kerrville, Del Rio and Uvalde.

San-Tex entered into the franchise agreements with JIB in 2010. Yadav has ownership in 222 Jack in the Box restaurants, many in northern California. He also is a franchisee for TGI Fridays, Dennys, Corner Baker and El Pollo Loco.

In its lawsuit, JIB says that from 2017 through 2019 it pushed San-Tex to fix various problems at the Jack in the Box restaurants in the San Antonio area.

Operational deficiencies

Among the alleged deficiencies: excess smoke from broken kitchen exhausts, missing or nonworking kitchen equipment, malfunctioning ice machines and pot holes in the parking lot. JIB includes photos in its lawsuit.

The air-conditioning systems failed to work at 28 restaurants and led the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to shut down one due to extreme heat endangering workers and patrons, JIB alleges. Walk-in coolers also were broken, which JIB says creates a food safety danger.

The issues violated terms of the franchise agreements, JIB says.

San-Tex lawyer Zarco dismissed JIBs allegations, saying his clients fixed up the restaurants after they were put on notice by the franchiser.

We spent $2.5 million to $3 million fixing up the restaurants, and now that we spent all that money, now you want to terminate us? Zarco said.

JIB will be unjustly enriched if its allowed to take over the restaurants. He plans to counter-sue JIB for wrongful termination and other claims.

San-Tex didnt address the alleged deficiencies despite numerous warnings, JIBs lawsuit says. JIB sent a default notice in June before terminating the franchisee agreements in August.

In its termination notice, JIB granted San-Tex a temporary license to continue operating the restaurants under various terms and conditions. Among them: San-Texas was required to show proof that it repaired air-conditioning and ventilation systems, fryers and grills.

But San-Tex failed to agree in writing to the conditions, and the temporary license never became effective, JIB says in its suit.

Despite the spat, the Jack in the Box on Nacogdoches Road was still serving food in the chains branded packaging on a recent visit.

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Zarco said that even though JIB terminated the franchise agreements, a court has to determine whether the termination was, in fact, proper.

JIB says San-Texs actions have injured JIB and a related companys business reputations and (are) diluting the distinctive quality of their trademarks, the lawsuit says.

JIB is suing San-Tex and its principals for breach of contract, trademark infringement and dilution, and unjust enrichment, among other claims. JIB also seeks a court order preventing San-Tex from continuing to operate as Jack in the Box locations.

In addition, JIB wants San-Tex to turn over its profits, plus pay JIB up to three times its actual damages. JIB also is requesting unspecified punitive damages.

The franchisees complaint

In the lawsuit against JIB, the franchise association alleges the franchiser has failed to properly account for a $180 million fund created to execute marketing programs for the benefit of the chains restaurants.

For the past several years, JIB has been unable to or unwilling to invest in marketing or menu innovation and unable or unwilling to establish an effective brand strategy, the franchise operators allege in their suit. Because there currently is no cohesive brand strategy, the Jack in the Box System is losing ground to competitors.

Zarco added that the association has had reason to believe that a lot of the marketing dollars have been used to operate JIBs business and bolster its financial performance.

The association, which represents 91 franchise owners who operate more than 1,600 Jack in the Box restaurants, seeks the appointment of a receiver to take control of the marketing fund.

Patrick Danner is a San Antonio-based staff writer covering banking and civil courts. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 22:33:11|Editor: huaxia

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NEW DELHI, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Indian authorities on Thursday extended an international flight ban to April 14 amid COVID-19 crisis.

"It has been decided that all scheduled international commercial passenger services shall remain closed till April 14," said an order issued by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).

Last week, DGCA imposed a week-long ban on international flights.

However, the ban does not apply to cargo flights or those specially permitted by the DGCA.

Domestic flights have been banned until March 31.

Authorities have already suspended trains, metros, inter-state buses and all public transport in India with the imposition of a 21-day lockdown announced by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday evening.

The total number of COVID-19 cases in India rose to 649 as of Thursday. So far 13 COVID-19 deaths have been reported in the country.
The Centre on Thursday announced a slew of measures to provide relief to poor and vulnerable sections of the population during the Covid-19 crisis, but the efficacy of many of these will depend on a robust last-mile delivery mechanism, which has been badly affected right from the start of the 21-day lockdown. Experts said most of the announcements pertain to beneficiaries of existing schemes.

Hence, anyone who is not part of the current set of programmes may not be able to access the relief measures. They also pointed out that in some cases, such as raising the MGNREGA wages by Rs ...
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday spoke with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the emir of the state of Qatar Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al Thani and discussed the situation arising out of the coronavirus outbreak.

During his telephonic conversation with the crown prince, the prime minister thanked himfor his personal attention to the health and safety of Indian expatriates in the present situation, an official statement said.

The two leaders exchanged information and views on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the situation in their respective countries as well as the steps being taken by their governments, it said.

They agreed that the next few weeks would be crucial to control the spread of the virus and required concerted and coordinated efforts by all countries.

In this context, they appreciated the organisation of a Virtual Summit among G20 leaders earlier in the day to discuss the pandemic.

Both the leaders emphasised the importance they attach to the strength and richness of the bilateral relationship, the statement said.

They agreed to maintain regular consultations between their officials in the present situation, particularly to ensure continuity of logistical supply lines.

The crown prince assured Modi about the welfare of the over two million Indians living in UAE and contributing to its economy.

During their conversation, Modi and the emir of Qatar expressed hope that the efforts and measures being taken to stop the spread of the disease by all affected countries would yield early and positive results, the statement said.

They emphasised the importance of international solidarity and information-sharing in fighting the pandemic.

The prime minister thanked Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani for his personal attention to the welfare of the Indian nationals living and working in Qatar, particularly in the present situation, according to the statement.

The emir assured the prime minister about the safety and welfare of all Indian expatriates in Qatar.

The two leaders agreed to maintain regular contact and consultation on the evolving situation, it said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The coronavirus crisis is costing Ireland about 300 million a week, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe has told the Dail.

Speaking during the debate on the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Bill, he told TDs that this amount could increase or decrease.

The cost of this intervention to the State will be approximately 300 million per week. That cost is only based on estimates we are creating at a point of huge uncertainty.

"That cost could grow, depending on the challenge we face, or it could diminish if we are successful.

"That acknowledgement of risk and what could change, however, only deepens my view that this is the kind of action a State needs to take at a time of need, he said.

The plight of those who have lost their jobs were a central theme of his speech, Mr Donohoe sought to give some hope.

He said that although the journey back to economic health could be fraught and filled with economic risks, they would complete that journey.

Quoting the poem Everything Will Be Alright by Derek Mahon, he said there will be dying there will be dying, he referred also to the watchful heart.

As part of required social distancing measures, just one third of the Dails 160 TDs are present and sitting two seats apart for the debate.

During exchanges, Mr Donohoe concurred with Independent Tipperary TD Mattie McGrath that in many ways the State and its citizens were involved in a war.

But he said that war is about division and about separation, and they wanted to show unity in their efforts, and were striving for a European response that was collective and about solidarity.

Mr Donohoe said it was precisely because of decisions they made in recent years that they could marshal a Government response to the crisis.

At the time of a loss of income, the State should step in and look to guarantee and subsidise a portion of that income.

He said that by acting now the State had the ability, if not guaranteed, to offset the worst of the crisis.

Mr Donohoe added that the State was a vital positive constructive force, the animating concept in peoples lives as citizens.

But it exists within constraints and needs to be able to fund itself, he said.

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FAIRFIELD  Police say a Bridgeport man has been charged for allegedly stealing multiple Apple Inc. products from his former employer.

Miguel J. Portela, a 40-year-old, was arrested by the Fairfield Police Department on March 12 and charged with third-degree larceny and third-degree burglary, according to a police press release. He allegedly store the devices from the Verizon Wireless store on the Post Road.

Officers spoke to a store employee who reported that Portela had walked into the store around 5:50 p.m., entered the storage room and walked out of the store with several iPhones, the release said. Portela worked at the Verizon Wireless store in Norwalk and the employee told officers that it was common to have workers take phones from other stores in order to re-stock their own supplies.

Police said a short time after Portela left with the phones, the manager of the Norwalk store notified the employee at the Fairfield store that Portela had been fired earlier that day and should not be allowed in the building.

An employee at the Fairfield store told police they discovered that nine iPhones and one Apple Watch were missing. Police said the items were valued at $7,190.

Through the subsequent investigation, Fairfield Police located Portela at his home on Jones Avenue in Bridgeport that evening, the release said. Portela allowed the officers to search his vehicle and police located and seized an unopened iPhone matching the serial number of one of the phones that had been stolen from the Fairfield store.

The release said investigating officers also located a Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 and a Verizon Jetpack mobile hotspot that had been reported stolen from the Norwalk Verizon Wireless. They said the other stolen items were not located in the search.

Police said Portela was placed under arrest and later released on a $1,000 bond. They said he is expected to be arraigned on March 26 at Bridgeport Superior Court.
This week, the talk all across our state, our country, and the globe is all the same. Coronavirus is the topic of discussion, as it should be. Here at the Capitol, its an issue of great importance. We are looking to make sure it is addressed with the proper precautions in an effective and direct manner with the safety of our public being the top priority.

Here in Jefferson City, we have taken steps to help curb the spread of any potential viruses, including the encouragement of people visiting our Capitol.

The Capitol will still be open to the public, but leadership is encouraging the public at large to consider not traveling here temporarily to avoid any potential spreading of the coronavirus. At this time all groups are still welcome, but we ask that you all please be vigilant, especially those that are elderly or those with weakened immune systems. Additional precautions also include closing the House Chamber and side galleries to the public as well as the House Lounge.

Visitors are still able to view session from the upper galleries, and hearings will proceed as normal with the public being able to attend and testify. The goal of the House is to ensure the legislative process continues unimpeded and that visitors continue to have access, while at the same time securing high traffic areas that could promote the spread of the virus.

Missourians seeking additional information or guidance on the novel coronavirus are encouraged to call a new statewide public hotline that was activated by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS). Residents can access the information available through the hotline by calling 877-435-8411. The hotline is staffed by medical professionals and is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

This week, we worked on several contentious pieces of legislation, with a particularly lengthy debate occurring as we perfected HOB 1858. This bill establishes the "Missouri-Made Fuels Act", which specifies that all diesel fuel sold or offered for sale in Missouri for use in internal combustion engines must contain at least the following stated percentage of biodiesel fuel oil by volume on and after the following dates:

April 1, 2022, until March 31, 2023, 5%; April 1, 2023, until March 31, 2024, 10%; and beginning April 1, 2024, 20%.

After hours of debate, we perfected that legislation and it now awaits third reading in our chamber.

We also third read and passed several bills this week, including:

HB 1454, which would establish a commission to seek out within every county and city within a county, business organizations that have available job opportunities and are interested in hiring veterans to fill those opportunities. The commission must collect contact information from such business organizations and display such contact information in a table on the commission's website. The list of business organizations included in the table must be arranged by county and city not within a county. This bill was passed out with a vote of 145-2, and now awaits action in the Senate.

HB 1682 prohibits the use of vapor products, as defined in Section 407.925, RSMo, in any indoor area of a public school or school bus. The bill allows a school board to adopt additional policies relating to vapor products. It passed with a 149-4 vote and now heads to the Senate.

HB 1744 would require the Department of Revenue to accept electronic versions of documents used to verify the residency of an applicant for a Missouri driver's license. We also passed this one with a 152-2 vote.

My Legislation, HB 1697 was passed out of the House Committee on Insurance Policy by a unanimous 14-0 vote this week. This bill deals with the billing practices of insurance companies, and prevents insurance companies who have overpaid provider one from not paying provider two and forcing the second provider into trying to collect the money they are owed from provider one. The bill clearly states that insurance companies are the responsible party.

That same committee also heard my sponsored bill, HB 2035 which pertains to temporary total disability payments. The bill simply allows these payments to be made by check or electronic transfer. The current law restrict payment to a check. The bill will save the state money from producing and mailing checks and will allow people to actually receive their funds faster. That bill now awaits a committee vote.

It was my pleasure to read one of my favorite Dr. Seuss's books  Snitches and Scary Pants  to the first grade class which includes my grandson, Charlie. A special thank you to their teacher, Sarah Winch for letting me read to her class.

If you would like to have me visit your school or to speak at one of your meetings or your organization, please feel free to contact my office to set up a time.

To track any of the bills that are moving through the legislative process or to watch online either the committee hearings or the House Chamber when it is in session, go to https://house.mo.gov/

If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to contact my office either by email or phone.

It is an honor to serve as your state representative.

This report was filed Jan. 5, 2018
UPSC Recruitment 2022: One day left to apply for several vacancies at upsc.gov.in, here's direct link

800 quarantined after Delhi Mohalla clinic doctor tests positive for coronavirus

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Mar 26: As many as 800 people who came in contact with a mohalla (community) clinic doctor who tested positive for coronavirus have been quarantined, the state government said on Thursday.

Earlier, the authorities asked those who visited him between March 12 and 18 to go into home-quarantine for the next 15 days.

The Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM), Shahdara, also asked these visitors to contact the control room, in case they showed any symptoms of COVID-19.

The order says that the Mohalla Clinic doctor Gopal Jha could have been a positive coronavirus case. According to the Delhi Health official, the clinic has been closed and is being sanitised.

Earlier, the government had directed officials to take strict penal action against landlords forcing doctors, paramedical staff, and healthcare personnel in the national capital to vacate in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.

First death in Kashmir: 65-year-old religious preacher dies of coronavirus

"A lot of complaints have been received from doctors/paramedical staff/healthcare personnel all over NCT of Delhi, that their landlords/house-owners are forcing them to vacate their rented residences... such behaviour amounts to obstructing public servant in discharging their duties," read the Delhi government notification.

"All the District Magistrates/Zonal Deputy Commissioners of Municipal Corporations/District Deputy Commissioner of Police are directed to take strict penal action against such landlords/house-owners," it added.

With six new positive COVID-19 cases reported in the last 24 hours, the total in the national capital reached 36 on Thursday.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Thursday, March 26, 2020, 11:22 [IST]
Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin on March 25 decided to extend the movement control order (MCO) from March 31 to April 14, as new COVID-19 cases in the country continue to rise. 

In Putrajaya, Malaysia (Photo: Xinhua)

The leader said he will announce a more comprehensive economic stimulus package on March 27.

According to the PM, as of March 25 noon, Malaysia had reported 172 new COVID-19 cases, raising the total in the country to 1,796, with 17 deaths.

Meanwhile, two more foreigners have tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 that causes the COVID-19 in Cambodias Preah Sihanouk province, bringing the total in the country to 93.

The figures were shared by Prime Minister Hun Sen at a get-together with health volunteers to combat the pandemic on March 25.

Of the COVID-19 cases, six have recovered.

The same day, the Thai Public Health Ministry reported 107 new cases of the disease, raising the total to 934.

All train passengers in Thailand, including those using the skytrain, will be required to wear masks before entering stations and during onboard travel from March 25, as part of the government's efforts to tackle the escalating COVID-19 crisis.

Meanwhile, Myanmar government is also planning to draw a plan to provide prompt response to possible COVID-19 infection at internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in the country.

There are 128 IDP camps, accommodating 184,333 people in 24 townships in Kachin, Kayin, Shan and Rakhine states as per the statistics in January this year./.VNA
New Delhi, March 26 : India's largest paramilitary force CRPF on Thursday announced that its over 3.5 lakh personnel will contribute their one-day salary to the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund in fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) -- one of the seven Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) under Ministry of Home Affairs -- initiated the move to extend a helping hand to the government which earlier on Thursday announced its first Rs 170,000 crore Covid-19 relief package to protect the weaker sections of society.

"The CRPF personnel have decided to make a humble contribution of one-day salary to the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund. We are dutifully commited to stand firmly with our nation in this challenging time of COVID-19 spread," the CRPF said in statement.

Mandated to provide internal security in Jammu and Kashmir and Maoist-affected states in the country, the CRPF said it is an unanimous decision and a sincere effort by our personnel.

The paramilitary force made the announcement after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman declared a Rs 170,000 crore relief package under the PM Garib Kalyan Yojana which would benefit migrant workers and the rural poor and women among others.

The relief package was announced two days after the Prime Minister announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown till April 14 to break the spread chain of Covid-19 that has killed hundreds of people across the globe.
By Geoffrey Smith

Investing.com -- Europes battered bank stocks are flying again for a second day as the flood of central bank liquidity lifts all boats, while regulators reassurances on how to account for the inevitable sharp rise in distressed loans is also lending support.

By 6 AM ET (1000 GMT), the Stoxx 600 Banks index was up 5.2%, adding to Tuesdays gain of nearly 10%. Ireland's AIB Group (IR:AIBG) shares were up 16.3% while Societe Generale (PA:SOGN) shares were up 10.3% and Deutsche Bank (DE:DBKGn) stock was up 7.1%.

The benchmark STOXX 600 index was up 3.6% at 312.80.

Banks now have some 823 billion euro ($890 billion) worth of loans outstanding through the European Central Banks refinancing operations, more than at any time since 2013, after a spate of open market operations that have shown how much they need central banks backstops right now.

Among that increase is around $116 billion offered through a swap facility with the Federal Reserve. Banks demand for seven-day dollars fell sharply at this weeks auction to only $4.1 billion at an operation on Tuesday.

We see this as an indication that whilst stress in US$ liquidity remains elevated, the ECBs backstops have successfully reduced them, Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) analysts led by Jernej Omahen said in a note to clients on Tuesday.

At Wednesdays auction of seven-day funds, demand fell from $36.3 billion a week earlier to $17.3 billion, suggesting a further easing of tensions.

There are other signs of tail risks being reduced, albeit gradually. The Eurogroup, which brings together eurozone finance ministers, inched toward activating the currency unions 700 billion-euro bailout fund at their meeting on Tuesday.

While theres some disappointment among periphery markets that there will be no joint debt issuance to underwrite whats likely to be a massive widening of budget deficits, the key point is that recourse to the European Stability Mechanism further enhances the guarantee of ECB support through outright bond purchases (although last weeks new 750 billion QE program should already cover most eventualities).

Story continues

Elsewhere, the European Banking Authority on Wednesday formally gave its blessing to what amounts to the suspension of accounting rules that force banks to book provisions early against loans that they expect to turn sour. The IFRS 9 rule was adopted after the last crisis to stop banks pretending that bad loans were still good, but risked making a bad situation worse if narrowly applied in the current downturn, which is of a very different nature.

There is a broad understanding that the operational capability of banks in making in-depth assessments may be more limited under the current circumstances, hence short-term flexibility in operational requirements is warranted, the European Banking Authority said in a statement, which gave clear precedence to meeting the immediate needs of the economy for credit.

Given the nature of the present shock which may also have medium and long term implications the flexibility embedded in the accounting and regulatory frameworks is to be fully used by institutions to help maintain soundness through the crisis and provide critical functions to the economy, it added.

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New developments in the response to the coronavirus pandemic continue to come at a fast pace.

Overnight, the Senate approved a federal response bill, which now heads to the House: Senate unanimously passes massive coronavirus aid plan.

What will it mean for you? That depends on a number of factors: COVID-19 stimulus bill by the numbers.

The first jobless claims report since the pandemic hit is bleak: US jobless claims hit 3.3 million, quadruple previous record

Medical response

In Midland County, a sixth case was reported on Wednesday afternoon. In a positive note, none of the patients are current hospitalized.

As confirmed cases of coronavirus rise in Michigan, MidMichigan Medical Center-Midland says it remains in good standing as far as supplies go: MidMichigan Health: Masks, bed capacity sufficient.

Also see: McLaren seeks donations of personal protective equipment

Impact on businesses

We took a look at a number of ways the coronavirus response is affecting local businesses:

 Local restaurants persist, evolve operations to feed community: Coronavirus has meant slower business for many

 Niche businesses traverse uncertain territory: Reactions from local ice cream parlor, candy store, popcorn shop and donut dealer

 Local grocery stores adapt to new reality: Implementing additional measures to keep customers safe

Community response:

 Midlander with Italy ties supports coronavirus countermeasures

Taking a look back in time, Tawny Ryan Nelb writes about the 1918 flu pandemic: Midland History: Helen Dow Hale and the flu pandemic of 1918

You ask

We're trying out a new feature on our website to let you submit questions to our staff and we'll work to get an answer, where possible:

 You ask, MDN answers: Coronavirus and preexisting conditions

 You ask, MDN answers: adequate drug supplies

Submit your question:

Map: Cases by state
Head of the Moroccan government Saad Eddine El Otmani asked all public sector administrations to put off hiring new employees until the end of the coronavirus crisis.

In a sign of austerity measures, El Otmani also ordered in a letter delaying all promotions planned in the current budget.

The Prime minister said that the job freeze does not apply to health and security services.

In this connection, the Moroccan royal armed forces have asked nurses and health workers to apply to join the armys ranks, as military and civilian medicine join efforts to counter the coronavirus in the country.

Morocco has imposed a nationwide quarantine and banned travel between cities. Only critical businesses such as shops and supermarkets selling foodstuff, pharmacies and banks and other essential agencies were allowed to operate.

Morocco has set up a special national response committee to the coronavirus including as well as an economic committee to meet the challenges relating to the pandemic.

The King ordered the creation of a special fund to offset the economic and social impact of the virus and upgrade health service. So far, generous donations from the Moroccan public and private sector flowed to the fund, which has so far garnered more than $3 billion, including state budget contribution.
World leaders are to hold online crisis talks Thursday on the coronavirus pandemic that has forced three billion people into lockdown and claimed more than 21,000 lives.

With the disease tearing around the globe at a terrifying pace, warnings are multiplying over its economic consequences, and experts say it could cause more damage than the Great Depression.

Amid squabbling between the leaders of China and the US over who is to blame, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for the world to act together to halt the menace.

"COVID-19 is threatening the whole of humanity," he said. "Global action and solidarity are crucial. Individual country responses are not going to be enough."

The global lockdown -- which also took in India's huge population this week -- tightened further Thursday as Russia announced it was grounding all international flights, while Moscow's mayor ordered the closure of cafes, shops and parks.

Workers wearing protective clothing disinfect a hotel as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus in Yangon, Myanmar. By Ye Aung THU (AFP)

Tokyo's millions of citizens have been told to stay home and tourism-dependent Thailand has shuttered its borders.

Economists say the restrictions imposed around the world could cause the most violent recession in recent history.

"The G20 economies will experience an unprecedented shock in the first half of this year and will contract in 2020 as a whole," ratings agency Moody's said.

Unemployment rates are expected to soar -- as much as 30 percent in the US -- according to James Bullard, president of the St Louis Federal Reserve.

Leaders of the G20 major economies will hold a virtual huddle later Thursday in the shadow of such dire predictions.

People stand on designated areas to maintain social distancing as they queue outside a medical store in Allahabad, India. By SANJAY KANOJIA (AFP)

"As the world confronts the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges to healthcare systems and the global economy, we convene this extraordinary G20 summit to unite efforts towards a global response," tweeted the king of Saudi Arabia. Saudi currently holds the rotating G20 presidency.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said richer nations needed to offer support to low and middle income countries.

The devastating effect on poorer nations was laid bare Thursday when the Philippines announced that nine frontline doctors had died after contracting COVID-19.

Three large Manila hospitals said this week they had reached capacity and would no longer accept new coronavirus cases.

Hundreds of medical staff are undergoing 14-day self-quarantines after suspected exposure, the hospitals said.

Gun rush

The death toll from the virus, which emerged in China late last year, continued to grow, with the US becoming the sixth country to hit four figures.

An empty Bolivar square in Bogota, after Colombian President Ivan Duque announced mandatory preventive isolation from March 24 to April 13. By Raul ARBOLEDA (AFP)

Almost 1,050 people are now known to have died in the United States, with nearly 70,000 confirmed infections, a tally by Johns Hopkins University showed. Globally the number of infections is closing in on half a million.

The rocketing infection rate in the US has sparked a rush to buy weapons, gun store owners told AFP, with customers panicking about societal breakdown.

"A lot of people are buying shotguns, handguns, AR-15 (semi-automatic rifles), everything," said Tiffany Teasdale, who sells guns in Washington state.

A health worker carries a body on a stretcher outside Gregorio Maranon hospital in Madrid. By OSCAR DEL POZO (AFP)

"A lot of people are scared that someone is going to break into their home... to steal cash, their toilet paper, their bottled water, their food."

Around half of the US population is under lockdown, but President Donald Trump said he would decide soon whether unaffected parts of the country can get back to work.

"We want to get our country going again," Trump said. "I'm not going to do anything rash or hastily.

"By Easter we'll have a recommendation and maybe before Easter," he added.

The White House, which has been criticised for its lacklustre response to the mushrooming crisis, has repeatedly lashed out at Beijing over the disease.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Group of Seven powers were united against China's "disinformation" campaign.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman infuriated Washington by suggesting on Twitter that US troops brought the virus to Wuhan, the metropolis where it first emerged late last year.

Stigmatising

Scientists say the new coronavirus was first detected at a market that sold wild animals.

Egypt's landmark Tahrir Square in Cairo stands empty on the first evening of a two-week long night-time curfew imposed by the authorities. By Khaled DESOUKI (AFP)

"Every one of the nations that were at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place," Pompeo told reporters.

But any notion of unity after the videoconference among the G7, which also includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, was dashed by the lack of a joint statement -- often a formality at such gatherings.

Reports suggested the statement was scuttled by Pompeo's insistence that it use the term "Wuhan virus" -- a phrase frowned upon by medical professionals who say it is stigmatising.

The origins of the virus notwithstanding, its human cost continued to rise, as did the volume of the alarm bells being rung all over the world.

Iran's death toll surpassed 2,200 Thursday and Spain's topped 4,000. Meanwhile health experts cautioned that the sewage-soaked alleyways and bamboo shacks that are home to one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh provide fertile ground for the spread of the disease.

Britain's National Health Service said London's hospitals faced a "continuous tsunami" of seriously ill COVID-19 patients.

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Southern California tenants and landlords are bracing for missed rent payments in April due to the coronavirus pandemic. (Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Tenants and landlords throughout Southern California are bracing for next Wednesday, when April rents are due just as thousands of people have lost their jobs and most business have been shut down as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Government officials have provided certain protection against evictions for renters and limited mortgage relief for landlords affected by the virus. Some landlords say they are trying to work out deferred payment plans with tenants to make up for any missed rental payments.

But stress, fear and confusion remain, especially in Los Angeles County, where 55% of residents are renters and rents are among the highest in the nation.

Heres how are a few tenants and landlords are grappling with the crisis:





'Im not going to have the money'

Martin Isenberg lost all three jobs he was working when the coronavirus crisis hit and businesses shut down.

Were planning to have a conversation with our landlord and see if maybe we can do half the rent, said Isenberg, 27, who shares a $2,000-a-month apartment with his still-working girlfriend in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

All of my income is gone, he said, referring to his jobs as a substitute schoolteacher, bartender and freelance Hollywood set dresser. I was working constantly and still struggling to pay rent, so of course when something like this happens, Im not going to have the money.

Im just trying to be as frugal as possible and I applied for unemployment, Isenberg said, adding that hes concerned about having to make up for any unpaid rent in the months to come.

When I finally do go back to work when this is all over, and I have zero dollars in my savings account because I used it all on groceries and the basic expenses of living, then Im expected to pay my rent for that month and be given six months to pay back the rent that I didnt pay, he said.

So essentially Ill be going into debt for a crisis that was not of my causing, Isenberg said. Im going to have to pay twice as much rent as I was before, which is not a solution.





Story continues

'The rents cover our living'

Lisa McFadden Neath, who with her mother owns eight commercial and residential properties in Bakersfield and San Luis Obispo, said the situation is very scary. It keeps me awake at night.

Her commercial tenants include a hairdresser and real estate agent, and her apartment tenants include a bartender, waiter, winery worker and plumber. She pays the utilities for her commercial clients.

Every commercial tenant I have has asked if I can work with them on their rent, as have three of her residential tenants, McFadden Neath said. Ive told them were all in this together and of course I will do what I can to help them while keeping the lights on.

But McFadden Neath, 51, said she needs the rent payments. Were a small business, she said. I have a mortgage on my house that I have to cover. I have my mom, and she has a mortgage on her home. The rents cover our living.





'I can't sleep'

Cara Guglielmino is an actor and comedian who also was working as a restaurant server when she saw an Instagram post that her Beverly Center restaurant, Angler, had closed due to the pandemic. That was news to us because they had not informed us that they were closing, she said.

Now, Guglielmino doesnt know how shell pay the $1,850 monthly rent for her one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood.

Im stressed, I cant sleep, she said. I dont know what to do. Im trying really hard to not spend on anything that isnt within the basic necessities.

Guglielmino, 30, said her landlord posted a notice on her door that tenants affected by the virus would have up to six months after the emergency eases to repay missed rent. But that was of little solace to her.

What well be having to do is pay rent plus half-a-rent until we catch up, she said. In the meantime, its not like I can take my unemployment [benefit] and save it for later.

Guglielmino added: We dont know where restaurants are going to be after this. Are people going to want to go out? Are people going to be staffing [restaurants] the same was as they were staffing before this?

Theres a ton of us [renters] that are all in the same boat and were all really worried, she said. Its probably going to increase the homeless population at the end of this. The landlords need to allow a rent pause. Rent will not be deferred and will not be owed. This is a crisis.





'I will not kick them out'

Sydney Wen owns a three-unit rental triplex in Torrance, and one of his tenants is a babysitter who suddenly lost her job because her clients were sent home to work, removing the need for her services.

I will support her by trying to find a negotiated solution, Wen said. I hope my other two tenants will keep paying rent. But if they stop, I will continue to support them, too. I will not kick them out. I used to be on food stamps, I know their struggle.

But Wen, 46, said he faces a crisis as well because, like many landlords, he has certain fixed costs  a mortgage on the property, insurance and taxes, utilities and maintenance costs that must be paid.

I have emergency savings, but if this goes on for five or six months, Im going bankrupt, Wen said. I dont see any communication from local and state governments that theres any sort of forbearance being given to individual landlords.





'Forbearance ... until the tenant can catch up'

Robert Hart is chief executive of TruAmerica Multifamily, a Century City firm that owns about 11,000 rental units throughout California with roughly 33,000 tenants.

Many tenants will pay their rent because they still have the ability to, theyre not out of work even if working from home, or theyre retirees on fixed incomes, Hart said. But there will be other tenants that simply dont have the cash.

Hart said he and many other landlords absolutely would try to help those tenants get through the crisis by working out payment plans. That workout, from our point of view, is a forbearance of rent for a period of time until the tenant can catch up, he said.

As another example, Hart pointed to Irvine Co. in Orange County, which has told tenants that if theyre unable to pay their full rent in April and May, they can defer half of that owed rent over a six-month period.

But such payment plans and government orders relaxing rules on evictions are being misinterpreted by some tenants as meaning they dont have to pay rent at all in April if theyve been affected by the virus, Hart said.

Theyre not saying you dont have to pay your rent; theyre saying you dont have to pay it now, he said.
A 22-year-old man has been arrested by the Mumbai Police after he was caught roaming in the city on his bike during the country-wide lockdown.

The man, identified as Rakesh Rajbhar, was on Wednesday spotted without a head gear and face mask at Vasai Wakanpada Sitaram Road in Palghar district by a police officer at the check post, police said.

In a situation where nobody is allowed to step out, police officer Sanil Balakrishna Patil gestured at him to stop by waving his hand, but Rajbhar tried to escape by speeding.

The officer started chasing him on another bike, but he lost control of the vehicle and fell down at some distance. He was badly injured and was rushed to the nearest hospital by his fellow cops present on the spot.

Later, the man was arrested.

A case had been registered against him under Sections 353, 333, 279, 337, 338 and the Motor Vehicle Act of the IPC, police said.

The officer is undergoing treatment at the hospital and further investigation is underway.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sikh community has not only suffered through conflict, but also persecution in an increasingly intolerant society.

Kabul, Afghanistan  The sounds of cries  some loud, many stifled  fill the halls of the Karte Parwan Gurudwara, one of only three remaining places of worship for the small Afghan Sikh and Hindu community in the capital of Afghanistan.

Some of the muffled wailing spills onto the streets of the Karte Parwan area, once home to a large number of Afghan Sikhs who lived in harmony with the Muslim-majority population in pre-conflict Afghanistan.

However, the recent decades of war in Afghanistan have been hard on the community that has not only suffered through the conflict, but also faced persecution from a society that became increasingly intolerant.

Afghan forces killed gunmen who attacked a Sikh religious complex in the capital on Wednesday, ending an hours-long siege that killed 25 people.

The most recent attack, on the 400-year-old Gurudwara in Shor Bazaar in Kabul, has left the community desolate. The situation is very scary, the whole community is in mourning and crying, 25-year-old Raj Sutaka, an Afghan Sikh from Kabul who runs a pharmacy business, told Al Jazeera.

Over the years, Afghan Sikhs and the Hindu population have dwindled from nearly 700,000 in the 1970s to less than a few hundred, today. We are about 70 to 80 families who are left in all over Afghanistan. It used to be many more, but as of today, we are maybe 400 to 450 adults and about 100 to 200 children. So we are not more than a total of 700, Sutaka said, trying hard to keep a steady tone.





Living in fear

Around him, men and women mourned for the loss of loved ones. Some families lost as many as seven people, including children. Apart from the worshipers, there were also at least 40 families who lived in the complex of the Gurudwara. Sutaka himself lost a dear friend and a relative.

Everyone is scared and living in fear. We are even afraid of going to Gurdwaras to mourn least something happens again, he said.

And their fears were justified. On Thursday afternoon, when Sutaka and other community members were carrying 25 bodies to the cremation grounds for the final rites, another explosion, detonated remotely, went off close to their procession in the Qalacha area.

Right now we were carrying the dead bodies and an explosion happened close by. Luckily we survived and reached the crematorium, he said, showing photos and videos from inside the crematorium, where a mass funeral was held.

We used to get threats every now and then, but except one attack 40 to 45 years ago in Jalalabad, never had anyone ever attacked a Gurudwara. Not even during the years of war in the last four decades.

Six-hour massacre

Sutaka described the chain of events on Wednesday for Al Jazeera.

I was here at the Karte Parwan Gurudrawa when we heard about the attack at Shor Bazaar around 7:30am. The morning prayers had just gotten over and prasad was being distributed. There were also snacks for the gathering and many were waiting to be served when two gunmen stormed inside, he said, sharing a story pieced together from those who survived.

They first threw bombs and then started firing bullets at the people. The massacre went on for six hours, he said.

Afghan Sikh men carry the coffin of one of the victims [Mohammad Ismail /Reuters]

While the armed group ISIL (ISIS) claimed responsibility of the attack, government sources said it was conducted by the Haqqani Network, and could have been in retaliation for recent violence against Muslims in India.

The Taliban and other terrorist groups sponsored by the governments in our region have in the past also attacked our society and tried create divisions among people, alleged Javid Faisal, spokesperson at the Afghan National Security Council.

Such past events instill fear and insecurity within the community and can affect the unity of the nation, too, he said.

On Wednesday evening, Hamdullah Mohib, the national security advisor, visited survivors and their families to offer his condolences and promised to investigate the attacks, Sutaka said.

Despite the grim situation, the community is not alone in their grief, and messages of solidarity have poured in from every corner of Afghanistan.

They are more Afghan than a lot of other Afghans, said Sahira Sharif, a member of parliament from Khost Province, which was once home to hundreds of Sikh families.





Bonhomie and cordiality

While only a handful of Sikhs remain, Sharif said she has fond memories of growing up in a multicultural society.

There was a lot of bonhomie and cordiality between the Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus in Khost. We socialised with each other and, growing up, they would come to our houses and we would go to theirs, she recalled to Al Jazeera, adding that the Sikh community was so trusted that other Afghans would save their money with them, in the absence of a bank.

Later, when Sharif was campaigning for a parliamentary seat, many Sikhs backed her. When I was running for the 15th round of elections, I went to their neighbourhood and met with the women of the community. They campaigned for me, they hosted me for lunch and I could see their cultures and practices remained very close to that of other Khostis, she said.

Samira Hamidi, an Afghan activist and regional campaigner at Amnesty International, said: The Sikh community of Afghanistan are among the most resilient, peaceful and country-loving citizens. There are so many of them who have preferred living in Afghanistan despite all the threats against them.

This deep social connection has elevated a collective grief among Afghans, irrespective of their faith and beliefs.

Yesterdays attack on our Sikh brothers and sisters is inhumane and cowardice. It is painful to hear the father whose three-year-old daughter was shot in front of him, she added, visibly disturbed at the tragedy of Harinder Singh Khalsa, who lost seven members of his family, including his wife, mother and daughter.

Hamidi, like many Afghan Muslims, extended her solidarity to the Sikhs.

At this painful time, all I can say is we need to stand with them, share their grievances and comfort them. I have huge respect for each of them for the love and compassion they have for Afghanistan, and I wish no one, including them, to have to face the tragedies like yesterday anymore, she said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed at a Group of 20 (G20) video conference that a freeze be placed on economic sanctions to allow countries to better combat the coronavirus pandemic that has infected more than 500,000 worldwide and killed nearly 23,000 people.

Putin told leaders of the 20 most industrialized nations on March 26 that restrictive measures imposed on countries should be lifted on humanitarian grounds to facilitate mutual deliveries of drugs, food, equipment, and technology.

Russia is under numerous rounds of sanctions imposed by the European Union, the United States, and other countries over its actions in Ukraine.

It has also denounced crippling economic sanctions against Iran that the United States has reimposed since Washington in 2018 withdrew from a landmark nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers.

Without naming a specific country, Putin said that a moratorium should be enacted on restrictions placed on essential goods as well as financial transactions to purchase them.

"It is a question of whether people will live or die, a purely humanitarian issue," he said.

There have been increased calls for Washington to suspend sanctions against Iran, one of the countries hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic.

The United States has offered to help Iran in its fight against the virus, which has infected 29,406 people in the country and killed 2,234 of them, according to a tally on March 26 compiled by Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

However, Washington has shown no desire to ease its sanctions and its policy of maximum pressure on Tehran.

Iranian officials have dismissed Washington's humanitarian offer as dishonest and called instead for the lifting of the sanctions.

"Does the U.S. want a 'forever pandemic? Moral imperative to stop observing the bully's sanctions," Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted on March 26.

Russia has reported 840 confirmed coronavirus cases and three deaths attributed to it, according to Johns Hopkins University.

With additional reporting by AFP and TASS
SYRACUSE, N.Y.  Syracuses coronavirus testing program is switching labs after many patients encountered long delays getting test results.

The Syracuse Community Health Center, which operates the drive-through testing program at 819 S. Salina St., started sending all new patient samples this morning to Genetworx, a lab in Virginia.

The center has been using Quest Diagnostics, another lab in Virginia, since it launched the testing program March 16. Because of a backup at Quest, some patients tested at the health center last week are still awaiting results.

The health center tried out Genetworx one day over the weekend and was pleased with the results, said Derrick Murry, the centers chief operating officer. The turnaround time was less than 48 hours. So the center is phasing out Quest Diagnostics.

We feel confident they will ensure the results our patients need are done in a reliable and consistent time frame which is critical as we go forward, he said.

In addition to inconveniencing patients, slow results delay efforts by Onondaga County Health Department investigators to trace the steps of patients who test positive to find other people they may have exposed. The longer each patients results take, the more time potentially infected people could go about their lives unaware of the risk.

There are 81 confirmed coronavirus cases in Onondaga County, 10 of them hospitalized. There has been one death in the county.

The health center is testing about 150 people a day. It collects nasal and oral swabs from people who suspect they may have coronavirus, then ships them to the lab for testing.

Murry said the Onondaga County Health Department calls patients who test positive, while health center nurses call patients who test negative.

Patients still awaiting results from Quest Diagnostics can register on the labs website to get results online.

James T. Mulder covers health news. Have a news tip? Contact him at (315) 470-2245 or jmulder@syracuse.com
LONDON, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Powtoon , a leading video creation and visual communication platform, announced today its tools and guides that will change the way people conduct and experience remote learning and remote working . The new tools, along with Powtoon's video creation capabilities, allow for the easy and seamless creation of training videos for learning and development, internal communications, business presentations, product launches, digital and broadcast ads, explainer videos, and educational materials for the classroom.

As the entire world adapts to the new work- and learn-from-home reality, businesses, managers, teachers, and educational institutions have been forced to change how they teach and function, and companies are relying more than ever on effective internal communication to keep remote-working team members updated and engaged.

The challenge, however, is that students and employees quickly become overloaded, inattentively spending hours in video calls while multitasking, leaving managers and educators unable to effectively communicate to their audiences.

With the launch of its remote learning and working tools, Powtoon enables users to convey their message and value in an attention-grabbing way, changing the way viewers consume material.

Powtoon's platform allows users to create professional videos, presentations, and other visual communications quickly on their own, without design or technical skills, using its library of characters, props, stock images and footage, ready-made templates, and intuitive drag-and-drop interface to suit any occasion.

In addition to the new tools, Powtoon is making it easier than ever to get started with the following:

Removing all content limitations from free Powtoon plans for charities, nonprofit organizations, and government bodies through June 30

Classroom education plans will now be free through June 30

Reducing the price of Powtoon Pro+ annual plans by 50%

Offering special plans for large corporations through the duration of the crisis

"As the world shifts to a new way of working and learning, we are excited to present our solution, which will significantly improve the way we communicate with one another," said Ilya Spitalnik, Founder of Powtoon. "Keeping students and employees engaged is more important than ever and Powtoon is the perfect tool for that."

About Powtoon

Powtoon is a leading video and visual communication platform launched in 2012. Powtoon's mission is to empower individuals, teams, and companies to achieve measurable results by transforming communications into visual experiences that get their audience to care, connect, and act. In just eight years, over 75 million Powtoons have been created for use in business presentations, product launches, digital and broadcast ads, explainer videos, education materials for the classroom, and much more. Powtoon adds a spark of awesomeness to everyday communications, turning content into substance people really want to watch and engage with.

Over 25 million people across the world, including 96 percent of all Fortune 500 companies, Ivy League universities, and leading SMBs, actively use Powtoon. And a new Powtoon is created every second of every day. Powtoon currently has offices in London, Tel Aviv, and Ukraine.

Contact Information:

Suzanne Kagan

Senior Marketing Manager

[email protected]

SOURCE Powtoon

Related Links

https://www.powtoon.com


A parish priest in western Poland is offering his flock the possibility of Easter confessions from the comfort of their own car as social distancing to fight the coronavirus becomes the new norm.

"We've already done a practice run... I have an appointment with a family of five tomorrow and next week I'm due to hear a parishioner confess every sin from his entire life," Father Adam Pawlowski told AFP.

The priest from the western village of Rogalin plans to park his car in an alley by the church and will roll down his window for the parishioner parked at least 1.5 metres (five feet) away to avoid any potential coronavirus infection.

Every year many Poles attend confession before Easter in the majority Catholic EU member of 38 million people, which has 1,120 confirmed cases of COVID-19 including 14 deaths.

The religious authorities have reminded the faithful that confession via telephone or the internet is not valid but says the in-person location does not have to be a church confessional.

Drive-through confessions have appeared the US and online mass and other initiatives are also appearing as people try to live a normal life in the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee on Thursday decided to hand over its inns to AIIMS and Safadarjung Hospital for utilisation in view of the coronavirus outbreak.

Forty rooms of Gurudwara Rakabganj have already been given to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital after the hospital management contacted DSGMC, its chairman Manjinder Singh Sirsa said.

"In a meeting today, we decided to offer our inns to other hospitals. We have told Union Health minister Harsh Vardhan that 34 rooms of Gurudwara Motibagh could be used by AIIMS and Safdarjung Hospital," he said.

It was also discussed in the meeting that coronavirus patients could be kept atthe committee's hospital at Gurudwara Bangla Sahib. If the health ministry decides for it, the committee can make all the necessary preparations, he said.

Sirsa said that the committee is also sending 'langar' (food) for 20,000 people daily to feed the needy persons as a complete lockdown is in place due to the coronavirus outbreak. The committee will provide food to more people if needed, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Mumbai, March 26 : Bollywood actor Hrithik Roshan has stressed that the safety of the most fundamental caretakers of the city and society must be ensured, and has taken an extra step by procuring masks for Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

Hrithik on Thursday tweeted: "In times such as these, we must do whatever we can to ensure the safety of the most fundamental caretakers of our city and society. I have procured N95 and FFP3 masks for our BMC workers and other caretakers." The "War" star then paid his gratitude to minister Aaditya Thackeray for giving him the opportunity to support the Maharashtra government.

"My gratitude to @AUThackeray for giving me the opportunity to support the Maharashtra govt in their endeavour to curb the pandemic. It is our duty to help in whatever capacity we can. @mybmc #coronavirusoutbreak #stayhomestaysafe," he added.

On the acting front, Hrithik was last seen on screen in "War" along with actor Tiger Shroff.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Chinas announcement this month of nearly a week of no new infections in Wuhan, the hard-hit city where the coronavirus pandemic originated, was both hope-inspiring -- and hard to believe.

Medical professionals said the draconian set of policies imposed by the Chinese government  including widespread testing, isolation of all infected people and anyone they came in contact with  are proven methods for limiting contagion. Other countries, South Korea and Taiwan, for example, have followed similar courses, and they have also reported steep declines in new infections, though neither says it has achieved no new local infections, as China claims.

Top photo: A TV image described as empty beds in a Wuhan hospital. A Taiwan network reported that one hospital was under pressure from the central government not to admit patients so it could report no new cases.

What we don't know is the degree to which they're being transparent and the degree to which they're following up on existing infections, Don Goldmann, a professor of immunology, infectious diseases, and epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a phone interview.

Dr. Goldmann said Chinese scientists have been extremely transparent about what they've discovered about the coronavirus so far; they have shared information on the genetics and sequencing of the virus and details of autopsies, clinical care and outcomes, he said. They've also shared fatality rates among different age groups.

So I'm not sure why they would make this up, he said, especially since risking another wave of this would not be in their interests or in the interests of their leadership.

Still, skepticism about China's no-new-local-infections claim is widespread, including, at least according to the anecdotal evidence, inside China. The doubt is fueled both by China's Communist Party's long history of propaganda and by the obvious benefits of changing the focus from the governments initial efforts to suppress information about the coronavirus to its supposedly glorious victory over the disease crippling much of the world.

A propaganda spokesman's job is the turn messy facts into a clean narrative, Andrew J. Nathan, professor of political science at Columbia University and a leading China expert, said in an email. China is trying to bury the embarrassment of the Covid-19 cover-up in a happy story of triumph over the virus.

But it feels like overreaching to say that transmission has completely stopped, Nathan continued. It seems that the message is political, not epidemiological.

A Coca-Cola bottling worker in face mask in Wuhan. State media are trying to show China defeating the coronavirus. (Xiao Yijiu/Xinhua via AP)

Some reports have chipped away at least at China's most extreme claim of success. On the very days when the national health authority was announcing that there were no new local infections, social media accounts in China were circulating photographs of urgent notices put up in residential areas announcing new cases and warning people to stay home.

EBC News, a Taiwan cable news network, broadcast two such photographs dated March 20, which is two days after China reported there were no new local Wuhan infections. One of the notices, after announcing the new cases, read: Do not go out, or gather, wash your hands, be careful, hold on, hold on, and hold on some more.

EBC also broadcast video of a hospital in Wuhan that it says was taken on March 19 and provided by a local Wuhan journalist. The video shows a reception area crowded with people, some of them on gurneys with IV drips, and health care workers in full protective gear, white suits, face masks and goggles.

According to the Taiwan commentators, the reporter had accompanied a friend who was seeking care for his sick mother, but the hospital, while allowing patients to stay in the waiting area, was refusing to admit any of them. When the reporter asked the reason, a health worker at the hospital told him the hospital was under pressure from the central government to report no new cases.

Firefighters perform disinfection on the platform of Wuhan Railway Station.

There's no question that since Beijing began implementing strict quarantine measures to fight the virus, the Chinese propaganda machine has been in full gear, praising the Communist Party and its paramount leader, Xi Jinping, for directing an effective response to the epidemic and presenting itself as a model for the rest of the world. The overall message is that, as always, when things get tough, the Communist Party and its leaders, and only they, can be counted on for national salvation.

From the flood rescue effort in 1998 to the SARS epidemic in 2003 and the earthquake relief work in 2008, the People's Daily, the party's official organ, said early in March, as China began reporting a drop in new coronavirus infections, these great struggles one after the other have taught us that the Chinese Communist Party is the backbone of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.

In recent days, the Chinese media have gone beyond praise of the country's leaders to depicting a world grateful to China for its leadership in the fight against the disease. It has also been expressing fury at President Trump for calling the disease the Chinese virus and it has lent credence to the unfounded conspiracy theory that the virus actually originated not in a market in Wuhan, but in an American military germ warfare lab.

China selflessly extends helping hand to countries around the world in global battle against Covid-19, read one recent headline in the English-language People's Daily Online. The article showed pictures of a group of Chinese health care workers at a hospital in Italy giving the thumbs up. Another recent headline: Foreign Politicians Thank China for Support Amid Epidemic.

The barrage of good news propaganda has, moreover, been accompanied by what the human rights group Reporters Without Borders is calling China's relentless crackdown on all independent news outlets that might mar the official narrative. This repression originated early in January when Li Wenliang, the doctor who first reported the existence of the virus, was taken into custody by the local Public Security Bureau and only released when he signed a confession admitting to spreading false rumors.

Dr. Li soon died of the very disease whose existence was being denied by China's authorities, and his martyrdom forced the authorities to admit that they had behaved incorrectly in his case.

But the effort at information control has continued nonetheless. At least three citizen journalists who put out videos and reports on the dismal, crowded conditions in Wuhans hospitals have disappeared. Among them was Fang Bin, a businessman in Wuhan who was able to video-record his own arrest by Chinese police, posing as medical workers at his apartment. Fang was released for a time, but he soon put out a video in which he clearly anticipated his ability to act as an independent source of information in Wuhan wouldn't last long. I'm afraid, he said. Before me there's the virus. And behind me, the legal and administrative apparatus of the Chinese state.

There have been other apparent arrests, or at least unexplained disappearances, including that of Ren Zhiqiang, a wealthy property developer who circulated an article in which he criticized Xi for his handling of the crisis. Earlier this month, according to Reporters Without Borders, an issue of the magazine Ren Wu was pulled from the newsstands after publishing an interview with a prominent Wuhan doctor criticizing the government for censoring doctors.

Now, with China's recent expulsion of reporters from The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, the country's effort to gain total control of the coronavirus narrative would seem to be almost complete.

China is in the midst of its most intensive propaganda operation in living memory, in trying to project its success in dealing with the virus, Peter Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the London University School of Oriental and African Studies, told Hong Kong's South China Morning Post. There is now an imperative for the statistics to be low, and now we have statistics that serve the political imperative.

So, what is the true picture? That is not an easy question to answer, but the available evidence would seem to support the conclusion that, while the no-new-infections claim may be more propaganda than literal result, China has, as Dr. Goldmann said, almost certainly succeeded in substantially slowing down the spread of the virus.

Still, several things are missing from the official narrative that might be useful to other countries seeking to reduce the viruss spread. These include whether the actions taken to track down infected people and force them into total quarantine could be duplicated in democratic countries. Taiwan's EBC television network a couple of weeks ago broadcast video of a street brawl between local residents and police, the residents evidently furious they were unable even to obtain food and shouting, We've been abandoned. No images of that sort are likely to be shown on Chinese Central TV.

And then there's the risk mentioned by Dr. Goldmann that a new flare up of the virus would harm the credibility of the authorities. But one commentator on Taiwan television speculated that, if there is a new surge of infections, the propaganda machine will put the blame on the United States and Europe, saying the new infections were the result of their failure to follow the Chinese example.
While some investors are already well versed in financial metrics (hat tip), this article is for those who would like to learn about Return On Equity (ROE) and why it is important. To keep the lesson grounded in practicality, we'll use ROE to better understand Essex Bio-Technology Limited (HKG:1061).

Over the last twelve months Essex Bio-Technology has recorded a ROE of 25%. One way to conceptualize this, is that for each HK$1 of shareholders' equity it has, the company made HK$0.25 in profit.

Check out our latest analysis for Essex Bio-Technology

How Do You Calculate Return On Equity?

The formula for ROE is:

Return on Equity = Net Profit (from continuing operations)  Shareholders' Equity

Or for Essex Bio-Technology:

25% = HK$303m  HK$1.2b (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2019.)

It's easy to understand the 'net profit' part of that equation, but 'shareholders' equity' requires further explanation. It is the capital paid in by shareholders, plus any retained earnings. The easiest way to calculate shareholders' equity is to subtract the company's total liabilities from the total assets.

What Does Return On Equity Signify?

ROE looks at the amount a company earns relative to the money it has kept within the business. The 'return' is the profit over the last twelve months. That means that the higher the ROE, the more profitable the company is. So, all else being equal, a high ROE is better than a low one. That means ROE can be used to compare two businesses.

Does Essex Bio-Technology Have A Good ROE?

One simple way to determine if a company has a good return on equity is to compare it to the average for its industry. Importantly, this is far from a perfect measure, because companies differ significantly within the same industry classification. Pleasingly, Essex Bio-Technology has a superior ROE than the average (9.3%) company in the Biotechs industry.

SEHK:1061 Past Revenue and Net Income, March 26th 2020

That is a good sign. In my book, a high ROE almost always warrants a closer look. One data point to check is if insiders have bought shares recently.

Story continues

The Importance Of Debt To Return On Equity

Companies usually need to invest money to grow their profits. That cash can come from retained earnings, issuing new shares (equity), or debt. In the first and second cases, the ROE will reflect this use of cash for investment in the business. In the latter case, the debt required for growth will boost returns, but will not impact the shareholders' equity. Thus the use of debt can improve ROE, albeit along with extra risk in the case of stormy weather, metaphorically speaking.

Combining Essex Bio-Technology's Debt And Its 25% Return On Equity

Essex Bio-Technology has a debt to equity ratio of 0.30, which is far from excessive. Its ROE is very impressive, and given only modest debt, this suggests the business is high quality. Judicious use of debt to improve returns can certainly be a good thing, although it does elevate risk slightly and reduce future optionality.

But It's Just One Metric

Return on equity is useful for comparing the quality of different businesses. In my book the highest quality companies have high return on equity, despite low debt. If two companies have the same ROE, then I would generally prefer the one with less debt.

But ROE is just one piece of a bigger puzzle, since high quality businesses often trade on high multiples of earnings. The rate at which profits are likely to grow, relative to the expectations of profit growth reflected in the current price, must be considered, too. So I think it may be worth checking this free this detailed graph of past earnings, revenue and cash flow.

Of course Essex Bio-Technology may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of other companies that have high ROE and low debt.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
Software robots will disseminate patient test results in minutes, allowing nurse specialists to spend more time preparing for and dealing with Covid-19

Today UiPath is launching a pro bono automation project with the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital. The initiative will see software robots assigned to the Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) Department at the Mater. This development will significantly reduce the administrative strain placed upon the department by multidrug resistant organisms or viruses such as Covid-19, enabling IPC nurses to spend more time with patients. The project will see the Mater offered free trial robot licenses for the IPC Department until the end of the year.

With data being automated through software robots, the information will be processed in a fraction of the current time, disseminating patient results in minutes. It will save the infection control department 3 hours per day, 18 hours per week and 936 hours a year which they can now spend managing the current Covid-19 pandemic.

As a result of Covid-19, the Mater expects to receive hundreds of swabs and microbiology tests in the coming months which the software robots can assist in rapid processing. The results can then be distributed to healthcare workers rapidly and essential infection prevention and control measures can be put into action.

Jincy Jerry, Assistant Director of Nursing, Infection Prevention and Control, MMUH, said: "Given that IPC nurses spend close to 30% of their day with administrative tasks, for the past few months I have been looking at ways to make software robots part of our daily jobs. With the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding now, it is crucial that all frontline staff are freed up as much as possible to spend time with patients and deal with this outbreak, rather than being in front of computers."

"Not only will automation help with this, but it will also take the strain off the hospital as it continues to process huge amounts of more routine patient data in addition to Covid-19 specific information."

"As we've already seen, alongside the public playing their part in physical distancing, fast diagnosis and appropriate self-isolation are crucial to preventing the spread of COVID-19. We're confident that the project we're embarking on will help mitigate the huge strain this outbreak is putting on healthcare organisations not just in MMUH, but across Ireland."

Mark O'Connor, Public Sector Director Ireland at UiPath, said: "Infection Prevention Control is critical to help people stay healthy, and while COVID-19 is top of mind, this project will continue to deliver benefits long term. At this time of heightened stress and anxiety, it's vital to free up doctors and nurses' time for patients wherever it can be done."

"Robotic process automation minimises, if not removes, the need for people to carry out repetitive, rules-based admin work speeding up processes and ensuring they're error-free. With a robot for every nurse approach, essential frontline staff will be freed to be nurses and not system administrators, being able to focus more on the quality of care which can make a real difference when it comes to treating patients in times of need."

O'Connor will be hosting a webinar on April 2, 2020 at 10 a.m. EST/3 p.m. BST to discuss Mater's use of automation to respond to Covid-19-related scenarios. To register, visit this link.

For more information on UiPath, go to uipath.com.

About UiPath

UiPath is leading the era of "Automation First" by betting on a robot for each person and allowing robots to learn new skills through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Through free and open training, UiPath brings digital era skills to millions of people around the world, improving business productivity and efficiency, employee engagement, and customer experience.

The company's hyper-automation platform combines the number one Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution with a full suite of capabilities, including process mining and analytics, that enable every organization to scale digital business operations at unprecedented speed. The company has already automated millions of repetitive, mind-numbing tasks for businesses and government organizations all over the world, including more than 50% of the Fortune 500 and 8 of the Fortune 10.

UiPath has recently been recognised as the top company in The Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for 2019, a ranking of the fastest growing public and private technology companies in North America, and number 3 in the 2019 Forbes Cloud 100.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005081/en/

Contacts:

Toni Iafrate?

UiPath?

toni.iafrate@uipath.com

978-239-5499?
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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Berlin, Germany  Thu, March 26, 2020 19:40 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da7c6d 2 World Germany,coronavirus-testing,coronavirus,COVID-19,pandemic,health,SARS-CoV-2,infection,infectious-diseases Free

Germany has boosted its coronavirus test rate to 500,000 a week, a virologist said Thursday, adding that early detection has been key in keeping the country's death rate relatively low.

"The reason why Germany has so few deaths compared to the number of infected people can be explained by the fact that we carry out an extremely large number of laboratory diagnostic tests," said Christian Drosten, who heads the Institute of Virology at Berlin's Charite University Hospital.

"Estimates from the last days show that we are carrying out half a million tests a week," he added.

Drosten also highlighted Germany's dense network of laboratories spread across its territory as a factor contributing to early detection.

Meanwhile the research ministry said it would commit 150 million euros (US$164 million) to improve communication between hospitals and laboratories about coronavirus patients' health data, hoping the information exchange could feed into development of a vaccine.

Official data compiled by the disease control agency Robert Koch Institute show that 36,508 people have been infected in Germany, including 198 who have died from the disease.

At 0.54 percent, Germany's death rate is far lower than the 7.3 percent in Spain where 4,089 deaths were recorded for 56,188 confirmed cases.

France has also recorded 1,331 fatalities of 25,233 confirmed infections -- a death rate of 5.2 percent.

Besides the large-scale testing, experts in Germany also said that the virus has largely affected a younger, healthier section of the population compared to elsewhere.

At the same time, experts have repeatedly warned that in the country where almost a quarter of the population is over 60, the number of deaths could still skyrocket if people do not stick to measures to help halt contagion.

Lockdown measures are in place across Germany, preventing people from leaving their homes except for essential trips, while most shops, restaurants and bars are closed.
<! Pope Francis: in coronavirus danger >

Pope Francis is in coronavirus danger after a Vatican worker who lives in his

residence was hospitalised for testing positive for coronavirus.

The unidentified clergyman has lived in the Holy Sees Saint Marthas guest house for years, reports said.

Pope Francis also uses the building as his residence, to take his meals and for private meetings.

The 83 year-old Pontiff has remained largely secluded since coming down with a cold at the end of last month.

Italy is the epicentre of Europes virus outbreak, recording more deaths than China.

Vatican authorities have disinfected the guest house, the Daily Mail reported, quoting Italian papers, La Stampa and Il Messagro. .

Pope Francis has been eating alone in his room for some time as a precaution and is in good health, La Stampa reported.

<!

after_article responsive (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

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Infection by imported cases spurs tightening

Global Times

By Liu Caiyu and Xu Keyue Source:Global Times Published: 2020/3/25 0:38:41

More cities urged to follow Beijing with centralized 14-day quarantine

The emergence of domestic COVID-19 patients in China who were infected by people returning from overseas has promoted public calls to give all international arrivals mandatory 14-day quarantine terms in designated sites, as the current policy of allowing them to take home quarantine has shown apparent deficiencies.

The voices demanding quarantine of all inbound travelers in designated places has grown louder after Beijing and Shanghai on Tuesday each reported one local confirmed COVID-19 case that was linked to imported cases, following one detected in South China's Guangdong Province on Sunday.

The cause of infection of the Beijing patient, surnamed Liu, was possibly due to his sharing a stairway with a patient coming from the UK who was serving a home quarantine after arrival in China on March 5, the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control said Tuesday.

As of Monday, China had confirmed 427 imported cases, including 380 Chinese citizens and 47 foreign citizens, China's Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

Previously, Beijing had allowed passengers to apply for home quarantine if they lived alone or all family members needed quarantine, but it revoked the measure on Tuesday, saying all people entering Beijing from overseas will face a centralized quarantine in the capital for 14 days upon arrival starting from Wednesday.

Home quarantine is inadequate, because in many communities, residents are able to go out with an entry permit and no one can keep an eye on them all the time, a community worker surnamed Meng in Beijing told the Global Times on Tuesday.

"The 14-day intensive quarantine on centralized and designated sites should be the most thorough and safest method, where staff members stationed there will look after us in every respect," Wendy Yang, who came back from Spain and now is quarantined at a hotel in Beijing, told the Global Times.

"I did not take a single step out of my door," she said.

Other Chinese cities need to learn from Beijing by plugging the loopholes in home quarantine and adjusting their policies immediately to enforce a centralized quarantine of all passengers on arrival from abroad, netizens posted online on Tuesday.

Most Chinese cities and provinces, such as South China's Guangdong Province and Shanghai, allow travelers to apply for home quarantine if they live alone or all family members in a house face quarantine.

Due to the cost factor, it seems unrealistic to impose the "closed-loop" measures of quarantining all inbound travelers in centralized places, although some cities require quarantined people to pay their own bills, said Zhu Lijia, a professor of public management at the Chinese Academy of Governance.

Wang Peiyu, deputy head of Peking University's school of public health, also told the Global Times that Chinese cities should test all inbound travelers upon arrival. Nucleic acid testing could screen most infected cases.

Except major cities and provinces, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong Province and Yantai, a city from Shandong Province, which had stepped up efforts to guard port entry by testing all passengers, many other Chinese cities only test passengers from major pandemic-stricken regions.

But Zhu argued testing all inbound passengers would be a huge workload for customs entry ports and airport staff and will use large amounts of medical resources, so it is difficult to implement in reality.

Wang also said sometimes, a nucleic acid testing could be inaccurate, therefore to completely cut off the transmission channel, cities should impose 14-day centralized quarantine on all inbound travelers. Some cases of virus carriers could test negative for COVID-19 one time if they are at the early stage of infection or still in the incubation period, studies showed.

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New York: Scientists warned that the United States someday would become the country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. That moment arrived on Thursday, US time (Friday AEDT).

In the United States, at least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1000 deaths  more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen.

A member of the Brooklyn Hospital Centre COVID-19 testing team calls in the next patient in line. Credit:AP

With 330 million residents, the United States is the world's third-most populous nation, meaning it provides a vast pool of people who can potentially get COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

And it is a sprawling, cacophonous democracy, where states set their own policies and President Donald Trump has sent mixed messages about the scale of the danger and how to fight it, ensuring there was no coherent, unified response to a grave public health threat.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 17:37 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d9d692 1 National COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,coronavirus,coronavirus-mask-rush,mask,Cianjur,West-Java,hospital,medical-practitioners Free

The Cianjur Police criminal investigation unit has arrested four suspects, identified only by the initials IS, RN, YH and CR, for stealing hundreds of boxes of masks from Pagelaran General Hospital in Cianjur, West Java.

Cianjur Police Chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Juang Andi Priyanto said three of the suspects were employees of the hospital and one was a civil servant.

The other [alleged] perpetrator, CR, acted as a fence, Juang told reporters during a press conference at the Cianjur Police headquarters on Thursday, as quoted by kompas.com.

According to the police, the suspects are accused of taking masks from the hospitals pharmaceutical warehouse on four different occasions. Police claim the accused stole a total of 360 boxes of masks, fewer than an initial report that 470 had gone missing.

Hospital director Awie Darwizar said on Tuesday that the masks were needed by its medical workers to treat COVID-19 patients and that the facility currently only had 60 boxes left, which would be only be enough for the next several days. He estimated that the financial loss caused by the theft was about Rp 100 million (US$6,100).

Police claim the accused admit to having sold the stolen masks outside of town at prices ranging from Rp 80,000 to Rp 100,000 per box.

Meanwhile, the market price for this type of mask is currently about Rp 200,000 per box, Juang said.

Cianjur Police criminal investigation unit head Adj. Comr. Niki Ramdhany said examinations of witnesses and the crime scene led them to these four suspects.

At the scene, there were no broken doors or windows. So from the beginning, we suspected that insiders were involved, said Niki.

According to Niki, the crime was committed at night by entering the pharmaceutical warehouse using a key owned by one of the suspects.

They turned off the CCTV cameras so that their actions were not recorded, said Niki.

The four suspects are being held by the Cianjur Police and were charged under articles 363 and 480 of the Criminal Code. They face a maximum punishment of seven years' imprisonment if convicted.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put a massive strain on Indonesias healthcare system, with reports of inadequate medical supplies and the deaths of hospital workers as patient numbers continue to surge.(syk)
Police are seeking the publics help in solving two Juniata County convenience-store robberies from 2019 that may be related.

According to the Pennsylvania State Police at Lewistown, the first robbery occurred Jan. 5, 2019 at Toms at 9 Stop in Fermanagh Township and the other was reported Jan. 27, 2019 at the Uni-Mart in Port Royal.

In the first robbery, police say a man with a handgun entered the store around 11:30 p.m. and demanded money from the cash register. The clerk gave him an undisclosed amount of cash.

The second robbery occurred around 7 a.m. when a man, who did not display a weapon, demanded money from the register. The clerk denied his request, and the man ran when a manager came out from the back of the store. They saw him leave in a 2000 to 2005 Volkswagen sedan.

The man in the first incident is described as being white and in his 30s, between 5-foot 8-inches and 5-foot 11-inches, of thin build, and wearing a tan, hooded sweatshirt, khaki pants, a beanie hat and a scarf around his mouth. The second is described as a white man with a hoodie and a hunting mask.

Police believe the two robberies are linked. No injuries were reported.

Anyone with information should call 717-320-1010.

Thanks for visiting PennLive. Quality local journalism has never been more important. We need your support. Not a subscriber yet? Please consider supporting our work.
A small-town Kentucky mayor did not hold back when posting on a county neighborhood Facebook group, telling followers that the coronavirus is a 'serious ordeal' and criticizing those who are not taking the pandemic seriously.

Walton in Boone County, Kentucky is a town of just 3,600 people, but Mayor Gabe Brown gained far more fans than that when he posted his strongly-worded rant to the wider county community Facebook page, which gained national attention.

The post has been shared by more than 2,300 people, and a single tweet showing images from his Facebook post got 1,100 likes alone.

Mayor Gabe Brown of Walton, Kentucky posted a strongly worded Facebook post urging people to take the coronavirus and social distancing seriously

Mayor Brown is known by his supporters as being quite a character. He was elected unopposed in November 2018

'Listen up dipsh*ts and sensible people,' he wrote, clearly frustrated by the county's apathy towards the coronavirus outbreak. 'I might not have the best bedside manor. I might not put you at ease like the Governor does, but I dont care.

'You need to realize that this is a serious ordeal. In fact, its a big f**cking deal. Stay at home.'

In his post, he explained that he is taking at least three calls a day about Covid-19, and therefore has more information than many of the county's residents do about the virus.

The post has been shared on Facebook more than 2,300 times and many times on Twitter

He told followers to take the virus more seriously than they have been, and act like they have it in order to not spread it to others.

Warning of the consequences if they don't heed his advice, the Mayor wrote: 'More cases are coming. If you ignore this problem, the worst thing that could happen is that your mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, aunts, uncles could die.'

Reacting to his post in Twitter, one user wrote: 'Love this! Go Mayor Gabe Brown!', while another wrote 'I think we have a new "America's Mayor."'

Another commented that they liked how he signed of his message, tweeting: 'I really like "warmest regards" at the end.'

People on Twitter react to the Mayor's Facebook post, cheering him on

His town of Walton lies across both Boone county and Kenton County in Kentucky. Kenton County has been one of the areas hit heaviest in the state with eleven confirmed cases, according to the Northern Kentucky Health Department.

Walton is a small town in Boone Country, Kentucky with just over 3,600 residents

Boone County's Governor, Andy Beshear, has also gained praise during the crisis for his calm and measured daily news briefings on the coronavirus

In contrast to the language used by Mayor Brown, Boone County's Governor Andy Beshear has also been praised for his measured and direct deliveries of daily news conferences about Covid-19.

Some residents outside the county have even offered to trade to get him as their own governor.

Governor Beshear was particularly outspoken about a group of young adults holding a 'coronavirus party' to defy the county's directive to socially distance in a bid to stem the spread of the virus.

Reportedly one party goer now has the coronavirus, much to the Governor's despair. 'This is one that makes me mad,' the governor said during a press briefing. 'We have to be much better than that.'

As of 26 March, CNN's state-by-state coronavirus case tracker puts Kentucky down as having 198 total cases so far, with five deaths.

According to Johns Hopkins University's coronavirus tracker, the US has had a total of 69,197 confirmed cases, with 1,050 deaths.
T he Queen has held her weekly audience with Boris Johnson by telephone amid the coronavirus lockdown and after her son Prince Charles tested positive.

In images shared by the royal family, the monarch is seen using an old-fashioned phone in her Berkshire residence as she spoke with the Prime Minister on Wednesday evening.

The weekly audience came on the same day that Clarence House announced the Prince of Wales had been diagnosed with coronavirus.

Buckingham Palace said the Queen, 93, who is staying at Windsor Castle with the Duke of Edinburgh, 98, remains in good health and is following all appropriate advice.

Boris Johnson speaks to the Queen on the telephone for her weekly audience amid the coronavirus crisis / PA

In the picture taken during her conversation with Mr Johnson, the monarch is in a room adorned with ornaments including a china corgi.

The royal family said in a post on social media: "The Queen held her weekly Audience with the Prime Minister today by telephone.

"Her Majesty - pictured this evening at Windsor Castle - has held a weekly Audience with her Prime Minister throughout her reign."

The Queen also had her weekly audience with Mr Johnson by phone last week.

The Queen pictured alongside Prince Charles, who has tested positive for coronavirus / Getty Images file photo

On Wednesdays, the Queen holds an audience with the Prime Minister in the evening following PM's Questions in the House of Commons.

This can vary if either the Queen or the Prime Minister are away. The date will either be changed or they speak on the telephone.

Members of the royal family have moved over to holding meetings by telephone as the coronavirus crisis deepens.

Prince Charles tests positive for coronavirus

Charles, the Duke of Cambridge and the Earl of Wessex have all participated in telephone meetings or video conferences over the past couple of days.

The Queen is expected to make a public address to the nation at some point in the coming weeks.

A Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said: "Her majesty the Queen remains in good health.

"The Queen last saw the Prince of Wales briefly after the investiture on the morning of March 12 and is following all the appropriate advice with regard to her welfare."

On Wednesday evening, the royal family tweeted: "Thank you to organisations such as the RoyalVolService who have been supporting and furthering this recruitment drive.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 22:36:16|Editor: yan

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LUSAKA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Zambia's finance minister on Thursday said it was not possible now to clearly state how the COVID-19 outbreak will affect the country's economy, but analysts have noted that the pandemic will have far-reaching economic and social implications on Zambia.

Bwalya Ng'andu said it was difficult to assess how the pandemic will affect the economy, adding that the impact will only be known after the pandemic has died out.

He told reporters that the pandemic was still evolving and urged the business community to join hands with the government in fighting the coronavirus as the impact of the pandemic will affect their operations.

The Zambian minister was speaking after he received some donations aimed at tackling Coronavirus such as sanitizers from some local firms.

According to the analysts, some of the measures imposed by the government such as closing three airports and only remaining with one, will have a negative impact on the economy.

Hakainde Hichilema, an economist and the country's main opposition leader, said the government needed to expedite its response on the economic side of the pandemic.

He noted that the value of the local currency has been depreciating, a move that requires quick action from the government.
The family of retired FBI Special Agent Bob Levinson, who vanished in Iran 13 years ago, said Wednesday they are now convinced he died in captivity, though when is not clear.

Levinson's wife Christine and their children said the U.S. government had informed them he was likely dead and they had accepted it -- even as President Donald Trump, who has made Levinson's case a cudgel to hammer the Iranian regime with, said at a White House briefing Wednesday evening, "No, I don't accept that he's dead. I dont accept it."

In a statement, the Levinson family -- all tireless advocates including his daughter Sarah Moriarty, who testified in Congress again last month to press lawmakers to help bring him home -- said they had grudgingly heard the news they've dreaded for 13 years.

"We recently received information from U.S. officials that has led both them and us to conclude that our wonderful husband and father died while in Iranian custody. We dont know when or how he died, only that it was prior to the COVID-19 pandemic," the Levinsons said. "It is impossible to describe our pain. Our family will spend the rest of our lives without the most amazing man we have ever known, a new reality that is inconceivable to us. His grandchildren will never meet him. They will only know him through the stories we tell them."

PHOTO: Christine Levinson, center, wife of Robert Levinson, and her children, Dan and Samantha Levinson, talk to reporters in New York, Jan. 18, 2016. (Seth Wenig/AP, FILE)

It wasn't immediately clear why the Trump administration told the family that Levinson almost certainly had died as an Iranian hostage if the President himself wasn't convinced of it.

MORE: Robert Levinson Family: Despite Iran Pledge, No New Info on Missing Ex-FBI Agent

Sources have long told ABC News that bitter disagreements have existed for years inside the U.S. intelligence community, with the FBI less willing to assess their former comrade as having died a hostage than their counterparts at CIA, who reached that conclusion many years ago. Whether any new intelligence informed the recent assessment he had died was not immediately known, though the Trump administration has this year repeated demands that Levinson be returned home.

Story continues

"I mean, I have to say this, and they have been making this statement to the family I believe, but it's not looking good. He wasn't well for years anyway in Iran. It's not looking promising," Trump said at the White House Wednesday when he was asked about Levinson. "Im telling you it's not looking great but I won't accept that he's dead. They haven't told us that he's dead but a lot of people are thinking that that is the case. Feel badly about it."

Some officials said they were blindsided by Trump's remarks.

While working as a CIA contractor, the retired FBI agent, who would be 72 now, vanished on Iran's Kish Island on March 9, 2007. Documents his family obtained by an Iranian source and provided to ABC News last fall appeared to show that Iranian military prosecutors ordered him detained on the island on suspicion of spying and held him for months at a military airfield even after he slipped into a coma that they said was caused by his diabetes.

PHOTO: A 2007 image of former FBI Agent Bob Levinson. -The former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 2007, has died in Iranian custody, his family said on March 25, 2020. (www.helpboblevinson.com/AFP via Getty Images)

Former Bush administration senior official Ladan Archin, who was born and raised in Tehran and is familiar with how Iranian military officials communicate, deemed the two 2007 documents to likely be authentic. Archin, who served as the Defense Department's Iran country director, examined the files last fall following the odd admission by Tehran's judicial system to a United Nations body that an open case against Levinson existed despite 12 years of denials by the regime that he ever was detained there.

MORE: Documents may be breakthrough in case of FBI veteran Robert Levinson, who vanished in Iran

Archin provided a more precise translation of the documents than a U.S. government translation given to the Levinsons years ago. It revealed that the word "judicial" in the apparent 2007 arrest order had been inadvertently omitted in the version originally given to the family. This was significant given Tehran's statement to the UN about a judicial case against him, which they later claimed was not an admission they held him.

"He is here using the cover of a tourist while conducting various meetings, taking pictures and gathering information," an Iranian counterintelligence official appears to have informed military prosecutor Hojatol-Islam Bahrami in March 2007, who then ordered Levinson's immediate arrest by "MOIS (Ministry of Intelligence) brothers" in a handwritten reply on the typed memo.

A spokesman for Irans UN Mission, Alireza Miryousefi wrote on Twitter Wednesday in response to the news that "Iran has always maintained that its officials have no knowledge of Mr. Levinson's whereabouts, and that he is not in Iranian custody."

ABC News also reported last year that Levinson's case had been set aside by the Obama administration during negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal, senior officials of both the Obama and Trump administrations confirmed, while a handful of other Americans were set free in 2016. One of those freed was Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who wrote in a memoir last year that an Iranian source indicated Levinson, or answers to his fate, were withheld by the regime as a future bargaining chip for their interests.

MORE: New book fuels hope, anger for family of ex-FBI agent abducted in Iran

"Initially Levinson -- or a complete accounting of what had happened to him -- was to be a part of the deal, but the Rouhani administration decided there was no political value of the time in acknowledging after eight years that yes, Iran had been responsible for his disappearance," Rezaian wrote in his book, "Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison -- Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, High-Stakes Diplomacy, and the Extraordinary Efforts It Took to Get Me Out."

Levinsons case has long been vigorously championed by acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grennell, who until recently was U.S. Ambassador to Germany.

With the novel coronavirus pandemic forcing Americans to avoid gatherings, even funerals, the large Levinson family is left to mourn in solitude and continue to wonder what happened to the husband, father and grandfather.

"If not for the cruel, heartless actions of the Iranian regime, Robert Levinson would be alive and home with us today. It has been 13 years waiting for answers. Thirteen years since we last saw him or had any contact with him. How those responsible in Iran could do this to a human being, while repeatedly lying to the world all this time, is incomprehensible to us. They kidnapped a foreign citizen and denied him any basic human rights, and his blood is on their hands. Bob Levinson should have spent his last moments surrounded by his family and all the love we feel for him. Instead, he died alone, in captivity thousands of miles away, in unbelievable suffering. His body has not yet been returned to us for a proper burial. We dont even know when, or even if, his body would be returned to us. This is the very definition of cruelty."

Retired FBI agent, missing in Iran since 2007, died in captivity: Family originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Uber is not-so-subtly pushing its drivers towards doing food deliveries. Last week, the company started sending drivers in the US an in-app notification with instructions on how to toggle between Driver and Delivery views. As Uber Eats VP Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty said on Twitter, the coronavirus outbreak changed people's routines. Drivers' incomes are affected by shelter-in-place orders issued to limit COVID-19's impact, and deliveries are now more in demand.

The ride-hailing giant started sending out notifications to drivers -- even those who've never done an Uber Eats delivery in the past -- in over a dozen US cities experiencing an increase in demand for deliveries. It plans to send the same message to more cities in the coming weeks, though, depending on demand.

In its announcement, Uber said that it's seeing signals that people are relying on delivery services more, though it's too early to tell if the coronavirus outbreak will have an impact on food delivery, as well. So far, it has seen a significant increase in the number of restaurants looking to deliver in the US and Canada. It has also seen an uptick in food delivery requests in Seattle and San Francisco, in particular.

2/5 - In the US, we've started informing drivers about how to deliver with @UberEats to meet increasing demand in some cities. We'll be expanding these opportunities to new places as needed over the next few weeks. pic.twitter.com/8AQ77P6zNN  Pierre-Dimitri (@pierre_dimitri) March 25, 2020

In response to the pandemic, Uber Eats waived delivery fees for 100,000 independent restaurants earlier this month. Uber also suspended Pool rides in the US and Canada and started offering 14 days of financial assistance to drivers infected with the coronavirus. More recently, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi asked lawmakers to include the company's drivers and delivery personnel in the coronavirus stimulus package they're currently discussing. Being included in the package would make the contractors eligible to receive unemployment insurance and a $1,200 direct deposit from the government.
By the time the jail reported its first staffer with COVID-19, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo had spent days working on an executive order that would allow broad-scale compassionate releases of medically vulnerable, nonviolent inmates. But the effort has been complicated by an opinion from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, indicating to local officials the state may try to intervene.

Hidalgo explained Thursday that she and her staff are retrenching and evaluating all options in the wake of Paxtons Wednesday ruling, even as the urgency increased with the announcement Thursday that a male sheriffs deputy in his late 20s had been infected with the new coronavirus. He last worked March 21 at the 1200 Baker Street administration building.

Healthcare professionals have urged us to reduce the amount of people in the jail downtown, where 8,500 inmates and thousands of employees come into close contact, the county judge said. We are working to increase social distancing between healthcare employees, detention officers and inmates. That may require moving inmates to other facilities or the early release of some non-violent offenders.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Sheriff seeking compassionate release of some inmates at the Harris County Jail

Hidalgos move follows impassioned pleas for such releases by Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, who said that the coronavirus could spread like wildfire among inmates at the lockup. The draft, which was near completion, would deputize the sheriff to assess who would be released on a general order bond. Among the stakeholders reviewing multiple drafts were officials from the district attorneys and sheriffs offices, the county attorney and officials from the pretrial services division, who would assist in releases.

The sheriff was provisionally looking at about 500 people who fit the criteria. In the meantime, 15 people with symptoms were awaiting test results and another 400 are in observational quarantine with no symptoms, said Jason Spencer, spokesman for the sheriff. A massive outbreak at the jail would mean that inmates would overwhelm the Houston-area health care system, he said. Thats going to make it tougher for others to get ventilators.

Sheriffs, judges, law enforcement agencies and jails around the country have begun taking extraordinary steps to prevent mass infections in correctional facilities, including the Trump administrations chief law enforcement official. Attorney General William Barr ordered the Bureau of Prisons to begin transferring elderly and medically compromised inmates to home confinement.

The county executive order would have allowed eligible elderly and medically fragile people awaiting trial on nonviolent charges to be freed to await trial on bond.

The Texas attorney generals executive order slowed progress of the planned order. The opinion does not directly address compassionate releases. It says that as a general matter, the (state), its agencies and its property are not under the authority of a local officer  wording that caught the eye of lawyers at the Harris County Attorneys Office as a possible glitch in an unprecedented compassionate release order.

Governor Abbotts executive order makes the need for continued, unburdened operation of state offices clear, Paxton said in a release issued Wednesday.

The states emergency stance indicates that the governor can have purview over the movement of people and occupancy of premises within a disaster area during a health event.

The attorney generals office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Hidalgo has explored other options for addressing what experts say is a dangerous public health situation at the jail, including isolating vulnerable inmates in another facility or working collectively with the judges on releasing such inmates.

Experts in corrections say addressing the pandemic at jails is vital to everyones health.

Michele Deitch, who specializes in corrections policy and management and is a University of Texas law school lecturer, said Harris County officials have been commendable in their thinking, but the work has been too piecemeal.

It cant just be fiddling around at the margins with a few people here and a few people there. These need to be very deep cuts in the population, she said.

The population needs to be dramatically and rapidly reduced to avert a catastrophe.

First, because being incarcerated in the jail should not be a death sentence, and there are so many medically vulnerable people there, she said. The reduction will also reduce strain on the jail medical system and allow some social distancing among the smaller population.

Elsewhere, a supreme court justice in New Jersey released 1,000 jail inmates on compassionate releases, and Los Angeles County has released 1,700 people from its jail.

Theres lots of really good things going on in different parts of the county, Deitch said. Lots of areas are bringing their jail populations down through different strategies. It is a really collaborative effort between sheriffs and judges and prosecutors and defense attorneys to get out everyone who can plausibly be let out without putting public safety at risk.

Since the sheriff began pushing to remove some vulnerable people from the equation, state district judges, many working remotely, have been combing through their dockets, contacting lawyers and trying to make these determinations piecemeal. Several said that while theyre balancing risks, they dont want inmates at risk of death because of the fast-moving contagion.

The judges releases have resulted in a 4 percent increase in felony pretrial releases in just over a week, said Jay Jenkins, Harris Countys project attorney for Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, who regularly studies fluctuations in jail population.

To have any impact, the releases have to be large scale, Jenkins said. In that way, it is a failure of leadership.  If someone doesnt step up, this is going to be a disaster.

The sheriffs office estimated that about 500 inmates are potential candidates for release under the order because they face nonviolent charges and are especially at risk due to their age or pre-existing medical conditions, Spencer said.

For Alec Karakatsanis, the lead attorney in the cases challenging Harris Countys wealth-based bail practices, its time for action.

The sheriff has long explained that there are thousands of people inside the jail who pose no public safety risk, he said. The jail doctors have said that they need to reduce the jail population by several thousand people to have any hope of preventing an outbreak that spreads to the community and overwhelms Houston hospitals.

Judge Franklin Bynum, who has been at the forefront on bond reform efforts among the misdemeanor judges, put it bluntly, saying judges at this moment in history have only two choices.

Judges can sign orders releasing people now, or they can sign dismissals later for the people that will die in the jail, he said.

gabrielle.banks@chron.com

twitter.com/gabmobanks
Will your favorite burger joint survive the coronavirus crisis? How about that little bookstore on the corner that also had to shutter, or the bar you and your co-workers used to hit after work before everyone started telecommuting, or the yoga studio youve been going to for three years? Are they going to make it through this ordeal?

Is the city or town or suburb you live in going to look remotely recognizable when this is all over?

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The answer to those questions may hinge on the aid package for small businesses that the Senate passed Wednesday as part of its $2 trillion economic rescue bill.

Although it received relatively little attention during negotiations compared with other, sexier pieces of the coronavirus legislation (such as direct cash payments to families or the bailout fund for larger corporations), the proposal to help small businesses may have the most direct impact on American life. Its success or failure could be the difference between whether hundreds of thousands of restaurants, shops, and other businesses survive long enough to reopen or have to shutter permanently. If we want the places we live, shop, and eat in to reemerge intact, it rides on this.

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And at the moment, Im worried that the help that Congress is offering is simply too small. There may not be sufficient funding to go around for all the mom-and-pop shops that need it.

Under the relief plan, small and medium-size businesses (as well as nonprofits) harmed by the outbreak will be eligible for special low-interest loans to cover their major operating expensesloans the government will cancel as long as borrowers dont cut their payrolls. If a business slashes staff, the amount of forgiveness will be reduced proportionately. But given the programs design, theres a strong chance that the vast majority of business owners who receive these loans wont be required to pay them back.

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In short, Washington will essentially hand your favorite bakery or coffee shop money to keep its people on rather than laying them off. (If a business already let workers go, as many have, it will be eligible for forgiveness as long as it hires them back after receiving the loan.) The hope is that this will help keep firms from dumping their workers onto the state unemployment rolls, which are already getting overwhelmed by the number of applicants, while keeping small businesses alive through the thick of this crisis.

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But there are reasons to be concerned about how well the plan will work. Some are logistical. For the sake of speed, Congress chose to build on an old program run by the Small Business Administration that guarantees loans made by private banks. (Why would banks make loans the government will probably just wipe away? Because theyre getting paid commissions to do the underwriting.) This may be a faster way to get money out the door than creating a new lending program from scratch, since most small businesses already have some kind of banking relationship. But its still not entirely clear how quickly the effort will scale, and if it takes too much time, many restaurants and shops risk failing while they wait for help; according to the JPMorgan Chase Institute, only half of small businesses have enough cash to survive for 27 days without new revenue.

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The biggest cause for worry, however, might simply be the insufficient sums of money available through the program.

First, the loans arent that large. Businesses will be permitted to borrow amounts up to 2.5 times the size of their average monthly payroll. They can spend that cash on wages, salaries, rent, mortgage interest, or utilities and still qualify for forgiveness, so theres flexibility to cover key costs. But its only a couple months worth of help that wont be enough to tide them over if this crisis lingers.

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Second, the overall pot of money just isnt that big. The government can make $349 billion in loans under the main program. Including the bills other help, the total help available to small businesses is $377 billion. As George Washington University economist Steven Hamilton and others have pointed out, thats about half of what would be required to cover 2 months of payrolls for every business in America with fewer than 500 employees, which are the programs main targets (some larger firms, like midsize restaurant chains, are eligible too).

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Realistically, not every small business in America will need this aid (plenty of small companies are still operating and making money right now). But since these loans are first-come, first-served, theres a real chance that the cash will run out before everyone who needs a lifeline gets one.

One wild card in all of this is the Federal Reserve. The central bank has said it plans to create a Main Street Business Lending Program to complement Congress efforts. But the Fed hasnt publicized any details of what the program will look like. It might be a helpful backstop; it might not. We dont really know.

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It is possible that when the small-business rescue runs out of funding, Congress will just go ahead and appropriate more. It might make the loans larger or offer different relief options. (Personally, I think proposals for long-term, zero-interest loans that still need to be paid back might be more effective.) But in the end, thats pure speculation. It would have been better to spend more upfront, especially given that helping small businesses is one of the most politically popular things Congress can do. The fact that it didnt is especially dismaying given that the coronavirus bailout program for large corporationswhich includes a large lending program from the Federal Reserve, as well as some large tax breakswill likely keep big companies afloat for much longer than two months.

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Given all the uncertainty around this rescue effort, it would probably be smart for more places to follow the lead of cities like New York and Los Angeles, which have put a moratorium on commercial evictions. That will give small businesses time to apply for aid and hopefully stabilize themselves. Local governments could halt other debt collections. A federal freeze on small-business debt might have been a good idea too, but unfortunately never really seems to have been on the table.

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But in the end, pausing debt payments isnt a permanent fixit just pushes the immediate financial burden onto landlords, among others, who have their own debts to pay. Congress needs to find a longer-lasting solution that will prevent droves of local businesses from going bust across the country. Failing to do so will be devastating, not just for the cultural fabric of communities but for the wider economy. The more small businesses fail, the harder and longer it will take for employment to recover after this downturn ends, since there will be fewer employers around to hire. Each and every empty storefront will be a hole in the economy that will take time to fill. Were only a couple of weeks into this, and Washington already needs to do more to keep small-business owners from closing up shop for good.
Scientists warned that the United States someday would become the country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. That moment arrived Thursday.

In the United States, at least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1,000 deaths  more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen, according to data gathered by The New York Times.

With 330 million residents, the United States is the worlds third-most populous nation, meaning it provides a vast pool of people who can potentially get COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

And it is a sprawling, cacophonous democracy, where states set their own policies and President Donald Trump has sent mixed messages about the scale of the danger and how to fight it, ensuring there was no coherent, unified response to a grave public health threat.

Although the American medical system is unsurpassed and its public health system has a reputation as one of the finest in the world, a series of missteps and lost opportunities dogged the nations response.

Among them: a failure to take the pandemic seriously even as it engulfed China, a deeply flawed effort to provide broad testing for the virus that left the country blind to the extent of the crisis, and a dire shortage of masks and protective gear to protect doctors and nurses on the front lines, as well as ventilators to keep the critically ill alive.

Chinas leaders, stung by the SARS epidemic in 2003 and several bird flu scares since then, had a deeply flawed early response to the outbreak that began in the city of Wuhan, with local officials suppressing news of the outbreak.

But Chinas autocratic government acted with ferocious intensity after the belated start. Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan quickly began preparing for the worst.

The United States instead remained preoccupied with business as usual. Impeachment. Harvey Weinstein. Brexit and the Oscars.

Only a few virologists recognized the threat for what it was. The virus was not influenza, but it had the hallmarks of the Spanish flu: relatively low lethality, but relentlessly transmissible.

Cellphone videos leaking out of China showed what was happening as it spread in Wuhan: dead bodies on hospital floors, doctors crying in frustration, rows of unattended coffins outside the crematories.

What the cameras missed  in part because Beijing made Western journalists lives difficult by withholding visas and imposing quarantines  was the slow, relentless way Chinas public health system was hunting down the virus, case by case, cluster by cluster, city by city.

For now, at least, China i containing the coronavirus with draconian measures. But the pathogen had embarked on a Grand Tour of most countries on Earth, with devastating epidemics in Iran, Italy, France. More videos emerged of prostrate victims, exhausted nurses and lines of coffins.

The United States, which should have been ready, was not.

There was no Pentagon ready to fight the war on this pandemic, no wartime draft law. There was eventually a White House Coronavirus Task Force, but it has been led by politicians, not medical experts.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is one of the great disease-detective agencies in the world, and its doctors have contributed mightily in skirmishes against Ebola, Zika and any number of other health threats.

But the agency retreated into silence, its director, Dr. Robert Redfield, almost invisible  humbled by a fiasco in the failure to produce basic diagnostic testing.

Now at least 160 million Americans have been ordered to stay home in states from California to New York. Schools are closed, often along with bars, restaurants and many other businesses. Hospitals are coping with soaring numbers of patients in New York City, even as supplies of essential protective gear and equipment dwindle.

Other hospitals, other communities fear what may be coming.

The world will be a different place when the pandemic is over. India may surpass the United States as the country with the most deaths. Like the United States, it, too, is a vast, democracy with deep internal divisions. But its population, 1.3 billion, is far larger, and its people are crowded even more tightly into megacities.

China could still stumble into a new round of contagion as its economy restarts, and be forced to do it all again.

In the meantime, with the virus loose in the streets while millions of Americans huddle indoors, when will it be safe to come out and go back to work?

The virus will tell us, said Dr. William Schaffner, a preventive medicine specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical School.

When a baseline of daily testing is established across the country, a drop in the percentage of positive tests will signal that the virus has found as many hosts as it can for the moment, and is beginning to recede.

When hospital admissions have hit a clear peak and begun to plateau, we can feel optimistic, Schaffner said. And when they begin to drop, we can begin to smile.

That moment may arrive this summer. But as soon as the first of Americans begin venturing cautiously out, we will have to start planning for the second wave.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Updated projections from the U.S. Travel Association and Tourism Economics forecast that the countrys economy could lose 5.9 million travel-related jobs by the end of April due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) crippling the travel industry.

The latest projections indicate that the situation is worsening, as the agencys projections from just a week earlier forecasted the losses at 4.6 million jobs, 22% less than the current updated projections.

The coronavirus crisis is hitting the travel economy hard, and its also hitting fast, said U.S. Travel Association President and CEO Roger Dow. These new figures underscore the extreme urgency of financial relief for travel businesses  83% of which are small businesses  so they can keep paying their employees. Not only are workers suffering right now, but if employers are forced to close their doors, it is unknown when or if those jobs will ever come back.

The estimated loss in travel-related jobs alone would more than double the U.S. unemployment rate from 3.5% to 7.1% by the end of April, according to the U.S. Travel Association, with an expected loss in travel-related economic impact of $910 billion, seven times worse than the impact of 9/11.

Businesses cant keep their lights on if they dont have any customers, and they dont have any customers because of the actions that are necessary to stem the spread of coronavirus. The resulting closures will take the greatest toll on the frontline employees who can least afford to lose their jobs  wait staff, housekeepers, concession workers, etc., Dow said.

New York is particularly susceptible to travel-related job loss due to the city and states reliance on both foreign and domestic tourism as a major cog in the local economy.

James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, told the New York Times that the city is likely to lose up to 500,000 travel-related jobs.

Among the industries most likely to be impacted are hotels, restaurants, for-hire vehicles, museums and other cultural institutions, according to Parrott.

Fred Grapstein, chairman of the Hotel Association of New York City, told the Times that the citys hotels have been forced into massive layoffs due to the drastic drop in tourists and business travelers.

What youre seeing, unfortunately, is the layoff of all personnel  both union and management, Grapstein said.

LOCAL TRAVEL AGENTS

Staten Island travel agents and local tourism professionals say their business is completely on hold due to the coronavirus.

Our business is essentially in triage mode at the moment, with rightfully concerned clients contacting us around the clock to postpone their vacations, many of which have been planned for more than a year, said Thomas Mottola, co-owner, Mottola Family Travel, Independent Agents with Glass Slipper Concierge, in Westerleigh.

Heather Pastore, owner of the Castleton Corners-based Manhattan Greeterz Walking Tours, recently told the Advance/SILive.com that her tourism business has seen a dramatic decrease in business.

Tourism is extremely impacted by this because all our major destinations in New York City that are tour-related are shut down because of the coronavirus. Its impacting us because most walking tour companies are independently or family-owned and operated, she said. We are forced to scale back or rearrange our schedules.

***

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A California company has developed an at-home coronavirus test people can administer on themselves, but the test could take weeks to roll out pending emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Scanwell Health, a California-based testing company, licensed the rights to a test developed by China that uses a patient's blood to determine if they have Covid-19, Time first reports.

Chinese company Innovita created the test that was later approved by China's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Instead of using the test at home, though, it was employed at hospitals and across the country to help test thousands of citizens for the novel virus.

But Scanwell Health sees potential in the test to be self-administered by people who believe they might be infected.

"The advantage of a rapid test like we're working on is that it can be performed completely at home by the patient," Dr Jack Jeng, chief medical officer of Scanwell, told Time. "It can be widely scalable rapidly and quickly deployed."

This would be the first blood-based test for Covid-19 in the US, as current testing relies on swabs.

If rolled out in America, patients would first check-in with a health app, developed by telehealth company Lemonaid, to describe the symptoms they are feeling. If it is warranted, a testing kit would then be sent to the user.

The test involves the person mixing two drops of blood in with a solution provided, wait 15 minutes, and then share the results via the app. Doctors who work with Lemonaid would then advise the patient on if they should monitor their symptoms or seek help from medical professionals.

The test will detect the presence of the antibodies IGM in the blood, which emerges in the early stages of infection, and IGG, which increases during the body's response to the virus.

What is delaying the roll out of this at-home test is approval from the FDA.

Scanwell Health requested emergency authorisation from the agency, but this approval could take six to eight weeks.

The UK is also pushing to roll out its own at-home testing kit that would also take the antibodies from blood to determine if someone has Covid-19 or not.

Initially, it was believed the test could be offered to citizens within days. But UK government's Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty told reporters on Wednesday the country was looking at weeks instead of days.

"The one thing worse than no test is a bad test," Mr Whitty said. "I do not think, and I want to be clear, that this is something we'll be ordering from the internet in a matter of weeks."

Other start-up companies in the US attempted to profit off at-home coronavirus tests that involved swabbing for specimens in the nose and throat to then mail into labs.

But the FDA informed consumers last week it has yet to authorise any testing that involved people collecting their own specimen.
The discovery of a new species of dromaeosaurid -- a family of generally small to medium-sized feathered carnivores that lived during the Cretaceous Period -- is reported in Scientific Reports this week. The fossil furthers our understanding of dinosaur evolution during the Late Cretaceous (70-68 million years ago).

Steven Jasinski and colleagues discovered 20 identifiable skeletal elements of the new dromaeosaurid in deposits of the Ojo Alamo Formation in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico, USA. The dinosaur has been named Dineobellator notohesperus from the Navajo word Dine (Navajo people) and the Latin word bellator (warrior). The authors report a number of unique features, including vertebrae near the base of the tail that curved inwards, which could have increased Dineobellator's agility and improved its predation success. A gouge mark on the fossil's large sickle-shaped claw may have been inflicted during an altercation with another Dineobellator or other theropod such as Tyrannosaurus rex, they speculate.

Phylogenetic analyses of relationships between species suggest that Dineobellator may be part of the Velociraptorinae subfamily, which also includes velociraptors. Ancestors of Dineobellator are thought to have migrated from Asia to North America where multiple lineages may have evolved, potentially accounting for differences in morphology between Dineobellator and other dromaeosaurids.

The findings, which contribute to the sparse fossil record of dromaeosaurids, indicate that this family was still diversifying at the end of the Cretaceous period prior to the mass extinction that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs 65.5 million years ago.

###

Article and author details

New Dromaeosaurid Dinosaur (Theropoda, Dromaeosauridae) from New Mexico and Biodiversity of Dromaeosaurids at the end of the Cretaceous

Corresponding author:

Steven Jasinski

State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, PA, USA

Email: sejasinski@gmail.com

DOI

10.1038/s41598-020-61480-7

Online paper*

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61480-7

* Please link to the article in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo ends)
Astronauts making the seven-month trip to Mars face an increased risk of going deaf and suffering balance problems, according to the findings of a new study.

Researchers from the Medical University of South Carolina used MRS scans to discover that long space missions can cause a fluid build-up in the ear.

Such build-ups can cause hearing loss and giddiness - a condition called 'mastoid effusions' - impacting the bone at the back of the ear.

Donald Trump wants the first manned mission to Mars to happen by 2033. The trip will take around seven months - longer than astronauts currently stay on the ISS.

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Astronauts on board the International Space Station spend an average of six months in space. The new study found this puts them at a greater risk of an ear condition that could cause deafness. This is a picture of Christina Koch in space - but is not linked to this study

The study involved MRI scans of 35 astronauts - 17 from the NASA Space Shuttle program team and 18 of them having spent time on the International Space Station.

Travelling outside Earth's atmosphere into the reaches beyond has long been likened to doing a headstand - because of zero gravity, researchers say.

A study found astronauts on (ISS) expeditions lasting six months were over nine times more likely to suffer a condition called 'mastoid effusions.'

This was compared to those who took part in shorter Space Shuttle missions of around two weeks.

The mastoid bone is at the back of the ear and contains air cells vital for hearing - when fluid collects in this area, it can cause pain and reduced faculties.

Corresponding author Dr Donna Roberts, of the Medical University of South Carolina said there was a direct link between conditions on the ISS and mastoid effusions.

Head congestion is one of the most common symptoms experienced by astronauts as the nose, ears and eyes become clogged with fluid.

Spaceflight leads to over three and a half pints of blood shifting upwards, from the lower to the upper body.

The study published in JAMA OtolaryngologyHead & Neck Surgery is the first to measure the affect on the sinuses mastoid air cells.

No differences were found in the sinuses of the astronauts in the study.

However, long-duration spaceflight was associated with a 9.28 greater odds of mastoid effusions compared with short-duration.

This may be because it damages tubes and vessels that link the inner ear to the back of the throat and head, explained Dr Roberts.

She said in zero gravity, astronauts experience nasal stuffiness and head pressure, but there is little data concerning any physiological changes of the nasal sinuses or mastoid air cells.

NASA has avoided the use of CT (computed tomographic) scans to limit the dose of radiation astronauts receive, given the exposure they experience during spaceflight.

But, as part of routine medical protocol, they all undergo pre and post-flight MRI scans of the head.

Her team took advantage by reviewing these scans - all of which were obtained before and after either Space Shuttle or ISS missions.

'Long duration spaceflight on the ISS is associated with an increased incidence of mastoid effusions,' Roberts said.

'The cause of this phenomenon is likely multi-factorial, but possible explanations may be reflective of several conditions associated with effusions seen on Earth.

'Further investigation is needed to provide a definite explanation for the development of these effusions and to determine whether these results can be applied to more than this small astronaut population.'

The study compared scans of astronauts on the two weeks space shuttle missions to those of International Space station astronauts who spend about six months in space

Astronauts on the International Space station who spend more than six months in space have a 9 times greater risk of contracting an inner ear condition that could lead to deafness

Dr Michael Stenger, of NASA's Human Research program, who was not involved in the study, said the consequences need to be better understood by space doctors.

New medical requirements will be needed for upcoming exploration missions away from Earth, Stenger siad.

This is because a mastoid effusion could increase the risk for debilitating ear pain.

'On the ISS, in the event of a medical emergency, astronauts can de-orbit and be treated relatively quickly, within hours.

'On a mission to the moon or Mars, treatment would be limited to supplies and techniques available on the vehicle.'

Possible remedies include simulating Earth like gravity on the Mars spaceship or thigh cuffs that can trap blood in the legs.

'The space research and medical community is aggressively working to identify the proper magnitude and duration of these countermeasures,' said Stenger.

'This work becomes increasingly important as more novel consequences of long-duration spaceflight are discovered.'

He said it was an exciting time in human space flight with the advent of commercial operators and the upcoming manned missions to the Moon.

'Although it has been 50 years since the Apollo 11 moon landing and 20 years sincehumans began continuously residing on the ISS, researchers continue to make novel discoveries regarding the human body in space,' said Stenger.

The findings have been published in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery.
What may be the first U.S. securities lawsuits alleging misdeeds related to coronavirus were filed this month  one against a cruise line and another against a pharmaceutical company that claimed to have developed a vaccine for COVID-19.

There are likely many more securities lawsuits to come, experts say. The pandemic promises to be another cost driver for directors & officers policies, a line that has already been under pressure by events-driven litigation prompted by calamities such as oil spills, cyber attacks, airplane crashes and wildfires, said Christine Williams, chief executive officer for the financial services group at Aon, a global brokerage and risk management firm.

Plaintiffs attorneys are going to be looking at this as an opportunity, Williams said. She added that even when the claims are specious, the cost of defending can become very high very quickly.

Williams said the D&O line has been in a challenging marketplace since 2018, with less capacity and insurers insisting on higher retentions. She said lawsuits swept into being by the #Me too movement demonstrated to insurers how claims more commonly associated with other lines, such as employment practices liability for sexual harassment allegations, can leak into D&O.

She said California wildfires and major oil spills have had a similar impact.

The trend is for premiums to continue to increase, Williams said. Also: Insurers are looking to scale back their limits. If it was $50 million this year, it will be $25 million.

Williams expects the coronavirus outbreak to be the latest event to drive a new rash of D&O claims.

Kevin M. LaCroix, executive rive president at RT ProExec, noted the securities lawsuits filed against Norwegian Cruise Lines and Inovio Pharmaceuticals in a blog post last week. LaCroix, who is an attorney, said they were the first securities lawsuits filed in response to the cornoavirus outbreak. Both suits were filed March 12.

The suit against the cruise line alleges Norwegian employed sales tactics of providing customers with unproven or blatantly false statements about COVID-19 to entice customers to purchase cruises.

The suit against Inovio takes aim at statements made by Chief Executive Officer J. Joseph Kim, who told Fox Business News that he had developed a vaccine for COVID-19 in a matter of about three hours once we had the DNA sequence from the virus. The suit says Kim made similar comments in a well-publicized meeting with President Donald Trump on March 2.

According to the complaint, Inovios stock soared from $4.28 to $19.36 after the Trump meeting, but dropped to $5.70 after Citron research on March 9 called for a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into Kims ludicrous and dangerous claims. Cirton, which does investment research, said Inovio had merely created a precursor for a vaccine, not the final product.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of all investors who had purchased Inovio shares from Feb. 14 to March 9, 2020. LaCroix said he found it interesting that the lawsuit does not allege Inovio wont someday develop a COVID-19 vaccine, only that it had not yet done so.

With a wave of D&O litigation Insurance on the horizon, insurance attorneys have been reviewing potential defenses. Several law firms have noted that many D&O policies have an exclusion for bodily injury claims, which means insurers may not be on the hook if the complaint alleges a policyholder caused harm by exposing the public to the virus.

But a policy exclusion goes only so far. There are plenty of other ways directors and officers can get into trouble.

A white paper by Aon points to some potential pitfalls:

Individuals are slandered due to their national origin in relation to COVID-19.

Mismanagement of the response to the pandemic results in a stock drop caused by corporate waste or failure to properly supervise.

An employees medical condition related to the virus is disclosed without permission.

Mary McCutcheon, a partner with the Farella Braun + Martel law firm in San Francisco, pointed to another peril in a March 19 blog post. She said officers and directors may be more vulnerable to insider trading claims as stock prices fall.

If companies do not survive the crisis, shareholders and creditors may pursue such claims in bankruptcy courts, with the directors and officers (and ultimately, their insurance) as the only remaining viable targets, McCutcheon wrote.

In an email to the Claims Journal, McCutcheon said plaintiffs lawyers may find it difficult to link damages caused by the pandemic to specific corporate or individual wrongdoing, which gives them an incentive to pursue claims to force settlements from litigation-adverse companies, directors and officers and their insurers.

Whether its a #Me too claim, a massive security breach or now COVID-19, plaintiffs lawyers will always seek to find new grounds for bringing securities claims, she said.

Downplaying the impact of the virus on an enterprises supply-chain may mark another way to litigation.

William Wagner, a partner with the national Taft law firm in Indianapolis, wrote in an article for the Indiana Business Journal March 15 that 60% of U.S. manufacturers have been impacted by COVID-19 in their production facilities and supply chains. He said executives may feel compelled to quell investor panic.

Wagner pointed to a class-action lawsuit against HD Supply Holdings Inc. to demonstrate the folly in that strategy. Stockholders alleged that the companys distribution centers were paralyzed after the company relocated its headquarters across country and laid off nearly all of its supply chain employees. Yet executives made statements such as the supply chain difficulties are behind us now and weve had  no surprises whatsoever.

Whistleblowers from the company said otherwise. Even though HD Supply said the statements were just puffery, the U.S. District Court in Atlanta found that the investors had sufficiently alleged that the companys CEO had made misleading statements. The court gave preliminary approval to a $50 million settlement on Feb. 21.

The takeaway for public company CEOs from the HD Supply case should be clearonly state what you know to be true, even if it leads to a drop in your stock price, Wagner wrote.

About: Norwegian Cruise Lines was one of the first two defendants in securities litigation related to the coronavirus. This photo by the company shows the Norwegian Bliss.
The law enforcers succeeded to detain a woman and her husband, who, most likely, helped her to escape

A 39-year-old woman, a native of Kolomyia, Ivano-Frankivsk region, ran away from Kyiv hospital. She had a positive test for coronavirus as Dzerkalo reported.

According to mass media, a woman, who returned from labors from Belgium, was hospitalized to the regional clinic forcibly.

Thus, on March 23 a woman returned from Brussels by plane. After arrival in Ukraine, she had a fever and the express test showed a positive result for Covid-19.

The same day, the ambulance car hospitalized her to Oleksandrivsky hospital of Kyiv, where she had the express test for Covid-19 with a negative result.

At night on March 24, the patient to Kyiv hospital #4, at 1:00 a.m. she had the express test for coronavirus with a negative result. At 11:00 she had the repeated analysis but with a positive result. She had the diagnosis: the suspicion for Covid-19 infection.

According to mass media, the patient decided to leave the hospital for unknown reasons and possibly, planned to return home. She did not answer the calls and did not contact the doctors.

The law enforcers held the necessary events and detained a woman along with her husband (who, most likely, met her) on the highway near Rakivchyk, Ivano-Frankivsk region. Both woman and man were hospitalized to a regional infectious hospital.

The methods of transportation from Kyiv are to be established.

Another six cases of coronavirus spotted in Kyiv. The number of Kyiv citizens infected with Covid-19 increased up to 40 people.
On Wednesday, February 26, Theresa (Tete) Murray, nee Nugent, was laid to rest in one of the most picturesque cemeteries in the world, at Omey Island, Claddaghduff, Co Galway.

A native of Two Mile House, the late Theresa (above) worked for a time at Higgins shop opposite the Town Hall on Main Street, Naas. She then leased a premises on Basin Street where she set up her own grocery store which she ran for several years.

In the mid 60s, Theresa headed for England where she met John Joe Murray of Inishshark, Co Galway. The pair married and returned to Ireland where they set up home in Clifden, and later at Grallagh, Claddaghduff, raising five children, Johnny, Michael, Rose, Mirella and Edwina.

Theresa worked at the telephone exchange in Clifden, at a time when all phone calls to the area were put through manually by an operator.

Zest for life

Known in Naas for her lively sense of humour and her fondness for pranking friends, her zest for life and fun didnt desert her in later life. Always good company, she hosted weekly gatherings at her home in Claddaghduff which her friends never missed. Her generosity and concern for others were also evident throughout her life and visitors to her home were always sure of a warm welcome.

She found time every evening for prayer and was a regular attender at mass in the little seaside church where her funeral services were held. Predeceased by her husband John Joe, Theresa passed away peacefully after a short illness on Saturday, February 22, at Galway Regional Hospital, surrounded by her family.

Music a strong presence in Theresa's life

Music had always been a huge part of family life and Theresa and John Joe instilled in their children a love of traditional music and dancing. Her daughter Mirella performs around the world with Cherish the Ladies, and played at the offertory, a waltz called 'The Diamond'.

Others who performed at her funeral mass included Sharon Shannon, Liz and Yvonne Kane, Don Stiffe, Laoise Kelly, Ellen McDonagh, Feichin Mulkerrin, Marie Walsh, Francis OHalloran, Paddy Joe King, Kevin Abeyta, a great friend of her from Donegal Hughie Boyle, and her niece, Meadhbh OMeara from Naas, also sang.

Her granddaughter Tara sang beautifully during the mass. Grandson Johnny (Buster) did one of the readings, granddaughter Blaithin led the Prayers of the Faithful and granddaughters Sophie and Roisin brought the gifts to the altar.

Huge funeral attendance

The huge crowds attending the Tuesday evening service and Wednesday morning funeral mass were a testament to her popularity in the area.

The funeral cortege made its way from the Star of the Sea Church at Claddaghduff across Omey beach to the graveyard on the island where her coffin was lowered. Family members dropped red roses onto the coffin before, in time honoured tradition, local men took up shovels and completed the burial.

May her gentle soul rest in eternal peace  the late and much loved Theresa 'Tete' Murray, amen.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks to news reporters ahead of a vote on the coronavirus relief bill on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., March 25, 2020.

As the House prepares to pass a historically massive $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill, Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday outlined more steps she wants to take to blunt damage to the economy and health-care system.

After the Senate passed the package, believed to be the biggest rescue plan in U.S. history, on Wednesday night, the House hopes to follow suit Friday in what Pelosi predicted would be a "strong, bipartisan" vote. The California Democrat set the stage for more congressional legislation as the pandemic rampages through the country.

Pelosi indicated she would push to send more money directly to Americans on top of the cash payments set out in the Senate-passed bill. The proposal would give up to $1,200 to qualified individuals and $2,400 to couples, which starts to phase out for people making more than $75,000.

"I don't think we've seen the end of direct payments," Pelosi told reporters on Thursday morning. A separate proposal House Democrats put forward this week called for direct payments of $1,500 for individuals.

A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the Republican leader would be open to sending more relief checks.

As businesses across the country close to slow COVID-19's spread, a record 3.3 million people filed unemployment claims last week. The number of virus cases continues to climb in the U.S., approaching 70,000, while at least 1,000 people have died from the disease, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

As lawmakers deal with an unpredictable crisis, Pelosi said Congress "has to be on call for what we need when we need it, and we don't know what that might be."

Still, the speaker outlined some immediate goals she wants to address in future bills. She highlighted free coronavirus testing and treatment, along with more money for state and local health-care grants and food assistance. She also called for tougher safety standards for frontline workers.

The outbreak has created uncertainty around when and how Congress will vote to provide relief. Most House members are currently home after two representatives tested positive for COVID-19 and others who had contact with them chose to isolate.

The Senate, where one member has tested positive, does not plan to vote again until April 20, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday night. However, he said the chamber would stay "nimble" and could get called back, if needed.

After the Senate vote, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the "odds are high" Congress will need to pass more relief legislation.

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Banks are profiting from the Covid-19 pandemic. That's according to Sinn Fein's finance spokesman Pearse Doherty and others who have raised concerns about extra payment demands from struggling mortgage holders.

While the main banks have agreed to a three-month payment break for mortgage owners, Mr Doherty said lenders were throwing the extra interest for the delayed loans back onto borrowers.

He and other Opposition TDs raised the problems with the mortgage payment breaks during debates today about emergency laws which are being fast-tracked through the Dail.

Speaking in the chamber, Mr Doherty said: The banks came out with great fanfare and said a moratorium or three-month break would take place. The reality is that these banks will profit on the back of the pandemic and that is not acceptable.

"Let us consider Bank of Ireland - its website shows this clearly. Someone with a 30-year mortgage of 200,000 will pay 1,804 extra to the bank because of this three-month break.

That is how much extra the bank will take from such a customer. That is not acceptable.

A vulture fund - let us name it - Pepper - is telling customers that it will give them the three-month break but it will increase the repayment from 1,500 to 1,600 each month until the amount of money the customer should have paid, including the interest, is paid off. The fund is not extending it over the full duration of the loan.

Not only are the banks not waiving interest, they are charging interest on the interest they are rolling up. It is absolutely scandalous.

Independent Sligo Leitrim Marian Harkin raised the same concerns and said it was high time for banks to show solidarity with people in a time of crisis.

She appealed to ministers to act, saying: Using whatever further pressure they can exert, they must ensure that we do not see the interest on interest of which some of my colleagues have spoken.

"It must not be the case that payments deferred now still have to be paid within a specified time. People are outraged at the idea of interest on interest.

"I know the Minister of State does not have complete flexibility, but these are extraordinary times and we require real and meaningful solidarity from our banks and financial institutions."
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The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz Announces Investigation on Behalf of Fluor Corporation Investors (FLR)

The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz is investigating potential claims against the board of directors of Fluor Corporation ("Fluor" or the "Company") (NYSE: FLR) concerning whether the board breached its fiduciary duties to shareholders.

If you are a shareholder, click here to participate.







If you own Fluor shares and wish to discuss this matter with us, or have any questions concerning your rights and interests with regards to this matter, please contact Frank R. Cruz, of The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz, 1999 Avenue of the Stars, Suite 1100, Los Angeles, California 90067 at 310-914-5007, by email to [email protected], or visit our website at www.frankcruzlaw.com. If you inquire by email please include your mailing address, telephone number and number of shares purchased.

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005147/en/
The President HE Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo has granted amnesty to eight hundred and eight (808) prisoners.



The decision was taken upon the recommendation of the Prisons Service Council of the Ghana Prison Service and in consultation with the Council of State.



In a statement signed by the Director-General of Prisons, Patrick Darko Missah and copied to Peacefmonline.com, the decision was taken in accordance with article (72)1 of the 1992 constitution.





Read Below Full Copy Of The Statement



Presidential Amnesty To Deserving Prisoners



His Excellency the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, upon the recommendation of the Prisons Service Council and in consultation with the Council of State, has already in accordance with Article 72(1) of the Constitution granted amnesty to Eight Hundred and Eight (808) convict prisoners.



2. The categories of convicts affected are as below:



a. First offenders - 783



b. Seriously ill - 11



c. Inmates on death row to be commuted to life imprisonment - 7



d. Inmates serving a life sentence to have a sentence commuted to 20 years definite term - 4



e. Very old prisoners (7- years and above) - 3





3. The first offenders totaling 783 who have served half of their sentences, eleven/11 seriously ill prisoners, and three/3 aged (very old) prisoners are to be released outright. However, seven/7 prisoners on death row would have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment; while four prisoners serving a life sentence will be commuted to twenty/20 years definite term.





Signed



PATRICK DARKO MISSAH



DIRECTOR-GEN. OF PRISONS

Source: Isaac Kwame Owusu/Peacefmonline.com/[email protected]









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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NASA's response so far to the COVID-19 pandemic has focused on switching to remote work as the virus spreads, but the agency is evaluating other methods to address the unprecedented public health crisis as well, including new ways to contribute to the larger U.S. response.

Those measures include finding ways to support employees caring for dependents and partnering with other government agencies to help medical personnel caring for patients. But NASA's top priority during the coronavirus pandemic is the safety of its employees, agency head Jim Bridenstine emphasized during a digital town hall held yesterday (March 25).

"Our number-one highest priority as an agency is your health and your safety, and we don't want to ask you to do anything that you feel is unsafe," Bridenstine said during the event. "If you think something is unsafe, don't do it," he reiterated. "Your safety is my highest priority, and you've got my commitment to continue defending your decisions."

Related: Live updates about the coronavirus pandemic

Updates: The coronavirus pandemic impacts on space exploration

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine addressed staff questions about the agency's response to the coronavirus pandemic during a virtual town hall filmed on March 25, 2020. (Image credit: NASA)

NASA leadership also told staff to expect missions already in flight to remain in their normal state through the pandemic and pointed to the fact that many operate mostly autonomously as a matter of course. "We're going to continue to operate those," Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk said.

Citing the European Space Agency's decision to switch four missions to a safe holding mode with completely autonomous operations, Jurczyk said that, at least for now, NASA will not be following suit. "We're looking at that possibly if things deteriorate further, but we're going to maintain all our missions in space in mostly normal operations for now," he said.

The bulk of the town hall focused on answering questions NASA personnel had submitted about the continuing crisis and the agency's response to it . In particular, staff asked leadership about how the agency was evaluating ways it could put its resources to use  whether it was considering finding ways to manufacture ventilators or donate protective equipment, for example.

Related: Coronavirus prevention measures take their toll on astronomy

Bridenstine and James D. Polk, NASA's Chief Health and Medical Officer, said that the agency was indeed studying potential contributions but was not yet ready to announce any measures.

In part, Polk said, NASA is waiting for a cross-government meeting scheduled for today (March 26) meant to work out how agencies can most effectively collaborate. He said he expected topics like whether NASA could support ventilator production to be discussed during that conversation.

"This is on the minds of a lot of people at the agency," Bridenstine said. "NASA is involved in providing solution sets for the nation, and we will be more and more involved as the days go on, because we do have an extremely talented and very bright workforce and a lot of capabilities that can help."

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine addressed staff questions about the agency's response to the coronavirus pandemic during a virtual town hall filmed on March 25, 2020. (Image credit: NASA)

Donating personal protective equipment from cleanrooms and other NASA facilities is complicated, Polk said, because the agency orders these items on a just-in-time schedule. "We don't have a massive stockpile of PPE to donate," he said of these items, including masks and gloves.

Some mission-critical work that is continuing also requires this equipment, and supply shortages have required NASA centers to send materials to each other. He also pointed to concerns about getting the right equipment to the right people through the right channels. "We're looking into that right now," Polk said.

Bridenstine highlighted NASA's Ames Research Center in California for its initiative in looking for ways to contribute to the pandemic response. The center has worked to donate supercomputer resources to researchers looking for treatments and vaccines for the new coronavirus and also worked with the state's National Guard to make space available for medical care outposts.

The other major topic addressed during the town hall was how NASA is meeting the needs of its own employees during this time of upheaval. Questions addressed concerns like how staff could take time to care for dependents, whether contractors would be paid throughout the crisis and how the transition to working remotely might affect NASA in the long term.

Throughout the conversation, NASA leadership emphasized that the agency's priorities were focused on employee health, the safety of critical missions and flexibility during uncertain times. They also expressed confidence in the measures the agency has enacted so far , even when those measures have seemed premature. "Every time we've made a decision and we've felt like maybe we're leaning too far forward, the world catches up to us very quickly and it turns out to be a good decision," Polk said.

While the conversation focused on NASA's tactics for surviving the pandemic, Bridenstine was careful to note that he believes that the crisis will eventually be resolved. "Let's not get caught up in these times that seem dark; let's start thinking about what the future looks like," he said. "We need to make sure that we're thinking about a future that is bright. We need to think about a future where NASA is doing stunning achievements that inspire not just the nation but the world."

Watch the full virtual town hall meeting with NASA chief Jim Bridenstine here.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels . Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook .
LAS VEGASBusiness and individuals are struggling to adjust to a new normal during the COVID-19 pandemic, and thats abundantly clear in Las Vegas.

Sin City, which built its reputation on offering vices of all types 24 hours a day is seeing all that change in a matter of days.

With Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak calling for a non-essential business shut down, the infamous Las Vegas Strip went dark this week, and the states legal brothels also closed. The question posed by the escorts of those brothels, well as so many other men and women working in adult businesses, is will federal stimulus coronavirus relief funds be allocated for sex educators, porn film producers, crew and talent, and escorts? Or once again, will the adult industry be stigmatized?

As a nation, we are facing an unprecedented challenge that could last for many months, said Dr. Victoria Hartmann, director of the Erotic Heritage Museum, in Las Vegas. Those of us in sex research, curation of the humanitiesespecially as it pertains to sexualityadvocacy groups, but also sex workers in every facet of their work and home lives, will be disproportionately affected by the ravages of Covid-19 and its economic effects. What is Congress doing to help those of us who have dedicated our professional lives to this section of humanity? Will, the government come to our aid, or will they use this time to wipe us out of existence? Regardless of moral platitudes against sex work or sex research, real people with real lives will be unalterably affected, can Congress place compassion ahead of judgment?

From the consistent pressure from conservative groups to limit or completely stop sex-positive expositions as well as silence adult performers, to the constant health concerns over the Puritan-led illegality of prostitution adding to a nationwide health and safety risk, adult businesses and their workers are under constant scrutiny. In the supposed $2 trillion the Federal government is proposing to dole out to the American workforce within the next few weeks, it seems all-too-obvious that judgment might hinder workers in the adult field seeing much-needed aid.

For more, visit EroticMuseumVegas.com.
Grant Denyer has called for this year's Logie Awards to be postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The ceremony is usually held on the Gold Coast in late June or early July, by which time COVID-19 will most likely still be a public health concern.

The Dancing with the Stars host said that going ahead with the TV industry's night of nights would be 'self-indulgent' and unnecessary.

'It feels wrong and self-indulgent in these times': Grant Denyer has called for this year's Logie Awards to be postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Pictured on July 1, 2018

'It feels wrong and self-indulgent in these times for the industry to pat itself on the back,' he told the Herald Sun on Wednesday.

'I hope they pause the event, either delay it in a major way, or put it off for a year. However, as Amanda Keller's campaign manager, I certainly want to see it return at some point.'

This year's event is scheduled for June 28, and organisers are yet to make a formal announcement as to whether it will go ahead.

Grant, 42, famously took home the Gold Logie in 2018.

Having his say: The Dancing with the Stars host said that going ahead with the TV industry's night of nights would be 'self-indulgent' and unnecessary

It comes after viewers blasted DWTS last week after the contestants ignored social distancing restrictions designed to limit the spread of coronavirus.

While the program is no longer being filmed in front of a live audience, the show's format forces its competitors to physically interact with their dance partners.

'@DancingOn10, I didn't realise that being a celebrity was an antidote for the coronavirus,' one person tweeted.

Quality time: When father-of-two Grant is not in Melbourne hosting DWTS, he is practising social distancing with his family at their rural property outside of Bathurst, NSW

Channel 10 is now planning to wrap up the competition this Sunday, a week earlier than scheduled, as a safety measure for the cast and crew.

When father-of-two Grant is not in Melbourne hosting DWTS, he is practising social distancing with his family at their rural property outside of Bathurst, NSW.

As of Friday morning, there are 2,996 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia, including 13 deaths.
VERKHNE-BLAGOVESHCHENSK, Russia  The crime scene is a riverbank from which Russian Cossacks drove thousands of Chinese to their death by drowning in the Amur River 120 years ago. On a nearby hill stand a bronze memorial statue and a concrete Orthodox cross.

These memorials are not there to mourn the victims. Instead, they celebrate the Cossacks for their role in securing lands that were once Chinese but, since the middle of the 19th century, have been firmly part of the Russian Far East.

For two countries that revel in bitter memories of suffering at the hands of foreign intruders, the gruesome events on the Amur in 1900 present a ticklish problem. Russia and China now have close economic and political ties, and are bound together by shared wariness of the West and by highly selective memories of their own often fraught pasts.

We need them and they need us, said Olga Zalesskaia, a China expert and a dean at the Blagoveshchensk State Pedagogical University. Now we are cooperating, and it makes no sense to stir up all the painful pages of the past.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: The second COVID-19 positive patient who travelled in a train from Delhi to Chennai and is undergoing treatment at Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, has tested negative in two subsequent mandatory tests. He will be discharged in two days, said Health Minister C Vijayabaskar.



In his Twitter Vijayabaskar said, "TN's second positive case for corona who traveled from Delhi & undergoing treatment in #RGGH is recovering well. He is declared corona negative after two subsequent mandatory tests. He will be discharged in 2 days."

The case of the 20-year-old from Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, raised concern about community transmission as he tested positive for the infection without any travel history to foreign countries. He boarded Tamil Nadu Express on March 10 and reached Chennai on March 12. Meanwhile, speaking to press here on Wednesday after a meeting with all deans of private medical colleges and doctors, the minister said government will extend support in treatment of patients admitted by health department in private hospitals.

The minister also said private doctors and hospitals have expressed willingness to support the government.

He said the Government Medical College Hospital in Omandurar Estate 'B' block will start functioning as an isolation facility from Friday. The 350-bed facility will have 125 beds exclusively for ICU and 60 for patients who require advanced medical care, he said. On complaints of shortage of protective equipment and masks in government hospitals the minister said from Thursday the health department will ensure the supply chain is maintained in all government hospitals.

"The day's requirement in all the hospitals is 60,000 per day." Meanwhile, about sample testing fee in private labs, the minister said, the government has requested the labs to offer the test at a minimal fee as possible. The third private COVID testing lab for TN is approved by @MoHFW. Testing can be done at Neuberg Ehrlich Lab Pvt Ltd, Balaji Nagar, Chennai, the minister also tweeted.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 13:10:07|Editor: huaxia

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CHANGSHA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- More than 115,000 migratory birds including the lesser white-fronted goose, one of the most endangered bird species, passed the winter in central China's Dongting Lake, according to a local nature reserve.

Dongting Lake, located in central China's Hunan Province, is the second-largest freshwater lake in the country.

The east Dongting Lake national nature reserve administration said they spotted 12,428 lesser white-fronted geese this winter, a significant increase compared with 10,779 last winter.

Yao Yi, chief engineer of the administration, said that there are fewer than 35,000 lesser white-fronted geese currently in the world, indicating that east Dongting Lake has become one of the most important wintering places for the species.

The improvement of the ecological environment of Dongting Lake in recent years has led to a better habitat for the endangered species, and the nature reserve has played a role in protecting the reproduction and survival of this globally endangered bird, Yao added.

The management departments of Dongting Lake organized nine teams to carry out research on the species and a number of waterbirds between March 16 and 17. The overwintering waterbirds are ready to leave the wetlands in Dongting Lake and travel to the Yellow River basin areas for summer, according to Yao.
Two residents of Munger district in Bihar tested positive for Covid-19 on Thursday, taking the total number of confirmed cases in the state to six, an official said.

According to Pradip Das, the director of Patna-based Rajendra Memorial Research Institute the only testing laboratory for Covid-19 in Bihar - samples of 55 people who had come in contact with the man, the only one to have died from the disease so far, were collected and sent for examination.

Two of them-- a 40-year-old-woman and a 12-year-old boy -- tested positive for coronavirus, Das said.

They are relatives of the deceased and lived in a house adjacent to his, Munger District Magistrate Rajesh Meena said.

The 38-year-old man with travel history to Qatar who died last Saturday had comorbidity and was suffering from renal failure. He tested positive for coronavirus but the report came after he had died.

All 55 people, who had come in contact with the man, were kept in home quarantine on the directions of health officials, who had reached Munger and collected the samples for testing.

The two who tested positive for the disease will now be sent to a hospital in Bhagalpur, Meena said.

Other confirmed coronavirus cases in the state include three residents of Patna who are not related to each other.

Of these, a middle-aged woman, whose son had travelled to Italy recently, is admitted at AIIMS, Patna, while two others both men in their 20s, one of whom returned from Scotland and the other from Gujarat are at the Nalanda Medical College Hospital.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As the House of Representatives prepares to pass a historic $2 trillion coronavirus relief package, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi faces a bigger challenge: figuring out a way for 435 members to cast votes in the time of social distancing.

The pandemic has left multiple members of Congress in quarantine and led to restrictions on movement that could prevent the House from voting. While House leadership has indicated they hope to pass the initial coronavirus aid bill quickly using a voice vote, the likely need for further relief and other legislation has led Pelosi to consider new procedures, including measures for remote voting that a report from the House Rules Committee described as one of the biggest rule changes in the last century.

On Wednesday, the Senate voted to pass a $2 trillion relief package that will give some Americans $1,200 checks to help cover expenses during the coronavirus pandemic. The House of Representatives is set to vote on the package on Friday. In a dramatic illustration of the dangerous and unprecedented situation, the sergeant at arms, Paul Irving, and Dr. Brian Monahan, the House physician, sent an email to all members on Thursday outlining numerous precautionary measures for the vote. Voting will be conducted in 16 separate groups organized alphabetically to allow members to stay 6 feet apart.

Members should use extreme care and deliberation when making the determination to travel to Washington, D.C., the email said.

House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer has said Fridays coronavirus vote will be a voice vote, which does not require all House members to be present. However, a voice vote can be derailed by a single objection from any one of the 435 House members. And multiple members have said they are unsure whether they will support the legislation.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)

On Wednesday, Pelosi told members of the Democratic Caucus in a phone call that she hopes the bill passes without objection, according to a Hill source. If there is not unanimous consent for the aid, Pelosi said, there will have to be a floor vote and she consulted with the House physician to get ideas for how that might safely proceed.

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In a press conference on Thursday, Pelosi indicated she was optimistic there would be no objections or need for members to vote on the House floor. I feel certain that we will have a strong bipartisan vote, Pelosi said.

But even if the initial coronavirus relief package passes, difficult questions remain about how Congress can proceed as some members are quarantined and the nation faces the prospect of an extended lockdown.

Last week, Pelosi, whose office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, assigned Democratic House Rules Committee Chairman James McGovern the task of compiling a report on voting options during the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes would only apply to the House.

In the Senate, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have introduced a bipartisan resolution for remote voting. However, McGoverns report suggested remote voting would be too time-consuming to implement quickly during this current crisis. He also concluded that remote voting comes with security and legal concerns and recommended different measures for the House to conduct votes when all members are not present on Capitol Hill.

McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, turned in his report late Monday night. In a letter accompanying the report, McGovern said unanimous consent or a voice vote, two current procedures, would be the quickest and likely best path forward to pass the coronavirus relief package, since they would not require the full House to be present. McGoverns report noted unanimous consent was used the last time the U.S. faced a similar crisis over a century ago.

By far the best option is to use the existing House rules and current practices. During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, the House did not adopt a method of remote voting  e.g. by telegraph or correspondence. Instead they eventually utilized a unanimous consent agreement to pass critical legislation despite not having a physical quorum present, recognizing the importance of conducting business in the chamber at a time of national crisis, the report said.

However, both voice votes and unanimous consent can be derailed by a single objection. And even if there is widespread support for the initial coronavirus relief package, Pelosi and others have said there will likely need to be other aid legislation passed soon as the pandemic continues.

McGoverns report acknowledged the ongoing questions about how Congress could continue to go about its business amid a lengthy quarantine.

House Rules Committee Chairman James McGovern, D-Mass. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

While passing legislation without a recorded vote is the easiest path procedurally and the best option for Member and public safety, it may not be possible since any single Member can prevent it.

McGoverns report went on to review other measures, but ultimately recommended proxy voting in which an absent Member gives a present Member their proxy to cast an actual vote for them, for a prescribed period of time.

According to the Hill source. McGovern also said on Tuesdays caucus call that he believed Republicans would be amenable to implementing proxy voting.

A spokesperson for Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did not respond to a request for comment. However, at least one Republican, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., praised McGoverns excellent report and expressed support for his recommendation in a tweet on Monday.

Members must be able to represent our constituents while not spreading the virus. A bipartisan solution for the emergency may be proxy voting for those who cant travel, Cheney wrote.

Multiple state legislatures have already adopted proxy voting due to the pandemic. While proxy voting would require some members to be present on Capitol Hill, McGovern argued it is far more feasible than remote voting, which would involve a system that enabled members of Congress to cast votes from a separate location.

While the current voting system on the House floor is electronic, it is closed off and disconnected from the internet. According to the Hill source, McGovern discussed his recommendations on a call with Pelosi and the Democratic caucus on Tuesday, saying one of the issues with any internet-based voting system is that it paves the way for rival states, including China and Russia, to interfere.

Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A spokesperson for McGovern declined to comment on the call and referred to his report, which addressed potential security concerns surrounding remote voting. The report says a secure method for voting would be critical and require an expert staff dedicated to ensuring there are no foreign or domestic attacks threatening the integrity of a vote by any Member, or threatening the systems functionality as a whole.

While experts agree that remote voting comes with security concerns, they see this as a surmountable problem. Larry Pfeiffer, a former chief of staff to CIA and NSA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, told Yahoo News he believes Russian and Chinese interference should be expected if anything less than a secure communications solution is considered for remote voting. However, Pfeiffer also indicated he believes the U.S. military and intelligence community could be consulted to quickly come up with a solution that would guarantee communications integrity, authenticity, confidentiality and availability.

In this instance, Id recommend the KISS solution: Keep it simple, stupid, Pfeiffer said.

Organizations like the U.S. military and the National Security Agency have been experts in the field of secure messaging for decades. They should be consulted and a quick, simple, easy-to-use solution provided.

Daniel Schuman, policy director for Demand Progress, a progressive advocacy organization focused on digital issues, told Yahoo News that arguments that Russia or China will interfere or disrupt remote voting dont make sense. He said concerns over disruption or authentication can be addressed, given the limited number of participants, the ability to see and hear votes over proven teleconference solutions like Zoom, and the ability to go back and verify that votes were recorded as intended, among other options. Schuman published a review of McGoverns report on Tuesday that criticized the Rules Committee for not analyzing remote voting by teleconference or contemplating an extended absence from the Capitol.

Simply put, the House of Representatives must instantiate the option for emergency remote voting by teleconference that can be invoked during the coronavirus pandemic, Schuman wrote. This option should not be a first resort. Indeed, the House should try to continue its operations under current House rules.

In his interview with Yahoo News, Schuman was also critical of Pelosi for not acting sooner. Speaker Pelosi should have put in place remote voting and options to put it in place before they left," Schuman said.

Members of the House of Representatives have also called for remote voting. On March 18, as concern about the coronavirus mounted, Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., took to Twitter to call for the House to implement a remote voting plan.

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., has called on the House to implement a remote voting plan. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Amid an epic crisis, the continuity of government operations is of paramount importance. Its 2020  Congress can and should be able to operate in all circumstances, including without having to be physically present in the same room. We need remote voting, Beyer wrote.

The Hill source said that Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., was also adamant about the need for remote voting in the Democratic Caucus telephone call on Tuesday.

We must send the right message to the country by operating remotely, Nadler said, according to the source. Hill technical staff should set up a voting station in every members home.

Nadler did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In a statement to Yahoo News, Beyer said he believes there are secure methods of remote voting.

Congress must be able to govern the country in times of crisis, and while the COVID-19 pandemic is the latest crisis threatening the continuity of operations on Capitol Hill, it is not the first and probably will not be the last, Beyer said. There are ways to guarantee the security and authenticity of remote voting by Members of Congress and we should aggressively pursue them.

Congress has investigated remote voting in the past, particularly following the Sept. 11 attacks, when a continuity of government commission was set up to make recommendations for alternate procedures that could be implemented in a disaster. However, as Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who served on the commission, wrote in a piece for the Atlantic earlier this month, all of those recommendations went nowhere.

But security isnt the only concern surrounding the implementation of remote voting  particularly given the urgency of the current crisis. The Rules Committee report described remote voting as constitutionally untested, meaning legislation passed via remote vote could run the risk of being challenged in court, which might delay implementation of urgent coronavirus measures. Unlike remote voting, the report said, proxy voting has a basis in parliamentary tradition and would not be subject to the same challenges.

Providing for remote voting would require significant changes to multiple core House rules  it would not be possible to simply add a clause allowing Members to vote from elsewhere. Alterations much smaller than the ones contemplated have taken years of deliberation and debate, the report said.

The report said remote voting would require major changes to foundational House rules surrounding deliberation, voting, and attendance that could cause unintended consequences.

A rule change of this magnitude would also be one of the biggest rule changes in the last century, in one of the most critical institutions in our country, the report said.

While the rules committee report recommended proxy voting as a simpler option during the pandemic, it is not without its own challenges. Like the coronavirus relief package, a rules change to enable proxy voting in the current climate would need to be passed by unanimous consent or voice vote.

As a result, it could also be derailed by a single objection.

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The latest novel coronavirus news from Canada and around the world Thursday (this file will be updated throughout the day):

10:45 p.m.: The Conservative party is suspending its leadership race in light of the COVID-19 crisis.

The party says it is no longer possible to meet the deadlines to process memberships and donations, and handle the ballots for the scheduled June 27 election.

No new date has been set. The party says it will re-evaluate the decision on May 1.

10:05 p.m.: The federal government is shutting down in-person Service Canada centres over COVID-19 concerns.

The Liberals say the move, announced late Thursday night, shouldn't affect most unemployed workers who seek employment insurance benefits since the vast majority of applications are done online.

The new benefit for those who dont qualify their EI but lost income amid the pandemic will also be available through an online application which should open early next month.

9:00 p.m. An Ontario regional health unit says two members of a long-term care home have died after developing symptoms following a COVID-19 outbreak.

The Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge District Health Unit says one resident died Tuesday and another on Wednesday at the Pinecrest Nursing Home in Bobcaygeon.

The two who died were not tested for COVID-19.

The deaths came after three residents tested positive on March 20. Fourteen staff members also tested positive.

6:53 p.m. Canada has a total of 4,043 COVID-19 cases, 11 presumptive, 4,032 confirmed, including 39 deaths, and 212 resolved, according to The Canadian Press.

Quebec has 1,629 confirmed, including eight deaths, and one case resolved

Ontario has 858 confirmed, including 15 deaths, and eight cases resolved

British Columbia has 725 confirmed, including 14 deaths, and 173 cases resolved

Alberta has 486 confirmed, including two deaths and 27 resolved

Saskatchewan has 95 confirmed, including three cases resolved

Newfoundland and Labrador has 82 confirmed cases

Nova Scotia has 73 confirmed cases

Manitoba has 25 confirmed and 11 presumptive cases

New Brunswick has 33 confirmed cases

Repatriated Canadians account for 13 confirmed cases

Prince Edward Island has nine confirmed cases

Yukon has three confirmed cases

Northwest Territories has one confirmed case

Nunavut reports no confirmed cases.

6:45 p.m. The University of Ottawa announced itll be cancelling its spring convocation scheduled for June 7 to the 10. Students will still graduate on time and receive their degrees.

6:40 p.m. Another 66 people in British Columbia have been diagnosed with COVID-19 for a total of 725 cases in the province.

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says there are no new deaths. Fourteen people have died from COVID-19 in the province.

5:39 p.m. The U.S. now leads the world in confirmed coronavirus cases, The New York Times reports. In the United States, at least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, and more than 1,000 of them have died. The total amounts to more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen, according to data gathered by the Times.

With 330 million residents, the U.S. is the worlds third-most populous nation. It provides a vast pool of people who can potentially get COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

5:35 p.m. Alberta has identified 67 new cases of COVID-19, bringing its total to 486.

Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the provinces chief medical health officer, says the cases include 13 at the McKenzie Towne Continuing Care Centre in Calgary. The virus was linked to one death at that centre earlier this week.

Hinshaw says 27 Albertans have so far recovered from COVID-19.

4:35 p.m. Saskatchewan is reporting nine more cases of COVID-19, increasing the provinces total to 95.

The government says three people have recovered from the virus, while five others have been hospitalized. It says two patients are in intensive care.

4:34 p.m. There are 3,910 confirmed and presumptive cases of COVID-19 cases in Canada, according to The Canadian Press. Eleven of these are presumptive, 3,899 confirmed, and 185 resolved. There have been 39 deaths.

Quebec has 1,629 confirmed, including eight deaths and one resolved

Ontario has 858 confirmed, including 15 deaths and eight resolved

British Columbia has 659 confirmed, including 14 deaths and 173 resolved

Alberta has 419 confirmed, including two deaths

Saskatchewan has 95 confirmed, including three resolved

Newfoundland and Labrador has 82 confirmed

Nova Scotia has 73 confirmed

Manitoba has 25 confirmed, 11 presumptive

New Brunswick has 33 confirmed

Repatriated Canadians account for 13 confirmed cases

Prince Edward Island has nine confirmed

Yukon has three confirmed

Northwest Territories has one confirmed

Nunavut has no confirmed cases.

4:15 p.m. Vancouver is opening two emergency response centres in its downtown to provide additional spaces for homeless people.

4:10 p.m. Prince Edward Island is reporting four more cases of COVID-19, raising the provincial total to nine. Chief public health officer Dr. Heather Morrison says the latest cases are all travel related.

4:01 p.m. Toronto has 339 confirmed cases of COVID-19, an increase of 31 over the last 24 hours. Twenty-two people are in hospital, 10 are in the ICU. There have been four deaths overall so far.

Twenty-five per cent of Toronto COVID-19 cases are attributed to community spread, says Dr. Eileen de Villa, medical officer of health for the City of Toronto.

There have been three outbreaks of two or more cases in long-term-care homes.

De Villa says some homeless shelters continue to hold beds that are less than six feet apart, and that they are working to address the issue.

Hotels in the city have already received individuals from the shelter population who need to isolate and be tested, de Villa said.

She pointed out that in Nova Scotia and Quebec people are being fined for failing to comply with social-distancing orders and that some European cities have banned leaving home except for weekly shopping trips.

De Villa warned that if Toronto residents fail to follow the protective measures, they may see stronger ones, affecting our civil liberties, put in place.

3:54 p.m. Toronto Mayor John Tory, freshly out of travel-triggered isolation, tells the daily news conference he strongly urges all property owners to help tenants stay in their homes amid the COVID-19 crisis.

3:20 p.m. Ontario says it will ramp up capacity to conduct around 18,900 COVID-19 tests a day by mid-April.

The government says it will gradually increase testing by 3,000 to 4,000 per week as it moves toward that target.

The province does 3,000 COVID-19 tests a day, and will increase to 5,000 a day later this week.

There is a testing backlog of nearly 11,000 cases, which the province hopes to have cleared by early next week.

3:15 p.m. Luminato Festival, Torontos international festival of arts and ideas, announced its cancelling its festival scheduled for June 11 to the 28.

2:45 p.m. Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister is pushing back a promised cut to the provincial sales tax, because of the financial strain of fighting COVID-19.

Pallister says the novel coronavirus is taking a toll on the economy, and the province will drain hundreds of millions of dollars from its rainy day fund within three months.

Pallister also says the province is looking at borrowing more than a billion dollars.

2:30 p.m. Saskatchewan is temporarily suspending eviction hearings over COVID-19.

The government announced starting immediately the Office of Residential Tenancies will not accept applications for missed or late rent.

2 p.m.: New Brunswick is reporting seven new cases of COVID-19 in the province Thursday, bringing the provincial total to 33.

Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Jennifer Russell says all seven new cases are travel-related. She says the current testing regime is focused on testing those most at risk.

Russell says she expects more people to be tested once the province sees any cases of community transmission.

1:50 p.m.: Global cases of COVID-19 have now eclipsed 500,000, according to Johns Hopkins ongoing tally. China, Italy and the U.S. lead the way, accounting for roughly 235,000 of the confirmed cases.

1:48 p.m.: Premier Doug Ford says it is disgusting that Pusateris is charging $30 for hand wipes. A furious Ford says cabinet will impose measures to stop price gouging.

1:30 p.m.: Newfoundland and Labrador chief medical officer Dr. Janice Fitzgerald confirmed 15 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday afternoon.

This brings the total number of cases to 82. Fitzgerald says all of those cases are recovering at home.

The majority of cases have come from the provinces Eastern health region. Minister John Haggie added that nine of the cases are health workers from the region.

1:25 p.m.: A 91-year-old man from Quebecs Laurentians region who lived in a seniors home is the eighth person to succumb to COVID-19 in the province.

Quebec Premier Francois Legault says the province now has 1,629 confirmed cases of COVID-19, an increase of 290 from the day before.

1:20 p.m.: Premier Doug Ford says 72 COVID-19 assessment centres are open across Ontario.

1:18 p.m.: The TTC will likely require at least tens of millions of dollars in financial assistance to cope with what the agency describes as an unprecedented ridership drop caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more from the Stars Ben Spurr.

1:15 p.m.: Metrolinx CEO Phil Verster said in a message to employees Thursday that the transit agency is donating 18,000 face masks to health workers. The regional transit agency, which oversees GO Transit, had been stockpiling the equipment as part of its pandemic planning, but in a March 20 letter Ontario Associate Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Barbara Yaffe advised Verster that masks were not recommended for GO workers.

In a March 24 letter to Yaffe, Manny Sforza, international vice president of Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents 2,000 Metrolinx employees, accused the transit agency of reneging on its promise to provide the masks to bus drivers and other front line workers, and claimed provincial health officials werent being transparent.

Sforza wrote that he accepted masks that had been intended for transit workers might need to be redirected to the health care sector, but there needs to be an honest discussion about this reality rather than manoeuvres behind the backs of the workers whose (personal protective equipment) is being donated. 

1:05 p.m.: Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland says any move by the United States to send American soldiers to the border to intercept illegal migrants would be seen as damaging to Canadas relationship with the United States.

Freeland says Canada has made its position clear at a number of levels, including at the health and political levels that such a step would be unnecessary and not appropriate, given the current public health situation in Canada involving the coronavirus.

She said keeping the border free of military presence is an important symbol of the close ties between the Canada and the U.S. and their close military partnership.

12:58 p.m.: The British Columbia government is taking what is says are unprecedented steps to protect supply chains for goods and services, and stop the resale of food and medical supplies.

Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth issued a series of orders today to establish a unit to co-ordinate the distribution of goods and services, and he is allowing deliveries to be made at any time of the day.

The resale of food, medical supplies, personal protective equipment and cleaning products has also been banned.

12:50 p.m.: Prince Edward Islands top medical official said one person is considered to have recovered from COVID-19 and that there were no new cases of the virus on Thursday. Five people have contracted the illness in the province.

12:45 p.m.: Canadas chief public health officer says random checks will be done to ensure Canadians returning to Canada from abroad are following the new mandatory 14-day quarantine.

Dr. Theresa Tam says contact information about travellers will be collected when they arrive at the border to allow for followup, which could include visits to their homes.

She says federal health officials will be working closely with local public health agencies to enforce the mandatory quarantine, which could lead to fines or prison time if breached.

Tam also said recent data on COVID-19 cases in Canada show one per cent of cases have been fatal, which means Canadas health system is not yet overwhelmed.

12:45 p.m.: Ontario is liberalizing liquor licensing laws to allow restaurants to temporarily sell beer, wine, and spirits to go.

Tourism Culture and Heritage Minister Lisa MacLeod told 1,250 industry participants on an electronic town hall Thursday that our government is helping bars, restaurants and pubs by allowing the sale and delivery of alcohol.

12:30 p.m.: Nova Scotia is reporting five new confirmed cases of COVID-19 for an overall total of 73 confirmed cases in the province.

The province says most of the cases are travel-related or connected to earlier cases, although one of the new cases cant currently be linked to travel or an earlier case. The 73 individuals affected range in age from under 10 to mid-70s and two patients are currently in hospital.

12:28 p.m.: Canada is discouraging the United States from sending American soldiers to the border to intercept illegal migrants who could spread the COVID-19 contagion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday.

Trudeau confirmed that the two countries are discussing the possibility, which was first reported by Global News.

Canada and the U.S. have the longest unmilitarized border in the world, and it is very much in both of our interests for it to remain that way, Trudeau said during his daily briefing outside Rideau Cottage in Ottawa.

We have been in discussions with the U.S. on this.

12:21 p.m.: China says it is temporarily barring most foreigners from entering the country as it seeks to curb the number of imported coronavirus cases.

The foreign ministry announced late Thursday that even foreign citizens with residence permits will be prevented from entering starting on Saturday. All visa-free transit policies will also be temporarily suspended.

It said diplomatic workers will be exempt, and foreign citizens coming to China for necessary economic, trade, scientific or technological activities or out of emergency humanitarian needs can still apply for visas.

12:20 p.m.: The Manitoba government is reporting another probable case of COVID-19, bringing the total of probable and confirmed cases to 36. The latest case is a Winnipeg man in his 20s who is believed to be linked to a previously known patient.

The provincial lab has been able to ramp up testing, and ran 734 tests on Wednesday. Health officials are expanding testing to include people with respiratory symptoms who work in health care, who live in remote communities, or who live in group settings such as nursing homes and shelters.

11:45 a.m.: According to the provinces data Thursday morning, of the 22 new cases reported in Toronto, 13 are younger than 40 years old. This includes a female under 20, three women in their 20s and two men in their 20s. Three men and three women in their 30s also tested positive.

11:40 a.m.: The federal government is asking banks and credit-card companies to lower interest rates on Canadians struggling financially because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Finance Minister Bill Morneau is in talks with Canadian banks asking them to look at ways to help Canadians struggling to pay their bills.

Trudeau says the government is also looking at extending lower-interest credit directly to consumers.

The prime minister also said he is in talks with the United States about ensuring the Canada-U.S. border remains free of military presence after Global News reports the U.S. may be looking at deploying troops to the border to stop illegal border crossers. We have highlighted that the fact that the Canada-U.S. border is the longest unmilitarized border in the world that has benefited both countries. It should stay that way, Trudeau says.

11:27 a.m.: Trudeau says if travellers returning to Canada dont go into quarantine for two weeks, they could face huge fines and even jail time. The maximum penalty is a $1 million fine and three years in prison.

11:25 a.m.: Among the 170 new COVID-19 cases in Ontario are people who had travelled to Spain, Egypt, Germany and the U.K. At least 12 of the new patients have been hospitalized, including a Toronto woman in her 20s. Five of the hospitalized patients hail from Lambton, Ont., and are all aged over 60. According to the latest update, 38,550 people have been tested  26,727 are negative; 10,965 cases are under investigation and eight cases are resolved.

11:15 a.m.: Ontario reports 170 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the provincial total to 858. Its the biggest one-day spike in new cases since the outbreak begin. The number of deaths reported in the province is 13, the same as Wednesday.

10:30 a.m.: Toronto Coun. Joe Cressy announces TOArtist COVID-19 Response Fund established by Toronto Arts Council and Toronto Arts Foundation to offer grants up to $1,000 to support Toronto artists dealing with the profound economic impacts of COVID-19.

9 a.m.: The Blue Jays had today circled on the calendar for months. The season opener was going to be the moment Toronto unveiled its biggest free-agent acquisition  at least in terms of dollars  in franchise history. A diminished Boston team, fresh off an off-season fire sale, was positioned to become Hyun-Jin Ryus first victim. Instead the MLB season has been put on hold. Read the column from the Stars Gregor Chisholm.

8:20 a.m. New signs will be posted at City of Toronto parks Thursday. All playgrounds and parks amenities are closing in the wake of coronavirus.

7:58 a.m.: The number of coronavirus infections was set to top a half-million worldwide Thursday as both Italy and the United States appeared poised to surpass China, where the pandemic began, and Spains death toll climbed to more than 4,000. Health care systems in Europe and New York buckled under the strain.

Faced with the spread of the pandemic, the U.S. Senate passed a $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care facilities.

At least 2.8 billion people are under severe travel restrictions. But the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, scolded world leaders for wasting precious time in the fight against the virus that has already killed more than 22,000 people and infected over 480,000, thrown millions out of work and ravaged the world economy.

The time to act was actually more than a month ago or two months ago, he said Wednesday. We squandered the first window of opportunity. . . . This is a second opportunity, which we should not squander and do everything to suppress and control this virus.

5:10 a.m.: The City of Pitt Meadows, B.C., is asking for tax deferrals and financial supports from the province.

Mayor Bill Dingwall, along with 19 other mayors in the region have requested, in writing on March 23, an expansion of the Provincial Property Tax Deferment Program to include residential, business and non-profit organizations.

Dingwall says the pandemic has caused a financial strain on everyone, particularly families and small business.

The province, under the Community Charter, has the authority to defer property taxes for municipalities, which are due on the first regular business day after Canada Day.

4:59 a.m.: Turkeys trade minister says the country is restricting the export of respirator-related medical equipment in order to meet domestic needs.

Ruhsar Pekcan said on Twitter Thursday that the export of equipment including ventilators, intubation devices and intensive care monitors would be subject to government authorization.

The measure aims to ensure that a disruption to the health services does not occur and the existing capacity is used effectively, the minister said.

Turkey has reported 59 COVID-19 deaths and at least 2,433 infections.

4:41 a.m.: U.S. deaths from the coronavirus pandemic topped 1,000 in another grim milestone for a global outbreak that is taking lives and wreaking havoc on economies and the established routines of ordinary life.

In a recognition of the scale of the threat, the U.S. Senate late Wednesday passed an unparalleled $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems.

4:01 a.m.: There are 3,409 confirmed and presumptive cases in Canada.

Quebec: 1339 confirmed (including 6 deaths, 1 resolved)

British Columbia: 659 confirmed (including 14 deaths, 173 resolved)

Ontario: 688 confirmed (including 13 deaths, 8 resolved)

Alberta: 419 confirmed (including 2 deaths)

Saskatchewan: 86 confirmed

Nova Scotia: 68 confirmed

Newfoundland and Labrador: 4 confirmed, 63 presumptive

Manitoba: 25 confirmed, 10 presumptive

New Brunswick: 26 confirmed

Canadians quarantined at CFB Trenton: 13 confirmed

Prince Edward Island: 5 confirmed

The territories: 4 confirmed

Total: 3,409 (73 presumptive, 3,336 confirmed including 35 deaths, 182 resolved)

4 a.m.: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will confer today with leaders of the worlds biggest economies about the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hell be taking part in a video conference with leaders of the G20.

They are expected to talk about co-ordination of international efforts to contain the deadly virus and cushion the devastating blow to the worlds economy.

Hes also expected to use his daily news conference outside his residence to highlight the billions worth of direct financial aid the federal government is providing to help Canadians and businesses weather the crisis.

Legislation enacting $52 billion worth of financial aid and another $55 billion worth of tax deferrals was approved yesterday by Parliament but the money wont actually start flowing for another few weeks.

4 a.m.: Advocates and front-line workers say the COVID-19 pandemic could explode within Torontos homeless population.

They say government actions to curb the spread of the illness may have the opposite effect on those who live without housing.

A number of drop-in and respite sites have closed, while others must limit their numbers inside.

Many feel people cannot practise safe social distancing inside those sites, nor can they easily go the bathroom or wash their hands because many food banks, restaurants and coffee shops have shut.

4 a.m.: Canadas agriculture sector is warning of higher prices and potential food shortages if it isnt designated an essential service.

Todd Hames, president of the Alberta Wheat Commission, says they have concerns about potential problems.

Hames says railways, the Port of Vancouver and companies that supply fuel and farm implements also need to remain open with spring seeding only weeks away.

He says its especially important since there have been delays in getting grain to market due to strikes and rail blockades.

4 a.m.: Canadas cattle industry has stabilized after seeing a sharp drop in prices when the coronavirus pandemic was declared.

The Canadian Cattlemens Associations executive vice-president Dennis Laycraft says the industry has been working with Agriculture Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to ensure meat-packing plants remain open.

He says the association wants to make sure that market isnt affected and is relieved that borders are still open to beef as an essential good.

But first and foremost, he says there must be recognition of efforts to keep an adequate supply of food available to Canadians.

4 a.m.: Bill George, chair of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, says workable safety rules need to be developed for migrant farm workers.

He says they view farm work as an essential service, but sometimes it would be hard to maintain the six feet minimum separation.

He says either they to find a way around the separation distance or potentially look at relying on other countries to supply produce.

George says each day of delay increases the risk of crops not being planted in time  something that Canadians could see reflected at the grocery store.

With files from The Canadian Press.

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Amaravati, March 26 : Andhra Pradesh DGP Gautam Sawang said on Thursday that any individual crossing over the border into the state will be mandatorily subjected to 14-day quarantine.

Speaking on Thursday to the media, Sawang stated that since Wednesday, there have been attempts by many people to enter the state from neighbouring Telangana.

With reports continuing to come in, of people belonging to Andhra Pradesh converging at various points along the interstate border with Telangana, the AP top cop maintained that nobody will be allowed to contravene the lockdown regulations in place.

On Wednesday night, the AP-Telangana border had witnessed tense scenes after a few hundred people, mostly students, armed with permission letters issued by Telangana Police, had tried to return to their homes in Andhra Pradesh.

However the AP Police had stopped their entry leading to tension for a couple of hours. Following the two state governments' intervention, the students were allowed to cross over to Andhra Pradesh where the AP Police took them to an isolation centre for observation.

The AP government had earlier announced that people from outside would not be allowed entry into the state during the lockdown period. However, with many Paying Guest (PG) and working people's hostels in Hyderabad shutting down to the COVID-19 lockdown, people staying in these places were forced to return to their hometowns in Andhra Pradesh.
Banners warning that playing cards together is suicide and guards yelling at crowds to separate: a Chinese city near the coronavirus ground zero remains far from normal even after emerging from a two-month lockdown. Huanggang, home to 7.5 million people, was among the worst-affected areas in Hubei, the province where the new coronavirus first emerged late last year before morphing into a deadly pandemic. Travel restrictions were loosened on Wednesday and -- if healthy -- people were allowed to leave Hubei, where more than 50 million people were placed under lockdown in January to prevent the spread of the virus. But warnings were prominently displayed across Huanggang city to remind people that the virus still posed a threat as they returned to the streets. "Gathering to play cards is suicide," said a red banner hanging by the roadside. "If you don't wear a mask, the virus will fall in love with you," warned another. Restaurants in the city re-opened -- but diners weren't allowed to eat inside. Instead, delivery drivers collected takeout orders from different shops on one food street lined with red lanterns, as a handful of customers ate at tables outside. Several hotels remained closed. Others offered only a small number of rooms to guests. - 'Not safe' - Nearly 3,000 people were infected and 125 died in Huanggang, which is now considered a low-risk area. Like other regions in the province, people can travel in and out of the city if they have a "green" health status on a special phone app. It is a big change from earlier this year, when Hubei was placed under lockdown to fight the virus, which was traced to a market in the province's capital Wuhan. But despite the easing of restrictions, Huanggang is still on edge, and officials repeatedly told AFP that the situation was still "not safe". Reporters were made to cover up their vented N95 masks with additional surgical masks before being allowed to leave the train station, where guards shouted at crowds of passengers not to stand too close together. A closed field hospital is a testament to the vast changes the city has already gone through. The Dabieshan Medical Center was under construction when the epidemic broke out, but new walls and equipment were rapidly drafted in to make it suitable for treating infectious diseases. The final patients were discharged last week and now the empty hospital is dark and deserted. AFP reporters saw used protective equipment lying on the ground, with abandoned quilts and flasks next to beds in empty wards. Du Zhiqiang, who is in charge of the hospital's construction, said the power had been turned off after it was decommissioned as a COVID-19 facility. Work resumed two days ago on building the new hospital as planned, he told AFP. - 'Need to take care' - With transport curbs easing, thousands of people have taken their chance to travel in or out of Hubei. AFP saw busy waiting rooms at several railway stations, and packed sleeping compartments on trains. Many Huanggang residents jumped at the chance to go out. Around 20 people queued to get into the Wanda Plaza mall, where shoppers had their temperature checked and showed a health code before being allowed inside. Some businesses inside the mall were offering "re-opening discounts", and posted signs reassuring customers that the stores have been thoroughly disinfected. One pancake seller who didn't want to be named told AFP that Thursday was her first day back at work. Being out of the house felt "freer", she said, but business is "definitely not as good as before". Wearing the obligatory face masks, a group of young women walked arm-in-arm down the street, deciding on lunch options. Chen Wenjun, a 22-year-old pharmacist, ate near a street food stall with two friends. She said she was happy to finally be out after weeks cooped up at home, but was not letting her guard down: "Even though a lot of things have been opened, we still need to take care." Huanggang was among the worst-hit cities in China's Hubei province, ground zero of the coronavirus pandemic Restaurants in Huanggang have re-opened but diners aren't allowed to eat inside, and are served at outdoor tables instead Despite the easing of travel restrictions, Huanggang is still on edge and officials told AFP it is still 'not safe' Thousands have jumped at the chance to travel in or out of Hubei as travel restrictions have eased People in Huanggang are still being cautious, despite an easing of the lockdown
Housing sales fell by 42 per cent during January-March period at 45,200 units across seven major cities on poor demand amid concerns over spread of coronavirus infections, according to housing brokerage firm Anarock.

Housing sales stood at 78,510 units in the year-ago period across seven cities -- Delhi-NCR, Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune, as per sales data till March 25.

Sales declined by 24 per cent on a quarter-on-quarter basis.

Anarock, with nearly Rs 200 crore turnover last fiscal, said that there would be negligible sales till this month end because of nationwide lockdown.

"Given the ongoing global healthcare calamity, it's no surprise that housing sales and new project launches across India's top seven cities decreased both on yearly and quarterly basis," Anarock Chairman Anuj Puri said.

He further said that, March -- the month when most advisories and lockdown were imposed -- saw a steep decline in both new launches and housing sales against the preceding two months.

According to the data, housing sales in Delhi-NCR dropped by 41 per cent at 8,150 units during January-March 2020 from 13,740 units in the same period last year.

In MMR, sales were down by 42 per cent to13,910 units from 24,000 units in the year-ago period, while, Bengaluru saw 45 per cent dip at 8,630 units from 15,580 units in January-March 2019.

Sales in Pune declined to 7,200 units from12,340 units, a drop of 42 per cent, whereas, Hyderabad witnessed the maximum fall of 50 per cent at 2,680 units from 5,400 units during the period under review.

Sales in Chennai stood at 2,190 units, a 36 per cent fall from 3,430 units in January-March 2019 and Kolkata saw 39 per cent decline to 2,440 units in January-March 2020 from 4,020 units a year ago.

"The government has taken an inarguably necessary hard-line stance to curtail the spread of the virus. The lockdowns have stalled construction activity and will lead to project delays in the future, but this is a reality the sector must accept and live with," Puri said.

New launches too fell by 42 per cent annually - from 70,480 units in the first quarter of 2019 to approx 41,200 in January-March 2020, the report said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Vietnamese Ministry of Health has issued an urgent notification on tracing visitors to a number of places in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City who might have come into contact with patients having caught the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

According to the notification, visitors to the six following places between March 13 and 21 are asked to quickly contact local Centers for Disease Control to have their health checked:

-- An eatery named 173 Thai Ha selling bun dau mam tom (vermicelli served with fried tofu and shrimp paste) in Alley 13 on Thai Ha Street in Hanoi. A COVID-19 patient visited the shop for lunch between 12:00 pm and 2:00 pm on March 13.

-- An eatery selling barbecued meat skewers at 31A Ho Dac Di Street in Hanoi. A COVID-19 patient was there for dinner between 5:00 pm and 8:00 pm on March 15.

-- The Vinmart supermarket located at a Vincom shopping mall at No. 2 Pham Ngoc Thach Street in Hanoi. A COVID-19 patient shopped there between 8:00 pm and 10:00 pm on March 15.

-- Buddha Bar & Grill at No. 7 Thao Dien Street in District 2, Ho Chi Minh City. A COVID-19 patient attended a party there from 10:00 pm on March 14 until 2:30 am on March 15.

-- An eatery selling eel glass noodles at No. 42 Thai Ha Street in Hanoi. A COVID-19 patient was there between 12:00 pm and 2:00 pm on March 19.

-- The FV Saigon Clinic located at No. 46 Vo Thi Sau Street in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City. A COVID-19 patient visited the clinic between 9:00 am and 10:00 am on March 21.

The Vietnamese Ministry of Health's eighth urgent notification to look for people in possible contact with COVID-19 patients

This is the first time the health ministry has announced a search for visitors to public areas, instead of passengers on board flights as it had done in the seven previous urgent notifications.

The national steering committee for COVID-19 prevention and control on Wednesday called on people to refrain from going out.

In absolutely necessary situations that require leaving homes, people are asked to wear face masks and keep a safe distance from others.

Vietnam has so far confirmed 148 cases of new coronavirus infections, with 17 having fully recovered and been discharged from the hospital by Friday last week.

No death related to the disease has been recorded in the country.

Three of the 36 COVID-19 patients in Ho Chi Minh City have walked out of the hospital free of the virus.

Fifty-one people have tested positive for the virus in Hanoi but they are still treated and waiting to be discharged.

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All 5,000 US Navy sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier will be tested for coronavirus after 23 members of the crew tested positive for the virus.

The San Diego-based ship will be quarantined in Guam while the sailors are tested for the virus.

McClatchy DC reported that the ship was on deployment in the Pacific and had just completed a visit to Da Nang, Vietnam, on 9 March. The first infected sailors were identified 15 days later.

Navy Secretary Thomas Modly told reporters that the sailors who had tested positive thus far have only exhibited mild symptoms.

Aches and pains, and sore throats, but nothing that required hospitalisation, he said.

The ship had about 800 test kids on board and will receive more on Thursday, according to Mr Modly.

During the ships visit to Guam, sailors will be confined to the ship or the pier depending on their duties.

No one on the crew will be allowed to leave anywhere into Guam other than on pierside. We are already in the process of testing 100 per cent of the crew to ensure that weve got that contained, Mr Modly said.

In total, the Navy has 86 active coronavirus cases throughout the branch. Fifty seven cases are sailors or officers, 13 are civilian workers, five are contractors and 11 are dependents.

While the Navy has been the branch hardest hit by the coronavirus thus far, the pandemic is also causing problems throughout the Armed Forces.

The Chicago Tribune reported that training exercises, including a large international joint exercise in Europe, have been cancelled due to the virus.

General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said risk to national security would be moderate to minor and that the worst-case scenario would be that the military would lose some of its preparedness for missions and combat.

Im just not in a place right now where I can give you an accurate description of what thats going to look like, Mr Milley said.

The chief of the National Guard Bureau, General Joseph Lengyel, said the pandemic is like having hurricanes of varying strength hit every US state and territory, including Washington DC, at once.

The National Guard has been mobilised by every state and three territories, with more than 10,000 Guard members activated for duty.

Recommended Trump announces plan to rank US counties in bid to reopen economy

This is a historic event that will require a historic response, Mr Lengyel said.

No US troops have died due to the coronavirus as of the reporting of this story, though military officials anticipate it will continue to spread through the branches.

Brigadier General Paul Friedrichs, Joint Staff Surgeon for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said 280 members of the active duty force were confirmed to have coronavirus. A week prior, that number was 51.

We think were going to see this - no surprise - continue to grow, he said. Our curve is not flattening.
This is what we feed on, and now, we have no work to do as movements has been restricted, a staff of tourism industry said.

There is no doubt that the travel industry has suffered a massive blow due to the coronavirus pandemic sweeping through Nigeria and other parts of the world. Hotels, airlines, and cruise operators are just a few of the hardest hit travel industries that suffer the most immediate repercussions.

As of 2018, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said the tourism sector accounted for 34 per cent of GDP and about 20 per cent of the nations employment creation in 2017. Thus, this means that the sector also has a significant impact on the countrys economy.

On March 18, the government announced it was restricting entry into the country for travellers from China, Italy, Iran, South Korea, Spain, Japan, France, Germany, the US, Norway, the UK, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Nigeria expanded its restrictions on March 21 announcing it will close its two main international airports in the cities of Lagos and Abuja from March 23 for one month.

These travel ban and restrictions have dealt a huge blow on travels and tours industry. The risk particularly applies to companies who already have financial problems. The situation is more optimistic for strong industry players. Some of them are taking different measures to secure their financial situation.

According to the countrys National Centre for Disease Control, The Federal Government of Nigeria has also suspended the issuance of visa on arrival to travellers from these countries. All travellers returning from these countries prior to the restriction will be in supervised self-isolation, monitored by the NCDC and Port Health Services.

Travel agencies are putting their best foot forward to ensure their customers are being satisfied during this period. The companies have to deal with thousands of calls from customers, who intend to either cancel their trips or are trying to book flights to get home, as well as those due to travel imminently or with trips planned for later in the year.

During a phone interview with a Travels and Tour company in Lagos, an employee, who does not want her name in print said the effect of the virus on the travel industry is high and tiring.

She stressed that customers are constantly calling to request for refunds of their money and to change their travel plans. When asked what the travel industry is doing to manoeuvre the situation, she said:

Airlines are doing their best to handle the situation by giving vouchers to customers that can be used for future travels. Customers can be rest assured that their next trip is partly covered.

It is not like money isnt coming in, so it is not possible to refund people. The same thing applies to hotels, tourist centers and others.



Most of the tickets have been left open and some airlines cancellation policies dont permit refunds.

Some airlines have also been lenient by leaving tickets open for up to a year or giving vouchers, stating that they have a particular amount that can be used in the future because it isnt the fault of the customers.

No one knows when the disease will clear, so people dont know when they will travel. Even local airports are beginning to shut down.

These past few weeks have been tough because we have clients calling and some people do not want to understand as they continually ask for their money back. The disease is taking a toll on us but there is nothing that can be done.

Another employee in the same industry described the effect of the disease as a huge loss.

In his words, This is what we feed on, and now, we have no work to do as movements has been restricted.

The packages booked by people going for honeymoon cant be feasible and we are begging for hotels to give refunds but unfortunately, some have a no-refund policy. Some airlines have also stated that they do not give people money back.

We come to work to receive calls from customers. Before, the calls are usually from people hoping to book flight, but now, people are either asking for refunds, to cancel their trips and leave their trip open and how long it will be valid.

It has become a norm now due to travel restrictions.

There is no measure being put in place to solve the situation. The travel industry is shutting down.

I work at the International Air Transport Association, which is the governing body for airlines and those working in airline-related services and they have predicted that Nigeria will lose almost 109 billion Naira. This is because almost all agencies are shutting down while others have asked their staff to come three times in a week to cut cost.

Staff are scared that their salary wont come in due to the decrease in sales.

Everyone is in limbo and this is not a good time to be in the travel industry.

The events planning industry is also suffering from coronavirus pandemic in Nigeria. Social gatherings have been limited to 50 persons. (Lagos, 20)

Bars, lounges have also been asked to shut down but some have refused to adhere to the directive. At Oworoshoki area of Lagos, Bars were opened and ready for business but only few customers patronised.

Speaking with Seun Bankole, an event planner, the CEO of House of Wonders; she said;

The disease has affected event planning because so many clients have requested to cancel their events which has already been slated between now and April because they are scared of people refusing to come due to the spread of the Covid-19 disease as well the fear of the government coming to bombarding the venues and halting the process.

Only a few, who are religious have opted to stay put and stay positive that nothing will happen but this will also mean a reduction in the number of guests.

I and some of my colleagues are praying and hoping the situation is contained so things can go back to normal. It is similar to the INEC election where people had to cancel their weddings for the election to hold.

There is nothing people can do but the best that can be done is for the urgent events like christenings, birthdays to be held in small gatherings like in your home, living room I.e. a place that wont call crowd in order not to flout government orders.
Linn County Commissioners Will Tucker and John Lindsey have sent a letter to Gov. Kate Brown with a list of 14 recommendations about how the state can help businesses weather the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Board Chairman Roger Nyquist did not sign the letter, which is similar to others sent by other county commissions across the state.

Tucker said he and Lindsey drafted the letter as a way of clearing up some of the confusion surrounding the governors executive orders.

We came up with many of the points in the letter, but we also used some found in letters from other counties, Tucker said. I have been able to listen in on conference calls with the governor, but have been unable to actually ask questions. This is one way we can communicate our concerns.

Nyquist said he didnt sign the letter because I dont believe there is anything in the letter the state will take us up on. I dont want to make a representation to our small businesses that help is coming from the state's direction.

On Tuesday, Nyquist directed Phil Warnock, community and economic development director, to make sure the Oregon Cascades West Council of Governments is prepared to help small business owners who apply for assistance. Warnock said the COG typically works with dozens of small business owners annually.

Nyquist advised him to prepare to deal with a thousand or more, but he said later that it appears the federal government is going to have businesses work directly with the Small Business Administration.

The commissioners requests included:

 Immediately distribute the $1.7 billion in kicker money to those who havent already filed their taxes and/or received it.

 Set up a small business crisis hotline to streamline available relief.

 Divert the 2019 corporate kicker money into the Unemployment Insurance Fund to help Oregonians get more immediate relief from job loss.

 Delay corporate activity tax for the first and second quarters if needed.

 Suspend payroll taxes for lost revenue and cancellations to restaurants and lodging facilities that are in crisis.

 Authorize the extension of mandatory tax filing deadlines in keeping with President Trump's 90-day extension.

 Buy back all food inventories from schools and restaurants and distribute to food banks and critical community populations.

 Ensure that our trucking and transportation industries are not impacted so they can continue to supply communities with vital goods.

 Offer tax credits for businesses seeking to retain jobs; offer paid time off and encourage telecommuting.

 Suspend cable internet fees.

 Suspend manufacturing restrictions.

 Reverse the $5 million recently allocated to the cap-and-trade tax.

 Direct the Department of Agriculture to work with the agriculture industry and processors to ensure food supply.
The Armenian Government has approved a comprehensive program of measures to combat the coronavirus impacts.

The issues were presented by Deputy PM Mher Grigoryan, who noted that, given the current situation in the world, it is necessary to have some polarization regarding what needs to be done, as well as regarding the use of resources.

This polarization will be in the following directions: in the event of deformation of consumption in the system, a certain decrease in liquidity is also observed, and it is assumed that we need to take a number of measures to neutralize this problem, he said.

A second direction is a group of people who have lost their jobs amid the coronavirus pandemic, and we must focus and support them, he added.

According to him, the third direction is to ensure the social protection of socially vulnerable groups of the population. We need to take measures in this direction, he noted adding that next comes the re-equipment of the healthcare system and the replenishment of state reserves. That is, the formation of an effective system for managing medicines, raw materials, property, and food resources is underway, he added.

Armenia has already confirmed 290 coronavirus cases. A state of emergency has been declared in the country.
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Over 800 people in Delhi have been asked to quarantine themselves after they came in contact with a mohalla clinic doctor who has been confirmed positive for coronavirus, said Delhi Health Minister Satyendra Jain on Thursday. Among the 800 quarantined are all those patients who had visited the mohalla clinic in Maujpur run by the doctor.

Jain also said that the doctor's wife and daughter along with two others have also been tested positive for coronavirus. According to Jain, the doctor got the virus from an infected woman who had recently returned from Saudi Arabia.

According to news agency ANI, the Shahdara Sub-Divisional Magistrate has ordered that all those who visited the mohalla clinic in Mohanpuri area of Maujpur between March 12 and March 18 must practice home quarantine for the next 15 days. The Magistrate has asked these people to immediately contact the control room if they start to display any symptoms of the coronavirus.

The deadly COVID-19 virus has claimed 13 lives in India so far, taking the positive cases to 649, including 593 active cases. The Maharashtra tally has reached 121, including three deaths. Gujarat too has reported three deaths. Delhi has also seen the number going up to 36, while one patient has died so far.

Also read: Coronavirus in India Live Updates: 800 quarantined in Delhi's Maujpur after Mohalla Clinic doctor tests positive

Also read: India readies massive COVID-19 testing plan

Also read: Actor Pawan Kalyan donates Rs 2 crore to combat COVID-19 spread
New Delhi, March 26 : Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Harsh Vardhan held a meeting on Wednesday to review actions and preparedness for Covid-19 management.

Stressing the importance of social distancing for effective containment of the disease, he asked all the states to be more vigilant and implement all possible containment strategies to break the chain of transmission of the disease in India.

He urged the states and Union Territories to ensure strict implementation of the lockdown and availability of essential services and commodities.

The Health Minister also stressed on the importance of setting up dedicated hospitals for Covid-19 in the states, as well as the treatment of confirmed cases as per protocol, to ensure contact tracing in all cases and their follow up.

He advised the states and UTs to undertake effective community surveillance with specific focus on international travelers to India since last one month.

In addition, he also advised them for random verification of home quarantine and action against defaulters.

During the interaction through the video conferencing, Harsh Vardhan advised states and UTs to explore and request retired doctors to volunteer for Covid-19 work.

In addition, states were advised to ensure training of ambulance drivers, call centre personnel and EMR team members and also to update district-wise ambulance details on the Covid-19 portal.

Harsh Vardhan urged them to attend on priority the issue of the health workers' transportation so that there is no shortage of doctors, nurses and other health staff in medical facilities.

He advised them to make common travelling arrangements for doctors, nurses and other health workers.

In addition, he took up the matter of effective coordination with the AIIMS portal for Covid-19 patient care and active coordination with IMA and other associations of nurses and paramedics.

Citing some recent reports about some landlords and owners evicting doctors and paramedics who were serving the country in combating Covid-19, he strongly advised the States to issue directive to landlords to desist.

The Health Minister also stated that the government has announced Rs 50 lakh insurance cover for doctors, paramedic, healthcare workers dealing with coronavirus outbreak.

He advised states to provide funds under the National Health Mission to medical colleges for procuring Covid-19 related items.

He said that proper directions are in place to ensure the availability of all essential services.

In addition, he advised the states to ensure that the pharmacies perform doorstep delivery of drugs as a notification has been issued by the central Government in this regard.

Stressing on ensuring mental health of those under quarantine, Harsh Vardhan advised states to start a Helpline for thm.

Stating that telemedicine guidelines have been issued and an app is also being launched, he asked the states to identify hub of doctors who will use the app to advise people at home.

The meeting was held through video conferencing with Health Ministers, Chief Secretaries of twenty-seven states and UTs and other related officers of the health departments.

Senior officers from the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) were also present during the video conferencing.

The Union Minister also had a telephonic talk with his Kerala counterpart K. K. Shailaja and discussed the status of Covid-19 in the state.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Amtrak has suspended service of the Vermonter long-distance train north of New Haven, Connecticut, the railroad announced this week.

The train normally goes from Washington, D.C., up the eastern seaboard to New Haven and then on through Hartford and Springfield, ending in St. Albans, Vermont.

The Vermonter will not run on Sundays until further notice.

Amtrak also suspended service on its Ethan Allen Express north of Albany, New York, said Jason Abrams, public relations manager. The Ethan Allen usually, as the name honoring the Green Mountain Boys leader implies, reaches Vermont.

Amtrak and the Connecticut Department of Transportation have already put CTrail and Amtrak Hartford Line trains as well as Valley Flyer service north of Springfield to Holyoke, Northampton and Greenfield on a Saturday timetable seven days a week.

The coronavirus has prompted competing bus carriers to step up sanitation and the cut back on service.

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Given the deluge of queries coming in from Indians and those of Indian origin in Canada, the Indian High Commission in the country has deployed cutting-edge IT tool in the form of a chatbot to address concerns over the Covid-19 crisis.

The chatbot, called CANbot, has natural language conversation capabilities in English, Hindi and Punjabi and allows those seeking answers urgently to get them safely and securely, either through a chat function on the High Commissions website or on a dedicated WhatsApp number.

The ability to quickly respond to the frantic questions relating to Covid-19, public safety measures taken in India and Canada and restrictions on international travel, has become particularly critical given the impact the pandemic has had, especially with nearly 1.6 million persons of Indian-origin living in Canada.

Among them are nearly 200,000 Indian students at Canadian colleges and universities, and since such institutions have closed, there have been concerns about this matter among their families in India, not to mention the issue of flying them back at a time when flights between the two nations are non-existent for the time being. This move comes even as the foreign ministers of the two countries discussed ways of dealing with the crisis of nationals seeking to return home.

The effort behind launching the chatbot was because the High Commission wanted to create a service that can assist people in this emergency, Indias envoy to Ottawa Ajay Bisaria said. The High Commission as well as the Indian consulates in Toronto and Vancouver have witnessed a massive surge in queries received due to the situation arising from Covid-19 pandemic, including the disruption in international travel. Bisaria said, We empathize with peoples concerns in these troubled times and the need to receive immediate and accurate information wherever they are.

The bot has been developed for the High Commission of India by the Indian conversational platform Verloop.io and home healthcare company Portea Medical.
A water dragon that jumped into a dingo exhibit at Lone Pine Sanctuary has escaped danger thanks to the help of YouTube viewers alerting the park's keepers during an online live stream.

Lone Pine Sanctuary spokeswoman Akane Hatai said 15 exhibit cameras were being used at the sanctuary before an additional four were placed this week.

A water dragon made the mistake of jumping into the dingo puppies' exhibit. Credit:Youtube

"Weve been doing live-streaming to see what the animals are up to and give people an opportunity to see them if they couldnt visit," she said.

Ms Hatai said it was a chance for people to catch the animals behind the scenes at 12pm and 2pm daily online.
Silence may be deadly for property/casualty insurers writing commercial insurance, an executive of an insurtech that specializes in analyzing insurance policy language suggested recently, explaining that without specific words addressing pandemic risks, insurers might face claims down the road.

In a new publication, RiskGenius CEO Chris Cheatham describes the possibility that the absence of language explicitly covering communicable disease claims or exclusion clauses in commercial insurance policies will put more carriers on the hook to cover business interruption and other claims. In fact, RiskGenius estimates that roughly 80 percent of commercial insurance policies are silent or vulnerable on communicable disease coverage.

In a post on the RiskGenius Insurance Prospectus blog, Cheatham notes that while many attorneys believe other provisions in a Silent COVID policy would exclude coverage, such as the need for physical damage to trigger coverage, his team believes this issue may arise in claims and litigation.

While insurance experts would be correct in asserting that insurance policies silent on communicable diseases traditionally do not cover communicable disease losses, we are focused on what may occur with unexpected court rulings or new laws and regulations, he wrote in an email newsletter about the blog item.

Already, legislation was recently proposed in New Jersey seeking to retroactively cover small businesses for COVID-related interruptions, regardless of whether policies have virus exclusions. And members of Congress have written a letter to insurance industry trade groups, likewise seeking retroactive coverage, acknowledging in their letter that the business interruption coverage in many commercial property policies is triggered by direct physical loss or damage to insured property.

A Louisiana court has also seen the first lawsuit on a business interruption coverage matter in a civil district court in New Orleans. In the case, Cajun Conti, LLC, et al. v. Certain Underwriters at Lloyds London, et al., Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans, La., a restaurant is asking a state judge for a declaratory judgment that its all-risks policy will cover damages if it is ordered to close by civil authorities in response to the coronavirus.

Citing opinions of insurance experts who suggest that P/C coverage beyond travel and trade credit specialties is minimal, Cheatham says that these insurance professionals are assuming a normal loss event in which traditional legal analysis will apply.

I view the Coronavirus Pandemic as something different; this is a Black Swan Event, Cheatham wrote in his newsletter.

Attempts by courts and legislatures to step in and modify insurance policies that may not cover disaster events are not without precedent. Battles over the anti-current causation provision in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy are a recent example. Cheatham cited earlier battles over pollution exclusions in commercial general liability policies when asked to recall other parallels.

Drawing a comparison to the silent cyber issue in his blog post on COVID, Cheatham explains why he believes the silent COVID coverage issue will dwarf the cyber counterpart in frequency and intensity. (The silent descriptor in the cyber scenario refers to the fact that many traditional insurance policies covering property damage, theft and business interruption do not have specific exclusions for situations where cyber attacks on operational technology cause losses, nor do they have clear grants of coverage.)

RiskGenius, whose software empowers insurance professionals (underwriters, brokers and everyone in between) to assess emerging risk exposure throughout their entire portfolio of insurance policies based on the policy language, will be releasing iterative Silent COVID checklists to assist in the analysis of commercial insurance policies.

According to Cheatham, RiskGenius has processed over 80,000 insurance policies and forms and over 1.5 million insurance clauses. While they are almost all U.S. commercial P/C policies rather than non-U.S. forms, he said they include virtually every line of businessproperty, general liability, business owners, auto, umbrella/excess, crime, inland marine, and others.

Asked about feedback he has received from carriers in response to the silent COVID blog post, he said that RiskGenius completed COVID coverage analysis for two top-50 insurance carriers. RiskGenius is also making COVID coverage checklists publicly available in order to assist carriers with a recent request from the N.Y. Department of Financial Services, directing them to provide commercial property policyholders with an explanation of benefits under their policies connection with COVID-19.

Topics Carriers COVID-19 Legislation Claims Property Property Casualty
A nursing manager who cared for coronavirus patients at a New York City hospital where nurses have been wearing trash bags as gowns has died of the virus.

Kious Kelly died at the Mount Sinai West hospital in Manhattan on Tuesday. His colleagues told NBC News's Emmanuelle Saliba that the 48-year-old had been caring for coronavirus patients.

Mt Sinai Health System confirmed on Wednesday that a member of staff had died, saying: Today, we lost another hero  a compassionate colleague, friend and selfless caregiver.

(Facebook/The Mount Sinai Hospital)

Whilst the statement did not confirm the cause of death, it added: This growing crisis is not abating and has already devastated hundreds of families in New York and turned our frontline professionals into true American heroes.

Medical staff at Mt Sinais flagship hospital on New Yorks Upper East Side said that the death of Mr Kelly was connected to the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and basic supplies.

Kious didnt deserve this, one nurse told the New York Post. The hospital should be held responsible. The hospital killed him.

Nurses added that there were no more protective gowns  or other essential items  available at the Mt Sinai hospital where Mr Kelly died. Staff at Mt Sinai West have resorted to reusing PPE equipment among infected coronavirus patients due to shortages.

In a Facebook post, nurses shared an image of makeshift trash bag gowns. The caption read: NO MORE GOWNS IN THE WHOLE HOSPITAL, and NURSES FIGURING IT OUT DURING COVID-19 CRISIS.

Mt Sinai physician, Ujjwal Rastogi, said on Twitter that this madness needs to stop. He added: We lost one of our beloved nurses at Mount Sinai NYC. He was such a great guy, always caring for his patients, fellow co-workers, residents and fellows.

A spokesperson for Mt Sinai has reportedly denied the claims about equipment shortages.

It comes as a medical crisis escalates at another Mt Sinai hospital, in the borough of Queens.

One doctor told Sky News that the situation was hell, biblical. I kid you not,.

With more confirmed cases than any New York borough, Queens has become the epicentre of the citys  and Americas  coronavirus pandemic.

In a letter to staff, Mt Sinais Chief Medical Officer said the current situation was the humanitarian mission of their lifetimes.

There are now more than 15,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in New York City alone.
Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have begun shutting down non-essential business to slow the spread of the virus.

President Jair Bolsonaro on Wednesday blasted as criminals the governors and mayors of Brazils largest states and cities for imposing lockdowns to slow the coronavirus outbreak, drawing fierce backlash as the death toll in the country rose to 57.

Bolsonaro has aligned himself with United States President Donald Trump in prioritising the economy over the shutdowns favoured by public health experts, who have warned the outbreak in Brazil could trigger a collapse of the healthcare system next month.

More:

Latin Americas largest nation reported 2,433 confirmed coronavirus cases on Wednesday, up from 2,201 the day before.

Other viruses have killed many more than this one, and there wasnt all this commotion, Bolsonaro told journalists outside his official residence. What a few mayors and governors are doing is a crime. Theyre destroying Brazil.

If we dont get back to work, Brazil could depart from democratic normalcy, he added, citing recent examples of social unrest in Latin America.

As his boss downplayed the virus, national security adviser Augusto Heleno on Wednesday, ignored medical advice to self-isolate for two weeks, instead returning to work just seven days into his quarantine after a positive coronavirus test. Heleno also attended cabinet meetings on the day he was waiting for the test result, Reuters learned.

In throwing his weight against the shutdowns taking effect in Brazils biggest cities and states, Bolsonaro has cast himself against local officials, congressional leadership and even the advice of his own Ministry of Health.

In a widely criticised national address on Tuesday, he played down the threat of the virus, assuring Brazilians that 90 percent of us will have no symptoms if contaminated and his history as an athlete meant he personally would suffer at most a little flu.

Senate President Davi Alcolumbre called Bolsonaros speech grave, warning it contradicted the advice of the World Health Organization and calling for leadership that is serious, responsible and committed to the life and health of its [Brazils] people.

Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazils two most populous and most affected states, have both begun shutting down non-essential business and public gatherings to slow the spread of the virus.

Demand for electricity, a strong indicator of economic activity, fell sharply at the start of the week in Brazil, according to the National Operator of the Electricity System.

The agricultural sector, a powerhouse of the Brazilian economy, also said it was suffering due to the coronavirus, with farm lobby CNA warning that grain, coffee and sugar cane growers were facing operational hurdles.

Still, the Ministry of the Economy made clear it would not sacrifice long-term debt targets to rescue the economy, with a top official saying there was no capacity for huge fiscal packages to fight the coronavirus crisis.

Economic Policy Secretary Adolfo Sachsida said any additional measures that might be implemented would only be for 2020, but warned that fiscal stability in coming years cannot be put at risk by overspending in 2020.

Brazils Minister of Health Luiz Henrique Mandetta said the government is having a hard time getting medical equipment where it is needed due to widespread flight cancellations that have forced the healthcare system to rely on ground transportation.

Mandetta said the ministry would allow doctors to use the anti-malarial drug chloroquine to treat coronavirus.

The drug, described by Trump as a potential game-changer, has not yet been proven effective against the new coronavirus. A lead doctor on clinical trials in Brazil for the related drug hydroxychloroquine told Reuters that initial results would only be available in two weeks.
New Delhi, March 26 : Congress interim President Sonia Gandhi on Thursday wrote a four-page letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and extended her party's full cooperation in the nationwide lockdown, but demanded protection aid/equipment to medics and health workers and implement its proposed Nyuntam Aay Yojana (Nyay scheme) to contain the economic distress.

"I would like to re-emphasise the urgent need to arm our doctors, nurses, and other health workers with personal protection equipment, including N-95 masks and hazardous materials suit (hazmat suits)," wrote Sonia Gandhi, while welcoming the 21-day lockdown.

She also asked the government to implement the Minimum Income Guarantee Scheme, 'Nyay Yojana', proposed by the Congress which, she said, was the need of the hour.

She said: "Alternately, a cash transfer of Rs 7,500 to every Jan Dhan account holder, PM Kisan Yojana account holder, all old-age/widow/differently abled persons pension account, MGNREGA worker's accounts, as one-time special measure to tide over the 21-day lockdown be considered." Sonia Gandhi suggested that the distribution of free 10kg rice or wheat per family member to every ration card holder through the PDS be also taken up as a special measure.

The Congress leader emphasised that in this harvest season the farmers' produce should be purchased immediately and all recovery of loans suspended.

In her letter, she pointed out that coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic sweeping across the world had caused serious public health concerns, anguish, and apprehensions.

"It has imperiled lives and put at risk the lives and livelihood of millions, particularly, the most vulnerable sections of our society. The entire nation stands as one in solidarity in the fight to halt and defeat the corona pandemic.

"Ensure the opening and scaling up of manufacture of personal protection equipment. Announce a special 'risk allowance' for doctors, nurses and health workers for six months from March 1 onwards.

"As President of the Indian National Congress, I would like to state that we will support and collaborate fully with every step taken by the Union government to ensure the containment of the pandemic," wrote Sonia Gandhi.

"Salaried class employees are also bearing the brunt of the harsh measures required to contain the spread of the disease, and the government may consider deferring all EMIs for six months. The interest charged by the banks for this period may consequently be waived.

"All businesses, particularly the Micro, Small & Medium businesses, have been facing unprecedented distress even before the onset of the pandemic. The pandemic has increased their distress manifold. The Union government must consider announcing a comprehensive sector-wise relief package, including necessary tax breaks, interest subvention and deferment of liabilities," she wrote.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
(Photo : pixabay)

Denman Glacier in East Antarctica is gaining scientists' attention lately as it is melting faster than average amid global warning.

How fast has the glacier been melting?

According to a report by CNN, Denman Glacier is melting so fast that it could cause sea levels to rise around 5 ft. The giant glacier has already retreated about three miles over the past 22 years and is more likely to collapse if the climate continues to warm.

Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Irvine, and the University of California all agreed that the glacier's retreating activity is concerning considering that ice sheets in this region has long been thought to have lower risk of collapsing than Western Antarctica.

Virginia Brancato, the lead author of the study explained that "Because of the shape of the ground beneath Denman's western side, there is potential for rapid and irreversible retreat, and that means substantial increases in global sea levels in the future."

Read Also: [WATCH] Submarine Robot Expedition in Antarctica to Find Out How Fast the Thwaite Glacier Melts Captured For the First Time on Video

Why is this concerning?

More studies have been focused on Western Antarctica in previous years as glaciers in the region are melting at a rapid pace.

"But as glaciers such as Denman have come under closer scrutiny by the cryosphere science community, we are now beginning to see evidence of potential marine ice sheet instability in this region," said Eric Rignot, co-author of the study titled "Geophysical Research Letters." The study was published last March 24.

Rignot added that the glacier in East Antarctica at about 10 miles wide is 'big' enough to cause 'significant' impact on sea levels.

The study said that the giant glacier has already lost a cumulative mass of 268bn tons of ice and has been melting at around 10 ft annually. That is above average when compared to other ice shelves in the region.

Read Also: NASA Scientists Find Warm Water Below Helheim Greenland Glacier

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Photo: (Photo : Instagram/sussexroyal)

Prince Harry said that it was his idea to move to Canada. The Sussex couple with their baby Archie is currently in Canada doing self-quarantine as they wait for the "Megxit" to become official at the end of the month. Moving forward, they will be spending most of their time in North America.

Prince Harry Decided on the Megxit

Meghan received a lot of hate comments from people when the couple announced the Megxit; however, an inside source claims that Harry was the one who decided to leave for Canada.

An insider from Express said that what made Harry decide on leaving was because of how Meghan was being treated. He thought of protecting her and their son, Archie, so he decided to move to Canada.

The source said that Harry "snapped" when he saw that Meghan was never going to be treated right. That was what made up Harry's mind to go to Canada. The insider also said that to protect Archie from all the negative vibes of being a royal member, he decided to leave his royal title and take his family to Canada away from the spotlight.

The Sussex couple's final engagement with the royal family was during the Commonwealth Day festivities at Westminster Abbey that happened on March 9.

Harry's Close Friend Opened Up About His Decision

Harry has not said a word about the reports regarding the Megxit, but one of his close friends did the talking. Nacho Figueras told Hello Magazine about the Duke of Sussex's decision to move to Canada during an interview for the special, "Royal Divide: Harry, Meghan and The Crown", which was televised on ABC.

Figueras told the media that Harry said he wants to "live a normal life." He explains how Harry has suffered from everything that has been going on with their lives. Harry told his friend that when a thousand paparazzi are waiting outside their house to catch a glimpse of their child, then it is not normal.

The polo star also added that Princess Diana's death is one of the biggest reasons why they decided to leave the monarchy. Harry only wants to protect his family, and he does not want them to suffer the way his mother did.

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Prepare for The Megxit

Effective April 1, Meghan and Harry will become officially out of the royal family. They returned to Canada after finishing their last round of royal duties at the beginning of the month.

During a dinner for Sentebale, the Duke of Sussex announced that the UK will always be his home. He also shared that he and Meghan still want to continue to serve the royal family in some way, though it did not happen.

Harry also added that he has grown up feeling all the support from the people, and he was happy to see that everyone welcomed his then soon to be wife Meghan with open arms as he finds his true love and happiness that he had hoped for all his life.

He added that for the following years, he would continue to invest in "charities and military communities". Then he ended by thanking everyone for their ongoing support.

Since they will be exiting the royal family, and leaving their royal titles behind, they would have to rename their main charitable foundation, Sussex Royal. An examination will be done in 12 months for their decision to leave.

Prince Harry and Prince William's Relationship

Harry's relationship with Prince William was greatly affected because Harry felt that Meghan is not being treated right. The Sussex couple has issues with the British tabloids for publishing personal letters that Meghan wrote to her father.

An insider from CheatSheet said that Harry and William have not yet made amends. Both of them are still "filled with anger and resentment."
One thousand smartphones have been donated to provide a lifeline to some of Irelands most vulnerable who may be isolated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Vodafone Ireland donated the phones to charity Alone which will distribute them to elderly people in need.

The smartphones are pre-loaded with useful apps, including WhatsApp, Facebook and Spotify along with information about online food deliveries and other important phone numbers, including the ALONE national helpline.

The company will also donate 2,000 credit top-ups worth 20 to ALONE, a charity which supports older people.

An emergency donation will also be made to Women's Aid as the charity works to help women under increased threat from domestic abuse while trapped at home during the coronavirus crisis.

Women are calling the National Helpline every day in a heightened state of alert, trauma and anxiety because of the emergency and Womens Aid believe that victims of domestic abuse may now be trapped in increasingly dangerous situations.

The charity expects to see an increase in the number and the severity of domestic abuse attacks throughout this period.

Speaking on the announcement, Anne OLeary, CEO at Vodafone Ireland said: We want to ensure that wherever possible we keep people connected with family and friends, their local supermarket or any other critical services they may require.

"We are very happy to be able to support ALONE and Womens Aid, organisations that are working tirelessly to ensure those in need are being cared for."

Sean Moynihan, CEO of ALONE said: This crisis is proving particularly challenging for older people and especially those who are most vulnerable and living on their own.

It is vital that older people are able to reach the people and organisations they need, and that they know that while we all may be staying apart, they are not alone.

"This support from Vodafone will enable older people we work with to stay linked in, and able to access any assistance they need at this time. As we are all physically distant at the moment, staying connected is more important than ever.

Under Government advice, Vodafone Ireland retail outlets will remain open, with reduced opening hours.

To ensure those most at risk are safe and get access to services, Vodafone has implemented priority assistance for the elderly and for vulnerable groups from when stores open until 12pm (Mon-Sat) and until 2pm (Sun).

Ms O'Leary said: "At Vodafone, we believe that technology and connectivity is vital, especially for those who may be more vulnerable and isolated in our communities during this very difficult time for our country."

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MAYFIELD HEIGHTS, Ohio

Carrying concealed weapon: Mayfield Road

Officers responded to Walmart March 15 for a report of a man flashing a gun at employees. They located him in the area and asked him to raise his arms. Instead, he reached for his waistband and took out a stolen bottle of wine and proceeded to drink all of it.

A gun was located in his waistband. He said he carries it because he has been shot in the past.

The Cleveland man, 47, said he drank the entire bottle of wine because he knew he was going to jail.

He was charged with having weapons under a disability, and further charges are expected to be added at grand jury.

Employees later said the man had shown the gun when he told them he was with law enforcement and was not going to pay for several items.

Fraud: Washington Boulevard

A resident said March 12 that someone had fraudulently opened a natural gas account in his name, and it had a balance of $721 that was sent to collections. The address listed on the account was for an East Cleveland residence, where he had never lived.

He said his car had been broken into in Cleveland in 2017 and his Social Security card was stolen from it. The incident was documented.

Disturbance: Mayfield Road

An unknown man was said to have exposed himself to a McDonalds employee and urinated on the building around midnight March 18. The suspect had purchased food in the drive-thru lane while on a bicycle, but paid with cash and was not identified.

Disturbance: Landerhaven Drive

A drunken man yelled obscenities at Staybridge Suites March 13 and harassed other guests. He told officers he was waiting for co-workers to arrive at the hotel with his paycheck. The Garfield Heights man, 52, was too drunk to care for himself and subsequently was arrested for disorderly conduct-public intoxication.

Theft: Mayfield Ridge Road

Roommates at a home reported March 14 that $20 cash and a pair of Apple air buds had gone missing from the home after a man had stayed there one evening. One woman said she also had caught the man taking a picture of her credit card.

It was determined that the man was a Broadview Heights resident who had only visited the home when given a ride by one of the women. Officers discovered his real name and found he had active warrants. There was not enough evidence to charge him with theft.

Disturbance: Landerhaven Drive

Around midnight March 15, officers responded to the Staybridge Suites for a report of several people fighting. Those involved were separated and all were asked to leave the hotel. A Cleveland man, 20, was found to have an active warrant out of Summit County and was turned over to deputies.

Theft: Mayfield Road

A Cleveland woman, 23, fled from the loss prevention office at Walmart March 14 after being suspected of an $82 theft. She was located by officers in the Hillcrest Hospital parking garage and arrested.

Fraud: Ranchland Drive

A man reported March 16 that he had wired $16,000 to Kentucky for a purchase of 200 to 300 printers on Ebay and the seller had not shipped the items and was not communicating with him. Officers contacted the suspect, who said there was an issue with the payment clearing his bank. The man was advised to contact police if the printers were not received shortly.

Theft: Mayfield Road

Two customers got into an altercation at Giant Eagle March 16 and one was said to have threatened the other with a knife.

Officers found one suspect in the parking lot, where it was determined that he had not paid for $439 worth of groceries. He said he had left the store because the other man had threatened him the knife.

He claimed he had $10,000 cash in his possession and owned three companies and had no reason to steal. He even offered to buy dinner for the officers. The Painesville man, 34, was subsequently charged with theft.

The other man said he only mentioned the knife to keep the man from coming closer to him. He was not charged.

Fraud: Golden Gate Boulevard

Police were advised from a sheriffs office in Florida March 12 that a gift card scam involved the suspect using a gift card at the Best Buy in the city. The $2,500 purchase was made to buy an Apple watch and two iPads. Police are trying to identify the suspect.

Menacing: Marsol Road

A man, 39, was charged with menacing March 15 after he went to a fellow tenants apartment with a baseball bat to discuss loud noises that were coming from that unit. His explanation for having the bat changed several times, and he said the woman at the apartment had threatened to have her boyfriend assault him. The victims requested a protection order.

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Individuals, community organizations and private companies are coming up with initiatives of their own as Indonesia faces an increasing number of COVID-19 cases, contributing what they can to help the country and its people to tackle the outbreak.

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As the Coronavirus pandemic has sent almost the entire world in a lockdown situation, nearly 800 cruise passengers in Australia will be quarantined on an island, home to hundred of the country's "cutest marsupials"  the quokkas.

The cruisers onboard Vasco Da Gama will be disembarked in the Rottnest island, off the west coast. The decision was made after Perth island blocked docking of any ship following the outbreak of the infectious COVID-19.

According to reports, the Australian cruisers will be ferried off in groups to the island, which is often a hotspot for tourists and home to the cheerful-looking quokkas, almost the size of domestic cats and herbivores. It's a nocturnal animal and considered to be an endangered species residing in south western Australia.

In the island, the quokkas have no predators and are often featured in selfies, which are taken by the tourists on the island for its clear blue sky and sandy beaches.

As per an ABC report, the 800 people will be housed in the existing and vacated accommodation, which includes a hostel, bungalows, cabins and dormitories.

The Western Australian officials have also stated that the island presently has sufficient staff to cater to the quarantined people. However, emergency service personnel would also be made available soon.

The passengers will be examined by medical staff time to time and triaged if needed. The island also has a small airstrip for helicopters, which will facilitate short medical evacuation flights to the nearby Perth hospitals.

Meanwhile, Australia has recorded more than 2,400 coronavirus cases and and on Wednesday it reported the ninth casualty in the pandemic outbreak.
By Easton Sanders Mar. 25, 2020 | 08:01 PM | WESTERN KENTUCKY





With heightened fears due to the ongoing pandemic and concerns over forced business shutdowns, local grocery stores are facing new challenges and scrambling to keep up with demand.







West Kentucky Star caught up with Andy Carloss, owner of Midtown Market. Carloss says they've really had to change the way they are operating within the store in an effort to follow federal, state, and local authorities guidelines to ensure the safety of staff and their customers.







Carloss said, at the end of the day it's about keeping everyone safe and healthy.







"We're adding a lot more cleaning procedures. We have to wipe off all of the carts, the doors, the furniture, the baskets, the keypads, the counters, the checking lanes, and all that," said Carloss.





He says they have eliminated a lot of their self-service items, and have also been working to make sure that everyone stays at a safe distance when in line.





In line with their effort to keep everyone healthy and safe, Carloss is also urging customers to utilize their drive-through service. He encourages everyone to call in grocery orders and they'll get them ready.







"We are really pushing the drive-through service and curbside pickup." Carloss continued, "A lot of people previously just used it to pickup sandwiches, and coffees in the morning. But now more and more people are calling in their grocery orders and coming through the drive-through to pick it up."





Carloss says the virus has caused them to lose a lot of employees that may be immunocompromised, but with the increase in demand they have also gained a lot of new employees as well.





"We're still hiring some, as far as Food Runners go. We're just taking it day by day" He said, "This last week we've added four or five, and we've got plans for two more."







Food Giant has had a similar experience. Jan Borders, Scan Coordinator at the Draffenville Food Giant, says there have been "tremendous difficulties" in regards to keeping up with demand.







"We try to keep the shelves full the best we can." She said, "We have still been getting trucks in three to four times a week. We've had trouble keeping eggs but we've only ran out of milk once. We have done really good."





Borders says with the extra cleaning and stocking, they have had to call in extra help as well.





"We have tried to go above and beyond with keeping everything sanitized. We're doing the best we can do to serve customers," She said.







You can learn more about Midtown Market and Food Giant at the links below.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is creating new challenges for local grocery stores.

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Cancellations: Ryanair is among the carriers grounding flights in light of the coronavirus. Photo: Reuters

The airline industry "could be resuscitated as quickly as it collapses", with pent-up demand, a consolidated market, working capital inflows and very low fuel prices driving the recovery, according to Davy Stockbrokers.

But the International Air Transport Association (IATA) now reckons airlines will lose $250bn (232bn) as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and has urged governments to accelerate action to save carriers. The expected losses are twice as much as previously forecast by IATA.

While Davy has tipped Ryanair and Aer Lingus owner IAG as being the "most secure" in the current crisis, Citi reckons that Ryanair and Wizz are the only two carriers that do not require "imminent capital".

"We continue to believe that the European market will follow the US model of consolidation," said Davy analyst Stephen Furlong in a report from the stockbroker yesterday.

"The current crisis will hasten this," he added. "That is not to say that governments will not support airlines."

"However, the EU has to be careful that state aid does not lead to a distortion in market economics," said Mr Furlong in his report. "Our view is that, one way or another, weaker airlines will be smaller after this crisis."

He added that while airlines could bounce back post-crisis, there will be a logistical challenge in re-establishing hub flows and supply chains, while discounted fares will probably be necessary to boost travel demand.

"Longer term, we could see a smaller consolidated industry with GDP-like (rather than GDP-plus) demand growth, meaning less demand for aircraft and therefore putting those few airlines which are in the market for new deliveries in an even stronger position with the OEMs [original equipment manufacturers such as Boeing and Airbus]," he said.

Davy has now rated Ryanair and IAG shares as 'outperform' compared with a previous 'neutral' rating. IAG also owns British Airways, Iberia, Vueling and Level.

Ryanair has more than $4bn in cash to see it through the crisis, with CEO Michael O'Leary saying the carrier could survive 12 months without any revenue generation.

Citi has downgraded IAG to neutral from buy, and retained a buy rating on Ryanair shares.

"Ryanair and Wizz are the only two names in our coverage that our analysis suggests do not require imminent capital," said Citi in a note.

"At the other end of the spectrum, Lufthansa (despite its ambitious fixed cost reductions) and Air France-KLM may both require their market cap equivalents in the form of cash injections," it added.

"And, in the middle of the pack, IAG and EasyJet are by no means free of capital risk," its analysts noted.

IATA chief executive Alexandre de Juniac said that there is now virtually no passenger demand for airlines.

Airlines are fighting for survival in every corner of the world, he said: "For airlines, it's apocalypse now."
Here is everything Boris Johnson has done since the coronavirus outbreak. (Pool via Reuters)

When Boris Johnson planned how 2020 would look, it is highly unlikely that coronavirus was top of his list.

COVID-19 emerged in China at the beginning of the year, before spreading across the globe.

The first two cases in the UK were announced on 31 January, and the first death came on 5 March, when a woman in her 70s died after contracting the disease.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the prime minister has had to take a series of unprecedented steps that will go down in history.

Here is what Johnson has done, from social measures to economic safeguarding, since the outbreak of COVID-19:

Wednesday, 11 March

The government announces extra spending to help the UK cope with the impact of coronavirus.

In his first budget speech to the Commons, chancellor Rishi Sunak pledges 30bn of extra spending in a number of measures to protect the economy against coronavirus.

Latest coronavirus news, updates and advice

Live: Follow all the latest updates from the UK and around the world

Fact-checker: The number of COVID-19 cases in your local area

Explained: Symptoms, latest advice and how it compares to the flu

Thursday, 12 March

Johnson chairs a Cobra meeting on coronavirus.

In a press conference afterwards, he warns: Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.

Dubbing COVID-19 the worst public health crisis for a generation, he urges those with persistent coughs or fevers to stay at home for seven days.

Friday, 13 March

Johnson speaks to Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte to express his solidarity and sympathy with Italy. He says the UK will support Italy in any way possible.

Johnson also suspends local government and mayoral elections for 12 months following guidance from the Electoral Commission.

Saturday, 14 March

The PM speaks to Donald Trump about the coronavirus pandemic and action being taken to stop the spread of the disease.

Sunday, 15 March

It is announced that Johnson will hold daily press briefings on the coronavirus crises.

Story continues

The PM also speaks to Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe on the phone as they update each other on their countries efforts to stop the virus spreading.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson leaves 10 Downing Street, London, for the House of Commons for Prime Minister's Questions. (PA)

Monday, 16 March

Johnson holds the first of a series of daily press briefings on coronavirus.

In it, he urges everybody in the UK to work from home and avoid pubs and restaurants to ease pressure on the NHS, as well as advising people to avoid non-essential travel.

The PM adds he doesnt think it will be necessary to use government powers to shut schools.

Tuesday 17 March

Johnson warns that the governments extreme measures will go further and faster in the next few days.

The government also announces 330bn of government-backed loans and more than 20bn in tax cuts and grants for companies threatened with collapse  making it the biggest package of emergency support for business since the 2008 financial crash.

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) also warns Britons against all non-essential travel abroad.

Wednesday, 18 March

Johnson announces that most schools across England will close from Friday, March 20, until further notice, though children of key workers will still be able to go to school.

Friday, 20 March

Building on his advice for people to avoid social settings, Johnson orders the closure of all pubs, cafes, bars, and restaurants.

Nightclubs, theatres, cinemas, gyms and leisure centres are also told to close.

The government also announces it will pay up to 80% per cent of wages for workers' at risk of being laid off.

Monday, 23 March

Johnson effectively puts the UK in lockdown, ordering people to stay at home and banning gatherings of more than two people, with police being given powers to disperse people and issue fines.

Shops are also ordered to close, and limits put on the number of times people can go out.

In a tweet, the PM says: If you dont follow these instructions, you are putting peoples lives at risk: You must stay at home to protect our NHS and save lives. #StayHomeSaveLives

Coronavirus: what happened today
In those sessions, Mr. Krumroy identified the association of trauma with relief-seeking behaviors, like drinking and using drugs, that has scarred so many members, himself included. For him, the trauma that led to his own excess drinking was the AIDS epidemic, when he lived in San Francisco during the height of the crisis. Now he is fighting to quell the reverberations that the coronavirus pandemic is setting off.

These Google groups and individual phone calls are going to be crucial to helping us all acknowledge how traumatic the coronavirus potentially is, Mr. Krumroy said. We need to tell each other that our reactions are normal and understandable and not something to be ashamed of. And with that mutual support, Im hopeful that most of us will be able to resist any urge to re-engage in our behavior.

But Kristen Marshall, who manages the DOPE Project in San Francisco for the national Harm Reduction Coalition, is not nearly as hopeful. To help prevent overdoses, the project distributes clean syringes, addiction medications like naloxone and Narcan, snacks and water bottles to programs working directly with people without housing. She is considered an essential worker who does not have to heed the states orders to shelter in place, so she is moving about the city with other health workers, to aid people without housing who are suffering from addictions and health crises, ordered to scatter, their belongings confiscated.

Closing or limiting programs designed to support them puts them at even higher risk for overdose and overdose death, Ms. Marshall said.

She added: For so many of our folks, their contact with our programs are some of their only opportunities for socialization and connection. So workers and their organizations are desperately trying to balance keeping themselves healthy and safe while also refusing to close their programs doors.

The business shutdown orders rolling through the country are hitting some in the recovery community in ironic ways. On the Facebook group Harm Reduction Abstinence Moderation Support, which accepts many people who handle substance issues by reducing use instead of abstaining, some worry that with some liquor stores closing, they will have to withdraw cold turkey and plunge into delirium tremens  or the DTs, with hallucinations, vomiting, fever and high blood pressure. And then they fear they wont be admitted into overcrowded emergency departments. Or will be exposed to Covid-19 in those waiting rooms.

Many of our members have laid in a supply of alcohol so they wont crash immediately, said Kenneth Anderson, the founder of the group.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 13:43:31|Editor: Xiaoxia

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BERLIN, March 26 (Xinhua) -- China has shown the world that with proper measures, COVID-19 can be controlled within six to eight weeks, which has offered hope for the world, said a German expert.

"China showed the world that the outbreak could be controlled in six to eight weeks, important for the economy," said Dr. Berthold Kuhn, senior adviser at the Berlin-based think tank Dialogue of Civilizations (DOC) Research Institute in a recent telephone interview with Xinhua.

Kuhn said the world has seen crashes in many stock markets around the world, not only in Wall Street but also in Frankfurt.

"We need to think about new mechanisms to reduce the impacts on the global market. That must be a topic for G20 video conference, otherwise it would become a catastrophe," said Kuhn about the G20 virtual leaders' summit on COVID-19 to be held via video on Thursday.

International cooperation is very important in the fight against the COVID-19, Kuhn said, voicing concern about how the situation will develop in countries "where health systems are not very good."

These countries need development assistance, an issue that could be addressed at the G20 meeting, said Kuhn.

It is highly appreciated that China acts in close cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO) and also shares data and experiences with other countries, said Kuhn, who is also a China expert at the Free University of Berlin.

"We are pleased to see that China is already assisting other countries, like Italy," said the expert.

China shared the genetic sequence of the virus with other countries and helped them develop test kits, said Kuhn, calling for efforts against nationalist sentiments amid the pandemic.

"The meeting like G20 is important, as leaders can coordinate with each other and fight against not only the virus but also nationalist sentiments and stigma," he said.
A Ugandan Popstar named Bobi Wine has recently released an informative song about the various steps one should follow amidst the coronavirus pandemic. The song also features reggae artist Nubian Li. The song that was uploaded on social media and YouTube is titled ''Corona Virus Alert'' stresses on the fact that we should not take the coronavirus lightly.

'Sensitise the masses'

The song starts out by saying that everyone is a potential victim of the virus but everyone can also be a solution. The song states that we must all practice social distancing so that we can be that solution and beat this virus. Take a look at the song below.

Watch as we use music to send the message and further raise awareness on the Corona Virus pandemic. We hope you enjoy the music, pick the message, share widely & spread the word. In solidarity, we shall beat the virus.#Edutainment #UnitedAgainstCOVID19https://t.co/XGd1FmpBHh pic.twitter.com/FGm2I8dllx  BOBI WINE (@HEBobiwine) March 25, 2020

Take a look at peoples reactions to the catchy song below.

Read: Ugandan Climate Activist Cropped From Photo With Greta Thunberg, Netizens Enraged

Read: Uganda: Imam Suspended From Holy Duties After Unknowingly Marrying A Man

Oh God! Sincerely our dear president is greatly endowed. Respect my President  Elie mihigo (@eliemihigo8) March 25, 2020

This is massive and we declare you Hon @HEBobiwine and Mr. @NubianBukenAli as true patriotics of @UgandaGovt  Uganda People's Human Rights Movement (@UgandaHuman) March 25, 2020

This is nice  Urban Bouy (@Urbanbouy01) March 25, 2020

Thank you. Bobi you've really provided exemplary leadership in this time. Forefront of the fight against #COVID19 with your limited resources. Proud of you.  The Real Oloo (@PKOloo) March 25, 2020

Thanks so much for this beautiful Edutainment song  Nsereko Kafrika (@KafrikaNsereko) March 25, 2020

In addition to being a musician, Bobi Wine is also a politician who serves as a member of parliament representing Kyadondo East constituency in Wakiso District, in Ugandas central region.

Read: Ugandan Authorities Bust Smuggler From DRC For Hiding Cosmetics In Fake Baby

Read: Woman Saving Gorillas Of Uganda Nominated As 2019 Tusk Award Finalist
An Indo-Canadian politician who returned to her previous profession of nursing as the Covid-19 pandemic struck Canada, has become the first Canadian member of Parliament to test positive for the virus.

Kamal Khera, 31, MP from Brampton West, tested positive at the Peel Memorial Hospital in the Greater Toronto Area. Khera, who is also a parliamentary secretary in Justin Trudeaus Government, also received some words of solace from the Canadian Prime Minister, as he responded to her announcement on Twitter, by saying, Take care of yourself, Kamal. Were all thinking of you  and hoping you get well soon. Trudeau himself continues to remain in self-isolation as his wife Sophie Gregoire had earlier tested positive.

In a statement, Khera said, On Saturday night, I began developing flu like symptoms while at home and immediately began self-isolating.

While I am still experiencing symptoms, I am in good spirits. I know that many Canadians are in much worse circumstances. My thoughts are with all families who have been affected by this public health crisis, she added.

As the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario had sent out a call for former members of the profession to help out at this critical time, Khera had registered to help ease the nurse shortage. She had tweeted at that time, As a RN (Registered Nurse) there couldnt be a more important time to give back to my community.

While it remains unclear how Khera contracted the virus, the outlet Global News reported that she had met with the United Nations World Food Programme chief David Beasley on March 12 and a week later, he had tested positive.

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An investigation has been launched into Norwegian Cruise Line after leaked emails revealed how staff were ordered to downplay the risks of coronavirus to customers.

The Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody's office announced Monday it was launching a probe over allegations the cruise line gave 'misleading and potentially dangerous sales pitches' to customers amid the pandemic.

Leaked internal emails emerged in early March showing that managers were giving sales staff phrases to tell customers dismissing the risk of contracting coronavirus on board ships to try to flog more holidays.

The emails, leaked to Miami New Times by a whistleblower, showed that a senior sales manager in the company's Miami headquarters had created scripts with the misleading talking points so staff could persuade worried customers not to cancel their trips.

Leaked internal emails emerged in early March showing that managers at Norwegian Cruise Line were giving sales staff phrases to tell customers dismissing the risk of contracting coronavirus on board ships to try to flog more holidays

Staff were told to say lines such as 'the only thing you need to worry about for your cruise is do you have enough sunscreen,' and 'the coronavirus can only survive in cold temperatures, so the Caribbean is a fantastic choice for your next cruise,' the emails revealed.

Another line included the false claim that 'scientists and medical professionals have confirmed that the warm weather of the spring will be the end of the Coronavirus.'

The General Attorney's office called the findings 'disturbing' and confirmed it had opened an investigation to determine whether Norwegian gave inaccurate and misleading statements to customers while the world grapples to bring the deadly virus under control.

The Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody's office announced Monday it was launching a probe over allegations the cruise line gave 'misleading and potentially dangerous sales pitches' to customers amid the pandemic

'We are in the thick of a public health crisis like our modern world has never experienced,' Moody said in a statement.

'My Consumer Protection Division is conducting an extensive investigation to get to the bottom of the disturbing allegations against Norwegian Cruise Line.

'Let this serve as a warning to anyone seeking to mislead consumers during these challenging times. I will do everything within the power of this office to hold accountable those who would prey on Floridians during this health crisis.'

The GA said Norwegian is cooperating with the investigation.

The cruise line had previously responded to the reports on March 12 saying: 'We remain committed to operating with integrity and providing our guests with the best possible vacation experiences across the globe. We are aware of the article in question and are looking into the matter.'

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

News of the probe comes as more than 50 cruise lines, including Norwegian, suspended all operations to and from US ports in efforts to try to slow the spread of the virus.

Cruise ships have become particular hotbeds for the killer disease, with a number of liners being doomed by fatal outbreaks.

One ship with 77 people onboard experiencing 'flu-like symptoms' is now headed for Florida as all 1,243 guests are told to isolate in their rooms.

At least 30 guests and 47 crew members have fallen ill on board Holland America's Zaandam, in the latest outbreak to hit a cruise liner.

The liner set sail on a two-week voyage from Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 7 - 10 days before the company canceled all voyages over fears of an outbreak - and was due to arrive in Chile on March 21.

The Zandaam is now on route to Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale to dock March 30, after being stranded at sea when other ports turned it away amid fears it contains coronavirus patients.

The extent of the possible outbreak is not known as there are no tests onboard, meaning sick people have simply been isolated and their close contacts told to quarantine.

Passengers from the cruise ship Grand Princess board a chartered plane at Oakland International Airport on March 11 after escaping the doomed vessel. Cruise ships have become particular hotbeds for the killer disease, with a number of liners being doomed by fatal outbreaks

More than 50 cruise lines, including Norwegian, suspended all operations to and from US ports in efforts to try to slow the spread of the virus

All 1,243 passengers have been told to stay in their rooms.

Of the 586 crew members, those not essential to running the ship are also in quarantine and essential staff are self-isolating when not working.

'Since it is flu season, and COVID-19 testing is not available on board, it is difficult to determine the cause of these elevated cases at this time,' the company said in a statement.

'The safety and well-being of our guests and crew is one of our highest priorities.'

The ship had been granted permission to dock in Punta Arenas in Chile but when it arrived on March 14, permission was refused and passengers were prevented from leaving.

In the worst cruise ship crisis so far, 706 people tested positive on the Diamond Princess after Japanese authorities imposed a two-week lockdown in Yokohama.

In the worst cruise ship crisis so far, 706 people tested positive on the Diamond Princess after Japanese authorities imposed a two-week lockdown in Yokohama

A passenger waves as she walks with others on the deck of the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February. Japan was widely criticised for its handling of the ship, with one disease expert saying the quarantine was 'completely inadequate' after viewing the conditions on board

At least seven people have died after they were taken to hospital from the doomed vessel.

Passengers were confined to their cabins during the lockdown but several countries eventually lost patience with Japan and airlifted their citizens home.

Japan was widely criticised for its handling of the ship, with one disease expert saying the quarantine was 'completely inadequate' after viewing the conditions on board.

Japan had initially impounded the ship after a passenger who left the ship in Hong Kong in January subsequently tested positive.

Weeks later another Princess ship was struck by an outbreak, when two passengers and 19 crew members on the Grand Princess cruise ship tested positive for coronavirus in early March.

The ship docked in Oakland, California, on March 9 with 3,500 on board and people were repatriated and sent to army bases for quarantine.

The number of confirmed US cases from the ship has since risen to 28.

The first passengers from the Grand Princess began leaving their 14-day quarantine and returning home last week.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that the Group of Seven powers were united in opposing China's coronavirus "disinformation," but European allies emphasized cooperation to fight the global pandemic. Foreign ministers from the major industrialized democracies spoke about the crisis by videoconference, scrapping a meeting scheduled in Pittsburgh, but any hope of showing a common front was eroded by the absence of a joint statement. Pompeo, a sharp critic of Beijing who has gone on the offensive over what he calls the "Wuhan virus," said he shared a common view with the top diplomats of the other G7 countries -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. "Every one of the nations that were at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place," Pompeo told reporters. Pompeo said that China "has been and continues to be engaged in" a social media campaign that has included conspiracy theories of US involvement. "This is crazy talk," he said. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman infuriated President Donald Trump's administration by suggesting on Twitter that US troops brought the virus to Wuhan, the metropolis where it was first detected late last year. A spokesman from China's foreign ministry said Thursday that China strongly condemned Pompeo's comments, including his use of the term "Wuhan virus". "This US politician moves counter to the international consensus and continues to stigmatise China, smearing China's efforts, trying to use this to shift attention and blame with extremely malicious intent," said Geng Shuang at a press briefing Thursday. The virus has killed more than 21,000 people globally, but Beijing has appeared to bring it under control and has sent aid overseas -- including 40 tons of medical supplies to US ally Italy, which has the world's highest death toll. On Wednesday, Pompeo minimized China's efforts and pointed to a US Air Force cargo plane's aid delivery to Italy as well as private US charity efforts. China is "now making small sales of product around the world and claiming that they are now the white hat in what has taken place," Pompeo said. But he also said the United States sought cooperation, including with China. The two countries' leaders are set to take part in a virtual summit on the crisis Thursday of the Group of 20 major economies. "We desperately want to work with every country around the world. This is a global pandemic," Pompeo said. - France warns not to 'exploit' crisis - German magazine Der Spiegel, quoting anonymous diplomats, said that the joint statement was scuttled by Pompeo's insistence that it use the term "Wuhan virus" -- a formulation frowned upon by medical professionals who say it is stigmatizing. Pompeo did not deny the report when asked about it, saying that each minister would speak separately but that they had a "common understanding" on the health and economic crisis caused by the "Wuhan virus." France and Germany issued statements on the G7 talks that made no mention of China. Canada said China was raised in "broader discussions." French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian "underscored the need to combat any attempt to exploit the crisis for political purposes," a statement said, in likely a veiled response to Pompeo. Le Drian "expressed the view that the unity of all in order to effectively combat the pandemic must now take precedence over any other considerations," it said. France called for the G7 to find ways to assist Africa, warning that both the continent's healthcare system and economies were ill-equipped for the global crisis. Pompeo has accused China of putting the world at risk by initially suppressing news of the virus. Beijing in turn has accused the Trump administration of seeking a scapegoat for its own failures. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks after virtual Group of Seven talks to journalists, who are spaced out in line with COVID-19 precautions A man wearing a face mask in Hangzhou, China walks past a bus with a message supporting Italy in its efforts against the COVID-19 coronavirus French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian warned countries not to 'exploit' the coronavirus pandemic
Wawa is showing its appreciation for first responders on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. Starting Thursday all Wawa stores will be providing health care workers and first responders with free coffee to fuel their shifts during this crisis" to honor their service to the community.

Particularly during this unprecedented time, we want to say were here for you. We want to salute the many health care heroes who are doing great work throughout our communities. From Main Line Health to CHOP to Penn Medicine to Jefferson in Philadelphia. From Orlando Health to Winter Haven in Florida. From Virtua Health System to Bay Shore Medical in New Jersey. From Johns Hopkins to MedStar in Maryland and Virginia and Christiana Health in Delaware. These are just some of our partners who are also truly amazing health care systems now on the front lines of this crisis. You have our deepest thanks and gratitude.

LATEST CORONAVIRUS UPDATES FROM NJ.COM

Wawa also announced Thursday new safety measures for employees and customers. This includes visual floor markers to support maintaining a healthy distance and with distancing aids, in the form of clear, plastic shields, at our check-out counters. Those are in addition to the enhanced cleaning and sanitation protocols previously implemented as in-store precautions.

As of six days ago, Wawa customers were no longer permitted to pour and prepare their own coffee as well as other beverages as the convenience store company adjusted its policies to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

Other changes which went into effect Friday included the temporary suspension all self-service fountain beverages, Icee drinks, cappuccino and iced coffee. In addition, employees now are individually bagging all bakery products for customers.

Another new policy is the closure of all stores from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. every night to clean and restock.

(NJ Advance Medias Chris Sheldon contributed to this report.)

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Manila: Nine doctors have died in the Philippines from the coronavirus, the country's top medical association said Thursday, as hospitals were overwhelmed and medics complained about a lack of protection on the front lines.

The announcement of the doctors' deaths heightened fears that the scale of the health crisis in the Philippines is much worse than is being officially reported, with the confirmed virus death toll at just 38.

The main island of Luzon, home to 55 million people, is in the second week of a lockdown to contain the spread of the disease, however medics are warning there is a surge in cases.

The Philippine Medical Association said Thursday a ninth doctor had died of the virus, and that health workers were not getting enough protection.

"If it were up to me, test the frontliners first and test them again after seven days. Doctors could be carriers themselves," Benito Atienza, vice president of the Philippine Medical Association said.

Three large Manila hospitals announced Wednesday they had reached full capacity and would no longer accept new coronavirus cases.

Hundreds of medical staff are no longer accepting patients because they are undergoing 14-day self-quarantines after suspected exposure, the hospitals said.

Just under 2,000 people had been tested in the Philippines as of Tuesday from those with severe symptoms and those considered most vulnerable to COVID-19, such as the elderly, those with life-threatening ailments, and pregnant women.
Last Sunday, the oldest coffee shop in Mobile, Carpe Diem Coffee and Tea, closed temporarily due to the coronavirus pandemic that has shuttered so many businesses nationwide. Owner Alan Tolson then reached out to a rival to offer some of his remaining supplies, and the gesture touched many fans of both businesses on social media.

Housed in a Victorian cottage directly across from the entrance to Spring Hill College, Carpe Diem is much more than a coffee shop. It has become part of the fabric of the Mobile community over the past 25 years. Its a place where high school and college students hang out on the front porch and the side deck, where people bring their laptops and work, where folks have meetings and lunch dates  in other words, where everyone feels at home.

Weve thought a lot about this and it is with a heavy heart that we have finally decided it is in the best interest of... Posted by Carpe Diem Coffee & Tea Co. on Saturday, 21 March 2020

After giving away as much inventory as possible to employees, Tolson reached out to Jeff Roberts of Yellowhammer Coffee, an upstart in the coffee business that currently operates on a drive-thru model, to see if he could use a couple dozen gallons of milk as well as many cartons of heavy whipping cream and half and half.

Roberts happily accepted the offer and expressed his gratefulness on Facebook: In the middle of the craziness, its not just neighbors helping neighbors, but also coffee shops helping coffee shops. Carpe is the oldest coffee shop in Mobile and once this is all over with they are going to come back stronger than ever before, and well be one of their first customers.

With all the craziness going on in your news feed I want to bring you some positive news. Pictured above is Alan, the... Posted by Yellowhammer Coffee on Monday, 23 March 2020

Roberts was amazed at the response to his post, he said in a phone interview. The coffee community in Mobile is our own little posse, he said. Ive known Alan for years and had just talked to him last week. We definitely look out for each other and have each others backs.

Yellowhammer is continuing to operate for now because of the drive-thru concept. The business got its start as a coffee truck in July of 2016. I had a lot of food truck friends and couldnt figure out why nobody had taken the Starbucks idea and put it in a food truck, Roberts said. The coffee truck was such a hit that he built a second trailer that is semi-permanently located at Bay City Church near Mary G. Montgomery High School in Semmes, where it offers drive-thru and walk-up service.

He and his wife and business partner, Monique, opened their first brick-and-mortar shop in January of 2019, in the tiny former Foosacklys location at Dauphin Street and I-65. Roberts had been skeptical at first, but Foosacklys owner Will Fusaiotti convinced him to try it. He said, Ill put money on it that its going to work, Roberts remembered. It kind of gave me the confidence. We signed a lease and opened the store, and its been unbelievable.

The Midtown shop has done so well that hes now signed a lease for another location at Schillinger and Moffett roads in Semmes, as well as a new location in Tillmans Corner, which will open later this year or in early 2021. Both of those new locations will give Yellowhammer an opportunity to add food items.

And the original food truck is going more than ever, he said, with stops at events, schools and churches all over Mobile. The schedule is posted on Yellowhammers Facebook page, and Roberts hinted that the food truck is scouting locations for a possible new West Mobile store as well.

We know its a very interesting time and season we are in, for everyone. Weve decided to keep running this week, but... Posted by Yellowhammer Coffee on Sunday, 22 March 2020

Our mission is to serve amazing coffee with unmatched customer service, said Roberts, who has implemented a walk-the-line system at the drive-thru in order to provide orders faster. In response to the coronavirus threat, employees wipe down their iPads after every customer.

Im still blown away at the journey, he said. I still cant believe it. Every day, were trying to get better.

Meanwhile, Carpe Diem is continuing to take orders for ground and whole-bean coffee, which they will ship to anywhere in the continental United States. Visit www.carpe-coffee.com/coffee for more information.
Conakry, Guinea (PANA)  Seven people, including three Guinean soldiers and a Malian national, were arrested and detained for trafficking in arms they stole from the Autonomous battalion of airport troops (BATA), police sources said on Thursday
Royal aides are 'thinking outside the box' to establish new ways of working for The Firm amid the coronavirus crisis, a source has revealed.

Technical staff for the royal family are said to be 'looking ahead' to ensure that members like Queen, 93, Prince Charles, 71, and Prince William, 37, can 'go digital' during the crisis.

The source told Vanity Fair that work is underway to help royals hold engagements and meetings online, revealing: 'No one wants to sit around doing nothing so were coming up with other ways to do things. Digital is now the way forward.'

It comes after an unprecedented photograph of the Queen speaking with Prime Minister Boris Johnson over the phone was released yesterday as it was announced Prince Charles has tested positive to the virus.

Aides are 'thinking outside the box' to ensure the royal family are able to continue working from home amid the coronavirus outbreak

The source said the family were following guidance with regards to social distancing and isolating, but that they are determined to keep working as normally as possible.

They explained that aides were looking ahead at the coming months and how the royals could work in the near future.

While the royals often attend engagements and meetings in person, the source went on to say that those 'on the technical side' were currently furiously working to ensure the work could be done online.

Aides are having to 'think outside the box' in efforts to manage the situation, and are working to ensure the working methods are sustainable for 'weeks, if not months.'

A source told Vanity Fair that 'things are changing' in the way members of the royal family work as the coronavirus crisis continues (pictured, Kate Middleton, 37, and Prince William, 37, on a visit to an NHS 111 centre last week)

In the mean time, while many meetings and engagements over the coming weeks have been cancelled, the royals are said to be keen to keep in touch with their patronages.

The source said they are determined not to let their charities down and have been busy writing letters to their patronages to assure them they still have their support.

Despite the challenges of the situation, the source went on to say that feeling amongst the royal staff was positive.

They said: 'Spirits are high and the feeling is, if we cant do something the way we used to, we have to come up with another way to do it.'

The news comes as it was announced that Prince Charles, 71, has tested positive for the virus, while wife Camilla tested negative

Meanwhile Clarence House also released a statement asking fans to reconsider sending royals letters or cards at this time, due to 'reduced abilities' in the household.

The household normally covers the communication for Prince Charles and Camilla, as well as the Cambridges and the Sussexes.

It comes as it emerged Prince Charles is working at his desk 'as usual' today despite having coronavirus.

The Prince of Wales, 71, has a 'mild' form of the illness and is on the Balmoral estate with his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, who has tested negative and is without any symptoms of the virus, which has killed 465 and infected 9,500 more in the UK so far.

Meanwhile Buckingham Palace released a photo of the Queen on the phone to Prime Minister in a move to calm fears for her health.

Royal aides are said to be working furiously on the 'technical side' to ensure the monarchy can continue to work as normal, with some talk of moving engagements online

It comes after The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who have relocated with their children to their home in Norfolk, are sid to be 'revamping their work' in response to the crisis.

They recently visited NHS 111 to thank staff for their help, while Prince William was also the first member of The Firm to speak to the nation during the crisis in a video released last week.

Earlier this week an expert claimed Prince William is set to 'step up into statesman role' during the coronavirus crisis and will lead the Royal Family's efforts to support the nation.

Speaking to Australian website 9Honey, Katie Nicholl said the move was 'significant', adding that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were the 'best placed' members of the royal family to be 'pillars of support' for the nation at the moment.
BUCHAREST, March 25 (Reuters) - Romania's government will postpone monthly loan repayments for a period of up to 9 months to help domestic borrowers hit by the coronavirus crisis, President Klaus Iohannis said on Wednesday.

"We are convinced that until then, our people and our economy will recover. These are real facilities for Romanians and the whole economy."

European Union-member Romania, under state of emergency since the middle of March, reported 144 new infections on Wednesday to an overall of 906 cases and 13 deaths.

From Wednesday, people are allowed to leave their homes only for work, with a signed note from their employers, and to buy groceries. The elderly will be required to stay confined at all times except between 1100-1300 a.m. and the army will be used to supplement police personnel on the streets. (Reporting by Radu Marinas)
Russias government, while starting to impose closures in other sectors, has so far largely left the church alone, even as the number of cases in Russia rises. The countrys rates are still lower than parts of Europe or the United States. Russia reported 840 confirmed cases Thursday, with 546 of those in Moscow, but the past two days have seen the largest spike.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA)  The Libyan ministry of foreign affairs has reaffirmed its appeal to the UN Security Council, calling the body to end the aggression against Tripoli and protect civilians in accordance with the UN Charter and the international law
To give our hospitals a fighting chance against this pandemic, we are all upending our lives to stay home as much as possible and avoid close contact.

Yet at the same time, our government is crowding hundreds of immigrants arrested in President Trumps indiscriminate sweeps into big rooms in New Jerseys jails, a feeding ground for the virus  and a potential death trap. It defies logic.

Think this wont affect the rest of us? Think again.

The virus will be carried by a guard or two into our jails, where it will inevitably spread wildly in close quarters. Detainees and staffers will get sick first, then infect their families, and all of ours.

When inmates fall ill, they will be sent to overwhelmed emergency rooms in places like Newark.

Two doctors from the Department of Homeland Security just warned Congress of a tinderbox scenario, if we dont release the immigrants before the virus tears through, and they fill up and overwhelm the ventilator resources.

By the time the rest of us get sick, will any beds or ventilators be left? Will we even have enough healthy corrections officers to guard the most dangerous criminals?

This much is certain: Lives will be lost.

* * * * *

And we all know that President Trump will not act, which means the best hope is that Gov. Phil Murphy will step into that vacuum.

Hes closed daycares, schools and banned public gatherings statewide. So why allow hundreds of immigrants to live in exactly the close quarters this virus thrives in?

Drug users and petty burglars are already being released from our jails, because Murphys Attorney General understands that public health is at stake. Yet the immigrants detained not as punishment, but solely to ensure that they show up for court, are not. What sense does that make?

Only a few have been let out in New Jersey by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, on the most exceptional basis  even though the majority of detainees have no history of criminal violence. We can ensure they show up in court by using alternatives like ankle bracelets, which have worked elsewhere.

How can Murphy help, given that ICE is a federal agency? Citing the power of state government to enforce building capacity rules, Physicians for Human Rights, Human Rights First and Amnesty International USA just called on him and other governors to crack down immediately, in a joint letter. Their actions may be challenged, but given the high stakes, it is worth a try.

We got no response from Murphys office this week. But our hope is he steps up and demands action, along with county officials like Joseph DiVincenzo, who oversees Essex County jail. This is about life and death. Its time to go all-out.

* * * * *

Patrick Colligan, head of the union that represents jail corrections officers, has already called to safely reduce the detained population, however we can. Were under a state of emergency, so its sound policy, he said. We want to protect our officers in the jail, obviously.

Which brings us to John Tsoukaris, the head of ICEs Newark office. The man with the discretion to release the immigrants in New Jersey.

What does he say to these officers, their families, and all the rest of us being put in greater danger because he wont take the same preventative step as the state, and release nonviolent detainees?

What does he say to the immigrants who will inevitably fall sick and die, to their kids and loved ones, many of whom are U.S. citizens?

He ignored all our questions. In response to more than 40 advocacy groups, he wrote Thursday that ICE has prudently released several detainees on forms of supervision because of their age or medical conditions.

Several? Why not all the rest?

The former head of ICE, John Sandweg, argued in the Atlantic that we must release all nonviolent detainees, the only way to protect detention facilities and the people in them from COVID-19.

More than 3,000 physicians have signed a letter urging ICE to release detainees while their legal cases proceed, especially the most vulnerable. Theyre just stuck there like sitting ducks, one said.

Thats how it feels to Nicolas Morales, who called us from the Elizabeth detention center on Thursday to say he just spent several days in isolation as punishment for leading a hunger strike.

They said no more people were coming in, but theyre still bringing in people, he said. Right now, Im in a 44-person room. There is no protection. There is poor sanitation in here. This place, its like a warehouse. My fear is that were going to get infected with the virus.

Cesar Giovani Urvina-Gallegos, 60 years old and medically fragile with high cholesterol, a known risk factor, remains in Essex County jail, despite a desperate plea for release by his lawyer with the Rutgers Immigrant Rights Clinic.

So does a client of Lauren Major with American Friends Service Committee, who implored ICE last week to release the man in his 50s with high blood pressure, diabetes and early signs of heart trouble, before he complained of a sore throat and a fever on Thursday. She also got no answer.

Detainees are super scared, and collecting their own lists of people, she told us  those with asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes. A lot of our clients are calling, saying they are afraid theyre going to die in this facility.

And Trump wont be the only one who is remembered for his inaction, if they do.

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A Northern Irish pastor who fell critically ill with coronavirus has warned that the deadly pathogen wants to kill you, adding that he is grateful to be alive.

Mark McClurg, from Co Down, was hospitalised and placed into intensive care at the Ulster Hospital near Belfast after becoming infected with the virus.

In a video posted on social media from his hospital bed, the 40-year-old father-of-three said: This coronavirus is deadly and is dangerous.

Coronavirus wants to kill you.

It wants to take all the life out of your lungs so that you cannot even breathe.

Mr McClurg, a member of the Elim Pentecostal Church, praised the nurses and doctor who had cared for him day and night despite the risk to their own health.

They have saved my life, he said. I am grateful that I am living.

He also paid tribute to his wife, Claire, for her care and support, particularly when he was at his lowest ebb and could not even talk.

She was the one who saw me through.

Mr McClurg, who will soon be moving back to a ward at Ulster Hospital after his condition improved, also urged people to take the virus seriously.

Dont think this wont touch you, he said. Dont think for a moment that this is just a cough and a cold you will get.

Look at me and listen.

If you get coronavirus and you have to go into the intensive care unit, that means you are going to struggle to breathe, you could go on a ventilator, so please listen to all the advice of the Government.

As of Tuesday, Northern Ireland had reported five deaths from coronavirus and 172 confirmed cases.

Mr McClurg added: We must protect the heart and soul of Northern Ireland at this moment and our NHS staff.

They need us. I have seen their faces, I have spoken to them, some have come to terms that theyre going to get coronavirus  let that sink in.

Do your part and stay at home.
[March 26, 2020] City Brew Tours Brings Brewing & Live Beer Education Into Home Kitchens Nationwide to Combat Isolation

BOSTON, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- City Brew Tours, a leading curator of craft brewery tours and experiences in North America, announces today the launch of their live Beer Events at Home to combat the isolating effects of the current crisis. Industries, including travel and craft beer, have suffered devastating effects from the recent pandemic. As a small business at the crossroads of both of those industries, City Brew Tours saw an opportunity to entertain, educate, and captivate people from the comfort of their own home, while providing continued work to the company's 60 employees. Guests can choose between the Live Homebrew Experience suitable for all ages and skill levels or the Beer and Cheese Pairing Virtual Happy Hour  best for anyone of legal drinking age. With company-owned and franchise locations in 11 cities including Boston, Washington D.C., Cleveland, and Portland, Oregon, City Brew Tours' core business relies on driving groups of thirsty beer enthusiasts and taking them behind the scenes of an area's top breweries. "If we can't bring our guests to the breweries, we'll bring the brewing and beer education to them virtually. Thankfully, between my business partner who used to be a commercial brewer and all of our avid homebrewing guides, we have decades of combined homebrewing experience," said Chad Brodsky, the company's Founder and CEO. The Live Homebrew Experience includes brewing instruction led live by one of City Brew Tours' expert beer guides via online video conference. The experience requires no prior knowledge and comes with the equipment and ingredients for participants to make their first ull case of pale ale or amber ale.



"We've curated the perfect kit for people to try homebrewing. These high-quality and reusable materials, with minimum investment, are shipped nationwide right to a participant's front door before the experience begins," said Barry Hansen, the company's COO and Mr. Brodsky's business partner. The Beer and Cheese Pairing Virtual Happy Hour adds a fun interactive spin to the existing video chat with friends, at a low price point. Utilizing the same entertaining and interactive methods that guides use on tours, this live virtual guided beer and cheese edutainment will explore the intricacies of pairing beer and cheese. City Brew Tours recommends participants pick-up 2-3 different types of cheeses during their next grocery run or delivery. Participants will need at least two types of beer at home; they are encouraged to purchase beer from their local breweries, many of which are offering curbside take home, as this is the only way that the breweries can survive this difficult time.

### CONTACT:

Chad Brodsky

[email protected]

888-623-8687

Bookings: https://www.citybrewtours.com/beer-events-at-home/ Live Homebrew Experience - $99 - Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays at 1:00 p.m. ET Beer and Cheese Pairing Virtual Happy Hour - $20/Household - Daily at 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. City Brew Tours continues to offer gift certificates and advanced bookings for their tours via their website. Related Images beer-events-at-home.jpg

Beer Events at Home brew-your-own-beer-at-home.jpg

Brew Your Own Beer At Home Related Links City Brew Tours View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/city-brew-tours-brings-brewing--live-beer-education-into-home-kitchens-nationwide-to-combat-isolation-301030665.html SOURCE City Brew Tours

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A German cathedral has dug out its collection of relics related to the little-known Saint Corona, said to be the patron saint of resisting epidemics, amid the growing coronavirus crisis.

Aachen Cathedral, near Germany's borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, is polishing relics found in its treasure chamber to go on show once the pandemic has passed.

Coronavirus has infected more than half a million people worldwide, with 43,646 cases confirmed in Germany amid 239 deaths.

But the pandemic is said to have boosted public interest in the Christian martyr, who is believed to have been killed by the Romans during the reign of Marcus Aurelius some 1,800 years ago.

Aachen Cathedral, near Germany's borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, is polishing relics of Saint Corona (pictured) to go on show once the pandemic has passed

The cathedral had planned to display Saint Corona's shrine this summer as part of an exhibition on gold craftsmanship before the outbreak began in China in December.

It is unclear when the public will now be able to view the relics due to tough restrictions on gatherings which have been imposed to help combat the spread of the virus.

But experts are now painstakingly cleaning the gold, bronze and ivory shrine, which has been hidden from public view for 25 years, in preparation for when it can go on display.

'We have brought the shrine out a bit earlier than planned and now we expect more interest due to the virus,' said Aachen Cathedral spokeswoman Daniela Loevenich.

Saint Corona is believed to have been 16 years old when she was killed by the Romans, most likely in Syria, for professing the Christian faith.

The teenager suffered an excruciating death, according to legend. She was tied to two bent palm trees and then torn apart as the trunks were released.

The cathedral had planned to display St Corona's shrine (pictured) this summer as part of an exhibition on gold craftsmanship before the outbreak began in China in December

Restorer Luke Jonathan Koeppe and the director of the cathedral treasury Birgitta Falk present a shrine with the relics of Saint Corona

'This is a very gruesome story and led to her becoming the patron of lumberjacks,' Brigitte Falk, head of Aachen Cathedral Treasure Chamber said.

She added it was pure chance that she also apparently became a patron saint for resisting epidemics.

However, some experts claim the teenager is in fact the patron saint of treasure hunters.

'You have people praying to the patron saint of treasure hunters, which seems to be against CDC guidelines,' Candida Moss, the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham said.

She added that Saint Corona's story is 'complicated' and there is even reason to believe she was invented.

It is unclear when the public will now be able to view the relics due to tough restrictions on gatherings which have been imposed to help combat the spread of the virus

The shrine with the relics of Saint Corona, believed to be the patron of epidemics, is seen at the cathedral in Aachen, Germany

Pictured: Aachen Cathedral, where the relics of Saint Corona will go on show once the pandemic has passed

Saint Corona's relics, brought to Aachen by King Otto III in 997, were kept in a tomb underneath a stone in the cathedral until 1911-12 when they were placed in the shrine, which is 93 centimetres tall and weighs 98 kilograms.

The Roman Catholic cathedral at Aachen, built by Emperor Charlemagne in the ninth century, is one of Europe's oldest.

Charlemagne was buried there in 814 and it was later used for the coronation of German kings and queens.

The cathedral stressed that Saint Corona is the patron saint of resisting all epidemics, not just the virus rapidly spreading across the globe.

It just so happens coronavirus received its name because under a microscope it looks like a globe with small globules, resembling a crown, said Ms Falk.

In Latin, corona means crown or garland.

'Like many other saints, Saint Corona may be a source of hope in these difficult times,' added Ms Falk.
This article originally appeared on the Wantagh-Seaford Patch

WANTAGH, NYThis, too, shall pass. That's the message some Long Islanders hope to send others trying to make it through the outbreak of the new coronavirus, which has affected so many people financially, emotionally and, in many cases, physically.

"Right now in these times, everybody is a little uneasy, and they dont know what to expect," Katherine Schilling of Wantagh told Patch. "Its a rough time with everything were dealing with."



Eager to spread some cheer and feel-good vibes in a world on the edge, Schilling and her niece, Nicole Sapienza, recently launched a social movement centered on positivity and hope. Together, the two created the Facebook group, Rainbows Over Nassau And Suffolk Counties And Beyond.

Courtesy: Katherine Schilling, used with permission

The rainbow, to most people, signifies sunshine after the storm," Schilling said. "Rainbows are positive. People smile when they see a rainbow."



Through the group, they are encouraging families stuck in isolation due to COVID-19 to display rainbows in their front doors, windows, driveways - or really just about anywhere. One woman even asked if she could draw a rainbow on her cast after she broke her leg, Schilling said.

There was also one post where the mother had her daughter dressed up as a rainbow they both created," she said. "She was smiling and waving to people. People have been so creative. We have posts where people are holding up rainbows for their grandparents saying 'We miss you' because they can't get close to them."

Courtesy: Katherine Schilling, used with permission

In less than a week, more than 35,000 people have joined the group, and not all of them are from Long Island.



Some have joined from Canada, Italy, Germany, I mean, all over," she said. "Im totally flabbergasted. I cant believe how many people have joined."

And as more people seek to find joy in a world that seems filled with uncertainty right now, she expects more members to join to help continue spreading a message of hope.

"Ive had messages from nurses, postman, police officers thanking me," she said. "When they go to work or come home, they notice the rainbows."

To keep up to date with coronavirus developments in New York, sign up for Patch news alerts and newsletter.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Hajr is an Arabic word used for quarantine.

But Dr. Assim AlAbdulKader knows he has to take the time to explain what the word means in the context of the coronavirus.

AlAbdulKader is one of many doctors, medical students and fellows working with the COVID-19 public health team at the Cuyahoga County Board of Health helping to make sure that its response to the coronavirus works for all cultures.

In the past week, the 33-year-old family and preventive medicine doctor, who grew up and completed medical school in Saudi Arabia, has worked with multiple families, some with confirmed positive tests for COVID-19, and others who had high levels of exposure to family members with the virus.

Because AlAbdulKader speaks the Arabic language and understands the culture, he knows that using a word like quarantine requires additional explanation.

The inference of the word hajr, though not a direct translation, is that the person has a mental health defect or plague-like disease and must be kept away from others.

Its challenging, he said, especially if a person doesnt have symptoms.

They may think I am not sick. I am not crazy. I dont have a deadly disease,  he said.

AlAbdulKader can explain that what the health department is instructing is that if they are quarantined, that they stay at home and away from others to prevent the spread of infection to others. And that during the incubation period, they can spread the virus, even if they have no symptoms.

What he has told people is, You do care about your family. And we care about you and your family, too.

If a family member has to isolate  azel  within their own home, he can give them practical advice such as to stay in a bedroom as much as possible and to wash hands as much as possible within the home.

We can explain, You are helping if you do this.

AlAbdulKader, has worked several days a week making calls and answering phones at the board of health. Hes balanced that with his work at MetroHealth Medical Center, where hes a geriatrics fellow. In between, he spends time with his wife, who is working on her Ph.D at Kent State University, and four children, sons who are 10 and 3, a daughter who is 8, and an 11-year-old sister-in-law, who they adopted when she was a baby.

At the board of health, hes among the people reaching out by phone to people who have tested positive for the virus. That includes doing interviews to collect names of people in their families, workplaces and social circles they have recently been in close contact with. Then, he will help to call those people and explain how they can quarantine, check if theyve had symptoms, and give them advice on how to treat things like fevers and chills at home, and when a dramatic change, like severe shortness of breath, should prompt a call to a special hotline at the board staffed around-the-clock by physicians like him.

AlAbdulKader, and other doctors like him, who share culture and language with communities they serve, have been invaluable, Dr. Heidi Gullett, medical director for the county board said.

They have enabled public health officials to do better disease investigations into clusters of COVID-19 cases and to get those families and communities vital health information.

We have a very diverse team that includes people of different races and ethnicities. We speak many languages, AlAbdulKader said. But we are all dedicated and share a common goal.

Among those goals, he said, is building trust.

For many immigrants, whether legal residents or not, there can be a barrier between them and authorities. The word investigation, can sound scary, he said, even though in this context it really means more of an interview and the documenting of symptoms and contacts.

Having that cultural humility is essential, he said, when providing public service.

When we reach out to local communities, we try to understand their worries and fears, said AlAbdulKader, a Case Western Reserve School of Medicine graduate, who also has a masters degree in public health. Before working at MetroHealth he also worked with immigrant and refugee patients and families at Neighborhood Family Practice, a federally qualified health center.

During one encounter, AlAbdulKader needed to overcome concerns of one mother, who told him she was the only one to cook and provide care for her other family members.

How can I isolate? she wanted to know.

He understood her perspective. It was as if he was asking her to not take care of her family, which was her responsibility.

After explaining why it was important for her to isolate to prevent the spread of the virus to her family, he asked her what she needed to help her do it.

We provided food for two weeks so that mother could isolate, AlAbdulKader said.

Most of his communications with people have been over the phone, though he has delivered food to one family and was able to wave at them through the window. Other doctors have suited up with the personal protective equipment, which includes masks, gloves and face shields, to visit people in their homes.

It can be a challenge, AlAbdulKader said, to balance between the way doctors practicing Westernized medicine communicate with patients, which includes advising and empowering patients to make choices, and practices in the Middle East and Asian countries, which can be more paternalistic.

AlAbdulKader said hes tried to bridge those approaches.

Im trying to support and empower them to take ownership of health but also to be firm, because we know that isolating and quarantining arent options, they are important.

The work, he said, will likely get more challenging as people are hospitalized and in more serious condition.

AlAbdulKader said he weaves into his conversations, things like blessings or prayers common to Arabic and Muslim culture.

One is loosely translated, May God prevent the sickness from you. It tells them that you support them to not stay sick or to be well.

Another blessing, he explained, says basically anything that will happen has been decided by God and I am a believer, I can trust Allah.

That puts them at a lot of ease, he said.

Cuyahoga Countys has posted multilingual coronavirus resources with information in:

Other coronavirus coverage:

Cuyahoga County disease detectives,' CWRU medical students track coronavirus in one of Ohios hotspots

Cuyahoga Countys public health warriors try to get ahead of the local coronavirus curve

Local coronavirus test results delayed, creating backlog of data and anxiety for patients
Niamey, Niger (PANA) - Niger has recorded its eighth case of coronavirus, a Brazilian national aged 62, who entered the country from Senegal on 27 February, according to a press release from the Ministry of Health
With his phenomenal performances in several movies, Leonardo DiCaprio is now widely considered to be one of the most revered actors in Hollywood. Leo has been in the acting game for a long time now and he has had the opportunity to work with acclaimed filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. His recent film Once Upon a Time In Hollywood was also critically acclaimed.

Also read: Leonardo DiCaprio And Camila Morrone Isolating Together Amidst Coronavirus Outbreak?

Apparently, the actor has had a long dating history. The Oscar winners bachelor persona is quite popular. With all that said now, read on to know more about Leonardo DiCaprio's dating history:

Also read: Leonardo DiCaprio's Blockbuster Movies That Were Based On Books

Demi Moore

Demi Moore is an American actress. Dicaprio and Moore were spotted together in 1997. Moore was also linked with Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher.

Naomi Campbell

Naomi Campbell is a popular English model and actress. Leo was linked with Naomi Campbell in the mid-nineties. Apparently, the pair enjoyed a brief fling.

Bar Rafaeli

Apparently, Leo has dated several Victorias Secret models, from Bar Rafeli to Giselle Bunchen. They met at a party in Las Vegas and had an on and off relationship that ended in May 2011. Both were spotted at the Los Angeles Lakers vs. the Oklahoma City Thunder game in April 2010. In 2010, both were seen getting cozy at the Annual Cinema For Peace Gala during Berlin International Film Festival.

Giselle Bundchen

Leonardo has been in some high-profile relationships, one of which was with Brazillian supermodel Giselle Bundchen. The actor also took her to the Oscars. The 38-year-old supermodel was in a relationship with DiCaprio for five years.

Camila Morrone

Leo dated Camila Morrone, a model who is of American-Argentinian descent. The two also attended the UEFA Champions League, where she was spotted adjusting Dicaprios collar. She also responded to the criticism over the age gap between her and Leo saying that people are so mean and full of anger and that they do not know anything about their relationship.

Rihanna

After Leo and Rihanna were spotted attending several parties together, a rumour broke out that the two were dating. But now, after his split with Kelly Rohrbach, the two were reportedly seen hanging out in Paris. There are not many details available regarding their relationship.

Get the latest entertainment news from India & around the world. Now follow your favourite television celebs and telly updates. Republic World is your one-stop destination for trending Bollywood news. Tune in today to stay updated with all the latest news and headlines from the world of entertainment.
Los Angeles County has released 1,700 inmates from its jails amid fears that coronavirus could run rampant behind bars.

Sheriff Alex Villanueva announced the startling figures Tuesday, as several prisoners were pictured collecting their belongings and leaving one of the county's facilities.

A number of the inmates looked delighted by their first taste of freedom, brandishing large smiles as they headed out into the wider world.

Villanueva confirmed that all of the 1,700 inmates who have been granted early release were due to be set free in less than 30 days.

He also clarified that they were all convicted of nonviolent misdemeanors, according to Los Angeles Daily News.

The LA County prison system has around 17,000 inmates, meaning that 10% of its entire population has now been released.

Los Angeles County has released 1,700 inmates from its jails amid fears that coronavirus could run rampant behind bars. One inmate is seen walking to freedom Wednesday

A number of the inmates looked delighted by their first taste of freedom, brandishing large smiles as they headed out into the wider world

All prisoners who have been released were already due to be set free within the next 30 days

More prisoners are set to be released in the coming days, but Villanueva says the rates will begin to slow.

'There won't be any big amount,' he stated, according to the LA Daily News.

'All the low-hanging fruit, we've already picked it.'

There are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 inside any Los Angeles county jails, and officers have been making fewer arrests in the hopes of inadvertently introducing a new prisoner into the system who could be carrying the highly-contagious virus.

As of Thursday afternoon, there are 799 confirmed cases of coronavirus in LA County, and 13 people have died in relation to the disease.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Police Department made 14% fewer arrests during the first 15 days of March compared with the same period last year.

More prisoners are set to be released in the coming days, but Villanueva says the rates will begin to slow

A man is pictured picking up his possessions as he walks free from an LA County Jail Wednesday

Sheriff Alex Villanueva announced the startling figures Tuesday

Meanwhile, 30% of the LA County prison system is homeless, and Villanueva told the Los Angeles Daily News that his department was 'working to ensure they don't inadvertently release an inmate with the virus'.

'We have a plan of transferring sick inmates from our custody to the (L.A. County) Department of Public Health. Those protocols are well established,' he stated.

It comes as many counties across the country fear a deadly coronavirus outbreak could sweep through their prison systems.

The Twin Towers Correctional Facility, also referred to in the media as Twin Towers Jail, is one of the prisons in LA County. The county has around 17,000 prisoners

New York's notorious Riker's Island Prison has 52 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is one of the prisoners who has tested positive to the disease.

In a bid to stop further spread, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday that around 300 prisoners from Rikers will be released.

'Some have many months [of their sentence left], some have only a few months, some have only weeks, but I'm going to treat this category across the board,' he stated.

De Blasio says he is working with other New York state officials to release around 800 other prisoners from separate jails.

New York's notorious Riker's Island has 52 confirmed cases of COVID-19 (pictured)

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths
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Linkedin Riza Roidila Mufti (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 15:05 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d912c6 1 Business tanjung-priok,seaport,container-terminal,Trade,business,COVID-19,coronavirus,IPC,Pelindo-II Free

Container traffic at Indonesias biggest and busiest seaport, Tanjung Priok in North Jakarta, declined 5.13 percent year-on-year from January to February, but the port operator expects improvements with factories in China reopening.

State-owned port operator Indonesia Port Corporation (IPC), also known as Pelindo II, saw 992,212 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of container traffic from January to February this year, compared with 1.05 million TEUs in the same period last year. Port container traffic is the flow of containers loaded and unloaded from land to sea transportation and vice versa.

The decline reflects a direct impact from the coronavirus outbreak, which originated in Wuhan, China. However, this is understandable because, when this virus started to spread in December 2019, there was a drop in productivity there as well, said IPC transformation director Ogi Rulino. [] China contributes the most to container traffic at Tanjung Priok Port.

Ogi said traffic would return to normal soon in the future, especially as industrial activities in China had started to recover. IPC has yet to change its annual targets for container traffic and revenue at 8.1 million TEUs and Rp 13.5 trillion respectively. Its net profit target this year is Rp 3.1 trillion.

Read also: Indonesia records $2.3b trade surplus in February despite coronavirus pandemic

IPC would monitor container traffic in the next two to three months to determine whether it needed to review its business targets, Ogi added.

With the help of 17 subsidiaries, the port corporation operates a total of 12 ports in the western part of the Indonesia. Besides Tanjung Priok, IPC also operates Teluk Bayur Port in West Sumatra, Palembang Port in South Sumatra, Tanjung Pandan Port in Belitung and Pontianak Port in West Kalimantan.
Restaurants aren't the only businesses badly affected by coronavirus with hotels and motels also under serious threat, new government data has revealed.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released the findings of its first COVID-19 survey.

In a chilling sign of things to come, 96 per cent of firms told the statisticians they expected coronavirus to hit them in coming months with just under half, or 49 per cent, so far experiencing an 'adverse impact' from the global pandemic.

New rules banning indoor gatherings are taking their toll, with restaurants and cafes as of this week restricted to takeaway orders.

Restaurants aren't the only businesses badly affected by coronavirus with hotels and motels also under serious threat, new government data has revealed. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released the findings of its first COVID-19 survey. Pictured are empty tables at Sydney's Circular Quay

SECTORS WITH JOBS UNDER THREAT - Food services - Accommodation - Airlines Advertisement

ABS data showed 78 per cent of food services businesses were struggling.

An identical proportion of accommodation businesses were also suffering with Australia now closed to foreigners as Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory closed their borders.

SECTORS WITH JOBS AVAILABLE - Mining - Science and technology - Electricity/gas/water supply Advertisement

In a handful of industries, however, the effects were minimal.

Only 21 per cent of scientific and technical services firms surveyed reported being affected by coronavirus.

By comparison only a third, or 34 per cent, of electricity, gas and water supply businesses were affected.

A similar proportion, or 37 per cent, of mining companies feared a revenue loss.

Dr David Gruen, Australia's chief statistician, promised to provide more data on the economic effects of coronavirus, with more surveys done online and by phone rather than face-to-face.

The ABS data showed 78 per cent of Australian accommodation services businesses were suffering from the coronavirus-induced downturn

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

'The economic implications of the spread of the coronavirus, COVID-19, are highly uncertain,' he said.

'In these circumstances, there are sizeable benefits for the community and governments to have access to information about the economic responses of individuals and businesses that is as up-to-date as possible.'

Australia's major airlines have retrenched the majority of their staff, following a ban on international flights.

Qantas has temporarily stood down 20,000 people, or two thirds of its staff, while its rival Virgin Australia has done the same thing to 8,000 employees, making up 80 per cent of its workforce.

Travel agent Flight Centre on Thursday announced it would make 3,800 staff redundant in Australia.

In a handful of industries, however, the effects were minimal. Only 21 per cent of scientific and technical services firms surveyed reported being affected by coronavirus

Company founder Graham Turner sent customers an email stressing the retrenchments were a last resort.

'They are being stood-down out of necessity, not removed from our business permanently,' he said.

'We are proactively working to assist these people as best we can during this challenging time.'

Westpac, Australia's second biggest bank, is expecting the national unemployment rate to double from 5.1 per cent in February to 11.1 per cent by June, as another 814,000 jobs were lost.

It is also expecting the economy to contract by 3.5 per cent April, May and June, which would make the most severe quarterly downturn since the Great Depression of the early 1930s.
By AFP

WASHINGTON: The US Senate unanimously passed the nation's largest-ever rescue package late Wednesday, a $2 trillion lifeline to suffering Americans, critically depleted hospitals and an economy all ravaged by a rapidly spreading coronavirus crisis.

The measure cleared the Senate 96-0 after days of tumultuous, sometimes bitter negotiations and debate, as the US death toll for the pandemic soared past 1,000, with 68,000 confirmed infections.

Outbreaks have grown nationwide, but with particular fear that New York could be the next epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.

"Let us tell them tonight that help is on the way, that they are not truly alone, that this country, that this Senate, that this government is here for them in a time of dire need," top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said moments before the vote.

"Let us marshal this government into action."

ALSO READ: US Senate, White House agree on a USD 2 trillion coronavirus rescue plan

The measure now heads to the House of Representatives, where a Democratic leader said he expected it to pass by voice vote Friday before it goes to President Donald Trump for his signature.

The monster package, thrashed out between Republicans, Democrats and the White House, provides direct cash payments to millions of hurting American taxpayers, amounting to $3,400 for an average American family of four.

It provides some $500 billion in grants and loans to small businesses and core industries, including as much as $50 billion for strained airlines and their employees.

It also surges $100 billion of desperately needed resources for hospitals and other health facilities in dire need of medical equipment, and dramatically expands unemployment benefits to help workers sickened by coronavirus or laid off during the crisis.

The United States has the third-highest number of infections globally behind China and Italy. About half are in New York state.

"We still have the trajectory going up," said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, adding that about 12 percent of the people who test positive require hospitalization.

Cuomo said health officials anticipate about 120,000 coronavirus patients coming into New York's hospitals, which have a capacity of 50,000 beds.

The state has around 30,000 confirmed cases, he added, with 285 deaths.

CLICK HERE TO READ CORONAVIRUS LIVE UPDATES

But the governor pointed to evidence suggesting New York's strict stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures have slowed the hospitalization rate.

"The arrows are headed in the right direction," Cuomo told reporters.

The intensity of the crisis caught the Trump administration by surprise, and by Wednesday Trump and his top lieutenants were demanding the Senate quicken the pace and pass the legislation.

"We need to get this money into the American economy and (to) American workers," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.

Over half the US population is now under some form of lockdown as authorities nationwide seek to stem the outbreaks.

Birmingham, Alabama and Charlotte, North Carolina have become the latest major US cities to order residents to stay indoors.

Wall Street stocks closed mixed Wednesday as the markets awaited a vote on the rescue package, the third of its kind in the past month, but by far the largest.

- 'Wartime' investment -

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has hailed the "wartime level of investment" in the nation.

It dwarfs the bailouts of 2008, when a worldwide financial crisis sent the US economy into a tailspin.

With infections rising, the Senate bill's injection for hospitals could be among the bill's most effective element in fighting the pandemic, as it will help facilities restock protective gear, intensive care beds and ventilators and other medical equipment.

Trump tweeted Wednesday that four hospitals being built in New York with federal assistance "are moving along very well, ahead of schedule."

"Many additional ventilators also delivered," he added.

Trump had voiced hope Tuesday that the country could begin to reopen in a few weeks, but his top infectious disease advisor, Anthony Fauci, said the timetable would need to remain "very flexible."

Trump faces a re-election battle this year, and his campaign has been upended by the pandemic.

He said Tuesday that social distancing had caused too much pain to the economy, adding that he wanted the country "opened up and just raring to go by Easter," which is April 12.

Later, Trump appeared to retreat from his Easter goal at a news conference alongside Fauci.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told CNN late Wednesday he believed the coronavirus crisis will last "substantially past" Easter.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 26

Trend:

Turkmenistan is organizing the return of its citizens from countries infected with coronavirus, Trend reports with reference to Turkmenistan today State News Agency of Turkmenistan.

"Turkmenhowayollary" agency organized charter flights to China, to bring back its citizens. All the planes had medical personnel who immediately took care of the Turkmen citizens.

In addition to China, Turkmenistan also organized the return of its citizens from Turkey, Russia, Belarus and other countries.

Students who returned to Turkmenistan will continue their education remotely.

There are no cases of coronavirus infection in Turkmenistan. The country takes all necessary measures to prevent the enter of infection into the country.

The outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which is an international transport hub - began at a fish market in late December 2019. The number of people killed by the disease has surpassed 21,300. Over 471,000 people have been confirmed as infected. Meanwhile, over 114,800 people have reportedly recovered.

Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019. Several countries are working on a vaccine against the new virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
Chancellor to help one in three self-employed people amid pushback over more big bailouts

One in three self-employed workers are in line to have the Government pay their wages amid the coronavirus crisis after Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, warned that all five million could not expect blanket cash subsidies. On Thursday, Mr Sunak will announce an emergency package for the self-employed, nearly a week after setting out 80 per cent wage subsidies for employees. The Treasury has spent days deliberating how to best target the self-employed people who need help most. One option is to offer a similar subsidy to the one given to employees, but with a lower cap than 2,500 to make the bailout more affordable. The money is expected only to be available to those self-employed people who can prove they have been directly affected, estimated at about 1.7 million out of nearly five million.  Daily Telegraph

Bailout will compensate 2m selfemployed workers  The Times

but they will need to wait until end of May to get emergency cash  The Sun

Britain heading for a deep recession, say experts  FT

Almost 500,000 people in UK apply for universal credit in nine days  The Guardian

>Yesterday:

Katy Balls: Coronavirus is a stress-test for the cabinet, and Sunak is coming out best

As the prime minister reluctantly brings in draconian measures, reports suggest that under-strain cabinet ministers have now turned their ire on one another  competing for promotion as the chief executive of government. The news that Dominic Raab is the designated survivor should Johnson fall ill is said to have gone down like a cup of cold sick with his rivals The minister of the hour is Sunak. His fast promotion to chancellor had led to snipes that he would be a baby chino  a chancellor in name only. Instead, hes become the poster boy of good government  praised for offering an emotional intelligence at the various press conferences that has at times been lacking from the prime minister. YouGov polling this week suggests Sunak has gone from relative unknown to most popular government minister.  The Guardian

Recession will do more harm than the virus  Gerard Baker, The Times

Shock forces Europe to face its Hamilton moment  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph

This is the cost of our hideous complacency  David Aaronovitch, The Times

Editorial:

How to support the self-employed through the pandemic  FT

NHS now likely to cope with coronavirus, says key scientist

The virus death toll could end up being substantially lower than 20,000 with most of the fatalities in people who would have died later this year anyway, a government adviser has said. Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College scientist whose research precipitated tougher government measures last week, told MPs: It [the deaths of those who would have died anyway] might be as much as half or two thirds of the deaths we see, because these are people at the end of their lives or who have underlying conditions. Professor Ferguson is a key member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, which is providing the evidence guiding Mr Johnsons response to the coronavirus.  The Times

Symptom tracker app suggests 6.5m Britons may already have coronavirus  Daily Telegraph

Loosen rules to speed up hunt for coronavirus vaccine  The Times

Johnson pushed to accelerate coronavirus testing  FT

Chief Medical Officer warns of global bottleneck of immunity kits  Daily Mail

NHS symptom checker may be giving people a false sense of security  Daily Telegraph

Huge boost as 10,000 Dyson ventilators ordered for Britain  Daily Express

Hopes rise for home coronavirus antibody test  The Times

Editorial:

Testing is the best route back to normality  The Sun

>Today: Francis Davis in Comment: These virus guidelines signal a go-ahead for a cull of the vulnerable and disabled

as Hancock scraps NHS parking charges for medical staff

Parking charges for NHS staff will be lifted while they fight the coronavirus outbreak, the Government has said, with the move following a public outcry. NHS workers will also be able to park for free in council-owned car parks and parking bays, and Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said the move was in response to the unprecedented challenge faced by the NHS. Under the package, the National Car Parking Group confirmed that it will also provide NHS staff with free parking at all 150 of its car parks in England. It came as a petition calling for free parking for NHS staff attracted more than 400,000 signatures in four days. Rules vary by NHS trust, but health service workers can pay anything between 50 and 200 a month to park at work.  Daily Telegraph

Fear contagious among staff fighting on NHS front line  The Times

Equalise front-line doctors death benefits, says BMA  FT

UK outbreak may have started in January  Daily Telegraph

Army of black cabbies could ferry NHS staff  The Sun

>Yesterday: Dr Luke Evans MPs column: New in Parliament. A doctor on the Health Select Committee. And tasked with helping to lead locally.

Patel calls for borders to be closed stop new coronavirus cases being imported

Priti Patel has called for UK borders to be closed to stop people arriving from coronavirus hotspots. The Home Secretary is seeking support for her plans to stop passengers being able to fly in to the UK from countries with high levels of infections such as Iran, the US and China. Mrs Patel believes flights from virus hotspots should not be allowed when the country is on lockdown to prevent its spread The lack of a travel ban in the UK is in stark contrast to policies in the EU and the US, which have closed their borders to travellers from many other countries. Flights headed to the UK from New York, Tehran, Rome and Beijing all took off yesterday. An estimated 100,000 passengers are still arriving through UK airports each day  around one fifth of the number before the pandemic.  Daily Mail

Refugee doctors plead for fast-track to practise in UK  FT

More:

Tracker: 9,529 cases, 465 deaths  Daily Telegraph

Overnight death number halves  Daily Mail

Latest advice  HM Government

>Today: MPs Etc.: Coronavirus Count

Johnson looks at wartime powers to prevent profiteering during crisis

The Government is looking at new wartime powers to set a maximum price for certain foods and products in order to stop companies from profiteering amid the coronavirus outbreak. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he was examining the legislative framework  to prevent profiteering, just as happened in wartime many many years ago. There have been reports that the prices of some everyday food and other products, such as hand sanitiser, being increased as stocks have run low The Government brought in maximum price controls during the Second World War in order to prevent businesses from profiteering. In one case, Blaydon District Industrial and Provident Society in Newcastle was fined 290 in 1941 after it sold two pounds of apples for about 11 when the maximum price was 4.  Daily Telegraph

Expert claims UK could end up with food rationing  Daily Express

Grateful salute to best of Britain as 500,000 volunteer their help  The Times

Prime Minister backed by huge majority in new poll  Daily Express

Comment:

Remember the heroes and villains of this crisis  Jenni Russell, The Times

We simply dont know what kind of Britain will awake from all this  Martin Kettle, The Guardian

Editorial:

Overwhelmingly positive response shows a united and generous country  The Times

>Today:

>Yesterday:

as English police to get power to use force to impose coronavirus lockdown

Police will be authorised to use force to send people back home if they refuse to obey the coronavirus lockdown, under government plans. Ministers will issue fuller details by Thursday of how police will enforce the lockdown ordered by the prime minister on Monday, aimed at stopping the spread of the virus by keeping people apart. The Guardian has learned that, under plans being discussed by ministers and senior officials, officers would first encourage and cajole people to go back indoors if they suspect them of being out of their home in breach of the ban. If that and the issuing of a fine failed, reasonable force could be used as a last resort.  The Guardian

Officers are drafted in to guard shops to stop panic buying  Daily Mail

Buckland says prisoners may be released early to ease coronavirus crisis in jails  Daily Telegraph

Comment:

We must act before coronavirus overwhelms our prisons  Matthew Scott, Daily Telegraph

>Yesterday: Richard Walton in Think Tanks: The challenge of the virus to policing. And how forces will and should respond.

Positive test for Prince Charles raises royal coronavirus fears

The heir to the British throne, Prince Charles, on Wednesday became the most prominent public figure in the UK to be confirmed as having coronavirus, in a development that raises questions about the risk the virus poses to senior royals. Clarence House, the princes official residence, said the Prince of Wales, 71, had been tested for the illness in Aberdeenshire, where he has an official residence at Birkhall, on the queens Balmoral Estate. He has been displaying mild symptoms but otherwise remains in good health and has been working from home throughout the last few days as usual, Clarence House said. The princes wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, had also been tested but did not have the virus, the statement added.  FT

Heir to the throne in good spirits after positive coronavirus test  The Times

Queen holds audience with PM by phone  The Guardian

Comment:

As a future king, Charles could take no chances  Camilla Tominey, Daily Telegraph

Corbyn attacks Government over builders being forced to work

Jeremy Corbyn has revealed how a construction worker suffering from coronavirus has admitted to using the London Tube as he had no choice but to carry on working. At his last PMQs session today Jeremy Corbyn told the horrifying tale of a worker who felt like he had to go in anyway or he wouldnt be paid. The Labour boss demanded that all non-essential construction work be stopped immediately to halt the spread of the virus. Ministers have said as long as all workers stay two metres apart that they can carry on coming in, sparking a huge row However, the PM could only say that people are allowed to go into work if they cant do their jobs at home.  The Sun

Close down building sites to slow spread of coronavirus, Johnson told  The Times

UK building sites start to close despite government advice  FT

Fury at Khan grows as key workers are forced onto packed Tubes  Daily Mail

More:

Labour leader condemned as worst of all time by own MP  Daily Express

Comment:

The governments Covid-19 plan is full of holes  John McDonnell MP, The Guardian

>Yesterday:

Spain overtakes Chinas virus deaths with highest daily coronavirus toll

Spain has recorded the highest daily death toll from coronavirus anywhere in the world since the pandemic began with 738 fatalities in one day, as its medical workers complained of critical shortages in equipment and supplies. The country has recorded a total of 3,434 deaths from the virus, more than China where the virus originated and killed 3,281. Italy has the most deaths of any country with 6,820. Salvador Illa, the health minister of Spain, said: It is obvious that the number of deaths has increased and that it will continue to increase for a few more days as we approach the peak. The universal healthcare system is a symbol of national pride but the virus, which has infected more than 47,000 in Spain, has exposed weaknesses after years of budget cuts, with emergency units in Madrid at full capacity.  The Times

Coronavirus holds New York in its grip  Daily Telegraph

US package will send $1,200 to many Americans  Daily Mail

Japan fears new spike as Singapores GDP tumbles  FT

Putin slammed for refusing lockdown as Russia sees huge spike in cases  Daily Express

Threat of being shot on sight for Indians who defy lockdown  The Times

Region around Finnish capital to be isolated  The Guardian

>Today: Garvan Walshes column: South Korea, Taiwan and Germany gained from mass testing. Why have we been so slow?

>Yesterday: Ben Robacks column: Trump wants to rush Americas response to COVID-19  but the states might stop him

Johnson shelves plans to cut MPs to 600

Proposals to slash the number of MPs from 650 to 600 have been shelved by Boris Johnson due to the greater workload that will be generated as a result of the UK leaving the European Union. Chloe Smith, the constitution minister, has confirmed that the plans have been dropped, citing the additional pressures that came with taking back control of the UKs political and economic independence. However, she added that the Government will still press ahead with plans for a shakeup of constituencies to ensure that they contain near-equal numbers of voters. This is likely to lead to a significant redrawing of the electoral map, with several safe seats turned into marginals. The decision not to press ahead with the downsizing of Parliament is likely to be welcomed by the Labour Party, which stood to be worst impacted by the reforms.  Daily Telegraph

Dominic Grieve: Military prosecutions bill creates more than problems than it fixes

Firstly, the bill shows worrying signs of being an exercise in public relations rather than reasoned change. The government has emphasised that a key proposal is to prevent prosecution after a lapse of five years from the date of the alleged offence, save in exceptional circumstances  and it sets out elaborate hurdles that a prosecutor must leap in order to do so. But there is also a schedule to the bill which contains a list of exclusions that cover all forms of sexual offences. This could create the bizarre outcome that an allegation of torture or murder would not be prosecuted when a sexual offence arising out of the same incident could be.  The Times

Salmond to reveal plot in new book

Alex Salmond is writing a revelatory book that will target his opponents in the Scottish National Party who he believes were conspiring against him. In a sign of the deep divisions within the nationalist movement, the former first minister has started work on his account of the past two years. It will cover the period from when allegations of sexual misconduct were made against him in January 2018 through to his acquittal this week on 13 charges at the High Court in Edinburgh. It will be revelatory, a supporter of Mr Salmond said. I dont think he will miss and hit the wall.  He has identified senior figures in both the Scottish government and the SNP who he believes plotted to discredit him.  The Times

A defence of Im sleazy but not criminal is nothing to smile about  Alex Bell, The Courier

News in Brief:
On March 24, President Donald Trump floated the idea that business could be back to normal by Easter and that there could be packed churches on Easter Sunday. April 12,

He later backed off that idea, suggesting it would depend on what federal health officials recommend about how to react to the coronavirus epidemic.

But it raised the question of when churches should open again. Clergy reacted to Trumps packed churches by Easter comment by advising caution and continued vigilance for the nations health.

I think the president is trying to give hope  I share that same hope  that would be wonderful, said the Rev. Chris Hodges, pastor of Alabamas largest church, the Church of the Highlands, which averages more than 50,000 worshippers weekly and last week organized mass drive-through testing for 2,200 people for COVID-19.

But we are preparing for an online experience, Hodges said. Thats probably what will end up happening. We are trying not to predict how long things will take since it seems like what we know about this crisis changes from day to day.

On April 28, Gov. Kay Ivey said churches must continue to stay closed for the immediate future as part of her Safer at Home order.

Open by June?

For the past two weekends, many churches across Alabama have been closed for public worship.

Some clergy are hoping for services by summer.

In my head, Im saying, June, July, said the Rev. Mike McClure Jr., pastor of Rock City Church, which has campuses in Birmingham, Forestdale and Tuscaloosa. McClure was the first megachurch pastor to cancel services, which he announced March 12.

Weve got to weather this storm," McClure said. "I would love to have church on Easter. I just dont think its realistic. Im not putting people in harms way.

The outgoing and incoming bishops for the Catholic Diocese of Birmingham also urged caution.

Theres always hope, said incoming Bishop Steven J. Raica on Wednesday We always have to follow the indications of the health authorities. We rejoice in the hope something miraculous could happen. It would be a miracle.

Retiring Bishop Robert J. Baker, who is now pastoral administrator for the more than 100,000 Catholics in North and Central Alabama until Raica takes over on June 23, on Friday officially announced no public Mass on Easter Sunday.

The risks became even more obvious Wednesday when a Catholic priest, the Rev. Ray Dunmyer, pastor of a church in Montevallo, was treated at a hospital for COVID-19.

Mobile Archbishop Thomas J. Rodi on March 27 said there would be no public Masses on Easter in that Southern part of the state. The suspension of public worship services and most church activities in the Catholic churches of the Archdiocese of Mobile is extended through April 18, 2020," he said. "Public Easter services will not be celebrated in our Catholic churches.

The Rev. Ed Hurley, pastor of South Highland Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, called restarting worship in churches on Easter aspirational but unrealistic.

Even if churches were reopened on Easter Sunday, the risk of spreading the disease in a crowd remains. How many people would want to be there? Hurley said.

Some rural churches still meet

The Rev. John Killian, former president of the Alabama Baptist Convention and now director of missions for the Fayette County Baptist Association, said that some small rural churches are still holding regular services on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights.

Some of them have not closed, he said. Unlike churches that have hierarchical structures, each Baptist church is autonomous and makes its own decisions.

Out of 29 churches in our association, five of them met on Sunday, Killian said. Its their decision, not mine.

Most churches are following advice of state health officials to not hold worship services. They are waiting for indications from those health officials on when they can resume and get back to normal.

I was hoping by Easter Sunday, but this thing hasnt leveled off, Killian said. Now Im hoping by the first Sunday in May. Lets just be hopeful anyway.

Drive-in services

Killian said hes heard of some efforts to have drive-in services on Easter Sunday.

Winfield First Free Will Baptist Church plans to meet this Sunday morning in Fayette Park, with car radios tuning in to a sermon preached on an FM signal from a small transmitter.

First Baptist Church of Fayette plans to have people drive their cars to a vacant lot on Easter Sunday and listen to a sermon together on a small FM transmitter.

I think by Easter youre going to see drive-in churches, he said.

Whats foolish is for people to think God will protect them, Killian said. You sure dont need to be walking around church hugging everybody.

McClure said hes stressing that there are other ways to serve God, apart from meeting in a sanctuary.

The church isnt closed; the building is, McClure said. Weve got an army of people doing grocery deliveries. Just because we cant have a service doesnt mean we cant do service.

On March 26, East Alabama Medical Center in Opelika repeated a request for churches to stop meeting in conventional fashion, a step that would help slow the spread of the deadly virus. The hospital said Lee County has spiked from 1 positive case on March 15 to 47 cases less than two weeks later and many people said a church was their last public setting visited.

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If you believe the headlines, Britain is a land of the selfish. The Im-all-right-Jack moron, happy to pile up his trolley with more bog roll and pasta than any butt or stomach could consume in a lifetime.

Weve seen them in the papers and on the telly, sneering into the cameras how they dont care about anyone but themselves. But are these panic buyers really the cause of the empty shelves in our supermarkets? Or is something more complicated, and less depressing, going on?

Talking around the industry, it seems theres a bit of both. Supermarket chiefs will tell you that sales in the last week have in some categories soared 130% as people have stampeded to stock up.

Says one: Its like Christmas, but with a difference. We plan for Christmas every year for months in advance. This has come almost overnight.

Modern supermarkets are super-marketing machines. They have supremely sophisticated algorithms that follow the sales data minute by minute, comparing against previous days, months and years, factoring in weather patterns, sporting events and an ever increasing number of other variables.

In normal times, it works well. Supply is kept tight so only a tiny fraction of food goes to waste, or into the discount bin. But come a black swan like coronavirus, and the whole system goes to pot.

Supermarkets and their suppliers are so used to operating on a hairs breadth inventory model that when a black swan event like coronavirus floats in, the system collapses.

One food supplier to the majors says the crisis has exposed the shortcomings of relying on algo computer models, and should lead to structural changes in the way food is supplied and stored, with more slack built into the system to prevent shortages.

But the industry rejects the charge.

As Clive Black, analyst at Shore Capital, puts it: Even Mystic Meg couldnt have predicted this level of demand.

One supermarket supply director adds: Harry Potter with his magic wand couldnt have kept our shelves stocked last week. It was like being plundered by plagues of locusts.

He witnessed a customer in one East London store battling with a security guard as she tried to wheel out a trolley loaded with tins of food without paying. She was refusing to pay because the queues were too long, he says.

He saw another shopper abusing an elderly female cashier at his Cambridge store for not having enough on the shelves. I thought the country was going to get thrown into total uproar like the riots of 2011, he says.

It was most marked in London and the south east  the rich were loading up their big cars and leaving nothing for everyone else. Poor people cant afford to panic buy.

While theres no doubt some people were behaving like that, data from market research group Kantar points to a more subtle shift in behaviour. It shows that, in the week to March 17, the amount people were buying per shop was up, but only by an average of 6%. The difference was, people were shopping 12% more often.

Says Kantars head of retail and consumer insights Fraser McKevitt: This is a case of not the few but the many. Lots of people buying a little bit more.

And when you think of it, that behaviour makes sense. People have seen that theres not been enough pasta or tinned tomatoes, so when they find it, they buy a little more than they immediately need.

Also, knowing there was a chance of a lockdown coming, they bought enough for a few days, just in case.

Supermarkets bridle at the suggestion that there has not been enough food for the public. As one director puts it: There is no food shortage. There is a glut of food. There is just too much demand.

She and others add that the gaps on shelves have eased in recent days as shoppers cupboards and fridges fill up.

But surely theres another factor at play. In normal times, much of what we eat comes from restaurants, cafes and pubs. Most office workers will buy breakfast or lunch from a local cafe and the kids will get a school dinner. Young Londoners these days barely know where their kitchen is, let alone how to cook.

Now all the restaurants are shut, that demand is surging into supermarkets.

Shores Black says Brits normally buy 60-65% of their food (measured by calories) in supermarkets. Now, it will be 85%-95% (the rest being made up of hospitals and prisons).

That extra demand is nothing to do with stockpiling or panic. Just ordinary people trying to fill their bellies.

So, supermarkets are shifting their supply chains to get more food into stores faster.

Two cite how they have instructed their pasta suppliers to cut the different shapes from eight or nine to perhaps two. That means less downtime in the factory changing the shaping tools from tagliatelle to spaghetti to fusilli and repeatedly swapping the packaging around.

People just want pasta. Theyre not too bothered what type, says one.

Fewer choices of pack sizes make an impact, too. Both in speeding up manufacture, but also making shipping less complicated.

Supermarkets are doing similar rationalisation of their product categories. Stop stocking fashion and homewares and you can make way for more pasta and sauces in your depots and stores.

Fresh foods arent so flexible: Eggs only come out of the hen six times a day, says one supermarket chief. You cant tickle them and they give you twins.

Geography can be a friend or enemy. Sourcing toilet rolls from Italy is difficult with travel restrictions. From Bolton, less so.

One grocer warns Spain might disrupt fruit exports as the virus spreads from Madrid. Theyre Spanish. They might just decide to keep them for their own market.

Theres another obvious solution to supply concerns  utilising the unused capacity in the food service industry.

Jobs are being lost by the hundred from catering suppliers as restaurants close, so Brakes, Bidvest and others are starting to work with supermarkets to boost supplies to their stores.

So, have the supermarkets got it right yet?

Two of the biggest chains say they are confident the supply-demand match has stabilised in the past three days. Measures to restrict how much shoppers can buy will help eke out supply through the day, they say.

But its early days yet. Since the Government forced us all to lock ourselves away like Rapunzels this week, the one permitted daily trip to the supermarket will become our only pleasure. The predictable weekly shop will become a thing of the past.

Hows your AI algo going to cope with that, Mr Tesco?

Oh, and theres another thing.

If you thought nobody had any room left at home to store more food, think again. AO World, Dixons Carphone and John Lewis say cooling equipment is flying out of the door.
 ,                  .      -  ...
Even the interview started in a way that was indicative of our current global shared reality.

Ziv, you need to get to help him get into the Zoom! Shiri Kenigsberg Levi yelled at her husband across the room in her home in Ashkelon, Israel. Theres a birthday party  they sent a link!

Youve most likely seen Levi on your Instagram feed. Or on Twitter. Or on Facebook. Levi has four kids, two computers and a never ending pile of WhatsApp messages from their teachers. Her 90-second diatribe on the trials and tribulations of online learning has ricocheted around the world as the coronavirus has forced parents and children to learn and work at home. Her video, filmed on a whim in her car, has been translated into more than 20 languages and been seen millions of times across platforms.
Announcements by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman relating to the impoverished section of the country is laudable, Manish Gunwani of Nippon India Mutual Fund said in an interview with CNBC-TV18.

Among a slew of measures, Sitharaman announced Rs 1.7 lakh crore package under Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Scheme

The Scheme will be in two silos - one food-related and one for cash transfer - largely under direct benefit transfer (DBT), Sitharman said in a video conference today.

"We have come with a package that will take care of the concerns of people who need immediate help. The package will help poor people from rural and urban areas, workers, widows, divyangs and senior citizens," the FM said.

According to Gunwani, the market will now keep an eye for a potential rate cut by the RBI, or any other stimulus measures.

The Monetary Policy Committee will hold a three-day meeting and the final outcome will be announced by the Reserve Bank of India on April 3.

On investors behaviour with respect to SIP or any MF redemption pressure, he said, "The first half of March was pretty strong in terms of domestic inflows in MF, but the second half was a washout due to logistic problems after lockdown."

"But overall investors interest has not been hit too much by the virus, which is a good sign and indicated that investors are looking for an investment with a long term perspective and the virus is a temporary problem," he added.

Gunwani is bullish on the market as he thinks the COVID-19 episode will conclude within the next 3-9 months. "Yes earnings are washout but if we look beyond that the market is very cheap on earnings yield, bond yields etc."

With largest competitive leaders in the industry, it is a very rare to get such kind of opportunity, said Gunwani who hopes Indian investors stay invested having suffered by big lockdown after COVID-19.

Equity benchmarks have so far corrected more than 35 percent from their record highs hit in January this year.

: The views and investment tips expressed by investment expert on Moneycontrol.com are his own and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.
The Elmhurst Hospital Center in New York City is fast becoming 'ground zero' for the city's battle with the coronavirus, with 13 patients dying at the facility in the span of just 24 hours.

A spokesperson with the hospital described the number of deaths as being 'consistent with the number of ICU patients being treated there.'

Health and Hospitals Deputy Press Secretary Stephanie Guzman explained to Patch: 'Staff are doing everything in our power to save every person who contracts COVID-19, but unfortunately this virus continues to take an especially terrible toll on the elderly and people with preexisting conditions.'

'Elmhurst is at the center of this crisis, and it's the number one priority of our public hospital system right now.'

Scroll down for video

A spokesperson with the hospital described the number of deaths as being 'consistent with the number of ICU patients being treated there'. Long lines have been forming extensively around the facility

Patients not suffering from coronavirus have already been transferred from the facility, which has 545 beds.

The hospital has added 25 staffers since Tuesday and more ventilators, according to City Council Member Francisco Moya. Moya previously worked at Elmhurst Hospital.

Health officials say Elmhurst Hospital, part of the city's municipal hospital system, already is running at more than 125 per cent capacity compared to its typical 80 per cent capacity rate.

Guzman did assert that the hospital was one of the top priorities of the municipal health system.

The hospital has added 25 staffers since Tuesday and more ventilators to tackle the increase of patients

Health officials say Elmhurst Hospital already is running at more than 125 per cent capacity compared to its typical 80 per cent capacity rate

Throughout the week, people in long queues could be seen waiting outside the hospitals.

A behind the scenes video by an ER doctor at the hospital, shared with the New York Times, shows just how intense the frontlines in the fight against coronavirus is at the facility.

Dr Colleen Smith shared a picture of a refrigerator truck she claimed was to transport bodies of dead coronavirus patients.

Roughly 6420 people in Queens have tested positive for the coronavirus

In the video, Dr Smith shows just five ventilators being unwrapped at the hospital. She adds that unless people die then they will have to 'beg' for ventilators again.

According to data from the city's health department, roughly 6420 people in Queens have tested positive for the coronavirus. That makes up approximately 32 per cent of the of New York's cases, which has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States.

Some 280 people have died from New York City.

There are more than 68,000 confirmed coronavirus cases across the U.S. as of Wednesday evening; more than 1,000 people have died
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 19:18:00|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- From sharing epidemic prevention and control experience to offering emergency medical aid, China has been actively promoting international cooperation in various fields to fight the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic with the rest of world.

The latest diagnosis and treatment plan, prevention and control plan and other technical documents have been compiled, translated and promptly shared with over 180 countries and more than 10 international and regional organizations, said Zeng Yixin, deputy director of the National Health Commission (NHC), at a press conference in Beijing.

He said that a meeting to share China's epidemic prevention and control experience was jointly held by the NHC and the WHO, which was attended by representatives from 77 countries and seven international organizations and was watched by over 100,000 people online.

China has also established an online knowledge center in the field of epidemic control and clinical treatment, as well as an expert database for international cooperation, Zeng said, adding that nearly 30 technical exchange meetings have been held with more than 100 countries and regions by video links.

In the meantime, China has also provided assistance to 89 countries and four international organizations.

Chinese medical workers and supplies have been sent to 28 Asian countries, 16 European countries, 26 African countries, nine countries in the Americas and 10 countries in the South Pacific, Deng Boqing, deputy head of the China International Development Cooperation Agency, said at the same press conference.

On the premise of fully ensuring domestic epidemic control, China has properly formulated its aid plan and offered assistance to other countries within its capability, Deng said.

Noting China is facing rising risks of imported cases of the novel coronavirus disease, Deng said China's assistance to other countries is conducive to the global fight against the virus and will consolidate its hard-won achievements in containing the spread.

Chinese researchers' contributions were also recognized by the global scientific and technological community.

For example, China shared the first completed genome sequence of the novel coronavirus on Jan. 11 and had built two platforms to share its scientific developments.

One of the platforms, the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Resource (2019nCoVR) database, has recorded more than 4 million downloads by users from 152 countries and regions as of Wednesday, according to Vice Minister of Science and Technology Xu Nanping.

Sharing scientific data and information is China's fundamental attitude to the COVID-19 control, said Xu.
: As the nation-wide



lockdown entered the third day, life for migrant workers in various parts of Kerala, with no wages, is an uphill task.

Many workers staying at Pullad in Pathnamthitta complained that they had to go without food in the past two days and wanted to return to their respective states.

"We want to go back to our homes. We do not want to die here," a worker from north India said and appealed to the state government to arrange a bus to take them home.

"We are daily wage workers. When there is no work, how will we get money?" he asked.

"We want to go home to be with our parents. We will manage some how there. We do not know the language here," the man said in Hindi.

Another worker said they came out of the building asking for help from police, but were driven away.

"We are not getting anything. We do not have money as there is no work," he added.

In Kannur, hundreds of people from neighbouring Tamil Nadu gathered at the collectorate on Thursday to tell the district authorities their woes.

The Additional District magistrate met them and said arrangements had been made for them to provide food in community kitchens. Food kits would also be distributed, the official said.

The workers, including many women, were insisting on returning to their homes to see their children.

"We have told that we cannot go now due to the lockdown," she said.

Some of them had tried to leave for TN in a lorry, but were stopped.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A trio of popular hiking trails in the Columbia River Gorge are the latest in sweeping closures of outdoor spaces in the Pacific Northwest.

Dog Mountain, Cape Horn and the Lyle Trailhead of Klickitat Trail will all close to the public, effective at the end of the day Wednesday, the U.S. Forest Service announced.

The new closures come two days after several popular trails and viewpoints closed in the waterfall corridor of the Columbia Gorge in Oregon.

State parks in both Oregon and Washington already closed to the public this week. Many national parks in both Oregon and Washington have also either shut down completely or partially.

The new trail closures come as Oregonians and Washingtonians have been ordered to cease all non-essential travel. However, executive orders in both states allow people to continue going outside for exercise, as long as they strictly maintain six feet of social distance.

Thats all but impossible at popular hiking trails, which have continued to draw large crowds in the early days of spring.

Though some trails in the Columbia River Gorge remain open, it may be hard to maintain the recommended six feet of space from other hikers on popular trails, as they attract people from miles around, the U.S. Forest Service said in a news release Wednesday. If an area is too crowded to maintain six feet of distance from other hikers, please do not exit your car. Have a backup plan and consider a walk in your local neighborhood.

Forest officials said more trail closures may be on the way, as the agency considers risks at other close proximity recreation areas.

--Jamie Hale; jhale@oregonian.com; 503-294-4077; @HaleJamesB

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Waterfront Toronto has extended the deadline for deciding whether to go forward with Sidewalk Labs proposal to build a high-tech district on the waterfront because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The tri-government agency issued the statement Thursday afternoon following a meeting of its board of directors.

In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, today the Waterfront Toronto Board of directors passed a motion to extend the date for a decision on moving forward with the Quayside project with Sidewalk Labs to June 25, read a tweet from Waterfront Toronto.

The deadline was May 20.

In a statement, Sidewalk Labs spokesperson Keerthana Rang said Sidewalk Labs is in agreement with the decision to delay due to COVID-19.

We look forward to continuing discussions with Waterfront Toronto on the project, she said.

Google sister firm Sidewalk Labs has proposed building a district complete with self-driving cars, wood-based buildings, data collecting sensors and other innovations on the eastern waterfront.

The project has met with opposition from some citizens, business people, government officials and others over concerns that the data collection might invade privacy of those who will live, work or pass through the district.

Waterfront Toronto has launched extensive consultations to get public feedback on the project.

Read more about:
A FATHER and son have been accused of assaulting two gardai by spitting on them amid public fears over the spread of Covid-19.

Paul Clarke (49) and his son James Clarke (27) allegedly spat at the gardai as they carried out a routine drug search in Dublin city centre this morning.

The incident was recorded by a crowd of onlookers and the footage has already been posted on Facebook, one of the alleged garda victims told Dublin District Court.

Judge Miriam Walsh refused both accused bail and remanded them in custody.

The accused, both from the same address at Clonard Road in Crumlin are charged with assaulting Gardai Kate Mulligan and Kevin Carthy.

James Clarke is also charged with garda obstruction and breach of the peace.

The offences are alleged to have happened at ODonovan Rossa Bridge, Dublin 8 this morning.

Garda Mulligan said she arrested Paul Clarke at Merchants Quay at 11.35am today and brought him to Kilmainham Garda Station, where he made no reply to the charges after caution.

Objecting to bail, she cited the seriousness of the charges, saying it was alleged the accused spat on her and Gda Kevin Carthy as they tried to carry out their duties.

She said there was a crowd gathered around, recording the incident and the gardai had since viewed this on social media and were making endeavours to get that footage.

In light of Covid-19 there is already fear in the population, Gda Mulligan said, and to spit at the gardai in this climate moreso than ever, its dangerous.

Defence barrister Sarah Connolly said Paul Clarke, who was on disability allowance, had medical difficulties, having had a kidney transplant three years ago. He also had issues with his gall bladder and ulcers on his neck that were travelling to his brain, she said.

Gda Carthy said he was dealing with a simple drug search with another person when the two co-accused became involved in the incident and it got out of hand.

They started spitting at us, there were official batons used and pepper spray was used, the garda said. I was spat at at least twice.

Ms Connolly said Paul Clarke denied spitting at the gardai. He accepted tensions were heightened and things might have got out of hand, she said, but he was not involved in spitting at the gardai.

The allegations were at the lower end, notwithstanding current matters, Ms Connolly said.

Current matters are going on and everybodys lives have totally changed and theres a new order in place at the moment, Judge Walsh said.

Paul Clarke stood wearing a blue surgical mask on his face during his bail hearing.

Gda Carthy said James Clarke was arrested at ODonovan Rossa Bridge and made no reply to the charges at Kilmainham Garda Station.

Objecting to bail, he said there had been a large crowd and a lot of witnesses had phones recording it.

In relation to Covid-19, spitting on anybody, let alone the gardai trying to carry out their duty is a very serious offence, he said.

It happened in front of a large crowd in the middle of Dublin city centre and he was fully against James Clarke being granted bail, he added.

James Clarke was also on disability allowance. When asked what for, he told the judge he had severe epilepsy.

Both gardai said they would not be satisfied with bail conditions, such as a requirement to sign on at a garda station.

Judge Walsh remanded the accused in custody, to appear in Cloverhill District Court on March 30.
King Edward Memorial (KEM) hospital became the second hospital in Mumbai to begin COVID-19 testing. However, if social media posts and the plea of the doctors are to be believed, they are working long hours with almost no protective gear. They're reportedly even going hungry in the process.

According to TOI, a social media message about resident doctors from KEM Hospital, Parel, having just a meal of biscuits and water late night for dinner touched a chord. Not much later the staff over at Taj Hotels sent food packets to all staffers in municipal hospitals.

@AUThackeray Residents doctors at KEM HOSPITAL AND other BMC run municipal hospital are not getting food as the mess and canteens are not getting enough supply.

These doctors are working day and night and they stay away form their homes. No tiffins available due to lockdown.  Shreedevi Tanksale (@docs28) March 25, 2020

Talking about the exhaustion, sleeplessness and hunger one post reportedly said, There was no availability of even tea or coffee. Ahead of us was a 12-hour fight till the morning. We had to work even if with an empty stomach !! We said to each other, 'chhod yaar dekha jayega' and went on to have Parle G with water which couldn't have tasted better.

However, after receiving the food, some took to Twitter to thank the staff at Taj.

A heartfelt thanks to @RNTata2000 @TajHotels and @SanjeevKapoor for being the savior and providing food to doctors in such crucial times. 

Food packets being provided to doctors of KEM medical college, Mumbai.

I hope others will come out and help too. #StayAtHome pic.twitter.com/7VJxcDQUVv  Crime Master Gogo (@mayur_mandrah) March 25, 2020

Multiple posts online suggest that neither do the doctors at the hospital have proper gear to treat patients, nor is their enough food supply in the hospital mess.

For the doctors at various hospitals who are at the frontlines not having proper medical gear puts their lives at risk. This is undeniably a problem that needs swift action.

@MoHFW_INDIA @CMOMaharashtra @mybmc @ndtv @aajtak @BBCHindi @indiatvnews @ZeeNews residents doctors of KEM hospital Mumbai have not been provided with N95 masks till now, what if these young doctors and medical staff get the infection treating patients? Who will be answerable?  Dr PRAKHAR NIGAM (@nigamprakharsci) March 26, 2020

TOI reports, Five medical students from civic-run medical colleges were quarantined after being put on duty at Kasturba Hospital and at Mumbai International Airport. They tested negative (but will continue in quarantine for a few more days before a second confirmatory test is done). With no proper facility the fear of doctors contracting COVID-19 is ever present.

Food needed at KEM. KEM hospital became the second hospital to start testing COVID-19 in mumbai. Due to curfew they have been facing shortage of food for doctors and patients @PMOIndia @AmitShah @AUThackeray @PiyushGoyal @Tejasvi_Surya #Feedthewarriors please help!  kunal ajani (@kunal_ajani) March 25, 2020

In a letter to chief minister former MARD (Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors) head, Dr Kalyani Dongre wrote, Doctors use one mask for three to four days due to shortage. This is a risk to their health. She pointed out that constant exposure to COVID-19 with inadequate and proper protective measures could create more manpower crunch.

Resident Doctors in Mumbai, with one of the highest number of Covid cases are working without adequate personal protective equipments, using three masks in a day. With the lockdown they are facing shortage of food. KEM doctors had to seek the help of an NGO to secure meals, sad! pic.twitter.com/57GjUgzoKk  swagata yadavar (@swagata_y) March 24, 2020

A member of the Association of State Medical Interns of Maharashtra (ASMI) reportedly said, "Despite a pandemic, we have a shortage of masks, gloves, etc. While the dedicated Covid-19 OPD at JJ Hospital has everything, the regular casualty doesn't have enough amount of protective gear. What happens if a COVID-19 patient who is asymptomatic or has regular fever and cough walks into the casualty? Wouldn't it expose us to the infection?

TOI

Here is the thing, doctors do not need us to clap hands for them, people need to pressure the government to equip the doctors, who are risking their lives, with the proper protective gear and ensure they have essential supplies like food to sustain themselves!
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President Klaus Iohannis reiterated his call on Romanians on Thursday to observe the restrictions imposed by the authorities and stay home.

"I want to reiterate my call on all Romanians: please, dear Romanians, observe the restrictions imposed by the authorities! Stay home, because only this way we can protect our heath. The better we manage now to keep under control and limit the spreading of the coronavirus, the faster we can all return to the activities we are missing now. I know it is hard, but only making these sacrifices, we will win the fight with this extremely dangerous enemy," Iohannis said at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace.
What now? Everyone has to agree in order to get this thing done quickly. Literally. That's because the Senate needs unanimous approval in order to pass this. Bookmark that idea.

In case you haven't noticed, no one in Washington ever agrees on much of anything. Yes, they all agree a stimulus should pass. But the details are difficult and passing it will get harder the more time people have to digest it.

What's in the bill?

Stimulus checks! -- Most Americans will get some kind of help from the latest draft of this bill (it's still a draft!). But not everyone. About 90% of Americans would be eligible for some kind of payment, according to one estimate. Read here for Katie Lobosco and Tami Luhby's breakdown.

Key element: $250 billion to give up to $1,200 to individuals, $2,400 to couples, $500 per child -- However, the payments would start to phase out for individuals with adjusted gross incomes of more than $75,000, and those making more than $99,000 would not qualify at all. The thresholds are doubled for couples.
LEWISTON, ID - Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, based in Pullman, has issued a statement announcing that the Nez Perce County coronavirus patient is an SEL employee at its Lewiston operation. SEL is conducting additional disinfection of relevant workspaces.

At a 7:00 p.m. Tuesday press conference, officials from the Public Health - Idaho North Central District announced Nez Perce County's first confirmed case of coronavirus. The positive test result came in to health officials around 5:00 p.m. Tuesday.

The Nez Perce County adult is under the age of 60. Officials declined to specify in the press conference if the patient is a male or female, their specific age, or disclose in what city the person lives, citing patient privacy.
Media streaming app Plex is now offering its Live TV feature for free to all users until 30 June.

Previously, Live TV was available exclusively to Plex users who subscribed to the Plex Pass service, but it will now be available for all users.

The service requires an HD antenna and tuner, and allows you to stream free live TV to all of your connected devices.

Plex noted that DVR and other premium features related to Live TV will remain exclusive to Plex Pass subscribers throughout this promotional period.

If you have an HD antenna and tuner, then now you can stream your free live TV to all your devices without Plex Pass through the end of June (DVR and other premium features still require a Plex Pass), Plex said.

And if you dont, we got some of our hardware partners to offer them to Plex users at a discount for a limited time.

Plexs Live TV feature is not currently supported in South Africa  the full list of supported countries can be found here.

Streaming services under strain

Streaming services including Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube are under increased strain due to the surge in traffic caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Many of these services have begun reducing the quality of their video streams worldwide to ensure that their servers can cope with the increased demand.

The measures taken by Netflix to reduce the bit rate of its video streams in Europe should result in a decrease in traffic of 25%, the company said.

It added that while the bit rate will be decreased, the platform should still offer high-quality video streams.

YouTube has now made standard definition the default viewing resolution worldwide in an effort to reduce traffic on its platform.

While YouTube viewing has historically spiked in the evening when people are off work, consumption is now more steady across the day, the company said.

Now read: Coronavirus WhatsApp service used in South Africa to go global
Tyler Florence returns to host season 12 of The Great Food Truck Race, which premieres tonight, March 26, at 9 p.m. ET. Viewers can watch it on the Food Network, Hulu + Live or fuboTV (7-day free trial).

The race begins in the so-called food truck capital of the world of Los Angeles. There are seven food truck teams: Team Bachelor Kitchen from Austin; Team Crystals Comfort Food from Philadelphia; Team Eat My Crust from Phoenix; Team Fat Kid from Virginia Beach; Team Lunch Ladies from Marthas Vineyard; Team Mystikka Masala from Dallas; Team Super Sope from Turlock, Calif.

The teams are tasked with making and selling luxe food thats inspired by whats traditionally sold at food trucks. Private-plane hors doeuvres and champagne-infused dishes are what fans can look forward to in this first challenge. One team will get eliminated from the competition tonight.

The six remaining teams will go onto San Diego in next weeks episode and have to make something delicious out of a slimy sea creature. The winner of the overall competition will receive $50,000.

What channel is Food Network on?

You can find which channel Food Network is on by using the channel finders here: Verizon Fios, AT&T U-verse, Comcast Xfinity, Spectrum/Charter, Optimum/Altice, DIRECTV and Dish.

Where can I watch it if I dont have cable?

You can watch it on Hulu + Live or fuboTV (7-day free trial).
Nicols Maduro effectively converted Venezuela into a criminal enterprise at the service of drug traffickers and terrorist groups as he and his allies stole billions from the South American country, the Justice Department charged in several indictments against the embattled socialist and his inner circle that were made public Thursday.

The coordinated unsealing of indictments against 14 officials and government-connected individuals, and rewards of USD 55 million against Maduro and four others, attacked all the key planks of what Attorney General William Barr called the "corrupt Venezuelan regime," including the Maduro-dominated judiciary and the powerful armed forces.

One indictment by prosecutors in New York accused Maduro and socialist party boss Diosdado Cabello, head of the rubber-stamping constitutional assembly, of conspiring with Colombian rebels and members of the military "to flood the United States with cocaine" and use the drug trade as a "weapon against America."



Criminal acts to advance a drug and weapons conspiracy that dates back to the start of Hugo Chavez's revolution in 1999 occurred as far afield as Syria, Mexico, Honduras and Iran, the indictment alleged. Barr estimated that the conspiracy helped smuggle as much as 250 metric tons of cocaine a year are out of South America.

Maduro blasted back by accusing the US and Colombia of "giving orders to flood Venezuela with violence."



His chief prosecutor also announced an investigation against opposition leader Juan Guaid after one of the individuals indicted on drug charges, retired army Gen. Cliver Alcala, said in a radio interview Thursday that he signed a contract with the opposition leader and his American "advisers" to purchase US assault rifles for a planned coup against Maduro.

Guaid's team said he has never met Alcala, who has been living openly in Colombia since 2018 despite having been previously sanctioned by the US for drug smuggling.

"As head of state, I am obligated to defend peace and the stability of our homeland given any circumstance that arises," Maduro tweeted.

As the indictments were announced, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the State Department would offer cash rewards for information leading to the arrests or convictions of Maduro and his associates, including rewards of up to USD 15 million for Maduro and up to USD 10 million each for four others.

"The Maduro regime is awash in corruption and criminality," Barr said in an online conference from Washington. "While the Venezuelan people suffer, this cabal lines their pockets with drug money, and the proceeds of their corruption. And this has to come to an end."



In Miami, prosecutors charged Supreme Court Chief Justice Maikel Moreno with laundering in the US at least USD 3 million in illegal proceeds from case fixing in Venezuela, including one involving a General Motors factory.

Much of the money he spent on private aircraft, luxury watches and shopping at Prada, prosecutors allege. Maduro's Defense Minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino, was charged with conspiracy to smuggle narcotics in a May 2019 indictment unsealed in Washington.

The shock indictment of a functioning head of state is highly unusual and is bound to ratchet up tensions between Washington and Caracas as the spread of the coronavirus threatens to collapse Venezuela's health system and oil-dependent economy driven deep into the ground by years of corruption and US sanctions.

Maduro has ordered Venezuelans to stay home to try to stave off the spread of the virus that officials say has infected 106 people.

Analysts said the indictments could boost US President Donald Trump's re-election chances in the key swing state of Florida, which he won by a narrow margin in 2016 and where Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans fleeing authoritarian regimes have political muscle.

But its unclear how it brings Venezuela any closer to ending a 15-month standoff between Maduro, who has the support of Russia and China, and the US-backed opposition leader Juan Guaid. It also could fragment the US0-led coalition against Maduro if European and Latin American allies think the Trump administration is overreaching.

"This kind of action does nothing to help a negotiated solution something that's already really difficult," said Roberta Jacobson, who served as the State Department's top diplomat for Latin America until 2018.

Maduro, a 57-year-old former bus driver, portrays himself as an everyman icon of the Latin American left. He's long accused the US "empire" of looking for any excuse to take control of the world's largest oil reserves, likening its plotting to the 1989 invasion of Panama and the removal of strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega to face drug trafficking charges in Florida.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Seeking immediate support from the government, Council of Leather Exports (CLE) on Thursday said shipment orders worth USD 1 billion (around Rs 7,600 crore) was cancelled in the last one week on account of coronavirus spread.

CLE Chairman Aqeel Ahmed Panaruna urged the government for immediate relief for the exporters. Over 90 per cent of our exporters fall under MSME and there is a huge loss of capital for all of them, he said in a statement.

FOLLOW LIVE CORONAVIRUS UPDATES HERE

The industry employs 4.42 million people. In these challenging times the sector is facing huge losses and "I am extremely concerned that the companies in the leather, leather products and footwear sector (including non-leather footwear, components and sub-suppliers) will not survive, unless the central and state governments implement a stimulus package," the chairman said.

Explaining the current situation, Panaruna said the overseas buyers are continuously cancelling their export orders due to unstable situation in major markets, including Italy, Germany, Spain, France, the UK and US, which constitute about 65 per cent of leather exports.

Further, the buyers have put-on hold the shipments which are ready for export, he said. "The buyers in other major markets have also drastically reduced their buying forecasts. The virus spread has adversely impacted more than 2,700 registered manufacturer exporters who are in deep trouble across pan India," he added.
BEIJING, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- On March 19, the 2019-nCoV Detection Kit and Nucleic Acid Extraction Donation & Shipment Ceremony was held in Beijing. Beijing Applied Biological Technologies Co., Ltd. (XABT) was invited to the event at which the biologics maker donated an allotment of nucleic acid detection kits that it had produced to Italy. Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries president and China Peace and Development Foundation honorary president Li Xiaolin, as well as Italian ambassador to China Luca Ferrari delivered speeches at the event.

At the ceremony, ambassador Luca Ferrari, on behalf of the Italian government and people, thanked the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, the China Peace and Development Foundation and XABT for the sincere assistance they were providing to Italy. He emphasized the phrase "a friend in need is a friend indeed," during his speech. The fact that China and Italy are helping each other in facing the crisis shows the deep friendship between the two countries. With close solidarity, China and Italy will surely overcome the epidemic and do so soon.

Nucleic acid detection is an important detection and screening method for 2019-nCoV used by the World Health Organization (WHO) and national health authorities. XABT, among all the companies that have obtained the registration certificate from the National Medical Products Administration of China for the coronavirus nucleic acid detection reagent, is one of the few high-tech companies producing the rapid detection technology covering three genes, ORF1ab, N and E. The company's 2019-nCoV nucleic acid detection kit (fluorescence PCR method) can achieve up to 99.9% accuracy due to the specific binding at the molecular level. The company has received the ISO13485 system certification, and its products, all of which conform to the CE certification standards of the European Union, are being adopted by more and more countries as a tool to control and prevent the further spread of the virus.

The company's official website: http://www.x-abt.com/en/

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1136459/XABT_1.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1136458/XABT_2.jpg
JERUSALEM, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Researchers at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as several Yissum start-up companies are exploring a variety of methods to combat the COVID-19 virus, through investigations into AI drug discovery, biochemical detection tools and diagnostic capabilities. A number of researchers submitted proposals to the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) today under the IIA's program to fast track Covid-19 related research.

"We are reaching out to industry to help bring these ideas to fruition," said Dr. Itzik Goldwaser, CEO of Yissum, the technology transfer company of the Hebrew University. "Among the early stage technologies currently being developed are creative ideas spanning drug discovery, MedTech and medical equipment as well as systems to better diagnose and treat coronavirus. Our researchers have proposed a large number of ideas that include repurposing current drug treatments, face masks that can actively kill the Covid-19 virus, and even plant-based diagnostic tools and treatments."

In addition to the research proposals submitted to the IIA, many Yissum subsidiaries have also rapidly adjusted to use their established core technologies to fight against the deadly virus.

Notable among them are:

Pepticom: Pepticom is implementing its proprietary core AI technology on various Coronavirus proteins and the ACE2 to identify novel inhibitors that can fight Sars Cov2. They are currently looking for partners to validate and develop these peptide drug candidates.

Enlivex: Has developed a medication that could help treat severe symptoms of covid-19 including catastrophic organ failure.

For further details on how to partner with Yissum on these emerging technologies, please contact us through our website at www.yissum.co.il

About Yissum

Yissum is the technology transfer company of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Founded in 1964, it serves as a bridge between cutting-edge academic research and a global community of entrepreneurs, investors, and industry. Yissum's mission is to benefit society by converting extraordinary innovations and transformational technologies into commercial solutions that address our most urgent global challenges. Yissum has registered over 10,750+ patents globally; licensed over 1050+ technologies and has spun out more than 170 companies. Yissum's business partners span the globe and include companies such as Boston Scientific, Google, ICL, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Microsoft, Novartis and many more. For further information please visit www.yissum.co.il

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/704545/Yissum_Logo.jpg

Media Contact: Estee Yaari, Media Relations, Yissum, [email protected]

SOURCE Yissum

Related Links

http://www.yissum.co.il


San Antonio recorded its third death from COVID-19, a woman in her 50s who had chronic underlying health conditions, the Metropolitan Health District said Wednesday.

She died at Mission Trail Baptist Hospital, where she was being treated.

The first Air Force basic training recruit to test positive for coronavirus, meanwhile, was moved into isolation Wednesday and placed under observation.

The number of coronavirus cases in Bexar County rose to 84, an increase of 15 cases from Tuesday, according to Metro Health. The new total includes 27 cases related to community spread, or local infections from an unknown source, and 36 stemming from travel. Nine are still under investigation.

A woman in her 80s who died Saturday in hospice care after receiving treatment at Brooke Army Medical Center was the citys first coronavirus-related death. She, too, had underlying health issues, officials said. Authorities have not yet said whether other health issues were a factor in the death Tuesday of a woman in her 40s, a part-time employee of St. Lukes Catholic Church who had been treated at University Hospital.

Kendall Countys third case of coronavirus also was confirmed Wednesday, a day after the Boerne City Council voted to extend the mayors emergency health declaration through April 23.

Comal County announced two more cases, one of them travel related and the other still undetermined, bringing its total to seven. The county had received 92 COVID-19 test results, including the seven positive results. Twenty-eight results are still pending.

County Judge Sherman Krause said health workers submitting COVID-19 tests to private regional labs sometimes receive overnight, within about 12 hours, and at other times have waited for days.

Sometimes the delay is because of how many other cities are in front of us. But there is usually a delay with the announcement of these numbers, he said.

Krista Torralva covers several school districts and public universities in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | Krista.Torralva@express-news.net | Twitter: @KMTorralva
Waive utility bills

Re: Shift aquifer funding to COVID-19 assistance, by Josh Brodesky, Other Views, Sunday:

Its sad to see what is happening to many of our small businesses because of this virus. Really, there is nothing we can do to avoid that. Our contact at restaurants and social activities makes it dangerous for us to socialize.

Theres no way these small businesses can recoup their losses for this time period. Once the revenue is lost, it is gone. What we can do is minimize their losses by reducing their expenses to survive.

Another thing the city can do, but has not been addressed, is waive SAWS and CPS Energy bills during this period. The businesses are doing everything they can. We should try to help in every way we can as a city.

J.A. Tony Saucedo Jr.

On ExpressNews.com: Brodesky: Shift aquifer funding to COVID-19 assistance

Good work, chef!

Shoutout to Jason Dady and all his employees for doing everything they can to keep the San Antonio restaurant scene alive. Theyre stepping up with meals for those affected in industries like hospitality.

Phillip Hooge

(Some) words inspire

Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

John F. Kennedy in 1961: Ask not what your country can do for you  ask what you can do for your country.

Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965: A presidents hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

Ronald Reagan in 1989: We the People tell the government what to do; it doesnt tell us.

Donald Trump in 2020: No, I dont take responsibility at all.

Andy Luevano
It is an undoubtedly strange time for all of us, and it feels even stranger still to be birthing a baby in the current climate.

Im due to have a baby in about three weeks and not only will our families, including my daughter, not be able to visit us in hospital (support people and postpartum visitors are being limited to one), we are not sure whether it is safe for our parents, who live a plane ride or a long drive away, to come and visit at all.

Sarah Berry with her daughter.

A time of celebration has become, like the rest of our lives right now, a time of isolation.

But although pregnancy can feel uncertain without the added pressure of coronavirus, there is no need to panic.
The Chinese government is touting bile extracted from caged bears as a treatment for coronavirus, which experts have branded hugely irresponsible.

Scientists agree that Chinas wildlife trade  notably markets where species are crammed closely together  was the most likely source of the coronavirus pandemic.

But in a list of recommended treatments for Covid-19, the countrys National Health Commission promotes injections of a traditional medicine treatment containing bear bile.

An estimated 12,000 bears are held in captivity on farms and milked regularly for their bile in China and Vietnam.

According to charity Animals Asia, the cages in China are sometimes so small that the bears are unable to turn around or stand on all fours. Some are put into cages as cubs and never leave them. They may grow too large to fit through the cage door or remain stunted.



Bears may be kept caged like this for up to 30 years. This has a terrible effect on the physical and mental wellbeing, the group says.

The animals bile  a digestive fluid produced by the liver and stored in the gallbladder  is harvested through invasive surgery, which causes severe suffering, pain and infection.

Bear bile is an ingredient of tan re qing, injections of which are among recommended treatments for severe and critical coronavirus in a plan published three weeks ago, circulated by Chinese state media.

Traditional Chinese medicine practitioners typically use tan re qing to treat bronchitis but Clifford Steer, a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who has studied the subject, says there is no evidence that bear bile is an effective treatment for coronavirus, National Geographic reported.

Last month, the Chinese government banned the eating and transport for eating of wild animals as the coronavirus was spreading, but it did not cover use of wildlife products in Chinese medicine or as ornamental items.

Aron White, a China specialist with the Environmental Investigation Agency, said: Restricting the eating of wildlife while promoting medicines containing wildlife parts exemplifies the mixed messages being sent by Chinese authorities on wildlife trade.

Aside from the irony of promoting a wildlife product for treatment of a disease which the scientific community has overwhelmingly concluded originated in wildlife, the continued promotion of the use of threatened wildlife in medicine is hugely irresponsible in an era of unprecedented biodiversity loss, including illegal and unsustainable trade.

The investigative group said that even if bear bile and tiger bone are taken from captive animals, it does not relieve pressure on endangered wild populations, as such legal markets fuel demand for threatened wildlife.

At this moment in history, as the world is crippled by the coronavirus pandemic, there could be no better time to end the use of the parts of threatened wildlife in medicine, especially as recent surveys conducted in China showed the vast majority of respondents were opposed to use of wildlife in medicine.

At bear bile farms in China and across southeast Asia, neglect and disease are common, according to Animals Asia, which states: Most farmed bears are starved, dehydrated and suffering from multiple diseases and malignant tumours that not only contaminate their bile but ultimately kill them.

Recommended Bear held captive in cage since birth freed by campaigners

The group says it has also seen old or very sick bears  those that fail to produce bile  simply left to starve to death in their cages.

Pathology reports have shown that bile from sick bears is often contaminated with blood, pus, faeces, urine, bacteria and cancer cells, it says.

Earlier this year, illegal wildlife traders in China and Laos were found to be cashing in on fears over the coronavirus outbreak in China by peddling fake cures containing rhino horn and other endangered species products.

In 2016, Chinese law was amended to further legitimise the commercial use of wildlife, asserting that animals may be used for traditional Chinese medicine.
Chennai, March 26 : The Tamil Nadu government on Thursday warned of stringent action against private banks, self-help groups, and finance companies if they go on to collect interest on loans from small borrowers.

The government also permitted small caterers serving the elderly to continue supply of cooked food, provided their vehicles sport the sticker 'Essential Service' and the drivers have identity cards.

In a statement issued here, the government said nobody is going to work owing to the lockdown and hence private banks, self-help groups and finance companies should not collect their loan dues till further orders.

The government also announced various other measures to ease the life of the people belonging to different sectors during the 21-day nationwide lockdown period.

The other measures taken decided by the government after a meeting of District Collectors held by Chief Minister K.Palaniswami through video conferencing: Setting up of nine groups comprising of IAS officers to smoothen the hindrances due to the lockdown;

Setting up of vegetables and fruits markets in big grounds where three feet social distancing could be maintained;

Spraying of disinfectants using fire service vehicles in crowded localities;

Supply of two months medicines to pregnant woman, perons with chronic ailments like blood pressure, AIDS, tuberculosis and diabetes;

Commissioner of Greater Chennai Corporation to allow production and movement of essential items;

Issue of identity cards by Distict Collector Personal Assistant and concerned police stations;

Permitting organisations to supply essential items, medicines to grocery and cooperative stores and residences;

Village Administrative Officers to permits to farmers to move their products;

Permitting movement of agricultural harvesting machines, farm labourers and farm products to markets and factories;

Permitting movement of livestocks, cattle feed, fish and eggs;

In case of emergencies elderly persons, dialysis patients and quarantined families can call 108 number

District Collectors to monitor 54,000 persons who had come from overseas and home quarantined and also ensure supply of essential items to the families home quarantined.
Ottawa, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - BluMetric Environmental Inc. (TSXV: BLM) announces that Jane Pagel, Geoff Simonett, Jeffrey W. Talley, Scott MacFabe and Ian Macdonald were elected to BluMetric's Board of Directors at its fiscal 2019 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders held on 25 March 2020. Ian Macdonald is a new director and is subject to TSX Venture approval.

Mr. Ian Macdonald, M.Sc., P.Geo., EP (CEA) is a professional geoscientist and certified environmental auditor. He has been with BluMetric and its affiliates for more than 34 years working in the earth science and auditing fields. Mr. Macdonald manages projects in multiple sites and multiple jurisdictions across Canada in the areas of contaminant hydrogeology and remediation, source water protection, waste management and management systems. Mr. Macdonald is a Past President of the PGO (Professional Geoscientists Ontario), has been a member of numerous municipal and institutional advisory committees, and has a wide understanding of consulting services.

BluMetric also announces the appointment of Mr. Geoff Simonett as Chair of its Board of Directors. He has been an independent Director since 23 March 2016. During this time, he has served as Chair of the Human Resources and Compensation Committee as well as Chair of the Audit Committee.

Pursuant to the Company's Board compensation policy, BluMetric has granted options for 20,000 common shares to Mr. Geoff Simonett, who is entering his fourth year of service, as well as options for 20,000 common shares to Ms. Jane Pagel, who is entering her sixth year of service. These options are granted effective 25 March 2020, vest over one year and are exercisable into common shares of BluMetric at a price of $0.08 per share for five years.

About BluMetric Environmental Inc.

BluMetric Environmental Inc. is an established publicly traded environmental consulting and engineering company with expertise across professional and trade disciplines and technologies that allow for the design, fabrication and delivery of sustainable solutions to environmental and water challenges. BluMetric has over 150 employees operating in ten offices and over 40 years of expertise. Headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, BluMetric's team of industry experts serves Commercial, Industrial, Military, Mining and Government clients in Canada and the United States.

For more information, please visit www.BluMetric.ca, or contact:

Scott MacFabe, CEO

BluMetric Environmental Inc.

Tel: 613.839.3053

Email: smacfabe@blumetric.ca



Vivian Karaiskos, CFO

BluMetric Environmental Inc.

Tel: 613.839.3053

Email: vkaraiskos@blumetric.ca

Forward-Looking Statements

Some of the statements in this press release, including those relating to the Company's discussions of contractual agreements, future products, opportunities, cost initiatives, strategies, and other statements that are predictive in nature, that depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, or that include words such as "expects", "anticipates", "intends", "plans", "believes", "estimates", or similar expressions, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of securities laws. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, the information concerning possible or assumed future results of operations of the Company. These statements are not historical facts but instead represent only the Company's expectations, estimates, and projections regarding future events. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update or release any revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this communication or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/53853
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 20:37:51|Editor: mingmei

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Chinese Ambassador to Bangladesh Li Jiming (5th, L) and Bangladeshi government officials pose for photos at the handover ceremony for emergency medical supplies in Dhaka, Bangladesh, March 26, 2020. A large consignment of emergency medical supplies provided by the Chinese government to the Bangladeshi government after Dhaka's urgent request arrived on Thursday afternoon at the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport on a special Chinese flight. (Xinhua/Liu Chuntao)

DHAKA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- A large consignment of emergency medical supplies provided by the Chinese government to the Bangladeshi government after Dhaka's urgent request arrived on Thursday afternoon at the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport on a special Chinese flight.

The aid consists of 10,000 testing reagents, 15,000 surgical masks, 10,000 medical protective clothing and 1,000 infrared thermometers, according to a release issued by the Chinese Embassy in Dhaka.

Chinese Ambassador to Bangladesh Li Jiming handed over the emergency medical supplies to the Bangladeshi government officials at the airport.

"Counting from the day we received the request letter from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of the Bangladesh government on March 15th, it takes only 12 days for all these most urgently needed medical logistics to arrive in Dhaka now, the speed of China emergency aid project has definitely made a record and nothing could be better" Li said.

According to an Embassy official, this is the second batch of the Chinese supplies, as about 500 COVID-19 test reagents were delivered to Bangladesh earlier on an urgent basis.

Also a part of medical supply for Bangladesh promised by China's Jack Ma Foundation is expected to reach Dhaka this Saturday and Sunday.

Bangladesh is reportedly in dire need for such medical supplies as the entire COVID-19 situation escalates in the country.

On Thursday, five more people have tested positive for COVID-19 in Bangladesh, making it 44 total confirmed cases in the country.

"The number of cases increased to 44, with five more cases reported in the last 24 hours," said Meerjady Sabrina Flora, head of the country's Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) under the Health Ministry, at a press conference through online.

Of the total cases in the country, she said, "We've recorded five deaths so far while 11 patients have recovered."

Bangladesh on Wednesday announced the country's fifth death related to the COVID-19.
This is a clear way we can help, and we are looking for other opportunities to help our area in this crisis.

Graphite Metallizing Corporation (Graphalloy), a family-run manufacturing company in Yonkers, NY, has donated almost 3,000 N95 masks to local hospitals in an effort to help fight the Covid-19 outbreak and protect healthcare workers and first responders. The masks are used at the company as a safety measure for employees when machining parts. Due to the severity of the crisis, the company decided that these masks should be given to those who need it most right now.

Recipients of the masks included NYU-Langone Hospital, Columbia Presbyterian, St. John's Hospital in Yonkers, and Yonkers Police and first responders. These types of donations can help overcome a serious shortage that many healthcare workers and first responders are facing. "This is a clear way we can help, and we are looking for other opportunities to help our area in this crisis," said Eben Walker, General Manager of Graphite Metallizing.

Graphite Metallizing Corporation produces the bearing material Graphalloy, a self-lubricating graphite/metal alloy that can withstand high temperatures. Graphalloy is utilized in high temperature food applications, pumps, wastewater treatment plants, power plants, and other businesses and utilities to reduce equipment failures and shutdowns. The company has been manufacturing in Yonkers, New York since 1913.
C oronation Street is the latest television series to be disrupted due to the outbreak of coronavirus.

ITV has announced that the long-running soap will suspend production with effect from 23rd March, just days after BBC halted filming on EastEnders.

Episodes will be spaced further apart than usual from Monday 30th March.

Is Coronation Street on tonight?

Coronation Street will be on television tonight. It will air at the normal time of 7:30pm.

As the series confirmed on Twitter, from Monday 30th March, the show will air on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7:30pm.

A statement on ITVs website confirms that this reduction in scheduling will ensure Coronation Street and Emmerdale can broadcast at least until the early summer.

Corrie fans applauded the soaps decision to suspend production, with one writing: "thank you guys so so much for staying on air.

"Yous [sic] are the best, still hope everyone is keeping safe though and looking after themselves. Proud to support.

Thank you for trying so hard and staying on air. currently planning to watch those three episodes twice over so that way ill get my fix, wrote another.

Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures 1 /81 Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures A deserted Westminster Bridge PA A man wearing a face mask or covering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, walks past customers sat outside a restaurant AFP via Getty Images Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the Coronavirus lockdown Andrew Parsons Runners pass cardboard cutouts of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William during the London Marathon in London AP An empty escalator at Charing Coss London Underground tube station Jeremy Selwyn Electronic bilboards displays a message warning people to stay home in Sheffield PA A sign is displayed in the window of a student accommodation building following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Mancheste Reuters People take part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions, in Londo AP People sing and dance in Leicester Square on the eve on the 10PM curfew Reuters Hearts painted by a team of artists from Upfest are seen in the grass at Queen Square, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Bristol Reuters Graffiti reads 'good luck and stay safe', as the number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases grow around the world, under a bridge in London Reuters A sign is pictured in Soho, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London Reuters Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures, during a coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, London AP A person runs past posters with a message of hope, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Manchester REUTERS Riot police face protesters who took part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions in London AP An image of The Queen eith quotes from her broadcast to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the Coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images Durdle Door in Dorset Reuters Captain Tom Moore via Reuters Mia, aged 8, and Jack, aged 5, take part in "PE with Joe" a daily live workout with Joe Wicks on Youtube to help kids stay fit who have to stay indoors due to the Coronavirus outbreak PA An NHS worker reacts at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital during the Clap for our Carers campaign in support of the NHS Reuters Goats which have taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno @AndrewStuart via PA Tobias Weller PA Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed London Landscapes: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, central London. Matt Writtle A newspaper vendor in Manchester city centre giving away free toilet rolls with every paper bought as shops run low on supplies due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus PA Theo Clay looks out of his window next to his hand-drawn picture of a rainbow in Liverpool, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continue Reuters A young man cuts another man's hair on top of a closed hairdresser in Oxford Reuters General view of the new NHS Nightingale Hospital, built to fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London via Reuters Jason Baird is seen dressed as Spiderman during his daily exercise to cheer up local children in Stockport, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters A woman wearing a face mask walks past Buckingham Palace Getty Images A man holds mobile phone displaying a text message alert sent by the government warning that new rules are in force across the UK and people must stay at home PA Medical staff on the Covid-19 ward at the Neath Port Talbot Hospital, in Wales, as the health services continue their response to the coronavirus outbreak. PA Prime Minister Boris Johnson taking part in a virtual Cabinet meeting with his top team of ministers PA A shopper walks past empty shelves in a Lidl store on in Wallington. After spates of "panic buying" cleared supermarket shelves of items like toilet paper and cleaning products, stores across the UK have introduced limits on purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have also created special time slots for the elderly and other shoppers vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Getty Images People on a busy tube train in London at rush hour PA Mia, aged 8 and her brother Jack, aged 5 from Essex, continue their school work at home, after being sent home due to the coronavirus PA Children are painting 'Chase the rainbows' artwork and springing up in windows across the country Reuters Social distancing in Primrose Hill Jeremy Selwyn A general view of a locked gate at Anfield, Liverpool as The Premier League has been suspended PA Homeless people in London AFP via Getty Images A piece of art by the artist, known as the Rebel Bear has appeared on a wall on Bank Street in Glasgow. The new addition to Glasgow's street art is capturing the global Coronavirus crisis. The piece features a woman and a man pulling back to give each other a kiss PA The Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, London, for Windsor Castle to socially distance herself amid the coronavirus pandemic PA A general view on Grey street, Newcastle as coronavirus cases grow around the world Reuters Matt Raw, a British national who returned from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China, leaves quaratine at Arrowe Park Hospital on Merseyside PA Britain's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news conference inside 10 Downing Street Reuters The ticket-validation terminals at the tram stop on Edinburgh's Princes Street are cleaned following the coronavirus outbreak. PA Locked school gates at Rockcliffe First School in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear PA A sign at a Sainsbury's supermarket informs customers that limits have been set on a small number of products as the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases grow around the world Reuters Jawad Javed delivers coronavirus protection kits that he and his wife have put together to the vulnerable people of their community of Stenhousemuir, between Glasgow and Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" Getty Images A man who appears to be homeless sleeping wearing a mask today in Victoria Jeremy Selwyn A pedestrian walks past graffiti that reads "Diseases are in the City" in Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images Staff from The Lyric Theatre, London inform patrons, as it shuts its doors PA A quiet looking George IV Bridge in Edinburgh PA A quieter than usual British Museum Getty Images A racegoer attends Cheltenham in a fashionable face mask SplashNews.com A commuter wears a face mask at London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn A empty restaurant in the Bull Ring Shopping Centre Getty Images A deserted Trafalgar Square in London PA Passengers determined to avoid the coronavirus before leaving the UK arrive at Gatwick Airport Getty Images

ITV confirmed the suspension of both soaps yesterday, saying in a statement: ITV has sadly taken the decision to suspend production of the soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale with effect from Monday 23 March.

Weve been doing our best to carry on filming, whilst adhering to the Governments latest health guidelines, to ensure weve episodes of both soaps airing on ITV until at least the early summer.

However, the health and well-being of the production teams, actors, crew and their families is of paramount importance to us and we now feel that the time has come to stop filming.

Wed like to thank our viewers for their support and hope they continue to enjoy both soaps in the coming months.

Actress Melanie Hill said on Twitter that the cast will be back to work soon.

Just wanted to say that we will be back at work SOON -we are all gutted to be standing down but know its for the best - #staysafe #corrie.
" " France is moving towards a system in which disposable, one-use cups and plates will be made of biodegradable material. Kevin Kurek/EyeEm/Getty Images

In an effort to stem excessive waste, France has passed a law banning disposable plastic cups, plates and cutlery. The sweeping new law falls under the country's Energy Transition for Green Growth Act initiative, but does make exceptions for compostable products made from biosourced materials.

These bioplastics are made from plant materials cane sugar or corn, for instance, or from plant byproducts like wood bark and corn husks  can decompose at rates significantly quicker than those of traditional plastics made from petrochemical processing.

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" " France's new law will make exceptions for cups made from degradable, compostable materials like bioplastics. Sam Whitfield/Flickr

This new ban on single-use plastic goods goes into effect in 2020, and is just the latest step in the country's fight against waste and economic damage  this past July, France banned the use of the kind of flimsy, disposable plastic bag commonly used in supermarkets and grocery stores. Other countries, and some U.S. cities and states, have similar bans in place.

According to one estimate, in 2010 eight million tons of plastic waste found their way into the ocean. Scientists warn that unless our waste is better managed, that number could increase by as much as 10 times in the coming years.

But despite its potential benefits, bioplastics are not a complete solution. For one thing, some plant-based plastics must be commercially composted, a process which itself requires a significant amount of energy to be spent. And others argue that creating plastics from products like corn will have negative repercussions on farming and the price of food. Not all are embracing the new law.

"My members are not against bioplastics or new products," Eamonn Bates, secretary general of the food-packaging industry association Pack2GoEurope, told CNN. "But the industry does oppose them being imposed for certain applications especially when the life-cycle analysis shows that there is no environmental basis for doing so," he said, emphasizing that the group will petition the European Commission to overrule the ban on ground of free-trade rule violations.

" " Though the fries may be French, by 2020 the disposable plastic utensils won't be. Maximilian Stock Ltd./Getty Images

On the other hand, some see this as just a first step  French politician Arash Derambarsh, who's been involved in waste issues and worked to ban French supermarkets from throwing away unsold food, has suggested he'd like to see the ban on plastics extend across the entirety of Europe.

Then again, France has always been a trendsetter, particularly when it comes to fashion. Perhaps the country should take note of Jalilia Essaidi, a Dutch clothing designer and artist whose couture looks are made from bioplastics sourced from cow dung.

Now That's Interesting The first country in the world to ban plastic bags? Bangladesh in 2002.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 09:50:41|Editor: ZD

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TRIPOLI, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) on Wednesday called on Libyan parties to stop all hostilities and focus on fighting the novel coronavirus.

"While the whole world is engaged in fighting the spread of COVID-19, which has overwhelmed several well-resourced countries, attacks and counter attacks in Libya continue to inflict further suffering and civilian casualties," the UMSMIL said in a statement.

"UNSMIL calls for an immediate de-escalation, including cessation of hostilities, demobilization of forces, and stopping the influx of foreign fighters and weapons. Libyans need to shift their focus to the fight against COVID-19," the statement said.

The UMSMIL reminded all parties in Libya of their obligations in accordance with international humanitarian and human rights law to ensure the protection of civilians.

Tripoli, the capital, has been plagued by a deadly armed conflict between the UN-backed government and the east-based army over control of the city since last year.

Although both parties have announced their acceptance of international calls for halting all military actions to fight the virus, they have been trading accusations over truce breaches and targeting the civilians in Tripoli.
Highlights The Department of Telecom (DoT) is reportedly going easy on collecting AGR dues because focus right is different.

DoT officials say that right now priority is to keep the telecom services running.

The Supreme Court earlier had stated that delay in payment of AGR dues was contempt of court.

While coronavirus has created a lot of trouble for Indians, it has brought temporary relief to telecoms companies that were under pressure to pay hefty AGR dues. Airtel and Vodafone that were reeling under the demands for AGR dues now have temporary relief because Department of Telecom (DoT) is busy with more pressing concerns and is going easy on this matter.

With a nation of 1.3 billion people under lockdown and hundreds of millions of people going through life, including work, while confined to their houses, for the government keeping telecom services up and running has become a priority. Hence, DoT has reportedly decided to set aside the matters related to AGR dues temporarily, and concentrate on the telecom infrastructure.

"There have been no notices sent to telcos on their AGR payments or any discussions on it. Right now, all the focus of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is on how to ensure smooth running of operations during the Corona pandemic," a government official told ET Telecom.

This means that Airtel and Vodafone can breathe a sigh of relief. At least for now.

PM Modi announced a nationwide lockdown starting March 24 for two weeks. Many industries, including the telecom sector are now facing challenging times. People have been experiencing a spike in their telecom, internet needs as they operate from their homes.

On March 17, the Supreme Court slammed DoT saying that self-assessment of AGR dues was contempt of court. However, it allowed the government to go ahead with a deferred payment mechanism. The SC was to hear the matter in two weeks. After the lockdown, however, it is unclear as to when the Supreme Court will proceed with the next hearing.

The Cellular Operators Association of India that represents Airtel, Vodafone and Reliance JIO has stated that in dire times like these, the country needs three telcos or maybe more. The telcos stated that a situation of duopoly and monopoly will disrupt the entire telecom industry. If the companies are asked to pay dues in full, it will put Vodafone in a particularly tricky position.

As per estimates by the DoT, the telcos have to pay a cumulative amount of Rs 1.47 lakh crore towards AGR dues.

Earlier, this week Vodafone Idea, which is particularly hit hard paid a self-assessed principal amount of Rs 6,854 crore. It has to pay a total of Rs 58,254 crore towards AGR dues. Airtel, paid a self-assessed amount of Rs 18,004 crore and has to pay a total of Rs 43,980 crore. Tata teleservices paid Rs 4,197 crore and has to pay a total of 16,798 crore.


Nine liquor factories in seven districts of Rajasthan will be used to produce sanitisers to deal with the shortage in supply amid coronavirus outbreak.

Four private companies and 5 production units of state-owned Ganganagar Sugar Mills have been directed by the government to start manufacturing sanitisers and licences to do the same have been issued.

The five production units are stationed in Jhotwara(Jaipur) Mandore (Jodhpur), Kota, Udaipur, Hanumangarh. The four private companies are based out of Alwar and Jaipur.

Officials in government premises, police and other essential services staff will get the sanitisers for free. The people will get them at low rates.

The drug controller started issuing licences on Monday.

Manish Kumar, the Vice President of ADS Agro Industries Ltd., Ringus, one of the private companies given the task, told The New Indian Express, " We have started preparations to fight coronavirus in these difficult times. The sanitiser manufacturing will start as soon as drug control personnel come and we receive instructions from the Excise Department."

Also Read: Coronavirus relief: Finance Ministry urges RBI to pause EMI, loan repayments

Also Read: Coronavirus relief aid: Who gets how much direct cash transfer?
Apollo Tyres Ltd is quoting at Rs 85.8, up 6.12% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. The stock is down 59.91% in last one year as compared to a 23.82% drop in NIFTY and a 37.64% drop in the Nifty Auto index.

Apollo Tyres Ltd is up for a third straight session in a row. The stock is quoting at Rs 85.8, up 6.12% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 4.83% on the day, quoting at 8719.2. The Sensex is at 30053.01, up 5.32%. Apollo Tyres Ltd has dropped around 42.91% in last one month.

Meanwhile, Nifty Auto index of which Apollo Tyres Ltd is a constituent, has dropped around 28.63% in last one month and is currently quoting at 4936.15, up 3.79% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 25.87 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 49.68 lakh shares in last one month.

The benchmark March futures contract for the stock is quoting at Rs 84.7, up 5.15% on the day. Apollo Tyres Ltd is down 59.91% in last one year as compared to a 23.82% drop in NIFTY and a 37.64% drop in the Nifty Auto index.

The PE of the stock is 8.22 based on TTM earnings ending December 19.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
W eve all thought it: maybe now that were being forced into isolation, this might be the time that we finally write that great novel, paint that masterpiece or record that seminal album.

Alas, many of us will probably end up settling for Netflix on repeat. But if you still harbour those artistic dreams, there are plenty of great musical works in the back catalogue to inspire you.

These five albums have all been recorded in isolation through choice, chance or otherwise. They vary in type  some are deeply insular, while others are wildly creative  but they all owe some credit to the fact they were created away from distraction.

From the cabins of Wisconsin to the mansions of Southern France, these are the self-isolation albums you need to hear.

For Emma, Forever Ago  Bon Iver

After suffering through a string of failed musical projects, poor health both physically and mentally, and a break-up, Justin Vernon  aka Bon Iver  decamped to his fathers isolated hunting cabin, deep into rural Wisconsin. He spent three months there during the icy winter of 2006/07, hunting for food, drinking beer and, eventually, recording his debut album on an old Macintosh computer.

The story has been mythologised plenty in the years since, but for Vernon, things were far less romantic, describing it as a lonely few months at the cabin, where I plugged in the laptop and f***** around. Still, the austere, melancholy album that he recorded there launched his career, and set him up as one of the biggest touring acts on the planet.

Nebraska  Bruce Springsteen

This album wasnt meant to be a product of isolation. One January night in 1982, alone in his rented New Jersey house, Bruce Springsteen recorded a number of demos during a nocturnal spree of creativity. The songs, taped using a simple four-track machine, were sparse, using few instruments other than an acoustic guitar. He sent them off to his manager with the intention of asking his full band to flesh them out, as was often the case. But when it came to those sessions, it didnt feel right  the ghostly atmosphere of those demos couldnt be improved, nor replicated.

In the end, the demo tapes themselves were released, making up the 10-track album Nebraska. But that sense of isolation goes deeper than just the way in which it was recorded. The album is an outlier among Springsteens discography, incongruently bleak and never supported by a tour. The lyrics speak of downtrodden criminals and glum blue-collar workers, cut off from the warmth of life. It was an album that stripped Springsteens songwriting down to its cold, shivering bones.

OK Computer  Radiohead

When it came to recording their third album, Radiohead made a conscious decision to distance themselves from the inward-facing miserablism of The Bends. It had been a commercial and critical success, but the band members couldnt bear to bore any deeper into that hole.

They began recording in a small Oxfordshire studio, but something was amiss  they needed further detachment. And so they took over St Catherines Court, a mostly empty mansion near Bath. It was an auspicious move. The various rooms of the building, from the grand staircases to the ballroom, allowed the band to play with atmosphere and acoustics. The lack of any great oversight or schedule gave them the freedom to craft something new.

The result was something truly special: OK Computer, one of the best albums of the decade. Its the kind of complex, layered work that could only be forged from the mind of an unshackled artist.

McCartney  Paul McCartney

Shell-shocked by John Lennons decision to leave the Beatles in September 1969, Paul McCartney gathered his family and fled north of the border, cocooning himself in the confines of his Scottish farm. Nobody knew where hed gone  the sudden disappearance gave fuel to the Paul is Dead conspiracy  until he was eventually discovered by a team of journalists.

By McCartneys own admission, he was teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but later returned to London before the year was up. He acquired a four-track recorder and, in secret, began work on his first ever solo album. The result is a lo-fi sketch, lasting little over half an hour. Its not the finest thing in his discography, but it was the sound of an artist finding his way from beneath the shadow of The Beatles  and he certainly wouldnt have been to do so had he not been through that period of self-isolation.

Exile On Main Street  The Rolling Stones

Taxes were high back in the day. As the country rebuilt itself after the Second World War, the highest rate of income tax was well above 90 per cent, and only in 1971 was it cut down to 75 per cent. It left the nations millionaires rather out of pocket, and many declared themselves tax exiles  those who go to live in another country with lower rates until they can pay back their debts.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Mota Ventures Corp. (CSE:MOTA)(FSE:1WZ:GR)(OTCPINK:PEMTF) (the "Company" or "Mota") is pleased to announce that further to its January 10, 2020 news release, it has now acquired the intellectual property and trade names of Sativida from Sativida OU (Estonia). The Company will license both back to Sativida OU's subsidiary, VIDA BCN LABS S.L. (collectively with Sativida OU, "Sativida") in exchange for a royalty associated with the gross revenues generated by Sativida.

Sativida is an arms'-length producer and online retailer of cannabidiol ("CBD") and branded CBD products in various jurisdictions in Europe, including Spain, Portugal, Austria, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Sativida currently develops and retails a vast range of organic CBD oils and cosmetics across Europe and is in the process of expanding its distribution network internationally to include the United States. Sativida has become the number one search-ranked online retailer of CBD products in Spain and Mexico, and intends to continue its expansion into other countries in Europe and Latin America.

Through Mota, Sativida has an agreement with Unified Funding, LLC ("Unified") for the expansion of the brand into the United States. Unified will provide assistance to Sativida with product sourcing, packaging, shipping, payment infrastructure and marketing in the United States. Unified Funding is an e-Commerce and technology company focused on serving U.S.-based and international consumers in the CBD and natural health products market. Powered by its proprietary technology platform, Unified has created an e-Commerce ecosystem to scale its brands through data analysis, strategic customer acquisition and supply chain management. Since June 2015, Unified has generated a database of over 4.5 million consumers and has facilitated over US$200 million in consumer transactions from more than one million paying customers.

"I am very excited to announce the acquisition of the Sativida brand. This gives Mota immediate entry into the European market and will be a building block for our planned European expansion. Mota's U.S. operation, First Class CBD, is set to enter the European market and we expect the acquisition of the Sativida brand to expedite this expansion. Furthermore, our partnership with Unified Funding, LLC, the e-Commerce platform behind the success of First Class CBD, will allow us to bring the Sativida brand to the U.S. market as well," stated Ryan Hoggan, CEO of the Company.

Noah Laith, founder of Sativida, commented, "Joining Mota is a major step for Sativida that will provide access to the capital, connections and infrastructure necessary to grow our business in Europe and internationally."

Pursuant to the previously announced binding agreement with Sativida dated January 9, 2020 (the "Transaction Agreement"), the Company was granted the right to acquire Sativida in stages (the "Transaction"), at the discretion of the Company, as certain corporate and intellectual property registrations were completed. To accomplish this, the Company set up a wholly-owned Spanish subsidiary ("Spanish Subco") and coordinated the registration of various intellectual property and trade names associated with business operations of Sativida.

The Company, through Spanish Subco, has now completed the acquisition of the intellectual property and trade names of Sativida in Spain, and will license both back to Sativida in exchange for a royalty associated with the gross revenues generated by Sativida. Pursuant to the Transaction Agreement, the Company also holds the right to acquire, through Spanish Subco, all of the outstanding share capital of Sativida at any time for no additional consideration.

Consideration for the Transaction is made up of an initial component of 2,000,001 (the "Consideration") and an earn-out component made up of three milestone payments based upon the revenue of Sativida (each, a "Milestone Payment"). The Consideration was paid in 5,496,221 common shares of the Company (the "Consideration Shares") at a deemed price of $0.5689 per share. Each Milestone Payment will be based on a 400% multiple of Sativida's revenue until the aggregate of the Initial Consideration and Milestone Payments reaches 4,000,000, at which point the multiple will be reduced to 100%. In no event will the combined Milestone Payments and the value of the Initial Consideration exceed 15,000,000. Payment of the Milestone Payments will be satisfied by the Company issuing common shares ("Milestone Shares") to Sativida. The total number of Milestone Shares issuable to Sativida will be determined by dividing the amount due by the volume weighted average closing price of the Company's common shares on the Canadian Securities Exchange in the ten trading days prior to the day that the Milestone Payment is due.

The Consideration Shares and the Milestone Shares will each be subject to a 36-month pooling arrangement such that 10% of the Consideration Shares, or the Milestone Shares, as applicable, will be released from escrow on upon their issuance, with an additional 15% being released every six-months thereafter until all Consideration Shares or all Milestone Shares, as applicable, are released.

As part of the Transaction, Mota Ventures will enter into employment contracts with certain employees of Sativida and will provide an option pool that may be divided among the employees of Sativida equal to 60,000 in stock options of Mota Ventures for every 1,000,000 in revenue that Sativida earns, subject to certain conditions. Additionally, Mota Ventures has paid a 10% finder's fee based on the total value of the Consideration Shares (528,072 common shares) to certain finders that assisted in introducing the Transaction to the parties as well as a 2% administrative success fee based on the total value of the Consideration Shares (105,614 common shares) to a consultant who assisted in the administration of the transaction.

The Company and Sativida are at arms'-length. The Transaction is not expected to result in a "reverse-takeover" or "fundamental change" for the Company under the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange, or result in the creation of any new insider or control person of the Company. No changes to the board of directors, or management, of the Company are contemplated in connection with the Transaction.

About Mota Ventures Corp.

Mota is seeking to become a vertically integrated global CBD brand. Its plan is to cultivate and extract CBD into high-quality value-added products from its Latin American operations and distribute it both domestically and internationally. Its existing operations in Colombia consist of a 2.5-hectare site that has optimal year-round growing conditions and access to all necessary infrastructure. Mota is looking to establish sales channels and a distribution network internationally through the acquisition of the Sativida and First Class CBD brands. Low cost production, coupled with international, direct to customer sales channels will provide the foundation for the success of Mota.

About Sativida

Sativida is a producer and online retailer of CBD and branded CBD products in various jurisdictions in Europe, including Spain and the United Kingdom. Sativida currently develops and retails a vast range of organic CBD oils and cosmetics across Europe and is currently expanding its distribution network internationally. For more information on Sativida, readers are encouraged to review their website at www.sativida.es.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

MOTA VENTURES CORP.

Ryan Hoggan

Chief Executive Officer

For further information, readers are encouraged to contact the President of the Company, Joel Shacker, at +604.423.4733 or by email at IR@motaventuresco.com or www.motaventuresco.com

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release, which has been prepared by management.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statement

All statements in this press release, other than statements of historical fact, are "forward-looking information" with respect to the Company within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including with respect to the expansion of Sativida's business and entrance into the U.S. market, the expansion of First Class CBD's business and entrance into the European market, its plans to become a vertically integrated global CBD brand, its plans to cultivate and extract cannabis to produce CBD and high-quality value added CBD products in Latin America for distribution domestically and internationally. The Company provides forward-looking statements for the purpose of conveying information about current expectations and plans relating to the future and readers are cautioned that such statements may not be appropriate for other purposes. By its nature, this information is subject to inherent risks and uncertainties that may be general or specific and which give rise to the possibility that expectations, forecasts, predictions, projections or conclusions will not prove to be accurate, that assumptions may not be correct and that objectives, strategic goals and priorities will not be achieved. These risks and uncertainties include but are not limited those identified and reported in the Company's public filings under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise unless required by law.

SOURCE: Mota Ventures Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/582610/Mota-Ventures-Moves-Forward-with-Its-Acquisition-of-Spanish-CBD-Company-Sativida
Sepio Systems, a Rockville, MD-based provider of Rogue Device Mitigation (RDM) solutions, raised an additional $4m in funding.

The round, which brings the total investment in the company to $15m, was led by Munich Re Ventures (MRV) and Hanaco Ventures.

The company intends to use the funds to expand into new regions of the globe.

Led by Yossi Appleboum, Co-Founder & CEO, Sepio Systems provides a platform for security teams to get access to visibility into their hardware assets like keyboards, USBs, desktop boxes, and more and their behavior in real time. A comprehensive policy enforcement module allows administrators to define granular device usage rules and continuously monitor and protect their infrastructure. Leveraging a combination of physical fingerprinting technology together with device behavior analytics, the companys solution offers instant detection and response to any threat or breach attempt coming from a manipulated or infected element.

Sepio has an R&D center in Lisbon.

FinSMEs

26/03/2020
Doctors and infectious disease experts are leading growing calls for Australia to be put into complete lockdown for up to six weeks to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Despite the country's total number of COVID-19 cases jumping to 3,050 on Friday morning, with 13 dead, the Federal Government has so far stood firm on its refusal to close schools, confine people to their homes and close all non-essential businesses.

Infectious disease expert Professor Brendan Crabb said keeping only 'essential services' open was a drastic, but necessary step.

Pedestrians walk through Sydney in masks on Thursday. Doctors and infectious disease experts are calling for the prime minister to put in place a full lockdown including closing schools

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the government had received no medical advice to close schools, despite one member of the expert panel guiding the government on the crisis campaigning for a full and immediate lockdown.

Mr Morrison has taken a staged approach to restrictions, including closing the borders to all but essential travel, but Professor Crabb, from Melbourne's Burnet Institute, said the measures were too easily misinterpreted and called for a blanket lockdown for two to six weeks.

'This is war, this is an actual war being fought. A lockdown-type mentality sends an unambiguous message that just cannot be misconstrued,' Professor Crabb told The Age.

'Everyday matters now... I would want to see very strong reasoning for why they (the government) would not go as hard as they can early.'

Full lockdown would prevent Australians from leaving their homes other than for essential reasons like shopping for groceries.

Infectious disease expert Professor Brendan Crabb has called for keeping only 'essential services' to reduce the infection rate

A nurse takes a sample from a driver at a new COVID-19 drive-thru testing facility at in Adelaide on Tuesday

University of NSW professor Mary-Louise McLaws said supermarkets, banks and pharmacies would have to stay open.

'Lockdown would have to be very severe for about three weeks,' she told news.com.au.

'During this time cases would recover and people would stop being infectious.'

A 'response tracker' set up by the University of Oxford gives Australia a ranking of just 40 out of 100 for the stringency of its lockdown.

University of Oxford's response tracker gives Australia a ranking of just 40 out of 100 for the level of its lockdown

The US and much of Europe and South America have an index of between 60 and 100.

UNSW's Raina MacIntrye, who is part of the expert panel advising the government on its COVID-19 response, said schools should be closed as part of the new lockdown.

Prof MacIntrye said the majority of the panel agree an immediate, short-term lockdown was needed, but the advice was being ignored.

'I was hoping we'd see a more comprehensive lockdown for a short period of time, but that is not the approach we're taking. It's more a trickle sort of approach, a little bit by bit, which won't be as effective at stopping the transmission in the community,' she told the ABC.

Australia has 3,050 confirmed cases of coronavirus as of Friday morning, with 13 deaths

Leading infectious disease expert Raina MacIntrye (pictured) believes the federal government's trickle down approach won't be enough to stop the transmission of COVID-19 across the country

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

'The more you slam on the brakes, the more control you'll get of the epidemic, the more the cases will go down. The other alternative is to wait until things really get out of control and your health system starts to get infected.'

Professor MacIntrye said the economic hit to the country would be far greater in the long term if hardline action wasn't taken now.

'If you don't control the disease, your economic losses are going to be far greater and the recovery time is going to be a lot longer,' she said.

Advice was put together by a panel of academics from Australia's Group of Eight Universities and handed to Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt on Monday.

The government was urged to introduce 'strong immediate and co-ordinated social distancing measures' including shutting down schools and ramping up testing measures.

But the government's current scope and scale of physical distancing measures is concerning the university panel.

The panellists are confident it will lead to a spike in cases and a higher numbers of deaths.

Professor MacIntyre believes it's not too late to stabilise the projected death toll, but it can only be done if 70-80 per cent of people stop contacting each other.

The panel is one of a number to have been established to guide the federal government through the current health crisis.
College students and other adults returned to their family home in recent weeks as campuses and businesses closed due to the coronavirus health crisis. More may be on the way, as unemployment spikes.

To accommodate extended family members, Oregonians have created quick-fix, comfortable sleeping areas by setting up an air mattress in underused spaces and decluttering spare bedrooms.

CORONAVIRUS IN OREGON: THE LATEST NEWS

Despite the health crisis and its economic fallout, some homeowners are moving forward with plans to have a self-contained, smaller second home, or ADU (accessory dwelling unit), built on their property.

Converting an unfinished basement, structurally sound garage or part of the backyard into living quarters is a long-term housing strategy and its pricey.

About half of Portlands existing accessory units are detached new construction, which is the most expensive type, costing about $200 to $300 a square foot to professionally design and build with high-performance insulation and heating and cooling systems.

Still, ADUs are considered the least costly type of housing that can be built in Portland if the land is already owned and if it qualifies for a waiver of the citys system development fees, which can mount up to $22,500.

Advocates and real estate agents say a compact second home can add to the propertys resale value and pay for itself over time, by consolidating family finances or drawing rental income.

Some new houses include a flexible living space with a separate entrance that grants privacy to a member of a multigenerational family or tenant.

During the coronavirus pandemic, a Portland owner is writing about self-quarantining in his ADU.

Is it finally time to add an in-law flat for adult kids or parents to return home?

Melanie and Mick Giusti are going forward with their plans to leave their house in California when escrow closes in April and move to the Portland area to be closer to their grown sons and in-laws. Also coming: Micks parents and hopefully later, Melanies parents.

We want to be close to our kids and grandkids, and help our parents age in place as a whole family but let them be independent, says Melanie Giusti over the phone while inside her home in Santa Clara County, which has been under shelter-in-place orders since mid March.

The Giustis have been scouting for the right place in unincorporated Washington County for about 18 months, and now hope to find one virtually.

Last week, they had a FaceTime conversation at a potential property with a real estate agent and Portland ADU expert Kol Peterson, who offers onsite consultations.

Were learning about ADU requirements and its complicated, says Melanie Giusti. A big part of [Micks parents] quality of life is they love to cook, they love food, and its difficult to put them in a place with only a bar sink, bar fridge and hot plate. They need a proper kitchen.

An in-law suite could allow an aging parent to be close to family rather than spending what could be $72,000 a year for assisted living, says Peterson, who interviewed hundreds of sources for his comprehensive book, Backdoor Revolution-The Definitive Guide to ADU Development.

A Portland Homeowner Report released in December by Pro.com found that the most popular ADUs are used as living spaces for elderly relatives, adult children and family friends, and as income-producing apartments to rent (36 percent each).

Cities and counties outside Portland, considered an epicenter of ADU development, are starting to see increased interest since the passage of Oregon House Bill 2001, which compelled jurisdictions to drop their off-street parking and owner-occupancy requirements.

ADU experts are making it easy for people to research laws, find how a specific counties assess ADUs for property tax evaluations, see photos and read peoples stories about their experience and expenses.

AccessoryDwellings.org, a long respected online resource, posts case studies and updates on financing and other progress of ADUs, which is still a rare form of housing.

Peterson, a small housing advocate and educator who has been involved in ADUs for decades, posts up-to-date information and photos on BuildingAnADU.com, which includes ways to determine ADU eligibility scores.

He also holds online classes with video walk-throughs, interviews with homeowners, and tips to ADU design best practices.

ADUs are a recession-proof form of investment, says Peterson, who has just posted research on the coronavirus and ADUs.

Portlands initial ADU explosion began in [2010, during the zenith of] the Great Recession," says Peterson, who earned a masters degree in environmental planning from Harvards Graduate School of Design and co-owns, with his wife, Deb Delman, CaravanThe Tiny House Hotel in Northeast Portland. I wouldnt go so far as to attribute the growth of ADUs to the recession, but I would point out that ADUs are a very rational place to invest money in a down economy.

--Janet Eastman | 503-294-4072

jeastman@oregonian.com | @janeteastman

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Business Insider

Dr Mathias Doepfner

Max Threlfall

The coronavirus pandemic can be confusing and concerns about the impact on the economy are valid.

But the lockdown measures currently in force are the right call to control the coronavirus.

Mathias Dopfner is CEO of Axel Springer SE, the parent company of Insider Inc.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

I have wanted to write for days but have hesitated. Because I have doubts. And because I'm not sure what's right. Because, as a person with asthma, I would be regarded as a so-called 'risk patient'. And because I carry the responsibility for 16,500 employees. And for whatever reactions this text elicits.

I have been listening keenly to what the virologists and epidemiologists have to say. Governments are following their recommendations. I find this unrestricted power too void of alternatives, because the experts do not have the mandate of the electorate.

And despite this, they indirectly decide what measures the government orders. Anyone who can count to three knows that the world economy and our society could not survive a standstill like this for even a few months.

In the past weeks, my opinion has been wavering. Sometimes I fall asleep, angry. Angry at my fear of the virus, because I can't tell how dangerous it really is

The coronavirus mainly affects older people and people with an existing condition. Does that not mean measures should apply to people in those risk groups in particular? While everyone else goes about their life and their business as usual?

If we take a closer look, we actually know very little about the virus. Evidence suggests that a large number of cases are going undetected. How high is this figure in Europe, where far fewer tests are being carried out than in other parts of the world? And what does a statistic say about mortality?

I get annoyed when politicians try to outdo one another in their competition to see who can pass the strictest measures. Who is the fastest to pass emergency legislation. Behind closed doors, some of them speak in a different tone, feeling they can't speak openly in the current atmosphere. This worries me, as people don't seem to think about the consequences. I am worried that our open and liberal society could be damaged by good intentions.

Story continues

I am angry that respected people see China as a role model in this crisis.

Despite the fact that China is a dictatorship, a country that persecutes people simply for having a different opinion. That controls its population using a social scoring system. But it managed the coronavirus situation really well, more and more people are saying. All the while forgetting that journalists who researched the truth were thrown out of the country. Forgetting that we cannot trust China's information policies. Refusing to accept that the Chinese government might well be lying to us.

Is this what our future will look like? Should China become our role model, just because it mastered this crisis using totalitarian means? My fear is that we are committing democratic suicide because we are afraid of death.

That's how I fall asleep at night.

And then I wake up. More than 450,00 cases of the novel coronavirus worldwide. 20% of the patients checked into US hospitals are between 20 and 44 years of age. And then there are the pictures from Bergamo. Trucks carrying corpses. Mass graves. Weeping doctors and nurses who are no longer able to provide the right care to the dying. The 70-year-old doctor refusing treatment, because he has had to turn away so many patients who are the same age as he. That's what I wake up to.

And after all these thoughts and although I worry that the consequences of the virus could be worse than the virus itself (recession, mass unemployment, people losing their property, perhaps worse), I ultimately believe that the measures are right. The more determined we are, the better.

Shutdown. Pause. Mute. Minimal contact. Peace and quiet. Nothing. For a short time, a few weeks. We can manage that. But we need an end in sight.

It is a radical approach for a short period. We slow down the spread of the virus in order to gain time. Time to prepare. A standstill like this cannot be withstood by society, economically or politically for too long. The notion that we can just press the pause button until the virus goes away is naive and dangerous.

The day will come when politicians change course again. And that's when we will need to take special care of those who are at risk. We must protect them. Hopefully we will soon have a vaccine and improved intensive care facilities to help us do so.

The rest of us, however, have to wake up from economic hibernation. Let us get back to our everyday lives. To the goals and ambitions that are vital to our civilization. As fast as possible. Otherwise, we might lose something even greater: our social order, our freedom. I am seriously worried that we might relinquish our core societal values for a little more security.

But it doesn't have to be that way. We can come out of this situation stronger than when we went into it.

Crises are often catalysts of change. That is nothing new to us. Some of civilization's greatest achievements came in the wake of wars or epidemics.

According to the medical historian Klaus Bergdolt, the plague was a vital prerequisite for the Renaissance, one of the most culturally inspiring and rich eras in human history. The plague was followed by a period of great wealth and, above all, by a hitherto unknown individualism. In Egon Friedell's words: "The year of the conception of modern man was 1348, the year of the Black Death."

World War II was followed by Germany's "Wirtschaftswunder." And after the second oil crisis from 1978 to 1980, investments in renewable energies grew enormously.

Crises force us to do things differently, to rethink the world. It promotes solidarity. A common enemy connects us, in this case thankfully not another country or people, but a virus. Crises act like a magnifying glass, revealing the weaknesses, but also the strengths of individuals and systems. People might fail in a crisis  through resignation. Or surpass themselves by demonstrating courage and a sense of community. Crises can also make us more aware of what is worth preserving and of what needs to be changed.

We often talk about no longer needing offices, a workplace. Work, we say, can be done in many different places. A smartphone and a laptop are all we need. Now, sitting in our home offices, we realize it's not that simple after all. We notice how vital direct dialog is. And we see how many trips and meetings in the past we could have done without. The coronavirus crisis might make our work simpler, more efficient and better.

The role of the media is also being tested. Taking personal risks, journalists are once again what they have not been for a long time. Our window to the world. Our filter to the truth. They have a huge responsibility. And I find that, all in all, they are living up to this responsibility impressively.

I often get letters saying the media must now provide for solidarity and unity. However, the journalist's remit must not change, just because we are in a state of crisis. Journalists must continue to doubt and to ask questions. We need more than just solidarity and a sense of togetherness. We also need criticism. And more than anything else, we need diversity in the information we receive and the opinions we hear.

We do not need central-state propaganda, but rather a healthy rivalry between critically intelligent positions. We now hopefully all see how important independent journalism is.

When the crisis has been overcome, life will no longer be the way it was before. The economic damage will be enormous. Entire industries might disappear or change completely. New booming sectors will emerge. We will work differently. Travel less. Perhaps be more caring to the environment. Show more respect to politicians who act responsibly and do not pander to populism. Our encounters with one another will be different. Perhaps we will be more grateful. We will have wild parties. We will celebrate togetherness. And our freedom.

Perhaps we will change our greeting rituals. Cheek kissing might disappear. Is that a loss, or perhaps a blessing?

Maybe we will greet one another as they do in Thailand  hands pressed together, a slight bow, a smile.

The smile is something I would really like to see. Especially in Germany. Nobody laughs as little as the Germans do. Perhaps the coronavirus will leave us with a smile. When it's all over. A smile of gratitude.

Read the original article on Business Insider
LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) -- Subaru of Indiana Automotive paying its employees until April 3rd is going to help the local economy.

Purdue Associate Professor of Economics Dr. Timothy Bond said money made in the county will most likely be spent in the county.

A caveat to that is many restaurants and business are closed leaving people to rely on online business.

"As long as the workers are getting paid it is not a catastrophe," said Bond.

That is at least for now. Dr. Bond said in the short term Greater Lafayette's economy is going to be okay, but long term not so much

"There is the national impact as this is related to concern about people not being able to sell things produced in that plant," said Bond.

The plant produces on average, throughout the last five years, more than 300,000 cars using more than 6,000 employees.

"If you have a large number of workers who do not have a disposable income anymore that is going to further amplify that effect," said Bond.

Bond said more sales will be limited and the number of employees on payroll will go down.

He said online sales will skyrocket during this time of unpredictability.

"People are afraid to go out to local stores, so shifting more online, so you are taking more money out of local people's pockets," said Bond. "That is going to hurt local businesses even more."

Bond said the $2 trillion stimulus deal will have a huge role economically.

"That should really help smooth the losses of people who have lost their job as a consequence of this," said Bond.

He said the longer the economic hardship lasts more repercussions will be felt.

However since he said the economy was fairly strong before COVID-19 hit, the less of a fallout there will be.

"If we can smooth through this rough patch and we can get our restaurants open and people back on the streets hopefully we can get a quick recovery here," said Bond. "Hopefully this is a short effect."

As it stands, SIA will be closed until April 6th.
SPRINGFIELD  The number of cases of coronavirus confirmed by Baystate Health has jumped to 97  up 45 from the day before.

In explaining the rise, Baystate officials said in a statement on Thursday, We have received additional test results back in the past 24 hours, which is reflected in the significant change in numbers vs. yesterday.

Baystate Health facilities in Western Massachusetts have tested 934 people for COVID-19 and found a total of 97 individuals to have the virus. Another 476 people tested negative.

The Springfield-based health provider in still awaiting test results for 361 others.

Baystate Health is not providing additional details on patients, such age, gender or residence.

As of Wednesday night, Massachusetts had recorded 1,836 confirmed cases of COVID-19, resulting in 15 deaths, according to the state DPH.

Sign up for free text messages about important updates on coronavirus in Massachusetts

Related content:
A teenage girl is the latest victim of a brazen sex attack on a Melbourne tram.

The 14-year-old was on the 96 tram from Southern Cross Station to St Kilda, when the unknown man approached her from behind about 10.30am on Sunday, February 2.

Police want to speak to this man about a sexual assault on a Melbourne tram on February 2.

Police have been told the man sexually assaulted the girl and immediately left the tram in St Kilda.

The alleged attacker was described as being of Indian sub-continental appearance, aged 25 to 30 years old, about180cm tall and with a medium build.
The Minister of Health, Victor Costache, resigned on Thursday.

The official announcement was made by Prime Minister Ludovic Orban.''I took note of this resignation. I am sending it to President Iohannis to issue the decree,'' Orban said.He also announced that Secretary of State Nelu Tataru will take over the leadership of the Health Ministry
Caolan Smyth rejects claims that his life is at risk

A man on remand pending trial for attempted murder has brought a High Court challenge over his detention in the Midlands Prison's segregation unit.

Caolan Smyth (28) claims that since being moved to the prison some months ago he has been locked up for 23 hours a day.

He says he has been told by the prison authorities that he is being kept away from other prisoners for his own safety due to a threat to his life.

Mr Smyth rejects claims his life is in danger and says his segregation from the general prison population is taking its toll on his physical and mental health.

PUNISHMENT

Mr Smyth, of Cuileann Court, Donore, Co Meath, is charged with the attempted murder of James 'Mago' Gately, who was injured but survived after being shot five times at a Topaz garage in Clonshaugh, north Dublin, on May 10, 2017.

His trial is pending before the non-jury Special Criminal Court.

Mr Smyth also claims he is only permitted screened visits and is not given regular exercise.

He also cannot avail of the educational, vocational and recreational facilities that are available to other prisoners.

It is alleged the conditions of his detention amount to the imposition of a punishment without any disciplinary hearings being conducted.

Mr Smyth has never been asked nor consulted about his continued segregation.

He claims a breach of his constitutional rights, including his right to bodily integrity.

He also claims his right to prepare for his trial is not being respected and he cannot get visits from his lawyers after 5.30pm on weekdays.

His judicial review proceedings are against the governor of the Midlands Prison, the Irish Prison Service and the Justice Minister.

He seeks orders including one quashing the governor's decision to detain him in the segregation unit.

The case was mentioned this week before Mr Justice Senan Allen, who was told a timetable had been agreed between the parties that should result in the case being heard in the coming weeks. The judge adjourned the matter to next month.
Days after issuing an executive order that broadly defined most businesses as essential during the coronavirus shutdown, Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi said on Thursday that it was not meant to interfere with decisions made by local governments.

Governor Reeves signed the order on Tuesday, saying that essential businesses should be allowed to stay open, with some limitations, during the coronavirus shutdown. It offered a broad list of such businesses, including some that were exempt from limits on gatherings of more than 10 people as long as they took into account reasonable measures, such as social distancing and sending sick employees home.

After widespread criticism, Governor Reeves said on Thursday that he would issue a supplemental notice saying that the order was intended as a floor statewide for local governments to follow.

Some cities and counties in the state had already imposed their own more narrow restrictions regarding which businesses were considered essential, leading to confusion about how the state order would be executed.
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Glencore Plc. (GLEN.L) said that its larger operations have not been materially impacted by the coronavirus outbreak, but a number of its smaller assets have had to restrict or stop operations. The government of Quebec has ordered all non-essential businesses to close in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19. The company noted that Raglan (nickel) and Matagami (zinc) operations in Quebec, canada will be on care and maintenance for the next three weeks. In Ontario, the government has issued a similar decree, but mining has been designated an essential business and therefore our assets can continue to operate. Glencore's wholly owned subsidiary, PetroChad (Mangara) Limited has taken steps to commence ceasing production at its Badila and Mangara oil fields. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
[Last March 23], the Ontario Government declared Real Estate an essential service, in order to permit transactions to close. I want to make it clear that this does not mean business as usual for Ontarios Realtors, OREA president Sean Morrison stated in the letter.

As Realtors and community leaders, we must do our part to help limit the spread of COVID-19. Why put your health on the line  or the health of your client or community  for showings that can simply be postponed for a few weeks? Its not worth the risk, he added, citing virtual tours as a powerful alternative avenue for business.

The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) also called upon its approximately 56,000 members to adhere to the State of Emergency and halt all personal transactions for the time being.

Realtors have a responsibility to protect their own safety, as well as the safety of their colleagues, clients, and the general public. Members should adapt their practice to ensure that their professional activities are safe and comply with all guidance provided by Health Canada, the Province of Ontario and medical professionals, TRREB president Michael Collins said.

Clients and other consumers are subject to the shutdown orders and should not be visiting properties for open houses in particular. Many aspects of the home buying and selling process can continue to occur without in-person contact, including documentation and signing, and in many circumstances, closings.
The Washington DC administration has ordered closure of all non-essential businesses until April 24, as part of its efforts to contain the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

In an advisory on Wednesday night, the city administration also asked the residents to stay in their homes. The capital city of the United States has so far reported 185 confirmed coronavirus cases and two deaths.

"You have a critical role to play in stopping the spread of COVID-19 in DC. Effective at 10 pm tonight (Wednesday), the District of Columbia will close all non-essential businesses through Friday, April 24," the city government said.

"We are depending on you -- be a good neighbour, STAY HOME," it said.

In the order, Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser also prohibited gathering of 10 or more people.

"The intent of the order is to temporarily cease all non-essential business activities, including tour guides and touring services; gyms, health clubs, spas, and massage establishments; theaters, auditoriums, and other places of large gatherings; nightclubs; hair, nail, and tanning salons and barbershops; tattoo parlours; sales not involved in essential services; retail clothing stores; and professional services not devoted to assisting essential business operations," she said.

Bowser also directed an additional USD15 million of the Cash Reserve Fund to be used for the purchase of ventilators, personal protective equipment, testing supplies, medical supplies, and other necessary equipment for DC's response to the coronavirus.

To date, the mayor has directed USD53.15 million to the District's COVID-19 response and recovery.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Apostle Eric Kwabena Nyamekye, the Chairman of the Pentecost Church says although Ghana could go on a lockdown, nothing positive would be achieved in the fight against COVID-19, if it did not seek the intervention of God.



He explained that although prayer could not change who God was, it could change his mind.



No one can measure the power of prayer and the fervent prayer of a righteous man does a lot of wonders, he said.



Apostle Nyamekye said this on Wednesday March 25, 2020, around the 18:15 hours when he led the Pentecost Church and the nation at large to bring the National Day of Fasting and Prayer' to a closure.



No one has immunity for COVID-19 across the globe, he said and added that the disease did not spare anyone including the rich, healthy or high social status men.



It was therefore a wake-up call on everyone including non-believers to seek the face of the Lord in this time of global crisis.



The Chairman called on the world to develop a global approach to fight the canker, which was leading to high mortality every minute.



I believe the roots of the Coronavirus are dead, what is left is for the leaves to wither, he said.



He encouraged Ghanaians to remember other nations, when praying for God to change the narrative of COVID-19, to end the pandemic.



The President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo Addo, on Saturday March 21, 2020 while addressing the nation on the state of the COVID-19 in Ghana, appealed to all Ghanaians, to observe March 25 as a National Day of Fasting and Prayer to help in the fight against the COVID-19 outbreak.



Ghana has since March 12, 2020 recorded 68 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and three deaths.

Source: GNA









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Dubai: The head of the United Nations told leaders of the world's 20 major industrialised nations during an emergency virtual summit that "we are at war with a virus - and not winning it" despite dramatic measures by countries to seal their borders, shutter businesses and enforce home isolation for well over a quarter of the world's population.

The unusual video call in lieu of a physical gathering comes as governments around the world stress the importance of social distancing to curb the spread of the highly infectious virus, which has prompted closures, curfews and lockdowns globally.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the world was not winning the "war" against COVID-19. Credit:Getty Images

The Group of 20 nations, which faces criticism for not taking cohesive action against the virus or its economic impact, vowed to work together. The group said they are collectively injecting more than $US4.8 trillion ($7.9 trillion) into the global economy to counteract the social and financial impacts of the pandemic.

In a final statement after the meeting, the G20 said they were committed to strengthening the World Health Organisation's mandate. They said "global action, solidarity and international cooperation" were needed more than ever.
The U.S. military has decided it will stop providing some of the more granular data about coronavirus infections within its ranks, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper revealed

The US Defense Department has issued a 60-day freeze to troop deployments to aid in further prevention of the spread of the coronavirus as cases jump by 30 percent on Wednesday

U.S. Sailors man the bridge of USS Boxer, just one of the U.S. warships hit by the coronavirus

The US military has decided it will stop providing some of the more granular data about coronavirus infections within its ranks out of concern that the information might be used by adversaries as the virus spreads.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper outlined the plan in an interview with Reuters, saying that he wanted the military to keep providing broader data about infections in the armed forces, which boasts well over one million active service members.

He also banned all troop movement overseas for 60 days to curb the spread of the coronavirus as cases among US service members rose by 30 percent to 280 cases on Thursday, a jump of 53.

A further 81 civilian employees, 67 dependents and 40 contractors have tested positive.

The freeze will affect 90,000 service members including those who were set to leave Afghanistan as part of a peace deal with the Taliban.

The largest increase in military cases has been seen in the United States but there are thousands more US military personnel in quarantine or in self-isolation in Europe and the Middle East due to exposure to a person with the coronavirus or recent travel to a high-risk area.

Esper, a former Army secretary, said he wanted some of the more mission-specific information to be withheld to prevent compromising operational security.

'What we want to do is give you aggregated numbers. But we're not going to disaggregate numbers because it could reveal information about where we may be affected at a higher rate than maybe some other places,' Esper said, without disclosing precisely what information would be withheld or when the plan would be implemented.

The military has a small number infections compared to its one million plus forces but until now the locations of individual cases have been provided, including the first case in a US soldier in South Korea in February.

Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Ernesto Santa Ana, right, and Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Maria F. Potts-Szoke, work in Naval Medical Research Center's mobile laboratory aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt where 23 cases of the coronavirus was confirmed Thursday

'I'm not going to get into a habit where we start providing numbers across all the commands and we come to a point six, seven weeks from now where we have some concerns in some locations and reveal information that could put people at risk,' Esper said.

'The rate of infection and its impact is not hitting us at the levels that we have any concerns about right now,' he added but noted that releasing information about troops overseas was dangerous for the safety of those in the fight against al-Shabaab in East Africa as well as Islamic State militants in Syria or Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, the Navy revealed they had changed their policy to no longer supply information on which ship positive sailors serve on after over a dozen cases were discovered on various warships based in San Diego.

The policy said it would will now 'only release the number of positive cases and the geographic location of those sailors'.

The largest increase in troops has been seen within the U.S. with 85 percent of cases in the Air Force based at home.

Ninety percent of 104 cases in the Navy at now based at home while the Army declined to reveal their figures, according to Yahoo! News.

Esper did not confirm that the threat of the coronavirus was greater for troops based at home than overseas but commented on it being easier to control the actions of troops and their families who are stationed outside of America.

'You have far, far, far greater control of your servicemembers when you're deployed abroad, even when you're stationed abroad, than you do back in the United States,' he said.

The number of those in quarantine and self-isolation has also not been revealed amid claims that it is not something the military want 'to advertise'.

'If advertised, numbers can be used by adversaries to their advantage,' said Air Force Colonel Christopher Karns, a spokesman at the U.S. Africa Command.

On Wednesday, Esper also suspended all troop movement overseas for 60 days in attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus in the military.

The order applies to all US forces, civilian personnel and families, including those scheduled to return stateside and those scheduled to deploy.

'This measure is taken to aid in further prevention of the spread of [COVID-19], to protect U.S. personnel and preserve the operational readiness of our global force,' according to the DOD statement.

The order will be hardest felt in Afghanistan where US troops were scheduled to leave in accordance with a peace agreement with the Taliban but 90,000 service member will be affected in total.

The US headquarters overseeing operations in Afghanistan reported Tuesday that four service members who recently arrived in the country had tested positive for the virus and were placed into a separate quarantine.

Sailors prepare surgical equipment to be sterilized aboard the Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Mercy which is on its way to Los Angeles to aid with the coronavirus

Exceptions will be granted to those needing medical treatment and Navy ship deployments if they will be in transit for 14 days.

'The purpose is to make sure that we're not bringing the virus back home, infecting others, that we're not spreading it around the military,' Esper told Reuters.

The Pentagon froze domestic travel for service members, civilian employees and their family members until May 11 earlier this month.

The news also comes as a total of 23 cases were confirmed aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, currently underway in the Pacific, after three people were airlifted from the ship on Tuesday.

Four patients in total have now been airlifted out for treatment at a medical facility in Guam as the number of cases on the ship rose by 20 in a day.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, on March 26, announced the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Scheme worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore and direct cash transfer benefits to help the poor and migrant workers during the coronavirus pandemic. Amid the COVID-19 outbreak, migrant workers in major cities have been struggling to obtain essential supplies since the 21-day lockdown began. These schemes aim at supporting the economically weaker classes hit by the lockdown. Here are the key highlights of the relief package. (Image: Reuters)

For doctors | Insurance cover worth Rs 50 lakh per person for doctors, paramedics, nurses and other health professionals. (Image: AP)

For poor people | Up to 80 crore poor people to get an additional 5 kg of rice/wheat, over and above the existing 5 kg limit. (Image: Reuters)

For farmers | The first installment of Pradhan Mantri Kisan Yojana's annual Rs 6,000 assistance shall be transferred to beneficiaries immediately. (Image: PTI)

For MGNREGA workers | Wage to go up by Rs 2,000 per worker. (Image: Reuters)

For poor widows, senior citizens and divyang | An ex-gratia amount of Rs 1,000 per month for the next three months. (Image: Reuters)

For beneficiaries of Ujjwala Scheme | Free gas cylinders to below poverty line families registered under the scheme for three months. (Image: pmuy.gov.in)

For women having Jan Dhan Accounts | An ex-gratia amount of Rs 500 p.m for the next three months (Image: india.gov.in)

For women in self-help groups | For seven crore households, the limit of collateral-free loans increased to Rs 20,00,000 from existing Rs 10,00,000. (Image: Reuters)

For organised sector workers | The government to pay EPF contribution of both employer and employees for the next three months. This will be applicable to firms with up to 100 employees, where 90 percent of employees earn less than Rs 15,000 p.m. (Image: PTI)

For organised sector employees | The EPF scheme is amended to allow non-refundable advance of 75 percent of the amount in credit of the account or 3 months' wages, whichever is lower. (Image: PTI)

For construction workers | The government will utilise Rs 31,000-crore fund available in Building and other Construction Workers Fund to aid 3.5 crore construction workers during the coronavirus pandemic. (Image: PTI)
OTTAWA COUNTY, MI -- Ottawa County has created an email address to take complaints about people violating Gov. Gretchen Whitmers stay-at-home order during the coronavirus crisis.

Many local police departments have advised people to call their non-emergency numbers or, in the city of Grand Rapids, the numbers 311.

In Ottawa County, those with violation reports should email StayHomeStaySafeComplaints@miottawa.org

Whitmers order took effect Tuesday, March 24 and was intended to keep all non-essential workers at home an effort to prevent further spread of coronavirus COVID-19.

She clarified her view of the order Tuesday and said that people involved in activities that are not life-sustaining," or they are not part of critical infrastructure, they should stay at home.

'Essential Michigan workers make sandwiches, intubate ill, change oil during coronavirus stay-at-home order

A violation, a misdemeanor citation, is punishable by a $500 fine and up to 90 days in jail.

Ottawa County sheriffs deputies said an officer will review the emails and evaluate them for appropriate action. The person making the email should include the date/time, business name, address and description of the violation they believe is occurring.

Michigan coronavirus numbers now at 2,856 cases, doubling in three days

Complaints may then be transferred to the appropriate police agency for review.

Our goal is to educate the public and not be forced into a situation where we have to enforce the law by citation, said Ottawa County sheriffs Capt. Mark Bennett.

Wyoming police on Thursday issued a statement regarding the governors order, asking the public to do their best to comply.

We remind everyone that the orders are enforceable as criminal misdemeanor violations but more importantly we hope and expect our community will adhere to a common social contract in this difficult time and make enforcement unnecessary, Wyoming police Capt. James Maguffee said in a written statement.

Read all of MLives coverage on the coronavirus at mlive.com/coronavirus.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

CORONAVIRUS PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

More from MLive

Thursday, March 26: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

Dont fall for coronavirus stimulus scams, Michigan Attorney General warns
Ukrainian diplomats are urging the international community to up pressure on Russia, including through the new sanctions.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine has stated that Ukraine will appeal to international courts in connection with Russia imposing a ban on land ownership in the occupied Crimea by Ukrainian nationals.

"The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry condemns the signing on March 20 of Russian President's Decree No. 201, which added Crimea to the list of border territories of the Russian Federation where foreign citizens, stateless persons, and foreign legal entities shall not own land," MFA Ukraine said in a statement.

The ministry notes that the signing of this decree is another illegal step by Moscow on the appropriation of Ukrainian government assets and private property in the territory of occupied Crimea, and a gross violation of Ukrainian legislation and international humanitarian law.

Read alsoTurkey once again declares its non-recognition of Russian annexation of Ukraine's Crimea

"Ukraine will use all opportunities provided by international law and international courts to repeal the decree and hold Russia accountable for this offense," the ministry wrote.

Ukrainian diplomats are urging the international community to up pressure on the aggressor state, including through the new sanctions.

As reported earlier, on March 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin expanded the list of territories where foreigners cannot own land. The list includes most areas in the occupied Crimea.
Delhi to ease restrictions, if Covid cases come down in next 2-3 days: Health Minister

Lata Mangeshkar health update: Doctor says,'She in ICU with Covid-19 and pneumonia, will be under observation'

Assam relaxes night curfew timings from tomorrow ahead of Magh Bihu: Details here

Strictly comply with lockdown Tibetan government in exile says

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Dharmshala, Mar 26: The Tibetan government-in-exile has appealed to the community to strictly comply with the nationwide lockdown imposed to fight coronavirus.

The appeal comes after the death this week of a member of the community in McLeodganj, where the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) is headquartered.

This was the first death due to coranavirus in Himachal Pradesh.

#Stayathome and send us your selfie

On Thursday, the Dalai Lama praised the tough measures being taken to contain the virus.

The Tibetan spiritual leader also wrote to Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur, expressing support.

In its appeal to Tibetans in the state and elsewhere in the country, the CTA urged strict compliance to instructions issued by any state government.

The CTA itself has reduced the presence of staff at its headquarters, encouraging employees to work from home, an official said.

Explained: Shops open, but police thrash if you step out; How lockdown is failing to save people

The man who died of coronavirus had recently returned from the US.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Thursday, March 26, 2020, 17:09 [IST]
Awad released the posters on his Facebook page

Joining the global campaign to curb the spread of coronavirus, Egyptian designer Moustafa Awad released a series of posters tackling the topic.

The posters are available on Awad's Facebook page.

Awad is working in the advertisement sector of Egypt's Ministry of Culture.

Some of his works carry messages in several languages calling for general caution against spreading the virus. Other posters assure "We Will Win", addressing the global pandemic.





For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend the G-20 conference on the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday through video conferencing.

An unprecendented move, the conference has been named G-20 Virtual and is being chaired by Saudi Arabia. It is expected that an action plan will be prepared to fight the coronavirus.

According to sources, the video conferencing will take place from 5.30 p.m. on Thursday evening till 7 p.m.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Modi tweeted that the G-20 is going to play an important role in facing the COVID-19 threat. It is believed that in the meeting there will be an effective discussion on how to prevent the spread of coronavirus and the measures to mitigate its effect.

Prime Minister Modi himself has said that he is expecting an effective and beneficial discussion on this issue.

During the G-20 meeting, a wide-ranging discussion on the treatment of coronavirus is also likely to take place. The member countries may also discuss and announce a package to deal with the crisis.

Currently, over 150 countries are affected by the coronavirus. According to data from the John Hopkins University, 4,38,000 people worlwide have been infected with this disease, and the death toll has crossed 20,000.
Indonesia is imploring its citizens not to panic and to practise social distancing and self-isolation, as the country's health system strains under the weight of rapidly rising infections.

The country reported 105 new cases of coronavirus on Wednesday, taking the national tally to 790, and three new deaths, taking the death toll to 58 people.

A member of the Indonesian Red Cross Society takes a break after spraying disinfectant at the Kemayoran train station in Jakarta. Credit:Bloomberg

Ascobat Gani, a public health economist, warned that "maybe we will follow Wuhan or Italy. I think we are in the range of that" according to Reuters.

A study by the London-based Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases suggested the true number of infections in the country may already be 34,300 people.
'80 hours for 80mn campaign': Pressing US to ditch Iran sanctions amid outbreak

03/26/20

Source: Press TV

Amid a worldwide outcry against the United States' illegal and unilateral sanctions imposed on Iran, a popular campaign has been launched to pressure Washington into temporarily lifting the sanctions that are obstructing the Iranian people's efforts to curtail the deadly coronavirus outbreak. The '80 hours for 80 million campaign' has been launched on the New/Mode advocacy platform to promote this cause.



80 hours for 80 million

The participants are required to enter their phone numbers on the campaign's webpage which will then put them through to the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control so they can demand that OFAC enable the temporary sanctions relief.

"We're making 80 hours of calls to OFAC on behalf of 80 million people," reads the campaign's manifesto.

The United States reinstated its sanctions against Iran in May 2018 after leaving a United Nations-endorsed nuclear agreement with the Islamic Republic and five other countries.

Tehran sued Washington at the International Court of Justice afterwards. The tribunal ruled that the US should lift its sanctions on humanitarian supplies.

Washington claims that it has exempted foodstuffs and medicine from the bans, something that Tehran entirely disputes.

The Islamic Republic has written to the United Nations and all international organizations, urging the removal of the vehicles of "economic terrorism" that have come in the way of its fight against the outbreak.

'Deadly sanctions'

The organizers of the popular campaign have warned about the consequences that the Iranian nation has come to face as a result of the "deadly sanctions" amid its battle against the new virus that has already claimed the lives of 2,077 Iranians.

"Researchers predict that if sanctions aren't lifted, at least 3.5 million Iranian lives will be lost to COVID-19," the campaign statement reads, using the name given to the new coronavirus.

"Iranians can't buy or make necessary supplies - such as paper for masks - if the US doesn't lift sanctions," says the manifesto, and cautions, "That's 80 million. 80 million Iranians facing tragic consequences if US sanctions aren't lifted."

The organizers have also pointed out that the US slapped even more sanctions on Iran right after the viral outbreak as part of its "maximum pressure" policy against the Iranian nation.

The move, they note, came while China and the United Kingdom were calling for Washington to ease up the economic measures amid the global crisis.

"Join us in fighting to #EndCOVIDSanctions and give Iranians what experts say is critical to stopping COVID-19: 120 days of sanctions relief or face catastrophic loss of life," the statement says.

According to the World Health Organization, since emerging in central China late last year, the respiratory disease has claimed more than 18,900 lives and infected more than 422,800 others.
(Katy Kildee/kkildee@mdn.net)

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel on Thursday issued an urgent consumer alert urging Michiganders to be on high alert for bad actors aiming to coerce them out of their personal information in a new federal stimulus payment scam.

Scammers are using the news that the federal government will send one-time payments to millions of people across the country as part of the federal economic relief response to COVID-19 to steal personal information.
The impact of the coronavirus crisis over the past two months on the hotel industry has been well documented as occupancy rates have plummeted and hotels have had to furlough workers and temporarily close locations.

The American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) spelled out the grim facts last week. Based on current occupancy (which is below 20% in many major cities) and near-term occupancy estimates, AHLA says 4 million jobs either have been or will be lost in the next few weeks.

MGM Resorts International (NYSE:MGM) has been hit as hard as any, announcing on March 16 that it was temporarily closing all of its casino resorts in the U.S., including its properties in Las Vegas; Detroit; Mississippi; Springfield, Massachusetts; and National Harbor, Maryland, among others. The company's stock price plunged 34% on the news on March 16.

But over the last five days through March 24, the stock price has bounced back about 23%. Here's why.

Ample liquidity

On March 12, the company announced that it had canceled its planned $1.25 billion stock buyback program due to market volatility.

"As a result of the unforeseen and unprecedented volatility in the financial markets due to coronavirus, and the resulting impact on our ability to determine and maintain an offering price range, we have decided to terminate the tender offer," Jim Murren, then-chairman and CEO of MGM Resorts, said.

Murren said the company has ample liquidity to weather the coronavirus storm.

"Our recently closed real estate transactions, as well as the contemplated $1.4 billion redemption of operating partnership units, will provide us with approximately $8.2 billion of net cash proceeds, allowing us to achieve our strongest balance sheet in the last decade and one of the strongest in our industry," Murren said.

MGM had $2.4 billion of cash and investments, excluding MGM China Holdings Limited and MGM Growth Properties, as of March 11. Plus, it has a $1.5 billion in revolving credit, giving it about $3.9 billion of liquidity.

That may have put the market at ease some following the temporary closures. In addition, insiders, including executives and board members, bought shares over the last few days, buoying the stock price.

Changes at the top

On Sunday, March 22, MGM brought on a new CEO, Bill Hornbuckle, who has been with the company since 1998, most recently as president and chief operating officer. Hornbuckle will serve as acting CEO, replacing Jim Murren, who was appointed by Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak to lead the state's COVID-19 response task force. Murren had announced in February that he was stepping down but would stay on until a replacement was named. Paul Salem, who is currently on the board, was tapped to replace Murren as board chairman.

The continuity during this time of great uncertainty for the industry and the economy appears to be a good move.

In his first major action Monday, Hornbuckle announced that MGM has created a $1 million emergency fund to help its employees through this crisis. "As we confront extraordinary events and an unprecedented global pandemic crisis, we know that this is an extremely challenging and uncertain time for many of our employees, their families, friends and neighbors and we are committed to help those in need," Hornbuckle said. MGM employs about 83,000 people around the world.

The company also donated 400,000 meals to food banks around the country in the past week.

MGM officials, as well as the other leaders from the hotel industry, met with Trump administration officials last week seeking federal relief from the coronavirus crisis. Congress has been working with Trump administration officials this week on a plan that hoteliers hope will provide some relief for the industry.

These are difficult times for MGM and the industry. MGM's stock price has plummeted over 60% this year and is down to $12 per share. MGM looks well-positioned to get through it though, and it should be a market leader once again when it gets to the other side.
(Natural News) The ongoing coronavirus outbreak could be natures way of sending us a message warns Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Andersen stated that humanity was placing too many pressures on the natural world and that the coronavirus was one of the consequences of doing so.

Andersen, along with other leading scientists, also called the current pandemic a clear warning shot in regards to the destruction of natural habitats. They warn that many even deadlier diseases exist in the wild and that it was human behavior that almost always causes them to cross over into humans.

To prevent future outbreaks, the scientists called for the end of habitat destruction through mining, excessive farming and even housing as these often drive wildlife into contact with people. They specifically singled out the wild animal trade, something that was prevalent in Wuhans wet markets where the first cases of COVID-19 first broke out.

Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people, said Andersen in an interview with the Guardian.

Our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbor diseases that can jump to humans.

Chinas wildlife trade poses a risk

Early this year, scientists claimed that the coronavirus responsible for the current pandemic made contact with humans in a wet market selling wildlife in Wuhan, China. World Health Organization (WHO) officials concluded that it most likely came from a bat, though it may have jumped to another host, before infecting humans.

In February, after temporarily closing wildlife markets, China finally enacted a permanent ban on the trading of wildlife. Its relation to the coronavirus was just too much of a risk to keep the $20 billion industry alive.

Before the ban, the industry was seen by many local government officials in rural areas as a way to boost local economies. Indeed, the industry had the support of the state, which even backed television programs showing people farming various wild animals both for commercial sale and private consumption.

The state forestry bureau has long been the main force supporting wildlife use, said Peter Li, a China Policy Specialist for the Humane Society International. It insists on Chinas right to use wildlife resources for development purposes.

With this in mind, some doubts have been raised about whether the ban will end the industry. Before the ban, people needed special licenses to participate in the captive breeding of wildlife. However, some activists have pointed out that licenses to operate legal wildlife farms were often just covers for illegal activities.

They just use this premise to do illegal trading, said Zhou Jinfeng, head of Chinas Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF). There are no real pangolin farms in China, they just use the permits to do illegal things.

Indeed, the U.K.-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), stated in a report this week that the coronavirus outbreak may have actually boosted the wildlife trade as online sellers market rhinoceros horn medicines as a treatment to reduce fever.

Coronavirus was predicted by previous outbreaks

That the coronavirus crossed over to humans from wildlife shouldnt have come as a surprise. Professor Andrew Cunningham of the Zoological Society of London pointed out that previous outbreaks such as the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak predicted that this would happen.

The emergence and spread of Covid-19 was not only predictable, it was predicted [in the sense that] there would be another viral emergence from wildlife that would be a public health threat, said Cunningham.

Aaron Bernstein of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health agrees with Cunningham and Andersens sentiments. As with the latter, he points to COVID-19 as well as other diseases such as SARS, MERS and AIDS as nature trying to say that were playing with fire. He further advocates for joining environmental policy with health, calling their separate a dangerous delusion.

Sources include:

TheGuardian.com

CNBC.com

Reuters.com

Independent.co.uk
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Traci Lynn Martin aims to circumnavigate all five Great Lakes on her surfski kayak this year, to bring awareness to people suffering from chronic pain.

Martin, 52, a mother of three from Kansas City, Missouri, tried the journey once before. She arrived in Cleveland in November 2017, but had to abandon the trip a month later in Toronto, after ice formed on Lake Ontario. She completed three lakes, paddling 3,592 miles -- 230 miles short of the Guinness World Record.

This year, Martin -- who has rheumatoid arthritis -- started in Buffalo on March 1. And shes not going for the record.

She wants to inspire people who struggle everyday with a chronic health condition or disability to never give up.

Its more about the message than the miles, Martin said Wednesday in a phone interview in Ashtabula. She planned to paddle about 17 miles that day, and hopes the south wind wont slow her down too much today. But she plans to break this weekend because of strong wind, waves and rain.

In 2017 I was like this thoroughbred horse ready to get out of the gate and just go, go, go, Martin said. "This time around I have a lot more patience. If the weather is telling me its not a good day, then Im not going to put myself in danger and go out."

Martin has more experience with the Great Lakes this time; she knows how quickly they can change.

I came up here very naive as to just how quickly the lakes change, she said. Different lakes have different personalities.

Traci Lynn Martin aims to circumnavigate all five Great Lakes this year on her surfski kayak.

This time, Martin has lots of friends helping her make arrangements, especially on Lake Eries south shore. And because shes not trying for a world record, she has a backup boat she can use if her first boat gets damaged. Her two surfskis are covered with the names of more than 2,000 people from around the world, all suffering from chronic illness.

A surfski is longer than a kayak, with a deeper cockpit. The craft can be unstable, but can effectively navigate through big surf and waves.

Martins ambition is inspired by the 2015 death of her mother, who regretted not accomplishing more of her dreams. She wants to prove that people with chronic illnesses dont have to quit their passions.

The plan is to continue onto Lake Huron, then Michigan, then Superior and then carry the boat around Niagara Falls to reach Lake Ontario.

Shes hoping the weather will be on her side this year. But if I only get the four lakes done, thats OK, too.

For more Lake Erie news, follow RocktheLake on Facebook.
SAHARAN sands were found in many parts of Limerick this weekend, leaving many people dumbfounded - and many cars in need of a wash.

This Sunday, car windshields in Mungret, Dooradoyle and in multiple parts of the county were covered in a fine dusting of a sand-like substance after rainfall the previous night.

Local geoscientist and lecturer Breandan MacGabhann was contacted by many concerned locals, though he reassures that there is no cause for concern.

Sometimes you get the dust blowing off the Sahara desert and the particles of that dust are so small that they easily stay up in the atmosphere, he told the Limerick Leader. They just get brought up by winds up the Atlantic and then blown on shore here in Ireland.

It's something that happens, I wouldn't say commonly, but it's certainly not rare by any means. I think there was an episode of it in 2017. So you know, it's not something that is totally bizarre, the Green Party Executive Committee and Limerick City West representative said.

I got reports not just all over county Limerick, but also in Kerry, Wicklow, Galway, and even Derry, he added, so it's something that was, you know, to some extent nationwide.

The Saharan dust was picked up by winds which carried it over Spain, before depositing it in many parts of Ireland and the UK by something rarely found in the desert - rain.

Its really down to the wind blowing in the right direction. It doesn't really need any particular local weather conditions - you just need rain. Once this stuff is carried by the wind up in the atmosphere, it will pretty much stay up there because the winds up in that altitude tend to be high enough to just keep blowing it around until clouds start to form around the dust. So then you'll get rain drops, with the water collecting around a little bit of dust. So whenever the rain is falling, the dust is actually in the water of the rain. It's inside the raindrops rather than being blown down on us.

Explaining the unique and eye-catching patterns the dust left on the cars, he said: If the rain is not too heavy, then it doesn't really get washed away or anything, and it will start to dry off and the dust just gets left behind. That's why you can see the pattern it leaves on the cars.

Read also: Riverbank erosion a continuing problem in county Limerick town

Breandan explained how, initially, people were worried that the dust was not a natural occurrence.

I got a lot of people getting in touch on Twitter and so did Claire Keating just because people wake up with dust covering in the cars in Mungret and Dooradoyle and obviously, a lot of people's first thought was oh, did something go wrong with Irish Cement again? But thats not the case.

This is not something that would have affected our air quality at all just because the dust was inside the raindrops whenever they were falling.

Hazy, deep red sunsets were spotted over the weekend in many parts of the county, which some claim may also have been a sign of the sands in the atmosphere.

Africa's orange and red sunsets are often the result of large amounts of dust in the atmosphere, whereas our sunsets here are usually quite clear as winds usually come from across the Atlantic ocean where there is no air pollution.

The Sahara is one of the largest deserts in the world, almost as big as China or the United States.

Strong winds in the region mean that theres a lot of sand and dust that can be picked up and moved in the tropical air.

The air routinely takes a wind path towards Ireland, but more often than not it is released in rain before reaching Irelands shores.

I don't think that there's any real danger, added Breandan, it's a natural event and nothing to worry about for anyone other than a few car washes.
https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Famous-NY-Mohel-Passes-Away-from-COVID-19.html

Rabbi Romi Cohn saved 56 Jewish families during WWII and embodied Jewish values.

Rabbi Avraham Cohn  known as Romi  was a familiar presence in New Yorks Jewish communities. A successful real estate developer, he was also a mohel who performed over 35,000 circumcisions by his estimate. He never took payment and he trained over a hundred other mohels on the condition that they perform this mitzvah for no monetary reward.

Romi Cohns legacy of helping others began when he was a young child and he saved scores of his fellow Jews from the Holocaust. He faced unimaginable horrors. Born in Pressburg, Czechoslovakia, in 1929, his family were Chassidic Jews, and would regularly open their home to students who were boarding at local yeshivas, providing them with meals and a family away from home.

All that changed in 1938 when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Suddenly it was terribly dangerous to live openly as a Jew. Though he was only ten years old, Romis parents sent him to safety in Hungary where he enrolled in the Pupa Yeshiva, and was helped by the Rosh Yeshiva who hid the fact that Romi was an illegal refugee. For a few years, life seemed fairly normal  until 1944, when Germany invaded Hungary and began deporting Jews to death camps.

Romi used forged identification papers that identified him as a Christian to return to Czechoslovakia, and there he made contact with secret partisan fighters who were resisting the Nazis. For a time, Romi worked with resistance fighters, supplying Jews with forged documents that identified them as Christian and finding hiding places. A sympathetic worker in the local Gestapo headquarters helped Romi and the other partisans, supplying them with German seals so they could stamp their forged documents with authentic Nazi insignias.

Romi was arrested on suspicion of carrying forged documents but managed to escape from custody. Realizing that hed face certain death if he was caught a second time, Romi fled to the mountains in Hungary where groups of partisan fighters were hiding. He forged a Nazi military travel order, identifying him as a non-Jewish Jan Kovik, who was carrying a message to a distant military outpost near territory where partisans were fighting. Nazis who checked these forged travel orders, Romi later recalled, all shook my hand and wished me luck. They thought I was going to go strike a blow for the Reich.

By then, German forces were already in retreat, and Romis unit of partisan fighters drove them further westward. They also captured soldiers and senior Nazi officials. In all, Romi helped save the lives of 56 Jewish families during the Holocaust. He was awarded the Silver Star medal by the International Partisans after the war.

Europe in 1945 was in disarray and Romi had no idea if anyone in his family had survived. He was only sixteen years old, and returned to Czechoslovakia to see if he could find anyone hed once known. He met with returning survivors, asking them if theyd heard any news about his family. One day, he met a man who was so emaciated that Romi burst into tears. Suddenly, this survivor called out Romis name. It was his father! He was ill Romi hadnt even recognized him. The pair embraced, and Romis father told him the terrible news that his mother, his sisters and his brother had all died at Nazis hands.

Romi eventually got permission to move first to Canada, then the United States. He settled in New York, where he met his wife Malvine. Together, they built a new life dedicated to Jewish observance and rebuilding the Jewish community that the Nazis had tried so hard to destroy.

With the rise of Holocaust denial, Romi began to speak out about his Holocaust experiences. In 2002 he published The Youngest Partisan: A Young Boy Who Fought the Nazis, about his experiences during World War II. We have to keep in mind today, we live in a free country and we say, This could never happen here, which is a tremendous mistake, Romi warned. I come from Czechoslovakia. Democracy in Slovakia was even superior to American democracy  total democracy. And if this could happen in a civilized country, overnight Within six months, propaganda turned the population completely.

In the decades after the Holocaust, Romi did all he could to rebuild Jewish life. He set up a foundation to help support Jewish students, wrote books on Jewish subjects, and helped build synagogues and Jewish schools. He even wrote an entire Torah scroll which he gave to Rabbi Chaim Zanvl Abramowitz, also known as the Ribnitzer Rebbe, who was Romis rabbi and spiritual guide. n January 27, 2020, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Romi delivered the opening prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Rabbi Romi Cohn passed away on March 23, 2020 at the age of 92 from Covid-19 related illness. Many people, they lost their faith in God during the Holocaust Rabbi Cohn explained. His experience was different: The Holocaust enforced my belief because I was in situations where...I had continuously two angels walking next to me. No matter what situation I was in, impossible situations, and they protected me.
Filling a room with scent can help you be more productive when working from home as well as helping you to relax at the end of the day.

Scientists have shown that fragrances cross over the blood-brain barrier and interact with receptors in the central nervous system to affect how we feel.

Reed diffusers are the most effortless way to layer scents around the home as they don't require any flames, plugs, or batteries, unlike candles or electric diffusers.

From sleep-inducing lavender to zingy lemon and mint, ahead are eight of the best reed diffusers to freshen up your home.

Chesapeake Bay Candle Cashmere Jasmine Reed Diffuser, $19.99

If you're trying to create a warm, restful vibe for your living room then the Chesapeake Bay Cashmere Jasmine reed diffuser will help you find that feeling of calm.

The comforting arms of exotic jasmine, cotton blossom and rose soften the atmosphere through a combination of ylang ylang, lemon and cedar wood essential oils. Its sleek, minimalist design means it will look great in any room, whatever the decor.

Since 1994, Chesapeake Bay Candle has been creating fragrances drawing inspiration from Maryland's idyllic shoreline, and this one has more than 6,000 five-star reviews on Amazon.

CLICK TO BUY AT AMAZON

Nest Fragrances Amalfi Lemon and Mint Reed Diffuser, $48

Close your eyes and you'll feel like you're in Italy when you have the Nest Fragrances Amalfi lemon and mint diffuser in your home. This one's great for masking stale cooking smells as well as for using in the bathroom to create a spa-like mood.

It's all thanks to zesty lemon and orange bergamot blended with freshly picked mint and a hint of driftwood that transport you to Italy's Amalfi coast.

Nest Fragrances diffusers have patented-pending ScentSticks, which release the oil slowly and evenly for an average of 90 days.

CLICK TO BUY AT NEST FRAGRANCES

Manu Home Natural Lavender Reed Diffuser Sticks, $24.50

From the pretty purple packaging to the gorgeous reusable glass bottle, the Manu Home natural lavender reed diffuser would make a great gift to anyone struggling to sleep.

Inspired by the sunny lavender fields of Provence, this diffuser brings the soothing scent of fine French blossoms into your home. The essential oil blend combines the clean, herbal aroma of Provencal lavender with the delicate essence of clary sage to help you relax and forget stress.

All Manu Home diffusers are hand-made in the USA and offer between ten and 12 weeks of fragrance.

CLICK TO BUY ON AMAZON

Salvatore Ferragamo Tuscan Creations Convivo Eau De Parfum Reed Diffuser, $115

The Salvatore Ferragamo Tuscan Creations reed diffuser is one of the more expensive diffusers on the market, but you're paying for quality.

The scent is a sophisticated mix of tonka bean, vetiver and leather topped with cardamom and bitter orange peel. It will help your room smell like a luxury five-star hotel and is appealing to both the male and female nose.

The sticks are made from natural reeds, which means they are able to spread the fragrance through a very enveloping and long-lasting diffusion.

CLICK TO BUY AT SAKS FIFTH AVE

Capri Blue Volcano Reed Diffuser, $34

Bring the outdoors into your living space with Capri Blue's Volcano reed diffuser. Not only is the holder a lovely shade of blue, which would brighten up a living room or bathroom, but the scent smells deliciously fresh.

The mix of tropical fruits, sugared oranges, lemons and limes topped with lightly exotic mountain greens awakens the senses, giving you the same comfort that you'd get from a slice of tropical cake but without the calories.

The fragrance blends seamlessly with Capri Blue's range of soy-blended candles so you can layer scents around the home.

CLICK TO BUY AT ANTHROPOLOGIE

Yankee Candles Clean Cotton Reed Diffuser, $25

Make your surroundings smell as clean as the scent of freshly-washed sheets or laundry on a washing line with the Yankee Candles clean cotton reed diffuser.

With pre-fragranced reeds, there's no oil to add, so there's no clean-up and you can choose how much fragrance you want by adding or removing reeds.

The diffuser will make the air you breathe feel like a summer's day as sun-dried cotton combines with green notes, white flowers and a hint of lemon. There's also a hint of rose for added freshness.

CLICK TO BUY AT YANKEE CANDLES

Jo Malone Lime Basil and Mandarin Diffuser, $98

Lime, Basil and Mandarin is Jo Malone's signature scent, perfuming homes around the world with a unisex citrus fragrance that's uplifting and awakening. The sleek monochrome bottle is instantly recognizable, showing all house guests that you have chic and sophisticated tastes.

Peppery basil and aromatic white thyme bring an unexpected twist to the scent of limes on a Caribbean breeze. This makes it fresh and fruity without being overpowering. The diffuser comes with ten reeds, and Jo Malone advises using all ten at once for optimal diffusion.

CLICK TO BUY AT JO MALONE

Alio Apple And Cinnamon Oil Free Reed Diffuser, $18

Alio diffusers are great for homes with kids or pets as they're oil free so there is no danger of spillages. Instead, the reeds are pre-scented. Made from all-natural wood resin, sourced from sustainably raised trees, they neutralize other odors in the home and then top them with something warm and comforting.

The apple and cinnamon scent opens with the freshness of crisp red apples and juicy, tart berries. A warm spice blend of cinnamon and clove brings warmth to the heart while hints of sweet vanilla add the finishing touches.

CLICK TO BUY AT ALIO HOME

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Family-owned Bacardi has expanded its commitment across countries and brands to help produce more than 267,000 gallons (1.1 million liters)of hand sanitizers, as worldwide demand continues to exceed supply in efforts to reduce the risk of COVID-19. This week, eight Bacardi-owned manufacturing sites across the United States, Mexico, France, England, Italy and Scotland are joining the efforts, following last weeks announcement that Bacardi in Puerto Rico would supply alcohol to make hand sanitizers. Across the sites, Bacardi is diverting its global production power, resources and processes to supply the much-needed alcohol essential for the increased production of hand sanitizers.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200325005615/en/

Bacardi Puerto Rico Provides Raw Materials for Hand Sanitizers - Photo Courtesy of Bacardi

Bacardi is also playing a part in donating these products to local organizations and emergency responders, as well as its employees and contractors. In addition, the company is providing alcohol at cost to select partner companies looking to ramp up their production of hand sanitizers for commercial sale. These temporary, emergency actions at all locations will not disrupt the supply of brands in the Bacardi portfolio.

Over our 158-year history, we have risen to many challenges and we are doing the same again in response to COVID-19, said Jean-Marc Lambert, SVP Global Operations for Bacardi. All our brands and partners involved in this initiative will help people most in need benefit from the supply of these hand sanitizers. Our goal is to make a very real difference in the fight against COVID-19.

The current list of sites providing support either immediately or in the coming week are:

BACARDI rum in Puerto Rico  partnered with Puerto Rico based manufacturer Olein Refinery to provide raw materials that will enable the production of more than 1.7M units of 10-ounce (300 ml) hand sanitizers. Donated product to local USPS, firefighters, police and non-profit Somos Unidos (United Way);

 partnered with Puerto Rico based manufacturer Olein Refinery to provide raw materials that will enable the production of more than 1.7M units of 10-ounce (300 ml) hand sanitizers. Donated product to local USPS, firefighters, police and non-profit Somos Unidos (United Way); Bacardi Bottling Corporation in Jacksonville, FL, USA  is planning to help produce approximately 23,000 gallons (87,000 liters) to make 120,000 units of 25-ounce (750 ml) bottles hand sanitizer for donation to local hospitals, firefighters and police. In addition, the team will supply 7,600 gallons (29,000 liters) to nearby manufacturers.

 is planning to help produce approximately 23,000 gallons (87,000 liters) to make 120,000 units of 25-ounce (750 ml) bottles hand sanitizer for donation to local hospitals, firefighters and police. In addition, the team will supply 7,600 gallons (29,000 liters) to nearby manufacturers. BACARDI rum in Tultitlan, Mexico  supplying more than 5,200 gallons (20,000 liters) of alcohol to nearby manufacturer, Grupo Sterk, to help increase production of hand sanitizer by approximately 6,300 gallons (24,000 liters), of which 2,100 gallons (8,000 liters) will be donated by Bacardi to local communities in Tultitlan, Arandas and Atotonilco;

 supplying more than 5,200 gallons (20,000 liters) of alcohol to nearby manufacturer, Grupo Sterk, to help increase production of hand sanitizer by approximately 6,300 gallons (24,000 liters), of which 2,100 gallons (8,000 liters) will be donated by Bacardi to local communities in Tultitlan, Arandas and Atotonilco; GREY GOOSE vodka in Cognac, France  will supply 7,600 gallons (29,000 liters) of alcohol per day to French companies to increase supply of hand sanitizers by 9,500 gallons (36,000 liters) for local pharmacies, hospitals and the emergency services;

 will supply 7,600 gallons (29,000 liters) of alcohol per day to French companies to increase supply of hand sanitizers by 9,500 gallons (36,000 liters) for local pharmacies, hospitals and the emergency services; BOMBAY SAPPHIRE gin in Hampshire, England  is helping to produce a small quantity of hand sanitizers that will be donated to local doctors, chemists and care homes;

 is helping to produce a small quantity of hand sanitizers that will be donated to local doctors, chemists and care homes; MARTINI in Pessione, Italy  is supplying alcohol for the production of 1,000 7-ounce (200ml) hand sanitizers for the local community, Red Cross and local emergency services;

 is supplying alcohol for the production of 1,000 7-ounce (200ml) hand sanitizers for the local community, Red Cross and local emergency services; DEWARS Blended Scotch Whisky in Aberfeldy, Scotland  is helping to produce a small quantity of hand sanitizers for the Scottish Ambulance Association among other local community groups;

 is helping to produce a small quantity of hand sanitizers for the Scottish Ambulance Association among other local community groups; ANGELS ENVY Kentucky Straight Bourbon in Louisville, KY, USA  is supplying nearly 1,000 gallons (3,800 liters) of alcohol to create approximately 16,000 8-ounce (250 ml) bottles of free hand sanitizers for first responders and healthcare professionals.

All hand sanitizers produced in collaboration with Bacardi contain more than the minimum alcohol content recommended by the World Health Organization for containing the spread of the virus.

About Bacardi

The Bacardi Limited brand portfolio comprises more than 200 brands and labels, including BACARDI rum, GREY GOOSE vodka, PATRON tequila, DEWARS Blended Scotch whisky, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE gin, MARTINI vermouth and sparkling wines, CAZADORES 100% blue agave tequila, and other leading and emerging brands including WILLIAM LAWSONS Scotch whisky, ST-GERMAIN elderflower liqueur, and ERISTOFF vodka. Founded more than 158 years ago in Santiago de Cuba, family-owned Bacardi Limited currently employs more than 7,000, operates production facilities in 11 countries, and sells its brands in more than 170 countries. Bacardi Limited refers to the Bacardi group of companies, including Bacardi International Limited. Visit www.bacardilimited.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200325005615/en/
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San Francisco, 26 March 2020: The Report Electric Transporters Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Vehicle (Bike, Scooter, Skateboards), By Battery (Sealed Lead Acid, NiMH, Li-Ion), By Voltage, And Segment Forecasts, 2019 - 2025

The global electric transporters market size is projected to reach USD 66.98 billion by 2025, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc., progressing at a CAGR of 8.4% during the forecast period. Rising fuel price has been spurring the growth of the market. In addition, growing inclination towards eco-friendly transportation has led to increased adoption of electric transporters. The vehicles are compact and lightweight in nature and are highly convenient for short distance commuting.

Electric scooters were the most prominent vehicle type in terms of revenue in 2017. These vehicles are compact, which provide ease of transportation in a heavy traffic situation. Moreover, electric scooters are available in various types such as portable hoverboards, foldable scooters, and Segways model. Thus, customers get more options to choose an appropriate electric scooter depending on their preference. The segment is poised to expand at a CAGR of 9.7% over the forecast period. The market share of electric bikes is likely to decline over the forecast period owing to their high cost. Stringent government regulations for using e-skateboards in public places and on roads are also limiting the growth of the segment.

Sealed lead acid batteries were the most popular battery type for electric transporters in 2017, owing to their low cost and a higher range per charge. The growth of the NiMH batteries segment can be limited by increasing environmental concerns over Nickel and other harmful chemical leakages through these batteries while decomposing. Lithium-ion batteries are estimated to gain considerable market share by 2025 owing to growing technological innovations such as fast charging and surging use of polymers for better battery life.

In present time, the market is flooded with a variety of electric transporters. Increased adoption in China is proving to be a challenge for the government. Prominent cities in China, including Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, have strictly banned the use of e-bikes as their riders tend to ignore traffic rules. Thus, creating awareness among users and developing a robust regulatory framework is essential for the market to grow substantially.

Access Research Report of Electric Transporters Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/electric-transporters-market

Further key findings from the report suggest:

Electric scooter is likely to be most promising vehicle type segment during the forecast period

By voltage type, the 48V segment accounted for over 36.0% share in 2017 and the segment is anticipated to experience significant growth over the forecast period

North America is projected to register substantial growth over the coming years owing to various technological developments and success of rental business model, especially in the automotive industry. The regional market is poised to exhibit a CAGR of 9.4% from 2018 to 2025

The key players operating in the market include Allcell Technologies LLC, BMW Motorrad International, BOXX Corp., and KIWANO.

Browse more reports of this category by Grand View Research at: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry/automotive-and-transportation

Grand View Research has segmented the global electric transporters market on the basis of vehicle type, battery type, voltage, and region:

Electric Transporter VehicleType Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2014 - 2025)

Electric scooter Retro Standing/ Self-Balancing Folding

Electric bike

Electric skateboards

Electric Transporter Battery Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2014 - 2025)

Sealed Lead Acid

NiMH

Li-Ion

Electric Transporter Voltage Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2014 - 2025)

24V

36V

48V

Greater Than 48V

Electric Transporter Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2014 - 2025)

North America

Europe

Asia Pacific

Latin America

Middle East & Africa

Access Press Release of Electric Transporters Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-electric-transporters-market

About Grand View Research

Grand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.

For More Information: www.grandviewresearch.com
By Aziz El Yaakoubi and Yousef Saba

DUBAI (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates directed most of the public and private sectors to have the majority of staff work from home, and imposed overnight curfews as a temporary measure this weekend for a nationwide disinfection to combat the coronavirus.

The regional business hub, which has confirmed 333 cases of the virus and two deaths, has not announced an official curfew or work suspension but has increasingly clamped down on movement.

Authorities announced restrictions on movement of traffic and people overnight from Thursday until Sunday for the disinfection drive. The restrictions will last from 8 p.m. (1600 GMT) to 6 a.m.

Only essential service workers would be allowed out and violators will face fines, a security forces spokesman said in a press conference on Thursday.

Public transport including trams and metro services will be suspended, while private cars, cabs and delivery vehicles can operate outside those hours.

The UAE has slowly followed other Gulf states in suspending passenger flights and closing public venues such as restaurants and malls. Dubai emirate on Wednesday directed the private sector to implement remote working for most staff but exempted a broad spectrum of businesses.

On Thursday, the UAE government ordered all federal ministries and establishments and the private sector to limit the number of staff in offices to 30%.

It exempted sectors providing essential services including health, finance, energy, telecoms, security, military, cargo and food.

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have taken the most drastic steps, including imposing partial nationwide curfews and suspending work at most public and private sector establishments.

Kuwait on Thursday banned all taxis, directed the state supply company to cover any basic food shortages and said it would disburse a month's salary to all Kuwaiti students abroad.

VIRUS SPREAD

The number of cases in Saudi Arabia passed 1,000 after authorities on Thursday announced 112 new infections, most of them in the capital Riyadh and the holy city of Mecca.

Story continues

They also reported a third death from the virus, a resident in Medina who had suffered from chronic diseases.

Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar also saw more cases, taking the total in the six Gulf states to over 2,600, with nine deaths.

Saudi Arabia has released 250 foreign detainees held on non-violent immigration and residency offences as part of efforts to contain the spread of the disease, the state-backed Human Rights Commission said on Thursday.

Bahrain and Kuwait have also announced prisoner releases.

Bahrain continued to evacuate several hundred Bahraini pilgrims stranded in Iran, which is an epicentre for the disease in the region.

A second repatriation flight of around 60 Bahrainis arrived overnight from the holy Shi'ite Iranian city of Mashhad, operated by Iranian airline Kish, families and a Bahraini official told Reuters.

Bahrain earlier this month repatriated 165 people, but a number of subsequent scheduled flights were cancelled. At least 85 of the first batch of evacuees tested positive for the virus.

The island state, which has reported 419 coronavirus cases and four deaths, most of them linked to travel to Iran, has longstanding differences with Iran and has criticised the Islamic Republic for not stamping Bahraini citizens' passports.

In Qatar, the government's crisis committee ordered the closure of all non-vital shops, and cafes and entertainment outlets, and restricted the working hours of all other shops to 6am to 7pm.

Pharmacies, grocery stores and delivery services are excluded from these restrictions, the committee said in a press conference broadcast on Qatari channel Al Jazeera.

Qatar recorded 12 new cases of the virus on Thursday, taking its total to 549.

(Reporting by Alaa Swilam, Lisa Barrington, Ahmed Tolba, Aziz El Yaakoubi, Yousef Saba, Stephen Kalin and Maher Chmaytelli; Writing by Lisa Barrington; Editing by Ghaida Ghantous, Raissa Kasolowsky, Mike Collett-White and Susan Fenton)
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today announced the launch of Digital Threats: Research and Practice (DTRAP), a new peer-reviewed open access journal that targets the prevention, identification, mitigation and elimination of digital threats. As DTRAP seeks to bridge the gap between academic research and industry practice, the new journal is aimed at concrete, rather than theoretical, threats. As of the first issue of DTRAP, all papers will be published on a gold open access basis and will be free to read and share via the ACM Digital Library.

The inaugural issue of DTRAP is a special issue of the 2019 FIRST (Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams) Conference, a five-day global event that brings together incident response and security professionals from around the world to share their experiences and expertise. The conference consists of presentations selected from abstracts submitted. The guest editors, Andrew Cormack of Jisc Technologies and Jeroen van der Ham of University of Twente, invited authors of selected abstracts to submit full-length papers, which were then subject to peer review by reviewers from academia and industry.

"Keeping computing systems secure from threats, whether those threats jeopardize our health information, our personal information, or our voting systems, is one of the most urgent and essential tasks of modern life," said DTRAP Co-Editor-in-Chief Leigh Metcalf of the CERT Cybersecurity Division at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. "An ongoing challenge in our field is that threats emerge so quickly. DTRAP will fill a niche in our field for cybersecurity professionals to share information and insights about the real challenges that are out there now, as well as proven approaches for mitigating them."

"We encourage submissions from people with a wide range of expertise in all fields related to cybersecurity," added DTRAP Co-Editor-in-Chief Arun Lakhotia of University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Cythereal, Inc. "Too often, leading-edge cybersecurity researchers at universities, and practitioners working on the front lines of keeping systems secure, have worked within their own silos. We believe the DTRAP journal will be a way to foster more dialogue and engagement between these two important groups, which will vastly improve the toolbox cybersecurity professionals are working with."

"In addition to DTRAP, ACM publishes additional journals on computer security, including ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC) and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), each with their own editorial focus," added ACM Director of Publications Scott Delman. "All three of these journals serve computing professionals by providing high-quality rigorous content on one of the most important topics in computing today. However, DTRAP is the first in an entirely new genre of publication for ACM that will appeal to both researchers and computer security practitioners in industry interested in access to content at the intersection of research and practice. ACM has assembled an outstanding editorial team overseeing the journal's content and we are confident that this new journal will be a highly valued contribution to the field as the journal establishes itself over the coming years."

DTRAP plans to publish a new class of articles called "Field Notes." Designed to capture interesting empirical observations that may provide a data point for future research and unusual or novel occurrences, a Field Note is envisioned as an article that provides some insights into some problem that is interesting and relevant for further research investigation.

In addition to a new selection of research papers each quarter, DTRAP will invite contributions to two regular columns: "With the Benefit of Hindsight" and "Leaving the Laboratory: Putting Research into Practice." "With the Benefit of Hindsight" will detail what authors have learned from past cybersecurity successes or failures, exploring themes such as lessons learned during a security event, how the landscape has changed since the event, and what further development remains to be done.

Each installment of "Leaving the Laboratory" will examine a peer-reviewed research article from a recent issue of DTRAP with respect to implementing research, essentially taking the research into practice. Topics for this column will include general concerns for both researchers and practitioners that relate to doing research effectively, or examining actual changes seen in the security landscape as a result of researchers and practitioners collaborating.

###

In addition to Co-EICs Metcalf and Lakhotia, the DTRAP editorial team includes 32 Associate Editors representing various countries including Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.
When New York City closed schools to combat the coronavirus outbreak and ordered remote learning for its more than 1 million students, English teacher Stephanie Paz wasnt worried about how she would virtually teach her ninth-graders to take notes in the margins of their books or how they would discuss each others essays without being in the same room. Her biggest concern was whether they would have the basic technology needed to access their virtual lessons.

Paz teaches at a school in the Bronx, where she says more than half her students did not have a computer or Internet at home when the transition to online learning was announced in mid-March. The school handed out laptops to some students but did not have enough for everyone before remote learning began on March 23, so others got paper learning packets.

I am concerned that, in 2020, all of our students dont have access to technology or Internet at home, Paz says. I worry that, as a district, we havent prioritized that. And as a nation, we havent prioritized that.

She is right to be concerned. As the virus that causes COVID-19 spreads, the nations K-12 schools and colleges have been forced to weigh health recommendations against the needs of students, many of whom are caught in the digital divide separating those who have Internet access and those who do not. About 15% of U.S. households with school-age children lack high-speed Internet access, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of 2015 Census Bureau data. Rural communities lag behind urban areas, as do tribal lands, where about a third of people dont have high-speed Internet, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

Dozens of broadband companies have signed on to the FCCs Keep Americans Connected pledge for 60 days, agreeing to waive late fees, to refrain from terminating service for homes and small businesses in arrears on bills and to open wi-fi hot spots. Some are also offering free Internet to households with K-12 and college students and to low-income families who are new customers.

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But advocates have called on them and on the government to do more. It still leaves millions of American children disconnected, Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy, says of the offer. And by the way, what happens when the 60 days are over?

Sohn, who worked for the FCC under the Obama Administration and who testified about digital inequality before Congress in January, says in the short term, the FCC and Congress should increase broadband subsidies and make more funds available for schools and libraries to provide Internet-enabled devices and hot spots to low-income students. She says more companies should lift data caps and provide low-cost broadband options.

This relief cannot come fast enough, says Sohn. Compounding the coronavirus crisis: many families count on K-12 schools for free or subsidized meals and other social services and rely on colleges for housing and income from work-study jobs.

By late March, 46 states had closed all schools, and at least 54.8 million K-12 students were either trying remote learning or not getting any instruction at all, according to Education Week. Several districts have said they might not reopen this school year.

Roye, a school principal, and sons Mosijah and Iyeoshujah on day one of remote learning | Ruddy Roye for TIME

Its something I could not in a million years have imagined having to do, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on March 15 when he announced the closure of the nations largest school district. He acknowledged that many households lacked the technology for digital learning and would suffer economic hardship if working parents had to arrange childcare.

The citys department of education is working to lend 300,000 Internet-enabled iPads to students in coming weeks, but thousands did not have the technology needed for remote learning when it began.

Alyssa Royethe principal of a Brooklyn elementary school many of whose students live in public housingexpects it could take weeks for her schools roughly 100 students to get the equipment they need to fully participate in online learning.

In the days leading up to the remote-learning transition, she called every family with a child in her school to ask if the home had computers and Internet access. Only a handful did. For everyone else, she filled out an online form for them to request an iPad from the department of education.

Her own familys situation highlights the disparities that exist not only between affluent and low-income school districts but also between schools in the same district, where funding is unevenly distributed and some neighborhoods might benefit from generous parent donations.

Royes two sons have a computer and a tablet to use at home, and they attend public schools in New York City that were already well equipped for online learning. Since remote classes began, they have been able to log on at the required times and participate in video chats with their teachers and classmates. The pandemic, she says, has made the digital divide more glaring than ever.

In some parts of the country, school officials have avoided or ended online learning because of those disparities. If thats not available to all children, we cannot make that available for some, said William R. Hite Jr., the superintendent of Philadelphia schools, when announcing that students would not be required to submit online assignments.

The Oregon department of education told schools that if they implemented distance learning, it must be accessible to all students, including those without Internet access or computers and those with special-education needs. You cannot open a brick-and-mortar school in Oregon unless it is accessible to every student in their school district. The same rules apply to an online school, Marc Siegel, spokesperson for the Oregon department of education, said in an email. Online learning in a school district cannot be implemented with an access for some mindset.

But even in some of the countrys most comfortable suburbs near high-tech urban centers, online equality is elusive. Take Bothell, Wash., an affluent bedroom community near Seattle, which began online learning on March 9 for 23,000 students in the Northshore school district.

For some parents, the transition went smoothly. Grace Jurado borrowed a couple Chromebooks from the school district, which had about 4,000 to lend out, and set them up at her dining-room table. Her three children, in sixth, eighth and 11th grades, worked through their lessons every day for a week. One of her daughters recorded YouTube videos for choir. Her son video-chatted with his friends to figure out how to attack their homework assignments. They all took a break at the end of the day to take their dogs for a walk.

But Amy Amirault found it impossible to give one-on-one help to her 14-year-old son Daniel, who has autism and behavioral challenges, while running from kid to kid to help her three younger children follow their online classes.

Northshore superintendent Michelle Reid ultimately ended online learning after five days. In an email to parents, she cited the inequities it had highlighted, in areas from special-education services to childcare to Internet access.

Other districts have raised similar concerns, questioning whether remote learning violates civil rights laws related to educating children with disabilities, who might struggle to use online tools or need more help than a parent can provide. But in guidance issued March 21, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said those concerns should not stop schools from offering distance learning during this time of unprecedented national emergency.

Jessica King, a single mother of two in Chicago, where schools are closed until April 21, says the disparities will worsen the disadvantages already facing low-income students, whose K-12 opportunities can help or drastically hinder their chances of going on to college. Making just $15 an hour as a teaching assistant in a Catholic school, King does not have a home computer and cannot afford Internet to access the optional online assignments recommended for her 6-year-old son, who has ADHD and a behavioral disorder. We already deal with the achievement gap, she says. But now its just like its going to widen.

The problem is not confined to K-12 schools. Hundreds of colleges have transitioned to online learning even though not all students have easy access to wi-fi off campus.

Delaney Anderson, a sophomore at the University of Minnesota, Morris, is one of them. The university has asked students to move out of dorms and stay off campus unless they dont have a safe place to go, but wi-fi at home on the Fond du Lac reservation is spotty at best. Its difficult to play a YouTube video, Anderson says, let alone a lecture.

As they wrestle with remote-learning challenges, many teachers say theyre trying to continue students educations and provide a sense of normality, while recognizing the new hurdles children could be facing beyond schoolwhether their parents were laid off, their younger siblings now need babysitters, or their relatives have contracted the virus.

On her first day teaching remotely in New York City, Paz says her priority was checking in with students, who seemed overwhelmed, before bombarding them with new learning material. She took attendance, shared a video welcoming students to online learning and asked them to complete a journal entry on how they were feeling about their new normal.

We have to be flexible, Paz says. We have to remember that our students are human beings in the midst of a global crisis. And the same way that its stressing us out, its stressing them out.
Female genital mutilation, like I endured as a six-year-old, has always been for the benefit of men.





The minute a girl is born into a society that accepts female genital mutilation (FGM), her life is mapped. Her right to marry, her right to education, her right to explore, is decided for her. Why? Because she is an asset, a commodity. And like any other asset or commodity, she can be profitable, or she can be disposable. FGM, also called cutting, happens when she is treated as both.

When I was six years old and living with my family in Somalia, I became a victim of FGM. From that moment on, my entire life changed. My world collapsed that day. I was a child; I had been butchered.

FGM is trauma that doesnt stay in childhood. It becomes part of a girls entire life story. When a girl is mutilated like this, her life is set on a path she has no say in. I didnt.

Every day, thousands of girls are mutilated by FGM around the globe. Some 200 million women and girls alive today have undergone it.

Because of population growth in the 29 countries where the practice is particularly prevalent, UNICEF predicts that the number of girls being cut will rise from 3.6 million a year in 2013 to 6.6 million by the year 2050, if nothing is done to stop it.

Those girls will never forget what has happened to them  just as I never have. It is a gruesome horror that I carry with me. I am 50 years old now, but the anger is always fresh, always raw.

I remember that day when, as a six-year-old girl, I became a prisoner of my own body. I remember that everyone around me, everyone I trusted, knew exactly what was going to happen to me and did nothing anything to stop it.

I knew the reason it was happening to me was so that I could be preserved for someone else  my future husband. My life didnt matter  it was all about him. I felt trapped. There was no point in living, no point in being born, if I was just going to be a producer of someone elses children.

Since that day, I have carried tremendous physical, emotional and psychological pain. But I normalised it, because everyone else around me normalised it, too.

But not any more. Although it took me many years to get to this point, I have dedicated the past 11 years to campaigning against FGM.

There is much greater awareness about this issue now.

My family fled the civil war in Somalia for the UK, where FGM is banned. Here, the government is listening to activists like me more closely. We have had consultations, and I believe the UK government now views FGM as a form of sexual abuse of children and as a child protection issue, rather than as a cultural practice it should not get involved in.

This support has given me the courage to go on and talk much more openly about FGM, particularly in schools. The biggest part of my work now involves educating young people and students. This is what I was born to do  it is what gives me tremendous hope and meaning. I do believe it is the young who will finally eradicate this practice.

But it is not just Western societies like the UK that are listening and where attitudes are changing. In Senegal, for example, the practice of FGM is still happening, but the government and leaders in society are taking action to put an end to it.

Senegal has used human rights laws to teach people. The constitution explicitly prohibits the practice of FGM and, as a result, the latest report from the non-government organisation, 28toomany, shows that approximately 80 percent of the population  crucially, both men and women  believe it should stop. There is a much greater understanding now about the medical dangers of FGM, including the risk of dying in childbirth.

But what has really worked in Senegal is men coming on board and saying: I dont want women to be cut.

I believe men have a major role to play. In most societies, men tend to stay silent about things that are happening to women, even when they know it is happening, because it has to do with female body parts.

But it is not just a womens issue  it is a human rights issue. And human rights issues are mens issues, too. If you become a father and you know your daughter is going to be cut, you have to stand up for her.

So, I am asking the men in all our communities to have the courage to stop this violence against women and children. It has gone on long enough, and it has always been done for the benefit of men. It is time for men to own up to their part in it.

In my activism, I have seen so much change. Women I know have changed their minds about getting their daughters cut. Conversations have opened up between mothers and families.

Can you imagine what society could be like if women all over the world could write their own destinies?

Give girls an education and see what they can achieve with their lives. Dont slice their flesh and expose them to lifelong trauma. Dont normalise their deaths. Treasure them.

I have so much hope for the future. I have no doubt female genital mutilation will be eradicated within the next century. I believe that wholeheartedly. And I hope to be alive to see it.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
DUBLIN, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Automated Guided Vehicle Market, by Component, by Type, by Navigation Technology, by Application, by End User, by Region, Industry Analysis and Forecast, 2019 - 2025" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Global Automated Guided Vehicle Market size is expected to reach $5.4 billion by 2025, rising at a market growth of 13.6% CAGR during the forecast period.



Automated guided vehicles deliver a range of benefits, such as a reduction in operating costs, increased safety of the workforce and a decrease in production time. The other factors leading to the adoption of AGV are the growing implementation of mobile robots worldwide and initiatives to improve safety and productivity at work.



Industrial structures are rapidly evolving, moving towards automated systems to enhance and optimize productivity levels, reorganize logistics, and improve transportation & logistics systems. Industry 4.0's emergence has contributed to the widespread sharing of data and automation in the manufacturing industry. With growing interest and a move toward automated systems and innovations, the automated market for guided vehicles has seen growth in recent years. Technological advances, especially in the navigation area, have played an important role in increasing the adoption of automated guided vehicle in the manufacturing sector.



Due to rapid technological advances in robotics and automation, the manufacturing sector has seen an increase in the incorporation of robotics engineering and technology into its production process. Manufacturers recognize factors like orientation, precision, load, speed, duty cycle, travel and climate before selecting a robot to achieve the most efficient and profitable results in their manufacturing plant. An integrated robot is one of the most widely discussed types of industrial robots, which resembles a human arm in its mechanical form. Articulated robots with six degrees of freedom are the most widely used industrial robots, as the architecture provides maximum flexibility and application in various applications like automotive assembly, food packaging, forging applications, etc.



The major strategies followed by the market participants are Acquisition and Partnerships. Based on the Analysis presented in the Cardinal matrix, Kion Group, Toyota Industries Corporation, ABB Group, John Bean Technologies Corporation, Daifuku Co., Limited, and The Krones Group are some of the forerunners in the Automated Guided Vehicle Market. Companies such as Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc., Kuka AG, and Oceaneering International, Inc. are some of the key innovators in Automated Guided Vehicle Market.



Partnerships, Collaborations & Agreements

Apr-2019: John Bean collaborated with Hyster-Yale, a company engaged in designing, engineering, manufacturing, selling, and servicing a comprehensive line of lift trucks and aftermarket parts. Following this collaboration, JBT is launching a new dual-mode automated guided vehicle to the market powered by Hyster-Yale.

collaborated with Hyster-Yale, a company engaged in designing, engineering, manufacturing, selling, and servicing a comprehensive line of lift trucks and aftermarket parts. Following this collaboration, JBT is launching a new dual-mode automated guided vehicle to the market powered by Hyster-Yale. Apr-2019: Hyster-Yale collaborated with RICO Manufacturing, a company that manufactures lift trucks. Following this collaboration, the company launched a new offering which converts their 6,000 lbs. capacity Hyster or Yale electric counterbalance lift truck to a certified EX model with the help of the latter company.

electric counterbalance lift truck to a certified EX model with the help of the latter company. Mar-2019: John Bean teamed up with Crown Equipment, a manufacturer of powered industrial forklift trucks. The collaboration was aimed at manufacturing the products, which is expected to help the clients in maximizing the benefits of material handling automation.

teamed up with Crown Equipment, a manufacturer of powered industrial forklift trucks. The collaboration was aimed at manufacturing the products, which is expected to help the clients in maximizing the benefits of material handling automation. Feb-2019: Hyster-Yale introduced a series of trucks by using robotics technology in collaboration with Balyo.

Mar-2018: Kuka announced partnership with Homag Group, a market leader in wood processing machines. The partnership was aimed at developing smart robot solutions and selling them to the global woodworking market.

Feb-2018: Daifuku came into partnership with Jervis B Webb, a company engaged in designing, engineering, installing, and supporting the integrated material handling systems. Under this partnership, the companies aim to deliver comprehensive solutions to vehicle manufacturers and their suppliers.

Acquisition & Mergers



Jan-2020: Toyota Forklift merged Toyota Industrial Equipment Manufacturing (TIEM) and Toyota Material Handling USA (TMHU), its two forklift divisions into a single unit named as Toyota Material Handling, Inc. (TMH). The merger enabled the company in simplifying, streamlining, and strengthening customer experiences.

(TMHU), its two forklift divisions into a single unit named as Toyota Material Handling, Inc. (TMH). The merger enabled the company in simplifying, streamlining, and strengthening customer experiences. Apr-2019: Toyota Industries North America completed the acquisition of Hoist Liftruck Mfg., LLC. The company was renamed as Hoist Material Handling, Inc. and operates under Toyota Material Handling USA . The acquisition strengthened the forklift product line of Toyota.

. The acquisition strengthened the forklift product line of Toyota. Apr-2019: Daifuku completed the acquisition of Vega Conveyors and Automation, a warehouse automation company. Through this acquisition, the former company aims to expand its foothold in India and other markets within Oceania and Asia by using the latter company's technology and expertise.

and other markets within Oceania and by using the latter company's technology and expertise. Jan-2019: John Bean acquired LEKTRO, a manufacturer and supplier of all-electric towbarless tow and pushback vehicles. Together, the companies is expected to offer global sales and support presence to the customers, enhanced product portfolio, and increased engineering capabilities.

acquired LEKTRO, a manufacturer and supplier of all-electric towbarless tow and pushback vehicles. Together, the companies is expected to offer global sales and support presence to the customers, enhanced product portfolio, and increased engineering capabilities. Jun-2018: Hyster-Yale acquired 75% stake in Zhejiang Maximal Forklift Co., Ltd. from KNSN Pipe & Pile Company Limited. The company was renamed as Hyster-Yale Maximal Forklift ( Zhejiang ) Co., Ltd. The acquisition enhanced the product portfolio of the former company.

) Co., Ltd. The acquisition enhanced the product portfolio of the former company. Jul-2017: ABB completed the acquisition of B&R (Bernecker + Rainer Industrie-Elektronik GmbH), a provider of on product- and software-based, and open-architecture solutions for machine and factory automation. The acquisition expanded ABB's expertise and leadership in industrial automation.

Jun-2016: Kion took over Dematic, a best-in-class automation provider. Through this acquisition, Kion Group became one of the leading global providers of intelligent intralogistics solutions.

Geographical Expansions



Sep-2019: ABB announced that it is opening a new robotics manufacturing factory in China . The construction of this factory has been started and expected to open in early 20201. It is expected to be the most advanced, flexible, and automated factory in the robotics industry.

. The construction of this factory has been started and expected to open in early 20201. It is expected to be the most advanced, flexible, and automated factory in the robotics industry. Mar-2018: Kuka opened a new matrix production plant in Augsburg, Germany . This plant expanded the company's reach to Germany .

Product Launches & Expansions



Nov-2018: Oceaneering introduced REVO-GT, a transportation vehicle system. This system uses self-guided driverless group transit vehicles and has the capacity of up to 24 passengers. It enables the passengers to select from pre-programmed routes connecting different origins to one or more specific destinations.

May-2018: Toyota introduced a new Traigo80 heavy-duty electric forklift. This forklift delivers high-performance, manoeuvrability, and efficiency.

Mar-2018: Toyota released T-ONE, new intelligent in-house developed automated guided vehicle automation software. The software has been installed as an integration layer, which communicates with the Toyota Autopilot automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and existing infrastructure such as goods identification equipment, warehouse management systems, and other material handling equipment.

Key Topics Covered



Chapter 1. Market Scope & Methodology

1.1 Market Definition

1.2 Objectives

1.3 Market Scope

1.4 Segmentation

1.4.1 Global Automated Guided Vehicle Market, by Component

1.4.2 Global Automated Guided Vehicle Market, by Type

1.4.3 Global Automated Guided Vehicle Market, by Navigation Technology

1.4.4 Global Automated Guided Vehicle Market, by Application

1.4.5 Global Automated Guided Vehicle Market, by End-user

1.4.6 Global Automated Guided Vehicle Market, by Geography

1.5 Methodology for the research



Chapter 2. Market Overview

2.1 Introduction

2.1.1 Overview

2.1.2 Executive Summary

2.1.3 Market Composition and Scenario

2.2 Key Factors Impacting the Market

2.2.1 Market Drivers

2.2.2 Market Restraints



Chapter 3. Competition Analysis - Global

3.1 Cardinal Matrix

3.2 Recent Industry Wide Strategic Developments

3.2.1 Partnerships, Collaborations and Agreements

3.2.2 Product Launches and Product Expansions

3.2.3 Geographical Expansions

3.2.4 Mergers & Acquisitions

3.3 Top Winning Strategies

3.3.1 Key Leading Strategies: Percentage Distribution (2015-2019)

3.3.2 Key Strategic Move: (Acquisition and Mergers : 2020-Jan - 2015-May) Leading Players



Chapter 4. Global Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Component

4.1 Global Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Hardware Market by Region

4.2 Global Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Software Market by Region

4.3 Global Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Services Market by Region



Chapter 5. Global Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Type

5.1 Global Tow Vehicle Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

5.2 Global Pallet Truck Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

5.3 Global Unit Load Carrier Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

5.4 Global Hybrid Vehicles Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

5.5 Global Forklift Truck & Others Type Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region



Chapter 6. Global Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Navigation Technology

6.1 Global Laser Guidance Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

6.2 Global Vision Guidance Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

6.3 Global Magnetic Guidance Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

6.4 Global Inductive Guidance Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

6.5 Global Natural Navigation & Others Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region



Chapter 7. Global Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Application

7.1 Global Logistics & Warehousing Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

7.2 Global Assembly Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

7.3 Global Packaging Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

7.4 Global Trailer Loading and Unloading Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

7.5 Global Raw Material Handling & Others Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region



Chapter 8. Global Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by End-user

8.1 Global Automotive Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

8.2 Global Manufacturing Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

8.3 Global Logistics Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

8.4 Global Food & Beverages Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

8.5 Global Retail Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

8.6 Global Healthcare Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

8.7 Global Others Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region



Chapter 9. Global Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market by Region

9.1 North America Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market

9.2 Europe Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market

9.3 Asia-Pacific Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market

9.4 LAMEA Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) Market



Chapter 10. Company Profiles

10.1 ABB Group

10.2 Kion Group (Dematic)

10.3 Toyota Industries Corporation (Bastian Solutions LLC)

10.4 Daifuku Co. Limited

10.5 John Bean Technologies Corporation

10.6 Oceaneering International, Inc.

10.7 Kuka AG (Swisslog Holding)

10.8 Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc.

10.9 E&K Automation GmbH

10.10 The Krones Group



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/qvzqf8

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YARDLEY BOROUGH >> The Yardley Borough Police Department report the following incidents and arrests: WARRANT (DOMESTIC ASSAULT) >> At approximately 7:55 p.m. on January 11 a victim fleeing a domestic assault in her vehicle was entering the parking lot at police headquarters when her car was struck by another vehicle. The striking vehicle fled prior to police arrival. A follow-up investigation...
A plan to help support the U.S. oil industry, specifically in the shale patch, has died for now.

S&P Global Platts reported that the $2 trillion plan agreed upon by the White House and Congressional leaders to boost the virus-plagued U.S. economy did not include funding to purchase approximately 77 million barrels of crude.

It is not necessarily dead forever, Platts reported. "The $3 billion requested by the Trump administration to buy U.S.-origin crudes could still be added to future coronavirus stimulus legislation," the report said. Platts said the absence of any money for Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) purchases could come in further coronavirus aid.

The Trump administration had requested $3 billion to buy oil for the SPR. That amount would have purchased 77 million barrels, enough to bring the SPR to its capacity.

Oil from the SPR actually has been sold off in recent years. The SPR was created during the Ford administration to be a lifeline in case of serious supply disruptions.

But the idea behind the sales  besides as a revenue measure  was that with U.S. net import dependence for all petroleum having disappeared, and with the U.S. becoming a net exporter of petroleum, its need to hold that much crude oil no longer existed. Crude oil held in the SPR peaked at 726 million barrels in 2011. The SPR now contains 635 million barrels, stored in multiple locations.

The U.S. was a net exporter of all petroleum products in the last three months of 2019, the latest months for which data is available. Less-thorough weekly data signifies that this trend has continued. That figure includes all things petroleum, including crude oil but also large amounts of products, including diesel and propane.

But the U.S. was still a net importer of approximately 3 million barrels of oil per day (b/d) in the last four months of the year and still averaged total crude oil imports of about 6.8 million b/d in 2019.

The SPR purchase was the primary means of assisting the oil patch in the coronavirus relief plan. The North American oil rig count last week declined to 870, down a whopping 97 rigs in one week, according to Baker Hughes. A year ago, it was at 1,121.

Story continues

But the pain so far has yet to reach the U.S. as much as Canada. Last week's U.S. number was down 20. It was down 77 in Canada.

The modeling behind the SPR purchase is that 77 million barrels of new demand could help support the industry. It was written to specifically assist the shale patch. Suppliers needed to be U.S.-based, have fewer than 5,000 employees, so a giant like ExxonMobil could not bid, and the crude needed to have been produced in the U.S.

Whether it would have had any impact was a subject of debate. The world consumed about 100 million b/d before the recent collapse in demand. The tender for the first batch of oil was released last week, with the SPR requesting to buy 30 million barrels to be delivered between May 1 and June 30. That would amount to about 490,000 b/d. If that's based on a rejiggered demand picture of something like 88 million b/d, that's an increase in demand of bout .05 to .06%. If it's against total U.S. petroleum demand, re-set down to 18 million b/d (or less...nobody really knows), it's more like 2.7%.

Regardless, that debate has come to a halt with the failure of the SPR purchase to make it into the final legislation agreed to by Congressional and White House negotiators.

See more from Benzinga

 2020 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
In the time of lockdown and social distancing, when schools and colleges are switching to digital classrooms, the Ministry of Human Resources and Development (MHRD) has released an official notice, asking students to utilize their time productively by engaging in the online learning.

In a notice addressed to all students and teachers on Wednesday, the University Grants Commission (UGC) secretary Prof Rajnish Jain said that students and teachers could opt for online courses on the digital platforms during the Covid-19 lockdown.

MHRD has provided a list of ICT initiatives in the digital platforms which can be accessed by the teachers, students, and researchers in universities and colleges for broadening their horizon for learning.

Following is the list of ICT initiatives:

SWAYAM online courses: It has teaching/ learning resources that any student/learner can use free of cost without registration. This was earlier delivered on the SWAYAM platform.

UG/PG MOOCs: It provides access to the learning material of the SWAYAM UG and PG (Non-Technology) archived courses.

e-PG Pathshala: This provides access to e-content in 87 Undergraduate courses with about 24,110 e-content modules.

SWAYAMPRABHA: This is a 32 DTH channel providing high quality educational curriculum-based course content.

CEC-UGC YouTube channel: This platform provides access to the unlimited educational curriculum at free of cost.

National Digital Library: This platform is a digital repository of academic content in different formats in all disciplines. It also provides interface support so that it can be easily accessed on all popular forms of access devices.

Shodhganga: This is a digital repository platform that provides access to current as well as archives of more than 15,000 core and peer-reviewed journals.

Vidwan: It is a database of experts and it provides information about experts to peers, prospective collaborators, funding agencies, policymakers and research scholars in the country.

e-Shodh Sindhu: This platform provides current, as well as archival access to more than 15,000 crores, peer-reviewed journals and more.
The premiere date of In the Height mightve been pushed back, but theres still plenty of musical theater content available on streaming platforms. Whether youre social distancing or just imagining a night at a Broadway musical, heres a list of movie musicals you can watch on Netflix and Disney+.

Lin-Manuel Mirandas In the Heights movie-musical has been indefinitely postponed

With the surge of coronavirus cases (COVID-19) in the United States and abroad, the release date of Lin-Manuel Mirandas movie adaptation of In the Heights has been postponed.

The film originally had an Aug. 6, 2020 premiere date. Its unclear when this movie will debut in theaters, although some fans expect more information to be released in the coming weeks. This announcement came after the postponing of other movies.

That includes Disneys live-action Mulan, Marvels Black Widow, Wonder Woman 1984, and No Time to Die. The creator of In the Height took to social media, sharing the news with musical theater fans.

We had the best summer of our lives filming #IntheHeightsMovie last year, Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote on Twitter. We gathered in Washington Heights and told this story, on location in this neighborhood, with our neighbors in our community. We couldnt wait to share it with you. But were going to have to wait a little longer.

Zac Efron, Nikki Blonsky, Queen Latifah and the cast of Hairspray | Al Pereira/WireImage

Hairspray, Sweeney Todd, and Jersey Boys are available for streaming on Netflix

It may be a little while before fans see the movie musical version of In the Heights. (Stephen Spielbergs adaptation of West Side Story is still slated for a December 2020 release.)

In the meantime, fans can watch other movie musicals, available for binge-watching anytime with a Netflix subscription. Theres Hairspray featuring Zac Efron, Nikki Blonsky, and Queen Latifah. Theres the terribly twisted Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The original version of Jersey Boys is on Netflix, in addition to the music-filled television series, Glee.

Even some Disney-owned movies like Mary Poppins Returns and Princess and the Frog are available on Netflix. For the time being, at least. Presumably, most Disney-related movie musicals will make the switch to Disneys streaming platform within the next few years.

Ben Fankhauser, Corey Cott, Liana Hunt and cast during the Newsies Final Broadway Curtain Call | Walter McBride/WireImage

Disney+ has its own set of movie musicals, including Newsies, The Sound of Music and Annie

If you want to see whats going on in New York, spend some time with the Newsies and both the live and movie version of this Disney-owned musical. Theres the 1999 version of Annie, where fans can see the hard-knock life of this red-headed orphan.

Theres even ABCs The Little Mermaid Live, which debuted on the television network during 2019. Disney+ has its original musical series based on the Disney Channel original movie, High School Musical. The entire first season of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series is available for streaming on this platform.

More information regarding In the Heights will presumably be announced in the coming weeks.
A new study in The Economic Journal, published by Oxford University Press, suggests that migrating extremists can shape political developments in their destination regions for generations. Regions in Austria that witnessed an influx of Nazis fleeing the Soviets after WWII are significantly more right-leaning than other parts of the country. There were no such regional differences in far-right values before World War Two.

There is a long history of ideological radicals who have moved abroad to spread their political views: From the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin over the revolutionary Che Guevara to Jihadist fighters returning to their home countries from the Islamic State. Governments fear that these immigrants bring political turmoil and often react with travel bans or harsh surveillance. Beyond anecdotal evidence, however, researchers have not yet identified effects of migrating extremists on the spread of actual political beliefs.

The researchers use the Allied occupation of Austria after World War Two as a natural experiment. In the summer of 1945, occupation zones in the Austrian federal state of Upper Austria were unexpectedly reallocated between the United States and the Soviets. US-liberated regions north of the Danube River were reassigned to the Soviets, while the southern bank remained under US control. People started to flee to the US zone in large numbers immediately. Primarily Nazi elites fearing Soviet punishment migrated to the south bank of the Danube River. The zoning along the Danube River divided an otherwise historically, economically and culturally homogeneous region into two areas - one with a high density and another one with comparably low density of Nazi elite members.

Austria's long tradition of far-right populism allows the authors to trace the effects of migrated Nazi elites since the late 1940s until today. The results indicate a substantial and persistent increase in extreme right-wing attitudes in the destinations of migrating extremists. Even seventy years after the Nazi influx, vote shares for far-right parties are still much higher in places where Nazi elites settled.

The authors provide two main explanations for the long-term persistence of far-right values: local institutions and family ties. Migrated Nazis founded and penetrated local party branches at their destination. Those institutions multiplied their impact. The researchers found that migrating Nazis leverage far-right votes by at least a factor of 1.3 up to a factor of 2.5. Another explanation for persistence is intergenerational transmission. The authors collected pre-war phone book entries and show that names of far-right politicians today still reflect long-gone migration of Nazi elites after the war. All results hold when including controls for socio-economic and time invariant geographic characteristics.

It appears that political preferences are transmitted from generation to generation. Even after three or four generations, attitudes and beliefs of Nazi migrant families and communities continue to differ. Descendants of migrating extremists together with local party institutions are continuously spreading their beliefs to residents through active engagement in local politics.

"We were surprised to learn that imported extremism can survive for generations and does not fade away," said the paper's lead author Felix Roesel. "The good news is that liberal and democratic values spread in a very similar manner. This is what new research has shown. Populism is not more contagious than other political ideas."

###

Direct correspondence to:

Felix Roesel

ifo Institute, Dresden Branch

Einsteinstrasse 3

01187 Dresden, GERMANY

roesel@ifo.de

To request a copy of the study, please contact:

Daniel Luzer

daniel.luzer@oup.com

Sharing on social media? Find Oxford Journals online at @OxfordJournals
A leaked iOS 14 build has further added credence to the fact that Apple is working on an AR/VR headset which it could potentially release in 2021 or 2022. The leaked iOS 14 build contains a photo of a generic controller for an AR/VR headset that looks similar to HTCs Vive controller.

A previous rumor had claimed that Apple has partnered with Valve over its AR headset. A report from 2017 had claimed that Apple engineers were using HTCs Vive headset for internal testing. It is unlikely that Apples AR/VR controller will have such a generic design. This is likely just a generic image that Apple is using a placeholder and the final product is going to be more polished.

Apple is working on many new AR features for iOS 14. This includes a new AR app codenamed Gobi that will provide users with more information about the world around them using AR. The app will integrate with Apples own retail stores and Starbucks. Users will be able to hold their phone in front of an Apple Store and get information about the displayed products, pricing, compare their features, and more.

As discovered by MacRumors, Apple is testing a new AR experience called crosswalk bowling game. The AR experience will allow users to roll down a virtual bowling ball across a crosswalk to knock down virtual bowling pins on the other side while waiting for the pedestrian light to change to green. This AR experience can also be activated at an intersection near Apples office in Mathilda Ave in Sunnyvale, California.

References to Apples AR/VR headset were also found in the internal builds of iOS 13. It is clear that Apple is building AR apps and an ecosystem before it releases its AR headset. Previous rumors and reports point to Apple releasing its AR headset in 2021 and then follow it up with a sleeker pair of AR glasses in 2022. The company recently launched the 2020 iPad Pro with a LiDAR scanner that further helps in enhancing the AR experience.

[Via MacRumors
As African nations race to impose lockdowns and curfews in a bid to limit the spread of Covid-19, some are worried about the disruption that social distancing will bring to Africa's social norms.

On a continent where two or three generations often live under the same roof, and personal space is lacking, some experts believe it will be more difficult to impose social distancing to slow down the coronavirus spread in Africa compared to Europe, Asia and the United States.

"Spending time together is the norm," says Gilles Yabi, founder of the West African think tank Wathi, of a culture where family gatherings and big crowds go hand in hand.

That continues even in sickness. In African cultures, the sick are treated and revered, not isolated, making self-quarantining almost impossible.

Socialisation is not just a matter of culture but survival. "People need to work," continues Yabi, "and that involves taking public transport and mingling with other passengers in oft-packed buses."

Crowded cities and vast slums also complicate social distancing in Africa.

"For a variety of reasons, it is certainly very difficult to enforce," he told RFI.

Yet, confinement has become inevitable, as the number of coronavirus cases climbs, forcing African governments to impose restrictions on their citizens to curb the outbreak.

In God we trust

According to Yabi, getting people to listen to the restrictions will depend on the credibility of the one dishing out the instructions.

Trust in government remains low but is high among religious leaders. Yabi says policy makers should include religious authorities in their lockdown measures to bring populations on board.

Authorities are struggling to do that in Africa's largest country Nigeria, where certain pastors have launched disinformation campaigns challenging the existence of the coronavirus.

"A lot of people think it is only God who chooses who will die or who will be contaminated. It is difficult to get them to realise that human beings have the capacity and the intelligence to make decisions themselves," explains Yabi.

Story continues

The Nigerian government has urged citizens to rely only on information related to Covid-19 that has been approved by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.

Several African countries have implemented lockdowns and curfews, encouraging citizens to stay at home and self-isolate. Confinement offers more security on a continent where health systems are weak.

Investing in health

"I think the continent has the possibility of limiting the spread of the coronavirus, but if countries miss that opportunity, I dont see how the continent can cope," comments Yabi.

For years, doctors have complained that underfunding and neglect have debilitated health systems.This makes Africa's handling of the pandemic much more challenging.

"If even a small percentage of the population catches the dangerous form of the disease it will be impossible to give them urgent assistance," says the Wathi founder, whose think tank recently published a paper on West Africa's health systems.

A poor country like Bangladesh has 5 medical doctors per 10,000 people, whereas Cote dIvoire has 2.3 doctors and Burkina Faso--hardest hit in West Africa by Covid-19-- has just 0.6 medical practitioners per 10,000 people, explains Yabi.

"This is why you can't manage this epidemic in our countries," he says, calling for more investment in terms of staff and resources to bolster African systems, and help them cope with the curtailing the transmission of the coronavirus.
PRISTINA -- Kosovos parliament has ousted the country's government in a no-confidence vote, throwing the Western Balkan nation into political turmoil even as it struggles along with the rest of the world to battle the coronavirus epidemic.



The parliament late on March 25 voted 82 in favor of the no-confidence motion, 32 against, with one abstention.



The motion was called by the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) -- a partner in Prime Minister Albin Kurtis government.



Even though a member of Kosovos ruling coalition, the LDK has opposed many of the prime minister's polices, including matters regarding the fight against the coronavirus and the imposition of 100 percent tariffs on goods from neighboring Serbia.



The future remains uncertain. In normal circumstances, a snap election could be held, but that is unlikely amid the battle to stem the spread of the COVID-19 illness.



For now, according to the countrys constitution, Kurti is expected to stay as caretaker prime minister until his leftist-nationalist Vetevendosje (Self-Determination) party puts forward a candidate for premier as required in the next 15 days.



But the toppling of the government leaves the small Western-backed nation without strong leadership as it struggles to stem the COVID-19 pandemic.



Authorities have confirmed more than 60 coronavirus infections and at least one death, that of an 82-year-old man with underlying health issues.



Tensions within the VetevendosjeLDK coalition intensified after Kurti on March 18 fired Interior Minister Agim Veliu, who supported President Hashim Thacis call to declare a state of emergency over the coronavirus pandemic.



Kurti rejected the call, saying it would cause unnecessary panic. The move would also have given the president -- a rival of Kurtis -- additional powers. The presidency is mainly a ceremonial position but does hold some official responsibilities.



The LDK has also opposed the imposition of 100 percent tariffs on Serbian imports, a move supported by Kurti but which has angered the United States and European Union.



Pristina imposed 100 percent tariffs on Serbian goods and services in November 2018 in response to Belgrade's continued lobbying for countries to reverse their recognition of Kosovo, a former province of Serbias.



Prior to the no-confidence vote, U.S. Ambassador to Kosovo Philip S. Kosnett said he was pleased that parliament was holding a session on the motion.



Kosnett said on Twitter March 24 that he told Kurti it was important for the assembly and all Kosovo's institutions to respect the constitution.



Meanwhile, Germanys ambassador to Kosovo voiced the concerns of Germany and France in saying the two countries are at the side of Kosovos people in crisis.



Christian Heldt said on Twitter on March 24 that the LDK should reconsider the call for the no-confidence vote to maintain a trusted and stable government to face Kosovos challenges.

With reporting by The New York Times, AFP, and Balkan Insider




I have a Self-Invested Personal Pension worth 480,000. The majority of this was from a financial settlement.

I am 51 now and would like to retire at 60. I am still paying into a work place pension (around 10 per cent of my salary).

I'm desperate not to lose my pension pot and am worried about the dip in the market just now.

Financial crash: How do I protect my pension when markets fall?

I realise I need to be looking long term, but at the moment I just see thousands slipping away.

Will I have enough for retirement? Is there anything I can do to protect my pension pot?

SCROLL DOWN TO FIND OUT HOW TO ASK STEVE YOUR PENSION QUESTION

Steve Webb replies: With the current turmoil in the financial markets I can entirely understand your concern about what the future may hold.

However, whilst none of us can say with certainty whether the markets have now 'reached the bottom' and will start to recover or have further to fall, the current crisis is a reminder of some timeless truths about how best to build a decent pension pot in the longer term.

Steve Webb: Find out how to ask the former Pensions Minister a question about your retirement savings in the box below

To start on a positive note, it is really encouraging to see that you are putting a meaningful amount of money into your workplace pension.

If you can keep doing this for another decade up to your planned retirement, this will make a real contribution.

The first advantage of saving in this way is that your employer will be paying in as well. This helps to build up your pot more quickly.

The second advantage is that you get tax relief on your pension contributions, so there is in effect a contribution from the Government.

In terms of your investments, you are right to say that you need to focus on the long term.

When markets plunge in a single day it is easy to forget that those who have invested in shares have generally enjoyed a decade of pretty sustained growth.

Market falls will always happen from time to time, although it is fair to say that recent falls have been some of the most dramatic that we have seen.

An important principle in investing is not to put all your eggs in one basket  or to 'diversify' your investments.

This can involve investing in a range of markets (not just the UK stock market) but also a range of 'asset classes'  this could include corporate bonds, government bonds, commercial property, commodities and so on.

The attraction of investing across a range of assets is that it is very rare for them all to move the same way at the same time.

Investing across a range of assets and deciding the right mix is not straightforward but there are relatively low cost 'multi-asset' funds available where this is done for you.

Another important principle is to invest according to your attitude to risk and your capacity to cope with losses.

As you get older, you are starting to want greater certainty and that may mean gradually moving your investments into lower risk assets.

This process is known as 'lifestyling' and it is possible that your workplace pension provider is already doing this for you on your workplace pension.

The only thing to bear in mind about moving into lower risk investments is that, all being well, you could be retired for 25-30 years if you retire at 60.

This is still a long time horizon and if you move too early to low risk assets you are likely to face much lower returns over that period.

Although the value of your pension pot will probably have gone down even further since you sent in your question, you can take comfort from the fact that you have made a solid start to saving for a pension and are already doing many of the right things to keep building up further pension saving for your retirement.
Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander on Wednesday said that the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act will help keep Americans healthy, keep paychecks coming for workers, and help relieve financial burdens for Americans hurt by COVID-19.

Senator Alexander said, The government has shut down the economy for the public health, so the Senate is responsible for taking steps to help families, workers and business who have been hurt by the outbreak of COVID-19. This bill will keep payroll checks coming to workers during the crisis, relieve financial burdens on Americans during the crisis, and contain the disease. This legislation fixes and significantly improves the paid leave policies passed by the House of Representatives. Additionally, the bill will help improve our health care capability and provide relief to schools and students who have had their education disrupted. Specifically, the bill would help expand testing, make all COVID-19 tests free, increase hiring of more health care workers, increase supply of personal protective equipment, and speed the development of new vaccines and treatments. The legislation allows students to defer payment on their student loans and to keep their Pell grants.

The CARES Act will help Americans:

 Addressing supply shortages for drugs and equipment, including ventilators and masks

 Increasing access and affordability of health care for COVID-19

 Speeding development of faster diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments

The CARES Act will help students and schools who have had their education disrupted by:

 Allowing students to defer student loan payments for 6 months and keep their Pell grants

 Allowing federal academic testing and accountability rules to be waived

The legislation will provide relief to workers and businesses by fixing and improving the paid leave policies passed by the House of Representatives.

A section-by-section of the legislation is available here.
A Melbourne man who fatally punched a surgeon in the head at a hospital has been denied the chance to appeal his decade-long prison sentence.

Patrick Pritzwald-Stegmann, 41, suffered fatal head injuries when Joseph Esmaili struck him at Box Hill Hospital in Melbourne's east in May 2017.

Joseph Esmaili's appeal of his ten-year jail sentence has failed. Credit:Jason South

Esmaili became the first person sentenced under the state's "coward-punch" laws and received a mandatory minimum 10-year prison sentence.

Victoria's Court of Appeal on Thursday rejected his attempt to appeal that sentence.
South Korea, which has been among the best in the world at coronavirus testing, has agreed to provide the United States with badly needed test kits. Seoul says U.S. President Donald Trump asked South Korea for the coronavirus help on Tuesday.
(Alliance News) - Atlas Mara Ltd on Thursday confirmed that it continuing its asset swap talks with Equity Group.

The African banking investor in January said that it was yet to conclude talks to complete the exchange of assets in four different countries for a stake in the Kenyan financial services firm.

In April 2019, Atlas Mara agreed to give up its holding in Banque Populaire du Rwanda, African Banking Corp Zambia, African Banking Corp Tanzania, and African Banking Corp Mozambique. In return the London-listed company will receive 252.5 million shares in Equity Group, which represents a 6.3% stake.

The transaction had a cash equivalent value of USD105.4 million.

On Thursday, Atlas Mara said it no longer expects the talks to conclude in the early part of 2020 due to the current situation arising from the virus outbreak.

The company also said that it is evaluating the release of its annual statements following the two-week moratorium announcement from UK regulators. It additionally has postponed its May 2020 annual general meeting due to the virus pandemic.

Shares in Atlas Mara closed untraded at USD0.68 on Thursday in London.

By Tapan Panchal; tapanpanchal@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2020 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Growing up with a dog or a cat in the house means you are 20 per cent less likely to have social and emotional problems as an adult, a study claims.

Researchers from the University of Western Australia found pets were particularly beneficial to only children.

They studied children aged five and then again when they turned seven to find out the impact animals have on their mental and physical health.

The Australian study found small children with a pet are less likely to be naughty at school and more likely to socialise with other children.

Growing up with a dog or a cat in the house means you are 20 per cent less likely to have social and emotional problems as an adult, a study claims. Stock image

The benefits of a pet are well known for adults, from walking dogs to increase exercise activity to having cats as companions for those on their own.

Having pets at home leads to an increase in confidence and teaches children vital lessons about caring for others, trustworthiness and friendship, the study found.

Even the death of a pet, while heartbreaking, can help kids develop an understanding about loss and develop their emotional understanding, said the University of Western Australia research for the specialist Journal of Pediatrics.

The authors looked at data from a nationwide study of more than 4,200 Australian children at both age five and, again, at age seven which included a psychological questionnaire measuring social-emotional development.

The massive study also looked at children's personality strengths and weaknesses.

One in four of the study group - 27 per cent - had abnormal scores but those with pets were, on average, 20 per cent less likely to be among them.

The scores were better for those with either a dog or a cat compared to those without pets at all, the study authors discovered.

Overall, 75 per cent of the children analysed lived in a home with a pet and most likely to have had a pet join the household around the time they began school.

The report said: 'Early school age is an important period for family pet acquisition.

'Pets may protect children from developing social-emotional problems and should be taken into account when assessing child development and school readiness.'

Researchers from the University of Western Australia found pets were particularly beneficial to only children living in homes without brothers or sisters. Stock image

The study authors found that children without siblings benefit the most in terms of their social skills as the pets help them socialise and relate to others.

They found owning a household pet is associated with fewer social and emotion problems in young children and it doesn't matter what the pet is.

'Compared with children with no pets, children with dogs or cats had fewer emotional symptoms and peer problems, and dog owners had better prosocial behaviour,' they found.

'Pet ownership was associated with positive child social outcomes, such as relationships with peers and the ability to form friendships and be well-liked.'

One of the things the researchers found was that interacting with pets can help children to learn about social concepts.

They do this by mimicking the interactions that children have with other humans.

'Interacting positively with a pet can increase confidence and decrease the fear of rejection in social interactions with other children,' the authors claim.
Over 2,000 Irish citizens across 86 countries have asked the Government for help getting home in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.

There are 170 Irish citizens, including a number of medics, were put on a flight home from Perth, Australia yesterday.

Senior Official Elizabeth Canavan says the Government is working around the clock to help citizens who are

Read More:

We are working with Aer Lingus and British Airways to try and repatriate citizens from Peru," she said.

We are working 24 hours (a day) to get the necessary transport and permissions in place to move them.

We are also aware of two cases of Covid-19 confirmed in a hostel in Cusco in Peru. Neither of the people with a positive test are Irish citizens.

Irish and UK citizens in Perus had been expected to fly out on Wednesday but many were unable to get to the capital.

Apart from the sheer distances involved to get to Lima, a lot of roads are sealed by army or police.

Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra made the decision to close the nation's borders and impose martial law.

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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Brussels, Belgium  Thu, March 26, 2020 20:00 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da8ee0 2 World European-Union,European-Commission,coronavirus,COVID-19,novel-coronavirus,pandemic,health,SARS-CoV-2 Free

EU leaders on Thursday will try to unify Europe's scattershot response to the COVID-19 outbreak that has crippled Europe, with France and Italy calling for "corona bonds" to help jump start the economy.

Hundreds of millions of EU citizens are holed up in lockdowns to help slow the pandemic that has killed more than ten thousand Europeans, mainly in Italy, Spain and France.

Early on, member states privileged national responses by shutting borders, hoarding medical supplies and waving through major spending plans regardless of EU rules.

"When Europe really needed to be there for each other, too many initially looked out for themselves," European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said ahead of the talks.

"When Europe really needed an 'all for one' spirit, too many initially gave an 'only for me' response," she added, speaking at a sparsely attended session of European Parliament.

The former German defense minister said Brussels was now trying to build a more singular approach and leaders will use video talks to put that into action.

According to a draft statement, measures should include building an emergency stock of medical equipment and easing inter-EU border closures.

They will also rubber stamp the suspension of EU deficit rules that will allow countries to spend freely to fight the virus regardless of deficits.

The 27 leaders will in addition task EU officials to start work on an "exit strategy" and recovery plan to help rebuild the economy after the havoc wrought by COVID-19 and the drastic shutdown measures taken to fight it.

'Indecently ideological'

In their own call for EU solidarity, nine EU leaders ahead of the talks said any economic plan should include the launch of joint borrowing by members of the euro single currency.

But that proposal was rejected behind the scenes by Germany, the Netherlands and other rich northern bloc members, who slam it as indecently "ideological" during a health crisis.

France, Spain and Italy have long called for a some kind of eurobond, that is in effect joint borrowing by the 19 members of the euro single currency.

They say it could serve as the bedrock of a safer and more unified European economy and would become a globally respected asset on par with the US Treasury bills.

But wealthier members see the eurobond as an attempt by over-spending southerners to take advantage of cheap borrowing prices afforded Germany and other paragons of balanced budgets.

Thursday's summit will also take stock of measures taken across the bloc to promote the search for a vaccine.

Europe has become the heart of the pandemic, with the death tolls in both Italy and Spain overtaking that of China, where the disease first emerged.
Douglas Kiker is still singing. Hes still watching American Idol, too.

Oh, I love American Idol, said Kiker, whose first appearance on the shows current season made him an immediate fan favorite only for his run to come to an early end. Ive always loved American Idol.

To recap: Kiker is a Greensboro native who moved to the Mobile area and settled in Grand Bay. He was working on the back of a garbage truck when American Idol held auditions in Mobile in August 2019. He had virtually no experience other than singing in the shower, but he joined hundreds of other hopefuls lining up in the GulfQuest Maritime Museum for a shot at stardom.

He didnt make the cut. He later said he felt like nerves got the best of him, so he went to Baton Rouge for a second try. There he got a pass to move on to second-round auditions in Savannah, Ga.

Footage from that appearance was used in the shows season premiere in mid-February, and it made Kiker, 27, look like a great Cinderella story. He was bashful, humble, and absolutely smitten by Katy Perry. He lacked polish, but he had impressive power and range.

One of the three celebrity judges happened to be another Alabama native. For a man who does not know what his voice can do, for a man who does not have an idea about what key hes singing in, for a man who has no idea who the heck he can be  youre a hell of a man, Lionel Richie told him.

Theres so much in there, said Luke Bryan, the third celebrity judge, of Kikers raw talent.

The three judges gave him a ticket to Hollywood. Unfortunately he didnt fare as well in the Hollywood round, where his lack of experience and training became more of a disadvantage. That was where it ended.

Except that for Kiker, that might turn out to be where bigger things began.

My life has changed drastically. I didnt ever imagine that anything like this was possible, he said. I feel like Ive lived more this year than I have my whole life.

Kiker said that while he cant really talk much about American Idol other than what you saw on TV, his main takeaway is positive: It broadened his horizons. Ive met so many different people, he said. So many good people.

Im pursuing this for the simple reason that it could change lives, starting with my family, he said. I would like to sing for a living, if thats possible.

During his Idol run, Kiker was booked for a performance at Mobiles Cedar Street Social Club. He commented at the time that it was his first-ever performance with a backing band. Asked what he learned from that experience, he was typically forthright.

I learned to be more prepared, he said, laughing. When I said I was green on American Idol, I wasnt kidding.

Kiker said he hopes to perform locally in the future -- fans can keep an eye on his social media channel for details -- but for now hes taking things one day at a time. Hes no longer working as a garbage man. Hes begun posting occasional performances at hwww.facebook.com/DouglasKikerAmericanIdol/. He knows he needs experience and training, he knows his Idol exposure gives him a chance to be taken seriously, and hes trying to make his next moves carefully.

Ive literally had a lot of offers, but Im taking it slow, he said. I know its a cutthroat industry.

Kiker feels he came through the Idol experience with very little negative feedback from the public other than that I was off key and my teeth are missing. He thinks experience and practice will give him the vocal confidence that he has sometimes lacked, and things can build from there.

Everybodys eyes are on me and I dont want to feel like I made the wrong move and feel like I let everybody down, he said. I want to make my hometown proud, I want to make my state proud, I want to make America proud.

I just want it to be known that Im not going to change who I am, he said. Which brings us to his advice to anyone else thinking about taking a shot at bigger things, anybody else like himself who might audition for Idol in the future.

All you have to do is believe in yourself, he said. If youre nervous, put that energy into the song. Dont be quiet. You are a star. Shine. You know what Im saying?

Just dont let anybody smother you, he said. Believe in yourself and dont be quiet.
A chief scientific consultant for the 2011 pandemic movie 'Contagion' has announced he has contracted coronavirus.

Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, the director of Columbia University's Center for Infection and Immunity, went on the Fox Business Network on Tuesday to discuss the coronavirus pandemic and he revealed his own diagnosis.

He said on Lou Dobbs Tonight: 'I would just like to say, on this show tonight, that this has become very personal to me too because I have COVID as of yesterday. It is miserable, it is miserable.'

He added: 'If it can hit me, it can hit anybody. That's the message I want to convey.'

Dr. W. Ian Lipkin announced his coronavirus diagnosis during an interview on Tuesday on the Fox Business Network

Lipkin pushed back against the idea of rushing people back into public too soon, opting for a more cautious approach to reintegration.

Lipkin worked as the lead medical advisor for the Contagion, a film where doctors and medical researchers scramble to track a highly contagious, lethal virus as it moves from Hong Kong to the United States.

As coronavirus began to spread through the U.S. in early March, the movie's popularity soared. Contagion shot up from Warner Bros' 270 most watched film to the company's second.

In his interview, during which he coughed several times, Lipkin expressed the effectiveness of social distancing in tamping down the impact of coronavirus.

'With respect to what we were talking about in terms of Easter, we really don't know when we're going to get this under control,' Lipkin said.

The 2011 movie 'Contagion' is about doctors and medical researchers who scramble to contain a lethal virus that quickly spreads around the globe

'What New York, Chicago and Washington have done has been very, very helpful and I would like to see that implemented broadly across the United States.'

President Donald Trump has said he wants the country 'open by Easter' to stimulate the country's sagging economy and get things back to normal.

During a Tuesday townhall on Fox News, Trump said: 'We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don't turn the country off.'

Lipkin warns against opening the country back up and instead wants the U.S. to take a more conservative approach to fighting coronavirus.

'It's extraordinarily important that we harmonize whatever restrictions we have across the country because we have porous borders between states, between cities, and unless we're consistent, we're not going to get ahead of this thing,' Lipkin said.

'The very best tool we have is isolation and confinement. We need to protect ourselves.'
Amid the nationwide lockdown, a



25-year-old physically challenged woman living along here got a first hand experience of the humane side of Mumbai Police after she reached out to them for help.

Virali Modi, the resident of suburban Malad, tweeted to Mumbai Police on Tuesday about her helplessness without her maid, which made things increasingly difficult for her as the maid not only cooked food but also provide her physiological care.

Due to restrictions imposed in view of the lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus, the maid was unable to go to the woman's home to work.

The police took immediate note of the woman's tweet and reached out to her and assured to allow her maid to work at her place.

"I am disabled and I live alone. I need my maid who cooks and does other physiological care for me. Due to the virus, she won't be able to come. What do we do about these situations?" the woman said in tweet to the Mumbai police.

The tweet was brought to the notice of state Home Minister Anil Deshmukh, who immediately asked his team to alert the local police station about the woman's plight.

The Mumbai Police also responded to the woman's post on its Twitter handle and sought her contact details.

Police inspector George Fernandes and his team then rushed to the woman's home to take her welfare.

Fernandes took details of her maid and driver, and assured that both of them would be given curfew passes so that they can travel to work and back home.

Deshmukh lauded Fernandes and his team for their prompt response to the woman's request.

"While we are in the middle of an unprecedented health crisis, we cannot forget the human side to the problem. Thestate government will help anyone who reaches out to us," the Home minister said in a statement.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
See update below:

Nevadas Democratic governor has banned the use of chloroquine to treat the coronavirus. Per US News and World Report:

Sisolak signed an emergency order earlier Tuesday barring the use of anti-malaria drugs for someone who has the coronavirus. The order restricting chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine came after President Donald Trump touted the medication as a treatment and falsely stated that the Food and Drug Administration had just approved the use of chloroquine to treat patients infected with coronavirus. Sisolak said in a statement that theres no consensus among experts or Nevada doctors that the drugs can treat people with COVID-19.

Update via CNN:

The regulation bans the prescription of the drugs to treat Covid-19. However, in a follow-up tweet, Sisolak noted that the emergency regulation does not apply to doctors who order the drugs for coronavirus treatment in an inpatient setting. "In other words, if a doctor in a hospital or emergency room setting wants to prescribe these drugs to treat a patient diagnosed with COVID-19, he or she is still free to do so," Sisolak tweeted. If the medications are prescribed by a doctor for outpatient use, a code will be tagged on the drugs which will limit users to a 30-day supply only, according to a statement from Sisolak.

Its not as if patients are given an experimental therapy against their will. Patients should always be informed about potential risks and benefits for any treatment being proposed so they and their doctor can determine the best path forward. Doctors, unlike the experts in their labs, practice the art of medicine as they treat each unique patient, facing myriad challenges and situations that require judgment calls.

Such judgment calls are being made throughout New York as Governor Cuomo ordered a large supply of chloroquine for doctors to use as they scramble to treat patients with the virus.

In contrast, the governor of Nevada has now made it impossible for people who live in his state to have the option of chloroquine under compassionate use. Thats nuts.

Ive had personal experience with having to partner with my doctor to use treatments outside of the mainstream in order to get well. Its a terrifying position to be in as both patient and doctor feel a sense of desperation. One might say that such an urgent feeling might cloud ones judgment, and perhaps so. But when youre up against the wall, you have nothing to lose as Trump often says. And while thats not exactly true because, obviously, you could lose a lot if the treatment does harm, the fact remains that without trying something that seems reasonable, your fate may well be sealed.

Meanwhile, as the Governor of Nevada bans the use of chloroquine and despite the relentless mockery of President Trump for feeling hopeful about its potential, doctors across America are now stockpiling it along with other medications that might be effective against the coronavirus.

Oh, and did I mention that theyre stockpiling it for themselves and their families?

And its not just one or two disreputable doctors here or there. Its a lot of them. The New York Times reports:

Doctors are hoarding medications touted as possible coronavirus treatments by writing prescriptions for themselves and family members, according to pharmacy boards in states across the country. The stockpiling has become so worrisome in Idaho, Kentucky, Ohio, Nevada, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Texas that the boards in those states have issued emergency restrictions or guidelines on how the drugs can be dispensed at pharmacies. More states are expected to follow suit. This is a real issue, and it is not some product of a few isolated bad apples, said Jay Campbell, executive director of the North Carolina Board of Pharmacy. [snip] The prescriptions, she said, were being written by doctors for themselves and their family members, often in large quantities with refills.

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NORFOLK, Va. (AP)  Toilets on two Virginia-based Navy aircraft carriers that have become repeatedly clogged could require treatments costing $400,000 each to get them working properly, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report found.

The recently-built USS Gerald R. Ford and USS George H.W. Bush were made with sewage systems similar to those used on commercial aircraft, but increased to accommodate more than 4,000 people, The Virginian-Pilot said, citing the report. But the pipes turned out to be too narrow to handle the volume of sailors flushing toilets at the same time, Shelby Oakley of the U.S. Government Accountability Office told the newspaper.





. . .
WASHINGTON  The coronavirus is taking a growing toll on the U.S. military, and commanders and senior officials are bracing for worse. From nuclear missile fields at home to war zones abroad, from flight lines to ships at sea, the Pentagon is striving to shield vital missions even as it faces urgent calls for help on the civilian front.

Training exercises big and small, including one of the largest in Europe since the end of the Cold War, have been curtailed. Army recruiting stations have closed. Troops around the globe are hunkering down to confront an enemy unlike anything the worlds most lethal armed forces have encountered before.

Its unprecedented in my lifetime, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said, adding that he believes that in a period of months the worst will be over and the force will once again be fully mission capable.

Until then, the ramifications of COVID-19 for the military are likely to expand. There are worries, for example, about the defense industry being weakened and key weapons development slowed.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that in a worse-case scenario, the military will lose some of its preparedness for combat and other missions. But the impact is likely to be moderate to minor to low in terms of its risk to national defense, he told reporters on Monday.

Im just not in a place right now where I can give you an accurate description of what thats going to look like, he said.

The Pentagon budget also is taking a hit, although a coronavirus relief bill working its way through Congress would provide billions for the growing list of new expenses, including loans to industry that would enable accelerated production of medical equipment like ventilators and respiratory masks for civilian use.

Many of Americas closest allies are waging their own COVID-19 battles, including Britain, Germany, Italy, France and other NATO partners, as well as South Korea, which hosts about 28,500 U.S. troops. At least temporarily, the pandemic has taken the edge off conflict in some of the globes major flashpoints, such as Iran, as governments focus on fighting the disease inside their own borders.

Gen. Joseph Lengyel, chief of the National Guard Bureau, which is accustomed to responding to single-event domestic natural disasters like a flood or hurricane, said the coronavirus outbreak is akin to having hurricanes of varying ferocity hit every U.S. state and territory, as well as the District of Columbia.

This is a historic event that will require a historic response, Lengyel said.

The Guard has been mobilized by every state governor and in three territories. In Washington, California and New York the federal government is footing the bill. As of Wednesday, more than 10,000 Guard members were on duty. The active-duty military also is helping, with three field hospitals deploying to New York and Washington, and Navy hospital ships expected in Los Angeles and New York.

The Guard is chipping in with a range of expertise, including what it calls weapons of mass destruction teams that are helping set up drive-thru testing stations.

No U.S. military member is known to have died from COVID-19, although infections are spreading.

Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the top doctor on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday it appears highly likely that the spread inside the military will continue. Over the next three weeks, which he said is as far ahead as modeling data can reliably support a forecast, we think were going to see this  no surprise  continue to grow. His comment aligns with those of many others in the medical community and across the military, standing in contrast to President Donald Trumps statements about starting to return the country to normalcy by Easter.

As of Thursday, 280 of the 1.4 million-strong active duty force had been confirmed with the disease, up from 51 a week earlier.

Our curve is not flattening, Friedrichs said.

The virus has penetrated the Pentagon, but with modest impact thus far as Esper and Milley remain at work in the military headquarters. As a precaution, Esper and the deputy defense secretary, David Norquist, are being kept physically separated. On Monday, the buildings health risk alert level was raised a notch, and on Wednesday Esper ordered the higher alert level for all Defense Department sites worldwide.

In a virtual town hall meeting with Defense Department employees, Esper on Tuesday said his top priority is protecting troops and their families, but he noted that the military cannot function free of risk.

You cant do social distancing in a submarine or even a tank, he said.

Navy ships have stopped port visits abroad, except when resupply or maintenance requires it. On Thursday the Navy said eight sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt tested positive after the aircraft carrier made a port visit in Vietnam. A short time later, officials said the number was rising rapidly and was in the dozens. This was the first reported time the virus has struck a warship at sea. The carrier was being diverted to Guam on Thursday, and all 5,000 aboard are to be tested. In general, the virus has been slower to disable a generally younger and healthier military population.

Not every ounce of normalcy has drained from the military establishment, but many of the problems and projects that dominated the defense scene just weeks ago have lost some of their immediacy  the ongoing battles against the Islamic State group, the drawing down of troops in Afghanistan, the stand-up of a Space Force, the grand plan for shifting the militarys focus toward China.

This sudden shift has echoes of September 2001. One day before the terrorist attacks, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was making a public pitch for combating bureaucratic waste in the Pentagon, a campaign that fell to the wayside as the nation geared up for war against al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Military commanders have been taking steps to protect and isolate key troops such as those on counterterrorism teams, security forces and air crews. Officials acknowledge growing concern about U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where thousands of locals who had been in neighboring Iran have streamed back across borders.

So far, no U.S. service member in Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan is known to have tested positive for the virus, but a couple dozen have shown symptoms and are in isolation. Navy Capt. Bill Urban, spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said two U.S. sailors tested positive in Bahrain earlier this week. Across the Mideast, about 1,500 U.S. troops are in precautionary quarantine.

In Iraq, commanders have moved U.S.-led coalition troops off smaller bases and sent some out of the country after the Iraqi government suspended all military training.

Though little discussed in public, the U.S. has made significant adjustments to ensure that the nations strategic nuclear forces  the bombers, submarines and land-based missiles that form the U.S. nuclear triad  remain at the ready. For example, airmen who operate and secure Minuteman 3 nuclear missiles on the Great Plains are doing longer tours in the missile fields and self-isolating afterward.

The Navy has paused some phases of initial training for its elite SEAL force. Navy Capt. Tamara Lawrence, a spokeswoman for Naval Special Warfare Command, said an eight-week pause is affecting three training sections. She said early training that pushes new candidates to the limit was paused because the extremely strenuous requirements can risk affecting their immune systems.

Lawrence said there is no current expectation that the pause will affect the Navys ability to fill its need for SEALs and the personnel who drive their boats.

The Armys specialized Green Berets are continuing field training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, although some classroom training has been shifted online.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26) Two more areas in Luzon Zambales and Los Banos town in Laguna have recorded their first cases of COVID-19.

The Zambales Provincial Health Office announced Thursday that the province's first positive patient is a 73-year-old male resident of San Antonio town.

It noted the man, a US citizen, had history of travel to Cavite and Manila.

Authorities said the patient returned to Zambales on March 15, and developed symptoms such as fever and diarrhea a day after. He is in stable condition but remains under strict monitoring, the health office added.

Meanwhile, a 69-year-old male resident of Los Banos  who died last week while awaiting test results tested positive for the infectious disease, Mayor Caesar Perez announced Wednesday night.

Perez said the patient had travel history to churches in Metro Manila, particularly in Quiapo and Baclaran.

The patient's family members were placed under quarantine, while their residence had already been disinfected, the mayor added.

Laguna province recorded its first COVID-19 case on March 15. Calamba, a city next to Los Banos, also reported its first positive case on Wednesday.

Nationally, COVID-19 has infected 636 people, with 38 fatalities as of the Health Department's latest record.
Signs of Vietnamese farm export recovery have appeared as the Chinese market has begun importing products again.

Nguyen Quoc Trinh, chair of the Long An provinces Dragon Fruit Association, on March 20 said the sale of dragon fruit is going better as China has resumed imports.





The red flesh dragon fruit price has increased to VND18,000 per kilogram, and white flesh to VND14,000. The prices are still below expectations because these are off-season products, but they are acceptable as exports to other markets, including the US, EU and South Korea, have become stuck.



If the epidemic had not happened, the prices would be higher because this years output is 50 percent lower as a result of drought and saline intrusion, Trinh said.



Though the Chinese market has shown signs of improvement, farmers and exports still are cautious.

Signs of Vietnamese farm export recovery have appeared as the Chinese market has begun importing products again.

As the Chinese market is still unstable, Trinh said dragon fruit farmers need to continue to diversify export markets.



Cooperatives have signed many contracts on supplying dragon fruit to supermarkets to develop the domestic market, he said.



Dragon fruit is being classified at source and a part of the output is dried or used to make fruit juice and processed products. The products are expected to sell well if China can contain the epidemic.



As for catfish, Ong Hang Van, deputy director of Truong Giang Seafood in Dong Thap province, has confirmed that Chinese businesses began buying catfish again two weeks ago. However, the sales were just 30 percent of the normal level because their logistics system has not been fully recovered.



We think trade with China will only return to normal by the third quarter, Van said, adding that the Chinese market consumes 35 percent of Vietnams catfish exports.



To stabilize the markets, large companies export products directly, not through intermediaries, which helps ensure quality.



Nguyen Lam Vien, chair of Vinamit, which makes dried fruit products, also said the Chinese market has begun recovering, but it is still unstable.



In general, farm produce and food will recover sooner than other products. However, we need to wait more months to come to aconclusion, Vien said.



China is facing the same problem as Vietnam  new infection cases from overseas. The country will still have to take drastic measures to control the epidemic, which affects goods circulation.



The Chinese market now has high demand for high-quality products that are good for health, he said.



Regarding rice exports, Vietnam hopes exports to China may be higher than the 500,000 tons in 2019.

Chi Mai

Vietnam seeks new markets for farm produce The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) has asked its Vietnam Trade Offices (VTRs) overseas to help connect Vietnamese enterprises with foreign partners to boost farm produce exports.
This editorial has been updated to reflect news developments.

For a few hours on Wednesday, it seemed the Senate still could not muster the will to start pumping trillions of desperately needed dollars into the American economy.

Four Republican senators  Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Tim Scott of South Carolina and Rick Scott of Florida  announced they had found a flaw in the economic stimulus legislation so grave that they would be forced to delay its passage.

The proposed unemployment benefits, they said, were much too generous.

Yes, thats right: They worried the federal government was in danger of doing too much to help low-income workers whose jobs are being sacrificed to save lives.

The views expressed by the four senators are not just meanspirited but misguided, for reasons we will explain below. Yet the senators timing was even worse. The United States has never experienced a comparable collapse in economic activity. Thousands upon thousands of workers are losing their livelihoods with every passing day that Congress continues to drag its feet. How could it be that any senator did not grasp the urgency of this moment in American history? How could it be that any senator would threaten further delays to prevent a few thousand workers from getting a few hundred dollars in extra aid?
He is also busy with Aadujeevitham, written and directed by Blessy. Based on the novel of the same name by Benyamin, the film stars Prithviraj Sukumaran as Najeeb, an Indian immigrant worker in Saudi Arabia. The actor is said to have shed 30 kilos for this film.

He recently explained his reasons for leaving the country prior to Aadujeevitham's shoot. He mentioned that he needed some time alone to get into the skin of the character and that this final transformation that he will be undergoing for this will movie should be seen by the audience only when the movie releases.

He recently had shared that his thanks for those who were concerned about the team's safety. Currently situated in Wardi Rum, Jordan, the team felt that shooting for the film is the best option as they have already landed in the country, given the fact that no airline service is operational in Jordan right now.

Now, some pictures of the shoot location are out, and you can see a minimal crew shooting along the hot deserts of Wardi Rum. With this being said, there is a new update on the current situation of Aadujeevitham's crew at Jordan. Reportedly, According to the words of Anto Antony Punnathaniyil MP from the Pathanamthitta electoral district in Kerala, "Got a mail earlier today from my dear friend & Director Blessy who is stuck in Jordan at the moment shooting his next movie starring Prithviraj Sukumaran. Passed on his concerns to the external affairs minister for their well being & received an immediate response assuring the same. The movie is based on my all time favourite novel Aadujeevitham by Benyamin. I wish and pray for the well being, safety and speedy return of the entire cast and crew. Looking forward to the release of the movie."

Take a look at the screenshots of the mail forwards between the director and the MP!
The Cheesecake Factory has told landlords nationwide it wont be able to pay rent on any of its near-300 properties come April 1 because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report on Eater Los Angeles.

The popular restaurant chain said the coronavirus has inflicted a tremendous financial blow to its business, according to an email to landlords that Eater Los Angeles obtained.

The Cheesecake Factory has temporarily closed two of its restaurants in response to coronavirus, the company announced in a statement.

All 10 New Jersey restaurants still remain open for takeout and delivery.

As we navigate through COVID-19, the health and well-being of our staff members and guests remains our number one priority, CEO David Overton said in the statement. We have been following the guidance of the CDC and our local health departments and will continue to do so throughout this evolving situation. At the same time, we are grateful for the opportunity at present to continue to serve and comfort our guests via to-go and delivery orders.

The Cheesecake Factory was founded in 1972 as a producer and distributor of cheesecakes and other desserts. Its first restaurant opened in Beverly Hills, California in 1978.

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Vin Diesel has been the face of The Fast and the Furious as Dominic Toretto since 2001. Though he had roles prior to the action movies, Diesels career skyrocketed after the release of the first film in the franchise. With credits like The Chronicles of Riddick and Guardians of the Galaxy under his belt  and Diesel on red carpets everywhere  many wonder his partner is and how they met. Heres what we know.

Vin Diesel made a name for himself via The Fast and the Furious franchise

Vin Diesel and Paloma Jimenez | David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

California native, Mark Sinclair, may not be the Hollywood name fans recognize, but its the name Vin Diesel was given at birth. The fraternal twin of Paul Vincent was born to his psychologist mother, Delora Sherleen Sinclair, who specialized in astrology.

Diesels adoptive father, Irving Sinclair, worked as an acting instructor and theatre manager, in an artists housing project in New York Citys Greenwich Village, according to IMDb.

At 7 years old, Diesel and his friends broke into a theater. The consequences were to read a script, on the condition that they would attend every day after school.

From there, Diesel worked in his fathers company to Off-Broadway productions, and eventually, to Hollywood. His first project was in the 1990 drama, Awakenings, as an uncredited Hospital Orderly.

Five years later, he wrote and directed the video short, Multi-Facial, alongside his twin. This wasnt exactly the jumping-off point to catapult Diesel to superstardom. However, the short garnered Steven Spielbergs attention, which landed Diesel a spot in the 1998 film, Saving Private Ryan.

Along came Chronicles of Riddick: Into Pitch Black in 2000 and The Fast and Furious in 2001. The rest is history.

Who is Diesels partner?

Diesel keeps his private life mostly under wraps. His partner is Karla Paloma Jimenez Denagustin, but she goes by Paloma Jimenez.

The model was born in Guerrero, Mexico. Shes currently 37 years old (Diesel is 52 years old). She has appeared in numerous campaigns, including Coca Cola, Honda, Pantene, and more.

Jimenez also appeared on the Mexican comedy and variety show, Otra Rollo: ADALRAMONES which aired live in Televisa and on Unison (in the US).

She and Diesel have been together (reportedly) since 2007 and have three children together: Hania Riley Sinclair, Pauline Sinclair  named after the late actor and Diesels friend, Paul Walker  and Vincent Sinclair.

How did Diesel and Jimenez meet?

Its unclear exactly when Diesel and Jimenez met, or how their relationship came to be. Theres little proof of their relationship via social media. Some wonder if the pair secretly married or if they remain in partnership without legally committing. We cant find any conclusive evidence that states the two are married.

Diesel mostly posts about projects hes working on, photos and videos of he and their children, and pictures with costars and celebrity friends.

Before Jimenez, Diesel previously dated The Fast and the Furious co-star, Michelle Rodriguez. Hes also been linked to Layla Roberts, Elisa Jordana, Kaya Jones, Samantha Philips, Chanel Ryan, and Summer Altice, Shannon Malone, and Maria Menounos.

Rumors of the couples breakup and an alleged affair circulated in 2016 but Diesel denied truth to any rumors and the two seem to be stronger than ever.
Prime Minister Hun Sen said Wednesday he was considering the possibility of declaring a state of emergency, though he said it in the middle of an irate speech criticizing price gouging.

Speaking to volunteer doctors and healthcare professionals in Phnom Penh, Hun Sen said the pharmacists still have time to decrease the price of face masks, adding they could lose their business license and that all masks would be confiscated from their shops.

I am checking the possibility of using Article 22 of the Constitution to ask the King to place the country under state of emergency, he said, immediately after making the threat to shutdown pharmacies.

I don't want to use it, but [I will] if my call is not effective, he said, labelling the mask sellers as opportunists.

Cambodia, he said, would need to enact a law first to implement the Article 22 of the Constitution, adding that he needs to know the scope of the state of emergency. Hun Sen did add that it would curtail civil liberties.

When the nation faces danger, the King shall make a proclamation to the people putting the country in a state of emergency after agreement with the Prime Minister, the president of Assembly and the president of the Senate reads Article 22 of the Constitution.

On Tuesday, Thailands Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha declared a state of emergency starting March 26 as an effort to fight the novel coronavirus outbreak, with Hun Sen mentioning his Thai counterpart's decision in his speech.

Cambodias coronavirus tally has risen sharply to 96 positive cases in the last few weeks. As Cambodia has seen a significant increase in cases, both its neighbors  Vietnam and Thailand  have closed all land borders with the country.

While Cambodia has ordered the closure of schools, cinemas and other gatherings, it has yet to impose a lockdown across the country. Hun Sen called people to maintain social distancing, to refrain from handshakes and to cut essential travel.

However, the prime minister said there he was not going to order the shutdown of cafes, malls and garment factories. It was unclear how this fit in with his call for social distancing. Also, in Phnom Penh, funerals and weddings have continued unabated.

Human Rights Watchs Phil Robertson said the government did not need a state of emergency to crackdown on price gouging. But, looking around the region, to countries like Thailand and the Philippines, Robertson said it was likely Hun Sen would be tempted to assume draconian emergency powers.

Imposing a state of emergency to control the price of facemasks would be like trying to kill a fly with a sledge hammer, said the deputy director for Human Rights Watchs Asia division.
While ounces produced may be down in 2020, the margins for gold miners may be better.

A number of precious metal producers are reducing production due to government restrictions in response to COVID-19 concerns. Companies with operations in South Africa, Quebec and parts of Ontario have been told to stop operating.

One-third of NYSE-listed senior gold miners have withdrawn 2020 production guidance, according to data compiled by Kitco. (Sibanye-Stillwater, which is putting its South African mines on care and maintenance for the next 21 days, just said "...production for 2020 may differ from previous guidance.") And as more miners reckon with the impact of COVID-19, the number should rise.

Joe Mazumdar, editor and analyst at Exploration Insights, said this setback might not hurt as much as imagined. Gold seniors are cashed up due to the precious metal performing well in 2019, so the miners are in better shape to weather the downturn. Oil prices have also fallen steeply, a significant cost for miners.

"[The seniors] may produce less ounces, but I think the potential for them to generate more margin on each ounce is pretty good," said Mazumdar.

Here's our compiled list as of March 25 on how COVID-19 has affected NYSE-listed senior gold producers. Any data points or information missing? Let us know in the comments below. Market capitalization figures as of March 25, 2020.

1. Newmont (NYSE:NEM) $38.4B market cap - On March 22, the world's largest gold-mining company is putting four mines on care and maintenance and withdrawing its 2020 production guidance as a result of the COVID-19 outbreakaround the world, the company announced Monday. Guidance is withdrawn. Mines representing approximately 80 percent of the company's production outlook for 2020 continue operating in line with production targets for the year.

2. Barrick Gold (NYSE:GOLD) $33.98B - Outside of the usual announcements regarding COVID-19 precautions, Barrick has filed limited news about impacts on operations. There has been no announcements regarding outlook in public filings. On March 24, the company said it is limiting work at Ontario-based Hemlo Mine, but operations continue since Hemlo is an "essential business to the community."

3. Kirkland Lake Gold (NYSE:KL) $13.36B - On March 22 the company terminated its share purchasing program. Kirkland's newly-acquired Detour Lake Mine "will transition to reduced operations." The company said the impact on production could not be estimated at this time.

4. Freeport-McMoran (NYSE:FCX) $10.52B - Freeport, one of the world's largest publicly traded copper companies and also a major gold producer due to by-product output at its mine in Indonesia, said on March 23, it is suspending its dividend in response to the economic uncertainty brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. The company also said it is revising its mining plan due to low prices for base metals. Copper and molybdenum production could be reduced.

5. Agnico Eagle Mines (NYSE:AEM) $9.95B - Bowing to provincial authorities, Agnico Eagle Mines said on March 24 that it is ramping down operations in the Abitibi region of Quebec, which include the LaRonde Complex, the Goldex mine and the Canadian Malartic mine. The three Abitibi operations accounted for 876,000 ounces of payable gold production in 2019. Agnico Eagle's total production in 2019 was 1.78 million ounces of payable gold production. The company has also withdrawn guidance.

6. AngloGold Ashanti (NYSE:AU) $8.26B - AngloGold Ashanti will temporarily suspend production from its South African operations for three weeks starting March 26. South Africa's State President Cyril Ramaphosa that the country would go into a nationwide lockdown for 21 days. The company also suspended production at its Cerro Vanguardia mine in Argentina. In 2018 South African gold production was 487,000 ounces, and at Cerro Vanguardia, the company produced 282,000 ounces.

7. Kinross Gold (NYSE:KGC) $5.84B - $5.84B - No real news outside of general precautions. On March 25, the company said operations continue at Kinross's Tasiast mine site in Mauritania.

8. Gold Fields (NYSE:GFI) $5.19B - Per President Cyril Ramaphosa announcement, Gold Fields' South Deep mine in South Africa will be safely put on care and maintenance on March 27 for 21 days. The company's Cerro Corona in Peru in on a 15-day curfew, but continues to operate.

9. Sibanye-Stillwater (NYSE:SBSW) $3.96B - On March 25, Sibanye's South African gold and PGM operations were placed under temporary care and maintenance to comply with the nationwide lockdown.

10. Yamana Gold (NYSE:AUY) $3.12B - On March 25, Yamana Gold withdrew production guidance for 2020 as some operations are curtailed as part of the global effort to combat the COVID-19 outbreak, the company said late Tuesday. Operations at the Canadian Malartic, a 50-50 joint venture with Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd., are being ramped down due to an order by Quebec officials to restrict non-essential business until April 13. Yamana described this gold mine as the largest in Canada.

11. Compania de Minas Buenaventura (NYSE:BVN) $2.24B - The company's Peru operations are under country-wide restrictions. As of March 17, the company said there had been no material impact to production or shipment of concentrate from any of the company's operations to date as a result of COVID-19. Additionally, there has been no significant disruption to the supply chain of the company's operations.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Mar. 26, 2020 | 02:20 PM | CALLOWAY COUNTY

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its local impact, officials in Murray and Calloway County have declared a local state of emergency.



Under the declaration by the city of Murray, which is retroactive to March 1, the Calloway County Office of Emergency Management will coordinate all local government agencies to provide any needed assistance within the county. All city agencies will cooperate with the the Emergency Management Director to provide any needed help.



Also, Murray's Mayor Bob Rogers is given authority to waive procedures and formalities as needed, regarding any needed public work, entering in contracts, incurring obligations, employment of permanent or temporary workers, utilization of volunteers, rental of equipment, and appropriation or spending of public funds.



There is no expiration date on the city's order.



On Wednesday, the Calloway County Health Department announced that a second person had tested positive for COVID-19.





Specifically, the city of Murray's declaration, as seen in the attached image, says that the following will be enacted:







1. The local Emergency Operations Plan shall be fully executed.







2. The Calloway County Emergency Management Director shall direct the Calloway County Offices of Emergency Management to provide such assistance as can be delivered from available local resources, and shall coordinate all agencies of local government to provide assistance to Calloway County.







3. All agencies of the City of Murray shall cooperate to the fullest extent with the Calloway County Office of Emergency Management and shall provide such assistance as may be required for response to this emergency.







4. Under the State of Emergency, as provided in KRS 39A.100 (2) and 45A.380, the Mayor, among other powers granted to him under those statutes, may waive procedures and formalities otherwise required by the law pertaining to: a) performance of public work, b) entering into contracts, c) incurring obligations, d) employment of permanent and temporary workers, e) utilization of volunteer workers, f) rental of equipment, and g) appropriation and expenditure of public funds.
Temples in the holy city of Varanasi wore a deserted look as celebrations on the occasion of Chaitra Navratri were suspended amid a lockdown to counter the coronavirus pandemic.

Police teams were deployed outside several temples in an effort to ensure that the rules of the lockdown are followed.

Some devotees were seen offering prayers from outside temples.

In his address to the nation on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country beginning midnight to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

The number of coronavirus cases in the country now stands at 649, according to the Union health ministry update on Thursday morning.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Its the worst epidemic of our times, a health emergency that has now left more than 420,000 infected, 18,800 dead and paralyzed the global economy. The scale has been clear for weeks. All the more baffling, therefore, to watch poor decisions being repeated, over and over again.From Italy to the U.S. and Britain, each government first believes its country to be less exposed than it is, overestimates its ability to control the situation, ignores the real-time experience of others and ultimately scrambles to take measures.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has now closed schools and imposed a lockdown to limit the lethality of the coronavirus in Britain. Its a sharp course correction for a man who, less than a month ago, said he was shaking hands in a hospital and spoke of business as usual, while Italy was pulling down the shutters.Hes not alone. With populism in the ascendant, leaders from U.S. President Donald Trump to Indonesias Joko Widodo have worried about immediate political concerns first, rather than the impending pandemic. Countries that have successfully learned from others and from past experience, say, Taiwan, are far outnumbered by those apparently incapable of taking lessons even from near-neighbors.

Its not as simple as poor governance. The shortcuts that humans use to make decisions in a crisis underlie how hard it is to adapt policy to fast-changing circumstances.

At the most basic level, the explanation is simple: We make decisions based on past experience and recognized patterns. Countries that have done best at containing the virus so far have the experience of dealing with previous outbreaks. That includes Hong Kong and Singapore in the case of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS; and South Korea with Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS.For governments outside Asia, the same error of decision-making, or cognitive bias, has been less helpful. For them, SARS was a disease that they could see was devastating but also less contagious, confined to a different region and over within months. They also think of flu. Thats easily transmitted, but much less lethal. Their experiences suggested drastic early action was unnecessary.Compounding this is that superficial differences blind us to the fact that an experience elsewhere could be useful for policy at home, points out Nick Chater, professor of behavioral science at Warwick Business School. In the current outbreak, China was seen as too dissimilar  politically, socially, even ethnically  for the virus to be quickly considered a coming problem that might merit a response.Italy, the first Western country to be floored by the illness, initially resisted wide-ranging closures. In late February, as town-level lockdowns were beginning, one party leader urged people to go out for drinks, coffee or pizza: Lets not lose our customs. He later contracted the virus.

Story continues

This held even as the situation worsened across Europe. France was edging toward a Paris lockdown, eventually announced March 16, but across the channel, Britain still held horse races and music concerts, sticking to a policy of so-called herd immunity that requires the majority of people to get infected and recover. It took an Imperial College report, laying bare the human cost, to change minds at the top. The scramble to prepare backup plans for U.K. schools and other services suggests it was never considered a real possibility  until it was.

The failure of empathy doesnt happen at just cabinet level. When I spoke from my home in Hong Kong to relatives in Europe a few weeks ago, they struggled to comprehend that what was hitting us in Asia could reach them and change their daily lives. It did. Writ large, that has dramatic consequences, not least the waste of months when tests and protective equipment could have been prepared. Entire policy options are off the table because the epidemic has spread too far.

Narratives that build on national exceptionalism dont help, clouding the response of even Southeast Asian countries to the experiences of neighbors. Populist tendencies that encourage confirmation bias and our preference for omission discourages decisions that may have painful outcomes today  even if not doing anything produces a worse result. Populists, after all, dont want to be unpopular. That partly explains the tendency of Trump, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and others to downplay the threat. Bolsonaro continues to compare the virus to a little cold.It makes little sense to worry about a temporary downturn when the worst-case could involve permanently wiping out a significant portion of your population. That makes basic distancing measures, in the words of St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard, an investment in survival. But its tough to act out of proportion with what people see in front of them compared to what they might be dealing with tomorrow.

Theres another unhelpful proclivity, explains Donald Low, professor of practice in public policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology: an optimism bias that leads to myopia in times of crisis. This is especially true for the usually successful governments of wealthy nations, rarely presented with debacles on this scale. Often, there is an illusion of control.

Humans dont like to change their minds. Consider the rabbit-duck illusion, used by psychologist Joseph Jastrow and cited by Chater in a recent article. Once I see a duck in the image, I cant see a rabbit, and I wont see both. In a pandemic, this can be very bad news, especially if supranational organizations that should foster wider thinking are largely absent.There are glimmers of hope. Local authorities and companies have been nimble in places like Brazil and the U.S., apparently able to switch from rabbit to duck. More policy makers will need to set in place the defenses, with better advice and transparency, to ensure they do the same.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Clara Ferreira Marques is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities and environmental, social and governance issues. Previously, she was an associate editor for Reuters Breakingviews, and editor and correspondent for Reuters in Singapore, India, the U.K., Italy and Russia.

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion

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2020 Bloomberg L.P.
In settings like this, health care workers may need to use PPE [personal protective equipment] for every patient whether they have symptoms or not, but its just not possible given the limited PPE supplies the entire nation is facing, he said.
State final examinations for grades 4 and 9 will be cancelled.

Ukraine's Education and Science Ministry says it is ready to reschedule external independent testing (EIT) for secondary schools and colleges, as well as university entrance exams because of the quarantine over the novel coronavirus.

"We are ready to launch the EIT in June, July, or even in mid-August," acting Education Minister Lubomyra Mandziy said, according to the news outlet Hromadske. "If it's in mid-August, then the testing procedure, results assessment will end in mid-September. The entrance campaign will be over by mid-October," she said.

Read alsoUkraine to ban mass events, temporarily shut schools amid coronavirus concerns

If the education process resumes in May, the ministry is ready to conduct a trial EIT test in May. The final testing session will take place after June 20, she said.

If schools and colleges reopen in June, the trial EIT could be held in June before the start of the main session, which should also take place in June.

The entrance campaign will also be extended if the EIT takes place in June. The ministry should then prepare amendments to the rules for admission to higher education institutions.

The Ukrainian Center for Education Quality Assessment will in mid-April release a video about the trial EIT, Mandziy said.

She assured that the testing would definitely take place this year.

Yet, she said, the state final examinations for grades 4 and 9 will be canceled.

The coronavirus quarantine in Ukraine is in effect until April 24.
 Flash

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned Wednesday's attack in Kabul on a Sikh-Hindu temple in which dozens of civilians were killed and injured, said his spokesman.

Guterres reiterated that attacks against civilians are unacceptable and those who carry out such crimes must be held accountable, said Stephane Dujarric, the spokesman, in a statement.

Guterres expressed his deepest sympathy to the families of the victims and wished a speedy recovery to those injured, said the statement.

The United Nations stands in solidarity with the people and the government of Afghanistan and will continue supporting efforts to bring peace to their country, it said.

The attack occurred Wednesday morning when at least four insurgents equipped with suicide vests, hand grenades and assault rifles burst into the temple and began shooting on the worshipers.

The Afghan Interior Ministry said 25 civilians were killed and eight others wounded in the attack. Hours after the attack, the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
StePac's modified atmosphere packaging promotes fresh food safety and security during Coronavirus outbreak

TEFEN, Israel, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The European Organization for Packaging and the Environment (EUROPEN) called on the European Commission on 20 March to recognise packaging as an essential component in maintaining the uninterrupted flow of product groups that the Commission has identified as critical such as "health-related and perishable goods, notably foodstuffs.[1]"

Amid food shortage fears, particularly for fresh produce and uncertainties unnerving the global community in the wake of the Corona virus pandemic, sustainable packaging specialist StePac demonstrates how its modified atmosphere packaging solutions can help alleviate many of the concerns related to food contamination and food security.

While governments are coordinating necessary measures to ensure the continuous movement of fresh produce between countries and continents, border restrictions and workforce shortages have induced considerable delays in cargo flows, rendering perishables particularly vulnerable to spoilage and waste.

StePac developed advanced Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) solutions which effectively delays ripening and ageing processes, inhibits microbial decay and preserves the quality and nutritional value of the fruit and vegetables packed within. The packaging is extensively used for prolonged storage and long-haul shipments of a range of fruits and vegetables.

The implicit abilities to significantly extend shelf-life via StePac's modified atmosphere packaging has been instrumental in helping growers, packers and distributors extend seasonality, ship by sea instead of by air and reduce waste along the supply chain in order to supply fresh produce safely and in intact quality.

"We are continuously hearing reports of vessels not being unloaded on time, and containers left sitting for long periods at harbours," says Gary Ward, Ph.D., Business Development Manager for StePac. "Fresh produce exporters and importers are concerned that by the time their produce reaches the customer, the quality will have deteriorated considerably, impacting its value and increasing waste. Our unique packaging products can extend the shelf life of fresh produce by 50% to 100% offering a lifeline for all stakeholders in the fresh produce supply chain and help weather the logistical storms."

Another current major concern is the contamination risks that can arise from handling of foodstuffs. Customers are increasingly seeking packaged fresh produce that traditionally sit naked on the shelves.

"StePac's Xgo brand of retail packaging formats are hermetically sealed," explains Ward. "They not only preserve the quality of the produce and extend shelf life, but also act as a physical barrier that prevents contact of the produce by the human hand from the moment it is packed until it is opened by the consumer. Consequently, once packed - the risk of produce being contaminated during the supply chain is effectively eliminated. Such assurance is not guaranteed when fruits and vegetables are sold loose or housed in packaging with punch holes or perforations."

Perishable fruits and vegetables, characterised by a relatively short shelf life, gain an extended life span- a benefit that becomes only more vital in times of possible shortages and profligate stockpiling by the consumer.

The company's unique polymer packaging formulation has also demonstrated capabilities for preserving nutritional value of fresh produce following prolonged storage. A 2018 independent study conducted by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey analyzed the post-harvest quality of Hicaznar pomegranate fruit packaged in StePac's Xtend branded MAP packaging and noted that this packaging better preserves the vitamin C content than the naked control during six months of storage at 6C.

In addition, nutritional analysis of shipments of fresh broccoli arriving to Japan revealed that the general nutritive value and vitamin C levels were better retained in Xtend iceless packaging than in standard iced packed broccoli. "Vitamin C is known to help strengthen the immune system and tackle infections, such as the common cold and flu. Consumers are seeking natural immune boosting sources in the hope of building better resistance to the COVID-19 virus," adds Ward.

StePac's MAP solutions are based on 25 years of accumulated research and expertise in biology, plant physiology, phytopathology, and post-harvest sciences.

Company Contact:

StePac, Johnson Matthey

Ms. Hila Nagel

Marketing Communications

Tel: +972-4-612-3500

info@StePac.com

www.StePac.com

Twitter: @StePac_Xtend

Press Contact

NutriPR

Ms. Liat Simha

liat@nutripr.com

www.nutripr.com

Twitter: @LiatSimha

[1] https://europen-packaging.eu/news/news/133-packaging-needs-to-be-recognised-by-eu-and-national-governments-as-an-essential-part-of-the-continued-flow-of-goods-during-the-covid-19-pandemic.html

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1138000/StePac_Smart_Packaging.jpg
The United States will offer USD 15 million for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on drug-trafficking charges, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday.

Pompeo announced the reward as the Justice Department unveiled charges against Maduro, describing him like a common criminal rather than a head of state as Washington tries to help opposition leader Juan Guaido take power.

"The Venezuelan people deserve a transparent, responsible, representative government that serves the needs of the people -- and that does not betray the trust of the people by condoning or employing public officials that engage in illicit narcotics trafficking," Pompeo said in a statement.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP)  A New Mexico medical marijuana company has begun exporting cannabis-based medicine to Israel.

Ultra Health spokeswoman Marissa Novel said recently the company started exporting earlier this month through a partnership with Israeli pharmaceutical group Panaxai.

The medicine was created using hemp grown in Bernalillo County.

Ultra Health is believed to be one of the first U.S. companies to export medical marijuana to Israel.

Ultra Health CEO and president Duke Rodriguez says New Mexico officials played a crucial role in getting the export effort started.
Description

GIS  26 March 2020:  26 March 2020: The population will be able to purchase essential goods through online shopping as from Friday 27 March 2020, during the lockdown period. Food, beverages, health and sanitary products, and toiletries are what constitute essential goods that can be purchased online through the following shops: theshop.mu, priceguru.mu, shopwise.mu, ordermanze.mu, and dreamprice.mu.

The Minister of Commerce and Consumer Protection, Mr Yogida Sawmynaden, made this announcement, today, at a press conference in relation to Covid-19.

Mr. Sawmynaden reiterated Governments commitment to ensure that the population have access to essential goods while ensuring minimum personal interactions among the population to avoid further propagation of the Covid-19.

He indicated that the Government and the Mauritius Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI) are collaborating to set up this online shopping platform whereby various companies will be able to sell essential goods following the complete lockdown.

The Minister lauded the partnership between the Government, the MCCI and the private sector to cater for the needs of the population during this time, and expressed gratitude to the spirit of patriotism of business owners who have put aside their profit-making motivations. On that note, he urged other private companies willing to join this endeavour to contact the MCCI.

He also pointed out that the personnel who will be involved in the home delivery system, will abide fully to the sanitary recommenda tions against the Covid-19.

Mr. Sawmynaden underlined that it is essential for everyone to collaborate in this unprecedented critical situation, which necessitates changes in ones consumption habits and urged Mauritians to act in a responsible manner and avoid excessive shopping.

He also recalled that distribution of basic food commodities to the vulnerable namely citizens who are on the Social Register of Mauritius, those who receive the Carers Allowance, as well as residents of Homes and the disabled, has started as from this morning.

Moreover, the Minister reiterated that there is no such shortage of basic commodities such as rice, oil, flour, milk and petrol as well as LPG gas on the market.

He deplored the persisting irresponsible actions of Mauritians who are still not conforming to the lockdown measures, thus putting their own life and that of their family in jeopardy. He appealed to the population to abstain from going out unless absolutely necessary.
Todays coronavirus updates look at the latest on stimulus checks and the confirmed case numbers country and worldwide.

According to John Hopkins University, COVID-19 cases have topped 487,000 worldwide as of 7:30 a.m. Thursday,

JHU also reports that there have been over 22,000 deaths but also 117,749 recoveries.

In the U.S. specifically, the school counts nearly 70,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 1,046 deaths, and 619 recoveries.

The numbers come from the WHO, CDC, ECDC, NHC, DXY, 1point3acres, Worldometers.info, BNO, state and national government health departments, and local media reports, per JHU.

CNN also reports that nearly a third of the world population is under some kind of movement restrictions.

In Pennsylvania, citizens in a handful of counties are living under a stay at home order from Gov. Tom Wolf and health department secretary Rachel Levine. They are allowed to go to the grocery store and other life-sustaining places like the bank or the pharmacy, but thats it.

Pennsylvania state officials will release their latest numbers as of 12:01 a.m. Thursday around lunchtime today.

In other nation-world news on Thursday morning, the U.S. Senate has voted to pass a $2 trillion economic package that will get money into the hands of millions of Americans sometime between the next three weeks and mid-May.

As for how much you could get, CNBC explains:

"But you have to meet certain qualifications in order to be eligible for the money, based on your adjusted gross income in your latest tax returns. If you earn more than $75,000 as an individual, $112,500 as the head of household or $150,000 if you are married and filing jointly, the amount of those checks starts to get reduced.

Checks will be reduced by $5 for every $100 exceeding those thresholds. It completely phases out at $99,000 in income for individuals, $146,500 for head of household filers with one child and $198,000 for joint filers with no children.

Those who have direct deposit set up with the IRS should receive their payouts faster than those who are waiting for a check.

It continues to be unclear what year of tax returns the IRS will use to decide who is and isnt eligible for a payment. Another uncertainty is whether or not youll have to pay the check back on future tax bills.

The House must pass the package before it is signed by President Donald Trump. Then, the work to get payments out will begin.

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More of PennLives coronavirus coverage:
The federal government will release N6.5 billion to the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), the finance minister, Zainab Ahmed, has said.

The fund, she said, is an intervention to assist in the fight against the spread of the COVID-19 in Nigeria.

She made this disclosure during a meeting with the leadership of the National Assembly in Abuja on Wednesday.

Ms Ahmed, the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria and other executive officials met with the lawmakers to discuss the planned budget review as well as the effect of the pandemic and recent oil price crash on the nations economy.

The meeting comes about a week after the Senate resolved that the review of the 2020 budget was inevitable.

The resolution was sequel to the receipt and deliberation of the interim report of the Senate joint committee on finance, appropriations, national planning and petroleum resources (upstream).

In her presentation, the minister said the federal government had made provisions for health sector interventions by introducing import duty waivers for essential input for pharmaceutical firms; tax waivers on new equipment; and deferment of tax to increase production.

She disclosed that the federal government would be releasing N6.5 billion in two tranches (N1.5 billion and N5 billion) to the NCDC as intervention to assist in the fight against the spread of the COVID-19 disease in Nigeria.

The Lagos State Government would receive financial support from the federal government to the tune of N10 billion to combat Ccoronavirus spread in the state, she said.

She also informed the lawmakers that Nigeria had received a grant of $18.2 million from Japan for strengthening seven NCDC centres across the country. She added that N1 billion would be released by government to pharmaceutical firms in the country.

Minister of Finance Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed [PHOTO CREDIT: @FinMinNigeria]

Ms Ahmeds statement comes days after Ibrahim Oloriegbe, the chairman of the Senate committee on Health (Secondary and Tertiary) told journalists that N620 million earlier budgeted for the NCDC, has been released in full.

Nigeria recorded its first death from the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak on Monday.

So far, Nigeria has a total of 51 confirmed cases and one death.

Lagos State has the highest number of confirmed cases in the country with 32 cases, followed by Abuja with 10 cases, Ogun State three, and Ekiti, Oyo Edo, Bauchi Osun and Rivers have one case each.

Most of the cases reported are travellers who have just returned to the country. Other cases are people who have come in contact with infected people.

Some senior government officials like Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, and the Chief of Staff to the President, Abba Kyari have tested positive while others have self-isolated.

Meanwhile, most state governments have directed that some of its workers stay at home and not report to work.
The oil industry has been hit by a simultaneous demand and supply shock in March as the coronavirus pandemic cuts fuel consumption and top producer Saudi Arabia raises output to full capacity to fight a price war with rivals.

International crude oil prices have lost about 45% this month and fallen below the cost of much of the world's production, causing energy companies worldwide to slash spending by tens of billions of dollars.

The collapse in demand and of energy diplomacy between Saudi Arabia, Russia and others have triggered unprecedented responses from governments and investors. Here are ten signs of an industry in distress.

(Also read: Why crashing rates of global crude have not lowered your fuel bill drastically)

SAUDI ARABIA GOES ALL-IN

Riyadh shocked the oil industry by going on the offensive after talks collapsed with Russia in early March on a deal to cut supply to compensate for how coronavirus was hitting demand.

Saudi Arabia slashed export prices and said it would pump at a record of 12.3 million barrels per day, pouring a flood of oil into a market that needed less. It lined up an armada of ships for export, targeting refiners that buy Russian crude, as well as the United States, wiping out profit margins for U.S. exports.

The moves were all the more shocking coming from a producer that for years has had a role akin to the industry's central bank. The kingdom is the de facto leader of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and for decades adjusted output more than any other oil producer to keep markets balanced.

TEXAS CONSIDERS CUTTING PRODUCTION?

Producers in top U.S. producing state Texas went to regulators - and asked them to intervene to cut production. Texas does not intervene that much. The last time was in 1973. To be sure, other Texas commissioners and oil industry groups have thrown cold water on the idea.

WITH OPEC?

One of three Texas commissioners at the body that regulates the industry got a call from the secretary general of OPEC to discuss the market. Commissioner Ryan Sitton said on Friday that Texas could consider a 10% output cut, possibly in coordination with that group. Before now, U.S. shale oil producers dared not consider coordinated cuts for fear of violating U.S. anti-trust laws.

HISTORIC SELLOFFS

Three of the steepest declines in benchmark Brent crude have taken place in the last two weeks - March 9, March 16, and March 18

On March 9, Brent dropped 24%.

On March 16, Brent dropped 11%

On March 18, Brent dropped 13%.

On March 23, the U.S. gasoline market plummeted the most ever in one day, as futures lost 32% to hit a record low.

JET FUEL IN STORAGE

Jet fuel deteriorates quickly in storage, and then it cannot be used. Yet demand has fallen so fast as airlines ground aircraft around the world that firms including oil majors BP and Royal Dutch Shell both sought to lease ships just to store unneeded jet fuel.

REFINING GASOLINE COSTS MONEY

You want to make gasoline? It'll cost you. On Monday, the margins to produce U.S. gasoline - the price for a barrel of oil minus a barrel of gasoline - closed at a negative price, which means refiners would lose money buying crude to make the fuel. Gasoline typically drives the energy complex, as fuel for vehicles accounts for most oil demand worldwide. The margin fell to minus $1.11 a barrel on Monday, its lowest since 2008.

RUSSIA DIGS IN, ROSNEFT CELEBRATES SHALE WOES

Rosneft Chief Executive Igor Sechin was unwilling to give ground as the U.S. shale industry faced collapse. Oil prices could go back to $60 a barrel if "shale oil leaves markets," he said on Friday. On Monday, his rival, Lukoil co-owner Leonid Fedun, said "this will be a war until exhaustion."

ETHANOL? NEVER MIND

Corn and sugar supplies look set to rise this year as fuel suppliers make less ethanol for blending into gasoline. Companies such as France's Tereos are shifting ethanol production to industrial uses like hand sanitizer, while sugar producers in Brazil are aiming to make more of the sweetener rather than the fuel.

LATE-DAY CRAZINESS

Volatility in oil markets has been exacerbated as oil companies stay out. That leaves speculators, and makes for rapid moves in prices around the close of trading. Thursday's rally was so great that post-close trading had to stop; Friday was the reverse, with prices that dove by $4 at the end of trading.

"It's a crazy market. I don't know how to trade this," one futures trader said.

REFINERS STAY SHUT

French major Total shut its Grandpuits refinery, located outside of Paris, early in March for maintenance. When it was time to restart the 102,000 barrel-per-day facility, Total said...never mind. Demand weakened so quickly that it figured it would just keep it offline. While others have closed, major refiners outside Los Angeles, California, have curtailed production because of lackluster demand.

Also read: Excise on fuels may go up by upto 8 per litre to fight Covid-19

PETROL PUMPING BECOMES UNSAFE

One of the nations hit worst by the coronavirus pandemic, Italy, is simply shutting its petrol stations. They started to close on March 25 on the nation's motorways, operators there said, because it was impossible to guarantee health safety standards and keep businesses going.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.
Kabul, March 26 : The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) on Thursday welcomed and supported an appeal from the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for immediate ceasefire to fight the COVID-19 outbreak in the country.

All sides of war should give up war and focus on fight against the epidemic and protect the life of the entire Afghan citizens, Xinhua news agency quoted the AIHRC office as saying.

On Monday, the UN chief appealed for an "immediate global ceasefire" aiming at protecting the vulnerable civilians in the conflict zones from the ravages of the pandemic.

"The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war," Guterres said in a briefing at the UN headquarters in New York. However, he did not mention any country by name but added "that is why today, I am calling for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world".

Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani frequently called on the Taliban to agree on a ceasefire to facilitate peace talks and most importantly the fight against the COVID-19 but the outfit refused and persisted on continuation of war in the conflict-ravaged nation.

In the latest clashes, five Afghan police officers and 10 Taliban militants were killed and several people wounded after Taliban attacked security forces positions in northern Kunduz and western Ghor provinces on Wednesday night.
Sam Stathis, owner of Olympia of Palm Beach Training Center, formerly known as the South Florida Trotting Center, wants everyone to know that the track will be hosting harness racing qualifying races on Wednesday, April 1 and that the training centre has stall space available for Florida horsepeople.

I want everyone to know that we are here to help all horse people during this crisis, Stathis said. And that we just received approval from the USTA (United States Trotting Association) to hold qualifying races.

We are just finishing arranging everything for the qualifying races, Stathis explained. You need to have judges, a clerk of course, video, timing, an EMT and other special people to hold these races and I am pleased that we have assembled a team so we can hold these races for the horsepeople.

I am even hiring a drone person to video the qualifying races from the air, Stathis said. I think everyone will love to see that special effect/view. As we do not want to encourage any crowds for these races due to [COVID-19] I am trying to provide the best viewing possible for these races.

Entries for the qualifying races at Olympia of Palm Beach must be called in to Kathy Breedlove by 1:00 p.m. Monday, March 30 at 954-654-0129. There will be only three horses per race and if possible, horses will be split into divisions by gait. Qualifying races will begin Wednesday, April 1 at 11:00 a.m.

Also, at this time at Olympia of Palm Beach, we are inviting horsepeople to move to our training facility, Stathis said. And the fee is whatever they can reasonably afford on an emergency basis.

All we request is that the horses must have current health papers, Stathis added. And that at Olympia of Palm Beach we have a zero drug and alcohol tolerance policy on the property.

For more information about Olympia of Palm Beach, click here or call 315-225-4992.

(Olympia of Palm Beach)
PETA slammed for being racist, spreading misinformation over coronavirus tweet

by KAIRVY GREWAL

March 24,2020 | Source: The Print

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has drawn the ire of Twitter users after it tweeted a picture Sunday that said COVID-19 wouldnt exist in a vegan world. The suggestion that pandemics like coronavirus are caused due to meat consumption resulted in people accusing the animal rights organisation of being racist and spreading misinformation.



With coronavirus claiming over 14,923 lives worldwide, users called out the organisation for its untimely tweet, while some said PETA was engaging in passive racism.



Others reminded PETA of the E. Coli outbreak, the source of which was believed to be lettuce.



Jimmys Famous Seafood company also didnt hide its disappointment, while some users called for PETA to withdraw its tweet and delete its account.



PETA had written a blog post in which it maintained that raising animals for food in filthy conditions is a breeding ground for diseases that can be transmitted to humans. It said, For animals, the environment, and your own health, going vegan is your safest bet. Yes, even after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides.



PETA drew some criticism earlier too when it tweeted similar views. On 20 February 2020, it posted, Carnivorous is an anagram of coronavirus. Coincidence? We think NOT!



Some users accused it of being tone deaf and the flat earthers of veganism.



The source of the coronavirus outbreak is believed to have been a wet market in Wuhan, which sold dead and live animals. This has opened up a series of debates on whether meat eating is solely to blame for the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus.



Dr Stephen Felt, a professor of comparative medicine at Stanford University Medical Center, said, There are handful of food-borne parasitic diseases that one can only get from eating undercooked or raw pork so if you stopped eating pork altogether, youd never need worry about any of those.



At the same time, Dr Felt added, But certainly, for zoonotic agents not transmitted through ingestion of infected meat, it would be difficult to claim with any certainty that the occurrence of these diseases would be reduced if humans began to consume less animal products.



Dr Homayoon Farzadegan, a professor who teaches epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at John Hopkins University added: Just living in close proximity with animals that are the potential reservoir of zoonotic viruses may lead to new transmissions.

 Copyright  2020 Printline Media Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Theme(s): Others.
MIAMI  Joe Biden lauded seven governors  drawn from both parties  by name on Monday, praising their leadership during the coronavirus crisis.

On Wednesday, he singled out one for sharp criticism: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

In doing so, Biden managed to highlight both the crucial role Florida plays in the presidential race, and the equally critical role it occupies in the national debate over responding to the coronavirus crisis.

After images of drunken spring-breakers partying amid a contagion were broadcast nationally, DeSantis  a protege of President Donald Trump  was thrust into the vanguard of Republican governors balking at issuing a broad shelter-in-place order to limit the spread of the virus.

As the states coronavirus caseload has increased, so has the criticism of DeSantis, making him an inevitable target for Biden in a state Trump must carry in order to win the White House.

Floridians deserve science-based action from Governor Ron DeSantis, Biden said in a written statement that faulted the absence of leadership from President Trump.

While other large states continue to take strong, urgent, and sweeping action to stop the spread of COVID-19, Florida has not. I urge Governor DeSantis to let the experts speak to the public and explain why this is the case, Biden said. In this moment of growing uncertainty and anxiety, Floridians want  and deserve  to hear from the public health officials leading the charge.

Republicans called Bidens statement a desperate political move to damage the president by attacking DeSantis, a top ally whose successful 2018 primary campaign revolved around fealty to Trump.

Trump has since changed his residency to Florida, made sure to focus his attention deeply on the state and, on Wednesday, approved a disaster declaration to let federal aid flow more easily to the state.

Florida, which has the highest percentage of 65 and older population in the nation, has been slow to test for coronavirus. But as testing has ramped up, so have reported caseloads, which surged 35 percent in a days time to 1,977.

Story continues

The presidents national poll numbers have improved since he began holding regular White House news briefings, where he occasionally praises DeSantis. At the same time, Trump has occupied the spotlight, Biden has been stuck at home, maintaining social distance as he slowly ramps up virtual public appearances from a newly installed home studio in Wilmington, Del.

The Gallup Poll today had President Trump at a 60 percent approval for how hes handling the crisis and the governors polling was pretty close last week on how hes handling it, said Evan Power, chairman of the council of county chairs for the Republican Party of Florida.

So its not a great move to criticize DeSantis or the president over this, Power said. Its a cry for relevancy.

After the March 10 round of primaries, Biden has struggled to capture the media spotlight as national TV news turn its near-complete attention to coronavirus and away from the 2020 campaign trail.

Over the period beginning March 11 through Wednesday, Trump has gotten 440,785 television mentions nationally compared to roughly 83,000 for Biden, according to TV Eyes, a program that tracks mentions.

Biden also received a fraction of the attention Trump got on March 17, the day the former vice president won a key bloc of primary states  including Florida  and essentially ended his primary contest with Bernie Sanders. In a typical election year, that performance would have given any presidential candidate a big shot of momentum and national airtime.

That day, Bidens name was mentioned 5,417 times nationally, compared to Trumps 16,488.

In a sign of Bidens muted microphone, DeSantis wasnt asked at either of his two news conferences Wednesday about the former vice presidents criticism. DeSantis went on to praise Trump for doing a great job but he chafed at the number of New Yorkers who are able to fly to Florida , potentially bringing the coronavirus, which would defeat some shelter-in-place containment strategies.

The policies are ineffective because you have flights, DeSantis said.

Echoing Trump, DeSantis reiterated that his cure-cant-be-worse-than-the-disease approach accounts for the potential economic and social devastation from government-mandated social distancing.

Youre going to see not only economic consequences from that, you are going to see a lot of public health consequences from that, he continued. Im worried about the mental health impact of whats happened. Im worried about drug abuse, based on some of the dislocations. Im worried about suicides. Im worried about domestic violence. And Im worried about child abuse. In any situation like that, all this stuff goes up. This is one of maybe the most significant situations people have faced.

Biden advisers and Democrats say they expect the policies of DeSantis and Trump will ultimately lead to both a public health disaster and a bad economy for Trump, who was planning on running for reelection on his economic record.

In 2016, Trump won Florida by 1.2 percentage points. Floridas large senior population lives off investments, making coronavirus a twin threat because it kills the elderly and social distancing is damaging the stock market.

In a 1-percent state where the sitting GOP governor has been seen as slow to respond, it can make a difference, said Greg Goddard, a Democratic consultant from the state who served as former presidential candidate Amy Klobuchars Southeast finance director.

The Trump campaigns Florida spokeswoman, Emma Vaughn, accused Democrats of politicizing a national emergency ... Now is not the time for partisan politics  we are Floridians first.

Biden advisers say hes focusing on Florida because its the poster child for dangerous policy rooted in political calculus, not public health. They point to editorials criticizing DeSantis , stories detailing the states relatively slow response and an infamous interview with drunk spring breakers expressing no worries in Miami Beach about getting coronavirus in a state with a sizable elderly population.

Bidens criticisms of DeSantis and Trump came on the heels of a new national TV ad from a pro-Biden super PAC, Unite The Country, highlighting Trumps statements downplaying the threat of the virus earlier this month. It was followed by House Democrats from the state who sent a letter to DeSantis urging him to issue a statewide shelter-in-place order.

One of the congressmen who signed the letter, Rep. Ted Deutch, said DeSantis needs to use his close relationship with the president to get more equipment and help for Florida.

The governor has a chance to use that relationship he has with the president of the United States, Deutch said. So, yeah. Floridas a really important state. But if Vice President Biden is pointing out what the governor is doing wrong, its a fair point to raise.

Gary Fineout contributed to this report.


Investment banks are dusting off models from the 2008 financial crisis to gauge the right time to buy back into stock markets that have plunged 30% from their February record highs because of the coronavirus crisis.

That inflection point is not easy to model when the virus is still spreading rapidly across Europe and the United States.

But the U.S. government's $2 trillion in fiscal stimulus, coming on top of unprecedented measures from the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks on Tuesday triggered one of the sharpest global equity market rallies in decades.

Wall Street's so-called fear gauge, the Cboe Volatility Index has also fallen from its highs.

For some, the signals for a reversal are in place.

Veteran investor Bill Ackman told investors in his listed Pershing fund he had turned increasingly positive on stocks and credit, and taken off hedges he put in place in early March when markets first started cratering.

He said Pershing was "redeploying our capital in companies we love at bargain prices that are built to withstand this crisis."

Goldman Sachs' view was that this week's record stock market rally had been led by "underweight" sectors, suggesting many funds had been covering short positions. Indeed, energy, travel and auto stocks were Tuesday's biggest gainers.

At Morgan Stanley, Andrew Sheets, head of cross-asset strategy, said in these situations, including in 2008, markets often trough well before the crisis actually ends.

From the 2008 trough there followed a decade of stunning gains that added more than $25 trillion to global equity value.

"(The market) won't need to see a peak in U.S. (Covid) cases, it just needs to see some confirmation of the path and it nees to be happy with the path," Sheets said.

But so far he remains underweight credit and has only marginally upped equity exposure.

JPMorgan says there is more than one way of measuring it, especially given the unique nature of the crisis which hit the real economy first, with financial markets following.

John Normand, JPM's head of cross-asset strategy said one model suggested now is the time to re-enter -- a quarter before a recession is likely to end. His view is that the coronavirus-induced recession will be "undoubtedly deep but also possibly the shortest-ever."

Normand also said investors could wait for "green shoots" or evidence of an actual upturn -- reflected in a trough for JPMorgan's global Purchasing Managers Index.

A third, valuation-based model triggers a "Buy" signal when risk-premia across several asset classes fall to certain "deep value" thresholds.

Norman said the latter two models were not yet signaling it was time to buy.

Notably, U.S. and European stock valuations based on a 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratios now have dipped well below historical averages, according to Refinitiv data.

Meanwhile, credit markets are still sending out distress signals -- yields on junk-rated U.S. bonds are around 10% currently compared to 6% a month ago, meaning many companies may find it hard to service debt.

In Europe, an index of European credit default swaps, that measure the default risk of a basket of sub-investment grade companies, is off its peaks but remains elevated at around 520 basis points, almost double end-February levels.

The volatility index's (VIX) 30% drop from recent peaks is a clear positive for riskier assets. But if 2008 is any guide, its decline may not yet signal the market trough. In 2008, the VIX retreated from highs in October, but markets took another five months to bottom out.

The recession in 2008 was a long one -- some economists reckon this time a turnaround in global growth will come by the third quarter.

Yet some also warn that markets are only now coming to grips with how severe a potential downturn could be.

"We ... haven't fully appreciated how far this recession will go," said Andrea Cicione, head of strategy at TS Lombard, in London. Some of her concerns center on potential second-round effects such as rising unemployment and companies slashing their capital expenditures.

For now, the trajectory of the coronavirus and its economic fallout will play a key role in determining the market's path, said Randy Watts, chief investment strategist at William ONeill+Co.

In the short run, the market is still going to stay very volatile until one of three things happens - either the number of deaths and the number of new infections in the U.S., peak, there is some kind of a cure or vaccine developed or until the U.S. economy begins to reopen," he said. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie
The Senate passed a historic $2 trillion coronavirus relief package Wednesday night, as it tries to stem the destruction the pandemic has brought to American lives and wallets.

The chamber approved the mammoth bill  the largest economic rescue package in U.S. history  in a unanimous 96-0 vote after days of furious negotiations, partisan sniping and raised tempers on the Senate floor. The bill now heads to the House, which will push to pass it by voice vote Friday morning because most representatives are out of Washington.

"This is a proud moment for the United States Senate and for the country and we're going to win this battle in the very near future," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters after the vote.

The 880-page legislation includes one-time direct payments to individuals, stronger unemployment insurance, loans and grants to businesses and more health-care resources for hospitals, states and municipalities. It includes requirements that insurance providers cover preventive services for COVID-19.

Read more: Here's what's in the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expects her chamber will approve the measure in a "strong, bipartisan vote" on Friday, she told reporters Thursday.

The Senate rushed to pass the sweeping aid bill as data are expected to show a historic spike in unemployment claims after businesses across the country shuttered in an attempt to slow the outbreak's spread. Some hospitals have started to buckle under a flood of patients, asking for critical supplies such as masks and ventilators.

As of Thursday morning, U.S. coronavirus cases numbered more than 69,000, while deaths have now topped 1,000, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The chamber approved the plan to combat the outbreak as the crisis started to thin its ranks. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., did not vote after testing positive for COVID-19, and neither did GOP Sens. Mitt Romney and Mike Lee of Utah, both in isolation after contact with their colleague. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the second-ranking Republican, also missed the vote after feeling ill.

While the Senate took precautions Wednesday such as keeping votes open longer to reduce crowding, senators still huddled in groups and chatted.
An appeals court in capital Algiers Wednesday confirmed the jail term sentences against former Premiers charged with corruption.

Ahmed Ouyahia and Abdelmalek Sellal were sentenced respectively to 15 and 12 years in prison last December after they were charged with misappropriation of public funds, abuse of power and granting undue privileges.

Both were Prime Ministers under former autocratic leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika who was forced to step down in April last year following popular uprising demanding an overhaul of his regime.

The two former Prime Ministers are named in corruption affairs in connection with the car assembly industry in the gas-rich African country and illegal financing of Bouteflikas controversial election campaign for a fifth term in office despite his health condition.

Several figures in Bouteflikas entourage have been detained and jailed.

The Wednesday court verdict halved five-year prison sentences for two former industry ministers and reduced the prison terms of prominent businessmen.

On Tuesday, Karim Tabbou, a leading figure in the popular uprising in Algeria, also known as Hirak, was sentenced to one year in prison in a trial denounced by his defense lawyers and human rights watchdogs.

The European parliament also condemned the judicial harassment of the human rights activist.

In a joint statement, the chair of the human rights subcommittee, Maria Arena and the chair of the European Parliament delegation for relations with the Maghreb countries, Andrea Cozzolino believe that the conviction of Karim Tabbou in appeal in the absence of his lawyers, goes against his right to a fair trial, as supposedly guaranteed by Algerian law as well as by international conventions ratified by Algeria.

The two presidents of these bodies of the European Parliament consider that the judicial harassment of which Karim Tabbou is a victim is incomprehensible and contrary to the rule of law.
Grocers and third-party services are seeing an influx in demand for delivery, resulting in longer-than-normal wait times as health and government authorities urge people to practice social distancing amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A woman walks pass a Metro grocery store in Toronto on November 1, 2017. Grocers and third-party services are seeing an influx in demand for delivery, resulting in longer-than-normal wait times, as health and government authorities urge people to practice social distancing amid the COVID-19 outbreak.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Doug Ives

Grocers and third-party services are seeing an influx in demand for delivery, resulting in longer-than-normal wait times as health and government authorities urge people to practice social distancing amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

"The demand has increased so much, so quickly, it's impossible for us to meet," said Marie-Claude Bacon, vice-president of public affairs and communications at Metro Inc. The grocer's e-commerce business serves parts of Quebec and the Greater Toronto Area.

"The delays are very long."

Traffic to the company's website has doubled since the outbreak came to Canada, she said.

Whereas previously customers could order online and pick-up in store or receive a delivery that same day, Bacon said they must wait much longer now for delivery and pick up.

Metro is trying to hire more staff to meet the surge, she said.

Meanwhile, the company is asking that people who are capable of shopping at stores to do so.

"If you're in good health, if you can have someone come into the store and shop, that's the ideal way of doing it in order for us to be able to provide the service to the ones who are not able to come to our stores."

Loblaw Companies Ltd. has seen its PC Express business, which allows customers to shop online for pick-up or delivery, more than double in recent weeks, said Catherine Thomas, senior director of external communication, in an email.

Wait times vary depending on the location, she said, and the company is doing its best to fulfil orders quickly.

"But, in some areas where demand is particularly high, wait times for pick up or delivery could take a few days."

That spike comes as authorities encourage Canadians to stay at least two metres away from others in an effort to slow transmission of the virus, and as the company dropped fees and prices for its e-commerce business, she said.

"As demand grows, we're finding new ways to serve more people, faster. That means more equipment, more capacity during pick up windows, and staff hiring."

The company is exploring a potential pilot in the future where it will close one store to customers and use it to fill online orders, she said, in an effort to address the growing demand.

Loblaw CEO Galen Weston addressed the company's e-commerce services during the coronavirus outbreak in a note to customers mid-March.

"We are managing the rising number of orders and ramping up our systems as quickly as we can so customers can shop online with confidence," he said.

"However it will be difficult for us to meet all the additional demand, possibility limiting availability for people who are sick, in self-isolation, or at elevated risk."

He asked "healthy, mobile and symptom-free" shoppers to come into stores.

Instacart, a California-based company that delivers groceries in cities in 11 of Canada's provinces and territories, has seen order volume grow more than 150 per cent over the past several weeks, the company said in an email.

"In the last few weeks, we've seen unprecedented customer demand across our platform," it said, noting the average customer order size is up more than 15 per cent month over month.

It did not answer questions about how long a delay customers can expect compared to operations before the pandemic, but sent a statement that said, in part, that "customers can expect to see delivery availability vary across stores during the busiest request windows."

Delivery windows vary based on retailers, the number of available shoppers and other factors, it said, encouraging customers to check delivery times online frequently.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 25, 2020.

Companies in this story: (TSX:MRU, TSX:L, TSX:EMP.A)
Delivery of essential items ordered online could become a reality once again after days of customers having to put up with abrupt cancellations and e-commerce ground staff facing harassment at check posts where police personnel seemed unaware of who was allowed to function despite the lockdown and who wasnt.

Delhi Police assured representatives of e-commerce companies on Wednesday that their delivery boys would be allowed to enter the Capital and deliver goods. In a meeting with the representatives, additional commissioner of police Mandeep Randhawa told them that their employees would be given curfew passes to cross interstate borders, and would be allowed to move within the city for home delivery of essential items.

Randhawa assured them that the police would help the companies open their warehouses and ensure they face no problems. The work has already started. Curfew passes will be issued at the earliest. Home delivery of essential services will not be affected. We are working with the companies to ensure that neither their delivery persons nor citizens face any inconvenience, Randhawa said.

From Sunday, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi had called for a day-long peoples curfew across India, customers have been complaining that the stock of essential products, such as groceries, vegetables, fruits and even medicines, have been short on apps such as Grofers and Big Basket.

These companies had called out police and local authorities for forcibly shutting their warehouses, not allowing delivery staff to cross borders and harassing agents on their way to deliver orders. Our warehouse in Faridabad was closed by the local law enforcement on Tuesday. While we understand that they are doing their duty, essential items to over 20,000 households in Faridabad and Delhi would have been affected every day, if this situation had persisted, said Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder and chief executive officer of Grofers.

Freshtohome, a company that delivers meat, fish and poultry products, also sent out a statement alleging that their agents were being harassed by the police. We are facing hardships in delivering due to local authorities stopping us in spite of clear guidelines that food deliveries are exempted from the lockdown. We are trying to convince the authorities, a message sent out to Freshtohome customers on Tuesday read.

Many of these sites had completely shut operations from Tuesday evening owning to the confusion among enforcement agencies. Sites such as Big Basket were yet to resume service till late Wednesday. We are currently not operational, and we are not sure when well resume operations. Our operations are completely shut down due to severe restrictions imposed on our staff and movement of vehicles, a statement issued by Big Basket on Wednesday evening read.

Narrating their experience over the last three days, many delivery agents said that they were abused and beaten up by police, and their vehicles damaged while delivering products. I was near IP Extension on Sunday when two policemen stopped me and started kicking my motorcycle. They asked me for my identity card and then screamed at me saying that I could not go any further, and if I did, they would arrest me, a delivery agent of Big Basket said.

During the hour-long meeting on Wednesday, police and the e-commerce representatives also discussed ways to ensure stringent hygiene standards for all its employees.

Home delivery of essential items is important. We encourage citizens not to step out of their homes. The essential items will be delivered at their doorstep. There is no need to panic. If people face any problems during this lockdown, police is there to help them, Randhawa.

Delhi Police have also started asking residents welfare associations (RWAs) across the city to allow delivery boys to drop off essential items. The representatives of e-commerce companies informed police that at many colonies, their delivery staff were stopped by security guards and not allowed to enter.

It is not just the local distribution that has been affected, many residents have been complaining of delays and cancellations of grocery orders on e-commerce websites as well. Companies who deliver these services said the government needs to communicate the definition of essential goods to the enforcement teams on-ground.

We will start accepting orders and delivering essential groceries at the earliest. Local authorities are helping us in restarting our operations. We did face some problems over the last few days, but we will be on track now, a spokesperson for Grofers said on Wednesday.
Ford Motor Co.s plan to restart production at some of its most important U.S. plants roughly a month after they shut down will have to overcome immediate skepticism from the United Auto Workers union.

After halting North American production as of March 19 amid the spread of the coronavirus, Ford said in a statement that its aiming to restart production at a sedan factory in Mexico on April 6, then several facilities in the U.S. on April 14. The UAW quickly issued a statement of its own saying the union is uneasy about the schedule.

We are reviewing with great concern and caution todays announcement, the UAW said Thursday. Our priority is the health and safety of our members, their families and the American public.

Tension between the UAW and carmakers is likely going to be high as Ford, General Motors Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV seek to get assembly lines running again. Two union members who worked at Fiat Chrysler plants in Michigan and Indiana died after contracting Covid-19, and the companies have confirmed several other coronavirus cases among their staff.

Date Assembly plants resuming production Hermosillo Assembly (Fusion, Lincoln MKZ) Dearborn Truck (F-150) Kentucky Truck (F-Series, Expedition, Lincoln Navigator) Kansas City Assembly (Transit) Ohio Assembly (F-Series)

Ford said it will put in place additional safety measures to protect returning workers as it brings the plants back online. A Ford employee at a plant in Wayne, Michigan, tested positive for the virus earlier this month.

The shutdowns have pressured Fords finances and contributed to S&P Global Ratings downgrading the automaker to junk on Wednesday. After suspending its dividend, fully drawing down $15.4 billion from two credit lines and retracting the earnings guidance given to investors on Feb. 4, management is sharing in the sacrifice.

Effective May 1, top executives base salaries will be put off by at least five months, Ford said in a regulatory filing Thursday. The deferrals apply to Executive Chairman Bill Fords entire salary and half of the base pay for Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett, Chief Operating Officer Jim Farley and Chief Financial Officer Tim Stone.

The executives will receive their deferred salary amounts after the company has repaid at least $7 billion of its automotive debt, according to the filing.

CEOs Memo

Hackett, 64, said in a letter to employees Thursday that the deferrals will apply to the top 300 senior executives at Ford.

While the company may pare back work schedules and compensation for people whose jobs cant be done effectively away from Fords facilities, the goal is to manage through the crisis without eliminating jobs, he said.

If the effects of the coronavirus on the global economy and Ford go on for longer  or are more severe  than we currently anticipate, we may have to take tougher actions, Hackett wrote. But not today.

Ford shares rose as much as 4.8% shortly after the start of regular trading. The stock has dropped about 40% this year.

With assistance from Meghan Genovese.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
Chef Floyd Cardoz, a culinary giant known for his pioneering work as executive chef of New Yorks Tabla, died Wednesday from complications of the coronavirus.

Cardoz was 59.

The chefs Hunger Inc. Hospitality confirmed his death to People. He was admitted to Mountainside Medical Center, located in Glen Ridge and Montclair, with a fever on March 17. He tested positive for the coronavirus on March 18, CNN reports.

Cardoz, who lived in Verona, had returned to the United States on March 8 from Frankfurt, Germany after a trip to Mumbai, India.

He had been filming in India with Aziz Ansari and chef David Chang for the second season of Changs Netflix series Ugly Delicious.

Glad we get to tell the story of our passion with Indian food, he posted on Instagram March 8 alongside a photo with Ansari. Thanks @davidchang for letting us crash this party!

A week ago, Cardoz posted an update from the hospital.

I was feeling feverish and hence as a precautionary measure, admitted myself into hospital in New York, he said.

Tabla, known for its acclaimed Indian cuisine, opened in 1998 and was a partnership between Cardoz and New York restaurateur Danny Meyer. The restaurant, which received three stars, or an excellent rating, from New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl, closed in 2010.

This is American food, viewed through a kaleidoscope of Indian spices, Reichl wrote in 1999. The flavors are so powerful, original and unexpected that they evoke intense emotions. Those who do not like Tabla tend to dislike it with a passion.

Cardoz was also executive chef at New Yorks North End Grill and opened Paowalla, which became Bombay Bread Bar. He recently became vice president of culinary for the Estiatorio Milos Group.

The chef grew up in Goa, India and Bombay  now Mumbai  where he owned The Bombay Canteen, O Pedro and Bombay Sweet Shop.

He is survived by his wife and business partner, Barkha, and their sons Peter, 27, and Justin, 22.

I dont want to believe this, tweeted Chang, founder of Momofuku restaurants. I feel so terrible for his family and his two sons. All the cooks and managers that worked under him. Easily one of the most beloved people in the business. He was criminally under appreciated, introduced so many new flavors and techniques to America. Tabla forever.

He said Cardoz was one of his earliest supporters.

People may not realize it, but so much of the food you eat today was influenced by Floyd when he was the cdc (chef de cuisine) at Lespinasse with the late chef Grey Kunz, Chang said, referring to the four-star restaurant at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. The family tree that branched out of that hall of fame kitchen changed gastronomy in America for the better. But as great as a chef as Floyd was, he was a better person and amazing dad. I will miss you so much Floyd."

The respected chef and restaurateur triumphed in the third season of Bravos Top Chef Masters" in 2011.

Bravo and the 'Top Chef family are deeply saddened by the passing of Chef Floyd Cardoz," a Bravo spokesperson said in a statement. He was thoughtful, kind and his smile illuminated a room. He was an inspiration to chefs around the world and we offer our deepest sympathy to his family and friends.

Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi posted about Cardoz on Instagram.

Floyd made us all so proud," Lakshmi said. Nobody who lived in NY in the early aughts could forget how delicious and packed Tabla always was. He had an impish smile, an innate need to make those around him happy, and a delicious touch. This is a huge loss, not only for the professional food world, but for Indians everywhere. My heart goes out to his wife Barkha and their whole family. RIP.

Have a tip? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.

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While December in South Africa is holiday season, January is inevitably broke season. Earlier this year South African fried chicken fast-food chain, Chicken Licken, launched a campaign for their wallet-friendly EasyBucks meals, based on the idea of 'everyone's talking about it.'

All of the elements in the integrated campaign  from the film to the extended online films, the interactive website to social engagement and tactical print  ensured that the entire country was talking about EasyBucks.And now, in the next instalment of the campaign, theyve taken the concept a step further.Unique to South Africa is the fact that locals still call Chicken Lickens biggest competitor Kentucky. So, they decided to get the home of this competitor talking too, by putting up an EasyBucks billboard in the last place youd expect: Kentucky USA. The price of R24 was converted into US dollars, translating to a ridiculously low $1,60. And that certainly got Kentucky talking! The team filmed the locals reactions to the billboard, the low price and their eagerness to try Chicken Licken, in order to create an online film. Directed by Joe Public United Film Director, Katlego Baaitse and produced by Burley Boys Productions, its a lovely, entertaining peek into the lives of salt-of-the-earth Kentuckians and, of course, a cheeky poke at the competition. The film went live on 25 March 2020 and is expected to get South Africa talking about EasyBucks yet again.Chicken LickenChantal Sombonos van TonderJoe Public UnitedPepe MaraisXolisa DyeshanaAssaf LevyZamani Ngubane, Sibusiso MkhwanaziCaroline Bergh, Inge-Marne CoetzeeLeigh TaylerAmber Mackeurtan, Asbo Ofori-AmanfoWendy BothaBurley BoysKatlego BaaitseBarend StofbergDaryl BurleyWarren BurleyBurley BoysBarend StofbergAlex MayHofmeyr SmitWarren Burley
New measures for Covid-19 containment were introduced yesterday March 24, 2020.

Amongst these measures include new Covid-19 testing criteria , wherein patients must have a "fever and at least one sign of respiratory disease, for example cough, shortness of breath" according to the government.

Additionally, if you have been in contact with a high risk group such as healthcare workers, those with an underlying illness, prisoners, and those who have been subject to long term care, you will be tested.

This change comes as HSE staff and laboratories are overloaded with testing and are currently experiencing a backlog of approximately 20,000 people a day.

Those who have been waiting to be tested and have not received an appointment will now not be tested.

Testing algorithms will now be updated to reflect this new method.

Health care workers are waiting on more test kits to arrive due to the unprecedented volume of people getting tested for the virus. A shipment of tests are expected to arrive later this week from South Korea.

South Korea are manufacturing approximately 100,000 testing kits per day and has become the world supplier of Covid-19 testing kits.

The government also placed a substantial order for protective gear, including gowns, masks, shields and more.
Asian markets mostly rose Thursday as investors breathed a sigh of relief that US senators have finally passed a gargantuan stimulus package for the world's top economy after being delayed by wrangling over details.

The unprecedented $2 trillion plan -- described by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a "wartime level of investment" -- helped spur a surge across global equities as panicked traders worried about the impact of the coronavirus sweeping the planet.

But another advance on Wall Street was blunted Wednesday as it emerged that four Republican senators have baulked at the generous provisions agreed to in the bipartisan deal with the White House.

The bill eventually cleared the Senate by an overwhelming majority and will now head to the House of Representatives before going to President Donald Trump for his signature.

The monster deal thrashed out between Republicans, Democrats and the White House includes cash payments to American taxpayers and several hundred billion dollars in grants and loans to small businesses and core industries. It also buttresses hospitals desperately in need of medical equipment and expands unemployment benefits.

The plan, together with a huge bond-buying programme by the Federal Reserve that effectively prints cash, is part of an unprecedented global response to the outbreak, which has even seen Germany put together a list of measures worth more than $1 trillion. Asian markets mostly rose though major indexes struggled after posting hefty gains this week.

Tokyo ended down 4.5 percent after surging almost a fifth over the previous three days, while Hong Kong shed 0.7 percent and Shanghai eased 0.6 percent. Seoul fell more than one percent.

But Sydney jumped more than two percent, Wellington and Mumbai climbed four percent, while Manila rallied nearly eight percent. Jakarta soared more than 10 percent as dealers there played catch-up with the rest of Asia having been closed Wednesday for a holiday.

There were also healthy gains in Taipei and Bangkok. Singapore lost more than one percent after data showed the city-state's economy suffered its worst quarterly contraction since the financial crisis more than a decade ago, giving global investors an early insight into the economic effects of the pandemic.

The government on Thursday unveiled a US$33 billion stimulus package.

Singapore is considered a bellwether for trade-reliant Asian countries. In early trade, London sank almost three percent, while Paris and Frankfurt lost more than two percent.

While the US bill provides much-needed support, observers continue to err towards caution with most now expecting the global economy to plunge into recession as countries go into lockdown, turning off the growth taps.

"While this is good .. it's impossible to gauge the ultimate economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic for weeks, possibly months, and until that point, the sustainability of any rally in oil or equity markets is questionable and suggests the current high level of volatility will likely extend," said AxiCorp's Stephen Innes.

"All the stimulus chatter will fade if the COVID-19 headcount curve goes vertical. The reality is the 'Big Bazooka' sway is impossible to sustain, and not to mention the surprise effects greatly diminish. Ultimately, policy is harder to maintain the more protracted virus outbreaks continue." Investors are now nervously awaiting the release later Thursday of US jobless claims data, which is expected to show a massive rise.

"The high-frequency data will confirm we're in a horrible vortex of the fastest and most substantial rise in the US unemployment in modern financial history," Innes added.

And CMC Markets analyst Michael Hewson said the figures "could well be extremely ugly" and warned some estimates had put them at around the four million mark.

Also Thursday, G20 leaders will be holding a summit by teleconference, with hopes they can provide a united front in the face of the pandemic after the group of leading economies faced criticism that it had been slow to address the crisis.

French presidential sources said the virtual meeting would focus on "coordination on the health level" as well as sending a "strong signal" to financial markets over efforts to stabilise the global economy. - Key figures around 0820 GMT -



Tokyo - Nikkei 225: DOWN 4.5 percent at 18,664.60 (close) Hong Kong - Hang Seng: DOWN 0.7 percent at 23,352.34 (close) Shanghai - Composite: DOWN 0.6 percent at 2,764.91 (close) London - FTSE 100: DOWN 2.9 percent at 5,529.78 Euro/dollar: UP at $1.0921 from $1.0883 at 2230 GMT Dollar/yen: DOWN at 110.43 yen from 111.20 yen Pound/dollar: UP at $1.1931 from $1.1890 Euro/pound: UP at 91.53 pence from 91.51 pence Brent North Sea crude: DOWN 3.0 percent at $26.56 per barrel West Texas Intermediate: DOWN 3.9 percent at $23.53 per barrel New York - Dow: UP 2.4 percent at 21,200.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
PORTLAND, Ore.  Unemployment claims in Oregon skyrocketed to more than 76,500 over the week of March 15, according to the Oregon Employment Department (OED)  more than 15 times the week immediately prior.

Over the first three days of this week, initial claims continued to track at record levels, the agency said.

"This comes as a sharp increase from 4,900 initial claims filed during the week of March 8," officials said in a statement. "The Employment Department is taking several measures to meet the unprecedented need for unemployment benefits, which is largely due to reduced hours and layoffs related to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic."

The majority of processed claims in Oregon have come from the leisure and hospitality sector as restaurants and hotels close or scale back their operations. Others came from health care and retail.

Last week saw the highest number of initial jobless claims in the U.S. since the federal government began tracking that data in 1967  about 3.28 million across the nation.

RELATED: Oregon eases unemployment requirements as COVID-19 response causes lay-off boom

Ironically, OED has had to hire new employees over the past two weeks to deal with the overwhelming number of claims, as well as shifting workers to different program areas. The agency has also doubled the number of workers processing unemployment claims.

"Still, record levels of unemployment claims cause longer wait times, as the department works to gather and process the details factoring into each individual claimants eligibility and weekly benefit amount," the agency said. "We encourage Oregonians who have lost their jobs to file claims using our online system to lower wait times by phone."

A new video from the Employment Department shows step-by-step details for filing an online claim.

"The department also continues to offer job seeker and employer services, including more phone and virtual options for appropriate social distancing," OED said. "We are present to help Oregonians who have experienced tremendous disruptions, while also doing our part to follow health and safety guidelines for our communities."

The Employment Department has also added a COVID-19 web page to serve as a resource guide. It includes an overview of the Unemployment Insurance program, along with questions and answers about specific COVID-19 coronavirus-related situations and unemployment benefits.
The number of cases of coronavirus on the African continent continues to grow with more than 2,400 confirmed cases and 60 reported deaths across the continent as of Wednesday. There is the potential for a horrific loss of millions of lives, should the virus start to spread in working class areas and densely packed slums in many of the overcrowded cities across Africa. The spread can only be exacerbated by the conflicts, poverty and disease that are a scourge on the continent.



Jan Egeland, the Norwegian Refugee Council secretary-general, warns of the already desperate situation facing many in refugee camps, like the 1 million refugees in the Sahel region who have been displaced by the wars and intrigues of the imperialist powers and their proxy forces in the region. He told the Financial Times (FT), How can you do social distancing when thousands of people are already crowded together in a tiny camp or refugee settlement?



Atiya Mosam, a doctor and public health specialist from South Africa, told the FT, In these areas once it gets in we will have widespread infection. We say, wash your hands, someone in the informal settlements will say, with what?



In addition to tuberculosis and HIV, some experts are beginning to worry how the virus will affect malaria patientsa disease that kills 404,000 people across the continent each year, mostly children. Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, head of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and a prominent epidemiologist, told Bloomberg, There are lots of unknowns. We dont know how this virus will interact with malaria in our context. ... Its a challenge around diagnoses, its a challenge around care. It makes it even more complex.



Also speaking to Bloomberg, Dr. Ngozi Erondu, associate fellow in the Global Health Program at Chatham House in London, said, We are seeing that the virus has a more severe impact on people with underlying health conditions and so it is logical to hypothesize that we may see more severe COVID-19 illness in a population that is malnourished, has malaria as well as a mound of other infections.



An international and coordinated struggle against the spread of coronavirus on the African continent is an urgent necessity. This is underscored by the attitude of the major imperialist powers to the unfolding crisis. Having spent decades looting and impoverishing the continent, exploiting and oppressing its vast working class, instigating neo-colonial wars of conquest that have resulted in the death, displacement and destitution of millions, the financial oligarchy and its governments are set on abandoning millions to die.



Summing up the mood of the ruling elite to the impending catastrophe in Africa and the urgently needed assistance that will be required to halt the spread of the virus, the FT writes, [W]ith every country looking inward, there are few with resources to spare.



The FT quotes Gyude Moore, a government minister in Liberia during the 2014 Ebola outbreak that killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa, that it was no good asking people to stay at home when they needed to work every day to survive. People do not have resources to stock up. They have to go out and hustle daily to feed their families.



Moore added, Health systems back home are in no way as robust as in the West, they will be overwhelmed quickly. In the past you could look to the West to help. But they are battling the same thing so its not certain that any help is coming at all.



South Africa recorded 155 new cases yesterday, for a total of 709. This was a nearly 28 percent increase from the previous day. Nigeria (46 cases) and Zimbabwe (3 cases) each recorded their first deaths. In Egypt, 402 cases have been reported and 21 deaths, and in Algeria, 302 cases and 21 deaths. In Tunisia, there are 173 cases and five deaths, and in Morocco, 225 cases and six deaths. In Ghana, 69 cases are reported and three deaths, and in Senegal, 99 cases. The first case has been reported in war-torn Libya.



In Zimbabwe, Zororo Makamba, a prominent journalist and son of a business tycoon, died from COVID-19 after returning from a trip to New York. He was just 30 years old and had underlying health problems.



With HIV and AIDS the most prominent underlying conditions on the African continent, many other young people are primed to succumb to COVID-19.



According to the international AIDS and HIV charity Avert, AIDS is now the leading cause of death among young people in Africa, with The majority of young people living with HIV [being] in low- and middle-income countries, with 84 percent in sub-Saharan Africa...half of the 15- to 19-year-olds who are living with HIV in the world live in just six countries: South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Mozambique and Tanzania. Fully 73 percent of new HIV infections among adolescents occurred in Africa.



In a bid to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, many African countries have already instituted some form of lockdown and mass quarantine.



South Africa, on Monday, joined the list of countries to implement a lockdown with President Cyril Ramaphosa enforcing a 21-day stay-at-home order and shut down of all non-essential servicesdeploying the military and police. And in Senegal, the government has instituted a dusk-till-dawn lockdown.



But while African governments posture as taking decisive action to curb the spread of the virus, they have played a major role in the state of virtual collapse of health care. According to Bloomberg, Africa accounts for 16 percent of the global population but just 1 percent of health-care spending. Italy, where the hospitals have been overwhelmed and over 7,500 have already died from COVID-19, has 41 medical doctors per 10,000 people, whereas in Africa there are just 2 per 10,000.



During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, More people died from a lack of general health services than from Ebola, Jimmy Whitworth, a professor of public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, explained to Bloomberg Business earlier this month. That crisis resulted in the disruption of basic treatments and procedures for HIV, malaria and tuberculosis as clinics shuttered and patients avoided doctors out of fear of contracting the disease.



This horrific scenario is bound to repeat itself, as most doctors lacking personal protective equipment (PPE) are likely to contract the virus and pass it on patients and co-workers, making hospitals transmission hotbeds.



Decades after many African countries won formal independence, even the most basic social services and social infrastructure are a dream for the masses of working people. The bankruptcy of the various petty-bourgeois and bourgeois nationalist movements has been exposed. African governments preside over massive inequality, defend the interests of a narrow layer of capitalist elites and seek to balance between American imperialism, Chinese capitalism and the old European colonial powers.



Much was made of the low number of cases on the African continent in its initial stages, and why there was a long lag between the initial outbreak and its arrival on the continent. But this too was largely an expression of decades of underdevelopment, impoverishment and backwardness that imperialism and the African ruling elite are responsible for. In speaking to France24, Augustin Augier, executive director of Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA), said the most likely reason Africa has such a low number of cases is because of the low volume of contact between the continent and the world, including fewer planes and people coming here.



An international campaign in the working class demanding the necessary resources, staff and equipment to stop the spread of the virus on the African continent is imperative. But this requires independent political leadership and a perspective based on the struggle against imperialism and its local agents and for socialism.
The Indian Air Force (IAF) on Wednesday said it has created nine quarantine facilities of 200-300 personnel capacity each at its nodal bases across the country to combat the outbreak of novel coronavirus.

"To monitor the prevailing situation and provide immediate response and assistance as required, a 24x7 crisis management cell has been set up at the IAF Headquarters and various Command Headquarters," stated an IAF press release.

IAF aircraft are continuing to fly in medical supplies and doctors to Leh and fly out blood samples for COVID-19 testing to Chandigarh and Delhi, the release noted.

"Command Hospital Air Force Bangalore (CHAFB) has been designated as the first laboratory in the IAF to undertake COVID-19 testing, which will greatly enhance the region's ability to carry out quick testing of suspected cases and allow prompt and timely intervention where required," it mentioned.

All measures and directives issued by the government towards containing the spread of COVID-19 have been strictly enforced across all IAF stations, the release stated.

"The Indian Air Force continues to take measures to provide all possible assistance to civil administration across the country in containing the spread of COVID-19. The IAF has created nine quarantine facilities of 200-300 personnel capacity each at nodal IAF bases across the country," the release noted.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  Senator Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel's recent admission of breaching quarantine protocol under the COVID-19 outbreak has sparked outrage among netizens and even celebrities online.

Actress and philantrophist Angel Locsin did not mince words after an old photo of her endorsing Pimentel during the 2007 elections resurfaced over the internet.

When asked if she regretted campaigning for him, Locin told netizens: "Yes. Super. Mortal sin. Patawarin niyo po ako bilang ex husband po siya ng pinsan ko (Forgive me because he was the former husband of my cousin)."

"You had yourself tested, you broke the quarantine guidelines, you visited a hospital, risking the health of the many doctors and nurses and patients there. Hindi mo nakuha yung memo ni influencer, 'no?? 'Di nag-iisip eh. Reckless endangerment 'yan di ba?"said celebrity Agot Isidro.

For other netizens, no one, even the senator, should be above the law.

"You reek of privilege and no one wants it. Pay for what you've done! #KokoResign #KokoKulong," @justkaraaa_ tweeted.

"Sorry not sorry...Your selfishness can kill people that help us fight this virus. You are the VIRUS!!!" #KokoResign," said @Chelli53431913.

As of Thursday afternoon, #KokoResign has garnered over 40,000 tweets.

A change.org petition among netizens has also been doing the rounds online, seeking to "expel Koko Pimentel from the Senate and charge him with violation of RA 9271 and RA 11332."

The petition, which seeks to get 50,000 signatures, has already gained 45,000 as of posting.

"We have to make people accountable for their actions and it is before the law that everyone is made equal," wrote Joven Elepano, who started the petition addressed to Sen. Emmanuel "Manny" Pacquiao.

Pimentel, who tested positive for the virus, has been drawing flak for visiting the Makati Medical Center and accompanying his wife Kathryna who was about to give birth.

The senator apologized Wednesday and reasoned that the issue was "farthest from [his] mind" as an expectant father.

Makati Medical Center Director Saturnino Javier called this move "reckless and unacceptable" after the senator exposed their health workers to potential infection.

But on the same day, the Department of Justice said that it would "temper" the law with compassion and would only investigate when it receives a complaint on PImentel's alleged breach.

"As I have said before, during abnormal times like these, when people are prone to commit mistakes or violations of the law, the DOJ will temper the rigor of the law with human compassion," Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said.

Justice Undersecretary Markk Perete also noted that reports have not established so far grounds for a warrantless arrest of Pimentel for violating Republic Act 11332 or the Mandatory Reporting of Notifiable Diseases for those who violate the public health protocol.

Under the law, non-cooperation of a person identified as having the notifiable disease, or affected by the health event of public concern may be fined 20,000 to 50,000 or up to six months of jail time.

A warrantless arrest is allowed following the en flagrante delicto principle, in cases of hot pursuit, among others. Thus far, reports have not alleged circumstances establishing the requirements for any of these grounds," Perete said.
SK Innovation CEO Kim Jun speaks during the company's annual general meeting at its headquarters in Jongno-gu, Seoul, Thursday. Courtesy of SK Innovation



By Nam Hyun-woo



SK Innovation, Korea's leading refinery, and S-Oil both expressed concerns over the uncertain business environment and promised to maintain stability through crisis management at their respective annual general meetings.



During the meetings, their CEOs highlighted efforts for stable management, rather than launching aggressive business strategies. This appears to be a move to ease shareholders' concerns over the firms' weakening profitability amid the growing COVID-19 outbreak.



SK Innovation held its annual general meeting Thursday and a number of agenda items were approved, including the reappointment of CEO Kim Jun as a director of the board.



During his opening remarks, Kim said the company was facing "an unprecedented crisis" due to the global economic downturn and declining demand for its major products following the coronavirus pandemic.



"We expect to face heightened uncertainties due to the economic downturn and weaker demand stemming from COVID-19," Kim said. "SK Innovation has weathered through a slew of difficulties since its establishment and we believe we have the capability to overcome difficulties embedded in our DNA. The company will spare no effort to overcome this unprecedented crisis and make a leap forward."



Regarding Kim's reappointment, SK Innovation's board said, "Kim is a qualified director who can lead the stable operation of the company's materials and battery divisions amid the volatile business environment."



Last year, SK Innovation saw its consolidated operating profit decline to 1.27 trillion won ($1.03 billion), down 39.6 percent from a year earlier, mainly due to deteriorating profitability in its refining and chemical businesses.





S-Oil CEO Hussain Al-Qahtani
Foreign enterprises are ramping up investment in China's Yangtze River Delta, reaffirming their long-term confidence in the growth potential of China despite the economic fallout from the coronavirus epidemic.

Multinational companies will not change their global strategies just because of short-term factors like the coronavirus outbreak, according to Zhong Yan, a researcher with the Shanghai Institute for East Asian Studies.

SHANGHAI, March 25 (Xinhua) -- In the Yangtze River Delta, one of China's most economically vibrant regions, foreign enterprises are ramping up investment, as the world's manufacturing hub gradually recovers from the novel coronavirus epidemic and goes all out to restore economic activities.

U.S. materials science firm Dow on Monday announced its plan to invest 300 million U.S. dollars over the next five years in its manufacturing site in Zhangjiagang, east China's Jiangsu Province.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signing ceremony between Zhangjiagang Free Trade Zone Administrative Committee and Dow Chemical (China) Investment Company Limited in Zhangjiagang, east China's Jiangsu Province, March 23, 2020. (Xinhua)

About 100 km away from Zhangjiagang, Starbucks announced in mid-March its largest manufacturing investment outside the United States -- building a coffee innovation park in the city of Kunshan, with an initial investment of 130 million U.S. dollars.

Other foreign investments springing up recently in the region include retail giant Costco's planned second store in Shanghai and U.S. agribusiness leader Cargill's investment in the neighboring province of Zhejiang.

These investments reflect foreign companies' long-term confidence in the growth potential of China despite the economic fallout from the coronavirus epidemic, experts said.

EXPANDING MARKET

"Although the world is still facing arduous epidemic prevention and control work, foreign investors see no decline in their enthusiasm for the Yangtze River Delta," said Zhong Yan, a researcher with the Shanghai Institute for East Asian Studies.

Covering a 358,000-square km expanse, the Yangtze River Delta, consisting of Shanghai and the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui, is one of the most populated and urbanized city clusters in China, contributing one-fourth of the country's gross domestic product.

Zhong attributed the ardor of foreign investment, ranging from the industries of chemicals, food, health care, to consumer goods and modern services, to China's expanding and upgrading market demand.

Dow's expanding manufacturing site in Zhangjiagang is seen as a key step for its development in the delta region and beyond, considering China's growing market and the wide application of differentiated silicone products in key industries, such as mobility and transportation, building and infrastructure, electronics, and home and personal care.

An employee works at a base of Dow Chemical Company in Zhangjiagang, east China's Jiangsu Province, March 8, 2020. (Xinhua)

"Due to megatrends such as globalization, urbanization, and a growing focus on sustainable development, customers across industries are seeking more innovative, sustainable, and differentiated silicone products -- especially customers in China and the Asia Pacific region," said Mauro Gregorio, president of Dow Performance Materials &Coatings.

LONG-TERM STRATEGY

Many foreign companies see China as a long-term priority, and are thus ramping up investment to cash in on the growing purchasing power of consumers in the world's second-largest economy.

"Starbucks has spent the past 20 years sharing its passion for coffee across China," said Belinda Wong, Starbucks China chairman and CEO, adding that the coffee innovation park in Kunshan will set a blueprint for the future of coffee roasting and supply chain management and further elevate China's coffee industry.

The Yangtze River Delta has long been one of Starbucks' most important markets. Shanghai, where Starbucks China is headquartered, has become the city owning the most Starbucks stores in the world, with more than 700 stores opened in the city.

Foreign businesses are taking a variety of measures to counter uncertainties from the epidemic, but multinational companies will not change their global strategies just because of short-term factors like the coronavirus outbreak, Zhong said.

A factory of U.S.-based agriculture and food company Cargill in Pinghu City, east China's Zhejiang Province, March 18, 2020. (Xinhua/Cui Li)

"In the short term, the world may experience slowing investment and capital shortages. This requires China, a major engine of the world's economy, to go full steam ahead," Zhong said. "Multinational companies participating in this process are both beneficiaries and promoters," he added.

RESILIENCE

As the epidemic wanes in the country, China's economy is gradually returning to normality. Sheng Laiyun, deputy head of the National Bureau of Statistics, said although the outbreak has exerted relatively big shocks on economic activities in the first two months, its impacts are short-lived and controllable.

The country's sound economic fundamentals will not be changed in the long term as enterprises are getting back to work, Sheng said, adding that China will strengthen counter-cyclical adjustments and invigorate the innate resilience of the economy to shore up high-quality development.

Measures facilitating the resumption of production were in line with recent satellite maps, showing an expanding area of nighttime light in the Yangtze River Delta in March compared with early February, especially in some manufacturing zones.

Workers operate production facility at a factory of Grenzebach in Jiashan County of Jiaxing City, east China's Zhejiang Province, March 17, 2020. (Xinhua/Cui Li)

To spur economic growth, local authorities have accelerated the implementation of foreign-funded projects. Zhejiang launched 34 foreign-invested projects worth 46.3 billion yuan (6.5 billion U.S. dollars) earlier this month.

Five of the world's top financial institutions, including JPMorgan, Invesco and Russell Investment, held online opening ceremonies for their branches in Shanghai last week.

After more than 40 years of reform and opening-up, China is playing a more stabilizing and active role in the world's economy, said Zhong.

The Yangtze River Delta has relatively high-quality growth and is more resilient facing an adverse global economic environment, Zhong said. "At a time of more uncertainties emerging, the Yangtze River Delta city cluster is demonstrating its strong attraction."
The number of novel coronavirus cases has been steadily increasing for days, most recently reaching more than 900 confirmed cases and 11 deaths statewide and 165 confirmed cases in the Houston region.

Houston residents have been ordered to stay at home, non-essential businesses have closed, school districts have announced plans to not let students return to campuses until at least April and city streets are more calm than ever before. As Houston learns to navigate life during a pandemic, health authorities such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are urging residents to stay smart and not give in to false rumors that could endanger their health.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 22:18:27|Editor: Xiang Bo

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DAR ES SALAAM, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Tanzanian President John Magufuli on Thursday appointed John Mbungo director general of the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) following recovery of huge amount of money embezzled by cooperatives officials.

Until his new appointment, Mbungo was acting director general of the east African nation's anti-corruption watchdog.

Magufuli made the appointment after the PCCB had recovered 8.8 billion Tanzanian shillings (about 3.8 million U.S. dollars) that were embezzled by agricultural marketing cooperatives (AMCOS) across the country.

"You have done a commendable job by recovering such a colossal amount of money that was earmarked to pay farmers for their crops. You deserve to be promoted," Magufuli told Mbungo.

The president made the appointment shortly after he had received two annual reports from the Controller and Auditor General and the PCCB at the Chamwino State House in the capital Dodoma, an event televised live by state-run Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation.

On March 14, 2020, Mbungo revealed that the anti-corruption watchdog had recovered 3.8 million U.S. dollars that was embezzled by agricultural marketing cooperatives across the country.

He said the money has been recovered between November 2019 and February 2020.

He said the recovered amount was part of 124 billion shillings that the Minister for Agriculture Japhet Haonga had tasked the anti-graft body to investigate following reports of misuse of the money by AMCOS officials.

Mbungo said out of the recovered money, some was voluntarily surrendered by AMCOS officials who had embezzled it and some was surrendered after the officials were interrogated by PCCB.
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Linkedin Ghina Ghaliya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 14:35 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d8f2c2 1 Politics house-of-representatives,DPR,Lawmakers,COVID-19,coronavirus,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,virus-corona Free

After extending its recess from March 22 until March 29 following the emergence of the COVID-19 outbreak in Indonesia, the House of Representatives has decided to commence its next session on March 30.

The legislature is located in Senayan, Jakarta, the epicenter of Indonesia's COVID-19 epidemic. The House has been in recess since Feb. 28.

"The third session has been decided to begin on March 30," lawmaker Arsul Sani of the United Development Party (PPP) faction, who is also a deputy speaker of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), told the press on Thursday.

He added that although the House would not extend its recess further, it would follow the governments health emergency protocols during the plenary meeting to open the session, including maintaining adequate seating distance. All lawmakers who came to the plenary meeting must also have their body temperature checked before entering.

Some House members will be asked to sit in the balcony, which is usually reserved for visitors, he said.

Arsul went on to say that he had recommended that the House leadership keep the opening meeting brief by providing the relevant material to lawmakers beforehand, so the House Speaker would not need to read it out loud during the meeting.

Lawmakers and their families had been scheduled to be tested for COVID-19 on Thursday and Friday in the Kalibata and Ulujami areas of South Jakarta. Journalists assigned to cover the legislature had also been scheduled to be tested for COVID-19 along with the lawmakers.

The House had bought 40,000 rapid test kits expressly for this purpose, funded by donations from several lawmakers.

However, the plan has been postponed until further notice following wide public criticism.

Thousands of people have signed a petition calling for the plan to be canceled on Change.org, as there are many sick people across the country who were still finding it difficult to be tested.

Three opposition parties  the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), the National Mandate Party (PAN) and the Democratic Party  have also objected to the plan, saying that the House should be providing the test kits for free to those who could not afford them as well as to medical workers on the front lines.

Indonesia has reported 790 confirmed cases of COVID-19 to date, including 58 deaths.
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Linkedin Budi Sutrisno (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 15:23 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d9279a 1 World COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,coronavirus,United-Kingdom,British-ambassador,Indonesia Free

The United Kingdom has appealed to its citizens traveling in Indonesia to return home while they can as many countries across the globe have imposed travel and border restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

British Ambassador to Indonesia Owen Jenkins said British nationals staying in Indonesia in the short term should immediately weigh their options as more airports had closed and more airlines had suspended flights.

If you can think of any circumstances at all where you would wish to be in the UK over the next few months, we strongly advise you to leave, Jenkins said in a video posted on the embassys Twitter account on Wednesday.

Many Brits love this great, beautiful country & have made Indonesia their home ... but COVID19 Travel disruption means our advice is - if you can think of any circumstances where you would wish to be in the UK over the next few months, we strongly advise you to leave.  pic.twitter.com/C99CoB7qT8  UK in Indonesia (@UKinIndonesia) March 25, 2020

The British Embassy in Indonesia has been working to track information on commercial flight schedules and possible routes and to encourage more than 10 airlines to reinstate flights and increase capacity amid demand for flights.

All hands are on deck in Jakarta and Bali. I have instructed every member of staff to drop everything else. Helping British nationals get home is our number one priority, Jenkins said in another video.

Apart from flight availability, Jenkins acknowledged that health services in Indonesia might come under intolerable strain when the country is forced to provide more assistance as coronavirus cases increase.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 790 people in Indonesia have been infected by the novel coronavirus, with 58 cases that have turned fatal, according to Indonesian government data.

It could become difficult for British nationals to access even routine or emergency medical care. Our advice is clear. British nationals traveling here or anyone who is vulnerable should make plans to get home, he said.

The ambassador also asked British travelers wishing to get home to be persistent in contacting airlines and travel agents to help flight companies see there is demand and to encourage them to keep operating flights.

Read also: No lockdown for Indonesia, Jokowi insists as COVID-19 cases continue to rise

Jenkins said the embassy was trying to help British nationals in need of lodging or those whose flights were cancelled and could not get back in time before the expiration of their stay permits.

The embassy has asked Indonesian immigration authorities to give due consideration to British nationals and accommodate their visa extension applications or grant them emergency stay permits.

We work alongside our colleagues in the Indonesian directorate general of immigration and are extremely grateful for their help and for their agreement that people should not be fined for overstaying their visa when they couldnt leave, said Jenkins.

According to the Bali office of the Law and Human Rights Ministry, at least 1,830 foreigners have applied for emergency stay permits at immigration offices on the resort island since February.

The offices spokesperson, I Putu Surya Dharma, said up to 80 percent of the foreigners were Chinese nationals. The remaining came from Britain, Italy, the United States and Germany, among other countries.
The Egyptian Red Crescent Society has offered medical and humanitarian supplies to Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.

The move was made in coordination with the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

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Pennsylvania is about to join the nine other states and a territory that have postponed their primary election in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Both the House and Senate on Wednesday approved legislation that would delay the April 28 primary by five weeks to June 2.

The bill now goes to Gov. Tom Wolf who said that he would sign it into law. He offered his support during Wednesdays news conference updating the states coronavirus outbreak and response.

Other states that have postponed their primaries because of the COVID-19 outbreak include Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico.

The measure not only changes the primary date but includes other election-related changes, including allowing polling places to be consolidated. It also permits polls to be located in places that serve alcoholic beverages provided voting not take place in the same room where those beverages are served. And it allows county elections officials to begin processing mail-in and absentee ballots at 7 a.m. on Election Day.

Weve done something very good here today, House State Government Committee Chairman Garth Everett said, prior to the House voting 198-0 to approve the bill that not only changes the primary date but includes other election-related changes, including allowing polling places to be consolidated.

Eighty-three of the House members cast their votes remotely.

Rep. Kevin Boyle, D-Philadelphia, said he supports the bill because it was necessary given the current public health crisis. Logistically, though, he said it also was needed because election officials said they were having a difficult time finding poll workers willing to work the polls with this contagious virus hanging around.

Everett agreed that it was necessary for the health and welfare of election officials. While he didnt agree with those who favored making it a mail-in only primary, he did encourage those who in vulnerable condition to "exercise that right to use their mail-in ballot that weve given them.

The Senate approved the bill by a 50-0 vote without any debate or discussion. Only a handful of senators were on the floor to cast their votes in person during the historic session where 40 or so members participated and voted remotely.

Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre County, indicated June 2 was chosen because the state would be coming up against the June 9 deadline set by the Democratic National Committee for states to pick their nominee and there is some post-primary work needs to be completed before that.

Running it much later would have proven problematic so we picked June 2 and well hope that things will clear up and well be able to vote in person on that day in-person a little bit easier than we would on April 28, he said in a conference call with reporters after the Senate session ended.

Reggie Shuford, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, called the decision to delay an extraordinary step taken to address the health concerns of voters, poll workers, and election administrators.

State officials now have time to prepare for an election in which voters will be looking for alternative means to vote," Shuford said. The recently enacted vote-by-mail option is a great way to vote while also maintaining social distancing. Election officials must educate voters about their right to vote by mail and consider the idea of sending every registered voter a mail-in ballot or at least an application to vote by mail. No one should have to choose between protecting their health and exercising their right to vote.

Dauphin County elections director Jerry Feaser said the delay is a help. He was facing a situation if the primary was held on April 28 of having lost half of his poll workers due to concerns about COVID-19. Feaser also anticipated that as many as half of his polling places also would beg off from hosting a poll since many of them are located in houses of worship.

He said he intends to start asking his poll workers and reaching out polling places soon to determine their availability on the new date for the primary.

This is going to give me a little more of a breather and more time to prep the voting machines, and reach out to poll workers who were not going to work otherwise and get them trained on the new voting system, which Dauphin County will be using for the first time in the primary, he said.

He voiced frustration with state officials who seem to underestimate the education required to be a poll worker.

This isnt an easy job, Feaser said. You dont pull someone off the street two days before and say hey, work this poll.

Furthermore, he said the ability to consolidate polling places may prove to be more trouble than its worth. Voters will be frustrated when they go to their old polling place only to find out they now have to go somewhere else. On top of that, once voters get to a place where precincts are consolidated, he expects there will be voter angst not knowing which area of the room they can vote.

The irony of the whole measure that Feaser said had to be pointed out is the underlying bill to which the change in the primarys date and other changes were added creates the Pennsylvania Election Law Advisory Board. That board is intended to provide guidance to the Legislature on the ramification of election-related changes to avoid pitfalls like some of the ones he expects will happen.

*This post was updated to correct the number of states that have postponed their primary and include the names of those states and territory.

Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy.

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[March 26, 2020] The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership

Wakefield, MA, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today its 21st Anniversary. Advancing its mission of providing software for the public good, the ASF's all-volunteer community grew from 21 original Members overseeing the development of the Apache HTTP Server to 765 individual Members, 206 Apache Project Management Committees, and 7,600+ Committers shepherding 300 projects and 200M+ lines of Apache code valued at more than $20B. Apache's breakthrough technology touches every aspect of modern computing, powering most of the Internet, managing exabytes of data, executing teraflops of operations, and storing trillions of objects in virtually every industry. Apache projects are all freely-available, at 100% no cost, and with no licensing fees. Over the past two decades, The Apache Software Foundation has served as a trusted home for vendor-neutral, community-led collaboration, said David Nalley, Executive Vice President at The Apache Software Foundation. Today, the ASF is a vanguard for Open Source, fostering project communities large and small, with a portfolio of best-in-class innovations upon which the world continues to rely.



The Apache Way As a community-led organization, the ASF is strictly vendor-neutral. Its independence ensures that no organization, including ASF Sponsors and those who employ contributors to Apache projects, is able to control a projects direction or has special privileges of any kind. The ASF's community-focused development process known as "The Apache Way" guides existing projects and their communities, and continues to inspire a new generation of innovations from around the world. The Apache Way edict involves: Earned Authority: all individuals are given the opportunity to participate based on publicly earned merit, i.e., what they contribute to the community.



Community of Peers: individuals participate at the ASF, with merit gained by the individual everlasting and free from association of employment status or employer.



Open Communications: all communications related to code and decision-making are publicly accessible to ensure asynchronous collaboration within the ASF's globally-distributed communities.



Consensus Decision Making: Apache Projects are overseen by a self-selected team of active volunteers who are contributing to their respective projects.



Responsible Oversight: The ASF governance model is based on trust and delegated oversight.



The Apache Way has been a forerunner in collaborative computing, and has directly influenced the InnerSource methodology of applying Open Source and open development principles to an organization. The Apache Way has been adopted by countless organizations, including Capital One, Comcast, Ericsson, HP, IBM, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, SAP, T-Mobile, and many others. The ASF's focus on community is so integral to the Apache ethos that the maxim, "Community Over Code" is an unwavering tenet. Vibrant, diverse communities keep code alive, however, code, no matter how well written, cannot thrive without a community behind it. Members of the Apache community share their thoughts on "Why Apache" in the teaser for "Trillions and Trillions Served", the upcoming documentary on the ASF https://s.apache.org/Trillions-teaser



Powerhouse Projects Dozens of enterprise-grade Apache projects have defined industries and serve as the backbone for some of the most visible and widely used applications in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, Big Data, Build Management, Cloud Computing, Content Management, DevOps, IoT and Edge Computing, Mobile, Servers, and Web Frameworks, among many other categories. Noother software foundation serves the industry with such a wide range of projects. Examples of the breadth of applications that are "Powered by Apache" include:



Chinas second largest courier, SF Express, uses Apache SkyWalking to ship critical COVID-19 coronavirus supplies worldwide;



Apache Guacamoles clientless remote desktop gateway is helping thousands of individuals, businesses, and universities worldwide safely work from home without needing to be tied to a specific device, VPN, or client;





Alibaba uses Apache Flink to process more than 2.5 billion records per second for its merchandise dashboard and real-time customer recommendations;



the European Space Agency's Jupiter spacecraft mission control is powered by Apache Karaf, Apache Maven, and Apache Groovy;



British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)'s application Gaffer stores and manages petabytes of data using Apache Accumulo, Apache HBase, and Apache Parquet;



Netflix uses Apache Druid to manage its 1.5 trillion-row data warehouse to manage what users see when tapping the Netflix icon or logging in from a browser across platforms;



Uber's 100-petabyte data lake is powered in near real-time using Apache Hudi (incubating), supporting everything from warehousing to advanced machine learning;





Boston Children's Hospital uses Apache cTAKES to link phenotypic and genomic data in electronic health records for the Precision Link Biobank for Health Discovery;



Amazon, DataStax, IBM, Microsoft, Neo4j, NBC Universal and many others use Apache Tinkerpop in their graph databases and to write complicated traversals;



the Global Biodiversity Information Facility uses Apache Beam, Hadoop, HBase, Lucene, Spark, and others to integrate biodiversity data from nearly 1,600 institutions and more than a million species and nearly 1.4 billion location records freely available for research;





the European Commission developed its new API Gateway infrastructure using Apache Camel;



China Telecom Bestpay uses Apache ShardingSphere (incubating) to scale 10 billion datasets for mobile payments distributed across more than 30 applications;



Apple's Siri uses Apache HBase to complete full ring replication around the world in 10 seconds;



the US Navy uses Apache Rya to power smart drones, autonomous small robot swarms, manned-unmanned team advanced tactical communications, and more; and



hundreds of millions of Websites worldwide are powered by the Apache HTTP Server.



Additional Milestones In addition to the ASF's 21st Anniversary, the greater Apache community are celebrating milestone anniversaries of the following projects: 25 Years - Apache HTTP Server

20 Years - Apache mod_perl, Tcl, APR/Portable Runtime, Subversion

18 Years - Apache DB, Incubator, Ant

17 Years - Apache Cocoon, James, Web Services, Maven, Logging Services

16 Years - Apache Gump, Portals, Struts, Geronimo, SpamAssassin, Xalan, XML Graphics

15 Years - Apache Lucene, Directory, MyFaces, Xerces, Tomcat The chronology of all Apache projects can be found at https://projects.apache.org/committees.html?date

The Apache Incubator is home to 45 projects undergoing development, spanning AI, Big Data, blockchain, Cloud computing, cryptography, deep learning, hardware, IoT, machine learning, microservices, mobile, operating systems, testing, visualization, and many other categories. The complete list of projects in the Incubator is available at http://incubator.apache.org/



Support Apache The ASF advances the future of open development by providing Apache projects and their communities bandwidth, connectivity, servers, hardware, development environments, legal counsel, accounting services, trademark protection, marketing and publicity, educational events, and related administrative support. As a United States private 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charitable organization, the ASF is sustained through tax-deductible corporate and individual contributions that offset day-to-day operating expenses. To support Apache, visit http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html



About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is the worlds largest Open Source foundation, stewarding 200M+ lines of code and providing more than $20B+ worth of software to the public at 100% no cost. The ASFs all-volunteer community grew from 21 original founders overseeing the Apache HTTP Server to 765 individual Members and 206 Project Management Committees who successfully lead 350+ Apache projects and initiatives in collaboration with 7,600 Committers through the ASFs meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way". Apache software is integral to nearly every end user computing device, from laptops to tablets to mobile devices across enterprises and mission-critical applications. Apache projects power most of the Internet, manage exabytes of data, execute teraflops of operations, and store billions of objects in virtually every industry. The commercially-friendly and permissive Apache License v2 is an Open Source industry standard, helping launch billion dollar corporations and benefiting countless users worldwide. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charitable organization funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Amazon Web Services, Anonymous, ARM, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, CarGurus, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, Leaseweb, Microsoft, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, Verizon Media, and Workday. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF



 The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Accumulo", "Apache Accumulo", "Camel", "Apache Camel", "cTAKES", "Apache cTAKES", "Druid", "Apache Druid", "Flink", "Apache Flink", "Groovy", "Apache Groovy", "Guacamole", "Apache Guacamole", "HBase", "Apache HBase", "Apache HTTP Server", "Karaf", "Apache Karaf", "Maven", "Apache Maven", "Parquet", "Apache Parquet", "Rya", "Apache Rya", "SkyWalking, "Apache SkyWalking", "Tinkerpop", "Apache Tinkerpop", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.



# # # Sally Khudairi Vice President The Apache Software Foundation [email protected]

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Coronavirus in India Live Updates: Coronavirus cases in India have touched 649, including 13 deaths. While India is undergoing 21-day lockdown till April 14, Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with leaders of the G-20 countries will soon hold a crucial virtual meeting to discuss efforts that are being taken to contain the deadly virus. The government today announced Rs 1.7 lakh crore worth package for poor people, health workers, employees and poor women to mitigate the crisis that have emerged due the pandemic outbreak. Globally, the virus has killed over 21,000 people, with over 4.8 lakh people already being affected.

Check all the latest updates on the coronavirus outbreak on BuisnessToday.In live blog

7.00 pm: Coroonavirus impact: International flights banned till April 14

Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has closed all international commercial passenger flights till 6:30pm (GMT) on April 14. This ban will not apply to approved international all-cargo operations and flights.

It has been decided that scheduled international commercial passenger services shall remain closed till 18:30 hrs (GMT) of April 14, 2020. This will not apply to approved international all-cargo operations & flights: Directorate General of Civil Aviation pic.twitter.com/NKQAw89rMd  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

6.52 pm: Coronavirus impact: CMIE predicts biggest contraction for India Inc in 20 years

India Inc is currently facing a deep contraction and it is broad-based across sectors and industries, according to a latest report Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). The Mumbai-based think tank warned that the coronavirus outbreak could make it even bigger, longer and broad-based.

6.50 pm: Coronavirus impact: Finance Ministry urges RBI to pause EMI, loan repayments

Finance Ministry has asked the Reserve Bank of India to consider emergency measures to help borrowers cope with economic pressure triggered by the COVID 19 outbreak. Department of Financial Services Secretary Debashish Panda reportedly wrote a letter to the RBI on Tuesday suggesting a moratorium of a few months on the payment of equated monthly installments (EMIs), interest and loan repayments and a relaxation in the classification of bad loans.

6.41 pm: Coronavirus in delhi: Essential shops allowed run 24X7

Delhi government has allowed establishments that sell essential items or are part of a supply chain for such items to function 24X7, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal informed. No additional permits or licences will be required for this, he added.

We have decided to allow all establishments that supply essential items or are part of the supply chain for such items to function 24x7 to prevent overcrowding during the day. This will require no additional permits and licenses.  Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) March 26, 2020

6.30 pm: Coronavirus in Maharashtra: Groceries, medical stores to remain open all day

All stores of essential commodities, groceries and medicine have been allowed to stay open round the clock in Maharashtra. Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray issued orders allowing such stores to be open 24 hours. These shops, however, have to adhere to social distancing, sanitisation and cleanliness norms.

6.09 pm: Coronavirus relief fund: Insurance for health workers great relief, says Harsh Vardhan

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan appreciated the insurance package declared by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today for health workers working in the country which includes more than 10 lakh Asha workers. This is good news and it gives security to all the health workers, the Health Minister told ANI.

5.55 pm: Coronavirus in India: 13 active cases in J&K

Jammu and Kashmir government informed that 13 people have been tested positive for COVID-19 till now in the state. 5,482 people who came in contact with possibly infected or positive cases have been put under surveillance, government said.

5.42 pm: WATCH: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee directs officials, street vendors to practice social distancing

#WATCH West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee seen directing officials and vendors to practice social distancing, in a market in Kolkata. #COVID19pic.twitter.com/dwkDbvcraR  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

5.25 pm: The govrenment announcement today of a financial assistance package, is the first step in the right direction, tweeted Rahul Gandhi.

The Govt announcement today of a financial assistance package, is the first step in the right direction. India owes a debt to its farmers, daily wage earners, labourers, women & the elderly who are bearing the brunt of the ongoing lockdown.#Corona  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 26, 2020

5.13 pm: Yogi Adityanath praises coronavirus relief fund

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has appreciated the economic package released by Centre today to mitigate economic impact of coronavirus lockdown. The step taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of a Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan package is a step which should be welcomed by all, the UP Chief Minister told ANI.

4.31 pm: "Community transmission of COVID-19 will start if the community and we don't work collectively and follow guidelines. But it would never happen in India if we follow social distancing and treatment properly," says Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Union Health Ministry.

Community transmission phase of #COVID19 will start if the community & we (the govt) don't work collectively & follow guidelines. But it would never happen in India if we follow social distancing & treatment properly: Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Union Health Ministry pic.twitter.com/7mBg30g6bF  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

4.30 PM: While the numbers of COVID19 cases are increasing, the rate at which they are increasing appears to be relatively stabilising. However, this is only the initial trend: Lav Aggarwal

4.24 PM: Govt is taking steps to ensure that production, supply or distribution of essential goods and services do not get affected during #CoronavirusLockdown. States are working to provide food and shelter to migrant workers: Punya Salila Srivastava, Joint Secretary, MHA.

4.24 PM: 42 fresh cases in 24 hours

42 fresh coronavirus cases and four deaths related to COVID19 have been reported in the last 24 hours. Total number of cases stands at 649. On our request, work has started in around 17 states for COVID-19 dedicated hospitals: Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Union Health & Family Welfare Ministry

4.15 PM: Government of India allows doorstep delivery of medicines/drugs to people in view of the COVID19 pandemic. Notification to be published soon.

4.10 PM: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has written to 18 Chief Ministers in connection with the people from West Bengal that are stuck in various parts of the country, amid the lockdown. In the letter, she has appealed to the CMs to provide basic amenities to them.

4.07 PM: Delhi Metro: We have received a few queries regarding the tenure of the closure of the Metro services. It is hereby informed that, in light of the lockdown issued by the government, Metro services will remain closed till 14 April 2020.

4.05 PM: Mahindra, Maruti to make ventilators

Pawan Goenka, the managing director of the company's automotive division on Thursday tweeted that the company has embarked on a two pronged strategy to produce ventilators at its factories. "At one end, we along with two large PSUs are working with an existing manufacturer of high spec ventilators to help them to simplify design and scale up capacity. Our engineering team is right now with them working on it," his tweet read.

Also read: Coronavirus: Here's how Mahindra, Maruti will produce ventilators at plants

3.48 PM: Liquor factories to produce sanitisers in Rajasthan

Nine liquor factories in seven districts of Rajasthan will be used to produce sanitisers. Four private companies and 5 production units of state-owned Gnaganagar Sugar Mills have been directed by the government to start manufacturing sanitisers and licences to do the same has been issued to them.

3.45 PM: Follow lockdown protocols: Dr Harsh Vardhan

We need to ensure and ascertain that the lockdown protocols are effectively followed to prevent spread of the disease: Dr Harsh Vardhan

#IndiaFightsCorona



Union Health Minister @drharshvardhan interacts with Health Ministers of States through a Video Conference to discuss & review status, preparedness and measures to manage & contain #COVID19.#CoronaOutbreak#SwasthaBharat#HealthForAllpic.twitter.com/VXZadLpJdD  Ministry of Health (@MoHFW_INDIA) March 26, 2020

3.43 PM: Coronavirus cases in J&K

As the number of persons infected with coronavirus has gone up to three, in an effort to contain the spread of infection in Srinagar, the District Magistrate has ordered the closure of all places of worship: Government of Jammu and Kashmir.

3.29 PM: 73-year-old man who tested positive for coronavirus dies due to co-morbidity in Bhilwara in Rajasthan: Officials

3.26 PM: Coronavirus cases in Maharashtra

A 42-year-old man in Nagpur tests positive for Coronavirus. The tally in state rises to 125.

3.25 PM: Exchanges cut trading hours for commodity trading

Leading stock exchanges BSE and NSE on Thursday cut down trading hours for commodities derivative segment till 5 pm, instead of current practice of allowing it up till mid-night, in the wake of coronavirus pandemic. The trading will begin at 9 am and close at 5 pm and the new timings will be effective from March 30 till April 14, the exchanges said. In separate statements, commodity exchanges -- MCX and ICEX -- announced about the reduced trading hours. Commodity markets trade between 10 am to 11.50 pm, while equity markets close at 3.30 pm. - PTI

3.21 PM: SMG to extend plant shutdown

Suzuki Motor Gujarat Pvt Limited (SMG) will be extending their plant shutdown till 14th April 2020 in wake of the coronavirus outbreak in India. SMG manufactures cars on a contract basis for Maruti Suzuki.

3.18 PM: Coronavirus cases in Haryana

The total number of positive COVID-19 cases in the state now stands at 18. These include two cases in Faridabad; 10 in Gurugram; one in Palwal; three ub Panipat; one in Panchkula; and one in Sonepat.

3:01 PM: Uttarakhand helpline number

Uttarakhand government has announced a helpline number to assist COVID-19 affected. People who are stranded in other states can get in touch with the Uttarakhand government through 0135 2722100 on landline or 9997954800 on WhatsApp.

2.57 PM: Israel evacuates Israelis from India

The Israel government evacuated 317 Israelis from India amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Israeli government will evacuate 200 more of its citizens from India tomorrow.

Israel's Ambassador to India Ron Malka:Today,we'are evacuating 317 Israelis today. In another flight tomorrow,200 more Israelis to be evacuated.Indian govt has helped us a lot,I want to thank them;Israel took drastic measures to fight Coronavirus, situation there is under control pic.twitter.com/fjLbHSrKPs  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

2.51 PM: Moody's said Delhi and Benglauru airports may be downgraded

Ratings agency Moody's has said that Delhi and Bengaluru airports may be downgraded as a result of coronavirus. Amid the lockdown, air traffic would reduce drastically. DIAL and GMR that operate the airports repay loans from aeronautical and non-aeronatuical avenues that are linked to airport traffic.

2.41 PM: Indian Army draws up a multi-point plan to tackle coronavirus

Indian Army is identifying lands to set up quarantine facilities. It is also extending its hospital network for civil use. It is also planning to train army personnel on coronavirus.

Indian Army issues fresh instructions reiterating enhanced measures to fight #COVID19pic.twitter.com/nJX9rV8hiX  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

2.36 PM: Coronavirus cases in Rajasthan

Two more people test positive in the state, a 45-year-old man in Jaipur and a 35-year-old man from Jhunjhunu. Both have a foreign travel history. Contact tracing underway. The total number of cases in the state rises to 40.

2.31 PM: Coronavirus cases in Telangana

Three more persons have been tested positive for #coronavirus, taking the total number of cases to 43 in Telangana. One person has been cured/discharged: State Health Department.

2.09 PM: Workers to be allowed to draw non-refundable advance of 75 pc from credit in PF a/c or 3 months salary, whichever is lower: FM

2.08 PM: Amid travel restrictions due to the 21-day lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus, a 26-year-old daily wager walks more than 135 km without food from Nagpur to reach his home in Chandrapur.

2.00 PM: Under cash transfers (largely based on DBT), 8 specific announcements have been made for:

Farmers

MREGA

Poor widows

Pensioners/divyang

Jan Dhan Yojana (women who have accounts)

Ujjwala scheme

Self-help groups (women dealing with national rural livelihood missions)

Organised sector workers, construction workers and district mineral fund.

1.59 PM: Govt to pay EPF contribution for three months

The government will pay EPF contribution for both employer & employee (12% each) for the next three months. This is for all establishments that have upto 100 employees & 90% of whom are such employees earning less than Rs 15,000/month. This will benefit 80 lakh employees and incentivise 4 lakh establishments. Provident fund scheme regulations will be amended because of COVID to allow non-refundable advance of 75% of the amt standing to the credit of a members of 3 months of wages, whichever is lower.

1.58 PM: Over 20 crore women Jan Dhan Account holders to get Rs 500 per month for next three months to help them run their households: FM

1.56 PM: Ujjwala beneficiaries to get free cooking gas (LPG) cylinders in next three months; this will benefit 8.3 crore BPL families: FM

1.54 PM: Collateral-free loan doubled to Rs 20 lakh to 63 lakh women self-help groups; to impact 7 crore households: FM

1.53 PM: Wage increase to Rs 202

Wage increase from 182 rupees to 202 rupees, under MGNREGA, resulting in an additional income of 2000 rupees, benefitting 5 crore families.

1.52 PM: Rs 1,000 to be given to senior citizens: FM

One-time amount of Rs 1,000 to be given to senior citizens, widows and Divyang people, in two installments over the next three months. Expected to benefit 3 crore people.

1.49 PM: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has announced Rs 100 crore relief package for the poor in wake of Coronavirus.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has announced a Rs 100 crore relief package for the poor in wake of #CoronavirusLockdownpic.twitter.com/F4sQl6DFOI  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

1.40 PM: Direct Cash Transfer to farmers

Over 8.69 crore farmers to be immediately benefited through Direct Cash Transfers. Instalment of Rs 2000 in the first week of April will be transferred: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman

1.39 PM: Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Ann Yojna (for next 3 months)

Over 80 crore poor people covered(2/3rd of India's population), in addition to already allotted 5 kg of rice/wheat per person,an additional 5kg will be free. Additional 1kg pulse (acc. to regional preference) will be given, announces the FM.

1.34 PM: Per person 5 kg rice or 5 kg wheat for free for three months; 1-kg pulse per household also announced.

1.33 PM: Rs 50 lakh insurance per health care worker

There will be Rs 50 lakh insurance per health care worker as a medical insurance cover for them for three months. Hopefully, we would be able to contain the virus in this period: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

1.29 PM: FM announces Rs 1.7 lakh crore package

Finance Minister Nirmala Sithraman: A package is ready for the poor who need immediate help like migrant workers and urban and rural poor. No one will go hungry. The package is worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore.

1.27 PM: Watch live coverage on Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's press conference.

WATCH: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman addresses the media in Delhi https://t.co/SvDinw5db0  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

1.18 PM: The special COVID-19 economic task force, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week, was working on an economic package for the sectors most affected by the coronavirus outbreak, including informal sectors.

1.15 PM: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will address a press conference in New Delhi shortly.

1.10 PM: Locals in Chennai distribute food and fruits to the needy, amid lockdown due to coronavirus.

Tamil Nadu: Locals in Chennai distribute food and fruits to the needy, amid lockdown due to Coronavirus. #CoronavirusLockdownpic.twitter.com/chdQGheRbW  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

12.55 PM: Won't shut clinics: Kejriwal

The Delhi CM says unfortunately, a Mohalla clinic doctor is tested positive, but Delhi govt won't shut clinics as this would cause lot of inconvenience to people. "Mohalla clinic will remain open. We will ensure safety of all Doctors and their tests will be done regularly," says Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Food home delivery services have been allowed, the delivery persons can show their ID cards that will be sufficient. Mohalla clinics will continue to function but with all precautions: CM @ArvindKejriwalpic.twitter.com/LmJC7f2nSJ  AAP (@AamAadmiParty) March 26, 2020

12.49 PM: Essential supplies stores to be allowed to operate 24*7 in Delhi

As a special measure, grocery and essential supplies stores to be allowed to operate 24*7. This will help in staggering customer visits and help in maintaining social distancing norms. #IndiaFightsCorona  LG Delhi (@LtGovDelhi) March 26, 2020

12.44 PM: Madhya Pradesh COVID-19 tally reaches 20

Madhya Pradesh rose to 20 with five more patients in Indore hospitals testing coronavirus positive, health officials said on Thursday. The tally includes a Ujjain-based woman, who died on Wednesday in Indore, the officials said. Among the five new cases in Indore, two are women, a government medical college spokesman said.

12.41 PM: Warm, humid weather linked to slower COVID-19 transmission: MIT

A warm and humid weather is linked to slower spread of the novel coronavirus, according to a study which suggests that Asian countries experiencing monsoon may experience lesser transmission of the virus. The scientists, including Qasim Bukhari from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, assessed data on the number of COVID-19 infections in different parts of the world and compared it with two parameters of weather from all the regions -- temperature and humidity. The findings, described in SSRN repository, show that 90 per cent of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, transmissions until March 22, 2020, have occurred in regions with temperature between 3 and 17 degrees Celsius. - PTI

12.35 PM: Nirmala Sitharmaan to address media today

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will hold a press conference at 1 pm on Thursday. The Finance Minister is expected to announce a much-anticipated relief package for the coronavirus-hit economy.

12.30 PM: Mohalla clinic doctor in Delhi tests positive

According to news agency ANI, the Shahdara Sub-Divisional Magistrate has ordered that all those who visited the mohalla clinic in Mohanpuri area of Maujpur between March 12 and March 18 must practice home quarantine for the next 15 days. The magistrate also asked these people to immediately contact the control room if they start to display any symptoms of the coronavirus.

12.22 PM: 800 quarantined in Delhi's Maujpur area

Around 800 people have been quarantined in Delhi's densely populated Maujpur area after a Mohalla Clinic doctor was tested positive for the deadly coronavirus. Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain told NDTV these people had been kept in isolation for 14 days.

Along with the doctor, who had a travel history to Saudi Arabia, his wife and a teenager daughter also tested positive

12.14 PM: Karnataka issues warning to landlords

Karnataka government has warned strict penal action against landlords or house-owners under provisions of law for forcing doctors, paramedical staff and healthcare professionals to vacate their rented residences citing COVID-19 spread through them as the reason. Stating that lot of complaints have been received in this regard, an order issued by Additional Chief Secretary Health and Family Welfare department Jawaid Akhtar said such behaviour amounted to obstructing public servantin discharging their duties.

12.13 PM: 48 people quarantined in Kashmir

Forty-eight people, who had come in contact with the first coronavirus fatality in Kashmir, are in quarantine and authorities are in touch with the states visited by the man to track those who may have been infected by him, an official said on Thursday. The 65-year-old man, hailing from Hyderpora area of the city here, died on Thursday morning -- becoming the first fatality in Jammu and Kashmir due to coronavirus.

12.09 PM: Defer all EMIs for 6 months: Sonia Gandhi

"Centre might consider deferring all EMIs for 6 months; interest charged by banks for this period may consequently be waived. All loan installment deductions from salaries of government employees may also be deferred for six months," says Congress Interim Chief Sonia Gandhi, in her letter, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

11.59 AM: Here's the list of government laboratories approved by ICMR to test covid-19.

11.52 AM: Sonia Gandhi writes to PM Modi

Congress Interim President Sonia Gandhi writes to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, suggesting measures that can be taken during the lockdown.

11.35 AM: Coronavirus cases in Gujarat

Till now, 43 positive cases of coronavirus have been detected in Gujarat, including 3 deaths. These include a 85-year-old woman who had a travel history to Saudi Arabia and had comorbid conditions and a 70-year-old man from Bhavnagar who also had comorbid conditions due to coronavirus: State Health Department.

11.34 AM: Defence Minister Rajnath Singh chairs a review meeting with the Chief of Defence Staff and Chiefs of Army and Navy on the Ministry's preparedness for tackling COVID-19.

11.30 AM: Indian students currently in Pakistan should observe precautions against COVID-19 and stay safe. They may contact High Commission at 03028514549: High Commission of India, Islamabad.

11.20 AM: DPIIT sets up a control room

DPIIT sets up a control room to monitor the status of transportation and delivery of goods, manufacturing, and delivery of essential commodities. "In the event of any manufacturing, transporter, distributor, wholesaler or e-commerce companies facing ground level difficulties in transportation and distribution of goods or mobilization of resources, the same may be informed to the Department at the following telephone number/ email:- 91 11 23062487 and controlroom-dpiit@gov.in," he added.

11.11 AM: Coronavirus cases in Delhi

Positive cases in Delhi have risen to 36. "A mohalla clinic doctor and 4 others have tested positive after they came in contact with an infected woman who returned from Saudi Arabia. The doctor's wife and daughter are also among those who tested positive," said Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain.

11.08 AM: Daily wage workers leave for their native places

Daily wage workers walk near Delhi-Ghazipur border for their homes in different districts of Uttar Pradesh. A woman says, "We have no money left as we don't get any work here. What shall we eat? If we would not leave the city, we would die of hunger".

10.50 SM: Death toll rises to 13 in India; cases soars to 649

According to Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, total number of COVID-19 positive cases have climbed to 649 in India. Outof 649 cases, 593 are active cases and 42 have been cured or discharged. Toll rises to 13, as of March 26.

10.45AM: Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain informed that a total of 800 people who came in contact with the mohalla clinic doctor, have been quarantined for 14 days

10.36 AM: Health Ministry Update

Total number of COVID-19 positive cases rise to 649 in India (including 593 active cases, 42 cured/discharged people and 13 deaths): Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

10.35 AM: Coronavirus cases in Maharashtra

Another coronavirus death reported in Maharashtra. Two new positive cases of coronavirus have been reported in Mumbai and Thane. Till now, the total number of positive cases in the state is 124. The total number of coronavirus deaths in India now stands at 15.

10.30 AM: Kashmir reports first COVID-19 death

Kashmir sees first death as 65-year-old COVID-19 patient passes away in Srinagar.

Congress President & CPP Chairperson Smt. Sonia Gandhi writes a letter to PM Modi with suggestions that the govt should immediately undertake in this lockdown period. pic.twitter.com/YGsjUUFGKe  Congress (@INCIndia) March 26, 2020

10.15 AM: New cases in UP

A 21-year-old woman (whose parents tested positive), a 32-year-old man with travel history to Dubai, a 33 year-old woman and a 39 year-old man have been tested positive for Coronavirus: Dr Sudhir Singh, Incharge, Isolation Ward, King George's Medical University.

10.00 AM: Coronavirus cases in Telangana

Two fresh cases of COVID-19, including a three-year-old boy, have been reported in Telangana, taking the total number of people infected with the virus in the state to 41, according to a government bulletin on Wednesday. The other case is a 43-year-old woman from Hyderabad city who is "the family/primary contact of a previous positive case", it said. The woman "does not have any history of international travel. She is presently admitted and stable. She is a contact of another patient in Telangana," the bulletin said.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh chairs a review meeting with the Chief of Defence Staff and Chiefs of Army and Navy on the Ministry's preparedness for tackling COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/n2sxXC4E8j  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

9.44 AM: Extensive testing, isolating cases and contact tracing must: Chetan Bhagat

A lockdown only buys time, while other steps are must to prevent spread post lockdown, says author Chetan Bhagat. "Are their numbers/addresses/methods on how daily wage labor is getting their payments from states? Or is it automatic. Please do share the process. Will help spread and encourage others to," asks Bhagat.

9.43 PM: US Senate passes $2 trillion coronavirus economic stimulus bill

US Senate overwhelmingly backs $2 trillion bill aimed at helping unemployed workers and industries hurt by the coronavirus epidemic, as well as providing billions of dollars to buy urgently needed medical equipment. The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 96-0, sending it to the House of Representatives. - Reuters

9.42 AM: Private hospitals to start treating patients from today

Private hospitals will start treatment of COVID-19 patients from today. The government has roped in private hospital to contain the deadly virus outbreak in India.

9.41 AM: Watch a British woman taking self-isolation "very seriously"

Delhi: Daily wage workers walk near Delhi-Ghazipur border for their homes in different districts of Uttar Pradesh. A woman says, "We have no money left as we don't get any work here. What shall we eat? If we would not leave the city, we would die of hunger". #CoronavirusLockdownpic.twitter.com/WcZHY4jt9X  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

9.40 AM: PM Modi dials Putin

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a telephone conversation today with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two leaders discussed the global situation in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. The two leaders agreed on further consultation and cooperation in adequately addressing all challenges faced by this major global crisis, including those pertaining to health, medicine, scientific research, humanitarian matters and impact on global economy. They stressed the significance of international cooperation for unitedly fighting COVID-19, including within the framework of G20.

9.35 AM: Attack the coronavirus together: WHO

"To slow the spread of #COVID19, many countries introduced "lockdown" measures. But on their own, these measures will not extinguish epidemics. We call on all countries to use this time to attack the #coronavirus. You've created a 2nd window of opportunity," says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organisation.

9.32 AM: Bihar Covid19 lockdown status on March 25

Fine imposed: Rs 15,87,800

FIR registered: 41

Seizure of vehicles: 531

Arrest: 9

9.30 AM: Where does India's health infrastructure stands? Checkout this infographic

A 65-year-old man from Hyderpora, Srinagar passes away due to Coronavirus; Four of his contacts also tested positive yesterday: J&K Principal Secretary (Planning Commission) Rohit Kansal (file pic) pic.twitter.com/HKgVLciSkK  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

9.25 AM: Delhi mohalla clinic doctor tests positive

A mohalla clinic doctor in Delhi's Mohanpuri area in Maujpur has tested positive for coronavirus. The administration has issued a notice, asking all who visited the mohalla clinic between March 12 and 18 to self-quarantine for 15 days.

9.20 AM: The Resident Doctors' Association of Punjab writes to Chief Minister Capt. Amarinder Singh; says no mask, sanitisers, gloves available, let alone PPE kits for those working in emergency.

9.15 AM: Current tally in India (as on March 25, 06:45 PM)

Total cases: 563

Foreigners: 43

Discharged/cured: 43

Deaths: 10

9.05 AM: Nobody will starve in Kerala: Pinarayi Vijayan

Nobody will starve in Kerala, says state Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. "No family will starve. Every panchayat will have a community kitchen. People might be reluctant to contact individuals for food. So there will be a service phone number. If anyone calls that number, food will be delivered," he maintains.

9.00 AM: Coronavirus cases in India

The total number of COVID-19 cases in India stands at 606, including 553 active cases, 42 cured/discharged people and 10 deaths, according to the Ministry Health and Family Affairs data (as on March 25, 06:45 PM).

8.45 AM: Coronavirus cases in United Kingdom

The number of coronavirus deaths in the United Kingdom has risen to 463 as on Mar 25, the British government said. The total number of positive cases in the country right now is 9,529.

8.41 AM: Covid-19 cases in Thailand and South Korea

Thailand recorded 107 new cases on Wednesday, bringing its total to 934, while South Korea's tally rose to 9,137 with 100 new infections.

8.40 AM: Coronavirus death toll in United States

Nationwide, more than 53,000 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus that is particularly perilous to the elderly and people with pre-existing medical conditions, with at least 730 deaths. World Health Organisation officials have said the United States could become the global epicenter of the pandemic, which first emerged late last year in the Chinese city of Wuhan. - Reuters

8.30 AM: Italy coronavirus death toll reaches 7,503

The death toll from an outbreak of coronavirus in Italy has grown by 683 to 7,503, the Civil Protection Agency said on Wednesday, a decline in the daily tally of fatalities following a spike the day before. On Tuesday 743 people died. That followed 602 deaths on Monday, 650 on Sunday and a record of 793 on Saturday - the highest daily figure since the contagion came to light on Feb. 21. The total number of confirmed cases in Italy rose to 74,386 from a previous 69,176, the Civil Protection Agency said. - Reuters

8.15 AM: Spain's coronavirus death toll overtakes China's

Spain struggled to cope on Wednesday with a mounting coronavirus crisis as its death toll exceeded China's with another 738 lives lost in a single day, and a third senior government minister was diagnosed with the virus. With 3,434 fatalities, Spain now has the second-highest number of deaths globally after Italy's 6,820. Nursing homes across the country have been overwhelmed and a skating rink in Madrid has been turned into a makeshift morgue. - Reuters

8.00 AM: No new local coronavirus case in China

Mainland China reported a second consecutive day of no new local coronavirus infections as the epicentre of the epidemic Hubei province opened its borders, but imported cases rose as Beijing ramped up controls to prevent a resurgence of infections. A total of 67 new cases were reported as of end-Wednesday, up from 47 a day earlier, all of which were imported, China's National Health Commission said in a statement on Thursday. The total number of cases now stands at 81,285. The commission reported a total of 3,287 deaths at the end of Wednesday, up six from the previous day. - Reuters
New York, March 26 : The White House coronavirus task force pointed to early signs that social distancing norms in the US are beginning to work, with the number of new cases in the high risk New York area relatively "constant" instead of curving sharply upwards.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed 192 people in New York City alone and more than 900 people across the US. The total US caseload has crossed 62,000 as on March 25 end of day in the US.

"You will see in New York City, the number of cases per day has been relatively constant over the last three days as the number of new cases per day", Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus co-ordinator, said at a Wednesday evening briefing.

Birx said that these numbers are clearer to interpret now because the testing backlog has been reduced significantly.

In his daily briefing, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo shared data that show the reduction in density plan is working.

Last Sunday, New York hospitalisations were doubling every two days, by Monday that rate slowed to every 3.4 days and by Wednesday, it came down to every 4.7 days, according to Cuomo.

Birx urged Americans "not to let up for a moment" as the 15 day mark nears for the first test case of social distancing guidelines.

"This is a real call to every person in New York City in the New York metro area to continue to follow the White House social distancing guidelines", she said.

Four counties - New York City, Westchester, Suffolk and Nassau County - account for the maximum cases in the New York metro area.

Along with a few counties in New Jersey, 56 per cent of new cases are still coming from the New York metro area, Birx said.

Birx explained that the hospital cases in New York will continue to rise but the encouraging sign is that they are not rising any more than a "consistent day over day rise", Birx said the increase in hospital cases are a reflection of the infection rate before the full mitigation efforts were put into place.

New York is reporting an infection rate of 1 in 1000 compared with around 0.2 per cent per 1000 in the rest of the states.

The Trump task force is urging anyone who has been in the New York area to self quarantine for 14 days to ensure that the virus does not find new seeding spots in the community.

Florida became the first state to require people coming from New York to self-quarantine for 14 days. Governor Ron DeSantis said that anyone flying in from the city and surrounding areas will face criminal penalties if they do not self-quarantine.

With its warmer climate, Florida is a favourite retirement spot for people from the colder northern states and 20 per cent of its population is over 65 - the age group most susceptible to Covid-19 - compared to 16 per cent nationally.

New York currently accounts for 31 per cent of people succumbing to Covid-19, according to data from Birx and New York Governor Cuomo.

(Nikhila Natarajan can be contacted at @byniknat)

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
South superstar Pawan Kalyan has donated a total of Rs 2 crore to combat the spread of coronavirus. The Gopala Gopala actor has donated Rs 50 lakh each to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana Chief Minister Relief Funds. He also donated Rs 1 crore to Prime Minister's Relief Fund to combat the corona pandemic.

I will be donating Rs.1 crore to PM relief fund to support our https://t.co/83OmZ9biYX Sri @narendramodi ji,in turbulent times like this. His exemplary and inspiring leadership would truly bring our country from this Corona pandemic. - Pawan Kalyan (@PawanKalyan) March 26, 2020

I will be donating Rs.50 Lakhs each to both AP and Telangana CM relief funds to fight against Corona pandemic. - Pawan Kalyan (@PawanKalyan) March 26, 2020

Pawan Kalyan, however, is not the only big actor from Tollywood to donate to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana CM Relief funds. The Bheeshma actor, Nithiin also donated Rs 10 lakh each to the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana CM Relief funds respectively.

Taking to Twitter, the Bheeshma actor wrote, "In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak,I'd like to do my bit fr d country's safety. I wish to make a donation of Rs 10 lakhs fund to

@TelanganaCMO n another Rs 10 lakhs to @AndhraPradeshCM fr d equipment needed to combat this epidemic. We can fight this together. #StayHomeStaySafe"

South film industry veterans like Rajinikanth, Prakash Raj, Suriya along with brother Karthi, Vijay Sethupathi, and many others have also contributed to the Film Employees' Federation of South India. Secretary of the Tamil Nadu Directors Association RK Selvamani has also urged Kollywood actors to come out and extend help to daily wage earners.

Talking of Bollywood, the Producers Guild of India has set up a relief fund for daily wage workers whose lives have been hit due to production shutdown. In its official statement, the Producers Guild also gave out an email address for all the people who are interested to donate. The interested people can mail the Guild at support@producersguildindia.com. Further information about the Producers Guild relief fund will come out soon, according to the official statement.

IMPORTANT... Producers Guild of India announce Relief Fund for daily wage earners impacted by complete shutdown of film, television and OTT productions... OFFICIAL statement... #CoronaVirus#COVID19pic.twitter.com/UywHCZL3O3 - taran adarsh (@taran_adarsh) March 17, 2020

Also read: Coronavirus: Akshay Kumar's Sooryavanshi, Vin Diesel's Fast and Furious release postponed

Also read: Coronavirus in India Live Updates: 65-year-old COVID-19 patient dies in Kashmir; number of deaths rises to 15
New Jersey now will get additional help from the federal government as it copes with the coronavirus.

President Donald Trump issued an emergency declaration for the state on Thursday, making it eligible for special funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The money will help pay for expanded unemployment insurance, child care and supplemental nutrition and assistance programs, according to the states congressional delegation.

Im glad to see the administration listened to our request and well see more help coming our way," said Rep. Andy Kim, D-3rd Dist. New Jersey has become one of the focal points of this disaster.

Gov. Phil Murphy sought the declaration as the number of coronoavirus cases in the state keeps climbing. New Jersey has more than 4,400 cases, second only to neighboring New York. The number of coronavirus deaths rose to 62.

With our major disaster declaration approved, New Jersey will now have access to greater essential federal support to help our residents through this emergency, Murphy said. This declaration will allow us to lift remaining bureaucratic barriers to assistance and enhance our statewide response to COVID-19.

Murphy said the money also will help fund emergency work and the repair or replace disaster-damaged facilities.

The state also has a Small Business Administration emergency declaration that makes small businesses in New Jersey hurt by the coronavirus eligible for low-interest federal loans of up to $2 million.

Trumps earlier declaration of a national emergency freed up $50 billion in federal funds for New Jersey and other states.

And the $2 trillion stimulus package that passed the Senate Wednesday includes $150 billion for state and local governments.

NJ Advance Media Trenton Bureau staff writer Matt Arco contributed to this report.

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N HS volunteers have shared their reasons for signing up after over half a million answered the Government's call to help tackle coronavirus.

More than 560,000 have now responded to the Health Secretary Matt Hancock's request to support people in isolation as Covid-19 spreads across the UK.

On Thursday morning, Mr Hancock said the number of people who have already volunteered their time was "fantastic" and invited more to join the effort.

Stuart Beards, 26, hopes to help by delivering necessities to those in quarantine, saying he was motivated by "the countless pleas online from health officials to support the NHS".

Matt Hancock announces drive for volunteers / Sky News

He said: "It needs to be a universal community effort to support the NHS."

When asked about any concerns for his own health, the London-based security operations manager said he was "already taking precautions at home and are sticking to the rules implemented by the Government and health advice to minimise any contact".

More than 560,000 responded to the Health Secretary Matt Hancock's request to support people in isolation / Reuters

He added: "At the end of the day, if we can help by volunteering, it may stop a vulnerable person leaving their home.

"If it helps keep one person safe, it's worth it."

Lisa O'Hare, 44, from Wilmslow, has also signed up and wants to give back to the health service that has helped her.

Lisa O'Hare who has volunteered to help the NHS through the coronavirus crisis. / PA

"I've got one dodgy kidney but I wouldn't like the other to be fighting on its own," she said.

"If it wasn't for the NHS, I wouldn't be here now. They've saved me and so many people I love so many times. This is the least I can do."

The tax manager will be making calls to vulnerable people as she has an underlying health condition and does not wish to risk exposing herself to the virus.

She added: "It felt like something I could do from my house which is useful - a lot of people could do with a chat and I could too, so it will be useful."

Owen Lloyd, 22, volunteered after seeing the strain his NHS staff friends are under.

He lives a few minutes' walk away from east London's ExCeL Centre, currently being transformed into NHS Nightingale, and said: "I'd like to offer any support when that is ready."

Owen Lloyd who has volunteered to help the NHS through the coronavirus crisis. / PA

Mr Lloyd said: "Even if I only end up doing one thing through this, I will be proud to say I have assisted the NHS and taken some pressure off our brilliant NHS workers."

Jacqui Hargrave, 48, usually writes a popular blog about open water swimming but work is restricted as her family needs to stay home, so she will "be making phone calls to people who are lonely".

Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures 1 /81 Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures A deserted Westminster Bridge PA A man wearing a face mask or covering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, walks past customers sat outside a restaurant AFP via Getty Images Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the Coronavirus lockdown Andrew Parsons Runners pass cardboard cutouts of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William during the London Marathon in London AP An empty escalator at Charing Coss London Underground tube station Jeremy Selwyn Electronic bilboards displays a message warning people to stay home in Sheffield PA A sign is displayed in the window of a student accommodation building following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Mancheste Reuters People take part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions, in Londo AP People sing and dance in Leicester Square on the eve on the 10PM curfew Reuters Hearts painted by a team of artists from Upfest are seen in the grass at Queen Square, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Bristol Reuters Graffiti reads 'good luck and stay safe', as the number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases grow around the world, under a bridge in London Reuters A sign is pictured in Soho, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London Reuters Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures, during a coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, London AP A person runs past posters with a message of hope, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Manchester REUTERS Riot police face protesters who took part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions in London AP An image of The Queen eith quotes from her broadcast to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the Coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images Durdle Door in Dorset Reuters Captain Tom Moore via Reuters Mia, aged 8, and Jack, aged 5, take part in "PE with Joe" a daily live workout with Joe Wicks on Youtube to help kids stay fit who have to stay indoors due to the Coronavirus outbreak PA An NHS worker reacts at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital during the Clap for our Carers campaign in support of the NHS Reuters Goats which have taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno @AndrewStuart via PA Tobias Weller PA Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed London Landscapes: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, central London. Matt Writtle A newspaper vendor in Manchester city centre giving away free toilet rolls with every paper bought as shops run low on supplies due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus PA Theo Clay looks out of his window next to his hand-drawn picture of a rainbow in Liverpool, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continue Reuters A young man cuts another man's hair on top of a closed hairdresser in Oxford Reuters General view of the new NHS Nightingale Hospital, built to fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London via Reuters Jason Baird is seen dressed as Spiderman during his daily exercise to cheer up local children in Stockport, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters A woman wearing a face mask walks past Buckingham Palace Getty Images A man holds mobile phone displaying a text message alert sent by the government warning that new rules are in force across the UK and people must stay at home PA Medical staff on the Covid-19 ward at the Neath Port Talbot Hospital, in Wales, as the health services continue their response to the coronavirus outbreak. PA Prime Minister Boris Johnson taking part in a virtual Cabinet meeting with his top team of ministers PA A shopper walks past empty shelves in a Lidl store on in Wallington. After spates of "panic buying" cleared supermarket shelves of items like toilet paper and cleaning products, stores across the UK have introduced limits on purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have also created special time slots for the elderly and other shoppers vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Getty Images People on a busy tube train in London at rush hour PA Mia, aged 8 and her brother Jack, aged 5 from Essex, continue their school work at home, after being sent home due to the coronavirus PA Children are painting 'Chase the rainbows' artwork and springing up in windows across the country Reuters Social distancing in Primrose Hill Jeremy Selwyn A general view of a locked gate at Anfield, Liverpool as The Premier League has been suspended PA Homeless people in London AFP via Getty Images A piece of art by the artist, known as the Rebel Bear has appeared on a wall on Bank Street in Glasgow. The new addition to Glasgow's street art is capturing the global Coronavirus crisis. The piece features a woman and a man pulling back to give each other a kiss PA The Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, London, for Windsor Castle to socially distance herself amid the coronavirus pandemic PA A general view on Grey street, Newcastle as coronavirus cases grow around the world Reuters Matt Raw, a British national who returned from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China, leaves quaratine at Arrowe Park Hospital on Merseyside PA Britain's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news conference inside 10 Downing Street Reuters The ticket-validation terminals at the tram stop on Edinburgh's Princes Street are cleaned following the coronavirus outbreak. PA Locked school gates at Rockcliffe First School in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear PA A sign at a Sainsbury's supermarket informs customers that limits have been set on a small number of products as the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases grow around the world Reuters Jawad Javed delivers coronavirus protection kits that he and his wife have put together to the vulnerable people of their community of Stenhousemuir, between Glasgow and Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" Getty Images A man who appears to be homeless sleeping wearing a mask today in Victoria Jeremy Selwyn A pedestrian walks past graffiti that reads "Diseases are in the City" in Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images Staff from The Lyric Theatre, London inform patrons, as it shuts its doors PA A quiet looking George IV Bridge in Edinburgh PA A quieter than usual British Museum Getty Images A racegoer attends Cheltenham in a fashionable face mask SplashNews.com A commuter wears a face mask at London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn A empty restaurant in the Bull Ring Shopping Centre Getty Images A deserted Trafalgar Square in London PA Passengers determined to avoid the coronavirus before leaving the UK arrive at Gatwick Airport Getty Images

She said: "My parents, they are in their 70s and vulnerable but they have each other.

"They have neighbours who have nobody, and they will be so isolated, particularly the elderly.

"If I can help even one person so they can have something to look forward to during the day then it's a good thing."

Jacqui Hargrave who has volunteered to help the NHS through the coronavirus crisis. / PA

The Prime Minister praised those who have volunteered during his daily press conference on Wednesday.

Speaking from Number 10, Boris Johnson offered the then-405,000 who had signed up a "special thank you".




Tunis, Tunisia (PANA) - A total of 600 people were arrested and presented before the public prosecutor's office for violating general sanitary confinement in Tunisia as part of the fight against the spread of the new coronavirus (Covid-19), the spokesman of the Ministry of the Interior, Khaled Hayoubi said on Thursday
On the same day Gov. Kate Brown promised more transparency in the states release of data about the coronavirus pandemic, several Portland-area hospital systems said they had no plans to publicly disclose data about their own hospitalizations.

At least 75 of the 266 Oregonians identified with coronavirus have been hospitalized at some point since state officials identified the first patient Feb. 28.

Under pressure from The Oregonian/OregonLive and other media outlets, Brown has now directed the Oregon Health Authority to share all COVID-19 information with the public that does not compromise patient privacy.

Hospital-level information, including COVID-19 patient counts, has not been released yet. But Brown said Wednesday more information will be forthcoming.

OHSU Hospital is the only local system that is regularly disclosing patient data. As of 11 a.m. Wednesday, OHSU had admitted 10 of the states 75 COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization.

One of OHSUs patients has died, three were discharged and six remain hospitalized.

Kaiser Permanente, which reported Oregons first coronavirus case last month at its Westside Medical Center in Hillsboro, wont share patient statistics about COVID-19.

In this public health emergency, we will rely on the Oregon Health Authority to collect and share regional data, Michael Foley, a spokesman, said in a statement.

Kaiser operates the Sunnyside Medical Center in Clackamas, where two people have died from COVID-19, according to information released by the Oregon Health Authority.

Ten Oregonians have died statewide through Wednesday.

Providence Health & Services also wont release tallies of patients with COVID-19. Providence operates eight hospitals in Oregon.

For now, we have chosen to report our data into the state rollup by the Oregon Health Authority, Providence spokesman Gary Walker said in a statement.

Providence operates St. Vincent Medical Center, where two patients have died, according to the Oregon Health Authority.

Legacy Health has five hospitals in the Portland area and one in Silverton. One of its patients, at Legacy Mount Hood Medical Center, has died from COVID-19, according to the state health authority.

Legacy Health had been publicly disclosing tallies of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 but abruptly stopped Monday or sometime before.

We did take the numbers down because the numbers were changing so rapidly, spokesman Brian Terrett said in an email.

We were only listing hospitalized patients but learned that a number put up at 5:00 might not be accurate because a patient may have been discharged after the number was reported, he said. We felt that accuracy was more important.

Asked whether Legacy Health would commit to posting tallies going forward, in light of OHSUs ability to provide accurate information, Terrett did not respond.

-- Brad Schmidt; bschmidt@oregonian.com; 503-294-7628; @_brad_schmidt

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
The Union health ministry, on Wednesday morning, reduced the Covid-19 nationwide death toll by one and clarified that the test report of a Delhi man who died Tuesday night was negative for coronavirus infection.

The health ministry website, on Wednesday morning, clarified that the second death reported in Delhi is Covid-19 negative.

The preliminary test of the Delhi man had come positive for coronavirus infection and the website was updated based on that. However, the later confirmatory test showed that he did not have the disease, Lav Agarwal, joint secretary, Union health ministry, said.

The Tuesday night update had Delhis Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) unit frantically calling up its officials and those of the union health ministry to find out who had died.

We had not informed the ministry officials about the death. I do not know how the website got updated, a senior official from Delhis health department, on condition of anonymity, said.

The authorities later figured out that a 60-year-old man with Covid-19 like symptoms  fever and cough whose samples had been collected for tests, had died at the Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality Hospital in Tahirpur.

The man had come to us with arrhythmias and needed an angioplasty. However, he had symptoms of mild fever and cough. When the treating doctor took his history, they came to know that one of his family members had just returned from Saudi Arabia. We sent his samples for the Covid-19 test. Before the results could come, he died of complications on Tuesday night, Dr BL Sherwal, director, Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality Hospital, an autonomous institute under the Delhi government, said.

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Dear home,

My name is Philip and I am from Mountmellick, a little countryside town in Laois.

After travelling for six months in Asia, I came to Spain for a different culture, different language and a new challenge.

Its not my final destination but, for now, its home. Here, I work as a chef. It's something I have never done before but I enjoy it. My last shift was ten days ago.

In the first few hours of lockdown, nobody, including me, knew what it meant or what was going to happen. People were worried. When lockdown was announced, it was a surreal feeling. The normal life we once knew was on temporary hold.

The police imposes fines as well as detainment for people who leave home for no reason. There is also a one-person-per-car policy.

Supermarkets and pharmacies have a ten people in, ten people out system in place and pharmacies operate with a one in, one out system. Police cars play the same message all day on loudspeaker: Quedate en Casa. It means stay at home.

The first few days of lockdown just felt like a few days off work. It was worrying, but you were home and safe and knew that staying at home would help save lives.

TV, reading, home exercise and buying the smallest thing in the supermarket, just to be able to go outside for air, is getting me through it  while wearing a face mask and gloves, of course.

As the days pass and the virus continues to spread and kill, the feeling of temporary lockdown starts to feel permanent. What was, ten days ago, a vibrant and busy town, is now a ghost town with only police. Its eerie. Never once did I imagine that people you meet normally on the street would be a threat to your health.

Thankfully, something breaks the day. Every evening at 8pm, people all over Spain come to their balconies and cheer and applause for the healthcare workers, police and military. It definitely lifts the spirits.

I know we will all get through this soon, and then appreciate life even more. If I have one message to send home to Ireland, it is to stay at home and dont risk lives. Stay safe Ireland, Ill see you soon.

We are living history. The challenges posed by Covid 19 are similar the world over but everybodys experience of this emergency will be different. In this special series, Lockdown Letters' gives our readers at home and across the globe an opportunity to share their stories about how the Coronavirus and the measures to tackle its spread are impacting their lives in these unprecedented times.

Please email your submission (400 words max.) to stories@independent.ie along with a photograph. We will publish as many letters as possible on Independent.ie and a selection in print every week.
By Valentina Za and Giancarlo Navach

BARI, Italy (Reuters) - Grape exporters in Puglia  the heel on Italy's boot -- don't have time for debates about European solidarity bonds.

By now, they would normally have loans in place to buy the Italia and Regina varieties of grapes that will soon bud on local vines, destined for fruit bowls around the world.

But normal banking transactions, like almost every other economic activity, have ground to a halt as the coronavirus sweeps through Italy, killing more people than anywhere else in the world and decimating the euro zones third largest economy.

With each passing day, revenue prospects get dimmer and with them the hope of credit relief from banks. It's a downward spiral that is particularly acute in southern Italy and risks widening the gap with the richer north, where before the pandemic struck, income levels were twice as high and unemployment was nearly a third of the rate of the south.

Coronavirus paranoia is hurting sales of our produce abroad. Orders from France and Germany have stopped. And if the situation doesn't improve we won't find seasonal workers for the harvest, said Luca Lazzaro, head of regional farming lobby Confagricoltura Puglia.

Facing a steep recession, Italy has called for Europe to issue so-called corona bonds to alleviate the financial pain from the pandemic, a move some richer countries, such as Germany, oppose.

In the meantime, major Italian banks have earmarked billions of euros to support stricken businesses and the government has pledged to guarantee up to 80% of new loans. But an unprecedented drop in commerce, required to halt the spread of the virus, makes credit decisions difficult.

Those difficulties are compounded in the south, where banks are weaker and companies are less profitable than their northern rivals and more reliant on bank credit for their day-to-day financing.

Having prioritised problem banks in the centre and north of the country over the past five years, Italy had only started to tackle the bad debt problems at its southern lenders when the coronavirus struck.

Story continues

Rome had moved to bail out Popolare di Bari, the region's largest lender, in December with over a quarter of its loans, mainly to fragile local businesses, in arrears. Another 15 smaller southern banks are in a risky position, according to Italys central bank, with one in ten loans in trouble after accounting for loss provisions, more than twice the national average.

"This is a country divided in two. The south's frail ecosystem needs local credit," said Adriano Giannola, an academic and the chairman of south-focused think-tank Svimez.

"Authorities thought it was best to have the south's biggest banks merged into the large northern-based groups. But banks first allocate credit to the least risky borrowers and that puts southern businesses at a disadvantage."

Almost 40% of southern businesses were ranked as "vulnerable" or "at risk" before the coronavirus crisis, according to credit data group Cerved, compared to a national average of 24%. Cerved said the pandemic could boost those scores by a quarter.

A POSITIVE TREND

At the start of this year, things had been looking up for Bari, Puglia's capital city.

After a decade-long downturn, more businesses, including cafes, restaurants and B&Bs, were opening than closing and employment levels were rising partly thanks to tourism  an industry obliterated by the virus.

"I'm not saying we were over the crisis that started in 2009, but we did have a positive trend, said Beniamino Campobasso, head of local retail industry association Confesercenti Puglia.

Despite public debt running at more than 1.3 times domestic output, Rome is planning additional support for the economy that could double the 25 billion euro (23.04 billion pounds) stimulus package announced earlier this month.

The government has also told banks to give firms a six-month moratorium on their debts but the measure applies only to businesses that were in good health before the pandemic  leaving troubled firms on the hook.

The moratorium means something of a reprieve for the fruit dealers and farmers of Puglia, whose olive oil industry has been devastated by a bacteria that has killed thousands of olive trees.

Its definitely something, said Lazzaro, the head of the regional farming lobby.

Before the coronavirus outbreak started shutting things down, Popolare di Baris temporary administrators were calling on borrowers to repay existing debts, triggering alarm among local businesses.

Popolare di Bari declined to comment.

But a debt holiday will only work if local firms can get fresh funding. Quick decisions on credit, not easy at the best of times, are even more difficult with bank staff confined at home, dealing with a flurry of loan applications.

"To still be here to start again when the ban lifts we need immediate and easy access to credit," said Campobasso.

"Let's speak plainly: that is not something we're used to around here. Credit has become more and more difficult with each passing year."

(Editing by Carmel Crimmins)
CORVALLIS, Ore. -- An Oregon State University study published last week found that diabetes education programs that are linguistically and culturally tailored to Latinos lead to significantly higher rates of completion among Latino participants -- even higher than rates among non-Latinos enrolled in the English versions of those programs.

Cultural adaptation means that a program is not simply a word-for-word translation of an English-language version. For example, the Programa de Manejo Personal de la Diabetes (PMPD) was originally developed in Spanish, using idioms and examples that are familiar and applicable to Latinos specifically.

"Linguistic adaptation is important, obviously, when we're trying to reach people who speak languages other than English. But equally important is that it's culturally adapted," said lead author Carolyn Mendez-Luck, a researcher in OSU's College of Public Health and Human Sciences. "Those two go hand-in-hand."

Latinos in the U.S. are twice as likely as non-Latino whites to develop Type 2 diabetes, with over half of Latinos expected to develop Type 2 diabetes by age 70.

Latinos also tend to experience more complications from uncontrolled diabetes, including kidney disease, vision problems and heart disease. Such complications lead to high health care costs and significant disability.

Diabetes self-management education has been shown to improve healthy eating, and has been linked to lower medical costs and reduced ER visits. But few prior studies have focused on Latino participation in such programs.

Mendez-Luck and OSU co-authors Diana Govier, Jeff Luck, Esmeralda Julyan and Shyama Mahakalanda used data from the National Council on Aging to measure participation rates among Latinos and non-Latino whites in two programs, the PMPD, and its equivalent that targets non-Latinos, the Diabetes Self-Management Program (DSMP). Angelica Herrera-Venson of the National Council on Aging was also a co-author.

The sample, drawn from the council's Chronic Disease Self-Management Education Database, included 8,321 Latinos and 23,537 non-Latino whites who participated in either program between January 2010 and March 2019.

The researchers found that, compared to non-Latino whites, Latinos enrolled in either the PMPD or DSMP program had a higher probability of completing at least four sessions of the six-session programs. Among Latinos, those enrolled in the PMPD Spanish-language program had the highest probability of completing all six sessions.

A potential explanation for higher rates, the study says, is that these kinds of programs are "sensitive to cultural values and beliefs related to diabetes, thus making them more relevant and interesting to Latino participants."

For example, in talking about food, a Latino-tailored diabetes program would emphasize the need to limit intake of rice and tortillas, rather than white bread and potatoes, as might be the case in a non-Latino program. Or if talking about exercise, a program based in a desert community would not be likely to recommend kayaking as an option.

In addition to language translation, linguistic adaptations may also use easy-to-understand terminology, the study says, which helps make programs more accessible to participants with lower educational levels. Such materials may also help boost Latinos' overall health literacy, which can improve health outcomes and increase motivation for self-care.

A unique factor in providing diabetes education to Latinos, Mendez-Luck said, is having to combat the cultural notion of "susto," the belief held by some Latinos that a major scare or trauma in someone's life is what initially causes them to get diabetes.

There are also challenges in bridging the gap between what some Latino elders believe about the disease and its treatment, and what their caregivers do to help them.

The National Council on Aging is continually working with community-based organizations to identify and disseminate culturally adapted version of health education programs. Going forward, the researchers said, further study will be needed to determine whether those tailored approaches lead to similar participation rates among other racial and ethnic groups.

###
Three Plainfield residents have been arrested and charged in the stabbing death of a man outside a nightclub last month, authorities said.

Jose Rivera Nelson Martinez, 20, Rudy Gonzalez Segovia, 22, and Arquimidis Jossue Alvarado Arias, 29, are charged with murder, attempted, murder and weapons offenses for their roles in the attack outside Chez Maree nightclub in Plainfield on Feb. 23, the Union County Prosecutors Office said Thursday.

Olvin Benitez Lopez, 30, was pronounced dead outside the Watching Avenue club around 2 a.m., while three other men  ages 27, 28 and 30  were injured in the stabbing, officials said.

Segovia was arrested at his home earlier this month, while Arias and Martinez were separately taken into custody in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., respectively, by the U.S. Marshals Service with help from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Segovia is being held and Martinez was extradited back to New Jersey earlier this week. Arias awaits extradition.

Anyone with information is asked to call Sgt. Johnny Ho at 908-403-8271 or Det. Sonia Rodriguez at 908-341-3380.

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Attorneys representing Wyoming coal miners reached a settlement in a class action lawsuit against a bankrupt coal operator.

The settlement with Blackjewel LLC of West Virginia requires final approval by a federal judge, The Casper Star-Tribune reports.

The lawsuit alleged the coal operator violated federal labor law by failing to notify or compensate hundreds of workers before abruptly closing its mines.

The judge needs to issue a decision before the court releases details of the settlement, which remain sealed, attorney Ned Pillersdorf said.

We have reached a comprehensive settlement with everyone involved in litigation, Pillersdorf said while addressing Blackjewel workers during a live social media broadcast Tuesday.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of about 1,700 Blackjewel miners and other workers affected by the closures at two Wyoming mines and others in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia in July.

The lawsuit filed in a West Virginia federal court alleged Blackjewel violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act when then-CEO Jeffrey Hoops failed to give sufficient written notice of the layoffs or offer 60 days of wages.

Under the legislation known as the WARN Act, the workers would be entitled to wages and benefits, court filings said.

Though the mines have reopened under new ownership, attorneys, creditors and workers continue to battle over outstanding legal issues in federal bankruptcy court.

A majority of former Blackjewel workers have yet to receive the full compensation they were promised, according to investigations by Wyomings Labor Standards Office.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Virginia
Health officers and superintendents in six Bay Area counties announced an extension Wednesday of the region's school closure through May 1 to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The closure extension will affect schools overseen by the Alameda County Office of Education, Contra Costa County Office of Education, Marin County Office of Education, San Francisco Unified School District, San Mateo County Office of Education and the Santa Clara County Office of Education.

The extension is intended to build on the Bay Area's shelter-in-place order issued March 16 to contain the virus' spread. Gov. Gavin Newsom has warned that the statewide shelter-in-place order could also last into the summer.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that multiple major banks will offer a 90-day grace period for mortgage payments in light of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.

The grace period applies only to homeowners making mortgage payments to Wells Fargo, Citi Bank, JPMorgan Chase and U.S. Bank, according to Newsom.

State legislators praised Newsom and the banks for negotiating the grace period but called for a similar grace period for tenants across the state who pay rent.

Newsom has already signed an executive order allowing individual jurisdictions to pause rent payments and enact eviction moratoriums for renters, but only some city and county governments have taken that step.

Large numbers of people who think they may have the novel coronavirus are flocking to a free testing site at a Hayward fire station.

The COVID-19 Testing Center at Fire Station No. 7 at 28270 Huntwood Ave. tested 207 people on Monday and another 460 people on Tuesday, Hayward city spokesman Chuck Finnie said.

The center is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, but it closed early on Wednesday because the center ran out of test kits, Finnie said.

The testing center is scheduled to reopen on Thursday.

The city is conducting the tests in conjunction with Avellino Labs, a Menlo Park biotech company that got approval for the tests from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the wake of one death and 178 cases of the novel coronavirus in San Francisco as of Wednesday, city leaders are calling for more federal and state funding ahead of an anticipated surge of cases.

During a briefing at the city's Emergency Operations Center, Mayor London Breed said while the city's hospital system was in good shape to deal with the current cases, she predicted that could change.

Breed estimated the city will need about 5,000 more hospital beds and at least 1,500 ventilators.

Breed said she reached out to both Gov. Gavin Newsom and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday, asking them for more resources for the city's hospitals to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

A coalition of nearly 50 public agencies, non-profit organizations and indigenous tribes released a set of guidelines Wednesday to protect public health and reduce crowds at public parks and open spaces.

The coalition, including the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council and the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, released the guidelines in response to recent reports of overwhelming crowds at public parks and open spaces.

The guidelines are intended to encourage Bay Area residents to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, even if they are not in an enclosed space.

The coalition advised residents to avoid holding social gatherings at public parks, going outside for health reasons rather than socializing, and staying at least 6 feet away from strangers. Residents are also advised to visit less frequented parks and open spaces and avoid areas with crowded parking lots and trails.

At least two coastal cities announced Tuesday that they will be closing parking lots to beaches indefinitely to further enforce San Mateo County's and California's shelter-in-place orders in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Both Half Moon Bay and Pacifica said their city lots to beaches are closed effective Wednesday. State beaches closed the parking lots to their areas on Tuesday after an influx of visitors crowded the coast this past weekend.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday issued an order closing parking lots at state beaches and parks.

A $2 trillion federal novel coronavirus stimulus package will include $25 billion in relief funding for public transit agencies across the country, an allocation BART General Manager Bob Powers called "critical lifeline funds" Wednesday.

The package is the result of a bipartisan deal that will include an expansion of unemployment benefits, emergency funding for state and local governments, funding for hospitals, a pool of grants and loans for small businesses and $1,200 checks given to most Americans. The House of Representatives and Senate are expected to vote on the economic aid package this week.

The transit funding will help BART and other local public transit agencies shore up losses in fare revenue and lost revenue as a result of reduced economic activity as millions of people stay in their homes. BART officials have said the agency's roughly 90 percent ridership drop and 50 percent reduction in economic activity compared to similar periods last month will reduce its monthly revenue by about $57 million.

With ridership numbers down sharply amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority announced Wednesday that it is reducing service effective next week.

Beginning Monday, VTA will reduce light-rail service to two-car trains running every 30 minutes, with all bus and light-rail trips after 9 p.m. canceled except for Route 22, which goes between the Palo Alto and Eastridge transit centers and will continue to run 24 hours a day.

The actions are similar to ones taken by BART, which reduced its service hours to end at 9 p.m. starting this past Monday. VTA's Express 181 route will operate to match BART's new schedule, offering service past 9 p.m. to meet the last BART trains at the Warm Springs station.

The agency has also suspended all in-person service at its River Oaks office on North First Street in San Jose, as well as the Downtown Customer Service Center on West Santa Clara Street in San Jose.

The Oakland Police Department said that three officers have tested positive for the novel coronavirus so far.

One officer tested positive last week, the second officer tested positive on Sunday and results for the third officer were confirmed on Tuesday.

A police spokeswoman said all three officers are self-quarantined and are recovering.

The Police Department said it has taken immediate action and precautions to protect the health and safety of all of its employees and is following Alameda County's public health order and COVID-19 protocols that have been issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Four Contra Costa County Fire Protection District employees have tested positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus, the district announced Wednesday.

Eighteen Con Fire employees were tested after showing symptoms such as fever, cough and sore throats, but 12 were confirmed negative while two others are isolated and off-duty while awaiting test results.

The four employees who tested positive are off-duty and awaiting a return to duty based on established federal guidelines.

The fire district said the four employees represent about 1 percent of their workforce, so their positive tests do not have any adverse impact on the district's operations.

The San Francisco Sheriff's Department announced Wednesday that four more department employees have tested positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus.

The four employees are a deputy assigned to a city Department of Public Health clinic, a cadet assigned to a City Hall patrol unit, a deputy assigned to County Jail No. 4, and a senior deputy assigned to a City Hall unit, sheriff's officials said.

The department also had one prior deputy test positive for COVID-19 on Sunday.

Following a positive test involving Sheriff's Department staff, the department has worked to create a timeline of the affected employee's assignments and staff, identifying anyone who had direct or indirect contact with them, and sharing the timeline with relevant people in other city departments.

The Contra Costa County Treasurer-Tax Collector's Office reminded homeowners Wednesday of the April 10 property tax delinquency deadline and said it will cancel late payment penalties and interest for people affected by the novel coronavirus.

The Treasurer-Tax Collector's Office doesn't have the authority to extend the deadline, but said it will waive penalties for late payments if a taxpayer can document that the outbreak is hindering their ability to pay their property tax on time.

A man who was fatally shot in Berkeley on Friday afternoon was identified by the Alameda County coroner's bureau on Wednesday as 29-year-old Diante Craig of Richmond.

Craig was shot near the corner of University Avenue and Chestnut Street, two blocks east of San Pablo Avenue, at about 12:20 p.m. Friday and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Hosea Askew, 52, of Richmond, was arrested on Saturday in connection with Craig's death but the Alameda County District Attorney's Office hasn't yet filed charges against him. Askew remains in custody at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin without bail.

At the request of Supervisor Keith Carson, whose district includes Berkeley, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors adjourned its meeting on Tuesday in Craig's honor and held a moment of silence for him.

Carson said Craig's mother is an Alameda County employee.

Copyright  2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
Printing from Office365 and scanning into it have long been a painful experience for users around the world. Now, with KWizCom apps, it has never been easier.

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SharePoint Online users are invited to join Ishai Sagi for a live interactive session where he will demonstrate real life scenarios on how KWizCom's Scan App simplifies the process of creating documents in Office 365 by scanning papers into a single or multiple pages including advanced options like OCR.

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The worldwide coronavirus pandemic became personal for many Southeast Texans on Thursday when a well-liked educator from Lumberton died after being diagnosed with COVID-19, the number of confirmed cases locally rose by nearly half, and the city of Beaumont for the first time acknowledged the realistic possibility that the virus is being spread from person to person within the community.

Meanwhile, Port Arthur announced its first confirmed case, while Beaumont reported an eighth person had tested positive for the virus. Hardin County reported its third and fourth cases. Orange County has thus far reported one.

A statement from the Beaumont Public Health Department provided new insight into its cases. The citys confirmed patients range in age from 23 to 79; six are recuperating at home and two others are hospitalized.

The department also used sterner language to warn residents of the potential for so-called community spread. Two days earlier, officials had said there was very little evidence that the virus was making its way within the community like that.

Health Director Sherry Ulmer said the change in tone was meant to encourage people to take precautions seriously. The department is still completing investigations into its two most recent cases.

But the days most difficult news came from Hardin County, where Michael Westbrook, a member of the Symphony of Southeast Texas and a longtime local educator, became the regions first person to die from the disease. His death was confirmed by Lumberton Police Chief Danny Sullins, and the tributes from colleagues and former students poured in throughout the day.

As a teacher it is our hope that we impact kids lives, said Port-Neches Groves High School band director Alex Wells, who has known Westbrook since college. And I know he has.

Related: Beloved SE Texas educator dies after contracting coronavirus

More Information Helpful numbers (409) 550-2536: Hotline for residents of Jasper, Jefferson, Hardin, Newton, Orange and Tyler counties who have symptoms that could be coronavirus and want to be tested. The hotline is active Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. In off hours, callers will be directed through an automated menu to their county's health department. 211, option 6: For general coronavirus inquiries. See More Collapse

Over the course of his career, Westbrook worked for the Hardin-Jefferson, Lumberton, PN-G and Evadale school districts.

Former co-worker Gretchen Scoggins recounted Westbrook as a jovial, cherished colleague.

The last thing I said to him was, I love you brother, she said. And then I got the call from a mutual close friend to him. At 1 this morning, his heart had stopped. They had done CPR.

Jimmy Frasier, a former student and now a band director himself, recalled meeting Westbrook while in seventh grade.

Mike had just became the band director at Evadale High School, he said. I was really excited because he was a trumpet player, like myself, and he had gone to college with my sister. I was really fortunate to have him as a band director for the year he was at my school, and I learned a lot about playing trumpet from him.

Top hits: Get Beaumont Enterprise stories sent directly to your inbox

Westbrooks death also brought global tragedy to the local stage.

Before, I saw it really as an inconvenience, Wells said of the pandemic that has brought about wrenching changes in the everyday lives of millions. And now it hits home. You dont just see it on the news anymore. It is now part of your life.

Chief Sullins said he expects folks in Lumberton and other local communities to be more serious in their response to the outbreak. He noticed it on Thursday while checking on stores. Jefferson County Judge Jeff Branick a day earlier required stores to limit access. Hardin County Judge Wayne McDaniel said his and other counties are expected to soon follow suit.

Yet Sullins said people were already practicing social distancing.

Jasper, Newton and Tyler counties have not had any positive cases.

Related: Stores ordered to limit crowds

In a statement issued Thursday, Westbrooks employer, Hardin-Jefferson ISD, acknowledged that an employee had been diagnosed with COVID-19 but opted not to identify them out of respect for the privacy of the individual and their family members.

The district said the individual was on campus on March 16-17 and March 19-20.

Any individuals who were present at the high school on those dates should take necessary precautions for their health and safety of themselves and their families, the statement said.

The district also said it was working with local health department officials to identify and notify those who may have come into contact with the employee.

Related: Distance learning highlights digital shortfalls

A separate statement from Hardin-Jefferson confirmed the death of Westbrook but did not mention how he died.

Hardin County Health Department Director Sharon Whitley said the departments policy is to find out as much information about where an infected individual went during the time they potentially were infected and reach out to whatever group may have come in contact with them.

It is up to that organization to let their customers, clients and employees know that they may have been exposed or were exposed to someone who has the virus, she said.

Whitley did not specifically name Westbrook but said her agency was still investigating the fatal coronavirus case. She said the department had not determined how the victim had contracted the virus or whether they had any pre-existing conditions.

Scoggins said her friend had health struggles.

We talked a lot about that as a diabetic, she said.

Related: Map: Coronavirus cases across the US

In Jefferson County, Branick said he had no plans at this time to update the existing emergency orders despite the increased warnings about community spread and the first coronavirus-related death in Southeast Texas. Those orders already restrict what stores can be open and where people can go.

Branick said hes talked with several medical professionals, including the current and past presidents of the Jefferson County Medical Society, all of whom told him that the current regulations were adequate.

He also has requested the current president of the society survey his membership to gauge their feelings on the response.

I have gotten a couple of very nasty text messages from a couple of nurses that believe everything should be shut down, he said. Im trying to listen to the doctors.

Related: Companies, organizations support local agencies during coronavirus outbreak

Branick said he was gathering more information, including from the survey, and will use it to make future decisions.

The case reported in Port Arthur Thursday night involved a person in their 40s. It was the first Jefferson County case reported outside of Beaumont.

While Branick did not place additional regulations on private residents on Thursday, he did issue an updated order targeting hospitals, physicians, health care providers and other individuals or entities who may be testing or treating individuals for COVID-19.

These individuals are now required to immediately contact the Jefferson County Office of Emergency Management to report both positive and suspected cases of COVID-19.

Related: Jefferson Co. opens first drive-thru test site

The order requires these cases to be reported within no fewer than four hours of learning of a suspected or positive case. The report must include the name, address, age, current location and information about whether the individual had traveled out of Southeast Texas.

Failure to comply can draw a fine of up to $1,000 or 180 days in jail.

Branick said this was in response to information he obtained that there is a suspected case of coronavirus in Jefferson County, however the person has not been tested.

They had not tested the individual because they were already treating him for COVID-19, he said. So its not a confirmed case  but the Department of State Health Services and the Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council are finally starting to report both the confirmed and suspected cases.

Related: Jefferson Co. Judges wife negative for COVID-19

He said that information is vital when making decisions on whether to increase restrictions.

Branick was unsure Thursday afternoon if he could release the number of suspected cases, but the six-county region participating in the Southeast Texas Regional Emergency Operations Center has 13 confirmed positives.

These cases are expected to continue increasing as more individuals are tested.

A little more than 1,000 calls have been received by the hotline launched Friday to streamline the screening and testing process for residents of the counties int he emergency operations group  Jasper, Jefferson, Hardin, Newton, Orange and Tyler counties. More than 300 cases have been referred for testing, with 40 scheduled to have been tested Thursday.

More than 90 people have been tested for coronavirus in just the three days since the groups drive-thru testing facility opened.

Chris Moore contributed.

kaitlin.bain@beaumontenterprise.com

isaac.windes@hearstnp.com
Himalaya Food International announced that the Singapore Arbitration has given award in the long drawn case of the company with Simplot USA.

Simplot had claimed US $14 million plus interest since 2012 as refund against sale of French Fry line and Specialty Potato Lines.

The Tribunal has directed Simplot to return the Equipments of French Fry & Potato Specialty Lines and HFIL to pay a total of US $ 3.96 mm with further interest @ 5.33% till the date of payment from the date of award.

The Company proposes to take expert advise from its Legal Counsel at Singapore for future course of action. It can now add the FF line & Potato Specialty Lines in its Production Plans.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
IT'S been a tale of two markets for the Cork-based maker of the popular Ballymaloe range of relishes and sauces. General manager Maxine Hyde is the third generation of her family to head up the business.

A wholesale arm, with sales last year of 2m, supplies relish and sauces to cafes, hotels and restaurants in Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands. It has seen sales slump this month by 90pc. Customers forced to close their own outlets simply aren't buying.

But Ballymaloe's retail products sold in supermarkets are selling at record levels, swept up in the general grocery uplift as consumers have stocked up.

Retail sales are up more than 30pc this month and could top last year's 4m in revenues.

"We don't expect retail sales to compensate for what we're losing on the food services side. Our relish goes into delis, restaurants, sandwich bars - all of them badly hit," Hyde says.

A decision to start making pasta sauces at its processing and packaging plant in Little Island, Co Cork, is looking particularly smart amid stockpiling of non-perishable foods.

Sales of the four sauce varieties have surged by more than 50pc this month. A fifth option - Hidden Veggie - has just been launched this week.

But relish still accounts for around 55pc of Ballymaloe's revenue, reflecting the star power of a product that traces its origin to Hyde's grandmother, Myrtle Allen, who created Ballymaloe Original Country Relish in her restaurant in 1964.

The second most popular product is Ballymaloe Irish Beetroot, with its Cork-grown beets.

"There's very little Irish competition and no international competition for Irish-made beetroot," Hyde says.

But the pasta sauces, produced with tomatoes imported from continental Europe, already account for 10pc of revenue. That figure is likely to rise.

"We can make pasta sauces very easily because we have the right cookers and packing lines," she says, adding that producing pasta sauce means Ballymaloe now occupies "the whole meal space, whereas traditionally we were more side of the plate, in condiments".

However, the business is heavily dependent on a European supply chain, using hauliers and the British land bridge.

All sugar, vinegar, glass containers and plastic packaging are imported from the UK or Germany. Even Irish onions are available only part of the year.

"We'd love to be able to buy these things in Ireland," says Hyde, whose firm reports no current difficulty sourcing foreign ingredients and packaging for its products.

She is concerned this may change.

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"The movement of essential goods could become more difficult. As companies get hit with coronavirus, there must be higher demand on retail packaging and glass as well," she says. "If we were trying to get an order from a glass company that has huge orders from other companies, we could be put at the end of the line."

For now, nearly half of Ballymaloe's 33-member staff work on the Little Island production line, where the sanitisation regime has been intensified.

The other half, like Hyde, can work from home.

Ballymaloe's debts are manageable, she says, and don't require any of the payment breaks being offered by banks to SMEs.

She is hopeful all staff can stay employed, though it may mean shifting roles between the production line or to retail distribution.

"We're not in financial difficulty, and as long as supply routes stay open, we won't be," she says.

But the firm is analysing risks among its own trading partners, including small distributors.

"We have written up a list of clients where we could be hit with bad debts. We are looking at what the cash flow impact could be. But we're really hoping that isn't going to play out."

Sudden business shutdowns have reduced Ballymaloe's food services exports to Germany and the Netherlands to virtually zero.

Ballymaloe continues to ship products via the port of Rotterdam to the United States, United Arab Emirates and Australia.

It has plans to start supplying 120 Coles Supermarkets in Australia in May. Americans, meanwhile, are proving particularly fond of the mint jelly.

Ballymaloe has just hired its first-ever exports manager, due to take up the post next month, and Hyde forecasts that the new recruit will be busy.

"We've had a lot of new customers buying Ballymaloe products in recent weeks. People want to buy Irish," she says.

"I really hope Irish people get out and enjoy restaurants and hotels when Covid-19 is contained and all this is behind us. No matter what happens, people have to eat."
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 01:09:26|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- China and France should continue carrying on their good tradition of supporting each other and jointly tackle challenges posed by the COVID-19 epidemic, the two countries' foreign ministers said Thursday.

In their phone conversation, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian briefed each other on the latest progress in the two countries' fight against the epidemic.

Both sides agreed that the two foreign ministries should strengthen coordination at the working level over the upcoming Group of 20 (G20) summit, push the international community to send a positive signal of solidarity and coordination, swiftly adopt multilateral action in fighting COVID-19, safeguard international public health security and preserve the health of mankind and world prosperity and stability.

The call was made ahead of the G20 extraordinary leaders' summit on COVID-19, which was held online later Thursday.
But that tone has changed. On Thursday, Japans health minister, Katsunobu Kato, warned of evidence that Japan was now at a high risk of rampant infection.

Cases have spiked in Tokyo, setting records for four days running, and more localities have told residents that they should avoid nonessential outings. On Tuesday, the Tokyo Olympics were delayed for a year.

But the public is still not taking officials warnings seriously. While schools have been closed for a month and large events canceled, life has otherwise returned to normal. People gather in parks, ride the subway and go out to eat. And testing is still limited, raising fears about the full scope of the viruss progression through the country.

The risk is that things may be brewing underneath the surface that you dont recognize until its also a little bit too late, one epidemiologist said.

Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

We also have a daily tracker that shows the viruss trajectory by country.
Lithuanias solar scene has achieved another milestone in solar energy generation by presenting a remote solar consumer platform to its residents.

The project is unique as it gives an opportunity to buy or rent a remote solar panel and do all that using one online platform. As the world needs faster and more efficient ways to generate renewable energy, online platforms like Solar Community could be a life-changing solution.

The online platform enables consumers to purchase a part of the solar energy generated in remote solar parks. New opportunities for residents of apartments appeared as the Lithuanian Ministry of Energy introduced a new law to install solar plants on October 1, 2019.

Residents now can produce and consume electricity for their own use in geographically different places. The buyer calculates how much energy a household uses and then accordingly buys a part of remotely generated power. Capacities range from 1 kW to 10 kW and feed the electricity produced into the grid to cover their household needs later.

Andrius Terskovas, Managing Partner and Chief Business Development Officer of Sun Investment Group, explains why they chose this concept and how it benefits consumers: The world is eager to contribute to clean energy generation and switch to solar energy. But eagerness is not enough - at this point, we have to act quickly and come up with more efficient solutions. The Lithuanian market was suitable to start our project. Recently, Lithuania - in pursuit of the EU energy plans - passed amendments stating that everyone has the right to generate and use renewable energy sources from remote solar power plants.

Terskovas adds that it does not only help Lithuania to move towards climate neutrality, but its also a practical way for citizens to save money, An average Lithuanian household needs a 2-3 kW power solar panel. So within a year of using a 2 kW solar panel, a household would approximately save 190 euros, around 930 trees, and reduce CO2 emission by 37 tonnes. Of course, the return depends on a panels size and whether you rent or buy it, but the results are evident.

Terskovas explains how platforms like Solar Community could speed up the conversion to renewables. Companies are often discouraged from building solar panels in their property, as its expensive to build, takes a long time to get permissions for building it, and there is a lack of solar energy auction quotas. Until now, in Lithuania, only a few companies and individual users had enough resources to build solar panels, but the new platform would open the door for people living in shared premises and for companies with fewer resources.

Solar Community is an example of how governments and organizations can include more individual and private consumers to contribute to clean energy transition. Businesses can also use the new remote model. With these changes, its expected that the popularity of solar energy will increase, encouraging other countries to follow Lithuanias example.

Household owners can also apply for the financial aid to buy a remote solar panel. The Lithuanian Energy Ministry has recently released a support scheme which allows consumers to apply for a one-time compensation of 323 euro per installed kW. This is expected to increase the current number of producing consumers of 3,400 by several times.

Although Lithuania is the first country in the world to launch an online platform to buy solar energy, similar efforts arent a new thing in the world. For instance, recently, Audi introduced its subscription-based platform where Audi vehicle users can purchase plans for solar energy. With similar projects in progress, we can expect to see more advanced solutions for developing solar energy production.

Modern consumers need require advanced solutions. For a long time, it was believed that solar energy is available only for companies and individuals who own private property or have a large rooftop to set the structure.

But now, with Lithuania taking a leap in remote solar energy production, the market should see more consumers contributing to renewable energy growth. -- Tradearabia News Service
(Photo : Pixabay) (Photo : Pixabay)

A next-generation army communications satellite will launch on Thursday, Mar. 26, on the first countrywide safety mission for the USA Space Force.

The 6th and final Advanced Extremely High-Frequency satellite (AEHF-6) is scheduled to raise off atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Thursday. You can watch the action at Space.Com courtesy of ULA, or directly at the corporation.

SpaceFlightNow said AEHF satellites circle Earth in geostationary orbit, approximately 22,200 miles (37,730 kilometers) above the planet.

"In the modern dynamic environment, national security is of maximum importance," Gary Wentz, ULA vice president of government and business programs, said in a statement. "We are proud to launch the first National Security Space task for the U.S. Space Force," he said. ULA said it is looking forward to handling over the final AEHF asset to assist our nation's countrywide protection and the warfighter community."





ALSO READ: NASA Administrator Backs Military Space Force But With One Important Clarification





What's so special about this project?

Representative of Aerospace Corporation and AEHF's prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, claimed the six-satellite gadget gives vastly advanced global, survivable, protected communications competencies for strategic command and tactical warfighters operating on ground, sea and air platforms.

"The jam-resistant gadget also serves international partners together with Canada, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom," he said.

The first five AEHF craft is already up, having released in August 2010, May 2012, September 2013, October 2018, and August 2019, all atop Atlas V rockets. The device has been operational since 2015, and the satellites have a 14-year layout lifetime.

AEHF-6 could be the primary National Security Space task for the U.S. Space Force, which became officially set up in December 2019.

The AEHF satellites are follow-ons to the Air Force's Milstar satellite network and are designed to operate at the least 14 years.

Each of the AEHF satellites, which can be spread around the world to allow global coverage, gives more capacity than the entire five-satellite Milstar constellation. The AEHF satellites are cross-related with one another, permitting the network to beam alerts around the sector without going through a ground station.

ALSO READ: U.S. Space Force Defends Logo After Star Trek Fans Compared it to Starfleet Command Logo; The Cast Reacted

Col. John Dukes Jr., senior materiel chief for the geosynchronous orbit division SMC's production corps, said the project will immediately operate as soon as it passes post-release tests.

The AEHF satellites offer connectivity at one of a kind specified fact rates between 5 bits per second to 8 megabits per second. What distinguishes the AEHF satellites is their capacity to resist jamming and preserve operating, even on the occasion of nuclear war.

Dukes said AEHF will allow the President of the United States, countrywide leaders, and four international allies to be able to talk in voice-recognizable communication. The governments of Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have joined the program.

Dukes claimed they have enough bandwidth to service all the terminals in our concept of operations. "By upgrading from the Milstar to the AEHF constellation, [we would be able to provide services] from now to 2030."

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
NEW YORK, March 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Marubeni Corporation ("Marubeni" or the "Company") (OTCMKTS: MARUY). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888-476-6529, ext. 7980.

The investigation concerns whether Marubeni and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

In November 2019, Marubeni reported a loss of 3.9 billion yen ($35.85 million) related to inappropriate recognition of loss from its U.S. agribusiness Gavilon's trade in Italy and Spain in the last business year. Then, on March 16, 2020, Reuters published an article entitled "Exclusive: Flying blind  Marubeni's Gavilon ignored Brazilian red flags." The Reuters article reported, among other issues, that "Brazilian risk controllers at Gavilon do Brasil raised red flags as early as June 2016 about lax accounting that ultimately let the company book inaccurate estimates for freight costs, boosting its profits and masking losses"; "an Ernst & Young audit flagged to Gavilon do Brasil managers that its processes left room for fraud"; and that "it was only in 2019 when Gavilon adopted a new accounting methodology that major discrepancies were revealed between actual shipping costs and the freight costs recorded in Gavilon's books, leading to an internal investigation."

On this news, Marubeni's share price fell $2.00, or 3.96%, to close at $40.56 on March 16, 2020.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com.

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

888-476-6529 ext. 9980

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP

Related Links

www.pomerantzlaw.com


Brazils state governors are defying President Jair Bolsonaro over his call to reopen schools and businesses, dismissing his argument that the cure of widespread shutdowns to contain the coronavirus is worse than the disease.

Mr Bolsonaro contends the clampdown already ordered by many governors will deeply wound the already beleaguered economy and spark social unrest.

In a nationally televised address on Tuesday night, he urged governors to limit isolation only to high-risk people and to lift the strict anti-virus measures they have imposed in their regions.

What needs to be done? Put the people to work. Preserve the elderly, preserve those who have health problems. But nothing more than that, said Mr Bolsonaro, who in the past has sparked anger by calling the virus a little flu.

Brazils President Jair Bolsonaro puts on a mask during a press conference on Wednesday (Andre Borges/AP)

Mr Bolsonaro told reporters in the capital, Brasilia, on Wednesday that he had listened to his US counterpart, Donald Trump, and found their perspectives to be similar.

The countrys governors protested that his instructions ran counter to health experts recommendations and endangered Latin Americas largest population.

They said they would continue with their strict measures. The rebellion even included traditional allies of Brazils far-right president.

Governor Carlos Moises of Santa Catarina state, which gave almost 80% of its votes to Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential election, complained he was blown away by the presidents instructions.

Mr Moises said he would insist that all residents stay home during the pandemic despite the presidents stand.

A volunteer gives away soap in an effort to avoid the spread of the coronavirus in one of Rios favelas, or slums, areas at great risk from the coronavirus (Leo Correa/AP)

In a videoconference earlier in the day between Mr Bolsonaro and governors from Brazils southeast region, Sao Paulo governor Joao Doria threatened to sue the federal government if it tried to interfere with his efforts to combat the virus, according to video of their private meeting reviewed by The Associated Press.

Story continues

We are here, the four governors of the southeast region, in respect for Brazil and Brazilians and in respect for dialogue and understanding, said Mr Doria, who supported Mr Bolsonaros 2018 presidential bid. But you are the president and you have to set the example. You have to be the representative to command, guide and lead this country, not divide it.

Mr Bolsonaro responded by accusing Doria of riding his coattails to the governorship, then turning his back.

If you dont get in the way, Brazil will take off and emerge from the crisis. Stop campaigning, the president said.

The governors werent the only defiant ones. Virus plans challenged by Mr Bolsonaro were upheld by the Supreme Court. The heads of both congressional houses criticised his televised speech. Companies donated supplies to state anti-virus efforts.

An aerial view of the almost empty Paulista Avenue, one of Sao Paulos most important financial centres, amid the countrys lockdown on Tuesday (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Mr Bolsonaro has found some support among his base  #BolsonaroIsRight trended atop Brazilian Twitter on Wednesday  though that backing has been countered by a week of nightly protests from many Brazilians respecting the self-isolation rules, who lean from their windows to bang pots and pans.

As of Wednesday, Brazil had about 2,400 confirmed cases and 57 deaths related to the outbreak. Experts say the figures could soar in April, potentially causing a collapse of the countrys health care system.

There is particular concern the virus potential damage in the ultra-dense, low-income neighborhoods known as favelas.

Bolsonaros administration has also faced criticism from economists, including Arminio Fraga, a former central bank governor, and Claudio Ferraz, a professor at Rio de Janeiros Pontifical Catholic University.

Brazil is seeing something unique, an insurrection of governors, Mr Ferraz wrote on Twitter.

This will become a new topic in political science: checks and balances by governors in a Federal System.
BELLWAY p.l.c. ('the Company')

NOTIFICATION OF TRANSACTIONS OF

PERSONS DISCHARGING MANAGERIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

26 MARCH 2020

The Company has been today informed that Jason Honeyman, Chief Executive has used 25% of his 2019 bonus (after income tax and national insurance) to purchase shares in the Company. The shares are held in the name of his wife, Joanne Honeyman. As set out in the 2019 Annual Report and Accounts, whilst not a requirement of the Remuneration Policy, Jason had informed the Remuneration Committee that he would invest 25% of his 2019 and 2020 bonuses (after income tax and national insurance) in Bellway shares which he will keep for a minimum of three years. This will help to build his shareholding ahead of a change in the policy that the Committee will consider proposing to the 2020 AGM.

The relevant notifications set out below are provided in accordance with the requirements of Article 19 of the EU Market Abuse Regulations.

BELLWAY p.l.c.

NOTIFICATION OF TRANSACTIONS OF

PERSONSDISCHARGING MANAGERIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

1 Details of the person discharging managerial responsibilities/person closely associated a) Name Joanne Honeyman as PCA of Jason Honeyman (PDMR 2 Reason for the notification a) Position/status PCA of Director (PDMR) b) Initial notification/Amendment Initial notification 3 Details of the issuer, emission allowance market participant, auction platform, auctioneer or auction monitor a) Name Bellway p.l.c. b) LEI 213800CY4L3HST4FGZ98 4 Details of the transaction(s): section to date; to be repeated for (i) each type of instrument; (ii) each type of transaction; (iii) each and (iv) each place where transactions have been conducted a) Description of the financial instrument, type of instrument



Identification code

12.5p ordinary shares



GB0000904986 b) Nature of the transaction

Purchase of Ordinary shares in the Company c) Price(s) and volume(s) Price(s) Volume(s)

19.95 2,687 d) Aggregated information



Aggregated volume

Price

e) Date of the transaction 26 March 2020 f) Place of the transaction London Stock Exchange (XLON)

Name of contact and telephone number for queries:

Simon Scougall

Group General Counsel & Company Secretary

Bellway p.l.c.

Tel: 0191 217 0717
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 01:04:22|Editor: yan

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NAIROBI, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Governments and humanitarian agencies should prioritize investments in social safety nets for the elderly population, whose vulnerability to the COVID-19 pandemic is higher compared to other population groups, a charity said on Thursday.

Justine Derbyshire, chief executive of global charity HelpAge International, said that interventions aimed at containing the virulent disease should pay special attention to senior citizens.

"It is absolutely vital that we have clear measures to support older people, such as ensuring that they can access important health information aimed at those who may be illiterate or have no mobile phones or computers," Derbyshire said in a statement issued in Nairobi.

He said that the aging population in low to middle-income countries grappling with social, political and economic fragility could suffer immensely in the event of large scale COVID-19 infections.

He urged governments and multilateral institutions to roll out targeted interventions aimed at minimizing negative impact of COVID-19 pandemic to senior citizens living in conflict zones.

"We must ensure that they have access to clean water, sanitation and food supplies when they may not be able to reach central aid points," said Derbyshire.

He said that additional resources should be channeled toward health programs tailor-made for the older generation, whose vulnerability to COVID-19 has been worsened by their weak immunity and preexisting medical conditions that include diabetes, cancers and cardiovascular ailments.

On Thursday, the Africa CDC has disclosed that the death toll from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the African continent has reached 73 as the number of confirmed positives cases surpassed 2,819 as of Thursday.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on March 24th that Christian missionaries working in North Korea are asking for help, saying that North Koreans are in great trouble due to the spread of the coronavirus infection.

According to the report, Open Doors recently sent an e-mail asking for help, saying, "In the midst of a deadly epidemic in history, we are putting North Koreans in a more vulnerable situation."

Open Doors, which has delivered daily necessities to North Koreans as well as operating underground churches in the North, has recently informed local sources that the international epidemic has made it imperative for Christian medicine, food, and basic relief supplies in the North, RFA said.

According to OpenDoor, hospitals, doctors and medicine in North Korea are very scarce. Patients are buying generic drugs from unqualified doctors on the black market, or most families are suffering from food shortages. In this situation, however, residents must first provide food to the military, RFA reported.

The Rev. Kim Sung-Eun of the Caleb Mission Church, who has been a missionary to North Korea, quoted testimony from North Korean defectors' families in the North as saying, "we have little income from North Koreans due to worsening economic conditions in the North," adding, "It is hard to find commercial transactions taking place after North Koreans gather at the marketplaces for a living."

Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), said, "because of COVID-19, the worsening of North Korean people's lives has already been predicted. However, it is hard to expect reasonable assistance unless the North Korean regime transparently reveals related issues, such as the food situation lacking," RFA reported.
There were no discussions on the orgin of COVID-19 during the G20 leaders' virtual summit which was chaired by Saudi Arabia's King Salman on Thursday.

But the leaders of G20 nations held discussions on how to deal with the current crisis.

"The spirit was collaborative and discussions were held on how to deal with the current crisis. There were no efforts to ascribe blame to anyone for the outbreak of the virus," informed sources told ANI.

The deadly virus, an issue, that had led to an international debate after US President Donald Trump described Covid-19 pandemic as the 'Chinese Virus'.

US and Chinese officials have sparred with each other over the origin of the coronavirus which has claimed more than 20,000 lives worldwide.

Earlier this month, during a telephonic conversation with Yang Jiechi, Director of the Office of Foreign Affairs of the Communist Party of China, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo "stressed that this is not the time to spread disinformation and outlandish rumours, but rather a time for all nations to come together to fight this common threat."

"Secretary Pompeo conveyed strong U.S. objections to PRC efforts to shift blame for COVID-19 to the United States. The Secretary stressed that this is not the time to spread disinformation and outlandish rumours, but rather a time for all nations to come together to fight this common threat," a US State Department spokespersons had said in a statement dated March 16.

The US President has more than once called it - Chinese virus - much to the ire of China.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Neil Michael, Aoife Moore, and Conall O Fatharta

Thousands of Irish people are battling to get home amidst the biggest shutdown in global aviation since the dawn of commercial flight due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It comes as the death of two more people from coronavirus in Ireland were confirmed last night.

The deaths have been identified as a man and woman in the east of the country. It is understood the woman had an underlying health condition.

There have now been nine deaths related to Covid-19, with 235 newly confirmed cases yesterday, bringing the total to 1,564.

Tanaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney said his department was working on solutions with airlines and governments in the impacted areas to get around 2,000 Irish people home from some 86 countries.

However, he said the matter was complex, challenging, and takes time but said that it was being worked on around the clock.

He said this is because the world is witnessing what the Department of Foreign Affairs has described as the biggest shutdown in global aviation since the dawn of commercial flight.

Officials say they are doing all they can to get Irish people home, but they admit the situation is worse than anything they have ever experienced.

We have never seen anything like it before, they said.

It eclipses the shutdowns following the September 11 attacks and the volcanic ash crisis. The situation is fast-moving and volatile.

What we have seen in recent days is not only countries, but entire regions, close off airspace and ground airlines at short notice.

This has led to people who had confirmed and booked flights having them cancelled suddenly or being refused at airports.

Among those trying to get home are around 130 trapped in Peru, which is under military lockdown, with people facing arrest and detention if seen out and about.

Last night reports emerged that two tourists had tested positive for corona-virus in a hostel in Cusco in Peru  a city where around 35 Irish citizens are currently trapped.

The infected tourists are understood to be Finnish and Dutch. It is unclear if any Irish people are staying in the hostel.

However, all of its occupants may now be quarantined for up to three months and be unable to fly home.

There are also hundreds of Irish people trying to get home from Australia, including more than 65 medics who want to return home to help with the battle to fight Covid-19 here.

There are also over 100 Irish tourists currently in New Zealand.

About 250 Irish citizens are due to arrive in Dublin from Rome on a special Alitalia flight into the capital, one of two being sent to help take out 500 Italians in Ireland who want to go home.

Last night, the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) also moved to assure its members that their pension and death-in-service entitlements will not be impacted if a member dies as a result of contracting Covid-19.

GPs had raised concerns after receiving correspondence from the General Medical Services Superannuation Plan.

Irelands numbers of cases and deaths continue to be less than previously predicted by medical experts.

However, chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan said it is too early to say why that is.

Over a week or so we predicted 350 or so cases by day, we havent seen that.

Its too early for us to conclude if this is down to social distancing, but from contact tracing it shows people are taking note of the advice.

Dublin has the highest number of cases at 559, followed by Cork at 133.

The Department of Health says that contact tracing for patients is now down to about five contacts per case, which indicates that social distancing is working.

The news of the deaths comes as the Department of Health changed the criteria on who will be tested.

Patients must now show two symptoms, be from vulnerable groups, or a healthcare worker.

Dr Holohan said the fact that only 6% of tests were returning as positive sparked the change in the criteria.

Changing case definition is a standard practice in managing pandemics, he said.

Ultimately, we want our 6% detected rate to increase, we want to find as many people as possible with Covid-19, isolate them, and contain the spread.

President Michael D Higgins has said that the coronavirus crisis will change Ireland as a nation and may result in a fairer society that places people at the heart of the economy.

He said that, despite this being an awful time for the country, that great things are happening and at the end we could come out a better people.

[snippet1]987600[/snippet1]
Pennsylvania State Police are asking for the publics help to find the person who shot and killed two cows in Somerset County last month.

The Jenner Township farm owner told authorities he woke up the morning of Feb. 8 to discover two of his Hereford cows were shot dead with a rifle while grazing along the fence line of their Mastillo Road property.

The cattle were worth a combined $3,800, and one was pregnant when she died, according to WJAC-TV in Johnstown.

The incident occurred sometime between 6 p.m. on Feb. 7 and 6:30 the next morning, the owner said.

Anyone with information related to the shooting can call the state polices Somerset barracks at 814-445-4104, the Pennsylvania Crime Stoppers at 1-800-4PA-TIPS (8477) or submit a tip online.
Lisa and Michael 'Wippa' Wipfli have just welcomed their third child together, daughter Francesca Vera Alice.

And on Thursday, Lisa doted on their newborn in hospital.

Lisa shared a sweet video of Francesca during a feed and other candid photographs from the delivery room, after a nurse tried to stop Wippa from entering the birthing suite due to the coronavirus pandemic.

'Baby bubble bliss': Lisa Wipfli doted on newborn daughter Francesca on Thursday in hospital and shared candid photos from the delivery room

In the clip, Lisa enjoyed a face mask and relaxed in a pair of black pyjamas as she held her tiny tot, who was wrapped up in a white blanket.

'Baby bubble bliss and making the hospital feel like a day spa with a Go-To skincare mask,' Lisa wrote on her Instagram story, with her friend Zoe Foster-Blake being the founder of the brand.

The brunette also shared pictures from the delivery room, shortly before she gave birth.

Multitasking mama! In the clip, Lisa enjoyed a face mask and relaxed in a pair of black pyjamas as she held her tiny tot, who was wrapped up in a white blanket

Family album: The brunette also shared pictures from the delivery room, shortly before she gave birth. She shared a picture of Wippa, 40, with a camera around his neck and in scrubs

She shared a picture of Wippa, 40, with a camera around his neck and in scrubs, writing: 'This is the face of a focused dad who means business.'

Lisa also shared a photo of herself being wheeled into the delivery room, presumably for a c-section.

'This is the face of a very excited mum about to meet her baby girl,' Lisa wrote on her Instagram story.

Another photo showed Lisa and Wippa in their hospital scrubs.

'Scrub selfie,' the post was captioned.

'The face of a very excited mum!' Lisa also shared a photo of herself being wheeled into the delivery room, presumably for a c-section

'Scrub selfie': Another photo showed Lisa and Wippa in their hospital scrubs

The pair announced the birth of their daughter on Wednesday, sharing an adorable snap of the newborn sleeping.

'Welcome into this crazy world Francesca Vera Alice Wipfli. You complete our family and in the one day you've been on this planet you've brought more love and joy to our hearts than I thought possible,' Lisa wrote online.

Wippa revealed on Wednesday's Fitzy and Wippa that a nurse was hesitant to let him into the birthing suite with his wife after having contact with TV host, Richard Wilkins, who has tested positive for COVID-19.

'You complete our family': The pair announced the birth of their daughter on Wednesday, sharing an adorable snap of the newborn sleeping

'We're about to wheel her into the surgery where all the doctors are waiting, and then this Irish nurse says, 'Stop everything! There's a note here (that says) I've got to ask this question: You've been in touch with Richard Wilkins. Who is Richard Wilkins and why is he important?'' he recalled.

Luckily for Wippa, he tested negative for COVID-19 last week after the entire Nova team underwent testing on March 15 as a precaution.

Richard, a Weekend Today star, had appeared on their show as a guest on Thursday, March 12 and soon after tested positive for COVID-19.

Wippa and Lisa also share two sons together, Theodore, four, and Jack, three.

As of Thursday afternoon, there are 2,725 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 12 deaths.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) points to a reporter on Capital Hill, December 3, 2019, in Washington, DC.

Alex Brandon/AP Photo

The United States Senate and White House agreed Wednesday on a $2 trillion stimulus bill to help bolster American workers and the economy riven by the coronavirus pandemic.

It's the largest emergency stimulus package in modern American history.

American individuals making less than $75,000 would be given a one-time payment of $1,200, and billions more would be given to small businesses, local and state governments, and hospitals.

But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Congress will "probably" need to provide more aid to Americans and the economy as the crisis continues.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

After a strained week of negotiations, the Senate agreed on a $2 trillion stimulus bill to help American workers and the economy. The bipartisan effort, which has White House approval, is the largest of its kind in modern American history.

But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told CNN Wednesday that Congress should be ready to provide more aid to people and the economy.

"We should be willing, able to come back in a bipartisan way and do more if we need. I believe we'll probably have to do that one way or another," the Democrat from New York said. "We don't know how long it's going to last, who's affected. We still don't exactly know."

If the bill passes both houses of Congress and is approved by President Donald Trump, it would give direct payments to American workers, which could begin in April. Americans making less than $75,000 per year would receive a one-off payment of $1,200, with less money going to those who earn $75,000 or more. People making at least $99,000, and families who earn a combined $198,000 or more, would not receive a check. All parents would be paid an additional $500 per child, according to the proposed text.

Unemployment insurance will also be temporarily expanded, increasing such payments by $600 a week for the next four months and covering gig-economy workers, freelancers, and furloughed employees.

Story continues

The bill allocates a total of $250 billion to individuals and families. Some $300 billion will go to small businesses, $150 billion for local and state governments, and hospitals will get $130 billion.

Congress may bolster the stimulus with more funds

The $1,200 payment is just above the national median rent for a one-bedroom apartment, according to an analysis of rent prices in 2018 from the apartment search company Abodo.

Indeed, Schumer told CNN the bill was passed quickly and doesn't contain everything Americans need.

"Does it have everything we need? No. Are some things in there that I would have rather not had? No, of course," he said Wednesday. "But this is the art of coming together. America needed huge help quickly. And I think we've risen to that occasion."

Jason Furman, the former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, told BBC Newshour Wednesday morning that Congress will likely continue writing legislation and expand the stimulus "to combat the spread of coronavirus."

"I would have preferred that that was built into the legislation upfront," Furman told BBC Newshour on Wednesday morning. "That it said things like, 'If there's still a problem, more checks would go out.'"

The package comes just weeks after the Federal Reserve put $1.5 trillion of liquidity into the markets to avoid economic collapse. Wednesday's package is the first that gives aid to individuals and families, many of whom are out of work due to social distancing and self-isolation measures.

"This is a war-time level of investment into our nation," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said. "The Senate's going to make sure they have the ammunition they need."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Store offers HQ as hospital

Baukjen

There have always been two good reasons to shop at London womenswear label, Baukjen: their smart workwear pieces and their stylish weekend casuals.

Now there are two more. First they are offering 40 per cent off to all NHS workers, healthcare professionals, social workers, teachers, police, transport workers and therapists.

Second, the brand has offered up its London headquarters  a 6,000ft building that usually holds 50 staff  as extra space to the local GP surgery and hospital in case of emergency.

Pictured: Dress 139 baukjen.com. The brand has offered up its London headquarters  a 6,000ft building that usually holds 50 staff  as extra space to the local GP surgery and hospital in case of emergency

John Lewis Easter treats for NHS staff

JOHN LEWIS & PARTNERS

John Lewis may have closed all 50 of its stores, but you can still shop online and take advantage of an extended returns period, too.

The company has also donated 75,000 each to Age UK, FareShare, the Trussell Trust, Grocery Aid and RetailTrust, and set up a 1 million Community Support Fund.

Theres also a fund for employees  many of whom have joined colleagues at the brands sister store Waitrose.

Jacket, 90.30, johnlewis.com (pictured). John Lewis has donated pillows, phone chargers, eye masks and hand cream to hospitals

NHS workers are given priority at Waitrose, and John Lewis has donated pillows, phone chargers, eye masks and hand cream to hospitals to make staff breaks more comfortable, plus delivered 50,000 Easter treats to NHS staff.

From fast fashion to protective wear

H&M

The High-Street favourite has rearranged its production lines to produce desperately needed personal protective equipment for hospitals and healthcare workers.

The company is turning its fast fashion status to all our advantage, shifting supply chains around the world so delivery can start as soon as possible.

And if youre buying something from the core range theyll still be stocking on the website? H&M has also extended its returns policy from 28 days to 100 days.

Sunglasses 6.99 hm.com. The High-Street favourite has rearranged its production lines to produce desperately needed personal protective equipment for hospitals and healthcare workers

Pictured: Top 17.99 and skirt 24.99 from hm.com. The company is turning its fast fashion status to all our advantage, shifting supply chains around the world so delivery can start as soon as possible

Win! A designer handbag

LULU GUINNESS

The cool and quirky British handbag brand is encouraging acts of kindness by asking followers on Instagram to share the good deeds being carried out in their local communities.

Bag, 295, luluguinness.com. The cool and quirky British handbag brand is encouraging acts of kindness by asking followers on Instagram to share the good deeds being carried out in their local communities

Best two nominees each week get to select a bag of their choice from the range. Hows that for a much-needed mood-lifter?

Spanish favourite shifts 2 million masks

MANGO

Using its super efficient logistics system, Mango is distributing two million face masks to hospitals in its home country Spain.

Like hospitals in the UK, many are experiencing shortages of essential medical supplies. Meanwhile, the store has extended its returns period for UK shoppers to 60 days, plus theres now free delivery on orders over 30.

Blazer, 59.99 mango.com. Mango is distributing two million face masks to hospitals in its home country Spain

The ultimate feelgood shirt

SEZANE

Fashion industry favourite Sezane has created the Pierro shirt (80) in response to the crisis.

A gorgeous floral print design, all proceeds will be donated to the emergency aid fund set up for the foundation of French hospitals.

A further 10 per cent of the brands global sales are also going to the emergency aid fund.

Fashion industry favourite Sezane has created the Pierro shirt, 80, (pictured) in response to the crisis from sezane.com

Samcams help for the aged

CEFINN

Samantha Camerons designer brand Cefinn will be donating 5 to Age UK and the Trussell Trust from all orders received online for the next four weeks.

The charities support those who are particularly vulnerable during the Covid-19 outbreak  older people and those living in poverty who are reliant on food banks.

Samantha Camerons (pictured) designer brand Cefinn will be donating 5 to Age UK and the Trussell Trust from all orders received online for the next four weeks. Dress, 370, cefinn.com

Shoe savings for life-savers

Kurt Geiger

The accessories brand has just announced NHS workers will receive a 50 per cent discount for a year in all Kurt Geiger stores (albeit once they reopen).

While some companies have been slated for firing staff without warning, KGs CEO Neil Clifford has voluntarily suspended his own salary to ensure employees still get paid.

A volunteering scheme has been created with Age UK so shop staff can volunteer the time they would have spent working to support their local communities.

Oh, and 55 100 gift cards have been donated to each city hospital across the UK and Ireland to key workers in the critical care departments.

Kurt Geiger has just announced NHS workers will receive a 50 per cent discount for a year in all Kurt Geiger stores. Pictured: Bright blue, 79.20, kurtgeiger.com

Liz Hurley for Kurt Geiger. Bags: 99 (pictured). Gift cards have been donated to each city hospital across the UK and Ireland to key workers in the critical care departments

A volunteering scheme has been created with Age UK so shop staff can volunteer the time they would have spent working to support their local communities. Pictured: Tan, 95.20, kurtgeiger.com
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 09:30:31|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Beijing, capital of China, Sept. 6, 2019. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)

China is willing to share prevention, control and treatment experience with Germany, strengthen cooperation in vaccine and drug research and development, and contribute to the health and wellbeing of both peoples and global public health security, said Xi in a telephone conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.



BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday that China is ready to work with all other parties to step up coordination against COVID-19 and shore up confidence in the international community.

Xi made the remarks during a telephone conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of an extraordinary virtual summit of the Group of 20 (G20) leaders on a coordinated response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Chinese president noted that Merkel has expressed to the Chinese side sympathies and support, and the German government and various sectors in the country have extended their helping hand in the early days of the outbreak in China, saying that the Chinese people will remember that in their hearts.

Germany is now facing a serious challenge from the epidemic, and the Chinese people feel the same way, said Xi, adding that China firmly supports Germany in its fight against the epidemic and is willing to continue to provide assistance within its capacity.

He also said that the Chinese and German experts have already had video exchanges, and German experts have also travelled to China with the World Health Organization expert team, adding that China is willing to share prevention, control and treatment experience with Germany, strengthen cooperation in vaccine and drug research and development, and contribute to the health and wellbeing of both peoples and global public health security.

"May you lead the German people to overcome the epidemic as soon as possible," Xi said.

A man wearing a face mask and gloves leaves a supermarket in Frankfurt, Germany, March 25, 2020. (Xinhua/Lu Yang)

Viruses know no borders and are a common challenge faced by humanity, Xi said, adding that no country can stay out of or be immune from the epidemic.

In the battle against the outbreak, China and Germany, as well as China and the European Union (EU) have demonstrated the strength of solidarity and cooperation, and displayed positive energy, Xi said.

Noting that the extraordinary G20 summit is about to be held, Xi said that the Chinese side is ready to work with all sides, including Germany, to step up coordination and speak with one voice to advocate the spirit of sharing the same boat and jointly fight the COVID-19 epidemic, so as to shore up confidence in the international community.

He also proposed that all sides should give consideration to both the present and the long term, coordinate domestic effect and global impact, strengthen macroeconomic policy coordination, stabilize markets, ensure growth, promote employment and people's livelihood, and at the same time push for market opening to ensure openness, stability and safety of the global supply chains.

A volunteer stands next to packages containing protective suits in Heinsberg, Germany, on March 6, 2020. A group of overseas Chinese living in Frankfurt, Germany have sent some 900 protective suits, packed in 25 boxes, to Heinsberg, a German region heavily hit by COVID-19. (Photo by Liu Yang/Xinhua)

Xi stressed that the two sides should continue to conduct key political agenda planning, further advance communication and collaboration in various fields, guarantee the stability of China-Germany, China-EU production chains and supply chains, and explore the potential for cooperation in emerging industries, so as to mitigate shocks caused by COVID-19.

For her part, Merkel said as Europe is facing a grim epidemic situation, Germany has been taking decisive measures to contain the outbreak, adding that the German side is grateful for the timely and precious help China has offered, and hopes to cooperate with China in the research and development of vaccines and medicines, so as to set an example of fighting against COVID-19 with solidarity.

The German side advocates that the international community should respect facts, uphold an objective and fair stance, and overcome the outbreak through cooperation, she said.

Merkel called on the G20 members to strengthen coordination and cooperation, support each other, and play a leading role in overcoming the current crisis and stabilizing the global economy.

The German side looks forward to further enhancing Germany-China, EU-China exchanges and cooperation after the pandemic, she said. 
Photo credit: Esquire

From Esquire

Street medicine is what it sounds like: the practice of providing health care to the unsheltered homelesspeople who live in the streets, in abandoned buildings, or in their cars. There are more than 44,000 unsheltered homeless people in Los Angeles alone, the most in any American city.

Its not even close, in fact44,000 is more than the homeless populations of the 29 next most populous cities combined.

The 44,000 tend to live in close proximity to one another.

They tend to have higher percentages of people who are immunocompromised.

And they tend to be less aware of breaking news.

They dont generally get treated for contagious diseases.

They dont generally have the means to maintain good health.

The 44,000 dont generally have doctors.





The communities of unsheltered homeless are like kindling waiting for a spark, says Brett Feldman, a physician assistant and the street medicine director for the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.

On March 20 the Institute of Street Medicine, a governing body, released a guideStreet Medicine Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic, available for freeproviding practical suggestions for street medicine teams. In 2005, fewer than a dozen street medicine programs existed in the world. Today there are more than 100, and the Institute provides consistent support, training, and guidelines to local affiliates.

Photo credit: Chris Shinn

Feldman, 38, aims to give the homeless what a doctor would. He travels the city trying to change statisticsthe average life expectancy for the unsheltered homeless is between just 42 and 52, with a mortality rate thats 10 times greater than the average person. Today, that means taking temperatures and checking for coronavirus symptoms.



He started his first street medicine program in Pennsylvania in 2007, with the help of the Institute. Hes been at Keck since 2018, where he leads teams of healthcare and social workers into homeless camps across Los Angeles County, offering full-service primary careeverything from dispensing medications and checking blood pressure to drawing labs and providing point-of-care ultrasounds. He also networks within the hospital system to provide consult services for homeless patients admitted to AC + USC Medical Center.

Story continues

With COVID-19 threatening to infiltrate outdoor communities, Feldman says hes relying on the same tools he always has: compassion and relationship-building. He focuses on one patient at a time.

Photo credit: Chris Shinn

Street medicine, he says, is a unique form of medicine in that it compels healthcare workers and social workers togo to the people who need themto embed with the ones who most need their help. Feldman thinks of it as medicine as an instrument of peace, dependent on an abilityhis abilityto share in the suffering of the most vulnerable.

We asked him how its going out there.

Photo credit: Chris Shinn

The virus moves easily. People are sleeping outdoors, in close proximity. Whats the plan?

There are 15,000 shelter beds, all of which, before this happened, were full. Theres Skid Row, which is a very, very crowded area. There are about 15,000 people on Skid Row if you include everybody on the streets, in the shelters, and in the housing within those few blocks. About 2,500 of those are people sleeping outdoors.

And those people will move in and out of shelters and soup kitchens and different places to eat throughout the day and mingle with different people on the street.

That area is particularly scary because if somebody gets infected, they may have touched thousands of people before they're ever discovered. And its scary because we know that people experiencing homelessness are less likely to come through traditional healthcarewhich is part of the reason we have to do street medicine in the first place. It means we probably won't find out that they were infected until somebody gets really, really sick and comes into the hospital.

Photo credit: Chris Shinn

And by that time, it will have been weeks that this would have been in this community just ravaging through it.

Now, outside of Skid Row, there are very few shelters, very few soup kitchens, and the shelters that do exist are much smaller. There are many more unsheltered that live in these tiny, 10-people-or-less communities that are actually almost protected in a way because of their social isolation at baseline.

What is mission critical for you right now?

Yesterday, for example, we came across a patient who we had seen in the hospital for an abdominal issue, nothing to do with COVID-19. We got to his camp. Its under a bridge, where there are about 15 people total in the camp, and he shares a tent with his daughter, whos about 26 years old. He tells me that his daughter has fever, shortness of breath, and coughwhich is suspicious right now for COVID. So we want to see her, but shes out collecting bottles and cans to get money for food. Now he shares a tent with her, so he may not be symptomatic for two weeks. And all the tents are lined up, crowded together under this bridge.

So what do we do? She should be isolated and away, but instead shes in the community running around collecting recyclable cans. So we left a mask for him and for her. We gave him a new tent to give to her and suggested that she isolate six feet away from the tent that they previously both shared. And then we talked to the rest of the encampment, asking them to spread their tents out, and we tried to educate them on social distancing and protocols and left them hand sanitizer and that kind of stuff. That was the best we could do.

We didnt see her, but now we know about her, so the team is going back today to see if we can find her.

Photo credit: Chris Shinn

Have any of L.A.s homeless tested positive?

The problem is that we don't have testing. So everybody's short on testing. In one of the hospitals where I provide street medicine consultation, I just found out that they have 500 pending tests waiting to be run. But they don't have enough people to run the test.

Do street medicine teams have enough safety equipment?

Were okay with that right now, but I don't know how long our stock is going to last. I think we probably have another two or three weeks. And I don't know when its going to be that we could get more new supplies. But I mean the whole country is dealing with the same issue.

Is the homeless population taking this seriously?

When you talk to the people living on the street, its fascinating. I dont know exactly what to make of it, but theyre not concerned. Part of it is, I think educationthat we need to try and get them appropriately concerned. But a big piece of it is that they have threats to their safety and health every daythreats that we dont experience and cant imagine. So, to them, this is just the next threat. And it really highlights their resilience and ability to withstand the pressures that we cant.

The only difference this time, of course, is that its a threat to all of us. So they have to be appropriately concerned, and thats part of our job.

Photo credit: Chris Shinn

How are you and your healthcare colleagues feeling?

I think a lot of people are really scared. When all of society is being told to stay at home, don't come to workthe restaurants are closed, everythings closedand we are told to go to work, it scares a lot of people. When I was first applying for this job, Laura Mesqueda, the dean of the Keck School of Medicine, said, Brett, I need to know if youre the kind of person who runs into a burning building, or away from it.

And now this is the burning building.

When we signed up to be healthcare workers, we kind of said, Well, if a crisis hits, we're running in. But then when the time comes, people have different reactions to it. In street medicine, weve been running in to this building for years. And being with them on the streets now is just the next threat to them, and we need to stand in solidarity with them.

This is what we've been preparing for.

Youve spoken of radical humility, and the role humility plays in fostering solidarity. Youve talked about the idea of sharing suffering with those in your carebut now theres a possibility of literally sharing the virus. You are at risk, doing the work you do. Are you seeing solidarity out there?

Yesterday, Dr. Jim Withers in Pittsburgh sent me a picture of his staff, wearing personal protective equipment, testing somebody for COVID-19 in Pittsburgh. Shortly before that, I got an email from Dr. Henrik Thiesen, from Copenhagen, Denmark, who sent us a picture of his preparations for COVID-19 and how their shelter, which is usually stocked full, now looks emptythere are six feet between each cot, so now the shelter can only hold a quarter of what it used to hold. So here I am, in L.A. getting emails from all over the world, from street medicine providers, preparing for the same thing, at the same time.

What does this mean for the homeless long-term for people experiencing homelessness ?

In L.A., they have frozen evictions during this time, so nobody can be evicted from their apartment. But there are also many, many people that arent working. A lot of people work paycheck-to-paycheck, and theyre hourly, and theyre not getting their hours in. So even though they cant get evicted, theyre getting further and further in the hole. If this lasts four months and their rent is $2,000 a month, now theyre eight or 10 grand in the holeand theyre never going to get that.

For the longest time, L.A. has also had rent controls, which means that if youre in an apartment, your rent can only be raised by a certain percentage pointwhich means that the landlord has vested interest in evicting you. If he evicts you, he can set the price at market. So he can charge an extra thousand dollars a month or whatever to the next tenant. So again, if this lasts four or five months, now youre $8,000 to $10,000 in the hole. You can't pay it back, and the landlord is incentivized to evict youand we're going to get a flood of people on the streets.

Thats what Im really bracing for.

Editors note: You can support the Street Medicine program at Keck School of Medicine at USC by donating masks, hand sanitizer, medical gowns, or money to https://sites.usc.edu/streetmedicine/donate/.

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A 53-year-old woman tested positive for novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19) on Thursday, taking the total number of patients in the district to three and state to 18.

The woman had returned from Dubai on March 23 and approached Panipats civil hospital on March 25.

District nodal officer for health Pradeep Ahlawat said, The womans samples were sent to Government Medical College in Khanpur Kalan. Her diagnosis was confirmed on Thursday.

Her husband and son, who had also been to Dubai, have been quarantined. Their samples will also be sent for examination.

Gurugram so far leads Haryana cities with 10 cases, Panipat follows with three, Faridabad two; and Palwal, Panchkula and Sonepat with one case each.

Two others from the state who have been diagnosed with Covid-19 are in Delhi.

According to a health department bulletin, 163 people are hospitalised at present; and of the 526 samples tested, 388 are negative. The results of 122 others are awaited.

Of the 10,899 people under observation, 10,803 had returned from international trips and 96 had come in contact with Covid-19 cases. Among them, 645 people have completed the surveillance period of 28 days, hence, the total number of people under surveillance is now 10,254 in the state.
Student nurses will be paid for their work throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Health Minister Simon Harris has announced.

The move comes after the health sector and opposition parties pleaded for the students to be paid as hundreds are to start hospital placements as the country braces itself for a peak in Covid-19 cases.

In a statement this evening, Minister Harris announced that both student nurses and midwives would be offered a Healthcare Assistant (HCA) contract and be paid for their work.

This will allow students to complete their placement in a HCA role and continue to complete the course.

Student nurses are to apply online through HSE.ie/oncall.

Minister Harris said: "This is an offer and not an obligation. But I know so many of our student nurses want to play their role as we navigate our way through these difficult times.

"Our healthcare professionals have shown immense leadership and I will do everything I can to support them."

HCAs are paid 28,000 a year.

There are currently 4,000 student nurses in Ireland.

One student nurse told the Irish Examiner this week that nursing students were already facing a backlash over their work, with some asked to leave rented accommodation over fears that they would spread Covid-19.

Everyone knows health itself is a hazardous occupation, but its especially hazardous at the minute," the student nurse, who asked not to be named, said.

"To expect students to enter that area without pay, its unrealistic and unfair."

This evening, Minister Harris thanked student nurses for their "brilliant work" and encouraged them to help throughout the crisis.

"We need all hands on deck through this challenging period," Minister Harris said.

I want to thank our student nurses and midwives for the brilliant work they are doing in this difficult time.

Earlier - Coronavirus: Student nurses to get paid for duration of crisis

Simon Harris has announced that student nurses will be paid for the duration of the Covid-19 crisis.

The Health Minister has confirmed that all 4,000 student nurses and midwives will be offered a contract as a Healthcare Assistant and will be paid accordingly.

Mr Harris paid tribute the "brilliant work they are doing in this difficult time," adding, "we need all hands on deck".

This will allow students to complete their placement in a HCA role and continue to complete their course.

A Healthcare Assistant earns 28,000 a year.

Earlier in the week, Labour leadership candidate Alan Kelly said they deserved to be paid as they were "on the frontline".

Student nurses like many healthcare professionals are putting themselves out on the frontline working to protect us from the spread of Covid-19, but unlike many of their colleagues in our hospitals they are not being paid," he said.

In a live televised address to the nation on St Patricks Day, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar paid tribute to those workers saying he was proud of the members of his family who work in the sector.

Not all superheroes wear capes - some wear scrubs and gowns, he said.

- Additional reporting Joel Slattery

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A Belfast college is helping to train students in Croatia within the construction sector through after offering up access to its online portal as nations make the switch to remote learning.

Belfast Metropolitan Colleges BIMcert digital construction learning platform is now being used by a Croatian vocational school for its online training, as schools in country are having to shut to help curb the spread of coronavirus.

The Croatian Agency for Vocational Education and Training appealed for help in securing additional specific online training.

The pan-European action to help offer up the schemes is being taken by the Belfast Met-led project, along with the full support of the BIMcert programme manager, Mr Paul Mc Cormack.

We want our training offering to benefit the European construction industry but we are also conscious of delivering real societal benefit to countries at this time of need.

Due to the ongoing global crisis we are all dealing with currently we are all now looking at the way we live and indeed the way we work.

The importance of having online blended learning available has never been so important. Digitalisation is a game changing strategy that can empower us all.

Facilitating BIM upskilling can be recognised as an instrument contributing to the European Green Deal by ensuring that the construction work life cycle and costing analysis have a sustainable growth agenda for the future, along with digital technologies.
A coalition of abortion rights advocates announced Wednesday it is suing Texas over its temporary ban on abortions during the coronavirus pandemic.

The lawsuit comes as state officials force abortion providers to stop nearly all abortions through much of April, saying the move will free up needed hospital space and medical supplies. Abortion advocates have called the move a political ploy.

It is shameful that our politicians use emergency actions during a global pandemic to push through their anti-abortion agenda, said Amy Hagstrom Miller, who heads Whole Womans Health, one of the plaintiffs in the case, in a call with reporters. We cannot sit idly by while the state is forcing Texans to be pregnant against their will.

The new fight began over the weekend, when Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued an order postponing non-essential surgeries across the state. On Monday, Attorney General Ken Paxton clarified that the order applied to all abortions except those in which a womans life is endangered.

For subscribers: Harris County testing sites in danger of closing due to low number of coronavirus tests

Similar bans have been put in place in other Republican-led states, Ohio and Louisiana. Other states, including Washington, Massachusetts and Illinois, have declared abortions essential services.

Abortion providers across the state said they have turned away hundreds of patients since the ban took effect, some of them sobbing and begging for help. Some have closed outright; others, including Planned Parenthood clinics, are still providing non-abortion health services.

Most abortions in Texas do not happen in hospitals, and many providers have noted that they dont use the type of protective gear that would be helpful for medical professionals fighting the coronavirus, such as the N-95 surgical masks. Most abortions are early-term medication abortions that require no protective gear.

Advocates say the ban will disproportionately affect low-income women and women of color, many of whom are already dealing with job loss and financial uncertainty from the coronavirus countermeasures.

Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

We were already being overwhelmed by black women wanting assurances they could seek out abortions during this time, said Marsha Jones, who heads a fund in Dallas for women of color seeking abortions. Its putting an undue burden on these black women.

Anti-abortion advocates have praised the ban. On Wednesday, Paxton told the conservative group Texas Values that the decision was about focusing resources on the pandemic, which is expected to inundate hospitals in coming days.

I dont even see why people on the other side would dispute this, he said during a Facebook Live event. If we dont do this then we will have people potentially die. Hopefully we can work together to save human life.

The suit, brought by Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Lawyering Project, is seeking a restraining order and eventually an injunction to overturn the abortion ban.

jeremy.blackman@chron.co
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Congress president Sonia Gandhi wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday, voicing her support to the 21-day lockdown announced by the PM in view of the coronavirus outbreak, and suggested several measures such as protection of doctors, easing the supply chains and deferment of loans.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic sweeping across the world had caused serious public health concerns, anguish and apprehensions in India, she wrote in her letter to the prime minister.

"It has imperilled lives and put at risk the lives and livelihoods of millions, particularly, the most vulnerable sections of our society. The entire nation stands as one in solidarity in the fight to halt and defeat the Corona pandemic," Gandhi added.

She noted that the 21-day nationwide lockdown announced by the prime minister as a measure to fight the coronavirus was a welcome step.

"As President of the Indian National Congress, I would like to state that we will support and collaborate fully with every step taken by the Union Government to ensure the containment of the pandemic," Gandhi said.

At this challenging and uncertain time, she said it was imperative for each one of us to rise above partisan interests and honour our duty towards our country and indeed, towards humanity.

"It is in the spirit of solidarity and cooperation, therefore, that I would like to suggest some measures that I believe will help us address the massive health crisis we are about to face and to ameliorate the immense economic and existential pain that vulnerable sections of our society will soon be subjected to," the Congress chief said.

She stressed on the need to arm doctors, nurses and health workers with personal protection equipment, including N-95 masks and hazmat suits.

"Let us ensure the opening and scaling up of manufacture and supply of these items so that not a single health professional faces the predicament of contracting or passing on COVID-19 owing to unavailability of 'Personal Protection Equipment'," Gandhi said.

Announcing a special "Risk Allowance" for doctors, nurses and health workers for a period of six months retrospectively from March 1 was imperative, she added.

Noting that many businesses and companies were laying off and retrenching large numbers of regular and temporary employees, Gandhi said, "It would be in order for the Union Government to immediately put in place broad-based social protection measures, including direct cash transfer, to these sections to tide over the period of difficulty."

She also sought a deferment of all loan recoveries up to six months, including those for farmers and the salaried class.
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In an urgent alert issued Wednesday, Los Angeles County officials advised doctors and nurses to reuse face masks and wear gowns and masks that are expired. (Howard Lipin / San Diego Union-Tribune)

A severe shortage of gear that can protect healthcare workers from COVID-19 has prompted Los Angeles County officials to advise doctors and nurses to reuse face masks and wear gowns and masks that are expired, a desperate attempt to conserve supplies amid the pandemic.

In an urgent alert sent to providers on Wednesday, officials from the L.A. County public health department said COVID-19 infections are rapidly rising in the county and that staff need to implement these measures now, before a massive wave of patients hits.

The county has ordered more protective gear, but its stockpile is currently completely depleted of masks  both surgical masks and the more protective N95 respirators  and is running low on everything else, according to the advisory.

The news has heightened fears among providers.

I feel like Im just going to end up using the same N95 mask and eventually itll get so tattered Ill get exposed, said one doctor at a major L.A. hospital who, like others interviewed for this article, did not have permission from her institution to speak to the media.

The local guidance is the reflection of a global shortage of supplies that has pushed U.S. policymakers to slowly weaken safety precautions for health care providers treating COVID-19 patients.

"We need to collectively prepare for a surge of newly infected patients including those who are critically ill ... and to try to avert severe shortages of medical supplies," said the advisory emailed to all health care providers in L.A. County by Dr. Sharon Balter, director of the county public health department's division of communicable disease control and prevention.

Hospitals have also been tightening rules to mitigate low supply levels. At a large hospital in L.A. County, nurses now have to sign out masks whenever they take one and are then subject to questioning by their supervisor to make sure they are being used for a valid reason, a hospital nurse said.

Story continues

"It almost feels like they think were going to steal these masks," she said. "We don't really know what to do  we just know we can't protect ourselves while we're taking care of the patient."

The nurse said they are only allowed to wear masks once a patient has been tested for COVID-19, not in any other circumstance when a patient is coughing and they are worried about infection. The hospital has forbidden staff from bringing in and wearing their own cloth masks, she said.

"It's just a really terrible time to be working," she said. "It really is coming down to whether we want to go work and get a paycheck and support our families, or if we want to protect ourselves."

In the alert sent Wednesday, officials recommended that providers switch from using disposable supplies to reusable goggles and cloth gowns that can be washed. They also said providers could consider wearing the same face mask for multiple patients, something that has not been previously recommended due to concerns about carrying infections from room to room.

Gabe Montoya, an emergency medical technician at Kaiser Permanente Downey Medical Center, said his hospital is rapidly running out of protective gear and what remains has been locked up. He said they are being asked to wear items "for hours on end, even beyond manufacturers' recommendations."

Montoya said that he and his coworkers feel unsafe and some have moved out of their homes to stay in hotels or had their loved ones move out to protect them from infection.

"In my case, Ive gone three weeks already without seeing my husband and my elderly mother," he said in a statement. "The shortage of personal protective equipment is a national disgrace."

Healthcare workers tend to be more exposed to viruses than others because of the number of sick people they interact with and the close contact required to do their jobs.

In New York, now the national epicenter of the outbreak, a number of healthcare workers have already fallen ill. A study found that in Italy, about 20% of healthcare professionals working on the front lines of the outbreak have become infected with COVID-19.

At St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, the masks are currently "under lock and key," and providers there have also been told to wear a single one while moving between multiple patient rooms, said a nurse who works there.

"I never in my life have been told to keep using the same N95 mask ... they just changed their whole ideology because of the shortage," he said. "The nursing staff are afraid, the respiratory therapists are afraid, the housekeepers are afraid to clean the room."

This week, local nurses union SEIU 721 filed a complaint with the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health because of the reuse of face masks and lack of N95 respirators. Union leaders demanded that hospitals not assign suspected COVID-19 patients to their members until they were provided the appropriate gear.

It is utterly disappointing that L.A. County would put front-line healthcare workers like myself in this kind of danger when its precisely in times like these that we desperately need all medical staff in top condition, Cynthia Mitchel, a supervising registered nurse at LAC+USC Medical Center, said in a statement. Instead of being proactive, the county is setting us up to become super spreaders."

Federal recommendations for protecting health care workers have dramatically changed since the beginning of the outbreak.

Originally, officials said that medical staff should wear N95 masks, which are more protective than surgical masks, when interacting with suspected COVID-19 patients. Now those masks are recommended only during certain high-risk procedures.

The changes in guidance are intended to stretch supplies so that no one is ever completely without gear, as has happened in other countries, officials say. The national stockpile has only 1% of the masks needed to respond to the pandemic. But providers say that isn't good reason to put them at risk.

It concerns me that were changing our practice based on conservation of supplies, said UCLA nurse Marcia Santini. If we get sick, and we have to be self-quarantined, we're going to have a staffing crisis.

L.A. County officials this week also rescinded an order requiring all medical staff who aren't vaccinated for the flu to wear masks at all times while at work. They also asked doctors' offices to cancel all non-urgent appointments to conserve protective gear that may have been used.

Additionally, officials advised doctors not to test all patients who are suspected of having COVID-19, only those for whom the test result would change the treatment. Officials said the recommendation was driven by a shortage of tests and backlogs in processing results, problems that have plagued the nation's response to the outbreak for weeks.

At many L.A. County hospitals, the testing delays are also exacerbating the shortages of protective gear.

If a patient is suspected of having COVID-19, staff wear protective equipment when interacting with them while waiting for the test results, said a nurse at a Westside hospital. As of Wednesday, the results could take as long as six days to come back, he said.

"We're burning through tons of masks and gowns," he said. "If things become really bad, then we're just wasting equipment before things even peak."

Times staff writers Hailey Branson-Potts and Emily Baumgaertner contributed to this report.
By March 23, central Chinas Hubei province, the epicenter of the countrys COVID-19 outbreak in the country, had not reported any confirmed or suspected cases for five consecutive days. One of the important reasons behind this success in combating the epidemic was traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).

Leng Caixia (L), a pharmacist of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), prepares herbs to produce doses of TCM decoctions to help combat the novel coronavirus epidemic at Xiaogan Chinese Medical Hospital in Xiaogan City, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 25, 2020.(Xinhua/Hu Huhu)

The first national TCM team arrived at the Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, Hubei province, on Jan. 25. With no specialized TCM pharmacies or formulas, they had to begin their efforts from scratch, and took over an inpatient ward in the hospital.

This is the first time that TCM medical workers have taken over an independent ward in a hospital in an emergency since the Peoples Republic of China was founded, opening a new front against the novel coronavirus that was centered around TCM, said Huang Luqi, president of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences (CACMS).

At the same time as setting up the TCM medical team and refining TCM treatments for pneumonia, TCM medical workers also took charge of the Jiangxia temporary hospital in the city.

During its 26 days of operation, the Jiangxia temporary hospital received a total of 564 pneumonia patients, 394 of whom were cured and discharged using TCM treatment methods, including medicine, acupuncture and the martial art Tai Chi.

A total of 74,187 pneumonia patients have been treated using traditional Chinese medicine, accounting for 91.5 percent of the total cases in China, according to Yu Yanhong from the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Meanwhile, clinical observation suggests that TCM proved effective in over 90 percent of cases.

To control the spread of the coronavirus in Wuhan, Tong Xiaolin, chief researcher with the CACMS, and other experts formulated a recipe customized to treat patients with mild forms of pneumonia, suspected cases and those with high temperatures and kept in quarantine.

The medicine was then given to patients in Wuhan with the support of the government. It was found to prevent patients with mild symptoms from rapid deterioration and kept severe cases under a degree of control, according to Tong.

In Wuhans Wuchang District, which was severely stricken by the epidemic, more than 90 percent of suspected cases became confirmed cases by Jan. 28. TCM intervention started from Feb. 2, and the diagnosis rate fell to 30 percent by Feb. 6 and then to about 3 percent by March 5.
Prince William Pkwy., 2600 block, 3:16 a.m. March 19. Citizens reported hearing gunshots in the parking lot of a hotel and three men were seen running into a hotel room. During a search of the room, two firearms and other property were recovered, but no injuries or property damage were reported. Two Woodbridge men, 25 and 26, were arrested and charged with reckless handling of a firearm and possession of a stolen firearm. The 26-year-old was additionally charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. The third accomplice was not located.
On the fifth anniversary of Saudi involvement in the Yemen conflict, all warring parties offered support on for the United Nations' call for a ceasefire to protect civilians from the Covid-19 pandemic.

But the war, started when Saudi Arabia's intervened in Yemen's civil conflict, is far from over, and Houthi rebels seem stronger than ever.

So far, Yemen's healthcare system has not recorded a case of coronavirus but aid groups have warned that when it does hit, the impact will be catastrophic.

Millions of people have been displaced and diseases including cholera are widespread due to the scarcity of clean water.

Saudi Arabia, the Yemen government and the rebels all welcomed the appeal from UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres who this week called for an "immediate global ceasefire" to help avert disaster for vulnerable people in conflict zones.

However, the Yemen conflict has been punctuated by failed agreements, and negotiating a pause could be very difficult. None of the parties to the conflict spelt out any mechanism for the process.

De-escalate acts of violence

"The government of Yemen welcomes the call of the UN chief... for a ceasefire in the face of coronavirus, and to de-escalate acts of violence in the entire country," it said in a statement.

"The political, economic and health situation require halting all escalations... to preserve people's lives and deal responsibly with this pandemic."

The Saudi-led coalition also backed the initiative, saying: "We support the Yemeni government's decision to accept the UN's calls for a ceasefire."

Strong position

The Huthis, who move into the sixth year of the conflict in a strong position with more strategic gains in recent months in the country's north, also welcomed Guterres's call to wind back fighting.

Mehdi al-Mashat, head of the Huthis' political wing, expressed the insurgents' "total readiness to be open to all efforts and initiatives in the context of a full and real ceasefire".

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In his appeal from UN headquarters in New York on Monday, Guterres said: "The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war.

"That is why today, I am calling for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world."

(-with agencies)
Groups of ultra-Orthodox Jews have held prayer meetings in Melbourne this week in defiance of strict social-distancing rules designed to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

State MPs blasted the the groups who met late at night in small private venues to conduct daily "minyan" prayers, a type of worship that requires the presence of 10 or more Jewish men.

Men leaving the secret prayer meeting on Wednesday night.

The gatherings have raised concerns about the spread of the virus in the Jewish community.

Local MP David Southwick, who referred the matter to police, said it was "appalling that people are not following the rules and putting lives in danger".
United States Forces Korea (USFK) commander Gen. Robert Abrams declares a "public health emergency" for all USFK commands and all USFK installations to exerciseall "necessary authorities" to protect those under his command from the COVID-19, in this video released by the USFK, Wednesday. Screenshot from USFK's Facebook



By Jung Da-min



United States Forces Korea (USFK) commander Gen. Robert Abrams has declared a "public health emergency" for all USFK commands and all USFK installations and will exercise all "necessary authorities" to protect the force from COVID-19.



The USFK said in a statement issued Wednesday that the emergency situation will remain in effect through April 23, unless the USFK commander decides to renew it or terminate it sooner.



"The protection of the force remains our number one priority, and we continually monitor and assess the conditions of COVID-19 in South Korea and its presence near USFK installations," Abrams said. "In order to ensure I possess the necessary authorities needed to enforce compliance and protect the force."



According to the USFK, the declaration neither changes the current health protection condition and preventive mitigation measures being taken, nor indicates an increased risk level on USFK installations.






By PTI

UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations has condemned the terrorist attack on a Gurudwara in Kabul that killed at least 25 people, with the UN chief calling for perpetrators of such crimes to be held accountable and the world body emphasising that there can be no justification for the killing of civilians at a religious house.

At least 25 worshippers were killed and eight others injured when a heavily armed suicide bomber stormed his way into a prominent Gurudwara on Wednesday in the heart of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, in one of the deadliest attacks on the minority Sikh community in the strife-torn country.

The Islamic State (IS) terror group, which has targeted Sikhs before in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack on the Gurudwara in Shor Bazar area at about 07:45 (local time) as 150 worshippers were inside the building.

ALSO READ: Islamic State group claims attack on Sikhs in Kabul

"The Secretary-General condemns the attack in Kabul on a Sikh-Hindu temple in which dozens of civilians were killed and injured.

"He expresses his deepest sympathies to the families of the victims and wishes a speedy recovery to those injured," Secretary General Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement on Wednesday.

It added that the Secretary-General reiterates that attacks against civilians are unacceptable and those who carry out such crimes must be held accountable.

"The United Nations stands in solidarity with the people and the Government of Afghanistan and will continue supporting efforts to bring peace to their country," the statement said.

In a tweet, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said it is "outraged" by the attack.

"There can be no justification for the killing of civilians at a religious house. Our condolences to the victims and their families."

High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) Miguel Angel Moratinos expressed his "dismay" at the terrorist attack at the Gurudwara, which killed 25 victims, including a child.

The "despicable attack comes at a time when the world is facing a pandemic which adversely impacts all of us, requiring us to stand together as "One Humanit'," Moratinos said.

He stressed that attacks targeting sacred sites and worshippers are intolerable and have to stop.

Recalling the UN Plan of Action to Safeguard Religious Sites, he called on all governments and relevant stakeholders to support the implementation of the plan to guarantee the sanctity of worship places and the safety of worshipers.

Moratinos said the latest attack adds to an expanding number of attacks targeting various faith communities around the world.

He reiterated that such outrageous acts of terror should not "dissuade us from working together to promote solidarity, respect, and peace globally."

On behalf of the UNAOC, the High Representative expressed his condolences to the victims' families and conveys his solidarity to the people and the Government of Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON  Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro was indicted in the United States on Thursday in a narco-terrorism and cocaine trafficking conspiracy in which prosecutors said he led a violent drug cartel even as he amassed power.

The indictment of a head of state was highly unusual and served as an escalation of the Trump administrations campaign to pressure Maduro to leave office after his widely disputed reelection in 2018. Maduro has led Venezuelas economy into shambles and prompted an exodus of millions of people into neighboring countries.

Attorney General William Barr announced the charges Thursday at a news briefing along with the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the top federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Miami.

Maduro condemned the charges, accusing the United States and its ally Colombia on Twitter of giving the order to fill Venezuela with violence. He declared that he would not be defeated.

In addition to Maduro, more than a dozen others were charged, including Venezuelan government and intelligence officials and members of the largest rebel group in Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, known as FARC, which has long drawn its financing from the cocaine trade.

The chief justice of Venezuela was also charged with money laundering and the countrys minister of defense with drug trafficking, Barr said. The charges were contained in four separate indictments, two filed in New York and one each in Miami and Washington, Barr said.

The State Department is offering rewards of up to $15 million for information leading to the capture or conviction of Maduro, who remains in Venezuela, said Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan.

One of the indictments unsealed in federal court in Manhattan included four counts, accusing the defendants of possessing machine guns and conspiring to possess machine guns in addition to the narco-terrorism and cocaine trafficking conspiracy charges.

Maduro helped run and ultimately led a drug trafficking organization called Cartel de Los Sols as he gained power in Venezuela, according to court papers.

Maduro negotiated multi-ton shipments of cocaine produced by the FARC, directed his cartel to provide military-grade weapons to the group and coordinated foreign affairs with Honduras and other countries to facilitate large-scale drug trafficking, according to the indictment.

Katie Benner, William K. Rashbaum and Benjamin Weiser are New York Times writers.
She has been encouraging her radio listeners to join in the 'clap for our carers' applause, set to take place on Thursday at 8pm.

And Amanda Holden appeared in great spirits as she left London's Global Studios after hosting her Heart Breakfast Show amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The radio host, 49, cut a stylish figure in a blue blazer dress with silver button detailing which showcased her gym-honed pins.

Cheery: Amanda Holden appeared in great spirits as she left London's Global Studios after hosting her Heart Breakfast Show on Thursday amid the coronavirus pandemic

Amanda teamed her ensemble with an elegant black coat and black court shoes, while keeping her accessories minimal aside from a delicate silver pendant necklace and circular-framed shades.

The mother-of-two wore her blonde tresses in a bouncy blown out style and highlighted her visage with soft touches of make-up.

Earlier in the day, the media personality shared another plea for her fans to show their appreciation for the UK's key workers, alongside a leggy snap of her posing in the office.

Turning heads: The radio host, 49, cut a stylish figure in a blue blazer dress with silver button detailing which showcased her gym-honed pins

All in the details: The presenter kept her accessories minimal aside from a delicate silver pendant necklace and circular-framed shades

Radiant: The mother-of-two wore her blonde tresses in a bouncy blown out style and highlighted her visage with soft touches of make-up

Wow! Earlier in the day, the media personality encouraged her radio listeners to join in the 'clap for our carers' applause alongside a leggy snap

Take a note miss! Amanda's co-host Ashley Roberts also got in on the action as she posed beside her - at a safe distance - in a graphic print T-shirt and pink skirt

Sweet: Later in the day Amanda shared a sweet family snap with her daughters Hollie and Alexa and their dog Rudie

She also added a pair of black-rimmed glasses to her look, as she perched on the edge of a desk in an empty newsroom.

Amanda captioned the image: 'Take a note ... join us @thisisheart at 8pm to applause the #clapforourcarers [heart emoji].'

Her co-host Ashley Roberts also got in on the action as she posed beside her - at a safe distance - in a graphic print T-shirt and pink skirt.

Her plea comes after she praised the NHS for 'literally saving her life' when her baby son was stillborn at seven months in 2011.

The broadcaster once again urged Heart FM listeners to support the #ClapForCarers event as she detailed her own experience with the health service on Wednesday morning's Breakfast Show.

The Britain's Got Talent judge praised the NHS by saying: 'They [the NHS] have always been important to Great Britain.

Candid: Amanda said on Wednesday's Heart Radio that the NHS 'saved her life' and 'looked after her family when we lost a baby' as she urged to take part in #ClapForCarers event

'They've always been important to all of us, but now more than ever we should be appreciating them.

'I know for me personally, without getting tearful, they saved my life, literally. My sister was in a car accident two years ago, they saved her life, literally. They looked after us as a family when we lost a baby.'

Amanda lost her beloved son Theo seven months into her pregnancy in February 2011.

Amanda was fast approaching her due date with her son when she was given the devastating news that Theo's heart had stopped beating.

Family unit: The actress has two daughters with husband Chris Hughes, Lexi, 14, and Hollie, eight (pictured). She lost her beloved son Theo seven months into her pregnancy in 2011

A year before, she had miscarried a little boy at 16 weeks. In an interview about that time, she said: 'It was without doubt the blackest period of my life.

'I have such a charmed and lovely life and I just never imagined I would miscarry a baby. Never. You never think it might happen to you.'

The actress, who has two daughters with husband Chris Hughes, Alexa, also known as Lexi, 14, and Hollie, eight, said their baby boy would never be forgotten.

Experience: Of how the NHS helped her, Amanda said: 'I know for me personally, without getting tearful, they saved my life... they looked after us as a family when we lost a baby'

She said: 'I'll literally do anything for the National Health Service because they got me through it, they got Chris through it and I now thankfully have two healthy girls and a little boy who is still part of the family but just not here.'

Going on to discuss the #ClapForCarers event on the radio show, which will see the public clap in their homes to say thanks to the medical professionals at the frontline of the coronavirus crisis, Amanda said it was 'the least we can do.'

Adding that everyone in Global radio stations would be taking part, she said: 'We're going to make some noise for the doctors, nurses, carers, GPs, pharmacists, the mechanics who looks after all the vehicles.

'Just literally everybody who are involved in the NHS and are working so hard to help those affected by the coronavirus.'

Sharing her hopes that listeners would take part, Amanda added: 'We would love you to join us, you just need to make sure you've got Heart on, turn your radio up, and then we're going to give them a massive round of applause.

'I mean we're all going to look ridiculous, all standing on our doorways, hanging out the windows clapping but we don't care because it's a small gesture, but if we join together and give them a round of applause, it would just spur them on.'
Over the past week, as the coronavirus has begun to spread rapidly in historically oppressed regions of the world, including South America, Africa and Asia, medical experts have warned of a potential mass outbreak in Indonesia, Southeast Asias most populous country.

After weeks of the Indonesian government downplaying the threat, its spokesman on COVID-19, Achmad Yurianto, admitted on Friday that, according to official estimates, between 600,000 and 700,000 people have likely come into contact with individuals infected by the virus. Indicating that the government has no idea of the true extent of infections, Yurianto said that this high risk population was scattered across the archipelago.

Since the beginning of the week, new cases have been reported in South Sumatra and West Nusa Tenggara, along with North Maluku, Jambi and Papua, on top of infections in Jakarta and Bali.

In comments cited by the Australian yesterday, Achmad Yurianto, an Essex University professor of applied mathematics, stated that, on current trends, half the Indonesian population, or some 135 million people, will be infected by mid-May. The projection, however, is based on the government carrying out a lockdown of Jakarta, the capital and apparent epicentre of the pandemic. No lockdown has yet been ordered. The warnings indicate that millions could die.

Already Indonesia has one of the highest mortality rates per confirmed case of any country in the world. As of yesterday, 55 people had died as a result of the virus, under conditions in which just 686 infections have been identified through testing. This means that over eight percent of confirmed cases have resulted in deaths, approaching the level of Italy, which is thus far the country that has been hardest hit by the global pandemic.

In Indonesia, fewer than 3,000 tests have been carried out. The high mortality rate among confirmed cases likely means that only those who are severely affected by the disease and who are approaching a critical medical condition are being treated. In other words, thousands of others are likely carrying the virus without any prospect of being examined.

Over the past week, horrific videos have circulated widely on social media of people collapsing and dying in public streets with symptoms consistent with COVID-19.

The reality was demonstrated by the death of 72-year-old French tourist Gerard Philippe Follet in Bali on March 15. Follet was found slumped over his motorcycle in Denpasar and unresponsive. In front of dozens of tourists and locals, he briefly appeared to regain consciousness before dying suddenly.

For over a week, Balinese authorities claimed that Follets death had been the result of an underlying heart condition combined with excessive alcohol consumption. This was despite the fact that witnesses to his death had immediately reported that he displayed symptoms consistent with coronavirus. Only several days ago did officials acknowledge that Follet died as a result of COVID-19. This means that any real prospect of contact tracing those with whom he had interacted and those who sought to treat him has been lost.

For the past month, President Joko Widodos administration has done nothing to expand access to testing. This week, China donated 125,000 testing kits, which are beginning to be rolled out around the country. Given that the virus has likely already spread widely, the kits will rapidly be exhausted.

There are also warnings that the health system will not be able to cope with an influx of cases. Already, hospitals appear to be overwhelmed, leading the government to establish a make-shift medical centre on the grounds of the athletes village from the 2018 Asian games. Hospitals have reported shortages of personal protective equipment, including face masks.

The government has belatedly purchased 105,000 pieces of protective equipment and test kits from Singapore. However, doctors and nurses representatives warn that the supplies will be insufficient.

Indonesian Doctors Association spokesman Halik Malik told the media this week: In Italy, 4,800 health workers were infected by coronavirus but in Indonesia we cant afford a situation like that.

Malik warned: The system and the resources we have, in terms of funds, equipment and human resources, cant handle an explosion of cases. We wont be able to handle a worst-case scenario. At least eight of the 55 confirmed deaths are doctors and nurses.

The under-resourced hospitals have been subjected to years of funding cuts, amid a rapid rise in Indonesias population.

Widodos government has embarked upon further pro-business policies since its victory in last years national election, including tax breaks for the wealthy and for international investors, privatisations and greater undermining of environment and safety regulations. This program has encountered growing opposition, including mass student protests late last year.

The class character of the governments response to the pandemic has been graphically demonstrated by its refusal to institute a lockdown of Jakarta, which has a population of almost 10 million.

While office workers have been encouraged to work from home and the wealthiest layers of the population have reportedly fled the city, maids, nannies, vendors and other sections of the working class and the oppressed have been forced to continue working. Local authorities have announced a state of emergency, but parts of the citys public transport network are continuing to operate. Moreover, there are no restrictions on people travelling in and out of the city, threatening to spread infections to provinces across the country.

An article in the Jakarta Post yesterday, which pointed to the lax measures, nervously asked: Will Indonesia be Southeast Asias Italy?

The governments hostility to a lockdown is driven solely by fears that it would dramatically impact on corporate profits, including those of the many transnational corporations with operational bases in Jakarta.

Social anger has erupted on social media. Thousands of workers and young people have denounced the governments decision to fast-track testing for all members of the national parliament, under conditions in which ordinary people have been denied any prospect of a medical examination, much less treatment.

As is the case internationally, the criminal response of the Widodo administration to the disaster is inextricably tied to the massive growth of social inequality and the dominance of the corporate and financial elite over every aspect of society. In 2017, Oxfam ranked Indonesia as the sixth-most unequal country in the world. In a country of some 264 million people, the four richest individuals have a combined wealth greater than the poorest 100 million.

Meanwhile, the pandemic is spreading throughout the region. In Malaysia, there were 1,518 confirmed cases as of Monday, the majority of them linked to a mass religious gathering late last month. Its government has implemented a partial lockdown, including the closure of the border with Singapore, and has deployed the military to enforce restrictions on internal movement.

As a result, residents in Singapore are becoming fearful of a potential food shortage. The city-states food self-sufficiency rate is less than 10 percent, and Malaysia is one of its key sources of imports. Long queues have begun to form at Singapore supermarkets.

In Thailand, the Public Health Ministry announced 121 new coronavirus infections on Monday, raising the total to 721 cases. Soaring by a rate of 33 percent daily, the number of infections is predicted to reach about 350,000 by April 15, with 7,000 deaths. By then the number of critically ill people would be an estimated 17,000, enough to exceed Thailand's medical resources.

In the Philippines, more than 670 Manila health workers were quarantined over fears they had been exposed to the virus, which placed additional strain on medical wards. Across the country, two doctors have died from the virus. It is painful for us to hear about their deaths. This is the reality we face. We are risking our lives as we fulfil our duties, Maria Theresa Depano, a health staff at a hospital outside Metro Manila, told the Guardian.
Karnataka government has warned strict penal action against landlords or house-owners under provisions of law for forcing doctors, paramedical staff and healthcare professionals to vacate their rented residences citing COVID-19 spread through them as the reason.

Stating that lot of complaints have been received in this regard, an order issued by Additional Chief Secretary Health and Family Welfare department Jawaid Akhtar said such behaviour amounted to obstructing public servantin discharging their duties./



Noting that the state government has issued Karnataka Epidemic Diseases (COVID-19) regulations 2020 for prevention and containmentof the virus, it directed Deputy Commissioners of the district, Commissioner and Joint Commissioner of BBMP (civic body in Bengaluru), Commissioners of Municipal Corporations and District Deputy Commissioner of Police to take action against such incidents.

"Strict penal action should be taken against such landlords or house-owners under relevant provisions of law and submit an actiontaken report on a daily basis to office of Additional Chief Secretary, Home Department," the order read.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sanitation workers collect garbage and clean sewers, often without masks, gloves or boots, or risk losing income.

Mumbai, India  On Sunday, as India went into a complete lockdown called by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to halt the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, Sayaba Kunchikorwe spent his day loading garbage on a municipal truck in Dharavi, one of Mumbais biggest slums.

Wiping his brow, the 34-year-old shovelled a mound of stinking wet waste onto a plastic mat with his two-pronged rake before tossing it into the garbage truck. The waste consisted of rotting food items, clothes, broken glass, plastic bags, medical waste, and a few face masks.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 infection in the country, he and his colleagues have seen an uptick in the number of discarded face masks in the garbage.

In spite of handling hazardous waste in the middle of a global contagion, Kunchikorwe was working without a mask, gloves, boots, or any other protective gear.

After we threatened to strike, the contractor gave some of us a disposable mask and low-grade hand gloves, he told Al Jazeera, holding up a mask and a torn glove. Both articles lasted a day, so we stopped using them. Were anyway used to working without them, he added.

A contract worker shows the pair of gloves he received from the government, that became torn in a day [Shone Satheesh Babu/Al Jazeera]

A contract employee with the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), Kunchikorwes job is among the essential services excluded from the lockdown.

Minimum wage

T Sundararaman, global coordinator for Peoples Health Movements, says sanitation workers like Kunchikorwe are in the vanguard of preventive healthcare, especially in dense urban environs.

If they stop working even for a couple of days, itll lead to a public health catastrophe. The number of vermin vectors will increase exponentially, leading to plagues and epidemics, he explained.

Despite that, he said, Indias socioeconomic milieu, riven by caste, geography, and patchy implementation of policies, ensures that sanitation workers remain marginalised at all levels.

Sanitation workers need masks, gloves, boots and gowns at all times. In the current scenario, they are at high risk due to the disposal of infectious articles like masks, used tissues, or clothing, he said.

Even washing their hands, prescribed as a key deterrent to the spread of COVID-19, is not an option for Kunchikorwe and his colleagues.

Theres no soap. We have to buy shampoo sachets and walk a distance to the municipality office to wash up, he added.

Kunchikorwe is among 6,500 contract employees who work in Mumbais 227 municipal wards to keep the city garbage-free. Many of them get paid Rs 200-350 ($2.6-4.6) a day, well below the minimum wage of Rs 625 ($8.3) stipulated by Maharashtra state.

They supplement the work of the municipalitys permanent staff of 28,000 workers in the solid waste management department. The permanent staff receive three to four times the pay, personal protective equipment, and additional benefits like medical insurance, retirement funds, and leave allowance.

The contract workers are victimised by a contract system under which they are hired by different firms every six months to circumvent the labour laws that would extend safety and welfare measures to them.

High mortality rates

Up to 20 percent of sanitation workers in Mumbai, and the majority of those hired to clean sewers, manholes, and septic tanks, are contracted.

Whether permanent or on contract, 90 percent of the employees are Dalits or belong to other marginalised communities.

Mortality rates among sanitation workers are high, some die long before retirement, succumbing to infectious illnesses, alcoholism, and other causes.

Workers sort through the garbage to remove pieces of glass or concrete which is not allowed to be put in the garbage truck [Shone Satheesh Babu/Al Jazeera]

One estimate suggests that the death rate of workers cleaning sewers is five times more than other urban Indians between the age of 15 and 59.

Many contract workers such as Zakir Hussain were forced to buy their own masks themselves due to the coronavirus scare. He purchased an N95 mask for Rs 100, which he plans to use for a month.

He claimed that municipal officials did not give him any safety instructions in the wake of the pandemic. I started taking precautions after watching some videos on social media, said Hussian, 28, who works at the municipal ward in Colaba, south Mumbai.

In developed countries, Sundararaman from Peoples Health Movements pointed out, the risks to sanitation workers have been mitigated by following protocols such as mechanization, providing protective equipment, and enhancing social benefits like adequate compensation for injuries/disease.

In India, these protocols are followed in the breach, he claimed.

On Monday, India was put under an unprecedented lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19, with states sealing their borders, shutting down public transport, and asking citizens to work from home.

But for many, working from home was not an option.

Chotalaxmi Naamdaar, a contract labourer who collects garbage in Fort in south Mumbai, was stopped by the police on the way to work. They were asking for an ID, which we dont have, and asked us to return. That meant losing Rs 250 as my daily income, the 42-year-old told Al Jazeera.

In Thane, a neighbouring district of Mumbai, contract workers have been deployed to clean a building in Kasarvadavali, where 13 people are being kept under observation for COVID-19.

Bala Hivrale, vice president of the Maharashtra Municipal Kamgaar Union (MMKU), said the workers were not provided masks and gloves either.

All these years they did not provide us protective gear. But for humanitys sake, this is an emergency. Why are they so callous towards us? he told Al Jazeera.

Authorities say safety gears provided

The deputy Municipal commissioner of Thane Municipal Corporation, Asho Burpalle, said all workers had been provided masks, towels, soap and gloves. Who are we to stop what the government has promised? he told Al Jazeera.

Hivrale countered that the measures were only being announced but not implemented. Only the permanent workers have received the gear. Contract workers are being threatened with termination when they ask for protective equipment, he said.

Bhima Valmiki is among the 6,500 contract workers employed by the MCGM to pick up garbage from the streets.[Shone Satheesh Babu/Al Jazeera]

Ashok Khaire, joint municipal commissioner of the MCGM, told Al Jazeera the municipality had issued an advisory to all employees, as well as supplied masks, hand-sanitiser, and gloves.

The contractors have been instructed to provide all necessary equipment. Those violating it will be black-listed. We are also paying contract workers additional Rs 300 ($4) per day for coming to work, he said.

However, many workers Al Jazeera spoke to in Dharavi and Chembur in central Mumbai, Fort in south Mumbai, and Bhandup in northeast Mumbai refuted Khaires claims.

We have not been told about the extra compensation. If its travel compensation, it should be given on a daily basis, which has not happened so far. Instead, we are paid below minimum wage, said Dadarao Patekar, who works in Chembur.

Some, like Ravindra Prahlad Gretkar who works in northeast Mumbai, have not even received wages for the month of February.

When I asked for the salary, they said to submit bank statements for the entire year, said Gretkar, who had to spend Rs 4,000 ($53) on a cataract operation for his mother the previous week. Due to the lockdown, the price of everything has doubled. I had to borrow money from a friend to buy groceries.

Activists stress that the government should recognize the crucial role sanitation workers play in keeping the country healthy and revamp policies regarding sanitation work.

Coronavirus or not, if we stop working for a few days, people will die, Hivrale, the workers union vice president, said.
Coronavirus Outbreak Updates: G20 leaders committed to using all available policy tools to minimize economic and social cost of the COVID-19 pandemic and to restore global growth, market stability & strengthening resilience. G20 countries also committed to injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy.

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The toll due to the virus increased to 10 with another fatality being reported from Maharashtra, according to official data.

A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown to contain the coronavirus pandemic, nearly 90 more coronavirus positive cases were reported in India, taking the total number of cases to 606 on Wednesday.

Puducherry Chief Minister V Narayanasamy had earlier announced that curfew will be imposed in the Union Territory till 31 March.

It has been alleged that Kumar was distributing bags containing vegetables to a gathering of more than 200 people near his residence in Nellithope.

A complaint was filed against Congress MLA John Kumar for allegedly violating the lockdown orders issued by the Puducherry government to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.

This will not only reduce inconvenience to emergency services but also save critical time, he said. The minister said maintenance of roads and availability of emergency resources at toll plazas will continue as usual.

In view of COVID-19, it has been ordered to temporarily suspend the collection of toll at all toll plazas across India, Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari announced.

The Centre on Wednesday announced to temporarily suspend toll collection on national highways to ease emergency services during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The owners of these vehicles will have to collect the passes from the DCP offices in their respective areas and hand them over to the drivers of the vehicles after which they would be allowed entry through the border posts.

To ensure the smooth continuance of essential services, the Delhi Police on Tuesday had decided to issue curfew passes for goods vehicles driving into the city from the National Capital region (NCR) carrying essential items.

The movement of vehicles carrying essential services has been permitted during the 21-day nationwide shutdown in the Delhi-Noida border (Noida Sector-14-Mayur Vihar border).

"The Bank has decided to make maximum 10 percent of the existing fund based working capital limits (FBWC) subject to maximum of Rs 200 crore. This is in addition to existing adhoc/excess/standby letter of credit (SLC)/gold card limit, BoB said in a late night statement.

This follows a similar additional funding facility announced by the country's largest lender State Bank of India for its borrowers, last week.

Bank of Baroda on Wednesday said it has set up an emergency credit line to provide funds to its existing MSME and corporate borrowers impacted by the outbreak of coronavirus.

Eighteen coronavirus positive cases were linked to a kindergarten centre, PAP Community Foundation (PCF) Sparkletots in Fengshan. It has been decided that all PCF centres, operated as pre-schools by the ruling People's Action Party, would be closed for four days from Thursday.

According to the ministry, of the new cases, 38 people have travel history to Europe, North America, ASEAN and other parts of Asia, while the rest were locally transmitted cases.

The 73 new cases reported on Wednesday has brought the total number of COVID-19 cases in Singapore to 631, the health ministry said.

A three-year-old Indian girl was among the 73 new COVID-19 cases that have been reported in Singapore in a day, taking the tally to over 600.

All three are male patients of ages 25, 29 and 55 years. They have travel history of returning to Goa from Spain, Australia and the USA, respectively, the officials said.

The Directorate of Health Services, in a late night press statement in Panaji, said three suspected cases of COVID-19 from Goa, whose test results were awaited, have turned out positive.

This is the first time the tourist state has reported coronavirus positive cases.

Three persons, all with travel history abroad, tested positive for the novel in Goa on Wednesday, health department officials said, as the tourist haven joined the states which have reported COVID-19 cases.

With these two cases, the number of positive cases in the state has gone up to 40.

A 43-year-old woman from Hyderabad with no history of international travel has also tested positive. She is the primary contact of a positive case reported earlier.

A three-year-old is among two COVID-19 positive cases reported in Telangana on Wednesday, health officials said. The boy recently returned with his parents from Saudi Arabia. He has been admitted to a hospital where his condition is stated to be stable.

"Figures for the last seven days show load factors of over 80 percent for flights to the UK, France and Germany, with a fall to 36 percent for outbound services from those countries, illustrating the demand for homeward travel," said the airline.

Our state-of-the-art aircraft with their advanced air filter systems, combined with strict bio-security screening of our staff mean that we can continue operating a significant number of flights to reunite stranded passengers with their loved ones, the airline said in a statement.

Qatar Airways has informed that it continues to operate more than 150 flights per day to over 70 cities worldwide despite the COVID-19 crisis that has crippled global airline operations.

Senate leaders were trying to overcome late objections to a $2 trillion economic rescue package to ease the financial pain of the pandemic.

New York State alone accounted for more than 30,000 cases and close to 300 deaths , most of them in New York City. In Washington, President Donald Trump implored Congress to move on critical coronavirus aid without further delay.

A makeshift morgue was set up outside Bellevue Hospital, and the city's police, their ranks dwindling as more fall ill, were told to patrol nearly empty streets to enforce social distancing.

New York authorities mobilized to head off a potential public health disaster in the city on Wednesday, with its emergence as the nation's biggest virus epicentre.

New York State alone accounted for more than 30,000 cases and close to 300 deaths.

The tracker had shown 827 deaths a few hours earlier. The United States has the third-highest number of confirmed cases behind China and Italy, and the US death rate is now 1.5 per cent, based on reported cases.

The number of fatalities due to the novel coronavirus rose to 1,031 in the United States on Thursday, with 68,572 confirmed cases nationwide, according to the tracker run by the Johns Hopkins University.

IndusInd Bank, Tech Mahindra, Axis Bank, Sun Pharma and HDFC are among major gainers on Nifty, while losers are Yes Bank, Grasim, JSW Steel, Adani Ports and Maruti Suzuki.

The Indian indices opened on positive note on Thursday with Nifty above 8,400 level. The Sensex is up 243.93 points or 0.85 percent at 28779.71, while the Nifty up 53.85 points or 0.65 percent at 8371.70.

The paper said 22 of the fatalities were in the Bergamo diocese, at the heart of the outbreak not far from the financial centre Milan.

"Priests get sick and die like everybody else, maybe even more than the rest," the Avvenire wrote.

A total of 67 Italian priests infected with the novel coronavirus have died since the pandemic reached the Mediterranean country in February, the Avvenire newspaper said Wednesday. The youngest of those listed by the Catholic Church-affiliated paper was 53.

Scientists investigating SARS-CoV-2 have found that the structure is very similar to the SARS-CoV. But there are also a number of marked differences. For example, one of the most startling differences of COVID-19 is its rapid spread across the world.

An area of inquiry is its relationship to other coronaviruses. For example, its been identified as being part of the same family of coronaviruses which caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). SARS was first identified in 2002. It caused severe respiratory disease which was fatal in approximately 10% of cases. MERS, on the other hand, originated in the Middle East and although less infectious, caused death in around 37% of cases.

Understanding the virus is the preoccupation of scientists who are trying to unravel its mysteries as a first step to finding ways to stop the disease spreading, and to finding a vaccine. On a daily basis scientists are finding out new things about SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the rapidly spreading disease COVID-19.

COVID-19, which first emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019, is relentlessly sweeping across the world. The scale of the epidemic has caused chaos and led to the World Health Organisation declaring it a pandemic in March 2020.

According to reports, four other individuals who came in contact with the patient also tested positive.

He had a travel history of New Delhi and Uttar Pradesh where he was part of the Tablighi Jamaat, attended by people from Malaysia and Indonesia.

According to Kashmir News Observer, the person died due to cardiac arrest and he had a long medical history of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity.

Kashmir recorded its first death due to the novel coronavirus after a 65-year-old man from Soporev who tested positive to COVID-19 passed away at Chest Disease hospital Srinagar on Thursday morning.

"The Saudi G20 Presidency has set the date of the extraordinary virtual Leaders' Summit for Thursday, March 26. King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud will chair the meeting to advance a coordinated global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its human and economic implications," an official statement said on Wednesday.

Saudi Arabia, which currently holds the G20 presidency, last week called for the "virtual summit" following criticism that the powerful group of major economies had been slow to address the global crisis.

Saudi Arabia's King Salman will chair an emergency virtual summit of G20 leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Thursday to advance the coordinated response to the novel coronavirus pandemic that has claimed over 21,000 lives and upended life and businesses across the globe.

"The test came out positive this morning. We are now taking the necessary precautions for her relatives as well," the official said.

The woman, who hailed from Navi Mumbai, had symptoms similar to the coronavirus infection. Thus, as a precautionary measure, her samples were taken and sent for testing, he said.

The test report of a woman who died on 24 March turned out positive for coronavirus on Thursday, taking the COVID-19 toll in Maharashtra to four, a health official said.

Maharashtra, with rest of the country is under lockdown till 14 April. Essential services like food items, vegetables, fruits, grocery and bakery items are exempted from lockdown.

"Two new positive cases of coronavirus in Mumbai and Thane; Till now, the total number of positive cases in the state is 124: Health Department, Maharashtra," ANI tweeted.

Two more positive cases of coronavirus has been reported in Mumbai and Thane on Thursday. With this the total number of positive cases in Maharashtra has gone up to 124, as per the state health department.

"The doctor's wife and daughter have also tested positive," the Delhi health minister said.

A mohalla clinic doctor in Delhi and four others have tested positive for COVID-19 after coming in contact with an infected patient, said Health Minister Satyendar Jain. The woman had recently travelled to Saudi Arabia. With this, the positive cases in the National Capital have risen to 36.

He informed," The company is adopting two pronged approach. At one end, we along with two large PSUs are working with An existing manufacturer of high spec ventilators to help them to simplify design and scale up capacity. Our engineering team is right now with them working on it."

Goenka in a tweet said Mahindra is overwhelmed with pouring in of support from individuals and companies for its effort to make available ventilators.

Mahindra and Mahindra in partnership with two public sector units is working with an existing manufacturer of high-spec ventilators to help them simplify design and scale up capacity, said Pawan Goenka, MD of Mahindra & Mahindra a few days after the chairman Anand Mahindra announced that the group will offer all possible support to deal with COVID-19 contagion.

The two parties decided that the delivery person, along with the vehicle, will be issued passes. Passes can also be availed online after a couple of days. These passes will be produced at each DCP office to the organisations involved in the supply chain. The person must submit his Aadhaar card, and any misuse or false information given would lead to cognizable offence.

On Wednesday evening, over 300 representatives of multiple e-commerce food, medicine, fruits and vegetables delivery aggregators were called for a meeting by the Bengaluru Police Commissioner. The meeting was about the smooth delivery of essentials during the 21-day-long lockdown.

"24% of the confirmed cases in Pakistan so far are between 21 to 30 years of age. This constitutes a majority of the cases. The pattern is unlike other countries where cases mostly comprise older people," Geo TV quotes Mirza as saying.

In contrary to the trend seen in China or any other COVID-affected country, a majority of the 1,022 confirmed cases in Pakistan constitute young adults falling in the age bracket of 21-30 years, Special Assistant on Health Dr Zafar Mirza informed during his televised media briefing on Wednesday.

She also suggested a sector-wise relief package for business badly hit by the pandemic. "Centre must consider announcing sector-wise relief package, including tax breaks, interest subvention, deferment of liability," wrote Sonia.

"At this challenging and uncertain time, it is imperative for each one of us to rise above partisan interests and honour one's duty towards our country and indeed, towards humanity."

"As president of the Congress, I would like to state that we will support and collaborate fully with every step taking by the union government to ensure the containment of the pandemic," Sonia Gandhi wrote in the four-page letter.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Thursday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi supporting the 21-day national lockdown as a "welcome step" while suggesting economic and health measures in its fight against the novel coronavirus.

The airline's entire commercial passenger aircraft fleet of 82 Boeing 737, two Airbus A320 and 32 Bombardier Q-400s is currently grounded as the government has suspended domestic and international flight operations to curb the spread of coronavirus.

"The special flight will be operated as per Government of India's request and the airline will deploy its Boeing 737 aircraft for the assignment," the low-cost carrier said in its press release.

Spicejet has said that it will conduct a special flight to Jodhpur on Sunday to bring Indians returned from Iran yesterday to Delhi. "Will conduct special flight from Delhi to Jodhpur on Sunday to take Indians who have returned from Iran to government quarantine facility," SpiceJet said in a statement.

Press conference will also be live streamed on FINMIN SM Platforms and Telecast live by DD and ANI.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is expected to address the media in New Delhi at 1 pm. The finance minister is likely to announce a relief package amid 21-day nationwide shutdown over coronavirus pandemic.

Close to 900 people are under quarantine after a doctor of a mohalla or community clinic in Delhi tested positive for coronavirus, reported NDTV. They have all been isolated for 14 days, Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain told the media house. He also said the number of coronavirus or COVID-19 cases in Delhi is now 36.

The test is designed to seek out genetic material of the virus in secretions from a patient  most commonly saliva and secretions from the nose, both of which would have small amounts of the virus in an infected person. These samples are collected using a swab, and fed to a portable device that will return a result in 5 to 10 minutes. It uses an extremely rapid method to multiply the genetic material in the sample (exponentially), called Cepat.

Researchers at the NanoBio Lab at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) in Singapore have developed a rapid test that can diagnose a coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2) infection in as little as five minutes. If and when the test seeks the necessary approvals, it would be the fastest test currently available for COVID-19. The team is currently optimising the test for a diverse range of potential patients and hopes to submit the test for approval in a month's time.

Kejriwal said that people are largely keeping indoors and the situation is "under control" but more caution was needed to prevent the spread of the deadly virus.

Also, concerned SDMs and ACPs have been directed to ensure shops selling groceries, vegetables and milk remain open and essential items are adequately stocked in their respective areas, Baijal said.

In a joint digital press conference with Baijal, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said that one case of coronavirus was reported in Delhi in past 24 hours taking the total number of such cases to 36.

The Delhi government will allow shops selling essential items to operate round the clock so that there is no rush of people in the wake of the 21-day lockdown, Lt Governor Anil Baijal said on Thursday.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Yojana will include cash transfers to the poor and migrants.The finance minister has announced medical insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh per health worker for three months.

Under the Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Yojana (food scheme), 80 crore people will be benfitted, said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. "Every one under this scheme will get 5 kg of wheat/rice for free in addition to what they are already getting. We will also give one kg of one choice of pulse to each household under this scheme for the next three months. They can take it in two installments also," said Sitharaman.

"They receive Rs 6,000 per annum through the PM-KISAN scheme. We will now be giving the first instalment upfront. Around 8.69 crore farmer will get immediate benefit out of this," said the finance minister.

"Wage increase under MNREGA scheme will benefit 5 crore families. Wage increase will result in additional income of Rs 2,000 per worker," said Nirmala Sitharaman.

Centre will pay the EPF0 contribution both, of the employer and of the employee (12 percent each) for firms with over 100 employees for the next three months, said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

An order by the department of health also stated that even the healthcare workers working in the facilities which are directly involved in drawing samples from patients at designated hospitals will also be tested for the disease. On Wednesday, the wife and a 17-year-old daughter of the mohalla clinic doctor was tested for COVID-19. Around 1,000 patients who were seen by the doctor between March 12 to March 18 are also being traced.

The city has reported 36 confirmed cases of COVID-19 till Wednesday, of these 26 have a travel history and 10 are of local transmission.

After a 49-year-old doctor working in a mohalla clinic tested positive for COVID-19, the Delhi government has decided to conduct tests for all the healthcare workers who are directly involved in the treatment of COVID-19 patients.

With the help of NGO "Ek Noor" and peace committee members, the police officials of West district initiated a campaign for distribution of food, water and sanitisation in the slum area, a senior police official said.

Approximately 1,000 food packets were distributed with the help of an NGO in slum clusters of West Delhi''s Raghubir Nagar and Ghondewala Mandir, they said.

The Delhi Police on Thursday distributed food packets to slum-dwellers in West Delhi amid the lockdown and educated them about the precautions to be taken in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, officials said.

Kumar had already announced that his state government will bear the treatment costs of coronavirus patients. In a bid to ease the hardships that the poor may face on account of the lockdown necessitated by the coronavirus outbreak, Kumar had also on Wednesday announced that all ration card holding families in the state will get an assistance of Rs one thousand each.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has announced a grant of 100 crores for the coronavirus relief fund which will include shelter and food for labours, rickshaw pullers, roadside vendor and other poor people. He said that shelter camps will also be made along with the health facility.

According to a WhatsApp message, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will be addressing the nation on Friday night to announce the nationwide shutdown.

"There is a rumour going around on WhatsApp - some of you may have heard the rumour - that there is going to be a lockdown in Singapore this weekend. Can I just make it very clear - there is no lockdown," Mr Wong said in a press conference.

WhatsApp messages about Singapore going under possible "lockdown" this weekend over the COVID-19 outbreak are untrue, National Development Minister Lawrence Wong said.

"Following the latest government directive on the COVID-19 situation, SMG will be extending plant shutdown till 14 April, 2020," MSI said in a regulatory filing.

Maruti Suzuki India on Thursday said that the Gujarat-based Suzuki Motor Gujarat Pvt Ltd (SMG) will extend its plant shutdown till 14 April in view of nationwide lockdown announced in the country.

The sale will be regulated through first rule like online submission of prescription. In case of chronic illness, the chemist will not ask for prescription immediately and it can be presented within a month. Ministry said drugs can be supplied at the doorstep of the patients located within the same revenue district where the licensee (Chemist Shop) is located. The chemist will have to submit the email id through prescription is to be received to licensing authority

These medicines fall under the schedule H category which means such drugs cannot be purchased without the prescription of a qualified doctor. The new rules allows submission of prescription in electronic forms if it gets delayed in case of acute crisis.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has issued a gazette notification easing the rules to allow the retail sale of drugs to the doorstep of patients during the 21-day nationwide lockdown.

"If even one link in supply chain is broken, India could run out of stocks of packaged foods in the next 7-10 days. The Centre has issued permissions but we need support at district level," Berry said.

Government support and intervention is required to restore supply chains immediately or the country could run out of stocks of packaged foods in the next 7-10 days, biscuits and dairy giant Britannia Industries managing director Varun Berry said on Thursday, as supply chain disruptions continue to be crippled amidst the Covid-19 outbreak.

ANI further added that a tripartite agreement was signed between the Odisha government, corporates, and medical colleges to set up a 1,000-bed exclusive COVID-19 treatment hospital.

Odisha is to set up the "largest" COVID-19 hospital in the country, ANI reported on Thursday, however, there was no official statement from the state government about the same. "Will be a 1,000 bed hospital and will be functional in a fortnight. Odisha will be the first state in the country to set up such a large scale hospital exclusively to treat COVID-19 patients," the report said.

Health ministry joint secretary Lav Aggarwal on Thursday said, "Forty-two fresh coronavirus cases and four deaths related to COVID-19 have been reported in the last 24 hours. Total number of cases stands at 649."

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said that the government is taking steps to ensure that production, supply or distribution of essential goods and services do not get affected during the 21-day complete lockdown over coronavirus. "States are working to provide food and shelter to migrant workers," said Punya Salila Srivastava, Joint Secretary, MHA.

Joint Secretary of the health ministry, Lav Aggarwal, said that while cases of coronavirus are increasing in India, the rate at which they are increasing "appears to be relatively stabilising". "However, this is only the initial trend," he said in the daily briefing on Thursday.

Iran on Thursday announced 157 new deaths from the novel coronavirus, AFP reported on Thursday. The total figure of deaths in the country is now 2,234. The report also said that Iran has imposed a ban on intercity travel to try to curb the spread.

CNN-News18 reported that a few migrants were made to crawl by the Uttar Pradesh Police in the Badaun district.

"Seventeen states are starting to build hospitals dedicated for COVID-19. States have been asked to make dedicated COVID-19 hospitals," he added.

Health ministry joint secretary Lav Aggarwal addressed concerns of the condition of daily wage workers and migrant workers stranded in cities after the 21-day lockdown was enforced and said that they will be given shelter and food from the government. "We have to stay where we are instead of moving around," he added, reiterating the need for self-isolation.

R Ganga Ketkar of the Indian Council of Medical Research on Thursday said that the steps taken by the government "are so effective that if we follow them strictly, the coronavirus cases will hardly increase in the country".

Rajasthan deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot replied to NC leader Omar Abdullah regarding some Kashmiri students stranded in Rajasthan's Kota district. Pilot said, "Kota district officials and local police are in touch with these students now. Will be provided transport and/or accommodation, meals. And also to all other such stranded students from all over the country."

State governments like Jharkhand and Rajasthan have reached out to native migrants in other states as the 21-day complete lockdown over the coronavirus was imposed on Tuesday.

The Mumbai Police on Thursday tweeted, "Essential pass, for essential services. Requesting all shops providing essential services & commodities, to reach out to their local police station for these passes, to ensure hassle-free commute and sale."

He also said that COVID-19 "does not spread through mosquitoes".

"Community transmission phase of COVID-19 will start if the community and we (the government) don't work collectively and follow guidelines. But it would never happen in India if we follow social distancing and treatment properly," said Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Union Health Ministry.

He added, "Sanitizers developed by us have been distributed to many people. In the last 15-20 days, we have supplied more than 20,000 sanitizer bottles to various agencies."

Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) chairman, Dr G Satheesh Reddy was quoted by ANI as saying, "We have also developed N-99 and three-layered masks, we have produced more than 20,000 masks and supplied to various agencies, including Delhi Police."

The Ministry of Food Processing Industries on Thursday wrote to state governments to ensure seamless production and distribution of essential food products during the 21-day lockdown over coronavirus. The statement also said that a grievance redressal cell has been set up.

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday directed officials and vendors to practice social distancing, in a market in Kolkata.

The Jammu and Kashmir government on Thursday said that a total of 13 people have been tested positive for the novel coronavirus till Thursday in the union territory. 5482 people in contact with possibly infected/positive cases have till now been put under surveillance, the statement added.

As job losses mount, some economists say the nations unemployment rate could approach 13 percent by May.

The pace of layoffs is sure to accelerate as the U.S. economy sinks into a recession. Revenue has collapsed at restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, gyms, and airlines. Auto sales are plummeting, and car makers have close factories. Most such employers face loan payments and other fixed costs, so theyre cutting jobs to save money.

Nearly 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week  more than quadruple the previous record set in 1982  amid a widespread economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus. The surge in weekly applications was a stunning reflection of the damage the viral outbreak is doing to the economy. Filings for unemployment aid generally reflect the pace of layoffs.

"Being the police chief of the district, I feel sorry and apologise for this. Investigation is being conducted against the responsible person," said Ashok Kumar Tripathi, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Badaun.

After a video of police personnel in Uttar Pradesh's Badaun making migrant workers crawl on the roads went viral on Thursday, the Uttar Pradesh Police issued an apology for the incident and said that disciplinary action had been initiated.

The US Embassy in India issued an alert for its citizens stranded in India and said, "We urge US citizens to secure and keep your travel documents ready, as flights may be announced on short notice."

Police personnel in several states like Rajasthan and Karnataka "punished" people for violating the lockdown over the coronavirus. Uttar Pradesh Police apologised for a similar incident in the state's Badaun area after a video of it went viral.

Mahindra Group chairperson Anand Mahindra on Thursday congratulated two teams of the company for producing various renditions of a ventilator for coronavirus patients.

A homeless couple living near Jantar Mantar in Delhi, Sapna and Sanjay, said that they were worried about sustenance amid the complete lockdown over the coronavirus. Sanjay was quoted by ANI as saying, "We have exhausted our rations and don't know what will happen now. My wife is 8 months pregnant, my heart aches that she has to go hungry."

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said on Thursday, "It has been decided that scheduled international commercial passenger services shall remain closed till 18.30 hrs (GMT) of 14 April, 2020. This will not apply to approved international all-cargo operations and flights."

The Delhi Police on Thursday distributed food to people in the Najafgarh and Majnu ka Tila areas of the National Capital, ANI reported.

Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh said that there was no restriction on the timings of essential service shops. "I assure that the food delivery boys will face no difficulty in carrying out their duties," he said.

The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) on Thursday made a donation of Rs 33 crore to the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund for those affected by the coronavirus pandemic. "We are dutifully committed to stand firmly with our Nation in this challenging time of COVID-19 spread. Its a unanimous decision and a sincere effort by our personnel. The effort was to make the immediate contribution with the noble intent to keep it unrevealed. The CRPF remains steadfast towards its motto of service and loyalty," the statement said.

The Chhattisgarh government has reportedly taken over all the private medical colleges, nursing homes, and hospitals, including RIMS in Ranchi, to use as centres to treat coronavirus patients.

The Jammu and Kashmir police is putting stamps reading 'corona lockdown violator' on the hands of people in Ranbir Singh Pura city who are violating the complete lockdown over coronavirus. Shabir Khan, SDPO, RS Pura said, "We are using a permanent ink that takes around 15 days to erase".

The health ministry on Thursday said that 88 new cases of the novel coronavirus were reported in the country in a day, which is the highest jump of infections in a single day. The total number of cases rises to 694, the statement said.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said, "The government announcement today of a financial assistance package, is the first step in the right direction."

The G20 nations on Thursday pledged $5 trillion for the global economy as the world struggles to combat the global coronavirus pandemic.

The Delhi government on Thursday withdrew the permission it had granted to online delivery services like Zomato to function during the 21-day complete lockdown.

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Thursday issued a notification allowing inter-state travel of animal fodder, The Indian Express reported. "It is hereby clarified that exceptions under clause 6 covers the transportation/inter-state movement of animal feed and fodder, being the essential items," the notification read.

Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh said on Thursday, "Nearly 11,000 convicts and undertrials who are imprisoned for offences with prescribed punishment up to 7 years or less should be released on emergency parole or furlough to reduce overcrowding in prisons & to contain COVID-19 outbreak."

In his remarks at the G20 virtual summit, Narendra Modi noted the alarming social and economic cost of the coronavirus pandemic. He added that 90 percent of the COVID-19 cases and 88 percent of deaths were in G20 countries, even as they share 80 percent of world GDP and 60 percent of world population, the Ministry of External Affairs said.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said that G20 leaders committed to using all available policy tools to minimise economic and social cost of the COVID-19 pandemic and to restore global growth, market stability and strengthening resilience. G20 countries also committed to injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy.

"G20 leaders agreed to take all necessary measures to contain COVID-19 pandemic and protect people. They also supported the strengthening of WHOs mandate in the fight against pandemics, including delivery of medical supplies, diagnostic tools, treatments, medicines and vaccines," the MEA said on Thursday.

Social workers on Thursday distributed food to people near the Kurla Terminus in Mumbai.

On 25 March, he self-reported for collection of samples for the coronavirus test at the Gandhi hospital, and was tested positive for coronavirus on 26 March.

On 14 March, the patient travelled by train to Delhi from Hyderabad and travelled back by train on 17 March. On 18 March, the patient arrived at the Secunderabad station, where he developed cold and fever, after which he went home in an auto with this son, the notification said. The same day, he consulted a doctor at Quthbullapur and was prescribed medicines.

The Telangana government on Thursday reported four new cases, which brought the total cases of coronavirus in the state to 44, of which one has recovered.

A man, in his mid-30s, tested positive for the COVID-19 in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands on Thursday, the first case in the Union Territory, officials said. The man, a resident of Mayabunder, had returned from Kolkata on 24 March, Chief Secretary Chetan Sanghi said.

Doctors in the coronavirus-hit Chinese city of Wuhan plan to embark on a long-term study of COVID-19 impact on the male reproductive system to verify initial research, indicating that the pathogen could affect sex hormone levels in men, PTI reported.

He added, "When the accident took place, factory workers admitted her to a govt hospital in Bharat Nagar. Doctors there were taking x-rays of her chest instead of treating her leg. They said that her lungs have filled up with water. So I came to Kanganwal."

"Nobody was ready to drive us to the hospital due to the lockdown. Ambulance drivers were asking for Rs 2,000 which I could not pay, so I had to carry her on my bicycle," the husband, Devdutt Ram, said.

A man carried his injured wife on a bicycle for 12 kilometres from Bharat Nagar to Kanganwal in Punjab to reach a hospital. The woman got injured during an accident which occurred on 20 March while she was working in a factory.

While the number of positive coronavirus cases in India rose to 694, the toll rose to 16 on Thursday, the health ministry said. 44 people have recovered from the infection. The states of Kerala and Maharashtra are the worst affected by the COVID-19, with 125 and 124 cases, respectively.

PTI quoted Maharashtra Police as saying that two container trucks carrying over 300 migrant workers heading home to Rajasthan from Telangana intercepted in Maharashtra.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said that G20 leaders committed to using all available policy tools to minimise economic and social cost of the COVID-19 pandemic and to restore global growth, market stability and strengthening resilience. G20 countries also committed to injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy.

"G20 leaders agreed to take all necessary measures to contain COVID-19 pandemic and protect people. They also supported the strengthening of WHOs mandate in the fight against pandemics, including delivery of medical supplies, diagnostic tools, treatments, medicines and vaccines," the MEA said on Thursday.

Maharashtra: Social workers distributed food to the needy people today near the Kurla Terminus in Mumbai. #COVID19 #CoronavirusLockdown pic.twitter.com/cKlBB7iAGe

Social workers on Thursday distributed food to people near the Kurla Terminus in Mumbai.

On 25 March, he self-reported for collection of samples for the coronavirus test at the Gandhi hospital, and was tested positive for coronavirus on 26 March.

On 14 March, the patient travelled by train to Delhi from Hyderabad and travelled back by train on 17 March. On 18 March, the patient arrived at the Secunderabad station, where he developed cold and fever, after which he went home in an auto with this son, the notification said. The same day, he consulted a doctor at Quthbullapur and was prescribed medicines.

The Telangana government on Thursday reported four new cases, which brought the total cases of coronavirus in the state to 44, of which one has recovered.

A man, in his mid-30s, tested positive for the COVID-19 in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands on Thursday, the first case in the Union Territory, officials said. The man, a resident of Mayabunder, had returned from Kolkata on 24 March, Chief Secretary Chetan Sanghi said.

Doctors in the coronavirus-hit Chinese city of Wuhan plan to embark on a long-term study of COVID-19 impact on the male reproductive system to verify initial research, indicating that the pathogen could affect sex hormone levels in men, PTI reported.

Ludhiana: A man carried his injured wife on a bicycle for 12 kilometers from Bharat Nagar to Kanganwal to reach a hospital. The woman got injured during an accident which occurred on March 20 while she was working at a factory. #CoronavirusLockdown #Punjab pic.twitter.com/tX9dgxZ14C

He added, "When the accident took place, factory workers admitted her to a govt hospital in Bharat Nagar. Doctors there were taking x-rays of her chest instead of treating her leg. They said that her lungs have filled up with water. So I came to Kanganwal."

"Nobody was ready to drive us to the hospital due to the lockdown. Ambulance drivers were asking for Rs 2,000 which I could not pay, so I had to carry her on my bicycle," the husband, Devdutt Ram, said.

A man carried his injured wife on a bicycle for 12 kilometres from Bharat Nagar to Kanganwal in Punjab to reach a hospital. The woman got injured during an accident which occurred on 20 March while she was working in a factory.

Around the globe, the death toll stood at nearly 8,200 in Italy, more than 4,100 in Spain and over 1,000 in the US, approximately 400 of them in New York State, the worst hotspot in the nation. The United Nations estimated that as many as 25 million jobs could be lost in the economic upheaval, more than during the global financial meltdown of 2008.

In India, where the countrys 1.3 billion people were under orders to stay home, legions of poor were suddenly thrown out of work, and many families were left struggling for something to eat.

As the number of infections around the globe reached a half-million and world leaders held a video summit to grapple with how long to keep the economy at a standstill to help flatten the rising curve, the damage to peoples livelihoods and their well-being started to come into focus.

The human and economic toll of the lockdowns against the coronavirus mounted Thursday as India struggled to feed the multitudes, Italy shut down most of its industry, and a record-shattering 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in a single week.

While the number of positive coronavirus cases in India rose to 694, the toll rose to 16 on Thursday, the health ministry said. 44 people have recovered from the infection. The states of Kerala and Maharashtra are the worst affected by the COVID-19, with 125 and 124 cases, respectively.

Maharashtra: Yavatmal police stopped two trucks carrying people, at a border check post on the Maharashtra-Telangana border. They were going to their home state Rajasthan from Telangana amid #CoronavirusLockdown . (26.03.2020) pic.twitter.com/iQusa0zvCX

PTI quoted Maharashtra Police as saying that two container trucks carrying over 300 migrant workers heading home to Rajasthan from Telangana intercepted in Maharashtra.

Coronavirus Outbreak Updates: G20 leaders committed to using all available policy tools to minimize economic and social cost of the COVID-19 pandemic and to restore global growth, market stability & strengthening resilience. G20 countries also committed to injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy.

The health ministry on Thursday said that 88 new cases of the novel coronavirus were reported in the country in a day, which is the highest jump of infections in a single day. The total number of cases rises to 694, the statement said.

The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) on Thursday made a donation of Rs 33 crore to the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund for those affected by the coronavirus pandemic. "We are dutifully committed to stand firmly with our Nation in this challenging time of COVID-19 spread. Its a unanimous decision and a sincere effort by our personnel. The effort was to make the immediate contribution with the noble intent to keep it unrevealed. The CRPF remains steadfast towards its motto of service and loyalty," the statement said.

After a video of police personnel in Uttar Pradesh's Badaun making migrant workers crawl on the roads went viral on Thursday, the Uttar Pradesh Police issued an apology for the incident and said that disciplinary action had been initiated.

"Being the police chief of the district, I feel sorry and apologise for this. Investigation is being conducted against the responsible person," said Ashok Kumar Tripathi, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Badaun.

Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) chairman, Dr G Satheesh Reddy was quoted by ANI as saying, "We have also developed N-99 and three-layered masks, we have produced more than 20,000 masks and supplied to various agencies, including Delhi Police."

State governments like Jharkhand and Rajasthan have reached out to native migrants in other states as the 21-day complete lockdown over the coronavirus was imposed on Tuesday.

Rajasthan deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot replied to NC leader Omar Abdullah regarding some Kashmiri students stranded in Rajasthan's Kota district. Pilot said, "Kota district officials and local police are in touch with these students now. Will be provided transport and/or accommodation, meals. And also to all other such stranded students from all over the country."

Meanwhile, Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren took note of people stuck in Chennai.

Joint Secretary of the health ministry, Lav Aggarwal, said that while cases of coronavirus are increasing in India, the rate at which they are increasing "appears to be relatively stabilising". "However, this is only the initial trend," he said in the daily briefing on Thursday.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has issued a gazette notification easing the rules to allow the retail sale of drugs to the doorstep of patients during the 21-day nationwide lockdown.

These medicines fall under the schedule H category which means such drugs cannot be purchased without the prescription of a qualified doctor. The new rules allows submission of prescription in electronic forms if it gets delayed in case of acute crisis.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has announced a grant of 100 crores for the coronavirus relief fund which will include shelter and food for labours, rickshaw pullers, roadside vendor and other poor people. He said that shelter camps will also be made along with the health facility.

Kumar had already announced that his state government will bear the treatment costs of coronavirus patients. In a bid to ease the hardships that the poor may face on account of the lockdown necessitated by the coronavirus outbreak, Kumar had also on Wednesday announced that all ration card holding families in the state will get an assistance of Rs one thousand each.

Under Ujjwala scheme women will be given free cylinders for the next three months. 8.3 crore families below poverty line will get free LPG cylinders for three months.

Under the Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Yojana (food scheme), 80 crore people will be benfitted, said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. "Every one under this scheme will get 5 kg of wheat/rice for free in addition to what they are already getting. We will also give one kg of one choice of pulse to each household under this scheme for the next three months. They can take it in two installments also," said Sitharaman.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Yojana will include cash transfers to the poor and migrants.The finance minister has announced medical insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh per health worker for three months.

The Centre on Thursday announced the 'Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Scheme' for Rs 1.7 lakh crore. "This scheme includes food security and cash transfers," said Nirmala Sitharaman.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is expected to address the media in New Delhi at 1 pm. The finance minister is likely to announce a relief package amid 21-day nationwide shutdown over coronavirus pandemic.

Spicejet has said that it will conduct a special flight to Jodhpur on Sunday to bring Indians returned from Iran yesterday to Delhi. "Will conduct special flight from Delhi to Jodhpur on Sunday to take Indians who have returned from Iran to government quarantine facility," SpiceJet said in a statement.

"The special flight will be operated as per Government of India's request and the airline will deploy its Boeing 737 aircraft for the assignment," the low-cost carrier said in its press release

According to the Union Health Ministry, the number of cases of coronavirus infection has reached 649 across the nation. The number of patients who have recovered and discharged from hospitals are 42. So far, India has reported 13 deaths.

Kashmir recorded its first death due to the novel coronavirus after a 65-year-old man from Soporev who tested positive to COVID-19 passed away at Chest Disease hospital Srinagar on Thursday morning.

According to Kashmir News Observer, the person died due to cardiac arrest and he had a long medical history of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity.

The Indian indices opened on positive note on Thursday with Nifty above 8,400 level. The Sensex is up 243.93 points or 0.85 percent at 28779.71, while the Nifty up 53.85 points or 0.65 percent at 8371.70.

IndusInd Bank, Tech Mahindra, Axis Bank, Sun Pharma and HDFC are among major gainers on Nifty, while losers are Yes Bank, Grasim, JSW Steel, Adani Ports and Maruti Suzuki.

A three-year-old is among two COVID-19 positive cases reported in Telangana on Wednesday, health officials said. The boy recently returned with his parents from Saudi Arabia. He has been admitted to a hospital where his condition is stated to be stable.

A 43-year-old woman from Hyderabad with no history of international travel has also tested positive. She is the primary contact of a positive case reported earlier.

Amid the worldwide increase in COVID-19 cases, World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday said that a nationwide shurdown, which is being implemented by India and many other countries to curb the fast-spreading virus, will not be enough to eradicate the pandemic.

"To slow the spread of Covid-19, many countries introduced "lockdown" measures. But on their own, these measures will not extinguish epidemics. We call on all countries to use this time to attack the novel coronavirus. You have created a second window of opportunity," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press conference.

A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown to contain the coronavirus pandemic, nearly 90 more coronavirus positive cases were reported in India, taking the total number of cases to 606 on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the number of cases was 519.

The death toll due to the virus increased to 10 with another fatality being reported from Maharashtra, according to official data.

Madhya Pradesh reported its first coronavirus death, a woman who succumbed to viral infection, an official was quoted by PTI as saying.

However, in what may be seen as some reassuring news, joint secretary in the health ministry Lav Agarwal told CNN-News18 that no community transmission of the novel coronavirus has been reported in India yet.

State-wise figures

In its updated figures at 6.45 pm on Wednesday, the ministry stated that Maharashtra has reported three deaths and one death each was reported from Bihar, Karnataka, Gujarat, Punjab, Delhi, West Bengal, and Himachal Pradesh.

The ministry said Maharashtra has reported the highest number of COVID-19 cases so far at 128, including three foreign nationals, followed by Kerala which has recorded 109 cases, including eight foreign nationals.

Karnataka has reported 41 cases of coronavirus patients, while cases in Gujarat rose to 38, including one foreigner.

Cases in Uttar Pradesh rose to 37, including a foreigner. The number of cases in Rajasthan increased to 36, including two foreigners, while the positive cases in Telangana stood at 35, including 10 foreigners.

Cases in Delhi rose to 31, including one foreigner.

Punjab reported 29 cases while In Haryana, there are 28 cases, including 14 foreigners.

Madhya Pradesh recorded 14 cases, Ladakh has 13, while Tamil Nadu has reported 18 cases, including two foreigners.

West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh have nine cases each.

Chandigarh, as well as Jammu and Kashmir, have reported seven cases each so far.

Uttarakhand has four cases, including one foreigner. Bihar also has four cases.

There are three cases in Himachal Pradesh while there are two cases in Odisha. Puducherry, Mizoram, Manipur, and Chhattisgarh have reported a case each.

People in white coats like God, says Modi

Narendra Modi, noting reports of doctors facing discrimination for treating coronavirus patients in several parts of the country, said that he is very pained with the discriminatory behaviour against the staff of essential services. Warning against discrimination, he said that "people in white coats and doctors are like God right now, they are protecting us".

"I appeal to all the citizens, if you notice any incident where professionals, such as doctors and nurses, are ill-treated then you should take an initiative to make such people (those who are ill-treating healthcare professionals) understand that they are wrong. I have told Home Ministry and DGPs to take strict action against those who are not supporting or not co-operating with doctors, nurses and other professionals who are serving us in this critical time," Modi said in his address to the citizens of Varanasi on Wednesday.

            -,                             , ,              pic.twitter.com/XGTKx1V2yA  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 25, 2020

In a similar vein, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said, "Some landlords are threatening to evict doctors/nurses from their houses. They're saying they'll (medical personnel) spread the coronavirus. It won't be tolerated. God forbid, if someone gets infected from your house then they, and no one else, will come to your rescue...."

States announce relief measures for underprivileged

Newly sworn-in Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Wednesday announced an aid of Rs 1,000 for labourers in the unorganised sector.

He also announced that beneficiaries of the social security pension scheme, widow pension, old-age pension and destitute pension schemes will get two months' pension in advance.

Labourers in the unorganised sector will be given financial assistance of Rs 1,000 each through the Sannirman Karmkar Mandal, said Chouhan who took over as chief minister two days ago.

Further, an advance of Rs 2,000 per family would be provided to members of the Shariya, Baiga, and Bhariya tribal communities, he said.

As schools are closed, some 65.91 lakh students do not get mid-day meals at school. Therefore, Rs 155 would be transferred into the bank account of each primary school student and Rs 232 in the account of each middle-school student, adding up to an aid of total of Rs 156.15 crore, he said.

The Kerala government is planning to come up with 'community kitchen' to cater food to the needy, said Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

The state is also going to come up with 1,000 restaurants that will provide home delivery of food at a subsidised rate.

Speaking to media persons here on Wednesday, the Kerala chief minister said that the local self government institutions would ensure the supply of food items to those affected by the lockdown so that there is no starvation in the state.

"We expect people to cooperate and stay where they are as suggested by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They should not violate the conditions enforced during the quarantine," he said.

The state cabinet had decided to come out with the Kerala Epidemic Disease Ordinance 2020.

Earlier in the day, the chief minister tweeted, "Kerala has taken extensive measures to ensure that no one will starve during the lockdown. Will be implemented through Local Self Governments, ward-level committees, and volunteer."

Pakistan suspends domestic flights

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Pakistan, the government suspended all domestic flight operations until 2 April to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus after the country reported nearly 1,000 cases from the COVID-19 infection, authorities said on Wednesday.

The nationwide tally of the COVID-19 patients has soared to 990 with 410 cases in Sindh; 110 in Balochistan; 296 in Punjab; 78 in K-P; 80 in Gilgit-Baltistan; 15 in Islamabad; and one in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, The Express Tribune reported.

The National Disaster Management Authority has said that so far seven people have died due to the novel coronavirus and 18 recovered.

Meanwhile, Spain deputy prime minister Carmen Calvo reportedly tested positive for coronavirus. "She had tested negative in previous tests, the statement said, but doctors didn't think those provided conclusive data. Calvo is receiving medical treatment and progressing favorably, the statement said. She's in quarantine at a hospital," CNN reported.

Spain recorded the worlds second-highest tally of coronavirus deaths after 738 more reportedly died on Wednesday, the country's deadliest toll in one day, according to AP.

With 3,434 coronavirus patients dead, Spain surpassed Chinas death toll of 3,285. Italy still has the most deaths of any nation in the world with 6,820. Infections in Spain also rose 20 percent from a day earlier to 47,610.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, has tested positive for the new coronavirus. The palace says he has mild symptoms.

With inputs from agencies
The UAE announced on Wednesday the detection of 85 new coronavirus (COVID-19) cases and the recovery of seven more individuals.



Dr Farida Al Hosani, the official spokesperson for the UAE health sector, highlighted the latest COVID-19 developments in the country and the measures taken by Emirati authorities to combat the spread of the pandemic, reported Emirates news agency Wam.



Dr Al Hosani, who is also the Director of the Department of Communicable Diseases at the Abu Dhabi Centre for Public Health, said that the new cases are from various nationalities, including one each from Djibouti, Canada, Hungary, Russia, Belgium, Mauritius, Tunisia, Serbia, Venezuela, Sweden, Brazil, Romania, and Oman; two each from Palestine, Indonesia, Colombia, Japan, Germany, Egypt, Morocco and Spain; three each from the Netherlands, Australia, South Africa, Philippines, France, India, the US, and China; four each from Saudi Arabia and Italy; five each from Iran and Pakistan, and seven each from the UAE and Britain, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 333.



She also announced the recovery of seven cases among individuals--five Bangladeshi and two Pakistani nationals--who have all been discharged from the hospital after making a full recovery, taking the total number of recoveries in the UAE to 52 so far.



Dr Al Hosani stressed the importance of all UAE citizens and residents staying home unless absolutely necessary and adhering to all the precautionary measures advised by the relevant authorities.



"The detection of one infected case compels the authorities to conduct a necessary investigation among all those in contact with this one case in order to identify the source of the infection and its aftermath. In this we usually detect additional cases. It usually starts with a person coming from abroad who then transmits the virus to others around him or her," she explained.



"The recent precautionary measures announced are aimed at protecting society, with the law to be applied only to violators of the UAE law on communicable diseases, under which violators are subject to jail terms and fines," she warned.
BRUSSELS - European Union leaders gave Albania and North Macedonia the greenlight Thursday to begin EU membership talks, ending a long series of setbacks and disappointments for the two Balkans nations quest to join.

No date was set for the start of the membership negotiations, which can take several years.

Albania and North Macedonia were meant to begin accession talks last year, but French President Emmanuel Macron blocked the move and said he would continue to do so until the process for allowing countries into the 27-nation bloc had been reformed.

Macron did so despite warnings that further delays to the countries membership efforts could undermine stability in the volatile Balkans. North Macedonias leader reacted by stepping down and calling early parliamentary elections.

The European Commission later revised the accession process for North Macedonia and Albania to respond to Macrons objections and other questions raised by the Netherlands.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, left, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom ( Associated Press )

On Tuesday, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, spoke to the media from a Manhattan convention center thats being converted into a 1,000-bed hospital for COVID-19 patients.

No one delivers bad news as well as Cuomo. He is a master of rue. Also bluntness. And that combination is what New York, and the nation, is starved for these days.

Not condescension. Not soothing blandishments. Not dangerous Trumpist lies that imply the sick will rise from their beds and the dead from their graves on Easter Sunday.

While Cuomos daily pressers communicate home truths, the delusions President Trump shares in his news conferences veer toward the sickeningly bizarre. His self-serving distortions deserve to be declared a public health hazard.

But back to Cuomo. He customarily starts with the hard facts.

The increase in the number of cases continues unabated, he said Tuesday, gesturing at a harrowing graph that made it clear why New York is the epicenter of the virus in the U.S. We havent flattened the curve. The curve is actually increasing.

On Wednesday, he tempered that, but just a tad: Data, he said, suggests confirmed cases have been doubling, but not as rapidly as every two days. On Thursday, he delivered the news that New York hospitals will soon be overwhelmed no matter what is done to mitigate the spread of the disease.

Cuomo doesn't apologize for being grim. His unvarnished talk brings to mind the words of another leader, 80 years ago: Winston Churchill. Sure, Cuomos Queens accent is nothing like Churchills Queens English. But the governors simple candor recalls Churchills statement about the Nazi victory over the French.

The news from France is very bad.

The simple truth has poetry to it.

Likewise, the news from New York is very bad. The latest count: 34,486 COVID-19 cases reported in the state and neighboring New Jersey, where many hard-hit municipalities are New York City suburbs. The states have seen 329 deaths between them.

Story continues

In California, by contrast, the Wednesday count was 2,648 cases and 56 deaths. But it too is a hotspot, and the upward curve of the pandemic there could soon equal New Yorks.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom favors unminced words almost as much as Cuomo. He was first in the nation to order statewide stay-at-home restrictions; he too holds frank daily news conferences.

[On] the question of whether California will open in April, let me be sober about that. Im not Pollyanna-ish, Newsom said Tuesday in his Marin County accent. Early April  would be misleading. On Wednesday, he reiterated: "The stay-at-home orders are real.... Halfway is no way."

Truth telling can be nasty business. Cuomo is far pushier about being in the vanguard of the COVID-19 disaster than Newsom, at least so far. Maybe its a Queens versus Marin thing, but depending on how fast, or if, Californians bend the curve, the coastal distinction in manners may fade.

When Cuomo made it clear last week that New York would need at least 30,000 ventilators to keep virus patients alive, Washington sent 400 (later bumped up by 2,000). Cuomo snapped: "You pick the people who are going to die because you only sent 400 ventilators."

On Wednesday, Cuomo was equally disgusted by the stimulus bill that finally passed in the Republican-majority Senate. What does it mean for New York state?" Cuomo asked. "It means $3.8 billion. $3.8 billion sounds like a lot of money, but were looking at a revenue shortfall of [as much as] $15 billion.

No one could have predicted the exact nature and trajectory of COVID-19. But perhaps we could have predicted Trumps exact response to an existential threat  opening up a firehose of lies.

In the Greek tragedy that has been Trumps term in office  where one act of hubris after another has imperiled American democracy and now hundreds of thousands of human lives  the president never fails to take the side of Americas enemies against its people. In this case, he seems to favor the spread of a virus over the lives of the afflicted. Especially if it might lift the Dow.

But another parallel tragedy has been the enforced cowardice of those around him, with only a few standout exceptions (notably, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whom Trump has failed to sideline so far).

Andy Slavitt, who was the head of Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act under President Obama, posted a chilling Twitter thread about Trumps response to COVID-19 two weeks ago. He wrote that more than a million people may die in the U.S. because the Trump administration dithered, plus this: Federal workers could not be seen contradicting Trump.

Lets get this straight: When actions could have done the most to save lives and lessen the huge financial hit of the coronavirus, government officials, experts in their fields, were so cowed by our unstable president and his itchy Twitter trigger finger that they didnt speak up  even to save lives. That is a national government decompensating.

Whats left, for now, is federalism. Which is why Americans can turn to their governors  with Cuomo and Newsom in the lead  to speak the truth, mandate the shutdowns, contradict what passes for pandemic policy under Trump. As Churchill might have said, appeasing a tyrant never ends well.

@page88





For the record:

4:52 PM, Mar. 26, 2020: A previous version of this column said that Dr. Anthony Fauci is with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.


Childline has experienced unprecedented demand for its services as more and more young people become increasingly distressed about coronavirus.

Across the UK there have been over 900 counselling sessions with youths since the outbreak.

These were delivered by staff working at Childline's two Northern Ireland bases, in Belfast and Foyle, between January 21 and March 22.

Nearly two-thirds (597) took place last week as parents started working from home and closures were announced.

The demand for support services hit a peak on March 18, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that schools would be shutting down.

Childline delivered 121 counselling sessions on the issue in one day alone.

More than half of those who spoke to Childline last week about coronavirus were counselled for their mental and emotional health as they struggled to cope with issues including isolation, arguments at home and the removal of professional support from schools and the NHS.

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One teenage girl told a counsellor: "I feel really anxious, upset and lonely.

"The news has made my mental health worse, but my Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service appointment has been cancelled and school has closed.

"I'm stuck at home and having a horrible time because my sisters are bullying me because I'm autistic." Childline staff and volunteers are battling to keep the essential service running and continue to support children throughout the crisis.

While the service has reduced slightly because some volunteer counsellors have been told to self-isolate, it continues to be a lifeline for some of the most vulnerable children.

Last week Childline delivered more than 50 counselling sessions to children who were having suicidal thoughts, which were exacerbated by feelings of being trapped and isolated, themselves caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Other issues raised included school work and family relationships.

One girl told Childline: "My mum is being very distant with me and I am usually very close to her, so it's really upsetting me.

"My mum and I have a good relationship, but she's really obsessed with the news and she won't hug me or even get very close to me.

"It scares me to think this will go on for months.

"She constantly talks about the coronavirus and my anxiety is getting worse."

Most of the young people Childline has been supporting are 12 to 15-year-old girls.

Belfast Childline service manager Mairead Monds said: "The 24/7 news cycle about coronavirus is causing huge worry and anxiety in young people, particularly those who are already coping with many other issues in their lives."

Parentline NI has also received a high volume of calls over the past 10 days.

The organisation issued a reminder to parents that it offers free support and guidance.

The most common problems raised in the calls related to anxiety, separation, substance misuse, boundaries in general but particularly with teenagers and parental mental health.

It has also taken calls about suicidal teenagers.

Contact Childine on 0800 1111 or www.childline.org.uk. Contact Parentline for free on 0808 8020 400 or chat online at www.ci-ni.org.uk
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 18:22:27|Editor: zyl

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A traffic assistant wearing a mask directs traffic in Dakar, Senegal, March 26, 2020. Senegalese Ministry of Health and Social Action confirmed on Thursday the country's total COVID-19 cases have surpassed 100, with six new confirmed cases reported, bringing the total number to 105. Monday night, Senegalese President Macky Sall declared a state of emergency from midnight Monday, along with a dusk-to-dawn curfew, effective from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. the next day. Sall also banned public or private meetings of any kind, and ordered temporary closure of public places and meeting places. Senegal has suspended all international passenger flights till April 17. (Photo by Eddy Peters/Xinhua)

DAKAR, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Senegalese Ministry of Health and Social Action confirmed on Thursday the country's total COVID-19 cases have surpassed 100, with six new confirmed cases reported, bringing the total number to 105.

During the daily press conference on COVID-19, Dr. Alyose Waly Diouf, spokesperson of the health ministry said among 130 tests done by Institute Pasteur in Dakar, 6 came back positive, including 5 imported cases and one close contact of earlier confirmed patients.

Among the 105 confirmed cases, 51 are imported ones.

Monday night, Senegalese President Macky Sall declared a state of emergency from midnight Monday, along with a dusk-to-dawn curfew, effective from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. the next day.

Sall also banned public or private meetings of any kind, and ordered temporary closure of public places and meeting places.

Senegal has suspended all international passenger flights till April 17.

Nine patients have been declared cured by local health authorities.
Fresh Fighting Adds 1,000 to Displaced Population in Myanmar's Rakhine

2020-03-25 -- More than 1,000 civilians in Minbya township have been displaced by fighting between Myanmar forces and the rebel Arakan Army in the latest flare-up in a conflict that has raged in Rakhine state for more than a year and uprooted 140,000 people, local villagers said Wednesday.

Villagers from five communities in the township fled when Myanmar soldiers open fire in their areas, they said.

"People from Kyautmaw, Phone Thar Paletaung, Kwa Sone, Taung Pauk Kay and Sattara villages fled from their homes to other villages" said an area resident who declined to give his name out of fear for his safety.

"We don't want the military to open fire on villages," he said. "The villagers are worried about getting into trouble [but] people don't know anything."

Both the AA and Myanmar soldiers have apprehended villagers they believe may be abetting the enemy. Civilians have reported that government troops have interrogated and at times tortured villagers in an effort to find civilians who are helping the AA.

Myanmar soldiers "opened fire on Kyautmaw and Taung Pauk Kay villages, and the villagers ran away," said a resident of Kyautmaw who also declined to give his name out of fear for his safety.

"A military convoy is near Phone Thar Kwa Sone village," he added. "We don't know where they were shooting, but bullets landed on our house in Kyautmaw village. We didn't leave when we heard that the military convoy was coming, but we fled when they opened fire on the villages."

Thursday marks the second time that residents of the villages have been forced to flee their homes amid the 15-month-old conflict. They also left their homes in June 2019, local residents said.

Myanmar military spokesman Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun said that the government army was not engaged in any battles in Minbya township.

"There is no fighting in that area. We had fighting in the Paletwa area," he told RFA's Myanmar Service, referring to hostilities in a township in neighboring Chin state.

On Monday, a Myanmar military airstrike following fierce fighting killed a child and wounded 15 people in a village in Minbya township, hours after the government formally branded the AA an unlawful association and a terrorist group.

The Myanmar military confirmed the use of helicopters to return fire against the AA, which has conducted an attack on a military training school, but denied that soldiers bombed the village.

Armed conflict intensified in late 2018 as the AA ramped up its efforts to gain greater autonomy for the ethnic Rakhine people in the state.

'Many difficulties, obstacles'

Clashes between Myanmar and Arakan forces have recently increased in other areas of the state and in Chin's Paletwa township, said Zaw Zaw Tun, secretary of the Rakhine Ethnics Congress (REC), a Sittwe-based NGO that tracks the number of displaced civilians.

"There has been more fighting along the river road from Kyauktaw township to Paletwa and in villages in Rathedaung, Buthidaung, Myebon, and Minbya townships," he said.

"Many villagers have been fleeing because of the fighting and the government army's use of Air Force and Navy units," he added.

More than 50 people have been killed amid the fighting between Feb. 26 and March 24, and more than 150 others have been injured, according to the REC.

The REC puts the number of displaced civilians at more than 140,000, counting people who are in displacement camps as well as those who have taken shelter in Buddhist monasteries or in the homes of friends and relatives.

The Rakhine state government list says there are about 60,000 displaced civilians living temporarily in 131 camps in the northern part of the state.

Kyaw Min, director of Rakhine state's Disaster Management Department, said his team is doing the best it can to assist displaced civilians despite obstacles.

"We have many difficulties and challenges in our department," he said. "We are doing our best, although transportation is bad and the security situation is not safe."

Kyaw Min also said his department has asked the state's General Administration Department to distribute aid to locals who go to its offices.

Reported by Min Thein Aung for RFA's Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

Copyright  1998-2020, RFA. Used with the permission of Radio Free Asia, 2025 M St. NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036. For any commercial use of RFA content please send an email to: mahajanr@rfa.org. RFA content March not be used in a manner which would give the appearance of any endorsement of any product or support of any issue or political position. Please read the full text of our Terms of Use.

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National Cathedral donates 5,000 respirator masks to DC hospitals

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The Washington National Cathedral has donated 5,000 N95 masks to two medical facilities in the District of Columbia metropolitan area, having recently discovered them in storage.

The cathedral announced on Wednesday that they sent 3,000 masks to MedStar Georgetown University Hospital and 2,000 N95 masks to Childrens National Hospital.

According to a statement posted to Facebook, the N95 masks were recently discovered in storage by a stonemason, having been acquired years earlier for a previous health scare.

They had been acquired after a previous health scare, stored away in the Cathedral crypt and forgotten, stated the cathedral on Wednesday. Current CDC guidelines, and the manufacturer, concluded the masks were still good since they had never been opened. We're hoping it's a small step in helping to protect the people who need it most.

The Very Rev. Randolph Hollerith, dean of the cathedral, said in a statement that it was one of many things the congregation was doing in response to the pandemic.

In these difficult and trying times, the Cathedral community is doing everything we can to help protect the most vulnerable among us from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, stated Hollerith.

We have made significant adjustments to our worship programs and made church services available for streaming online, and now were prepared to take this additional, proactive step to ensure thousands have access to protection that otherwise may never have been available to them.

The cathedrals donation of masks comes as many medical facilities and organizations in the United States report a shortage of personal protective equipment such as hospital gowns, face shields, and respiratory N95 face masks.

National Public Radio reported that several groups have launched projects to get more mask donations from assorted groups, including nail salons and museums.

Shabd Simon-Alexander, an activist who helped to launch the group Mask Crusaders, told NPR that she felt the efforts were inspiring yet showed the failures of officials to prioritize the matter.

I'm super inspired by the way that people are stepping up to help each other. And I love to see, like the beauty in humanity, but in reality, it shouldn't fall on us, said Simon-Alexander to NPR. We can't mutual aid our way out of systemic failure. And it's not sustainable. It's just a stopgap.

For his part, President Donald Trump stated at a press briefing on Tuesday that his administration was in the process of delivering large quantities of PPE materials.

Through FEMA, the federal government is distributing more than 8 million N95 respirators, 14 million surgical masks, and many, many millions more are under order, and theyll be arriving soon, explained Trump.

2.4 million face shields, 1.9 million surgical gowns, 13.5 million gloves, and more than 4,000 ventilators to the areas of greatest need have already been sent. And we have 4,000 being delivered to New York.
Vale S.A VALE recently decided to temporarily halt iron ore shipments to its Malaysian terminal and distribution center, TelukRubiah Maritime Terminal (TRMT), effective Mar 24. This is likely to lead to 500,000 tons in lost shipments over first-quarter 2020.

The terminal shipped 23.7 Mt of iron ore in 2019. Vessels heading to TRMT will be redirected and redistributed among Vales blending facilities in China. While there is no expected impact on production and sales volume in 2020, the idling of the terminal till Mar 31, 2020 is likely to impact sales of approximately 500,000 tons in first-quarter 2020. Additional logistics are likely to lead to an increase in costs; however, it will be immaterial to margins.

Malaysia has a total of 1624 coronavirus cases, per the World Health Organizations report as of Mar 25, 2020 with the death toll at 16. The country is currently under 14-day MCO (movement control order), which came into force on Mar 18, 2020, to contain the spread of the coronavirus. The order has been further extended to Apr 14, 2020. Schools, universities, government and private premises, barring essential services have been shut down. Mass gatherings and travel have been prohibited.

Vale Unveils Aid Package for Suppliers

Vale has announced support initiatives for suppliers to help them cope with these troubled times. These include making advance payments to small and medium-sized companies in Brazil.The company will also provide financial support to construction companies and workers allocated to projects that have been halted to reduce the flow of people and ensure safety of employees and outsourced workers.

Voiseys Bay on Care and Maintenance

Vale had earlier announced that it is placing its Voisey's Bay mining operation in Canada on care and maintenance for a period of four weeks. The move is a precaution measure to help protect the health and well-being of Nunatsiavut and Innu indigenous communities in Labrador, and its own staff due the fly-in nature and higher exposure to travel of the remote mining operation. Voisey's Bay produced 25.0kt of copper in concentrate in 2019. The decision also impacts Voisey's Bay Mine Expansion project currently underway to transition to underground operations.

Story continues

Vale also informed that due to travel and equipment transportation restrictions, it is revisiting its plans for the Mozambique coal processing plants stoppage. Notably, it was previously expected to commence operations in second-quarter 2020. A new date is under evaluation, which could ultimately affect coal production guidance for 2020.

In a bid to fight the coronavirus-induced crisis and strengthen its cash reserves, Vale has made the decision to disburse US$5 billion from its Revolving Credit Lines maturing June 2022 (US$ 2 billion) and December 2024 (US$ 3 billion).

The pandemic continues to claim lives and ravage economies. Mining companies are halting their operations as different governments are imposing restrictions to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Price Performance

Vales shares have fallen 38.2% in the past year compared with the industrys decline of 38.3%.

Zacks Rank & Stocks to Consider

Vale currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Some better-ranked stocks in the basic materials space are Newmont Corporation NEM, Franco-Nevada Corporation FNV and Novagold Resources Inc. NG. While Newmont and Franco-Nevada currently sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), Novagold carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Newmont has an expected earnings growth rate of 72% for 2020. The companys shares have gained 34% in the past year.

Franco-Nevada has a projected earnings growth rate of 37.6% for the current year. Its shares have rallied 43% over the past year.

Novagold has an estimated earnings growth rate of 11.1% for fiscal 2020. The companys shares have surged 61.6% in a years time.

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The department for promotion of industry and internal trade (DPIIT) has set up a control room to monitor in real-time the status of transportation and delivery of essential commodities amid the coronavirus lockdown in the country.

IMAGE: Locals throng a market in Kanpur to buy vegetables during the nationwide lockdown imposed in the wake of coronavirus pandemic. Photograph: PTI Photo.

It will also monitor the difficulties being faced by various stakeholders during the lockdown period from March 25 to April 14.

"In the event of any manufacturing, transporter, distributor, wholesaler or e-commerce companies facing ground level difficulties in transport and distribution of goods or mobilization of resources, the same may be informed to this department" the DPIIT said.

Grievances can be emailed to "controlroom-dpiit@gov.in" or informed through telephone (011-23062487). This number will be functional from 8am to 6pm.

The issues reported by various stakeholders through this control room would be taken up with the concerned state government, district, police authorities, and other agencies.

It has urged to all "stakeholders, industry associations to report the issues affecting the industry, trade, especially the ground level issues on this control room," it said.

The issue assumed significance as traders and e-commerce companies have raised concerns over police beating up delivery boys in different states, while they were doing their duty.

Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla held a detailed meeting on Wednesday with DPIIT, traders and e-commerce firms on smooth supply of essential goods in the country.
The Clarence House just recently confirmed that Prince Charles was tested positive for coronavirus and is being treated at his home in Birkhall, in Balmoral Castle estate, Scotland.

The 71-year-old Duke of Cornwall displayed mild symptoms and is currently undergoing self-isolation. Fortunately, his wife, Camilla Parker-Bowles was tested negative, but is also staying at their Birkhall residence.

It is still unclear as to when or from whom the future king of the U.K. acquired the dreaded virus given that the royal was still undertaking numerous royal engagements in mid-March.

God Save The Queen

Meanwhile, the Buckingham Palace reassured the public that Her Majesty the Queen is "in good health."

"Her Majesty The Queen remains in good health. The Queen last saw The Prince of Wales briefly after the investiture on the morning of 12th March and is following all the appropriate advice with regard to her welfare," an official statement released by the palace.

Earlier this week, it was reported that the longest-reigning monarch left London and was moved to Windsor Castle a little early than planned.

Following this, the 98-year-old Duke of Edinburgh was also transferred to their royal residence at Windsor from his Sandringham Estate via helicopter.

Since the royal couple is already in their 90s, this is to take extra precautions with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), older people aged 65 years old and above -- especially those with underlying medical conditions -- are at a particularly high risk of contracting the virus.

Royal Aide Diagnosed With Coronavirus

Aside from Prince Charles, one Royal Household staff was also tested positive from the dreaded virus.

It was reported that the royal aide showed early signs and symptoms of COVID-19 while the 94-year-old monarch was still staying at her London residence.

"The worker tested positive before the Queen left for Windsor. But the Palace has 500 members of staff so, like any workplace, it's not inconceivable it would be affected at some stage," the spokesman from the palace announced.

The spokesman also explained that the said staff was immediately placed under self-isolation while the palace enforced strict safety precautions for the rest of the employees.

The Queen Virtually Keeping in Touch While UK is on Lockdown

Due to an increasing number of confirmed cases, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has issued a stay-at-home order and placed the U.K. under lockdown for three weeks.

With this, the head of the monarchy reportedly utilizes communication apps such as FaceTime and Skype to stay connected to other members of the royal family.

Moreover, to alleviate the public's anxiety with the ongoing health crisis, Her Majesty the Queen is set to deliver a televised address to "lift the nation's morale". This is to "provide calm reassurance" to the nation during this "difficult time."

Apart from the Queen's annual Christmas message, this will be the first time that the longest-reigning monarch will do a televised address after The Queen Mother's death in 2002.
On March 25th, 2020, Dare2Compete, one of India's largest student communities, released the rankings of D2C Prestigious B-School Competitions 2020 through social media and their website amid COVID-19, as part of Dare2Compete Awards.

On the basis of 13,800 plus B-School student votes, Dare2Compete declared this under two segments - Top 20 from votes across All B-Schools and Top 20 from votes across popular 10 B-Schools, the ones that are eligible for majority of the campus engagements.

B-School Competitions, one of the campus engagements from companies, are known to shape the lives of students in different ways by providing learning opportunities beyond the confines of the traditional classroom.

Working on case studies, simulation games, etc. aids students in understanding the corporate environment even before they step into the corporate realm.

Recognizing the efforts taken in organizing competitions and campus engagements, Dare2Compete confers Companies with accolades every year, the rankings of which are disclosed as D2C Prestigious B-School Competitions 2020.

Holding an unwavering stance under both segments, HUL LIME Season 11 grabbed the first place under D2C Prestigious B-School Competitions 2020, for the second year consecutively.

Under All B-Schools segment, Reliance TUP 5.0 held the second place, jumping three positions from last year, while the third place was taken by Google Case Challenge 2019.

The fourth and the fifth places were held by ICICI Bank Beat the Curve 2019 and Flipkart Wired 2019 Campus Case Challenge 3.0, respectively. Both of them were new entries to this list outperforming the well-known names that slipped in this year's rankings.

As per the student votes from the popular 10 B-Schools comprising IIM A, IIM B, IIM C, IIM L, IIM K, IIM I, XLRI, FMS, MDI & SPJIMR, Aditya Birla Group's Stratos retained its second position this year as well, followed by InvicTAS from TATA Group, a new entrant in this list.

ITC Interrobang?! Season 9 and Flipkart Wired 2019 Campus Case Challenge 3.0 came fourth and fifth respectively. Mahindra War Room Season 12 that had secured third place in the rankings of 2019 shifted down to the sixth place closely followed by Asian Paints CANVAS 2019 that saw a jump in its rank this year.

This year marked the entry of many new engagements in these rankings - AB InBev The BUD Challenge and OLA Campus Connect Challenge to name a couple. Focus of many companies have now shifted to doing deep and thought provoking engagements with students to get their mind share.

In another category that recognised B-Schools on the basis of the performance of their students across campus engagements/competitions, IIM Bangalore outperformed all other B-Schools to come first as D2C Competitive B-Schools 2020 closely followed by IIM Kozhikode, Indian School of (ISB) and MDI Gurgaon.

Dare2Compete also recognized students for their performance across campus engagements. Ameer Iqubal from IIM Bangalore topped the D2C Competitive Leaders 2020 rankings by excelling in close to 13 competitions this year.

He was followed by Vishwajit Bhat from IIM Bangalore with 12 competitions under his belt. Top 30 D2C Competitive Leaders 2020 consisted of students from FMS Delhi, IMT Ghaziabad, XLRI, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Shillong, NITIE and other top tier institutions, performed exceptionally well in corporate competitions.

Visit www.dare2compete.com/awards to know more about Dare2Compete Awards 2020 and to view all categories under it.

This story is provided by PRNewswire. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Retailing powerhouse Premier Investments has become the latest major retailer to shut stores and stand down staff, with the Smiggle and Just Jeans owner also telling landlords it would not pay rents during the shutdown.

The ASX-listed group, which is 42 per cent owned and chaired by retail veteran Solomon Lew, told investors on Thursday it had "no choice" but to temporarily close all of its retail stores until April 22, standing down over 9000 staff worldwide, bar a small number of the company's 500 head office staff.

Premier, which owns Just Jeans, Portmans, Smiggle and Jay Jays, will close its stores and stand down 9000 staff globally. Credit:SMH/The Age

The company will also stand down its entire executive team, which will work from home during the period for either no pay or reduced leave entitlements. Premier's brands include Smiggle, Peter Alexander, Jay Jays, Just Jeans and Portmans.

Continuing the company's hardline stance against landlords, Premier said it also intended to pay no rent across any of its stores during the period. Seventy per cent of its store leases either expire this year or are in holdover, providing the company with "extraordinary" flexibility.
Doctors in the coronavirus-hit Chinese city of Wuhan plan to embark on a long-term study of COVID-19 impact on the male reproductive system to verify initial research, indicating that the pathogen could affect sex hormone levels in men.

Though still preliminary and not peer-reviewed, the study is the first clinical observation of the potential impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, on the male reproductive system especially among younger groups.

A paper published on the preprint research platform of medRxiv.org, the researchers from Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University and the Hubei Clinical Research Centre for Prenatal Diagnosis and Birth Health said they analysed blood samples from 81 men aged 20 to 54 who tested positive for the coronavirus and were hospitalised in January, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Thursday.

The median age of the participants was 38 and roughly 90 per cent of them had only mild symptoms. The samples were collected in the last days of their stay in hospital.

Last month, a Chinese health official said two thirds of the victims of the virulent coronavirus were males with 80 per cent of the dead were over 60-years-old.

The majority of those who died were men accounting for about two-thirds and women for one-third, Jiao Yahui an official of China's National Health Commission said.

The doctors researching impact of COVID-19 on men reproductive system used the samples to look at the ratio of testosterone to luteinising hormone (T/LH).

Since more than half of the people with COVID-19 were reproductive-aged, more attention should be paid to the effect of Sars-CoV-2 on the reproductive system, the Wuhan researchers said in their paper, referring to the official name for the new coronavirus, the Post report said.

They said their results were not conclusive and the blood samples were not direct proof of reproductive problems with COVID-19 patients. Other factors, such as medication and immune system response could also cause changes in hormones.

The researchers said they planned to launch a long-term study, which might include the collection and analysis of sperm samples and interviews with coronavirus patients.

Previous studies have indicated that the new coronavirus could bind with ACE2, a receptor protein cell.

Li Yufeng, a professor of reproductive medicine at Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, had observed in a study male sexual glands could become a major target of the coronavirus attack.

Other studies have also suggested that severe acute respiratory syndrome or Sars, a distant relative of the new coronavirus, could also cause inflammation in the male sex glands, the Post report said.

A researcher with the State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Medicine at Nanjing Medical University, said the new observations were highly valuable information but a bigger sample would be needed to clarify the results.

Many viruses can affect fertility, but not every virus can cause a pandemic. If the impact is long-lasting it can be a problem, the Post quoted the unidentified researcher as saying.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Christian Drosten, director of the Institute of Virology at Charite hospital, in Berlin, Germany. (Michael Kappeler/AFP via Getty Images)

Germany is the fifth most-affected country in the world, in terms of confirmed cases of coronavirus. As of Thursday 26 March, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Europes largest economy stood at 39,502, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center.

Yet despite tens of thousands of cases, Germany so far has reported 222 deaths from the virus, dramatically lower that the more than 7,500 in Italy and around 4,000 in Spain. This low fatality rate of 0.56% has attracted global attention and debate.

Christian Drosten, Institute for Virology director at Berlins Charite hospital, said that the low death toll from coronavirus is mainly down to extensive testing.

"The reason why we have so few deaths compared to the number of infected people is because we do a lot of laboratory diagnostics," Drosten said at a press conference on Thursday. In Germany, over half a million coronavirus tests are currently being carried out every week.

Drosten was speaking at the launch of a new research network, a national taskforce that will pool the expertise of university clinics and scientists to collect data and speed research into understanding and tackling the spread of the virus. The government will back the network with 150m (137m, $162m).

Making direct comparisons between national mortality rates can be misleading, not just because of recording lags and different methodologies on reporting cases and deaths, but also because of the extent of testing. The more aggressively a country tests for coronavirus, the more cases of mild infections will be found and recorded in the statistics, which pushes the fatality percentage rate down.

Read more: Angela Merkels first coronavirus test is negative  but remains in home quarantine

Various medical experts have attributed the low mortality partly to the fact that the first wave of coronavirus cases happened among younger people, many of whom had returned from ski holidays in other European countries, especially resorts in Italy and Austria, and recovered.

Story continues

These are predominantly people who are younger than 80 and who are fit enough to ski or engage in similar activities. Their risk of dying is comparatively low, Hans-Georg Krausslich, head of virology at the University Hospital in Heidelberg, told the Financial Times. In most cases the illness is mild and shows few symptoms, and we assume that the detection of such mild cases varies from country to country. In statistical terms that leads to a difference in case fatality rates.

Italy and Germany both have large ageing populations, but younger Germans tend not to live with or close to their families as is often the case in Italy, and this would also influence the spread of the virus to the elderly.

Germanys coronavirus mortality rate may not remain this low: the Robert Koch Institute has warned repeatedly we are only at the beginning of the pandemic, and that the death toll can be expected to rise as more elderly people become infected.

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Photograph: John Locher/Associated Press

A record 3.3 million people filed claims for unemployment in the US last week as the Covid-19 pandemic shut down large parts of Americas economy and the full scale of the impact of the crisis began to emerge.

Experts warned of a catastrophic unemployment crisis after the labor department announced jobless claims filed by individuals seeking unemployment benefits rose by more than 3 million to 3.28 million from 281,000 the previous week. The figure is the highest ever reported, beating the previous record of 695,000 claims filed the week ending 2 October 1982.

The release offers the first official glimpse of the severe economic downturn that the US faces as companies shutter businesses and states across the country move to prevent people from gathering in crowds in an attempt to contain the virus.

US Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin has predicted unemployment in the US  close to record lows only last month  could reach 20%. The Trump administration is pushing through a $2tn stimulus package that includes payments to taxpayers as well as bailouts for hard-hit industries to mitigate Covid-19s impact. But the money will not head off a huge surge in unemployment.

Nearly every state cited the impact of Covid-19, the labor department said. Service industries broadly, particularly accommodation and food services, were hard hit although states also cited healthcare and social assistance, arts, entertainment and recreation, transportation and warehousing, and manufacturing industries.

This mornings jobless claims confirm that the United States is in the thralls of a catastrophic unemployment crisis, the likes of which we havent seen since the Great Depression, said Andrew Stettner, senior fellow at the Century Foundation thinktank. This represents the single worst one-day piece of labor market news in Americas history.

Across the US, laid-off workers have overwhelmed state labor departments with claims for unemployment benefits. In New York City, which now accounts for roughly 5% of global Covid-19 cases, there has been a 1,000% increase in claims.

Story continues

Taylor Cox, a 29-year-old bartender from Indianapolis, was laid off 12 days ago. People are scared, people dont know whats going to happen. The idea of a tipped worker going without tips for eight weeks or more is one of the most frightening things to have to confront, told the Guardian.

Ahead of the labor department release, the Trump administration pushed to block states from releasing daily figures on the soaring unemployment crisis.

Ohio and South Carolina stopped releasing daily figures after receiving a memo from the department of labor that read: The data from these reports is monitored closely by policy makers and financial markets to determine appropriate actions in light of fast-changing economic conditions. As such, the data must remain embargoed until the national claims report is released the following Thursday at 8.30am.

Related: What US unemployment benefits can I get during the coronavirus? Your payment options explained

According to Johns Hopkins University there are now 55,233 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the US and 802 reported deaths, up from 302 last weekend. Despite the rising casualties, president Donald Trump said this week that he would like the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.

Trump is concerned the quarantine measures could prove more harmful than the virus, an opinion that is disputed by economists and health experts. On Wednesday he tweeted: The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!

The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2020

Last weeks sharp rise in unemployment marks the end of an historic period of US jobs growth. US employers have added jobs every month for 101 consecutive months and in March the unemployment rate was 3.5%, a 50-year low.

Economists said it was still too early to gauge the depth and length of the pandemics impact on the jobs market. The Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis president, James Bullard, has said he expects unemployment to hit 30% in the second quarter, while Morgan Stanley has estimated that unemployment would average 12.8% over that time period.

There is going to be a lot of hardship for a lot of people, said Gus Faucher, chief economist of the PNC Financial Services Group. But he expects to see a solid rebound by the summer if the virus is contained by then.
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday said that 8.69 crore farmers will get immediate help during the lockdown period through direct cash transfers in the first week of April.

"8.69 crore farmers to be immediately benefited through Direct cash transfers. Installment of Rs 2000 in the first week of April will be transferred," Sitharaman said at a press conference here.

Elaborating the Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Ann Yojna (for next 3 months) she said, "80 crore poor people covered, in addition to the already allotted 5 kilograms of rice or wheat per person, an additional 5 kilogram will be provided free. An additional 1 kilogram of pulses (according to regional preference) will also be given."

The Finance Minister said that BPL families currently covered under the Ujjwala scheme will receive free cylinders for three months so that there is no shortage of cooking medium.

The Finance Minister has announced a relief package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore to the underprivileged, poor and migrant workers affected by the lockdown amid COVID-19 outbreak.

She also said that workers - like nurses, paramedics and sanitation staff - who were in the frontline of the war against the disease, will be provided medical insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh per person.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country effective from midnight to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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New York has asked FEMA for emergency help as the city's morgues could reach capacity within a week.

Officials fear the city may be running out of space to store the dead as fatalities from the coronavirus continue to soar.

A makeshift morgue is already being set up outside Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital as officials warn that there is only enough room for 900 bodies to be stored across the five boroughs of America's largest city.

During a briefing on Wednesday, officials at the Department of Homeland Security were told that New York's morgues are reaching capacity, according to Politico.

A department official said they were told the morgues in New York City are expected to reach capacity by next week.

Another source told the outlet that some of the city's hospital morgues hit capacity over the past seven days.

New York City has asked FEMA for emergency help as morgues across the five boroughs are expected to reach capacity in a week. Meanwhile, workers are building a makeshift morgue at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan (pictured Thursday morning)

Members of the National Guard are seen setting up a massive tent at the makeshift morgue site in Midtown on Thursday

Supplies are being unloaded from storage containers and carted into the white tents at the temporary morgue site Thursday

New York City has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the US, with more than 21,300 cases and 280 deaths from the virus as of Thursday afternoon

Nearly 74,000 people have tested positive for coronavirus and 1,074 have died across the US as of Thursday afternoon. New York state accounts for more than half of the nation's cases with 37,258 infections, including 385 deaths

New York City has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the US, with more than 21,300 cases and 280 deaths from the virus as of Thursday afternoon.

More than 2,800 people in the city are hospitalized because of the virus - double the figure from three days earlier - and more than 600 are being treated in intensive care.

The Big Apple accounts for more than half the cases in the country's hardest-hit state, where there are now 37,000 coronavirus cases and close to 400 deaths.

There are currently about 53,000 beds and 3,000 intensive care unit beds available in New York hospitals, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo, who warned that the state could need 140,000 beds and 40,000 ICU beds to cope with the outbreak.

New York state currently has a 12 percent hospitalization rate in relation to coronavirus, Cuomo said.

To prepare for an expected surge in deaths, officials began erecting the makeshift facility outside Bellevue Hospital this week.

Armed military personnel, NYPD and NYC Medical Examiner's Office employees were seen setting up huge, dome-like white tents in the parking lot on Wednesday.

Multiple refrigeration trucks were also lined up at the site in Midtown along 30th Street and the FDR Drive parkway.

National Guard officers carry steel poles used to support the white tents at the makeshift morgue site on Thursday

Crews unload a stack of medical equipment from a storage container using a fork lift

City officials stand in a street lined with refrigerated trucks as they watch the temporary morgue site come together

National Guard members wearing face masks brave drizzly weather as they help put together the morgue facility

Workers build a makeshift morgue outside Bellevue Hospital to handle an expected surge in coronavirus fatalities Wednesday

Crew members erected huge white tents on Wednesday as part of the makeshift facility

Refrigerated trailers are also parked at the temporary morgue site

Military personnel and members of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner at Bellevue hospital where a makeshift morgue is being built with refrigerated trailers and tents

Cuomo and other state officials are desperately seeking additional medical equipment and hospital beds to keep up with the surging number of critical cases.

They've also called for more doctors and nurses to join the fight against the virus, prompting New York University to offer to let its medical students graduate early so they can enlist.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaking during a news conference at the Jacob Javits Center that will house a temporary hospital in response to the COVID-19 outbreak

All 19 million residents of New York state were placed under a stay at home order on March 20 after Cuomo temporarily banned 'all non-essential gatherings' to curb the spread of the virus.

Worldwide, the death toll climbed past 20,000, according to a running count kept by Johns Hopkins University. The number of dead in the US topped 1,000, with nearly 74,000 infections.

A spokesman from the Federal Emergency Management Agency said that New York has asked for emergency mortuary assistance and that the disaster response agency is reviewing the request.

A former senior administration official said that as coronavirus deaths rise and morgues reach capacity, federal help will become available.

This assistance could come in the form of the Department of Health and Human Services oversees the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams, which can establish temporary morgues and operate in response to requests from local authorities.

Despite the alarm, Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokeswoman for the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, said that the concerns about morgue capacity may be unfounded.

She told Politico: 'We have the ability to expand pretty dramatically. If you look back at what we did during 9/11, we have the ability to create mobile stations that allow us to house bodies if we run out of space.'

Worthy-Davis speculated that the concern over morgue capacity may be stemming from hospitals' morgues, which tend to be smaller and could run out of space sooner.

After New York's first positive test came back on March 1 - in a health care worker who had traveled to Iran and secluded herself upon returning - Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo initially cast the disease as a dangerous threat but one that the city's muscular hospital system could handle.

Late on Wednesday night in Washington, the US Senate passed a $2.2 trillion conomic rescue package in response to pandemic. The House of Representatives will vote on the package on Friday.
SCHENECTADY  Forget about Saratoga County being the Capital Regions fastest-growing county.

For the past year that honor goes to Schenectady County, which ranked second statewide for percentage growth  though it came at the sluggish rate of 0.1 percent, according to U.S. Census Bureau county population estimates released Thursday.

Schenectady County added 220 residents to reach 155,299 from 2018 to 2019, the only one of the Capital Regions four central counties to see population growth. And the county ranked fourth for its actual increase in numbers, the census estimates report.

But Saratoga County still ranked tops in the state for percentage growth from 2010-2019, a period in which it added 10,265 people to reach 229,863 residents, showing a growth rate of 4.7 percent, the population estimates show.

Albany Countys population declined by 1,079 from 2018-19 to reach 305,506; Rensselaer County fell by 569 to 158,714; and Saratoga County declined by 307 to hit 229,863.

Saratoga, Albany and Schenectady counties added residents from 2010 to 2019. Over that longer period, Albany County added 1,298 more residents, and Schenectady County added 548 residents. Rensselaer County, however, lost 719 people to drop to 158,714 over the past decade.

Anemic is how Mark Castiglione, executive director of the Capital District Regional Planning Commission, describes the population growth the region has seen since the 2010 Census.

The breakdown of county population growth shows that immigrants from foreign countries moving into the Capital Region counties have dropped by about a third compared to the 10-year average since 2010.

Certainly, immigrants from outside the U.S. coming into the region has (provided) steady population growth, Castiglione said.

These new population estimates come as the 2020 Census has kicked off with the mailing of questionnaires to homes, a process that began March 12. The region's counties, towns, cities and villages are campaigning to get everyone counted.

The Capital Regions overall drop in population in the new annual data reflects New York states slight decline as well as that of 56 of the states 62 counties. The states population stands at 19,453,51 as of July 1, 2019, a fall of 76,790 residents since July 1, 2018, the census bureau reported.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

The only counties adding residents by percentage from top to bottom were Orange at 0.7 percent (2,814 new arrivals), Schenectady at 0.1 percent (220), Dutchess at 0.1 percent (just 15), Rockland at 0.1 percent (13), Sullivan and Ontario with 0 percent (36 and 26, respectively).

Hamilton County, the states least populous county, had 16 fewer residents to drop to a count of 4,416 people.

The nations growth from 2010-19 happened in counties in the south and west. Six of the top 10 counties were in Texas, with one each in Arizona, California, Nevada and Washington.

The numbers show that 53.6 percent of all U.S. counties have fewer people in 2019 than they did in 2010.

One interesting trend we have seen this decade is widespread population decline among smaller counties, while larger counties tended to have population growth, Christine Hartley, a demographer in the U.S. Census Bureaus Population Division, said in a statement.

Three out of four counties with a population of less than 10,000 in 2010 had even smaller populations in 2019," Hartley said. "At the same time, three out of four counties of 50,000 or more were larger in 2019 compared to 2010."

The Albany-Schenectady-Troy metropolitan area remained ranked at 63rd among the countrys 384 metropolitan areas despite losing 1,882 residents to reach 880,381 residents. At 361st for population change, it fell in line with the other upstate metro areas along the New York State Thruway corridor: Utica was ranked 344th, Syracuse was at 356th, Buffalo was 358th, and Rochester was 363rd.
Public Statement on COVID19 Crisis released by Peopleas Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (PADS) (20 March, 2020)

[released on 26 March 2020]

India is passing through the first stage of the most serious health crisis in its recent history. How we respond to it as a society is crucial to mitigating effects of COVID 19 on our individual health. Democracy is ultimately a system of social relationships, of everyone with everybody else, that respects the twin principles of equality and individual autonomy, so that everyone becomes responsible to everyone else without the use of threat, fear, and social power. If there are many characteristics of our society and government which make us undemocratic, this crisis can also be an opportunity to strengthen our democracy.

India has a very unequal medical delivery system. While the prosperous Indians can get as good health services in private hospitals and clinics as available anywhere in the world, vast swathes of rural India are bereft of any public health services. Areas of urban poverty are also similarly deprived. Indian government takes care of only 27% of health expenditure, spending only 1% of GDP on health. In China government takes care of more than 56% of the health expenditure. In many other countries government expenditure on health is more than 80%, which ensures everyone gets required health care, rather than only those who can afford it. Given the state of affairs of public health system in the country, poor and rural Indians are likely to be the primary sufferers of acute health crisis from coronavirus. It is essential that the state machinery resolves to provide equal quality care to every Indian, and all available health resources are pooled in and distributed according to the requirement of individual sufferers, rather than on the basis of how much they can pay. Resources of private hospitals too must be diverted to meet the pandemic and opened to every Indian free of cost. Government of India has advertised a separate test price of Rs4500/ for private hospitals. This will only mean that people who can afford this price will get tested, poor will be left to languish in stressed public health system. Instead of this discriminatory practice, widespread testing at zero price should be started urgently. As the experience of COVID19 crisis even rich capitalist countries like Italy, Spain and US shows, privatised health care under capitalism is a drag on public health. Socialised and free health care is necessary for social well being.

Indian state authorities have historically been more intent upon imposing their power on people, rather than taking care of their own responsibilities. Government of India has lost precious three months window available for preparing for the impending crisis. Even basic masks, and personal protective equipment are not readily available to our nurses and doctors. ICU beds and ventilators are going to be in short supply. In the national address announcing three week countrywide lockdown, Prime Minister Modi did not mention that essentials of everyday life will remain available, which led to an unnecessary panic. It is obvious that daily wagers, contract workers, and people working in the informal sector are going to be the worst economic sufferers of the lockdown. State plans for how they are going to be compensated should have been in place before the lockdown was announced. As during demonetisation, the PM thinks that his grandstanding will take care of problems people are going to face. Before stopping bus and train services the government should have ensured that millions of migrant workers who need to be with their families, safely reach their native places. What kind of quarantine a working family living in a small dingy room in a slum can afford? State needs to immediately open spaces for public quarantine in all empty public buildings like schools, colleges, stadiums, and even shopping malls.

According to medical experts, widespread testing and quarantine of all positive and suspected individuals is the only way to slow the spread of the virus. General lockdown becomes essential because even seemingly healthy people too can be carrying the virus and spreading it to others. However, Indian state authorities need to understand that public lockdown under an extended health emergency like COVID19 must be fundamentally different from a short term curfew imposed after a riot, when the assumption is that anyone on street is a potential trouble maker. Telangana chief minister is already threatening to issue shoot as sight orders to make people stay indoors. Ministers, officials and prosperous people may have enough supplies at home to last them three weeks. How can ordinary people stay indoors for that long? While enforcing the lockdown in Wuhan, the Chinese government had ensured an elaborate delivery system employing thousands to provide essentials to people at home. It seems Indian state authorities are more focussed on forcing people indoors, rather than providing them with essentials so that they can stay indoors.

Social stigma, public humiliation and even lynching are endemic to our society. If anything, the ideological attacks of the ruling dispensation on minorities, oppressed castes, and the so-called aanti-nationalsa generally have heightened these tendencies. There is an acute danger that patients suffering from Coronavirus, their families and friends, and hospital and other staff taking care of them, may end up facing ostracization. There are already some cases of nurses being asked to vacate by their landlords. Even airline staff who brought back Indians from countries infected with the virus have faced problems in their housing societies. Since in popular media China is presented as responsible for the pandemic, people of North-East living in other parts of India have faced public humiliation. Certain steps of our governments, like physically stamping people ordered to remain in quarantine further encourage such behaviour. The identity of Coronavirus victims has been revealed in media in many places. These steps not only violate the right to privacy, but also fundamental rights to personal safety and dignity. Only Orissa government has issued orders that the identity of Coronavirus sufferers cannot be revealed. Other governments should also issue similar orders.

Given the nature of Coronavirus, probably more than half of Indians are going to be infected by it in coming months. However, only the most vulnerable, namely little children and the elderly in already weak health will require hospitalisation and critical medical care. It is necessary that rather than panicking and stigmatising victims of this virus, we as a society provide all necessary medical and psychological care, and economic relief to any Indian who is going to suffer.

PADS demands that

1. Indian state ensures equal and quality medical services to every Indian suffering form the Corona virus. In particular, no double streams of medical services, one comfortably curative in private hospitals for the rich, and the other understaffed and undersupplied stream for the poor in government hospitals, be allowed to continue. All medical resources available in the country should be distributed only on the basis of need, rather than wealth and status.

2. As the crisis has probably already reached stage three in the country, it is essential that crucial health infrastructure like virology labs in every district, and training of ASHA workers for preventive care in rural India be provided immediately.

3. Measures to financially compensate people working in the informal sector of the economy should be announced and enforced immediately.

4. Enough places of public quarantine are made available to the poor living in crowded conditions.

5. Doctors, nurses, and safai karamcharis attending to victims of Coronavirus are provided protective gear immediately.

6. Elaborate systems of pubic delivery of essentials at door-step are made.

PADS appeals to the people of India to realise the gravity of the crisis and observe all quarantine protocols. They should refrain from and confront any stigmatisation of sufferers of Coronavirus and their families. Overcoming the crisis would require significant voluntary effort from all Indians in providing help and care to the needy. Only that will deepen our democracy.

Released by Battini Rao, Convenor PADS (95339 75195, battini.rao[at]gmail.com)
A southern Italian town has used hay bales to block roads leading into the community during the coronavirus crisis  while having no confirmed cases.

The mayor said every route except one has been closed off in a bid to protect residents during the pandemic.

This means there is only one way of entering Monteleone, the mayor said in a Facebook video, adding it was easier to control comings-and-goings this way.

Giovanni Campese said on Tuesday the town in Apulia had not recorded any infections, and had around five or six people in quarantine after returning from at-risk zones.

Videos show hay bales being driven around town and being dropped in the middle of streets.

We did not have enough barriers to close roads, Mr Campese told Italian TV. We arranged to use something we have a lot of instead

Italy has been on lockdown since 10 March as it battles the coronavirus outbreak, which has seen more than 74,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the country to date.

People have been ordered to stay at home except in certain cases where they are allowed to go outside, for example to go to work or buy food.

A mayor in Sicily has announced plans to use drones to enforce these rules, as Spain and China did during their lockdowns over the virus.

Around 110,000 people have been charged with ignoring the governments restrictions, according to interior ministry figures.

Italy announced it was tightening up its sanctions for those who break the rules aimed at tackling the spread of Covid-19  a flu-like virus that can develop into pneumonia  earlier this week, increasing the fine to a maximum of 3000 (2,700).

Italy has seen the largest coronavirus death toll in the world, standing at around 7,500 on Thursday.

Additional reporting by Reuters
A Melbourne drug dealer found with more than $105,000 in cash hidden behind a hotel room curtain has been jailed for more than six years.

Jackie Chan, 28, had a rude morning wake-up call when he was roused by police raiding his Box Hill hotel room in April last year.

The search uncovered a bag behind a curtain, containing $105,000, another $8000 in cash in a Louis Vuitton satchel, bags containing white powder and green vegetable matter and multiple phones.

A Melbourne drug dealer found with more than $105,000 in cash hidden behind a hotel room curtain has been jailed for more than six years (file picture)

His car also contained a hidden stash of $45,000 in cash, a large set of kitchen scales and drugs.

Chan pleaded guilty to trafficking commercial quantities of cocaine and methylamphetamine and possessing drugs of dependence.

He also pleaded guilty to dealing with more than $158,000 in cash, suspected to be proceeds of crime.

Chan began using drugs as a teenager after he fell in with the wrong crowd, the County Court heard on Thursday.

His parents, who settled in Australia as Vietnamese refugees, were often absent and his deviant peers became like surrogate family.

By age 20, he quickly became addicted to cocaine and quit his full-time job to start dealing and fund his drug debts.

Judge George Georgiou accepted Chan was motivated to fund his own habit and abused drugs to cope with underlying mental health issues.

"Whilst drug addiction is no excuse for your behaviour, in your case, I'm prepared to accept your addiction has some mitigatory effect on your moral culpability," he said.

He accepted Chan's remorse, youth and that it was his first time in jail.

His rehabilitation prospects were reasonable, with the right treatment, the judge found.

"You should know, Mr Chan, from your own addiction to illicit drugs, the devastation and misery drug traffickers cause to the lives to those who use and become addicted to drugs," Judge Georgiou said.

Chan was jailed for six years and two months, with a minimum three years and eight months. The sentence includes almost a year already served in pre-sentence custody.
She's the outspoken television presenter who is using her platform in the spotlight to encourage Australians to keep safe amid the coronavirus pandemic.

And on Thursday, Carrie Bickmore, 39, shared footage of her five-year-old daughter, Evie, singing a song dedicated to keeping your hands clean to Instagram.

In the video, little Evie is heard singing: 'Wash, wash, wash your hands. Washing is so much fun. Use your hands, fist your wrist. Keep your germs on the run'.

Adorable! Carrie Bickmore (pictured, right) shared footage of her adorable daughter, Evie, five singing a song dedicated to hand washing on Thursday amid the coronavirus pandemic

The Project host then flipped the camera towards her, before saying: 'In case you need a new song for your kids to sing while washing their hands'.

The Logie award-winner went on to urge her followers: 'Stay home and keep two arms length apart,' before she concluded: 'Let's do what we can to keep our country safe'.

Carrie's cute Instagram post comes after she revealed that Evie's meditation exercises were helping her through the uncertain times.

Song: In the video, Evie is heard singing: 'Wash, wash, wash your hands. Washing is so much fun. Use your hands, fist your wrist. Keep your germs on the run'

Speaking on The Project, Carrie said: 'I was thinking about what's going to happen if school shuts, who is going to look after the kids, what's going to happen with work.'

Carrie went on to say that she noticed her heart rate was higher than usual and realised that she was feeling more anxious.

To combat the feeling, Carrie revealed she did her daughter's meditations to calm her down because it was on her phone.

Zen: Carrie's cute Instagram post comes after she revealed that Evie's meditation exercises were helping her through the uncertain times. Speaking on The Project last week

The TV host explained: 'I ended up playing one of the meditations I do with Evie, a five-year-old's smiling mind meditation, which is where you have to imagine hugging a teddy bear.'

'I felt so much better afterwards and it was stopping and acknowledging I am feeling a bit (anxious),' she added.

Carrie shares two daughters, Evie, five, and Adelaide, one, with partner Chris Walker. The sisters join older brother Oliver, 12, who she had with her late husband Greg Lange.

Family: Carrie shares two daughters, Evie, five, and Adelaide, one, with partner Chris Walker. The sisters join older brother Oliver, 12, who she had with her late husband Greg Lange
(Natural News) America is about to be flooded with dead bodies from the coronavirus epidemic thats now burning its away across the nation. With over 68,000 confirmed infections and over 1,000 confirmed deaths already in America, the nation is on track to see at least 100,000 coronavirus deaths in the coming months.

NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio is now warning that half of all New Yorkers  around 4 million people  will become infected with the Wuhan coronavirus, according to the NY Post. As merely a 2% case fatality rate, that will result in an estimated 80,000 deaths in NYC alone.

Via the NY Post:

His health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, said the percentage could be even worse by the fall.

We think 50 percent by the end of this epidemic, this pandemic, so by the time September rolls around likely 50 percent, but it could also be much higher, Dr. Barbot said at the briefing.

The citys hospital system is nearing its breaking point.

In case anyone was still under the illusion that the coronavirus wouldnt kill anyone in America, heres the explosive death curve showing the rapid acceleration of daily deaths in the USA (which reached 225 deaths over the last 24 hours):

As a point of reference, my original pandemic projection model (revision 1) had predicted 1,000 deaths by April 10th. That means it was overly optimistic. But if you recalibrate the projected dates to the 225 deaths reported today, it means we will be seeing 400 deaths per day exactly one week from now. And in two weeks, there will be over 700 deaths per day in the USA, according to the model.

New York, North Carolina and Hawaii are begging FEMA for help disposing of all the bodies

At the same time NYC is expecting tens of thousands of deaths from the coronavirus over the next several months, three US states are now requesting emergency mortuary assistance from FEMA in order to deal with all the dead bodies.

Those states are New York, North Carolina and Hawaii. Curiously, Hawaii is currently reporting only 95 infections and 1 death due to the coronavirus, which almost certainly means Hawaii isnt doing much testing.

According to CNBC.com:

New York, Hawaii and North Carolina have requested emergency mortuary assistance from FEMA to handle the coming deaths expected from coronavirus as the pandemic bears down on the United States.

The requests are for HHS Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams, or DMORT, which work to quickly and accurately identify victims and support local mortuary services, according to a government website.

Politico reported Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security had been briefed that New York Citys morgues were nearing capacity, citing a DHS official and another source familiar with the matter. The New York Post reported on Tuesday that a makeshift morgue was being set up at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, citing a source who was familiar with the operation.

In other words, New York is rapidly running out of places to put all the dead bodies.

This never happens with just the flu, of course. Thats because the coronavirus is far deadlier than the regular flu, even if pandemic denialists / #covidiots havent yet been able to accept that irrefutable fact.

Weve also learned that refrigeration trucks are being ordered in large quantities from US manufacturers to assist with the transportation of dead bodies. It wont be long before the US will need to crank up mobile cremation ovens to start disposing of all the bodies of victims, just like we saw in China.

This outbreak has only just begun in the USA, by the way. We havent even seen 1% of where this is headed. It wont be long before the USA is the coronavirus epicenter of the world, dwarfing all the numbers posted by China, Asia and all European countries combined.

It now looks mathematically impossible to see fewer than 100,000 deaths in the USA by the time this is all over. The real question is whether we can keep the total deaths below one million.

If you want to live, read Pandemic.news.
Barr Considers Expanding Home Confinement for Older Prisoners Amid CCP Virus Outbreak

The Justice Department (DOJ) is considering releasing older prisoners for home confinement as part of efforts to mitigate the impact of the CCP virus in federal prisons, the attorney general said.

Attorney General William Barr said on Thursday that he had directed the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to assess whether it was possible to expand home confinement particularly for those older prisoners who have served substantial parts of their sentence and no longer pose a threat and may have underlying conditions that make them particularly vulnerable.

We have authorities under the first step act and under other general authorities  will permit us to release to home confinement for certain designated circumstances, Barr said during an unrelated press conference. And Ive asked and issued a memorandum just today to the Bureau of Prisons to increase the use of home confinement based on a number of factors.

He said this includes assessing on a case-by-case basis whether an individual will be safer outside than inside prison. Moreover, he added that if anyone is to be released for home confinement, the individual would need to be quarantined for 14 days prior to leaving to ensure that the prisons are not putting people in the community at risk.

This comes after lawmakers and advocacy groups called on the Trump administration to reduce federal prison populations in order to prevent the spread of the CCP virus, also known as the novel coronavirus.

The Epoch Times refers to the virus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the regimes coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and fan a global pandemic.

Meanwhile, public health experts and epidemiologists have also raised concerns about the potential spread of the CCP virus inside prisons. Chris Beyrer, a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, previously told The Epoch Times that the risks of people contracting respiratory diseases such as COVID-19 are higher in prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers.

Beyrer said implementing social distancing in those facilities is difficult and access to hand sanitizers and other hygiene products is limited.

There are currently 175,376 inmates held in federal prisons either run by the BOP or private corporations, according to the agency. Over 10,000 among this population are over the age of 60. As of March 26, there are 10 confirmed cases of the virus among federal inmates and eight confirmed cases among federal prison staff, according to the BOP website.

Barr said among the 10,000 inmates that are aged 60 and over, 40 percent of them are serving sentences for violent crimes or sex offenses.

The attorney general added that he believes the BOP has generally been able to handle outbreaks in the prison system. He cited the example of the 2018 and 2019 flu season, saying that the percentage of people who sought medical attention for the flu inside prison was lower than on the outside.

We want to make sure that our institutions dont become petri dishes and it spreads rather rapidly through a particular institution, he said. But we have the protocols that are designed to stop that.

The BOP previously told The Epoch Times that it had been making plans to address the epidemic since January and have consulted many experts. The agency on March 13 released a number of measures to mitigate the transmission of the virus in federal prisons. Some measures include suspending social visits for 30 days, suspending legal visits for 30 days, with case-by-case accommodation being granted, and also suspending inmate facility transfers for 30 days.

Barr said during the press conference that the BOP has a very substantial in house medical staff of about 2,400 doctors and medical professionals. He added that the prison has a very robust regime in place to address the virus including using special tools that are not available outside the facility.

He said this includes the ability to actually physically lock down establishments to quarantine people, monitor contacts, and provide in-house medical care. New arrivals are also subjected to a mandatory 14 day quarantine period.

The bureau has a very rigorous set of protocols that it has put into place and its constantly expanding them as it learns more, he said.

Some of the facilities that have confirmed cases have been placed under lockdown, he said.

In order to prevent the spread of the virus in prisons, several states have begun or have committed to releasing inmates, including in New York, Florida, and New Jersey.
Southwest Airlines said today that it will dramatically pare back its Hawaii flights starting April 5.

Coming just a week after celebrating its one-year anniversary of flying to the islands, the carrier said it will, "compress our Hawaii operation to offer two roundtrips daily between Oakland and Honolulu." It will also thin its inter-island flying to just two or three daily roundtrips between Honolulu and neighboring islands.

This comes on the heels of a new 14-day quarantine rule for all passengers arriving in Hawaii, and Hawaiian Airlines' announcement this week that it will maintain just one flight daily between San Francisco, Los Angeles and Honolulu. More about that here.

Southwest said, "Weve been preparing a temporary flight schedule that supports both the realities of this vastly diminished marketplace for visitors while underscoring our commitment to the communities of Hawaii with a plan to continue providing interisland service for business, medical, and other essential travel."

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The carrier stresses that the schedule changes are intended to be "temporary and nimble." But the cuts could run into typically busy summer months, too: "We have teams already looking at the May and June schedules, as well, with the steadfast goal of giving our customers as much notice as possible to changes that affect them," the airline said.

If you are holding tickets to fly to Hawaii this spring, Southwest says that it will acommodate you "through our established protocols and offered additional flexibility in our published policies (which you can see here.) The carrier adds: "Our flight schedule on Southwest.com and elsewhere already reflects these changes effective April 14 through May 2, with the soon-to-cancel flights April 5-13 already unavailable for booking."

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A build to rent development has been approved in Cabra in north Dublin and a children's hospital group has moved most of its pediatric services from one hospital to make space for coronavirus patients.

Independent.ie reporters are bringing you the latest coronavirus stories you may have missed today.

485-unit development approved in Cabra for UK build-to-let investor Tristan Capital

Shawn Pogatchnik reports

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The planning board has approved a 485-unit residential development on the Carnlough Road in Cabra, Dublin 7, on lands originally purchased from CIE 16 years ago.

The build-to-rent scheme by UK firm Tristan Capital Partners - which acquired the site last year from Pat Creans Marlet Property Group for a reported 39m - includes nine blocks up to eight storeys tall.

In its newly published decision, An Bord Pleanala approved the plans subject to several conditions, including provisions for adequate traffic flow and a parking management plan. These stipulate the development should have a maximum of 403 car parking spaces and a minimum of 529 spaces for bicycles.

It said an environmental impact report would not be required.

The design includes a neighbourhood centre with space for a cafe, a convenience store, a gym and child care facilities, while one block will be devoted to community space, including co-working areas, meeting rooms and a cinema.

Those referred for COVID-19 test on or before Tuesday will not be tested if their appointment is tomorrow

Eilish O'Regan reports

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Whatsapp People who have already given a swab will be contacted by text by the HSE about the result. Photo: REUTERS

People who were referred by their GP on or before Tuesday to provide a swab test for the coronavirus will not be tested if their appointment falls tomorrow

Previously they were told to turn up at the testing centre tomorrow although testing criteria has been tightened and only applies to certain priority groups.

They should self isolate for fourteen days and household members restrict their movements.

Hospital group to relocate children's services to make extra bed spaces for coronavirus patients

Gabija Gataveckaite reports

Childrens Health Ireland is temporarily relocating childrens services from its Tallaght hospital to Crumlin and Temple St hospitals, as well as its urgent care centre in Blanchardstown.

Most childrens health services, including inpatients, day cases and the paediatric emergency department in Tallaght will close from midnight on Friday March 27.

The outpatients department will stay open, as well as virtual clinics and specialist out patient services to support patients who attend with chronic needs.

This will make space in the hospital for coronavirus patients and an unprecedented demand on acute services, especially adult healthcare.

The relocations are a part of contingency plans in light of the ongoing coronavirus crisis and will see Tallaght University Hospital used for additional bed capacity, staff and emergency facilities in dealing with sick adults.

Other CHI hospitals in Crumlin and Temple St will also remain fully open, as well as the urgent care centre in Blanchardstown.

Grainne Sexton: 'The past week has forced me to find new and creative ways to connect with friends'

Grainne Sexton writes

It has been two weeks since college closed and it is therefore not revelatory to admit that I miss the way things were. I miss my friends and the plans we had made for the months of March and April. I miss my part-time job and the co-worker I spent every Friday furtively chatting with. I miss sitting in seminars and engaging in impassioned debates with fellow students about the merits and failings of various literary texts.

Hit by a sudden wave of loneliness, I began this week feeling adrift and detached. Unlike the impulsive messages I am used to sending over Facebook or random tweets drafted to Twitter followers, I realised that meeting up with friends online doesn't just 'happen'. Similar to the low-level planning involved in organising coffee dates or casual pints, virtual interactions require a degree of organisation that, up until now, had eluded me.

The app of the moment is Houseparty. At a time when we are all seeking distraction from isolation and uncertainty, I have found it to be a godsend. My friends and I can chat over video call while also playing card games. We can invite other friends who are online to join - in the same way we'd invite a person to sit at our table in the pub. It's a strange feeling to be sitting in my pyjamas at home, roaring with laughter at a virtual version of Cards Against Humanity and staring at my friends through a screen. This is our new reality, however, and there is a common relief amongst us that at least we have this - some thread which is keeping us safely tied together.

WATCH: Donald Trump announces US coronavirus rescue bill
Farmington School District Superintendent Matt Ruble gave an update during this week's school board meeting on how the district is operating during the current shutdown of the schools.

We started Alternative Methods of Instruction (AMI), he said. We had a training session on Monday. The overview of it, we are pushing out instruction, both digital and paper copy.

"We are trying to limit the paper copies, because that becomes an issue of transference [of the virus]. We began those lessons [Tuesday], that will continue throughout the district closure."

Ruble said teachers are working from home, calling parents and students and pushing out the AMI.

Food service, transportation, were delivering meals, providing meals, and 12-month staff are still reporting to their offices and keeping the guidelines intact, he said.

According to Ruble, on Tuesday the district served more than 600 meals.

The breakfast and lunch in the three different locations, so that was great. That number will go up Wednesday because of the weather, it was better without the rain.

The school board held a brief meeting Tuesday night. Because of the limitation on 10 people or less in a gathering, they had to push the student recognition of winter athletes until April.

The district just completed the graduate followup report. Ruble said they follow up with last years graduates at 180 days.

We had over 60% were in a two-year, four-year or a career technical school, he said. We had about 15% that were working, and another 3-4% that were in the military and 3-4% percent other.

When asked about whether the closures will continue after April 6, Ruble wasnt completely sure at this point.

We are meeting [Thursday] with the MAAA Superintendents, then we are meeting as a Southeast group on Friday morning to have more discussions, he said. The standard we will continue to follow, the health department recommendations and the CDC.

"We have not made a decision yet, but I could certainly see it stretching into mid-April. I think St. Louis, St. Charles and Jefferson Counties have already expanded the closure. That will be based on what kind of information we get, and we start seeing positive test results out of the ones being tested.

As far as the buildings, Ruble said that they are going above and beyond to make sure everything is being sanitized and are using all the precautions and all the recommendations from the CDC.

Its a little bit like flying a plane while they are trying to build it, he said. Its definitely a new norm.

Mark Marberry is a reporter for the Farmington Press and Daily Journal. He can be reached at 573-518-3629, or at mmarberry@farmingtonpressonline.com

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Nurses at the



government hospital in Chikalthana area here, where swab samples of suspected coronavirus patients are collected, demanded protection gear and other facilities on Thursday.

There weren't enough personal protection kits, necessary medicines and sanitizers and handwash facilities at the hospital, they complained in a memorandum submitted to the civil surgeon Dr Sundar Kulkarni.

"These things are available in only few wards. In view of the present situation, they should be provided in every ward," said Jana Munde, secretary of the Aurangabad chapter of the Maharashtra State Nurses Association.

"We also need separate washrooms and changing rooms to avoid infection. Reaching hospital in time is a problem due to lockdown. So we have demanded transportation facility. Answering police's questions while traveling to work causes delay," Munde added.

There was no canteen and due to the closure of hotels, the hospital staff can not even get a cup of tea in the vicinity, she added.

Hospitals in Aurangabad, a central Maharashtra district, does not have any active COVID-19 patient at present. But the state is leading with number of cases -- 125 -- in the country.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
To live our lives in solitude is hard and that's where taking help from experts is recommended.

As coronavirus spreads havoc and cities and countries shut their borders, millions of people all over the world are being forced to spend their days at home in self-isolation and self-quarantine. This, because COVID-19 spreads from person to person contact via respiratory droplets, which can easily find its way from an infected person to a healthy one in public.

With close to 5 lakh people infected with this disease, reducing contact with other people is the easiest method to stop the spread, followed by wearing and a mask and constant handwashing with soap and water.

That said, humans are social creatures, for whom living in isolation is not all fun and games. To live our lives in solitude is hard, and when things are hard, help from experts is easy to find  and highly recommended. Who better to guide us through than people who spend days and months on end, cooped up in space, with no way to go out and only a handful of the same people to talk to and occasional calls to family and friends?

Astronauts are trained to live in isolation and be productive while they're at it. And while we work from home for an indefinite period, taking some advice to boost our productivity and get us out of a seeming slump is what the psychologist ordered.

So here's what five astronauts have shared on beating the boredom and completing their tasks while they live in the empty, strange, zero-g environs of space.

Anne McClain

NASA astronaut Anne McClain wrote a blog post for NASA on tips to live in space. McClain follows NASA-taught expeditionary behaviour skills, or EBs  communication, self and team care, living in a group, leadership and followership.

While communication and self-care need little explanation, leadership and followership certainly begs a follow-up question.

"Accept responsibility," says McClain. "Adjust your style to your environment. Assign tasks and set goals." This is clearly hinted to all the bosses out there. To all the employees out there, working from home, McClain also has some advice for you - "contribute to your leaders direction, but ask questions and talk when something isnt right."

1/ One thing astronauts have to be good at: living in confined

spaces for long periods of time. Find yourself in a similar scenario? Here are

some pro tips...a thread.  Anne McClain (@AstroAnnimal) March 22, 2020



While we are stuck home, we are surrounded by people, our families and tense moments can arise. We can't just storm out and in these moments without endangering ourselves or someone else, so its best to keep the head calm and the attitude positive.

"Cooperate rather than compete, respect roles, responsibilities and workload and take accountability but give praise freely," McClain says.

Scott Kelly

Retired astronaut and commander of the International Space Station, Scott Kelly wrote an op-ed for The New York Times. In the article, he shares advice and insight from his time on the space station  340 consecutive days, in the same space lab, talking with the same crew members, watching 16 sunrises and sunsets a day. Imagine that getting tedious!

"Work can have a way of taking over everything if you let it," says Kelly. To keep that from happening, he advises people to follow a schedule and build a structure for your time in the day. However, don't go overboard on the work, he warns, and enjoy your time at home when you're home.

Astronauts are not unlike ourselves. While yes, some of them spend their days 408 km above the Earth's surface where the rest of us live, they too do ordinary things like binge-watching television shows. It was Game of Thrones for Kelly. You might want to try something else  perhaps The Good Place? Brooklyn Nine-Nine? The Expanse?

Though we're supposed to stay home and stay isolated, it doesn't mean we can't go outside at all. Just with good reason, and caution  stay at arm's length from people around you at all times.

Chris Hadfield

"Understand the actual risk and don't just be afraid of things," says Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield in a Youtube video he released on 21 March. He has spent time in the space station and has also been a pilot for the space shuttle missions.

In the video, Hadfield gives people a guide to living in isolation. He shares a view that the entire isolation period is a mission, and breaks it down like a drill sergeant. His background in the military surely help. He then tells us to set goals  for both the short- and long-term  to meet, looking at things that might be obstacles, and taking action. Do something you haven't done before, learn a new hobby, etc, he says.

If you think you might be sick, self-isolate. If you are showing any symptoms, consult a doctor.

Peggy Whitson

Peggy Whitson is a retired astronaut who has made multiple trips to the ISS. She also became the first female commander of the ISS with Expedition 16.

In an interview with CBS, she gave her fellow Americans some advice on dealing with solitude during this time. NASA astronauts are taught expeditionary crew skills that include team working, group living and recognising that the purpose of the team is the most important. These are skills that can be put to use during our time in isolation. After all, there's no I in TEAM.

WATCH: @AstroPeggy, one of the most successful astronauts in American history, shares her advice for staying in during the #coronavirus pandemic: You have to be able to communicate effectively... that is the most important thing you have to be able to do. pic.twitter.com/m3mzy0BOsE  CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) March 23, 2020

Being around family at home on day 1 of social distancing might've been fun, but that might not be the case on say day 10. Remember to communicate effectively with people at home is key to not having fights, says Whitson. While we may think we are communicating the ideas in our head but that may not be the case in reality.

If the boredom is kicking in, task lists helped Whitson out when she was bored on Earth. (She claims never to be bored in space, since they have dozens of things to do to keep busy, as Kelly said, and also because each time she looked out of the window, she had something spectacular to look at.)

Buzz Aldrin

In an interview with Ars Technica, 90-year-old Buzz Aldrin talks about how he is dealing with the social distancing that has been made mandatory because of coronavirus. He said he is at home, hunkering down, and doing fine health-wise.

When asked what he was doing to protect himself from the coronavirus, he replied, "lying on my ass and locking the door."

Aldrin was one of the first men to go to the moon on as part of the Apollo missions. After Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins (oh yes, there were three people that made the Apollo 11 mission what we know it to be) came back to Earth, they were quarantined for three weeks inside an airplane-turned-trailer, before being moved to a "secure" building called the Lunar Receiving Laboratory.

Aldrin's advice to people who are facing similar quarantine type situation all over the world is to exercise. At least that's what he and Collins did during their free time.

If it's good enough for the astronauts who went to the moon, it sure as the moon should be good enough for you and me.

#StaySafeStayHome, folks! Things could be a whole lot worse.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak
Egypts health ministry has announced that 54 new coronavirus cases have been detected and one person has died from the virus on Wednesday.

The total number of cases has now reached 456 and the number of fatalities is up to 21.

The ministry added in a statement that 15 more cases  11 Egyptians and four foreigners  have fully recovered and left isolation hospital on Wednesday.

The number of people whose test results have turned from positive to negative so far has reached 113, among whom 95 have fully recovered and left isolation hospital.

The 54 newly detected cases are all Egyptians who were in contact with positive cases announced before, the ministry said.

The new fatality was a 63-year-old Egyptian citizen from Menoufiya governorate.

All the positive coronavirus cases are in isolation hospitals and are undergoing medical treatment according to World Health Organisation guidelines, health ministry spokesman Khaled Megahed said.

Egypts Minister of Health Hala Zayed urged Egyptians to "stay at home" to help slow the spread of the coronavirus in a press conference earlier on Wednesday.

"The next two or three weeks are very important," the minister said, calling on people to exercise vigilance and avoid gatherings and family visits.

"It will not be worrying if we reach 1,000 [cases] in the long term. It would be worrying if we reach the figure in two or three days," Zayed said.

Egypt has a good chance of beating the virus, but this will only happen if everyone follows the restrictive measures, the minister added.

Egypt has declared a two-week curfew from 7pm to 6am starting Wednesday, the strictest measure taken so far to combat the spread of the coronavirus.

Egypt had already halted international flights, banned mass gatherings, shuttered cinemas, mosques and churches and suspended communal prayers.

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New Delhi: South superstars Pawan Kalyan and Ram Charan took to social media on Thursday to announce that they will donate Rs 1 crore and Rs 70 lakh, respectively, to combat the spread of the deadly coronavirus pandemic. Pawan Kalyan, who is also a politician, would donate Rs 50 lakh each to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana governments while he would give contribute Rs 1 crore towards the Prime Ministers Relief Fund.

In a series of tweets, he wrote, I will be donating Rs 50 lakh each to both AP and Telangana CM relief funds to fight against coronavirus pandemic.

I will be donating Rs.50 Lakhs each to both AP and Telangana CM relief funds to fight against Corona pandemic.  Pawan Kalyan (@PawanKalyan) March 26, 2020

I will be donating Rs.1 crore to PM relief fund to support our https://t.co/83OmZ9biYX Sri @narendramodi ji,in turbulent times like this. His exemplary and inspiring leadership would truly bring our country from this Corona pandemic.  Pawan Kalyan (@PawanKalyan) March 26, 2020

I will be donating Rs 1 crore to PM relief fund to support our Hon PM Sri Narendra Modi, in turbulent times like this. His exemplary and inspiring leadership would truly bring our country from this Corona pandemic, he added.

Hours later, Ram Charan also announced that inspired by Pawan Kalyan, he would donate Rs 70 lakh to the Centre and states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in this crisis situation.

He wrote, At this hour of crisis, inspired by Pawan Kalyan, I want to do my bit by contributing to aid the laudable efforts of our governments... Hope you all are staying safe at home!

Read his post here:

Hope this tweet finds you in good health. At this hour of crisis, inspired by @PawanKalyan garu, I want to do my bit by contributing to aid the laudable efforts of our governments...

Hope you all are staying safe at home! @TelanganaCMO @AndhraPradeshCM @PMOIndia @KTRTRS pic.twitter.com/Axnx79gTnI  Ram Charan (@AlwaysRamCharan) March 26, 2020

A couple of days ago, Telugu actor Nithiin also donated Rs 10 lakh each to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana governments to help them fight the virus spread.

The coronavirus has brought the world to a standstill. In India, the total number of positive cases is at 606 while the death toll is at 12.
One of Indias largest gold jewellery store chain, Kalyan Jewellers March 26 told employees there will be no loss of pay at non-operational showrooms across the country due to the lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The major gold trading centres across the country have been shut due to the country-wide lockdown announced by PM Narendra Modi to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease

In his previous address to the nation on March 19 PM Modi has appealed to India Inc. to take care of the economically disadvantaged. "Do not cut their pay for not turning up to work, he had said.

The current situation around COVID-19 is unprecedented. During these challenging times, all Indian businesses will need to be cognizant of their societal roles. Even though there may be a temporary slow-down in revenues and profitability, at Kalyan Jewellers, we will continue to support all our staff financially and emotionally  be it our permanent employees or contractual employees or casual staff - by paying their full salaries, said TS Kalyanaraman, Chairman and Managing Director, Kalyan Jewellers.

"Our company will continue to keep up our commitment and work ethics during these testing times. We are certain that together we will all ride through this tough period soon, Kalyanaraman added.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

The company in a letter written to the showroom managers, regional managers, business heads and other team members said, The days when the showroom is closed in compliance with local State/City/Municipal rules will be considered as working days for purpose of attendance. There will be no loss of pay for such days. This applies to all permanent, contractual and casual staff."

The domestic gems & jewellery sector is currently pegged at around Rs 75,000 crore, according to industry body GJC.
NBCUniversal Chief Executive Jeff Shell has been diagnosed with COVID-19 after feeling ill earlier this month.

Shell, 54, revealed he tested positive for the disease in a memo via email to NBCUniversal staff on Thursday.

He wrote: I recently have been feeling under the weather and just learned that I have tested positive for Covid-19.

NBCUniversal Chief Executive Jeff Shell announced Thursday he has tested positive for coronavirus

Although the virus has been tough to cope with, I have managed to work remotely in L.A. and am improving every day.

Shell also said that NBCUniversal, under parent company Comcast, has committed more than $150million to help employees whove taken a financial hit due to the coronavirus.

NBCUniversal has been forced to shut down film, television and other media operations as the outbreak continues across the globe.

We are working to resume these activities as soon as possible, but of course not until it is safe to do so, Shell wrote.

In the meantime, we recognize that a sudden halt to production creates a significant financial hardship for many. To that end, we have committed over $150 million across our film, television and parks businesses to help our employees and other workers, and to at least partially bridge the period before normal operations can restart.

In the short term, the goals are simple. Take care of each other and take care of our viewers.

Los Angeles Times reports that Shell began feeling sick on March 15 after NBCUniversal shut down operations and productions. He received the positive diagnosis on Wednesday.

Jeff Shell (left), pictured with wife Laura Shell, is currently in Los Angeles following his coronavirus announcement

There are nearly 500,000 confirmed coronavirus cases across the globe as the disease continues to spread. Pictured: emergency medical technicians lift a patient that was identified to have coronavirus into an ambulance while wearing protective gear in New York City

Shell later returned to Los Angeles and began working from home.

NBCUniversal has since instructed employees to work from home in an effort to curb coronavirus infections.

News of Shells diagnosis comes after the death of Larry Edgeworth, a NBC audio technician who died March 19 after testing positive for coronavirus.

Larry Edgeworth (pictured) is a NBC employee who died of coronavirus this month

Edgeworth, who is survived by two children, suffered from other health issues at the time of his death.

NBC Chairman Andy Lack revealed Edgeworths death in an email to employees.

'I'm deeply saddened to tell you that we've lost a longtime member of our NBC News family - Larry Edgeworth passed away yesterday,' Lack said.

'Many of you were fortunate enough to work with Larry over the years, so you know that he was the guy you wanted by your side no matter where you were.

NBCUniversal has taken hit after hit during the outbreak, as the company has shut down film and television productions, as well as its Universal Studio theme parks both domestic and abroad.

Most recently, the International Olympic Committee revealed Tuesday that it would postpone the 2020 Summer Olympics for one year.

This has dealt a massive blow to NBCUniversal, which maintains the rights to televise the Olympic ceremonies and games.

The company received $1.25billion in advertiser commitments for the now postponed games and is now working to renegotiate with advertisers.

The Tokyo Olympics has also lodged a wrench in the companys promotional plan for their upcoming streaming service, Peacock.

Peacock was initially scheduled to premiere July 15, just days before the Olympic Games, and Shell said the release will continue as planned.

As coronavirus cases in the U.S. surge past 73,000 and more than 1,200 people have died, other public figures have announced positive coronavirus diagnoses.

Actors Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson confirmed that they tested positive for Covid-19 on March 12. They said they were one-day-at-a-time.

Theyve since been released from the hospital and are self-quarantining in Australia. They made an announcement this week that their health is improving.

Rita Wilson (left) and husband Tom Hanks (right) were the first celebrities to confirm they had tested positive for Covid-19 on March 12.

Convicted felon Harvey Weinstein (left) and Senator Rand Paul (right) have been diagnosed with coronavirus

Disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein contracted coronavirus after being carted to Rikers Island to serve his prison sentence. He is currently being held in isolation at Wende Correctional Facility in New York.

Other confirmed cases include Prince Albert, Actor Daniel Dae Kim, US Senator Rand Paul and NBC star Kevin Durant.

In the United States, officials have reported more than 73,000 and the number of deaths have topped 1,200 as of this week.

Wednesday became that deadliest day in the U.S. with more than 200 deaths.

Dr. Anthony Fauci issued a stark warning Wednesday that coronavirus may come back in cycles as the death toll in the United States hit 1035, with 252 people dying in a single day.

Although New York has become the lead coronavirus epicenter in the nation, officials believe Louisiana may soon surpass the state.

Officials say recent Mardi Gras celebrations play a large role in this prediction.

Although the Trump administration recently issued a travel ban to 26 European counties, domestic travel is still permitted.

However, President Trump said this could change if infections continue to swell.

During a meeting with press in the Oval Office, the president said when asked about possibly restricting movement within the America: 'We haven't discussed that yet.'

'Is it a possibility? Yes. If somebody gets a little bit out of control, if an area gets too hot,' he said during the bilateral meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.
OROVILLE, Calif. - Nursing students across the state are worried they wont be able to graduate on time due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The students and faculty at Butte College have been contacting Governor Newsom and lawmakers with their concerns hoping to receive help.

"It is so sad to think that after all this time our dreams of helping others might be delayed," Vondracek said.

Action News Now Skyped with a 4th-semester nursing student at Butte College, Devyn Vondracek.

She alongside her 59 other peers in the nursing program say theyre beginning to panic.

Schools are closed across the nation and students are now learning virtually.

"For most programs, this is not a big deal but for nursing students it is," she said, "We can do our theory online thats not the problem it's being able to get those direct patient hours."

Theyre called clinical hours, according to the Board of Registered Nursing (BRN). In order to graduate students must complete 25 percent simulation training and 75 percent direct patient care, which includes hands-on practices.

"Doing IV-meds, oral meds, shots just your basic care, we help people to the bathroom, take their vitals blood pressure heart rate," she says.

But with the Coronavirus outbreak, Vondracek says theyre not allowed in hospitals or at many of their clinical sites.

"Which makes it impossible to comply with the BRNs rules," Vondracek said.

Action News Now also skyped with the Nursing Program Director, Laurie Meyers, "Theyre afraid, theyre scared, theyre in doubt, they want to go out and help."

Meyers says 14,000 nursing students in the state are at risk of not graduating in May.

"Other states have already had an executive order by the governor to allow this exemption of 75 percent direct patient care for clinical hours and are ready to proceed," Meyers said.

The students have completed 890 hours so far  with 128 hours left to finish in the semester.

Meyers says while generally, it would be best for face to face clinical, virtual simulation is very comprehensive.

"Theyre very robust theyre great learning opportunities many other states have already approved 50 percent virtual simulation before the crisis so just allowing us to get there in California would be beneficial," Meyers said.

Both Meyers, Vondracek and many others in the program have been working to make their voices heard by lawmakers.

"We have been calling sending emails and reaching out on social media," Vondracek said.

"Theyve reached out to the chancellor's office and the chancellor's office has heard us and theyre working with the governor pretty intently to help this but the governor still needs to hear our voice,"Meyers said.

Action News Now spoke with Senator Nielsen on the phone, he says with the shortage of healthcare workers as it is talk is already in the works with the governor to address the students' concerns.

Nielsen says me hes confident the request is headed in a positive direction. He also added he cant put a date on when the governor will speak out, but he says soon.
Dominic Chacon was hired in October as the sous chef at downtowns Maverick Whiskey, and it was a dream come true for the longtime San Antonio food veteran. He liked the stable hours, loved drawing a regular paycheck, and most importantly, he enjoyed cooking the meals on a daily basis.

But like many of the estimated 140,000 workers in the San Antonio hospitality scene, he was told last week he was being let go after restaurants and bars were forced to close to dine-in customers to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. That order is expected to last through at least mid-April, turning the hospitality industry upside-down with workers already living paycheck to paycheck and tip to tip facing potential financial ruin.

Several area restaurants and organizations are doing what they can to provide aid to disrupted hospitality workers in the form of advance pay, tip-sharing and by opening up their food pantries for take-home meals.

With the help of Culinaria, a local nonprofit that promotes the San Antonio dining scene, San Antonio chef and restaurant owner Jason Dady is offering free lunches (1 to 3 p.m.) and dinners (6 to 8 p.m.) every day at his Alamo BBQ Co. restaurant on Grayson Street, temporarily renaming it the HospitALLity House.

On ExpressNews.com: Culinarias Restaurant Weeks To-Go program, helping eateries survive coronavirus

Dadys restaurant group, which includes other properties such as Range (temporarily closed), Two Bros. BBQ Market and Tre Trattoria, has been trimmed from around 250 workers to a staff of 12 throughout the properties.

He estimates that he has distributed more than 600 meals to date. Most include a barbecue sandwich or sausage wrap, chips, small dessert, hot bowl of soup and an optional can of beer or soda. Many of the items served are donated from several area food and beverage outlets such as Silver Eagle Beverages, Kiolbassa Smoked Meats, No. 9 Florals and Gifts, and Bakery Lorraine, among others.

Im going to be doing this until somebody gives me the order that I cannot, said Dady, who hands over the meals personally donning a mask with appropriate social distancing. One of the things we are blessed to have is a solid group of food people and businesses that are willing to support this effort.

Direct monetary donations for HospitALLity House are being accepted through the Culinaria website at culinariasa.org/emergency-relief-fund.

Daniel Gallagher and Luis Rizo were two of the industry casualties enjoying their meals at HospitALLity earlier this week. Both were let go from the downtown Rosarios Mexican Cafe y Cantina.

Ive been in the industry for 10 years, and this is the first and only time Ive been out of a job, Gallagher said. And its not like we are all given a manual telling us what do do. I have to file for unemployment, but thats not something Ive done before.

Rizo said he puts zero blame on Rosarios for temporarily taking away his job, and that the restaurant opened up its food reserves for employees to take home before closing indefinitely.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio restaurants now selling groceries

The industry is doing everything it can to help our own, Rizo said. We just found out about (HospitALLity), and think its amazing that something like this exists and is an option for us.

Suzanne Taranto-Etheredge, president and CEO of Culinaria, said the group is organizing a fund that will provide direct financial assistance to restaurants, bars and affected industry workers, but details are still being worked out.

Were used to raising money through live events, where we could generate $50,000 to $100,000 in a month, and that option isnt possible now, Etheredge said. Everybody is starting over at zero, and the laws and rules seem to be changing every day. It would be great to get $1 million and give out a bunch of $10,000 grants, but the last thing I would want to do is give out numbers that arent a reality and add false hope to these already troubling times for our industry.

A team of five laid off San Antonio food pros decided started a new catering business called HUSH (Help Us Serve Hospitality), which opened Monday downtown at 130 E. Travis St. It provides daily meals and alcohol deliveries, and money from tips and a portion of all sales proceeds will also go to the Culinaria fund.

One of the founders, Bennett Rodriguez, a former Cured server, said that the group was formed in haste because we all want to stay in this crazy food business. Orders can be made online at hushsanantonio.com, and are available for same-day delivery until 8 p.m.

Another area company named Food Related (formerly the Gaucho Gourmet), has also opened up its business for online shopping at foodrelated.com, with products that can be delivered free of charge or picked up curbside at 17401 Triton in Schertz. Proceeds from sales are being put to use for the Love Drop Off program, which is designed to distribute free weekly food kits to hospitality industry workers. Follow them on Facebook at @FoodRelatedFam to find out where and when the next drop off location will be.

Several individual restaurants are donating a portion of sales of food or gift cards to help laid off workers. One is Dough Pizzeria Napoletana.

Co-owner Lori Horn, who was forced to slash her staff from 77 at her two restaurant locations to about a dozen, launched a program where all curbside tips will be distributed evenly among former staff. Dough also will add all the proceeds from gift card sales through April 30 to the fund.

Even those workers still employed have seen their income drop with the citys emergency regulations. Over at Mr. Jims Trading Post in China Grove, bartender Crystal Blunt still has a job, but the tip jar now sits empty and she now cleans the bar instead of pouring cold beer.

I have a little bit of a nest egg saved up, but we work in a cash business, and you arent going to find anybody industry that will say they saw this coming, said Blunt, who also temporarily lost her other job at a Northeast Side bar named Rod Dogs Saloon in October due to a fire. I feel for everybody attached to the industry.

On ExpressNews.com: Cook protein in bulk, then freeze it for future meals to ride out coronavirus

As for Chacon, hes now using his time to decide whether to return to the kitchen. He launched his Toastie Buns food trailer in 2011. That business is now closed and the trailer is being leased by another, but hes considering taking it back and relaunching.

Its possible that I might have to get a job in another industry, but its not something that I want to do, Chacon said. Im a cook. Thats what I do and love to do it. We are an industry that likes to curse, tell dirty jokes and live life. We dont adapt well to office life or any other structured environment.

Chuck Blount is a food writer and columnist covering all things grilled and smoked in the San Antonio area. Find his Chucks Food Shack columns on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com, or read his other coverage on our free site, mySA.com. | cblount@express-news.net | Twitter: @chuck_blount | Instagram: @bbqdiver
ShopRite said Wednesday an employee at one of its Union County stores has tested positive for the coronavirus, the third reported case of the virus among the chains workers in New Jersey.

We do have an associate with a confirmed case of COVID-19 at ShopRite of Garwood, the grocery company said on social media. You should know that ShopRite is prepared, and we have implemented the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommended protocol to reduce the spread of the virus.

The company said any colleagues in close contact with the employee were informed and required to self-quarantine for 14 days.

In addition to following CDC protocols, we have implemented our own enhanced sanitation process including all workspaces used by the associate and common areas, the statement said.

Employees at ShopRite stores in Newark and Morristown were also confirmed to have the contagious respiratory virus, according to the company.

We are proud of the amazing dedication our associates are demonstrating, and we thank them for their service to our customers. Please join us in wishing our associate well and a speedy recovery, ShopRite said.

It was not immediately clear if any of the cases were connected.

At least 4,402 people in New Jersey tested positive for the coronavirus with at least 62 deaths as of Wednesday, according to the state health department. In Union County, officials reported at least 262 confirmed cases.

We do have an associate with a confirmed case of COVID-19 at ShopRite of Garwood. You should know that ShopRite is... Posted by ShopRite on Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share.

If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

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Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
"365: Repeat The Year"

Time slot: Monday and Tuesday

Broadcaster: MBC

Genre: Fantasy, mystery, thriller

Episode: 24 (35 minutes /episodes)

Director: Kim Kyung Hee

Screenwriters: Lee Seo Yoon, Lee Soo Kyung

Detective Ji Hyung-Jo, together with his team, capture notorious criminals on the loose. He is skilled in arresting offenders of the law but he was eventually locked in prison. His partner and a good friend were murdered in his own house. The killer made it possible to avenge all the prosecutors responsible for his imprisonment.

Famous webtoon artist Shin Ga Hyun resents the fact that she is handicapped and being locked in a wheelchair. Her boyfriend's family does not approve of their wedding plans. She fought with her good friends and kept them away from her life. She felt helpless and unable to do things as normal people do.

These downfalls made the two characters lose hope towards work and life. Things start to change when they receive an invitation to meet Ms. Lee Shin, elegant and persuasive with the way she talks about "reset." In one meeting place, together with 8 people from all walks of life gather for one purpose. Everyone had the chance to travel back in time for a year. Ms. Lee Shin promised to meet them again in the same place after a year of "reset."

It is a mystery to discover how each person changes a thing of the past. The "reset" allows the viewers to learn the things each one regrets to do. That impacts his present life to be miserable.

"A Piece of Your Mind"

Time slot: Monday and Tuesday

Broadcaster: TVN

Genre: Melodrama, Romance

Episode: 16 (1hour 10 minutes /episodes)

Director: Lee Sang Yeob

Screenwriter: Lee Sook Yun

Genius Ha Won works in a hi-tech company that specializes in discovering new technology that aids artificial intelligence. One of his great inventions is an "AI Memory Box" where a person's memories are stored. His biggest challenge is to make the "AI Memory Box" make a significant on-point reaction to any questions asked. He needs to configure the outcome of the "AI Memory Box."

Ha Won admires listening to any classical music. On his way home, he heard extraordinary music. His interest leads him to follow and find the source of the sound. He entered a room and met a lady surrounded by mixing boards and electrical instruments.

Han Seo Woo works in the studio as music or sound engineer. She has been packing her things as the studio is about to close because the owner decided to sell the building. The music soothed the mind and made a flashback to Ha Won's past. A young girl came to his memory running in the snow. He remembered the place to be in Oslo. The girl in his memory is Kim Ji Soo who happens to be his first love.

Ha Won tried to lock the memory he had with Ji Soo in his "AI Memory Box." He also decided to work with Seo Woo to record the music and at the same the voice of Ji-Soo.

The first episode introduces the 3 characters: a man who adores a lady with all his loyalty and lady who invests her emotions to support the man's dream even if it breaks her heart.
New Delhi, March 26 : A day after the attack on a gurudwara in Kabul left at least 25 Sikhs dead, the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH) on Thursday condemned the attack.

The Jamaat said that the Muslim community of India stands shoulder to shoulder with their Sikh brothers and sisters in their hour of grief and extend condolences to the families of those who died in this attack and prays for the speedy recovery of those who are injured.

JIH President Syed Sadatullah Hussaini said: "We are extremely saddened by the brutal attack on the Sikh community in Kabul, Afghanistan. These types of attacks are an open violation of human rights and international humanitarian law and deserve maximum condemnation by all. Those who are behind this attack must be brought to justice and deserve strict punishment." "The targeting of religious minorities must end immediately. The Afghan government must ensure the security of the Sikh community that has played a stellar role in the building of Afghanistan," he said.

Praising the Sikh community for its humanitarian work, the JIH said that it is at the forefront of relief and rehabilitation activities all over the world in times of national calamities and injustice perpetrated on innocent people.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 16:10:22|Editor: huaxia

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NEW DELHI, March 26 (XInhua) -- A spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy to India has refuted the arguments on stigmatizing China for the COVID-19.

The spokesperson said such arguments ignore the facts and confuse right and wrong, thus they are "irresponsible and do nothing to help international cooperation on epidemic prevention and control."

"We are strongly opposed to these arguments," said Ji Rong, counselor and spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy, in a statement published on the embassy website on Wednesday.

"There is a clear consensus by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the international community that a virus should not be linked to any specific country, region or ethnic group and such stigmatization should be rejected," she said.

Ji stressed that in the fight against the COVID-19, WHO has consistently called on the international community to respect science and respond rationally, and urged all governments to educate the public about the correct name of the disease.

"WHO has stressed that any discriminatory practices should be condemned, the use of "China" and "Wuhan" naming the virus by some media must be corrected, and the international community should focus on China's swift response to the epidemic rather than stereotyping the Chinese people," she noted.

"China has neither created the virus nor intentionally transmitted it," the Chinese diplomat said, adding that the so-called "Chinese virus" is absolutely wrong.

"We hope some people could heed the reasonable voice from the international community and stop making wrongful remarks that stigmatize China."

"The COVID-19 is no longer the battle of one country or one city," she said. "It is now a battle for all. We hope this pandemic can bring us greater solidarity, trust, international health cooperation and better global governance in the public health sector."

Ji said China and India have maintained communication and cooperation and lent support to each other in coping with the epidemic in this difficult time.

"China will continue to fight the epidemic together with India and other countries, enhance cooperation in multilateral platforms such as G20 and BRICS, contribute our wisdom and strength to better addressing global challenges and promote the health and well-being of all the mankind," she said.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fortuna Silver Mines, Inc. (NYSE: FSM) (TSX: FVI) is pleased to report updated Mineral Reserve and Mineral Resource estimates as of December 31, 2019 for the Caylloma Mine located in Peru and the San Jose Mine located in Mexico and reiterates the Mineral Reserve and Mineral Resource estimate as of March 31, 2019 for the Lindero Project located in Argentina.



Jorge A. Ganoza, President and CEO, commented: "Our infill drill program at Caylloma was successful at replenishing the majority of Mineral Reserves mined in 2019 with higher grade mineralized material." Mr. Ganoza continued, "At San Jose, upgrading through infill drilling proved more challenging, as mining is transitioning from the central Stockwork zone to the Trinidad North area where mineralization tends to be narrower and more variable in nature. As the mineralization style changes, the operation is implementing various initiatives, such as pillar recovery and narrow vein mining methods, to optimize mineral extraction."

Highlights of Mineral Reserve and Mineral Resource Update

Combined Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves for the Caylloma and San Jose mines are reported at 6.4 Mt containing 37.2 Moz silver and 220 koz gold, representing year-over-year decreases of 18 percent and 19 percent in contained silver and gold ounces, respectively

Combined Inferred Mineral Resources for the Caylloma and San Jose mines are reported at 7.9 Mt containing an estimated 30.9 Moz silver and 168 koz gold, reflecting a year-over-year decrease of 6 percent in contained silver ounces and no change in reported gold ounces

Lindero Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves are reported at 84.2 Mt containing 1.7 Moz of gold. Inferred Resources are reported at 8.6 Mt containing 106 koz of gold (refer to Fortuna news release dated April 4, 2019 (https://fortunasilver.com/site/assets/files/4690/2019-04-04_nr.pdf))

Mineral Reserves - Proven and Probable Contained Metal Property Classification Tonnes

(000) Ag

(g/t) Au

(g/t) Pb

(%) Zn

(%) Ag (Moz) Au

(koz) Silver

Mines Caylloma,

Peru Proven 99 101 0.34 2.19 3.09 0.3 1 Probable 2,361 80 0.20 2.41 3.86 6.1 15 Proven + Probable 2,460 81 0.21 2.41 3.83 6.4 16 San Jose, Mexico Proven 232 311 2.12 N/A N/A 2.3 16 Probable 3,704 239 1.58 N/A N/A 28.5 188 Proven + Probable 3,936 243 1.61 N/A N/A 30.8 204 Total Proven + Probable 6,396 181 1.07 N/A N/A 37.2 220 Gold

Mine Lindero, Argentina Proven 25,352 N/A 0.76 N/A N/A 0.0 618 Probable 58,875 N/A 0.58 N/A N/A 0.0 1,096 Proven + Probable 84,226 N/A 0.63 N/A N/A 0.0 1,714 Total Proven + Probable 37.2 1,934





Mineral Resources - Measured and Indicated Contained Metal Property Classification Tonnes (000) Ag

(g/t) Au

(g/t) Pb

(%) Zn

(%) Ag (Moz) Au

(koz) Silver

Mines Caylloma, Peru Measured 681 110 0.37 1.96 3.28 2.4 8 Indicated 1,671 104 0.31 1.56 2.96 5.6 17 Measured + Indicated 2,352 106 0.33 1.67 3.06 8.0 25 San Jose, Mexico Measured 17 104 0.80 N/A N/A 0.1 0 Indicated 538 105 0.70 N/A N/A 1.8 12 Measured + Indicated 555 105 0.70 N/A N/A 1.9 13 Total Measured + Indicated 2,907 106 0.40 N/A N/A 9.9 37 Gold

Mine Lindero, Argentina Measured 2,092 N/A 0.55 N/A N/A 0.0 37 Indicated 16,774 N/A 0.49 N/A N/A 0.0 265 Measured + Indicated 18,866 N/A 0.50 N/A N/A 0.0 302 Total Measured + Indicated 9.9 339

Mineral Resources - Inferred Contained Metal Property Classification Tonnes (000) Ag

(g/t) Au

(g/t) Pb

(%) Zn

(%) Ag (Moz) Au

(koz) Silver

Mines Caylloma, Peru Inferred 4,056 112 0.37 2.58 4.00 14.6 48 San Jose, Mexico Inferred 3,889 131 0.96 N/A N/A 16.3 120 Total Inferred 7,945 121 0.66 N/A N/A 30.9 168 Gold

Mine Lindero, Argentina Inferred 8,600 N/A 0.38 N/A N/A 0.0 106 Total Inferred 30.9 274

1. Mineral Reserves and Mineral Resources are as defined by the 2014 CIM Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves

2. Mineral Resources are exclusive of Mineral Reserves

3. Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability

4. Factors that could materially affect the reported Mineral Resources or Mineral Reserves include; changes in metal price and exchange rate assumptions; changes in local interpretations of mineralization; changes to assumed metallurgical recoveries, mining dilution and recovery; and assumptions as to the continued ability to access the site, retain mineral and surface rights titles, maintain environmental and other regulatory permits, and maintain the social license to operate

5. Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves are estimated as of September 25, 2019 for the San Jose Mine and as of June 30, 2019 for the Caylloma Mine and reported for both mines as of December 31, 2019 taking into account production-related depletion for the period through December 31, 2019. Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves for Lindero are estimated and reported as of March 31, 2019

6. Mineral Reserves for the San Jose Mine are based on underground mining within optimized stope designs using an estimated NSR break-even cut-off grade of US$64.54/t, equivalent to 138 g/t Ag Eq based on assumed metal prices of US$17/oz Ag and US$1,380/oz Au; estimated metallurgical recovery rates of 91 % for Ag and 90 % for Au and mining costs of US$33.24/t; processing costs of US$17.12/t; and other costs including distribution, management, community support and general service costs of US$15.18/t based on actual operating costs. Mining recovery is estimated to average 91% and mining dilution 11%. Mineral Resources are reported at a 110 g/t Ag Eq cut-off grade based on the same parameters used for Mineral Reserves and a 15% upside in metal prices. Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves include 2.36 Mt containing 20.4 Moz of silver and 124 koz of gold reported at a 142 g/t Ag Eq cut-off grade, in addition to Inferred Resources totaling 2.71 Mt containing 10.9 Moz of silver and 78 koz of gold reported at a 110 g/t Ag Eq cut-off grade, located in the Taviche Oeste concession and subject to a 2.5 % royalty

7. Mineral Reserves for the Caylloma Mine are reported above NSR breakeven cut-off values based on the proposed mining method for extraction including; mechanized (breasting) at US$ 85.26/t; mechanized (enhanced) at US$ 78.90/t; and semi-mechanized at US$ 86.03/t using assumed metal prices of US$17/oz Ag, US$1,380/oz Au, US$2,170/t Pb and US$2,590/t Zn; metallurgical recovery rates of 84 % for Ag, 25 % for Au, 91 % for Pb and 90 % for Zn with the exception of the Ramal Piso Carolina vein that uses a metallurgical recovery rate of 75 % for Au. Mining, processing and administrative costs used to determine NSR cut-off values were estimated based on actual operating costs incurred from July 2018 through June 2019. Mining recovery is estimated to average 93 % with mining dilution ranging from 10 % to 22 % depending on the mining methodology. Mineral Resources are reported at an NSR cut-off grade of US$65/t for veins classified as wide (Animas, Animas NE, Nancy, San Cristobal) based on the same parameters used for reserves, and a 15% upside in metal prices and US$135/t for veins classified as narrow (all other veins) based on narrow vein mining methods

8. Mineral Reserves for Lindero are reported based on open pit mining within a designed pit shell for variable gold cut-off grades and gold recoveries by metallurgical type. Met type 1 cut-off 0.27 g/t Au, recovery 75.4 %; Met type 2 cut-off 0.26 g/t Au, recovery 78.2 %; Met type 3 cut-off 0.26 g/t Au, recovery 78.5 %; and Met type 4 cut-off 0.30 g/t Au, recovery 68.5 %. Mining recovery is estimated to average 100% and mining dilution 0%. The cut-off grades and pit design are considered appropriate based on long term gold prices of US$1,320/oz, estimated mining costs of US$1.28 per tonne of material, total processing and process G&A costs of US$8.29 per tonne of ore, and refinery costs net of pay factor of US$6.90 per ounce gold. Lindero Mineral Resources are reported within the same conceptual pit shell above a 0.2 g/t Au cut-off grade based on the same parameters used for reserves and a 15% upside in metal prices

9. Eric Chapman, P. Geo. (APEGBC #36328) is the Qualified Person for Mineral Resources and Amri Sinuhaji (APEGBC #48305) is the Qualified Person for Mineral Reserves, both being employees of Fortuna Silver Mines Inc.

10. Totals may not add due to rounding procedures

11. N/A = Not Applicable

San Jose Mine, Mexico

As of December 31, 2019, the San Jose Mine has Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves of 3.9 Mt containing 30.8 Moz of silver and 204 koz of gold, in addition to Inferred Resources of 3.9 Mt containing a further 16.3 Moz of silver and 120 koz of gold.

Year-over-year, Mineral Reserves decreased 24 percent in terms of tonnes and 21 percent in contained silver and gold ounces after net changes resulting from production-related depletion and the upgrading and conversion of Inferred Resources to Mineral Reserves due to a limited infill drill program focused primarily on the Stockwork zones. Silver grade increased 3 percent and gold grade increased 4 percent to 243 g/t and 1.61 g/t, respectively due to an increase in the break-even cut-off grade from 134 g/t to 138 g/t Ag Eq.

Measured and Indicated Resources tonnes exclusive of Mineral Reserves increased slightly year-over-year from 0.3 Mt to 0.5 Mt due primarily to the change in the breakeven cut-off grade for reserves.

Year-over-year, Inferred Resources increased 61 percent in terms of tonnes and 7 percent in contained silver and gold ounces. Silver and gold grades decreased by 33 percent. The net variation is due to reductions resulting from the upgrading of high-grade Inferred Resources related to infill drilling in the Stockwork zones counteracted by exploration drilling discovering new resources in the Victoria mineralized zone.

Caylloma Mine, Peru

As of December 31, 2019, the Caylloma Mine has Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves of 2.5 Mt containing 6.4 Moz of silver and 16 koz of gold, in addition to Inferred Resources of 4.1 Mt containing 14.6 Moz of silver and 48 koz of gold.

Year-over-year, Mineral Reserve tonnes decreased by 6 percent, while silver grade increased 5 percent to 81 g/t, lead grade increased 14 percent to 2.41%, and zinc grade increased 4 percent to 3.83%. Changes are primarily due to mining related depletion and the upgrading and conversion of Inferred Resources to Mineral Reserves due to a successful infill drill program focused primarily on the Animas NE vein.

Measured and Indicated Resource tonnes, exclusive of Mineral Reserves, increased by 9 percent year-over-year to 2.4 Mt.

Inferred Resources tonnes decreased by 1.3 Mt or 24 percent year-over-year. Silver, lead, and zinc grades increased 10 percent, 8 percent, and 4 percent, respectively. The decrease in Inferred Mineral Resources is primarily due to a successful infill drill program of the Animas NE vein resulting in the upgrading of Inferred Mineral Resources to Mineral Reserves coupled with an increase in cut-off value from US$50/t to US$65/t for the reporting of resources in wide veins.

Lindero Project, Argentina

The Lindero Project has Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves of 84.2 Mt containing 1.7 Moz of gold, in addition to Inferred Resources of 8.6 Mt containing 106 koz of gold (refer to Fortuna news release dated April 4, 2019 (https://fortunasilver.com/site/assets/files/4690/2019-04-04_nr.pdf)).

Qualified Person

Mr. Eric Chapman is a Professional Geoscientist of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of the Province of British Columbia (Registration Number 36328) and has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information contained in this news release.

About Fortuna Silver Mines Inc.

Fortuna is a growth oriented, precious metals producer focused on mining opportunities in Latin America. Our primary assets are the Caylloma silver Mine in southern Peru, the San Jose silver-gold Mine in Mexico and the Lindero gold mine, currently under construction, in Argentina. The Company is selectively pursuing acquisition opportunities throughout the Americas and in select other areas. For more information, please visit our website at www.fortunasilver.com (http://www.fortunasilver.com).

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Jorge A. Ganoza

President, CEO and Director

Fortuna Silver Mines Inc.

Trading symbols: NYSE: FSM | TSX: FVI

Investor Relations:

Carlos Baca- T (Peru): +51.1.616.6060, ext. 0

Forward-looking Statements

This news release contains forward looking statements which constitute "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation and "forward looking statements" within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (collectively, "Forward looking Statements"). All statements included herein, other than statements of historical fact, are Forward looking Statements and are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those reflected in the Forward-looking Statements. The Forward looking Statements in this news release may include, without limitation, statements about the Company's plans for its mine sand mineral properties; the Company's business strategy, plans and outlooks; the merit of the Company's mines and mineral properties; mineral resource and reserve estimates; the Company's ability to convert inferred mineral resources to indicated mineral resources and to convert mineral resources to mineral reserves; timelines; production at the mines, the future financial or operating performance of the Company; the effects of laws, regulations and government policies affecting our operations or potential future operations; future successful development of our projects; the estimates of expected or anticipated economic returns from the Company's mining operations including future sales of metals, concentrate or other products produced by the Company; the Company's ability to achieve its production and cost guidance; capital expenditures at the Company's operations; approvals and other matters. Often, but not always, these Forward-looking Statements can be identified by the use of words such as "estimated", "potential", "open", "future", "assumed", "projected", "used", "detailed", "has been", "gain", "planned", "reflecting", "will", "containing", "remaining", "expected", "to be", or statements that events, "could" or "should" occur or be achieved and similar expressions, including negative variations.

Forward-looking Statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the Forward-looking Statements. Such uncertainties and factors include, among others, risks inherent in mineral exploration; the reliability of Mineral Resource and Mineral Reserve estimates; uncertainties inherent in the estimation of Mineral Reserves, Mineral Resources, and metal recoveries; the Company's ability to replace mineral reserves; changes to current estimates of mineral reserves and resources; changes to production estimates; changes in general economic conditions and financial markets; uncertainty of production, development plans and cost estimates for the Caylloma Mine, the San Jose Mine and the Lindero Project; changes in prices for silver and other metals; technological and operational hazards in Fortuna's mining and mine development activities; market risks related to the sale of the Company's concentrates and metals; future development risks, the Company's ability to obtain adequate financing for further exploration and development programs and opportunities; governmental and other approvals; the ability to obtain necessary licences and permits; claims and legal proceedings, including adverse rulings in litigation against the Company; challenges to the title to the Company's properties; political unrest or instability in countries where Fortuna is active; labor relations issues; as well as those factors discussed under "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Information Form. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in Forward-looking Statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended.

Forward-looking Statements contained herein are based on the assumptions, beliefs, expectations and opinions of management, including but not limited to expectations regarding the accuracy of the Company's current mineral resource and reserve estimates; mine production costs; expected trends in mineral prices and currency exchange rates; that the Company's activities will be in accordance with the Company's public statements and stated goals; that there will be no material adverse change affecting the Company or its properties; that all required approvals will be obtained; that there will be no significant disruptions affecting operations and such other assumptions as set out herein. Forward-looking Statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company disclaims any obligation to update any Forward-looking Statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by law. There can be no assurance that Forward-looking Statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, investors should not place undue reliance on Forward-looking Statements.

Cautionary Note to United States Investors Concerning Estimates of Reserves and Resources

Reserve and resource estimates included in this news release have been prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") and the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves. NI 43-101 is a rule developed by the Canadian Securities Administrators that establishes standards for public disclosure by a Canadian company of scientific and technical information concerning mineral projects. Equivalent U.S. reporting requirements are currently governed by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") Industry Guide 7 ("Industry Guide 7") under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Canadian standards, including NI 43-101, differ significantly from the requirements of the SEC currently in effect under Industry Guide 7, and reserve and resource information contained in this news release may not be comparable to similar information disclosed by U.S. companies. In particular, the term "resource" does not equate to the term "reserves". Under the SEC's disclosure standards currently in effect under Industry Guide 7, mineralization may not be classified as a "reserve" unless the determination has been made that the mineralization could be economically and legally produced or extracted at the time the reserve determination is made. While the SEC recognizes the reporting of mineral deposits which do not meet the Industry Standard Guide 7 definition of "reserve" as of February 25, 2019, the effective adoption of the Modernization of Property Disclosures for Mining Registrants, such rules are not required to be compiled with until the first fiscal year beginning on or after January 1, 2021. As a result, the SEC's disclosure standards currently in effect normally do not permit the inclusion of information concerning "measured mineral resources", "indicated mineral resources" or "inferred mineral resources" or other descriptions of the amount of mineralization in mineral deposits that do not constitute "reserves" by U.S. standards in documents filed with the SEC. You are cautioned not to assume that resources will ever be converted into reserves. You should also understand that "inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. You should also not assume that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource" will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian rules, estimated "inferred mineral resources" may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies except in rare cases. You are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource" exists or is economically or legally mineable. Disclosure of "contained ounces" in a resource is permitted disclosure under Canadian regulations; however, the SEC's disclosure standards currently in effect under Industry Guide 7 normally only permit issuers to report mineralization that does not constitute "reserves" by such standards as in-place tonnage and grade without reference to unit measures. The requirements of NI 43-101 for identification of "reserves" are also not the same as those of the SEC's disclosure standards currently in effect under Industry Guide 7, and reserves reported in compliance with NI 43-101 may not qualify as "reserves" under such SEC standards. Accordingly, information concerning mineral deposits set forth in this news release may not be comparable with information made public by companies that report in accordance with U.S. standards.
Australian stocks snapped a three-day winning streak in spectacular fashion on Friday, giving up early gains of more than 2 per cent to close deep in the red.

The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 tumbled 270.9 points, or 5.3 per cent, to 4842.4, erasing much of the rebound seen in the previous three sessions.

Despite the late plunge, the index still managed to finish the week with a gain of 0.5 per cent.

Chris Weston, head of research at Pepperstone, said he was not surprised by the late move, suggesting the rally from the multi-year lows hit on Monday lacked conviction.

Im not convinced by the rally, not at all, Mr Weston said. Volumes are rubbish. Theres no conviction - I just feel people are absolutely knackered.

Given the speed of the rebound, coming despite a torrent of bad news on the state of the local and global economy, Mr Weston believes theres a lot of scepticism among investors.

After everything weve seen, people are not sure whether they should chase this rally, he said. Should they put money to work now, has it just been a short-covering rally, or is it due to month-end positioning.

Fitting with the ugly close, all sectors finished lower, led by REITs which tumbled 8.7 per cent. Healthcare also slumped 7.1 per cent.

Among the big names, Scentre Group tanked 12.5 per cent to $1.51 while Goodman Group shed 10.7 per cent to $11.13.

CSL fell 7.6 per cent to $279.12 while all of the big four banks tumbled by more than 6.3 per cent, led by ANZ with a fall of 7.4 per cent to $15.47.

Wesfarmers and Transurban also skidded more than 7 per cent, closing at $32.25 and $11.84 per cent respectively.

Charter Hall Group was the worst performer on the benchmark index, finishing with a loss of 14.7 per cent to $2.96. ALS sat at the other end of the scoreboard, gaining 5.5 per cent to $5.39.

As for when a sustained rebound in equity markets will occur, Mr Weston said it will come down to when businesses begin to come back online

The defining moment will be when activity levels start to normalise, he said. You look at anyones forecasts, consensus looks for a disastrous June quarter followed by a big snap-back in the September quarter with a lot of stimulus.

Anything that makes me question that the September quarter wont as goods as everyone thinks, then I think equities will take another leg lower.
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Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said that the Obama cabinet tried to warn the incoming Trump cabinet about preparing for a pandemic nearly 4 years ago.

Johnson said on MSNBC:



This pandemic were facing right now is a once in a century, unprecedented crisis, but not unpredictable. And weve got a taste of the future with the ebola crisis in the fall of 2014. And so the risk of a lethal virus spreading globally like this has been something that has been and should be uppermost on the minds of DHS officials, health officials across the U.S. Government.

And, in fact, when the outgoing Obama administration cabinet sat down and met with the incoming Trump administration cabinet on Friday, January 13th, one of the very few things we discussed was how to respond to a lethal pandemic like this.

Trump ignored warnings about the coronavirus from the nations intelligence agencies for months. He and his administration ignored the warnings about a potential pandemic from the outgoing Obama administration years ago.

The coronavirus wasnt something that happened out of the blue. The Trump administration had ample warning and did nothing. The economy is in a state of collapse. The nation is dealing with a once in a century public health crisis because Trump and his administration ignored the warnings that could have lessened the illness and pain that is being inflicted on the nation.
Five central paramilitary forces such as the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Border Security Force (BSF), Indo-Tibet Border Police (ITBP), Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) and Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) have a combined strength of 7,500 hospital beds, where Covid-19 patients can be treated as a contingency measure if the country faces a surge of positive cases, officials told HT.

The Union ministry of home affairs (MHA) had on March 23 asked the paramilitary forces, also called Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs), to provide a list of their 32 composite hospitals -- located across the country -- for Covid-19 patients and also ordered them on March 9 to make adequate arrangements for isolation facilities.

These composite hospitals and isolation facilities are located in Delhi, Greater Noida, Hyderabad, Guwahati, Jammu, Tekanpur in Gwalior, Imphal, Dimapur, Nagpur, Silchar, Bhopal, Kolkata, Pune, Bengaluru, Chennai and Jaipur among other areas. One of the biggest facilities of the forces is ITBPs Chhawla Camp in Delhi, where several batches of evacuees, who arrived from different Covid-19-affected countries such as China and Iran, have been treated since early February.

A CRPF officer, who didnt wish to be quoted, said, We have arranged around 2,000 beds for quarantine in several locations, and more may be arranged. The medical staff in our camps has been sanitised and necessary equipment and masks are in place.

The Centre is also making arrangements for specialist doctors and medical tools such as ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE) as many of these forces facilities are not equipped with adequate medical staff.

The forces have already been told that contingency measures should be in place for troops or their family members already admitted to these facilities be shifted to another location if there is a spurt in the number of Covid-19 patients.

The CAPFs are holding their key meetings via video-conferencing, convoy movements have been halted in sensitive areas such as Jammu & Kashmir and troops have been asked to stay put in their respective bases.

The government had last week ordered the forces to go into a battle mode to combat the Covid-19 outbreak, which has claimed 20,000 lives across the world.

The rotational deployment of paramilitary troops at the United Nations missions has also been put off for now.

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Local college students are asking for grading system adjustments after the conronavirus pandemic forced schools to conduct classes remotely for the remainder of the spring semester.

Students at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the University of the Incarnate Word, St. Mary's University and Texas A&M San Antonio launched Change.org petitions, asking for a "pass or fail" grading system.

Stay up to date on the latest coronavirus news with mySA.com:

Petitions for UTSA and UIW share similar language, citing disruptions students did not anticipate. St. Mary's students say moving to online classes adds to an already high level of stress and many are having connectivity issues at home. The petitions all have a common concern: the move to online classes is not affecting students evenly and grade point averages shouldn't suffer.

As each of the petitions near their respective signature goals, UTSA, UIW and St. Mary's are offering updates. TAMUSA was not immediately available to comment.

UIW is calling the situation "fluid" and is exploring "all options." University administration and the student government association are in contact with the board and the provost, a spokesperson said.

"Any decision will flow through shared governance, with faculty senate recommendations coordinated with deans and offered to the provost for decision," the university said in an email.

RELATED: Officials announce 'Stay Home, Work Safe' order for San Antonio, Bexar County

UTSA Provost Kimberly Andrews Espy is asking for the faculty senate to provide a recommendation on the grading system adjustments by April 3.

St. Mary's University is also looking at ways to help students adapt, said Director of Communications Jennifer Lloyd.

"St. Mary's University is exploring a variety of grading options to ensure students receive the highest quality education achievable this spring semester," she said. "Students enroll in St. Mary's because of our mission to provide an academically excellent education. Any adopted changes in grading policies will support that mission."

San Antonio students are not alone in their concerns. Similar petitions are racking up signatures nationwide. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has already changed its grading policy for the spring semester.

UIW said it has not made any decision about how a possible revised grading system would look like and St. Mary's said any changes will be communicated directly to students.

Madalyn Mendoza is a breaking news reporter and general assignment writer. Read her on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | mmendoza@mysa.com | @MaddySkye

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:
The search continues for a 4-year-old Lee County girl who vanished while walking her dog in a rural Lee County area.

Evelyn Vadie Sides was last seen around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday in the 5000 block of Lee County Road 66 in Loachapoka, a town about a half mile west of Auburn.

Lee County Sheriffs Office spokesman Andrew Peacock said Evelyn was under supervision and walking her dog when she essentially just disappeared. He said few details can be released at this time, but said Evelyn was at a location with which she was familiar though it was not near her home.

Peacock said at this point foul play is not suspected in Evelyns disappearance. The girls dog has not yet been found either.

Hundreds of law enforcement officers from multiple agencies were on the scene Wednesday night searching for the little girl. By the time everyone arrived, we were fighting darkness, he said.

The search effort continued this morning and includes the use of helicopters and drones, Peacock said. Because of the technology being used, authorities are not asking for volunteers at this time because they need to be able to keep track of people and their whereabouts. Searchers are also on horseback.

They are searching very thoroughly, Peacock said. We will continue to search until we find her.

The outpouring of support has been tremendous, which speaks volumes for the people in that area, he said. If we need anything (from volunteers) we will definitely reach out.

The search area is wooded, though not dense, and sparsely populated.

Evelyn is described as 3-feet tall and weighing 40 pounds. She has red hair and green eyes with a red mark on her nose. The child was wearing a short-sleeve floral dress when she disappeared.

Anyone with information on the girls whereabouts was asked to call the Lee County Sheriffs Office at 334-737-7131 or 911.
Midland small businesses that are still allowed to function under the states shelter ban are navigating new territory this week.

The Daily News surveyed a number of local restaurants and grocery stores, and we found while the coronavirus is slowing, many remain optimistic and are grateful for the communitys support.

Local restaurants evolve operations to feed community

Per Gov. Gretchen Whitmers order, eateries across the state have been forced to shut down their dine-in operations to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus.

For some who were already carryout-oriented, such as Good-to-Go: Specialty Takeout in downtown Midland, it has meant only minor adjustments to operations. For others, however, it has meant getting creative in the ways they serve and communicate with the community.

Over at The Creek Grill, 1259 S. Poseyville Road, Owner Katy Dean said they just added another phone line to allow for more call-in orders. She said it will also allow customers to send a text when they arrive to pick up their order, so an employee can bring their order out to the car as a curbside service.

However, it has been a learning curve for employees as they transition to taking almost all credit card payments over the phone, for a touch-free system.

Every day is a new day to sort of sit down and figure out OK, what can I order realistically that I can sell fast enough with only takeout? Dean said. But right now, we anticipate being able to offer 90% of our full menu for indefinitely as long as people come in.

Many places that offer carryout are going this extra step to bring orders out to drivers, so that they dont have to come inside. Mike Horvath, co-owner at Good To Go said they will even put someones order out on the picnic table with their name on it, if thats what customers feel most comfortable doing.

Even though this is going on, some people still need to be at work and they need to get lunch, Horvath said. So, were very happy and grateful to still offer that.

Still, Good To Gos other owner, Kara Bingham, said some days are better than expected while other days are horrible.

We're hoping everything averages out, she said. Our main goal is not to cut anyone's hours or lay anyone off. So far, we haven't had to do that, which makes us very happy. Our employees do great work for us and we don't want to see them struggle if we can help it.

Other restaurants, such as Basil Thai Bistro, have started implementing delivery, just to keep up with the demand as best they can. General Manager Ken Scarmeas said they will deliver anywhere in a 5-mile of the restaurant radius for orders with a minimum total of $40, and for the most part, the support theyre still receiving from the community has kept the restaurant going.

Were still definitely going to be here; were going to be open through this time, Scarmeas said. If anything changes, we will let everybody know, but we really appreciate the help from the community and how many people have come out (to support us).

However, even despite adding these extra services, for most eateries, the rapid changes have taken a toll on business, which has led to changed or decreased hours, a decrease in number of staff and/or menu changes.

For example, Ryan Such, owner at Lannys Restaurant in Sanford, said he was pleasantly surprised with the amount of business they had last week, however, this week has been slower. So, he said, theyve decreased staff and changed their hours. Rather than stay open until 8 p.m. each week, hes scaled back to 7 p.m. Hes also tried out being open on Sundays for a few hours, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Were trying to keep things set and normal, but we might obviously have to adjust depending on what goes on, and its week by week, Such said.

Over at Amazing Deli, General Manager Kevin Haggart said they still have loyal customers coming in who crave the unique items on their menu, such as Eds Reuben (a Rueben sandwich with a fried egg), although Main Street has been quiet. Hes looking on the brightside of the entire situation, however, and said he plans to give the dining room a facelift while it is not in use by customers.

And, while business slows down for some, it has picked up for others. George Prokap at Pizza Dude, 4328 N. Saginaw Road, said theyve actually seen an increase in business and takeout pizza orders. Although, theyve still scaled back their open hours.

However, despite all the ups and downs each of these restaurants are facing, all the supervisors and owners agree their customers have been overwhelmingly positive, and their support is extremely appreciated.

Ninety-nine percent of the people have been very supportive, and you know, we have great customers, and thats been apparent over the last week, Such said. So, theyre coming in and as much as they can, but its been a lot of positive feedback and good things being said; good wishes.

To follow daily updates, hours and specials from local eateries, visit their individual Facebook pages and ourmidland.com/curbside

Grocers implement additional measures to keep customers safe

Local grocery stores are implementing additional measures to keep their customers safe.

LaLondes Market is now limiting the number of customers inside the store to 12 at any given time. Small dots have also been placed on the floor at 6-foot intervals throughout the store, which gives customers a visual reminder to maintain that distance.

Customers are being asked to enter the store through the back door and exit through the front, and staff members are cleaning doorknobs and other surfaces multiple times a day, as well as wearing gloves.

You should, if you are healthy, feel comfortable and confident to come in and shop in our store. We are doing everything in our power to keep you as safe and as healthy as possible, owner Scott MacNellis said in a video posted to the LaLondes Market Instagram page.

Although essential items such as milk, eggs and bread have been in much higher demand, MacNellis says the store has still been able to keep those items on the shelves.

Were not selling out of things because our suppliers have been so amazing, he said.

From 8 to 9 a.m., the store will continue to be reserved for seniors and caregivers. Customers can also call the market to place a grocery order, which staff will then assemble for you to pick up.

Jacks Fruit and Meat Market is also making a few changes to adapt to the coronavirus. They have changed their store hours to allow for more time to clean the store, and are now opening at 10 a.m.
Micheal Martins Fianna Fail is scheduled for long talks with Leo Varadkars Fine Gael over forming a stable government

Fianna Fail and Fine Gael began talks yesterday that are likely to last for a fortnight over a programme for government.

The two parties issued a joint statement after what was described as a "productive" meeting.

"They both agree the need to form a strong, stable government that will help Ireland recover post Covid-19. They are working to develop a programme for government that provides stability and majority support in the Dail," the statement said.

DISCUSSIONS

Meanwhile, Green TDs are divided over whether the party should enter government with Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.

Party sources say leader Eamon Ryan is in favour of the Greens ultimately doing a deal with the Civil War parties if efforts to form a national unity government fail.

Carlow-Kilkenny TD Malcolm Noonan said that if a unity government cannot be formed, "the only realistic scenario for a stable government is Fianna Fail and Fine Gael", adding he was "more than willing to talk to them".

However, several new TDs denied the Greens are open to talks with the parties after a senior source said a coalition with Fine Gael and Fianna Fail cannot be ruled out, if a unity government is not possible.

Finance spokesperson Neasa Hourigan said the Greens want to be in government "but the Covid crisis is not the time for a programme for government talks".

"We're focusing all our energies on putting forward a reasonable and palatable proposal for unity government," she said.

Ms Hourigan's view was backed by TDs Roderic O'Gorman and Patrick Costello, who said: "We're asking people to pull together as a country, why aren't politicians doing the same thing?"

Mr Ryan is said to be among those who is enthusiastic to return to government but he is facing resistance from newer members of the parliamentary party, Green Party sources said.

Mr Ryan did not respond to a request for comment.

DIFFERENCES

Mr Noonan denied there is a split but admitted there was a "difference of opinion and it may be significant".

He said anything negotiated would ultimately have to be voted on by members.

"Fine Gael and Fianna Fail is the only option for a stable government. It's bound to be the case there are differences of opinion about the strategy," he said.

Meanwhile, Ceann Comhairle Sean O Fearghail has warned that politicians will be unable to pass any new laws after this Sunday, creating a "very serious constitutional problem".

In an email to Fianna Fail TD Marc MacSharry, Mr O Fearghail confirmed, based on legal advice, that the new Seanad, to be elected next week, could not meet until 11 people are nominated to the upper house by a Taoiseach elected by the current Dail.

"This obviously gives rise to a very serious constitutional problem: from midnight March 29, the Houses of the Oireachtas will not be able to pass legislation," he said.

However, senator and former attorney general Michael McDowell said whether or not the Seanad could sit in the absence of the 11 Taoiseach's appointees had been considered in 2016.

At that time, the legal advice was that it could operate.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is putting pressure on the Greens, Independents and small parties, to enter government talks.

He said a government will need to last for the next four years and have "a stable working majority", requiring at least 10 more TDs, as well as those from Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.
A nanodegree in autonomous vehicles is just one of 40 programs that Udacity is offering for free to workers laid off in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Udacity

Online learning platform Udacity is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic by offering free tech training to workers laid off as a result of the crisis. On Thursday the Mountain View, California-based company revealed that in the wake of layoffs and furloughs by major U.S. corporations, including Marriott International, Hilton Hotels and GE Aviation, it will offer its courses  known as nanodegrees  for free to individuals in the U.S. who have been let go because of the coronavirus. The average price for an individual signing up for a nanodegree is about $400 a month, and the degrees take anywhere from four to six months to complete, according to the company. The hope is that while individuals wait to go back to work, or in the event that the layoff is permanent, they can get training in fields that are driving so much of today's digital transformation. Udacity's courses include artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital marketing, product management, data analysis, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles, among others. Gabe Dalporto, CEO of Udacity, said that over the past few weeks, as he and his senior leadership team heard projections of skyrocketing unemployment numbers as a result of COVID-19, he felt the need to act. "I think those reports were a giant wake-up call for everybody," he says. "This [virus] will create disruption across the board and in many industries, and we wanted to do our part to help."

A nanodegree in autonomous vehicles is just one of 40 programs that Udacity is offering for free to workers laid off in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Udacity

Dalporto says Udacity is funding the scholarships completely and that displaced workers can apply for them at udacity.com/pledge-to-americas-workers beginning March 26. Udacity will take the first 50 eligible applicants from each company that applies, and within 48 hours individuals should be able to begin the coursework. Dalporto says the offer will be good for the first 20 companies that apply and that "after that we'll evaluate and figure out how many more scholarships we are going to fund." The company also announced this week that any individual, regardless of whether they've been laid off, can enroll for free in any one of Udacity's 40 different nanodegree programs. Users will get the first month free when they enroll in a monthly subscription, but Dalporto pointed out that many students can complete a course in a month if they dedicate enough time to it.

Closing a skills gap

Udacity's offerings at this time underscore the growing disconnect between the skills workers have and the talent that organizations need today  and in the years ahead. The company recently signed a deal with Royal Dutch Shell, for instance, to provide training in artificial intelligence. Shell says about 2,000 of its 82,000 employees have either expressed interest in the AI offerings or have been approached by their managers about taking the courses on everything from Python programming to training neural networks. Shell says the training is completely voluntary.

We have to be asking how are we going to help them get the skills they need to be successful in their careers moving forward when this is all behind us. Gabe Dalporto CEO of Udacity
Hundreds of people, stranded in transit at the Howrah station here owing to suspension of passenger train services during lockdown, have been transported by bus by the West Bengal government on way to their respective destinations, state Transport Secretary N S Nigam said here on Thursday.

Most of these people, who had been outside the station building since Saturday midnight, had a harrowing time spending the nights in the open and desperately seeking avenues to return home, before the state authorities came to their rescue.

Eastern Railway authorities claimed that the Railway Protection Force (RPF) personnel provided security to them as also with food before they were ferried to their respective destinations by bus by the state government.

The Railways had suspended train services, except for some suburban trains, on Sunday owing to the 'Janta Curfew' announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It then announced the suspension of all passenger trains from Sunday midnight in a bid to prevent the spread of the virus.

"There is no stranded passenger at Howrah station at present. They have been transported away by the state government in its buses," ER spokesperson Nikhil Chakraborty said.

Most of these stranded people were from Assam and were working in different parts of the country. They were travelling back to their native places following the lockdown that came into force in different states since last week, when they were caught in the shutdown after reaching Howrah.

"A major chunk of these people are from Assam. They are poor people, we fed them and their travel have been ensured free of cost by our government," the state transport secretary told PTI.

The West Bengal government started taking them to Assam border in buses since Monday and handing them over to the authorities of the neighbouring state.

He said the local authorities at a border district in Assam took a lot of time in giving clearance for the entry of these stranded people, following which the issue was taken up with the top level of the government and the matter was resolved.

Nigam said these people were stranded at the Assam border for two days after reaching there from Howrah by bus, before they were taken in by the neighbouring state on Wednesday.

Their food and shelter requirements were taken care of by the West Bengal government during the period, he said.

Another 250 people were scheduled to reach the Assam border at Baxirhat in Coochebehar district of West Bengal by Thursday night, he said.

"We have taken care of these people as required, on humanitarian ground," Nigam said.

The state transport secretary said his counterpart in the Assam government has been requested to make arrangements for their onward travel to their respective places from the border after conducting health check-up.

Many others who are also stranded at Howrah station belong to West Bengal and arrangements were made to take them home, a transport official said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
DUBLIN, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Immersion Cooling Market in Data Centers - Growth, Trends, Forecast (2020 - 2025)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global immersion cooling market in data centers is anticipated to register a CAGR of over 40%, during the forecast period (2020-2025). Key players are Fujitsu Limited, Green Revolution Cooling, Submer Technologies, etc.



The future is coming quickly and that means huge data will be here sooner rather than later and with huge data comes a major demand for more energy-efficient and effective data center cooling. Immersion cooling meets the needs of an ever-growing data center power density and will likely increase the demand in future.



The increase in the number of hyper-scale data centers is driving the market as hyperscale data centers are broadly used in different sectors to increase computing ability, memory, networking infrastructure, or storage resources. The different features of the hyperscale data centers include the physical infrastructure and distribution systems that support the data centers for maximizing cooling efficiency, as well as the ability to scale computing tasks in a quicker and faster way. According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), IT exports from India may exceed USD 330 billion by 2019-20. This accounts for nearly 14% of the projected worldwide spend, if India maintains its current share of the global offshore IT market.



Dealing with high-density power consumption drives the market as many industry estimates put cooling costs at about 40% of a data center's energy consumption. Immersion cooling is able to reduce a data center's energy usage by over 60%, with some systems stating it could be as much as 95%. For many data centers, that is millions of dollars in savings every year.



High investment with greater capital expenditure is restraining the market growth, as requirement of specialized infrastructure is needed and hence need to be justified with a longer-term ROI in mind.



Key Market Trends



Mineral Oil Fluid to Hold Major Share

Mineral oils are preferred by end-users looking for a low-cost, energy-efficient cooling solution. Cooling through mineral oil needs less energy, as it retains heat 1,000 times better than air. It is a great thermal insulator, which allows the equipment to operate well while being submerged.

Although oils have lower heat capacity than water, oil cooling has advantages over other types of liquid cooling methods in that it is a dielectric liquid and does not require complex infrastructure within individual servers.

Also, mineral-oil-based coolants are cheaper, compared to engineered or synthetic fluids. For example, mineral oil costs just over USD 10 per gallon, while synthetic fluids, such as 3M Novec 1230 produced by 3M Co., cost over USD 70 per gallon. Also, compared to air and water medium, mineral oil has a better heat capacity and power efficiency.

per gallon, while synthetic fluids, such as Novec 1230 produced by Co., cost over per gallon. Also, compared to air and water medium, mineral oil has a better heat capacity and power efficiency. As mineral oil is produced as a primary by-product while converting crude oil into gasoline, there are several established vendors that already serve the cosmetics and industrial sector from where companies could source the product and modify it for their use. However, in the case of synthetic liquids and other substitutes, 3M enjoys a major market share. All the major operators and immersion cooling technologies, including Allied Control Ltd, Fujitsu Limited, ExaSclar Inc., and LiquidMips, use coolants provided by 3M .

North America to Hold the Dominant Share

North America is estimated to dominate the global data center liquid immersion cooling market during the forecast period, due to the presence of a large number of data centers in the region, along with the rise in popularity of this technology, especially in the United States .

is estimated to dominate the global data center liquid immersion cooling market during the forecast period, due to the presence of a large number of data centers in the region, along with the rise in popularity of this technology, especially in . In the United States , the demand and rate of adoption for cloud-based computing are rapidly increasing by technology giants, such as Facebook and Apple, owing to which, the number of data centers is increasing in the country, thereby, propelling the utilization of immersion cooling systems.

, the demand and rate of adoption for cloud-based computing are rapidly increasing by technology giants, such as Facebook and Apple, owing to which, the number of data centers is increasing in the country, thereby, propelling the utilization of immersion cooling systems. In June 2017 , Facebook announced that it will lay a 200-mile cable to the new data centers in Mexico , which are likely to boost the market growth over the forecast period. Additionally, a few states of the United States are offering tax incentives, specifically to data centers. For instance, Florida approved use and sales tax exemption for every new data center built in the state, which is expected to present a positive impact on the growth of the US market.

, Facebook announced that it will lay a 200-mile cable to the new data centers in , which are likely to boost the market growth over the forecast period. Additionally, a few states of are offering tax incentives, specifically to data centers. For instance, approved use and sales tax exemption for every new data center built in the state, which is expected to present a positive impact on the growth of the US market. Companies are rigorously investing in data centers to meet the growing demand from respective operations. For instance, the increasing demand for cognitive capabilities in the United States has led IBM Corporation to build four new cloud data centers in the country. This is likely to encourage the utilization of immersion cooling technology in these data centers, thereby propelling the market growth over the forecast period.

has led IBM Corporation to build four new cloud data centers in the country. This is likely to encourage the utilization of immersion cooling technology in these data centers, thereby propelling the market growth over the forecast period. Also in 2018, Kolos constructed the largest data center (of 600,000-square meter, with 1,000 MW of computing power) in the world in Ballangen, Norway . The data center is expected to scale up about two gigawatts of consumable renewable power, which is more than the generation capacity of any other data center in the world. This will drive the demand for immersion cooling effectively.

Competitive Landscape



The market studied is moderately consolidated, as the companies in the market are continuously developing new cooling solutions with capabilities to cool highly dense storage components. They are also investing in research and development activities to create alternative solutions that further support developments in the market.



In terms of the data center market scenario, there is a considerable number of merger and acquisition activities taking place, globally, which is expected to boost the capabilities of several players to invest in advanced cooling infrastructure.



Key Topics Covered



1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Study Deliverables

1.2 Study Assumptions

1.3 Scope of the Study



2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY



3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY



4 MARKET DYNAMICS

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 Industry Attractiveness - Porter's Five Force Analysis

4.2.1 Threat of New Entrants

4.2.2 Bargaining Power of Buyers/Consumers

4.2.3 Bargaining Power of Suppliers

4.2.4 Threat of Substitute Products

4.2.5 Intensity of Competitive Rivalry

4.3 Introduction to Market Drivers and Restraints

4.4 Market Drivers

4.5 Market Restraints



5 TECHNOLOGY SNAPSHOT

5.1 Evolution of Data Center Cooling

5.2 Energy Consumption and Computing Density Metrics and Key Considerations

5.3 Teardown of Fluid, Processor, GPUs, Racks, and Infrastructure Providers



6 MARKET SEGMENTATION

6.1 By Applications

6.1.1 High-performance Computing

6.1.2 Edge Computing

6.1.3 Artificial Intelligence

6.1.4 Cryptocurrency Mining

6.1.5 Other Applications

6.2 By Cooling Fluids

6.2.1 Mineral Oil

6.2.2 Deionized Water

6.2.3 Fluorocarbon-based Fluids

6.2.4 Synthetic Fluids

6.3 By Type

6.3.1 Single-phase Immersion Cooling System

6.3.2 Two-phase Immersion Cooling System

6.4 Geography

6.4.1 North America

6.4.2 Europe

6.4.3 Asia Pacific

6.4.4 Rest of World



7 COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

7.1 Company Profiles

7.1.1 Fujitsu Limited

7.1.2 Green Revolution Cooling Inc.

7.1.3 Submer Technologies

7.1.4 Allied Control Ltd.

7.1.5 Asperitas Company

7.1.6 Qcooling L.P.

7.1.7 Midas Green Technologies



8 INVESTMENT ANALYSIS



9 MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND FUTURE TRENDS



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/ofv5vr

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JACKSONVILLE, Fla., March 25, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CSX Corp. (CSX) will release first-quarter financial and operating results after the market close on Wednesday, April 22, 2020. This will be followed by a conference call and live webcast hosted by the companys management team at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time.



Those interested in participating via teleconference may dial 1-866-627-3868. Callers outside the U.S. dial 1-825-312-2388. Participants should dial in 10 minutes prior to the call and use 1979628 as the passcode.

Presentation materials and access to the webcast will be available on the companys website at http://investors.csx.com . Following the earnings call, a webcast replay will be archived on the companys website.

About CSX and its Disclosures

CSX, based in Jacksonville, Florida, is a premier transportation company. It provides rail, intermodal and rail-to-truck transload services and solutions to customers across a broad array of markets, including energy, industrial, construction, agricultural, and consumer products. For nearly 200 years, CSX has played a critical role in the nation's economic expansion and industrial development. Its network connects every major metropolitan area in the eastern United States, where nearly two-thirds of the nation's population resides. It also links more than 230 short-line railroads and more than 70 ocean, river and lake ports with major population centers and farming towns alike.

This announcement, as well as additional financial information, is available on the company's website at http://investors.csx.com . CSX also uses social media channels to communicate information about the company. Although social media channels are not intended to be the primary method of disclosure for material information, it is possible that certain information CSX posts on social media could be deemed to be material. Therefore, we encourage investors, the media, and others interested in the company to review the information we post on Twitter ( http://twitter.com/CSX ) and on Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/OfficialCSX ). The social media channels used by CSX may be updated from time to time. More information about CSX Corporation and its subsidiaries is available at www.csx.com .

Story continues

Contact:

Bill Slater, Investor Relations

904-359-1334

Bryan Tucker, Corporate Communications

855-955-6397




: The Andhra Pradesh government on Thursday decided to cancel the annual examinations for classes VI to IX and promote all students to the next class.

"Since the state has been under a lockdown to check the spread of coronavirus till April 14, it is not feasible to conduct annual examinations (summative assessment II) for students of classes VI to IX.

"Therefore, it has been decided to cancel the summative assessment II for these classes and declare the students as 'all pass'," Commissioner of School Vadrevu China Veerabhadrudu said in a memo to Regional Joint Directors and District Educational Officers.

The order was issued following a directive from Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy at a review meeting on Thursday.

Jagan also directed that dry ration be supplied at the house of each student, in lieu of mid-day meal, as the schools have been closed due to the coronavirus lockdown.

He asked the authorities to ensure quality of ration supplied to the wards, a CMO release said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Mar. 26

By Ilkin Seyfaddini  Trend:

Uzbek company is building a plant to produce raw materials for face masks in Uzbekistan, Trend reports via Uzbek media.

The spunbond plant (spunbond - the name of the technology for production of nonwoven material from polymer) will cover the need for raw materials for face masks in the entire Central Asian region.

As part of the fight against the spread of coronavirus COVID-19 doctors recommend the widespread use of face masks. Raw materials for masks production are spunbond and meltblande nonwoven.

SPUNMELT Ltd. started the construction of a spunbond plant worth $8.6 million in Bekabad city in order to provide the producers of medical masks with timely raw materials.

The project will be implemented within the framework of creating an agricultural cluster of IE Textile Technologies Group LLC. SPUNMELT operating company was established to implement the project.

The production capacity will be more than 7,000 finished spunbond fabric pieces per year.

The material is widely used in the manufacture of face masks and gowns, personal care products, diapers, cleaning and filtering materials, agriculture, light industry and furniture production.

At present in Uzbekistan all used volume of hygienic spunbond as raw material is imported mainly from China, Turkey and Russia.

Adjustment of own production will allow reducing volumes of spunbond import.

The equipment from which the production line is assembled is purchased from recognized and high quality suppliers from Europe, Japan and China.

The outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which is an international transport hub - began at a fish market in late December 2019. The number of people killed by the disease has surpassed 21,300. Over 471,000 people have been confirmed as infected. Meanwhile, over 114,800 people have reportedly recovered.

Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019. Several countries are working on a vaccine against the new virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

---

Follow author on Twitter: @seyfaddini
The Marshall Uxbridge Voice is a ray of hope as we struggle to come to terms with the lockdown in many countries while the world attempts to bring the Coronavirus, or COVID-19, under control. Music is one of the few true getaways, and all that becomes even better with good speakers. Well known British audio company Marshall has warmed our hearts with the first glimpse at the upcoming Uxbridge Voice smart speaker. The latest smart speaker addition to the companys line includes direct access to Amazon Alexa virtual assistant and support for Spotify Connect and Apple AirPlay 2 streaming standards.

Each Marshall Uxbridge Voice speaker measures 5.04-inch x 6.61-inch x 4.84-inch, which makes this almost as compact as a Google Home or the Amazon Echo smart speakers. They tip the scales at 1.39kg, which is lighter than a lot of laptops that you can buy. In fact, the Marshall Uxbridge Voice are also more compact than their own siblings, the Acton and the Stanmore. These speakers integrate a dual farfield microphone array so that they are able to detect you saying Hey Alexa even for some distance away. Each Marshall Uxbridge Voice speaker has the enclosed cabinet design with a 30-watts Class S amplifier for the woofer and tweeter. You get adjustable bass and treble controls too, something that has been a hallmark of Marshall speakers for years now.

Access to Amazon Alexa virtual assistant and support for Spotify Connect and Apple AirPlay 2

The Marshall Uxbridge Voice will be available worldwide from April 8, with prices set at 169.99 GBP and 199 USD. The India-specific prices of these speakers is not yet announced. You will be able to buy the Uxbridge Voice in two colourswhite and black. While you can connect with these using Amazon Alexa, Spotify Connect and AirPlay 2, there is also the simpler option of Bluetooth. These speakers can also be configured as multi-room speakers, if you intend to splurge on more than one of theseand they work with 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi networks.

In fact, that is not all. In the coming months, the Marshall Uxbridge Voice will also launch with support for the Google Assistant and Tencents Xiaowei assistants. The Uxbridge Voice with Tencent Xiaowei will be available from May 4 will the Google Assistant version arrives on June 11and prices will remain the same across the board, irrespective of which voice assistant version you choose.
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The global polyphenylene oxide (PPO) market size is projected to reach USD 2.27 billion by 2025, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc., expanding at a CAGR of 5.3% during the forecast period. Rising demand from end-user industries such as automotive and electronics & electrical.

Globally, surging demand for electronic products such as outlet boxes, smoke detectors, and lighting is poised to boost the growth of the PPO market. Improving living standards coupled with increasing per capita disposable income is estimated to positively impact the market over the forecast years. Burgeoning automotive manufacturing in Latin America and Asia Pacific is expected to stimulate the growth of the market.

Rising consumer awareness regarding new technologies in emerging economies is anticipated to fuel the demand for advanced electronic components. Increasing trade of electronic devices among countries is anticipated to unfold immense growth opportunities for market players.

Electronic components emerged as the leading application segment in the polyphenylene oxide market. Major products where electronic components are used are relay housings, pump housing/impellers, connectors, bobbins, circuit breakers, motor brush cards, coil encapsulation, fans and blowers, heat exchangers, thermostat housings, and large and small appliances.

Increasing PPO application in the electrical and electronics industry such as TV output transformer, air conditioning control boxes, deflection yoke and bobbins are slated to stoke the growth of the market. Asia Pacific is the leading regional market, with a global volume share estimated at over 50.0% in 2017. Favorable economic policies coupled with entry of global plastic manufacturers are supporting the growth of the market in Asia Pacific.

A well-established electrical & electronics manufacturing base in China, Taiwan, and South Korea coupled with a strong chemical manufacturing base in India is likely to trigger the adoption of polyphenylene oxide. China being the major market has witnessed tremendous growth in end-use industries.

To request a sample copy or view summary of this report, click the link below:

https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/polyphenylene-oxide-ppo-market

Further key findings from the report suggest:

In terms of revenue, the automotive application is expected to rise at a CAGR of 4.1% from 2018 to 2025 owing to growing automotive production in emerging economies

The U.S. polyphenylene oxide market is anticipated to exceed 85 kilo tons by 2025, owing to presence of a large number of automotive companies and rapidly increasing shale gas operations

The PPO market is moderately concentrated owing to presence of both large as well as small players

Some of the key companies present in the market are BASF, SABIC, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corp., Sumitomo Chemicals, Momentive Performance Materials, LyondellBasell, Polyplastics Co. Ltd., Asahi Kasei Chemicals Corp., and Solvay SA.

Grand View Research has segmented the global polyphenylene oxide market on the basis of application and region.

Polyphenylene Oxide Application Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025)

Air Separation Membranes

Medical Instruments

Domestic Appliances

Automotive (Structural Parts)

Electronic Components

Fluid Handling

Polyphenylene Oxide Regional Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025)

North America US Canada Mexico

Europe UK. Germany France

Asia Pacific China India Japan Korea Taiwan

Central & South America Brazil

Middle East & Africa Saudi Arabia



About Grand View Research

Grand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.
An Irish citizen is among a group of 146 tourists who have been placed under quarantine for up to three months in their hostel by armed soldiers in Peru.

The complex has been shut down and is surrounded by armed police and soldiers.

This is because two guests tested positive for Covid-19 earlier in the week.

Their identity is not known but other Irish tourists in neighbouring hostels fear they may also get quarantined if any of their fellow residents test positive for the deadly virus.

Along with nine UK citizens, the Irish citizen is now locked inside the Pariwana Hostel in the south eastern Peruvian city Cusco.

And they have been warned they face ten years jail if they fail to comply with the quarantine.

They are now only allowed out of their room for one hour a day, and they must also wear a face mask at all times.

The Irish citizen is one of around 130 Irish tourists in the country who have been desperately trying to leave the country for nearly two weeks.

Their efforts were stepped up at the end of last week in advance of Peruvian President Martin Vizcarras decision to close his borders and impose martial law.

The only flights leaving the country are via the military base in Lima.

Irish and UK citizens in Perus had been expected to fly out on Wednesday but many were unable to get to the capital.

Apart from the sheer distances involved to get to Lima, a lot of roads are sealed by army or police.

Those trapped in Peru include Andrew Cotter, from Mitchelstown, Cork, and his 30-year-old girlfriend Marie Barry, from Conna.

They are among a group of around 35 Irish citizens trapped ihe south eastern Peruvian city of Cusco.

It takes 21 hours by road to get from there to the capital.

They also include Catherine Scroope and Ruadhan Elliott, from Bantry, west Cork.

Irelands Ambassador to Chile yesterday assured Irish citizens in Peru that everything is being done to get them out at this distressing time.

In an email to people registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs, Paul Gleeson told them Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney is continuing to work on evacuation flights.

The Peruvian authorities have been asked if the plane can land in Lima and apparently they are now waiting for the government to agree a date and time for the flight.

Irelands request for permission to land a plane in Lima is, he told them, one of a significant number of such requests been put forward by different countries.

But we are hopeful we will have the relevant permission soon, he told them.

Once we have that, we will notify you of our plans for transport from where you are staying to Lima and the military airport there.

And while he confirmed that neither of the people who tested positive in the Pariwana Hostel are Irish citizens, he also said he had spoken to one Irish citizen staying at the same hostel.

And he said: For any Irish citizens unable to join a evacuation flight for any reason we will be coordinating closely with the UK and EU partners and our honorary consul in Lima to identify solutions to help you travel home as soon as circumstances allow.

He warned against anybody trying to book a commercial flight out of Peru after the current state of emergency is lifted.

We are not recommending booking future commercial flights at this point until it becomes clear as to whether or not the current restrictions will be extended, he said.

And he added: Please be rest-assured our team here in the region and Dublin are working all hours we can to try and get you home as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, at least three Irish citizens trapped in Peru are medics trying to get back to Ireland to help in the fight against Covid-19.

Another is believed to be a relative of the Housing Minister.

Lesley Ann Devereux, from Greystones, Co Wicklow, said she is grateful to Simon Coveney and his officials at the Department of Foreign Affairs.

She urged them to please continue to do all you can to get Irish citizens out of the provincial cities and towns of Peru.

Lesley-Ann, who is believed to be related to Eoghan Murphy, added: Please get Irish citizens on board a repatriation flight home before we end up quarantined for months.

Lesley Ann Devereux

One of the tourists, who asked not to be named, told the Irish Examiner last night: Myself and my girlfriend are both healthcare professionals from Dublin, both employed by the HSE.

We both desperately want to get home to help as frontline staff which is what we are.

Currently we are in Barranco in an Airbnb incredibly frustrated by the lack of flight home so far.

Another health worker, from Co Louth, who asked not to be named, is in one the remote Peruvian city of Iquitos.

It cant be reached by land and access for them and two other Irish citizens in the city is "extra difficult.

The plane journey to Lima is two hours but if they went by boat the journey would take up to five days.

They said the Austrian Ambassador in Iquitos has been trying to organize a flight for all 190 EU and British citizens stranded in Iquitos to bring them to Lima.

This seems to be a next to impossible task due to the strict Peruvian restrictions and the lack of communication coming from the Peruvian authorities, they said.

They say they have been based in a single hotel room since the military lockdown.

I have left the room for less than 1 hour a day and that is to go and get supplies from the local supermarket, they said.

I have a five-year-old child and a wonderful partner at home worried sick.

It is an extremely slow process here and extremely worrying times for myself and all involved here in Iquitos and other cities far from Lima.

Their local TD Fergus ODowd has been very helpful so far with getting in touch with Paul Gleason from the Irish Embassy in Chile, they added.

Tourists learn of quarantine from poster in hostel lobby

Tourists at Cuscos quarantined Pariwana Hostel in the southeastern city received official confirmation they were quarantined from a letter posted on a wall in the lobby area yesterday.

It stated that from this moment on all the people inside the hostel go into absolute quarantine.

A manager explained: The result of our guests tested positive for Covid-19.

I must clarify they did not bring the virus to the hotel.

So it is possible we have more infections among us.

It is for them that more rigorous measures were taken regarding personal hygiene.

He said he knew this news was not not easy to hear but he vowed to do all he could to make sure we can live together in the best way during the quarantine.

He said he is currently working on the plan that we must all comply with during our quarantine which can last one month to 3 months.

And he warned them that the length of time the quarantine lasts for will only depend on us.

He also warned them: I must also clarify that failure to comply with these regulations issued by the government and through can lead to private custody between five and 10 years.

Each guest must have their own cutlery and their own plate, which will be washed by them, he said.

They will only have permission to be in the common areas for one hour during the day.

Handwashing will be constant, the use of masks will be mandatory and no one can be less than 1 m away from another person.

If we comply with these rules the time in quarantine can be reduced because this way we will have fewer infections.

Otherwise the infections will continue to spread and the quarantine time will be longer.

And he said: I hope we all understand this is going to be a team effort.

It is up to each of us to do our part to get out of this together, take care of yourselves and take care of others."
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The stock continuously hit lower circuits in the past eight trading sessions.

IRCTC was locked in an upper circuit of 5% at Rs 856.35, snapping its eight day losing streak. It shed nearly 34% in past eight sessions.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has made travellers reconsider going on vacation in the middle of a global pandemic, putting pressure on travel and tourism industry.

Shares of IRCTC have tanked 59% from its record high of Rs 1995 registered on 25 February 2020. The stock was listed on stock exchanges on 14 October 2019 at Rs 644, a premium of 101.25% to the IPO price.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday (24 March 2020) called for a nationwide lockdown starting midnight. The duration of the lockdown will be 21 days. Modi said the lockdown was necessary to break the chain of the COVID-19 virus, adding that "social distancing is the only option to combat the virus outbreak".

Although Coronavirus started in central China, it is spreading faster in the rest of the world. The epidemic has grown to infect over 472,037 people with over 21,302 fatalities. India has reported 13 deaths and over 678 cases so far.

IRCTC, a Mini Ratna public sector enterprise under the administrative control of Ministry of Railways, is the sole entity authorized by Indian Railways (IR) to provide catering services to railways, online railway tickets and packaged drinking water at railway stations and trains in India. IRCTC operates in four business segments, namely, internet ticketing, catering, packaged drinking water and travel & tourism. The Government of India holds 87.40% stake in the company as on 31 December 2019

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
W ith the nation put on lockdown, more and more of us are turning to Netflix to keep us entertained  and nail-biting thriller The Platform has gained a lot of attention online.

The 2019 film, which was picked up by Netflix following its debut at the Toronto Film Festival, is set in a dystopian, futuristic prison known as The Hole, where the cells are stacked on top of one another.

In what viewers have interpreted as a metaphor of capitalism and the class system, the story sees a banquet of food descend from above on a platform, leaving the upper-tier of prisoners to eat first, while those lower and lower down the literal food chain left fighting for scraps.

Netflix describes this Spanish film as "a twisted social allegory about mankind at its darkest and hungriest  which feels oddly prescient as many people in the UK have found themselves left fighting for food as supermarket shelves are left bare by panic buyers.

The best films to watch during self-isolation 1 /13 The best films to watch during self-isolation Bridget Joness Diary "If working here means staying within 10 yards of you, frankly, Id rather have a job wiping Saddam Husseins arse." Who knew that Bridget Jones was the original social distancing icon? The beauty of Bridget, Samuel Pepyss main rival for Britains greatest ever diarist, is she knows how to amuse herself just as much when she stays in as when she goes out. As we all lock ourselves in our flats, we can all follow the wise example set by our favourite singleton: choosing vodka and Chaka Khan. JT Available to buy on Amazon Prime Video Pride If the world ever needed a reminder of the good in people, its now. Pride is one of the most powerful British films ever made, and it has the feel-good factor by the bucket load. It follows the LGBTQ+ activists who joined forces with the Welsh miners during the strikes of 1984, with fantastic performances from George MacKay, Andrew Scott, Dominic West, Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, and plenty more. The films central message is the power people can have when they come together and mobilising as one. It's the exact opposite of staying home alone in self-isolation, but the spirit of triumphing over adversity is something everyone can get behind. HF Available to buy on Amazon Prime Video Wallace and Gromit A particular happy place of mine is the Films for ages 8 to 10 section of Netflix. Forget your true crime, or your mob epics, or your delicately assembled cinematic masterpieces  give me Matilda, Shrek or (the original) Jumanji. A recent browse led me to the four Wallace and Gromit shorts. Delightfully simple, slyly intelligent and with no shortage of nostalgia, theyre perfect for some comfort viewing. And theyre barely half an hour long, which means the ones on Netflix (A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out, A Matter Of Loaf and Death, and, best of all, The Wrong Trousers) are perfect for a back-to-back session. JE Available on Netflix The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro's well-mannered novella is beautifully rendered here, in a film that was nominated for eight Oscars. It is a quiet, polite film; it moves slowly, the frames gliding. And yet its entirely absorbing, a film to be lost in. It is a story of war, of corrupt power, of misguided gentility, of the changing of the world and those who commanded it. It is a story of fading social graces, of quiet reserve, of inner pain. It is also, really, a love story. An unrequited love story, in fact, those being the most painful and poignant of all. Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins captivate. A film to watch over and again. DE Available to buy on Amazon Prime Video Cool Hand Luke Thought self isolation was bad? It has to be better than being trapped in a Florida prison camp in the 50s, paving the roads on a chain gang. Here, Paul Newman delivers a career-defining performance as Lucas "Luke" Jackson, a war veteran imprisoned for drunkenly breaking parking metres; despite his army background and the way of the prison camp  submit, submit, submit  something in Luke refuses to bend. Watching him stand strong against the stinging lash of authority is inspiring, a reminder of just how much people can endure. That he stays laughing is better, a reminder of just how much people can survive with good humour. The end is a blunt instrument, but Newman is glorious. DE Available to buy on Amazon Prime Video Paddington 2 Watched The Godfather Part II too many times? Plump for Paddington 2 instead, which gives Michael Corleone and family a run for his money in the best sequel stakes. Being stuck at home with the kids (or without) is an excellent excuse to indulge in the utterly joyous jaunts of Ben Whishaws Paddington, Hugh Grants self-skewering, pompous actor, and Brendan Gleesons marmalade sandwich-making prison cook. AB Available to watch on Amazon Prime Video Ticks So-bad-theyre-good horror films are the eternal guilty pleasure. Recent additions to my watchlist are Unfriended, The Pyramid and Evil Aliens (all heartily recommended) but one I keep coming back to is Ticks. It tells the story of some troubled inner-city kids who are taken on a well-intentioned wilderness retreat, only to be plagued by a swarm of mutated ticks. The dialogue is hilariously awful and the ticks themselves are distinctly unscary. But the best thing is a genius bit of casting in which Alfonso Ribeiro, aka Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, plays a try-hard bully named Panic (They call me panic, cause I never do.) Its all ridiculous. Need we say more? JE Available to watch on Amazon Prime Video Legally Blonde At a time when all the odds feel stacked against us, who better to teach us how to cope than the fabulous and indefatigable Elle Woods. Admittedly, were trying to overcome a global pandemic and she was just trying to win back her snobby ex-fiance Warner, but the sentiment is the same. After Warner dumps her, she will not be immobilised by the crisis it brings to her life. Instead, she bags herself a place at Harvard Law School where he is also studying. He spots her in the corridor and incredulously asks: YOU got into Harvard Law? Her response? What, like its hard? An inspiration to us all. JT Available on Netflix Groundhog Day Is this day eight of self-isolation, or day nine? If the sunrises and sunsets are starting to merge, Phil Connors knows how you feel. Groundhog Day tells the story of a weatherman seemingly bound to relive the events of February 2 over and over and over again  sound familiar? Bill Murrays exasperation may ring a little truer than ever before. AB Available on Netflix Sony Pictures A Quiet Place We, like millions of movie fans, were devastated by the news that A Quiet Place Part II is being postponed from March 18 until further notice. Luckily, the original dropped onto Netflix over the weekend, and theres no better time to enjoy a cathartic scare and rewatch the horror hit of 2018. Director John Krasinsky achieved something remarkable with the first film, managing to produce a horror which isnt overly gory and doesnt rely on cheap jump scares to keep audiences interested. The central premise  make a sound and you die  is as simple as it is effective, and Emily Blunt delivers one of the strongest performances of her career as family matriarch Evelyn Abbott. Even when the future of the industry is in doubt, its a comfort to return to modern classics like this one  even if it does make us jump out our skin. HF Available on Netflix Jonny Cournoyer

With the heavily metaphorical ending leaving some viewers scratching their heads, we unpack what message filmmaker Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia intended the audience to leave with.

The Platform ending explained

Doomed: Goreng is stuck in cell 48 (Netflix) / (Netflix)

We come to understand the rules of The Hole through Goreng (Ivan Massague) a newcomer to the prison, who is stuck in cell 48 with Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor).

When the platform of food drops down, he explains that 47 other prisoners would have eaten before them, meaning theyre left with the scraps. The desperation of those further down the prison chain is clear as they resort to violence and even murder to try and get more food.

As the film progresses, viewers come to see a young girl who is trapped at the very bottom of The Hole. It transpires the child is Miharus (Alexandrea Masangkay) daughter, and she has been protecting her offspring and keeping her healthy in the dire circumstances. It seems that Miharus insistence to get to the bottom of the hole isnt to find her daughter, but only to make sure she can make it through the system unharmed.

As both the girl and Goreng attempt to get to the top of the prison, Goreng finds himself unable to as he has been too brutalised by the system, which sees him stuck in the same place. However, the girl makes her way to safety.

Hope: The child symbolises change / Netflix

Some have argued that Miharus daughter is a metaphor of human resilience throughout even the darkest and most difficult times, and further pushes the notion that only true change can come from the innocence of youth.

The irony within The Platform is that there is more than enough food and resources within The Hole (a metaphor for capitalism, a economic system we are all imprisoned by) to satisfy all the prisoners.

However those at the top (ie the wealthy) overconsume, and are given no incentive or reason to want to share  leading to inequality, pain and suffering.
NEW YORK, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- "Due Diligence in Social Impact Deals," a podcast recorded from its panel at the Social Venture Circle Conference, is now available, released by accomplished attorneys, Allen Bromberger, Bromberger Law, and Teresa Pahl, Hanson Bridgett. While due diligence is part of many financings, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and exits, traditional diligence does not evaluate social or environmental impact, Bromberger and Pahl led the discussion to support impact investors to make clear, confident investment decisions and help social entrepreneurs prepare for this phase of growth, especially relevant in uncertain times.

"What is the company doing to generate impact now, and what will it be doing in the future?" asks Bromberger. "Can the company capture this information, and if so, how do they do it? Is there a third-party standard, or are there internal metrics? Who collects and analyses the information? For social entrepreneurs and impact investors, these issues are critical as strong trust must be built in times of crisis."

In the podcast, Pahl and Bromberger reviewed the process of impact due diligence on a potential investee or, a social venture, for a merger or acquisition. They walked through the various tools used for the due diligence process:

Narratives of Expected Impact, allowing investors to develop an understanding of the types of information that should be collected using impact due-diligence questionnaires and quantitative impact due-diligence tools

allowing investors to develop an understanding of the types of information that should be collected using impact due-diligence questionnaires and quantitative impact due-diligence tools ESG Diligence Questionnaires, addressing and reporting environmental concerns, from supply chain to climate change; social issues, such as labor laws, and health and safety; and governance factors, like business integrity and transparency

addressing and reporting environmental concerns, from supply chain to climate change; social issues, such as labor laws, and health and safety; and governance factors, like business integrity and transparency Quantitative Tools, from IRIS (Impact Reporting and Investment Standards) to the integration of the UN Sustainable Development goalsinvestors select relevant indicators based on strategy and impact themes, using IRIS metrics and SDG subjects

(Impact Reporting and Investment Standards) to the integration of the UN Sustainable Development goalsinvestors select relevant indicators based on strategy and impact themes, using IRIS metrics and SDG subjects Environmental Due Diligence, evaluating environmental permits and licenses, EPA correspondence, disposal methods, environmental liabilities, indemnification obligations, and more

evaluating environmental permits and licenses, EPA correspondence, disposal methods, environmental liabilities, indemnification obligations, and more Screening for Impact, collecting impact data, ensuring accountability to a fund's impact-oriented missionsome create an "impact committee" to minimize the impact risk of the fund's pipeline and help allocate time and resources

"Think of due diligence as the comprehensive investigation for an investment opportunity to assess the risk, return, and impact," said Pahl. "There are many measurement tools available, so decide which standards and benchmarks you want to measure the impact-related outcomes important to you. These guides create a scorecard to process information and compare investment options. Overall, focus on your impact risk vs. impact return and financial risk vs. financial return, during times of crisis and beyond."

Listen to "Due Diligence in Social Impact Deals" on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, and other podcast platforms.

ABOUT

Bromberger Law works at the intersection of business and philanthropy, representing clients in a broad range of activities that range from non-profit to commercial. The firm's focus is social enterprise, advising entities that seek to do good while doing well, often using market-based business strategies, whether non-profit, for-profit, or hybrid, advising such organizations on all matters from inception to exit. The firm represents entrepreneurs and their advisors, charities, private foundations, funders, investors, intermediaries, DAFs and fiscal sponsors in a wide variety of legal matters. Learn more about its leadership and attorneys, and engage on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Founded in 1958, Hanson Bridgett has more than 175 attorneys located in offices in San Francisco, Sacramento, the North Bay, the East Bay, and Los Angeles. The firm's clients range from multinational Fortune 500 corporations to individuals, and also include a number of public agencies in California. Hanson Bridgett is a dedicated supporter of diversity and inclusion. Its commitment to diversity begins with the recruitment of our workforce. Currently, the firm's attorneys consist of 47% women, 27% people of color, and 4% self-identified LGBTQI+people. Moreover, its firm's partners are 40% women, 21% people of color, and 6% self-identified LGBTQI+. More information on Hanson Bridgett can be found at www.hansonbridgett.com.

MEDIA CONTACT

Marissa Feinberg

[email protected]

(917) 494-5041

SOURCE Bromberger Law

Related Links

https://www.brombergerlaw.com


GOLDEN, CO / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Vitro Diagnostics, Inc. (OTCPINK:VODG), dba Vitro Biopharma, announced its 1st quarter ended January 31st, 2020 financial results of operations.

Vitro Diagnostics Inc. ("Vitro Biopharma") is pleased to announce a record 1st comparative quarter in Total Revenues. Vitro Biopharma recorded 1st quarter revenues of $225,921 vs $192,895 an increase of 17% over the same comparative quarter last year. In addition, Stem Cell treatments accounted for 74% of the revenues up from 71% of the revenues in the prior comparative quarter last year. Current quarter stem cell revenues were $167,750 for the 1st quarter ended January 31, 2020 vs $137,123 for the first quarter ended January 31, 2019.

The company's gross profit margins improved to 75% up from 73% in the comparative prior year's quarter. Gross margin improvement is in line with the strategic direction of the company to expand the market of its flagship product AlloRx Stem Cells. The company's clean-room lab expansion last year and expanded Stem Cell manufacturing using its patent-pending cell line, has increased efficiencies and lowered production costs.

Overall operating expenses increased in the quarter to $193,385 from $147,398 in the prior year's comparative quarter. The increase in expenses reflects additional investment as the Company expands its capability to service its strategic direction of offshore Stem Cell treatments while also expanding into US markets. The company expended additional resources on external consultants supporting our regulatory status in maintaining ISO9001 & ISO13485 certifications, expanding our efforts to approach US markets through FDA filings and advancement of existing patent filings.

The company's first quarter is its most seasonal quarter as the period between Thanksgiving and the New Year is slow for all the company's revenue lines of Nutra Vivo/STEMulize, AlloRx Stem Cells, private labeled InfiniVive-MD Stem Cell Serum and our core research products.

During the quarter the company achieved and pursed the following company objectives

Series A Convertible Preferred Stock Offering:

During the quarter the company commenced a Series A Convertible Preferred Stock offering to accredited investors under the SEC Regulation D exemption. The preferred Stock is priced at $25 per share which is convertible at $0.25 cents per share for a total of 100 shares. The minimum investment is $50,000 per unit. The company sold $450,000 of the Series A Convertible Preferred Stock during the quarter. The company has additional interest in the offering and subsequent to the quarter has sold an additional $50,000 unit for a total to date of $500,000. The company has additional interested parties for approximately $200,000. The offering is for a total of $1,000,000.

Expansion of revenues & results from the clinical trials in the Cayman Islands:

Our partnership with DVC. Stem in the Cayman Islands continued to advance through treatment of new & previous patients. This IRB-approved protocol targets patients with inflammatory conditions including multiple sclerosis, systemic inflammation and new indications including Chrohn's disease, Alzheimer's disease and COPD. To date we have treated 60 patients including repeat treatments. There have been no serious adverse events and we continue to gain evidence of efficacy. One of the initial MS patients has now received a second transplant of our AlloRx Stem Cells and he has reported significant therapeutic benefits of both the initial and subsequent therapy. He had received an earlier transplant of adipose-derived MSCs that was effective, but the improvement lasted 3 months while AlloRx Stem Cell therapy lasted 18 months. We had predicted such a clinical outcome based on significantly higher potency of umbilical cord MSCS compared to those derived from adipose tissue or bone marrow. The Chrohn's disease patient showed significant improvement as did both the AD & COPD patients.

Further Expansion into US Markets-FDA IND:

The strategic development of our stem cell therapies involves pursuit of both offshore and domestic markets. The partnership with DVC Stem, our IRB-approved trial in the Bahamas together with other strategic opportunities represent offshore operations & prospects. During Q1 2020, we initiated expansion into US therapeutic markets through development of an Investigational New Drug (IND) application for submission to FDA. Once approved, an IND allows the conduct of clinical trials for specific medical conditions in the US.

Given the current COVID-19 pandemic, our initial IND application is for use of AlloRx Stem Cells in treatment of Coronavirus infections. This is supported by clinical studies showing that 17 critically ill patients responded favorably to IV infusion of umbilical cord-derived MSCs. All patients were receiving assisted ventilation but 3 days following stem cell therapy, were removed from ventilators and subsequently discharged from the hospital. We are pursuing discussions with FDA to establish the appropriate regulatory pathway and expedited review options given the current emergency circumstances. (See Subsequent Events, below, for additional discussion of our COVID-19 response.) Once our initial IND is in place, we have plans for additional INDs for stem cell therapy of musculoskeletal conditions and Alzheimer's disease.

PR Medica Opportunity

We have received an initial order of AlloRx Stem Cells for testing purposes by PR Medica located in Cabo San Lucas. Given successful test results, we anticipate subsequent new revenue generation from this customer.

InfiniVive-MD Stem Cell Serum:

Vitro Biopharma's cosmetic topical stem cell serum is being distributed by InfiniVive MD into cosmetic clinics that are providing the topical treatment as a beautification product. To date the company's product is being offered in 10 cosmetic clinics.

Our partner, Dr Jack Zamora, MD was a keynote speaker at a master session at the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery annual meeting in late February. The topic of his presentation was "Topical Stem Cells, Exosomes and Conditioned Media Serums in Aesthetics." This was the official launch of the InfiniVive-MD platform including: Dailey Serum, Stem Cell Serum 2.0 & Exosomes within the product line. Vitro Biopharma will manufacture & private label these new products for distribution in the US. We anticipate InfiniVive MD growth, development and revenues to mirror the development of Apyx subdermal plasma skin tightening as a cosmetic treatment and technique that has gone global.

www.jackzamoramd.com www.infinivivemd.com

Research and Development, Facility Expansion & Patent Prosecution

Our core research product sales continued to expand in Q1 2020. Our facility expansion continued with addition of manufacturing capacity and development of plans to add operational facility to increase outputs further by 100% or more. We were also in discussions with the USPTO regarding our pending patents for our novel stem cell therapy and stem cell activation technology. We continue to work closely with our examiner and have established communication channels to facilitate awards of these patents.

SUBSEQUENT EVENTS: COVID-19 Opportunity and Risks

The COVD-19 pandemic is a significant obstacle for all business. However, Vitro Biopharma is uniquely positioned since we have a potential effective therapy. This is based on 3 independent reports showing efficacy of stem cell therapy in 17 COVID-19 patients. All were treated with IV umbilical cord MSCs comparable to AlloRx Stem Cells and all 17 required respiratory assistance but within 3-4 days of treatment, were able to breath without ventilators and were discharged within 14 days. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3053080/coronavirus-critically-ill-chinese-patient-saved-stem-cell On the contrary, untreated patients on ventilators have death rates of 50% or more. We have received a formal request to supply AlloRx Stem Cells for compassionate use from a major university medical center and several other potential clinical partners have also expressed interest in using our cells to treat COVID-19 patients. We are presently working with the FDA to gain authority to begin clinical testing in the US. We are currently assessing the overall financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business, but this depends on overall control of the pandemic. There have been no staff layoffs and our workers are considered essential since we conduct essential research to the COVID-19 response.



Dr. Jim Musick, CEO of Vitro Biopharma, said, "We are very pleased with the increased revenue growth during our first quarter 2020 compared to the prior year However all our resources are currently focused on the emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing our inventory of AlloRx to satisfy anticipated emergency demand to treat critically ill COVID-19 patients." The Company is working to get expedited clinical trial approvals to sell our AlloRx Stem Cells to hospitals coping with the pandemic. Vitro is pleased to have recently been recognized by Bioinformant as "a Company Tracking the Coronavirus". https://bioinformant.com/product/coronavirus-covid-19-report/ We anticipate clinical progress in the effectiveness of our stem cell therapies while expecting to see a reduction in our offshore and cosmetic revenues for the next quarter or two. The company is in a good cash position to weather this storm and simultaneously advance its AlloRx stem cell therapies into clinical trials.

In summary, Vitro Biopharma is advancing as a key player in regenerative medicine with 10- years' experience in the development and commercialization of stem cell products for research, recognized by a Best in Practice Technology Innovation Leadership award for Stem Cell Tools and Technology and a growing track record of successful translation to therapy. We are leveraging our proprietary technology platform to the establishment of international Stem Cell Centers of Excellence and regulatory approvals in the US and worldwide.

Sincerely yours,

James R. Musick, PhD.

President, CEO & Chairman of the Board

www.vitrobiopharma.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements herein regarding financial performance have not yet been reported to the SEC nor reviewed by the Company's auditors. Certain statements contained herein and subsequent statements made by and on behalf of the Company, whether oral or written may contain "forward-looking statements". Such forward looking statements are identified by words such as "intends," "anticipates," "believes," "expects" and "hopes" and include, without limitation, statements regarding the Company's plan of business operations, product research and development activities, potential contractual arrangements, receipt of working capital, anticipated revenues and related expenditures. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include, among others, acceptability of the Company's products in the market place, general economic conditions, receipt of additional working capital, the overall state of the biotechnology industry and other factors set forth in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Most of these factors are outside the control of the Company. Investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Except as otherwise required by applicable securities statutes or regulations, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

CONTACT:

Dr. James Musick

Chief Executive Officer

Vitro BioPharma

(303) 999-2130 Ext. 3

E-mail: jim@vitrobiopharma.com

www.vitrobiopharma.com

The company provides its financial information for investor purposes only, the results published are not audited or necessarily SEC or GAAP compliant

The company provides its financial information for investor purposes only, the results published are not audited or necessarily SEC or GAAP compliant

The company provides its financial information for investor purposes only, the results published are not audited or necessarily SEC or GAAP compliant.

The company provides its financial information for investor purposes only, the results published are not audited or necessarily SEC or GAAP compliant.

SOURCE: Vitro Diagnostics, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/582759/Vitro-Biopharma-First-Quarter-ended-January-31-2020-Financial-Results-of-Operations
Noida SEZ has 400 units and around 100,000 workers, and was shut down on March 23.

IMAGE: A daily wage worker walks on foot along Agra-Kanpur Highway towards his home which is more than 200 km away after 21days nationwide lockdown amid coronavirus pandemic. Photograph: ANI Photo

There was a time when Mushtaq Ansari (25) would have to race to reach the Noida Special Economic Zone to catch the first shift that began at 7 am.

There was time only to gulp down a glass of milk and a piece of fruit.

Now, theres no rush. At 10 am, he was making leisurely inroads into a stack of paranthas with pickle and creamy dahi.

Theres nowhere to go, nothing to do. Im enjoying it now. But I might get to enjoy it too much, he says with a grin.

Ansaris family came to Noida from Bihar 30 years ago and, after a diploma in engineering, he was lucky to get a job in the SEZ, working for a China-based company, PCTPL, which manufactures PVC sheets used for SIM, credit and debit cards.

One of the primary customers of PCPTL is French telecom giant CISCOM.

Noida SEZ has 400 units and around 100,000 workers, and was shut down on March 23.

Ansari says, at the time his company pledged to pay wages to all employees.

But now? His good humour slips a little.

When COVID-19 broke out in China, they shifted all their orders to us.

"We were looking forward to fat end-of-year bonuses: there was so much work and India could have filled the gap. But nowIm a bit worried.

"If the company slows down and there is a global lockdown, how can I expect the company to pay my wages? It is, after all, not a khairaat (alms) he says.

There is no such ambivalence in either Mahendra Kumar, who worked as a daily-wage attender at a petrol pump, or Hemant Nagar, who worked in the Minda auto components factory in Surajpur.

Although petrol pumps are classified under essential services, there is hardly any business.

All workers have been told not to report to work.

Both Kumar and Nagar are going home - walking because there are neither buses nor trains.

Kumar hopes to hitch a ride on a vegetable or milk truck at least part of the way to Kanpur.

Nagar has to walk around 100 km to a village near Aligarh.

But hadnt Prime Minister Narendra Modi advised all Indians to stay where they are?

What can Modiji do about prices? A katta (10 kg) of atta used to cost Rs 260. This morning, it was selling at Rs 400.

"Potatoes have gone up to Rs 40 a kg. Whoever heard of such a thing? We earn Rs 7,000 a month - when there is work.

"Now, theres no work, no rations, and no money. So we will go home and help with the harvesting, Nagar said.

His friends chip in. At least at home there will be no rent to pay. And food is always there on the table

But walking 100 km?

Dont kanwariyas do it? Navratra has started. We will stop in temples and villages on the way.

"Maybe well get a lift. It isnt impossible, Nagar said effervescently.

All along the sides of the Gautam Buddha Nagar highway, many people are leaving, and not all of them will return.

Ive had enough, says Kumar softly. Ill help with the katai (harvest) and then just stay in the village.

These wage-earners are just the tip of the iceberg for police officers tasked with keeping people at home.

Harish Chander, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Central Noida, is holding a briefing for his team, counselling them not to be too strict, but not show any leniency to gawkers and those out for joyrides.

He anticipates problems as people who are confined to one-room homes, get fed up and start spilling out on to the roads.

He says Noida police is making arrangements to organise food delivery in many localities.

But he confesses that it is hard to be patient all the time.

Theres a fracas a few hundred meters away: A policeman is using his baton to thwack at a motorcycle that is breaking the barrier - until the rider shows him the cargo hes carrying.

It is a rat cage with four squealing, wriggling rats that have to be disposed of.

Hastily the policeman waves the bike through and it vanishes.

Such are the practical problems of managing a lockdown.
Indian students wait for news of their flight back to India at international airport in Manila, Philippines. PTI photo

Manila: Hundreds of Indian students, stranded in the Philippines, can fly back to India when the temporary travel ban is lifted, the Indian embassy here said on Thursday, assuring all possible help to the distressed citizens.

On March 17, the Indian government banned the entry of passengers from Afghanistan, the Philippines and Malaysia to India with immediate effect amid stepped up efforts against the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.

"Embassy is in regular contact with students in Perpetual Help. Shops & essential stores in area open. Indian restaurants are ready to deliver. 16,000 Indian students in Philippines are advised- can travel to India when temporary ban is lifted. Emergency no. 09477836524," the embassy said in a tweet.

Amid rising cases of COVID-19, India last week banned the landing of all international commercial passenger flights from March 22 to 29 while asking the Civil Aviation ministry and Railways to suspend all concessional travel on flights and trains, except for students, patients and disabled people.

Over 40 people have died from the novel coronavirus disease in the Philippines and the country has recorded more than 700 infections, according to worldometer, a website that tacks the number of global deaths due to COVID-19.

The death toll from the coronavirus has risen to 21,293 with more than 471,518 cases reported in over 170 countries and territories, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The last few weeks in Israel have been a time of frantic efforts to corral the coronavirus and an equally frenzied political squabble over the creation of a national unity government. Both are urgently needed; neither has yet been achieved.

As always, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been center stage. He was quick to perceive the danger that the virus posed to the lives and livelihoods of Israeli citizens and to national stability. He was (and remains) a caretaker prime minister with a minority in the parliament and a cabinet of mediocrities. Netanyahu himself is to blame for this  the appointments were his, after all  but he didnt waste time looking for qualified replacements. He simply took the management of the crisis on his shoulders.

What followed was a series of bold, unilateral decisions. He took it upon himself to close down Israeli flights abroad, virtually isolating the country from the rest of the world. He ordered Israelis to stay at home for protection. He shut schools, banned large gatherings and brought a hyperactive economy to a halt. These measures seemed extreme at the time, especially for an open society. But within weeks they have become standard practice in countries in Europe and around the world.

Netanyahu did not hesitate to use the full range of his powers. He deployed the Shin Bet, Israels internal security service, to track down and sequester potentially infectious citizens; sent the Mossad on foreign missions to bring home essential medical supplies; and insisted on the last word over economic and medical policy. And, in calm but stern televised appearances, he sold the country on the need to accept onerous government restrictions as the price of fighting the virus.

It is too early to assess the efficacy of these policies. But so far, the hospitals have not been overwhelmed by patients, and there have been only two Covid-19 related deaths. Experts here are certain that there will be many more, and Netanyahu concedes this is true. But thus far, Israel has done an effective job in curbing the pandemic. The economic price has been terrible and has already been disastrous for whole segments of the population who are out of work and unlikely to find employment even after the crisis passes.

Story continues

And yet, the country is following Bibis lead. The common public sentiment right now is that this time of fear is not the time to replace the government, wrote Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy earlier this week. Netanyahu is seen as someone who is handling the crisis well. And the public needs a leader it can trust at least in this. Levy, long one of Bibis most virulent and uncompromising left-wing critics, shocked and infuriated his readers by calling for a government of national unity under Bibis leadership. The warnings about the end of democracy, the destruction of Israel and the end of the world, the slogans [of the protesters] can wait a bit, he says.

The warnings dont match reality. The Knesset is in session and its key financial and security oversight committees are in the hands of Bibis opponents. On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled against Likud Speaker of the House, Yuri Edelstein, who has used parliamentary maneuvers to keep his job. The mainstream media is as hypercritical as ever. And, despite the many restrictions imposed by the anti-virus regimen, the right to public protest has been preserved.

The best proof that Netanyahu is not the dictator his critics portray is willingness to share power with Blue and White opposition leader Benny Gantz. Netanyahu has publicly offered to form a government based on a 50-50 split of cabinet seats, senior ministerial positions and collective responsibility. The government he proposes would serve for three years, with Bibi and Gantz rotating as prime minister after eighteen months.

Gantz has made it plain that he would like to join such a government and has accepted the principle that Netanyahu, who got more votes in the last election, should get first turn. But he has, thus far, been unable to take the final step. He is afraid of the hardliners in his party, who ran on a promise not to serve under the indicted Netanyahu. The law allows Netanyahu to stay in office unless proven guilty. The hardliners, led by former Finance Minister Yair Lapid, are determined to change that law and end Bibis career. Naturally, Netanyahu will not go quietly.

Gantz has proved indecisive. His to-be-or-not-to-be routine has hurt his stature and upset a shaken country yearning for unity. Joining Netanyahu on reasonable terms is not defeat. It would be greeted with relief both by those who want to see Netanyahu handle this crisis and those who do not want him to handle it alone.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Zev Chafets is a journalist and author of 14 books. He was a senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the founding managing editor of the Jerusalem Report Magazine.

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A photo illustration shows corn rice and rice displayed at a North Korean food store run by North Korean defector Hong Eun-hye in Seoul.

Authorities in North Korea are taking action against wholesalers for hoarding food and price gouging amid rising food prices as the coronavirus epidemic bears down on the reclusive country, local sources told RFA.

With food security and malnutrition already a serious problem under normal conditions in North Korea, the government appears to be showing no tolerance for those who would use the crisis as an opportunity to boost prices.

Police details are searching houses for hidden stores of food, then punishing the hoarders if they find it.

Last week, the local police randomly searched the houses of wholesalers who sell rice and corn to market merchants here in Pyongwon county, a resident of South Pyongan province told RFA on Monday.

In houses where they found more than a ton of grain, they seized it all. They even searched inside the kimchi pots half-buried in the ground, the source said.

The source said that all the wholesalers who were exposed by the police were arrested.

They were taken to the local police station for the crime of hoarding food while the country is in chaos due to the epidemic, the source said.

The police put them in a military labor camp the next day without any additional investigations, the source added.

According to the source, the operation was a message to other rice traders that may be hoarding or price gouging as borders shut down and movement of people becomes even more restricted.

The merchants that they imprisoned for hoarding will be punished for three months in the labor camp, said the source.

Another source, a resident of Ryanggang provinces Hyesan city, told RFA Tuesday that similar operations were occurring in that region near the border with China.

Here in Hyesan, the provincial Peoples Council and local law enforcement agencies had already been cracking down on vendors who bought more than 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of grain, the second source said.

[The police] interrogated them, asking why they bought such large amounts of grain so suddenly, then forced them not to raise prices, the second source added.

But even so, the public continued seeing price increases, so [the police] arrested 10 rice dealers in mid-March for hoarding and sent them to the labor camp, said the second source.

According to the second source, the authorities have incorporated their actions against hoarders and price gougers into daily propaganda.

They drive around the streets with their speaker cars blaring every morning that we need to eliminate the capitalist idea of buying out commodities like rice and oil to create a shortage, then selling everything at a higher price, the second source said.

But people cant stand those propaganda mobiles and their noisy loudspeakers are driving us crazy.

The second source said the measures seemed to be working, as rice prices did not rise unreasonably at the market in Hyesan.

But there is not enough soybean oil, so people are hoarding that now. People are now overly anxious, saying they dont know how they can survive another month of [this].

Pyongyang has not yet reported a single confirmed case of coronavirus in the country, but has taken extensive measures to stop the spread of the virus, including the quarantine of entire counties near the Chinese boarder and the cancellation of important national celebrations. Experts believe it is very unlikely that COVID-19 has yet to enter North Korea.

Reported by Hyemin Son for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - Revelo Resources Corp. (TSXV: RVL) ("Revelo" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the sale of 20 generative net smelter return ("NSR") royalty interests over exploration properties in Chile for proceeds of US$ 1.5 million, as announced by Revelo on January 20, 2020 and March 20, 2020, and by EMX on March 20, 2020, has closed. Two of the royalties were sold to an arm's length property owner, which exercised a right of first refusal, for US$ 338,000 and 18 were sold to EMX Royalty Corp. (TSXV: EMX) (NYSE American: EMX) for US$ 1,162,000. Of the amount paid by EMX, US$ 369,907 was applied to fully repay EMX for an outstanding loan due from Revelo. Under TSX Venture Exchange policies, EMX is a non-arm's party since EMX and Revelo have one common director. That director abstained from all negotiations and voting on the transaction on behalf of both EMX and Revelo and the independent directors of both companies authorized the transaction.

ABOUT REVELO

Revelo is a Canadian company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV: RVL). Revelo has interests in an outstanding portfolio of projects prospective for gold and copper located along proven mineral belts in one of the world's top mining jurisdictions -Chile. The Company has a vision to reward shareholders with wealth-generating mineral discoveries along Chile's prime mineral belts, through leveraged and more efficient capital deployment, exploration, discovery and monetization. For more information, please visit Revelo's website at www.reveloresources.com.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Michael Winn, Chairman

INVESTOR CONTACT

Timothy J Beale | President & CEO

T: +1 604 687-5544 | info@reveloresources.com | www.reveloresources.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENT

This news release contains certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical fact, that address events or developments that Revelo expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential", "indicate" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. Although Revelo believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/53830
MIAMI - Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro stood defiant in the face of a $15 million bounty by the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges, calling Donald Trump a racist cowboy and warning that he is ready to fight by whatever means necessary should the U.S. and neighbouring Colombia dare to invade.

Maduros bellicose remarks Thursday night came hours after the U.S. announced sweeping indictments against the socialist leader and several members of his inner circle for allegedly converting Venezuela into a criminal enterprise at the service of drug traffickers and terrorist groups.

One indictment by prosecutors in New York accused Maduro and socialist party boss Diosdado Cabello, head of the rubber-stamp constitutional assembly, of conspiring with Colombian rebels and members of the military to flood the United States with cocaine and use the drug trade as a weapon against America.

Maduro, a former bus driver who fashions himself an everyman icon of the Latin American left, said the charges were politically motivated. He said they ignore U.S. ally Colombias role as the main source of the worlds cocaine and his own role in facilitating peace talks between Colombias government and that countrys rebels over the past decade.

Donald Trump, you are a miserable human being, Maduro railed during his televised address. You manage international relations like a New York mafia extortion artist you once were as a real estate boss.

What was some of Maduros most venomous rhetoric ever against Trump also came with a threat of military force: If one day the imperialists and Colombian oligarchy dare to touch even a single hair, they will face the Bolivarian fury of an entire nation that will wipe them all out.

Earlier, Venezuelas chief prosecutor opened an investigation against opposition leader Juan Guaido for allegedly plotting a coup with retired army Gen. Cliver Alcala, who after being named in the U.S. indictments said he had stockpiled assault weapons in Colombia for a cross-border incursion. Without offering evidence, Maduro said the Drug Enforcement Administration was behind a plan by Alcala to assassinate him and other political leaders.

The indictment of a functioning head of state is highly unusual and is bound to ratchet up tensions with Washington as the spread of the coronavirus threatens to collapse Venezuelas shortage-plagued health system. Maduro has ordered Venezuelans to stay home in an effort to curb the spread of the virus, which officials say has infected 107 people and claimed its first death Thursday.

Criminal acts to advance a drug and weapons conspiracy that dates back to the start of Hugo Chavezs revolution in 1999 occurred as far afield as Syria, Mexico, Honduras and Iran, the indictment alleges. Attorney General William Barr estimated the conspiracy helped smuggle as much as 250 metric tons of cocaine a year out of South America.

The Maduro regime is awash in corruption and criminality, Barr said in an online news conference from Washington. While the Venezuelan people suffer, this cabal lines their pockets with drug money, and the proceeds of their corruption. And this has to come to an end.

The co-ordinated unsealing of indictments against 14 officials and government-connected individuals, along with the announcement of rewards of $55 million against Maduro and four others, attacked all the key planks of what Barr called the corrupt Venezuelan regime, including the Maduro-dominated judiciary and the powerful armed forces.

In Miami, prosecutors charged Supreme Court Chief Justice Maikel Moreno with laundering in the U.S. at least $3 million in illegal proceeds from case fixing in Venezuela, including one involving a General Motors factory. Much of the money he spent on private aircraft, luxury watches and shopping at Prada, prosecutors allege.

Maduros defence minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino, was charged with conspiracy to smuggle narcotics in a May 2019 indictment unsealed in Washington.

This announcement is a major blow for Maduro who has been running Venezuela like a mafia state, with rampant corruption and widespread atrocities, and absolute impunity, said Jose Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director of Human Rights Watch. With this indictment he may now lose his aura of invincibility, of being completely above the law, which is very welcome news.

But its unclear how it brings Venezuela any closer to ending a 15-month standoff between Maduro, who has the support of Russia and China, and the U.S.-backed Guaido. It also could fragment the U.S.-led coalition against Maduro if European and Latin American allies think the Trump administration is overreaching. An estimated 5 million Venezuelans have left the country in recent years, fleeing hyperinflation and widespread food and medicine shortages.

Its an incredibly dangerous gamble to redouble the offensive against Maduros regime when the priority must be to shore up the countrys collapsing health system and prevent an even worse migrant exodus, said Ivan Briscoe, the Latin America director for the Crisis Group. These U.S. charges could spell doom for any thaw, expose Guaido to grave risks, and appear high-handedly indifferent to the immediate suffering of Venezuelas people.

Maduro has long accused the U.S. empire of looking for any excuse to take control of the worlds largest oil reserves, likening its plotting to the 1989 invasion of Panama and the removal of strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega to face drug trafficking charges in Florida.

Barr and Elliott Abrams, the State Departments special envoy on Venezuela, are driving the hawkish U.S. stance toward Maduro, much as they pushed for Noriegas ouster in the late 1980s  Barr as a senior Justice Department official and Abrams as assistant secretary of state for Latin America.

U.S. officials see other parallels as well. Noriega transformed Panama into a playground for violent, international drug cartels, and the Trump administration has accused Maduro and his military henchmen of harbouring drug traffickers, guerrillas from Colombia and even Hezbollah, a designated terrorist group.

They also have accused government officials together with well-connected businessmen of stealing hundreds of billions of dollars from the state coffers, much of it from state oil giant PDVSA, which has seen its production plunge to a seven-decade low.

Still, charging Maduro was no easy task. Sitting foreign leaders normally enjoy immunity from prosecution under U.S. law and international norms.

But the U.S. is among 60 countries that no longer consider Maduro a head of state even if he does hold de facto power. They instead recognize Guaido, the head of the congress, as Venezuelas rightful leader following the socialists re-election in a 2018 race marred by allegations of fraud and an opposition boycott.

The evidence against Maduro was collected over several years by investigators in Miami, New York, Houston and Washington who have brought drug trafficking, foreign bribery and money-laundering charges against several senior Venezuelan officials, members of the military and government-connected businessmen.

To the surprise of many, Maduro has stubbornly clung to power. The Trump administration raised the ante last fall, withdrawing support for a Norway-sponsored mediation effort and extending sanctions so that even foreign companies faced retaliation for extending Maduro a lifeline.

Separately, Barr prioritized investigations into Maduros inner circle, according to two people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal Justice Department deliberations.

The pressure to deliver, the people said, went into overdrive around the time Guaido visited Washington in February and Trump praised him as his guest at the State of the Union address, calling him a very brave man, who carries with him the hopes, dreams and aspirations of all Venezuelans.

Frank Mora, a former Pentagon official, said the U.S. is right to condemn Maduro and others for repressing his people, stealing from state coffers and turning Venezuela into a criminal state.

But he worries the indictments play more into the emotion of voters in Florida  a must-win state for Trump where Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans fleeing authoritarian governments have political muscle  than help address the countrys grinding crisis.

Were not going to go in and capture him, said Mora, who now heads the Latin America studies institute at Florida International University. This isnt about regime change or restoring democracy to Venezuela. Its about electoral politics.

___

Associated Press writer Joshua Goodman reported this story in Miami and AP writer Scott Smith reported from Caracas, Venezuela. AP writers Jim Mustian in New York and Michael Balsamo and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.
Medical workers arrive at an airport in Yinchuan, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, March 25, 2020. A total of 323 medical workers returned from Hubei to Yinchuan on Wednesday. A total of 785 medical workers of 6 batches have gone to Hubei to aid the novel coronavirus control efforts there since the outbreak of the epidemic. (Xinhua/Feng Kaihua)
M ore than half a million people have signed up to help the NHS as volunteers in just over 24 hours as the UKs battle against coronavirus crisis continues.

The health service and Prime Minister Boris Johnson thanked those who have offered to step in and support some of the most vulnerable people across the country.

The mass sign-up numbers far outstrip the quarter of a million requested by Health Secretary Matt Hancock to help the 1.5 million people isolating for 12 weeks.

Mr Hancock said on Thursday morning that 560,000 people had answered the Government's call.

NHS staff wearing masks / Getty Images

Speaking at Wednesday's daily press conference at Number 10, Mr Johnson said he wanted to offer a "special thank you to everyone who has now volunteered to help the NHS".

"When we launched the appeal last night, we hoped to get 250,000 volunteers over a few days."

The NHS said in a tweet: "Thank you so much to everyone who has signed up to help some of the most vulnerable people in their communities.

It comes after the number of people who have tested positive for coronavirus in the UK rose by almost 1,500 as the death toll passed 460.

Some 9,529 people had tested positive by 9am on Wednesday, the Department of Health confirmed. That's up from 8,077 at the same point a day earlier.

Coronavirus in numbers: UK deaths rise to 463

Mr Johnson said the volunteers would be "absolutely crucial" in the fight against the illness.

Professor Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, said: "We are truly amazed by the number of people who want to come and help us in the war against coronavirus.

"I would like to thank every last one of you who are offering your time - you will without a doubt help us to save lives.

"Our NHS needs you - whether it's by volunteering or simply staying at home - you are helping your families, communities and protecting our NHS."

Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures 1 /81 Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures A deserted Westminster Bridge PA A man wearing a face mask or covering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, walks past customers sat outside a restaurant AFP via Getty Images Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the Coronavirus lockdown Andrew Parsons Runners pass cardboard cutouts of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William during the London Marathon in London AP An empty escalator at Charing Coss London Underground tube station Jeremy Selwyn Electronic bilboards displays a message warning people to stay home in Sheffield PA A sign is displayed in the window of a student accommodation building following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Mancheste Reuters People take part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions, in Londo AP People sing and dance in Leicester Square on the eve on the 10PM curfew Reuters Hearts painted by a team of artists from Upfest are seen in the grass at Queen Square, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Bristol Reuters Graffiti reads 'good luck and stay safe', as the number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases grow around the world, under a bridge in London Reuters A sign is pictured in Soho, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London Reuters Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures, during a coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, London AP A person runs past posters with a message of hope, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Manchester REUTERS Riot police face protesters who took part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions in London AP An image of The Queen eith quotes from her broadcast to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the Coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images Durdle Door in Dorset Reuters Captain Tom Moore via Reuters Mia, aged 8, and Jack, aged 5, take part in "PE with Joe" a daily live workout with Joe Wicks on Youtube to help kids stay fit who have to stay indoors due to the Coronavirus outbreak PA An NHS worker reacts at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital during the Clap for our Carers campaign in support of the NHS Reuters Goats which have taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno @AndrewStuart via PA Tobias Weller PA Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed London Landscapes: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, central London. Matt Writtle A newspaper vendor in Manchester city centre giving away free toilet rolls with every paper bought as shops run low on supplies due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus PA Theo Clay looks out of his window next to his hand-drawn picture of a rainbow in Liverpool, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continue Reuters A young man cuts another man's hair on top of a closed hairdresser in Oxford Reuters General view of the new NHS Nightingale Hospital, built to fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London via Reuters Jason Baird is seen dressed as Spiderman during his daily exercise to cheer up local children in Stockport, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters A woman wearing a face mask walks past Buckingham Palace Getty Images A man holds mobile phone displaying a text message alert sent by the government warning that new rules are in force across the UK and people must stay at home PA Medical staff on the Covid-19 ward at the Neath Port Talbot Hospital, in Wales, as the health services continue their response to the coronavirus outbreak. PA Prime Minister Boris Johnson taking part in a virtual Cabinet meeting with his top team of ministers PA A shopper walks past empty shelves in a Lidl store on in Wallington. After spates of "panic buying" cleared supermarket shelves of items like toilet paper and cleaning products, stores across the UK have introduced limits on purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have also created special time slots for the elderly and other shoppers vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Getty Images People on a busy tube train in London at rush hour PA Mia, aged 8 and her brother Jack, aged 5 from Essex, continue their school work at home, after being sent home due to the coronavirus PA Children are painting 'Chase the rainbows' artwork and springing up in windows across the country Reuters Social distancing in Primrose Hill Jeremy Selwyn A general view of a locked gate at Anfield, Liverpool as The Premier League has been suspended PA Homeless people in London AFP via Getty Images A piece of art by the artist, known as the Rebel Bear has appeared on a wall on Bank Street in Glasgow. The new addition to Glasgow's street art is capturing the global Coronavirus crisis. The piece features a woman and a man pulling back to give each other a kiss PA The Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, London, for Windsor Castle to socially distance herself amid the coronavirus pandemic PA A general view on Grey street, Newcastle as coronavirus cases grow around the world Reuters Matt Raw, a British national who returned from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China, leaves quaratine at Arrowe Park Hospital on Merseyside PA Britain's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news conference inside 10 Downing Street Reuters The ticket-validation terminals at the tram stop on Edinburgh's Princes Street are cleaned following the coronavirus outbreak. PA Locked school gates at Rockcliffe First School in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear PA A sign at a Sainsbury's supermarket informs customers that limits have been set on a small number of products as the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases grow around the world Reuters Jawad Javed delivers coronavirus protection kits that he and his wife have put together to the vulnerable people of their community of Stenhousemuir, between Glasgow and Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" Getty Images A man who appears to be homeless sleeping wearing a mask today in Victoria Jeremy Selwyn A pedestrian walks past graffiti that reads "Diseases are in the City" in Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images Staff from The Lyric Theatre, London inform patrons, as it shuts its doors PA A quiet looking George IV Bridge in Edinburgh PA A quieter than usual British Museum Getty Images A racegoer attends Cheltenham in a fashionable face mask SplashNews.com A commuter wears a face mask at London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn A empty restaurant in the Bull Ring Shopping Centre Getty Images A deserted Trafalgar Square in London PA Passengers determined to avoid the coronavirus before leaving the UK arrive at Gatwick Airport Getty Images

Anyone who is over the age of 18, fit and healthy and non-symptomatic can offer their time to the scheme.

GPs, doctors, pharmacists, nurses, midwives, NHS 111 advisers and social care staff will all be able to request help for at-risk patients through a call centre run by the Royal Voluntary Service, which will match people who need help with volunteers who live near them.

NHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens praised the "overwhelming response" to the call for volunteers to help the vulnerable and thanked those who will devote their time to the health service.

"Times like this show just how generous the British people are and how much they value our health service - we are blown away by this response and the kindness of our country," he said.

"I can't thank those enough who have pledged to devote their time to helping others at what is a challenging and uncertain time for you and your families.

"The NHS is always there for you - now is your time to be there for us too."

Housing, Communities and Local Government Secretary Robert Jenrick called NHS staff "absolute heroes ... working round the clock to support us as a country" and provided more detail on what the volunteers may be doing.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme that there would be a variety of jobs available, including parcel delivery and driving.

They may also be asked to drive people to appointments or make regular phone calls to those in isolation, the NHS said.

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For weeks, government officials and physicians have warned the public to be aware of a dry cough and a temperature above 100 degrees as key symptoms for the coronavirus.

But hospitals around the country are beginning to see a new symptom appear: stomach pain. Michael Hirsh, Worcesters director of public health, said the citys hospitals are now seeing patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 and are displaying only abdominal pain.

What weve been seeing is patients coming in not so much with complaints about respiratory stuff but with abdominal stuff, Hirsh said.

The pain in the stomach is a result of a patient developing pneumonia in the lower lobes of the lungs, Hirsh said. If the lobes are inflamed frequently, the irritation in the diaphragm causes pain in the abdomen.

The more we see the disease, were going to see manifestations of the disease that dont fit that classic picture of dry hacking cough and fever, Hirsh said. Were going to see other manifestations of it.

Hirsh said many of the patients with abdominal pain havent had any respiratory symptoms. While theres not enough data available yet, Hirsh said at this time younger patients reported the stomach pain, while older patients showed respiratory symptoms.

Of the 2,417 coronavirus cases in Massachusetts, 437 are people between the ages of 50 and 59  the highest age group affected by the outbreak. The second highest age group is 30 to 39, with 433 confirmed cases, and the third highest age group is 20 to 29, with 425 confirmed cases, according to the Department of Public Health.

The United States now has the highest number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the world. Doctors continue to study the virus as it spreads by the thousands each day.

One symptom doctors discovered as an early symptom of the virus is a loss of smell.

Like stomach pain, loss of smell is a new symptom and the medical community continues to wait on more data.

Symptoms that youd see, nausea, diarrhea and fever, at this point I would warn the public, they shouldnt write off those symptoms just the routine springtime gastroenteritis or flu, Hirsh said.

Sign up for free text messages about important updates on coronavirus in Massachusetts

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(Reuters) - European stocks edge higher on Thursday, reversing earlier losses as investors awaited a vote by EU lawmakers on emergency funds to cushion the blow from the coronavirus outbreak.

A stronger open on Wall Street helped sentiment, as markets clawed back some ground after big losses in the past month. [.N]

By 1430 GMT, the pan-European STOXX 600 index was trading 0.4% higher, adding to a 11% gain made over the past two days. The index had fallen up to 2% earlier in the day.

The index is still down 28% from a record peak hit in February, with a recession in Europe looking imminent in the wake of widespread disruption to business due to coronavirus.

European Union lawmakers were expected later on Thursday to approve emergency funds to cushion the blocs economic slump triggered by the pandemic and shore up hard-hit airlines by preserving their landing slots.

Overnight, the European Central Bank ditched a cap on how many bonds it could buy from any single euro zone country, clearing the way for potentially unlimited money-printing as part of its response to the outbreak.

The travel and leisure industry .SXTP led gains for the day, adding about 4% as investors bought back into the worst hit sector.

Italian .FTMIB and Spanish .IBEX bourses trimmed the day's losses, but still traded lower as the number of fatalities from COVID-19 in Italy topped 7,500, while those in Spain rose beyond 3,400, exceeding the total death toll in China.

Weve had a few days of recovery in prices, but we are unlikely to see a sustained recovery until we get a sense that the pandemic is under control in most countries, said Simona Gambarini, markets economist at Capital Economics in London.

As new cases show little signs of peaking, Europes disease control agency said every country in the bloc was forecast to run out of intensive care beds by mid-April.

German shares .GDAXI fell 0.3%, while a survey showed consumer morale in Europe's biggest economy tumbled to its lowest level since 2009. Gains on Tuesday and Wednesday had added up to the market's biggest two-day rise since 2008.

In a further sign of duress from the outbreak, data showed U.S. jobless claims surged to a record 3.28 million last week as measures to contain the virus brought business activity in the worlds largest economy to a grinding halt.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 21:50:36|Editor: zyl

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People work to build a makeshift hospital at Indira Gandhi Athletics Stadium in Guwahati, India, March 26, 2020. Local government has decided to convert two stadiums in Guwahati into makeshift hospitals to treat COVID-19 patients. The death toll due to COVID-19 in India on Thursday morning rose to 13, the federal health ministry said, with 649 confirmed cases reported so far. (Str/Xinhua)

NEW DELHI, March 26 (Xinhua) -- New hospitals dedicated to treatment of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) will soon come up in 17 states in the country, the Indian government said on Thursday.

India has reported 13 deaths till Thursday morning as the total number of COVID-19 cases rose to 649.

Senior official in the Health Ministry Lav Agarwal told the media that top officials in the 17 states had been directed to immediately start the work for setting up these new hospitals, and the work has begun.

"In a video conference with states' Secretaries, India's Cabinet Secretary asked them to make hospitals dedicated to treating COVID-19 patients. As many as 17 states have started to build these hospitals. Field workers are being oriented to deal with the disease, and we are using online platforms to reach each and every person in the country," Agarwal told reporters in a televised press conference.

The setting up of 17 new hospitals comes after doubts were raised recently over India's unpreparedness in combating the COVID-19.

The Foreign Affairs magazine wrote in an article published Wednesday that India was still not prepared well to tackle the COVID-19. The article said the Indian government spent only a little over 1 percent of its GDP on health care, which was among the lowest rates in the world.

"According to some estimates, India has only between 70,000 and 100,000 Intensive Care Units (ICU) beds across both the public and the private sectors. Health experts insist that India has until about April 10 to better prepare its hospitals, convert a few stadiums into isolation centers, and procure as many ventilators as possible," said the U.S. magazine.

World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Programme Executive Director Mike Ryan was recently quoted as saying that India needed to do much more than simply imposing a 21-day countrywide lockdown.

"You must have a system to find cases, you must test, you must expand your capacity to treat and isolate, you must be able to quarantine your contacts," Ryan was quoted as telling an Indian TV channel on Wednesday.

The UN body, however, praised India's decision to lock down the country at an early stage.
Washington, DC, US (PANA) - The World Bank Group (WBG) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have called on all official bilateral creditors to suspend debt payments from International Development Association (IDA) countries that request forbearance
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He tweeted: FLASH: The Federal Government is releasing additional N6.5 billion as an emergency intervention to the National Centre for Disease Control (@NCDCGov) as Nigeria intensifies the fight to curb the spread of the #COVID19 in the country, the finance minister has said yday in Abuja.
(Alliance News) - The following is a round-up of updates by UK companies on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, issued on Thursday and not separately reported by Alliance News:







Hostelworld Group PLC - hostel operator - Cancels 2.1 euro cent final dividend for 2019, but says net cash "strong". Bookings deteriorate more than guided earlier in March, now sees first-quarter 2020 earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation hit of EUR5 million. Reducing marketing spend, enacting other measures to save cash.







Quiz PLC - fashion retailer - Revenue and margins to be "materially" below expectations for year ending March 31 as traffic in stores and online visits slump. Physical stores and concessions now closed. Unable to give guidance for financial 2021, currently looking to renew facilities expiring in April. Eliminating all non-essential spend.







Topps Tiles PLC - tile retailer - Does not plan to pay interim dividend for current financial year ending September and withdraws guidance. In "good" financial position, believes it can weather 12-week closure of retail stores followed by weak quarter after reopening. It is "clear" Covid-19 will materially reduce revenue and profit. Retail like-for-like sales in 12 weeks to March 21 down 3.1% yearly.







Ince Group PLC - legal services - Cancels interim dividend previously declared. Covid-19 having "significant" effect on UK operations, as well as international. All discretionary spending limited, not possible to forecast trading performance during pandemic. Not confident on meeting market expectations for year ending March 2020 or financial 2021.







Knights Group Holdings PLC - legal services - Revenue and cash flow impact from Covid-19 limited to-date, but stopping all non-essential spending, reducing board salaries by 30% and employee salaries over GBP30,000 by 10%. Difficult to predict long-term impact, cannot provide guidance. Performance in year ending April 30 in line with market expectations, balance sheet "strong", lenders supportive.







Aukett Swanke Group PLC - architect - Says concept & pre-planning and technical services largely unaffected by Covid-19 disruption, but on-site work more difficult. Cost impact so far "minimal", liquidity "good", so far business is functioning well.







GYG PLC - superyacht services - Balance sheet "strong" after positive performance in 2019 and early 2020, can withstand market uncertainty. Most shipyard operations still going, though some suspended, but work contracts postponed not cancelled. No contract cancellations so far, "strong" start to first quarter of 2020, too early to predict Covid-19 impact.







Mpac Group PLC - automated packaging - Withdraws final dividend for 2019 to conserve cash. Has "strong" balance sheet, debt-free, well-positioned to navigate disruption, but unable to predict impact. Expects order intake to fall in 2020 as customers defer investment decisions and delay ongoing projects.







Brickability Group PLC - concrete blocks and bricks - Trading in line with expectations for second half ending March, earnings for full-year to meet expectations. Manufacturing sites now closed after UK government advice. "Well-positioned" for uncertainty, strong balance sheet, but will still cease all discretionary spending. Unable to give guidance for soon-to-begin financial year.







Northbridge Industrial Services PLC - industrial equipment - Financially "resilient", balance sheet strong, believes can recover from temporary downturn. Uncertain on impact from Covid-19 in 2020. Lower oil price beginning to impact work in Australasia and Asia, overall demand likely to be lower, hitting revenue.







Hargreaves Services PLC - industrial services - Defers 2.7p interim dividend already declared until things become more clear. Since late January, trading largely unaffected by Covid-19, but not possible to forecast what future impact might be. Reducing non-essential spending, in talks with existing and potential new lenders.







Van Elle Holdings PLC - ground engineering - Cancels 0.2p interim dividend already declared. Spread of Covid-19 having a "significant" impact on trading, expects further disruption. Has positive cash, but talking with lenders over financing options. Difficult to predict future impacts, taking action to preserve cash.







ADES International Holding PLC - oil & gas drilling - Not seeing significant impact on operations from Covid-19, trading meeting expectations.







STV Group PLC - broadcasting and media - Withdraws planned 14.7p per share final dividend for 2019. Has "good" access to liquidity, focused on reducing costs, no dividend and lower spending to save GBP10 million. Says TV and online viewing "strong" during first-quarter 2020.







Vianet Group PLC - data management, real-time usage monitoring for pubs - Withdraws final dividend, will save firm GBP1.2 million. Has "good liquidity" but taking action to reduce costs. Mandatory closure of pubs, bars, restaurants to hurt Smart Zone customers; allows reduced contract rates. Trading in financial year to March, and full-year profit, to meet market expectations, rise year-on-year.







BigDish PLC - yield management platform for restaurants - Puts in place immediate cash preservation measures, engages advisory firm to source funding without need for share placing. Optimistic restaurant industry will recover once allowed to reopen. Manchester team furloughed. Has enough funding until end of 2020.







London Security PLC - fire safety - Most offices, engineers not working. Reducing costs, but expects Covid-19 outbreak to hurt trading.







Non-Standard Finance PLC - consumer lending - Will not be paying final dividend for 2019. Withdraws all guidance and medium-term targets, "significantly" reducing lending volumes. Offering credit to "key workers". Says trading environment "unprecedented", unable to say how much trading will be hurt.







Ocean Wilsons Holdings Ltd - maritime services - Main operating subsidiary Wilson Sons withdraws USD0.54 per share dividend, recommends new USD0.21 per share payout. Wilson Sons financially "solid", unable to give guidance on how Covid-19 will hit trading. Ocean Wilsons reduces own dividend to USD0.30 from USD0.70 per share withdraws own guidance.







Princess Private Equity Holding Ltd - private equity - Too early to quantify impact on investments. Net asset value falls 1.0% over February, March to fall further. Confident liquidity is sufficient to meet debt requirements.







Merian Chrysalis Investment Co Ltd - investment trust - Believes Covid-19 impact likely to be "modest" on most portfolio companies, but says it is impossible to predict. Merian has "strong" balance sheet, no leverage.







Better Capital PCC Ltd - investment trust - Covid-19 has "inevitably" had serious effect on companies in BECAP12 Fund, likewise on BECAP Fund. Difficult to quantify damage so far. Better Capital says "improbable" investees can be exited "sensibly" during lifetime of funds, firm to de-list in coming weeks.







Impact Healthcare REIT PLC - healthcare real estate - Balance sheet "resilient", low gearing, room on covenants and undrawn facilities. Performance during 2019 "strong", pretax profit up 59%. Tenants have "strong" rent cover, some tenants in talks with NHS to provide beds.







JLEN Environmental Assets Group Ltd - environmental infrastructure investor - Expects drop in power prices in short-term due to lower demand, but long-term price outlook better. JLEN financially "strong", reaffirms dividend plans. Portfolio performing well so far in 2020, especially wind.







Anglo Asian Mining PLC - gold, copper, and silver miner - Operations at Gedabek and Gosha mines ongoing despite restrictions in Azerbaijan. Mining and maintenance continues, able to secure necessary supplies outside of country. Unable to ship gold dore to refiners, however, due to flight restrictions. Financially "strong", maintains 2020 production guidance.







Caledonia Mining Corp - gold miner - Lockdown in South Africa having knock-on effect in Zimbabwe, mainly in the supply of equipment. Confident Blanket mine can continue producing gold, believes enough equipment in place to operate well past April 16 lockdown finish date. Cash position solid, boosted by higher gold price recently.







Gem Diamonds Ltd - diamond miner - Puts Letseng mine in Lesotho on care & maintenance for three weeks due to government-enforced lockdown.







Resolute Mining Ltd - gold miner - Gold production not yet affected by government action in Mali and Senegal. No change to current output or cost guidance.







Hummingbird Resources PLC - gold miner - Business continuing as normal, no impact on production at Mali's Yanfolila gold mine.







Metals Exploration PLC - gold miner - Continues to be able to sell gold dore from Runruno mine in the Philippines. However, future ability to ship gold dore abroad not guaranteed. Has seen some interruptions to supply chain, not material yet.







RockRose Energy PLC - oil & gas - Still expects to pay final dividend of 25p per share for 2019. Cash position "strong", has hedging in place to mitigate oil price fall. Reviewing spending, at least USD50 million of planned 2020 spending will be postponed. No material impact yet on operations.







Inspired Energy PLC - energy consultant - Decides to defer 2019 final dividend, despite having "robust" balance sheet, strong corporate order book standing at GBP58.5 million as of February 28. Not able to give any financial guidance for 2020 due to uncertainty over how Covid-19 will play out.







MetalNRG PLC - natural resources investor - On-site work stops at Gold Ridge project in Arizona. Proposes alternative terms to seller of Romanian oil project amid oil price fall, due diligence completed. Pursuing "attractive" prospects given current market turmoil, confident on weathering "storm".







Sunrise Resources PLC - pozzolan and perlite miner - Making steady progress at CS project, Nevada, where state government has implemented measures similar to UK.







By George Collard; georgecollard@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2020 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Five new coronavirus positive cases were reported on Thursday, including the first case from Baghpat district, which took the total number of cases in Uttar Pradesh to 43.

The 32-year-old Baghpat man, who contracted the infection, had returned recently from Dubai and felt discomfort in breathing after which he contacted the district hospital. His sample was taken and it tested positive for coronavirus.

He is presently admitted to hospital in Baghpat, said Dr Sudhir Singh, spokesperson of KGMU, where the samples of all five positive cases were tested.

Another positive case is a 24-year-old man from Agra. He has a travel history from a foreign country, said Dr Vikasendu Agrawal, state surveillance officer in the health department. This is Agras 9th case.

The number of corona patients who have been cured has gone up from 11 to 14 as three more in Noida were declared recovered, said Dr Agrawal.

A 21-year-old woman from Noida also tested positive. Her parents had tested positive earlier this week, said Dr Singh.

Another 33-year-old woman and a 39-year-old man from Noida, stated to be relatives and contacts of a old case, tested positive. This takes the total number of cases in the state to 43. The patients are admitted to hospitals in Noida, from where maximum 14 cases have been reported.

Over 30,000 people are under surveillance in the state, which has eight testing labs functional.

In all 1,937 samples have been tested in the state till now and positive cases have been reported from Agra (9), Ghaziabad (3), Noida (14), Lucknow (8), Lakhimpur-Kheri (1), Pilibhit (2), Kanpur (1), Moradabad (1), Shamli (1), Jaunpur (1), Baghpat (1) and Varanasi (1).

CORONA STATS

Travellers identified from affected countries in UP: 37,748

Passengers from 12 specified countries in UP: 37,196

Number of symptomatic travellers: 592

Travellers hospitalized as of today: 97

Samples found positive: 43

Samples tested: 1,937

Travellers screened at airports: 26,369

Travellers screened at border checkposts: 15,46,974 (These are all travelers, not suspects)
Former Marine Colby Hollabaugh leads the Sea Lions for Service Members course in Laguna Beach, California. At the Pacific Marine Mammal Center veterans work as a team to rehabilitate injured and sick sea lions to eventually release back into their natural habitat. Hollabaugh is diagnosed with PTSD, and his work has taught him that, just like veterans, recovering sea lions arent weak - they just need help.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 22:27:01|Editor: Liu

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BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Brunei reported five new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, bringing the country's total to 114 cases.

According to Brunei's Ministry of Health, three more cases have recovered, bringing the total recovered cases to five. One patient is still in critical condition, requiring ventilator support, while three patients are under intensive care. The rest are in good health.

The ministry said so far, a total of 1,221 individuals are undergoing quarantine, 794 people have completed the 14-day quarantine period and 4,519 laboratory tests for COVID-19 have been conducted.

A 53-year-old local man became the first confirmed case for COVID-19 in Brunei on March 9 after returning to the sultanate from Kuala Lumpur. He possibly contracted the virus there during the religious mass gatherings from late February to early March, which were reportedly attended by about 16,000 people.
Bishop Ronald W. Gainer announced Thursday that no public Masses will be celebrated for Palm Sunday, Holy Week, or Easter, in light of the coronavirus outbreak.

The Harrisburg Diocese decision follows suit with the decree issued by Pope Francis. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia announced Wednesday that Holy Week public worship and Easter public services in the southeastern part of the commonwealth have also been suspended.

Gainer said in a statement that it would be irresponsible of him to open Harrisburg parishes while still in the midst of this pandemic. He said hes going to follow the recommendations coming from state government leaders.

Our Diocese, our nation, and our world are experiencing the unthinkable with the coronavirus, Gainer said in a statement. With this global pandemic in mind, the Holy See, Pope Francis, has decreed that all Holy Week and Easter Masses will be celebrated, but that countries impacted by coronavirus and in cases where restrictions regarding the assembly and movement of people are in place, the bishop and priests may celebrate without the presence of the faithful.

He continued: Please know the impact of this announcement is not lost on me. I too am deeply hurting by not being able to gather with the faithful for the celebration of Mass. Although we cannot come together for public Masses during this holiest time of year, our priests will celebrate Palm Sunday, Holy Week and Easter Masses. Many of our Parishes are live streaming these Masses and I encourage the faithful to participate in Mass through these online means.

Palms that would be used on Palm Sunday are going to be made available at a later date, according to the Harrisburg Diocese. Other changes also announced Thursday include a postponement of the Chrism Mass.

Parishes within the Diocese have been asked to prepare worship aides and distribute them to parishioners, allowing them to more actively participate in the Holy Week and Easter Masses remotely.

Live stream options and resources for parishioners are available on the Health Alerts page of the Diocesan website, www.hbgdiocese.org/coronavirus.
A 70-year old woman, who died after being found positive for the coronavirus in an initial test, has become Karnataka's second COVID-19 fatality with results confirming the infection on Thursday as the total number of affected by the contagion in the state rose to 55, the health department said.

Results of three other people, including a 35 year-old man from Mysuru with no travel and contact history so far, returned positive on Thursday, besides that of the woman who died on Wednesday, it said.

However, the man was with quality assurance section of a pharmaceutical company in Nanjangud and had come in contact with many healthcare professionals.

"Till date 55 COVID-19 positive cases have been confirmed which includes 2 deaths and 3 discharges," the department in a bulletin said.

It said, as many as 50 positive patients are in isolation at designated hospitals and are stable.

Out of the 55 case, six are transit passengers of Kerala who had landed in airports in the state.

According to the department, the 70-year old woman, a resident of Chikkaballapura district who returned from Mecca in Saudi Arabia on March 14, died on March 24 at a designated hospital here.

On Wednesday, the government had said the woman had tested positive initially but it was waiting for a final confirmatory report, which eventually came on Thursday, as the nation-wide COVID-19 toll was put at 16.

Her funeral rites were completed with all the precautionary measures as per the guidelines issued by the Centre for COVID-19 suspect deaths, it added.

Earlier this month, a 76-year old Kalaburagi man died "due to co-morbidity and was also tested positive for COVID- 19," becoming the country's first coronavirus fatality.

On the man from Mysuru, the department said he has been isolated at designated hospital in Mysuru and detailed investigation was under process.

"Seven primary contacts have been traced and are under house quarantine," it added.

On the other fresh cases, it said a 64-year old man from Anantapura in Andhra Pradesh, who returned from France on March 1, has tested positive.

Later he had travelled to Himachal Pradesh, Puttaparthi and arrived in Bengaluru on March 31, the bulletin said, adding he was being treated at a designated hospital in Bengaluru Rural District.

A 45-year old man from the city and contact of a patient who earlier tested positive has also been confirmed for the infection.

The department said contact tracing has been initiated for all the cases.

Among the 55 positive, as many 35 have been reported from Bengaluru, five from Dakshina Kannada, three each from Kalaburgai, Chikkaballapura and Mysuru, two from Uttara Kannada and one each from Kodagu, Dharwad, Davangere and Udupi.

Three of them are discharged patients in the state capital while one death each has been reported in Kalaburgari and Bengaluru.

Meanwhile, an order has been issued by the Karnataka government allowing all Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs) to practice tele-medicine consultation with certain restrictions, keeping in view the lockdown across the state.

The government has also directed officials to take strict action under the Karnataka Epidemic Disease (Covid-19) regulations 2020 against landlords or house-owners forcing doctors, paramedical staff or healthcare personnel to vacate their houses.

Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa, who on Thursday held a videoconferencing with Deputy Commissioners of all districts regarding measures taken to control the spread of COVID-19 and for the implementation of lockdown, asked them to take required stringent measures to see that people remain in home and don't come out unnecessarily.

Asking officials to strictly enforce the lock down, he told authorities to even consider arresting those who violate it.

The CM also directed officials to ensure that banks and financial institutions postpone the payment of installments of loan; and see to that all essential agricultural equipment, fertilisers and pesticides are available to farmers.

Asking officials to ensure that private clinics across the state functions, Yediyurappa said, all essential items should made available to people near their houses.

Medical Education Minister K Sudhakar has announced that 31 fever clinics will start functioning at different locations across Bengaluru and those who have returned from foreign countries in last two months and their first and secondary contacts can get their health tested here.

In the next ten days, around 25,000-30,000 people are expected to be tested in these clinics, he said.

From January 21 till date, a total of 1,25,000 people have come to Bengaluru from foreign countries and all their travel details are available with the government. Only 1,500 among them were made to undergo coronavirus test.

Now all those who traveled from foreign countries will be made to undergo tests and there by eliminate any fear in their minds, the Minister added.

In Mangaluru, the district Wenlock hospital will be turned into a dedicated facility for the treatment of COVID-19 patients, Dakshina Kannada district-in-charge Minister Kota Srinivas Poojary said.

Another report from Mangalur said Congress Rajya Sabha MP Oscar Fernandes has granted Rs 1 crore from his MP local area development (MPLAD) fund for the efforts of Udupi district administration against the spread of coronavirus.

Meanwhile, the state Congress president demanded that both state and central governments convene a meeting of opposition leaders to discuss measures for controlling the spread of COVID-19 and managing the situation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 03:57:41|Editor: huaxia

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Sideline Video: In respect of the social distancing rule and the local authorities' call to help combat the COVID-19, the doctors of Chinese descent in Province British Columbia, Canada, have jointly opened a hotline to telecommunicate with their patients. (Xinhua/Li Baodong, Zhang Mocheng)

"If you lost your job because of COVID-19 but are full-time, contract or self-employed, this new benefit will be there for you. If you are sick or quarantined or looking after someone sick or taking care of your kids, it's there for you. If you are still employed but not receiving income because of this crisis, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit is there for you."

OTTAWA, March 25 (Xinhua) -- Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that more financial aid will go to Canadians and businesses to weather the COVID-19 pandemic after the Canadian parliament approved the emergency package of 82 billion Canadian dollars (about 56 billion U.S. dollars).

The parliament passed the legislation of the emergency package of 82 billion Canadian dollars earlier Wednesday.

Trudeau told a daily news conference that his government is aware of the uncertainty facing the country and has merged two public assistance measures into a single program to make it easier for Canadians who are out of or off work because ofk COVID-19 to apply and receive money.

A woman wearing a face mask crosses a street in Toronto, Canada, March 23, 2020. (Photo by Zou Zheng/Xinhua)

It combines the Emergency Care Benefit (10 billion Canadian dollars) and Emergency Support Benefit (5 billion Canadian dollars) into the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and will provide workers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic with 2,000 Canadian dollars (about 1400 U.S. dollars) per month for the upcoming four months.

"If you lost your job because of COVID-19 but are full-time, contract or self-employed, this new benefit will be there for you. If you are sick or quarantined or looking after someone sick or taking care of your kids, it's there for you. If you are still employed but not receiving income because of this crisis, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit is there for you," Trudeau said.

Trudeau said an application portal will be launched quickly and Canadians should be able to get money within 10 days of applying, noting though that money is unlikely to start flowing to people until April 6.

Customers wearing face masks shop at a supermarket in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, March 24, 2020. (Photo by Zou Zheng/Xinhua)

He also indicated his government is reviewing the demands of business groups to substantially increase the wage subsidy so employers can keep workers on the payroll even if they are off in self-isolation.

"We are absolutely looking at more direct help for businesses," he said. "We are working with business groups. We are working with small business groups and hearing their concerns, looking very carefully at the models put forward in other parts of the world, like Denmark and Germany, and looking at how we could make that work and make an equivalency here in Canada," he said.

More than 60 Canadian business groups have reportedly urged Trudeau government to provide direct funding for employees.

A sign reminds people to keep two metre social distance is placed at English Bay in Vancouver, Canada, March 23, 2020. (Photo by Liang Sen/Xinhua)

The prime minister said the government will provide financial aid to the media companies that have seen their advertising revenue dry up as corporations have had to close their doors because of the COVID-19 crisis.

As of 13:30 p.m. Canada's Eastern Time Wednesday, there were more than 3,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 30 deaths in Canada.

(Article by Xinhua Reporter Li Baodong) 
WASHINGTON  Durwesh Khalfe didnt believe he was getting out of Peru until he saw his name checked off the manifest list at the Cusco airport.

For nearly two weeks, he was one of over 100 Texans stuck abroad as countries shut down to combat the spread of COVID-19.

Khalfe, a 27-year-old from Missouri City, was one of the lucky few to make it on the first repatriation flight out of Cusco this week. Also on his flight were William Henderson and Lara Allen, a Houston couple who landed at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on Thursday afternoon.

Theyd all nearly given up hope of getting out of the country where theyd been stranded since March 15, when Peru went into lockdown.

For the latest: Interactive maps, charts show spread of coronavirus in Texas

I was just waiting for any second for the dime to drop more or less and say sorry, the flights canceled, Henderson said.

It's unclear how many Texans are still struggling to return home. There were about 100 Texans stuck in Peru alone this week, but U.S. Sen. John Cornyn's office says it has also received calls from Texans stuck in Morocco, Turkmenistan, Honduras, Jordan, El Salvador, Guatemala and Brazil.

Houston Democrat U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletchers office has received calls from 32 constituents stuck in Honduras, Argentina, Guatemala, India, Ecuador, Australia, and Morocco. Twenty one of them have made it home so far.

But there may be thousands of Americans still stranded in Peru alone, Fletcher wrote in a letter this week to Huge de Zela, Perus ambassador to the U.S., urging him to do all in your power to help them get out.

The unplanned extension of their time in Peru has created additional challenges  some are now without essential medications and others are without sufficient funds, Fletcher wrote. Each additional day creates additional problems that can be alleviated if they can return home to the U.S.

Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

The U.S. Department of State has created a task force to repatriate Americans abroad. It said earlier this week it had brought more than 9,000 Americans back from 28 countries as part of the unprecedented global effort to bring home our citizens from every corner of the globe.

The Department has never before undertaken an evacuation operation of such geographic breadth, scale, and complexity, it said in a statement. We are using all the tools at our disposal to overcome logistical and diplomatic challenges and bring Americans home from hard-to-reach areas and cities hardest-hit by the virus.

But with countries on lockdown, theres only so much American officials can do.

When Khalfe left the U.S. for Peru on March 12 there were just 11 confirmed cases there. Now there are hundreds. The government has a firm control over flights in and out  and very few, if any, have gone through Cusco, where police and the military patrol the streets enforced a strict curfew from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m.

For subscribers: How Harris County's stay-at-home order compares to other counties, states

Days were punctuated by emails, more often than not containing empty promises of progress. Tuesdays last-minute cancellation of two scheduled flights was one particularly cruel occasion.

An elderly couple also stuck at the hotel were supposed to be on that flight. Dwight, the husband, was running out of his heart medication.

We got a little optimism and it kind of got squashed, Lara Allen said. Theres a lot of that. A lot of highs and lows, and a lot of generated emails that are kind of the same email.

So when they woke up early Wednesday morning to an email saying they were on the next flight out, they werent confident it was real.

It didnt sink in until they were off the ground, and the plane erupted in applause. Dwight made it on the flight, as well, with just one days worth of medicine left.

We were really lucky, Henderson said. I dont know how we got on the first group. I think because we were harassing senators and just harassing the hell out of anybody we possibly could.

ben.wermund@chron.com
PLATTSMOUTH  Two Plattsmouth restaurant owners who were contacted this week both agreed the safety of public from the coronavirus (COVID-19) is the main concern.

Absolutely, said Back Alley Diner owner KaCee Peters. Safety is always first.

Absolutely, echoed Mary Harrison, owner of Moms Cafe. We understand the situation.

Nevertheless, their sales have dramatically dropped from the recent mandate from Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts in response to the virus, they added.

Last week, the governor ordered restaurants in several eastern Nebraska counties, including Cass, to close except for takeout/delivery service.

Its been devastating to go within a weeks period down from 50 to 60 orders a day to two or three orders a day, said Harrison, whose cafe is at 422 Main St. Its very hard. Were taking it day by day.

She seemed pleased with takeout orders last Friday evening during her popular fish dinners.

The support (from the community) was unbelievable, Harrison said.

However, sales declined over the next two days to just four orders during her entire Sunday hours, she said.

It makes for a long day, Harrison said, adding that people might be buying more groceries than normal for staying at home because of the virus.

Peters said she had to temporarily lay off eight employees because of reduced business.

When you go down to a skeleton crew, it hurts. My staff is like family.

Currently, she and her mother, plus two employees volunteering their time, are running the business.

Its great that they are willing to help us out, said Peters, who diner is in the same building as the local VFW post.

Her hours have been reduced, also. Until further notice, her diner is closed during the lunch hour, not opening until 4 p.m. Its also now closed on Sundays.

Harrison had to temporarily lay off 10 employees with just two managers, her husband, Ross, and herself running things for the time being, she said.

Her hours have also been reduced to where the cafe now opens at 8 a.m., instead of 6:30.

The large dining area in her restaurant, normally lit up with tables full of diners, is now dark and empty.

Its very emotional, Harrison said while gazing into the dining area on Tuesday.

The current situation led to Peters to offer delivery service that she didnt have before.

If you dont adapt youll be left behind, she said.

With a small fee, Peters has begun delivery takeouts in Plattsmouth and surrounding areas, including Beaver Lake, Buccaneer Bay, Copper Dollar Cove, even Murray. In fact, on Tuesday evening, she went to Murray to deliver a meal to a party that came up from Nebraska City, Peters said.

Our delivery service is catching on, she said.

However, it isnt just her business thats hurting, she added. Orders to her food supplier have been cut impacting that business, plus shes had to cancel her linen cleaning firm.

Theres a ripple effect, she said.

Harrison said she cant wait for things to get back to normal so she can hire back her employees and continue serving in-house meals.

We miss our customers, she said.

The Journal sought comment from other local restaurants, but the owners either declined or the business was closed period for the time being.

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Photo credit: Lockheed Martin

From Popular Mechanics

The U.S. Army plans to field a new armed scout helicopter, the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), in the 2030s.



Two companies, Lockheed Martin and Bell, will now build prototypes of their FARA aircraft designs.

Lockheed Martin and Bell are expected to deliver prototypes in 2023, turning them over to the U.S. Army for testing.

The U.S. Army has selected Lockheed Martin and Bell as finalists to build Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, or FARA. Lockheeds Raider X (pictured above) will go up against Bells 360 Invictus (below). Each company will build one prototype, with the winner chosen in 2023. The service wants to field the armed scout helicopter quickly to fill a critical gap left when the service retired the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior.



Photo credit: Bell

Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft is envisioned as a combination scout/light attack helicopter to support Army helicopter and ground forces. FARA will fly alongside the Armys AH-65E Apache Guardian attack helicopter, locating and identifying enemy tank formations and other units. Once identified, FARA would call in Apache helicopters armed with Hellfire anti-tank missiles or rocket and artillery strikes to destroy the threat. FARA would also locate and shadow enemy forces it doesnt help destroy, ensuring Army ground commanders have the latest intel to plot their destruction.

FARA will be a two-person helicopter externally similar to an attack helicopter but smaller, more nimble. The aircrafts mission will primarily be to locate and observe enemy forces, particularly columns of tanks, geolocating their position and passing on the data to artillery, attack helicopters, ground forces, and fighter jets.

The Army wants an aircraft with long range, enabling it to sweep vast areas of the ground below in its search for the enemy. A small cannon provides self-defense, and FARA will carry anti-tank missiles to take out targets of opportunity. For example, a scout chopper might happen upon an enemy tank battalion and quickly neutralize its mobile air defense armored vehicles, leaving the tanks vulnerable to friendly air power.

Story continues

Photo credit: JOSE CABEZAS - Getty Images

Defense News reports the has Army selected Lockheed Martin and Bell as finalists, and each will build a flying prototype of their entrant. Lockheed Martins entry, designed by subsidiary Sikorsky, is the Raider-X. Raider X uses two contra-rotating main rotor blades and a push propeller. The Bell Invictus retains a more traditional helicopter-style layout, with a main rotor and ducted tail rotor. Both feature a nose-mounted small caliber automatic cannon and anti-tank missiles and other weapons stored on retractable launch pylons. Both appear to use some shaping to reduce their radar signature, though stealth was not on the Armys list of requirements.

A second video envisions Invictus launching several drones, or what it calls Air Launched Effects. Invictus would use the ALEs to search for, identify, and destroy enemy forces over a wide area without endangering itself. In the scenario above a pair of Invictus choppers locate and destroy a battery of S-400 long-range air defense missiles, with the operation ending with the drones colliding with their targets and detonating explosive warheads.

Lockheed Martin released a similar video for Raider X, one that plays up the heritage of its subsidiary, Sikorsky, in the world of helicopter design.

The two finalist companies are the same ones the Army selected two weeks ago for Future Long Range Assault Aircraft , a program designed to develop the successor to the UH-60 Blackhawk transport helicopter. Lockheed Martins Raider-X is very similar in design to the SB-1 Defiant, the companys offering to replace the Blackhawk. Bell is offering the V-280 Valor tiltrotor as a replacement for the Blackhawk but sticking to a more conventional helicopter design for FARA. This is likely because FARA is meant to get into tight spaces, particularly between skyscrapers in urban environments, and using a side-by-side tiltrotor configuration makes for a wider aircraft.

This is, as Defense News points out, the Armys third attempt to replace the OH-58D Kiowa warrior scout helicopter. Combined with the threat of lower defense budgets in the 2020s, the Army may choose the cheaper aircraft with lower operating costs, especially if paired with the ability to grow capabilities in the near future.

The Army expects to begin flight evaluations of both designs in late 2023, fielding the first production aircraft in the 2030s.

Source: Defense News

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Angelina Jolie is doing her bit to feed underprivileged children whose access to school lunches was cut off by school closures amid the coronavirus pandemic.

She has given $1 million to the charity No Kid Hungry, which says it has so far spread $2 million across 30 states to feed low-income children and their families.

'As of this week, over a billion children are out of school worldwide because of closures linked to coronavirus,' said Angelina, 44, in a statement for No Kid Hungry.

Stepping up: Angelina Jolie is doing her bit to feed underprivileged whose access to school lunches was cut off by school closures amid the coronavirus pandemic

'Many children depend on the care and nutrition they receive during school hours, including nearly 22 million children in America who rely on food support.'

Angelina, who is famous for her philanthropy, added: 'Kid Hungry is making resolute efforts to reach as many of those children as possible.'

She has worked extensively with the United Nations and co-wrote a Time essay published Wednesday promoting UNESCO's new Global Education Coalition, which seeks to facilitate remote education as schools close around the world.

In 2006 the film star and her ex-husband Brad Pitt started their own charity named after their eldest son Maddox, 18, and focused on his native Cambodia.

Around the world: Angelina has special envoy status from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; she is pictured in West Mosul during a 2018 UN trip to Iraq

This organization keeps 10 schools up and running in Cambodia, and Angelina separately funds girls' schools in Afghanistan and Kenya, People reports.

She has jetted around the world in service of various causes and in 2012 got special envoy status from the United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees.

Angelina is not the only celebrity to throw her support behind No Kid Hungry as Jennifer Garner and Amy Adams started a fundraiser for them last week.

In the joint clip, which was made over video-chat, Amy and Jennifer announced last Tuesday they would read children's books on Insta Stories to raise money.

Giving back: Angelina is not the only celebrity to throw her support behind No Kid Hungry as Jennifer Garner (right) and Amy Adams (left) started a fundraiser for them last week

Jennifer and Amy launched this Save With Stories venture to encourage donations to Save The Children and No Kid Hungry.

They have attracted help from a string of other celebrities including Camila Cabello, Lupita Nyong'o, Brie Larson, Noah Centineo and Beanie Feldstein.

Angelina's father is Midnight Cowboy icon Jon Voight, who tweeted a video last week in which he prayed for God to 'wipe away this curse' of COVID-19.

'We are all Gods children. God bless this nation and the entire creation. And may God protect our president and his family... Love to you,' he said.
Britains first involuntary celibate bomb-maker discussed launching an attack after becoming angry about his lack of success with women.

Anwar Said Driouich, 22, from Middlesbrough, was part of a misogynistic movement named Incel which has been associated with at least six mass-shootings in the US.

Followers believe in genetic determinism and blame attractive men and women for their inability to find a partner.

The subculture first turned violent when American Elliot Rodger murdered six fellow students at the University of California before killing himself in May 2014.

Incel Anwar Driouich, 22, pleaded guilty to possessing explosive substances, downloading terror manuals and discussing plans to launch an attack at the Old Bailey on Thursday

NYPD's Counterterrorism patrol's were stepped in March last year following a terror attack in the Netherlands which saw three people killed

Officials seized several guns from a 23-year-old Redmond man after he made "concerning Twitter posts posing with weapons and referencing the Joker movie," police said. Police were particularly concerned about a member of the Incel movement targeting the Joker film in 2019

Rodger left behind a 137-page manifesto and a YouTube video revealing his motivation for the attack was a failure to secure a girlfriend, which in turn led to his hatred for those who were in relationships.

Annie Kelly, a PHD student at the University of East Anglia, warned in March that it was a matter of time before an Incel attack was carried out in the UK.

Police were called by chemical supplier Aqua Plants Care when Driouich bought 10kg of ammonium nitrate online. When his family home was raided officers also found a stockpile of sulphuric acid and urea.

He had downloaded five bomb-making manuals and al-Qaeda propaganda magazines, although he was said to be anti-Islamist.

Driouich had accessed a website named incels.co on the day before his arrest, and viewed a post with the title Could be another ER coming up soon - understood to have been a reference to Rodgers attack.

He pleaded guilty after a judge ruled that his proposed defence - that he was only buying the chemicals and downloading bomb-making manuals to relieve his emotional pain - could not be put before a jury.

The case was dealt with as part of the Old Bailey terrorism list, although Kiernan Cunningham, prosecuting, said Driouich showed no evidence of having a terrorist mind-set.

However, Mr Cunningham told an earlier hearing: There is evidence of the suspects morbid fascination with extreme violence, born out of his disillusionment at his own existence and his intention to commit suicide and in doing so to harm others.

Driouich used Facebook to discuss his support for right-wing agitator Tommy Robinson, the Christchurch terrorist attacks on two mosques and 9/11 conspiracies.

He also expressed antipathy towards ISIS and ISIS Bride Shamima Begum.

In one message Driouich and a friend discussed their perceived hardships in life and struggles with women.

A shooting in Tallahassee in 2018 killed two women and injured four more. The shooter, Scott Paul Beierle, was inspired by Incel ideology and turned the gun on himself

The case was dealt with as part of the Old Bailey terrorism list, although Kiernan Cunningham, prosecuting, said Driouich showed no evidence of having a terrorist mind-set

Driouich wrote: Its f****** humiliating I have no hope with girls man I might as well be a ghost to them its pathetic.

I want to massacre this place man. I wouldnt even feel sorry for anyone. I know Im a cold hearted sob (sic) and I just cant help it I have so much anger built up in me.

The documents he downloaded included three volumes of Improvised Munition Black Books, the Anarchists Cookbook version 2000, Ragnars Big Book of Homemade Weapons and a document named Bloody Brazilian knife-fighting techniques.

He had also collected three volumes of an al-Qaeda online publication called Inspire, which included articles on car bombs and attacks on aeroplanes.

During an earlier hearing, Judge Anthony Leonard said Driouich had developed a personality which left him feeling very much an outsider.

He said: In my judgement the defence that he had possession of an explosive substance for a lawful purpose could never be satisfied by a defendant proving on a balance of probabilities that he settled on viewing of violent imagery and fantasies of violent conduct as a means by which to relieve his emotional pain.

What is alleged against this defendant is that he went further than fantasising about it and went on to purchase one of the ingredients which can be used to make an explosive.

In my judgment the issues raised here goes only to mitigation and not to whether he is guilty of the offence charged. If accepted, it will be very relevant to the eventual sentence.

Driouich will be sentenced on Friday.
A woman who says her high-rolling gambler ex-boyfriend swore to make her life hell after they split up has fought off his claim to a share of her 540,000 home.

Tracy Perrin, 59, broke up acrimoniously with Phillip Langford in 2016 but faced a court fight over the house in Eltham he claimed to have helped to finance.

Mr Langford, said to make makes about 100,000 a year from gambling, told a judge he had showered Mrs Perrin with expensive gifts including a diamond ring and a 7,500 Rolex watch during their four-year relationship.

He argued that the Eltham property was shared as he had contributed to the mortgage, insisting at Central London county court that the couple had planned their future together.

Mrs Perrin, a teaching assistant, said her former partner had been little more than a paying guest, claiming he had earned the nickname Phillip the Lodger and was very possessive about food that he had bought. Mr Langford denied the claims.

Judge Sarah Langley has rejected Mr Langfords claim for a 50,000 share of the house and left him with a bill for about 35,000 in legal costs.

She said that money he handed over was payment to Mrs Perrin in respect of his rent or keep and any gifts were part and parcel of the relationship.

The couple began dating in July 2012 and Mr Langford moved into Mrs Perrins home, which she had shared with her husband until his death three years earlier. She accused him of being spiteful, bullying and controlling during their relationship.
Getty Images

John Wood Community Colleges Career Services Center is offering a resource for students and community members searching for employment.

Job Link is a virtual connector between students and community members searching for work and employers looking for those with skills and qualifications. Students or community members who sign up for Job Link can list the categories or positions of interest to them while employers can post openings at jwcc.edu/job-link. As positions match individuals interests, a job notification is automatically emailed when posted by an employer.
A third person has died in Victoria from coronavirus, taking the national death toll to 12.

The state's Chief Medical Officer Brett Sutton confirmed all three victims, the state's first deaths, were in their 70s.

He said the primary issue is in vulnerability of people over the age of 70 with pre-existing health conditions.

But Dr Sutton urged people who don't fit into that category not to get complacent.

'I do not want to give the impression that if you're over 70 with no medical condition at all that you are not at risk of dying or needing intensive care because that is certainly the case.

Construction workers during their lunch break in the Sydney CBD observing social distancing policies by sitting a safe distance apart

'The older that you get, especially over 60-65 years of age the greater the risk of severe illness.'

Dr Sutton said Victoria's first deaths were 'not unexpected' as the numbers who had tested positive increased.

'They are regarded as coronavirus deaths, the reality is if you are over 70 you are more vulnerable.

The streets of Sydney are deserted (Martin Place pictured on March 26) after the government introduced stricter measures to slow the spread of the deadly respiratory infection

Two women seen in the streets in Sydney on Thursday March 26 wearing face masks to limit the spread of coronavirus

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

'This is what coronavirus does.'

Dr Sutton urged people to respect the privacy of all families involved, and again pleaded with people to take social distancing measures more seriously.

The advice comes as Australia recorded a spike in cases overnight, with 190 more in New South Wales alone.

A 68-year-old Queensland man died on Wednesday afternoon after catching the virus on board a cruise ship that docked in Sydney last week.

Queensland Health said the man had a 'serious underlying medical condition before contracting the virus.'
COVID-19 cases in Pakistan now at 990: Domestic flights suspended

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Mar 26: Pakistan has suspended all domestic flight operations until April 2 to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus after the country reported nearly 1,000 cases from the COVID-19 infection, authorities said on Wednesday.

The nationwide tally of the COVID-19 patients has soared to 990 with 410 cases in Sindh; 110 in Balochistan; 296 in Punjab; 78 in K-P; 80 in Gilgit-Baltistan; 15 in Islamabad; and one in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, The Express Tribune reported.

The National Disaster Management Authority has said that so far 7 people have died due to the novel coronavirus and 18 recovered.

In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, the country has halted its domestic flights operations.

According to a statement shared on the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority's website, the government has "decided to suspend all types of domestic scheduled/non-scheduled, chartered and private aircraft passenger flight operations with effect from Thursday, March 26, at 6:00am up to April 02, 2020."

Foreigner treated with HIV drugs for coronavirus tests negative in Kerala

Meanwhile, there is complete lockdown in the country and people have been told to remain inside of their homes. They are only allowed to go out in case of emergency.

The government has pledged to increase testing capability and other facilities in hospitals as new medical supplies are expected to start pouring in from China by Friday, according to NDMA chief Lt-Gen Muhammad Afzal.

According to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker, there are 417,966 confirmed cases across the world, 18,615 deaths and 107,705 recoveries.

On Tuesday, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan announced a multi-billion stimulus package to combat the deadly coronavirus and to facilitate poor people in the prevailing circumstances.

The government also suspended all passenger train operations through the country till March 31 and deployed army to assist the civil administration to enforce a nationwide lockdown to contain the virus outbreak.

China neither created nor intentionally transmitted coronavirus: Beijing spokesperson

Khan said 200 billion rupees have been allocated for the labour class to mitigate their sufferings, while the government is also reaching provinces and the business community to extend their assistance.

He said the government was highly conscious of its responsibilities and it was due to various policies and steps that the coronavirus was still contained.

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Story first published: Thursday, March 26, 2020, 8:07 [IST]
For more coverage, visit our complete coronavirus section here.

In these days of coronavirus, etiquette takes on a greater importance. This isnt a matter of where to place knives and forks, or even of someone obnoxiously wearing his backpack on a crowded BART train; the new etiquette is part of a more dire social reality.

Or, as Bay Area etiquette expert Lisa Grotts bluntly put it: Six feet apart is better than six feet under.

We reached out to Grotts, a former director of protocol for the City of San Francisco, for her take on the quickly evolving etiquette for interaction as we coexist in the world of COVID-19.

And evolving it is. Only three weeks ago, I walked into a business for a first meeting and the person immediately thrust out his hand for a hearty damn glad to meet you handshake. It was jarring, but I did shake his hand.

A week after that, I met a man about buying a car and when he came within 10 feet of me he said, Hello, Im Deepak and Im not going to shake your hand. And that too was strange  no one had ever told me they WEREN'T going to shake my hand  but it was at least reassuring.

Today, neither bit of awkwardness would even be there since the handshake is no longer an option in our current world.

Who would have thought three short weeks ago a handshake would spell danger? said Grotts. Its the most accepted form of communication in the world, but now its on hold for an indefinite period of time.

This global pandemic is breathing new life into old rules," she added. "Without much warning, we now live in a world that continues to evolve at lightning speed.



Within a few weeks we have gotten rid of some behaviors and come to accept others that were unheard of. Now, we not only wait in line patiently outside the grocery store, we wait six feet apart. And its totally normal.

But this too didnt happen overnight. Some stores adopted distancing rules quickly, but many took a while to follow suit. The Whole Foods near my Albany home was slow to adapt, but now it carefully monitors its crowds. Only last week, my local produce market let everyone just walk into their very crowded store. Social distancing was closer to six inches than six feet.

But recently, I went there and found an orderly line outside with everyone six feet apart and a line monitor handing us a sanitized cart when it came our turn to enter. The socially distant outside line has gone mainstream.

While Grotts says, "spatial distancing is now as common as brushing your teeth," that is definitely not as true inside stores. Here, shoppers must navigate narrow aisles  you cant social distance by walking out into the street when youre inside Safeway  and compete for sometimes scarce products.

If there is only one pack of toilet paper left, it can become an instant free-for-all. And if youre getting some produce, most people might wait at a respectful distance, but some will still thrust their arm right over your shoulder. Whether we evolve so we're as respectful inside stores as we are outside of them remains to be seen.

But inside a store, fears of COVID-19 are not only from fellow shoppers getting too close: germy surfaces like the credit card reader at the checkout are being constantly used and I've never seen one get a wipedown.

The next step in our etiquette evolution may be to always wear your gloves to the supermarket  and not the kind favored by Emily Post.

If there was ever a time when our social behavior mattered, it is now. As Grotts points out, We are living in unique and extraordinary times. The unknown and the uncertainty create fear. We must change our thought process from me to we. We are at war with a virus, and what we do right now as individuals will have an impact on our country as a whole in the coming weeks and months.

Here is where the social pressure, a key enforcer of etiquette, comes in. The proper behavior during these times is to isolate. It may seem an odd way to follow the etiquette of the moment but otherwise you may find yourself quarantine shamed.

"While it may be unpleasant, Grotts said, we really don't have much choice in the matter.

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

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The last thing we want is our states and cities and counties pitting our residents against each other, said Matthew Chase, executive director of the National Association of Counties. This is a time when the country needs to come together, and not start pointing fingers at each other.  Its a very mobilized society, people move around every day, and we like to remind everyone  this is a national and a global issue, and we want a coordinated federal, state and local response. 
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 23:15:23|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The world is now in a battle against COVID-19, a disease caused by a previously unknown coronavirus that has spread to over 190 countries and regions.

The following are the updates on the contagious illness.

DHAKA -- Five more people tested positive for the COVID-19 in Bangladesh on Thursday, bringing the total confirmed cases to 44 in the country, an official said.

Five deaths have so far been recorded while 11 patients have recovered, Meerjady Sabrina Flora, head of the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research under the Health Ministry, said at an online news conference.

- - - -

NAIROBI -- Kenya's Ministry of Health on Thursday confirmed three more cases that tested positive to COVID-19, bringing the number of confirmed cases so far to 31.

Mercy Mwangangi, chief administrative secretary for health, said that the three cases are all female with two from Kilifi county in the coastal region and one from Nairobi.

- - - -

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN -- Brunei reported five new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, bringing the country's total to 114 cases.

According to Brunei's Ministry of Health, three more cases have recovered, bringing the total recovered cases to five. One patient is still in critical condition, requiring ventilator support, while three patients are under intensive care. The rest are in good health.

- - - -

BUCHAREST -- The Romanian authorities announced Thursday that the confirmed COVID-19 cases increased by 123 in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number to 1,029.

It took exactly one month for the country to see its COVID-19 cases surpassing 1,000 since the first case was confirmed on Feb. 26.

So far, 94 people have recovered, while 17 people have succumbed to the disease, the Strategic Communication Group, the government agency authorized to publish information on COVID-19, informed in its daily announcement.

- - - -

JERUSALEM -- Israel reported three new death cases from the novel coronavirus, bringing the death toll to 8, while total cases reached 2,666, the state's Ministry of Health said on Thursday.

The three new death cases are all elderly people aged from 83 to 91 years old.

- - - -

ADDIS ABABA -- The Eritrean government has confirmed three more cases of COVID-19, increasing the total confirmed cases to four as of Thursday.

"Three passengers who arrived in Asmara from Dubai with flight Air Arabia on March 23, were diagnosed positive for COVID-19 on late Wednesday," the Eritrean Minister of Information Yemane Gebremeskel said in a statement issued.

- - - -

SINGAPORE -- Singapore's Ministry of Health said it had confirmed 52 new COVID-19 cases as of 12:00 p.m. Thursday, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the city state to 683.

Among the 52 new confirmed cases, 28 were imported cases and 24 were local cases.
Against that backdrop, some American officials want to move quickly against Chinese intelligence operatives. American counterintelligence officials have more closely scrutinized the work of Chinese diplomats, journalists, scientists and others in the United States, though some critics have denounced this as a new red scare. In September, the United States secretly expelled two employees of the Chinese Embassy in Washington who had been caught driving on a sensitive military base in Virginia with their wives; it appeared to be the first expulsion of Chinese diplomats accused of espionage in more than 30 years.

Any expulsion of Chinese employees at media outlets accused of conducting intelligence work could include ones based at the United Nations, where China has a permanent seat on the Security Council, according to an intelligence official familiar with the plans. Most Chinese employees of state-run organizations work in Washington for large organizations.

Some Chinese intelligence operatives pose as journalists at those agencies and at smaller state-run outlets, using nonofficial cover, in the parlance of spies, experts on Chinese espionage say. Some American officials have spoken of entirely shutting down those small outfits as well as any Chinese organization or company accused of being a front for intelligence work.

American officials declined to estimate the number of Chinese intelligence operatives in the United States they say use journalism employment as a cover or the number they would like to expel.

The F.B.I. referred questions to the State Department, which said it does not comment on intelligence matters. The Chinese Embassy did not reply to a request for comment.

American intelligence officials have long asserted that many Chinese journalists abroad play a hybrid role in which they not only provide reports for publications and broadcasters in China, but also give information to Beijings intelligence apparatus.

The action now under consideration would try to avoid evicting most of those who play a hybrid role and focus more on people the U.S. government believes are mainly spies, according to intelligence officials. The journalistic reports filed by those Chinese citizens are simply a screen for covertly collecting intelligence, the officials said.
Hamnet by Maggie OFarrell (Tinder Press 20, 384 pp)

Hamnet

by Maggie OFarrell

(Tinder Press 20, 384 pp)

This is Maggie OFarrells first foray into historical fiction, and, as with her contemporary work, its the ebb and flow of emotions that carry this heartbreaking, beautifully written story along on its melancholy current.

On a hazy summers day in Stratford, 1596, Hamnet, the young, day-dreamy son of William Shakespeare, is searching his empty household for help for his ailing twin, Judith. She survives, but Hamnet (whose name is interchangeable with Hamlet) dies from the plague, and his family falls apart.

Shakespeare appears in the grief-stricken narrative, all tinder and flint, sending out sparks to ignite and kindle, but his wife Agnes is the beating heart of the novel.

Gifted with second sight, adept at herbal cures, she is her familys anchor. Hamnets death unmoors her from all she knows and loves: She, who can hear the dead, the unspoken, the unknown . . . she cannot find, cannot locate the spirit of her own child.

Devastatingly good.

On a hazy summers day in Stratford, 1596, Hamnet, the young, day-dreamy son of William Shakespeare, is searching his empty household for help for his ailing twin, Judith

William Shakespeare (pictured) appears in the grief-stricken narrative, all tinder and flint, sending out sparks to ignite and kindle

CONJURE WOMEN

by Afia Atakora

(4th Estate 14.99, 416 pp)

CONJURE WOMEN by Afia Atakora (4th Estate 14.99, 416 pp)

Set on a ruined plantation in the rural South, this lush, engrossing, haunting debut is the coming-of-age story of former slave Rue, whose world is upended in the chaotic aftermath of the American Civil War.

Rue is struggling with the legacy of her mothers power  May Belle was a skilled midwife with arcane knowledge of cures and curses, a voodoo gift that set her apart.

Rue is reluctantly following her mothers path, while keeping a secret which is vital to the protection of the emancipated, sequestered community, and involves Varnia, the daughter of the plantation owner. The ill-omened birth of strange baby Bean, a tide of sickness that fells the other children, and the arrival of a charismatic, wandering preacher, makes Rue dangerously vulnerable in the battle between old ways of living and new ways of believing as her communitys attitude to Rue slowly tilts from reluctant admiration to suspicions of witchery.

THE COLOURS by Juliet Bates (Fleet 16.99, 384 pp)

THE COLOURS

by Juliet Bates

(Fleet 16.99, 384 pp)

Juliet Bates studied art and art history and there is a delightful observational delicacy to her prose, a careful cataloguing of the ever-changing shades of the waves and the vivid red of the clarty sand of Teesby, where the novel is set. Its a quality that perfectly befits the two main characters  Ellen, who sees the worlds colours in a strange and unusual way, and her son Jack, who becomes a painter and an art teacher.

Theirs is a story of illness, estrangement and misunderstanding. Sectioned after a traumatic event at the beach, in 1931, Ellen spends most of her life in a mental hospital, while, during WWII, lost boy Jack tries to create perfect scale models of bits of the world so that the real thing could be flattened at the same time as warring with memories of his mother, and her hopes of a reconciliation.
Photo: The Canadian Press

Nicolas Maduro effectively converted Venezuela into a criminal enterprise at the service of drug traffickers and terrorist groups as he and his allies stole billions from the South American country, the Justice Department charged in several indictments against the embattled socialist and his inner circle that were made public Thursday.

The co-ordinated actions attacked all the key planks of what it called the corrupt Venezuelan regime, including the Maduro-dominated judiciary and the armed forces, which holds major influence over decision-making.

One indictment by prosecutors in New York accused Maduro and socialist party boss Diosdado Cabello, head of the rubber-stamping constitutional assembly, of conspiring with Colombian rebels and members of the military to flood the United States with cocaine and use the drug trade as a weapon against America. Criminal acts to advance a drug and weapons conspiracy that prosecutors contend dates back to the start of Hugo Chavez's revolution in 1999 occurred as far afield as Syria, Mexico, Honduras and Iran, the indictment alleged.

Maduro blasted back by accusing the U.S. and Colombia of giving orders to flood Venezuela with violence.

As head of state, I am obligated to defend peace and the stability of our homeland given any circumstance that arises, he tweeted.

As the indictments were announced, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the State Department would offer cash rewards of up to $55 million for information leading to the arrests or convictions of Maduro and his associates. It offered rewards up to $15 million for Maduro and up to $10 million each for the others.

The Maduro regime is awash in corruption and criminality, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said in an online news conference from Washington. While the Venezuelan people suffer, this cabal lines their pockets with drug money, and the proceeds of their corruption. And this has to come to an end.

In Miami, prosecutors charged Supreme Court Chief Justice Maikel Moreno with laundering in the U.S. at least $3 million in illegal proceeds from case fixing in Venezuela, including one involving a General Motors factory. Much of the money he spent on private aircraft, luxury watches and shopping at Prada, prosecutors allege. Maduro's Defence Minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino, was charged with conspiracy to smuggle narcotics in a May 2019 indictment unsealed in Washington.

The shock indictment of a functioning head of state is highly unusual and is bound to ratchet up tensions between Washington and Caracas as the spread of the coronavirus threatens to collapse Venezuela's health system and oil-dependent economy driven deep into the ground by years of corruption and U.S. sanctions. Maduro has ordered Venezuelans to stay home to try to stave off the spread of the virus that officials say has infected 106 people.
URUMQI, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region plans to invest 7.5 billion yuan (about 1.05 billion U.S. dollars) to upgrade the power network in its rural areas this year, in a bid to enhance poverty alleviation in the region, local authorities said Wednesday.

During the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020), a total of 22.6 billion yuan has been invested to improve rural power facilities in the region, said the Xinjiang branch of the State Grid Corporation of China.

Thanks to a stable power supply, drying rooms and cold storages have been built in Aketao County, helping local farmers to produce better quality apricots.

"My family earned 8,000 yuan selling fresh apricots and 12,000 yuan selling dried apricots last year," said Tinshur Alsiddin, a 70-year-old farmer who was listed as living below the poverty line in the county. But he will likely lift himself out of poverty this year by selling better quality apricot products.

Besides, the regional government will invest more than 330 million yuan to build a total of 367 4G base stations for 334 poor villages this year. It will also provide clean and safe drinking water for 15,300 impoverished residents to ensure the supply of safe drinking water to all impoverished people in the region.
U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse and three fellow Senate Republicans are demanding changes to a $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill before allowing a vote on Wednesday.

Sasse, along with Sens. Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Rick Scott of Florida, say that they object to a proposed increase in unemployment benefits and that they won't allow the stimulus bill to be fast-tracked without changes.

At issue, Sasse and the others said in a joint statement, is the addition of $600 a week in federal money to state unemployment benefits, regardless of the person's previous earnings.

Their concern, Sasse told The World-Herald, is that some people could make more money on unemployment than by working at a grocery store, gas station or pharmacy, even home health aides. So, in theory, a worker might choose unemployment over a job.

That, they argued, risks leaving critical sectors of the economy with too few workers and could force employers to pay more to fill jobs during a crisis that's already hurting many businesses' bottom lines.

They hope to cap unemployment benefits at 100% of whatever a person made when last working. Graham and Sasse said you can't pay people more not to work than to work.
PHOENIX  Gov. Doug Ducey announced a new series of orders, directives and requests Wednesday designed to deal with the coronavarius health emergency.

The governor said he is asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture to allow more flexibility in its food stamp program.

In general, what's known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program restricts what people can purchase, usually to certain foods for preparation at home. Ducey said he wants to allow eligible families to purchase prepared and hot meals that are available at grocery stores.

It would not, however, permit food stamps to be used at restaurants.

Ducey said he wants to allow the state Department of Economic Security, which administers the program, to approve applications without first conducting eligibility interviews. That, according to the governor's office, should result in not just quicker services but also reduce the potential health risk to both the applicant and the state workers.

Citing the scarce work opportunities, Ducey also wants to waive the requirements that students be employed for at least 20 hours a week to keep their food stamp eligibility. And he wants families to be able to get a maximum allotment for up to two months, a move state health officials say could provide an additional $25 to $150 monthly.

KidsCare enrollment

Separately, Ducey said he has gotten permission from the federal government to ensure that none of the nearly 37,000 children enrolled in the KidsCare program lose coverage because a parent is unable to afford monthly premiums.
Rapid City Mayor Steve Allender, City Council President Laura Armstrong and City Council Vice President Chad Lewis sent a letter Wednesday to South Dakota Department of Health Secretary Kim Malsam-Rysdon requesting more specific information on the states preparedness for COVID-19 testing.

In the letter, the Rapid City officials asked 10 questions on the amount of COVID-19 tests available in the state and how the state is processing, distributing and providing accurate results.

Given the recent actions taken by the Rapid City Council to curb transmission of this virus, were certain that you also comprehend the urgency of your response to this inquiry, the letter states. We have a collective responsibility to the residents of this city and state to have open and transparent discussion of these important issues during this time of unprecedented national crisis.

At a Thursday press conference, Gov. Kristi Noem acknowledged she received the letter but did not answer any of the questions during the conference.

The answers to those questions are very simple and easy to get. So, we will respond to that formal letter, Noem said. I do know the mayor (Allender) has my cell phone number, so he can feel free to reach out to me at any point in time. So, that is all information that well be getting to them shortly.

Allender held his daily press conference after Noems. The mayor said the letter from Rapid City officials was sent as a courtesy to the governors time. Allender said he does have Noems cell phone number, but he is trying to respect her duties and scope that she has within the state.

I think the questions, as were being proven time and time again, the questions we had on a Monday may have been answered organically by Wednesday, Allender said. Some of these questions, as I think the email is traveling from Rapid City to Pierre, may have been answered already She acknowledged the letter and they will answer the remaining questions. We appreciate the cooperation with the state.

Allender reminded citizens to disregard any rumors about the virus that are coming from unreliable sources on the internet and social media. He also said Rapid Citians need to continue to practice social distancing and avoid groups of more than 10 people.

This is the beginning. We may not have fully begun yet, Allender said. There will be plenty of time for finger-pointing when this is over. For right now, lets disregard rumors.

The public health emergency is having a large impact on Rapid Citys economy, Allender said, but the full impact will not be felt for several months. The mayor said approximately 20 part-time employees with the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center have been laid off and many seasonal city employees in the Parks and Recreation Department will not be hired because of the pandemic.

We will need a minimum of a couple of different sales tax submissions from the state, which will take place over the next six weeks, Allender said. The tougher city budget questions will be made at a later time, perhaps at the tail end of spring, where we will have a better picture about what we can expect for losses. Theres no doubt that city revenue is down millions of dollars right now just in user fees and sales taxes.

The mayor also reminded the public there will be the second public reading at 6 p.m. Friday of a city ordinance that would close some businesses temporarily in the restaurant and entertainment industries to try and limit public gatherings. Allender said the City Council will also take up an amendment to the ordinance to allow future changes to be made by resolution.

The Council Chamber audience will be strictly limited that we will have chairs placed six feet away from other chairs in all directions. We may put tape on the floor, Allender said. If you dont need to be at this meeting (Friday night), dont. Email in your public comment and it will be read. Otherwise, if you must come to City Hall, understand there are very few of you who will be allowed to sit in these chambers. There will be overflow down in the lobby, and we may call a name over the intercom to come up and present to the Council.

Public comment on the proposed resolution can be submitted via email to pauline.sumption@rcgov.org.

Contact Assistant Managing Editor Nathan Thompson at nathan.thompson@rapidcityjournal.com.

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With the number of positive COVID-19 cases rising in tribal communities, Indian Country will finally see billions of dollars in relief from a major coronavirus package almost over the finish line on Capitol Hill.

The U.S. Senate late Wednesday voted 96-0 to pass H.R.748 , a bipartisan bill that brings $8 billion directly to tribal governments, plus $2 billion for federal programs that serve tribal nations. The U.S. House of Representatives must now take action before the measure can be signed into law by President Donald Trump.

"These are key victories but we're not done," Sen. Tom Udall (D-New Mexico), the vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs , said in a floor speech in the afternoon. "We must uphold our trust and treaty responsibilities to all American Indians and Alaska Natives."

"So Congress must do more to respond to the unique COVID-19-related public health and economic crises in Indian Country"

We must ensure Indian Country has equal access to federal coronavirus resources," Udall said at the conclusion of his speech.

Udall pointed out that the Navajo Nation , home of the largest reservation in the United States, has been hit hard by the coronavirus. The tribe has seen an exponential growth in positive COVID-19 cases in just the past several days, with a huge spike confirmed in counties in New Mexico and in Arizona as the bill was being debated thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C.

What this means for the Navajo people is this: We must continue to work together, as a Nation, to fight back the spread of COVID-19," Seth Damon, Speaker of the Navajo Nation Council , said late Wednesday night after the measure was approved in the Senate. " We must support each other and provide the encouragement to our children, our relatives and our elders to stay healthy."

With 69 confirmed cases so safe, Navajo Nation isn't the only area being hit. Slowly but surely, more tribes and more Indian Health Service facilities are reporting positive COVID-19 results in their communities, where daily life has ground to a halt as services and programs are being curtailed and more people are being told -- and even ordered -- to stay at home.

"This is the most important time -- the calm, perhaps before the storm," Governor Stephen Roe Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community , where two cases have been confirmed on the reservation in Arizona, said in a video message on Wednesday night.

"I want to remind all of us that the best way to treat a patient with COVID-19 is to prevent them from having it in the first place," said Dr. Anthony Santiago, the chief medical officer at the Gila River Health Care , emphasizing social distancing, hand washing and limited trips as key to preventing the spread of the disease, for which there is no known cure.

MARCH 25 COVID-19 UPDATE: GOV. STEPHEN ROE LEWIS AND DR. SANTIAGO Posted by Gila River Indian Community on Wednesday, March 25, 2020

According to IHS data as of the evening of March 24, more than 1,800 people have been tested for the coronavirus. Most of the results have returned negative, though more than 900 tests are still being processed.

The numbers, however, are incomplete, as facilities run by tribes through self-determination contracts or self-governance compacts are not required to report coronavirus testing data to the IHS. Neither are urban Indian health care providers.

"This is a rapidly evolving situation and the IHS will provide updated information as it becomes available and is verified," the agency cautions on its website

With the expected enactment of the coronavirus relief package, tribes and federal agencies that serve their communities stand to benefit. Of $150 billion relief fund for local governments, Indian nations will receive $8 billion to address the economic, health, social and other impacts of the pandemic.

Our tribes are already feeling significant strain," said Sen. Martha McSally (R-Arizona), a member of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs who helped push for the set-aside . "This legislation provides immediate cash relief and strong assistance to tribal communities impacted by this so workers and families can pay their bills.

Additionally, about $2 billion will flow to federal agencies, with the IHS set to receive $1.032 billion. A "significant" portion, according to Sen. Udall, will be directed to tribes for their self-determination contracts and self-governance compacts, as well as to urban Indian providers.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is set to receive $453 million to help tribes with public safety needs and to help them purchase protective equipment for their communities. This will come in the form of tribal priority allocations, known as TPA within the agency.

Indian Health Service #Coronavirus data:



Tests: 1804

Postive: 68

Negative: 800

Pending: 936



"Data is reported from IHS, tribal, and urban Indian organization facilities, though reporting by tribal and urban programs is voluntary."



NOTE>>Data as of 7pm Eastern March 23, 2020  indianz.com (@indianz) March 26, 2020

Another $327 million would go to the Bureau of Indian Education . The agency, which is now funded separately from the BIA by Congress, has been forced to close 183 schools across the nation as a result of the coronavirus. Tribal colleges and universities will be able to benefit from the influx, according to lawmakers.

The package also includes $305 million for Indian housing programs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development . There's also $100 million for the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations at the Department of Agriculture

"By working together to pass this important piece of legislation, we are providing critical assistance to millions of American Indians and Alaska Natives across the country," said Sen. John Hoeven (R-North Dakota), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affair. "Now, Indian tribes will be better able to help their communities small businesses, schools, hospitals and clinics weather the challenges of COVID-19."

STAY HOME, STAY SAFE, SAVE LIVES 03.25.20 This graph shows the increase in COVID-19 cases since the first case was... Posted by Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer on Wednesday, March 25, 2020

The Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians is among those seeing major upheaval. The tribe, which is the largest east of the Mississippi River, has been forced to curtail critical operations and shut down crucial economic development enterprises, including hotels and casinos, in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus on its homelands in Michigan.

"We are all at risk so I am grateful that the U.S. Senate enacted the $2 trillion relief package," Dr. Aaron Payment, the tribe's chairperson, told Indianz.Com on Wednesday night.

But Payment, who also serves as vice president of the National Congress of American Indians , noted that $8 billion isn't nearly enough to address the needs in communities that have long been under-served. Rep. Deb Haaland (D-New Mexico), who is one of the first two Native women in Congress , had called for a $20 billion relief fund.

"While not great, we were not left out," said Payment.

"I applaud NCAI and the National Indian Health Board for their advocacy and our friends in Congress who understand and respect that we pre-paid for the federal treaty and trust responsibility," Payment added.

We must ensure Indian Country has equal access to federal #Coronavirus resources": Listen to Sen. Tom Udall (D-New Mexico), vice chairman of Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, discuss tribes and #COVID19 relief efforts in Senate speech. @SenatorTomUdall https://t.co/O4TYSOUx5d  indianz.com (@indianz) March 25, 2020

The coronavirus bill is expected to pass the House on Friday. During a tribal leader town hall co-hosted by NCAI, NIHB, the Native American Finance Officers Association and other Indian organizations, Sen. McSally urged the other chamber to take quick action.

"This a big deal and I'm glad we were able to deliver on that," McSally told tribal leaders. She said she "went to the mat" to ensure Indian Country was included in the final package.

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Even with perfect administrative acumen, there may not be enough devices. A major manufacturer, Medtronic, is going all-out to quintuple production, with a weekly goal of 500 acute units made at its plant in Ireland in the coming weeks. Most of that, though not all, will probably go to the United States. Other major producers are also ramping up. Thats good for states bracing for the worst. It is also probably inadequate to satisfy aggregate demand in a timely way.
Floyd Cardoz, the winner of the third season of "Top Chef Masters," has died on Wednesday from complications due to the novel coronavirus.

The 59-year-old is the first high-profile chef to die from the virus, which has become a global pandemic.

The Indian-born celebrity chef's family confirmed his death in a statement: "It is with deep sorrow that we inform you of the passing away of Chef Floyd Cardoz, Co-Founder, Hunger Inc. Hospitality. Floyd tested positive for Covid 19 in the USA, on March 18th and was being treated for the same at Mountainside Medical Center, New Jersey, USA."

Just a week ago, Floyd Cardoz even posted an Instagram photo from his hospital bed.

In the caption, he said that he had flown from Mumbai -- where he ran the acclaimed restaurants Bombay Canteen and O Pedro -- to New York via Frankfurt on March 8.

"I was feeling feverish and hence, as a precautionary measure, admitted myself into hospital in New York," Cardoz wrote. He added that he was anxious about the state of his health that he had to get himself checked out to a hospital.

Following his Instagram post, Cardoz's restaurant group confirmed that he had tested positive for the coronavirus on March 18.

"As a precautionary measure, we have informed the Health Department in Mumbai. We are also reaching out personally to people who have interacted with him during his visit to India so that they can take necessary medical advice should they indicate any symptoms."

Cardoz was in Mumbai with comedian Aziz Ansari where they filmed the second season of "Ugly Delicious." In an Instagram post he published last month, he said that he was happy to tell the story of their passion for Indian food.

37-year-old Ansari, who is best known for his roles in "Parks and Recreation" and "Master of None" has not yet publicly complained of any symptoms of the coronavirus.

Life Of Cardoz

The multiple James Beard Award nominee was born in Bombay, India, and went to culinary school in Mumbai before studying at the Global Hospitality Management School at Les Roches in Switzerland.

In 1988, he moved to New York and several years later, he started working at the four-star kitchen Lespinasse, where he became an expert with dishes from the French, Swiss, and American cuisines.

Years later, he went on to open Tabla and was immediately welcomed by critics and diners.

The NY Times wrote about Cardoz's cooking that "helped end an era in which the fine-dining wing of the restaurant business operated as a club to which cuisines of non-European descent need not apply."

Cardoz offered restaurant-goers not just Indian food during his lifetime, but also European cuisine. He opened North End Grill and later, White Street, before focusing solely on Indian food during the middle of the last decade.

In 2015, he opened The Bombay Canteen in Mumbai, which received blockbuster success since it has begun, and also O Pedro, which is also in Mumbai. He recently launched his third venture, the Bombay Sweet Shop.

Floyd Cardoz is survived by his wife Barkha, his mother Beryl and sons Justin and Peter.
Private investment in Destination Medical Center edged up in 2019, topping the previous years years total by approximately $10.3 million.

The DMC Economic Development Agency identified approximately $272.1 million in new private investment last year, according to a report presented to the DMC Corp. executive committee Thursday morning.

"We had a really, really good year," DMC Corp. Board Chairman R.T. Rybak said of private investment in the district, which is the highest reported total since state legislation created DMC in 2013.

The DMCC executive committee approved the annual report which is due to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development by April 1.

Mayo Clinic contributed $139.1 million in the investment, up from the $126.5 million it reported last year. Key projects highlighted Thursday were $48.1 million in Saint Marys Hospital modernization and growth, as well as $17.8 million to upgrades in the Mary Brigh Buildings east tower and operating rooms.

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Private developers and others contributed another $133 million in work throughout the year, down slightly from $135.3 million in 2018. Projects ranged from retail upgrades to millions spent to create market-rate apartment buildings.

While Mayo Clinic investments can include projects anywhere in the city, private investment is confined to the DMC district, which covers the downtown core and stretches west along Second Street to just beyond the Saint Marys Hospital campus.

City and DMC Economic Development Agency officials said it's unclear how the COVID-19 pandemic will impact investment this year.

Last seemed to be a solid year, and 2020 seemed to be headed in the same direction pre-COVID, said Rochester Assistant City Administrator Terry Spaeth.

Patrick Seeb, the DMC EDA director of economic development and placemaking, said he's spoken to developers who have expressed concerns, but say they are not planning to slow efforts at this point.

Construction trades are considered essential jobs and have leniency under the stay-at-home order being implemented by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

INCREASE STATE FUNDING

If the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development verifies the $272.1 million in private investment reported for 2019, the state will add approximately $7.5 million to its annual release of funds for public infrastructure projects.

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Approval would bring this years state DMC contribution to nearly $21 million, up from approximately $13.5 million last year.

Its all part of the unique finance model created by the 2013 DMC legislation, which aims to support the citys public infrastructure needs as private market activity grows.

The legislation allocates $585 million in public funds for the 20-year DMC effort. Up to $411 million will come from the state, with the city providing $128 million and Olmsted County earmarking $46 million to help fund transit-related projects.

So far, the city has provided nearly $57.3 million, according to a DMC report sent to the Legislature earlier this year. The county has provided $10.5 million.

The state has released nearly $22.5 million in infrastructure aid since the DMC effort began, with the first payment made in 2017.

Annual private investments throughout the two decades are expected to top $5.6 billion, with Mayo Clinic planning to spend $3.5 billion.
Leaders of the G20 major economies are holding an online summit on March 26, in a bid to fend off a coronavirus-triggered recession, after criticism the group has been slow to address the crisis. AFP-Yonhap



The following is a full text of a joint statement adopted at the G-20 2020 Extraordinary Virtual Leaders Summit. It was provided by Cheong Wa Dae.



The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful reminder of our interconnectedness and vulnerabilities. The virus respects no borders. Combatting this pandemic calls for a transparent, robust, coordinated, large-scale and science-based global response in the spirit of solidarity. We are strongly committed to presenting a united front against this common threat.



We are deeply saddened by the tragic loss of life and the suffering faced by people around the world. Tackling the pandemic and its intertwined health, social and economic impacts is our absolute priority. We express our gratitude and support to all frontline health workers as we continue to fight the pandemic.



The G20 is committed to do whatever it takes to overcome the pandemic, along with the World Health Organization (WHO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank Group (WBG), United Nations (UN), and other international organizations, working within their existing mandates. We are determined to spare no effort, both individually and collectively, to:



Protect lives.

# Safeguard people's jobs and incomes.

# Restore confidence, preserve financial stability, revive growth and recover stronger.

# Minimize disruptions to trade and global supply chains.

# Provide help to all countries in need of assistance.

# Coordinate on public health and financial measures.



Fighting the pandemic



We commit to take all necessary health measures and seek to ensure adequate financing to contain the pandemic and protect people, especially the most vulnerable. We will share timely and transparent information; exchange epidemiological and clinical data; share materials necessary for research and development; and strengthen health systems globally, including through supporting the full implementation of the WHO International Health Regulations (IHR 2005).



We will expand manufacturing capacity to meet the increasing needs for medical supplies and ensure these are made widely available, at an affordable price, on an equitable basis, where they are most needed and as quickly as possible. We stress the importance of responsible communication to the public during this global health crisis. We task our Health Ministers to meet as needed to share national best practices and develop a set of G20 urgent actions on jointly combatting the pandemic by their ministerial meeting in April.



We fully support and commit to further strengthen the WHO's mandate in coordinating the international fight against the pandemic, including the protection of front-line health workers, delivery of medical supplies, especially diagnostic tools, treatments, medicines, and vaccines. We acknowledge the necessity of urgent short-term actions to step up the global efforts to fight the COVID-19 crisis. We will quickly work together and with stakeholders to close the financing gap in the WHO Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan. We further commit to provide immediate resources to the WHO's COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation (CEPI) and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, on a voluntary basis. We call upon all countries, international organizations, the private sector, philanthropies, and individuals to contribute to these efforts.



To safeguard the future, we commit to strengthen national, regional, and global capacities to respond to potential infectious disease outbreaks by substantially increasing our epidemic preparedness spending. This will enhance the protection of everyone, especially vulnerable groups that are disproportionately affected by infectious diseases. We further commit to work together to increase research and development funding for vaccines and medicines, leverage digital technologies, and strengthen scientific international cooperation. We will bolster our coordination, including with the private sector, towards rapid development, manufacturing and distribution of diagnostics, antiviral medicines, and vaccines, adhering to the objectives of efficacy, safety, equity, accessibility, and affordability.



We ask the WHO, in cooperation with relevant organizations, to assess gaps in pandemic preparedness and report to a joint meeting of Finance and Health Ministers in the coming months, with a view to establish a global initiative on pandemic preparedness and response. This initiative will capitalize on existing programs to align priorities in global preparedness and act as a universal, efficient, sustained funding and coordination platform to accelerate the development and delivery of vaccines, diagnostics and treatments.



Safeguarding the global economy



We commit to do whatever it takes and to use all available policy tools to minimize the economic and social damage from the pandemic, restore global growth, maintain market stability, and strengthen resilience.

We are currently undertaking immediate and vigorous measures to support our economies; protect workers, businesses?especially micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises?and the sectors most affected; and shield the vulnerable through adequate social protection. We are injecting over $4.8 trillion into the global economy, as part of targeted fiscal policy, economic measures, and guarantee schemes to counteract the social, economic and financial impacts of the pandemic.



We will continue to conduct bold and large-scale fiscal support. Collective G20 action will amplify its impact, ensure coherence, and harness synergies. The magnitude and scope of this response will get the global economy back on its feet and set a strong basis for the protection of jobs and the recovery of growth. We ask our Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors to coordinate on a regular basis to develop a G20 action plan in response to COVID-19 and work closely with international organizations to swiftly deliver the appropriate international financial assistance.






Braving the outdoors: Pauline Goodwin, wearing a face mask, and her dog Pixie Buttons pause for a moment in the sunshine at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin. Photo: Steve Humphreys

Some 40,000 patients who were suspected of having the coronavirus by their GP in the past week have been plunged into confusion after learning they will no longer be eligible for a test.

However, they must still behave as if they have the virus and self-isolate at home for 14 days - and other members of their household will have to restrict their movements. GPs were only informed yesterday morning that the health service was abandoning the previous "test, test, test" strategy.

The dramatic tightening of the rules around testing will mean from now, GPs will only refer a patient for a swab test if they have a fever and also a respiratory symptom, such as a cough or shortness of breath. They will also have to fall into specific groups, including those with underlying illnesses and health workers.

The new approach by health bosses, which follows on from WHO advice adapted to the Irish situation, comes as two more people died from the virus yesterday - a man with no known underlying illness, and a woman. Both were from the east of the country.

Another 235 people tested positive yesterday, bringing the number of cases here so far to 1,564.

Some 49pc of cases are thought to be community transmitted.

Around 40,000 were in a backlog to be screened for the infection but it is believed most of these have been dropped from testing centres.

It has emerged that people who were referred by their GP on or before Tuesday to provide a swab test for the coronavirus will not be tested if their appointment falls tomorrow.

Previously they were told to turn up at the testing centre tomorrow although testing criteria has been tightened and only applies to certain priority groups.

They should self isolate for fourteen days and household members restrict their movements.

There are now 39 patients with the virus in intensive care - up from 17 last week.

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Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan yesterday defended the decision to narrow the criteria for testing and focus on priority groups.

He said the system could not cope with the 20,000 people seeking tests daily and just 6pc of them were testing positive with many turning out to have the winter flu instead.

"Our data showed yesterday that only 6pc of our tests so far returned positive; so for every 100 people we test we are only finding six people with Covid-19. In light of this, our case definition changed.

"Changing case definition is a standard practice in managing pandemics.

"Ultimately, we want our 6pc detected rate to increase, we want to find as many people as possible with Covid-19, isolate them and contain the spread."

Dublin GP Dr Maitiu O Tuathail said family doctors are telling patients they referred for a test who had not received an appointment to provide a swab that they will not now be tested.

"They need to self-isolate at home away from other family members for 14 days," he said.

Household contacts of those with symptoms must now also follow restricted movements for 14 days.

Patients who have received an appointment for a swab test can proceed and they will receive a test.

He said it is a stark turnaround from the previous appeal to people who had potential symptoms of the virus to contact their GP.

He welcomed that priority groups will be tested and will receive a test result earlier. However he said it will mean that there is less of a picture of the extent of the infection in the community.

Expand Close Resolute: Dr Tony Holohan defended the decision over testing. Photo: Gareth Chaney, Collins / Facebook

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Whatsapp Resolute: Dr Tony Holohan defended the decision over testing. Photo: Gareth Chaney, Collins

Patients who have not received an appointment, but may qualify for a test under the new criteria, must contact their GP again to be assessed and if they are eligible they will be sent forward.

The HSE has set up over 40 testing centres across the country but patients have endured delays of 10 days as stocks of some kits ran low.

Dr Holohan said he still hoped it will be possible to carry out 15,000 tests a day by the end of next month.

The Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) said yesterday that all patients referred for testing prior to and including last Tuesday who have not been tested or do not have an appointment will not now receive one.

"Patients who have been given an appointment for testing should attend for same. If you have been tested and had a swab taken you will receive the result either by text or phone call from a public health doctor," said a spokeswoman.

"If you have not received an appointment for testing and you feel you meet the new criteria you need to ring your GP to discuss if you need a new referral for testing. GPs acknowledge the new arrangements may cause some confusion with the public and would ask for their patience."

Meanwhile, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the forecast he made that there would be 15,000 cases of the coronavirus here at the end of the month will not materialise. However, he said there are cases of the virus in the community which have not been detected.

St James's Hospital in Dublin had to make an appeal for protective clothing and equipment for staff yesterday and emergency supplies had to be transferred from another hospital.

Health Minister Simon Harris said: "Almost 13 years' worth of personal protective equipment will arrive in Ireland by the end of the week."

The delivery is expected from China on Sunday.

"Usually we spend 15m a year on personal protective equipment - we will spend 225 this year," he told Virgin Media News.
The Dail meets today to pass emergency laws to deal with the impact of the coronavirus.

All stages of the omnibus bill are expected to pass during a 10-hour sitting with reduced attendance.

The vast package of measures being passed today was revealed by the government earlier this week and covers multiple Government departments.

The 3.7bn social welfare package will see payments provided to people who lose work because of the crisis.

New laws temporarily banning evictions and rent increases are also due to be debated alongside justice, defence and health measures.

A reduced number of TDs will meet in order to allow for social distancing in the Dail chamber and the Leinster House complex.

The Dail will also elect a Leas Ceann Comhairle - likely to be Independent TD Denis Naughten.

These may be the last laws the Oireachtas can pass some time.

The Ceann Comhairle has warned it will lose the power to legislate from midnight on Sunday.

The new Seanad will be elected next week - but won't be able to sit until there is a new government, putting extra pressure on the efforts from Fine Gael and Fianna Fail to form one.

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Vegan recipes: Learn to make Panspermia, a multi-grain soupoffered to Hermes Chthonius and the dead in the ancient Greek spring festival of Anthesteria.

For Greeks, the gate to spring has been the Athenian festival of Anthesteria that was held for three days in the month of Anthesterion (February-March). Anthesteria is the ritual rite of the journey from winter to spring, from death to life. During the third day of the festival, the Greeks made panspermia. Panspermia is a multi-grain soup, which was offered to Hermes Chthonius and the dead.

Panspermia, an ancient Greek ritual

Hermes Chthonius is a god associated with the earth and underworld. He is the god who presides over passages between this world and the underworld, and thus he is considered a psychopomp, a deity who helps guide the souls of the deceased to the afterlife. During the third day of Anthesteria known as Chytroi  the name derives from the cooking pots chytrai  the Greeks made panspermia.

Panspermia makes for an atmosphere of mystery and timelessness. Not only has this recipe been passed down from the times of ancient Greece but it is still very popular among the Mediterraneans. The Spring Equinox marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring. This is the perfect time to perform renewal rituals and get ready for a new cycle of growth. Preparing panspermia is a ritual that can help us mark a rebirth as nature reawakens. The grain, a symbol of Mother Earth and the bounty of harvest, is the main ritualistic ingredient in panspermia and relates to nature as we place our trust in this new cycle of growth.

Food is about history, culture, and rituals. Especially in Greece, people still perform this ritual by enjoying this soup with their families, feeding their domestic animals with panspermia and even leaving bowls of panspermia for stray and wild animals.

Ancient Greek Panspermia Ingredients

1 cup of dried chickpeas

1 cup of dried butter beans

1 cup of wheat grains (wheat berries)

1 cup of Le Puy green lentils

1 tablespoon of salt

 teaspoon of ground black pepper

 cup of Greek extra virgin olive oil

1 lemon (freshly juiced)

8 sprigs of fresh oregano

2 diced scallions

How to make Ancient Greek Panspermia

Preparation Time: 12 hours

12 hours Cook Time: 1 hour

In a large bowl, cover the chickpeas with cold water and soak overnight. The next day, drain and rinse well. Follow the same process with the butter beans and wheat grains.

Tip them in a large pan set on medium-high heat and cover with fresh cold water. Bring to the boil, then leave to simmer for 40.

Add the lentils and leave the grains to simmer together for 20, until they are tender.

Season the soup with salt and pepper.

Pour the olive oil and immediately remove from the heat.

When you are ready to serve the panspermia, add a splash of fresh lemon juice to flavour and garnish with fresh oregano and diced scallions.

Spring is a time of renewal; ancient Greeks understood that, so lets energise our bodies with a nourishing dish!
Oslo (Norway), 26 March 2020 - PCI Biotech (OSE: PCIB), a cancer focused biopharmaceutical company, today announces that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has informed the company that a new US patent will be granted early April 2020. The US patent covers the use of fimaVacc in combination with a new important class of vaccine adjuvants called toll like receptor agonists.



Toll like receptor agonists (TLR agonists) is a diverse class of molecules that can be used for enhancing immune responses to several types of vaccines. TLR agonists have similarities to molecules present in various types of infectious agents, like viruses and bacteria, and can act as adjuvants to alert the immune system of a possible infection, thereby activating the immune system. The combination of TLR agonists with PCI Biotech's vaccine technology, fimaVacc, has been shown to be effective for enhancing cellular immune responses that are important for the effect both of therapeutic and prophylactic vaccines. The US patent to be granted in April 2020 gives broad coverage for the combination of TLR agonists with the fimaVacc technology.

TLR agonists represent a new important class of vaccine adjuvants that are being developed with many new vaccine candidates. This US patent is therefore important for PCI Biotech's partnering efforts and it also provides intellectual property of importance for our ability to potentially generate an internal future vaccine pipeline, said Per Walday, CEO of PCI Biotech.

As part of PCI Biotech's strategy for applying the PCI technology for therapeutic cancer vaccines, several global patent applications were filed in 2013 and 2014. Today's announced US patent secure protection until 2035 and this patent application is still pending in Europe and key Asian markets.

About fimaVacc

This novel vaccine technology applies a unique mode of action, triggered endosomal release of antigens, to enhance the cytotoxic effect essential for therapeutic cancer vaccines as well as for several types of vaccines against viral and parasitic infections. fimaVacc works in synergy with several other state-of-the-art vaccination technologies, and is especially effective in combination with some types of TLR agonists. The fimaVacc programme aims to enhance the cellular immune responses that are important for the therapeutic and prophylactic effect of vaccines, and the fimaVacc technology has proven excellent preclinical efficacy with protein- and peptide-based vaccines. The technology has shown particularly strong CD8 T-cell immune responses, which are important for therapeutic vaccination, as well as enhanced helper (CD4) T-cell and antibody responses.

PCI Biotech successfully translated the vaccination technology into humans through a Phase I study in healthy volunteers that was completed in May 2019. The study covered more than 90 subjects and established the tolerability of fimaVacc across a wide range of doses. The immune results provided proof-of-concept and demonstrates fimaVacc's potential to enhance overall T-cell responses, by demonstrating improvement of the immunogenicity of vaccines in healthy volunteers.

Effective induction of cytotoxic T-cells will be critical to realise the huge potential of therapeutic cancer vaccines, and is also important for vaccination against some viral and parasitic infections, but vaccines often fail to generate such responses. Insufficient delivery of vaccine antigens to the appropriate presentation pathway in the immune cells may be one of the main reasons for weak cytotoxic T-cell responses. The fimaVacc technology has the potential to effectively enhance vaccine presentation through these pathways.

Contact information:

Per Walday, CEO

pw@pcibiotech.no

Mobile: +47 917 93 429

About PCI Biotech

PCI Biotech is a biopharmaceutical late stage clinical development company focusing on development and commercialisation of novel therapies for the treatment of cancer through its innovative photochemical internalisation (PCI) technology platform. PCI is applied to three distinct anticancer paradigms: fimaChem (enhancement of chemotherapeutics for localised treatment of cancer), fimaVacc (T-cell induction technology for therapeutic vaccination), and fimaNAc (nucleic acid therapeutics delivery).

Photochemical internalisation induces triggered endosomal release that is used to unlock the true potential of a wide array of therapeutic modalities. The company's lead programme fimaChem consists of a pivotal study in bile duct cancer, an orphan indication with a high unmet need and without approved products. fimaVacc applies a unique mode of action to enhance the essential cytotoxic effect of therapeutic cancer vaccines, which works in synergy with several other state-of-the-art vaccination technologies. fimaNAc utilises the endosomal release to provide intracellular delivery of nucleic acids, such as mRNA and RNAi therapeutics, thereby addressing one of the major bottlenecks facing this emerging and promising field.

For further information, please visit: www.pcibiotech.com



Forward-looking statements

This announcement may contain forward-looking statements, which as such are not historical facts, but are based upon various assumptions, many of which are based, in turn, upon further assumptions. These assumptions are inherently subject to significant known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors. Such risks, uncertainties, contingencies and other important factors could cause actual events to differ materially from the expectations expressed or implied in this announcement by such forward-looking statements. PCI Biotech disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The Missouri Department of Health released a new report Thursday afternoon showing 146 new cases of coronavirus COVID-19 have been reported in the state bringing the total to 502, including eight deaths. St. Louis County is reporting the most cases with 173. The city of St.
He is dapper, beaming with the confidence of youth; he does not have the temperament for sheltering in place. Its springtime, the year is 1624, and the 25-year-old Anthony van Dyck is sailing south, to Sicily, where he has been invited to paint the islands Spanish viceroy.

Van Dyck is establishing his international career as a portraitist to the rich and famous, and he has already had some success in Genoa, London and his hometown, Antwerp. Now, in Palermo, he feels on the cusp of a breakthrough.

He gets the portrait done that spring, but then: disaster. On May 7, 1624, Palermo reports the first cases of a plague that will soon kill more than 10,000, some 10 percent of the citys population. On June 25, the viceroy whom van Dyck painted declares a state of emergency; five weeks later, hes dead. Quarantined in a foreign city, the young Fleming watches in horror as the port closes, the city gates slam shut, the hospital overflows, the afflicted groan in the street.

As the emergency wears on, a gang of Franciscans starts digging up the earth on a hill facing the harbor. In a cave they unearth a pile of bones, which, the archbishops commission determines, belongs to Saint Rosalia, a noblewoman of centuries past. Rosalias relics are paraded through the city as the epidemic abates, and the grateful citizens worship her as the santuzza, the little saint, who saved the city.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Mar. 25, 2020 | 11:32 PM | MCCRACKEN COUNTY





Due to restrictions put in place by Governor Andy Beshear, and with social distancing in mind, the Fiscal Court held their first meeting entirely online, with all members participating from different locations.







The Fiscal Court approved the replacement of the fence along the front of Carson Park. Morris Fencing, Inc. will be performing the replacement at a cost of $10,250, which will be payed for using funds from the Purchase Area Development District's Area Development Funds.







After the vote, Commissioner Eddie Jones shared his thoughts the replacement.







He said, "I would like to thank Steve Irvin for finding the grant money for this project. I think it will make a dramatic improvement to 28th Street, and to the appearance of Carson Park."







Jones also shared that the project was funded by state grant money, and wasn't pulled from the General Fund.





The Fiscal Court also approved a payment of $67,060.50 for the County's portion of the Bob Leeper Bridge project. The bridge connects the Greenway Trail system to the McCracken County mountain bike trails, and other inter-connected trails. The county also reimbursed the city in the amount of $18,328 for geotechnical and engineering design costs.





In his closing statement, McCracken County Judge Executive Craig Clymer called the meeting historic.







He said, "This meeting is historic for McCracken County. We're kind of old school, but we're stepping out into the frontier."







Commissioner Bill Bartleman closed by thanking Clymer and their entire staff for the work they have done in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and for his help with setting up the meeting.

The McCracken County Fiscal Court held their first teleconference meeting on Wednesday.
British discount pub chain JD Wetherspoon wants to suspend payments to its Irish food and drink suppliers and has paused development of its next outlets in Dublin, Galway and Waterford.

In an email message to suppliers from Wetherspoons chairman Tim Martin, the firm says it wants to hold bill payments until its bars are back to business.

We are asking for a moratorium on payments until the pubs reopen, at which point we intend to clear outstanding payments within a short timeframe, Mr Martin says.

We understand that this puts significant pressure on our suppliers, but we are kindly asking for your assistance during this very difficult period. A number of our suppliers have already offered assistance and we would be most grateful for your cooperation as well.

A spokesman for Mr Martin confirmed that Wetherspoons has asked its suppliers for a moratorium to help it through this period.

He said its message, also sent to UK suppliers, says Wetherspoons has done business with many suppliers for 30 to 40 years and the firm wants to trade with them for another 30-40 years - but needs their help now.

The spokesman said Wetherspoons is open to discuss individual cases with suppliers.

A week ago - before British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered a UK-wide lockdown on social venues - Mr Martin sparked outrage by arguing that public houses should stay open through the pandemic. He said then that social distancing policies within pub premises should be sufficient to reduce risks.

There's hardly been any transmission of the virus within pubs and I think it's over the top to shut them, Mr Martin said in a Sky News interview. That's a commercial view but also a common sense view.'

The Wetherspoons spokesman confirmed today that the company has suspended operations at all seven of its Irish pubs in line with State policy. It also has stopped work on its next four locations in the pipeline on Camden Street and Hanover Quay in Dublin and in Galway and Waterford.

All development work (is) on hold, he said.
Diageo-controlled liquor maker United Spirits on Thursday said it has shut down its manufacturing units amidst the coronavirus lockdown, declared the government.

According to the company, it is not possible to make an assessment of the financial impact of this currently.

"In compliance with the nationwide lockdown announced by the Honourable Prime Minister on March 24, 2020, all the offices and manufacturing units of the Company will remain closed," said USL in a regulatory filing.

It further said: This shutdown will stay in effect until April 14, 2020, subject to further directives issued by the respective government authorities and the company's assessment of the prevailing situation."



Earlier this week, Diageo had announced to produce around 300,000 litres of bulk hand sanitiser across 15 manufacturing units for use by public healthcare workers and donate 500,000 litres ENA to the sanitiser industry to enable the production of more than two million units (250 ml each) of hand sanitisers.

The company will also support the hospitality sector with a Rs3 crorehealthcare cover to bartenders and donate approximately 150,000 masks to five state's public health departments.

"With the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in India over the past few days, the company has been closely monitoring the situation and managing its operations while taking necessary preventive measures," the company said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
L loyds of London on Thursday said it was too early to assess insurance losses from coronavirus as it revealed a 1.8 billion hit on investments.

The 334-year-old marketplace, which provides a venue for brokers and underwriters to trade insurance, faces a two-pronged headache, first on claims and second on the performance of investments which help meet claims.

Lloyds 30 billion investment portfolio made 3.5 billion last year but is down by 1.8 billion this year due to the slump in bond yields.

Chief executive John Neal said it was too early to assess the size of insurance losses but a preliminary figure should be available in early May.

The corporation has asked firms to estimate the ultimate potential losses from Covid-19 and report back.

Lloyds has already designated coronavirus a major claims event, which is classified as any disaster leading to more than 100 million of claims.

Chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown said: I would not be surprised if it didnt aggregate into something similar to the larger natural catastrophe claims we have had througn the past few years.

Lloyds largest net loss last year was Typhoon Hagibis, which cost 500 million.

The industry has come under fire for its response to the crisis after suggestions most claims will not pay out due the wording on many business interruption policies, which mostly do not cover pandemics.

The Treasury Select Committee head Mel Stride has demanded answers from the Association of British Insurers about the industrys response to the crisis.

Bruce Carnegie-Brown said Lloyds had identified at least 14 different types of policy which may be triggered by corona claims including event cancellation, travel claims and workers compensation.

He said: We think there will be a large number of claims which come through.

The controversy over business interruption is specific to the fact that these covers are available but most people dont buy them.

We see customers who experienced claims on things like Sars and Ebola buy them but most customers do not because they did not imagine it was a risk to the business.

It was not seen as a risk so its not surprising a number of people find themselves uncovered for a risk that now seems pretty serious.
Lizzie Cundy's ex-lover has split up with his fiancee for a second time and set up home with her 21-year-old daughter.

In complicated web, millionaire nightclub boss Jeremy Gordeno was dating Candice Hodge, 40, but moved on to Ms Cundy before he struck up a close friendship with Candice's daughter, Francesca.

He then returned to Miss Hodge just before Christmas and asked her to marry him during a sun-kissed Caribbean break over the New Year.

But in a further twist, Miss Hodge dramatically called off their engagement after the holiday and now Mr Gordeno has rekindled his relationship with Francesca.

Speaking to MailOnline, Candice said she is 'shattered and disgusted' with her daughter and former lover.

Millionaire nightclub boss Jeremy Gordeno (pictured this week) has re-kindled his romance with 21-year-old Francesca Hodge (left)

Candice (right) and Gordeno (centre) are pictured together with Candice's daughter, who the nightclub boss is said to have grown close to despite their 32-year age gap

Candice and Gordeno got engaged just before Christmas and he whisked her away to Antigua to celebrate that and New Year together (they are pictured celebrating the New Year together)

'If he can't have me, then he wants to have my daughter,' Candice said.

'I am absolutely disgusted at what he is doing. I called off the engagement, but we remained friends.

I had no idea what was going on until I went to his flat to help him move in and asked to see the spare room. He would not let me in, but I pushed in anyway and saw Francesca's clothes.

'I just could not believe it. Francesca and I are no longer talking and I want nothing more to do with her. She is just blinded by love and can't see that she is being used by him to get back at me.'

Gordeno and Francesca have been spotted together living at a 1m love nest in Weybridge, Surrey. The property is the former home of Girls Aloud star Nicola Roberts.

Gordeno and Francesca have been spotted together at a 1m love nest in Weybridge, Surrey (Gordeno is pictured walking through Surrey this week)

Gordeno was pictured at the wheel of 21-year-old Francesca Hodge's Fiat 500 car this week - even though he has two months of a drink drive ban to serve

Ms Cundy dumped Gordeno over his friendship with Francesca and this photo of her sitting on the nightclub entrepreneur's lap emerged, prompting the TV star to take decisive action

The pair now share the former home of Girls Aloud star Nicola Roberts (pictured) with the engagement to Francesca's mum Candice called off

Mr Gordeno was this week pictured near the home at the wheel of her Fiat 500 car - even though he has two months of a drink drive ban to serve.

He was also flouting the law by talking on his mobile phone as he drove through Surrey.

It is the second time Hodge, a dog groomer from Esher, Surrey, has been dumped by her millionaire lover for her own daughter.

Candice Hodge (left) arrived at court wearing a black coat, black blouse and black skirt in February as she was given a two-year restraining order for threatening and abusing WAG Lizzie Cundy (right)

Ms Cundy (left) and Candice's fiance Gordeno (right) were together for ten months before she dumped him when he struck up a close friendship with Candice's daughter, 21

Miss Hodge revealed last October she was no longer on speaking terms with Francesca after she began a secret affair with her boyfriend.

While the pair were locked in dispute, Ms Hodge was also at war with former WAG Ms Cundy, 50, who dated Gordeno for over a year.

Candice, pictured on holiday with Francesca, right, previously admitted she was angry with her daughter for becoming close to Gordeno after she was with him for two years

MailOnline revealed the TV personality ended their relationship when she discovered he was seeing Francesca when photos emerging of her perched on his knee during a night out.

Mr Gordeno was seeing Hodge and Cundy at the same time leading to a love triangle that became even more complicated when Francesca was involved.

Their rivalry culminated last month in Ms Hodge being given a two-year restraining order for harassing the TV star.

Ms Hodge sent abusive text messages to her rival and was accused of verbally abusing her during a confrontation at Mr Gordeno's 5m Hampshire mansion.

Speaking after her conviction at Aldershot Magistrate's Court, Hodge revealed she had got engaged before Christmas and showed off a 10,000 diamond ring.

She said her fiance flew her to Antigua in the Caribbean to celebrate their engagement.

But within weeks of the court hearing Candice said she called a halt to their relationship saying it was 'too abusive'.

'I want nothing more to do with him and I don't want my daughter anywhere near him,' She said,

Breaking down in tears, she added: 'Francesca will not listen to me. We do not talk anymore and I just wish she would see him for what he is. He uses people. I don't want her to be with him.

'After the court hearing I knew I had to end out relationship as it was not healthy. I called it off, but we remained friends. I had no idea that my daughter had moved in with him.'

Mr Gordeno and Francesca were unavailable for comment.
Doctor couple among the three new positives cases detected

A member of the National Disaster Response Force sprays disinfectant as a precautionary measure against the spread of the COVID-19 virus at Charminar in Hyderabad on March 22, 2020. India is observing a 21-day lockdown to break the chain of transmission of the virus. (AP)

Hyderabad: The coronavirus Covid-19 has now well and truly begun spreading in the community in Hyderabad and other districts with the Telangana Health Department announcing three new cases on Thursday afternoon.

It described all of them as contacts  the term used to designate someone who was in close touch with an already Covid-19 confirmed patient.

These three new cases take the total Covid-19 infected numbers in Telangana to 44.

Patient Number 42 is said to be a 49-year-old male from Qutbullapur in Medchal-Malkajgiri district who had travelled to Delhi. He is described as a contact but information was not provided as to which confirmed patient this man had been in contact with or where.

The Health Department bulletin, however, said the man had recently travelled to Delhi, indicating that is a case of local transmission.

Patient No. 43 is a 36-year-old woman, a doctor from Domalguda locality in Hyderabad. She is a contact of a previously confirmed Covid-19 patient. The third positive case announced on Thursday, Patient No. 44, is her husband, a 41-year-old and also a doctor.

All three patients are stable and have been admitted to designated hospitals, the bulletin said.
Cash-strapped Pakistan will seek USD 3.7 billion additional financing from the three multilateral creditors, including another loan of USD 1.4 billion from the IMF, to cope with the challenges being posed by the novel coronavirus outbreak in the country, according to a media report on Thursday.

In addition to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, the World Bank (WB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) will extend loans of USD 1 billion and USD 1.25 billion respectively to the country, the Express Tribune quoted Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, adviser to Prime Minister Imran Khan on Finance.

The step is aimed at soothing the markets that remained in panic despite Prime Minister Khan announcing a Rs 1.2 trillion economic relief package a day earlier.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Pakistan sharply rose to 1,102. There were 417 patients in Sindh, 323 in Punjab, 131 in Balochistan, 121 in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), 84 in Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), 25 in Islamabad and 1 in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, according to the website of ministry of health services.

So far 8 people have died while 21 recovered.

Pakistan announced the decision on the same day the IMF and the WB made an appeal to all bilateral creditors to suspend debt repayments by countries that were eligible for loans from the WB's arm, the International Development Assistance (IDA).

Shaikh also announced abolishing the capital value tax to support the Pakistan Stock Exchange that recorded a decrease of 1,336.03 points to settle at 27,228.80 on Wednesday.

Pakistan and the IMF have agreed on an additional upfront financing of USD 1.4 billion as part of the Extended Fund Facility (EFF), said Shaikh.

This amount will take the total size of the bailout package by the IMF under the EFF to USD 7.4 billion. The IMF board is expected to meet next month to approve Pakistan's second review.

Shaikh clarified that the IMF would not disburse USD 1.4 billion out of its USD 50 billion emergency facility for COVID-19, which was only meant for countries whose economies were the worst hit by the pandemic.

However, Pakistan's economy is expected to suffer significant damages, he added.

The finance adviser said Pakistan's exports were likely to fall as the economies of the countries that purchased goods from the country would weaken.

Similarly, remittances from expatriates might decrease as well as the countries where they are based, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, will be affected.

The economic activity in the country will reduce which in turn will decrease the income of people and taxes.

Shaikh said the WB would divert USD 1 billion and the ADB will also provide USD 350 million on an urgent basis. In addition to this, the ADB will also approve USD 900 million in June.

He also provided further details of about Rs 1.2 trillion economic relief package that the prime minister had on Tuesday announced to help the vulnerable people and economy to cope with the fallout of the virus.

The cash-strapped Pakistan government has been implementing austerity measures to improve the country''s finances. In July last year, Pakistan registered a currency reserve of less than USD 8 billion -- enough to cover only 1.7 months of imports.

The IMF formally approved a USD 6-billion loan to Pakistan in July 2019, citing "significant" economic challenges. Pakistan has so far received billions in financial aid from friendly countries like China, Saudi Arabia and the UAE during the current fiscal year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As the coronavirus epidemic drags on, there are still concerns over the school opening slated for early next month.

The Ministry of Education is now mulling whether to ask schools to replace their lessons with online classes depending on the severity of the epidemic by region.

Elementary, middle and high schools nationwide were supposed to open on March 2 but amid the outbreak of COVID-19 they were ordered to put off the start of their new academic year until April 6.


NORTH BENTON, Ohio  Next Generation 4-H Club met March 8 to install newly elected officers. Leading the club this year are Alex Courtney, president; Heath Criss, vice president; and Stella Zippay, secretary.

Mahoning Countys 4-H urban educator Kristen Eisenhauer spoke to the club on running a club meeting and how to make a business motion properly. Members received information to begin the clubs plant sale fundraiser. Adviser Olivia Myers spoke on setting goals and had all members write down a goal for their plant sale.

Zippay and Brooklyn Stoufer reported on sessions they attended at the county Quality Assurance training. As a community service project, members and cloverbuds recently made Valentines and delivered them to residents at Auburn Skilled Nursing, Copeland Oaks and Windsor House in Canfield.
An employee arranges one kilogram gold bars at the Perth Mint Refinery in Perth, Australia, on Aug. 9, 2018.

Gold prices jumped to a two-week high on Thursday, after a record surge in U.S. jobless claims dented the dollar and boosted expectations of further stimulus to cushion the global economic toll from the coronavirus pandemic.

Spot gold rose 0.95% to $1,628.46 per ounce. U.S. gold futures rose 1.1% to 1,649 per ounce.

"More countries are expected to release some sort of stimulus packages which is a big event for gold. In addition to it, unemployment claims jumped. That tells the investors that QE is going to have more longevity," said Michael Matousek, head trader at U.S. Global Investors.

Central banks have been turning to quantitative easing (QE), or large-scale purchases of government bonds and other financial assets to pump money into the economy.

Gold climbed more than 1% earlier in the session after data showed a record high of more than 3 million Americans filed claims for unemployment benefits last week as strict measures to contain the pandemic hit economic activity.

"It's an indication that things are slowing down dramatically. The worse data you can get right now, the market should respond favourably, because that provides more ammunition for the Fed to be keep on stimulating," Matousek added.

The dollar dropped to a near one-week low against rivals, making gold cheaper for holders of other currencies. Wall Street stocks jumped as investors bet on more stimulus measures.

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday overwhelmingly backed a $2 trillion bill aimed at helping unemployed workers and industries hurt by the outbreak. This came after the U.S. Federal Reserve said on Monday it would buy as many bonds as needed to stabilize financial markets and backstop direct loans to companies.

"Extraordinary steps by the Fed this week, including uncapping the size of asset purchases and buying investment grade bonds, should push real interest rates deeper into negative territory and in turn support demand for real assets like gold," said UBS commodities analyst Giovanni Staunovo in a note.

Gold market participants remained concerned about a supply squeeze following a sharp divergence in London and New York prices as the coronavirus closed precious metals refineries.

U.S. exchange operator CME Group on Tuesday announced a new gold futures contract to combat price volatility caused by the shutdown of gold supply routes, but traders and bankers said it would not immediately calm markets. U.S. gold futures rose 0.8% to $1,646.80 per ounce, and held above the London spot contract.

Palladium dropped 2% to $2,270.06 per ounce, a day after posting its largest daily gain since 1997 as a lockdown in major producer South Africa exacerbated supply woes.

Platinum slipped 0.3% to $735.95, while silver was flat at $14.43.
After days of walking a fine line between praising Donald Trump and demanding more aid from the White House, a clearly aggravated Governor Andrew Cuomo seemed ready to share a piece of his mind  just like a true New Yorker.

Speaking at a press briefing this week on the latest updates surrounding the global coronavirus pandemic, the New York governor slammed the federal government for failing to provide the state with crucial medical supplies as it found itself at the epicentre of the unfolding crisis.

FEMA is sending us 400 ventilators. Four hundred ventilators? I need 30,000 ventilators. You want a pat on the back for sending 400 ventilators? he said on Tuesday. You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die because you only sent 400 ventilators!

This was the man who New Yorkers have tasked to lead the state through numerous crises for decades, serving as attorney general before becoming governor in 2011: an outspoken, tell-it-like-it-is politician who doesnt take any prisoners. In many ways, his sometimes-brash style appears similar to that of the president, though the two men are ideologically worlds apart.

The White House administration appeared to succumb to pressure following the governors fiery press conference. Vice President Mike Pence later confirmed the federal government would send an additional 2,000 ventilators to the state most impacted by the pandemic nationwide.

It was still nowhere near what the governor said he needed, however, at a moment when the entire world is in a competition to buy personal protective equipment for hospital staff, the development was another small victory for New York in the ongoing war against an invisible enemy.

Mr Cuomo has emerged as one of the most high-profile governors on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, receiving widespread praise for his handling of the states outbreak, despite it being one of the most infected places in the country, according to the latest data.

But health officials say New Yorks figures are likely higher than the rest of the country in part because its local government has been able to roll out expansive testing capabilities  a move that experts said could help save lives by slowing the spread of transmissions  far quicker than other states.

Despite having sued the president on a number of occasions and publicly speaking out against his administrations hard-line immigration agenda, Mr Cuomo seems to have maintained a steady relationship with Mr Trump throughout the pandemic, reportedly speaking to him multiple times a day while pushing for further life-saving resources to be sent to New York.

A day after Mr Cuomo slammed Mr Trump over the lack of ventilators, he later praised the White House for its cooperation during the pandemic.

He has also publicly praised Mr Trump for his help, saying in a previous press briefing: I can tell you he is fully engaged on trying to help New York. Hes being very creative and very energetic, and I thank him for his partnership.

While Mr Cuomo does not align politically with Mr Trump, he has seemingly walked that fine line quite successfully in recent days. The president himself told Fox News its a two-way street when it comes to helping out the nations governors during the pandemic, adding: They have to treat us well also.

In fact, as criticism over Mr Trumps seemingly slow and fumbled response to the coronavirus continued to grow throughout the week, President Cuomo began trending on social media as users praised the New York governor for his frequent public updates and daily press briefings about the novel virus.

One viral tweet that received more than three thousands likes on Wednesday read: When you watch Governor Cuomo doing his coronavirus briefings, you cant hep but think Why the hell wasnt HE running for President?

The governor also received glowing praise from local newspapers, including the New York Times, which published a story on Wednesday titled: How Cuomo, Once on Sidelines, Became the Politician of the Moment.

Mr Cuomo, whose father served as a three-term governor of New York, has been involved in politics virtually his entire adult life, entering the national spotlight as secretary of Housing and Urban Development under former President Bill Clinton in 1997.

Until recently, the governors relationship with Mr Trump has been all but friendly.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo speaks to the media after meeting with President-elect Donald Trump on 18 January, 2017 at Trump Tower in New York City. (Getty Images)

Just last month, the two were involved in a rift after the administration kicked New Yorkers off a Trusted Traveller Programme, a move Mr Cuomos administration said was politically motivated and meant to force his hand in providing sensitive immigration data to the White House.

They failed to find a resolution during a meeting due to an apparent stalemate over a New York state law allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain drivers licenses. That same law, which the Trump administration strongly opposed, blocked state data from going to federal immigration authorities.

Mr Cuomo doesnt seem to be letting up any time soon, even in spite of the administrations apparent strong arming.

Speaking to NY Daily News before a meeting at the White House, the governor concluded about his attempts to work with the administration: It makes me feel better knowing I did everything I could to argue for the state of New York.
The Embassy of the Republic of China on Wednesday donated gift items to the Nigerian ministry of health towards the prevention of Covid-19.

The Minister of Health, Osagie Ehanire, received the Chinese delegation led by Third Secretary Li Guanjie who presented the gifts.

The minister appreciated their kind gesture and applauded Chinas progress in their fight against the virus so far.

China has recorded reduced numbers of deaths and new cases.

Mr Ehanire further probed on the strategy used by the Chinese government so that Nigeria could emulate them, stating that the journey to fight Coronavirus is not the journey that many people know, and its only China that understood the language.

He also requested the assistance of Chinese public health experts.

Since the outbreak of the virus in December 2019, the health minister said, this was the third time the Chinese government was visiting the ministry.

The first time was to share with the Nigerian government that Nigerians in China were taken care of by their government. The second was when the embassy visited to ask what help they could offer Nigeria during the period Nigeria faced the threat of the disease.

Giving an update on Nigerias strategy, Mr Ehanire said our health system may not be as strong as the Chinese but the federal government is doing everything within its power to strengthen the health sector so that public health will reduce the indices and the number of those who may require serious treatment to a manageable number.

He said the ministrys policy is to strive for the best-case scenario and prepare for the worst-case scenario. To achieve this, he said Nigeria needs technical support, ventilators, General Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and diagnostic reagent (needed for Laboratories Primers).

The ministry of health also received donations from the Jack Ma Foundation who sent medical materials which consist of 107 boxes of medical supplies and equipment, comprising surgical masks, medical disposable protective clothing, face shields and detection kits, all weighing about 1,400 kilogrammes.

Jack Ma is a Chinese business magnate, investor, and politician.
I remember when the number of coronavirus cases in Spain passed 1000. It was a Tuesday and my friends and I were drinking cervezas at a bar, naively celebrating because our university classes in Madrid had been cancelled for two weeks.

That was two weeks ago. Now, late on Thursday afternoon, Spain was approaching 50,000 cases. Its death toll stood at 3647, surpassing China's.

Fleur Connick ... she's seeing here the same mistakes she saw in Spain.

I write this with a sense of urgency, not to sound like an alarmist but to share my own experience over the past few weeks in Madrid, where I was on exchange  and why I decided to get out while I could and return to Australia. Currently, I am self-isolating for two weeks in Sydney, as required for any Australian returning from overseas travel.

As someone who has seen first-hand how quickly an outbreak of COVID-19 can become uncontainable in a country, I fear Australia is acting too slowly and too cautiously. We need to act without hesitation, learn from countries and cities that took extreme measures fast and went into lockdown early, and follow advice from our leading health practitioners and the World Health Organisation.
As hospitals and other safety organizations, like fire departments, police stations and the American Red Cross, tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortage of essential personal protective equipment and facilities has been making headlines.

Bowling Green State University campuses in Bowling Green and Huron, as well as BGSU at Levis Commons, are answering the call by donating PPE supplies and space to organizations in both communities.

As a public university, were committed to doing our part to support the public good in this time of need, said BGSU President Rodney K. Rogers. Were humbled to be able to make a contribution to help protect the people on the frontlines of this pandemic.

The Bowling Green campus worked with the Wood County Health Department Thursday to coordinate the donation of tens of thousands of gloves and goggles to the Wood County Hospital.

Its been a complete team effort, said Dr. Jon Sprague, Bureau of Criminal Investigation eminent scholar for the Ohio Attorney Generals Center for the Future of Forensic Science at BGSU. It was a way we could all get involved and help out the community.

Supply donations came from a variety of campus units including forensic science, biology, chemistry and the School of Earth, Environment and Society.

While blood donations are also always needed, the American Red Cross is currently facing a severe blood shortage due to an unprecedented number of blood drive cancellations. BGSU responded to this need by offering space in the Perry Field House and at BGSU at Levis Commons. Three drives have been held so far and will continue into April.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put us in a unique situation to help, said Sherideen Stoll, chief financial officer and vice president, finance and administration. While these facilities cannot be fully open to students and employees, they provide the perfect space for the American Red Cross, which follows stringent safety protocols, to hold drives to help meet patient needs.

The drives have been a success, with 26 first-time donors attending the latest drive.

Because of this wonderful space, we have the ability to spread out the beds to social distancing standards, which has been the reason many of our drives have had to cancel, said Diane Smith, American Red Cross Bloods Services account manager. Donors have been coming out in record numbers; the Bowling Green community drive is really making a difference in northwest Ohio.

At BGSU Firelands, PPE donations were coordinated through Erie County Emergency Management. Two pickups were made this week and another is scheduled. Supplies have also been donated directly to the Port Clinton Fire Department, Ottawa County Sheriffs Office and Danbury Township Fire Department.

We didnt think twice about it, said BGSU Firelands Dean Andy Kurtz. We know that supplies are running low and we have those supplies in our nursing and allied health labs, which arent currently being used.

Items donated so far include procedure masks, N95 masks, isolation gowns, procedure gowns, wipes and respiratory care supplies.

By collaborating with our local partners, many of whom we already have relationships with, we have been able to quickly assess our supply and get items distributed to agencies that need them, said PJ Mays, assistant dean at BGSU Firelands.

Kurtz added that nursing program partner Lorain County Community College graciously agreed to the donation of its supplies at the Firelands campus as well.
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Linkedin Apriza Pinandita (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 19:46 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da8e51 1 World COVID-19-in-Indonesia,China,Indonesia,bilateral-cooperation,bilateral-ties,coronavirus,virus-corona,Retno-Marsudi,Wang-Yi Free

Indonesia and China have agreed to use global platforms to strengthen bilateral ties, with the COVID-19 response identified as the first and foremost issue to address together.

The pledge was among the matters discussed during a phone call on Tuesday between Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi and Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Apart from discussing means to fight the spread of the deadly coronavirus, the two ministers exchanged notes on how their countries were addressing the global health crisis.

The foreign minister conveyed her appreciation [of] the Chinese governments success in handling COVID-19. She also appreciated the assistance provided by the Chinese government for Indonesia in battling the virus, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Teuku Faizasyah said on Thursday.

During the phone call, the Indonesian minister expressed hope that the two countries would intensify their cooperation, including on the procurement of medical supplies Indonesia needs.

Read also: COVID-19 stimulus: Learning from others

Beijing has flown much-needed medical equipment from the city of Shanghai to Jakarta to support Indonesias COVID-19 prevention and control measures.

According to the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta, the assistance was a way of returning the favor to the international community, including Indonesia, which had helped China in its hardest time during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Medical supplies consisting of test kits, N95 masks, surgical masks, protective gear and portable ventilators were shipped on Tuesday, adding to a delivery made the day before.

Indonesia received thousands of pieces of medical supplies from China on Monday. The equipment was transported on a military aircraft that landed at Halim Perdanakusuma Air Force Base in East Jakarta after picking up the goods from Shanghai.

Officers spray the Indonesian Air Force's C130 Hercules aircraft with disinfectant liquid at Raden Sadjad Air Base, Natuna, Riau Islands on Sunday, March 22, 2020. The aircraft number A-1333 carries medicines and medical equipment to handle COVID-19 outbreak from China. (Handout/Indonesian Air Force Information Service)

During a press conference on Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said the Chinese government would without any hesitation reciprocate the kindness of countries that had assisted China in its fight against COVID-19.

We will offer assistance as our capability allows to friendly countries that are in a severe situation and lack prevention and control materials, especially those developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as regional organizations, such as the African Union, Geng said according to a press release.

China also stands ready to deepen cooperation with Indonesia in responding to the epidemic and is ready to share its experience with Indonesia and other ASEAN countries.

We are confident that, under the leadership of President Joko Widodo, the Indonesian people will ultimately prevail over the epidemic, said Wang Yi in a statement on Wednesday.

The Chinese minister said China and Indonesia, both being important members of the G20, should work together for more solidarity and coordination among the group and send a unified positive message in the face of the unprecedented challenges posed by COVID-19.

Indonesia and China should also support other countries in their outbreak response and contribute to global public health security, he added.

Read also: China's imported virus cases spike as fears grow of second wave

The phone call on Tuesday was made as Chinas Hubei province, where the pandemic originated, started to lift travel restrictions on people leaving the region as the outbreak eases in the region  despite the fact that other regions were tightening controls as new cases doubled due to imported infections.

The Hubei Health Commission lifted curbs on outgoing travelers starting Wednesday, provided they had a health clearance code, Reuters reports.

The provincial capital Wuhan, where the virus first appeared and which has been in total lockdown since Jan. 23, will see its travel restrictions lifted on April 8.

However, the risk from overseas infections appears to be on the rise, prompting tougher screening and quarantine measures in major cities, such as the capital Beijing, the news agency reports.
Low and no-alcohol looks to be a star category of the future

Weve just had the wettest February since records began, but perhaps of more immediate importance for the drinks trade, it was preceded by the driest Dry January in UK history.

More than a quarter of UK drinkers reduced or completely stopped drinking in January, according to Drinkaware research.

The study found that 72% of those who said they drank less plan to continue to do so in the long term, while 12% of this group intend to stop drinking completely.

Another finding from the study is that taking drink-free days is the most popular technique to cut down. This ties in with Drinkawares Drink Free Days campaign, which encouraged midlife drinkers in particular  those aged 45-64  to incorporate more alcohol-free days into each week.

But its not just about older drinkers, as research carried out for Franklin & Sons shows. The premium soft

drink brands report shows younger generations are also cutting down on alcohol, with the key reasons being that they are going out less often (43%), have a desire to get fit (30%), and are trying to save money (27%).

For retailers who rely on sales of BWS  and also producers of these drinks  this consumer trend across all age groups is a concern.

It has been well documented that the low and no-alcohol category, along with premium soft drinks, is attracting waves of NPD and innovation. But how much should retailers focus on alcohol-free drinks and is there a danger that a seller of alcohol could veer too far from their raison detre?

Research by Kam Media highlights low and no-alcohol as providing a huge opportunity for the off-trade, with more than a third of UK adults having consumed a low or no-alcohol drink at home, a statistic that doubles among the generation Z and millennial sectors.

Its research shows that these consumers are choosing a low or no-alcohol drink for either a quiet night watching TV, to drink with their evening meal at home or with lunch.

Kam Media marketing director Katie Jenkins says this trend doesnt just impact the alcoholic drink sector but also soft drinks.

She says: Traditional soft drinks brands would do well to sit up and take notice. The high proportion of consumers who are now drinking low and no variants at home are moving into consumption occasions traditionally dominated by soft drinks. These companies now have serious new competitors, in the out-of-home space at least, in the shape of the big brewers.

Another point for the off-trade, she notes, is that consumers can find shops less intimidating than pubs or restaurants, making them good places to encourage trial of new products.

And when it comes to new products, one of the most successful areas for alcohol-free has been beer.

Jonathan Rons, from the Retail Data Partnership, says unit sales of non- alcoholic beer in UK convenience stores doubled in the past six months, while distribution trebled, albeit from a very low base. However, he adds, the top five SKUs accounted for more than 80% of non- alcoholic beer sales.

He also highlights the huge opportunity to improve display and visibility in stores to grow the category because, he says, the research shows only one in five shoppers have even noticed the low and no-alcohol variants in a convenience store.

Research by IWSR shows the low and no-alcohol beer sector currently accounts for 2% of the total UK beer market and its analysts forecast this will grow 6% a year by 2023. In Spain, alcohol-free beers now account for more than 15% of the entire beer sector, proving there is still potential for more growth in the UK.

Emily Neill, chief operations officer at IWSR, says: The forecast growth in this sector [in the UK] is in marked contrast to the total beer market, which we forecast to be flat or even slightly declining across the same period.

Looking ahead, product innovation is likely to be driven by drinks that position themselves as healthier alternatives to alcohol, such as products that curtail their carbohydrate, calorie, artificial ingredients and/or sugar content. Gluten-free and vegan alternatives are likely to drive further category interest, according to IWSR.

Neill adds: In North America a plant-based theme is trending, with agave-based spirits, cannabis or CBD-infused products and botanical ranges doing particularly well. Consumers also want more transparency, which is why natural products are sure to be a hit in the European market, which is seeing growth in more selective and mindful drinking.

WINE SEGMENT

IWSR says the most interesting market is likely to be the wine segment, which could see a different reaction to this trend.

Dan Mettyear, IWSRs head of wine, says: The concept of non-alcoholic wine is an interesting source of tension within the industry.

Many traditional wine producers shun dealcoholised wine from even being associated with the wine category. Others, looking at the commercial opportunity, are keen for alcohol-free wine to be considered equal to its counterpart, with some even eager for it to be subject to the same regulations and controls.

As we begin seeing more wine producers investing in low and no-alcohol, their main challenge will be in producing a wine alternative that delivers on taste. This has been a key barrier in non-alcoholic wine becoming a mainstream alternative to date.

Another point of ongoing discussion with this sector in the UK is about ensuring the industry can operate positively as a collective force Laura Willoughby, co-founder of Club Soda, says: Spain has a buoyant alcohol- free industry because lots of people put their weight behind it and lots of groups worked together.

She notes that many UK producers are doing a good job of establishing a premium tier in alcohol-free drinks, but this also needs some focus.

Its true there isnt any alcohol tax for these drinks so pricing needs to be thought out carefully, but in many cases [for example in alcohol-free spirits], the producer has worked really hard to create these flavours, using expensive ingredients and difficult processes.

We need to collectively work together to grow this category or we will be stunting growth in this space.

Paul Mathew, founder of Everleaf alcohol-free drinks and owner of Bermondsey bar The Hide, confirms this.

He says: We use Madagascan vanilla and Spanish saffron to make Everleaf, which are two of the most expensive ingredients in the world. Alcohol tax is a bit misleading because it wouldnt add much to the price of the bottle. If Everleaf was the alcoholic strength of, say, Aperol it would add just 1.30 to each bottle.

I think there should be a spectrum of pricing in alcohol-free drinks and this is something retailers can consider doing. For example, Prosecco to Champagne has a big price jump and it could be the same in alcohol-free.

Daniel IAnson, advocacy manager at Pernod Ricard, says: When Seedlip first came on to the market peoples jaws hit the floor when they saw the price. But the rules of economics mean that the more products that enter this market the more peoples expectations will change. There will be a premium and a value end when it becomes a proper category.

I dont think we have even got started yet with this category. The opportunities are so big and we are in the early days. We have lots more we can do and I think there will be myriad NPD over the next few years.

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2 1 of 2 Courtesy of the City of San Antonio Show More Show Less 2 of 2 Tom Reel /Staff file photo Show More Show Less



Ongoing shelter-in-place orders allow for outdoor exercising, but you can only walk the neighborhood so many times before losing your mind. So while youve got some extra time, break up the monotony with a trip to another part of town to take in some architecture and learn a little more about San Antonio.

As long as you keep your distance from others, this is perfectly allowable under San Antonios stay-at-home rules. In fact, fresh air and exercise will help you deal with the stress of staying at home under these circumstances.
Medical experts to Italy prepare to board a plane in Fuzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province, March 25, 2020. A team of 14 medical experts from eastern China's Fujian Province departed on a chartered flight to Italy on Wednesday morning to aid the European country's fight against the COVID-19 outbreak. Previously, China had sent two medical groups with a total of 22 people along with more than 20 tonnes of medical supplies to support Italy's epidemic fight. (Xinhua/Wei Peiquan)

FUZHOU, March 25 (Xinhua) -- A team of 14 medical experts from east China's Fujian Province departed on a chartered flight to Italy on Wednesday morning to aid the European country's fight against the COVID-19 outbreak.

The team consists of experts from several hospitals and the center for disease control and prevention (CDC) of Fujian, as well as an epidemiologist from the national CDC and a pulmonologist of Anhui Province.

The experts specialize in areas including respiratory, intensive care, infectious disease, hospital infection control, traditional Chinese medicine and nursing.

Their missions will include sharing experience in COVID-19 prevention and control with local hospitals and experts and providing treatment advice.

They will also provide disease prevention and control know-how to Chinese communities and students in Italy, and offer them protective supplies and traditional Chinese medicines.

The experts will mainly work in the Tuscany region of Italy.

The flight took off at about 11:10 a.m. from Fuzhou Changle International Airport and is scheduled to arrive in Milan at 4:45 p.m. local time.

Also on board the plane were about eight tonnes of medical supplies donated by the province, including 30 ventilators, 20 sets of medical monitors, 3,000 protective suits, 300,000 medical masks, 20,000 N95 masks and 3,000 face shields.

Previously, China sent two medical groups with a total of 22 people along with more than 20 tonnes of medical supplies to support Italy's epidemic fight.

COVID-19 had claimed 6,820 lives as of Tuesday evening in Italy, which has lost more lives than any other country to the pandemic. The cumulative number of the novel coronavirus cases in Italy reached 69,176, the largest number outside China.

Huang Yu, a provincial health official and leader of the team, said China has acquired extensive experience in its fight against the disease, and they are ready to share it with their Italian colleagues.

"We are honored to be given the task assigned by our country, and we will do our best to help the Italian people tide over the difficulties," Huang said.

Xu Nengluan, director of the infectious diseases department of Fujian Provincial Hospital, has been treating COVID-19 patients for over two months.

"For our medics, saving lives knows no borders," Xu said, commenting on his new task in Italy.

The Chinese government has announced assistance to 82 countries, the World Health Organization and the African Union, including test kits, masks and protective suits. Many batches of supplies have reached the recipients, China's foreign ministry said last Friday.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 23:55:10|Editor: yan

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THIMPHU, March 26 (Xinhua) -- A Bhutanese student in quarantine in capital Thimphu has tested positive for COVID-19, making it the third case in the country and the first Bhutanese national to be infected, the Health Ministry said Thursday.

As per the ministry, the student has returned from Britain recently and was in quarantine when tested for the virus.

The ministry has initiated contact tracing and most of the contacts were already put under quarantine. Around 25 people were tested for the virus of which only the student was tested positive.

Meanwhile, the country's health minister has also informed that the ministry has called back the doctors who went abroad. Around 24 have returned and are currently in quarantine centers.

Bhutan currently has only around 3,000 health workers and as per the minister this number will not be able to deliver the services if the country enter into the worst-case scenario. Around 600 backup volunteers have been trained to carry out health screening and the ministry plans to train 5,000 more.

To meet the shortages, the ministry also plans to keep those working in private clinics for backup services. The country also plans to call resigned doctors, nurses and health workers to make up for shortage if faced with worst-case situation.
According to tweets on its twitter handle on Thursday, N1 billion of the fund would go to Lagos and N500 million to Abuja.
Burma Myanmar Army Seizes Shan State Militia Chiefs Over Drugs Bust

Myanmars military displays seized drugs and drug-making materials for the press, foreign military attaches and international anti-narcotic organizations in Kutkai Township, northern Shan State on March 6. / The Office of the Commander-in-Chief of the Defense Services

Myanmars army seized more than 1,000 weapons and detained leaders from the military-backed Kaungkha militia in Kutkai Township, northern Shan State, according to a militia source.

At least eight leaders from the group were detained by the northeastern military command in Lashio, an anonymous militia leader told The Irrawaddy today.

They called our leaders to a meeting on March 24 but they did not come back, said a Kaungkha group officer. He said some leaders were involved in drug trafficking but those detained in Lashio were not.

He said troops seized over 1,000 weapons at the militias headquarters in Lwekham village on the same day their leaders were detained in Lashio.

Myanmars military spokesman Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun told The Irrawaddy: Large amounts of illegal drugs were found in Lwekham and the armed group might be involved in the case. Only an armed group could do this. Therefore, those who were detained might be related to the drugs case. But I did not know the details.

Those who were involved in drugs case may face prosecution. If they did not violate the law, they will be fine. They failed to inform us so we took action against them, he said.

Myanmars army found a large amount of illegal drugs, other materials and equipment valued at 267 billion kyats (US$194 million) over 11 days until March 9 in Lwekham and Kaungkha villages, which were under the control of the Kaungkha militia.

The militia, also known as the Kachin Defense Army (KDA), is a splinter group of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), based in northern Shan State.

The KDA transformed into a border guard force in 2010 and has 10 groups based in five townships in northern Shan State. Their headquarters in Lwekham village is registered as having members 850 with Myanmars government and has transformed into a militia. But it has more than 2,000 members who have not registered with the government, according to the source.

On orders from their leaders, they gave their weapons to Myanmars army, according to the militia source.

The Tatmadaw (military) called for a meeting but many of the militia members reportedly refused.

We could not do anything until our leaders are released. Therefore, we had to give them all our guns, said the source.

The Kaungkha militia had no plans to join the KIA, according to the source, who added that the Tatmadaw should consider the future of its members who were not involved with the drugs trade.

[Myanmars army] took a political opportunity by moving against the whole organization, instead of targeting the leaders responsible, he said.

No one will leave unless we get orders from our leaders, he said.

Myanmars military currently controls the militias territory and deployed approximately 5,000 troops, according to the source. Entry to the area was heavily restricted and villagers had fled after house-to-house searches.

With Lwekham and Kaungkha under Tatmadaw control, drugs production has ceased. The source wondered why the military had only taken action this month despite years of drug production in the area.

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Kanye West has appeared on the cover of The Wall Street Journal and in the interview, discussed everything from the racism he has endured throughout his life to his controversial friendship with brother President Donald Trump.

In the interview, the 'Stronger' rapper explained, Everything is about putting people in their place. Classism, protectionismnot just racism. He added, Classism is like living on a bookshelf. The more money you have, the higher you go. And you get to the top and look over and what do you see? Fear.

West, 42, has had quite the decorated career, with nine studio albums and a whopping 21 Grammy wins.

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He added, "Im a black guy with a red [MAGA] hat, can you imagine?"

He continued to talk about the racism he experienced in the past as well as his support for Trump, saying, "It reminded me of how I felt as a black guy before I was famous, when I would walk in a restaurant and people would look at you like you were going to steal something. This is your place, Ye, dont talk about apparel. This is your place, Ye, youre black, so youre a Democrat.'"

West isn't only a successful musician. He also runs the fashion line Yeezy with trainers driving a $1 billion resale market.

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In typical Kanye fashion, Kim Kardashian West's husband said, I do not like the word ambitious. Im Kanye West. The word ambitious is beneath my abilities, Im just a doer."

You can see in my eyes theres not one bit of fear," West explained.

This same fearlessness seems to govern his political inclination too as he has continued to voice his support for Donald Trump.

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In 2018, he tweeted, You dont have to agree with Trump but the mob cant make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother. I love everyone. I dont agree with everything anyone does. Thats what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.
Hours later, she was admitted to a hospital in Evanston where she was diagnosed with COVID-19. She spent three days hospitalized, in a room alone that had a space attached to it for the nurses and doctors to sanitize after visiting her. It was from her hospital bed where she learned the news of the first death in Illinois linked to COVID-19.
The All Parties Sikh Coordination Committee (APSCC) on Thursday condemned the attack on a gurdwara in Afghanistan in which 25 Sikhs were killed.

"We demand proper protection of the minorities including Sikhs living in different parts of the globe," APSCC chairman Jagmohan Raina said in a statement.

Expressing outrage over the attack on the gurdwara and subsequent killings, Raina said human values continue to be trampled over by the elements that are inimical to peace and prosperity in the world.

"Only an insane can target a religious place like gurdwara and then kill innocents. The incident is highly deplorable and it needs to be condemned by one and all irrespective of their religious and political ideologies. The attackers and the perpetrators of the attack need to be brought to book so that justice prevails," said Raina.

At least 25 worshippers were killed and eight others injured when a heavily armed suicide bomber stormed his way into a prominent gurudwara on Wednesday in the heart of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, in one of the deadliest attacks on the minority Sikh community in the strife-torn country.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The CDC office in Beijing is a shell of its former self, said one of the people, a U.S. official who worked in China at the time of the drawdown.

Separately, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the global relief program which had a role in helping China monitor and respond to outbreaks, also shut their Beijing offices on Trumps watch. Before the closures, each office was staffed by a U.S. official. In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture(USDA) transferred out of China in 2018 the manager of an animal disease monitoring program.

Reductions at the U.S. agencies sidelined health experts, scientists and other professionals who might have been able to help China mount an earlier response to the novel coronavirus, as well as provide the U.S. government with more information about what was coming, according to the people who spoke with Reuters. The Trump administration in February chastised China for censoring information about the outbreak and for keeping U.S. experts from entering the country to assist.
Bindi Irwin tied the knot with her American beau Chandler Powell in a surprise wedding ceremony on Wednesday afternoon.

And while the 21-year-old looked absolutely breathtaking in a lace and tulle gown, she certainly didn't disappoint with her accessories.

Bindi kept her look simple and chic for the ceremony, wearing a stunning lace hairband which sat elegantly to the back of her hair.

Here comes the bride! Bindi Irwin, 21, (R) kept it simple but chic as she chose a striking lace hairband for her lavish wedding to Chandler Powell, 23, (L) on Wednesday night

The lace accessory was the perfect addition to her classic look, matching the lace used on the bodice of her gown.

The accessory complemented her chestnut brown tresses, which she wore in loose waves for the special occasion.

Bindi opted for a glossy make-up style for her big day, choosing a dewy foundation which she paired with dark mascara and a matte lipstick.

Pure elegance: The lace accessory was the perfect addition to her classic look

Family ties! Bindi paid tribute to her mother Terri with her choice of wedding dress, which was remarking similar to what she wore at her wedding to Steve Irwin 27-years-ago

Bindi paid tribute to her mother Terri with her choice of wedding dress, which was remarking similar to what she wore at her wedding to Steve Irwin 27 years ago.

She stunned in a breathtaking white gown, which featured elegant lace in a floral pattern on the sleeves and bodice.

The lace sleeves in particular are a tell-tale sign Bindi was inspired by her mother.

Last-minute ceremony: Bindi, 21, and her professional wakeboarder husband, 23, married at Australia Zoo, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, on Wednesday evening (AEST)

Bindi and her professional wakeboarder husband, 23, married at Australia Zoo, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, on Wednesday evening (AEST).

They made the 'difficult decision' to have no guests present to keep the community safe as the number of coronavirus cases in Australia continues to rise.

The family had planned the wedding for nearly a year but decided at the last minute to hold a 'small ceremony' without guests due to the pandemic.
There was no trolley to meet them with family and friends, but when they got to their hotel room at the Waldorf Astoria to celebrate, he showed her a video of well wishes from everyone, peppered with photos of them throughout their courtship. They ordered celebratory Pizanos pizza.
Chateau Lafite Rothschild is undoubtedly one of the worlds most prestigious and collectable wines. Tim Triptree MW helps explain why its so highly sought after

Chateau Lafite Rothschild has a rich and fascinating history. The first reference dates back to 1234 and the name Lafite derives from the historic language term fite, which means mound or hillock, and describes their plateau which is one of the highest spots in the appellation.

At the beginning of the 18th century Lafites wine was sold in London, where it was reported to be a favourite of the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, who was reputed to have purchased barrels of 1732 and 1733. In France, Lafite became known as the King's wine, after being introduced to the Court at Versailles by Marechal Richelieu.

The first of the first growths

In terms of red Bordeaux, or claret as it is also referred to by the British, there are no greater wines than the five chateaux referred to as the first growths: Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, Chateau Latour, Chateau Margaux, Chateau Haut-Brion and Chateau Mouton Rothschild.

First growth, or premier cru classe, is the top tier of the Bordeaux classification, a list drawn up under the instruction of Napoleon III in 1855. The wine producers were classified according to a chateaus reputation and trading price, which, at that time, was directly related to quality.

The wines were ranked in importance from first to fifth growths (crus), with four first growths listed initially (Mouton Rothschild was added in 1973). Lafite was officially ranked first in the list of the 1855 Classification of the Bordeaux Grands Crus Classes prepared for the Universal Exhibition in Paris in the same year.

Within the five rarefied first growths, Lafite is perhaps the wine with the best reputation for quality and longevity, commanding correspondingly high prices. It is considered by some to be the best wine to come out of Bordeaux.
With state finances in turmoil, Gov. Phil Murphys administration announced earlier this week it had ordered $920 million in discretionary spending be put on hold.

New Jersey homeowners will feel the pinch, as the impounded cache includes $142 million in Homestead property tax relief that would have reduced the May tax bills for hundreds of thousands of taxpayers.

Nearly $24 million in aid for distressed municipalities, some of New Jerseys most financially vulnerable towns, was placed on reserve, as was $10 million in new aid to help Trenton lower property taxes.

The states colleges will have to wait and see on some $70.6 million in support, including nearly $30 million to the Rutgers system, $7.1 million to Montclair State University, $4.1 million to Kean College and $7.2 million to the Rowan system.

The state treasurer said in a letter to department heads that the spending freeze was necessary in light of the fiscal uncertainly due to the COVID-19 health emergency ... to ensure sufficient cash and budget authority to meet emergency and statutorily required obligations.

The states fiscal year ends June 30 and it cant run a deficit.

Entire industries have temporarily closed their doors as New Jersey carries out dramatic social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus. This will undoubtedly reduce the consumption taxes the state collects on goods and services.

The impact of COVID-19 on the State, its economy, and budget and finances is unpredictable and rapidly changing, but the State believes that events surrounding COVID-19 will negatively impact the States economy and financial condition," the treasurer said in a recent financial disclosure.

You can review the full list of frozen appropriations here.
Coronavirus Outbreak Updates: Six out of the nine total coronavirus confirmed cases in Bihar have no travel history, the Bihar Health Department said on Friday.

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India saw the highest rise in novel coronavirus cases in a single day on Thursday, even as the Central Government announced a Rs 1.7 lakh crore fund aimed mainly at underprivileged sections of the society. The health ministry said that 88 new cases of the novel coronavirus were reported in the country in a day, taking the total number of infections in India to 694.

So far, 15 coronavirus cases have been reported in Indore, six in Jabalpur, two in Bhopal and Shivpuri and one in Gwalior and Ujjain, a senior health department official said. Ten new cases were found in Indore.

The number of coronavirus cases in Madhya Pradesh rose to 27 on Thursday. The death toll of COVID patients in the state also increased to two, with a man who had died in Indore on Wednesday testing positive for the disease.

Of the 453 apprehended, 112 are from the north division and 75 from the eastern suburban division, the police officer said. As many as 65 offenders have been arrested from the south suburban and 62 more from the central division, he said.

The arrests were made by the Kolkata Police during Naka-checking and patrolling across the city, he said. A total of 453 people have been arrested by the city police in the last 24 hours till 5 pm on Thursday for violating the Total Safety Restrictions, he said.

Over 450 people have been arrested in the city in the last 24 hours since Wednesday at 5 pm for defying the lockdown order imposed by the West Bengal government to contain the spread of the disease, a senior police officer said.

Curfew has been imposed in one km radius of the person who tested positive in Ramganj area of Jaipur as it is a highly congested area. According to Rajasthan Health Department Additional Chief Secretary Rohit Kumar Singh, intense contact tracing has started.

On Thursday, five more people were tested positive for COVID-19, taking the total positive cases in the state to 43, according to Rajasthan Health Department.

"A COVID-19 positive person has died in Bhilwara, Rajasthan. He had other conditions including diseases relating to kidney and blood pressure," said Rajan Nanda, Principal, Mahatma Gandhi Hospital told ANI.

A COVID-19 positive patient, who had comorbid conditions including diseases relating to kidney and blood pressure, has died in Rajasthan's Bhilwara.

As the number of cases worldwide reached a half-million and deaths climbed past 23,000, the damage to people's livelihoods and their well-being from the effort to flatten the rising curve started to come into focus.

The human and economic toll of the lockdowns against the coronavirus mounted Thursday as India struggled to feed the multitudes, Italy shut down most of its industry, and a record-shattering 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in a single week. The US surpassed the official Chinese government numbers to become the country with the most reported infections.

Over 180 people with undeclared recent travel histories have been traced and shifted into quarantine in Srinagar, officials said. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had earlier on Thursday reported 88 new COVID-19 cases, which is the highest in a single day, taking the total countrywide tally to 694.

According to Worldometers, the website that records confirmed cases of infection and deaths globally, the US by Thursday night had 85,088 individuals infected with coronavirus, of which 16,877 were added just in a single day. A week ago, the number of confirmed cases were 8,000. It has dangerously surged 10 times in the span of a week.

The United States surpassed China (81,285) and Italy (80,589) in terms of number of people infected with the novel coronavirus.

Over 16,000 confirmed cases were reported in a single day in the US on Thursday as the total number of COVID-19 patients soared to 85,088, the highest for any country, according to data compiled by Worldometer.

An April resuming of life is "not realistic. The numbers are still going up. That only happens after the numbers have peaked and are going down a lot and getting down to an absolute level," Gates told CNN on Friday.

If you're hoping to return to normal life, work, and social gatherings by April, be prepared to bunker down for a lot longer, warned Bill Gates at the ongoing CNN town hall on the coronavirus pandemic.

The report also noted the novel virus, which originated in China's Wuhan, was 'imported' in the state as almost 66 percent of the cases in the state had an international travel history.

According to an analysis by Times of India , prepared by the state department on the first 122 COVID-19 cases in the state, has found out that almost half of the patients were in the age group of 31-50 years.

Confirming the matter to Dhaka Tribune , Dr Shahriar Sajjad, in-charge of the airports medical team, said the equipment included 10,000 testing kits, 10,000 personal protective equipment (PPE) and 1,000 infrared thermometers.

A second batch of medical equipment, donated by the Chinese government, has arrived in Dhaka from Kunming, to help Bangladesh tackle the COVID-19 pandemic better on Friday.

Venezuela has confirmed the countrys first death from the novel coronavirus, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said in comments broadcast over state television.

They left Hooghly on 23 March and reached Burdwan on some vehicle, officials said, adding that hey failed to any transport over there and started walking. They wanted to go ahead with their journey on foot to reach their homes in Saharsa district, but were not allowed and have been moved to a shelter home in Dumka, sub-divisional officer Rakesh Kumar said.

A group of 27 migrant labourers, who work in West Bengal's Hooghly district, walked about 160 km to reach Dumka in Jharkhand on Thursday, failing to get any transport on the way to their homes in Bihar's Saharsa district, officials said.

The government of Assam has set up an account for crowdfunding resources to ensure that every step possible was being taken to safeguard the health of people in wake of COVID-19 outbreak. Taking to Twitter, the government shared account details for anyone who wanted to contribute to the fund.

We are trying to factor the temporary massive shock into our estimate modelling. The magnitude of fluctuation is much bigger than expected, he said. The projection will be much bigger, far higher than the 25 million we estimated.

However Sangheon Lee, director of the ILOs employment policy department, told Reuters in Geneva on Thursday that the scale of temporary unemployment, lay-offs and the number of unemployment benefit claims were far higher than first expected.

The International Labour Organization, a UN agency, had estimated a week ago that, based on different scenarios for the impact of the pandemic on growth, the global ranks of the jobless would rise by between 5.3 million and 24.7 million.

Global job losses from the coronavirus crisis could far exceed the 25 million estimated just days ago, UN officials said on Thursday, as US jobless claims surged to record levels, starkly showing the scale of the economic disaster.

"Due to novel coronavirus pandemic, Muslims are recommended to offer Zuhur at home instead of praying Jumah at mosques. Don't come out for congregational prayers and stay at home to save lives. It is mandatory upon all to avoid causing harm to their fellow citizens. #NoJumahInMasjid," AIMPLB tweeted. Mukarram Ahmed, Imam Fatehpuri Masjid said it is need of the hour that people offer prayers at their homes and follow the advisory regarding the lockdown.

All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) urged Muslims to offer Zuhur prayers at home instead of praying Jumah at mosques in the view of novel coronavirus outbreak.

A second positive case of COVID19 has been reported from Andamans and Nicobar Island. According to officials, he had traveled with the first positive case. Both patients are currently undergoing in hospital and protocols being followed, Chetan Sanghi, Chief Secretary, Andaman and Nicobar Islands toLD ANI.

The total number of Coronavirus positive cases in Pune district is now at 32, out of which 5 have been already cured and discharged.

Three COVID-19 patients from Pune's Pimpri-Chinchwad in Maharashtra have tested negative in their repeat samples on Friday. They are expected to be discharged today following due process, Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Commissioner Shravan Hardikar told ANI.

The governor of Reserve Bank of India, Shaktikanta Das, is set to address a press conference on Friday at 10 am. The RBI chief's addresses comes a day after the central government announced a coronavirus relief package of worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore. The central bank on Friday took to the official Twitter handle to inform about RBI Governor's press briefing.

NPPA chairman Shubhra Singh wrote to chief secretaries of all states and union territories requesting them to instruct district administrations to facilitate Pharma companies and ensure unobstructed movement of raw and packaging material and manpower to accomplish work-related to production, packing and distribution during the lockdown.

The Playwrights Horizons theatre group and SAG-AFTRA executive vice president Rebecca Damon confirmed the news on Thursday. Blum ls survived by his wife and fellow actor Zarish, whose credits include Law & Order, Seinfeld, and Blue Bloods.

Actor Mark Blum, who starred in Desperately Seeking Susan, Crocodile Dundee and the TV series You, has died due to complications from coronavirus. He was 69.

At an India-initiated video-conference of SAARC leaders on 15 March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had suggested that health professionals of the member nations could come together to jointly fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

India made the proposal at a video-conference of senior health officials of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries on Thursday.

India has proposed setting up of a common electronic platform for all SAARC nations to share expertise and best practices in jointly combating the novel coronavirus.

Benchmark indices are trading positive in the pre-opening session with Nifty around 8900. At 09:01 hrs IST, the Sensex is up 855.49 points or 2.86 percent at 30802.26, and the Nifty up 257.95 points or 2.99 percent at 8899.40.

Sensex jumped over 1,100 points or 3.25 percent to reclaim 31,000-mark on Friday. The broader Nifty 50 index soared to trade above 9,000 level in the morning session.

At 09:16 hrs IST, the Sensex is up 1,079.02 points or 3.60 percent at 31025.79, and the Nifty up 366.00 points or 4.24 percent at 9007.45, ahead of RBI presser on Friday. About 505 shares have advanced, 62 shares declined, and 34 shares are unchanged.

RBI chief Shaktikanta Das will address media at 10 am, the central bank has tweeted, as economic uncertainty prevails amid nationwide lockdown over coronavirus pandemic. The RBI Governor's address comes a day after the central government announced Rs 1.75-lakh-crore stimulus package to help the poor and migrants tackle the financial difficulties arising from the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

The rupee appreciated by 56 paise to 74.60 against the US dollar in early trade on Friday, tracking positive opening in domestic equities, as investors awaited positive cues from the Reserve Bank of India to tide through the coronavirus crisis, reports moneycontrol.

Moody's said, at the 2020 estimated growth rate, a sharp fall in incomes in India is likely, further weighing on domestic demand and the pace of recovery in 2021.

Moody's Investors Service on Friday slashed its estimate of India's GDP growth during 2020 calendar year to 2.5 percent from an earlier estimate of 5.3 percent, on account of the rising economic cost of the coronavirus pandemic. This compares to a 5 percent growth in 2019.

The MPC has decided to advance its meeting due on 3 April was decided for 24, 25, 27 March undertook careful evaluation, said the RBI Governor during the presser on Friday.

The RBI governor Shaktikanta Das announced that the RBI repo rate was cut by 75 basis points during a media briefing on Friday. The cut has been made to encourage banks to give more to business rather than deposit it with RBI. We hope to mitigate the negative effect of COVID-19 on the economy with these efforts

Shaktikanta Das, RBI Governor on Friday said that if COIV19 case prolongs and the supply chain could get disrupted and it could jeopardise India's growth. "We hope that drop in crude oil prices will help India," he said.

The RBI governor announced that the Repo rate stands at 4.20 percent now vs 5.15 percent earlier. He also said: "We are not giving out inflation and growth projection numbers due to the uncertain conditions."

The RBI governor on Friday said that there was a rising probability that large parts of the world economy could slip into a recession. He noted that tough times were ahead but they don't last, 'only tough institutions do'.

India has locked down economic activity. Keeping finance flowing is the 'paramount objective' of the RBI, while India has locker down economic activity and financial activity is under severe stress, noted the RBI chief.

The RBI on Friday cut LAF by 90 bps to 4 percent. It also announced that the Reverse repo-rate has been reduced by 90 basis points to 4%

The MPC (Monetary Policy Committee) has noted that global economic activity has come to a near stand-still as COVID19 related lockdowns and social distancing in affected countries. "Expectations of a shallow recovery in 2020 from 2019's decade low in global growth have been dashed," said the RBI chief.

The RBI chief said that measures will result in total liquidity injection of Rs 3.74 lakh crore to the system.

The RBI decided to reduce the Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR) of all banks by 100 basis points to 3 percent of Net Demand and Time Liabilities with effect from the fortnight beginning 28 March for a period of 1 year.

Offshore Rupee NDF Market has been growing rapidly, noted the RBI. Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) which was required to be introduced from April 1, 2020, is now defer to October, 2020.

He urged people to not panic withdraw their deposits from banks. "Your funds are safe," he said.

The RBI governor assured citizens that the Indian banking system is safe and sound. "In recent past COVID-19 related volatility in stock market has impacted share prices of banks as well resulting in some panic withdrawal of deposits from a few private sector banks." he said.

The RBI has injected liquidity of Rs 2.8 lakh crore via various instruments equal to 1.4 percent of GDP. "Along with today's measures liquidity measures equal to 3.2% of GDP. RBI will take continuous measures to ensure liquidity in the system," said Shaktikanta Das in his address.

The positive coronavirus cases in India jumped to 724. A total of 66 people have been cured of the disease. So far, 17 people have lost their lives due to the virus, according to data from the health ministry.

Two new coronavirus positive cases were reported in Rajashtan's Bhilwara. Both are close relatives of the person who was tested positive and died last evening, due to prevailing comorbid conditions, said officials. The total positive cases rise to 45 in the state, said Rajasthan Health Department.

The district administration ordered all doctors, nurses and other staff of the facility to be quarantined.

According to a health department official, a 38-year-old man from Munger district who died at AIIMS, Patna, last week before his test results confirmed that he was suffering from COVID-19, was first admitted to the private hospital situated in Khemnichak locality of the city which has since been sealed.

A 20-year-old man, who worked as a ward boy at a private hospital where he came into contact with a COVID-19 patient, has tested positive, taking the total number of such cases reported from Bihar to seven, the health department said on Friday.

President Ram Nath Kovind along with the Vice President, interacted with Governors, Lt Governors and Administrators of all States and Union Territories on issues related to COVID-19 on Friday. He lauded the efforts of all health professionals and everyone at the forefront of handling this challenge.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is set to address people at 12 pm on coronavirus crisis and 21-day-long nationwide lockdown to curb the further spread of the virus on Friday.

RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said all instruments - conventional and unconventional - are on table to support financial stability and revive growth and noted that Rs 3.74 lakh crore liquidity will be injected into system through various measures announced on Friday.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday cut benchmark interest rate by 75 basis points to 4.4 per cent. The central bank also reduced the cash reserve ratio (CRR) of all banks by 100 basis points to 3 per cent with effect from March 28 for 1 year.

The Indian rupee appreciated by 81 paise to 74.35 against the US dollar in intra-day trade on Friday, after the Reserve Bank announced various measures including a 75 basis point cut in repo rate to support the economy amid the coronavirus-induced crisis.

"The Central government is satisfied that the drug 'hydroxychloroquine' is essential to meet the requirements of emergency arising due to pandemic COVID-19 and in the public interest, it is necessary and expedient to regulate and restrict the sale and distribution of the drug and preparation based thereon for preventing their misuse," it said.

The order issued on Thursday said that in public interest, it was necessary and expedient to regulate and restrict the sale and distribution of the drug and preparation based thereon for preventing misuse.

The Union health ministry has restricted the sale and distribution of 'hydroxychloroquine' stating it as an essential drug to meet the requirements of any emergency arising due to COVID-19 pandemic.

"There are a total of 39 Coronavirus positive cases in Delhi today, 29 of them had come from outside and were kept in quarantine and 10 of these are cases of local transmission," said Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal.

The Delhi government has made arrangements to provide lunch and dinner in 325 schools. "Around 500 people will be provided food in all these schools. So far we were providing food to 20,000 people daily, the number will now increase to around 2,00,000 from today," said Arvind Kejriwal.

"Please visit your local police station with documentation of proof of essential service you provide to obtain a pass," tweeted Navi Mumbai Police.

A day after the Mumbai police initiated dialogue with e-commerce majors for streamlining the delivery of essential commodities at the doorstep of citizens who have been confined to their homes following the nationwide lockdown, the Navi Mumbai Police is issuing essential service passes for individuals and vendors who provide essential services.

In a media release, the company said "as corporate citizens we in industry must lend our meaningful support to contain this pandemic. Such challenging circumstances indeed call for extraordinary measures. In line with ITC's credo of 'Nation First  Sab Saath Badhein', that focuses on inclusive and sustainable progress, particularly of vulnerable sections many of whom reside in rural India, ITC has geared its value-chain to lend support to the government in its efforts to fight this threat to the people of India."

This fund will be used to provide relief to most vulnerable section of the society, provide assistance to rural healthcare and even provide protective gear for medical staff.

ITC chairman Sanjiv Puri on Friday announced the conglomerate has set up Rs 150 crore COVID-19 contingency fund for vulnerable sections of society.

Divisional commissioner and deputy commissioner of excise department will monitor the supply of these products, it stated.

In an order issued on Thursday, excise department commissioner Rajesh Bahuguna directed 11 distilleries to manufacture spirit and sanitisers to ensure the availability of these products at government and private hospitals.

The Madhya Pradesh government directed 11 distilleries in the state to manufacture spirit and hand sanitisers to meet the growing demand for these disinfectants during the coronavirus outbreak.

This is a part of the Central Bank's measures to counter the Coronavirus lockdown, which had started off with the RBI governor announcing massive slash of 75 basis points in the key repo rate to 4.4 per cent, to revive economic growth.

The decision, announced by RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das after a Monetary Policy Committee meeting, will bring relief to the middle class who had been demanding a relaxation on EMI payments as a new month approaches.

A moratorium period is a time during the loan term when the borrower is not required to make any repayment. Normally, the repayment begins after the loan is disbursed and the payments have to be made each month. However, the RBI has made a one-time exception in view of the financial distress arising out of the global pandemic coronavirus and the economic havoc wreaked by the lockdown imposed to control its spread.

The RBI said the moratorium will not result in asset classification downgrade and will have no adverse impact on the credit history of the borrowers.

The Reserve Bank of India on Friday announced that banks are permitted to allow a three-month moratorium on payment of instalments of all term loans outstanding on 1 March, 2020.

A: There is no clear evidence yet presented yet, but if you look at the rate at which numbers are increasing in India (see the graph), that must be the case. I have said this earlier as well. As of today, officially we are still in Phase II.

Q: Is there evidence of community transfer of coronavirus in India so far? What stage of the pandemic are we in?

Dr Shahid Jameel, CEO of Wellcome Trust/ DBT India Alliance, in an exclusive interview addressed some of he questions that are on everyone's mind regarding the novel coronavirus pandemic.

"All passengers who travelled with him on the train are being traced," Dr K Rakesh Kumar, Dy Commissioner Office, Tumakuru.

A 65-year-old man who had tested positive for coronavirus passes away in Tumakuru city of Karnataka. He had travelled to Delhi by train on 5 March and returned on 11 March.

The total number of COVID-19 cases in the country has risen to 724, with 17 dead. Globally, the virus has infected 537,000 and 24,119 people have died so far.

Tamil Nadu on Friday reported six new coronavirus cases, taking the state's total tally of confirmed cases to 35.

In the video, Kokrajhar Police staffs can be seen distributing food items and water in Srirampur where a total of 226 people have arrived on Friday from various parts of the country.

The Smart Protection Unit of Assam Police has been exclusively deployed for relief work, facilitating any organisation that wants to help those in need.

This arrangement will be enforced for 2 months initially and will be reviewed later, he said.

"All other patients will be shifted to private nursing homes across Guwahati," he added. He also said that similar steps will be taken in the Assam Medical College (Dibrugarh), Silchar Medical College (Silchar).

Assam's Gauhati Medical College will shut down in 48 hours and will be converted into a dedicated centre to treat coronavirus patients, state minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on Friday. Only the gynaecology department (only for delivery cases), and emergency ward will be operational, he said.

Twelve more people (contacts of earlier positive cases) have tested positive for coronavirus in Maharashtra's Sangli district, ANI reported on Friday. The state has a total of 147 positive cases, the public health department said.

All 620 final year MBBS students in the medical colleges in Assam are summoned back to their college. They will undergo 7-day intensive training to treat COVID-19 patients, he said.

The Assam government has signed 33 MoUs with private nursing homes across Guwahati. The cancer unit in GMC will be functional as usual as it is located away from the main campus.

Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that doctors will be working for seven days at a stretch and then will quarantine themselves for 14 days. He added that the state will have five new 300-bedded hospital only for COVID-19.

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, speaking about measures for the citizens of the state stranded in other states, said, "I've urged the chief ministers of Maharashtra, Uttarakhand and Haryana to arrange food and lodging for citizens of Uttar Pradesh living in their states. We will bear the cost of the arrangements. We've appointed nodal officers to coordinate with governments of 12 states whose people are living in Uttar Pradesh."

National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) director general SN Pradhan said that personnel are "getting battle-ready" should its services be required for COVID-19 emergency. "We have prepared 84 small core teams per battalion," he said.

The ministry also said that till now 724 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed, total deaths stand at 17. In the last 24 hours, 75 new positive cases and 4 deaths have been reported.

The health ministry, in the daily briefing said, "We have given an order to a PSU to provide 10,000 ventilators. Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) has also been requested to purchase 30,000 additional ventilators in 1-2 months."

Lav Aggarwal, joint secretary of the health ministry, said that around 1.4 lakh companies have asked their employees to work from home on the government's appeal, adding, "President Ramnath Kovind also has interacted with all state Governoers to combat with Covid19 situation through video conference."

"I have developed mild symptoms of the coronavirus, that is to say a temperature and a persistent cough. I am working from home and self isolating. But be in doubt that I can continue leading the fight against coronavirus via video conferencing," he said.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson posted a video on Twitter saying that he has tested positive for the coronavirus and is self isolating.

"We have issued national telemedicine guidelines. This facilitates the process wherein doctors sitting at their homes can provide services to the patients. We urge & request citizens to take advantage of it & doctors to utilize this," said Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secy, Union Health Ministry.

He also wrote to the Union Minister of Human Resource to ensure an uninterrupted supply of basic necessities and medical facilities to students staying in hostels & other residential facilities in different parts of India due to the lockdown.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that a "more nuanced and compassionate approach" is required to minimise the adverse effects of the 21-day complete lockdown on the marginalised sections.

Earlier, he had said, "Im shaking hands continuously. I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, youll be pleased to know. I continue to shake hands. We already have a fantastic NHS, fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of the disease  I want to stress that for the vast majority of the people of this country, we should be going about our business as usual.

On 3 March, at the unveiling of the UK's action plan against the coronavirus pandemic, reports quoted UK prime minister Boris Johnson as saying that he is constantly shaking hands with people, even with coronavirus patients. On Friday, he became the first prime minister in the world to test positive for the infection.

While the country went into a 21-day complete lockdown two days ago, reports about daily wage workers and migrants stranded without work and sustenance have flooded the media. The Centre and state governments are making efforts to minimise the effect of the lockdown on such marginalised sections.

Telangana chief minister KC Rao said, "All the urban local bodies, municipal bodies and district collectors have been advised to provide all the necessary facilities to the needy, daily wage and contract workers."

The officials also said, "Apart from Maldives, we are ready to dispatch Rapid Response Teams (RRTs) to Nepal for assisting them with the current COVID-19 situation. Other assistance as sought by MEA/MoD for other countries will be provided as and when required."

Officials of the Indian Army were quoted by ANI as saying that in addition to the five hospitals across the army, navy, and air force that are carrying out coronavirus tests, six additional hospitals are also being equipped with the resources to begin testing.

Singer Kanika Kapoor has tested positive in her third the novel coronavirus test, the Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences hospital was quoted as saying by ANI.

Another case who was admitted in Amritsar found was negative and is cured. The total number of patients tested positive till date are 38.

The statement also said that all the five patients are contacts of earlier positive cases.

Five new cases of novel coronavirus were on Friday reported in Punjab, the state health department said. Three cases are from SBS Nagar district, one from Jalandhar and one from SAS Nagar.

PTI quoted officials as saying that the Centre will clear entire pending wages of Rs 11,499 crore under MGNREGA by 10 April.

Uttar Pradesh principal health secretary Amit Mohan said that out of 49 coornavirus cases in state, 14 people have been discharged. "35 patients admitted in the hospitals are in stable condition. There are eight testing labs while a new lab in Jhansi will start functioning soon," he added.

He also addressed concerns of migrants from other states who are in the National Capital currently.

He said, "Even if there is an increase of 100, 500, or 1000 cases in a single day, we are ready for it. Testing kits, ambulances, and ICU beds have been arranged. We are not saying cases will increase, we are just preparing ourselves for any eventuality."

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said that the state government is equipped to handle an increase of even a 1,000 coronavirus cases in a day.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi reacted to his counterpart in the UK Boris Johnson's announcement of testing positive for the novel coronavirus on Friday. He said, "Prayers for your good health and best wishes in ensuring a healthy United Kingdom."

"His grandson had returned from England on March 12 and was under self-quarantine, the family told civic officials. The 82-year-old developed cough four days ago and on Thursday underwent a CT scan at Saifee hospital. Upon testing, the respult was positive and the doctor was shifted to Hinduja. He passed way Friday night at 12.30 am," the report said.

The Indian Express reported that a Mumbai doctor who tested positive for COVID-19, passed away on Thursday night at the city's Hinduja Hospital.

The BMC on Friday said that nine more cases of coronavirus have been reported in Mumbai. Five have travel history and four are close contacts. Six of them are from Mumbai and three are from other places. The total number of positive cases in the city now stands at 86.

Huge number of people seen walking on foot toward their homes in different districts of Uttar Pradesh, at Ghazipur near Delhi-UP border in absence of transport services due to the lockdown.

The Jammu and Kashmir government also said that the total number of COVID-19 cases in the union territory have risen to 18, with one casualty.

Meanwhile, Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said, "39 new COVID-19 positive cases were reported in Kerala. 34 from Kasargod, two from Kannur and one each from Thrissur, Kozhikode, and Kollam. This takes the total positive cases in the state to 176, including 12 discharged patients."

Fresh cases of the novel coronavirus were reported in Kerala, Telangana, and Jammu and Kashmir on Friday. Telangana chief minister KC Rao said that ten new patients were reported, taking the total cases to 59 in the state.

A fresh case of COVID-19 has been reported in Chandigarh, Manoj Parida, Chandigarh administration advisor said. "Symptoms of Coronavirus was found in the patient 15 days after their arrival from Dubai. Contact tracing underway," he said.

A hope for the future of all of us in the body of a person over one hundred years old, when the sad chronicles of these weeks mechanically tell us every day of a virus that is raging especially among the elderly. Mr. P. made it. The family brought him home yesterday evening. To teach us that even at 101 years the future is not written," the statement said.

"The man, referred to as "Mr. P" in the statement, was born in 1919  in the middle of another tragic world pandemic," the report said.

A 101-year-old patient with coronavirus has recovered and been released from the hospital, CNN reported quoting the Rimini deputy mayor.

The fire brigade and the BMC have started spraying disinfectants in Mumbai, Maharashtra minister Aaditya Thackeray said on Friday.

Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia on Friday spoke to migrants who are stranded in the National Capital. He asked them to stay in the night shelters and said that the state government will take care of everything, AAP tweeted.

Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik on Friday announced a Rs 2,200-crore financial package to assist weaker sections of the society, PTI reported.

Assam excise minister Parmal Suklabaidiya said that as per Assam health department's demand, around five crore bottles of 200 ml hand sanitiser will be supplied by excise factories of the state free of cost. 11 companies have started producing sanitizer in the state.

Four more test positive for COVID-19 in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, total cases in UT rise to 6, PTI reported.

All liquor shops in Madhya Pradesh ave been ordered to shut in the duration of the 21-day complete lockdown over the coronavirus, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said. The shut down will start from Saturday.

Singapore on Friday called off the Shangri-La Dialogue for the first time in its history due to the coronavirus outbreak, the top-level forum was scheduled for June, ANI reported.

Seven fresh coronavirus cases were reported in Rajasthan, the state health department said on Friday. The total number of positive cases are now 50 in the state.

A public interest litigation (PIL) was reported filed in the Supreme Court on Friday "seeking food, water, shelter, medical aid and 'urgent indulgence to the plight of migrant workers and their families, including women, kids, elders and divyangs, who are walking on foot to their villages' amid lockdown," News18 reported.

A group of 25 migrant labourers at a bus stop in Nagpur to leave for their hometown in Madhya Pradesh amid #CornaLockdown. A labourer says,"We don't have any work now due to curfew. We're waiting for govt help in transportation as we have kids with us".

Five new coronavirus cases on Friday surfaced in West Bengal, including a 9-month-old girl. Of the five cases, two are children aged 11 and 6 and two are 27-year-old and 45-year-old women, the state health ministry said. They came in contact to a positive case in Delhi who came from UK on 16 March.

"After 10 days of confinement, it is clear that we are only at the beginning of the epidemic wave, Phillippe said.

The French government on Friday extended the confinement measures in a bid to tackle the spread of coronavirus, the Prime Minister Edouard Phillippe said. Philippe was quoted by CNN as saying that "government-enforced restrictions on movement will continue to be in place until 15 April".

IMFs Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva was quoted by Reuters as saying that it is clear that the world has entered a recession as bad or worse than the global financial crisis over a decade earlier.

People walking on foot in Kalindi Kunj area near Delhi-UP border towards their native places in different districts of Uttar Pradesh due to unavailability of transport services in wake of coronavirus lockdown.

Regional newspapers in Kerala reported that local vegetable vendors have started home delivery services, as a way to adapt to limited business amid the 21-day lockdown over coronavirus.

Italy on Friday saw the biggest jump in deaths due to coronavirus with 969 deaths in a day. The total number of deaths are at 9,134 in Italy.

Italy on Friday saw the biggest jump in deaths due to coronavirus with 969 deaths in a day. The total number of deaths are at 9,134 in Italy.

Six out of the nine total coronavirus confirmed cases in Bihar have no travel history, the Bihar Health Department said on Friday.

How can a govt that gives tax break of 1.45 lakh crore to corporates, writes off 7.78 lakh crore loans of rich cronies not have money for worst affected by lockdown? Wheres the 20K crore for PM's residence coming from? More important than lives of lakhs of poor Indians? https://t.co/zEqkLFP5pO

Sitaram Yechury on Friday slammed the Centre over the unprecedented migration that has been started by the 21-day lockdown over coronavirus.

"SV stepping up. Apple, Google have launched Covid websites. Facebook, Apple donating millions of masks. Salesforce gathering masks, deploying free software for healthcare. What's alarming is how much we're relying on co's in private sector to lead when federal government is failing us," said Wired reporter Lauren Goode.

Here's my thread on how local vendors in rural areas of Kerala are reinventing themselves in the time of lockdown. Since Home delivery is allowed, even many of the small grocery retailers have started home delivery with the help of whatsapp. (1/n) pic.twitter.com/c6SqTk5FY3

Regional newspapers in Kerala reported that local vegetable vendors have started home delivery services, as a way to adapt to limited business amid the 21-day lockdown over coronavirus.

Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray on Friday said, "We've seen people who were hiding in milk tankers while trying to go to their native states getting caught. Many chief ministers have requested me to take care of people from their states. We request people to stay at their place, we will take care of them."

The Supreme Court's Offices of Registery, with certain exceptions, will remain closed till 15 April 2020 as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 pandemic.

It also quoted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as saying, "No bill is perfect, but we want to make sure that it at least comes near part of the way to being sufficient. ...already working towards a fourth coronavirus response measure. We know that this cannot be our final bill."

The US House of Representatives on Friday approved a $2 trillion "response stimulus package" to fight coronavirus, CNN reported. "The far-reaching legislation stands as the largest emergency aid package in US history. It injects a massive financial boost into a struggling economy with provisions aimed at helping American workers, small businesses and industries grappling with the economic disruption," the report said.

US president Donald Trump said he would sign the bill immediately.

Today weve all acknowledged our nation faces an economic and health emergency of historic proportions, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The House approved the sweeping measure by a voice vote, as strong majorities of both parties lined up behind the most colossal economic relief bill in the nations history. It will ship payments of up to $1,200 to millions of Americans, bolster unemployment benefits, offer loans, grants and tax breaks to businesses large and small and flush billions more to states, local governments and the nations all but overwhelmed health care system.

Italy on Friday saw the biggest jump in deaths due to coronavirus with 969 deaths in a day. The total number of deaths are at 9,134 in Italy.

Italy on Friday saw the biggest jump in deaths due to coronavirus with 969 deaths in a day. The total number of deaths are at 9,134 in Italy.

Six out of the nine total coronavirus confirmed cases in Bihar have no travel history, the Bihar Health Department said on Friday.

Coronavirus Outbreak LATEST updates: Six out of the nine total coronavirus confirmed cases in Bihar have no travel history, the Bihar Health Department said on Friday.

IMFs Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva was quoted by Reuters as saying that it is clear that the world has entered a recession as bad or worse than the global financial crisis over a decade earlier.

Singapore on Friday called off the Shangri-La Dialogue for the first time in its history due to the coronavirus outbreak, the top-level forum was scheduled for June, ANI reported.

A 65-year old woman died on Friday due to the COVID-19 at Kasturba Hospital in Mumbai, the Maharashtra health ministry said. This is the fifth death in the state due to the virus. An 85-year-old doctor, a likely COVID-19 positive case, also died at a private hospital in Mumbai, the statement said.

Assam excise minister Parmal Suklabaidiya said that as per Assam health department's demand, around five crore bottles of 200 ml hand sanitiser will be supplied by excise factories of the state free of cost. 11 companies have started producing sanitizer in the state.

UK health minister Matt Hancock on Friday tested positive for the coronavirus soon after Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a statement saying he had contracted the infection.

"Following medical advice, I was advised to test for coronavirus. Ive tested positive. Thankfully my symptoms are mild and Im working from home and self-isolating," Haddock said.

The BMC on Friday said that nine more cases of coronavirus have been reported in Mumbai. Five have travel history and four are close contacts. Six of them are from Mumbai and three are from other places. The total number of positive cases in the city now stands at 86.

PTI quoted officials as saying that the Centre will clear entire pending wages of Rs 11,499 crore under MGNREGA by 10 April.

On 3 March, at the unveiling of the UK's action plan against the coronavirus pandemic, reports quoted UK prime minister Boris Johnson as saying that he is constantly shaking hands with people, even with coronavirus patients. On Friday, he became the first prime minister in the world to test positive for the infection.

Earlier, he had said, "Im shaking hands continuously. I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, youll be pleased to know. I continue to shake hands. We already have a fantastic NHS, fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of the disease  I want to stress that for the vast majority of the people of this country, we should be going about our business as usual.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson posted a video on Twitter saying that he has tested positive for the coronavirus and is self isolating.

"I have developed mild symptoms of the coronavirus, that is to say a temperature and a persistent cough. I am working from home and self isolating. But be in doubt that I can continue leading the fight against coronavirus via video conferencing," he said.

Twelve more people (contacts of earlier positive cases) have tested positive for coronavirus in Maharashtra's Sangli district, ANI reported on Friday. The state has a total of 147 positive cases, the public health department said.

Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba has told state governments to step up the surveillance of international passengers who reached India before the government banned commercial flights from abroad from landing in the country.

Gauba, the countrys senior-most bureaucrat, said there was a gap in the number of passengers who should have been monitored and the actual number.

"This may seriously jeopardise our efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19, given that many amongst the people who have tested positive so far in India have a history of international travel, the Cabinet Secretary said in a letter to all chief secretaries on Thursday.

Tamil Nadu on Friday reported six new coronavirus cases, taking the state's total tally of confirmed cases to 35.

According to Pradip Das, Director of Rajendra Memorial Research Institute here, an ICMR centre, test reports of two staff members of a private hospital in the city, where a coronavirus patient was admitted last week before being shifted to AIIMS-Patna where he died, have been positive.

Besides, another patient admitted to the Nalanda Medical College Hospital (NMCH) here hailing from Siwan, has tested positive, he added.

"There are a total of 39 Coronavirus positive cases in Delhi today, 29 of them had come from outside and were kept in quarantine and 10 of these are cases of local transmission," said Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal begins his address to people on coronavirus crisis and 21-day-long nationwide lockdown to curb the further spread of the virus on Friday.

The RBI on Friday cut LAF by 90 bps to 4 percent. It also announced that the Reverse repo-rate has been reduced by 90 basis points to 4 percent. India has locked down economic activity. Keeping finance flowing is the 'paramount objective' of the RBI, while India has locker down economic activity and financial activity is under severe stress, noted the RBI chief.

Shaktikanta Das, RBI Governor on Friday said that if COIV19 case prolongs and the supply chain could get disrupted and it could jeopardise India's growth. 'We hope that drop in crude oil prices will help India, he said. The RBI governor Shaktikanta Das announced that the RBI repo rate was cut by 75 basis points.

The cut has been made to encourage banks to give more to business rather than deposit it with RBI. We hope to mitigate the negative effect of COVID-19 on the economy with these efforts.

RBI chief Shaktikanta Das will address media at 10 am, the central bank has tweeted, as economic uncertainty prevails amid nationwide lockdown over coronavirus pandemic.

Three COVID-19 patients from Pune's Pimpri-Chinchwad in Maharashtra have tested negative in their repeat samples on Friday. The total number of coronavirus cases in Pune district is now at 32, out of which 5 have been already cured and discharged.

According to an analysis by Times of India, prepared by the state department on the first 122 COVID-19 cases in the state, has found out that almost half of the patients were in the age group of 31-50 years.

India saw the highest rise in novel coronavirus cases in a single day on Thursday, even as the Central Government announced a Rs 1.7 lakh crore fund aimed mainly at underprivileged sections of the society. A COVID-19 positive patient, who had comorbid conditions including diseases relating to kidney and blood pressure, had died in Rajasthan's Bhilwara early Friday morning.

The fund included free food grain and cooking gas to the poor for three months, and cash doles to women and poor senior citizens  all part of a bid to ease the economic impact of the nationwide lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday.

India joins countries  from the US to Singapore  that have pledged spending to contain the economic fallout of the pandemic that has infected almost 5 lakh people globally and left over 21,000 dead.

The health ministry said that 88 new cases of the novel coronavirus were reported in the country in a day, taking the total number of infections in India to 694.

Modi noted the alarming social and economic cost of the coronavirus pandemic in his remarks at the G20 virtual summit. He added that 90 percent of the COVID-19 cases and 88 percent of deaths were in G20 countries, even as they share 80 percent of world GDP and 60 percent of world population, the Ministry of External Affairs said.

'Don't want anyone to remain hungry': Sitharaman

While over 80 crore poor ration card holders will each get 5 kgs of wheat or rice and one kg of preferred pulses free of cost every month for the next three months, 20.4 crore women having Jan Dhan bank accounts would get one-time cash help of Rs 1,500 spread over three months.

Over 8.3 crore poor women, who were handed out free cooking gas connections since 2016, will get free LPG refills for the next three months, while poor senior citizens, widows and disabled will get ex-gratia cash of Rs 1,000.

The package included advancing the payment of one-third of the Rs 6,000 a year pre-2019 general election cash dole scheme for farmers, government contributions to retirement funds for the next three months of small companies with 90 percent of staff earning less than Rs 15,000, and a Rs 50 lakh insurance cover to healthcare workers.

For rural workers, the daily wage under the MNREGA employment guarantee programme has been increased to Rs 202 from Rs 182, benefiting 5 crore workers of about Rs 2,000 in all.

"The lockdown has been in force (since Wednesday), and therefore, we have come out with a package which will immediately take care of the concerns and welfare of the poor and suffering workers and those who need immediate help," finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said at a news conference.

The package, she said, is being announced within 36 hours of the 21-day nationwide lockdown announced by the Prime Minister to protect the nation's 130 crore people from the fast-spreading coronavirus.

"We do not want anyone to remain hungry," she added also hinting at more announcements if a need arises.

Responding to the measures, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi said:

The Govt announcement today of a financial assistance package, is the first step in the right direction. India owes a debt to its farmers, daily wage earners, labourers, women & the elderly who are bearing the brunt of the ongoing lockdown.#Corona  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 26, 2020

State-wise picture

Four more people, including a doctor couple, tested positive for COVID-19 in Telangana on Thursday, taking the total number of cases to 45 in the state, even as the government initiated steps to contain the spread of the virus.

Those tested positive are a 49-year old male resident of Qutbullapur in Medchal district, a 36-year-old doctor and her 41-year-old husband, also a doctor, and a 45-year-old man, resident of Secunderabad, a medical bulletin on COVID-19 said.

It said the four had not travelled to any foreign country, while all the 45 confirmed cases had a history of travel or contact with suspected or confirmed cases.

"There is no evidence of community transmission", it said.

In Jammu and Kashmir's Srinagar, a 65-year-old man died, becoming the first fatality in the newly formed Union Territory due to coronavirus.

"As we share the sad news of our first #Covid19 fatality, my heart goes out to the family of the deceased. We stand with you and share your grief," Mayor of Srinagar Junaid Azim Mattu tweeted.

Government spokesperson Rohit Kansal also confirmed the death via Twitter.

Two more persons have tested positive for coronavirus in Rajasthan, taking the total number of confirmed cases of the infection to 40 in the state, officials said.

The persons aged 45 years and 35 years have a travel history to West Asia. The former is a resident of Jaipur while the latter belongs to Jhunjhunu.

The state authorities have initiated an extensive contact tracing at both these places to contain the spread of the deadly virus.

The total number of COVID-19 cases in Maharashtra has gone up to 124 as two more persons tested coronavirus positive on Thursday, health officials said.

"Both are from Mumbai city. We are finding out if they have any travel history," an official said.

Till Tuesday, 2,988 people were admitted to isolation wards of hospitals since 18 January, while 932 persons were in hospital quarantine for suspected exposure to the virus.

As many as 14,502 people were put under home quarantine, officials said.

Migrants struggle to return home

Hit by a sudden 21-day lockdown and no transport, hundreds of migrant labourers from Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan are walking for days to reach their homes from the Delhi-NCR region and Gujarat, about 200 to 300 kilometres away.

And some elsewhere tried to make the desperate journey crammed inside container trucks.

Maharashtra Police on Thursday found over 300 migrant workers holed up inside two container trucks meant for carrying essential commodities from Telangana to Rajasthan.

The shocked officials found that the workers, who hailed from Rajasthan, had chosen this clandestine and dangerous mode of travel as they were desperate to return home.

Migrant labourers elsewhere in the country like in Kerala and Karnataka who are yearning to go home in the absence of any work to make living say they have no choice but to stay back and be at the mercy of authorities.

With hundreds of hapless daily-wagers trudging along desolate inter-state highways on the way back to Rajasthan from adjoining states, mainly Gujarat, the Gehlot government is facilitating their return home from the border after screening for any coronavirus infection.

With inputs from agencies
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The person-to-person spread of the coronavirus in the Houston region would peak in two weeks and burn out by mid-May if the stay-at-home order invoked Tuesday is continued until then, according to modeling by local scientists.

The modeling, which informed Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgos order, considered the effect on the spread of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, if shed taken the stringent intervention immediately or waited a week or two weeks to act. Spread would increase exponentially had she waited, it found.

From our modeling, it was clear that waiting is not a good thing, said Eric Boerwinkle, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health, who conducted the study with a biostatistician at that Houston institution. The numbers are sobering, but the message is clear: early intervention is better than late intervention and more stringent intervention is better than less stringent.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: Stay informed with accurate reporting you can trust

UTHealth released the modeling data as the city of Houston began gearing up  scouting sites that easily can be converted into medical centers, looking for hotel rooms for COVID-19 patients who cannot isolate at home or in a hospital  for whats expected to be the next, worse phase of the pandemic: the dramatic escalation in cases.

The efforts also came a day after Hidalgos order closed most businesses and directed residents to stay put, except for groceries and errands. She said she was heeding the warnings of health experts, whod called for the order to prevent Houston hospitals from being overwhelmed with cases.

The UTHealth modeling, shared with city and county officials Monday, provided data backing the warnings. It found that intervening immediately would limit the number of cases in the region to a peak at about 150 a day around April 7 and stop the spread around May 12. In that time, the cumulative total of cases would reach nearly 3,500, it found.

Houston Chronicle

Cases would peak at more than 1,000 a day on April 15 if Hidalgo had waited a week and more than 6,600 a day on April 22 if shed waited two weeks. Transmission would last until May 29 under the first scenario and June 16 under the second.

All three of the scenarios are based on the premise the restrictions would continue until mid-May. Hidalgos order is scheduled to expire April 3.

The UTHealth researchers are currently conducting modeling research to look at the effect on COVID-19s spread if the restrictions are lifted after two weeks and after one month. Boerwinkle said he hoped to have that data available by the end of the week.

The citys search for candidates for makeshift medical centers includes now-vacant hospital buildings and other facilities that could be used to treat patients if  or when  area hospitals reach capacity and become overwhelmed.

Were looking at all potentially available resources, Mayor Sylvester Turner said.

Turner said the city also is finalizing lease agreements with two hotels for around 180 rooms that could house patients who need to isolate themselves. Some of those rooms, he said, could be used for the citys homeless population as well.

The efforts were aided by the citys acceptance Wednesday of a $5 million health disaster grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The money also will be used to boost administrative health staff, provide behavioral and mental health support services, establish quarantines and buy equipment for testing, according to the agenda item presented to councilmembers Wednesday.

The plans reflect the view, reinforced by the UTHealth research, that the pandemic will worsen before it begins to improve. Officials and hospital executives have closely monitored the situation in New York City, whose health care system is under increasing stress amid an outbreak there.

Currently, most hospitals in Houston are not at capacity, though some said they already have little room to spare. The recent cancellation of elective procedures, among other moves, has helped free up some space.

Its pretty much a full house all the time, said Bryan McLeod, a spokesman for Harris Health System, which operates the countys Ben Taub and Lyndon B. Johnson safety-net hospitals.

He said the system was at 87.3 percent of its capacity at the end of February, though most of the empty beds are not for critical adult care. The occupancy level will be recalculated at the end of March.

The Houston Methodist system, which operates eight hospitals, is at 71 percent capacity systemwide, a spokeswoman said. Memorial Hermann, which has 17 hospitals, is at 60 percent.

Gov. Greg Abbott announced a measure Wednesday to help increase bed space, waiving certain licensing rules to allow facilities with pending applications, and those that have been closed for less than 36 months, to come online.

Also Wednesday, the Texas Association of Freestanding Emergency Centers issued a statement that their facilities stand ready to help ease the burden.

Boerwinkle and UTHealth colleague Momiao Xiong used artificial intelligence to create the modeling system. A paper on its use to analyze the virus spread globally is under review by a top-tier journal.

There is no planned publication of the local research, which focuses on not just the Houston area but other metropolitan regions in Texas, because it was done as a service to those communities, said Boerwinkle. The modeling, originally based on the virus spread in China and Italy, incorporated the U.S. spread as well.

Boerwinkle, former chair of the UT public health schools department of epidemiology, human genetics and environmental health said the Texas coronavirus picture looked good, at least compared to New York and California, when the team analyzed it March 16th. But by March 23rd, he said, it had taken a significant turn for the worse.

Thats what got the mayors and judges attention, said Boerwinkle.

Under the modeling, had Hidalgo waited a week, the cumulative number of cases would climb to nearly 23,800. If shed waited two weeks, the number of cases would exceed 153,000.

Nine counties  Harris, Brazoria, Fort Bend, Galveston, Montgomery, Austin, Chambers, Liberty and Waller  constituted the Houston region under the modeling.

Boerwinkle said if the restrictions remain in place until mid-May, hes confident the community will have gained enough immunity to the virus that their lifting would result in no more than a small second wave and even smaller third wave, not a major resurgence.

Boerwinkle added that he understands that the burden on health care setting is just one aspect of the issue, that the social fabric and economy are also considerations.

The intervention taken Tuesday is whats necessary to stem the tide, said Boerwinkle. But area residents should know this isnt like hunkering down for the weekend for a hurricane. This is longer term than that.

todd.ackerman@chron.com

dylan.mcguinness@chron.com
- The airbag prevents passengers from being ejected from the sunroof and becoming injured in a rollover accident

-The evaluation results of the roof airbag shared at the technical seminars hosted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and SAE

SEOUL, South Korea, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Hyundai Mobis said on 26 March that the company is concentrating on enhancing the reliability of new safety devices like the roof airbag and is planning to leverage its differentiated technology to take on the global market.

Hyundai Mobis' roof airbag is deployed under the surface side of the vehicle in a rollover accident, covering the entire roof in just 0.08 seconds, protecting and preventing all passengers from being ejected from the sunroof.

Since it began mass-producing its first airbags in 2002, Hyundai Mobis has continuously introduced advanced airbag technologies. Recently, the company is developing convergence technologies in safety on a full scale.

Meanwhile, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) conducted a safety evaluation of Hyundai Mobis' roof airbag.

Last January, NHTSA gave a presentation on the 'Status of NHTSA's Roof Ejection Mitigation Research' at 2020 SAE Government/Industry Meeting hosted by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and disclosed the evaluation results of Hyundai Mobis' roof airbag.

NHTSA is a US government agency whose mission is to save lives, prevent injuries and reduce economic costs due to road traffic crashes, through education, research, safety standards and enforcement activity.

About Hyundai Mobis



Hyundai Mobis is the 7th largest leading automotive supplier. Founded in 1977 and headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, Hyundai Mobis is to become a lifelong technology partner for vehicles and people.

It is excellent in sensors, sensor fusion in controllers and software design capabilities in safety control. As Hyundai Mobis internalized all core auto component technologies, it has various product groups in ADAS based on its state-of-the-art technologies which combined sensors and these technologies. Its products also include core modules (chassis, cockpit and front-end), brakes, suspension, steering, airbags, lights and automotive electronics.

Mobis currently has more than 30,000 employees and has been manufacturing in more than 30 regions in 10 countries including South Korea, China, Germany, India and the United States. In addition to its R&D headquarters in South Korea, Mobis has 4 technology centers in Germany, China, India and the United States.

Media Contacts

Hyundai Mobis PR, Hanbyul Kim, khb@mobis.co.kr [EOD]
On Wednesday, the Chatham Board of Health issued a notice urging people from New Jersey, New York or Connecticut who've come to their seasonal homes in Chatham voluntarily self-isolate in their homes for 14 days.

The move was recommended by the White House Coronavirus Task Force, the notice reads.

"This voluntary self-isolation, out of an abundance of caution, recognizes that New York City is the current epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, with more than 15,000 confirmed cases in New York City alone. Self-isolation for 14 days will help curb the spread of the disease in Chatham and Barnstable County and lessen the stress on our critical infrastructure, including First Responders, Hospitals and Health Care," the notice reads.

"We strongly urge new arrivals to take special steps to distance themselves when buying groceries or undertaking other essential activities in our community; practice social distancing, avoid group gatherings, monitor your health, and contact your Health Care Provider should you feel ill."

COVID-19 Resources:

https://www.chatham-ma.gov/home/pages/covid-19-coronavirus-information

https://www.mass.gov/resource/information-on-the-outbreak-of-coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19

https://www.cdc.gov/

www.mass211.org

Any person who is experiencing symptoms such as a fever, and cough or difficulty breathing is encouraged to self-isolate and call your healthcare provider for medical advice. All persons are urged to maintain social distancing (6 feet from other persons) whenever possible and to wash hands, utilize alcohol-based hand sanitizer, and practice proper respiratory etiquette. High risk individuals, including older adults, those with underlying medical conditions (heart or lung disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, weakened immune system, anyone who is pregnant), are particularly urged to avoid large gatherings.

Chatham residents who have COVID-19 questions or special needs can call the town's Emergency Operations Center at (508) 945-5191 weekdays.
A 51-year-old with suspected coronavirus said he wouldn't wish the illness on his worst enemy as he described his symptoms in a powerful video.

Repairman Andy Hardwick, initially had a cough and a sore throat, but did not have a high temperature.

However, after he went to sleep, he woke up unable to breath and suffering from a fever.

The "normally fit" father-of-two posted a video from his sick bed describing the symptoms at the request of friends and "to make people take it seriously".

Andy Hardwick described his symptoms in a heartbreaking video posted to Facebook / Facebook/ Andy Harwick

"Hi, my friends have asked me to make this video whilst I've got this coronavirus to talk about the signs and symptoms in a bid to make people take it seriously," he said.

"So here it goes. I'm 51, normally fit, down the gym 3 times a week at least... I have asthma occasionally and take the preventative pump.

"It starts with a cough, a very dry cough, and if you're like me it will make your throat sore, you start to feel generally crappy and then your lungs will tighten.

"I didn't have a fever at this stage, but I went to bed thinking it would pass. I woke up a few hours later, not being able to breath properly, temperature, sweaty, clammy, but freezing, I couldn't get warm, I had a raging thirst."

Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures 1 /44 Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures AP Buckingham Palace AP Piccadilly Line tube AP Big Ben AP Millennium bridge AP Wembley Stadium AP St Pancras International train station AP Downing Street AP Victoria Station AP Regent Street AP The Mall leading to Buckingham Palace AP London's National Gallery in Trafalgar Square PA Edinburgh's Royal Mile PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bath PA Bath PA London's Waterloo station PA London Bridge PA London's Canary Wharf Jubilee Line platform PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA London's Buckingham Palace PA London's Tower Bridge PA London's Leicester Square PA London's Millennium Bridge with St Paul's Cathedral PA London's Criterion Theatre PA London's Palace Theatre PA London's Phoenix Theatre PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA Bournemouth beach PA Bath PA Bath PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bournemouth beach PA

Mr Hardwick said the virus left him with a sore neck and spine.

"My spine hurts, my back hurts, my neck hurts. You dont want to talk, you get shortness of breath if you move around, and you dont want to lift your head off a pillow.

It does come in waves, you will feel slight relief sometimes, then it will go  This really hurts, its like nothing Ive ever had before, I wouldnt wish it on my enemy.

Mr Hardwick called 111 and was assessed by a doctor over the phone, who said his symptoms suggested he did have Covid-19.

According to the Guardian, He was instructed to call back if his breathing deteriorated and he was in need of hospital treatment.

Mr Hardwick is not the first suspected coronavirus sufferer to take to social media to describe the symptoms.

Dr David Hepburn, who works at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, south Wales, posted a video online to raise awareness of the virus.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi (center) joins other employees in ringing the Opening Bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as the ride-hailing company Uber makes its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) on May 10, 2019 in New York City.

Gig workers won a landmark protection in the $2 trillion stimulus bill that passed in a unanimous 96-0 vote in the Senate Wednesday. The bill now moves to the House, which is expected to vote Friday.

The bill would allow gig workers, such as Uber and Lyft drivers, as well as freelancers and the self-employed to be eligible to apply for unemployment benefits. It would also add $600 per week for up to four months compared to what beneficiaries normally receive.

"I am thankful that the U.S. Senate has ensured that drivers and delivery peoplealong with all independent workerswill qualify for expanded unemployment insurance under the bipartisan COVID-19 relief package," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on Thursday.

"The 1.3 million Americans who drive and deliver with Uber are facing extraordinary economic challenges. Many are on the front lines of this crisis, keeping their communities moving and getting food to people sheltering indoors," he said. "Those who've lost the opportunity to earn need and deserve this support. I encourage the House to act on this legislation to address this emergency, and I am committed that Uber will do its part to advocate for new laws that permit companies like ours to provide additional benefits for independent workers going forward."

The protection also marks a win for the companies that employ gig workers and rely on them for their businesses to function. Khosrowshahi appealed directly to President Donald Trump and members of Congress to include relief for gig workers whose income has been significantly impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

In a letter to Trump this week, Khosrowshahi advocated for a "third way" to classify workers outside of the binary of employee versus contractor to "to remove the forced choice between flexibility and protection for millions of American workers."

Khosrowshahi's appeal came after the company's fierce opposition to efforts to encourage the firm to treat drivers as full employees. California recently enacted a law that aims to reclassify gig workers as employees, which Uber has challenged in a lawsuit with Postmates and two of its contractors. The reclassification would require companies relying on gig workers to take on costs of full-time employers, such as healthcare benefits.

Advocates for the California law say gig workers at Uber and other firms are clearly core to their businesses and therefore should not meet the requirements of a contractor. But Uber has said their model allows workers to form a schedule that meets their needs and gain supplemental income.

Uber will still have a lot of work ahead of it to convince lawmakers that they should create an entirely new classification for its workers. But in the meantime, the provision in the stimulus bill could set the groundwork for Uber to argue in the future for the government to protect workers where their contractor status leaves them exposed.

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WATCH: Here's how Uber loses money
L ondon shares were deep in the red today, after two days of gains, as data confirmed the world is in a deep recession.

Traders reacted to a awful US jobless claims number which came in at 3.3 million - the worst in history.

Analysts had pencilled in anything from 1 million to 4 million claims, a massive spike from last week when the figure was 281,000.

The magnitude of claims show how extensive the damage to the US economy has been from coronavirus as businesses lay off workers to reduce costs.

One broker said: Make no mistake, this is the big event of the day and has damaged sentiment across the globe. This is the start of awful data and will show what a big a hole the world economy is in.

The UK has its own unemployment problems and early government figures show that applications for universal credit have been up by over half a million in the last nine days.

As a result the FTSE 100 was down 114.11 points at 5574.09 with banks hardest hit, amid fears they could be most damaged by a recession.

Royal Bank of Scotland was off 5% or 6.7p at 124p after Ian Gordon, analyst at Investec, said he could think of no reason for buying the stock. Gordon believes RBS - which is still 62.4% owned by the taxpayer - will be lossmaking in 2020 and that there will be no dividend.

Gordon said: Any notion of a near-term Government sell down appears redundant, in 2020 we now expect RBS to be loss-making and to pause the dividend. It is now for the birds.

HSBC was also in the red for a second day in a row amid worries that there could be a second wave of coronavirus cases in Asia with Japan's capital Tokyo and Hong Kong bracing themselves. Shares were down 4% or 24p at 485p.

Further down the league table and there were some bright spots, including engineering firm Babcock which said it had joined the fight to build ventilators. It comes as yesterday the government ordered 10,000 ventilators from vacuum cleaner-maker Dyson.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock says the NHS needs 30,000 of the ventilators within months to treat coronavirus patients. Babcock shares rose 4p at 375p.

But there were worrying signs for the media industry after Daily Mirror and Daily Express owner Reach said advertising revenue and print circulation would be damaged by coronavirus. Reach sought to calm investors, adding that the company has a robust balance sheet and recently signed a new 4 year revolving banking facility of 65 million.
WASHINGTON, D.C.-- Oregon's delegation to Congress sent a letter to President Donald Trump Wednesday evening asking him to declare a major disaster in the state.

The letter, co-signed by all of Oregon's senators and representatives in the house from both sides of the aisle supports Gov. Kate Brown's original disaster declaration request. If the president decides to declare a major disaster in Oregon, federal money will be freed up to help support individual assistance programs like unemployment assistance.

The letter states:

"No state will be able to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic alone, which is why we urge you to approve Governor Browns full request for assistance."

Trump has already declared major disasters in Texas, Florida, Illinois, Louisana, California, Washington and New York.

To view the letter, click here.
Governments across Europe are turning to technology to track the spread of the coronavirus and monitor people under quarantine, an approach that seeks to learn from Asia but is also putting the region's privacy rules to the test.

From Helsinki to Madrid, applications are being developed for people to report their symptoms to doctors and researchers; to trace and model the spread of the flu-like virus; and ensure that those under quarantine stay at home.

Yet progress has been patchy, there is scant coordination, and privacy advocates caution there is a trade-off between any benefits to public health and digital surveillance that the European Union's privacy rulebook, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), seeks to prevent.

Take Poland: The government has just launched a smartphone app, called Home Quarantine, for citizens returning from abroad who have since March 15 been required to self-isolate for two weeks.

To register, they upload personal details and a photo. They are then sent reminders via text message and should respond within 20 minutes by uploading a new selfie. This is verified by facial recognition and its location stamp is checked against the registered address.

Kamil Pokora, a product manager who has just returned to Gdansk from a holiday in Thailand, said police were checking in on him, as is mandatory. He is also using Home Quarantine, which is voluntary, but finds that it doesn't work properly.

"It has many errors," said Pokora, 37. "I keep getting asked to perform tasks which are not even included in the app. It isn't user friendly."

Poland's Personal Data Protection Office, responsible for enforcing the GDPR, said it was not consulted about Home Quarantine. Spokesman Adam Sanocki said it would monitor the deployment and, should it find irregularities, would take action to ensure personal data are protected.

Asked about the criticisms, Poland's digital ministry said it constantly monitored the system and improved it when necessary, helped by feedback from users.

Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski said on Wednesday the government planned to make Home Quarantine compulsory for everyone under quarantine.

THE ASIAN WAY

Home Quarantine copies the proactive and, so far, effective approach taken by Taiwan, which has just upgraded its arsenal with a mobile phone-based "electronic fence" to keep at-risk individuals at home.

Taiwan, which has one of the lowest coronavirus tolls in Asia, already requires arrivals from abroad to download a questionnaire and report the airport they came from, their 14-day travel history and health symptoms.

Those assessed to have low risk get a text message telling them they are free to travel. Those deemed to pose a risk must self-isolate for 14 days, with their compliance monitored using location data from their smartphones.

Under the GDPR, consent to processing sensitive personal data should be freely given and there are far-ranging constraints on its use. For example, it should not be stored indefinitely or used for another purpose.

Berlin-based privacy expert Frederike Kaltheuner, a tech policy fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, said there needed to be clear evidence tech solutions were worth privacy compromises: "In other words: we need to know that these tools actually work."

In Finland, national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and software developer Futurice are close to launching a web and mobile service for people to report their respiratory symptoms.

The only personal information that people report is their age and postcode, information the app's backers say will help map the spread of the pandemic. The government, while supportive, has not yet officially backed the initiative.

'SPYING LAW'

Elsewhere, governments are rushing to pass emergency laws to allow the use of individual smartphone data to trace contacts and enforce quarantines - even if they haven't yet obtained the technology to do so.

Slovakia this week proposed temporary legislation that would allow individual movements to be tracked for the duration of the pandemic.

This represents a huge infringement of human rights and freedoms, Justice Minister Maria Kolikova told parliament, adding, however, that she believed the right to life was absolute.

Former Prime Minister Robert Fico slammed the legislation as a "spying law".

A proposal by German Health Minister Jens Spahn to allow individual smartphone tracking without a judicial order was blocked by the Social Democrats (SPD), the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition.

"This would be a wide-ranging intrusion into civic rights," said Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht of the SPD.

Germany's leading virologist, Christian Drosten, said the use of individual location data for contact tracing, as in South Korea, would still need to be backed up by well staffed health teams able to interview large numbers of coronavirus victims and trace people who may have been exposed to them.

Germany lacks those resources, and so "for me, the question as to whether we can learn something from them is a bit futile," Drosten, director of the Institute of Virology at Berlin's Charite hospital in Berlin, said in a podcast for NDR radio.

HACKATHONS, GRASSROOTS INITIATIVES

Alarmed by an explosion in infections and fatalities, several countries have launched 'hackathons', or brainstorming sessions where software developers team up to search for new technology solutions.

In hardest-hit Italy, the government has appealed to companies to come forward with solutions, while data scientist Ottavio Crivaro is leading a grassroots appeal for people to donate their data to help map the pandemic.

Experts note some of these problems have already been solved elsewhere - Singapore for example has launched the TraceTogether app that collects smartphone location and Bluetooth data from volunteers to check whether they have been in proximity with someone infected with coronavirus.

A focus on technology may also detract from simpler answers.

India, for example, allows the use of indelible ink to stamp the hands of people in quarantine - a variation on its system to prevent people voting more than once in elections.

"There's often a low-tech solution to these problems," said Edin Omanovic, advocacy director at Privacy International, a non-governmental organisation. "With quarantine, sometimes the best thing is just to go and have a look."

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A new feathered dinosaur that lived in New Mexico 67 million years ago is one of the last known surviving raptor species, according to a new publication in the journal Scientific Reports.

Dineobellator notohesperus adds to scientists' understanding of the paleo-biodiversity of the American Southwest, offering a clearer picture of what life was like in this region near the end of the reign of the dinosaurs.

Steven Jasinski, who recently completed his Ph.D. in Penn's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences, led the work to describe the new species, collaborating with doctoral advisor Peter Dodson of the School of Veterinary Medicine and Penn Arts and Sciences and as well as Robert Sullivan of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque.

In 2008, Sullivan found fossils of the new species in Cretaceous rocks of the San Juan Basin, New Mexico. He, along with his field team of Jasinski and James Nikas, collected the specimen on U.S. federal land under a permit issued by the Bureau of Land Management. The entire specimen was recovered over four field seasons. Jasinski and his coauthors gave the species its official name, Dineobellator notohesperus, which means "Navajo warrior from the Southwest," in honor of the people who today live in the same region where this dinosaur once dwelled.

Dineobellator, as well as its Asian cousin Velociraptor, belong to a group of dinosaurs known as the dromaeosaurids. Members of this group are commonly referred to as "raptor" dinosaurs, thanks to movies such as "Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic World." But unlike the terrifying beasts depicted in film, Dineobellator stood only about 3.5 feet (about 1 meter) at the hip and was 6 to 7 feet (about 2 meters) long--much smaller than its Hollywood counterparts.

Raptor dinosaurs are generally small, lightly built predators. Consequently, their remains are rare, particularly from the southwestern United States and Mexico. "While dromaeosaurids are better known from places like the northern United States, Canada, and Asia, little is known of the group farther south in North America," says Jasinski.

While not all of the bones of this dinosaur were recovered, bones from the forearm have quill nobs--small bumps on the surface where feathers would be anchored by ligaments--an indication that Dineobellator bore feathers in life, similar to those inferred for Velociraptor.

Features of the animal's forelimbs, including enlarged areas of the claws, suggest this dinosaur could strongly flex its arms and hands. This ability may have been useful for holding on to prey--using its hands for smaller animals such as birds and lizards, or perhaps its arms and feet for larger species such as other dinosaurs.

Its tail also possessed unique characteristics. While most raptors' tails were straight and stiffened with rod-like structures, Dineobellator's tail was rather flexible at its base, allowing the rest of the tail to remain stiff and act like a rudder.

"Think of what happens with a cat's tail as it is running," says Jasinski. "While the tail itself remains straight, it is also whipping around constantly as the animal is changing direction. A stiff tail that is highly mobile at its base allows for increased agility and changes in direction, and potentially aided Dineobellator in pursuing prey, especially in more open habitats."

This new dinosaur provides a clearer picture of the biology of North American dromaeosaurid dinosaurs, especially concerning the distribution of feathers among its members.

"As we find evidence of more members possessing feathers, we believe it is likely that all the dromaeosaurids had feathers," says Jasinski. The discovery also hints at some of the predatory habits of a group of iconic meat-eating dinosaurs that lived just before the extinction event that killed off all the dinosaurs that weren't birds.

Jasinski plans to continue his field research in New Mexico with the hope of finding more fossils.

"It was with a lot of searching and a bit of luck that this dinosaur was found weathering out of a small hillside," he says. "We do so much hiking and it is easy to overlook something or simply walk on the wrong side of a hill and miss something. We hope that the more we search, the better chance we have of finding more of Dineobellator or the other dinosaurs it lived alongside."

###

Steven E. Jasinski is a curator of paleontology and geology at the State Museum of Pennsylvania and earned his doctoral degree in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science in the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts and Sciences.

Peter Dodson is a professor of veterinary gross anatomy in the School of Veterinary Medicine and a professor of earth and environmental science in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Robert Sullivan is a research associate at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque.

Jasinski was supported by Geo. L. Harrison and Benjamin Franklin fellowships. The research was also partially funded by a Walker Endowment Research Grant and a University of Pennsylvania Paleontology Research Grant.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, all 6.9 million of Georgias voters will be mailed absentee ballot request forms in an effort to let Georgians vote from home, the office of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a press release Tuesday.
Canberra, March 26 : A new mass bleaching event has occurred at Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the third since 2016, officials said on Thursday.

Recent aerial surveys of the world's largest coral reef system located in northeast Australia has revealed that bleaching was occurring on the reef with varying degrees of severity, Efe news quoted the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) as saying in a statement.

"Some southern areas of the Reef that had little or no bleaching in 2016 and 2017 have now experienced moderate or severe bleaching," the government agency said about the impact of the intense heat of Australia's summer on the reef.

GBRMPA is responsible for the care and protection of the reef which is around 344,000 sq.km in size and has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Corals have a unique symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae called zooxanthellae, which provides them with oxygen and a portion of the organic compounds produced through photosynthesis.

When subjected to environmental stress, many coral reefs expel their zooxanthellae en masse, and coral polyps are left without pigmentation, appearing almost transparent on the white skeleton of the animal, a phenomenon known as bleaching.

Australia, whose government backs coal-fired power and has been criticized for its indifference to climate change, has experienced one of its worst droughts in the last few months and one of the most devastating bushfire seasons in history as well as one of the worst storms in decades, in addition to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Last August, the GBRMPA downgraded its outlook for the corals' health from "poor" to "very poor" and said the target set by the government's Reef 2050 plan to improve water quality had not been achieved.

The government adopted the program, which includes improving water quality among a host of other measures, to prevent the Great Barrier Reef from being put on the World Heritage endangered list.

The 2,300-km-long site is home to 400 types of coral, 1,500 species of fish and 4,000 varieties of molluscs, began to deteriorate in the 1990s due to the double threat of warming water and increased acidity caused by more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued an order Wednesday banning health care facilities ranging from dental offices to hospitals in New Mexico from performing nonessential surgeries and other procedures for the next three months except in cases in which a delay would put a patients health at risk.

The governor cited a dwindling supply of protective gear needed for first responders, nurses and doctors treating coronavirus patients.

Were going to do everything we can  everything  to protect those on the front line of this war against COVID-19, Lujan Grisham said in announcing the order.

The sweeping order applies to hospitals, day-surgery centers, dental, orthodontic and other health care facilities.

It also requires health care providers and facilities to submit their policies on how to comply with the order to the Department of Health within three days and identify which procedures will be deemed essential and which nonessential. Providers were ordered to submit an inventory of their supplies to the state Department of Health.

The ban does not apply to emergency surgeries and other procedures if a delay would present a threat to a patients life; cause permanent damage to the patient; make a medical problem worse; or otherwise put patients at undue risk of permanent harm. It also does not apply to prenatal or postnatal care.

Dr. Jason Mitchell, Chief Medical Officer for Presbyterian Healthcare Services, said the governors decision to postpone all elective procedures is in line with Presbyterians existing approach, and we fully support the decision.

Mitchell said surgeries that have been delayed include bariatric procedures and total joint replacements.

Postponing elective procedures will allow critical staff to be redeployed to other areas of our hospital and minimize the use of PPE, he said.

A spokesman for University of New Mexico Hospital, Mark Rudi, said the hospital has started contacting patients to reschedule surgeries.

Oral surgeons and dentists have been telling patients that procedures are canceled, except in emergency cases.

John Cruickshank, CEO of Lovelace Medical Group, said Lovelace Health System is following the governors new declaration and delaying elective type surgeries and procedures.

While some elective surgical cases can be postponed for a period of time, there are circumstances that require immediate and emergent attention.

He said Lovelace is also following the American College of Surgeons recommendations on elective surgical procedures during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The order was not unexpected. The Department of Health had already issued guidelines suggesting that doctors, dentists and other health care providers delay elective surgeries.

While that was due in part to the threat of catching the virus, there have also been concerns about the stockpile of personal protective gear.

The state has received emergency protective gear from the Strategic National Stockpile, but only 25% of the supplies it requested.

The state said it received nearly 20,000 N95 masks, 47,000 face masks, 8,900 face shields, 7,326 gowns and 26,000 gloves as part of the federal Pandemic All Hazards Preparedness and Innovation Act, but Lujan Grisham said in a statement that the equipment that arrived was in poor condition.

She said the state is working to get more equipment from the federal government, but wants to protect and judiciously use the resources we have now.

A second order issued by the department prohibits health care providers and wholesale medical suppliers from selling or distributing personal protective equipment without prior state approval.

It does not ban the sale of protective gear, such as protective masks, to individuals, but does prohibit the sale of the equipment to out-of-state parties without the Department of Healths approval.

Both orders include administrative civil penalties, including fines of up to $5,000 for each violation.

Journal reporter Colleen Heild contributed to this story.
Controversial author Taslima Nasreen's sequel to her banned work "Lajja" will be published in English next month, more than 10 years after it was written.

In fact, "Shameless" has never been published in its original Bengali, or any other language, until very recently, when a Hindi translation was brought out. It talks about communal tensions in India and the deep scars they leave on individual lives.

According to publishers HarperCollins India, the book is an "explosive sequel" to "Lajja" and an "uncompromising, heart-breaking look at ordinary people's lives in our troubled times".

Nasreen wrote the sequel during the time she lived in Kolkata before she had to leave the city forever. The book has been translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha.

"Lajja" dealt with the alleged persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. At the end of the novel, Suranjan Datta and his family relocated to Kolkata, hoping to find a safe haven.

"Shameless" takes forward the story of Suranjan and his family - his mother Kiranmoyee and his sister Maya - as they struggle to eke out a living in Kolkata, poor, rootless, and the victims of a violence so brutal that it has scarred them forever.

Their inner turmoil is reflected in their relationships. Kiranmoyee lost her husband Sudhamoy, who committed suicide after they moved to Kolkata and were swindled out of all their money.

Suranjan and Maya have both broken off their marriages (to Hindu Bengalis). Suranjan then starts seeing Zulekha, the survivor of a gang rape, while Maya is dating the upwardly mobile Sibohan (whose name she first thought was the Hindu Shovan).

Into their lives comes the real-life Nasreen, living in exile in Kolkata under police protection herself. She tries to understand these people as they try to adapt to their new world, and as she tries to adapt to hers.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi, March 27 : The Congress on Thursday appealed to the party workers across the country to distribute food and medicine kits to the deprived people from the state level to the block level in the wake of the 21-day nationwide lockdown to combat the spread of novel coronavirus (Covid-19).

In a letter to all the state Congress unit chiefs, Congress General Secretary K. C. Venugopal said, "As you are aware, the outbreak of Covid-19 has necessitated stringent measures like complete lockdown for containment and management of virus transmission. Following the high chance of community transmission, the Central government and respective state governments have declared total lockdown in the country for 21 days." He said despite the fact that such a strict measure was the need of the hour, the "hasty implementation" without any proper preparatory protocols has created total chaos in terms of logistic movement of essential supplies across the country.

The Congress leader said that the lack of proper management on the ground has created hurdles for inter-state movement of essential commodities even via platforms of e-commerce sectors. They are facing challenges in delivering essential items such as rice, wheat, pulses, baby food, milk and dairy products, he said.

"The total lockdown will definitely harm the daily wage earners, domestic helps, agricultural labourers and migrant workers," he said, adding, "In this critical time, it is incumbent upon us to ensure the availability of food and medicines to the people who will find difficulties during the lockdown." "In this regard, all state unit chiefs are requested to take urgent measures to distribute food and medicine kits to the deprived people from the state level to the block level on behalf of Congress," he said.

Venugopal said that the food kit may include essential items like rice, wheat, pulses, baby foods.

The distribution of food kits should adhere to the social distancing protocols as demanded by the health experts. Huge gatherings should be avoided at any cost.

His appeal to the party workers comes at a time when the total number of Covid-19 patients in India rose to 677 on Thursday, including 16 deaths.
Ranbir Kapoor, when he started out his career in Bollywood, was known for his boyish charm and innocence. He has also portrayed solid roles and transitioned into a bearded, brooding rock musician in the movie Rockstar, which is one of his most popular movies of all time. No matter how serious his movies are, Kapoor also never fails to make the audience laugh.

Also read: Ranbir Kapoor's 'Barfi': Interesting Trivia About The Anurag Basu Directorial

He fully transformed himself when he was preparing for the movie Sanju. The actor has a strong standing in Bollywood now and has worked in several kinds of movies. The actor is currently preparing for his role in the upcoming superhero movie Brahmastra, which is set to release in 2020. Lets take a look at some of the most hilarious scenes from his films:

Also read: Ranbir Kapoor To Make A Comeback In The Rom-com Genre With THIS Telugu Remake?

Rockstar: Jordan proposes to Heer

There is a scene from the movie where Jordan (Ranbir) has been told that an artists true potential is unlocked when he suffers heartbreak. So he decides to propose to Heer (Nargis). While doing so, he immediately makes a fool of himself. He then heads to the college canteen and talks about his heartbreak to his friend. To which his friend asks him why would he be eating samosas if he was heartbroken, and that he was just faking it.

Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahaani: Prem hides Jenny in his house

This is the scene from the popular 2009 movie, Ajab Premi Ki Ghazab Kahani, where Prem (Ranbir) escorts Jenny (Katrina) to his house after she is stood up by the man she has planned to run away with. In this hilarious scene, Prems father is looking for him. So he arrives at his place sneakily. He then tells his mother to hide Jennifer. There are a lot of funny moments in this entire film, and this is one of them.

Sanju: Sanju is startled by a prisoner

In the movie Sanju, when Sanjay Dutt is sent to jail, he meets a prisoner. The prisoner is seen preparing a shave for a bearded Sanju. The prisoner then tells him, whilst preparing the shaving accessories, that he killed his own wife and cut her into pieces, to which Sanju tells him that he does not need a shave as he will be portraying a man with a full-grown beard in his next movie.

Get the latest entertainment news from India & around the world. Now follow your favourite television celebs and telly updates. Republic World is your one-stop destination for trending Bollywood news. Tune in today to stay updated with all the latest news and headlines from the world of entertainment.
VoteVets, a national progressive veterans group, is supporting Francis Conole in the 24th Congressional District race.

The organization's political action committee announced its endorsement Thursday. Conole, D-Syracuse, is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. John Katko.

"Right now, especially as we are facing one of the greatest challenges in our country in recent history, we need proven leaders like Francis in Washington who know how to overcome tough circumstances and deliver results that always put people first," said Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets PAC. "That's why we are proud to endorse Francis Conole for Congress."

Conole is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and Iraq War veteran. He deployed with Army Special Forces to Iraq where he worked with Iraqi forces and planned for the withdrawal of U.S. Special Forces.

Later in his career, he served as a policy adviser to two defense secretaries, Ash Carter and Jim Mattis, at the Pentagon.

He returned to central New York in 2019. In April, he launched his campaign for Congress.

Conole said he's honored to earn VoteVets' support.

"The global pandemic and national crisis our country is facing prove we need real leadership in Washington that can deliver results that protect the American people," Conole said. "Like so many of my fellow Democratic servicemembers in Congress, I've dedicated my life to serving, protecting and defending our country under the most challenging circumstances."

Conole and Dana Balter are vying for the Democratic nomination in the 24th district, which includes the western part of Oswego County and all of Cayuga, Onondaga and Wayne counties. The congressional primary is Tuesday, June 23.

The winner will face Katko, R-Camillus, in the November general election.

Politics reporter Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding.

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The Kerala government is planning to open more de-addiction centres across the state after being flooded with complaints about irrational behaviour and withdrawal symptoms among tipplers amid the closure of liquor shops and bars in the state due to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.

All bars were closed in the state on Sunday as part of measures put in place to ensure social distancing to check the pandemic in the Kerala, which is among the hardest-hit states by Covid-19 with 126 cases. On Thursday, the state ordered the closure of all liquor stores until 14 April in Kerala. The closure will coincide with the three-week national lockdown imposed from Wednesday to check the spread of the pandemic. It will be the longest for liquor shops in the state since a partial prohibition was revoked in 2017.

Alcohol sales are a major source of revenue for Kerala and the state government drew a lot of flak for letting liquor shops function while non-essential shops were shut.

State excise minister T P Ramakrishnan said the government will provide free treatment at the de-addiction centres. We admit it is a social issue. But our hands are tied now. We can only open more de-addiction wards in the hospitals at this juncture, he said

All district hospitals and medical colleges in the state have de-addiction units.

Police have stepped up security around liquor shops as tipplers continue frequenting them while state excise commissioner G Anantha Krishnan has directed officials to popularise de-addiction vigorously and keep a watch spurious liquor mafias.

We have tightened security for outlets. At the same time we will keep a vigil on hooch traders, said excise commissioner.

Kerala has faced several hooch tragedies when the government has restricted the supply of liquor. In 1982, 77 people were killed in a hooch tragedy in Kochi, and 32 people died in another tragedy in Kollam district in 2000.

The government has explored ways to distribute liquor online but it is difficult to do so because of the lockdown. We have no such plan now. It seems more cumbersome at this juncture, said Ramakrishnan.

Tourism minister Kadakampally Surendran said the sudden closure of booze outlets has created a big social issue. The government always insisted on abstinence, not a blanket ban. Regulars will go to any extent to get their usual kick. We are worried about the social ramifications it has created, he said.

Sensing the problems, the government had earlier exempted liquor from the lockdown restrictions and pushed it to an essential commodities list. The move prompted much criticism from the opposition and prohibition activists.

The government cant encourage liquor like this. It is only interested in money not welfare of its subjects, said former PCC chief and four-time MP V M Sudheeran.

The government had issued directions against long queues outside Kerala State Beverages Corporation (KSBC)-run liquor outlets to ensure social distancing. The customers were asked to use masks and that only five of them can queue up and maintain a distance of one meter between them. But these instructions were hardly followed.

On Wednesday, the government issued directions against long queues outside Kerala State Beverages Corporation (KSBC)-run liquor outlets to ensure social distancing. The customers were asked to use masks and that only five of them can queue up and maintain a distance of one metre between them. But these instructions were hardly followed.

The KSBC sells liquor worth Rs 40 to 45 crore daily. In 2018-19, it sold alcohol worth Rs 14, 508 crore, according to State Beverages Corporation statistics. Excise duty on liquor in the state is between 300% and 500% and the closure of liquor shops has hit the government revenues hard. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan justified the move to keep the liquor shops open on Monday citing social issues if they were closed.

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We are very pleased to acquire The Homer Laughlin China Co., and Hall China Company brands for the hospitality market," said Steelite International president and CEO John Miles

Steelite International (Steelite), the world-leading manufacturer and supplier of award-winning tableware and buffet solutions for the hospitality industry, announced today the acquisition of The Homer Laughlin China Company  Foodservice Division and the Hall China Company  Foodservice Division from The Homer Laughlin China Company. The former Homer Laughlin and Hall China manufacturing operations will now collectively be known as The Fiesta Tableware Company. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Steelite will take over the manufacture and sales of key product lines from Homer Laughlin and Hall Chinas foodservice offerings. Customers can expect most dealer partners to stay the same, and all representation will be conducted through Steelite's network. Its vast international reach will put the Homer Laughlin name on foodservice tables worldwide.

Homer Laughlin's iconic retail line, Fiesta, will not be part of the sale and will continue to be manufactured at the existing plant in Newell, West Virginia. Fiesta, will be sold exclusively to the foodservice market by Steelite International.

Elizabeth Wells McIlvain, president of The Homer Laughlin China Company, said, "We want our customers to know they are in good hands with Steelite. Both companies are working hard to make this a seamless transition." She added, "We started our foodservice division in the late 1950s, and it's been a rewarding 60+ years. We especially thank all of our foodservice customers who have supported us and helped make Homer and Hall what are widely considered iconic brands. To these customers, you will still be able to get these products, but through Steelite's rep channel and dealers. Finding a powerhouse brand like Steelite was important to us as we transitioned to focus on Fiesta and its considerable retail influence.

McIlvain said the Wells family entered into the sale of the foodservice division to be able to focus exclusively on the popular and colorful line of retail dinnerware that has been an American standard and one of the most celebrated American retail brands since 1936.

We are very pleased to acquire The Homer Laughlin China Co., and Hall China Company brands for the hospitality market," said Steelite International president and CEO John Miles. "In working with the Wells family, we understood we needed a creative solution since we were only acquiring a portion of the business. We took a step back to analyze the situation and came up with an imaginative and collaborative plan that achieved both parties' goals, which were for Steelite to acquire and sell HLC and Hall China brands to the Americas foodservice market and for Fiesta's production to stay in America at the current HLC facility on the Ohio River. As we take over the manufacturing of the foodservice ranges, our number one priority at Steelite will be to supply HLC and Hall China customers with the same quality, durability, and body composition the brands are known for in our industry."

McIlvain said, "The decision to sell the foodservice division was very difficult for the Wells family, and we deliberated and considered it thoughtfully. We wanted to find a home for our foodservice customers with a manufacturer who could take on the reputation for excellence and the beloved shapes and patterns that we've been proud to manufacture for more than 60 years. Steelite is that company."
What do you say to Americans who are watching you who are scared?"

That question by an NBC News reporter at a recent White House coronavirus briefing, presented Donald J. Trump with an opportunity to soothe an anxious nation.

Instead, the president did what he often does: attack.

I say that you are a terrible reporter, Trump replied, berating him for the nasty question..

Not until the next days briefing did Trump attempt a message of encouragement for the American people. But his wooden delivery underscored a depressing notion. We the people seem a distant priority to his own self interest.

Its natural for a president to nurse national morale and try to kindle hope by emphasizing the positive. But theres nothing reassuring about ignorance, about reckless disregard of the facts and the people within his own administration sounding alarms. Trumps constant contradicting of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other health experts signals discord that can lead to panic  and further damage the economy Trump is so desperately trying to protect.

While Trumps narcissism, his vigil of self-protection and self-promotion, is sometimes palatable in politics and his bluster is often mothers milk to Wall Street, its not healthy for the national character.

Against a pandemic, its profoundly dangerous.

The man who bragged he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose votes seems intent on testing that theory. As COVID-19 cases spike  Wednesday was the deadliest in the U.S., CNN reported, with fatalities at 926 by evening and total cases reaching 65,385  tens of thousands or more of our fellow Americans could die because of his hubris.

Yes, he acted swiftly in halting travel from China. But throughout the crisis, Trump has become more animated about losses to the S&P 500 than loss of life. He seems more concerned with his political vulnerability than that of the U.S. health system. He frames this national challenge as us versus them, casting governors pleading for federal help as failures.

He now says he always knew the virus was serious but he communicated the opposite for weeks, delaying urgent preparations. Things were totally under control, he claimed. Cases were going down, not up, he said. They would disappear in hotter weather by April, he asserted without a scintilla of proof.

He falsely insisted a vaccine was close at hand. He has peddled the idea of a malaria drug as a miracle antidote, setting off a scramble for prescriptions thats caused a nationwide shortage for lupus patients and others with legitimate need. An Arizona man died after attempting to self-medicate after hearing Trump tout the drug.

Now, Trump is itching to cast aside federal social distancing guidelines that experts insist are Americas only hope of containing this virus.

We have to get back to work, Trump said this week, suggesting it could happen by Easter.

We cant give this virus free rein in Sunday pews, assembly lines and office tower elevators. Economies can recover. Dead people cant.

Trump supporters who have chosen to disregard his moral deficits in a trade-off for tax cuts, conservative judges and immigration crackdowns must now prioritize the fate of the country they surely love.

The other day, upon learning that Republican political foe Sen. Mitt Romney was self-quarantining, our president responded on national television, Gee, thats too bad. Is this the voice of the leader we require?

America is facing a crisis like no other in our history.

In Trumps orbit, the adults with the wisdom and the duty-bound conscience to try and rein him in have dwindled. Those left have limited power.

I cant jump in front of the microphone and push him down, Fauci said in a recent interview with Science magazine.

Faucis attempts to correct the record after Trumps misrepresentations and exaggerations have been answered by Trumps blithe assertions that the doctors are simply overreacting.

It seems futile to hope an honest, responsible leader will emerge in Trump, that he will marshal Americas vast resources in science, logistics and human capital with the skill needed to stave off disaster.

But for now, despite his rhetoric, Trumps actions suggest hes heeding advisers on big calls. In a press conference Wednesday, he agreed to be flexible on his Easter goal: Im not going to do anything rash, or hastily, he said. I dont do that.

Thank you to the advisers who talked him off that ledge. Please continue to neutralize his short-sighted instincts and nudge him toward a responsible course.

Other leaders, continue stepping up. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is winning accolades for his daily briefings, and the governors of California, Washington and New Jersey have also been at the forefront to fight the spread of coronavirus. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has urged Trump to stay the course on social distancing.

Locally, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez and health director Dr. Umair Shah are leading the charge. Gov. Greg Abbott has mostly ceded leadership to locals, unacceptable when lives are at stake statewide.

This moment requires selfless leadership and compassion for the vulnerable. The president is failing us.

Were counting on the local, state and public health officials leading out front and behind the scenes to fill the void.
Nancy Pelosi predicted Thursday that upcoming relief packages will likely include more direct checks for Americans to address fallout from the coronavirus outbreak.

'I don't think we've seen the end of direct payments,' the House Speaker told reporters during a briefing on Capitol Hill.

The $2.2 trillion bill that passed Wednesday night in the Senate includes a measure that will send direct payments of $1,200 to most Americans making less than $75,000.

Pelosi asserted her confidence that the coronavirus relief package will easily pass in the House on Friday.

'Tomorrow we will bring the bill to the floor. It will pass  it will pass with a strong bipartisan support,' she vowed, adding that while some lawmakers' objections would be noted, the bill would still land on the president's desk by the end of the week.

'We will have a victory tomorrow for America's workers,' she lauded during her weekly briefing.

The bills passage in the Senate Wednesday and Pelosis vow for more checks for Americans comes as U.S. employment claims surged to 3.28 million last week  four times the previous all-time-high.

Three million people filed claims between March 14 and March 21, according to a report that was released by the Department of Labor on Thursday morning, shattering President Donald Trump's record-breaking unemployment lows.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that Americans would likely see more direct checks in future economic stimulus packages. 'I don't think we've seen the end of direct payments,' she said

The $1,200 will be sent to Americans as thousands have lost their jobs or are unable to work  causing a spike in unemployment to nearly 3 million new claims

Unemployment claims spiked in the last week, raising from record low levels to nearly 3.3 million out of a job due to the coronavirus outbreak, the Department of Labor revealed in a report Thursday

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin argued on CNBC during a call-in interview that the unemployment number is 'not relevant'

The Senate passage comes as the number of coronavirus cases in the U.s. skyrocketed over the last week, nearing 70,000 by Thursday morning

In the week ending March 14, the number of initial unemployment claims was 282,000 - meaning 3,001,000 new ones have been filed since then.

Before the virus hit, unemployment in the U.S. was at its lowest in 60 years and the economy was stronger than it had ever been.

Pelosi signaled Wednesday night that she is prepared to move the massive economic stimulus package swiftly through the lower chamber before the end of the week after the Senate voted unanimously to pass the bill.

She told reporters Wednesday night, following the 96-0 Senate vote, that she would like to see 'a good debate on the floor' over the more than $2 trillion relief package.

She added Thursday that Democrats had to do 'jiu jitsu on the bill' to get it ready for passage in the Senate.

The House Speaker, whose 80th birthday is Thursday, also said Wednesday that if any lawmaker asked for a recorded vote rather than a voice vote procedure, which would force the lower chamber back into session, that she would move to change the rules to allow 'proxy voting.'

This change would give a small group of lawmakers the power to vote on behalf of the larger group of congressmen and women on the floor.

'If somebody calls for a recorded vote, and once they know we have options [to pass the bill], they probably won't call for it,' Pelosi told a gaggle Wednesday night, which was pooled by Washington Post reporter Paul Kane due to social distancing.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced the chamber will consider the stimulus bill on Friday morning.

'Members are advised that the House will convene at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, March 27, 2020 to consider the bill,' Hoyer's office released in a statement Wednesday night.

'Members are further advised that due to the limited flight options, Members participating in self-quarantine, and several states mandating stay-at-home orders, we expect the bill to pass by voice vote on Friday,' he continued.

A voice vote is where lawmakers shout 'aye' or 'nay' on the chamber floor  and House leadership is hoping the 'ayes' will far outweigh the 'nays.'

Assuming everything goes off without a hitch, the House will pass the bill Friday and send the package to Donald Trump's desk for signature.

The Senate isn't scheduled to hold its next vote until April 20, but McConnell said Wednesday night in his floor remarks that lawmakers had to be 'nimble' to potentially come back into session before then  adding he would give senators 24 hours' notice before reconvening.

The almost 900-page measure is the largest economic relief bill in U.S. history, and both parties were desperate for quick passage as the coronavirus cases in the country skyrocketed over the last week and thousands of Americans lost their jobs and paychecks.

The $2.2 trillion package includes setting aside $500 billion to give direct payments to most Americans making less than $75,000 and expands unemployment benefits as the rates skyrocketed in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.

The Senate finally approved the massive coronavirus relief package 96-0 Wednesday night. 'It's a proud moment for the Senate,' Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin dismissed the 3.3 million unemployment figure as irrelevant as he argued Thursday that the rescue package being voted on in Congress will help alleviate joblessness.

'I just think these numbers right now are not relevant,' Mnuchin told CNBC when he called in to talk to the network about measures being taken to combat the coronavirus' effect on the economy.

'Obviously there are people who have jobless claims and, again, the good thing about this bill is the president is protecting these people, so you know, now with these plans, small businesses will hopefully be able to hire back a lot of these people,' he argued.

He also pointed out there are job opportunities out there.

'By the way, you know, lots of big, big companies do continue to hire for obviously grocery stores, pharmacies, you know, delivery services. These companies are on overtime, so I know they are hiring people as fast as they can,' he said.

The previous high unemployment was 695,000 in October 1982. The Labor Department report says service industries - specifically food and accommodation - are the hardest hit but adds that claims are also coming from the healthcare industry and from people who work in manufacturing, entertainment and arts.

Mnuchin added that the coronavirus relief bill is Trump's way of 'protecting' workers and claims the checks will be in people's bank accounts in three weeks.

'Most of these will be direct deposit,' Mnuchin told CNBC. 'It will be within three weeks.'

'We're determined to get money in people's pockets immediately,' he continued.

The Treasury secretary added that the coronavirus relief bill is Trump's way of 'protecting' workers.

The bill also provides a $367 billion program for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home and allocates $10 billion to help airlines struggling as travel restrictions are imposed.

The U.S. death toll reached 823 on Wednesday

Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky, Mitt Romney and Mike Lee of Utah and John Thune of South Dakota are all self-isolating over fears of coronavirus  the reason for the 96-person vote in the Senate.

Paul announced Sunday that he tested positive for the fast-spreading respiratory disease.

The package was also delayed at the last-minute, according to statements from aides from both parties, when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he wanted loans for businesses to be publicized every seven days.

Wednesday night, after the GOP-backed package had already been blocked by Democrats twice this week, the bill was passed.

'It's a proud moment for the Senate,' McConnell told Politico. 'We responded to the way the American people are acting among themselves by helping each other and putting whatever past grievances they have behind and trying to work together to get this behind us.'

Trump also touted the Senate passage in a tweet after midnight, writing: '96-0 in the United States Senate. Congratulations AMERICA!'

Democrats are preparing to present a fourth coronavirus stimulus package next week  and Pelosi is promising more relief for Americans in the form of a direct checks, especially in light of the surge in those losing their jobs or out of work.

The highest number of new unemployment claims was in Pennsylvania, where there were more than 360,000. California saw an increase of 130,000 and there was an increase of 180,000 in Ohio.

Fed Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, in an interview on NBC's 'Today Show Thursday, acknowledged that 'significant' rises in unemployment were ahead but argued that would pass when the virus was under control.

'You may well see, you know, significant rises in unemployment, significant declines in economic activity,' he said. 'But there can also be a good rebound on the other side of that and that's actually one of the main things we're trying to do by assuring the flow of credit in the economy and keeping rates low is to assure that that rebound, when it does come, is as vigorous as possible.'

Powell said he's looking to the second half of the year for the economy to turn back around.

'The sooner we get through this period and get the virus under control the sooner the recovery can come,' he said. 'I would expect the economic activity to resume and move back up in the second half of the year, very hard to say precisely when that will be and it will really depend on the spread of the virus. The virus is going to dictate the timetable here.'

Coronavirus has now killed more than 1,000 people in America and 20,000 around the world since November  and the number of confirmed cases in the U.S. continues to skyrocket, showing no sign of slowing.
The head teacher has spoken to her parents this morning and she is starting to be able to sit up and move around for short periods of time, the letter from the school read.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 26

Trend:

In accordance with the recommendations of the World Health Organization and the Operational Headquarters under the Cabinet of Ministers to curb the coronavirus pandemic in Azerbaijan, the Justice Ministry continues the necessary preventive measures, as well as disinfection, Trend reports with reference to the ministry.

The penitentiary and medical services of the ministry have switched to an enhanced working regime.

Meetings with those convicted and accused, as well as the transfer of parcels to them are not allowed. The health status of employees, as well as prisoners, is under medical supervision, a medical examination is carried out daily, and their temperature is checked. They have no health problems.

The situation is regularly examined by monitoring groups consisting of employees of the ministry and civil society representatives.

At the same time, within the framework of the states humane policy, the Commission on parole and transfer to institutions with a softer regime of detention continued its activities on holidays. During the meetings of the Commission held online, the cases of prisoners were examined, conversations were held with them, and materials about persons meeting the requirements of the law were immediately sent to court.

In order to protect the rights of prisoners, the on-duty judges urgently examined these cases, as a result of which 200 convicts were released early.

This humane step of the state was greeted with joy and gratitude by both relatives and the prisoners themselves. The Ministry of Justice continues measures in this direction.
A teenager at Harris Countys juvenile detention center has tested positive for COVID-19 and is being treated on site, officials said Thursday.

The child is under the age of 16 and has been detained at the facility since late 2019, said Kendall Mayfield, a spokesperson for the downtown center.

All children housed on the fifth floor with the teen  she indicated there are 12 to 15  have been quarantined, she said. A courts official said the patient is believed to be male.

The child exhibited symptoms and was tested for the novel coronavirus on Monday and is being treated on the premises by staff wearing protective equipment, Mayfield said.

Like other places, we dont have enough PPE, she said, referring to personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves.

We currently do have enough staff to meet the needs, she said. The facility has cleaned the premises and is screening all people entering and exiting the building for symptoms, according to Mayfield.

We are monitoring the kids on the quarantined floor closely and nurses are making rounds to see how kids are feeling, she said.

Mayfield said staff were notified, as were parents of children who potentially had contact with the youth.

The citys public health department recommended the juvenile lockup quarantine affected units, carefully monitor children and screen staff for symptoms of the virus.

Leaders at four advocacy groups  Texans Care for Children, Texas Appleseed, Intercultural Development Research Association and the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition  wrote Gov. Greg Abbott on March 19 seeking action based on concerns that children in juvenile facilities would be exposed.

Kate Murphy, a senior child welfare policy associate at Texans Care for Children, said cases like the teens pose a problem when it comes to following protocol for social distancing.

The risk of coronavirus spreading in juvenile facilities is substantial as its difficult if not impossible to properly quarantine kids in these group settings and keep the staff and other kids safe, she said. To address these safety issues, Texas leaders should stop putting new children in detention, plan to transition youth currently in detention back home or to another, safer alternative, and finally, ensure youth have access to the care and services they need to ensure safety after returning to their community.

gabrielle.banks@chron.com
business Gold price today: Yellow metal tests 42,000; buy on dips, say experts Gold is expected to trade on a positive note, with marginal volatility in the counter, say experts.
Karl Stefanovic and Jasmine Yarbrough are facing the grim reality of welcoming a child into the world during a coronavirus lockdown.

And on Thursday, the Today show host revealed his pregnant wife was concerned about him being exposed to COVID-19 at Channel Nine's Sydney studios.

'She's really worried about me bringing it back to the house [from work], so I'm taking as many precautions as I can,' he told The Kyle and Jackie O Show.

Scroll down for video

Health fears: Karl Stefanovic's pregnant wife, Jasmine Yarbrough, is 'really worried' he'll bring COVID-19 into their home. She is expecting a baby girl in 11 weeks' time

While Jasmine has been self-isolating at home, Karl has been hosting the Today show each morning at Nine's headquarters in Willoughby.

'She's more worried than anyone, being pregnant,' Karl said. 'I've got to be really cautious out there. It's a real worry for anyone.'

On a lighter note, Karl joked about running out of toilet paper and the 'hard stuff' - meaning alcohol - because he refused to 'panic buy' weeks ago.

'Jasmine's got cravings, she's not far away from giving birth, so there's so much s**t food at home. It's unbelievable. I can't not eat it!' he said.

Jasmine told The Daily Telegraph in February she was craving 'all kinds of ice cream' during her pregnancy.

Duties: While Jasmine has been self-isolating at home, Karl has been hosting the Today show each morning at Nine's headquarters in Willoughby. Pictured with Allison Langdon

Photos taken of Jasmine in a swimsuit in Byron Bay on December 14 confirmed speculation the couple were expecting their first child together.

Karl later announced the news via Instagram by writing: 'After a great deal of speculation...the rumours are true.'

They are having a baby girl. Jasmine is believed to be 29 weeks pregnant.

Happily ever after: In December, Karl and Jasmine celebrated their one-year anniversary after tying the knot in Los Cabos, Mexico, in late 2018. Pictured on their wedding day

Exes: Karl and Jasmine began dating in late 2016, five months after he had separated from his first wife, Cassandra Thorburn, following 21 years of marriage. Pictured in 2011

Karl and Jasmine began dating in late 2016, five months after he had separated from his first wife, Cassandra Thorburn, following 21 years of marriage.

The former couple share three children: Jackson, 20, River, 12, and Ava, 14.

In December, Karl and Jasmine celebrated their one-year anniversary after tying the knot at Mexico's five-star One&Only Palmilla resort in late 2018.

As of late Thursday morning, there are 2,675 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia, including 11 deaths
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday filed its first price gouging lawsuit amid the coronavirus crisis, alleging a company illegally drove up prices for health-related products.

After Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster on March 13, Auctions Unlimited, LLC, listed an auction on its website for over 750,000 face masks as well as N95 particulate respirator masks, hand soap, all-purpose cleaner and disinfectant wipes, according to the attorney generals office.

On March 24, bidding on N95 respirator masks pushed listings as high as $180 for a package of 16 masks. According to the suit, the company typically sells these masks at auction for $10 to $20 a box.

The Houston-based companys owner, Tim Worstell, denied the attorney generals claims on Thursday. Customers determine prices, he said, not auctioneers.

We believe that the attorney general is 100 percent wrong, Worstell said. Its a shame, because the buyers of these masks need these masks today.

American hospitals are experiencing severe shortages of such supplies as they race to treat rising numbers of positive COVID-19 patients. Many are scrambling to buy more, asking the public to donate or make masks at home, reusing them or using substitutes that arent fully protective. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in an unprecedented move this month recommended nurses use bandannas or scarves in place of masks as a last resort.

Worstell admitted to receiving warnings from both local police and the Texas Attorney General but moved forward anyway, according to the office. The company made $154,000 in sales over these auctions and Worstell personally made as much as $40,000.

The penalty for price gouging in Texas is a fine of up to $10,000 per violation with an additional penalty of up to $250,000 if the affected consumers are elderly.

The Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act expressly prohibits anyone from selling necessary items at an excessive price when a disaster is declared and, despite repeated warnings from law enforcement, that is exactly what weve seen Auctions Unlimited do, Paxton said in a statement. My office will not tolerate anyone taking advantage of Texans in need and profiting from this health crisis.

The state is seeking a jury trial and ultimately to block the company from making further sales of products intended to protect against the spread of COVID-19.

Worstell said that he doesnt view the sales as profiteering, saying that all of his companys products start at $1. Auctions Unlimited, which specializes in liquidation sales for other businesses, has sold the masks since mid-2018.

He said he asked the sellers to consider donating the equipment, and some did. Others wouldnt, and Worstell went ahead with the auction. He ended up selling to 204 buyers, he said.

This wasnt an easy decision by any means, Worstell said.

After closing the sale, Worstell waited to send out the masks because he said he wanted definitive instructions from the attorney generals office. In the terms and conditions of the auction, he informed the buyers that no sale was final until he received approval from the state, he said.

In the meantime, Worstell said he assumes the masks will sit unused in a warehouse  as they have for days  until the dispute is resolved.

Theyre going to sit here collecting dust because of these games, he said.

Texans who believe they have encountered price gouging can call the Attorney Generals toll-free complaint line at 800-621-0508 or file a complaint online at txoag.force.com/CPDOnlineForm.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The Bac Lieu wind farm in the Mekong Delta region

According to state power authority Electricity of Vietnam (EVN), early this year the country was home to nine wind power projects already in commercial operation with a combined capacity touching 370MW.

In addition, 31 projects with a combined capacity of 1,645MW have signed power purchase agreements (PPAs) but have yet to come on stream and 59 other projects (2,700MW) were added to the power planning to 2025 but have yet to sign PPAs.

Dozens of wind power projects are in the investment preparation phase in the central region, the Central Highlands, and the Mekong Delta, pursuing commencing operation before November 1, 2021 to become eligible for the preferential feed-in-tariff (FiT) regulated in the prime ministers Decision No.39/2018/QD-TTg amending and supplementing some articles of Decision No.37/2011/QD-TTg on the scheme to support wind power projects in Vietnam.

In light of Decision 39, the new level of FiT will be VND1,928 (8.5 US cents) per kWh for wind power projects on the mainland and VND2,223 (9.8 US cents) per kWh for offshore projects.

The rates are applied to wind power plants connecting to the national grid and beginning generation before November 1, 2021.

The move came eight years after the FiT of 7.8 US cents per kWh was introduced, which is said to be too low for investors to overcome perceived risks.

Commenting on the advantages of wind power over solar power, Bui Van Thinh, chairman of the Binh Thuan Wind Power Association and chairman and general director of Thuan Binh Wind Power JSC which operates Phu Lac wind farm, the usage coefficient of wind power on the power grid hovers at around 30-35 per cent [of the total number of hours yearly] compared to just 20 per cent of solar power.

Wind power is available around the day and uses less land area, at about 0.35 hectare per MW compared to 1.2ha per MW for solar power.

Due to diverse factors, both objective and subjective, many wind power projects, however, are facing cost overruns and are threatened by delays, making it difficult for them to reach the target of starting commercial operation before the November 1, 2021 benchmark.

Due to diverse factors, both objective and subjective, many wind power projects, however, are facing cost overruns and are threatened by delays, making it difficult for them to reach the target of starting commercial operation before the November 1, 2021 benchmark.

Even with the new rate of 8.5 US cents per kWh for on-shore projects, investors would reap profit only if their project has good wind potential, reasonable loan sources, and suitable equipment, Thinh commented.

Based on the experience from deploying Phu Lac wind farm, Thinh said that executing wind power projects is more complex than solar power projects as, besides the need for a solid foundation to ensure stable operation for more than 20 years, developers need specialised cranes to install super-long and heavy-lift equipment  sometimes at the height of 100m or above.

It usually takes 12-18 months to implement a wind power project on average while solar projects take only 5-12 months, Thinh added.

Another challenge was mentioned by Le Anh Tung, board chairman of Ecotech which has just kicked-off the construction of a wind power project in the Mekong Delta province of Soc Trang, who said there are only a few wind turbine manufacturers across the globe.

This, coupled with the trend of building sizeable wind power farms in countries around the world, pushes up equipment pricing and delivery time.

According to Scott Powers, Southeast Asia business director of Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Vietnam, a high-profile player in this field, wind power projects are robustly developing in regional markets like Taiwan and South Korea, heating up competition with Vietnamese investors.

If an order was placed in March 2020, it would need about a year for the wind turbine to be delivered, he said.

With only 18 months left until the November 1 deadline, a one-year waiting time for wind turbines makes reaching the deadline a primary concern for wind power investors.

These factors explain wind power project investors recent proposals to extend the deadline until the end of 2022.

Jean Francois Pierre Peron, managing director of The Blue Circle Vietnam Ltd., which operates in the green energy field, suggested that if the preferential FiT was extended by a year, the announcement should be made this late March.

If the announcement came later, investors would lack clarity and would be forced to take risks when placing an order for wind turbines, as well as encountering difficulties in securing licenses and conducting further auxiliary studies, he noted.
Spain has become the second country to record more coronavirus deaths than China, with its death toll soaring past the nation where COVID-19 was first detected.

On Wednesday, Spain recorded a further 738 deaths, its highest daily total, and brought the nations death toll to 3434. It has since risen further to 3,647, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

The country now sits only behind Italy in regards to the most coronavirus deaths, with Spains European counterpart recording 7,503 deaths.

Chinas death toll sits at 3285 and has rapidly slowed following stringent lockdown measures not only in the original epicentre of Hubei but across mainland China.

The escalating pandemic has brought life to a virtual standstill across multiple European countries as healthcare systems, including Spains, struggle to cope with the influx of coronavirus patients.

Nursing homes across the country have been overwhelmed by cases and in similar scenes to those that have occurred in Italy in the past week authorities are struggling to deal with the sheer amount of bodies.

Ice rink turned into makeshift morgue

In a sign of the countrys desperation, authorities were forced to transform an ice rink in Madrid into a makeshift morgue.

Police stood guard on Wednesday outside the capital's Palacio de Hielo rink, normally a popular venue for children's birthday parties, as hearses and ambulances arrived at the building.

A fleet of red vans have been pictured delivering bodies to the ice rink over the past few days.

Red vans drop off bodies to the makeshift morgue on Tuesday. Source: Getty

Workers in full protective gear wait to receive bodies at the ice rink. Source: Getty

Images from Spains hospitals almost mirror those from Italy, with intensive care units at capacity and resources stretched to its limit.

Spain has been left with no choice but to undergo a widespread lockdown as cases soared to just shy of 50,000 on Wednesday (local time).

Madrid has been the worst hit city, logging roughly a third of all Spanish cases.

In one shocking development, Spanish soldiers discovered the bodies of elderly people abandoned inside nursing homes.

Story continues

Streets across the nations major cities such as Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia are unrecognisably empty.

Fire engines and tractors have been deployed to spray disinfectant along streets in a bid to safeguard public spaces.

Authorities began to carry out mass testing for public workers in a requisitioned fairground in Madrid, one of the worst-hit regions.

Lack of equipment and ventilators

Spanish medical staff, who themselves account for thousands of infected cases, have taken out lawsuits against the government, complaining of the lack of basic protective equipment like masks, scrubs and gloves.

The Spanish army has asked NATO for ventilators, protective gear and testing kits, Armed Forces Chief Miguel Villarroya said on Wednesday.

A female patient is transferred in Madrid. Source: AP

The government had ordered 432 million euros ($800 million) worth of masks, gloves, testing kits and ventilators to be delivered over the next eight weeks, with the first large batch expected this week, Health Minister Salvador Illa said.

However despite their 11th day of lockdown where most services have closed while gatherings are banned, there is little sign the exponential growth of cases slowing down.

Yet there is hope their measures, despite not being viewed as draconian as Chinas, will prove to be as successful as the Asian powerhouses measures.

Chinas meticulous approach to the outbreak has allowed the province of Hubei to begin easing restrictions and pencil in April 8 as a date Wuhan, where the majority of deaths in China occurred, will be slowly lifted out of lockdown.

"We have achieved a near total reduction in social contact," health emergency chief Fernando Simon told a news conference, adding that Spain was nearing the peak of the epidemic.

Orgies and dog walking: Police crackdown on restriction breaches

And while the majority of Spaniards are cooperating, the Civil Guard police force warned on Wednesday as it sanctioned a man who had repeatedly tried to rent his dogs out via Facebook so that people could walk them.

A Barcelona street completely empty under the lockdown. Source: AP

Among the exemptions for Spains 46 million people during the restrictions is dog walking.

"The man was advertising activities which implied people leaving their homes to rent dogs, or walk rented dogs," said a police spokeswoman in the northeastern Galicia region.

"That would be infringing the decree that only permits going outdoors for work, groceries, walking your dog or pharmacy visits."

The man faces a possible fine of between 500 and 5,000 euros.

In one flagrant case, eight men were arrested in central Barcelona on Friday for "crime against public health" after they were found engaged in a drug-fuelled orgy.

The vast majority of Spaniards have complied with lockdown and social distancing recommendations, spawning dozens of confinement-related hashtags, social media trends or balcony singing as people seek to connect with and amuse one another.

With Reuters

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YEREVAN, MARCH 26, ARMENPRESS. Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan visited the National Security Service on March 26 and convened a working consultation there.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Artsakh President's Office, issues relating to the complex measures taken for preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus, as well as forthcoming state elections were on the consultation agenda. Particular attention was drawn to the activities of the national security structures aimed at ensuring the states and peoples security, protection of every society member, defense of legitimate interests and rights of citizens.

The Head of the State also underlined that during the state elections all measures should be taken to secure the health of the population. President Sahakyan highlighted the active participation of the national security servicemen in the solution of the set tasks within their powers
Donald Trump and his administration are said to have 'ignored' the advice of the National Security Council's 2016 pandemic 'playbook'.

The 69 page guide used a color-coded step-by-step plan to urge buying masks early on, told government to adopt a 'unified message' and instructed them to question testing capabilities, Politico reports.

A series of missteps at the nations top public health agency caused a critical shortage of reliable laboratory tests for the coronavirus, hobbling the federal response, an Associated Press review found.

Doctors and nurses are now so desperate for personal protective equipment amid the viral pandemic that theyve turned to the public for help in making them, saying do-it-yourself face masks are better than nothing.

And the president has spent the last week going against the advice of medical experts and suggesting the lockdown could be lifted as soon as Easter.

Trump told Fox News: 'Nobody ever expected a thing like this.'

Donald Trump, pictured Wednesday, and his administration are said to have 'ignored' the advice of the National Security Council's 2016 pandemic 'playbook'

The 69 page guide used a color-coded step-by-step plan to urge buying masks early on, told government to adopt a 'unified message' and instructed them to question testing capabilities

A spokesman for the NSC told Politico: 'We are aware of the document, although its quite dated and has been superseded by strategic and operational biodefense policies published since.

'The plan we are executing now is a better fit, more detailed, and applies the relevant lessons learned from the playbook and the most recent Ebola epidemic in the [Democratic Republic of the Congo] to COVID-19.'

A health department spokesperson said the current strategy is dictated by more recent guides.

But the handbook asks early one: 'Is there sufficient personal protective equipment for healthcare workers who are providing medical care?'

It adds: 'Early coordination of risk communications through a single federal spokesperson is critical.

'We recommend early budget and financial analysis of various response scenarios and an early decision to request supplemental funding from Congress, if needed.

'What is our level of confidence on the case detection rate? Is diagnostic capacity keeping up?'

It emerged earlier this month that President Trump ignored warnings from US intelligence agencies about the threat of a coronavirus pandemic, according to a report in The Washington Post.

One intelligence official and several Trump Administration officials spoke to the publication on the condition of anonymity, claiming the President downplayed the COVID-19 threat in spite of growing anxiety from aides and members of his own cabinet throughout January and February.

'Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were  they just couldn't get him to do anything about it,' one official stated, adding: 'The system was blinking red.'

Officials were first alerted to reports about cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China on January 3, after a director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spoke with Chinese colleagues.

'Ominous, classified warnings' purportedly put together by the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence began to increase over the course of the month.

'There was obviously a lot of chatter in January,' one of the officials told The Post.

Despite this, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar had trouble contacting Trump until January 18.

Two officials told The Post that when Azar finally got a hold of Trump over the phone and attempted to discuss the coronavirus, 'the President interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market'.

On January 27, several aides are reported to have gone to office of White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to urge that senior officials do more about the threat of coronavirus.

Mulvaney soon began setting up regular meetings about COVID-19, but Trump was allegedly 'dismissive' in the initial phases 'because he did not believe that the virus had spread widely throughout the United States.'

As coronavirus continued to spread in February, and US agencies tracked its spread around the globe, Trump continued to publicly downplay the threat.

A spokesperson for White House spokesperson told The Post in a statement: 'President Trump has taken historic, aggressive measures to protect the health, wealth and safety of the American people  and did so, while the media and Democrats chose to only focus on the stupid politics of a sham illegitimate impeachment.

'Its more than disgusting, despicable and disgraceful for cowardly unnamed sources to attempt to rewrite history  its a clear threat to this great country.'
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. Allowing your carrier to get money from you each month is a great way to prevent coverage lapses. What happens if the client is hit by an uninsured/underinsured driver? It is important to know if the client will be properly reimbursed, to cover the missing money for medical and repair bills.

It is important to know if the client will be properly reimbursed, to cover the missing money for medical and repair bills. How the company will handle an accident? Ask if the company will replace the damaged parts with new original manufacturer parts (OEM) or will opt for cheaper alternatives.

For additional info, money-saving tips and free car insurance quotes, visit https://compare-autoinsurance.org/.

Compare-autoinsurance.org is an online provider of life, home, health, and auto insurance quotes. This website is unique because it does not simply stick to one kind of insurance provider, but brings the clients the best deals from many different online insurance carriers. In this way, clients have access to offers from multiple carriers all in one place: this website. On this site, customers have access to quotes for insurance plans from various agencies, such as local or nationwide agencies, brand names insurance companies, etc.

"Always ask your insurance agent more details about coverage levels, coverage options, extra services and claim handling," said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director of Internet Marketing Company.

CONTACT:

Company Name: Internet Marketing Company

Person for contact: Gurgu C

Phone Number: (818) 359-3898

Email: cgurgu@internetmarketingcompany.biz

Website: https://compare-autoinsurance.org/

SOURCE: Internet Marketing Compan

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/582665/What-Info-Should-Drivers-Ask-Before-Signing-A-Car-Insurance-Contract
[March 26, 2020] Inland Cellular and Trilogy Networks Partner for the Rural Cloud Initiative

LEWISTON, Idaho, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Inland Cellular today announced plans to join the Rural Cloud Initiative, a nationwide strategic alliance with Trilogy Networks to accelerate digital transformation in the 2nd most diverse agricultural region in the US. This relationship will pair Trilogy's distributed cloud platform with Inland Cellular's wealth of network assets in Eastern Washington and North Central Idaho. This alliance allows Trilogy to extend its expertise in Edge Cloud Computing and low latency networking to family farms and multi-national corporations focused on precision agriculture across rural America. Edge Computing optimizes the interaction of IoT sensors & devices with Cloud applications by bringing compute and storage closer to the sources of data. This dramatically reduces latency and bandwidth requirements, enabling automation of the agricultural ecosystem. Farmers will have access to accurate data captured in real time from connected devices throughout their farm during the entire crop cycle. "The Precision Agriculture segment has been keenly focused on solutions to drive the next generation of efficiency in agricultural ouput," said George Woodward, President & CEO of Trilogy Networks. "We are at the genesis of what converged technologies can achieve. The power of Edge computing within feet of the crops is a game changer. Trilogy's LinX network and Multi-Tenant Edge solutions will enable the most efficient and highest quality food production on earth."



"The first phase of our alliance includes the deployment of high capacity compute and storage at our data center, within our central offices, and throughout several cell sites across Northern Idaho, Central & Eastern Washington and Western Montana," said Chip Damato, Executive Vice President, Inland Cellular. "This forward-looking initiative delivers real-time analytics at the far Edge of our network covering thousands of square miles of rich agricultural lands." For more information on Inland Cellular, visit https://inlandcellular.com For more information on Trilogy Networks, visit https://trilogynet.com.

Media Contact: Margaret McKoin

[email protected] cell: 817-403-0866 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/inland-cellular-and-trilogy-networks-partner-for-the-rural-cloud-initiative-301030555.html SOURCE Trilogy

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Trump Administration Quietly Appealing to Allies in Asia, Europe Amid Coronavirus Scare  Reports

Sputnik News

10:35 GMT 25.03.2020

With COVID-19 cases surging tenfold over the last week, the United States is on course to becoming one of the nations most heavily afflicted by the pandemic. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization warned that with its 55,000+ cases, the US has the potential to be the virus's next epicenter.

The Trump administration has been quietly turning to its transoceanic allies for assistance in dealing with the spread of the new coronavirus, even the president continues to boast that the US will not look for handouts.

"America will never be a supplicant nation. We will be a proud, prosperous, and self-reliant nation. We will embrace commerce with all, but we will be dependent on none," Trump said, speaking at a COVID-19 briefing on Tuesday.

The president's comments appear to contrast with his administration's policy, however, with South Korean media reporting Wednesday that Trump had requested support from Seoul on medical devices during his recent telephone call with President Moon Jae-in.

According to the South Korean president's office, during the Tuesday phone call, made at the US president's "urgent request," Trump praised South Korea's COVID-19 response, and expressed hope that Seoul could provide the United States with medical equipment support. Moon reportedly replied that South Korea would provide "maximum support" if available, adding that clearance by the US Food and Drug Administration might be needed.

A White House statement on the conversation did not mention any US aid request, saying the phone call was centered around Washington's effort to "work with global leaders to save lives and restore economic growth."

On Monday, Foreign Policy reported, siting diplomatic sources, that the State Department had instructed top diplomats to pressure governments and businesses in Eastern Europe to increase production and exports of medical equipment and protective gear to the United States.

"Depending on critical needs, the United States could seek to purchase many of these items in the hundreds of millions with purchases of higher end equipment such as ventilators in the hundreds of thousands," an internal State Department email said to have been written by Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale noted, adding that the appeal applies to all countries in Eastern Europe "minus Moscow."

COVID-19 Maneuvers in Western Europe

Earlier, German media reported that the US had attempted to poach German scientists developing a COVID-19 vaccine to provide Washington with exclusive access to a potential vaccine.

Last week, Defense One reported that the US Air Force had quietly flown half a million coronavirus test kit components out of Italy, one of the countries hit hardest by the pandemic, to Tennessee. Air Force Brig. Gen. Dr. Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, said the evacuation was "a great example of how nations are working together to ensure that we're meeting the global demand." Italy has suffered over 69,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including over 6,800 deaths.

Speaking at a Fox News town hall on Tuesday, President Trump said he believed more people would die if anti-COVID-19 restrictions in place in the United States were not lifted soon, and said he would "love to have the country opened up" by Easter, which will be observed this year on April 12. US lawmakers approved a $2 trillion coronavirus response bill in the early hours of Wednesday, with the mammoth economic stimulus package expected to cushion the economic blow caused by the pandemic.

Also Tuesday, World Health Organization spokeswoman Margaret Harris told reporters that the US could be the next epicenter for COVID-19 as cases skyrocket. "We are now seeing a very large acceleration in cases in the US, so it does have that potential," she warned.

 Sputnik

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Police and firefighters in Massachusetts have started to test positive for coronavirus, prompting the question of what happens if one department has several members sick, or in quarantine?

While some of the larger departments in the state -- Boston, Springfield and Worcester for example -- can absorb having personnel out of duty due to quarantine or positive results of COVID-19, smaller departments may struggle.

Those struggles may come with a price. Coronavirus could be potentially expensive for taxpayers if there is a significant increase in overtime hours to cover shifts.

For fire departments and police departments across the state, the plan is to rely on mutual aid agreements, along with backup from the Massachusetts State Police and the Massachusetts Department of Fire Services if too many members are out due to COVID-19.

We have a plan in place to deploy sworn members from non-patrol assignments both to backfill our own barracks if necessary and local departments that request assistance, if and when either scenario becomes necessary, said Dave Procopio, spokesman for the state police. We are likewise prepared to provide additional security for other agencies if needed.

Firefighters/EMTs in Billerica, Boston and Worcester have tested positive for coronavirus along with a Boston police officer. Other first responders across the state have been quarantined after being exposed to the virus that has killed 11 people in Massachusetts of Tuesday.

The Brookline Fire Department had to temporarily close a fire station after a firefighter showed symptoms of the virus.

Rich MacKinnon, the president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Massachusetts, who is also a Whitman firefighter, said as of Wednesday seven Massachusetts firefighters within the union tested positive for COVID-19.

Worcester officials said Monday that a city firefighter and a recruit in the fire academy are the cases within the Worcester Fire Department. On Wednesday, Worcester officials said roughly 200 first responders in the city have been tested.

As of Tuesday night, 185 firefighter unions in Massachusetts reported back statistics due to COVID-19.

There were 182 firefighter/EMTs tested and another 170 under a three-day quarantine. MacKinnon said as of Tuesday night, there were 114 members under 14-day quarantines.

Another 545 members filed exposure forms, noting they had an interaction with someone who has the virus or was showing symptoms.

Its crazy but its going to get worse, Colbert said.

For police, officials heard of roughly one dozen possible cases so far.

As Worcester City Manager Edward Augustus Jr. stated earlier in the week, the citys fire department has the numbers absorb losses and maintain services if seven to 10 firefighters arent on duty because of the virus.

The concern is for smaller departments. While its not in Massachusetts, the St. Johnsbury, Vermont Fire Department has three people out due to COVID-19. The department only has nine people, Somerville Fire Lt. Jay Colbert, 3rd District Vice President for the International Association of Fire Fighters, said.

We are running into problems, Colbert said. Worcester can absorb it, Brookline can absorb it, but these smaller departments will be asking a lot of the guys who arent quarantined.

For large scale fires and incidents, many fire departments in Massachusetts rely on neighboring towns and cities for mutual aid. Its not unheard of to see firefighters from several communities battling a serious fire in some communities.

The mutual aid system is going to be the first contingency plan in place if one fire department is overrun with personnel out because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Fire departments will always rely first on mutual aid, which has long been a part of fire service planning, a state Department of Fire Services spokeswoman said. If additional assistance is needed, the Statewide Fire Mobilization Plan would be activated.

That plan was used during the Merrimack Valley gas explosions and fires. The state DFS said more planning is underway to have additional contingencies in place.

Departments across the state, both police and fire, are limiting walk-in traffic at stations. Shifts are being separated, equipment and vehicles are being disinfected when shifts end and first responders are trying to limit personal contact, which can be difficult given the nature of the jobs.

Massachusetts State Police, which has 2,110 uniformed troopers, is taking added steps to limit troopers exposure. Its the state police that would backfill smaller communities if a department is hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.

State Police Col. Christopher Mason directed all troopers responding to calls and incidents that dont involve a serious felony or require an immediate arrest, to rely on summonses and citations through the mail.

When it is necessary to take an offender into custody, troopers have been directed to question the prisoner whether any of the following categories apply to them, their families, and anyone they associate with: potential virus symptoms, recent international travel, and exposure to anyone being monitored or treated for COVID-19, Procopio said. If any of the answers are in the affirmative, the arresting trooper will determine whether medical evaluation is necessary as well as whether the court will accept the prisoner for arraignment.

State police detectives who responded to death investigations involving people who had flu-like symptoms are now told not to go close to the body and gather information about the victim and health conditions from a safe distance.

The state medical examiners office will provide troopers with details.

The state police also divided up specialized units in order to cover duties on a rotating basis in order to limit possible exposure to the entire unit.

If it becomes necessary, troopers from investigative units will deploy to backfill patrol assignments, state police said. This has not been necessary yet and our Division of Field Services continues to maintain a strong presence on roadways and other patrol areas throughout the state.

Like many police and fire departments across Massachusetts, the state police troopers are also wearing latex gloves, masks and other personal protective equipment. Troopers are also adhering to social distancing.

Finally, we are of course mandating that any department member who has had potential contact with someone who has tested positive is himself or herself tested and are also directing any members who have any symptoms to self-quarantine, state police said. The colonel has formed an internal exposure response team, which includes members from various disciplines, including human resources, legal, and employee assistance, to coordinate the steps necessary for any member who has potential exposure.

But MacKinnon points out there are issues already with personal protection supplies and the rapid depletion of the resources.

If several departments are dealing with similar issues, the mutual aid system will be taxed, MacKinnon said.

Every municipality is going to be in the same boat, MacKinnon said. We do have mutual aid set up, but obviously every fire chief and manager are concerned about their own community first. As departments do decrease their staffing due to quarantines and positive cases, its going to be the same everywhere.

While first responders are known to work long hours and cover shifts, the impact could lead to heavy cash being spent by communities to pay for coverage, Colbert pointed out.

Fitchburg Police Chief Ernest Martineau, president of the Central Massachusetts Chiefs of Association, said there are concerns across the state about the virus impacting staffing for police departments.

With 80 sworn officers, Fitchburg has a contingency plan, the chief said.

This is something weve never seen before, Martineau said. Were just going day-by-day. Were prepared to deal with it head-on.

Hampden Police Chief Jeff Farnsworth, president of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, said police chiefs will continue to be in contact as these uncharted times continue.

Theres always concern that the numbers are going to spike for everybody and thats what you plan for, contingency of operations, Farnsworth said. Its all going to be a flexible situation as it arises.

MacKinnon points out another issue in this pandemic. First responders could be carriers of the virus. He stressed it is the reason first responders need priority testing.

We dont want to be carries of this and giving it to those people who are most vulnerable as we respond from incident to incident, MacKinnon said. We go into public housing, people residences every day. If Im a carrier and I dont know it, I dont want to be giving it to the general public.

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Sitharaman announces Rs 50 lakh insurance cover for doctors, paramedic, healthcare workers

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Mar 26: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced a Rs 50 lakh insurance cover for healthcare workers who are at the forefront of dealing with coronavirus pandemic.

Expressing her gratitude towards the frontline health care workers-ASHA workers, doctors, nurses, paramedics among others, Sitharaman said, "there will be Rs 50 lakh medical insurance cover for each healthcare worker for three months. Hopefully, we would be able to contain the virus in this period."

Sitharaman said the government has finalised an economic stimulus package to deal with the impact of 21-day countrywide lockdown to prevent spread of the virus.

On Wednesday, PM Modi appealed that people should stop discriminating and ostracising the doctors, other healthcare workers and airline crew as they are battling against the pandemic on the frontline.

"People in white coats in hospitals and clinics are our gods now; they should be respected," said PM Modi on reports of misbehavior with medics.
Photograph: Michael Nigro/REX/Shutterstock

The future of the controversial Dakota Access pipeline has been thrown into question after a federal court on Wednesday struck down its permits and ordered a comprehensive environmental review.

Related: Our fight against the Dakota Access pipeline is far from over

The US army corps of engineers was ordered to conduct a full environmental impact statement (EIS), after the Washington DC court ruled that existing permits violated the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa).

The ruling is a huge victory for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe of North Dakota, which rallied support from across the world and sued the US government in a campaign to stop the environmentally risky pipeline being built on tribal lands.

After years of commitment to defending our water and earth, we welcome this news of a significant legal win, said the tribal chairman, Mike Faith. Its humbling to see how actions we took to defend our ancestral homeland continue to inspire national conversations about how our choices ultimately affect this planet.

In December 2016, the Obama administration denied permits for the pipeline to cross the Missouri river and ordered a full EIS to analyze alternative routes and the impact on the tribes treaty rights.

In his first week in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order to expedite construction. Construction of the 1,200-mile pipeline was completed in June 2017.

The tribe challenged the permits  and won. As a result, the corps was ordered to redo its environmental analysis, which it did without taking into consideration tribal concerns or expert analysis.

The pipeline continued to transport oil from North Dakota to Illinois. The tribe and EarthJustice, an environmental law not-for-profit group, sued again.

In his ruling on Wednesday, the federal judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, said the environmental analysis by both the companies behind the pipeline and the corps was severely lacking.

The abysmal safety record of the pipeline parent company, Sunoco, does not inspire confidence, he added.

Story continues

The court-mandated EIS will be more in depth than the assessment already completed by the corps  and could take years. The court will next decide if the pipeline should be shut down until the EIS is done.

The corps did not respond to a request for comment.

This validates everything the tribe has been saying all along about the risk of oil spills to the people of Standing Rock, said Jan Hasselman, an EarthJustice attorney. The Obama administration had it right when it moved to deny the permits in 2016.

The setback for the pipeline comes as the Trump administration moves to severely curtail Nepa, the 1969 legislation which is widely considered the cornerstone of US environmental protection. Trump has repeatedly blamed Nepa for blocking fossil fuel projects.
Armed kidnappers Wednesday evening abducted Adamu Mohammed, an elder brother of Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed.

Multiple sources informed PREMIUM TIMES that the attack took place at the elder Mr Mohammeds residence located at Jaki Quarters of Bauchi metropolis.

The abducted sibling is said to be close to the governor and is involved in running affairs of the state.

Sketchy details of the attack obtained by this newspaper show that the armed men arrived at the residence of Mr Mohammed and opened fire to get access into the house.

The Senior Special Assistant to the Governor on Media, Mukhtar Gidado, confirmed the kidnap to Daily Trust newspaper.

Mr Gidado said the victim, popularly known as Yaya Adamu, was kidnapped on Wednesday evening. He said the kidnappers are yet to contact the family adding that security operatives have been alerted.

Governor Mohammed has been quarantined having been diagnosed with coronavirus.
TROY  Earlier this year, Guha Bala anticipated that life in the United States may soon change.

Bala, president of Velan Studios, the Capital Region-based video-game developer, watched in January as cases of the novel coronavirus spread throughout Asia, where many of Velan's partners are located. By February, business travel in the industry had been restricted. Now in March, Velan employees are joining millions of Americans who are working from home in an effort to slow the pandemic.

Yet employees at Velan, along with several other video-game studios and developers in the Capital Region, have an important role to fill. In a time when in-person interactions are being severely limited, these companies support the infrastructure that can keep people in touch from afar and occupied while they are encouraged to remain at home.

"Games arent the cure for everything," Bala said, "but they're a good way to avoid cabin fever in these times."

Before the coronavirus pandemic disrupted life as we all knew it, the video-game industry in the Capital Region was expanding. Employment at the six largest local studios, which include Velan Studios, Vicarious Visions, PUBG MadGlory, 1st Playable Productions, Wolfjaw and WB Games had increased 8.3 percent from February 2019 to February 2020, according to a survey from the Center for Economic Growth. All told, 455 people in the region work at a gaming studio, the survey reported.

All 76 of the Velan employees based in Troy are now working from home. Bala said it's been an adjustment, but his team has handled it well.

"So much of doing creative work is based on human contact," he said. "It's about discussing ideas and bringing people together. To a certain extent, a lot of it is the intangible that you pick up through conversation and through in-person interaction."

Bala said he hopes the situation will help his employees from a creative standpoint.

"In times of crisis, it's also a time that people can pull together and do things they didnt think (were) possible," he said. "This kind of situation, which I hope wont last long, does bring to mind what do we do for folks who arent traditional into social games? What kind of experiences may they enjoy?"

Jon Keller, the chief growth officer at Jahnel Group, a Schenectady-based software development company, said those who work in game and software development are fortunate to be in a position that allows them to work from home.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

"We havent really felt too much of any sort of pain as a result of the transition," Keller said. "I know theres a lot of other places out there that are feeling that, so were very fortunate in that sense."

Mitchell Patterson, studio director at Wolfjaw Studios, said studios like his have a unique advantage over other industries because gaming studios were permissive with work-from-home arrangements even before the pandemic.

"We already had a somewhat open culture when it came to work. We try to pride ourselves on work/life balance," he said. "All in all, all the projects are still on pace and everybody seems to be doing pretty good."

One way that Jahnel, Velan and Wolfjaw all like to keep their employees connected: trivia nights or off-hours gaming sessions. Apex Legends is on the docket this week at Velan, while Rocket League is a favorite at Wolfjaw.

"At a time when people arent really able to gather in physical spaces, gaming is really providing an avenue for people to stay connected in a virtual community," Keller said.

Michael.Williams@timesunion.com
As many as 44 people including students from Hyderabad have been allowed into Andhra Pradesh. They have been put up at K4 hostel of IIIT, Nuzidi, where a temporary quarantine facility for 330 persons has been created.

Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao and his Andhra counterpart YS Jagan Mohan Reddy held a discussion on Wednesday and agreed that all those who have reached the borders of Andhra Pradesh should be allowed into the state.

The two Chief Ministers also agreed to the point that the persons, who are still in Hyderabad, should stay there and should not be allowed to move.

The District Sub-Collector and the Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) supervised the shifting of these 44 people to the quarantine facility.

Andhra Pradesh has 11 confirmed cases of coronavirus so far, while the number in Telangana is 41 including 10 foreigners, according to the Union Ministry of Health on Thursday. The figure stands at 649 and 13 deaths.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
About 75% of web users judge whether a business is reliable or not by its website design.

DesignRush, a B2B marketplace connecting brands with agencies, determined the best agencies brands can work with to develop well-designed websites that meet business needs.

The top web design agencies in Miami, Florida are:

1. FUZE

FUZE is a full-service Miami-based website design company and digital agency blending strategy, design and technology to grow online businesses. From web and mobile app design and development to online marketing campaigns, their integrated solutions help brands increase visibility, engagement and revenue. They aim to treat clients as collaborative partners and view client success as a measure of their own. FUZE creates digital experiences that boost visibility, drive engagement and improve ROI for clients.

http://www.fuzeinc.com/

2. iCreate Your Site

iCreate Your Site web design company creates websites to pull more customers to the products and services that brands offer. They are an established Miami-based web design company that offers a unique blend of creativity, style, innovation and technology to design websites that promote growth. From website design to eCommerce web solutions, their integrated website design services can help brands engage with a larger audience, increase revenue and achieve a robust digital presence.

https://icreateyoursite.com/

3. X3 Digital

X3 Digital is a Google Partner and Google Certified digital marketing and design agency that helps small and medium-sized businesses grow through web development, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, branding, content strategy and paid search marketing. They aim to guide clients teams every step of the way, from start to finish.

https://x3digital.com/

4. GoHooper Web Agency

GoHooper Web Design was founded in 2006 by John Hooper and Jessica Hooper. The objective was to make everything in web design transparent and understandable from the beginning, without heavy tech jargon. They are a one-stop-shop digital agency focused on client success and offering affordable, friendly internet web design services with clients from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Dallas, Nashville, Chicago, to New York, Atlanta, Miami and more.

https://www.gohooper.com/

5. Rocket Marketing and Design

Rocket Marketing and Design is a full-service internet marketing and web design company in Miami, FL providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Google Places Optimization, Responsive Web Design, Pay Per Click, Social Media Marketing, Content Management, Mobile Marketing and more. The mission of Rocket Marketing and Design is to give businesses of all sizes the opportunity to use search engines as a means for expanding their business.

https://www.rocketmad.com/

6. Agency Madison

7. ATX Web Designs

8. Black Knight Publishing

9. Brainstormnyc

10. DecoGraphic

11. Diaz & Cooper Advertising

12. Electrum Branding

13. Innovative Flare

14. Intrazix

15. JetRuby

16. Point Taken Communications

17. Screen Media Group

18. 6th Borough Agency

19. Stratosphere Designs

20. Vantoro Marketing

21. Ventus Design Studio

22. Ziggletech

Brands can explore the top web design agencies by location, size, average hourly rate, and portfolio on DesignRush.

About DesignRush: DesignRush.com is a B2B marketplace connecting brands with agencies. DesignRush features the top agencies around the world, including the best Digital Agencies, Logo Design, Branding, Digital Marketing, Website Design, eCommerce Web Design Companies and more.
A diplomat returning from overseas breached Australia's mandatory requirement to self-isolate, prompting a senior government official to warn the "relevant ambassador" of the "seriousness" of the matter.

The Australian Federal Police advised the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade that the diplomat had not abided by the 14-day self isolation requirements on March 18.

DFAT's head of protocol Kate Logan raised the matter immediately with the country's ambassador in Australia.

In a letter to the diplomatic and consular community two days later, Ms Logan stressed that the requirement to self-isolate applied to members of the diplomatic and consular corps and their families.
An intensive care nurse claims NHS bosses told her to prepare her will before treating coronavirus patients at work.

Amber Cowan, 28, works at a hospital in Glasgow and claims she was told to get her affairs in order before starting her first night shift on a COVID-19 ward.

She wrote on Twitter this week: 'Getting told at 28 to make sure you have your pension and will sorted. First nightshift in intensive care and we are short staffed.'

Although it wasn't official Health Service advice, another NHS doctor told MailOnline yesterday: 'A friend who is 28 told me they had made their will.

'I have heard people say, 'I want to get coronavirus so that I will be immune.' It doesn't work like that.

'If you do not take this seriously, you are condemning someone to potentially dying with a nurse they don't know, because we are not allowing visitors in hospitals. That, or dying at home. That is the reality of it.'

Shocked locals in Glasgow applauded Ms Cowan and her colleagues for 'putting their lives on the line to save others'.

Amber Cowan, 28, works at a hospital in Glasgow and claims she was told her to get her affairs in order before starting her first night shift on a COVID-19 ward

This was Amber Cowan's tweet from this week warning people to observe social distancing

NHS frontline staff are currently treating patients diagnosed with the deadly bug without World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended protective clothing.

Terrified doctors and nurses have hit out at the Government for failing to provide them with enough gloves, masks, aprons and goggles amid the pandemic.

Yesterday, the British Medical Association warned that NHS staff will die if they are not given sufficient protective clothing while they treat patients with the virus.

The doctors' union slammed Public Health England for falling short of WHO guidelines.

Medical staff in other countries are given full hazmat suits, but PHE experts say their is no evidence full bodysuits are needed.

NHS frontline staff (one pictured using a bin liner left) are currently treating patients with the deadly bug without World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended protective clothing (Italian nurse in full PPE pictured right)

One NHS worker identified only as Lorraine, revealed her manager had sent staff a message the day before asking them to share masks, as well as filters.

'Now filters have got bacteria in them, masks have got bacteria in them, these things do not get sterilised like you would your operating equipment,' she said.

One cardiologist at a major London teaching hospital yesterday echoed claims the Government is not following global guidelines.

Dr Lisa Anderson said doctors working on coronavirus wards are 'taking risks' when it comes to their own health due to the 'inadequate' protection they are being provided with.

With 9,529 cases and 465 deaths, hospitals across the country are being flooded with COVID-19 patients, with medics likening wards to 'warzones'.

A paramedic is seen above without any protective equipment, while doctors and nurses are seen behind him with the facemask and scrubs

Twitter users praised Ms Cowan's efforts at her NHS hospital in Glasgow.

One person replied to her tweet: 'Thank you for putting your own life on the line to save others. You are one of life's true heroes.'

Someone else posted: 'Was told that at 18, it's not nice. Stand up and be counter for. The nation applauds you service.'

Another person commented: 'Much respect!! Doing an amazing job for the people of Scotland.'

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: 'We are working around the clock to give the social care sector and wider-NHS the equipment and support they need to tackle this outbreak.

'We have delivered millions more items of personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline staff at care homes, home care providers and hospices as well as to hospitals, ambulance trusts, GP practices and pharmacists.

'The full weight of the Government is behind this effort and we are working closely with industry, social care providers, the NHS, and the army to ensure the right equipment continues to be delivered.'
Unlocking the genetic code of the novel coronavirus will help us prevent other diseases

How the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 made the leap from animals to humans is a puzzle that scientists are trying to solve as humanity comes to grip with the deadly pandemic sweeping the globe.

At the frontline of this scientific work is Professor Edward Holmes, an evolutionary virologist who holds a joint position with the School of Life and Environmental Sciences and the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney.

He has been working closely with scientists in China and around the world to unlock the genetic code of SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19, to understand its origins and assist in the race other scientists are engaged in to find an effective vaccine.

Their work will also help in the monitoring and prevention of other viruses that could potentially transfer from wildlife into humans, causing what are known as zoonotic diseases.

Already this year, Professor Holmes has co-authored four papers on the novel coronavirus, including two of the earliest descriptions of the virus (published in Nature and The Lancet).

This week he publishes two more.

Brought forward for early publication on Thursday by Nature after peer review, the first paper identifies a similar coronavirus to the one now infecting humans in the Malayan pangolin population of southern China. Professor Holmes, a co-author, is the only non-China based academic on the paper.

Understanding the evolutionary pathway by which this novel coronavirus has transferred to humans will help us not only combat the current pandemic but assist in identifying future threats from other coronaviruses in other species.

This paper is an important part of solving that puzzle.

Professor Holmes said: "The role that pangolins play in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (the cause of COVID-19) is still unclear. However, it is striking is that the pangolin viruses contain some genomic regions that are very closely related to the human virus. The most important of these is the receptor binding domain that dictates how the virus is able to attach and infect human cells."

The paper identifies pangolins as possible intermediate hosts for the novel human virus that has emerged. The authors call for these animals and others to be removed from wet markets in order to prevent zoonotic transmission to humans.

Professor Holmes said: "It is clear that wildlife contains many coronaviruses that could potentially emerge in humans in the future. A crucial lesson from this pandemic to help prevent the next one is that humans must reduce their exposure to wildlife, for example by banning 'wet markets' and the trade in wildlife."

Just last week Nature Medicine published research co-authored by Professor Holmes with scientists from Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla California, the University of Edinburgh, Columbia University in New York and Tulane University, New Orleans.

That paper has dispelled the fanciful idea that the novel coronavirus was a manufactured biological agent.

Using comparative analysis of genomic data, the scientists show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.

Professor Holmes said: "There is simply no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 - the cause of COVID-19 - came out of a lab. In reality, this is the sort of natural disease emergence event that researchers in the field like myself have been warning about for many years."

That paper has quickly become the highest ranked academic study of all time as measured by Altmetric, a company that monitors media coverage of research papers.

"The high Altmetric is a strong indication of the remarkable global interest in this topic," Professor Holmes said.

And today, Professor Holmes publishes a commentary in the journal Cell with his colleague Professor Yong-Zhen Zhang from the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre and the School of Life Science at Fudan University, Shanghai.

In that article they outline our current knowledge of what the genomic data reveals about the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 virus and discuss the gaps in our knowledge.

This includes taking samples from the Wuhan wet market where it is believed the virus originated. The paper says that "genome sequences of 'environmental samples' - likely surfaces - from the market have now been obtained and phylogenetic analysis reveals that they are very closely related to viruses sampled from the earliest Wuhan patients".

However, Professor Holmes and Professor Zhang are quick to point out that as "not all of the early [COVID-19] cases were market associated, it is possible that the emergence story is more complicated than first suspected".

The paper says that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is likely to become the fifth endemic coronavirus in the human population. It concludes that "coronaviruses clearly have the capacity to jump species boundaries and adapt to new hosts, making it straightforward to predict that more will emerge in the future".

How we respond to that will require more research to assist develop public health policy.

They point to policy and other measures to help prevent other coronaviruses becoming a health danger to humans. These include:

- Surveillance of animal coronaviruses in a variety of mammalian species. It is known that bats carry many coronaviruses, we know little about what other species carry these viruses and which has the potential to emerge in humans. - Increase action against the illegal wildlife trade of exotic animals - Removal of mammalian and perhaps avian wildlife from wet markets

###

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INTERVIEWS

Unfortunately, Professor Holmes is too engaged in research on the novel coronavirus for interviews at this stage. For any media enquiries contact Marcus Strom.

MEDIA ENQUIRIES

Marcus Strom | marcus.strom@sydney.edu.au | +61 423 982 485
Bengaluru, March 26 : Karnataka government warned all landlords not to evict tenants from the healthcare industry, in the wake of rising Coronavirus pandemic, a top official said on Thursday.

"Take strict penal action against such landlords and house owners under the relevant provisions of law," ordered Additional Chief Secretary, Health and Family Welfare Department Jawaid Akhtar, coming in rescue of the doctors, paramedical staff and healthcare workers.

Akhtar passed the order to all district deputy commissioners, Bengaluru civic body commissioner, police and other senior officials across the state.

"A lot of complaints have been received from doctors, paramedical staff and healthcare personnel within the jurisdiction of the state of Karnataka that their landlords and house owners are forcing them to vacate their rented residences," he said.

According to Akhtar, such kind of behaviour amounts to obstructing public servants in discharging their duties.

The senior bureaucrat invoked Karnataka Epidemic Diseases (COVID-19) Regulations, 2020 under the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 and Hyderabad Infectious Diseases Act, 1950 for prevention and containment of the virus.

The state officials will derive powers from the invoked laws to rein in the offending evictor landlords and house owners.

Karnataka confirmed 51 Coronavirus positive cases, including a death till 2 p.m. on Wednesday.
Schools are confronting a wide range of potential problems around student data privacy as they scramble to put technology tools for virtual instruction in place during extended school building shutdowns .

Teachers have already begun connecting with students using a variety of digital tools, some of which are new to them and their schools and werent designed for classroom useeverything from videoconferencing apps like Zoom to digital devices like Chromebooks and learning platforms like Babbel and BrainPop.

An unprecedented number of online interactions between teachers and students from their respective homes introduce new privacy questions that lack easy answers. And at least one states governor, aiming to speed up implementation of new remote learning tools, has temporarily waived legal requirements for agreements between school districts and technology companies that typically include student data privacy provisions.

The challenges for schools in staying abreast of privacy concerns have become acute as companies have begun offering temporary free subscriptions to their expensive tech products, said Antonio Romayor Jr., chief technology officer for El Centro Elementary School District in California.

Some teachers in his district have begun bypassing the typical vetting procedures for new tech products by adding the free products directly to their single sign-on platforms for students and teachers to use, he said.

Some of those free products could eventually cost schools and parents money, which means anyone using them should be extra careful about offering credit-card information when signing up, Romayor said. Programs that arent vetted in advance also might run afoul of privacy policy. Its a constant struggle, he said.

While the new technological landscape for schools feels unprecedented in many ways, schools still have an obligation to inform parents of how their students data is being used, even if the teaching is occurring outside school buildings. Federal lawssuch as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)should help guide school leaders in deciding what new technologies to use.

The rules, the regulations apply whether the student is actually in the classroom physically or is at home being taught through a distance learning framework, said Linnette Attai, president of privacy compliance consulting firm with education clients PlayWell and a close observer of student privacy issues.

Student privacy experts are recommending that school districts take a deliberate, rather than frenetic, approach to adopting new technologies, and guard against overinvesting in new tools before being fully aware of how they work and how they could jeopardize students data privacy.

Cheri Kiesecker, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Data Privacy, wants parents and schools to minimize as much as possible the amount of student data thats being collected and sold by tech companies. She felt the same before the COVID-19 outbreak.

In fact, Kiesecker points to a 2018 warning from the FBI noting that the consequences of ed-tech companies collecting too much data on students could result in social engineering, bullying, tracking, identity theft, or other means for targeting children. Most U.S. states earned a C or lower grade from a 2019 survey of student data privacy protections by Kieseckers organization and the Network for Public Education.

As schools rush to put remote learning programs in places, Kiesecker argues that those student data privacy problems could get significantly worse. And that could have long-term consequences for many students. Data is actually your identity and a form of social currency, she said.

Speed vs. Quality

Schools are struggling to find the balance between moving quickly and prioritizing privacy, said Andrea Bennett, executive director of California IT in Education, a membership group for IT professionals in the states K-12 schools. Teachers and administrators at schools that havent focused on technology in the past are eager to quickly adopt new tools and catch up to help students. That enthusiasm, Im afraid, is something that might lead them into using an app that might not be safe, she said.

Some schools in need of a quick technology solution have signed up for services while simultaneously negotiating an agreement, rather than waiting to start until an agreement is drawn up, said Laura Pollak, a program specialist for the Nassau Board of Cooperative Educational Services in New York state. Legal experts in districts should be administrators most trusted source of guidance on these kinds of more flexible approaches, she said.

Several states, including California and Connecticut , have clearing-houses that vet education software tools so they can be used by any school districts in those states.

But in most states, such as New York, each district has to individually vet a new product. For Manhasset Union Free School District in New York, this is a process that has taken as long as six months and is now more urgent than ever as schools move to remote learning, said Sean Adcroft, the districts director of instructional technology and libraries.

In Connecticut, meanwhile, Gov. Ned Lamont signed an executive order last week that allows the states education commissioner to temporarily waive its student data privacy law, as he deems necessary in order to provide quality online educational opportunities to students during the period in which schools classes are canceled.

The law, passed in 2016 , requires schools and companies entering a partnership to sign a written contract that explicitly states the company will not use student data for any purpose beyond the companys stated function. The Commissioner of Education has alternative means to assure that student data is afforded privacy protections, including federal student privacy laws, without the use of a written contract, the order says.

Jennifer Jacobsen, one of the original advocates for the 2016 law and the parent of a high schooler, said she empathizes with the goal of waiving the order to help schools get remote learning programs up and running. But proper notifications and transparency to their families is not any less important today than it was yesterday, she said.

Companies that have been offering education technology products for several years have already been working to comply with existing privacy requirements, said Sara Kloek, director of education policy, programs and student privacy for the Software & Information Industry Association. Shes more concerned at this point about companies whose products arent designed for education.

Ed-tech companies need to figure out how to help schools through all of the marketing jargon and get through what the product actually does and how it can help the school, Kloek said.

The decisions to close many schools came so quickly, and schools just didnt have the time to take stock of potential privacy issues before jumping into planning, Attai said. We imagine there will be and likely have been mistakes made.

On-Camera Concerns

The online videoconferencing tool Zoom has emerged as one of the most popular resources for educators during the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, in part because the company is offering the service free to all K-12 schools. Data privacy advocates recommend that schools only use the companys education product , which includes specific provisions for FERPA compliance that the companys other products lack.

The Parent Coalition for Data Privacy recommends that parents consider covering students webcams unless theyre actively using the Zoom platformor transitioning to the similarly free, open-source Jitsi, which doesnt require anyone to create an account. The coalition cites an Federal Trade Commission complaint filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center in 2019 that alleges the company activates users webcams even when theyre not using the platform.

Some educators have been wondering whether they need parent permission before inviting students under the age of 13 to participate in Facebook Live chats, according to Bennett. Others want to establish rules for appropriate and safe conduct while teachers and students are on cameramaking sure theres nothing inappropriate in the background, someone walking around without a shirt on, she said.

Schools are taking different approaches to regulating videoconferences to avoid student privacy violations as wellsome in Pollaks area are discouraging any video face-to-face interactions with students, while Romayors district has instructed teachers to conduct only whole-group video chats, rather than conferencing with individual students.

Staying Informed

Parents play a role in protecting students from threats to their personal or data privacy, whether they realize it or not. Romayor said he often talks with parents who havent heard of FERPA or arent aware of laws that prohibit predatory activity or digital marketing to children. Districts have been trying for years to educate teachers on best practices for protecting student data privacy, but that continues to be a work in progress.

The lack of widespread knowledge about the intricacies of student data privacy can cause problems for schools, he said. If students or parents send a text message that contains a student username or password with identifying information, that students identity could be at risk of being stolen. If school employees access district data on a personal computer that has a virus, they could be compromising that data.

Romayor has been working on resources to keep district employees abreast of its policies and practices around privacy, and hes drafting a letter to families, in both English and Spanish, that summarizes federal and state laws around student data privacy.

Bennett said schools should send as much information to parents by regular mail as possible, to avoid excluding parents who dont have internet access or arent frequently checking school sites or social media. Among parents, The biggest frustration Ive seen is lack of communication, she said.

Some parents are expressing more pointed concerns. In Montgomery County, Maryland, a group of parents has been lobbying the school system for several years to share the details of its contract with Google for Chromebooksspecifically, whether the company is deleting students data according to the districts policy. The urgency of their efforts has increased now that the district is distributing devices to students who dont already have them.

Once we allow students to use Chromebooks at home, theyre likely to use them for school work for exponentially more timegiven social distancing, no teacher oversight, etc, says the parents draft letter to the district. This will turn the small spigot of information that currently flows to Google into a virtual firehose.

The technological and logistical chaos in K-12 education during the COVID-19 outbreak is likely to continue for some time. Educators may feel they need to rush to get things up and running, but experts caution them to take the time to figure out the best approaches for protecting students data privacy.

I think everyone needs to pay attention, make smart decisions, not rush to grab technology where technology is not needed, and fall back on old-school teaching, Attai said. Theres nothing wrong with some good worksheets, theres nothing wrong with writing essays.
Michigan State Rep. Tyrone Carter, D-Detroit, has tested positive for COVID-19, House leadership confirmed Thursday afternoon.

Carter is the first state lawmaker with a confirmed case of the coronavirus, which has infected at least 2,856 people in Michigan.

He is doing very well, is in good spirits and appears to be on the other side of his illness, according to a statement from the House Democratic Caucus.

I am concerned for Rep. Carter and Im praying for his speedy recovery, and for the safety of his friends and family, House Democratic Leader Christine Greig, D-Farmington Hills, said. We all must remain vigilant in practicing social distancing and do our part to stop the spread of this virus."

House Speaker Lee Chatfield, R-Levering, said anyone who was within six feet of Carter during the incubation period should monitor themselves for symptoms. He also wished Carter a speedy recovery.

Anyone who does show symptoms should seek testing with their local healthcare provider and maintain strict social distancing," he said. "Following these procedures will help us all get through this time safely and get back to normal as soon as possible.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clark Lake, said senators and staff have been informed of Carters positive test and encouraged anyone with concerns to self-quarantine for 14 days and contact their healthcare provider.

We are all experiencing this uncertain and anxiety-filled time together and it is made worse by limitations on our ability to demonstrate our support, but we are sending all our support and well-wishes to the Carter family," he said. We will continue to follow prescribed social distancing behaviors and take necessary precautions."

Both the House and Senate last met Tuesday, March 17 for a lengthy session that culminated in approving additional state funding to address the coronavirus pandemic. House and Senate leadership have said theyre leaving the option open to meet as needed during the outbreak.

Shortly after the diagnosis was made public, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wrote on social media that she was thinking of Carter and his family, adding, We all have to do our part to slow the spread of COVID-19.

I am thinking of Representative Carter and his family, and am hopeful for a speedy recovery. We all have to do our part to slow the spread of COVID-19.  Governor Gretchen Whitmer (@GovWhitmer) March 26, 2020

PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

Complete coverage of coronavirus in Michigan.

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Ron Moten, a longtime D.C. activist who advocated building another halfway house in Northeast as an alternative to Hope Village, said he went with a group Tuesday to try to deliver supplies to the facility but was turned down by staff. Residents were gathering for meals in groups as large as 30, he said, despite official attempts to limit gatherings to no more than 10 people.
Builders claim they are being held to ransom by their bosses and forced to go to work as pressure mounts on the Prime Minister to shut down all construction sites.

Mr Johnson was bombarded with calls to put a halt to all non-essential construction projects during Prime Minister's Questions yesterday.

But after London Underground trains and building site canteens were pictured packed with workers, employees have hit back saying they are being 'blackmailed' into going in.

One builder tweeted a video of a crowded site yesterday with the caption: 'How can this be happening and how can companies blackmail you to work. If you don't come in it's disciplinary or no money.'

The UK's main house builders Bellway, Persimmon, Barratt and Taylor Wimpey have all decided to stop working, but Redrow and Cairn Construction are still open. Work on the 18billion Crossrail project has also ground to a halt.

Last night the PM fell short of a complete ban, but warned workers to stay at home unless absolutely necessary - or more people will die.

Mr Johnson's decision to keep some sites open has resulted in a furious row with his successor as London Mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing mounting pressure to shut down all construction sites over concerns about social distancing and spreading coronavirus. Pictured on Monday: A busy canteen for builders in London

A graphic shows which UK construction companies have shut down their sites amid the coronavirus pandemic

Mr Khan argues that while the London Underground should remain open for 'key workers', particularly those who work for the NHS, builders are taking up too much space on crowded Tube trains and should be forced to stay away.

He said yesterday: 'Construction workers are still going to work and using public transport.

'You can't keep a safe distance on sites so the virus will spread and more people will die. I've repeatedly asked ministers to ban non-essential work. We need action today.'

But Public Health England's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty backed the PM, saying there has to be a 'trade-off' when it comes to such decisions.

Professor Whitty said action on construction has to be sustainable, as measures could be in place for a number of months.

British house builder Taylor Wimpey has shut down all of its UK construction sites

Persimmon has also decided to stop UK developments to help stem the spread of the virus

He said: 'The modelling we have done was based on the idea that quite a lot of people would have to go to work as part of this.

'We have to remember that many of the things we have to do are going to have to be sustained for a reasonably long period of time.

'And broadly the more difficult you make it for people the less easy it is to sustain. So there is some degree of trade-off between those two things.'

At PMQs yesterday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn spoke of a self-employed construction worker who tested positive for the virus after being forced to travel to work by Tube.

He asked: 'Can the PM be absolutely clear and give unequivocal guidance now that construction work on non-emergency work should stop now?'

Mr Johnson replied that some construction sites should continue to operate as long as social distancing - keeping six feet apart - is maintained.

A Number 10 spokesman later added that 'further steps' could be implemented as time goes on and that 'nothing is off the table' when it comes to COVID-19.

In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan argues that while the London Underground should remain open for 'key workers', particularly those who work for the NHS, builders are taking up too much space on crowded Tube trains (Central Line at White city seen on Wednesday) and should be forced to stay away

Construction workers are seen working at a site in Canary Wharf, east London on Wednesday

Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham has also expressed concerns.

He dismissed the economic argument for continuing non-essential construction work and told BBC Newsnight: 'When you're in the middle of a global pandemic  health reasons alone really should be guiding all decision making.'

In Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon echoed Sadiq Khan and Jeremy Corbyn's calls for a complete construction shutdown.

She spoke after workmen were pictured crammed into a portacabin at a development in Edinburgh yesterday.

Ms Sturgeon said: 'Our advice right now is that we would expect construction sites to be closed unless the building that is being worked on is essential, such as a hospital.'

Housing and communities secretary Robert Jenrick told the BBC yesterday that construction workers should be going to work if their employers want them to.

He said: 'If you can continue to operate safely within those guidelines then it's sensible for you to do so.'
Over 450 people have been



arrested in the city in the last 24 hours since Wednesday 5 pm for defying the lockdown order imposed by the West Bengal government to contain the spread of the disease, a senior police officer said.

The arrests were made by the Kolkata Police during naka-checking and patrolling across the city, he said.

A total of 453 people have been arrested by the city police in the last 24 hours till 5 pm on Thursday for violating the Total Safety Restrictions, he said.

Of the 453 apprehended, 112 are from the north division and 75 from the eastern suburban division, the police officer said.

As many as 65 offenders have been arrested from the south suburban and 62 more from the central division, he said.

A total of 42 people have been picked up in the south division of the city police while 40 apprehended from the port area and 30 from the south-east division for violating the rules, the officer said.

The policemen also held 18 from the south-west and nine from the east division, he said.

All of them will be prosecuted under IPC sections dealing with disobedience of order, the officer added.

Ten people have tested positive for Covid-19 in the state so far. Of them, one died at a city hospital on Monday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
AM Best has assigned a Financial Strength Rating of A- (Excellent) and a Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating of "a-" to Accelerant Insurance Limited (Accelerant EU) (Malta). The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Accelerant Intermediate Holdings (Accelerant) (Cayman Islands), the non-operating holding company of the Accelerant group. The outlook assigned to these Credit Ratings (ratings) is stable.

The ratings reflect the strategic importance of Accelerant EU to the Accelerant group, and Accelerant's consolidated balance sheet strength, which AM Best categorises as very strong, as well as the group's adequate operating performance, limited business profile and appropriate enterprise risk management.

Accelerant provides insurance capacity to managing general agents (MGAs) and has been in operation since January 2019. The group also offers underwriting, claims handling and analytical support to MGAs. The group, which is backed by a EUR 100 million capital commitment from private equity firm, Altamont Capital Partners, has established Accelerant EU as a vehicle to retain insurance risk within the group. In addition to providing capacity and management services, the group expects to establish shareholdings in a number of its MGA partners.

Accelerant EU will be the group's Malta-based insurance carrier, servicing MGAs in the United Kingdom, the European Union and Norway. U.K. business will be written by a third-country branch of the Maltese entity. In time, Accelerant plans to establish a Bermuda-based internal reinsurer to assist in centralising capital within the group.

AM Best expects Accelerant to maintain the strongest level of consolidated risk-adjusted capitalisation, as measured by Best's Capital Adequacy Ratio (BCAR), over the five-year period from 2020 to 2024, taking into account AM Best's additional capital requirements for new company formations. An offsetting factor in the balance sheet strength assessment is the high level of reliance on reinsurers, which is a result of the group's strategy to retain approximately 10% to 20% of business written.

The adequate operating performance assessment considers the group's five-year business plan, taking into account heightened execution risk during the start-up phase. Accelerant's forecast performance is reliant on its ability to source MGA partners in order to gain scale, and the underlying performance of its MGA portfolio. The group has a senior management team in place that has extensive experience in MGA management and in the reinsurance industry. In AM Best's view, this increases the likelihood of market acceptance and successful execution of the group's business plan.

This press release relates to Credit Ratings that have been published on AM Best's website. For all rating information relating to the release and pertinent disclosures, including details of the office responsible for issuing each of the individual ratings referenced in this release, please see AM Best's Recent Rating Activity web page. For additional information regarding the use and limitations of Credit Rating opinions, please view Guide to Best's Credit Ratings. For information on the proper media use of Best's Credit Ratings and AM Best press releases, please view Guide for Media Proper Use of Best's Credit Ratings and AM Best Rating Action Press Releases

AM Best is a global credit rating agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specializing in the insurance industry. Headquartered in the United States, the company does business in over 100 countries with regional offices in New York, London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. For more information, visit www.ambest.com

Copyright 2020 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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#ARM Worldwide, a Gurgaon based digital marketing & communication consultancy in support with a global technology leader, Huami Amazfit has announced the launch of a dedicated Whatsapp helpline for doctors and hospitals who are in need of hygiene supply and high-quality masks. Yesterday they already donated high-quality N95 masks & some protective suits to multiple Hospitals including AIIMS New Delhi, Manipal Hospital. They also announced a donation to Honorable MP Dr. Mahesh Sharma, in Noida for helping people fighting against the coronavirus pandemic. After the outbreak of COVID-19, the situation being faced across the globe is challenging and difficult. India is a densely populated country; its recommended to plan and take all necessary measures to combat the disease collectively.

On behalf of Huami, we are open for all requests from doctors & hospitals or any government authority for providing support for various hygiene essentials & Supply. I have converted my alternate no for this cause & Interested authority can directly reach out to our Whatsapp support line +91-85954 38550 says Honey Singh CEO #ARM Worldwide while launching the WhatsApp helpline for Doctors, Hospitals & front liner's who are leading the Fights against Corona.

With a belief that the worsening condition of COVID-19 doesnt go out of control in India. We want to extend our support to the government authorities and leading hospitals who are working really well during this tough time where the nation is facing a shortage of masks and hygiene essentials. We are thankful to Dr. Mahesh Sharma Honorable Member of Parliament and also a noble Doctor by profession, for giving us a chance to work towards this social cause and give our utmost contribution during this hard time says CP Khandelwal, CEO - PR innovations (Managing India Business Amazfit).

Covid-19 has been declared a Pandemic by WHO. In the time of this health emergency, every health facility requires personal protective equipment and logistics. During this crisis, PR Innovations has extended a gesture of compassion and humanity by donating N-95 masks required by the team of clinicians staff and paramedics, says Dr Jitendra Sodhi, Assistant Professor, Department of Hospital Administration, AIIMS, New Delhi.

Celebrating the human spirit of aid and positivity to combat the COVID-19 Pandemic through this generous gesture, Manipal Hospital, Dwarka gives heartfelt thanks to Huami Amazfit, PR Innovations and Mr. Honey Singh, CEO #ARM Worldwide, for donating N-95 masks to us at this tough time, says Pramod Alagharu, CEO, Manipal Hospitals Dwarka.

Manipal Hospitals Delhi thanks @honeytech and @huami_corp @AmazfitIndia for their contributions to fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic.#COVID2019 #Covid_19india #ManipalHospitalsDelhi #YourManipal #LifesOn pic.twitter.com/AwLJt1EzdQ  Manipal Hospitals (@ManipalHealth) March 24, 2020



Huami Amazfit, a global technology leader that has recently faced a tough time due to the COVID-19 outbreak in China understands the current situation in India and extends this donation as a gesture of care and well-being of Indian masses. The organization is already working with various NGOs in China and wants to extend open support to the Indian Government for any future donation requests.
Two men with no travel history have tested positive for Sars-CoV-2 in Thane and Kalwa in the past two days, according to the Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC). Both of them are admitted to private hospitals and are contact cases.

Sandeep Malvi, deputy municipal commissioner of TMC, said, A 58-year-old Thane resident, an employee of a private hospital, had fever since last week. He got admitted to the hospital on March 20 and tested positive yesterday. He must have contacted the virus in the hospital, as he has no travel history. We have sent three members of his family to Kasturba Hospital for testing.

In the second case, a 39-year-old man from Parsik Nagar in Kalwa, an IT employee, tested positive on March 24. An officer from TMCs health department said, He had come in contact with US delegates who had visited his office for a meeting last week. He tried to hide his symptoms and got tested in a private lab. We have sealed that lab. He got admitted to a private hospital in Mulund and his condition is stable. He has not revealed the number of people he came in contact with.

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The digital divide in the most isolated parts of the United States is reinforced by risky economic propositions and geographic barriers to connectivity, but a technology in its infancy  TV white space broadband  may help communities clear these hurdles.Since the nationwide switch to digital television in 2009, the Federal Communications Commission has gradually lifted restrictions, allowing companies to test whether broadband can be achieved with open frequencies known as white space in rural communities without interfering with other signals.The attractiveness of it was this was prime spectrum that was not being used, and it opens up a second Wi-Fi band with significant improvements in coverage, range and bandwidth, said James Carlson, CEO of hardware manufacturer Carlson Wireless Technologies.At the end of February, the FCC proposed to permit higher transmit power and antenna height above average terrain for fixed White Space devices in less congested geographic areas. The sense is that once these rules are changed, white space broadband providers will have more flexibility.Instead of building a new tower, they can place radios on an existing tower to reach customers that they wouldnt otherwise be able to reach with that tower, said Paul Garnett, senior director of the Microsoft Airband Initiative, which has facilitated white space broadband projects in half of the 50 states Currently, white space broadband can work, but the economics need to be better before expansion can take place, said Mark Ouellette, president and COO of Axiom. A few years ago, Ouellettes company started providing white space Internet to a handful of very rural homes in Maine. Once Axiom determined that the technology could work, it helped connect more homes, though its total number of customers, 40 to 50, has stayed relatively flat.Its a very limited service, Ouellette said. The reason for that is the service really works best in those places where other wireless connectivity solutions have failed.Only a few manufacturers produce equipment for white space broadband, so the hardware is very expensive, which means a provider needs more customers to produce a better return on investment, Ouellette said. But the more customers one has, the less bandwidth one has to offer, hindering providers from delivering Internet speeds that meet customer demand. This conflict between cost and connectivity could be reduced by the FCCs proposed changes.At present, because of technological restrictions, Axiom customers in Maine tend to get, on average, a download speed between 3 and 10 Mbps. Although such speeds dont meet the FCCs official definition of broadband download speed (25 Mbps), Ouellette sees these connections as a major victory.These customers dont have another choice, so for them, getting connected was exciting, Ouellette said. And for us, being able to connect a customer that previously we could not connect was exciting.White space can deliver true broadband speed in other contexts, however. Carlson said his companys equipment can lead to download and upload speeds of 26 Mbps for the European base and 22 Mbps for the United States.Bob Nichols, CEO of Declaration Networks, said his company, through white space technology, offers a variety of speed packages to customers in Virginia and Maryland, though not everyone opts for broadband speed.In many cases, 10 megabit speed packages for a lot of rural folks are sufficient, Nichols said. While we do offer 25/3 and above, we have a lot of folks who take stuff below.Garnett said Radwin, a company in Israel, is introducing white space radios that can bond and aggregate channels for higher speeds  even in the range of 300 Mbps. Garnett added that all Microsoft Airband Initiative projects are aiming for at least 25 Mbps/3 Mbps.Ouellette believes the promise of white space has been fulfilled in that it can help very difficult-to-serve customers. Nichols agrees that white space can help fill a gap in the digital divide that other technologies cant fix.The primary reason there is a digital divide is because the traditional approaches, fiber or cable, are very expensive, and the business case associated with deploying those types of technology in lower-density areas just doesnt make sense, Nichols said.Theres a tremendous need, Nichols added. Some of this recent activity with COVID-19 has really highlighted where people are able to go home and do teleworking and where they cant.Other stakeholders see how white space can bring other benefits as the technology advances.The coverage of this would be quite useful for drones compared to Wi-Fi, Carlson said.Garnett added that Microsoft has asked the FCC to tweak its regulations to allow for narrowband Internet of Things on white space, which could help connect sensors and other tech on rural farms that have great distances between them.
Al Jazeera spoke to some of the inmates whose names are on the list of Taliban prisoners slated to be released.

On a cold late night in March 2016, hours after the Taliban fighters left Jan Mohammeds [name has been changed to protect identity] house in Afghanistans Nangarhar province, security forces barged into his mud house and took him away.

The night before, the Taliban had forcefully entered Mohammeds house in Sherzad district, demanding food and water after escaping an ongoing gun battle with the Afghan security forces.

We could not stop the Taliban fighters. How could we dare do that? We were totally helpless against those gunmen, he recalled the night that changed his life forever.

Mohammed, a farmer, was arrested for backing the Taliban  a charge he denies.

I cannot forget how my children started crying when they [Afghan forces] dragged me out of my house. I heard my daughter saying, please kill me instead and spare my fathers life, Mohammed, who was sentenced to 12 years in jail for helping the Taliban, told Al Jazeera from the prison.

He was thrown in the notorious Pul-e-Chakrhi prison, a high-security facility outside the capital Kabul known for its poor conditions. The prison has a history of violence and torture, with mass graves discovered dating back to the time of Kabuls Soviet Union-backed governments in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Mohammed is one of the 5,000 prisoners slated to be released as part of an agreement signed between the US and the Taliban armed group, touted as the deal that will end the USs longest war.

According to the deal, signed in the Qatari capital Doha, the US will pull its troops out of Afghanistan after nearly 19 years in return for a security guarantee from the Taliban group. The Taliban has also agreed to participate in intra-Afghan talks aimed at establishing peace throughout the country.

The prisoner deal has been clouded by uncertainty as the Western-backed government in Kabul called for a phased release  a proposal rejected by the Taliban.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said the government would free 1,500 prisoners in the first phase and demanded guarantees that the prisoners would not return to fighting.

The Taliban, however, said the deal with the US required Ghani to free all 5,000 prisoners at once with no conditions.

The disagreement over the release and a political feud at the top level of Afghan government between Ghani and his political rival Abdullah Abdullah, who also claimed the presidency following a disputed election, have stalled the US-driven peace process.

I am seen as Talibans political prisoner, the Taliban are asking for my release because I helped their fighters once by feeding them that night. In reality, I had no other option because those fighters were armed, Mohammed told Al Jazeera from his prison cell.

I will never forgive those Taliban fighters who entered my house by force, and I will also never forgive those Afghan forces who raided my house.

Broken limbs and skulls

The list of 5,000 prisoners, seen by Al Jazeera, includes the name of Muslim Afghan, who is serving 15 years in Pul-e-Charkhi for carrying explosives.

Afghan was arrested in 2015 from Salam University, Kabul, where he was studying law. He alleges he was tortured while in custody.

During interrogation, my toenails were pulled out, and I was given electric shocks every day. I would be put in cold water ranging from 10 minutes to half an hour during winter season. I would pass out. When I gained my senses, I would realize I was laid down in the cold and freezing underground basement with a light blanket covering me, Afghan told Al Jazeera.

In cold and freezing winters of Kabul, I was asked to stand all night long in the hallways of the prison, my hands tied up and every time I moved or passed out, they kicked and punched me to wake me up. This went on until the next morning,

They continued to torture me because I wouldnt confess because there was nothing to confess!

Sources in the Afghan government and police who wish not to be named told Al Jazeera that Afghans uncle is part of the Haqqani Network  a Taliban affiliate  designated a terror organisation by Washington.

Afghan admitted his uncles links to Haqqani Network, but said he and 18 members of his family who were arrested at the time had no links to his uncle. Other members of his family were released after spending 3-4 years in prison.

My brother Muslim [Afghan] and other 18 members were arrested just because our uncle, who we dont have any links with, is with the Haqqani network. I went to university, my brother did, we were seeking education and working in reputable places, Afghans brother Sangin Ahmed told Al Jazeera.

Why are we paying the price of someone elses wrongdoings?

They have tortured my brother and have sentenced him to 15 years for no crime committed. My mother cries every day and fasts and prays for his release, Ahmed said.

Last week, Human Rights Watch expressed concerns over the fundamental problems in the Afghan justice system.

Although Afghanistan incorporated war crimes and crimes against humanity as part of its 2017 penal code, its investigations have focused only on attacks by Islamic State [ISIL] groups  not alleged crimes by government forces or the Taliban, the statement said.

This failure to investigate has created a major problem for potential prisoner releases. Officials trying to ascertain whether convicted Taliban identified for possible release may have committed war crimes wont get any guidance from the vague charges under which many are held.

The statement also said the government is imprisoning many people under the overly broad terrorism laws that may make it difficult to determine serious crimes committed by a prisoner.

And secret trials and torture to coerce confessions may make it impossible to determine which convicted prisoners actually committed serious crimes, it said adding that international humanitarian law encourages amnesties at the end of hostilities, but neither the release of war criminals nor prolonged imprisonment on dubious charges will bring Afghanistan closer to justice.

Unresolved dispute

Unable to convince Ghani and Abdullah to end their political feud that was jeopardising the US-led peace effort, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday his governments decision to cut $1bn of the US aid Afghanistan receives.

On Wednesday, the Afghan government said it would meet Taliban representatives to discuss the prisoner release.

If the Ghani-Abdullah dispute continues, it risks weakening the government further and derailing the possibility of an intra-Afghan dialogue with the Taliban.

Last week, US Special Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad said the coronavirus pandemic added urgency to prisoner releases, advising they take place as soon as possible.

The prisoner release will now begin on March 31, the Taliban announced on Tuesday after holding talks with Afghan government officials.

Back in Pul-e-Charkhi prison, Mohammed said he prays to be back with his family every day.

How I hope that God will listen to my prayers and that peace will come to Afghanistan, he said.

Yes, there are Taliban fighters in this prison, and they proudly say that we are with Taliban, but there are innocent people like me as well here, and they need to be released.
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More than a dozen crew members from two Costa cruise ships have been brought to shore in Miami, before being rushed to the hospital to be tested for coronavirus.

Startling footage filmed Thursday afternoon saw more than a dozen crew from the Costa Favolosa and the Costa Magica jump into lifeboats in order to reach mainland United States.

The crew members wore hazmat suits and were inspected by medics once they arrived on dry land, and several ambulances were on standby to escort them to hospital.

A company spokesperson said the Costa Favolosa and the Costa Magica are carrying a combined total of 1,939 crew, and there are at least 30 who have come down with a flu-like illness.

The spokesperson said the boats would dock in Miami late Thursday, and that the rest of the crew would be able to disembark. All passengers were able to disembark the boats back in Guadeloupe and nearby Martinique in the Caribbean.

More than a dozen crew members from two Costa cruise ships have been brought to shore in Miami, before being rushed onward to hospital to be tested for coronavirus

The crew members wore hazmat suits and were inspected by medics once they arrived on dry land, and several ambulances were on standby to escort them to hospital

A company spokesperson said the Costa Favolosa and the Costa Magica are carrying a combined total of 1939 crew, and there are at least 30 who have come down with a flu-like illness

It is unclear whether all 1,939 crew members will be tested for COVID-19, or whether they will be placed in quarantine for 14 days.

Both ships are based in Guadeloupe, a Caribbean island territory of France, but authorities have not allowed the boats to return there.

In recent days, both cruise ships have been circling off the coast of Antilla, Cuba after also being blocked from docking there.

The Costa Favolosa and the Costa Magica both set off on 7 and 14 night Caribbean cruises earlier this month, according to the Miami Herald.

Medics weren't taking any changes, donning gowns and protective masks and gloves as they brought crew members to shore

Startling footage filmed Thursday afternoon saw more than a dozen crew from the the Costa Favolosa and the Costa Magica jump into lifeboats in order to reach mainland United States

The two cruise ships had been blocked from entering ports in the Caribbean

However, the journeys were interrupted March 13, when parent company Carnival Corporations announced it would suspend operations for 30 days amid the global coronavirus pandemic.

All passengers and a small number of crew were able to disembark the boats back in Guadeloupe and nearby Martinique.

Three passengers and three crew members from the Costa Favolosa who left the vessel subsequently tested positive to COVID-19.

One passenger and one crew member from the Costa Magica also tested positive for the highly contagious virus.

In the 13 days since passengers disembarked, the ships have been traveling around the Caribbean in search of a place to port - until the United States intervened.

Miami's Jackson Health Systems told CBS that they will work with Baptist Health to treat sick crew members

In a statement the US Coast Guard, told The Miami Herald: 'The Coast Guard is monitoring the situation of both underway passenger vessels and is working with federal, state, and local port partners as coordination efforts are made to assist any mariners and crew that need higher medical care.'

Miami's Jackson Health Systems told CBS that they will work with Baptist Health to treat sick crew members.

'While we are all committed to preserving resources for our own residents, an international community like Miami would never turn our backs on people aboard ships at our shores,' they stated.

'A team from Jackson's emergency department worked with the US Coast Guard and Miami-Dade Fire Rescue to receive these symptomatic patients at the Coast Guard station, and they will be hospitalized at our three systems until they can safely return home'.

One passenger and one crew member from the Costa Magica (pictured) tested positive for COVID-19 earlier this month. The boat is pictured off the coast of Miami Thursday

Several cruise ships have seen COVID-19 outbreaks in recent weeks, with experts claiming that the close confines of thousands of people make the vessels a perfect breeding ground for the highly contagious virus.

Earlier this month, at least 103 passengers from the Grand Princess cruise also tested positive for COVID-19.

Last month, more than 700 people on board cruise ship Diamond Princess also contracted the disease. Eight of those people died in relation to the virus.

The Costa Favolosa and the Costa Magica are pictured alongside other large vessels off the coast of Miami Thursday. They are expected to be brought in to dock later this evening

The number of cases in the US has rocketed over the last two weeks
President Donald Trump has shifted his tone. He said he would stop using the term "Chinese virus" and decided "we shouldn't make any more of a big deal out of it," in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday. This change is of positive significance. We hope Trump could urge other US senior officials to follow suit and not use slurs such as "Chinese virus" or "Wuhan virus," that are widely considered racist, anymore.

China and the US have been engaged in a war of words recently and the US is to blame. If Trump's altered tone can lead other US officials to reduce their verbal attacks on China, it's believed Chinese officials would respond positively.

The novel coronavirus pandemic is spreading out of control globally. The world is keen to see China and the US shelve disputes and join hands to fight the virus. If the two big powers can turn to cooperation from discord, that will surely inspire the international community and also benefit the two countries.

But we are worried that Trump's adjustment may be a temporary tactic. It is well known that his repeated use of the "Chinese virus" has backfired in the US. Not only the Democrats, but also US mainstream public opinion, have poured a ton of criticism on their president. Asian Americans in the US are particularly irritated as the slur Trump used would fuel xenophobia and worsen their situation.

These public reactions have exerted substantial pressure on Trump's reelection bid. Meanwhile, the US now risks becoming the new epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic with its domestic situation worsening day by day. Intensifying conflicts with China at this time would do more harm to the US. The US is in dire need of medical materials such as facial masks and ventilators, and China is a major supplier. This has also increased pressure on Washington.

Therefore, concerns that Trump's change is out of expediency are not unwarranted. Nonetheless, it's a positive move made by Washington amid the current China-US stalemate. We welcome any change by the US side that could help alleviate China-US frictions, and hope Washington could make more efforts to reduce bilateral tensions.

Regardless of from which perspective, China and the US working together to fight the pandemic is more in the interest of Americans. The novel coronavirus is a common enemy that people haven't fully known. No country can win the virus fight alone. China-US cooperation will undoubtedly be mutually beneficial and in line with the interests of all people. Its gains will be dwarfed by its losses if Washington resorts to conflicting China to fight the epidemic.

China has brought the situation under control while the US is becoming the new epicenter. Central China's Hubei Province lifted its lockdown on Wednesday, so will its capital Wuhan in two weeks, but the US is just beginning its various stringent restrictions. At this time, if Washington continues to intensify tensions with China and create obstacles for epidemic control cooperation, it will worsen the US domestic political climate.

We hope Trump's promise could serve as an opportunity for the US to adjust its policy toward China at least during the pandemic. The so-called China threat, which has been maliciously exaggerated, is not as real as the threat of coronavirus. The latter is unleashing its destruction in the US and it's the true ferocious enemy of the US.

A special G20 summit on COVID-19 will be held on Thursday and is expected to come up with effective measures to jointly fight the wide spread of the novel coronavirus. As the two most powerful countries, China and the US should stand together to inspire other countries, coordinate international assistance, cooperate on vaccine and medicine development. This is the obligation that they should assume for their societies and the entire international community.

Defeating the coronavirus is the common expectation of all mankind. All countries are called on to join hands in the fight. It's hoped the US government could follow the trend when formulating its policies.
NEW DELHI : The government is looking for volunteer doctors to fight the coronavirus outbreak which has infected over 600 people in the country and has taken more than 19,000 lives across the globe.

In a statement posted on Niti Aayog's website on Wednesday, the government appealed to retired government, Armed Forces Medical Services, public sector undertaking or a private doctor to come forward and join the efforts of the government to fight the deadly virus.

Those who wish to contribute to this and be a part of this nobel mission to serve the country may register themselves on a link provided on the official website of the Niti Aayog.

The Government of India requests for volunteer doctors who are fit and willing to be available for providing their services in the public health facilities and the training hospitals in the near future.

We appeal to such doctors to come forward at this hour of need. You could also be a retired government, Armed Forces Medical Services, public sector undertaking or a private doctor," the statement said.

It noted that in case the outbreak leads to a high number of infected individuals, India's public health facilities will face tremendous load to take care of the large number of patients.

"This overwhelming burden may not be met by the available doctors in the public health system. The Central and state governments are augmenting and expediting increase in healthcare services in every part of the country. In addition, COVID-19 'train hospitals' are being created in this regard," it added.

The country is facing an unprecedented public health emergency with the COVID-19 pandemic affecting several parts of the nation.

The Central and state governments have made exceptional efforts to combat the crisis along with the involvement of all citizens.

Coronavirus cases in the country crossed 600 on Wednesday as authorities beefed up preparedness to fight the pandemic with a chain of hospitals of the Army ordnance factories and central paramilitary forces earmarking over 2,000 beds for isolation and treatment of people affected by COVID-19. In addition, the Hamirpur district administration in Himachal Pradesh took over all the ten hostels with 2,000 rooms of the National Institute of Technology (NIT) for creating an isolation centre.

A 2,200-bed state-run hospital in Kolkata has stopped admitting new patients who are suffering from other diseases and was discharging patients whose condition had improved as part of efforts to create a dedicated isolation centre.

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Military and medical staff on board the US Navy's lead hospital ship, 'Mercy', are making preparations to take on as many as 1,000 non-coronavirus patients after it docks in the Port of Los Angeles.

The former super oil tanker left its home port in San Diego on Monday to help free up beds on the mainland in the Los Angeles area for treating patients who are infected with the deadly, flu-like virus also known as COVID-19.

More than 800 medical professionals are on board the Mercy to provide medical and surgical services that patients normally would have received in hospitals which are now nearing their maximum with people seeing treatment and testing for the infection.

Military and medical staff on board the US Navy's lead hospital ship, 'Mercy', are making preparations to take on as many as 1,000 non-coronavirus patients after it docks in the Port of Los Angeles. The Mercy is pictured at its home port in San Diego before the current mission

The Mercy is seen departing its San Diego home port, bound for Los Angeles, where it will provide relief to mainland hospitals which are nearing capacity because of the coronavirus outbreak

Crew members are seen on deck of the Mercy as it makes its way to the Los Angeles area to serve as a hospital for noncoronavirus patients in need of medical and surgical services

The bow of the Mercy as it makes its way to the Port of Los Angeles with 800 medical personnel on board

The interior of the Mercy resembles most mainland hospitals, with similar medical equipment for treating patients

Members of the Mercy's crew are seen making preparations for non-coronavirus patients who will soon come on board in need of medical and surgical procedures

Despite leaving Monday and being only 55 nautical miles from its destination, Pentagon officials have said that the ship needs time to train medics and complete required certifications, according to a Fox News report.

Footage of the white-hulled Mercy in a Fox News segment reveals the effort underway to bring much-needed relief to soon-to-be overwhelmed hospitals.

Additional images reveal staff as they readied critical medical equipment to treat as many as 1,000 patients.

Hospitalman Katelynn Kavanagh, from Temecula, Calif., is pictured sanitizing medical equipment aboard the Mercy

Sailors move a hospital bed along a hallway aboard the Mercy as the hospital ship readies for noncoronavirus patients.

Pictured is one of the Mercy's intensive care units that will be used for treating noncoronavirus patients

Hospital beds are pictured as they are set up aboard the Mercy for the expected noncoronavirus patients

Sailors on board Mercy wipe down hospital beds with sanitizer in preparation for patients

A hospital corpsman assigned to the Mercy is pictured unpacking medical equipment

Sailors are pictured on the Mercy using sanitary wipes to clean medical equipment

There have been in the US more than 73,000 confirmed cases of the deadly, flu-like virus, also known as COVID-19.

The infection has been blamed for at least 1,074 known deaths across the country.

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

California has had 3,169 confirmed cases of the virus, which has been blamed for at least 67 deaths.

Surgical supplies are pictured aboard the Mercy

Shortly before the ship left San Diego on Monday, Rear Adm. Tim Weber, commander of Naval Medical Forces Pacific, recalled the vessel's motto.

'We are, as the USNS Mercy's motto says, steaming to assist,' Weber told NPR.

'In a matter of days we have assembled an incredible crew of more than 800 medical professionals who embark on the Mercy to lift the burden off local hospitals so they can focus on caring for patients with COVID-19.'

We are NOT deploying to treat COVID-19 cases, said the ship's commanding officer, Capt. John Rotruck, at a briefing with reporters.

All patients coming aboard will first have to fill out questionnaires and, if needed, have their temperatures taken.

If we did wind up with somebody that we either diagnosed as COVID-19 or thought was highly likely, Rotruck said, we would be looking to send them off the ship and do appropriate preventative measures for any contact they had.
Abubakar Bello, governor of Niger state, has gone into self isolation after attending same event with Bala Muhammed, his Bauchi counte...





Abubakar Bello, governor of Niger state, has gone into self isolation after attending same event with Bala Muhammed, his Bauchi counterpart who was diagnosed with coronavirus.





Both Bello and Muhammed had attended the meeting of the Nigeria governors forum (NGF) on March 18.





In a statement on Wednesday, Mary Noel-Berje, the governors chief press secretary, said the decision was taken based on the directive of the NGF.





The forum directed those who attended the same event with Bauchi governor to embark on self isolation.

Noel-Berje said the Bello will undergo a test to know his coronavirus status. The spokesman quoted the governor as saying his family would also be tested for the virus.





Considering the fact that I was in Abuja the whole of last week to participate in the APC National meeting with the president, The Nigeria Governors Forum meeting, National Economic council meeting and the World bank break fast meeting, as a way of leading by example, I have placed my self on isolation and waiting to be tested, along with members of my family, he said.





The spokesman said the governor has directed that all his close aides and all cabinet members should subject themselves to self isolation.





He urged members of the public to desist from panicking, adding that the government has put measures in place to contain the pandemic.




Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 21:16:16|Editor: huaxia

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MOGADISHU, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Somalia is set to normalize financial ties with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank after making necessary steps to begin receiving debt relief under the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC), the two lenders said.

The two lenders said in a joint statement issued on Wednesday evening that debt relief will help Somalia reduce its external debt from 5.2 billion U.S. dollars at the end of 2018 to 557 million dollars once it reaches the HIPC Completion Point in about three years' time.

World Bank Group President David Malpass welcomed Somalia's efforts to restore stability, engage with creditors, and adopt a poverty reduction strategy.

"Resumption of regular financing to Somalia is an important landmark, and we look forward to further economic and social progress," Malpass said.

Somalia, which is continuing its path towards stability and development after 30 years outside the international financial system, is the 37th country to reach this milestone, known as the HIPC Decision Point.

According to the two lenders, Somalia's immediate normalization of its ties with the global community will re-open access to critical additional financial resources to strengthen the economy, help improve social conditions, raise millions out of poverty, and generate sustainable employment for Somalia's people.

Somali Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire said the government was pleased by the latest move by the two lenders which allows Somalia to fully re-engage with global financial institutions.

"This decision is an important milestone which presents ample opportunities for Somalia as it relentlessly pursues its ongoing reform processes as well as its recovery and development agenda," Khaire said, noting that the journey required hard work, dedication and partnership," he added, and lauded the two lenders and partners for their support.

The two lenders said Somalia has committed to maintaining macroeconomic stability, implementing a poverty reduction strategy, and putting in place a set of reforms focused on fiscal stability, improving governance and debt management, strengthening social conditions, and supporting inclusive growth in order to reach the HIPC Completion Point.

Kristalina Georgieva, IMF managing director, said successful reform efforts have laid the foundation for inclusive economic growth and for addressing the needs of the country's most vulnerable people.
A member of the Logistics Brigade of the Spanish Army poses for photographers next to bunk beds for homeless people at a shelter in the Fira Pavilion, as the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak continues, in Barcelona, Spain. Photo: REUTERS/Nacho Doce

The Spanish government has asked Nato to help source emergency healthcare supplies as the country's coronavirus epidemic became the second deadliest in the world, with Spain now having registered more deaths than China.

Spain announced a new record number of fatalities yesterday morning, with 738 people having died from the virus in 24 hours to take the death toll to 3,434, second only to Italy.

Yesterday, it emerged that Madrid had requested assistance from Nato's Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Co-ordination Centre to locate items such as surgical masks, disposable gowns and virus test kits.

In the letter, sent to Nato on Monday, the Spanish government said the coronavirus health emergency in Spain started on March 9, the day after the country's government had allowed large demonstrations to take place on International Women's Day, despite calls to ban mass events.

Salvador Illa, the health minister, said yesterday that it was only in the evening of March 8 that the government became aware that "a significant level of contagion in some parts of Spain took place around the last week of February".

Several regional leaders and opposition politicians had called for action to be taken earlier to seal off Madrid, where the majority of cases occurred in the early days of the epidemic.

Spain was eventually put on nationwide lockdown on March 15, but the spiral of contagion and death continued on an exponential course.

Yesterday, the total of confirmed coronavirus cases stood at 47,610 in Spain, up from 7,753 10 days earlier.

Fernando Simon, the head of Spain's centre for health emergencies, insisted yesterday that the grim data in terms of deaths comes with signs that the lockdown measures are slowing the rate of contagion.

"If we haven't reached the peak yet, then we are very close to it," said Mr Simon.

Meanwhile, the tragic extent of Italy's medical emergency was thrown into stark relief yesterday when it emerged that a nurse took her own life after being traumatised by her experience in trying to save lives. Daniela Trezzi (34) was left deeply upset by what she had seen fighting the virus in a hospital in Monza.

Another 683 people who had the virus died in Italy yesterday, bringing the country's death toll to 7,503. But the daily figure was down from the 743 people who died on Tuesday. ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Visit our Covid-19 vaccine dashboard for updates on the roll out of the vaccination program and the rate of Coronavirus cases Ireland

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
As COVID-19 spreads across the world, it is vital to identify and map declared cases and the progression of the disease through affected areas.

According to the Universal Postal Union (UPU), if the authorities are to reach individuals, deploy emergency services or organise the delivery of medical supplies, accurate addresses are fundamental. Such addresses are only possible through a comprehensive street plan and house numbering system displayed on maps.

UPUs Addressing and Postcode Expert Patricia Vivas said: "In Europe, mapping outbreak cases of COVID-19 and deployment of emergency services have been handled in a matter of hours in countries like Italy or Spain. A very different scenario is to be expected in less economically developed countries where the COVID-19 situation is becoming increasingly intense; however, addressing networks and mapping tools have yet to be fully implemented in many of these countries."

Address infrastructure helps in the management of information, which can be coordinated and exchanged at different levels of government, as well as during the distribution of emergency services and management of health assets. Databases that use addresses can help link location data with personal identification details and information on infected cases or vulnerable segments of the population. Examples of critical data include the total number of people living in a neighbourhood struck down by the pandemic, and the number of people, particularly elderly people, expected to be in affected areas.

The response of emergency services is time-sensitive. Identification of a location and the best route to access it are crucial for rapid responses. Street names and house numbers greatly facilitate the ability of emergency response teams to reach an affected area. When operating in the field, the security and health personnel involved in the COVID-19 pandemic must be kept informed about the actions to be carried out and the risks of their work, stressed Vivas.

In order to make decisions about operations, existing hazards must be accounted for and a comprehensive plan designed. Integrating all of the available information, including spatial information, is a critical factor for making secure decisions. In countries affected by COVID-19, maps displaying precise outbreak areas and medical infrastructure should be made available to facilitate the identification and access of safe havens for victims and personnel.

For people in quarantine or confinement, the ability to order goods online is essential. However, deliveries need proper address information. Address networks also go far beyond the postal sector; they comprise crucial information  an underlying infrastructure upon which many other services can be built and actions planned. They are a significant step in connecting people and national authorities with rapid emergency response and resources available when a pandemic strikes. -- Tradearabia News Service
The number of coronavirus cases in Gujarat increased to 44 on Thursday as five new cases came to light, officials said.

Three persons have died due to the highly contagious disease until now, they said.

From 39 cases on Wednesday,the number of coronavirus cases in Gujarat rose to 44 by Thursday evening, said Jayanti Ravi, Principal Secretary, Health.

One case each was reported in Ahmedabad, Surat, Bhavnagar, Gandhinagar and Rajkot, she told reporters in Gandhinagar.

The highest number of cases, 15, have been detected in Ahmedabad, followed by Vadodara (8), Gandhinagar (7), Surat (7) Rajkot (5) and one each in Kutch and Bhavnagar, she said.

A 70-year-old COVID-19 patient died in Bhavnagar district early Thursday morning.

According to Ravi, he had travelled to Delhi recently, and was also suffering from heart disease, diabetes and hypertension.

As many as 19,567 persons are under 14-day 'home quarantine'.

In a proactive measure to find out suspected cases, the state government has initiated on-site and off-site survey of each and every resident of Gujarat, and 2.21 crore persons have been screened under this massive drive till now.

"We are also gathering their travel history, both in the country and abroad. Till now, we have identified 86 persons having mild symptoms. We are hoping to wrap up the state-wide survey in the next one week," said Ravi, who was accompanied by Director General of Police Shivanand Jha at the press conference.

Jha said that 482 persons were detained during the last 24 hours for roaming outside without any valid reason, defying lockout.

Police will take action against those who violate restrictions on movement, he added.

To reduce crowds at shops and malls, Jha said the police has asked the owners to issue tokens to customers for effective social distancing.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Keisha Henry poses for a portrait inside her lounge and catering business in New Orleans. She lost about $10,000 in revenue last week after three big functions she was slated to cater ended up canceling. Henry said she regrettably had to lay off several employees. (AP Photo)

Washington: With streets in major cities barren, and shops and restaurants forced to close due to the coronavirus pandemic, economists warn of a record explosion of Americans filing for unemployment benefits.

The Labor Department on Thursday will release its weekly data on first-time applications for jobless benefits covering the week ending March 21 the first to show the epidemic's impact on the US economy.

"Whatever the number, it will be horrific," said Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics.

The data have been mundane for the past two years amid a very strong US labor market, but the situation has changed for this lowly report on the frontlines of the virus fallout.

Last week's report showed jobless claims surged to their highest level since September 2017, especially with a jump in applications from hotel and restaurant workers.

"The consensus for today's first post-apocalypse jobless claims number (1.5 million), looks much too low," Shepherdson said, adding that he is expecting a staggering 3.5 million.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow acknowledged the report would show a jump, but said the market is expecting it.

"It's going to be a very large increase," he said.

But economists cautioned that forecasting data in unprecedented times is dicey at best.

The models "are based on prior experience and we have no prior experience of an economy that has largely been shut down," said Rubeela Farooqi of High Frequency Economics.

"These are extraordinary times that will result in extraordinary outcomes."

Reports from states and even data on Google searches show that unemployment offices have been overwhelmed in recent days and may have to estimate their totals.

Economists are projecting the pandemic's shutdown could lead to a staggering 14 percent contraction of the US economy, and the Conference Board on Wednesday said unemployment could rise to as high as 15 percent later in the year far beyond the 10 percent peak hit in October 2009 during the global financial crisis.
Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh (R) presents Friendship Order to Japanese outgoing ambassador Umeda Kunio (Photo: VNA)



At a reception earlier, Minh lauded the diplomats active contributions to the strengthening of the Vietnam  Japan extensive strategic partnership.



He stressed that during the ambassadors tenure in Vietnam, the bilateral ties have been developed substantially in various areas, with regular high-level visits which helped strengthen bilateral political trust.

On economic cooperation, Japan remained among the top investors, trade and tourism partners of Vietnam, Minh highlighted, thanking and hailing Japan for its continued supply of official development assistance to Vietnam, thus making active and effective contributions to the countrys socio-economic development.

For his part, the Japanese envoy thanked Minh and the Foreign Ministry for helping him fulfill assigned tasks.

According to him, Vietnam has become a top important and trustworthy partner of Japan in the fields of politics, security, economy and human resources training.

He heralded drastic measures undertaken by the Vietnamese Government in response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

The diplomat also pledged to continue contributing to bilateral ties in any position upon returning home./.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 01:48:44|Editor: huaxia

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GENEVA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday urged all countries to unite against the COVID-19 pandemic, warning that "millions could die" without aggressive action.

"Almost half a million people have already been infected, and more than 20,000 have lost their lives. The pandemic is accelerating at an exponential rate," WHO Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned at the G20 Extraordinary Leaders' Summit on COVID-19 held via a teleconference on Thursday.

WHO reports show that the first 100,000 cases took 67 days; the second 100,000 took 11 days; the third 100,000 took four days and the fourth 100,000 just two days.

"Without aggressive action in all countries, millions could die. The full social, economic and political fallout, only time will tell," Tedros said.

He raised three requests to address the global crisis that demands a global response. The first is to fight. "Fight hard. Fight like hell. Fight like your lives depend on it -- because they do. The best and only way to protect life, livelihoods and economies is to stop the virus. No excuses. No regrets," the WHO chief proclaimed.

"We must immediately build, expand, train and deploy health workers to find, test, isolate and treat every case and trace every contact," he added.

The second is to unite. "No country can solve this crisis alone. We're all in this together, and we will only get out of it together," he said, urging global solidarity from all countries.

The third is to ignite. "Repurpose the industrial might of your nations for this effort. Ignite global production for the tools we need to save lives now. Ignite innovation for vaccines and therapeutics. And ignite a global movement to ensure this never happens again," he said.

"The actions we take now will have consequences for decades to come," the WHO chief said, as COVID-19 is also the opportunity for everyone to "come together as one against a common threat, and to build a common future."
Letters and cards of support with chocolates have been delivered to a Brisbane aged care facility after residential and retirement homes are limiting visitations to help combat coronavirus.

Catholic Healthcares Villa Maria resident Gwen was happy to receive her letter.

The Mercy Action Group of All Hallows School were unable to conduct their usual visit to Catholic Healthcares Villa Maria Fortitude Valley.

However, students still made the effort to write letters and cards to senior citizens along with chocolate care packages.

Villa Maria's diversional therapist Joanna Leung said residents appreciated the gifts after residents' social interactions with the outside world had been greatly reduced.
The vehicle has been handed over to the Ministry of Water Resources for official use, being the purpose for which it was procured.
It began as a mysterious disease with frightening potential. Now, just two months after America's first confirmed case, the country is grappling with a lethal reality: The coronavirus has killed more than 1,000 people in the United States, a toll that is increasing at an alarming rate.

As the highly contagious virus has created clusters of illness, from Seattle to New York City, death has followed in turn. On Wednesday night, the country's largest city reported 88 new deaths from covid-19. As of Thursday afternoon, Americans had died in 42 states and territories and the District of Columbia, with punishing increases in Louisiana and Michigan. Experts fear the worst is still to come, pointing to a rapid acceleration of cases in communities across the country.

The Washington Post is tracking every known U.S. death, analyzing data from health agencies and gathering details from family and friends of the victims. In the first 1,000 fatalities, some patterns have begun to emerge in the outbreak's epidemiology and its painful human impact. About 65 percent of the dead whose ages are known were older than 70 and nearly 40 percent were over 80, demonstrating that risk rises along with age. About 5 percent whose ages are known were in their 40s or younger, but many more in that age group have been sick enough to be hospitalized. Of those victims whose gender is known, nearly 60 percent were men.

What remains murky is exactly who is dying in America during the pandemic, even as scientists and public health experts race to uncover information that can help save lives.

Overwhelmed state and local authorities have been issuing widely varying reports on those who died, citing medical privacy laws to shield even basic details about age, gender and underlying conditions, the three signal categories that epidemiologists say are key indicators of risk.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which offers a well-regarded and oft-cited public weekly tracker for the annual influenza season, offers no similar real-time surveillance for the novel coronavirus. The analysis the agency does provide relies on spotty reporting by the states, struggling to serve a surge of sick people.

There are some among the 1,000 deaths who publicly have a name, an age, a place of death and a life story: the playwright Terrence McNally, the rabbi Romi Cohn, the principal Dezann Romain. They appear in local media accounts: Sundee Rutter, a mother of six and breast cancer survivor in Washington state; Alvin Simmons, a father of two and hospital worker in New York; and Elizabeth Eugenia Wells, a grandmother who sang in her church choir in Georgia.

But many others surface only elliptically, in tweets and Facebook posts.

"Today, one of my friends died, presumably of complications related to coronavirus," a woman in Ohio posted in a tearful Facebook video message Monday. "She was my age. She had a husband, a daughter who is like 3. She was immunocompromised. She had some long-standing health problems. She wasn't, like, infirm. She was young and happy and vibrant. And now she's dead."

And: "My uncle died of Covid-19 today in California. He was 78 years old & had Parkinson's Disease. Went on some cruise prior to all the warnings. Went home, got ill, went to ER. Admitted. Lungs failed. ICU. Kidneys failed. Opted to DNR per MD 100% mortality rate opinion when pressed."

What becomes public varies widely by locality. In King County, Wash., an early epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, the health department posts daily updates to its website that include a victim's gender, age range, date of death, any presence of underlying health conditions and the hospital where they were treated. That report may include a note that the death is part of a cluster, such as at Life Care Center nursing home in Kirkland.

"Of the 87 deaths reported, 37 are confirmed to be associated with Life Care," King County reported on its site on Monday.

Some states, such as Florida and Colorado, offer detailed statewide data, while others, such as California, release almost no demographic details and defer to counties.

The inconsistency in reporting is particularly stark in New York. State health officials there have been taciturn about death statistics, usually leaving it to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, to announce the running toll at his daily briefings. In New York City, the health department has started releasing reports every day summarizing deaths by age group, gender, borough and preexisting medical problem.

Within them are numbers that raise red flags: data that shows at least 96 percent of those who died as of Wednesday had underlying conditions, and that 72 New Yorkers who died were under 64.

Still more deaths are not being counted at all, such as those who were misdiagnosed with the flu or another illness and those who died but were never tested, highlighting another key gap in mortality information.

One epidemiologist who left New York state's health department late last year said former colleagues have reached out to him recently, desperate to develop tools that would make it easier to track the disease as it spreads and kills.

"They not only lacked the ability to perform any type of modeling, forecasting or time series but could not even provide or perform basic epidemiologic analysis due to lack of access to data," the epidemiologist said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss operations within his field.

Ordinarily, experts say, the public could rest assured that the CDC is at least compiling detailed, nationwide data on the deaths and cases to analyze internally.

When a disease is categorized as "immediately notifiable, extremely urgent," as covid-19 is, officials are required to call and notify the CDC within hours of identifying a case.

"That means probable, suspected and then confirmed" cases of covid-19 - as well as deaths, said Charles Branas, the chair of the epidemiology department at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. That call is then to be followed, within a day, with the submission of an electronic form, Branas said.

But state health departments - including, critically, New York's - are short-staffed and so deluged by the pandemic that they have not been filling out the forms with the basic information the CDC requires to perform an analysis, CDC officials say.

The New York State Department of Health even recently solicited volunteer help from local public-health graduate students, according to an email shared with The Post.

The first known deaths from the novel coronavirus were an 86-year-old woman and a 54-year-old man in King County on Feb. 26.

Two weeks later, the toll had reached 50. Four days after that, it topped 100. Then, 48 hours later, it had doubled.

Since March 21, the toll has increased by between 90 and 193 deaths per day, and on Wednesday, agencies reported nearly 250 fatalities, the most so far in the United States in a single day.

"We are at the beginning of the wave in most places in the United States," said Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious-diseases physician and medical director of the special pathogens unit at Boston University School of Medicine. "The worst is probably yet to come."

The United States now has the sixth-highest death toll in the world, behind Italy, Spain, China, Iran and France. In Italy, where more than a third of the world's virus-related deaths have occurred, 21 days passed from the first death to the 1,000th, recorded on March 13. From there, Italy's toll has climbed faster. Last weekend, it recorded 793 fatalities in a single day, the deadliest day of the outbreak anywhere.

Leaders and health experts in the United States have pointed to Italy as an example of what could happen as the American health-care system becomes overwhelmed and under-resourced.

Most victims had underlying medical conditions, hindering their immune system's response to covid-19's assault on their cells. In New York City, which had reported 280 deaths as of Wednesday evening, more than anywhere else in the country, 96 percent of people had a preexisting illness, such as asthma, diabetes, lung disease or cancer.

Yet the virus can also strike down those who were otherwise healthy.

James Carriere, a prominent local attorney and 10th-generation Louisianian, was one of those people. The 80-year-old was healthy, exercising regularly and enjoying family dinners in classic New Orleans haunts when he fell ill.

He was admitted to the hospital and died in quarantine about a week later.

His son, Olivier Carriere, said goodbye to him on FaceTime.

"He enjoyed life; he was always doing something. Then, all of a sudden -" he said. "We're all in shock."

Epidemiologists caution against becoming alarmed by the deaths of older people with no known underlying conditions, or by the story of a 35-year-old, seemingly in the prime of life, who succumbs to the disease.

"But the comparable data that you should have is: What about all the 35-year-olds who didn't die?" Branas said. "Without that, these cases are merely anecdotal."

"Some people have so many preexisting conditions that they are so deeply at risk that when they get the disease, it is very difficult to prevent their death," Branas added. "That's why you don't want to rely solely on mortality data."

To understand the likely trajectory of a disease, and who is most vulnerable, scientists need to be able to examine complete data on who survived, in addition to who died of the disease.

The Post's data on the first 1,000 fatalities reveals trends that already have emerged in studies from other countries that have been battling the outbreak far longer. There's a silver lining to this, Bhadelia said: If the disease were exacting a worse toll in the United States than in countries already ravaged - if it also killed young people at a high rate - that would have been borne out in these numbers. So far, that has not been the case.

Dense urban centers, many of them in coastal states, have been hit hardest in the first two months of the outbreak, but it's only a matter of time before the coronavirus takes hold in rural areas, too. In some places, such as Albany, Georgia, where at least 12 had died as of Thursday, it's already happening. When it arrives elsewhere, it could have a crippling effect, especially in places where resources and health-care workers are already in short supply.

"It might take longer for covid-19 to make it into the rural communities, and they might not get as many cases there," Bhadelia said, "but the worrisome thing is, it might not take as many cases to overwhelm the health-care system in these areas."

Or, as Cuomo put it earlier this week, warning that his state is the canary in the coal mine: "We are your future."

- - -

The Washington Post's Lena H. Sun, Jennifer Jenkins and Julie Tate also contributed to this report.
The Democratic Republic of Congo capital Kinshasa will go into "total confinement" for four days from Saturday to help contain the spread of coronavirus, authorities said on Thursday.

Governor Gentiny Ngobila on Thursday decreed intermittent four-day confinements over three weeks, according to a speech seen by AFP. The city will be on lockdown for four days followed by two days to allow residents to shop followed by another four-day lockdown, in a rotation continued for the three-week period.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a few short weeks the coronavirus pandemic has transformed our economy and society and left people wondering when it will end and what on earth our communities will look like when it does.

Through it all Premier Doug Ford has been uncharacteristically calm and reassuring with his promise that his government will spare no expense to get Ontarians through the crisis.

Finance Minister Rod Phillips fiscal update on Wednesday was the opportunity to actually deliver the big funding increases that Ontarios health-care system desperately needs at this time. As well as the enhanced financial supports that struggling Ontarians and businesses will need.

But the governments plan is not nearly as big as its $17-billion price-tag makes it sound. And its unlikely to be enough to meet the challenge.

Its also based on what seem like very optimistic assumptions that COVID-19 will have barely any effect at all on government revenues from income and business taxes; that Ontarios historic low unemployment rates somehow wont rise much this year; and that the province will already be back to growth in the second half of the year.

We certainly hope Ford and Phillips are right about all that. But given how things look right now, its a positively rosy outlook.

The governments plan includes up to $10 billion in tax deferrals, primarily targeting businesses, and a $3.3 billion increase to health care spending.

But health care dollars never go as far as governments like to claim. Hospitals, for example, are getting $935 million under this plan, which isnt far off what they said they needed just to maintain the existing level of care before the coronavirus threw everyones best-laid plans out the window.

Similarly, the promised $3.7 billion in direct support for people and to protect jobs is far more modest than it first appears.

Right off the top, $1.5 billion of that goes to continuing the existing hydro subsidies that cut everyones electricity bills, whether they need the help or not, by 25 per cent.

When it comes to new and direct income supports to people who are struggling because of the pandemic, there isnt much here.

Parents with children under 12 will get a one-time payment of $200 ($250 for those with special needs). Ontarios lowest-income seniors will get up to $83 with a doubling of a guaranteed income benefit for six months.

But unlike Quebec, B.C, Alberta, Saskatchewan and even little P.E.I., theres no plan for direct cash payments to help those who have lost work or been forced to isolate because of COVID-19.

Ford, Phillips and finance officials say this is because Ontario doesnt want to duplicate what Ottawa is already doing for workers by speeding up access to unemployment benefits and creating a new benefit programs for the many workers who dont qualify for EI at all. They say Ottawa has more fiscal capacity than Ontario and governments should work together.

Fair enough. But plenty of other provinces are jumping in to enhance the Trudeau governments stimulus package with their own measures, believing it is a necessary provincial role.

B.C. created a one-time emergency benefit of $1,000 for workers who have lost income because of COVID-19. Quebec announced a $573-weekly payment for those eligible in isolation.

The Ford government, by contrast, seems keen to leave the heavy lifting to Ottawa.

That wont work. This pandemic requires every level of government to step up and support those who have lost their incomes.

COVID-19 has emerged as a monumental threat to our health and to our economy, Ford said.

Hes right. Thats why Ontarians need more from their government than its planning to provide.

And the government has the ability to deliver more. It made much of its prudent planning in setting aside record sums in contingency funds, as well as a $2.5 billion reserve fund.

More of those dollars need to be put in the hands of struggling Ontarians. And now, not when it may be too late to help them.

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Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav



Thackeray's handling of the coronavirus crisis in the state and the strategy of taking everyone along has been praised by leaders from various parties.

Amid the 21-day nationwide lockdown, Thackeray has been assuring citizens that the state has enough food grain stock to survive the crisis, and using social media in times of social distancing to establish a rapport with people.

Revenue Minister Balasaheb Thorat, who is also the Maharashtra Congress president, told PTI that though the state government is a three party-set up (comprising the Shiv Sena, NCP and Congress), the chief ministers word is final.

If all the 43 ministers start talking on different television channels, there would be chaos, he said.

"Whenthe chief minister talks to district collectors, divisional commissioners, municipal commissioners across the state, I am present at the meeting along with Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and other bureaucrats," Thorat said.

"Pawar then holds talks with me, Home minister (Anil Deskhmukh) and other officials to take stock of the lockdown in the state. The responsibility for each minister is to monitor situation in the district of which he is the guardian minister," he added.

Maharashtra has reported 124 coronavirus cases, the highest in the country so far.

Aam Aadmi Party's national joint secretary Ruben Mascarenhas said, "Thackeray has clearly emerged as Maharashtra's tallest leader. His demeanour, handling of the situation deserves accolades. He hascalmed nerves and taken people along."



Praising Thackeray, local BJP functionary Dayanand Nene tweeted, "I have been your strong political critic. But in the past few weeks, you have won me over with your calm demeanour and strong decisions. We felt you were a puppet of SP but now feel that you are the best head to run Maharashtra."A close aide of the CM said be it closure of schools and colleges, stopping international flights from landing in the state, or reducing crowd by shutting public transport, Thackeray has set an example of how to handle a crisiscalmly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bangladesh on Wednesday released jailed former prime minister and main opposition leader Khaleda Zia for six months amid the coronavirus outbreak in the country.

The 74-year-old opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party chief is serving a 17-year prison term in two graft cases since February 8, 2018.

Follow live updates of coronavirus cases here

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said Zia was freed conditionally on Wednesday afternoon on humanitarian grounds after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's approval.

Zia served thrice as the premier since 1991. Her party suffered a miserable defeat in the 2018 elections bagging only six seats in 300-seat parliament.

Read: Coronavirus India update: State-wise total number of confirmed cases

Her conviction on "moral turpitude" charges debarred her from contesting the polls.

She was sent to jail in February 2018 by a local court on charges of embezzling foreign donations meant for an orphanage, named after her slain husband and president Ziaur Rehman, during her premiership between 2001 and 2006.

Rehman, a military ruler-turned-politician, was the founder of the BNP.

She was convicted in another corruption case later the same year, though her party claims both cases are politically motivated.
Singapore reports 73 new COVID-19 cases on March 25, new preschool cluster found

Singapore reported 73 new cases of COVID-19 infection in the country as of 12pm on March 25, a dramatic rise in the record daily number since the beginning of the outbreak.

Of these, 38 are imported and 35 are local cases, Ministry of Health (MOH) said in a press statement.

The 38 imported cases had travel history to Europe, North America, ASEAN and other parts of Asia. All except one were returning residents and Long Term Pass holders.

27 cases are linked to clusters or previous cases; and eight cases are currently unlinked, and contact tracing is ongoing.

Photo courtesy: NCID

A new cluster at PCF Sparkletots Preschool @ Fengshan Blk 126 (126 Bedok North Street 2) has been identified, with 18 cases linked to it. 14 of the patients are staff at the preschool, and four are family members of one of the cases there.

Meanwhile, five confirmed cases have been discharged from hospital. In all, 160 have fully recovered from the COVID-19 infection in Singapore.

Of the 404 confirmed cases who are still in hospital, most are stable or improving. 17 are in critical condition in the intensive care unit.

65 cases who are clinically well but still test positive for COVID-19 have been transferred to Concord International Hospital, Mount Elizabeth Hospital and the Community Isolation Facility at DResort NTUC for isolation and care.

Two have passed away from complications due to COVID-19 infection.
Oregon labor unions are backing two ballot measures aimed at preventing legislators from skipping town to avoid votes.

The proposals come three weeks after the states legislative session came to an early close amid a walkout by Republican lawmakers.

The first ballot measure would amend the states constitution to prevent legislators with 10 unexcused absences from floor sessions from holding office in the next term. The second ballot measure would require legislators who miss the session without permission to pay a fine and forgo salary and other compensation.

The chief petitioners are Andrea Kennedy-Smith, a vice president of the largest public employees union, and Reed Scott-Schwalbach, a vice president of the statewide teachers association.

The unions are hoping to get the required signatures to put the measures on the ballot for the general election in November.

Most Republicans legislators stopped attending the 2020 legislative session to boycott a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade bill. Without a quorum, majority Democrats could not pass that bill, or any others. The walkout forced the legislature to shelve additional bills and prevented them from authorizing spending around homelessness relief, wildfire prevention, foster care, mental health and other high-priority needs.

Republicans twice fled the Oregon State Capitol in 2019 to oppose a multibillion-dollar business tax and to block a vote on a high-profile climate change bill that would have capped greenhouse gas emissions. After the second walkout, Gov. Kate Brown sent state troopers to try to retrieve the missing lawmakers.

-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com | @jamiebgoldberg

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Tests of certain elements of Russia's next-generation S-500 air defence missile system are being completed, director-general of the Design Bureau for Special Machine-Building (part of Almaz-Antey company) Vladimir Dolbenkov said.

"In the interests of the air and missile defence troops, company experts have created units of the next-generation Triumfator-M mobile air defence system," Dolbenkov said in an interview with the Russian Defence magazine.

A launcher, components of a multi-functional locator and a missile defense locator, an equipped chassis for a command post, and transport units for an early-warning radar system have been developed, and their tests are being completed," Sputnik cited him as saying.

In June 2019, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov said that phased tests of various elements of the S-500 anti-aircraft missile system (SAM) are being carried out with the launch of new missiles that have no analogues in the world. Later, the Deputy Minister of Defence of Russia Alexei Krivoruchko said that in 2020 there are plans to begin preliminary tests of the entire system.
The rapidly escalating coronavirus outbreak is hitting businesses hard, with many being forced to scale back, or shutter entirely, in a bid to stifle the spread.

On March 23, 40% more U.S. businesses were closed compared to the same date in January, according to real-time analytics from scheduling site Homebase.

And business owners are not hopeful. More than three-quarters (76%) of small businesses say they are being negatively impacted by the public health crisis  up from 23% just 10 days ago  according to a new report from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) released Monday.

But as businesses await more clarity on how long the mass lockdowns will last, and what local and national governments will do to support them, there are a number of things businesses can do now to ready themselves for reopening, according to risk management expert Nicholas Bahr.

Bahr, global practice leader in risk management at consultancy DuPont Sustainable Solutions, has spent 35 years helping businesses navigate geopolitical, climate and terror risks, including 9/11, and said "now is the time to turn risk into an opportunity." He outlined seven steps for doing so.
Calling the action of Police in removing the Shaheen Bagh protesters as 'disproportionate' and 'unnecessary', the people of Shaheen Bagh has on Thursday written to the Supreme Court judges. The Delhi Police, on Tuesday, i.e two days after imposition of Section 144 in the national capital cleared the Shaheen Bagh protest site amid rising cases of coronavirus. People of Shaheen Bagh had been protesting against the contentious anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) since 15 December last year.

#WATCH Delhi Police clears the protest site in Shaheen Bagh area, amid complete lockdown in the national capital, in wake of #Coronavirus pic.twitter.com/N6MGLTLs5Z  ANI (@ANI) March 24, 2020

In its letter, they have written that the people had already retreated to their homes in the wake of coronavirus and were at the last stage to submit an answer to the apex court-appointed interlocutors. While calling off the protest amid the outbreak of COVID 19, the protesters on March 22, said that 'the fight will go on, on the other side of this pandemic'. In its letter, they have written against the destruction of all art installations in Shaheen Bagh and whitewashing of graffitis outside Jamia Millia Islamia. On March 24, videos surfaced in which labourers were seen whitewashing the walls outside Jamia filled with anti-government, anti-CAA, NRC, NPR graffitis.

Coronavirus LIVE Updates

The letter has stated: "While we understand the need for the stricter imposition of curfew and enforcement of pertinent restrictions, the ruthless dismantling and thoughtless destruction of the markers of our physical protest, especially the very structures whose placement is in question in a matter that is sub-judice in the SC, reeks of strong vendetta and ill feelings towards our innocent protesters, locals and sympathisers. It further heightens distrust and the perception of being uncared for by the state institutions."

Maharashtra government issues revised protocol for 21-day lockdown

Coronavirus crisis in India

As of date, 606 positive cases have been reported of the pandemic Coronavirus (COVID-19) - 41 have been discharged and Maharashtra reporting the highest at 116. Ten deaths have been reported till date. India has suspended all visas and barred travel from Afghanistan, Philippines, EU, UK, China, Malaysia and mandatory 14-day quarantine from several other countries and the Prime Minister has issued a 21-day countrywide lockdown starting from 25 March to April 15.

Chidambaram suggests '10-point plan' to Centre to help India's poor amid 21-day lockdown

India has also closed the India-Pakistan border and restricted passenger movement at the border with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Myanmar. The government is monitoring all suspected cases and issued preventive advisories with states declaring the disease an epidemic shutting down all educational institutions, monuments, parks, gyms, swimming pools, pubs and banning large gatherings. All domestic airplanes and trains have ceased operation. Visit the official government here: MINISTRY OF HEALTH & FAMILY WELFARE

Middle-class localities in Mumbai ban entry of outsiders amid rising coronavirus cases
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 09:43:51|Editor: Xiaoxia

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KATHMANDU, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The World Health Organization (WHO) Representative in Nepal Dr. Jos Vandelaer has suggested Nepal cooperate with neighboring China and India to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

"China has built a lot of expertise while responding to COVID-19. If the three countries can work together, they can all learn from each other, and certainly Nepal can benefit from the support of both neighbors," Vandelaer said on Tuesday in an interview here with Xinhua.

At a time when Nepal has asked its neighbors China and India to provide emergency medical supplies to handle the outbreak, the WHO official said Nepal needs more supplies such as personal protection equipment and ventilators if the scale of the pandemic goes higher.

"Some of these things are available locally, but some should be brought in," he said, adding that the WHO and other pioneer agencies are setting up a coordination mechanism.

He also suggested the Nepali government increase surveillance to prevent the spread of COVID-19, saying that it's important to detect more cases to minimize the threat of the virus.

One of the lessons learned from China "is to educate people and next is to increase the measures like surveillance as it's very important to pick up the cases, test and treat them," Vandelaer said.

Nepal has so far tested 687 samples in its National Public Health Laboratory since January, among which 684 cases were negative, including the students who were evacuated from China's Wuhan last month.

Expressing confidence in Nepal's present capacity to detect cases and to confront them in laboratory, he said that global and local solidarity is required to win the battle.

Nepal has lately beefed up its preventive measures, including suspension of international flights and closure of its borders.

Vandelaer also took the occasion to stress that there is no reason to panic and urged the public to follow basic guidelines like washing hands and keeping social distancing.

"Everybody is at risk, and everybody can do their part. We learned from China that it's not just the health sector that needs to act, but the government and whole of society should act together," he said.

The official said that the WHO is in close coordination with the Nepali Health Ministry. They have mapped different scenarios for different level of preparedness.

"This pandemic actually needs global solidarity. Everybody is at the same boat, it is a matter of helping each other," Vandelaer said.
On average, Americans spend $1,200 per person on prescription drugs every year. Certain medications are shockingly expensive. For example, Revlimid, a prescription that treats blood cancer, runs around $20,000 for a 30-day supply. To say that most people cant afford a price tag like that is an understatement. But, even if you cant shoulder the cost of your medications, that doesnt mean you have to skip your meds. It is possible to get free medicine from drug makers. If your prescription costs are too high to manage, heres what you need to know about this option.



Free Medicine Through Patient Assistance Programs

Most major drug manufacturers offer a patient assistance program (PAP). Also known as a pharmaceutical assistance program, it is designed to help individuals who may not be able to afford their medication without some help. While the programs focus mainly on the uninsured and underinsured, others may also qualify.

If you are eligible for the PAP, then youll get access to free or low-cost medication from that manufacturer. Precisely how that unfolds varies by program, so youll have to go over the details to determine how the drug maker ensures you arent stuck with the financial burden.

However, it could involve the drug maker shipping your prescription straight to your door or directly to your doctor. When this occurs, either you or your doctor will need to play your refills well in advance. It can take several weeks for new orders to arrive, so youll have to be on top of things to ensure you dont run out of your meds.

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Qualifying for Free Medicine from Drug Manufacturers

Every PAP has different eligibility criteria. Usually, the biggest determining factor is your households income. Since a PAP is meant to help those who cant afford their medication, your households income has to be below a particular line. That limit is set by the drug maker, though its typically higher than the limit for Medicaid eligibility.

The manufacturer may also take other factors into consideration. For instance, some drug makers also gather information about your assets. You might have to provide details about any investment accounts, for example. When that occurs, even if your income is low, if your investment account balance is healthy, you might not be eligible for the PAP.

Can You Use More Than One PAP?

Generally, yes, you can use more than one PAP at a time. If you have medications made by different companies and meet each manufacturers PAP requirements, you may be able to get free prescriptions from both drug makers.

Normally, the only time you couldnt use multiple PAPs is if they would be covering the same medication. That typically isnt an issue with drug maker PAPs. However, there are other PAPs that arent tied to one manufacturer. They may be more restrictive about using more than one program

Ultimately, its always best to read the fine print to find out before you move forward with any PAP. That way, youll know if there are any potential issues ahead of time.

The Largest Drug Manufacturer PAPs

Certain PAPs are particularly large. They are run by major drug manufacturers who produce a wide variety of medications. As a result, there may be a significant number of people who could use (and qualify for) assistance, and they have the financial means to alleviate patients of the burden.

Here are just some of the largest drug manufacturer PAPs:

Smaller drug makers may also have their own programs. If you have a medication not made by one of the manufacturers above, consider doing a search. You can use the Medicare PAP finder or use a search engine.

If you go the latter route, do exercise caution. There are PAP scams out there. For example, if you have to pay a fee to apply, its a scam.

In most cases, if you head to the manufacturers website first, you can access details about its PAP from there, if ones available. That may be a safer road than using a search engine as youre starting out on the drug makers site.

What to Do Before the PAP Kicks In

Even if you qualify for a PAP, it can take time for your application to process or for you to receive your benefits. If you need medication immediately that you cant afford, speak with your doctor as soon as possible. They may be able to provide you with some free sample packets to cover the gap, ensuring you can remain on your prescription.

Additionally, your doctor may know about other programs in your area that can help. That way, you can get your medications during the period before the PAP kicks in.

Do you know of any other tips that can help people save on their prescriptions? Tell us about them in the comments below.

Give the gift of savings! Learn more

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Bill Cosbys legal team wants him released from prison due to his health concerns and the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

The 82-year-old disgraced comedian has been serving a three to ten-year sentence at the SCI Phoenix in Montgomery County prison facility for sexual assault.

Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt told website Six: We believe that it is only a matter of time in advance of Mr. Cosbys prison most likely falls target to the virus, such a confined area is the best location for a virus to spread speedily, it is dangerous to the jail staff members and susceptible inmates.

READ ALSO  Justice Is Finally Served  Amber Rose Trolls Comedian Bill Cosby Following Sentencing

Bill Cosby is no detriment or risk to the group. He just cant go any place, he is aged, he is blind. He can stay less than property arrest with an ankle bracelet, as he did just before, with his spouse taking care of him. Allow him do his time at the house.

Wyatt says they fear for Cosby because if personnel gets Infected with coronavirus they could pass it on to him.
Californias largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) announced Monday that it agreed to plead guilty to charges of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of 84 people during the devastating Camp Fire in 2018. The move came after state regulators conclusively determined that poorly maintained utility lines were at fault for the 2018 fire that completely destroyed the town of Paradise, population 26,000, and obliterated more than 18,000 buildings, causing $16.5 billion in damages.

Todays charges underscore the reality of all that was lost, said PG&E chief executive Bill Johnson. We hope that accepting those charges helps bring more certainty to the path forward so we can get victims paid fairly and quickly.

By fairly, Johnson means what is fair to PG&E and its shareholders and not what is fair to those who had their homes and lives destroyed by the companys willful negligence. The plea deal was in fact reached to drive down the companys financial liability for the disaster to as minuscule an amount as possible, while preventing prosecutors from pursuing further charges associated with the Camp Fire.

PG&Es goal throughout the proceedings has been to maintain profits at the expense of public safety, refusing to modernize its electrical infrastructure by replacing its antiquated wooden transmission lines with resilient steel or underground lines. The Camp Fire was sparked by a worn-out hook on a 100-year-old transmission tower. According to the findings of the state utility commission, the tower had not been inspected since 2001.

Sentencing will not take place until April 24 at the earliest due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, on March 17, PG&E filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission outlining the expected details of the sentencing. The report stated that the utility will be sentenced to pay the maximum total fine and penalty of $3.5 million, or only $41,176 for each victim of the Camp Fire. Additionally, PG&E would be responsible for a $500,000 payment to reimburse costs associated with investigating their responsibility for the wildfire, for a total of $4 million.

The total fine is only a fourth of the $16 million bonus package PG&E executives intended to award themselves in early 2019, which was disallowed by the bankruptcy judge. This came after the utilitys responsibility for the wildfire was already known, and after the company had declared bankruptcy earlier in the year to escape its debt obligations and other legal liabilities.

To shield PG&E and the other regional utility monopolies in California from future financial damages, last summer Democratic governor Gavin Newsom worked with the state legislature to create a $21 billion wildfire fund that would effectively shield the utilities from future liabilities. Newsom, notwithstanding his public criticism of PG&E, has taken over $200,000 in campaign funding from the company and has repeatedly sponsored legislation exempting it and the other utilities from legal liability.

Last week, as the stock market plunged in response to the rapid spread of the coronavirus pandemic, Newsom seized the moment to completely drop his oppositional posturing towards PG&E. He has signed off on the companys plan to exit bankruptcy by the end of June, thus allowing PG&E to qualify for the state wildfire fund. The agreement reached entails limited increases in state oversight, a reallocation of $7.6 billion in shareholder assets to repay or refinance utility debt, and a three-year pause on dividend payments to shareholders.

Lawyers for victims of the Camp Fire had initially filed more than $36 billion in claims against PG&E. This number, however, was whittled down last December to a significantly reduced $13.5 billion settlement fund. That amount was intended to cover not only victims and property damage due to the Camp Fire, but also the 2017 Tubbs Fire, 2016 Ghost Ship warehouse fire and the 2015 Butte Fire. The four disasters collectively led to 145 deaths and destroyed more than 25,000 buildings.

News of the expected sentencing of PG&E for the Camp Fire deaths, with its minimal $4 million penalty and exemption from further prosecution, caused the companys share price to rise 12 percent on Monday.

Although the company is still in chapter 11 bankruptcy, it is expected to emerge from bankruptcy on June 30 and at that point would have access to the $21 billion wildfire fund. Investors Business Daily reported last week that the Relative Strength Rating, which measures an individual stock performance versus the market average over the past 54-week period, had jumped from 67 to 76 and is expected to reach 80 in the coming weeks, placing it among the highest-performing stocks.

The increased stock price has also been boosted by PG&Es mass power shutoffs during the peak fire season, a reckless policy implemented last October that left millions of Californians, many of whom could no longer operate lifesaving medical equipment, without power.

To this day, the company has not been held accountable for depriving customers of electrical power that was paid for and available. Governor Newsom initially endorsed the shutoffs, stating, I do believe with the limited number of tools in the toolkit what theyre doing is appropriate under the circumstances, while PG&E CEO Johnson announced that shutoffs would take place entirely at the discretion of the company for at least the next ten years. In other words, in the wealthiest state in the wealthiest country in the world, home to Silicon Valley, 16 million residents will not have guaranteed access to municipal electric power, first introduced in the 1880s.

The actions of PG&E, like the coronavirus pandemic on an even larger scale, clearly demonstrate that the profit system cannot meet the basic needs of society and in fact represents a clear and present danger to the lives and livelihoods of millions of working people. The giant utility monopolies must be placed under the democratic control of the working class to guarantee reliable, lifesaving electrical power while initiating the long overdue modernization of the electric grid to eliminate the damage caused by wildfires and other natural disasters.
Managing insulin-dependent diabetes is no easy task. Most patients manually measure blood glucose and calculate insulin dosing using traditional multiple dose injection (MDI) therapy, a burdensome process that puts them at risk for both hypo- and hyperglycemia. Bigfoot Biomedical is working on a solution to take the guesswork out of MDI.

The Milpitas, CA-based company is developing the Bigfoot Unity Diabetes Management Program, an integrated system that helps patients dose their insulin more easily and accurately. The system consists of a mobile phone app plus proprietary insulin pen caps, pen needles, Abbott glucose sensing technology, a backup blood glucose meter, and glucose test strips. Bigfoots platform connects these different parts and uses algorithms to predict blood glucose levels and calculate recommended doses of insulin.

We asked Red Maxwell, Chief Marketing Officer, more about the companys past and its role in the future of insulin management.

Medgadget: Tell me about how Bigfoot Biomedical started. What was the inspiration behind the idea and product?

Red Maxwell: Bigfoot Biomedical was started, and remains today, a very personal mission. Many of us working at the company are touched by someone with insulin-requiring diabetes  our children, spouses, other family members and friends.

The legend of Bigfoot begins with co-founder Bryan Mazlish who spent years in finance and automated stock trading before his work took an important turn when his son Sam was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D) at the age of five. Bryans wife had lived with T1D for many years, but it was Bryans handling of Sams care with the round-the-clock monitoring of blood glucose levels and heavy weight of worry that prompted him to pursue a new path.

Using his experience with quantitative trading algorithms, Bryan began creating models to predict future blood sugar trends which he paired with remote glucose monitoring tools and an insulin pump, effectively building the first DIY artificial pancreas device. Soon Bryan was ready to find a commercial partner and create a new paradigm of care for those with insulin-requiring diabetes.

In 2014, Bryan joined forces with former JDRF CEO Jeffrey Brewer, whose son also has T1D, and founded SmartLoop Labs. That year, Wired Magazine published a piece detailing the legendary story of someone whod successfully hacked their own automated system, dubbing him Bigfoot. The name stuck and the company was renamed Bigfoot Biomedical, Inc. in February of 2015.

Today, Bigfoot and our more than 80 employees are working tirelessly on innovative solutions to simplify and optimize insulin delivery and dosing decisions for people living with insulin-requiring diabetes through the use of algorithms, artificial intelligence and automation. Our integrated system and services are designed to address many of the challenges facing people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes, health care providers, and insurance institutions. Insulin-requiring diabetes impacts over six million Americans.

Medgadget: How does the technology work? How is it different from other integrated/automated insulin pumps out there?

Maxwell: Bigfoot Unity utilizes proprietary, smart pen caps for basal and meal-time insulin dosing recommendations integrating Abbotts FreeStyle Libre platform. The system is intended to help people using Multiple Daily Injections know when and how much insulin to inject based on their doctors prescribed therapy regimen.

What makes the Bigfoot Unity Diabetes Management Program different from what is currently available with smart insulin pens is that it provides real-time data to help people make insulin-dosing decisions based on their doctors recommendations. Determining how much insulin to take and when is one of the most burdensome and frustrating aspects for someone with insulin-requiring diabetes because glucose-levels are influenced by multiple factors and because of the inherent dangers of injecting too much or too little insulin. With Bigfoot Unity, the person with diabetes will be able to quickly and easily determine their physician recommended insulin dosage based on his or her current glucose levels and recent dosing history.

The other important aspect that makes Bigfoot Unity stand apart from others in the market is our subscription-based model. Currently, people with diabetes have to manage multiple prescriptions. Bigfoot plans to package the Unity system as a monthly subscription and will include everything the person needs  Unitys proprietary insulin pen caps for both basal and bolus dosing, the Abbott glucose sensing technology, pen needles, backup blood glucose meter, glucose test strips and alcohol swabs. The system also includes a mobile phone app. The insulin pens will need to be obtained separately.

Bigfoots portfolio also includes the Bigfoot Autonomy Diabetes Management program with a closed-loop, automated insulin pump system. Bigfoot Autonomys insulin pump system, which received the FDA Breakthrough Device designation, will require a pivotal clinical trial and subsequent regulatory approvals.

Medgadget: At what stage is the company today? (Number of team members, stage of development and clinical studies, investment funding, etc.)

Maxwell: FDA submission of Bigfoot Unity is anticipated in 2020 with a target launch soon after clearance.

We have 80 team members and have raised $135 million in investor funding to date. Our list of investors including Abbott, JDRF, The Helmsley Trust, Quadrant Capital Advisors, Senvest Capital, Janus Henderson and Cormorant Asset Management.

Medgadget: What are some of the biggest challenges currently facing the team?

Maxwell: Our biggest challenge is time  it takes much longer to bring a product to market than any of us would like to see. The burden of insulin-requiring diabetes is tremendous and so naturally we want to see advancements like Bigfoot Unity available to those who need it as quickly as possible.

Medgadget: Looking to the next 5 years, what are some of the major goals for the company?

Maxwell: The diabetes technology industry is evolving quickly so Im more comfortable speaking to our immediate goals which are to bring the Bigfoot Unity Diabetes Management Program to market and begin clinical trials of future generation Bigfoot Unity systems incorporating closed-loop technology for injection users.

Check out this video of Bigfoot Biomedical:

Flashback: Bigfoot Biomedicals Diabetes Management System Going on Trial

Link: Bigfoot Biomedical homepage
A group of seven prominent House Democrats warned the Donald Trump administration against cutting aid to war-torn Yemen despite new Houthi restrictions on international assistance.

The chairmen of the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees and Middle East subcommittee, Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., Adam Smith, D-Wash., and Ted Deutch, D-Fla., penned a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and outgoing USAID Administrator Mark Green warning them against cutting humanitarian assistance for Yemen as the Houthis impose new restrictions inhibiting aid delivery.

These restrictions are unacceptable, but all political and diplomatic channels to resolve these issues must be exhausted before contemplating a large-scale, unilateral suspension of US assistance, which risks catastrophic humanitarian impacts, the lawmakers wrote in the letter. The recent agreement by the Houthi aid coordination agency to withdraw some of its unacceptable demands demonstrates that donors and humanitarian organizations are making progress through negotiation and diplomatic pressure.

Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., Ro Khanna, D-Calif., Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., and Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., also signed onto the letter.

Why it matters: Reports first emerged that the Trump administration was considering cutting Yemen aid after the Houthis threatened to instate a 2% tax on all humanitarian assistance projects throughout the territory they control. Shortly thereafter, the Houthis said they would suspend the tax for fiscal year 2020.

Still, the House letter acknowledged that the Houthi-led government in Sana has arbitrarily denied permission for humanitarian programming in the north, imposing a number of unacceptable conditions that have constrained the delivery of lifesaving assistance to some of the most vulnerable populations in Yemen. At the same time, the Democratic lawmakers noted that the Yemeni government has also restricted the movement of NGOs and aid delivery in the south while calling out the US-backed Saudi campaign against the Houthis for exacerbating the crisis.

Whats next: Khanna, one of the letters signatories, and several anti-war groups want to renew a push to cut off US funding for the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis in this years defense authorization bill  a fight they lost last year after negotiations with the White House and Republican-held Senate. Armed Services Chairman Smith has not committed to reviving that fight but has not yet ruled it out.

Know more: Naseh Shaker is on the ground in Yemen and has an in-depth look at how the country is preparing for coronavirus amid a civil war.
NEW YORK, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TCI Fund Management founder Chris Hohn and Renaissance Technologies founder James Simons both nabbed the top spot on Institutional Investors 19th annual Rich List ranking of the top-earning hedge fund managers, earning roughly $2 billion each in 2019.

Jim Simons remains the sole person to qualify for the Rich List in all 19 years of its existence.

Citadels Kenneth Griffin and Millennium Managements Israel Englander tied for the second spot, with 2019 earnings of $1.5 billion each. Chase Coleman of Tiger Global Management rounds out the top five, having earned $1.4 billion last year.

The 25 top-earning hedge fund managers took home a combined $20.2 billion in 2019  the most since calendar year 2013 and a stunning 76 percent increase over the previous years ranking, when the top 25 managers netted a combined $11.5 billion.

Each year, II determines the 25 hedge fund managers who personally earned the most money in a single year. To calculate earnings, we count gains on managers own capital invested in their funds, as well as shares of the firms total fees. When calculating the gains generated by managers own money, we do not take into consideration a high-water mark. In many cases, the gains on their capital play a major role in the ability of managers to qualify for the ranking.

The full Rich List, including manager profiles, can be viewed at www.institutionalinvestor.com



The 2019 Rich List  Top Ten

1

(Tie) Christopher Hohn (TCI Fund Management)

$1.8 billion 1 (Tie) James Simons (Renaissance Technologies) $1.8 billion 3 (Tie) Kenneth Griffin (Citadel) $1.5 billion 3 (Tie) Israel Izzy Englander (Millennium Management) $1.5 billion 5 Chase Coleman (Tiger Global Management) $1.4 billion 6 Steven Cohen (Point72 Asset Management) $1.3 billion 6 David Tepper (Appaloosa Management) $1.3 billion 8 Ray Dalio (Bridgewater Associates) $1.1 billion 9 Steve Mandel Jr. (Lone Pine Capital) $850 million 10 Nelson Petz (Trian Partners) $835 million
At a time when the rest of the world is facing meltdown over the coronavirus pandemic, there is something deeply unedifying about China's attempts to capitalise on the crisis to further its own global ambitions.

Xi Jinping visited Wuhan last week. Credit:AP

Beijing may take umbrage at Donald Trump's constant reference to the outbreak as "the China virus" or "the Wuhan flu", but the American president is simply stating the obvious, namely that the worst public health crisis the world has witnessed in a century originated in a Chinese wild animal market at the end of last year.

Moreover, the slow response of the Chinese authorities in dealing with the outbreak, together with the ruling Chinese Communist Party's initial attempt to conceal the true extent of the crisis, may well explain why it is Europe, and not China, that now enjoys the dubious distinction of becoming the pandemic's epicentre.

One of the CCP's guiding principles is that nothing can be allowed to undermine its supremacy. This would explain why, rather than heed the warnings of Dr Li Wenliang, the doctor who first identified the terrifying threat posed by COVID-19, the Chinese authorities denounced him for "rumour-mongering", and either ignored or played down the risks until well into January.
A three-year-old Indian girl was among the 73 new COVID-19 cases that have been reported in Singapore in a day, taking the tally to over 600.

The 73 new cases reported on Wednesday has brought the total number of COVID-19 cases in Singapore to 631, the health ministry said.

According to the ministry, of the new cases, 38 people have travel history to Europe, North America, ASEAN and other parts of Asia, while the rest were locally transmitted cases.

Eighteen coronavirus positive cases were linked to a kindergarten centre, PAP Community Foundation (PCF) Sparkletots in Fengshan. It has been decided that all PCF centres, operated as pre-schools by the ruling People's Action Party, would be closed for four days from Thursday.

According to local media reports, of the 18 cases linked to the kindergarten centre, 14 were staff members, including the principal. The rest four were the principal's family members.

After three employees of Dover Court International School were tested COVID-19 positive, it has been declared coronavirus cluster.

Clusters are declared where a disease spreads due to interaction with people, mostly employees or through social gatherings.

Of the 404 COVID-19 patients in hospital, 17 were critical and in intensive care unit. The others were stable and improving, the health ministry said, adding 160 people have been discharged from hospital.

The health ministry has so far identified 8,930 close contacts of COVID-19 patients who have been quarantined. Of these, 2,643 are in still in quarantine.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)


Contact Sri Lanka an online portal jointly created by the Ministry of Foreign Relations and Information & Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) for the benefit of Overseas Sri Lankans was launched today (26 March 2020) at the Ministry of Foreign Relations. The web link is hosted on the Ministry web page www.mfa.gov.lk and also can be accessed at www.contactsrilanka.mfa.gov.lk.

Establishment of the portal, is pursuant to the call made by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa for coordinated efforts by all Government stakeholders to fight the COVID-19 outbreak and to harness digital technology to prompt faster and more efficient service delivery.

All Sri Lankans living abroad are invited to register voluntarily on the platforms basic functionalities allowing the Government of Sri Lanka to reach out and provide assistance during emergencies such as the COVID19 outbreak. This platform will allow the Ministry to access real time data for quick action. The open access platform would also facilitate Overseas Sri Lankans to interact between government stakeholders, promoting greater access to the Government services through a single centralized point at the Ministry of Foreign Relations. This Portal will also connect Overseas Sri Lankans with the network of Sri Lanka Missions abroad.

In the long term, the Portal will be expanded and is expected to serve as an official source of information and facilitate Overseas Sri Lankans in obtaining a wider range of digital services offered by the Government.

A dedicated team of officials have already been assigned by the Ministry of Foreign Relations to respond to queries of Overseas Sri Lankans and also to act as an online help desk, during emergencies in consultation with relevant stakeholders. Registration by country will also allow the Ministry to propose concrete policy decisions in critical response situations such as evacuation etc., depending on the number of emergency assistance requests generated.

For easy facilitation, the portal also includes a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) which will serve as a guideline for generic queries. This user friendly platform can be easily navigated via the internet, on any browser or interface and can be accessed by all registered users to direct a query or request assistance, even from a mobile phone.

The data provided through this portal is protected to ensure the privacy of Overseas Sri Lankans and will not be shared without the consent of the users.

The ICTA will be working closely with the Ministry of Foreign Relations in expanding the features of the portal in stages, to create a comprehensive online service platform for Overseas Sri Lankans, via the Contact Sri Lanka Portal.

The Ministry of Foreign Relations, is hopeful that this integrated platform will elevate its existing service delivery for Overseas Sri Lankans to a higher level, particularly allowing rapid response in times of emergencies. All Sri Lankans living abroad are invited to benefit from this portal.

Ministry of Foreign Relations

Colombo



26 March 2020

Read more: www.mfa.gov.lk
New Delhi, March 26 : A new positive case of COVID-19 has been reported in Delhi taking the tally to 36 patients, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Thursday.

Kejriwal also said that the Mohalla Clinics in the city will remain operational, even as a doctor has been tested positive.

"One case has come up in the last 24 hours. 26 are those who came from abroad, while 10 people have received the infection from these people.

Kejriwal said we have seen from other nations that coronavirus cannot be controlled once it is spread. "We should ensure that it is not spread." He repeated that all the essential items are being provided to people in the city.

"A doctor of Mohalla Clinic has tested positive. His wife and child have also tested positive. We are not closing the Mohalla Clinics in the city. If that is done, people will have to go to big hospitals. So, the clinics will remain operational," Kejriwal said.

He added that the medical staff dealing with patients will have coronavirus tests on a regular basis so that they can be cured in time.

A doctor of Mohalla Clinic had developed symptoms of COVID-19 and the authorities had asked the visitors to go for the 15-day home quarantine.

The Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM), Shahdara has ordered that all those who visited or were present at the Mohalla Clinic in Mohanpuri area of Maujpur between March 12 and March 18 to stay in home quarantine for 15 days.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Cambridge's sleek, metallic and futuristic design philosophy continues on the AXR85 and AXC35. At times of great upheaval or stress, its always comforting to return to the familiar. As this year plays out like the fourth and final season of a disaster TV show, I find myself more in need of comfort than ever. For me, that means good video games and better music and, in amongst it all, Ive managed to rekindle my love of CDs while testing some new Cambridge and ELAC home hi-fi gear. Loading Now that our favourite artists can no longer tour, the best way to support them is buy their CDs or other merch. (Streaming is good, but artists reportedly only receive a minuscule part of the profits.) Ive been using this extra time at home to rediscover old favourites such as The Superjesus and Triple J Hottest 100s of yore. Picking up albums from Australian bands such as Eat Your Heart Out, G Flip and Tonight Alive has also been filling some of the gaps in the CD collection Ive been so proud of since I was a kid. Ive been testing out an impressive new CD system featuring the Cambridge Audio AXR85 amplifier ($799), Cambridge AXC35 CD transport ($599) and ELAC Debut Reference bookshelf speakers ($999). I was initially dubious, fearing it might sound empty without a subwoofer. As a drummer and bass player, the bass of the music I listen to is very important.

However, compared to my usual Sonos system of two Play:3s and a Sub, the Cambridge and ELAC configuration not only has good depth of bass, but also better detail on high notes, providing clearer definition for hi-hats and rides that gives a song extra emotion beyond the vocals. There is, however, a drop in quality between mainstream streaming services and physical media, which explains at least some of the disparity. The price difference between the two systems isnt huge either. ELAC's Debut Reference bookshelf speakers deliver deep bass and detailed high notes. The look of the Cambridge amp and CD transporter is sleek, metallic and futuristic, while the ELAC speakers are a dark wood that evokes a smoking jacket and drawing room scenario. What surprised me about the set up was just how much extra comfort I derived from the simple act of handling physical media. I live in a small apartment and can ill-afford the space for a record collection. (I even need to cycle my CD collection between here and my parents place.) But there is something in the ritual of selecting a CD, placing it in the tray, and listening to the whole thing from start to finish that brings more consolation than just pressing shuffle on a playlist ever could. My comfort game of choice is Forza Horizon 4. Turning off the music in-game and putting on an album like Paul Macs Above The Clouds and tuning out the outside world while destroying ancient stone fences in digital England is an almost transcendent experience.
The family of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who disappeared in 2007, said on Wednesday the U.S. government has concluded that Levinson died while in Iranian custody.

In a statement on Twitter, the family said it is "impossible to describe our pain." They did not share any information on when Levinson is believed to have died or how, but did say U.S. officials received information that points to Levinson's death.

Levinson vanished on March 9, 2007, while on his way to meet a source on Kish Island, Iran. The Levinson family received proof-of-life photographs and videos in 2010 and 2011, and for several years, U.S. officials said Levinson was in Iran working on a private investigation. A 2013 Associated Press investigation uncovered that Levinson was actually sent on a mission by CIA analysts who did not have authorization to conduct such an operation.

In their statement, the Levinson family vowed that "those who are responsible for what happened to Bob Levinson, including those in the U.S. government who for many years repeatedly left him behind, will ultimately receive justice for what they have done."

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Elton John to host 'Living Room Concert for America' with stars performing from home

New Oxford study suggests millions of people may have already built up coronavirus immunity


EDMONTONThe Alberta government is reassuring people there isnt a food shortage in the province and that its keeping an eye on demands in rural areas, Indigenous communities and food banks.

Agriculture Minister Devin Dreeshen said more people are working at home, takeout food orders are down and retail sales at grocery stores are up about 50 per cent.

It is not business as usual. Albertans are making fewer trips to the grocery store and some have unnecessarily been stockpiling or bulk buying out of fear of future shortages, Dreeshen said at a news conference Thursday.

There is no food shortage, he said, and retailers have taken steps to cut down on bulk buying by limiting the number of items that can be purchased, adjusting hours and ensuring seniors-only shopping early in the day.

Our government is also co-ordinating with federal agencies to ensure Indigenous Peoples have equal opportunity for health and safety and (are) not falling behind, Dreeshen said.

We are working with retailers on supply pressures for high-demand items and monitoring availability in rural, remote and Indigenous communities.

Dreeshen said the biggest shortages right now include meat and items with a long shelf life such as canned goods and Kraft dinner.

He said food banks are suffering.

Food banks here in Alberta have also seen a huge rise in requests for support and they expect this trend will continue. Unfortunately, as Albertans face great adversity, we have seen donations drop due to the economic impact of this current pandemic, Dreeshen said.

Our government is working closely with food banks across the province to understand their requirements and assess their short-, medium- and long-term needs to ensure they have necessary food supply.

Dreeshen said government help will be coming for food banks, which could include financial compensation to help them buy the supplies they need.

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The FPSO market  what tanker operators should know

Three lawyers from London law firm Haynes and Boone LLP present an overview of what they see happening in the market for Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessels  which may provide opportunities for companies in the tanker sector. By Myles Mantle (partner), Teena Grewal (Counsel) and Danielli Pugliese (Associate), Haynes and Boone LLP, UK.

The global market for floating production, storage and offloading vessels (FPSOs) is recovering well from deep lows in 2015/2016 and is expected to perform very well, at least for the mid-term. Contracts for as many as 24 FPSOs are expected to be awarded worldwide in 2020, 7 of which are expected to be in Brazil. The remainder of the contracts are expected to be in other Latin America countries (5), Asia (4), West Africa (3), Europe (3) and Australia (2), according to a report published in August 2019 by Rystad Energy, an energy consultancy and business intelligence data firm. Over the next five years, predictions are for orders of up to 67 floating units. Expectations are for Brazil to keep first place with planned or announced awards for 21 FPSOs (to be deployed primarily by Petrobras), followed by FPSOs to be deployed offshore Angola (5), Nigeria and UK (4 each) and Norway (2), among others, according to a 2019-2025 global FPSO industry outlook report published by GlobalData, a data analytics and consulting company. Brazil For offshore areas characterized by rough weather, substantial water depths and a lack of existing subsea infrastructure, FPSOs represent an obvious solution to the problem of ensuring safe and continuous oilfield production. This is a particularly important factor for the Brazilian offshore market where the majority of fields proposed to be developed over the next 5 years or so are very far from shore and in deep and ultradeep waters. In late 2019, Brazils oil giant Petrobras announced its plans to install at least 5 FPSOs to exploit surplus volumes from the Buzios pre-salt field in the Santos Basin, offshore Brazil and deploying one additional large FPSO per year in the field starting in 2024. This is an example of the exciting scenario in Brazil, which is expected to account for almost 30% of all global contract awards for FPSOs in 2020 and many more FPSOs deployed throughout the next decade, a combination of several factors leading to an increasing five-year outlook of Brazils competitiveness score, according to an IHS Markit presentation held in late 2019, amongst others. In particular Substantial oil discoveries in pre-salt fields offshore Brazil, driven to a large extent by Petrobras Recent and anticipated bid rounds for new exploration blocks International oil companies and more recently independent oil companies prioritizing the country, coupled with the lifting of the requirement for Petrobras to hold at least 30% of the pre-salt fields Policies including the extension of the Repetro special customs duty regime and the relaxation of its local content regulations The recovery from the countrys political turmoil and the Carwash corruption scandal. Outside Brazil Further demand is expected elsewhere around the globe. In the UK, 2 of the projects sanctioned in the North Sea in 2018 will require the development of new-build FPSOs and looking forward some of the larger North Sea projects are expected to use FPSOs. In Norway, where awards for at least 3 floating production vessels are projected until 2025, there may be further demand in the Barents Sea, where Equinor has already ordered its largest ever FPSO. There are also great prospects in West Africa, particularly in Angola and Nigeria, in the Eastern Mediterranean with the development of the Leviathan field in Israel and in South East Asia, particularly in Malaysia, where gas condensate and oil separation and processing facilities may be required. Gas processing An intriguing source of new orders to watch is the potential use of gas processing FPSOs lined up next to a liquefaction vessel. Fitting both processing and liquefaction capabilities on the same platform can be prohibitively expensive and so floating LNG solutions could be better achieved by having a separate processing FPSO and liquefaction platform. This could potentially increase demand for FPSOs in stranded gas fields which lack gas pipeline infrastructure and where there is not enough gas to justify huge multi-billion dollar FLNG platforms. Challenges To meet such a growing demand presents some challenges. Firstly, financial market regulatory requirements and decarbonization initiatives in society are impacting the availability of capital from commercial banks, and this will be particularly acute with respect to crude processing and production with maybe less pressure on gas processing FPSOs (at least in the medium term). Banks need to consider how much risk they are willing to take on FPSO projects and for a particular region compared to other energy projects and thus financing is likely to be provided from a wider range of sources in the future. Secondly, there are environmental concerns in frontier markets (both the difficulties of getting the relevant licences in a previously unexplored area and public pressure to keep those areas intact). Thirdly, aggressive timetables for the construction of FPSOs and achievement of First Oil present a technical and commercial challenge. In Brazil, for instance, Petrobras has an ambitious plan to reduce the period between discovery of hydrocarbons and first oil to 1000 days as opposed to a current market average of 1,900 days. This puts extra pressure on owners to ensure a safe, technically robust FPSO is contracted, financed, designed, built and delivered in a shorter time frame and within budget. This type of pressure has led some owners and operators to propose standardised hull and topside designs. Despite some challenges, the global market for FPSOs offers exciting opportunities for players in the market.




New Delhi, March 26 : In an unprecedented move amid the ongoing COVID19 crisis, President Ram Nath Kovind would address all the Governors and Lieutenant Governors of the country through a video conference on Friday morning.

Vice-president Venkaiah Naidu is also expected to join the all important conference from his residence. The President's conference would also be attended by the top voluntary organizations, including the Indian Red Cross Society known for its social emergency and humanitarian programmes across India.

The President would have detailed interactions with the Governors, particularly of 7 to 8 states where the COVID-19 crisis seems to be serious, official sources revealed to IANS.

At times of a big crisis, the President rarely interacts with the Governors. However, seeing the scale of the present crisis around the world as well as in India, the President has decided to review the situation with the Governors. As far as Red Cross Society is concerned, the President of India is also the President of this society which has more than 1100 branches spread across the country.

Sources said the President would talk in detail with the Governors of Punjab, Kerala, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra where COVID-19 cases are surging every day.

"The President would try to seek suggestions from the Governors relating to the ongoing efforts by the respective state governments. His objective is to supplement the relief efforts of the state administrations, a highly-placed source informed IANS.

Vice President Venkaiah Naidu, who has decades of experience in government functioning, is also expected to offer suggestions to Governors and Lieutenant Governors.

Sources said that several important and large voluntary organisations would also be asked for their effective roles in handling the crisis, particularly in offering food and shelter to the poor.

Millions of daily wage labourers and those dependent on petty jobs require basic needs including food. Several MPs and MLAs, cutting across party lines, are already setting up canteens to serve food to the poor in their respective constituencies.

Red Cross, which has presence in every district of the country, will also be playing a vital role in helping the needy and the poor, especially in the post-lockdown period.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
The United Nations and humanitarian organizations need $165 million to fight the Covid-19 pandemic in Ukraine.

In conjunction with the launch of the COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine Ms. Osnat Lubrani today issued the Ukraine Humanitarian Response Plan to the COVID-19 Pandemic, calling for US$165 million, Ukrinform learnt from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The plan defines the response efforts being undertaken by the UN, front line humanitarian actors and public health and health service providers to mitigate the humanitarian consequences of the virus transmission, which is estimated to impact up to 21 million people living in Ukraine.

The Plan considers the public health impact of the epidemic  as well as far-reaching consequences on the well-being of people and communities, which will go beyond the spread of disease, and span across many aspects of life from education, livelihoods, psychological well-being, and the ability to access basic human rights, reads the press release.

As noted, the humanitarian ask for Ukraine is an integral part of the COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan that was issued yesterday in Geneva and New York by the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

As of 10:00 on March 26, Ukraine had 156 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19, including five deaths.

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People wearing protective surgical masks walk along the Merlion Park, a major tourist attraction in Singapore. Maverick Asio l SOPA Images l LightRocket via Getty Images

Singapore's economy contracted by 2.2% in the first quarter from a year ago, official preliminary data showed, and authorities further downgraded their GDP forecast for 2020 as countries around the world battle the coronavirus outbreak. The Ministry of Trade and Industry said in a Thursday statement that the Singapore economy is now expected to shrink by between 1.0% and 4.0% this year. That's worse than its forecast last month for a change of between -0.5% and 1.5% in annual gross domestic product. The ministry said the downgrade in economic forecast took into account "the weaker-than-expected performance of the Singapore economy in the first quarter, and the sharp deterioration in the external and domestic economic environment since February." "The wider forecast range is to account for heightened uncertainties in the global economy, given the unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 outbreak, including the public health measures taken in many countries to contain the outbreak," it said in the statement. COVID-19 is the official name of the coronavirus disease that has infected more than 400,000 people across 196 countries and territories, according to World Health Organization data. There have been over 18,000 deaths attributed to the virus globally, WHO data showed.

As confirmed cases climb, authorities around the world have taken measures that include closing borders and shutting down workplaces and schools to restrict the movement of people in order to stem the spread of the virus. The trade-off of those decisions is a hit to the economy, with many analysts warning that many countries could enter a recession this year. Singapore was one of the earliest countries outside China to report cases of the coronavirus disease. The country has banned the entry of foreign visitors, shut bars and nightclubs, and limit crowd sizes. Singapore recorded its largest daily jump of 73 confirmed cases on Wednesday, bringing its total to 631 including two deaths.

First-quarter GDP contraction
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 19:26 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da604b 1 World coronavirus,Saudi-Arabia,umrah,umrah-pilgrims,COVID-19,virus-corona,minor-pilgrimage,travel-restriction,Jeddah Free

Forty-two Indonesian umrah (minor haj) pilgrims are reportedly stranded in Saudi Arabia after the Islamic kingdom imposed travel restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the country.

Indonesia's Religious Affairs Ministry said that the 42 pilgrims  39 of whom possessed umrah visas and three of whom had visit visas  had planned their trips to Saudi Arabia through 11 umrah travel agencies.

"I have already asked [the travel agencies] to immediately report the pilgrims to Saudi authorities so that their return can be arranged," the ministry's umrah and special hajj director, Arfi Hatim, said in a statement on Thursday.

Saudi Arabia announced the suspension of umrah on Feb. 27 and has since restricted movement to contain COVID-19. It suspended all international flights to and from the country for two weeks on March 15.

Read also: Umrah pilgrims can reschedule at no extra costs, government promises

The Islamic kingdom has also locked down its capital city of Riyadh and two Islamic holy cities, Mecca and Medina, while also imposing travel restrictions on 13 regions to stem the transmission of the disease, which has infected 767 people and killed at least one in the country, Bloomberg reported.

Saudi Arabias Hajj and Umrah Ministry has urged pilgrims with umrah visas within this year's umrah period to register with the government at e.services.haj.gov.sa until March 28 in order to arrange their departure, which will be facilitated by the Saudi government.

Endang Jumali, the hajj consul of the Indonesian Consulate General in Jeddah, said that the stranded Indonesian pilgrims were currently staying at the hotels provided by the travel agencies and that they were all in good health.

"The information regarding their departure flights and times will be delivered to their registered phone numbers," he said in statement on Thursday. (trn)








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In the video above, Dr. Samir Gupta explains why most people are better off washing their hands with soap and water than wearing gloves for protection against COVID-19.







Unfortunately, wearing gloves are giving lots of people a false sense of security leading to self-contamination.





I have also seen this in the food industry when vendors are wearing gloves to touch food and then handle money with the same glove and more food.




Sunrise weatherman Sam Mac launched a Healthcare Heroes campaign on Thursday to recognise medical professionals' hard work during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Gold Logie-nominated presenter is using his platform to offer shout-outs to nurses and doctors who are risking their lives to help those infected with COVID-19.

But his thoughtful gesture was tarnished somewhat when he chose to take a swipe at Channel Nine's Today show live on air.

'Imitation is the greatest form of flattery': Sunrise weatherman Sam Mac took a swipe at Today show host Karl Stefanovic for 'copying' his coronavirus campaign on Thursday

During the live cross, Sam read aloud supportive messages for medical staff that had been submitted by grateful members of the public.

Sam had previously offered free promotion to small businesses affected by COVID-19 as part of a segment called Plugapalooza last week.

He told hosts David Koch and Natalie Barr: 'We did Plugapalooza last week, Healthcare Heroes this week. You can see it next week on the Today show as well!'

David and Natalie burst into laughter back in the Sunrise studio.

Is that really necessary? Sunrise hosts Natalie Barr (left) and David Koch (right) chuckled as Sam joked that his latest campaign would be appearing on the Today show next week

'That did surprise us... Anyhow. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery,' David said before moving on to another news story.

Sam's comment was in reference to Today host Karl Stefanovic announcing his own segment, Karl's Classifieds, on Wednesday.

Not unlike Plugapalooza, Karl's Classifieds is an initiative to promote Australian businesses doing it tough amid coronavirus shutdowns and social-distancing measures.

Kind: On Wednesday, Karl Stefanovic (left) launched his Karl's Classifieds initiative to promote businesses doing it tough amid coronavirus shutdowns and social-distancing measures

'We did it!' Sam had previously offered free promotion to small businesses affected by COVID-19 as part of a segment called Plugapalooza last week

While the two campaigns are indeed similar, Sunrise's decision to take a cheap shot at Today when both shows are trying to help the community is a little mean-spirited.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Channels Nine and Seven for comment.

As of late Thursday morning, there are 2,675 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia, including 11 deaths.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed to citizens on Wednesday to help to nine families during the 21-day national lockdown and warned of strict action against those misbehaving with people on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

In a video interaction with the residents of Varanasi ahead of the Hindu festival of Navratri, the constituency the PM represents in Parliament, Modi responded to several queries related to the pandemic and the governments response to it.

Whoever has the capability, take the pledge to take care of 9 families for 21 days. It will be a true Navratri. Due to the lockdown, animals are also facing trouble. I appeal to the people to take care of the animals around them, said Modi.

Invoking the Mahabharata, he said the epic war was won in 18 days and his government is making the efforts to win this war against the pandemic in 21 days.



Friends, remember the epic war of Mahabharat was won in 18 days. At present, the whole country is fighting a war against coronavirus. In Mahabharat war, Krishna was the charioteer. In this war against coronavirus, 130 crore (1.3 billion) countrymen are the charioteers. With their support and guidance, the country will win the war against the virus, he said.

Asked about reports of misbehaviour with medical personnel and airline crew, he said he has asked the home ministry and state DGPs to take tough action against culprits. If anybody targets doctors, nurses and all those rendering their service, then it will cost them dearly, Modi said.
Thirty-three thousand people have volunteered to help the government in its fight against the spread of coronavirus in Haryana, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said on Thursday.

He said the district administration will utilise the volunteer's services as per need and all of them will be issued e-passes.

"We made an appeal that volunteers should come forward and get themselves registered with the government. In response, during the past four days, 33,000 people registered themselves as volunteers," Khattar said in a televised address to the people of the state.

"These include 546 doctors, 255 nurses, 1,108 paramedics. 4,700 volunteers have registered themselves for providing home delivery or door-to-door services, 5,700 volunteers will ensure social distancing is followed, and 6,200 will lend a helping hand to district administration," he said.

Khattar said that the power department shut down its cash counters to avoid queuing up of people to pay their bills and now consumers can pay their bills through digital mode. Those who make payment through this mode till the situation does not normalise will get a rebate of two per cent, which will be minimum rebate of Rs 20 and maximum up to to Rs 100.

In the wake of the lockdown, Khattar said that state government will be launching a website http://covidssharyana.in where grocery, 'kiryana' stores, chemist shops, those selling milk and other essential products can enroll so that all essential services can be provided to people to their doorsteps.

Amid reports of people not cooperating and defying lockdown orders at some places, Khattar said that according to the reports available with him a vast majority were cooperating and police was taking action against the few violators.

"If few people violate lockdown orders, our police personnel are able to persuade them and if some action is required to be taken then that is being taken (against the violators). We all will have to obey lockdown orders because it pertains to our security, our family's security, security of our state, nation and entire humankind," he said.

With some reports suggesting that people who were going out to buy essential commodities were not following social distancing at some places, Khattar assured that there was no need to panic as there was adequate stock of commodities.

"Though we may not be getting as much we need, but we have to manage. Our entire system is focused on making all essential supplies like ration, milk powder, medicines, milk and vegetables reach your doorsteps," he said.

Seeking to convey to people that they must adjust in this time of crisis, Khattar said, "Jivan jeene ke liye khana pena hai, khane pene ka liye nahin jena hai (We eat in order to live, we don't live in order to eat)."



Khattar said all health workers and frontline workers involved in combating the pandemic shall be provided accident insurance (ex-gratia).

"Government employees from various departments have gone into this battle to combat the spread of COVID-19. I recently made an announcement to give an ex-gratia of Rs 10 lakh. However, we have decided to raise it now. Those working in isolation wards and testing labs, for doctors this amount will be Rs 50 lakh and Rs 30 lakh for nurses and for remaining government or contractual employees involved in such services, the ex-gratia given will be Rs 20 lakh," he said.

To mitigate the difficulties of poor sections, including daily wagers, small shopkeepers, and other weaker sections, the state government had recently announced financial aid to help them.

"We already have 12.56 lakh beneficiaries registered under Mukhya Mantri Parivar Samriddhi Yojana for the poor section. We have started giving them immediate relief of Rs 4,500 and this amount has been disbursed for 2.76 lakh families," he said.

As far as 3.85 lakh construction workers registered under Construction Workers Board are concerned, the government will give financial assistance of Rs 1,000 per week to them.

On recently set up 'Haryana COVID Relief Fund', Khattar said that after his appeal seeking voluntary donations, people have started donating generously and so far more than 2,000 people have given Rs 5.84 crore.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bollywood filmmakers and actors including Karan Johar, Rajkumar Hirani, Taapsee Pannu, Ayushmann Khurrana, Lara Dutta, Sanjay Dutt, Jackie Shroff, Kiara Advani, Rakul Preet Singh and Bhumi Pednekar have pledged their support to a new initiative aimed at supporting the daily wage-earners who have been severely affected by the lockdown imposed to combat the coronavirus outbreak.

The initiative, 'I Stand With Humanity', has been started by the Art of Living Foundation and the Indian film and television industry has lent its support to provide families of daily wage workers with essential food supplies.

Indian movie director, Rajkumar Hirani supporting the initiative said: "Let's take care of the daily wage earners. Film fraternity has come together to help wholeheartedly. I pledge to contribute & support this initiative."

"I pledge to contribute and support this initiative! This is a situation that needs all our help, love, care and support," director Karan Johar posted on Twitter.

'Thappad' actor Taapsee said people must come forward to help the daily wage workers.

"This one for the daily wage workers. Because we need to do our bit for the ones who work with/for us. If not corona, lack of basic food might take them down. Let's help them to get through this," Pannu wrote on Twitter.

Ayushmann Khurrana called it a truly noble initiative.

Khurrana tweeted: "I vow to support this and contribute. India and Indians are under threat and each one of us have the power to make a difference. Let's support and care for each other as much as we can in this time of crisis. #Istandwithhumanity."

Lara Dutta mentioned that she was happy to contribute for the cause and encouraged everyone to support it while staying safe at home.

Veteran actors Sanjay Dutt and Jackie Shroff also said that they whole heartedly support the initiative.

Kiara Advani, Rakul Preet Singh, and Bhumi Pednekar also pledged their support.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The U.S. unsealed drug trafficking charges Thursday against President Nicolas Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials.

Why it matters: It's a highly unusual indictment of a head of state that comes 14 months after the U.S. recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela's president. Maduro remains in power, even as the U.S. has insisted he step down and said all options were on the table if he did not.

The Trump administration has stepped up its sanctions  more will be announced Thursday, per NBC News  but not managed to topple Maduro.

The State Department is offering $15 million for information that could lead to Maduro's capture.

Venezuela is in the midst of one of the world's worst economic crises and millions have fled the country, overwhelming Colombia and other countries in the region.

The Trump administration has worked to block the regime's revenue streams, which include oil, gold and drugs.

The Venezuelan opposition is demanding democratic elections (Maduro rigged the last presidential vote), but has limited leverage.

What they're saying:

For more than 20 years, Maduro and a number of high-ranking colleagues allegedly conspired with the FARC, causing tons of cocaine to enter and devastate American communities. Todays announcement is focused on rooting out the extensive corruption within the Venezuelan government  a system constructed and controlled to enrich those at the highest levels of the government. The United States will not allow these corrupt Venezuelan officials to use the U.S. banking system to move their illicit proceeds from South America nor further their criminal schemes.

 Attorney General Bill Barr

The bottom line: Even some of Maduro's critics concede a compromise will be needed to break this damaging deadlock. The Trump administration's position remains that Maduro must go.

Read the charges.
WASHINGTON  President Donald Trump on Thursday laid out his vision for what he called the "next phase" in the war on the coronavirus pandemic that is sweeping the country.

In a letter to the nation's governors, Trump said he and his administration planned to develop criteria to "help classify counties with respect to continued risks posed by" the deadly coronavirus. He said the use of "robust surveillance testing" will allow local governments to track the spread of the virus.

Counties would be divided into three low, medium and high "risk" levels, the president wrote. These categories will be accompanied by "new guidelines for state and local policymakers to use in making decisions" about whether to maintain, decrease, or increase their social distancing guidelines.

The president has made no secret of his desire to see U.S. businesses reopen, even as the virus is infecting thousands of people every day across the country. Trump has set upon the date of Easter, April 12, as the one by which he hopes to see large parts of the country "roaring" back into business.

On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence said that "a range of recommendations" would be presented to Trump over the weekend "for going forward. The president has made it clear that, in his words, he wants to open the country up. But we're going to do that responsibly," Pence told reporters at the White House.

Public health experts say that attempting to reopen businesses and loosen social distancing restrictions in a matter of weeks could mean tens of thousands of additional infections that could have been prevented by an extended campaign of mitigation. Trump, however, has suggested that experts who recommend extending the campaign are motivated by a desire to defeat him politically, and not by the desire to protect Americans from the life-threatening COVID-19 disease.

The White House has yet to release the new guidelines. But the very notion that risk during a contagion can be different from one county to another appears to contradict the basic health advice Trump's own experts are issuing.

White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that the United States "can start thinking about getting back to some degree of normality when the country as a whole turns that corner" of reducing the spread of the coronavirus outbreak.

There are 3,141 counties or county equivalents in the United States, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

As of Thursday, more than 81,000 Americans had been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus --- a higher number of infections than any other nation. More than 1,100 have died from it.

The Senate passed a massive $2 trillion relief bill Wednesday night to help individuals and businesses forced to suspend operations because of statewide stay-at-home orders and a national 15-day campaign to slow the spread of the virus. The House is expected to pass the bill Friday.

The relevant part of Trump's letter is below.

In furtherance of this shared goal, my administration is working to publish new guidelines for state and local policymakers to use in making decisions about maintaining, increasing, or relaxing social distancing and other mitigation measures they have put in place. This is what we envision: Our expanded testing capabilities will quickly enable us to publish criteria, developed in close coordination with the Nation's public health officials and scientists, to help classify counties with respect to continued risks posed by the virus. This will incorporate robust surveillance testing, which allows us to monitor the spread of the virus throughout the country. Under these data-driven criteria, we will suggest guidelines categorizing counties as high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk. With each passing day, our increasingly extensive testing capabilities are giving us a better understanding of the virus and its path. As testing gives us more information about who has been infected, we are tracking the virus and isolating it to prevent further spread. This new information will drive the next phase in our war against this invisible enemy.

Trump's reliance on surveillance testing appears to ignore the fact that the U.S. currently does not have a national surveillance testing system in place.

The massive relief bill passed by the Senate on Wednesday contains $500 million to modernize public health data collection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Language in the bill says the CDC must report its progress on developing a "surveillance and data collection system" to Congress within the next 30 days.

On Thursday, Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said there are some examples of states where surveillance testing has been done using the same platform as flu surveillance, but she did not identify the states.

The plan outlined by the president also does not take into account the likely impact of opening some areas of the country while keeping others closed. Public health experts say this can actually contribute to the spread of pandemics by causing people in search of goods and services to travel from closed-down areas with high infection rates to more open areas with lower rates.

Asked about this on Thursday, Birx said she believes Americans "will understand where the virus is and where it isn't, because we'll have the testing, and they will take appropriate precautions as they move in and out of spaces."

And while the White House appears ready to lean heavily on the idea of surveillance testing, Trump himself rejected the idea of testing everyone in the country who should be tested, and then quarantining all infected individuals before permitting everyone else to go back to work.

Asked about broad testing nationwide at a news conference on Wednesday, Trump grew visibly frustrated. "We can go to certain states [that] have virtually no problem or a very small problem. We don't have to test the entire state. I think it's ridiculous. We don't have to do it. A lot of those states could go back right now, and they probably will."

Coronavirus infections have been reported in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Police in Lebanon County are looking for the people who caused several thousand dollars in damage while burglarizing a church Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.

According to the Pennsylvania State Police at Jonestown, someone broke into the Moonshine United Zion Church on the 700 block of Moonshine Road in Union Township.

The burglar or burglars used a hammer to smash the front and side doors of the church, police say. They also shattered the glass out of the church sign. Inside the church, they used the hammer to punch holes in the sanctuary walls and stole a laptop computer.

Anyone with information should call the Pennsylvania State Police at Jonestown, 717-865-2194.

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Will US aircraft carrier become next Diamond Princess?

Global Times

By Liu Xuanzun and Guo Yuandan Source:Global Times Published: 2020/3/25 21:13:45

Questions have been raised over whether there will be large-scale novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infections on a deployed US warship after the US aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt reported three confirmed cases on Tuesday in what is believed to be the first such COVID-19 case on the deployed warship.

While the US Navy likely has contingency plans against biohazards to prevent a large scale outbreak on board, cross infections remain possible if sailors on the carrier did not apply a great deal of caution, but the incident will still deal a heavy blow to the US' military capability and global deployment, experts said on Wednesday.

The US Navy announced on Tuesday that three sailors on board the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier in the Philippine Sea have tested positive for COVID-19, US media outlet The Hill reported on Tuesday.

This marks the first incident of COVID-19 presence on a deployed US warship, the report quoted US Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly as saying.

The three sailors have been quarantined and will soon be flown from the ship, and people on board who had contact with the confirmed cases are also being quarantined, Modly said.

Holding a crew of 5,000 people with dozens of fighter jets and other types of aircraft, the carrier recently visited Vietnam, and then went on a mission to carry out exercises in the South China Sea "in an effort to send a message to Beijing," US media said.

Chinese military experts said that sailors live and work in crowded cabins on an aircraft carrier, making it vulnerable to infectious diseases. Some military observers said the Theodore Roosevelt might become the next Diamond Princess or Grand Princess, two cruise ships isolated at sea and seriously struck by the coronavirus.

The Theodore Roosevelt is likely equipped with effective quarantine facilities, and the US military is expected to equip its warships with strong anti-biological attack facilities, so a large scale outbreak on board might not occur (as easily as on civilian cruise ships,) Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

However, if the sailors did not have good awareness of epidemic control, the three people could have already spread the virus prior to their quarantine, Song said, noting that the US aircraft carrier should transfer them via helicopter to a nearby land-based hospital as soon as possible.

Vietnamese media previously reported that the carrier's officers and sailors took part in courtesy calls, technical exchanges and sport events, and US sailors on board also went ashore and visited the city of Danang. Reports also said some Vietnamese were allowed to board the aircraft carrier.

While there is no evidence to relate the COVID-19 cases to the carrier's visit to Vietnam, all of these activities risked cross infection, analysts said, noting that since COVID-19 has a latent period of one to 14 days and there are possibly asymptomatic patients, time will tell if there will be more cases on the aircraft carrier.

Regardless of whether the outbreak on board Theodore Roosevelt will further spread, the incident will definitely have a serious impact on US' military operations across the world, analysts said.

Many of the US military's exercises will have to stop, as some soldiers and officers will become infected with the virus and undergo quarantine, resulting in combat position vacancies, Song said.

As of Tuesday, the US Navy has announced 86 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 57 active military personnel. The number for the entire US military reached 174 by Tuesday, 41 more than the previous day.

US Defense Secretary Mark Esper also admitted earlier that the US military's combat readiness could be affected.

Esper said on Monday that the disease has forced the US military to cancel some training exercises, and the virus could affect its readiness to conduct combat missions if it worsens, USA Today reported on Monday.

Since the US military follows a global deployment strategy, the COVID-19 will have the biggest impact on its combat readiness, Song said, noting that the US has military bases around the world to exercise its international influence, but now the strategy has backfired and many of its troops must stay where they are and cannot interact with its allies as frequently.

The impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on the US military is also reflected in the conflict between its global deployment and safety of its personnel, Song said. "The Americans must reconsider and make a choice between global deployment and the safety of its personnel. If the US military insists on global deployment, it must have enough measures to deal with crises like this epidemic," he said.

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For Alex Flavel, a casual relief teacher, Tuesday's abrupt closure of Victoria's schools to stem the spread of coronavirus cost him work but also created an urgent need to assist healthcare workers with children to keep them at their posts.

Fortunately, thanks to a collaborate effort stretching as far away as Finland, a new web-based platform, Sub_in Australia, offers an opportunity for young teachers to connect with doctors, nurses and other medical staff in sudden need for home-based help.

Alex Flavel, a casual relief teacher, who has signed up to offer his skills to help care for the children of medical staff too busy to leave their posts.

Mr Flavel, 27, was among the first couple of dozen teachers, to sign up to provide "a hybrid tutor" role and, if necessary, even cook.

"We're stepping into that gap there to help those healthcare workers with child care," he said.
A senior official of a major Spanish cooperative of fruit and vegetable producers called on Wednesday for authorities to protect the supply chain of fresh food amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Andres Gongora, the secretary of the COAG fruit and vegetable growers' cooperative in Almeria, said that although he and other growers were able to meet the spike in demand caused by consumer stockpiling he was concerned that the transport network could fail.

"We've already come across a few cases of transport companies refusing to go to certain areas of Italy," said Gongora, standing alongside neat rows of cucumber plants destined for the major supermarkets of Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.

"We're really calling on the Spanish government to provide security measures for the transport companies and truck drivers so that they can carry out their work because they're the ones who have to go to certain places where there are difficult situations," he added.

Gongora also said a national shortage of masks was making it hard to protect his workers properly.

Covering over 31,000 hectares (76,600 acres) and visible from space, Almeria's greenhouses produce approximately 3.5 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables per year, according to Gongora.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks.
Roche (Basel, Switzerland) has begun working with the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to initiate a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase III clinical trial in collaboration with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a part of the US Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), to evaluate the safety and efficacy of Actemra/RoActemra (tocilizumab) plus standard of care in hospitalized adult patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia as compared to placebo plus standard of care.Actemra/RoActemra was the first approved anti-IL-6 receptor biologic available in both intravenous (IV) and subcutaneous (SC) formulations for the treatment of adult patients with moderate-to-severe active rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Actemra/RoActemra can be used alone or with methotrexate (MTX) in adult RA patients who are intolerant to, or have failed to respond to, other disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs).To date, there are several independent clinical trials exploring the efficacy and safety of Actemra/RoActemra for the treatment of patients with COVID-19 pneumonia. Actemra/RoActemra was also included in the 7th updated diagnosis and treatment plan for COVID-19 issued by Chinas National Health Commission (NHC) on March 3, 2020. However, this will be the first global study of Actemra/RoActemra in this setting and is expected to begin enrolling as soon as possible in early April with a target of approximately 330 patients globally, including the US. The primary and secondary endpoints include clinical status, mortality, mechanical ventilation and intensive care unit (ICU) variables.The new trial is vital as there are no well-controlled studies and limited published evidence on the safety or efficacy of Actemra/RoActemra in the treatment of patients suffering from COVID-19. In addition, Actemra/RoActemra is not currently approved for this use by any health authorities, including the US FDA."We are initiating a clinical trial to study Actemra/RoActemra for the treatment of people hospitalized with COVID-19 pneumonia, so that we can better establish the potential role for Actemra/RoActemra in fighting this disease," said Levi Garraway, M.D., Ph.D., Roches Chief Medical Officer and Head of Global Product Development. In these unprecedented times, todays announcement is an important example of how industry and regulators can collaborate quickly to address the COVID-19 pandemic, and we will share the results as soon as possible.
NYC (Photo : Image by Jo Wiggijo from Pixabay)

Image by Jo Wiggijo from Pixabay



Advertisement



As the coronavirus cuts through NYC, a makeshift morgue is set up to house those who have died from the ill-effects of the virus in the Big Apple.



The current count of the cases is 15,597 and with 192, taken by the reaper and these stats were made available by the Johns Hopkins University. NYC Gov Andrew Cuomo told the public on Tuesday that cases are doubled every three days and the forecasters are comparing it to the bullet train.



Assembled near the Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital is the morgue to house the corpses of the COVID-19 fatalities on Tuesday. Made up of several white tents, two refrigerated trailers, an RV with 'Mobile Command Center - Medical Examiner' on the outside, reported the New York Post.



Sources that are connected to the setup told the newspaper several more refrigerated trailers are coming in, to add to what they have now and these tents and trailers are planned for other local hospitals in NYC.



The source added that this setup will be city-wide to cope with the coming wave of patients.



On 9/11, the Bellevue Hospital was the site where the dead was housed about two decades ago told the New York Post.



According to Bryan Llenas, the number of COVID-19 is hitting the roof.



Such grim updates in the New York outbreak was reported by Dr Deborah Birx, a top response coordinator for the White House's coronavirus task force.



To add, Vice President Mike Pence said that anyone coming from the New York City metropolitan area, should self-isolate for 14-days to be sure that they are not infected, and transmit the disease in their communities.



These makeshift morgues in NYC are part of greater preparation too.



Dr. Deborah Birx also stressed according to sources, that strict quarantining for all those who have been to NYC for 14-days, to keep the contagion from spreading. She echoed the message of Vice President Mike Pence, she also noted than 60% of new cases in the United States has come from NYC.



The US VP Mike Pence mentioned that New York is now a major hotspot and high risk as well, with more support coming to help NYC weather the COVID-19 pandemic.



Pence mentioned that public health officials are recording one case per 1000 people density, which is greater than Washington state which is where coronavirus took its first death, spread since them.



NYC is ready to process more dead as the COVID-19 gets more virulent



In preparation for more deaths to come, NYC is now adding 45 refrigerated truck trailers that can hold approximately 45 bodies in its hold, should the worst outcome of more deaths that might stress the capacity of city morgues and hospitals.



There is an expectation that with more refrigerated tents, about 3,600 bodies can be held which adds to the capacity of NYC to process more fatalities anticipated.



In lower Manhattan, workers have put up a large tent near the central morgue, confirmed by Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokeswoman for the Office of Chief Medical Examiner. This adds to 800 to 900 bodies capacity with 5 city morgues.



She added that this is a precaution for the worst-case scenario, and stress it will not be needed.



Sources cite Michael Lanotte, executive director of the New York State Funeral Directors Association, saying these units are for the humane treatment of the victims before sent to funeral parlour.



Officials stress the need for these makeshift morgues in NYC, but hopefully, they will not be needed.


: A 28-year-old person tested



positive for coronavirus in Andhra Pradesh on Thursday, taking the total number of such cases to 11 in the state.

The youth returned to Vijayawada from Stockholm in Sweden on March 18. He developed symptoms of coronavirus and went for a medical check up at the government hospital, where tests confirmed positive for the disease, the Medical and Health Department said in its latest bulletin.

Of the 11 COVID-19 positive patients, one in Nellore has already recovered and been discharged from hospital. The others are currently undergoing treatment in various hospitals, it said.

Visakhapatnam and Vijayawada have registered three positive cases each while Guntur, Chittoor, Nellore, Ongole, Rajamahendravaram reported one each.

While a total of 360 blood samples of suspected coronavirus cases were sent for examination, 317 turned negative. Result of another 32 cases is awaited from the virology labs in Tirupati, Kakinada, Anantapuramu and Vijayawada, the bulletin said.

In all 81 people suspected of coronavirus were currently undergoing treatment at various hospitals across the state, it added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A father of two boys who are at high risk of catching coronavirus shared a touching photo of his youngest son on top of a shed speaking with neighbouring children.

Steven Tibbits, a therapist from Grovedale in Geelong, Victoria, told Daily Mail Australia his five-year-old son, Joshua, climbs on the roof a few times a day to talk to a little girl who lives next door.

The Tibbits family opted to put themselves in self-isolation 10 days ago, fearing the threat of coronavirus would intensify. In the time since they went into lockdown, Australian cases have soared from 401 to 2,675.

Their eldest son, James, 17, has a severe disability and requires round-the-clock care, including having to use a feeding tube, and the family made the decision not to risk his life during the pandemic.

Despite the lockdown, Joshua found an opportunity to make a friend outside of the family to play with.

Five-year-old Joshua (pictured) has been climbing onto the roof of his shed during his 10 days in self-isolation to play with the little girl who lives next door

'I came home to find my five-year-old on the roof of the shed,' Mr Tibbits said.

Mr Tibbits said Joshua has been 'a climber since he was eight months old', so seeing him on the roof of the shed wasn't out of the ordinary.

'But I was surprised that he was speaking to someone. He'd met two girls who live in the house next door - a five-year-old and a two-year-old.'

Mr Tibbits said the five-year-old girl was sitting on the roof of her own cubby house during the exchange.

The duo have struck up a friendship since being in isolation, and spend time together every day.

'When we're in the backyard we hear this ''Joshua, are you there?'' And he scampers up the fence railings and onto the roof,' Mr Tibbits said.

If the girls aren't calling out to him, he's usually trying to initiate conversation with them.

Mr Tibbits told Daily Mail Australia his family (pictured without their eldest son, James) had opted to bunker down during the coronavirus crisis

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

Initially, they were swapping toys and sometimes even baked goods, as 'little gifts for one another', but both families agreed to put an end to the small acts of kindness - for now.

'We need to put some restrictions on their interaction as the virus threat grows. No more exchanging gifts or food, and ensuring distance,' the father-of-two said.

Eventually, the pair will have to stop spending time together entirely while the government works to slow the spread of the deadly respiratory virus.

'Theyll still meet on the roof, talk, laugh, tell stories [until then]. And one day, soon enough, when all this passes they may be able to play together like normal times.'

Mr Tibbits said his family are erring on the side of caution until the threat subsides, not only for James, but for Joshua too.

He suffers from viral asthma and the family are aware that puts him in the high risk category along with his brother.

'We're just coping,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'Its stressful at times and you feel a bit imprisoned, but Joshua is putting a lead on the dog and taking him for walks in the backyard... We're just trying to break the day up into activities.'

They're prepared to ride the virus out in self-isolation - no matter how long that may be - for the health and safety of everybody around them.
To the annoyance of some shareholders, Canadian Natural Resources (TSE:CNQ) shares are down a considerable 69% in the last month. Given the 67% drop over the last year, some shareholders might be worried that they have become bagholders. What is a bagholder? It is a shareholder who has suffered a bad loss, but continues to hold indefinitely, without questioning their reasons for holding, even as the losses grow greater.

Assuming nothing else has changed, a lower share price makes a stock more attractive to potential buyers. In the long term, share prices tend to follow earnings per share, but in the short term prices bounce around in response to short term factors (which are not always obvious). The implication here is that long term investors have an opportunity when expectations of a company are too low. One way to gauge market expectations of a stock is to look at its Price to Earnings Ratio (PE Ratio). Investors have optimistic expectations of companies with higher P/E ratios, compared to companies with lower P/E ratios.

Check out our latest analysis for Canadian Natural Resources

How Does Canadian Natural Resources's P/E Ratio Compare To Its Peers?

We can tell from its P/E ratio of 2.68 that sentiment around Canadian Natural Resources isn't particularly high. We can see in the image below that the average P/E (5.7) for companies in the oil and gas industry is higher than Canadian Natural Resources's P/E.

TSX:CNQ Price Estimation Relative to Market, March 24th 2020

Canadian Natural Resources's P/E tells us that market participants think it will not fare as well as its peers in the same industry. Many investors like to buy stocks when the market is pessimistic about their prospects. It is arguably worth checking if insiders are buying shares, because that might imply they believe the stock is undervalued.

How Growth Rates Impact P/E Ratios

P/E ratios primarily reflect market expectations around earnings growth rates. If earnings are growing quickly, then the 'E' in the equation will increase faster than it would otherwise. And in that case, the P/E ratio itself will drop rather quickly. A lower P/E should indicate the stock is cheap relative to others -- and that may attract buyers.

Story continues

In the last year, Canadian Natural Resources grew EPS like Taylor Swift grew her fan base back in 2010; the 114% gain was both fast and well deserved.

Remember: P/E Ratios Don't Consider The Balance Sheet

It's important to note that the P/E ratio considers the market capitalization, not the enterprise value. Thus, the metric does not reflect cash or debt held by the company. Hypothetically, a company could reduce its future P/E ratio by spending its cash (or taking on debt) to achieve higher earnings.

Spending on growth might be good or bad a few years later, but the point is that the P/E ratio does not account for the option (or lack thereof).

How Does Canadian Natural Resources's Debt Impact Its P/E Ratio?

Canadian Natural Resources has net debt worth a very significant 142% of its market capitalization. This is a relatively high level of debt, so the stock probably deserves a relatively low P/E ratio. Keep that in mind when comparing it to other companies.

The Bottom Line On Canadian Natural Resources's P/E Ratio

Canadian Natural Resources's P/E is 2.7 which is below average (9.2) in the CA market. While the EPS growth last year was strong, the significant debt levels reduce the number of options available to management. If the company can continue to grow earnings, then the current P/E may be unjustifiably low. Given Canadian Natural Resources's P/E ratio has declined from 8.8 to 2.7 in the last month, we know for sure that the market is more worried about the business today, than it was back then. For those who prefer invest in growth, this stock apparently offers limited promise, but the deep value investors may find the pessimism around this stock enticing.

Investors have an opportunity when market expectations about a stock are wrong. If it is underestimating a company, investors can make money by buying and holding the shares until the market corrects itself. So this free report on the analyst consensus forecasts could help you make a master move on this stock.

Of course you might be able to find a better stock than Canadian Natural Resources. So you may wish to see this free collection of other companies that have grown earnings strongly.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
Moscow, March 26 : Russia manages to maintain strategic parity with NATO due to the combat potential of the Russian Armed Forces, which has more than doubled over the past eight years, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has said.

"The share of modern weapons and equipment has been brought up to 68.2 per cent and by the end of the year, it will reach the target of 70 percent," Shoigu said on Wednesday, speaking at the Federation Council upper parliament house, according to a video footage of the address, Xinhua reported.

He added that the share of modern weapons in the strategic nuclear forces has exceeded 87 per cent.

Shoigu said that the military activity of NATO near the Russian borders is increasing every year, its land and sea groupings are growing, its membership is expanding, while the US global missile defence system is being deployed.

The information space today has become another theatre of war, he added.

According to Shoigu, in the last three years, more than 25,000 high-tech computer attacks from abroad have been carried out against the information infrastructure of the Russian Armed Forces, with the numbers increasing annually by an average of 12 per cent.

However, the Russian Defence Ministry has created a reliable system for protecting information resources and ensuring high stability of the Armed Forces command and control system, he said.
At the ceremony, ambassador Luca Ferrari, on behalf of the Italian government and people, thanked the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, the China Peace and Development Foundation and XABT for the sincere assistance they were providing to Italy. He emphasized the phrase "a friend in need is a friend indeed," during his speech. The fact that China and Italy are helping each other in facing the crisis shows the deep friendship between the two countries. With close solidarity, China and Italy will surely overcome the epidemic and do so soon.

Nucleic acid detection is an important detection and screening method for 2019-nCoV used by the World Health Organization (WHO) and national health authorities. XABT, among all the companies that have obtained the registration certificate from the National Medical Products Administration of China for the coronavirus nucleic acid detection reagent, is one of the few high-tech companies producing the rapid detection technology covering three genes, ORF1ab, N and E. The company's 2019-nCoV nucleic acid detection kit (fluorescence PCR method) can achieve up to 99.9% accuracy due to the specific binding at the molecular level. The company has received the ISO13485 system certification, and its products, all of which conform to the CE certification standards of the European Union, are being adopted by more and more countries as a tool to control and prevent the further spread of the virus.

The company's official website: http://www.x-abt.com/en/

SOURCE XABT

Related Links

http://www.x-abt.com/en/


Miami

Florida has a message for New Yorkers: Please don't visit. And if you do, prepare to sit in quarantine or risk jail.

Hawaii, another state that thrives on tourism, is asking tourists to stay away for a month.

And Alaska is requiring a 14-day quarantine for anyone entering that state from, as Alaskans put it, "outside."

It is a rare circumstance in the United States, a country where travel between states is generally welcome and often only noticed in counts of tourism visits, that states are suddenly looking for ways to discourage residents of other states from coming into theirs.

Governors, who also now find themselves competing with one another for urgently needed medical resources like ventilators, say they are placing restrictions on visitors to save their own people, trying to prevent the contagious virus from spreading further into their states. They are on particular alert for travelers from New York City, which has far more cases than any other area in the country.

And in a spiraling health crisis that has largely been managed by individual governors rather than a cohesive federal government, there has been little to stop them from making their own rules.

On Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, signed an executive order requiring a 14-day quarantine of anyone who had arrived from the New York region over the past three weeks. All new arrivals will have to report names of people they have contact with to public health officials so they can trace those people as well, he said.

"Maybe they haven't even shown symptoms, but they could be infected," DeSantis said. "After all the hard work, we don't want it to now get seeded as people flee the hot zone."

Last week, Gov. David Ige of Hawaii, a Democrat, did the unthinkable in a state that lives on entertaining visitors by asking travelers to postpone trips for 30 days.

"The actions I'm announcing today may seem extreme to some of you, and we know that it will have negative effects to our economy. But we are confident that taking aggressive actions now will allow us to have a quicker recovery when this crisis is over," Ige said.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska, a Republican, enacted one of the strictest measures Monday when he ordered almost everyone arriving in Alaska, whether they live there or are visiting, to self-quarantine for 14 days and monitor themselves for symptoms of the virus. The state has 42 diagnosed cases  a smaller number of confirmed infections than in all but four other states  as of Wednesday morning.

"If you are a resident, your designated quarantine location is your residence," the order said. "If you are a visitor or worker, your designated quarantine location is your hotel room or rented lodging."

The aggressive quarantine measures in Florida were met with skepticism by many residents who fault the governor for taking steps aimed at arriving New Yorkers instead of adopting stricter restrictions throughout the state.

DeSantis has resisted calling on Floridians to stay in their own homes, unlike in New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, issued a statewide call for residents only to leave their homes if necessary.

Mayor Dan Gelber of Miami Beach, a Democrat whose city was the first in the state to formally issue a stay-at-home order Monday, applauded the governor's quarantine order of New Yorkers. At least 117 of Florida's more than 1,600 coronavirus cases have been linked to travel to New York, New Jersey or Connecticut, including about 11 percent of known cases in Palm Beach County.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

"They're coming from an area where it seems much more rampant than here," Gelber said. "I worry that people coming here from New York are coming because they don't like the stay-at-home order and they're just looking to ride it out anywhere else. We cannot be the resort you go to right now."

A Florida Department of Health form that passengers must fill out requires passengers to list family members traveling with them and to sign a page acknowledging that violating the 14-day quarantine can be punishable with up to 60 days of prison and a $500 fine.

DeSantis said last week that he had urged President Donald Trump, who is himself a legal resident of Florida, to restrict domestic travel between New York and Florida. More than 190 daily direct flights were arriving in Florida from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, according to the governor. When no restrictions came, DeSantis said he ordered quarantines.

Historians said it was difficult to recall a time in modern U.S. history when states imposed quarantine restrictions on residents of certain other states.

David Oshinsky, a medical historian whose book "Polio: An American Story" won the Pulitzer Prize, said he was not familiar with individual states taking such measures to quarantine residents of other states. But during several polio epidemics in the 20th century, local officials forbade "outsiders" from entering their jurisdictions.

"In 1916, when newspapers blamed Italian immigrants in New York City for starting a serious polio outbreak, several surrounding municipalities used heavily armed policemen to patrol the roads and rail stations in search of fleeing New Yorkers and their children," he said.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat who has been a frequent critic of the Trump administration, said this week that he has found himself in the extraordinary position of competing against other states and federal agencies for medical supplies.

"I was on the phone yesterday talking to companies, and here's what I ran into: In one case we're competing for ventilators with FEMA and the federal government," Pritzker said. "So Illinois is bidding for ventilators against the federal government. In another case, we were bidding against foreign countries and other states."
Reese Witherspoon continues to entertain and impress the public with her acting performances. The beloved star has taken on many different roles since her debut in the acting industry. Her reputation is a testimony to her versatile skill set and charming personality. Over the past few decades the public has gotten to know Witherspoon through Hollywood and some of her other work, but where did it all begin for the remarkable star?

Who is Reese Witherspoon?

Heres to my brother who always volunteers to be my chauffeur when Im in town! Love you big bro! pic.twitter.com/YFdIn82oqQ  Reese Witherspoon (@ReeseW) October 13, 2019

Though Witherspoon grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, she was technically born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Many people may also be surprised to learn that Reese is not actually the famous actress first name given to her at birth.

Laura Jean Reese Witherspoon was born in March of 1976. Her parents worked in the medical field, and she was raised with her one sibling, David Witherspoon. The two have a very special bond together. In southern fashion, the two have long ago gotten into the habit of calling one another Brother and Sister.

Witherspoon attended Harpeth Hall, a private all-girls high school. During her formative years, Witherspoon was able to expand on her love for literature and storytelling.

However, that wasnt all that she was known for. One of her former teachers recalled Witherspoon to be a funny and fierce student. She took her studies seriously and was eager to point out social injustices, but she also was known to get herself involved in a prank or two.

In a recent interview, Witherspoon alluded to time during high school where she may have attempted to fill the soda machine with beer. Amidst doing the average things that most teenagers will do, Witherspoon managed to successfully begin building her career as an actor.

Reese Witherspoons journey as an actress

Reese Witherspoon | Adrian Sanchez/Getty Images

When Witherspoon was a freshman in high school she went on a limb and answered an advertisement that was looking for extras. As fate would have it, Witherspoon ended up landing the lead role for The Man in the Moon.

Witherspoon struggled with deciding to pursue her passion for acting or to follow in her parents steps and studying something in the medical field. After receiving a noteworthy reward for her work in Freeway, she made the decision to postpone furthering her education for the moment.

Ultimately, it seems like Witherspoon made the right call. Her hard work and dedication paid off, and Witherspoon started appearing in films more frequently.

Witherspoons work in Pleasantville, Election, and Cruel Intentions put both her name and her career on the map. The public couldnt get enough of Witherspoon when Legally Blonde was released in 2001.

However, more recently, Witherspoon has been blowing the public and media away by a storm. In 2012 a source listed Witherspoon as a has-been  and they had no idea how incredibly wrong they were.

Witherspoon wanted more control over the roles and narratives being told in Hollywood, and on that note, she started her own production company. Witherspoon took on titles like Gone Girl and Wild and began showing the world what she is truly made of. When Witherspoon began working on Big Little Lies there was no question about her intentions or potential.

HBOs premiere of The Morning Show reinforced Witherspoons ambitious ideology. Hulu recently released Little Fires Everywhere, one of Witherspoons more recent projects that she has been diligently working on.

What did Reese Witherspoon recently reveal about being a child star?

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Witherspoon was questioned on the difficulties and dangers of being a child star. From getting your hopes up to having a healthy sense of ambition, navigating Hollywood is no easy feat for a child star.

However, what Witherspoon shed light on was a much graver issue. Witherspoon revealed she was assaulted by one of her directors at the age of 16. She also shared that this was not an isolated incident, and her silence was an unspoken condition of her employment.

Bad things happened to me, said the actress. I was assaulted, harassed. It wasnt isolated.

The actress spoke about how disheartening it was during her times as a young actor to so sparingly see any fellow women on the sets that she was working. Witherspoons actions and new role in Hollywood have already begun to initiate a much-needed change in Hollywood.

Witherspoon has also been unfairly shamed for not speaking up about her assault.

I recently had a journalist ask me about it, shared the actress. She said, Well, why didnt you speak up sooner? And I thought, thats so interesting to talk to someone who experienced those things and then judge them for the way they decide to speak about them. You tell your story in your own time when youre ready.

She added: But the shame that she tried to put on me was unreal, and then she wrote about how selfish I was for not bringing it up sooner. There wasnt a public reckoning 25 years ago when this stuff happened to me. There wasnt a forum to speak about it either. Social media has created a new way for people to express themselves that I didnt have. Thats the great strength in power and numbers. I think we have a lot of judgment and thats unfortunate because were all tenderfooted in these new times. Were trying to find our identity.
Description

GIS - 26 March, 2020: The number of people infected by the Covid-19 has soared to 81, a significant rise from yesterdays 48 cases, announced the Prime Minister, Mr Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, at a press conference, tonight, at the Treasury Building, in Port Louis. The number of people infected by the Covid-19 has soared to 81, a significant rise from yesterdays 48 cases, announced the Prime Minister, Mr Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, at a press conference, tonight, at the Treasury Building, in Port Louis.

Prime Minister Jugnauth lauded those who are respecting the confinement and curfew order but was very critical towards those who are defying the laws enforced so as to prevent the transmission of the coronavirus. So as to ensure the safety of one and all and minimise the risk of spreading the Covid-19, he appealed to citizens to adhere to the national confinement.

He reassured the population that the Government is taking all necessary actions to ensure the safety of all citizens and that as at date there is no shortage of medication to treat the Covid-19 patients. The Prime Minister also informed that yesterday, 20 000 test kits, masks and protective equipment were received, adding that 10 000 additional test kits will be delivered on Saturday 28 March 2020.

The Prime Minister further added that Rodrigues and Agalega have been isolated to protect these islands from the novel coronavirus, and recalled that there are no cases of Covid-19 in Rodrigues.

With regard to the distribution of basic food commodities which has been put in place to cater to the needs of the vulnerable groups of the society , he pointed out that distributions are being done since this morning notably to: some 20 shelters under the aegis of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family Welfare, and 66 Homes registered with the Ministry of Social Integration, Social Security and National Solidarity.

The Prime Minister also elaborated on two other key measures to help alleviate those facing difficulties, namely: provision of a home delivery service; and, creation of Covid-19 Solidarity Fund. The home delivery service which will start as from tomorrow, he stated, has been worked out by Government, jointly with the Mauritius Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI), to cater to the needs of those citizens who are facing scarcity in terms of acquiring basic food supplies.

Speaking about main role of the Mauritius Police Force in this situation, Mr Jugnauth pointed out that they are here to help the population and called upon law enforcement officers to remain firm, ensuring nonetheless that there is no abuse. He further indicated that concerning a reported case of police brutality, an investigation is under way and sanctions will be imposed if any abuse or law infringement is detected.
Facing increasing demand and pressure on the UK healthcare systems amid COVID-19, the NHS (National Health Service) is teaming up with Headspace to provide mental health tools and resources to all 1.2 million healthcare providers and employees

LONDON, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Headspace , a global leader in meditation and mindfulness, announced today it is offering free subscriptions to all 1.2 million healthcare providers and employees of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) who are facing increased demand and stress amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Through its scientifically validated meditation and mindfulness app, Headspace has been shown to reduce stress , increase resilience , and reduce burnout .

Rich Pierson, Co-Founder and CEO of Headspace, comments: "This is an extraordinary moment in time as we face an unprecedented global health crisis. COVID-19 has put our health professionals at the NHS under enormous pressure and they are undoubtedly experiencing mounting stress and anxiety as the situation rapidly evolves. As a Brit myself, I know first-hand the incredible work our NHS does, which is why the Headspace team is working to do all we can to support those on the front lines."

Beginning today, any NHS employee can get a free subscription to Headspace Plus by visiting www.headspace.com/nhs and enroll using their NHS email. All subscribers will get free access to all 1200+ hours of meditation and mindfulness content through December 31, 2020. Additionally, internal NHS "Wellbeing Leads" will have access to Headspace for Work's specially-curated workplace toolkit and content hub. This includes tools and resources designed to inspire and support NHS employees in caring for their mental health.

The program coincides with the roll-out of NHS Chief People Officer, Prerana Issar's, 'People Plan', which is a long-term initiative designed to support those in the NHS, signaling mental health as a significant area of focus.

Headspace and the Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust are currently conducting the largest workplace wellness study into the effects of Headspace on NHS staff wellbeing. Headspace also recently announced that it will be providing free Headspace Plus subscriptions to all healthcare professionals working in public health settings in the US through 2020 to address rising levels of stress and burnout during the global COVID-19 pandemic, on top of its existing partnership with the American Medical Association, American System of Health Pharmacists and Healthy Nurse Healthy Nation, an initiative of the American Nurses Association.

Healthcare professional burnout has been identified as a major issue to address due to its adverse impacts for both healthcare professionals and patients. Research shows mindfulness meditation can positively impact many of the factors related to burnout, including stress and depression. Headspace research specifically shows 14% reduction in burnout after only four sessions among health care professionals and 12% reduction in stress for medical students after 30 days.

In addition to its efforts to help healthcare workers in the US and UK, Headspace has also unlocked a free "Weathering the storm" collection in-app, a free selection of meditation, sleep and other experiences designed to support consumers around the world during the COVID-19 outbreak. The collection is available in the "Explore" tab and is available for users worldwide.

For more information on Headspace, please visit www.headspace.com .

About Headspace:

Headspace was created with one mission in mind: to improve the health and happiness of the world. Reaching more than 60 million users in 190 countries, Headspace was one of the first meditation apps in the world and remains a leader in mindfulness and mental training. Headspace is committed to advancing the field of mindfulness through clinically-validated research, having one of the largest research pipelines of any digital health and wellness company. Headspace operates a B2B business (Headspace for Work) to offer its mindfulness products and services to more than 600 companies, such as Starbucks, Adobe, GE, Hyatt and Unilever, to help them build healthier, more productive cultures, and higher performing organizations. Headspace partners with many of the world's most-recognizable brands, including Apple, Amazon, and more. Headspace also partners with brands like Nike, NBA, and the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team to offer sport and movement content. In 2018, Headspace launched Headspace Health, a digital health subsidiary pioneering new ways to incorporate the Headspace mindfulness experience into digital medicine. Headspace has been recognized by Fast Company as one of the World's Most Innovative Companies, Apple's Best of 2018, Samsung's Best of 2019 and one of CB Insights' top digital health companies, along with being selected for five Webby Awards in health and fitness between 2018 and 2019. For more information please visit us at www.headspace.com, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Singapore/New Delhi: Indian liquefied natural gas (LNG) importers have issued force majeure notices to suppliers as domestic gas demand and port operations are hit by a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus, industry sources told Reuters.

Any reduction in purchases by India, Asia's third-largest economy and one of the top importers of the fuel, is likely to further hit LNG prices, already cut by a drop in demand in China, where the virus emerged.

India imposed a sweeping lockdown of its 1.3 billion people on Wednesday for 21 days, and is only allowing the supply of essential commodities. The move prompted several industries to shut operations and some ports in the country to declare force majeure.

This, in turn, is spilling into the LNG market, several of the sources said.

India's top gas importer Petronet LNG has served a force majeure notice on Qatargas and is seeking delayed delivery of cargoes, two sources said. "Gas demand has reduced drastically and it is likely to go down further," a source with gas utility GAIL (India) said. "Only fertiliser, power and refineries are running at parcel loads. Other local buyers have already issued force majeure so where should we sell LNG?" the source said, adding that his firm had served force majeure notice to some suppliers and was in the process of sending notices to the remaining sellers.

India's Gujarat State Petroleum Corp (GSPC) has also issued force majeure notices to its LNG suppliers, two sources said.

"Performance under the contract with sellers will be delayed due to lockdown ... most of our customers have already sent force majeure to us. Industries like chemical, textile and ceramics that do not qualify under category of essential commodities are closing," a source at GSPC said.

DEMAND SLUMP

GSPC has cancelled a tender to import 11 cargoes of LNG for deliveries in May 2020 to March 2021, the company source said.

"We have decided to cancel the tender and we will inform the suppliers tomorrow," said the source, who declined to be identified as he is not authorised to speak to media.

India's daily gas send-out to domestic customers has dropped significantly, which has in turn caused LNG storage tanks to fill to the brim, with buyers unable to accept any more cargoes, another source said.

"Transport segment is already down 10% and retail gas is down to 10% of normal volumes, industrial output has been impacted," the source added.

"We may soon see cargoes meant for India being diverted to China, which is the complete opposite of what happened a month ago."

GAIL, GSPC, Petronet and Qatargas did not respond to Reuters' requests for comments.

Falling local demand could curb the gas output of Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), India's top oil and gas producer, its Chairman Shashi Shanker told Reuters. "As of now there is no impact on the production of oil and gas, but in the coming days gas production might get affected because of less off-take in view of the decrease in domestic demand," he said.

Shanker said ONGC's capital expenditure (capex) could get affected as the lockdown has delayed the supply of overseas equipment and restricted travel by expats to perform jobs. ONGC has drawn up plans for capex of 325 billion rupees ($4.3 billion) in 2020/21.

Asia spot LNG prices had recently been on an uptrend due to a slow recovery in demand from China as people returned to work, but with gas demand hit in Europe and now India, they are expected to reverse gains, traders said.
PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - Panama's government said on Tuesday it would widen a curfew to slow the spread of the coronavirus and require people to be in quarantine at all hours beginning on Wednesday, as the number of cases again jumped and two more people died.

Panama's health minister said the Central American country registered 443 cases of the virus, up from 345 the day before, and there were a total of eight deaths.

President Laurentino Cortizo did not specify how long the curfew would be in place, but added there would be "logical exceptions," including for health workers and certain businesses such as banks and supermarkets.

In Guatemala, lawmakers voted on Tuesday to extend the state of emergency due to the coronavirus for another 30 days. The country now has 21 confirmed cases of the infection, the government said.

(Reporting by Elida Moreno in Panama City and Sofia Menchu in Guatemala City; Writing by Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Here is a transcript of tomorrows briefing by the coronavirus task force:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Good morning. I want to update you on our efforts to defeat the Chinese Virus. Today I have closed the border to travel by all non-U.S. citizens coming from China.

REPORTER: Mr. President, you did that on Feb. 2.

TRUMP: Thats right, and I intend to keep doing it until we defeat the invisible enemy, as I call it. Its invisible. You cant see it. Mike, do you want to add anything?

MIKE PENCE: Thank you Mr. President. Your bold action in stopping Chinese people from crossing our border has saved millions of lives.

TRUMP: Tony.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Me? Well, yes, sure, closing the border was good. Actually, Italy banned all travel from China three days before the U.S. did. But lets look forward. We want to flatten the curve. We want more of a mound, not a spike.

TRUMP: Last night I invoked the Presidential Podium Act of 1937. As you know, weve been using an outdated, bulky microphone left here by the Obama administration. I touched it repeatedly, lowering it for Tony, then raising it for Mike, then lowering it for Deborah, then raising it for myself. The act gives me broad power to deal with this, but I didnt have to use it. I received a call from Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart. He said, Mr. President, I want to help. Im giving you two tiny podium mics. And here they are on our podium. I call it the Peoples Podium. Theyre beautiful microphones. I want to thank Doug and all the great CEOs who have praised me for acting quickly to close the border to the Chinese who are responsible for this war, as I like to call it.

REPORTER: Has there been any progress in stopping the virus?

TRUMP: Thats a nasty question. Really nasty. But I will tell you, I heard Dr. Laura Ingraham say on TV that there could be dozens of miracle cures that will save us. I have a hunch shes right.

REPORTER: Laura Ingraham is a host on Fox News Channel. Shes not a doctor.

TRUMP: I dont know anything about that. Tony.

FAUCI: Me? Well, sure, many of us in the medical profession are skeptical of people who would mislead the public. On the other hand, the president has hope. He hopes that Ms. Ingraham is a doctor. But its really about the curve. Where are we on the curve?

TRUMP: Deborah.

DR. DEBORAH BIRX: Thank you Mr. President. Id like to ask Americans to read both sides of this sheet of paper that we have deployed rapidly to all 50 states. It says the president acted quickly to close the border to travelers from China. Thats something all citizens should think about, especially millennials who will write our history. They must remember how quickly the president stopped people coming from China.

REPORTER: Mr. President, hospitals are running out of supplies 

TRUMP: Thats another nasty question. I took a call just this morning from Donnie Arnold, the CEO of Carnival Cruise Lines. He said hes giving us dozens of big, beautiful ships to deliver masks to hospitals all over America  in Omaha, Des Moines, Kansas City  wherever we need to get supplies quickly.

REPORTER: Sir, those cities are land locked. Besides, ocean vessels are slow, right?

TRUMP: Ben.

DR. BEN CARSON: The American spirit is under attack, but we can do anything we want if we put our minds to it. Remember, the president acted quickly to stop Chinese from coming here.

TRUMP: Tony, do you have something to add?

FAUCI: Now? Well, OK, I think the president means we will do whatever it takes to distribute supplies. Naval experts probably wouldnt use cruise ships for supply missions to the Midwest, but I see nothing wrong with exploring all options. Were on a curve which we must flatten and make it more of a mound. Not a curve, a mound.

REPORTER: What do you say to scared Americans?

TRUMP: I say, trust me. What do you have to lose?

Peter Funt is a writer and speaker. His book, Cautiously Optimistic, is available at Amazon.com and CandidCamera.com. His column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons.
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Ohio lawmakers on Wednesday approved a plan for an all-mail primary election running through April 28, the state legislatures fix to wrap things up after the original March 17 Election Day was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The bipartisan plan, approved unanimously by the House and Senate, would send postcards to every Ohioan with instructions on how to apply for an absentee ballot. Anyone who hasnt cast an early ballot already would have to print off a paper application, or call their county elections and request one be mailed to them, and mail it in. Elections officials then would mail an empty ballot with a postage-paid envelope. Voters would have until April 27 to mail it back or drop it off at at a curbside county ballot box, and votes would be counted on April 28.

The plan now heads to Gov. Mike DeWine, who is expected to sign it.

The legislatures plan likely would make moot a lawsuit filed by the Ohio Democratic Party in the Ohio Supreme Court. But it might not be the last legal word on the issue.

A coalition of voter-rights groups said the legislatures plan is unacceptable, saying it would disenfranchise wide swaths of voters. As the Senate was voting Wednesday, they suggested they might sue if the plan isnt changed.

There are very important rights  and principles that have been violated and we will explore and pursue options to address them, said Freda Levenson, legal director for the ACLU of Ohio.

Legislators largely rejected a plan backed by Secretary of State Frank LaRose and DeWine that called for a June 2 election date, sending postage-paid absentee ballot applications to Ohioans who hadnt already voted early, and then sending postage-paid ballots to all eligible voters who requests one.

LaRoses plan would have allowed for an in-person, June 2 vote, giving him until late April to possibly call it off if public-health conditions dont improve.

In a statement LaRose said he was disappointed in the legislatures decision to cut the election calendar.

Unlike the legislatures plan, LaRose said his and the governors proposal "would have concluded the election by putting a ballot request directly in the hands of every voter along with a postage-paid return envelope. Though I advocated for a different plan, the legislature has spoken, and I will uphold my oath of office by doing everything in my power over the next 34 days to ensure that every Ohio voter has the opportunity to safely make their voice heard.

In a letter to legislative leaders on Wednesday, leaders of the Ohio Association of Elections Officials, which represents county boards of election, said an April 28 date doesnt give them enough time to turn around an all-mail election. They said a mid-May date may be more realistic.

Local election officials share no desire to drag out the election one day further than necessary, the letter said. But in reviewing the requirements of the bill, especially noting its (well-conceived) reliance on mail, there are simply too many steps in the process to allow ample time for voters to receive and vote their ballots in the timeframes allotted.

But state lawmakers said they did the best they could under the extraordinary circumstances. An April 28 date allows for votes to be counted in time under delegate-seating rules for the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries, they said.

We know there was some confusion, and we really want people to understand that we want to protect voter rights, said state Rep. Stephanie Howse, a Cleveland Democrat. We want you to participate in this process, and we hope by putting these measures in place, we really are protecting our families.

Give the circumstances, I think this is the fairest, most equitable solution said state Rep. Dave Greenspan, a Westlake Republican.

During a news conference held by the voter-rights groups, Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, blasted state lawmakers plan, saying she preferred the one advanced by LaRose.

Hes trying to figure out how to balance the challenges of this pandemic and make sure people are participating and its unfortunate the legislature isnt supporting him in making the election actually work for voters, she said.

Among the voter-rights groups concerns:

- Instead of providing absentee ballot applications, it would require voters to print them off and pay for postage. This means only those with access to printers and stamps will be able to vote, they said. Its possible to request a ballot to be mailed to you, but that still would require a voter to come up with an envelope and return postage.

- The April 28 date is too soon for the state to effectively turn around an all-mail election. They said at least a mid-May date is the minimum amount of time needed to organize an election, and educate voters on how it will work.

- It doesnt allow Ohioans to register to vote or update their registrations 30 days before the proposed election date, a requirement under federal law they said still applies under the current conditions.

The exact wrong answer is to do a chintzy, half-baked, rushed vote-by-mail process, because it means people are not going to be able to participate. And thats just wrong, Miller said.

State officials have been trying to figure out how to finish the election after the DeWine administration effectively postponed it through the public-health order issued hours before polls were to have opened. They say it was necessary for safety reasons, and to make sure voters werent forced to choose between their health and their right to vote. LaRose administratively set the elections conclusion for June 2, setting off a flurry of lawsuits that contended he didnt have legal authority to change the election date.

The elections plan was passed as part of an omnibus coronavirus response bill that also waived state standardized-testing requirements for this years K-12 students, prohibits water-shut offs, expands unemployment insurance eligibility, extends the states April 15 tax deadline and authorizes DeWine to dip into the states rainy-day fund as he sees fit.

Read recent Ohio Statehouse / coronavirus coverage:

Ohio Senate passes coronavirus relief bill extending primary voting until April 28, waiving school testing requirements

Why isnt Ohio reporting negative coronavirus testing results?

When will Ohio end its stay-at-home order and other coronavirus restrictions?

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine will freeze state government hiring, seek big spending cuts amid coronavirus crisis

Six in Ohio now dead from coronavirus: Department of Health update for Monday, March 23
Tanya Garcia, 32, right, talks to Zion Adams, 9, who has been coming to Angelica's Daycare center for many years. The family business remains open despite the drop in clients due to the coronavirus outbreak. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

California's early childhood care system has long been held together by women such as Tanya Garcia, whose Hollywood duplex is home to two licensed day-care operations serving as many as 28 youngsters  among them the children of healthcare workers and public school teachers.

As hundreds of large preschools and day-care centers have closed amid statewide school shutdowns and stay-at-home orders, many children of essential workers are now being watched over by lone providers  mostly women working in their homes with help from family members. In L.A. County, experts say 75% are immigrants.

However, these providers are facing intense pressure to not only care for little ones during stressful times, but do so with scarce state guidance, dwindling necessary supplies, and growing fears of contracting COVID-19, leaders and advocates in the industry say.

Some have seen attendance shrink as parents are laid off  and if the day-care businesses are forced to close, many child-care advocates fear their services will not return. Other providers are overwhelmed with new requests for care, but have little guidance about when and how to take on new families.

They keep telling us, do what you think is best, Garcia said of the state social services department, which licenses preschools and home-based facilities such as hers. All of us are still healthy, were going to keep open and see where it goes.

Day-care centers and home-based providers have been declared essential businesses by the state and are exempt from closure.

Yet, nearly a quarter of larger school-based and stand-alone early child-care facilities statewide shut down, and experts predict more will follow.

In Los Angeles, the closures have been more acute, at 36%. But as of Monday, only about 450 of the state's more than 28,000 licensed family child-care homes have closed  and nearly 6,000 remain open in Los Angeles.

Our child-care facilities play an important role in absorbing the impacts of school closures, said Jason Montiel, a spokesman for the state Department of Social Services. "Californians who are performing essential work, including healthcare workers and those in public safety, rely on child care so they can do their jobs.

Story continues

The need for day care during the coronavirus emergency is hard to overstate.

Almost 80% of American healthcare workers are female: A significant majority of nurses, respiratory therapists, physician assistants and doctors under 35 are women. Close to 30% of healthcare workers in California have children under 14. Most are the primary caregiver in their families. If even a fraction were forced to stay home, it could exacerbate the extreme staffing shortages many hospitals now predict.

Weve committed to staying open until someone tells us we have to close, said Lisa Wilkin, executive director of the Child Development Consortium of Los Angeles, which runs early education facilities at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center and LAC-USC Medical Center.

Because we are on county hospital ground, we have committed to be open during emergencies, she said.

But the resources available to Olive View-UCLA and similar larger facilities that remain open are very different from those of more isolated home-based providers.

On March 16, the same day most K-12 districts closed, the state social services department issued new guidance to preschools and day-care providers, including stepped-up cleaning and sanitation procedures.

Luis Garcia spray-washes the children's equipment at Angelica's Daycare in Hollywood. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Weve been having conference calls with [state] licensing and with the health department, said Martha Ortega, site supervisor at West Hollywood Preschool at Plummer Park, which serves low-income families. As long as we have the materials, theyre telling us we should be open.

Among those materials are disposable gloves, which licensed child-care providers were already required to wear every time they changed a diaper. Yet, home day-care operators must buy their gloves and wipes from the same big-box stores where panicked hoarders have emptied the shelves.

"Providers are telling us they need diapers, they need wipes, they need cleaning supplies, said Jason Harris of Pathways LA, an early learning nonprofit. Theyre calling us and saying, What do we do?

The lack of coordinated emergency help for home-based day-care providers is rooted in California's disjointed state preschool and early childhood education system. Unlike a school district that provides support to its campuses, there is usually no intermediary between a home day-care provider and the massive state social services department.

The biggest question for family child-care homes is, what am I supposed to do? said Kim Kruckel, executive director of the Child Care Law Center in Berkeley. Am I allowed to stay open? Am I supposed to close? There has been no direct governance from the state, and the local [authorities] are saying child care must stay open.

The California Department of Social Services licenses all early childhood care providers, but local authorities, not the state, have made closure decisions on behalf of the larger facilities under their jurisdiction, including Head Start programs, parochial preschools and corporate day-care facilities.

For Delaney Wright Fine Arts Preschool, a private early childhood center in Hollywood, the decision to close last week came from the Episcopal Diocese. For Fountain Avenue Head Start, it was a directive from the Los Angeles County Office of Education, the largest of about 30 local agencies that administer the federally funded early learning program.

How do you tell a 3-year-old to keep his hand out of his mouth? said Keesha Woods, executive director of the Los Angeles County Office of Educations Head Start and Early Learning Division. Part of the reason we made the decision to close classrooms is that you cant control for that.

But for Angelicas Daycare, less than a mile from both preschools, the choice rests with Garcia, 32, and her mother Angelica Rodriguez, 53, who started the business 30 years ago.

At Angelica's Daycare in Hollywood, Tanya Garcia, 32, checks the temperature of Brissa Cespedes, 18, as a part of their daily routine to make sure all employees and clients are healthy in this time of the novel coronavirus. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

While the March 16 directive from the Department of Social Services made some rules more stringent, it also waived or relaxed many others, particularly for home-based providers.

Staffing ratios were eased across the board, including for hundreds of thousands of Trustline providers  nannies and baby-sitters whove undergone state background checks  who may now watch up to 10 children from different families together, just as licensed providers do.

Experts said home settings were safer in an outbreak than larger multi-classroom early learning centers, because most are either largely or totally staffed, run and cleaned by a single family, limiting contact to a small social network. Even the largest home center can take no more than 14 children.

On March 18, the California Department of Education announced it would continue to pay for state-subsidized care through June 30. Such protections are likely to boost home-based providers such as Angelica's Daycare, where more than half of the children receive government vouchers and many are now home with laid-off parents.

In theory, those facilities could absorb the children of critical workers, as the hospital-based Child Development Consortium facilities have done. But such efforts have so far been local and limited.

Instead, many early childhood education advocates fear the crisis will accelerate the permanent closure of home day care that has been happening for years.

Although the state added more than 3,000 spots in stand-alone early childhood education centers between 2017 and 2019, many home day-care operations closed in that same period, because most operate without any financial cushion and many older caregivers are retiring. The net result was 10,000 fewer spots. In L.A. County, 14,000 spots disappeared.

Their margins are razor thin, Kruckel said. There are a lot of people who love children and are really good at taking care of kids, but its so low-paying because legislators have chosen to pass it off as a personal issue.

Californias new Early Childhood Policy Council was intended to help change that and was charged with drafting a road map for the state to provide more comprehensive early childhood care while streamlining existing bureaucracy.

The early childhood education systems "are quite complex, so we are ... [working] to make it easier for families to navigate, said Kim Pattillo Brownson, vice president of policy and strategy at First 5 LA, a leading child advocacy organization.

But those changes may not come soon enough for thousands of home-based providers such as Garcia.

I made my pay for two weeks, but if more parents lose their jobs and keep children home, the next two may be difficult, Garcia said. We also have our staff, and theyre asking, whats going to happen to us?

Cristina Alvarado, executive director of Child Care Alliance of Los Angeles, said the pandemic's full impact on home day cares may not be felt for months.

"I think a lot are going to close for reasons out of their control," she said. "Once this is over, we need to figure out how were going to re-create the child-care system.
The G-20 countries on Thursday pledged to inject over USD 5 trillion into the global economy in a bid to counteract the social, economic, and financial impact of COVID 19 that has impacted people in at least 170 countries and caused over 21,400 deaths.

"We are injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy as part of targeted fiscal policy, economic measures, and guarantee schemes to counteract the social, economic and financial impacts of the pandemic," a statement issued after extraordinary G-20 leaders' virtual summit said.

The leaders said they will continue to conduct bold and large-scale fiscal support and that collective G20 action will amplify its impact, ensure coherence, and harness synergies.

They said that the magnitude and scope of this response will get the global economy back on its feet and set a strong basis for the protection of jobs and the recovery of growth.

The leaders also asked their finance ministers and central bank governors to coordinate on a regular basis to develop a G20 action plan in response to COVID-19 and work closely with international organizations to swiftly deliver the appropriate international financial assistance.

The statement welcomed the steps taken by the IMF and the WBG ( bank group) to support countries in need using all instruments to the fullest extent as part of a coordinated global response and asked them to regularly update the G20 on the impact of the pandemic, their response and policy recommendations.

"We will continue to address risks of debt vulnerabilities in low-income countries due to the pandemic. We also ask the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to monitor the pandemic's impact on employment."

Saudi Arabia, which currently holds the G20 presidency, chaired the leaders' extraordinary virtual summit.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
YEREVAN, MARCH 26, ARMENPRESS. Number of people infected with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) around the world has surpassed 488,000, according to the latest updates by coronavirus research centers.

Death cases are over 22,000.

117,607 patients have recovered.

China, where the outbreak started, continues leading in terms of the largest number of coronavirus infected people  81,285. Death cases are 3,287.

Then comes Italy with a total of 74,386 confirmed cases. Italy is in the first place in the world with the largest death cases from coronavirus (7,503).

In terms of death cases, Spain has appeared in the second place, overtaking China, as 4,089 people have died in Spain from COVID-19. The total number of cases in Spain has reached 56,187.

Coronavirus cases are also growing in US, where, according to the latest reports, the total number of cases is 68,594. US is ranked 3rd in confirmed cases.

Then comes Germany (39,502), followed by Iran (29,406), France (25,233), South Korea (9,241), Switzerland (11,593), UK (9,529).

Russia has confirmed 840 coronavirus cases, Turkey  2,433 and Georgia  77.

According to the World Health Organization, coronavirus cases have been confirmed in more than 195 countries and territories.

The total number of COVID-19 cases in Armenia is 290 as of March 26, 10:00. 272 are active cases, the remaining 18 have recovered. No death cases have been reported.

Russia to suspend all flights to foreign countries starting March 27

Starting March 27 Russia will suspend all regular and charter flights, except for flights aimed at bringing Russian citizens home, TASS news agency reported citing the governments press service. The decision comes aimed at fighting against the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

The Russian Federal Air Transport Agency will suspend the flights starting 00:00, March 27. The decision refers to the regular and charter flights from Russian airports to and from foreign airports. The exceptions will include the flights aimed at bringing Russian nationals back home. The flights will be carried out in accordance with the Russian governments decisions, the statement said.

Malaysias King and Queen quarantined after palace staff tests positive for COVID-19

Malaysias King Abdullah Ri'ayatuddin and Queen Azizah Aminah Maimunah have been quarantined after one of the staffers of the palace has tested positive for coronavirus. However, the King and the Queen tested negative for CODIV-19.

The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Malaysia is 1796. 21 people have died and 199 have recovered.

No one will go hungry: Indias finance minister proposes new relief package

Indias authorities will provide 2 billion USD for assisting the economy under the current situation caused by the spread of the novel coronavirus, Finance Minister Nirmana Sitharaman said.

A package is ready for the poor in rural and urban areas. No one will go hungry, the minister said.



Over 130 citizens violate state of emergency in Kazakhstan

More than 130 citizens of Kazakhstan have violated the state of emergency, Kazakh minister of information and social development Dauren Abayev told reporters. He presented the violations recorded at this period, adding that some people even tried to enter into the quarantine space.




The legislation tells you, I believe, that we not only understand the gravity of this challenge but the importance that we move quickly and put politics aside when it comes to the well-being of the people we represent and the future of our nation.
Human Rights Watch blasts arrest of Phuket artist for COVID-19 comments online

PHUKET: The international rights organisation Human Rights Watch has blasted the the arrest of a Phuket artist for posting comments about COVID-19 screening measures at Suvarnbhumi International Airport in Bangkok.

CoronavirusCOVID-19

By The Phuket News

Thursday 26 March 2020, 12:49PM

Mr Danai was arrested by officers from the Ministry of Digital Economy & Society (MDES) on Monday (Mar 23). Image: MDES

Danai Ussama, better known by his artist name Mr Zen and as owner and founder of the Wua Art Gallery on Phang Nga Rd in Phuket Town, was arrested at his home in Phuket on Monday (Mar 23).

Although still under self-quarantine, officers flew Mr Danai to Bangkok, where he was taken to the Crime Suppression Division headquarters and charged with violating section 14(2) of the Computer-Related Crime Act for putting into a computer system false computer data in a manner that is likely to cause panic in the public.

If found guilty, he faces up to five years in prison and a fine up to B100,000.

The charge is based on a complaint that Airports of Thailand PCL (AoT), which operates six international airports in the country, including Suvarnbhumi and Phuket International Airport.

The complaint was based on a Mar 16 post on the Zen Wide Facebook account where Mr Danai wrote that upon return from Barcelona, he and other passengers on his flight did not encounter any COVID-19 screening at Bangkoks Suvarnabhumi Airport.

AoT alleged his post is not factual and caused public panic, and misled people into thinking that Suvarnabhumi Airport had failed to effectively employ COVID-19 screening.

Human Rights Watch has blasted the arrest.

Thai authorities should immediately stop using anti-fake news laws to prosecute people critical of the governments response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the New York-based human rights organisation in a release issued today (Mar 26).

The state of emergency, which came into effect today, heightens concerns of greater repression of free speech, the statement noted.

Thai authorities seem intent on shutting down critical opinions from the media and general public about their response to the COVID-19 crisis, said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. The Emergency Decree provides the government a free hand to censor free speech.

In is report Human Rights Dimensions of the COVID-19 Response, Human Rights Watch expressed concerns that Thailand was clamping down on free speech amid the COVID-19 crisis.

Whistleblowers in the public health sector and online journalists have faced retaliatory lawsuits and intimidation from authorities after they criticised government response to the outbreak and reported alleged corruption related to hoarding of surgical masks and other supplies and black-market profiteering, the report noted.

Thai authorities also threatened some medical staff with disciplinary action, including termination of employment contracts and revocation of their licenses, for speaking out about the severe shortage of essential supplies in hospitals across the country, the rights group said.

Concerns about government restrictions on free speech significantly increased when Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha declared a state of emergency on Tuesday (Mar 24).

During a news conference, he said, After a state of emergency is announced everyone must be careful about social media misinformation the media and all of those who use social media to distort information will be scrutinised.

Reporting or spreading of information regarding COVID-19 which is untrue and may cause public fear, as well as deliberate distortion of information which causes misunderstanding and hence affects peace and order, or good moral of people, are prohibited. In that case, officials will suspend or edit such piece of news. If the case lead to severe impacts, the Computer-Related Crime Act or Emergency Decree on Public Administration in Emergency Situation will be enforced for prosecution, he said.

Access to information and freedom of expression are among the integral components of the right to health, especially in the context of a global pandemic. Access to information includes the right to seek, receive, and share information, which is especially relevant in the COVID-19 outbreak to ensure that everyone is informed about the disease as well as the governments response, Human Rights Watch said in its statement issued today.
Whether you know photography or not, you must have heard of National Geographic. Its a leading photography magazine in the world! So how good would a mobile photographic work be to be featured in such a top magazine?

Well, that answer is simple. That mobile photographic work has to be TECNO Camon 12 good. And here is why; not long ago, photographs taken by TECNO CAMON 12 mobile phone were so awesome they were featured in National Geographic.

As the most influential and widely known human geography magazine in the world, National Geographic is famous for its high-quality photographs. They are extremely selective: only one out of one thousand works from outstanding photographers and journalists gets to be chosen. So, it isnt surprising that National Geographic has become the ultimate dream destination for photography enthusiasts around the world.

The photographs taken by TECNO Camon 12 and published in National Geographic were taken by a young amateur photographer in Cote dIvoire, Marc Olivier NGUESSAN. His best friend who knew about NGUESSANs love for photography shared with him a link to the TECNO Global Photography Competition, from where his magical journey started.

TECNO knew the capabilities of the Camon camera, and what better way to let the whole world in on it than initiate a photography competition that involved photography lovers capturing monumental moments with the Camon 12 camera, and experience the beauty of mobile photography.

This event attracted the active participation of more than 4.77 million photography enthusiasts from 15 countries and regions. World-renowned photographer, Michael Christopher Brown, who is known for recording the Libyan war with his mobile phone, visited the offline photography training camp set up by TECNO in Nigeria to talk about the skills and fun of mobile photography.

NGUESSAN work was highly recognized by National Geographic. What this has proven in clear terms is that the camera function of TECNO CAMON 12 is indeed outstanding; participants of the competition couldnt stop attesting to this fact.

Michael Brown too had all praises for the accuracy of color and skin tone of CAMON 12: I really like the colors presented by the CAMON 12 camera. They are very real and penetrating. The skin tones of people are also very beautiful. I am very impressed.

Rich Allela from Kenya also said that the AI camera and the 120-degree ultra-wide-angle lens of CAMON 12 have made his photography excellent and full of details.

Indeed, TECNO CAMON 12 uses 16MP + 2MP + 8MP HD rear-facing cameras and 1.6m (4in) super large pixels. By increasing the photosensitive area of a single pixel, it can bring better colors and take outstanding low light photography. Its 120-degree ultra-wide-angle and 2cm extreme macro; AI camera, multi-scene switching, new HDR and other functions all provide more possibilities for CAMON 12 to become a professional camera phone.

Obviously, Camon 12 deserves to be one of TECNOs legendary camera phones. It is said that TECNO will soon release its latest product of TECNO CAMON series. We are looking forward to TECNO beating the performance set by the Camon 12 Series.
As India continues to fight the deadly coronavirus, Member of Parliament from Jammu's Poonch Jugal Kishore Sharma released an amount of Rs.1 crore for the prevention and care of people. This comes after the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir recorded its first death due to Coronavirus on Thursday. The 65-year old man from Hyderpora, Srinagar had a medical history of diabetes, hypertension and obesity.

The official statement released by the MP stated that the money will be utilised for ventilators, masks, sanitisers sprats and allied food materials in Poonch.

So far, there have been 11 cases of COVID-19 in Jammu and Kashmir out of which nine are active, one person has been fully cured and one has died. As per a government bulletin on Wednesday, in Jammu and Kashmir, as many as 5,124 travellers and people who came in contact with suspected and positive cases have been put under surveillance. Among them, 3,061 are in-home quarantine (including facilities operated by the government), 80 in hospital quarantine and 1,477 in-home surveillance.

READ: Coronavirus LIVE Updates: PM Modi to take part in G20 meet; J&K confirms first death

READ: MASSIVE: FM Sitharaman announces Rs 1.7 lakh cr Coronavirus relief package; Details here

The Coronavirus Crisis

As of date, India has reported over 650 confirmed positive cases of COVID-19. Out of all the states, Maharashtra has crossed a total of 115 positive cases becoming the highest number of cases detected in the country. Meanwhile, twelve people have died so far due to the deadly virus. Due to the outbreak, India has been put under a national lockdown for 21 days. Further, India has also closed the India-Pakistan border and restricted passenger movement at the border with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Myanmar.

Presently, there are around 471,311 confirmed cases of COVID-19 which has led to the death of around 21,293 people. Meanwhile, around 114,642 have reportedly been recovered. The hardest-hit region, after China, is Italy, Iran and South Korea, where the number of cases is rising by the hour.

READ: Delhi's Coronavirus cases rise to 36 after Mohalla clinic doctor & 4 others test positive

READ: '2+1 persons in taxis, 1+1 in autos': Maharashtra's Coronavirus lockdown transport rules
When we think of the Douglas C-47 Skytrain, we invariably focus upon those aircraft which took part in the D-Day Invasion of June 6th, 1944. Those scenes of massed C-47s in the air, bedecked with black and white invasion stripes, leave an indelible impression of that day on ones mind. But the type was essential to the war effort on every front in WWII, and arguably the most significant aircraft of the whole conflict  its reliable ability to move masses of men and materiel to almost any location asked of it were pivotal to the successful prosecution of the Allied war effort.

The dramatic nature of the D-Day invasion, and later massive airborne operations, often overshadow our memories for the exploits of those men and their C-47s who served in other combat theatres, and especially those in the South Pacific. However, there is a group in the Mallee district of South Australia which is attempting to bridge this divide  indeed, the father and sons team of Jeff, Ash and Marty Morgan is resurrecting a Skytrain with a serious Pacific Theatre combat pedigree!

Their aircraft is C-47A 41-18646. This aircraft joined the U.S. Army Air Forces at the end of October, 1942. Her theatre deployment started with the 46th Troop Carrier Squadron, 317th TCG of the 5th Air Force on December 14th, 1942, but she moved on to the 6th TCS, 374th TCG a little over a month later. According to Justin Taylans PacificWrecks.com, her regular pilot with the 6th TCS was S/Sgt. Ernest C. Ford of Manzanola, Colorado. Her crew chief T/Sgt. Amerigo Grassie was the only married member of the team, and his wifes name, Irene, became the airplanes nickname. While with the 6th TCS in the South Pacific, Irene flew many missions from her base at Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. During this time, the aircraft wore the nose number 52.

Steven Ford added some details about his fathers flights in this C-47 on Taylans website noting, My father, S/Sgt. Ernest C. Ford, was pilot of Irene. On the day C-47 Early Delivery was shot down, the Japanese were making an attempt to capture the Wau airstrip. Hundreds of Australian troops Kanga Force, ammunition and supplies were transported by the USAAFs 54th TCW. So important was this battle, that the Department of Information of the Australian Military Forces published the brochure, The Battle of Wau, for the Australian people to know the seriousness of this battle. My father was given a battlefield commission and ended up flying the most combat missions of any USAAF pilot, 365 [Ed.over two wars] To learn more of S/Sgt Ernest Fords exploits, his war diaries make for a fascinating tale! The 374th TCG, it is safe to say, was heavily engaged in the Pacific War, especially in New Guinea.

As PacificWrecks.com also notes, This aircraft had a long history of flying resupply missions based at Port Moresby [New Guinea]. On November 3, 1942 dropped supplies over Kokoda. On February 6, 1943 flew supplies to Wau.

Interestingly, Irene featured in a WWII news reel where she is seen in New Guinea operating as a so-called Biscuit Bomber dropping supplies to troops on the ground.

The Australians were heavily involved in the New Guinea campaign, with the island nation being so nearby, and there were a lot of joint operations with U.S. forces. Indeed, the RAAF took ownership of several U.S. Army Air Forces C-47s during this time. Irene was one of them, officially joining the RAAF on July 11th, 1944. Rather than receive a military serial though, she joined the Australian civil registry and underwent conversion back into a DC-3 airliner configuration. This rework took place at Essendon Airport near Melbourne, Victoria. She returned to action in New Guinea, and used various different civil registrations in this role. By 1945, Irene was flying operations with Guinea Airways.

Following the war, the DC-3 moved around a lot, flying with General Cargo Australia, East West Airlines, Trans-Australia Airlines, and several other smaller operators.

By 1973 she was with Connair Airlines, which operated in Australias Northern Territories. In 1974, this Dakota took part in another significant event, becoming the first aircraft to fly from Darwin following the devastating cyclone which had virtually flattened the city. She carried 25 survivors of the storm to a new life elsewhere.

Post-cyclone Irene took part in other unusual activities, taking part in survey and aerial mapping operations. She also flew with Ipec and even starred in a bawdy comedic film; Banana Airlines. Her last commercial flights involved moving fish between Essendon, Victoria and Tasmania.

She retired in 1983, and soon after, the owners of a McDonalds fast food restaurant in Adelaide acquired her as an attraction. They had her repainted into her Trans-Australia Airlines colors from 1948. The aircraft, outfitted as a dining area, and became a popular setting for McDonalds customers. The franchise owner said that his restaurant sales soared 60% when the DC-3 went in, and estimated that some 50,000 customers a year ate their meals in the airliner during its heyday.

By the late 1990s, Irene was getting a little worn as a restaurant experience. The owner sold her at auction to Jeff Morgan during 2000. Morgan and his sons have undertaken extensive restoration effort in the years since. While they would love to return the aircraft back to flying condition, it would likely involve a lot more paperwork and expense than is practical at present.Neither engine is airworthy, and the airframe had a fair bit of corrosion. Cleaning up the corrosion has been a primary focal point of the restoration efforts, but they have stabilized those issues. Restoring the cockpit, engines and airframe involved the Morgans sourcing many new, old stock parts and reworking others back to new.

As of 2020, the cockpit is fully restored, the engines work. Most recently, their efforts have been directed towards finishing and reattaching the outer wing panels. In February of this year, they successfully managed to mount the left panel, using a 1942 Blitz truck to help with the effort! Ash Morgan noted, There was not too much work done internally on the wing, but a lot of work was undertaken to get the old paint off and prepped for new paint. We added a New Old Stock wingtip, as the old tip was very rough and needed to be replaced. The right wing will hopefully be attached sometime this year.

This is a marvelous development, and we look forwards to when the Morgans have the aircraft returned to her full form again in the coming years

Click HERE to see a video of a 2016 engine startup and some close ups of the interior.

Click HERE to see additional historical details about the aircraft, including photographs.

Many thanks to the Morgans, and especially to Phil Buckley for bringing us this story!
Michigan residents are now subject to a stay-at-home order for at least the next three weeks, the latest, most sweeping step taken by state officials to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmers order, in effect through April 13, puts Michigan in league with more than a dozen other states that have enacted similar policies. State and local stay-at-home orders now impact at least 175 million people in the U.S., according to The New York Times.

In all, 17 states have issued statewide stay-at-home orders or advisories: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Another 11 states have local stay-at-home orders in populous counties or communities.

Read Michigans entire stay-at-home order here.

There are many common themes among what governors that have taken this route have advised, particularly when it comes to what businesses and activities are deemed essential and what should shutter their doors.

But stay-at-home orders arent necessarily one-size-fits-all. During a Thursday press conference, Whitmer characterized Michigans order as the most aggressive of any state in the country.

See how Michigan compares to other states below.

Current end date

Michigan:

11:59 p.m. April 13

Other stay-at-home states:

Theres no real consensus among stay-at-home states as to when the orders should end. Currently, only Louisiana shares Michigans April 13 end date.

Orders and advisories in Indiana, Ohio and Massachusetts are set to run through April 6. Illinois is scheduled to extend through April 7, and Washingtons is set to end midnight April 8.

Four states - Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, and Wisconsin - currently intend to extend their stay-at-home orders past Michigans. Connecticuts is scheduled to run through April 22, Wisconsins is set to end 8 a.m. April 24, Hawaiis is effective through 11:59 p.m. April 30 and Delawares is slated to end May 15.

Several states havent put an end date on their stay-at-home orders - governors in California, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and West Virginia have left it open-ended based on determinations from public health officials.

Nearly all governors who have issued stay-at-home orders have left the option open to extend them if deemed necessary.

Order vs. advisory

Michigan:

Its an order. Individual violations are misdemeanors punishable by up to a $500 fine and up to 90 days in jail. Non-essential businesses that remain open can face fines and other penalties for risking their workers health.

Other stay-at-home states:

In every state but Massachusetts with stay-at-home orders, violators of both business and individual restrictions can be subject to punishment.

Massachusetts has ordered all non-essential businesses to cease in-person operation, but the states stay-at-home language is an advisory for individuals, meaning theres no specific penalty if a resident does not stay home.

Thats because the governors administration does not believe Massachusetts residents can be confined to their homes and does not support home confinement for public health reasons, according to a public advisory.

Signs directing medical traffic near Spectrum Health's coronavirus (COVID-19) triage screening area outside the Emergency Department at Spectrum Health Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids on Wednesday, March 18, 2020. (Cory Morse | MLive.com)Cory Morse | MLive.com

Essential businesses

Michigan:

Michigans order prohibits in-person work that is not necessary to sustain or protect life. Major exemptions include health care facilities, public safety, and businesses that provide health care, food, medicine, gas and banking.

The governor's order identifies various types of critical industries that must remain open, including distribution centers, public transit, trash pick-up and disposal, public works and utilities, communications and information technology and "critical manufacturing."

Those businesses can designate suppliers or service providers who are needed to keep their operation going. Suppliers can designate other organizations they need to stay open.

Under the order, employers can designate employees who are needed to conduct minimum basic operations. Those employees are still allowed to leave their home to work.

Related: Whats open, whats closed under Gov. Whitmers coronavirus stay-at-home order

Other stay-at-home states:

Among the stay-at-home orders issued so far, exceptions for businesses providing health care, food, medicine, banking and services like trash or public transit are typical. Most states also have an explicit exemption for minimum necessary operations to keep a business afloat.

Some of the earlier states to adopt stay-at-home orders, including California, based its essential businesses list on federal guidelines for critical infrastructure services.

Other states, including Hawaii, Ohio and Illinois, have numbered lists of types of businesses that are exempt.

In Michigan and elsewhere, the definition of whats an essential business to keep in operation can vary widely. Some states are shuttering daycares, while others are keeping them open. Craft stores and other non-food retailers have argued their services are essential in stay-at-home states. And as The Washington Post points out, whether gun stores are essential has emerged as a point of contention around the country.

The Torch Bar and Grill sits empty on Monday, March 16, 2020 in Downtown Flint. The Torch will only be providing carry out orders following Gov. Whitmer's announcement Monday morning to shutdown all restaurants and bars in Michigan due to the coronavirus. (Sarahbeth Maney | MLive.com)Sarahbeth Maney | MLive.com

Restaurants and bars

Michigan:

Restaurants, bars and other dine-in dining was already prohibited in Michigan before the stay-at-home order, although the new order extended those restrictions through April 13.

Businesses can still remain open for take-out, carry-out or delivery services, but must adhere to social distancing rules.

Whitmer has encouraged people to use delivery services rather than picking up their food at local restaurants.

Other stay-at-home states:

Language protecting takeout, carryout and delivery operations at restaurants is typical among other states stay-at-home orders.

Size of allowable gatherings

Michigan:

Previous executive orders limited public and private gatherings of 250 people, then 50 people as Whitmers administration adjusted the states coronavirus response.

Now, Michigans stay-at-home order prohibits all public and private gatherings of any number of people occurring among persons not part of a single household.

People are still able to leave their homes to gather supplies, visit loved ones and exercise outside but are ordered to follow social distancing practices and stay six feet away from others as much as possible.

Other states:

Most states with stay-at-home orders have similar language to Michigans around public gatherings, and other states have put limits on all gatherings for vulnerable populations, the medically fragile or for specific regions.

According to the National Governors Association, 22 states and territories have put in place mandatory or recommended limits on gatherings of any size for some or all residents, while another 18 have capped gatherings of 10 or more.

In all, 46 states and territories have set a mandatory limit on public or private gatherings, while nine have recommended limits.

The playground at Loomis Park in Jackson as seen on Monday, March 23, 2020. The Cty of Jackson has closed all city playgrounds due to concerns of the coronavirus.J. Scott Park | MLive.com

Going outdoors

Michigan:

Whitmers order specifies people can leave their homes to go outdoors for exercise as long as they stay six feet away from anybody not in their household.

Get some fresh air, walk your dog. Just be smart about it," Whitmer said.

Michigans state parks remain open to the public, and park entry fees have been waived by the Department of Natural Resources. Campgrounds, overnight lodging and shelters are closed.

Other stay-at-home states:

No state with a stay-at-home order has stopped its residents from going outdoors for exercise, although some states have limited access or closed popular areas like beaches or parks.

New Mexico and Hawaii closed their state parks to the public, and Delaware closed its public beaches to all except those who are exercising or walking their dogs.

In California, officials are beginning to close parking lots at state parks and beaches where social distancing is not being observed.

Many states have closed access to public playgrounds.

A KKind employee weighs out marijuana flower at the new recreational marijuana provisioning center in Kalamazoo Township, Michigan on Friday, March 13, 2020. This is the first recreational marijuana shop to open in Kalamazoo County.Joel Bissell

Marijuana shops and dispensaries

Michigan:

Theyre considered essential.

Medical and recreational marijuana stores must close for in-person transactions, but are still able to make curbside sales and home delivery, Marijuana Regulatory Agency spokesman David Harns said.

The licensees must designate only as many employees as necessary to show up to work

Other stay-at-home states:

Not every state has legalized medical or recreational marijuana, but in states that have, marijuana dispensaries and cultivation centers have typically been allowed to stay open.

PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

Complete coverage of coronavirus in Michigan.

Related coverage:

All Michigan residents, most businesses ordered to stay home to slow spread of coronavirus

Read Michigan Gov. Whitmers entire coronavirus stay-at-home order

Whats open, whats closed under Gov. Whitmers coronavirus stay-at-home order

Wednesday, March 25: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

Michigan marijuana shops to remain open with essential businesses amid coronavirus stay-at-home order

8 tips to keep parents and kids sane and safe during Michigans coronavirus outbreak

How to report if your non-essential workplace is still open during Michigans coronavirus stay home order

Michigan grocery stores slammed after Gov. Gretchen Whitmers coronavirus stay-at-home order

Michigans coronavirus stay-at-home order torture, but good for some and way overboard for others
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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Beijing  Thu, March 26, 2020 23:23 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206db0cb8 2 World COVID-19,China,COVID-19-travel-restriction Free

China will drastically cut its international flight routes and bar entry to returning foreigners based in the country to stem the spread of the coronavirus, authorities said Thursday.

The country has not reported any new domestic COVID-19 infections for two consecutive days but officials have raised concerns about the number of imported cases, which have now surpassed 500.

Foreigners living in China with valid visas and resident permits will be blocked from returning to the country after midnight Saturday, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

"The suspension is a temporary measure that China is compelled to take in light of the outbreak situation," it added.

The most of the 500 imported infections involved Chinese nationals returning home, according to the foreign affairs ministry.

Diplomats and the crew of international airlines and vessels will still be permitted into the country, according to the statement.

Flights out of China will be capped at just one route a week to each country, with international airlines also permitted only one route.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China also said the passenger load on flights in and out of China should not exceed 75 percent.

The adjusted flight routes are expected to start running from March 29, it added.

All Beijing-bound international flights have been diverted to other urban centres.

Many Chinese cities including Beijing and Shanghai have already imposed a compulsory 14-day quarantine for all arrivals from abroad.

There were nearly 1,100 return international passenger flights scheduled to come to China this week.
The government has been accused of leaving construction companies in limbo over whether they can still keep operating amid the lockdown.

THE government has been accused of leaving construction companies in limbo over whether they can still keep operating amid the lockdown.

Northern Ireland rally driver Desi Henry, who is also a quantity surveyor for his family business PRH Construction, criticised both Stormont and Westminster for failing to address "uncertainty" on the issue for the sector.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Monday that all non-essential businesses must close in a bid to curtail the spread of coronavirus.

Other politicians, including First Minister Arlene Foster, subsequently announced construction companies could continue to operate if social distancing is adhered to. However, the Co Antrim man told the Belfast Telegraph it is impossible for distance to be maintained by employees while working on sites, which has prompted his family business to temporarily shut down operations.

"I don't know any site in the country that could adhere to a strict two-metre social distancing policy. It would be completely impossible to maintain that," Mr Henry said.

"Politicians who say that it is are living in dream land.

"That's why I think they need to give some clarity on how to move forward."

The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme aims to help firms continue to keep people in employment by putting staff members on temporary leave.

The government will pay firms cash grants of 80% of staff wages up to a cap of 2,500, providing they keep the worker employed.

HM Revenue & Customs, which administers the scheme, confirmed any firm which pays its staff via the PAYE system is qualified to apply. However, Mr Henry warned that firms like his family's, which has decided to close to respect the social distancing policy, may be forced to reopen in order to help their sub-contractors, who are effectively self-employed, to enable them to be paid.

The government is expected to outline measures to help those who are self-employed today.

"We're trying to run a family business and we're trying to do the best for obviously ourselves and our employees and sub-contractors," Mr Henry said. "A lot of sub-contractors we deal with are people that we have had for many years.

"So we're all sort of a big family.

"Many sub-contractors are just working week to week and all of a sudden they have absolutely no income.

"It's obviously very, very difficult times for people and obviously we want to try and do the right thing.

"Somebody needs to come and say to contractors, 'What is the case? What are the facts of this? Do we close, do we stay open?'

"Regardless of the 80% it's still going to cost us a lot of money.

"There's a lot of overheads. We have never experienced anything like this before.

"No one has and there's uncertain times ahead."
Deirdre Clune MEP is reminding consumers of their right to a full refund or to change their flight, in the case of airlines cancelling flights. The Ireland South MEP said EU passenger rights guarantee that any passengers, who have their flights cancelled by the airline, are entitled to choose between a refund or changing their flight date.

This is a worrying time for our citizens and many elements of our normal routines have been disrupted, including travel plans. The travel restrictions and health and safety warnings must be adhered to and we should follow the guidelines issued by the Irish government and authorities to protect everyones well-being.

However, in case of confusion, I want to remind air passengers that EU rules are clear on cancelled flights, whereby the airline must provide a clear choice between a refund, changing to a new flight at the earliest convenience or at a later date at the passengers convenience", said Deirdre Clune, a Member of the European Parliaments Committee on Transport.

In the context of the coronavirus outbreak and resulting travel restrictions and warnings, the EU Commission issued new guidelines on how passenger rights should be interpreted. But the rules for cancelled flights remain the same, MEP Clune confirmed.

Passengers who would prefer to have a refund instead of changing their cancelled flight to a later date can request the same from the airline. If they do not receive a satisfactory response, they can contact the national body responsible. In Irelands case, this is the Commission for Aviation Regulation.

MEP Clune underlined that the coronavirus impact has caused enormous difficulties for the airline industry: It is a very difficult time for the airline industry and it is understandable that there may be delays in terms of customer service, so we need to be patient in terms of customer service delays as many companies are dealing with this unprecedented situation with limited staffing."
Carsten Thiel, President of European Commercialization, EUSA Pharma

By CorpGov Staff

In recent months, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the outbreak of a public health emergency of international concern  also known as the disease labeled COVID-19, or the Coronavirus.

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can be commonly found in people and numerous different animal species. The virus rarely spreads from animals to people, or vice versa.

However, COVID-19 reports do spread mixed signals to our worlds population. Some sources claim that the initial spread did indeed happen through animal to person contact through a large seafood and live animal market in China. Later on, word spread that patients diagnosed with the coronavirus were not exposed to animal markets, and that person to person spread is how the virus continued to thrive amongst populations.

The coronavirus appears to spread from person to person mainly through respiratory transmission, which makes it difficult to differentiate between a common cold and a COVID-19 symptom.

The most important signs and symptoms to look out for include fever, cough, and shortness of breath. Such instances typically occur within two to fourteen days of exposure. Reports state that travel related COVID-19 is the common culprit  meaning, if you or your loved ones are traveling out of the country, youre more likely to catch the disease.

Current status of coronavirus spread

The beginning of the coronavirus disease outbreak started in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in December 2019. It didnt stop there, though.

Since December, 31 additional countries and territories including the United States have reported affected citizens. Worldwide, the current rate of associated deaths trailing back to the disease is 2,462. That was as of February 25, 2020.

Most cases found in the EU/EEA and the UK have found that an increasing number of coronavirus cases have been popping up with no defined chain of transmission  even though respiratory transmission is said to be how you can catch the disease.

Story continues

Countries around the world are currently implementing extraordinary public health measures to ensure safety and wellbeing to all citizens. Some areas are suggesting and preparing themselves for isolation, with school and work cancellations to protect their personal health.

Right now, the percentage of further transmission of COVID-19 is technically considered high, especially in EU/EEA countries and the UK. Sporadic cases may continue to surprise even more countries in the near future.

What are pharma companies currently doing to help?

Efforts to develop a reliable vaccine for future prevention of the coronavirus is in the works  from different countries around the world.

Carsten Thiel, president of European commercialization for the biopharmaceutical company EUSA Pharma, says that the latest estimates indicate that eventually 40  60% of all people who are socially active will get infected. While he acknowledges that is a scary number, he says the real question is over which time or how many years that will happen.

Chances are that the warmer temperature in May could dry out the infection rate, but next winter would see a new outbreak, said Thiel. So it comes down to winning time to have more people immune and to have a vaccine commercially available.

The United States of America

The United States is a part of the solution. President Donald Trump is planning to set up a sit down with pharmaceutical CEOs in the states soon. Trump claims, Weve asked them to accelerate whatever theyre doing in terms of the vaccine, absolutely.

Thiel says there is clearly a lot of miscommunication and misperception related to the virus.

Many people take appropriate action to prevent infection and thus the spreading of the virus. However some people are overreacting and are more scared than they should be  and others dont seem to really care, said Thiel.

Drug pricing and implementation into hospitals and pharmacies are just two of the topics that need to be tackled. Rapidly producing a preventative for hundreds of thousands of people across multiple countries to take will be the #1 challenge pharma companies will face in the near future.

Johnson & Johnson

President Trump is not the only leader responding to the outbreak of coronavirus, though. Johnson and Johnson recently announced that theyll be working collaboratively with Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies to produce antiviral therapies and vaccines against certain strains of the virus  specifically 2019-nCoV. Theyll do so by screening their library for compounds with anti-2019-nCoV activity to see what relief they can provide to patients fighting off the virus and to people that may potentially acquire the virus.

Their additional game plan is to review all the coronavirus pathophysiology pathways to see what has and hasnt worked in previously tested medications. From there, the trial and error will begin to create a lasting fighting mechanism to the virus.

APEIRON Biologics

As for Europe, APEIRON Biologics is currently working on a way to combat the coronavirus, too.

A little about APEIRON: APEIRON is a privately held European biotech company based in Vienna, Austria, and its primary focus is targeted towards the discovery and development of novel cancer immunotherapies. APEIRON received EU marketing approval for APN311 (Dinutuximab beta, Qarzib) in May 2017 for the treatment of pediatric neuroblastoma patients and out-licensed global, exclusive rights for this product to EUSA Pharma Ltd.

Now, APEIRON leverages its proprietary master checkpoint blockade mechanism to enable the human bodys natural defense mechanisms to fight the tumor. APEIRONs clinical lead program APN401 is a first-in-class autologous cellular therapy to strengthen immune reactivity via an intracellular master checkpoint, Cbl-b. APEIRONs projects and technologies are bolstered by a strong patent portfolio. APEIRONs development expertise is validated through partnerships with leading pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions.

APEIRON is working on a respiratory drug product to start pilot clinical trials to treat the coronavirus disease in China. APEIRON is known for attaining EU marketing approval for APN311, a product whose exclusive rights belong to EUSA Pharma Ltd.

Thiel says one of the main risks involved with the virus is its sudden spread.

In Italy, this led to a desperate situation in primary healthcare, clinics, and hospitals, where nurses and doctors are overwhelmed, protective clothing is running out of stock, and there is just not enough capacity to handle so many patients.

It is for this reason that many pharmaceutical companies have been working in tandem to quickly devise a vaccine.

This is what brings an otherwise functioning healthcare system on its knees, said Thiel.

To see an entire list of coronavirus treatments, vaccines, and drugs in the works right now, please visit https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/analysis/coronavirus-mers-cov-drugs/.

More on EUSA and Carsten Thiel

EUSA Pharma is a European-based, dynamic, global specialty pharmaceutical company created to bring innovative medicine to its patients. The passion and commitment behind EUSAs mission enables them to consistently provide available medications to help patients live and embrace a better life  and Carsten Thiel is the President behind the operation.

Carsten Thiel has been in the pharmaceutical industry for 25+ years with focuses in oncology and rare disease, making him a highly experienced commercial professional in the department. Before his leadership role at EUSA, Thiel was a CEO of Abeana Therapeutics, Inc. at Alexion, and he was Head of Europe at Amgen.

Thiel Currently holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, making him an asset to the team at EUSA Pharma.

Like Thiel, EUSA also focuses on oncology and rare disease specifically. The professionals at the pharmaceutical company strive to be passionate for their patients wellbeing day-in and day-out, and experience, compliance, excellence, and global reach all keep that passion fully intact. The committed and dynamic management team is 100% dedicated to improving overall health.

Currently, rare diseases are affecting less than five people out of 10,000 within the general population. There are between 6,000 and 8,000 rare diseases in the world today, with approximately five rare diseases being mentioned in medical literature every single week. Thats reason enough for EUSA to want to make an impact in the field.

EUSA is now weighing in on the coronavirus and making valid attempts to create a vaccine and treatment mechanism. Even though COVID-19 is no longer a rare disease, pharmaceutical professionals over at EUSA Pharma dont want it to continuously progress and effect more peoples lives around the world.

Action for the future

Determined action needs to be taken by pharmaceutical companies in all countries for the coronavirus to fully be pushed out of communities. Established pharmacy institutions like Johnson & Johnson and EUSA getting on board together to establish different aids and mechanisms will only get the world one step closer to a healthier planet.

Slowing down the spreading of Covid is the best thing we can do to save more lives, said Thiel.

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A new type of test developed by U.K. researchers from the Brunel University London, Lancaster University and the University of Surrey can provide COVID-19 detection in as little as 30 minutes using hand-held hardware that costs as little as 100 (around $120 USD) with individual swab sample kits that cost around $5 per person. The test is based on existing technology that has been used in the Philippines for testing viral spread in chickens, but it's been adapted by researchers for use with COVID-19 in humans. The team is now working on ramping mass production.

This test would obviously need approval by local health regulatory bodies like the FDA before it goes into active use in any specific geography, but the researchers behind the project are "confident it will respond well," and say they could even make it available for use "within a few weeks." The hardware itself is battery-operated and connects to a smartphone application to display diagnostic results and works with nasal or throat swabs, without requiring that samples be round-tripped to a lab.

There are other tests already approved for use that use similar methods for on-site testing, including kits and machines from Cepheid and Mesa Biotech. These require expensive dedicated table-top micro-labs, however, which is installed in dedicated healthcare facilities. This test from U.K. scientists has the advantage of running on inexpensive hardware, with testing capabilities for up to six people at once, which can be deployed in doctor's offices, hospitals and even potentially workplaces and homes for truly widespread, accessible testing.

Some frontline, rapid results tests are already in use in the EU and China, but these are generally serological tests that rely on the presence of antibodies, whereas this group's diagnostics are molecular, so it can detect the presence of viral DNA even before antibodies are present. This equipment could even potentially be used to detect the virus in asymptomatic individuals who are self-isolating at home, the group notes, which would go a long way to scoping out the portion of the population that's not currently a priority for other testing methods, but that could provide valuable insight into the true extend of silent, community-based transmission of the coronavirus.
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Eight countries under unilateral sanctions, mainly from the United States and European Union, urged UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday to request the immediate and complete lifting of those measures to enable the nations to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

In a joint letter obtained by The Associated Press, the ambassadors from China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria and Venezuela urged the UN chief to "reject the politicization of such a pandemic."



The ambassadors, who said they were under instructions from their foreign ministers, did not name any countries responsible for what they called "illegal, coercive measures of economic pressure."



But the United States has imposed sanctions on all of the nations except China and the European Union has imposed sanctions on all but Cuba.

In a speech to the Group of 20 major industrialized nations on Thursday, Secretary-General Guterres appealed "for the waiving of sanctions that can undermine countries' capacity to respond to the pandemic."



The ambassadors said their governments have "the political and moral will" to gear up to fight the pandemic, but they said this is a hard if not impossible deed" for countries facing sanctions.

The eight countries said efforts to combat COVID-19 are hindered by "the destructive impact" of sanctions nationally, "plus their extraterritorial implications, together with the phenomena of over-compliance and the fear for 'secondary sanctions,'" which impede governments from regularly accessing the international financial system or trading freely to procure medical equipment and supplies including testing kits for the virus.

The ambassadors noted that UN independent experts have concluded that unilateral sanctions affect over a third of the world's population.

Iran is one of the countries hardest-hit by the new virus, representing eight of 10 cases of the virus in the Mideast, and those leaving the Islamic Republic have carried the virus to other countries. US sanctions have made it more difficult for Iran to access the global market and international firms remain leery of deals with Tehran, even those for humanitarian purposes.

On Sunday, Iran's supreme leader refused US assistance to fight the new coronavirus, citing an unfounded conspiracy theory claiming the virus could be man-made by America.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Rivers governor, Nyesom Wike, on Wednesday announced the closure of land and sea borders in the state and a ban on vehicles entering or leaving the state.

The state is now on a complete lockdown as a preventive measure against the novel coronavirus.

A case of the virus was, however, confirmed on Wednesday in Rivers by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, raising the number of infected persons in Nigeria to 51 by Thursday morning.

With effect from 6pm on Thursday, March 26, 2020, the Port Harcourt International Airport, Omagwa will not be open to air traffic, Mr Wike said in a broadcast to the people of Rivers state.

While we may not have the right to stop flights from entering Port Harcourt, we cannot allow anybody coming from the airport to enter our State.

We are confident that the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria and other federal agencies will cooperate with us.

Mr Wike said all land and sea borders are closed and no vehicle would be allowed to leave or enter Rivers State.

The lockdown of the state is coming a few days after the Mr announced the setting up of surveillance posts at the state borders to screen people coming into the state and a ban on burials, weddings, and other social gatherings in the state.

The governor, in his latest broadcast, said why it became necessary to lock down the state.

It is with gratitude to God that I announce to you that our State would have been infected with coronavirus yesterday, but for the vigilance of security agents who, acting on a tip-off prevented an infected person from boarding a flight from Abuja to Port Harcourt.

The infected person beat all security measures that were put in place at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja and Abuja and was to sneak into Port Harcourt before security agents stopped her.

Based on this alarming Information, the State Security Council met yesterday and reviewed measures already put in place and decided that there was (an) urgent need to adopt stringent measures to protect those living and doing business in the state from the virus, he said.

Lawyers react to the lockdown

Nigerian lawyers who spoke with PREMIUM TIMES said the Rivers lockdown was unconstitutional and unnecessary.

Kenneth Ikonne, a senior advocate of Nigeria, said Mr Wike has exercised extreme power and has effectively cut off Rivers State from the rest of the Nigerian federation.

He (Wike) doesnt have such power. Rivers is not a sovereign state and Wike is not a Commander-in-Chief, Mr Ikonne told PREMIUM TIMES, Wednesday night.

The lawyer said the Nigerian president, according to Section 45 of the Nigerian Constitution, is the only person that can declare a state of emergency in any part of the Nigerian federation.

He said Governor Wikes action could trigger a scarcity of consumer products and inter-state conflict in Nigeria. He said the governor was taking advantage of the absence of authority in Abuja.

The reason why he resorted to this extreme measure is that there is an absence of authority in Abuja. The federal government is not giving the necessary direction and, therefore, there is a void. He is responding to that void but he doesnt have that power, he said.

Attah Ochinke, a lawyer and a former attorney general of Cross River, also faulted Mr Wikes action.

The constitution is very clear about the circumstances under which a persons freedom can be curbed and it does not include the suspicion that you are sick. Being sick is not a crime in Nigeria. To say that your movement is impeded on mere suspicion that you are sick, I think its a bit outlandish, Mr Ochinke told PREMIUM TIMES.

It is only upon the commission of a crime that a persons constitutional right to freedom of movement can be curbed. Being sick or being suspected to be sick is not a crime.

Mr Ochinke said the authorities. while dealing with the crisis caused by the outbreak of the coronavirus, should endeavour to act within the provisions of the constitution.

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It is just like when Buhari said national interest would supersede the rule of law and people rightly castigated him for that.

Why we are questioning it now is because rather than our rights being governed by the law which is the constitution as we know, we are now going to be impacted by the caprices of a single man which is the governor. Now, whether he is right or wrong in that exercise, we do not know.

Another lawyer, Frank Tietie, said the Rivers lockdown is not only unlawful but that it constitutes a threat to the survival of the people in the state.

Mr Tietie said the lockdown would cause hardship and endanger peoples lives in the state.

In Nigeria, everybody has to go out into the street to hustle in order to survive. You lock down socioeconomic activities, you are indirectly killing the people before the virus even gets to them, he said.

The Commissioner for Information in Rivers, Paulinus Nsirim, while responding to the criticism against the state government, told PREMIUM TIMES, Wednesday night, that people in the world over are talking about health emergency and not the constitution.

Well, this is Rivers state and that is the position of the Rivers state government! Mr Nsirim said.

PREMIUM TIMES, Thursday morning, contacted Mr Nsirim again to ask if the Rivers government was aware of the confirmed case of coronavirus in the state before the governor announced the lockdown.

I cant say anything now, the health commissioner is yet to give me some information, the commissioner said.

Increasing calls on government to lock down Nigeria

Going by the mood of the nation at the moment, there are many Nigerians who would applaud Mr Wikes action, it appears.

Wike has proven himself as a man with strong will and the courage to lead, said a business man in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State. Other Nigerian governors should copy from him and take necessary action to save peoples lives.

Nigerian scientists, under the aegis of the National Academy of Science, recently advised the Nigerian government to order a lockdown of the country to prevent further spread of the coronavirus.

It is now time for a national lockdown, especially now that the disease has invaded the highest level of our governance threatening our national security!

While the effort of individual state governments is lauded, with a lockdown, all citizens are required (as much as possible) to stay at home leaving room only for essential activities that allow for basic functions such as feeding and accessing health care, the president of the academy, Mosto Onuoha, said in a statement.

Akwa Ibom, another state in the South-South of Nigeria, on Thursday morning announced the closure of all its borders, except for the transportation of foodstuff and other essential commodities.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 14:16:21|Editor: huaxia

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HANGZHOU, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Dongyang, a city in east China's Zhejiang Province, has released a slew of supporting policies to boost the work resumption of Hengdian, a major filming base in the country.

The city government has allocated 10 million yuan (around 1.4 million U.S. dollars) to subsidize the venue and equipment rents and accommodation and catering fees for film and teleplay crews in Hengdian and cut or exempt taxes and fees for epidemic-hit film and television production companies.

Previously, Hengdian World Studios, one of China's biggest film and television program production centers, has launched measures including exempting the rental fees of film making base and studios, halving the hotel accommodation fees and offering a subsidy of 500 yuan for each extra.

So far, more than 20 film and teleplay crews have resumed operation in Hengdian World Studios, while over 40 others are preparing to restart studio shot.

Dubbed "China's Hollywood," Hengdian is the shooting base for one-fourth of China's movies and one-third of its TV series, with more than 64,000 episodes shot.
HAWTHORNE, May 1, 2015 (Xinhua) -- Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, unveils a suit of batteries for homes, businesses, and utilities at Tesla Design Studio in Hawthorne, California, the United States, April 30, 2015. (Xinhua/Yang Lei/IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Multi-billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk on Tuesday offered 1,255 ventilators for free to help fight COVID-19 pandemic. Image Source: IANS News

San Francisco, March 26 : Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the companys Gigafactory facility in New York will soon reopen to begin producing ventilators that are in short supply due to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Giga New York will reopen for ventilator production as soon as humanly possible. We will do anything in our power to help the citizens of New York," Musk tweeted on Wednesday.

The tweet comes after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio asked for Musk's help sourcing ventilators last week.

The need for additional ventilators has taken center stage in the ongoing fight against the spread of coronavirus and the ventilator has become a critical first line of defense for patients infected by the virus.

Tesla shut down its Gigafactory New York in Buffalo earlier this week after lockdown orders have been implemented in various parts of the US.

At Gigafactory New York, Tesla produces its solar roof tiles as well as other products and accessories, like components for its Supercharger V3.

Earlier, Musk offered 1,255 ventilators for free to help fight COVID-19 pandemic.

Musk has also donated 50,000 N95 surgical masks and various protective items to a hospital in the US.

--IANS wh/

na
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California state and local governments have been coordinating with the funeral industry to handle the excess deaths a pandemic might cause since about 2006. But the plan has never been stress-tested by anything like the coming coronavirus outbreak.

California's system of mutual aid is far more practiced in dealing with a handful or dozens of victims in a plane crash, fire or mass shooting, but it's never been used to cope with hundreds or even thousands of deaths that might occur over weeks in every part of the state.

When a catastrophe overwhelms the capacity of local funeral homes, the state can activate its Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. It would mobilize the broad category of licensed death care workers to safeguard and store the bodies, with federal funds picking up the cost.

The state's list of those workers is extensive: funeral directors, medical examiners, coroners, pathologists, forensic anthropologists, medical records technicians and transcribers, fingerprint specialists, forensic odontologists, dental assistants, x-ray technicians, mental health specialists, computer professionals, administrative support staff, and security and investigative personnel.

They are considered essential workers, and the kinds of problems they would confront are finding refrigerated places to store the remains (recommended between 39 and 46 degrees), identifying and keeping track of the dead and the relatives responsible for them, and making sure the right people receive and dispose of the bodies properly.

WHO'S IN CHARGE?

California's 58 county coroners are charged with dealing with an increased number of deaths. Some are elected by the public, some are appointed by their board of supervisors, and some simultaneously serve as county sheriffs.

In Los Angeles County, Coroner-Medical Examiner Jonathan Lucas has been preparing his office for an influx of cases, but has no firm idea what to expect.

"It's a difficult equivalence to make between what's happening in L.A. County and what's happening in Italy (and) China, because there are a lot of unknowns," Lucas said. "So we are simply just preparing for whatever we can try to prepare for."

That means stretching the office's limited supply of protective masks and other gear, and ramping up communications with the health care and funeral industries that will end up documenting, transporting and disposing of human remains.

Lucas is working to keep his workers healthy as well. He said he keeps his office door propped open so nobody has to touch a door handle.

THE ROLE OF PRIVATE MORTUARIES

Most of the people who will die of the disease caused by the new coronavirus will do so at home or at hospitals and other health care places. And when a person dies of a natural cause (like influenza or COVID-19) at home or the health care system, the body is removed to the private funeral home or mortuary for burial or cremation.

The California Association of Funeral Directors has helped the state plan for an increase in deaths.

"Part of that (process) was inventorying what's available within a county, for example, in terms of the number of funeral homes, how much refrigeration and storage capacity they had to deal with human remains and those kinds of things," said association Executive Director Bob Achermann.

State planners say a pandemic could generate six months' work for a local mortuary in about six to eight weeks. So the storage capacity of those businesses could be strained. Cemeteries and funeral homes are alreadly limiting the number of people who may be on their premises at one time, and many memorial services are being streamed or delayed to maintain social distancing.

Should the region need overflow storage, thousands of mausoleum vaults are available at Rose Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary in Whittier, said President and CEO Patrick Monroe.

It's the largest memorial park in North America, and it also has enough space to offer families room to temporarily entomb remains for the duration of the coronavirus outbreak, so they can be buried later when family and friends can attend ceremonies.

WHAT IF PRIVATE FUNERAL HOMES ARE OVERWHELMED?

If private or hospital morgues get overcrowded, the county coroner's office would step in.

"If any hospitals exceed their capacity, and hopefully we don't get there, but if hospitals exceed their capacity, then we would be able to sort of function as the county morgue," Lucas said.

The coroner's office will receive some of the bodies of COVID-19 victims, mostly those who die in places other than home or the health care system, and those who die under circumstances requiring investigation.

The county morgue has space for about 500 bodies, so the county has been working to clear up space by urging family members to accelerate transfers of those remains to private funeral homes and cemeteries.

California law permits bodies to be embalmed and stored in central locations, so that no one funeral home or hospital becomes overwhelmed or unsafe. Refrigerated trucks could be fitted out as temporary morgues, if necessary, Lucas said.

CALIFORNIA'S PLAN FOR PANDEMIC DEATHS

California state has been planning a public-private pandemic strategy since about 2006, and the latest version of The California Mass Fatality Management Guide was updated in September, long before the coronavirus appeared to be a threat to the state.

The 246-page plan includes some worst-case assumptions, for example, that between 25,000 to 59,000 Californians could die in a global pandemic influenza. Again, that is a worst-case scenario for an unknown pandemic, not specific to the coronavirus or COVID-19.

The plan proposes strategies to deal with some expected problems and shortages as disease reduces the labor force. For example, counties could re-assign some workers to the coroner's office to help issue death certificates. Cemeteries could put out a call for fill-in staff or volunteers to help dig graves.

If the need for help with bodies exceeds California's capacity, the plan says other states may step in to help. The state-to-state mutual aid system is overseen by the federal government. But the real unknown is the extent to which mutual aid agreements will work when every local government nationwide is facing a similar increase in deaths.

EXPECT THE BEST, PLAN FOR THE WORST

Nobody wants to think they or their loved ones might get ill with COVID-19 and die, but the experience in Italy and other countries is that the onset of symptoms and death can come quickly.

For that reason, in this calm before the onset of more illness and death, now is the time to speak with your loved ones and make your wishes known for the disposition of your remains and property.

It may feel like a dramatic step, but a hard conversation like that might have the added benefit of encouraging family members to be vigilant about social distancing as a prevention measure. And it's the grown-up thing to do in any case.

The National Institute on Aging has a guide for getting your affairs in order.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS:



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LOS ANGELES - For the second time this week, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has ordered gun shops to close, a move that challenges the county legal counsels finding that the stores are essential businesses that should remain open during the coronavirus crisis.

Los Angeles County, the nations most populous with 10 million residents, enacted a stay-at-home order last week that required all nonessential businesses to close to slow the spread of the virus.

On Tuesday, Villanueva ordered the shops closed. Panic-buying that produced long lines at the shops was worrisome from a public safety standpoint, he said.

Soon after that, the county counsel and the health department said the shops are among those considered essential under the countys stay-at-home order that closed many businesses and urged all residents to stay home as much as possible.

On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom was asked during a news conference if he believes gun shops are essential. He demurred, saying it was up to sheriffs to determine that in their jurisdictions.

In issuing his closure order Thursday morning, Villanueva cited the governors executive order on statewide closures during the crisis as stipulating gun stores are not essential. However, the order does not explicitly mention those businesses.

Villanueva said the shops may no longer sell to the general public but may still supply security guard companies. Anyone who already has purchased a gun and possesses a valid safety certificate can pick up their firearms, he said in a statement.

Deputies have not needed to issue citations yet to enforce the order, the sheriff said Thursday afternoon during a news conference.

The sheriff appears to be trying to carve out a legal middle ground by not in effect seizing individuals already purchased firearms and by allowing the stores to serve security guard companies, said Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California.

But Paredes said his organization is still exploring a legal challenge to the new policy.

We are into new territory that has not been tread before, Paredes said. Gun groups are asking the federal government to declare that gun stores are essential businesses, and it will resolve it for everybody and make it clear what we can and cannot do.

County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl said while she personally thinks gun stores are not essential businesses, the conflicting findings by Villanueva and the county likely need to get sorted out by a judge.

Let them go to court about it, she said.

The closure only applies to the countys unincorporated areas and 42 cities that contract with the sheriffs department for law enforcement.

___

Thompson reported from Sacramento.
By Express News Service

SALEM: Four of the Indonesian nationals and their Chennai-based tourist guide who tested positive on Wednesday were among 16 persons picked up by health officials from a mosque at Kitchipalayam in Salem on Sunday. The four were Muslim clerics aged 24, 38, 48 and 54 and their guide, 63. Government Mohan Kumaramangalam Medical College Hospital Dean Balajinathan said, "The 54-year-old man is a diabetic while the others do not have any medical condition."

Officials said that these 11 Indonesia nationals came to Delhi and then reached Salem by Kerala Express on March 11. They went to Ragmath Nagar mosque in Suramangalam on March 12. They conducted religious sessions from March 13 to 15 at Paal Market mosque in Shevapet, from March 16 to 18 at Sheikh Umar mosque in Ammapet and from March 19 to 21 at Bhuhariya mosque in Sanniyasigundu. On March 22, they held another session at a mosque in Kitchipalayam.

Officials have started to identify the persons who have been in contact with these clerics and attended sessions. On Wednesday, health officials sanitised all five mosques with disinfectant. They also checked for symptoms of COVID-19 among residents nearby and instructed them to stay at home for the next 14 days. Salem Collector SA Raman said, "As per Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami's instructions, we acted quickly and identified 136 persons who had been in contact with that Tabliqh team (Muslim clerics). They have been quarantined at home.

We have also put a mark on their hands denoting the home quarantine. They came to Salem from New Delhi by Kerala Express and did not travel to any other district. Steps are being taken to trace the passengers who were in contact with them on the train." Earlier, in a press release, the Collector urged all those who participated in the sessions to get in touch with the district administration through toll free number 1077 at Salem Collectorate or through 0427- 2450022, 0427- 2450023 and 0427- 2450498.
A 65-year-old religious preacher who had tested positive for the coronavirus disease this week died in a Srinagar hospital early Thursday, the first Covid-19-linked death in Jammu and Kashmir.

A government official said the man died at Srinagars Chest Disease (CD) hospital.

Srinagar Mayor Junaid Azim Mattu confirmed the death on Twitter minutes later. As we share the sad news of our first #Covid19 fatality, my heart goes out to the family of the deceased. We stand with you and share your grief, he tweeted, reminding people that they need to cooperate to break the chain of the infection.

Before returning to Jammu and Kashmir recently, the religious preacher had extensively travelled in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Samba, Jammu, Srinagar and Sopore to participate in religious events.

Health officials who have been tracing the movements of Jammu and Kashmirs 11 coronavirus patients have found that 5 of them had attended a religious event where the religious preacher was also present.

Four people, all of them from Bandipore district 30 km north of Srinagar, had tested positive on Wednesday.

Jammu and Kashmir government spokesperson Rohit Kansal said the four had contracted the infection from the 65-year-old.

After the man tested positive two days ago, authorities in Kashmir had placed scores of people including a dozen doctors and paramedics who had examined him earlier, under quarantine. The colony where he stays in Srinagar was also sealed.

Officials havent yet revealed how the religious preacher had picked up the infection. There have been contradictory reports that the preacher from a sect that emphasises on converting non-believers had travelled abroad or came in close contact with some people who had travelled abroad.

He wasnt very forthcoming not cooperative, said a government health department official.

However, family members of the preacher contradicted the claims that they had concealed his travel history and said he didnt have any international travel.

On 18th I had a discussion with a senior specialist of SKIMS hospital, his advice was medication and isolation. As my uncle wasnt improving, we took him to JVC hospital and again revealed the travel history. Then we took him to Covid clinic, I requested them to screen him for Covid-19 which was refused. It was only on 22 March that he was referred to chest disease hospital where he was screened and found to be a positive case, said Zaffar Ahmad his nephew, who is himself a medico.
If you have a love of geometry, why pass up a chance to own a totally round house?

Located way upstate, this Victor, NY, home, listed for $595,000, is a famously curvy local landmark with an interesting past.

For what it's worth, the Round House all started with a triangle. In 1966, before it rolled onto the property, an A-frame home was constructed on the 10-acre plot. Now attached to the back of the round residence, the original one-bedroom A-frame gives off a rustic and cool ski chalet vibe.

The main structure on the property was built in 1982. No one knows the inspiration for the circular addition, although some locals speculate that the owners who commissioned the place saw a round house somewhere and wanted one of their very own.

The listing details for the distinctive dwelling call it an "incredibly rare architectural delight."

Original A-frame portion of the home realtor.com

A-frame interior, with ski chalet vibes realtor.com

The great room in the Round House realtor.com

Kitchen in the Round House realtor.com

Quite apart from its shape, the home's most significant feature may be the windows.

The vertical windows that are all around the front of it were the leftover windows from the construction of the Xerox Tower building, which is up in Rochester, explains Wilma Townsend, curator at the Ontario County Historical Society.

Despite its interesting architecture, the owners walked away from the home in 1997, after a divorce. The home sat abandoned until 2002. During that time, the home was vandalized and used as a party venue by local teenagers.

The Round House was put up for auction by the county, and in 2002, a new family purchased the home, along with land, for $88,000.

__________

Watch: You Wont Be Able to Stop Looking at This All-Green 1970s Condo

__________

The current owners completely renovated the interior and have transformed the residence into a distinct and dramatic inspiring work of architecture, inside and out.

It features a stately two-story grand room, flanked by a pair of grandiose cascading staircases. Standout spaces include a large gourmet kitchen, formal dining room, and exterior patio area.

All told, the house has seven bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms. With 7,500 square feet of living space, it has enough room for a large family. Depending on a buyer's desire, it could also potentially be used as a retreat rental or a bed-and-breakfast. The town of Victor is situated right between Rochester and the Finger Lakes region.

And if the interiors aren't impressive enough, there are 10 acres outside to explore. Featuring a private pond and woods, the property is a true sanctuary for outdoor lovers.

The post Roll With It! This Upstate New York Round House Is a 'Rare Architectural Delight' appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.
Meghan Markle is taking extra precautions against coronavirus since Prince Charles tested positive for the virus, a close friend told DailyMail.com.

'Meghan said hearing the news of Prince Charles has put everyone on edge. She said she is worried about her own health and Harry's health because she doesn't want to pass anything onto Archie,' the insider said.

In reaction, the Duchess of Sussex has upped precautionary measures at their waterfront Vancouver Island mansion, as she was already making staffers wear latex gloves.

Now anyone who runs errands for the royals must wear a face mask at all times and staffers must leave their shoes and coats outside, the friend said.

They explained: 'Meghan said she would rather be overly cautious than not.'

Meghan Markle is taking extra precautions against coronavirus since Prince Charles tested positive for the virus, a close friend told DailyMail.com

'Meghan said hearing the news of Prince Charles has put everyone on edge. She said she is worried about her own health and Harry's health because she doesn't want to pass anything onto Archie,' the insider said

Meghan and Harry are currently holed up at their waterfront mansion on Vancouver Island with baby Archie and are taking extra precautions during the pandemic by making staffers follow a strict hygiene protocol and wear latex gloves

Prince Charles, 71, tested positive for coronavirus on Tuesday and is in self-isolation on the Balmoral estate in Scotland with his wife Camilla, representatives for the royal said in a statement.

The source added: 'Meghan said Harry's been in touch with his dad... Of course, he's frustrated. She said they both are frustrated because they are doers and want to do so much more to help.'

Neither Meghan nor Harry are displaying any symptoms of coronavirus, despite being around Prince Charles earlier this month, the close friend said.

The insider added: 'Meghan said taking a [coronavirus] test would be reassuring, but since they don't have any symptoms, they will just continue taking extra care of their health with heavy doses of Vitamin C, along with other supplements that help strengthen the immune system.'

Meghan has also implemented stricter household precautions, as the friend explained: 'Any staff member who goes outdoors to run errands has to leave their shoes in a designated area outside, along with coats or jackets.

'All produce must be washed with soap and water, and absolutely no boxes are to be brought inside the house. Whatever they order is opened outside, wiped down and then brought into the main quarters.

'Also staff members who have been out and about running errands are to wear face masks at all times. '

Meghan has implemented stricter household precautions, as the friend explained: ' Any staff member who goes outdoors to run errands has to leave their shoes in a designated area outside, along with coats or jackets'

Harry and Meghan last saw Prince Charles earlier this month, publicly seen together at the annual Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey in London on March 9 (pictured) . Neither Meghan nor Harry are displaying any symptoms of coronavirus, despite being around Prince Charles earlier this month, the close friend said

Meghan told her inner circle that Harry is 'stressed out and wishes he could do more' and the former actress is trying to 'keep his spirits up with long walks'.

DailyMail.com revealed on Wednesday that Meghan has told Harry that 'under no circumstances, is she okay with him traveling anywhere right now.'

Meghan and Harry are now figuring out how they can best help the community, and the Duchess of Sussex said 'she's thought about joining forces with a team of women making masks for medical workers, and those in need.'

DailyMail.com previously reported that while in self-isolation, Meghan and Harry started working with experts on how to best serve the public during this time, believing the pandemic is also a mental health crisis and they feel 'compelled to help'.

They have since used their SussexRoyal Instagram account to share tips on how to stay safe during the pandemic, most recently sharing a post with the six WHO recommendations.

A friend said: 'Meghan said just because they are isolating themselves, it doesn't mean they can't help. They aren't just sitting around at home doing nothing.'

'She said [she and Harry] are working with a mental health non-profit to create some sort of online support system for those most vulnerable, like new mothers suffering from postpartum depression.

'People who lack support systems need reassurance that they are not alone.'

DailyMail.com previously reported that while in self-isolation, Meghan and Harry started working with experts on how to best serve the public during this time, believing the pandemic is also a mental health crisis and they feel 'compelled to help'

Meghan also wants to pitch in locally by fostering a dog to help ease the strain on local animal shelters and rescue groups, and urged her friends to do the same. The source added: 'Meghan is looking at a black lab named Cole (pictured), who is really good with young kids and other dogs

Meghan also wants to pitch in locally by fostering a dog to help ease the strain on local animal shelters and rescue groups, and urged her friends to do the same.

The source added: 'Meghan said they were originally interested in a three-month-old mixed breed puppy named Panda, but are now looking at a slightly older black lab named Cole, who is really good with young kids and other dogs.

'Meghan said they have plenty of space and it wouldn't be a problem.'

The friend also revealed Archie, who celebrates his first birthday in May, is a 'bundle of energy' and is constantly babbling.

They added: 'Archie has now learned how to pull himself up while in the crib which Meghan said is cute, but can be a bit nerve-wracking.

'She also said Archie's new thing is blowing kisses, which is just absolutely adorable.'
Photo credit: Jessica Anna Russo

From Esquire

The music industry, like much of the world, is at a standstill. Coronavirus has halted the professional lives of touring musicians. And while fans might be missing the creative, communal atmosphere of live music, the musicians themselves are missing out on a vital part of their livelihood.

With the cancellation of music festivals and tours put on indefinite hold, artistsfrom international touring giants to emerging indie actsare struggling to figure out what to do without the ability to reach fans in person or sell tickets.

We reached out to four musicians from different corners of the industry who have put tours and album release cycles on hold to talk about what this means for their careers and their finances.

These interviews have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.



Photo credit: Jessica Anna Russo

Florida Georgia Line

Interviewed By Madison Vain

Few acts tour on the scale of Tyler Hubburd and Brian Kelley, the two men who make up the powerhouse country duo Florida Georgia Line. Since the boom-thwack of their debut single Cruise sucker-punched airwaves in 2012its the biggest selling single for the genre in the digital era and the first ever diamond-certified country songthey have headlined every room imaginable, playing for millions and millions of fans. (The size of their average show in 2019 was just under 19,000 .) This coming summer, the act was slated to team-up with Kenny Chesney on his Chillaxification Tour where theyd hit 20 (!) stadiums across the United States.

Esquire: In 2019, you played for just under a million fans and as far away as Australia on your world tour. How are you wrapping your heads around a suddenly clear schedule of live dates?

Tyler Hubbard: We thrive and we get paid and feed our families on having large gatherings. But it's a no brainer that it's not smart to continue working right now. We're trying to find the silver lining and enjoy time at home with the family and really, try not to live in fear. Were treating it like an extended snow day.

Story continues

When your Nashville restaurant, FGL House, was forced to close, you generously gave each employee $1,000 to hold them over. Whats the scale of impact on the decision not to tour on your own personal lives as well as the lives of your crew?

T.H.: It affects everybody. It affects the fans. It affects our families. It affects, obviously, our bank account and what we're capable of and able to do. It also affects all of our employees. We have hundreds of people that rely on us to feed their family. It does get stressful, and you start to think about it. We can float [the operation] for a little while, but there will come a time where if we're not able to go to work, we will have to start laying people off and we will have to start reassessing how we do business. But at this point, we're just trying to stay positive. If we're all still and we're not running around trying to beat the system, the quicker we're all going to be able to move on with our lives and get back to the normal business.

A lot of fans are wondering how they can best support their favorite artists at this time.

Brian Kelley: All we want is human connection, whether you're an artist or a fan. So just staying connected and encouraging of the artist that hey, when you guys come back, we're still here. At times, we feel like if we stay at home too long then our fans are going to move on to the next new thing. That loyalty goes a long way in just giving us a peace of mind that even if it's next year or the year after, our fans are going to show up and they're going to show up more excited than ever.

People are wondering about just that: What it will be like when fans can return to attending live concerts? What do you think the future holds for your tours?

T.H.: Hopefully it's going to be a big old party. By then, everybody will have been cooped up and worked hard on getting this thing in the past and getting everybody healthy and working together. So I think we'll celebrate getting through it together.





Photo credit: Jessica Anna Russo

Thundercat

Interviewed by Matt Miller

When I called Stephen Bruner, the bass virtuoso known as Thundercat, in the first week of the Coronavirus quarantine, he was at home, having cut short his national tour for his upcoming album It Is What It Is, due out on April 3. He was trying to stay positive. Hes been touring most of his lifeand though musicians are used to the ups and downs of their careershe told me he had never seen anything like this. Hes a Grammy winner (for his collaborations with Kendrick Lamar on To Pimp a Butterfly) and his first three solo albums were commercial and critical hits. But, hes still trying to find the light in a dark time in the industry when his band packed things up in Minneapolis on March 14 and went their separate ways for the near future.



Esquire: What emotions did you go through after having to cut a tour short suddenly ahead of your new album?

Stephen Bruner: I've spent most of my life playing my instrument live. So naturally it does suck, because I really enjoy playing live and I enjoy that aspect of what I do. I'll probably start trying to get into creative mode a bit, but I think, yeah I'm just taking a moment to relax because it's still a lot, to be honest with you. To watch everything shut down the way it's shutting downeverybody trying to find ways to make sense of it. But I'm okay and I tend to calm down in moments like this, honestly. And I don't really panic a lot. I feel like, for the time when we start touring again, that it will be that much more fun and it'll be more of a story, it'll be faster and crazier.

How big a hit is it for you and those who work on the tour around you to postpone these shows? What is that ripple effect?

It's definitely a difficult one. Because [performing] live is definitely a major source of my income. It's very difficult for everybody that works around me too, because everybody depends on this as a source of income. But when you decided to do music, you definitely, at some point, have been broke before. I'm a musician. I've had ups and downs throughout my career, for sure. I'm used to this as a lifestyle. There's a part of me that's just like, emotionally, mentally, I'm prepared for moments like this. Financially, it's always a roller coaster. There would be times where you're just eating your emotions as compared to having a full meal.

What do you see as the long term effects this could have on you or other artists?

The truth is, people are not going to stop being creative and people are not going to stop sharing and giving. Music is not going to stop being made. Everybody thought that rock music was horrible, at one point. Everybody thought that jazz music was horrible, at one point. Everybody said that about that trap music. It's like every little change and nuance is that rebellious spirit that music exists in, it will still live on. Erykah Badu always told me that this isn't a race. The art is a service. It's something that we provide for each other. Something that we wield, that's not exactly just ours. So it's something that's going to be here and this is another open opportunity to create or take the time to reflect. When I was a kid, I didn't get paid to play. I played because I love making music. So that in itself is enough. It's like, that's why I create, so that's why I think of it the way I do, and there is no pressure.





Photo credit: Jessica Anna Russo

Waxahatchee

Interviewed By Matt Miller

Katie Crutchfield will release Saint Cloud, her fifth album as Waxahatchee, on March 27. She rescheduled her headlining tour (which was supposed to kick off on April 10) to August. It changes things for my financial situation, she told me. It's crazy. I mean like getting going into a big record release tour is a big investment and then you make all that money back quickly through touring. And now, Crutchfield said, its all a waiting game.

Esquire: How does something like what we're going through with Coronavirus and COVID-19 impact artists in ways that fans might not be able to see?

Katie Crutchfield: I think the biggest one is financially. I was in a situation where I had a whole plan and everything was budgeted and everything was going to work out. And now this sort of puts everyone in a situation thats like, "Oh shit, I don't know how this is going to work." Touring is a big part of my income but its different for touring crew. They go from one tour, to another, to another, to another. You go from, kind of having like your whole situation planned out to being like, okay, it could be six months before I work again. And people really have to go back to the drawing board in that regard. It's hard to plan right now, so I'm not. I'm just, you know, living life. We're all going to be living life very frugally, I'm sure. And just sort of just figuring it out as we go, you know? So yeah, it's crazy. If people want to support artists right now, they should be buying their merch directly from them. They should be buying their album on Bandcamp. I feel like that's a really good outlet because that money really goes to the artists. But that's a big one.

What are you doing now that youre not prepping for a tour anymore?

Kevin [Morby, her partner and a musician in his own right] and I go on walks every day. But we're lucky we live in a place where we can go on these like long walks and really not see another person. We're spending some time together just like watching movies. Kind of doing the thing everybody's doing. Cooking together and stuff. But then, my whole mornings are spent sort of catching up on emails and calling people and reading and all of that stuff. He's definitely still working on music. I'm sure I would have to get back. I have a lot of new songs that I'm really excited about. The initial impact of all this stuff for me personally, I was really devastated and I'm trying now to find hope where I can and be positive. Eventually we'll all play music again. Eventually we'll all be playing shows again and it'll be okay. But my initial reaction was very sad and very, very upset. There was a whole grieving process that kind of happened. I just think now I've landed in a place of "I'm happy that my record's coming out" and I feel like it's a hopeful album. It has that energy and people need that right now kind of more than ever. I feel like people need music right now. I dont really use Instagram, but last week Kevin and I had the idea of going live. For the most part it's very, very casual. We're just going to invite people into our living room. We're going to play some tunes, we're going to talk to people, we'll probably take some guests, our friends and also maybe some fans and yeah. Just like have fun with it.

What do you think is going to come of this for you, other musicians, and the wider industry?

My first instinct is to like work on stuff, work on music. Just to do whats fulfilling to me and maybe that's one positive thing that'll come out of this. I will be reminded that I do this because I love making music. And maybe the money will dry up for a while or any of perks of it will dry up for a while and I'll just be left with my love of music for a little bit. Even when I was devastated about the tour, I kept feeling that people need music right now and I have new music to give them.I think that people are coming together and wanting to support each other and all of that stuff. I just think that I take comfort in the fact that like many of us are also going to be in the same exact situation and therefore we'll have these shared experiences.





Photo credit: Jessica Anna Russo

Angelica Garcia

Interviewed by Matt Miller

When we talked when stay-at-home orders began becoming the norm in American cities, Angelica Garcia was staying with her mom in Long Beach, California. Just before Coronavirus hit the U.S., she was prepping to launch her biggest tour to date: a slot opening for Vagabons national run. But, when the tour got put on hold, it was a major setback for Garcias career, which had momentum from the release of her new album Cha Cha Palace. Shortly after the release of her albumher debut on indie label Spacebomb Recordsshe was gearing up for some high profile shows at South By Southwest, where she hoped to get national attention. But that too was canceled, and instead, Garcia is in L.A., half the country away from her waitressing job in Richmond, Virginia, where she rents a place with another roommate.

With SXSW and the tour opening for Vagabon shelved right after the release of your album, what did that do for all the momentum you had going in your career?

It was definitely a bummer because my album just came out at the end of February. For a long time I'd go book my shows and then be really bummed because I couldn't refer people to an album because it wasn't done yet. So I was really looking forward to performing shows and being able to go, "And here's the album." That's four years of work on something and then it's kind of like working on something and not getting to do the big send off. Going out with Vagabon was going to be super cool because I feel like she has a great following. And I feel like just following her would've been an opportunity to reach more fans and more people that didn't know who I was.

What does this mean for you financially?

It's scary because other than this, I have a waitressing job. I took the time to go on tour. I made a plan to go on tour. So, that's why I decided to stay here because that time off work was taken anyway. I feel like I'm still processing all the little tiny parts of it. There's a lot of planning, there's a lot of income that isn't going to be made. I'm a relatively new artist. So I feel like a lot of tours that I have been on or dates that I go, in the beginning, it's kind of like you're cool if you break even. You have to spend money to get to these places. But people are still finding out who you are. So, for me, I feel like the cost of what I would have made to play a night at the club would either go towards where we're staying or gas or paying the band.

The real bummer is merch. Being able to sell my record at shows. Because when you sell the record, not only are you making like 20 bucks every time somebody buys an LP, but the record is promotional in itself. You can both hear it, and then tell other people about it, especially when they can say like, "Oh, it's new. It just came out, and I we just met her." I feel bad for my bandmates. They're really cool guys, great players. And I don't think they'd, that either of them had ever done a national tour. So they were super stoked to come with me. It was also going to be their income for the next month. So, that sucks. Everybody's just kind of on hold and at home. it's not necessarily like this is a good time to go get a job because what's going to happen? At least I'm around family and not by myself in Virginia. And so there's that. Hopefully the country does a rent freeze because I don't know what people are going to do.

What do you do now, and what can fans do to support artists?

A year or two ago, this would have really fucked me up for sure. At least I had just signed to a record label. And so they help with touring and stuff. When it was all waitress money, that shit would suck. Like really bad. Really, really bad. So yeah, this is definitely a good time for people to support musicians, especially DIY musicians that do everything completely out of their own pockets because that's just hard. It's probably going to be awhile before a lot of bands are going to be able to go out again because everybody's just got to spend all their energy saving, trying to make up for the loss. I know that giving money doesn't make sense for everybody, and not everybody can do that. So maybe at the very least, just listen to things or like try listening to new artists during this time and then like look into people, see where they are. And when things kind of turn and clear up, maybe that's when you can support people when they really need it, when they want to get back on their feet. So even using this time to like find out about people you like, and support them on the upswing. Because I know that a lot of people are really going to need that.

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Sheriff Alex Villanueva called the proposal to remove him as the head of the county's emergency operations center during the COVID-19 pandemic a "pure power grab at the worst time possible." (Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)

The L.A. County Board of Supervisors is taking steps to remove Sheriff Alex Villanueva as the head of the county's emergency operations center during the coronavirus outbreak, a move he called a "pure power grab at the worst time possible."

Three supervisors reached late Wednesday said the proposed change is months in the making and stems from the need to centralize disaster operations after a fragmented response during the deadly Woolsey fire, which killed three people and burned nearly 97,000 acres in Los Angeles and Ventura counties in 2018.

But Villanueva said the timing suggests retaliation for his decision to close gun shops during the pandemic, viewing them as nonessential businesses.

"This is pretty much a silent coup, what they're trying to orchestrate," Villanueva said. "We should be worried about masks, about test kits, and I have [Supervisor] Kathryn Barger worried about guns and ammunition."

In a statement late Wednesday, Barger said she has not commented on Villanueva's decision to close gun stores. She also said the Woolsey fire illustrated a need to "modernize our emergency operations efforts and align with best practices in other jurisdictions."

A spokeswoman for Barger noted that a motion to place the county's chief executive in charge of coordinating disaster preparedness as well as the activation and operation of the emergency center was brought to the board in November.

Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Mark Ridley-Thomas echoed that in interviews Wednesday night.

"I think the sheriff erroneously believes that centering the response to this crisis to the Office of Emergency Management is somehow a dis to him," Kuehl said. "And yet I can't imagine that anyone would say that the sheriff should be coordinating all the health departments and the homelessness outreach and placement in housing  these are all different areas of the county that have grown up since we first had that old ordinance."

Story continues

Ridley-Thomas said the board is focused on managing the most serious threat to public health in county history instead of engaging in "petty conflicts" with the sheriff.

The conflict highlights the ongoing power struggle between the sheriff and the board that began soon after he took office in December 2018. They have clashed over a variety of issues, including hiring decisions and spending.

Ron Hernandez, president of the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, said the public and deputies are "sick and tired" of the political tussles between the sheriff and the board.

"I believe the community is focused on keeping their families safe during this pandemic, and our deputies share that sentiment. These petty squabbles over power during a crisis are exactly what we dont need," he said. "To the sheriff and the Board of Supervisors, we say: Try acting like adults and focus on the emergency."

After Villanueva announced this week that gun shops needed to close their doors, he said he learned that the county's legal counsel had issued an opinion that such stores were essential businesses.

Early Wednesday, Villanueva tweeted that the Sheriff's Department's efforts to close nonessential businesses have been suspended and that Gov. Gavin Newsom would determine what qualifies as one.

When asked about the back-and-forth during a news conference later Wednesday, Newsom said he would defer to the sheriff on the issue.

Villanueva said he had sought to minimize the threat posed by first-time gun buyers panic-purchasing weapons at a time when homes are crowded, raising the possibility of suicides and domestic violence. "We'll have to mop up the mess left behind," he said.

Earlier in the week, Villanueva had criticized the county's virtual news briefings on the health crisis and noted that the Sheriff's Department was kept out of the county's decision to issue a stay-at-home order.

"This is about taking care of people, not taking care of elected officials or politicians," he told KTTV-TV Channel 11 in a segment he posted to his social media accounts. "When I see the same faces, and they're saying a lot but there's no substance, you eventually become background noise."

Villanueva has been hosting his own news conferences, separate from the ones hosted by Barger at the Hall of Administration, and said he has invited other county officials to the briefings.

"I've been working hard to bring everyone together," he said.

The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to consider the proposal next week.
In a blanket judicial order, the Allahabad High Court on Thursday extended all its interim orders and those passed by its subordinate courts till April 26 amid a near shutdown of the state's judiciary after the nationwide lockdown.

The high court on Wednesday had closed itself down indefinitely along with its Lucknow bench, besides all its subordinate courts and tribunal due to the 21-day lockdown imposed on March 24-25 midnight.

The high court has decided to hear only imminently urgent matters during its shutdown and asked magisterial courts to hear bail and remand pleas as per prevailing arrangements to hear them on holidays.

A bench of Chief Justice Govind Mathur and Justice Samit Gopal on Thursday said in all cases, where bail had been granted for a limited period and are to expire during the lockdown, the same would stand extended for a month from Thursday.

The high court also put in abeyance all orders on eviction, dispossession or demolition, passed by any court including the high Court, for a period of one month.

While extending the operation of various interim orders, including the grant of interim bail, the bench said due to the nationwide lockdown since March 24-25 midnight, it is difficult for citizens to approach courts.

To ensure that citizens are not deprived of their rights to approach the courts, the bench said, all interim orders passed by the Allahabad High Court and its Lucknow bench, besides also those of all district courts, civil courts, family courts, labour courts, industrial tribunals and all other tribunals subordinate to it, will continue to operate up to April 26 if any of these orders has expired after March 19 or is due to expire within a period of one month from March 26.

"We, however, make it clear that those interim orders which are not of a limited duration and are to operate till further orders will remain unaffected." the court said.

The court further directed that if criminal courts in the state have granted bail or anticipatory bail for a limited period which are likely to expire in one month from March 26, the reliefs of bail or anticipatory bails will stand extended till April 26.

If an order of eviction, dispossession or demolition has already been passed by the high court or the district or civil courts, the same shall remain in abeyance for a period of one month from March 26," the court said.

Considering the fact that it will be practically impossible for citizens to approach courts for redressal of their grievances for a period of twenty-one days specified in the the Ministry of Home Affairs' order dated March 24, we sincerely hope that the state government, municipal authorities and agencies and instrumentalities of the state government will be slow in taking action of demolition and eviction of persons," the bench ruled.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Pandemic Diplomacy: China Leaps Into Global Breach As Coronavirus Sparks Shortages

By Andy Heil March 25, 2020

You could call it "pandemic diplomacy."

Barely a month from its peak COVID-19 infection rate and price gouging on medical gear at home, China and its proxies are now shipping such equipment abroad by the planeload.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on March 18 fielded an offer from Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang of millions of medical masks and testing kits, following earlier Chinese deliveries to help stem the pandemic in Italy, Poland, Spain, and the Netherlands.

An Ethiopian Airlines jet on March 22 disgorged the first of millions of sets of personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing kits pledged to "each of the 54 African states" by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma.

China even teamed up this week with California-based entrepreneur Elon Musk, who played down the deadly pathogen as it was spreading to all 50 U.S. states, to send the United States some 1,255 ventilators -- essential equipment for critically ill COVID-19 patients.

Beijing appears to have stemmed the tide of reports that focused on China's early secrecy and mismanagement of the mushrooming COVID-19 outbreak with an outpouring of masks, respirators, and other protective equipment, deployments of Chinese epidemiologists, and millions of coronavirus test kits.

"China is trying to turn its health crisis into a geopolitical opportunity," the Financial Times quoted Chatham House research fellow Yu Jie as saying of the "soft power play."

Balkan Push

One of the clearest signs of Beijing's aggressive campaign to shift the coronavirus narrative has come in the Western Balkans, where EU integration has flagged and China and Russia are vying for influence.

Chinese loans and investments in that region have grown, but the pandemic has threatened to undo some of the "integrated trade policies" that closely align Beijing's lending, trade, and political goals.

In February, Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority region that makes up one of Bosnia-Herzegovina's two entities, suspended all work on hundreds of millions of dollars in hospital, dam, and other joint projects with Chinese companies.

In neighboring Serbia, however, a conspicuously unmasked President Aleksandar Vucic rolled out the red carpet on March 21 when a team of six Chinese health experts arrived with a planeload of medical equipment.

Vucic greeted them on the tarmac in Belgrade and thanked China for its "free help" and its "friendship and love" for his country.

"Hundreds of thousands of lives in Serbia will be saved thanks to the help that just came to us," said Vucic, who less than a month earlier predicted his country's only COVID-19 problem might be "deliberate or accidental panic."

"Serbia must not forget that [China helped it]," he added.

Vucic, whose country of nearly 7 million is an official candidate for EU accession, had stung Brussels on March 15 by saying that "European solidarity does not exist" except as "a fairy tale."

In almost the next breath, he appealed to "my brother, my friend, [China's Communist President] Xi Jinping" and China as "the only country that can help us now."

After meeting with the visiting Chinese experts, Serbian Defense Minister Aleksandar Vulin repeated Vucic's description of an "iron-clad friendship," adding, "With the help of the People's Republic of China, their doctors, medical and technical assistance, we again have hope."

China-U.S. Tensions

U.S. President Donald Trump, who campaigned in part in 2016 on bashing Beijing's treatment of the United States and has since engaged in a trade war with China, has repeatedly spoken about Beijing's cover-up efforts as what he calls the "Chinese virus" spread.

Such U.S. statements appear aimed in part at countering another of Beijing's PR tactics: a whisper campaign suggesting the coronavirus originated with the "U.S. Army."

Washington has accused Beijing of "spreading conspiracy theories" and trying to "deflect criticism for its role in starting a global pandemic and not telling the world."

In an article for Foreign Affairs on March 24, Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that the COVID-19 outbreak "should have offered a perfect opportunity for China and the United States to rise above their differences and tackle a common threat together."

Instead, Huang said, "their antagonism" in the face of COVID-19 "makes matters worse."

With reporting by RFE/RL's Balkan Service, Reuters, the Financial Times, AFP, and the South China Morning Post

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/china-coronavirus- pandemic-diplomacy-shortages/30509423.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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LAS VEGAS, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- GRAMMY Award-winning entertainer Bruno Mars, who has been a performer at the Park MGM theater, announced today that he has donated $1 million to the MGM Resorts Foundation to support MGM employees impacted economically by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Mars has performed a series of limited dates at The Park Theater at Park MGM in Las Vegas since 2016.

A representative for Mars says, "The people at MGM have given Bruno Mars the rare opportunity to be able to continuously gig while he's in the creative process of working on his next album. With the closures across Las Vegas, Bruno wanted to show his appreciation to the amazing employees who help make these shows possible in hopes that we'll all be out of this situation and having fun together again very soon."

The money will go toward The MGM Resorts Foundation's Employee Emergency Grant Fund & Children's Medical Support Fund, which is designed to help MGM employees and their immediate families with short-term assistance during unexpected hardships and emergencies. The Grant Fund may also provide disaster relief assistance to furloughed or laid-off employees whose compensation is suspended or employment terminated as a result of an extraordinary event (or events) that severely impacts a community in which MGM Resorts conducts business, such as the COVID-19 public health crisis.

"We consider Bruno Mars as part of the MGM family and appreciate what he is doing to help our employees and their families during these uncertain times," said Bill Hornbuckle, Acting CEO and President of MGM Resorts International. "We recently expanded the eligibility requirements for the fund to help as many employees as we can who are impacted by the crisis, and this donation will help us expand our reach even further."

To learn more about The MGM Resorts Foundation, visit www.mgmresortsfoundation.org.

About The MGM Resorts Foundation

The purpose of The MGM Resorts Foundation is to collect and distribute monies and assets donated by employees of MGM Resorts International (NYSE: MGM) for the aid and support of qualified community nonprofit programs, agencies or organizations designated exclusively by MGM Resorts' employees. The Foundation also collects and distributes donations made by a broad base of donors to support activities organized by MGM Resorts employees and approved by the Foundation's board of directors to benefit qualified nonprofit charitable organizations. The Foundation's Employee Emergency Grant Fund & Children's Medical Support Fund was organized specifically to enable MGM Resorts employees to provide emergency, hardship, and disaster support to fellow employees and their families. In addition, since 2012, the Foundation has been the presenting sponsor of the Women's Leadership Conference, the major women's conference in the Western region.

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  Lawmakers are now on self-quarantine after getting exposed to House appropriations chair Eric Yap of ACT-CIS Party-list, who recently tested positive for COVID-19.

House Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano, Majority Leader Martin Romualdez, and other lawmakers who were exposed to the congressman during the special session on Monday have started their home quarantine, a day after Yap bared that he has contracted COVID-19.

"Following protocols, all the Members and employees who attended the Special Session will go on self-quarantine," House Secretary General Jose Luis Montales told CNN Philippines Thursday.

He added that the session hall and all other areas visited by the lawmakers and employees during the special session will be disinfected and closed.

For Romualdez, going on a self-quarantine would be "the most responsible thing" to do at the moment to avoid potential infection.

"While I had no close contact with our esteemed colleague, House Committee on Appropriations Chairman and ACT-CIS Partylist Rep. Eric Yap, during last Monday's special session, the most responsible thing for me to do at this moment is to undergo self-quarantine," he said.

Isabela Rep. Antonio "Tonypet" Albano said he had to go into another "serious self-isolation" for 14 days after working closely with the lawmaker.

"Cong. Eric and I worked closely together to fix and amend this bill with everyone else. I practiced social distancing with everyone there, but I had my mask off at times when we were all eating and working," Albano said in his Facebook post.

Deputy Speaker Luis Ray Villafuerte, who was also present in the session, said that he will exercise the same precautionary measure even though he has not shown any symptoms so far.

Meanwhile, Senate President Vicente Sotto III said he did not have any contact with Yap, but will still undergo another COVID-19 test.

I'm fine but people think I should take a test again, I can and I will, said Sotto.

Sotto already went through testing but said he was not given VIP treatment by the Department of Health.

Yap's congressional office in Benguet was also closed on Thursday until further notice.

"In view of our latest development against our fight towards COVID-19, we will be placing the Congressman's Office in Benguet in the state of physical quarantine effective today, Thursday, 26th of March, 2020," the announcement read.

Last Monday, it took the lower chamber 17 hours to deliberate on the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act granting President Rodrigo Duterte special powers to address the outbreak. Yap was present in the session hall to sponsor the bill himself.

Prior to that, Yap also attended a meeting in Malacanang last Saturday with other officials even after he already had his swabs taken on March 15.

Senator Christopher "Bong" Go also announced that he will be on self-quarantine and his staff would do contact tracing of other people who might have been in contact with the lawmaker during the meeting.

Yap is the first congressman who reported to have tested positive for COVID-19. Albano recently bared that another lawmaker had allegedly contracted the virus but has since been recovering.

Senators Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III and Juan Miguel Zubiri have also turned out positive for the virus.

Pimentel has been drawing flak for breaching quarantine protocol and going to the Makati Medical Center to accompany his pregnant wife while still awaiting his test results.
Arthur Goldberg was aboard one. The retired Justice Department lawyer and his wife were in the middle of a 17-day tour of Morocco, out in the desert, when their tour operator told them they had to leave. Goldberg, who lives in Washington, said they were asleep at a hotel in Casablanca when an embassy email arrived advising them of a British Airways flight to London that afternoon  from Marrakesh. They made it.
An Unprecedented Challenge Before Us

Web video link for web https://vimeo.com/399599217

Small businesses are the backbone and foundation of Los Angeles. In the Second District, whether its the local coffee shop you visit every morning, the barbershop or salon, or the accountancy firm that helps you manage your finances, small businesses help to shape our daily lives in a wide variety of ways. Supporting the economic health of small enterprises means investing in the cultural and economic vibrancy of our own standing.

However, COVID-19 presents an unprecedented challenge of enormous scale and human impact. Long after this virus is gone, the economic damage will remain. As such, the County of Los Angeles is doing all that we can to focus on measures that will create an environment that promotes enterprise and boosts the confidence and capabilities of small businesses so they can weather this unprecedented storm.

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To meet this challenge, we are in the midst of building out a small business fund that will bring together the best of public and private sectors, to support small businesses during this undoubtedly tough time. The Los Angeles County will employ the full force of our public sector capacity; because we understand that the well-being of our community  and our very way of life  depends on it. We are currently in the process of building a strike team to support the newly formed Business and Worker Disaster Help Center. The Worker Disaster Help Center will serve three functions: be the single-entry point for businesses and workers; centralize County resources into a single portal, and provide direct one-on-one assistance to those with who need it most. In addition, the Department of Business and Consumer Affairs (DCBA) is currently increasing the capacity of their telephone call center to respond to each online request within 48 hours. For more information, please contact the department at 1-800-593-8222 or visit dcba.lacounty.gov.

Finally, our office has implemented the Support local business initiative. Every weekend, I visit local restaurants in my community to order food to-go. These are not normal times, but I hope in doing this I can bring attention to those who need it, and re-create a sense of normalcy at a time when we need it the most.

But this is just the beginning of what will be a long fight on multiple fronts.

Every day, our public health department is testing more people and the number of positive COVID-19 cases will continue to rise. As more directives across the State, and even at the County level, ask people to stay at home what is brought into sharper relief is how acutely vulnerable our regions homeless population is in this pandemic.

More than 59,000 people in Los Angeles are homelessincluding 44,000 who are unshelteredand they cannot stay at home because they do not have a home. Even before COVID-19 changed everything, we had an average of three homeless people dying on our streets every day. We must act, and we must act immediately to mitigate the effects of this pandemic on those who are experiencing homelessness before it ravages our encampments. Otherwise, the consequences will be profound and resonate far beyond our streets.

Our priority in this moment is to bring as many people who are currently experiencing homeless neighbors indoors immediately. We are currently expanding our network of winter shelters and working with several organizations to keep them open as long as possible. We have also purchased hundreds of trailers and are readying them for inhabitation.

In addition, we are exploring all potential sites to repurpose for interim housing, including master leasing hotels and motels, using shuttered juvenile probation camps, unused school bungalows and more. For those who are not presently in the shelter system, we are intensifying our outreach efforts to provide information around the virus to encourage people to come inside, as well as to screen for symptoms. This also includes efforts of placing hand-washing stations and other hygiene facilities in areas where there are concentrations of unsheltered people.

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Here, I want to thank those who are on the frontline for our Army of Good. These are the outreach workers, the services and care providers who have not relented in the face of the most challenging public health crisis in our lifetime. For them, we ordering more supplies to make sure they have the necessary emergency equipment such as gowns, masks and gloves and materials.

In times of crisis there will always be challenges, but there will also be hope. Through that hope comes the courage to build the world we want to see. Despite the unprecedented nature of COVID-19, you are not alone. Los Angeles County has a plan and well get through this together and emerge stronger as a community.
(Reuters) - Leaders of the Group of 20 major economies pledged to inject $5 trillion in fiscal spending into the global economy to blunt the economic impact of the coronavirus and "do whatever it takes to overcome the pandemic."

DEATHS, INFECTIONS

* Almost 489,000 people have been infected globally and over 22,000 have died, according to a Reuters tally.

* For an interactive graphic tracking the global spread, open https://tmsnrt.rs/3aIRuz7 in an external browser.

EUROPE

* The coronavirus death toll in Italy rose by 662 to 8,165 on Thursday.

* The number of cases in Italy's northern region of Lombardy increased by some 2,500, a steeper increase than in previous days.

* Spain extended its lockdown to at least April 12, as the death toll rose to 4,089.

* German hospitals with spare capacity will take in at least 47 coronavirus patients from Italy in a sign of European solidarity.

* Another 115 people have died in the United Kingdom after testing positive for the coronavirus, bringing the total number of deaths to 578.

* Britain has placed an emergency order of 10,000 ventilators from Dyson.

* Switzerland's infections topped 10,000 as the government pumped money into the economy and army medical units helped hospitals handle the spreading epidemic.

* President Vladimir Putin said he hoped Russia would defeat the virus in two to three months, as authorities suspended international flights, ordered most shops in the capital to shut and halted some church services.

* In Lisbon, a "drive-thru" clinic is performing five-minute swab tests through car windows on people with symptoms, as Portuguese authorities ramp up testing facilities.

* Slovakia aims to sharply increase daily testing in the next few weeks.

AMERICAS

* As the coronavirus pandemic's U.S. death toll raced past 1,000 people, hospitals and government authorities in New York, New Orleans and other hot spots grappled with a surge in cases and a dire shortage of supplies, staff and sick beds.

Story continues

* Americans should receive cash payments within three weeks, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said.

* Canada on Thursday attacked a U.S. proposal to deploy troops along the undefended joint border to help fight the spread of coronavirus.

* Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday urged Mexicans in the United States to avoid visiting Mexico except in emergencies.

* Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday exempted churches from coronavirus lockdowns by classifying religious activity as an essential service.

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC* Japan banned entry from 21 European countries and Iran, and set up a new crisis task force.

* China ordered airlines to sharply cut the number of flights in and out of the country as Beijing worries that travellers from overseas could reignite the outbreak.

* India's death toll from the coronavirus rose by six to 16 in the last 24 hours.

* South Korea warned that it will deport foreigners while its citizens could face jail if they violate self-quarantine rules after a surge in imported cases.

* Armenia and Kazakhstan reported their first deaths on Thursday.

* Australia entered 4,000 healthcare workers into a trial to see if a century-old vaccine for tuberculosis can fight off the new coronavirus.

* New Zealand started a one-month compulsory lockdown, with warnings from authorities to stay at home or face big fines and even jail.

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

* About half of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa still have a "narrowing" opportunity to curb the spread of the virus, the regional head of the World Health Organisation said.

* Turkey could order the public to stay at home if infections continue to spread, the government said as it clamped down further on medical equipment leaving the country.

* Iran started an intercity travel ban, a day after Tehran warned the country might face a second outbreak. Iran has reported 2,234 deaths and 29,406 infections so far.

* Lebanon will begin an overnight shutdown from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m., as it steps up measures to combat the virus.

* The United Arab Emirates will impose overnight curfews as a temporary measure this weekend, when it will carry out a nationwide disinfection campaign.

* Qatar signed agreements to increase its strategic food stuff reserves.

* Saudi Arabia has released 250 foreign detainees held on non-violent immigration and residency offences.

* The number of coronavirus cases in South Africa jumped to more than 900 on Thursday and President Cyril Ramaphosa called for richer countries to help African nations deal with the economic fallout.

ECONOMIC FALLOUT

* A Wall Street rally powered global gains in stocks despite a record number of new unemployment filings in the United States, as traders focused on the Senate's passage of the relief bill and the possibility of more stimulus to come. [MKTS/GLOB]

* The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits surged to a record of more than 3 million last week.

* The United States "may well be in recession" but progress in controlling the outbreak will determine when the economy can fully reopen, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said.

* India announced a $22.6 billion stimulus plan that provides direct cash transfers and food security measures to millions of poor people hit by a nationwide lockdown.

* China is implementing $344 billion of mainly fiscal measures in its fight against the outbreak.

* The African Development Bank (AfDB) sold a record $3 billion debt issue on Thursday.

* South Korean consumers turned the most pessimistic in more than a decade in March, a central bank survey found on Friday.

* Japan's government offered its bleakest assessment on the economy in nearly seven years, saying conditions in March were "severe."

EVENTS

* It is too soon to decide whether the Tour de France can go ahead, but if it does it may be without roadside spectators, France's sports minister said.

* Current contracts for players and coaches should be extended until the end of the delayed domestic soccer seasons, according to an internal FIFA document presented to its Coronavirus Working Group.

(Compiled by Milla Nissi, Sarah Morland, Aditya Soni and Ramakrishnan M.; Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Maju Samuel)
Whenever there is a new Royal Enfield inbound it is only obvious that it is going to have lots of people excited about it. And rightly so, Royal Enfield has one of the most loyal communities in India and their next motorcycle is said to be called as the Meteor. Now first thing first, that is a fantastic name. However, there is a bit more about the motorcycle that we know at this point and hence, we decided to put together a one-stop solution for all your needs on the know-how of the upcoming Royal Enfield. Heres what we know about it as of now.

Lets start with the all-important bit, the Royal Enfield Meteor will be a part of the companys next generation of 350cc motorcycles which is going to include the Classic, the Bullet and this, the Meteor. This means this will be replacing the Thunderbird and Thunderbird X motorcycles.

This means, expect the Meteor to build on the Thunderbirds biggest recall value  its riding ergonomics. You can expect the Meteor to get a wide seat, raised handlebars and forward-set footpegs for a relaxed riding position.

It will be powered by a new 350cc engine that could make use of an OverHead Camshaft setup instead of the tappet-valve system that the current motor uses. This would mean that the Meteor could see a bump in the power and torque output as compared to what the current-gen 350 makes. And it will have to be BS-Vi emission norm compliant, for which, the Meteor could make use of fuel-injection.

In terms of designing, expect the motorcycle to be properly retro and still have the familiar Royal Enfield-like styling that you could spot a mile away,

Another expectation is that the Meteor could debut with a digital instrument cluster.

And thats about all we know about the motorcycle. You should take this information with a pinch of salt as the motorcycle is still in testing phase which means, there could be some omissions, or additions, to the motorcycle that we have in mind. Whats certain is that the Meteor will be using the next-gen parts that Royal Enfield is working on so without a doubt, this is a very important motorcycle for the company.

Stay tuned to us for further updates on the Royal Enfield Meteor.

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By IANS

ISLAMABAD: While reiterating his hesitance in imposing a full-scale lockdown in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan urged the country's leaders to "discuss and reassess" their strategies in order to find a way to tackle the situation brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, it was reported on Thursday.

The country currently has 1,078 confirmed cases with seven fatalities, reports Dawn news.

Addressing a meeting of parliamentary leaders being chaired by National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser via video link on Wednesday, Khan said imposing a national lockdown would be detrimental for the country's economy, adding that it was not possible to "rationally judge the repercussions of decisions taken out of fear and panic".

ALSO READ: Pakistan suspends domestic flight operations till April 2 as coronavirus cases near 1,000

He told the parliamentary leaders that until Tuesday, only 153 of the confirmed cases were locally transmitted.

"In a way this is a very good thing for us," he said, pointing out that the rest of the cases had been imported from other countries.

The premier, while urging leaders to reassess the situation said: "There are types of lockdown; initially we imposed lockdown by shutting down schools and universities and cancelling matches.

"Sindh (government) believed that (they) should go beyond that... The Centre and I were of the opinion that we should not go as far as Sindh at the time. But then there was pressure from the media... Under that pressure, KP, Punjab and Balochistan also imposed incremental lockdowns."

CLICK HERE TO READ CORONAVIRUS LIVE UPDATES

He went on to say that imposing a lockdown, under which transport had to be suspended, would affect poor people, especially in villages.

"I believe that we should not go towards a lockdown in which we shut down transport. I believe that we will have to face huge problems on the supply side. I feel that this lockdown will affect our construction industry and there will be unemployment on a huge scale.

"Since provinces have taken their decisions, in tomorrow's (Thrusday) National Coordination Committee's meeting, I will put forward recommendations based on the assessments made by (my) team... I feel that we will have to constantly reassess. Because every step we take has repercussions for society."

Pakistan has already closed its borders with Iran and Afghanistan, Dawn news reported.

A lockdown has been imposed in Sindh to contain the spread of the virus.

Other provinces and federal territories have also imposed partial lockdowns.
The fourth day of statewide curfew brought for city residents sense of despair as even though hundreds of grocery and medical store owners were granted temporary trade licences, supplies arrived at snails pace, leaving many high and dry.

Grocery store owners objected to no relaxation given to open their shops and approval needed from different departments for supplying goods.

Uncertainty over mode of operations loomed large as they asked how would they supply goods to houses if they were not allowed to open shops.

President of Ludhiana Consumer Products Distributors Association, Harkesh Mittal, said that multiple departments were asking retailers and wholesalers to take permission.

No exemption is being given to us to open shops. How do the authorities expect smooth delivery of essentials?

Mittal said they had applied for temporary trade licences on Wednesday and the next day, they were asked to take permission from the food supply department.

The administration has not invited the association members for even a single meeting. The officials should hold a meeting with retailers and wholesalers so that they could apprise them of the issues being faced at the ground level, he added.

The administration should come up with a concrete plan, otherwise residents would suffer a lot during the curfew, Mittal said.

Residents a harried lot

Residents remained a harried lot due to limited supply of groceries.

One of the residents of BRS Nagar, Harvinder Singh, said they called a grocery store owner in their area thrice.

Initially, he said that delivery of goods would be made by the afternoon, but it couldnt be done till the evening. He later called to say that he has run out of essentials like pulses and it will take one or two days for things to streamline. He was also facing problems in delivery, he added.

Dwellers of Sarabha Nagar, Model Town, BRS Nagar, New Model Town as well as the old city areas are no different.

One of the residents of Model Town Extension, Daljit Singh, said they contacted two retailers in their area, but no one delivered on Thursday.

The first one said he has not opened his shop, while the second one claimed that he himself was reeling under the shortage of goods due to broken supply chain, he added.

Though some retailers were seen supplying goods in the city, they also rued shortage.

One such retailer in Model Town Extension, Deepak Chawla, said they were not being allowed to open their shops.

We supplied items which we had stocked at our houses. We are also not getting any supply from wholesalers, which is a major hurdle in smooth flow of services, he added.

The administration should find a solution to restore supply channels, Chawla said.

The authorities, however, said it will take two more days for them to streamline the functioning.

Deputy commissioner Pradeep Agrawal said due to overload of orders, shopkeepers faced initial hiccups.

However, such issues would be resolved in a day or two, following which the residents would get regular delivery of essential goods at their doorsteps, he assured.

The administration had on Wednesday posted the lists of grocery and medical stores at www.ludhiana.nic.in and mcludhiana.gov.in.

Area councillors are also forwarding the lists of store owners in their respective areas on social networking platforms.
On March 10, the North Dakota Republican Party and the Democratic-Nonpartisan League held their respective presidential caucuses. Trump was the only Republican presidential candidate seeking NDGOP support. Meanwhile, a dozen presidential candidates initially sought support from Dem-NPL voters. By the time caucus day rolled around, all but three Democratic candidates (Biden, Sanders, and Gabbard) had dropped out -- leaving Biden and Sanders as the viable candidates.

However, 15% of Dem-NPL voters caucused by mail in the preceding weeks, prior to dropouts. Thus, mail ballots account for most of the votes for Warren, Klobuchar, Buttigieg and Bloomberg. Finer-grained caucus results give us a glimpse into North Dakotans truly diverse preferences. While mail voters are not representative of all Dem-NPL voters, their votes are still worth learning from: Sanders received a clear plurality (878 votes by mail). Biden did well (580 votes), and Warren (283) and Klobuchar (212) had many supporters, too. Buttigieg (144) performed a little better than Bloomberg (103).

I asked 17 Dem-NPL voters where they placed these candidates on the political spectrum. Their responses average as follows: Sanders is slightly far-left; Warren is left; Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Biden are centrist; Bloomberg is center-right. Based on these candidates share of votes by mail, thats 1,161 (53%) votes for the left and 1,039 (47%) votes for the center.

Among North Dakotans who voted in-person on caucus day, a vast majority chose either Sanders (6,804) or Biden (5,162) -- the remaining viable candidates. Thats four Sanders voters for every three Biden voters, a more modest Sanders win compared with his 2016 victory in North Dakota. Biden supporters are no rarity in North Dakota even if Sanders is most popular.

Looking at results by location, Sanders won Fargo, Grand Forks, Minot, Williston, Dickinson and our reservation communities. Biden won Jamestown, Devils Lake, Valley City and Wahpeton. Biden and Sanders virtually tied in Bismarck. These patterns somewhat mirror regional distributions of NDGOP and Dem-NPL voters. In regional Republican strongholds, Dem-NPL voters often favored Biden. In predominantly Democratic regions of North Dakota, Dem-NPL voters often favored Sanders. Nevertheless, there were both Sanders and Biden supporters at each in-person location. No Dem-NPL regional community is in total agreement.

Blogger Rob Port tells us that moderates have left the North Dakota Dem-NPL for the NDGOP, but that isnt borne out by the facts. Rank-and-file Dem-NPL voters are politically diverse, but they do lean a little more left than center. Furthermore, it seems nobody is leaving the Dem-NPL. The ND Democratic Caucus turnout more than quadrupled from 2016 to 2020, showing that the party is growing, if anything. More likely, 2020s simpler voting process and vote-by-mail option greatly increased Dem-NPL turnout. Thus, I think the turnout boost is mostly due to ditching the Iowa-style caucus, because accessible voting results in more voters. Democratic presidential campaigns did a good job of mobilizing voters, too. Still, there is zero evidence of Dem-NPL moderates jumping ship to the NDGOP.

Some folks inside and outside of North Dakota are curious about North Dakota's Sanders win given the Biden surge seen elsewhere, the many Biden endorsements, and the conservatism North Dakota can be prone toward. I think its North Dakotas populist roots peeking through. Sanders resembles the independent and populist spirit of the historical Nonpartisan League, the third party that merged with the ND Democrats in the 1950s.

Its also noteworthy that Warren and Klobuchar outperformed Buttigieg in the lead-up to North Dakota's caucuses. North Dakotans may have favored the old guys, but votes by mail from February and early March show us that women candidates had their share of enthusiasts, too.

Ellie Shockley is a political psychologist, social scientist and education researcher. This column represents her personal views and not the views of any organization. She completed a doctorate at the University of Chicago and postdoctorate at Nebraska. She lives in Mandan. Find her past columns at EllieShockley.com

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NEWPORT NEWS, Va., March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Huntington Ingalls Industries (NYSE: HII) announced today that it has closed on the previously announced acquisition of Hydroid Inc., a leading provider of advanced marine robotics to the defense and maritime markets. In conjunction with the transaction, HII and Kongsberg Maritime have established a strategic alliance to jointly market naval and maritime products and services to the U.S. government market and potentially to global markets.



The acquisition of Hydroid, based in Pocasset, Massachusetts, expands HIIs capabilities in the strategically important and rapidly growing autonomous and unmanned maritime systems market. Hydroid will become part of HIIs Technical Solutions Unmanned Systems business unit that now includes unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) such as the Orca extra-large UUV that is produced in partnership with Boeing as well as Proteus, a large, dual-mode UUV operated out of Panama City, Florida. With the addition of Hydroid, HII now has capabilities in the medium and small UUV space from the REMUS and Seaglider autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) or marine robots.

The combination of HII and Hydroid brings together the full range of UUVs, said Andy Green, HII executive vice president and president of Technical Solutions. Combined, we can now offer a comprehensive suite of autonomous underwater vehicle systems that address our customers needs. While this is a perfect complement to our existing UUV business, more importantly, it brings together brilliant and talented people who are at the leading edge of unmanned systems technology.

Hydroid designs and manufactures state-of-the-art solutions for use in a number of applications including defense, marine research and commercial. Hydroid has over 15 years of experience providing the U.S. Navy and its allies with the most combat-proven UUVs in the world. For intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance applications, Hydroids UUVs deliver sensors to sensitive areas, collecting data in all operational environments. Their vehicles have also been involved with undersea mine countermeasures that have helped save lives. Hydroids UUVs located Air France Flight 447 wreckage and generated 3D mapping of the Titanic. And their vehicles offer scientists data relevant to climate change and other environmental issues.

Duane Fotheringham, who previously served as Hydroids president and chairman of the board, will serve as president of Unmanned Systems, reporting to Green. Fotheringham joined Hydroid in 2008 as the vice president of operations and was responsible for the research and development, engineering and manufacturing of the REMUS line of AUVs. Early in his career Fotheringham served as a nuclear submarine officer aboard the USS Salt Lake City and qualified as a Nuclear Engineer Officer. He holds a bachelors degree in electrical engineering from Washington State University and an MBA from the City University of Seattle, as well as executive education from the International Institute for Management Development, in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Mary White, who previously served as Technical Solutions senior director of unmanned maritime systems, will serve as vice president of operations and strategy for the new Unmanned Systems business, reporting to Fotheringham. White has 30 years of experience starting and leading large defense platform technology operations, running business development as well as mergers and acquisition organizations. She has bachelors degrees in industrial and systems engineering and computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology. She studied executive leadership at the College of William and Mary, and organization behavior and mergers & acquisitions at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Huntington Ingalls Industries is Americas largest military shipbuilding company and a provider of professional services to partners in government and industry. For more than a century, HIIs Newport News and Ingalls shipbuilding divisions in Virginia and Mississippi have built more ships in more ship classes than any other U.S. naval shipbuilder. HIIs Technical Solutions division supports national security missions around the globe with unmanned systems, defense and federal solutions, nuclear and environmental services, and fleet sustainment. Headquartered in Newport News, Virginia, HII employs more than 42,000 people operating both domestically and internationally. For more information, visit:

HII on the web: www.huntingtoningalls.com

HII on Facebook: www.facebook.com/HuntingtonIngallsIndustries

HII on Twitter: twitter.com/hiindustries

Statements in this release, as well as other statements we may make from time to time, other than statements of historical fact, constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in these statements. Factors that may cause such differences include: changes in government and customer priorities and requirements (including government budgetary constraints, shifts in defense spending, and changes in customer short-range and long-range plans); our ability to estimate our future contract costs and perform our contracts effectively; changes in procurement processes and government regulations and our ability to comply with such requirements; our ability to deliver our products and services at an affordable life cycle cost and compete within our markets; natural and environmental disasters and political instability; our ability to execute our strategic plan, including with respect to share repurchases, dividends, capital expenditures, and strategic acquisitions; adverse economic conditions in the United States and globally; changes in key estimates and assumptions regarding our pension and retiree health care costs; security threats, including cyber security threats, and related disruptions; and other risk factors discussed in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. There may be other risks and uncertainties that we are unable to predict at this time or that we currently do not expect to have a material adverse effect on our business, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements that we may make.

Contact:

Beci Brenton

Beci.Brenton@hii-co.com

(202) 264-7143
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - Tartisan Nickel Corp. (CSE: TN) (OTC Pink: TTSRF) (FSE: 8TA) ("Tartisan", or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the Company has completed a Spectral Analysis Survey conducted by Aster Funds Ltd. over the Kenbridge Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Deposit, Atikwa Lake Area, Ontario. The survey covered the patented and single-cell mining claims that make up the historic land position which contains the Kenbridge Deposit and the surrounding area, identifying several new exploration targets not only for nickel, copper, cobalt, but also for potential gold occurrences.

The Spectral Analysis Survey shows the distribution and intensity of up to 304 minerals, with the first pass showing up to16 minerals. Each mineral can be classified into an exploration relevance for base metals, precious metals and industrial metals.

The Spectral Analysis Survey picked up several minerals implicit in the formation of nickel sulphide deposits, and potentially other types of deposits on the Kenbridge Property. These minerals included chlorite*, muscovite, quartz, epidote*, goethite*, smectite, pyrophyllite, pyroxenite*, pyrrhotite*, hematite*, alunite, chalcopyrite*, sphalerite*, pyrite*, talc*, and kaolinite*. Starred minerals in the list are those which are seen in outcrop, surface geology, and drill logs at the Kenbridge Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Deposit.

The key benefit to the Company from the Spectral Analysis Survey is the Target Vector Minerals analysis "TVM" TM. TVM's were structured for metallic sulphides and the oxides that derive from them; gold; copper; and nickel, as well as direct indicators of Kenbridge-style mineralization in pyrrhotite and chalcopyrite. The Kenbridge Deposit was easily picked out by the survey, and shown to be some five TVM's of a possible six TVM's. The survey also picked out several other areas of five/six TVM's and one area of six/six TVM's. These areas will form the basis for a renewed surface exploration program at the Kenbridge Project in summer 2020.

Tartisan CEO Mark Appleby said, "the survey picked out the Kenbridge Deposit, and has shown the possible extension to the Kenbridge Deposit and three additional trends that relate directly to underlying geology and structure implicit in the Kenbridge Deposit. Of significant interest, the survey found two gold trends as well, which include the Violet and Nina historic gold occurrences. One of the occurrences is almost 54 hectares in size and covers almost all of three of our staked claims on the border of the Kenbridge property."

Tartisan will use the Aster Funds Ltd. Report as the basis for assessment filing over the single-cell mining claims and will form the basis of expanding the exploration potential of the Kenbridge Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Project.

About Tartisan Nickel Corp.

Tartisan Nickel Corp. is a Canadian based mineral exploration and development company which owns a 100% stake in the Kenbridge Nickel-Copper Project in Ontario; a 100% interest in the Sill Lake Lead-Silver property located in Vankoughnet Township, Ontario; a 100% interest in the Don Pancho Zinc-Lead-Silver Project in Peru just 9 km from Trevali's Santander mine. Tartisan also owns a 100% stake in the Ichuna Copper-Silver Project, also in Peru, contiguous to Buenaventura's San Gabriel property. Company financial strength is provided by a significant equity stake in Eloro Resources Ltd, which is exploring the low-sulphidation epithermal La Victoria Gold/Silver Project in Ancash, Peru and the Iska-Iska project in Bolivia.

Tartisan Nickel Corp. common shares are listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE:TN) (OTC Pink: TTSRF) (FSE: 8TA). Currently, there are 100,563,550 shares outstanding (103,263,550 fully diluted).

For further information, please contact Mr. D. Mark Appleby, President & CEO and a Director of the Company, at 416-804-0280 (info@tartisannickel.com). Additional information about Tartisan can be found at the Company's website at www.tartisannickel.com or on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Jim Steel MBA P.Geo. is the Qualified Person under NI 43-101 and has read and approved the technical content of this News Release.

This news release may contain forward-looking statements including but not limited to comments regarding the timing and content of upcoming work programs, geological interpretations, receipt of property titles, potential mineral recovery processes, etc. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore, involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.

The Canadian Securities Exchange (operated by CNSX Markets Inc.) has neither approved nor disapproved of the contents of this press release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/53836
Rosemary Gibson is senior advisor at the Hastings Center and a national authority on health care reform. In 2014, she won the highest honor from the American Medical Writers Association. She is an editor for JAMA Internal Medicine. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

Speaking to journalist Sharyl Attkisson in an April 23, 2018, interview, Gibson warned: "What happens if we have a Fukushima type event or the trade routes are blocked in the South China Sea? Or if there's a global pandemic? And the United States and virtually every other country in the world is dependent on a few companies in China for the ingredients to make critical antibiotics."

Gibson provided a detailed picture of Chinas growing domination of the medical drug and equipment market in her 2018 book China Rx: Exposing the Risks of Americas Dependence on China for Medicine (co-authored by Janardan Prasad Singh).

China is now the global kingpin in the supply of key ingredients for many prescription drugs, over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and supplements. The Chinese now control most of the active and inactive ingredients for the manufacture of medicine in the world.

Suppose your blood pressure medication is factory-made in Canada and you feel your supply line is safe. Your health is still in jeopardy because Communist China could choose to ban the export of your drugs active ingredient to Canada.

In China Rx, Gibson and Singh lay out the facts in how drug manufacturing has experienced a paradigm shift over several decades. Communist China has followed an aggressive plan in becoming the global supplier of necessary ingredients for medicines.

Penicillin, a longstanding drug in the fight against bacterial infection, is a prime example of Americas market loss and Chinas economic seizure and takeover.

Around 2004, the Chinese government had its national companies dump penicillin ingredients on the global market. Most Western countries, including the U.S., could not compete with their low prices and went bankrupt. Then China issued a major price increase on these important ingredients, thereby cornering the market and making billions.

Although the penicillin that you purchase at your local drugstore may not be manufactured in China in its final form, the keys to its production (active ingredients) are under communist control.

Forget about a vital drug like heparin, the only anticoagulant used in the U.S. for heart surgery and kidney dialysis. What about something simple, like Vitamin C?

China is now the primary supplier for the key ingredients for manufacturing this vitamin in the U.S. and around the world. Chinese companies created an artificial shortage of vitamin C around 2005 by slowing production and exports. American companies filed a class-action suit resulting in a legal battle lasting over eight years. The evidence was strong and convincing against China. The judge ordered China to pay over $160 million in damages to U.S. corporations.

The Seattle Times in June 2007 reported, In less than a decade, China has captured 90 percent of the U.S. market for vitamin C, driving almost everyone else out of business Chinese pharmaceutical companies also have taken over much of the world market in the production of antibiotics, analgesics, enzymes and primary amino acids. According to an industry group, China makes 70 percent of the worlds penicillin, 50 percent of its aspirin and 35 percent of its acetaminophen (often sold under the brand name Tylenol), as well as the bulk of vitamins A, B12, C and E.

In China Rx, Gibson also reveals that China is the main supplier of the active ingredients for acetaminophen and aspirin now used in over 600 prescription and over-the-counter drugs.

How were these warning signs missed for these less-complex drugs, not to mention the more expensive heart and cancer medications?

Who is listening to Rosemary Gibson on Capitol Hill?

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), while chairing a hearing of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship on March 12, sounded the alarm concerning critical shortages in our drug supply chain, the offshoring of American drug manufacturing for two decades, and now the threat of a global pandemic.

He warned, The inability to quickly increase the production of key supplies, such as surgical masks, medical gowns, and pharmaceutical drugs limits our ability to mitigate the worst effects of disease in this emerging crisis and in any future pandemic. It is unacceptable that China holds this much leverage over Americas public health and economy, which are both essential components of our national security.

Thank you, Senator!
By PTI

KABUL: India's Ambassador to Afghanistan Vinay Kumar on Thursday visited the Sikh gurdwara where at least 25 worshippers were killed after it was attacked by a heavily armed suicide bomber and offered condolences to families of the victims of the horrific attack.

At least 25 worshippers were killed and eight others injured when a heavily armed suicide bomber stormed a prominent gurdwara on Wednesday in the heart of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, in one of the deadliest attacks on the minority Sikh community in the strife-torn country.

ALSO READ | No justification for killing civilians in religious houses: UN condemns terror attack on Aghan Sikhs

The Islamic State (IS) terror group, which has targeted Sikhs before in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack in Shor Bazar area.

Amb @vkumar1969 visited the gurudwara and met community leaders, elders and families of the victims of terrorist attack. He shared their grief and offered condolences. He was told that the injured are receiving satisfactory treatment @harshvshringla @DrSJaishankar @MEAIndia pic.twitter.com/lou14BYevk  India in Afghanistan (@IndianEmbKabul) March 26, 2020

"Amb @vkumar1969 visited the gurudwara and met community leaders, elders and families of the victims of terrorist attack. He shared their grief and offered condolences.

"He was told that the injured are receiving satisfactory treatment," the Indian embassy in Afghanistan said in a tweet.

The embassy also said it was working for the return of the mortal remains of Tian Singh, one of the deceased from Delhi, whose family wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help them bringing back the mortal remains.

"@IndianEmbKabul is working for the return of the mortal remains of Shri Tian Singh. @IndianEmbKabul will continue to provide all assistance to the community and families as may be required in these difficult days," it said.

Prime Minister Modi said on Wednesday that he was "saddened" by the attack on the gurdwara when 150 worshippers were inside the building.

"I am saddened by today's terror attack at Gurudwara in Kabul. I express my condolences to the families of all the deceased," he said in a tweet.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) also condemned the attack that lasted for about six hours, terming it cowardly and reflective of a "diabolical mindset".

"Such cowardly attacks on places of religious worship of the minority community, especially at this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, is reflective of the diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers," it said in a statement.

The MEA said India stood in solidarity with the people, the government and the security forces of Afghanistan in their efforts for bringing peace and security to the country.

"We commend the brave Afghan security forces for their valorous response to the attack and their exemplary courage and dedication to protect the Afghan people and secure the country," it said.

Photos from the blast scene showed security forces carrying wounded people away on stretchers.

Some Afghan media outlets shared videos of the family members of victims waiting outside a city hospital in tears.

Police in Kabul said that at least 11 children were rescued from the gurdwara.

Sikhs have been target of attacks by Islamist militants before in Afghanistan.

In July 2018, ISIS terrorists bombed a gathering of Sikhs and Hindus in the eastern city of Jalalabad, killing 19 people and injuring 20.

Awtar Singh Khalsa, one of the country's best-known Sikh politicians then, was among those killed in the attack.
Amid the Coronavirus crisis, Pakistan-heritage Boxer Amir Khan on Wednesday offered to donate his four-storey building to the UK"s National Health Service (NHS) to be used by the people affected with the virus. Taking to Twitter, he posted a picture of himself standing before the 6,000 square foot building.

According to him, the building was set to be a wedding hall and a retail outlet. He further urged people to stay safe.

I am aware of how difficult it is for the public to get a hospital bed in this tragic time. I am prepared to give my 60,000 square foot 4 story building which is due to be a wedding hall and retail outlet to the @NHSuk to help people affected by the coronavirus. Pls keep safe. pic.twitter.com/MSpaEwPFuw  Amir Khan (@amirkingkhan) March 25, 2020

The Coronavirus Crisis

Presently, there are around 468,577 confirmed cases of COVID-19 which has led to the death of around 21,185 people. Meanwhile, around 113,817 have reportedly recovered. The UK has witnessed almost 10,000 cases and almost 500 deaths, with Prince Charles also testing positive on Wednesday.

Read: Middle-class localities in Mumbai ban entry of outsiders amid rising coronavirus cases

Read: COVID-19: Tripura to engage SHGs to distribute food among poor during lockdown

Along with it, as of date, India has reported over 600 confirmed positive cases of COVID-19. Out of all the states, Maharashtra has crossed a total of 115 positive cases becoming the highest number of cases detected in the country. Meanwhile, twelve people have died so far due to the deadly virus. Due to the outbreak, India has been put under a national lockdown for 21 days. Further, India has also closed the India-Pakistan border and restricted passenger movement at the border with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Myanmar.

Read: COVID-19 lockdown: J&K LG approves series of support measures for poor and needy

Read: US Coronavirus cases cross new milestone; real number feared to be much higher
France on Thursday carried out its first train evacuation of coronavirus patients from the hard-hit east of the country, which has registered over 1,300 hospital deaths in the fast-spiralling epidemic. The specially adapted high-speed TGV train, which in normal times whizzes travellers between France's main cities and to other European capitals, evacuated 20 patients from the Alsace region bordering Germany and Switzerland to help relieve overstretched facilities there, officials said. The patients were destined for hospitals in the Pays de la Loire region along the western Atlantic coast. President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday visited the eastern city of Mulhouse, home to a cluster of infections, where the army has set up a field hospital to help relieve hospitals. He announced on the trip that the French military would also start supporting public services strained by the epidemic. "The whole nation has been mobilised" in the fight against the disease, Macron said while wearing a face mask, while promising more investment for hospitals. Thursday's TGV evacuation, a first for Europe, saw the train's carriages transformed into intensive care units that can accommodate four patients and six medical personnel apiece. The country has over 11,500 coronavirus patients in hospital, of whom more than 2,800 are in critical care. France's national health agency, Sante Publique France, estimated Thursday that at least 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 infection were diagnosed by general practitioners last week, nearly double the roughly 25,000 people who have officially tested positive, most of those in hospitals, since the start of the outbreak. Most cases were in the larger Paris region, the east, and the Pays de la Loire. The agency's chief, Jerome Salomon, warned Thursday that "the crisis will be long, and the coming days will be particularly difficult." The government is expected to announce soon an extension of the initial 15-day home confinement period that came into force on March 17 in a bid to brake the spread of the virus. burs-mlr/js/spm The specially adapted high-speed TGV train evacuated 20 patients from the Alsace region bordering Germany and Switzerland Francec has over 11,500 coronavirus patients in hospital, of whom more than 2,800 are in critical care
When disaster strikes, we first worry about health and safety. Then concerns of financial loss and damage come to mind. Many commercial insurance policies contain clauses that protect a business in the event of a disaster  including a biological crisis, such as the coronavirus, which has led to governmental intervention, shuttering companies across America. Typically, these policies provide coverage on an all risk basis. That means all risks of loss and damage are covered unless explicitly, expressly and unambiguously excluded. For example, expenses incurred to decontaminate and protect your premises should be covered. Losses from the interruption of your business due to government-mandated closures in this viral pandemic may be covered. However, some insurance companies are instructing their claims adjusters to use obscure contract interpretations and deny certain business interruption claims, which are indeed covered. Readers who have business interruption insurance need to know how to protect themselves, and how to respond to a possible denial of coverage by a claims adjuster. If this happens to you, here are some insights into business interruption insurance coverage and claims from two attorneys specializing in insurance bad faith, Chicago attorney Michael Childress, and Brian S. Kabateck from Los Angeles. They have a combined total of 70 years of experience handling insurance bad faith cases. First: Get a Full Copy of Your Insurance Policy Kabateck: It is stunning how many people do not have copies of their insurance policy. They may have the declarations sheet but not the body of the policy. You need both in order to evaluate whether there is coverage. The declaration sheet often does not identify additional coverages, optional coverages or extensions of coverage that reside in the body of the policy.

Oftentimes you will need to ask your broker for that policy. You may hear, Why do you want it? You simply say that you want to know the kinds of coverages you have in the event of a claim. Childress: Well before a loss you want to have your full policy. Next: Read Every Single Word Kabateck: Some policy forms exclude coverage for losses due to viruses. ISO (The Insurance Services Organization) has a form used by many insurance companies with an endorsement at the back of the policy that specifically excludes loss for viruses and bacteria. If your policy has that, you are out of luck. However, under the standard ISO form there may be coverage, including contamination or the impact of governmental authority. With that ISO form, consider yourself lucky! To complicate matters even further, many insurance companies have their own policy forms that do not follow ISO, and so the devil is in the details. Youve got to read the policy. You need to know what is covered and what is not. The Governor Shut Down My Business! What Must I Do Now? Kabateck: There are two roads to finding coverage under an insurance policy. One is direct physical loss and damage, such as a tree falling on your roof. But damage does not have to be visible. It can be an odor or microscopic, such as fungal spores and viruses. If you have someone with the virus in your facility, then you probably have damage, and as just mentioned, will need to take steps to eliminate it from your business premises. The other road to finding coverage is being shut down by the government or local municipality. Most of these shutdown orders contain language that triggers coverage, by explaining that the action taken is to prevent spread of the virus, i.e. biological damage. One of My Workers Is Sick: Now What? Childress: Consider decontaminating your facility if any of your employees come down with the virus. You may need to hire a company that specializes in this type of remediation. It is important to make a timeline  a log  of when you first became aware of it, having someone experienced with business interruption claims interview employees.

If possible, determine the source of contamination and how long it might be there on your business premises. If you have this type of an impact on your facility, your chances of coverage for this expense is much higher. What Should I Do Right Away to Help Recoup Losses? Kabateck: Before you so much as speak with your insurance company, have someone experienced with commercial claims read the policy so that you are clear on what coverages you actually have. After that, set up a separate account for your extra expenses due to the virus losses, for example, canceled bookings and lost profits. Other losses include extra expenses that you are incurring to help your business survive. For example, if customers cant dine in your restaurant, then you will incur the added expense of outfitting your business for delivery and carry-out. When Speaking with a Claims Adjuster - Follow These Steps From watching television police shows, we all know about the Miranda warnings or What you say can and will be used against you in court. Both attorneys caution that the same applies when speaking with a claims adjuster. They list these steps to follow: Before you present your claim  before your first conversation with the adjuster  schedule an appointment with an attorney who handles business interruption claims to evaluate your policy so that you will know what is covered and what is excluded. You do not want to make a claim for things that are not covered, as this harms your credibility.

Keep a log of all of your conversations with the adjuster.

If the adjuster tells you, We are denying the claim, it is critical to reply, Please put that in writing, as this triggers the statute of limitations  the time limit  for a possible lawsuit against the carrier.

Business interruption claims are complicated. There are multiple avenues to finding coverage that benefit from a consultation with an attorney who handles these types of insurance claims. You may not need to retain the attorney, but given the stress you will be under, to level the playing field, time spent discussing your rights with a lawyer is an important step to take. Finally, Understand That Your Agent is Not Required to Offer You Potentially Needed Coverage Kabateck: Most people are completely unaware of the fact that an insurance agent only owes you a duty to obtain the type of insurance you request. Your agent is like a pizza order taker; if you dont say that you want pepperoni, it will not be offered.

Childress: I call it the Dont Ask, Dont Tell Policy. If you dont ask your insurance agent for specific types of policy coverage, they have no obligation of suggesting it to you. Many insurance agents are motivated to not offer certain types of coverage, to keep what is called their loss ratios down. They want to keep losses down so the ratio of losses  claims that are paid  to premiums received from policyholders is not high, keeping the insurance carrier happy. For example, one area where a claim could cost the company dearly is with business crime insurance, which is not generally part of many commercial insurance policies, or at very low limits of coverage. This covers crime-related loses, such as theft or embezzlement. But a business owner can ask for it, in varying amounts of coverage. Unless the business owner specifically asks for business crime insurance to be added to their commercial policy, it will likely not be suggested. Your insurance broker is not the person to ask if you have the coverage that your business needs. Many are just salespeople and do not understand what it is they are selling. I know that sounds strange, but it is true. It is always best to have a lawyer who is experienced with commercial claims help you determine the coverage your business needs.
Hyderabad, March 26 : The Telangana government on Thursday asked construction companies to take care of migrant workers at construction sites in Hyderabad.

Minister for Industry, Information Technology and Municipal Administration K.T. Rama Rao held a meeting with the Construction & Builders' Association representatives and reviewed the conditions of migrant labour at construction sites in Hyderabad.

He asked all the construction and infra companies to take care of the migrant labour who are working in their sites.

The builder community should cooperate and ensure their workers who came in from other states are being taken care of.

"Food, basic amenities, and healthcare needs should be made available," said KTR, as the minister is popularly known.

The minister asked the representatives to keep a close watch on the sanitation levels at the construction sites and also watch out for any Covid-19 symptoms in the labour. He assured that the teams from Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) and doctors from Basthi Dawakhaanas will be available to assist them medically.

A multi-department team will be in place to assist the construction industry with logistics. The state government will monitor the situation in these camps closely.
Monthly rents are coming due next week, the first payments since the coronavirus crisis began. Read more

The first rent payments since the Philadelphia region went on lockdown to try to stop the spread of the coronavirus are due in a week, and property owners and managers are anxiously waiting to see what happens.

My mind is like, Wait, the first is in a week. What? Where did March go?  said Melissa Simmons, owner of Philadelphia-based Property Management International Greater Philadelphia. Like everyone else, were hoping for the best with all this.

Simmons has been trying to spread the news about resources as they become available, including relief funds and unemployment assistance for tenants, and some mortgage relief and small business emergency assistance for property owners.

If owners are aware of resources that can help them, they can be more lenient with their tenants, and hopefully come to an agreement that keeps everyones credit OK, said Simmons, property manager for about 40 mostly single-family homes and owner of nine units in the Philadelphia region.

A record number of Pennsylvanians  more than a half-million  have filed for unemployment benefits since Gov. Tom Wolf announced the closure of nonessential businesses March 16. Governments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania temporarily have halted evictions, foreclosures, and the shutoff of utilities. The Philadelphia Tenants Union is advocating for the suspension of rent payments for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic.

At the same time, owners and managers of apartments, condos, townhouses, and rental homes need to pay their staff, property taxes, mortgages, and vendors. Having tenants staying at home all at once is a strain on utilities and plumbing for multifamily building owners. If the owner of a house loses the property, so does the renter. If some tenants cant make rent payments, managers arent collecting as much revenue, even as the pandemic may lead to fewer new leases.

"There is some anticipation of some short-term financial downturn for sure, said Marlynn Orlando, chief executive officer of the Pennsylvania Apartment Association, based in Bala Cynwyd.

Simmons said she is hoping the government will provide enough resources to everybody. The small owners and the tenants for sure. That its not just big companies that theyre going to be taking care of.

Hope for federal help

Most of the owners Simmons works with dont have large multifamily buildings; the vast majority own a single-family house. Others may have inherited a rowhouse from a relative and kept it as a rental property, or they and their siblings went in together on a place when they were in their 20s and now the rental income helps them afford their own homes.

The $2 trillion federal stimulus bill that Congress is considering includes $3 billion for rental assistance, mostly for public housing agencies.

Federal lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are offering mortgage relief for certain multifamily property owners who agree not to evict tenants who cant pay rent because of the coronavirus. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has encouraged banks with residential or commercial mortgages, equity loans, or business loans to work with mortgage and loan holders experiencing financial hardship because of the pandemic.

Philadelphia Foundation and the United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey started the PHL COVID-19 Fund, which will provide nonprofits with money for programs such as rental assistance and homelessness prevention.

Since before the pandemic, the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp. has been working to launch a program that would give monthly rent vouchers to tenants in subsidized housing who need help paying rent. The city also plans to establish PHLRentAssist, the rental assistance program Mayor Jim Kenney announced in his budget address March 5.

Emergency funds for tenants

The Pennsylvania Apartment Association has started collecting donations for an emergency assistance fund and aims to give small grants to tenants who are having trouble paying rent. The New Jersey chapter has asked the governor and Legislature to establish an emergency rental assistance program, which executive director David Brogan pointed out would benefit tenants, property owners, and operators of ancillary businesses. He acknowledged federal funds would be absolutely necessary to fund the program.

At the end of the day, we really need to stay in operation in order to provide the homes that people are staying in, Brogan said. The last thing we want right now is for people to become homeless.

 READ MORE: Amid coronavirus fears, Philadelphia City Council considers pressuring for an end to evictions, foreclosures, utility shutoffs

Philadelphia courts are closed through at least next Friday, so landlords cant get court orders that would be needed to evict tenants. Tenants are worried about what happens after courts reopen, said Judith Jones, vice president of the Philadelphia Tenants Union.

The group has been asking the mayor and City Council to extend the moratorium on evictions, as well as to stop foreclosures and residential tax liens during the pandemic. The group also is asking for a moratorium on rent payments, for landlords to forgive payments already missed during the pandemic, and for tenants not to owe back payments once it ends.

We dont want anybody to run into a problem later on owing back rent when theyre not able to work now, Jones said. Its going to take a toll, and theyre going to have a hard time catching up.

Theres been some talk among renters of rent strikes, but the Philadelphia Tenants Union is not advocating that, Jones said.

In a statement, Paul Chrystie, a spokesperson for the citys Department of Planning and Development, said, It is the citys hope that between federal stimulus funds, the PHL COVID-19 Fund, locally funded programs to be launched soon, and landlords and tenants recognizing our unique circumstances and working to accommodate each others needs, the citys renters will avoid evictions for the duration of this crisis.

Maintenance demands rise

Orlando said the Pennsylvania Apartment Associations members are trying to be flexible, including allowing some residents to stay past their leases. Property managers have to continue to provide safe residences for tenants, "especially because people are stuck at home, she said. That means maintaining buildings and responding to emergencies. And theyre trying to keep the workers they need to operate employed.

They are navigating the various mandates that keep coming out and changing, Orlando said.

Timothy Henkel, principal and senior vice president of Pennrose, a Philadelphia-based developer and manager, said some tenants inability to pay rent because of changes in job status is the next shoe to drop. Pennrose has 23 properties in Philadelphia and primarily manages housing in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and elsewhere on the East Coast for low-income residents.

Thats a very vulnerable population, Henkel said. Even outside a virus, in any economic downtown, theyre the first to lose their jobs.

Pennrose has expanded its support services for residents, including reaching out to food banks and donation funds on their behalf. Henkel said rent revenue is necessary as buildings undergo wear and tear and need continuous maintenance  not to mention cleaning, especially now.

The ability to keep rent flowing is really critical to keep those essential services going, he said. If [residents] have the ability to pay, we need them to continue to meet those obligations to the extent possible.
With schools and universities suspended because of Covid-19, Al-Ahram Weekly reports on how students are keeping up with their studies

With public and private schools and institutions of higher education closed, measures to secure the academic future of students have included the rolling out of online learning platforms as well as the postponement and sometimes cancelling of exams.

Minister of Education Tarek Shawki said on Monday night that the he would annuonce later in the week the fate of exams for grades nine and 12. These exams are crucial for students; grade nine grades decide whether students continue in a regular school or get transferred to a technical school. Grade 12 exams are important for university admissions.

Final exams from third year primary school to eighth grade have been cancelled, though students are required to submit a research paper in every subject online within two months. More than one student can participate in the research, said Minister of Education Tarek Shawki at a press conference on Thursday. He added that those who do not submit the required research paper will start the upcoming academic year two weeks earlier than scheduled.

Kindergarten students and those in first and second primary grades will not sit any exams and will be assessed by their teachers who will send reports to parents who should ensure children finish the curriculum available on the e-library. Grade 10 and 11 students will sit exams online using their tablets and results will be sent out via the Internet. Grades 10 and 11 are already part of the new system which incorporates technology in the learning process.

According to a press release issued by the Ministry of Education, homeschooled students or those with special educational needs must submit a project instead of sitting exams. The curriculum of public schools will not change, both students and parents are urged to use the coursework and resources available through the ministrys online learning platform, read the press release.

The ministry has created a website https://www.ekb.eg/ar/home on which study materials in English and Arabic have been uploaded for students between kindergarten and grade 11.

This process was implemented within four days, which is a great achievement, the minister said.

Students can also access the e-library from mobile phones and computers and the ministry is making lessons available through specialised TV channels.

The website https://edmodo.org helps teachers to communicate with their students, and the ministry has published a set of videos on how to use the new resources.

Measures adopted to overcome the suspension of schools have met with a variety of responses.

Gihan Salah, mother of year four and year seven students, believes the ministrys plans for online homeschooling as well as TV educational channels are ideal. Qualified teachers are currently helping students revise what they studied during the first term.

This method could put an end to the private lessons phenomenon, says Salah. She adds that her only concern is the ministers annulment of final exams for years three to eight.

The minister should have postponed the announcement for a month or two. Now my kids are not interested in studying because they know there will not be any exams.

Though it is hectic for parents who must closely follow up on their kids students are provided with worksheets and homework in addition to regular coursework. The whole system is perfect. I wish it could last for the coming academic year, says Salah.

Not everyone is so enthusiastic. Mervat Fathi, a school teacher in Aswan and a mother of two, believes the ministrys measures are impractical and few students are likely to study. She points out not all schools have uploaded the necessary materials.

My daughter who is in grade 11 and using the tablet along with her colleagues created a group on WhatsApp to explain to each other the difficult topics. The school told us they will upload the curriculum and explanations on the schools official page but nothing has happened yet, says Fathy.

She says only the most motivated students will log on to the ministrys websites and watch the educational channels while the less motivated will not bother.

Shehabeddin Mohamed, a grade 11 student at an international school, believes that online classes are impractical. There is no direct communication with teachers which makes it hard to understand some of the explanations given. Often I want to ask the teacher about things I do not understand but I cant due to the lack of direct communication.

Mohamed says this type of schooling distracts me because I can leave the session anytime and go eat, drink or even sleep.

Elham Ahmed, the mother of three students at a public school, says she does not know how to use the internet to log onto educational websites.

We live in an area where many people are illiterate and do not have smartphones or computers, she says. She is also concerned some teachers will take advantage of the situation and demand money in exchange for allowing children to pass.

Rana Ragab, nine, a student at a public school, says she spends most of the time watching movies and cartoons.

Why should I study when there is no final year exam. Lets play and have fun, isnt it enough that we are locked inside our homes and cant go out and play in the street, she says.

Education expert Mohamed Salah believes that the Ministry of Education has taken all the measures necessary to help students as they stay at home. This system replaces private lessons and will enable students to adapt in a better way with the ministrys new education system which has introduced electronic education to grades 1, 2, 10,11 via the tablet, he says, adding that the ministry should continue on the same track when schools are back to normal.

According to Salah, students next year will find it easier to deal with the tablet because they will have been using it more.

The Higher Education Ministry along with the Supreme Council of Universities has cancelled mid-term testing for all public and private universities and postponed final year exams until 30 May.

A number of universities have adopted their own plans to adapt to the new circumstances. Mohamed Eid, director of the internationalisation office at the British University in Egypt (BUE) says the university has transferred classes online and is working in parallel with e-learning platforms. The university intends to keep its exam schedule as it is connected with international exam schedules, said Eid.

The American University in Cairo (AUC) has been preparing itself for this possibility since January. According to Tarek Hussein, professor of economics at AUC, each of the universitys faculties has its own online platforms and professors are currently lecturing online, taking attendance and assigning students. Students must submit assignments on time online and they are graded as usual. As for the date of final term exams, the university will inform students in due time, he says.

AUC student Mahi Hisham believes online learning is a good alternative given the temporary suspension.

My professors come online live, they explain to us, we are free to ask any question. I dont feel anything is different other than the fact that I am at home, says Hisham.

It has been announced that Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) examinations will not be held in May and June. Examination body Pearson Edexcel and the American Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) have also canceled their exams in Egypt. International Baccalaureate has also canceled exams scheduled between 30 April and 22 May. The Minister of Education said on Monday that he would soon announce what would become of students enrolled in any of these exams.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under headline: Distance Learning

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The competition consists of three phases, starting with an invitation to submit an audition video showcasing the contestants' passion for all things bourbon:

PHASE 1  Video Submissions: Submit a 1-minute video to YouTube, Instagram or Facebook and be sure to tag #WorldsTopWhiskeyTaster. Share your submission URL and contact information to BardstownBourbon.com/WTWT. Videos should showcase your passion for bourbon, interest in an ambassadorship and palate prowess. Online video submissions are now being accepted and will be open through June 15, 2020.

PHASE 2  Regional Qualifiers: Bardstown Bourbon Company and Moonshine University will select up to 10 submissions per market to compete in live sensory challenges at some of the nation's most prominent bourbon bars. Regional qualifiers will be held in Louisville, Kentucky; Nashville, Tennessee; Indianapolis, Indiana; Chicago, Illinois; San Francisco, California; Miami, Florida; Denver, Colorado; Las Vegas, Nevada; Washington, D.C.; and Dallas, Texas. A complete list of these events will be announced at a future date.

PHASE 3  National Finals: One winner from each qualifier will be invited to compete for the top prize and title of "World's Top Whiskey Taster." The final event will take place this fall at Bardstown Bourbon Company in the Bourbon Capital of the world.

"Entrants are encouraged to be creative and have fun," said Bardstown Bourbon Company Vice President of Sales & Marketing Herb Heneman. "Tell us what makes your palate as good as it is. Show us things like your favorite bourbon cocktail, your most impressive or underrated pairing, or pick the most amazing bottle in your stash and geek out on it. But most of all, tell us what representing Bardstown Bourbon Company as a Distillery Ambassador would mean to you."

Phase 2 contestants will be selected in June and invited to compete in regional competitions featuring bourbon sensory and tasting challenges, such as identifying a bourbon's producer, age, mash-bill and proof, among others. Each contest will be hosted by prominent distillers, journalists and experts from Moonshine University, the creators and curators of the Stave & Thief Society's Executive Bourbon Steward training program in Louisville, Kentucky.

"The challenges contestants will face at these live events will truly put their sensory expertise to the test," said Moonshine University's Director of Spirits Education Colin Blake. "Where many other competitions have showcased mixology skills, this contest is  to my knowledge  the first to put contestants' palates to work. The 'World's Top Whiskey Taster' challenge will ask bourbon lovers to apply much of what we teach in our Executive Bourbon Steward training to practice."

The winner from each regional event will then travel to Bardstown Bourbon Company during Bourbon Heritage month in September to compete for the national title.

By the end of the competition, one champion will be crowned and awarded a cash prize of $20,000 with a contract to represent Bardstown Bourbon Company as a Distillery Ambassador at some of the country's top whiskey festivals in 2021, including WhiskyFest and Whiskies of the World. The winner will also receive a scholarship to Moonshine University's Executive Bourbon Steward certification program, and a trip to Bardstown, Kentucky, where they'll blend a custom product with Bourbon Hall of Famer and Bardstown Bourbon Company Master Distiller Steve Nally.

"We're looking for people who are all about exploring and sharing their bourbon experience," said Bardstown Bourbon Company National Brand Ambassador Sam Montgomery. "We invite social media bourbon evangelists who are actively snapping and sharing photos of pours and pairings, as well as travelers and bourbon explorers who love to share their tales."

Candidates must be at least 21 years old to enter. The winner will be considered an independent contractor of Bardstown Bourbon Company. This prize does not constitute an offer for employment.

For full contest rules, terms and conditions, please visit:

BardstownBourbon.com/WTWT/RULES

To upload an audition video or for more information, please visit:

BardstownBourbon.com/WTWT

Click here for a high-resolution photo.

About Bardstown Bourbon Company:

Located in the heart of Bourbon Country on 100 acres of active farmland, Bardstown Bourbon Company is one of the country's most modern and technically advanced whiskey distilleries. Celebrating the art of making high-quality and authentic whiskey, the innovative distillery produces custom rye, whiskey, and bourbon for prominent brands including Jefferson's, High West, Belle Meade, Hirsch, and many others through its one-of-a-kind Collaborative Distilling Program. Bardstown Bourbon Company honors tradition and drives innovation with its exceptional destination experience for visitors, offering the only full-service restaurant located within a distillery on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, The Kitchen and Bar at Bardstown Bourbon Company. The company was founded in 2014 by Peter Loftin . For more information, please visit bardstownbourbon.com or follow us on Facebook and Instagram .

About Moonshine University:

Founded by David Dafoe in 2012, Moonshine University is the nation's premier educational distillery and the exclusive educational member of the Kentucky Distillers' Association. Located in the heart of bourbon country, Moonshine University offers comprehensive, hands-on spirits education courses and services to entrepreneurs and professionals from around the world. As of 2019, graduates of this course have gone on to successfully launch 165 distilleries worldwide and counting. Moonshine University also houses the Stave & Thief Society, a comprehensive, hands-on bourbon certification program established to promote Kentucky's distinguished bourbon culture. For more information, please visit moonshineuniversity.com and staveandthief.com.

SOURCE Bardstown Bourbon Company

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Aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil aviation (DGCA) on Thursday extended the ban on international commercial passenger flights to India till April 14, 2020 as part of the efforts to check the spread of coronavirus in the country.

It has been decided that all scheduled international commercial passenger services shall remain closed till 1830 hrs GMT of April 14, 2020. However, this restriction will not apply to international all-cargo operations and flights specifically approved by DGCA, it said in a circular.

This implies that international commercial passenger flights will be able to operate from April 15, 12 am IST.

The DGCA had earlier suspended all international commercial passenger operations till March, 29. Domestic commercial passenger operations however, continue to remain suspended till March 31 as of now.

Following the DGCAs latest circular, low cost carrier- GoAir announced suspension of both- domestic and international flights till April 14. The airline stated, GoAir has temporarily suspended all its flights until 14th April 2020 to-and-from Ahmedabad, Aizawl, Bagdogra, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Goa, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Jammu, Kochi, Kolkata, Kannur, Leh, Lucknow, Mumbai, Nagpur, Patna, Port Blair, Pune, Ranchi, Srinagar and Varanasi, as well as international destinations namely Phuket, Male, Muscat, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Bangkok, Kuwait, and Dammam.

The airline also announced that it will protect all the PNRs for customers who booked themselves to travel between March 26, 2020 to April 14, 2020 as part of the Protect Your PNR scheme, wherein customers will be able to reschedule their flights up to April 15, 2021 using the same PNR.

Customers can redeem their ticket (booked between March 1 2020 and April 15, 2020 on ANY GoAir flight on any date between April 15, 2020 and April 15, 201 with no charges being levied (fare difference may be applicable), the airline said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 21:05:32|Editor: zyl

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Photo taken by a mobile phone shows medical workers preparing Chest X-ray check for COVID-19 patients at Ramon y Cajal Hospital in Madrid, Spain, March 26, 2020. The number of deaths from the coronavirus exceeded 4,000 in Spain on Thursday, according to the data published by the Spanish Ministry of Health, Consumer Affairs and Social Services. Meanwhile, the total number of cases in Spain has increased by 8,578 from Wednesday's total of 47,610 to 56,188 on Thursday. (Xinhua)

MADRID, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The number of deaths from the coronavirus exceeded 4,000 in Spain on Thursday, according to the data published by the Spanish Ministry of Health, Consumer Affairs and Social Services.

The death toll increased by 655 over Wednesday's 3,434 to 4,089.

Meanwhile, the total number of cases in Spain has increased by 8,578 from Wednesday's total of 47,610 to 56,188 on Thursday, while 3,679 people are currently in intensive care, compared to the previous figure of 3,166.

The positive news was the increase in the number of recoveries, which rose to 7,015 from 5,367 a day ago.

Madrid continues to be the worst-hit region of Spain, with the number of cases rising to 17,166 and the deaths at 2,090, meaning the city accounts for over half of the total number of deaths in Spain.

"We should never lose sight of the human dimension of what is happening at the moment. Our aim has to be to save lives and protect our citizens," declared Health Minister Salvador Illa in an appearance before the media in the Spanish Congress.

"It is vital that all political groups and the people have trustworthy news. We are facing a problem of a worldwide scale which is constantly changing," said Illa.

King Felipe VI of Spain visited some of the patients currently receiving treatment at the field hospital set up at the IFEMA exhibition center on the outskirts of Madrid on Thursday.

The hospital was constructed by members of Spain's Military Emergency Response Unit last week and received its first patients at the weekend.

The news came a day after the Spanish parliament gave its approval to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's request to extend the State of Alarm to April 12 from the original March 14.

A State of Alarm is the first of three emergency levels a Spanish government can apply under exceptional circumstances, with the others being 'A State of Exception' and 'Martial Law' (Estado de Sitio). A State of Alarm grants the government special powers to limit the movement of citizens, control the means of production and use private assets, and use the military to carry out essential logistical and supply jobs if needed.
In the backdrop of the coronavirus outbreak, the Centre on Wednesday announced to postpone the first phase of Census 2021 and the National Population Register (NPR) exercise.

The exercise slated to begin on April 1 this year has been "postponed until further orders", the office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner announced.



The department under the Ministry of Home Affairs said that the decision was taken to break the transmission of the deadly novel coronavirus which has claimed 10 lives so far in India. Over 562 confirmed cases have so far been reported.





The announcement comes a day after the Prime Minister announced a complete lockdown across the country for 21 days from Tuesday midnight.



The Census 2021 was scheduled to be conducted in two phases. The Phase I related to house listing and housing census was to be taken up during April-September 2020 while the Phase II was for population enumeration from February 9 to 28, 2021.



The updation of NPR was also proposed to be done along with the Phase I of Census 2021 in all the states and Union Territories, except Assam.



Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, the Home Ministry had earlier declared high alert and it was followed by the states and UTs.



The Ministry of Home Affairs has issued guidelines for strict implementation of the measures to be taken by the ministries and departments of government of India and state and UT governments for the containment of coronavirus.



Lockdown has also been declared by many states and UT governments. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has issued advisories for various precautionary measures, including social distancing.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 19:32:20|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- China will further enhance international military cooperation with other countries in face of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, a Chinese spokesman told a press conference on Thursday.

Noting the rapidly spreading of the epidemic in multiple places and countries, Ren Guoqiang, spokesman for the Ministry of National Defense, said China, who is still fighting against the outbreak within borders, is willing to help countries and organizations as much as it can.

Medical supplies including nucleic acid testing kits, protective clothing and masks were sent by Chinese military to Iran for epidemic control on March 19, said Ren.

On March 24, medical professionals dispatched by Chinese military, carrying supplies and equipment, arrived in Cambodia to offer a hand against the outbreak.

"We will never forget the foreign militaries and international organizations who helped out China at our most difficult times," said Ren.
Posted on March 25, 2020

We are collaborating with FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, in an effort to identify misinformation and to ensure news consumers get the facts.

Members of Congress are working toward passing a bipartisan, nearly $2 trillion stimulus package to bolster the economy in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. It would include direct payments to Americans, loans for small businesses, support for hospitals and more.

But online, some on social media are using various memes and posts to spread a falsehood that House Democrats are also trying to slip in $25 million to increase their own pay.

Thats wrong.

A number of the posts specifically refer to a $25 million funding allocation for the House referenced in a version of the package proposed by House Democrats on March 23.

That House proposal included $25 million for Salaries and Expenses for the chamber  which would be allocated in accordance with a spend plan submitted to the Committee on Appropriations of the House of Representatives by the Chief Administrative Officer and approved by such Committee.

But the bill never said it was for legislators salaries. Nor does the version of the stimulus package being worked out in the Republican-controlled Senate  the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act  which similarly outlines $25 million for the House.

A spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee called the pay-raise claims circulating online absurd and inaccurate.

Video: Senate reaches $2 trillion stimulus deal

The funding is to support the Houses capability to telework, including for the purchase of equipment and improvements to the network, Evan Hollander told us in an email. It will also provide for reimbursement costs for the staff of the House Child Care Center and covers the costs of the House food service contracts. In addition, it will support the Sergeant-At-Arms on continuity of operations matters.

He added: Moreover, Member salaries are funded through the Treasury pursuant to the Constitution and are not funded through appropriations.

Also, as we said, the $25 million funding for the House is included in the Senate version of the package, according to draft legislation posted March 25 by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The measure  which includes $93 million for the legislative branch collectively, including $10 million for the Republican-controlled Senate  has been agreed to in principle by congressional leaders and the White House.

A document posted by the Senate Appropriations Committee breaking down emergency appropriations in the package describes the $25 million allocated for the House in the same way Hollander does.

Its important to note, as weve explained before, that the 1989 Ethics Reform Act established an automatic adjustment formula to decide annual changes to lawmakers salaries.

That automatic adjustment formula is based on changes in private sector wages and salaries as measured by the Employment Cost Index, according to the Congressional Research Service. The percentage increase cannot surpass that for federal employees who fall under the General Schedule classification. It automatically goes into effect unless Congress statutorily denies it, which it has done every year since 2009.

Democrats had considered in mid-2019 ending that decade-long hiatus and allowing the automatic pay increase to go through, but backed away from the idea following a backlash from within the party.

Editors note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here.




As the coronavirus pandemic continues to escalate around the world - claiming the lives of 19,744 people worldwide - the Queen of Malaysia helping people in need by utilising her cooking skills.

Malaysia has seen 1,796 cases and 16 deaths so far and Tunku Azizah Aminah Maimunah Iskandariah - who is the wife of Al-Sultan Abdullah Al-Haj of Pahang - has been supporting those helping to fight the virus by cooking them traditional Malaysian meals and treats.

She posted on her Instagram account: Today's dishes that I would be sending to the Sungai Buloh Hospital and the Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre (CPRC) are ayam gulai tempoyak, fried cabbage and salted egg."

She also posted a number of photos of the dishes that shes made including a chicken dish, egg curry, stir fry with green beans and chocolate chip cupcakes.

She captioned another photo: "The least I could do...for the govt servants sacrificing their lifes [sic]... I salute them."

These Instagram posts were met with messages of praise for the monarch. She sent the dishes to a number of hospitals in Malaysia including, Sungai Buloh Hospital, University Malaya Medical Center, and the Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre (CPRC).
Gov. Charlie Baker asked the federal government to approve a major disaster declaration for Massachusetts, which would open up more funding to agencies and municipalities across the state battling the coronavirus pandemic.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency can offer funding to a state, tribe or municipality on a cost-sharing basis to respond to emergencies during a major disaster declaration.

FEMA approved a major disaster declaration for North Carolina on Wednesday, making them eligible for direct funding under the agencys Public Assistance Program. With that declaration, all areas in North Carolina affected by COVID-19 can get the direct assistance under a cost-sharing agreement where the federal government would ultimately cover 75% of the funds.

In previous years, FEMA has approved major disaster declarations for Massachusetts in response to winter storms, rain storms and flooding.

If the declaration is approved, Massachusetts residents could also get access to disaster unemployment assistance and crisis counseling assistance.

Unemployment claims spiked over the past week after the World Health Organization declared the oubreak a pandemic. The U.S. received 3.3 million initial claims for unemployment, including at least 147,995 in Massachusetts for the week ending on March 21. The Massachusetts figure alone is nearly 20 times as high as the number of initial claims filed a week earlier.

The federal government last week approved the Baker administrations request for a declaration of economic injury, allowing Massachusetts businesses hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic to apply for an emergency loan from the Small Business Administration.

Twenty-five people have died and 2,417 people have tested positive for coronavirus in Massachusetts, according to figures released Thursday by the state Department of Public Health.

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SYDNEY/SINGAPOREThe U.S. Senate offered struggling airlines unprecedented aid worth $58 billion that will helping cover their staff wages, as carriers around the world seek state support and turn passenger planes into cargo liners in their desperate bid for revenues.

The CCP virus crisis has ravaged the travel industry and grounded many of the worlds planes, prompting governments to take previously unthinkable steps to prevent bankruptcies, ranging from state handouts to temporarily halting competition rules.

For airlines, its apocalypse now, said Alexandre de Juniac, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which represents carriers around the world.

Travel restrictions and evaporating demand mean that, aside from cargo, there is almost no passenger business, he said.

IATA, which estimates the pandemic will cost the global industry $252 billion in lost revenues this year, said it had written to 18 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Japan and South Korea for emergency support for carriers.

Airlines UK, representing carriers in Britain, asked the government for tax and air traffic fee holidays.

The U.S. Senate passed an industry aid package, half in the form of grants to cover some 750,000 employees paychecks. Companies receiving funds cannot lay off employees before Sept. 30 or change collective bargaining agreements.

The bill has restrictions on stock buybacks, dividends and executive pay, and allows the government to take equity, warrants or other compensation as part of the rescue package.

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to back the move on Friday. President Donald Trump has promised to sign it.

United Airlines Holdings said capacity would drop by 68% in April and Alaska Air Group said it would cut its schedule by 70% in April and May. American Airlines suspended its dividend, drew down a $400 million credit line and secured an additional loan.

Cutting Jobs

In Asian countries, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand have announced some financial relief for airlines, but this has not stopped carriers from putting staff on leave and grounding planes.

Singapores finance minister Heng Swee Keat said Singapore Airlines Ltd would soon announce corporate action supported by state investor Temasek Holdings to tackle the crisis. Share trading in the carrier, which said this week it was seeking extra funds, was halted on Thursday.

Virgin Australia plans to permanently cut more than 1,000 jobs among the 8,000 staff that have already been stood down. Australias Flight Centre Travel Group said it would cut 6,000 travel agent roles globally.

In a move unthinkable under normal conditions, Australias competition regulator said it would allow Virgin, Qantas Airways and Regional Express to coordinate flight schedules and share revenue on 10 regional routes.

We hope that this temporary measure will also support airlines ability to again compete with each other on these routes once the pandemic crisis has passed, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Chairman Rod Sims said.

In bid to raise revenue and keep some planes flying, Delta Air Lines and Air New Zealand joined others in offering cargo flights and charters on passenger planes.

About half of the worlds air cargo normally travels in the bellies of passenger planes, so the cancellation of passenger flights has led to a sharp reduction in cargo capacity.

Weve shared these options with our global cargo customer base and are getting some strong interest from customers wanting to ship to and from Shanghai, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sydney and Melbourne, said Rick Nelson, Air New Zealands general manager for cargo.

Abu Dhabis Etihad Airways said it would operate 34 weekly cargo-only flights with Boeing 787 Dreamliner passenger jets to India, Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and South Korea.

Hawaiian Airlines said it had added more cargo-only turboprop flights between the states islands.

Roughly 1,800 planes had been grounded globally on Monday and Tuesday, according to aviation research firm Cirium.

By Jamie Freed and Joe Brock
WASHINGTON, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- They've been through trade wars, ethanol battles and slumping commodity prices, but farmers and ranchers' support for President Donald Trump remains strong, according to the latest Agri-Pulse poll of U.S. farmers and ranchers.

Some 72% of producers nationwide said they were willing to support Trump's reelection, up from 69% during the fall of 2018 and 45% in the spring of 2018.

Ninety percent of the Republican or GOP-leaning farmers who were polled said they would vote for Trump this fall, compared to 48% of the independents and 24% of the Democrats.

"Unless the upward curve changes  and that can certainly happen with all of the COVID-19 marketplace and trade disruptions - Trump seems well-positioned to capture a large portion of the farm vote going into the 2020 presidential election," says Agri-Pulse Editor Sara Wyant. "However, Joe Biden has the ability to tap into the economic uncertainty that many farmers are experiencing. Of the Democrats surveyed, Biden was the clear favorite of the primary candidates."

Nearly two-thirds of the farmers surveyed said they had at least some concerns about their ability to repay loans, and 79% said it was important that farmers receive another round of Market Facilitation Program payments in 2020. The Trump Administration has already paid out about $28 billion in MFP payments in the last two years.

In the fall of 2018, Trump's approval rating was 79%, but the share of farmers who strongly approved of his performance at that point was lower, at 37%. An earlier poll in the spring of 2018, during the lead-up to the tariff war with China, only 51% of producers approved of the job Trump was doing.

The survey of 600 producers, conducted by Aimpoint Research, included farmers and ranchers with at least $50,000 in gross farm income was conducted via telephone from Feb. 19 through March 13. For more background on the research and additional graphics, click here.

About Agri-Pulse: Agri-Pulse is a trusted farm and rural policy source in Washington, D.C. The multimedia company provides trusted insights on a wide variety of issues including farm policy, nutrition, trade, food safety, environment, biotechnology, organic, conservation and crop insurance, food safety and COVID-19. For more news, go to www.agri-pulse.com.

SOURCE Agri-Pulse Communications

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Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has come under fire from radio broadcaster Alan Jones for not grounding flights to China earlier as the coronavirus outbreak worsens.

The 2GB breakfast show host slammed the airline boss as Qantas continues international flights before they're suspended next Tuesday, despite the outbreak growing to 2,675 confirmed cases in Australia, including 11 deaths.

It comes after the national carrier was recently hit with a health and safety breach by SafeWork NSW after an audit found an 'inadequate system of work used to clean planes that may have transported passengers with an infectious disease'.

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce (pictured) came under more scrutiny from breakfast radio host Alan Jones on Thursday

Mr Jones told listeners he questioned Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Foreign Minister Marise Payne back in February as to why Qantas continued to operate direct flights to mainland China, the initial epicentre of the virus outbreak.

The airline eventually suspended flights to China later that month.

'Mr Joyce, God knows what that has done as you continue to fly to accelerate the spread of coronavirus here,' Mr Jones said on Thursday morning.

'I argued at the time the borders should be closed. At the time, several Qantas staff spoke to the program and said they'd been told the risk of contracting coronavirus was very low.'

Mr Jones revealed on his program earlier this month that SafeWork NSW recently issued an improvement notice to Qantas after a health inspection revealed the airline exposed staff and passengers to the risk of getting coronavirus.

2GB host Alan Jones (pictured) has been critical of Qantas and its chief executive over their response to the coronavirus outbreak

An inspector observed cleaners at Sydney airport on February 26 handle wet and dirty tissues, used face masks and soiled nappies without gloves, masks or surgical gowns, according to the notice seen by Daily Mail Australia earlier this month.

'Workers and other persons may be exposed to a risk of injury or illness from the inadequate system of work used to clean planes that may have transported passengers with an infectious disease,' the notice read.

Mr Jones slammed Mr Joyce on Thursday while interviewing Virgin Australia chief executive Paul Scurrah on his program.

Mr Scurrah gave a dignified response after Mr Joyce slammed his rival last week when he urged the federal government to not nationalise Virgin Australia and to do otherwise would be 'completely unfair'.

Qantas is yet to grounds all of its international flights as the deadly virus continues to spread

'I've always thought that in times of need, Australians should do the Australian thing to link arms and help Australia through,' Mr Scurrah said on Thursday.

'That has been my position. I've been in Canberra advocating for industry support. We all need to come through this together and put rivalry aside.'

Mr Jones agreed and had this message for the Qantas boss.

'Mr Joyce, I'd say to you, at the time of that serious observation from WorkSafe NSW, your opponent Paul Scurrah had nothing to say. I think you should take a leap of faith out of his book,' he said.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Qantas for comment.

Earlier in the program, Mr Jones revealed a Qantas passenger flying home from LA this week was forced to pay extra after changing his flight before the airline grounded its international flights.

He was due to fly home next month but Qantas cancelled his flight and charged him an extra $2000 to fly home earlier.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- New York City is adding a slew of essential workers to qualify for child care at its Regional Enrichment Centers (RECs), which opened Monday for children of first responders, health care workers and transit workers.

Ninety-three RECs opened this week, including four on Staten Island, to provide care. Beginning this Friday, other types of essential workers will be able to qualify for the centers, including grocery and pharmacy workers, and additional city agencies, Mayor Bill de Blasio said during a press conference Wednesday.

Weve said from the beginning that we include those who work in health care, our first responders, transit workers  starting this Friday, were going to add to that list  workers in a number of categories, and this is something that can be added to at any point, de Blasio said.

Essential staff at grocery stores and pharmacies will qualify for RECs. Essential staff at the Staten Island Ferry and NYC Ferry will join other transit workers in having the ability to bring children to regional centers.

Staff members at the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene who werent previously covered will qualify, as well as essential staff at the Department of Environmental Protection and Department of Probation.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***

Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza said during the press conference that the uptake for the RECs hasnt been as robust as anticipated -- which is why he and the mayor are expanding qualifications to other essential workers.

Regional Enrichment Centers are fully staffed with about 5,000 volunteers across the city, Caranza said. While there are 8,000 students citywide enrolled at RECs as of Wednesday, there is an approximate capacity of 40,000 students overall at the 93 centers.

We have approximately 40,000 student capacity in those centers. So were going to keep ramping up and going to different tiers of first responders and your emergency workers until we get to that 40,000 student capacity number, said Carranza.

De Blasio said that its crucial the city is making sure it is supporting these essential workers and giving them the option of child care.

If they want to take advantage of it and we find a lot of pickup on it, were going to be able to have the capacity we have now, he said. We could even build it our more. If we find that there is not as much use of it, well of course be able to compress it if we need to. But the important point is we will grow in whatever direction, according to the level of need, to make sure those essential workers can get to work and be really comfortable about where their kids are and what theyre doing.

The city Department of Education (DOE) said last week that it would be prepared to expand sites in New York City if needed.

WHO QUALIFIES?

Children who are New York City residents and have parents who are first responders, health care providers, or transit workers are eligible. On Wednesday, de Blasio added essential staff at grocery stores and pharmacies, staff who work on the Staten Island Ferry and NYC Ferry, staff at the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Probation, and Department of Health staff who werent previously eligible.

Other staff includes those who work at the citys Office of Emergency Management, Department of Social Services, Administration for Child Services, NYC Housing Authority, NYC Sanitation, at homeless shelters, and essential park staff. Staff who work at Regional Enrichment Centers or at feeding distribution sites -- which give three grab and go meals to kids across the city -- can also apply for care at RECs.

HOW TO APPLY

If you are considered an essential worker under the citys qualifications for an REC and you have no other childcare option, you can complete this survey form to begin the enrollment process for a REC.

After completing the survey, you will receive confirmation of your enrollment status in up to 48 hours, along with next steps.

53 Fighting the coronavirus: NYC on pause

ABOUT THE CENTERS

The four locations on Staten Island include: PS 48 in Concord; Staten Island School of Civic Leadership (PS 861) in Graniteville; PS 56 in Rossville; and the District 31 Richmond Pre-K Center located at 841 Father Capodanno Blvd. in Midland Beach.

Centers are open weekdays from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., and children enrolled can attend anytime during open hours.

The DOE identified the 93 RECs based on a combination of physical and operational factors, such as location, accessibility, capacity, health clinics, air conditioning, and where available, community schools or wraparound services.

Children are offered a site based on their home address and their parent/caregivers role providing essential services. Each room will have fewer than nine students, and RECs will maintain six feet of distance between people.

Students will have the opportunity to participate in remote learning with their regular school, as is the case for all DOE students. They will be asked each day to bring a device they can use for remote learning if one is available to them. From 3 to 6 p.m., students will also have opportunities to engage in art, music and physical education.

The agency said the environment will be safe and supportive, and staff will be prepared to respond to childrens social and emotional needs.

The DOE told the Advance/SILive.com on Tuesday that parents who are first responders and other essential workers who have children with disabilities will be accommodated at RECs. Students with disabilities will be in classrooms with special education teachers and, if needed, paraprofessionals, who will have access to important information like a students health, social-emotional and behavior needs.

Three hot meals per day -- breakfast, lunch and dinner -- will be offered at REC sites. The meals will be distributed in classrooms to avoid congregation in cafeterias.

Each site will be staffed by a combination of DOE and community-based organization staff, along with site supervisors. Centers will also each have two nurses, a social worker and a guidance counselor.

The DOE said many RECs will have the capacity to support 3- and 4-year-olds, with some centers dedicated fully to early childhood care. All other contracted child care centers and family child care homes will be allowed to operate for as long as they can safely do so, according to the DOE.

Sites will be regularly cleaned and disinfected.

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As the number of coronavirus cases in New Jersey climbed to more than 4,400 on Wednesday, Congress provided some financial relief for millions of Americans financially devastated by COVID-19 when it agreed to a $2 trillion stimulus package.

The Senate unanimously passed the bill. The measure now goes to the House and pending approval, to the desk of President Trump.

Individuals are eligible for the full amount  $1,200  if they have an adjusted gross income of up to $75,000 a year. The payment is reduced for singles earning up to $99,000. If you earn more than $99,000, you get nothing.

For married couples who file a joint tax return, you get the full amount  $2,400 - if your adjusted gross income up to $150,000. If you earn up to $198,000, you will get a partial payment. Married couples who earn more than $198,000 get no payment at all. Parents who qualify also get $500 for each child.

The number of coronavirus deaths in New Jersey jumped from 44 Tuesday to 62 Wednesday.

Heres a roundup of coronavirus news from around New Jersey and the world:

Coronavirus peak in hard-hit N.J. counties could be 3 weeks away: State Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said hospitals in Bergen, Essex and Hudson counties are already feeling the strain of cases and those counties could see a peak in cases in probably 21 to, it could be 60 days even based on the latest models.

U.S. Senate unanimously passes aid package: The Senate passed the unparalleled $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems engulfed by the coronavirus pandemic. The unanimous vote Wednesday came despite misgivings on both sides about whether it goes too far or not far enough and capped days of difficult negotiations as Washington confronted a national challenge unlike it has ever faced.

ICE begins releasing some detainees from two N.J. correctional facilities, source says: Immigration officials began releasing detainees Wednesday that are being held at two New Jersey correctional facilities amid the coronavirus outbreak, a source with knowledge of the situation told NJ Advance Media.

The detainees, who have health conditions that put them at high-risk, are being released from the Elizabeth detention center and the Essex County Correctional Facility by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the source, who is not authorized to speak publicly about the proceedings.

3rd ShopRite employee tests positive: Employees at stores in Essex, Morris and Union counties have now tested positive for COVID-19. Workers with confirmed cases of COVID-19 are not allowed to return to work until cleared by a doctor, store officials said.

These N.J. schools have connections to coronavirus cases: School districts in at least 10 counties have a links to a person who has tested positive for coronavirus. Bergen County has the most districts - four.

Baptisms, weddings, funerals postponed in Newark archdiocese as coronavirus spreads: A week after suspending Mass in the wake of the coronavirus, the Archdiocese of Newark suspended a large number of other events including baptisms, weddings, wakes and funerals until further notice.

Churches and chapels will also be closed and locked, and private prayer in any parish building has been discontinued, the diocese announced Wednesday evening. Parish offices will also be closed and employees who provide essential services will be limited and working on staggered schedules. The dioceses territory includes all of the Catholic parishes and schools in the counties of Bergen, Union, Hudson and Essex.

Trenton sets up coronavirus test site for first responders: The city of Trenton opened a coronavirus testing center Wednesday to test the citys first responders - firefighters, police and EMS. Only first responders serving the citys police, fire and EMS services can receive the test at the location. The site had a soft opening Wednesday. Mayor Reed Gusciora will visit the site Thursday morning for its formal opening.

N.J. nursing home shut down by coronavirus. All 79 residents moved to new facility: The St. Josephs Senior Nursing Home and Assisted Living Facility in Woodbridge was closed Wednesday and its residents moved after multiple residents at the facility have been diagnosed with coronavirus.

U.S. coronavirus cases: The Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University reports more than 69,000 cases across the country as of around 7 a.m. Thursday. There have been at least 1,046 deaths in the U.S.

Worldwide coronavirus cases: More than 474,000 people in 175 countries have tested positive. The center says there have been more than 21,350 deaths as of early Thursday.

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The Associated Press and NJ Advance Media staff writers Joe Atmonavage, Chris Ryan, Karin Price Mueller, Michael Sol Warren and Joe Brandt contributed to this report.

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Linkedin Gemma Holliani Cahya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 13:55 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d88b01 1 National COVID-19,coronavirus,exodus,social-distancing,quarantine Free

For many Indonesians, family is among the first people we turn to for support and comfort when the going gets tough, but as the COVID-19 pandemic keeps more and more people home for work and school, urban migrants in Jakarta have been asked to refrain from returning to their hometowns to prevent the outbreak from spreading farther across the country.

President Joko Jokowi Widodo called on all citizens last week to work, study and worship from home to help slow the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Indonesia has reported 790 confirmed cases to date and the numbers continue to rise each day. By Wednesday afternoon, 31 out of the 58 deaths across the nation were residents of Jakarta, which has emerged as the epicenter of the outbreak in Indonesia.

While many people still refuse to listen to the government and thereby put themselves and others at risk of infection, other people have chosen to stay put  not only for their own safety, but also for the safety of their loved ones.

Wednesday marked the 10th day of self-isolation for Cynthia, a 25-year-old start-up content editor who lives in a rented room in Jakarta, far from her family in Medan, North Sumatra.

Following the news closely from their home, Cynthias parents have asked her to return to Medan, worried about their daughter living alone in the capital that has been hardest hit by the outbreak.

Although she really wanted to go back to be with her family and to take care of her mother, Cynthia has decided to stay in Jakarta  at least until the outbreak subsides. She understands that older adults and people with chronic or underlying medical conditions are at a higher risk of infection, or even dying from COVID-19.

My mom is having chemotherapy right now for Stage IV breast cancer and she is immunocompromised. I would not forgive myself if anything happened to her just because I couldnt stay put in Jakarta," she told The Jakarta Post on Saturday. "I dont want to potentially carry a virus back to my hometown.

Cynthia, who declined to give her family name, said she understood her colleagues who had decided to go back to their hometowns for fear of being quarantined all alone, or just to be with their families during these unprecedented and stressful times.

That being said, it doesn't erase the fact that it is selfish and is putting others at risk. If I can stay away from my sick mom, so can you. But then again, it boils down to what they consider to be important, she noted.

Public health expert Sudirman Nasir said that it was important for people  and especially youngsters  to understand that although they might feel healthy or are not showing any symptoms associated with the disease, they can still be carriers of the virus and infect others.

For people who had traveled far from home for work or study, this meant that they must avoid returning to their hometowns in the midst of the outbreak, said the lecturer from Hasanuddin University in Makassar, South Sulawesi, who is now offering his lectures online for as long as the study-from-home policy remains in place.

Sudirman added that he never tired of telling those who lived far from home to stay put in Makassar.

If you love them, then dont go home, especially if your parents and relatives who have comorbidities [additional health conditions] or are above 65 years old. You can use technology to communicate with them for the time being, he told the Post. It is pivotal to practice [physical] distancing and avoid travel.

Separately, 31-year-old Yodie Hardiyam admitted to being a little worried that he might have put his familys lives in danger, although he had no idea whether he was a carrier. An employee of a company based in Jakarta, he did not think about the possible consequences of a brief trip he recently took to see his family in Salatiga, Central Java.

Im worried because [my parents] are now over 60 years old," Yodie said. "We keep tabs on each other every day to see how were doing. Alhamdulillah [Praise be to God] we are all healthy so far, and I am grateful for that.

Looking at the worsening conditions in Jakarta and across the country, Yodie has considered scrapping this year's plans to take mudik  the annual exodus that millions of Indonesians make to reunite with their families in their hometowns for Idul Fitri.

The two-day Islamic holiday is expected to fall on May 24 to 25 this year, while the holy fasting month of Ramadan is likely to start around April 24.

Chenny, 25, another employee based in Jakarta, said that most of her relatives in Samarinda, East Kalimantan, had already canceled their flights to Semarang.

The city in Central Java is where her grandmother lives, and where the entire family gathers every year for Idul Fitri.

We had already bought our tickets for Idul Fitri, but we decided to cancel them. Our grandmother is really old and we dont want to take any chances in any way and infect her, she said.

Syahrizal Syarief, an epidemiologist at the University of Indonesia, said that the most dangerous thing about returning to ones hometown or going on mudik during the outbreak was that people would ultimately flock to public transportation hubs  the worst possible place to be if the aim was to contain the virus' spread.

Syahrizal urged the government to issue a much stronger policy to avoid this mass movement of people. This was particularly vital because he believed that people would not wait until Ramadan to return to their hometowns, especially those who were financially affected by the physical distancing or the work-from-home policy.

Living costs are more expensive in Jakarta than they are back in rural areas. [People] most definitely wont wait until the fasting month to go home, he said.

As the number of scheduled trips continue to dwindle, the Transportation Ministry is mulling whether to restrict or even ban this years mudik to cut down on mass gatherings.

Meanwhile, railway companies are already feeling the adverse effects of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Vice president for public relations Yuskal Setiawan at PT Kereta Api Indonesia (KAI), when contacted by the Post on Saturday, said that the state-owned railway company had seen a 46 percent decline in bookings for long-distance journeys since the outbreak emerged.

Yuskal expected the downward trend to continue [at least] until Ramadan. Demand is low and many passengers have canceled their trips, he said.
By Luke Baker LONDON (Reuters) - The rapid spread of coronavirus is piling pressure on criminal justice systems globally and has led to a flood of prisoner releases, with the United States, Canada and Germany joining Iran in releasing thousands of detainees. Germany's most populous state, North-Rhine Westphalia, announced on Wednesday it would release 1,000 prisoners who are close to the end of their sentences, with sex offenders and violent inmates excluded from the list. The aim is to free up cells so that quarantined areas can be set up for inmates that contract the disease, with many expected to do so given the tight confinement in any prison facility and the ease with which the virus spreads

By Luke Baker

LONDON (Reuters) - The rapid spread of coronavirus is piling pressure on criminal justice systems globally and has led to a flood of prisoner releases, with the United States, Canada and Germany joining Iran in releasing thousands of detainees.

Germany's most populous state, North-Rhine Westphalia, announced on Wednesday it would release 1,000 prisoners who are close to the end of their sentences, with sex offenders and violent inmates excluded from the list.

The aim is to free up cells so that quarantined areas can be set up for inmates that contract the disease, with many expected to do so given the tight confinement in any prison facility and the ease with which the virus spreads.

In Canada, 1,000 inmates in the state of Ontario were released last week and lawyers are working with prosecutors to free many more from provincial jails by accelerating bail hearings, among other steps.

"The concern is that a jail sentence can potentially become a death sentence for those that are there," said Daniel Brown, a Toronto lawyer.

The U.S. state of New Jersey plans to temporarily release around 1,000 low-risk inmates, and New York City's Board of Corrections, an independent oversight body, has called on the mayor to release around 2,000.

Similar steps are being taken in Britain, Poland and Italy, with authorities set to closely monitor those that are released to ensure it does not lead to a surge in criminal activity or fuel social unrest at a time of national unease.

But while such measures are possible in many developed countries, and may help stem the spread of a disease that has infected more than 420,000 people and killed nearly 19,000, they pose serious challenges in other parts of the world.

In Iran, where around 190,000 people are incarcerated and the coronavirus has infected 25,000 people, the government has announced it will temporarily release 85,000 prisoners, with 10,000 of them being granted pardons.

Depending on how long the crisis lasts - and Iran is already talking about a second wave of infections - criminal justice experts say it may prove difficult to manage a large number of freed prisoners or reincarcerate them.

"The longer this goes on and the more desperate the situation becomes, it may lead to bolder decisions that lead to the release of more violent or more dangerous criminals," said Keith Ditcham, a senior research fellow in organised crime and policing at Britain's Royal United Services Institute.

"What do you do when things return to normality? You have a number of undesirables either in your country or travelling globally ... It puts the whole law enforcement effort back by a significant margin."

INSIDE OR OUTSIDE?

In some countries, the fear is that inmates won't be released. In Venezuela, human rights groups are concerned about the spread of COVID-19 among a prison population of 110,000 in conditions that are already highly unsanitary.

In Bogota, Colombia, a prison riot over coronavirus left 23 prisoners dead and scores injured, and similar unrest has struck detention facilities from Italy to Sri Lanka.

Sudan announced it was releasing more than 4,000 prisoners as a precaution against the disease.

In Brazil, some 1,400 prisoners escaped from four facilities last week ahead of a lockdown over coronavirus, with only around 600 recaptured so far, authorities said.

Even those calling for prisoners to be freed in the hope it will prevent deaths have faced problems. In Egypt, four women were detained a week ago after demonstrating for releases. They themselves were released after questioning.

"What we're seeing is quite a seismic change in how law enforcement goes about its business in the coming months," said RUSI's Ditcham. "The lesser of two evils may be to release all but the most violent and dangerous criminals."

(Additional reporting by Michael Nienaber in Berlin, Khaled Abdelaziz in Khartoum, Anna Mehler Paperny in Toronto and Tessa Vikander in Vancouver; Editing by Giles Elgood)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
The G20 nations today vowed to inject over $5 trillion into the global economy, as part of targeted fiscal policy, economic measures, and guarantee schemes to counteract the social, economic and financial impacts of the novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.

"We will continue to conduct bold and large-scale fiscal support. Collective G20 action will amplify its impact, ensure coherence, and harness synergies," said the G20 leaders in a statement following an extraordinary G20 Leaders' virtual summit.

The summit was held under the chairmanship of Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

"The magnitude and scope of this response will get the global economy back on its feet and set a strong basis for the protection of jobs and the recovery of growth. We ask our finance ministers and central bank governors to coordinate on a regular basis to develop a G20 action plan in response to COVID-19 and work closely with international organisations to swiftly deliver the appropriate international financial assistance," the leaders said.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful reminder of our interconnectedness and vulnerabilities. The virus respects no borders.

Combatting this pandemic calls for a transparent, robust, coordinated, large-scale and science-based global response in the spirit of solidarity, they said.

"We are strongly committed to presenting a united front against this common threat.We are deeply saddened by the tragic loss of life and the suffering faced by people around the world. Tackling the pandemic and its intertwined health, social and economic impacts is our absolute priority," the statement said.

It expressed its gratitude and support to all frontline health workers.

The G20 is committed to do whatever it takes to overcome the pandemic, along with the World Health Organization (WHO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank Group (WBG), United Nations (UN), and other international organizations, working within their existing mandates, the statement said.

"We are determined to spare no effort, both individually and collectively, to:

Protect lives; safeguard peoples jobs and incomes; restore confidence, preserve financial stability, revive growth and recover stronger," the G20 leaders vowed.

They will also work to minimise disruptions to trade and global supply chains; provide help to all countries in need of assistance; and coordinate on public health and financial measures.

Fighting the Pandemic

They committted to take all necessary health measures and seek to ensure adequate financing to contain the pandemic and protect people, especially the most vulnerable.

"We will share timely and transparent information; exchange epidemiological and clinical data; share materials necessary for research and development; and strengthen health systems globally, including through supporting the full implementation of the WHO International Health Regulations (IHR 2005).

"We will expand manufacturing capacity to meet the increasing needs for medical supplies and ensure these are made widely available, at an affordable price, on an equitable basis, where they are most needed and as quickly as possible. We stress the importance of responsible communication to the public during this global health crisis. We task our health ministers to meet as needed to share national best practices and develop a set of G20 urgent actions on jointly combatting the pandemic by their ministerial meeting in April," the statement said.

The leaders said they fully support and commit to further strengthen the WHOs mandate in coordinating the international fight against the pandemic, including the protection of frontline health workers, delivery of medical supplies, especially diagnostic tools, treatments, medicines, and vaccines.

"We acknowledge the necessity of urgent short-term actions to step up the global efforts to fight the COVID-19 crisis. We will quickly work together and with stakeholders to close the financing gap in the WHO Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan.

"We further commit to provide immediate resources to the WHOs COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation (CEPI) and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, on a voluntary basis. We call upon all countries, international organisations, the private sector, philanthropies, and individuals to contribute to these efforts."

To safeguard the future, we commit to strengthen national, regional, and global capacities to respond to potential infectious disease outbreaks by substantially increasing our epidemic preparedness spending. This will enhance the protection of everyone, especially vulnerable groups that are disproportionately affected by infectious diseases. We further commit to work together to increase research and development funding for vaccines and medicines, leverage digital technologies, and strengthen scientific international cooperation. We will bolster our coordination, including with the private sector, towards rapid development, manufacturing and distribution of diagnostics, antiviral medicines, and vaccines, adhering to the objectives of efficacy, safety, equity, accessibility, and affordability," it added.

"We commit to do whatever it takes and to use all available policy tools to minimise the economic and social damage from the pandemic, restore global growth, maintain market stability, and strengthen resilience.

The G20 leaders said: "We are currently undertaking immediate and vigorous measures to support our economies; protect workers, businessesespecially micro-, small and medium-sized enterprisesand the sectors most affected; and shield the vulnerable through adequate social protection.

International Trade Disruptions

Consistent with the needs of our citizens, we will work to ensure the flow of vital medical supplies, critical agricultural products, and other goods and services across borders, and work to resolve disruptions to the global supply chains, to support the health and wellbeing of all people, it said.

"We commit to continue working together to facilitate international trade and coordinate responses in ways that avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade. Emergency measures aimed at protecting health will be targeted, proportionate, transparent, and temporary. We task our Trade Ministers to assess the impact of the pandemic on trade," they said.

Enhancing global cooperation

The G20 will work swiftly and decisively with the frontline international organizations, notably the WHO, IMF, WBG, and multilateral and regional development banks to deploy a robust, coherent, coordinated, and rapid financial package and to address any gaps in their toolkit.

"We stand ready to strengthen the global financial safety nets. We call upon all these organizations to further step up coordination of their actions, including with the private sector, to support emerging and developing countries facing the health, economic, and social shocks of COVID-19," they said.
In late 2019 Chinese media revealed that nearly two billion dollars was being spent over the next two years to purchase 1.4 million modern protective vests and other items of bullet and shell fragment resistant gear for Chinese troops. These protective vests, as they are called in the West, will also include nearly a million of the bulletproof ceramic composite plates (SAPI, for Small Arms Protective Inserts) for the protective vests front line combat troops wear. These are an American innovation, and since the 1990s, the U.S. has purchased over twelve million SPPI inserts. Why so many? It's because the plates are bullet-proof, but only once or twice. The plates will stop high-powered rifle bullets, but this weakens the plates, often causing them to crack or chip. So every time a plate is hit, it is discarded and a new one slipped into the vest. The brittleness of these plates means they can be cracked if dropped or otherwise allowed to hit a hard surface. Its an odd characteristic for plates that will stop high-powered 7.62mm bullets, but it works. The downside is that the plates are not particularly durable, and wear out quickly on the battlefield.

Another reason for so many plates purchased is the development of new model plates, while many of the older ones were still available. Thus since 2011 the U.S. Army and Marines have been replacing existing SAPI ceramic bulletproof plates, with thicker, and heavier (by about 37 percent) ESAPI plates. The ESAPI appeared in 2008 and provided better protection from any kind of high powered bullet. The basic "Level 3" SAPI plates are 25.4x305cm (10x12 inches) and weigh 2.1 kg (4.6 pounds) each. For greater protection, the older Level 4 SAPI plates, weighing about 2.9 kg (6.4 pounds) each, could stop some types of armor-piercing bullets, but so can the lighter ESAPI, which are more expensive, at $450 a plate, down from $600 several years ago. The XSAPI plate appeared in 2011 but did not offer enough improvements to make ESAPI obsolete. Since 2012 the plates have become a little lighter and cheaper and more nations are buying them for troops and special police.

Weight is a big issue for the infantry, especially when operating in tropical climates. Troops do all sorts of things to save weight, and using the less bullet-proof SAPI plates was just one of them. Thus the SAPI plates remained popular on the battlefield, even as the new ESAPI plates arrived. Many of the SAPI plates were given to combat support troops, who rarely got shot at, but wanted some protection for those occasions someone took a shot at them. These troops, in contrast, didn't mind the extra weight and preferred ESAPI.

All these plates are made of boron carbide ceramic with a spectra shield backing. This combination causes bullets to fragment and slow down before getting through the plate. Occasionally, some fragments will get through, but these are stopped by the layers of Kevlar that make up the flak jackets. The ceramic plates require a manufacturing process that uses, and produces, a lot of toxic chemicals. As a result of this, much of the production has moved to China. The flack jackets have been around for decades and just used layers of bullet and shell resistant fabric to stop pistol bullets and shell fragments. Many police and even soldier still just use a flack jacket.

The success of the plates plus frequent attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan led the U.S. Army to try and get enough plates for all troops in the combat zone, not just those in infantry units. This was more of a morale issue than anything else, as non-infantry troops are most frequently exposed to bombs and RPGs. Fragments from these weapons can be stopped by the flak jackets without the plates. But morale is important, so the army hustled to get enough SAPI plates for everyone. The U.S. military has spent over $12 billion on various types of SAPI, ESAPI and XSAPI plates since 2001. These plates first became available in the late 1980s but it wasnt until many combat veterans confirmed that the plates worked did more troops get them.

It is not known what type of SAPI plates the Chinese are using but the purchase of this type of protection for their infantry shows the extent to which China has modernized their ground forces. Much of the new Chinese weapons and gear is of similar quality to that found in the West. This was something the Russians were never able to do during the Cold War.

Thats because the Chinese military does not, as in most communist police states, get all their military gear from state-owned and operated firms. No, as part of the economic liberalization implemented in the late 1970s, the military was encouraged to get the most (and best) for their money by soliciting items from multiple, mostly privately owned and highly competitive companies. Chinese and foreign customers were both sought as customers for this gear.

China began modernizing its army in the 1980s, an effort that was long overdue. By the end of the 1980s China had (at least on paper) motorized all of its infantry divisions. Before that, many infantry marched, or took the railroad, while some of their heavy equipment was still moved by horses. In effect, in the early 1980s, most Chinese infantry units were equipped like Western infantry were in the 1930s. By the 1990s more infantry divisions were getting armored vehicles and by 2012 many infantry units were getting a third generation of armored vehicles, or IFVs (Infantry Fighting Vehicles). This makes them mech (mechanized) infantry. All the vehicles were Chinese made, and often Chinese designed. So was all the other new gear.

This army modernization included new uniforms and combat gear, including two generations of new assault rifles. Military PR people made sure all this new stuff got plenty of coverage in the media. It was quickly discovered that all this new gear was very popular with most Chinese, who had seen their military regarded by foreigners and Chinese alike as antiquated since the 19th century. Now Chinese troops looked as spiffy and menacing as their Western counterparts. The Chinese were proud and civilians could buy many of the new military items. In China collecting modern military items became fashionable and popular.

Patriotic Chinese, as well as foreign military gear collectors, are increasingly being serviced by Chinese entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of the fact that most Chinese army military equipment (except weapons and some electronics) is also available on the civilian market. Once these entrepreneurs saw how eager Chinese were to buy army uniforms, field rations (like U.S. MREs), patches and all sorts of odd bits of equipment, they began offering the stuff on eBay for the international market. There they found more collectors (or just curious eBay shoppers) than they anticipated. Chinese manufacturers have increased production of some items just to deal with this new civilian market. As a result, both Chinese and foreign collectors are seen as another market and that market is being serviced.

Bulletproof plates were supposed to be only for military and police. But once China began manufacturing them they were widely available on the black market. Chinese weapons have long been available to foreign governments and, in some cases to well-financed criminal and terrorist groups with access to the weapons black market.
California Families Write Letters to First Lady Over Sex Ed Concerns

SANTA CLARA, Calif.Parents and children in California who are concerned over sex education in public schools have been writing letters to First Lady Melania Trump in what has become known as the First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) S.O.S. California Moms campaign.

These parents and children felt that their opposition to Californias sex ed curriculum was being disregarded and overlooked by officials. They have sent hundreds of letters to Melania Trump since the campaign started in February.

We want safety environments, Evaluz Alvarado, a 16-year-old student, wrote in a letter to Melania Trump. Parents have rights too and they have to know what their children are being taught at school.

The letters are mostly handwritten and from parents, grandparents, and children. America Figueroa, a spokesperson from Alliance To Protect Children (ATPC), said there hasnt been a response from the White House yet.

Figueroa, who is an early childhood educator and mother of five, told The Epoch Times that ATPC was organized earlier this year. One of its goals is to get more politically involved and invoke change in California, and it has joined the FLOTUS S.O.S. California Moms campaign.

An organization called Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas USA (Dont Mess With My Kids USA) is also participating in the campaign.

Figueroa said she found out about Assembly Bill 329 (AB329) a few years ago. AB329 and the California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA) require students in grades 712 to receive comprehensive sexual health education and HIV prevention education in both middle and high school.

One aim of AB329 and the CHYA is to inform youth about gender identities, sexual orientations, gender expressions, and so on.

Parents involved in the FLOTUS campaign have expressed concern over what the content may include, such as topics that they would rather teach their kids themselves. The Epoch Times investigated what parents deem age appropriate and published a report in February.

The first page of a campaign letter from 16-year-old student Evaluz Alvarado expressing concern to Melania Trump. (America Figueroa/February 2020)

The second page of Evaluz Alvarados campaign letter. (America Figueroa/February 2020)

Step by Step

In February, Figueroa asked President Donald Trump at the Palm Springs airport for his help with the childrens sex ed issue.

She said Trump responded: Were working on it very hard. Were working on it very hard, okay?

Figueroa and the campaign are reaching out to the White House because they felt they needed change to happen. At each level, they hit roadblock after roadblock and felt that the officials werent listening to them.

Weve gone step by step. We started off at the school level, district level, then we went to the county, and to the senate and the assembly, Figueroa said.

As the next step, Figueroa thought about traveling to Washington D.C. to seek further assistance.

Figueroa said the parents are reaching out for the First Ladys support because she is a mom.

When the media tried to attack her son, we saw how she reacted. Like real moms, like [how] we do, Figueroa said. You can say anything about me, but dont even think youre going to hurt my kid.

Homeschooling Her Boys

Figueroa said she became aware of the sex ed issue in the summer of 2018 when she was submitting school re-enrollment forms.

She said she opted her children out of the sex ed program by letter, but it wasnt honored by the school. She also did not want her boys participating in several surveys that took place at school.

They are invasive, and they have a lot of sexual questions as well. So even when theyre labeled as anti-bully and anti-abusive [surveys], they do contain sexual questions, she said.

She began to homeschool her kids in March last year. They missed their friends at first, but after a while, she said they didnt want to go back to regular school.

Theyre not completely in the safe side, she said. I dont know if their future wives are sitting in a public school classroom right now and how thats going to affect them.

Figueroa was concerned about why 10, 11, and 12-year-olds are being taught about sexual consent and negotiation when the legal age of consent is 18 in California.

I just had a grandbaby, my first grandbaby, she said. Hes 4 months old, but eventually hes going to have to go to school. Whats going to happen if things dont change?

We are ready to fight back and not stop until something happens, Figueroa said. What else can we do? We dont know, but we know for certain that we wont stop until they get their hands off our children.

Children are our future

Children deserve to be respected in every way possible, Spanish teacher Araceli Justiniani told The Epoch Times in an interview.

Justiniani teaches elementary school children in Southern California. She has shared her concern about elementary schools with President Trump and senators.

Some of the students have expressed to me that they dont like it, that they feel threatened, said Justiniani.

She said that the schoolchildren are innocent and that she hasnt heard about anything regarding sexual activity from them.

She wants the White House to know about Californias situation.

[Legislators] think they can rule all family. That, to me, is completely an atrocity, because family is  the foundation of a society, she said.

She has visited the areas of Santa Ana, Anaheim, Tustin, City of Orange, and Orange County, looking for help.

We completely exhausted our energy and resources and everything the whole year, Justiniani said.

She has spoken with parents and believes that they should ask questions and get involved in their childrens education.

Children are our future. We need to invest in our children, and I think [legislators] are completely missing the mark, she said.
A stock auction at Ha Noi Stock Exchange. The Ministry of Finance has issued a new circular guiding the reduction and exemption for 15 types of securities-related services.- VNA/VNS Photo Tuan Anh

The move offers urgent solutions to stabilise financial market expectations and restore market confidence, said Hoang Thach Lan, head of individual investor division at Viet Dragon Securities JSC (VDSC).

What I wonder is if the new regulation will be for a quite short period, only until the end of August this year. From September, all fee levels will return to normal, but I think we should keep reduction for some certain services like trading services on the underlying market, trading services on the derivatives market and securities depository services, Lan said.

The service fees cut is an urgent response, but there must be tougher measures from ministries and authority branches to help the stock market recover, said Nguyen Hoang Hai, Vice Chairman of the Viet Nam Association of Financial Investors (VAFI).

For example, the newly amended Securities Law allows the increase of foreign ownership ratios from January next year. But maybe we can consider applying this increase from July this year to help the Vietnamese stock market quickly attract foreign investment, Hai said.

To attract more capital for the banking system, we should also consider expanding foreign ownership from 30 per cent to 35 per cent, Hai said.

Budget spending may increase strongly in the near future. To minimise the budget deficit, we need to promote the equitisation processes in State-owned enterprises, cutting unnecessary spending to save capital for more necessary demand, Hai added.

The Vietnamese stock market has been falling during the COVID-19 outbreak, causing market capitalisation to plummet, said Do Bao Ngoc, Deputy General Director of Vietnam Construction Securities Joint Stock Company (CSI).

Many institutional and individual investors are suffering losses as market uncertainties surrounding COVID-19 were exacerbated over recent weeks, which is sending both market capitalisation and trading liquidity down, Ngoc said.

The finance ministrys exemption and reduction of securities service fees effectively helps support market members and investors. This measure was launched in a timely manner and considered a quick response. Currently, no stock market in the world has issued a similar policy, Ngoc said.

Global markets have been rattled, which has caused widespread supply chain disruption and hobbled the travel industry. If drastic containment measures are in place soon enough, the world economy will soon recover with production, trade, tourism and services restored to a normal state, Ngoc said.

The Vietnamese stock market has been in a downward trend since the COVID-19 outbreak. On the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange, the VN-Index has tumbled a total of 28.4 per cent since January 30 to hit its lowest level since June 2017.

Foreign investors have net sold a total of VND3.4 trillion (US$138 million) so far this year, according to KB Securities Company (KBSV).

Net foreign selling was attributed to worries about the downtrend of the global economy amid the spread of the disease.

To urgently support the stock market, the finance ministry cut fees of nine securities services and exempted fees for six others from March 19.

Under Circular 14/2020/TT-BTC issued on March 18, nine services have had their fees reduced by 10 to 50 per cent, and four others saw their fees slashed by 30 to 50 per cent.

The Finance Ministry said the cut and exemption would run from now to August 31. The ministry will consider whether to extend the regulation depending on the development of the pandemic.
The number of travelers flying through Portland International Airport has fallen 90% during the coronavirus outbreak, according to the Port of Portland, which runs PDX.

The port said more than 51,000 travelers passed through PDX on average each day in March 2019. This week, the port said forecasts suggest between 3,000 and 5,000 flyers each day.

Alaska Airlines, the Portland airports busiest carrier, said Wednesday that it will reduce flights by up to 70% in April and May as it adjusts to plummeting demand for air travel. Alaska said it is facing severe financial pressure for the foreseeable future.

The port said its marine terminals continue operating and, with the exception of automotive cargo, are experiencing normal export numbers despite the outbreak.

The decline in air travel is one more symptom of the sudden economic catastrophe battering Oregon and the rest of the nation during the outbreak. New Oregon jobless claims jumped nearly 1,500% last week as bars, restaurants and many other businesses shut down.

Economists warn of a severe recession  but say the state could bounce back quickly if the extreme measures being used to combat the pandemic are able to quickly contain the virus.

-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway |

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Early research shows that health care workers are more likely to contract the coronavirus than the average person and, when they get it, to suffer more severe symptoms. Many doctors are already rationing the protective gowns, gloves and masks that are necessary to keep them safe.

They are also drawing up their wills.

Dr. Au and her husband sat down over the weekend and updated the list of who should take care of their children if both of them die. We have it four deep now, she said. The top two choices are older and these people are in a high-risk group. The third person is a doctor. So we added a fourth person who is a low risk for contracting this thing. As the backstop in case it comes to that.

Dr. Jane van Dis is an ob-gyn in Los Angeles and the medical director for Maven, a telemedicine platform. She is also a single mother. I realized that if something happened to me that my life is all in my head, she told me. So on Saturday I combed through all of my policies  life insurance and disability  and all of my credit cards, my mortgage, my auto loan, trying to think of all of the details of my life so that if someone were trying to take it over for me they could.

Dr. Marshall said hes been encouraging his colleagues who dont yet have wills to draw them up. We know whats coming, he told me. There are a good number of people who are going to die here, he said, and health care workers will be part of that number.

Dr. Vicki Jackson, the chief of palliative care and geriatrics at Mass General, said she recently told her husband that she wants him to remarry if she dies. But its important to me that she be spunky, she told him. No milquetoast role models for the kids.

These are the kinds of conversations that many doctors have spent their careers urging patients facing serious illness to have. They are now showing us how its done.

Most people are in complete denial that your life can change on a dime, said Dr. Jackson. In medicine we know it, and we are more likely to talk about it. Because of the coronavirus outbreak, she added, the veil is less opaque right now. And I dont think thats bad.
YEREVAN, MARCH 26, ARMENPRESS. President Armen Sarkissian received Ambassador of Japan to Armenia Jun Yamada, the Presidential Office told Armenpress.

The sides exchanged views on the practical components of the Armenian-Japanese cooperation, taking into account the current situation caused by the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), as well as the future programs. The Ambassador presented the coronavirus situation in Japan and the actions taken in this respect. The sides discussed the opportunities of mutual support in such situation.

President Sarkissian thanked Japan for the constant support to Armenia, in particular for providing the necessary number of test kits for diagnosing the virus.

The meeting also touched upon the opportunities to implement joint projects in the field of IT, high technologies, innovation, nuclear safety waste management and also within the frames of the presidential initiative ATOM (Advanced Tomorrow).

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
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Linkedin Nathan Frandino, Shannon Stapleton and Robin Respaut (Reuters) Oakland, United States  Thu, March 26, 2020 13:13 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d83d94 2 World sewing-machine,volunteers,california,face-mask,coronavirus,COVID-19,pandemic,SARS-CoV-2,health,infectious-diseases,infection,protective-gears Free

Smita Paul has been sewing scarves and clothing for her small fashion business since 2003 but ever since the coronavirus struck the Bay Area and created a shortage in personal protective equipment for hospital workers, she has switched from sewing scarves to sewing masks.

We are all horrified. The idea of one of my friends having to go into this situation without having any protective gear, I just cant imagine," said Paul. "If we can do one little thing, were going to do it."

Paul is among a growing number eager to answer desperate calls from healthcare workers on social media and community forums asking for assistance in acquiring masks, gloves and other equipment needed to protect them against the pandemic that has killed at least 660 people in the United States and sickened more than 50,000.

Craig Enis, 50, works as a registered subacute nurse at Generations Healthcare in Walnut Creek, California. He said the facility is running low on surgical masks, gowns for isolation rooms, and hand sanitizer.

N95-masks are just nonexistent right now, he said.

Enis is afraid for himself as a healthcare worker and for his vulnerable patients, but nothing scares him more than possibly bringing home the virus to his two children.

Its incredibly scary because Im a single father, and they have no choice but to be with me, so whatever I come home with, theyre exposed to, Enis said.

A Google spreadsheet circulating online showed informal requests for almost three dozen medical facilities in the Bay Area, including the University of California San Francisco Medical Center (UCSF), Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health. Each request described items the facilities would accept and how to deliver them.

With California under a stay-at-home order, Paul rallied volunteer sewers to help. She has posted an instructional video on YouTube, provided kits with materials, and coordinated deliveries.

Were all volunteering, and it just shows what a group of concerned citizens can do. Well probably get 100 masks out today, said Paul, whose company, Indigo Handloom, is partnering with community members, including City College of San Franciscos fashion department, to increase mask production.

Anne Cocquyt, 36, in San Francisco, spent the weekend collecting unused and unopened boxes of N95-masks for nurses at Kaiser. She said she felt compelled to help after hearing reports on social media that nurses were cutting up plastic bottles to use as face shields.

Thats when we said 'OK, we need to do something right now,'" Cocquyt said. "This is a drop in the bucket but at the same time this might be one days worth of supplies for the nurses in the ER."

In a statement, Kaiser Permanente said it was working to increase its supply of protective gear as quickly as possible and develop a process to efficiently collect, inventory, inspect, and distribute these donations.

UCSF, meanwhile, set up three donation sites that opened on Monday. A statement called the donations critical for frontline employees.
Researchers found out that COVID-19 is changing its genetic make-up slightly and it also changes small parts of its genetic codes all the time according to a recently published article.

COVID-19 continues to ravage a person's life in almost all parts of the world. At present, there are more than 400,000 cases of individuals who are positive for the virus across the globe and with an increasing death of more than 21,000 according to worldometer.

VIEW OF RESEARCHERS ABOUT THE GENETIC MUTATION OF COVID-19

Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard University, said that the virus in the literal sense is changing genetically. The question that is now asked is whether the genetic mutation of the virus carries more harmful and dangerous effects on humans.

According to Ewan Harrison, a scientific project manager for the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium, viruses mutate naturally as part of their life cycle. This means that COVID-19 is just like any virus where it changes its genetic codes all the time.

COVID-19 is an RNA virus just like flu and measles. This means that a virus like this can be transmitted to another person through droplets or it can be inhaled by others that cause infections.

Harrison added that sometimes viruses make mistakes in their genomes as they replicate themselves. Moreover, this also somehow helped the researchers to trace the pathway of the virus through groups of people.

However, for Vineet Menachery who is a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch that COVID-19 differs from other flu viruses because they proofread their own genomes when they replicate themselves. He said: "They maintain this ability to keep their genome pretty much intact. The mutations that they incorporate are relatively rare."

DOES THE MUTATION CARRY MORE HARMFUL EFFECTS TO HUMANS?

It was clarified by March Lipsitch that there is "no credible evidence of a change in the biology of the virus either for better or for worse."

However, there are researchers also who are on the alert on the mutation of the virus because the changes in the virus might affect a person who is positive for COVID-19. One very significant example of this is that the virus can block parts of a person's immune system and it could hide out in a person's body and establish itself better.

According to Justin Bahl, an Evolutionary Biologist at the University of Georgia, "The viruses themselves are not actually under much pressure to change." This simply means that the virus does not need to become more potent to survive and thrive.

There are still many things that most of us including researchers and scientists do not about this new virus. It is no wonder anymore why there are many researches conducted worldwide about how this virus behaves.

In the meantime, infectious disease experts said that there is nothing to worry about because the mutation of the virus normally happens and there is no credible evidence yet if these changes will either worsen the health status of a person carrying it or not.

Read related articles:
The Cheesecake Factory, a popular US restaurant chain, has informed its landlords that it won't make the April rent because of the coronavirus outbreak.

A letter from David Overton, chairman, founder and CEO of the company which owns and operates 294 restaurants, put landlords on notice that there won't be rent payments made in April.

Overton explains in the letter sent earlier this month that the Calabasas, California,-based chain was forced to close locations as health officials made efforts to slow the spread of the deadly flu-like virus, also known as COVID-19.

The Cheesecake Factory, a popular US restaurant chain, has informed its landlords that it won't make the April rent because of the coronavirus outbreak. Pictured is The Cheesecake Factory location in Hackensack, New Jersey

David Overton, chairman, founder and CEO of the company, says the chain was forced to close locations because of the virus and that other restaurants that stayed open were reduced to delivery and to-go orders (pictured)

Overton (pictured) did not say how many restaurants were closed as efforts were made by health officials across the country to contain the deadly outbreak. Slower restaurant traffic resulting from the outbreak was blamed by the founder for cash flow problems

He fails to disclose how many restaurants were shuttered, but says that the locations that were allowed to stay open continued on with delivery and to-go orders.

That move, however, was unable to stem cash flow problems that resulted from a decrease in customer traffic, he discloses in the letter which was posted online by EATER.

Restaurants around the country are in similar situations, as they have been forced to reduce or end operations because of the coronavirus.

COVID-19 has been confirmed in more than 83,000 people across the country and has been blamed for 1,200 deaths.

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

The company's chief financial officer says the chain was hopeful landlords would show some understanding.

'In these unprecedented times, there are many factors that are changing on a daily basis given governmental regulations and landlord decisions to close properties,' says Matthew Clark in a statement forwarded to DailyMail.com by a company spokeswoman.

The Cheesecake Factory's chief financial officer says the chain was hopeful landlords would show some understanding. Pictured is one of the chain's locations in the Canoga Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California

'We have to take both into consideration in terms of understanding the nature of our rent obligations and with respect to managing our financial position,' Clark says.

'We have very strong, longstanding relationships with our landlords,' he adds. 'We are certain that with their partnership, we will be able to work together to weather this storm in the appropriate manner.'

Other companies that have also said they cannot make the rent or are negotiating with landlords include H&M, Mattress Firm and Subway, reports Yahoo Finance.

Meanwhile, fast-food chains that own the real estate used by their franchisees are giving the business owners a break.

Among them, McDonalds, which is landlord to about 15 per cent of its franchises, is considering lowering rent and other payments.
Prosecutors seek to seize $5 mln assets from ex-Mari El governor accused of bribery

 Official website of the head of Mari El

15:20 26/03/2020

MOSCOW, March 26 (RAPSI)  Prosecutors have filed with court a claim to forfeit assets worth over 370 million rubles (about $5 million) owned by ex-governor of Mari El Republic Leonid Markelov to the state, the press service of the Russian Prosecutor Generals Office reports.

The prosecutors revealed that Markelov, his relatives and organizations under their control owned 33 property items and 11 transport vehicles purchased using illegal income, the statement reads.

In November 2019, a court in Russias Nizhny Novgorod recovered over 2.2 billion rubles (about $34.5 million) from Markelov in favor of the state. The court levied 120 property items, 16 cars, luxury wristwatch worth 1 million rubles, over 8.5 million rubles, $224,000 and 660,000 euros upon a motion filed by prosecutors.

Currently, Markelov is on trial on bribery allegations. Initially, the case against him was to be considered in the Republic of Mari El, but the Supreme Court of Russia changed its territorial jurisdiction and forwarded the case to Nizhny Novgorod.

Investigators believe that Markelov acting as the republics governor received through Kozhanova 235 million rubles from the founder of Akashevskaya factory as a bribe for common protection and assistance in the property payment of funds provided by the state support for development of the agricultural complex.

According to defense lawyer Sergey Sevruk, Markelov is also a defendant in another criminal case over illegal possession of ammunition.

Media also reported that there is the third case against the former official over abuse of power.

Markelov pleads not guilty to all accusations.




Thanks to people hoarding toilet paper during the coronavirus pandemic, some Californians have completely run out of bathroom tissue.

So what do they do when nature calls? They improvise. And that, communities are discovering, can cause problems. Big, stinky, overflowing problems.

HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Live coronavirus updates

In Redding, Calif., wastewater management officials said someone apparently used shredded T-shirts as a toilet paper substitute, according to the Redding Searchlight.

While the soiled rags evidently passed through the sewer line of the persons residence, they snagged on pumps at a lift station on one of citys sewer lines. If workers hadnt taken quick action to clear the clog, a dangerous brown spill might have occurred.

Meanwhile, Napa Sanitation District officials posted a picture Monday on Facebook of hundreds of flushed wet wipes captured by a single screen at the districts pump station in Napa. The district reminded people to flush only toilet paper and human waste down the toilet.

Remember to never flush wipes, paper towels, or tissues because they clog the pipes! Throw all wipes and other materials in the trash can! the post read.

The same goes for sanitary napkins, tampons, and fats or oils.

District officials noted that packaging on many wipes label them as flushable, which is not true. There are no truly flushable wipes, they wrote.

Last week Tony Rubio, district manager for Sanitary District No. 5 in Marin County, told BuzzFeed News that two water sewage system overflows were caused by wet wipes being flushed down the toilet.

NEED TO KNOW: Houston area up to 250+ coronavirus cases

Besides municipal sewage systems, residential sewer lines are often clogged by wipes and other non-toilet paper materials, especially older pipes that havent been cleaned for a while. Sump pumps also can jam on wipes.

When such clogs occur, toilets typically back up and can spill out onto floors, creating a disgusting, noisome and unsanitary mess.

If you don't have toilet paper, wastewater officials ask that you bag waste paper substitutes instead of flushing them.

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

Sign up for 'The Daily' newsletter for the latest on coronavirus here.

---

Mike Moffitt is an SFGATE Digital Reporter. Email: moffitt@sfgate.com. Twitter: @Mike_at_SFGate
Chennai, March 26 : The AIADMK members of Parliament (MPs) and legislative Assembly (MLAs) will donate their March salary to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund to combat coronavirus.

In a statement issued by party coordinator O. Panneerselvam and joint coordinator K. Palaniswami here on Thursday, it was announced the donated amount would be used for coronavirus relief measures.

The AIADMK MPs would allocate Rs 1 crore out of their MP Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS) and the MLAs Rs 25 lakh from their MLA Local Area Development Scheme to the CM fund, it said.
Knesset Speaker and member of caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus Likud Party Yuli Edelstein resigned Wednesday morning. This thoroughly undemocratic manoeuvre comes in the wake of Mondays High Court ruling that he must allow a vote on his replacement.

The opposition Blue and White Party, led by Bennie Gantz, had petitioned the High Court for a ruling, following Edelsteins refusal to convene the Knesset, Israels parliament, to choose a new speaker.

President Reuven Rivlin nominated Gantz to form a government following the third inconclusive election in less than a year. After receiving a bare majority of the 120-seat Knesset votes, he has rebuffed Netanyahus attempt to form a national emergency government under his leadership. It is very unlikely that Gantz can form a government because two members of his own party refuse to form one dependent upon the support of the third largest bloc in the Knesset, the Arab Joint List.

Instead he has, with the support of Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home), sought to take over the speakers office, having won the leadership of several key Knesset committees for his own party and its allies, including the Arab Joint List. His aim is to use his blocs control of the parliamentary process to thwart Netanyahus attempt to secure his political survival by short-circuiting the Knesset and using the coronavirus crisis to establish a dictatorial regime under his leadership.

Gantz and his allies have few substantive political differences with Netanyahu and his far-right allies. He said, The proper functioning of democracy does not limit the [Netanyahus interim] governments actions, rather it gives them validity. As long as these difficult processes are handled properly, we will vote in their favour and give our full support, even if it hurts us politically.

Now that the Knesset committees have been established, the special means that the Shin Bet, Israels internal security agency, plans on using to trace people who had been in contact with coronavirus patients via their cell phones can go ahead. Last week, the High Court ruled, in response to a petition filed by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Arab minority rights group Adalah and attorney Shahar Ben-Meir, that if by noon Tuesday the relevant Knesset committees were not established to oversee these surveillance measures, long used against the Palestinians in the occupied territories without oversight, they had to stop. It also ruled that the police were not allowed to use digital surveillance until further notice.

In announcing his resignation, which comes into effect after 48 hours, Edelstein said the High Courts decision isnt based on the law, but on a radical unilateral interpretation and accused the court of undercutting the foundations of democracy.

He declared, The High Courts decision contradicts the Knesset protocols and is destroying the Knessets functionality and constitutes a blatant and vile meddling of the judicial system in matters which are under the purview of the legislature. This decision causes unprecedented damage to the Knesset and the peoples sovereignty.

He added that his resignation meant that the Knessetin accordance with procedural ruleswould not be able to convene for a vote on a new speaker before Monday.

Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit insisted that Edelstein must obey the courts decision and hold a vote for his replacement. But Eyal Yinon, the Knessets legal advisor, said that the Knesset could not convene before Monday without special instructions from the High Court. He added that the interim speaker, Labour Party leader Amir Peretz, who is allied with the Blue and White Party, could only begin his term on Friday morning.

Edelsteins resignation has stymied parliament and bought time for Netanyahu and Likud. It serves to reduce the amount of time that Gantz of the opposition Blue and White Party has to pass legislation preventing Netanyahu from serving as prime minister while under indictment for corruption, bribery and breach of trust before Gantzs mandate to form a government expires in April.

It also signals open war on the part of Likud and its far-right allies against the judiciary. Netanyahu has long denounced his prosecution for bribery and corruption as an attempted coup aimed at overturning his premiership. His aim is to incite his far-right supporters and encourage them to take to the streets.

Following Edelsteins resignation, a convoy of hundreds of cars and around 1,000 demonstrators travelled to the Knesset to demand the election of a new speaker today. The organisers of the Black Flag protest said, This is not just the test of Israels leaders, but also of the willingness of Israelis to fight for democracy in a time of crisis. As in earlier demonstrations last week and on Monday, the police tried to prevent them from protesting in front of the Knesset.

On Saturday, more than half a million people watched a virtual protest broadcast over Facebook opposing Netanyahus imposition of strict coronavirus regulations, including permitting Israeli security services to track the phones of coronavirus patients, as well as his attempts to cling onto power. Speakers at the online event included former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, former Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin and former Attorney General and Supreme Court Vice President Elyakim Rubinstein. Some 65,000 clicked attending on Facebook, while 597,000 viewed the live broadcast.

This growing constitutional crisis takes place against the backdrop of social and economic tensions that have escalated in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. There are 2,369 confirmed cases, with 39 people in serious condition. Five people have died.

On Wednesday, teachers returned to work after a near-week-long strike. The government had ordered the schools to close and teachers to deliver online lessons from March13. After four days of remote instruction, the Teachers Union announced that their members would stop work because the Finance Ministry had refused to pay them in full for their remote working days, claiming that many teachers, particularly in preschool, were not really working. The government has now agreed to pay them in full and extend the school year by the number of days lost.

Some 573,000 workers have lost their jobs over the past few weeks due to the stay-at-home measures, shuttered businesses and restrictions taken to control the spread of the virus, under conditions where Israels health care system is ill-equipped to cope.

The unemployment rate has soared to 17.6 percent, up from 3.6 percent. This is set to increase as Netanyahu has announced new restrictions banning all except essential workers from moving more than 100 metres from their homes and closing all places of worship. He also indicated that his caretaker government is set to impose a total lockdown, presumably with military and police patrols in the streets, if the measures taken thus far fail to stem the tide, saying yesterday in his daily televised broadcast, Its a matter of a few days.

Israels central bank has stepped in to buy $13.4 billion in government bonds in a desperate effort to support the countrys declining economy. This follows Netanyahus announcement of a $2.8 billion economic package to shore up Israels corporations. While $2.2 billion would go to businesses and an unspecified amount to the aviation industry, just $281 million would go to the health system and a similar amount to stem the spread of the virus. He said that any business hit by the virus could request money from the fund.

In another move aimed at helping business and at the request of the Manufacturers Association of Israel, Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Ophir Akunis has issued a general work permit that extends the legal maximum working day to 14 hours for up to 60 days.
With a health care system thats already stressed and facing a pandemic that will test all its limits, its difficult to think of legislation in the context of normal times. But there will be a day when health care returns to something resembling a pre-coronavirus state. And the virus is providing a daily reminder, in case anyone needed one, of all the ways our current health care system falls short.

Exhibit A is insurance. More than a decade after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, health insurance remains a problem for people who are not covered by employee plans. The state exchange can work well for those who qualify for subsidies, but too many people who fall outside those limits say the only plans available to them are prohibitively expensive and dont cover what they need.

Too many health care plans, both employer-based and privately purchased, function more like catastrophic coverage than health insurance. With high deductibles and premiums, they may keep a person who suffers from a surprise illness or accident from losing everything, but they dont serve to improve their daily health by promoting wellness and prevention.

That needs to change.

Comptroller Kevin Lembo, who knows more about health insurance than maybe anyone else in the state, is again pushing this session a public health insurance option, which would phase in availability in the state employees health insurance plan first for small business and, eventually, everyone in the state. It would limit costs by reducing the huge overhead associated with private plans, and improve outcomes with state oversight.

Gov. Ned Lamont has previously supported versions of a public option, but has changed his mind. The insurance industry, which has shrunk but continues to play a dominant role in Hartford political discussions, is vociferously against the proposal, which would function as a competitor with private plans and, if it works, drive down costs for everyone, whether theyre on the public option or not.

No one is questioning that the obstacles are serious. Wrangling enough votes to get its passed would be hard. Getting enough to overcome a possible veto could be insurmountable.

But lawmakers need to try. Everything is on hold as the state endures a lockdown of indeterminate length to weather the coronavirus threat, but this should give legislators time to consider how important it is that everyone in the state have access to quality, affordable health insurance. The public option is a major step in that direction. Its doable and affordable, and Connecticut could be a trailblazer for the nation. Lawmakers need to make it happen this year.
Saudi Arabia's King Salman on Thursday urged G20 leaders to take "effective and coordinated" action to combat the global crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, and called on them to assist developing nations.

"We must have an effective and coordinated response to this pandemic and restore confidence in the global economy," the king said in his opening remarks as G20 leaders began an emergency online summit.

"It is our responsibility to extend a helping hand to developing countries and least developed countries to enable them to build their capacities and improve their infrastructure to overcome this crisis and its repercussions," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Stocks in the news today: Here is a list of top stocks that are likely to be in focus in Thursday's trading session based on latest developments.

Shopper Stop: Company clarified to the exchanges BSE, NSE that the significant movement in price of its equity shares in the last one month is primarily due to the impact of Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19). The company said there are no other information/announcement that warrants any disclosure under Regulation 30 of the Listing Regulations.

Future Lifestyle Fashions: The company clarified to the exchanges that there is no such information/announcement which needs to be disclosed under regulation 30 of the Listing Regulations. It believes that since the shares of the company are freely traded on the Stock Exchanges, the sharp movement of price of the equity shares during recent past is due to unprecedented market conditions.

NTPC: The company informed BSE and NSE that second unit of 660 MW of Khargone Super Thermal Power Project has been added to installed capacity of company on successful completion of trial operation.

Indiabulls Housing Finance: Company announced that it has made timely payment of interest in respect of the unsecured redeemable non - convertible subordinated debt in the nature of Debentures (NCDs) issued on private placement basis.

Delta Corp: Company board will meet on Saturday, 28 March 2020 to consider the proposal for buy-back of fully paid-up equity shares of face value of Re 1 each of the company. As per the filing, the trading window for trading in the Equity Shares of the Company shall be closed from Wednesday, 25 March 2020 to Monday, 30 March 2020.

Arman Financial Services: The company clarified to the exchanges that its promoter group has not sold or reduced its stake in the company, but here has simply been an internal transfer of stake within the promoter group. As per the filing, 2,48,930 shares (2.94% of the share capital) held by Aakash Patel, Non-Executive Director have been transferred in an equal proportion to Ritaben Patel, Non-executive Director(1,24,465 shares) and Jayendra Patel, Vice Chairman & Managing Director(1,24,465 shares). All three are part of the promoter group and are in the same family, the filing added.

Ramco Industries: Company announced that as a measure of preventing the spread of Virus COVID-19, it has introduced Work from Home policy

Usha Martin: The company has decided to temporarily halt operations at its manufacturing facility situated in the State of Jharkhand with effect from 24th March 2020 until further notice.

CG Power and Industrial Solutions: In view of the outbreak of COVID-19 in India, the company has temporarily shut down all its factories in India.

Ballarpur Industries: Company informed the exchanges BSE and NSE that the manufacturing facility of the company at Yamuna Nagar, Haryana-Unit Shree Gopal has been temporarily closed, as per directives of the Government as a preventive measure against Covid-19 pandemic.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 15:22:43|Editor: huaxia

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by Christopher Guly

OTTAWA, March 25 (Xinhua) -- An emergency meeting of G20 leaders is set to address the human and economic toll taken by the COVID-19 pandemic, and China can play a key role in the discussions at the virtual gathering, according to two former Canadian officials.

"It doesn't have to agree with everything on both the economic and security sides. But on health, everyone should be in the same league, and China has had the experience," said Colin Robertson, who served as a Canadian consul in Hong Kong from 1987 to 1992.

He expressed the belief that China could play an important role in promoting the development of the vaccine and treatment for COVID-19 by sharing its experience on a digital platform that could be accessed by researchers around the world.

"China has the best petri dish, and could produce ventilators and masks for the public good," explained Robertson, vice-president and fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

He said the Group of 20, a global body created in 1999, should focus on healthcare and keeping supply chains for food, water and fuel moving, in collaboration with the World Health Organization.

"The G20 represents two-thirds of the world's population and represents about 80 percent of global economic output -- and these are the countries who should be leading the global effort," said Robertson.

Perrin Beatty, a former Canadian cabinet minister who now serves as president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, welcomed the special G20 meeting on COVID-19.

"This is an international issue," he said in an interview. "This is a war where everyone in the world has a common enemy that's invisible and deadly, and to be successful, we're going to require international collaboration."

Beatty said there is a lot to learn from China, which is ramping up its industrial capabilities as the country returns to work.

"We need supplies -- and there are lessons from what they did and what they did wrong," he said, referring to China's response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
FILE PHOTO: Airbnb logo is seen on a little mini pyramid under the glass Pyramid of the Louvre museum in Paris

By Jane Lanhee Lee

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Airbnb Inc hosts in the United States could get some relief from a $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill that is nearing a vote in Congress, the home-rental startup said on Wednesday.

The travel industry, including Airbnb, has been hard hit as governments worldwide impose restrictions on movement to help slow the spread of the virus, which has infected over 450,000 people across the globe and led to more than 21,000 deaths.

To relieve the economic impact in the United States, a massive federal aid bill that received bipartisan agreement on Wednesday includes temporary unemployment benefits for self-employed and gig workers during the coronavirus crisis.

In an email to Reuters, Airbnb expressed thanks to lawmakers for recognizing those who depend on income earned through renting out short-term accommodation via Airbnb's website.

Under the bill, Airbnb said hosts or hosts with family members diagnosed with COVID-19 - the illness caused by the virus - would be able to apply for unemployment assistance.

Hosts deemed sole proprietors that report Airbnb income would also be eligible for small business loans to cover interest on mortgage payments, rent and utility bills if their business is impacted by the outbreak, Airbnb said.

Hosts who use independent contractors to clean or service properties would also be eligible for those loans to pay workers, the company said.

(Reporting by Jane Lanhee Lee; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman held a press conference at 1pm on Thursday. It is her second address to the media within a matter of a week. The Finance Minister is expected to announce a much-anticipated relief package for the coronavirus-hit economy. In her previous press conference Finance Minister had said that an economic package was being looked at and might be announced sooner than later. Industry leaders and workers are looking up to the package as businesses have taken a severe beating amid the nationwide lockdown, which will be over 20 days from now.

Also read: Covid-19: No regulatory relief; Nirmala Sitharaman instead asks banks to take a hit

Also read: No charge on cash withdrawals from any bank's ATM for 3 months: FM Nirmala Sitharaman

Follow Nirmala Sitharaman press conference updates here:

2:12pm: While DBT transfers will put a lot of pressure on banks, MHA has now announced banking services as essential and will remain operational and will be exempted from the lockdown: FM Sitharaman

2:07pm: Today's measures are aimed at people who are immediate need of food, money and cooking gas, said FM Sitharaman.

2:05pm: These announcements will be implemented immediately, said FM Sitharaman.

2:01pm: Request state governments to utilise district mineral funds for coronavirus testing and medicines: FM Sitharaman

1:58pm: Workers' welfare fund of Rs 31,000 crore to be utilised for construction workers. We plan to direct state governments to help 3.5 crore construction workers to this end: FM Sitharaman

1:53pm: This will benefit 4.8 crore workers -- The PF scheme regulations will be amended because of coronavirus to allow employees to draw non-refundable advance of 75% of amount standing to credit or 3 months wages, whichever is lower: FM Sitharaman

1:50pm: Under PM Gareeb Kalyan, govt will pay the EPF contribution for both employer and employee for the next 3 months. This is for establishments with upto 100 employees where 90 per cent earn less than Rs 15,000 per month: FM Sitharaman

1:48pm: Under National Rural Livelihood Mission scheme collateral loans will be doubled to Rs 20 lakh for women: FM Sitharaman

1:45pm: Ujjwala Scheme women will be given free cylinders for the next 3 months. This will benefit 8.3 crore BPL families: FM Sitharaman

1:44pm: Women Jan Dhan account holders will receive Rs 500 in their accounts so that they can take care of their households. This will happen for the next 3 months: FM

1:42pm: The Finance Minister said that 8.69 crore farmers will be immediately benefited through Direct cash transfers. Installment of Rs 2000 in the first week of April will be transferred.

1:40pm: Per person 5kg rice or 5kg wheat for free for 3 months; 1kg of pulse per household as per to regional preference: FM Sitharaman

1:39pm: Rs 2,000 to be transferred to immediately in first week of April to farmers: FM Sitharaman

1:38pm: Cash transfer to touch upon:

1. Farmer:

2.MNREGA

3.Widows/Pensioners

4. Jan Dhan Yojana

5. Ujwala Scheme

6. Self Help Women Groups

7. Organised Sector Workers (EPFO)/ Construction workers

1:35pm: The Finance Minister announces 5kg of rice or wheat free of cost for the needy.

1:30pm: "No one will go hungry. The PM Gareeb Kalyan Scheme package is worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore": Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman

1:26pm: Finance Minister thanks the front line workers and expresses her gratitude to ASHA workers, doctors, sanitary workers, para-medics. She announces a insurance cover for them of Rs 50 lakh per person.

1:20pm: Govt is working to help those affected, especially migrant workers. We have come with a welfare package to help poor and the ones who need immediate help: FM Sitharaman.

1:15pm: QUICK RECAP -- Rs 15,000 crore to health workers

PM Modi announced Rs 15,000 crore to strengthen the health infrastructure in India. In his address to the nation, PM Modi said that the fund will be used for developing health infrastructure in the country, increasing the number of beds, testing kits, and even training of professionals to combat the disease.

1:05pm: QUICK RECAP -- DBT to construction workers

The Ministry of Labour stated that it would utilise the cess fund of Rs 52,000 crore to provide relief to the construction workers through direct benefit transfer (DBT). There are 3.5 crore construction workers registered with construction welfare boards.

1:00pm: Sonia Gandhi bats for deferring of EMIs

Sonia Gandhi has written to PM Modi urging the government to defer EMIs for 6 months. "Centre might consider deferring all EMIs for 6 months; interest charged by banks for this period may consequently be waived. All loan installment deductions from salaries of government employees may also be deferred for six months," wrote Sonia Gandhi.

12:55pm: QUICK RECAP -- GST filing deadline extended

In her last press conference, the FM announced that the last date for filing GST returns for March, April and May was extended to June 30. The previous date for filing of GST returns was March 31, 2020. The deadline for composition returns on GST was also extended to June 30.

12:50pm: QUICK RECAP -- No charge on ATM transaction

The minister announced in her last press conference that all debit card holders can withdraw cash from any bank free of charge. This was announced as the nation was going under lockdown and people could only withdraw cash from their nearest bank or ATM.

12:48pm: QUICK RECAP -- Income Tax deadline extended

The Finance Minister announced that the income tax filing deadline has been extended due to coronavirus. The deadline which was earlier March 31, will now be June 30.

12:45pm: QUICK RECAP -- PAN-Aadhaar linking deadline extended

In her last press conference, Finance Minister Sitharaman announced a slew of measures to help tackle the coronavirus impact. She extended the linking deadline of PAN and Aadhaar card from March 31 to June 30.

12:40pm: Ministry of Finance announced that the Finance Minister will hold a press conference at 1pm
President Donald Trump on Thursday argued the coronavirus is likely more prevalent than the numbers report because so many people have it but don't go to a doctor.

'It's one thing to have it. It's another thing to die,' the president said at his daily White House coronavirus briefing.

'When I first got involved I was told numbers much higher than the number that seems to be. Remember that people that have it - I just spoke to two people who had but never went to a doctor. They didn't report it. You have thousands and hundreds of thousands of cases like that,' he said.

President Donald Trump argued the coronavirus is likely more prevalent than the numbers report because so many people have it but don't go to a doctor

Dr. Deborah Birx, who is coordinating the day-to-day coronavirus response for the administration, said the prediction models dont match the reality on the ground in countries like China, South Korea or Italy either

The president made his remarks as the United States became the country with the most coronavirus cases in the world with 81,000 infections and more than 1,000 deaths.

Dr. Deborah Birx, who is coordinating the day-to-day coronavirus response for the administration, said the prediction models dont match the reality on the ground in countries like China, South Korea or Italy either  all of which were hard hit by the coronavirus.

We are about five times the size of Italy. If we were Italy and you did all of those divisions, Italy should have close to 400,000 deaths. They are not close to achieving that. These are the kinds ever things we are trying to understand. Models are models. There is enough data now of the real experience with the coronavirus on the ground to make predictions more sound, she said.

New figures released on Thursday show that the U.S. has overtaken China and Italy with the number of confirmed cases in the global pandemic.

Italy is still the hardest hit country in terms of deaths with more than 8,000 fatalities. China, where the pandemic began in December, has recorded more than 3,000 deaths.

The number of coronavirus infections have now topped a half-million worldwide.

But the president argued Thursday that Americans are ready to go back to work.

'We have to get back to work. Our people want to work. They want to go back. They have to go back and we're going to be talking about dates,' he said.

Trump has advocated for a return to normalcy as his original 15 day recommendations - which advised no social gatherings over 10 people and eating take out - to stop the spread of the coronavirus will expire early next week.

The president down played concerns from some medical experts that more time may be needed to ensure the virus has been contained. And he argued that people would still be practicing social distancing and hand washing.

'Maybe people won't be shaking hands anymore,' he said. 'The regular flu would be cut down by quite a bit if we didn't shake hands. You have a lot of deaths with that. When we are open, that doesn't mean you will be stop the guidelines. You will still distance yourself. But the timing is coming.'

The president suggested Easter as a good time to reopen the nation's tanking economy although many medical experts have cautioned that April 12 date may be too soon.

Trump also revealed his administration is working on a new set of guidelines to help the country re-open that would grade every county a high, medium or low risk for coronavirus.

'My administration is working to publish new guidelines for state and local policymakers to use in making decisions about maintaining, increasing, or relaxing social distancing and other mitigation measures they have put in place,' he wrote in a letter to the nation's governors that was released by the White House.

Trump argued that expanding testing capacities would make it easier to help classify hot spot areas for the virus and the data would then be used to classify counties for their risk level.

This will incorporate robust surveillance testing, which allows us to monitor the spread of the virus throughout the country. Using these data-driven criteria, we will suggest guidelines categorizing counties as "high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk,"' he wrote.

Birx said the coronavirus task force was still working on the details, including a timeline for when the risk assessment will be ready.

'Well, we have to get all of our data together. We owe it to the president to make that decision. That's what we are working on right now,' she said at the daily White House briefing.

The president's push comes after the World Health Organization this week predicted a grim outlook for the U.S., saying that the country would quickly become the global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic given the 'very large acceleration' of confirmed infections.

A member of the Brooklyn Hospital Center helps a person who was just tested for COVID-19 put an object in a biohazard bag

New York on Thursday recorded 100 coronavirus deaths in just 24 hours, bringing the state total to 385, as the number of fatal cases across the United States increased to more than 1,000.

New York, which is the epicenter of the US outbreak with 50 percent of the country's total confirmed cases, now as 385 deaths and more than 37,000 infections.

There are 280 deaths in New York City and more than 21,000 infections.

Louisiana is now emerging as the possible next epicenter of the US outbreak after infections rose by 30 percent in 24 hours. That state recorded 1,800 infections and 65 deaths by Thursday. Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans - the area that accounts for about 70 percent of the state's cases - has been blamed for the outbreak there.

New Jersey has 4,400 confirmed cases and 62 deaths, while California has more than 3,000 cases and 67 deaths. Washington state, which was initially the epicenter following an outbreak at a Seattle nursing home, now has 2,600 confirmed cases and 133 deaths.

It comes as new research showed the outbreak could lead to more than 80,000 deaths in the US within the next four months and overwhelm hospital capacity nationally as soon as early April even if social distancing measures are respected.

Forecasters at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington's School of Medicine have predicted that during the epidemic peak - set for some point in April - as many as 2,300 patients could die every day.

This was the case even if the population adhered to strict social distancing measures.

Their predictions came after analyzing the latest COVID-19 data, including hospitalization and mortality rates, as well as patient date in terms of age, gender and pre-existing health problems.

The analysis warned that based on current trends, demand for both ICU beds and ventilators would far exceed capacity for COVID-19 patients as early as the second week of April.

It comes as health care systems in both New York and Europe buckled under the weight of caring for seriously ill victims as officials desperately searched for enough ventilators to keep them alive.

New York City's convention center is now being turned into a temporary hospital and a makeshift morgue was set up outside Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital on Wednesday to cope with a possible surge in victims.

Public health officials in New York hunted down beds and medical equipment and put out a call for more doctors and nurses for fear the number of sick will explode in a matter of weeks, overwhelming hospitals as has happened in Italy and Spain.

In a preview of what might be ahead for the US, Spain has converted hotels into makeshift hospitals and turned an ice rink in Madrid into a temporary morgue. The curve of infections has not slowed in Spain, which now has more than 4,100 deaths, second only to Italy's death toll.

Faced with the exponential spread of the pandemic, the US Senate passed a $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems.

Millions of Americans hoped the measure would give them a lifeline as they lost jobs, income and child care due to the social-distancing rules needed to slow the spread of the virus.

At least 1.5 billion people across the world are now under severe travel restrictions.

But the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, scolded world leaders for wasting precious time in the fight against the virus that has already killed more than 21,000 people, thrown millions out of work and ravaged the world economy.

He called it 'public enemy No. 1.'

Across the US, roughly half of the population have been affected by stay-at-home orders in at least 18 states.

The sweeping orders are aimed at slowing the spread of the pathogen but have upended daily life as schools and businesses shutter indefinitely.
The coronavirus pandemic has caused a global shortage of face masks, pushing people around the world to start making their own.

A Jordanian designer, a Rwandan tailor, and an Italian upholsterer are all offering handmade masks to the public.

Meanwhile, students at a school in Colombia are making their own masks from recycled materials.

View more episodes of Business Insider Today on Facebook.

To make up for the global shortage of medical face masks caused by the coronavirus outbreak, workers in far-flung locations are taking matters into their own hands.

People in Italy  one of the hardest-hit countries by the pandemic  as well as countries that have relatively few cases of the virus, like Jordan, Colombia, and Rwanda, are finding creative solutions to help people secure supplies.

And in some cases, make a fashion statement.

Jordanian designer Samia Alzakleh has been designing bedazzled face masks made with hundreds of Swarovski crystals each. She's sold 60 of the sparkling masks in two weeks.

Jordan had 127 confirmed cases of the coronavirus as of March 24.

"These are not 100% medical. I just wanted to encourage people to wear masks,"she told Reuters. "And for people who like to follow fashion and the latest fashion trends, they can wear them."

Bedazzled face masks made by Jordanian designer Samia Alzakleh.

Reuters

A world away in Soacha, Colombia, students at Julio Cesar Turbay school are also making their own masks in light of the shortage. They use materials like banana leaves, plastic bottles, and newspaper.

Colombia had more than 300 confirmed cases of the virus as of March 24. Masks are especially scarce in the Bogota area, where air pollution runs high.

"As we are a population of limited resources, a vulnerable population here in the outskirts, our boys can't find the masks," Adriana Cubillos, a teacher at the school, told Reuters.

"They are not being sold, and if they are sold, the prices are beyond our budget. That is the reason why we have decided to do this as a didactic element."

Story continues

Masks are also hard to get in Rwanda, where 36 cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed as of March 24.

One tailor in the country's capital of Kigali, Alexander Nshimiyimana, has been making face masks out of traditional fabric called kitenge.

"We are trying to protect ourselves to limit the infection of the people during this virus attack," he told Reuters.

He sells his masks for 50 cents each  a fifth of the market price.

Italians are also finding ways to innovate.

With over 63,000 confirmed cases as of March 24, Italy is the worst-hit country after China.

Rwandan tailor Alexander Nshimiyimana has been making face masks out of traditional kitenge fabric.

Reuters

Adolfo Lettieri, the owner of an upholstery business in Tuscany, turned to mask-making in response to soaring mask prices.

"We started to make these masks out of anger, really, because when we tried to go and buy them, they were charging 15 euros a mask," Lettieri said. "So I decided to make them and give them away for free because this overcharging is something I can't stand."

The team of volunteers makes 1,500 masks a day using upholstery fabrics. Around 100 people line up each afternoon to wait for a free mask.

Healthcare workers around the world still lack access to these critical supplies. According to the World Health Organization, manufacturing of protective equipment would need to increase by 40% in order to meet current global demand.

But Lettieri believes that providing homemade masks for local citizens is also useful.

"I say, better this than nothing," he said. "People turn up and they're using baking paper, shawls, or even scarves, so better my mask than that."

With their entire country on lockdown, Italians have been helping contain the outbreak any way they can.

Maurizio Favilli, a retired tailor and a volunteer at Lettieri's business, said he's happy to put his skills to good use.

"I found out about his initiative and, given my experience, I wanted to make myself useful with the experience I've picked up, even if I am 80 years old," he said.

"I'm happy to be doing this."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Meghan to narrate new Disney film about elephants in first post-royal role (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

The Duchess of Sussex will return to the small screen as the narrator of a new Disney film about a family of elephants and their journey across Africa.

In her first post-royal project, Meghan will lend her voice to Disneynatures Elephant.

It will be available to stream on Disney+ from April 3, three days after she and Harry quit as senior royals.

A trailer for Elephant, posted on the official Disney Twitter account, revealed that it follows one familys extraordinary 1,000 mile journey across Africa on an adventure that will change their lives.

Disney said the film follows African elephant Shani and her son Jomo as their herd make a journey across the Kalahari Desert while led by their great matriarch Gaia.

To celebrate its release, Disneynature and the Disney Conservation Fund will support the wildlife charity Elephants Without Borders, an organisation working in Botswana ensuring people and elephants thrive.

It is understood that Meghan was approached by Elephants filmmakers last summer, who asked if she would consider recording the narration.

The film was announced along with another new documentary called Dolphin Reef, narrated by Hollywood star Natalie Portman, which will also debut on the streaming platform next Friday.

The announcement of Meghans role with Disney comes after video footage emerged of Harry at the premiere of The Lion King in London last July praising her ability to do voiceover work.

Video of the Day

The footage, published by the Mail on Sunday in January, shows the duke and duchess talking to the films director Jon Favreau as well as one of its stars Beyonce and her rapper husband Jay-Z.

Disneynatures Elephant, an Original Movie narrated by Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, starts streaming April 3, only on #DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/RtgymUMSV1  Walt Disney Studios (@DisneyStudios) March 26, 2020

Harry told them: Next time, if anyone needs any extra voiceover work, we can make ourselves available.

Former Suits actress Meghan then said: Thats really why were here  to pitch.

It was the second clip to emerge from that evening in which Harry highlights Meghans abilities as a voiceover artist.

Harry was also filmed chatting to Robert Iger, executive chairman of the Walt Disney Company, during the European premiere and said about Meghan: You do know she does voiceovers?

The Disney boss replied: I did not know that, and the duke went on to say: You seem surprised. Shes really interested.

Meghan and Harry will walk away from the monarchy for a life of personal and financial freedom on March 31, and will no longer be able to use their HRH styles or use Sussex Royal as their brand.
"Even in a best-case scenario," officials are projecting 2,000 people will die from the coronavirus in Santa Clara County over a 12-week period.

The projections were shared by San Jose Deputy City Manager Kip Harkness, who announced them at a city council meeting first reported on by the Mercury News. According the San Jose Office of Emergency Management, 2,000 individuals infected with COVID-19 may die in 12 weeks. If no mitigation measures were taken, that number could have risen to 16,000 in the same time span.

"Even in that best-case scenario, we were looking at the order  in the next 12 weeks  of 2,000 potential deaths directly from COVID-19, Harkness said.

Currently, Santa Clara County has 542 confirmed cases and 19 deaths, but Harkness warned this was almost certainly just a fraction of the infected individuals in the county. Because the county, like many others, has had difficulty obtaining tests, current stats "vastly undercount the number of actual cases."

"Our models suggest that it could be 25 times higher or more than the number of reported cases," Harkness said. "That means we have a false sense of security in terms of thinking, 'Oh, everybody who's tested, those are the only ones who are infected.' There are a large number of us walking around who are infected."

Even using "pretty conservative assumptions about transmission," Harkness said the Office of Emergency Management estimates there are 9,000 to 19,000 cases currently active in Santa Clara County.

"There is widespread infection in the county now," he said.

Where cases have been confirmed in the greater Bay Area:

ALAMEDA COUNTY: 164 confirmed cases, 4 deaths*

Fore more information on Alameda County cases, visit the public health department website.

*Number excludes infected patients in City of Berkeley, which has its own health department and 14 cases.

CONTRA COSTA COUNTY: 131 confirmed cases, 1 death

For more information on Contra Costa County cases, visit the public health department website.

LAKE COUNTY: 0 confirmed cases

For information on Lake County and coronavirus, visit the public health department website.

MARIN COUNTY: 60 confirmed cases

Fore more information on Marin County cases, visit the public health department website.

MONTEREY COUNTY: 24 confirmed cases

For more information on Monterey County cases, visit the public health department website.

NAPA COUNTY: 3 cases

For more information on Napa County cases, visit the public health department website.

SAN BENITO COUNTY: 6 confirmed cases, 1 death

For more information on San Benito County cases, visit the public health department website.

SAN FRANCISCO COUNTY: 223 confirmed cases, 2 deaths

For more information on San Francisco County cases, visit the public health department website.

SAN MATEO COUNTY: 195 confirmed cases, 5 deaths

For more information on San Mateo County cases, visit the public health department website.

SANTA CLARA COUNTY: 459 confirmed cases, 17 deaths

Fore more information on Santa Clara County cases, visit the public health department website.

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY: 32 confirmed cases

For more information on Santa Cruz County cases, visit the public health department website.

SOLANO COUNTY: 31 confirmed cases

For more information on Solano County cases, visit the public health department website.

SONOMA COUNTY: 34 confirmed cases, 1 death

For more information on Sonoma County cases, visit the public health department website.

In California, 67 coronavirus-related deaths have been reported, according to Johns Hopkins University.

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

Sign up for 'The Daily' newsletter for the latest on coronavirus here.

Katie Dowd is a digital editor with SFGATE. Email her: katie.dowd@sfgate.com.
Between 3% and 10% of patients who had recovered in the capital of Hubei have contracted the virus again. The problem of asymptomatics. New case of infection in Wuhan. The Malaysian royals are quarantined. Singapore researchers develop a five-minute test.

Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Between 3% and 10% of patients cured of the coronavirus in Wuhan have contracted the infection again after being discharged.

This is the result of a study conducted by two hospitals in the capital of Hubei, considered the epicenter of the pulmonary epidemic. Doctors from Tongji Hospital, where the virus was identified, claim they found no evidence that these individuals (all asymptomatic) wneinfected other people.

City health authorities say these newly positive patients will be hospitalized only if they exhibit symptoms of the disease. For the others, there is a two-week quarantine.

In China, the problem of asymptomatic patients is emerging, which are not counted in the official estimates. After five days without any new infection, Wuhan has registered a new case. He is a doctor from the city's university hospital: he is thought to have contracted Covid-19 from one of his symptom-free patients.

To date, the number of infected people in China exceeds 81,000, with 3287 deaths. Yesterday there were 67 new cases, all imported from abroad.

The spread of the virus shows no sign of stopping in Asia. In Malaysia, King Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah was placed in quarantine with his wife: seven people on his staff were found positive. There are 1796 people infected in the country; 21 have died.

Singapore researchers are developing a test that can diagnose the disease in five minutes. In the city-state there are 631 recorded cases and only two deaths.

In India there are 649 cases of Covid-19, with 13 deaths. In Delhi 900 people were placed in quarantine after a local clinic doctor was found positive.

In Vietnam, the number of reported infections continues to remain low (141, without any deaths).

In Indonesia there were 105 new cases; 111 in Thailand and 104 in South Korea. Japan is preparing to declare a state of emergency. There are 1313 cases of infection in the Land of the Rising Sun and 45 deaths.
[March 26, 2020] HITN Launches Content and Services to Help Hispanic Families Cope with the Coronavirus Threat

HITN announced that it has launched a full-scale effort to provide Hispanic families with information, resources and services that may help them navigate through the COVID-19 global pandemic. These efforts are led by HITN's health and wellness brand, Vida y Salud, and include information on its website, daily television block, newsletters and social media accounts. In addition, HITN Television is broadcasting special messages and public service announcements throughout its programming. "The most useful and practical thing that we can do as a multimedia company is to raise awareness and provide content and services that help keep our audience and their families safe, informed and even entertained in these difficult times of uncertainty and fear," said Guillermo Sierra, Head of Television and Digital Services at HITN. The first part of the campaign is the adoption of the #YoMeQuedoEnCasa ("I'm staying home") campaign. Through this simple message, adapted from the viral European experience, HITN is continuously reminding viewers that the best way to reduce the transmission of the virus is staying at home and avoiding physical social interaction. To maintain viewers informed about the progression of the emergency, HITN has partnered with The Health Channel (a South Florida PBS service) to produce daily news briefs that are broadcast at the top of the hour, every hour, during primetime. The reports called "Coronavirus en Tiempo Real" (Coronavirus in real-time), are als shared with national Hispanic cable networks Vme and Mexicanal, and through several digital outlets.



The site VidaySalud.com has also created a robust microsite that provides the latest information and recommendations from the CDC about the condition and its management in Spanish-language. The site is complemented by newsletters sent directly to the subscribers' emails and by several daily posts in social media. For Latin America, VidaySalud.com is also offering a free live chat with medical experts and psychologists who provide users with general information that may help them respond about the situation. "HITN has activated all of its digital properties to provide information and guidance during these critical times. Our high levels of reach and position are allowing us to connect with the audience in an active and meaningful way", said Maximiliano Vaccaro, Vice President of Digital Services for HITN.

In addition, HITN.TV, the channel's website, is offering special content dedicated to helping viewers stay active and relaxed while at home or under quarantine, including exercise, yoga, and meditation programs, as well as creative ideas that include activities to do with the whole family without leaving home. "It is quite evident that our viewers have heeded the #YoMeQuedoEnCasa call and are enjoying the high-quality programming HITN offers Hispanic families. This adds up to what we have been observing over the last several months, where the network's numbers have been on a consistent uptrend, week after week out-performing itself, delivering the highest Total day numbers HITN has seen in the history of its measurement, especially during Prime time. With top programs like Al Descubierto, Tesoros de Asia, Mundo Salvaje con Ron Magill, Centro Medico, and Historia de la vida, among many more, Hispanic families continue to prove that HITN is the network of choice for entertaining and educational content in Spanish," said Erika Vogt-Lowell, Director of Programming and Acquisitions for HITN. For more information on HITN's coronavirus campaign visit: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/cbOI8xNA-TlEIfZWJ HITN-TV is a leading Spanish-language media company that offers educational and cultural programming for the whole family. It reaches more than 44 million viewers in the US and Puerto Rico via DIRECTV, DIRECTV NOW, DISH Network, AT&T U-verse TV, Verizon FiOS (News - Alert) TV, Comcast, Charter Spectrum, Mediacom, CenturyLink Prism and Altice. For more information, please visit www.hitn.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005658/en/

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Worsening the problem, most state agencies that handle unemployment claims are operating at historically low funding levels and staffing that are intended to handle a trickle of claims. Just weeks ago, the job market was in the strongest shape it had been in decades.

Kim Boldrini-Sen, 41, has also struggled to even file her claim. She has tried in two states: In Connecticut, where she works as an acupuncturist in a private practice, and in New York, where she lives and has her own acupuncture business.

In Connecticut, she thought her application had been submitted. But when she returned last week to re-file as applicants are required to do each week, she found there was no record of her initial filing. After taking an hour to re-file, she received a pop-up notice that she was ineligible to do so online.

In New York, the state's website repeatedly crashed when she was halfway through filling out her request. When she finally managed to press submit, she received a pop-up saying she had to file over the phone. That hasn't worked well, either.

"I've called at all hours of the day, she said. "That's been my life for a week, and I still can't get through to anyone."
Sen. Chris Van Hollen on Thursday sought to reassure small business owners who already had to lay off their workers about a major facet of the Senate's $2 trillion coronavirus economic stimulus package.

"If you use these funds to rehire those employees ... then you qualify," the Maryland Democrat said on CNBC's "Squawk Box." "There are lots of people who have already had to close their doors since they had no customers walking into their restaurants or bars or whatever."

"They will be eligible and those loans will be forgiven" if the workers are rehired, Van Hollen added.

A key piece of the stimulus package  passed unanimously by the Senate on Wednesday  is the nearly $350 billion fund for small businesses. Businesses with less than 500 employees are eligible for the loans, which can be used for payroll and other expenses, such as insurance premiums and utilities.

Van Hollen noted the forgiveness provision lasts eight weeks from when the loan is approved. That is, the portion of the loan used to cover expenses during those eight weeks is what is eligible for forgiveness.

"That's one area that may well need to be extended depending on what happens with fighting the virus," said Van Hollen, who is on the Senate Budget Committee and the Committee on Appropriations.

The amount of the loan that is eligible to be forgiven depends on the number of workers who are retained or rehired, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The loans will available through the banks and credit unions that already participate in the Small Business Administration's 7(a) program, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Thursday on CNBC's "Fast Money."

"All of the big banks already participate in the 7(a) program," Rubio said.

The bill took the program's "existing infrastructure and repurposed it for the purpose of getting money into the hands of small businesses quickly for payroll," Rubio explained.

Business owners who want to see if they qualify for the loans should begin by contacting their bank, Kevin Kuhlman of the National Federation of Independent Business told CNBC.

The COVID-19 relief legislation is awaiting approval by the House of Representatives and then President Donald Trump. Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicted the House would it approve it Friday in a "strong, bipartisan" vote.

Van Hollen said he thought the legislation wasn't "perfect" but was an overall "good thing for the country."

"And of course, it's an emergency and urgent moment," he added.

 CNBC's Sarah O'Brien and Matthew J. Belvedere contributed to this report.
interposing voices Good morning, everyone. Hi.

sheri fink

So every morning in the Intensive Care Unit at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, the doctors gather for something called morning report.

doctor 1 So now, I want you all to present in a straight, true way 

sheri fink

The people who were on overnight, they stand around and the head doctor is there, and they kind of give a report of what happened. And then, the new doctors who are coming on, they get that information.

doctor 2 Yeah. When she was at rest this morning, she was breathing 23. Shes very comfortable, thumbs up.

sheri fink

They talk about, you know, who was admitted, who got critically ill.

doctor 3 The overnight patient is not doing well. He had to be re-intubated almost immediately.

sheri fink

And one recent morning report was particularly intense.

[music]

doctor OK. All right. OK. Next patient.

sheri fink

There were patients in their 80s and patients in their 30s.

doctor 1 31-year-old female, 30 weeks pregnant, asthma, obesity, admitted to the I.C.U. She was intubated yesterday evening. doctor 2 Jesus. doctor doctor 3 All right. Good. Next.

sheri fink

There were patients from nursing homes and patients who were homeless.

doctor 4 She was intubated overnight. Shes on azithromycin, klonopin, ceftriaxone. doctor OK. Next.

sheri fink

Patients with asthma and diabetes, and patients with no underlying conditions at all.

doctor  male. We just past medical history here for acute hypoxic respiratory failure.

sheri fink

But as the doctors race to get through the cases 

doctor Next patient.

sheri fink

 they all shared a nearly identical description.

doctor 1 He was upgraded from acute hypoxic respiratory failure. doctor 2 OK, next. doctor 3 Male, acute hypoxic respiratory failure secondary to confirmed Covid. doctor 4 All right. Next. doctor 5 Admitted for acute hypoxic respiratory failure with confirmed Covid-19. doctor 6 Next. doctor 7 Male, it looks like acute hypoxic respiratory failure.

sheri fink

Acute hypoxic respiratory failure secondary to Covid-19.

doctor 8 All right. Next.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]

Today: Its been more than a month since the coronavirus descended on New York Citys hospitals and on Brooklyn Medical Center, where the vast majority of patients in critical care have the virus. My colleague, Sheri Fink, followed one doctor through a single day there. Its Wednesday, April 15.

doctor Morning, everybody. [AMBIENT CHATTER] doctor 1 Josh, do you want to spend the  do you mind? This is Sheri. doctor 2 Sure. doctor 1 Shes with The New York Times, and shes gonna spend some time here a little bit. doctor 2 Pleasure. doctor 1 Its up to you. doctor 2 Im fine with  sheri fink Im a physician. doctor 1 A physician and a writer.

sheri fink

So for the past few weeks, Ive been embedded in the Brooklyn Hospital Center.

doctor 1 Im going to finish rounding here, and then Im going to go downstairs and cover SI. doctor 2 OK.

sheri fink

And what Ive been able to see there is incredibly unique  whats happening? What is it like inside a hospital during a pandemic?

dr. josh rosenberg  then well figure out the rest. doctor OK. All right. sheri fink Do you want to give him your mic, or are you willing to wear a mic?

sheri fink

And there was one doctor I met who really embodied that transparency.

dr. josh rosenberg Does it beep every time I say a four-letter word like South Park?

sheri fink

Dr. Josh Rosenberg.

dr. josh rosenberg I am mildly inappropriate. Im just warning you.

sheri fink

An attending physician in the Intensive Care Unit.

sheri fink How are you, Peter? doctor Hi, how are you  dr. josh rosenberg I didnt see you hiding over there, my friend.

sheri fink

There are people from all over the hospital recruited to work in the I.C.U., so its not just, like, I.C.U. doctors and nurses who are used to intensive care treatment, but in fact 

dr. josh rosenberg And shes one of the podiatry residents, so all people who are good with knives and big needles.

sheri fink

When I was there that day, there was a podiatry doctor and two of her residents. Those are doctors who work on the feet.

dr. josh rosenberg No, no, no. What I would like to do is that, as much as possible, were going to try to get all of the Covids on one side, and then the whole area is a dirty area.

sheri fink

And the I.C.U. had actually effectively doubled in size, so it was completely full. And they had to turn to other areas of the hospital to turn them into Intensive Care Units. In fact, a big part of the I.C.U. is now in a place that just a few weeks ago was where patients would come for outpatient chemotherapy treatments. Thats now in I.C.U..

dr. josh rosenberg Frankie, watch out. Dont trip Dont trip Dont trip. Dont trip. Dont trip.

sheri fink

It was also a bit of an obstacle course.

dr. josh rosenberg Dont trip.

sheri fink

There were cords everywhere.

dr. josh rosenberg Please be careful, Do you have gloves?

sheri fink

They had pulled apart the ventilators. They had the control  parts of the ventilators that were helping people breathe, those were in the hallways so that nurses and respiratory therapists didnt have to go in and out as much and expose themselves to risk.

dr. josh rosenberg What? speaker This is a disaster waiting to happen. dr. josh rosenberg Yes and no, though.

sheri fink

And the nurses were doing the same thing with IVs, with the tubing that the medicine flows through. So they had pulled the IV pumps out of the room so that they can not have to go in and out and use up the personal protective equipment.

dr. josh rosenberg Its great. And yeah, I mean, you can trip over it.

sheri fink

You all have to be very careful.

dr. josh rosenberg You just have to be careful. sheri fink Yeah. dr. josh rosenberg Right. Its making the best of what you can do. sheri fink Yeah. dr. josh rosenberg OK, guys, can we start with number two? I appreciate everybody being here and everybodys support massively.

sheri fink

So now, Dr. Rosenberg is taking over for the doctors who were working the night before, and hes beginning to make his rounds.

dr. josh rosenberg Lets start with number two, and then just go around the unit please. All right, so lucky number two.

sheri fink

So nearly all the patients in the I.C.U. are on ventilators.

dr. josh rosenberg So do we have any history of smoking, shisha use, anything like that?

sheri fink

Some have asthma. Some have diabetes.

dr. josh rosenberg All right. What did he do for a living? Occupational exposure?

sheri fink

But a lot of these patients dont have any underlying conditions at all.

dr. josh rosenberg Ill just write  because I mean, listen, on some of these you have a real reason why. You know, they may have bad lungs, and that makes it worse. Sometimes its just the disease, but if theres something we can do to 

sheri fink

So Josh and the other doctors are kind of confounded by some of the patients. They dont understand why, if they dont have a lot of underlying health issues, why their lungs look so bad.

dr. josh rosenberg Crap. Reported any asthma?

sheri fink

And they also just dont have that much to offer.

dr. josh rosenberg OK. So what are we going to do with him? doctor Right now, we are  well, at this point, Im not too sure what we can do with him. We have  we tried to [VOICE FADES]. dr. josh rosenberg So what is he on drug-wise?

sheri fink

So, I mean, for most patients, theyre trying this thing called the Covid cocktail, which is that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Thats that combination the President talks about a lot.

dr. josh rosenberg I dont think its doing much.

sheri fink

But theres really very little evidence, and Dr. Rosenberg in particular is very unsure that those drugs really help.

dr. josh rosenberg Well see about remdesivir, and well see if we get some Covid results and see what we can do.

sheri fink

So they start talking about other possibilities. Theres this experimental drug called remdesivir that you have to apply to the manufacturer for each patient, and they have to meet certain criteria. You have to have a test result. They cant have certain complications.

dr. josh rosenberg How do you guys feel about Kaletra or our other PIs? doctor They dont work at all.

sheri fink

Theres another drug called Kaletra that doctors think might have some effect.

dr. josh rosenberg The datas very  I mean, I think the data is very weak all over the place. Thats the basic problem. So I always look at it as, where are you starting these drugs? Its near the end of a sporting event. Youre down by a lot, and I dont care you throw out there, right? Even freaking Jordan couldnt recover that basketball game outside of Space Jam when youre down by 100 points and starting the fourth quarter. doctor Thats why I dont think we should be giving it to patients who are already near the end.

sheri fink

So they kind of toss this around.

dr. josh rosenberg Yeah. And so we dont know. I mean, thats the point. We really just dont know our data, but like, so looking at this  yeah. So well figure out. Well see if we get the remdesivir, which I doubt well be able to. Well try to get a positive test result. Next. Lets move on along. OK. I.C.U. six. Going for c-section? doctor Supposedly today, yeah.

sheri fink

There was another Covid patient in the Intensive Care Unit on a ventilator, and she was pregnant, which adds a whole layer of complexity.

doctor She needs another dose of decadron, and then  dr. josh rosenberg Decadron? No. Beclomethasone. doctor Oh, sorry. Beclomethasone. Did I say decadron? dr. josh rosenberg Yes.

sheri fink

And they actually decided to deliver the baby by c-section two months before the due date. They had to give a couple of doses of steroid medication to help mature the babys lungs. The whole goal was to save the mothers life, because I think part of it is that it gives more space for the lungs to expand once the baby is taken out.

doctor So if shes going for a c-section then she wont need remdesivir, right? dr. josh rosenberg I have no clue.

sheri fink

So far whats known is it tends to be quite rare that a baby would be born with Covid if the mom has it. At least thats what the early studies say.

dr. josh rosenberg All right. Number four. Number four. How are we doing here?

sheri fink

It might be surprising how enthusiastic Dr. Rosenberg sounds while discussing these patients, but hes leading this team. Hes trying to keep morale up.

dr. josh rosenberg All right. So Im going to stop here and head downstairs. Again, hes going to take six, seven, nine. Thank you. I will circle in with you guys. Good job. doctor Thank you. OK. dr. josh rosenberg Good job. doctor Oh, me?

sheri fink

But actually, when we were going from one part of the I.C.U. to another 

dr. josh rosenberg Lets go downstairs. [SIGHS] I dont like taking the elevators.

sheri fink

He runs into one of his medical students.

sheri fink Hi, guys. dr. josh rosenberg How are you doing, buddy? doctor As best as I can. dr. josh rosenberg One, shouldnt you be home? doctor Yeah. dr. josh rosenberg Shouldnt you be home? doctor My moms here. dr. josh rosenberg Oh, fuck. doctor I know. dr. josh rosenberg Which bed is she in on that side? doctor Shes in 10. dr. josh rosenberg OK. Im rounding her now. doctor OK. May I speak to you at some point today when you have a chance? dr. josh rosenberg Call me at any point. All right? doctor Thanks, Doctor. Appreciate it. dr. josh rosenberg Ill see you later. Call me if you need anything, in all seriousness. You have my cell, right? doctor Yeah. dr. josh rosenberg Perfect. Hes one of our medical students. Hes been here forever. So we sent home all the medical students that rotate with us very early in this crisis, because I kind of looked at this and I said, one, we dont have enough PPE, you know, for all of the medical students that are coming through. And two  you know, I hate to say it like this  like, I dont want to expose them. They have enough time to get the living daylights scared out of them. sheri fink Right. dr. josh rosenberg [LAUGHS] Let them actually be students for a bit.

[music]

[AMBIENT VOICES]

doctor 1 Im going to give myself the option, because its my clinic. doctor 2 OK, because tonight were going to publish the new schedule, OK? dr. josh rosenberg Next patient. Santos. doctor Yeah. So this is our  shes our 54-year-old female, history of hypertension, came here with shortness of breath, fever, is admitted for acute hypoxic  dr. josh rosenberg Shes the mom of our med student, right? doctor Yes. Shes confirmed positive Covid.

sheri fink

And when we get to this medical students mom, things are not looking good.

doctor Her FI, too, has been hovering between 100 to 80. I just want to make sure you know that shes not doing OK. dr. josh rosenberg Shes not doing well. Um, yeah, Ill speak to the son. I know him pretty well. doctor Yeah hes in here always. dr. josh rosenberg Is he the next of kin? Is he the next of kin? Hes the decision maker? doctor Right now he has family 

sheri fink

And Dr. Rosenberg wants to find out, is the son  is the medical student  the one who will be making decisions about her further treatment, about even possibly end of life care.

dr. josh rosenberg But is he giving us consents? doctor Yes. dr. josh rosenberg Or does she have a husband? doctor Yeah, yeah. Hes been giving consent. dr. josh rosenberg This is going to be hard, because he knows. Hes a smart kid.

sheri fink

I mean, to me it sounded like he feels that this medical student, even though hes still a student, is enough of a doctor to understand that the prognosis isnt great  that perhaps his mom has some risk factors for this being more severe, and for her to possibly not make it.

dr. josh rosenberg Hes a good dude. Hes a very sweet man, so well figure it out.

sheri fink

Of course, when its your family member, its not so simple.

dr. josh rosenberg All right. Here.

sheri fink

There are many cases where the doctors and the patients families have very different views of how to proceed with treatment.

dr. josh rosenberg Covid? doctor Acute respiratory  yeah. Well, its pending, but most likely. dr. josh rosenberg OK. So his pulmonary prognosis is horrible, right? doctor Yes. dr. josh rosenberg Hes not getting better. doctor No, hes not. dr. josh rosenberg Blood gas is  doctor Not good enough. dr. josh rosenberg Not good, and hes on 100%. doctor Yes. dr. josh rosenberg So what does the fam want us to do? doctor The family wanted us to continue treatment. They agreed to the NI.

sheri fink

Where the family still wants to press forward with all the intensive care available.

dr. josh rosenberg Right. So how many organ systems do we have down on him? We have our kidneys are down, our respiratory systems down, his cardiovascular is bad. Hes on multi-organ system failure, right? So I have three out of my systems down already. His prognosis at that point, given his disease status, is just poor, unfortunately.

sheri fink

And where the doctors had come to a different conclusion and really felt like there wasnt much hope, and that in fact the goals of care should shift away from trying to extend life and much more toward comfort and end of life  accepting that the patient was likely going to die.

dr. josh rosenberg And I hate to say it like this, but I dont know what Im able really to offer in terms of getting him back to where he was before. [SIGHS] Next.

[music]

doctor

Check vitals from there too 

speaker (on intercom) Attention, please. Attention, please. Code blue, 6B.

sheri fink

Suddenly, we hear this announcement go out over the hospital loudspeaker saying, code blue 

speaker (on intercom) Code blue, 6B. [KNOCKING] doctor Josh?

sheri fink

 which means that somebody needs to be resuscitated, that they are basically dying.

dr. josh rosenberg OK. Its code blue. youre on outreach or RESA? doctor RESA. sheri fink OK. All right. Can we follow you? doctor Yeah.

[music]

[AMBIENT CHATTER]

doctor 1 Covid or non-Covid? doctor 2 No, its not Covid. doctor 3 OK.

sheri fink

So the code blue, it turned out, wasnt for a Covid patient, but for a patient who had other medical problems.

doctor 192. Thats the code for 6A.

sheri fink

And they did CPR, and the patient survived.

doctor I got it. Youre good.

sheri fink

And for me, the moment was really just highlighting the fact that, in a hospital, that that work goes on  that there are all these other patients, too, who have different medical problems, and people are still having other emergencies. So hospitals cant just stop being hospitals for everybody else. I But its hard, because the number of patients with Covid is increasing. Usually, if you have people with a scary, infectious disease you would put them in specific rooms in the hospital, but, of course now theres many more patients than there are isolation rooms. So I think the doctors are very concerned about this possibility that somebody could come into the hospital for something else 

dr. josh rosenberg Shes Covid negative? doctor  and then, you know, catch Covid there. Thats the real worst case scenario. dr. josh rosenberg Shes not a Covid issue? doctor Not really, no. dr. josh rosenberg Lets try to get her the heck out of this unit, please. OK? Get her out.

sheri fink

But of course, one of the big risks is to be a person who is walking into that hospital every day to work there.

dr. josh rosenberg Hello. Dr. Rosenberg speaking. I was paged.

sheri fink

And in fact, at one point 

dr. josh rosenberg Yes, yes, yes.

sheri fink

Dr. Rosenberg gets word that one of his residents 

dr. josh rosenberg He has Covid.

sheri fink

 tested positive for Covid and is in the emergency room downstairs.

dr. josh rosenberg Thanks. All right. Whats up? You have his X-ray up? OK. Ill look at it in two seconds.

sheri fink

Someone pulls up an X-ray of the residents lungs for him to look at, and he peels off his Personal Protective Equipment, which in this case includes his own ski goggles, and he looks at the X-ray. And immediately, the tone shifts.

dr. josh rosenberg Thats shitty. I dont like that. I want him here. He is one to come up. doctor Yeah. Is that a  dr. josh rosenberg He comes right up, because hes high risk for getting intubated. doctor Yeah.

sheri fink

What he sees on the X-ray is something that looks bad to him.

dr. josh rosenberg Thats what Im worried about, because his X-ray looks crappy. doctor You know that he works here, right? Yeah. dr. josh rosenberg No. doctor It was just, like, lets just go back  dr. josh rosenberg Hes one of our surgical residents. Bring him to the I.C.U.. Bring him here. Dont dilly. Dont  doctor No, no, Im not saying that. Im just saying 

sheri fink

I think what was really striking to him, or what sort of, like, shocked him was that this was another doctor.

dr. josh rosenberg That is ours. That is one of us.

sheri fink

And close to his age, and somebody whos been doing the same kind of work that hes doing every day. And I think that shatters that sense of invulnerability.

dr. josh rosenberg This is insanity. For my first day after being back from a week in this crap, holy shit.

sheri fink

I actually found out partway through that day that Dr. Rosenberg, himself, had been out the previous week with symptoms of Covid. He actually didnt get a test until his symptoms had resolved, and it turned out to be negative, but hes pretty sure he had Covid.

dr. josh rosenberg Well, one of the things well discuss that the nurse was telling you, but we need more nurses.

sheri fink

And this is a huge problem. A third of the doctors and nurses were out sick. A number of them had tested positive for Covid and were critically ill. And its not just a problem for this hospital. Its a problem all over New York City, that as the hospitals are overwhelmed with Covid patients, you have high numbers of health staff out sick.

andrew cuomo Good afternoon. Thank you all for taking the time for being here today. As Governor of New York, I am asking health care professionals across the country, if you dont have a health care crisis in your community, please come help us in New York now.

[music]

sheri fink

The day that I was at the hospital, New York Governor Cuomo pleaded for doctors and nurses and health care staff from around the U.S. to come to New York 

andrew cuomo We need relief. We need relief for doctors. We need relief for attendants.

sheri fink

 in part to help fill in for the workers who are falling ill across the state.

andrew cuomo So if youre not busy, come help us please. dr. josh rosenberg Hey. Hey, hes going to be in I.C.U. 12, OK? No, not yet. Theyre about to bring him up shortly, but were getting everything done. I know. I know. Trust me, its freaky. I mean, hes only five years younger than me, you know? Im 45, like half of our patients upstairs. We have 40-year-olds who are intubated. Jesus. Geez. [GROANS] Man, this is brutal. All right, good. I just wanted to let you know where it would be, all right? You got it. Ill speak to you later. Bye. [SIGHS] I am tired. [AMBIENT CHATTER]

michael barbaro

A few days ago, as the daily death toll in New York began to decline, state officials said it appeared that the pandemic was approaching its peak, and that the worst was over. But on Monday, New Yorks daily death toll spiked again to 778. So far, nearly 11,000 people in the state have died from the coronavirus. Among them was the mother of Dr. Rosenbergs medical student, who died the day after Sheri visited the hospital. Well be right back.

[music]

Heres what else you need to know today.

archived recording Well, yesterday, the president at his news conference  and this is his quote  he said, he has the power. He says, when someone is President of the United States, the authority is total, and he said the governors know that. Do you know that? andrew cuomo No. I dont know what the president is talking about, frankly. We have a Constitution. The Constitution 

michael barbaro

On Tuesday, governors on the East and West Coast, led by Andrew Cuomo of New York, rejected President Trumps claim that he has the legal authority to reopen the American economy by himself once he determines that the pandemic is over.

andrew cuomo The federal government does not have absolute power. It says the exact opposite that the president said. It says, that would be a king. We would have had King George Washington. We didnt have King George Washington, and we dont have King Trump. We have President Trump.

michael barbaro

Appearing on NBC and MSNBC, Cuomo said that if Trump prematurely instructed states to end their lockdowns, many governors would disregard the order.

andrew cuomo If he says to me, I declare it open, and that is a public health risk or its reckless with the welfare of the people of my state, I will oppose it. And then, we will have a constitutional crisis like you havent seen in decades where states tell the federal government, were not going to follow your order.

michael barbaro

And 

donald trump As the organizations leading sponsor, the United States has a duty to insist on full accountability.

michael barbaro
The U.S. Space Force emblem as seen on the payload fairing of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket during launch operations for the AEHF-6 military communications satellite in March 2020.

WASHINGTON  The more Americans learn about the U.S. Space Force , the more they'll appreciate it, one of the new military branch's leaders believes.

President Donald Trump established the Space Force on Dec. 20, 2019, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. Since then, the new military branch has been met with not just confusion but sometimes open mockery.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. David Thompson, who also serves as vice commander of the Space Force, wants to counter any misunderstandings about the purpose of the new organization.

Related: Military space  the latest launches, tech and videos

The nation needs a Space Force because so much of our day-to-day lives depends on operations in space, Thompson said, citing the GPS satellites that help us navigate and the satellites that provide us internet service. In order to operate in space "for the nation, for national security, for our forces and perhaps ultimately for civil and economic benefit, we now have to be prepared to do that in the face of threats," he said during the Satellite 2020 conference here earlier this month.

World War II sent combat truly skyward. Over the course of the war, more than 100,000 planes were built, and millions of people enlisted in the armed forces. Americans back then "innately understood what [airplane] power meant to the security of a nation," Thompson said.

In 1947, just after the war ended, the United States established the Air Force as a separate military branch.

There might have been specific questions about the role of airplanes, "but nobody really asked, 'Hey, this Air Force thing, what is it? What do they do? Why in the world do we need airplanes anyway?'" Thompson said.

The same logic should apply to the Space Force, he added.

"You know, we talk about the North Koreans launching suspicious objects in the Korean Peninsula," the lieutenant general said. "The fact that we can provide warning to people that they are coming. People certainly understand that happens, but nobody stops to think, 'Wait; how do we do this?'"

Today, he said, "not enough people innately understand what we already do in space in a military sense." For example, satellites help military vehicles navigate the air and sea. They also help make sure weapons are used correctly and land precisely where they're supposed to, Thompson said.

He also lauded what he called "a burgeoning and blossoming commercial space sector."

Defense needs used to drive technology development; after all, NASA was established as a direct reaction to World War II and the pressures of the Cold War , which was pushing nations to compete over access to space. But about 15 years ago, Thompson said, a switch flipped, and now the commercial sector is developing technologies that the national defense world is paying closing attention to.

"We've now gotten to the point where that ingenuity, that investment, and the applications that have come as a result of that far outstrip anything we ever really thought about in the sense of using it for defense purposes," he said.

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China has recently rolled out a draft of measures aimed at driving the development of the industrial internet and accelerating its integration with other industries.

A welding robot works in an aluminium form company in Yichun, Jiangxi province. (Photo/People's Daily)

The countrys Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released 20 measures to drive the accelerated development of the industrial internet on March 20.

Through these measures, the ministry will boost integrated innovation and application of industrial internet while expediting the construction of new infrastructure. It will also work more quickly to improve security systems, boost the drivers of innovative development, arrange industrial ecosystems, and increase policy support.

Enterprises are encouraged to use industrial internet to share information, technologies, production capacity and orders, and step up efforts to make their industrial equipment cloud-based.

The country will use 5G technology and artificial intelligence to improve the industrial internet infrastructure and speed up the construction of big data centers for its development, according to the ministry.

The construction of big data centers will boost innovative development of industrial internet and help transform the manufacturing industry, said Wang Jian, an academician at the China Academy of Engineering, who is also a chief scientist at the China Academy of Industrial Industry.

Meanwhile, governments of provincial regions, including Guangdong, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, have introduced related policies aimed at supporting the development of the industrial internet industry.

The added value of Chinas industrial internet industry is expected to hit 3.1 trillion yuan in 2020, according to a recent report released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

It is forecast that the sector will account for 2.9 percent of the countrys GDP, and will create more than 2.6 million new jobs this year, the report said.

Experts predicted that industrial internet will become one of the most active areas in the national economy.
The Ebonyi State government says it will close the states borders on Saturday in a bid to prevent the deadly coronavirus from spreading to the state.

Governor David Umahi announced this on Thursday in Abakaliki, the state capital.

Though there has been an outbreak in Nigeria, with 51 confirmed cases and one death recorded so far, Ebonyi State has not recorded any confirmed case.

The governor said the closing of the border to passengers and commuters from Saturday is to protect residents from contracting the virus from people coming from infected states and areas.

He spoke when he led the state Covid-19 Medical team which he is the Chairman to monitor compliance with the state governments orders on safety measures to be adopted by essential services centres in the state.

Addressing staff of Native Kitchen Restaurant, Abakaliki, the governor urged them to be watchful and report any suspect with symptoms of the virus like coughing to government

We are checking for cholera, Lassa Fever, Covid-19. You have to be your neighbours keeper by giving us information. This will help us to protect Ebonyi State, he said.

From Saturday, no one will be allowed to come in or go out. Only vehicles carrying food stuffs, construction materials and medical supplies will be allowed to come in. Only patients going in or out for treatment will be allowed passage.

Mr Umahi also advised the people on safety measures to boost their immunity against the virus.

Try to use hot water, stay out of air conditioner. Avoid cold water, serve hot water and drink hot water. Try garlic and lemon, it is very important. Stay safe you are very important to us, he said.

The governor also visited some major banks in the state including Access, Keystone, FCMB and GTB.

Meanwhile, the state government has warned that any attempt to resist the ban on movement into the state would be severely dealt with by security agencies.

In a statement signed by the Secretary to the State Government, Kenneth Ugbala, the state government said everybody should stay where they are until the virus is contained.

Ebonyi State Government shall from Saturday 28th March 2020, stop all passenger vehicles from entering the State. There will be restriction of passengers/commuters coming in and out of Ebonyi State.

The position of Ebonyi State Government is that everybody should stay where he/she is until this unfortunate scourge of coronavirus is over.

The government would like Ebonyians to inform their family members, visitors, friends and well-wishers to be aware of this directive as there will be no exemption to its enforcement.

Meanwhile, any attempt to violate this directive will be strongly resisted and defaulters will be arraigned before the COVID-19 Examination Room. All entry/exit points, both land and sea in Ebonyi State shall be barricaded.

Given the foregoing, only vehicles on special duties such as vehicles carrying foodstuff, drugs, oil, petroleum and gas as well as construction materials shall be exempted from this directive as long as such drivers are not carrying passengers. Only drivers alone will be allowed with such vehicles on essential services, the statement read.
A controversial tweet by a Jamia Millia Islamia professor stating that he had "failed 15 non-Muslim students" in an exam led to a flurry of criticism, prompting the university to suspend him and order an inquiry against him on Thursday.

Professor Dr Abrar Ahmed, however, said his tweet had been "misunderstood" and he had posted it as a "satire" on how minorities are being "targeted" by the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA).

"All my students r (are) passed except 15 non muslims, who've to re-appear #CAA. If you protest #CAAProtests, I have 55 students in my favour #caasupport. Majority will teach U lesson if protest not ends #riot. Due to #corona your symbols of protest be erased. I wonder why they hate me?" Ahmed said in a tweet on Wednesday.

He later deleted the tweet.

Jamia on Thursday said it had suspended Ahmed for inciting communal disharmony.

"Dr. Abrar Ahmad, Asstt Professor of @jmiu_official tweeted in public domain as to failing 15 non-muslim students in an exam. This is a serious misconduct inciting communal disharmony under CCS CONDUCT RULES. The university suspends him pending inquiry. @DrRPNishank @HRDMinistry," the varsity said in a tweet.

In a social media post, Ahmed said his tweet was "misinterpreted" and "misunderstood".

"It was a Satire, Parody, a co-relation to explain how Minorities are being targeted by CAA and it would as Bad as a teacher saying that all minority students are failed and have to reappear," he said.

He added that no such examination had been conducted during this session and all students had passed in the exams held in the previous semester.

Ahmed said, "The only mistake I have done is to accommodate so many concepts in so less words (Twitter limit), and this Satire or Sarcasm has been taken in sense that was not intended."



He said he has been teaching for over 12 years and no student has ever complained of discrimination against him.

"Now, since university has ordered an enquiry in this issue, everything will be clear soon," he added.

The CAA allows easier citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Parsis and Jains who came to India from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh before 2015 to escape religious persecution there.

Muslim migrants don't figure in this list.

Those opposing the CAA contend that it discriminates on the basis of religion and violates the Constitution. They also allege that the CAA along with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) is intended to target the Muslim community in India.

However, the central government has dismissed the allegations, maintaining that the law is intended to give citizenship to the persecuted minorities from the three neighbouring countries and not to take away anyone's citizenship.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Green TDs are divided over whether the party should enter government with Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.

Party sources say leader Eamon Ryan is in favour of the Greens ultimately doing a deal with the two parties if efforts to form a national unity government fail.

Carlow-Kilkenny TD Malcolm Noonan said if a unity government cannot be formed then "the only realistic scenario for a stable government is Fianna Fail and Fine Gael and I am more than willing to talk to them".

However, a number of new TDs yesterday denied the Greens were open to talks with the parties after a senior party source told the Irish Independent that a coalition with Fine Gael and Fianna Fail cannot be ruled out if a unity government is not possible.

Finance spokesperson Neasa Hourigan said that the Greens want to be in government "but the Covid crisis is not the time for programme for government talks".

"We're focusing all of our energies on putting forward a reasonable and palatable proposal for unity government," she said.

Her view was supported by TDs Roderic O'Gorman and Patrick Costello, who said jointly: "We're asking people to pull together as a country, why aren't politicians doing the same thing?"

Mr Ryan is said to be among those who are enthusiastic to return to Government but he is facing resistance from newer members of the parliamentary party, according to three separate Green Party sources. Mr Ryan did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr Noonan denied there was a split, but acknowledged there was a "difference of opinion and it may be significant".

He said anything negotiated would ultimately have to be voted on by members. "Fine Gael and Fianna Fail is the only option for a stable government. It's bound to be the case there are differences of opinion about the strategy," he said.

It comes as Fianna Fail and Fine Gael began talks on a programme for government yesterday which are expected to last around a fortnight.

The two parties issued a joint statement after what was described as a "productive" meeting. "They both agree the need to form a strong, stable government that will help Ireland recover post-Covid-19. They are working to develop a programme for government that provides stability and majority support in the Dail," the statement said.

Meanwhile, Ceann Comhairle Sean O Fearghail has warned politicians will be unable to pass any new laws after this Sunday, creating a "very serious Constitutional problem".

In an email to Fianna Fail TD Marc MacSharry, Mr O Fearghail confirmed, based on legal advice, that it is not possible for the new Seanad, which will be elected next week, to meet until 11 people are nominated to the upper house by a Taoiseach elected by the current Dail.

"This obviously gives rise to a very serious Constitutional problem: from midnight next Sunday, March 29, 2020, the Houses of the Oireachtas will not be able to pass legislation."

However, senator and former attorney general Michael McDowell said the question of whether or not the Seanad could sit in the absence of the 11 Taoiseach's appointees was considered in 2016 and that legal advice then was that it was capable of meeting and continuing to operate.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar put pressure on the Greens, Independents and small parties to enter government talks.

He said that a new government would need to last for the next four years and have "a stable working majority" that would require at least 10 more TDs in addition to those from Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.
[March 26, 2020] HighByte Raises $875K Pre-Seed Round to Accelerate Growth

PORTLAND, Maine, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- HighByte, an industrial software company, today announced the close of its pre-seed round funded by independent angel investors and early-stage venture capital firms, including Maine Venture Fund and Switzerland-headquartered Momenta Ventures. Funding was received as $625K in convertible debt matched by a $250K long-term, low-interest loan from Maine Technology Institute (MTI). The financing provides HighByte with the capital runway needed for business development activities and additional R&D headcount in 2020. "These are challenging times for our manufacturing community as we start to understand the impact COVID-19 and other global factors will have on safety, productivity, and supply chain," said HighByte CEO Tony Paine. "This makes it more important than ever to find partners who believe in our team, vision, and ability to execute in order to make industrial transformation a reality for our customers. All of our investors bring more than just cash to the table. They are strategic partners who share in our core values of honesty, commitment, and collaboration." To date, HighByte has funded the company through founder contributions and $100K in grants awarded by the aforementioned MTI. In January 2020, the company announced general availability of HighByte Intelligence Hub Version 1.0. HighByte Intelligence Hub is the first DataOps solution purpose-built for industrial environments. DataOps is a new approach to data integration and security that aims to improve data quality, reduce time spent preparing data for analysis, and encourage cross-functional collaboration within data-driven organizations. HighByte Intelligence Hub enables Operations Technology (OT) to securely connect, model, and flow valuable industrial data throughout the enterprise, providing the critical data infrastructure for Industry 4.0. Pre-seed funding will fuel the company's next iteration of product development. "We are hyper-focused on accelerating digital industry disrupters," aid Ken Forster, Momenta's Executive Director. "We're investing in HighByte because we believe the company will help redefine collaboration between OT and IT and bring about the digitalization of traditional operating technology systems. The founders have an intimate knowledge of industrial data from their time at Kepware and have a proven ability to operationalize."



Angel investors include Corson Ellis, previous Founder and Chairman of Kepware and Brett Austin, previous President of Kepware. Kepware sold to PTC, a Boston-based enterprise software company, in January 2016. All HighByte founders are alumni of Kepware, including Tony Paine who served as CEO of Kepware from 2009-2016. "HighByte is an exciting addition to our portfolio as it represents a market and solution offering that are well-positioned for significant growth," said John Burns, Managing Director of Maine Venture Fund. "Innovative technology like HighByte Intelligence Hub will help add high-quality technical jobs to Maine's workforce and contribute to the state's evolving economy."

Complete funding details are available from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Additional Resources Read more about Industrial DataOps

Learn more about the HighByte founding team

View all company and product news About HighByte

HighByte is an industrial software development company in Portland, Maine building solutions that address the data architecture and security challenges created by Industry 4.0. We've developed the first DataOps solution purpose-built to meet the unique requirements of industrial assets, products, and processes at the Edge. Learn more at https://highbyte.com. About Maine Venture Fund

The Maine Venture Fund is an investment fund that focuses exclusively on promising growth companies. The fund considers Maine-based companies in all stages of their life cycle and in almost all industry sectors that can demonstrate potential for significant growth and public benefit. Learn more at https://maineventurefund.com/. About Momenta Ventures

Momenta Ventures is the investment arm of Momenta Partners, Digital Industry Growth Partners. With industry-leading Strategic Advisory, Executive Search, and Investment practices, Momenta accelerates the growth of companies in the industrial ecosystem globally since 2012. For more information, visit http://www.momenta.one, join the @MomentaPartners conversation or contact [email protected]. HighByte is a registered trademark of HighByte, Inc. Media Contact

HighByte

Torey Penrod-Cambra

Chief Marketing Officer

+1 844.328.2677 x701

[email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/highbyte-raises-875k-pre-seed-round-to-accelerate-growth-301030635.html SOURCE HighByte

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SPRINGFIELD  Lawmaking remains on hold in Illinois amid the COVID-19 pandemic as the states Senate and House each canceled next weeks scheduled session Wednesday.

The House was scheduled to be in Tuesday through Friday and the Senate was set to be in Tuesday through Thursday ahead of a scheduled two-week spring break from April 6 until an April 21 return.

For now, we are taking it day by day and urging everyone heed the advice of health care professionals by practicing social distancing, regularly washing hands and avoiding all unneeded travel, Senate President Harmon, D-Oak Park, said in a statement.

A letter to House members from Jessica Basham, chief of staff to House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, said members should be prepared to return to Springfield to address urgent matters, including during the weeks of April 5 and April 12 (the legislative spring break).

The statement from Harmons office said he asked members to keep their calendars clear for possible return dates as well.

Harmons statement also said senators and staff continue to examine legislative and procedural priorities so that when the legislative session resumes, the Senate is prepared to act efficiently and effectively.

We are going to have to figure out what is critical and what is time-sensitive, Harmon said.

Two of the most important matters are a state operating budget and a hospital assessment law update which affects approximately $3.5 billion in federal funding.

Basham said House Democrats will have a conference call Monday on budget-making and the hospital assessment program.

Members should anticipate receiving a status update on these matters during the Monday call, she said, noting discussions on the legislation are ongoing.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker, in a Tuesday briefing on COVID-19, acknowledged that the revenue projections behind his $42 billion budget proposal earlier this year are no longer valid as the economy is rocked by the pandemic.

And of course there are expenditures that were needing to make to save peoples lives, to protect people across the state, Pritzker said. Were going to do what we need to do, theres no question about that. But yes, of course, behind that weve got to look at our budget situation and do whatever we need to do to address it, and then weve got to also consult with the General Assembly on what we will do for next years budget.
Highlights The Redmi K30 4G is said to be axed in favour of a new 5G variant.

Redmi could launch a K30 5G Lite that uses a MediaTek Dimensity 800 chip.

The Redmi K30 4G sells as the Poco X2 in India.

Back in December, Redmi announced the K30 series in China and to keep all kinds of buyers happy, it announced a 4G version alongside the 5G variant. The K30 4G eventually ended up in India under the Poco X2 guise and since then has been acting as Xiaomi's new midrange offering that sits above its popular Redmi Note series. Xiaomi, however, seems to be done with 4G phones in China and if the new rumours are to be taken seriously, it may axe the K30 4G. Following up on that, it may even skip the Redmi Note 9 series as these phones only support 4G networks.

A tipster on Weibo has said that Xiaomi wants to go ahead with 5G-only phones in China and to make that happen, it will axe the existing 4G models. The Redmi K30 4G is the only new model in recent times that did not get the 5G treatment. Hence, Xiaomi might end up axing the Redmi K30 4G in China but it will not let that space go vacant in the highly competitive smartphone space. Instead, Xiaomi will bring a new variant of the K30 in that place.

Expected to be called the Redmi K30 5G Lite or Youth Edition, this variant of the K30 could skip on a few of the features of the regular Redmi K30 5G and might ditch the Qualcomm chips. Rumours of Xiaomi being the first phone maker to release a phone with the MediaTek Dimensity 800 chip and chances are that the K30 Lite could be that phone. The Dimensity 800 supports 5G networks and could help Xiaomi slot the K30 5G Lite under the Snapdragon variant.

The pricing is said to be in the range of $211 to $281, which puts it between the Redmi K30 5G and the Redmi Note series in China. This model will complete Xiaomi's 5G lineup in China, which is extended on the premium ranges with the Redmi K30 Pro 5G and the Mi 10 series phones.

Does this mean the Poco X2, which is just a renamed Redmi K30 4G, is short-lived in India? Xiaomi's arch-rival Realme has already launched 5G phones in the premium segment -- even though India is yet to see glimpses of 5G. Xiaomi may be trying to beat Realme to the budget segments with the K30 5G Lite and it could co-exist in India with the Poco X2.

The Poco X2 is, by all means, one of the most powerful phones in the sub-Rs 20,000 segment and Poco could continue to sell the phone with possible price cuts in the future. The Poco X2 has a few novelties going for it despite being a 4G phone. You get a 120Hz refresh rate 6.67-inch LCD display, a Snapdragon 730G chip, 64-megapixel Sony IMX686 sensor, a 4500mAh battery and support for 33W fast wired charging. The best part is that this starts at Rs 15,999.
China and South Korea, among the countries hit hardest by the coronavirus, have reported large outbreaks in their prisons. China alone has reportedly had 806 cases in five prisons across three provinces. In Spain, where the virus is spreading rapidly, 37 prison workers nationwide and two inmates have been infected. On Tuesday, Spanish authorities confirmed that a 78-year-old inmate had died; the facility where the prisoner was held is now under quarantine.
UN chief calls for ceasefire as Yemen braces for possible COVID-19 outbreak

25 March 2020 - Echoing his 23 March appeal to warring parties across the globe for an immediate ceasefire, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called on those fighting in Yemen to end hostilities and ramp up efforts to counter a potential outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"More than five years of conflict have devastated the lives of tens of millions of Yemenis," the UN chief said in a statement today, adding that an escalation in fighting in the towns of Al Jawf and Ma'rib now threatens to deepen human suffering.

The Secretary-General called on the parties in Yemen to work with his Special Envoy, Martin Griffiths, to achieve a nation-wide de-escalation. He also urged them to make progress on economic and humanitarian measures aimed at alleviating suffering and building confidence, and to resume an inclusive, Yemeni-led political process.

"A political solution is the only way to a comprehensive and sustainable resolution of the conflict in Yemen," stressed the UN chief.

Resurgent violence amid a global pandemic

Yemen has seen a series of fits and starts in efforts to ends its bloody civil conflict, which began in 2015 and has created one of the world's most severe humanitarian crises.

At the close of 2019, Special Envoy Griffiths reported a significant "drop in the tempo of war", including an 80 per cent reduction in airstrikes in some areas. An agreement was also signed unifying divided Government factions.

However, on 12 March, Mr. Griffiths warned the UN Security Council that a fresh escalation in violence once again threatens the quest for a political resolution.

Pointing to the recent military escalation in Al Jawf, he expressed concern about the impact of the violence on the people of that governorate  where thousands of families have been displaced and require shelter and assistance  and cautioned that critical humanitarian measures must not be politicized.

The spike in violence comes as outbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic have appeared in more countries around the globe.

Bracing for possible outbreak

According to a statement by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative in Yemen, Auke Lootsma, Yemen had no cases of COVID-19 as of 17 March.

However, the situation is being recognized as "the largest public health emergency of our time" with economic and social impacts yet to be determined. COVID-19 is quickly showing its impact with a growing number of cases in an increasing number of countries across the region.

In preparation for a possible outbreak, UNDP is working closely with Yemeni authorities as well as local and national implementing partners to ensure adequate contingency measures allowing for the continued delivery of its critical programmes.

"This is an evolving situation  one that requires caution and levelheadedness regarding the health and well-being of staff, partners and Yemeni communities," said the Resident Representative.

Ceasefires needed to combat COVID-19

In his broad appeal to warring parties earlier this week, the Secretary-General emphasized that the world now faces a common enemy  the spreading COVID-19 pandemic, which has now been reported in more than 180 countries.

"It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives," he said.

Senior UN officials have issued specific appeals to warring parties  including those engaged in the nine-year-old conflict in Syria - to silence their weapons and launch an "all-out effort" to counter possible outbreaks of the virus.

The Special Envoy for Yemen echoed those sentiments in a tweet today, stressing that battlefields are dividing Yemen and making it harder to combat potential outbreaks of the pandemic.

"The time to act is now," he said. "I urge the parties to hear [the Secretary-General's] call, work with my office to de-escalate violence nationwide and work together to protect the Yemeni people."

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Life came to a standstill across India following a lockdown announced by PM Modi. (PTI photo)

Ahmedabad: A 70-year-old COVID-19 patient died in Gujarat's Bhavnagar district early Thursday morning, a health department officials said.

With this, the total number of deaths due to coronavirus inthe state has gone up to three, they said.

"The 70-year-old man died at a government hospital in Bhavnagar," state principal secretary (health) Jayanti Ravi said.

Earlier, one patient each from Ahmedabad and Surat had succumbed to the viral infection, she said.

Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 patients in Gujarat rose to 43 with four more coronavirus cases reported in the state during the last 24 hours, a senior health official said on Thursday.

One new case each has been reported from Ahmedabad, Surat, Gandhinagar and Bhavnagar, state principal secretary (health) Jayanti Ravi said in Gandhinagar.

Ahmedabad is on top with 15 cases, followed by Vadodara-eight, Gandhinagar and Surat-seven each, Rajkot-four and Kutch and Bhavnagar-one each.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-25 16:34:17|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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Nepal police personnel are seen with a speaker for announcement of notices in a street in Kathmandu,capital of Nepal, March 26,2020. Nepal on Wednesday confirmed the third infection of the novel coronavirus, the Ministry of Health and Population said. The Nepali government has launched stringent measures, including the week-long lockdown nationwide, closure of all border points, suspension of all international flights and closure of offices except the emergency ones. (Xinhua/Sunil Sharma)

KATHMANDU, March 25 (Xinhua) -- Nepal on Wednesday confirmed a new infection with novel coronavirus (COVID-19), Nepal Ministry of Health and Population said.

It is the third confirmed case of COVID-19 in the Himalayan country after first was identified in late January and second on Monday.

Bikas Devkota, spokesperson at Nepal's Ministry of Health and Population confirmed to Xinhua on Wednesday that the third person, who is taking a medical care in isolation, was found infected with the virus during the slab test. "I have not got other details about the person," he said.

Nepal has relatively low number of confirmed cases, as the Himalayan country has been unable carry out large scale testing. According to the ministry, the country has so far tested 687 samples among which 684 were tested negative.

The Nepali government has launched stringent measures to prevent the spread of the pandemic, including the week-long lockdown nationwide, closure of all border points, suspension of all international flights and closure of offices except the emergency ones.
A couple have been charged after being caught meeting up in a car during Italys lockdown over its coronavirus outbreak.

Officers in the northern Piedmont region found two people in a relationship inside a vehicle together one night this week, despite a ban on leaving the house unless for essential reasons.

They have not understood the rules of love in the time of coronavirus very well, police in Asti said, adding they had been charged for not following Italy's containment measures.

The couple had tried to hide themselves away near a park, local media said.

We are boyfriend and girlfriend, and we havent seen each other for days, they said, according to newspaper La Repubblica.

Italians have been ordered to stay at least a metre away from other people, and to remain at home unless it is necessary to go outside  to buy groceries or go to work, for example  as part of a nationwide lockdown.

Around 110,000 people have been charged by police for ignoring the restrictions since 11 March, the interior ministry has said.

Some priests have reportedly been told off by authorities for still going ahead with funerals during the lockdown.

Italys government said this week it would be tightening up sanctions for those who break the containment rules, raising fines to between 400 (366) to 3,000 (2,745)  up from a maximum of 206 (188).

Meanwhile, if people who have been quarantined after testing positive for coronavirus intentionally violate the total ban on leaving their house, they could face a prison sentence of between one to five years, according to the emergency law-decree.

More than 74,000 people have been infected with the flu-like virus in Italy, according to official figures on Thursday.

Around 7,500 who tested positive have died in the country  more than double the death toll in China, where the disease originated towards the end of last year.

Italy has been in lockdown since 10 March as authorities work to limit the spread of coronavirus.
Wadia Group aviation venture GoAir has written to civil aviation ministry and sector watchdog DGCA, offering its grounded aircraft fleet, cockpit and cabin crew, and airport staff for carrying out emergency services and repatriation of citizens.

Regular passenger air services are suspended in the country till April 14 amid the 21-day nationwide lockdown, which is in place from Tuesday mid-night, as part of the larger efforts of the government to contain COVID-19 (coronavirus), which has wreaked havoc in several developed economies.

This has left the entire fleet of over 650 planes with the domestic air operators grounded, along with huge manpower with no work.

Moreover, stringent border control measures by various countries, including India, to deal with the unprecedented situation has left thousands of people stuck in different territories, and governments are operating special flights to evacuate their stranded citizens.

GoAir has reached out to the civil aviation ministry and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and offered its services in the wake of a complete lockdown across the nation, the airline said in a statement to PTI on Thursday.

The budget carrier's proposal came a day after market leader IndiGo made a similar offer to the government.

"Everyone around the world is facing an unprecedented challenge as we try and battle this global pandemic," it said.

The Mumbai-headquartered passenger air carrier has a workforce of around 5,500 personnel to operate its fleet of 56 planes.

"GoAir airline is fully supportive of the initiatives announced by Prime Minister. In fact, we were the only airline to respond to Prime Minister's call to observe Janata Curfew on March 22 by suspending all our flights on that day. With our state-of-the-art fleet of Airbus A320 aircraft, GoAir is on stand-by for any flight that the government may want us to fly," GoAir Managing Director Jeh Wadia said.

The airline, in the letter, has proposed that it can help in services such as ship cargo on behalf of the government, essential services such as medicines, food grains, ship manpower who would carry out emergency services: doctors, nurses, para medics, relief workers.

Besides it can also help in repatriation of stranded Indian citizens and expats to each other's countries as well as bring back people stuck in various states within the country to their respective places.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
CINCINNATI, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Tultex, an apparel brand under TSC Apparel, is redirecting its efforts to produce face masks for the healthcare industry amid the widespread shortage.

Tultex has a history of adapting its business operations to help the country in uncertain times.

"Since 1935, we have been stepping up to help our country in times of crisis," Debbie Gonzalez, VP of merchandising and brand management at TSC Apparel and Tultex said. "Our brand was an official supplier of sweatshirts to the U.S. Army during World War II. We have always been equipped to produce large quantities of product quickly. In this case, we want to help the healthcare workers in any way we can. We've built our foundation on helping out in times of need, and we're committed to continuing the work we started."

The Tultex Facemask is a reusable multi-ply 30 singles mask made from 100% U.S. cotton and is washable and breathable. Production will begin immediately, and the company believes it will produce 1 million to 2 million masks per week. Tultex will primarily be supporting healthcare professionals, hospitals, nursing homes, and frontline workers. The product will also be available to consumers. These masks are not medical-grade and are not meant to take the place of the N95 masks.

"When we heard the countless stories of healthcare professionals working with patients without masks or desperately trying to reuse them, we knew we had to step in and help," Dave Klotter, CEO of TSC Apparel said. "Our social responsibility is to work to provide solutions and keep our TSC associates working."

Visit the wholesale website www.tscapparel.com or the retail website tultex.com, and check out Tultex on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook (@TultexApparel). To join the Tultex community, visit the Tultex Creators Page.

About Tultex:

For nearly 100 years, Tultex has embodied the American entrepreneurial spirit, building an enduring and dynamic business based on quality, customer service, and innovation.

A pioneer in fleece garments, Tultex, then known as the Sale Knitting Company, provided important support to the armed services during World War II. Afterward, as a new generation went to college in the '50s and '60s, Tultex dressed them for pep rallies and protests. As the country discovered fitness in the '70s, Tultex cheered it on, and in the '80s, '90s and beyond, as the humble sweatshirt became a must-have fashion item, Tultex was at the leading edge. Now in the digital age, Tultex keeps looking forward, wired for global industry but never losing sight of our hometown roots.

Contact: Ardyst Zigler, PR Strategist at Influence & Co.

Phone: (407) 721-0130

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE TSC Apparel

Related Links

http://www.tultex.com


An aviation recruitment agency has been ordered to pay 41,370 compensation to a Human Resources (HR) manager who was found to have been discriminated against on the grounds of gender.

In the case, the Dublin based senior staff member found that on returning to the aviation recruitment company and staff support agency after maternity leave on June 24th 2019, she had been removed from the company's leadership team.

The woman - who joined the company in June 2016 - lodged a discrimination claim at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) and WRC Adjudication Officer, Maire Mulcahy has found that the company failed to return the HR manager to her job or to an equivalent post with the same terms and conditions post maternity leave.

Ms Mulcahy stated that the 41,370 represents six months remuneration in compensation for the distress resulting from the discrimination.

The global aviation company has sites in Dublin, Shannon, China, Japan, Vietnam, London, Spain and the US.

The HR manager stated that pre-maternity leave, she was head of HR, a member of the senior leadership team and responsible for sites at China, Japan, Vietnam, Shannon, Dublin, London, Spain and the USA.

However, after her return from work, a colleague was promoted to the post of HR manager, she was no longer a member of the senior leadership team and was responsible for sites at only Dublin and Shannon.

The complainant told the WRC hearing that she never got the chance to apply for the newly created HR managerial role and that she should have been told about the option to apply for the job.

Ms Mulcahy stated that on the womans return from maternity leave, her role contracted.

Ms Mulcahy stated that the woman lost responsibility for sites outside of Ireland reducing her international reach.

Ms Mulcahy also found that the complainant had been the most senior HR manager in the Dublin office reporting to the MD up until her return from maternity leave.

Ms Mulcahy now found that the complainant no longer occupied the senior position. Now she reported to a new and more senior HR manager appointed above her. I find that the revised role offered a diminished amount of responsibility and influence.

Ms Mulcahy also found that the complainant was denied the opportunity to apply for the newly created HR manager post.

Prior to her maternity leave, the complainant held the most senior position in the HR department.

Ms Mulcahy found that the complainant was not advised of any advertisement, or of the selection process, nor was she invited to compete alongside all-comers for the position.

Ms Mulcahy stated that her candidacy for this position was a foregone conclusion. The MD stated in evidence that she did not possess the skill set for the role. No opportunity was presented to her to argue the contrary.

Ms Mulcahy stated: I cannot conclude that the complainants gender had nothing to do with the respondents exclusion of her from the competitive process established to select a HR manager.

Ms Mulcahy found that the exclusion of the woman from the competitive process is evidence of discrimination on grounds of gender contrary to the provisions of the Employment Equality Acts.

The company stated that it denied that they acted in a discriminatory manner towards the complainant and submitted that she got her same job back.
In a bizarre incident, a young woman in Kolkata licked the uniform of a police man on Wednesday after he stopped her car during the ongoing lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

A video of the incident that has gone viral showed the policeman stopping a vehicle at the PNB Crossing in the Salt Lake area and wanting to know its destination.

Suddenly the woman came out of the car and started abusing the policeman using cuss words. The policeman tried to reason with her and claimed that he was only talking to the driver.

But unwilling to listen, the woman rushed to the policeman and, leaving everybody shocked, licked his uniform. The police alleged that she stained his dress with blood from a boil on her face.

The woman was found shouting in Hindi: "I am unwell. I live alone. If I don't go to the medicine shop, who will get the medicines for me?"

As the policeman seemed in a fix, a man accompanying the woman alighted from the vehicle and tried to calm down the woman.

Police later arrested the woman, her male companion and the driver.
Frontline workers will be honoured on tomorrow night's Late Late Show.

Former Irish rugby captain Brian O'Driscoll and comedian Dara O Briain will be on Skype talking to Ryan Tubridy as well as the cast of Mrs Brown's Boys.

Music will be performed by Hozier who will launch an ISPCC appeal.

Viewers will be asked to join in with a round of applause to thank people trying to stop the spread of Covid-19.

A similar round of applause dedicated to healthcare workers will take place in the Dail this evening.

Earlier this month, similar applause for those on the frontlines have been seen across Spain, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, Israel and other countries.

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As car factories around the world continue to shut down due to the coronavirus, some automakers have shifted to making something else besides automobiles. In order to help health workers and authorities out on the front line, Kia is considering to make face masks.

According to Reuters, the Korean automaker is looking to use its Yancheng plant in China in order to make the face masks. This comes after a spokesperson from Kia stated that the Chinese government encouraged automakers to do so. However, the spokesperson did not mention as to when Kia will begin manufacturing the said face masks, nor how many will they be able to produce.
As people stock up on groceries to get through the current stay-at-home orders because of novel coronavirus, more people are practicing social distancing when heading to the grocery store. Seniors and other vulnerable shoppers are taking advantage of special hours set aside just for them. And some people are avoiding the grocery store altogether by ordering them online for home delivery or curbside pickup.

But concern over how quickly this virus is spreading is raising a new worry: Do we need to sanitize our groceries before putting them away?

While the U.S. Food & Drug Administration says there currently is no evidence of food or food packaging being associated with transmission of COVID-19, some health experts are recommending taking additional precautions with groceries.

Michigan doctor Jeffery VanWingen created a video thats being widely shared showing steps he recommends. They include:

At the store: Wipe down carts and practice social distancing with other shoppers; commit to buying products before picking them up to minimize the number of hands that touch items; and avoid using reusable shopping bags (instead, use bags provided by the store, and dispose of them after youve unloaded them).

At home: Create a sanitized work surface in your kitchen where you can place grocery bags, as well as an additional clean zone where you can put items when theyve been sterilized; wipe down plastic and metal packaging with a disinfectant cleaner; transfer packaged items like bread into new containers; remove and discard exterior cardboard packaging on things like cereal and crackers; wash fruit in soapy water (something you may already be doing to prevent E. coli and salmonella); discard grocery bags and packaging, and reclean surfaces. And, as always, wash your hands.

VanWingen isnt alone in recommending that people take a few extra precautionary steps if they are concerned about the possibility of the spread of germs through groceries.

Consumer Reports has published a list of tips for protecting yourself from coronavirus when shopping for groceries. While they dont meet the surgical standards VanWingen advocates, they seem more attainable.

Wash nonporous containers: Consumer Reports recommends using dish soap on plastic, glass, and metal before putting them away. Soap and water can kill coronavirus because they tear apart the viruss outer barrier.

Wash your hands, counter, and other touched surfaces: Do this after you've put away the groceries. Consumer Reports says using disinfectant isnt necessary unless someone in your household is exhibiting signs of respiratory illness or has been exposed to the virus.

Wash produce with running water: According to Consumer Reports, there is no evidence that washing fruits and vegetables with soap does a better job of eliminating coronavirus. But rubbing produce under running water  and taking the extra effort to scrub hard skins on things like carrots and potatoes  can help remove pesticides.

-- Grant Butler

gbutler@oregonian.com

503-221-8566; @grantbutler

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Includes up to $50 billion for passenger airlines and $8 billion for air cargo carriers, half the money specifically for paying workers. $17 billion for businesses critical to maintaining national security." Companies accepting loans may not repurchase outstanding stock or pay dividends until one year after borrowing is repaid; must maintain employment levels they had March 24, 2020, to the extent practicable" through Sept. 30, and not cut jobs by over 10 percent from that level; or give raises to executives earning over $425,000 annually until loan repaid. Companies are not eligible for loans if top Trump administration officials, members of Congress or their families have 20% control.
In 1918, the United States was at war with Germany. That spring, the flu broke out in the U.S. as part of the greatest worldwide flu pandemic ever recorded.

It was called the Spanish flu, but its origin is still under dispute. With all certainly, it didn't start in Spain. It was called the Spanish flu because Spain was neutral during World War I, so flu cases were openly reported in the newspapers, whereas in other countries, such as Britain and Germany, reports were suppressed. Some researchers believed it started in China, others in France, and still others believe it began in Kansas. Nevertheless, it was a new strain that would soon wreak havoc on the world.

Due to the war, one factor that contributed to the spread of the flu was the intermingling of high-risk populations with the general population. The military was particularly prone to the flu because of the crowded living conditions on military bases and the movement of troops between bases and to and-from the battle lines in Europe. In the United States, troops went to towns and cities to march in parades for Liberty Loan drives despite warnings from some physicians that bringing together so many people in one place was "a ready-made inflammable mass for a conflagration." Maintaining wartime morale was judged important so parades continued.

All that crowding and opportunity to spread disease made a difference, and what had been a mild wave of flu in the spring that hit troops and civilians alike became a pandemic in the fall with widespread outbreaks. The Spanish flu had already been reported in mid-September at epidemic levels at several training campus such as Camp Upton in New York, Camp Devens in Massachusetts, Camp Lee in Virginia, Camp Dix in New Jersey, and in the relatively nearby Great Lakes Naval Training Station in North Chicago. But it wasn't until late September 1918, that Camp Custer in Battle Creek became a major outbreak site for the flu in Michigan.

By Sept. 30, when Camp Custer was quarantined, there were 557 cases of flu and two deaths from pneumonia. The next day, there were 20 more deaths with 2,000 cases and 805 hospital admissions. Within a week, there were 169 deaths; 45 deaths of those deaths occurred in 24 hours. One hundred thirty-three nurses began to pour into Camp Custer from Detroit and Ann Arbor, leaving the civilian population with reduced nursing care.

On the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Grace and Herbert Dow's oldest daughter, Helen, lived with her husband, Billy Hale, a chemistry professor, and 9-month-old daughter, Ruth Hale who was born Feb. 22, 1918. To contribute to the war effort, the campus had been taken over by a Student Army Training Corps (SATC) of 3,750 men, all crowded together in fraternity and sorority houses and dorms that had become barracks, with new recruits and officers arriving from Camp Custer.

Flu appeared on the University of Michigan campus among the SATC men by Oct. 4, 1918. Within a few days, there were 85 cases among the soldiers and 38 civilian cases. The soldiers were quarantined, but there wasn't much the medical staff could do to treat the disease. To prevent contagion, the men were confined to quarters and were preventively treated with a nose spray of a 10% solution of argyrols, a supposed anti-microbial made from a silver compound and a wheat protein. This was later shown to have no effect or may have harmed those who were treated. This was before the development of effective anti-viral medicines.

This new flu (identified as H1N1 in the 1990s through historical forensic analysis of gravesites in the permafrost in Alaska and Norway) wasn't the yearly flu with simple high fevers, a cough, and some respiratory distress. In 1918, the sick often died within days from lungs clogged with fluid and massive internal bleeding.

The city leaders were at a loss of what to do, and the Ann Arbor Mayor naively advised citizens to clean up the refuse and leaves in the streets outside their homes in case it might prevent the disease. More helpful was their ban on public assembly at theaters and churches to cut down on one-to-one transmission of the disease. Usually, flu deaths were among the very young and the very old, but with this flu, death came to healthy 20-40-year old patients who developed pneumonia. Doctors had never seen a flu like this. For some, the progress from first feeling sick to death was 24 hours.

With over 1,000 cases in Ann Arbor, flu was everywhere. It demanded round the clock care preparing proper food, chipping ice, changing bedding, and giving sponge baths for its victims. In 1918, many women had registered to help with the home front war effort as part of the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense. Calls went out for those women who could nurse since there were few nurses left in Ann Arbor. It is unknown if Helen had volunteered to nurse them, her family, or some of her neighbors. Two young chemistry instructors, Loren Adams Colen and Joseph Richtig, colleagues of Billy Hale, died on Oct. 11 and 12. For many, the war had come home.

Helen had the flu by Oct. 13, and Billy Hale telephoned her mother, Grace Dow, on Oct. 15 to find a nurse in Midland since all the local nurses had either gone to Camp Custer or were already engaged. It took all day, but after securing a nurse, Grace was driven to Ann Arbor in three hours in what was normally a six-hour drive with the limited speed of the 1918 automobile and the poor roads of the day. They arrived at 10 p.m. that night, but Helen died on Oct. 16, 1918 at age 24, only a few hours after Grace and the nurse arrived. She was the 10th or 11th person to die in Ann Arbor. As the disease took its course, Helen was one of 59 students and 58 citizens of Ann Arbor who died out of the city's population of 18,000.

Herbert Dow was in Cleveland and got the news by telephone. He was met at the boat in Detroit and hurried to Ann Arbor to accompany Helen's body back to Midland along with Grace, their son Willard, and Dr. Hale on Oct. 17. Her body was brought to the music room at the Dow house for the visitation by the community. The funeral was set for the next day at the home with a service performed by Rev. V. V. Nicholas of the First Presbyterian Church. The Dows had lost another child, Osborn, back in 1902 when he was just a toddler. This was the second time the Dows had a child die.

Throughout Michigan in the same week Helen died, there were about 20,000 cases of Spanish flu among the civilian population. The flu was less serious initially in Midland with about 60 cases reported to the health department by the end of October, but several of the over 200 cases reported in November developed into pneumonia, and some resulted in death.

The local Midland newspaper, the Midland Republican, suggested the early lack of deaths here may have been a result of either the prompt preventative actions taken including banning public assembly and closing schools or (quite seriously) the fact that most of the population is employed in the chemical company which may be a good "disinfectant." Two of the Dow's other daughters, Dorothy and Ruth, got mild cases of the flu, and Dorothy was kept home most of that year from eighth grade just to be safe. However, a spat of later deaths caused schools, churches and theaters to be closed for a second time as the usual disease cycle in civilian populations was six to eight weeks. The Dow's other daughter, Margaret, commented later that due to the flu, they were on vacation more than in school in her first year of high school. The Spanish flu didn't fully subside until the summer of 1919.

The exact number of those impacted worldwide is unknown due to the insufficient medical reporting of the time, but it is believed that one third of the world's population was infected resulting in 50 million deaths with 675,000 of them American citizens. This 2.5% death rate is a significantly higher mortality rate than our yearly flu, which kills about 35,000 people out of 35 million cases in the U.S. with a death rate of about 0.1%. Thankfully, our exponentially better medical care in the 21st century already proved effective in slowing deaths in the most recent major H1N1 outbreak of 2009 from a 1918-descended virus, and one can project it will also help fight the current COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.

This piece was authored by Tawny Ryan Nelb, of the Midland County Historical Society, and Nelb Archival Consulting.
Indonesia has the highest coronavirus death rate in the world - and more than half of the nation's population could be infected before it is brought under control, experts have predicted.

So far, 790 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 throughout Indonesia and 58 have died, meaning the death rate is about 9 per cent.

The World Health Organisation has estimated the worldwide death rate of the infection is about 3 per cent while Australia's rate was just 0.4 per cent.

The Indonesian government has only carried out about 2,000 tests for the respiratory virus on its population of more than 270 million, news.com.au reported.

Researchers believe further testing could reveal that millions of people have been struck down with coronavirus in the coming months.

Immigration officers in Bali have been checking the temperature of foreign tourists before letting them stay in the country

Indonesian medical staff, wearing protective equipment, test for COVID-19 at Patriot stadium

Hadi Susanto, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Essex in England, said 50 per cent of Jakarta's population could be infected within 50 days after the first case was announced by the President on March 2.

'We use Jakarta as a sample with a population of around 10 million. At its peak, the virus could infect 50 percent of the population,' Prof Susanto told local media.

He warned the predictions could be even more dire should the nation choose not to go into a mandatory lockdown.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has ruled out a lockdown because of the strain it would put on the community.

Instead, he has urged everybody to observe safe social distancing measures and stay at home as much as possible.

Tourists departing Bali have been seen wearing protective masks while in the airport before boarding their flights amid the coronavirus pandemic

Volunteers from Indonesia's Red Cross prepare to spray disinfectant at a school closed amid the spread of coronavirus

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

'Researchers usually like their calculations to be correct but in this case we don't want our modelling to be right,' Prof Susanto told The Australian.

'We do not want 1 per cent of 50 per cent of the infected population to die.'

More conservative estimates suggest some 70,000 Indonesians could be struck down by the virus by the end of April.

Disease surveillance and biostatistics researcher Iqbal Ridzi Elyazar from the Eijkman-Oxford Clinical Research Unit calculated the figure by assessing the doubling time for the infection so far.

They compared their own rates to that of Iran and Italy, where the virus spread rapidly, to China and Japan, which had a slower rate of spread.

The infection rate in Indonesia has doubled in the past three days, Mr Elyazar warned.

'The shorter the doubling time, the more dangerous it is,' he said.

An Indonesian bride wearing a face mask is sprayed inside a disinfection chamber on her wedding day on March 25 as the nation's confirmed coronavirus cases soar

Airport officer sprays disinfectant across items in an airport near Jakarta on March 25 as the coronavirus crisis intensifies

'Seventy-one thousand cases might sound scary, but that is what would happen without proper intervention... The President has urged the public to practice social distancing and we hope everyone is listening to him so we can decrease the doubling time.'

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd released a statement about the impact in Indonesia.

'Our friend and neighbour Indonesia, population 275 million, (is) now on the cusp of a full blown coronavirus disaster,' Mr Rudd tweeted.

'This has grave national security implications for both Jakarta and Canberra. This will require solidarity and deeply skilled diplomacy ahead.'

Tourist hotspot, Bali, only has four confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the moment, including a British tourist who died from the infection.

The other cases include a French tourist and two locals who had recently travelled.
By Paul Sandle

LONDON, March 26 (Reuters) - China's Huawei Technologies unveiled its new flagship photography-focused P40 smartphones on Wednesday in an online presentation after the coronavirus scuppered the event it had planned.

Richard Yu, chief executive of Huawei's Consumer Business Group, showed three smartphones in an online broadcast: the P40, P40 Pro and P40 Pro+, which have triple, quad and penta-camera configurations and "overflow" displays that curve over all four edges of the devices.

Huawei has been at the forefront of camera technology, and Yu said the P40 series set the bar higher again, with the largest camera sensor on a smartphone, up to 10 times optical zoom and advanced artificial intelligence.

The company's hardware has won plaudits from critics.

However, European consumers' appetite for its newest smartphones has been dented by shutdowns imposed in many countries to fight the spread of the coronavirus, and by the absence of Google's mobile services on Huawei's new devices following a ban imposed by the United States last year.

The U.S. alleges Huawei is involved in activities that compromise its national security, a charge the company denies.

The coronavirus pandemic has upended forecasts for smartphone sales, with shops closed across Europe and the global economy facing a sharp downturn.

Yu, however, was positive on both fronts.

"I hope the P40 series still can sell very, very well globally," he told reporters by video link.

He said coronavirus was under control in China and Huawei's manufacturing was back up to speed.

"The situation is good; more and more people go back to work and the shopping mall," he said. "Every government can learn from China, so I hope the coronavirus is under control very quickly.

"I am looking forward to that, so I am still positive."

He also said more developers were contributing to Huawei's own ecosystem. "Most of the most popular apps will be integrated with the HMS (Huawei Mobile Services) core and will be in the AppGallery," he said. "That is improving very, very quickly."

Story continues

Huawei still wanted to continue to partner Google, he said, but he added: "There is no other choice, we have to do this."

Forrester analyst Thomas Husson said the P40 smartphones combined best-of-breed hardware technology performance and advanced AI photography software.

But although the company was accelerating its efforts to work with publishers, app developers and brands, it was far from enough yet to convince consumers in Europe that AppGallery was a replacement for the Google Play Store.

And he said it really did not matter how differentiated the product was, the challenge for the coming months would be to adapt to the economy crisis.

"If the Chinese economy is starting to slowly get back to normal, needless to say premium smartphones will not sell well in Q2 and Q3 in most countries," he said.

The P40 and P40 Pro will be available from April 7 in Europe priced at 799 euros and 999 euros respectively, while the P40 Pro+ will follow a couple of months later priced at 1,399 euros. (Reporting by Paul Sandle Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
Australian MP Joins Armenian-Assyrian-Greek Initiative for Genocide Recognition

Australian lawmaker John Alexander (fourth from left) with some of the Joint Justice Initiative advocates. Member of Parliament and Chair of the Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport and Cities, John Alexander has signed an Affirmation of Support joining the Joint Justice Initiative launched by the Armenian-Australian, Assyrian-Australian and Greek-Australian communities.

The Joint Justice Initiative was launched in Canberra last month with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding by the Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC-AU), Assyrian Universal Alliance (AUA) and Australian Hellenic Council (AHC), and calls for national recognition of the 1915 Genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against its Christian Armenian, Assyrian and Greek populations.

Alexander, who is the Federal Member for Bennelong -- the most densely Armenian-populated electorate in Australia, has been a long-standing advocate for Australia's recognition of the Armenian Genocide, speaking on the record on the issue on countless occasions and even visiting the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan last year as part of the first Federal-led Australian Delegation to Armenia and Artsakh.

On that trip, Alexander became the first Federal Australian politician to visit the Armenian Republic of Artsakh.

"Mr. Alexander's record calling for Australia's recognition of the Ottoman Genocide of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks is exemplary, and his backing of our Joint Justice Initiative is a welcome honour for all in our communities," said ANC-AU Executive Director, Haig Kayserian.

On 25th February 2020, over 100 Federal Australian parliamentarians, diplomats, departmental officials, political staffers, academics, media and community leaders were treated to cultural performances, food, wine and brandy, as well as the historic signing of a Memorandum of Understanding, which affirmed that the signatory public affairs representatives of the three communities were jointly committed to seeing Australia recognise the Turkish-committed Genocide against the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian citizens of the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
TORONTO, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cardinal Resources Limited (ASX/TSX: CDV) is pleased to advise that it has received approval for the expansion of the current Mining Licence from 19 km2 to 63 km2, more than tripling the size of the Mining Licence for its world-class Namdini Gold Project in Ghana.

HIGHLIGHTS

Mining Licence increased to a maximum allowable area of 63 km 2 from 19 km 2 for a term of 15 years and is renewable





Expanded Mining Licence allows for further financial optimisation by repositioning infrastructure such as tailings storage facilities, stockpiles and waste dumps





Exploration potential enhanced within expanded area along the Namdini shear to the south

Cardinals Chief Executive Officer / Managing Director, Archie Koimtsidis stated:

It is most pleasing to have the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources and the Minerals Commission of Ghana support our Mining Licence area expansion. The expansion aligns with the Companys plan to not only significantly optimise the location of key infrastructure such as tailings storage facilities, stockpiles and waste dumps but also to further explore financial benefits during the Front-End Engineering and Design (FEED) of the Namdini Project. Further, it allows the Company to expand its exploration activities immediately south of Namdini which has great potential along the southern extension of the Namdini shear.

Namdini Mining Licence

The Minerals Commission of Ghana has approved a significant expansion of the Namdini Mining Licence. The new Mining Licence area covers a total of 63 km2 which is the maximum allowable area (Figure 1).

A Large-Scale Mining License covering the Namdini Mining License was granted to Cardinal Namdini Mining Limited (Cardinal Namdini), a wholly owned subsidiary of Cardinal Resources Limited, by the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources under the Ghanaian Minerals and Mining Act 2006 (Act 703) in 2017.

The Large-Scale Mining Licence originally covered 19km2 in the Dakoto area of the Talensi District in the Upper East Region of Ghana. The expanded Large-Scale Mining Licence now covers 63 km2 (Figure 1) and has been granted for an initial period of 15 years commencing in 2020 and is renewable. The expanded Large-Scale Mining Licence allows Cardinal to optimise and de-risk mine and infrastructure design and optimise financial outcomes as the Company continues to progress the FEED programme.

Cardinal is readying for development of the world-class Namdini Gold Project located in Northern Ghana, subject to concluding project development financing. Once developed, the Namdini Gold Project is expected to produce over 360,000 ounces per annum for the first two years of operation and over the life of mine is expected to produce an average of 287,000 ounces per annum. The Definitive Feasibility Study completed in late 2019, indicated compelling economics, including a post-tax NPV 5 of over US$958 million which is capable of generating over US$1.55 billion in undiscounted project cashflow (assuming a gold price of US$1,550/oz).

Cardinals Project development timetable is outlined below.

Project Development Timeline

Proposed Project Development Schedule (subject to financing*)

Milestone Target timeline Advance Resettlement Action Plan to completion** Q3 2020 Advance Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) to completion Q4 2020 Target production commencement H2 2022

*The Companys proposed project development schedule assumes that the Company is fully funded to proceed throughout and beyond the FEED process into early works and full construction. Whilst the Company is currently engaged in the financing process, the actual development schedule will depend upon the manner and timing of the Companys financing plans as well as any potential delays that may be associated with future Covid-19 disruptions. Dates are therefore indicative only.

**Key milestone in relation to the RAP was achieved with approval from the Minerals Commission of Ghana (MinCom) received. For more information please see ASX/TSX press release dated 11 March 2020.

Figure 1: Namdini Mining Licence

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/316459c7-48c5-4001-893e-7930988035d5

ABOUT CARDINAL

Cardinal Resources Limited (ASX/TSX: CDV) is a West African goldfocused exploration and development Company that holds interests in tenements within Ghana, West Africa.

The Company is focused on the development of the Namdini Project, for which the Company has published a gold Ore Reserve of 5.1Moz (138.6 Mt @ 1.13 g/t Au; 0.5 g/t cutoff), inclusive of 0.4Moz Proved (7.4 Mt @ 1.31 g/t Au; 0.5 g/t cutoff) and 4.7Moz Probable (131.2 Mt @ 1.12 g/t Au; 0.5 g/t cutoff).

The Company announced completion of the Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS), which was released 28 October 2019. The technical report on the Feasibility Study, prepared in accordance with NI 43101 of the Canadian Securities Administrators was issued on SEDAR at www.sedar.com on 28 November 2019.

Cardinal confirms that it is not aware of any new information or data that materially affects the information included in its announcement of the Ore Reserve of 3 April 2019 and its completed Definitive Feasibility Study of 28 October 2019. All material assumptions and technical parameters underpinning this estimate continue to apply and have not materially changed.

This announcement is authorized by the Board of Cardinal Resources Limited

For further information contact:

Archie Koimtsidis Alec Rowlands CEO / MD IR / Corp Dev Cardinal Resources Limited Cardinal Resources Limited P: +61 8 6558 0573 P: +1 647 256 1922 Cannings Purple Andrew Rowell or Peta Baldwin E: arowell@canningspurple.com.au E: pbaldwin@canningspurple.com.au

Competent / Qualified Person Statement

The scientific and technical information in this announcement that relates to Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves at the Namdini Gold Project has been reviewed and approved by Mr. Richard Bray, a Registered Professional Geologist with the Australian Institute of Geoscientists and Mr. Ekow Taylor, a Chartered Professional Geologist with the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. Mr. Bray and Mr. Taylor have more than five years experience relevant to the styles of mineralisation and type of deposits under consideration and to the activity which is being undertaken to qualify as a Competent Person, as defined in the 2012 Edition of the Australasian Code for Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves and as a Qualified Person for the purposes of NI43101. Mr. Bray and Mr. Taylor are fulltime employees of Cardinal and hold equity securities in the Company.

Disclaimer

This ASX / TSX press release has been prepared by Cardinal Resources Limited (ABN: 56 147 325 620) (Cardinal or the Company). Neither the ASX or the TSX, nor their regulation service providers accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

This press release contains summary information about Cardinal, its subsidiaries and their activities, which is current as at the date of this press release. The information in this press release is of a general nature and does not purport to be complete nor does it contain all the information, which a prospective investor may require in evaluating a possible investment in Cardinal.

By its very nature exploration for minerals is a highrisk business and is not suitable for certain investors. Cardinals securities are speculative. Potential investors should consult their stockbroker or financial advisor. There are a number of risks, both specific to Cardinal and of a general nature which may affect the future operating and financial performance of Cardinal and the value of an investment in Cardinal including but not limited to economic conditions, stock market fluctuations, gold price movements, regional infrastructure constraints, timing of approvals from relevant authorities, regulatory risks, operational risks and reliance on key personnel and foreign currency fluctuations.

Except for statutory liability which cannot be excluded and subject to applicable law, each of Cardinals officers, employees and advisors expressly disclaim any responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the material contained in this press release and excludes all liability whatsoever (including in negligence) for any loss or damage which may be suffered by any person as a consequence of any information in this Announcement or any error or omission here from. Except as required by applicable law, the Company is under no obligation to update any person regarding any inaccuracy, omission or change in information in this press release or any other information made available to a person nor any obligation to furnish the person with any further information. Recipients of this press release should make their own independent assessment and determination as to the Companys prospects, its business, assets and liabilities as well as the matters covered in this press release.

Forwardlooking statements

Certain statements contained in this press release, including information as to the future financial or operating performance of Cardinal and its projects may also include statements which are forwardlooking statements that may include, amongst other things, statements regarding targets, anticipated timing of the feasibility study (FS) on the Namdini project, estimates and assumptions in respect of mineral resources and anticipated grades and recovery rates, production and prices, recovery costs and results, capital expenditures and are or may be based on assumptions and estimates related to future technical, economic, market, political, social and other conditions. These forward  looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by Cardinal, are inherently subject to significant technical, business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties and contingencies and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from estimated or anticipated events or results reflected in such forwardlooking statements.

Cardinal disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly or release any revisions to any forwardlooking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, circumstances or results or otherwise after todays date or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, other than required by the Corporations Act and ASX and TSX Listing Rules. The words believe, expect, anticipate, indicate, contemplate, target, plan, intends, continue, budget, estimate, may, will, schedule and similar expressions identify forwardlooking statements.

All forwardlooking statements made in this press release are qualified by the foregoing cautionary statements. Investors are cautioned that forwardlooking statements are not guarantees of future performance and accordingly investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forwardlooking statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein.
Butte-Silver Bow commissioners approved a special loan program Wednesday night that will make $200,000 available to help local businesses weather the financial fallout from the coronavirus.

The program will be administered by the Butte Local Development Corp. and provide loans between $1,000 and $10,000 to local businesses, including bars, restaurants, salons and others, that were forced to close in hopes of curbing the spread of COVID-19.

The council voted 10-0 for the program, which taps the $200,000 from the Butte-Silver Bow Anaconda ARCO Loan Fund. It was established decades ago as part of a settlement with Atlantic Richfield and it currently has $433,000 in it.

The goal of this program is to serve as a gap until business returns to normal and federal stimulus dollars are made available, said BLDC Executive Director Joe Willauer. We are confident that through this partnership we will be able to provide a significant amount of help during these very difficult times."

The loans will be distributed based on a scoring system weighted to businesses most impacted by the pandemic. The money can be spent on payroll, fixed debts, payments to suppliers and other obligations related to the virus, but not on facility upgrades, equipment purchases, debt restructuring, leasehold improvements or business owners personal expenses.

Willauer said applications will likely be accepted through 5 p.m. Monday and after that, a panel will meet electronically to go over applications and make loan decisions. The panel will include two county commissioners, BLDC loan staff and BLDC board members and they will meet electronically in order to observe social-distancing practices.

We want to get these funds to the businesses that have been impacted the most by this emergency, Willauer said. These are going to be incredibly difficult decisions and we want to be fair and equitable with making them. We will be looking at total impact of the emergency, ability to repay funds, impact to employees and additional impacts.

The BLDC will post information about the program through its social media accounts and mailing lists, and a Word application will be available at acombo@bldc.net. There will be an online application form made available as well as a Word copy if needed. It is recommended to utilize the online form.

Willauer said the goal is to have loans approved and disbursed by the end of next week so funds can be put to use immediately. If there is continued demand, he said, county officials and BLDC staff will look for additional funding sources.

Besides loan amounts ranging from $1,000 to $10,000, here are additional details of the loan structure:

Term of loans is 12 to 36 months.

Interest is zero percent for the first six months, 2 percent after that.

Payments would begin to be due in the seventh month and there is no penalty fee for early payment.

There will be no origination, application or administrative fees.

Willauer thanked county officials, commissioners and the BLDC Board of Directors for the new program.

These funds were given to the city in the 80s and thanks to their responsible fiscal management, we are able to have tools to respond rapidly to this unprecedented emergency, he said.

"While we know that these are very challenging times, we know that we will get through this together.

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A government notification in the midst of coronavirus outbreak on Central Vista project, which includes a new Parliament building, on Thursday attracted criticism from Opposition parties, saying the funds for the project should be utilised for tackling the spreading pandemic.

Senior Congress MP Shashi Tharoor described 'Central Vista' project as a "postponable luxury" at this time of crisis while CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury said it was "unconscionable" that the Centre finds its necessary to spend Rs 20,000 crore at this "precise moment".

Follow latest updates on the coronavirus outbreak here

"As an MP, I appeal to the Prime Minister of India to divert the Rs 20,000 crore earmarked for new Parliament building and Central Vista to supplement the Rs 15,000 crore allotted to fight COVID-19, which is merely Rs 20 crore per district. Grand spending on buildings at this time of crisis is a postponable luxury," Tharoor tweeted.

As an MP, I appeal to @PMOIndia to divert the 20,000 Cr earmarked for new Parliament building & Central Vista to supplement the 15,000 allotted to fight #Covid19, which is merely 20 Cr per district. Grand spending on buildings at this time of crisis is a postponable luxury.  Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) March 26, 2020

Yechury said the Central Vista plan must be scrapped, earmarked funds must be transferred to tackle COVID-19 and its impact on the poor. "Unconscionable that the central government finds it necessary to spend Rs 20,000 crore at this precise moment for a new house for the Prime Minister and other beautification schemes," Yechury said.

The Central Vista project includes the construction of a new triangular-shaped Parliament, new residences for the Vice President and Prime Minister and 10 new building blocks to accommodate government offices. The prime minister's residence and office are likely to be shifted near the South Block and the vice-president's new house will be in the vicinity of the North Block.

The project cost is estimated to be Rs 20,000 crore and expected to be finished between 2022 and 2024.

Last week, the government had notified the change of land use of around 90-acre land in Lutyen's Delhi near Parliament House, Rashtrapati Bhavan, North Block and South Block.

Read: Coronavirus India update: State-wise total number of confirmed cases, deaths on March 26

The project had invited criticism from a number of architects, urban planners, historians and conservationists, who said tinkering with the historical buildings was unacceptable and it was a wasteful expenditure. Several have also questioned the lack of transparency around the project.

In a recent meeting with Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, a section of MPs have questioned the project with some saying the design of the new Parliament was not inspiring.

The new Parliament building will have a seating capacity of 900 to 1,200 MPs with computer screens on tables and offices for Union ministers and MPs and is expected to be built by August 2022. The Central Secretariat is likely to be finished by 2024.
Washington

The U.S. government has concluded that retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who vanished more than a decade ago, has died while in the custody of Iran, his family said Wednesday.

Shortly after the family's announcement, President Donald Trump told reporters that "I won't accept that he's dead," even though his own acting national intelligence director appeared to confirm the news with a statement conveying sympathies for the Levinsons.

The family said in a statement posted on Twitter that it had no information about how or when Levinson had died, but that it occurred before the recent coronavirus outbreak. The family said information that U.S. officials had received led them to conclude that he is dead.

U.S. officials communicated the news to Levinson's family in a meeting in Washington in recent weeks, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private encounter. The person said the information about Levinson had come from Iran's foreign minister.

"It is impossible to describe our pain," the family's statement said. "Our family will spend the rest of our lives without the most amazing man, a new reality that is inconceivable to us. His grandchildren will never meet him. They will know him only through the stories we tell them.'

Levinson disappeared on March 9, 2007, when he was scheduled to meet a source on the Iranian island of Kish. For years, U.S. officials would say only that Levinson was working independently on a private investigation.

But a 2013 Associated Press investigation revealed that Levinson had been sent on a mission by CIA analysts who had no authority to run such an operation.

The family said it does not know when or if Levinson's body will be returned for burial.
I dont do many interviews on The Finanser, but had been planning a massive book launch over the next month, touring the world and spending $1000s on media engagement. Ah well. Thats all on hold until this coronavirus thing ends 

Meantime, one of the major sponsors of the book launch is Appian. If you google Appian it says they provide low-code automation software. Whats all that about? To find out, I caught up with Mike Heffner, VP of the Global Financial Services Banking, Capital Markets, and Insurance Industry team at Appian. Heres the low down on low-code.

Chris Skinner: First of all Mike, I want to check in with you during this unprecedented time and ask how you are faring, and how is Appian responding to the Coronavirus outbreak?

Mike Heffner: Thank you, Chris. My family is hunkered down here in Massachusetts, doing well. And Appian, very early on in this crisis took exceptional measures to protect our employees, we are doing well. And, I am so proud to say that we were still able to rally together, in our respective remote work environments, to create a free Coronavirus Response Management application  available for enterprises to request, deploy, and configure in as little as 2 hours. If your readers are interested in learning more, they can do so here: www.appian.com/covid-19-response-management.

Chris Skinner: These are strange and troubling times, but we still have work to do and so welcome Mike to one of my rare Finanser interviews. Rather than talking about the crisis, lets talk about Appian and your business, as I am sure a lot of my readers will be unfamiliar with some of the things you do. For example, I talk a lot about cloud, open banking, kubernetes, AI, DLT, APIs and more TLAs and confusing things, and low-code is a newer catchphrase. Please explain what low-code means?

Mike Heffner: Low-code is much more than a catchphrase, its a new way to make unique software applications.

Appian is helping our clients optimize software development to propel operational efficiency, upgrade legacy systems, and delight their clients with exceptional solutions. What we are really trying to solve for is the delta between the demand for applications and the talent shortage of software developers to match the demand.

So, we pioneered the low-code market  creating a world where you build your applications with a mouse, instead of writing code with a keyboard, line by line.

Every application you build is composed of reusable components. Every data record, interface, business rule, integration, etc. So, with every app you build, it gets faster to build the next one.

Chris: So it seems that low-code is generally making software development fast and easy through packaging code into plug-and-play pieces, or am I being too simplistic?

Mike: Its actually more significant than that. Low-code software development empowers developers by removing impedances and giving them reusable objects, so they can quickly get results, and make changes if necessary. The complexity in traditional software development historically has made it too hard to reverse course. Low-code enables better outcomes. With Appian, you can test, play, learn and adapt. The financial institutions we serve generally have large, geographically distributed teams. low-code is ideal because it makes software development fast and easy to change because its more mobile, more portable to the cloud, more integrated, and more secure.

We have integrated DevOps features like connected dev/test/prod environments and automated object and app comparisons or diffing. We also have an open platform compatible with third party tools, like Jenkins, Git, etc.

Chris: Even so, that description is pretty generic, and as always, Im interested in what this means for banks?

Mike: For years, banks have been hiding behind the complexity of their architecture in an effort to defend the status quo. The truth is, that complexity creates so much opacity that it undermines decision-making and stifles innovation. Low-code provides transparency, giving the radical thinkers the ability, tools and vehicles to minimize technology impedance and foster innovation.

Low-code gives financial institutions speed and power, which is exactly what the banking industry needs to stay relevant with growing pressures from FinTech, RegTech and customer-driven expectations for enhanced services and delivery.

Appians low-code automation platform and solutions are well positioned to deliver value and enable the industry to become more transparent, intelligent, secure, and seamless. We want to enable banks to be able to achieve their vision and in fact talk about this concept of Idea to Application, Faster. Its grounded in reality that too many times in Financial Services great ideas for improved service, more integrated compliance, and streamlined delivery fall victim to legacy barriers and inertia.

Chris: That sounds great, but most banks are still heavily controlled and structured and may want to be agile, but theyre a long way from it. How are banks reacting to the idea of using these concepts?

Mike: Financial services is Appians largest and fastest-growing vertical. Our financial services customers know that they can deliver superior customer experiences, drive operational efficiency, maximize employee productivity, optimize business decisions, master complex compliance requirements, and manage global risk with Appian.

Chris: Can you give me any examples?

Mike: Sure, happy to. Weve got a lot of great customers in financial services: HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Santander, State Street to name a few. Following are a few specific public examples:

Sure, happy to. Weve got a lot of great customers in financial services: HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Santander, State Street to name a few. Following are a few specific public examples:

Addiko Bank reduced SMB lending approval time to from 7 days to 3 days with Appian.

Bank of the West is a great story. Using Appian, they completely transformed their enterprise in just 18 months  from customer onboarding to regulatory compliance while moving the entire organization towards digital.

Allan Gray is a newer customer. They built their client onboarding process on Appians low-code platform with Know Your Customer (KYC) functionality and dramatically reduced the onboarding friction experienced by their clients.

CME Group also uses us extensively, theyve launched 23 different applications to optimize operations across the business reducing the average time to deliver a new product by 80%.

Bendigo Bank also relies on Appian throughout their organization  25 applications deployed in 18 months, across various divisions of the bank including tier-1 mission critical work

UnionBank of the Philippines launched their first fully digital branch  they call it, The ARK  entirely on Appian and they did it in less than 12 months. They have deployed more than 100 applications and accelerated process times by 300% compared to their traditional branches.

FirstBank uses us for AML. We are enabling them to achieve compliance and, also saving them about 1,000 work hours each year.

TPG uses us for deal lifecycle management. We enabled them to automate lots of manual processes, creating greater accuracy and making their employees jobs easier.

Groupama is using Appian to manage the entire lifecycle of its product offerings

Janus Henderson developed an internal business platform that leverages Appian Records to enable investment and operations teams to see the data they need to see, collaborate around it effectively, and take immediate business action across the organization.

The OCC is a great example of the speed you can achieve with Appian. They were able to build 9 mission-critical risk management applications in just 18 months.

Sunsuper built an end-to-end Rollover automation solution in matter of weeks, their process time was reduced from weeks to overnight, resulting in a 50% savings on operational costs

Target Group built its next-generation CRM solution on Appian, reducing customer service processing time by ~80%.

Chris: What does this mean for the old nugget of banks determining whether to build or buy their code?

Mike: Low-code platforms offer a better solution that combines the speed of a packaged application, the uniqueness of custom development, and the power to support even the most complex enterprise use cases. With Appian, you get the best of both worlds, the speed that youre looking for in a packaged application with the flexibility to make it your own, and bring the solution to market, fast. We used to argue about buy vs. build. There were those who advocated build because in theory theyd get exactly what they wanted, which they sometimes did in v1, but it usually wouldnt work that way, based on waterfall development practices, you sort of get what youre looking for. And, in buying something off the shelf, youd bring in a vendor that would show something thats close enough  so, youd take it and adjust your business to fit it, which can be okay, but, often it isnt. In response, you alter the software which puts you off the upgrade path, slowing you down even more. What weve learned is that these packaged solutions are too brittle, and highly cumbersome to install and manage, and they offer zero flexibility to deal with new and emerging needs.

Buy versus build is becoming a legacy concept because of low-code. We enable our financial services customers to deliver a lot more, a lot faster, with far fewer developers. This is changing the whole equation. Building with low-code provides speed and flexibility. It allows banks to create applications that are easily configured and managed, and can scale up or down based on needs and requirements. With Appians low-code automation platform, teams get the power they need to work fast, prove value quickly, and build on success.

Chris: That sounds a bit worrying if youre a developer working for a large bank. Do you think banks will lay off developers en masse as a result of these developments?

Whenever you introduce something new, it creates stress and anxiety of the unknown but, low-code is for developers. They are critical to the low-code vision and to a banks success. Developers should spend their time and their unique talents on driving innovation, not coding the same form or interface over and over. Developers talents are also badly needed to deal with legacy architecture challenges that will continue to persist. Low-code now becomes a tool in their toolkit that enables them to be more productive, by a factor of ten to twenty times, improves business-IT collaboration, and leverages citizen developers,

Developers say the #1 way to help IT and reduce job frustration is faster/easier development tools. Nearly 80% believe that using low-code can free up developer time to work on higher-level projects. And, applications built on low-code platforms are immune to technical debt, saving developers from future frustrations, down the line.

Chris: What about generally for the future? How do you think the development marketplace will be changing over the next decade?

Mike: We are at a very interesting time, decisions we make today will have serious repercussions for our future. Humanity is constantly redefining its relationship with technology. Low-code is poised to move and shift to meet the changing needs. We are hyper-focused on accelerating the impact that our customers can bring to their customers. We believe the best way to do that is to orchestrate workflows across people, bots, and AI. Weve recently introduced Appian RPA, which really rounds out Appians automation stack of unified artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), workflow, business rules, and case management. So, however the development marketplace changes, we provide the right automation technology for the right automation use case.

Chris: And what are Appians immediate plans for the future?

Mike: Following on the success of our Institutional Onboarding solution, we will continue to invest in financial services solutions with a focus on the end-to-end customer lifecycle. Our customers are realizing significant value in terms of pre-defined records and industry-specific out-of-the-box integrations.

Chris: Finally, just so its on the record, you are a lead sponsor of my new book launch. Why?

Mike: Because our mindsets align so well. Youve always written about digital leaders being those who think differently, and not simply digitize old-school business models with digital technology. You advocate looking at technology and trying to work out how it could be used to reach the people who need service most. We at Appian share that vision.

About Michael Heffner

Mike Heffner leads the Global Industry group at Appian. The team is responsible for engaging with customers, partners, and analysts to solve digital transformation challenges in key verticals, including the Public Sector, Life Sciences, Healthcare, Energy, Insurance, Banking, and Capital Markets. Mike brings innovative approaches to problem solving to his role, including extensive leadership experience in operational efficiency, process transformation, and re-engineering. He is a frequent speaker at industry events, and a contributor on thought leadership digital trends and responses. Mikes domain expertise is Financial Services. Prior to Appian, he was Managing Director, Business Transformation at State Street Corporation, held management roles at Charles Schwab & Co., and Accentures Creating-Financial-Markets-Advantage executive group. Mike holds a BSBA in Economics from University of South Carolina, and an MBA from Babson College.

Posted on: March 26, 2020
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Market Introduction:

Baby wipes is a disposable wet wipe/cloth used to clean sensitive skin of infants. Baby wipes are saturated with solutions with gentle cleansing ingredients. They are usually packaged inside plastic cases or a tub to retain the moisture and are present in different packs and styles. Baby wipes are sold in the diaper section in the supermarkets. Dry baby wipes and wet baby wipes are the two available types of the baby wipes. Dry baby wipes are more portable and easy to handle as compared to wet baby wipes. The wet baby wipes are used single time in order to prevent cross-contamination risk. Their application is also widely used by travelers and women worldwide. Moreover, they are used for frugal personal and household uses.

To Get Free Sample Request Visit @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/19711

Market Segmentation:

Baby Wipes market can be segmented on the basis of product type, sales channel, packaging and region.

On the basis of product type, baby wipes market can be segmented into dry and wet baby wipes. Dry baby wipes have excellent absorbency and suitable for hand and face cleaning, patient cleansing and face cleansing while travelling. Whereas wet baby wipes are best used before diapering a baby, patient care and post workout wipe, as it provides excellent cleansing action, in addition moisturize the skin and soothes & prevents dryness after continuous use of wet baby wipes.

On the basis of sales channel, baby wipes market can be segmented into retail sales, departmental stores, medical stores and brand outlets.

On the basis of packaging, baby wipes market can be segmented into plastic cases and a tub in order to retain the moisture.

On the basis of region, Baby Wipes market can be segmented into seven key regions: North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Middle East and Africa and Japan.

Drivers, Restraints, and Trends:

Demand for childcare products, changing lifestyle patterns & emerging travelers, rising population of working women, modernization in healthcare practices, wide use in salon & spas and increasing disposable income fuel the demand for baby wipes. A major contribution of baby wipe goes into the growing birth rates, especially during the early life stage of an infant.

However, the raw material used to make the baby wipes consumes a lot of time to degrade due to presence of plastics and polymers. Hence, posing an environmental threat. Also the preservatives used causes risk of allergy and rashes among the new born.

Although, marketing innovations, upcoming trends by imposing hygienic biodegradable material by vendors and more fragrances are the rising trends which can boost up the market globally.

Regional Outlook:

Overall, growth rates for Baby wipes is slowing after a long expansion period but still the untapped markets are projected to be a potential market in coming years. Purchasing power over a time have increased exponentially in developing countries such as India, China and Brazil. Also increasing globalization, awareness of hygienic practices and higher disposable incomes are contributing towards baby wipes growth.

Due to increased expenditure per child in India, the market is projected to have ambitious projections. Also factors like increasing disposable income and rising hygiene awareness among mothers is contributing towards baby wipes growth.

China has become one of the largest consumer market of baby hygiene products. Whereas, Japan is resulting into low sales of baby hygiene products due to rapid growth in aging population, low birth rate and decreasing personal disposable per capita income.

For More Details and Order Copy of this Report Visit @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/checkout/19711

Key Players:

Major players in the Baby Wipes segment are Jhonson & Jhonson Pvt Ltd, Procter & Gamble Co, The Himalaya Drug Company, Cotton Babies Inc, Babisil Products Ltd, Unicharm Corporation, Kirkland, Moony, Pampers, Medline and Hengan International Group Company Ltd.
SAN FRANCISCO, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Fast , the world's fastest online login and checkout experience, today announced a $20 million Series A funding round led by Stripe, with additional participation from existing investors Index Ventures and Susa Ventures. Fast will use the investment to accelerate the global rollout of Fast Checkout, its universal one-click purchase product for e-commerce, and to further grow its product and engineering teams.

"This funding rapidly accelerates Fast's ability to improve the checkout process for billions of people and businesses around the world," said Fast CEO and Co-Founder Domm Holland. "Now, more than ever, we need to dramatically improve the e-commerce checkout experience, which has remained stagnant for 30 years. We have an even greater commitment to fulfilling our mission of making buying online fast, easy and safe for everyone."

Fast Checkout will launch in the coming weeks and complement Fast Login, Fast's free-to-use one-click login tool. With Fast Checkout, consumers are able to complete purchases with a single click on any browser, platform or device. In 2019, the $3.5 trillion global e-commerce market struggled with shopping cart abandonment for up to 80 percent of potential purchases , largely due to friction during checkout. At the same time, consumers are forced to fill out an average of 23 fields just to make a single online purchase. Fast eliminates the frustration of remembering passwords and inputting payment information. Purchasing once with Fast Checkout enables secure, one-click transactions on all Fast-enabled sites.

"Fast is taking a novel approach to improving the login and checkout process for online businesses," said Jordan Angelos, head of corporate development at Stripe. "We support their vision to remove friction from internet commerce wherever possible."

Fast was co-founded by Holland and COO Allison Barr Allen. Holland is a repeat entrepreneur who has founded and led multiple companies in Australia. Allen previously led global product operations for Uber's Money Team and is an active angel investor.

Holland was driven to create Fast when his son was briefly hospitalized and his wife's grandmother was helping the family by purchasing groceries online. What was meant to be a quick transaction turned into a vexing, time-consuming struggle when Holland's grandmother-in-law couldn't remember her password or reset it. Fast provides the solution for people who are constantly dissatisfied by passwords and poor online shopping experiences.

For more details on Fast, please visit fast.co .

About Fast

Fast's mission is to simplify and speed up life's tasks. Its Fast Login and Fast Checkout products enable a one-click sign-in and purchasing experience that makes it easier for people to buy and merchants to sell. The company's products work on any browser, device or platform to deliver a consistent, stress-free purchasing experience. Fast is entirely consumer-focused and invests heavily in its users' privacy and data security. Headquartered in San Francisco, Fast is a privately held company funded by Stripe, Index Ventures, Susa Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Global Founders Capital and Brian Sugar  who also serves on the board. To learn more, visit fast.co .

Margaret Pack

[email protected]

SOURCE Fast

Related Links

https://www.fast.co


NBC New York

Nearly 100 residents of a nursing home in New Jersey are presumed to have the novel coronavirus after 24 residents tested positive and many others started exhibiting symptoms.

All 94 residents of the St. Josephs Senior Home in Woodbridge were being transported by bus with the help of workers wearing full-body protective gear to a CareOne home roughly 30 miles away on Wednesday.

The hardest part is knowing that they probably dont understand the weight of the problem, so they feel abandoned, Henryka Roman, the daughter of a 94-year-old St. Josephs resident, told The Daily Beast. Her mother, Maria Zygmaniak, tested positive for the coronavirus after exhibiting symptoms such as a fever and cough.

Zygmaniak, who has been a resident at the home for seven years, only speaks Polish. She is in stable condition now, but who knows if she is going to survive this. We are not able to see her, and she probably doesnt understand why we cant see her, Roman said.

Relatives of residents told The Daily Beast that the facility contacted them recently to let them know that someone connected to the home had been admitted to the hospital and had later developed coronavirus symptoms. When that person tested positive, residents and staff in the home were also tested. Its not clear how the first patient contracted the virus.

New Jersey health officials said that many of the residents and roughly a dozen staff members began experiencing flu-like symptoms, leaving only three nuns to care for all of the senior homes residents.

This may result unfortunately and ultimately with the closure of that facility, a facility that has cared for the most vulnerable population in Woodbridge and the surrounding area for decades, said New Jersey Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli.

With the employees ill and now quarantined, and the inability to get the adequate staff to give the residents the care they deserve... thats why I said the ultimate result may be closure, she added.

Story continues

According to an assessment by Medicare, St. Josephs had a five star overall rating with a four star rating for staffing per nursing home resident, which is determined as above average.

One relative, whose 92-year-old mother is a resident at St. Josephs, told The Daily Beast that the home had been phenomenal at dealing with the outbreak and he hoped it didnt shut down permanently.

Theres a reason why they are so highly rated, the relative, who asked for his name to be withheld, said. They are incredibly caring and very good at what they do... I would, in an instant, get my mom back into the facility once it re-opened.

He said his mother had tested positive for coronavirus but was showing no symptoms other than a mild fever, and was in good spirits in hospital. Shes 92 but shes incredibly healthy so Im hoping she will be one of the patients whos fine with this, he said.

To me, the most important thing about this is its just a very clear indication of how incredibly contagious this is, he added.

Woodbridge Township Mayor John McCormac told The Daily Beast that six of the 11 first cases of the virus in Woodbridge were St. Josephs residents. Ultimately, they called the state for help last week, and nurses were assigned there from CareOne this past weekend. They started showing up over the weekend, and as of yesterday the decision was made to close the facility.

Everyone began the monumental task of moving 79 residents on six medical buses, the mayor added. Theres people in wheelchairs and walkers, and they have attachments for IVs. Its an amazing logistical challenge.

Since the coronavirus arrived in the United States, nursing homes have emerged as epicenters of an illness that puts those over the age of 60 at particularly high risk. The Life Care Center in the Kirkland community of Seattle, Washington was the first nursing home to be hit by the crisis, resulting in 35 deaths. Federal investigators found that employees who had the virus continued to show up for work and spread it to residents in other facilities as they helped manage the outbreak, the Associated Press reported.

Nursing homes would always have been ground zero, but given we already have huge staffing shortages, this will be magnified, David Grabowski, a Harvard Medical School professor told the AP, citing a 75 percent staffing shortage in nursing homes nationwide. It could be worse for todays nursing homes than ever.

One Mask Only: Coronavirus Docs and Nurses Forced to Make Terrifying Compromises

The coronavirus has swept through several other facilities in states across the country, including Washington, Illinois, New Jersey, and others. Thirty-three patients and 13 staff members were infected at Chateau Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in nearby Chicago.

Employees of the Illinois facility had reportedly complained about a lack of protective gear and supply shortages amid the outbreak, including a certified nursing assistant, Tonya Davis, who said they gave her just gloves, according to the Chicago Tribune.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy on Wednesday confirmed the states biggest spike in cases over a 24-hour period with 800 new cases, bringing the total to almost 3,700. The death toll from the virus in New Jersey stood at 44 on Wednesday.

I want to give a shout out particularly to CareOne, Murphy said on Tuesday. This started to unfold on Friday night and it was a battle over the whole weekend, he added, referencing the virus-stricken senior home.

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Security at the Indian Embassy in Kabul and consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar has been put on highest alert with Indian and western intelligence confirming that Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) terrorists chose to hit Guru Har Rai Gurdwara at Shor Bazaar due to heavy troop deployment at the Indian mission.

As many as 28 Sikh worshippers have been killed, eight are injured and another 85 were rescued during the shoot-out at the gurdwara, three kilometres away from the Indian mission.

According to information reaching Delhi from Afghan and western security agencies, the strike was ordered by Quetta Shura of Taliban at the behest of Pakistani deep state with the larger motive of driving out India from Afghanistan.

The entire operation was code-named Blackstar by the Pakistan intelligence, which used the Haqqani network led by Talibans deputy commander Sirajuddin Haqqani and elements of LeT.

Also Watch l Saddened to hear about terror attack on gurudwara in Kabul: PM Modi

As many as 4 attackers armed with AK-47 rifles were part of the strike team of terrorists who struck at the Gurdwara. The Afghan security forces managed to kill one of the terrorists; the rest escaped.

A senior official in the Indian security establishment said there was recognition in New Delhi that the terrorists probably attacked the gurdwara because it was a soft target. There have been alerts about a terror attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul and the consulate at Jalalabad for quite some time. It wouldnt have been an easy target since the security had been beefed up and more troop firewalls deployed.

Even while the grieving Afghan Sikhs were cremating the victims on Thursday afternoon, a bomb exploded nearby creating further scare in the area.

Since the US announced a deal with the Taliban on February 29, there has been a spurt in violence in Afghanistan with resurgence of the Haqqani network and relocation of terror camps of both LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammed from Pakistan.

According to counter-terror analysts, the Haqqani network comprises mainly of Zardan tribe based in Nangarhar, Khost, Nuristan and Kunar provinces, which is in direct conflict with the miniscule Sikh community over land in Jalalabad and trade in Kabul.

On July 1, 2019, the Haqqani network targeted the Sikh community in Jalalabad as they came to meet President Ashraf Ghani during his visit to Nangarhar province. In both cases, the Islamic State was allowed to take credit for the attack.

However, the play is much deeper with Pakistan setting sights on forcing India out of Afghanistan post withdrawal of the US forces from Afghanistan. With Taliban, Haqqani network, LeT and JeM all under control of the Pakistani deep state, Afghanistan again will provide strategic space to its terrorist arm for controlling Kabul and hitting at Kashmir.

Already there are inputs from western agencies about JeM and LeT moving their training camps to eastern borders of Afghanistan with Kashmir in the crosshairs. The Taliban, with their sword arm Haqqani network, will handle Afghanistan while the Islamic State and Al Qaeda would be their digital fronts in the social media space.

After the Gurudwara attack, the Indian security agencies fear that Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar will be targeted by the Haqqani network and associates in coming days.

While the world is grappling with the Covid-19 virus, the Pakistani deep state continues to push jihad against minorities in Afghanistan, said a senior official.

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People watch a plane of China Southern Airlines land at Beijing Capital International in Beijing as the country is hit by an outbreak of the CCP Virus, China, March 13, 2020. (Reuters/Thomas Peter)

China to Temporarily Ban Entry by Some Foreigners Over CCP Virus Concerns

The Chinese regime announced March 26 that it will temporarily bar entry to most foreign nationals in an effort to curb the spread of the CCP virus.

The ban will apply to foreign nationals holding visas or resident permits, and will take effect on March 28, Chinas foreign ministry said in a statement.

But foreigners coming to China for necessary economic, trade, scientific, or technological activities or out of emergency humanitarian needs can still apply for visas, it stated. The curb also wont apply to diplomatic workers.

With this move, China joins dozens of countries that have sealed their borders to foreigners amid the CCP virus pandemic. More than 100 countries have enacted travel restrictions or border closures since the global spread of the pathogen.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

Since the emergence of the outbreak in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, the virus has spread to more than 190 countries and regions worldwide. It has infected more than 440,000 people and killed more than 20,000 outside of China.

Chinese authorities havent reported any domestic infections in six of the past eight days, claiming that most newly confirmed cases were infected people arriving from overseas. However, locals report a different situation on the ground, saying hospitals are still full of COVID-19 patients. Many expressed doubt over the claim of no new domestic infections.

The Epoch Times also received leaked government data from the Wuhan health commission, showing that local authorities are purposefully underreporting positive diagnoses.

Hubei province, the viruss epicenter and home to around 60 million people, recently lifted travel restrictions, as authorities maintain that the virus has been contained domestically. The provinces capital of Wuhan will end restrictions on travel on April 8.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) also stated on March 26 that it directed Chinese airlines to maintain only one route to any country. It will also limit the number of flights to one per week, effective March 29.

The authority also ordered foreign airlines to reduce their international routes to China to one per week and only operate one route into the country.

About 80 percent of international flights were already being canceled prior to the announcement, but Chinese airlines had been asked not to cut their international routes until the CAAC issued its order.

Shanghai will require every international traveler arriving as of 6 p.m. local time March 26 to self-quarantine for 14 days, the local government announced.

Reuters contributed to this report.


In the current straitened sanctions period, Irans focus in its oil sector is broadly to increase the capacity of its fields in West Karoun and from the huge fields that it shares with Iraq. This strategy allows it firstly to generate income even in the low price oil environment - its US$1-2 per barrel lifting cost is the same as Saudi Arabias - and secondly to position itself to take up any slack in supply caused by dint of the oil price war. According to a senior oil sector source who works closely with Irans Petroleum Ministry, Tehran expects Saudi Arabia, for one, to struggle to meet the fantastical supply figures that it has given to key potential buyers, particularly in the East, in the coming weeks and beyond. This view appears entirely reasonable, given that just last week Saudi Aramco reportedly rejected at least three Asian refiners requests (one Korean, one Taiwanese, and one Chinese) for additional crude for April, on top of their long-term supply deals.

The development of the West Karoun fields does not just involve the continued exploration and development of the biggest well-known fields in the oil-rich region - North Azadegan, South Azadegan, North Yaran, South Yaran, and Yadavaran  but also of the lesser-known sites as well. The development of this latter segment of oil resources will be necessary to achieve the aim stated by Irans Petroleum Minister, Bijan Zanganeh, which is that the West Karoun fields will produce at least one million barrels of oil per day when access to sufficient investment and technology has been restored. In the interim, the region is producing around a third of that level. Even at this point, though, every incremental barrel increase is being sought as, according to the Iran source, for every one per cent that the rate of recovery from West Karoun is increased the recoverable reserves increase by 670 million barrels. At an average Brent oil price of US$30 per barrel that equates to just over US$20 billion in additional revenues for Iran.

Story continues

Such a field is Darquain (or Darkhoein), located 45 kilometres north of the city of Khorramshahr and 100 kilometres south of the oil-rich city of Ahvaz, in the Khuzestan Province. With an estimated minimum five billion barrels of oil in place, 1.3 billion barrels of which are deemed recoverable, the field was initially developed by Italys ENI based on its successful 2001 buyback contract tender, together with local partner Naftiran Intertrade. Production of the light oil (API gravity of 39) began in 2005, with Darquin-1, and the Darquain-2 development followed in early 2011. Both of these have been focused on the exploitation of the Fahlyan reservoir formation, with the resultant oil flows being delivered into the Ahvaz-Abadan oil pipeline.

Related: Oil Climbs As U.S. Pushes For An End To The Price War



As it stands, Iran is laying the groundwork for final talks with Chinese and Russian developers to take a more central development role in the field, once the global oil market has settled into a new equilibrium. Indeed, before the re-imposition of U.S. sanctions in May 2018, the contract for Darquain had been one of the US$30 billion of strategic energy deals agreed by Iran with Russia during President Vladimir Putins visit to Tehran in November 2017. These were to involve the state-owned Russian heavyweights Rosneft (oil) and Gazprom (gas), according to the Iran source.

Firm talks can only move forward again once the effects of the global lifecycle of the coronavirus have been fully factored in, irrespective of the rebound in Chinese demand that we are likely to see from the latter half of this quarter, said the source. Additionally, Iran will not want to make long-term deals even immediately after that if the oil price war is still going on as it will mean that the average pricing reference points in the contracts will be low, he added. Nonetheless, in preparation for this, the new contract to be offered any foreign developer for Darquain will not be the unpopular buyback contact but rather the new Iran Petroleum Contract (IPC) model.

The aim of the next phase  Darquian-3  will be to get production up to 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) within a five year period from the commencement of the new contract, which the Petroleum Ministry estimates will cost around US$1.5 billion is extra funding to achieve. Before the public backlash in Iran over reports that China was aiming to take over its oil and gas sector, the understanding between the Petroleum Ministry and China had been that in order to get the very preferential terms offered on taking over Totals stake in South Pars [Phase] 11, China would guarantee that the output from West Karoun fields would go up to 500,000 barrels per day within two years, the Iran source told OilPrice.com last week. It may be that ENI comes back but the most likely outcome is that Russian firms continue to work on a contractor basis [to avoid tangential U.S. sanctions on Iran] for the time being and then are in prime position to take over development when the oil market returns to more of an equilibrium point, said the source.

Related: Not Even The $2 Trillion Stimulus Package Can Save Oil Markets



This third phase development of Darquian will not only involve exploiting the more difficult areas of the previously developed Fahlyan reservoir formation but also on the development of the Ilam and Sarvak reservoirs. This follows the findings of previous ENI studies indicating that heavy crude in the two layers are recoverable. Given this difference in product, both water- and gas- injection will be used across the field and already, according to Iranian sources, 31 oil well, 6 gas injection wells, crude oil processing facilities including line pipes, processing installations, gas compressors, infrastructure including crude oil storage tanks and roads are already underway. Based on these advances alone, according to a comment last week from Jahangir Pourhang, chief executive officer of Arvandan Oil and Gas Production Company (AOGPC), Darquains output capacity increased 20,000 bpd over the past year.

Arvand itself is also seeing movement, spurred on by its status as also being a field Iran shares with Iraq. The two states share a number of major oil fields containing about 14 billion barrels of recoverable oil, principally: Azadegan (Iran side)/Majnoon (Iraq side), Azar/Badra, Yadavaran/Sinbad, Naft Shahr/Naft Khana, Dehloran/Abu Ghurab, West Paydar/Fauqa, and Arvand/South Abu Ghurab. For a long time, Iran was playing catch-up with Iran over exploiting the resources of these shared sites, given its previous period of long-running sanctions, especially when they were increased in 2011/12. Now, though, with Iraq in domestic political and economic disarray  not to mention, its increasingly strained relationship with the U.S.  Tehran believes that the time is right to drill more aggressively, including more horizontally.

Arvand, therefore, is also one of the fields that saw its foreign participation contract model change from buyback to IPC. Also located in Khuzestan Province, around 50 kilometres south of Abadan, the field has around one billion barrels of oil in place, and the recovery rate is 15 per cent. It also has at least 14 billion cubic metres of dry gas and 55 million barrels of gas condensate in place, according to Petroleum Ministry estimates. Discovered in 2008, it has relatively light crude (API gravity of 44) and because of the estimated relative ease of extraction and relative small scale, requires just US$135 million of investment to achieve a sustained daily output figure of around 20,000 bpd, although this could be increased through enhanced oil recovery techniques. Arvand is regarded by the Petroleum Ministry as being an ideal, bite-sized site through which a big foreign player from China or Russia could come back in a full exploration and development contract, which would be profitable to it in itself but which would also allow it to gauge the reaction from the U.S. and from the Iranian people, the Iran source concluded.

By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com

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C Shivakumar By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: Koyambedu wholesale vegetable market traders have agreed to roll back their demand that the market be closed for two days beginning Friday.

Traders were in a dilemma as vegetable stocks continue to arrive but there are no takers as the regular supply to hotels, hostels, canteens and retail vegetable markets has been hit owing to the COVID-19 lockdown.

S Chandran, Market Management Committee Licensed Merchants Association President and Anaithu Sangankalin Kootamaipu general secretary, told The New Indian Express that initially they had announced a two-day closure of the market from Friday.

However, the government intervened and asked the traders to keep the market open to prevent a rise in the prices of vegetables.

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What's more, the government has ensured that retail markets in T Nagar, Ambattur, Avadi, Mylapore, Tambaram and other places in the city will remain open thus doing away with the fear of non-availability of vegetables in Chennai during the 21-day lockdown.

A top Market Management Committee official told Express that the traders had put forth their demands to open the supply chain and the government will open the retail markets as they claim more than a tonne of vegetable is getting wasted.

Meanwhile, Chandran has said the labourers working in the market will be provided free food by the traders. "We have ensured that the labourers who are key in loading and unloading the vegetables will be provided with food," he said.

To a query on whether the retail market in the wholesale market will function, he said they have sought permission from the government to keep it open. He said that masks and sanitisers will be provided to the workers by traders.

He also said the government should ensure that traders as well as workers who are key in ensuring the supply of vegetables across the city don't get coronavirus by screening and testing them.
This article, How Kentucky became a surprising leader in flattening the curve on COVID-19, originally appeared on CNET.com.

As states in the US South and Midwest see their coronavirus infection rates grow, the rate remains notably low in a state with some of the worst health outcomes nationally. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has drawn bipartisan praise for navigating the outbreak in a calm and decisive manner, including declaring a state of emergency in early March that gave local officials time to help residents as well as school, health and other officials protect and plan against the global pandemic.

And his calm, fact-based daily news briefings, which have drawn comparisons to President Franklin Roosevelt's famous fireside chats, have earned Beshear a new status as a sex symbol on social media.

On Tuesday, Kentucky officials reported the state's fourth death due to COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus, bringing the state's total to 163. In comparison, neighboring Indiana had reported 365 confirmed cases and 12 deaths by Monday. Tennessee, which has 2.3 million more residents than Kentucky, had 517 confirmed cases and one death as of Sunday.

"We've seen states take very different approaches," Beshear, 42, said in a briefing on Sunday. "We have already done a whole lot of what other states are doing in one major -- and sometimes it seems scary -- order."

Asked this week whether his administration has seen positive results from its efforts, Beshear said it was still early. "We are in the midst of it, and I believe we are taking aggressive and important steps that are, and will, save people's lives. But it will be really hard to know exactly how we have done until we are further through it and have more data," he told reporters. "Our numbers aren't necessarily jumping as fast as some other ones are."

As of last week, state public health leaders reported that about 7% of COVID-19 tests conducted in Kentucky had come back positive. The state's junior senator, Rand Paul, also disclosed that he tested positive for the virus, becoming the first member of the Senate to receive such a diagnosis. As reported by local CBS affiliate WYMT, Kentucky is faring average among surrounding states, with a lower percentage than Indiana's 20% and Tennessee's 27% positive-test rate. Kentucky's 7% is, however, higher than rates in West Virginia and Missouri, which have fewer cases and have done less testing. It's also higher than the rate in Virginia, which has double the number of cases and substantially more tests completed.

Beshear's battle to "flatten the curve," or slow the spread of the coronavirus, has been charted in his daily press briefings, where he routinely appears with Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack and American Sign Language interpreter Virginia Moore. Beshear's calm, methodical explanations of the state's efforts to combat the spread, always accompanied by repeated reassurances in the face of panic, have received praise across social media.

More telling is the praise the Democratic governor has received from conservative Republicans in the state.

Thank you @AndyBeshearKY for all you are doing and going to do to save Kentucky lives during this COVID-19 National Emergency #TeamKentucky pic.twitter.com/ZynVCixAB1  CM David James (@CouncilmanJames) March 19, 2020

Republican Robert Stivers, president of the Kentucky state Senate, said earlier this month that the Beshear administration's "consistent updates on the state of public health" have helped "efforts to ensure our public health groups are prepared for this situation."

Although both the Kentucky House and Senate had been considering measures to restrict executive branch power in the weeks prior to Beshear's COVID-19 response, Republican David Osborne, Kentucky's Speaker of the House, more recently pledged to aid Beshear's efforts. He told the Courier Journal newspaper that he thinks the governor has the "authority he needs to take action, but we are prepared to step in with additional support if necessary."

Other influential Republican voices have also chimed in with support, including former Kentucky House Speaker Jeff Hoover, who tweeted that Beshear "has done a masterful job leading us in this unprecedented public health crisis. Proud of him (and for this state). I shudder to think what could have been."

Following a conversation with Beshear, US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called on US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar in a Tuesday release provided to CNET, asking Azar to back the governor's efforts to obtain supplies.

"I urge you to work with Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear as his administration requests additional PPE and test kits from your department," McConnell said.

The strategy

By March 4, Kentucky's central lab in the capital city of Frankfort had the ability to run 1,000 tests. Though Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee waited until March 12 to declare a state of emergency, Beshear set Kentucky's wheels in motion sooner, declaring a state of emergency on March 6. Within days, Beshear issued an order to waive co-pays, deductibles and coronavirus testing fees for about 433,000 privately-insured Kentuckians.

For those without private health insurance, much of the groundwork was set by Beshear's father, former Gov. Steve Beshear, who served from 2007 to 2015. That work was reaffirmed by the younger Beshear on taking office in December. Unseating Republican incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin, the younger Beshear swiftly made good on his campaign promise to halt Bevin's widely unpopular efforts to revoke the state's expanded Medicaid coverage for about 480,000 residents.

The same Medicaid expansion, authorized by the Affordable Care Act, was enacted by the former Gov. Beshear. Kentucky covers about 1.3 million people through Medicaid. About 600,000 of them are children.

"I believe we are taking aggressive and important steps that are, and will, save people's lives." Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear

The grandson of a preacher, the younger Beshear is open about his faith and quickly called on religious communities to cease weekly gatherings. By March 10, Beshear had cracked down on price gouging through an executive order and directed that all nursing homes and long-term care facilities, with narrow exceptions, be closed to visitors. Two days later, he asked public and private schools to begin shutting down, allowing flexibility to individual districts, which quickly implemented lunch-delivery programs for students. Then childcare centers were closed.

By March 14, the administration's new COVID-19 hotline was receiving 2,000 calls a day.

Without explicitly naming the directive an order to shelter in place, the Beshear administration announced the euphemistic "healthy at home" initiative on Sunday. Some 14 states have implemented similar orders. Beshear's initiative is the social-distancing policy capstone to what's been a nuanced, systematic shutdown of nonessential businesses and government services -- starting with bars and restaurants, and progressing until only grocery stores, auto mechanics, banks and medical facilities remain open. (In accordance with the bourbon-barreling state's unique food and beverage laws, liquor stores will also stay open.)

Amid the layered business closures, the governor's administration loosened the rules around unemployment insurance and established new unemployment phone lines and an application schedule following a surge. Driver's license and Real ID offices have also been closed.

The administration hasn't been alone in its actions. Kentucky Supreme Court Chief Justice John D. Minton Jr. shut down most of the state's courts until April 10, including eviction court. Though housing insecurity is expected to rise in the state, concurrent with household income drops amid job losses, by March 20 most evictions in the state had been halted.

Hospitals are setting up temporary coronavirus facilities or "cough clinics" in Hardin County and Harrison County, the location of the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Kentucky. As panicked shoppers empty store shelves, Kroger grocery stores in Kentucky and Southern Indiana are reserving the first operating hours exclusively for the use of residents considered at higher risk.

High stakes

For Kentuckians facing a pandemic, the stakes are higher than those in many other states. Kentucky routinely ranks among the worst for resident health outcomes, particularly in rates for smoking, cancer, black lung and cardiopulmonary disease. A Kaiser Family Foundation study said that up to 46% of Kentuckians would be considered high-risk if infected by COVID-19, making the state the sixth most vulnerable in the nation.

Kentucky has only barely recovered from a 2019 hepatitis A outbreak that killed over 50 people and sickened more than 4,400. The state's vulnerability to HIV outbreaks has made it a subject of federal focus. And by the most recent tally, Kentucky was No. 1 in the nation for fentanyl abuse, a finding consistent with the state's regular high-ranking appearances in opioid abuse studies across the nation.

Rural and Appalachian Kentucky remain at the heart of that vulnerability, with limited health care access and a string of recently shuttered hospitals. Just a week before the Beshear administration's sweeping COVID-19 response, the Kentucky General Assembly was weighing legislation aimed at stemming the closure of rural medical facilities after lawmakers discovered that of the state's 64 hospitals (in counties of fewer than 50,000) about 14%-15% of them are ready to default. In January alone, 1,000 area jobs in eastern Kentucky were lost when a hospital in Ashland closed.

Adding to the risk is the uncertainty over the exact capacity of both urban and rural hospitals, with Kentucky's Office of Rural Health recently requesting more information from the Kentucky Hospital Association. On Tuesday, Beshear said the state had about 18,000 hospital beds. A March ProPublica investigation into hospital capacity found that Louisville, the state's largest city, had 4,160 total hospital beds (510 in intensive care), with a 59% occupancy, potentially leaving only 1,700 beds open for incoming patients. Lexington, the state's second largest city, had 5,050 total beds (580 intensive care), leaving 2,070 beds potentially open at 59% occupancy.

Beshear has ordered all hospitals to suspend elective procedures, which could clear space for incoming COVID-19 cases as well as reduce viral spread. On Monday, Beshear told reporters his administration has considered creating "pop-up" facilities with the National Guard and has plans in place to convert hotels into hospitals, with additional beds, if needed.

On Tuesday, Beshear told reporters at a press briefing that the state had been outbid by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in one attempt to buy medical personal protective equipment. Kentucky's struggles to obtain COVID-19 tests and medical equipment, and to implement testing statewide, reflect similar struggles faced by states elsewhere. In Kentucky's first reported case, the patient was twice denied testing. Similarly, a Lexington woman had to wait nine days before being tested.

"The test is not yet unlimited. We want the test to be unlimited," Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Steve Stack said during a press conference. "We have voiced our concerns and our needs to the federal government to work with the partners who have the resources to make it unlimited as fast as it can."

Since testing began, Kentucky has prioritized its limited number of test kits, per CDC guidelines, to the most vulnerable patients at highest risk. That means the number of cases in the state may be far higher than charted, with transmission rates much faster.

"We are now just seeing the escalation of this virus and to suggest that there is a short duration that we can almost promise people is not something that we should be doing," Beshear told reporters Tuesday.

"This will not last forever. There will be a light at the end of the tunnel, even though we don't know exactly how far it is away. But as long as we have the strength and the perseverance and the resiliency, we can defeat this coronavirus on the very first try. And that's what we've got to do to protect our people."

With a vaccine potentially as far away as next year, and federal government support for medical supplies still uncertain, Kentucky's governor faces an uphill battle. But it's one in which his state appears ready to rally behind him.

Correction, 8:04 a.m. PT: The governor of Tennessee was incorrectly identified. The governor is Bill Lee.

The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as health or medical advice. Always consult a physician or other qualified health provider regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition or health objectives.
Apple could delay the release of the iPhone 12 by "months", according to a new report.

The company is facing struggles with both making the phones and knowing whether customers would be around and willing to buy them, according to a story from Nikkei Asian Review.

The rumours chime with previous concerns that Apple may not be able to launch the new handset for its usual release in September.

The launch could be delayed by a matter of months, the same report claimed, citing conversations with people that were part of discussions held by Apple about pushing the date back.

Apple is expected to release a range of new phones under the iPhone 12 banner this year, with some include depth-sensing cameras and other performance upgrades. They are also set to be Apple's first 5G iPhones, allowing it to integrate the faster data connections found in phones made by rivals such as Samsung.

The report did not indicate when the phone's launch could be pushed back to. It is likely that it will be aiming to release them by the holiday period towards the end of the year, at the very latest.

Any decision on a postponement is likely to be made in May, the report indicated, and the timeline may not be finalised until staff are back at work after the coronavirus lockdown. Apple sent all of its staff home relatively early as the disease spread across the US, and they are still being told to work from home.

In recent years, Apple has been on a very reliable schedule with iPhone launches. The company reveals the phone in early September, and then launches it a couple of weeks later.

Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Show all 15 1 /15 Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A rose is delivered by drone to a woman on Mother's Day in Jounieh, Lebanon AFP/Getty Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Women dance on their balcony as a radio station plays music for a flash mob to raise spirits in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A skeleton stands on a balcony in Frankfurt, Germany AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies The film Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna is projected on a building in Rome AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman uses a basket tied to a rope to pull a delivery of groceries up to her balcony in Naples, Italy EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Francesco Cellini plays for his neighbours from the rooftop terrace of his flat block in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman gestures from her balcony in Barcelona EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Cellist Karina Nunez performs for her neighbours at the balcony of her flat in Panama City Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Nash Petrovic live streams a set from his roof in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies People applaud medical workers from their balconies in Modiin, Israel Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A Brooklyn resident relaxes in a hammock hung on their balcony Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Residents toast during a "safe distance" aperitif time between neighbours in Anderlecht, Belgium Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Musician Adam Moser plays for neighbours from his balcony in Budapest, Hungary Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man and his son on their balcony in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man sits alone on a roof terrace in Rome Reuters

Apple has been rumoured to be launching a cheaper handset, known as the iPhone 9, in the earlier half of the year. Rumours before the widespread outbreak of coronavirus in the US suggested that it could be planning an event at the end of March, but no launch has been announced.

Last week, Apple announced an updated MacBook Air and a new iPad Pro  which includes some technology that might come to the iPhone 12.
The Editors Guild of India on Thursday expressed concern about "high-handed" and "arbitrary" police action which has interrupted the work of journalists reporting on the coronavirus outbreak in many parts of the country.

In a statement, the Guild said the job of the police was not to impede journalists' work, especially under the current circumstances, but to facilitate their functioning.

"The State and Union Territory governments and the police also need to be reminded that media has been exempted as an essential service under the current lockdown guidelines of the Union Home Ministry," the statement said.

The Guild urged all law enforcement agencies to let the media play its role as smoothly as possible.

"It also urges the government to put in place a suitable mechanism to facilitate minister-level regular briefings during the ongoing coronavirus crisis, so that communication does not suffer as it doesn't give the media adequate opportunity to ask questions," the statement said.

It expressed concern about "high-handed and arbitrary police action" that "has obstructed many journalists from reporting on the coronavirus outbreak in many parts of the country".

"Such action is self-defeating when media freedoms are critically important for covering the outbreak and the state response," the statement said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 19:47:19|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The 4,000-plus military medical professionals that have rushed to aid the battle against the novel coronavirus in central China's city of Wuhan are sticking to their positions until "a full victory is achieved."

Ren Guoqiang, a Defense Ministry spokesman, made the remarks at a press conference Thursday.

The military medics who came to help Wuhan will remain committed to supporting local authorities in fighting coronavirus, treating patients and carrying out scientific research, Ren said.

China's military medical experts have wasted no time stepping up drug and vaccine research as well as virus source tracing to aid the country's anti-virus battle, the spokesman said.

On March 16, a recombinant novel coronavirus vaccine developed by a research team led by Chen Wei, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a researcher at the institute of military medicine under the Academy of Military Sciences, passed a review by authorities and was greenlighted for clinical trials, he said.
Facebook has defended its approach to coronavirus information as hoaxes and false stories continue to spread on its platform.

The company says that more than a billion people have been sent to official health guidance by new features that encourage users to engage with authoritative information rather than rumours or false stories.

More than 100 million people had clicked through to links from authorities such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) which has been working with the company to promote official news on Facebook as well as its other platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram, it said.

In recent weeks, Facebook has added prompts and a Coronavirus Information Centre to user feeds on Facebook and Instagram in an effort to promote official advice on stopping the spread of the virus.

Social media companies have been accused of failing to adequately prevent disinformation appearing about the spread of Covid-19, including false adverts for protective equipment and treatments for the disease.

The Government has created a specialist unit which is working with social media firms to monitor and block the spread of such content - while services such as Facebook, Google and Twitter are placing official advice at the top of search results linked to the illness.

Former deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg, now the social network's head of global affairs and communications, said Facebook has "been working to connect people to accurate information and taking aggressive steps to stop misinformation and harmful content from spreading".

"This is an evolving crisis, so as world health officials issue new guidance and warnings about Covid-19, we'll continue working with them to ensure people have access to accurate and authoritative information across all of our apps," he said.

Facebook has also announced the launch of a new fact-checking initiative with Reuters, as part of the social network's global Third-Party Fact-Checking Programme.

The initiative sees fact-checking firms work with Facebook to help identify misleading content posted to social media and debunk false claims.

Facebook said the new scheme would add to its existing partnership with Full Fact in the UK.

The announcement comes on the same day the Government revealed it was launching a new WhatsApp service to offer people guidance.

Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Show all 15 1 /15 Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A rose is delivered by drone to a woman on Mother's Day in Jounieh, Lebanon AFP/Getty Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Women dance on their balcony as a radio station plays music for a flash mob to raise spirits in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A skeleton stands on a balcony in Frankfurt, Germany AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies The film Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna is projected on a building in Rome AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman uses a basket tied to a rope to pull a delivery of groceries up to her balcony in Naples, Italy EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Francesco Cellini plays for his neighbours from the rooftop terrace of his flat block in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman gestures from her balcony in Barcelona EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Cellist Karina Nunez performs for her neighbours at the balcony of her flat in Panama City Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Nash Petrovic live streams a set from his roof in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies People applaud medical workers from their balconies in Modiin, Israel Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A Brooklyn resident relaxes in a hammock hung on their balcony Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Residents toast during a "safe distance" aperitif time between neighbours in Anderlecht, Belgium Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Musician Adam Moser plays for neighbours from his balcony in Budapest, Hungary Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man and his son on their balcony in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man sits alone on a roof terrace in Rome Reuters

The service will provide information on topics such as coronavirus prevention and symptoms, the latest number of cases in the UK, advice on staying at home, travel advice and dispel myths around the virus.

People will be able to access the free service by adding 07860064422 to their phone contacts and then message the word "hi" in a WhatsApp message to get started.

The spread of disinformation on WhatsApp has been raised as a concern by some, with its encrypted messaging making it impossible to track the spread of content which may be false.

Professor Yvonne Doyle, medical director for Public Health England, said of the new WhatsApp scheme: "This service will help us ensure the public has a trusted source for the right information about coronavirus, updated with the latest public health guidance and providing assurance that they are not misled by any of the false information circulating."

Additional reporting by Press Association
The U.S. Capitol building on March 25, 2020, in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Senate was poised to pass a massive relief package on Wednesday for Americans and businesses ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic as New York hospitals braced for a wave of virus patients.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the chamber would adjourn for nearly a month after it passed a historically huge $2 trillion coronavirus relief package late Wednesday night.

But as the outbreak takes a toll on American health and financial well-being, the unprecedented crisis may force Congress to act again sooner than the Senate's planned return date of April 20. McConnell acknowledged that reality Wednesday night, promising the chamber would stay "nimble" as the pandemic spreads.

"If circumstances require the Senate to return for a vote sooner than April the 20th, we will provide at least 24 hours of notice," he said.

The legislation provides one-time payments for individuals, enhanced unemployment insurance, and loans and grants for businesses small and large. It also allocates more funding for hospitals, states and municipalities, and requires insurers to cover coronavirus preventive services with no cost-sharing.

Despite the amount of money piled into combating the crisis, unseen before in U.S. history, congressional leaders predict Congress will need to take more steps to fight the outbreak as it shows few signs of abating soon.

"I think the odds are we will need new legislation, more legislation after this," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said after the vote. "First, we don't know the extent of the crisis in terms of the magnitude, so that could rise, but there are going to be problems that we don't realize now that we are going to have to grapple with."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed the sentiment Thursday morning as she outlined other priorities she would like to see addressed, including expanded paid family and medical leave, more money for states, more food assistance funding and another possible round of direct payments. Responding to the Senate's plans to leave until April 20, she told reporters, "I think everybody has to be on call for what we need when we need it, and we don't know what that might be."

Data released Thursday shed light on the early economic wreckage left by COVID-19 as businesses across the country shutter to slow its spread. Initial jobless claims skyrocketed last week to a record 3.3 million, more than four times the highest mark previously seen in 1982.

Speaking to CNBC by phone Thursday morning, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said the $2 trillion package will "hopefully" buoy the economy for 90 days.

"And when I say hopefully and it turns out in 90 days not to be as hopeful as we thought, we'll be back here trying to tackle the same thing again," he said.

The outbreak has forced Congress into thorny decisions. The coronavirus has created a desperate need for government intervention unseen in decades. At the same time, the very lawmakers crafting the relief have started to test positive for COVID-19, forcing some of their colleagues into isolation to slow its spread.

Most House members are currently away from the Capitol after two representatives tested positive for COVID-19 and several other representatives who had contact with them went into quarantine. The chamber plans to pass the $2 trillion bill by voice vote on Friday morning.

Still, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer wrote to colleagues Wednesday night that representatives "who want to come to the House Floor to debate this bill will be able to do so."

On the Senate side, Schumer acknowledged the uncertainty in setting a schedule for being in Washington. He said determining when to return to the Capitol is "not even up to Leader McConnell or Leader Schumer, it is up to the medical experts and how long this disease goes on."

"It is how deep the coronavirus spreads that will determine when we will come back. And if we can't come back for a long time, I think we should explore as Sen. Klobuchar, and Durbin and Wyden and Warren are doing a way to vote remotely only in an emergency situation," he said.

Lawmakers in both parties and both chambers have increasingly pushed for remote voting as the crisis spreads. Rep. Katie Porter, a California Democrat and one of the most vocal supporters of conducting business from outside the Capitol during the outbreak, said Wednesday that she was in quarantine while awaiting a coronavirus test result.

The House Rules Committee released a report this week outlining "serious" challenges with remote voting. The panel's staff said it could take a long time to set up the process, adding that a remote system could be vulnerable to cyberattacks or face court challenges.

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Acupuncture is up to four times more effective than drugs at relieving migraine, a study suggests.

Patients given the treatment suffered over two fewer attacks a month, it found. By contrast, routine care including painkillers and tips on sleep and exercise only slightly reduced the average.

Those who went under the needle also had fewer attacks than those who were given fake acupuncture, showing it is not all in the mind, say scientists.

By the end of the experiment those having actual acupuncture were having 2.3 fewer migraine attacks a month, Dr Heather Angus-Leppan said the test was 'good evidence' of the benefits the treatment has

The real thing was compared with the sham version and usual care. Scientists gave 147 patients, whose average age was 37, one of the three interventions.

By the end of the experiment those having the actual acupuncture were having 2.3 fewer migraine attacks a month, compared to 0.4 and 1.6 for the usual care and sham groups respectively.

Professor Wei Wang, whose findings from the research in China are published in the BMJ, said: These results support the use of manual acupuncture in patients who are reluctant to use drugs or when they are ineffective  and it should be considered in future guidelines.

Dr Heather Angus-Leppan, a consultant neurologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, who was not involved in the study, said: We now have good evidence that acupuncture is an effective treatment for episodic migraine.

Given almost nine in ten patients have no effective preventive treatment it provides a useful additional tool in our therapeutic armoury, she added.

Dr Angus-Leppan said: It helps to move acupuncture from having an unproven status in complementary medicine to an acceptable evidence - based treatment.
Noida, March 27 : To curb the transmission of deadly the deadly coronavirus, the district administration of Uttar Pradesh's Gautam Budh Nagar has issued a form for people who have returned from abroad in the recent days.

The form that aims to keep a track of foreign returnees and their health condition can be submitted on a helpline number or an email ID designated especially for the purpose.

The form asks for details of the head of the house of foreign returnee's house, his/her address and details of the foreign returned person/people.

Apart from the details of these people, the district administration has also asked for details of domestic help and any person from the workplace who have come in contact with them.

The form also asks about the symptoms (if any) in these people, to keep a check.

However, the form only asks details of individuals who have returned to India after March 8, 2020.

The district administration has attributed the move to Indian Medical Research Council's guidelines to trace foreign returned person in colonies, test them and if required send into quarantine/isolation or self quarantine.
The US has agreed on a $2tn stimulus package, the largest economic stimulus in US history, in response to the economic impacts of Covid-19. While corporations will be the biggest recipients of the bailout, some of that money will be paid directly to Americans hit by the pandemic.

Most taxpayers will get a check in the mail, while those directly affected by the economic effects of Covid-19 are slated to receive robust government support.

Heres what we know so far about how the new stimulus package will directly affect Americans in the coming weeks:

Whos eligible for a check from the government?

Congress will spend about $250bn for checks up to $1,200 per person that will go directly to taxpayers.

To be eligible for the full amount, a persons most recently filed tax return must show that they made $75,000 or under. For couples, who can receive a maximum of $2,400, the cutoff is $150,000.

If a person makes more than $75,000, the amount given goes down incrementally by $5 for every $100 increase in salary. So a person who makes $85,000 would get $700 while a person who makes $95,000 would get $200.

If a person makes above $99,000, or a couple makes above $198,000, no check will be given.

There are some requirements and exceptions. Those getting a check must be living and working in the US and have a valid social security number. If a person is listed as a dependent on their parents tax return  the case for many college students  they are excluded.

The Tax Foundation, a DC-based thinktank, estimates that 93.6% of Americans will be eligible for a check coming from the stimulus package.

What about parents?

Taxpayers will be given $500 per child 16 or under listed as a dependent on their latest tax return.

When will I get this money?

That is still unclear. Experts say that Americans will probably not get the money until May, given how long it takes the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to send out checks. The treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said those whose bank account information is already with the IRS from previous tax returns can expect a payment within three weeks.

Story continues

For those who still need to give the IRS their bank account information, a web-based portal will be opening soon to allow people to provide the IRS with their information. The IRS says this is to make sure people get their checks immediately, instead of sending them through the mail.

This is not the first time the government has sent checks to Americans. The federal government gave up to $300 in 2001 and $600 in 2008 to taxpayers who met a certain income bracket to similarly stimulate the economy.

What if a person did not file their 2018 or 2019 return?

The IRS recommends people file their 2018 or 2019 tax return as soon as possible to get the payment. A check will be sent to any qualified person so long as they file their return within 2020.

What if a person does not file their taxes?

A person may still be eligible even if they do not file the taxes. The IRS says people who typically do not file taxes  low-income taxpayers and some veterans  will need to file a simple tax return in order to get the payment. Social security beneficiaries will not need to fill out the tax return, even if they do not file their taxes, to get the payment.

Does the package help unemployed workers?

Yes, specifically the bill will increase unemployment insurance by $600 for 13 weeks  about four months  for every person, added to the existing unemployment compensation a person gets from their states program.

The length and amount of compensation varies from state to state. A majority of states providing a maximum of 26 weeks of compensation, while average weekly compensation ranges from 20% of a persons wage to just over 50%.

What about freelance and gig workers?

While unemployment insurance typically does not cover people who are self-employed  freelancers, contractors and gig workers  the bill comes with a pandemic unemployment assistance measure that will extend insurance to those workers.

Have there been any changes to paid leave?

Not in this bill. Earlier last week, Donald Trump signed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, a bill worth about $100bn meant to expand paid sick leave and emergency paid leave, but it came with major loopholes. Companies with over 500 employees were not mentioned in the bill, while companies with under 50 employees can apply for exemptions.

The bill mandates 10 days of fully paid sick leave for employees of companies with 500 employees or less. Parents of those companies affected by their childrens school closing and those leaving for medical reasons can get 12 weeks of pay at 67% of their salary.

Will there be anything to offset healthcare costs related to Covid-19?

Again, not in this bill. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act included a measure that mandated all Covid-19 testing is free, but treatment for any symptoms (there is currently no cure for the illness) still comes at a cost.

A few states have reopened enrollment for their health insurance programs to allow those concerned about costs to enroll, and three major health insurance companies said they will be waiving any high costs for treatment, but there are still stories of people getting bills for as much as $34,000 to cover treatment of the viruss symptoms.
Scientists warned that the United States someday would become the country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. That moment arrived on Thursday.

In the United States, at least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1,000 deaths  more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen, according to data gathered by The New York Times.

The Times is engaged in a comprehensive effort to track the details of every confirmed case in the United States, collecting information from federal, state and local officials.

With 330 million residents, the United States is the worlds third most populous nation, meaning it provides a vast pool of people who can potentially get Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
The most rewarding part of my job in Monroe County, Ohio, is meeting with landowners who want to better manage their forests.

According to the United States Forest Service, around 56% of the forested land in the U.S. is privately owned. With so much property being privately owned, I view my job in educating landowners on best management of their parcels as very important.

Dont leave it alone

I believe there is a common misconception that owning a forested area and leaving it alone is good for it. That might be the case very rarely, but often the parcels that we manage as private landowners are so fragmented that they end up facing an onslaught of issues.

These issues include invasion of invasive species and pests. There is also often a legacy of poor timber management or land-use practices that can change physical and chemical properties of soil and water.

Even the typical tree species make-up of a property can be much different from what it was 100 or so years ago based on the management and land-use history of the property. Though this may sound a bit depressing, the point is that work and time often do need to be put into a forested property to ensure the function and health of that forest.

Landowners goals

Function and health of a forest are important from an ethical standpoint, but they are also important in reaching a landowners goals for their property. The initial question I ask when visiting a property is what the landowner goals for the forest are. Generally, the responses run a spectrum between making money off of the timber and enjoying the property for recreational activities.

The recreation activities mentioned have included ATV riding, hunting, wildlife viewing and having a place to get away from urban life. It is incredibly difficult to reach any of those goals without a healthy forest stand.

When poor logging practices occur, the landowner can be left with timber species of very little value which are now the major seed producers in the stand, no valuable tree species seedlings in the understory, soil erosion problems, and water quality issues.

Recreation

Proper management has positive impacts to recreation uses as well. A well-managed forest and well-maintained trail system can be helpful when using ATVs to prevent trail erosion problems. Creating well-placed canopy openings can be beneficial in encouraging diverse under-story vegetation growth that provide better wildlife food and cover for hunting or viewing.

Some of the common forest management practices that get recommended include grapevine cutting, invasive species control, crop tree release and tree thinning.

What options are available to landowners who want recommendations on the forestry management practices that will meet their goals for their property?

Forestry management plan

One way to get recommendations on forestry management practices is to have a forestry management plan (FMP) written for the property.

If interested in having an FMP written or in having management recommendations made, be sure to contact the local soil and water conservation district. The staff will be able to direct landowners with questions to the proper contact.

One concern that is often shared with me by landowners is of not being able to do the work needed on a property. This can be due to physical limitations, not living on the property or not being knowledgeable about the techniques.

It is important to get in contact with a local soil and water conservation district.
A snow storm will hit portions of the Denver freight market Friday and Friday night, from the high elevations and foothills of the Rockies to the plains of eastern Colorado.



SONAR Critical Events and radar: Thursday, Mar. 26, 2020, 10 a.m. EDT; North-central U.S snowstorm

This potent weather system could dump heavy snowfall in the high elevations of the Rockies surrounding the Denver area. There is some potential for heavy wet snow in the foothills, Palmer Divide, and across portions of the adjacent plains. Truckers may run into trouble spots and possible road closures on Interstates 70 and 76 in Colorado, as well as I-80 in western Nebraska.

Downtown Denver will likely just see a mix of rain and snow showers, but heavy snowfall isn't unusual this time of year in the Denver metropolitan area. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), March is the snowiest month of the year in Denver. On average, the city received 10.7 inches in March, compared to only 5.7 inches in February and 7.0 inches in January.

Impact on freight

Nationally, dramatic increases in outbound render volumes (SONAR: OTVI.USA) since March 1, have produced increases in outbound render rejections (SONAR: OTRI.USA) as stores are in a rush to restock empty shelves due to COVID-19 panic buying. So there's a capacity crunch in many markets, including Denver.

The latest SONAR data from FreightWaves show Denver's outbound tender rejection index (OTRI.DEN) has increased from 19% on March 1 to almost 28% yesterday, and outbound volumes are about 27% higher.



SONAR Tickers: OTVI.DEN, OTRI.DEN

Denver has the 22nd-highest level of outbound volumes in the country as of yesterday morning. The national OTVI has a base value of 10,000 based on trucking volumes on March 1, 2018. The index moves in proportion to the total observable outbound tender volume among the 135 freight markets nationwide.

Tender rejections are the percentage of electronic, contracted loads offered by shippers that carriers turn down. In this case, carriers are rejecting a high amount of freight because they literally may be at full utilization and do not have any excess capacity to take on the loads.

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But even carriers who have available drivers may balk even more at picking up loads in Denver until the impending winter-like storm passes. This would tighten capacity a bit more in the market.

This weekend

The Denver-area storm system will rapidly move into the northern Great Lakes Saturday through Sunday. The storm will produce a swath of snow from parts of Nebraska and South Dakota to Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and upper Michigan. Total snowfall accumulations will be approximately 2 to 6 inches with localized areas of up to 8 inches. Wind gusts will reach 25 to 35 mph, resulting in areas of blowing snow and reduced visibility.



SONAR Tickers: OTVI.DEN, OTRI.DEN

This won't likely turn into a major blizzard, but minor to moderate delays in freight flows are possible. But, except for Denver, freight markets in the impact zone (outlined in red on the SONAR map directly above) have low outbound volumes. This is indicated by their light blue and white shadings on the same map.

Have a great day! Please stay healthy and be careful out there!

See more from Benzinga

 2020 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Debt relief milestone in Somalia, as World Bank, IMF, call for global payment suspension in light of COVID-19

25 March 2020 - The top United Nations official in Somalia congratulated the Horn of Africa nation on Wednesday for achieving the benchmark set by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), confirming its eligibility for debt relief.

James Swan, Head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Somalia (UNSOM), said that by reaching the so-called "decision point" for debt relief under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries' Initiative (HIPC), Somalia has passed an historic milestone on its path to peace and prosperity.

"Achievement of the HIPC decision point is a major step forward for Somalia's economic progress, allowing the country to advance towards its long-term objective of inclusive economic growth and poverty reduction," he said in a statement.

"All Somalis can be proud of this achievement," he added.

The development is welcome news for Somalia  which is carrying $5.2 billion of debt - as it prepares for one-person, one-vote elections later this year against the backdrop of extreme humanitarian challenges.

Some 5.2 million are in need of assistance, alongside ongoing attacks by the Al-Shabaab terrorist group and the worst locust outbreak in 25 years.

Global debt relief call: World Bank, IMF

It also coincided with a call by the World Bank Group (WBG) and the IMF for all official bilateral creditors to suspend debt payments from the world's 76 poorest countries and enable them to redirect funds towards confronting the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a joint statement, the two Washington-based institutions also asked leaders of the G-20 leading economies to task them at their spring meetings on 16 to 17 April with assessing the impact and financing needs of each of the countries, which are part of the International Development Association (IDA).

Mr. Swan, who is also the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Somalia, said that the country's debt breakthrough was testament to the federal authorities' ability to manage public finances. "It also reflects strong collaboration between the Federal Government and the federal member states," he added. "The World Bank Group and the IMF believe it is imperative at this moment to provide a global sense of relief for developing countries as well as a strong signal to financial markets," it said.

The World Bank and the IMF established the HIPC Initiative in 1996, to ensure that no poor country finds itself in a situation in which it cannot service and manage its debt burden.

Reaching "decision point" not only confirms Somalia's eligibility for debt relief, but also fully normalizes its relations with international financial institutions. It will also now qualify for certain types of grant financing to meet its public finance and development needs and to access private-sector financing instruments.

The second and final step after decision point, known as the completion point, would open the way for full and irrevocable reduction in debt under the HIPC Initiative.

In a press release, the IMF said debt relief for Somalia  the 37th country to reach decision point  would help it make last change for its 15 million people by allowing its debt to be irrevocably reduced from $5.2 billion at the end of 2018 to $557 million once it reaches completion point in about three years' time.

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MENLO PARK, Calif.  As colleges across California shuttered their campuses and sent most students home last week, one campus in the Bay Area is requiring its students to return  amid a pandemic  and clean out their dorm rooms.

On March 18, Evette Castillo Clark, St. Mary's College dean of students, emailed parents and students that the Moraga campus was closing and students needed return and get their dorm rooms cleaned out by April 14.

The day before, six Bay Area counties, including Contra Costa, where the college is located, announced a shelter-in-place order in response to the growing threat of the coronavirus. Health officials want people to maintain distance from everyone but their immediate families.

"We realize that most students are away from campus now and are concerned about the shelter-in-place order established for Contra Costa County and surrounding Bay Area counties," wrote the dean. "We want to clarify that the order explicitly allows 'essential travel to or from educational institutions for purposes of receiving materials for distance learning.'

"Please plan to move out at your earliest opportunity," she wrote.

Some parents are livid.

"This is so reckless," said Karen Lane, who lives in Littleton, Colo. Her daughter, Madison, returned home the day the six counties announced the shelter-in-place. She's reluctant to send her daughter back to campus.

"The whole point (of the order) is to keep us from being mobile. Does anybody really need their comforter or coffee mug that badly?" she said.

St. Mary's College, a mission-style campus nestled in the rolling hills of the East Bay, follows a Lasallian Catholic educational philosophy. Roughly 3,600 students attend the liberal arts school, which claims notable alumni such as the actor Brian Doyle-Murray and Carolina Marquez, host of Cali Mornings, Cali 93.9 Los Angeles.

Incredulous and concerned about the college's order, Lane wrote to Clark expressing her alarm at the idea of sending her daughter to the Bay Area on an airplane while there's a growing global pandemic.

On March 24, the school's medical director, Rachel Snowden, responded to Lane by email.

She explained that the college was not only "in constant communication" with county health officials about their plans, but that other Bay Area colleges, such as Stanford University and Santa Clara University, were following similar procedures.

She suggested Lane connect with local students or families to assist with moving items out of Madison's dorm room, if Lane wasn't comfortable sending her daughter back to clean.

"This might be a helpful option for your family to consider," wrote Snowden.

A county health spokesman told the Los Angeles Times he hadn't heard about the situation until he was contacted by the newspaper, on Tuesday. Officials from Stanford and Santa Clara University said their universities were not requiring students to return to campus to clean their rooms in the near-term.

"We have told undergraduate students they should not return to campus at this time due to the ongoing shelter-in-place order," said Ernest Miranda, a spokesman for Stanford.

Robin Reynolds, the associate vice president for auxiliary services at Santa Clara University, said her university has told students to return between May 1 and May 8 to clean out their dorm rooms.

However, "we know the situation is fluid, so that may change," she said.

A spokesman for St. Mary's said the request was in line with two travel exemptions in Contra Costa County's shelter-in-place: one that allows for essential travel and another for distance learning.

"Saint Mary's College of California is acting to prevent and slow the spread of COVID-19, and working hard to adapt to changing circumstances in response to the impacts of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic," wrote Michael McAlpin, the college's director of media relations, in an email.

Asked if St Mary's request violated the order, Fischer, the Contra Costa County spokesman, declined to provide an opinion.

"We can't be in a position to adjudicate best practices, whether or not, in a particular case, it is good for certain students to follow, or not follow, the instructions," he said.

As to what will happen to Madison's belongings if she doesn't return, St. Mary's spokesman declined to comment.

But for Lane, it's pretty clear: "What's a thousand dollars worth of items when the choice comes down to my daughter's health, and that of others?"



(c)2020 Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com
MADRID  The number of coronavirus infections closed in on a half-million worldwide Thursday, with both Italy and the U.S. on track to surpass China, and a record-shattering 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week in a stark demonstration of the damage to the worlds biggest economy.

Health care systems in Europe and New York buckled under the strain, with Spain's death toll climbing to more than 4,000.

In the U.S., an unprecedented $2.2 trillion economic rescue package to help businesses, hospitals and ordinary Americans make it through the crisis cleared the Senate and is expected to be voted on in the House on Friday.

At least 2.8 billion people, or more than one-third of the Earth's population, are under severe travel restrictions. But the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, scolded world leaders for wasting precious time in the fight against the virus that has already killed more than 22,000 people and infected over 480,000, thrown millions out of work and ravaged the world economy.

"The time to act was actually more than a month ago or two months ago," he said Wednesday. "We squandered the first window of opportunity. ... This is a second opportunity, which we should not squander and do everything to suppress and control this virus."

In the United States, where deaths passed 1,050 and at least 70,000 people were infected, the damage from the widespread economic shutdown was made plain when the number of people applying for unemployment benefits last week was more than four times the old record, set in 1982.

A political battle, meanwhile, raged between those demanding urgent action for a long siege against the pandemic, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and President Donald Trump.

CORONAVIRUS IN OREGON: THE LATEST NEWS

Trump has expressed hope churches could return to normal by Easter on April 12, and grumbled that "our country wasn't built to be shut down"  apparently concerned that the outbreak's devastating effects on financial markets and employment will harm his re-election chances. Democrats say Trump is putting the economy ahead of the health and safety of Americans.

"I'd like to say, let's get back to work next Friday," said Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. "That'd be wonderful. But it can't be arbitrary."

In Brazil, the country's governors are defying President Jair Bolsonaro over his call to reopen schools and businesses, dismissing his argument that the "cure" of widespread shutdowns is worse than the disease. As of Thursday, the country had more than 2,500 cases and 59 deaths.

New York has emerged as a virus hotspot. The city's mammoth convention center is being turned into a hospital. The state recorded more than 350 deaths.

Spain has become the country in Europe where the outbreak is spreading the fastest. On Thursday, the Health Ministry reported reported nearly 8,600 new infections and 655 deaths, bringing the total cases to over 56,00 and more than 4,000 fatalities  second only to Italy's death toll of about 7,500.

Health Minister Salvador Illa sought to assure Spaniards that government measures to slow the virus were working, telling Parliament that the rises had been smaller than in previous days and "indicate a changing trend that brings us to think that we are entering a phase of stabilization."

In Italy, doctors and nurses begged the government to provide more masks, gloves and goggles and urged the public to understand how important onerous social distancing measures really are. Scientists say stopping just one person from getting the virus means scores of others will not become infected down the road.

"Help us help you," Dr. Francesca De Gennaro, who heads a small medical clinic in Italy's hard-hit Bergamo region, wrote in an open letter.

The rate of increase in Italy has slowed slightly, noted Dr. Hans Kluge, the head of the WHO's European office. He said officials hope to soon figure out whether lockdown measures in numerous countries have worked.

Germany has had a high number of infections at more than 39,000 people, but just 222 deaths  which has widely been attributed to early and aggressive testing, among other factors.

On Thursday, Lothar Wieler, the head of Germany's Robert Koch disease control center, said the country now has the ability to test 500,000 people a week, perhaps the greatest capacity in the world.

European Union leaders were holding their third summit in three weeks on the virus to manage the havoc it is wreaking on their 27 economies. As the number of deaths in Europe soared past 12,000, Spain extended a state of emergency that will allow it to impose broader lockdowns, while French President Emmanuel Macron launched "Operation Resilience," a military-backed response to the crisis.

France began evacuating infected citizens from the northeastern hotspot of Alsace using a special high-speed train.

Britain ordered 10,000 ventilators, working with engineers from Dyson. The government wants to increase its supply of the breathing machines from 8,000 to 30,000.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.

So far, more than 115,000 people have recovered from the virus, according to a running count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

China's cases have slowed, with only 67 new cases reported, all recent arrivals.

The leaders of the Group of 20 largest economies held a special video conference to better coordinate a response to the outbreak, amid criticism that the world's wealthiest countries have not taken cohesive action. The conference was chaired by Saudi Arabia's King Salman.

 The Associated Press

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The US finally agreed on a deal on a $2 trillion stimulus package, the largest ever in the countrys history  for comparison, Indias GDP is roughly $2.7 trillion  to help individuals and companies affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the next few weeks, people are expected to start receiving cheques in the mail (those with children will receive more). States and businesses are expected to receive money too.

In India, several states and some central government departments have announced similar packages  but for specific worker groups. A larger relief package is expected. More importantly, it is needed. For three weeks starting March 24, India is in a lockdown with almost all economic activity suspended.

It will take time to understand the complete impact of this but heres what we can safely assume: the lockdown will mean that India doesnt meet its 5% growth target this year; it will also mean that India misses its 10% nominal growth target next year (2020-21). Investment and consumption will both fall. There will be job losses. More people will be pushed back into poverty. The crisis in the banking sector, both a cause and effect of the pre-coronavirus slowdown in India, will become worse (unless the Reserve Bank of India comes up with a very generous forbearance policy). Business and consumer sentiment will decline. The worst affected will be the informal sector  hit hard by 2016s demonetisation and further weakened by 2017s implementation of a unified Goods and Services Tax (which, to be fair, is fundamentally reformist, but just proved too painful for some)  but a three-week suspension of economic activity will hit just about every business. And the worst hit will be the poor, including unskilled and semi-skilled migrant workers, thousands of whom are now trying to walk back home after rail and interstate bus services were stopped.

Everyone, not just unskilled construction workers or skilled factory workers, is worried about what the lockdown and the crisis will do their careers and finances. The VP of corporate strategy who is working from home is aware that strategy always comes after survival; the general manager of business development, who is also working from home, knows that there is not going to be any business to develop, at least not in the short-term. As an article in Vice magazine earlier this week put it: This is how we get laid off. At home, alone Over Zoom or e-mail.

Sure, India wont be the only country whose economy is affected by Covid-19. The global economy itself could go into recession, the International Monetary Fund has warned.

And if the lockdown works, to any extent, it will halt or slow the march of the infection, preventing a repeat of the kind of spread seen in Wuhan, Lombardy, and New York State. As on Wednesday, India had total 606 cases of Covid-19 and had seen 10 deaths.

India can then begin the arduous task of putting the pieces together and getting its economic engine chugging.

Any relief package announced by the Indian government has to do three things  it should directly transfer cash into the accounts of those who desperately need it (migrant workers would be top of the list in this writers assessment). It should focus sharply on sectors that are going to need help and offer this (banking and real estate would be obvious candidates, but just about every business, from auto to media, and textiles to engineering, needs help). And it should involve a huge government-funded (or partially government-funded) infrastructure-building exercise  a sort of new New Deal that can create jobs and also increase demand for everything from cement to steel.

Thats going to take money. Which is alright. India has to deal with the significant economic challenges posed by the pandemic in addition to the structural and cyclical issues with its economy that it was already dealing with  and if there ever was an opportune time for helicopter money, it is now, it is now, it is now.

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Linkedin Fadli (The Jakarta Post) Batam  Thu, March 26, 2020 18:21 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da0d10 1 National Batam,Riau-Islands,Singapore,COVID-19,Airport,Hang-Nadim-airport,novel-coronavirus,virus-corona,virus-korona-indonesia Free

Several stores and state-owned banks at Hang Nadim International Airport in Batam, Riau Islands province have ceased operating because of declining numbers of passengers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The director of the Hang Nadiem Airport Business Entity, Suwarso, said the lenders, namely Bank Mandiri, BRI and BNI, suspended their operations on Monday and they would remain closed until further notice.

"A lot the banks' customers are passengers from other regions who visit the bank right after they land. So to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the banks decided to stop operations temporarily," Suwarso said.

He said the banks initially would halt operations until March 31. However, after observing the current situation of the outbreak they decided to remain closed until further notice.

Read also: COVID-19: Batam ferry terminal mulls suspending operations amid declining income

Besides the banks, five outlets in the airport have also announced closures, while four other have requested leniency for paying their rent.

"Several shops have asked for rent reductions; we're currently discussing the matter," Suwarso said.

Before the outbreak, there were 52 flights in the airport per day carrying roughly 5,000 to 6,000 passengers to the island located close to the neighboring city-state of Singapore, but the flights were currently down to 30.

Each flight has a low load factor causing the number of passengers to plummeted to about 2,000 people per day. It was our lowest recorded [number of] passengers in the last 10 years," he said.

Suwarso said usually airlines requested additional flight schedules to airport authorities at about this time, considering the upcoming mass exodus after Ramadan during the Idul Fitri holiday. However, because of the COVID-19 outbreak none had filed such a request.

"The airlines have not requested [additional flights]. I think flight reductions would be more probable in the future," he said.

Read also: Riau Islands governor calls for temporary closure of factories on Batam island

Agus, one of the porters in Hang Nadim airport, said the COVID-19 outbreak had directly affected his income.

"There's no passengers who want us to carry their suitcases and bags anymore. It looks like they don't want to touch us," Agus said.

He explained that his daily income has been dropping drastically. He said he usually earned up to Rp 300,000 (US$18.43) per day, but that had dropped to only Rp 30,000 on his lucky days in the past weeks. (nal)
Looking for more of the best deals, latest celebrity news and hottest trends? Sign up for Yahoo Lifestyle Canadas newsletter.

Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam is warning Canadians against believing theyre immune from contracting coronavirus just because of their age.

Experts are warning young people that COVID-19 is only impacting those over 65. (Getty Images).

On Tuesday, Tam told reporters that despite international data revealing people over the age of 65 are considered high risk for coronavirus, it is possible at any age to become severely ill.

According to Tam, preexisting health conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and other chronic immunosuppressive conditions all put someone at high risk of developing complications related to COVID-19.

Canadas Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam is encouraging young Canadians to take all measures possible to prevent COVID-19. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also warns that anyone with asthma, chronic lung and cardiovascular conditions such as lung and heart disease, smokers, people undergoing cancer treatment, those living with uncontrolled HIV and/or AIDS and anyone who has taken corticosteroids for a prolonged period of time are considered particularly vulnerable.

Information from Italy also reveals that sex plays a factor in developing the virus, with more men contracting and dying from the virus than women.

ALSO SEE: 'Very, very dangerous' Goop 'expert' slammed for bizarre coronavirus video

Sabra Klein, a scientist who studies sex difference in viral infections at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health told The New York Times that its unlikely experts will be able to pinpoint why some people are more susceptible to coronavirus than others. Klein posits that the pattern of men contracting the virus more than women could be biological or behavioural and points to men smoking in higher numbers and washing their hands less frequently as possible causes. For whatever reason, men still need to be extra cautious about protecting themselves, no matter their age.

Stats in Italy have shown men are more likely to contract and die from COVID-19 than women. (Image via Getty Images).

Being male is as much a risk factor for the coronavirus as being old, Klein said. People need to be aware that there is this pattern. Just like being old means youre at higher risk, so does being male. Its a risk factor.

Story continues

ALSO SEE: Idris Elba slams theory celebs are being paid to say they have coronavirus: 'Absolute bulls***'

According to the World Health Organizations March 25 situation report, there have been more than 18,000 COVID-19 related deaths worldwide approximately 413,000 confirmed coronavirus cases.

Although the most global COVID-19 related deaths have been elderly men and women, Tam says a majority of coronavirus patients have been young  theyre just experiencing mild symptoms.

Young may be experiencing mild COVID-19 symptoms, however experts warn it's impossible to know who will become severely ill. (Image via Getty Images)

According to a recent report, approximately 18 per cent of COVID-19 hospitalizations in Spain were people under 50. Similarly, in the United States, new data revealed that one in four people hospitalized in New York City are under 50. In Italy, a quarter of the countrys 28,000 cases were people between the age of 19 and 50.

ALSO SEE: 'We were afraid of getting sick': Man dies after ingesting fish medication he thought would prevent COVID-19

Weve all heard of case reports of severe illness and even death, although much rarer in the younger age group, Tam said. Thats another reason why I say to young peopledont think its an illness that just impacts the older age groups or the people with chronic underlying illnesses. All of us can potentially get this disease and you may not be able to tell if youre the one thats going to get particularly sick. That message, I have to admit, hasnt been out there enough.

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A domestic Chinese goose was given a replacement bill from a 3D printer after a raccoon attack left its natural bill partially torn off.

The goose, named Bruce, was kept as a pet by an animal-friendly family in Utah, alongside a duck and a golden retriever.

After the raccoon attack, the family took the injured goose to a local shelter for injured animals, which worked with the nearby Bridgeland Technical College to create a 3D-printed replacement beak.

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A pet goose in Utah was given a 3D printed bill after losing the upper portion of its bill to a raccoon attack

The school turned to students in Cache Makers, a special program focused on uisng science and math principles in farming and agriculture, according to a report in Popular Mechanics.

A group of students spent several days creating 3D models to test on the Goose, then used a 3D printer to produce different iterations with Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene filament, a form of plastic used to make LEGOs and other toys.

When they settled on a final design, they used a dental glue normally reserved for attaching crowns to fix the 3D-printed shell to the remnants of the goose's natural bill.

Without the artificial bill, the goose had been shunned by other geese in the shelter because of its strange appearance.

The damaged bill also left the goose's mouth exposed, causing its tongue to dry out and impeding its ability to eat, drink, and groom itself.

While the students were working on the final replacement bill, shelter workers had to keep the goose's mouth manually lubricated with coconut oil.

After the replacement bill was finally attached, the goose was initially uncomfortable.

'At first, he shook his head, like rejecting it,' one of the Cache Makers told WZDX News.

After losing part of its natural bill, the goose was left with an exposed mouth and tongue which left it struggling to eat, drink, and groom itself. Shelter workers had to manually lubricate its tongue and mouth with coconut oil

A team of students at Bridgeland Technical College in Logan, Utah worked on several different designs for a replacement bill before settling on just the right fit

The students used 3D printers to create the beak from Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, a kind of plastic used to make LEGOs and other toys

The bill was attached using dental glue that's more commonly used to fix crowns in place

'But then he started moving his mouth up and down, starting to use the beak, and it was really cool.'

According to Jenny Kearl, director of Cache Makers, the project was inspiring both for the goose, who quickly regained his self-confidence and sociability with the new beak, and for the students.

'Its the first [prosthesis] weve ever done here, Kearl said. 'It got the kids more excited about projects they can do.'
Huawei's big reveal for its new flagship is entirely online. In the face of the coronavirus, the company had to launch its P40 smartphone series a little differently. Following the imaging prowess of last year's P30 Pro and the Mate 30, the company is still playing to those strengths as it still battles with its app store weaknesses.

This year's flagship smartphone series includes the P40 and the P40 Pro, but also an even-more-premium P40 Pro+ -- with the headliner features I'm most excited about.

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Let's run through the entire P40 family first and see what they all share. The standard P40 has a 6.1-inch screen, an Overflow Display that slopes downward on both the sides and the top and bottom edges. It was inspired by the shape you get from water surface tension -- that meniscus on the top of a glass of water or a water droplet. It also helps to ensure the P40 stands out, at least a little, from an increasingly samey crowd of smartphone screens.

Both the P40 Pro and the P40 Pro+ have the same screen, a 6.58-inch 2,640 x 1,200 Overflow display. On the P40 Pro I received, the curved effect isn't particularly pronounced on the top and bottom borders; there's a very faint curve to the glass. The bezels are, however, tiny. On the P40 Pro, there's a 2.65mm top bezel and 1.71mm side bezels. One thing I noted is how Huawei seems to have ditched its extra screen protection layer, which left a rough edge on the P30 Pro phones last year.

All of the phones now come with a 30-percent larger fingerprint scanner, which apparently unlocks 30 percent faster, too. If you're particularly into biometric unlocking, there's also dual-camera face unlock on the P40 series, with infrared tech to ensure it works even in low light. In short, there are lots of ways to unlock it. Setting up the face unlock feature is incredibly fast, and you can add an alternative 'look' to your face unlock profile, so the P40 can recognize you with or without glasses.

Huawei's phones have been crushing it when it comes to cameras, and the P40 series puts that upfront and (not) center. The cameras, irrespective of which P40 model, are all grouped together into a single camera unit. It's 'volcano-esque' according to Huawei's spokespeople, which is their way of saying it sticks out, but it has a nice curve to it. Both the P40 Pro and P40 Pro+ are IP68 rated against water and dust, while the P40 is rated IP53.

The cameras are, yet again, where things get interesting. All the P40 series phones have a 50-megapixel RYYB (red, yellow, yellow, blue) 1/1.28-inch sensor. That's a big sensor, relative to the 1/1.7-inch 40-megapixel sensor on the P30 and the 1/2.55-inch 12-megapixel sensor on the iPhone 11 Pro. Huawei claims this Ultravision sensor will ensure the highest light intake, higher dynamic range and lower noise. The company is trying to strike a balance between high pixel count and the size of those pixels, hence the huge sensor. The Nokia Pureview 808 had a bigger sensor, and it's still dwarfed by decent camera sensors, but don't get me wrong -- it's still a phone, and I love shooting with smartphones. Huawei delivered a P40 Pro this morning -- I just need to test the new camera out further before drawing any early conclusions.

On the P40, a 16-megapixel ultra-wide camera and an 8-megapixel 3X optical zoom flank the 50-megapixel primary camera -- that's roughly the same arrangement as last year's P30 Pro, augmented with that new sensor.

The P40 Pro goes with a 40-megapixel ultra-wide f1.8 cinematic lens that we saw on the Mate 30 and a 12-megapixel 5X optical zoom lens with a new RYYB sensor behind it (which reportedly takes in 40 percent more light) and a time-of-flight (ToF) sensor for depth effects. Its zoom can top out at 50X digital, but with all the caveats that entails.

On the P40 Pro+, it gets a little more fantastical. Take what you saw on the P40 Pro and add an 8-megapixel 10X optical super periscope telephoto lens. That works with the other telephoto lens to offer the equivalent of a 240mm zoom range -- and that's before any digital zoom. (For the record, that tops out at 100X zoom.)

That kind of zoom requires stability, so there's both AI stabilization on top of the optical image stabilization on the primary 50MP sensor and the telephoto cameras. This should help ensure long-range photos aren't just blurry smears. That Huawei has crammed a 10x zoom into a phone is... incredible. I just wish I knew how the images eventually turn out.

Huawei's AI photography chops are worth further elaboration. Besides improvements to portrait photography, with a new color temperature algorithm aimed at offering the best skin tones and facial lighting, there's a new 'best moment' feature with AI smarts able to pluck photos from seven different sports, ten different postures and facial expressions, too. That sounds impressive, but the P40 uses them in a great way. When you're taking group photos or shooting something impressive on your vacation, you can use the P40 to eliminate any errant pedestrians dashing past the moment you take the photo. Sure, that isn't a huge issue at this exact moment in time.

The same tech can help reduce glass reflections when you're taking shots of things behind glass barriers, or through car and airplane windows. It all looks truly useful.

When it comes to video, the P40 can capture at ISOs up to 51200; there's ultra-slow-motion, HDR and 4K timelapse all built-in. There's a new directional audio zoom feature, which uses the three built-in stereo mics to hone in and amplify distant sounds -- you might recall seeing similar tech on Samsung's Galaxy Note 10.

There's a dual-camera 32-megapixel front-facing setup, with a time-of-flight sensor and autofocus on the Pro and Pro+ models. The latter could be very useful for getting better selfies when people are moving around. While on the subject of focus, the primary cameras on the rear have phase-detection autofocus for faster focus in low light.

A lot of this work, both image processing and AI smarts, means the P40 needs a potent enough processor -- and Huawei believes its own Kirin 990 5G chip delivers on that front. Since the last generation of its home-made chip, the company claims its newest addition's neural processing unit (NPU) alone offers power efficiency savings of around 290 percent and performance improvements of roughly 480 percent.

Rounding out the technical specs, the P40 family has 90Hz screens, too, for smoother phone interactions. You can adjust that down to 60Hz in the settings to help extend battery life. On that note, the P40 Pro and Pro+ has a 4,200mAh battery and the smaller P40 3,800mAh cell. The P40 Pro and P40 Pro+ will work with a 40W wired fast charger, with the former also supporting 27W wireless charging, and the latter jumping to a rather epic 40W. Both wireless chargers are sold separately by Huawei.

That's the headline hardware news here, but the big questions remain when it comes to Huawei gear: What about the apps? What about Android? Not much has hugely changed.

The Huawei team is bullish about the situation. Jerry Huang, director of global partnerships and eco-development mentioned that the team continues to collaborate with major app developers and companies. It's also focused efforts on developing local apps that are hugely popular in particular markets. For Europe, apps like Deezer, Trainline and Zara were referenced in passing, but it appears to be an uphill task getting Huawei's dedicated app store up to speed.

If you want your apps hard enough on a P40, cloning an older Android phone or shopping in third-party app stores, like Amazon, still seems the easiest way. But Amazon's app store isn't a particularly vibrant one, versus Google Play or Apple's App Store. And Google really isn't keen on people trying to sideload its apps and services on to Huawei devices.

The P40 series will launch with Huawei's upgraded EMUI 10.1, which adds a refreshed look and Huawei's take on Facetime, called Meetime, which pitches high-quality video calls. Both parties need to have a compatible Huawei phone, of course. If they do, they then have to be resident in certain countries, which doesn't include the US or the UK.

The service offers video clarity in low light, and tops out at 1080p, resolution-wise, if your connection holds up. (The P40 series will launch as a 5G phone, but there will likely be a 4G iteration in some territories.) Huawei hopes to expand on this feature by getting its hooks into other kinds of cameras, including action cams and drones -- but those are entirely future plans for now. Unfortunately, I can't try Meetime out on my review sample.

And surprise! Huawei is also working on a voice assistant called Celia. She'll work with English, French and Spanish and will offer some straightforward, if basic, features like weather updates, texts and phone call requests.

The P40 and P40 Pro will arrive in white, black and deep-sea blue color options, with two new finishes, silver frost and blush gold, which will have a matte finish and be a little more fingerprint-resistant. Step up to the P40 Pro+, and you'll be able to pick up a ceramic finish that's glossy and apparently as strong as sapphire glass.

Both the P40 (799, roughly $875) and P40 Pro (999, roughly $1,095) will launch on April 7th. If you're looking for the premium P40 Pro+, you'll have to wait till June, with an estimated price tag of 1,399 -- a smidge over $1,500.

Update 4/13/20 8:00PM ET: An earlier version of this article stated that the P40 Pro supports 40W wireless charging, but in fact, it only supports 27W. This error has since been fixed.
The Cheesecake Factory has notified its landlords that it will not be able to make any rent payments in April, Eater Los Angeles reports.

In a letter dated March 18, Cheesecake Factory Chairman and CEO David Overton said he was "asking for your patience, and frankly, your help." Because of the coronavirus pandemic, several Cheesecake Factories have had to close or can only serve takeout and delivery, and as such the "severe decrease in restaurant traffic has severely decreased our cash flow and inflicted a tremendous financial blow to our business," Overton said. The company hopes to "resume our rent payments as soon as reasonably possible" but "cannot predict the extent or the duration of the current crisis."

The first Cheesecake Factory opened in 1972 in Beverly Hills; today, there are 294 locations in the United States and Canada. The company, which employs 38,000 people, has had to temporarily close 27 restaurants because of the coronavirus pandemic. A Cheesecake Factory representative told Eater Los Angeles the company has "very strong, longstanding relationships with our landlords. We are certain that with their partnership, we will be able to work together to weather this storm in the appropriate manner."

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Two of the 11 people on the fire victims committee involved in PG&E Corp.s bankruptcy proceedings have resigned their positions, a fresh sign of discord in the high-profile case that the company is trying to conclude in the coming months.

Kirk Trostle and Adolfo Veronese both told The Chronicle they resigned from the committee because they felt that PG&Es $13.5 billion settlement to pay victims is not a fair deal for the people who lost homes and businesses in fires caused by the companys power lines.

Their resignations come as attorneys for the remaining members of the committee have questioned how the stock market turmoil over the coronavirus pandemic could affect the value of the trust intended to pay victims.

The company and subsidiary Pacific Gas and Electric Co. are trying to resolve their bankruptcy by a state-mandated June 30 deadline. PG&E has secured broad support for its plan to resolve the case, locking down the $13.5 billion deal with victims lawyers and separate settlements with insurance companies and local governments. Just last week, PG&E resolved a months-long bankruptcy dispute with Gov. Gavin Newsom.

But tens of thousands of fire victims still need to vote on PG&Es bankruptcy plan, and the resignations of Trostle and Veronese suggest the company may have a hard time winning over all of them. Other fire victims have previously criticized the plan in letters and public comments, in part because the $13.5 billion victims settlement would be financed partially in stock.

Trostle and Veronese echoed some of those concerns.

Trostle, who lost his home in the 2018 Camp Fire, submitted a resignation letter on Tuesday saying that PG&Es reorganization plan is deeply flawed and very risky for all fire victims. He told a U.S. government official that fire victims are not guaranteed to receive the $13.5 billion in cash and stock they have been promised. He said he was advised that, as a member of the committee, he couldnt speak out against the terms of the settlement, so he was resigning in order to freely and publicly advocate in the fire victims best interests.

In an interview, Trostle told The Chronicle he thought it was unfair that insurance companies will receive $11 billion in cash under PG&Es plan but individual fire victims have to put their faith in a deal that includes deferred payments and stock. Victims would not receive stock directly; a trust would receive equity that an administrator would cash out over time.

But Trostle said the market volatility over the coronavirus and PG&Es ongoing exposure to fire risks made him concerned about the value of the stock the victims trust would hold. He said he was also concerned about some of the companys financial projections.

Its all a financial shell game, a financial joke that they built this thing on, Trostle said of the projections.

Veronese, who lost a Sonoma County business in the 2017 Nuns Fire, also confirmed his resignation in an interview with The Chronicle.

I dont think it was fair what the fire victims were going to get at the end of the day, Veronese said. I think resigning now makes a pretty good point and, hopefully, I can do better not being on that committee and help the fire victims get what they deserve.

The remaining members of the committee released a statement saying that Trostle and Veronese had worked tirelessly for fire victims as members of the group and we know they will continue to do so now that they are no longer on it.

We respect them greatly and share the same goal to ensure fire victims get paid fully for the injuries, pain, and suffering PG&E inflicted on them, the committees statement said. We wish them well.

Victims will soon be weighing how they want to vote on PG&Es plan, and if enough of them say no, it could imperil the companys ability to resolve the case by a state-mandated June 30 deadline.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

In response to the resignations on the victims committee, PG&E released a statement saying its focus throughout bankruptcy has remained on getting victims paid fairly and as soon as possible, continuing to deliver safe and reliable electric and gas service, and implementing needed changes across our business to improve our operations for the long term.

The company noted that the deal it struck to pay victims is supported by the committee and law firms representing individuals with about 70% of the pre-bankruptcy fire claims against PG&E. And Newsoms support marks another important step toward our emergence from Chapter 11 and to paying fire victims, the company said.

PG&E believes it remains on track to confirm its bankruptcy plan by June 30.

Bob Julian, an attorney for the victims committee, has acknowledged that many of the people affected by PG&E-caused fires have serious questions about the $13.5 billion deal. He said he wants the company to publicly state whether virus-driven upheaval on Wall Street will affect the value of the stock, as well as clarify the timing of when stock will be issued to the victims trust and when it can be sold.

Julian said victims lawyers are being inundated with questions about this plan and the value of this stock. In an interview, Julian said he and his colleagues are working through mediation to correct the problems that we perceive, and whatever the resolution (is) at that point can be given to the victims so they can decide how to vote on this plan.

PG&E filed for bankruptcy in January 2019 facing more than $30 billion in liabilities from fires blamed on its equipment. On Monday, PG&E announced it would plead guilty to 85 felony counts over the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. All but one of the felony counts are for involuntary manslaughter.

J.D. Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris
Israel's ex-military chief Benny Gantz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's main rival, was the only candidate nominated Thursday for speaker of parliament, a move that could lead to an emergency alliance between the two men.

Gantz and Netanyahu have gone head-to-head in three inconclusive elections over the past 12 months, with neither securing enough support to form a viable coalition.

Spurred on by the need to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, including more than 2,600 confirmed Israeli cases, there have been widespread calls for an emergency alliance between the rivals.

At a session in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, on Thursday, Gantz was named as the only candidate to succeed Netanyahu ally Yuli Edelstein, who resigned as speaker under pressure on Wednesday.

"I present Benny Gantz, the chairman of Blue and White - the leader of Blue and White - as a candidate for Knesset speaker," said Avi Nisenkorn, a lawmaker from Gantz's centrist alliance.

A formal vote to elect Gantz was underway early on Thursday evening.

Unity government?

A staunch ally of Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party, the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, has committed to backing Gantz as speaker.

Defence minister Naftali Bennett, a Netanyahu ally who leads the nationalist Yemina party, also applauded Gantz's move, welcoming him to a "unity government."

No unity government has been confirmed.

But a source within the Blue and White party, who requested anonymity, told AFP that Gantz's bid to become speaker was part of an effort to form an emergency government with Likud.

Likud in a statement said details emerging in the media about the composition of a unity government were just "rumours."

Gantz was charged with forming a government after the March 2 vote -- a task that had proved impossible following two previous elections last year, given the deep divisions within the anti-Netanyahu camp.

Those divisions quickly appeared to deepen after Gantz put himself forward as speaker on Thursday.

Two key partners in the Blue and White alliance -- the Telem and Yesh Atid parties -- immediately filed paperwork to split from Blue and White, spokesmen for both factions said.

Telem's Moshe Yaalon and Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid were widely thought to have opposed a unity deal with Netanyahu.

Netanyahu has made a series of offers to Gantz on a unity government, including deals that would see the premier's job rotate between the two men.

"There's deep unrest among all parts of the nation, we must put it aside," the premier said in a televised address late Wednesday focusing on anti-coronavirus measures.

"I call for the immediate formation of a national unity government to deal with the crisis."

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The UK is on day three of its lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic and as the message took a while to sink in, people are increasingly heeding the government's advice to stay at home with a sea of volunteers coming up with innovative ideas to deliver food and medicines and even interacting with the isolated over phone.

Beyond the stark numbers of those infected with COVID-19 rising to over 9,500 and the death toll hitting 465, there is a palpable sense of people fighting against the doom and gloom to keep spirits up amid the strict social distancing norms in place.

One of the heartening trends, which led to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson expressing his own special thank you, has been the over 500,000 volunteers who signed up within 24 hours of a government appeal to help the struggling state-funded National Health Service (NHS).

They are now being deployed for delivering food and medicines, driving patients to appointments and interacting with the isolated over the phone.

The scheme is aimed at relieving the immense pressure on the NHS, including community-based efforts from several diaspora groups.

The more people that work together, the easier this burden of the crisis, said a spokesperson for Sewa Day, one of the charity groups which has been helping with food donations and delivery.

Sikh charity Khalsa Aid has been undertaking similar efforts, including delivering hot food to NHS staff across over-capacity hospitals.

We will continue to support our NHS heroes during the coronavirus emergency, the charity said.

The government-imposed lockdown, aimed at getting a grip on patients needing medical attention in over-stretched hospitals, allows for one form of exercise a day and permits a trip to the local store for essentials, with those numbers being limited by marshals deployed at the entrance of all supermarkets.

Smaller shops licensed to sell alcohol alongside other essentials, referred to as cornershops in the UK, made the updated list of stores exempt from mass closures in the retail sector this week.

Many of these are run by Indian-origin owners and managers and have emerged as a hub of support for the local community.

We are doing our best to stay stocked up and have even started a delivery service for the elderly in our area, said an Indian-origin manager running a store in east London.

Another novel volunteering trend gaining momentum up and down the country includes running groups.

Many of these have transformed themselves from regular collective runners' meet-ups into a solo effort to double up as so-called drug runners and supply medicines to the elderly and vulnerable groups being put under a complete 12-week quarantine.

We're proud to be able to help Bristol pharmacies with a COVID-19 support initiative that sees runners deliver prescriptions to the most vulnerable while keeping our community active too, said one such mother's running group in the city of Bristol called This Mum Runs.

Social media channels are being used actively to seek out such innovative initiatives, with greater numbers joining in even as they follow the government's advice banning gatherings of more than two people and a minimum 2-metre stipulated distance between individuals.

There have even been calls against the use of the term social distancing as the outbreak unleashes a whole new set of ways of socially connecting.

While social distancing remains the official government advice, the experience within communities is proving quite effective to at least try and counter the social isolation being enforced to save lives.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
WASHINGTON - The House will give final approval Friday to the massive $2.2 trillion economic rescue bill with robust backing from both parties, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, a vote that would cap Congress tumultuous effort to rush the relief to a nation battered by the coronavirus.

Pelosi spoke Thursday morning, just hours after the Senate used an overnight vote to approve the measure 96-0. With House members dispersed around the country, Pelosi and Republican leaders were planning to bless the measure by a voice vote, probably with just a sprinkling of lawmakers present in the chamber.

It will pass with strong bipartisan support, said Pelosi, D-Calif. President Donald Trump has implored lawmakers to finish with the package so he can sign it into law.

The package comes to the House as fresh evidence emerges that the economy is in a recession. The government reported 3.3 million new weekly unemployment claims, four times the previous record. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said in a TV interview the economy may well be in a recession.

Pelosi praised the bills expansion of unemployment benefits and provisions that encourage companies hit by the pandemic to keep paying their workers, even those who are furloughed.

We will have a victory tomorrow for Americas workers, she said. If somebody has a different point of view, they can put it in the record, but were not worried about that.

The package would give direct payments to most Americans, expand unemployment benefits and provide a $367 billion program for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home. It would steer substantial aid to larger industries, too.

The unanimous Senate vote late Wednesday came despite misgivings on both sides about whether it goes too far or not far enough and capped days of difficult negotiations as Washington confronted a national challenge unlike any it has faced.

The 880-page measure is the largest economic relief bill in U.S. history. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared sombre and exhausted as he announced the vote  and he released senators from Washington until April 20, though he promised to recall them if needed.

Pray for one another, for all of our families and for our country, said McConnell, R-Ky.

The legislation now before us now is historic because it is meant to match a historic crisis, said Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Our health care system is not prepared to care for the sick. Our workers are without work. Our businesses cannot do business. Our factories lie idle. The gears of the American economy have ground to a halt.

The package is intended as relief for a sinking economy and a nation facing a grim toll from an infection thats killed more than 21,000 people worldwide. The U.S. death toll has surpassed 1,000 people.

This is a unique situation, Powell told NBCs Today show. This is not a typical downturn.

The Fed chief went on: Whats happening here is people are being asked to close their businesses, to stay home from work and to not engage in certain kinds of economic activity and so theyre pulling back. And at a certain point, we will get the spread of the virus under control and at that time confidence will return, businesses will open again, people will come back to work.

Underscoring the efforts sheer magnitude, the bill finances a response with a price tag that equals half the size of the entire $4 trillion-plus annual federal budget. The $2.2 trillion estimate is the White Houses best guess.

The drive by leaders to speed the bill through the Senate on Wednesday slowed as four conservative Republican senators from states whose economies are dominated by low-wage jobs demanded changes. They said the legislation as written was so generous that workers like store clerks might opt to stay on unemployment rather than return to their jobs. They settled for a failed vote to modify the provision.

Wednesdays delays followed Democratic stalling tactics earlier in the week as Schumer held out for additional money for states and hospitals and other provisions.

The sprawling measure is the third coronavirus response bill produced by Congress and by far the largest. It builds on efforts focused on vaccines and emergency response, sick and family medical leave for workers and food aid.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said earlier he expected the measure to pass by a voice vote without lawmakers having to return to Washington. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said Thursday his members were on board with that.

Well have a debate, and then well have a voice vote to bring it up and move it to the presidents desk, McCarthy told Fox News. He said that while Democrats inserted things in the bill that didnt deal with coronavirus, we will still get this package done for hospitals, workers, small businesses.

Every day matters, so we want to get this done quickly, McCarthy said.

The package has a heavily negotiated $500 billion program for guaranteed, subsidized loans to larger industries, including airlines. Hospitals would get significant help as well.

The bill would provide one-time direct payments to Americans of $1,200 per adult making up to $75,000 a year and $2,400 to a married couple making up to $150,000, with $500 payments per child.

A huge cash infusion for hospitals expecting a flood of COVID-19 patients grew during the talks to an estimated $130 billion. Another $45 billion would fund additional relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency for local response efforts and community services.

Democrats said the package would help replace the salaries of furloughed workers for four months, rather than the three months first proposed. Furloughed workers would get whatever amount a state usually provides for unemployment, plus a $600-per-week add-on, with gig workers like Uber drivers covered for the first time.

Businesses controlled by members of Congress and top administration officials, including Trump and his immediate family members, would be ineligible for the bills business assistance.

State and local authorities would receive up to $150 billion in grants to fight the virus, care for their residents and provide basic services.

Republicans won inclusion of an employee retention tax credit thats estimated to provide $50 billion to companies that retain employees on payroll and cover 50% of workers paycheque up to $10,000. Companies would also be able to defer payment of the 6.2% Social Security payroll tax.

Pelosi was a force behind $400 million in grants to states to expand voting by mail and other steps that Democrats billed as making voting safer but Republican critics called political opportunism. The package also contains $15.5 billion more for a surge in demand for food stamps as part of a massive $330 billion title for agency operations.

Most people who contract the new coronavirus have mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death.

In the United States, more than 69,000 people have been sickened by the virus.

___

Associated Press writers Matthew Daly, Mary Clare Jalonick, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.
The Mumbai police came to the



rescue of the poor and homeless in different parts of the city by providing food packets and protective gear to them during the COVID-19 lockdown, an official said.

Videos of Mumbai police officials giving away essential items went viral on social media.

Senior inspector Shalini Sharma and other staffers from Nagpada police station distributed masks and gloves and urged people to stay indoors.

In the western suburbs, inspector Ravindra Awahad from Borivali police station gave away food packets and water bottles to the homeless in the area.

Meanwhile, the police were seen distributing food packets and other essentials to people in Shahu Nagar, Sion, Antop Hill and Matunga areas as well.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Written by Carri Wilbanks

Mar 25, 2020

One of Mother Nature's most soothing yet exhilarating and beautiful creations in the world is the waterfall. There is just something mesmerizing about watching water tumble off a rock face into a pool or raging river beneath. The noise it makes, the sheer volume of water  it's magical. There are thousands and thousands of waterfalls strewn across the world, but not all are created equal.

Some, like Iguazu Falls on the border with Argentina and Brazil, claim the title of the world's largest, while others, like Havasu Falls in Arizona by the Grand Canyon, don't have the depth or width, but when it comes to sheer, mesmerizing beauty, there is nothing like the juxtaposition of orange and turquoise against a bright blue sky.

We'll take you around the planet, from Zimbabwe to the Philippines, Iceland to Tennessee, on a quest for the most mighty, unique, and beautiful natural water shows on Earth. Read more with our list of the world's most beautiful waterfalls.

Note: Some businesses may be temporarily closed due to recent global health and safety issues.
The majority of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts nearly 170-person workforce will be laid off due to mounting financial concerns about the coronavirus pandemic, officials announced Wednesday.

Of the centers 165 employees, 120 are set to be laid off starting April 11, according to a statement from the modern art museum in North Adams. The reduction impacted every department, including management.

All staff members, full- and part-time alike, are expected to receive their paychecks through March 27, whether they have been able to work or not, according to the statement. The museum previously announced it would be closed through May 1 due to the outbreaks impact.

The COVID-19 contagion strikes at the very heart of our mission, which is to gather together large numbers of people around acts of creativity," Joseph Thompson, the museums director, said in the statement. So the pain is compounded.

Employees will receive at least 70% of their regular pay starting March 27 through April 10. Laid-off staff members who were enrolled in the organizations health care plan will continue to be insured through July 31. The medical premiums are fully covered by MASS MoCA, according to the museum.

The centers remaining workers will take voluntary reductions in work hours or salary decreases of between 18% and 28%. These employees will be tasked with fundraising, managing the museums numerous facilities and planning for the organizations reopening, MASS MoCAs statement said.

A small group of buildings and grounds, security and custodial staff will remain on the full-time payroll after April 10, according to the statement.

The viral respiratory infections impact on businesses, the U.S. economy and daily life have rapidly increased in recent weeks. Unemployment claims in the country rose to 3.3 million last week, the Department of Labor reported Thursday.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker issued a stay-at-home advisory this week. He previously canceled school programing and restricted restaurants and bars from serving patrons on site.

Cutbacks at companies have been announced throughout the state, including at newspapers. Thirteen employees at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton and the Greenfield Recorder were laid off as a direct result of the pandemic. At The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, staff members were expected to take a 40-hour furlough.

MASS MoCA, a major cultural cornerstone in Berkshire County and Western Massachusetts, is in a renovated 19th-century factory. The location hosts galleries as well as indoor and outdoor performing arts venues. The center promotes various forms of art from sculpture to theater.

Half of MASS MoCAs annual programming is dedicated to concerts and other performing arts events, and 70% of the organizations annual budget comes from museum gate revenue, concert tickets and concessions, according to the centers statement.

The museum announced earlier this month it would be canceling or postponing all performances starting March 7, and the organization closed its galleries on March 15. The closures have had a particularly harsh effect on MASS MoCAs operating budget. The centers board of trustees moved this week to approve an emergency draw from the organizations endowment.

We are also aware of the role that MASS MoCAs operations and programs play within the local and regional economy, and we will do everything within our power to re-launch at the soonest possible instant, following guidance from public health officials, Thompson said in MASS MoCAs statement.

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PARK RIDGE, Ill., March 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- (AANA) The American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA) continues to devote its resources to monitoring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on nurse anesthetists, advocating for their safety and that of their patients and communities. To that end, the AANA Board of Directors has issued the following position statement to support healthcare workers on the use of self-supplied personal protective equipment (PPE):

The AANA believes that all healthcare workers should be allowed to use self-supplied Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), including industrial respirators that meet National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) standards, when providers feel that the equipment being provided by their healthcare facility is not adequate to protect them. The AANA opposes healthcare facility policies that prohibit healthcare providers from self-supplying the PPE they need to be safe.

Furthermore, the AANA supports the appropriate use of PPE by anesthesia providers as described in our position statement on the Use of PPE During the COVID-19 Crisis. The AANA also believes that decisions to change recommendations for the proper use of PPE should be evidence based and not due to challenges with supply.

SOURCE American Association of Nurse Anesthetists

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Through the use of Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers from Virginia Tech have found a startling fact about galactic objects called quasars! They aren't just energetic material that could shine even a thousand times over than the galaxies they are into. Some of them have tsunami-like powers that could push 46-million-MPH winds blasting out the annual weight material of the sun a hundred times over! This phenomenon could also create ripples throughout galaxies.

What are quasars?

Quasars are among the most vibrant objects in the universe. They are powered by massive black holes that eat up a significant amount of materials in the galaxy.

Quasars materialize as supermassive black holes consume matter from neighboring galaxies and spit out jets of matter. These energetic galactic object could also heat surrounding materials, resulting in the creation of superheated disks capable of blasting out "winds" through radiation and magnetic pressure.

The astronomers who carried out the experiment wanted to find out the amount of energy the winds have. The objective was quite challenging as qasars are found as far as 10bn light-years away.

Good thing, there's hubble space telescope which was able to capture light photos of this galactic object at its best. It has for instance captured a streaky jet object that has a length of 200,000 lightyears. That's four times bigger than the radius of the Milky Way galaxy!

Read Also: Stunning Hubble Snapshot Showcases Ancient And Far-Off Galaxies

Measuring the velocity of a quasar's wind

The astronomers also use Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), another Hubble instrument, to measure the velocity of a wind produce by quasar. COS is the sole device capable of capturing a particlular UV light range required to measure the presence of Doppler shift in the outflow of the galactic object. It paves the way for understanding the jets' composition and speed.

By measuring jets on some quasars, what the team of astronomers are quite mind-blogging!

According to the results, some jets are blasting out winds that could 'snowplow' a galactic object away from the center at a considerable speed of light. Of the 13 quasars examined, one of them started to produce winds at 43-million MPH and hit 46-million MPH speed three years thereafter. Its speeding up faster than any of its kind yet.

Lead researcher of the team Nahum Arav said, "the winds are pushing hundreds of solar masses of material each year".

He added that "the amount of mechanical energy that these outflows carry is up to several hundreds of times higher than the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy."

Arav noted that the qasar could probably glow across visible light spectra and X-ray as its shock wave warm its surrounding material to billions of degrees.

Read Also: Nest Of Superstars Spotted By Hubble Space Telescope | Tech Times

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Cuba hit out at the United States on Thursday over a "campaign of discredit and lies" against the doctors it has sent around the world to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. Following requests in recent weeks, communist Cuba has sent medical teams to Italy, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Grenada, Suriname, Jamaica and Belize. The export of medical services is one of the pillars of the Cuban economy that has suffered almost six decades of crippling US sanctions, bringing in $6.3 billion in 2018, according to official figures. "The American government's campaign of discredit is immoral in any circumstances, and it's particularly offensive for Cuba and the world in times of a pandemic that threatens all of us," said the foreign ministry. The US State Department is waging "a continuous and exacerbated campaign of discredit and lies against the international medical cooperation supplied by Cuba," the ministry said in a diplomatic protest statement. "#Cuba offers its international medical missions to those afflicted with #COVID-19 only to make up the money it lost when countries stopped participating in the abusive program," said the State Department on Twitter. Cuba, which is world renown for its medical training program, has more than 30,000 doctors working in 61 countries. However, following governmental swings from leftist allies to right-wing opponents, several countries -- including Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and El Salvador -- sent the doctors home to Cuba. The State Department said the Cuban state, which provides free education, "keeps most of the salary its doctors and nurses earn while serving in its international medical missions while exposing them to egregious labor conditions." "Host countries seeking Cuba's help for #COVID-19 should scrutinize agreements and end labor abuses." Cuba says it pays its medical professionals enough money to cover their expenses in their host country, on top of a salary of around $50 a month paid in Cuba. The rest of the money made from the program helps ensure health and education remain free for everyone on the Caribbean island nation, Havana says. Following requests in recent weeks, communist Cuba has sent medical teams to Italy, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Grenada, Suriname, Jamaica and Belize; pictured is a woman taking precautions against the spread of COVID-19, in Havana, on March 24, 2020
In the age of a pandemic, what do a North Brunswick mattress company and a Paterson tablecloth factory have in common?

Both companies have decided to use their expertise to start making medical masks, fighting the dwindling supply of the critically needed and potentially life-saving masks for healthcare workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus outbreak in New Jersey.

At its North Brunswick factory, mattress manufacturer Eclipse International will pivot from making mattresses to producing an initial batch of 38,000 masks, with plans to donate all the masks to healthcare workers who have been pleading for more supplies of protective gear. The first batch will be donated to the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, in New Brunswick, according to a statement.

The switch started when Stuart Carlitz, president and CEO of Eclipse International, watched a grim report of a shortage of the masks and realized much of the same materials were used for the mattresses he had been making for years.

This all started Friday morning when I heard Governor Cuomo in New York talk about the fact that they were out of masks and scrambling to find them and that they were actually paying much higher prices than what masks were being sold for weeks earlier," said Stuart Carlitz, president and CEO of Eclipse International. My first thought was thats really terrible that people would take advantage of this time to profit.

Looking down at masks his wife had given him to protect himself, Carlitz saw that one of the materials used in the mask were the same as in the mattresses: an Elite nonwoven fabric textile.

After ordering materials the company didnt have, including elastic, the company is set to produce the three-layer masks, Carlitz said.

I started researching on the internet for designs, he said. Sourcing the materials that I needed. We got our first delivery of elastic Monday morning. We immediately made several prototype masks.

Additional materials came in Tuesday, with production expected to ramp up this week.

Seamstress Victoria Espinal sews a face mask at Eclipse International. Normally a mattress manufacturer Eclipse International helps out in the fight to provide protective gear for hospitals and doctors. They are using materials normally used in mattresses and repurposing them to make face masks in their North Brunswick factory. Amanda Brown| For NJ Advance Med

In Paterson, at the Tablecloth Company, which makes  you guessed it  table clothes, requests from customers to look into making masks prompted the company to work at some prototypes. Many of the requests came from customers at nursing homes, where outbreaks of the virus can often be deadly.

The flip to making the tiny, stretchy masks that just barely cover the mouth and nose is a learning experience for a company that puts together mattresses. Much less material is used, but machines need to be retrofitted and employees retrained.

But the unprecedented need calls for unprecedented changes. Eventually, if the first batch goes well, Carlitz has plans to expand to other places that need the masks. All of the masks though, will remain free.

Im not trying to sell masks, said Carlitz. Whether its a dollar apiece or four dollars apiece, thats not going to change my business. Im going to donate the masks.

Michael Campbell, vice president of operations at Eclipse International, threads an embroidery machine as the company tests out a face mask template at the North Brunswick factory. Normally a mattress manufacturer Eclipse International, helps out in the fight to provide protective gear for hospitals and doctors. They are using materials used in mattresses and repurposing them to make face masks. 3/25/20 #togethernjAmanda Brown| For NJ Advance Med

Mattress manufacturer Eclipse International helps out in the fight to provide protective gear for hospitals and doctors. They are using materials normally used in mattresses and repurposing them to make face masks in their North Brunswick factory. 3/25/20 #togethernjAmanda Brown| For NJ Advance Med

An embroidery machine at Eclipse International does a test run of a face mask template at their North Brunswick factory. Normally a mattress manufacturer Eclipse International, helps out in the fight to provide protective gear for hospitals and doctors. They are using materials used in mattresses and repurposing them to make face masks. 3/25/20 #togethernjAmanda Brown| For NJ Advance Med

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The coronavirus crisis should not be used as an excuse to sell religion, a senior church leader says.

The Rev Dr Martyn Atkins, superintendent of the Methodist Central Hall Westminster, will use a BBC broadcast this Sunday to say Christians should not be salespeople of God.

Every Sunday the BBC is broadcasting a church service to a national wireless congregation as normal places of worship are closed.

Dr Atkins will say: Lent is a time to seek not only to follow Jesus, but to become more like him. The challenge is not to become good salespeople of religion as much as free gifts of Gods grace in Christ, where you are, today, now.

The service will be broadcast on all 39 BBC local radio stations in England at 8am. Broadcasts for other faiths are also taking place on local radio.

The Church of England and Catholic churches in the UK have closed all their buildings in line with the government ban on social gatherings. Many mosques in Britain have also shut.

However, not all countries are doing the same. Brazils president, Jair Bolsonaro, includes religious activities in its list of essential services.

US president Donald Trump has predicted churches will be packed again by Easter next month.

In South Korea, a religious cult was identified as the source of the country's outbreak, forcing its leader to later apologise.
Cloud Disco Dancing:

(Photo: Xinhua)

Cant go out to a nightclub during the outbreak? Tune in to a livestreaming music remix channel with a live DJ on your phone and dance to the beats while you stay home.

Remote work and cloud meetings:

A teacher with a vocational school in Anshan, Liaoning province, teaches online. (Photo/Xinhua)

Work at home from your laptop and dont worry about wearing pyjamas during the day. Arrange online meetings with your colleagues without delays to your work schedule.

Online education:

A Physics teacher gives an online tuition to students at Hefei NO. Eight Senior High School in Hefei, East China's Anhui province, Feb 3, 2020. (Photo/Xinhua)

Students can attend classes online or study via television as schools postpone the start of the new semester due to the outbreak. Cloud platforms are providing students with education resources covering all major school subjects.

Home workout:

A family in Chongqing exercises at home. (Photo: Wang Quanchao/Xinhua)

Exercise from the comfort of your home. Forget about the gym and enjoy some quality time with your family.

Free online medical services:

Doctors from the General Hospital of Ningxia Medical University provide online medical consultation services. (Photo/Xinhua)

Though not on the frontline of battling COVID-19, some doctors are offering free online medical consultations to patients who need them so they can all avoid going to hospitals during the outbreak.
An explosive device went off on Thursday a short distance from the site in Kabul where the cremation of the 25 Sikhs killed in a terror attack was underway, though there were no casualties, according to media reports.

The device exploded in a house in Qalacha area, not far from where members of the Sikh minority were cremating those killed in the attack on a Sikh place of worship at Shor Bazar on Wednesday. A second explosive device was defused by Afghan security forces in the same area, the media reports said.

People familiar with developments confirmed on Thursday that an Indian national named Tian Singh, a resident of New Delhi, was among the 25 people killed in the attack. Singhs wife, in a letter sent to the Prime Minister, requested the repatriation of his body.

External affairs minister S Jaishankar tweeted: Deeply concerned at the blasts reported near the cremation site of those killed during the attack on Gurudwara Sahib in Kabul. He added the Indian embassy was in touch with Afghan authorities to ensure adequate security onsite as well as safe return of families to their homes.

Jaishankar also said the Indian embassy was working to repatriate the body of Tian Singh. Though Singhs wife, in her letter, also called for those wounded in Wednesdays attack to be shifted to New Delhi, Jaishankar said medical opinion was against moving [the] injured at this stage.

The external affairs minister said there was understandable grief and anger over the terror attack and the Indian embassy was in touch with the families of those killed and injured.

Indian ambassador Vinay Kumar visited the Sikh place of worship and met community leaders and families of the victims on Thursday. He was told the injured were receiving satisfactory treatment.

The Islamic State claimed the attack, though Afghan officials said the Pakistan-based Haqqani Network was behind it. In a statement issued late on Wednesday, the Islamic State claimed the attack was revenge for developments in Kashmir and that it was carried out by an attacker using the kunya or assumed name of Abu Khalid al Hindi, suggesting that he was of Indian origin.

The Islamic State provided no other information about the attacker or his origin. Afghan officials have said four suicide attackers were involved in the incident and that they were all killed.

The suicide attackers targeted a dharamshala in Kabuls Shor Bazar, which has a sizeable population of the Hindu and Sikh minorities. Reports said the attack began at 7.45am Afghan time.

Images of the shrine posted on social media showed bloodstains on its floor. Other photos showed security forces and local residents evacuating the injured in ambulances. Witnesses said they heard several explosions during the gun battle.

On Wednesday, India condemned the attack and commended the Afhgan security forces. Such cowardly attacks on the places of religious worship of the minority community, especially at this time of Covid-19 pandemic, are reflective of the diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers, the external affairs ministry said in a statement, in which it hailed the valorous response to the attack and exemplary courage and dedication of the Afghan forces.
Egypts President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi has set into motion a package of important initiatives and measures to steer the fight against the unprecedented coronavirus pandemic that could ravage the domestic and global economy. He urged citizens to follow the advise of public health authorities and to avoid going out as much as possible in order to help curtail the spread of Covid-19. The world will be a different place afterwards, he said. The economic impact will be extremely profound, even in countries that manage to contain this disease. Alluding to the political exploitation of the crisis, he stressed that the official figures reflect the current situation in Egypt and added that from the word go certain parties were determined to cast aspersions on every action Egypt took. The very least that can be said about these aspersions is that they are lies containing a lot of slander and have nothing to do with coronavirus.

The global socioeconomic fallout from this crisis could last months. Economists predict unprecedented rates of unemployment, especially among irregular workers, severe recession in most industrial and commercial sectors and sharply declining economic growth rates.

The urgent social and economic measures taken by countries around the world share a number of features. They offer support to the most vulnerable sectors of society, increase government expenditures on social services, cut taxes, pump money into the hands of consumers, furnish emergency bailouts to hard hit sectors such as airlines and tourist companies, and increase funding for hospitals and the healthcare industry in general. The sheer magnitude of the crisis is forcing governments to shoulder more responsibility for the economy, in sharp contrast to the liberal economic strictures that prevailed during the globalisation era of the past few decades. Interventions in order to channel money and energies into medical research, manufacturing medical supplies, increasing hospital capacities and building new hospitals and other facilities are essential government tasks today. So, too, are government interventions to prevent the collapse of important economic sectors.

Even in the early stages of the contagion, it was estimated that coronavirus could cost the global economy more than $1 trillion of global GDP if it turned into a pandemic. Oxford University warned that the spread of the virus outside Asia could trigger a 1.3 per cent drop in global income in 2020, or about $1.1 trillion. An indication of how hard the pandemic might strike the world economy comes from the US where Congress has approved a $2 trillion emergency aid plan in order to contain the economic repercussions of the spread of coronavirus in the US alone. The sum equals 10 per cent of annual US GDP.

Financial and investment circles have welcomed the Egyptian government and Egyptian Central Banks urgent steps to stimulate the economy and offset the damages of coronavirus. They lauded, in particular, the measures to reduce the price of natural gas for industry, to cut electricity prices, to extend the deadline for paying real estate tax and to help out floundering industries. All such measures are crucial for local industry and investors.

Still, both domestically and internationally it looks like we have to brace ourselves for worse to come before humankind can beat Covid-19 into retreat. The dramatic coronavirus-related developments in Europe are very alarming and it is impossible to tell when scientists will find a cure. What this means is that a sense of collective responsibility between world governments and peoples is more crucial than ever before. Humanity must unite in the face of the most serious threat in modern times.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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US Christian leaders have criticised Donald Trumps Easter coronavirus deadline  by which he wants to see much of the country reopened and churches full. One described it as the height of hypocrisy.

As US coronavirus cases and deaths continued to soar, the president said on Tuesday he wanted to reopen large sections of the country by Easter Sunday  12 April  when there would be packed churches all over our country.

His comments came despite warnings from White House taskforce members Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, the latter saying she was deeply concerned about New York and its surrounding area.

On Wednesday the number of confirmed US cases rose to 54,453 and 737 deaths, according to figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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It is the height of hypocrisy for Trump to suggest that Easter is a time to defy public health recommendations and reopen America, said pastor and activist the Rev William J Barber II.

Jesus challenged oppression and cared for the poor, while Trump ignored the pandemic of poverty and tragically dismissed intelligence about the coronavirus. We need a resurrection of Jesuss concern for the most vulnerable, not a capitulation to corporate greed that could cost millions of lives.

The Rev Al Sharpton said that if Trump was going to use biblical language, the president needs to know the whole Easter story.

You cannot get to Easter Sunday without first going through the crucifixion on Friday. A crucifixion precedes the resurrection, Mr President, and we have not even got up Calvarys mountain yet to the crucifixion, we just have the cross on our back, he told MSNBCs Morning Joe.

Sharpton said New York  currently on lockdown with more than 30,000 cases across the state  would undergo a real crucifixion at the height of the pandemic, which will then go around the US before we can get to resurrection Sunday.

He added: A premature resurrection will lead to a disaster and we need to understand that, deal with it head on.

Story continues

The Rev Laura Everett, a pastor and executive director of Massachusetts Council of Churches, told of her anger with Trump.

Still fuming about Trump co-opting Easter for capitalism, she tweeted.

Are his Christian followers going to follow him down this path? Do you not remember how Lent begins, when the devil takes Jesus to the heights of the city and shows him all the glittery things if you but worship me?

Christianity Today published a critical editorial following Trumps comments in which it warned that even with good hygiene and physical distancing, congregating during a pandemic mars our witness.

It said: Rather than looking courageous and faithful, we come off looking callous and even foolish, not unlike the snake handlers who insisted on playing with poison as a proof of true faith.

In the Catholic church, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles tweeted on Tuesday night, after the presidents announcement, that all its churches would remain closed until at least 19 April  a week after Trumps suggested deadline.

In newly updated guidelines, it encouraged priests to continue celebrating mass without a congregation and live-streaming instead.

The Archdiocese of New York, which includes St Patricks Cathedral in Manhattan, said it would celebrate Holy Week and Easter Sunday via live stream or broadcast.

Bishop Michael Curry, who gave the sermon at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, has recommended the suspension of in-person public services in the Episcopal church  including during Holy Week  and encouraged people to worship online.

The presidents Easter deadline goes against the predictions of experts and political figures like New Yorks governor, Andrew Cuomo, who has said the battle against the virus will take several months.

I hope we can do this by Easter, Trump told Tuesdays White House briefing. I think that would be a great thing for our country.

Asked if that was realistic, he said: Were going to look at it. Well only do it if its good and maybe we do sections of the country, we do large sections of the country.

He said he chose Easter because I just thought it was a beautiful time, a beautiful timeline, its a great day.

He told Fox News: Youll have packed churches all over our country. I think itll be a beautiful time.
By PTI

KOLKATA: An elderly man tested positive for COVID-19 in West Bengal, taking the total number of cases in the state to 10, a senior health official said on Thursday.

The 66-year-old from Nayabad in Kolkata had no history of travelling abroad or outside the state, he said.

He is undergoing treatment at a private hospital's intensive coronary care unit, especially set up for novel coronavirus patients, the official said.

His family members have been placed under home quarantine, he said, adding that police have been posted outside their residence.

READ| Bengal man who stepped out to buy milk dies after being thrashed by cops

The man recently attended a wedding ceremony at Egra in East Midnapore district, where he might have come in contact with an infected person, sources in the health department said.

"After coming home from the wedding ceremony, he complained of fever and breathing problems, following which he was admitted to a private hospital on March 23," one of the sources said.

His samples were tested twice and the result turned out to be the same, a doctor at the private hospital said. The sexagenarian has been given oxygen support and necessary medicines, the doctors added.

Meanwhile, a woman who was sneezing and coughing in a bus, which was on its way to Kolkata from Paschim Burdwan, was told by the driver and his helper to get herself tested but she refused.

The driver, on reaching Esplanade area in the city, informed police about the matter, following which he was told to take the bus to Beliaghata ID hospital.

The woman, however, refused to alight from the bus despite repeated requests by doctors at the hospital.

"We tried convincing her to get down so that we can conduct a test, but she was reluctant," a senior doctor of Beliaghata ID hospital said.

A team of police officers also reached the hospital to convince her but she again refused, the doctor said.

The woman was finally taken to MR Bangur hospital in south Kolkata, where she agreed to get her tests done, a senior police officer said.
Wrexham Council open up system for businesses to apply for rates grant

This article is old - Published: Thursday, Mar 26th, 2020

Wrexham Council have published information on how businesses can claim a set of financial support linked to business rates.

As part of a range of pandemic economic support measures from UK and Welsh Government businesses could be eligible for grants of 10k or 25k based off their business rates.

In the announced measures business are eligible for:

 A grant of 25,000 for occupied businesses in the retail, leisure and hospitality sector with a rateable value of between 12,001 and 51,000, or

 A grant of 10,000 to businesses eligible for Small Business Rates Relief with a rateable value of 12,000 or less.

Wrexham Council, like all authorities, have been asked to administrate the grant process. Wrexham Council do not however set business rates.

A new online form has been launched where people can apply via https://beta.wrexham.gov.uk/service/covid-19-help-businesses.

For those looking up their current rateable value or similar details as held by the Valuation Office you can find their search form here.

The Councils new page also contains a summary of the new 100% relief for businesses as well as the qualifying criteria for the 2 grants.

People are urged to read the guidance before completing the form, with it also clearly stated any erroneous or incorrect claims will have to paid back in full.

Wrexham Council say they are expecting to process the claims in the coming weeks, Wrexham Council appreciates the exceptional circumstances faced by businesses and is working hard to implement this support package as soon as possible and it may take a few weeks to finalise all awards.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 26

Trend:

The coronavirus pandemic and the collapse of world energy prices caused economic problems in many countries. At the same time, oil exporting countries, including Azerbaijan, faced the biggest economic challenge. The country's banks play major role in eliminating the negative impact of the coronavirus pandemic and lowering oil prices.

We spoke with Shakir Rahimov, the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of one of the country's leading banks  Bank Respublika about the situation in the economy of Azerbaijan amid falling oil prices and the fight against the spread of the coronavirus.

How has the COVID-19 affected global energy prices, the stock markets and the global economy in whole?

The new type of coronavirus - COVID-19 has already influenced and will continue negatively affect the global economy. Unprecedented self-isolation measures aimed to contain the spread of pandemic in many countries led to significant reduction of demand of most of goods and services and made multiple industries completely unprofitable, which led to significant reduce in oil demand. The situation was also worsened by the panic in the global stock markets, where we saw a record drop of almost all companies share values. Consequently, the decline in oil demand and negative expectations amid falling stocks collapsed oil price.

You have mentioned the oil prices. Can you briefly describe what is happening in the oil market?

The declining trend in oil prices began in January 2020, when it became clear that coronavirus would have an extremely negative effect on the Chinese economy (15 percent of world GDP) and, thus, on the worlds economy in whole. In a short time, oil supply significantly exceeded global demand. However, the reduction in oil prices was not significant, as market players expected OPEC+ (the main oil exporting countries, mainly Arab states, plus Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan) to reduce production and thereby bring oil demand and supply in equilibrium.

But, unfortunately, this did not happen: the main negotiators - Russia and Saudi Arabia did not come to an agreement. This caused the oil price collapse in early March. However, taking into consideration that low oil prices are not profitable for Russia, Saudi Arabia or the United States (these are the three main oil producers), I think they will agree in upcoming months to reduce oil production, which will return oil prices to the range of $45-$50.

What can you say about the impact of low oil prices and the coronavirus pandemic on the country's economy? How prepared are we for what is happening?

As an oil exporting country, we are negatively affected by two external factors: the economic situation in the world and low oil prices. And this is a serious challenge for the country. On the top of already mentioned shocks is also a self-isolation policy within the country: people buy fewer goods and less use services. But I am sure that together we will cope with this challenge. We are now much better prepared for low oil prices than at any other time in the past, for example, in 2015.

I will try to list the main, in my opinion, positive factors:

1) probably, the most important is the reaction and behavior of the country's administration in a crisis situation. It is encouraging that logical decisions are taken quickly and then successfully implemented. I would like to underline the personal initiative of Mr. president in this scope;

2) budgetary rules have been adopted to reduce the negative impact of oil price volatility on the country's budget, which allows to ensure all social obligations of the state;

3) we have increased international reserves since 2015, and if we compare the ratio of reserves to the country's GDP in US dollar terms, this figure is much higher than it was in 2015;

4) low ratio of external debt to GDP;

5) tighter control over speculative currency transactions;

6) reforms in the tax and customs spheres that led to a significant whitening of the economy and an increase in tax and customs duties (it should be mentioned that given the importance of business for the development of the economy this whitening in the tax sphere carried out more through motivation than punitive measures, and I am sure that the merge of the Ministry of Taxes and the Ministry of Economic Development will help to continue this strategy);

7) the implementation of an exceptional model of synthesis of new generations managers (knowing many of them, I can say that these are high-class professionals) with experienced older generations managers.

You know that in order to reduce the negative impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the economy, macroeconomic stability and the business climate in the country, President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree that set important tasks for many state bodies. Could you please provide more information about this decree and other steps taken by the country's administration during this difficult time?

In my opinion, the state has taken exceptional proactive measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus in the country, several weeks (and in some cases a whole month) ahead of most of other countries. As some examples of timely decrees of Mr. president can be mentioned the creation of an operational headquarters consisting of senior officials under the management of the prime minister; allocating funding to reduce the negative impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the economy and social sphere, establishment of a Fund to Fight the pandemic, closing borders, introduction of a special regime, increase of medical workers salaries.

By a decree of March 19 Mr. president demonstrated the most important in the current situation: that the government will provide the necessary support to the population and the private sector. In accordance with the decree, 1 billion manat was allocated to support the economy, social sphere and macroeconomic stability. We were one of the firsts to allocate money from the budget for these purposes.

The Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection and the Central Bank were given exact tasks: revealing sectors of the economy and segments of the population to suffer most from the COVID-19 pandemic; preparing and providing the Cabinet of Ministers with the information on the levels of potential losses in these areas and suggesting measures to support these groups; assessment of the negative impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the banking sector and macroeconomics; preparation of proposals to support the stability of manat and consumer prices.

By another presidential decree was created a support Fund to Fight coronavirus, to which the state transferred 20 million manat. It is very heartwarming that not only the public but also the private sectors responded promptly to the presidents call to demonstrate its social responsibility. In just a couple of days, more than 40 million manat was transferred to the fund. The banking sector immediately supported the initiative of Mr. president.

Among the measures taken, I highly appreciate the First Vice President Mehriban Aliyevas address to the nation aimed to comfort and educate population of applying of principles of precaution, personal responsibility and care about the elder generation. I hope that other famous people will follow her example.

How do banks see their social responsibility? What are banks and, particularly, Bank Repspublika doing in this direction?

It is very important to note that banks, realizing their social and state responsibility could correctly react to emerged needs: to ensure uninterrupted supply of necessary goods to the country banks transferred entrepreneurs funds swiftly in the same time continuously serving a large flow of individuals. Banks have been working seven days a week and almost without breaks during the last weeks. I am very proud of all banks employees, who, despite the risks, tiredness and many other problems, were working courageously, spoke to a large number of customers fulfilling their civic duty. An important role in the coordinated work of banks played the Central Bank of Azerbaijan and the Association of Banks of Azerbaijan. Meetings were held and crucial decisions were made almost every day.

Bank Respublika, being one of the leading banks in the country, showed once again its social responsibility at these challenging times. Thus, the bank was among top three in terms of the number and amount of transactions with the population, serving customers in all branches without setting any limits. The bank was one of the first to transfer money to the Fund to Fight the pandemic, one of the firsts to respond to the call of Mr. president to join the program of self-employment of the population. Following the recommendations of the operational headquarters, the bank transferred all customer-entrepreneurs using the old version of Internet banking to a more modern and convenient version, enabling customers to remotely conduct all operations.

As you said, external shocks led to problems in many sectors of our economy. What, in your opinion, should the state bodies and banks do to compensate the negative consequences?

In my opinion, the government should take the following measures:

1) to provide temporary tax benefits for entrepreneurs affected by coronavirus;

2) to provide additional tax and customs preferences to companies that did not lay off their employees;

3) to provide temporary compensation to the least protected layers of population who have lost their sources of income due to the coronavirus;

4) to more actively attract small and medium enterprises to participate in tenders announced by the government;

5) to strengthen the lending through state funds (Entrepreneurs Development Fund, Agency for Agricultural Loans and Development, etc.);

6) to support banks in micro lending development, especially in the regions;

7) to subsidize part of the interest of loans to entrepreneurs and consumer loans;

Banks should:

1) improve remote service channels and ensure their safety;

2) develop mechanisms for providing customers with a grace period. Of course, the regulator - the Central Bank - should support banks by prudential regulation relaxation and providing the needed liquidity.
LONDON, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- J P Jenkins Ltd. is pleased to announce that shares of Firestone Diamonds Plc (FDI) have been admitted onto its share dealing platform.

Firestone is an international diamond mining company with operations in Lesotho. Firestone commenced commercial production in July 2017 at the Liqhobong Diamond Mine. Liqhobong is owned 75% by Firestone and 25% by the Government of Lesotho.Lesotho is one of Africa's significant new diamond producers, hosting Gem Diamonds' Letseng Mine, Firestone's Liqhobong Mine, Namakwa Diamonds' Kao Mine and Lucapa's Mothae Mine.

J P Jenkins is the oldest established trading platform in UK for unlisted or unquoted companies which enables shareholders and prospective investors to trade their shares on a matched bargain basis.

Should shareholders wish to trade their shares they can do so through their stockbroker. The indicative price and transaction history are available on J P Jenkins's website (www.jpjenkins.com). For more information please call +44 (0) 20 7469 0937.

Veronika Oswald, Director of J P Jenkins said: "We would like to welcome another exciting company to our share dealing platform and we are looking forward to trading the shares of Firestone Diamonds".

For further information, please contact:
New Delhi, March 26 : The Centre has set up a control room to monitor the status of transportation along with delivery of goods, manufacturing and essential commodities to the public.

Accordingly, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade has set up the control room to monitor on "real time" basis the status of delivery.

The facility will also monitor the difficulties being faced by various stakeholders during the lockdown period.

"In the event of any manufacturing, transporter, distributor, wholesaler or e-commerce companies facing ground level difficulties in transport and distribution of goods or mobilization of resources, the same may be informed to this Department...," the Ministry of Commerce and Industry said in a statement.

This department can be approached at its New Delhi number 23062487.
Britain needs 80,000 more volunteers to harvest its crops in the next few months despite a 10,000-strong land army already signing up.

Some 10,000 volunteers across 500 UK farms will not be enough, Stephanie Maurel, chief executive of the charity Concordia, told The Guardian.

Asparagus is set to be picked from next month but workers who usually come from overseas to work on the harvest have been held back by COVID-19.

Some 80,000 more workers are needed in order to properly clear the fields of all available produce, Ms Maurel, whose charity is working on the Feed the Nation scheme, added.

Some 10,000 volunteers across 500 UK farms will not be enough, said Stephanie Maurel, chief executive of the charity Concordia. Asparagus will be ready to be harvested from next month

'We're worried that there's going to be a shortfall,' she said.

Of the 10,000 who have signed up almost 90 per cent are from Britain, less than a third have any experience in agriculture and half said coronavirus had affected their jobs.

Andy Allen, from Portwood Farm in Norfolk, said he didn't expect to make any money from his harvest this year because of the lack of help.

'Due to European workers not being able to make their way to the farm this ear because of closed borders and cancelled flights, we have been short on the 130 workers we need to pick and pack our asparagus,' he added.

'This year our job is purely about feeding the nation, there is no money to be made.'

It comes after Environment Secretary George Eustice said that he was already talking to farmers about filling a 'gap' in the European temporary workforce in the UK's fields caused by the global coronavirus shutdown.

He urged people to sign up to help get in the harvest and help fill 'people's plates'.

It comes after Environment Secretary George Eustice said that he was already talking to farmers about filling a 'gap' in the European temporary workforce

The National Farmers' Union warned its members are already seeing prices cut and payments delayed because of disruption to the supply chain caused by reaction to the virus.

A spokesman added: 'Growers that rely on seasonal workers to pick, pack and grade our fruit and veg are extremely concerned about the impact coronavirus measures may have on their ability to recruit workers this year.

'The industry is already working hard to promote available roles on farm locally, recognising that this could help those who unfortunately find themselves out of work.

'We are urging the government to address this situation as soon as possible and to implement any solution as a matter of urgency.'

It comes as:

The Prince of Wales has tested positive for coronavirus but is only displaying mild symptoms, Clarence House announced.

The Foreign Office announced that Steven Dick, 37, the deputy head of mission at the British Embassy in Budapest, died after contracting coronavirus.

NHS England's medical director said hundreds of thousands of tests for Covid-19 per day could become a reality within weeks.

Boris Johnson urged London Mayor Sadiq Khan to 'get more Tubes on the line' but resisted calls to ban non-essential construction workers from heading to building sites.

Parliament is set to adjourn for an early Easter break after emergency legislation to tackle Covid-19 is approved.

The Prime Minister confirmed that ministers are considering asking black taxi drivers to act as a transport service for NHS workers.

Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, yesterday told MPs that he is confident the health service will remain 'within capacity'.

Economists have warned that food prices could surge in UK shops, with increasing numbers of workers either ill themselves or unable to cross borders because of restrictions on movement designed to slow the spread of the disease.

Would you like to apply to work on a UK farm this summer? Got to HOPs Labour Solutions to sign up to be a volunteer. Advertisement

Mr Eustice said: 'Our farmers are doing a fantastic job of feeding the nation during this immensely challenging time.

'I have been speaking with industry today and in the last week about the critically important issue of seasonal workers, who usually come from Europe to pick fruit and vegetables.

'We need to mobilise the British workforce to fill that gap and make sure our excellent fruit and vegetables are on people's plates over the summer months.

'There are already brilliant recruitment efforts underway by industry and I would encourage as many people as possible to sign up.

'We will also be looking at other ways to make sure farmers have support they need ahead of the busy harvest months, while also keeping workers safe and protected.'

Increasing numbers of workers are either ill themselves or unable to get to the fields because of restrictions on movement designed to slow the spread of the disease

The problem is not just confined to the UK, with France's agriculture minister Didier Guillaume calling yesterday for a 'shadow army' of laid-off workers to help bring in the harvest.

Ministers and experts in the UK have been at pains to tell the public there is no shortage of food, in a bid to discourage panic-buying.

Rain Newton-Smith, the CBI's chief economist said that food prices were 'starting to emerge as a concern', in an interview with the Telegraph.

'There is a real challenge if, as the crops come on stream, there aren't the people that can go and pick the crops,' she said.

'How do you get people to do these roles and how do you make sure, if we're still in social distancing, that they are not getting too close to each other?

'There's real pressure on supply so there is certainly some concern.'

France appealed on Tuesday to workers laid off by the coronavirus crisis to help farmers pick fruit and vegetables that will otherwise be left to rot in the fields due to a shortage of seasonal workers.

Farmers forecast a nationwide shortage of around 200,000 farm labourers over the harvest period as tight border restrictions imposed to help curb the spread of coronavirus make it much harder to recruit from outside France.

This has raised the prospect of strawberries, asparagus and other crops rotting in the fields.

Ministers and experts in the UK have been at pains to tell the public there is no shortage of food, in a bid to discourage panic-buying

With hotel receptionists, restaurant waiters, hairdressers and many others deprived of work by an unprecedented lockdown, Mr Guillaume told them to 'join the great army of French agriculture' in an interview to a French TV channel.

France has so far reported nearly 20,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus and around 860 deaths.

Christine Lambert, head of France's biggest farm union, FNSEA, said the farm sector needed 45,000 labourers in March and 80,000 in both April and May to help farmers, mainly to harvest fruit and vegetables.

'Due to the closure of the Schengen borders but also to movement restrictions in Europe, the Poles and the Romanians who used to come won't anymore,' Ms Lambert wrote on Twitter.

'If our call is not heard the production will remain in the fields and the entire fruit and vegetables sector will be damaged,' she added.
The powerful G-20 grouping on Thursday decided to inject over USD 5 trillion into the global economy to counter economic disruptions triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.

The G-20 leaders under the chairmanship of Saudi Arabia's King Salman held an extraordinary video conference in which they resolved to use all available policy tools to minimise the economic and social damage from the pandemic that has killed over 21,000 people and infected more than 470,000 globally.

"We are injecting over USD 5 trillion into the global economy, as part of targeted fiscal policy, economic measures, and guarantee schemes to counteract the social, economic and financial impacts of the pandemic," the G20 leaders said in a joint statement.

In his address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pitched for developing a new crisis management protocol to deal with global health crisis and urged G20 to work towards addressing shockwaves triggered by the pandemic.

He also urged the grouping to come out with a concrete action plan to fight the pandemic and said human beings rather than economic targets should be put at the centre of its vision for global prosperity and cooperation.

In its statement, the G-20 said it will work "swiftly and decisively" with frontline international organisations like the WHO, IMF, and multilateral and regional development banks to deploy a robust, coherent, coordinated plan to deal with the crisis.

"We commit to do whatever it takes and to use all available policy tools to minimise the economic and social damage from the pandemic, restore global growth, maintain market stability, and strengthen resilience," it said.

"We are currently undertaking immediate and vigorous measures to support our economies; protect workers, businesses - especially micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises - and the sectors most affected," it added.

As the world reels under the economic and social fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, the G20 held the video conference to discuss ways to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

The leaders, including US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, also agreed to contribute to the WHO-led COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund on a voluntary basis.

The G20 grouping shares 80 per cent of world GDP and 60 per cent of world population.

The grouping said it will continue to conduct bold and large-scale fiscal support to deal with the economic aspects of the crisis.

"Collective G20 action will amplify its impact, ensure coherence, and harness synergies. The magnitude and scope of this response will get the global economy back on its feet and set a strong basis for the protection of jobs and the recovery of growth," the bloc said.

"We ask our finance ministers and central bank governors to coordinate on a regular basis to develop a G20 action plan in response to COVID-19 and work closely with international organisations to swiftly deliver the appropriate international financial assistance," it added.

In his address, Saudi King Salman urged G20 leaders to boost funding for a vaccine for coronavirus.

The G20 said it will work to ensure the flow of vital medical supplies, critical agricultural products, and other goods and services across borders, and work to resolve disruptions to the global supply chains.

"We commit to continue working together to facilitate international trade and coordinate responses in ways that avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.

"Emergency measures aimed at protecting health will be targeted, proportionate, transparent, and temporary. We task our Trade Ministers to assess the impact of the pandemic on trade," it added.

"We reiterate our goal to realise a free, fair, non-discriminatory, transparent, predictable and stable trade and investment environment, and to keep our markets open," the G20 said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Associated Press

WELLINGTON: The man who committed the worst atrocity in New Zealand's modern history when he slaughtered 51 worshippers at two Christchurch mosques unexpectedly pleaded guilty to all charges Thursday.

The attacks targeting people praying at the mosques a year ago shocked the nation and prompted new laws banning the deadliest types of semi-automatic weapons.

It also prompted global changes to social media protocols after the gunman livestreamed his attack on Facebook, where it was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

The sudden turn in the case took survivors and relatives by surprise, and brought relief to people across New Zealand. Many had feared Australian white supremacist Brenton Harrison Tarrant would try to use his trial as a platform to promote his views. He'd outlined those views in a 74-page manifesto he published online shortly before the attacks.

Tarrant, 29, pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of terrorism at the Christchurch High Court. He had previously pleaded not guilty to all charges and his trial had been scheduled to start in June.

Tarrant is the first person to be found guilty of terrorism in New Zealand under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S.

The change in plea came less than two weeks after New Zealanders commemorated those who died during the attacks on March 15, 2019.

Honestly, I'm still trying to process what just happened, said Aya Al-Umari, whose brother Hussein was killed in the attack on the Al Noor mosque. I feel conflicted."

She said that on the one hand, she had wanted to find out more details about what happened at the trial but on the other hand was feeling relieved about not having to face the trauma of sitting through it.

Temel Atacocugu, who survived being shot nine times during the attack at Al Noor, said he was surprised by the turn of events and hoped the judge would set an example at the sentencing by imposing the harshest punishment in the country's history and helping ensure nothing like it would happen again.

I'm happy that he has accepted that he is guilty, Atacocugu said.

,Judge Cameron Mander has not yet set a sentencing date. Tarrant faces life imprisonment, with the judge having some discretion in deciding the minimum number of years Tarrant must serve before becoming eligible for parole.

The change in plea came at a hastily arranged court hearing at a time that New Zealand was beginning a four-week lockdown to try and combat the new coronavirus. The lockdown meant Tarrant appeared in the court via video link from his jail cell in Auckland and only a handful of people were allowed inside the courtroom.
Accion Labs, a Pittsburgh, PA-based digital-focused software product engineering company specializing in emerging technologies, received a growth investment from TA Associates.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

With it, TA Associates joined Basil Technology Partners as an investor in Accion Labs.

The company intends to use the funds to further grow organically and through acquisitions, with a particular focus on the U.S. and European markets.

Founded in in 2011 by Kinesh Doshi, CEO, Accion provides technology companies and enterprises with solutions and services to deploy emerging technologies. The companys expertise ranges across advanced UX, artificial intelligence and machine learning, big-data/analytics, migration to cloud/SaaS and re-engineering of legacy platforms, process automation, mobility, augmented reality and IOT. Clients include software product companies, e-SaaS firms, e-business organizations and enterprises undergoing a digital transformation across a range of industries such as healthcare, financial services, technology and fintech.

Accion has more than 2,600 engineers across 14 offices within the U.S., Canada, the UK and Asia-Pacific.

FinSMEs

26/03/2020
Despite old age, Geneva Wood managed to survive coronavirus, giving a glimpse of home to other people. (Photo : (Photo : YouTube/KING 5))

Despite old age, Geneva Wood managed to survive coronavirus, giving a glimpse of home to other people.



Advertisement

As a high-risk group for coronavirus, elderly people face fears of getting sick with COVID-19, which could be fatal for them. Although some have succumbed to death, there are still people over 80 years old who win the battle against this deadly disease.



Geneva Wood, a 90-year-old woman from Washington state, survived coronavirus. Her daughter Cami Neidigh shares how her mother fought to recover from her near-death experience.



Wood is one of the residents in The Life Care Center in Kirkland, which is considered as a center of the outbreak in Washington. She has been living at the senior-living facility since suffering a stroke in January. She was about to go home from the facility when she suddenly caught coronavirus. Her family was in a panic after knowing that she tested positive for COVID-19 because of her condition. Apart from old age, Wood has lost her ability to walk, talk, and move her right arm.



The old woman was brought to Harborview Medical Center on March 5 after having fever, cough, and shortness of breath, which are all symptoms of coronavirus.



Wood's family in panic

"My heart sank when I heard that she had tested positive. I was so sure she would be OK. She had fought so hard to come back from the stroke, how could it be possible that a virus was going to take her out?" Cami, one of Wood's children told Fox News.



Cami added that Wood never quits no matter what adversities she faces in life. Although she is stubborn at times due to old age, Wood's family is confident that she can survive coronavirus. For days, Wood can only see her family through a glass window, which worries since they are not allowed to go near her to avoid the spread of the virus.



Cami and the rest of the family members knew that Wood could pull herself again despite her condition. She shared that Wood is a survivor and is always determined like how she managed a broken hip. However, their high hopes diminished when Wood was brought to isolation. Knowing that she is alone breaks the heart of her children and grandchildren.



Like most people, there's a possibility that Wood would give up, especially that her family is not on her side. There were days when the family was told to visit the hospital after the doctors see that Wood might pass away anytime soon.



But visiting Wood means merely seeing her at the window. Cami relates that it is so heartbreaking and brutal "to be so close and not be able to reach out and touch her." She added that "it tears" her heart out as they reach for her arm on the other side of the wall.



A surprising detour

While everyone, including Wood, was just waiting for her last breath, a surprising shift made everyone happy. Although doctors might not be able to explain, there's a possibility that her great improvement could be credited to the presence of her loved ones.



Wood was crying one day and was asking for her children, urging the medical staff to let them go to her room while wearing protective gear. Cami said that they were given a chance to "touch her hand, rub her arm, and talk slowly" to comfort her. Seeing her mother and given a chance to touch her despite wearing gloves is a "gift."



(Photo : Facebook/Cami Neidigh)



On March 22, Wood was clear of coronavirus. Her family was so happy that Wood was finally allowed to go into a room without wearing a mask. She can now speak to her family and accept hugs. Cami said that she will be discharged soon and will be quarantined with her family members.



Cami hopes that the story of Wood will give a ray of hope not just to old people or to those who get COVID-19, but to the whole world which is facing this pandemic. She added that the virus is not a death sentence. Instead, it is a wake-up call for everyone to be positive while giving guidance to those who are since.



"If anyone's going to give the middle finger to a killer virus, it's her," Cami said about her mother's recovery.



The story of Wood surviving her near-death experience from coronavirus reminds us that there is still hope. Although the number of cases and deaths continue to rise, this will soon come to an end. Wood's resilience and her family's love has helped her recover from this brutal disease. So, if you know somebody who is suffering from COVID-19, share this story to them so they'll grab hold to a ray of hope that nothing is impossible with God's help.






Breaking barriers: but is integrated education really going to heal divisions for generations to come?

In one of her best-known songs, The Greatest Love of All, Whitney Houston sang: "I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way, show them all the beauty they possess inside, give them a sense of pride to make it easier."

And, while she wasn't singing about the 1998 peace process in Northern Ireland, it is true that the success of the journey from a conflict to a post-conflict society can often be measured by the attitudes of children who would have no personal experience, or memory, of the Troubles.

So, it is a little unsettling to read that a new research paper (Symbols and Labels: Children's Awareness of Social Categories in a Divided Society) confirms previous research that children as young as five in Northern Ireland have been "found to differentiate others on the basis of non-visible social categories, including religion and nationality".

The authors of the paper, Laura K Taylor, Jocelyn Dautel and Risa Rylander, from Queen's University Belfast and University College Dublin, continue: "Even in the post-accord generation, social divisions are reinforced by the majority of the population living in segregated housing and attending separate schools. Moreover, social life is organised along group boundaries, which are demarcated by 'peace walls', murals, kerb paintings, graffiti and flags, as well as defined psychologically and culturally in terms of social activities, or sporting events."

Twenty-two years after the hopes and optimism generated by the Good Friday Agreement, that's a particularly gloomy assessment of ongoing political/electoral/societal realities here.

In 1974, when I was 18, I told my dad (a member of the Ulster Unionist Party) that I supported Brian Faulkner's power-sharing deal with the SDLP and Alliance (the Sunningdale Agreement).

I asked him if he was angry, or upset.

His response was simple and honest: "Do what you think is right for the future and for your generation. Don't carry my baggage and the baggage of my generation, just because you think you have to."

Yet, here we are, 45 years later, and it looks like the generation after mine is still capable of recognising the same baggage; and, in many cases, seems willing to carry it forward.

And since the latest research suggests that it is in the 5-11 age-groups that awareness of political and ethnic "others" begins to take root and then grow in Northern Ireland, the question becomes: what do we do about it?

What is required to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated and that the conflict doesn't reignite, albeit in a different form?

Those questions have particular relevance when (excluding what may be a temporary, self-survival co-operation to tackle the Covid-19 crisis) the evidence of the last two decades indicates that the relationships between the two primary political/community blocs are as fraught with tension and mistrust as ever.

It may be too late to do much to change the minds of those who have been through and left the school system since 1998, but what about the next generation?

The authors note: "By identifying the age at which ethnic awareness is increasing, these findings suggest policymakers and practitioners target interventions to younger children before group identities become solidified, or entrenched. Finally, social categorisation among a post-accord generation can have long-lasting effects for the individual child and the broader society. Understanding when and how children develop a sense of social group boundaries has implications for practice and policy in conflict resolution.

"Ethnic awareness, however arbitrary, serves as a lens through which children perceive the social world.

"For instance, research has demonstrated that the content of children's national and ethno-political categories includes symbolic markers such as flags, street banners, coloured kerbstones and murals. Policymakers might strive to reduce such dividing markers in public settings.

"Ultimately, understanding children's social categorisation in divided societies can inform strategies for promoting the antecedents of children's peace-building."

For more than 30 years, opinion poll evidence suggests that most people (a comfortable majority, in fact) believe that education - the school system, in other words - is the primary key to changing old attitudes, among the children themselves, as well as their parents and broader family circles.

Yet, with the exception of the Alliance Party, there doesn't appear to be the political determination to push integrated schooling as a serious option.

That's not to say that the other parties don't continue to promote the concept of educating our children together, but they ended up with the rather odd solution of "shared education", rather than full-blown integration. The Star Trek option, if you like: "It's integrated education, Jim, but not as we know it."

If we are serious about what might be described as a "new-era Northern Ireland", shouldn't it begin with our children?

If they carry our baggage into the polling booth with them, because they are capable of recognising polarising differences from the age of five - at much the same time as they are beginning to speak in coherent sentences, showing evidence of independent thinking and building their own friendships - then there is no likelihood of significant change.

So, even if a border poll did deliver a united Ireland (although I don't think that's likely anytime soon), it seems certain that there would continue to be very significant differences of attitude between unionists/nationalists and Protestants/Catholics.

I wonder, though, if it actually suits the key strategists in unionism and nationalism not to have a united society?

Division makes it very much easier to lever your own bloc behind your political/constitutional goals; and also makes it much easier to focus on a single message (Union versus unity), rather than have to deal in nuance and grey areas.

Putting that more bluntly: educating children together from the age of four and allowing them to recognise there is more uniting them than dividing them makes it much more difficult to rally and campaign on a purely binary political choice.

Maybe those who want to change society and want to create a climate in which children don't recognise and embrace their ancestors's differences from an early age need to look somewhere else other than schools and education?

Children inherit much of their thinking from the habits and attitudes of their parents, so, perhaps, we need more research into, and testing of, the parents, rather than their children.

After all, we're the ones with the baggage which probably needs deposited in a gigantic left-luggage locker - and the key thrown away.
Police have come down hard on Australians caught ignoring strict ministerial directions in the face of the rapidly spreading coronavirus, handing out the first round of hefty COVID-19- related fines.

Officers patrolling the Sydney CBD on Thursday identified a massage parlour still operating despite a Public Health Order enforced from midnight Wednesday demanding businesses of its type close.

Police issued the female business owner a $5000 Penalty Infringement Notice for failing to comply with a direction under Section 7 of the Public Health Act 2010 (NSW).

Three of her female staff were also issued a $1000 fine each.

In an unrelated incident, police fined a 65-year-old woman who returned from Bali on Saturday but failed to adhere to the mandatory 14-day quarantine period.

Police came to her home in Lake Macquarie, in the NSW Hunter Region, on Monday and issued her a warning for breaching the order.

Police patrol closed businesses around the usually busy Darling Harbour precinct in Sydney on Thursday. Source: AAP

On Thursday morning, police were told the woman once again left her home and later that day officers returned to issue her a $1000 fine for doing so.

Police Commissioner Mick Fuller said on Friday police found the woman walking around outside.

Of course, this brings me no joy but whilst we are safe and whilst people are behaving well, we have to listen to the messaging from the premier, from the chief medical officer if we're going to get through this and minimise the loss of life, he told reporters.

So be sure the police will continue to turn up, we'll continue to protect you but you need to listen to the messaging. If you don't, you will get a $1,000 fine or a $5,000 fine.

He said since police attained clearance to issue the tough on-the-spot fines, and calls from civilians about people not adhering to self isolation rules had shot up significantly.

Prior to that, we had received around 200 Crime Stoppers calls for people not complying. Since then, that has gone up to 800 which is 600 calls in two days, he said.

Story continues

Police on guard in the Sydney CBD on Thursday. Source: AAP

David Elliott, the Minister for Police and Emergency Services, slammed those who continued to flout the rules, which he said applied to everyone.

No one is above the law. If you decide to ignore a direction, you will be caught, and you may very well find yourself slapped with a hefty fine, Mr Elliot said.

The fact that people are still not complying is the reason why we have police out in full force enforcing these directions. This behaviour is not only reckless and stupid, but potentially deadly.

NSW Police officers now have the additional power to issue on-the-spot Penalty Infringement Notices to anyone found to be breaching the new directions introduced to curb the coronavirus spread.

The infringements carry on-the-spot fines of $1000 for individuals and $5000 for businesses.

Restrictions ramped up

More business closures were ordered and stricter social distancing rules were enforced this week as coronavirus cases in Australia continued to climb, with the death toll reaching 13 on Thursday.

There are currently 2799 confirmed cases in Australia, up from 1709 on Monday and nearly tripled since Saturday.

NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian encouraged people on Friday to stay inside their homes this weekend.

Please make sure that if you're in self-isolation, stay in self- isolation. Please make sure that you don't undertake any activity unless you absolutely have to, she told reporters.

Please make sure if you're a senior or someone who has a vulnerable illness, please don't leave your home.

Businesses ordered to close

Tattoo parlours, waxing, tanning and nail salons

Hairdressers and barbers can continue but must strictly manage social distancing

Amusement parks and arcades, and indoor and outdoor play centres

Auction houses

Community and recreation centres, health clubs

Fitness centres and yoga and barre classes

Boot camps and personal training for more than 10 people

Galleries, museums, libraries and swimming pools

Current social distancing rules

Keep 1.5 metres away from other people at all times

There should be four square metres of space for each person in an enclosed room

Just five people are allowed at weddings

No more than 10 are advised for funerals, however this would be judged on a case-by-case basis

Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@yahoonews.com.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and download the Yahoo News app from the App Store or Google Play.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 22:24:17|Editor: Liu

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CAIRO, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's interior ministry released on Thursday 392 prisoners upon a presidential pardon and conditional releases, according to a ministry statement.

Around 107 prisoners were released upon a presidential pardon, while 285 were released conditionally. The releases came in commemoration of Egypt's 68th annual Police Day, which was marked on Jan. 25.

According to the Egyptian constitution, the president can issue pardon decrees for prisoners who had received final court rulings that cannot be further appealed.

The Egyptian president usually issues a pardon decree on public holidays, including two religious Muslim festivals, the holy month of Ramadan and the July 23 Revolution anniversary.

In May 2019, the president issued a decree pardoning 560 prisoners, including young people and prisoners with health problems.
" " A tiny leaf cutter ant carrying a huge leaf in his mouth while zipping along the edge of a sidewalk in the Soberania National Forest in Panama. Mass and weight indeed. avid_creative/Getty Images

Climb Mount Everest and you're guaranteed to lose some weight, but not because of the exercise. A person who's standing at sea level weighs slightly more than they would atop the mountain's peak. Weight is the measurement of gravity's pull on an object. And it varies by location.

Mass is a different beast altogether, one that's proven extremely hard to define. Although this is a bit of an oversimplification, in physics classrooms, students are told mass denotes two key characteristics of an object. The first is the amount of matter it contains. The second is the thing's ability to resist changes in its state of motion. (We call that phenomenon "inertia.") Unlike weight, mass is constant and holds firm no matter where an object travels.

You can never know too much about this all-important property; here are five massively cool tidbits we felt like sharing.

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1. There's a Unit of Mass Called a 'Slug'

It's a part of the U.S. Customary Units system and the less popular British Imperial System. For most of the world, the preferred unit of mass is the kilogram, one thousand of which equal a metric ton. Kilograms belong to the International System of Units, also known as the metric system. While they're everyday terms in other countries, Americans tend to be more reliant on U.S. Customary Units.

Now you might assume this system's answer to the kilogram is the pound. Yet pounds are technically units of weight. Both the U.S. Customary and British Imperial Systems measure mass with a different unit called a "slug." (On Earth, one slug is equal to about 32.2 pounds, or 14.60 kilograms.) Even so, it rarely comes up in casual conversations and most users aren't familiar with the term. That's a real pity; imagine WrestleMania fans cracking slug jokes by the ringside.

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2. The Scientist Who Discovered the Law of Conservation of Mass Was Beheaded

"In every operation," wrote the great chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, "an equal quantity of matter exists before and after the operation." Put another way, mass can neither be created nor destroyed. This principle has been named the Law of Conservation of Mass. Lavoisier's experiments in the late 18th century brought this idea to light.

Fellow scientists embraced his findings, but Lavoisier's career was cut short. Literally. When he wasn't decomposing water or making rust on purpose, Lavoisier helped collect taxes for the French government. That got him guillotined in 1794, after he was charged with "conspiracy against the people of France" by revolutionary forces.

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3. It's Part of the Most Famous Equation Ever Written

Of course, we're talking about E = mc2. Stated in plain English, it says energy (E) equals mass (m) times the speed of light (c) squared. Albert Einstein discussed the flipside of this equation in a classic paper published Sept. 27, 1905. By the way, he was only 26 years old at the time.

Said Einstein, "It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing  a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind."

So there's an inherent energy found in all objects that possesses mass. Einstein's breakthrough explains why every atom is slightly less massive than the sum of its parts (namely the protons, neutrons and electrons which comprise it). And the same energy/mass relationship he observed accounts for the destructive power of atomic bombs.

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4. Light Consists of "Massless Particles"

Photons are the fundamental particles of light. Experts describe them as being "massless." You see, the speed of a traveling object always changes its mass. Because that can complicate scientific discussions, when physicists talk about the mass of a given body or particle, what they're usually referring to is its rest mass. Basically, that's the mass it possesses when its velocity is equal to zero. Neutrons, protons and electrons all have rest masses  but photons don't! Neither do gluons, another type of subatomic particle.

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5. Earth Shares a Common "Center of Mass" With the Moon

Earth's mass is 81 times greater than the moon's; the disparity has a profound effect on their relationship. When you've got two or more heavenly bodies  like moons, planets and suns  orbiting each other, they're really revolving around a common center of mass. Called the barycenter, its location depends on the participants.

If two objects with the exact same mass start orbiting one another, their barycenter will be situated directly between them. But since Earth is so much larger than the moon, the Earth-moon barycenter is located deep inside our home world. And yet the Earth still revolves around it, just like the moon does.

Now That's Interesting In most cases, over 99.9 percent of an atom's mass comes from the nucleus. Protons and neutrons are the building blocks of nuclei  and they're each around 2,000 times more massive than the electrons that fly around them.
The Dail has voted against extending a ban on rent increases and evictions to cover the next year instead of just three months.

People Before Profit sought the amendment to legislation being considered by the Dail - arguing the economic effect of the Coronavirus will last longer than the medical impact.
One step at a time, the Indian government was closing in on travel to contain the spread of novel coronavirus, or COVID-19. While suspension of all international services was announced first, what was expected did happen eventually  a total suspension of air traffic within India.

It was well timed  48 hours after the last scheduled international flight into India. This meant that connecting passengers had reached their destinations. Even before the announcement was made on March 23, Indian airlines had grounded nearly half its fleet as passengers stayed away from air travel.

With less than 48 hours to plan, execute and shut down, it was a scramble for airlines to get planes to base and also the crew. The initial indefinite suspension was curtailed to midnight of March 31, only to be now pushed ahead due to the national lockdown.

With a lot of uncertainty around the duration of the closure, it was imperative that the airlines send the crew back to their home base. Not only would it add to airlines' costs to house the crew in a hotel, at a time when they are earning no revenue, but also the situation wouldnt be favourable for the crew to be stuck at a place away from home. Besides, one wouldnt know if hotels would continue to function or not!

As soon as the government announced the deadline of 23:59 pm on March 24 for the last of flights to land, social media was abuzz with questions about parking the planes. WhatAapp chatrooms were flooded with messages about where the airlines would park their planes. Delhi airport  Indias largest by traffic and area  had already closed one of its three runways for parking of planes. It was not an uncommon phenomenon. Zurich, Atlanta and Frankfurt  a lot of global peers  had done the same.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

But India had a different problem. A fleet of 650 commercial aircraft as well as private jets, comprising other non-scheduled operators, would have to be parked indefinitely. Unlike most other aviation markets, India is still partially regulated and airlines require permission from the government or airport operator for night parking a plane. An aircraft cannot be imported without having night parking in place. Thus, the over 650 planes have a designated night parking slot when they were imported and allowed to operate in India.

That begs the question why use the runway to park planes. Airlines obtain night parking permission from one airport and rotate the aircraft the whole night without really parking there.

Another common practices is to ensure control on costs and many a night parking stations may not have a crew base  the crew night halts and operates to a different destination the next day, all along being based at a major metro like Mumbai, Delhi or Bengaluru. With a lockdown in place, it was imperative that the crew returns to base and hence additional pressure on major cities.

The question still remains  where are the over 650 planes parked? Air India had nearly 20 of its aircraft grounded, a number also confirmed in its Preliminary Information Memorandum (PIM), which was published for privatisation. Along with Air India, SpiceJet has all its B737 MAX8 aircraft grounded since last year and all its B737-900 aircraft either stored or re-delivered. While Air India has its own space, Spicejet doesnt and has to rely on airports for bays.

A NetworkThoughts analysis aided by FlightRadar24 shows that Delhi has one-third of Indias commercial fleet parked after the grounding. A staggering 205 aircraft across airlines are parked at the New Delhi airport. IndiGo  Indias largest carrier by domestic market share and fleet  has over 60 aircraft parked at Delhi. That is one-fourth of its fleet. National carrier Air India, which has its hub at Delhi, has nearly 50 percent of its fleet parked there.

Mumbai is seeing nearly 100 aircraft across airlines being parked, followed by Bengaluru, which has 71 aircraft, and Hyderabad with 61. The Airports Authority of India controlled Kolkata and Chennai airports come in next with 54 and 53 aircraft, respectively.

IndiGo has parked its aircraft at 18 airports across the country, while SpiceJet and GoAir have parked at 11 airports each. Air India has parked its aircraft at seven airports in the country, while Vistara and AirAsia India  the Tata group airlines  have parked their aircraft six and five airports, respectively.

As is the case with traffic in the country, the top six airports Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata account for 85 percent of all the parked aircraft, with some airlines having parked aircraft at Indore, Pune, Amritsar, Guwahati, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Lucknow, Calicut, Thiruvananthapuram, amongst others.

A parked plane does require some maintenance and airlines would be using minimal manpower to ensure that the maintenance is carrier out as per the manufacturer guidelines. The most impacted airlines could be the smaller ones like Truejet and StarAir, who do not have a large manpower to alternate resources for maintenance, unlike the larger ones.

It is anybodys guess on when the restrictions will be lifted and if they would be in phases. All depends on how effectively the spread of coronavirus has been contained. To think the lifting of sanctions will see all planes in the air at once is a mirage and airlines are in this for a long battle. No wonder its being termed unprecedented.

Note: The above table indicates 622 aircraft that were in operation and parked. SpiceJet had its 13 B737MAX8 parked for a year, which arent accounted for, and Air India's stored aircraft amount to 19. These take the total grounded aircraft to 654.

Ameya Joshi runs the aviation analysis website Network Thoughts. Ameya writes a lot on aviation.
Reuters

By Chris Kirkham and Jeffrey Dastin

(Reuters) - On his delivery route through Orange County, California, Joseph Alvarado made 153 stops one day last week for Amazon.com Inc, touching the inside and outside of his van, more than 225 packages, and dozens of customers doors and gates.

In a global coronavirus pandemic that has infected about 420,000 people and killed nearly 19,000, delivery drivers like Alvarado have become as essential as first responders, providing food and other basics for millions of people who are isolating themselves under government stay-home directives. But unlike traditional emergency workers, todays delivery drivers typically have little or no health insurance, sick pay or job security - and many say they lack even the basics needed to stay safe on the job.

Alvarado said the van he drove wasnt cleaned before or after his 10-hour shift, nor were the bins holding packages handled by warehouse workers and delivery drivers. Yet his company offered no gloves or masks, and only sporadically provided hand sanitizer. Under pressure to meet targets for delivery speed and volume, Alvarado and other drivers say they have little or no time to stop and wash their hands.

Im being exposed, said Alvarado, 38, who has delivered Amazon packages for three years. I would think that a company like Amazon that is filthy rich, doing great, not going anywhere anytime soon, would want to take care of its employees.

Alvarado doesnt actually work for Amazon. He works instead for Pacific Keys Logistics LLC, one of hundreds of companies that compete for coveted delivery contracts with the worlds largest online retailer. The logistics company could not be reached for comment.

To keep the work, such contractors must meet Amazons stringent performance standards under compensation schemes that effectively require the delivery companies to keep a tight rein on costs. Often, delivering Amazon packages constitutes their entire business.

Such arms-length employment arrangements have insulated Amazon and other companies from liability and the costs of health insurance and other benefits. The business model - also employed by upstart app-based delivery firms such as Instacart, Shipt Inc and Postmates - has proven popular with investors by allowing the companies to avoid nitty-gritty costs like vehicle repair and crash liabilities.

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed the precarious environment that has been a daily reality for these workers as they now take on much greater risks in delivering essential goods, said David Weil, dean of Brandeis Universitys school of social policy and management and a former top Labor Department official in the Obama administration.

Its totally laid bare how vulnerable they are, he said. We are seeing there are millions of workers, who have no social safety net protections, who are now on the front lines of delivering food and delivering packages.

Contract drivers who deliver for Amazon in the United States are paid an hourly rate starting at $15, according to the company. In written responses to questions from Reuters, Amazon said it requires its delivery contractors to offer healthcare coverage, but didnt specify how much of the cost, if any, the firms cover.

Some drivers say they opt out of the health coverage because they cant afford the high out-of-pocket costs. Amazon said it required its contractors to offer drivers an unspecified amount of paid time off, but didnt say whether they were guaranteed sick pay. The company also has a program known as Amazon Flex, where independent contractors sign up for time slots to take groceries or packages to customers' doorsteps in their own cars. Amazon said it is taking extreme measures to protect all workers, including contracted drivers. Such efforts include tripling down on deep cleaning, procuring safety supplies that are available, and changing processes to ensure those in our buildings are keeping safe distances.

Amazon said it is giving its contracted delivery companies hand sanitizer and wipes to allow drivers to clean their vehicles. Asked about drivers accounts that such supplies were unavailable, the company said some delivery sites may on occasion see brief shortages.

App-based delivery firms have partnered with major retailers such as Walmart Inc, Kroger Co and Target Corp, which owns Shipt. Instacart and Shipt dont provide sick pay to drivers but both have said they will offer two weeks of financial assistance for those who test positive for COVID-19 or are placed into quarantine by health authorities.

Reuters interviewed more than a dozen delivery drivers for Amazon, Instacart, Postmates, Uber Eats, a food delivery service from ride-hailing firm Uber Technologies Inc, and others, many of whom said they believe the companies did not provide proper protection or support given the risks they are taking.

The lack of sick pay and supplies can also pose a risk to consumers, especially if drivers show up to work sick or cant frequently wash their hands, said Suzanne Judd, an epidemiologist at the University of Alabama at Birminghams school of public health.

Touching gates, touching door knobs, those are all going to be potential points of exposure, she said. Hand sanitizer itself is not enough.

Despite the risks, many drivers cant quit as the economy crashes amid relentless daily reports of rising death totals, business closures and government stay-home directives. As the crisis deepened last week, Amazon announced plans for 100,000 new workers to handle surging demand. But those openings will likely be easily filled with the masses of workers laid off from other hard-hit sectors such as restaurants because Amazon is among the few companies that is hiring. The company has temporarily boosted the pay for warehouse workers and contract drivers by $2 an hour in response to the pandemic, but the raises expire at the end of April.

Its very sad because three weeks ago we were in a historically tight labor market, said Matthew Bidwell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School who focuses on short-term working arrangements. It was forcing employers for the first time in a long time to offer more perks and more benefits. They no longer have that pressure."

Danny Gonzalez also delivers for Amazon in Orange County. After long shifts, his hands are blackened with grime from countless surfaces.

Where do you go wash your hands when youre in a vehicle? said Gonzalez, 33, of Anaheim.

Dispatchers enforcing Amazon standards track his movements with GPS technology, sometimes questioning the time taken on stops. Realistically, he said, the targets leave no time for hand-washing. He also skips a lunch break and estimates he runs up to 12 miles a day in sprints from the truck to doorsteps.

Theres no way you will complete a 280-package route in the eight hours or nine hours they want you to, he said. Were just statistics to Amazon.

The Amazon contractor that employs him, which he declined to name, offers health insurance that employees can purchase, but Gonzalez said he opted out because the costs would have eaten up nearly half his paycheck. Neither Gonzalez nor Alvarado have paid sick leave.

TREATED LIKE A LEPER

After the pandemic hit, Amazon announced it would set aside $25 million for contracted delivery drivers to apply for up to two weeks paid leave if they are diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed into quarantine by the government or Amazon. Other companies such as Uber, Postmates, Instacart and DoorDash have made similar pledges to help workers.

But the criteria make getting that paid time difficult, drivers said. Jonathan Perales, 25, a driver for Uber and Postmates in Texas, started coughing and feeling feverish earlier this month after picking up an ill passenger. The hospital he visited said he had symptoms of COVID-19, but declined to test him amid a national shortage of kits.

When he sought sick pay from Uber, the company told him he needed a positive coronavirus test or documentation from a medical professional ordering him to self-quarantine. No one at the hospital or the state health department was willing to submit such documentation to Uber on his behalf - which he said the company required - and another clinic refused to examine him when he showed up reporting coronavirus symptoms.

I was stuck in an impossible situation, Perales said. I was trying to get tested, and I was trying to seek financial aid. I was being treated like a leper.

Despite the illness, he needed the income to avoid an eviction, so he continued to work for Postmates for another two days. Uber shut down his account after he reported the symptoms, he said, which left him unable to pay his bill at the extended-stay motel where he had been living. He now lives in his car. Uber declined to comment on Perales case but said in a statement that drivers safety is always our priority. Postmates declined to comment.

DRIVING 45 MILES FOR HAND SANITIZER

Ron Spigelman delivers for Instacart. The company hasnt provided training or offered sanitation supplies or protective gear to wear in crowded stores, he said. He recently drove 45 miles to find hand sanitizer at a Dollar General in the countryside near Tulsa, Oklahoma.

He thinks drivers should have access to hand-washing stations. That way we feel more protected, he said, and I think the customers would feel more protected as well.

In a statement, Instacart said it would soon distribute hand sanitizer and provide access to cleaning supplies in some stores. The company plans to add an additional 300,000 independent delivery contractors to handle skyrocketing demand.

Some drivers have stopped delivering as the crisis worsened. Laura Chelton, 48, drives for Amazon Flex in the Seattle area - site of the first outbreak in the United States. Last week, she noticed that no one was wiping down surfaces in the area at Whole Foods where she picked up orders.

When she saw an older woman cough last week as she assembled grocery bags in that confined space - just eight by 10 feet - she decided that delivering groceries just wasnt worth the risk.

(Reporting by Chris Kirkham and Jeffrey Dastin; Editing by Brian Thevenot)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
WASHINGTONThe U.S. is entering a dark time. COVID-19 cases and deaths will likely spike over the next two weeks; hospitals say they are about to be overwhelmed; the economy is suffering the most dramatic and rapid downward spiral in the countrys history.

And yet, with all that on the horizon, President Donald Trump is prepared to declare victory and return to normal.

I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter, Trump said Tuesday, a day after tweeting: WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.

He appears to assume theres tradeoff between preserving the economy and preserving public health. Thats an assumption most other world leaders, including Canadas, have spared their citizens, presumably because they see a link between public health and healthy economies that has so far eluded Trump.

Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. had already topped 55,000 by Wednesday, and the number of deaths was north of 800. Confirmed cases have multiplied tenfold over the past week, while the number of deaths is doubling roughly every three days. Experts say it will be at least two weeks before the U.S. will even start to see whether social distancing and lockdowns have helped flatten the curve and slowed its spread.

At least two weeks. Or, as some of us refer to it, Easter.

As the public health tragedy unfolds, the Trump administration continues to send mixed messages. It has certainly recognized the economic urgency of the moment, as Congress wrangled over an unprecedented $2 trillion spending package to help Americans survive the pandemic-induced shutdown of entire sectors of the economy until the threat to public health passes.

But Trump and some conservative voices in the U.S. also seem to want to skip ahead a step, even if it means sacrificing public health. Texas Lt.-Gov. Dan Patrick suggested that senior citizens such as himself would be willing to make the sacrifice of lifting social distancing guidelines and take a chance on your survival in order to save the economy for the next generation. If that is the exchange, Im all in, Patrick said.

Aside from being macabre, the suggestion that the lives of older and more vulnerable people might be sacrificed to keep the economy strong misunderstands the choice thats actually available.

The stock market tanked and businesses were in jeopardy before the harshest shutdown orders and social distancing measures were adopted. When Trumps Oval Office address focused on the economy, the stock market plummeted as he spoke. When he changed tone and finally started to seriously address public health measures, it responded with an uptick.

It was the outbreak that caused the economy to go into sudden widespread recession, even if the attempted cure of social distancing has made it more pronounced.

By incurring the costs of pausing our economy for the short term, we aim to avoid significantly greater costs that would arise from allowing the virus to propagate unabated, Lisa Kramer, a professor of finance at the University of Torontos Rotman School of Management, wrote in an email.

Kramer calls the economy-versus-health dichotomy a false tradeoff. She says the much greater long-term reductions in economic output that could stem from an early end to social distancing could include supply-chain interruptions, longer and deeper unemployment, higher deaths from more overwhelmed hospitals, and more severe long-term health problems from survivors.

Is an understanding of those factors the reason a similar debate hasnt played out in Canada?

I would like to think that deeply embedded in the values of Canadians is a sense of community, Kramer writes. Therefore when faced with a pandemic, it is quite natural for us to ensure our collective actions do not jeopardize the health and well-being of others.

Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, says he thinks similar conversations are being had in Canada, but more quietly, under the media radar. The reason its getting the attention it is in the States, of course, is when the president brings it up it explodes as an issue, he said.

But it sure could get attention in Canada if Trump gets his way. If the U.S. reopens business before public health officials give the green light, we may need to refine the way we facilitate trade across the border, Kramer writes. While Canada would need to continue trading to get essentials like food and manufacturing components into the country, we may need to take more stringent steps to protect the health of Canadians who facilitate trade with the U.S., including truck drivers and border-crossing guards for example.

Stemming the spread in the absence of a societywide lockdown could be possible under the right conditions. Places in the world that have flattened the curve without mass social distancing  South Korea is the major success story  have done it through widespread, reliable testing that allows quarantines of those infected, tracking of interactions, and quick treatment. North American countries are a long way from having testing capacity on that scale, despite a ramp-up in the U.S. that has seen a fivefold increase in tests daily over the past week, up to 65,000 tests conducted on Tuesday.

There could be a day on the horizon  a beautiful day, as Trump envisions it  when the spread of the virus could be successfully controlled while allowing a gradual return to something like business as usual. But as Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday at the same podium as Trump, it depends on mass testing accompanied by identification, isolation, and contact tracing. As Fauci hinted in urging flexibility in the presidents timeline, that day is unlikely to come as soon as Easter.

The U.S. could be entering its darkest period since the Civil War. How dark it gets could depend on not trying to have businesses turn the lights back on too quickly.

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Young and healthy people have been urged to stay away from supermarkets and make meals from food in their cupboards as demand for groceries and household goods surges during the coronavirus lockdown.

Britons have hoarded food worth 1 billion during the past fortnight as a result of panic buying - despite assurances from the government and industry that there is still plenty in the supply chain.

The CEO of Tesco is encouraging shoppers who are fit and healthy to use stores in order to free-up delivery slots for online orders to the elderly and vulnerable.

But the boss of Ocado told people to 'make their meals work', adding: 'The first thing is 'don't panic'. There isn't going to be no food tomorrow. Nobody will starve.'

NHS England national medical director Stephen Powis accused panic buyers of depriving healthcare staff of the food supplies they need, adding: 'Frankly we should all be ashamed.'

Consumers shifted online as they feared supermarkets could become breeding grounds for the virus, after panic-buyers stripped shelves bare, stockpiling everything from pasta to toilet paper and paracetamol.

But the move has now led to home delivery slots being largely unavailable until mid April.

Ocado has been operating at full capacity during the crisis and said yesterday it had around ten times more demand for its services than it did before the outbreak began.

Online orders are now limited to one per week per customer, while some items have also been limited to just two per person.

Chief executive of the online delivery service, Lord Stuart Rose, urged consumers to act rationally as he revealed Britons had hoarded an extra 1billion worth of food over the past couple of weeks.

As Britain started its third day of mass self-isolation today, it also emerged:

Chancellor Rishi Sunak will finally today unveil a coronavirus bailout for millions of stricken self-employed workers.

One of the government's top advisers said the UK's epidemic will get worse before it gets better but could peak by Easter.

Dyson has been handed an order of 10,000 ventilators from the Government - as long as the machines pass early tests.

Retailer Boots begged people not to turn up demanding tests because it has yet to receive any.

Royal aides tried to trace anyone Prince Charles has met in the last fortnight after he tested positive for the disease.

The latest coronavirus figures for the UK showed 9,529 positive tests and a death toll of 465.

Social distancing lines are taped across a supermarket floor to encourage people to stay at least two meters apart at a Tesco in Peterborough

Huge queues wait patiently as they keep a safe distance outside the Asda supermarket in Byker, Newcastle upon Tyne

Hundreds of shoppers were queuing outside a Morrison's supermarket in Canning Town east London today as people attempted to adhere to the Government's social distancing rules

These shoppers waiting to access a Tesco supermarket in London are adhering strictly to social distancing rules. The retailer placed marks on the floor to show the six foot six distance people should stay apart to reduce the risk of spreading the virus

UK retailers such as Sainsbury's have implemented special access for NHS staff at their stores. This was the scene outside the Sainsbury's store in Charlton this morning

Ocado has reported the demand on its service is ten times that compared with the period before the coronavirus crisis

Some users have complained they cannot get a delivery slot before April 15, with only click and collect available

'We buy too much, eat too much and consume too much - we have to learn new ways': Ocado chairman urges Brits to rethink their habits Ocado chairman Lord Stuart Rose has issued guidance to Brits amid the coronavirus crisis. Lord Rose, 71, who is also a former chairman and chief executive of clothing and food retailer Marks & Spencer, has been in self-isolation after suspecting he had contracted the virus. He ventured out for the first time in two weeks on Wednesday. He said Britons should avoid going to supermarkets at peak hours and only buy what they need. Rose also called on people in the country to 'make your meals work'. 'If you buy a chicken, roast the chicken, have the roast chicken dinner, the following day turn it into a stir fry, the following day make it into soup,' he said. 'You can make a relatively small amount of food go a long way and I think we live in a very profligate society today - we buy too much, we eat too much, we consume too much and we have to learn new ways.' 'There is a billion pounds more food in people's larders than there was a couple of weeks ago - what are they doing with it? How much food do you need to eat? How much do you need to store away? Please show some restraint,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. 'There is no shortage of food ... Nobody will starve.' But he said it is important to ensure vulnerable people are given priority. Advertisement

Asda has announced it is increasing the amount customers can pay using contactless cards from 30 to 45 from April 1st.

The firm is also installing perspex barriers at checkouts to protect its staff from possible infection.

The company's CEO Roger Burnley said they were also closing some of the self-service checkout terminals so customers can remain two metres apart when paying for their goods.

The boss of the UK's biggest retailer Tesco, Dave Lewis, has written to customers to reassure them there is still plenty of food, but asking the young and the healthy to venture out to their local store.

Users of the retail giant's online service have complained they are unable to secure a home delivery slot.

In his letter, he has asked those who can venture out to shop in-store - while taking appropriate precautions.

The Government has tried to assure consumers that there is plenty of food available, though photographs on social media of empty shelves have prompted further panic buying, forcing some supermarkets to restrict the sale of some goods, such as toilet rolls.

In response to the ongoing crisis, the government has loosened restrictions on delivering to supermarkets, while the major retailers have implemented restricted opening hours to allow them time to restock shelves.

The retailer has created sanitisation stations at the entrance to its stores where shoppers can wipe down the handles of their trolleys or baskets with a virus-killing gel.

Mr Lewis admitted there have been problems with the online service because of the overwhelming demand.

He wrote: 'We also need your help to change the way you shop with us.

'Try to shop with no more than one other person, which will help to reduce the number of people in-store at any one time.

'Please use our cleaning stations to wipe your trolley, basket...If possible, use card or contactless payments.

'Please avoid shopping during our dedicated times for vulnerable and elderly people, and NHS workers, and be kind to our colleagues as they're working hard to serve you.'

Mr Lewis confirmed that the online shopping system has been overwhelmed. He asked people who are fit and healthy to use stores in order to free-up delivery slots for online orders to the elderly and vulnerable.

He said the retailer was at 'full capacity' and expected this situation to continue for the next couple of weeks.

He said the firm was looking to increase the number of delivery slots in an effort to satisfy demand.

Firms such as Tesco and Lidl are trying to recruit thousands of temporary staff to help them cope with the additional demand.

Sainsbury's, meanwhile, has announced it is to close a dozen smaller branches in areas that have become 'ghost towns'.

The supermarket giant said the decision had been made after panic buying put 'huge operational pressure' on its stores.

The retailer said government lockdown measures meant some areas had become virtual ghost towns and it could not justify keeping branches there open while other stores continued to face huge pressures.

Social distancing lines are taped across the floor in Tesco, Peterborough today

The graphic above shows the break down of what Britons spent their cash on in the supermarkets

War-time food rationing will likely come into force 'in a matter of weeks' because relying on public to exercise shopping restraint during lockdown 'won't work', academic expert warns The UK should be braced for food rationing because relying on the public to exercise shopping restraint simply 'won't work', according to an academic expert. Pictured: empty shelves at a branch of Waitrose in London last week By Hayley Richardson for MailOnline The UK should be braced for food rationing because relying on the public to exercise shopping restraint simply 'won't work', according to an academic expert. Bryce Evans, associate professor of history and politics at Liverpool Hope University, said we're not at crisis point yet, and urged people not to panic buy. Bryce Evans, associate professor of history and politics at Liverpool Hope University But he's also calling on authorities to look at the lessons learned from the First and Second World Wars to combat any potential shortages in the current coronavirus crisis. He warned history proves that urging people not to be selfish or stockpile is futile - and it's unfair to delegate that task to supermarket workers, too. Professor Evans added that we could see the formation of a new Ministry of Food to ensure items can be delivered to doors via online shopping and paid for with 'ration coupons'. And empty school kitchens could even be commandeered to make food en masse, before being delivered via courier, leaning on established supermarket networks. He told FEMAIL: 'There's a risk we're still not taking this crisis seriously enough when it comes to our food supply. There needs to be a big shift in current consumption behaviours, because it's a matter of weeks before things start to become a real problem if we continue in the same vein. 'And I can see rationing on the horizon. Both wars show us that what the government is doing right now - telling people not to panic buy, to voluntarily curtail consumption - just doesn't work, sadly. 'It has to be followed up with a clear, government-led rationing system of essential goods. 'This was previously done in collaboration with retailers and it can be replicated again, accompanied by price controls and greater penalties for the worst racketeers and black marketeers. 'Rationing can't be left up to poor old supermarket checkout staff, who have to deal with anger and arguments - the government must step in. 'The online ration system would also seem likely since we do not want scenes like at the weekend, where hundreds of people descend on a supermarket at the same time, because this increases the risk of transmission greatly.' Professor Evans said we could see the formation of a new Ministry of Food to ensure items can be delivered to doors via online shopping and paid for with 'ration coupons'. Pictured: empty shelves of beer and cider in Tesco Walkden, north west of Manchester Associate Professor Evans, who's written extensively on nutrition and public feeding in times of war, explains how 'established food supply networks for the most needy are already coming under pressure', with food banks closing and donations drying up. He added: 'The system is under enormous strain and it's going to impact upon the poorest people. If things accelerate as fast as they are doing in Europe, we have a problem. 'Remember that a lot of our food is imported from Europe and beyond. If those networks falter, it has a knock-on effect for us all.' As the crisis continues, Professor Evans predicts a new Ministry of Food - the type that oversaw rationing in World War II - to oversee a 'national kitchen' food supply system. He said: 'During both World Wars, we had a Ministry of Food. And you might see the emergence of that again. 'Many schools are now empty. Why not use the empty kitchens in these buildings to cook food, which can then be delivered via courier? 'This was done in wartime through the popular Queen's messenger convoys - vans driven by young women which would drive at high speed and distribute food after bombing raids. 'We could see the UberEats or JustEats model being taken over by the government, to establish an efficient and affordable system of doorstep delivery. It's a huge culture shift, and government intervention could represent the end of consumerism as we know it.' There could also be a shift in the nature of the UK's physical landscape, too - because if food supply networks fail, Britain will have to increase farming production. Professor Evans said: 'In the UK, we've got six million hectares of land which could be used to produce fruit and veg. But only 168,000 hectares are actually being used for that purpose. 'You'd have to have a scheme of compulsory purchase or requisition to enable us to use this land to produce more food. 'As the coronavirus crisis gets worse over the coming months, we need to be innovative. And the best blueprint for this comes from the wars - particularly the Land Army and Meals on Wheels campaigns.' As a silver lining to the bleak outlook, Professor Bryce says government-led rationing could actually help to redress the balance when it comes to the gulf in health and nutrition between the poor and the rich. He also suggested a celebrity-driven propaganda campaign could make sure any rationing project doesn't become 'drab and statist'. Instead, food advice would be issued by trusted retail figureheads as well as celebrity chefs. But the academic has also called on courts to issue the very toughest fines - and even prison sentences - for the worst black market racketeering offenders. He added: 'In a time of crisis, the black market is not the preserve of lovable rogues - it's deadly serious. 'And I'd suggest prison sentences and hefty fines are appropriate for those found guilty of the most extreme cases of profiteering from coronavirus. 'Again, there's a historical precedent here for the need to be strict. Eventually, you have to act. You can't rely on social shaming to hurt these individuals.' A government spokesperson told FEMAIL: 'We will do whatever it takes to ensure people have the food and supplies they need. Retailers are continuing to monitor their supply chains and taking all the necessary steps to ensure consumers have the food and supplies they need. 'Supermarkets are already taking action to limit the supply of certain items to make sure shelves are stocked and it is crucial we all respect and adhere to these decisions.' Advertisement

Tape marks out 2 metre sections on the floor to implement social distancing measures at the Tesco store in Peterborough

In Tesco's in Lewis, East Sussex, the company was operating a 'one in, one out' policy after it opened this morning at 6.30am

Customers in Lewes appeared to be adhering to social distancing rules while they wait to access the store in Lewes

At the Morrison's store in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear, this worker provided hand sanitiser to customers queuing to go shopping this morning

This Sainsbury's store in Peterborough has placed markings on the floor to make it easier for customers to adhere to the social distancing rules

Outside the Sainsbury's supermarket in Greenwich, staff patrolled the car park to advise customers to stay apart

Police introduce coronavirus CHECKPOINTS on roads and order neighbours to report 'large' gatherings as 8% of Britons are STILL flouting lockdown with house parties, barbecues and 'non-essential' shopping Police are today being told how to disperse groups of people. Pictured is a PCSO breaking up a game of football between youths in Whitley Bay, North Tyneside Police have today started to stop cars to demand to know where people are going and decide if their journeys are 'essential' as they enforce Boris Johnson's coronavirus lockdown after a shock poll showed millions of Brits are breaking the rules. North Yorkshire Police said it will now be using unannounced checkpoints to stop vehicles and order drivers to divulge details of their journeys with Devon doing the same as the Home Office prepares to announce new sweeping powers for officers to help them break up public gatherings. Those powers are likely to include the 'last resort' ability to force people to go home if they fail to listen to police direction or take notice of a 30 fine. Police patrols have also started to stop train passengers in Swansea to make sure their travel is 'essential'. The use of travel checks is likely to spark fierce criticism from civil liberties groups with police officers now seemingly being tasked with deciding how important someone's journey is amid reports of dog walkers being told to go home after driving to a public space for exercise. Nicola Sturgeon appeared to pre-empt the Home Office's official announcement as she set out her plans for police in Scotland at lunchtime which will see people who refuse to adhere to the ban on groups 'made to return home'. It is not the first time the Scottish First Minister has acted before the UK government on a coronavirus issue after she did the same on banning large gatherings to ease pressure on emergency services and on school closures. Members of the public have been urged by Andy Cooke, the chief constable of Merseyside Police, to report large gatherings as the authorities move to enforce the Prime Ministers 'stay at home' message. Mr Cooke said he would 'expect' people to report large groups but not to bother officers if it is 'two or three people stood at the end of the road'. The apparent need for the new police powers to break up gatherings has been illustrated by reports of officers being called to friends having barbecues, house parties and games of football. It came as a new poll conducted for ITV's Peston programme suggested almost six million people across the UK are continuing to go about their daily lives as normal amid fears spring sunshine could tempt even more to flout the rules. Mr Johnson's lockdown means people should only leave their home for food, medicine, exercise or to go to work if it is 'absolutely necessary'. Group gatherings of more than two people have also been banned. But the survey found seven per cent of Britons are still going out to see friends, eight per cent are doing 'non-essential shopping' and five per cent are not washing their hands more than they normally would. Meanwhile, six per cent of people - approximately three million - are continuing to hug others and shake hands, despite warnings this will increase the spread of the deadly Covid-19 virus. Officers in Plymouth were today pictured directing traffic at an apparent checkpoint to speak to motorists about their plans A survey for ITV's Peston programme found millions of people are not complying with the government's lockdown measures Advertisement

During the crisis, elderly and vulnerable shoppers have complained they have been unable to get delivery slots for online shopping from Britain's supermarkets.

That has prompted market leader Tesco to ask Britons who are able to safely come to stores to do so, instead of shopping online, so it can free up more slots for the more vulnerable.

Rose stopped short of telling young and able Ocado shoppers to go elsewhere.

'If you've had customers who've been regular customers for you for 10, 15 years, we can't just dump those customers,' he said.

Rose also noted that after the government relaxed competition rules there was 'enormous' co-operation between all retailers at present.

'If you see an unprecedented increase in demand, it's incredibly difficult to make the adjustments. But we are all trying, and we are working and co-operating together.'

These shoppers pictured this morning outside a Tesco supermarket in West London are queuing to get in while keeping a sufficient distance apart in order to reduce the risk of spreading coronavirus

Supermarkets have placed staff at the entrance to control access to prevent overcrowding on the aisles

Many supermarkets, such as Morrisons in Whitely Bay, pictured this morning, have placed temporary barriers outside their store to regulate queues waiting to access the shop and to encourage social distancing

Sainsbury's closes smaller branches in'ghost towns' Sainsbury's is to close a dozen smaller branches in areas that have become 'ghost towns'. The supermarket giant said the decision had been made after panic buying put 'huge operational pressure' on its stores. The retailer said government lockdown measures meant some areas had become virtual ghost towns and it could not justify keeping branches there open while other stores continued to face huge pressures. A spokeswoman said: 'We are temporarily closing 12 convenience stores. These are stores that have seen significantly fewer customers in recent days as people are working from home. 'All colleagues will move to neighbouring stores until these stores re-open.' It is not yet known which locations the stores are closing. The closures were announced despite signs that the worst of the panic buying, which has seen supermarket shelves emptied across the country, may have peaked. Advertisement

The Co-op has announced new measures to enforce social distancing in its stores in a bid to protect customers and staff from the spread of coronavirus.

The retail giant has introduced a range of measures across its 2,600 stores, including floor markers which will define a one-metre distance throughout the store and two-metre spacing for customer queues.

The Co-op is also aiming to limit the number of customers in stores at any one time as well as reducing the number of tills open, to allow greater distance between shoppers.

Chris Whitfield, the Co-op's chief operating officer, said: 'The safety and wellbeing of our colleagues is our priority and we fully support the need for social distancing.

'We have introduced a number of measures in store, which will be reviewed on a daily basis, and we thank our customers for their understanding and support.

'We are immensely proud of our frontline colleagues and the work they are doing at this unprecedented time to serve our customers, members and local communities but we urge our customers to follow the Government advice to only shop for essential items and to be considerate of others when they are shopping.'

The company added that to encourage the message to stay at home, Co-op stores will have reduced opening hours which will give staff time to re-stock and is encouraging contactless shopping where possible to reduce the handling of cash and speed up checkout.

Additional hand sanitiser, antibacterial wipes and soap have been provided to all stores.

Andrew Opie, of the British Retail Consortium, told The Grocer magazine: 'It's definitely calmed down, probably since the end of the weekend. We have seen a fall-off in demand and that's given as an opportunity to replenish the shelves.

'There is plenty of food in store at the moment and that is testament to the very hard work of retail colleagues who have been working around the clock.'

Some shoppers at Morrisons in Whitley Bay have been using masks, while others queue patiently for access to the store
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has condemned n its entirety, the unjustified banning of some media houses from covering activities of the Presidency, describing the development as a most heinous form of official victimization executed in bad faith.

In a press statement, signed by the PDP National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, the party described the media ban by the Buhari Presidency as highly detestable, undemocratic and totally against the provisions of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act as well as the tenets and guiding principles of rule of law.

The party notes that the Presidency had no justification for its action and could therefore not give any cogent reason to necessitate the ban.

The PDP cautioned the Buhari Presidency to note that the nation, and indeed, the world is currently distressed as we battle the deadly COVID-19.

The statement reads: This is therefore not the time for unnecessary pettiness, victimization and barring of media houses, a development which has sparked off suspicion in the public space as being designed to conceal certain facts from the public.

It is indeed instructive for the Buhari Presidency to note that our nation is in dire need of hope and direction contained in timely information, especially from the government.

Consequently, clamping down on the media, which is a critical stakeholder in this important effort to defeat COVID-19 is completely at variance with our national interest.

What our nation needs now is for all hands to be on the deck, with those in power shelving their pettiness, parochial interests, pointless and unreasonable ego as we collectively seek for solutions.

The PDP therefore charges the Presidency to immediately and without any further delay lift the ban on the affected media houses and allow them to discharge their responsibility to the Nigerian people, in line with the provisions of the law and their professional requirements.

Moreover, the PDP frowned at Federal Government for cancelling its Tuesdays media briefing on the COVID-19, thereby denying Nigerians of very vital information in the process. The party urged the Federal Government to exert itself and seek more concerted effort in the fight against the pandemic.
The E.U. may strengthen if it demonstrates measures relevant to the crisis and if it can use its scale to overcome the limitations of purely national policies, he said. But the fuss over borders is exaggerated, he added.

The virus travels with the person, so borders are relevant, he said. People talked about how catastrophic it was to have temporary borders between France and Germany, about Europe splintering, Mr. Heisbourg added. But not everything is geopolitical. You cant fight this without borders. Its about the logic of taming the epidemic.

If populists criticize the performance of Brussels, the pandemic is also an argument for giving Brussels more power over health research, standards and the coordination of policies, he argued.

Mr. Zuleeg agrees. When it comes to cross-border issues like this we need to set up ways to react quickly, he said. We had to do it in the financial and monetary field with the debt crisis, and now well have to do it in health. Not because someone wants a bigger Europe, but because we need to do it. We are interdependent across borders.

Monika Pronczuk contributed research from Brussels.
A s hundreds of doors close, thousands of digital doors open.

Londons galleries and museums are rethinking ways to reach the art-starved among us.

Its not a bad time to have a virtual stroll around a museum thats usually packed with visitors  youll have a guaranteed view of every artwork without someone's head in the way, and get a closer look than might be normally permitted. As an added bonus, galleries around the world that would be normally out of reach are now right there on your screen.

From full 360 degree museum tours, to spotlights on world famous artists, heres how you can visit museums and galleries from the comfort of home.

Natural History Museum

Inspect the butterflies, birds and beasts in the Natural History Museums collection up close. The interactive online guide includes insights into some of the 80 million specimens through short films, virtual reality and a 360 degree tool. Bonus: the departed Dippy the diplodocus is back on display in the entrance hall online.

Louise Bourgeois: Drawings 19472007

Christopher Burke

Louise Bourgeois made drawing a daily ritual across her seven decade-long career. Saville Row gallery Hauser & Wirths first online exhibition is a celebration of the French-American artists pieces in ink, watercolour and pencil. The gallery is also launching Dispatches, a new series of videos, events and features to keep connected with artists in isolation.

British Library

The British Library has spent the past two years digitising 30 historical globes from their maps collection, and now releases the results online. As the globes  some of which date back to the 1600s  are so fragile, theyve been kept broadly out of view. They can now be seen in augmented reality with the help of the Sketchfab app.

The rest of the librarys collection has a lot to offer too, with virtual tours into the stacks. Discover literature from medieval to Victorian times, as well as a number of virtual tours around the exhibitions you may have missed. Highlights include Harry Potter: A History of Magic, which has a section for each of the Hogwarts magic classes, and Alice In Wonderland, looking at how Lewis Carolls story has been retold over the past 150 years.

The National Gallery

The National Gallery is home to thousands of publicly owned artworks from the UK and Europe, spread across 18 rooms, which you can visit with the National Gallerys 360 degree tool. The tour offers detailed information about each painting as you look at it, as well as floorplans to navigate around as though you are there.

The Titian exhibition opened just days before all the museums closed, but you can still watch a number of Facebook Live interviews about the show on the gallerys YouTube channel

Titian: Love, Desire, Death at the National Gallery: In pictures 1 /9 Titian: Love, Desire, Death at the National Gallery: In pictures

British Museum

More than 8 million objects sit inside the British Museum. You can search through much of this online, exploring the artefacts individually or by geographical origin. Two of the galleries have digital versions online: Prints and Drawings, from artists including Degas and Henry Moore, and Oceania, which spotlights art and artefacts from Australia, New Guinea, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Make sure to also check out the History Connected channel, which gives an interactive timeline of objects across themes of art and design, living and dying, religion and belief, trade and conflict and power and identity.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York covers three sites, which are all combined in its new digital platform on Google Arts and Culture. Among the online exhibit highlights are spotlights on Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, the art of music through time and a new look at Vermeer. The Met also has a timeline of art history on its site, where you can study the development of artistic practice from 8,000 BC to the present.

Musee dOrsay, Paris

Holidu

The museum by the Seine in central Paris houses the worlds largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist artworks. Monet, Cezanne, and Gauguin can be found in the former railway station, which was built for the Universal Exhibition in 1900. Tour around this architectural masterpiece in 360 degrees (look out for the bronze model of Degas fascinating Dancer Aged 14, fitted with a real tutu).

Courtauld Gallery

The Courtauld Gallery has already been closed since 2018 for a major redevelopment, and created a virtual tour of the venue as it was before the doors shut. The photographic technique used to shoot the museums interior allows you zoom in close enough to see the brush strokes and texture of masterpieces such as Vincent van Goghs Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear or Edouard Manets A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.

V&A

Five thousand years of art and design make up the Victoria and Albert Museum collection. Fashion is one of the museum's strong suits (no pun intended) and the virtual Gallery of Fashion takes viewers through the history of clothing design around the world. Further exhibits include spotlights on Balenciaga, Schiaparelli, Indian textiles and the politics of fashion.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Getty Images

He wasnt valued as an artist in his lifetime, but Vincent Van Gogh is now one of the most popular painters of all, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has the largest collection of his work anywhere  thats more than 200 paintings and 750 personal letters. From sunflowers to his starry night, explore how he turned his pain into the joyful masterpieces appreciated by so many.

Frida Kahlo
Global warming has targeted the coral reefs in Australia once again within a span of five years. The Great Barrier Reef GBR is in the grip of a third mass coral bleaching event. The last such outbreak happened in 2016 and 2017 and it destroyed nearly half of the shallow water corals. The GBR is the worlds biggest reef system and it is in danger. Prof Terry Hughes of James Cook University is an expert in coral reef studies and he carried out a detailed study on the subject. He conducted an aerial survey over hundreds of individual reefs and told a section of the media, We know this is a mass bleaching event and its a severe one. He went on to add that the current level of bleaching is more severe than in 1998 and 2002.

How it compares with the bleaching of 2016 and 2017 is yet to be established.

Great Barrier Reef hit by third major bleaching event in five years https://t.co/sFsPsP4UHt via @nbcnews  Bob Ward (@ret_ward) March 24, 2020

The Guardian says the professor, working with those associated with looking after the Great Barrier Reef, conducted the survey using a spotter plane. He flew it at a low altitude to assess the extent and severity of bleaching. It is a result of global warming because of greenhouse gases and is considered a major threat to the ecosystems of coral reefs. Incidentally, not all bleached corals die. The bleaching occurs when they remain in warm waters for a long time. Recovery is possible when temperatures drop, else they perish.

Bleaching of coral reefs more in shallow waters

The UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts loss of majority of tropical coral reefs even if the global heating was restricted to 1.5C. If the temperature was maintained at 1.2C the reefs would be at very high risk. In this context, it is worthwhile to note that the world has already warmed about 1C since the industrial revolution.

Discuss this news on Eunomia

Hence, rise in global temperatures would harm the coral reefs.

This has never happened before.



The gorgeous Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia is turning whiter and whiter at a pace thats never been seen before, as warmer ocean temperatures heat the corals and cause bleaching.https://t.co/okqyiQgsar  New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) March 24, 2020

The Guardian quotes Hughes who says the effect of coral bleaching on popular tourist spots between Cairns and the Whitsunday Islands was not much.

The nature of bleaching there was mild and they could recover in due course of time. However, some juvenile corals had bleached in the central part of the reef. A report by the authorities observes that the reefs outlook needs to be improved. The Great Barrier Reef is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the back-to-back mass bleaching events could come in for scrutiny.

Global warming threatens Australian coral reefs

According to NBC News, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is a Travel destination. It faces another round of widespread coral bleaching event. Scientists assign this to rise in global temperatures coupled with corresponding warmer oceans. These are threats to the fragile corals. The current bleaching is the third such event in the past five years.

It has the experts worried. They say heat-induced bleaching is natural but climate change has increased the frequency of occurrences and the corals are denied time to recover and grow back. Prof Terry Hughes says, "The gap between one event and the next is shrinking, not just for the Great Barrier Reef, but reefs throughout the tropics. He adds that recovery takes time. It takes around a decade for even the fastest-growing corals and could take much longer for the slow-growing ones.

Coral reefs are a part of the ocean ecosystem

The Great Barrier Reef is a designated World Heritage Site. It is also an integral part of the ocean ecosystem. NBC News says the GBR covers a vast area that stretches for almost 1,500 miles off the coast of Queensland.

It is habitat of a wide variety of marine life like fish, turtles, mollusks etcetera. Coral bleaching is a result of abnormal conditions of the water. One of these is the fluctuation in ocean temperatures, another is when ocean water turns more acidic. Such environmental stress makes the corals lose their attractive colors and become ghostly white.
All international flights to Russia will be halted from Friday following a sharp jump in coronavirus cases in the country this week, Russian government officials have announced.

A statement on the governments website said an exception would be made for repatriation flights bringing Russian citizens home from abroad, or for flights given special government permission.

The measure came as the number of Covid-19 cases in Russia grew rapidly this week after officials registered 163 new cases on Wednesday, bringing the countrys total confirmed cases to 658.

In previous weeks, cases had been growing by just several dozens a day.

Earlier this month, Russian authorities limited air traffic to regular flights to world capitals and charter flights.

On Wednesday, Vladimir Putin, Russias president, said he would postpone a vote on constitutional changes, scheduled for 22 April, which would have allowed him to run for office again amid concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.

The absolute priority for us is the health, life and safety of people. Therefore I believe that the vote should be postponed until a later date, Mr Putin said.

The president also announced Russian citizens would not go to work next week in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus.

Although Russia has so far avoided a widespread outbreak of the kind seen in Italy and Spain, he warned it would be impossible to completely prevent the spread of the virus.

Mr Putin ordered snap checks on the readiness of Russian troops to deal with coronavirus earlier this week in a potential sign that his government was preparing for a serious outbreak.

Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, has also said all shops except pharmacies and grocery stores will close in the capital city from 28 March to 5 April because of the pandemic.

His announcement came after he told Mr Putin that the situation in the capital was now serious and authorities were dealing with significantly more ill people due to the virus.

Additional reporting by AP
New York City, the epicenter for the novel coronavirus in the United States, is in lockdown and citizens are asked to practice social distancing and stay indoors. As this video from Shifting Lanes shows, the streets of "The City That Never Sleeps" are now almost empty.

Although its not exactly safe to take to the streets, especially in New York, Hansen from Shifting Lanes took a Hyundai Veloster N for a drive in the city. Its not a test drive or an act of unnecessary bravery, but a video made to show how New York has become almost deserted during lockdown. Aside from a few people on the sidewalk and the occasional car on the street, New York City is empty. A desolate picture showing what a pandemic can do.

Hansen mentions that its very difficult for a car enthusiast like him to stay inside, but stresses that he didnt leave the car during his trip. And he also urges viewers to stay indoors during the pandemic, as recommended by the government and local authorities.

New York City is facing a serious crisis

USAState TotalCases NewCases TotalDeaths NewDeaths ActiveCases New York 30,811 +4,463 285 +14 30,418 New Jersey 3,675 44 3,631 California 2,643 +77 55 +4 2,580 Washington 2,469 123 2,222 Michigan 1,791 24 1,767 Florida 1,682 +215 22 +2 1,660 Illinois 1,535 16 1,517 Louisiana 1,388 46 1,342 Massachusetts 1,159 11 1,147 Pennsylvania 1,127 +276 11 +4 1,116 Georgia 1,097 38 1,059 Texas 1,023 12 1,000

The state of New York is by far the most affected by the COVID-19 outbreak with more than 30,000 cases confirmed as of March 25. New York City itself reported 15,597 cases, while Westchester has almost 4,000.

The death toll is moving close to 200 in the city and close to 300 in the entire region.

The outbreak prompted authorities to postpone the 2020 New York International Auto Show. Originally scheduled in April, the event will take place in August. Assuming that the pandemic will be stopped until then, that is. With the Jacob Javits Convention Center now empty and with no public events on the horizon, the state has announced that it will turn it into a field hospital.

According to New York governor Andrew Cuomo, FEMA will build four hospitals that will cover some 40,000 square feet inside the convention center. Each hospital will have a 250-bed capacity. A fifth hospital with 1,000 beds is being built by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Overall, the Jacob Javits Center will house at least 2,000 patients.

The state is also looking to set up temporary hospitals in Westchester Countys convention center and at two state university campuses on Long Island. They should be ready to operate in the first week of April.

These field hospitals are crucial in the fight against the pandemic as the massive number of patients threatens to overwhelm New Yorks healthcare system.

Road traffic drops nationwide

New York isnt the only city thats gone from busy to really quiet in just a few days. As the novel coronavirus spread throughout the U.S., traffic dropped in most major cities.

According to INRIX, a Washington-based company that provides traffic-related analysis, traffic started to decrease on March 13, after more than two weeks of steady increase. The decline was relatively small at five percent on March 13, but traffic dropped by 18 percent on March 15 and 24 percent on March 15. Nationwide traffic eventual dropped by 30 percent on March 20.

In New York, one of the most affected areas by the pandemic, traffic dropped by 43 percent by March 20. San Francisco experienced an even bigger drop of 51 percent, while traffic in Seattle decreased by 29 percent.

Traffic will probably continue to drop until the lockdown passes and it may very well hit the dramatic figures seen in Italy, where the drop hit 65 percent compared to January. Satellite data also suggests that air pollution has cleared significantly in major Italian cities like Rome and Turin and we may see a similar phenomenon in the U.S. too.
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Most of the US is under lockdown to help limit the spread of the coronavirus, resulting in less human activity outside and dramatically decreasing nitrogen dioxide levels by an unprecedented amount.

A new map, created by Earther, highlights the dramatic drop using data from a European Space Agency satellite and shows snapshots of the country from December 2019 through March 20, 2020.

As millions of Americans are no longer driving their cars, levels of nitrogen dioxide - which is formed when fossil fuels are burned - have plummeted.

Powered by Google Earth Engine, the map reveals major metropolitan areas that are home to hundreds of thousands to millions of Americans have experienced an improvement in air quality since the start of the US outbreak.

The two major decreases can be seen over Los Angeles, California and New York City  both have enforced a strict lockdown orders that ask residents to stay home unless travel is absolutely necessary.

The coronavirus started in Wuhan, China December 2019 and has since spread to more than 168 countries across the globe.

The death toll has now exceeded 15,000 and the number of cases worldwide has soared past 348,000 - with more than 43,000 cases and over 500 deaths reported in the US.

US officials have begun setting strict rules for their states as of this month, by banning social gatherings, implementing curfews and closing non-essential businesses until further notice.

And these stay-at-home policies and lockdowns across the country have dramatically reduced the amount of pollution in the air.

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The map, created by Earther, is powered by Google Earth Engine and pulls data from the European Space Agencys Sentinel-5P satellite.

The satellite is capable of capturing the nitrogen dioxide levels over the Earth, which is released into the air from burning fossil fuels.

Nitrogen dioxide is known to increase respiratory problems, as it inflames the lining of the lungs and reduces the persons ability to fight off lung infections.

It also causes wheezing, coughing, colds, flu and bronchitis, and is linked to asthma.

California was the first to implement a stay-at-home policy earlier this month, with Governor Gavin Newsom deeming socializing outside of the home a crime until further notice.

The state's drop in nitrogen dioxide began shortly after the policy went into effect, with Los Angeles, a pollution hub, experiencing the largest decrease.

The Bay Area and San Diego have also witnessed an improvement in their air quality.

The Northeast Corridor, which stretches from Washington DC to Boston, Massachusetts, is home to some 56 million people and is usually heavy with nitrogen dioxide.

However, it is also an area where officials were quick to impose a shutdown of non-essential travel and businesses.

In New York City, all nonessential gatherings of any size are temporarily banned and many businesses have been forced to suspend their operations.

The Big Apple has been deemed a hotspot of the virus and although it does not rely heavily on automobile traffic like Los Angles, New York City has also seen a drop in air pollution since the lockdown began.

Researchers at Columbia University have seen emissions of carbon monoxide over New York City decline more than 50 percent below typical levels over the past week.

Levels of carbon dioxide have dropped by up to 10 percent and methane have also fallen 'significantly', according to the Colombia team.

The rest of the major cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, usually form a daisy chain of pollution along Interstate 95, but, according to Earther, it has been broken since the areas mandated lockdowns.

In the Midwest, which consists of areas from Minnesota to West Virginia, sits the largest cluster of states in lockdown.

Currently six of them have asked residents to only leave for essential travel and more are expected to follow in the next coming days.

The map shows a dramatic decrease in pollution over Chicago, which is home to 2.7 million people.

Although many of the southern states have yet to implement stay-at-home policies, it seems residents are taking matters into their own hands.

Areas over Houston, Texas have seen an improvement in air quality, as well as New Orleans which is the only southern state to impose a total lockdown.

Earlier this month NASA and the European Space Agency released a separate set of satellite images that showed a dramatic reduction in the amount of harmful greenhouse gas emissions over China.

Researchers from Stanford University say in places like China the reduction in air pollution has led to fewer premature deaths from breathing toxic air.

The improved air quality around the world isn't likely to remain long term though, as scientists warn things will likely 'return to normal levels' when industry resumes.
Hadley Heavin's remains, which were recently identified by DNA 78 years after his death in the Pearl Harbor attack, were returned to his family at Tulsa International Airport this week and then taken to his hometown of Baxter Springs, Kansas. A service will be held there Saturday.
Hundreds line up to apply for jobs in March at King Soopers at the store at Constitution Avenue and Marksheffel Road. Many of those waiting had lost their previous jobs because of COVID-19 closures.
Alabama House of Representatives was scheduled to meet today but Speaker Mac McCutcheon presided over an empty chamber. That was the plan; McCutcheon had told lawmakers not to come. Posted by al.com on Thursday, March 26, 2020

Alabama House Speaker Mac McCutcheon said today theres no set date on when the House will resume the legislative session because of the coronavirus pandemic.

McCutcheon gaveled in the House for a previously scheduled meeting day today but immediately announced to an empty chamber that no business could be conducted. The speaker had advised members to stay in their districts and not travel to Montgomery.

Were working with the Department of Public Health, were working with the medical advisers in the state to see at what point in time the curve may flatten, if you will, McCutcheon said. All of those things are coming into play as we make a decision. But right now, we dont have a definite date that well come back and resume business.

The House and Senate adjourned for spring break on March 12. The Senate is scheduled to resume March 31 but that is in doubt. President Pro Tem Del Marsh said earlier this week senators would be ready to make a decision that day.

The state Constitution limits regular legislative sessions to 105 days. This session must end by May 18.

McCutcheon said priorities are the education and General Fund budgets, local bills, and other bills that can directly affect some businesses and the economy.

The budgets are for the fiscal year that begin Oct. 1. McCutcheon said its too soon to say whether lawmakers can finish their most important business or have to return for a special session this summer.

I think at this point it would be a little too early to try to start predicting what may or may not happen, McCutcheon said. Were a position right now where were trying to take care of the welfare of the members of this body as well as the state.

It would be up to Gov. Kay Ivey to call a special session.

Were going to have to determine what business we can conduct and take care of during this session before a special session would even be addressed, the speaker said.

McCutcheon said although legislators are not meeting they are engaged in the response to the pandemic.

The members of this body, although were not here today working, theyre in their districts working with people, getting phone calls every day from people working in their districts," he said. "Theyre concerned about hospitals. Theyre concerned about health care. The testing. Theyre concerned about the companies that are closing their doors and the people that are losing their jobs."

McCutcheon said he does not yet have any estimates on how much the economic slowdown caused by the pandemic will affect the state budgets.

It would be hard at this point to tell, McCutcheon said. I do think that the legislative body is going to be very mindful of the fact that the numbers will change because of the economic impact this has had on our state and will have on our state. And because of that, were going to try to be very frugal and wise in our decisions setting up the budget. But at this point I dont have any numbers.
A vast trove of visual art can be enjoyed online and there has never been a better time to discover local artists and galleries from the comfort of your own home.

Many private and artist-run galleries are busy uploading current exhibitions and art from their stockrooms as well as planning online exhibitions.

Most private galleries are open only by appointment but that means visitors can enjoy a more intimate art experience after viewing it first online.

The National Portrait Gallery may have closed its physical doors but art lovers can still check out the finalists in the Darling Portrait Prize, including David Darcy's portrait of environmental campaigner Wendy Bowman. Credit:David Darcy

Jan Minchin, director of Melbournes Tolarno Galleries said she was fielding calls to book private viewings of their current exhibition as soon as she sent out an email announcing the change.
New Delhi, March 26 : All Muslim sects have suspended the Friday prayers in mosques and urged the faithful to follow the government decision for a complete nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus. However, the calls for prayers will continue to be made from mosques at the designated hours.

Jamaat-e-Islami Sharia Council said in a statement: "The Friday prayers (Juma Namaz) should be observed (only by Imams, muezzins, khadims, and administrators of mosques). The prayers and the 'khutbah' (speech) should be completed in the minimum possible period whereas the remaining public should conduct the 'Zohar' prayer at home." The Shia sect's religious leaders too decided to suspended the Friday prayers across the country and asked the followers to remain indoors.

Maulana Ashraf, Imam of Mumbai, said: "We have suspended the Friday prayers and daily prayers in mosques since last week. This arrangement will continue till the government desires as the primary objective should be to save human lives and follow the government directive. We are appealing to the people to remain indoors from mosque loudspeakers and the social media." Kashmir's Grand Mufti Nasir-ul-Islam said that he had also appealed for the suspension of Friday and daily prayers and it's allowed in Islam.

The mosques in the national capital and elsewhere are only giving calls for prayers to the faithful whereas only three to five persons offer prayers on the premises while adhering to social distancing norm, said a muezzin.
Brewers and distillers across Europe are using their production facilities to make hand sanitizer to help fight the coronavirus outbreak.

BrewDog, Leith Gin, Verdant Spirits and Pernod Ricard are all getting involved in efforts to ramp up production of hand sanitizer, which has become scarce in many countries due to a massive spike in demand.

The announcements follow a raft of similar efforts from some distilleries in the United States.

BrewDog announced it would start making hand sanitizer at its brewery in Scotland on Twitter Wednesday.

"We are determined to do everything we can to try and help as many people as possible stay safe. It's time to keep it clean," tweeted the company.

Another Scottish company, Leith Gin, made its own announcement Tuesday.

"We have suspended spirit production and are making high strength hand sanitiser for those in need in our local community," tweeted the company.

The distillery also appealed for donations of small plastic bottles to use as packaging.

Verdant Spirits, a distillery based in Dundee, Scotland joined in the efforts Tuesday, tweeting an appeal for donations.

"We've been asked to switch our production temporarily to make hand sanitiser for our local health workers," said the company.

In France, beverage company Pernod Ricard said it would donate 70,000 liters of pure alcohol to produce hand sanitizer.

The company is working with Laboratoire Cooper, a major supplier of hand sanitizer to pharmacies in France, according to an announcement Wednesday.

Pernod Ricard subsidiaries in Sweden, Ireland, Spain and the United States will also contribute to local efforts to boost production of hand sanitizer, it said.

These efforts involve the Absolut Vodka distillery in Sweden; Rabbit Hole (Kentucky), Smooth Ambler (West Virginia) and TX Whiskey (Texas) in the United States; and other facilities in Spain and Ireland.

On Sunday, luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, the parent company of Christian Dior, Guerlain and Givenchy, announced it would help French health authorities by manufacturing hand sanitizer and providing it to them free of charge.

LVMH said it would use the production facilities of its perfumes and cosmetics brands to produce large quantities of sanitizer.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 14:18:55|Editor: huaxia

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ROME, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The number of new COVID-19 cases reported daily in Italy is dropping steadily while the daily death toll is still fluctuating.

Based on the mixed picture, local experts forecast a trend of slower growth of COVID-19 infections in the country in the coming weeks.

A total of 3,491 new cases were reported on Wednesday, representing a downward trend from the past few days when the figure stood at 3,612 Tuesday, 3,780 Monday and 3,956 Sunday respectively.

"The number of new infections is how we measure the spread of the pandemic," said Enzo Marinari, a professor of theoretical physics at Sapienza University in Rome, noting that it could be misleading to only compare the new cases from one day with those from the previous days.

"We should be comparing the trend in the number of new cases to what had been exponential growth, which was the case until last week," said the professor, who has organized a much-consulted social media page dedicated to the analysis of the viral outbreak in the country.

"I think we are getting nearer to the kind of plateau we have been looking for," Giovanni Maga, head of the DNA Enzymology and Molecular Virology Unit at the National Research Council, said, adding such a trend was expected as Italy began a series of containment measures about two weeks ago.

Given the incubation period of the virus, "this is the week when things were expected to start slowing down," Maga said. "It's still far, far too early to think about changing what we are doing but we can start to look at what the next phase could be."

Both Marinari and Maga are of the opinion that the next phase will come when patients recovering from the coronavirus start to outnumber new cases on a daily basis.

"We will get there," Maga said. "We just have to remain diligent and continue to follow the rules from the public authorities."

Meanwhile, the death toll in recent days has been less predictable. On Wednesday, health officials reported 683 new deaths, down from 743 on Tuesday. The figures stood at 602 and 651 respectively for Monday and Sunday, though.

Marinari said while the death toll is still far too high, it is not a good way to measure the effectiveness of Italy's current coronavirus containment policies.

"The death toll is a photograph from 20 to 25 days earlier when the victims first got infected," he said. "When the death figures are a reflection of those who became infected this week, we will see a far lower figure."
Portions of the pet care industry are being decimated by the coronavirus pandemic, with workers debating whether theyre considered essential, many day care and boarding centers closing, and some dog walkers and trainers trying to shift from normal routines.

The impact is outsized in the Bay Area. That anecdote about San Francisco having more dogs than kids? Census data show its true, with 120,000 or more canines to 115,000 kids, according to 2016 figures.

More than 330,000 people were employed in the pet care field nationwide in 2018, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The American Pet Products Association says pet care was a $95.7 billion industry in 2019. Of that, $10.3 billion was spent on boarding, grooming, training and walking.

The people who provide those services are being hit the hardest.

Diane Livoti, who developed Metro Dog in Richmond into one of the largest day care and boarding centers in Contra Costa County since opening in 2006, was forced to close March 16. Ninety minutes before the shelter-in-place order went into effect, she drove home the last dog being boarded at her facility.

Livoti laid off her 22 employees in hopes they could collect unemployment benefits and is pondering whether the business will ever reopen.

Everyone in our industry is grasping for ways to survive this, she said. I can accept that I may not make any money and may have to tread water for years, but I have to at least be able to pay my bills, so I dont lose my house.

Im scared. Im really scared here.

Livoti said the stimulus bill merely kicks the can down the road and might buy her eight to 10 weeks with the huge overhead of a business that is staffed 24 hours per day. Her payroll is about $30,000 every two weeks. The rent on her 12,500-square-foot facility is $10,000 per month. She pays down a Small Business Administration loan at $7,000 per month.

Just to break even, the company has to average nearly 80 dogs per day. In the week before the shelter-in-place mandate, Metro Dog averaged about 30 dogs per day.

This is not a get-rich industry. Its an industry of love and passion, Livoti said. Even if the world starts back up, Im not going to see my business return. I dont know that its a viable business model anymore. Its going to be a new world.

Veterinary hospitals and clinics are adjusting to the new world, like at Mission Pet Hospital, which is offering virtual phone appointments and curbside pickups so clients dont have to sit in the waiting room.

Without as many operating costs, things appear to be more sustainable for dog walkers and trainers, though they too are seeing a slowdown in business. Trainers are trying to teach online, and dog walkers are adjusting to clients working from home and no longer needing their services.

Jason Richards dog-walking business, Canine Boardwalk in Emeryville, has been operating for more than 15 years. He services a number of medical workers, but he said his business has still been nearly cut in half this month.

For the dogs he does still take on off-leash hikes, Richard limits the potential points of contacts with coronavirus by picking up dogs from backyards, wearing gloves and sporting a mask he bought during the wildfires.

I feel very fortunate that I have some very wonderful clients who have continued to pay my normal weekly rate, even when theyre working from home and dont need my care, Richard said. This might be manageable for about a month. Then, I hope we get back to normal or maybe even see a boom with those who are adopting pets and will be going back to work.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

Marc Pearl, owner of K9 Playtime, closed his 24/7/365 doggy day care that has served the South of Market neighborhood since 2007. But only for a day.

Among Pearls clients are judges, attorneys, FBI agents, police officers and hospital workers, so after closing March 17, he was told that providing care for essential workers pets made his business essential. His business also sells pet food.

With a trimmed-down staff and lessened hours, K9 Playtime reopened March 18 with about 30 dogs. The company usually cares for about 120 per day.

It looks deserted at a place that was so robust a month ago, Pearl said. Its frustrating, but heres what I told my employees: Were all in the same boat. If the boat sinks, were all sinking. So, I suggest that we row.

Pearl had just paid a $50,000 deposit for a new location and lost two managers in the days before the shelter-in-place order.

The former Pacific Bell executive tried to file for an SBA loan at midnight when the inundated system was getting maintenance. When he checked back at 6 a.m., he got four pages into the process before the site crashed.

Theres no doubt that were bleeding, Pearl said. We can survive, but if this goes past July, I dont know if I want to. How much money do I want to put into it? If we get into July and people are talking about forgetting 2020, I dont know if I want to fund somebodys real estate venture for that long.

Rusty Simmons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rsimmons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Rusty_SFChron
Introduction

Distinguished Guests, on behalf of the Board, Management and Staff of the Bank, I am honoured and most delighted to welcome you to the launch of the 2020 Monetary Policy Statement. I extend a special word of welcome to the Guest of Honour, Honourable Minister of Finance and Economic Development, his Cabinet colleagues, Members of Parliament and all Distinguished Guests attending this event for the first time. We are most grateful to you all for having made the time to attend the launch.

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, the publication and launch of the Monetary Policy Statement is an important event in the Bank's calendar of events, for a good public policy reason. It is a key aspect of good governance, transparency and accountability in the formulation and implementation of monetary policy.
CHICAGO  An alleged national puppy laundering ring that supplied dogs to Chicago pet shops has been shut down following a Chicago Tribune report that exposed how the stores were selling purebred and designer pets as rescues, despite the citys anti-puppy mill ordinance.

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller announced Wednesday that two so-called rescue shelters have agreed to cease operations as part of settlement with the state, which had sued the nonprofit rescue groups, a commercial broker and their officers for fraudulent practices in March 2019. The two groups must also pay the state $60,000, permanently cease deceptive practices and agree to other restrictions as part of the settlement.

Millers investigation found that the two nonprofits -- Hobo K-9 Rescue of Britt, Iowa, and Rescue Pets Iowa Corp. of Ottumwa -- transferred at least 3,600 dogs to entities in Illinois, California, Florida, Missouri and New Jersey from September 2016 to September 2019. They included Pomeranians, Shar-Peis, Alaskan malamutes, Yorkiepoos and other high-priced purebred and designer breeds.

Iowa officials alleged the owners J.A.K.S Puppies started Hobo K-9 Rescue in 2016 as a way to provide pricey pups to businesses in California and Chicago, where laws require pet stores to sell only shelter animals. Pet Luv Pet Center, a store in the Scottsdale neighborhood on the Southwest Side, acquired about 765 purebred and designer puppies from Hobo K-9 and sold them for more than $1.1 million between 2016 and November 2018, according to the attorney generals findings.

Pet Luvs written puppy guarantees provided to its customers claimed that the breeder of these dogs was Hobo K-9 Rescue," not the actual for-profit breeders from whom Hobo K-9 brokered the puppies, Miller said. Pet Luv sold most of the dogs -- which included Yorkshire terriers, Teddy bears, bichon frises and German shepherds -- for more than $1,000 each.

The stores owners, who could not be reached for comment, were not a defendant in the complaint.

Another Chicago pet store that sourced its puppies from Hobo K-9 was paid $3,600 by a customer who adopted a rescued goldendoodle.

The nonprofit shelter owners -- Jolyn D. Noethe and Kimberly K. Dolphin of Hobo K-9 and Russell Kirk of Rescue Pets -- did not admit any wrongdoing under the terms of the deal, but they agreed to the restrictions imposed by the state. The companies may continue to transfer dogs commercially and can provide puppies to legitimate shelters, but they cannot organize any new nonprofit operations, Miller said.

The defendants also must provide a quarterly report to the attorney general for three years, documenting the animals they transfer, sell or donate, as well as the destination of the animals to ensure they comply with the settlement.

Attorneys for the individuals and their respective businesses did not return calls seeking comment Wednesday.

In the civil complaint the Iowa attorney general filed against the defendants last year, Miller called them integral actors of a national puppy laundering ring.

The settlement does not give them immunity from any future legal actions by other government agencies or consumers.

This case was the first of its kind brought by any state attorney general, and this settlement will ensure the defendants never again attempt to evade puppy mill bans, Miller said in a statement. This outcome should send a strong message to others who are thinking about engaging in similar fraudulent activities in Iowa.

The Iowa attorneys generals office opened its investigation in June 2018 after the Tribune found that a loophole in Chicagos anti-puppy mill ordinance allowed three city pet stores to sell puppies supplied by rescues that are closely linked to longtime commercial dealers.

In an arrangement that is not an express violation of the city ordinance but runs counter to the spirit of the ban, records show these rescues provided city shops each year with hundreds of purebred and designer-mix puppies -- all of which came through kennels and properties owned by for-profit businesses or dealers.

J.A.K.S and Hobo K-9 were heavily cited in the Tribune report, as public records showed there was little distinction between the two north-central Iowa operations.

Both entities used the same storefront along Britts Main Street as their business address on veterinary inspection certificates, though a sign on the door identified it only as the J.A.K.S office. The rescue puppies were fed at the same time, examined by the same veterinarians and often transported on the same day as the commercial ones sold to suburban pet shops, state records show. The vast majority came to the Chicago area at 8 weeks old -- the earliest a puppy can be separated from its mother under Illinois law.

J.A.K.S exported 805 dogs to Illinois between January 2015 and November 2017, according to certificates of veterinary inspection filed with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. The records show 71% of the puppies were purebred, while the remaining 29% were considered designer mixes. The J.A.K.S puppies had a median age of 61 days at the time of their inspections, which typically occurred a few days before transport.

Hobo K-9 Rescue, which was formed in September 2016, exported 512 dogs between its inception and December 2017, according to the inspection certificates. About 73% of the puppies were pure breeds, while 27% were designer mixes.

The median age for the Hobo rescue puppies was 61 days at the time of inspection, just like the dogs that J.A.K.S sold to suburban pet stores.

Hobo sent all 512 puppies labeled as rescues to Pet Luv Pet Center just south of Midway Airport, records show. The Tribune investigation found none of the exported animals was older than 16 weeks or mutts, an unusual inventory for a rescue organization.

Chicago passed an ordinance in 2015 banning shops from selling the commercially bred pets. At the time of its passage, pet shop owners criticized the law and said typical rescue groups could never provide the kind of high-end, purebred and designer mix puppies customers wanted.

The measure was intended to prevent Chicago businesses from sourcing dogs from so-called puppy mills, large-scale breeding facilities often criticized for deplorable conditions and mistreatment of the mother dogs.

By misrepresenting a dogs origins, critics say the businesses hinder the Chicago ordinances goal to reduce the number of shelter dogs euthanized in the city each year.

The practice also misleads customers, some of whom may have only wanted a rescue puppy, the attorney general said.

Legitimate rescue groups have told us the activities of these sham nonprofits discredited and demeaned the good work that they do, Miller said.

Cari Meyers, founder of Chicago-based The Puppy Mill Project, which was behind the 2015 Chicago ordinance and has long complained about the Iowa puppy provider, said such judgments are long overdue.

She encouraged attorneys general in Illinois and Missouri, where the Tribune found another provider of purebred puppies to the Chicago area is based, to take similar action. Meyers said attempts to close the loophole in the citys ordinance that has allowed such purebred sales to continue are moving frustratingly slowly.

She is cautiously optimistic the Iowa settlement may lead to real change, though she pointed out that some providers in the industry simply reopen later under a different name.

I honestly feel like I could cry, she said after reading terms of the settlement. Its certainly a moment Ive been waiting for, and the fact Iowa didnt waste time and was able to get something done this quickly will help protect consumers who are buying these dogs without knowing they are not from rescues. Hopefully its a watershed moment in our fight and others will follow.

The Humane Society of the United States also applauded the Iowa judgment.

Iowa AG: Groups involved in puppy-laundering ring to disband

ASSOCIATED PRESS

DES MOINES, Iowa  Those who operated an alleged national puppy-laundering ring masquerading as pet rescues have agreed to dissolve the organizations and pay the state $60,000 as part of a settlement, the Iowa Attorney General's Office said Wednesday. Attorney General Tom Miller last year sued two nonprofit rescue groups -- Hobo K9 Rescue of Britt and Rescue Pets Iowa Corp. of Ottumwa -- and others, accusing them of working together to illegally transfer hundreds of designer puppies through the sham rescue groups to out-of-state pet stores. The lawsuit said consumers were misled about the true source of the puppies and that the defendants abused their Iowa non-profit status to circumvent state and local laws banning the sale of puppy mill dogs. The defendants denied the allegations but agreed to the consent judgment. Attorney general investigators said they found that the two nonprofits transferred at least 3,600 dogs to entities in California, Illinois, Florida, Missouri and New Jersey from September 2016 to September 2019. The dogs included Pomeranians, shar-peis, Alaskan Malamutes, poodle-Yorkies and other high-priced purebred and designer breeds.

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Nobody said social distancing was going to be easy.

But scientists agree self-isolation is a necessary step to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Still, some people arent just ignoring the recommendation to maintain six feet of space between people  they are flouting it.

At least one person in Kentucky has contracted coronavirus after attending what is being called a coronavirus party with a group of young adults, Gov. Andy Beshear announced on Tuesday.

Those attending the party intentionally got together thinking they were invincible and purposely defying state guidance to practice social distancing, Bashear said, according to CNN.

This is one that makes me mad, Beshear said. We have to be much better than that.

A day later, conservative website The Federalist published an article suggesting coronavirus parties akin to chickenpox parties could help end the pandemic. The article was so reckless  the plan was the brainchild of an unlicensed dermatologist from Oregon  that Twitter froze the websites Twitter account.

Think about all the illogical things posted to Twitter everyday and left there forever. This was bad enough to require immediate action.

It is dangerous and irresponsible, Dr. Arthur L. Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York Universitys Grossman School of Medicine, told The New York Times. To run around saying, Im going to take a lethal virus and deliberately infect you to build your immunity not only makes no medical sense, it gets pretty close to advising homicide.

You can get chickenpox just once, youre immune to it after youve had it. Its unclear if thats the case with coronavirus. Chickenpox kills 100 people a year in the United States. More than 900 have died from coronavirus in the United States since January.

Whether youre trying to be a rebel or you think youre creating herd immunity as The Federalists story suggested, it doesnt matter what your intentions are  going against recommended behavior during the countrys worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu in 1918 doesnt only put you in danger  in endangers the whole population.

So uh, partys over.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share. If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

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A73-year-old man who had tested positive for coronavirus and was in coma due to kidney failure in Rajasthan's Bhilwara district died on Thursday, an official said.

The death occurred on a day when two more persons, one each in Jaipur and Jhunjhunu, tested positive for COVID-19 infection, he said said.

Both the patients, who tested positive, have the travel history to Middle East. With this, the total number of COVID-19 cases in the state so far rose to 40.

The patient with chronic kidney and diabetes issues was admitted to a Bhilwara private hospital, whose three doctors and nine nursing staffers were found positive for coronavirus infection.

The authorities, however, did not attribute the death of septuagenarian patient directly to coronavirus infection.

"A death has occurred but the patient was in coma due to kidney failure and diabetes before coronavirus spread in Bhilwara. So, it would not be appropriate (to say) that he died of COVID-19 as the death occurred due to pre-existing diseases," Additional Chief Secretary (Health) Rohit Kumar Singh said.

He said that two positive cases, including one in Jaipur and Jhunjhunu have been found today. Total number of positive cases have rose to 49 in the state so far.

Entire state is under lockdown from March 22. Massive screening is underway to trace out contagion.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Averting a default,Air India has secured short-term funds to service Rs 700 crore worth non-convertible debentures due for redemption on Thursday, according to a source.

The debt-laden national carrier's operations and revenue flow have been crippled by coronavirus outbreak, which has also resulted in suspension of domestic and international flights.

On March 23,India Ratings warned that the national carrier may default on the debt payment, given the poor cash flow position after the announcement of the closure of national airspace.

Accordingly, the agency had on the same evening placed the instrument on rating watch with negative outlook.

On Thursday, an airline source told PTI that it has secured the needed amount from banks with government guarantee to pay interest to investors.

The source did not say how much money has been raised or the amount needed to pay.

A reply to a mail sent to an Air India spokesperson for confirmation is awaited.

According to the source, Air India has secured short-term bank loans backed by government guarantee to refinance the entire principal amount of Rs 700 crore of non-convertible debentures.

These NCDs are due for interest payment or redemption on March 26.

The airline needs Rs 30 crore to pay the interest.

The issuer's account was not provided for the same as of March 25, according to India Rating report last evening.

The amount was on rating watch negative since March 23, which reflects delays in funding the designated account as on March 23, as confirmed by the trustee IDBI Trusteeship Services.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
GODFREY  Gov. J.B. Pritkers announcement Wednesday extending the filing deadline for 2019 tax returns until July 15 may tempt residents to put off filing. However, even with the automatic three-month extension for federal and Illinois returns, tax preparers in Madison County are encouraging customers not to wait.

I think actually it is going to be better for everyone to file as soon as they can, said Wanda Jockisch, owner of ActionTax in Godfrey.

I just think that anything people can get done now is good, she said. We dont know whats going to happen in the future with this.

Jockisch, who has been in business for 24 years, said shes taking numerous precautions to ensure people feel comfortable visiting her office. She offers curbside drop-off and pickup, with some customers even choosing to wait in their cars while their tax returns are being completed.

We know that everyone is concerned and they should be, said Jockisch. We are taking all of the precautions we can with spraying Lysol and using Clorox wipes on our desks and signature pads in between each customer.

We are trying to make sure we keep our customers safe and ourselves safe, she said. We do appreciate that no one comes into the office whos been out of the country within 45 days and that clients dont bring any extra people into the office who dont need to be here.

With only three preparers working in the business  each with a private office  Jockisch said most of her customers continue to feel safe coming into the business.

I think most people feel comfortable because we go by appointment only and have private offices here, she said. Also, they know were taking precautions and theyre not going to be in this office with probably more than three people at a time. Theyve been very appreciative when they see that were wiping everything down between each client.

Kelly Flaherty of Thompson Flaherty, CPA in Edwardsville said his office has reduced its hours and is serving clients through drop-off only. Customers have been very understanding and willing to work with him.

Its been working out really well, he said. I cant thank my clients enough for their understanding and patience.

Flaherty also suggested people file their tax returns sooner rather than later, even with Illinois extending the filing deadline.

Were still encouraging people to bring in their information, he said. Especially people who are getting refunds, because they may need the money right now.

Patty Tomerliin of Tomerlin Bookkeeping Services in East Alton said she had hoped Illinois would extend the filing deadline because her office was already feeling the effects of being closed to walk-in service. With returns taking longer to prepare when customers drop off their documents, Tomerlin was worried about being able to take care of all of her clients.

The three-month filing extension should help, she said.

Its been pretty difficult, she said. Were getting backlogged. Were still going to keep working, but at least that (deadline extension) gives us some breathing room.
The Venezuelan people deserve a transparent, responsible, representative government that serves the needs of the people  and that does not betray the trust of the people by condoning or employing public officials that engage in illicit narcotics trafficking, Pompeo said.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  The Presidential Security Group says charges may be filed against House appropriations committee chair Eric Yap of ACT-CIS Party-list for attending a Malacanang meeting and misdeclaring information on his health condition, just days before getting confirmation that he tested positive for the virus.

PSG Commander Col. Jesus Durante said they are already conducting investigation involving the lawmaker, who revealed Wednesday that he tested positive for the virus. Durante said depending on the results of the investigation, charges can be filed against Yap.

Yap, who entered Malacanang last Saturday for a meeting with other lawmakers and other government officials, failed to disclose all the necessary information, Durante noted.

"The PSG fully implements strict security measures in Malacanang Palace. One of these is by filling up a declaration form which asks for contact tracing and monitoring, COVID-19 symptoms check, and travel history," the PSG said in a statement.

"For whatever reason, he failed to disclose all needed information. PSG troopers on duty assessed him according to the answers on the said form he submitted, the basis of which he was allowed entry," it added.

Furthermore, Durante said that at least 20 people were told to isolate themselves following the incident. Among them are the PSG staffers who were at the gate to receive Yap, the personnel who served during the meeting, and Senator Christopher Bong Go.

The PSG said the incident will serve as a reference for its implementation of enhanced screening measures for all who will enter Malacanang Complex.

Meanwhile, Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said the Palace has received reports that certain officials considered as persons under investigation or monitoring have breached the health department's protocol. But the Office of the President will still evaluate the reports, he said.

The reports being aired in the open are however conflicting, hence the Office of the President deems it appropriate that the same be formally evaluated by the concerned agencies upon a complaint or otherwise to ascertain the true facts behind the incidents, said Panelo in a statement.

He added, The protocols set by the government for persons under investigation or monitoring must be strictly and absolutely observed by all people falling under the said categories, regardless of their socio-political status.

In an interview with CNN Philippines, Yap said he will cooperate with the investigation.

He admitted that he had himself tested for COVID-19 on March 15 after coming into contact with Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade. Tugade underwent self-quarantine after attending an event with a COVID-19 patient but later tested negative for the disease.

"Wala akong symptoms, wala naman akong nakasalamuhang nag-positive," Yap said, explaining he was asymptomatic when he visited Malacanang. [Translation: I had no symptoms, I had not been in the company of anyone who tested positive for COVID-19].

CNN Philippines Correspondents Xianne Arcangel and Triciah Terada contributed to this report.
NEW HAVEN  New Haven reported its first death from Covid-19 Wednesday, while the number of persons with the coronavirus has surged from 16 to 29.

Mayor Justin Elicker said the jump is likely a combination of increased testing results coming back and community spread.

New Haven Health Department Director Maritza Bond said the man was in his late 50s and had underlying medical issues that contributed to his inability to recover.

She said they do not know how he contracted the virus. The director said he worked at a number of sites and interacted with many many people.

Bond said people with prolonged contact with the individual were advised to do self-monitoring and the city is working closely with that facility and are in daily contact with it. She did not said what the facility was.

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3, noted in a statement that there were two deaths as a result of the coronavirus in the district she represents, the man in New Haven and an 88-year-old resident of West Haven.

My thoughts and prayers are with the families of the two individuals in our district who died from complications due to the coronavirus, she said in a release. This pandemic is on our doorstep, and we must do everything we can to stop it.

The New Haven announcement was made at the daily press conference held by Elicker who also said an individual at the Bella Vista housing complex for seniors has tested positive and will self-isolate. Bond said the person was in the hospital over night and was expected to return to their apartment at Bella Vista Wednesday evening.

Bond said she provided recommendations on the best way to get the person back to their unit without exposing others to the virus.

The city usually does not name institutions where an individual has tested positive for Covid-19, but the mayor wanted to make sure that the estimated 2,000 Bella Vista residents were aware of it.

It is very important, from a health perspective, we believe, that Bella Vista residents are taking very seriously their role in reducing community spread and also taking very seriously the importance that they need to follow directions to take care of themselves as well, Elicker said.

Elicker said the city has had multiple conversations with the Carabetta Co., which manages Bella Vista, on protecting the residents against the virus,

He said some of the steps included increased cleaning of the facility and putting up posters advising them on how to stay safe. Elicker said they also have a robocall system to quickly communicate when there is a need to. The mayor said they now also have a policy of not accepting visitors unless it is a health worker or someone delivering food.

Bond said they also facilitated a webinar for all multi-unit facilities similar to Bella Vista advising them about protocols to follow. Elicker said he would also have a robocall with the residents of Bella Vista Wednesday night.

The mayor also said the city has worked out a plan with Yale New Haven Hospital on improved safety measures so no other individual with Covid-19 will be able to leave without a medical discharge.

A homeless man close to being discharged, but under quarantine because he was being treated for Covid-19, left without medical approval and was later found in Milford, where is now voluntarily being monitored.

Elicker said there will be increased security at the hospital entrances and exits to make sure that if there is anyone who is a flight risk that that individual is not going to be able to leave the facility and they will quickly notify the New Haven police if there is any major issue.

Across Connecticut a total of 875 people have tested positive for COVID-19, more than 5,898 tests have been conducted in Connecticut, including state and private laboratories, according to a release from Gov. Ned Lamont. The release said about 113 people have been hospitalized and 19 people have died.

The numbers now are starting to significantly increase, Bond said.

About making additional beds available at Yale New Haven Hospital, Elicker said it is his understanding that the state is working to identify sites for the surge in bed needs. He said New Haven will help the hospital in any way possible.

On using the Hill Regional Career High School as an emergency shelter for the homeless with Covid-19, who are not sick enough to stay in the hospital, Elicker said they are still working on staffing it and getting enough protective gear.

Also, he said the city has determined that the gymnasium, where up to 75 patients can be handled, has a separate air handling system from the rest of the school.

He said they always planned to clean the entire school after the crisis is over, but the fact that there are separate systems should put community concerns at ease.

The mayor said getting it up and running is a major topic of conversation with staff every day.

Elicker said for very obvious reasons, we want to make sure that we are allowing the hospital to have enough vacant beds for new patients, who actually need intensive care.

He said the emergency shelter would alleviate some of the pressure on the hospital.

The mayor said he is also working with advocates for the undocumented to make sure they report symptoms for Covid-19 and not be afraid to contact health officials.

Fire Chief John Alston Jr. said two firefighters who felt ill were tested for the virus and they came back negative. He said he is waiting for the results of the tests for two other firefighters.

Police Chief Otoniel Reyes said one officers wife, a healthcare worker, has tested positive so he is self-isolating at home. Another officer, who was feeling symptomatic, is negative for the flu and is now awaiting results of a test for Covid-19 .

On the budget process, the city will start having more in depth hearings on the proposed 2020-21 document on Monday. Elicker thanked the aldermanic leadership for working with him on the process going forward.

He said the complication is not knowing the impact the Covid-19 crisis would have on the budget this year and next year. He said they are starting to understand some of those complications, but not others.

The budget itself is a little bit of a moving target because we are not quite sure what the economic horizon is for the city, Elicker said.

DeLauro, in noting the deaths in her district, said, Congress needs to act urgently to continue addressing the health and economic crisis facing families.

We swiftly passed two important coronavirus response bills thus far, but we must do much more to control the spread of this virus. That is the surest way to prevent more tragic deaths like those in our District today, she said in a release. Every minute matters for our healthcare workers, first responders, and everyone at-risk across the country. In our own daily lives, we must continue following the advice of medical professionals. I urge everyone to follow the CDCs guidelines and Governor Lamonts Stay Safe, Stay Home policy.

The Connecticut State Police also said Wednesday that there are four confirmed cases of Covid-19 within that agency. The four cases include a trooper from Troop G, Bridgeport, a trooped from Troop L, Litchfield, the Training Academy in Meriden and a recruit from the 129th Training Troop who was training remotely, the agency release said. All are in self-quarantine.

Social distancing is not easy, and isolations effect on our mental health should not be minimized, DeLauro said. But stopping the spread of this deadly disease must be our top priority. Any one of us can contract the coronavirus, and we must do our best to prevent further illnesses and deathsespecially for vulnerable populations like our seniors and those with underlying health issues.

mary.oleary@hearstmediact.com; 203-641-2577.
Movie fans have been waiting patiently for a solo movie featuring The Flash since 2016s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Thankfully, plans for the film have finally been solidified and pre-production is underway. Here is the scoop on the release date and cast for DCs The Flash movie.

Ezra Miller as The Flash | Warner Bros.

Who will star in The Flash Movie?

Ezra Miller will reprise his role as Barry Allen, aka The Flash, in the film. Miller previously starred as the Scarlett Speedster in 2017s Justice League alongside Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Godot, Jason Momoa, and Ray Fisher. He also appeared briefly as The Flash in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad.

Most recently, as a wink to DC fans, the actor popped up on The CWs Arrowverse crossover event, Crisis on Infinite Earths, as a Barry Allen from an alternate universe. Fans were giddy to see both Miller and The Flash television series star, Grant Gustin, suited up and sharing screen time as two versions of the Fastest Man Alive.

Viewers may also recognize Miller from his stints on other shows, including Californication and Royal Pains. He has also found success on the big screen in films ranging from drama, to comedy, to fantasy. The actor landed roles in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Trainwreck, as well as the Fantastic Beasts series, among other blockbusters. Miller is known for his quirky performances and commitment to each character he portrays.

Who else could appear in the film?

The rest of the cast has not yet been confirmed, but some actors are on the radar for possible co-starring roles.

Kiersey Clemons told W Magazine that she was cast as Iris West in Justice League, but her scenes were deleted. It is a safe bet that the actress could be a candidate to play The Flashs love interest in the solo movie. Likewise, since Billy Crudup played Barrys father, Henry, in Justice League, he could potentially reprise the role in The Flash movie. Regarding the part of the villain, Leonard Snart, aka Captain Cold, James McAvoy of X-Men fame is in the running to play the character, according to wegotthiscovered.com.

When is The Flash Movie scheduled to premiere in theaters?

The Flash filming was scheduled to begin in late April or early May of 2020. However, as reported by Inverse, shooting was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, which derailed many Hollywood projects. Despite the suspension of production, the studio has not moved the release date, and Radio Times reports that The Flash is still scheduled to hit theaters on July 1, 2022.

How does The Flash fit into the DC Extended Universe?

There have been eight films released as a part of the DC Extended Universe. Man of Steel, which Newsweek ranks as the best of the bunch, kicked off the film series in 2013. It was followed up in cinemas by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Suicide Squad (2016), Wonder Woman (2017), Justice League (2017), Aquaman (2018), Shazam! (2019), and Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020). Wonder Woman 1984 is scheduled for a Summer 2020 release.

Looking ahead at the launch calendar, The Batman, The Suicide Squad, and Black Adam are expected in 2021, with Shazam! 2, The Flash, and Aquaman 2 planned for 2022 release dates.

Until The Flash movie premieres in the not-so-distant future, fans can catch up on the DC Extended Universe films released prior to 2020 on Amazon Prime Video, where they are available to rent or own.

Read more: The Flash: Why Fans Think Grant Gustin is Feuding With On-Screen Love Interest Candice Patton
Srinagar, March 26 : Divisional Commissioner, Kashmir P.K. Pole has ordered an inquiry into the alleged mishandling of the patient who tested positive for coronavirus and died on Thursday morning at CD hospital in Srinagar.

The order issued by Pole said the patient was mishandled by the authorities at CD hospital and SKIMS Bemina.

He asked Additional Commissioner Kashmir Tasaduq Hussain Mir to enquire into the matter.

"Principal SKIMS Medical College-Hospital Bemina vide his communication No. SKIMS-MC-PS/2020/39g dated: 25-03-2020 has submitted a report indicating therein that a 65-year-old patient, resident of Hyderpora Srinagar who reported to Casualty of SKIMS Medical College Hospital Bemina on 21-0302020 at 08. 30 AM alongwith his travel history was found to be a COVID-19 suspect, " reads the order.

The order says the report revealed that the patient who was later tested positive for COVID-19 had not been handled as per the protocol required for treating such patients.

"The report further reveals that knowing the travel history of the patient and observing the symptoms of the patient, the Hospital Administration has not brought it into the notice of Divisional/District/Police authorities when he left the hospital without getting admitted." The order says that the patient has been given ample time to spread the virus by intermingling with the public and relatives.

"The negligence at the hands of Hospital Administration has resulted in a lot of confusion and vulnerability amongst masses. In view of the above, Medical Superintendent SKIMS Bemina and Head of the Department, Chest Medicine SKIMS Bemina are hereby called to explain their position forthwith, "the order reads.
With the number of new coronavirus cases doubling every 2-3 days, a surge of patients that will strain if not overload Pennsylvania hospitals looks ever-more possible.

Gov. Tom Wolf said Wednesday our hospital beds are beginning to fill up  At our current rate, our hospitals will soon be overwhelmed.

State Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said Wednesday more than 120 people have required hospitalization since Pennsylvania reported its first two cases of the new coronavirus on March 6. That equals about 10% of those who have tested positive, she said. About 38 have required intensive care, and about 18 have required ventilator care, she said.

She said state and hospital officials are rushing to prepare for a surge she expects to come over the next few weeks.

Pennsylvania has about 3,400 intensive care beds, with about 60 percent occupied, she said. Pennsylvania has about 3,000 ventilators, including those from the states emergency stockpile, with about 75 percent available.

Levine further said the emergency stockpile has a little over a million N95 face masks, which the state has been distributing to hospitals and emergency responders. The federal government has also provided some. But the state is seeking still more more from sources including the federal government, businesses that normally use them for other purposes, and by scouring whatever is available in Pennsylvania or throughout the nation or even overseas.

She said the state hopes to buy more ventilators.

But based on national accounts, states throughout the country are competing for an already tight supply. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for example, has said his state has about 4,000 ventilators but expects to need 30,000. For days he has been pleading for ventilators from any source and offering to pay generously. On Wednesday, he made an offer to any state that can lend some, guaranteeing hell send them back, along with people to operate them, when the surge hits the state than lent them.

Pennsylvania also is preparing to turn hotels into sub acute facilities for people who no longer need full hospital care but are still recovering, Levine said. That would allow recovering patients to be moved out of hospitals to make room for sicker patients.

Wolf said the key to preventing Pennsylvanias hospitals from getting overwhelmed is for residents to abide by his pleas  and orders in a growing number of counties  to stay home and practice the social distancing that can prevent the coronavirus from spreading.

If thats successful, he said, it will lessen the size of the eventual surge while allowing more time to get ready.

Were trying to give our health care system the time to ramp up to save the lives they will need to save, he said.


Moon proposes exemption of entry bans on business travelers



By Do Je-hae



President Moon Jae-in and other leaders of G20 countries vowed a coordinated global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, in an extraordinary virtual summit, according to Cheong Wa Dae, Thursday.



"Korea remains committed to continuously improving and refining quarantine measures and will share our successful response model with the international community," Moon said in the video conference.



Moon also made some specific proposals for stronger cooperation among G20 member countries on COVID-19 management, including the sharing of all clinical data and quarantine experience, as well as to work together toward developing therapeutics and a vaccine. He also proposed measures for coordinated actions for a global economic recovery, such as expansionary macroeconomic policies and strengthening the global financial safety net.



In particular, he called on member states to recognize the need for expediting business exchanges despite COVID-19, which has prompted countries around the world to significantly tighten their borders. Currently, more than 170 countries and territories are imposing regulations against travelers from Korea. "In order to minimize COVID-19's negative repercussions on the global economy, it is vital that countries maintain the flow of essential economic exchanges. To that end, to the extent that we do not undermine any one country's efforts at disease control, I propose that we seek ways to allow for the travel of essential persons such as scientists, medical professionals and business leaders."







The first G20 virtual meeting produced a joint statement pledging concerted efforts to safeguard the global economy, address international trade disruptions and enhance global cooperation through front-line international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Health Organization (WHO).



The South Korean leader shared Korea's experience in dealing effectively with the COVID-19, such as a fast testing system, the campaign for social distancing, and government policies to financially support businesses hit by the virus spread.





"Since the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, my administration has adhered to the three principles of openness, transparency and democracy in its response. We identified new cases by conducting an overwhelming number of tests, and have meticulously tracked down transmission pathways," Moon said. "Moreover, confirmed cases and their close contacts were all placed in isolation and banned from travelling abroad. Doing so, we believed was the best way to curb the spread of the infection and reduce the loss of lives."



"In this process, all creative tools at our disposal have been mobilized. Highly accurate diagnostic reagents that enable quick tests were developed at an early stage. For swift and timely testing and infection prevention, drive-through testing sites were set up. Also, an IT-enabled self-quarantine app and a self-diagnosis app were deployed to closely monitor those under self-isolation. Furthermore, in accordance with the WHO's recommendation, we minimized restriction on cross-border movements of people and goods while undertaking measures to maximize the impact of quarantines through special entry procedures."



Moon also introduced measures to help the business sector that has been hit by COVID-19. "To ensure that COVID-19 does not lead to serious contractions in consumption, investment and industrial activities, the Korean government is implementing bold expansionary macroeconomic policies and financial stabilization measures totalling $100 billion (132 trillion won). First, in order to relieve the burden on affected businesses, micro-business owners and the self-employed, as well as to boost consumption, we prepared an assistance package worth $26 billion."





Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the G20 Extraordinary Virtual Leaders' Summit on COVID-19 via video link in Beijing, capital of China, March 26. Xinhua-Yonhap
A widow who says her high-rolling gambler ex swore to 'make her life hell' after they split has beaten him in a court fight over her 540,000 London home.

Phillip Langford, a successful businessman who also makes 100,000 a year from betting, claimed he rescued then girlfriend Tracy Perrin from poverty and showered her with expensive gifts, including a diamond ring and a 7,500 Rolex watch, during their four-year relationship.

However, after they split up 'acrimoniously' in 2016, he insisted he part-owned Mrs Perrin's house in Eltham, saying they had found the property together in 2013 and viewed it as their shared 'home.'

Phillip Langford claimed he part-owned Mrs Perrin's house in Eltham, London after contributing to mortgage payments

He had contributed to the mortgage and the former couple had a deal that he would share ownership of the house as they 'planned their future together,' the gambler claimed.

But Mrs Perrin, who has her name on the deeds of the property along with her daughter Scarlett, said her ex was no more than a paying house guest and had no stake in her home.

He had earned the nickname 'Phillip the Lodger' by being 'very possessive' about food shopping he had bought, and on one occasion had an 'angry' row with Scarlett because she ate his chocolate from the fridge, her lawyers said.

She told Central London County Court he had sworn to make her life 'hell' after the pair split up in 2016 and she changed the locks on the house to keep him out.

Now Judge Sarah Langley has now thrown out his claim for a 50,000 slice of the house and hit him with a 35,000 court bill.

The court heard the pair met and began a relationship in July 2012, three years after the death of Mrs Perrin's husband.

Mr Langford moved in with his partner in the home she had shared with her late husband and bought her gifts, including a diamond ring, Rolex watch, leather skirt and manicure sessions, the judge said.

In May 2013, Mrs Perrin and her daughter bought a new-build house in Woodcroft Close, Eltham.

Mr Langford, who followed the pair into the new house, claimed he helped Mrs Perrin choose her new home and also handed her 1,000 per month towards the mortgage - at one point increasing that to 1,600.

He also lent her 15,000 to pay off mortgage arrears on her former family home back in July 2012, the court heard.

Mr Langford insisted he had bailed out Mrs Perrin when she was in dire financial straits - with assets to hand, but little cash - and 'had bailiffs at the door.'

Tracy Perrin (pictured outside the Royal Courts of Justice) said she never planned a long term relationship with Phillip Langford who the court heard earned the nickname in her household of 'Philip the Lodger' because he was getting possessive about his purchases and shopping

'When I first met her she didn't have much food,' he told the court.

'I took her to Sainsbury's and paid 200 or 300 on groceries and she actually cried at the till she was so grateful.'

He lavished thousands on her over the years and she enjoyed the 'spoils' of his wagers, the court heard.

On top of helping with the mortgage, he paid for family holidays and gave her expensive gifts - including the 7,500 Rolex watch.

Despite not having his name on the deeds, Mr Langford claimed he was entitled to a 50,000 share of the house's value, which he said reflected his 'beneficial interest' in the property.

But Mrs Perrin said she never asked him for the 15,000 loan, which she had rapidly repaid in any event.

She insisted she had not planned for a long-term relationship with a man she branded 'spiteful, bullying and controlling' and claimed most of the cash he gave her was for rent.

She said he pledged to 'make her life hell' after their relationship hit the rocks and that she was actively frightened of him when they split.

Mrs Perrin, (pictured( who has her name on the deeds of the property along with her daughter Scarlett, said her ex was no more than a paying house guest and had no stake in her home

'He was controlling to say the least,' said the 59-year-old teaching assistant, telling the court that Mr Langford had smashed a TV he had paid for after one argument.

'He would run his finger to pick up dust and turn his nose up at anything being left out...he said he would make my life hell, which he certainly has.'

Stuart Snow, for Mrs Perrin, claimed Mr Langford was nicknamed 'Philip the Lodger' around the house, adding: 'that's how he was viewed in the property...'

And he suggested to Mr Langford in the witness box: 'That's how you got the name 'Philip the Lodger' because you were getting very possessive about your own purchases and shopping.'

Mr Langford, who runs a skip-hire business and claims to make 100,000 a year from gambling, was also 'possessive' about his chocolate in the fridge, the barrister claimed.

Mr Snow said: 'There was one incident where Scarlett ate some of your chocolate from the fridge and you got quite angry about that.'

But Mr Langford insisted he 'never had that name', adding: 'I didn't buy food and put it in the cupboards and say 'that's mine'.

'We were living as a couple...I wanted my share of what I paid towards the house. They expected me to walk away with absolutely nothing.

'I viewed the property the day after she found it with her sister. We viewed it together.

'I was dealing with the conveyancing solicitors. She instructed me to act on her behalf.

'Me and Tracy were planning our future and we discussed it between ourselves.'

He told the judge that after the split: 'I came home from work and put my key in the door and she'd changed the lock.'

Mrs Perrin denied Mr Langford had rescued her financially, saying: 'He never gave me a lifestyle I didn't already have. My husband did that and I never wanted for anything.'

The court also heard that Mr Langford was 'excluded' by the British Horse Racing Association in January 2016 after an enquiry found that he and a jockey carried out a 'corrupt conspiracy to exploit inside information.'

Mrs Perrin's barrister said: 'He is a professional gambler and his claim represents nothing more than an opportunistic 'bet' in the hope of receiving financial reward.'

The judge found he had bought her the gifts as he claimed, saying: 'I accept these were all part and parcel of the relationship between them.'

She added: 'He bought her a TV for Christmas and then replaced it after he smashed it following an argument.'

But she concluded: 'Mrs Perrin never reached a stage in her relationship with Mr Langford where she wanted to commit to a long-term future.'

Mrs Perrin had decided to buy the new house to create a new - but smaller - family home, she said.

'I don't accept that they started to look for a property together in January 2013 as Mr Langford claimed,' said the judge.

In fact, Mrs Perrin had already found her new home by November 2012 and Mr Langford criticised her choice when he saw it.

'Nor was there any discussion about a beneficial interest in the property,' she continued.

In relation to the house, she found that Mr Langford had done nothing more than 'make payments to Mrs Perrin in respect of his rent or keep' and was due no stake in the property from his financial contributions.

After Mr Langford's case was dismissed, he was ordered to pay legal bills, estimated at around 35,000.
Council President Emeritus Herb Wesson Partners with Good+Foundation to Supply Families in Need with Free Diapers and Baby Wipes

Los Angeles Council President Emeritus Herb Wesson has partnered with the Good+Foundation in Los Angeles to provide free diapers, baby wipes and toys to local families in need during the coronavirus outbreak. The diapers and baby wipes will be distributed to local organizations that work with low-income families in Los Angeles County.

Free diapers and baby wipes during a time like this can really make a difference for struggling families, said Wesson. The money saved on having to buy diapers can mean more money for food for a household where one or both parents are not working at this time. Baby wipes, like toilet paper, have been flying off the shelves and not always available for parents in need of them. Im glad that my office can continue to be a resource to all communities during our collective time of need.

Councilmember Wesson has always been there for the community and I knew that we could partner with his office to get these diapers distributed and out the people who really need them, commented Dr. Alan-Michael Graves, Good+Foundation National Director.

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Founded in 2001, Good+Foundation is a leading national nonprofit that works to dismantle multi-generational poverty by pairing tangible goods with innovative services for low-income fathers, mothers and caregivers, creating an upward trajectory for the whole family.

With warehouses in New York City and Los Angeles, Good+Foundation partners with approximately 75 innovative anti-poverty programs across the country with the goal of incentivizing parental enrollment and participation in programs like job training, GED attainment, anger management, healthy relationships, and addressing trauma.

In 2010, Good+Foundation expanded programming to intentionally include fathers believing that stronger fathers build stronger, more resilient families, which are the backbone of thriving communities.

The more we invest in fathers, the greater impact we see on children and families as a whole, added Dr. Graves.

In addition to the diapers and baby wipes, Wesson has directed his staff to reach out to local and national businesses for donations that can be made to the community during Los Angeles coronavirus quarantine.

To date, Wesson has helped lead the City Council on developing emergency measures to implement a moratorium on housing evictions and mortgage foreclosures, initial financial assistance for small businesses, and other temporary measures to support working people during this period of economic uncertainty. Wesson says they have also worked with Mayor Eric Garcetti and the LA Department of Transportation to relax street sweeping parking enforcement in residential areas across his council district while the city confronts this crisis.

Wesson is also taking the health and safety of his staff seriously as well.

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To protect my staff and our communities, my office has shifted to telecommuting, but are fully available for constituent inquiries via and phone, Wesson explained. I encourage my constituents to go to herbwesson.com.

Wesson says that he sends out an almost daily email newsletter to his constituents that explains all of the latest news regarding the coronavirus pandemic and resources available to Los Angeles residents.

Those resources include the Los Angeles Unified School Districts opening of Grab & Go Food Centers that give families 60 sites where they can pick up two nutritious meals for every child in the household.

Wesson added, In a week, life, as we know it, has changed. But its also shown us all who the true essential workers in our society are. Its not the business executives, nor the Wall Street bankers. Its our grocery store workers, our doctors, nurses, and pharmacists, our delivery drivers, our restaurant staff, and other workers who are among the hardest working and lowest paid members of our society. When this is over, I hope we all take a serious look at how we value these incredibly important workers.

Many folks who had a steady paycheck last week dont know where there next one is coming from. Many businesses dont know where their next revenue will come from. Things have turned upside down in one way or another for all of us.

But I am proud of the way our city has responded. I know this is an incredibly challenging time, but perhaps better than anywhere in the nation, our city and state have recognized the urgent threat this virus presents and have shown we are willing to sacrifice our short-term, individual way of life for the long-term benefit of our society.

More than ever, this is a time for us to come together as one. This virus knows no background or ethnicity, and it requires all of us coming together to beat it. This time can bring out the best or the worst in us, and its up to each and every one of us to determine which one we will be.

Wesson urges Los Angeles residents to sign up for his email newsletter and to follow him on social media for the latest updates. His website is herbwesson.com.
By AFP

BERLIN: Germany has boosted its coronavirus test rate to 500,000 a week, a virologist said Thursday, adding that early detection has been key in keeping the country's death rate relatively low.

"The reason why Germany has so few deaths compared to the number of infected people can be explained by the fact that we carry out an extremely large number of laboratory diagnostic tests," said Christian Drosten, who heads the Institute of Virology at Berlin's Charite University Hospital.

"Estimates from the last days show that we are carrying out half a million tests a week," he added.

Drosten also highlighted Germany's dense network of laboratories spread across its territory as a factor contributing to early detection.

ALSO READ | Iran reports 157 new coronavirus deaths, raising total to 2,234

Meanwhile, the research ministry said it would commit 150 million euros ($164 million) to improve communication between hospitals and laboratories about coronavirus patients' health data, hoping the information exchange could feed into development of a vaccine.

Official data compiled by the disease control agency Robert Koch Institute show that 36,508 people have been infected in Germany, including 198 who have died from the disease.

At 0.54 per cent, Germany's death rate is far lower than the 7.3 per cent in Spain where 4,089 deaths were recorded for 56,188 confirmed cases.

France has also recorded 1,331 fatalities of 25,233 confirmed infections -- a death rate of 5.2 per cent.

Besides the large-scale testing, experts in Germany also said that the virus has largely affected a younger, healthier section of the population compared to elsewhere.

At the same time, experts have repeatedly warned that in the country where almost a quarter of the population is over 60, the number of deaths could still skyrocket if people do not stick to measures to help halt contagion.

Lockdown measures are in place across Germany, preventing people from leaving their homes except for essential trips, while most shops, restaurants and bars are closed.
SAN FRANCISCO - Two men who travelled on a coronavirus-stricken cruise ship stalled for days off the California coast have died, federal officials said Thursday, and they confirmed that fewer than half the ships passengers were tested for the virus despite assurances that everyone would be tested.

The men, both in their early 60s, were on the Grand Princess sailing from San Francisco to Hawaii on Feb. 21 and died from the coronavirus, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.

One of the men was transported directly from the ship to a hospital when it docked March 9 in Oakland in the east San Francisco Bay. It had idled for several days off the California coast. The other man was among hundreds taken to Travis Air Force Base in Northern California for a 14-day isolation. He was immediately taken to a hospital after developing symptoms, said Bert Kelly, a spokesman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One man died Saturday and the other Monday, Kelly said.

There is still no accurate accounting of how many of the 3,500 passengers and crew from 54 countries were infected with COVID-19 after a Northern California man on a previous sailing returned home and died of the virus, sparking the investigation.

Despite assurances from Vice-President Mike Pence and California Gov. Gavin Newsom that everyone aboard the ship would be tested after the ship docked, only 1,100 passengers of about 2,400 have been tested, Kelly said. Many of the others declined testing after waiting numerous days in isolation. Kelly said of those tested, 103 have tested positive and 699 were negative. More results are pending.

After Newsom promised on March 12 that all of these individuals will be tested, his administration has not responded to numerous inquiries over more than a week about who was being tested, when or why.

Taking a test was actually discouraged, if you were not showing any signs of illness, said Grand Princess passenger Laurie Miller of San Jose, who spent 14 days at Travis Air Force Base before returning home Tuesday.

Miller and her husband chose not be tested because they hadnt shown symptoms and were told if they tested negative it wouldnt shorten their quarantine. If the test was inconclusive or results were delayed, they would have had to stay at the base longer, she said.

The ships passengers were flown or bused to military bases in the U.S. or their home countries for a 14-day isolation while 1,100 crew members scattered to their home countries, including about 500 to the Philippines. The rest of the crew members and six passengers remained on the ship in isolation there. Its unclear how many crew members have been tested.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.

All passengers will have completed their 14-day quarantine by Friday, Kelly said.

___

Associated Press writers Juliet Williams in San Francisco and Don Thompson in Sacramento, Calif. contributed to this story.
According to the current analysis of Reports and Data, the global Cervical Cancer Diagnostic market was valued at USD 7.23 Billion in 2019 and is expected to reach USD 11.68 Billion by the year 2027, at a CAGR of 6.2%.

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), six million people in the United States acquire HPV each year. At least 20 million already have it, and more than half of all sexually-active adults are expected to be infected during their lifetime. Cervical cancer is a type of cancer that occurs in the lower part of the uterus, which is connected to the vagina. Most of the cervical cancer cases are caused by various strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is a sexually transmitted infection. Vaginal bleeding, watery bloody discharge ad pelvic pain during intercourse are the symptoms of cervical cancer. Cervical cancer can be diagnosed with the help of screening tests like Pap test, HPV DNA test, punch biopsy, and endocervical curettage to treat two types of cancer, i.e., Squamous cell cancers and Adenocarcinoma.

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Increasing adoption of Pap test, a huge amount of government funding, an increase in the occurrence of cervical cancer in middle age women, which leads to an increase in screening, and increases in awareness are some of the primary growth stimulants for the market. For instance, Medicaid, the popular government insurance program, covers the screening for cervical cancers. Medicare, another widely used insurance, covers Pap test, pelvic exam, and clinical breast exam for cervical cancer screening every two years. These programs were found to be responsible for the growth of the overall market. Certain manufacturing and pharmacological issues and regulatory hurdles are hindering the growth of the market.

Increased FDA approval to companies is also propelling the growth of this market. For instance, in June 2018, FDA approved Bevacizumab (Avastin) of Genetech/Roche Inc plus chemotherapy for treating advanced cervical cancer patients.

Further key findings from the report suggest:

The Cervical Cancer Diagnostic market is witnessing the fastest growth in the Asia Pacific region, at a CAGR of 7.2%, due to high awareness and access to modern healthcare infrastructure, low cost of VIA test, and a rise in consumption levels.

The market for point of care testing type segment is expected to hold the fastest growing CAGR because of an increase in demand for speedy monitoring patients by doctors and clinicians.

Europe is the second-largest region with a share of 25.8% due to the high cases of cervical disorders in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, etc.

HPV Testing is accounted to be the second leading segment, which holds a market share of 25.4% due to the high usage of advanced diagnostics and cost-effective procedures.

The diagnostic centres segment is projected to have the highest CAGR among the other end-user type.

North America is expected to account for 45.6% of the global Cervical cancer Diagnostic market owing to the increasing occurrence of cervical cancer cases, rise in the female population, growing acceptance of HPV infections, along with government funding scenario.

Radiation Therapy segment holds the second largest share in this market, which is valued at USD 2123.6 million due to its expensive manufacturing cost, but people prefer it because it kills cancer cells at one go.

Key participants include Abbott Laboratories, Beckman Coulter, Becton, Dickinson and Company, and F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.

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Segments Covered in the report:

For the purpose of the study, this Reports and Data has segmented the Global Cervical Cancer Diagnostic Market on the basis of biomolecule type, disease type, profiling technologies, application, services, and region:

Product Type (Revenue, USD Million; 20172027)

Pap Smear Tests

Colposcopy

HPV Testing

Biopsy & Endocervical Curettage

Others

Therapy (Revenue, USD Million; 20172027)

Surgery

Radiation Therapy

Chemotherapy

Targeted Therapy

End-User (Revenue, USD Million; 20172027)

Hospitals & Clinics

Diagnostic Centres

Laboratories

Others

Regional Outlook: (Revenue, USD Million; 20172027)

North America U.S. Canada

Europe Germany U.K. Spain France Italy Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific Japan China India Australia Rest of Asia Pacific

Latin America Brazil Mexico

Middle East and Africa (MEA)

To identify the key trends in the industry, click on the link below: https://www.reportsanddata.com/report-detail/cervical-cancer-diagnostic-market

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Five new coronavirus cases were reported in Delhi in the past 24 hours, pushing the number of total cases to 35, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said on March 25, as his government decided to issue e-passes for people associated with essential services to commute during the lockdown.

Kejriwal said people ensuring essential services such as milk sellers, vegetable vendors and grocers can call helpline 1031 to get the passes on their mobile phones through WhatsApp.

Addressing a joint digital press conference with Lt Governor Anil Baijal, the chief minister said people can walk down to shops nearby to buy items of daily use, and they don't need any pass for it.

"We will issue e-passes to people engaged in manufacturing, transport, and storage of essential items as well as to people associated with private essential services," he said, amid reports that delivery agents of e-commerce websites were facing difficulties in reaching their destinations due to the lockdown.

Coronavirus LIVE updates

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

An official later said a person wanting an e-pass will have to call 1031 and give his or her required details. Thereafter, an e-pass will be issued on the applicant's mobile phone number through WhatsApp. Also, the Delhi police held a meeting with etailers to ensure a seamless delivery of essential goods.

Kejriwal said of the five fresh cases reported in the past 24 hours, one is a foreign national.

He also said landlords threatening doctors and nurses to evacuate, fearing the spread of the contagious disease COVID-19, will not be tolerated and strict action will be taken against them.

Lt Governor Baijal directed all district magistrates, DCPs and deputy commissioners of municipal corporations to take strict action against such landlords.

Also read | EC allows use of indelible ink for stamping people for home quarantine

Baijal also directed authorities to ensure proper arrangements for transportation of medical staff from their residence to their workplace during the 21-day lockdown announced by the government.

"We would ensure that the essential services are maintained during the lockdown. Details have been worked out on how we will go about it," the LG said.

Two senior police officers  Sanjiv Khirwar and Muktesh Chandar  have been appointed as nodal officers to address the problems faced by service providers of essential goods and services, an official order said.

Kejriwal said his government has increased the number of spots across the city where free food for the poor will be made available.

"We have arranged for food for poor in our night shelters, free ration for 72 lakh beneficiaries, increased pension rates under widow, elderly and physically disabled schemes," he said.

"However, there are a lot of people who fall outside the ambit of many schemes. We know people are more in number. We are increasing the number of spots where free food is provided," he added.

Also read | Stuck with offline payment modes in the lockdown? Try these digital options

Meanwhile, the Delhi government permitted all manufacturers of drugs and cosmetics to produce ethanol-based hand sanitisers up to June 30 without a separate license to deal with the shortage in markets.

It has been observed that hand sanitisers are either not available with most of the vendors in the market or are available at exorbitant prices.

"The decision to 'grant conditional permission/approval to manufacture ethanol-based sanitiser/hand cleanser/hand rub to manufacturers of drugs, homeopathic medicine manufacturers/cosmetic manufacturers in Delhi for a period up to June 30 only shall be deemed cancelled/withdrawn automatically, unless otherwise extended," the government said in a circular.

On March 25, 90 more coronavirus positive cases were reported in India, pushing the total number of cases to 606, while the number of deaths was 10, according to the Union Health Ministry. The number of active COVID-19 cases stood at 553 while 43 people have been cured, discharged or migrated. The 606 positive cases include 43 foreign nationals, the ministry said.
Guest Column End of Aid; Beginning of Resilience?

Thousands of Myanmar migrant workers wait to enter Myanmar at No. 2 Friendship Bridge near the Thai-Myanmar border in Mae Sot on March 25. / Kyaw Kha / The Irrawaddy

A few days ago, an aid industry donor asked that colleagues and I produce a revised workplan, stating how our project will be implemented in the coming months. Given the circumstances, desk-based work is welcome right now, and we will do our best. However, one wonders whether the old ways of working will be relevant for much longer. Maybe the aid industry will be one of the many victims of COVID-19? But however things develop, it will be critical not to lose the notion of solidarity that underpins international aid. Its now even more important to treat each other with respect and love.

The ongoing health crisis is devastating communities, societies and economies across the world. When the dust has (hopefully) settled, our planet may be a very different place. This seems likely to be particularly true in the global north. Months of isolation will be fundamentally disruptive for certain economic sectors. The developed world is on the cusp of a major socio-political and economic shakeup.

If the Chinese recovery continues, which is of course profoundly to be hoped for, the Peoples Republic will have a head start in rebuilding. Chinese investors may find some well-priced purchases in stressed European stock and other markets. This could significantly impact the global balance of geo-strategic powerincluding attitudes to and strategies of foreign aid. Already, the era globalization seems like a receding memory. However, global youth activism of the last few years gives reason to hope that what comes next may be more equitable and progressive than our previous destructive exploitation of the planet.

The pandemics long-term consequences are still very unclear. Thousands have already died in Europe and sadly more may follow. Many others are sick and depleted health services seemingly vulnerable, with economies in absolute crisis.

In this context, it seems unlikely that large amounts of foreign aid will be available for what just a few weeks ago we called fragile or developing countries. Politicians around the globe will be under pressure to prioritise spending their limited aid money closer to homerather than on those suffering in far-off places. Hopefully, once-rich countries will not completely abandon their previous commitments to foreign aid.

Lesser amounts of Western donor aid may ultimately be somewhat beneficial to certain communities. Significant amounts of Western aid does not always reach those most in need of it. Nevertheless, humanitarian needs in poor countries will presumably be staggering, probably for years. Much will depend on whether the coronavirus ravages hotter countries in the global south, like Myanmar. Let us pray it does not.

The aid industry as we know it may be coming to an end. To the extent that humanitarian and development assistance continues, it is likely to be more closely bound to donors strategic interests. Some will see the end of a sometimes self-satisfied and self-serving Western aid regime (or aid Raj) as no great loss.

The whole world now knows what it feels like to be a victim of natural or man-made disasterwith uncertain future, worries all around, often dependent on the kindness of strangers. There are great challenges in store for societies and individuals who have long enjoyed high levels of human security. Hopefully, first-world countries can demonstrate the resilience of those societies that have historically been less fortunate.

Many of us in and from the rich world have long become used to comfort and security, and the belief that each generation will have a standard of living at least equal toand probably better thanthose who came before. Such comforting assumptions are probably no longer bankable.

One wonders how ethnic nationality communities in Myanmar will cope with and respond to the current crisis. Karen, Mon, Kayah, Shan, Kachin, Chin, Rakhine, Rohingya and other groups have long known underdevelopment, suffering and death, as a result of natural disaster and at the hands of government forces. These individuals and communities have developed great resilience and strategies of self-help and mutual support. Perhaps there are lessons here, which others could adopt and adapt. The most important of these might be to love each other, and share and conserve scarce resources.

Communities and local authorities will be particularly challenged by the return of large numbers of migrant workers from neighboring Thailandonly victims of the economic crash. Ethnic armed organisations (EAOs)which have long sought to represent minority communities in the struggle for self-determinationmay once again become highly relevant. The governments of Myanmar and elsewhere are likely to come under increasing pressure in the coming weeks and months; states may fail. In this case, non-state actors and EAOs will be increasingly important, as providers of at least limited security and services in remote areas (which may be less affected by the pandemic). Already, several EAOs and related civil society groups are providing health information and advice to the public. Such efforts and demonstration of responsible governance should be applauded and supported.

One fears however, that the Myanmar army may also see an opportunity in the present crisis. Will we see the Tatmadaw, as the Myamar military is known, move violently against EAOseven those with which it has established ceasefireswhile the worlds attention is focused elsewhere? Tatmadaw troop movements are reported in a number of Karen areas, with regular clashes still ongoing.

Hopefully, international donors will not to forget about Burma and other poor countries. Before closing down shop, perhaps the remaining donors in Yangon could allocate what funds are left to local organizations working to alleviate suffering. Also, regarding the peace process, the need for international advocacy remains.

Dr. Ashley South is an independent author, researcher and consultant, and a research fellow at Chiang Mai University.

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WHO Declares Coronavirus a Pandemic as Cases Keep Rising Globally
The coverage on this live blog has ended  but for up-to-the-minute coverage on the coronavirus, visit the live blog from CNBC's Asia-Pacific team. All times below are in Eastern time. Global cases: More than 526,000

Global deaths: At least 23,700

US cases: At least 82,400

US deaths: At least 1,100 The data above was compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

8:45 pm: Los Angeles launches program to produce 5 million non-medical masks for essential workers

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Thursday announced a new program that will aim to produce 5 million non-medical masks for workers in essential sectors and medical patients. The program, L.A. Protects, is seeking the help of local manufacturers who can produce non-medical masks to protect people like grocery-store employees, non-medical staff in hospitals and medical patients. Kaiser Permanente has developed the design specifications of the masks in need, according to the program's website. Organizations who can help or are in need of masks can sign up for the program online. Salvador Rodriguez

8:20 pm: Trump declares major disaster in Maryland

President Donald Trump on Thursday declared that a major disaster exists in Maryland, making federal funding available to the state and local governments in recovery efforts in the fight against the coronavirus. The declaration makes federal funding available to "State, tribal, and eligible local governments and certain private nonprofit organizations for emergency protective measures, including direct Federal assistance, for all areas in the State of Maryland impacted by COVID-19." Salvador Rodriguez

7:30 pm: De Blasio says New York has now hit 365 deaths from COVID-19

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday announced the city now has 23,112 cases of COVID-19 and 365 deaths.

"The next few months will be painful and stress our health care system like never before," de Blasio said in a tweet. "To our health care workers: you are going above and beyond the call to save New Yorkers and we will remember your actions for the rest of New York history." Additionally, de Blasio said the Brooklyn Navy Yard has now begun manufacturing plastic face shields and will have 50,000 made by the end of this week alone. De Blasio said the city has received 1,500 ventilators from the federal government thus far, but he said that is a fraction of what will be needed. "Ventilators will mean the difference between life and death for thousands of New Yorkers," he tweeted. "The federal government MUST help us close that gap." Salvador Rodriguez

7:04 pm: New Hampshire issues stay-at-home order amid coronavirus outbreak

New Hampshire is the latest state to issue a stay-at-home order and close all nonessential businesses amidst the coronavirus outbreak. Gov. Chris Sununu announced the order Thursday and it goes into effect March 27 at 11:59 pm. "We can't stress this enough: You should stay at your house unless absolutely necessary," Sununu said in a statement on Twitter. "Of course, we won't prevent you from leaving your home to go for a walk, or when heading to the store for groceries, or going to an essential job." Essential businesses that will remain open in New Hampshire include grocery stores, pharmacies and gas stations. Movie theaters, hair salons and barbershops, as well as other businesses deemed nonessential, have been ordered to close. The state also extended remote learning until May 4. Hannah Miller

6:51 pm: Sen. Amy Klobuchar says her husband is recovering after hospital stay for coronavirus

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said that her husband, John Bessler, is recovering at home after being hospitalized for severe symptoms from the coronavirus. Klobuchar, who dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary race in early March, said on Twitter that Bessler "took a good turn, was just released & is now recovering at home!" "Thanks to those who cared for him & for all front line health care workers," she tweeted. Kevin Breuninger

6:38 pm: Alphabet's Verily ramps up drive-through coronavirus testing with 1,000 Google volunteers

Alphabet's life sciences business Verily now has close to 1,000 volunteers from sister-company Google working across its COVID-19 screening and testing platform as it readies for a ramp-up. The company also released a video explaining the screening and testing process, including its "drive-thru" testing, manned by the volunteers. The ramp-up comes after the company started on a much smaller scale than the nationwide access President Trump and Google CEO Sundar Pichai hinted at in mid-March. Verily, which is the life sciences company that sits under the Alphabet umbrella, has been working closely on a state-level with the governor's office and is taking direction from public health officials as it scales. Christina Farr, Jennifer Elias

6:26 pm: Fanatics shifts production from MLB jerseys to masks and gowns to fight coronavirus

Fanatics plans to make more than 1 million masks and gowns in its Easton, PA plant. Source: Fanatics

They were supposed to be celebrating Opening Day, but instead Major League Baseball and Fanatics are teaming up for a very different cause: the fight against COVID-19. Sports apparel maker Fanatics' 360 square-foot plant in Easton, Pennsylvania is usually rolling out MLB jerseys by the thousands this time of year, but on Thursday the retailer and MLB have halted production efforts of baseball jerseys to begin making safety masks and gowns for healthcare workers on the front line. "The COVID-19 crisis has compelled our country to be more collaborative, innovative and strategic than ever before. As the demand for masks and gowns have surged, we're fortunate to have teamed up with Major League Baseball to find a unique way to support our frontline workers in this fight to stem the virus, who are in dire need of essential resources," says Michael Rubin, executive chairman at Fanatics. Jessica Golden

6:16 pm: Stock futures rise slightly as Wall Street tries to build on Thursday's massive gains

U.S. stock futures rose slightly after the bell following a sharp rally sparked by increasing expectations of massive fiscal stimulus while investors shook off grim unemployment data. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures traded 49 points higher, or about 0.2%. S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 futures were up 0.2% and 0.3%, respectively. Dow futures briefly traded more than 100 points higher shortly after the 6 p.m. open. Fred Imbert

6:13 pm: The US is now the epicenter of the outbreak

America now has more confirmed coronavirus cases than Italy and China, becoming the largest outbreak in the world. The total number of cases in the U.S. reached 82,404, eclipsing China's 81,782 confirmed infections and Italy at 80,589, according to data compiled by John Hopkins University. The virus emerged in Wuhan, China, in December. It has since spread to more than half a million people in almost every country around the world and continues to pick up speed, the World Health Organization warned earlier this week. Will Feuer

5:30 pm: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio says at least half a million New Yorkers will be unemployed

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said that early estimates of unemployment data shows at least half a million New Yorkers have or will lose their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic, which has forced state and local officials to shutter businesses and schools across the state. "It's staggering, we're only seeing the initial numbers, they will get worse unfortunately," de Blasio said, adding that a lot of people can't get even through to apply for unemployment. "Right now our early estimate is unfortunately at least a half million New Yorkers will end up unemployed, are already or soon will be," de Blasio said. Noah Higgins-Dunn

5:15 pm: GM temporarily cuts pay by 20% for 69,000 salaried workers

General Motors told about 69,000 salaried employees globally on Thursday that it will temporarily cut 20% of their salaries as the automaker attempts to save cash amid the coronavirus pandemic. The deferment, which will begin April 1, will be repaid in a lump sum with interest no later than March 15, 2021, according to the company About 6,500 U.S. employees also will be essentially temporary laid-off, which the company is calling a "salaried downtime paid absence." The workers will receive 75% of their pay, keep seniority and retain health care benefits. Mike Wayland

4:41 pm: Trump plan calls for classifying risk county by county

President Donald Trump laid out his vision for what he called the "next phase" in the war on the coronavirus pandemic that is sweeping the country. In a letter to the nation's governors, Trump said he and his administration planned to develop criteria to "help classify counties with respect to continued risks posed by" the deadly coronavirus. He said the use of "robust surveillance testing" will allow local governments to track the spread of the virus. Counties would be divided into three low, medium and high "risk" levels, the president wrote. These categories will be accompanied by "new guidelines for state and local policymakers to use in making decisions" about whether to maintain, decrease, or increase their social distancing guidelines. The president has made no secret of his desire to see U.S. businesses reopen, even as the virus is infecting thousands of people every day across the country. Trump has set upon the date of Easter, April 12, as the one by which he hopes to see large parts of the country "roaring" back into business. Public health experts say that attempting to reopen businesses and loosen social distancing restrictions in a matter of weeks could mean tens of thousands of additional infections that could have been prevented by an extended campaign of mitigation. Trump, however, has suggested that experts who recommend extending the campaign are motivated by a desire to defeat him politically, and not by the desire to protect Americans from the life-threatening COVID-19 disease. Christina Wilkie

4:22 pm: GM extending plant shutdowns

General Motors has confirmed that it is extending the temporary closures of its North American plants due to the coronavirus pandemic. In a message to employees, Phil Kienle, vice president of the automaker's North America manufacturing and labor relations, said that the company "will continue to evaluate our operating plan going forward." GM's plants, which shut down last week due to COVID-19, were supposed to remain shuttered through March 30. A GM spokesman was not immediately available for comment. The message comes hours after Ford Motor and Fiat Chrysler announced plans to resume production at their North American plants beginning in April. Mike Wayland

4:10 pm: Dow clinches biggest 3-day surge since 1931

Stocks surged for a third straight day as investors shrugged off the release of record-breaking initial jobless claims while the Senate passed a massive economic stimulus bill amid the coronavirus outbreak. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped more than 1,300 points, or 6.2%. The Dow also capped off its biggest three-day surge since 1931. Over the past three days, the Dow is up more than 20%. The S&P 500 also posted a three-day winning streak rising 6.2%. The Nasdaq Composite advanced 5.6% as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google-parent Alphabet all jumped more than 4%. Boeing, Chevron and Walgreens drove the Dow's gains, with each stock rising more than 10%. Utilities and real estate were the best-performing sectors in the S&P 500, both closing more than 7% higher. Fred Imbert

3:50 pm: Major cruise lines could be left out of the bailout

Cruise lines are among the businesses that have suffered the most fallout from the coronavirus outbreak. And the major ones could get left out of the bailout fund included in the $2 trillion stimulus bill the Senate passed Wednesday night. The bill allocates $500 billion to distressed businesses that can apply for loans or guarantees from a fund overseen by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. To be eligible for that relief, however, a company must be "created or organized in the United States or under the laws of the United States" and "have significant operations in and a majority of its employees based in the United States." Several major cruise lines, however, are not incorporated in America. Carnival, for example, is incorporated in Panama, although it has a U.S. entity and a headquarters in Miami. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange. Cruise lines also typically employ many foreign workers on their ships, who can be exempt from U.S. minimum wage requirements. As of Thursday morning, there were indications that cruise lines themselves were uncertain whether the language in the bill excluded them from relief. "My interpretation is that cruise lines may not qualify, but I'm taking a closer look to see whether that is really the case," said Aaron Cutler, a partner in the government relations and public affairs department at influential international law firm Hogan Lovells. Lauren Hirsch

3:20 pm: How the NBA is planning to save its season

Rudy Gobert #27 of the Utah Jazz reacts after dunking during the third quarter of the game against the Boston Celtics at TD Garden on March 06, 2020 in Boston, Massachusetts. Omar Rawlings | Getty Images

There is no doubt the coronavirus pandemic will leave its imprint on the sports world, but no league may suffer more than the National Basketball Association. After being the first U.S. league to suspend games due to the coronavirus outbreak, the NBA is currently contemplating how to resume play, if possible, as the league wants to salvage revenue, which the Washington Post reported could total $1 billion in losses. In his interview with ESPN last week, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said he wants to "believe we're going to be able to salvage at least some portion of the season." According to NBA executives and agents who discussed the matter with CNBC on condition of anonymity, the league remains focused on a return after suspending operations following Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert testing positive for COVID-19 earlier this month. Las Vegas has emerged as the best location to resume the season, according to league executives. If the season can't resume, the NBA will need to consider revenue consequences of a canceled season, and how it will affect players' salaries, which are tied to games being played. "The players are going to experience a fair amount of salary pain," said Richard Sheehan, a professor of finance at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business Sheehan. Jabari Young

3:10 pm: San Francisco's Muni Metro, light rail service to be replaced by buses

The SFMTA announced additional service changes during San Francisco's coronavirus shelter-in-place order.



Starting March 30, all Muni Metro and light rail routes will be replaced by buses. Riders will be able to take buses for the J, KT, L, M, and N lines using the same bus stops as the early morning Metro bus service. All Muni Metro subway stations will also be closed, except for the ones downtown which will remain open for BART customers.



"In response to changing ridership, these service adjustments will help us to focus resources on routes outside of the downtown area that are connecting people to essential jobs and services," SFMTA said in an online post.



"Closing the Muni Metro underground system will allow us to redirect custodial resources to other, higher-use facilities and minimizes risk to our station agents. Based on our ridership data and observations, we do not expect these changes to impact the ability of our riders and operators to maintain social distance." SFMTA plans on doing maintenance work on vehicles and infrastructure during this time. You can find the full list of changes here. Riya Bhattacharjee

3:00 pm: Fauci says US 'can start thinking about' getting back to normal when outbreak slows

CNBC's Dan Mangan

2:45 pm: CEO of largest NY health provider  only science can dictate coronavirus drug treatments

Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling is calling for caution regarding potential drug treatments for COVID-19. "You can't let politics dictate, what people would like to see dictate," Dowling said on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "You've got to let the science dictate, because if you don't, you'll do damage to people." Dowling, whose 23-hospital system is the largest health-care provider in New York state, said it is OK to be optimistic about the experimental treatments underway, "but you've got to wait until you can prove" that it is effective in treating COVID-19. In fact, Dowling said he was personally optimistic about some of the trials underway at Northwell Health's hospitals. The health system is working with Regeneron and Gilead Sciences to test the efficacy of existing drugs. Northwell Health does not have "definitive results yet," Dowling cautioned. "But I am pretty certain that within the next week or two we're going to find out that one or more of these drugs do make a difference and that would obviously change the landscape when that happens," said Dowling. The drugs in trial at Northwell Health are Gilead Sciences' remdesivir and sarilumab, which was developed by Regeneron and Sanofi, according to the Long Island Press. Kevin Stankiewicz

2:20 pm: Worldwide cases top 500,000, doubling in just over a week

COVID-19 cases surpassed 500,000 across the world, doubling in just over a week as the pandemic accelerates. The total number of global cases now stands at 510,108 as of 1:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The virus emerged in Wuhan, China, in December. It has since spread to most countries around the world, according to the World Health Organization. Confirmed COVID-19 cases topped 200,000 last week, and passed 300,000 on Saturday, according to Hopkins data. The virus has infected an additional 100,000 people around the world since Tuesday, when worldwide infections passed 400,000. The virus has now killed more than 22,290 people around the world. Roughly 120,000 people have recovered from COVID-19, according to Hopkins. Will Feuer

2:09 pm: Coronavirus may be deadlier than 1918 flu

Some scientists estimate that millions will ultimately die before COVID-19 runs its course. There's a lot that infectious disease specialists and scientists still don't know about the virus. Exactly how deadly and contagious COVID-19 is, is still a matter of debate. We break down what we know about the virus and how it compares with some of history's deadliest pandemics and diseases. First, you'll have to bone up on a bit of epidemiology. The 1918 flu was one of the most horrific pandemics of the 20th century, hitting those ages 20 to 40 especially hard, according to WHO. COVID-19s R naught of 2 is slightly more infectious than the 1918 flu. The 1918 flu, which was known as the Spanish flu, didn't actually originate in Spain. It had a mortality rate of 2.5% and killed more people  30 million to 50 million  than the 20 million who died in World War I. If the 4.5% mortality rate of COVID-19 drops, it won't be as bad as the 1918 flu. If it continues on its current trajectory, it will be almost twice as deadly. Berkeley Lovelace

1:48 pm: Italy death toll rises by 662 in a day, now totals more than 8,000

The death toll from an outbreak of coronavirus in Italy has grown by 662 to 8,165, the Civil Protection Agency said. However, there appeared to be an error in the agency's data because it reported no deaths on Thursday in the third-worst-affected region, Piedmont, which would be unprecedented in recent days. Separately, Piedmont authorities said their death toll had risen by 50 in the last 24 hours. On Wednesday 683 people died. That followed 743 deaths on Tuesday, 602 on Monday, 650 on Sunday and a record of 793 on Saturday -- the highest daily figure since the contagion came to light on Feb. 21. The total number of confirmed cases in Italy rose to 80,539 from a previous 74,386, the Civil Protection Agency said -- the highest number of new cases since March 21. Of those originally infected nationwide, 10,361 had fully recovered on Thursday compared to 9,362 the day before. There were 3,612 people in intensive care against a previous 3,489. The hardest-hit northern region of Lombardy reported a steep rise in fatalities compared with the day before and remains in a critical situation, with a total of 4,861 deaths and 34,889 cases. That compared with 4,474 deaths and 32,346 cases reported up to Wednesday. Reuters

1:23 pm: States with the most job losses so far because of the coronavirus

The record-breaking spike in U.S. jobless claims data varied in its impact on American workers depending on state as governors across the country instituted different combinations of restrictions and closures to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Thomas Franck, John W. Schoen

1:09 pm: WeWork reassures investors it has enough cash to weather coronavirus downturn

WeWork is telling investors it has enough cash on hand to execute its long-term plans and weather the near-term challenges posed by COVID-19. In a seven-slide deck for investors, WeWork said it had $4.4 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of the end of 2019. The company is expected to release full-year financial results after the market closes on Thursday. In a letter obtained by CNBC, WeWork's executive chairman, Marcelo Claure, and CEO, Sandeep Mathrani, say that the company "has a strategic plan and a sound financial position." WeWork is the second SoftBank-backed company to reassure investors that its cash position will get it through an increasingly uncertain and volatile year. Deirdre Bosa, Laura Batchelor

12:57 pm: Nancy Pelosi predicts more direct payments during the coronavirus crisis

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks with reporters during her weekly press conference at the US Capitol March 26, 2020, in Washington, DC. Alex Edelman | AFP | Getty Images

As the House prepares to pass a historically massive $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill, Speaker Nancy Pelosi outlined more steps she wants to take to blunt damage to the economy and health-care system. After the Senate passed the package, believed to be the biggest rescue plan in U.S. history, on Wednesday night, the House hopes to follow suit Friday in what Pelosi predicted would be a "strong, bipartisan" vote. The California Democrat set the stage for more congressional legislation as the pandemic rampages throughout the country. Pelosi indicated she would push to send more money directly to Americans on top of the cash payments set out in the Senate-passed bill. The proposal would give up to $1,200 to qualified individuals and $2,400 to couples, which starts to phase out for people making more than $75,000. Jacob Pramuk

12:46 pm: Cuomo says 'reckless' $2 trillion coronavirus bill fails to help New York's revenue loss

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called the $2 trillion relief package aimed at easing the economic impact of the coronavirus "irresponsible" and "reckless," saying it doesn't do enough for his state's huge loss in revenue. "The congressional action in my opinion simply failed to address the governmental need," Cuomo said at a press conference in Albany. Cuomo said that the $5 billion New York would receive from the bill doesn't come close to covering state's projected revenue shortfall, which could total $15 billion. "I'm disappointed, I said I was disappointed. I find it irresponsible, I find it reckless," Cuomo said. "When this is over, I promise you I'm going to give them a piece of my mind." Noah Higgins-Dunn, Kevin Breuninger

12:39 pm: US suspends plans to buy oil after funding is left out of $2 trillion stimulus package

The U.S. Department of Energy is suspending its plans to buy crude for the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve after the requested $3 billion in funding for the project was left out of the $2 trillion stimulus package. "Given the current uncertainty related to adequate Congressional Appropriations for crude oil purchases associated with the March 19, 2020 solicitation, the Department is withdrawing the solicitation," an amendment filed Wednesday said. "Should funding become secure for the planned purchases, the Department will reissue the solicitation," it added. The original request for proposal, filed on March 19, outlined plans to purchase the first 30 million barrels of American-made crude oil for the SPR out of a total of 77 million barrels. But funding to execute the plan was left out of the $2 trillion stimulus package which the White House and Senate agreed to Wednesday night, and which the House is expected to vote on Friday. Initially,$3 billion had been requested for the project. Pippa Stevens

12:28 pm: New York coronavirus cases soar to 37,258 as state scrambles for ventilators

New York coronavirus cases continue to surge, topping 37,258 as the state scrambles to find enough hospital beds and ventilators to handle the coming onslaught of patients, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. More than 5,300 residents have already been hospitalized and the state is projecting that will climb to 140,000 over the next two to three weeks, he said. At least 1,517 people have been discharged, he added. The state has already spent $1 billion trying to stymie the outbreak and estimates that business closures will cost roughly $10 to $15 billion in lost revenue. "To be angry is a luxury, we don't have time to be angry. Let's just deal with the facts," Cuomo said at a press conference in Albany. Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

12:20 pm: 'They're putting us all at risk:' What it's like working in Amazon's warehouses during the outbreak

As the coronavirus outbreak has worsened, many Americans have hunkered down in their homes and are turning to online marketplaces like Amazon to get essentials like toilet paper, food and hand sanitizer delivered to their door. While physical stores run out of stock and cities are on lockdown, Amazon's warehouse workers, delivery drivers and contract employees have been praised for their fearlessness in continuing to go to work during a crisis. Amazon has called its employees "heroes fighting for their communities" and CEO Jeff Bezos said workers efforts were "being noticed at the highest levels of government." Warehouse workers and other Amazon employees don't view their jobs with the same rose-colored optimism. A dozen Amazon workers told CNBC they're terrified to go to work during a pandemic, while others have expressed frustration over how their employer has responded to the threat of the coronavirus at their workplaces. Many of the workers asked to remain anonymous so as not to upset their employer. Annie Palmer

12:12 pm: Hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones gets emotional about his daughter getting coronavirus

Paul Tudor Jones, one of Wall Street's most influential investors, got personal about his daughter's recovery from the coronavirus and how he aims to help New York City's most vulnerable denizens. In a surprising revelation, Tudor Jones told CNBC, "My heart goes out to the people that are going to be our first-responders. My heart goes out to the people that are going to be affected. My own daughter has CV-19 right now. She's recovering from it." Matthew J. Belvedere

12:01 pm: Treasury chief Mnuchin says record unemployment claims 'aren't relevant' right now

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin waved aside jaw-dropping new jobless claims by more than 3 million Americans, saying that the record-setting unemployment filing numbers "right now aren't relevant." Mnuchin said "the good news" is a $2 trillion relief bill working its way through Congress that is aimed at alleviating income losses and other financial fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. Mnuchin said that the aim of that package is that many people who have recently lost their jobs as a result of the coronavirus outbreak will get hired back by their employers with this relief. Asked what his reaction was to seeing the 3.28 million new unemployment claims reported for the past week on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street," Mnuchin said, "To be honest, I think these numbers right now aren't relevant whether they're bigger or shorter in the short term." Dan Mangan

11:53 am: 'Virus-proofing' the family deli  How a small business owner fights to slow the spread of the Coronavirus

Shoppers at Felice Italian Deli in Clearwater, Florida are provided hand sanitizer and asked to don gloves before entering and the establishment has now started 'touchless-transactions.' Gabriella D'Elia is ahead of the game in Florida, but she hopes being proactive will save lives and help flatten the curve ... one customer at a time. Ray Parisi

11:49 am: Craft distillers and brewers making sanitizer are lobbying Congress and FDA to keep producing

Crew members apply labels to bottles for hand sanitizer at Eight Oaks Farm Distillery in New Tripoli, Pennsylvania, on March 19, 2020. Branden Eastwood | AFP | Getty Images

Whiskey sales have fallen at least 50% at the New Liberty Distillery in Philadelphia because of the shutdown of bars, restaurants and state-owned liquor stores due the coronavirus outbreak. The pain can be even greater for many others, said owner Robert Cassell. "Some distilleries, that number is probably closer to 80% because they're smaller operations that rely on the direct-to-consumer [channel]," said Cassell, who is also the president of the Pennsylvania Distillers Guild. Hoping to use their facilities to help battle the coronavirus outbreak and keep employees on the payroll, the guild has partnered with the state of Pennsylvania to produce 100,000 bottles of hand sanitizer using alcohol that would normally fill bottles of spirits. Bottlers of sanitizer have been in short supply as people look to prevent the spread of the highly contagious virus. Frank Holland

11:41 am: Streets in India sit eerily empty amid coronavirus lockdown

This aerial photograph taken on March 25, 2020 shows a deserted road, as a nationwide lockdown continues after the coronavirus outbreak on March 25, 2020 in Kolkata, Eastern India. Debajyoti Chakraborty | NurPhoto | Getty Images

Streets in India normally bustling with people and traffic stayed empty Wednesday as the country of 1.3 billion people endured the first day of a national lockdown brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the new measure Tuesday, saying that people would have to remain in their homes for the next 21 days with only essential services remaining open. The move is designed to curb the virus's spread and keep the country's already-fragile health system from buckling under a surge of critically ill patients. Adam Jeffery, Hannah Miller

11:24 am: Markets take 3 million claims in stride and now brace for 'tsunami of negative news'

The first crushing wave of 3.28 million workers seeking unemployment benefits is expected to be followed by millions more in the coming weeks as the impact of virus-related shutdowns ripples across the U.S. economy. Economists had expected anywhere between 1 million and 4 million new claims to be filed for the week ending March 21, as the impact of the first state shelter-in-place orders affected workers. The 3.28 million is a record and dwarfs the past record of nearly 700,000 claims filed in one week in 1982. Stocks rose after the claims report. Treasury yields, which move opposite price, edged higher but were still lower on the day. "This week's jobless claims surge was well advertised before the print," said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at National Securities. "People were talking about the potential of this to be as high as 6 or 7 million. The focus by the market now is on the fact we're likely to get a historically large fiscal stimulus bill signed in the House by Friday. This is just the beginning of a tsunami of negative news ... Everything on the economic data front is going to start looking horrendous." Patti Domm

11:17 am: Senators will leave Washington until April 20  but the coronavirus crisis could force them to return

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the chamber would adjourn for nearly a month after it passed a historically huge $2 trillion coronavirus relief package late Wednesday night. But as the outbreak takes a toll on American health and financial well-being, the unprecedented crisis may force Congress to act again sooner than the Senate's planned return date of April 20. McConnell acknowledged the reality Wednesday night, promising the chamber would stay "nimble" as the pandemic spreads. "If circumstances require the Senate to return for a vote sooner than April the 20th, we will provide at least 24 hours of notice," he said. Jacob Pramuk

11:00 am: The 'patchwork' efforts by US to curb spread of coronavirus are not enough, former Obama advisor says

The "patchwork" efforts by local and state officials across the U.S. to curb the spread of the coronavirus are not enough, former Obama White House health policy advisor Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel told CNBC. State and local officials have implemented a variety of "shelter-in-place" orders, shuttering nonessential businesses, bars and restaurants to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Without a national lockdown, the states that have issued shelter-in-place type orders are shouldering a brunt of the economic damage, Emanuel said. Worst yet, those efforts are being undermined by other regions that aren't doing the same. "If we don't have a full national lockdown ... You are going to have these rollercoasters. You contain it in some area. Then we try to ease it up, then it just blossoms again and we are never going to get it under control in the whole country," Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box." William Feuer

10:40 am: Gig workers for companies like Uber, Lyft would get unemployment benefits under Senate stimulus bill

Gig workers won a landmark protection in the $2 trillion stimulus bill that passed in a unanimous 96-0 vote in the Senate Wednesday. The bill now moves to the House, which is expected to vote Friday. The bill would allow gig workers, such as Uber and Lyft drivers, as well as freelancers and the self-employed to be eligible to apply for unemployment benefits. It would also add $600 per week for up to four months compared to what beneficiaries normally receive. The protection also marks a win for the companies that employ gig workers and rely on them for their businesses to function. Lauren Feiner

10:08 am: Dow rallies 600 points, heads for 3-day winning streak

CNBC

Stocks traded sharply higher on Thursday even after the release of record-breaking initial jobless claims sparked by the coronavirus pandemic. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 650 points, or more than 3%. The S&P 500 gained nearly 3% while the Nasdaq Composite advanced 2.6%. Those gains put the major averages on track for a three-day winning streak. Fred Imbert, Pippa Stevens, Eustance Huang

9:41 am: Coronavirus stimulus checks will come within three weeks, Mnuchin says

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin speaks during the daily briefing on the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, at the White House on March 25, 2020, in Washington, DC. Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday that people will start getting relief checks within three weeks, as the country reels from the coronavirus pandemic. Mnuchin spoke to CNBC the morning after the Senate passed a $2 trillion stimulus package intended to blunt economic damage from the spread of the coronavirus. The House is expected to vote on the legislation Friday. The massive relief bill offers direct cash payments of up to $1,200 for individuals and $2,400 for couples, with $500 added for every child, based on 2019 tax returns for those who filed them and 2018 information if they have not. The benefit begins to phase out for individuals making $75,000 in income and ends completely for those making $99,000 or more. Kevin Breuninger

9:35 am: Stocks jump for a third day, shaking off a record surge in jobless claims because of the coronavirus

Stocks opened higher on Thursday even after the release of record-breaking initial jobless claims sparked by the coronavirus pandemic. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 500 points, or more than 2%. The S&P 500 gained more than 1.5% along with the Nasdaq Composite. Boeing, JPMorgan Chase and Intel drove the Dow's gains, rising at least 3%. Industrials and health care were the best-performing sectors in the S&P 500 as the both traded more than 2% higher. Fred Imbert, Pippa Stevens, Eustance Huang

9:30 am: Trump's claim that malaria drug can treat coronavirus gives hope, but little evidence, it will work

Hopes for a coronavirus treatment were boosted after President Donald Trump announced at a White House press briefing last week that two anti-malaria drugs were a "game-changer" that have shown "very, very encouraging results. But scientists and infectious disease experts say Trump's claims about the drugs  chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine  may be a bit premature. While some small studies give doctors reason to hope, large clinical trials are needed to determine whether the drugs are truly effective in fighting COVID-19, they say. To pass the FDA's muster, and win approval for widespread use, chloroquine and azithromycin will need to undergo rigorous clinical trials with thousands of participants  not a couple dozen, according to the agency's guidelines. Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

9:18 am: Senate's $2 trillion coronavirus package includes payroll tax delay for employers

The Senate's $2 trillion stimulus package designed to contain the economic damage from coronavirus will postpone payroll taxes for employers, a key source of revenue for Social Security and Medicare. The bill passed late Wednesday will allow companies to pay their 2020 payroll taxes through the end of 2022. They will have to pay 50% by the end of 2021. The Senate legislation, which has been described as the largest rescue bill in history, must be approved by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and signed by the president in order to become law. The House is expected to vote on the matter on Friday. Tucker Higgins

8:57 am: Udacity offers free tech training to laid-off workers

Online learning platform Udacity is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic by offering free tech training to workers laid off as a result of the crisis. On Thursday the Mountain View, California-based company revealed that in the wake of layoffs and furloughs by major U.S. corporations, including Marriott International, Hilton Hotels and GE Aviation, it will offer its courses  known as nanodegrees  for free to individuals in the U.S. who have been let go because of the coronavirus. The average price for an individual signing up for a nanodegree is about $400 a month, and the degrees take anywhere from four to six months to complete, according to the company. Susan Caminiti

8:47 am: Ford plans to restart production at 'key' auto plants starting in early April

8:30 am: Weekly jobless claims soar to 3.28 million

Americans displaced by the coronavirus crisis filed unemployment claims in record numbers, with the Labor Department reporting a surge to 3.28 million for the week ended March 21. The number shatters the Great Recession peak of 665,000 in March 2009 and the all-time mark of 695,000 in October 1982. Businesses across the country have shut down amid a policy of social distancing aimed at keeping the virus's growth in check. Individual states have reported websites crashing amid a rush to file. Jeff Cox

8:19 am: German employment index hits lowest since Jan 2010

The Ifo economic institute's German employment barometer fell in March to its lowest level since January 2010, the Handelsblatt newspaper reported, adding that the drop is the biggest since records began in 2002. "German companies are putting the brakes on personnel planning," Ifo expert Klaus Wohlrabe said of the data, which the Munich institute calculates monthly for Handelsblatt based on the employment intentions of around 9,000 companies. "A rise in unemployment will be unavoidable despite short-time work," Wohlrabe said, referring to a government-backed scheme that allows firms to put workers on shorter hours. Reuters

8:18 am: Swiss coronavirus cases top 10,000, with 161 deaths

Switzerland has 10,714 confirmed coronavirus infections and 161 people have died of the disease, the Federal Office of Public Health said. The numbers were up to date as of 0715 GMT, it said. Reuters

8:01 am: Dow futures down 300 points as traders brace for jobless claims report

People gather at the entrance for the New York State Department of Labor offices in Brooklyn on March 20, 2020. The Federal Reserve estimates that 47 million people could lose their jobs before the COVID-19 crisis ends. Andrew Kelly | REUTERS

U.S. stock futures fell in early morning trading as investors looked ahead to the national weekly initial jobless claims data, which are expected to show a record-breaking spike. Dow futures indicated an opening drop of more than 300 points at the market open. S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq-100 futures pointed to opening losses of more than 1%. National weekly initial jobless claims data will be out 8:30 a.m. ET. Economists are projecting record-shattering numbers. Fred Imbert, Pippa Stevens, Eustance Huang

7:45 am: Fed chief Powell's message to Americans: 'The Federal Reserve is working hard to support you'

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told Americans the central bank is working hard to support them during these unprecedented financial conditions. "The Federal Reserve is working hard to support you now, and our policies will be very important when the recovery does come, to make that recovery as strong as possible," Powell said on NBC's "Today." "Really the message is this: This is a unique situation, its not like a typical downturn. We've asked people to step back from economic activity really to make an investment in our public health. They're doing that for the public good and this bill that's just passed is going to try to provide relief and stability to those people," Powell added. Maggie Fitzgerald

7:23 pm: US cases posting steeper rise than most

In the U.S., the rapid increase in the distribution of coronavirus test kits has likely accelerated the pace of reported and confirmed cases. Cumulative case counts also don't account for how many patients have recovered or for lags in reporting cases and differences in reporting methods. Still, researchers say that even incomplete data is critical to current efforts to "flatten the curve" of the spread of the pandemic  from the steep rise in the initial phases to a more gradual increase as efforts to contain the outbreak take effect. John Schoen

7:00 am: Here's what's in the $2 trillion US stimulus bill

The Senate approved an unprecedented stimulus bill, estimated to cost $2 trillion, as Congress tries to lessen the pandemic's human and economic toll. The chamber passed the legislation Wednesday night as workers face widespread layoffs, hospitals and states starve for resources and businesses small and large worry about their survival. The House aims to pass it by Friday. The bill is designed to offer relief to individuals, the health care system and even an entire corporate sector ravaged by the outbreak. Here's what's in it. Jacob Pramuk

6:57 am: Spain reports over 8,000 new cases as death toll rises

In this handout from the Comunidad de Madrid, health workers prepare to receive the first patients with coronavirus at Ifema exhibition complex on March 22, 2020 in Madrid, Spain. Comunidad de Madrid | Getty Images

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Spain has risen by 8,578 in the last 24 hours, the country's health ministry announced. That takes the total number of cases in Spain to 56,188. The death toll in Spain rose to 4,089 on Thursday, up from 3,434 the previous day. Spain's death toll has surpassed China's, where the official number of fatalities stands at 3,291. Holly Ellyatt

5:59 am: Iran starts intercity travel ban

Iran has started an intercity travel ban, an Iranian official said in a televised news conference, Reuters reported. The ban comes a day after Iran's government spokesman warned the country might face a surge of COVID-19 cases. Officials have been critical of Iranians who have ignored appeals to stay at home and cancel travel plans for the Persian New Year holidays that began on March 20. Iran has recorded 27,017 confirmed cases of the virus, and has reported just over 2,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. Holly Ellyatt

5:40 am: UK retail sales failed to grow in February

A lady shopper with a striped bag outside the window of fashion brand Superdry, on 18th April 2017, in London, England. Richard Baker | In Pictures via Getty Images

British retail sales failed to grow at all in February, marking their weakest performance since 2013, official figures show. When compared with the same month a year earlier, retail sales in the U.K. for February 2020 remained flat; the lowest year-on-year growth rate since March 2013, the Office for National Statistics said. The lackluster data reflects poor sales even before most retailers were forced to close because of the lockdown due to the coronavirus. Holly Ellyatt

5:30 am: US envoy blames China for endangering world with coronavirus

The U.S. ambassador to London said China had put the world in danger by suppressing information about the coronavirus outbreak. "First it tried to suppress the news," Ambassador Woody Johnson wrote in an article for U.K. newspaper The Times. "Had China done the right things at the right time, more of its own population, and the rest of the world, might have been spared the most serious impact of this disease," the ambassador said. Holly Ellyatt

4:50 pm: European stocks decline ahead of upcoming US jobs data
Most presidents get a bump when theres a national crisis, said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster. While I think many of us would argue his handling of this crisis has been insufficient and inconsistent, when people started to tune in to the severity of the epidemic was when he started sounding more serious.

Yet, Mr. Trump hasnt behaved like a traditional president in a crisis moment. At times, hes acted more like our national id, telling Americans what they may want to hear, even if those claims are false or are considered downright dangerous by public health experts.

His Easter promise is a perfect example. Experts say the idea that Americans can return to normal life by April 12 is about as realistic as a giant bunny hiding chocolate eggs.

None of the public analyses modeling the spread of the coronavirus suggest that there will be a resolution of the pandemic in the United States anywhere close to Easter. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a member of Mr. Trumps task force, has said its possible that the country will see a peak in the number of cases around May 1.

Believe me, I understand the desire to know when normal life will resume. Finding the space to write to you this evening involved bribing children with television and cookies. But in this case, experts agree that opening up too early can be catastrophic. One model found that, without action by governments and individuals, 2.2 million people in the United States could die (though some action has, of course, already been taken).

And Mr. Trump cannot actually reopen the country with a snap of his fingers: Governors issue stay-at-home orders and decide what opens and remains closed in their states. The president doesnt have the authority to overrule them.

That reality may not matter, at least not politically. The polling shows that despite Mr. Trumps dubious comments, Americans blame the virus rather than the president for our current situation. At least, for now.
By Trend

Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops 23 times, Trend reports referring to Azerbaijani Defense Ministry on March 25.

The Armenian armed forces were using large-caliber machine guns and sniper rifles.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding regions.




UW Students Can Request S/U Grading for Spring Semester Courses

University of Wyoming students will have the opportunity to shift from conventional letter grades to satisfactory/unsatisfactory grading for courses they take during the current spring 2020 semester.

The UW Board of Trustees approved the change today (Thursday) in response to a recommendation from the universitys administration. The plan resulted from UWs move to online course delivery March 30 for the remainder of the spring semester, prompted by concerns over the novel coronavirus COVID-19.

We believe the optional S/U or pass/fail grading strategy will ease the necessary transitions into remote course delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic, relieve undue stress and promote strong engagement, Provost Kate Miller says.

Students will have until April 17 to submit requests to change from conventional grading to S/U grading under the new policy, which applies to all undergraduate and graduate coursework, not just elective courses.

Undergraduate students will be required to consult with and obtain approval of their instructors and academic advisers before making the change. Graduate students must receive approval from their major professors. An exception request to change their grading option will be available on the Office of the Registrars website and must be filled out by students and electronically signed/approved by their advisers or major professors.

Existing university regulations allow students to request S/U grading for elective courses during the normal drop-add period, which ended Feb. 5 this semester. The boards action is a temporary exception that extends the deadline to request S/U grades to April 17 for this semester only.

As is the case at many universities, S/U grading long has been provided as an option for UW students to take courses in subject matter areas outside their majors and related fields so that their academic experience may be broadened, without harming their grade-point averages. But, with the move to online instruction this semester, UW is making S/U grading an option for students to take in all undergraduate and graduate coursework, including general education courses -- not just elective courses.

Neither a satisfactory nor an unsatisfactory grade has an impact on a students GPA. But an unsatisfactory grade does not allow the student to receive course credit.

If students are applying to graduate school, including professional schools, or if their lives are not disrupted dramatically by the coronavirus crisis, it may be beneficial for them to stay with conventional grading and have letter grades displayed and calculated into their GPAs, Miller says. Students should discuss possible federal aid impacts with their advisers and/or the Office of Scholarships and Financial Aid before requesting the switch.

UW is one of many universities to expand use of this option because of the move to online instruction due to COVID-19 during the spring 2020 semester. Others include Colorado State University, the University of Nebraska, Iowa State University, the University of Minnesota, Indiana University, the University of Maryland, Georgetown University and Duke University.
In context: As countries worldwide are shutting down their economies in an effort to stop the spread of the Coronavirus and prevent medical systems from failing, Apple is faced with a situation where people are less worried about owning the latest iPhone and the supply chain is struggling to return to normal operation, so the iPhone 12 may just arrive later than planned.

It was only a week ago that industry insiders were still confident about Apple's ability to deliver the next iPhone in the September timeframe. The thinking was that since factories and component suppliers are expected to reach full production capacity in May, the company could work around the smaller time window to ship the new devices just in time for the planned launch date.

According to a new report from Nikkei, the equation has changed enough in the global climate to make Apple reevaluate if keeping the September launch window is a smart thing after all.

The company is said to be discussing the current slowdown in shipments from component suppliers, which means that mass production wouldn't go as fast as originally planned. Then there's the issue of lower demand for smartphones in general as a direct effect of people trying to make ends meet due to lost income thanks to the Coronavirus.

Apple will continue to monitor the situation and decide if a delay of the iPhone 12 is in order. Another issue is that the new devices are still going through the final stages of the engineering process, with very little progress over the last month. Hands-on work with the prototypes is currently out of question due to travel restrictions, as Apple's engineers can't be sent to factories in China.

Suppliers have also been notified to defer their schedules for two to three months, which means that mass production would start in August as opposed to June, which has been the norm for the last few years.

JPMorgan analysts have similarly predicted that "given multiple bottlenecks in EVT (engineering verification test, now scheduled in mid-April) and PVT (production verification test) and pilot production (now scheduled for late June) due to recent travel restrictions imposed globally, we believe that a 1-2 month delay in iPhone launch could indeed happen."

The extent of the Covid-19 aftermath is slowly coming into focus, with production of iPhones grinding to a halt in India after the government ordered a complete lockdown for 21 days for over 1.3 billion people. Before the Coronavirus became a worldwide issue, Big Tech was dreaming of using this region as a large production hub that would shield them from political trade wars, but that is no longer their biggest concern.

Apple is expected to make the decision sometime around May, but all signs point towards at least a couple of months of delay. It's also possible that the launch date could slip into 2021, which would allow carriers more time to deploy 5G infrastructure.
Although working in Lugano, a Swiss city near the border of Italy's Lombardy region which has been one of the areas hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, young Chinese scholar Zhang Zhan said she is confident in Switzerland's efforts to combat the highly-infectious disease.

Zhang, a faculty member at the Universita della Svizzera Italiana (USI), one of the public-funded universities in Switzerland's Italian-speaking region, is doing research at USI's Chinese Media Observatory (CMO) and coordinating the Master Program of Media Management.

"Swiss people, being prudent in life, are too self-disciplined to violate any rules or regulations especially once they realized how severe the situation is," Zhang said.

"So long as the emergency measures are carried out," she continued, "people have no need to panic, because the Swiss government has put the health of the public as the top priority, and has assured enough supply of daily necessities for at least the next four months."

As of March 16, the federal government declared that Switzerland, home to about 8.5 million people living in a territory of less than 45,000 square kilometers, was in an "extraordinary situation" and that the entire population is urgently called upon to act responsibly. Some troops have been mobilized to help contain the spreading of coronavirus, which represents the largest army mobilization since the Second World War.

That was almost three weeks since the virus was detected in the country on Feb. 25.

"When the first case was confirmed in Ticino, the USI, where more or less half of the students are from Italy, did not shut down the campus immediately since such decision must be agreed with the canton government. However, many of the Chinese students had plenty of reasons to be anxious, because they'd learned how serious the disease could be from their home country," Zhang recalled.

"It was a hard time for them," she explained. "They were reluctant to attend classes and were not comfortable wearing face masks on campus, since the general public were told that healthy people should not wear masks here.

"The same is true for people of Chinese origin running small businesses," Zhang continued. "Without an order from the local government they couldn't close their stores or restaurants. But they were highly concerned about the high contagiousness of the epidemic."

Before launching emergency measures, the federal government mainly restricted access to hospitals for tests and treatment for those at greatest risk, especially those aged above 65. This was considering the fact that the around 1,000 ICU beds, 850 artificial respiratory machines and 45 artificial lungs could not meet the demand for all of those with the disease, according to Swiss Society of Intensive Care Medicine (SGI-SSICM). Therefore, those with minor symptoms were advised to stay at home.

However, when the number of confirmed cases soared to over 1,000 in just a few weeks, the government started to realize the severity of an epidemic which cannot be contained without emergency measures.

"In my local supermarket, bread and pasta both sold out the day the country announced the adoption of emergency measures. However, they'd been sufficiently restocked two days later when I revisited," Zhang recalled.

Aside from that, the century-long development of the pharmaceutical industry has enabled local medical corporations, such as, Hamilton Medical and Roche Holding AG, to have an edge when combating the rampant viral disease.

According to local press, Hamilton Medical, the manufacturer of intelligent medical ventilators and respiratory care supplies, can continue exporting their equipment to other European countries, such as the hardest-hit Italy. Meanwhile, the medicine and diagnostic test provider Roche has received emergency approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the coronavirus test it has developed.

Recently, Zhang has been continuing to work as usual preparing for lessons she's supposed to teach, however, not in classrooms, but through online live-streaming. Despite the exponential growth of confirmed cases which have now hit 10,000, the scholar said she plans to remain in the country, because she is confident that the disciplined citizens and the highly advanced medical technologies will eventually help turn the tide.
Iran Reports Record Number Of New COVID-19 Cases As Travel Ban Imposed

03/26/20

Source: RFE/RL

Stepping up its fight against the new coronavirus outbreak, Iran has begun banning people from leaving their cities and requiring those who are already on Persian New Year trips to return to their hometowns at the earliest opportunity.



Official Iran's statistics on coronavirus as of March 26

Infections: 29,406

Deaths: 2,234

New Cases: 2,389

Recovered: 10,457

Iran has announced 157 new deaths from the coronavirus, raising the official toll to 2,234, as a ban on intercity travel came into effect amid fears of a second wave of infections in one of the world's worst-hit countries



Health Ministry spokesman Kianush Jahanpur told a news conference that a record-breaking 2,389 new cases have been confirmed over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of declared infections to 29,406.



Jahanpur said that the spread of the new coronavirus and its rate of infection was "growing steadily" in Iran.



A poster in the city of Isfahan encourages people to "Stay at Home"

(photo by ISNA)

The travel ban was imposed after officials had complained that many Iranians ignored the authorities' advice to stay at home and cancel travel plans for the Persian New Year holidays that began on March 20.



"Those who have traveled for the Iranian New Year holidays should immediately return to their cities without making any stop in the cities on their way back home," Hossein Zolfaghari, a member of Iran's national headquarters for fighting the coronavirus, said on March 26.



"The closure of universities and schools as well as the suspension of gatherings has been extended," Zolfaghari said, adding that violators of the measures will face legal consequences.



On March 25, the government warned about the danger of ignoring the authorities' travel guidelines.



"This could cause a second wave of the coronavirus," government spokesman Ali Rabiei said, according to state TV.



A family in Qom enjoying the quiet outdoor

(photo by ISNA)

President Hassan Rohani said Iran will contain the coronavirus spread in two weeks, adding that further measures have been taken to ease the economic impact of the outbreak on lower-income citizens.



"We will send a letter to Iran's supreme leader today to seek permission for the withdrawal of $1 billion from Iran's sovereign wealth fund," Rohani said in a meeting, broadcast live on state TV.



Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has the last say on all state matters.



Iran has rejected an offer from the Geneva-based medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to set up a 50-bed inflatable hospital in the central city of Isfahan to deal with the outbreak.



It has also refused the United States' offer of humanitarian assistance, saying that Washington should lift sanctions if it wants to help Tehran fight the epidemic.



Iran has been under crippling U.S. sanctions in connection with its nuclear and missile programs.
Here's what you need to know about what's happening in San Jose.

California woman says she was smacked, spit on and coughed at after asking for social distance on running trail

The victim said she contacted the police after the incident, which occurred last Saturday afternoon in the Communications Hill neighborhood of San Jose.

Read the full story on Newsweek.

Police employee finds surplus cache of masks, and SJPD donates them to hospitals for COVID-19 fight



One afternoon last week, San Jose Police Department property supervisor Anna Hawkes was awash in news of widespread shortages of masks and other supplies at area hospitals straining to keep up with the spiking number of people needing hospital care for COVID-19.

Read the full story on The Mercury News.

Infectious disease expert says nearly half the patients at San Jose Kaiser have coronavirus

Roughly half of all patients at the 242-bed San Jose Kaiser hospital have tested positive for COVID-19 or are suspected of being infected with the novel coronavirus.

Read the full story on Metro.

North San Jose office park lands trio of tech leases

A big San Jose tech campus has landed several large leases, including one with prominent defense contractor Raytheon.

Read the full story on The Mercury News.

This story was created automatically using data about news stories on social media from CrowdTangle, then reviewed by an editor. Click here for more about what we're doing. Got thoughts? Go here to share your feedback.
Cough Suppressant Drugs Market Introduction

Cough is a reflex action that clears the throat of mucus or any sort of foreign irritants. Coughing is the most common symptom of a number of medical conditions. According to a study published in the Journal of the Association of Physicians of India, cough is the sixth most common reason for hospital outpatient department visit. Factors that increase the risk of dry cough include exposure to pollutants/environmental irritants, residence close to heavy traffic leading to respiratory problems, cigarette smoking, asthma, chronic obstructive airway disease, use of angiotensin converting enzyme, acute & chronic infections, airway diseases, parenchymal disease, cardiovascular, and gastrointestinal.

Read Report Overview: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/cough-suppressant-drugs-market.html

Based on type, cough can be divided into acute cough and chronic cough. Cough suppressants are also known as antitussives. Cough suppressants inhibit cough coordinating region in the brain stem. High prevalence of cough is projected to increase demand for cough suppressant drugs during the forecast period, which in turn is anticipated to drive the global cough suppressant drugs market.

Cough Suppressant Drugs Market  Competitive Landscape

The global cough suppressant drugs market is highly fragmented with several domestic players holding key market share in respective region. The low cost of manufacturing, easy availability of these products, large volume business for cough suppressant drugs and easy entry for new players into cough suppressant drugs market. All these factors have attracted large number of domestic manufacturers into this field. Major players operating in the global cough suppressant drugs market focus on business expansion and are engaged in mergers and collaborations.

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Perrigo Company plc

Perrigo Company plc is an Ireland-based company that generates 70% of its revenue from the U.S. and has significant presence in the global cough suppressant drugs market. The Company is a leading provider of over-the-counter health and wellness solutions.

Pfizer, Inc

Pfizer, Inc. is another multinational company with strong presence in the cough suppressant drugs market in North America. Pfizer Inc. is a global pharmaceutical company that develops, manufactures, and markets prescription medicines in 11 therapeutic segments, including cardiovascular, oncology, neuroscience, pain, and infectious diseases. It operates through two business units: Pfizer Innovative Health (IH) and Pfizer Essential Health (EH).

GlaxoSmithKline

GlaxoSmithKline is a global pharmaceutical company actively involved in research, development and manufacturing innovative pharmaceutical medicines, vaccines and consumer healthcare products. In 2018, GlaxoSmithKline invested around 4.60 Mn USD for research and development of pipeline products.

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Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. is a key producer of generic medicines and a recognized leader in innovative and specialty pharmaceuticals worldwide. The company delivers high-quality and patient-centric health care solutions across the globe. It has a wide generic product portfolio with more than 35,000 products in almost every therapeutic area.The company primarily operates through two business segments : Generic medicines and specialty medicines.Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. markets its gout therapeutic drug under its generic medicines business segment

Other players operating in the global cough suppressant drugs market include Tris Pharma, Inc., Aytu BioScience, Inc., Mayne Pharma Group Limited, and Acella Pharmaceuticals, LLC.

Cough Suppressant Drugs Market  Dynamics

Anticipated launch and commercialization will drive the cough suppressant drugs market.

A large number of drug candidates are in different stages of clinical trial approval in the U.S. and Europe. The anticipated launch and commercialization of these products is expected to propel the global cough suppressant drugs market during the forecast period.

The cough suppressant drugs market to grow with high prevalence of cough.

According to the Journal of the Association of Physicians of India data, around 54% of population of India suffered from Cough. The global cough suppressant drugs market is projected to expand at a rapid pace during the forecast period. Increase in the geriatric population, changes in lifestyle, and rise in health care awareness are the major factors driving the global market.

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Favorable health care policies lead to an increase in affordability of various health care treatments. This, in turn, increases the life expectancy of the population. The population aged above 65 years usually suffers from various health disorders. Hence, increase in the geriatric population augments the global cough suppressant drugs market. However, stringent government regulations for sale of over-the-counter cough suppressant drugs are likely to restrain the global cough suppressant drugs market.

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The personnel of the Defence Forces are justly proud of their record of steadfast loyalty and service to the State and its citizens, even though that same dedicated professionalism and patriotism has largely gone unrequited.

In recent years, veterans of the Defence Forces joined forces with the families of serving soldiers, sailors and air staff to campaign for better pay and conditions because they are the poorest-paid State employees in an organisation that is treated as the Cinderella of the public service.

The simple slogan for the campaign was 'Loyalty and Respect', which encapsulates the esprit de corps of our silent sentinels.

All they were asking for was that the State reciprocated by acknowledging their loyalty, service and professionalism which has been unflinching for almost a century - and pay them a decent living wage that is commensurate with the important role they play in our society.

While it prevaricated on the plight of our troops, the same Government was happy to exploit the Defence Forces' sterling 60 years of service to the UN when it went looking for a seat on the Security Council.

It should have been a source of public shame that many members of the armed services, even after a belated paltry pay rise, automatically qualify for the family income supplement.

This was the primary motivating factor behind the large numbers of highly skilled professional personnel who reluctantly marched back to civvy street at such a rate that a massive recruitment drive could not reverse the losses.

Last year the figure exceeded 500 personnel, which is more than the strength of a full infantry battalion.

But all that was back in a time that will become known as the period before an unknown virus called Covid-19 unilaterally declared total war on humanity and turned our lives upside down.

For war is the only metaphor for this pandemic; propelled by an invisible, merciless enemy that will not stop its deadly onslaught until it has been wiped out. Total war is the only antidote to total war.

As the viral blitzkrieg swept relentlessly towards our shores, the Government turned to the Defence Forces to play a pivotal role on the frontline in the battle ahead.

The truth is that the fight against this virus - the single worst crisis our country has faced since the Famine - would be inordinately more difficult if we did not have a multi-skilled, well-organised, disciplined military organisation to call on in our darkest hour.

The central mission of the Defence Forces is characterised by the motto of the US Marine Corps: improvise, adapt and overcome.

All three arms of the Defence Forces are preparing to do a lot of improvising and adapting in the months ahead in order to protect us. All across the country soldiers, sailors and air crews are doing their bit conducting vital support operations in this emergency.

Personnel, all of whom share the same anxiety for their families as the rest of us, have been confined to barracks to isolate them from the disease as they stand by for whatever mission they are given.

Troops are involved in contact tracing while Army paramedics and ambulances are on stand-by to assist their civilian counterparts.

Army engineers have been erecting testing centres across the country and the Navy has deployed ships to provide back-up for test centres in Cork, Galway and Dublin.

Soldiers are transporting vital test kits and other health supplies to hospitals and others have been distributing food to the homeless.

The Aer Corps is also on stand-by with helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft for whatever eventualities lie ahead.

But these are only the missions they have been required to do so far as the period of calm begins to give way to the approaching storm.

As a worst-case scenario, barracks are being prepared in the event that the hospital system is overrun. In Italy, the army was assigned the grimmest of tasks, transporting the growing numbers of dead, something that we pray will not happen here.

In the weeks ahead our troops will be severely tested by challenges that are unknown in our living memory and the Marine Corps mantra will be severely tested.

And we should not forget about the anxiety that must be felt by our 550 troops on UN peacekeeping missions in the warzones of the Middle East for their loved ones back home and the uncertain future ahead.

Acknowledgement of the vital role the Defence Forces will play in the Covid-19 war came on Tuesday when the Government drafted emergency legislation that will allow retired soldiers to re-enlist in the Defence Forces.

And no doubt many will forget their reasons for leaving and answer that call. For that is what patriotic soldiers do.

There was well-deserved universal praise for Leo Varadkar's compassionate, reassuring and searingly honest address to the nation on a St Patrick's Day like no other.

But the following day there came another example of impressive leadership, this time from the Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces, Vice-Admiral Mark Mellett, who posted a personal message to his staff on YouTube and Twitter which every citizen should watch.

In the time before Covid-19, the 'chief' was fighting a secret battle on behalf of his personnel with the Department of Defence responsible for the shameful downgrading of his forces, in a bid to stop the exodus and maintain an effective operational ability for crises such as this.

In the role of the general briefing his troops on the eve of battle, Mellett's tone is at once resolute, reassuring and confident.

In the uncertain post-Covid 19 future, his words will often be repeated, like the Taoiseach's St Patrick's Day address, to exemplify the fighting spirit that got us through this dark hour together.

The vice-admiral tells his troops: "As members of Oglaigh na hEireann we know our duty: to defend our State and the people of Ireland... As we face this threat we will be strong, resilient and steadfast.

"We will overcome this adversity and through our actions we will provide leadership, confidence and reassurance for our people and see our nation through this difficult time.

"Oglaigh na hEireann has been the people, is the people and will be the people. We serve the people, families and communities of Ireland and we will do everything in our power to defend and protect our citizens.

"I have such pride in your loyalty, dedication and commitment."

The Chief of Staff fittingly concludes his message to his troops in Irish.

"Oglaigh na hEireann now is the time to strengthen the nation."
Les representants des autorites sont des bonimenteurs . Laccusation est signee Olivier Terrien, secretaire de la CGT au CHU de Nantes (majoritaire). Qui denonce pele-mele le manque de transparence dans la crise sanitaire relative au coronavirus, et le manque de moyens de lhopital public . La decision de la direction ...
Google Suite, used by many school districts for online learning, experienced a service disruption in some areas, several school districts reported on Thursday.

It is unclear how widespread or long the outage lasted, but the Google Outage Map showed problems along the Northeast on Thursday.

In Trumbull, history teacher Katie Boland said the platform was down for about a half hour around lunch time. Fairfield schools Superintendent Michael Cummings reported the service was back up in his district at 3:15 p.m.

Beside Google Classroom, the outage also included Google Drive, Gmail and YouTube.

Google could not be reached for comment, but a Google spokesman told Business Insider the problem was a router failure in Atlanta, not because of increased traffic due to COVID-19.

Cummings and Christopher Cipriano, principal at Notre Dame High School in Fairfield, both use the system to help advance distance learning efforts while students are home during the coronavirus quarantine. They both reported their systems were affected.

Google Classroom is a free web-based service that allows teachers to post, collect and grade assignments, and make announcements. Students can use it to pose questions and make comments.

Students are invited to join a class through a private code.

Jared Ferrari, parent of Liam, a Holland Hill fifth grader in Fairfield, said the system went down for his 11-year-old around noontime, just as he was wrapping up for the day.

This is probably going to happen more as more kids try to sign on nationwide, Ferrari said. Its kind of going to get crushing.

Ferrari said his son spends his whole school day on the program, from home room at 9 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. most days. He even has band on the program, and records and uploads music so the teacher could hear it.

The Connecticut Department of Education, on Thursday, said it was not immediately aware of the situation and could not say how many districts used Google Classroom or were impacted by the service interruption.
RIO DE JANEIRO - He said self-isolation was "mass confinement." He called the novel coronavirus a "little cold." He asked, if only people older than 60 are at risk, "why close the schools?"

This was Jair Bolsonaro, leader of Latin America's largest country, calling on Brazilians to return to jobs, public spaces and commerce amid the coronavirus pandemic, contradicting not only his own health officials, but also the global consensus on how to see countries through the pandemic without a crippling loss of life.

It was a portrait of Bolsonaro isolated and unbound: Alone before the camera, attacking the media, undermining political opponents, indulging talking points he's used since the crisis began even as the disturbing reality overtook his sanguine predictions.

"Most of the media has been countervailing," he declared in a national address Tuesday. "They spread the sensation of dread, with their flagship the high number of victims in Italy. The perfect scenario to be used by the media to spread hysteria."

"In my particular case," the 65-year-old former army officer added, "with my history as an athlete, if I were infected by the virus, I wouldn't need to worry. I wouldn't feel anything or, if very affected, it would be like a little flu or little cold."

Rather than calming panic and confusion, Bolsonaro's pronouncements appear to be only fueling them. As confirmed cases and deaths mount - Brazil leads Latin America in both - fear is growing over whether the country's institutions and leaders will rise to the challenge of a historic moment, with far less room for error than wealthier countries already in the full grip of coronavirus.

The minister of health has warned the health system will collapse by the end of April. Millions of already impoverished people face weeks without income. Hunger could sweep the country. Rio and Sao Paulo clang each night with the sound of Panelacos, pot-and-pan-banging protests against Bolsonaro's dismissal of the virus.

But to Bolsonaro, things aren't that bad. He says the measures being taken by state governors to slow the disease's spread - encouraging social isolation, closing churches, malls and schools, banning large crowds - are needlessly excessive.

"It will pass shortly," he predicted Tuesday. He called on businesses and schools to reopen. "Our lives have to continue; jobs should be maintained."

Bolsonaro appears to be making a high-stakes bet, risking what public health analysts warn could be mass casualties and a ruptured health system to keep the economy running. It's much the same argument that President Donald Trump, whom Bolsonaro has often sought to emulate, is making in the United States.

"Bolsonaro seeks legitimacy by reproducing President Trump's speeches," said Fernanda Magnotta, a political scientist at the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation, a university in Sao Paulo. "But he forgets that Brazil does not have the same financial resources as the United States, and, therefore, cannot afford to say certain things. . . . We are talking about absolutely different countries."

Brazil is one of the most inequal countries in the world. More than 40 million people - nearly 20% of the population - work in the informal economy. They clean houses, sell snacks and hawk cheap food and merchandise on the beaches. The poor pack the favelas of Rio and Sao Paulo, slums where overcrowded and unsanitary conditions are expected to accelerate Brazil's outbreak. Nearly everyone in the lower classes depend on the public health care system, which in Rio was already at capacity and in turmoil even before coronavirus.

Critics say government proposals to meet the needs of society's most vulnerable during virus quarantines have either been counterproductive or woefully insufficient, weakening their chances of success.

Officials have proposed paying informal workers deprived of an income an untenable monthly sum of $40 per month. Then this week, in an overnight decree, Bolsonaro proposed allowing businesses to withhold contracted payments from their employees for up to four months, provoking a national uproar before he backed away.

Now the president is losing allies. Governors who were once supporters are going their own ways, Senate leader Davi Alcolumbre, a Bolsonaro ally stricken by covid-19, said the president was putting the country in danger.

"In this grave moment, the country needs serious leadership, responsible and committed to the life and health of the population," he said after Bolsonaro's speech Tuesday. "We consider the public position of the president today to be grave . . . attacking the containment measures against Covid-19."

"The president has missed the timing of this crisis and is now being hit by reality," said Carlos Melo, a political scientist and professor at the Institute of Teaching and Research in Sao Paulo. "He has been fighting the world by doubling down on his bet that the pandemic will not result in so many deaths after all."

Public health experts say Bolsonaro is perpetuating dangerous misinformation.

By downplaying it as a "little cold," the Brazilian Society of Epidemiologists said, Bolsonaro is giving a "false impression to the population that the social containment measures are inappropriate."

Protests are growing. Every night for more than a week, Brazilians in cities across the country have banged pots and pans from their windows and balconies - a discordant nighttime lullaby for a country growing more sick.

For Eduardo Alfradique de Oliveira, a 32-year-old in the Rio neighborhood of Copacabana, it begins every night at exactly 8:28 p.m. A neighbor begins banging from a nearby window - a call to arms - and he grabs his pot.

"This isn't a political issue," he said. "It's a human issue. He's the president of the republic. We have to protest in any form that we can. People are going to die."
The truth is that if you invest for long enough, you're going to end up with some losing stocks. But long term Beijing Urban Construction Design & Development Group Co., Limited (HKG:1599) shareholders have had a particularly rough ride in the last three year. Unfortunately, they have held through a 61% decline in the share price in that time. And over the last year the share price fell 42%, so we doubt many shareholders are delighted. Furthermore, it's down 18% in about a quarter. That's not much fun for holders. However, one could argue that the price has been influenced by the general market, which is down 18% in the same timeframe.

Check out our latest analysis for Beijing Urban Construction Design & Development Group

There is no denying that markets are sometimes efficient, but prices do not always reflect underlying business performance. One imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement.

Although the share price is down over three years, Beijing Urban Construction Design & Development Group actually managed to grow EPS by 10% per year in that time. This is quite a puzzle, and suggests there might be something temporarily buoying the share price. Or else the company was over-hyped in the past, and so its growth has disappointed.

Since the change in EPS doesn't seem to correlate with the change in share price, it's worth taking a look at other metrics.

We note that the dividend seems healthy enough, so that probably doesn't explain the share price drop. We like that Beijing Urban Construction Design & Development Group has actually grown its revenue over the last three years. But it's not clear to us why the share price is down. It might be worth diving deeper into the fundamentals, lest an opportunity goes begging.

The image below shows how earnings and revenue have tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail).

Story continues

SEHK:1599 Income Statement March 26th 2020

We're pleased to report that the CEO is remunerated more modestly than most CEOs at similarly capitalized companies. It's always worth keeping an eye on CEO pay, but a more important question is whether the company will grow earnings throughout the years. So we recommend checking out this free report showing consensus forecasts

What About Dividends?

When looking at investment returns, it is important to consider the difference between total shareholder return (TSR) and share price return. The TSR incorporates the value of any spin-offs or discounted capital raisings, along with any dividends, based on the assumption that the dividends are reinvested. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. In the case of Beijing Urban Construction Design & Development Group, it has a TSR of -56% for the last 3 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!

A Different Perspective

While the broader market lost about 20% in the twelve months, Beijing Urban Construction Design & Development Group shareholders did even worse, losing 39% (even including dividends) . However, it could simply be that the share price has been impacted by broader market jitters. It might be worth keeping an eye on the fundamentals, in case there's a good opportunity. Unfortunately, last year's performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 14% over the last half decade. Generally speaking long term share price weakness can be a bad sign, though contrarian investors might want to research the stock in hope of a turnaround. I find it very interesting to look at share price over the long term as a proxy for business performance. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. Consider for instance, the ever-present spectre of investment risk. We've identified 5 warning signs with Beijing Urban Construction Design & Development Group (at least 2 which can't be ignored) , and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

We will like Beijing Urban Construction Design & Development Group better if we see some big insider buys. While we wait, check out this free list of growing companies with considerable, recent, insider buying.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on HK exchanges.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
EDITORS NOTE: This story is part of a trio of stories in the Intelligencer examining the impact of COVID-19 on the music business in Madison County.

EDWARDSVILLE  The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a screeching halt to the concert schedules of two Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) faculty members, but they are still hitting a smooth note when it comes to helping students reach their musical goals.

Jason Swagler, director of jazz studies at SIUE, and Zebadiah Zeb Briskovich, an adjunct professor and jazz bass instructor at SIUE, are professional musicians as well as teachers.

While the temporary closing of music venues in Madison County and the St. Louis area means they cant play live, they can still work with SIUE students via the internet.

On the teaching side, weve had to move everything online and the university has pretty much gone dark, Swagler said. The whole online thing has been around for a while and some things transfer well, particularly classes that are more lecture-based. Lessons go over pretty well too, even though there is no substitute for face-to-face lessons.

A member of the SIUE faculty since 2000, Swaglers teaching duties have included private applied jazz saxophone, concert jazz band, lab band, combo, jazz history, music history, and music theory.

But even with his experience, the transition to finishing the remainder of the spring semester entirely online hasnt been easy.

Where weve had to be particularly creative is all of the ensembles and rehearsals, Swagler said. The faculty have brainstormed as to how we are going to deal with that, and there really is no efficient way at this point. You really cant expect us to play or rehearse live, even as a duet, via the internet.

For the most part, what a lot of people are doing to keep the ensembles engaged, is having listening-based assignments that might be centered on the things you might have to be aware of when youre playing with an ensemble. What were doing in the jazz area specifically for our combos, is having a weekly (online) meeting, which is a combination of lecture, talking about particular recordings and giving them assignments.

Briskovich, meanwhile, is the top call bassist in the St. Louis region on both electric and acoustic bass. He is known for his musical versatility and has been featured on national and international recordings in the genres of jazz, pop, country, rock and fusion.

That versatility has come in handy for Briskovich as he makes the transition to online lessons with SIUE students.

I primarily do one-on-one lessons, so I teach the bass lessons (online) and I have a drummer, Briskovich said. Last week we were just getting things prepared and we were using an app called Zoom, which a lot of people are using now. Its basically a meeting app and you can invite more people onto it.

For an ensemble class, we combined it with all the combos that we have and those normally meet twice a week. Now were meeting all together via Zoom and we give them assignments they can do outside of class.

While the transition to online teaching is still a work in progress, Swagler, Briskovich and other music faculty members have been able to continue teaching with at least some degree of normality.

Not being able to play live, though, has been a more difficult transition.

Swagler maintains an active performing career, playing 100 to 150 dates a year under his own name and as a freelancer.

He is a founding member of the soul-jazz group CommonWealth and has toured extensively throughout the world. His albums, Rough Stuff and Map of the World, are available through iTunes and streaming services.

On the performance side, Im fortunate at least that Im in a situation where I dont have to stress about my gigs drying up, Swagler said. Thats not my main income at this point, although years ago it was.

I talk to a lot of friends and see a lot of people on social media that are really stressed right now. Ive been surprised at how quickly musicians are hanging by a thread at this point. Were only a couple of weeks into this and people are having gigs canceled months in advance.

Swaglers recent schedule was lighter than it used to be, with one or two shows a week, but all of those events have been canceled for the next two months.

In terms of the estimated loss of income, Ive probably lost about $2,000 a month, Swagler said. For people that are trying to do it full-time, like some of our adjunct faculty, its going to hit them much harder because they play live a lot more than I do.

One of those adjunct faculty members is Briskovich, who is already feeling the pinch of the coronavirus shutdown.

My last gig was March 13 at Jazz at the Bistro (in St. Louis), but my gig the following weekend was canceled, which would have been a road trip to North Carolina with an artist from Nashville, Briskovich said.

Essentially, what this (pandemic) has done is to cut out any of our live work. Thats everything from concerts at a jazz club, festivals, fairs, wedding receptions and corporate events. For a lot of people, including myself, thats basically everything outside of teaching.

The next major event for Briskovich that hasnt already been canceled is a gig with Circus Flora in St. Louis in June. Everything through the end of May has either been postponed or canceled.

On average, Briskovich has three to five gigs a week. With all of those shows being canceled, he has some unplanned free time for the next two months but more importantly, some huge gaps in his income stream.

For a freelance musician, May is a big time for us to work because its the start of the wedding season, Briskovich said. Through the week, you may do gigs with a jazz trio for dinner parties. Hotels also have a lot of events and all of those things have dried up. Thats a difference of thousands of dollars just in the first couple of weeks.

Briskovich is among the many artists who have at least considered doing performances online, both as a way to keep playing and a way to bring in some extra income.

But bringing a group of musicians together to perform is proving to be a challenge, especially under current restrictions.

We have all been discussing the online show idea and we were scheduled to do one this weekend with a drummer friend of mine I work with in Nashville, Briskovich said. But you have to think about how doable that really was with all of us supposed to be staying at home.

That one is not going to happen, which is sad, but at the same time, it feels like the right thing to do. Everybody is trying to do their part and take the hit right now and come stronger when things get better.

Swagler believes that musicians will continue to feel the repercussions of COVID-19 and the shutdown of live music well after the quarantine has ended.

However long we have to deal with this, its really going to shake up the music industry, Swagler said. Playing live is the main stream of income for people these days because the sale of music has completely tanked.
John A. Budesky is stepping down as the leader of Goochland County to become Hanover Countys next chief administrator.

Both counties announced the move Wednesday after the Hanover Board of Supervisors made the decision to hire Budesky. He will replace Hanover County Administrator Cecil R. Rhu Harris Jr., who said in November he would retire in May.

Its truly an honor to be considered by this board for this position. Im grateful for opportunity youve provided for me. Budesky told the Hanover supervisors. Its a role I take extremely serious and with pride. Public service to the community is really a lifestyle.

Budesky has previously worked for Hanover County as a deputy administrator. His 25 years of local government experience include terms as the county administrator for New Kent County and city manager in Manassas.

Mr. Budesky has been a valued member of our leadership team and has contributed immeasurably to our success, Goochland County Chairwoman Susan Lascolette said in a news release. While we are losing an outstanding leader, I take comfort in knowing we are gaining a trusted regional partner.

We wish him the very best in his new position.
WASHINGTON  One of the thorniest debates in American politics is over health care. Now add a pandemic.

The future of Americas health insurance system has already been a huge part of the 2020 presidential race. At campaign events over the past year, voters have shared stories of cancer diagnoses, costly medications and crushing medical debt.

That was before more than 68,000 people in the United States tested positive for the coronavirus, grinding the country to a halt, upending lives from coast to coast, and postponing primary elections in many states. The virus has made the stakes, and the differing visions the two parties have for health care in America, that much clearer.

Health care was always going to be a big issue in the general election, and the coronavirus epidemic will put health care even more top of mind for voters, said Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan research organization. Sometimes these health care debates can get a bit abstract, but when its an immediate threat to the health of you and your family, it becomes a lot more real.
There should not be a shortage of cash. You are instilling the fears into the system by saying that if you handle cash it would be infectious. But, what alternative do the people have?

The UPA's economic czars C Rangarajan, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Pronab Sen on what Modi Sarkar should do now.

IMAGE: People line up to buy essential commodities from a shop during the complete lockdown announced to control the spread of coronavirus, at Bowbazar Market in Kolkata, on March 25, 2020. Photograph: Ashok Nath Dey / ANI Photo.

Economy doctors of the United Progressive Alliance government -- C Rangarajan, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, and Pronab Sen -- had played a pivotal role in fixing the 2008-09 crisis.

They say the present crisis is different from the one then and requires a different prescription.

Indivjal Dhasmana finds out what each one of them has to prescribe.

C Rangarajan

Former chairman of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council

The 2008-9 crisis was a typical economic crisis. It started with the collapse of financial institutions, then it affected the overall economic situation and it engulfed the world, including India.

Currently, external demand is falling, domestic demand is going down, and there are disruptions to the supply chain. It is here that the RBI and the government should take the measures.

A) RBI

i) Banks are going to face a situation where repayments of loans are delayed and so a certain amount of regulatory forbearance becomes necessary. This can be in terms of relaxing the rules of what constitutes non-performing assets. Income recognition norms need to be relaxed. This must apply to bank loans to all sectors and all sizes not only MSMEs but also large corporate.

ii) RBI must supply more liquidity to the banking system. It has already taken some steps. Besides open market operations, it has started long term repos. In 2008, US central bank bought corporate bonds.

That is not legally permissible in India. But banks are holding government securities. So it is possible for them through open market operations and other standard techniques to provide additional liquidity to the banking system.

iii) The policy rate needs to be brought down. But please remember that it is a double-edged sword. Some people are dependent on interest income on deposits.

B) Government

i) It must incur all expenditure necessary to combat virus. Expenditures for testing not only in the government but also private hospitals. There should be additional creation of isolation wards in hospitals, arrangement of more masks, sanitisers. It should also incur costs of importing equipment for testing.

ii) There are industries which are particularly affected -- travel, transport, hospitality industries. Some help needs to be provided to them. The government must defer dues of industries such as excise duty, license fee and others.

iii) It should ensure that business units do not retrench workers. Advice should go from the government that they should not do this. It has already done that. Certainly some people would be thrown out of the employment. There should be cash transfer. Some state governments are doing it.

The government should do what it does at the time of droughts and floods. The government in collaboration with non-government organisations should provide the basic amenities of life like food and clothing and certain other things to the people who are directly affected by the virus.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia

Former Planning Commission deputy chairman

We are facing a health emergency that also has serious economic effects. It is unprecedented and so there is no rule book.

The first priority has to be health and since there isnt yet a vaccine or curative therapy, the only way of avoiding massive infections is lockdowns and social distancing.

This will be disruptive. We do not really know how long this disruption will last. But it is bound to spill over beyond the end of March.

The economy was limping even before the crisis and it will now do much worse. The usual source of information about the global economy is the International Monetary Fund.

It has not updated its somewhat upbeat forecast made in January before the pandemic but independent analysts now project negative growth for the world for two quarters at least.

The highly adverse negative global environment will depress our performance. To this we have to add the domestic disruption from lockdowns and loss of income and uncertainty about the future  we can try to start recovering in the third quarter of 2020-21.

Health will involve more expenditure and the central government has to help the states. We also need to take steps to expand existing social security to help those in the informal sector who will lose jobs and income.

Business also needs to be supported by expanding credit and regulatory forbearance. Otherwise there will be a string of bankruptcies, which would be a system failure.

The fiscal deficit will exceed the Budget target not just because of additional health expenditure but because revenues will fall short, with gross domestic growth (GDP) growth being very low.

We can worry about bringing the deficit under control through a credible medium-term strategy once the downturn is arrested. For the present, the focus of fiscal, monetary and credit policy must be to limit damage.

Hopefully the group under the finance minister, working along with the Reserve Bank of India, will come up with concrete proposals very soon.

Pronab Sen

Former chief statistician

The 2008-09 crisis essentially originated in the financial sector but it affected the global trade -- the second part is similar to what is happening.

However, within the country we were relatively insulated then. So, most of the losses that we took in terms of GDP growth came from exports that time.

Generally, it is believed that exports constitute 20 per cent of GDP. But this is not correct, exports are in the manufacturing sector so you should look at value added and this comes to about five per cent of GDP.

What we are looking at now is that because you have restrictions on everything other than essentials you are looking at industry which are closed and constitute 15-20 per cent of GDP. So, the magnitude of the crisis is much larger on GDP now than in 2008-09. And, then second round effect is going to be there.

The kind of V-shape recovery that we had in the aftermath of the earlier crisis was because of the demand that the government pumped through fiscal measures. Now, the hit that you are essentially witnessing is the supply side problem because you are forcing the industry to shut shop.

So, demand boost measures would not really solve the problem. The only thing we can now do is to focus on the income hit that has taken place.

People who are now unable to buy essentials that we have to focus on. We are trying to prevent possible food riots.

Whatever the government may say, the requirement of cash is not going to go down -- it will go up. You and I can buy essentials through credit or debit cards, but not all. So, liquidity management should be clearly the RBIs first step.

There should not be a shortage of cash. You are instilling the fears into the system by saying that if you handle cash it would be infectious. But, what alternative do the people have?

The second order issue is force majeure. You have essentially asked industries to shut shops. The revenue flows of these industries have come to a stop. Unless these industries have large retained earnings in their balance sheets, they will simply not be able to service their debts.

It is extremely important for the RBI to go for forbearance of asset recognition, hold it off till it starts counting again. RBI should keep it open ended and not classify any assets as NPAs. It should re-set the zero date from which the clock will again start to tick.

It will lead to lots of pressure on banks because they will have to pay interests on deposit but they will not be able to earn interests on very large chunk of their assets. The RBI should then say I am the lender of the last resort, I would take care of that problem.

Eventually, this will have to come from the fiscal side, the government will have to pump in money.
Israel thanked the Indian government for the evacuation of over 500 Israeli nationals from India, in two trips, one each on Thursday and Friday. A special Air India flight was to fly 317 Israeli back home on Thursday followed by another 200 on Friday, said ambassador Ron Malka.

Today, weare evacuating 317 Israelis. In another flight tomorrow, 200 more Israelis to be evacuated. Indian govt has helped us a lot, I want to thank them; Israel took drastic measures to fight Coronavirus, the situation there is under control, he was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

The flight carrying the Israelis is to leave from New Delhis IGI Airport for Tel Aviv, however, it will not carry any passengers back on the return flight, said another news agency.

The evacuation of Israelis comes close on the heels of similar missions to fly out over a thousand foreign nationals including the Japanese and the Germans on five special flights from Delhi.

Over 150 Japanese nationals were flown out on a special flight that flew in from Tokyo, while four other flights flew out 500 people to Germany, 120 to Ukraine and 240 to two Baltic nations.

Officials said two more special flights to Frankfurt (Germany) and Austria were scheduled from the Delhi airport on Thursday to evacuate 750 people.

The United States and France are also in talks with the Indian government to evacuate their citizens from the country. Over 2000 French nationals are currently staying in India. The exact number of stranded Americans could not be ascertained, but it is believed to be in hundreds.

The US on Wednesday said it was in contact with the Indian government to help find accommodation for American citizens stranded in the country because of the Covid-19 lockdown till the time it can arrange flights to evacuate them. It also advised them to adhere to the lockdown norms during their stay in the country and said it hopes it will be able to arrange for a safe passage for them with the Indian government once the flight arrangements have been made.

The Indian government has imposed a 21-day lockdown from Tuesday midnight to prevent the spread of coronavirus, severely restricting the moments of people and transport.
Ana de Armas is best known for her appearances in War Dogs and Knives Out. Heres what the actress once said about people who doubt her ability as an actress.

Ana de Armas movies and TV roles

Ana de Armas | Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

Ana de Armas made her acting debut in the 2006 movie Virgin Rose, in which she played the role of Marie. The following year she appeared in the film Madrigal. The actress landed her first recurring role when she starred in the television series The Boarding School. She played the character Carolina Leal Solis from 2007 to 2010.

Her first English movie role was in the 2015 film Knock Knock, alongside actor Keanu Reeves. After that, she appeared in the film Anabel. She began playing bigger roles in the films War Dogs, Bladerunner 2049, and Knives Out.

Ana de Armas makes sure work isnt the center of her life

Ana de Armas in 2019 | Tasos Katopodis/WireImage

Although de Armas has enjoyed a successful acting career, work isnt her main focus. She told Vanity Fairs Sloane Crosley she prefers to talk about life and whats going on in the world. She says she is fond of her career as an actress, but she wants to live a well-rounded life.

I have great friends, and incredible things have happened for me here, but the lifestyle and the exposure and the constant business situations are not for me, de Armas told Vanity Fair. I like talking about life and art and babies and pets. Acting is what I love to do, but I cant talk about it, not all the time.

Ana de Armas message for people who doubt her ability

Ana de Armas | Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for Campari

In her Vanity Fair interview, De Armas says she doesnt have to prove herself to anyone. Rather, she is focused on proving to herself that she has the ability to complete a challenge.

For anyone who ever questions or how did I get to do this or that, f*** them, de Armas said. They will not get to spend their New Years with me. They are not the people whose opinion I should care about. They are not the people I share my happiness with. Ive never had an agenda. All I want to do is work. All I want to do is get something challenging and prove to myself that I can do it.

Ana de Armas believes in living a full life

At one point in the interview, de Armas gets up to leave. As she is leaving, Crosley says she flings a designer bag over her shoulder. When Crosley says she would be concerned about ruining the bag, de Armas simply says, Oh, you cant be. Life is for living.

Whats next for Ana de Armas

This year, de Armas is set to star in No Time to Die, alongside actor Daniel Craig. She will play the character Paloma. She is also slated to appear in Blonde and Deep Water.

Read more: How Katie Holmes Responds When People Tell Her She Cant Accomplish Something

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During a press conference held at the White House, Anthony Fauci pleads to America, especially the younger generation, to stay at home and stay safe. The infectious expert warns the young people that they are susceptible to the virus.

The states across the United States have imposed mandatory shelter-in-place and stay-at-home orders to exercise social distancing and decrease the speed of the spread of the coronavirus. However, Anthony Fauci observes the young Americans not taking these precautions seriously.

The Party Continues

Last week, a crowd was seen partying on Miami Beach. Brady Sluder from Ohio said, "If I get corona, I get corona. At the end of the day, I'm not going to let it stop me from partying."

Spring breakers at Florida beaches and Texas South Parade also violated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's orders to eliminate any gatherings of 50 people or even President Donald Trump's recommendation of limiting gatherings to 10 people.

During a live interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Fauci reached out to the young people: "Please understand that you will play a major role in ultimately containing this infection by not being careless and avoiding and listening to the recommendation of physical separation."

More on Coronavirus:

The Youth's Role

There are currently 62,627 cases of the coronavirus in the United States, making it the 3rd country with the most number of COVID-19 cases. Last week, US case count was at 4,000.

The coronavirus rapidly spread in epicenters like New York City. According to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York had more than 16,000 cases as of Monday morning. It is expected to further increase as the government pushes for rapid mass testing.

Fauci further warns the young people that they may be carriers of the virus, and may spread it to vulnerable parts of the country without showing any symptoms of the disease.

"You have a societal responsibility to protect the vulnerable, and you do that by not letting yourself get infected," he added.

40% of people infected by coronavirus are under the age of 54

Though most of the fatalities came from those above 65 years old, Fauci reiterated that the young Americans are at risk.

The coronavirus immensely infects people with pre-existing conditions or those older than 65 years old. However, a recent study suggests that 1/3 of US Coronavirus cases are from between 20 to 44 years old.

As of March 26, the United States recorded 68,489, 29% of which are between the ages of 20 and 44. The report also indicates the same age group contributes 20% of the total number of hospitalized infected patients with 12% being in the ICU.

The World Health Organization continuously updates their "advice for public" page based on new scientific findings as the pandemic evolves. It provides key measures to prevent the spread of the virus as well as what to do if you suspect yourself or anyone to be infected by coronavirus.
Gold prices in the Mumbai bullion market on March 26 fell by Rs 141 to Rs 43,283 per 10 gram.

The rate of 10 gram 22-carat gold in Mumbai was Rs 39,647 plus 3 percent GST, while 24-carat 10 gram was Rs 43,283 plus GST. The 18-carat gold quoted at Rs 32,462 plus GST in the retail market.

The major gold trading centres are shut due to lockdown announced by state governments to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease.

"Gold prices retreated from a two-week high hit in the earlier sessions as a flight to cash offset optimism around the US government agreeing on a massive stimulus package to ease the economic burden of the coronavirus pandemic," said Navneet Damani, Vice President, Motilal Oswal.

Metal prices witnessed a positive move after the stimulus announcement although but could not sustain the momentum. Market participants will keep an eye on the weekly jobs data and Q4 GDP numbers of US.

The broader trend on Comex could be $1,580-1,635 and on the domestic front, prices could hover in the range of Rs 41,400-43,000, said Damani.

The gold/silver ratio currently stands at 106.05 to 1, which means the amount of silver required to buy one ounce of gold.

Silver prices declined Rs 90 to Rs 40,810 per kg from its closing on March 25.

In the futures market, the gold rate touched an intraday high of Rs 43,000 and an intraday low of Rs 41,430 on MCX. For the April series, the yellow metal touched a low of Rs 37,530 and a high of Rs 44,961.

Gold futures for delivery in April gained Rs 708, or 1.68 percent on the MCX trading at Rs 42,925 per 10 gram in evening trade in a business turnover of 2,507 lots. Gold contracts for June delivery rose Rs 224, or 0.52 percent, at Rs 43,060 per 10 gram in a business turnover of 15,809 lots. The far month August contract was marginal down Rs 4, or 0.01 percent at Rs 42,989 in a business turnover of 426 lots.

The value of the April contract traded so far is Rs 1,807.18 crore and June contract saw the value of Rs 1,146.68 crore.

Similarly, Gold Mini contract for April was higher by Rs 81, or 0.19 percent at Rs 42,794 in a business turnover of 3,591 lots.

MCX Gold price is trading under ascending broadening wedge pattern, price remains to trade higher. Sustaining above Rs 42,200 next leg of rally would push price higher towards Rs 42,400-42,500 levels, according to Axis Securities.

Source: Axis Securities

The precious metal may test near Rs 43,000 in the next 2-3 trading sessions. On the hourly chart, the price is finding support near 60 EMA at every small correction.

The broking firm advised its clients to buy April Gold at Rs 42,200 with a stop loss at Rs 42,050 and a target of Rs 42,400.

MCX Gold has intraday support at Rs 41,900-41,645 whereas resistance is placed at Rs 42,710-42,970 levels, according to Motilal Oswal.

The brokerage firm said spot gold has support at $1,592-1575 whereas resistance is at $1,635-1,652.

At 13:02 pm (GMT), spot gold was up $9.56 at $1,626.74 an ounce in London trading.
Disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who recently tested positive for coronavirus while in prison, is reportedly "doing fine".

Weinstein is serving his 23-year term at the Wende Correctional Facility after being convicted of raping a once-aspiring actress in a New York City hotel room in 2013 and forcibly performing oral sex on former TV and film production assistant Mimi Haleyi at his apartment in 2006.

A source from the prison told Deadline that the disgraced producer has not showed any signs of severe illness so far. He was reportedly diagnosed with coronavirus on March 21.

"He is fine. He is over the hump and just mending," the source said.

Weinstein was recently shifted to high security Wende Correctional Facility from Rikers Island prison to spend his jail term. Before that, he was at Bellevue Hospital where he was being monitored for a heart condition and high blood pressure. At the hospital, the producer had gone under an angioplasty procedure.

The producer behind Oscar-winning films as "Shakespeare in Love" and "Pulp Fiction" was the first prominent Hollywood name to be ousted for his predatory behaviour in the bombshell expose by The New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey on October 5, 2017, followed by Ronan Farrow's piece in The New Yorker on October 10.

The reports sparked off the #MeToo movement, which empowered survivors of sexual assault, abuse and rape to raise their voice and hold the perpetrators accountable.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
UK Home Secretary Priti Patel is keen to close the UK borders to passengers from global COVID-19 hotspots such as the US, Iran and China, similar to moves taken by India, according to a UK media report.

The senior Indian-origin Cabinet minister feels visitors from certain countries should not be continuing to fly into the UK when the government has put the country in lockdown to halt the spread of the deadly virus, which has claimed 465 lives across Britain.

Patel is seeking cross-government support for the move that would stop the daily flights from Tehran, New York and Los Angeles and Beijing, claimed a Daily Telegraph' report.

"We are most concerned about the daily flights from the US and Iran which are coming in on a daily basis," the newspaper quoted a source as saying.

"We want to stop non-EEA (European Economic Area) nationals from flying into the UK. The EU is not a problem for the most part because their domestic lockdowns are so severe," the source said.

There are around 100,000 passengers arriving at UK airports daily, largely Britons returning home after UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab called on all British tourists and short-stay travellers to return to the UK as soon as possible while flights were still available.

Passengers showing symptoms of the coronavirus infection are not allowed to board flights in hotspot countries.

However, there are no health or temperature checks for passengers arriving in the UK. They are asked to self-isolate for 14 days on arrival but there is no means of enforcing this.

Reportedly the issue of banning flights into the UK has been raised at a Cabinet committee coordinating the UK government's response to the coronavirus pandemic but is yet to be resolved.

India had imposed a ban on flights from Iran earlier this month and has since imposed stricter measures, including airport closures, as the country went into a 21-day strict lockdown this week.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Express News Service

BHUBANESWAR: In a bid to ease heavy rush in haats and vegetable markets in Twin City which continue to witness huge congregations for purchase of essential commodities, Commissionerate Police is planning to implement measures to enforce social distancing strictly and avoid crowding.

Police are holding discussions with traders to sell essential commodities and vegetables from various school premises. They are also encouraging vendors to start home delivery of essentials.

A senior police officer said all vegetable markets in the Twin City have been witnessing heavy rush for the last few days as public made bulk purchases for next fortnight following the lockdown order to check spread of coronavirus.

We are planing to direct a couple of shopkeepers to operate from the premises of some schools to ease rush at haats and ensure social distancing among the buyers. Discussions are also on to decide whether schools premises can be designated for the purpose, said a senior police officer.

Police are holding discussions with various traders to ensure social distancing at wholesale and retail markets, including Malgodown in Cuttack. Within three days, new measures will be implemented to maintain social distancing norms strictly.

Now, focus is mainly on ensuring normalcy in essential services for which passes were being provided to exempted categories.

Meanwhile, Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) has started drawing circles outside shops selling essential commodities in haats, in a bid to practice social distancing during the lockdown period.

CMC sketches home delivery plans

Cuttack: Cuttack Municipal Corporation on Wednesday has put in place a home delivery system for the people of Millennium city. Informing this CMC Commissioner Ananya Das said We have worked out a system of home delivery of essential commodities in the city after discussion with Big Bazar, Reliance Fresh and Metto Supermarket. The system will help denizens in availing essentials at their home.

CMC has also notified name of three home delivery service providers and location of the outlets with phone numbers.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 20:48:27|Editor: Liu

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DAR ES SALAAM, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Tanzanian health authorities on Thursday gave an update on the COVID-19 outbreak in the east African nation as the number of confirmed cases hit 13.

Out of the 13 confirmed cases, eight cases were in Dar es Salaam, two cases in Arusha region, two cases in Zanzibar and one case in Kagera region, Ummy Mwalimu, the Minister of Health, told a joint news conference with Zanzibar's Minister for Health Hamad Rashid in the capital Dodoma.

"Eight out of the 13 confirmed cases were Tanzanians and five were foreigners," she said without mentioning the nationalities of the foreigners but she added that there was no local transmission of the deadly virus until Thursday.

She said to date, a total of 273 samples including 243 samples in mainland Tanzania and 30 samples in Zanzibar have been tested with results showing 12 positive imported cases and one positive of a contact of an imported case.

Mwalimu said the first confirmed case of a 46-year-old Tanzanian female has now tested negative and a process was underway to discharge her.

She said from March 23, 2020, all people arriving in Tanzania from most affected countries were subjected to 14-day mandatory isolation in selected hotels and designated facilities.

Mwalimu said since President John Magufuli ordered for the mandatory isolation, a total of 111 people who arrived in the country from March 23 were in mandatory isolation.

The minister said the government has received a consignment of medical materials donated by Chinese business magnate Jack Ma, through his Alibaba Foundation to help the country in the control and prevention of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mwalimu mentioned the donated medical materials as face masks, testing kits and protective suits.

She said the medical materials donated by Jack Ma will be distributed to designated facilities for testing and treating COVID-19 cases.

Mwalimu said the Ministry of Health continued to give protective guidelines to the general public on the virus, appealing to the public to observe the guidelines. Enditem
Since the 19th century, Egypts army has played an outsized role in governing the country and continues to do so.
Downing Street has admitted it might take 'months' to bring in thousands of ventilators for the NHS - despite fears that the disease could peak at Easter.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said 8,000 of the vital machines had been sourced, as part of efforts to bolster the health service's capacity to 16,000.

However, while many of those should be in use 'in the coming weeks', the spokesman suggested 'thousands' would take much longer.

Experts believe the NHS will need at least 30,000 of the devices to avoid huge numbers of deaths when the outbreak is at its height.

The comments came as separate efforts to get manufacturers to produce ventilators took a step forward, with the government ordering 10,000 from Dyson - despite the engineering giant never making them before.

Billionaire entrepreneur James Dyson has said 'the race is on' to get the medical machines created specifically for the pandemic.

The British firm, most famous for its vacuum cleaners, says it has a prototype tested on humans and could start delivering them from mid-April, pending 'regulatory approval'.

Dyson has released pictures of their CoVent ventilator, shown here in a design image on the side of a hospital bed, as the Government placed an order for 10,000 to fight coronavirus

James Dyson has said the 'the race is on' is to convert production to making the machine (pictured in design images) so it can help the NHS

Business minister Nadhim Zahawi was grilled on the BBC's Newsnight over ventilator numbers and when new ones would come on stream

Could Dyson REALLY make ventilators to treat coronavirus victims? Experts warn building life-saving equipment will take 'many months' British manufacturing giants such as Dyson face months of arduous preparation before they can turn their hands to building ventilators. Experts warn the appeal of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson for businesses to turn their factory production lines into ventilator conveyor belts may not be realistic. The firms may need to overhaul their entire supply chain and have to hastily train their staff to make and check the critical life-support devices. Reports suggest that British companies may soon be ordered rather than asked to manufacture ventilators much like firms 80 years ago during the Second World War. Robert Harrison, a professor of engineering at Warwick Manufacturing Group, thinks that firms like JCB and Rolls Royce could, in theory, manufacture ventilators. Mr Harrison says sourcing the parts required would be difficult, while training staff to build and test the life-saving apparatus is also fraught with difficulties. 'They have relevant skills and capabilities, but given that all the design and manufacturing related information could be supplied to them, getting the parts and the tooling to manufacture such a thing will be a significant task, perhaps taking many months,' he said. 'Today's ventilators are quite complex products  there is a computer-electronic control system with valves, regulators, filters, oxygen and exhalation sensors, flow meters. 'Because something is needed very quickly, I think it would not be a case of utilising any new technologies but taking a tried and tested design and trying to reproduce this in volume and at the required level of quality. 'As this is a life-critical piece of equipment, achieving this is a significant challenge given that, amongst other things, it requires an existing manufacturer of such equipment to provide their design and manufacturing-related know-how as an enabler.' Advertisement

The Prime Minister's official spokesman thanked businesses for an 'overwhelming response' to the drive to build the vital machines for those who are critically ill.

'Safety of those who need this vital equipment is our absolute priority. We are now testing proof of concepts from a number of suppliers in the coming days with the support of expert clinicians and health regulators,' he said.

'New orders are all dependent on machines passing regulatory tests; this is the case with Dyson. Their machines must meet the necessary safety and regulatory standards - if they do not they will not be brought or rolled out to hospitals.'

Downing Street expects 'thousands' of the 8,000 additional ventilators on their way to the NHS to be available in the 'coming weeks' with a peak in coronavirus cases looming.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: 'Of those 8,000, we would say we expect thousands of those to arrive in the coming weeks and thousands more in the pipeline to arrive in the coming months.'

Business minister Nadhim Zahawi was grilled on the BBC's Newsnight over ventilator numbers and when new ones would come on stream.

He conceded that the true figure currently available in the NHS was 8,000, despite Health Secretary Matt Hancock indicating there are 12,000.

Mr Zahawi was told that the NHS itself had contradicted ministers.

Mr Zahawi said: 'The 8,000 are already in the NHS. But the NHS is also constantly procuring.

'Which is why when you say 12,000, that is already procured in the system, but maybe not yet actually in place.'

Of the Dyson plan, Mr Zahawi said: 'They are going to make 15,000 in fact... 10,000 for the UK, 5,000 that they are going to give away, 1,000 for the UK.

'They have said they will have them in April. That is when they will have the first production through.'

Pressed on whether new ventilators from any source would be available in two weeks' time, Mr Zahawi said: 'That is exactly what we are hoping.'

Health minister Edward Argar confirmed this morning that the current tally stands at 8,000 but more 'off the shelf' machines were coming, separate to the PM's manufacturing 'challenge'.

'There are another 8,000 on top of that that are on order,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

In an email to staff, Mr Dyson said his eponymous company had designed the 'CoVent' at the request of Boris Johnson, and promised to donate 5,000 to the international relief effort.

Dyson has diverted hundreds of its engineers on to the 'CoVent' ventilator project.

But experts have claimed Dyson's machine could be 'many months away' because of the time it would take to convert its production line and train staff to make they en masse.

Other engineering consortiums - involving F1 team McLaren, Nissan and aviation specialist Meggitt - are also gearing up to start production.

British engineering giants JCB and Rolls Royce, as well as Airbus, have answered the Government's plea for help develop and build ventilators.

Mr Dyson said teams of engineers had been working solidly on the design since receiving the call from the Prime Minister 10 days ago.

The company is now waiting for the design to receive regulatory approval so manufacturing can commence.

Created in partnership with Cambridge-based science engineering firm TTP, the new ventilator had to be safe, effective, efficient in conserving oxygen and portable, Mr Dyson said.

It also had to be bed-mounted, easy to use and not require a fixed air supply.

The battery-powered machine has been designed for use in different settings including field hospitals and when patients are being transported.

In an email to staff, Mr Dyson said the device drew on technology used in the company's air purifier ranges, and was powered by a digital motor.

'The core challenge was how to design and deliver a new, sophisticated medical product in volume and in an extremely short space of time. The race is now on to get it into production,' he said.

He added: 'Ventilators are a regulated product so Dyson and TTP will be working with the Medicine and Healthcare Regulatory products Agency and the Government to ensure that the product and the manufacturing process is approved.

'We have received an initial order of 10,000 units from the UK Government which we will supply on an open-book basis. We are also looking at ways of making it available internationally.'

A spokesman for the company said the fan units needed for the device are already available in a very high volume.

The UK is going it alone to make more ventilators and protective gear for the NHS - without help from the EU.

Boris Johnson's official spokesman was asked if the Government was looking to partner with a Brussels scheme to procure more protective equipment and ventilators for the NHS, as it battles a growing number of coronavirus cases.

Today's ventilators include a computer-electronic control system with valves, regulators, filters, oxygen and exhalation sensors, flow meters.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: 'I think the short answer to that is no.'

But Number 10 stressed it is working with businesses currently manufacturing ventilators, as well as design companies, in order to increase the number of machines for those suffering from the most severe effects of coronavirus.

Dyson, the British company known for its vacuum cleaners and hand dryers, has already confirmed it will step in to produce ventilators for the NHS.

Private hospitals last week struck a deal to supply almost 1,200 ventilators to the NHS, as the UK looks to increase availability from 8,000 to 30,000.

The PM's spokesman told reporters on Wednesday: 'We have been in discussion with over 3,000 businesses who have come forward to offer support, whether that be in design, in manufacturing or delivery.

'Our focus is on supporting established UK manufacturers to increase production of already-approved machines to help them reach the NHS more quickly.

'We are testing proof of concepts from a number of suppliers with the support of a team of expert clinicians.'

Vets have also been asked to supply mechanical ventilators which are usually used on animals, with the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) writing to practices to call for donations suitable for human use.

In a Facebook post, the RCVS issued an 'urgent nationwide call for NHS-compatible ventilators and other equipment' that could be 'vital in helping frontline medical professionals combat the coronavirus pandemic'.




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A professor who shot to fame after his children crashed a live interview has delighted viewers by appearing onscreen once more  accompanied by his cheeky brood.

Professor Robert Kelly was joined by his wife and kids this morning to give an update on the coronavirus situation in South Korea, where the family are based.

The BBC News cameo comes three years after the dad-of-two became an online hit after being interrupted during a serious video commentary by his young daughter Marion, who came bounding into the room.

She was then followed by her baby brother James in a rolling bouncer, before their panicked mother burst in to pull the pair out.

The children first came to the world's attention when they joined in a live interview on the BBC in 2017 / BBC

Today, the family of four returned to the news programme  with no unexpected entrances this time.

In the clip, James  no longer a bouncing baby  waves to the nation from his mother's lap, while his older sister jumps on her dad for a cuddle.

All four members were featured in the 2020 interview / BBC

However, as their parents get into details about life under lockdown and South Korean policies, the children soon start to get bored.

As Mrs Kelly addresses the difficulties of staying at home with young children, Marion starts to pull her dad's face while James beings to chew noisily.

When Professor Kelly starts to discuss the extreme measures in place to battle Covid-19 in the country, the children get even more restless.

James bounces up and down before walking off to the back of the room, while Marion starts to make a gurgling sound which her mum dulls by clamping a hand over her mouth.

Once again Professor Kelly apologies for the interruption.

"Sorry my kids, he begins to say.

But the presenter replies: That is one thing that you can never apologise for.

It is part of the scene, he adds.

Social media rejoiced at the return of the family and shared gifs, screenshots and newly-created memes with the children in the background.

Taking to Twitter, TV critic and broadcaster Scott Bryan shared the clip and added: We needed this.

Another added a gif of the children strolling into the room in 2017.

One user said: I love her touseling [sic] her Dad's hair.

While another added: Beautiful family. Made me smile again. Well done for coming back on. Still laugh out loud at the first interview

Some couldnt believe how much the children had grown and said: Wow! Surely its not been that long since we first saw them is it?! The kids are so much older!

One user said: Thank you for that.
'A national government will help us to harness the totality of national resources to fight the war against the coronavirus most effectively,' state Lieutenant General Ashok Joshi (retd) and Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).

IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi during his speech to the nation, March 24, 2020.

The loss of nearly one crore and 80 lakh Indians during just two years ending in 1920 due to the pandemic Spanish Flu that struck towards the end of the Great War is a sobering reminder: One in 16 just perished.

That was six percent of its population then. It is frightening even to think of the worst that could happen in the densely packed sub-continent today, if matters are allowed to drift. Of course, nothing of the kind would be allowed to happen.

Pandemics are not respecters of political borders. The land mass of the sub-continent as a whole is threatened.

India has already appealed to all the nations of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation. But the scale of the pandemic is frightening, and calls for a warlike response.

Besides the direct threat of the disease, the economic cost of containing, combating and eliminating the disease would be mammoth.

Isolation of the infected, their hospitalisation, and preventive measures taken to prevent the spread of the disease would slow down the entire economic activity.

The worst sufferers would, of course, be the poor, the marginalised, and the daily wage earners.

The adverse of impact of measures taken to combat the Covid-19 on the macro-economy may well outpace the adverse effect on health.

The medical and economic impact of the pandemic, over a period of time could cause despondency, which in turn could lead to grave disorder.

It is all but obvious that the common man has not fully comprehended the threat to national security.

The continuation of protests over the CAA points in that direction. The pandemics are not respecters of beliefs, or ideologies, or religions for that matter.

IMAGE: Armed security personnel stand guard at the Charminar in Hyderabad. Photograph: ANI Photo.

In such a situation, we need to come together and fight the war on the pandemic as one.

The government would also need to muster all possible talent and build a national consensus.

Many tough measures, like curbs on movement and many other freedoms we take for granted may well have to be curbed to get over the grave danger.

The government may well have to arm itself with extraordinary powers to deal with the situation.

In such a scenario, in a democracy there can be danger of some elements playing on ideology, sectarian or other divides and weaken the national response.

The party divides and the tactics of the Opposition take away energy and time from the singular pursuit of fighting the pandemic.

Democracies in comparable situations have formed national governments to overcome some of the inbuilt weaknesses of the democratic regimes.

This approach was successfully tried out in Great Britain during World War II, so much so that ultimately, the democracy got better of a totalitarian enemy nation.

In light of the past experience and objective reality of the Indian situation, it would be a good idea for India to consider forming a national government at the Centre.

The states could also be encouraged to look for talent rather than party affiliations in forming governments. But the example would have to be set by the Union government.

In national emergencies, the national leadership in India has always given a good account of itself and the nation has never failed to respond either.

A national government will help us to harness the totality of national resources to fight the war against the coronavirus most effectively so that the carnage is avoided.

The economic measures taken could well include infrastructure projects which provide employment to the skilled and the unskilled labour, and, at the same time, give a fillip to the economic activity.

Even in older times, centuries ago, such projects were undertaken in troubled times, fundamentally to put money in the pockets of the poorest.

Published with kind permission from the Indian Defence Review, where the column was first published.
By Parisa Hafezi

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran may face a second outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, a government spokesman said on Wednesday, as the Islamic Republic banned internal travel and traditional gatherings in parks during the Persian New Year holiday period.

"Unfortunately some Iranians have ignored advice from health ministry officials and traveled during the New Year holidays ... This could cause a second wave of the coronavirus," spokesman Ali Rabiei said, according to state TV.

President Hassan Rouhani has banned any new trips between cities, Rabiei said, and "violators will be confronted legally".

The escalating outbreak in Iran has killed 2,077 people so far, health ministry official Kianush Jahanpur said on Wednesday, with 143 deaths recorded in the past 24 hours.

Officials have complained that many Iranians ignored appeals to stay at home and cancel travel plans for the Persian New Year holidays that began on March 20.

"This (new) plan is strict and it will create difficulties and restrictions for travel, and prompt people who have already traveled to return home faster," Rouhani said in a remarks carried by state television.

At a meeting telecast live, Rouhani said more restrictions would be introduced to contain the coronavirus that has infected 27,017 people nationwide. The government has so far stopped short of imposing a lockdown on Iranian cities.

The president said gatherings would also be restricted during Sizdah Bedar on April 1, a nature festival during which Iranians traditionally have picnics outdoors.

"These are tough decisions that are necessary to protect lives. All parks may be closed, and Sizdah Bedar will not be like previous years, but we have no choice but to do so," Rouhani said, adding that details of the plan will come shortly.

Authorities have called on Iranians to avoid public places and stay at home, while schools, universities, cultural and sports centers have been temporarily closed across the country.

Story continues

Rouhani said the new measures would be implemented for 15 days until April 4, when under normal circumstances schools open in Iran after the New Year holidays.

Trucks filled with disinfectant and teams of municipal workers on foot continue to spray down streets, shrines, public parks, trash bins, public toilets and markets in Qom, Tehran and other cities and towns with cases of infection, state TV showed.

Authorities announced Iran's first infections and two deaths from the virus on Feb. 19. Iranian officials, including Rouhani, have repeatedly dismissed concerns raised by many Iranians about the government's handling of the outbreak, saying all necessary measures to overcome the crisis have been taken.

(Additional reporting by Dubai newsroom; Writing by Parisa Hafezi Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Teresa Hazelwood stopped by a Dollar General store in northern Mississippi to get some chips, and soon found herself riding out a suspected tornado in the parking lot and felt it lifting her car. She gripped the steering wheel and prayed.

I just prayed to God, oh please God help me, Hazelwood recalled after Tuesdays storm. And things was going every which way. I could feel the vehicle move. It lifted, it moved me out of the parking spot. And I just kept praying please God help me.

The suspected tornado heavily damaged the store in Tishomingo and other structures in northern Mississippi and Alabama as a severe storm system crossed the Deep South, authorities said.

Tishomingo Police Chief Mike Kemp told WTVA minor injuries were reported in that community.

National Weather Service meteorologist Mike Johnson said there were reports of widespread tree damage and some structural damage in Tishomingo County, which is in northern Mississippi abutting the Alabama border.

He said the tornado touched down about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Its a pretty compact system that produced the tornado and its moved into parts of Alabama and Tennessee, Johnson said.

The National Weather Service had issued multiple tornado warnings through the early evening, including a tornado emergency for an area of northwest Alabama.

The National Weather Service in Huntsville tweeted shortly before 6 p.m. that TORNADO HAS BEEN REPORTED ON THE GROUND and told residents in an area of Colbert County in north Alabama to seek shelter. That county also abuts the Mississippi state line.

The weather service also said there were preliminary reports of falling debris in the area.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Windstorm Alabama Mississippi
While airlines and other businesses are included in the legislation, Somehow the Postal Service is not worthy of any financial assistance in the midst of this crisis, Connolly said. Its to me an outrageous situation. We could have completely returned the Postal Service to solvency and got it started back on its feet and guaranteed continued uninterrupted service to the American people during this crisis and beyond. Weve decided were going to help well-healed industries that have connections, and were going to let the Postal Service hang in the wind.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 06:10:20|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Two UN officials on Thursday expressed grave concern over the increase in stigma, hate speech and hate crimes targeting individuals and groups wrongfully vilified and perceived to be associated with COVID-19.

"We are all facing the same enemy, one which is invisible, rapidly advancing, taking lives away and causing havoc indiscriminately. But allowing it to tear apart the fabric of our societies is perhaps one of the most serious upheavals that the COVID-19 pandemic is inflicting upon our world," said Miguel Moratinos, the high representative for the UN Alliance of Civilizations, and Adama Dieng, special advisor to the UN secretary-general on genocide prevention, in a joint statement.

As much as the pandemic poses a global threat to peace and security, it also presents an opportunity to demonstrate unity and join hands, they said. "As the pandemic affects everybody, we should all be reminded of our common humanity, and that our lives are interconnected and our survival depends on reciprocal support."

More than ever, it is imperative to stand up against stigma, hate speech, xenophobia, racism and all forms of discrimination that are an affront to universal human values and rights, they said.

Beating the pandemic involves effective international cooperation and implementing an all-of-society approach, one that includes national governments, civil society, media, private companies, faith actors, youth and women, they said. "If we want societies to be inclusive, cohesive and peaceful, this is the time to foster an alliance between cultures, civilizations, and people."
Species that live in the world's oceans are fleeing towards the Earth's poles in a desperate attempt to escape rising water temperatures closer to the equator.

Researchers studied more than 300 species  including plants, mammals and birds  to see where the majority of species are living today.

The study looked at more than 100 years worth of data and discovered that populations are now blossoming closer to the poles.

At the same time, population numbers of marine creatures and plants are dwindling near the equator, as they struggle to adapt to warmer waters.

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Scientists assessed more than 100 years of data looking at where populations of various marine life is thriving. They found animals are now favouring the polar ends of their natural ranges. Pictured, diagram showing the range of two species (discs) and the sites at different latitudes where data on population numbers was gathered

All animals and plants that live in the oceans have a natural range in which they have adapted to survive in.

These often span vast areas, with some species having a range of hundreds of miles.

But when academics from the universities of Bristol and Exeter studied the oceanic life, they found a shift in where the populations were thriving in favour of the polar ends of these ranges.

The team believes the study, published in the journal Current Biology, indicates rising temperatures have led to widespread changes in population size and distribution of marine species.

Martin Genner, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Bristol and senior study author, said: 'The main surprise is how pervasive the effects were.

'We found the same trend across all groups of marine life we looked at, from plankton to marine invertebrates, and from fish to seabirds.'

The world's oceans have warmed by an average of 1C since pre-industrial times, the researchers said.

To find out how this temperature change has affected marine life, the team reviewed 540 published records of species abundance changes.

This allowed them to gauge occupancy trends over time and show the latitude favoured by species.

They found certain species to be thriving in the cooler regions of the oceans, with rising temperatures opening up previously inaccessible habitats.

For example, the researchers said, the populations of Adelie penguins was declining near the equator but increasing towards the polar regions.

They found conditions of habitats near the equator were too warm to tolerate.

The study found certain species are thriving in the cooler regions of the oceans, with rising temperatures opening up previously inaccessible habitats. For example, the researchers said, the populations of Adelie penguins (pictured) is declining in abundance near the equator but increasing in abundance towards the polar regions

Louise Rutterford, a study author based at both Exeter and Bristol universities, said: 'Some marine species appear to benefit from climate change, particularly some populations at the poleward limits that are now able to thrive.

'Meanwhile, some marine life suffers as it is not able to adapt fast enough to survive warming, and this is most noticeable in populations nearer the equator.

'This is concerning as both increasing and decreasing abundances may have harmful knock-on effects for the wider ecosystem.'

Changes in distribution are likely to continue, however, as marine warming is predicted to increase up to 1.5C over pre-industrial levels by 2050.

Mr Genner said: 'This matters because it means that climate change is not only leading to abundance changes, but intrinsically affecting the performance of species locally.

'We see species such as Emperor penguin becoming less abundant as water becomes too warm at their equatorward edge, and we see some fish such as European seabass thriving at their poleward edge where historically they were uncommon.'

A separate study yesterday revealed that rising temperatures were enabling British wildflowers, including rare southern marsh and bee orchids, to expand further north in the UK.

Examples from the citizens' National Plant Monitoring Scheme included the southern marsh-orchid, a tall plant formerly restricted to damp grasslands in the southern UK, that has been been spotted as far north as Newcastle upon Tyne.

As well as southern plants finding new habitats in northern climates, there is concern for northern plants that have nowhere else to go, according to wildlife charity Plantlife which co-ordinated the survey's volunteers.

They includes Arctic and alpine species which cannot go further up the mountains, such as Highland saxifrage.
New Delhi, March 26 : The 21-day nationwide lockdown gives India an opportunity to flatten the new coronavirus curve, especially if widespread testing is carried out during this period -- the absence of which will increase chances of resurgence of cases after the lockdown period is over, leading health experts warned on Thursday.

Total number of coronavirus cases in the country rose to 649 from 606 a day before, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said on Thursday. The number of cases were just about half four days ago.

"The number of cases doubling in a few days is not actually a surprise because these people acquired infection sometime in the past before the lockdown. They are developing symptoms and coming to light now," Professor Vivekanand Jha, Executive Director at The George Institute for Global Health in India told IANS.

In fact, the number of cases are likely to continue to increase in the next one or two weeks at least.

"Because the incubation period is two weeks, if someone got infected, for example the day before yesterday, that patient may develop symptoms even after two weeks," Jha informed.

"The lockdown will obviously flatten the curve somewhat, but there is a risk of resurgence of the disease. Or the curve will go up again unless in the meantime we strengthen our healthcare system, both in terms of providing more testing, but also in terms of augmenting our hospitals so that if cases appear later on, the hospitals will be able to provide appropriate care to those people," he emphasised.

There are 29 private laboratory chains, accredited by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for conducting tests for novel coronavirus, Joint Secretary of Health Ministry Lav Agarwal told reporters on Wednesday.

These labs have 16,000 collection centres across the country, where at least 12,000 tests can be conducted per day.

Besides private labs, there are 119 government laboratories approved by ICMR, of which 104 are operational for testing COVID-19 and 15 are in the process of being functional according to ICMR data put out on March 24.

Mugdha Tapdiya, Associate Consultant, Internal Medicine, Fortis Hospital Vasant Kunj in New Delhi also agreed that "only lockdown is not enough" to flatten the coronavirus curve in India.

"We have to lead by the examples of South Korea and Japan, where they have managed to flatten the curve with wider testing and lockdown with self-discipline. There are lots of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic people (without a history of travel) at this time who are sitting at home with the elder family members," Tapdiya said.

"Once they become sick they will never be tested because there is no travel history which is a huge mistake. Test, treat, isolate should be the norm. Larger bounce back will be staring at us once the lock down is over if we do not test more and allow positive people to spread undiagnosed infection in community," Tapdiya added.

According to the revised strategy of testing for COVID-19 infection, issued by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare last week, all asymptomatic individuals who have undertaken international travel in the last 14 days, should stay in home quarantine for at least 14 days.

They should be tested only if they become symptomatic (fever, cough, difficulty in breathing). Besides, all family members living with a confirmed case should be home quarantined.

The revised strategy further stated that all symptomatic contacts of laboratory confirmed cases will be tested, all symptomatic health care workers will also be tested. All hospitalised patients with severe acute respiratory Illness (fever and cough and/or shortness of breath) will also be tested for novel coronavirus.

What is needed now is more effective isolation of infected people and continued education and communication to raise awareness among people, said Navin Kumar, Head of Clinical Microbiology & Infection Prevention, Manipal Hospitals, Dwarka, New Delhi.

Meanwhile, according to the Medical Technology Association of India (MTaI), an association of research-based medical technology companies, in the current situation, quick movement of medical equipment is paramount for timely diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of patients suffering from COVID-19 and other critical ailments.

However, manufacturers and distributors of crucial medical devices are facing several logistical challenges due to restrictions on inbound passenger flights and as well as movement of vehicles between cities and states, it added.

The lockdown is majorly affecting courier agencies like Bluedart, SafeExpress, and FedEx which are not allowed to move freely even while carrying medical devices. If the logjam continues, hospitals could face an acute scarcity of medical devices very soon, MTaI said in a statement on Thursday.

(Gokul Bhagabati can be contacted at gokul.b@ians.in)

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-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Tourists in Tasmania have been ordered to go home by the state's premier, who has also implored people not to visit the island amid the coronavirus pandemic.

People staying in hotels, hostels, bed and breakfasts, campsites and boarding houses have until midnight on Sunday to leave their accommodation, the state government has announced.

'I'm sorry to say that, but go home,' Premier Peter Gutwein told reporters on Thursday.

'Unfortunately there will be some dislocation for people but I make no apologies for working hard to keep Tasmanians safe.'

The state has recorded 42 coronavirus cases, the latest six confirmed on Wednesday night, but there remains no evidence of community transmission.

Tourists staying in hotels, hostels, campsites and boarding houses in Tasmania have until midnight on Sunday to leave their accommodation (Pictured: passengers at Hobart Airport)

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

Mr Gutwein also implored non-essential visitors to stay away, noting a mandatory 14-day quarantine period on arrival for anyone not considered essential.

'We're built on tourism so it hurts me to say that but do not come and put Tasmanians at risk,' he said.

'We're an island and we are unique in that regard. We have used our island state as an advantage.'

Tasmania will more than double its coronavirus economic stimulus package to $1 billion after an initial $420 million spend last week

'It is unprecedented. Never before has the state had to take steps of this magnitude,' Mr Gutwein said.

'The health, wellbeing and safety is the government's number one priority but we need to ensure we underpin our economy and community.'

Mr Gutwein said a hard lockdown was possible if people ignored current advice.

Tasmania has not ruled out a hard lockdown if people ignore current advice (woman going through quarantine check at Hobart Airport)

A spokesperson for the premier told Daily Mail Australia if people refuse to leave the state 'authorities would be notified and they would be dealt through the state controller.'

Tasmanian authorities were unable to reveal what the punishment would be for tourists refusing to leave

In the state, a maximum fine for disobeying rules under the Public Health Act is $8,400.

Three of the 42 confirmed cases recently travelled from overseas, two were on cruise ships and one is a close contact of a previously confirmed case.

Public Health Director Mark Veitch said 240 people linked to cruise ships are in self-isolation and are being monitored.

Another 80 people, who are close contacts of cases, are also in self-isolation.
The Senate passed an unparalleled $2.2 trillion economic coronavirus rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems engulfed by the pandemic

Washington: The Senate late Wednesday passed an unparalleled $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems engulfed by the coronavirus pandemic.

The unanimous vote came despite misgivings on both sides about whether it goes too far or not far enough and capped days of difficult negotiations as Washington confronted a national challenge unlike it has ever faced.

The 880-page measure is the largest economic relief bill in US history. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared somber and exhausted as he announced the vote  and he released senators from Washington until April 20, though he promised to recall them if needed.

Pray for one another, for all of our families, and for our country," said McConnell, R-Ky.

The legislation now before us now is historic because it is meant to match a historic crisis,"said Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Our health care system is not prepared to care for the sick. Our workers are without work. Our businesses cannot do business. Our factories lie idle. The gears of the American economy have ground to a halt."

The package is intended as relief for an economy spiraling into recession or worse and a nation facing a grim toll from an infection that's killed more than 21,000 people worldwide. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, asked how long the aid would keep the economy afloat, said: Weve anticipated three months. Hopefully, we wont need this for three months."

Underscoring the effort's sheer magnitude, the bill finances a response with a price tag that equals half the size of the entire $4 trillion-plus annual federal budget. The $2.2 trillion estimate is the White House's best guess.

Insistently optimistic, President Donald Trump said of the greatest public-health emergency in anyone's lifetime, "I dont think its going to end up being such a rough patch" and anticipated the economy soaring like a rocket ship when it's over.

The government has temporarily shut down the economy because of this disease, and the government must help those who are hurt by it, said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

The drive by leaders to speed the bill through the Senate was slowed as four conservative Republican senators from states who economies are dominated by low-wage jobs demanded changes, saying the legislation as written might give workers like store clerks incentives to stay on unemployment instead of returning return to their jobs since they may earn more money if they're laid off than if they're working. They settled for a failed vote to modify the provision.

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Other objections floated in from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has become a prominent Democrat on the national scene as the country battles the pandemic. Cuomo, whose state has seen more deaths from the pandemic than any other, said, I'm telling you, these numbers don't work."

Ardent liberals like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were restless as well, but top Washington Democrats assured them that a additional coronavirus legislation will follow this spring and signaled that delaying the pending measure would be foolish.

The sprawling measure is the third coronavirus response bill produced by Congress and by far the largest. It builds on efforts focused on vaccines and emergency response, sick and family medical leave for workers, and food aid.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., swung behind the bipartisan agreement, saying it takes us a long way down the road in meeting the needs of the American people."

Senate passage delivered the legislation to the Democratic-controlled House, which is expected to pass it Friday. House members are scattered around the country. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the measure would pass by voice vote without lawmakers having to return to Washington.

The package would give direct payments to most Americans, expand unemployment benefits and provide a $367 billion program for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home.

It includes a controversial, heavily negotiated $500 billion program for guaranteed, subsidized loans to larger industries, including airlines. Hospitals would get significant help as well.

Six days of arduous talks produced the bill, creating tensions among Congress' top leaders, who each took care to tend to party politics as they maneuvered and battled over crafting the legislation. But failure was not an option  nor was starting over  which permitted both sides to include their priorities.

This is a proud moment for the United States Senate and the country and were going to win this battle, McConnell told reporters afterward. We've pivoted from impeachment to 100 to nothing on this rescue package ... this is about as flawless as you could possibly be. The vote actually was 96-0 because several members missed the vote out of concerns they have been exposed to the virus.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has tested positive for it, while GOP Whip John Thune returned to South Dakota on Wednesday after feeling ill.

The bill would provide one-time direct payments to Americans of $1,200 per adult making up to $75,000 a year, and $2,400 to a married couple making up to $150,000, with $500 payments per child.

A huge cash infusion for hospitals expecting a flood of COVID-19 patients grew during the talks to an estimated $130 billion. Another $45 billion would fund additional relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency for local response efforts and community services.

Democrats said the package would help replace the salaries of furloughed workers for four months, rather than the three months first proposed. Furloughed workers would get whatever amount a state usually provides for unemployment, plus a $600 per week add-on, with gig workers like Uber drivers covered for the first time.

Businesses controlled by members of Congress and top administration officials  including Trump and his immediate family members  would be ineligible for the bill's business assistance.

Schumer boasted of negotiating wins for transit systems, hospitals and cash-hungry state governments that were cemented after Democrats blocked the measure in votes held Sunday and Monday.

But Cuomo said the Senate package would send less than $4 billion to New York, far short of his estimate that the crisis will cost his state up to $15 billion over the next year. More than 280 New Yorkers have died from the virus, a death toll more than double that of any other state.

Still, Pelosi said the need for more money for New York is no reason to stop the step we are taking.

Pelosi was a force behind $400 million in grants to states to expand voting by mail and other steps that Democrats billed as making voting safer but Republican critics called political opportunism. The package also contains $15.5 billion more for a surge in demand for food stamps as part of a massive $330 billion title for agency operations.

State and local authorities would receive up to $150 billion in grants to fight the virus, care for their residents and provide basic services.

Republicans won inclusion of an employee retention tax credit that's estimated to provide $50 billion to companies that retain employees on payroll and cover 50 percent of workers' paycheck up to $10,000. Companies would also be able to defer payment of the 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax.

A companion appropriations package ballooned as well, growing from a $46 billion White House proposal to $330 billion, which dwarfs earlier disasters  including Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy combined.

Europe is enacting its own economic recovery packages, with huge amounts of credit guarantees, government spending and other support.

Germany, Europe's biggest economy, has agreed to commit over 1 trillion euros ($1.1 trillion) in fiscal stimulus and support  roughly 30 percent of that nation's entire annual output. France, Spain and Italy have launched similar programs.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death.

In the United States, more than 69,000 people have been sickened and more than 1,000 have died.
France, the rest of the eurozone, and the UK will join the Irish economy in slumping into recession this year, while the US is already shedding millions of jobs amid the Covid-19 storm, economists have warned.

The eurozone and the UK will face contractions of 2% in 2020, before "a gradual rebound" of potentially more than 3% next year, according to S&P Global Ratings.

"Risks to our forecast are skewed to the downside: The pandemic might last longer and be more widespread than we currently envisage," Europe chief economist Sylvain Broyer at the ratings firm said.

"The size and kind of policy responses countries take now are key to avoiding permanent economic damage later," he said.

The figures compare with the slump of over 7% in Irish GDP this year projected by the Economic and Social Research Institute, in its latest report.

S&P warns that Europes slump could get a lot worse, if the health crisis extends for a long period.

"Risks are still to the downside, as the pandemic might last longer and be more widespread than we currently envisage," Mr Broyer said.

"For example, we estimate a lockdown of four months could lower eurozone GDP by up to 10% this year," he said.

On the French economy, economists at Capital Economics in London cite figures from the French statistics office that show activity "is currently running a whopping 35% below normal".

"If so, the downturn in France, and presumably elsewhere, may be even bigger than we had thought," said Capital Economics.

The French statistics are based on early information from electricity demand, railway travel and payment card transactions, in recent weeks.

In Ireland, the Institute of Directors (IoD) said most of its business bosses believe the pandemic will threaten their companies.

"In the space of just a few months, the world as we know it has changed utterly - business leaders are finding themselves in unchartered waters, having to take very difficult decisions to protect the livelihoods of their staff and the immediate business continuity of their organisations in the short term," said IoD chief executive Maura Quinn.

Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at online broker IG, said that US stock markets were saved in the latest session as Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell settled investors nerves with promises the US central bank would take even more action to strengthen the US economy defences from the fallout of the pandemic.

The S&P index survived the scare of the number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits surging to 3.28 million in a week.

The promise of the US government spending $2 trillion (1.85bn) to fight the economic fallout from Covid-19 will help soften the effects on the US economy, investors believe.

In Ireland, the Iseq index rose strongly, by 4.5%, as the shares in AIB roared back, and surged by 17% in the session.

AIB and Bank of Ireland have been among the leading casualties of the stock market rout in the last two weeks.

Bank of Ireland shares ended 6% higher in the session.

Other irish companies exposed to the effects of the lockdown, including forecourt fuels firm Applegreen, hotelier Dalata, and Swiss-Irish food producer Aryzta fared badly, however.
The U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort is shown docked at the Port of Miami following a tour of the vessel by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence in Miami, Florida, on June 18, 2019. (Joe Skipper/Getty Images)

Navy Hospital Ship to Arrive in NYC on Monday

A U.S. Navy hospital ship will arrive in New York City on Monday to assist the area as it handles the nations largest outbreak of the CCP virus.

President Donald Trump made the announcement on March 26 during the daily coronavirus briefing at the White House.

The incredible naval hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, which is incredible actually when you see it inside, will be underway to New York City on Saturday, Trump said.

The ship was originally scheduled to depart to the city in mid-April, but the Pentagon sped up preparation in order to deploy the vessel sooner.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo estimates that the city and the state will run short on hospital beds due to the spread of the virus. The Comfort has 1,000 beds and will be fully stocked with supplies when it deploys from Virginia.

They did the maintenance quickly and it was going to be there for quite a while longer, another three or four weeks. It should be arriving, I told the governor twenty minutes agoGovernor Cuomothat the ship will be arriving in New York Harbor on Monday.

New York has been hit the hardest by the coronavirus outbreak. The states confirmed cases surged to over 30,000 on March 26. New York City has the majority of the states cases. The CCP virus has so far killed 192 people in the city.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus, which first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, to spread throughout China before it was transmitted worldwide.

Trump said he would bid the ship farewell as it departs for New York from Norfolk, Virginia.

I think Im going to go out and Ill go kiss it goodbye, Trump said.

Trump said he had informed Cuomo about the ships estimated arrival time 20 minutes prior to the coronavirus briefing.

On a call with governors earlier in the day, Trump stressed the need to reopen businesses and to recognize regional differences in the viruss impact. The White House is developing guidelines for state and local officials on whether to maintain, relax, or tighten social distancing and other anti-contagion measures. The messages are in line with Trumps vision of starting to open up the country by Easter.

We all have to get smart, Trump said on the call. We have to open up our country.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
An Egyptian criminal court in the Nile Delta town of Damanhour sentenced five defendants to death for vandalising a gas pipeline last year, leading to several deaths.

Nine people were killed and almost a dozen injured in a fire in November 2019 in Itay El-Baroud in Beheira governorate that resulted from a gas leak after an attempt to steal gas from a pipeline.

The court on Thursday also sentenced five others to life in prison for their involvement in the attack.

Late last month, the court referred the case of those who received the death sentences to the grand mufti, Egypts top Muslim religious authority, to give his opinion on the sentence .

Under Egyptian law, the muftis opinion is not legally binding.

Thursdays sentences can still be appealed before an appeals court.

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A cruise ship with 77 sick people aboard is reportedly heading to Florida and is expected to dock next week. As per reports, the cruise released a statement and informed that at least 30 guests and 47 crew aboard Holland America's Zaandam ship have been reportedly experiencing flu-like symptoms. All 1,243 guests have been asked to self-isolate themselves by staying in their rooms as the ship sails to Fort Lauderdale, where it is expected to dock on March 30.

No testing facilities on the ship

Initially, the ship was granted permission to disembark in Punta Arenas, Chile, but it was later rescinded. Testing kit for coronavirus is not available on the ship, the cruise reportedly said in a statement. The statement also read that since its flu season, and COVID-19 testing is not available onboard causing it difficult for the people to get examined and determine the cause of these elevated cases at this time.

Read: Mexico Will Receive Cruise Ships Amid Coronavirus, But "individually Fumigate" Passengers

Read: Cruise Ship Passengers Bused To Flights Out Of Honolulu

All ports along the Zaandam's route are closed to cruise ships. Holland America deployed a second ship -- Rotterdam -- with extra supplies, staff, COVID-19 test kits, and other support as needed to meet the Zandaam on March 26 at night. The ship was at anchor for several days in Valparaiso, Chile, while it took on more provisions and fuel before departing for Fort Lauderdale.

Safety of passengers

Zaandam departed Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 7, prior to Holland America's March 17 decision to suspend its global cruise operations for 30 days. The voyage was scheduled to end in San Antonio, Chile, on March 21. No one has been off the ship since March 14 in Punta Arenas, Chile, where guests were initially told they could disembark for flights but were not permitted to. However, the ship is still trying to secure permission to enter the Panama Canal and looking into different options.

The cruise also reportedly said in the statement that they are adhering to all the safety norms prepared to protect the people and curb the spread of the disease if anyone is affected. How the safety of each passenger is the real motto of the cruise and the way they are catering it is commendable. Currently, there are 586 crew members on board. Those not required to operate the ship are in quarantine while those who are needed to maintain operations are self-isolating when not working. Meanwhile, those who are experiencing symptoms have been isolated and their close contacts are in quarantine.

Read: Coronavirus Cases In Australia Continue To Rise, Cruise Denied Entry

Read: Cruise Ship Passengers Wait For Portugal Inspection
Bad information about the novel coronavirus appears to be contagious. But there are some steps you can take to verify information on social media before you share it.

The temptation to share unverified but alarming information is understandable. Many of the people who share hoaxes don't do it to mislead; they think they're sharing valuable information with their friends and family. But it's easy to hit "retweet" on something that's just not true. And false information isn't helpful to anyone.

CORONAVIRUS LIVE UPDATES: Pandemic in early stages, experts say

"We're not just fighting an epidemic; we're fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous," said World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Feb. 15.

For starters, if someone high up in the government or military was attempting to communicate vital information to American citizens, they probably wouldn't do it with a rambling screenshot from the Notes app. A source in Homeland Security is not trying to get the word out about impending martial law, and there is no "high-ranking military friend in D.C." passing along a tip about the president using the Stafford Act for a nationwide quarantine.

Another hot topic: ibuprofen. The French doctor who originally advised people not to take Tylenol probably meant well, but medical experts around the world say there's no evidence ibuprofen is linked to a higher risk of COVID-19 infection, nor has it been linked to increased complications from the disease.

President Trump, no stranger to repeating rumors that would reflect well on him, has repeatedly claimed that certain existing drugs could treat coronavirus. Elon Musk shared that optimism. But while scientists are working to test the efficacy of the malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in fighting coronavirus, there's currently no reliable, published, peer-reviewed evidence on the subject.

LATEST: What you need to know today about the virus outbreak

The Food and Drug Administration has not approved either drug to treat the disease, and no one should be attempting to self-medicate with it. Already, this bad information has had tragic repercussions: A man reportedly died after ingesting chloroquine at home in Arizona in hopes of preventing coronavirus.

So take a beat before you retweet. Here are some ways to verify what you're reading before you share.

Verify the account that's posting the information.

Check the account. Are they verified on Twitter or Facebook? That lends more credibility to what they say. If they aren't verified, do more checking.

Check the photo on the account. Does it seem like a real person, or is it a photo of a celebrity or something generic, like a sunset or a flower? You can use reverse Google Image search to see if the photo was taken from elsewhere on the internet.

Check the age of the account and how many followers it has. A brand-new account with a dozen followers is unlikely to be one that's breaking major national news.

A NEW ROUTINE: Coronavirus show what Houstonians take for granted

Scroll back through some older posts  has the account always shared news, or was it a meme account a month ago?

Take note of how the news is being presented to you  just in the tweet? Is there a link to a longer story somewhere? Again: A screenshot of an email, text message, Google Doc or Notes app is unlikely to be good information.

Check the source. Is the account attributing the information to an organization, a politician, a news outlet, or "a friend of a friend"? Good information will have a reputable name to back it up.

Verify the site the information is coming from.

If there's a link, click it. Does it go where you expected it to go? Check the URL  are you really on the site you think you're on, or does something seem off? Look for strange spelling and anything weird in the web address.

A website you've never heard of is unlikely to be the first and only source for major breaking news, no matter how slick the layout looks.

Check the date on the article. Is it new or old?

Check the byline. Is it a real name? Click through to the bio page  does it sound real? Does the author have social media accounts where you can verify that he or she is an actual reporter? This is another opportunity to use Google Image reverse search if there's a photo.

Verify the information itself.

The best way to verify a piece of information is to see whether reliable news outlets have reported it. As news organizations, there is a burden on us to do more digging to verify things before we share them on social media. We don't always get it right, but there's a better chance something tweeted from your local newspaper is true than something from a completely random person with no accountability to anyone.

Read the story or post. Does the wording sound off  maybe like it was run through Google Translate a few times? That's one way fake news websites rip off articles from legitimate sites.

Trust your gut. If there's a nagging voice in the back of your head saying, "Eh, I'm not entirely sure this is true," or "Wow, that sounds kind of far-fetched, but who knows?" it's better to hold off on sharing it until you can verify.

If you see someone on social media sharing information that's not true, try to be gentle when pointing it out. Correcting false information can backfire. People are prone to be defensive and to double down when they're challenged. We're all a little tense right now. Be kind. And don't forget to wash your hands.



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NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / In June, Thompson Education Center's CEO, Sherry Li, attended the Liberty High School Senior Assembly. Being a member of the Liberty Rotary Community, Ms. Li donated and presented scholarships to distinguished students. The Assembly was very well attended, with the Board of Education, Administration and Staff of Liberty Central Schools being present and who extended their best wishes to the students who have received awards as well as congratulated all the fellow graduating students for a job well done. Thompson Education Center is a project that plans to create a high-end education community in Sullivan County, Town of Thompson, covering 575 acres.

Thompson Education Center would work with accredited colleges and will include a Business School, a School of Film & Arts as well as programs in the following industries: Nursing/Medical Training, Culinary Arts, High School Equivalency and Executive and Vocational Training and related ancillary facilities. After completion of Phase 1, the project will include 4 classroom buildings, student dormitories, student townhouses, and a student center.

Currently, Thompson Education Center has entered into agreements and signed letter of interests with high schools, colleges, education institutions and systems both in U.S. and China, each of them will provide a great number of students to the center. Also, TEC has already been working with several U.S. accredited colleges on Undergraduate Programs and ESL Programs.

Economic growth within the local community is expected through the development of Thompson Education Center. Numerous construction professional firms have been retained for the project such as architects, engineers, land-use lawyers, local contractors. An increasing number of jobs will be created throughout the entire project, such as real estate agents, professors, instructors, librarian, cleaning, and maintenance workers amongst many others.

Thompson Education Center has already gained much support from local government agencies, small businesses and individuals. The center will continue working closely with Sullivan County Partnership, Chamber of Commerce, Visitors Association amongst others to bring more investors and visitors to Sullivan County to strengthen the economy. Thompson Education Center is proud to be a community member and eager to support its community and children. The center has been dedicated to delivering fresh fruits, vegetables, and meat to the Boys & Girls Club/Town of Wallkill, NY since late 2015.

Thompson Education Center - Dedicated to Education, Communications, and Business Opportunities: http://thompsoneducationcenterinitiatives.com/

Thompson Education Center and Sherry Li Appreciated by Catskill Regional Medical Center Foundation: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/thompson-education-center-sherry-li-004500936.html

Thompson Education Center and Sherry Li Invited to the Opening Ceremony of North America-China Dragon Business Association: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/thompson-education-center-sherry-li-034000392.html

Contact Information:

Thompson Education Center

Sherry Li

212-845-9519

ccoanys@yahoo.com

SOURCE: Thompson Education Center

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/582696/Thompson-Education-Centers-Sherry-Li-Presents-Scholarships-to-Liberty-High-Students
Sir Patrick Stewart has been entertaining fans for decades. Truly, the 79-year-old actor has worked within just about every genre. From theater to television and film, Stewart has played so many popular characters and touched so many lives. He himself has become a living legend.

Yet, now Hollywood has officially more or less shut down. So many film and television productions are on hold due to the coronavirus. Since celebrities are staying in, theyre taking to social media to connect with fans and express their creativity in other ways. But no one has done it like Stewart.

Patrick Stewart visits the SiriusXM Hollywood Studio | Emma McIntyre/Getty Images

Patrick Stewart is back in his most famous role

Before we get to how Stewart is spending his time in isolation, its worth noting what hes been up to work-wise. Of course, the actor bid adieu to Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men series with 2017s Logan. But he only recently revisited his other iconic sci-fi role: Star Treks Jean-Luc Picard.

The actor played the starship captain for seven seasons on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Stewart then reprised the role for several big-screen adventures. But he hadnt played Captain Picard for nearly 20 years when CBS All Access launched its new series, Star Trek: Picard.

The show only premiered on the streaming service in December 2019 but was already renewed for season 2 before it premiered. And because Star Trek: Picard already wrapped its first batch of episodes, the production  as of yet  hasnt been affected the coronavirus pandemic.

Now hes found a way to tap into his Shakespearean roots

In recent years, fans havent just been enamored with Stewarts work. The actor has fostered an impressive social media following. Frequently, hell let followers into his personal life, even sharing photos of his famous friendship with X-Men co-star Ian McKellen. So, of course, Stewart found the perfect way to spend his self-quarantine during this pandemic.

After tweeting a video of himself reciting William Shakespeares Sonnet 116, Stewart was overwhelmed by the response from fans. So he began posting similar videos each day during his self-quarantine. Shakespeare famously published a collection of 154 sonnets in 1609. So Stewart has his work cut out for him. Beginning on March 22, he started with Sonnet 1.

When I was a child in the 1940s, my mother would cut up slices of fruit for me (there wasnt much), Stewart wrote as he began this Shakespearean adventure, and as she put it in front of me, she would say, An apple a day keeps the doctor away. How about A sonnet a day keeps the doctor away?

Fans are loving how the actor is spending his self-quarantine

Of course, fans  some of whom are probably more familiar with Stewarts TV and film work than his extensive Shakespearean run onstage  loved the chance to see the actor return to his roots. In fact, Stewarts gravitas and passion for the material have served as a beacon during this global crisis.

You, Sir, make me smile, tweeted one fan. Please, dont stop being you during this dark time. Another noted how Stewart brings the same presence to the sonnets as he does Star Trek. Thank you. Somehow you reciting Shakespeare just gives me the feeling that everything will be ok, the fan said. Almost as if you were Jean-Luc Picard giving a speech. Thank you sir! Thank you!

Stewart may have started posting his Shakespearean readings on a lark. But it has developed into a countdown for many fans as the full effects of the coronavirus pandemic make themselves known. At least Stewart has enough material to last him a few months, thanks to Shakespeare.
Stranded far from home due to the coronavirus pandemic, a former Winnipegger now serving Anglican churches in eastern Quebec dusted off his childhood Spanish this week to deliver a Sunday sermon to an impromptu congregation in Bolivia.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (657 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Stranded far from home due to the coronavirus pandemic, a former Winnipegger now serving Anglican churches in eastern Quebec dusted off his childhood Spanish this week to deliver a Sunday sermon to an impromptu congregation in Bolivia.

Rev. Joshua Paetkau of New Carlisle, Que., led prayers, songs and preached to 30 children and their caregivers quarantined at the orphanage/daycare centre Stansberry Childrens Home in Santa Cruz.

SUPPLIED Rev. Joshua Paetkau with Anglican bishop Bruce Myers of Quebec on the day of Paetkaus ordination at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Quebec City in 2018.

"My message was about the light of faith, the light that shines in the darkness and sees a way forward where there seems to be no way," Paetkau, 33, wrote in an email exchange about the March 22 service.

Accompanied by his wife and two children, Paetkau was visiting Bolivia (along with 13 extended family members from Winnipeg and Alberta) when COVID-19 travel restrictions cancelled some of their connecting flights back to Moncton, N.B.

With no way to get home, the family of four returned to the childrens home where Paetkaus parents volunteered when he was a child. His parents, siblings and nieces and nephews returned to Canada safely.

For the last two years, Paetkau has served as a full-time priest to the five tiny churches in the Parishes of New Carlisle and Chaleur Bay on the Gaspe Peninsula. Before his ordination to the priesthood in 2018, Paetkau lived in Winnipeg for nearly a dozen years, graduating from Canadian Mennonite University in 2009.

Paetkau said panic about COVID-19 started to build toward the end of their 19-day trip. Bolivians recently endured a three-week transportation strike and are finding parallels to the new restrictions now imposed on them.

"From what I am able to observe, which is not very much, the sense of anxiety is not as high as what I hear coming from Canada," he wrote this week. "However, the number of people who live a day-to-day existence in this country will surely make suspension of employment difficult to deal with."

Paetkau has contacted the Canadian Embassy about his situation, and continues to search for ways to get home. However, he is resigned to an indefinite stay in the country he had last visited 14 years ago. It is the first trip to Bolivia for his wife, Bethany, and their children, Solomon, 11, and Rose, 8.

SUPPLIED Rev. Joshua Paetkau, his wife Bethany and their children Rose and Solomon enjoy a sand dune near Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

The Paetkaus may get a little help from higher up, suggested Bishop Bruce Myers of the Anglican Diocese of Quebec, who contacted his local MP, Jean-Yves Duclos, also president of the Treasury Board, for help in flying the family back to Canada. Another priest in Myers diocese is stuck in France after a vacation.

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"I asked Mr. Duclos to see if France and Bolivia might be on the list of countries to be repatriated," Myers said in a telephone call from his home in Quebec City.

All public services have been suspended since March 13 for the 4,000 Anglicans in 65 parishes within Diocese of Quebec, marking the first time its churches have been closed since the 1918 influenza epidemic. Myers now leads his flock in private prayers from his living room through online platforms.

"Weve been here before and we came through the other side of that, and we expect well come out of the other side of this, as well," Myers said of the current pandemic.

For the foreseeable future, Paetkau plans to keep up the Spanish-language worship at Stansberry Childrens Home, as well as communicating regularly in English with his parishioners in Quebec.

Paetkau said his message to them is the same in both languages: people of faith around the world should love each other and to continue to live in hope.

faith@freepress.mb.ca
MUSKEGON, MI  Two months ago, Alisha Poland, Ronald Monczuski, and their baby daughter found themselves at Family Promise of the Lakeshore, a local nonprofit that connects homeless families with churches that provide shelter and support.

Then, in the midst of their personal upheaval, the Poland-Monczuski family was moved from their shelter at First Evangelical Lutheran Church, 1206 Whitehall Rd., and into the Family Promise administrative offices. It was yet another consequence of the near-universal upheaval communities are facing in trying to quell the spread of novel coronavirus.

This adjustment, and changes at other homeless services providers across the Muskegon area, highlight how difficult it is to follow a stay-at-home order for people who dont have permanent housing  and the extra risk that they may face during destabilizing times.

Living here, we want to get back up on our feet, but we cant, with everything shut down, said Poland.

Family Promise, 2160 Crozier Ave., began planning for ramped-up action against COVID-19 about a month ago, said Marian McDermed, the organizations director. Sending families to churches could expose the groups volunteers, many of whom are over the age of 60, McDermed said. So they established a housing-in-place plan inside their offices.

So the families are staying here, 24/7, she said. They dont leave.

Two families now reside, quarantine-style, inside the Family Promise offices. Three children  Skarlett Monczuski, a rambunctious 21-month-old, and 3- and 5-year-olds  and their parents follow a chore list and share one bathroom. A conference room has been converted into a dining room, library and play space.

Kids can run around in the parking lot or across the alley in a little playground, but for the most part, theyre inside, said McDermed.

One day, the weather was nice enough for some outside play, and Skarlett was so excited to leave the building that she immediately took a spill on the asphalt, her mother said.

She is very energetic, cant sit still, so being in here is very hard for her, Poland said.

Volunteers from the former host churches drop off meals. And for the most part, Poland and Monczuski stay busy by playing games and cards and watching TV, they said. But while they feel cooped up during this period of self-isolation, there is also a larger sense of being stuck in their circumstances.

Ive got multiple, medical appointments that I have had to cancel, Poland said. My medical issues are the reason why we are in this situation, living at Family Promise. Its really hard not being able to get what we need to get done to get back on our feet.

Across the county, the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing homeless service providers to adjust their approach to aiding clients who are at special risk.

Shelters, by definition, congregate groups of people in small spaces. Those who rotate between the couches of family and friends are forced to be more mobile, not less.

And low-income workers may be the most at-risk of losing their jobs during a crisis, which exacerbates their need, said Melissa Boughner, director of development at the Muskegon Rescue Mission.

The population that we serve, theyre the ones with second- and third-shift, minimum wage jobs, Boughner said. Theyre the ones at most risk because theyre the first to be let go during a situation like this.

The Rescue Mission currently has 80 men in its mens shelter, and about 45 women and children at its family shelter, unusually high numbers for springtime, she said. Some people are sleeping on cots and sleeping bags, because there arent enough beds.

Our biggest thing is, we see a lot of single parents that have to choose between day care or a roof over (their) head and food on the table for (their) kids, said Boughner.

Every Womans Place, which operates a shelter for domestic violence survivors, has limited new guests from coming in, which poses unique challenges for people who are at-risk of violence in their homes during a stay-at-home order, said Anje Banks, the organizations program director.

To that end, EWP has implemented a new chatline on its website and a confidential text line for people in need of services.

(The shutdown) definitely will increase the need for our serviceswhich is part of why were staying open and trying to make our services available to them, said Banks. People are unable to reach out in the ways they usually would.

The organization can still assist with removing people from violent homes right now, but interactions with people at home have decreased, Banks said.

It doesnt mean the needs not there, theres just less ability to access our services in the way they usually would, said Banks. Sometimes the only safe way is to see us in person. Theres a little more of that control being placed on them.

At the Rescue Mission, all clients get matched to a primary care provider even during ordinary times; now theyre also being screened for possible infection, at which point they would be placed into quarantine, Broughton said.

Because the Rescue Mission has had to close its thrift stores  a major revenue stream for the organization  those staffers have been repurposed at the shelters, providing extra cleaning services.

Schools being shuttered means that homeless children dont have the structure of school, said Boughner. The organization is trying to maintain normalcy despite this, she added, giving kids time at their on-site playground and playroom.

They dont know whats going on, they just think mom is home longer with them, Boughner said.

None of the service providers that spoke with MLive have clients who present symptoms of COVID-19. But they have had to develop plans for if the virus enters their shelters. Each have set up quarantine spaces, and increased their usual cleaning routines.

In some ways, this new challenge has also been an opportunity for community members to step up, said the Rescue Missions Boughner. She said a chef from Maranatha Bible and Missionary Conference prepared 40 turkeys for the shelters guests, for example.

Everyone is so overwhelmed by the stories of love from the community, Boughner said. We have never closed our doors, because our community seems to excel in giving when it comes to hard times like this.

Still, at Family Promise, where the Poland-Monczuski family sleep in an office-turned-shelter, theres also some concern that financial donations will decrease as peoples paychecks are cut and community gatherings, including church services where collections plates are filled, are canceled.

Twenty-five percent of our income comes from churches, said McDermed. Churches arent meeting anymore. So what do you do? Were holding it together with bobby bins and baling wire.

And were not the only nonprofit thats like that, she added. Every single nonprofit in our community is doing it.

MLive multimedia specialist Alison Zywicki contributed to this report.

CORONAVIRUS PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

Read all of MLives coverage on the coronavirus at mlive.com/coronavirus.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

Read more on MLive:

Woman tests positive for coronavirus at Flint homeless shelter

What Michigans coronavirus numbers tell us and what we still dont know

Lakeside businesses hurt by coronavirus and road work can apply for Muskegon loans

Muskegon takes on awkward task of holding virtual meetings during coronavirus

Coronavirus strands West Michigan man in Peru
The screens have been dark for weeks now.

When shelter-in-place orders closed local businesses by the masses, the handful of historic cinemas left in San Francisco may have been hit the hardest.

But in spite of the burden of the unprecedented situation, theres a new way to go to the movies this weekend.

Exhibitors, programmers, front-of-house staff and distributors alike are facing financial hardships, unable to generate revenue with a lack of audiences. A slew of independent filmmakers feared they wouldnt be able to see their hard work come to fruition with a proper theatrical release. Yet, virtual screenings are changing that by encouraging people to pay to watch new releases digitally in order to support local cultural institutions.

So, grab your microwave popcorn and digital ticket. Heres a list of upcoming movies you can enjoy from the comfort and privacy of your own home that will also support local theaters so we can all watch movies together again someday.

Roxie Theater: Virtual Screen

Now playing

One of the oldest continually operating theaters in the country, the Roxie (3117 16th St.) has set up a virtual screening room. Moviegoers can choose from three new releases: Bacurau, a Brazilian sci-fi thriller about a small village in turmoil; Fantastic Fungi, a documentary about mushrooms accompanied by a Q&A with director Louie Schwartzberg and mycologist Paul Stamets; and The Wild Goose Lake, a stylish, Hitchcockian crime romance set in Wuhan.

Each $12 ticket grants you (and anyone else youre quarantining with) access to one movie for five days. Profits are split 50/50 between the distributors and the theater.

Balboa/Vogue Theater: Stay-at-Home Movie Nights

Friday, March 27 and Saturday, March 28 at 7 p.m.

CinemaSF, which oversees both the Balboa (3630 Balboa St.) and Vogue Theater (3290 Sacramento St.), is scheduling ongoing movie nights accompanied by a virtual chat room if youre looking for a more discussion-based platform. On Friday night, theyll be showing Crip Camp, a 1960s era documentary about a summer camp for teenagers with disabilities, just down the road from Woodstock. The film is now streaming on Netflix.

On Saturday, theyll shift to Stuart Gordons Re-Animator, a 1985 horror-comedy about a scientists human experiments gone awry. The movie can be rented on Amazon Prime for $2.99, and Google Play for $1.99, and the chat room will be hosted by CinemaSFs resident horror expert Harry Nordlinger.

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema New Mission: Kino Marquee

Now playing

A local iteration of the national chain, the Alamo (2550 Mission St.) has partnered with distributor Kino Lorber for a virtual viewing series, Kino Marquee, which will screen a number of first-run and repertory titles, beginning with the aforementioned Bacarau, which received the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. A virtual Q&A with the filmmakers and cast is scheduled for Wednesday, April 1 at 5 p.m. PST.

A PR representative for the Alamo Drafthouse told SFGATE they are working on additional screening initiatives for some of their signature programming series, which means you might be able to watch late-night horror with Terror Tuesdays again or enjoy Champagne Cinema with a themed bubbly cocktail recipe for you to prepare from home.

Weve all been thrust into a brave new cinema world, said Kino Lorber President and CEO Richard Lorber. Kino Marquee offers film lovers and the theaters a way to mutually support each other  audiences can keep going to newly released movies and theaters can keep selling tickets to great cinematic experiences online. We offer Kino Marquee as a lifeline to help keep art house cinemas in business and keep the work of top independent filmmakers under the halo of first release virtual screens.

Are we missing something? Have a virtual screening planned for the near future? Email amanda.bartlett@sfgate.com | Twitter: @byabartlett
Foreign-born workers joined thousands in filing unemployment claims with the state during the coronavirus pandemic only to face a crucial barrier: the online portal is only available in English.

The lack of a multilingual unemployment form has prompted at least dozens of laid off workers, if not more, to seek help from attorneys, community organizers and family members who speak English. Employees of the Greater Boston Legal Services, Lawyers for Civil Rights and the Chelsea Collaborative have become unofficial unemployment claims specialists, processing claims for workers who primarily speak Spanish, Vietnamese Cantonese and other languages.

Everyone is trying to figure out how to apply. The way that the Asian community applies, if they cant speak English, is they go to the office, said Bethany Li, a senior staff attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services.

The option to apply for unemployment in-person no longer exists, the call-in option is overloaded and the online form is only available in English, Li added. GBLS attorneys are now helping clients who speak Vietnamese, Cantonese and other languages fill out unemployment claims online.

Gladys Vega, executive director of the Chelsea Collaborative, said her staff processed 50 unemployment claims from clients on Tuesday alone.

Its a months worth of volunteer work, she said. We hardly ever have a need to do unemployment benefits. Its such a seldom service that we provide.

At least, it was until last week. The coronavirus pandemic prompted school districts to send students home, airlines to cancel flights and hotels and restaurants to close. Businesses across industries downsized, cutting hours or laying off employees altogether.

Massachusetts took a hit after Gov. Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency over the coronavirus pandemic. The governor banned all dine-in services at restaurants, shutting down bars and limiting restaurants to take-out and delivery orders in hopes of stemming the spread of the highly contagious coronavirus.

The next day, the state received almost 20,000 unemployment claims  more than it received throughout all of February.

The latest joblessness numbers released Thursday show Massachusetts received 147,995 jobless claims for the week ending on March 21, or an average of over 21,000 initial claims a day. Thats a nearly twentyfold increase from the previous week, when the state received 7,449 initial claims.

Baker signed a bill last week to waive the one-week waiting period for the state to send unemployment checks to laid off workers, but the state continues to get flooded a historic number of applications.

The Department of Unemployment Assistance received twice as many new unemployment claims as it got during the entire worst month of the Greater Recession, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development tweeted on Wednesday.

The office pulled in hundreds of employees to help with the high volume of claims and is now considering contracting extra help.

Yet attorneys, community organizers and advocates that offer multilingual services say the surge in unemployment reveals a gap that leaves behind those who speak languages other than English. According to the American Community Survey, residents in 5.6% of total households in Massachusetts said they spoke English less than very well. That amounts to hundreds of thousands of working-age adults.

(3/4) Mientras continuamos haciendo todo lo posible para satisfacer la necesidad de asistencia con reclamos, utilice nuestros recursos en linea. La forma mas rapida de resolver los problemas mas comunes es revisar nuestra guia y preguntas frecuentes en https://t.co/i8gl2yoD5x  MassLWD (@MassLWD) March 25, 2020

The Massachusetts governments website also can be translated into several languages, including Arabic, simplified Chinese, Hatian Creole, Spanish and Vietnamese. Yet when one reaches the application form itself, the online portal is only available in English. The option to have Google translate the page no longer exists.

Weve done a series of town halls in multiple languages for people to help them understand what the issues are and how to go about filling out an application, Baker said when asked about the English-only online portal. I know thats available in multiple languages. I cant speak to which ones. I dont know as I stand here that all languages are available. People are continuing to update that file.

The state has held several virtual town halls to answer the publics questions with some presentations in English, Spanish and Chinese. (The following presentation, for example, explains in Chinese how applicants can recover their passwords.)

Como presentar una solicitud de ayuda por desempleo...de los estudiantes de @UMassAmherst https://t.co/ysCuEKuVeY #mapoli  Sarah Betancourt (@sweetadelinevt) March 26, 2020

Oren Sellstrom, litigation director at Lawyers for Civil Rights, sent a letter Wednesday to Labor Secretary Rosalin Acosta and DUA Director Richard Jeffers to make the online application process more accessible to residents with limited English proficiency.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of non-English speakers across the Commonwealth are currently facing economic catastrophe, the letter states. It is imperative that the Department act now to increase language access to ensure that all residents can access unemployment benefits on an equal basis.

Sellstrom also suggested making the online portal mobile friendly, noting that many low-income families often rely on smart phones for internet access because they do not have laptops or desktops.

Roxana Rivera, vice president of the majority-immigrant union 32BJ SEIU, said members who were laid off from jobs in maintenance, security and airport operations told her theyre struggling to file for unemployment online because of language barriers.

As people face the devastating prospect of losing their jobs, along with fears about catching COVID-19, they shouldnt have to worry about being able to feed their families because they cant access benefits theyre entitled to," she said in a statement.

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Vega, the Chelsea Collaborative director, said she understands the state is trying to do its best during an unprecedented surge of unemployment claims, but notes that the linguistic and technological gap leaves some laid off workers behind when they need help the most.

Its very frustrating, and dont get me wrong, Im not being unappreciative, she said. Its just that it gets very frustrating and overwhelming.

Another sources of frustration for Vega is that unemployment benefits cant be extended to some of her clients who need it the most, even if they pay taxes. Shes referring to clients who are in the country without legal immigration status.

While her colleagues focus on unemployment claims, Vega has collected food donated by local businesses and food pantries and delivered them to undocumented families in Chelsea. She also ordered more than $100 in groceries for an undocumented woman in Methuen, which was delivered by an Uber driver who volunteered to make the trip from Chelsea.

My biggest concern is undocumented families that are being unemployed. That is what worries me the most, she said.

It is unclear exactly how many undocumented people live in Massachusetts as no official count of the population exists. A Pew Research report from February 2019, based on U.S. census data dating back to 2016, estimates that Massachusetts is home to at least 250,000 undocumented immigrants. Massachusetts Jobs with Justice, a workers rights coalition, estimates the number is at least at 400,000.

Lily Huang, co-executive director of Massachusetts Jobs with Justice, said she and her colleagues have fielded calls from laid off workers and consulted them on how their immigration status affects their eligibility for unemployment.

The other day, for example, Huang said she received a call from a student with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which offers temporary protections and work authorization to undocumented people who came to the U.S. as minors.

They didnt even know that they qualified for unemployment, Huang recalled. So I think the first hurdle is knowing that you can even qualify for unemployment, and the second is going onto the website and applying.

For those who do not, Jobs with Justice and several immigrant workers centers launched a fund, called the Undocufund for COVID-19 Relief in Massachusetts, to raise money for undocumented workers and their families. The group aims to raise at least $1 million to distribute among 3,000 families and individuals, according to a news release announcing the fund.

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Got a news tip or want to contact MassLive about this story? Email newstips@masslive.com or message us on Facebook orTwitter. You can also call our news tips line at 413-776-1364.

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CLEVELAND, Ohio - What a difference a global pandemic can make.

Voters in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who were surveyed in the Great Lakes Poll from March 17 to March 25 cited health care as the issue theyll care most about as they pick a presidential candidate this year. In the last Great Lakes Poll two months ago, voters in three of those states had said economic issues were most important to them. Only Wisconsin cited health care as its top priority in January.

In all four states, disproportionate numbers of Democrats and women said they were most concerned about health care, while Republicans and men were most concerned about the economy.

Researchers at Baldwin Wallace University, Ohio Northern University and Oakland University near Detroit who conducted the study polled 3,817 registered voters in the four states for the second of their planned four Great Lakes polls this year. The margins of error for responses in the poll range from 3.3 percentage points plus or minus in Ohio to 3.9. in Pennsylvania, and higher for subgroups.

More than 50 percent of voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania said they strongly or somewhat" disapprove of how President Donald Trump has handled the issue. Voters in Ohio were more narrowly divided, with 45.1 percent saying they strongly or somewhat approve of Trumps health care policies, with 46.7 percent expressing disapproval.

Voters in each state were happier with Trumps response to the COVID-19 virus, with 58.1 percent of Ohioans, and more than 51 percent of respondents in the other three states saying they strongly or somewhat approve. When respondents were asked whether they believed former Vice President Joe Biden would do a better job handling the epidemic, Ohio was the only state where voters predicted Biden would do worse than Trump. Voters in all four states predicted Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders would handle the coronavirus worse than Trump.

Baldwin Wallace University political scientist Thomas Sutton noted the poll was conducted as virus-related closures went into effect, and as people began to recognize the virus negative effects on the economy. Respondents showed high levels of concern about both health care and the economy, he observed.

We went from an economy doing very well, with a high stock market to low unemployment, to everything suddenly falling off a cliff, said Sutton, who heads the universitys Community Research Institute.

The poll results didnt show that coronavirus lowered the publics opinion of Trumps handling of the economy because people blame the virus, not him, for the sudden downturn. He said that if the $2 trillion stimulus package the U.S. Senate adopted on Wednesday becomes law, Trump will likely get credit for it and experience a positive residual effect in the fall election.

In this case, we are seeing a rally around the flag effect where people are having more favorable attitudes towards Trump in this uncertain and chaotic time, added Baldwin political scientist Lauren Copeland, the community research institutes associate director, who believes the pandemic exposed shortcomings in the U.S. health care system. People are feeling more anxious with so much uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus.

In all four states, more than 87 percent of voters said they were very or somewhat concerned about the coronavirus effect on the economy. More than 84 percent said they were at least somewhat anxious about the spread of the disease.

More than 80 percent said they were following the news about COVID-19 very or fairly closely. More than 78 percent said theyd changed their daily routine because of the outbreak. More than 75 percent said they were very or somewhat concerned about the virus effect on their personal finances. More than two-thirds said they were very or somewhat worried that they or a family member might contract the coronavirus.

More than 65 percent told the pollsters the worst is yet to come on the virus. More than 61 percent described it as a real threat. Yet more than half said they have confidence in the U.S. health system to handle the virus.

In the midst of an unemployment rise and stock market slump related to the coronavirus, more voters in each state said the economy had worsened over the past year than said it improved. Republicans were the only group in each state that said the economy got much or somewhat better over the past year. More voters in all four states thought the economy was more likely to get worse than better over the next year, with more voters in Wisconsin and Michigan predicting a downturn than those in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where Trump has higher approval ratings.

In the latest poll, 33.5 percent of the Ohioans surveyed said health care issues were most important to them. Economic issues, such as taxes and jobs, were the priority for 31.8 percent of Ohio voters. Security issues, like terrorism, foreign policy and border security were tops for 15.8 percent of Ohioans. Roughly 5 percent said education was most important to them, and slightly more cited energy issues like carbon emissions and climate change.

You can read cleveland.coms comprehensive coverage of the poll here.

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Pope Francis has tested negative for coronavirus for a second time after a Vatican worker who lives in the same residence was reportedly hospitalised due to the disease.

The 83-year-old Pontiff was swabbed yesterday along with those who surround him, who also all tested negative.

A clergyman at Saint Martha's guest house, which the pope uses as his own residence, has allegedly tested positive for the virus.

The building, which is undergoing a deep clean, is also used by the pope as a place to take meals and have private meetings. He has been largely secluded since coming down with a cold at the end of last month.

Pope Francis does not have any symptoms of the virus, said Vatican sources. He is pictured giving a mass at Santa Marta Church this morning

Pictured above is Saint Martha's guest house in the Holy See, Rome. The pope uses the building as his residence, eats there and holds private meetings inside

The Pontiff, who is said to be in good health, live streamed a mass at the Santa Marta church this morning.

Fears were first raised for the pope's health on Ash Wednesday, when he fell ill with a cough, fever, chills and sore throat.

He was swabbed but tested negative for coronavirus, it was revealed on March 3, and is thought instead to have been suffering from a cold.

As well as using the Saint Martha guest house, the pope also visits the Vatican Library to record messages for the world's 1.3 billion Catholics.

The La Stampa and Il Messagro newspapers said the unnamed person has been hospitalised in Rome and steps have been taken to disinfect the building.

Pope Francis celebrates a private morning mass at the Santa Marta Chapel in The Vatican

The Vatican has been closed since the outbreak began in Italy. Officials are reporting a glimmer of hope, as the number of new infections and death rate both appear to be slowing.

La Stampa additionally reported that Pope Francis has been 'eating alone in his room for some time' as a precaution.

'He spends much of his time in his apartment, and when he moves inside the residence, he keeps the necessary safe distances,' La Stampa wrote. 'The anti-contagion has been tight around the pope for weeks.'

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni told AFP he could neither confirm nor deny the reports.

There are concerns for the Argentine-born pope if he contracts the virus due to his age and previous health conditions. He lost part of his lung as a young man and suffered from sciatica, a nerve condition that causes pain in his hip.

He has refused to move into the sumptuous papal palace after being elected in March 2013, preferring the guest house.

It is the place where cardinals stay when they gather for conclaves to elect popes and has about 30 residents, according to Il Messaggero, and have a small circle of contacts.

Pope Francis urged Christians not to succumb to the evils of self-pity and to stop complaining about their lives rather than taking action during a Mass livestreamed from his Vatican home

The pope is said to have no plans to move to a different residence despite cases of the disease in Vatican city.

'The new cases include an employee of the merchandise office and two employees of the Vatican Museums,' the official news site said.

Italy has remained at the epicentre of Europe's virus outbreak, and has recorded more deaths than China due to the disease. There are four cases of the virus in the Vatican, according to its news website, with the first being reported on March 6.

The pope gave a video address on Tuesday where he urged Christians not to 'complain about everything' or indulge in 'evil' self-pity.

Francis said that sloth - marked by carelessness, apathy and self-pity - is a 'poison, a fog that envelops the soul and doesn't let it live', before offering prayers for health workers and priests who have died helping those suffering from coronavirus.

Hours later the pope also ran a mass Lord's Prayer through an online broadcast to help comfort people amid the outbreak.

The pope has been holding his general audiences and Sunday blessings over the internet and television from the official papal library instead of before crowds numbering tens of thousands of people in St. Peter's Square.

Francis also offered a prayer for those who have died while treating coronavirus patients, saying they provide an 'heroic example'

Italy has seen a slight fall in its death rate since the outbreak began, recording a lower 683 deaths on Tuesday, bringing the country's total to 7,503.

The country also recorded 602 deaths on Monday and 650 on Sunday.

Authorities are hoping that the national shutdown is starting to have an impact, as the number of new cases reported has also begun to drop.
With the coronavirus crisis showing no end in sight, the Tennessee Supreme Court has extended its suspension of most in-court cases through April 13.

The order says, "On March 13, 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chief Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court declared a state of emergency for the Judicial Branch of Tennessee government and activated a Continuity of Operations Plan for the courts of Tennessee.

"This state of emergency constitutes a 'disaster' for purposes of Tenn. Sup. Ct. R. 49 and Tenn. Code Ann.  28-1-116. In light of ongoing concerns, the Tennessee Supreme Court hereby continues the suspension of in-person court proceedings and the extension of deadlines as set forth in this order. We again emphasize that the local and state courts of the State of Tennessee are open and will remain open under all circumstances, subject to the provisions of this order. Under the constitutional, statutory, and inherent authority of the Tennessee Supreme Court, we adopt the following provisions.

"All in-person proceedings in all state and local courts in Tennessee, including but not limited to municipal, juvenile, general sessions, trial, and appellate courts, shall be suspended from the close of business on Friday, March 13, 2020, through Thursday, April 30, 2020, subject to the exceptions below.

"Exceptions to this suspension of in-person court proceedings include, but are not limited to: ? Proceedings necessary to protect constitutional rights of criminal defendants, including bond-related matters, preliminary hearings for incarcerated individuals, and plea agreements for incarcerated individuals

- Proceedings related to relief from abuse, including but not limited to orders of protection ? Proceedings related to statutory order of protection hearings after entry of an ex parte order as necessary to satisfy any due process concerns 03/25/2020

- Proceedings related to emergency child custody or visitation orders

- Proceedings related to the voluntary surrender of parental rights ? Settlements involving a minor or a person with a disability

- Department of Childrens Services emergency matters related to child safety, placement, permanency, or federal funding for children in foster care ? Proceedings related to petitions for temporary injunctive relief

- Proceedings related to emergency mental health orders ? Proceedings related to emergency protection of elderly or vulnerable persons ? Proceedings directly related to the COVID-19 public health emergency

- Other exceptions as approved by the Chief Justice.

"The presiding judge or the designee of the presiding judge of each judicial district is authorized to determine the manner in which in-person court proceedings for the exceptions listed above are to be conducted. Other exceptions to the suspension of in-person court proceedings must be approved by the Chief Justice. Any permitted in-court proceedings shall be limited to attorneys, parties, witnesses, security officers, and other necessary persons, as determined by the trial judge. Judges and their staff shall ensure that social distancing and other such measures are strictly observed.

"For purposes of implementing procedural matters during this time, the provisions of Rule 18(c) of the Rules of the Tennessee Supreme Court are suspended to allow judges to issue general orders. Judges are charged with the responsibility of ensuring that core constitutional functions and rights are protected. Additionally, court clerks are charged with ensuring that court functions continue. See Tenn. Code Ann.  18-1-101 (2009); 18-1-105 (Supp. 2019). Nevertheless, all judges and court clerks should minimize in-person contact by utilizing available technologies, including alternative means of filing, teleconferencing, email, and video conferencing. Any Tennessee state or local rule, criminal or civil, that impedes a judges or court clerks ability to utilize available technologies to limit in-person contact is suspended through Thursday, April 30, 2020. See, e.g., Tenn. R. Civ. P. 43.01.

"With respect to plea agreements for non-incarcerated individuals, this suspension expressly applies to those provisions of Tenn. R. Crim. P. 11 which otherwise would require the proceeding to be in person in open court. See, e.g., Tenn. R. Crim. P. 11(b)(1) and (2), 11(c)(2)(A). The presiding judge or the designee of the presiding judge of each judicial district shall develop a written plan to affirmatively address issues regarding the incarceration of nonviolent offenders in furtherance of efforts to reduce the jail population, including but not limited to bond reductions or eliminations, deferred sentences, and suspended sentences. The presiding judge or the designee of the presiding judge of each judicial district shall submit its plan to the Administrative Office of the Courts by the close of business on Monday, March 30, 2020, absent an extension granted by the Chief Justice. Judges offices and court clerks offices may limit in-person contact with the public during the period of suspension, but must remain functional.

"If it becomes necessary to close judges or court clerks physical offices during the period of suspension, these offices shall remain accessible by telephone, email and fax to the extent possible during regular business hours. If available, drop boxes should be used for conventionally filed documents. This order expressly encourages and does not prohibit court proceedings by telephone, video, teleconferencing, email, or other means that do not involve in-person contact. This order does not affect courts consideration of matters that can be resolved without in-person proceedings. Although some non-emergency matters will need to be rescheduled, judges are to continue to resolve matters that do not require in-person court proceedings. Court clerks are to work cooperatively and at the direction of the presiding judge of each judicial district to fulfill the clerks obligation to facilitate continuing court function. Deadlines set forth in court rules, statutes, ordinances, administrative rules, or otherwise that are set to expire during the period from Friday, March 13, 2020, through Tuesday, May 5, 2020, are hereby extended through Wednesday, May 6, 2020.

"Statutes of limitations and statutes of repose that would otherwise expire during the period from Friday, March 13, 2020, through Tuesday, May 5, 2020, are hereby extended through Wednesday, May 6, 2020.

"Deadlines, statutes of limitations, and statutes of repose that are not set to expire during the period from Friday, March 13, 2020, through Tuesday, May 5, 2020, are not extended or tolled by this order. With regard to notarizing documents at this time, attorneys and judges are encouraged to utilize the Online Notary Public Act, Tenn. Code Ann.  8-16-301, et seq., and the regulations promulgated by the Secretary of State at Sec. of State, Tenn. R. and Reg. 1360-07-03-.01.

"Additionally, with regard to court filings, declarations under penalty of perjury may be used as an alternative to a notary. Given the increasing economic issues caused by this pandemic, no judge, clerk, or other court official shall take any action to effectuate an eviction, ejectment, or other displacement from a residence during the effective dates of this order based upon the failure to make a rent, loan, or other similar payment absent extraordinary circumstances as determined by a judge in a court of competent jurisdiction.

"Nothing in this order affects the obligations, terms, or conditions for payment under existing contracts. Judges also are encouraged to work with court clerks and local law enforcement to develop policies severely limiting or eliminating any new garnishments during this time. Orders of protection and temporary injunctions that would otherwise expire during the period from Friday, March 13, 2020, through Tuesday, May 5, 2020, are hereby extended through Wednesday, May 6, 2020.

"This order applies statewide to all courts and court clerks offices except administrative courts within the Executive Branch and federal courts and federal court clerks offices located in Tennessee. Under the terms of this order, the courts of Tennessee remain open, consistent with the Judicial Branchs obligation to mitigate the risks associated with COVID-19.

"Judges should work with local law enforcement and other county officials to ensure that, to the extent possible, courthouses remain accessible to carry out essential constitutional functions and time-sensitive proceedings. This order is intended to be interpreted broadly for protection of the public from risks associated with COVID-19.

It is so ORDERED. FOR THE COURT: _________________________

Jeffrey S. Bivins, Chief Justice
Prominent chef Thomas Keller is suing his insurance company for losses caused by the shutdowns of his two Napa County restaurants, a case that could help determine the extent of insurance coverage for the commercial impact of the coronavirus.

Keller owns the French Laundry restaurant and the Bouchon Bistro, both in Yountville. He closed them after the countys health officer, Karen Relucio, told all residents on March 18 to remain at home except for essential services or activities, and directed nonessential businesses to halt operations. More than 300 employees were sent home without pay, he said.

In a suit filed Wednesday in Napa County Superior Court, Kellers lawyers said they expect Hartford Fire Insurance Co. to deny coverage. Its policy, issued in July, includes a typical business interruption provision covering losses caused when a business is closed by government orders because of a loss of property.

The restaurants suffered such losses, the suit argued, because their property, food and utensils, was exposed to potential loss from infection by the virus, which can cling to surfaces for days unless cleansed.

We need insurance companies to do the right thing and save millions of jobs, Keller said in a statement released by his lawyers. He said restaurants are the nations largest private employer, with 15.6 million workers.

Hartford declined to comment on the lawsuit. But Kellers lawyer, John Houghtaling, pointed to an article posted March 12 by an insurance company lawyer, Shannon OMalley, that argued against coverage for restaurant closures.

The virus may be cleaned without essentially altering the property, OMalley wrote. While creative policy-holders and their attorneys may try to link the virus and physical property damage, she said, suspected contamination is not enough for coverage  and, at most, insurers would have to cover only the cleanup costs.

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I represent restaurants across the country, and theyre all being told the same thing, said Houghtaling, who filed a similar suit last week for a restaurant owner in New Orleans. The insurance industry is denying the fact that the coronavirus poses a danger to property.

He said some insurance policies covering business interruptions explicitly exclude coverage for harm caused by viruses, but Keller paid a higher premium for a policy that has no such exclusion.

Keller, 64, has been named the nations best chef by multiple organizations over the years, and the French Laundry, which he has owned since 1994, has won similar honors as one of the worlds top 50 restaurants. His suit asks a judge to declare that his insurance policy covers his losses.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
Representatives from the Group of Seven nations met Wednesday to discuss the coronavirus pandemic, but they couldn't agree on a joint statement to release to the public afterwards.

German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that the disagreement had to do with the United States' insistence that the novel coronavirus be called the "Wuhan virus," in reference to where the pathogen is believed to have originated. The other countries, including Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, and Japan, winced at the notion, fearing that it could cause unnecessary division at a time when nations need to band together, The Washington Post reports.

But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he believes it's important to highlight that the Chinese government didn't warn the rest of the world about its initial outbreak. "We tried, you'll remember, from the opening days to get our scientists, our experts on the ground there so that we begin to assist in the global response to what began there in China, but we weren't able to do that," he said. "The Chinese Communist Party wouldn't permit that to happen." The World Health Organization has advised against calling the COVID-19 virus other names like "Chinese virus," warning it could encourage xenophobic behavior.

Pompeo said Beijing's ruling party "poses a substantial threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus clearly has demonstrated." Read more at The Washington Post.

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Gov Ned Lamont tightened crowd restrictions Thursday night, limiting any gatherings to five people, demanded that restaurants take better control of their take-out foot traffic and told gun shop owners they can only open for customers by appointment.

In an order issued at about 9:30, Lamont suspended the state tax on plastic shopping bags, and freed supermarket employees from having to bag customers groceries.

A previous order had set a 50-person ceiling on crowds but in recent days Lamont said that crowds of any size can be unsafe.

Im going to be stricter than that, Lamont said during a mid-afternoon news conference. No more than five people in a social gathering, and less than that if you possibly can. If youre taking a walk outside, when youre seeing friends, stay apart and no more than five. This is really important, because even though young people are much less likely to have a severe condition from COVID, youre just as likely to pass it along, either at home or to older folks. I really want to be strict on that.

Lamont also ordered the suspension of school achievement tests for the year.

He said people over the age of 60 simply should stay home. Dont go out for shopping or anything else unless you have to, he said.

Two more fatalities occurred since Wednesday, including an 80-year-old East Haven woman. There are 125 people hospitalized with COVID-19, he said, as well as 1,012 confirmed cases, up from Wednesdays 875.

He asked that people who develop symptoms, including fever, to keep themselves at home for two weeks. If you have any symptoms at all, assume its COVID-19 and go home, and stay there for 14 days, he said. Go home, self quarantine and 99 percent get better and those few who dont, call your doctor and well have you tested.

In the East Haven case, We are saddened to hear of any fatalities from this virus Michael Pascucilla, director of health for the East Shore District Health Department, said in a release Thursday. My thoughts and prayers are with the family of the individual in our district who died from complications due to the coronavirus.

Mayor Jor Carfora again called on residents to practice social distancing and said the town is recommending that all individuals both adults and children, stay home and not interact with individuals outside of the household.

Appearing with U.S. Sens Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy for an hour with reporters in the State Capitol, Lamont said he hopes that Connecticut, with its proximity to the epicenter of the pandemic in New York, is awarded more than the billion dollars expected in the $2 trillion emergency legislation passed by the Senate and awaiting action in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Lamont hinted he would lift the 10-cent tax on plastic bags that has been in effect since Aug. 1. Health officials had complained that contamination can occur with the reusable bags shoppers bring in to supermarkets and grocers. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker on Wednesday nullified a similar law in his state.

Lamont Thursday also asked President Donald Trump to declare Connecticut a disaster area, to make it easier for state residents and businesses to seek aid.

The request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, if approved, could free up funding under a variety of federal programs, including unemployment assistance, counseling and legal services, child care and funeral assistance.

This global pandemic is continuing to have a major impact on the lives of every person and entity in our state and around our county, Lamont said in a statement. If approved, this disaster declaration request will provide greatly needed assistance to our residents, as well as our local and state governments, so that we can try to bring some relief during this difficult and ongoing challenge.

Several states already have been granted Major Disaster Declarations, which allows them to access more federal funding and aid from FEMA. New York was the first on March 20. Since then, the White House also has granted declarations for California, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, New Jersey, Texas, Illinois and Washington.

Bad actors

In a related development, Attorney General William Tong, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz and state Department of Consumer Protection Commissioner Michelle H. Seagull on Thursday told residents to beware of scams in which fraudulent emails, text messages and social media posts claim that they must fill out their 2020 U.S. Census forms to become eligible for federal stimulus checks that are part of a pending relief package in Washington.

Bad actors are always looking for ways to profit off of peoples fears and anxieties, Tong said in a statement. This new scam is no different. There is zero connection between your 2020 Census response and any economic stimulus aid. If you receive any text messages, phone calls or emails falsely claiming this, please report this to my office immediately.

You will not have to fill out the census to receive a stimulus check, said Seagull. Scammers often try to take advantage of us when we have something incredibly serious on our minds  and in this situation theyre using two critical things: the Census and COVID-19. Remember, that if someone threatens to take away money or benefits unless you surrender personal information, its likely a scam.

Seagull and Tong also issued a set of guidelines for people to consider when they plan to donate to charities during the pandemic, including thoroughly researching the charity, and double-checking to see whether it is registered with the state.

Later in the day, Tong announced that he joined more than two-dozen attorneys general from throughout the country asking the U.S. Department of Education to provide aid for student loan borrowers during the public health crisis.

With millions of Americans newly unemployed, the Department of Education must provide comprehensive, robust relief to student loan borrowers. Although it has already taken some positive steps, there is much more that the department can and must do to protect borrowers from mounting debt during this crisis, Tong said.

Also on Thursday, the state judicial branch ordered three facilities closed indefinitely at the end of business Friday, including the Litchfield Judicial District courthouse in Torrington, the Geographical Area courthouse in Rockville, and the courthouse in Danielson. The Danbury courthouse was closed after business on Wednesday.

Emilie Munson contributed to this report.
A crowded prison dorm at California Institution for Men in Chino, where three staff members have tested positive for coronavirus. (U.S. District Court)

Lawyers for California prison inmates say the state has failed to take urgently needed steps against COVID-19 outbreaks and asked federal courts on Wednesday for an emergency order for prison releases.

They said federal intervention is needed to prevent illness and death "certain to occur if the COVID-19 virus is allowed to take its natural course in the still-overcrowded California prisons."

The motion asks for "targeted releases" of low-risk inmates who have less than a year left to serve as well as the release or relocation of inmates who are 65 or older and those who have chronic lung disease or other medical conditions that put them at severe risk from COVID-19. The lawyers also seek steps to protect about 50,000 prisoners double-bunked in open dorms where social distancing is impossible.

The filing does not ask for a specific number of releases but enough so the prisons comply with social distancing orders Gov. Gavin Newsom has issued for all of California.

Without immediate action, the lawyers told the judicial panel overseeing California prison conditions, "COVID-19 will spread like wildfire in [the state's] crowded prisons ... overwhelming hospital capacity and needlessly infecting thousands."

Newsom on Tuesday ordered prison admissions be halted, but said he had "no interest in ... releasing violent criminals from our system."

There was no immediate response by lawyers for the state.

The prison system's most recent population study, released in January but containing 2018 demographics, shows more than 10,500 inmates age 60 or older. The court motion says 17,000 prisoners are designated medically high risk.

"We're doing this so they have the same opportunity to survive the virus as the rest of us," said Michael Bien, a Bay Area attorney whose firm represents mentally ill inmates in long-running prison civil rights litigation.

One inmate and nine prison employees have tested positive for COVID-19 across six prisons. The inmate was reported in stable condition at the California State Prison in Lancaster.

Story continues

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation on Wednesday posted data showing 159 inmates to date tested for the virus, with results for 94 of those tests still pending. The biggest cluster, 32 tests, is at the state-leased California City Correctional Center in Kern County.

The prison system two weeks ago curtailed outside visitors and has reduced transfer of inmates from one prison to another.

The department has said it is bolstering its defenses with gateway screening, additional cleaning and distributing extra soap to inmates who ask for it.

"We have long-standing outbreak management plans in place to address communicable disease outbreaks such as influenza, measles, mumps, norovirus and varicella, as well as preparedness procedures to address a variety of medical emergencies and natural disasters," the department said in a statement Tuesday.

Internal records obtained by The Times show numerous cell blocks put on quarantine, and then restrictions lifted, on a daily basis. One directive tells prison medical workers there are "severe shortages" of masks, respirators and other protective gear. They are told to consider practicing "extended use" of protective gear as they move from patient to patient.

Staff and inmate families told The Times of instances in which prison kitchens and dorms have run out of disinfectant.

California has stared down federal court orders to release inmates before, most recently in 2014 when judges deemed the state had not done enough to reduce overcrowding so severe it threatened inmates' lives and welfare. The state's prisons are currently operating at 134% capacity. There are about 121,400 inmates among 35 state-run prisons, as well as firefighting camps and in-state private lockups.

About 65,000 workers enter and leave prisons daily, with no more than verbal screening on whether they feel ill, have recently traveled or had contact with someone infected with COVID-19.

An early order advised wardens to prepare for temperature screening to monitor for those with fever, as was done at overseas airports early in the COVID-19 pandemic. But some staff told The Times that doesn't happen and that workers who are sick have lied and gone into prisons.

U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller last week created a task force to report back on prison efforts to deal with COVID-19. Bien said the group has met almost daily, but while discussions on mental health care during the crisis are progressing, movement on a plan to reduce the risk of viral spread through the prisons has been slow and limited.

Over the last decade, California shifted lower-level offenders to county jails and made many drug and theft offenses misdemeanors in part to reduce overcrowding. The state prison system therefore now has a distilled population of serious offenders, as well as elderly inmates serving extended or life sentences.

Bien called the state's response "the best they can do" under current policies. "At the same time, we have increased fear, anxiety, and we're limiting mental health treatment. The state needs to do much, much more."
ST. LOUIS (AP)  The youngest of the eight people to die of the coronavirus outbreak in Missouri was a 31-year-old Red Cross employee who was buried as her family watched from their cars.

The American Red Cross Missouri-Arkansas Region said that besides the death of Jazmond Dixon in St. Louis, one other Red Cross employee tested positive and another staff member is "presumed to be positive through a medical assessment, but has not been tested." None of the three employees had contact with members of the public as part of their daily duties, and all three worked at the same Red Cross facility, KSDK reported.

HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Live coronavirus updates

"Just a few weeks ago, the coronavirus was a headline from China, and never in a million years did my family think that we would one day have experienced our loved one, our Jazz, to be the first official victim in the City of St. Louis. It's crazy," said Dixons cousin, Belafae Johnson.

Dixon was buried on Tuesday. The other seven deaths include three women who lived at an assisted-living center in Springfield. A fourth resident of the Morningside East home is hospitalized.

State health officials reported 255 confirmed cases as of Tuesday, an increase from 183 on Monday as testing capacity increases.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.

Gov. Mike Parson has banned all gatherings of more than 10 people but was resisting pressure to take stronger measures. On Tuesday, Parson said issuing a statewide stay-at-home order would devastate the state's economy but he said he could change his mind if he becomes convinced it is necessary.

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Without his action, locally issued stay-at-home orders have are in effect or about to take effect in the state's largest communities of Kansas City, St. Louis, St. Joseph, Springfield and Columbia. A ban on non-essential business in Branson also took effect Tuesday, and city hall in Jefferson City closed to the public Wednesday.

With Americans' lives and livelihoods hanging in the balance, President Donald Trump said he "would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter, on April 12. But that statement sharply contradicted health officials' calls for stricter restrictions on public interactions. Scientists and other politicians in the U.S. have warned that the worst is yet to come.

Parson, a Republican and staunch Trump ally, dismissed the idea that restrictions put in place to slow the COVID-19 outbreak will be lifted anytime soon, The Kansas City Star reports.

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I hope the president is right, Parson said Tuesday, but the reality is we are planning this much longer than two weeks here in the state of Missouri.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, who issued the metros first emergency declaration and ordered residents to stay home starting Tuesday, called the presidents shifting message incredibly distressing.

Lucas has acknowledged the incredibly deleterious impact to Kansas Citys economy. But he adds: I also know that if people die, I cant bring them back."
click to enlarge SCREENGRAB/WARREN COUNTY POLICE A Warrenton man was charged with making a terrorist threat after he filmed himself licking bunch of items at Walmart. "Who's afraid of the coronavirus?" Cody Pfister, 26, taunts in a video he later posted to social media.
Self-swab tests for the novel coronavirus work just as well as those performed by healthcare workers, a new study finds.

Researchers, led by insurance provider UnitedHealth Group, found positive cases in more than 90 percent of patients, which is the same rate at which clinicians

The team says patient-administrated tests will reduce the risk of exposure for doctors and nurses as well as improve the overall efficiency for testing.

It comes on the heels of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) updating its guidelines to allow patients to swab their own noses or throats for the virus.

A new study found that elf-administered tests detected COVID-19 in more than 90% patients, which is the same rate that clinician-administered tests detected the virus. Pictured: A health care worker takes a swab from a man at a mobile testing site in The Villages, Florida, March 23

The self-swab test allows people to swab the front part of the nostril and mid-nose rather than deep inside the nasal cavity. Pictured: Doctors test hospital staff with flu-like symptoms for coronavirus at Barnabas hospital in the Bronx in New York City, March 24

Researchers say the self-swab tests are less invasive and preserve personal protective equipment such as gloves and face masks. Pictured: A patient arrives at Mount Sinai West Hospital in New York City, March 26

The current test for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, required a clinician collecting a sample from deep inside the patient's nasal cavity.

Researchers argue that not only are healthcare workers wasting vital personal protective equipment (PPE) such as gloves, but it is uncomfortable for the patient.

The self-swab test allows people to swab the front part of the nostril and mid-nose, which is less invasive.

For the study, which has sent to a peer-reviewed journal, the team examined 500 patients from OptumCare, a health group that falls under the UnitedHealth umbrella.

Results showed that self-administered swab tests detected COVID-19 in at least 90 percent of positive patients.

That's the same rate at which clinician-administered test detect the virus.

'We know that broad, rapid and accurate testing is essential to addressing the COVID-19 crisis,' said lead author Dr Yuan-Po Tu, an infectious disease expert at The Everett Clinic, in Washington state.

'Yet the current clinician-administered process significantly limits testing capacity, puts frontline health care workers at risk of COVID-19 exposure, and is unpleasant for patients.'

He says that by patient administering testing themselves, it will not only protect medical workers but also preserve PPE, including face masks, gloves and gowns.

UnitedHealth says it plans to roll out self-swab test in Seattle starting on Monday and hopes to do so in more states as soon as possible.

Washington state has already recorded at least 130 deaths from coronavirus, second only to New York with 385 deaths.

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

The number of cases in the US has rocketed over the last two weeks

However, some health experts have expressed some concern about self-swabbing due to the potential of supplies running low and people not complying with doctors' orders.

Two physicians wrote in the Harvard Business Review that home testing should be allowed, so long as their three bits of advice are followed.

They ask the people with non-severe symptoms to call a telemedicine service first before running to a healthcare facility.

Second is to help people perform the test correctly so it doesn't cause physical discomfort or result in a false negative.

Lastly, they ask that patients self-quarantine for 48 to 72 hours until their test results return so they don't infect others.

In the US, there are more than 73,000 confirmed cases of the virus and there are more than 1,000 deaths.
FILE PHOTO: Newly casted ingots of 99.99% pure gold are stored after weighing at the Krastsvetmet non-ferrous metals plant in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk

By Harshith Aranya

(Reuters) - Gold prices edged up on Thursday, recovering from initial losses, after data showed U.S. jobless claims surged to a record high due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The data put further downward pressure on the dollar, lifting the appeal of gold which is seen as a safe haven.

Spot gold was up 0.3% at $1,618.60 per ounce by 1235 GMT.

"Short term, initially gold may rise when stocks fall because it's a safe haven asset. However if selling in stocks continue, funds may see margin calls and need to sell gold for cash," said Samson Li, a Hong Kong-based precious metals analyst at Refinitiv GFMS.

"Long term, with all the liquidity central banks are injecting into the system, there will be massive purchasing power destruction in the future, which will be good for gold."

Data showed the number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits shot to an all-time high of more than 3 million last week as strict measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic hit economic activity.

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday overwhelmingly backed a $2 trillion bill aimed at helping unemployed workers and industries hurt by the coronavirus, but that did little to prop up risk sentiment.

This came after the U.S. Federal Reserve said on Monday it would buy bonds in unlimited numbers and backstop direct loans to companies.

"We see real interest rates remaining negative for a long time, keeping the non-yielding gold investments attractive... Any price setback will be an opportunity to buy gold," said Soni Kumari, commodity strategist at ANZ.

Gold market participants, meanwhile, remained concerned about a supply squeeze in the market, following a sharp divergence in London and New York prices as the coronavirus closed precious metals refineries.

U.S. exchange operator CME Group on Tuesday announced a new gold futures contract to combat price volatility caused by the shutdown of gold supply routes, but traders and bankers said it would not immediately calm markets.

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U.S. gold futures rose 1% to $1,649.40 per ounce, and held above the London spot contract.

Elsewhere, palladium dropped 2.3% to $2,264.53 per ounce, having registered its largest daily gain since 1997 on Wednesday as a lockdown in major producer South Africa exacerbated supply woes.

"Palladium is still not on very firm ground as the metal is more sensitive to economic meltdown," ANZ's Kumari said.

Platinum slipped 2.1% to $722.31 an ounce, while silver shed 0.3% to $14.39.

(Reporting by Harshith Aranya and Asha Sistla in Bengaluru; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Susan Fenton)
The World Health Organization has warned that African countries should prepare for the worst as coronavirus numbers continue to increase across the continent.

Speaking during a Press conference on Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said coronavirus is presenting an unprecedented threat.

Dont assume your community wont be affected. Prepare as if it will be. Dont assume you wont be infected. Prepare as if you will be, Dr. Ghebreyesus said.

We probably have undetected cases. We have to prepare for the worst. In other countries we have seen how the virus actually accelerates after a certain tipping point. So the best advice for Africa is to prepare for the worst, he added.

So far, WHO reports that there are over slightly over 591 coronavirus patients in Africa and the numbers are rising each day.

Egypt reported the largest number of positive cases (196), followed by South Africa (116), Algeria (72), Morocco (49), Senegal (31), Burkina Faso (20), Cameroon (10), Rwanda (8), Democratic Republic of Congo (7), Ghana (7) and Kenya (7).

Others listed on the WHO website are Cote dIvoire (6), Ethiopia (6), Seychelles (4), Congo (3), Nigeria (3), Tanzania (3), Liberia (2), Namibia (2), Zambia (2), Benin (1), Central African Republic (1), Equatorial Guinea (1), Eswatini (1), Gabon (1), Guinea (1), Gambia (1), Mauritania (1), Somalia (1), Sudan (1) and Togo (1).

Number of coronavirus deaths reported in Africa were at 15 as of Wednesday with Algeria topping the list with five casualties.

WHO however reports that there are 48 people who have recovered after contracting the COVID-19 disease: Egypt (32), Algeria (12) and the rest are from Senegal and Cote dIvoire.

On Wednesday, Dr. Ghebreyesus said despite the rising number of positive cases, there is hope.

Physical distancing measures  like cancelling sporting events, concerts and other large gatherings  can help to slow transmission of the virus. They can reduce the burden on the health system, he said.

The WHO boss further appealed to governments to suppress and control epidemics by ensuring that they isolate, test, treat and trace people who may have contracted the novel coronavirus.

According to him, isolating, testing and treating every suspected case and tracing every contact, must be the backbone of the response in every country.

If they dont, transmission chains can continue at a low level, then resurge once physical distancing measures are lifted, he added.

He cited the Republic of Korea saying their unique efforts in combating the pandemic have led to decline in reported cases and at the peak there were more than 800 cases, and today the report was only 90 cases.

A month ago, the Republic of Korea was faced with accelerating community transmission. But it didnt surrender. It educated, empowered and engaged communities; It developed an innovative testing strategy and expanded lab capacity; It rationed the use of masks; It did exhaustive contact tracing and testing in selected areas, Dr. Ghebreyesus said.

WHO recommends that, wherever possible, confirmed mild cases should be isolated in health facilities, where trained professionals can provide good medical care, and prevent clinical progression and onward transmission.

If thats not possible, countries can use community facilities to isolate and care for mild cases and refer them for specialized care quickly if needed, the WHO boss added.

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---citizenTv
So going from those staying temporarily with others, living in crowded dwellings, to more street-based homelessness, literally having nowhere to go or stay. And that could potentially be in the thousands. Loading Melbourne lord mayor Sally Capp said there was likely to be an increase in homelessness right across the inner city as large numbers of businesses closed and jobs were lost. We understand the demand may increase significantly over the coming weeks, she said.

Homeless service Launch Housing has created a special COVID-19 taskforce that is urgently taking rough sleepers off the street. Outreach co-ordinator Mark Fitzgerald said about 65 had been moved into motels so far, at a cost of about $700 a week each. 'That doesnt just put them at risk, it puts all of us at risk.' Launch Housing outreach co-ordinator Mark Fitzgerald We've been directed by [the Department of Health and Human Services] to just put in as many people as we can, he said. Let's get them off the street. We'll worry about money later.

However, Mr Fitzgerald is concerned they will reach a point where they run out of motels rooms and believes the long-term solution is more affordable housing. He said rough sleepers were more likely to catch and spread the disease, plus they were more susceptible to becoming severely ill or dying due to underlying health conditions. Unfortunately its taken a pandemic to show that everybody needs shelter, he said. And when some people don't  that doesnt just put them at risk, it puts all of us at risk.

Loading The Salvation Armys Lighthouse Cafe on Bourke Street has had to cut its overnight capacity as it divided its space into metre squares with tape. Major Brendan Nottle said up to 170 people used to sleep at the venue, but now that number was down by around a third. He said clients were being helped to find alternative housing and that the Salvos were providing takeaway meals, care packages, hand cleaning stations and video streaming calls. A long queue could be seen outside Fitzroys St Marys House of Welcome this week. Chief executive Robina Bradley said it had been flooded after other services shut.

Loading Launch's taskforce is also trying to convey the seriousness of the virus to rough sleepers, but not all have been able to take it in due to a constant state of crisis, Mr Fitzgerald said. The Age spoke to about half a dozen homeless people in the CBD, all of whom said they were more concerned with the effects of city closures. Im not worried, said David, age 51, as he sat among a large group of rough sleepers sitting close together on the corner on Bourke and Swanston streets. What is concerning him is the decreasing number of potential donors on Melbournes streets.

No one is giving us money because they are worried about this disease," he said. There was frustration among the group, with one saying he could resort to violence and others agreeing. Big Issue vendor Michael fears he could end up on the street. Credit:Jason South Big Issue seller Michael lives in a backpackers hostel but if he lost his income would quickly become homeless. And sales have been down. Its certainly troubling, he said. If we do have a lockdown, then I wont get people to sell my magazine to and Im going to end up on the streets.

How are you going to self-isolate when you need to make money to survive? A man in his mid-20s, with blond curls framing a bruised and bloodshot eye, said hed go to a quarantine centre if he contracted the virus. Its a smart idea, he said. However, his mate, a 41-year-old Indigenous man, who was huddled in a doorway close by, said he would struggle with being confined due to his history. Someone like me would stress out in a place like that, he said.
One of the ways COVID-19 can be brought north is via some of the people we are relying on most during this pandemic: health care workers. But officials say precautions are being taken to reduce that risk.

Every N.W.T. community relies on healthcare providers who fly in from other parts of Canada, according to the Northwest Territories Health and Social Services Authority (NTHSSA).

The N.W.T. and Nunavut Workers Safety and Compensation Commission (WSCC) has said essential workers such as nurses or doctors can skip the mandatory 14-day self-isolation period all other travellers arriving in the N.W.T. are subject to, but only if self-isolation would interrupt the delivery of their essential service.

WSCC sets rules for essential workers returning from outside N.W.T.

"ALL travellers from outside the territory are considered potential carriers of the virus and must self-isolate at home or a similar place in which to stay," cautioned the WSCC in a message sent Saturday setting down rules for employers, including local health authorities.

"To preserve essential services, it is key to consider the risk that a returning worker could pose by endangering the health of multiple other essential service staff, which could jeopardize the ability to provide essential services."

The WSCC says health authorities must question returning healthcare workers about where they travelled, what types of activities they engaged in while away, and whether they or anyone they were with exhibited symptoms of COVID-19. Symptoms include fever, shortness of breath and coughing.

If they answer yes to the last question, the WSCC says the worker must be assessed and cleared by a health professional before returning to work.

If allowed back to work without self-isolating, health workers must be screened daily for symptoms of COVID-19 symptoms and self-isolate for 14 days if any symptoms are present. They are also required to self-isolate at home on days they are not required to be at work.

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The WSCC says they must also avoid close contact with others when travelling to and from work.

Health authority says it is exceeding requirements

The NTHSSA says it is being even more careful than the WSCC requires.

In an email, it says employees who are cleared to return to work will wear protective equipment and take "other precautions."

The authority did not specify what protective equipment is required and what other precautions are being taken and have not responded to CBC's requests for clarification.

The authority says all healthcare workers and staff are being questioned daily to determine whether they have any symptoms. If they do, they are not allowed at work. The authority says efforts are being made to reduce the number of nurses and doctors coming in from outside the territory.

"For small communities outside Yellowknife we have been working to extend current locum/casual workers where possible and are sending local staff from regional centres to support local health centres when possible," a spokesperson said in an email.

At Stanton Territorial Hospital in Yellowknife, all staff are required to fill out a screening questionnaire each day they report to work and receive a sticker they must wear to show they've been screened.

"A similar process is happening in Inuvik," said the authority in the email. "In our higher-risk sites, such as long term care, we are implementing daily staff and patient temperature monitoring."

Teleconference meetings are being held daily to assess staffing levels at health centres across the territory.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Wednesday named seven companies that it has blacklisted for trade in Iranian petrochemicals, three based in mainland China, three in Hong Kong and one in South Africa, the State Department said in a statement.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had said on Tuesday the agency was targeting such entities but did not name them.

His announcement appeared designed to signal that Washington would not ease its campaign of choking off Tehran's ability to export its oil, despite appeals from China and others that it do so on humanitarian grounds because of the coronavirus outbreak.

The campaign, instituted after President Donald Trump in 2018 unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal Iran struck with six major world powers, aims to force Iran to limit its nuclear, missile and regional activities.

The State Department identified the firms targeted as Hong Kong-based Mcfly Plastic Hk Ltd, Saturn Oasis Co, Sea Charming Shipping Company Ltd; Chinese companies Dalian Golden Sun Import & Export Co. Ltd., Tianyi International (Dalian) Co. Ltd. and Aoxing Ship Management (Shanghai) Ltd. and South Africa's SPI International Proprietary Ltd.

It also said it had targeted two entities which own or control SPI International and had knowledge of its sanctionable activities: South African company Main Street 1095 and Iranian entity Armed Forces Social Security Investment Company.

Further, the agency targeted Mohammad Hassan Toulai, managing director of Iran's Armed Forces Social Security Investment Company; Hossein Tavakkoli, director of SPI International; and Reza Ebadzadeh Semnani, director of Main Street 1095.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bernadette Baum)
The US Embassy in Islamabad said on Thursday that it will provide USD 2 million as emergency assistance to Pakistan to fight the coronavirus outbreak that has killed eight people and infected over 1,100 in the country.

The embassy said that Ambassador Paul Jones highlighted the support for Pakistan in his message on social media.

He said that that Pakistan and the United States are partners in the fight against coronavirus.

"We've made Pakistan a priority country for emergency coronavirus assistance. We redirected USD 1 million in existing funding, and provided USD 1 million in new funding for lab and emergency supplies and to enable communities to identify potential coronavirus outbreaks, he said.

He said that the United States and Pakistan are longstanding partners in tackling global health challenges, and this partnership has been critical as we work together against coronavirusto achieve our shared goals of health and prosperity of our peoples.

Jones further said that the US also has commitment to deepen collaboration with new technologies and resources, and guidance for American citizens in Pakistan.

He encouraged American citizens in Pakistan to register for the Smart Traveller Enrollment Program to receive security and health alerts.

The announcement by the US came a day after China sent to Pakistan two planes loaded with essential protective medical gear and virus testing kits.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Medical workers outside at Elmhurst Hospital Center in the Queens borough of New York City on March 26, 2020. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

New York Reports Nearly 6,500 New CCP Virus Cases, 100 New Deaths

New York recorded nearly 6,500 new cases of the CCP virus overnight, bringing the total number in the state to 37,258 on March 26.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

New York had 30,811 cases on March 25, marking an increase of 20 percent.

The state has more than 50 percent of all cases in the United States. About one of every three cases in the country is in New York City, which reported 3,537 new cases and has nearly 22,000 in total.

The surge came a day after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said social distancing measures appear to be working, citing how projections showed that hospitalizations from the virus went from doubling every two days to doubling every 4.7 days.

The death toll in the state rose to 385 on March 26, an increase of 100 from a day prior. Most of the deaths are in the city, which has a population of 8.6 million.

Two people depart a tent after being tested for the CCP virus outside Elmhurst Hospital Center in the Queens borough of New York City on March 26, 2020. (Stefan Jeremiah/Reuters)

The mortality rate from the disease dropped to 1 percent in the state. Health experts believe the true rate is lower because many patients who show only mild symptoms are never tested, leaving them outside the case count.

A makeshift morgue was created outside Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, and Army personnel are being deployed to quickly build field hospitals, converting the Javits Center in Manhattan and other buildings.

Hospitals in the city are in danger of being overwhelmed as the number of patients requiring care sharply rises, and some patients spend up to 30 days on ventilators, while reports of workers lacking enough personal protective equipment circulate, though officials have denied a shortage.

We now have enough personal protective equipment for the foreseeable future, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters at a press conference.

But he said that nearly any scenario will see the states existing capacity overwhelmed, prompting officials to race to boost capacity to 140,000 beds from 53,000 beds through measures such as requiring every hospital to raise capacity by at least 50 percent and converting facilities like Javits. Officials are scouting new sites, primarily in the downstate area.

An Air Force member exits a tent erected as a makeshift morgue outside of Bellevue Hospital in New York City on March 25, 2020. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)

Our goal is to have a 1,000-plus overflow facility in each of the boroughs downstate and the counties, he told reporters.

The social distancing measures, such as requiring residents to stay home except for essential trips, is the other prong, trying to reduce the speed at which people get infected, bringing the rate of increase down.

Hospitals taking care of more patients than they have the capacity for in New York City can transfer patients to hospitals in the city that arent at capacity, Cuomo said, adding that he doesnt support moving patients to hospitals upstate.

Im not eager to redistribute people from downstate to upstate, he said.

Cuomo and state officials again dismissed calls for travel restrictions to keep New Yorkers from traveling to other areas in the country.

Dr. Zuckers position was, its not necessary. And I would agree with Dr. Zucker, Cuomo said, referring to comments made by the state commissioner of health, Dr. Howard Zucker.
Provides Update on Phase I/II Clinical Trial of AMT-130 in Huntington's Disease and Response to COVID-19 Pandemic

LEXINGTON, Mass. and AMSTERDAM, March 26, 2020 ), an investigational AAV5-based gene therapy incorporating the patent-protected FIX-Padua variant for the treatment of patients with severe and moderately severe hemophilia B. The targeted number of patients to be dosed per the clinical trial protocol was 50. In total, 54 patients have received the one-time dose of etranacogene dezaparvovec.



"I am very proud of the entire uniQure team, our investigators, study coordinators and the hemophilia patient communities who helped make this major milestone possible," stated Matt Kapusta, chief executive officer of uniQure. "With target patient dosing now finished, we are closely monitoring the trial and working within guidance provided by the FDA regarding COVID-19 to minimize any risk or disruption in patient follow-up visits. We continue to expect top-line data from the Phase III trial before the end of this year, which we believe will support a BLA submission in 2021."

The pivotal Phase III HOPE-B trial follows the Company's ongoing Phase IIb trial of etranacogene dezaparvovec, in which we have previously reported that, after 52 weeks of follow-up data, all three patients had stabilized and sustained FIX activity at therapeutic levels after the one-time administration of etranacogene dezaparvovec. Additionally, in an ongoing Phase I/II trial of AMT-060, the Company's first-generation gene therapy for the treatment of hemophilia B, all 10 patients continued to show sustained and stable increases in FIX activity and long-term clinical benefit, including improved disease phenotype and substantial reductions in spontaneous bleeds at up to 4 years of observation.

Update on the Phase I/II Clinical Trial of AMT-130 in Huntington's Disease

The first two patients in the Company's Phase I/II clinical trial of AMT-130 in Huntington's disease have been enrolled after successfully meeting all screening and eligibility criteria. These patients were scheduled to have their procedures on March 24 and 25 at the Ohio State University. Due to the expanding impact of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, these procedures have been temporarily postponed. The decision to postpone treatment in the trial follows the COVID-19-related State of Emergency declarations in the United States, where the trial is taking place.

"We are following all federal and local regulations including the FDA guidance on clinical trial conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic and we are working very closely with trial investigators to ensure that patient safety remains our top priority," stated Robert Gut, M.D., Ph.D., chief medical officer at uniQure. "Despite this unexpected postponement, we are encouraged by the progress that we have made with this trial since the beginning of the year, and the fact that we have patients who are highly motivated to participate. We will continue our work to resume treatment in the Phase I/II trial as soon as it is clinically appropriate."

uniQure's Response to COVID-19

The Company is continuing its operations under guidance from national, state and local authorities in the Netherlands and in the United States, including the US Food and Drug Administration. Ongoing clinical research activities are being closely monitored to minimize any risk, disruption or delay in either patient dosing or follow-up visits.

uniQure is focused on ensuring the health and wellbeing of its global workforce. As of March 13, the Company mandated a work-from-home policy for all non-essential employees. As a biopharma research and development company, uniQure is deemed to provide Essential Services under the "stay at home" advisory that was issued by the Governor of Massachusetts on March 23, 2020 and is maintaining its mission-critical activities that include commercial-scale manufacturing operations.

About the Pivotal Phase III HOPE-B Trial

The pivotal Phase III HOPE-B trial is a multinational, open-label, single-arm study to evaluate the safety and efficacy of etranacogene dezaparvovec in 50 patients. Adult hemophilia B patients classified as severe or moderately severe are enrolled in a six-month observational period during which time they will continue to use their current standard of care to establish a baseline control. After the six-month lead-in period, patients will receive a single intravenous administration of etranacogene dezaparvovec at the 2x1013 gc/kg dose. Dosing of patients in the HOPE-B pivotal trial was initiated in January 2019.

The trial's primary endpoint is the assessment of Factor IX activity 26 weeks after dosing. Secondary endpoints include annualized bleeding rate (ABR) and usage of Factor IX replacement therapy over a 52-week time frame, as well as other efficacy and safety aspects. Post-treatment, patients will be followed for 5 years.

Patients enrolled in the HOPE-B pivotal trial will be tested for the presence of pre-existing neutralizing antibodies to AAV5 but will not be excluded from the trial based on their titers. Previous studies performed by uniQure suggest that AAV5-based gene therapies may be viable treatments for at least 97% of patients.

About Etranacogene Dezaparvovec (AMT-061)

Etranacogene dezaparvovec, also known as AMT-061, consists of an AAV5 viral vector carrying a gene cassette with the patent-protected Padua variant of Factor IX (FIX-Padua). AAV5-based gene therapies have been demonstrated to be safe and well tolerated in many clinical trials, including four uniQure trials conducted in 25 patients in hemophilia B and other indications. No patient treated in clinical trials with the Company's AAV5-based gene therapies has experienced any cytotoxic T-cell-mediated immune response to the capsid. Additionally, preclinical and clinical data show that AAV5-based gene therapies may be clinically effective in patients with pre-existing antibodies to AAV5, thereby potentially increasing patient eligibility for treatment compared to other gene therapy product candidates. Etranacogene dezaparvovec has been granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation by the United States Food and Drug Administration and access to Priority Medicines (PRIME) regulatory initiative by the European Medicines Agency.

About AMT-130

AMT-130 is our novel gene therapy candidate for the treatment of Huntington's disease, a severe genetic neurodegenerative disorder causing loss of muscle coordination, behavioral abnormalities and cognitive decline, often resulting in complete physical and mental deterioration over a 12 to 15-year period. AMT-130 utilizes our miQURE proprietary, gene-silencing platform and incorporates an AAV vector carrying a microRNA specifically designed to silence the huntingtin gene and the potentially highly toxic exon 1 protein fragment. AMT-130 has received orphan drug and fast track designations from the FDA and Orphan Medicinal Product Designation from the EMA.

About uniQure

uniQure is delivering on the promise of gene therapy - single treatments with potentially curative results. We are leveraging our modular and validated technology platform to rapidly advance a pipeline of proprietary gene therapies to treat patients with hemophilia B, hemophilia A, Huntington's disease, Fabry disease, spinocerebellar ataxia Type 3 and other diseases. www.uniQure.com

uniQure Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, which are often indicated by terms such as "anticipate," "believe," "could," "estimate," "expect," "goal," "intend," "look forward to", "may," "plan," "potential," "predict," "project," "should," "will," "would" and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs and assumptions and on information available to management only as of the date of this press release. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, whether we will obtain top-line data from the HOPE-B Phase III trial before the end of this year or ever, whether such data will support a BLA submission in 2021, whether we will be able to resume treatment in the Phase I/II trial as soon as it is clinically appropriate, and our expectation to continue our operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements for many reasons, including, without limitation, risks associated with our and our collaborators' clinical development activities, clinical results, collaboration arrangements, corporate reorganizations and strategic shifts, regulatory oversight, product commercialization and intellectual property claims, as well as the risks, uncertainties and other factors described under the heading "Risk Factors" in uniQure's Annual Report on Form 10-K filed on March 2, 2020. Given these risks, uncertainties and other factors, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.
Five of them are in critical condition.

Fourteen soldiers who have been wounded in the Joint Forces Operation zone in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, have been delivered by a medevac plane to Odesa.

"Fourteen persons, including five with serious wounds, have arrived Many have blast injuries, severe wounds to the eyes, chest wounds," Odesa volunteer Andriy Tantsiura said on Facebook on March 26.

Read alsoRussia-led forces mount seven attacks on Ukraine army in Donbas on March 23, two soldiers wounded

Civil volunteers have started raising funds for the purchase of medicines and supplies needed for the soldiers.

The wounded soldiers were brought to Odesa-based Military Medical Clinical Center, where sanitary and epidemiological measures have now been stepped up to reduce the risk of coronavirus infection for military personnel.

In particular, according to a Cabinet decision, non-urgent surgery has been suspended. Only urgent operations are carried out. Visitors' entrance is prohibited until further notice.
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VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Maple Leaf Short Duration 2020 Flow-Through Limited Partnership (the "Partnership") is pleased to announce that it has completed its second and final closing on March 26, 2020 with aggregate gross proceeds of $21,074,900.00.Partnership Objectives & Benefits - National Class UnitsThe Partnership is designed to provide holders of National Class Units ("National Class Limited Partners") with an investment in a diversified portfolio of Flow-Through Shares of Resource Companies incurring Eligible Expenditures (as those terms are defined in the Prospectus) across Canada with a view to maximizing the tax benefits of an investment in National Class Units and achieving capital appreciation and/or income for National Class Limited Partners. National Class Limited Partners must be residents of Canada or liable to pay Canadian income tax.Investors are expected to receive tax deductions for 2020 of approximately 100% of the amount invested based on and subject to certain conditions as set forth in the Prospectus.Partnership Objectives & Benefits - Quebec Class UnitsThe Partnership is designed to provide holders of Quebec Class Units ("Quebec Class Limited Partners") with an investment in a diversified portfolio of Flow-Through Shares of Resource Companies incurring Eligible Expenditures principally in the Province of Quebec with a view to maximizing the tax benefits of an investment in Quebec Class Units and achieving capital appreciation and/or income for Quebec Class Limited Partners. Quebec Class Units are most suitable for investors who reside in the Province Quebec or are liable to pay income tax in Quebec.Investors are expected to receive tax deductions for 2020 of up to approximately 131% of the amount invested based on and subject to certain conditions as set forth in the Prospectus.Liquidity EventThe investment portfolios of both the National and Quebec Class Units will be actively managed in such a way as to preserve the ability to undertake a future liquidity event, such as a rollover into a mutual fund corporation.The SyndicateThe syndicate of agents for the offering is being led by Scotia Capital Inc. and includes National Bank Financial Inc., CIBC World Markets Inc., BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc., Industrial Alliance Securities Inc., Stifel Nicolaus Canada Inc., Canaccord Genuity Corp., Desjardins Securities Inc., Echelon Wealth Partners Inc., Manulife Securities Incorporated, Raymond James Ltd. and Laurentian Bank Securities Inc.A copy of the Prospectus can be obtained from any agent.Offering JurisdictionsEach of the Provinces and Territories of Canada.FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:Hugh Cartwright, ChairmanMAPLE LEAF FLOW-THROUGH PROGRAMSTel: 1-866-688-5750Email: info@ mapleleaffunds.ca Web: www.MapleLeafFunds.ca SOURCE: Maple Leaf Short Duration 2020 Flow-Through Limited Partnership
SPRINGFIELD  City police officers have been given facemasks, glasses and gloves to help protect them when they have to come in close contact with residents while responding to emergency calls.

Surgical and N95 masks and the other equipment were handed out to squad officers beginning Wednesday, Police Commissioner Cheryl Clapprood said.

The health and well-being of our officers has always been my highest priority. There are several COVID-19 cases in our community and it is extremely contagious. I want to keep our officers healthy and hope our residents are doing everything possible to prevent the spread of this virus, she said.

As on Wednesday, there are enough N95 masks for every squad officer, but supplies are short and they can only be steamed and reused a few times before they use their protective fibers. The N95 masks block 95 percent of airborne particles.

Officers also will carry surgical masks that can be placed over a patient or other persons mouth to prevent them from spreading germs to the officer, she said.

The masks were donated by Smith & Wesson, Springfield Public Schools, Pastor Chen of the Chinese Christian Church. The Executive Office of Public Safety and Springfield Officer of Emergency Preparedness assisted in securing the N95 Masks, which are in a serious shortage.

Anyone who has N95 Masks available and willing to donate to help protect officers is asked to contact the Commissioners Office 413-787-6313.

Related Content:
By Express News Service

THANJAVUR: Revenue and police officials are taking steps to implement lock down in the district. Though roads were relatively empty on Wednesday, one could spot people on two wheelers moving around in the city. Almost all shops except pharmacies were shut on Old bus stand area, Gandhiji road, Railway junction area, Medical college road, Najikkottai road and Vilar road. However, when it was reported many shops in the east gate area were being opened and police asked them to close.



When there were a significant number of persons on two wheelers near the Anna statue area, police resorted to hitting the bikes with lathis. Those with genuine reasons were allowed to travel. Violators were made aware of the reason for the lockdown and their vehicle keys were taken away.



Violators booked



The police started booked several violators near the New Bus stand, Old bus stand, Railway junction, Santhapillai gate. Meanwhile all the six check posts at the border of the district remain closed and only with vehicles carrying essential commodities including fertilizers were allowed to ply.



Minister warns motorists



Handlooms and Textiles Minister OS Manian on Wednesday warned public that vehicles of those who violate curfew would be seized.



Addressing media on Wednesday, he said Our district is being equipped to treat patients by adding more beds to the hospitals in Nagapattinam and Mayiladuthurai. We request the people to stay indoors and follow self-quarantine. However, some people are still travelling in vehicles for nonessential purposes. The administration would seize the vehicles of those who travel for nonessential purposes.



COVID-19 LIVE | India tally reaches 626, eight new cases in Tamil Nadu



According to officials, there are two General Hospitals in the district that are being set up into facilities to accommodate people. About 300 beds are set to be allotted for Coronavirus treatment.



We have converted the newly built Maternal and Child Health Care block in Mayiladuthurai Government General Hospital which has six floors into a Corona treatment facility. We are adding 150 beds to it.



We are also converting the newly-constructed buildings of Nursing College and Nursing College Hostel, which would have 140 beds combined, into a Corona-treatment facility, said R Mahendran, the joint director of the health services department.
Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci seemingly pushed back Wednesday night against President Donald Trumps desire to quickly end coronavirus restrictions and reopen the economy, noting that the virus makes the timeline.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, appeared on CNNs Cuomo Prime Time to discuss the growing pandemic and the administration's efforts to combat the spread of COVID-19.

Anchor Chris Cuomo at one point noted that theres currently two different points of pressure from opposing directions: those who want to bring social distancing to an end and open the country back up and others arguing that we need to maintain restrictions much longer because mitigation isnt close to complete.

The CNN host then brought up his brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has repeatedly warned that his state is still seeing accelerating cases.

Youre absolutely correct, 100 percent, Chris, the doctor replied. Its accelerating. And what youve got to do is when you have a big country like this, youve got to look at it in different ways.

He went on to say that while he definitely wouldnt lift any restrictions on New York now, there are other parts of the country which we need to get a better feel for what is going on.

And the way we do that is by increasing testing and identifying people who are infected, isolating them, getting out of circulation, and then do contact tracing, Fauci continued. Thats what we call containment. So you can do containment and maybe ease up a bit in one area, whereas in other areas where its mitigation, all you got to do is put all your resources in there to help the people who are under this stressful situation.

After Fauci said that there could be different strategies for different parts of the country, Cuomo noted that the Los Angeles mayor said it could take months before theyre back to normal while New York says it is still two to three weeks before the hospitals experience their worst crush of patients.

Story continues

I mean, it seems that the timeline is getting extended farther out, not that things are going better than expected anywhere, Cuomo added.

What youve got to do, Chris, youve got to be realistic and youve got to understand that you dont make the timeline, Fauci replied. The virus makes the timeline. So youve got to respond in what you see happen.

And if you keep seeing this acceleration, it doesnt matter what you sayone week, two weeks, three weeksyouve got to go with what the situation on the ground is, he continued. So when people say it may take months, I think what people are talking about is how long it takes to go all the way down.

The infectious disease expert concluded by noting that you cant make an arbitrary decision because you need the data.

The president, meanwhile, has recently floated Easter as the day hed like for the administrations social distancing policy to be lifted because he thought it was a beautiful timeline and hed love to see the churches packed that day.

It has recently been reported that Trumps patience with Fauci, who has frequently attempted to correct the president's many misstatements on the pandemic, has worn thin. At the same time, pro-Trump media has begun to increasingly take pointed shots at the universally admired figure.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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The auction ban imposed by the federal government does not necessarily mean the real estate industry will shut down, according to the Real Estate Institute of Australia (REIA).

In an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a slew of restrictions on public gatherings, including auctions.

"In the retail space, auction houses, gatherings together in auction rooms, that can no longer continue. Real estate auctions and open house inspections, in particular open house inspections  that cannot continue," Morrison said.

REIA President Adrian Kelly said prior to Morrison's address, REIA has already urged realtors to explore other strategies to continue their businesses.

"While it is not business as usual, there are opportunities for any real estate agent who looks for them, there are still ways of conducting inspections and to auction property," he said.

Also read: Busy auction markets amid COVID-19

Kelly said local real estate institutes will be communicating with their agents to assist them in conducting their businesses.

Following Morrison's announcements, the Real Estate Institute of Victoria reached out to the Consumer Affairs Victoria to clarify the scope of the restrictions.

In a statement, REIV President Leah Calnan said inspections by appointment for sales and rentals and auctions through online methods can continue.

"The Victorian real estate sector is a flexible, innovative, and resourceful industry capable of dealing with any problem," Calnan said. "Many agencies have already invested in online platforms for property auctions and have been trialing them in recent months, and houses will continue to be sold in Victoria."

Calnan said interest in the Victorian property market remains strong and that local agents are starting to embrace technology and explore workarounds amid the restrictions.

"Local agents are turning to technology to satisfy the high demand in Victorian real estate, with virtual reality inspections, and transactions conducted over the phone and electronic document signing over the internet becoming commonplace," Calnan said.

In a report in The Australian Financial Review, Tim Lawless, research director of CoreLogic, said that while the ban will likely see activity in the market moderate, home prices will hold steady.

"Auctions only make up 11% of all listings nationally, so it remains a small portion of the residential property transactions," he said. "I think prices will be largely insulated, although there is clearly some downside risk, particularly with unemployment rate forecast ramping up."
After two years of strong recovery and high growth, the banking sector is facing major challenges because of Covid-19.

Moodys earlier this month released a report on the prospects of Vietnams banking sector and the impact of the epidemic. The credit rating firm believes that SBV will allow the banks that meet Basel lI standards to increase credit limits this year.



At the end of 2019, Moody's lowered Vietnam's credit rating to "negative", and lowered the credit outlook for 18 Vietnamese banks in accordance with the sovereign ranking. The move has affected Vietnamese banks ability to borrow foreign capital.



In the latest report, Moodys said state-owned banks and small banks will need to increase capital to increase asset growth while maintaining capital adequacy ratio (CAR).

Moodys earlier this month released a report on the prospects of Vietnams banking sector and the impact of the epidemic. The credit rating firm believes that SBV will allow the banks that meet Basel lI standards to increase credit limits this year.

Meanwhile, the SBVs Credit Department has warned of the bad debt increase as Covid-19 has had adverse impacts on all business fields, affecting business solvency.



By early March, 23 credit institutions had reported that their VND926 trillion worth of outstanding loans may be affected by COVID-19. This accounts for 14.27 percent of their total outstanding loans and 11.3 percent of total outstanding loans of the whole banking system.



The business fields which have most suffered from the epidemic are agriculture, forestry and aquaculture, import/export, accommodation service, food and drink, transport, textile and garment, footwear, electronics, refrigeration engineering, oil and gas, tourism and education.



Commercial banks will not only see lower income from credit, but also lower revenue from service fees as all transactions in the economy will slow down.



Thirty two commercial banks have announced they will join witj NAPAS, the unit that connects banks and provides diverse payment portal to card users, to run a program on money transfer fee exemption and reduction.



As the economy is predicted to become stagnant, supply chains have been interrupted and increase in bad debt is expected.



The General Statistics Office (GSO) reported that the industrial production index in the first two months of the year increased by 6.2 percent in comparison with 2019, a sharp decrease from the 9.2 percent growth rate of the same period last year.



The Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) also showed negative signs as it dropped to below 50.



Regarding demand, the total goods and service retail revenue in the first two months only increased by 8.3 percent, lower than the 12.2 percent growth rate of the first two months 2019.



The credit growth rate by February 20, 2020 decreased by 0.18 percent compared with the beginning of the year.

Kim Chi

EVFTA paves way for European investors to contribute capital to Vietnams banks Within five years from the day the FTA takes effect, Vietnam pledges to consider European credit institutions proposals to allow them to hold up to 49 percent of shares in two Vietnamese joint stock banks.
A teacher who was left stranded in Australia while trying to make it home to New Zealand from London has finally completed her journey.

Tess Johnson, 26, wanted to get back to Hamilton to be with her family after living in London for four years.

She intended to travel through Sydney to get back to New Zealand but she was stopped from boarding her final flight across the Tasman due to her Australian passport.

Ms Johnson was born in Australia but had lived in New Zealand for 10 years from when she was 12. She is a dual citizen of both countries.

She made the mad dash starting on Monday morning with a cousin and her friend to get back as New Zealand lifted its coronavirus alert level to three - one step before a total lockdown.

Tess Johnson, a dual citizen of Australia and New Zealand, moved to London four years ago but wanted to be with her family during the coronavirus pandemic

She said being stopped at Sydney Airport was 'the worst experience'.

'We were crying, it was just horrible... My parents are really concerned - Mum cried all day,' she told the New Zealand Herald.

'[Immigration officials] were really harsh to me. They told me they could see no valid reason to let me back into New Zealand until this is sorted.'

She claims she was told that because she had been living in the UK for four years that her New Zealand residency was 'blocked'.

After an MP in her home city intervened, Ms Johnson was able to return to New Zealand and arrived at Auckland Airport on Wednesday night.

'My cousin didn't come. It was a very emotional goodbye. We were both crying of happiness and sadness at the same time,' she said.

'My mum was waiting up eagerly for me all night. I did tell her to sleep but I don't think she did.'

Ms Johnson said she is now self-isolating in a cabin on her parents' property in Hamilton.
PHILIPSBURG:--- Prime Minister and Chair of the EOC Silveria Jacobs visited PJIA on March 25th, to accept the donation of 5000 medical masks on behalf of the Government of St. Maarten. The donated masks are to be used by the Medical Professionals on St. Maarten who are on the frontlines of the battle to block the spread of COVID-19 and care for our patients.

On Monday, Royal Dutch Airlines KLM transported 8,000 masks to St. Maarten on the request of PJIA. The remainder of the masks will be used for the protection of PJIA employees against the COVID-19 virus while they are at work. This is specifically important in areas where passengers frequent. The multiple pallets arrived on a passenger-empty flight from Schiphol, Amsterdam.

Brian Mingo, the CEO of PJIA, expressed his thanks to Schiphol for making these masks available and to KLM for transporting it. Additionally, PJIA Task Force Manager Connelly Conner, stated that PJIAs objective is to minimize the spread of this virus, protect staff, the airport community, tourists, and the public from becoming infected.

Prime Minister Jacobs recognized PJIA as a key stakeholder in the Emergency Support Function ESF 10 along with Port St. Maarten. Prime Minister Jacobs said, PJIA has worked towards implementing measures to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 and I thank them for their close cooperation."

The Government of St. Maarten is appreciative of the 5000 masks that arrived from Schiphol. This is one of PJIAs best gestures despite their great cooperation thus far seeing these trying times, Prime Minister Jacobs stated.

Prime Minister Jacobs encourages other businesses to exercise their social responsibility and explore how their business can contribute within the community or via the government, which can get help to those persons most vulnerable in our society. We need all hands on deck, Prime Minister Jacobs concluded.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker and state health officials are giving their daily update on the spread of COVID-19 in Illinois.

The state Department of Public Health is reporting 673 new cases of the disease caused by the new coronavirus, bringing the state's total to 2,538. Additionally, there have been seven more deaths, bringing that total to 26 statewide.

The cases exist in 37 of the state's 102 counties.

"I am begging you, if you don't have to be out, please stay inside," Pritzker said, pleading with residents to follow health guidelines.

The number of new cases announced Thursday was more than double the 330 new cases that were announced on Wednesday, and is the largest jump in cases in a single day.

Because testing is limited and people can spread the disease for days before showing symptoms, health experts continue to urge social distancing measures, frequent handwashing and other precautions, even in counties that have not reported confirmed cases.

"To be very clear, this virus doesn't care if you're bored and you want to hang out with your friends," the governor said. "... It has infected infants. It has killed people in their 20s and 30s and 40s. It has forced doctors around the world to make terrible decisions about who will live and who will die."

Pritzker has closed schools and issued a statewide stay-at-home order until April 7. People are still able to go to grocery stores, gas stations, pharmacies and jobs that are considered essential, among other destinations. The order is meant to discourage people from leaving their homes and coming into contact with others unless it is absolutely necessary, thus slowing the spread of the virus and giving hospitals a better chance to prepare for a surge of patients.

Experts have urged that Illinoisans should act like the virus is already in their communities as lack of testing means it has probably spread far beyond the reported cases.

This story will be updated.

Contact Allison Petty at (217) 421-6986. Follow her on Twitter: @allison0512

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E-Triage will risk stratify patients, identifying those individuals that are at high risk for hospitalization. For lower risk patients, health care workers will be sent to the patients home for further assessment, follow up, and testing.

In response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and the need to keep patients from flooding hospital emergency rooms, OSF HealthCare  an integrated health system based in Peoria, Illinois and consisting of 14 health care facilities throughout the state  will use a new artificial intelligence based tool designed to shift triage out of the hospital emergency room and into the community to get care to people in their homes.

Developed by Baltimore-based StoCastic to identify patients that are at high risk for hospitalization due to the Coronavirus, E-Triage enables nurses to triage patients over the phone rather than in hospitals, then gather information and mobilize pandemic health care workers to test patients in their homes and send samples to labs.

Using machine learning technology, E-Triage will risk stratify patients, identifying those individuals that are at high risk for hospitalization, explains John Vozenilek, vice president and chief medical officer innovation and digital health for OSF HealthCare. For lower risk patients, health care workers will be sent to the patients home for further assessment, follow up, and testing.

By triaging patients over the phone rather than in hospitals, E-Triage is expected to eliminate the potential for long lines and over-crowding at area hospitals due to the Coronavirus.

Through tools such as E-Triage and E-CaseLink  a predictive modeling tool which aims at mobilizing health workers quickly and efficiently  StoCastic harnesses large-scale EHR data to support real-time decision-making that confronts pain points in patient progression in the emergency department (ED), hospital, outpatient, and community settings.

Our EHR- integrated support tools deploy artificial intelligence methods that enable smoother, more affordable health care, explains Scott Levin, PhD Chief Technology Officer for StoCastic.

Begun at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and supported by the National Science Foundation's Small Business Innovation Research program, StoCastic is transforming the delivery of health care through ground-breaking solutions that harness large-scale electronic health record data and provide care teams with real-time, predictive insight.

StoCastics solutions are customized to each hospitals unique population, care system, and organizational objectives, and are grounded in scientific evidence, relying on feedback and engagement from frontline providers.

For more information about StoCastic, visit https://www.stocastic.com/digital-decision-support-solutions.
The Ulemas (Muslim clerics) of the Uttar Pradesh have appealed to the Muslims to offer Jumma Namaz or Friday prayers at their homes instead of assembling at the mosques as a precautionary step to curb the risk of Covid-19.

"There will be only five people in the mosques - An Imam (one who leads the congregation), a Muezzin (who gives out Azaan or call to prayer)and three others - for the Namaz. We appeal to the people to follow this directive," said a cleric.

The Ulemas have requested the people to pray to God that the coronavirus pandemic is removed from the world.

As many as 649 positive cases of COVID-19 have been reported from the country, including 47 foreign nationals, said the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Thursday.

There have been 13 instances of death due to novel coronavirus in India.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
WA Education Minister Sue Ellery said it was essential education was provided to WA students in whatever form, no matter their individual circumstances, as the Easter holidays approached.

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She said physical attendance was still permitted at schools for those parents who need to have their children there.

"For those that can't attend, they will be provided with some hard copy packages along with online learning," she told 6PR's Drive program ahead of a national meeting with other state education ministers on Thursday night.

Hard copies would form the bulk of educational material for primary school students, while online learning tools would be used for secondary, and in particular, Year 12 students.

"We are in a set of circumstances that none of us could have envisaged," Ms Ellery said.

"We know it's important for all sorts of reasons to provide education, and we want to ensure those people who can go to work and earn money for their families can do that.

"Education can continue but it's not going to be just business as usual."

She anticipated students would not be able to attend schools for up to six months.

"They are anticipating it will peak some time in August, [so] what level you start resuming normal life, I don't know... we are going to find that out together.

"In WA we are lucky that we have been delivering distance education for some time already."

Ms Ellery said no decision had yet been made whether Year 12 ATAR exams would proceed and flagged teachers assessing students over their body of work for the year in case exams were cancelled.

"No student will be disadvantaged for pathways to university," she said.
Eighteen people died when a truck, loaded with construction material and travelling at high speed, smashed into 15 vehicles on Wednesday night

Egyptian prosecution ordered the four-day detention of a truck driver over a deadly accident that left 18 people dead in Giza on Wednesday, a judicial source told Ahram Online on Thursday.

The multi-vehicle accident on a stretch of the ring road occurred when a trailer-truck travelling at high speed plowed into as many as 15 vehicles, only after the countrys nighttime curfew took effect. The vehicles, which included microbuses, trucks and cars, were lined up at a checkpoint to be inspected by officers.

Some 20 people were injured in the crash.

The prosecution also ordered the driver be tested for drugs.

Deadly road accidents take place near daily in Egypt due to poor road safety, badly maintained infrastructure, and loosely enforced traffic regulations.

Over 3,000 people were killed in traffic accidents in Egypt in 2018, according to the countrys official statistics agency CAPMAS.

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The insurance company representing four major superannuation companies has pledged it will not apply pandemic exclusions for life insurance as the nation faces a rising death toll from the coronavirus pandemic.

TAL is the insurer for UniSuper, Prime Super, TWU Super and NGS Super who all have exclusions for death insurance in the case of a pandemic. But after pressure from the consumer advocate and meetings with the funds, the insurer has pledged to waive these exclusions.

"As the COVID-19 situation has evolved very rapidly, TAL has been gathering information and assessing the situation accordingly and in consultation with our superannuation fund partners," a TAL spokeswoman said in a statement.

"TAL has confirmed to each of these superannuation funds that the pandemic exclusions set out in the policy will not apply."
LUND, Sweden, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- BioInvent International AB ("BioInvent") (OMXS: BINV) today announces that the Board of Directors has resolved to postpone the annual general meeting until May 28, 2020.

As a result of the recent outbreak of the new coronavirus (COVID-19), there is a great uncertainty concerning the spread of the virus and its effects. The increased risk level regarding the spread of the virus has led authorities in Sweden, and in several other countries, to introduce restrictions for events and travels. With a majority of the board members, and the CEO, resident in countries where both exit and entry bans currently exists, the Board of Directors has resolved to postpone the annual general meeting until May 28, 2020, to improve, if possible, the possibilities for board members and the CEO to attend the general meeting. The annual general meeting was originally scheduled to be held on April 29, 2020.

BioInvent is taking necessary precautions with regard to the coronavirus and will continue to monitor its spread and associated measures closely. BioInvent has clinical trials in process and clinical trials soon to be initiated. Global measures against the coronavirus and the need to prioritize healthcare resources will likely affect the timelines for these studies. The precise impact is difficult to assess at this stage, given the rapidly developing situation.

Martin Welschof, CEO of BioInvent, says:

"We may see a delay of the early results from the Phase I open label study with a combination of BI-1206 and rituximab for treatment of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (NHL), which, however, are still expected in H2 2020. For the time being, early clinical trial results for BI-1206 in combination with pembrolizumab and clinical trial initiations in other programs remain on track. However, given the rapidly evolving situation with the coronavirus, timelines are still subject to potential changes and we will provide updates as necessary."

About BioInvent

BioInvent International AB (OMXS: BINV) is a clinical stage company that discovers and develops novel and first-in-class immuno-modulatory antibodies for cancer therapies, with two ongoing programs in Phase l/ll clinical trials for the treatment of hematological cancer and solid tumors, respectively. Two preclinical programs in solid tumors are expected to have entered clinical trials by the end of 2020. The Company's validated, proprietary F.I.R.S.T technology platform simultaneously identifies both targets and the antibodies that bind to them, generating many promising new drug candidates to fuel the Company's own clinical development pipeline or for additional licensing and partnering.



The Company generates revenues from research collaborations and license agreements with multiple top-tier pharmaceutical companies, as well as from producing antibodies for third parties in the Company's fully integrated manufacturing unit. More information is available at www.bioinvent.com.



For further information, please contact:

Martin Welschof, CEO

+46 (0)46 286 85 50

martin.welschof@bioinvent.com Hans Herklots, LifeSci Advisors

+41 79 598 71 49

hherklots@lifesciadvisors.com



BioInvent International AB (publ)

Co. Reg. No. Org nr: 556537-7263

Visiting address: Ideongatan 1

Mailing address: 223 70 LUND

Phone: +46-(0)-46-286-85-50

www.bioinvent.com



The press release contains statements about the future, consisting of subjective assumptions and forecasts for future scenarios. Predictions for the future only apply as the date they are made and are, by their very nature, in the same way as research and development work in the biotech segment, associated with risk and uncertainty. With this in mind, the actual outcome may deviate significantly from the scenarios described in this press release.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

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Lucknow, March 26 : The mustard crop is adding a green and yellow lush to the fields. Alongside is the wheat crop turning a vibrant golden colour. Both the crops are ready for harvest but the lockdown has put farmers - big and small in a quandary.

"Labourers are not being allowed to come for harvest and we do not know how we will manage things because the next one fortnight is very crucial for the crops," said Prem Singh Chauhan, a medium farmer in Sultanpur district of Uttar Pradesh.

In Gonda district, the local farmers are now helping each other in harvesting.

"Ours is a case of 'saathi haath badhana'. Since Monday, we collect in groups in our village and have been harvesting mustard in one field collectively. When we finish, we will move to another field. The police are not allowing labourers to come and we cannot let the crop wither away in the fields," said Rajjan Kumar, a small farmer.

Farmers across Uttar Pradesh claim that the lockdown could adversely impact their agricultural operations.

"We can harvest the crop but other operations like harvesting and threshing need to be done by labourers who are adept at the work. Moreover, if the lockdown is prolonged, we will have problems in storing and selling the produce. As it is, we have suffered enough loses due to recent rains and hailstorm," said Balwant Singh, a farmer from Gorakhpur.

Sardar Surjit Singh, who is among the affluent farmers in Pilibhit district, said that 'Baisakhi', which is a festival of celebration by farmers, may not be very joyful since harvesting and threshing of the crops is stalled due to lockdown.

Singh has large farms and needs labourers in large numbers to harvest the crops.
Coconino County has a second death from COVID-19, county officials confirmed Wednesday afternoon.

The first death, a male in his 50s with underlying health conditions, was announced just a day earlier.

Total county cases are at 21, with 173 tests pending. County epidemiologist Matthew Maurer said the county has received results for about 90 of those tests and will be updating case totals later this evening.

The fact that were seeing positives should not be seen as a negative, said Marie Peoples, County Incident Commander and Deputy County Manager, who attributed the rising numbers to the countys proactive approach to testing.

Maurer explained the county is currently submitting between 40 and 80 new tests each day for evaluation, not including hospitals and clinics that are sending in their own samples.

The Arizona Department of Health Services currently reports 401 total cases in Arizona with six deaths.

Peoples said there should be no doubt if a person has been exposed to COVID-19 because the county will contact them as part of its ongoing disease investigation, a lengthy but thorough process.

Anytime we uncover someone that perhaps had an exposure to COVID-19, we are contacting them, Peoples said. There is no guesswork in it. They dont have to worry or wonder.

Coconino County Health and Human Services urges people to continue to take precautions. The best ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19:

Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. If soap and water are not available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands.

Avoid close contact with people who are sick.

Stay home when you are sick.

Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then immediately throw the tissue in the trash.

Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces.

For more information about COVID-19, please visit www.coconino.az.gov/covid19 or email COVID19Information@coconino.az.gov.
H ospitals in London are being deluged by a continuous tsunami of coronavirus patients and critical care beds are close to running out, a health chief said today.

Health chiefs said new beds were filling up rapidly, while up to half of the capitals NHS workforce was off sick or in self-isolation due to the virus.

But experts believe that if Londoners obey the lockdown and stay at home then the city can get through what will be a very difficult time in the next two to three weeks.

A total of 3,247 Covid-19 cases had been declared in London by last night  more than a third of the 9,529 in England  and there have been at least 168 deaths.

A military lorry at St Thomas' hospital / Getty Images

However, there is a lag of up to four days in NHS Englands mortality data, meaning the true number of deaths in London is likely to be higher.

A third of the 33 boroughs have more than 100 cases each, with Lambeth and Southwark both reporting more than 200.

The true number of infections will be many times higher because community testing was halted a fortnight ago. Patients are currently being tested only when ill enough to be admitted to hospital.

Volunteers deliver food to nurses and staff outside St George's Hospital / REUTERS

Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents hospital bosses, said the surge in demand for critical care was off the scale in London and warned that it was set to exceed supply by the weekend.

This was despite hospitals in the capital rushing to increase intensive care capacity by an unprecedented five- to seven-fold in the last fortnight, he said.

Mr Hopson told BBC Radio 4s Today programme that hospital chief executives in London told him they were seeing an explosion of demand in seriously ill patients.

He said: They are saying its the number of patients that are arriving, the speed with which they are arriving and how ill they are.

They talk about wave after wave after wave. The word that is often used to me is a sort of continuous tsunami.

As one CEO said to me yesterday, this is much bigger, in much larger numbers with a greater degree of stretch than you could ever have possibly imagined.

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The 4,000-bed Nightingale field hospital at the ExCeL conference centre in the Docklands, which will have 500 beds with ventilators, is hoping to open next week.

An appeal has been launched for staff to transfer from NHS trusts.

The capitals 18 trusts with A&Es are rapidly seeking to increase the number of intensive care beds from about 1,000 to 4,000, according to the Health Service Journal. However, these numbers are thought to be over-optimistic.

Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures 1 /44 Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures AP Buckingham Palace AP Piccadilly Line tube AP Big Ben AP Millennium bridge AP Wembley Stadium AP St Pancras International train station AP Downing Street AP Victoria Station AP Regent Street AP The Mall leading to Buckingham Palace AP London's National Gallery in Trafalgar Square PA Edinburgh's Royal Mile PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bath PA Bath PA London's Waterloo station PA London Bridge PA London's Canary Wharf Jubilee Line platform PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA London's Buckingham Palace PA London's Tower Bridge PA London's Leicester Square PA London's Millennium Bridge with St Paul's Cathedral PA London's Criterion Theatre PA London's Palace Theatre PA London's Phoenix Theatre PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA Bournemouth beach PA Bath PA Bath PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bournemouth beach PA

In a conference call between health chiefs earlier this week, it was said that London runs out of [ICU] beds in four days unless urgent action was taken, the HSJ reported.

Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, yesterday said that it would be a close- run thing over the next three weeks when asked whether the NHS had the critical care capacity to cope with the rise in cases.

He said the combination of the lockdown, postponing non-emergency operations and the increase in ventilated beds meant the difference between supply and demand would reduce to the smallest possible gap over the next three weeks.

He added: This gap will be probably manageable by the NHS. But we cannot guarantee that.

A man walks past a Coronavirus warning sign outside the Royal Free hospital / Getty Images

Last night a further 28 deaths were announced in England, including the 12 in London, taking the UK death toll to 463.

Today it was reported that an 84-year-old male prisoner in HMP Littlehey in Cambridgeshire had died from Covid-19.

The 12 London deaths included the first person to die in a community hospital.

A member of the ambulance service at St Thomas' Hospital / AFP via Getty Images

The elderly patient, in their eighties with underlying health conditions, was in a rehabilitation unit run by North East London Foundation Trust.

These units are typically used as step down facilities to enable elderly patients to be released from acute hospitals.

Today Professor Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College expert whose coronavirus projections are informing the Governments response, said London was a hotspot for the virus but was optimistic about its ability to cope.

London during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures 1 /66 London during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures A woman jogging near City Hall, London, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown PA An image of Queen Elizabeth II and quotes from her broadcast on Sunday to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA A pedestrian walks past a billboard reading "Please believe these days will pass" on Broadway Market in east London AFP via Getty Images Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge Getty Images Boris Johnson Jeremy Selwyn Sun-seekers cool off in the water and sunbathe on the riverbank at Hackney Marshes in east London AFP via Getty Images Ed Davey is shown on screens as he speaks via videolink during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, London PA A herd of fallow deer graze on the lawns in front of a housing estate in Harold Hill in east London AFP via Getty Images A woman wearing a mask crosses a bridge over Camden Lock, London PA An empty Millenium Bridge PA A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" is seen on an underground station platform Getty Images People push to enter the Niketown shop in Londo AP Jo Proudlove and daughter Eve, 9, follow the daily online "PE with Joe" Joe Wickes' exercise class on "Fancy dress Friday Reuters Police in Westminster Jeremy Selwyn Waterloo station looking empty PA Getty Images A quiet Parliament Square Getty Images PABest A man walks along a passageway at London's Oxford Street Underground station the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown to help curb the spread of the Coronavirus PA Social distancing markers around the camel enclosure at ZSL London Zoo PA A police car patrols Greenwich Park in London PA The Premier League in action in front of empty stands AP Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed. A deserted Piccadilly Circus PA A general view is seen of a deserted Trafalgar Square AFP via Getty Images Getty Images The iconic Abbey Road crossing is seen after a re-paint by a Highways Maintenance team as they take advantage of the COVID-19 coronavirus lockdown and quiet streets to refresh the markings Getty Images A view of 20 Fenchurch Street (the 'Walkie Talkie' building) in the City of London, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus PA A deserted Chinatown PA A person looks at graffiti on a JD Wetherspoon pub in Crystal Palace, south London. Wetherspoons workers have described founder Tim Martin's lack of support for his chain's 40,000 employees as "absolutely outrageous" PA The London ExCel centre that has been turned into a makeshift NHS Hospital and critical care unit to cope with the Coronavirus pandemic PA The Palace Theatre, which usually shows the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child play, sits in a deserted Shaftesbury Avenue PA The Sondheim Theatre, which usually shows the Les Miserables musical, sits in a deserted Shaftesbury Avenue PA Two members of a British Army mounted regiment exercise their horses in Parliament Square AP Westminster Bridge is deserted PA A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA An empty street and bus stop at St James's Park AFP via Getty Images Whitehall Jeremy Selwyn A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA A single pedestrian walks past The national Gallery AFP via Getty Images London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn Kings Cross and St Pancras Jeremy Selwyn Buckingham Palace looking empty in London, PA London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn Kings Cross and St Pancras Jeremy Selwyn London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn London's Carnaby Street empty as shops closed after a lockdown was announced in the latest bid to stop the spread of coronavirus through the UK AP A quiet Jubilee line westbound train carriage PA A single pedestrian walks past The national Gallery AFP via Getty Images A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA Empty Embankment Jeremy Selwyn

He said: While the health system will be intensely stressed, particularly in areas of London, it wont break.

"We will have enough surge capacity overall over the country to keep with the rapidly growing epidemic we are seeing at the moment.

Professor Ferguson told MPs yesterday he expected the UK death toll to not exceed 20,000. Today he said that two-thirds of deaths were likely to occur in vulnerable people who would have died anyway, regardless of the virus.

The 12 deaths in London was the lowest recorded in a week, while the 28 across England was the lowest figure in eight days.

However, Professor James Naismith, of Oxford university, said: I would urge people neither to panic nor celebrate on the basis of the numbers on any single day.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock came under further pressure today over the protective equipment being provided to frontline healthcare staff when GPs said they lacked confidence to see patients.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock / PA

Listen to today's episode of The Leader:

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Professor Martin Marshall, an east London GP and chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said in a letter to Mr Hancock: GPs across the country have never been more concerned, not just for the safety of themselves and their teams, but for patients too.

"Our members are telling us that their confidence to carry out patient consultations is being impacted by uncertainty over the quality of PPE being supplied to their surgeries.

A spokesperson for the NHS in London said: "NHS staff in London are at this stage responding to a larger number of patients with confirmed coronavirus than other regions of the country so as well as increasing 'surge' capacity across London hospitals, we're deploying other options too, including new facilities like the NHS Nightingale London and using capacity in the private sector.
Interior ministry says eight PKK fighters neutralised in retaliation to the mortar attack.

Two Turkish soldiers were killed and two others wounded after a mortar attack by Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq, the Turkish Defence Ministry said.

In a statement late on Wednesday, the ministry said Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters mounted a harassment attack on Turkish troops. It said targets identified in the region were struck and destroyed immediately in retaliation.

The ministry also said Turkish security forces neutralised eight PKK members in northern Iraq following the attack.

200320041200347

Turkish authorities often use the word neutralised to imply the terrorists in question surrendered or were captured or killed.

The PKK is designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. Some 40,000 people have been killed in the fight between Turkish forces and the PKK.

Turkey recently dismissed eight mayors who were under investigation for terrorism-related charges in eastern Turkey and replaced them with state officials, sustaining a crackdown on the pro-Kurdish Peoples Democratic Party (HDP).

All eight of them were accused of being members of a terrorist group. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government accuse the HDP of having links to the PKK group, leading to prosecutions of thousands of its members and some leaders.

The HDP denies such links.
Construction projects statewide will be brought to a temporary halt Friday while contractors review site-specific issues, develop mitigation strategies and communicate to workers about new state guidelines for construction work during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Baker administration is requiring adherence to the safety stand down as part of a sweeping set of guidelines provided to the construction industry Wednesday. Those new state rules require, among other things, all workers to self-certify before each shift that they are not sick and that certain construction workers have their temperatures taken daily.

While some municipalities have shut down construction sites as the coronavirus spreads and COVID-19 patients begin to inundate hospitals, Gov. Charlie Baker has been adamant that construction work should continue, despite the public health emergency, with some new precautions built in.

Theres no question that if people are going to be working on construction and job sites, they need to have access to sinks, warm water, hand sanitizer, and a commitment to implementing the physical distancing and the social distancing that weve all been talking about, Baker said Wednesday afternoon after the guidance was issued. Theres a lot to those guidances and those recommendations and those requirements, and local communities have made clear to us that they look forward to ensuring that the sites in their communities that are engaged in that activity live up to those standards, and if they dont, theyll do something about it, which is exactly as it should be.

The guidance imposes a zero tolerance policy at work sites. If a worker is sick, they are to remain home. If a worker begins to feel sick on the job, they are to go home. And if a supervisor sees a worker who appears sick, they are to send the worker home.

Sign up for free text messages about important updates on coronavirus in Massachusetts

Before starting each shift, every employee will be required to self-certify to their supervisor that they do not have a fever of 100.3 degrees or more, that they do not have a cough and that they do not have difficulty breathing. Workers must also certify that they have had no close contact with someone who has COVID-19 and that they have not been asked to self-isolate.

Employees exhibiting symptoms or unable to self-certify should be directed to leave the work site and seek medical attention and applicable testing by their health care provider, the guidance advises. They are not to return to the work site until cleared by a medical professional.

Employees who work in confined spaces or inside a closed building envelope will have to be temperature screened by a Medical Professional or Trained Individual provided that such screening is out of public view to respect privacy and results are kept private, according to the administrations guidance.

Handshakes are to be banned on job sites, every job site is to develop and post cleaning and decontamination procedures, each worker must wear gloves at all times, all workers shall drive to work site/parking area in a single occupant vehicle, large gathering spaces like break areas and shacks are to be eliminated and replaced with smaller break areas, and the administration suggests that all workers bring their own food from home.

Job site supervisors are told to keep all crews a minimum of 6 apart at all times to eliminate the potential of cross contamination and when a six-foot distance is not possible due to the work being conducted, the administration wants construction companies to give each employee PPE including as appropriate a standard face mask, gloves, and eye protection. At the same time, the administration has been urging construction companies to donate their masks to hospitals and health care workers.

The new rules also require all outdoor construction sites that dont already have access to an indoor bathroom install wash stations with hot water, if possible, and soap at fire hydrants or other water sources to be used for frequent handwashing for all onsite employees.

Though the new rules are sure to require some adjustment period for workers and contractors, its Bakers decision to keep construction work going through the pandemic that has irked some local officials and exposed a rift between the state response to the spread of COVID-19 and how its being handled at the local level.

On Wednesday, Bakers chief legal counsel sent a letter to city and town executives with the new guidance and instructions that all construction projects should continue operations during the governors state of emergency but with social distancing measures incorporated.

Local policies, regulations or directives that provide otherwise are in direct conflict with the Order and should be withdrawn, Bob Ross wrote.

Boston, Somerville and other municipalities that had already ordered construction to stop dissented, and announced later that their local orders will not be withdrawn.

The safety and health of construction workers and all residents of Boston is my first priority, and I am not willing to put that at risk as the virus spreads throughout our communities, Boston Mayor Martin Walsh, who ordered all non-essential, city-permitted construction to cease by March 23, said. Large gatherings such as those at construction sites have been proven to escalate the spread of the virus, and Boston must do everything in its power to flatten the curve, and stop the spread of coronavirus.

After Somerville Rep. Mike Connolly blasted the governors decision to keep job sites up and running, Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone declared his resistance to the governors order.

Some times you have to put down your foot & say no. The construction stoppage will continue in Somerville. We tried to keep it open & its just not safe. The sites will stay closed to prevent the spread of #COVID19, the mayor tweeted.

Cambridge also announced that its temporary construction moratorium also remains in effect at this time.

During a conference call with U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and reporters Thursday afternoon, Walsh said he had not changed course.

As of right now, construction is still not allowed in the city of Boston. Were going to come up with some policies and procedures before we start the construction, Walsh said, reiterating his concern that construction workers are a risk."We going to put some safety precautions in place to try to limit the spread," Walsh said.

In a press conference Thursday afternoon, Baker suggested that hes OK with Boston and other municipalities ignoring his administrations order to withdraw their own construction moratoriums.

In the guidelines that we issued, one of the things we said was that the act of actually overseeing and enforcing this stuff needs to be done at the municipal level, for municipal-permitted work, Baker said. Boston and several other municipalities have said -- and its a fair point -- that they dont believe theyre in a position at this point to do the work that would be associated with ensuring that those guidelines are being adhered to on the ground on all the projects.

Referring to Walsh, Baker said he is very sympathetic to the mayors point of view and said that Walsh is not going to open back up until he feels comfortable that job sites in the city can adhere to the new state guidance."And I get that," Baker said Thursday.

Elsewhere in Rosss letter, he explains to cities and towns that orders from the governor supersede those issued at the local level, especially during a state of emergency.

The Baker-Polito Administration recognizes the value of local decision making in most circumstances. Nevertheless, ensuring an effective response to the COVID-19 emergency requires the Administration to prioritize consistency and clarity of action, he wrote. A key requirement of any effective, statewide response will be that public officials avoid conflicting directives and duplication of efforts.Baker has previously said, with regard to school closures, that cities and towns are welcome to go beyond what he has ordered statewide.

Im as confused as anyone about the different approaches to construction projects being taken by @marty_walsh and @MassGovernor, Lou Antonellis, business manager and financial secretary for IBEW Local 103 tweeted Thursday. What about #SafetyFirst dont you understand!

Related Content:
[March 26, 2020] Arizona Tech Incubator Providing Virtual Resources Amidst COVID-19

CHANDLER, Ariz., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Chandler Innovations, the city's business incubation and entrepreneurial development program, is working diligently to comply with the CDC and WHO's recommendations for social distancing in the wake of COVID-19. "Social distancing and working from home have presented some challenges," says Chandler Innovations CEO, Diana White. "But we are determined to provide a consistent level of support not only to our entrepreneurs but to the entire Chandler, AZ business community." White has taken inspiration from other organizations that have embraced virtual platforms to host events and provide resources. "AZ Tech Council and the Chandler Chamber of Commerce have held successful online events. We need to embrace the current circumstances and adapt." AZ Founders Guild is another organization that has transitioned to providing entrepreneurial support virtually. Innovations sponsors the Chandler Chapter of this group that hosts monthly events to provide one on one interaction with other founders and business owners.



Vincent Serpico, Founder of the Guild, host of the Scottsdale Chapter, and CEO of Founders Workshop, a company that builds mobile and web apps for non-tech founders of tech start-ups, agrees that virtual interaction is critical. "This is the time when Founders must come together and support each other. Some of us are facing economic hardships, and social distancing is just making things worse," says Serpico. "Virtual meetings bring us all together to bridge the gap of isolation and share valuable ideas to help all of us get through this together." Chandler Innovations will be offering events, entrepreneurial tracks, counseling services, and advisory board meetings virtually until further notice. The incubator will also temporarily expand its focus on providing resources for businesses in the technology and innovation sector to include all Chandler businesses in need of guidance and business counseling during an unprecedented time of uncertainty.

For more information about Chandler Innovations, visit innovationsincubator.com. About Chandler Innovations: Chandler Innovations is a business incubation program for tech-focused businesses. The program is sponsored by the City of Chandler and powered by Moonshot at NACET. Chandler Innovations offers four track-programs throughout the year for those who work, live or own property in Chandler. It also offers entrepreneurship mentoring and community events. Contact:

Diana White

CEO, Chandler Innovations

[email protected] View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/arizona-tech-incubator-providing-virtual-resources-amidst-covid-19-301030224.html SOURCE Chandler Innovations Incubator

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Elderly coronavirus patients came under attack from angry youths who threw stones at a fleet of ambulances moving them to a new home in Spain.

The Civil Guard convoy was ambushed when it arrived in the town of La Linea de la Concepcion near Gibraltar, bringing 28 patients to a new care home.

Angry locals obstructed the convoy and stoned the vehicles before throwing Molotov cocktails at police who were guarding the home.

The hostile reception was in stark contrast to the cheers and applause which had greeted the convoy when it evacuated the sick patients from the town of Alcala del Valle, after a virus outbreak at their previous care home.

A gang of people, many of them wearing masks and hoods, assembled in the town of La Linea de la Concepcion to confront an ambulance convoy bringing elderly residents to their town

The Civil Guard convoy was ambushed when it arrived in the town of La Linea de la Concepcion near Gibraltar, bringing 28 patients to a new care home

Two men were arrested in La Linea de la Concepcion after parking a car across the road in a bid to stop the pensioners moving in, the Spanish government said.

Around 50 youths then surrounded their new residence, which is called Tiempo Libre or Free Time.

The locals also appeared to be breaching coronavirus lockdown rules which ban people from leaving their homes unnecessarily.

Local reports said the men involved had been sharing WhatsApp messages before the attacks in which they had threatened to set up barricades with burning tyres.

A National Police spokesman said: 'Several youths gathered at the entrance to the town and threw stones at the ambulances as well as leaving a vehicle across the road to try to prevent it reaching its destination.

'Officers arrested the two occupants of the vehicle, two men aged 32 and 35.

'Once the elderly people were taken into the home, police had to establish a security cordon around the residence as around 50 people outside threatened to cause problems.

'Other acts of vandalism occurred later on in the town.

'Several officers were identifying two individuals when an object was thrown from the roof of a nearby building which exploded as it hit the ground but missed the police.

'Thirty minutes later there was a repeat of the incident in the same place. The objects were taken away to be analysed.'

La Linea's mayor Juan Franco has condemned the attacks, saying of the culprits: 'They are a little group of undesirables and idiots who don't represent our town.'

A convoy of ambulances and Civil Guard vehicles drives along a narrow street in the town of Alcala del Valle, where dozens of pensioners were evacuated from a care home

The pensioners had been moved from the care home in Alcala del Valle after at least 38 people tested positive for coronavirus and three died.

The regional government in Andalusia ordered them out of the Dolores Ibarruri care home and the Civil Guard convoy took them out of the town on Tuesday.

Local residents tried to lift the pensioners' spirits as they left the town, sending them good wishes from their balconies as the convoy drove past.

One onlooker shouted: 'Come on, you are going to be fine, they are going to take very good care of you, don't worry, you will be back very soon!'

Although there was applause for the pensioners as they left, some relatives say they were not informed about the transfer and fear their relatives will not get the correct medication.

'They have not allowed him to take his clothes or his personal belongings. We do not know who will attend to them or if they know what medication our elders take,' the nephew of one 99-year-old evacuee told El Mundo.

'The relatives have not been informed at any time, nor the provisional director of the residence, who in the last few hours had managed to gather material and personnel to guarantee the operation of the centre.'

Reports say that 38 out of 41 residents have tested positive, along with 19 of the 33 workers in the home. Three people have reportedly died.

Juan Franco, the mayor of the town, had been working in the care home with four councillors after the staff fell ill.

Residents of the town applaud from their balconies in a show of support for the elderly care home residents as they were taken to another town

A Spanish army officer waves at people in a nursing home, keeping their distance behind a window

Earlier this week, Spain's defence minister revealed that some elderly residents had been found dead or abandoned at some care homes.

Spanish soldiers made the grim discoveries after they were called in to disinfect the nursing homes.

Some elderly residents had apparently been found dead under the same roof as relatives who were still alive.

Spain now has the world's second-deadliest outbreak, after its death toll surged past China's yesterday.

Spanish officials reported 655 new deaths in their latest update today, taking the total from 3,434 to 4,089.

The figure is now well above the 3,287 people who have died in mainland China, where the outbreak began in late 2019.

Italy has the world's highest death toll, with 7,503.

Spain's total infection count increased by 8,578, taking the total from 47,610 to 56,188.
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DENVER (AP)  Officials in five Denver area counties announced stay at home orders on Wednesday that will restrict the movement of more than 2 million people in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

The orders from health departments covering Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Douglas and Jefferson counties go into effect Thursday and follow a stay at home order for Denver, which took effect Tuesday.





. . .
Thousands of cruise ship passengers were allegedly told they could 'walk off and go home' with no medical checks, before at least 31 of them were diagnosed with coronavirus.

The Ovation of the Seas, which docked in Sydney on March 18, has since been linked to 31 cases of COVID-19 in New South Wales alone.

It was one of four ships to dock in Sydney in the last week with infected passengers aboard, with authorities fearing the thousands who disembarked may have contributed to a spike in the number of cases of COVID-19 in Australia.

There are now 2,725 confirmed cases across Australia, with NSW having 1,219 and seven deaths - the highest number nationwide.

In a shocking audio clip played on the Kyle and Jackie O Show on Thursday, a member of staff is heard allegedly telling thousands of passengers they could 'walk off and go home', without the need to self-isolate.

The ship, carrying nearly 3,000 passengers, docked in Sydney on March 18, with the holidaymakers pouring into Australia and some even taking domestic flights.

Passengers are seen flocking from Ovation of the Seas after it docked in Sydney (pictured) on March 18, having been told they could 'walk off and go home'

But four days after they arrived, passengers began receiving frantic emails and calls from health officials, advising them they urgently needed to self-isolate.

'In conference with the Australian Border Force today, we have the confirmation that none of our guests will be required to self-isolate or anything of that sort,' the staff member is claimed to have told passengers before arriving in Sydney.

'We have a full, clean bill of health, so to speak. Whether you're international or going back home in Australia, you will walk off and go home.'

The passengers are heard cheering on the recording, claimed to have been made hours before the ship docked in Sydney.

Officials later discovered that a 67-year-old male passenger from Canada had contracted the deadly respiratory virus, and had been infectious for the last two days of the trip.

The Ovation of the Seas (pictured) sailed back into Sydney on March 18, with thousands of passengers disembarking

Scores of employees were later seen piling out of the Ovation of the Seas ship without being tested for coronavirus (pictured on Saturday)

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

The ship had been allowed to dock as it had not entered a foreign country, having planned to sail to New Zealand but been refused entry.

It comes as police in New South Wales begin to patrol docks to ensure no other infected passengers enter Australia.

There are still around 1,100 crew members on the Ruby Princess, some of whom have developed flu-like symptoms.

The Ruby Princess returned to Sydney last Thursday with 1,148 crew and 2,647 passengers on board - all who disembarked the vessel without going through any health screenings or assessments for COVID-19.

Since then, at least 133 passengers have tested positive for coronavirus - which makes the ship Australia's largest source of infections.

As of Thursday morning, Australia's death toll from COVID-19 now stands at 11, with 2,675 cases across the country

One female passenger, aged in her 70s, has since died.

Several ships were allowed to dock in Australia and disembark passengers, despite a ban coming into place on March 15.

Garry Kirstenfeldt (pictured left), a passenger on board the Voyager of the Seas, died from coronavirus on Wednesday afternoon

Those ships - Ruby Princess, Ovation of the Seas, Celebrity Solstice and Voyager of the Seas - arrived in Sydney between March 18 and March 20.

All have had cases of coronavirus since docking.

Garry Kirstenfeldt, 68, a passenger on board the Voyager of the Seas, which docked in Sydney on March 18, died on Wednesday.

It comes as NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian announced on Thursday passengers won't be allowed off cruise ships in Sydney until new protocols are signed.

'I don't want a single person coming off a ship in Sydney until various signing of protocols between the federal and state governments,' Ms Berejiklian said.

'And that's what we are negotiating with the federal government.'

Ms Berejiklian said that harsher protocols needed to be introduced to stop cruise ship disembarking without strict checks.

'The position we land on we will mean that the state and federal authorities will be in complete lockstep,' Ms Berejiklian said.

An email from the Maritime Union of Australia to PANSW, obtained by The Australian, reveal it had pushed for reforms to address the 'failure to implement adequate checks for coronavirus infections' at seaports.

The documents also raised concerns over how ship masters - who are not medically trained - are authorised to 'self-declare' any biosecurity risks.

'Undoubtedly, there is a global concern regarding the potential spread of this deadly virus,' Maritime Union of Australia assistant secretary Paul Garrett told PANSW chief executive Philip Holliday in an email.

'Any accurate diagnosis of a virus like the coronavirus is left to medically untrained seafarers as well as ships masters who simply would not be familiar with the symptoms and diagnosis of coronavirus as part of their Medical First Aid on board Ship Certificate. '

The Princess Cruises-operated Ruby Princess ship returned to Sydney on Thursday with 2,647 passengers on board - all were allowed to disembark without

Several passengers and crew members from the Ruby Princess, including Rona and Michael Dobrin (pictured, left) and Greg Butler (right) have since tested positive for coronavirus

Elisa McCafferty, 48, her husband and her parents were among the 2,700 passengers on the Ruby Princess.

She said she only learned about the outbreak on the ship when she got to London's Heathrow Airport on Sunday.

'They should not have let us on, and they should not have let us off, and they should not have let us out of the country,' she told The Australian.

Health authorities had classed the Ruby Princess as low risk, given it had sailed from Sydney to New Zealand.

The Border Force even issued a notice instructing the 2,700 passengers that they could travel home in the normal manner, but should self-isolate for 14 days.

NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said most infected passengers hadn't displayed symptoms until the day they left the ship or later.

She said there was little health authorities could do to prevent the disembarkation of asymptomatic cruise passengers.

People are seen aboard the Celebrity Solstice on Friday (pictured) as it docked at Circular Quay amid the coronavirus crisis

An elderly couple who caught coronavirus on the Ruby Princess claim cruise ship staff kept them in the dark about other guests who had symptoms of the illness.

Michael Dobrin, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor, and his wife Rona, 75, disembarked in Sydney on March 19 and tested positive to COVID-19 two days later.

NSW Health on Sunday confirmed 26 passengers from the ship tested positive to coronavirus, after it was allowed to dock in Sydney.

Seventeen passengers and one crew member were diagnosed in NSW while eight passengers were diagnosed interstate.

Ms Dobrin said she and her husband developed a cough a day or two before the ship docked, but had no other symptoms.
26.03.2020 LISTEN

President Akufo-Addo has introduced the government telecommuting platform, Smart Workplace for use by all public sector workers, Graphic Online has been told.

This is part of efforts to ensure governance continuity and provide a safe working environment for public servants during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

In his second address to the nation on measures being instituted to help curb the spread of the Coronavirus disease, the President directed the Ministry of Communications to implement a digital solution to ensure uninterrupted government business.

The National Information Technology Agency (NITA) has accordingly put together a comprehensive solution to enable all Public Sector workers (ministries, departments and agencies) to stay at home and work remotely, observing all the safety protocols of social distancing while working remotely from home, Graphic Online has gathered.

Graphic Online gathers that it will also ensure reliable and effective connectivity via sponsored data to the Smart WorkplaceM portal.

The Smart Workplace solution provides secured access to all applications required to work effectively.

This includes secure business-class e-mails services, access to Microsoft office applications, document management, Instant Messaging (IM), audio and video conferencing, calendar management and file storage amongst others.

Connectivity can be anywhere, anytime and on any device (PC, laptop, tablet and smartphone.

Public sector workers will therefore be encouraged to have meetings and collaborations through Audio and Video Conferencing. The fixed-to-mobile convergence will also allow Toll Free numbers to be re-routed/transferred to mobile phones outside the office (useful for Call Centers) operations) for smooth operation of government services.

The Ministry of Communications, as directed by the President, is ready to ensure government functions in all crisis situation such as the current pandemic.

People can work remotely to curb the spread of the virus and also ensure productivity even in self-quarantine mode if required. It is Digitime in GHANA indeed.

---graphic.com.gh
A 65-year-old man who had been with a Tablighi Jamaat outside Valley dies in a Srinagar hospital days after testing positive

Srinagar: A 65-year-old man admitted to a Srinagar hospital earlier this week after testing positive for Novel Coronavirus or COVID-19 died at Srinagar's government-run Chest Disease (CD) hospital on Thursday morning.

With this Jammu and Kashmir has recorded first death due to the virus. Ten other people are being treated including seven in the Valley and three in Jammu region of the Union Territory after testing positive for COVID-19. Thirteen more such patients are admitted at a Leh hospital.

The man who died in Srinagar hospital had a medical history of illness with sugar, hypertension and obesity. The doctors said he suffered a massive cardiac arrest and their effort to revive him failed.

"Despite our best efforts, the COVID-19 positive patient at Chest Disease Hospital, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The patient had medical history of prolonged illness with sugar, hypertension andobesity," one of them said.

Originally a resident of the Valley's north-western Sopore town, he had contracted the deadly virus while attending the public outreach programme of Tablighi Jamaat for spreading the faith in various parts of the country.

"The patient had returned from New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu recently after being part of a Tablighi Jamaat attended also by people from Indonesia and Malaysia", a government official said.

The J&K government has ordered inquiry into the alleged mishandling of the patient after he was tested positive for COVID-19 at the CD hospital. "Apparently, he was not handled as per the protocol required for treating such patients", said an official who wished not be named.

He said that the hospital administration even after knowing the travel history of the patient and observing the symptoms of COVIC-19 in him did not bring it into the notice of divisional or district or the police authorities when he left the hospital without getting admitted.

As per official sources, the patient was given ample time to spread the virus by intermingling with the public and relatives.

Kashmir's Divisional Commissioner Kashmir P. K. Pole was quoted by local news agency KNO as saying I have ordered for a probe to find out whether the case was mishandled and protocol was followed or not."

On Wednesday, chaotic scenes were witnessed at hospitals and various other medical facilities in the Valleys Baramulla and Bandipore districts with panic-stricken residents who had met this person or attended religious gathering he too was a part of arriving at these in large numbers to offer themselves for COVID-19 tests.

Meanwhile, the J&K police and Central armed police forces are on the eighth day running Thursday enforcing restrictions strictly across the Valley as part of a lockdown aimed at limiting the spread of COVIC-19.

The police have arrested more than three hundred people or registered cases against them under the relevant provisions of law after they were found violating restrictions in force in the Valley since Thursday last.

The police and district administrations have also sealed a couple of dozen hotels and restaurants across the Valley after these were found functioning despite the closure order issued by the government under Section 144 CrPC and the Disaster Management Act, 2005. The official sources said that as many as 218 FIRs were registered against the lockdown violators till Wednesday.

The lockdown is being enforced strictly also in Jammu region of the UT whereas tougher measures are in place in Ladakh. Lieutenant Governor, Girish Chandra Murmu, on Wednesday appealed the people to observe the 21-day lockdown earnestly to break the transmission chain and contribute in the fight against the spread of deadly COVID-19.
By Huizhong Wu

BEIJING (Reuters) - Publishers of three U.S. newspapers urged China on Tuesday to reverse the expulsion of a about a dozen of their journalists, calling the move "uniquely damaging and reckless" at a time when the world is sharing the burden of fighting the coronavirus.

China announced on March 18 it was revoking the press accreditations of all American journalists in the China bureaus of the New York Times <NYT.N>, Wall Street Journal <NWSA.O> and Washington Post, which were due to expire at the end of 2020.

"We strongly urge the Chinese government to reverse its decision to force the Americans working for our news organizations to leave," the publishers said.

"Perhaps more than any major news event in modern history, this moment underscores the urgent importance of both probing, accurate, on-the-ground reporting from the centres of the pandemic and of sharing the information."

China's foreign ministry had not seen the letter, spokesman Geng Shuang told a daily media briefing on Tuesday, but he defended the expulsions, calling them "necessary countermeasures" that were entirely a response to "unjustifiable oppression" of Chinese media in the United States.

The expulsions were the latest escalation in a dispute over media freedom and access, which has seen Washington order four Chinese state media outlets to reduce their total staff in the United States to 100 from 160.

The U.S. journalists from the three newspapers have until Friday to hand in their press credentials and halt reporting, but will be able to stay a short period longer. One of them said they had been told they could apply for a temporary visa to stay in the country for 7-10 days.

China and the United States are locked in an increasingly bitter rivalry that has extended to the coronavirus outbreak.

Last month, Washington demanded journalists from Chinese state media be registered as staff of diplomatic missions. China then expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters - two Americans and an Australian - after the paper published an opinion column calling China the "real sick man of Asia".

Story continues

Washington cited a "deepening crackdown" on independent reporting in China as the reason for its decision to reduce the number of Chinese state media journalists in the United States. China's Foreign Ministry has said its measures are "necessary" and "reciprocal" against "escalating discrimination and oppression against Chinese media" by Washington.

A recent report by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China found that 82% of foreign journalists surveyed said they had experienced interference, harassment or violence while reporting during 2019.

(Reporting by Huizhong Wu and Gabriel Crossley; Editing by Peter Graff, Robert Birsel and Tony Munroe)
In an unprecedented development of the coronavirus outbreak, it was revealed on March 25 that Prince Charles was tested positive for COVID-19 and was later quarantined. However, Britain reportedly said on March 26, that the 71-year-old member of the Royal family did not jump the queue for the test even though his symptoms and condition met the criteria. Prince Charles office said that he was tested earlier this week and is currently in good health in self-isolation at his residence in Scotland with mild symptoms along with his wife Camilla who had tested negative.

According to reports, while Scotlands chief medical officer said there were clinical reasons for Prince Charles being tested, a Royal source has revealed that he was subjected to the COVID-19 test because of his age and medical history. However, this move has been criticised by some people on social media as in the UK it is not allowed to get an individual tested until he or she showcases severe symptoms. Britain's junior health minister, Edward Argar told an international news agency when inquired about why the Royal family member was tested that his symptoms, his condition, met that criteria. He further added that the Prince of Wales 'did not jump the queue.

Read - Prince William Mocked COVID-19 Crisis Weeks Before Prince Charles Tested Positive

Read - Fact-Check: Did Kanika Kapoor Meet Prince Charles? Pictures Trigger Speculation

Prince William mocked coronavirus crisis

Meanwhile, a video of Prince Charles son, Prince William has emerged which was reportedly shot three weeks ago who joked about the pandemic and called it hyped by media. The video has been making rounds on the internet and has been shared across various social media platforms with one of the Twitter users even saying that virus does not discriminate.

The coronavirus which originated in China in December 2019 has now claimed over 21,295 lives worldwide as of March 26. According to the tally by international news agency, the pandemic has now spread to 198 countries and has infected at least 471,464 people. Out of the total infections, 114,642 have been recovered but the easily spread virus is continuing to disrupt many lives. Major cities have been put under lockdown in almost all countries, and the economy is struggling.

Amid these crises, the video dated March 3, 2020, of Prince William mocking the pandemic has also been deemed ironical. The son of Prince Charles and the Duke of Cambridge asked the emergency workers if COVID-19 was being given more importance than it deserves during his first official tour to Ireland.

"I bet everyones like: Ive got coronavirus, Im dying, and youre like no, youve just got a cough," Prince William said before adding, "Does it seem quite dramatic about coronavirus at the moment? Is it being a little bit hyped up do you think in the media?"

He added, "By the way, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are spreading coronavirus! Sorry!" he joked at the event. "Were keeping an eye on that, so do tell us if we need to stop!

Read - COVID-19 Positive Prince Charles Met Queen Elizabeth On March 12: Reports

Read - BREAKING: Prince Charles Tests Positive For Coronavirus, Currently In Self-isolation
Apples 2020 iPhone launch plans seem to have been undermined by coronavirus, with both of its anticipated smartphone launches delayed  possibly for months.

Hey Siri, what on earth is happening?

If everything had gone according to plan (it didnt), Apple was expected to introduce an iPhone 9 in March and the first 5G-enabled iPhone 12 in September.

However, as the human, economic and societal damage wrought by COVID-19 reverberates across a planet on which the leading nations cant even agree on what to call the disease, Apple may delay both launches. Nativism is clearly making the world more fragile to global challenge.

Apple hasnt fully committed to a delay; a report on Nikkei says only that it is considering the option.

Whats driving the question is executive concern about multiple challenges: logistics, component supply, market weakness, and consumer confidence.

In the background, weve heard the company is intensifying its work to manufacture components in multiple countries, breaking its reliance on China. Yet India, where some manufacturing was expected to begin in earnest this year, has also gone into lockdown as the central government attempts to mitigate the human and economic cost of the virus on its people. This has halted production there, creating yet more challenges for Apple's Operations team.

Social isolation means consumer electronics sales are in free fall as the worlds stressed-out shoppers stay home.

Not only are most shops closed (including all of Apples own retail stores outside China), but given hundreds of millions of people have had to make income sacrifices, new smartphones arent particularly high on the "must-buy" list when people are more concerned about mortgage or rent payments, health and food.

Coronavirus has fractured the social and political landscape, probably forever. Were seeing a shift in consciousness, and it hurts.

So, is the age of Apple over?

To answer that question, we'll have to see what emerges from the disaster. We may end up with a planet on which people have a deeper understanding of the global interrelationships between everyone who lives here, or we may find ourselves stranded on isolated islands defined by arbitrary national borders.

The truth is well probably have a bit of both, with some nations resolutely locking the gates and hiding behind nationalist doors  though doors offer no protection against flood, famine or disease.

In this patchwork of philosophies, Apple will need to dance delicately. It is, after all, a global company based on a multi-national supply chain.

It is, however, also an American company: Its headquarters are in the U.S.; it supports tens of thousands of U.S. jobs  and the company nearly always introduces new products and services to the U.S. first.

This means that however global the supply chain, the majority of the benefits from that chain go to the Apple's home country.

At the same time, Apple is also a global firm that works to provide some support in all the nations in which it does business.

Thats a perfectly reasonable position for any enterprise to take  indeed, enterprises that lack such values tend to have a tougher time attracting and keeping talented staff. In what feels an increasingly nihilistic age, people seek out employers who showcase values they agree with.

However, the human and economic scars of the on-going pandemic will take time to heal, and we dont yet know what consensus reality will be shaped like yet.

Why would we? Most of us are still in shock over what's unfolding.

Apples challenge will be in defining its business around the primary values of the post-pandemic society, and we have not arrived there yet.

What I think will happen

I think Apple may delay introduction of the iPhone 9, but Id urge it not to delay the launch too long. People will still need mobile devices, and while the introduction of a lower-cost iPhone may not generate the sales volume the company originally anticipated, it will send a message that the company understands the needs of consumers in a contracted economy.

The situation is more complex with iPhone 12. The big pull of that device (other than the big changes in design) will be 5G networks and services.

However, 5G infrastructure deployment will inevitably slow as carriers instead invest in beefing-up existing services to accommodate growing work-from-home demand. Thats point one. Point two is how interested mass market users will, or wont, be in high-bandwidth services that demand they invest in additional monthly fees.

I believe demand and deployment of the technology will be muted in comparison to where we expected it to be by the end of the year.

People have bigger things on their minds at present than fast mobile broadband. Everyone is at home, for a start. In other words, 5G is going to be a hard sell.

Meaning and relevance

In the end its all about relevance. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs understood relevance.

The iMac  a uniquely designed computer with internet access inside  was the epitome of relevance in consumer electronics. The iBook introduced the world to real mobility. The iPod and iTunes captured the zeitgeist and iPhone changed the world.

The problem when it comes to future iPhone launches is that what the world's becoming is harder to see than before. All we know is that the future has become more uncertain and no one really knows what values and philosophies will define tomorrow.

These challenges make it incredibly difficult to design relevance into the heart of any product, let alone the worlds most sophisticated device.

But we do know that humans have a tendency after disaster to attempt to create meaning. In the UK, thats why we ended up with the National Health Service following the dark terror of the Second World War.

Apple as a follower strives to do the right thing. Thats commendable. Doing the right thing (if there is a right thing) is the right thing to do. But, as a leader, Apple must dig deeply into its corporate DNA to figure out not what the world needs today, nor what it needs for its business, but what well all need tomorrow.

Delivering this is where its success always lies.

Leadership has consequences.

Good luck.

Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolics bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.
A few weeks ago, many of us had not heard of the coronavirus. Then COVID-19 came swooping down, like a huge swana black swanwhose wings stretch across the globe. In seemingly no time, this novel virus has become ubiquitous and massively disruptive.

Thats exactly why its a black swan eventrare; with extreme impact, especially on the economic system; and, in retrospect, highly predictable.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a finance professor, writer, and Wall Street trader, popularized the notion of black swan events in his 2007 book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. His premises and insights seemed prescient at the time, coming just on the cusp of the 2008 financial crisis and are resonating again in the wake of the current upheaval.

David Kelly, professor of economics and academic director of the Master of Science in Sustainable Business Program at the University of Miami Patti and Allan Herbert Business School, published a paper on hurricane risk in 2018, which considered some of Talebs premises.

To account for these rare events that seem to be occurring with increasing frequency, it makes sense to build resiliency into business strategies, said Kelly.

Theres a lot more risk in the economic system today, so companies have to behave differently and change their risk models to account for these possibilities, said Kelly, who teaches a class on risk management and is an appointee to the provosts resiliency task force.

Kelly explained that the just-in-time inventory movement utilizes global supply chains and has become commonplace in commerce during the past 30 years.

This allows for goods to be produced quickly at low cost, but is highly vulnerable and not very resilient when in a case like the Apple fire in China [a 2016 fire at an Apple factory in Zhengzhou that was producing 70 percent of iPhones] when the whole production line shuts down.

Courses in the Sustainable Business Program, he noted, emphasize resiliency and effective risk models to address climate change, sea-level rise, and a host of other complicated global issues.

We do a lot of exercises to think of risks we havent thought of, consult with experts, and conduct surveys to look at unknown factors, said Kelly, but a lot of times its not so much, did I see this disaster comingits more, am I resilient to a range of business uncertainties. 

Talebs black swan term references a phenomenon in the animal kingdom. For centuries most people, scientists included, believed that only white swans existed because they were the only ones sighted in the Western World. The discovery in 1697 of black swans in Australia changed scientific history and profoundly changed zoology. In retrospect, the existence of swans that were other than white seemed supremely logical.

While the discovery is important to ornithologists, wrote Taleb, most importantly it illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations and experience, and the fragility of our knowledge.

Almost everything we know is fallible, said Anjan Chakravartty, Appignani Foundation professor of philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences. We do the best we can to reason well with the evidence we have, but ultimately, even our strongest conclusions sometimes hold only under certain conditions. And often, we arent in a position to know the full extent of these conditions until we accidently bump into an exception to them.

Taleb suggested, and Chakravartty concurred, that philosophers are particularly well-suited to tackle the challenges of uncertainty and improbability relating to knowledge.

Philosophers are especially well placed to explain the nature and growth of knowledge, how it is acquired and safeguarded, and its limits and potential, said Chakravartty. In an age where, increasingly, various forces are attempting to undermine knowledge in the public domain in the service of their own social, political, or economic interests, it is incumbent on humanists and scientists alike to combat ignorance.

One of the defining characteristics of a black swan event is that it gives the impression, retrospectively, that we should have seen it coming. Should we have seen this current health crisis and economic collapse coming? Did we suffer from black swan blindness?

No doubt there are cases in which we are lulled into a false sense of security: Were so used to something working that we fail to think carefully about the precise conditions under which it will, and the possible conditions under which it will not, said Chakravartty.

By the same token, its unrealistic to think that were always in a position to see things coming, he acknowledged. There are always limits on our time, ingenuity, and resourceswe can only do our best.
Married At First Sight star Michael Goonan shocked listeners on Thursday when he joked about raping a co-star during a live radio interview.

The 29-year-old company director was asked on Hit Mid North Coast's Krysti and Bodge if he was 'bone buddies' with KC Osborne after filming MAFS last year.

Michael then joked he would need to give KC 'roofies' before having sex with her.

'I don't know how many roofies I'd need': Married At First Sight star Michael Goonan shocked listeners on Thursday when he joked about raping a co-star during a live radio interview

'To be honest with you, if I had a shot with KC, I'd take it. But I think she's out of my league,' he said.

'I don't know how many roofies I'd need to give her to get a shot. I just don't know whether I'd be able to get in there.'

Roofies is a slang term for Rohypnol, a powerful sedative which has been used as a date rape drug.

The joke was all the more shocking because Michael and KC are in a relationship.

Tasteless! When asked about his relationship with KC Osborne (pictured), Michael said: 'I don't know how many roofies I'd need to give her to get a shot'

The distasteful comments come after Michael's on-screen wife, Stacey Hampton, confirmed he was involved with KC.

The 26-year-old law graduate was asked about their romance during an Instagram Q&A on Wednesday afternoon.

She simply replied with a thumbs-up to indicate KC and Michael were still together.

What will KC have to say? The joke was all the more shocking because Michael and KC are in a relationship. Pictured on Married At First Sight

KC and Michael are believed to have started dating around December, after MAFS finished production but before the cast reunion on January 15.

While the relationship is relatively new, they are said to be 'smitten' with each other.

'Trust me, they'll be engaged this time next year!' a source told Woman's Day last week. 'I think Michael has definitely found his match in her.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Michael Goonan for comment.

Confirmation: The distasteful comments come after Michael's on-screen wife, Stacey Hampton (pictured), confirmed he was involved with KC
A set of renter protections passed earlier this year by the Indianapolis City-County Council will stay on the books after Gov. Eric Holcomb vetoed a bill that would have nullified some of the measures.

The governors veto came late in the day March 25, the last day for bills to be signed into law, vetoed or allowed to pass without a signature. It also came on the first day of a state-mandated stay-at-home order because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is fracturing whatever economic security renters had before.

Mayor Joe Hogsett, who made tenant protections one of the main priorities for his administration, thanked Holcomb in a statement.

As we confront an unprecedented public health emergency that has cast a dark cloud of economic uncertainty over families across the state, now is not the time to uproot local protections for renters without understanding the consequences, he said.

The protections passed by the city-county council include fines of $2,500 and $7,500 for landlords who violate anti-retaliation measures, as well as the creation of a Tenant Information Hotline to help with legal assistance and a requirement for landlords to inform renters of their rights and obligations

Senate Enrolled Act 148 included an amendment that would have nullified some of the protections, including the fine and the landlords obligation to tell renters what rights they have.

Holcomb wrote in a veto letter to Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray that the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the circumstances in which SEA 148 passed. He also noted an executive order temporarily prohibiting evictions and foreclosures.

While I understand the bill was intended to create uniformity between state and local laws governing the relationship between landlords and tenants, I believe this is not the right time for such language to become law, Holcomb wrote in the letter.

Whitley Yates, who is director of diversity and engagement for the Indiana Republican Party, praised the decision in a Facebook post.

Leadership is sometimes making choices that arent popular but standing by whats right, she wrote with a praise hands emoji. We are in this together.

Many groups from around the state begged lawmakers  and then Holcomb  to not move forward with the amendment, which was originally introduced by the Indiana Apartment Association and added to Senate Bill 340.

Along with loosening protections for renters in Indianapolis and other cities that have taken action on their own to guard tenants, the amendment included broad language that would have restricted cities from regulating any other aspect of the landlord-tenant relationship.

Jessica Fraser, director of Indiana Institute for Working Families, said in a statement she has great appreciation for Holcombs decision to veto the bill.

Compared to renters in other states, Indiana renters are already at a significant disadvantage in terms of their rights and recourse when they encounter a bad landlord, she said. Because housing stability and quality are so fundamental to families abilities to hold down jobs, perform well in school, and maintain health, we should be looking at how balance the rights of tenants and landlords in ways that promote housing stability and reduce evictions.

Indianapolis had 11,570 evictions in 2016, according to Eviction Lab at Princeton University. That was second only to New York City.

Four other Indiana cities ranked in the top 50 for mid-size cities.

The Recorder interviewed vulnerable renters in an October 2019 story about Black renters facing especially heavy tenant burdens in Marion County.

One of those renters was Richard Martin, who would be considered severely rent burdened because he collects $700 a month in disability but pays $600 to rent his two-bedroom home on North Dearborn Street.

The Recorder did not use Martins real name in order to protect him from retaliation from his landlord.

At the time of the interview, Martins gas and water had been shut off because he couldnt afford the bills.

Man, you know that aint ever gonna cover no utility bills, he said of the $100 he has after paying rent. This is a Black, poor neighborhood. Its the ghetto.

Contact staff writer Tyler Fenwick at 317-762-7853. Follow him on Twitter @Ty_Fenwick.

A 2019 IUPUI study showed Black and Latino renters spend a higher percentage of their income on rent than whites. (Photo provided)
New York, NY, March 25, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, the Older Americans Act reauthorization was signed into law with provisions that will help ensure that LGBT elders get the services and support they need to remain independent. SAGE, the worlds largest and oldest organization dedicated to improving the lives of LGBT older people, has spent years working with our allies in Congress, the LGBT community, and the aging sector to push for this inclusion and celebrates this victory for the LGBT community. This legislation is especially timely given the sobering risks LGBT elders face during the current COVID-19 pandemic and their heightened need for inclusive services and care.



The reauthorization will require that state and local departments of aging (state units on aging and area agencies on aging) be held accountable for undertaking outreach to LGBT older people who need services in their communities. It will also hold them responsible for engaging in both data collection and reporting - on the needs of LGBT older people and whether they are meeting those needs.



At a time when LGBT older people are literally at the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis, there has never been a more important time than now to make federally-funded elder services LGBT-inclusive, said SAGE CEO Michael Adams. Giving LGBT elders, many of whom are socially isolated and health-compromised, the same access to services as all older Americans will save lives, Adams added.



Seniors have served our communities for decades and need our support now more than ever, said Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici, Chair of the Education and Labor Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Human Services. Strengthening programs that benefit our seniors has long been one of my top priorities, and Im glad this significant update I led to the Older Americans Act is now law. It will provide a strong foundation to help meet the needs of seniors during this pandemic and beyond. Im grateful that this updated bipartisan law will support Meals on Wheels, fight elder abuse, and help to address social isolation. We achieved important victories for LGBT seniors in this bill, and I will keep fighting with SAGE to fully meet their needs. At this time in our country, its especially important that we care for those who led the way before us.



SAGE is deeply grateful to our partners in Congress, including Reps. Bonamici, Haaland and Scott, and Senators Casey, Murkowski and Bennet and others who have worked so hard for this breakthrough, said Adams. Most importantly, todays victory belongs to our LGBT elder pioneers, who have struggled for decades for this kind of progress.



Because the Trump administration has consistently aimed to erode LGBT peoples protections, there is a lot of work remaining to protect the lives and well-being of older LGBT people in this country. SAGE, True Colors United and Family Equality joined forces and filed suit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for its unlawful November 2019 announcement that it would stop enforcing anti-discrimination protections that forbid federal grantees from denying services to, or otherwise discriminating against, LGBT individuals and others. The administration's unlawful action endangers already vulnerable populations, especially as the country confronts the coronavirus pandemic.



It is tragically ironic that, even as SAGE celebrates Congress for having the bipartisan wisdom to reauthorize an LGBT-inclusive Older Americans Act, we are forced to sue the Trump administration for authorizing federal grantees to discriminate against LGBT elders at will, said Adams.

###



SAGE is the country's largest and oldest organization dedicated to improving the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) older people. Founded in 1978 and headquartered in New York City, SAGE is a national organization that offers supportive services and consumer resources to LGBT older people and their caregivers. SAGE also advocates for public policy changes that address the needs of LGBT elders, provides education and technical assistance for aging providers and LGBT community organizations through its National Resource Center on LGBT Aging, and cultural competency training through SAGECare. With staff located across the country, SAGE also coordinates SAGENet, a growing network of affiliates in the United States. Learn more at sageusa.org.




Latest News Understanding the 'perfect storm' that was the Sydney property market in 2021 Leading expert reflects on the crazy year that brokers and buyers experienced  and throws forward to the 12 months to come

How to manage home buyer regret Tips for brokers on how they can keep their clients onside once they have bought

An aggregator has announced that compliance will be a driving priority for the group this year as the government works towards introducing a best interest duty (BID) for mortgage brokers.

According to Finsure GM of aggregation, Simon Bednar, the group is doing everything possible to streamline processes and ease the burden the new measures will place on brokers.

Finsures compliance framework has been designed and built over the past 12 months and is still evolving and can easily adapt to the incoming obligations under the rewritten RG209 and mortgage broker best interest duty, he continued.

Bednar highlighted the groups Infynity customer relationship management (CRM) platform as being a major point of difference.

The Infynity system uses predictive data to provide insights into broker behaviour, empowering brokers to proactively make changes to their business rather than relying on retrospective reporting and past behavior, he said.

The quality assurance and compliance management framework is built into the Infynity system which allows brokers and licensees immediate access to real time data on compliance reporting and application statuses.

The results are broken into four key categories  fraud, anti-money laundering, quality assurance and responsible lending  to make clear the further training needed on an individual basis.

The data-driven remedial action plans have been successful in supporting the ongoing accreditations of brokers when there has been an attempt by a lender to remove them, said Bednar.

This data driven model also allows for the accurate reporting of lender turnaround times, which will assist brokers in meeting their obligations under the broker best interest duty. It features a file review process which includes the review of applications prior to the submission to the lender.

FBAA managing director Peter White AM has applauded Finsure for embracing compliance in such a robust manner.

Meeting compliance obligations in 2020 and the coming decade is unquestionably the greatest priority for all aggregators, ACLs and ACRs, he said.

The ability to manage these obligations and proactively measure outcomes cannot be understated.
michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]

Today: After years of false starts, the United States has signed a historic peace deal with the Taliban to end the war in Afghanistan. My colleague Mujib Mashal traveled to the front lines in Afghanistan and the signing ceremony in Doha to find out whether peace is actually possible. Its Friday, March 6. Mujib, what was the situation heading into this peace deal?

mujib mashal

This conflict has gone on for about 40 years. It kind of began with the Soviet invasion in the 70s, and it dragged on. It became a civil war. And the chaos of the civil war became a safe haven for terrorist groups like Al Qaeda that use it as launching grounds to attack the United States. And in retaliation, the United States invaded Afghanistan. And they toppled the Taliban government that was hosting Al Qaeda. So now weve got mostly three main players. One is the Taliban that feels that they are a government-in-waiting because they were toppled. And then its the U.S. military thats been on the ground for 18 years, and they want out. And so thats the second player. And the third player is the Afghan government that has been propped up by the United States over the past 18 years. And they are in the middle because they havent been part of the negotiations. So the effort to find a way out that can satisfy all the three players, its been a difficult process.

michael barbaro

Right. And Mujib, the last time you and I spoke, a peace deal was on the brink of happening. But the Taliban carried out an attack. It killed an American. President Trump, who was involved in those negotiations, was furious and at the last minute, called the talks off.

mujib mashal

Exactly. But that process was picked up again in recent months. And in the past few weeks, it finally felt like it was seriously coming together that we may have a way out of this conflict.

[music]

The way it happened is that they took the same deal that they almost finalized last September. They put a condition in front of it. The condition was that for seven days across Afghanistan, the violence level needed to be significantly reduced just to build some trust so ordinary Afghans could finally get to imagine what the dividends of peace could look like. And when that temporary truce started, the first thing that came to my mind was, what does it mean to the soldiers who have been fighting for years with no respite? So I thought of this guy I had sat next to on one of my flights, earlier flights, from southern Afghanistan. I had sat next to this guy, and I started making small talk with him. And he was like, yeah, Im a highway police commander, posted in this stretch of highway between Zabul and Kandahar provinces, both very, very badly hit areas of the war. And so I was like, hey, would it be OK for me to come visit you at some point? He was like, sure. So I got his number. And we were always nervous to go visit a place like that for security reasons. So when this truce went into effect, the first person that came to my mind was him. I want to go see what this would feel like for these guys who have constantly faced loss and fire. To go see, engage their emotions, and how they were experiencing this very rare breather from daily violence and daily attacks.

michael barbaro

So what did you do?

mujib mashal

So the photographer Kiana Hayeri and I, we flew to Kandahar. And from there, we found this old, really seasoned taxi driver who had done the road for about 40 years. And he drove us to the commander, to the base on the highway. And its a beautiful drive. But every couple miles of the drive getting to this commander, was seeing bridges blown up, the road blown up. So we arrived at this outpost on top of a hill, and were met by the commander. And he sort of oversees this 40, 50-mile stretch of the highway.

^mujib mashal

^: The one good thing he has is good weather.

mujib mashal

Hes got about 300 men spread out in a dozen outposts because what the Taliban do is plant a bomb when a convoy is driving. They blow up the bomb. And then once the convoy sort of gets disoriented with the explosion, they attack them from all corners.

interposing voices [SPEAKING PASHTO] mujib mashal This is the main way the Taliban come here.

mujib mashal

So every morning, they come out, and they just patrol along the highway, look for any wires, look for any pieces of the asphalt dug up.

mujib mashal This is where they get the  kiana hayeri The mines. mujib mashal  the mines. Thats the reason [INAUDIBLE]. kiana hayeri The actual mine or the cables? mujib mashal The cables. Thats how they dig it up. kiana hayeri OK. mujib mashal This is what they dig the cable with.

mujib mashal

And this commander  something that really, really got to me in the sense of how bad theyve been suffering was, he was like, listen, Ive lost more men fetching water than I have in face-to-face fighting.

michael barbaro

Mm.

mujib mashal

My men come out, and they make their way down to get water in these buckets. And a sniper takes them out.

michael barbaro

Wow.

mujib mashal

So thats how badly theyve been surrounded. Thats the kind of fire they were receiving. And I asked him, I was like, how has it been this couple days of  we visited them on day three, I think, of this violence reduction. And hes like, its been beautiful.

interposing voices [SPEAKING PASHTO] mujib mashal These are the latest [INAUDIBLE]. interposing voices [SPEAKING PASHTO] [laughter] interposing voices [SPEAKING PASHTO] mujib mashal [LAUGHS] I was like, is that thing still packed? He was like, yeah, if I push it right now, its  Im like, please dont.

mujib mashal

Seeing them walk around. Seeing them just  some of them having their weapons down.

mujib mashal Hes just been engaged three days ago.

mujib mashal

It felt like they were breathing a little relief.

[walkie-talkie sound] mujib mashal And then he said, lets go for a drive. speaker Good?

mujib mashal

He was showing us a couple other outposts.

mujib mashal Like, of the 300 other people he has, he probably doesnt have a single one who hasnt been wounded at some point during the war.

mujib mashal

And the amazing part was a lot of his fighters were really young  20, 22, 23, 25. A lot of them had started as child soldiers  14-, 15-year-olds. And many of them were really badly broken. Somebody was missing a finger. Somebody was missing a leg. Somebody was missing an eye. Some were wounded two, three times by the time theyre 24, 25 now. Lets see, there are these two brothers, actually three brothers.

speaker Assalamu alaikum.

mujib mashal

The one was home, had already lost a leg. Their father had served in the police for a long time. And hed just died last year clearing roadside bombs. And so that job and been passed down to his sons. And both of them were in their early 20s. One was, I think, 21. The other one was 23.

police officer [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

And one of them, his only interaction with the Taliban, was when he was detained by them for three days and tortured. And he still has the scars of that torture to show.

police officer [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

The village they come from, in different neighboring province, it is entirely contested by the Taliban. So these brothers cant really go home often. One of them actually even arrived late to his own wedding because his family had prepared all the festivities. He tried to find the truck driver that could smuggle him to his own village for the wedding. By the time he got there, the festivities were over. So he missed his own wedding, basically. They are so young. And theyre so shaped by this war, that when I asked them even basic questions of what peace could mean to them, they would just smile and just grin. And they couldnt mentally get into the details of it. So I pushed them a little. I was like, listen, peace means that 50,000, 60,000 Taliban fighters out there, either laying down their arms or integrating into the army and the police, and basically sitting across from you, sharing this barrack with you. And one of them was like, I dont like them. I dont like the way they look. And I was like, well, thats what peace means. It means those Taliban fighters who need to be accommodated somehow. So he thought about it again. And he was like, well, peace is good, but well think about it.

interposing voices [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

The commander is just 29 years old. But he seems so sort of seasoned and so experienced and so wise. And he got a little more reflective as we were driving between outposts.

lt. col. musa-kalim rodwal [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

And one of the stories you told us as we were driving was, as an example of what pains him about this war. And he said, listen, I wish I was fighting people who were from a different country. The people were fighting, theyre not even from a different village. Theyre not even from a different district. And he told us the story of this local guy he said had come to his outpost for tea and for lunch with other elders maybe even a dozen times. And then they discovered him planting roadside bombs during one of their operations. And he didnt even know the guy was a Taliban.

lt. col. musa-kalim rodwal [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

To him, that was a point of how localized, how interlinked and interwoven this conflict is. It almost seems that the easier part of the peace is between the Taliban and the Americans. But were talking about peace between people who are sharing the same stretch of the highway.

michael barbaro

And sharing tea, in fact.

mujib mashal

Or sharing tea. Yeah.

lt. col. musa-kalim rodwal [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

And he said, the most basic thing, the most important thing in human life is freedom. And he said, life is nothing without freedom. And he said, the way we live, these targets on our back wherever we travel, constant fear of attacks and violence  he said, this is not life. This is not life.

lt. col. musa-kalim rodwal [SPEAKING PASHTO]

[music]

mujib mashal

As I was with them and hearing their stories, it was very clear that the truce was working. They hadnt faced any fire in several days. And the truce working meant the peace deal would go ahead and be signed between the U.S. and the Taliban in Doha. So we got back in our taxi, drove to Kandahar. We took a flight from Kandahar to Kabul. I spent the night in Kabul, and then from there, fly to Doha to make it in time for the signing.

[music]

mujib mashal Its the day before the agreement is supposed to be signed. And the dignitaries are arriving from around the world in the Sheraton Doha. It seems like its happening.

michael barbaro

Well be right back.

mujib mashal Theyre putting final touches at the venue.

michael barbaro

So Mujib, you are in Doha getting ready to report on this historic peace agreement. What is the scene like there?

mujib mashal

So the event is supposed to happen at the Sheraton in Doha.

mujib mashal Theres a podium where the signing is going to happen, and two sides are going to give speeches.

mujib mashal

And this ballroom is prepared.

mujib mashal A kind of spotless red carpet. And red sort of velvety drapings behind the platform, and it says, The Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan.

mujib mashal

And people are slowly trickling in to find their way.

[camera shuttering] The most high-profile guest is the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the emir of Qatar. chatter

mujib mashal

And then 

chatter

mujib mashal

 dozens of Taliban started arriving for the occasion.

chatter

mujib mashal

And a lot of more unusual noise and clamor than you would see at a normal diplomatic event, and because this wasnt a normal diplomatic event. It was an insurgency that was only known for blowing stuff up and fighting in the battlefield. And now sitting in the same room as the secretary of state and world leaders and getting ready to sign as equals with a world power.

archived recording [SPEAKING PASHTO] mujib mashal Ceremony just gets underway. All the dignitaries have arrived.

mujib mashal

And then as the proceedings started, I found a seat in the balcony upstairs.

archived recording (mike pompeo) Good afternoon. I want to start by thanking his highness, Sheikh Tamim for Cutters invaluable role as host for these historic talks.

mujib mashal

And Secretary of State Pompeo gets up, and he gives brief remarks.

archived recording (mike pompeo) This effort only became real for the United States when the Taliban signaled interest in pursuing peace and ending their relationship with Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorist groups. The agreement that we will sign today is the true test of this effort.

michael barbaro

So Mujib, whats actually in the agreement thats about to be signed?

mujib mashal

The most concrete thing in the agreement is an American commitment to start withdrawing the remaining of its troops. So right now, theres still about 12,000 American troops in Afghanistan. And the agreement lays out a 14-month timeline for a gradual withdrawal of those troops.

archived recording (mike pompeo) Heres our take on what steps by the Taliban will make this agreement a success.

mujib mashal

There is some basic language of conditionality attached to it.

archived recording (mike pompeo) First, keep your promises to cut ties with Al Qaeda and other terrorists. Keep up the fight to defeat ISIS.

mujib mashal

That in return, the Taliban are making some commitments  that they would not allow terror groups, theyll not allow Al Qaeda. The other pieces are that the Americans will help release up to 5,000 of the Taliban prisoners who are in the Afghan government. And those prisoners will get released in the next couple weeks before the Taliban sit down for direct negotiations with the other Afghan side.

archived recording (mike pompeo) And start the difficult conversations on a political roadmap for your country.

mujib mashal

And then in that future negotiations, at the top of the agenda, would be a comprehensive cease-fire.

archived recording (mike pompeo) And for all of us here, and most importantly for the security of the American Afghan people, this must happen. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]

mujib mashal

And then.

sheikh tamim [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

The Talibans deputy gets up.

archived recording (deputy leader of the taliban) [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

He seems nervous, and hes struggling to read the text. But he basically says the same thing  that we want a peaceful future. We are committed to the agreement that well sign.

archived recording [APPLAUSE]

mujib mashal

There is muted cries of allahu akbar from the Taliban guys, which is sort of victory cry. And then the deputy Taliban leader takes his place at the desk. And the American chief negotiator takes a seat next to him. The Taliban guy, hes watching closely to make sure the American envoy puts his signatures down first 

michael barbaro

Wow.

mujib mashal

 as if to make sure there isnt some sort of a last-minute trick. And after the American signs the first page, the Taliban opens his pen, and he starts signing also.

archived recording [APPLAUSE]

mujib mashal

And that was it. They had signed an agreement that had taken a year and half of negotiations. And there was a sense of expectation that this momentous signing between the U.S. and the Taliban would open the way for peace.

michael barbaro

Mm-hm.

mujib mashal

But as soon as the two sides signed, the Taliban have started attacking again.

archived recording 1 Now, remember that landmark deal between the U.S. and the Taliban at the weekend, well  archived recording 2 Cracks are now starting to appear in the agreement. archived recording 3 Appears to be unraveling. archived recording 4 Its already unraveling just four days after it was signed. archived recording 5 New violence in Afghanistan just days after that landmark truce between the 

mujib mashal

Back to Taliban launching attacks on Afghan outposts. Back to Taliban stopping people on the highways.

archived recording 6 Afghan police say that at least three people have been killed earlier.

mujib mashal

Dozens dead every day since.

archived recording 7 Separate attacks have left at least 19 people  archived recording 8 20 Afghan soldiers  archived recording 9 More than 20 Afghan soldiers  archived recording 10 Dead. archived recording 11 33 attacks in 16  archived recording 12 Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned that violence will continue in Afghanistan.

[music]

michael barbaro

Mujib, why would the Taliban begin launching attacks days, hours after signing a peace deal?

mujib mashal

The Taliban say the deal makes it clear their violence is only ending with the Americans.

michael barbaro

Mm.

mujib mashal

And theres nothing in the deal about reducing attacks on Afghan government, on Afghan security forces. And Ive posed this question to the Taliban. And I was like listen, so for 18, 19 years, youve been saying this is a jihad against foreigners, right? But the foreigners just signed with you. Theyre leaving. So how do you legitimize the shedding of Afghan blood now?

michael barbaro

Right.

mujib mashal

And he was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. Just because we got the foreigners to agree to leave doesnt mean we can give up already that the structure they created, the government they propped up, the system they put in place will inherit everything, and we will be left out here without correcting that system that is in Kabul to include our wishes also. So theyre very clear that theyre going to continue to use violence as leverage to bring political change also.

michael barbaro

So in their mind, they need to keep waging a war on these kind of extensions and projections of American power. And they are allowed to do it under this agreement because it only explicitly says you cannot attack U.S. forces.

mujib mashal

Precisely. So theres an interesting thing that happened just on Wednesday. After three days of violence, the U.S. military got back into action. They carried out an air strike against the Taliban. And the U.S. militarys justification was, listen, the agreement may have just ended the violence explicitly between us  meaning, between the Taliban and the Americans  but theres a sense in the agreement that if you all of a sudden start attacking the Afghan security forces, we, as the U.S. military, reserve the right to go to their defense.

michael barbaro

That feels like a very significant structural flaw in a peace deal to have left so much ambiguity that your former enemy can go on to destroy the government that the United States has built there.

mujib mashal

Theres a structure flaw in that for sure. But getting around that structure flaw, there were two possibilities. One was you can ensure that doesnt happen by getting the enemy to agree to a cease-fire, right?

michael barbaro

Mm-hm.

mujib mashal

The Taliban in no way were going agree to a cease-fire. So you either kept negotiating for months to try to force them to a cease-fire. Or they have agreed to this structurally flawed agreement, but hoping that because the U.S. reserves the right to carry out airstrikes, would mean the Taliban will carry out fewer attacks to risk being killed by American airstrikes. So what were seeing right now is the Taliban testing how much they can get away with in this ambiguous area of how far the U.S. will go to defend the Afghan government. But theyre also testing something else. So as part of the deal, the U.S has committed to helping release 5,000 of Taliban prisoners. And the Afghan government said, no way. Those are our prisoners. The U.S. doesnt have the right to commit to something like that. And the Taliban now are like, we dont care. U.S., you sort it out. You committed to us. But at the same time, it almost feels like theyre using violence to remind the Afghan government that if they drag their foot on the prisoners issue, the Taliban are still a reality in the battlefield. That they still have the same sort of firepower.

[music]

michael barbaro

Mujib, I wonder if you have talked to those police officers that you had visited before the signing?

[phone dialing]

mujib mashal

I did.

automatic operator The number you are calling is not in service.

mujib mashal

I mean, it was a bit of a struggle to get back in touch with them, because that area where theyre serving  what the Taliban do is they cut off cell towers, and you lose cell phone signal.

[phone dialing] But when I got back in touch with them. lt. col. musa-kalim rodwal (on the phone) [SPEAKING PASHTO] mujib mashal (on the phone) [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

They say theyve been facing fire for the past three consecutive nights.

michael barbaro

Wow.

lt. col. musa-kalim rodwal (on the phone) [SPEAKING PASHTO] mujib mashal [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

One of the outposts they showed us and I toured, they had two people wounded in that outpost. Their commander that we went to see, he was ambushed. So the commanders like, its back to the same levels as a attack for us.

lt. col. musa-kalim rodwal (on the phone) [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

But he said something really interesting that I think summed up the mood after the recent Taliban attacks.

lt. col. musa-kalim rodwal (on the phone) [SPEAKING PASHTO] mujib mashal (on the phone) [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

He said, the one thing that is good about their attacks now is that it makes things clear. It makes our fight clear that until now, the Taliban were saying, oh, the foreigners are here. Were fighting the foreigners. And that kind of give their fight a little legitimacy, right? And they said now that theyve gotten their agreement with the foreigners, and theyre still deciding to attack us, we have a more open hand to return fire, as their attacks dont have that same legitimacy anymore. So its almost crystallized the fight for them a little bit.

lt. col. musa-kalim rodwal (on the phone) [SPEAKING PASHTO]

mujib mashal

But the fact that their daily reality after the signing has been no different from their reality before the signing seemed heavy on them, that they were back to the same being shot at and returning fire.

mujib mashal [SPEAKING PASHTO] lt. col. musa-kalim rodwal (on the phone) [SPEAKING PASHTO]

[music]

michael barbaro

It feels like nothing about this peace deal actually looks like peace to them. In fact, its just the beginning of a new phase of the war.

mujib mashal

At the moment, it doesnt. It actually feels like a continuation of the war they were fighting already. But one thing that came out of this peace deal was a brief pause, even if it was just for seven days. They felt and experienced a new reality. And maybe, maybe for a long time, they wont experience that again. Maybe their reality will be violence. But at least they have a reference point now. They can think back to seven days. And maybe that will serve as a reminder of what is still possible and what they could still get to.

[music]

michael barbaro

Mujib, thank you very much.

mujib mashal

Thank you.

[music]

michael barbaro

Well be right back. Heres what else you need to know today. Italy and Iran have ordered all schools and universities to close as the coronavirus sweeps across both countries. In Italy, around 150 people have died from the virus  the highest number outside of China. While in Iran, there are now more than 3,500 infections. In the U.S., California has declared a state of emergency after an outbreak that has infected dozens of residents. And state officials said they were ordering a cruise ship to remain off the coast of San Francisco out of fear that the coronavirus may be spreading among its passengers. As of Wednesday evening, there were at least 211 infections in the U.S. And 

archived recording (elizabeth warren) I will not be running for president in 2020. But I guarantee I will stay in the fight for the hardworking folks across this country who have gotten the short end of the stick over and over. Thats been the fight of my life, and it will continue to be so.

michael barbaro

Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the Democratic race for president on Thursday, saying, that after a series of disappointing primaries, there was no longer a place for her in the race.

archived recording (elizabeth warren) I was told at the beginning of this whole undertaking that there are two lanes  a progressive lane that Bernie Sanders is the incumbent for, and a moderate lane that Joe Biden is the incumbent for. And theres no room for anyone else in this. I thought that wasnt right, but evidently I was wrong.

michael barbaro

Warren declined to endorse either Biden or Sanders for now. And during a news conference in front of her house, expressed regret that there was no longer a woman in the race.

archived recording And I wonder what your message would to the women and girls who feel like were left with two white men to decide between. archived recording (elizabeth warren) I know. One of the hardest parts of this is all those pinkie promises, and all those little girls who were going to have to wait four more years. Thats going to be hard.

michael barbaro
- Senator Koko Pimentel was reportedly spotted shopping at a grocery store in Bonifacio Global City

- He went to the said store on March 16, just two days after he began experiencing body aches and flu

- The management of the said establishment already issued a statement about what happened

- S&R revealed that the employees who got in contact with the politician are now undergoing quarantine

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Senator Aquilino Koko Pimentel III was spotted shopping at a grocery store in Bonifacio Global City on Monday, March 16.

KAMI learned that the grocery store named S&R confirmed the said information through a statement that was released recently on social media.

It appeared that the lawmaker went to the said establishment two days after he began experiencing flu and body aches.

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According to S&R management, the footages of its CCTV during the said date showed that the politician was indeed shopping inside its BGC store.

All the employees who got in contact with the Senator are now placed under quarantine.

The store also makes sure that daily disinfection will be done to avoid the possible spread of the novel coronavirus.

"It was confirmed that the senator was at the S&R BGC on March 16, 2020. CCTV footage showed him checking out at counter 13 at exactly 1:59 p.m.," the statement reads.

As a result, S&R employees who were in contact with the senator were already placed in quarantine. S&R BGC also took extra disinfection steps We disinfect our stores daily and ascertain that our staff are clear prior to work, it added.

In a previous article by , Senator Pimentel revealed to the public that he tested positive for the novel coronavirus disease.

Aquilino Koko Pimentel III is one of the incumbent Senators in the Philippines. He is currently in hot water because of his decision to go to the Makati Medical Center despite being on self-quarantine.

POPULAR: Read more news about Senator Koko Pimentel!

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TikTok dance challenges are taking over social media. We are always on point in asking passers-by to dance to famous songs together with our host Andre!  Dont forget to subscribe to HumanMeter!

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White House counselor Kellyanne Conway is back to throwing elbows, even as a new poll finds most Americans are certain the coronavirus outbreak will trigger an economic recession.

The aide to Donald Trump has conducted fewer television interviews and West Wing driveway gaggles since the Covid-19 pandemic hit US soil. But she was back at it on Thursday, and in signature form.

Though she did not name Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, she portrayed him as slow to grasp and respond to the sometimes-deadly bug.

"We have the mayor saying  not playing politics here  we have a mayor saying, 'Look at me, I'm on the subway, go out on the town,'" she said. "And then he recommended what show everybody should go see."

Broadway theatres in the Big Apple have shut down since the outbreak made the country's largest and most densely populated city the coronavirus epicenter.

She also had some of a typically sharp critique of former Vice President Joe Biden, who has emerged as the Democratic presidential frontrunner as a Washington Post-ABC News poll found nine in 10 Americans expect a recession due to the pandemic.

"Joe Biden has a 'Democrat problem'" because, during the virus outbreak, prominent state and local officials from that party, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and California Governor Gavin Newsom have been "collaborating and complimenting the White House and the administration and the president's efforts."

That, however, is only part of the truth.

Mr Cuomo has at times been sharply critical of Mr Trump and the federal government. For instance, this week he again blasted the commander in chief for calling the country's battle against the virus "a war," saying if Mr Trump truly believes that, his government's response should more closely resemble a wartime effort.

What's more, she also walked back the president's statement from Tuesday that he wants to open all or parts of the country "for business" by Easter Sunday (12 April).

Rather than moving ahead with an order -- which some legal experts say state and local officials would not have to follow under America's federal system -- for sure on that day, Ms Conway contended her boss "will follow the facts of the data."

To that end, Mr Trump informed governors in a letter Thursday his team will judge areas county-by-county, grouping them in three categories as they judge which ones are Covid-free enough to deem ready to be "open for business," as Mr Trump has said.
A Sutton, Mass.-based contractor has agreed to pay $120,000 to reimburse the state for the cost of responding to a 2017 explosion and fire of a backyard shed at a Shrewsbury residential property, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey announced.

The explosion and fire released hazardous chemicals and fumes, causing workers and a neighbor to develop respiratory problems.

The consent judgment, entered in Suffolk Superior Court, resolves part of a lawsuit the AGs Office filed in April 2019 against P&M Asphalt Services Inc. and the propertys owners, Edgar Muntz Jr. and 393 Oak Street Realty Trust, a realty trust Muntz owns and manages.

The lawsuit alleged that the defendants violated the states hazardous materials laws by demolishing a backyard shed at the property, which was filled with hundreds of containers of dangerous chemicals, including dynamite, mercury, arsenic, chloroform and sodium cyanide.

These defendants ignored our states important environmental protection laws and showed little concern for the health and safety of their workers and nearby neighbors, Healey said in a press release issued by her office. Todays settlement ensures that the public is not stuck paying for the consequences of these illegal actions and should serve as a deterrent to others.

As alleged in the complaint, the shed burst into flames during the demolition, releasing the hazardous materials into the air and soil. The AGs Office alleges that, in further violation of state law, none of the defendants reported the explosion or contamination to the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP), or any other authority.

After a neighbor alerted local authorities, MassDEP, along with other state and local agencies, responded to the scene and took remedial action to secure the site and clean up the hazardous materials.

The rules for notification and proper handling of hazardous materials are in place to protect public health and the environment, said MassDEP Commissioner Martin Suuberg in the release. This case demonstrates the harm that can be caused when these rules are not followed, and MassDEP was pleased to work with the Attorney Generals Office to ensure the Commonwealth was reimbursed for clean-up costs.

The settlement will go toward reimbursing the state for the cost MassDEP incurred when it assessed, contained, and removed the hazardous material from the property. The AGs Office is continuing to pursue claims against Muntz and the realty trust in court, seeking reimbursement of MassDEPs remaining costs, penalties, and injunctive relief.

Source: Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General

Topics Trends Massachusetts Contractors Chemicals
The six year-old boy who was seriously injured when he was thrown from the 10th floor of London's Tate Modern art gallery is managing to sit up, his family have said.

The French infant is 'slowly but surely continuing to progress' after he was attacked by autistic teenager Jonty Bravery at the tourist attraction on August 4, according to his relatives.

In a post on a GoFundMe page, which has raised more than 199,000 for the boy's treatment and rehabilitation, his family said: 'He has gained muscle tone and regained enough strength to manage to sit longer in a sitting position and straighter in his chair without the help of his corset.

The six-year old boy was seriously injured after he was thrown from the viewing platform of the Tate Modern art gallery in London (pictured). He can now sit up, his family have said

'He can now eat all soft foods and can almost eat all of his meals on his own, holding his spoon himself with his right hand.

Jonty Bravery, 18, from Ealing, west London , said to detectives after he was arrested that he had planned in advance to hurt someone at the art gallery on that date

'As he has more strength, he also has more breath and for that reason, we understand better what he says and he manages to speak to us more.

'At last, he continues to train to open his left hand during the exercices (sic) but he now manages to move his left arm a little to the right and a little to the left, in front of him.

'Only few movements, very approximate and they exhaust him so much that he very quickly starts yawning, but for him, it's the beginning of the reconquest of his left arm!'

The family say that 'after a slump', their 'smiling little boy' seems to be coming back.

They also had a message for their supporters during the coronavirus pandemic.

They added: 'We are very moved to see that you continue to think of our little knight in these difficult times.

'At the hospital, the situation is more complicated with the coronavirus epidemic and containment measures, but you are still there for us: how to thank you?

'Please stay safe and take care of yourself and those you love.'

The victim fell from the observation balcony of the Blavatnik Building at the art gallery

The boy, who can not be named, was thrown from a viewing platform at the gallery.

He suffered a bleed to the brain, fractures to his spine and broken legs and arms following the fall.

The boy was visiting London with his family at the time and spent several weeks in intensive care.

Bravery, now aged 18, of Ealing, west London, admitted a charge of attempted murder at the Old Bailey in December.
With road and rail traffic suspended due to a nationwide lockdown to combat coronavirus, many people, including migrant workers, are stranded in the national capital without any means of sustenance, while a few are making a road journey to their home towns and villages.

Among those who are making a road journey, mostly on foot, include Bramhpal Singh.

Singh (24), a native of Pauri Garhwal district in Uttarakhand, left Gurgaon, where he works in a roadside restaurant to return to his village, nearly 300 kilometres from here, to visit his sick mother.

He walked from Gurgaon to Dhaula Kuan, took some rest, boarded random DTC buses to reach the Anand Vihar Interstate Bus Terminal in east Delhi.

Singh pleaded bus drivers to let him board the bus as he is not from the essential services category.

"I want to reach my village at the earliest," Singh said who started working at the roadside restaurant barely a fortnight ago for Rs 8,000 but got a call from his brother informing about this mother's ill-health.

"I will somehow reach Meerut and then again walk to Uttarakhand if I don't get any mode of transport," he said, carrying a sack on his shoulder.

According to GPS tracker, Singh will probably take two-and-half days if he goes on foot.

Jagat Pal (36), a rickshaw driver in Mayapuri, is also among the stranded ones and is unable to go back to his village.

"I have no work so there is money. I and other rickshaw drivers are borrowing money from others for food," Pal, who hails from Pratapgarh district in Uttar Pradesh, said.

Pal said he should have left along with 15 others on Sunday, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19.

The 15 work as rickshaw drivers and daily wage earners.

"They (the 15) have still not reached Pratapgarh after two days," he said.

The distance between Delhi and Pratapgarh is more than 700 kilometres.

According to GPS tracker, if one goes on foot, he would take 127 hours (five and half days) to reach their destination.

Not just, Pal, hundreds of migrants workers have been stranded in Delhi without any work or means for sustenance.

The Anand Vihar ISBT has many stranded like Suresh Chaudhary, who are heading back as there is no work in the national capital.

"We have locked ourselves in our room as there is no work.... Our little savings are also drying. We don't know how long we can sustain ourselves, he said.

Chaudhary, who shares a room with five other workers, said, "I am stuck in a place which is worse than even jails. Even convicts in jail are getting better food, facilities than us. I am managing with whatever little money I have earned in the previous week."



Dev Pal, a resident of Badaun district in Uttar Pradesh, said he came to the national capital a couple of days ago to see his ailing uncle.

"My uncle was unwell and I came here in east Delhi's Seemapuri area on Sunday to see him. Now, I got a call from Badaun that my mother is sick. I came out of my uncle's house and have been waiting for a bus at Apsara Border till Anand Vihar for the past one hour. A couple of buses have passed but no one is willing to stop. I have to go to Badaun somehow," Pal said.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced a complete lockdown of the entire country for 21 days in an unprecedented drastic measure to try halt the spread of coronavirus.

The death toll due to COVID-19 in India rose to 16 and the number of positive cases increased by nearly 90 to 694, according to the health ministry.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Venezuela's first communications satellite, launched in 2008, is out of service due to a systems failure, the country's government has said.

"Due to a failure, the Simon Bolivar satellite is no longer working for communication," said the science and technology minister in a statement, without giving further details.

On Monday, the US-based site Space reported that VeneSat1 -- the satellite's other name -- "has been stuck for 10 days in an elliptical orbit," after a "series of maneuvers left it tumbling in an unusable orbit."



According to the Bolivarian Agency for Space Activities, the satellite was used to transmit certain television signals, as well as for internet connections and mobile telephone use.

It was built by China and baptized "Simon Bolivar" in honor of a national Venezuelan hero. It was launched in 2008, while Hugo Chavez was in office (1999-2013).

Venezuela launched a second satellite, the "Francisco de Miranda," in September 2012.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
BUZZFEED je objavio galeriju fotografija "ljudi koji su pobijedili izolaciju i koja ce zagrijati vase hladno i mrtvo karantensko srce", a neke od fotografija zaista su dirljive. Uostalom, uvjerite se sami.

1.

Three generations of social distancing as my dad meets his grandson for the first time  pic.twitter.com/uyHHgBBXxb  Emma (@emmabethgall) March 21, 2020

2.

when social distancing is in place, a hand held through a window and an open door chat with my nan...  pic.twitter.com/Z69OzeaImi  lucy b  (@buswellshewitt_) March 25, 2020

3.

My Grandson having a flute lesson through the window! Bless him! pic.twitter.com/j8DSmpQfUT  Pip (@IvorIdea) March 25, 2020

4.

My aunt, uncle and cousins went to my grandmother's living facility and held a St. Patrick's Day parade for them she's clapping for them through the window, I am unwell. pic.twitter.com/3EF5qzCwZR  Shannon Lynch (@shannonblynch) March 17, 2020

5.

Since we cant go inside the retirement home to visit our grandma, we made a sign and visited her window :) pic.twitter.com/oxeXsUrlM0  sarah (@sarahbouch22) March 23, 2020

6.

Heartwarming or heartbreaking?



Grandpa plays a game of tic-tac-toe with his grandson. #SocialDistance #CoronaVirus pic.twitter.com/Q7ZwrlKOo9  Mike Brookbank (@brookbanktv) March 21, 2020

7.

Window visit with Mom pic.twitter.com/pNmdGWsTIE  Ingried Wimmer (@IngriedWimmer) March 18, 2020

8.

Tekst se nastavlja ispod oglasa

Hi Grandpa. We miss you. We wish we could come visit you. We love you.



I spoke with the granddaughter of the 97 y/o WWII Veteran you see here. Richard has #COVID19, hes at the Oregon Veterans Home in Lebanon where a fellow veteran with #coronavirus died today. Story @ 10 pic.twitter.com/RPkXpQJe7T  Bonnie Silkman KPTV (@BonnieSilkman) March 23, 2020

9.

Play date today with my Grandson thru the window pic.twitter.com/SyfSf92uup  Paul Pit (@pitter144) March 23, 2020

10.

I went to see my Grandma today, who is about to be 90 years old. My plan was just to wave from the street but she ran up to my car as I drove past. I made sure she stood a few feet away from my car at all times but she still insisted on throwing groceries through my window.  pic.twitter.com/Jlzev5IoEI  kelly victoria  (@saysthefox) March 24, 2020

11.

I went to see my Grandma today, who is about to be 90 years old. My plan was just to wave from the street but she ran up to my car as I drove past. I made sure she stood a few feet away from my car at all times but she still insisted on throwing groceries through my window.  pic.twitter.com/Jlzev5IoEI  kelly victoria  (@saysthefox) March 24, 2020

12.

Grandpa Zenefski got to meet Maeve (through the window) today.



His reaction was pretty priceless.



Also, I think we finally convinced him to stay home. So, thats a win!



Cc: @janashortal & @bengarvin for more good things! pic.twitter.com/hjyg4yxP9B  Rebecca Slater (she/her) (@rebeccazenefski) March 24, 2020

13.

Got out the shower to hear the kids screaming and dog going bananas. Worst nightmare. Ran downstairs to hear, GRANDADS HAIR!!!



My dad has dyed his hair purple to amuse himself during #COVID2019 #lockdownuk and used his one exercise to show us through the window. Love him  pic.twitter.com/WUP7d2aRlh  Anna Davis (@annalouisedavis) March 25, 2020

14.

On @instagram - this heartwarming moment of a granddaughter telling her grandfather through the window of a nursing home that shes engaged. Visitation at the facility is restricted at the moment due to #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/xh6o6OmnAP  James LaPorta (@JimLaPorta) March 18, 2020

15.

This is the new normal in the face of #COVID19 My brother meets my daughter's newborn through the front porch window. Better safe. Be smart @CDCgov #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/a1WFYooNO4  Dr. Nancy Snyderman (@DrNancyMD) March 19, 2020

16.
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The Goa government on Thursday



announced that shops providing essential items like groceries, milk and vegetables would be kept open round-the-clock in the state during the lockdown period.

Chief Minister Pramod Sawant said though the government was not in favour of taking such a step, it had to take the decision due to pressure from social media users and other quarters.

He said shops selling groceries, milk and vegetables would be kept open round-the-clock, but people should maintain social distancing while visiting these outlets.

The chief minister said the decision will be implemented keeping in view the central governments guidelines related to the 21-day nationwide lockdown in force since Tuesday midnight to curb the spread of coronavirus.

Meanwhile, Sawant said at least 1,500 people from Goa, who travelled outside the state in recent past, have been home quarantined.

He said police will act against people who have given wrong travel history.

Sawant said those under home quarantine should remain indoors, and if they are found roaming outside, locals should inform the authorities.

So far, Goa has registered three coronavirus positive cases, all reported on March 25.

Meanwhile, the coastal state did not report any new COVID-19 case on Thursday, health department officials said.

The officials said out of the 11 test reports received during the day, none was found positive for the viral infection.

Currently, eight people are under isolation at the Goa Medical College and Hospital, while 23 others are in different quarantine facilities, they said.

State health authorities have advised 39 people to remain under home quarantine.

The three persons, who tested positive on Wednesday, are aged 25, 29 and 55 and had returned to Goa from Spain, Australia and the USA, respectively.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
State health officials announced another virus-related death of a Harnett County resident in their 30s with an underlying health condition, but provided no additional information. The state earlier this week announced two other deaths  one a person from Cabarrus County and another person from Virginia who contracted the virus while in North Carolina. The Virginia resident will not be counted in North Carolina's official tally, however, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The state counted more than 630 positive COVID-cases as of Thursday morning, or about 130 more than Wednesday, with 50 people hospitalized. Guilford County reported it had 26 cases as of Thursday, although some of those may not have been included in the daily tally from the state. More than 15,000 COVID-19 tests have been completed statewide.

Gov. Roy Cooper has over time expanded statewide movement and commerce restrictions, and extended the closings of K-12 public schools through May 15. Cooper has declined a statewide stay-at-home decree, but he said on Wednesday he expected additional guidance and orders soon.
A selfless paramedic has moved into a campervan and away from his family to keep her them safe during the coronavirus outbreak.

NHS worker Danny Hughes, 28, from Newhaven, East Sussex says he deals with patients who have the virus every day and decided to isolate himself because several members of his family are vulnerable, including one who is pregnant.

Mr Hughes called on the public to only call 999 in an emergency and revealed how he has been working exhausting 12-hour shifts that often overrun.

The paramedic, who is also an RAF veteran, is one of several health workers who have isolated themselves to keep their families safe as they bravely battle the virus.

Mr Hughes said he had his family - many who are in the high risk group, including one who is pregnant - in mind when he made his decision.

NHS worker Danny Hughes, 28, from Newhaven, East Sussex has moved into a campervan and away from his family to keep her them safe during the coronavirus outbreak

The paramedic, who is also an RAF veteran, is one of several health workers who have isolated themselves to keep their families safe

He also added: 'The main reason for moving into the camper van is one member of my household while I was away became symptomatic.

'Given the state of how busy we are I didn't think that sitting at home for two weeks would be the best use of my time.

'I thought it was more advantageous to isolate myself temporarily.'

Instead he decided to move into the camper van so that he could continue working for the South East Coast Ambulance service (SECAmb), where he is based in Polegate, East Sussex.

'We come into contact with patients who potentially have the coronavirus on a daily basis - whether that is the potential to have it or those who are confirmed as having Covid-19.

'I wanted to put that step forward and protect my family.

'I may not have symptoms but there is nothing to say I won't pass it on to my family.'

Mr Hughes also thanked the public for their support while he and colleagues are busy dealing with the coronavirus.

'It has been very positive overall, the public are very supportive of the ambulance service paramedics and of the NHS as a whole.'

Mr Hughes called on the public to only call 999 in an emergency and revealed how he has been working exhausting 12-hour shifts that often overrun

Mr Hughes also thanked the public for their support while he and colleagues are busy dealing with the coronavirus

However, he also called on people to obey government guidance so that the NHS is not 'overrun' with Covid-19 cases.

'I have witnessed the effects of the virus and would urge members of the public to read the latest Government advice.

'Contact 111 if needed and only call 999 in an emergency to free up ambulances for emergencies.

'We are exceptionally busy as a service.'

With many medics working long, hard hours caring for the sick and the elderly, some have decided to isolate themselves from loved ones to protect them from the killer virus.

Taking to social media, they have shared their plight to try and appeal to Brits to stay home and stop the spread of the illness.

In a video shared online, tearful Chanice Cushion, who works at Southend Hospital in Essex, urged Brits to do all they can to minimise the spread of the virus as she shared her heartbreak at having to move away from her daughter, two.

She posted the clip on Facebook yesterday and said that she had made the decision with her partner to protect their daughter and her vulnerable mother-in-law, who has chronic asthma.

Describing how her daughter was 'going about her day as normal' as she packed to leave, Chanice welled up and explained how she told her 'mummy's going away for a little while'.

She said: 'She's a two-year-old, she doesn't understand. I left home earlier, and I said ''mummy's going away for a little while. Mummy's got work.''

'And she said, ''Mummy, I come''. I said ''no baby, you can't. I said I'm going to Nanny's house and Nanny's going to stay here with you.''

'So today's my first day of 12 weeks away from my kid, and it's very hard. So I said my goodbyes to her and, as a normal parent would do, started to cry.

'She just looked at me and went ''Mummy, why are you sad''. I didn't know how to answer it, so I just replied with ''Mummy is sad''.

'She grabbed her sleeve and she was wiping my tears away with her sleeve and said ''don't cry Mummy''.'

In a video shared online, tearful Chanice Cushion, who works at Southend Hospital in Essex, urged Brits to do all they can to minimise the spread of the virus

She said hospital staff are 'basically suspecting anyone' who comes through the doors with either a cough or temperature of having coronavirus

The video has been shared more than 80,000 times online, and she has received thousands of comments of support.

Breaking down into tears, Chanice added: 'I've had to leave my daughter for three months because I don't want to put her in that vulnerable situation.

'She has no idea what's going on. No idea at all.'

And Chanice says she is petrified of going in to work.

She said hospital staff are 'basically suspecting anyone' who comes through the doors with either a cough or temperature of having coronavirus.

The medical emergency assistant said: 'Guys, you need to stay indoors.

'I'm petrified of going to work - I'm petrified - but I have to go to work.

'You have to stay indoors. There is nothing so special out there for you to be going out.

Nick Dennison, who works at Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey, made the 'difficult choice' to treat the country's sickest patients, exposing himself to being infected

'Yeah, the sun's shining - you might be dead in a few weeks because you wanted to go out and get some fresh air and mingle with people and not keep a two-metre distance.

'You need to really get your priorities straight. Go home, stay home, protect your children, protect the vulnerable people that you could potentially be infecting.

'Shelves are being stripped of fruit, veg, meat. I even struggled to get eggs.

'It just seems so surreal. How are the NHS workers supposed to stay healthy and fit when we've got nothing to feed us, we've got nothing to build our energy.

'Just stay indoors and if you need to come out, one person come out from a family and go do what they've got to do, then go straight home.

'Get straight in the shower, wash your hands for 20 seconds. You need to be so vigilant guys.'

Jenny Hawkins (pictured) , from Surrey, whose husband has cystic fibrosis pleaded with the public on Facebook to stay at home, revealing she has had to move out of her home so she can 'give her all' to the health service

Nick Dennison, who works at Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey, made the 'difficult choice' to treat the country's sickest patients, exposing himself to being infected - and has explained the personal sacrifices he and other NHS heroes have to make to battle the deadly Covid-19.

Mr Dennison says that 'the public health message is not getting through', adding that 'a lot of people are going to die.' He is now urging Britons to follow their Government's advice and socially isolate.

In a moving Facebook post, Mr Dennison wrote: 'My son turned three years old last week and is six weeks into a three year chemotherapy program for lymphoma. This virus is a big threat to his life and as I am going to be exposed this week doing my job, I can no longer live at home.'

Anaesthetist Jenny Hawkins, from Surrey, wrote on Facebook that she is moving out of the home she shares with her husband, who has cystic fibrosis, in order to protect him and to continue working on the frontline at Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust.

She asked people to listen to government advice so that she could return home to her husband soon, saying 'I dont think Im asking you to sacrifice anywhere near what Im having to.'

The moving post has gained 199,000 likes and 182,000 shares and Jenny was praised by friends for her 'amazing' sacrifice and told they were 'so proud' of the effort she was putting in.

One wrote: 'Jenny your amazing . Everyone stay at home.
To address the immediate economic distress in the wake of the lockdown prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and ensure food and cash reaches the marginalised segments of society, the government announced a Rs 1,70,000 crore package, under a new scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Yojana (PMGKBY), on Thursday.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, at a press conference in the capital, announced a series of measures, which focused on additional food transfers at no cost, additional cash for vulnerable segments, concessions on government schemes aimed to help households reduce their expenditure, and support those in the frontline of the battle against the pandemic. The primary beneficiaries of these measures include those below the poverty line, farmers, women, elderly citizens, the physically challenged, and workers in both the unorganised and organised sectors.

Sitharaman underlined that within 36 hours of the lockdown  Prime Minister Narendra Modi directed a national lockdown for three weeks on Tuesday night  the government had come up with measures to immediately take care of welfare concerns of the poor. She, however, did not address questions about the fiscal implications of the scheme, or announce measures for other economic sectors which have also got severely affected in the wake of the restrictions and the lockdown.

Sitharaman announced a medial insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh per person for doctors, health care personnel and sanitation staff, acknowledging their contribution at this crisis hour.

The PMGKY had two broad components  the first was centred on ensuring food availability and support, and the second was centred on income support.

On food, Sitharaman said 800 million people  two-thirds of the countrys population  would now be eligible for, in addition to the existing allocation of five kg of wheat or rice, another five kg of wheat or rice per month, for the next three months, for free. They would also get one kg of pulse, according to the specific regional variant of the pulse in their geographical area, in this period. This is meant to ensure that no one stays hungry, emphasised Sitharaman.

In terms of direct financial support, the FM announced support under eight distinct categories using the direct benefits transfer framework.

The first was targeted at farmers, who get direct cash support of 6,000 annually under the PM-Kisan scheme. Sitharaman said that the first instalment of the money  2000  would be front-loaded and given immediately. This will benefit 86.9 million farmers, said the FM.

The second was for workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS). From a daily wage of 182, they would now be entitled to get 202. This will benefit 50 million families. It will help increase the income to 2,000 per worker, emphasised Sitharaman.

The third measure was for economically poor widows, elderly citizens above the age of 60, and the physically challenged. They will get an ex-gratia amount of 1,000. The measure will benefit 30 million poor citizens, the FM said. The amount is to be given in two instalments.

The fourth measure was targeted at women who held Jan Dhan Accounts. There are 200 million women Jan Dhan account holders. The government will give them 500 per month, for three months, to ensure they can run their households in this period of disruption. A related announcement was for the beneficiaries of the PM Ujjwala scheme, where over 83 million households got gas cylinders. For three months, these households will get free cylinders. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many households have found the cost of refilling their gas cylinders burdensome. Minister of state for finance, Anurag Thakur, sitting alongside Sitharaman, underlined that with these measures, the government was seeking to ensure that poor families had access to food, to incomes, and to cooking gas.

The fifth measure was targeted at women self-help groups (SHGs). Sitharaman pointed out that there were 6.3 million SHGs in the country, with members from 70 million households being members of these groups. They were eligible for collateral-free loan up to 10 lakh till now. This amount will now go up to 20 lakh. Self-help groups are eligible for increased collateral free loans, which will give more money in their hands, said the finance minister.

The sixth measure was targeted at organised workers. This had two components. The government, the FM announced, would contribute both the share of the employee and the employer of the Employer Provident Fund for the next three months. The government will give both the 12% share of the employees, and the 12% share of the employers  so a total of 24% per month for three months, to ensure there is no break in the continuity of EPFO contributions. This will apply to establishments which have less than 100 employees, where 90% of the employees earn less than 15,000 per month. The second inter-related measure was the governments decision to amend the provident fund regulation scheme, to allow employees to withdraw, on a non refundable advance basis, 75% of the amount, or up to three months of wages, whichever is lower, from their accounts.

The seventh announcement was for construction workers. The FM said that there already existed a fund for the welfare of construction and other workers. This had, at the moment, 31,000 crore and 35 million workers were registered under it. We have given directions to state governments to utilise the funds to provide assistance to construction workers to protect them. And the final announcement was with regard to district mineral funds, with the FM requesting state governments to utilise these funds to supplement medical testing and screening activities to fight the coronavirus.

Congress parliamentarian Rahul Gandhi said the governments announcement of a financial assistance package is the first step in the right direction. ...India owes a debt to its farmers, daily wage earners, labourers, women & the elderly who are bearing the brunt of the ongoing lockdown, he tweeted.

Trinamool Congress MP Derek OBrien said the measures were similar to what states have already announced. Centre takes cue from relief plans already rolled out by state governments like West Bengal a week ago free six months ration for the poor, health insurance for champion frontliners fighting corona and Rs 1000 for daily wagers under new Prochesta scheme, he said, adding that the Centres move will supplement state efforts.
But in Texas, at least one abortion provider, Whole Womans Health, has had to interrupt care, canceling appointments for more than 150 patients at three locations on Monday alone. On Wednesday, Whole Womens Health sued the state in federal court over the restrictions.

Patients were crying and begging us to still let them come in, said Amy Hagstrom Miller, president of Whole Womans Health, the clinic that brought the Supreme Court suit over the Texas restrictions. We have one woman who drove 250 miles to one of our clinics who is sort of camping out, not leaving, waiting for us to figure out a way for her to be seen.

A doctor who provides abortions elsewhere in the state told me that her patients pleaded with her to do the procedure when they came in for ultrasounds before the order went into effect, but she couldnt because Texas requires a 24-hour waiting period.

Abortion providers point out that they could use less scarce medical gear and reduce the risk of spreading the virus in waiting rooms if they could expand access to medication abortions via online consultation with a doctor. This kind of abortion involves dispensing pills; studies have shown it is safe and effective.

During the pandemic, it would be possible to provide medication abortion through 11 weeks of pregnancy without an in-person visit and by mailing pills to a patient, tweeted Dr. Daniel Grossman, a gynecology professor at the University of California, San Francisco. This would reduce the patient and clinicians risk of acquiring the virus and without the need for personal protective equipment.

The problem is that at least 18 states, including Texas, require the doctor who prescribes the abortion pills to be present when the medication is taken, which means patients have to go to a clinic two or three times (to date the pregnancy with an ultrasound, to take the pills, and sometimes for a follow-up visit). The Ohio Senate passed a tele-medicine abortion ban on March 4; the bill now awaits action in the House.

Despite the downsides, the push to use the coronavirus crisis to block access to abortion may just be getting started. This week, Mississippis governor threatened action against the states only clinic if it continued to perform abortions, without specifying what he meant. And dozens of anti-abortion groups sent a letter to Alex Azar, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, demanding the use of the governments broad emergency authority to urge abortion clinics to stop operating and prevent the expansion of abortion by telemedicine.
Midland Mayor Patrick Payton said Wednesday that the West Texas Food Bank can use the communitys support.

Payton said during an afternoon press conference that the oil price downturn and coronavirus pandemic have placed an economic hardship on the region, and there is a great demand on the food the WTFB provides.

Payton emphasized that the West Texas Food Bank serves multiple counties across the region.

He also said he has received photos showing a line of vehicles at the Midland location stretching from the back door and stretching all the way out to Andrews Highway.

Car after car after car filled with people who are in dire need of food, Payton said.

Its going to be on us to make sure we get the food to the food bank. Its going to be up to us see how we can partner with the food bank to make sure they have everything they need. And understand that doesnt mean you go to the food bank and go see if you can volunteer because then were going to be doing things we shouldnt be doing.

West Texas Food Bank 1601 Westcliff Drive 697-4003 wtxfoodbank.org Midland Pantry - drive-thru Hours: Tuesday and Friday: 9 a.m.-noon Wednesday: 1-4 p.m. See More Collapse

The reality is, we have an economic crisis. We have a pending physical crisis if we dont take care of the things we need to do. And so, I guess the sobering note to all of us is: These are serious times that demand serious action and wise action by a serious people here in this community. So, Im asking you, Im imploring you, and if you want to use this word, Im begging you to pay attention to what youre being asked to do.

Practice your social distancing. Dont go do things just because you think you can -- and (that) nobody can tell you what to do. Its time for us to sacrifice for one another aggressively as we get past this.
More and more countries have opted to combat the coronavirus by imposing unprecedented restrictions on social and professional activities for entire populations. Initially, many governments were reluctant to follow the harsh Chinese methods, which now seem to have succeeded in bringing the epidemic, in China at least, to a standstill.

The UK and India have announced strict lockdowns, Frances Prime Minister has tightened week-old restrictions, the Netherlands have extended a ban on gatherings of more than three people until June, while Italy and Spain struggle, without much success, to impose total restrictions.

Meanwhile, Singapore and South Korea are meticulously trying to track anybody who is potentially infected.

Sweden is taking a softer line, keeping primary schools, restaurants and bars open, and even encouraging people to go outside for a nip of air, the US still hesitates as to how to approach the crisis and the United Nations Security Council is unable to decide on a common global response.

But in general, more and more countries are opting for a Chinese-style total lockdown.

Three scenarios

Analysts see three possible scenarios in dealing with the current crisis: herd immunity, track and trace, and total lockdown.

In the first scenario, aimed at creating a large immune population, youre going to let the virus run entirely and then ultimately the virus will slow down at the point that it is has infected a very large segment of the population so that it starts to slow its spread, says John Daley, Chief Executive of the Grattan Institute, , a Melbourne-based policy think tank.

That was roughly the strategy of the UK government up until a week or so ago, but then UK Prime Minster Boris Johnson, shocked by the exploding figures, changed his mind, announced a strict lockdown on Monday, enforced by the police, with a ban on gatherings of more than two people and strict limits on out-of-home exercise, telling the British people you must stay at home.

Initially the Netherlands opted for the herd community scenario as well, when Prime Minister Mark Rutte said that a lot of people will get ill, but with minor symptoms, while the government concentrates on postponing the peak of the infection curve so as to avoid overcrowding the hospitals.

But, like Johnson, Rutte seemed to have changed his mind after many disregarded the more flexible guidelines, and Dutch infection and death statistics shot up to the point that The Netherlands now ranks fourth on a global scale in terms of casualties per million inhabitants.

2020-03-24 Confirmed coronavirus deaths per country per million

The problem with the herd immunity scenario, according to John Daley of the Grattan Institute, is that that it can go on quite a while before things get back to normal, because you cant guarantee how long it will take. He also says that the more you flatten the curve by reducing the number of infected people, the longer the epidemic is likely to last.

Track and Trace

Another scenario works only in relatively small and isolated areas. You basically look around at any infection you can find, work backwards to find out who were all people they had been in contact with, test them, and if they test positive, isolate them.

It works in Tasmania, Singapore, and, to a certain extent, in South Korea, whose only border is with its northern brother, and hermetically closed.

It makes no sense for France or the UK, where you have hundreds of thousands of new cases per day, there is just no way that you are going to be able to track and trace them, says Daley.

Total lockdown

Total lockdown is the method preferred by the Chinese, and successfully implemented in Hubei province and its capital Wuhan.

You are going to try and get the infection rate below 1, meaning that instead of one person infecting an average of 2,5 people, which happens if you have no controls in place, you aim at them infecting fewer than one other person on average. The result, if the method is applied rigorously, is a rapid decline in the number of infections, which can then be controlled using the track and trace method.

What happens next?

Once the pandemic is brought under control, the question will arise for some governments of keeping certain crisis regulations in place?

In many countries the powers that you need to do this are already on the statute books under emergency legislation, says Daley. Most countries have some kind of legislative framework to declare a state of emergency, the current situation legitimately qualifies as one of those.

There is always a risk that the state of emergency is not lifted, once the crisis passes, but I dont think that is a huge risk in established democracies, he says.

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But in some younger democracies the government may attempt to use the current health crisis to extend emergency powers indefinitely.

On Monday, the government in Hungary attempted to fast-track a bill through parliament which would give the executive sweeping new powers, including the right to extend the state of emergency declared to fight the coronavirus.

The bill, proposed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbans right-wing nationalist government, would enable the administration to indefinitely extend the state of emergency and its associated powers of rule by decree, removing the current requirement for MPs to approve any extension.

But the opposition socialist MSZP party and their allies said the proposed law would expose Hungary and Hungarians to the whims of Viktor Orban indefinitely, and managed to halt the legislation.

RFI is Premium Times syndication partner. We have permission to republish its contents.




Haiti - Economy : The IMF and the WB call on creditors to freeze the debt of poor countries





The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (BM) have publicly called on international organizations and private creditors to freeze the collection of their debts to the poorest countries and to help them have more cash to fight the pandemic. Covid-19 coronavirus. The call aims to favor a group of 75 countries where two thirds of the world's population are concentrated in extreme poverty.



"The World Bank Group and the IMF believe it is imperative at this moment to provide a global sense of relief for developing countries as well as a strong signal to financial markets," declared these two institutions in a joint statement estimating that this respite would make it possible to analyze the situation and the needs of each country.



The demand targets countries that are eligible for loans from the International Development Association (IDA), which operates on the orbit of the World Bank. These are countries whose per capita income is below 1.175 dollars or which, even above this threshold, do not have the credit capacity to receive loans from the World Bank. Most of them belong to the African continent or to the island Asia region. In the Caribbean and Latin America, only Haiti is concerned, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guyana, as well as the independent Caribbean islands: Dominica, Saint Vincent, Grenada and Saint Lucia.



Note that initially this suggestion was made by the President of the World Bank, David Malpass, to the G20 countries and was then extended to all bilateral creditors. Likewise, the two organizations have offered to carry out an assessment of this group of countries in order to draw up a list of those who have unsustainable debt and to work on restructuring their commitments.



SL/ HaitiLibre


















Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 23:34:57|Editor: huaxia

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HONG KONG, March 26 (Xinhua) -- A total of 558 Hong Kong residents in central China's Hubei Province were brought back to Hong Kong on Wednesday and Thursday by four chartered flights commissioned by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government.

It was the second round of chartered flight operation after the first one in early March, bringing 281 Hong Kong residents back on Wednesday and 277 on Thursday.

The two-day operation went smoothly, said HKSAR government's Director of Immigration Erick Tsang.

On Thursday, the two chartered flights, with 142 and 135 passengers on board respectively, landed at the Hong Kong International Airport at around 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. local time respectively.

The HKSAR government's Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Patrick Nip, who led the operation to Hubei, told media upon his arrival in Hong Kong on Thursday that among the passengers 138 were in Xianning city, 104 in Xiaogan city and the rest in some other cities of Hubei province.

Out of them 140 people are aged under 16, and 63 people are aged above 60.

The returnees will undergo a 14-day home quarantine upon their arrival.

The HKSAR government sent the first round of chartered flights on March 4 and 5 to bring back 469 Hong Kong residents from Hubei.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 16:17:33|Editor: Yurou

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The first batch of medical supplies donated by Chinese foundations arrives in Bangkok, Thailand, March 25, 2020. Medical supplies donated by the Jack Ma Foundation and the Alibaba Foundation were formally received by Thailand's Ministry of Public Health at a handover ceremony on Thursday. The foundations shipped the first batch of supplies including face masks, protective suits and face shields via a specially chartered flight. The 17-ton supplies arrived in Bangkok on Wednesday. (Xinhua)

BANGKOK, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Medical supplies donated by the Jack Ma Foundation and the Alibaba Foundation were formally received by Thailand's Ministry of Public Health at a handover ceremony on Thursday.

The foundations shipped the first batch of supplies including face masks, protective suits and face shields via a specially chartered flight. The 17-ton supplies arrived in Bangkok on Wednesday.

Anutin Charnvirakul, deputy prime minister and minister of public health, took receipt of the donations from James Dong, CEO of Lazada Thailand in representation of the two foundations.

Thailand's Ministry of Public Health, in collaboration with the Government Pharmaceutical Organization of Thailand, will transport and distribute the supplies across the nation.

"Thailand is faced with a time of unprecedented challenges like many countries around the world, however we are determined to win the fight against the pandemic. Our heartfelt gratitude goes to the Jack Ma Foundation and the Alibaba Foundation for their timely and much-needed assistance as we are making our best efforts to adjust to a rapidly evolving situation," said Charnvirakul.

Thailand declared a nation-wide state of emergency to fight the coronavirus pandemic, effective from Wednesday mid-night until April 30.

Under the emergency decree, all foreigners are banned from entry at all entry points. The only exceptions will be shippers, diplomats, drivers, pilots and others permitted by Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha.

Thailand reported 111 new coronavirus infections, taking its tally to 1,045, the government said on Twitter Thursday.

"We hope the donations will help Thailand to contain Covid-19 ... The biggest challenge is getting medical supplies to where it is needed in the fastest way possible, but we are working very hard to get it done," said Dong.

A second batch of medical supplies will be dispatched later this week.
Are you also looking up on the internet for multibaggers? You are not alone. An analysis of Google Trends shows that the interest in 'multibaggers' is nearing the peak, which historically happens when the market is going through a correction.

The last time when it hit a peak of 100 was in April 2019. The Nifty50 corrected from 11,856 and made a low of 11,108 on May 14 before bouncing back.

A multibagger is a term used for a stock that has more than doubled in value over a time period. So a stock that has clocked 100 percent returns is a 1-bagger, 200 percent is a 2-bagger and so on.

If you input a keyword in Google Trends, it shows the historical interest in the term on a scale of 0 to 100, relative to the highest point on the chart for a given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity.

The data also corresponds to new accounts, which have been opened recently. It looks like new investors have already made their base to generate multibagger returns, given the fact that we are trading at three-year lows.

The recovery on D-Street, according to most experts, will be swift but a complete recovery could take some time. The returns are likely to remain muted for 2020, largely due to the economic fallout of the coronavirus outbreak in India and across the world.

Smallcase Technologies has seen an increase in its new investor numbers in March. They have seen a 3.5x increase in new account leads in March MoM, a 1.5x increase in new investors in March MoM, and 1.6x increase in orders in March MoM, said a report.

There is definitely negativity and pessimism. For the last two years, stock markets are flat but the last two weeks have been horrible. It started with Yes Bank fiasco, which impacted thousands of small-time retail investors, followed by global meltdown because of Covid-19 and sharp fall in crude oil prices, Prakarsh Gagdani, CEO, 5paisa.com, told Moneycontrol.

He said existing customers were selling their positions, booking losses and some were also redeeming their mutual funds. "On the other hand, new investors are flocking to stock markets like never before. This trend is unprecedented. In 20 years of my stock market experience, I have never seen so many people opening accounts. Young millennials who have never tasted markets are coming in big numbers to invest which is a very good sign and also a silver lining in these bad times, he said.

Nithin Kamath, Founder& CEO, Zerodha, shared the view. We are also adding new clients at the fastest rate ever, which is even more surprising given the market conditions. This shows maturity on part of the investors, he said.

Waiting for the right opportunity:

Indian markets are down by about 40 percent from record highs but investors are waiting for more clarity before putting in a lumpsum. However, most investors are continuing with their SIPs which is heartening.

We are in a bear market which has led to negativity and pessimism on D-Street. And if you thought that the last two years were largely flat, take a look at the last two weeks  they have been horrible.

Currently, Indian Indices are in the bear market territory (a condition where indices tumble more than 20 percent from a recent high). According to the historic data, an index which is in the bear market territory might take 18 to 36 months on an average (to recover), said Gaurav Garg, Head of Research at CapitalVia Global Research Limited- Investment Advisor.

During the 2007-08 recession, the indices took more than 15 months to recover. "The recovery process will be slow, and investors should wait for the right opportunity. If a portfolio is down by 30-40%, recovery might take at least 18 months, he said.

Garg further added that investors should stay with quality stocks and keep a watch on coronavirus turmoil as economic conditions, demand and supply would be the key factors in determining the recovery timeframe.

Global equity markets have tumbled in the last one and a half months as coronavirus infections have spiralled across the world. India hasn't been spared either. Foreign institutional investors have pulled out more than Rs 56,000 crore in the cash segment of India equity markets.

US markets have fallen more than 35 percent from its recent peak, ending one of the longest winning streaks -- of 11 years-- in market history. Indian stock market, too, found itself in a bear grip and registered a similar fall of more than 30 percent from its peak in mid-January.

FIIs have been on a selling spree, having sold equities worth more than Rs54,000 crore in March alone. While DIIs have put up a brave front by buying equities worth Rs46,000 crore in the same time, they have remained ineffective in controlling the sharp fall in the markets, said Ajay Menon, CEO, Broking & Distribution, Motilal Oswal Financial Services Ltd.

The majority of the retail investors who were already invested in the market did not get the opportunity to exit as the fall was quick and sudden. We have seen few investors who were willing to deploy money in the markets, however this has remained largely few and scattered, he said.

Confidence had been badly shaken and investors were not sure when the markets will turn around, Menon said, adding they were willing to wait out before trying to accumulate.

: The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts on Moneycontrol.com are their own and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.
(Newser)  The name is most familiar in terms of vacuum cleaners, but Dyson is now going to churn out ventilators, too, reports Forbes. British billionaire James Dyson says the company designed and built a prototype 10 days after receiving an SOS call from Prime Minister Boris Johnson in regard to the coronavirus pandemic, reports CNN. The ventilators will now go into production, and the company expects to fulfill an order of 10,000 from the British government in early April. Dyson says he will donate an additional 5,000 of the ventilators, which he says are specially suited for COVID-19 patients, to other countries. (In the US, billionaire Elon Musk bought more than 1,000 ventilators from China and is donating them to California hospitals.)
A hero doctor has worked tirelessly for 28 days straight to treat up to 55 patients a day as the coronavirus crisis puts pressure on health professionals.

Dr Kamran Ali is a general practitioner at two Brisbane clinics in Kallangur and Kenmore, working from 9am until 5pm - or sometimes later- without a break.

Nearby clinics are closing their doors as vulnerable medics hang up their scrubs and work from home to avoid the danger of becoming infected.

With many practices not taking on new patients as GPs decline, Dr Ali, the only doctor at the Australian Doctors Clinic Kallangur branch, is forced to work non stop overseeing between 50 to 55 people a day.

Dr Kamran Ali (pictured) has worked for four weeks straight, seeing up to 55 patients a day, to ensure people are receiving adequate medical attention amid the coronavirus pandemic

'Our whole health care clinic system is overloading,' his wife Nazia told Daily Mail Australia.

'There are many doctors with chronic conditions, pregnant, or that have kids under one at home. The doctors are in a lot of stress.

'Doctors are as scared as anybody else, they are at risk. They are on the front line.

'It is a difficult time.'

Dr Ali is one of many doctors working tirelessly across the country as patient numbers rise and health facilities become increasingly overburdened.

Last week, he held patient consultations in the car park so others in the waiting room were not put as risk.

A shortage of supplies has left doctors without personal protection equipment, including masks.

Mrs Ali said she is worried about doctors contracting the illness as they currently do not have enough protection.

Her husband is currently using face masks that were donated by a local medical student.

Dr Ali pictured with his wife Nazia and sons, Rayyan, ten, and Moiz, eight, at Legoland

In response to the shortage, Health Minister Greg Hunt announced on Tuesday crucial health supplies have been ordered and 54 million masks are expected to be in the country by the end of April.



The mother-of two said while all doctors are doing their best and the government is doing everything it can to support them, the crisis is continuing to put the health care system under immense pressure.

The sharp influx of patients has also forced doctors to become selective about who they treat.

Mrs Ali said with such a high volume, critical cases remain the highest priority -meaning some people are experiencing delays receiving medical attention.

Earlier this week, the government announced Telehealth, a digital consultation platform, will be expanded to allow vulnerable doctors to work from home.

While the alternative is safer, some ailments and illnesses require face-to-face diagnosis or treatment, such as cuts and stitches.

Mrs Ali said although the system is great for helping doctors, those who have underlying condition or are over the age of 60-70 are opting to use the service, which puts more pressure on workers in clinics.

She said her husband told her 'at the moment I can't take a break, these patients have no where to go, the clinics nearby are not accepting these patients.'

An image of Dr Ali (pictured) went viral earlier this week when his wife shared the details of her husbands intensive work schedule

Mrs Ali said despite being exhausted in the evening, her husband is passionate about his work and driven by helping others.

On Sunday, she shared a photo of her husband in his scrubs to a Facebook Group dedicated to acts of kindness unfolding amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The post praising her husband, and other doctors, for their dedicated work has since gone viral, racking up more than 51,000 likes and almost 6000 comments.

The comment section was flooded with thousands of messages of support for Dr Ali, thanking him for his essential act of service.

Despite the harrowing conditions of the pandemic, Mrs Ali said it has been uplifting witnessing people respond to the hardship with acts of kindness towards others.

'Everyone is coming out with love and support. I have seen people doing amazing things for others - paying people's rent and their groceries. It is amazing.

'You see these kindness acts going around and it motivates you to do more.'
West Berkshire Public Protection Partnership (PPP) welcomes new efforts

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has drawn up an online form so that members of the public may report businesses for dishonest trading practices.

The website allows users to petition against a wide array of transgressions, including misleading marketing, unfair pricing and manipulation of the market.

The Government is expecting a rise in such activity, as unscrupulous traders seek to exploit the Covid-19 outbreak.

The crisis has been characterised by shortages at supermarkets, driving many consumers to source from alternative suppliers.

This has created an unprecedented situation, with potential for victimisation and criminality.

The form can be found at bit.ly/3bpjHu2

While the CMA stresses that it cannot respond to individual reports, it will monitor all information submitted in a holistic, sensitive manner.

The body states: The information you provide will help us develop our understanding of potential issues arising in connection with the coronavirus outbreak.

Information may also be used to help us in considering or taking competition or consumer enforcement action should that be appropriate.

West Berkshire Councils executive member for economic development, planning and public protection Hilary Cole said: We are pleased to see that the Competition and Markets Agency has provided a simple way for consumers to report unscrupulous business practices at this difficult time.

Given the situation, it is important that everyone in our community pulls together, including our businesses, and it is disappointing that a very small number of businesses across the country are not doing so.

The Public Protection Partnership will look at any reports it receives of unfair business practices, including those who have not closed in spite of being instructed to do so.

We would urge anyone who has concerns about the way a business is operating to either put a report in via the CMA or to contact us directly.

We will report these to the relevant authorities and, where necessary, use the powers we have been given by Government to carry out enforcement against these businesses.
Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

New Mexicos first mall added an unusual anchor tenant earlier this year  one which could help chart the course for the rest of its renovation.

New Mexico Orthopaedics opened its three-story, 68,000-square-foot facility on the west side of Winrock Town Center in January, by the former home of Montgomery Ward. Jeffrey Racca, an orthopedic surgeon with the center, in early March said the facility was seeing around 650 patients per day for services ranging from physical therapy to MRI work, all in a mall setting with other amenities nearby.

The idea was to be one-stop shopping, basically, Racca said.

While the main mall is currently closed amid efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19, New Mexico Orthopaedics has an exterior entrance and is still open for business as a healthcare provider.

New Mexico Orthopaedics maintained a clinic on Presbyterian Hospitals campus for around two decades. However, Racca said the facility near Downtown was landlocked, with no room to grow.

Consequently, as the practice added doctors and physical therapists, Racca said it increasingly had to move things offsite, making it harder for physical therapists to communicate with doctors, and vice versa.

While a mall might seem an odd location for a healthcare center, medical providers are increasingly turning to malls for available space, as changing retail trends force big-box stores to adapt or fold.

You have these large buildings that were retail 20 years ago, and that model just doesnt work anymore, said James Jones, director of healthcare information systems for New Mexico Orthopaedics.

Racca added that the orthopedic company was drawn to the mall because of its relatively central location and abundant parking.

The three-story facility has an MRI system in the basement, which Racca said has more space than a traditional cramped machine.

The ground floor features an area for check-in, but Jones said the facility deliberately did away with traditional check-in and check-in desks, as a way to streamline the process for patients.

Racca said the layout places physical therapists, doctors and other staff in close proximity to one another, making it easy to coordinate on patient care.

While the building has been extensively renovated, long-time visitors to Winrock may notice a couple of homages to the old mall, including an original skylight in the visitor waiting area.

New Mexico Orthopaedics was one of the first new tenants to move into Winrock during the malls multi-million-dollar conversion into a mixed-use facility. Since then, another medical practitioner, TriCore Reference Laboratories, has signed on.

Were helping revitalize a mall thats been basically stagnant for 15, 20 years, Racca said.

Nancy Adelsheim, executive director of New Mexico Orthopaedics, said the organization is in contact with other medical providers, and would love to see other medical groups come to Winrock, creating a medical hub at the revitalized mall.

I just think its so advantageous for our patients, Adelsheim said.
A secondary school student in the northern province of Ninh Binh connects to her teachers and classmates through an online learning platform (Photo: VNA)

This is one of the measures taken by the Ministry of Education and Training amid the long school closure due to COVID-19.

Students at most universities; pupils at high, secondary and primary schools; and children at kindergarten nationwide have been off school for almost eight weeks.

Due to the continuing threat of COVID-19, the exact date schools can reopen has not yet been decided.

The second semester of the 2019-2020 school year started in January and normally ends in May.

Due to the long school closure, the school year will finish no later than July 15, according to a new plan by the education ministry.

According to Deputy Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Huu Do, the ministry will review and streamline the school curriculum to shorten learning time when students are back at school.

The streamlining will ensure that students are equipped with knowledge and develop their capacity to be able to meet criteria. The streamlining plan will be approved by the ministry, not by single schools, he said.

The ministry has also planned to strengthen online teaching and lessons on TV.

Localities and educational facilities must follow the ministrys instructions to offer online training based on the streamlined curriculum.

The ministry also ordered verifying content of lessons to broadcast them on channels of the Vietnam Television.

The Ministry of Education and Training will work with the Ministry of Information and Communications to offer free technological platforms for online teaching, Do said.

The school closure has interrupted learning of 12th graders who will sit for the national high school exam.

The ministry has set the exam date between August 8 and 11 instead of July.

To help 12th graders make the best preparations for the exam, the ministry will publish sample tests.

Do said the ministry would hold a meeting this week with local education departments to discuss these plans.

The ministry always puts the safety and benefits of students, teachers and school staff as a top priority. Therefore, the school, students and parents should not be worried and actively co-ordinate with the education sector to fight against the pandemic and at the same time ensure learning and teaching quality in spite of the school closure, he said.
COVID-19 could lead to more than 80,000 deaths in the US and overwhelm hospital capacity nationally even if social distancing measures are respected, new research showed Thursday.

The US death toll for the pandemic has already soared past 1,000, with more than 83,000 confirmed infections.

Forecasters at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington's School of Medicine analyzed the latest COVID-19 data at a local, national and international level.

These include hospitalization and mortality rates, as well as patient data in terms of age, gender and pre-existing health problems.

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COVID-19 could lead to more than 80,000 deaths in the US and overwhelm hospital capacity nationally as soon as early April even if social distancing measures are respected, new research showed Thursday. New Yorkers lined up outside a hospital in Queens

'The trajectory of the pandemic will change - and dramatically for the worse - if people ease up on social distancing or relax with other precautions,' said Christopher Murray, IHME director. Medical personnel conduct drive-thru testing center in Miami, Florida

Specifically, they looked at the time lag between the first fatal cases and public interventions such as shuttering schools and businesses.

They then looked at each American state's ICU bed and ventilator capacity.

The analysis warned that based on current trends, demand for both would far exceed capacity for COVID-19 patients as early as the second week of April.

During the epidemic peak - also set for some point in April - as many as 2,300 patients could die every day, according to the IHME models.

This was the case even if the population adhered to strict social distancing measures.

'Our estimated trajectory of COVID-19 deaths assumes continued and uninterrupted vigilance by the general public, hospital workers, and government agencies,' said Christopher Murray, IHME director.

'The trajectory of the pandemic will change - and dramatically for the worse - if people ease up on social distancing or relax with other precautions.'

The analysis estimated that approximately 81,000 people in the US will die from the virus over the coming four months.

New Jersey Army National Guard medical personnel from the 250th Brigade Support Battalion assist New Jersey citizens at a COVID-19 Community-Based Testing Site at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

The number of cases in the US has rocketed over the last two weeks

Estimates ranged between 38,000 and more than 160,000.

It forecast that a total of 21 US states will need more ICU beds than are currently available and that 12 states may need to increase their capacity by 50 per cent or more to accommodate patient needs.

The economic shutdown triggered by the coronavirus pandemic caused an unprecedented 3.3 million people to file for unemployment benefits last week alone.

'We hope these forecasts will help leaders of medical systems figure out innovative ways to deliver high-quality care to those who will need their services in the coming weeks,' said Murray.

Earlier this week, Harvard researchers said they believe Americans may need to be at home much longer in order to 'flatten the curve' of the coronavirus spread and avoid overwhelming the US healthcare system.

The Harvard study, which was posted Tuesday on the preprint server MedRxiv, claims that social distancing may have to be turned off and on like a spigot for up to two years in order to combat the virus.

In the study titled 'Social distancing strategies for curbing the COVID-19 epidemic', Harvard medical researchers write that 'a single period of social distancing will not be sufficient'.

Earlier this week, Harvard researchers said they believe Americans may need to be at home much longer to avoid overwhelming the US healthcare system. Medical staff on board the US Navy's lead hospital ship, Mercy, are preparing to take on 1,000 non-coronavirus patients in LA

In the study titled, Social distancing strategies for curbing the COVID-19 epidemic, Harvard medical researchers write that 'a single period of social distancing will not be sufficient'. Sailors move a hospital bed aboard the Mercy as the hospital ship readies for patients

There are two possible futures for social distancing. The first scenario (depicted) would see the US get to a point where there is low healthcare resources, which means intermittent social distancing would need to be extended into 2022

In the second scenario (pictured), if there are higher healthcare resources, social distancing can end in the middle of 2021

Instead, researchers believe that the US may need to try intermittent social distancing, which means there would be periods of isolation mixed in with normal interaction.

'Intermittent social distancing can maintain critical care demand within current thresholds,' the authors wrote. The study's authors believe this would help free up hospital beds for the critically ill.

According to the researchers, there are two possible futures for social distancing and how it could help stop the coronavirus.

A nurse waits for a new patient at a drive-thru testing station at Cummings Park in Stamford, Connecticut

The first scenario would see the US get to a point where there is low healthcare resources, which means intermittent social distancing would need to be extended into 2022.

In the second scenario, if there are higher healthcare resources, social distancing can end in the middle of 2021.

The researchers wrote that they 'evaluated the impact of one-time social distancing efforts of varying effectiveness and duration on the peak and timing of the epidemic with and without seasonal forcing'.

'When transmission is not subject to seasonal forcing, one-time social distancing measures reduce the epidemic peak size.'

But, 'under all scenarios, there was a resurgence of infection when the simulated social distancing measures were lifted'.

To break that down even further, the authors believe that there should be no more than 37.5 cases of COVID-19 per 10,000 people.

Their study shows that that should be the 'on' switch to begin social distancing all over again.

If the 37.5 number is maintained, they argue that it would keep the number of patients needing critical care at 0.89 persons for every 10,000 people.

Both studies came during the same week that President Donald Trump (pictured on Wednesday) said he wants America to get back to business by Easter, suggesting some efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus outbreak will no longer be needed by then

Both studies came during the same week that President Donald Trump said he wants America to get back to business by Easter, suggesting some efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus outbreak will no longer be needed by then.

The president, who is concerned about the economic repercussions of an extended shutdown of nonessential business, said in a television interview on Tuesday that he wanted to see businesses returning to normal by Easter, or April 12.

'I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,' he said.

'The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success,' Trump tweeted Wednesday.

'The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!'

Trump also pushed back against suggestions that he is being cavalier about the prospect of more deaths being caused by a premature of reopening of the economy.

'How many deaths are acceptable to me?' Trump told reporters Wednesday evening. 'None.'
KLAMATH FALLS, Ore.  Klamath County's second positive test for the new coronavirus came from a Sky Lakes employee, Sky Lakes Medical Center confirmed on Thursday.

The employee works at a facility separate from the primary medical center and Emergency Department, Sky Lakes said.



(Courtesy Sky Lakes Medical Center / LinkedIn) (Courtesy Sky Lakes Medical Center / LinkedIn)

"Preliminary investigation indicates that, even though the employee displayed no symptoms upon returning for a half-day at work, the individual wore a mask while engaged in close contact with a small number of patients and other staff," Sky Lakes said in a statment. "Testing was initiated after onset of symptoms, and COVID-19 was later confirmed."

Although the employee had recently traveled by plane, they had not visited one of the CDC-designated "hot spots" in the country, Sky Lakes said. However, the trip included a layover at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on the way to Medford.

The case was first announced by Klamath County public health officials on Thursday morning, who said that they had just received confirmation.

"Employers assist in the investigation and contact tracing of healthcare workers who have COVID-19. All individuals with risk of exposure will be notified and given directions about next steps," Klamath County Public Health said.

The individual is being quarantined at home. Anyone who was close to the employee has been contacted, tested for COVID-19, and will also be quarantined for 14 days.

The first case of COVID-19 in Klamath County was announced on March 7, the same day as the first two cases in neighboring Jackson County. Health officials have since said that the first individual was isolated and has recovered from the disease.

Jackson County now has four confirmed cases of new coronavirus, while Josephine County announced two new cases on Thursday. Josephine's county's first case was also a healthcare worker, Asante confirmed.

Our highest priority is the health and safety of our community. We will take all steps necessary to ensure safety while also holding to our core value of integrity. We will not release the name, address or other identifying information about this person, said Jennifer Little, KCPH director. It is a matter of integrity to our team and patient confidentiality.

RELATED: Passengers on flight to Medford may have been exposed to COVID-19, health officials say

Instead of releasing any identifying features about the individual, public health officials in southern Oregon have preferred to use back-tracking investigations to quietly contact any people who have been in close quarters with the individual, followed by quarantine and monitoring for symptoms.

Klamath County Public Health said that the information may not appear in the Oregon Health Authority's daily statewide tally of cases, as health officials did not learn about the positive test until after Thursday's numbers were rounded up at 8 a.m. It should appear in OHA's numbers on Friday.

On Wednesday, Sky Lakes Medical Center announced new visitor restrictions to further protect patients and staff from possible infection with COVID-19, limiting visitors to only adult guardians or caregivers for surgical patients that need them. All surgical updates will now be given over the phone to a designated family member.

"Our providers and staff remain committed to taking care of our friends and neighbors. This situation demonstrates that even when we are well-meaning, we must take the threat of this virus seriously," Sky Lakes said.
The Governor of Kano State, Abdullahi Ganduje has ordered the closure of land borders and routes linking the state to other parts of the country, as a preventive measure against Coronavirus.

This is coming few days after Kano State Government ordered the closure of all event centres in the state.

Also Read: Coronavirus: FG May Ban Interstate Travel, Close Motor Parks

The Chief Press Secretary to the Governor, Abba Anwar, made this known on Thursday.

Ganduje disclosed that the closure takes effect from Friday, March 27.

It was also that domestic flights coming into Malam Aminu Kano International Airport will remain at the airport, without getting access into the city.
A deployed Navy aircraft carrier has stopped in Guam and will test its entire crew for the illness caused by the novel coronavirus as several more crew members have contracted the disease.

All the roughly 5,000 personnel aboard the carrier Theodore Roosevelt will be tested for COVID-19, the sometimes-dangerous disease caused by the coronavirus, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said Wednesday.

Three sailors tested positive for the illness earlier this week. Now, nearly two dozen other sailors on the ship also have COVID-19, The Wall Street Journal first reported.

We found several more cases onboard the ship, Modly told reporters from the Pentagon on Thursday. We are in the process now of testing 100% of the crew of that ship to ensure we are able to contain whatever spreads might've occurred there on the ship.

But I also want to emphasize that the ship is operationally capable and can do its mission.

Related: Navy Reports 1st Coronavirus Cases on Deployed Warship

There are currently about 800 COVID-19 test kits on the Roosevelt. Modly said additional supplies to test the rest of the crew, including swabs and other materials, are being flown out to the carrier Thursday.

Once the tests are administered onboard, theyll be flown off the ship to a Defense Department lab. Medical Officer of the Marine Corps Rear Adm. James Hancock said the military is working with industry partners to add point-of-care testing onto ships.

But were just not there yet, Hancock said.

While the ship is in Guam, Modly said no one aboard the Roosevelt will be allowed to leave pier side. Those who already tested positive for COVID-19 whove been flown off the ship are quarantined on Guam, he added. None has required hospitalization.

Their symptoms are very mild -- aches and pains and those types of things, sore throats, Modly said.

The Navy has 104 COVID-19 cases among active-duty personnel. Thats about a third of the cases across the Defense Department branches.

I don't have a reason for that, the acting Navy secretary said. It would be speculation for me to give you a reason for why that has happened.

There are Navy personnel spread across the globe, he added, with high concentrations of sailors in San Diego and Norfolk, Virginia.

But we have not done the forensics yet on where these individual sailors contracted the disease, Modly said. And until we know that exists, it would be irresponsible for me to say why we think this is happening.

-- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins.

Read more: Navy Boot Camp Trainers Must Spend 90 Days Away from Families in Lockdown Measure
The sun sets behind a crude oil pump jack on a drill pad in the Permian Basin in Loving County

By David Gaffen

(Reuters) - The oil industry has been hit by a simultaneous demand and supply shock in March as the coronavirus pandemic cuts fuel consumption and top producer Saudi Arabia raises output to full capacity to fight a price war with rivals.

International crude oil prices have lost about 45% this month and fallen below the cost of much of the world's production, causing energy companies worldwide to slash spending by tens of billions of dollars.

The collapse in demand and of energy diplomacy between Saudi Arabia, Russia and others have triggered unprecedented responses from governments and investors. Here are ten signs of an industry in distress.

SAUDI ARABIA GOES ALL-IN

Riyadh shocked the oil industry by going on the offensive after talks collapsed with Russia in early March on a deal to cut supply to compensate for how coronavirus was hitting demand.

Saudi Arabia slashed export prices and said it would pump at a record of 12.3 million barrels per day, pouring a flood of oil into a market that needed less. It lined up an armada of ships for export, targeting refiners that buy Russian crude, as well as the United States, wiping out profit margins for U.S. exports.

The moves were all the more shocking coming from a producer that for years has had a role akin to the industry's central bank. The kingdom is the de facto leader of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and for decades adjusted output more than any other oil producer to keep markets balanced.

TEXAS CONSIDERS CUTTING PRODUCTION?

Producers in top U.S. producing state Texas went to regulators - and asked them to intervene to cut production. Texas does not intervene that much. The last time was in 1973. To be sure, other Texas commissioners and oil industry groups have thrown cold water on the idea.

WITH OPEC?

One of three Texas commissioners at the body that regulates the industry got a call from the secretary general of OPEC to discuss the market. Commissioner Ryan Sitton said on Friday that Texas could consider a 10% output cut, possibly in coordination with that group. Before now, U.S. shale oil producers dared not consider coordinated cuts for fear of violating U.S. anti-trust laws.

Story continues

HISTORIC SELLOFFS

Three of the steepest declines in benchmark Brent crude have taken place in the last two weeks - March 9, March 16, and March 18

On March 9, Brent dropped 24%.

On March 16, Brent dropped 11%

On March 18, Brent dropped 13%.

On March 23, the U.S. gasoline market plummeted the most ever in one day, as futures lost 32% to hit a record low.

(GRAPHIC: Global Oil Slump - https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-OIL/0100B5LV472/index.html)

JET FUEL IN STORAGE

Jet fuel deteriorates quickly in storage, and then it cannot be used. Yet demand has fallen so fast as airlines ground aircraft around the world that firms including oil majors BP <BP.L> and Royal Dutch Shell <RDSa.L> both sought to lease ships just to store unneeded jet fuel.

REFINING GASOLINE COSTS MONEY

You want to make gasoline? It'll cost you. On Monday, the margins to produce U.S. gasoline - the price for a barrel of oil minus a barrel of gasoline - closed at a negative price, which means refiners would lose money buying crude to make the fuel. Gasoline typically drives the energy complex, as fuel for vehicles accounts for most oil demand worldwide. The margin fell to minus $1.11 a barrel on Monday, its lowest since 2008.

RUSSIA DIGS IN, ROSNEFT CELEBRATES SHALE WOES

Rosneft <ROSN.MM> Chief Executive Igor Sechin was unwilling to give ground as the U.S. shale industry faced collapse. Oil prices could go back to $60 a barrel if "shale oil leaves markets," he said on Friday. On Monday, his rival, Lukoil <LKOH.MM> co-owner Leonid Fedun, said "this will be a war until exhaustion."

ETHANOL? NEVER MIND

Corn and sugar supplies look set to rise this year as fuel suppliers make less ethanol for blending into gasoline. Companies such as France's Tereos are shifting ethanol production to industrial uses like hand sanitizer, while sugar producers in Brazil are aiming to make more of the sweetener rather than the fuel.

LATE-DAY CRAZINESS

Volatility in oil markets has been exacerbated as oil companies stay out. That leaves speculators, and makes for rapid moves in prices around the close of trading. Thursday's rally was so great that post-close trading had to stop; Friday was the reverse, with prices that dove by $4 at the end of trading.

"It's a crazy market. I don't know how to trade this," one futures trader said.

REFINERS STAY SHUT

French major Total <TOTF.PA> shut its Grandpuits refinery, located outside of Paris, early in March for maintenance. When it was time to restart the 102,000 barrel-per-day facility, Total said...never mind. Demand weakened so quickly that it figured it would just keep it offline. While others have closed, major refiners outside Los Angeles, California, have curtailed production because of lackluster demand.

PETROL PUMPING BECOMES UNSAFE

One of the nations hit worst by the coronavirus pandemic, Italy, is simply shutting its petrol stations. They started to close on March 25 on the nation's motorways, operators there said, because it was impossible to guarantee health safety standards and keep businesses going.

(Reporting By David Gaffen; Additional reporting by Jessica Resnick Ault; Editing by Simon Webb, Daniel Wallis and Marguerita Choy)
KYODO NEWS - Mar 26, 2020 - 18:49 | All, Japan

China said Thursday it has detained a prominent Chinese scholar at a Hokkaido university for suspected espionage, claiming he has confessed to the crime.

"The facts of the case are clear and the evidence is conclusive," Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said during a regular press briefing, stressing that Yuan Keqing, a professor of East Asian political history at the Hokkaido University of Education, is a Chinese citizen.

Details of the alleged espionage were not disclosed.

Yuan has not been in contact with the university since mid-June, after he left for China to attend the funeral of his mother, according to the university and his friends.

The university last heard from his wife in July that Yuan was being treated for an unspecified illness.

Fearing that he might have been detained by Chinese authorities, a group of Japanese researchers issued an emergency appeal late last year.

Later in January, a group of colleagues, friends and others delivered a petition to the Chinese consulate general in Sapporo, asking it to help bring him back to Japan.

Related coverage:

Japan professors issue appeal for Chinese colleague missing in China

Ex-SoftBank employee arrested over alleged info leakage to Russia

Trump administration to cap Chinese state-run media staff in U.S.

Yuan, born in China's Jilin Province in 1955, studied law at Hitotsubashi University graduate school in Tokyo and is a permanent resident of Japan.

The Chinese authorities in September detained Hokkaido University professor Nobu Iwatani for alleged spying, subsequently releasing him in November. Iwatani specialized in studies on the Chinese Nationalist Party during the 1937-1945 Sino-Japanese War, a field close to Yuan's area of expertise.

Since 2015, at least 15 Japanese citizens have been detained in China on various charges, including espionage.

China has been stepping up its scrutiny of foreign organizations and individuals in the name of protecting national security since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2013.

Not only Japanese, but a number of other foreign nationals have been held in China, particularly after a counterespionage law took effect in 2014 and a national security law in 2015.

Just a day earlier, the Australian government demanded the immediate release of a Chinese-Australian writer after China formally indicted him for spying.

Yang Hengjun was formerly a diplomat for China's Foreign Ministry and worked for the Ministry of State Security, before becoming an online democracy activist and an Australian citizen.
New York, March 26 : New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has issued a stunning warning that 4.6 million people in the city - half its population - could become infected with COVID-19 before it abates.

"It's a fair bet to say that half of all New Yorkers, and maybe more than half, will end up contracting this disease and that's worrisome, very deeply worrisome for all of us," he said on Wednesday evening while at the same time in Washington the White House Coronavirus Task Force said that the number of new cases there were relatively "constant" in a sign the social distancing norms were working.

De Blasio's claim about the city a total population of 8.6 million was also in contrast to New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo's statistics that the rate of increase in cases was showing signs of slowing.

Cuomo said at a news conference earlier in the day that rate of hospitalisation of coronavirus patients which was doubling every two days on Sunday, had slowed to doubling every 3.4 days on Monday and 4.7 days on Tuesday.

New York state is under a semi-lockdown with a total closure of all non-essential businesses and offices, and Stay-at-Home orders for the people.

New York City, the epicentre of the pandemic in the US, had recorded 17,856 cases on Wednesday with 192 deaths.

New York is reporting an infection rate of 1 in 1,000 compared with between 0.1 and 0.2 per 1,000 in other states, according to Vice President Mike Pence.

The White House coronavirus co-ordinator, Deborah Birx, said at the task force brifing, "You will see in New York City, the number of (new) cases per day has been relatively constant over the last three days.

Birx said that these numbers are clearer to interpret now because the testing backlog has been reduced significantly.

However, she said the hospital cases in New York will continue to rise, although not any more than a "consistent day over day rise." This increase in hospital cases are a reflection of the infection rate before the full mitigation efforts were put into place.

Birx warned against complacency and urged Americans "not to let up for a moment" as the 15-day mark nears for the first test case of social distancing guidelines.

"This is a real call to every person in New York City in the New York metro area to continue to follow the White House social distancing guidelines", she said.

Bix said that 56 per cent of new cases are still coming from the New York metro area that includes a few counties in New Jersey state.

New York City's Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbo said that the percentage of people in New York City infected with COVID-19 will "likely 50 per cent but it could also be much higher" by September.

"I think it's safe to say that there are tens of thousands of New Yorkers that are somewhere along the spectrum of having COVID-19 or having been exposed to COVID-19 and that's why it's so important for people to stay home," she said.

De Blasio, who has criticised President Donald Trump's handling of the crisis, reiterated his demand to call out the military to help him deal with the city's coronavirus pandemic.

The Trump task force is urging anyone who has been in the New York area to self-quarantine for 14 days to ensure that the virus does not find new seeding spots in the community.

Florida became the first state to require people coming from New York to self-quarantine for 14 days. Governor Ron DeSantis said that anyone flying in from the city and surrounding areas will face criminal penalties if they do not self-quarantine.

With its warmer climate, Florida is a favourite retirement spot for people from the colder northern states and 20 per cent of its population is over 65 - the age group most susceptible to COVID-19 - compared to 16 per cent nationally.

New York currently accounts for 31 per cent of people succumbing to COVID-19, according to data from Birx and New York Governor Cuomo.

(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter @arulouis, and Nikhila Natarajan can be contacted at @ByNikNat)

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Sana Shakil By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: With India going into full lockdown for three weeks from Wednesday to control the spread of the coronavirus, the Centre sought allay the anxiety of around 80 crore people enrolled with ration shops by increasing their monthly quota of subsidised foodgrains by 2 kg each  from 5 kg to 7 kg.

"The poor and vulnerable sections need support. The Centre has decided that 80 crore people will be covered under the National Food Security Act," said Union Minister Prakash Javdekar, said after the Union Cabinets meeting.

Amid reports of panic buying, the Union home ministry asked all states and Union Territories to give wide publicity to the fact that the country has ample supplies of all essential commodities while curbing the spread of rumours.

ALSO READ| Centre asks states, UTs to curb rumours on food shortage amid coronavirus lockdown

It also issued detailed advisories on setting up round-the-clock control rooms and helplines for providers of essential goods and services, including at the inter-state level. It suggested a standard operating procedure to facilitate them by appointing nodal officers at inter-state borders and issuing vehicular passes/e-passes.

In a separate letter, the home ministry said urged states/UTs to take necessary steps to publicise that all essentials like food, medical, civil supplies and other essential services will be maintained.

In another advisory to the private security agencies, the ministry urged them to adopt a humane approach during the lockdown and not sack employees or cut salaries. The ministry urged the agencies to show empathy with its workforce.

ALSO READ| Coronavirus lockdown: Centre asks private security agencies to not sack employees

"This is the time for private security industry to adopt a humane approach and protect its workers and staff members from lay-offs," it said. During his video interaction with residents of Varanasi, PM Narendra Modi warned of action against those misbehaving with frontline staff fighting the virus.

If anybody targets doctors, nurses and all those rendering their service during this crisis, then it will cost them dearly, Modi said, adding those in white coats are Gods incarnation.

IAS officer appointed as nodal officer

Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal appointed senior IAS officer Vivek Pandey as the nodal officer to ensure unhindered operation of e-commerce services for delivery of essential items in the city

Modi, Putin exchange views

Ahead of the G20 emergency summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin and PM Narendra Modi held a telephonic conversation during which they exchanged views on the coronavirus pandemic

Bengaluru traffic pass

Bengaluru Police will issue two types of passes  one for persons and another for vehicles  for people and vehicles that will be allowed to move

G-20 virtual summit today

Saudi Arabias King Salman will chair a G20 emergency virtual summit on COVID-19 on Thursday. The idea was mooted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he shared the outcome of the SAARC video conference with the Saudi Crown Prince.
Specialty international reinsurance company Chaucer has announced the appointment of Ann Blanco, class underwriter, to support development of the companys international general liability account. In her new role, Blanco will work closely with Thomas Beasley and Rob Neil, who joined Chaucer at the end of last year.

Blanco has nearly a decade of market experience. She is also a qualified lawyer and is fluent in Spanish. Prior to joining Chaucer, she held positions at QBE and Guy Carpenter.
A flight attendant warned passengers that they would be sprayed with Lysol if they coughed or sneeze during a flight.

In a video shared by Instagram user Zion Setal via Barstool Sports, cellphone footage captured the moment the flight attendant addressed passengers aboard a departing flight from Florida to Connecticut.

While holding a can of Lysol Disinfectant Spray, the man jokingly cautions the people against spreading germs.

A flight attendant (pictured) jokingly told passengers he would spray them with Lysol if they coughed or sneezed during a flight from Florida to Connecticut

'I'm telling you right now,' the man said over the speakers,' if I see you cough [or] sneeze I'm going to spray your ass.'

'I'm not messing around,' he added.

The flight attendant was met with laughter and chuckles from the group of passengers aboard the flight.

Setal: '[The flight attendant] was making jokes the whole time and made everyone fell more comfortable about flying with this virus going around'

Setal told DailyMail.com that the flight attendant used humor to comfort passengers who were nervous about flying during the outbreak.

He said: '[The flight attendant] was making jokes the whole time and made everyone fell more comfortable about flying with this virus going around.'

The video comes as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread across the globe, causing an increase in infections and deaths.

The number of coronavirus cases worldwide has neared 500,000 and reached more than 21,000 deaths, according to officials at John Hopkins University.

In the United States, coronavirus cases have amassed to more than 83,000 and the number of deaths have topped 1,200 as of this week.

Wednesday became that deadliest day in the U.S. with more than 200 deaths.

Dr. Anthony Fauci issued a stark warning Wednesday that coronavirus may come back in cycles as the death toll in the United States hit 1035, with 252 people dying in a single day.

Speaking at the White House daily briefing, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that Americans should be prepared for the outbreak to 'become seasonal'.

His caution came as Donald Trump appeared to soften his desire to lift the lockdown across the county by Easter.

The president said he still wants to reopen within that timeframe but acknowledged not all states could meet his timeline.

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

Pictured: Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Donald Trump giving remarks about the coronavirus outbreak during a press conference Wednesday

Opening up the country at Easter rather than two weeks later could kill 450,000 more Americans, graphs published by The New York Times show.

Fauci told reporters: 'Would this possibly become a seasonal, cyclic thing? I think it very well might.'

The Senate recently passed a 2.2trillion coronavirus bill in an unanimous vote. The bill will continue to the House for a vote and then needs Trump's signature to release funding.

The package would give direct payments to most Americans, expand unemployment benefits and provide a $367 billion program for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home.

Most Americans making less than $75,000 as a single tax filer would receive a $1,200 direct payment under the bill.

The number of coronavirus cases worldwide has neared 500,000 and reached more than 21,000 deaths

The payments would go out by direct deposit for those who have recently paid taxes or received tax refunds that way, but for others physical checks will be sent.

The Trump administration previously issued a travel ban from European countries in response to the outbreak early last week. The ban includes 26 European countries.

Although U.S. airports were initially swamped with panicked travelers attempting to fly home at the start of the outbreak, they've since become virtually empty as fears intensify.

Anxious Americans are staying home for the foreseeable future amid fears that if they leave the country they will no longer be able to return.

Domestic travelers are also not taking any chances after Trump warned that a domestic travel ban could be in the cards, as the government takes increasingly extreme measures to try to halt the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Trump said that a domestic travel ban was also a possibility if coronavirus gets 'too hot' in certain areas of the US.

During a meeting with press in the Oval Office on Thursday, the president said when asked about possibly restricting movement within the America: 'We haven't discussed that yet.'

'Is it a possibility? Yes. If somebody gets a little bit out of control, if an area gets too hot,' he said during the bilateral meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.

Empty airports and travel bans will do little to save the airline industry, which has taken a hammering from the coronavirus outbreak.

Firms have been forced to slash flights to keep the companies' heads above water as planes are empty of passengers.

American Airlines and Delta Airlines both announced plans to cut more flights, while Southwest Airlines CEO told employees he would take a 10 per cent pay cut as the firm grapples with sagging passenger demand for flights.


Expands Namdini Mining Licence Area

Perth, Mar 26, 2020 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Cardinal Resources Limited ( ASX:CDV ) ( FRA:C3L ) ( OTCMKTS:CRDNF ) ( TSE:CDV ) is pleased to advise that it has received approval for the expansion of the current Mining Licence from 19 km2 to 63 km2, more than tripling the size of the Mining Licence for its world-class Namdini Gold Project in Ghana.HIGHLIGHTS- Mining Licence increased to a maximum allowable area of 63 km2 from 19 km2 for a term of 15 years and is renewable- Expanded Mining Licence allows for further financial optimisation by repositioning infrastructure such as tailings storage facilities, stockpiles and waste dumps- Exploration potential enhanced within expanded area along the Namdini shear to the southCardinal's Chief Executive Officer / Managing Director, Archie Koimtsidis stated:"It is most pleasing to have the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources and the Minerals Commission of Ghana support our Mining Licence area expansion. The expansion aligns with the Company's plan to not only significantly optimise the location of key infrastructure such as tailings storage facilities, stockpiles and waste dumps but also to further explore financial benefits during the Front-End Engineering and Design (FEED) of the Namdini Project. Further, it allows the Company to expand its exploration activities immediately south of Namdini which has great potential along the southern extension of the Namdini shear."Namdini Mining LicenceThe Minerals Commission of Ghana has approved a significant expansion of the Namdini Mining Licence. The new Mining Licence area covers a total of 63 km2 which is the maximum allowable area (Figure 1*).A Large-Scale Mining License covering the Namdini Mining License was granted to Cardinal Namdini Mining Limited ("Cardinal Namdini"), a wholly owned subsidiary of Cardinal Resources Limited, by the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources under the Ghanaian Minerals and Mining Act 2006 (Act 703) in 2017.The Large-Scale Mining Licence originally covered 19km2 in the Dakoto area of the Talensi District in the Upper East Region of Ghana. The expanded Large-Scale Mining Licence now covers 63 km2 (Figure 1*) and has been granted for an initial period of 15 years commencing in 2020 and is renewable. The expanded Large-Scale Mining Licence allows Cardinal to optimise and de-risk mine and infrastructure design and optimise financial outcomes as the Company continues to progress the FEED programme.Cardinal is readying for development of the world-class Namdini Gold Project located in Northern Ghana, subject to concluding project development financing. Once developed, the Namdini Gold Project is expected to produce over 360,000 ounces per annum for the first two years of operation and over the life of mine is expected to produce an average of 287,000 ounces per annum. The Definitive Feasibility Study completed in late 2019, indicated compelling economics, including a post-tax NPV5 of over US$958 million which is capable of generating over US$1.55 billion in undiscounted project cashflow (assuming a gold price of US$1,550/oz).*Cardinal's Project development timetable is outlined in the link below.About Cardinal Resources Ltd

Cardinal Resources Ltd (ASX:CDV) (TSE:CDV) (OTCMKTS:CRDNF) is a West African gold exploration and development Company that holds interests in tenements within Ghana, West Africa.

The Company is focused on the development of the Namdini Project with a gold Ore Reserve of 5.1Moz (0.4 Moz Proved and 4.7 Moz Probable) and a soon to be completed Feasibility Study.

Exploration programmes are also underway at the Company's Bolgatanga (Northern Ghana) and Subranum (Southern Ghana) Projects.

Cardinal confirms that it is not aware of any new information or data that materially affects the information included in its announcement of the Ore Reserve of 3 April 2019. All material assumptions and technical parameters underpinning this estimate continue to apply and have not materially changed.
Nine reality juggernaut is The Block is the latest to suspend production as the coronavirus pandemic creates havoc.

The series has been filming for several weeks in Brighton.

The Age reports building work on the site continues, however, with around 40 builders and tradies to continue working to create extensions at the rear of the five properties.

Executive Producer Julian Cress said he was juggling the economics with contestants potentially stranded for an extended period from interstate family,

On one hand, we have a huge number of people who rely on us for their livelihoods  crew, tradies, builders and so on. On the other hand, we have contestants who have come from all around Australia to take part in The Block, and the advice is becoming more and more dire each day, with looming threats of lockdown, he said.

We wanted to get out in front of [a potential shutdown], not get stuck behind it, to get our contestants safely home for a short period of time, we hope.

There were also inherent risks in contestants visiting multiple suppliers across the city.

Nine programming director Hamish Turner tells TV Tonight, How long it goes for is out of our hands. We hope it doesnt go for months. Weve got the ability to go without it for weeks but if it goes into months that would cause possible headaches down the track.

At the moment weve got the ability to present what we said we would at the beginning of the year.
A woman works on an assembly line producing 105-millimeter artillery shell casings at the Budd Wheel Plant in Detroit in January 1943. (Corbis / Getty Images)

Blinking Owl Distillery produces just 1,000 bottles a week of its vodka, gin and other spirits handcrafted from organic grains out of its repurposed corrugated metal hut in a Santa Ana industrial district.

So, after government orders forced the microdistillery to close March 17 and owners Robin and Brian Christenson furloughed four bartenders from its tasting room, they were thrilled to get a call from Orange County. Would the distillery be interested in producing some critically needed hand sanitizer?

Its an entirely different business and regulations, but a couple of weeks ago when we saw that the Purell shortage was going on, we thought about it and were like, Wait a minute, we make high-proof alcohol. We could do this,' said Robin, whose husband, Brian, has taken to calling their product craft small-batch hand sanitizer.

The couple expect they can sell some 4,000 gallons a week for first responders and buyers such as hospitals, which have ordered it by the drum. They plan on lowering costs by making it from corn, and if sales keep the lights on and their single distiller employed, that's good enough for them. Its also good enough for the federal government, which has been trying by hook or by crook to increase supplies.

The federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau has issued emergency regulations allowing distillers to begin immediate production, while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued its own relaxed guidelines for companies not licensed or registered as drug manufacturers to produce sanitizer.

Blinking Owl isnt the only distillery that has moved into sanitizer. Spirits giant Pernod Ricard was lauded by President Trump for cranking out big volumes of the virus killer, while companies in different industries are switching to producing other critically needed supplies as the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, exceeded 100,000 and deaths topped 1,700 in the United States on Friday evening.

Story continues

Jeeps are assembled at the Ford River Rouge plant in Detroit during World War II. (Charles Phelps Cushing / ClassicStock / Getty Images)

Los Angeles apparel companies are making masks, as is Hanesbrands Inc., a large North Carolina manufacturer of underwear. It will start making FDA-approved nonsurgical masks as part of a consortium that could produce as many as 6 million per week, while companies such as Apple and Facebook are donating to healthcare workers millions of reserve masks they have stockpiled.

General Motors is working with Ventec Life Systems to radically increase its production of ventilators, with the two companies announcing Friday  amid a public tussle with Trump, who wants them delivered faster and cheaper  that the automaker will build the devices at GMs Kokomo, Ind., manufacturing facility and ship them as soon as next month. GM said it will also be making FDA-cleared Level 1 surgical masks at its Warren, Mich., plant.

Ford and Toyota also have said they're working with medical device makers to produce ventilators and other equipment, while Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has tweeted that he's working with Medtronic to build ventilators and will reopen a New York factory to assist in production.

Call it war mobilization.

The unprecedented $2-trillion stimulus package Trump signed Friday is roughly twice the size of what was adopted in response to the 2007-08 financial crisis amid a record surge this week of 3.3 million unemployment claims.

Trump has cast himself as a wartime president, saying, In a true sense we're at war and we're fighting an invisible enemy.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) frames it this way: A fight has arrived on our shores.

The response so far doesn't approach the Chinese government's construction of two hospitals in a little over a week to treat COVID-19 patients, let alone the U.S. response during World War II, when Detroit automakers were ordered to stop passenger car production and put all their resources into tanks, military trucks, jeeps and other war materiel.

But with California Gov. Gavin Newsom projecting the state may be short 17,000 hospital beds and New York officials fearing the city and state may be overwhelmed with cases, there have been calls even from Republicans for a stronger federal response through the utilization of a Korean War-era act to order companies to ramp up production of critical supplies  something Trump finally did Friday with a single company, GM.

If I had the power, I would do it in New York state because the situation is that critical New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said during a March 22 briefing .

Six months after the U.S. entered World War II, a converted Chrysler plant in Detroit was turning out tanks 24 hours a day. (Underwood Archives / Getty Images)

The Defense Production Act, modeled after the broad war powers President Franklin D. Roosevelt was handed during World War II, gives the government authority to purchase and distribute critically needed supplies before other buyers, and even order companies to produce goods on an emergency basis.

Trump signed an executive order March 18 giving Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar authority to put the act to use against the virus outbreak. But it was not until Friday that he told Azar to order GM to "accept, perform, and prioritize Federal contracts for ventilators," contending that "GM was wasting time" and the action would save lives.

Friday's order came despite pushback from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the president's own misgivings. Last Sunday, Trump said, Were not a country based on nationalizing our business," though the government doesn't have the authority to take ownership of a company under the act, even if it can direct operations.

The 1950 law was signed by President Truman after the outbreak of hostilities on the Korean peninsula and was intended to rapidly build up the military. It had other provisions, including wage and price controls, that have since been rescinded, but others have remained in place or even been strengthened.

For example, the U.S. has invoked a provision of the act to rebuild its rare-earth metals industry, which is now controlled by China but is critical to the manufacture of cellphones, missiles and wind turbines. Another provision allows national security reviews of private businesses and transactions such as the popular social media platform TikTok, which is being probed for its ties to China .

Though the law stems from the Korean conflict, it is the Second World War that perhaps more closely mirrors the global battle that has broken out against the coronavirus, which has spread to every continent except Antarctica and chased billions of people out of their workplaces and into their homes.

In response to the Nazi aggression in Europe and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. created an alphabet soup of federal agencies that rivaled the New Deal. Among them were the War Production Board, the Office of War Mobilization, the Office of Price Administration and the War Food Administration.

Yet the government nearly fumbled the ball at first, trying to lure the private sector into building a war machine using financial tools such as tax incentives and accelerated write-offs of capital investments, said Alexander Field, an economics professor at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University.

It was not 'snap our fingers, we are going to build 100,000 aircraft,' said Field, who is now writing an economic history of the period and sees parallels to todays struggle against the coronavirus. "Many manufacturers did not want to use their own funds to build specialized facilities and acquire special-purpose machine tools to manufacture goods that they knew would have a limited shelf life. We bumbled a lot in World War II, and with a really determined effort we could have screwed it up and lost the war."

Mark Wilson, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said the government ultimately realized that the fastest way to get the war materiel it needed was to simply finance the construction of new factories and then have private corporations with expertise run them  so-called GOCO (government-owned, contractor-operated) plants  or to simply guarantee the government would purchase the products the private sector produced.

A worker at a Dodge plant converted to produce trucks for the U.S. Army in August 1942. (Corbis / Getty Images)

If you wait for the private companies and the bankers to calculate whether this is going to make sense for them economically, you can just create artificial delays, said Wilson, who wrote a 2016 book, Destructive Creation, arguing that plants newly built by the government to produce ships, aircraft, tanks and other key materiel played a bigger role in the war effort than conversions of existing plants did.

They did it remarkably quickly in a matter of months, but it was not something you could turn on in a matter of days, he said, adding that the pace could likely be increased by modern technology such as computer-aided design and modular construction (which the Chinese used to build their two hospitals).

Today we need gear and supplies such as hospitals and beds, ventilators and masks, test kits and cleaning agents. And even if the production is vast, it would probably amount to a fraction of the $3 trillion or more in today's dollars spent during World War II by industry and government on manufacturing and equipment, according to one estimate.

Still, World War II can provide a road map, Wilson said, with the government guaranteeing the purchase of medical equipment, and encouraging and overseeing the licensing and sharing of proprietary designs, which was how General Motors and Ford were able to build aircraft engines designed by Pratt & Whitney in the 1940s.

Indeed, today, the big automakers are working with various medical device makers to ramp up ventilator production, while Hanesbrands said it plans to share its mask design with other apparel makers.

Wilson added that "great calamities" such as the Depression and World War II turned out to stretch for years, and authorities should not make the mistake of worrying about overproduction or waste and "not needing it in the end." Field noted that whatever equipment healthcare providers do not need after the outbreak subsides could be stockpiled by the government for a strategic reserve.

The giant war mobilization effort also had the effect of driving down the unemployment rate, which averaged 9.9% in 1941 but fell to less than 2% as the conflict ground on  a consideration today as millions are being laid off due to the virus outbreak.

Americans also can take heart in how fast the government and manufacturers were able to respond when the U.S. faced a manufacturing crisis in 1942 after Japan invaded Singapore. That cut off 90% of the countrys supply of natural rubber, forcing the U.S. to establish a synthetic rubber industry at breakneck speed.

"We had no domestic sources of natural rubber. That was a real potential catastrophe. It was close, Field said, noting the governments Defense Plant Corp. ultimately spent about $800 million to build 51 factories that were not privatized until 1955.

Jerry McGinn, a former Defense Department official who oversaw implementation of the Defense Production Act from 2015 to 2018, said that building facilities under the act requires the government and companies to share the capital investment and companies to document their expenses and pricing so profits are fair and reasonable.

After the contract is over, the government turns over ownership to the company for a nominal fee but retains perpetual rights to production when needed.

Rows of army ambulances parked at a Dodge truck plant in Detroit in August 1942. (Arthur Siegel / Anthony Potter Collection / Getty Images)

The current bureaucratic process, involving requests for proposals and other steps, to get rare-earth metals plants built will probably take about 18 months before dirt is even turned. However, McGinn said, the timeline could be sped up to deal with the coronavirus.

This being the Manhattan Project, you can accelerate dramatically by perhaps half, but it is just not going to happen in a week, said McGinn, who is now executive director of the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason Universitys business school.

Another faster way for the government to contract for what it needs, he said, is for officials to simply throw money at an industry, such as by designing and producing goods through pilot projects. "There are lots of different ways that the government can engage with industry to meet a need; some of these are really rapid," he said.

In his public spat with GM CEO Mary Barra, Trump tweeted Friday that the company "said they were going to give us 40,000 much needed Ventilators, 'very quickly'. Now they are saying it will only be 6000, in late April, and they want top dollar. Always a mess with Mary B. Invoke 'P,'" later clarifying P stood for the Defense Production Act.

In their own joint statement Friday, GM and Ventec said that they were working "around the clock" and that retooling of the GM Kokomo facility was already underway to produce more than 10,000 per month, multiple times more than Ventec can make on its own. The statement said the companies had developed a global supply base for the more than 700 individual parts that are required.

Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, said the auto industry's initiative highlights how the automakers and their suppliers can manufacture in large quantities once they get ramped up, once they get the right tools in place to make the actual parts that are needed."

But he said people often forget in our high-tech society that software cant fix every problem, something to consider even as GM is working with a ventilator maker using proven, existing designs.

You have to extrude metal, you have to bend metal, you have to weld metal because there is no such thing as a software ventilator, he said, adding that it might take at least 30 days to retool factories to get them ready to make the parts.
There are no reports on Russia's reaction to the proposal.

Ukraine, using OSCE channels, has turned to the Russian Federation with a proposal to ensure a full ceasefire in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, because of the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic.

"The Ukrainian side, represented by Leonid Kuchma, has asked the OSCE to turn to the Russian Federation to request so that an unconditional, full and comprehensive ceasefire could be ensured amid the pandemic," Member of Parliament from the Servant of the People parliamentary faction Iryna Vereschuk said, according to the Ukrainian media portal Obozrevatel.

Read alsoDonbas war update: Russia-led forces mount nine attacks on Ukrainian positions on March 25

Security in the east of Ukraine "remains our number one task," she said.

She recalled that Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres had spoken up for ending all conflicts on the planet for the period of the pandemic.

"There were examples, like in Libya, when they have in fact ceased fire. There were agreements for a pandemic, this global threat to the life and health of the planet, to stop the fire, to let doctors have access, to ensure access to medical services regardless of which side people in Ukraine have taken," she said.

According to Vereschuk, she "has not yet seen the reaction of the Russian Federation" to the proposal of Ukraine.
Congress flag falls off while being hoisted by interim president Sonia Gandhi [Video]

Divisive ideologies anchored in hate causing havoc on secular fabric of our society: Sonia Gandhi

COVID-19: Sonia Gandhi writes to PM Modi, pledges support to govt

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Mar 26: Congress Interim President Sonia Gandhi has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi with suggestions that the government should undertake during the lockdown period.

In a four-page letter to PM Modi, Sonia Gandhi wrote, "As president of the Congress, I would like to state that we will support and collaborate fully with every step taking by the union government to ensure the containment of the pandemic."

"At this challenging and uncertain time, it is imperative for each one of us to rise above partisan interests and honour one's duty towards our country and indeed, towards humanity," said Gandhi.

7 myths on coronavirus busted

The Congress party, she said, extended to the government "our full support and cooperation".

Sonia Gandhi suggested that the centre consider deferring all EMIs for 6 months and waive interests charged by banks for this period.

"The government should "immediately put in place broad-based social protection measures including direct cash transfers" to daily wagers, MNREGA workers, factor workers, construction workers, farmers and others in the unorganized sector," the interim Congress chief wrote.

Sonia Gandhi also recommended her party's NYAY scheme for minimum income support as the "need of the hour", to give the poor a basic economic resource to fall back on.

Fact check: A moist throat does not prevent or kill coronavirus

"Alternatively, a cash transfer of Rs 7,500 to every Jan Dhan account holder, PM Kisan Yojana account holder, all old-age/widow/differently-abled persons' pension, MNREGA worker's accounts, as a one-time special measure to tide over the 21-day lockdown period should be considered," she wrote.

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Story first published: Thursday, March 26, 2020, 12:25 [IST]
Students from local school help Chinese peacekeeping engineers repair the Carniola Road

By Wang Xi and Hu Bin

BUKAVU, DRC, Mar. 26 -- The Carniola Road repaired by the Walungu detachment of the 23rd Chinese peacekeeping engineer contingent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) successfully passed the acceptance inspection by the engineering department of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) on the morning of March 24, local time.

The task of repairing the Carniola Road was assigned to Chinese peacekeeping engineers in November last year. After nearly five months of hard work, the Chinese peacekeepers overcame numerous difficulties and completed the repair task.

"The road has been well repaired and vehicles can now pass smoothly. We are very grateful for everything the Chinese peacekeeping engineers have done," said the chief executive officer of the Walungu region, who spoke highly of the Chinese peacekeepers after the mission was completed.

The Carniola Road is a traffic artery connecting Bukavu in the South Kivu province and cities in the northwest. The road lacked maintenance for a long time. Besides, the natural environment in the Walungu mission area is harsh, and the security situation is severe, which has posed great challenges to the construction mission.
Emily Williams is a business reporter at The Post and Courier, covering tourism and aerospace. She also writes the Business Headlines newsletter and co-hosts the weekly news podcast Understand SC.
The coronavirus is not the only threat we face. As I wrote in The Hill last week and The Wall Street Journal editorialized last Friday, we may face a far greater threat from a collapsed economy, which would devastate everyones financial and medical condition.

This should be of special concern in Connecticut, which entered the current crisis already economically anemic and financially shaky.

It should be a priority to keep people working and, as soon as possible, to return to work the tens of thousands suddenly being idled. The Connecticut Labor Department received 99,000 unemployment claims from March 13 through Monday this week versus a recent weekly average of 2,500.

A deep recession or depression would bring an inevitable deterioration in public health along with severe economic pain. It would push us backward down the Preston Curve, which demonstrates that life expectancy varies directly with income level: wealthy societies are relatively healthy, poor ones less so.

We should balance the incidence curve with the Preston Curve, putting as much effort into moderating economic devastation as we put into flattening the incidence, or infection, curve to keep coronavirus hospitalizations below hospital capacity.

In both efforts, we should remain realistic but optimistic. We are not experiencing a nationwide spread so much as a spread around certain hot spots, such as the Seattle area around the Life Care Center nursing home, and in dense population centers, notably in New York State (mainly New York City), where more than half of the nations cases (51,000 as of late afternoon Tuesday) are now concentrated, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

Apart from southwest Connecticuts proximity and interrelationship with New York City, the state has neither hot spots nor heavy urban density equivalent to New York City. Notably, as of Tuesday afternoon, the state had only 618 cases, 71 hospitalizations and 12 deaths, 10 of whom were over age 80.

While strict shutdown and shelter in place measures make sense in New York City, it is doubtful that such measures do in most of Connecticut.

We can put aside the scaremongering of some alarmists that COVID-19 may be the equivalent of the Spanish Flu. The 1918 flu attacked people of all ages, whereas coronavirus spares the young. The median age in the U.S. is seven years younger than Italy, where the death rate is now the highest in the world.

During a recent White House briefing, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator, said, We do know from other countries that mortality under 30 (years of age) is extraordinarily low. U.S. experience indicates the same. A report on nearly 2,500 of the first recorded cases in the U.S. found that people 19 and under accounted for less than 1 percent of the hospitalizations and no ICU admissions or deaths, according to The New York Times. We should be grateful that our youngest are being spared.

So how should these lessons inform public policy even as we face an inevitable rapid increase in cases, hospitalizations and deaths  again, primarily in other states?

We should maintain perspective. According to the CDC, from 12,000 to 61,000 Americans die annually from the flu, and more than 67,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses in 2018.

One policy we should re-evaluate constantly is that of keeping schools closed, since, based upon evidence so far, schoolchildren are not at risk of serious infection and teachers below 30 have little risk of mortality.

But Gov. Lamont has shut the door on this possibility, just this week extending his school shutdown policy from the original two weeks to five, and, now, hes talking about keeping schools closed until next fall.

This is dangerous talk, because it means many businesses could not re-open for months since parents cant work if they have to stay home to take care of their kids.

Thus, there could be no end to Lamonts open-ended closing of all non-essential businesses across Connecticut.

In Tuesdays press conference, the governor said words to the effect that it is my instinct that this virus will be with us for some time.

No one questions his good faith, but, with all due respect, Connecticut citizens should not accept Lamonts instinct. He should provide rules-based guidance as to the specific conditions and evidence which will justify his continuing shutdown policies and serve as the eventual basis for reopening schools and business. The guidance, rules and evidence should be Connecticut-specific.

Connecticut has its own unique situation and needs that are sufficiently different from other states to suggest different policies. As a nation we are all in this together, but, from state to state, we are in it to different degrees and in different ways. Ultimately, all states benefit if individual states optimize their individual policies.

Red Jahncke is the president of Townsend Group Intl, LLC, a Greenwich-based consulting firm.
TDT | Manama

Thirty trucks and two cargo planes loaded with food arrived in Bahrain yesterday. This was confirmed by Bahrain Chamber of Commerce and Industry Food Wealth Committee head Khalid Al Ameen. He said that the arrival of several tonnes of all kinds of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs indicated that suppliers in Bahrain are ensuring the import of adequate food supplies to cover the countrys needs. Al Ameen yesterday conducted a tour of Bahrains markets along with businessman and fruits and vegetables importer Redha Al Bustani.

Al Ameen acknowledged the abundance of fruits and vegetables in the local markets. Al Ameen noted that large shipments were due to arrive in Bahrain from the Netherlands next week. He asked people to stop panic-buying as there is enough food stock for everyone in the country for at least the next six months. He had pointed out yesterday that Jordanian authorities have lifted the ban on their export of fruits and vegetables more than a week following the issuance of a decision to ban supply.

Industry, Commerce and Tourism Minister Zayed R Al Zayani had stressed recently that the ministry is in constant coordination with relevant authorities to ensure that goods and products are continually available in Bahrains markets. Al Zayani assured that food and commodities in the Kingdom remain abundant, and noted that there is no need to purchase large quantities of goods other than what is needed. The minister further assured that all food stores are prepared to deliver products when required, and that the supply of medicine and food remains a top priority
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday chaired a review meeting with the Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat, Chiefs of Army, Navy and Air Force and senior officials on the preparedness for tackling COVID-19 menace.

"Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh chairing a review meeting on MoD's preparedness for tackling the COVID-19 menace. #IndiaFightsCorona," the Ministry of Defence tweeted from its official account.

"Also seen are Chief of Defence Staff Gen Bipin Rawat, Defence Secretary Dr. @drajaykumar_ias, Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Karambir Singh, Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal RKS Bhadauria, Chief of the Army Staff General MM Naravane and Secretary (ESW) Smt Sanjeevanee Kutty," spokesperson MoD tweeted.

This comes as the total number of confirmed positive COVID-19 cases have risen to 649 in the country (including 593 active cases, 42 cured/discharged people) and 13 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Thursday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country effective from midnight to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / London Digital Asset firm BEQUANT and BCB Group, an FCA regulated business payments provider for the cryptocurrency space, have announced a partnership, whereby BEQUANT will be using BCB Group's multi-currency payment accounts as well as market liquidity in FX and crypto. BEQUANT has been actively developing its digital services for institutional clients and has recently launched its Prime Brokerage and BEQUANT Solutions units.

Together, these services will provide an unprecedented level of digital asset integration for the financial services industry. BEQUANT Prime Brokerage provides collateral management, custody, manages relationships with digital asset exchanges, provides benefits from aggregated volume discounts and offers leverage and portfolio margining. BEQUANT Prime Solutions offers a powerful digital asset suite, including trading terminals, cross-border compliance and matching engines to deep liquidity and tokenization.

George Zarya, CEO of BEQUANT commented "BCB Group is a reliable and trustworthy partner, and their services allow us to effortlessly manage our business needs".

Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie, Founder and CEO of BCB Group added "BEQUANT's holistic approach to institutional crypto markets makes them an ideal client for BCB, where our mission is to build the infrastructure this market needs to trade and settle frictionlessly. We recognise BEQUANT's efforts to remain on the front foot with regulators which resonate with our own outlook and we look forward to a fruitful partnership."

About BEQUANT

BEQUANT is a one-stop-solution provider for professional digital asset investors and institutions. Our breadth of products includes prime brokerage, custody, fund administration enhanced by an institutional trading platform providing low-latency, and direct market access to top liquidity pools.

About BCB Group

BCB Group is Europe's leading crypto-dedicated payment services provider, serving some of the industry's largest clients. BCB Group provides payment services in 20+ currencies, FX, cryptocurrency liquidity and digital asset custody. Responding to institutional demand for operational best practice in the cryptocurrency market, BCB Group was created by established thought leaders in finance, regulation and technology.

BEQUANT

Contact: Sunil Chauhan

Telephone: +44 (0) 2038933214

Email: Sunil.Chauhan@BEQUANT.pro

Website: www.BEQUANT.pro

BCB Group

Contact: Sam Shrager

Telephone:+44 7877 940652, +44 207 298 6090

Email: sam@bcbgroup.io

Website: https://bcbgroup.io/

SOURCE: BEQUANT

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/582664/BEQUANT-Partners-with-BCB-Group-for-Payment-and-Liquidity-Services
B rits who continue to flout coronavirus lockdown rules will be arrested for breaking the law, Home Secretary Priti Patel has announced.

It comes after Boris Johnson ordered all non-essential shops and businesses to close and told Brits to stay home as the NHS battles the Covid-19 outbreak.

As of 9am on Thursday 9,529 people have tested positive for the virus in the UK with 463 patients having died.

The new lockdown enforcement powers also allow police officers to order people to go home, leave or disperse an area and ensure parents are taking steps to stop their children breaking the law.

Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures 1 /81 Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures A deserted Westminster Bridge PA A man wearing a face mask or covering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, walks past customers sat outside a restaurant AFP via Getty Images Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the Coronavirus lockdown Andrew Parsons Runners pass cardboard cutouts of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William during the London Marathon in London AP An empty escalator at Charing Coss London Underground tube station Jeremy Selwyn Electronic bilboards displays a message warning people to stay home in Sheffield PA A sign is displayed in the window of a student accommodation building following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Mancheste Reuters People take part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions, in Londo AP People sing and dance in Leicester Square on the eve on the 10PM curfew Reuters Hearts painted by a team of artists from Upfest are seen in the grass at Queen Square, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Bristol Reuters Graffiti reads 'good luck and stay safe', as the number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases grow around the world, under a bridge in London Reuters A sign is pictured in Soho, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London Reuters Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures, during a coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, London AP A person runs past posters with a message of hope, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Manchester REUTERS Riot police face protesters who took part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions in London AP An image of The Queen eith quotes from her broadcast to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the Coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images Durdle Door in Dorset Reuters Captain Tom Moore via Reuters Mia, aged 8, and Jack, aged 5, take part in "PE with Joe" a daily live workout with Joe Wicks on Youtube to help kids stay fit who have to stay indoors due to the Coronavirus outbreak PA An NHS worker reacts at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital during the Clap for our Carers campaign in support of the NHS Reuters Goats which have taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno @AndrewStuart via PA Tobias Weller PA Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed London Landscapes: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, central London. Matt Writtle A newspaper vendor in Manchester city centre giving away free toilet rolls with every paper bought as shops run low on supplies due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus PA Theo Clay looks out of his window next to his hand-drawn picture of a rainbow in Liverpool, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continue Reuters A young man cuts another man's hair on top of a closed hairdresser in Oxford Reuters General view of the new NHS Nightingale Hospital, built to fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London via Reuters Jason Baird is seen dressed as Spiderman during his daily exercise to cheer up local children in Stockport, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters A woman wearing a face mask walks past Buckingham Palace Getty Images A man holds mobile phone displaying a text message alert sent by the government warning that new rules are in force across the UK and people must stay at home PA Medical staff on the Covid-19 ward at the Neath Port Talbot Hospital, in Wales, as the health services continue their response to the coronavirus outbreak. PA Prime Minister Boris Johnson taking part in a virtual Cabinet meeting with his top team of ministers PA A shopper walks past empty shelves in a Lidl store on in Wallington. After spates of "panic buying" cleared supermarket shelves of items like toilet paper and cleaning products, stores across the UK have introduced limits on purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have also created special time slots for the elderly and other shoppers vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Getty Images People on a busy tube train in London at rush hour PA Mia, aged 8 and her brother Jack, aged 5 from Essex, continue their school work at home, after being sent home due to the coronavirus PA Children are painting 'Chase the rainbows' artwork and springing up in windows across the country Reuters Social distancing in Primrose Hill Jeremy Selwyn A general view of a locked gate at Anfield, Liverpool as The Premier League has been suspended PA Homeless people in London AFP via Getty Images A piece of art by the artist, known as the Rebel Bear has appeared on a wall on Bank Street in Glasgow. The new addition to Glasgow's street art is capturing the global Coronavirus crisis. The piece features a woman and a man pulling back to give each other a kiss PA The Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, London, for Windsor Castle to socially distance herself amid the coronavirus pandemic PA A general view on Grey street, Newcastle as coronavirus cases grow around the world Reuters Matt Raw, a British national who returned from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China, leaves quaratine at Arrowe Park Hospital on Merseyside PA Britain's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news conference inside 10 Downing Street Reuters The ticket-validation terminals at the tram stop on Edinburgh's Princes Street are cleaned following the coronavirus outbreak. PA Locked school gates at Rockcliffe First School in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear PA A sign at a Sainsbury's supermarket informs customers that limits have been set on a small number of products as the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases grow around the world Reuters Jawad Javed delivers coronavirus protection kits that he and his wife have put together to the vulnerable people of their community of Stenhousemuir, between Glasgow and Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" Getty Images A man who appears to be homeless sleeping wearing a mask today in Victoria Jeremy Selwyn A pedestrian walks past graffiti that reads "Diseases are in the City" in Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images Staff from The Lyric Theatre, London inform patrons, as it shuts its doors PA A quiet looking George IV Bridge in Edinburgh PA A quieter than usual British Museum Getty Images A racegoer attends Cheltenham in a fashionable face mask SplashNews.com A commuter wears a face mask at London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn A empty restaurant in the Bull Ring Shopping Centre Getty Images A deserted Trafalgar Square in London PA Passengers determined to avoid the coronavirus before leaving the UK arrive at Gatwick Airport Getty Images

Those who refuse to comply could be given a fixed penalty notice of 60, which will be lowered to 30 if paid within 14 days.

Second-time offenders could be fined 120, which doubles on each further repeat offence.

Those who do not pay the penalty can be taken to court, with magistrates able to impose unlimited fines.

The World on Coronavirus lockdown 1 /60 The World on Coronavirus lockdown Getty Images A UK government public health campaign is displayed in Piccadilly Circus Reuters Chinese paramilitary police and security officers wear face masks to protect against the spread of the new coronavirus as they stand guard outside an entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing AP A usually busy 42nd Street is seen nearly empty in New York AFP via Getty Images Bondi Beach, Australia Getty Images Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images View of the illuminated statue of Christ the Redeemer that reads "Thank you" as Archbishop of the city of Rio de Janeiro Dom Orani Tempesta performs a mass in honor of Act of Consecration of Brazil and tribute to medical workers amidst the Coronavirus (COVID - 19) pandemic Getty Images Rome AFP via Getty Images An Indian man paddles his bicycle in front of a mural depicting the globe covered in a mask, as India remains under an unprecedented lockdown over the highly contagious coronavirus Getty Images Aerial view of the empty 9 de Julio avenue in Buenos Aires in Argentina AFP via Getty Images A view of an empty Grand Canal Reuters Las Ramblas, Barcelona, Spain Getty Images Aerial view of the empty Central cemetery in Bogota, Columbia AFP via Getty Images The facade of the Palacio de Lopez (seat of the government palace) AFP via Getty Images Miami, Florida AFP via Getty Images Aerial view of the empty Simon Bolivar park in Bogota AFP via Getty Images An LAPD patrol car drives through Venice Beach Boardwalk AP Venice Beach, California Getty Images Los Angeles, California Getty Images Surfers Paradise is seen empty in Australia Getty Images Many shops stand shuttered on the Venice Beach boardwalk Getty Images Empty escalators are seen at a deserted train station during morning rush hour after New South Wales began shutting down non-essential businesses Reuters A nearly empty Times Square in New York AFP via Getty Images Caracas AFP via Getty Images Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador AFP via Getty Images A general view of an unusually quiet Midland Park in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images A general view of an unusually quiet Civic Square at lunchtimein Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images A policeman rides his motorcycle wearing a face mask in front of a closed shopping mall in Buenos Aires, Argentina AFP via Getty Images Florida Keys AP The historic Channel 2 Bridge closed to fishermen, bikers and pedestrians in Florida Keys AP The Beach on Scenic Gulf Drive near Seascape Resort in south Walton County, Florida sits empty of tourists AP Surfers Paradise is seen empty in Australia Getty Images A deserted Rajpath leading to India Gate in New Delhi AFP via Getty Images A general view is seen of a closed Luna Park in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A general view is seen of a closed Luna Park in Sydney, Australia Getty Images Empty roads are pictured following the lockdown by the government amid concerns about the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Kathmandu, Nepal Reuters An empty New York Subway car i AFP via Getty Images The empty pedestrian zone is seen in the city of Cologne, western Germany, AFP via Getty Images Place de la Comedie in the city of Montpellier , southern France AFP via Getty Images An empty street in Kuwait city AFP via Getty Images A building is covered by the Portuguese message: "Coronavirus: take precaution" over empty streets in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, AP A general view shows an empty street after a curfew was imposed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Reuters Parliament of Canada is pictured with empty street during morning rush hour AFP via Getty Images A near empty beach on Southend seafront in England PA Near empty Keswick town centre in Cumbria, England PA

Announcing the new enforcement powers, Ms Patel said: The Prime Minister has been clear on what we need to do: stay at home to protect our NHS and save lives.

All our frontline services really are the best of us and are doing an incredible job to stop this terrible virus from spreading.

Thats why Im giving the police these new enforcement powers, to protect the public and keep people safe.

She ealier shared a tweet from the UK Crown Prosecution service, saying that reports of people deliberately coughing on emergency workers are "appalling".

Mr Patel added: "The @CPSuk have clearly said that this is a crime and will not hesitate to prosecute anyone who threatens the vital work of our emergency workers. "

It also comes as police forces across the country continue to crack down on those flouting the rules.

The Derbyshire Police said on Thursday that people continue to drive to the Peak District for walks despite the forces warnings to stay at home.

In a series of tweets, which included drone footage of people enjoying walks, the force said: Despite posts yesterday highlighting issues of people still visiting the #PeakDistrict despite government guidance, the message is still not getting through.

Cars were parked in both the car park and on the hill up to it. A bag of stones that was at the entrance as a roadblock had been pulled to the side to allow cars to enter. Plenty of people were walking, many of which had parked up in cars before heading out for their walk.

Some number plates were coming back to keepers in #Sheffield, so we know that people are travelling to visit these areas. Daily exercise should be taken locally to your home. Under government guidance, all travel is limited to essential travel only.

In response to new police powers being brought into force to make sure coronavirus lockdown restrictions are followed, Clare Collier, advocacy director at Liberty, said: Were extremely concerned by the extent of these coercive powers.

This is a pandemic and so it should be treated as a public health issue. Instead, the Government is treating it as a criminal justice issue, putting resources into detaining and criminalising.

Whats concerning is what this heavy-handed approach will do to the publics relationship with the police in the long-term.

While some people will feel reassured by a firmer police response to the pandemic, others will feel fear, especially groups who are already over-policed.
In the midst of a global pandemic and an unprecedented border shutdown between the two countries, Canada formally named its ambassador to the United States. She is Kirsten Hillman, who has been doing the job in an acting capacity since last summer.

Justin Trudeau made the announcement official on Thursday morning.

Hillman is a veteran public servant and trade expert who earned the trust of Justin Trudeaus government during the tense free-trade negotiations with Donald Trumps White House. Until about a month ago, that seemed like the most difficult thing that a Canadian envoy to Washington would have to handle.

As the first woman to serve in this role, Hillman takes on the post when Canada and the United States are consumed with containing a virus that knows no borders, but one that has forced the closing of borders between the two of the most economically integrated nations on earth.

It would be hard to find an ambassador appointed to oversee Canada-U.S. relations at a more pivotal time.

Canada and the United States have been acting in lockstep so far on attempts to contain the virus. One of the last things that Parliament did before going into lockdown earlier this month was quick passage of the new North American Free Trade Agreement  NAFTA 2, as its called. By mutual agreement at the top levels, non-essential travel was banned between the two countries a week ago, and Canada has stopped taking refugee-seekers at the U.S. border.

But Trump and Trudeau do not seem to share views about where the COVID-19 crisis is headed in the next few weeks  especially about containment measures.

Trump has been saying that widespread physical-distancing should be over in the U.S. by the Easter holiday in mid-April. Trudeau is not voicing the same optimism, saying Canada could be in some kind of lockdown for months.

The U.S. presidents main preoccupations seems to be on what this virus is doing to the economy; Canadas prime minister says repeatedly that public health has to be the priority.

One of Hillmans main jobs in the days and weeks ahead will be to make sure that this discrepancy doesnt hurt Canadas efforts to wrestle down the virus, or do damage to the Canadian economy, which depends so much on trade and traffic with the United States.

An over-early relaxation of containment measures in the U.S. would almost inevitably spill over into virus spread or economic damage to Canada, if essential cross-border traffic has to be further curtailed.

Hillmans appointment breaks a usual pattern of the ambassadors job going to people with close political ties to the prime minister of the day. This isnt an accident; Washington is a hyper-political town and expects that the ambassadors are politically connected to the countries they represent.

Hillman is replacing David MacNaughton, who went to Washington after Trudeau took power with exactly those credentials. MacNaughton, a long-time Liberal, worked closely with Trudeaus team, especially chief of staff Katie Telford, long before the 2015 election. He stepped down last summer, before the last election, and Hillman has been acting in the job ever since.

At the same time, the United States has also been between ambassadors when it comes to Canada. Trumps first appointee, Kelly Craft, left last summer to take up a new post, as her countrys ambassador to the United Nations.

In February, Trump formally nominated Crafts replacement  Aldona Wos, a former physician who served as ambassador to Estonia in past Republican administrations. Her history as a powerful fundraiser for the Republicans fits with the habits of U.S. presidents, of both stripes, to reward big donors to the plum post in Canada.

Woss appointment still has to be confirmed by the Senate  a process that presumably awaits a return to more normal times in Washington.

Hillmans background is rooted in trade law, serving in a variety of advisory roles in government  at the World Trade Organization, in the old Foreign Affairs department and as chief negotiator for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. She is respected by Conservatives and Liberals, having worked at high levels for both types of government.

Her elevation from acting to permanent ambassador had been expected  even predicted in this paper a couple of months ago.

Its one of the few developments that could have been predicted in global politics in this strange year. Nothing about Hillmans job will be predictable in the days and weeks ahead.

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I am an internal medicine physician directly taking care of patients admitted to the hospital who are COVID-19 positive or those who are being tested for COVID-19. Last week, my hospital created a special team dedicated to taking care of these patients. During that time, the hospital was eerily quiet: the ED no longer had patients lying in stretchers, and the inpatient medicine teams were carrying half of the patients they usually do. It was the calm before the storm, and honestly a refreshing break from the ins and outs of admitting and discharging.

On March 19th, the storm we had been anticipating arrived. The census on the COVID-19 team doubled overnight. The workload was unmanageable for me, the only physician overnight. For patient safety, the medicine leadership created a second COVID-19 team and added on a second physician overnight.

Many of the patients I am currently caring for (thankfully) have low suspicion of COVID-19, or if they do have COVID-19 (i.e., came in with the diagnosis or tested positive during the admission), do not need inpatient level of care. Some of these patients who have some symptoms overlapping with COVID-19 (e.g., fever, cough) have a remote history of treated cancer. Their oncologists are (rightly) terrified that they will decompensate and want their patients to be admitted and tested for COVID-19. I am not against testing people for COVID-19. In fact, I think everyone should be tested, especially health care workers who are young and asymptomatic. A study from South Korea, which screened a large proportion of their population, demonstrated that those aged 20-40 are likely to be asymptomatic carriers of the virus.

What I am against is admitting every single patient who needs to be ruled out for COVID-19 who dont have inpatient level needs (e.g., no need for supplemental oxygen) because we are afraid they will decompensate. The decision behind which type of patient needs to be admitted comes from the whim of the ID doctor who is on call for the shift. As you can imagine, this doctor is getting hundreds of questions a day from other doctors all over the hospital about who should be tested for COVID-19. This doctor, therefore, has limited time to read about the patient in the EMR, let alone evaluate the patient in person. The ID doctors are the gatekeepers, and their jobs are critically important, but they are overburdened. You can ask two different ID doctors the same question, and they may give you completely different answers about whether the patient needs to be admitted.

Why the inconsistency in medical decision making? Our hospital and our healthcare system at large does not have an algorithm that we can reliably use to decide which of these patients are safe to go home and which of these patients need to be admitted to the hospital. As a counter-example, there are many well-established algorithms and criteria for urinary tract infections and pneumonias, based on evidence-based medicine and years of cumulative doctor experience. Because COVID-19 as a disease is so new, and because our country has been so ill-prepared for this pandemic, we do not have the knowledge nor the infrastructure to allocate the limited resources we have. We are quickly going to run out of hospital beds, PPE, and healthcare staff to take care of patients if we have no way to decide who is sick enough to require hospitalization.

The root of the problem is twofold: 1) Testing for COVID-19 isnt widely available; and, 2) non-ID/internal medicine doctors (e.g., proceduralists and oncologists) are afraid that their patients will decompensate and/or that if they do a procedure on these patients, the providers themselves will get COVID-19. It is unclear if these physicians are afraid of dying from the disease (an OB/GYN colleague said she didnt sign up for this job to be exposed to a disease that has a 2 to 3 percent mortality rate) or if they are afraid of spreading this to vulnerable patients.

I fall into the latter camp. As a future general internist, I feel that its my duty to take care of these patients. What I did not expect from this pandemic is to reassure other doctors and healthcare workers who do not have experience taking care of these patients. There is emerging literature on COVID-19 that is easily accessible to physicians and nurses, but some of them choose to make their medical decisions based on fear (e.g., pushing for unnecessary admissions that lead to overuse of PPE and hospital beds) instead of evidence. I also did not expect the divisiveness that this pandemic has brought within the healthcare community. There have been accusations by surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nursing colleagues that they were not told by other physicians that their patient was COVID-19 positive. Some do not trust the ability of ID doctors to make decisions about who requires testing. Some are even refusing to perform procedures or care for patients unless they are confirmed COVID-19 negative. In a time where collaboration is key among the different types of providers, there is a division that is preventing us from providing the best care for our patients. This realization makes me anxious, more anxious than the fact that we will soon run out of PPE and ventilators, or the high likelihood that I will unknowingly pass on COVID-19 to a patient.

The glimmer of hope through all of this is the kindness of others. The nurses in the ED who help me put together the plastic disposable stethoscopes so I can evaluate my patient. The patients who make jokes about my wonky face shield and N95 get-up. People who donate time, money, and food to those who dont have the means to prepare for the pandemic. Those who practice social distancing. And most of all, my physician colleagues, nurses, janitors, phlebotomists, nursing assistants, PTs, pharmacists who are fighting every single day for their patients, despite the chaos and the risks. Thank you to everyone who is doing their part. Together, we can survive COVID-19.

The author is an anonymous physician.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
PARIS, Dec. 10, 2019 (Xinhua) -- French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin as he arrives at the Elysee Presidential Palace to attend a summit on Ukraine in Paris, France, Dec. 9, 2019. Ukraine and Russia agreed on a f Image Source: IANS

Moscow, March 27 : Russian President Vladimir Putin and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron discussed the COVID-19 outbreak in a video conference on Thursday, the Kremlin said in a statement.

The statement said the video conference was held at the initiative of the French side before the emergency virtual G20 meeting, Xinhua reported.

Putin and Macron informed each other about measures taken by Russia and France to counter the spread of the infection and minimize the negative socio-economic consequences, the statement said.

The parties confirmed their will to coordinate efforts on the issues of returning citizens of both countries to their homeland, as well as providing conditions for transporting medical supplies and equipment.

They discussed possible interaction within the framework of the UN Security Council in the joint fight against the coronavirus, according to the Kremlin.

Putin and Macron also discussed actual aspects of the settlement in Syria and Libya, the statement said, without providing further details.
It's not always easy to find an evening gown or summer dress that makes you feel glamorous and that has been made in an environmentally sustainable way.

Fashion brands starting to move away from non- biodegradable polyesters and water-draining cotton are faced with the challenge of maintaining elegance and style while being more ethical in their use of fabrics.

H&M has just launched the SS20 edition of its Conscious Exclusive collection of garments made from recycled materials, and the initial campaign shots are promising.

H&M has just launched the SS20 edition of its Conscious Exclusive collection of garments made from recycled materials, with the pieces evoking the glamor of 1920s south of France

The poster photos of models frolicking around the South of France clothed in sophisticated floaty dresses, loose blouses and classy capri pants scream luxury, despite the low starting price point of the range at $24.99 for a crisp white T-shirt.

It's also had the seal of approval from British model Jourdan Dunn, who wore a bottled blue ruffled Conscious Exclusive evening gown to a glamorous Fashion Week party in Paris.

The tulle ball gown ($399) is one of the more expensive items but you don't have to spend a fortune to add some continental chic to your closet in a guilt-free way.

The gorgeous cotton voile day dress that the model is shown wearing to lounge on the chair is priced at $69.99, while accessories include an elegant navy hair scarf costing $29.99 and some chunky gold clip-on earrings for $24.99.

You can also get a jacket and wide-leg pants in a linen and Tencel lyocell blend as long as you're brave enough to wear a sand colour suit.

The Conscious Exclusive SS20 collection is inspired by Le Train Bleu, the elegant train that ran from Calais to Cote D'Azur in the 1920s, to celebrate a time when the travel was just as important as the destination.

The gorgeous day dress that the model is shown wearing to lounge on the chair is the $69.99 Cotton Voile Dress, featuring a printed design and ruffle-trimmed neckline

But although the design inspiration may be full of nostalgia, the fabrics used in the manufacturing process for are cutting-edge. For example, have you ever thought about what happens to the byproducts of the grapes that are used to make wine?

Vegea is a soft vegan leather alternative made from the discared grape skins and stalks and it's used in the collection on chain-strap handbags and shoes.

Coffee is another unexpected part of the collection, with the grounds collected from H&M's production offices being used to make natural dye with less environmental impact than chemical dyes.

Other pieces in the collection that includes trouser and top co-ordinates made from circulose, which is a new natural material created by gently recovering cotton from worn-out clothes blended with FSC certified wood pulp

The collection has the seal of approval from British model Jourdan Dunn (right) who wore a bottled blue ruffled Conscious Exclusive evening gown (left) to a Fashion Week party in Paris

The Conscious Exclusive SS20 collection is inspired by Le Train Bleu, the elegant train that ran from Calais to Cote D'Azur in the 1920s

H&M has even been able to use a satisfyingly easy-to care version of polyester thanks to the innovation of a high-quality recycled polyester, Renu.

They've also used leftover stock fabrics from previous collections.

Retailers known for 'fast fashion' such as H&M have come under fire for creating capsule collections that promise to be sustainable rather than devoting the entire brand to being eco-friendly.

But the hope is that H&M's sustainable collections will pave the way for 'consciously' made clothes at accessible price points.

DailyMail.com may earn commission on sales from the links on this page.
Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Heather Humphreys has strongly encouraged employers to avail of the Governments new Wage Subsidy Scheme to retain employees and to re-employ employees in cases where they have recently been laid off due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Scheme will be available to employers who keep employees on the payroll through the current Covid-related trading difficulties, meaning employers can retain links with employees for when business picks up after the crisis. Under the terms of the Scheme employers will be refunded up to 70% of an employee's wages - up to a level of 410.

The Scheme is confined to employees who were on the employers payroll as at 29 February 2020 and full details can be viewed at Revenue Wage Subsidy Scheme.

Speaking yesterday, the Minster said, "This pandemic is presenting our people and businesses with unprecedented challenges and they require practical, flexible and innovative solutions. Thats why we have introduced this new Wage Subsidy Scheme, which supports employers to retain as many workers as possible by giving support to wage costs. Its important to bear in mind that if you have recently laid off workers, you can still avail of the Scheme by re-employing them, which will allow you to plan ahead with more surety."

Source: www.businessworld.ie
HAILEY  Blaine County commissioners are urging residents not to travel outside Blaine County for casual travel and recreation, hotel stays, shopping and other activities that are not defined as essential under the Idaho Department of Health & Welfare Self-Isolation Order.

These trips are a violation of the letter and spirit of the order, a statement from commissioners released Thursday said.

People should minimize travel to essential activities, and eliminate all non-essential travel, the statement said.

The order permits outdoor recreation as long as people also observe social distancing. Blaine County residents who go outside for exercise should do it in Blaine County, not in other counties, the statement said.

Commissioners also ask residents to shop for essential items in Blaine County if at all possible  not in other counties  and so on for other activities.

Anyone who is sick must stay in their homes, the statement said.

It is up to the citizens of Blaine County to do their part to limit the spread of this deadly disease, here in Blaine County, or anywhere else, the statement said. It is also up to citizens to ease the minds of residents in neighboring counties who are concerned they are at greater risk of becoming infected due to the high volume of travelers from Blaine County. This can be accomplished by minimizing or eliminating out-of-county travel.

The commissioners also asked anyone traveling to Blaine County to do so only for essential purposes. Anyone who stays in the county for a longer period should self-isolate for 14 days when they get home.

We owe it to ourselves and our neighbors to do everything we can to slow the spread of coronavirus, Commissioner Angenie McCleary said.

Each of us contributes to the goal of stopping the spread of coronavirus, which affects all of us, Commissioner Jacob Greenberg said. We must be smart and do our part to succeed, so were able to return to normal life sooner, rather than later.
Popular Kannywood actor, Ali Nuhu has denied reports that he tested positive to coronavirus.

Nuhu made this known during an interview with the BBC Hausa service on Thursday.

Also Read: Coronavirus: Nigerian Celebrities Self-Isolate After AMVCA

The actor said it was unnecessary for Lagos state government and other health authorities to raise the alarm that celebrities who attended AMVCA should self-isolate.

Recall that Lagos State Government called for test to be conducted on those who attended the film award ceremony, after a guest at the ceremony had the coronavirus.

The actor revealed that despite being told to self-isolate, no health official visited him. He also revealed that NCDC had given him the all clear to carry on his normal activities.
A young boy seen wearing a face mask outside the Funan Mall. (PHOTO: Dhany Osman / Yahoo News Singapore)

SINGAPORE  The Singapore government will allocate over $48 billion to combat the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis, said Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat in his Ministerial Statement delivered in Parliament on Thursday (26 March).

Dubbed the Resilience Budget, the sum comes on top of the $6.4 billion Unity Budget announced by Heng in February that was meant to alleviate the economic impact of the pandemic.

Altogether, we are dedicating close to $55 billion to support people in this battle, amounting to 11 per cent of our (gross domestic product). This is a landmark package, and a necessary response to a unique situation, said Heng.

He added that the government has received President Halimah Yacobs in-principle approval to draw up to $17 billion from Singapores past reserves to fund part of the Resilience Budget.

Heng noted that the last time the country had to tap on the past reserves was during the 2009 global financial crisis, during which then President S R Nathan approved a draw of $4.9 billion to fund the Jobs Credit Scheme and special risk-sharing initiative.

Thanks to a sharp economic recovery, however, there was no need to tap past reserves then.

Saving jobs, helping businesses

The goals of the latest supplementary Budget are threefold: to save jobs, support workers and protect livelihoods; to help enterprises overcome intermediate challenges; and to strengthen the nations economic and social resilience.

Among measures to protect workers employment, an enhanced Jobs Support Scheme (JSS) will see the government co-funding 25 per cent wages till the end of the year. This percentage will be raised to 50 per cent for firms in the food services sector and 75 per cent for those in the aviation and tourism sectors.

In total, this scheme will see $15.1 billion spent to support more than 1.9 million local employees under the JSS.

For those who find themselves unemployed due to the pandemic, an $800 monthly grant will be started from next month, while a temporarily relief fund will also be started to help families in immediate need of financial aid.

Story continues

Needy Singaporeans will also receive additional cash payouts and grocery vouchers as part of enhancements to previously announced schemes, among other measures. This enhanced Care and Support Package will cost around $4.6 billion, said Heng.

Beyond wage support schemes, the government will also deferring income tax payments for local businesses from April till June. To help firms with their costs, qualifying commercial properties will be excused from paying property tax for the whole of 2020.

I strongly urge landlords to fully pass on the rebate to tenants, by reducing rentals, to directly ease the cash flow and cost pressures faced by tenants, said Heng.

He added that the government will be leading by example in this effort by enhancing rental waivers for stallholders at hawker centres managed by the National Environment Agency (NEA) and tenants under other government agencies such as HDB and the National Arts Council.

On financing businesses, Heng announced a number of enhancements to existing schemes aimed at helping local enterprises. Among these are an expanded Temporary Bridging Loan Programme (TBLP), which will now cover all enterprises with a maximum supported loan sum of $5 million, as compared with $1 million before.

Small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) that require support beyond the TBLP can tap on the Enterprise Financing Scheme (EFC)  SME Working Capital Loan, which will see its maximum loan quantum raised to $1 million.

Meanwhile, the maximum loan quantum under the Enterprise Financing Scheme (EFS)  Trade Loan will also be raised to $10 million, with the government also raising its risk-share in such loans to 80 per cent.

In addition, we will work with participating financial institutions to defer capital payments for one year on 4th EFS-Working Capital Loan and the TBLP loans if requested by businesses, said Heng. He noted that these deferments would be subject to assessment by the participating financial institutions.

Another $20 billion worth of loan capital will also be set aside to support good companies with strong capabilities, Heng added.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is also working with banks and insurers to look into helping businesses and individuals facing cash flow challenges with their loan obligations and insurance premium payments.

As the situation is fluid, we will seek to provide help where the credit needs are more acute, said Heng.

Support for specific sectors

Noting that the COVID-19 pandemic will take at least a year to resolve, Heng pointed out that broad swathes of the economy have been hurt  with the worst-affected being Singapores aviation and tourism sectors.

Beyond an enhanced JSS for those working in the aviation line, a $350 million aviation support package will also be introduced to fund measures such as rebates on landing and parking charges, and rental relief for airlines, ground handlers and cargo agents, said Heng.

This will allow Singapore to retain a minimum level of connectivity to the world during the pandemic. This is critical to enable overseas Singaporeans to return home and keep our supply lines for essential goods open, he added.

The JSS enhancements will also be applied to licensed hotels, travel agencies, tourist attractions, cruise terminals and operators, as well as meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions (MICE) venues.

For the tourism sector, a sum of $90 million will also be set aside to help the industry rebound when the time is right, said Heng.

The JSS enhancements will also be applied to licensed hotels, travel agencies, tourist attractions, cruise terminals and operators, as well as meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions (MICE) venues  with the government offsetting 75 per cent of the first $4,600 of monthly wages.

Meanwhile, a $95 million Point-to-Point Support Package will be rolled out to help taxi and private hire car drivers, who have seen their incomes dwindle with falling visitor numbers. Another $55 million will also be put to providing support for the arts and culture sector.

Black swan event

On Thursday morning, the Ministry of Trade and Industry further downgraded Singapores 2020 GDP forecast from a range of between -0.5 per cent and 1.5 per cent, to between -4 per cent and -1 per cent.

Based on advanced GDP estimates, Singapores economy in the first quarter saw a 10.6 per cent quarter-on-quarter contraction, or 2.2 per cent year-on-year. This reversed the 0.6 per cent growth seen in the previous quarter.

In his speech, Heng said Singapore was experiencing a black swan event with the confluence of multiple external shocks. The pandemics impact has also been magnified by an already fragile world economy that has been weakened by the US-China trade conflict and an oil price war.

He noted that, overall, the Resilience Budget measures would raise Singapores overall budget deficit for the 2020 financial year to $39.2 billion, or 7.9 per cent of GDP.

We are able to support this unprecedented deficit, and still remain fiscally sustainable, because we have been disciplined in the use of past reserves, tapping on it only in exceptional circumstances like these, said Heng.

Stay in the know on-the-go: Join Yahoo Singapore's Telegram channel at http://t.me/YahooSingapore

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UN Launches $2 Billion COVID Humanitarian Appeal

By Margaret Besheer March 25, 2020

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed Wednesday for $2 billion to help the world's most vulnerable nations cope with the coronavirus pandemic.

"COVID-19 is menacing the whole of humanity, and so the whole of humanity must fight back," Guterres told reporters in an online news conference. "Individual country responses are not going to be enough."

The funds would assist 40 of the most vulnerable developing countries for the next nine months as they deal with the spread of the potentially deadly respiratory virus.

"The world is only as strong as our weakest health system," Guterres warned. "If we do not act decisively now, I fear the virus will establish a foothold in the most fragile countries, leaving the whole world vulnerable as it continues to circle the planet, paying no mind to borders.

The $2 billion would fund a six-point plan of action. Among its goals are improving public awareness of measures needed to slow the virus's spread, including social distancing and handwashing. Ramping up testing and getting priority treatment to those at highest risk for severe illness is also covered.

The plan also allocates substantial resources for protecting frontline health and humanitarian workers.

"Our message to all countries is clear: heed the warning now," said World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. "Back this plan politically and financially today, and we can save lives and slow the spread of this pandemic. History will judge us on how we responded to the poorest communities in their darkest hour."

The U.N.'s humanitarian office, OCHA, will coordinate the plan, which will bring together existing appeals from the WHO and other U.N. partners.

OCHA chief Mark Lowcock said he is releasing $60 million from his internal emergency fund to kickstart efforts. That is in addition to $15 million he disbursed earlier in the crisis.

He urged wealthier countries to step up in order to protect themselves.

"We are seeing huge economic stimulus plans being developed around the world and that's going to help," Lowcock said. "But it would be a smart strategy and an intelligent strategy for every developed country to spend just a little bit of their money on dealing with this problem in the vulnerable places as well, because that is part of what you need to do if you want to protect yourself against this pandemic."

On Thursday, G20 leaders will hold a virtual meeting since they are unable to meet in person. Secretary-General Guterres wrote to them this week to urge them to come up with a strong economic response package of their own to inject trillions of dollars into the international economy to help stop the pandemic and accelerate the financial recovery from it.

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Alabamas senators voted for an historic stimulus bill. Things improved for Wall Street, but its still a struggle for main street.

Its a lot to keep up with. Heres Alabamas latest economic news -- good and bad. And a few things to know about how swiftly-changing national policies could affect you.

What you need to know tonight

National:

The Senate passed the largest economic stimulus package in American history last night, $2 trillion in total. Its expected to pass the House tomorrow morning and will quickly be signed into law by President Donald Trump.

Link: Whats in the stimulus bill? Will you get a check?

The stock market soared again, officially pulling out of a Bear Market as it continued a three day rise. Investors are clearly thrilled about the stimulus deal but trouble still looms on the horizon. Last week 3.3 million people filed for unemployment, five times higher than the record of about 600,000 set in 1982.

President Trump continues to signal that hed prefer to reopen the country for business sooner rather than later, even as health and economic experts advise against it.

State:

Unemployment claims are also spiking in the state, with 31,000 new claims filed since Sunday -- already three times more than the 9,000 claims filed last week. Honda extended its production shutdown through April 7.

All public K-12 schools have been instructed to move online for the rest of the year or pursue another alternative.

The legislature was scheduled to reconvene today but Speaker Mac McCutcheon postponed the return of the House indefinitely.

Were working with the Department of Public Health, were working with the medical advisers in the state to see at what point in time the curve may flatten, if you will, McCutcheon said. All of those things are coming into play as we make a decision. But right now, we dont have a definite date that well come back and resume business.

Market update:

Dow Open: 21,468.38

Dow Close: 22,552.17 (Up 6.38%%)

In case you missed it:

What were watching

Now that the Senate has passed the stimulus package, well be watching for its passage in the House tomorrow. Then well all be curious to know how it will impact Alabama companies and businesses.

Resources

Coronavirus in Alabama: How many infected; where to get tested; key information you need

Coronavirus in Alabama: How to help, how to get help

What happens if you lose your job due to coronavirus?

What to do if you cant pay your bills

Alabama urging employers to file unemployment claims on employees behalf

COVID-19 COVERAGE RESOURCES: Follow our live updates. Find all of our coronavirus stories. A continuously updated vital information post. A free text-messaging service so you can receive the most urgent coronavirus updates on your cellphone. And ask questions. To sign up, subscribe to Alabama Coronavirus Urgent Alerts. A new weekday newsletter is available. You can subscribe here. Also, download our mobile app where you can receive on-the-go notifications.
Nine doctors have died in the Philippines from the coronavirus, the country's top medical association said Thursday, as hospitals were overwhelmed and medics complained about a lack of protection on the front lines. The announcement of the doctors' deaths heightened fears that the scale of the health crisis in the Philippines is much worse than is being officially reported, with the confirmed virus death toll at just 38. The main island of Luzon, home to 55 million people, is in the second week of a lockdown to contain the spread of the disease, however medics are warning there is a surge in cases. The Philippine Medical Association said Thursday a ninth doctor had died of the virus, and that health workers were not getting enough protection. "If it were up to me, test the frontliners first and test them again after seven days. Doctors could be carriers themselves," Benito Atienza, vice president of the Philippine Medical Association told AFP. Three large Manila hospitals announced Wednesday they had reached full capacity and would no longer accept new coronavirus cases. Hundreds of medical staff are no longer accepting patients because they are undergoing 14-day self-quarantines after suspected exposure, the hospitals said. Just under 2,000 people had been tested in the Philippines as of Tuesday from those with severe symptoms and those considered most vulnerable to COVID-19, such as the elderly, those with life-threatening ailments, and pregnant women.
A man in Rwanda who violated an order to stay at home during the coronavirus pandemic was killed and eaten by a crocodile, according to a report by the BBC on Wednesday.

According to the BBC report, the incident happened in the Nyabarongo river where the man had gone fishing.

The mayor of the southern Kamonyi district told the BBC, He had broken the stay-home rule, hes among very few people here who are not co-operating with the lockdown to stop the [corona]virus."

Rwanda, in eastern Africa, had imposed a lockdown on Sunday. The national has 40 confirmed cases of coronavirus.

MORE CORONAVIRUS NEWS

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Italy has charged nearly 110,000 people for breaking lockdown measures introduced to control its ongoing coronavirus crisis.

As the country continued to record hundreds more deaths each day this week, thousands were still being caught violating measures designed to slow the spread of Covid-19, according to official figures.

More than 8,000 people were reported by authorities on Tuesday  bringing the total number of people reported to 109,964  as the Italian police force checked about 228,000 people in one day to make sure the public were following the measures.

Earlier this week, ministers approved an emergency decree to introduce tougher sanctions for anyone who ignores the lockdown.

Those who violate the containment measures could receive a fine of between 400 (360) and 3,000 (2,700); a significant increase from the previous maximum fine of 206 (187).

In addition, anyone who has been quarantined after testing positive for Covid-19 and intentionally violates the order to stay in their home could face a prison sentence between one to five years, according to the decree.

The stricter measures were introduced after Italy recorded the highest death toll from coronavirus in the world with more than 7,500 reported fatalities, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Centre.

Italy has introduced some of the toughest measures in the world to control Europes worst outbreak, banning nonessential movement within the country and closing all nonessential businesses.

Although the countrys government has said it will extend its quarantine period beyond the original deadline of 3 April,the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, said on Tuesday he was very confident that Italians could go back to some normality before the current state of emergency expires on 31 July.

The state of emergency for six months does not mean restrictions last until 31 July, Mr Conte said.

We are ready to loosen the measures at any moment, we hope very soon.

Italy has recorded nearly 75,000 Covid-19 cases, as of Thursday morning, and is close to becoming the country with the most confirmed cases in the world.

China, which had the first major outbreak of coronavirus earlier this year, has recorded 81,736 cases but has seen very few new cases in recent weeks after it introduced a severe lockdown to contain the virus.

Chinese authorities have begun lifting travel restrictions this week in Hubei province, the area where Covid-19 was first identified.
Minister of Finance Pierre Gramegna, Minister of the Economy Franz Fayot, and Minister for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Lex Delles presented Luxembourg's ambitious stabilisation package this Wednesday.

The coronavirus outbreak has sent shock waves through the world's financial markets - and the Grand Duchy was not spared. The government's stabilisation package is designed to stabilise the national economy and financial system.

The government is set to mobilise 8.8 billion in order to soothe the reeling economy. This amount is synonymous with 14% of Luxembourg's GDP. Minister of Finance Pierre Gramegna explained that the package is hoped to "keep Luxembourg's companies fit."

Four key objectives

The ministers explained that the stabilisation plan boasts four key objectives:

Responding to immediate liquidity requirements

Facing cashflow difficulties

Facilitating corporate borrowing through state support

Maintain employment

The government will try to meet each of these objectives by implementing a number of measures. It was stressed that the measures are as unbureaucratic as possible in order to provide immediate financial relief.

New key measures

The ministers explained that small-sized businesses (counting 9 employees or less) that had to close will receive a direct payment of 5,000 from the state. This amount does not have to be paid back.

Companies (of all sizes) can apply for a financial aid amounting to up to 500,000 to cover their operating expenses. This financial aid has to be paid back eventually.

The government has also found agreements with banks to postpone the reimbursement of existing credits. This should allow businesses to overcome current cashflow difficulties.

Luxembourg will also adopt a state guarantee scheme for new bank loans of companies (a maximum of six years applies). The government has agreed to cover 85% of the risks.

Companies can apply to be exempt from social contributions for the first two quarters of the year.

The short-time working scheme ("chomage partiel") is a key measure to maintain employment and to fight against dismissals, Franz Fayot stressed. As Prime Minister Xavier Bettel explained earlier this week, the state will cover 80% of salaries of employees working for a company that was directly impacted by a government decision.

The state's investment bank SNCI is a key ally in the fight against harsh economic repercussions. The bank will, among other things, provide up to 600 million in loans to ailing companies.

Franz Fayot stressed that the government would go the extra mile to make sure that no company or employee is left out in the rain. The stabilisation package may be adapted depending on future developments and evaluations.
We are not done looking for those responsible.

This was the warning given by the Head of the Special Operations Response Team (SORT) Supt Roger Alexander yesterday during the Beyond the Tape TV programme on TV6.

Earlier in the day, Alexander was part of several units which went searching for kidnap victim Mattie Maraj in the eastern division.
Shaheen Bagh protestors on Wednesday wrote a letter to the Supreme Court seeking an investigation into alleged forcible removal and destruction of their protest site on 24 March and have sought a direction from the apex court for citizens' rights.

New Delhi: Shaheen Bagh protestors on Wednesday wrote a letter to the Supreme Court seeking an investigation into alleged "forcible removal and destruction" of their protest site on 24 March and have sought a direction from the apex court for citizens' rights.

The Shaheen Bagh protestors wrote the letter through the court-appointed interlocutors, about "forcible and vindictive removal" of the protest site at Shaheen Bagh on the morning of 24 March, 2020, and the subsequent detention of "peaceful, innocent protesters and volunteers".

"While we understand the need for the stricter imposition of curfew and enforcement of pertinent restrictions, the ruthless dismantling of the markers of our physical protest, especially the very structures whose placement is in question in a matter that is sub-judice in the SC," the protestors said in the letter.

A copy of the letter has been accessed by ANI. "We would like to reiterate here on record that 23 March was designated as the next date of hearing in the SC regarding the road closure around Shaheen Bagh and a fair discussion around reaching some mutually convenient solution was to be expected," the letter stated.

"It is extremely disheartening and faith-rattling to see the unrestrained, almost vindictive force that has been used against our site and the legacy we struggled to create, in spite of these very matters being under the review and scrutiny of the Supreme Court," the letter further stated.

Delhi: Delhi Police clears the protest site in Shaheen Bagh area, amid complete lockdown in the national capital, in wake of #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/4IYvGCqyFL  ANI (@ANI) March 24, 2020

"In fact, the police also brought along young civilian men in large numbers to our site (some on tractors) to assist with this forced dismantling", the letter claimed.

"This is deeply unsettling and we demand a fair probe into the involvement of all the unidentified, non-designated and non-police personnel present with the police forces at Shaheen Bagh between the hours of 6-10 am on 24 March4, 2020, the letter stated.

"We would also like to ask the Court whether it will grant us any protection during the proceeding of this case, seeing as how the Delhi Police has no regard for this matter being sub judice in the top court of our nation? We have come a long distance in our fight against injustice. We do realise that our efforts have birthed practical, tangible sources of dissent in the system itself," the letter stated.

Amid a COVID-19 lockdown, Delhi Police on Tuesday cleared the Shaheen Bagh protest site where people were agitating against the Citizenship Amendment Act. A few protesters were also detained for "unlawful assembly" during the lockdown.

"People at the protest site in Shaheen Bagh were requested today to clear the site as lockdown has been imposed. But after they refused, the action was taken against violators as the assembly was unlawful. Protest site has been cleared. Some protestors have been detained," said RP Meena, DCP South-East district.

Advocate Amit Sahni, who filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking clearance of the anti-CAA protest site in Shaheen Bagh, welcomed Delhi Police's move to clear the site on Tuesday and said that it has come as a great relief.
A 91-year-old greeter at an Arkansas church where 34 congregants were infected by coronavirus has died.

William Bill Barton died at 8am on Tuesday, making him the second Covid-19-related death in Arkansas.

According to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Mr Barton was a greeter at Greers Ferry First Assembly church, where 34 members have tested positive for coronavirus.

Mr Bartons death comes days after the churchs pastor, Mark Palenske, issued a stark warning, advising people to take the threat of the virus seriously. Both he and his wife were infected.

We were definitely sick, but the testing was not available. Not for us and not for dozens of us in the church, he wrote. We pushed the envelope a little with some local medical help in the hope that our concerns could be set aside. One local doctor had a very small number of commercial tests and the rest is history, I suppose.

Recommended Arkansas pastor issues warning after surge in coronavirus cases

He said he and his wife, Dena, experienced headaches, body aches, lethargy, chills, sweating and nausea. He described his wife having a very scary morning where she experienced something akin to a seizure and had to be hospitalised.

Since then, the couple has recovered somewhat and are resting back at their home.

In the post, he praises medical workers and takes aim at acts of stubborn independence that can have far reaching effects on someone elses life.

Respect and compassion for the people around us must dominate our self-discipline, he wrote.

Mr Palenske believes he and many members of his congregation were exposed to the virus during a childrens ministry event at the church in the early days of its appearance in the US. He said that though the church had taken precautions and cancelled many events, the childrens event occurred before the severity of the virus was apparent.

William "Bill" Barton died Tuesday, 24 March after being infected by the coronavirus. (Facebook)

While Mr Palenske and most other faith leaders are urging their membership to follow health guidelines, there are some who have refused to cancel their services despite the risk of mass infection.

A Louisiana pastor, Tony Spell, has defied orders from the state to suspend his church services, arguing that his church is essential and that by having his services outdoors and asking parishioners to observe social distancing guidelines enough precaution has been taken.

However, photos from Mr Spells church services show people crowded under tents well within six feet of each other.

If they close every door in this city, then I will close my doors, he said. But you cant say the retailers are essential but the church is not. That is a persecution of the faith.

Though Mr Spell has garnered the most media attention for unapologetically holding services - other Christians have condemned him and a petition to have him arrested has been circulating - hes not the only pastor who has defied orders.

Tom Walters, pastor of Word of Life church in Pennsylvania, apologised for defying government recommendations against large group gatherings.

Pittsburghs Action 4 News reported the group held a a large church service on Sunday.

Mr Walters said he felt led to hold the service but apologised nonetheless.

Please believe me when I say that it was not out of arrogance or defiance, but solely for the purpose of praying for our churches, communities, and nation, he said. We certainly want to be a blessing to our community and have certainly tried to be in years gone by. My heart was so heavy to experience the amount of hateful comments we received, but I guess I can understand.

Other pastors have been less repentant.

Greg Locke of Global Vision Bible Church in Tennessee insists his church will stay open during the coronavirus lockdowns. According to the Christian Post, Mr Locke claims Facebook deleted one of his church announcements because it violated the sites policy on Covid-19 information.

Im beyond fired up at this point!!! Yall need to WAKE UP. Facebook removed my service announcement post and said to keep the church open was promoting a crime. WE ARE NOT CLOSING!!! he wrote on Twitter.

Mr Lockes Twitter profile claims he is an outspoken pastor and that he refuses to bow to the politically correct idol of our culture.

He has recently promoted the Twitter hashtag #DemocratsHateAmerica and called an attempt by Senate Democrats to include funding for Planned Parenthood in a coronavirus stimulus bill crack-smoking demonism.

In an interview with The Tennessean, Mr Locke claimed his church was an essential service.

Its important for us to remain open. Its not because were trying to prove a point, he said.

Mr Locke said the church conducted extra cleaning before their most recent service and provided hand sanitising stations and face masks for congregants.

We want people to know we are a clean environment, were a safe environment and we want people to know that were a necessity, were an essential in the community, he said.

The church also offers their services via livestream.
The third accused person in the alleged $4million National Communications Authority (NCA ) scandal, Dr Nana Owusu Ensaw, has been acquitted and discharged by the Court of Appeal.



Dr Ensaw, who is the Akuapem North Municipal Director of Health and a former board member of the NCA, became a free man yesterday after a three-member panel of the second-highest court of the land upheld his appeal challenging the trial High Courts dismissal of his submission of no case.



The three-member panel was presided over by Justice Victor Ofoe, with Justices Suurbaareh, and Justice Bright Mensah as the members



Per the Court of Appeals decision, Dr Ensaw ought not to have been called upon by the trial High Court to open his defence because according to the court, the prosecution failed to establish a prima facie case against him.



With the Court of Appeal upholding his appeal, Dr Ensaw has been acquitted and discharged and, therefore, when the High Court delivers its judgement on the case on May 12, 2020, his name is expected to be struck out as acquitted and discharged.



However, the Attorney-General (A-G) has the option of appealing against the decision of the Court of Appeal at the Supreme Court.



Alleged embezzlement



The five accused persons  Dr Ensaw, William Matthew Tetteh Tevie, a former Director-General of the NCA; Eugene Baffoe-Bonnie, a former Board Chairman of the NCA; Alhaji Salifu Mimina Osman, a former Deputy National Security Coordinator, and George Derek Oppong, a businessman  have been accused of stealing $3 million out of $4 million of state funds said to be for the purchase of a cybersecurity surveillance equipment, known as the Pegasus machine, for the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), which was sponsored by the NCA.



The accused persons are charged with diverse counts of wilfully causing financial loss to the state, stealing, conspiracy, money laundering, among other charges.



They have pleaded not guilty to all the charges and are currently on bail in the sum of $1 million each.



Submission of no case



On May 23, 2019, the trial High Court judge, Justice Eric Kyei- Baffour, who is currently a Justice of the Court of Appeal, dismissed a submission of no case filed by the five accused persons



He held that the prosecution had established a prima facie case against Ensaw, Eugene Baffoe-Bonnie; the former Board Chair of the NCA , William Tetteh Tevie; former Director-General of the NCA; a former board member; Alhaji Salifu Mimina Osman, a former Deputy National Security Coordinator, and a businessman, George Derek Oppong.



He, therefore, ordered the accused persons to open their defence on the respective charges levelled against them.



Although Justice Kyei Baffour discharged Dr Ensaw on four counts namely conspiracy, willfully causing financial loss to the state, using public office for profit and intentionally misapplying public property, he held that the prosecution had established a prima facie case against him on two counts- money laundering and stealing.



Justice Kyei Baffour, therefore, ordered Dr Ensaw to open his defence on the two charges.



Not happy with the courts decision, all the accused persons appealed against Justice Kyei Baffours ruling for them to open their defence.



Prosecutions facts



The said alleged scandal is said to have happened in 2016.



Per the facts of the case, Baffoe-Bonnie, Tevie and Osman were allegedly aided by a private citizen, Oppong, to engage in the act.



According to the state, the previous administration had contracted an Israeli company, NSO Group Technology Limited, to supply listening equipment at a cost of $6 million to enable the authorities to monitor conversations of persons suspected to be engaged in terror activities.



A local agent, Infraloks Development Limited, also charged $2 million to facilitate the transaction, bringing the total sum to $8 million.



The facts stated that the National Security did not have the money to fund the transaction, and for that reason the NCA, which has supervisory jurisdiction over the use of such equipment, was asked to fund the project.



It said $4 million was withdrawn from the accounts of the NCA and $1 million out of the withdrawn amount deposited into the account of the Israeli company.



According to the state, the remaining $3 million was lodged in the account of Oppong, who acted as a representative of the local agents, Infraloks Development Ltd.



Osman is alleged to have fronted for the entire deal.



The state said the accused persons later laundered the amount for their private benefit.

Source: Daily Graphic









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The novel coronavirus undoubtedly threatens the survival of many businesses globally.

But it is also a time some businesses are cashing-in. For instance, those producing hand sanitizers, liquid soaps, face masks, wipes and gloves are making huge gains due to a high demand for these products that serve as protective gears against the disease.

At Kumasi in the Ashanti Region, there's a rush by people for Veronica buckets which are mostly used for hand-washing.

Veronica Buckets, comprising of a bucket and a basin on top of a wooden stand, are placed outside many public places for quick and easy sanitation.

This one-stop-shop of soap and running water, accessible to people at various public places, is a vital and simple step in saving lives. In times of a pandemic like the coronavirus, they're very useful in countries like Ghana where the taps do not flow constantly, and are not in every home or public space.

Checks by Citi Business News at some vending points within the Ashanti regional capital showed that more people; both individuals and institutions, continue to purchase the plastic containers. One of the sellers, Faisal Razak, confirmed that market has been good in these past few days.

Due to the coronavirus, we started making something extraordinary in such a way that they can pull water through the tap in a very simple way. We have different sizes. A veronica bucket that takes 100 liters cost GHS85:00, and we have 80 liters for GHS80:00, and we have different sizes. Depending on the size we add the tap to it for you and charge you a normal price. Today for instance I have sold 300 of the buckets. The demand is going very well, they're really patronizing, and we want everyone to have some prevent the disease.

Another seller, Henry Amankwah, confirmed to Citi Business News that patronage has increased.

At first, people didn't buy more of these buckets, but since they announced the measures for protection, business is really going well. I have GHS60:00, GHS65:00 and GHS75:00 cedis with the tap fixed on them.

Some workers were seen busily fixing the taps on the plastic containers to meet the rise in demand.

As the public is highly encouraged to frequently wash their hands, most homes, offices and other public places have the Veronica Buckets placed at vantage points to ensure that people adhere to the directive.

Some buyers complained about the prices of the buckets, but said they had no option than to purchase them.

I bought the bucket because we are washing our hands with soap and clean running water. I bought mine for GHS40, although I wish they sell it at GHS30:00 so that more people can buy it.

Another buyer said I came to buy this container because of the sickness. At first it used to be GHS30:00 but now they are selling it at GHS30:00.

The price is manageable; I bought mine for GHS30:00 because I manage a public toilet facility and people need to use their hands another buyer said.

But one of the vendors, Faisal Razak vendor, says the prices of the buckets are reasonable and fair.

Some are complaining about the price; but we've been explaining to them that we're using quality products. After buying the buckets and the taps, I have also engaged people who fix them for me and I pay them, so in the end I make just little profit. We're pricing it in such a way that everyone can buy some he noted.

citinewsroom
The import and export activities in Tanger-Med port continue as usual, but in view of the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, it has been proceeded to the tightening of health and sanitary control of professional drivers of international road transport, in accordance with the health emergency decreed in Morocco.

All the services of the Tangier-Med port authority are operational, be it the harbor masters office, towing or mooring, to ensure sea calls in the best conditions, said the director of the Tangier-Med Port Passenger, Kamal Lakhmas, in a press statement wednesday.

Port activities at Tangier-Med port are continuing in a normal manner, including in import/export and transshipment container traffic, TIR truck flows, liquid and solid bulk traffic, all in compliance with the regulations in force, Kamal Lakhmas added. The entire port community is mobilized to ensure smooth import-export flows for the needs of the Kingdom and transshipment for global flows.

In this sense, he said the Tangier-Med port and its partners have put in place a non-stop plan to ensure port operations around the clock, 7 days a week.

In addition, Lakhmas noted, the entire port community, including partners and local authorities, are informed of all required hygiene and sanitary barrier measures recommended by the Ministry of Health to preserve safety throughout all operations at the port.

He hailed the commitment of all stakeholders to ensure the continuity of port operations, maintain a safe and healthy working environment, and guarantee national and international supply chains.

For his part, the head of the sanitary control service of Tangier-Med and head of the sanitary control services at the level of Tangier-Tetouan-Al Hoceima, Abderrahim Rachdi, indicated that the service monitors and controls the health condition of all professional drivers working in international road transport and passing through the maritime line Tangier-Med-Algesiras.

The control measures at the port were tightened after Moroccos decision to suspend maritime passenger transport links as part of preventive measures to fight the spread of Covid-19.

Besides the checking of professional drivers health, trucks are sanitized, Rachdi said, adding his department also conducts awareness campaigns among professional drivers on preventive measures to avoid contamination by the virus.
NBU sells nearly $11 mln on Thurdsay to support hryvnia

22:40, 26.03.20 293

Ukraine's international reserves now amount to about $25 billion.
A U.S. cybersecurity firm said Wednesday it has detected a surge in new cyberspying by a suspected Chinese group dating back to late January, when coronavirus was starting to spread outside China.

FireEye Inc. said in a report it had spotted a spike in activity from a hacking group it dubs "APT41" that began on Jan. 20 and targeted more than 75 of its customers, from manufacturers and media companies to healthcare organizations and nonprofits.

There were "multiple possible explanations" for the spike in activity, said FireEye Security Architect Christopher Glyer, pointing to long-simmering tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade and more recent clashes over the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed more than 17,000 people since late last year.

The report said it was "one of the broadest campaigns by a Chinese cyber espionage actor we have observed in recent years."

FireEye declined to identify the affected customers. The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not directly address FireEye's allegations but said in a statement that China was "a victim of cybercrime and cyberattack." The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined comment.
The nationwide lockdown to curtail the spread of deadly coronavirus has led to the shortage of medicine in Ludhiana.

Serpentine queue of residents was witnessed outside the pharmacy of Dayanand Medical College and Hospital.

Arjun, a resident of Amarpura, whose father was discharged on Thursday from the civil hospital, Ludhiana, said that he could find only some medicines at the drug store in the hospital.

I was told that the remaining medicines will be available at Christian Medical College and Hospital (CMC&H). But cops at a Naka told me to go back and buy medicine tomorrow (Friday). I do not know what to do, said Arjun.

A mask which is costing around 5 to the manufacturer is being sold for anything between 20 to 50. I tried to order something online, but it was not delivered. I had to actually look for multiple medicines for my mother, who was treated for breast cancer and my father, who takes medicines for diabetes and blood pressure, said Vishal, a resident of Civil Line.

While a woman identified as Pinki from Bhattian area of the city said that she somehow managed to visit the hospital despite curfew. l collapsed in front of the OPD reception counter at the civil hospital and was left unattended.

I was exhausted and began to feel giddy. I collapsed. I do not know what happened later, said Pinki.

Ludhiana District Chemist Association president GS Chawla blamed the police for the problem.

Police is being overly strict on us. They are posing a lot of problem in the supply chain. Our delivery boys are being stopped at police nakas. Some of them are treated badly. We are working for the society. A diabetic, hypertensive, all these people need regular supply of medicines. But if police continue to harass us, we will not be able to match the demand, said Chawla.

He said that around 400 wholesaler and 2500 retailers chemists are operating in the city.

Some respite for city residents

Zonal Licensing Authority (ZLA) Kulwinder Singh said that a meeting was conducted with the officials of the administration on Thursday, following which 150 chemists, 30 wholesalers in Pindi Street along with 150 deliverymen were issued curfew passes. Besides, the government has put a cap on masks and no chemist could sell the three layer facemask for over 16, he said.

700-litre sanitiser for district health dept

ZLA Kulwinder Singh said that 700-litre sanitizer has been provided to the health department of Ludhiana. It will be used for disinfecting the hospitals and other buildings which are vulnerable to infection.
MINNEAPOLIS - U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchars husband has been released from a hospital where he was being treated for low oxygen and pneumonia as a result of the coronavirus, the senator said Thursday.

Klobuchar, a former Democratic presidential candidate, said in a statement that her husband, John Bessler, took a good turn, was just released and is now recovering at home.

Thanks to those who cared for him and for all front line health care workers, she said. Klobuchar announced Monday that Bessler has the coronavirus and was admitted to a Virginia hospital where he was placed on oxygen, but not a ventilator.

Bessler, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, became ill when he was in Washington and Klobuchar was in Minnesota, she said. He initially thought he had a cold, but quarantined himself immediately anyway. He got tested after he began coughing up blood, and was admitted to the hospital, where he was put on oxygen but not a ventilator.

Klobuchar said earlier this week that she and Bessler had been in different places and she was outside the 14-day window for getting sick, so her doctor advised her not to get tested herself.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia.

Klobuchar said Monday that it took five days for Bessler to be tested, noting that such delays are a problem facing many.

Bessler has taught at the University of Baltimore School of Law since 2009. According to a bio on the universitys website, he teaches courses in civil procedure, contracts, capital punishment, international human rights law and other topics. He is also an author.

During Klobuchars campaign for president, he was often by her side. When Klobuchar was in Washington during impeachment proceedings and couldnt campaign in Iowa herself, Bessler and the couples daughter acted as her surrogates, and met with countless Iowa voters on her behalf.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 20:25:12|Editor: huaxia

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ISTANBUL, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The Turkish coast guard has rescued at least 189 illegal immigrants in six separate incidents off Turkey's Aegean coast, the coast guard announced on its website during the last three days.

Five of the incidents happened when Greek coast guard teams pushed the boats carrying migrants to several Greek islands on the Aegean Sea back to Turkey, according to the announcements.

In one incident, 31 migrants were rescued off the Datca district in the southwestern province of Mugla after they were put on a small lifeboat by the Greek coast guard at the Simi island and left to be dragged on the sea.

In another one that happened off the western province of Izmir, the Turkish teams saved 29 refugees in three inflatable boats which were tied to each other by Greek coast guard teams.

The Turkish guard also saved 24 migrants off Izmir when their inflatable boat was stranded at sea over an engine failure.

The Aegean Sea was once the main route for migrants trying to sneak into Europe via Turkey. A deal was signed between Ankara and the European Union in March 2016 to curb the flow of illegal immigration.

As part of the agreement, Turkish authorities stopped a total of 60,802 illegal immigrants from reaching Greece via Turkey last year, according to figures released by the Turkish coast guard.

However, the Turkish government last month decided to allow the refugees to cross the Aegean Sea to Greece after it said it would no longer cope with the burden of over 3.7 million refugees in the country.

But later, following the order of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the coast guard announced that the sea was closed to all passages.

Since the beginning of this year, the force said a total of 8,836 illegal immigrants have been rescued or apprehended on the Aegean Sea on their way to Greek islands, up from 4,261 in 2019.
First, newspaper health reporter, Donald McNeil writes: "If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days, while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt."

Dear Dave: My company has recently mandated that I ask as many of my workers as possible to work from home. My first reaction was, "Thats it. I cant do my job any longer. I will be losing a handle on what my employees are doing." However, I am delightfully surprised to find that my remote workers have been quite active and productive. Now, my concern is finding ways to keep them productive, so they dont burn out or lose interest. Any ideas would help. Thanks.  S

Dear S:

It appears that the "cave mentality" we are being asked to institute must also be meshed with our need to be social and productive. Companies have shifted gears and are seeking new and better ways to have workers work from home and not risk picking up the coronavirus. This makes sense, but has sprouted several different kinds of anxieties.

I think that everywhere you and your team turn, there will be negative stories and reports about surviving the pandemic. And to a large extent, companies are also teaching their managers how to manage and inspire their remote employees to be and stay engaged. The freedom of working from home is a blessing to many, but a threat to many others. As we all know, people may not be afraid of the sweeping changes; only the fact that they will need to change.

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It also appears that scare tactics sell more newspapers and Social Media apps than talking to your cat. My sympathy to all cat talkers out there. But we have definitely learned to interpret [the news] as a fear-inducing medium. I keep thinking to myself, when news commentators are presenting the news on TV, "Go ahead and lie to me  for God's sake I need something besides predictions of my demise." Sadly, your employees may share my attitude.

Accordingly. I have taken a double secret probation oath to protect my fragile psyche by immediately shutting off or moving away from the barrage of coronavirus negative stories and frightening warnings that are hopping out of my TV and computer screen at me. I am not in denial  I dont think  but I am sick and tired of hearing that if I dont wash my hands every 20 minutes, I may as well just cash it all in and jump in the hole. I hope your employees have taken the same pledge.

Some ideas for you

I am sure your future remote workers will be concerned about  no, they will just plain worry about  whether or not they can be effective at home and that they wont be singled out as one of the bottom 20 percent of the legions of remote workers that are "just not getting it and are failures." Isolation does weird things to the mind and "Covid-cabin-fever" can cause us to hide on our couches waiting for the boogie man to go away. Reassure those who are unsure but deserve assurance.

This means that communication is critical for establishing and maintaining engagement with any employee, not just the ones who work remotely for you. But keeping in touch with remote workers can sometimes feel  for both you and the workers  forced, intrusive, and quite difficult. Because you may feel like you need to contact them every hour on the hour, your workers will feel like they are being pestered, untrusted, and violated.

Thats why its important to make sure you contact your workers  or have them contact you  only when there is something vital and important to be said. Decades ago, I had a manager who would call me every Sunday night at 7 p.m., asking me what I was going to do that next week. And he was a SOB, too, but that is a different story. I dreaded the calls and promised myself that I would never manage that way. I would stay in touch, but not be an obstinate pest. That gave them space and pride.

Bridget Miller, a writer for HR Management and Compliance says that keeping employees engaged can help keep them satisfied and make them less likely to leave your organization. But although this is true for all employees, it might require different tactics for remote workers. She suggests that managers should stay involved with what their remote employees are doing, but  most importantly  help them realize that they own their work and can be trusted to use established methods  or invent acceptable ways  to complete their work.

Finally, be sure goals are clearly communicated  your remote workers must know every day what they need to do, so they can use their skills and knowledge to reach their goals. Being away from the team can make remote employees unsure of whether their contributions are impacting the team or various projects. Clearly communicating goals and giving them frequent feedback can provide assurance that their role is valued and that they are adding to the output of the team.
Study knocks down some theories for the origin of a mysterious light signature that has puzzled physicists for years

So far, the only direct evidence we have for the existence of dark matter is through gravity-based effects on the matter we can see. And these gravitational effects are so pronounced that we know it must make up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe.

But we know little else about dark matter, including whether it is made up of as-yet-undiscovered particles.

There are many competing theories for the composition and properties of dark matter, and for whether dark matter has any visible markers to at last unmask it.

Among the theorized dark matter particle candidates are WIMPs (weakly interactive massive particles), axions, and sterile neutrinos - and physicists have searched for each type using a variety of Earth and space-based instruments and methods.

Nearly 20 years ago, physicists suggested that the theorized sterile neutrino form of dark matter could be responsible for emitting light at a specific energy as its particles decay away in space, and in 2014 a study detailed a light signature, called the "3.5 keV line," found in very large galaxy clusters - keV is a measure of energy that represents a thousand electron volts or kilo electron volts.

The study theorized that this line, which had no confirmed source, could be the smoking gun for dark matter decay that scientists had been searching for.

But a new study by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Berkeley, and the University of Michigan - publishing this week in the journal Science (see an arXiv.org preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.06976) - concludes that this explanation of sterile neutrino decay is now essentially ruled out as the source of this line.

"Our finding does not mean that the dark matter is not a sterile neutrino, but it means that ... there is no experimental evidence to-date that points towards its existence," said Benjamin Safdi, a study co-author and an assistant professor of physics at the University of Michigan.

The researchers' approach, which analyzed X-ray telescope observations of dark places within our own galaxy where dark matter was expected, did not find evidence of the 3.5 keV line.

"Our limits are so strong that they are likely to cause difficulty for any simple models of dark matter," said Nicholas Rodd, study co-author and a physicist affiliated with the Berkeley Lab theory group and the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, which has faculty members from UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab. Rodd has been working with Safdi for several years in researching possible visible manifestations of dark matter in space.

The technique the researchers developed, which is detailed in the latest study, also has the potential to analyze, with extreme sensitivity, other possible dark matter signatures in space.

"While this work does, unfortunately, throw cold water on what looked like might have been the first evidence for the microscopic nature of dark matter, it does open up a whole new approach to looking for dark matter which could lead to a discovery in the near future," Safdi said.

Instead of looking at other galaxies and galaxy clusters - places expected to be especially rich in dark matter - for signs of this 3.5 keV line, the researchers analyzed data from more than 20 years' worth of X-ray telescope images of "empty" space within our own Milky Way galaxy where you might expect the presence of dark matter but nothing else.

Based on observed gravitational effects associated with dark matter, galaxies including our own Milky Way galaxy are expected to be surrounded by so-called halos of dark matter. Such halos would explain observations showing that objects nearer to a galaxy's center orbit as the same speed as objects at the outskirts, which defies explanation if you only take into account visible matter.

"Everywhere we look, there should be some flux of dark matter from the Milky Way halo," Rodd said, owing to our solar system's location in the galaxy. "We exploited the fact that we live in a halo of dark matter" in the study.

Christopher Dessert, a study co-author who is a physics researcher and Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, said galaxy clusters where the 3.5 keV line has been observed also have large background signals, which serve as noise in observations and can make it difficult to pinpoint specific signals that may be associated with dark matter.

"The reason why we're looking through the galactic dark matter halo of our Milky Way galaxy is that the background is much lower," Dessert said.

The researchers used data from the XMM-Newton (X-ray Multi-Mirror) mission, a space-based X-ray telescope launched in 1999 by the European Space Agency. They restricted the data they used to a collection of images from about 800 so-called "blank sky" regions in space that were sampled within 5 to 45 degrees of the Milky Way's galactic center - areas expected to have higher concentrations of dark matter.

They compared their own analysis to others' analyses that were based on observations of regions in space thought to be rich in dark matter, such as the Perseus Cluster of galaxies and the Andromeda Galaxy.

Rodd said the team's analysis technique could be used to reanalyze data taken from other X-ray telescopes' observations to scan in high detail for other light signals emitted across a far broader range of energies.

"How can we extend this technique to look at more cases?" Rodd said. "There are tons of other datasets out there that we don't say anything about in this study. If you are looking generically for dark-matter decay and you want to have more sensitivity, this is the way. This is a general tool that anyone searching for dark matter can use."

###

Researchers in the study were supported by the DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program and the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley. The research was supported by Advanced Research Computing at the University of Michigan.

Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 13 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab's facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
PORTSMOUTH, Ohio  A former city councilman and practicing defense attorney rumored to be a player in a sex trafficking ring was detained by police while officials searched his home Wednesday morning

The streets surrounding Michael Mearan's home near the Scioto County Courthouse were blocked by police vehicles and flooded with police personnel.

Mearan sat on his front porch while police searched his home, then drove from the scene. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost accompanied police.

Attempts to reach Mearan for comment were unsuccessful.

Portsmouth police detectives began looking into Mearan in late 2018, about the same time the Enquirer began reporting on rumors of sex trafficking in this southern Ohio city.

After the Enquirer published the results of its investigation in March, agents with the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation became involved.

The streets surrounding Michael Mearan's home near the Scioto County Courthouse in Ohio are blocked by police vehicles and flooded with police personnel March 25.

The prosecution is handled by Angela Canepa at the state attorney generals office of special prosecutions.

Ten women said they worked as prostitutes for Mearan, and several of them said they traveled to numerous states to have money for sex at his behest.

Trapped and trafficked: Officials in small Ohio town accused of sex trafficking underage girls

The women told the Enquirer that Mearans operation included some of the most powerful men in Scioto County as customers and participants. One said she slept with a former police chief for money.

Three others said they were approached by Mearan or others to perform sexual favors for now-retired Scioto County Common Pleas Court Judge William Marshall in exchange for lighter sentences in their criminal cases.

Marshall was suspended from practicing law after interfering in his daughters speeding ticket case. His family tried to take control of his personal affairs in court, saying he was a severe alcoholic and had gone to work as a judge while drunk.

That opened an investigation by the Ohio Public Defenders office into Marshalls conduct and whether the results in as many as 3,000 criminal cases he oversaw should be reexamined.

Story continues

Drugs, sex trafficking and missing women: Small Ohio town haunted by dark allegations

The state's investigation reflects what was initially outlined in a sealed federal wiretap affidavit issued as part of a separate Drug Enforcement Administration investigation several years ago.

Police surround former city councilman Michael Mearan's home in Portsmouth, Ohio, on March 25, 2020.

That document, obtained by the Enquirer in early 2018, includes accounts of Mearan sending women to Florida and other states to have sex for money.

That investigation resulted in eight drug convictions, but Mearan was not charged. The DEA said it handed any notes on Mearan over to the FBI, and it is not clear what happened after that.

The family of Megan Lancaster, a Portsmouth prostitute who went missing in 2013, has worked for years to get answers about her disappearance, including whether Mearan is connected.

We hope that it brings answers and justice to all the girls, whether hes trafficked them or had a past with them at all, Kadie Lancaster, Megan's sister-in-law, said. "Of course, we pray to God this brings Megan home.

If you or someone you know needs help:

National Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-888-373-7888

Drug Helpline: 1-888-633-3239

Follow Liz Dufour, Bob Strickley and Kate Murphy on Twitter: @ldufour, @rjstrickleyjr and @KateMurphyNews

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Sex trafficking: Home of former Portsmouth, Ohio, councilman raided
All City of Midland buildings and facilities are now closed to the public through April 13, including City Hall, the Municipal Service Center, the water treatment plant, the wastewater treatment plant, the Law Enforcement Center, and all Midland Fire Department stations. In addition to these new closures, the following previously-announced closures and service changes will remain in effect until Monday, April 6: the Grace A. Dow Memorial Library and Midland Civic Arena will remain closed to the public; rental certification inspections through the Building Department are postponed; and visitors to Washington Woods and Riverside Place senior housing complexes are limited to essential care providers only. During these closures, doors to city facilities will be locked. Individual public access may be allowed in extenuating circumstances, but by appointment only.

The following service changes will be implemented:

 The sanitary landfill will be closed to residential customers. Commercial customers may continue to utilize the facility as needed.

 The start date for spring yard waste collection is postponed through Monday, April 13.

 Monthly brush collection is suspended through Monday, April 13.

 Dial-A-Ride Transportation will operate normal phone and bus service hours to provide rides for essential travel only.

 Water service installations are postponed through Monday, April 13.

 Building permits and inspection services will be limited to emergency needs only.

 All public meetings of all city boards, commissions, and committees have been cancelled through April 14. A decision regarding the scheduled meeting of the Midland City Council on April 13 will be announced at a later date.

The Midland Fire Department has suspended all station tours, fire prevention education programs, and non-emergency services until further notice. Visitors outside of fire department personnel's immediate families will not be permitted at the city's three fire stations. Emergency response will be provided as normal.

City of Midland rental certification inspections have been suspended through at least Monday, April 6. Affected property owners will be contacted by Midland City Building Department staff to reschedule any pending inspections.

Senior Services has closed or limited a number of its services for the next several weeks, including the five Activity and Dining Centers and all activities, classes, clinics and events for the next eight weeks. They hope to resume normal operations beginning Monday, May 11.

The Midland County Register of Deeds office closed to public access.

From the Catholic Diocese of Saginaw: Holy Week celebrations will not be offered publicly this year in the Diocese of Saginaw. Visit the diocesan website, www.saginaw.org, where you can watch daily Mass, soon find ideas about celebrating Holy Week and Easter at home, sign up to receive our email updates and more.

Due to K-12 school closures and large-event restrictions in place amid the COVID-19 virus pandemic, the April 18 competition day event for the 2019-20 A.H. Nickless Innovation Award competition has been postponed until further notice.

The April 26 Midland Community Orchestra concert has been cancelled.

The Chippewa Nature Center canceled multiple events including: Spring Break Mini-Day Camp for March 30-April 2 and Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour for April 3-4.

A series of lectures and concerts by Midland pianist and teacher George Fee were postponed until the fall. They were "Chopin: Poet of the Piano;" "Franz Liszt: Spiritual Seeker;" and "Claude DeBussy: Seeker of the Inexpressible."

The Midland Business Alliance has decided to postpone all events through Friday, April 3, which includes April WakeUp! Midland for April 3.

The Leadership Midland Alumni Association Night at Dow Diamond that was scheduled for April 20 is also canceled.

Midland Center for the Arts canceled the following: Echo in the Canyon, a Matrix: Midland film; Comedy Night in April; Uncorked canceled through April; and Interlochen's The Sleeping Beauty.
Four hours after issuing an order for the police personnel, listing essential service providers allowed to operate in the city amid the lockdown orders, the Delhi Police withdrew it with immediate effect without citing any reason. However, it was mentioned that revised instructions will be issued and all traffic, police picket and beat staff will be briefed about the fresh orders, likely to be issued by late night or Friday morning.

The first order, which was issued and shared on various official WhatsApp groups around 10.30am, directed the police personnel deployed on ground to allow persons and vehicles engaged in essential services to operate in Delhi and listed names of retailers and online delivery services that should be allowed to function.

Zomato, Flipkart, Amazon, 24Seven, Blue Dart, DTDC, Wow Express, Swiggy, Grofers, BigBasket, MilkBaasket, Dunzo, Big Bazaar, Snapdeal, Licious, Medlife, Pharmeasy, UrbanClap, Ninjacart, Honsa Conumer Pvt. Limited, Healthians Diagnostics, Delhivery Pvt Limited, Nutrimoo Milk Dairy, More Retail Limited, Easyday, Jabong, Myntra, Spencers, Reliance Fresh, Jubilant Food Works, Foodpanda, Faasos, Pizza Hut, Uber Eats, Needs Supermart Pvt Limited, 1MG, Dr. Lal Path Labs, Max-Path, Satvacart and Iifco, among others were listed.

Around 2.30pm, the police issued a statement, withdrawing their previous orders. A police officer, who asked not to be named, said, Essential supplies would continue and a uniform order across states would be issued soon. Till the new order is passed, all essential service providers will be allowed to function.

On Wednesday, the Delhi Police held a meeting with representatives of e-commerce platforms to ensure uninterrupted supply of essential goods. The police have also set up a platform on WhatsApp for e-commerce websites to get their issues resolved and delivery agents were issued passes for free movement.
The greatest writers block Ive felt in years was at the end of my first coronavirus email.

For the past decade-plus, my written correspondence to strangers and acquaintances has ended with a variation of the same chipper response: Hope youre having a great Wednesday! Hope youre having a great week! Hope youre having a great 2020!

Staring at the screen, I realized quickly, I no longer have a clue how to start and finish an email.

The rules of casual correspondence have seemingly been upended in the recent weeks, when the background noise of COVID-19 was replaced by alarm bells, including shelter-in-place orders, supply shortages and a nationwide brace for impact.

When writing to a stranger, its hard to know where to start. Normal go-to sign-ons and sign-offs to emails (Happy Wednesday!; Have a great day!) seemed oblivious at best, and at worst make the sender sound vaguely unhinged.

KQEDs Olivia Allen-Price summed it up nicely on Twitter on Monday, declaring: 2020: The year my e-mail sign-off went from Cheers to Hang in there.

A call for suggestions from Chronicle readers on social media yielded solutions that were both practical and entertaining. More on that later. Lets give the first word to Tina Hayes, a professional etiquette trainer at School of Etiquette and Decorum.

Hayes, who lives in the East Bay and works with schoolchildren and adults, said her communication has definitely changed in the past 10 days.

I start off almost all of my emails with, Hoping all is well in spite of these unsettling times, Hayes said. Every single one. I never go straight into the heart of an email.

She suggested acknowledging the changes in the world in the beginning of a work email, on sort of a three-part sliding scale based on how well you know the recipient: From formal emails (hope youre well), to business casual (a warmer tone), to stronger work friendships (start by wishing well to spouses and children).

And she advised to end the emails simply. No exclamation points. Contacted by The Chronicle by email, Hayes signed off her response with a classy Kind regards.

Even though this has taken over our lives, we cant let it be overwhelming in the professional arena, Hayes said. We have to stay with the business at hand.

Hayes said the American Association of Etiquette Professionals was set to start its annual conference in Arkansas next week. They will now meet by videoconference. But she passed on some sign-off suggestions she collected from her professional colleagues, in part to show how etiquette may differ by region.

Charlotte, N.C.: Take care and be safe.

Seattle: Stay sane and healthy.

Arkansas: A simple Sincerely or All my best.

Iowa: Please take care and be safe, with warmest regards.

Denver: Stay well.

Chronicle readers on Twitter had slightly ... bolder suggestions.

Courtesy Tina Hayes

Ed Murrieta (@EdMurrieta) advocated for CBS anchor Dan Rathers short-lived sign-off from his newscasts in 1986: Courage.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

(Shortly after this piece ran online, Rather responded in a tweet: I agree. Courage works well for these times.)

Sam Winchester (@SamWinchester90) borrowed a line from Fiddler on the Roof that fits well with the current times: May you live to see a thousand reasons to rejoice.

Twitter user @40goingon28 had this inspiring response: Im using, If we shall chance to meet again, may it be in the glow of victory in the mighty halls of Valhalla, assured that we died as we lived, with honor and bravery, but its a little clunky.

Others included Thanks and take care, from Twitter user @akyx; Be safe, be kind, and be well, from Lisa Delaney (@Delane63); and Dont tell me problems. Tell me solutions  General Francis X Hummel, from @JohSanders.

Im starting to like Stay gold, as recently debated on Alison Greens Ask a Manager site, where an intern was chided (then fiercely defended) for using the reference to a Robert Frost poem, borrowed heavily in S.E. Hintons The Outsiders.

Hayes final suggestion for correspondence during the coronavirus crisis: Consider not writing at all. Being stuck in our homes, with considerably less communication, might be the perfect time to revive the ancient art of talking to each other by phone.

Were in very unsettling times right now, Hayes said, and thats the time to really pick up the phone and have conversations and talk to people. ... If you really want to develop relationships, you have to pick up the phone a little more.

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicles pop culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee wrote to 18 chief ministers on Thursday, seeking aid for workers from the state who are stranded in different regions of the country due to the lockdown over the novel coronavirus outbreak

New Delhi: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee wrote to 18 chief ministers on Thursday, seeking aid for workers from the state who are stranded in different regions of the country due to the lockdown over the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The letter comes amid reports that migrant workers across the country were trying to walk back home due to unemployment, lack of shelter and food.

According to Census 2011, there are around five lakh migrant workers from the state who are working in different parts of the country.

"Bengal has many workers  semi-skilled and unskilled, working in different parts of the country," Banerjee said in the letter.

"Due to complete lockdown in the country for COVID-19 pandemic, many Bengal workers could not travel back and are stuck at different places."

The chief ministers of Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Delhi, Odisha, Karnataka, and Punjab were among those who received the letter.

"We have received information that many such workers who are ordinarily resident of Bengal are stuck in your state too," Banerjee said.

"We are getting SOS calls from them."

They are generally in groups of 50-100 and can be easily identified by the local administration, the chief minister said.

"Since it is not possible for us to reach any help to them, I take the opportunity to request you to kindly ask your administration to provide them with basic shelter, food, and medical support during this period of crisis," she said.

"We, in Bengal, are taking care of such stuck people in our state," Banerjee said in the letter.

She stated that the chief secretary would pass on the details of such people to the respective state chief secretaries to speed up this entire process of humanitarian support in this hour of crisis.

Earlier in the day, the Centre has announced a Rs 1.75-lakh-crore economic bailout to help the poor tide over the impact of the nationwide lockdown that is in place to contain the spread of the deadly COVID-19.

The benefits  through cash and food  were targeted at farmers, migrant workers, the poor, women and the disabled, among others.
Javier Perez de Cuellar was a soft-spoken Peruvian diplomat who led the United Nations (UN) as its fifth secretary general through bitter confrontation with the US Congress during the Reagan administration to a period of unprecedented peacemaking that coincided with the end of the Cold War.

Perez de Cuellar, who has died aged 100, served as UN secretary general from 1982 to 1991 and was a practitioner of quiet diplomacy. He gained a reputation in his first term as a competent yet bland bureaucrat who appeared powerless to stem the tide of conflicts in Afghanistan, the Middle East and the Falkland Islands. He caught his stride after his 1986 re-election, overseeing a succession of peace deals in Central America, Africa and the Persian Gulf.

The UN peacekeepers won the Nobel Peace Prize under Perez de Cuellars tenure in 1988. But his most enduring legacy remains his quiet efforts to coax the UN Security Councils five permanent members  including Cold War superpowers the United States and the Soviet Union  to work quietly together to forge a peace deal ending the Iran-Iraq war, a conflict that cost more than one million lives.

The Cold Wars demise led to an era of intense UN activism, and Perez de Cuellar seized on the thaw to pursue peace agreements in places like El Salvador, and to help shape postwar settlements in Namibia and Cambodia. Ironically, the new world order Perez de Cuellar assiduously promoted culminated with a UN-sanctioned, US-led military conflict against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. It was a conflict he sought unsuccessfully to avert.

Javier Perez de Cuellar de la Guerra was born in Lima in 1920. He was four when his father, a wealthy businessman, died, and he continued his education in Catholic schools. He graduated with a law degree from Catholic University in Lima and took his first job as a clerk in the Peruvian foreign service to pay his law school tuition.

He once said he decided on a diplomatic career because it helps you to know countries, and at someone elses expense. He spent the next several decades in postings as Perus ambassador to Switzerland, the Soviet Union, Venezuela, France and the UN.

Perez de Cuellar joined the UN in 1975 as then-secretary general Kurt Waldheims special representative for Cyprus, where the Peruvian diplomat launched negotiations between the islands Greek president Makarios III and Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash.

In 1979 Waldheim promoted Perez de Cuellar to undersecretary general for special political affairs, where he fruitlessly pressed the Soviets to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan. He was selected secretary general in December 1981 as a compromise candidate after Waldheim, running for a third term, deadlocked with the Tanzanian foreign minister, Salim Ahmed Salim. Perez de Cuellar received fewer votes than some other candidates, but he prevailed because he was the only one who didnt get vetoed.

His first term was marked by painful diplomatic setbacks, including the unsuccessful efforts to oversee the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, end the civil war in Lebanon or to negotiate a peace deal between Britain and Argentina during the 1982 Falklands War.

His second term coincided with the arrival of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and a series of political and economic reforms known as perestroika, which created unexpected opportunities for political cooperation between the two superpowers, and for the UN.

Perez de Cuellar oversaw a string of diplomatic successes, including peace deals ending the Iran-Iraq war and conflicts in El Salvador, Namibia and Mozambique. But he was not without his detractors, who maintained that his studiously cultivated image for self-effacement, independence and impartiality masked a more ambitious streak and a willingness to yield to the interests of powerful states to achieve those ambitions.

After his UN retirement, Perez de Cuellar remained active in diplomacy and politics, mounting a failed 1995 campaign against Alberto Fujimori to be president of Peru. He served as the countrys prime minister (2000-01) and its ambassador to France.

He was married twice and is survived by two children.

Javier Perez de Cuellar, diplomat and politician, born 19 January 1920, died 4 March 2020

 Washington Post
As outlined in the government's coalition agreement the Villa Louvigny will house the culture ministry in a few years time.

Minister for Mobility and Public Works Francois Bausch presented the details of Villa Louvigny's future following a parliamentary question by LSAP deputy Mars Di Bartolomeo.

At this moment the ministry of health is situated in the historic building. Early 2022 the ministry will find its new home in Rue Charles Darwin in Gasperich. The Luxembourg Health Directorate, however, will be split across two addresses, including Rue de Bitbourg. In the meantime renovation works in the Villa Louvigny will be scheduled.

Relocation will begin in the summer of this year, but due to current coronavirus circumstances and the closing of all construction sites this may be delayed.
Though unable to travel because of the coronavirus pandemic, members of the Group of 20 -- the 20 major economy nations and the European Union -- are holding an emergency virtual meeting to discuss ways to coordinate a response to the pandemic.

Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS Markit, wrote in a column in the Washington Post that similar coordination is essential in heading off the economic damage caused by an unprecedented oversupply of oil.

That threat has been amplified by the battle for market share between Saudi Arabia and Russia, as well as the unprecedented drop in demand. Yergin estimated a 6 million-barrel drop in demand in the first quarter because of Chinas shutdown, the biggest single decline in modern history.

Oil is definitely going to be on the agenda, Yergin told the Reporter-Telegram by email. The United States is insisting on it, and its already there. The aim is to bring the battle for market share to an end and take at least some of the pressure off the oil market.

Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, told the Reporter-Telegram by email that the global pandemic combined with an unprecedented oversupply of oil calls for world leaders to work together more than ever before. Diplomatic discussions with our trade partners are essential to create the certainty and stability that the global economy needs right now.

Without immediate action, Yergin said in his column, A hammer blow could fall in the next two months if, as seems likely without immediate action, more surplus oil floods the marketplace than at any time in history.

With Saudi Arabia and Russia so entrenched in their battle for market share, Yergin wrote, stopping the price war may well require collaboration through some broader framework such as the Group of 20. That would promote discussion beyond the Saudi-Russia impasse by bringing in the United States and a larger group of producers and consumers, including Brazil, China, France, Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

With Saudi Arabia and Russia and other producing countries promising to add another 4 million barrels oil per day, Yergin said that in a matter of weeks oil inventories could swell to a size triple those built up during the 2014-2016 price collapse.

Everything depends on how the crisis plays out in the coming days, but our organization, IHS Markit, estimates that the drop in consumption could range from 10 million to 15 million barrels per day in the next four to eight weeks  or up to 15 percent of global demand. That would be a staggering, never-seen-before decline. The market could not even begin to cope with a surplus of that magnitude, he wrote.

Oil prices would drop further and the global oil and gas industry infrastructure, from the oil well to the gas station pump, would face damaging disruptions, he said in his column.

The consequences could be devastating for developing countries that have fragile health systems and are reliant on petroleum revenue. But the fallout could seriously damage the U.S. oil and gas industry, regional economies, financial markets and the industrial sector that produces equipment for the industry. Many jobs would be lost and businesses shut down, slashing federal, state and local tax revenue, he wrote.
Theres still much we dont know about coronavirus COVID-19 in Michigan.

The states daily update on the number of cases and deaths provides some details, but its a picture with many, many gaps.

Infectious disease people always like to talk about the iceberg and how youre only seeing the top of the iceberg, said Emily Martin, an epidemiologist at University of Michigan.

As the crisis unfolds, heres a look at what we know and dont know about whats happening.

WHAT WE KNOW

As of Thursday morning, Michigan had almost 2,900 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

As for 10 a.m. Thursday, Michigan had 2,856 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 60 deaths reported to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

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In the past week, the numbers have doubled every three days.

Michigan confirmed its first coronavirus cases on March 10. It took nine days, until March 19, to exceed 100 patients; another three days to cross the 1,000 mark on March 22, and three days for those numbers to double once again.

The first death was reported on Wednesday, March 18.

Some of the increase is a result of more testing for coronavirus.

For the first week of the crisis in Michigan, all tests for COVID-19 were processed by the state Bureau of Laboratories. There are now several hospitals and private labs who are processing tests, which helps account for the sharp increase in confirmed cases that began March 19.

With the increase in testing, every day youre going to see the cases in Michigan skyrocket, Martin said. "Its because were filling in the gaps of the data.

So it looks like its skyrocketing, and that results in a lot of panic and worry and hysteria," she said. "People feel like the virus is moving faster and faster and faster, when really its that were just seeing more of the picture than before.

More then eight of 10 cases are in metro Detroit.

About almost a third of coronavirus patients so far live in the city of Detroit, and 85% live in Wayne, Oakland or Macomb counties. And 52 of the 60 deaths -- 87% -- involve metro Detroit residents.

About 39% of Michigan residents live in the tri-county region.

Lynn Sutfin, spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, attributed the numbers in metro Detroit to three factors: Its the most populated area of the state; the most densely populated, and the region where testing for the disease has been the most aggressive.

In the past week, its spread from 15 to 52 counties.

Although metro Detroit is the epicenter of coronavirus in Michigan, the virus has spread throughout the state.

There are still 31 rural counties without a confirmed case, mostly in the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula. About 90% of Michigan residents live in a county that has at least one coronavirus patient.

Six of 10 confirmed cases in Michigan involve people under 60.

People age 60 and older are at higher risk of complications from coronavirus, and it appears children tend to have a very mild form of the disease.

Still, 56% of Michigan residents with coronavirus are between the ages of 20 to 59.

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About 27% of Michigan residents tested so far have tested positive.

As of Wednesday, there were 9,109 completed coronavirus tests on Michigan residents and 2,453 -- or 27% -- were positive, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human and Services.

Its unclear how many tests are pending.

[12:16 PM] Scott W. Levin Sorry, but your browser does not support frames.

WHAT WE DONT KNOW

The true extent of coronavirus in Michigan.

Access to testing for coronavirus remains limited, Michigan health officials say, and that means we really dont know how many people in Michigan have coronavirus.

The federal Centers for Disease Control has said the top priority is testing hospitalized patients and health-care workers who have COVID-19 symptoms. Thats followed by people with symptoms who are first-responders, living in a long-term care facility and/or are at risk of complications because of their age or other health conditions.

Testing healthy, younger people with mild symptoms is a non-priority unless the person has had known exposure and/or a health-care worker or first-responder, the CDC says.

How much of the increase in cases is due to increases in testing vs. community transmission.

Its very unclear how much of the increase in cases over the past week is a result of the increase in testing vs. a surge in community transmission.

Among the factors that muddy the waters: The cases being reported now involve patients likely infected a week ago or more.

Another factor: Differences in turnaround times in lab testing. Cases are being reported once tests results are complete, but while some tests have a turnaround of 24 hours while others are taking a week or more, which can distort the daily numbers being reported.

Were seeing this giant backlog in testing results coming out now, said Linda Vail, who heads the Ingham County Health Department.

Why Michigan numbers are so much higher per capita than other Midwest states.

Michigan was among the last of the Midwest states to confirm its first case of coronavirus, but has since surged to one of the top states in both raw numbers of cases and in cases per capita.

The numbers for Detroit and its metro area are particularly high per capita compared to Los Angeles and Chicago, which are among the hot spots of the pandemic.

One explanation could be a difference in testing. Michigan was ahead of many other states in expanding testing capacity beyond sending test specimens to the CDC, Vail said. But without complete state-by-state testing data, its hard to know.

Another theory: Detroit Metro Airport has been one of the 13 airports around the country and the only in the Midwest outside of Chicago that has been serving international flights from countries where the White House imposed travel restrictions related to coronavirus.

Whether social distancing is working.

Because the cases being reported now involve contagion that happened a week or two ago, the impact of stringent social distancing has yet to be seen, Martin said.

When you think about this lag, the questions of, Are the precautions working? Is social distancing working? -- we wont have the answer for like another two weeks," Martin said.

Whitmer has gradually increased social-distancing rules, starting out with recommendations to avoid large groups and has since increased a series of tightening restrictions. As of Tuesday, Michigan residents are under a stay-at-home order, which residents are ordered to stay in their homes except for essential tasks. The order also means that only those deemed as essential employees can work outside the home.

When will the crisis pass?

Nobody knows.

It took China about two months to get past its crisis point, Martin said. But that involved much more draconian measures on social distancing.

Youve got to be realistic and youve got to understand that you dont make the timeline, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said in a March 25 interview on CNN. The virus makes the timeline.

Read all of MLives coverage on the coronavirus at mlive.com/coronavirus.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

CORONAVIRUS PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.
By Elissa Kozlov and Paul Duberstein

We are in uncharted territory. Never before have we been asked as a society to distance ourselves so dramatically from one another, and while these recommendations are 100% necessary to combat the spread of a deadly illness, the psychological consequences of social distancing are not trivial.

Numerous scientific studies on the adverse health consequences of social isolation suggest that we are on the brink of a potentially devastating mental health crisis that can increase the death toll from COVID-19. Social isolation increases the risk for deaths of despair like suicide or overdose as well as deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer. People will die from COVID-19, and some will succumb to the adverse effects of the social distancing that is so vital to slowing the spread of the infection.

This impending crisis of isolation will affect rich and poor, young and old. But no one is more at risk than our older, chronically ill population and their families. Video chatting and talking on the phone are excellent ways to stay connected, but fewer older adults have the knowledge, skills and financial resources to use technology. According to the most recent 2017 Pew statistics, 42% of U.S. adults 65 or older own smartphones, but that number drops to 17% for those over the age of 80.

Only 34% of U.S. adults over the age of 65 report using social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, which, in the age of social distancing, will help many people stay connected. Furthermore, 17% of adults over the age of 65 have vision impairment and half of the adults over the age of 75 have difficulty hearing, which makes talking on the phone or video chatting challenging or impossible. Older adults are being asked to isolate, and many will not have the resources and skills to mitigate the health-damaging effects of isolation.

Decades ago, physicians and nurses made house-calls. During these visits, the clinician would not only perform important procedures but also allay feelings of anxiety or loneliness with a reassuring smile or a gentle hand on the shoulder. House-calls are mostly a thing of the past as a result of policy shifts that frequently undermine efforts to provide quality health care.

When clinicians provide less care, family members must pick up the slack, but social distancing will keep many away. These family members may feel guilty or conflicted, but they should hold tight to the knowledge they are doing the responsible thing by social distancing during this epidemic, and try to channel your distress to productive measures. For example, send care packages, make photo albums and scrapbooks for your loved ones. If your loved ones are currently in a facility that is on lock-down, perhaps staff can help set up video chats for residents or read emails or letters out loud to help combat loneliness and isolation.

This kind of technology can also offer support for those with a limited life expectancy and their families. But what is the adaptation to being able to hold the hand of a loved one too ill to speak on the phone? In 2018, the Governors Advisory Council on End-of-Life Care in New Jersey recommended supporting patients and family members through telemonitoring, and this crisis only underscores the need for action on that recommendation.

We also need to make it easier for everyone in New Jersey to receive mental health care. Currently, New Jerseys criteria for clinical psychologists to become licensed differ from our neighbors in New York and Pennsylvania. Many psychologists licensed and practicing in New York or Pennsylvania are unable to become licensed in New Jersey, which contributes to the lack of highly trained mental health care providers in our state. It is time to develop one national licensing process for clinicians to expand the availability of mental health and telemental health nation-wide.

Humans are remarkably resilient. We have survived and rebuilt after natural disasters, wars and countless other tragedies. We are in a tremendous period of uncertainty about our future. How long will this last? How many will die? Now, more than ever, we must practice staying focused on the present and incorporating self-care techniques, such as getting enough sleep, sticking to a routine, nurturing hobbies, exercising and reaching out to loved ones via phone and video, will help keep us strong and healthy during this stressful time.

People will die from COVID-19, and some will succumb to the adverse effects of the social distancing that is so vital to slowing the spread of the infection.

Elissa Kozlov, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and researcher. She is also an instructor in the Department of Health Behavior, Society, and Policy at the Rutgers School of Public Health and a core faculty member of the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Policy and Aging Research.

Paul Duberstein, Ph.D., is a public health psychologist, social justice advocate, and chair and professor in the Department of Health Behavior, Society, and Policy at the Rutgers School of Public Health.

The Star-Ledger/NJ.com encourages submissions of opinion. Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow us on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and on Facebook at NJ.com Opinion. Get the latest news updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.
SV Krishna Chaitanya By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: After facing a backlash for trying to cram 300 students in one hostel, IIT-Madras has now decided to spread them over three hostels to ensure social distancing norms are complied amid the coronavirus scare.

In a fresh email communication on Thursday, accessed by The New Indian Express, the Dean Students said Bhadra, Cauvery and Brahmaputra have been identified as men's hostels and Sabarmati for women. "We have made sure the number of residents would be far less than half the capacity of the hostels," the Dean said.

The development comes after The New Indian Express highlighted the plight of the students who were forced to relocate to Bhadra hostel. However, the students are still not convinced and say the hostel rooms and toilets are in an unhygienic condition.

"Yesterday, the wardens blamed us for staying in campus and said that it was your decision to stay back, so you have to follow the administration's decision. They threatened to disconnect water and electricity supply. It takes more than 20 hours for me to reach my native place. So, how was I supposed to go," a student asked.

The institute in its defence claims it was very short of staff to maintain and give the best services. "We are trying our best but we need your (students) cooperation and support in these difficult times. Every individual should take responsibility to work together. With bare minimum housekeeping staff working long hours, we need to be sensitive and pitch in to help keep places clean," the Dean appealed to the students.

The institute asked the students to adjust for the time being and take responsibility as if they were staying in their home, even if there are some shortcomings temporarily.

Meanwhile, there is no word on the issue of single mess facility made available to the students.
By Online Desk

Parents, beware! New evidence from China, US and Europe suggests that although older people are hardest hit by COVID-19, younger people are not spared and therefore they should not view themselves as immune to the deadly virus.

Although the data from China showed that the elderly and those with other health conditions are the most vulnerable, young people  from twenty-somethings to those in their early forties  are falling seriously ill. In Italy, the most hit country in Europe, almost one-fourth of the nearly 28,000 coronavirus patients are between the ages of 19 and 50, according to Statista.

US has also seen similar trends. Among nearly 2,500 of the first coronavirus cases in that country, 705 were between the age group of 20 to 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even the Director-General of World Health Organisation Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently sounded an alarm while warning young people against complacency.

According to WHO data, people under 50 make up a significant proportion of patients requiring hospitalisation. The WHO chief's comments came after reports that young people in many countries are being complacent about health warnings.

Coronavirus can sicken or kill young people as well and they must also avoid mingling and spreading it to older and more vulnerable people, the health body said.

Practise physical distancing, get socially connected

During a recent press briefing, WHO used the phrase 'physical distancing' and not social distancing as you just need to physically separate yourself from others, but still remain socially connected. This move would break the chain of transmission.

Amid global shortages of protective gear for health workers and diagnostic tests, there is only one mantra to keep coronavirus at bay - physical distancing as mass gatherings will not only amplify the disease but can disseminate it very quickly.

Experts say the most powerful and only tool we have left to flatten the ascending coronavirus curve is physical distancing. Yet far too many people are falling short of whats needed.

A study on physical distancing, published in The Lancet, said the closure of educational institutions and workplaces in Wuhan city in Hubei province of China, the epicentre of the coronavirus, reduced the number of COVID-19 cases and substantially delayed the epidemic peak -- giving the health system time to respond.

Go home and stay home

Remember, anybody can spread the virus even if you dont have symptoms. Therefore...
Queensland schools will go 'student-free' from next week amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk issued the student-free directive on Thursday.

Schools will remain open for children of essential workers.

'I know the community has had a lot of mixed reactions and we have listened,' Ms Palaszczuk said.

'I think it's very important that we do cater for our schools across the state to make sure that our workforce, that their students are able to go to school.'

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk issued the student-free directive on Thursday

Queensland schools will go 'student-free' from next week amid the coronavirus pandemic. Schools will remain open for children of essential workers

She also issued a stern message to parents that chose to keep their children home that it would not be a holiday.

'Let me give this very clear message to parents who will have their children at home: They should be learning from home next week,' she said.

'They should not be out and about in shopping centres and if you have a grandparent who is unwell, who has one of those chronic conditions, you must not take your children to visit those grandparents.'

Queensland Education Minister Grace Grace said essential workers included healthcare workers like nurses and doctors as well as supermarket staff.

'This is unprecedented history, and unprecedented times.

'That is why the student-free days next week will enable our teachers to prepare for learning at home and to be able to deliver the curriculum requirements of students when we work out exactly what is going to happen into the future.'

Queensland Education Minister Grace Grace said essential workers included healthcare workers like nurses and doctors as well as supermarket staff

The move comes as the state closes its borders to slow the spread of coronavirus.

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

Australia currently has 2,675 confirmed cases and 11 people have died after contracting the deadly illness.

Queensland joined the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Tasmania and South Australia at midnight on Wednesday by closing its borders.

New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT still have open borders.

Australia recorded a spike in cases on Wednesday night, with 190 more in New South Wales alone.

Victoria's total rose to 520 diagnosed cases of the respiratory infection, an increase of 54 from Wednesday.

A 68-year-old Queensland man died on Wednesday afternoon after catching the virus on board a cruise ship that docked in Sydney last week.

Queensland Health said the man had a 'serious underlying medical condition before contracting the virus.'

Sydney's eastern suburbs has the highest number of coronavirus cases in the state after a surge overnight, bringing the New South Wales total to 1,219.

Southeast Sydney has between 161-320 cases of COVID-19, while the north closely follows with between 81 and 160.

The city's west and southwest, and the Hunter New England region, both have between 41 to 80 confirmed cases each.

Of the state's cases, seven people have died and 16 are currently in intensive care.

It comes after several backpackers based in Bondi, in Sydney's east, tested positive to COVID-19 between Friday and Sunday.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 26

Trend:

Operational Headquarters under Azerbaijans Cabinet of Ministers held a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Ali Asadov on March 26, Trend reports.

The meeting participants discussed issues related to the special quarantine regime and the situation with observing the requirements of the regime.

Prime Minister Asadov noted that everyone should unconditionally fulfill the requirements of the special quarantine regime and sanitary-epidemiological norms. He also emphasized the necessity of tightening the control over the implementation of the special regime requirements. During the period of the special quarantine regime, 746 people were were brought to administrative and one to criminal responsibility.

City and district executive powers have been instructed to control the implementation of the special quarantine regime.

Moreover, the meeting participants discussed the issues related to the evacuation of foreign citizens, the situation in quarantine zones, as well as the treatment of patients and adopted relevant decisions.
LINCOLN (AP)  Nebraska approved an $83.6 million emergency relief package Wednesday to help public health officials respond to the coronavirus pandemic, as the number of cases continued to rise and Lincoln officials ordered some businesses to close and restricted how others can operate.

Gov. Pete Ricketts signed the funding bill to pay for additional medical and cleaning supplies, tests and overtime for state health care workers.

He also added Lancaster, Dodge and Saunders counties to the list of places where restaurants and bars will have to close their dining rooms because of the health risk. Similar restrictions were already in place for Douglas, Sarpy, Cass and Washington counties. Combined, all of those counties account for more than 1.1 million people and well over half of the state's population.

Meanwhile, Lincoln Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird announced a ban on gatherings larger than 10 as well as rules that will force the closure of salons, massage parlors, tattoo shops and other places where people spend time close together.

The directed health measure will present new challenges and ask for new sacrifices," Gaylor Baird said. It is important to remember why we are so committed to complying with them faithfully.

Ricketts said state officials had confirmed 66 COVID-19 cases as of Wednesday afternoon, which was two more than on Tuesday. Although Nebraska hasn't had anyone die of the disease, the number of sick has grown steadily over the last few days as residents physically isolated themselves from others to try to slow the spread and prevent new cases from overwhelming Nebraska's hospitals.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death.

Also on Wednesday, a health care provider at the neonatal intensive care unit of Childrens Hospital & Medical Center in Omaha tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Hospital officials said the person was working last weekend and had contact with 10 patients. The families of the patients and hospital staff members who came in contact with the provider have been informed. The hospital didn't say whether the infected person is a doctor or has some other role, and it didn't give the person's sex or age. A hospital spokeswoman, Sarah Weller, also declined to give that information.

The provider was tested when he or she developed symptoms early this week and is now isolating at home, the hospital said.

After approving the new funding, the Legislature, which has 17 days remaining in its regular session, adjourned for an unknown amount of time.

We don't know what we don't know, and we don't know when we'll be returning," said Speaker of the Legislature Jim Scheer. Hopefully we'll see a lot of advancements that allow us to return earlier rather than later, but I want to be sure we are safe when we do come back.
Hanoi's Temple of Literature is closed to tourists, March 10, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Thai Anh.

Hanoi has ordered the shutting of non-essential businesses, except for shops selling food, medicine and fuel, until April 5 to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Shops selling necessities like food, medicine and fuel can stay open, Nguyen Duc Chung, Chairman of the city People's Committee, said in a directive to local leaders Wednesday.

Karaoke parlors, bars, night clubs, and cinemas, either inner-city or on the outskirts, must be suspended.

Chung also said large gatherings like weddings and religious ceremonies should not be organized with a large number of people.

The decision follows a similar one in Saigon on Tuesday which ordered all restaurants, barber shops, pool clubs, gyms, and beauty salons to close from Tuesday to contain the novel coronavirus infection. Bars, karaoke parlors and theaters in the southern city were closed from March 15.

Earlier, following an emergency meeting on March 13, Hanoi had requested bars, karaoke parlors and tourist sites to close until the end of March.

Hanoi has so far recorded 50 Covid-19 cases out of Vietnams total of 148. Of the latter figure, 17 have recovered and been discharged.

Many of the active cases, currently in hospitals, are Vietnamese and foreigners arriving from Europe and the U.S.

The pandemic has killed over 21,000 people globally, having spread to 198 countries and territories so far.
Spains death toll from the coronavirus epidemic has risen to over 4,000.

Some 655 fatalities were recorded over the past 24 hours  down from over 700 on Wednesday, the health ministry reported on Tuesday.

The overall number of Covid-19 cases soared to 56,188 from 47,610, as the number of reported deaths reached 4,089.

Spain extended its lockdown on Thursday until at least 12 April.

Parliament voted in the early hours of Thursday to extend emergency measures, including the state of lockdown that has seen people confined to their homes except for essential trips for food, medicine and work.

Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Show all 15 1 /15 Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A rose is delivered by drone to a woman on Mother's Day in Jounieh, Lebanon AFP/Getty Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Women dance on their balcony as a radio station plays music for a flash mob to raise spirits in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A skeleton stands on a balcony in Frankfurt, Germany AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies The film Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna is projected on a building in Rome AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman uses a basket tied to a rope to pull a delivery of groceries up to her balcony in Naples, Italy EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Francesco Cellini plays for his neighbours from the rooftop terrace of his flat block in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman gestures from her balcony in Barcelona EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Cellist Karina Nunez performs for her neighbours at the balcony of her flat in Panama City Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Nash Petrovic live streams a set from his roof in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies People applaud medical workers from their balconies in Modiin, Israel Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A Brooklyn resident relaxes in a hammock hung on their balcony Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Residents toast during a "safe distance" aperitif time between neighbours in Anderlecht, Belgium Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Musician Adam Moser plays for neighbours from his balcony in Budapest, Hungary Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man and his son on their balcony in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man sits alone on a roof terrace in Rome Reuters

It is not easy to extend the state of emergency, Spains prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, said in parliament. I am convinced the only efficient option against the virus is social isolation.

The largest opposition party, the conservative Peoples Party, supported the measure. However, its leader, Pablo Casado, chastised Mr Sanchez for what he described as a late and inadequate response to the crisis.

Mr Casado blasted the decision not to cancel the International Womens Day marches on 8 March, which drew hundreds of thousands of people to the streets, and criticised the governments failure to provide medical professionals with vital equipment.

Governments dont send their soldiers to the front without helmets, flak jackets and ammunition. But our health workers dont have any protection, Mr Casado told parliament.

Nursing homes, whose elderly residents are highly vulnerable to the disease, have been particularly hard hit.

An analysis by radio network Cadena Ser found at least 397 residents of such homes had died from coronavirus, more than 10 per cent of the countrys death toll.

In Madrid, Spains worst affected region, hearses continued to arrive at the citys ice rink, which was converted into a makeshift morgue after authorities said existing facilities lacked resources.
US deaths from the coronavirus pandemic have topped 1,000, in another grim milestone for a global outbreak that is taking lives and wreaking havoc on economies and established routines of ordinary life.

In a recognition of the scale of the threat, the U.S. Senate late Wednesday passed an unparalleled $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems.

The unanimous vote came despite misgivings on both sides about whether it goes too far or not far enough and capped days of difficult negotiations as Washington confronted a national challenge unlike it has ever faced. The 880-page measure is the largest economic relief bill in U.S. history.

Worldwide, the death toll climbed past 21,000, according to a running count kept by Johns Hopkins University. The number of dead in the U.S. rose to 1,041 as of late Wednesday, with nearly 70,000 infections.

Spains death toll has risen past 3,400, eclipsing that of China where the virus was first detected in December, after a one-day spike of 700 fatalities. Spains count is now second only to that of Italy, with over 7,500 deaths. Lidia Perera, a nurse at Madrids 1,000-bed Hospital de la Paz, said more workers were desperately needed. We are collapsing, Perera said.

The Spanish parliament voted to allow the government extend strict stay-at-home rules and business closings until April 11.

Such measures are becoming increasingly common in the U.S., where New York is the current epicenter of the domestic outbreak, accounting for more than 30,000 cases and close to 300 deaths, most of them in New York City.

Public health officials in the city hunted down beds and medical equipment and put out a call for more doctors and nurses for fear the number of sick will explode in a matter of weeks, overwhelming hospitals as has happened in Italy and Spain.

A makeshift morgue was set up outside Bellevue Hospital, and the citys police, their ranks dwindling as more fall ill, were told to patrol nearly empty streets to enforce social distancing.

In Washington, President Donald Trump has called for Americans to dedicate themselves for 15 days to social distancing, including staying home from work and closing bars and restaurants to help try to stall the spread of the disease.

Yet, hes also grumbled that our country wasnt built to be shut down and vowed not to allow the cure be worse than the problem  apparently concerned that the the outbreaks devastating effects on financial markets and employment will harm his chances for re-election later this year.

The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success, Trump tweeted Wednesday.

Democrats say that Trump was prioritizing the economy over the health and safety of Americans.

Id like to say, lets get back to work next Friday, said Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Thatd be wonderful. But it cant be arbitrary.

Biden said the congressional aid package addressing the outbreak goes a long way, but that meticulous oversight is required.

Were going to need to make sure the money gets out quickly into peoples pockets and to keep a close watch on how corporations are using the taxpayers funds that they receive, to make sure it goes to help workers, not rich CEOs or shareholders, the former vice president said.

Brazils President Jair Bolsonaro has also called to reopen schools and businesses, dismissing his argument that the cure of widespread shutdowns to contain the spread of the coronavirus is worse than the disease.

Bolsonaro contends that a clampdown already ordered by many governors will deeply wound the beleaguered economy and spark social unrest. In a nationally televised address Tuesday night, he urged governors to limit isolation only to high-risk people and lift the strict anti-virus measures they have imposed in their regions.

The countrys governors protested on Wednesday that his instructions run counter to health experts recommendations and endanger Latin Americas largest population. They said they would continue with their strict measures in place. The rebellion even included traditional allies of Brazils far-right president.

Meanwhile, the governor of a state in central Mexico said the poor are immune to the coronavirus pandemic, even as the federal government suspended all non-essential government activities in a bid to prevent the spread of the virus.

Puebla Gov. Miguel Barbosas comment Wednesday was apparently partly a response to statistics showing that the wealthy who travel much more have made up a significant percentage of Mexicans infected to date, including some prominent businessmen. The country has seen six deaths so far.

The majority are wealthy people. If you are rich, you are at risk. If you are poor, no, Barbosa said. We poor people, we are immune.

Barbosa also appeared to be playing on an old stereotype held by some Mexicans that poor sanitation standards may have strengthened their immune systems by exposing them to bacteria or other bugs.
Most Americans will be receiving checks from the federal government after President Donald Trump and Congress agreed to a $2 trillion coronavirus relief deal Wednesday.

The stimulus is unprecedented in size, and politicians hope it will prevent the country from descending into a recession if a protracted fight against COVID-19 grinds the economy to a halt.

So what does it mean for you? Although the final legislative language is still being hammered out, here is what was proposed and passed in regards to stimulus checks:

 Individual taxpayers with incomes up to $75,000 will receive a one-time $1,200 direct payment. If you make more than $99,000, you will get nothing. If you make between that range, you'll get less than $1,200, but the exact number has not been confirmed yet. An earlier version of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act stipulated $5 would be subtracted from the $1,200 for every additional $100 in income.

 For couples, everything doubles. Combined incomes of up to $150,000 will receive $2,400; the cap is a combined income of $198,000.

 Families that qualified for the one-time payment will also receive an additional $500 per child.

 Annual income is based on your 2018 tax returns. If you did not file a tax return in 2018, you must file the 2019 return before qualifying for the stimulus check.

 If you're on unemployment, the bill increased unemployment insurance by $600 per week for four months (this is on top of what individual states pay out for unemployment). It has also been expanded to include freelance and gig economy workers.

 Although Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin spoke of a desire to send checks regularly throughout the coronavirus pandemic, this ultimately didn't make it into the final bill. If Congress wants to send more than one stimulus check, it will have to separately authorize another payout.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

As to when checks will arrive, that's still very much up in the air. The last time Americans got stimulus checks  in 2008 under George W. Bush  it took about three months for checks to arrive. Theoretically, Americans should get them faster this time, provided they're signed up with the IRS for direct deposit into their bank accounts (like how you get tax refunds).

Nonetheless, it seems like the earliest estimates for seeing that cash is around mid-April.

Katie Dowd is a senior digital editor with SFGATE. Email her: katie.dowd@sfgate.com
They are doing so much work and putting so much on the line, quite frankly, and once that goes into the river, its done, says Page. It was about getting these stories out as soon as we can. Thats why there wasnt time to try to get funding [for the film]. The feeling is we just have to do this.
A 60-year-old man tested positive for COVID-19 in Bhubaneswar on Thursday, raising the number of novel coronavirus cases in Odisha to three, officials said.

It is yet to be ascertained whether the patient visited any foreign country and efforts are on to find out his travel history, according to the officials.

"One more sample has tested positive for @covid19 in the state. This makes the number of positive cases 3 and all are from Bhubaneswar," the Health and Family Welfare Department tweeted.

The government is trying to trace all those who had come in contact with the patient, a senior official said.

A 33-year-old man, who had returned from Italy, was the first COVID-19 patient of the state and it was detected on March 16. The second patient, who had come back from London, was diagnosed last Thursday.

The government urged people not to panic and remain alert as the state reported the third case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Representatives of 2,801 medical staff from 21 medical teams from 14 provinces and cities across China built a "Thanksgiving Wood" on March 23 at a hospital in Wuhan, capital of central Chinas Hubei province, which was previously the epicenter of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak.

Led by Li Lanjuan, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, medical representatives from 21 medical teams who assisted virus-hit Wuhan gathered in the eastern subdivision of Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, and planted trees in the Thanksgiving Wood along with staff from the hospital.

Each tree was given a special name connected to the name of a province or city where the medical teams were from. Many medical workers took photos in front of the trees.

On the morning of Sept. 23, the eighth batch of medical teams from southwestern Chinas Guizhou province donated all the relief materials it had brought from the province to Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University.

"Our hearts have always been on the battlefield, unswervingly supporting the efforts of the eastern subdivision of the hospital to fight against the epidemic," said Yang Hui, deputy director of the Guizhou provincial health commission and chief of the Guizhou medical teams aiding Hubei.

We are grateful to people around the country, especially to the angels in white across the country who came to help with our battle against the epidemic in Hubei, Wuhan and Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, said Wang Gaohua, president of Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University.

Wang added that the "Thanksgiving Wood" will be designated as a vital education base for staff and new employees of the hospital, who will receive gratitude education here every year in the future.
THE Kisutu Resident Magistrate's Court in Dar es Salaam yesterday rejected a crucial document as evidence for prosecution into 1bn/-economic and organised crime and abuse of position trial facing the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) Line project estimated at 15tril/-.

Such document is a Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) investigation report on review of the project bidding process under which the prosecution has sought to tender in evidence to support the trial of three accused persons.

However, Principal Resident Magistrate Thomas Simba ruled in favour of the trio, Reli Assets Holding Company (RAHCO) former Director General Engineer, Benhadard Tito, ex-RAHCO Company Secretary, Emanuel Massawe and businessman Kanji Mwinyijuma, said such document was inadmissible.

The magistrate gave such decision after going through competing submissions presented by the prosecution, led by an officer from the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB), Magela Ndimbo and Advocate Peter Kibatala and Jeremia Ntobesya, for the accused persons.

He pointed out that a prosecution witness, Dr Laurence Shirima, who is PPRA Chief Executive Officer (CEO), had told the court before producing the intended exhibit that the document was received by his office, and later stamped, thus, he could easily identify the same through the seals.

According to him, having closely scrutinised the document in question, the Magistrate also found that the seals alleged to have been stamped on the document were illegible and that it was uncertain where it came from.

"The document is supposed to have been sealed on every page, but even when it was sealed, the seal is illegible. The witness said he identified the document because of the seal, but it is an illegible. It is unknown where this document came from. The court refuses to accept this exhibit," he ruled.

Following the ruling, the magistrate adjourned the trial to April 1, 2020 for continuation of the hearing. In the trial, the accused persons are alleged to have committed the offences between 2014 and 2015.

The accused are charged with conspiracy, abuse of position and occasioning over 1bn/-loss in transactions relating to upgrade of the railway. They allegedly conspired to commit offence under Prevention and Combating of Corruption Act between September 1, 2004 and September 30, 2015.

It is alleged that on February 27, 2015, at RAHCO offices in Ilala District, while discharging his duties, being the Managing Director of the Company, Eng. Tito intentionally abused his position by procuring Rothschild (South Africa) Proprietary Limited.

According to the prosecution, such company was procured as transaction advisor for the project to upgrade the Central Line Corridor Railway in Tanzania by single source method without a prior approval of RAHCO Tender Board, an act which was in violation of Procurement Act.
Disbursement also dropped by 6.6% year-on-year to US$3.85 billion, data as of March 20 has shown.

In the first quarter, Vietnam licensed 758 foreign-invested projects worth a total of US$5.5 billion, mainly thanks to a US$4 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) power plant in the southern province of Bac Lieu.

Such an investment made Bac Lieu the largest recipient of foreign investment and power generation the most attractive industry during the period.

Additional pledges to existing projects and capital contributions and share purchases saw steep declines to US$1.07 billion and US$2 billion, respectively.

With power generation occupying the top place, manufacturing was the second most attractive sector with US$2.72 billion, followed by wholesale and retail with US$682 million.

Ho Chi Minh City was the second largest recipient of foreign investment with over US$1 billion while the southern province of Tay Ninh came third with US$506.8 million.

A breakdown of investors shows that Singapore made the largest investment in Vietnam in the January-March period with US$4.54 billion, followed by Japan and China with US$846.7 million and US$815.6 million, respectively.

As of March 20, there were over 31,600 active foreign-invested projects in the country with total pledges of US$370 billion, of which 58.3% had been disbursed.
I think the mayor was right, in reaction to what she saw on a sunny day, on a warmer day, frankly people seem just to not understand what weve said over and over again at this podium and elsewhere  were going to try to get the message further out to people to make them understand, Pritzker said. I think that the decisions about how this will be enforced are going to be done at the local level, but I have encouraged law enforcement to remind people.
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The problems are real, the concerns understandable, but the timing could not have been worse.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, state Sen. Elizabeth Little and Assemblyman Dan Stec have engaged in a series off conference calls in recent days to address economic concerns around the region.

With an emergency health crisis fast approaching, their priorities were misplaced.

The North Country Chamber of Commerce hosted a tele-town hall on Friday with the three elected representatives, while Lake George Regional Chamber of Commerce moderated a conference call with the three leaders on Tuesday.

The Lake George event came on the same day Gov. Andrew Cuomo sounded the alarm that New York City had become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, with the state facing a shortage of hospital beds, equipment and staff to adequately combat the emergency.

Right here in Glens Falls, hospital nurses were concerned they were not being issued masks to protect them from the coronavirus, and coronavirus tests had been suspended unless patients were symptomatic.

While this gloomy outlook was unfolding, Assemblyman Stec was saying he hoped the region could be back to something close to normal by mid-spring.

Did he mean Easter?

Phone callers wanted to know about summer tourism and how the federal government bailout would help them. While it appears we will all get checks, Gov. Cuomo said that New York comes out on the losing end of the $2 trillion bailout passed by the U.S. Senate.

Oh, and probably a lot of people are going to die because we cant take care of them. Some of them may be front line health care workers.

Hopefully, Rep. Stefanik will have something to say about how she will protect New Yorkers interests when the bailout is voted on in the House of Representatives.

At the Friday event, Rep. Stefanik said her priority was making sure relief is provided to small businesses. If they can afford health care, of course.

As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, surely Stefanik was briefed back in January about the probability of parallel economic and health-related calamities.

She did not sound any warnings that we heard.

I was hoping at one point that one of the three would have interjected their concern about being asked the wrong questions.

I was hoping they might demand that the health crisis coming up the Northway be addressed, and that questions about business bailouts and tourists would have to wait because lives were at stake.

Real leadership would have asked the business community what it could do to deliver hospital gowns and masks, because in the coming weeks the lives of their friends, neighbors and relatives might be at stake.

Early Tuesday, I was watching historian and author Jon Meacham commiserating with his television hosts about the direction of the country.

Character is destiny, Meacham said, quoting a Greek philosopher.

Ultimately, our government leaders need to understand that the most important role of the federal government is to protect its citizens, and when they dont do that, it says something about their character.

Our leaders first concern should be keeping us all safe.

It would have been nice if just one of these esteemed political leaders had said that.

n Tingley is the editor of The Post-Star and may be reached via email at tingley@poststar.com. His blog The Front Page discusses issues about newspapers and journalism. You can also follow him on Twitter at .</&box_em>

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DECATUR  Fifteen tests for COVID-19 have been completed in Macon County, with nine negative results and six pending results, officials said Thursday.

Additionally, six Macon County residents have been tested outside of the county. All of those results were negative.

However, officials continued to stress that testing remains limited.

"It is safe to assume that COVID-19 is in our community," the county's Crisis Communication Team said in a statement. "Because testing is not widely available to the general public, it is imperative that community members, whether feeling ill or well, implement social distancing best practices to limit the spread and contraction of COVID-19. This means staying home and away from as many people as possible as often as possible."

Many people with symptoms do not meet the state criteria for testing, and experts say people can spread the disease for days before they ever show symptoms. That's why officials say it is crucial to continue to practice social distancing and other precautions, regardless of the data.

The county's Crisis Communication Team is made up of local government and health care leaders, including both Decatur hospitals and Crossing Healthcare.

"It remains true that Macon County will inform the press and public as soon as possible at the time of a confirmed case of COVID-19 in a Macon County resident," the team said.

The Illinois Department of Public Health is currently reporting 1,865 confirmed cases of the virus. The cases exist in 35 of the state's 102 counties. Nineteen deaths had been reported as of Wednesday afternoon, when the most recent state data was made available.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, and death.

WHY HASN'T MORE TESTING BEEN DONE?

This is a frequent question coming from Herald & Review readers on social media. Here's what we know:

Tests are completed according to criteria from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Testing criteria outlined on the state health department website, which you can see here. It says that because test kits and supply constraints are limited, the state labs will only accept:

Specimens from hospitalized patients with severe acute lower respiratory illness (e.g., pneumonia) or

Specimens from clusters in a congregate setting that serves more vulnerable populations such as a supportive care facility, assisted living facility, group home, homeless shelter, or correctional setting.

There is also a possibility that a health care provider may have submitted tests to a private lab and Macon County may not be notified. In that case, the county's health department would be told if a private lab test were confirmed as positive, officials have said.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker said earlier this week that laboratories in the state are now processing about 2,000 tests per day, up from about 50 per day at the start of the outbreak, which partially accounts for the rapidly rising number of confirmed cases. Officials have repeatedly stressed that because many people have not been tested, the actual number of cases is probably much higher.

Herald & Review Central Illinois Editor Chris Coates talked to Decatur Memorial Hospital Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ted Clark about testing in a video interview Monday. Here's what he said:

"Testing's a big question. The short story, is we don't have enough tests.

"Some of that is based on how this occurred throughout the world, where other areas were affected first and they were collecting the items needed essentially to do this testing. There's a lot more to it than just a simple test. There are specific items that you need to be able to perform this test, specific equipment. We do have good testing equipment at DMH.

LISTEN TO OUR CORONAVIRUS PODCAST

"We are currently testing through IDPH. There are also some commercial sources, LabCorp being one of them regionally that's testing. So there is testing available but we're following the CDC criteria. They're really keeping us to the high-risk patients as far as patients who have traveled internationally or have a known exposure to COVID-19, also patients that have a specific clinical presentation that looks like COVID-19. That gets pretty detailed.

"We have algorithms in our emergency departments that allow us to put together a picture of what a COVID-19 case looks like and if we identify one, we make sure we get them in the appropriate precaution area and we also initiate testing."

You can watch the entire interview here.

HSHS St. Mary's Hospital declined interview requests and responded to a list of questions with the following statement:

Please be assured that HSHS St. Marys Hospital is monitoring all developments associated with COVID-19 (coronavirus) in the Decatur community. We are continuously evaluating how to best align our staff and supply resources with the evolving patient demand. We are assessing the situation at all of our sites in the local community to ensure we can meet patient needs across our collective service areas, and we are closely coordinating with public health officials. Given our commitment to patient and employee safety, we are all currently deferring elective care and procedures, which has enabled us to redeploy staff and resources to our areas COVID-19 response.

Please realize that as this COVID-19 pandemic progresses, we will likely be working with additional resources from state and federal government that could expand the amount of care that we can provide. Your local healthcare providers are prepared to respond to any and all developments related to COVID-19, as well as any other infectious disease outbreak.

Additionally, St. Marys Hospital is part of a larger organization, Hospital Sisters Health System (HSHS), which includes 15 hospitals in Illinois and Wisconsin and nearly 200 specialty care clinics through our three physician groups: HSHS Medical Group, Prairie Heart Institute and Prevea Health. HSHS is also looking at how we as a health system can best allocate staff and resources based on how this pandemic advances across the communities we serve.

Macon County Public Health Administrator Brandi Binkley also addressed the testing situation in a video on the health department's Facebook page on Sunday.

"Testing capacity is very limited, so those kits have to be used for the people who absolutely need them," she said, adding, "In most cases, about 80% of people that have this are able to recover safely at home."

Here are other messages from the county's Crisis Communications Team:

EQUIPMENT DONATIONS

The Macon County Crisis Communication Team is accepting donations of homemade masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) from 1 to 3 p.m. on Thursdays, March 26, April 2 and April 9, at the Decatur Civic Center drive-thru, 1 Gary K Anderson Plaza.

These donations will be distributed to Crossing Healthcare, Decatur Memorial Hospital and HSHS St. Marys Hospital.

The donations can include boxed, unused surgical type masks (including N95 masks); clean handmade, sewn masks; unused, wrapped or boxed gowns and exam gloves; hand sanitizer; bleach wipes and alcohol wipes to help with the national shortage during the COVID-19 outbreak. The community should be assured that these donations will be received in accordance with CDC guidelines.

For those who wish to make masks, please use this link (which includes instructions for elastic ties) or this link (which includes instructions using cotton ties) as a guide. The Crisis Communication team suggests putting them in Ziploc bags in quantities of 25.

Community members should only drop off donations at this designated location at the Decatur Civic Center. Do not bring them to the hospitals or clinics.

QUESTIONS ABOUT STAY-AT-HOME ORDER

The health department has been receiving many calls from community members regarding whether or not their businesses can remain open during Governor Pritzkers Executive Order.

Business owners are encouraged to contact the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) to discuss the specific details surrounding the Executive Order and what it means for their individual business. The DCEO can be reached via phone call at 800-252-2923 or email at ceo.support@illinois.gov.

BLOOD DONATIONS

A Message from the Central Illinois Community Blood Center: We are encouraging blood donations now and in the next 8 weeks to ensure adequate supplies during the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19). We are working to prevent shortages locally. We are monitoring credible health agencies for updates on COVID-19 and are responding accordingly. For blood drive sponsor groups that are considering cancelling drives, please work with us on potential options to re-direct donors. There is no known risk to the safety of the nations blood supply except for lack of donations and there are no reports of spread of this respiratory virus by blood transfusion. Giving blood is critical to ensure an adequate supply to meet patient needs. Learn more about how you can help by donating blood, time, or money by visiting their website at https://www.bloodcenter.org/; emailing impact@mvrbc.org; or calling (800) 747-5401.

The American Red Cross is facing a severe blood shortage due to an unprecedented number of blood drive cancellations during this coronavirus outbreak. Healthy individuals are needed to donate now to help patients counting on lifesaving blood. For an appointment, please visit RedCrossBlood.org or call 1-800-RED CROSS (1-800-733-2767). Please also note that the American Red Cross Blood is hosting a blood drive every Tuesday from noon to 6 p.m. at Decaturs American Red Cross Chapter on 2674 N. Main St. in Decatur.

IF YOU HAVE SYMPTOMS

Symptoms of COVID-19 can include fever, cough, and shortness of breath. Symptoms may appear two to 14 days after exposure.

Do not go to a hospital emergency room or doctor's office unless it is a true emergency. Instead, call your primary care doctor.

If you do not have a primary care doctor, you may call DMH Medical Group at (217) 876-2856, Crossing Healthcare at (217) 877-9117 or SIU at (217) 872- 3800.

HSHS Medical Group Family Medicine Forsyth is operating a regional respiratory hub. Their hours are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, and Saturday 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Please call your primary care provider before seeking care at the respiratory hub and if you have any questions.

Memorial Health System is operating a respiratory screening clinic at its DMH Express Care East location to screen people for the COVID-19 virus. The clinic at 4455 U.S. 36 East will operate from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. People coming to the respiratory clinic should call (217) 876-1200 before they arrive.

Patients and visitors to healthcare facilities should be prepared to be screened before entering.

Contact Allison Petty at (217) 421-6986. Follow her on Twitter: @allison0512

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The Jammu and Kashmir administration has ordered an inquiry to fix responsibility as to why a COVID-19 suspect, who later tested positive, was allowed to leave a hospital where he had gone for treatment with signs of infection.

Divisional Commissioner Kashmir P K Pole, taking serious note of the lapse, had on Wednesday directed Medical Superintendent and head of the chest medicine department SKIMS hospital Bemina to explain their position forthwith.

He also directed Additional Commissioner Kashmir Tassaduq Hussain Mir to inquire into the matter for action against the officers.

Mir has been directed to submit a report within two days.

Pole said the inquiry had nothing to do with the coronavirus patient who died on Thursday.

"The inquiry has been ordered not for punitive purposes but with curative objectives so that such incidents are not repeated," the Divisional commissioner told PTI.

According to a report furnished by the Principal SKIMS Medical College, the patient had reported to the casualty department of SKIMS Hospital Bemina on Mar 21 along with his travel history and was found to be a COVID-19 suspect.

The report said the patient, who tested positive later on, was not handled as per the required protocol.

The report castigated the hospital administration for not informing the district administration and police as the patient had a travel history and showed symptoms of COVID-19 but was not admitted.

"The patient has been given ample time to spread the virus by intermingling with public and relatives," the report added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ali Larter kept her chin up while out for a hike in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles on Wednesday.

The model dressed in sporty black layers as she caught a breath of fresh air during a break from LA's Safer At Home orders.

Ali, 44, topped her look off with a trucker hat and sunglasses.

Positive attitude: Ali Larter kept her chin up while out for a hike in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles on Wednesday

She seemed mesmerized by her music, bobbing along with headphones in.

Ali's been making sure to reach out to the community during these unprecedented pandemic times.

The Resident Evil actress shared her experiences volunteering with the Red Cross to give children in need food in a recent Instagram. In the photo she was seen sporting a face mask while in front of a trolley of food.

Safe and sound: The model dressed in sporty black layers as she caught a breath of fresh air during a break from LA's Safer At Home orders

'I was able to physically volunteer this morning at a food resource center set up at San Fernando High School,' she explained going on to say that the cars were lined it 'five blocks deep.'

Volunteers took precautions, as Ali said: 'We wore masks, gloves, and practiced social distancing.

'My heart was filled by these kids,' she went on. 'Their excitement over their snack packs, the parents thankfulness for this service.

Giving back: The Resident Evil actress shared her experiences volunteering with the Red Cross to give children in need food in a recent Instagram

She went on to give some information about the program before admitting: 'My emotions are running high during this time of uncertainty and fear, but it is in community where I find my solace.

Then she thanked Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Austin Beutner. Deborah Marcus, and Matthew McConaughey's Just Keep Livin' foundation.

Ali shares two children with husband, comedian Hayes MacArthur. She welcomed son Theodore Hayes on December 20, 2010 and daughter Vivienne Margaret was born on January 15, 2015.
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Global sales of dust extractors exceeded the revenues worth US$ 1 billion in 2018, which are projected to witness an average Y-o-Y growth of around 6%, in 2019 and ahead. As envisaged by a new research intelligence outlook of Future Market Insights (FMI), dust extractors will enjoy significant gains in the low dust class, accounting for a substantial incremental opportunity over the course of coming years.

While adoption of dust extractors in medium dust class will retain a dominant share over that in the low dust class in the long run, the latter is highly likely to outpace former owing to the impressive growth of commercial building sector. Sales are likely to experience a considerable hike in the forthcoming years, as the demand from major end-use sectors, particularly commercial building and offices, is on a constant rise.

Construction sites, though envisaged to remain key demand generator in the dust extractor space, will be closely trailed by the wood working segment. The report positions wood working applications of dust extractors market as an important demand contributor to the market and projects a healthy rate of growth for the dust extractor demand in wood working segment.

DYI Applications Boosting Potential of Online Sales Channels

Growing number of projects in the commercial space construction landscape will remain a significant booster for the demand growth of dust extractors at a global level. Moreover, noteworthy increase in the number of DIY applications, strongly backed by flourishing online retail channels, has been cited in the report as important factors impacting the growth of dust extractor market in years to come. The report has attributed growth of DIY applications segment to the progress of home improvement industry, observed in the recent past.

In the light of success registered by leading online distributors of DIY vacuum cleaners such as Amazon, EBay, Alibaba, and ShopClues among others, a number of organizations are strategizing their entry to the E-commerce space. The report projects that power tools sales are likely to emerge as a popular strategy among players, which are stepping in the online retail world for DYI vacuum cleaner sales. Growing consumer preference for online channels while shopping DIY application tools is instrumenting accelerated online sales of dust extractors, as per the report findings. However, high price point associated with high-capacity vacuum cleaners will continue to restrain the accelerated growth of dust extractor market in the long run.

In line with the potential competitive edge offered by dust extractor models with compact dimensional design and light weight, key manufacturers are following the growing trend of high R&D investments in innovative product launches.

Japan to Rise as the Industry's Manufacturing Hub

Europe is envisaged to emerge as a highly profitable region for the prominent consumers of dust extractors, towards the end of the forecast period. Currently, the US and Germany represent the most prominent countries generating significant demand for dust extractors, subsequently benefiting the markets in North America and Western Europe, respectively.

According to the report, the demand for dust extractors in developed regions will continue to be favorably influenced by the stringent regulatory framework of regional governments regarding the usage of vacuum cleaners.

Furthermore, Japan is also anticipated to be a lucrative regional market for dust extractors, in terms of value and volume. FMI's analysis also depicts that Japan is currently reflecting the potential to develop into the new manufacturing hub. MEA is also projected to remain a prominent regional market for dust extractor sales, which has been primarily attributed to the robust growth of key end-use sectors across the region.

Dust Extractor Market: Vendor Landscape

The dust extractor market is largely fragmented, as a result of the strong presence of a large number of local and established players. The report provides details of some of the key players in the global dust extractor market, such as Milwaukee Tool, Alfred Karcher SE & Co. KG, Makitra Corporation, Hilti Group, Robert Bosch GmbH, DeWalt (acquired by Stanley), Metabowerke GmbH, Panasonic Corporation, Nilfisk Inc., Tennant Company, Numatic International Ltd., Electrostar GmbH (Starmix), Bisell Inc., Fiorentini / Clemas & Co., Verimark (Pty) Ltd., and C & E Fein GmbH.

Source Link: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dust-extractor-sales-poised-for-healthy-growth-at-over-6-cagr-during-2019-to-2029--future-market-insights-300845003.html

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Hospitals in London Britain's COVID-19 hotspot with over 3,000 of the country's 9,529 confirmed cases - are witnessing wave after wave of seriously ill coronavirus patients, a senior official from the state-funded National Health Service (NHS) said on Thursday as the UK entered day three of its lockdown to curb the pandemic.

Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers the representative body for hospital chiefs, said that they have been getting reports that the rate at which hospital beds are being filled out is extremely alarming even as their staffing levels are dropping as a result of the infection.

They talk about wave after wave after wave. The words that are used to me are that it's a continuous tsunami. As one said to me, it's much bigger and large numbers with a greater degree of stretch than you can ever have possibly imagined, Hopson told the BBC.

They are struggling with the explosion of demand in seriously ill patients. They are saying it's the number arriving and the speed with which they are arriving and how ill they are, he said.

The UK government announced the setting up of a makeshift hospital with 4,000 beds to be created at the ExCel conference centre in east London earlier this week, a move welcomed by NHS Providers but with a warning that even that capacity is fast getting filled up in the UK capital.

One advantage we have is the opportunity to learn from what is going on in London, given that London is some way ahead of most of the rest of the country, recognising there are other hotspots elsewhere, said Hopson.

It's encouraging to hear there's progress with the antibody test to identify who's already had the disease. That will make a big difference in time, but the immediate focus is on who has COVID-19 now, and the reality is that despite the push to expand testing, it's not going to be sufficient to cover patients and a significant number of the NHS' 1.2 million staff, he warned.

The number of people who have died in the UK after contracting coronavirus rose by 43 to hit 465 by Thursday, representing the smallest rise in the number of deaths since last week. However, alongside there was the biggest increase in the number of infections across the UK up 1,542 to 9,529.

The number of cases and deaths is expected to keep rising as the UK works on trying to flatten the curve of the pandemic following a nationwide lockdown enforced by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday.

Imperial College Professor Neil Ferguson, whose work on the epidemic has informed the government's policy, said his research team is "moderately confident" that demand for intensive care beds will peak in two-and-a-half to three weeks' time if the measures have the desired effect.

We are going to have a very difficult few weeks but we think overall with the capacity being rapidly put in place that whilst the health system will be stressed it won't break, he said.

Meanwhile, the government has ordered 10,000 ventilators from Dyson known for vacuum cleaners to help deal with the coronavirus crisis. The firm, headed by British inventor Sir James Dyson, said it had designed a new type of ventilator in response to a call on behalf of the NHS.

I will do everything I can to ensure our dedicated staff have whatever they need during this unprecedented time, said UK health secretary Matt Hancock.

A waiver of parking fees for NHS and social care staff and speeding up supplies of urgent personal protection equipment (PPE) are among some of the steps being put in place.

Meanwhile, Public Health England (PHE) has said that final tests on finger-prick testing kits should be completed in the coming days. Such a test, which can be carried out by individuals in their homes, will be able to determine if someone has or has already had COVID-19.

The UK's chief medical adviser, Chris Whitty, warned rigorous testing needs to take place before the kits are available to the public, saying: The one thing that is worse than no test, is a bad test."



Prime Minister Boris Johnson has described these tests as a total game-changer as the government ordered 3.5 million testing kits from at least three commercial suppliers.

Several million tests have been purchased for use. We need to evaluate them in the laboratory, because these are brand new products, to be clear that they work as they are claimed to, Professor Sharon Peacock from Public Health England, told the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee on Wednesday



"Once they have been tested, and that will happen this week, and the bulk of the tests arrive, they will be distributed into the community in which there will be a mechanism to order a test via Amazon, performed at home and then sent back to see whether they're positive or negative, Peacock said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
You can't control whether you lose your job and your benefits because of COVID-19. You can, however, take steps to protect yourself in case you wind up without health insurance during the global pandemic.

Don't panic. Take a breath. Collect yourself. And then make a plan.

1. If you have a spouse with insurance, try to get on their plan.

If you have a spouse or partner with employer-sponsored insurance, you may be able to join if you lose your job or your benefits due to a furlough or other cuts. For those worried they could soon lose their jobs, have your spouse or partner contact their human resources department to see if you can join their plan. You probably won't be able to get on that plan without a change in your benefit status, but get the details on how to make that change now so that you'll be prepared.

2. Explore COBRA.

If you lose your job at any time, you may be legally entitled to buy into your employer's health insurance plan for a period of time. The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, commonly known as COBRA, gives you the right to buy this coverage for as long as 18 months (longer if you're approaching Medicare eligibility), provided you're willing to pay for it.

Because employees pay the full cost of health insurance premiums without any employer contribution, COBRA tends to be very expensive -- prohibitively so for most people. On an annual basis, the average employer-sponsored insurance premium for family coverage was more than $20,000 in 2019 and more than $7,000 for an individual. Under COBRA, the employee pays the full premium and may be charged a small administrative fee. These costs may be especially hard to bear without income. However, if you have a chronic condition or already know you will need expensive care, it may be worth it.

If your company has at least 20 employees, it is likely subject to COBRA rules. In that case, they are obligated to notify you about this option if they terminate your employment. In the meantime, you can proactively check with your human resources representatives to see if it is an option for you, and if so, what it would cost.

If you are furloughed, you may eligible for COBRA if you lose eligibility for the group health insurance plan. Your company will have to issue you COBRA documents in that case; make sure to get those so you can qualify.

3. Check out the health insurance marketplace.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) created health insurance marketplaces operated either by the states, the federal government, or as a state-federal partnership. Everyone has access to one of these marketplaces where individuals can compare an assortment of plans with varying costs and coverage levels.

Even the most basic marketplace plans offer comprehensive benefits and consumer protections. Though buyer beware: The lower the monthly premium, the higher the deductible and other cost-sharing components are likely to be.

Typically, these marketplaces are only open during specific "open enrollment" periods, but a few states have opened up enrollment now to help uninsured residents get covered during this crisis. Other states may follow.

Even if your state does not offer a special enrollment period, you may still be able to sign up. Life events like a marriage, a move, or a job loss or change are typically deemed "qualifying events," during which you can enroll outside of the open enrollment window. Losing your job or your benefits, including from a furlough that results in losing eligibility for the group insurance plan, is just the sort of life event for which these exceptions are designed. But don't delay. Marketplace insurance usually takes effect on the first day of the following month or the one after that, depending on when you apply.

Depending on your financial situation, you may qualify for free or subsidized insurance. Even if it's just for a transitional period, these programs provide comprehensive coverage, often at reduced cost. Visit healthcare.gov or your state's health insurance marketplace to learn more about your specific situation.

4. Consider applying for Medicaid.

Medicaid is the publicly funded health insurance program designed to cover the most vulnerable and low-income people. It operates as a federal-state partnership, with certain rules set at the federal level and specific administration handled at the state level. As result, eligibility rules vary depending on where you live, how many people live in your household, what your income is, and whether you have any special conditions. Under the ACA, 37 states and the District of Columbia expanded their Medicaid programs to allow for greater flexibility in expanding coverage to more residents.

Medicaid is highly regulated, with substantial consumer protections. It offers robust benefits at free or very low cost to enrollees. Depending on the state, eligibility may start retroactively as of the day you apply. Even if it takes time to determine if you're eligible, if you ultimately are, you may be fully protected from health costs you are forced to incur in the meantime.

Though some people hate the idea of getting help to pay for anything or of getting help from the government, this is not a moment to worry about stigma. If you need coverage, and you qualify for this program, take the opportunity to protect yourself financially.

5. Ask for help

Health insurance has its own jargon, convoluted rules and bureaucratic hurdles. Trying to sort it out on your own at any time can be completely overwhelming. In a crisis when the world seems to be holding its breath waiting for catastrophe to strike, you're probably not in the best position to navigate all on your own.

The good news is you may not have to.

Start with your company's human resources; they may be able to help you transition off of their plan. You can also call the state or federal health insurance marketplace. Even if you have to wait on hold or encounter bureaucratic-style customer service, don't give up. If you don't get a clear answer or the help you need, call back another time or ask for a supervisor. There is always someone who can get to the bottom of your situation. It just may take some patience.

Though federal funding was slashed for insurance navigators, nonprofit organizations still exist in many places to help consumers find health insurance options. Often operating locally or at the state level, helpers are out there. Start at the federal website and Google your way to help in your area. Look for nonprofit agencies whose mission is to help, rather than for-profit companies that may be trying to sell you less-than-robust insurance coverage.

Hospitals and health centers often employ financial counselors whose jobs are to help patients find health insurance. These staff are often extremely well versed in the intricacies of insurance rules and options. Call the clinic or the hospital you would most likely go to for care if you get sick, and ask them for help finding and applying for coverage.

More than 150 million Americans get their health benefits through an employer. COVID-19 may push that number way down. It is no time to be without health insurance. If you find yourself in that situation, remember that there are options. While you might be waiting for the worst to happen, get yourself prepared. Figure out where to turn if you need to get covered in a hurry.

Then, stay home. And wash your hands.

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Snow showers this evening becoming more scattered later. Low near 25F. Winds light and variable. Chance of snow 40%..

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Snow showers this evening becoming more scattered later. Low near 25F. Winds light and variable. Chance of snow 40%.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 10:40:08|Editor: huaxia

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HARBIN, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Staff in the National Park of Siberian Tigers and Amur Leopards in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province are spreading forage feed in the snow-covered mountain range to provide food for wild boar and roe deer, which are the prey of the endangered wild cats.

Rounds of snowfall in March have blocked many parts of the mountain, making it difficult for wild animals to find food. Some wild boar and roe deer cubs have died of hunger and cold, said Zhang Lianfeng with the park administration.

He said the staff spread corn and soybean meal while patrolling the mountain.

Built in 2017, the national park covers 1.46 million hectares of land in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, bordering Russia and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The national park management has helped improve the biodiversity in the area, which is crucial for the survival and reproduction of wild Siberian tigers and leopards at the top of the food chain in the area.
Liz Hurley suggested Eamonn Holmes tried squatting while brushing his teeth to ease back pain. (Getty Images)

Shes famed for her youthful looks - and now Liz Hurley has been sharing her secrets for keeping active and niggle free as well.

The star, 54, has instructed Eamonn Holmes, 60, to ease his back pain by doing squats as he brushes his teeth.

Speaking to the Daily Mirror, the Irish TV presenters wife Ruth Langsford, 60, said: Every morning Eamonn wakes up, he has another woman on his mind  Elizabeth Hurley.

Eamonn and Liz met at a recent lunch, and now he is literally bending over backwards for her.

Ruth Langsford revealed the actress had shared her secrets with her husband Eamonn Holmes. (Getty Images)

Read more: Elizabeth Hurley transforms into sexy 'ninja' for fancy dress party with friends

"Comparing notes about backache, Liz has convinced him that a really effective way of strengthening his lower back was to squat while brushing his teeth.

Carried out repeatedly, day after day, she says it has helped her tremendously. Good job its only me who can see what he looks like as he does this.

In 2016, Eamonn underwent a double hip replacement after suffering discomfort for 25 years.

Earlier this month, he attended Turn The Tables 2020 in aid of Cancer Research UK along with Liz at Fortnum & Mason in London.

Read more: Elizabeth Hurley shows off her figure in striped bikini - 'just like a fine wine'

Squats can help lower back pain by strengthening your core, as well as thighs  however it is important your form is correct, or you could make it worse.

According to Womens Health, you should keep your torso upright, back straight and ensure your knees dont pass your toes when you dip down with the weight distributed evenly in your heels.

Liz previously revealed her favourite anti-ageing skincare product which she religiously uses twice a day.

Speaking of her work with Estee Lauder, the mum-of-one said: I think Ive been lucky because Ive been with the company for 24 years so Ive had really good products at my fingertips  and I use a lot of them.

Read more: Elizabeth Hurley reveals 16.15 beauty secret as she swaps bikinis for winter fashion staple

Story continues

My most favourite product of all has always been Advanced Night Repair which is a serum that I was given my first bottle of when I first joined the company in 1995, and Ive used it religiously twice a day ever since.

Liz continued: Other products I particularly love are the La Mer products. They make beautiful skincare.

I probably use more product now than I did 20 years ago and Im looking forward to putting more on!

She uses their Moisturising Soft Cream the most, but also enlists their classic Moisturising Cream depending on the time of year or if shes had a hectic travel schedule.
A section of a Northern Ireland Army base is being prepared for use as a large-scale mortuary as part of plans to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

At least one climate-controlled building on Holywood's Kinneagar site in Co Down will be converted for this purpose, the BBC reports.

Health Minister Robin Swann has warned that deaths in Northern Ireland could surpass the 3,500 people killed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Chief Medical Officer Dr Michael McBride said on Wednesday he estimates that thousands of people in Northern Ireland are infected with Covid-19.

The Kineagar site, which has little operational role, has been earmarked for sale in 2022.

The site is located near Belfast Lough and is close to residential housing.

Authorities are seeking to expand capacity for storage of bodies in Northern Ireland amid concerns the funeral system will be overwhelmed.

Officials are working to increase the current capacity of 280 bodies due to fears of a backlog of burials and cremations.

Justice Minister Naomi Long said the priority was to ensure there was respect and dignity for the deceased and their families.

"We are on a fast moving and frankly troubling terrain, and we have to plan accordingly, both in individual departments and across the Executive," she said.

"Preparing for the future and looking at worst case scenarios, while trying to mitigate against those worst case scenarios, is now our focus.

"As part of that work, we are taking precautions to prepare for the risk that the normal burial arrangements are not sufficient.

"We will do all we can to ensure dignity for the deceased and their family. We will work with all of those involved to enable as many people as possible to be buried or cremated in the usual way.

"However, we must also safeguard public health. In the event that the virus hits Northern Ireland very hard, then we have seen elsewhere in the world that this gives rise to challenges which we are working to meet.

"We currently have some additional space in temporary resting places for the deceased over and above the normal arrangements. We are actively seeking to increase that capacity and are working closely with a range of organisations to find the best solution.

"As part of that work, a request has been submitted for the use of the soon to be decommissioned Kinnegar site near Belfast to be used as the NI Temporary Resting Place, in the event that it is needed."

Earlier in the week, DoJ officials told a Stormont committee there was likely to come a point where it would be impossible to adhere to the current practice of holding funerals within three days of a death.

As well as an increase in death rate due to the disease, sickness among funeral directors and council staff is anticipated to put added pressure on the system.
Mumbai, March 26 : Two more COVID-19 patients - both 65-year-old women - died, and 125 total positive cases were recorded in Maharashtra on Thursday, officials said.

The latest victim is a Mumbaikar who was admitted to Kasturba Hospital on Monday and tested positive, besides having diabetes and hypertension problems. She died late on Thursday evening, said d official.

The other patient was a Mumbaikar living in Govandi, who was also suffering severe diabetes and high blood pressure.

She had been admitted to Tandon Hospital and DY Patil Hospital in Navi Mumbai for treatment last week.

However, since her condition didn't improve, she was rushed in critical condition to a government hospital in Vashi, Navi Mumbai, on Tuesday (March 24) where she breathed her last the same night.

To the shock of the health authorities, the cause of her death turned out to be Covid-19, and now efforts are being made to trace the history of her infection, whether due to foreign travel or through contacts.

Earlier on Thursday, the test reports of two persons admitted were found positive followed by one more case detected as positive.

The new cases include one each from Mumbai, Sindhudurg and Nagpur, and their treatment is currently underway.

Two of the three new infected persons - in Sindhudurg and in Nagpur - have caused serious concerns for the health authorities as the first had apparently travelled by train, while the second had recently travelled to New Delhi.

Mumbai has so far recorded six deaths of Covid-19 patients. Apart from the two women, there were two men both aged 63, a 65-year old and also a positive-turned-negative 68-year old man from the Philippines.

However, the government has officially knocked off the Filipino national from the Covid-19 list as he died due to other problems after being cured of coronavirus, as per officials.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
The last thing we need in the fight against this virus is a Ministry of Supply

Supply, supply, supply. Clausewitz knew that victory in war depended on it, and we can all see that victory over the Coronavirus depends on it too.

The Editor of this site asked me to look into the arguments for and against a Ministry of Supply, as set up in 1939.

Immediately after he rang, I happened to speak on the telephone with a friend of mine who lives in sheltered housing, and who suffers from various ailments which mean the Coronavirus would kill her.

She could not have been more enthusiastic about the proposal:

I think its an incredibly good idea, to have a government-run department that makes sure necessary supplies get to chemists and hospitals, and can supply my carers with the proper protective kit they should be wearing.

But the example of the previous Ministry of Supply is not altogether encouraging. Its creation was demanded by Winston Churchill and others, to show that the Government was at last taking seriously the grievous deficiencies in equipment from which Britains armed forces suffered in the late 1930s.

The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, resisted. Here is Chips Channon, Conservative MP for Southend, who hero-worshipped Chamberlain, writing in his diary on 17th November 1938, soon after Munich, where Hitler was bought off by allowing him to annex the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia:

Winston Churchill made a terrific attack on the Government, and he begged 50 Conservatives to follow him into the Lobby. Actually only Messrs Macmillan and Bob Boothby went, and the figures, a majority of 196 for the Government, were satisfactory. The PM spoke for one hour one minute, very well, clearly and amusingly. He refused to create a Ministry of Supply.

By April 1939, things were looking worse. Hitler had the previous month annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia, which he was not supposed to do.

Along with the great majority of Conservative MPs, Channon continued loyal to Chamberlain, of whom he wrote on 20th April:

The PM played with the House today. In answer to a question, he confirmed that a Ministry of Supply would be set up, and that the name of the Right Honourable Member who would be appointed to the post of its Minister was  and he paused  the temperature of the House rose. Burgin. The House, half hoping, half-fearing, that it would be Winston, was amazed.

Leslie Burgin, a National Liberal MP serving as Minister of Transport, was a nonentity. A.J.P. Taylor described him as another horse from Caligulas well-stocked stables.

Chamberlain still thought there was a chance of, in his words, getting back to normal relations with the dictators, so wished to give no demonstration of bellicosity, which Churchills appointment would certainly have been.

In this the Prime Minister was following the course charted by his predecessor, Stanley Baldwin, who in 1936 created the post of Minister for Co-ordination of Defence, but instead of giving it, as expected, to Churchill, conferred it on Sir Thomas Inskip  an appointment described at the time as the most cynical since Caligula made his horse a consul.

At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Churchill was restored to the Admiralty, where, as he later related, he found Burgins staff at the Ministry of Supply dismally slow and unimaginative.

What matters, one begins to see, is not the name of the ministry, but the identity of the minister. In May 1940, when Churchill became Prime Minister, he brought to the prosecution of the war his own astonishing dynamism.

In the 1930s, Churchill was an outsider, to whom no careerists attached themselves, for he had become a defender of lost causes.

On becoming Prime Minister in May 1940  a moment at which a defender of lost causes was just what the nation needed  he brought in other outsiders, including his boon companion Lord Beaverbrook, on whom he conferred the new and vital role of Minister of Aircraft Production.

Beaverbrook, regarded by many people from King George VI downwards as an impossibly disreputable figure, was praised by others, including Churchill, for sweeping aside all manner of obstacles in order to produce the aircraft the RAF needed to win the Battle of Britain.

The Ministry of Supply went to Herbert Morrison, a leading Labour figure, but Harold Macmillan, one of the handful of Conservative MPs to have supported Churchill in the late 1930s, was made Parliamentary Secretary in that department.

Macmillan was 46, and regarded by many in the parliamentary party as unprepossessing, bookish, eccentric (Chips Channon), but as Anthony Sampson relates, in an excellent short biography published in 1968,

inside the department Macmillan was very effectiveable to put into practice at last the planning ideas which had been rotating in his mind over the last decade. The boards and committees which had been so mocked before now took shape. He helped to reorganise the ministry, to give closer contact between government, industrialists and labour: neat new Area Boards were set up, with representatives from different ministries, which were responsible to the Industrial Capacity Committee with Macmillan as its chairman. It was a planners paradise. He lovingly explained the new system in a speech on 7th August 1940, and jokingly remarked that he would try to introduce State Socialism in the country if he did not have to put up with the tremendous resistance of the Labour movement.

In July 1941, Beaverbrook became Minister of Supply, with Macmillan as his admiring pupil:

He was fascinated by Beaverbrooks ruthless drive, his mastery of power and his dramatic style: he would ring up his Parliamentary Secretary from Washington at three or four in the morning, and Macmillan found himself working all round the clock until you could not call your soul your own. Some of Macmillans Liberal colleagues suspected that Beaverbrook had had a coarsening influence on him.

This apprenticeship served Macmillan in good stead: a decade later, when he was charged as Housing Minister with the seemingly impossible task of getting 300,000 houses a year built, he used Beaverbrooks methods, including the identification and hiring of dynamic businessmen, the promotion of brilliant officials, the sacking or sidelining of useless ones, the setting of over-ambitious targets, the ruthless appropriation of whatever resources were required, and the use of dramatic, self-glorifying publicity, to get the job done.

The houses were built using a mixture of public and private methods which to later eyes came to seem muddled and ineffective. In the hands of someone as energetic and ruthless as Beaverbrook or Macmillan, the mixture could, on the contrary, be a formidable way of surmounting all obstacles.

For they brought to it a wartime determination to make extraordinarily rapid progress, using every tool at their disposal, not caring in the slightest whether a particular lever belonged to the state or to private enterprise.

Here perhaps is the main lesson of this history for the present crisis. Any system can be made to work by a dynamic leader, who hires other dynamic figures.

To tackle the Coronavirus crisis, four Cabinet committees have been set up, chaired by Matt Hancock (health), Michael Gove (the rest of the public sector), Rishi Sunak (the economy) and Dominic Raab (international).

There is reported to have been some ministerial infighting. This is inevitable, when energetic ministers are bending every sinew to achieve very difficult things in a very short time. Here is Charles Williams, Beaverbrooks most recent biographer:

Arguments in the War Cabinet were sharp and at times noisy. The debate on the use of labour was one such. Beaverbrook argued that the sole aim was maximum output. (When he found out that valuable time was lost when workers took cover at the sounding of the warning alarm, he suggested that the alarms be switched off.) The Minister of Labour, the trade union leader Ernest Bevin, took an opposite view, saying that workers needed proper protection and welfare provision if they were to give of their best. To make matters worse, Bevin was given to shouting, and Beaverbrook was not used to being shouted at. Bevin was chalked up as another enemy. But the list was becoming alarmingly long.

The Prime Minister has to hire the right people, and back them as long as they are getting things done, no matter who they offend in the process. Easy to say, not so easy to do.
A more recent publication of this set of statistics is available. Latest publication: Air transport 2021, November

Published: 26 March 2020

Altogether 1.9 million passengers flew through Finnish airports in February 2020

Altogether 1.9 million passengers flew through Finnish airports in February 2020, which was one per cent lower than one year before. There were 1.5 million passengers at Helsinki Airport and a total of 0.4 million passengers at other domestic airports. Helsinki Airport accounted for 78 per cent of all passengers at domestic airports.

Seventy per cent of the passengers were from international flights and 30 per cent from domestic flights. Of the passengers at Helsinki Airport, 81 per cent were from international flights. Ninety-six per cent of the passengers at Helsinki Airport flew on scheduled flights and four per cent on chartered flights. At the other domestic airports, 15 per cent of the passengers flew on chartered flights.

Passengers of scheduled and chartered flights at Helsinki Airport and other domestic airports in January to February 2020

In the January to February period of 2020 altogether 3.9 million passengers flew through Finnish airports, which was one per cent more than one year before. Seventy-one per cent of the passengers were from international flights and 29 per cent from domestic flights. There were 3.1 million passengers at Helsinki Airport and a total of 0.8 million passengers at other domestic airports. Helsinki Airport accounted for 79 per cent of all passengers at domestic airports.

In the January to February period of 2020 air freight and mail transports amounted to 31.746 tonnes in total, and 98 per cent of the tonnes were transported through Helsinki Airport. Ninety-nine per cent of the tonnes were transported between Finland and foreign countries. Altogether 17.878 tonnes of the goods were outgoing and 13.868 tonnes were incoming.

Source: Transport and tourism, Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Sami Lahtinen 029 551 3207, Matti Kokkonen 029 551 3770, sami.lahtinen@tilastokeskus.fi

Director in charge: Mari Yla-Jarkko

Publication in pdf-format (160.6 kB)

Updated 26.3.20020

Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Air transport [e-publication].

ISSN=2670-1847. February 2020. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 13.1.2022].

Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/ilma/2020/02/ilma_2020_02_2020-03-26_tie_001_en.html
An overwhelmed Italian city at the heart of the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday sent more of its dead to nearby towns for cremation as the country's world-leading toll topped 8,000. Officials in Rome reported 662 new deaths and 6,153 infections -- largely in line with the figures reported throughout the week. The rise in daily deaths edged down to the lowest point in the crisis -- 8.8 percent -- while the infection rate stood at around eight percent for the fourth day running. But the numbers are not dropping much further and Italians appear to be coming to terms with the realisation that two weeks of life under lockdown have not made the disease go away. "Until we see this damn rate drop, we will have to continue making very hard sacrifices," deputy civil protection service chief Agostino Miozzo said in reference to the ever-tightening containment measures. Italy's coronavirus death toll now stands at 8,165 -- more than that of second-placed Spain and China, where the virus emerged in December, combined. - 'Crematoriums could not cope' - The endless flood of victims forced the city of Bergamo at Italy's northern epicentre of the pandemic to send still more bodies to less burdened crematoriums in neighbouring towns. An AFP photographer saw six camouflage green army trucks transporting coffins out of a Bergamo cemetery on Thursday. "The large number of victims has meant that Bergamo's crematorium could not cope on its own," mayor Giorgio Gori said in a statement released to AFP. The mayor said the city had also received 113 urns with the ashes of bodies that had been sent out for cremation earlier this week. The bodies in the city of about 120,000 people are literally piling up. A warehouse in the commune of Ponte San Pietro on Bergamo's western outskirts held 35 freshly-made wooden coffins Thursday that were destined for cremation at a later date. Still more coffins filled a barren church hall in the Seriate commune to Bergamo's east. A priest said a quiet prayer over the rows of coffins and a single red rose rested atop one in the otherwise empty room. - Anxious south - Yet the Italian government is just as anxious about the northern crisis spilling over into the far less developed south. The head of the Campania region that includes Naples warned of a "dramatic explosion" of infections based on this week's trends. "The next 10 days will be hell for us," governor Vincenzo De Luca said in an open letter to Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. The number of officially registered deaths in Campania -- Italy's third-most-populous with nearly six million people -- rose from 29 on Sunday to 83 on Thursday. But no southern region has recorded more than 100 coronavirus fatalities to date. Italy's latest figures confirm that COVID-19 overwhelmingly kills the elderly and the sick. Data from Italy's first 5,542 fatalities show that 98.6 percent of the victims already suffered from at least one ailment or pre-existing condition. Slightly over half had three or more other health problems when they died. Only 29.1 percent of the victims were women. The disparity has been observed elsewhere and still puzzles doctors around the world. The average age of victims was 78 -- a fraction lower than the 78.8 reported last week based on the first 3,200 deaths. But Italian virologist Roberto Burioni said the figures were "not particularly reliable" because the country was primarily testing people who already exhibited flu-like symptoms. Italy's death rate among the confirmed COVID-19 cases -- 10.1 percent -- was thus much higher than in countries with broad-based testing such as South Korea. The endless flood of victims forced the city of Bergamo at Italy's northern epicentre of the pandemic to send still more bodies to less burdened crematoriums A single red rose rested atop a coffin at a warehouse in the commune of Ponte San Pietro on Bergamo's western outskirts A priest says a quiet prayer over the rows of coffins at the warehouse on Bergamo's outskirts
[March 26, 2020] Full-Service Wealth Management Firms Reached Record Levels of Customer Satisfaction Prior to Market Upheaval, J.D. Power Finds

Full-service wealth management firms are entering the coronavirus-fueled market rout from a position of strength when it comes to their existing client relationships. According to the J.D. Power 2020 U.S. Full-Service Investor Satisfaction Study,SM released today, investor satisfaction with full-service firms has reached an all-time high, moving upward in lockstep with the performance of the S&P 500 Index during the past year. However, periods of extreme market volatility-like that of the past several weeks-have historically been a drag on investor satisfaction. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005004/en/ J.D. Power 2020 U.S. Full-Service Investor Satisfaction Study (Graphic: Business Wire) "Wealth managers are seeing increasing client satisfaction scores, but they've also been helped by a strong stock market," said Mike Foy, senior director of wealth intelligence at J.D. Power. "Obviously, the market performance side of the equation has changed significantly due to coronavirus. Our research shows that brands that have developed high-trust relationships with clients will not only be able to retain higher loyalty through more difficult times but will also be significantly less likely to see clients decrease investment as a result of disappointing performance." Following are some of the key findings of the 2020 study: Advisors head into market crisis riding wave of record high investor satisfaction: Overall investor satisfaction with full-service wealth management firms this year is 850 (on a 1,000-point scale), up 15 points from 2019 and the highest level ever recorded in the study's 8-year history. The biggest single driver of the increase is satisfaction with investment performance.







Overall investor satisfaction with full-service wealth management firms this year is 850 (on a 1,000-point scale), up 15 points from 2019 and the highest level ever recorded in the study's 8-year history. The biggest single driver of the increase is satisfaction with investment performance. Digital contact more important than ever: Financial advisor use of digital channels for client contact is directly correlated with increased investment. In fact, advisors who use frequent digital communications (four or more touch points) such as email/text/online/video are 50% more likely to see increased investment from clients vs. when no digital contact is initiated.



Financial advisor use of digital channels for client contact is directly correlated with increased investment. In fact, advisors who use frequent digital communications (four or more touch points) such as email/text/online/video are 50% more likely to see increased investment from clients vs. when no digital contact is initiated. Trust is the great equalizer: High-trust brands enjoy higher satisfaction, loyalty and greater referrals from clients even when problems or difficult markets inevitably arrive. Key drivers of brand trust include taking responsibility for mistakes and resolving them effectively; providing useful guidance; fulfilling service expectations; and putting the interest of clients first. ESG (environmental, social & governance) gets real: More than three-fourths (76%) of investors who rate their firm a 9 or 10 for commitment to social causes say they "definitely will" recommend their investment firm to friends and family. Among investors rating their firm at 6 or below for social causes, only 32% say they "definitely will" recommend their firm. Millennial women choose female advisors: Millennial women are nearly 2.5 times more likely than older women to work with a female advisor than with a male advisor, suggesting such clients are seeking out female advisors to a degree that previous generations of women have not. Since only 15%-20% of all financial advisors are women, it underscores the importance of bringing more female advisor talent into the industry to meet this growing need. Firms that become known as organizations where females can thrive as advisors will have a big competitive advantage in the future. Study Rankings RBC (873) ranks highest in overall investor satisfaction, followed by Fidelity (865) and Edward Jones (860).

The U.S. Full-Service Investor Satisfaction Study, now in its 18th year, measures overall investor satisfaction with full-service investment firms in eight factors (in order of importance): financial advisor; account information; investment performance; firm interaction; product offerings; commission and fees; information resources; and problem resolution. The study is based on responses from 4,532 investors who make some or all of their investment decisions with a financial advisor. The study was fielded from November 2019 through January 2020. For more information about the U.S. Full-Service Investor Satisfaction Study, visit https://www.jdpower.com/business/resource/us-full-service-investor-satisfaction-study. To view the online press release, please visit http://www.jdpower.com/pr-id/2020028. J.D. Power is a global leader in consumer insights, advisory services and data and analytics. These capabilities enable J.D. Power to help its clients drive customer satisfaction, growth and profitability. Established in 1968, J.D. Power has offices serving North America, Asia Pacific and Europe. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005004/en/

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Instead of finishing school in July, at least 69 students at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine will graduate in April, starting their hospital internships early in order to help with the fight against the COVID-19 coronavirus.

In a statement, the school said it gave students the option of graduating early in response to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's (D) "directive to get more physicians into the health system more quickly." New York City is being hit especially hard by COVID-19, with more than 20,000 confirmed cases as of Wednesday evening.

Steven Abramson, an executive vice dean at the medical school, told CNN the fact that so many students have agreed to help in this time of need is "awe-inspiring." One student, Gabrielle Mayer, said it was an "easy decision" to make, since she and her classmates have "the skill set that seems needed and valuable right now."

This plan must still be approved by the New York State Department of Education and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education; if it goes through, students will start their internships at NYU-affiliated hospitals, and will "never be asked to do something that is above their level of competence," Abramson said.

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A woman has been slapped with a $1,000 fine after ignoring instructions to self-isolate during the coronavirus lockdown.

The 65-year-old woman returned to Sydney from Bali on Saturday and was ordered to self-quarantine for 14 days amid the deadly COVID-19 outbreak.

Police received reports that the woman had broken her quarantine on Monday and visited her home in Redhead, south of Newcastle, and issued her with a warning.

Police received reports that the woman had broken her quarantine on Monday and visited her home in Redhead, south of Newcastle, and issued her with a warning (stock image)

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

Later on Thursday, officers received further information that the woman had once again left her home and was breaching the public health order.

Officers returned to her house later that day at 1.45pm and issued her a $1,000 penalty infringement notice.

Police from Thursday have had the power to hand out fines of $1,000 to individuals and $5,000 to businesses that breach public health orders or ministerial directions.

NSW Minister for Police and Emergency Services David Elliott said the rules could not be clearer and they apply to everyone.

'No one is above the law. If you decide to ignore a direction, you will be caught, and you may very well find yourself slapped with a hefty fine,' the Minister said.

'The fact that people are still not complying is the reason why we have police out in full force enforcing these directions.

'This behaviour is not only reckless and stupid, but potentially deadly.'

Australia's positive coronavirus cases soared to 3,112 as of Friday morning, with 13 dead.

Police from Thursday had the power to hand out fines of $1,000 to individuals and $5,000 to businesses that breach public health orders or ministerial directions (stock)
The beginning of the school year when you got to show off your new duds, new cars, new looks!

Sports! Playing, cheering, watching high school athletics.

The arts: Dramatic arts, musical groups and shows, graphic arts groups, debate, etc.

The prom! No dancing the night away or punch bowl antics.

The daily interactions. Just being with the group, hanging with friends and classmates.

Access to college recruiters and advisors  its harder to line up higher education.

Walking onstage to get a diploma while all the family is watching with everyone elses family.

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US Attorney General Bill Barr said Thursday he had instructed federal prisons to free some inmates to lessen the impact of the coronavirus epidemic. One day after the United Nations human rights chief urged countries to protect people held in overcrowded jails and other enclosed facilities, Barr said he had encouraged US prisons to release qualified inmates. "I've asked and issued a memorandum just today to the Bureau of Prisons to increase the use of home confinement, based on a number of factors... particularly for those older prisoners who have served substantial parts of their sentences," Barr said. He said the instruction was focused on prisoners who are not considered dangerous and who may have underlying medical conditions that make them particularly vulnerable to the COVID-19 virus. "We want to make sure that our institutions don't become petri dishes" for the disease, Barr said. His instructions apply to the some 170,000 inmates in the US federal prison system, where about a dozen cases of coronavirus have been discovered among prisoners and prison staff. The directive will favor prisoners over 60 years old who have not been convicted of violent or sexual crimes. Possibly 2,000 inmates could qualify. The majority of the 2.2 million people serving prison time in the United States are in state and local institutions. A number of state governors have come under pressure to free elderly inmates with greater risks of coronavirus infection. The leaders of California and New Jersey are already moving with similar actions to Barr's. On Wednesday, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Michelle Bachelet, called for governments to ease the pressure on prison populations. "COVID-19 has begun to strike prisons, jails and immigration detention centres, as well as residential care homes and psychiatric hospitals, and risks rampaging through such institutions' extremely vulnerable populations," Bachelet said in a statement. Ethiopia announced it would free more than 4,000 prisoners and Afghanistan also plans to let go up to 10,000 detainees. The US federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana
IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack, rallying up to 20 per cent

Mumbai: Equity benchmark Sensex jumped over 700 points in opening session on Thursday led by gains in HDFC twins, Infosys, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank amid mixed global cues.

The 30-share BSE barometer was trading 713.76 points or 2.30 per cent higher at 29,249.54.

Similarly, the NSE Nifty was up 167.95 points, or 2.02 per cent, at 8,485.80.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack, rallying up to 20 per cent, followed by Axis Bank, Bajaj Auto, ICICI Bank, HDFC and Bajaj Finance. On the other hand, ITC, Maruti and ONGC were the top losers.

In the previous session, the BSE gauge Sensex shot up 1,861.75 points or 6.98 per cent to settle at 28,535.78, and the NSE barometer Nifty spurted 516.80 points or 6.62 per cent to end at 8,317.85  the biggest single-day gain for the indices.

According to traders, investors are weighing the economic impact of the 21-day lockdown in the country.

All eyes are Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's economic package to cushion the economic impact of the lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19, expected to be announced shortly, they said.

Bourses in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Seoul were trading on a mixed note.

Stocks on Wall Street ended with firm gains in overnight trade.

Incessant foreign fund outflow also kept domestic market participants risk-averse, traders said.

The number of deaths around the world linked to the new coronavirus has crossed over 21,000. In India, more than 600 coronavirus cases have been reported so far.
Indian doctors working within the UK's state-funded National Health Service (NHS) have written to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to scrap an unfair and discriminatory surcharge imposed on foreign doctors, many of whom are working round the clock to combat the coronavirus pandemic that has infected over 9,500 people in the country.

The Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS), introduced in April 2015, is imposed on anyone in the UK on a work, study or family visa for longer than six months in order to raise additional funds for the NHS.

In the Budget earlier this month, Indian-origin UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that the charge would be further hiked from 400 pounds to 624 pounds per year.

We believe that this surcharge is discriminatory and unfair, as the overseas workers are already paying their due share of National Insurance contributions, superannuation and income tax, reads the letter sent to Johnson on Wednesday by the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO), which has been lobbying against the IHS for many years.

We request you to remove the health surcharge with immediate effect. The NHS has been in a workforce crisis for several years, but now with the COVID-19 pandemic, there has never been a worse time for an overstrained service, and we require all the help we can get to meet the challenges, appeals the letter, signed by BAPIO President Ramesh Mehta, chair J S Bamrah and Secretary Professor Parag Singhal.

They believe that the health surcharge not only adds a significant financial burden on new arrivals but also makes them feel "undervalued", and it proves a disincentive to BAPIO's recruitment drives from India.

By removing this, the government will demonstrate the genuineness of their caring attitude towards frontline staff, the letter notes.

It comes just as thousands of retired Indian-origin doctors and nurses began answering the UK government's call to return to the NHS as the health service comes under considerable strain, with over 9,500 positive cases of COVID-19 and the country's death toll from the deadly virus rising to 465.

These are exceptional and extraordinary times and we are here to assist the health service as much as possible. We are advising our recently retired doctors to return to work, of course with the provision that if any of them are unwell or have a chronic illness they must follow the government advice and self isolate, said Mehta.

The UK has an estimated 60,000 doctors of Indian-origin working within the NHS, often referred to as the backbone of the country's health service.

Among the recently retired, at least a couple of thousand are likely to be of Indian-origin, with a further estimated 10,000 in long-term retirement who are also being rallied to assist in whatever capacity possible.

During his weekly briefing from 10 Downing Street on Wednesday evening, Johnson issued a special thank you to these returning medics and the nearly 405,000 people who have volunteered to support the NHS.

To all of you, and all the former NHS staff who are coming back now into the service, I say thank you on behalf of the entire country," he said.

The effort was also lauded by MPs in the House of Commons before Parliament closed its session on Wednesday, earlier than planned for its Easter break to comply with the strict social distancing rules amid a near-lockdown and stay at home government order in an effort to try and control the rapid spread of the pandemic.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As Russia moves aggressively to consolidate its hold over Crimea, the Black Sea region it seized in 2014 from Ukraine, journalists with Radio Free Europe/Radio Libertys (RFE/RL) Crimea.Realities unit are marking six years of unflinching efforts to provide residents with accurate information and counter the propaganda reinforcing Moscows presence.

Our journalists have been there from the beginning, reporting on every possible platform, in Crimeas multiple languages, for residents otherwise captive to Kremlin propaganda and disinformation, said RFE/RL President Jamie Fly. Russia is using Crimea as a testing ground for informational warfare, and our Crimea team is on the front-lines, responding with professionalism, integrity, and courage.

Crimea.Realities, part of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, was launched in March 2014, just weeks after little green men in unmarked uniforms -- later known to be special forces attached to Russias military -- entered Crimea. Its reporters have provided authoritative coverage ofevery major story coming out of the region, including Russias military build-up, U.S. and European sanctions and the companies circumventing them, the persecution of the indigenous Crimean Tatar minority, court cases, the 2018 naval confrontation near the Kerch Strait, and threats to the peninsulas precarious fresh water supply. It also serves as the trusted local news source for an information-starved populace, reporting on schools, roads, pensions, and health-care.

Our journalists have been there from the beginning, reporting on every possible platform, in Crimeas multiple languages, for residents otherwise captive to Kremlin propaganda and disinformation.

Designed for maximum accessibility, Crimea.Realities reaches audiences - with high numbers in Russia -- via dedicated web sites in Ukrainian, Russian, and Crimean Tatar that have been visited over 140 million times. It broadcasts 24/7 in Ukrainian and Russian on radio and twice-weekly on TV. It publishes on all leading social networks, including the Russian platforms VKontakte and Odnoklassniki.

Research by the Kyiv-based Institute of Mass Information in 2019 shows that Ukrainian mass media rely on Crimea.Realities for 18 percent of their reporting about the region. In 2016, the Russian research center Medialogiya recognized Crimea.Realities among the three most-cited information sources about Crimea; in response to political pressure, the group dropped Crimea.Realities from subsequent surveys.

As Crimea.Realities has built audience and influence, Russian authorities have taken notice. As many as 60 contributors to its local network have faced pressure and threats from Russian security services, forcing most to either leave the peninsula or their jobs. Many work under pseudonyms, while guests invited for interviews and on-air commentary often request to do so anonymously for fear of retribution. In 2016, journalist Mykola Semena became the face of Russian efforts to silence Crimeas independent media after he was found guilty of separatism and banned from journalism for publishing an opinion piece denouncing the occupation. Contributor Taras Ibrahimov was recently barred from entering the peninsula for 34 years.

In addition to persecuting individual reporters, the Kremlin has targeted Crimea.Realities itself, designating it a foreign agent in 2017. Moscows stated intention to stand up a sovereign internet this year engineered to filter out unsanctioned media poses an additional threat to the outlets ability to operate.

About RFE/RL

RFE/RL relies on its networks of local reporters to provide accurate news and information to more than 37 million people in 26 languages and 22 countries where media freedom is restricted, or where a professional press has not fully developed. Its videos were viewed over 3.6 billion times on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram/IGTV in FY2019. RFE/RL is an editorially independent media company funded by a grant from the U.S. Congress through the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

----

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:

Joanna Levison in Prague (levisonj@rferl.org, +420.221.122.080)

Martins Zvaners in Washington (zvanersm@rferl.org, +1.202.457.6948)
CLEVELAND, Ohio  An HIV-positive Ohio prison inmate is arguing to the states high court that remaining imprisoned during the coronavirus pandemic could be a death sentence for him and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

The Ohio Supreme Court on Thursday ordered that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWines administration respond to the case by Monday.

Derek Lichtenwalter, who is serving a 30-month sentence for leading police, sheriff deputies and state troopers on an hour-long chase in Guernsey County, filed the lawsuit without an attorney March 19.

Lichtenwalter, 44, argued that he is a non-violent offender and is considered high-risk because of his HIV diagnosis. He also noted that Ohio prisons could not guarantee the social-distancing and hygiene guidelines required by state and federal health officials to help stem the spread of the virus.

DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney declined to comment. A message left for Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections spokeswoman JoEllen Smith was not immediately returned.

People with immunodeficiency disorders are especially vulnerable to Covid-19. DeWine on March 16 issued specific orders to the prison system that aims at stopping a coronavirus outbreak in the prison and jail systems, including screening all incoming inmates and possibly refusing prisoners with coronavirus symptoms.

DeWine said at a news conference on Wednesday that no Ohio prison inmates have tested positive for Covid-19.

Lichtenwalter argued that the state has a legal obligation to protect inmates from unnecessary harm. He said because he is serving non-mandatory prison time and is considered high-risk for Covid-19, he should be released.

He said hes currently in an area of Belmont Correctional Institution, in southeastern Ohio, where he is consistently within three or four feet about 126 other inmates. He said its impossible for the prison to enact proper social distancing of six feet.

Lichtenwalter likened an outbreak at the jail to playing Russian roulette.

The Common areas are overcrowded and what this means is once it gets to the prison it will be spread quickly through the population, Lichtenwalter wrote. The death rate of 1-5 percent is high enough, yet I am with chronic health problems.

He wrote he and other inmates serving time for low-level offenses could return to the prison after the outbreak subsides, or until there is a vaccine readily available to the public.

He likened the situation in prison to an outbreak at the Life Care Center nursing home in Kirtland, Washington, where 129 people were infected and 29 died.

Please understand that there is no way that once the coronavirus, covid-19 gets to prison it will be able to be contained, and once it spreads many will die who need not and who otherwise would be home within a few months to a few years, Lichtenwalter wrote.

Read more from cleveland.com:

Cuyahoga County judges, defense lawyers create task force to evaluate courthouse response to new coronavirus era

Bogus coronavirus cures and phony stimulus phishing: FBI warns of wave of scams amid the pandemic

Death of pregnant woman on I-90 near Dead Mans Curve in Cleveland ruled undetermined
The Huron & Sanilac County Economic Development Corporation has been asked by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and the I-69 Thumb Region to assist in the application process for the MEDCs Emergency Small Business Relief Program.

There are two programs, a Small Business Grant program and a Small Business Loan Program.

The grant program is available to businesses of 0-50 employees and must fall under the Governors Executive Order 2020-9 or any subsequent Executive Order of similar intent. The grants are for $10,000 or less. Huron County has received $81,011 in grant money and Sanilac County has received $83,860.

The Small Business Loan Program is for businesses with less than 100 employees. The loans must be a minimum of $50,000 and are capped at $200,000. This program is for those businesses that can demonstrate that they are impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and would be used for working capital to support payroll, rent, mortgage payments, utilities expenses, etc.

The information and applications for both programs are available on at: http://huroncounty.com/covid-19-business-relief web site. Please select the county that the business is in Huron or Sanilac and fill out the application and return the application as an attachment to: Huron Grants  huroncountygrant@huroncounty.com; Huron Loans  huroncountyloan@huroncounty.com; Sanilac Grants  sanilaccountygrant@huroncounty.com; or Sanilac Loans  sanilaccountyloan@huroncounty,com.

Details for both the grant and loan programs are on the website. The deadline to apply is Sunday, March 29, at 11:59 p.m.

Both programs applications will be reviewed at the regional level and sent to MEDC for consideration. We are anticipating selections would be made in the next 10 days or less.
Sitting cross-legged in her living room, Donna Borak rested her palm on her heart as she guided a small group of virtual participants in meditation and deep breathing. Notice where you might be holding tension, she instructed. Send your attention to your head ... maybe acknowledging its OK if youve been worried and scared, she told them Maybe finding comfort that we are all in this together.

From her Washington, D.C., home, Borak has been hosting a free virtual meditation class daily for anyone who wants a respite during such a moment of uncertainty. Attendees are encouraged to bring children, loved ones or pets. Even your plants. Inhale, maybe even a little bit more deeply this time, slowly letting the air out of your mouth.

As social distancing has emerged as a key tool to staunch the spread of the coronavirus, ordinary people around the globe have turned to technology to overcome physical barriers. In ways big and small, they are forging new connections and comforting others inundated by bad news about the virus or burdened by unpaid bills.

Borak wanted to carve out a space for togetherness  for a stressed-out parent, a manager or a laid-off employee to take a break. So far, attendees joining her class on Zoom video conferencing have mainly been friends and family, and shes been sharing sessions on Instagram.

While a meditation class for 15 minutes doesnt solve financial stress or help to explain what will happen next or address serious health care concerns, to me, its an opportunity to not be alone and to not exist in isolation, she said by phone. I didnt want anyone to feel alone.

For most people, the virus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover. A journalist whose work stints included The Associated Press and who had been attending yoga teacher training, Borak draws lessons from such testing times.

Going forward, for every time that we opted out at the last minute of attending an event or a happy hour or a dinner, well hopefully feel differently about it when we come back together again, she said. We need each other. In Austin, Texas, Catherine Woodiwiss has also gone online to provide relief of a different kind. She knew that the cancellation of South by Southwest  a film, music and technology festival that attracts hundreds of thousands to Austin  could hit artists and small business owners hard.

Her first instinct to help by buying local wasnt going to work amid the social distancing and various shutdowns. So she encouraged those who lost income to reach out online. I cant give a ton, but I can give something, and will as much / for as long as I can, she wrote on Twitter. She said takers included an 18-year-old pregnant woman who works as a cashier and said her store would be closed for a month and a musician whose shows would have covered rent and other expenses.

She used Venmo to send money directly after doing a light vetting of recipients by looking at their accounts. Im comfortable erring on the side of being of help, she said. In a moment of need, I am comfortable giving to who asked for it. There are times that I have been very much in need of financial support from other people, Woodiwiss said in a phone interview. I am very lucky to be at a moment ... where thats not true.

Shes been setting aside money for a while to help with different causes. Now coronavirus is her cause  and shes part of a bigger effort. On her social media feeds, shes seen people come together in new ways, holding singing circles or sharing self-quarantine recipes.

Borak and Woodiwiss are among an army of virtual volunteers worldwide donating time and money. Some have used the Internet to set up food- delivery services to the elderly. One mother issued an international call for help celebrating the birthdays of her self-quarantined children. People are trying to figure out how to belong with each other ... when we are physically separate, Woodiwiss said. In this moment of real, relatively unanticipated crisis, its been really great to see people show up.
Lockheed Martin's Sikorsky and Bell Textron Inc. will compete for the U.S. Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program, the service announced Wednesday.

The service selected Lockheed's RAIDER X coaxial helicopter and Bell's "360 Invictus" single-rotor concept for the second phase of the program, in which the companies will design, manufacture and test their prototypes, Army officials said in a news release.

"Our focus is on delivering capability for our soldiers at the speed of relevance," said Gen. John Murray, commanding general of Army Futures Command, in the release. "We're doing that here -- providing opportunities for our industry partners to design, test and build capability alongside our soldiers to ensure that we win on a future battlefield."

Currently, the Army is developing FARA and the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) as part of its larger Future Vertical Lift initiative, or FVL. The FVL effort will bring in new aircraft as the service phases out its UH-60 Black Hawks and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters.

FARA is meant to fill a capability gap left by the retirement of the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters. But last year, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told lawmakers that the chosen FARA design may ultimately replace half of the service's Apache fleet, according to The Drive.

Related: Test Pilots Sound Off on Futuristic Helicopter Vying to Replace Army's Black Hawk

The helicopters are expected to hold their first flight demonstrations in the fall of 2022. The contract amounts were not disclosed.

"The Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft is the Army's number one aviation modernization priority and is integral to effectively penetrate and disintegrate adversaries' Integrated Air Defense Systems," said Bruce Jette, assistant secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, in a released statement. "It will enable combatant commanders with greater tactical, operational and strategic capabilities through significantly increased speed, range, endurance, survivability and lethality."

The Raider has been flying since 2018 and has surpassed speeds of 200 knots, according to Sikorsky representatives. It is currently being scaled into the Raider X, which will be 20% larger for the FARA program.

The "360 Invictus" helicopter should be able to fly at speeds greater than 180 knots true airspeed, or more than 200 miles per hour, Bell officials said while unveiling the prototype in October.

The aircraft, loosely based on Bell's 525 Relentless rotor system, will also have a supplemental power unit that can boost the aircraft's speed in flight.

Other companies that were in the running for the program included: AVX Aircraft Co., partnered with L3Harris Technologies; Boeing Co.; and Karem Aircraft.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @oriana0214.

Read More: Military Families Overseas Say They Cant Order from Amazon Anymore
Robert Levinsons family believes former FBI agent died in Iranian custody, based on information from US officials.

Tehran has said a former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran 13 years ago had left the country a long time ago, despite his family saying a day earlier that he had died in Iranian custody.

Robert Levinson went missing on Irans Kish Island in the Gulf in March 2007. The case is another irritant in the already hostile relationship between Washington and Tehran.

Levinsons family said on Wednesday it now believed Levinson died in Iranian custody, based on information from US officials.

Today with aching hearts, we are sharing devastating news about Robert Levinson, the head of our family, they said in a statement.

However, Irans foreign ministry spokesman said on Thursday, based on what he called credible evidence, Levinson had left Iran years ago for an unspecified destination.

In the past years Iran has tried to find out his state but could not find any signs of him being alive, spokesman Abbas Mousavi said, according to state television.

Reuters news agency had reported in 2013 that Levinson, a private detective and former FBI agent, was investigating allegations of corruption by well-connected people in Iran.

Lawyer David McGee had then said Levinson was trying to trace money laundered through Iranian exiles living in Toronto.

US officials had acknowledged to Reuters that Levinson had a relationship with the CIA as a source at the time he visited Kish Island and disappeared.

A video released in 2011 showed him pleading for help. It did not say who was holding him or where.

Tehran denied knowledge of Levinsons whereabouts last November, when it said a legal case involving him was under way at a revolutionary court that handles security-related cases.

Iran has always maintained that its officials have no knowledge of Mr Levinsons whereabouts, and that he is not in Iranian custody. Those facts have not changed, the spokesman for Irans mission at the United Nations, Alireza Miryousefi, said on Thursday.

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had not been told that Levinson was dead.

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But White House national security adviser Robert OBrien said later that an investigation was still going on but we believe that Bob Levinson may have passed away some time ago.

Levinsons family said in their statement: We recently received information from US officials that has led both them and us to conclude that our wonderful husband and father died while in Iranian custody.

They said they did not know when or how he died but that it was before the coronavirus epidemic hit Iran. Nor did they know if Levinsons body would ever be returned to them.

OBrien said Iran must provide a complete accounting of what happened to Levinson. Levinson disappeared after flying from Dubai to Kish in 2007. There he met with Daoud Salahuddin, an American militant who fled to Iran while facing charges in the murder of an Iranian embassy official based in Washington, DC.

Levinson, then a private investigator, was seeking information on alleged corruption involving former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his family, sources familiar with his work said.

The Iranian government has never publicly acknowledged any role in Levinsons abduction, though at the time of his disappearance a government-affiliated media outlet had said he was in the hands of Iranian security forces.

Some US investigators, at least until recently, believed Levinson was still alive, while officials at other US agencies believe he died perhaps years ago.

The US and the Islamic republic are longtime foes. Washington opposes Tehrans influence in the Middle East and backs its regional rival Saudi Arabia. They also support opposing sides in wars in Yemen and Syria.

Washington also maintains tough economic sanctions on Iran. In 2018, Trump pulled the US out of an international agreement which curbed Irans nuclear programme.
Lions and tigers and teddy bears, oh my!

With families around the world abiding by social distancing guidelines recommended by health experts and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials to curb the further spread of coronavirus, neighborhood bear hunts are becoming all the rage in some areas.

Taking a page from Michael Rosens 1989 childrens book Were Going on a Bear Hunt, members of a number of communities across the globe are placing teddy bears and other stuffed animals in their homes windows to create a scavenger hunt-esque activity for kids who are stuck at home. While taking walks or drives around the neighborhood with their parents, kids in participating communities can have some fun by keeping an eye out for any number of stuffed animals that have been put on display at other houses.

Shanna Bonner Groom, who spearheaded the recent bear hunting initiative in the Stewart Springs neighborhood of Murfreesboro, Tenn., tells TIME that she got the word out by posting the idea in her neighborhoods private Facebook group after seeing it floating around on social media. Now, she says kids are roaming the neighborhood in full safari outfits, binoculars included.

Within hours, everybody was responding and wanting to join in, she says. Everybodys trying to enjoy this time at home with each other but do social distancing at the same time. So were trying to come up with some fun activities.

A teddy bear in the window of a home in Murfreesboro, Tenn. | Shanna Bonner Groom

Groom says that nearly half the homes in her 200-house neighborhood are now participating in the bear hunt, including ones where no little kids live.

We have some houses where probably every stuffed animal they own is stuffed into a window, she says. Some families have turned it into a safari instead of a bear hunt because you see other animals. People are putting bear prints on their sidewalks with chalk. Its morphed into more.

Story continues

Like other cities around the world, Reykjavik residents have dealt with social distancing by putting #teddybears in their windows to cheer up their young ones. Children are encouraged to go for a walk in their neighbourhood and see how many teddy bears they can spot #bearhunt pic.twitter.com/yVsI1RsDst  Visit Reykjavik (@visitreykjavik) March 26, 2020

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Meanwhile, in the London borough of Lewisham, Daniele Hamamdjian says that bear hunting took off on her block after she shared the idea in her neighborhoods WhatsApp group.

We put our teddy bear in the window and the next thing you know, everybody was putting one in their window, she says. It was really heartwarming. I got emotional looking at all the pictures coming in because I think people just want to hang onto anything positive, even if its a stuffed animal in a window.

To the parent (its gotta be a parent) who came up w/ this idea, THANK YOU. Explaining to a 4yr-old why playdates arent allowed anymore is heartbreaking, so Going on a Bear Hunt during our walks is the distraction we needed. Our street right now:#COVID19 pic.twitter.com/aOhSlmJsVJ  Daniele Hamamdjian (@DHamamdjian) March 22, 2020

Rhodes Bailey, whose family has been participating in the bear hunt going on in the Hamptons and Old Woodlands neighborhoods of Columbia, S.C., adds that bear hunting has become more than just a game for them.

Its a way of communicating with other people while youre still safe in your family isolation, he said. Its like a silent visual message that families get to send to each other from their windows and it says, Were all in this together. Im experiencing what youre experiencing.'

Something uplifting to share during the crisis - lots of lovely residents in Gondar Gardens have put teddy bears in their windows to create a bear hunt for children that walk by! What a sweet idea  pic.twitter.com/q5MA63M13M  Lorna Jane Russell (@lornajane2) March 25, 2020

Bailey says that he and his wife have turned searching for bear dens, as theyve dubbed the houses with bears, into a learning experience for their 5-year-old daughter.

We said, We gotta go find as many bears as we can, and my wife got a pad and paper so that my daughter could write down the number of bears shed seen. We used it as a counting game for her, he said. Whenever we saw one, everybody would yell Theres a bear! Theres a bear! and point at it. You get kind of caught up in the moment but in a really positive way.

The Hamptons/Old Woodlands neighborhood started a family bear hunt (social distancing-compliant). @DarePBailey is our enthusiastic lead bear hunter. Most people put teddy bears in their windows, but this one got free. pic.twitter.com/RCEiRYuTi6  Rhodes Bailey (@RhodesBailey) March 21, 2020

Groom says that the success of bear hunting has inspired her community to organize other social distancing-friendly activities like a chalk-a-walk  everybodys going to write inspiring messages and draw pictures on their sidewalk  a senior walk for the high school seniors  everyones going to come outside and cheer for them  and a visit from a local food truck  were trying to support our local restaurants so they stay in business.

Just because were social distancing doesnt mean we have to socially isolate, she says. Were trying to come together as a community but still be six feet apart.

Our  sits in the window (in Brussels) so when kids go for a walk they can also go on a bear hunt! pic.twitter.com/A7Enq3GQqj  Katie Owens (@ktowens) March 30, 2020

A common sentiment amongst the bear hunters seems to be that sharing this activity with their neighbors has made them feel a greater sense of community. It extends our family symbolically in a way that we otherwise might not be able to, Bailey says. When you go by a bear house, its almost like a positive love code that people are sending. You feel like theyre immediately friends. You have the same sense of community and the same sense of love for kids and family.Hamamdjian adds that it can be a positive diversion for kids who might not understand why social distancing is important right now. How do you explain to a four-year-old that shes not allowed playdates and her friends arent allowed playdates because people are sick? You dont want to traumatize them and you dont want them to fear other human beings, but they still have to be cautious, she says. So spotting stuffed animals in windows is a really nice distraction from the coronavirus conversation. Amid these tough times, Bailey notes that adults and children alike need things like bear hunting to remind them why self-isolating is important. It reminds us that were part of something bigger than ourselves and were all going through this together, he says.

Please send any tips, leads, and stories to virus@time.com.
Sinduja Jane By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: I was staying with my grandparents in a rented house near Nanganallur. While I was away, a few residents association members asked my grandfather to tell me to move out. They started creating an issue after reports of doctors being told to vacate houses in rest of the country appeared, said a government doctor. He added that he moved out to his aunts place because he did not want to make an issue out of it. Though doctors and nurses are on the forefront of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, a section of them are facing discrimination from house owners and neighbours.

According to sources, two doctors working at Government Stanley Medical College Hospital were also told to move out from their rented flat. We dont need claps or clangs, what we want is support and encouragement at these difficult times, said the doctors. The Health department has constituted teams of doctors, nurses and paramedical staff to work in isolation wards on rotation. After four to seven days of duty, one team will quarantine themselves at homes, and then a fresh team is posted.

The Health department on Tuesday instructed all deans of medical colleges, and the Joint Director of Health Services to make necessary arrangements for those on rotation in isolation ward, for staying inside hospital premises to reduce the risk of infection.
Katy City Council voted to postpone the May city council elections and declared a public health emergency at the March 23 meeting. The election will now take place in November. The council also passed an order prohibiting community gatherings.

The meeting, which was live streamed on Facebook, addressed the mounting concerns over how the novel coronavirus crisis would impact the city council elections.

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The vote to postpone the election carried unanimously after deliberation. The council had originally faced some backlash from residents for considering postponing the election, but in the end, the council put public safety over the elections.

I believe that liberties are of paramount importance, said council member Frank Carroll III. But at some point there is a public safety element.

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Mayor Bill Hastings lamented the loss of the elections, but noted that there have been many losses throughout the pandemic.

Times have changed, and were going to have to get with the program, and to do that, were going to have to make some decisions that we do not like, he said.

Postponing the election would cost the city financially, but forging ahead, the council agreed, could potentially cost more.

City Secretary Becky McGrew stated that a normal election costs the city around $25,000. While postponing the election could cost the city another $10,000, Carroll noted that following through with the election could be even more costly as the city followed health protocols.

(The amount of $25,000) is under normal circumstances. When you have to have sanitation, personal protective equipment  wiping down equipment after every vote  best case scenario is $40,000, said Carroll.

Im not comfortable that we have the means to protect (people) that are working the polls, Corte added. My main focus is on public safety.

The city also passed an ordinance prohibiting community gatherings in accordance with Gov. Greg Abbotts executive order issued to impede the spread of COVID-19. Failure to adhere to the ordinance may result in a $2,000 fine.

According to the governors order, residents must avoid social gatherings in groups of more than 10 people. Residents must also avoid eating or drinking at bars, restaurants and food courts. Residents are also banned from or visiting gyms or massage parlors. The Katy Police Department now has the authority to enforce these guidelines.

Hastings acknowledged the difficulty of the present climate but added, This community  I think this is an opportunity to be united as we have never been united before.

claire.goodman@chron.com
Urban American transportation has been stuck in a multi-decade status quo. Most of a city's road space goes to cars and other single-occupancy vehicles, which can use it unlimited for free. Curb space is also mostly for those vehicles, which park along it day and night at free or below-market rates.There long have been calls to change this, due to the environmental, safety and quality-of-life problems posed by automobiles. Activists who want a more balanced approach to rights of way demand bike lanes, bus lanes and wider sidewalks, arguing that this will foster alternative transport. Innovative businesses, such as ride-share or bike-share companies, ask for space to operate, knowing this will help them scale. If some free on-street parking were replaced with per-minute drop-off space, for example, Uber drivers wouldn't have to double park so much. Or if cities used some of that space for bike racks, Lime bikes could be stored rather than littered onto sidewalks. And if cities replaced some parking spaces with designated bus lanes, both public and private bus companies could utilize them, moving more people more efficiently.The possible alternative uses of right of way really are endless, but cities have largely ignored them, instead continuing to prioritize king car. Where have transportation agencies been through all this? After all, city and metropolitan transportation agencies are full of people who understand how pro-car policies hurt cities and how pragmatic changes can level the playing field. So why aren't their goals turned into policy?Turns out, the interest-group politics that block so many other policy reforms apply to urban transport too. In the worst-case scenario, transportation agencies themselves behave like special interests, viewing any new innovation as a threat to their fiefdoms or engaging in protectionism for others.Take the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which oversees public transit, paratransit, and bike and pedestrian infrastructure. It has, through hard caps and other regulations, unilaterally prevented private bike-share, scooter-share and moped-share companies, as well as private buses, from scaling in the city. SFMTA helped cause the closure of bus startups Chariot and Leap, for example, by outlawing them from running routes that competed with city-run Muni buses.New York City's Department of Transportation oversees roads and parking, and hasn't made big shifts to how either are run; the right of way it manages still overwhelmingly serves single-occupancy vehicles. The agency also controls the private bus industry, both intercity and intracity, and has been stingy over the years with permits while cracking down on companies that work in the shadows. In both cases, the DOT demonstrates what transport behavior it does and does not want.Los Angeles has long been America's car capital, and the DOT there hasn't been out front about changing anything either. But it has found time to suspend Uber's permit to rent electric scooters and bicycles because the company wouldn't share its data with the agency.Some transportation departments aren't opposed to right-of-way shifts and alternative transport options, but they don't lobby heavily for them. Again, it boils down to special-interest politics: Any time there's a public meeting about changing right of way (for example, by removing on-street parking spaces to build bike lanes), car owners come out with their pitchforks. Elected officials capitulate to their demands, enacting legislation or issuing directives that transportation department staffers must follow. It seems that there's no objective party around to ask why one segment of the commuting populace (single-occupancy vehicle drivers) should get so much more space and legal protection than another (alternative transport providers and users).My hope is that city transportation departments become that party, asking the smart questions about balancing transport rights and planning right of way accordingly. In fairness to the agencies I called out above, they sometimes have. The SFMTA, for example, recently spearheaded the Better Market Street Project , which has made most of San Francisco's main thoroughfare free of private cars. The New York City DOT battled through years of NIMBYism and lawsuits to turn Manhattan's 14th Street into a busway pilot . And L.A.'s DOT has installed "pedestrian scrambles" citywide, allowing pedestrians to cross an intersection in every direction including diagonally.But activists are still calling for these agencies to more vocally share their institutional knowledge, educating residents on why public right of way shouldn't be solely for single-occupancy vehicles at everyone else's expense. At the very least, these agencies shouldn't be going out of their way to obstruct alternatives to king car.GoverningGoverning
The FBI announced on Wednesday night that a domestic terrorism suspect who was allegedly planning to use a car bomb at a local medical facility was killed during an attempt to apprehend him just outside of Kansas City, Missouri.

Timothy Wilson, 36, was "actively planning to commit an act of domestic terrorism -- a bombing -- and over the course of several months had considered several targets," according to the FBI. He had recently decided to target a hospital as news surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic picked up, sources familiar worth the investigation told ABC News.

MORE: DOJ weighs terror charges for those who make threats to spread coronavirus

Wilson was killed Tuesday when he allegedly showed up armed to pick up an inert explosive device supplied by authorities. He was injured and taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead.

It is unclear whether the suspect killed himself or he was shot by authorities.

According to the FBI, Wilson sped up the plan to use his car as a bombing device "in an attempt to cause severe harm and mass casualties" during the coronavirus pandemic.

PHOTO: The Federal Bureau of Investigation seal is seen at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., June 14, 2018. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters, File)

Wilson considered various targets and ultimately settled on an area hospital in an attempt to harm many people, targeting a facility that is providing critical medical care in today's environment," according to a statement from the FBI Kansas City Field Office. "Wilson had taken the necessary steps to acquire materials needed to build an explosive device. At all times during the investigation, the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force kept close track of Wilson in order to protect public safety."

One of the suspect's early targets was a school with African American youth, according to sources.

Wilson was under investigation by the FBI for nearly 18 months.

Domestic terror suspect allegedly plotted to use car bomb on hospital during coronavirus outbreak originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
In the face of the shutdown of the citys arts and culture industry, the Toronto Arts Council and Toronto Arts Foundation are throwing a lifeline to individuals who find themselves out of work and desperate for income.

The two entities have launched the TOArtist COVID Response Fund, hoping to raise $1.5 million to $2 million to put money immediately into the pockets of actors, musicians and other artists.

We live in an incredible city because of our artists. Hopefully theyve been able to apply for federal support down the line, but we need to reach out and help them now, said Claire Hopkinson, director and CEO of the arts council and arts foundation.

Hopkinson said 100 per cent of donations will go directly to artists, with administrative costs picked up by the foundation.

Weve been feeling it on the front line as artists have called us and told us their situation, and told us they cant meet their rent and theyve got to make some very hard choices, Hopkinson said.

I know there are so many needs out there right now. But those people who have full-time jobs still, and who love the arts and who would have bought tickets, at this time of closures maybe they could think about offering some support, Hopkinson added.

Major donors and foundations have already pledged more than $500,000 with individual donors pledging more than $40,000 within a few hours of the appeals launch.

Hopkinson said at least 10,000 people in the arts community have lost jobs as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, many of whom dont qualify for employment insurance because theyre considered self-employed. Many in the arts community also derive much of their income from the restaurant and hospitality industry, which has also been severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Artists median salaries are about $30,000, which is about half of what most Torontonians earn, and they dont have the savings to rely on in a period of tremendous instability without any income, Hopkinson said.

The fund will pay up to $1,000 to artists of all types whose performances have been cancelled. Within a few hours of the funds announcement, more than 100 artists had applied for assistance, Hopkinson said.

See torontoartscouncil.org for more information about the fund.
My daughters are occasionally amazed by the vast number of facts I know.

For example, they'll ask me about something from history when doing their homework and, more often than not, I'll have the facts.

What started World War I? Well, my young ladies, the trigger  no pun intended  was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, though it was the mutual defense treaties that drew one country after another into the conflict.

What was Reconstruction? Well, daughter of mine, it was a plan to bring the country back together after the Civil War while integrating former slaves into society. However, it was a huge mess after the assassination of Abe Lincoln.

Now, when I say the girls are "amazed," I don't mean they look at me with awe and say, "You're amazing, Dad."

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In reality, they say, "What kind of nerd were you that you know all this stuff?"

Memories, Lost and Saved

A big part of my amazing store of knowledge is the fact I have one of those brains. You know, I can remember odd and otherwise useless facts but my own anniversary will occasionally sneak up on me.

A blessing? Eh, it's a mixed bag. Just ask the Wise Woman who is occasionally frustrated by the fact I can't remember appointments or plans that we've discussed.

What can I remember? Well, this week it's all about homelessness.

This weekend  earlier online  in the Post Bulletin you'll read a trio of stories about how communities in Southeast Minnesota are dealing with homelessness. Why homelessness? Well, because I remembered something.

One Conversation Triggers Memory

On Feb. 13, I drove to Winona to do a little story about Winona-Fillmore Counties Habitat for Humanity and Minnesota State College-Southeast working together to remodel the basement of a Winona church to become the city's first emergency homeless shelter.

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I'd gotten most of what I needed for the story talking to a MSC-SE student volunteering his time, a volunteer from the church and Habitat's Amanda Hedlund. But Hedlund asked if I wanted to talk with the pastor of the church, Wesley United Methodist Church, Rev. Robert Hicks.

I looked at my phone (to see the time) and thought, "Yeah, I probably have five minutes."

Nearly an hour later, I finished interviewing Hicks. What I learned is how the choice to open the church to those in need was a tough call among his congregation. It's not that they didn't want to help, but they needed to know what that might look like.

The same thing had happened at Community Bible Church in downtown Winona, the location of the Winona Community Warming Center.

There was even another location that would soon start a remodeling effort to become another homeless shelter in Winona.

How many homeless shelters did one city of about 28,000 people need, I wondered. I also began to recall stories I'd written about efforts to develop a shelter in Red Wing.

Connecting The Dots

Hicks also told me about a group in Winona that has, for years, been leading efforts to build up an infrastructure to help the homeless. Again, this sounded like the group I'd covered in Red Wing.

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All this made me wonder: If cities like Red Wing (population: 16,000) and Winona are just now coming together to help the homeless beyond the emergency measures cities and counties have (hotel vouchers on a cold night), then what happens in places where they don't have that many people or resources.

Take Fillmore County, which has about 21,000 people total. The largest city, Chatfield (pop. 2,800), is half in Olmsted County. And, as caring as the people in Chatfield or Preston (the county seat) may be, there aren't enough resources to go around for people in need.

And, of course, how does all this compare to Rochester?

All These Pieces of Information

All these dots and connected thoughts were the inspiration for the Weekend Focus you'll soon read.

From there, I still had to go out and interview people. One night, I spent about two hours at the Dorothy Day Hospitality House in Rochester talking to guests. I sat in on an emergency homeless task force meeting for Three Rivers Community Action Network. And, I went back to Winona to talk with leaders of that group that's been trying to help the homeless for about five years.

Overall, I think this is a better use of my brain than remembering George Brett's 1980 batting average. Yeah, I'm still wasting brain power on that.
Like most businesses, Con Horgan has witnessed the rapid impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. From Tralee in Co Kerry, the circus performer runs a small outfit - Fanzini Productions - that relies on festivals all over Ireland and across Europe for his living.

He also performs solo as Professor Plunger and has been taking part in festivals since 1997. He additionally organises the National Circus Festival of Ireland in Tralee.

He was due to take part in the St Patrick's Day Festival at Merrion Square in Dublin last week and has seen a number of events that were lined up for coming weeks cancelled.

"Artists are some of the most vulnerable in society," he said. "I often say we walk a tightrope in the circus and we also walk a tightrope in life. The margins are very fine and the protection isn't there for us.

"It underlines the precarious nature of the arts in society."

Horgan said performers such as him rely on mass gatherings and in a normal year would have an average of eight events pencilled in every month during the busiest part of the year.

He typically performs in front of crowds of between 500 and 1,000, but has regaled gatherings with as many as 15,000 people.

"We rely entirely on festivals and work that relies on people coming together," he said. "March, April and May are completely gone.

"June - there are some festivals still considering it. July looks OK at the moment, but that could all change. We just don't know."

In most cases, if a festival gets cancelled, performers signed up to take part in it simply don't get paid.

"It's an immediate loss. There's very little support," he added. "It's an extremely tough time for us."

Horgan also fears that the current crisis will force many performers out of the arts forever.

"You can't live on fresh air," he said. "There will be a lot of people who will be forced out of the arts because of this.

"On the positive side, there's potential here for a lot of creativity to come out of this.

"You can see on social media how people are responding to it."

Horgan said that bookings in Europe for this summer were being cancelled ahead of events in Ireland.

"We've had festivals cancelling now for June in Germany and in England," he said. "There's a certain percentage of festivals that are cancelling and a certain percentage that are rescheduling."

A European tour was set to start in July, but looks like it's in trouble now too, he added, although many of the events scheduled for it have not yet been cancelled.

That tour is due to visit venues in Germany, Austria, Poland, Switzerland and Spain. It would have taken him up to the first week of September.

Expand Close Con Horgan and Kim McCafferty of Fanzini / Facebook

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"It's a very much wait-and-see attitude," said Horgan. "It's understandable, but it does put artists in an extremely precarious place.

"In the short term, it's an issue because the income has completely stopped."

His group, with a web presence at fanzini.ie, was relying on funding from Culture Ireland for the tour, but he's now unsure where that stands.

Horgan praised the weekly support from the Government - which was increased yesterday - for those who have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic. But he's concerned for the longer-term future of performers such as him and the arts in general.

We'll all eventually have to foot the bill - or at least a big chunk of it - for the economic and social supports that have been rapidly enacted during the crisis.

"The longer-term problem that I see is that all these supports have to be paid for," said Horgan.

"Generally, in the past, when money is required, it's taken from the arts. It's one of the first ones to be hit."

"I would urge people to remember, and particularly their legislators, that it's to festivals that people go and there will be a huge appetite and desire for creativity at the end of this," he said.

"People are forced to stay in their homes and the arts is a really amazing conduit for them when they come out. We come to the arts for the celebration of life."
Arcadis has taken measures to protect the health and safety of employees and their families, clients and society and to ensure business resiliency



Arcadis stops the current share buy-back program and withdraws the proposal for dividend payment to enhance its cash position as a precautionary measure



Arcadis closely monitors directions by the Dutch government regarding COVID-19 impacting the AGM

Amsterdam, 26 March 2020 - Arcadis (EURONEXT: ARCAD), the leading global Design & Consultancy organization for natural and built assets is responding to the consequences of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

First priority in dealing with the current COVID-19 outbreak is to protect the health & safety of employees and their families, clients and society. Significant measures were taken to secure a thorough health approach, in line with WHO recommendations and the guidance from government experts in the various countries in which Arcadis operates. Employees are equipped to maximize work from home, using digital collaboration platforms and virtual channels.

Considering the unprecedented and rapidly changing operating environment, Arcadis has also taken measures to ensure business resiliency, guided by a global task force established in early March, as well as regional and local teams of subject matter experts. As a result, Arcadis is well prepared and organized to continue delivering on its commitments to clients.

Operational performance

The impact of the COVID-19 outbreak was initially limited to the Arcadis business in China and Hong Kong. Since the virus has now spread around the world, it will adversely impact our markets and it requires the additional measures we are taking. In identifying and implementing the actions, Arcadis made a distinction between immediate priorities, preparing for the crisis impact, and recovery thereafter. The results of our actions will be impacted by the time societies and governments need to contain this crisis, and on support businesses will receive from governments.

Our primary focus is on continuing to serve our clients, win projects where possible and apply commercial effectiveness to keep our pipeline of orders filled.

To further ensure business resiliency, a large number of measures have been taken to reduce cost, such as freezing virtually all travel, reducing of external advisory services and suspending all uncommitted capital expenditure. In addition, a full hiring stop has been implemented for any new employees. Applying for relevant government support in countries which provides for this opportunity is being reviewed.

Solid financial position and good liquidity

The focus of Arcadis in the last two years has been on reducing debt and strengthening the balance sheet. The strategy has resulted in a solid financial position and good liquidity. In order to contain its cost and protect its cash position, Arcadis has decided as a precautionary measure to stop the current share buy-back program and to withdraw the dividend proposal from the agenda for the Annual General Meeting as scheduled for May 6th, 2020. Arcadis does understand the importance of dividends for its shareholders but considers this decision to be in the best interest of Arcadis, its people, its clients and its shareholders. The adjusted agenda for the Annual General Meeting can be found on the Arcadis website www.arcadis.com.

Where it comes to the Annual General Meeting (AGM), Arcadis is aware of, and closely monitors regulations by the Dutch government regarding COVID-19 and in particular in person meetings. Arcadis may take further COVID-19 related decisions with regard to the AGM. Arcadis suggests to regularly check its website for any further updates.

Peter Oosterveer, CEO said: For all our employees and our customers everyday life and work has been severely disrupted. The prosperity and safety of our societies is being challenged and everyone realizes that it will take a considerable amount of time and effort to allow us to resume life and business as usual. We will all have to contribute to this task. In the meantime, those who care for our health and our safety deserve our unconditional support and respect. We are all completely focused on the measures necessary to deal with the current circumstances. We are a strong company, provide valuable expertise and have an extremely dedicated team, and in joining forces with our clients we will navigate through this period.

For further information please contact:

Arcadis Investor Relations

Jurgen Pullens

Mobile: +31 6 51599483

E-mail: jurgen.pullens@arcadis.com

Arcadis Group Communications

Joost Slooten

Mobile: +31 6 27061880

E-mail: joost.slooten@arcadis.com

About Arcadis

Arcadis is a leading global Design & Consultancy organization for natural and built assets. Applying our deep market sector insights and collective design, consultancy, engineering, project and management services we work in partnership with our clients to deliver exceptional and sustainable outcomes throughout the lifecycle of their natural and built assets. We are 28,000 people, active in over 70 countries that generate 3.5 billion in revenues. We support UN-Habitat with knowledge and expertise to improve the quality of life in rapidly growing cities around the world. www.arcadis.com .

REGULATED INFORMATION

This press release contains information that qualifies or may qualify as inside information within the meaning of Article 7(1) of the EU Market Abuse Regulation.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

Statements included in this press release that are not historical facts (including any statements concerning investment objectives, other plans and objectives of management for future operations or economic performance, or assumptions or forecasts related thereto) are forward-looking statements. These statements are only predictions and are not guarantees. Actual events or the results of our operations could differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are typically identified by the use of terms such as may, will, should, expect, could, intend, plan, anticipate, estimate, believe, continue, predict, potential or the negative of such terms and other comparable terminology. The forward-looking statements are based upon our current expectations, plans, estimates, assumptions and beliefs that involve numerous risks and uncertainties. Assumptions relating to the foregoing involve judgments with respect to, among other things, future economic, competitive and market conditions and future business decisions, all of which are difficult or impossible to predict accurately and many of which are beyond our control. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, our actual results and performance could differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

Attachment
Public health officials are urging Yellowstone County residents not to use rapid COVID-19 tests.

The Unified Health Command, comprised of RiverStone Health, Billings Clinic, St. Vincent Healthcare and Yellowstone County Disaster and Emergency Services, is urging people to not use these rapid tests due to serious flaws that could hinder data collection of the disease and provide false results, according to a press release from RiverStone Health.

The Food and Drug Administration has not authorized any test available to purchase for testing at home for COVID-19, according to the release. The rapid tests look for the presence of antibodies that are produced as part of the immune response to a virus. However, antibodies may not be detectable for three to seven days after a person is infected. During this time, a person could be infectious even if the test produces a negative result.

The tests being sent to the Montana Department of Health and Human Services Laboratory and to independent laboratories identify the COVID-19 virus specifically. The rapid tests do not.
The 2019-2020 filing season has definitely taken a turn this year. A few weeks ago, the idea of COVID-19 seemed like an unfortunate health problem on the other side of the world. Then it happened: A pandemic came knocking on our nations door and the coronavirus, oh so rudely, showed up right here in the Hoosier state.

With the uninvited arrival of COVID-19 to the Circle City, theres no doubt weve all been affected by such a wave of events. Our schools were abruptly shut down, causing parents everywhere to worry about securing child care and the very jobs that many can no longer go to. Now were all at home, trying to adjust to constant changes, and it all happened during what can already be a stressful time of year for some: tax season.

As we work from home, enjoy unexpected time with our families and catch up on some television, many taxpayers are left confused about what to do next. Heres some helpful information to help taxpayers relax about their taxes.

The Tax Deadline Has Changed

Generally taxpayers are expected to file their tax return and pay any taxes due by the usual April 15 deadline. But this year, stay-at-home orders and social distancing have presented taxpayers with unique filing obstacles. Considering the stress of tax filings and payments on the nations taxpayers, Congress took action and extended the tax deadline 90 days to July 15.

You Can Still File Now, You Dont Have To Wait

Previously the IRS encouraged taxpayers to file as soon as possible to counter tax fraud but this year they want taxpayers to file as soon as possible to curb the economic hardship being caused by COVID-19. Though you have more time to file, the time to file is now. Filing now can relieve some of the financial and mental stress caused by the coronavirus outbreak and help keep the local economy afloat. According to the IRS, this seasons average refund isapproximately $3,125 and the sooner taxpayers get their money the more secure theyll likely feel.

Reconsider Filing Options

Right now, taxpayers cant just walk into a free tax prep site or a tax office and get your taxes done. Local community centers, libraries and other IRS VITA/TCE sites have closed their doors to protect their communities and staff and help slow the virus spread. And tax offices are not open to the public so you may need to consider other filing options. The IRS has online options for free tax filing. If you normally visit a tax office, contact your tax pro to see what other options are available. Ask your tax preparer if theyre able to prepare your tax return virtually or over the phone, so that you dont have to go into the office. Many tax pros are prepared to help taxpayers in a way that keeps everyone safe by offering alternatives to on-site appointments. You may be able to forward your tax documents through encrypted email, a secure online portal or mail tax documents so that you dont have to meet face to face. Be sure to have all necessary documents ready for easy filing and inquire about the procedures to keep your documents safe.

Beware of Scammers and Fraud

Unfortunately in times like these, people may not always be who they seem. In the midst of a crisis, theres always someone looking to take advantage of the situation. Beware of scammers and protect your personal information. The IRS or Indiana Department of Revenue (IN-DOR) will never call you to demand immediate payment, threaten to immediately bring in law-enforcement for not paying or demand a credit card over the phone. If youre looking for a tax preparer, be sure to check the IRS Preparer Directory, ask questions and read reviews to avoid the wrong preparer. Coronavirus scams are real so protect yourself and report fraudulent activity. If you think youve been a victim of tax fraud or other scam be sure to contact the IRS, Indiana DOR or the Indiana Attorney Generals office.

Stay Calm and Stay Informed

Support each other and stay positive. If youre headed out for essentials, check in with elderly family and neighbors to see if theres anything they need. Remember that everyone is feeling the impact in some way. Pay attention to the news and discuss concerns with those you trust and encourage your loved ones to do the same. Were all a team in this! Following government health regulations, properly washing hands and following other CDC guidelines is critical to our success in defeating COVID-19. Be light-hearted, share hoarded toilet paper, dont let the kids eat all your snacks, tell lots of jokes, and smile!

For more information on local guidelines visit IN.gov or Marionhealth.org.

For Information on COVID-19 and your taxes visit IRS.gov or.In.gov/dor.

For more information on the coronavirus and how to slow the spread visit CDC.gov.

Brittany Sabalza, enrolled agent, is director of continuing education for Pro Tax Solutions Indianapolis and a tax columnist.
The coronavirus pandemic continues to cause chaos across the UK and around the world.

Heres your morning briefing of everything you may have missed overnight about the fight against Covid-19.

UK to make new 15-minute at-home antibody tests available within days

A Public Health England director revealed new 15-minute home test kits to determine whether people have had a case of coronavirus  and there are thought to be immune  will be available to the British public within days.

The government has bought 3.5 million of the tests for coronavirus antibodies, which are currently being assessed for accuracy.

If they work, the tests would allow doctors and nurses to determine whether they could return to work.

Thousands of the tests will be sold in chemists such as Boots or delivered by Amazon to people with symptoms who are self-isolating as soon as next week.

They will be given to NHS staff and key workers first as a priority.

Emergency legislation becomes law, giving ministers unprecedented powers to tackle outbreak

The UK woke on Thursday to new draconian emergency powers aimed at helping ministers to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Coronavirus Act 2020 came into law on Wednesday after both the Lords and the Commons passed the unprecedented 329-page bill in just three days.

It will see the powers of ministers, councils, police, health professionals and coroners temporarily strengthened during the UKs current lockdown, which is designed to stall the spread of the potentially deadly illness.

Ministers, for example, will now have the ability to restrict or prohibit events and gatherings during the outbreak of the virus, in any place, vehicle, train, vessel or aircraft, any moveable structure and any offshore installations and where necessary, to close premises.

The legislation, which will be in force for a two-year period, will be reviewed by MPs every six months, after No 10 relented to pressure earlier this week.

Dyson receives order for 10,000 ventilators from government

The government has ordered 10,000 medical ventilators designed at breakneck speed by vacuum maker Dyson, as the country tries to boost the number of devices available to treat coronavirus patients.

An image issued by Dyson of their proposed CoVent ventilator on a hospital bed (PA)

Engineers from the British firm drew up designs for new machine within a matter of days after prime minister Boris Johnson made an urgent appeal for manufacturers to supply the NHS in anticipation of cases peaking in the UK in coming weeks.

Founder James Dyson said his company had received an initial order of 10,000 units from the government, which it will supply on an open-book basis.

The company is also looking at ways of making the ventilator available internationally.

UK death toll rises to 463

The number of deaths in the UK as a result of the Covid-19 coronavirus rose to 463, after authorities in England reported a further 28 deaths in 24 hours.

They included a 47-year-old who did not have an underlying health condition.

The others who died, including one person aged 93, did have underlying health conditions, NHS England said. Their families have been informed.

US coronavirus death toll passes 1,000

The number of dead in the US rose to 1,041 on Wednesday, with nearly 70,000 people infected with Covid-19.

In recognition of the scale of the threat, the US Senate passed a $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems.

The Senate passed the vote unanimously despite misgivings on both sides about whether it went far enough or not far enough.
A gang of yobs who filmed themselves stabbing a young man six times in broad daylight and posted it on social media have been jailed for more than 26 years.

Around 12 people were seen kicking, punching and knifing the 22-year-old victim in his head, back and arm in the video.

The thugs even taunted the man as he lay on the ground in a residential street in Willesden, north west London.

Keanu Brown (left) and Jordan Joseph (right) were found guilty of inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent

He was left unconscious from the sickening assault on the afternoon of June 11 last year, and police say he is lucky to be alive after being treated at a central London hospital.

Detectives tracked down four of the thugs through CCTV and enquiries, and arrested them weeks later.

They also seized weapons, drugs, cash and clothing in their probe.

Keanu Brown, 18, Jordan Joseph, 21, Mickell Barnett, 20, and Keano (CORR) Mason, 19, were found guilty of inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent after a trial at Woolwich Crown Court in south east London.

They were all cleared of attempted murder and sentenced at the same court on March 16.

Mickell Barnett (left) and Keano (CORR) Mason (right) were found guilty of inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent

Brown and Joseph, both of Brent, north west London, were each sentenced to seven years and three months.

Barnett, of Enfield, North London, was locked up for six years and nine months.

Mason, of Brent, was caged for five years and eight months.

Their victim has been left with no lasting injuries, police said.

Five other suspects were cleared of attempted murder following trial.

A further four suspects also accused of attempted murder were due to face trial last month - but the charges were dropped.

Detective Sergeant Steven Colclough, of the Metropolitan Police, who investigated the case, said: 'This was a vicious attack carried out on a residential street in broad daylight, and it was extremely fortunate the victim survived his injuries.

'He was set upon by a large group of males, and his attackers showed how callous they were in filming the incident and posting it on social media.

'Fast-time enquiries led officers to a large number of suspects who were arrested as part of the investigation, and the evidence collated by police resulted in these four men being brought to justice.'
SAN JOSE  The hiring hot spots for the Postal Service in the Bay Area are expected to be San Jose and San Francisco, the mail service said.

With a growing number of people out of work, the Postal Service is ready to hire as many as 1,000 people throughout the Bay Area, according to a post on the U.S.P.S. web site.

Salaries for the newly available positions range from $17 an hour to $20 an hour, the Postal Service stated.

To be sure, coronavirus fears have unleashed the grim prospect of an employment catastrophe.

Still, the recruiting binge is a reminder that numerous companies and organizations hunger for workers due to shifts in demand and consumer habits.

Demand for delivered products has spiked with more people seeking to stay at home due to shelter in place restrictions imposed by state and local government agencies, along with a push to avoid exposure to the coronavirus.

Supermarkets are among the companies that are seeking to hire more employees in a big way.

Albertsons Cos., the owner of Pleasanton-based Safeway, said this month that it wants to hire thousands in Northern California at the four supermarket chains it owns.

There are more than 2,000 immediate openings at Safeway, Andronicos, Vons, and Pak N Save retail stores, Albertsons Co. said.

Walmart will hire 6,200 workers in California, the retail titan said. That comes on the heels of the companys announcement it would hire 150,000 nationwide.

Amazon wants to hire 100,000 to handle a surge of e-commerce transactions and deliveries.

The Postal Service is offering entry-level and career positions with great federal benefits, the post office said on its web site.

An array of jobs need to be filled, according to the postal organization.

For those who prefer to work outside, job openings are available for door to door deliveries and rural deliveries.

People who want to work inside could potentially find jobs moving mail within a mail processing center and fixing automated machinery. Jobs inside also could include work as a mechanic, custodian, or tractor-trailer operator.

People can apply at the Postal Service website: about.usps.com/careers

The Postal Service has a place for you, the mail delivery operation stated.

Editors Note: Because of the health implications of the COVID-19 virus, this article is being made available free to all online readers. If youd like to join us in supporting the mission of local journalism, please visit napavalleyregister.com/members/join/.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
India's has requested Pakistan to defer a meeting between their Indus Commissioners in the wake of coronavirus pandemic, officials said on Thursday.

The meeting is scheduled for this week. However, Islamabad is yet to respond to New Delhi's request, offficials added.

Indus Commissioners of India and Pakistan are supposed to hold meeting by March 31 every year, according to the Indus Waters Treaty signed between the South Asian neighbours.

Under the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty, "the Commission shall meet regularly at least once a year, alternately in India and Pakistan".

The last meeting of the Commission was held in Lahore in August 2018.

On February 13, India's Indus Commissioner, P K Saxena had invited his counterpart Syed Mohammed Meher Ali Shah to hold the annual meeting of Permanent Indus Commission in the second half of March and requested for the proposed agenda, sources said.

On March 12, the Pakistan commissioner accepted India's invitation, and agreed to meet his Indian counterpart in the last week of the month. He also stated that details of the proposed agenda shall be communicated in due course.

However, with the World Health Organisation declaring COVID-19 as pandemic on March 11, India proposed to "defer this meeting for some time in the larger interest of both the countries", sources said.

There is also a nationwide lockdown till mid-April, in an effort to contain the spread of coronavirus, which has killed over 21,293 people globally.

The Permanent Indus Commission, formed under the Indus Waters Treaty was signed between India and Pakistan in 1960. Indus commissioners of both the countries act as representatives of the respective governments for the treaty, which deals with sharing of river waters between the two countries.

Waters of three rivers --Ravi, Beas and Sutlej-- have been allocated exclusively to India under the treaty, while the western rivers --Indus, Chenab and Jhelum-- are for Pakistan with India given some rights like agriculture, navigation, domestic use and also the unrestricted rights to develop hydro-electric power projects within the specified parameters of design and operations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan has said that the lockdown is not enough to contain coronavirus in the country.

"This is a serious concern because not only does the lockdown keep people from going to work, it keeps them at home which is not necessarily that pristine isolated place but can also be a slum where people live together," Rajan in an interview with Bloomberg said. "It may be hard to prevent infections from spreading."

He added that the lockdown will be substantially harder for the poorer sections of society.

The lockdown order has brought almost all commercial activities in India to a halt.

Rajan said that the infrastructure in this country is a hindrance to the government's fight against the coronavirus, adding that all resources must be focused on tackling the pandemic.

He also said that under lockdown, the magnitude of the problems will become more difficult for India.

He asked rich countries to help under-developed countries and mobilise resources to them to contain the virus. "Think of the poor countries that already start with a paucity of ventilators and are dealing with the same crisis," Rajan said.

But he also cautioned that each country must first make sure they themselves are well equipped before helping others.

Rajan said that the disease must be eradicated from all parts of the world or else it might come back. He added there's a possibility of a second or third wave of the virus and all eyes should be on China for progress.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in an announcement on Tuesday had declared a 21-day nationwide lockdown to ensure social distancing to contain the novel virus.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharamn today announced several measures to lighten the economic impact of the lockdown on citizens. She announced a Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief package for the poor.

Earlier too, she had taken some steps like easing tax deadlines and business regulations.

Modi had pledged Rs 15,000 crore to ramp up healthcare facilities in the country to fight against coronavirus.

Also Read: Coronavirus update: Odisha first state to set up 2 hospitals for COVID-19 patients

Also Read: Coronavirus Live Updates: Essentials, medicines to be available 24X7 in Delhi, Maharashtra
Even when theres a global pandemic, were going to want to look our best. Sure, were going to be venturing outside an awful lot less, but with video conferencing and weekly virtual pub nights, its not as though we have licence to revert to cavemen.

To make sure we dont end up looking something like Tom Hanks in Castaway, us guys will still need regular haircuts. But when were told to stay inside and only head out for essential needs, does that include a trip to the barbers?

For now, hairdressers and barbershops have been deemed safe to remain open in Australia, although there are restrictions in place, such as having only one person per 4 metre squared of floor space. The Australian government initially implemented a 30-minute-only appointment rule, but that has quickly been scrapped.

Some barbershops, such as Tooth & Nail in Marrickville in Sydneys Inner West and Tidorys Barber Shop in the Eastern Suburbs, have decided to shut their doors, while others have made the effort to tell their customers about the restrictive measures theyre now legally required to put in place.

The Emporium Barber, which has four stores in Queensland and one in Bondi, NSW, has posted on its site the number of people allowed in each shop at any one time  theyre limited to 15 in Bondi, including staff  but reassures customers that theyre abiding by the governments guidelines when it comes to cleanliness. Plus, theyre still allowed to serve alcohol!

We spoke to Trent Pridmore, Founder & CEO of The Emporium Barber, to find out what measures theyre putting in place and how theyre adapting to the ever-changing rules.

Obviously were quite a bit quieter at the moment in comparison to normal. Our stores are in areas where there are large multinational commercial tenants, the majority of which have instructed their staff to work from home, he begins.

Our hygiene standards have always been extremely high but weve certainly stepped it up again since all this has started.

All staff are washing hands before and after client interaction, equipment is sanitised between each client with hospital-grade disinfectant, fresh towels and capes for all clients are sanitised and the entire store gets several cleans each day.

I would 100% say that it would be safer at the moment for one of our clients to come into the stores than having someone come into their house. 

It would be harder to disinfect your equipment/tools if people are mobile. How can you guarantee a house is cleaner than one of our stores?

Fortunately for guys, a style or crew cut shouldnt take long, but the idea of sitting in a chair that somebody else has occupied moments before, or being manhandled by a stylist who would have seen countless people come and go, can be more daunting than usual.

Its therefore perhaps no surprise to learn that some gents are turning to cutting their own hair at home (or occasionally with the help of a partner)  and gay guys are crisis-bleaching their hair peroxide blonde. A lot of guys resorting to such drastic measures are posting videos of the process and results to online video sharing platform, TikTok, with the #quarantinecut, #quarantinecutchallenge and #selfcutchallenge hashtags all trending.

If guys are going to do their own hair, I wouldnt think that anything other than clipper cuts or buzz cuts are going to be happening. Anything else would be just too hard. Just grab yourself a decent pair of clippers, use the guards as a guide for length, start of longer as once youve cut it off you cant put it back, Trent tells us.

One such video, posted by Eli Clarke exemplifies just how different Australian haircuts are compared to the rest of the world, with the man in the video resorting to placing a bowl over his head to give himself a classic bowl cut. We think the results speak for themselves.

Another user, @claudia.mitchel8, has posted a video of her brother Lucas getting an at-home mullet trim. The mullet is a hairstyle championed by Aussies (theres even a festival dedicated to it) and the comments section on the video appears to favour the look.

Its not just Australians getting in on the act, as barber shops around the world are closed. One user in America, @therealslimpaigey1, decided his barnet looked good after shaving just one whole side off. Fortunately, he didnt leave it that way, as a later video proves he shaved the rest off too.

@therealslimpaigey1 Of course, you could play it safe, such as @bernardcastrillon, who decided to shave all his hair off in one clean sweep for a simple buzzcut.
"This award speaks volumes about A.S.I.'s continuous and positive growth going in the right direction. We couldn't have asked for a better partner than Balance Claims. They have been easy to work with and have seamlessly integrated with our company."

A.S.I. Construction, a Burr Ridge, Illinois-based premier construction and remodeling company serving commercial and residential markets in the Chicagoland area, recently won the Balance Claims Balance Partner Award.

Based in Indianapolis, Balance LLC is a business process outsourcing firm focused exclusively on assisting contractors to manage their businesses as efficiently and effectively as possible. Balance LLC Director/ Member John Dye explained that the Balance Partner Award is given every year to a partner contractor that the company believes best invented itself in a specific calendar year.

For 2019, A.S.I. was as ideal a partner as we could hope to have at Balance, Dye said. Their documentation, communication, and office team went above and beyond, allowing them to succeed with Balance! We look forward to continuing our partnership with ASI for years to come."

A.S.I. Construction CEO Jay Andreas was honored to receive this award.

"This award speaks volumes about A.S.I.'s continuous and positive growth going in the right direction," Andreas said. We couldn't have asked for a better partner than Balance Claims. They have been easy to work with and have seamlessly integrated with our company. "A.S.I. has dedicated team members who love what they do and our growth speaks for itself. Currently, we are over $10 million in revenue sales and we hope to be in the $30 to $40 million range in the next two to three years."

For more information, visit https://constructionbyasi.com/.

About A.S.I. Construction

A.S.I. Construction, founded in 2013, is a premier construction and remodeling company serving commercial and residential markets in the Chicagoland area. The company provides a wide variety of exterior services, such as repair and installation of roofs, gutters, soffits, siding, and

fascia. In addition, A.S.I. offers an extensive line of windows and doors to meet almost any commercial or residential project. The company also has a public adjustment department, managing all aspects of insurance assessments and negotiations for repairs related to Storm Damage. As a company that is

growing at a fast pace, A.S.I. takes great pride in ensuring excellent customer service and performing each job with the utmost integrity. A.S.I. Construction is a member of the Better Business Bureau with an A+ rating. For further information, please visit our website at http://www.constructionbyasi.com. Stay connected with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

About Balance LLC

Founded in 2015, Balance, LLC is a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firm focused exclusively on assisting contractors to manage their businesses as efficiently and effectively as possible. As a 3rd party claims administrator and specialized consultancy, we help contractors save time and money by offloading the management of their claims administration including both the estimates and supplements work processes. We partner with most of the leading technology platforms and service vendors in our space to deliver thorough, compliant, and timely claims management. This allows our clients to focus on selling, building, and billing. Acting as a direct extension of our clients, we work within their platforms and processes to provide seamless and timely delivery with a focus on customer service and business process.
Consolidated revenues grew 6.9% to 274.7m

Current EBITDA (before IFRS16) rose a distinct 13.2% to 25.3m1

EBITDA margin (before IFRS16) turned out at 9.2% (in line with target)

Operating cash flows: 29.9m (before IFRS 16), multiplied by 3.2

Positive net cash (excluding lease liabilities): 11.1m

Paris, 26 March 2020

ROCHE BOBOIS SA (ISIN: FR0013344173 - Ticker symbol: RBO), high-end furniture global market leader and the name behind French Art de Vivre, releases its results for the year ended 31 December 2019. The accounts were approved by the Executive Board at its meeting on 24 March 2020. The audit is currently being finalised, and the reports will be issued later.

IFRS (m)

unaudited data

2018

2019 2019

Before applying

IFRS16 (unaudited) Change %

Before applying

IFRS16 Sale of goods 224.7 242.2 242.2 Royalties and other services 32.3 32.5 32.5 Revenues 257.0 274.7 274.7 +6.9% Gross margin on sales 130.0 143.2 143.2 +10.2% Current EBITDA[1] 22.4 45.8 25.3 +13.2% Current EBITDA margin 8.7% 16.7% 9.2% - EBIT before non-recurring items 11.6 16.7 16.1 +38.8% EBIT 11.1 15.8 15.2 +37.0% Net financial expense (0.4) (2.1) (0.3) - Tax charge (4.0) (4.1) (4.1) - Net profit 6.7 9.6 10.8 +61.2% Net profit Group share 6.3 9.3 10.5 +66.7%

At the 2019 year-end, Group revenues came to 274.7m at 31 December 2019 compared with 257.0m at 31 December 2018, rising 6.9% (+5.2% at constant exchange rates). The Group saw its income rise in all its geographical areas, including the UK zone, which this year returned to growth.

The Group's gross margin is up 59.2% (compared with 57.8% at 31 December 2018), increasing 13.2m in value, through the effect of a geographical mix (with greater volumes in higher-profitability zones).

External expenses amounted to 70.5m on a reported basis, taking into account a significant fall in rent expenses through the application of IFRS16. Excluding IFRS16, external expenses were perfectly controlled. These expenses came to 92.0m compared with 85.3m at end 2018, with most of the increase due to the consolidation of Deco Center 95, and foreign-exchange effects.

Before applying IFRS 16, current EBITDA came to 25.3m compared with 22.4m, increasing 13.2% compared to 31 December 2018. All the geographical zones contributed to this increase, particularly the other Europe zone, thanks to the very healthy activity trends of the stores in Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, as well as the United Kingdom, which is enjoying the return to growth.

In line with the strategy instituted, France is continuing its growth, displaying an EBITDA margin rate of 6.6% (compared with 6.3% at 31 December 2018).

The Group's current EBITDA margin is 9.2%, in line with the target set (compared with 8.7% at 31 December 2018).

Before applying IFRS 16, recurrent operating profit amounted to 16.1m compared with 11.6m at 31 December 2018, increasing 38.8%. For the record, the previous year, the Group had recognised a non-recurring expense of 3.4m (bonus share plan (AGA)).

After recognition of a 0.9m non-recurring expense, the operating profit amounted to 15.2m (before applying IFRS16) compared with 11.1m at 31 December 2018.

Taking into account net financial income and tax (-4.1m), Net Profit Group before applying IFRS 16 came to 10.5m compared with 6.3m at 31 December 2018, growing 66.7%.

Cash generation increased strongly - Disposable cash amounted to 31.1m

Equity capital came to 59.1m at 31 December 2019 compared with 53.4m at end December 2018.

WCR was thoroughly controlled, with a positive change of 9.2m (compared with (7.4)m at 31 December 2018).

Operating cash flows at 51.3m posted a strong rise, factoring in a positive 21.4m contribution from the application of IFRS 16. Excluding IFRS 16, this figure reached 29.9m compared with 9.3m at 31 December 2018. This high amount more than covered the investments entailed in store openings and renovations (9.2m) and the dividends paid to shareholders (2.9m).

At end 2019, Group disposable cash had risen strongly to 31.1m compared with 15.5m at 31 December 2018. Excluding lease liabilities arising under IFRS 16, the Group had a positive net cash position at 11.1m.

Roundup on activity at the start of the year, and the impact of COVID-19

Since the start of this year, and in continuity with 2019, the Group has observed a very healthy business trend, with a business volume +10.9% increased at end February 2020 for all the Roche Bobois stores, and +14.1% increased for this brand's owned stores alone. This healthy overall trend extended up to mid-March 2020.

However, in view of the exceptional circumstances arising from the Coronavirus (Covid-19) epidemic, and the lock-down measures announced by the different countries, Roche Bobois SA has, since mid-March, been progressively closing down all its owned stores in France, Europe and the United States/Canada during this period. The franchise stores are remaining open in accordance with local regulations (particularly in Asia). These measures are designed to protect the health of all staff and to inhibit the propagation of the virus.

Production in France, Italy and Portugal, and deliveries, were carried on normally up to mid-March 2020. Note that, for Cuir Center in China, suppliers' factories are now operating at full speed.

To date therefore, the Group is expecting a lengthening of delivery times for orders booked in the 1st quarter of 2020, but has recorded no order cancellations. All firm orders will be delivered as soon as the situation allows. At the same time, and depending on how long the lockdown lasts, the Company is expecting a significant, or even very significant retreat in its revenue for the 2nd quarter 2020 and in incoming orders. Historically, however, this quarter is a period when the Group experiences slackening of orders in its main markets (seasonality in the furnishing sector).

Roche Bobois recalls strength of its supply-to-order model which, in the past, has already proved its resilience in the different crises; in this case, purchases are deferred over time and outstanding orders are fulfilled in the months following.

This resilience and the Group's financial soundness, with a strong available cash position, are strengths with which to manage this unexpected crisis. The Group will keep the market informed of any significant developments in this situation that affect its activity.

Continuing international deployment - Phased takeover planned of 6 franchised stores in the United States

In view of the exceptional circumstances due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the signature of the share purchase agreement (SPA) connected with the acquisition of American franchisee stores has been postponed.

Roche Bobois recalls that in February 2020, it signed a non-binding letter of intent with its major american franchisee for the takeover in 2020 of three Roche Bobois franchised stores on the West Coast of the United States, located in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, with a unilateral option to take over 3 additional stores located in Atlanta, Houston and Dallas between 2021 and 2022.

Combined revenue for all 6 stores reached USD 16.6m in 2019, on a very high EBITDA margin consistent with the brand's standards in the United States.

The Group confirms its determination to finalise this operation, which will be highly relutive and will have a very positive effect on growth in the consolidated EBITDA margin. This transaction will be self-financed and/or with a special loan.

To conclude, note that Roche Bobois is planning 7 new owned stores in the 2020 financial year:

3 openings in Europe: Germany (Cologne); Portugal (Lisbon 2) and Switzerland (Sion);

1 opening in the United States: Minneapolis;

3 stores to be brought into Group ownership (takeover of San Francisco, Portland and Seattle).

Alongside this, the Group remains aligned with its policy, planning 5 to 10 franchised store openings in 2020.

About Roche Bobois SA



Roche Bobois SA is a French family business founded in 1960. The Group operates in 54 countries and has a network of 331 company-owned stores and franchises (as of 31st December r 2019) through its two brands: Roche Bobois, a high-end furniture brand with a strong international presence, and Cuir Center, positioned in the mid-range market segment with an essentially French customer base. With the Roche Bobois brand, the Group embodies French Art de Vivre which it promotes worldwide with original and bold creations from talented designers (Bruno Moinard, Jean Nouvel, Ora Ito, Sacha Lakic, Christophe Delcourt, Stephen Burks, Kenzo Takada, Bina Baitel...) and partnerships with fashion and Haute couture houses. Roche Bobois is also a committed to supporting the world of arts and culture. In 2019, the combined turnover by both brands, including franchises, amounted to 490 million excluding VAT, including 398 million and 92 million for Cuir Center. Roche Bobois SA consolidated revenues came to 274.7 million in 2019.

For more information please visit www.finance-roche-bobois.com







CONTACT

Actus Finance - Anne-Pauline Petureaux

Investor Relations

Tel.: +33 (0)1 53 67 36 72 apetureaux@actus.fr



Actus Finance - Alexandra Prisa

Press Relations

Tel.: +33 (0)1 53 67 36 90

aprisa@actus.fr







APPENDICES

GLOSSARY

EBITDA = earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. Current EBITDA equals Group pre-tax profit before deduction of interest, depreciation, amortisation and impairment charges on non-current assets, store opening costs and staff share-based payments, but after impairment of inventories and trade receivables. It shows profit generated by business activities regardless of financing conditions, tax constraints and the upgrading of operating assets. Non-recurring expenses (one-off, unusual or infrequent items) are excluded.

Forward-looking statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. These statements do not constitute guarantees regarding the future performance of ROCHE BOBOIS. This forward-looking information covers the future outlook, growth and commercial strategy of ROCHE BOBOIS and is based on the analysis of future result forecasts and estimates of amounts that cannot yet be determined. By nature, forward-looking information involves risks and uncertainties, as it relates to events and depends on circumstances that may or may not occur in the future. ROCHE BOBOIS draws your attention to the fact that forward-looking statements provide no guarantee of future performance and that its actual financial position, results and cash flow, as well as changes in the sector in which ROCHE BOBOIS operates, may differ significantly from those proposed or suggested by the forward-looking statements contained in this document. Moreover, even if ROCHE BOBOIS' financial position, results, cash flow and changes in the sector in which ROCHE BOBOIS operates were to be in accordance with the forward-looking information contained in this document, these results or changes may not be a reliable indicator of ROCHE BOBOIS' future results or developments. A description of events that could have a material adverse impact on ROCHE BOBOIS' business, financial position or results, or on its ability to achieve its targets, is given in Chapter 4 "Risk Factors" of the Base Document.

[1] EBITDA after restatement for store openings and before bonus share plans

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The National Air and Space Museum, working with the Smithsonian Transcription Center, is seeking the public's help to expand access to the extensive, handwritten astronaut training notes by Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly into space.

Before she became the first American woman to fly into space, Sally Ride needed to learn how to be an astronaut. Now, 30 years later, the public can help expand access to Ride's training experience by volunteering to transcribe her extensive handwritten notes.

The National Air and Space Museum has begun the process of converting the 23 cubic feet of material it obtained from Ride's estate in 2015 to be available for research and study. Archivists have scanned and indexed the entire collection , but more can be done to make the papers fully searchable.

The museum has now added to the Smithsonian Transcription Center's website Ride's 1979 and 1980 NASA notebooks, as well as some of her flying instructions and training schedules. The public can sign up to help transcribe the papers , as well as review the work of other volunteers (or "volunpeers" as the museum's staff calls them).

In Photos: Sally Ride, the 1st American woman in space

"These new digital assets [will] allow for a much larger audience to view and engage with the entire collection," archivist Patti Williams wrote on Monday (March 23), announcing the project . "Without ever visiting the National Air and Space Museum Archives, researchers and students can gain insight into Ride's lifetime of professional achievements, as an astronaut, physicist, and educator."

Among the first people to lend time to the transcription project have been Ellen Stofan, the director of the National Air and Space Museum, and the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie Bunch.

"When my friend and colleague Ellen Stofan mentioned she's spending some of Women's History Month transcribing astronaut Sally Ride's materials , I was eager to dig in," Bunch wrote on Twitter. "This was before Ellen told me there are 38,640 pages!"

"Ride kept a trove of documents that can deepen our understanding of her journey to space and her achievements on Earth. If you, too, want to reconnect with history or marvel at the wonders of space exploration, join Ellen, the Smithsonian Transcription Center and me to transcribe," he wrote.

Ride, who died in 2012, was selected to become an astronaut in 1978. As a mission specialist on space shuttle Challenger's STS-7 crew, she became the first U.S. woman in space.

Related: Women in Space: A gallery of firsts

Sally Ride's notebook from the Rogers Commission investigation into the 1986 space shuttle Challenger tragedy (at left) and her early NASA training notes are among the late astronaut's papers that the Smithsonian is seeking to be transcribed. (Image credit: Smithsonian via collectSPACE.com)

Ride launched again into space in 1984 before retiring from NASA three years later. She went on to become a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and an advocate for science education.

In addition to Ride's astronaut training notebooks, which in part detail her work with the space shuttle's remote manipulator system, or Canadarm robotic arm, the Smithsonian is also looking to the public for help transcribing Ride's notes from the NASA commissions on which she served, including the investigations into the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia tragedies in 1986 and 2003, respectively.

"You may know of Ride as the first American woman in space, a leader of integrity who served on committees investigating NASA accidents, an educator, an inspiration," wrote Bunch. "But beyond the icon status  postage stamp , name drop in [Billy Joel's] 'We Didn't Start the Fire'  she was a real, nuanced person."

"You may discover a new story while you make Ride's work more accessible to researchers and the next generation of space explorers," he wrote.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2017 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.
Can robots provide an effective method to combat the COVID-19 pandemic? A team of robotic leaders, including Henrik Christensen, the director of UC San Diegos Contextual Robotics Institute, believes that healthcare systems can use robots for a variety of purposes.

In a new editorial, published in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of experts weighs in on how robots and machines may help humanity stem the ongoing spread of the virus.

Infrared Thermal image people walking the city streets. Image Credit: Ivan Smuk / Shutterstock

Robots and healthcare

Robots, machines, and artificial intelligence (Ai) have come a long way, and through the years, there have been many breakthroughs, helping people and saving lives. A specialized field where robots can significantly help is healthcare, which is grappling with the sudden influx of patients infected with the novel coronavirus.

In Italy, the healthcare system is on the brink of collapse, with many doctors and nurses contracting the disease. Due to the high infection and death rate in the country, hospitals now lack essential healthcare workers and resources to continue providing care to critical patients.

As of writing, the worldwide case toll has reached 526,044, while 23,709 people have died. Italy is the hardest hit after China, with 80,589 infections and 8,215 deaths. The United States has now reported the most confirmed cases with 82,404 and 1,178 deaths, while Spain has 56,347 cases and 4,154 deaths. China, where the virus originated, has started to recover from the pandemic, it has 81,782 confirmed cases and 3,291 deaths.

How can robots help fight COVID-19?

Despite many countries and territories imposing lockdowns and social distancing, those on the frontlines combatting the virus cannot stay home. Robots, however, can perform jobs that are dangerous for humans, to prevent the spread of the virus and protect health workers from harm.

In some countries, robots are being used to assist with specific tasks, such as disinfection and checking people's temperatures.

However, the authors of this editorial suggest that more could be done. Robots that are used for other uses could be repurposed to handle dangerous tasks that involve a risk of infection. Healthcare systems worldwide could make use of robots in telemedicine, decontamination, monitoring, and compliance of voluntary quarantines. Also, the handling of contaminated waste products, delivering food and medications, monitoring vital signs, and assisting in border controls.

For disease prevention

Robots can help in disease prevention by disinfecting contaminated surfaces. For instance, robot-controlled ultraviolet surface disinfection can help stem the spread of the virus not only from person to person but also through contaminated surfaces.

The coronavirus can stay on surfaces for hours to days. Ultraviolet devices have shown promise in disinfection; hence, hospitals can use this technology for disinfection.

Instead of manual disinfection, which requires workforce mobilization and increases exposure risk to cleaning personnel, autonomous or remote-controlled disinfection robots could lead to cost-effective, fast, and effective disinfection, the authors wrote.

Further, robots and computers can use intelligent navigation to detect high-risk and high-touch areas in public places. Disinfection tents could also be used for public spaces, where everyone or anything which goes in needs to be disinfected.

For diagnosis and screening

Robots play a pivotal role in detecting infection, diagnosis, and screening of potential virus carriers. Countries can use automated camera systems to screen multiple people at the same time in large areas. This way, people who have elevated temperatures can be detected immediately. These robots can also work in hospitals to repeatedly monitor temperatures of patients.

These machines can also work in initial diagnostic testing of suspected COVID-19 patients. Automated or robot-assisted nasopharyngeal swabbing may speed up the process and reduce the risk of infection among healthcare workers.

Automating the process of drawing blood for laboratory tests could also relieve medical staff from a task with a high risk of exposure. Researchers are studying robotic systems based on ultrasound imaging identification of peripheral forearm veins for automated venipuncture, the researchers added.

Drone systems

Drones can help monitor and detect people with infectious respiratory illnesses. A company in Canada is working closely with the University of South Australia, which developed a pandemic drone to detect and monitor people with symptoms.

The drone will be attached to a special sensor and computer vision system to monitor heart and respiratory rates, temperature, and those who are coughing and sneezing in crowds, public places, and even in offices and other people where people gather or assemble.

Professor Chahl, working alongside Dr. Ali Al-Naji and Asanka Perera, achieved global recognition in 2017 when they demonstrated image-processing algorithms that could extract a humans heart rate from drone video.

Since then, they have demonstrated that heart rate and breathing rate can be measured with high accuracy within 5-10 meters of people, using drones and at distances of up to 50 meters with fixed cameras. They have also developed algorithms that can interpret human actions such as sneezing and coughing. He says the technology could be a viable screening tool for the COVID-19 pandemic. It might not detect all cases, but it could be a reliable tool to detect the presence of the disease in a place or a group of people.

Professor Chahl says the technology was originally envisaged for war zones and natural disasters as well as remotely monitoring heart rates of premature babies in incubators. Now, shockingly, we see a need for its use immediately, to help save lives in the biggest health catastrophe the world has experienced in the past 100 years.
The opportunity to launch new and disruptive products to the international capital markets is clearly here and now.

MetalStream Ltd (LL16561, MetalStream) is pleased to announce that Mr Andrew Walsh has been appointed to the board as Director of Corporate Strategy, with the primary focus of bringing MSGLD security tokens and gold streaming opportunities to the wider global marketplace.

Andrews extensive experience in the Asian financial markets spans 30 years and ranges from proprietary equity and derivative trading to private equity investment and corporate management. His extensive knowledge allows him to specialize in the implementation of new technologies for the transformation of industries.

Andrew has held senior regional management and trading positions at various top-tier international financial institutions and banks. It is this broad range of experience which makes Andrew such a valuable member to the MetalStream board.

MetalStream Managing Director, Mr Rohan Cavaliero, is enthusiastic about the appointment, MetalStream is delighted to welcome Andrew Walsh to its Board of Directors. Andy brings a wealth of experience across international financial markets and the commodities sector and will apply this to MetalStreams new and progressive approach to financing and mining gold. More than ever the rapidly changing and volatile financial landscape is demanding progressive innovation. Andy shares our passion for providing new solutions to todays problems.

As the new Director of Corporate Strategy for MetalStream, Andrew Walsh is positive about what he can accomplish with the company, Im extremely excited to be a part of MetalStream. The teams collective knowledge and competence across all spectrums of entrepreneurship is incredible and our combined wealth of knowledge and belief in the next generation of financial products is truly amazing. The opportunity to launch new and disruptive products to the international capital markets is clearly here and now.

Andrew sees the combination of blockchain and gold as representing a paradigm shift in gold mine financing, delivering investment opportunities for investors, finance and supply chains. Having been directly involved in the creation, structuring and trading of equity derivative products in the 80s when they were deemed New Age, I can tell you that I feel the same enthusiasm as I did then. To be an integral part of a game-changing era in the way we finance, invest and trade is beyond exciting.

About MetalStream

MetalStream Ltd (LL16561) is incorporated in the Labuan International Business and Financial Centre, Malaysia, an independent offshore financial jurisdiction regulated by the Labuan Financial Services Authority under the purview of the Ministry of Finance, Malaysia. Its core business is the issuance of security tokens fully backed by and redeemable for precious metals.

MetalStream has assembled a team of industry leaders in mining, technology and capital markets to bring the benefits of tokenization to the mining industry. MetalStreams first security token is the MSGLD token backed by and redeemable for gold bullion and sold at a 30% discount to the current spot price of gold.

MetalStreams MSGLD represents an evolution in gold securities as they are a more flexible, cost-effective and efficient way to acquire, hold and trade gold bullion. With MSGLD, investors get the liquidity of a token plus the safety of gold at a 30% discount to the spot price.

Further information about MetalStream and MSGLD can be found on MetalStreams website at http://www.metalstream.io. Enquiries should be directed to support@metalstream.io.

The Labuan Financial Services Authority accepts no responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Information

This document may contain forecasts, projections, goals, plans, and other forward-looking statements regarding MetalStreams earnings and other data. Such forward-looking statements are based on MetalStream managements assumptions, estimates, outlook, and other judgments made in light of information available at the time of preparation of such statements and involve both known and unknown risks and uncertainties.

Accordingly, plans, goals, and other statements may not be realized as described, and actual financial results, success/failure or progress of development, and other projections may differ materially from those presented herein.

Even when subsequent changes in conditions or other circumstances make it preferable to update or revise forecasts, plans, or other forward-looking statements, MetalStream disclaims any obligation to update or revise this document.

Unless otherwise specified, any financial data in this document is defined in USD.
Four people in HCMC and one in the northern Quang Ninh Province have tested Covid-19 positive, bringing the national tally to 153 as of Thursday evening.

Two people quarantined upon entering Vietnam March 21-23 are among the latest cases. The other three cases are people who contracted the virus from other Covid-19 patients.

"Patient 149" is a 40-year-old Vietnamese man in Hanoi's Long Bien District who works in Hessen state, Germany. On March 23, he landed in Quang Ninh's Van Don Airport on Vietnam Airlines flight VN36 along with his 68-year-old mother. He was asymptomatic on arrival. He was quarantined with two others on the same flight at the Quang Ninh Military School quarantine zone. He tested positive on March 25. 207 other passengers on his flight have tested negative. The man, his mother and two quarantine roommates have been transferred to the Ha Long City Hospital 2 for monitoring and treatment.

"Patient 150" is a 55-year-old Vietnamese man living in Tan Dinh Ward, District 1, Saigon. He and his wife landed March 13 in HCMC on Eva Air flight BR395 from the U.S., transiting in Taiwan.

The Health Ministry communique on the latest infections says the man returned home from Tan Son Nhat airport, and from March 14-18, he went to several places and made contact with several people. He also had a house party with four people on March 14, went to a noodles soup stall on Han Thuyen Street on March 15, had a meeting at the Transimex company with 24 people and another party in a restaurant on March 16. On March 18 he met friends in Nha Be District and went for a health check at the Family Medical clinic on Le Duan Street where he was advised to go to the HCMC Hospital for Tropical Diseases. On March 23, he developed a sore throat, cough and fever. After tests showed he was Covid-19 positive, he has been quarantined and treated at the Can Gio Hospital. The communique had no information about his wife or her health status.

"Patient 151" is a 45-year-old Brazilian woman residing in Thao Dien Ward, District 2, Saigon. She works at the Gia Dinh shoe company, which has two branches - one in Dong Nai Province's Vinh Cuu District and the other in District 2's An Phu Dong Ward. She is a co-worker and had close contact with "Patient 124," a 52-year-old Brazilian man who got infected after going to the Buddha Bar in the district with another infected man.

"Patient 151" and "Patient 124" often went to work in a car with a personal driver, sharing trips to the two company branches and to a Starbucks shop in District 2. "Patient 151" also went to several places, including a food stall in Dong Nai's Bien Hoa City on March 13, the An Phu supermarket on March 16, and the Hue Phong factory in Go Vap District on March 19. She was tested and quarantined in a military school in Cu Chi District on March 23. The driver is also quarantined there.

"Patient 152" is a 27-year-old Vietnamese woman residing in Tay Thanh Ward, Tan Phu District, Saigon. She is the sister of "Patient 127," an employee of the Buddha Bar, living with him in the same house. She works at the Formica company on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street, District 3. She had close contact with four co-workers from March 10 to March 14, and with a partner at the company on March 19. From March 15 to March 18, she went to several places and made contact with several people: on March 15 she went to her parents' house in Tan Binh District; on March 17 she went out for lunch with two of her friends in a restaurant in District 1; and on March 18 she came into contact with a delivery person.

On March 20, when she heard of people getting Covid-19 infections at the Buddha Bar, she took time off work and quarantined herself at home. She was monitored by a local medical clinioc. Her swab samples were taken on March 23 and she was quarantined in Can Gio. Her company has been closed temporarily.

"Patient 153" is a 60-year-old Vietnamese woman from Da Nang City's Hai Chau District. She visited a relative in Australia and returned to Vietnam March 21, landing in HCMC on Vietnam Airlines flight VN772. She was transferred to a quarantine zone in the dorm of the HCMC National University on arrival in the same room as "Patient 143" and two others.

On March 23, when "Patient 143" was confirmed infected, she and two other people in the room were transferred to the Cu Chi Field Hospital to be quarantined and monitored.

Thursdays additions have raised to 10 the number of Covid-19 patients linked to HCMC's Buddha Bar.

Vietnam has confirmed 153 Covid-19 cases so far, 17 of whom have been discharged from hospitals. Most of the active cases are people returning from Europe and the U.S. and people who came into close contact with them.

The Covid-19 pandemic has spread to 198 countries and territories, claiming over 22,000 lives.
SUWANNEE COUNTY, FL -- The Suwannee County School District has issued the following statement (on its website) concerning school closures due to the coronavirus outbreak.

" By order of the State of Florida, students will be out of school from Monday, March 16th through Tuesday, April 14th. Classes are scheduled to resume on Wednesday, April 15th. All extracurricular programs, athletic events, and after school programs are canceled for this time. There will be more information to come when it is known.

INSTRUCTIONAL CONTINUITY PLAN PARENT INFORMATION

SCSD will resume instructional services for all students on Monday, March 30, 2020, in a variety of formats appropriately designed with students grade levels, technology skills, and internet access beingconsidered.

Students in grades PreK-5 will receive paper packets of instructional materials to work on weekly. These materials will be available online, at the school sites, and will be delivered to homes by school bus on Mondays and Wednesdays beginning March 30, 2020. All assignments that are being sent home will also be posted on the SCSD website (www.suwannee.k12.fl.us) for elementary students who have access to a computer and printer in their home.

The primary method of curriculum delivery will be via the student assigned Chromebook. For those without access to the internet, methods for alternate delivery of curriculum will be formulated by each school site administrative and subject area team. All subjects on the student schedule should have a curriculum delivery method via online or duplication ready material(s) beginning March 30, 2020. Assignments will be posted on Monday of each week. Students will be given a full week to complete assignments.

COVID-19 SCSD MEAL PLAN

Beginning Monday, March 30, meals will be provided for drive thru pick up at a site in Live Oak and a site in Branford. In addition, school buses will be delivering meals and student assignments for students and families that do not have transportation ability to go to the pick-up sites. Meal services will only take place on Mondays and Wednesdays. The student must accompany the parent for meal delivery or pick up.

Links to more information and frequently asked questions such as grade promotion information and meal pickup times have been posted on the District Website home page at www.suwannee.k12.fl.us, as well as the FOCUS Student and Parent Portals.

RESUMING INSTRUCTION FOR ALL STUDENTS PreK-12

Following a statewide conference call with the Department of Education (DOE), and other state officials yesterday, the Florida public schools were notified that classes will remain suspended through April 15, 2020. However, during this statewide extension, education for students will resume.

Since Friday evening, the Suwannee County School District (SCSD) has been preparing for the possibility of an extended school closing, through April 15, 2020, by developing an Instructional Continuity Plan (ICP). The ICP outlines the Districts intent and ability to provide for all students to continue their education with their current teachers from home. Although not all details of the plan are completed, like all districts throughout Florida, the SCSD will continue to work to complete the details of the plan for implementation to begin on Monday, March 30, 2020. The Districts website and Facebook page will have the most up to date information regarding specifics related to how and where students will be able to receive their instructional materials. An overview of the plan is provided below.

The Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 5 Plan will support students with prepared instructional materials by grade level in Reading, Math, Science, and Social Studies. Beginning on March 30, parents will be able to download the packets from the home page of the District website, pick up instructional packets at the school sites, or possibly receive packets from school buses that will be traveling their normal transportation routes. Details regarding the exact times and locations will be made public in the next couple of days.

The Grade 6 through Grade 12 Plan will support students using online instruction in the Canvas learning management platform. All students in grades 6 and up already have an assigned Chromebook, and most have been utilizing the Canvas system to access course materials in some classes for the last two years. In the event that a student does not have internet access, an alternate paper assignment will be made available for download, pickup, or delivery by school bus.

RIVEROAK Technical College (RTC) (adult, secondary, adult education, and English as a Second Language programs) will support students utilizing online instruction via the Canvas learning management platform, other web-based standalone programs, and/or instructional packets. If needed, instructors with specific information that will include directions for accessing Canvas and web-based programs will contact its adult students. Additional information will be pushed out to all social media platforms and the RTC website at: www.riveroakcollege.com

Additional District-wide information includes the following:

All school extracurricular activities and events are canceled through Wednesday, April 15, 2020.

Schools are planning for students to return to classes on Thursday, April 16, 2020.

All statewide testing for the school year has been canceled; as well as, ACT and SAT testing until at least June. We have not received final guidance on Advanced Placement assessments.

We will monitor all developments closely and provide staff, students, and families with information as it is made available.

FOOD SERVICE

Food Service will begin on Monday, March 30, 2020.

At this time, there are two potential possibilities. We are awaiting approval from the federal government for our emergency feeding plan. There are potential feeding sites that will open in Live Oak and Branford, similar to the summer feeding sites that are available in the summer months. We are also exploring using school buses to deliver meals and student assignments twice weekly. More details on the feeding program will be made public as they are available.

LOCATIONS :

Suwannee High School (drive thru)

Branford Elementary School (drive thru)

MEAL PICKUP TIMES :

Mondays and Wednesdays from 10:00 a.m.  1:00 p.m., beginning Monday, March 30, 2020.

OTHER INFORMATION :

State Food Service guidelines require the student to be present for meals to be distributed.

Any person 18 years old or younger can be served at the Food Service pick up sites.

Students may pick up meals for themselves without a parent present.

Meals may only be picked up at the school sites listed above. There will be NO onsite dining."

Courtesy of http://www.suwannee.k12.fl.us
My, how the tables have turned.

Many Americans are relocating from their homes to far-flung places to escape the coronavirus outbreak.

This, public health officials tell us, only worsens the outbreak  they can carry the virus without any symptoms.

A growing number of people in Mexico want their government to crack down on the reportedly growing number of American citizens who are fleeing south to escape Trump's colossal mismanagement of the worsening U.S. outbreak.

Customs and Border Protection quietly requested 1,540 military personnel to assist with border enforcement, citing migrants' "potential to spread infectious disease" per DHS memo leaked to me. 1,000 troops would go to the Canadian border: https://t.co/ARxTjp3MWF pic.twitter.com/1H4jrwkVSU  Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) March 26, 2020

From BBC News:

Residents in Sonora, south of the US state of Arizona, have promised to block traffic into Mexico for a second day after closing a checkpoint for hours on Wednesday. They wore face masks and held signs telling Americans to "stay at home".Mexico has fewer than 500 confirmed Covid-19 cases and the US over 65,000. The border is supposed to be closed to all except "essential" business, but protesters said there has been little enforcement and no testing by authorities. The blockade was led by members of a Sonora-based group, Health and Life, who called for medical testing to be done on anyone who crosses from the US into Mexico. Jose Luis Hernandez, a group member, told the Arizona Republic: "There are no health screenings by the federal government to deal with this pandemic. That's why we're here in Nogales. We've taken this action to call on the Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to act now."

Read more at Arizona Central (the source of the reporting, paywalled):

Protesters block southbound lanes at Arizona border crossing, demand stricter coronavirus screenings

Read more at BBC:

Coronavirus: Mexicans demand crackdown on Americans crossing the border
Concerns about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and related travel restrictions have prompted oilfield pipe manufacturer Tenaris to postpone the company's annual stockholders meeting.

Tenaris originally planned to hold its annual stockholder meeting in Luxembourg on April 30 but in a Wednesday afternoon statement, the company said uncertainty about the future spread of the virus prompted postponing the meeting until June 2.

The company's board of director plans to issue stockholder meeting proposals on April 29. How much the company will in dividends is expected to be at the top of the list.

Most annual stockholder meetings for publicly traded companies takes place in late April or early May. Tenaris is the first publicly traded energy company to announce postponing its meeting because of the coronavirus.

Service Sector: Tenaris lays off 900 as demand for pipeline projects crumbles

Like other oilfield equipment manufacturers, Tenaris is being affected by a crude oil price downturn and the impacts of the coronavirus. Crude oil is trading at near 20-year lows after a price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia has exacerbated a global supply glut while the pandemic has cut demand.

With slumping orders for steel pump, Tenaris plans to lay off 900 workers across the United States over the next few weeks.

Fuel Fix: Get daily energy news headlines in your inbox

Tenaris was founded in Italy by CEO Paolo Rocca's grandfather and later moved its main operations to Argentina. The company was virtually unheard of in Texas until just over decade ago, when it bought St. Louis-based Maverick Tube Corp. and Houston-based Hydril Co. for a combined $5 billion.

Over the past decade, Tenaris grew from about 50 Houston employees to more than 2,000. The company opened a sprawling $1.8 billion pipe mill southwest of Houston in Bay City in 2017 and reopened its Conroe plant last year.

Considered to be the largest steel pipe producer in North America, Tenaris posted a $743 million profit on $7.3 billion of sales in 2019.

Read the latest oil and gas news from HoustonChronicle.com
An 18-year-old childhood friend was arrested for the alleged murder and rape of the 16-year-old teenager whose remains was found in an isolated patch of desert in northern Nevada earlier this month, Thursday.

Bryce Dickey, childhood friend and high school pal of the victim Gabrielle "Britney" Ujlaky is being charged of felony murder during a sexual assault or attempted sexual assault; or open murder with the use of a deadly weapon.

Ujlaky was reported missing on March 8, 2020 and her body was found at Burner Basin after three days.

Prosecutors from Elko county claim that the victim was choked and stabbed by the suspect, although the teen's cause of death has not been disclosed yet. According to the prosecutors, Dickey could face death penalty if proven guilty of Ujlaky's murder.

Dickey was reportedly the last person who saw the victim before she went missing, he also claimed that she was taken by a tall man with a cowboy hat and was driving a green pickup truck.

Speculations arose when a used condom with Dickey's DNA was found on the victim's body. The police also added that they found Dickey's blood-stained boots which strengthened the allegations against him.

However, Dickey explained the condom by admitting that he had sex with the victim the day she vanished. Investigators did not disclose the information if the sex was consensual but Dickey is also being charged with sexual assault.

Read also: Deranged Young Man Kills Father, Stabs Mother in Horrific Hayward Murder

Disproving Dickey's claims of having sexual relations with the victim, Ujlaky's friends and family has previously stated that she was not sexually active and has not expressed any romantic interest on the suspect.

The girl's mother, Alisha Ujlakay, also said that knowing her daughter, there was nothing consensual about what happened. She further added that, Dickey whom she described as a "shy cowboy" was like a big brother to her daughter and that he was dating another teenager during that time.

Suspect allegedly confessed his feelings for victim

Cheyenne Fry, a friend of the victim told Oxygen that Dickey has previously admitted having romantic feelings for Ujlaky, but she rejected him. She also said that she believes Dickey did not want to take no for an answer, thus committing the crime to get his way.

Prosecutors on the case have not definitively stated yet whether they think Dickey planned the murder or if it was committed in the height of the assault. There has not been any public release of the possible motive on Ujlaky's killing either, and the sheriff department also refused to make a comment.

Suspect attended vigils for the victim

In the past weeks before his arrest, it was reported that Dickey was still present during candlelit vigils and memorial celebrations in honor of the victim.

According to Fry, Dickey even comforted her and hugged her, adding that she cannot believe the audacity of the guy to do that and show his face in front of everyone.

Dickey even posted on Facebook how he was mourning the loss of his "sis", saying her life has ended too soon.



Related article: Police Tracks 'Wordless' 911 Call, Finds Dead Bodies of Father and Two Children

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Can you move just a little bit to this way? Perfect. A-L-L-I-A, my name is Allia Phillips. I am 10 years old. I live in New York, New York. And I live in a shelter. And I love playing violin. OK, Im going to have to stand up for this. A lot of things are really happening right now, like Covid-19. [Violin playing] Ive heard that it is a very contagious virus. And when people get it, a lot of people have to go to the hospital. But some of them have to get isolated. Its changed my life because now, we dont get to go in school. My teacher told us that she didnt know if it was going to close for the whole year. Ta-da. Youve got blanky fuzz in your hair. Right now, me and Allia are actually living in a family shelter. I dont like the way you brush it. You brush it so hard. Basically, its one room with a bathroom, and then one bed and a bunk bed. I guess, its now my classroom, too. I got contacted by her school to go pick up her iPad device. And her iPad does not have internet. The shelter that were in, they do not allow internet. What classroom stuff are we going to do today? Math? Well, science is already too hard. It keeps on pausing itself, just freezing. Oh OK, I will look into that in a little bit. Across the room. And see whats going on. I have a cellphone. We use the hot spot. I dont have a lot of data. And its a little spotty and slow. Essentially, thats just where weve been is puttering outside to get a better signal, hoping it gets better. A school has 17 tables in the cafeteria. Each table has 12 seats. I am worried that children are going to get left behind because they dont have their devices or they didnt have the access to the internet. Lets try that one again. So well probably have to redo our whole grade, and relearn everything we already know. Right now, my biggest worry for Allia would be the social interaction. My mother, whos disabled, and her service animal lives with us. So were all in this really tiny space. Yeah. Im worried about that because my grandmother, she is really old. And if she gets it or if my mother gets sick, they could get hurt. And if they both get it, whos going to take care of me that day? And then if were all locked in the same room, how are we going to be safe?
Evangeline Lillys Lost co-star Maggie Grace has slammed her for refusing to socially distance herself during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Lilly had written in an Instagram post that she values her freedom more than anything else, and had liked the coronavirus to a respiratory flu.

Theres no need to panic, but at the same time this is about all of us  the vulnerable, the immunocompromised, older folks, Grace wrote in a comment. Sure, its a free country, but how about choosing to exercise some of that wonderful freedom to have some compassion, trust the extensive science here and not overwhelm health system. No doctor should have to choose which patients get life saving care and which patients get sent home to die  the sort of triage that is tragically happening in Italy right now, she went on. Think about how these small decisions effect your dad and those in your community as ventilators run out.

Maggie Grace's response to Evangeline Lilly's instagram post  pic.twitter.com/t09w4Bxgzw  LOST (@LOST_Daily) March 24, 2020

Then, making a reference to their Lost co-star Daniel Dae Kim, who has tested positive for the virus, Grace concluded, PS Daniel said he is doing a lot better btw. I dont know, Maybe you guys want to chat.

Also read: Sophie Turner goes Sansa Stark on Evangeline Lillys coronavirus comments: I dont give a f--k about your freedom

Lilly in an Instagram comment had previously written, I have two young kids. Some people value their lives over freedom, some people value freedom over their lives. We all make our choices. Where we are right now feels a lot too close to Marshall Law [sic] for my comfort already, all in the name of a respiratory flu. Shed captioned her controversial post, Just dropped my kids off at gymnastics camp. They all washed their hands before going in. They are playing and laughing.

Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner had also slammed Lillys comments. In an Instagram video, Turner had said, Stay inside. Dont be f---ing stupid. Even if you count your   [does air quotes] freedom over ... your health. I dont give a f--- about your freedom. You could be infecting other people, other vulnerable people around you by doing this. So stay inside guys! Its not cool, its not big, and its not clever And thats the tea.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
Nicole Hall Leach and her two sons got up Tuesday morning and went to school  in their apartment.

Leach, 36, is pursuing a bachelors degree in education from Texas A&M University San Antonio. Her 11-year-old, Marquette Jr., was wearing his Eisenhower Middle School shirt, but has been home-schooling online since October. Christopher, 9, was getting used to attending third grade remotely instead of at Larkspur Elementary.

Those schools, along with every other in Texas and the vast majority in the country, are closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19  so millions of children now take their lessons from small screens or weekly paper handouts. And the adults in their families have to adjust.

Mom, apparently weve got to watch this BrainPop video, but it wont let me do it cause I got to sign in, Christopher said from his little table under a living-room window.

Do I have to make you an account? Leach asked, ignoring her own laptop on the dining table. Bring it to me.

After clicking on traffic lights and crosswalks to prove she wasnt a machine, Leach let the real machine handle her sons science lesson.

Theres a huge array of disasters that can happen in our world, but its important to remember that scientists do their best to predict a lot of them and prediction science is getting better all the time, cartoon characters told Christopher in a video. Whenever disaster does strike, governments and humanitarian agencies are there to provide as much aid as possible.

For hundreds of thousands of San Antonio students, this is what class will look like for the next month, at least.

Touch screen math

The Texas Education Agency has ordered schools to provide remote instruction during their pandemic-driven shutdowns, advising them to secure their continued state funding by saving assignments and having teachers periodically check in with students on the phone or online.

Local school districts are responding with a patchwork of methods, from live-streamed virtual classrooms on a normal school schedule to self-paced online assignments to paper packets exchanged in school parking lots. Several districts are offering families high-tech plans with online lessons, low-tech plans with paper lessons, or both.

On ExpressNews.com: School districts in San Antonio extend coronavirus closures to April 24

Leach takes both children to pick up school lunches at Larkspur, in the North East Independent School District. But having spent $324 on a new laptop for Christopher so everyone had a computer, she didnt bother going to campus for paper packets.

Christophers school day used to start at 7:45 a.m., but now hes allowed to sleep in, as long as hes on Google Classroom by 8:30. He worked until 2:45 p.m. just doing English and math on the first day, and had a lot of questions: Do I really have to do all of this? I mean, why do we have all this work if we dont have to go to school? Do I have to do it all day?

He has a lot, Leach said. As long as we pace it, he has until Friday to turn everything in.

Christopher took a math test online Tuesday and earned a perfect score by 9:45 a.m. Marquette, not to be outdone, aced an online health test.

It was easier to do fractions when he could write them down, but on the laptop, Christopher has to drag icons across the screen with a touch pad and you might lose it a couple of hundred times, he said sadly. The pieces just went right back to where they started.

His teacher communicates online via the Seesaw system. Leach chatted with her all weekend while setting up Christophers computer and work station. They got help from her again Monday when they couldnt access an assignment.

Home schooling online benefits Marquette, who has attention deficit hyperactive disorder, but now his little brother can be a distraction.

When you add two kids together, its like hes back in his regular classroom, Leach said. Now I understand what the teacher was going through.

She also struggles to balance her own online university learning with her sons. One will want to show her a completed test, the other will have a question, and when its over shes lost track of her reading. Leach gets more of her own work done during her overnight shifts providing child care at a foster group home.

Ill be glad when everything gets back to normal, she said.

Helps me focus

At Ebony Rices home in the Vista subdivision on the Northeast Side, her nephews and niece had internet access and their own laptops, but they had picked up paper packets for the week at their NEISD campuses.

Rice, 25, is a full-time graduate student, seeking a masters in health administration from the University of the Incarnate Word. She also works nights as a full-time nurse at a New Braunfels nursing home. The children live with their grandmother, who is 63 and works during the day as a nurse, but she cant easily help them with computer work, so they went with the paper lessons, Rice said.

One nephew, Jamaury Anderson, sat on a small chaise lounge Monday afternoon, papers on a tray in front of him and a laptop next to him.

Im on my break, said Jamaury, 9, a third-grader at Steubing Ranch Elementary. Can I? he said, looking at the dark TV screen.

Rice lets them take breaks for 15 or 20 minutes after they finish worksheets, and Jamaury had just finished reading about things invented by kids. As he watched cartoons, his sister Shawnette, 11, a fifth-grader at Steubing Ranch, and brother Davontae, 15, a freshman at Madison High School, worked in small chairs at a child-sized table.

Davontes packet asked him to edit a short story, while Shawnette was answering questions about the properties of objects. The younger kids were going to play math video games and Davontae is learning sign language by watching online videos the teacher sends.

They all access grades and talk to their teachers online  and all said they thought they were getting less work than a normal week at school. Rice worried theyd have to repeat a grade, or would fall behind academically even if theyre promoted.

Either way, it wont be good, she said.

The trio spent long stretches of time working silently, which Jamaury said he prefers  If its more quiet, it calms me down and helps me focus, he said.

Shawnette agreed, but said learning at home was harder because she cant get help from teachers right away.

I dont like it, Davontae said. It dont feel right doing your schoolwork at home.

Youre the teacher

Whitney Weddel, a certified nurse and teacher at East Central High School, turned her own dining room into a career and technical education classroom, with her laptop positioned to face Brenda, a simulation mannequin lying on a thin mattress.

Students in her health and registered nurse class have to take a certification test that includes a two-hour written exam and a live skills test with an evaluator. The test was scheduled for the last week of March, but testing centers are closed until further notice so no one knows when it will happen.

If they arent practicing their skills, then they wont be ready when this is all over, Weddel said.

On Tuesday afternoon, students excitedly greeted each other as they signed on. Hows the class plant? Weddel asked one who had taken their succulent home for what they thought would be a weeklong spring break.

Well, you shouldve given me more than $10 for plant food, the girl responded. Because Im having it for a month.

On ExpressNews.com: Digital divide suddenly wider

As they practiced skills at home, Weddel told the students theyd need to get creative. When theyre brushing their teeth, she told them to imagine brushing a patients teeth. Seek help from a parent or sibling to practice helping them walk, she said.

Morgan, go ahead and walk me through the skill. Youre the teacher, Weddel told a student, who directed her through the steps for giving a patient a bed bath and watched through her computer as Weddel applied the instructions to Brenda. Meanwhile, Weddels English bulldog, Leo, noisily licked his paws underneath the table.

Weddel had bought one student an iPad, not expecting any reimbursement from East Central ISD, just to keep up with the lessons.

Its been so intense because you dont realize what these kids dont have, she said.

Teachers at Northside ISD, the largest in Bexar County, were told to make allowances for the thousands of its 108,000 students who dont yet have the technology for online learning. It posted a form last week for families to request laptops, tablets and wireless hotspots  and was quickly inundated.

Now the form is only available from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m. so an army of district staff can spend the day processing requests and scheduling pickups, said Barry Perez, district spokesman. As of Thursday, the school district had given out nearly 24,000 Chromebooks and iPads. Almost 3,700 MiFi hotspots have been distributed or reserved from an order expected to arrive this week, Perez said.

With distance learning taking place across the state now, and maybe even across the nation, inventory was very low, he said.

Teachers are using Google Classroom, but some are getting creative with the Zoom video conferencing platform, Perez said. The lessons are self-paced and Northside is working on supplemental paper packets, mostly for primary grades, he said.

Required Reading: Get San Antonio education news sent directly to your inbox

The school district is still figuring out accommodations for special education students and those who speak other languages, including its community of refugee students from Afghanistan and other countries in Asia and Africa.

We have been working around the clock to make sure we meet the needs of all of our groups, Perez said.

Pacing, feedback and apps

In North East ISD, more than 7,000 families had picked up paper packets as of Thursday, and the district had issued laptops or tablets to almost 4,000 students.

Equity is a huge factor and a priority for us, said Aubrey Chancellor, school district spokeswoman. We wanted to make sure that, no matter what the circumstances are for a family, they would have the ability to continue to learn.

Many teachers had already been using online platforms to assign work and connect with parents. Families who chose paper packets pick them up weekly from schools, turning in completed packets when they get new ones. The completed worksheets are left untouched for 24 hours as a precaution against contagion, Chancellor said. Then teachers grade them and return them to families at the next pickup.

Students who arent able to ask teachers for help online can call the district counseling number to connect with them. NEISD assigned students roughly three hours of work per day, less than a normal school day, because teachers arent devoting minutes to giving examples or group collaboration, she said.

The school district put out a sample schedule, including time to eat breakfast and play outside. Yes make sure you change out of PJs, it says. But its just for families who want the structure, Chancellor said.

Our intent is not to make this any more stressful for families who are dealing with unusual or new circumstances, she said.

Laptop availability issues

Harlandale ISD on the citys South Side has almost 14,000 students, 88 percent from families with low enough incomes to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Schools have distributed more than 2,000 laptops and tablets from their campus collections, and hundreds more are on order, but all students are getting packets or workbooks for every class, including fine arts, whether or not they have technology, said Melissa Casey, interim assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction.

Harlandale initially asked for computer requests only from families that didnt have a single one in their home, Casey said. A second round of distribution wont begin until those households are taken care of. Teachers have to keep in mind students are likely sharing devices with their siblings, Casey said.

To think our kids are going to be doing work from 8 to 3 is not realistic or very helpful to them, she said.

Many Harlandale teachers have established Google Classrooms and are using the ClassDojo app for communications. Its harder for teachers to give help and feedback to students who arent online, Casey said.

Some teachers and counselors are giving live and recorded lessons online, but there isnt a set schedule for students. Schools are aiming for two hours weekly of teaching and independent work per class, Casey said.

Were trying to do the best we can for the kids we have and the population we have, Casey said. We have basically asked everyone to adjust what theyve been doing all year in a couple of days.

Staff writer Krista Torralva contributed to this report. Alia Malik covers several school districts and the University of Texas at San Antonio. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | amalik@express-news.net | Twitter: @AliaAtSAEN
Bhopal, March 26 : With a 21-day lockdown in the country to prevent coronavirus, farmers are worried about their standing crops because if the harvesting and storage is not done on time then they will suffer. Farmers are now demanding special concessions from the government in these conditions.

Generally, the harvesting time of rabi crops including wheat, gram, and mustard is in March and April. At present, these crops are blooming in the fields of Madhya Pradesh as preparations are being made for harvesting them but the coronavirus has not left farmers untouched.

The 21-day lockdown has made it difficult for farmers to reach their fields and harvest the crop.

Shivkumar Kakaji, National President of Kisan Mazdoor Mahasangh and Abhimanyu Kohada, National President of Youth Unit, have written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi supporting the decision of the lockdown and said that the federation and crores of farmers of the country supports it.

They wrote, "These days it is time to harvest the rabi crops, in some states farmers have harvested the crops, in some states it is still under preparation and the process will continue till the next days. Where the crop has been harvested all the hard work and cost of the farmers there is lying open in the fields at the moment, as well as the crop standing in the fields is prone to unseasonal rain and danger from animals." It said that the economy of the country is agriculture based, and due to this lockdown, it will be difficult for the farmers to go to the farm and this will affect the economy and there will be a risk of adverse conditions.

Apart from this, with no proper storage of grains and no concrete strategy for farmers and farming, the situation may become more serious in future because if this corona epidemic lasts for a long time then starvation conditions can also arise, it said.

The farmers demanded that an effective strategy should be chalked out by the central government keeping in mind their problems and the necessary orders are issued to the states. Passes should also be issued to farmers, labourers and others engaged in harvesting for the stipulated time frame.

Similarly, Kedar Sirohi, a farmer leader, said that no one is against the lockdown as it is a way to stop the epidemic, but keeping in view the problems of farmers, something must be done so there is no loss to the harvested crop.

At the same time, arrangements should be made for purchasing crops from farmers, as if this is not done then the coming days will be troublesome for the farmers and for the country.

Sirohi suggested that after the harvesting of the farmers, a plan should be made to purchase at the village level so that the farmers are able to get a reasonable price for the produce. Also, proper storage should be made for the harvest.

He said if the government does not step in, the traders would buy grain from the farmers for a quarter of the price and the farmers would be compelled to sell it.
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Linkedin Wahyoe Boediwardhana (The Jakarta Post) Surabaya  Thu, March 26, 2020 12:11 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d7f985 1 National Sexual-assault,sexual-abuse,sexual-abuse-victims,child-abuse,child-molestation,East-Java,surabaya,prosecutors,judges Free

The Surabaya District Court has sentenced Ali Shodiqin, the former junior high school principal of the Surabaya State University Labschool (Labschool Unesa) in the East Java capital, to 10 months in prison after it found him guilty of sexually abusing six students.

The sentence was significantly shorter than the prosecution's demand of six years.

The judges had charged the former principal under Article 281 of the Criminal Code on public indecency, which carries a maximum punishment of 2 years and eight months in prison, reported tribunnews.com.

Prosecutor Novan Arianto had demanded at the start of the trial that the defendant be convicted under Articles 80 and 82 on child abuse and molestation of the 2002 Child Protection Law, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years.

Novan said that the prosecution was still considering whether or not to appeal the sentence. "We have seven days to decide on that matter," he said.

Ali declined to comment on his sentence. "I can only say thank you," he said.

The alleged abuse came to light when the school administered psychological tests for its students, during which five students revealed that they had been abused by Ali, who was then the principal of Labschool Unesa's junior high school division.

One of the students responded that she had been physically abused by Ali, while the other four students said that they had been sexually assaulted.

The East Java Child Protection Agency has urged prosecutors to appeal the sentence, saying that it was essential for law enforcement to use the Child Protection Law in all criminal offenses that targeted children.

"What has happened to the children will potentially traumatize them in the long term. Thus, we must handle [every crime against them] using the appropriate procedure, including providing them with psychological support," the agency's chairwoman, Sri Adiningsih, said on Wednesday.
While much of our economy is reeling from a shut down as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nancy Pelosi betrayed her true nature by nearly wrecking the relief efforts by Congress. She packed legislation to support Americans affected by the loss of work and wages with millions in pork for her pet projects as well as leftist political mandates. This set the stage for a major fight in Congress at a time when millions of Americans are suffering and fearful of the unknown.

Legislation to fund medical ventilators, desperately needed hospital clothing, supplies and beds along with financial support for out-of-work employees and their families was unnecessarily delayed. Thats because Nancy Pelosi inserted tax credits for solar and wind research, massive cuts to aircraft emissions, $25 million for the Kennedy Center, and $300 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts and Public Broadcasting, $20 million for the Bureau of Reclamation and $33 million for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which is pushing the Climate Change scenario).

The millions and the mandates didnt stop there.

Even though airports and cruise lines are practically empty, she wanted an extra $26 million for overtime for TSA employees and $45 million for the Agricultural Marketing Service to grade meat. Pelosi, aka Chancellor Palpatine, continued grasping for power. She inserted in the virus-relief and economic stimulus bill legislation to allow same day voter registration. She even added prohibitions from colleges disclosing the immigration status of students to ICE. All leftist stuff thats been in someones desk just waiting for a chance to be slipped into a bill like this.

In one of the biggest examples of tyranny she would have mandated a total restructuring of corporations receiving help from this legislation. The Securities and Exchange Commission would, under her scheme, require all manner of diversities on their boards including one third of members to be from labor unions. Pelosis stamp of identity politics would permanently have changed American businesses forever had it reached the final vote. Rep. James Clyburn, famous for having rescued the failing candidacy of Joe Biden, said it best of the Pelosi Pork Bill. He said, this is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision. (The Hill, March 19, 2020).

This behavior is the definition of demagoguery. It fulfills the mission of Democrat strategist and erstwhile mayor Rahm Emanuel who said,  never let a good crisis go to waste. Tyrants have adopted this mantle for centuries in their quest for absolute power. Voters should remember all of this in November.

Ralph Miller
President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Foreign leaders from the Group of Seven countries failed to agree on a joint declaration because of disputes on what to call the coronavirus pandemic, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel.

President Donald Trump and congressional leaders have described the coronavirus  which has been found in 170 countries  as the "Chinese virus" and the "Wuhan virus."

"It's not racist at all," Trump said last week. "It comes from China  that's why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate."

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Foreign leaders from the Group of Seven countries failed to agree on a joint declaration because of disputes on what to call the coronavirus pandemic, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The US State Department, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, insisted on describing the novel coronavirus as the "Wuhan virus" during preliminary discussions  a nod to its suspected place of origin in Wuhan, China, according to Der Spiegel. The differences between the other G7 countries and the US blocked the issuance of a joint declaration, the magazine reported.

The rejection of the proposed joint statement was confirmed by CNN. The heads of state later published separate statements on the coronavirus.

"What the State Department has suggested is a red line," a diplomat from a European country told CNN. "You cannot agree with this branding of this virus and trying to communicate this."

The upcoming meeting between Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US was supposed to take place in Pittsburgh in later this month, but it is expected to be conducted via teleconference because of the coronavirus.

President Donald Trump and congressional leaders have described the coronavirus  which has been found in 170 countries  as the "Chinese virus" and the "Wuhan virus." The leaders also said the Chinese government had a documented history of downplaying the virus and obfuscating information before it spread beyond its borders and affected other nations.

Story continues

"This is the Wuhan coronavirus," Pompeo said earlier in March. "It has proven incredibly frustrating to work with the Chinese Communist Party."

When Trump was asked about his description of the virus, he said he did not believe it had racist undertones.

"It's not racist at all," Trump said last week. "It comes from China  that's why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate."

Critics have said that characterizing the virus by its country of origin fueled xenophobic attitudes. Other diseases  including the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus, more commonly known as the "swine flu," that was first found in the US  are not referred to by their countries of origin.

The World Health Organization urged people to be "careful" in labeling the coronavirus and said, "Viruses know no borders and they don't care about your ethnicity."

The remarks come as numerous hate crimes have been reported by people of Asian heritage around the world. The Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and San Francisco State University have since created a website on which people can report discriminatory behavior.

Trump on Monday said the Asian American community ought to be "totally protected" in light of xenophobic attacks during the coronavirus pandemic, including "nasty language."

Read the original article on Business Insider
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The Global Cosmetic Surgery Market has been growing persistently and is set to capture a CAGR of 7.8% over the forecast period of 20172023, reveals Market Research Future (MRFR) in a minutely analyzed research report. The global cosmetic surgery market has been observing continued growth on account of social and cultural factors such as the influence of social media and films. Interestingly, physical appearance is a social phenomenon, and the people are overwhelmingly driven to opt for cosmetic surgeries by the desire to look beautiful, flawless and young. Advertising and marketing are instrumental in shaping the cosmetic surgery market as they reinforce such beliefs among consumers which makes them indulge in cosmetic surgeries.

Photo filters available on applications such as Snapchat and Instagram have reportedly been vital in triggering body dysmorphic disorders among the youth who opt for cosmetic surgeries in an effort to look like an edited version of themselves. Rising disposable income levels in developing countries coupled with high adoption rates of invasive and minimally invasive cosmetic procedures drive the market majorly. Moreover, cosmetic surgeries are increasingly becoming affordable, and the trend of medical tourism has helped spur the growth of the market.

Request Free Sample Report at: https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/3157

Technological developments in procedures and availability of skilled surgeons have helped consumers shake off their inhibitions regarding cosmetic surgeries. The rise in youth population is also a critical factor in propelling the market growth. The young population is more influenced by social media, changing beauty standards, peer pressure and form a large base of the cosmetic surgery consumers. On the downside, the side effects associated with cosmetic procedures and the high cost of cosmetic surgeries are significant market restraints. However, with more number of men opting for cosmetic procedures, the trend is likely to provide potential growth opportunities to the market. These factors in combination will help the market achieve a valuation of USD 21.97 Bn by the end of 2023.

Segmentation

The global cosmetic surgery market has been segmented based on surgery type which comprises liposuction, eyelid and nose surgery, body contouring, facial reconstruction, cosmetic implants and others. The body contouring segment has been further segmented into tummy tuck, breast lift, others. The cosmetic implants segment has been further segmented into breast augmentation, buttock implants, chin & cheek implants.

Access Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/cosmetic-surgery-market-3157

Regional Analysis

The global cosmetic surgery market spans across the regions of North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East & Africa. North America holds the maximum share of the market owing to an increase in awareness and growing acceptability of cosmetic surgery in the region, especially the US. Moreover, the region is technologically advanced which has resulted in the development of less painful and non-invasive procedures. The Asia Pacific region is expected to showcase relatively fast growth over the forecast period, with key contributions from Japan, India, and China. There is a shift towards Latin America and Asia Pacific for owing to medical tourism for cosmetic surgeries.

Competitive Landscape

The notable players in the global cosmetic surgery market include Johnson & Johnson, Cutera, Inc., Allergan, Inc., Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Syneron Medical Ltd., Genesis Biosystems, Inc., and others.
The UK government on Thursday handed police forces in England the power to fine and even arrest those repeatedly breaking strict lockdown rules in place in the country to combat the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel said that to ensure people stay at home and avoid non-essential travel, police will be empowered to instruct members of the public to go home, leave an area or disperse and can issue a fixed penalty notice of 60 pounds which would double with each repeat offence.

Individuals who do not pay a fixed penalty notice under the regulations could be taken to court, with magistrates able to impose unlimited fines, and if someone continues to refuse to comply, the police may even arrest them where deemed proportionate and necessary.

The Prime Minister has been clear on what we need to do: stay at home to protect our NHS and save lives, the Indian-origin Cabinet minister said.

All our frontline services really are the best of us and are doing an incredible job to stop this terrible virus from spreading. That's why I'm giving the police these new enforcement powers, to protect the public and keep people safe, she said.

Under the rules, the fixed penalty of 60 pounds will be lowered to 30 pounds if paid within 14 days and parents would be held accountable for their children following the lockdown.

However, the Home Office said that in the first instance the police will always apply their common sense and discretion.

It reminded people that they will only be allowed to leave their home for shopping for basic necessities, as infrequently as possible; one form of exercise a day, alone or with members of their household; any medical need, to provide care or to help a vulnerable person; and travelling to and from work, but only where they cannot work from home.

Participating in gatherings of more than two people in public spaces is not permitted except in very limited circumstances, for example, where it is for essential work purposes.

In addition to the new powers, a package of support has been unveiled to boost police resources including protective gear.

The announcement came as the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) confirmed that anyone using coronavirus to threaten police and emergency workers faces serious criminal charges.

The CPS intervention comes after reports in recent days of police, shop workers and vulnerable groups being deliberately coughed at by people claiming to have the disease.

I am therefore appalled by reports of police officers and other frontline workers being deliberately coughed at by people claiming to have COVID-19. Let me be very clear: this is a crime and needs to stop, said Max Hill, CPS Director of Public Prosecutions.

Coughs directed as a threat at other key workers or members of the public could be charged as common assault, punishable by up to 12 months in prison.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Oleksii LIskonih/iStock(WASHINGTON) -- President Donald Trump said he no longer needs to refer to the novel coronavirus as the "Chinese virus," but his top diplomat is continuing to tie the outbreak to the Chinese city where it first exploded, as a way to push back on what he called the Chinese Communist Party's "disinformation campaign."



In brief remarks after hosting the G7 foreign ministers' meeting on Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued his department's war of words with Chinese officials as the pandemic continues to claim lives and costs economies around the world.



His push seems to have caused a small rift in the G7 alliance, which failed to agree on a joint statement after Pompeo insisted that it include the term "Wuhan virus," according to two sources familiar with the matter.



"The Chinese Communist Party poses a substantial threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus clearly has demonstrated," Pompeo said at the department, blasting Beijing for providing assistance to other countries and then "claiming that they are now the white hat."



Foreign ministers from the seven countries -- U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom -- met via video teleconference on Wednesday, after the U.S. canceled the annual meeting, scheduled for Pittsburgh, because of the COVID-19 outbreak. While they discussed a range of foreign crises where the allies are working together, their first focus was on the pandemic, that has shut down the global economy and killed over 18,500 people.



Amid that global fight, Pompeo and the State Department have waged a second battle to blame the Chinese government for the outbreak, especially after Chinese officials elevated conspiracy theories churning on the web that falsely accused the U.S. military of starting the outbreak.



Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian pushed those theories on Twitter, prompting the State Department to summon the Chinese ambassador in Washington and dress him down and Pompeo to call his counterpart Yang Jiechi, director of the CCP's Office of Foreign Affairs.



"This is crazy talk," Pompeo said Wednesday of those theories, calling them part of a "disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try to deflect on what has really taken place here."



That's a reference to the Chinese government's initial rejection of U.S. offers to help study the virus by sending scientists and experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Wuhan. That lack of transparency let the virus spread, Pompeo added, calling for more "transparency" from Beijing.



But it seems U.S. allies wanted to avoid using the term "Wuhan virus" at a time when the World Health Organization has been urging all countries to work together. Two sources familiar with the matter told ABC News that Pompeo and the U.S. delegation wanted a joint statement from the G7 countries to include the term, but it was opposed by others, with no joint statement specific to the pandemic issued in the end.



Asked about that, Pompeo declined to comment specifically on the joint declaration, but told reporters there are "a handful of places like the [Iran nuclear deal] where we have tactical differences about [how] to achieve our strategic outcomes" with allies.



But in response to calls for the U.S. to work with China, Pompeo said American officials "desperately want to work with every country around the world," including China, but have been rebuffed by Beijing.



Beyond the G7, Pompeo's attacks also contrast with Trump's more conciliatory tone on Tuesday. In an interview with Fox News, he said he wasn't going to use the phrase "Chinese virus" anymore, not because it's been criticized for stigmatizing Asians and sparking threats against Asian Americans, but because he no longer needed to.



"Everyone knows it came out of China, but I decided we shouldn't make any more of a big deal out of it," Trump said.



In contrast, the State Department and China's Foreign Ministry continue to engage in a fierce back-and-forth on Twitter, which notably, the Chinese government has barred its public from accessing.



Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying accused State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus of "lying and slander" after Ortagus highlighted that authorities in Hubei province ordered labs to stop testing and destroy samples, while officials arrested or reprimanded doctors for speaking out on social media about the outbreak.



"Please take some time to understand the situation before you speak," Hua tweeted.



Ortagus fired back with the hashtags "CovidCoverup" and "ChinaTransparencyNow," again accusing Chinese authorities of refusing "to admit human-human transmission until Jan. 20, with catastrophic consequences."



On Jan. 20, Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a Chinese official helping lead the coronavirus response, announced the virus can be transmitted person to person, six days after WHO said Chinese doctors had "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission."



A little over two months later, with over 400,000 cases worldwide, it's now clear that is not the case.



Copyright  2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
Doctors check on a Covid-19 patient at the National Hospital of Tropical Diseases in Hanoi, March 24, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Thanh.

Four people from HCMC, two from Hanoi and one from Nghe An have raised the nations Covid-19 infections to 148 Thursday morning.

"Patient 142" is a 26-year-old man residing in the An Phu Tay area in Ho Chi Minh Citys Binh Chanh District. He landed in Saigon March 10 on Eva Air flight BR395 from Taipei. He had then visited the Binh Dan Hospital in District 3, the office of the U.S. Consulate General and met with several officials in charge of temporary residency in Tan Uc Commune. He tested positive on March 23 and is being treated at a field hospital in Can Gio District.

"Patient 143" is a 58-year-old South African woman living in Tan Son Nhi Ward, Tan Phu District, HCMC. She returned from the U.S. on Eva Air flight BR395, which took off from Seattle and transited in Taiwan before landing March 21 in Saigon. She was sent to a quarantine camp at a university dormitory in Thu Duc District. She had been in direct contact with a family member who had Covid-19 before flying back to Vietnam.

On March 22, she showed Covid-19 symptoms of fever, cough and shortness of breath before testing positive. She is being treated at the Cu Chi field hospital.

"Patient 144" is a 22-year-old man in Phu Nhuan District. He flew from the U.K. and landed March 22 in HCMC on Vietnam Airlines flight VN50. He was quarantined in the southern province of Tra Vinh upon arrival.

"Patient 145" is a 34-year-old man residing in Son Ky Ward, Tan Phu District, HCMC. He works as a manicurist in the U.S. He returned to Vietnam on flight VN50 that landed in Can Tho City March 22 and was quarantined in a military school. Later, he developed a cough and was taken to the Can Tho Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases Hospital, where he tested positive and is now receiving treatment.

"Patient 146" is a 17-year-old girl who lives in Nghi Thiet Commune, Nghi Loc District, Nghe An Province in central Vietnam. She returned to Vietnam from Thailand on March 20. Shed previously come into close contact with a Covid-19 patient in the central city of Da Nang. After entering Vietnam, she was sent to isolation at a camp in Ha Tinh Province that neighbors Nghe An where she tested positive. She is being treated at Ha Tinhs Cau Treo General Hospital. Her flight details were not available at the time of publication.

"Patient 147" is a 19-year-old from Yen Hoa Commune, Cau Giay District, Hanoi. A student in the U.K., he landed March 21 in Hanoi on Vietnam Airlines flight VN54. He was quarantined on entry and tested positive shortly after. He has been admitted to the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi's Dong Anh District.

"Patient 148" is a Frenchman, 58, who was staying in O Cho Dua Ward, Dong Da District, Hanoi after landing March 12 on Vietnam Airlines flight VN18. After he arrived in the capital city until March 19, he visited many tourist sites in Hanoi. On March 19, he was tested and quarantined at home. He was confirmed Covid-19 positive on March 24.

So far, the nation has confirmed 148 infections, including 131 active cases.

The earlier 17 cases were discharged after treatment. Of the current cases in hospitals, 15 have tested negative at least once.

Many of active cases are Vietnamese nationals retuning from Europe and the U.S. and foreigners visiting from the same regions. Starting March 22, Vietnam has suspended entry for all foreign nationals, including those of Vietnamese origin and family members with visa waivers.

The Covid-19 pandemic has killed more than 19,700 people globally as it spread to 198 countries and territories.
Alabamas plan to prioritize who gets a ventilator in a pandemic is facing a legal and ethical challenge, as advocates argue its unlawful and unfair to keep people with intellectual and developmental disabilities off the list.

"You're singling out a group of people and the policy is really based on a value judgment that the lives of people with cognitive or intellectual disabilities are less worth living," Rhonda Brownstein, legal director of the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program, said in a phone interview Wednesday.

The Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program and The Arc of the United States advocate on behalf of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The two nonprofits filed a federal complaint on Tuesday.

Alabama public health documents currently list "severe or profound mental retardation, dementia and brain injury as among many potential reasons to be denied a ventilator in a crisis.

The nonprofits argue that Alabama's protocol violates the American with Disabilities Act and other federal laws. They filed the complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights on Tuesday, arguing that Alabama's protocol puts disabled peoples' lives at risk.

The complaint calls on the federal office to "take immediate action to address this discrimination and assist covered entities in developing non-discriminatory approaches before there are lethal consequences from the application of these illegal policies."

As AL.com reported on Tuesday, the Alabama Department of Public Health issued an updated version of the protocol, dubbed Criteria for Mechanical Ventilator Triage Following Proclamation of Mass-Casualty Respiratory Emergency, in 2010. It outlines statewide recommendations for how hospitals should manage access to ventilators during a severe health crisis like a pandemic.

It lists a number of health conditions that could lead to a patient being denied access to a ventilator in an overwhelmed Alabama hospital during a health emergency. The health issues include heart attack, metastatic cancer, "severe or profound mental retardation, moderate to severe dementia, and severe traumatic brain injury.

The last three diagnoses concern advocates.

"That's not only wrong, it's also illegal because federal law prohibits allocating medical treatment based on a person's disability, which is exactly what this policy does," said Brownstein.

A number of other states, including coronavirus hot-spot Washington, have their own ventilator rationing protocols in place. A similar challenge to the Washington protocol was lodged on Monday, and Brownstein said she expects to see advocacy organizations follow in their footsteps in states across the nation.

Under federal law, the federal government must investigate such complaints and determine if anyone's rights were violated.

A potential resolution lies in federal action, Brownstein said.

What we ask for is that the Department of Health and Human Services issue guidance to states and thats whats missing, she said. States should not be left on their own to make these very, very difficult judgments; the federal government needs to step in and issue guidance.

The Alabama Department of Public Health did not respond to a request for comment.
26.03.2020 LISTEN

Some few days ago, Hon. Kennedy Agyapong gave an evidence-based expose on Bishop Daniel Obinim on Live TV, the Man of God also responded to those allegations leveled against him by the Lawmaker.

Well, new audio shows how the Assin Central Member of Parliament, Hon. Kennedy Agyapong claimed Bishop Daniel Obinim wanted to apologize to him behind closed doors.

Speaking on Oman Fm yesterday, 24/03/2020, the Lawmaker, revealed that he has sent all evidence about all allegations he leveled against Obinim to the Police Headquarters where the IGP and CID boss was present.

He added that the Police got extremely angry when he said in one of his videos that, he is not afraid of the Law.

One of the interesting statements the legislator said, was that One gentleman called Fiifi called him that, he is on a conference call with Obinim and the other three people who wish to apologize to him.

Kennedy Agyapong said there was no way he would listen to the apology because Obinim and his small boys have insulted him and what pains him more is the fact that he said he will let people beat him up, nanansem.com can report.

He also gave an update on the Gold -Saga and said one if Obinims Fiances have called Adwoa to threaten her.

Watch video below
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 20:35:58|Editor: Liu

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JAKARTA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The Indonesian government plans to issue bonds to help pare down the impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak on the business sector, a senior official said on Thursday.

The debt papers, the so-called "recovery bonds", will be issued in rupiah and will be sold to the central bank (Bank Indonesia), exporters and importers, Secretary to the Coordinating Ministry of Economy Susiwijono Moergiarso said.

The proceeds would be used to help finance programs to rescue businesses which are disrupted by the COVID-19 outbreak and prevent layoffs, he said.

They will be disbursed through special loans for the business sector, the official said.

"The special loans will be disbursed to the easiest possible, so that the businessmen can use the loans to help shore up their businesses," he said.

To get the special loans, firms have to maintain at least 90 percent of their workforce without trimming their wages, said Moergiarso.

A rule will be issued to pave the way for the central bank to purchase the planned bonds and the draft for the new rule is expected to be issued on Friday, according to him.

The new rule would allow Bank Indonesia to purchase the government debt papers not only in the secondary market, he added.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dragged down Indonesia's exports and imports of capital goods and raw materials, and weakened business activities.

Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati has said that the government baseline scenario is that the economy will go at a slower pace to 4 percent this year from 5.02 percent last year, but the growth could fall to between 0 percent and 2.5 percent if the COVID-19 outbreak lasted between three and six months.

The COVID-19 virus has killed 78 people and infected 893 others in Indonesia with 35 patients recovered, the government's spokesman for the virus-related matters Achmad Yurianto announced on Thursday.
Conference call on 26 March 2020 at 4pm CET (Frankfurt) / 11am EDT (New York)

MARTINSRIED, Germany and MUNICH, Germany, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Medigene AG (MDG1, Frankfurt, Prime Standard), a clinical stage immuno-oncology company focusing on the development of T cell immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, today published its financial results and Annual Report for the 2019 financial year and its outlook for the current 2020 financial year. The full version of the Annual Report 2019 can be downloaded here: http://www.medigene.com/investors-media/reports-presentations/



Company highlights in 2019 and since period end:

T cell receptor-modified T cell therapies (TCR-Ts)

Medigene commences treatment of patients in the Phase I/II trial of its first TCR-T immunotherapy MDG1011 against several blood cancers and opens additional clinical trial sites.





MDG1021 from Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) was selected as next clinical TCR-T development candidate for testing in patients with relapsed or persistent hematologic malignancies after allogeneic hematological stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT).





Medigene developed the inducible Medigene TCR (iM-TCR) and in-licensed the PD1-41BB switch receptor from Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen (HMGU) for an improved safety and activity of Medigene's TCR-T candidates and future applications in solid tumors.

Dendritic cell (DC) vaccine

Medigene completed the Phase I/II clinical trial of the DC vaccine in AML patients in December 2019 and reported positive final 2-year topline results in January 2020. These results were consistent with the 12-month interim analysis presented in 2019.

Partnerships

Medigene and Roivant Asia Cell Therapy Holdings Ltd. (a subsidiary of Roivant Sciences Ltd.) on behalf of Cytovant Sciences Co. Ltd. entered into a strategic license and cooperation agreement for cell therapies in Asia. Medigene received an upfront payment of US $10 m and is eligible to receive potential development, regulatory, and commercial milestone payments.





bluebird bio Inc. presented preclinical data on the first therapeutic TCR-T candidate arising from the Medigene collaboration targeting the tumor antigen MAGE-A4 which is expressed by a variety of solid tumor types. bluebird bio announced its intention to start clinical development of the MAGE-A4 TCR-T candidate in 2020.





The remaining rights to the non-core product Veregen  and the complete stock of the corresponding active pharmaceutical ingredient were sold to the German pharmaceutical company Aresus Pharma GmbH.





The research collaboration with the Universite de Montreal and IRICoR, a pan-Canadian drug discovery research commercialization center, will provide Medigene with tumor-specific antigens as novel targets for various cancer indications, particularly for solid tumors.

Story continues

Prof. Dolores Schendel, CEO/CSO at Medigene AG: In the past fiscal year we set the course for the expansion of our clinical programs. We are pleased that for our ongoing clinical trial with the TCR-T immunotherapy candidate MDG1011 we were able to treat the first patients and that the activities to improve patient recruitment have borne fruit. Our clear goal is to complete dosing of the first three dose cohorts this year.

In the coming months, we plan to start our second clinical trial with development candidate MDG1021 and we continue intensive work for the innovation of our technologies. Safe and targeted immune therapies are needed, especially for solid tumors, and here we are focusing on potential combinations of approaches for next-generation TCR-T cell therapies with our iM-TCRs and the co-stimulatory receptor PD1-41BB.

The cooperation with IRICoR offers us exclusive access to a still untapped world of potential target antigens for solid tumors. We look forward to progress in our partnerships with bluebird bio and Roivant/Cytovant which we believe should provide both financial and scientific benefits. We currently dont see effects on our business caused by the circumstances due to the Coronavirus crisis but will continue to monitor developments closely. Furthermore, we believe Medigene is well-equipped to cope.

Company outlook:

T cell receptor-modified T cells (TCR-Ts)

By the end of 2020, Medigene expects to complete dosing of the first three dose cohorts in the dose-escalation part of the Phase I/II trial of MDG1011 in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and multiple myeloma (MM).





Subject to regulatory approval, Medigene plans to initiate the Phase I study of MDG1021 in patients with relapsed or persistent hematologic malignancies after allo-HSCT in the first half of 2020. This trial will be conducted at LUMC.





Building an extensive pipeline of potential TCR development candidates is an important goal to secure future clinical programs. In 2020, Medigene will continue to work on further developing its T cell enhancers, characterizing new TCR candidates and collecting preclinical data for future clinical TCR-T trials, especially targeting solid tumor indications.

Dendritic cell vaccines (DCs)

Medigene retains development and commercialization rights to its DC vaccine outside of Greater China, South Korea and Japan. The Company intends to leverage its expertise with the DC platform along with the resources of partners to efficiently advance the clinical development of the DC vaccine program.

Partnerships

Medigene continues its successful collaborations with bluebird bio and Roivant/Cytovant and is constantly evaluating new partnering opportunities related to its portfolio of product candidates to maximize the Companys value.

Key financials in full year 2019 and financial forecast:

The financial forecast for 2020 reflects the Companys focus on and progress in the core business of immunotherapies and does not include potential future milestone payments from existing or future partnerships or transactions, as the timing and extent of such events depends to a large extent on external parties and therefore cannot be reliably predicted by Medigene.

Currently the Company expects no material influence of the recent outbreak of the coronavirus on total revenue, research and development expenses and loss at EBITDA level. Furthermore, in preparation of the financial forecast 2020 the Company has assumed that there will be no significant events which could have a material influence or lasting effect on the operations of the Group such as force majeure (e.g. fire, flood, earthquakes, strike or war) or extraordinary economic events.

Medigene is expecting to generate total revenue of between 7.0 - 9.0 m in 2020. The decrease in comparison to 2019 (10.6 m) is based on the prepayments from Medigenes development partnerships that were collected immediately in 2019 but are not expected in 2020. Due to the progress of the preclinical and clinical development programs in the core area of immunotherapies, including manufacturing costs for clinical trial material and deferred expenses from 2019, the company expects a significant increase of research and development costs to 29 - 34 m (2019: 22.6 m) and a loss at EBITDA level of 24 - 32 m (2019: 17.8 m).

Based on its current planning, Medigene has sufficient financial resources to fund business operations into the second half of 2021.

Conference call:

The Management Board will hold a conference call in English today:

Date of telephone conference: Thursday, 26 March 2020 Time: 4pm CET (Frankfurt) / 11am EDT (New York) Register online/ Dial in number:

https://www.medigene.com/investors-media/reports-presentations/telephone-conferences



Medigene AG (FSE: MDG1, ISIN DE000A1X3W00, Prime Standard) is a publicly listed biotechnology company headquartered in Martinsried near Munich, Germany. The company is developing highly innovative immunotherapies to target various forms and stages of cancer. Medigene concentrates on the development of personalized T cell-based therapies, with a focus on T cell receptor-modified T cells (TCR-Ts) and associated projects currently in pre-clinical and clinical development.

For more information, please visit http://www.medigene.com

This press release contains forward-looking statements representing the opinion of Medigene as of the date of this release. The actual results achieved by Medigene may differ significantly from the forward-looking statements made herein. Medigene is not bound to update any of these forward-looking statements. Medigene is a registered trademark of Medigene AG. This trademark may be owned or licensed in select locations only.

Contact Medigene AG

Dr Gary Waanders, Claudia Burmester, Dr Anna Niedl

Tel.: +49 89 2000 3333 01

email: investor@medigene.com
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 20:25:12|Editor: huaxia

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NAIROBI, March 26 (Xinhua) -- East African ministers have suspended face-to-face meeting until the novel coronavirus pandemic is contained.

The ministers of Health and East Africa Community (EAC) said in a joint statement issued in Nairobi on Thursday that all the meetings henceforth will be conducted through video, webinars and Skype calls.

"We urge all institutions in the region to resort to modern technology like video conferencing as part of COVID-19 management strategy," the ministers said.

The ministers from Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Sudan and Uganda directed that member states implement 100 percent exit and entry screening by applying the multilayer mechanism to avoid loopholes.

They resolved to facilitate free movement of goods in the region during this period when COVID-19 cases continue increasing globally.

They urged governments to support local companies to boost local production of products used in COVID-19 management such as hand sanitizers, medical products, soap and others.

The ministers urged EAC secretariat to mobilize resources and invest in public health systems to ensure resilience and health security in the region.
Sean Fleming TD has called on the Government to introduce financial supports for those in the independent media during the outbreak of Covid-19.

The Laois Offaly Fianna Fail TD believes it is vital that local media is protected through the crisis.

"Hundreds of thousands of people in every county get their news from their local media on a daily basis by listening to their local radio or reading their local newspapers or the online version of newspapers.

"The country faces a difficult time. The role of local independent media outlets in their public service broadcasting responsibilities is high. The Government have acknowledged the role the local media play in informing the public. We need substance to this praise and see financial supports delivered to ensure local media sources around the country continue long after this pandemic has passed.

"The Minister is already reviewing the radio sector to see what supports can be given to them. This needs to be extended to all local newspapers and local on-line media in view of the dramatic fall-off in advertising during this crisis.

"Local newspapers and broadcasters are well placed to provide relevant and informed information in their local communities. It is essential that this vital public service be maintained and supported at this time," said Deputy Fleming.
Two million Canadian workers have been laid off or are at immediate risk of layoff as a result of the public health measures to combat COVID-19, according to an analysis of employment data by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Toronto alone could have 260,564 newly unemployed people  translating into an unemployment rate of 12.4 per cent, up from 5.4 per cent in February. Ontario, meanwhile, could have 564,174 newly unemployed people.

The unemployment rate in March is on track to be the highest in 70 years, and were only at the beginning of the economic fallout, said David Macdonald, the reports author and a senior economist at the CCPA. He said the national unemployment rate, which was 5.9 per cent in February, has likely doubled in the last week. You can see pretty quickly how cataclysmic this all is.

Women, low-wage workers and young people have been hardest hit, according to Macdonalds analysis, which found that 13 per cent of all working women in Canada are at risk of layoff, compared to nine per cent of working men. It also found that two out of every five workers making $14/hour or less and one out of every three workers making $14 to $16/hour are at risk of immediate job loss. By comparison, just one per cent of workers making $40/hour are at risk of losing their job.

Youth unemployment is likely to at least double from 10.4 per cent to 25.5 per cent, but could reach as high as 33 per cent.

Macdonald used Labour Force Survey data from February to forecast the best and probable cases for unemployment rates by identifying workers at the greatest risk of layoff. He focused on the following sectors: retail, food and hospitality; airlines; and culture, sport and recreation.

He specifically looked at workers in front-line occupations, who are most at risk of layoff due to forced closures. He excluded workers in grocery stores and drug stores, which have been allowed to remain open, as well as online retailers. Macdonald did not project how the unemployment rate might be offset by additional hiring in these sectors. He also didnt include layoffs in the auto sector or manufacturing.

This model is an attempt to get the broad strokes of what happened in the past two weeks, he said. Its certainly not going to be perfect, but its trying to get some idea of the scale.

A precise accounting of the economic carnage that has occurred as the country tries to contain the coronavirus wont be known for weeks, but Macdonald said the unemployment rate would rise from 5.9 to 13.9 per cent in his probable scenario.

Its shocking, but its backed by the EI claim data, he said.

A record one million people filed for employment insurance last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday.

Weve never laid off a million people in Canada in a week and well likely hit 1.5 (million) if not more by the end of this month, Macdonald said. Theres just no precedent for this.

More women than men work in retail and food services, Macdonald said, explaining why the unemployment rate projects to be higher for women. Men are more likely to work in trades, transport and trucking. Those industries werent hit immediately, so thats why youre seeing a bit more impact on women than men.

On Wednesday the federal government proposed new legislation for delivering financial assistance to Canadians. The Canada Emergency Response Benefit would provide $2,000 per month, for up to four months, to any workers who lose their income as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, whether or not theyre eligible for employment insurance. The government describes it as a simpler and more accessible combination of the previously announced Emergency Care Benefit and Emergency Support Benefit.

Macdonald called Wednesdays announcement a critical step toward supporting workers, adding that it highlights how inadequate and bureaucratic the employment insurance system was in normal times.

His analysis found that 27 per cent of workers at risk of immediate layoff would have been denied EI due to inadequate hours, and more than three-quarters of workers in major cities at risk of being laid off would be better off with the new benefit than they would have been under EI.

Macdonald stressed his projections are only for the first round of layoffs, concerning workers on the front lines of affected occupations facing the most immediate risk of layoffs.

We havent even got to the knock-on effects of those folks not spending in the economy.
Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly have stressed the importance of self-isolation amid the global coronavirus pandemic in a video shared by ITV News on Wednesday.

The hosting duo, both 44, urged others to 'stay at home' in a bid to protect their vulnerable young fan Mila Sneddon, who was diagnosed with leukaemia in November last year and is undergoing intensive chemotherapy.

Saturday Night Takeaways' Ant and Dec, who are currently in quarantine, said in a video message from their separate houses: 'EVERYBODY STAY AT HOME! There, hope that helps Mila.'

Impassioned: Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly have stressed the importance of self-isolation amid the global coronavirus pandemic in a video shared by ITV News on Wednesday

The pair's plea came after cancer-stricken Mila requested the presenters to speak up in support of the fight against COVID-19, which has claimed 465 lives in the UK.

Addressing the nation, Ant said: 'Hi everybody Ant and Dec here, not together because we're at home like everybody should be.'

'Absolutely, and as we heard Mila wants us to tell everybody to stay at home so we can protect her and thousands and thousands people like her', Dec added.

Mila's parents Lynda Sneddon, 36, and Scott Sneddon, 50, decided the best way to keep their little girl safe was by not taking any risks and self-isolating in different houses.

Touching: The hosting duo, both 44, urged others to 'stay at home' in a bid to protect their vulnerable cancer-stricken fan Mila Sneddon, four (pictured)

'EVERYBODY STAY AT HOME!' Saturday Night Takeaways' Ant and Dec, who are currently in quarantine, said in a video message from their separate houses

Killer disease: The pair's plea came after cancer-stricken Mila requested the presenters to speak up in support of the fight against COVID-19, which has claimed 465 lives in the UK

Speaking out: Addressing the nation, Ant said: 'Hi everybody Ant and Dec here, not together because we're at home like everybody should be'

The mother-of-two, who has stayed with the little girl while Scott lives separately, shared a heartbreaking photo of Mila kissing her dad through the window earlier this month.

The image was taken on March 20 and has been liked by over 44,000 people and shared 37k times.

Coronavirus was classed a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) earlier this month, leading countries such as Italy, Spain and the UK to implement nationwide lockdowns.

Last week, around 1.4 million vulnerable people in Britain - including those with underlying health conditions - have been told to self-isolate.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has urged any doctors or nurses who quit or retired in the past three years to return during the crisis.

Heartbreaking: Mila was diagnosed with leukaemia in November last year and is undergoing intensive chemotherapy

Sacrifice: Her mother Lynda, who has stayed Mila while dad Scott lives separately, shared a heartbreaking photo of Mila kissing her dad through the window earlier this month

On Monday night, Boris ordered the immediate closure of all non-essential shops and threatened people with fines or even arrest if they do not 'stay at home'.

The shutdown will last for a minimum of three weeks and the UK's new state of emergency is unprecedented in modern history.

Gatherings of more than two people have been banned in the most dramatic curbs on freedom ever seen in Britain in time of peace or war, as the government goes all out to stop the spread of the killer disease.
People carry grocery items distributed by volunteers in Amritsar, India. (Narinder Nanu / AFP/Getty Images)

The biggest lockdown in human history  1.3 billion Indians ordered to stay home to curb the spread of the coronavirus  has unleashed chaos across the country as stranded migrant workers sleep in city streets, police beat curfew-breakers, fruits and vegetables rot in markets and masses of informal laborers find their livelihoods wiped out.

The first two days of the lockdown imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi have thrown the lives of some of Indias poorest people into disarray. A total shutdown of trains and buses has prevented countless migrant workers from returning to their villages, forcing them into makeshift shelters or open fields where they are subsisting on food handouts, and hand-washing and social distancing are impossible.

This is a complete catastrophe, said Ranu Bhogal, who is policy, research and campaigns director for Oxfam India.

For many Indians, contracting the coronavirus  in a country with a vastly underequipped health sector even in normal times  is suddenly a less urgent concern than finding their next meal.

It is a startling moment, the latest dangerous chapter in the pandemic. Modi enacted the three-week lockdown Tuesday with just four hours notice, leaving no time for millions of construction workers, street vendors, cleaners and others  who earn daily or weekly wages in a vast informal economy  to secure salaries or reach their homes.

A police officer hits a man with a stick at a checkpoint in Mumbai, India, during a nationwide lockdown. (Indranil Muherjee / AFP/Getty Images)

Some migrant workers, wearing masks and backpacks, were trying to walk hundreds of miles to their villages, defying the stay-at-home orders and risking beatings by police. In Mumbai, Indias financial capital, scores have been sleeping in the open near a train station after local leaders banned interstate travel last week.

Many wander the surrounding area during the day, looking for food or an open grocery store to charge their phones, and using a public toilet to keep clean. Others doze under trees, their heads resting on their bags as they wait for food handouts.

Story continues

What should I do? Ruhul Amin, a 28-year-old construction worker from West Bengal state, said when asked about contracting the virus. I know Im coming in contact with others, I know I am at risk. But this is about survival.

A policeman wearing a mask stands along a road in New Delhi, India. (Sajjad Hussain / AFP/Getty Images)

Amin said police have been unsympathetic, beating up those who ask for help. Authorities have set up WhatsApp hotlines for migrant workers to seek assistance, but Amin doesnt have a smartphone.

We cant sleep under the open sky for 21 days, he said. There are hundreds of us, and it is impossible to follow social distancing.

In New Delhi, thousands of stranded workers were crowding into shelters or gathering in public spaces where the municipal government or aid groups were serving plates of rice and dal from giant barrels. Saba Bhat, who works with a nongovernmental organization, said the groups 20-room shelter was filled with workers, some of whom had been evacuated from railway stations and mosques.

We are running short of resources, she said. I have gotten about 4,000 calls.

These are men who work as daily wage labourers to eke out their existence.

The #lockdown which is a necessary medical emergency, has become a desperate economic crisis for the poor.

Abandoned by the state, they are dependant on charity to get a single meal in a day. pic.twitter.com/AMIbrid5JF  Karwan e Mohabbat (@karwanemohabbat) March 26, 2020

The plight of migrant workers reflects the challenges India faces in imposing the type of lockdowns implemented in parts of the U.S. and Europe, which in some areas have been credited with slowing the transmission of COVID-19.

About 80% of Indias 471-million-strong labor force works in what is broadly known as the informal sector, meaning they lack contracts, social security and other benefits, and are not covered by labor laws. None can work from home, and if travel and nonessential businesses are shut down, they lose any hope of earning a living.

Also challenging for India is its density: With millions of people packed into slums and tenements, clusters of infections are popping up in crowded urban areas. The country has recorded slightly more than 700 COVID-19 infections but conducted only about 22,000 tests as of Tuesday, one of the lowest rates in the world.

The World Health Organization has endorsed Indias lockdown but said it needed to be accompanied by expanded testing, increased supplies of frontline medical equipment and improved tracing and quarantining of infected people and their contacts.

India missed the opportunity to screen migrant workers at train stations this month as huge numbers began returning to their villages by the railway system, the worlds busiest. In some northern villages, residents have reportedly blocked returnees, fearing they could be carrying the virus.

We should have anticipated these things, Bhogal said. In terms of preparing people for the lockdown, there was zero preparation, and that has caused havoc in the country.

Modis government has assured Indians that food and other essentials would remain available during the lockdown, which also bans religious gatherings and groups of five or more.

But in some cities, residents captured videos of police officers beating people who ventured outside to buy food. In others, produce markets were jammed with crowds, making a mockery of social distancing.

Indian shopkeepers and customers jammed a marketplace in New Delhi a day after a nationwide lockdown. (Yawar Nazir / Getty Images)

Advocacy groups said that hunger among Indias lowest classes would make them more susceptible to diseases such as COVID-19.

Rajib Dasgupta, an epidemiologist and professor at New Delhis Jawaharlal Nehru University, said initial reports indicated the lockdown had created immense hardship for millions of Indians.

Its possible that a lockdown at this stage would have some beneficial effect, but the challenge is, how long can India sustain its lockdown given the enormous humanitarian issues it comes with? he said.

Modis government on Thursday announced a$22-billion relief package including cash handouts and other benefits for low-income Indians. But experts were skeptical that it would help stranded workers, many of whom might lack documents proving their eligibility.

Those who live from week to week, they are now the hardest hit, said Dola Mohapatra, executive director of Rise Against Hunger India, a Bangalore-based charity. The only way out for them is to get back to some economic activity. During a crisis, if people dont have resilience, they will fall back into poverty, and we are on the brink of that.

Even before the coronavirus crisis, India was facing an economic crunch marked by rising unemployment and declining growth. New Delhi and other cities have also been gripped by protests against a citizenship law that have resulted in widespread damage and dozens of deaths.

Mohapatra spent much of Thursday on the phone with half a dozen partner agencies that were distributing food in Mumbai, New Delhi and other cities. The mobile networks were overloaded as people searched for information about the lockdown, so it was often hard to hear people onthe other end of the line. But all shared the same stories from speaking with stranded migrants, Mohapatra said.

The common thread from all of them, he said, is that people are less worried about corona and more worried about the immediate looming hunger.

Special correspondent Parth M.N. reported from Mumbai and Times staff writer Bengali from Singapore.




Actor-comedian Bill Burr will be returning for the second season of "Star Wars" spin-off series "The Mandalorian" at Disney Plus.

According to Deadline, the 51-year-old actor will reprise his role of Imperial sharpshooter-turned-mercenary Mayfield.

Burr is best known as a stand-up comedian. As an actor, he is still remembered for his role of Patrick Kuby in cult hit series "Breaking Bad".

"The Mandalorian" is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order. The series depicts a lone bounty hunter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic.

"Narcos" star Pedro Pascal plays the title role, along with Carl Weathers, Werner Herzog, Taika Waititi, Gina Carano, Giancarlo Esposito and Nick Nolte.

The second season, which comes from creator Jon Favreau, will also feature Rosario Dawson and "The Terminator" star Michael Biehn.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
SEATTLE  Elected officials are figuring out Zoom just like the rest of us.

Some of the most important legislation states and cities enact to fight the coronavirus pandemic will be passed on grainy video chats or glitchy conference calls, using processes that have never been tested.

Policymakers around the country are quickly learning how -- or whether -- they can cast votes remotely, a method that could prove crucial to responding to the pandemic while maintaining social distancing guidelines.

The Seattle City Council has held meetings remotely since March 9, as Washington state suffered the earliest fallout from the virus. The Council passed bills to stop evictions of renters and small businesses, expand sick leave, bolster businesses and artists and provide relief to utility ratepayers -- all while meeting over a Skype audio line.

Theres been some technological catch-up, Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda admitted, but the Council has been able to do its work in real time in a collaborative way in the last two weeks, and I don't think being remote has hindered that.

Several states passed rules to allow their legislatures or local governments to vote remotely, and lawmakers are testing video chat and teleconference technologies that might allow them to hold emergency votes from afar.

But some legislatures have found themselves bound by state constitutional rules that require them to meet in person, and officials at every level are debating whether virtual meetings comply with public access and transparency laws.

Meanwhile, after several members of the U.S. Congress tested positive for the virus, some lawmakers pushed to allow the House and Senate to vote remotely, though a report by House Democratic leaders this week said doing so would raise serious security, logistical, and constitutional challenges.

Local laws

While many legislatures meet only part-time, city and county governments -- as well as school boards, fire districts and the like -- often need to vote on a regular basis. In several states, governors and legislatures have acted to ensure local governments have the authority to conduct business remotely.

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, issued an executive order allowing local governments to vote remotely if one member is physically present.

We wanted to strike a balance between the public health and safety considerations and basic notions of transparency, said Luke Britt, the states public access counselor.

The order limits remote votes to essential business, meaning cities cant use the provision to sneak through a controversial zoning ordinance. Britt said he has encouraged local governments to provide a way for the public to submit comments electronically, while livestreaming meetings if possible.

In Michigan, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer also allowed for local bodies to vote electronically, while the legislature in Oklahoma passed a bill allowing teleconferencing options. Colorado is exploring whether electronic forms of communication comply with the states open meetings law.

In Seattle, where the City Council started meeting by phone more than two weeks ago, Mosqueda said it took some time to work out the kinks of the process -- and that other cities need to start making remote voting plans now, so theyre not paralyzed if they cant meet in person.

The lesson for the rest of the country is that we were probably a few weeks late in implementing what we needed to do, said Mosqueda, who was serving as temporary president when the Council decided to meet remotely.

Seattle officials had to ensure that the public could participate, that staff members could help with bill analysis and that meetings were still broadcast. Seattleites can send comments by voicemail or email. It took some test runs -- both with the technology and the procedures -- to get the Council ready for live remote meetings.

The more they do it, the more savvy they become, said City Clerk Monica Martinez Simmons. The biggest thing is -- almost like a radio show -- consider your audience and the way they're receiving this information.

Mosqueda said the process has had its hiccups but is better than the alternative.

It is always a challenge when you can't have an in-person conversation with someone, Mosqueda said. But there is no piece of legislation worth risking your life or your staff's life when there are plenty of ways to participate remotely.

Nearby Kirkland, where the coronavirus killed nearly three dozen nursing home residents, held its first remote City Council meeting March 17. Councilmember Toby Nixon said the video meeting was effective for conducting business, though the broadcast that reached the public was glitchy at times.

The city provided a video feed in the lobby of City Hall for residents without internet access, but only one person showed up to watch.

Nixon, who also serves as president of the transparency watchdog Washington Coalition for Open Government, said Kirkland wants to ensure its process is as open as possible. The City Council allows residents to submit public comments by email, voicemail or video message, all of which are read or played at the meeting. The Council also votes by roll call, so each members position is clear.

We basically said, We have to set the example and not even be in the room together, Nixon said.

States prepare

State legislatures can expect to work through the same challenges that Seattle, Kirkland and several other Washington cities are fine-tuning now.

Even before the coronavirus crisis, Oregon and Wisconsin had rules in place allowing their legislatures to vote remotely in emergency situations, making them outliers. Both legislatures are troubleshooting their systems, knowing the pandemic may require a special session.

We've got the concept, weve tested the concept and had a walk-through a couple days ago, and it's looking good, said Wisconsin state Senate President Roger Roth, a Republican. It's not perfect, the video won't be perfect, but it will absolutely convey to the public everything that's happening.

Under the method Roth helped devise, all 33 senators will call into a single videoconference on their state-issued laptops. Wisconsins remote voting rules require that lawmakers have voice or video communication and have an outlet for the public to monitor proceedings. Virtual sessions are to be broadcast on WisconsinEye, a public affairs cable network.

The Wisconsin legislature delayed the end of its session as the pandemic spread across the country, and the Senate still needs to act on more than 100 bills passed by the Assembly, Roth said. If things progress the way they look to progress, I don't know how any legislative body in the U.S. will be able to come into their chambers and do business, he said.

Roth said the virtual-vote plan has been mostly accepted, but its not been without opposition.

I dont want to be calling in on a teleconference trying to take care of important business, state Sen. Tim Carpenter, a Democrat, told the Wisconsin State Journal.

Carpenter, who urged the legislature to meet in person as soon as possible, did not respond to a request for comment.

Oregons rules for remote voting, Chief Clerk of the House Timothy Sekerak said, require lawmakers to be distinguishable and intelligible, and the proceedings need to be available for the public to witness.

Its a learning curve, Sekerak said. This process is one where we're going to uncover things we didn't know we didn't know.

Other states, including Utah and Pennsylvania, have quickly passed rules to allow legislators to conduct virtual votes. Mark Thomas, chief of staff for the Utah Senate, said the details of remote sessions are still unclear, but lawmakers wanted to give themselves the option to do so.

There's a lot of logistical things that we're still reviewing, but we at least have the constitutional and rulemaking authority now, he said. How does the public actually get notice? How are they able to participate? What if they have questions or issues? How would the voting actually occur? There's obviously security concerns.

Thomas said the Utah legislature is likely to hold a special session later this year, and its still unclear whether it will be conducted electronically.

Next week, the South Dakota legislature will meet over teleconference to consider action on vetoes, as well as emergency measures to respond to the pandemic.

The Pennsylvania legislature has adopted rules for remote voting, though some party leaders must still be present.

In Arizona, a House measure would allow some lawmakers to vote remotely, but the system can accommodate only a handful of participants at a time -- and Democrats assert the move is designed to ensure Republicans can preserve their thin majority even if a few of their members cant attend.

Meanwhile, New Hampshire lawmakers overwhelmingly voted down remote voting, amid concerns it would violate the state Constitution. Many states, including Florida, Minnesota and New York, require lawmakers to meet in person, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Transparency concerns

Open government advocates acknowledge the extraordinary nature of the pandemic.

Nobody can be a purist and insist that everything must be business as usual when nothing is business as usual, so public bodies are certainly entitled to a little wiggle room on formalities as long as it remains unsafe to cram people into meeting rooms, said Frank LoMonte, director of the University of Floridas Brechner Center for Freedom of Information.

Many state attorneys general have issued guidance in recent days, instructing local governments how to meet remotely and comply with their states open meetings laws. The Wyoming Press Association also weighed in, noting that meetings should be available to the public electronically and on a toll-free call-in line for those who dont have a computer.

On Tuesday, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, suspended portions of the states open meetings law. Governments are no longer required to make their meetings available at a public facility, if theyre responding to the emergency or conducting necessary and routine matters. Additionally, officials no longer must provide public records at their facilities, many of which are closed.

In an email, LoMonte said governments that vote remotely should seek to postpone any matters that arent time-sensitive and make sure the public can be heard, even if it's clunky and imperfect.

But even transparency experts arent unified on all the details. While LoMonte advised limiting remote meetings to essential and emergency business, Nixon -- the Washington state open government leader -- said its important to continue even the mundane work.

The Kirkland City Councils last meeting included agenda items such as municipal parking, a transit station, athletic fields and a long-debated zoning change.

Were trying to lend that air of normalcy as much as possible, Nixon said.

Nixon added that it may be harder for small and rural local governments to set up remote meeting technology, and they likely have more constituents who cant access the internet to watch a livestream. He also raised concerns about ensuring public records are retained when officials work from home.

Another consequence of governments working from home, LoMonte noted, is that public records requests may be delayed.

Honestly, this is an opportunity for agencies everywhere to do what they should've been doing for years anyway: Pushing out key documents and databases online before they're requested, he wrote.

This article was first posted on Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 03:45:56|Editor: Lu Hui

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Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte addresses the Senate, in Rome, Italy, March 26, 2020. Giuseppe Conte on Thursday reported to the Senate on his government's actions to date and to describe future measures to counteract the economic fallout from the virus. Earlier this month, the government approved a 25-billion-euro package for the national healthcare system, workers, families and the business sector. Conte told the Senate that his government is at work on a new package "with additional allocations of no less than the 25 billion (euros) we have already allocated." (Xinhua)

ROME, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The coronavirus pandemic continued to advance in locked-down Italy on Thursday, bringing the combined number of infections, fatalities and recoveries to 80,539 cases, according to the latest count released by the Civil Protection Department (CPD).

Speaking during a nightly televised press conference, CPD Director General Agostino Miozzo confirmed that there were 4,492 new coronavirus infections compared to Wednesday, bringing the nationwide total of active infection cases to 62,013.

Of those infected, 33,648 are under house isolation, 24,753 are in ordinary hospital wards and 3,612 are hospitalized in intensive care units.

He added that there were 999 recoveries compared to Wednesday, bringing that total to 10,361.

The death toll on Thursday stood at 662, bringing the total to 8,165 fatalities since the pandemic first broke out in northern Italy on Feb. 21.

The numbers are up from an official tally on Wednesday evening of 57,521 infected, 7,503 deaths and 9,362 recoveries.

Miozzo also confirmed that CPD Chief Angelo Borrelli has tested negative for the virus, and that Italian citizens have so far donated over 52 million euros (57.4 million U.S. dollars) to the CPD to fight the emergency.

TERRIBLE DAYS

Also on Thursday, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte reported to the Senate on his government's actions to date and to describe future measures to counteract the economic fallout from the virus.

"These are terrible days for our national community," Conte began, addressing senators sitting one seat apart and wearing face masks.

"We never would have thought that in our country we would one day see images of army trucks loaded with the coffins of our fellow citizens," he said in reference to some cities whose dead from coronavirus had to be transported elsewhere by the military because their morgues were overloaded beyond capacity.

"For the first time since World War II, we have been forced to place limits on some of the fundamental liberties guaranteed by our Constitution," Conte said in reference to government decrees restricting citizens' movements.

"The government is fully aware that the COVID-19 pandemic ... also requires a significant economic response," the prime minister continued.

Earlier this month, the government approved a 25-billion-euro package for the national healthcare system, workers, families and the business sector.

Conte told the Senate that his government is at work on a new package "with additional allocations of no less than the 25 billion (euros) we have already allocated."

The prime minister said that "the emergency is also showing us the need to safeguard our strategically important industries."

"Our country's most precious assets must be protected by every means necessary, and we will work in this direction beginning with our next regulatory measure in April," said Conte.

He added that in order to relaunch Italy's economy, "public and private investments in environmental sustainability and the digital transformation of our country remain absolutely central."

ECONOMIC IMPACT

Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic looks set to cast a long shadow in broader economic terms.

Standard & Poor's Global Ratings said in a statement on Thursday that "the eurozone and the UK (United Kingdom) are facing recessions" and that "we now expect gross domestic product (GDP -- in the eurozone and the UK) to fall around two percent this year due to economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic," representing a loss of 420 billion euros in real GDP in 2020 "compared with our forecast from November 2019."

However, the "risks are still to the downside, as the pandemic might last longer and be more widespread than we currently envisage. For example, we estimate a lockdown of four months could lower eurozone GDP by up to 10 percent this year," S&P analysts wrote. (1 euro = 1.10 U.S. dollar)
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Linkedin Riham Alkousaa and Paul Carrel (Reuters) Berlin, Germany  Thu, March 26, 2020 12:30 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d8099c 2 World lockdown,coronavirus,Wuhan-coronavirus,COVID-19,Germany,medical-practitioners,doctor,migrants,refugees,pandemic,SARS-CoV-2 Free

Five years ago the arrival of a wave of refugees caused much consternation and fuelled support for Germany's far-right. Now, the country is turning to its migrant community to plug an anticipated shortage of medical staff battling the coronavirus.

The German government says it can double its number of intensive care beds, and even produce more ventilators but a medical staffing crunch is shaping up as the Achilles heel of its strategy to fight the coronavirus.

In Saxony, the heartland of the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), the regional medical board is advertising for migrant doctors to help tackle an expected rise in cases.

"Foreign doctors who are in Saxony but do not yet have a license to practice medicine can help with corona[virus] care," read a Facebook appeal.

The push to tap migrant medics in Saxony comes despite the AfD enjoying a surge in support in a regional election there last year, harnessing voter anger over refugees to come second behind Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives.

Merkel's 2015 decision to open Germany's borders to some 1 million migrants fleeing war in the Middle East - the defining moment of her chancellorship - was widely criticized by the AfD and even many of her own conservatives.

A new film, 'Merkel - Anatomy of a Crisis', also takes a critical look at her handling of the refugee influx.

But the coronavirus epidemic means medics of all backgrounds are in demand.

Saxony's regional medical board reported on Monday that 300 volunteers had responded to its appeal for help, including "many foreign doctors whose licensing procedures are not yet completed, whose help is very welcome."

As of Tuesday, there were 31,554 cases of coronavirus in Germany, with 149 deaths, the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases said. The government says Germany is still at the beginning of the epidemic.

Shadi Shahda, 29, is one migrant medic ready to help.

He came to Germany last April on a visa for highly-qualified job seekers and with three years' experience as an ENT (ear, nose, throat) medical resident in Syria. But a language exam he needed to take this month to work as a doctor in Saxony was cancelled due to the coronavirus.

He jumped at the medical board's Facebook post and says: "I am waiting for their call ... I was very happy when I saw that I could do something in the country where I am living."
SAN CARLOS, Calif., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Apexigen, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, today announced that Xiaodong Yang, M.D., Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer, plans to present an overview of the company at the upcoming Solebury Trout Virtual Investor Conference. The 25-minute presentation includes an interactive Q&A with participants prompted to submit questions electronically. Details are as follows:

Date/time: Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 3:00pm EDT Access: https://78449.themediaframe.com/dataconf/productusers/solebury/mediaframe/36519/indexl.html

About Apexigen

Apexigen is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing a new generation of antibody therapeutics for oncology, with an emphasis on new immuno-oncology agents that may harness the patient's immune system to combat and eradicate cancer. APX005M and Apexigen's other programs were discovered using Apexigen's proprietary APXiMAB discovery platform. This platform has enabled Apexigen and its collaboration partners to discover and develop high-quality therapeutic antibodies against a variety of molecular targets, including targets that are difficult to drug with conventional antibody technologies. Seven product or product candidates discovered using APXiMAB are currently commercially available or in clinical development, either internally by Apexigen or by its licensees. For more information, please visit www.apexigen.com.

Investor Contact:

Jennifer Porcelli

Managing Director

Solebury Trout

646-378-2962

[email protected]

Apexigen Contact:

Mark Nevins

Sr. Vice President, Business Development

650-931-6236

[email protected]

SOURCE Apexigen, Inc.

Related Links

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Dhaka, March 26 (IANS) The Bangladesh government has conditionally released former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and suspended her sentence for six months, as the country goes all out in its efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic, it was reported on Thursday.

After serving 25 months for corruption cases, she was released through executive orders from the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University on Wednesday evening, reports bdnews24.

The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) supremo was driven to her residence in the captial city's Gulshan area, as scores of supporters crowded her path and shouted slogans.

Earlier on Thursday, the Home ministry had ent an order for Khaleda's release to the prison authorities, after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina gave the go-ahead.

Khaleda, who is ailing, had been receiving treatment in prison said the bdnews24 report.

Expressing concerns over Khaleda's health amid "risks of coronavirus infection", BNP lawyers demanded her release the day before.

Meanwhile, BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir said they wanted to keep Khaleda in "quarantine" and party leaders were discussing ways to keep her supporters away for some days.

Khaleda has been in prison since February 2018 after she was sentenced to a total of 17 years in two graft cases involving Zia Orphanage Trust and Zia Charitable Trust.

She was initially kept at Old Dhaka's abandoned central prison, but on April 1, 2019 she was moved to Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University for treatment.

In the past two years, Khaleda's legal team had appealed several times for her bail but it was not granted.

It was reported in the media that her family appealed to the Home Ministry for her temporary release earlier this month.

--IANS

ksk/
SPRINGFIELD  Retired Mary Walsh School principal Mary Ellen Petruccelli and her husband, Daniel, are among 1,200 passengers stranded at sea on the MS Zandaam as more passengers and crew members fall ill.

Petruccelli has chronicled her trip on Facebook since the couple embarked on March 6. Earlier posts were laced with optimism and humor  the bar ran out of Guinness on St. Patricks Day, for instance  but have lately taken on a more dire tone as the Holland America cruise ship has been turned away from port after port in South America.

Although waters have been calm, the couple find themselves nevertheless in the eye of the COVID-19 storm.

As of Thursday afternoon, 144 passengers and crew members had fallen ill with flu-like symptoms. Neither Petruccelli nor her husband feels ill, she has told friends and family on social media.

Pertruccelli said the captain has lobbied passengers to contact embassies and legislators in their home countries to help secure passage through the Panama Canal. The Panamanian waterway seems the ships best chance to find a port amid the pandemic.

On Saturday, March 21, Captain Ane Jan Smit gave us encouraging news. Possible arrival in Fort Lauderdale on March 30 once we transit the Panama Canal. Plan B: Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, or Plan C: San Diego, California, she wrote in an email.

But, on March 22, everything changed.

The captain announced illness on the ship (passengers & crew) and told everyone to return to their staterooms. We have remained there since then, Petruccelli wrote.

The cruise line has provided passengers with food, beverages, clean towels, free Wi-Fi and the ability to make phone calls to family  plus access to television and twice daily status updates.

On Wednesday, Petruccelli referred to a covert operation with a ship called the MS Rotterdam.

Urgent medical supplies loaded on board. Rendezvous with Rotterdam tonight more personnel and medical supplies. Both ships to anchor off Balboa, Panama. Ship to ship operations okd, she posted.

It is unclear whether those supplies include tests for the novel coronavirus.

While their critical passage hangs in the balance, a childhood friend back in Massachusetts, Deborah Peck, has advocated for the couple through staffers for Massachusetts lawmakers. Peck said she has run into a wall of frustration with staff at the U.S. State Department.

It doesnt even seem like some of the people I spoke with on the phone even know about this ship, Peck said on Thursday.

Reached Thursday afternoon, a spokesman for Springfield U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neals office said the congressmans staff had successfully worked with the State Department to usher several local residents home from countries including Ecuador, Peru and Turkey as border closings bore down.

We have contacted the State Department and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on behalf of the Petruccellis, said Neal Chief of Staff William Tranghese.

Neal, the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, pledged through a staffer to help the couple as he headed to Washington for a vote for a $2.2 trillion relief package to combat financial devastation for many Americans in the wake of the outbreak.

Petruccelli posted an appeal on Facebook on Wednesday asking friends and family to contact Neals office.

Further delays put us in greater peril, she wrote.
A stunning storm cloud loomed over Dighton, Kansas, on March 22, with the impressive sight caught on camera by Kansas native, and storm chaser, Dustin Hessman.

Hessmans footage shows the storm cloud moving across the sky as he drives alongside it.

The storm had been flagged by the National Weather Service as having the potential to produce nickel size hail and 50 mph winds.

Talking with Storyful, Hessman said he was very surprised with how the storm turned out, owing to the conditions.

The local storm chase, he said was undertaken with a very marginal setup atmospherically, yet produced a dramatic scene. Credit: Dustin Hessman via Storyful
Terra Uhing appreciates how people are seeking to cheer one another amid the stress of the coronavirus.

But the executive director of the Three Rivers Public Health Department continues to urge people to stay home.

In recent times, Uhing has heard of many kind gestures people have made to help those in isolation, such as elderly individuals.

Its important to make sure they are getting what they need.

If you have an elderly loved one, you as a family member or caregiver need to ensure you are doing your part to ensure theyre OK and theyre getting checked up on, Uhing said.

She also appreciates reports of many thoughtful endeavors and daily receives calls and messages from people wondering if they can take part in certain activities. She knows its important to keep up peoples spirits.

These community gestures of kindness are a great charismatic thought, but at the end of the day we all have to do our part and practice social distancing and staying homeif at all possiblebecause that is the only way were going to flatten this curve here in Nebraska, Uhing said.

A general concept of Flattening the Curve is the idea of slowing the spread of the virus so medical resources can keep pace with the number of cases.

If we are not careful, our health systems are going to be at capacity very, very soon, Uhing said. If we take these preventative measures nowstaying home, not letting kids go all over and play, not going to the parks and playing together, not going to school eventssome of the stuff thats already mandatedthat is whats going to make the difference for flattening the curve in Nebraska.

Nan Cunningham, a licensed therapist at Our Community Counseling in Fremont, has recommended that people connect through social media, like Facebook, or by emails and phone calls.

Call someone and have a cup of tea over the phone, Cunningham said.

Uhing thinks sending a card or letter would be all right. These are paper products and not something people will rub on their faces.

But once again, you have to wash your hands, she said. You have to use common sense. Be cautious.

The Centers for Disease Control have been instructing people to wash their hands frequently and not touch their faces and to clean and disinfect surfaces.

The CDC has these hand-washing tips:

Wet your hands with clean, running water (warm or cold), turn off the tap, and apply soap.

Washing hands with soap and water is the best way to get rid of germs in most situations. If soap and water are not readily available, you can use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol. You can tell if the sanitizer contains at least 60% alcohol by looking at the product label.

Concerned about COVID-19? Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.
Sanaa (AFP) - All sides in Yemen's long conflict offered support on Thursday for the United Nations' call for a ceasefire to protect civilians from the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The move came on the fifth anniversary of regional power Saudi Arabia's intervention in Yemen's civil war, at the helm of a military coalition supporting the internationally recognised government against the Iran-backed Huthi rebels.

Yemen's broken healthcare system has not so far recorded a case of the COVID-19 illness, but aid groups have warned that when it does hit, the impact will be catastrophic in a country already regarded as facing the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Millions of people have been displaced and diseases including cholera are widespread due to the scarcity of clean water.

Saudi Arabia, the Yemeni government and the rebels all welcomed the appeal from UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who this week called for an "immediate global ceasefire" to help avert disaster for vulnerable people in conflict zones.

However, the Yemen conflict has been punctuated by failed agreements, and negotiating a pause could be very difficult. None of the parties to the conflict spelt out any mechanism for the process.

The government of Yemen said in a statement that it "welcomes the call of the UN chief... for a ceasefire in the face of coronavirus, and to de-escalate acts of violence in the entire country."

"The political, economic and health situation require halting all escalations... to preserve people's lives and deal responsibly with this pandemic."

The Saudi-led coalition also backed the initiative, saying: "We support the Yemeni government's decision to accept the UN's calls for a ceasefire."

The Huthis, who move into the sixth year of the conflict in a strong position with more strategic gains in recent months in the country's north, also welcomed Guterres's call to wind back fighting.

Story continues

Mehdi al-Mashat, head of the Huthis' political wing, expressed the insurgents' "total readiness to be open to all efforts and initiatives in the context of a full and real ceasefire".

UN special envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths, called for an urgent meeting of all sides to discuss the implementation of a ceasefire.

He urged the warring parties to "put their words into action".

"I expect the parties to adhere to their words and put the interest of the Yemeni people above all," he said in a statement.

In his appeal from UN headquarters in New York on Monday, Guterres had said: "The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war.

"That is why today, I am calling for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world."
As a bus departed from its terminus at Hankou Railway Station at 5.25 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Wuhan started to resume bus service after nine weeks of lockdown.

Apart from a driver, a safety supervisor was also on each bus, whose duty was to make sure all passengers are healthy as their health code shows before boarding.

"For those who do not use smart phones, they should bring with them a health certificate issued by the health authorities," said Zhou Jingjing, a safety supervisor aboard bus No. 511 departing from Wuchang Railway Station complex, Xinhua news agency reported.

Wuhan, the once hardest-hit city in central China's Hubei Province during the COVID-19 outbreak, resumed a total of 117 bus routes starting Wednesday, around 30 percent of the city's total bus transport capacity, the municipal transport bureau said.

From Saturday, six metro lines are expected to reopen to the public. The service time will be published on the stations.

According to a spokesperson of the bureau, passengers must wear masks, register with their names and scan a QR code, and take a temperature check before taking buses and subways. To minimize the infection risk, people who are vulnerable to the virus including those aged above 65 are not encouraged to take public transportation.

On January 23, Wuhan declared unprecedented traffic restrictions, including suspending the city's public transport and all outbound flights and trains, in an attempt to contain the epidemic within its territory. Similar restrictions were soon introduced in other areas in Hubei.

Hubei authorities ended restrictions on outbound traffic starting Wednesday, with the exception of its capital city of Wuhan, which will lift outbound travel restrictions on April 8, according to a provincial government notice issued Tuesday.
Cities across India saw a rush to buy grocery and other essential items on the first day of a nationwide lockdown on Wednesday even as Covid-19 infections rose to 606, including 10 deaths. With stories of hardship and anxiety pouring in  of the plight of migrant labourers and of apprehensions that some pharmacies in Delhi might run out of stock  the government stepped in to ensure essential services are not interrupted.

Coronavirus update: Scramble for supplies on Day 1 of three-week lockdown in India

Long queues, crowded markets, and harassment of e-commerce and food delivery people by police departments seemingly unaware of what was allowed and what wasnt, marked the first day of the three-week lockdown to cease the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), although by Wednesday evening, some sense of order emerged. Read more

Covid-19: What you need to know today

The US finally agreed on a deal on a $2 trillion stimulus package, the largest ever in the countrys history  for comparison, Indias GDP is roughly $2.7 trillion  to help individuals and companies affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Read more

Coronavirus update: Containing spread of Covid-19 in clusters could help flatten the curve

Since March 2 when the second wave of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) cases was reported in Delhi and Hyderabad, India has not reported any case of community transmission, but the government is working to control cases of focal outbreaks in some states. Read more

Coronavirus update- Take care of 9 families in 21 days: PM Modis appeal to citizens

Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed to citizens on Wednesday to help to nine families during the 21-day national lockdown and warned of strict action against those misbehaving with people on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Read more

India under Covid-19 lockdown: All about the disaster management law

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day national lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19 by invoking the Disaster Management Act, 2005. The law gives the Central government powers to take quick policy decisions and impose restrictions on people to manage a disaster. Heres an explainer on what the law entails for people and governments in these difficult times. Read more

Coronavirus update: ICMR nod to 3 more private testing labs, total 29 now

New Delhi The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the countrys apex biomedical research body, on Wednesday approved three more private laboratories to test for the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), taking to 29 the number of private facilities that can collect samples at 16,000 centres. Read more

Coronavirus update: Delhiites rush to buy essential items, queue up outside shops

It took Ravi Kumar, a resident of Mayur Vihar Extension in east Delhi, nearly two hours to buy groceries at a retail chain store in the neighbourhood on Wednesday. The long wait was not due to the crowd but due to the safety and social distancing measures being taken by store in-charges in view of the Covid-19 outbreak. Read more

Ghazipur slaughterhouse shut, Delhi zoo scouts for other supplier

The Delhi zoo may have to look for alternative sources for procuring meat meant for its animals, after the 21-day nationwide shutdown announced Tuesday pulled the shutters down on the Ghazipur slaughterhouse, which supplies meat to the zoo daily. Read more

5 more coronavirus cases in Delhi, says Arvind Kejriwal; follows up with a request

Five more people have tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen in national capital Delhi, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Wednesday evening, reiterating his appeal to people to stay at home as part of the nationwide lockdown. Read more

Govt announces e-passes for essential services, helpline for harassment complaints

With long queues at police stations for curfew pass, the Delhi government on Wednesday announced it would issue e-passes to those delivering essential services within and outside city limits. It also announced a helpline for those who have been harassed by state enforcement agencies, including police, to register their complaint. Read more

Smoother delivery across Delhi, cops assure e-tailers amid Covid-19 pandemic

Delivery of essential items ordered online could become a reality once again after days of customers having to put up with abrupt cancellations and e-commerce ground staff facing harassment at check posts where police personnel seemed unaware of who was allowed to function despite the lockdown and who wasnt. Read more

Coronavirus update: Delhis Mayur Vihar had locked its gates after first Covid-19 case

For nearly a week, the neighbourhoods of east Delhis Mayur Vihar Phase-1 have locked their gates to outsiders. The security guards of all apartments have been given strict instructions to not allow in any visitors, house helps or vendors distributing newspapers. Read more

Coronavirus update: Borders shut, migrant workers look for refuge in shelter homes

With rail and interstate bus services suspended due to Covid-19 outbreak, these labourers  most of them migrants  can neither return to their villages and towns, nor afford to pay for their food and shelter without work. Read more

Coronavirus update: Police up vigilance, say fewer trying to enter, leave Delhi

A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared a complete lockdown in the country for 21 days to prevent the spread of the coronavirus infection, Delhi Police fanned out across the city on Wednesday in an attempt to keep people indoors. Read more

Coronavirus update: Supply chain hit, medicines might run out due to lockdown, says pharmacies

Small pharmacies in the city may soon run out of medicines and other essential medical supplies, say drug distributors in Delhi, who are unable to maintain a continuous supply chain since the lockdown has been imposed in phases since Sunday. Despite the government saying that people working in essential sectors be allowed to travel, staff from warehouses and stores have not been able to reach their workplace. Read more

How to cope with lockdown: Fix routine, stay connected

Living in lockdown can expose people to stress, anxiety and boredom, especially when the lockdown period is a few weeks long, shows research on the psychological impact of pandemics. While the disruption of routine exposes most people to anxiety, among the most vulnerable are front-line health workers who work through the lockdown and can develop depression, anxiety, hostility and somatisation (physical symptoms associated with mental distress). Read more
The first evacuation flight bringing stranded Britons home from South America has touched down in the UK - as tourists caught in the coronavirus lockdown around the world continued to beg for help.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said that a chartered British Airways flight from Peru landed last night after the Government agreed a deal for it to take off from Lima.

British travellers stranded around the world have said they face a race against time to get on repatriation flights, with accommodation closures and further air traffic bans looming.

Hundreds of people in Peru said they fear being stuck for 'months' after two reported cases of Covid-19 in a hostel meant around 150 tourists inside were placed into quarantine.

Others said their accommodation providers are planning to close at the end of March.

Mr Raab said: 'We are working urgently with Peruvian authorities to deliver more flights in the coming days.'

Elsewhere, repatriation efforts around the world have seen special flights chartered.

British travellers stranded around the world have said they face a race against time to get on repatriation flights, with accommodation closures and further air traffic bans looming. Pictured are UK citizens in Peru

In Guatemala, Marc Wilson (left) said he was helped by the British Embassy on to a bus crossing the border into Mexico City, where he hopes to get a plane home. Doominic Raab said today: 'We are working urgently with Peruvian authorities to deliver more flights in the coming days'

Hundreds of people in Peru said they fear being stuck for 'months' after two reported cases of Covid-19 in a hostel meant around 150 tourists inside were placed into quarantine

In Guatemala, where flights have been cancelled, Southampton postman Marc Wilson said he was helped by the British Embassy on to a bus crossing the border into Mexico City, where he hopes to get a plane home.

And in Cambodia, Chloe Sloggett, an aesthetics practitioner from north London, said she is facing an anxious wait alongside scores of others to get on a charter flight to Heathrow via Kuala Lumpur on Friday.

It follows Government advice for travellers to return home as soon as possible.

Speaking from Peru, English teacher Simon Taylor, 38, from Hull, said: 'Lots of hotels and hostels are planning to close (on March 31) and that means people will need to move and their database for repatriation will become outdated.'

Alex Foulkes, 31, a BBC film-maker from Wrexham in Wales, said he is among the tourists inside the Pariwana backpacker hostel in Cusco, Peru, which has been placed into quarantine after guests tested positive for coronavirus.

He said: 'It feels like being in prison.

'We literally just have beds in our rooms and the bathroom is shared by dozens of travellers.

'I'm not sure how we'll cope with being confined to our rooms for the next three months for 23 hours a day.

'There's a mixture of emotions in the hostel at the moment.

'The news that we could be trapped here for three months is devastating. Obviously, there were lots of people shedding tears as the news was read out as nobody knows when they'll be able to leave.

'I'm in shock as I originally thought we may be stuck here for around two weeks.'

In Guatemala, Mr Wilson said he is optimistic of being on a plane home by the end of the week.

The 33-year-old said: 'If everything goes to plan, I'll be home by Sunday.

'I'm still worried Mexico might shut before then.

'The embassy has called to say they are changing which border we are going through in the morning, so it sounds like they are beginning to shut to me.'

In Asia, 24-year-old Ms Sloggett said she is hopeful of returning from her three-month adventure in the coming days after sharing travel tips and advice on a Facebook group for other stranded tourists.

She said: 'It has been touch and go the whole time and many people have been sceptical. The Facebook group has been our main hope and a way of seeing how many people are in the same situation.

'It's been very stressful for us as it has been so hard to get any answers from anyone in the UK or the embassy here.

'Luckily we as a couple haven't lost loads of money due to booking flights that won't go ahead; however, I know so many others who now have thousands of pounds of credit with multiple airlines.'

Meanwhile an NHS nurse stranded in Cambodia who begged Boris Johnson to bring her home is finally back in the UK.

Respiratory nurse Cheryl Baxter and her husband Ivon were on holiday when Britain went on lockdown and were due to fly home on March 22.

But they were stopped from boarding their second flight in Bangkok after officials demanded a medical certificate.

They spent the whole day obtaining the paperwork and were re-booked onto another flight - only to be told they to undergo coronavirus testing before they could travel.

Friends set up a crowdfunding campaign as the couple, of East Sussex, 'neared meltdown' and almost ran out of money.

After an agonizing 72-hour wait for their results and a direct plea to the Prime Minister, the couple came back negative and were able to board their flight with 1,000 raised by wellwishers via their Go Fund Me page.

Respiratory nurse Cheryl Baxter and her husband Ivon (pictured together) were on holiday in Cambodia when Britain went on lockdown and they found themselves unable to get home

An update today read: 'It is with great pleasure to update you with some positive news. Cheryl and Ivon have now returned home safely.

'We can not thank everybody enough with the support shown through a very tough 48 hours for Cheryl and Ivon, who had to face the fear and distress which was caused.'

The post continued: 'We reached our target which we are extremely grateful for.

'Cheryl and Ivon will now do what they do best and return to work as frontline/Keyworker's for our country.

'No more donations are required, this campaign has had a positive effect and we are hoping that by what we have managed to do many other stranded Will get home safely too. Again thank you for your kindness, thoughts and prayers.

Ms Baxter is a ward matron at Conquest Hospital in Hastings and her husband Ivon is also a key worker, she said in her online video.

Before they got the green light to go home, she uploaded the heartbreaking clip begging the Prime Minister to intervene so she could go back to work.

After an agonizing 72-hour wait for their results and a direct plea to the Prime Minister, the couple were able to board their flight with 1,000 raised by wellwishers via their Go Fund Me page

Breaking down into tears, she said: 'I've now run out of my medications needed and money is dwindling fast, so please UK Government and the Foreign Commonwealth (Office) help us back to our own country like you say we should.

'I'm a frontline NHS nurse - come on Boris Johnson, help me get back to where I'm needed.'

The Go Fund Me page had a target of 1,000 to help the couple with the cost of new flights, extended accommodation and food.

Their original online message read: 'We were told on the first cancellation on Sunday we did not have the medical certificates required to enter Bangkok, explaining we did not have the Covid-19 virus.

'The medical certificate cost is 80 dollars and now it's not worth the paper it's written on. Apparently now we need a swab and negative lab results proving we do not have this Covid-19 virus.

Before they got the green light to go home, Cheryl Baxter (pictured) uploaded the heartbreaking video message begging the Prime Minister to intervene so she could go back to work

'We also run the risk of Bangkok airport closing and also, the longer we're here, of us contracting this virus in a foreign country.

'We really are trying, believe you me, but with the language barrier and lack of communication this seems to be a relentless task.

'We are near a meltdown and unable to cope with this uncertainty so I'm begging you all, please post and share this to assist me and my husband and also the other people trying to return home and get the help we so desperately need.'

While Mrs Baxter and her husband are safely home, dozens of British families are still stuck abroad due to coronavirus restrictions.

Britons are increasingly turning to online fundraising to get back to the UK.

Crowdfunding page GoFundMe said a keyword search on its website shows a 54 per cent increase in campaigns in the last week mentioning being stuck abroad, and a 33 per cent increase in campaigns mentioning being stranded overseas.

Elizabeth Hazlewood, from Shrewsbury in Shropshire, created a crowdfunding page after being left stranded in Tunisia.

Elizabeth Hazlewood, 52, (pictured) from Shrewsbury in Shropshire, created a crowdfunding page after being left stranded in Tunisia

The 52-year-old support worker travelled to the country on Friday March 6 and was scheduled to fly back on Wednesday.

But her flight home was cancelled after the country suspended commercial air travel to stop the spread of Covid-19.

Ms Hazlewood said she is staying in a hotel in the capital Tunis and is waiting further instructions from the British embassy.

'I am running out of money rapidly,' she added. 'I really am stressed because of the situation and feel totally lost and alone.'

Another crowdfunding page was created for a family of four from Leswalt, south-west Scotland, who are stuck in Florida.

George McMillan, 43, his wife Kim, 42, and their children Finlay, 13 and Ruby, five, travelled to the popular holiday destination on March 5.

George McMillan, 43 (far right), with his wife Kim, 42 (far left), and their children Finlay, 13 and Ruby, 5, from Leswalt, Scotland, as they are stuck in Florida after their flights were cancelled due to coronavirus, after dozens of families stuck abroad due to coronavirus restrictions are trying to crowdfund their way home as a last resort

But their holiday plans were scuppered after Disney World Florida announced it would close due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Mr McMillan, who suffers from Crohn's disease, said their flights to the UK were cancelled and they were soon to be kicked out of their hotel.

'It's been very stressful, more so these last few days as in two days time that's us out of the hotel,' he said.

'I have enough medication to see me through to about Saturday.'

While flights have been arranged for their return, Mr McMillan said they were not guaranteed.

'There is (so) much conflicting information, we are effectively in the dark,' he added.

Meanwhile, Adam Smith, 32, from Nazeing in Essex, and his girlfriend were two months into their travels across central America when they found themselves stuck in El Salvador.

Mr Smith said the country has enforced curfews and travel restrictions, with only one person per household allowed to go out to visit a supermarket, bank or pharmacy.

He has been speaking to the British embassy to arrange flights home but has not been told when this could happen.

He described the response from the UK Government as 'responsive but so far lacking any detailed plan of action'.

Describing the atmosphere in El Salvador since the lockdown, he said: 'Orderly - everyone we've spoken to has been 100 per cent behind the president's response.'

Elsewhere, Jenny and Rosie Addison are stuck at Dubai Airport on the way home from a holiday in the Philippines after their connecting British Airways flight to London was cancelled.

Jenny (left) and Rosie (right) Addison are stuck at Dubai Airport on the way home from a holiday in the Philippines after their connecting British Airways flight to London was cancelled

The police officer, 28, and A&E nurse, 25, have nothing left to eat or drink after all retailers in the airport closed and have been trying to get home since March 14.

They are both 'key workers', but are terrified of being stranded in the UAE, which is also on lockdown, after airport staff warned it would close tomorrow.

The UAE warned foreign tourists that all flights would be grounded by midnight tomorrow.

But after a number of new COVID-19 cases, this was brought forward to 12am on Tuesday.

The Addison sisters, who are originally from Kendal, Cumbria, were due to begin their journey home from the Philippines on March 14.

They were forced to wait for 10 days until they could get on a plane, managing to get the last flight from Cebu on Tuesday, March 24.

But when they arrived in Dubai, they were devastated to find their BA flight to London had been cancelled as the UAE's flight restrictions had been brought forward.

Jenny told MailOnline: 'There are no shops or restaurants open in Dubai airport to buy food or drink. We are being little information staff at the airport.

'We feel really worried and scared as we do not know what is going to happen or whether we are just going to be stuck in the airport which is apparently closing down tomorrow.'

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is advising Britons stuck in the UAE to get in contact with them. But the Addison sisters claim they have had no help.

The UK travel advice for Dubai reads: 'Inbound and outbound flights will stop as of midnight on 24 March.

'If you're a remaining British traveller in the UAE, you should continue to contact your airline or tour operator regarding any possible return flights. Contact the British Embassy if you are in difficulty.'

A spokesman for Dubai Airport said it was assisting passengers by referring them to their airlines and native embassies.

A spokesman from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said: 'We recognise British tourists abroad are finding it difficult to return to the UK because of the unprecedented international travel and domestic restrictions that are being introduced around the world - often with very little or no notice.

'The Government is seeking to keep key transit routes open as long as possible and is in touch with international partners and the airline industry to make this happen.'
A quarantine zone for Covid-19 patients in the Da Nang Hospital in Da Nang, central Vietnam, March 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Nguyen Dong.

Two British nationals and a Vietnamese woman at the Da Nang Hospital are free of the Covid-19 infection, hospital director Le Duc Nhan said Thursday.

"The three patients have recovered and are qualified to be discharged in accordance with the Ministry of Health's protocol," Nhan said, adding that all three have tested negative for the coronavirus three times in a row.

The two British citizens were on Vietnam Airlines VN54 flight flew from London and landed March 2 in Hanoi. At least 16 people on that flight have been confirmed to be infected with the Covid-19 virus, including a flight attendant.

The Brits were confirmed Covid-19 positive on March 8.

The other patient, a Vietnamese woman who works as a saleswoman in an electronics shop in Da Nang's Hai Chau District, has also recovered. She'd come into direct contact March 4 with the British men who came to the shop as customers, before being confirmed to be infected herself on March 10.

The patients were treated in accordance with procedures and regimen laid out by the Health Ministry. The hospital was disinfected to prevent cross-infection among medical workers, Nhan said.

Da Nang City has confirmed six Covid-19 cases so far. The three active cases left are an American man confirmed infected on March 18, a 24-year-old Vietnamese woman confirmed infected on March 23, and a 27-year-old Vietnamese woman confirmed infected on March 25. None of the three have any severe symptoms, Nhan said.

Vietnam has recorded 153 Covid-19 cases in total, of whom 17 have been discharged from hospitals. Among the active cases, 37, including the latest three recoveries, have tested negative between one and four times.

Many of the currently active cases are Vietnamese nationals returning from Europe and the U.S. and foreigners visiting from the same regions.

The Covid-19 pandemic has killed more than 22,100 people globally after spreading to 198 countries and territories.
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Linkedin Ghina Ghaliya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 14:20 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d8e33e 1 Politics DPR,Lawmakers,house-of-representatives,COVID-19,coronavirus,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,Arsul-Sani,PPP,PKS,PAN,Democratic-party Free

The House of Representatives has postponed COVID-19 testing for lawmakers and their families, which was scheduled for Thursday, following an outpouring of public outrage over the plan.

United Development Party (PPP) lawmaker Arsul Sani said the tests had yet to be discussed by the House secretary-general and party factions.

However, he denied that testing was being postponed due to the public outcry.

"Whats clear is it won't be done today [Thursday]. It will be discussed later, the Peoples Consultative Assembly (MPR) deputy speaker told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Arsul added that the House had yet to decide whether the tests would be conducted before the end of the House recess period on March 30.

He said that while it was understandable that the public had criticized the plan, the rapid test kits that were going to be used were funded by donations from House leaders and members.

"The House bought 40,000 rapid test kits. Most of them will be given to several regional administrations and hospitals," Arsul said.

House secretary-general Indra Iskandar previously told the press that as many as 2,000 people would be tested on Thursday or Friday at the House's housing complexes in Kalibata and Ulujami.

Three parties outside the government coalition, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), the National Mandate Party (PAN) and the Democratic Party, have expressed their opposition to the plan.

The parties argued that free tests should instead be given to those who cannot afford them and medical workers on the frontlines of the pandemic.

The plan has also been widely criticized by the public as people across the country struggle to get tested. Thousands of people have signed online petitions on Change.org, calling for the plan to be canceled.

As of Wednesday, Indonesia has reported 790 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 58 deaths.
THE VALLEY ANGUILLA:--- Today, March 26th at 1:04 pm we received notification from the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA), that two of the four samples sent on Monday, March 23rd have tested positive for the COVID-19 virus and two have tested negative. The first positive case is an imported case - a 27-year old female visitor from the US, who arrived in Anguilla on March 11th. The second positive case, a 47- year old male resident, is a close contact of the first case. This is also an indication of local transmission. In accordance with public health practices for containment and prevention of spread:

 The individuals, who both presented with mild symptoms, were placed in isolation upon suspicion and they remain in isolation at this time.

 the Ministry of Health and Health Authority colleagues have initiated aggressive contact tracing to identify every individual who may have come into close contact with this patient. All individuals thus identified will placed under quarantine and tested.

Furthermore, additional social distancing measures for the general public as outlined in the Plan for

Escalation of Measures for COVID-19 will be announced shortly.

The Government of Anguilla has been preparing for the arrival of COVID-19 since late January. We urge residents not to panic and instead be guided by the helpful practices that you can do prevent the spread of COVID-19. To date, out of a total of nine suspected cases of COVID-19, five have tested negative, two have tested positive and two are pending.

Members of the general public are once again urged to follow proper hygiene, respiratory etiquette, and comply with the social distancing guidance in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The Ministry of Health and the Government of Anguilla maintain that the health and safety of the nation continue to be the utmost priority.

The Ministry will continue to provide timely and accurate information as the situation continues to evolve. Persons with any questions or concerns that they may have been exposed to COVID-19 should call the Ministrys hotlines at 476-7627, that is 476 SOAP or 584-4263, that is 584-HAND.

The Ministry of Health will continue to provide timely updates through our media partners, our official

Facebook page or at www.beatcovid.ai.
By Richard RJ Eskow, senior adviser for health and economic justice at Social Security Works. Eskow is also the host of The Zero Hour, a syndicated progressive radio and television program. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Call it the Boeing bailout. As the world struggles with the pandemic, Boeing should be seen as the vector for a parallel epidemic. Its Patient Zero in an epidemic of corporate failure. As we change the way we live our lives, corporations like Boeing should change the way they are run. Corporate mismanagement made this crisis worse and, if it doesnt change, will make the recovery more difficult.

Unfortunately, it looks like Boeing and its fellow malefactors are going to get a free ride. The corporate bailout is coming down the track, thanks to the new Senate agreement, with oversight that appears no stronger than that used in the bank bailouts after the 2008 crisis. That leaves the public exposed to ongoing corporate abuse, even as its government acts to rescue the abusers.

All signs indicate that Priority Number One is the rescue of our most badly mismanaged corporate vectors. President Trump says we have to protect Boeing, this countrys largest exporter and a major employer. Boeing itself has called for a minimum of $60 billion in access to public and private liquidity, including loan guarantees, for the aerospace manufacturing industry.

Market forces cant save Boeing. The government itself is its largest customer. Its other customer base, the airlines, are also in trouble. That leaves the U.S. government as the rescuer of last resort.

If they want public help, they must agree to be fundamentally transformed.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren was on the right track when she laid out some conditions for rescuing troubled corporations, such as: keeping people on the payroll throughout the crisis, paying at least $15 afterward, honoring all collective bargaining agreements, a ban on dividends or executive bonuses, a permanent ban on share buybacks, and a requirement that all political spending receive shareholder and board approval.

But even this agreements weak provisions arent likely to be enforced very enthusiastically. The Obama administration did a lukewarm job, at best, enforcing TARPs rules. What can we expect from this one?

This deal doesnt get it right. But its worth considering what a well-constructed bailout program would look likeboth to set the terms of the debate, and in anticipation of future bailout needs.

When it comes to their self-interest, senior executives and those who serve them are endlessly inventive. It has taken a long time to create this corporate crisis, and it will take some fundamental changes to reverse it. Every bailout should include major reforms along the following lines.

1. Public rescue must come with significant public ownership. Nobody in the business world would be expected to rescue a failing companywhether through loan guarantees, liquidity, direct subsidies, or any other actionswithout significant ownership concessions in return. Why should the American people, who are being asked to take on risk thats considered too toxic for the private sector?

For that kind of outlay, workers and the public must have seats on the boardnot symbolic ones, but seats with real voting power.

In some cases, that may amount to full nationalization. As Ryan Cooper points out in The Week, Boeings market capitalization is plunging fast, leaving few options besides full ownership on the table. Besides, as Alexander Sammon wrote in the American Prospect last October, Boeing is already an essentially a publicly-funded companyjust one that has privatized profits.

This does not mean that corporate bailouts must necessarily lead to a major socialization of the private economy. It could, and thats a debate worth having. But companies that have been partially or fully nationalized could also be re-sold to the private sector under new operating rules like those laid out here. Better yet, the government could use this process to vastly expand the scope of worker-owned and democratically-run enterprises.

2. Bailed-out corporations must be managed in the long-term interests of customers and employees. The hyper-financialization of corporate leadership, driven by perverse incentive packages driven off short-term share price, has led to aggressive management styles that shortchange employees, customers, and the public. This system must be replaced in every bailed-out corporation with incentives and directives that demand responsible management. Otherwise, the public will only be enabling the continuation of past irresponsibility.

3. Shareholders, employees, and customers must understand that the corporation needs rescuing because the corporations leaders failed at their jobs. CEOs and key executives didnt handle risk properly. A pandemic outbreak is an unusual event, but not an unpredictable one. Weve been warned of the possibility for many years, and responsible business leaders would have planned for it. Boeings profits, for example, depend largely on an industry that was always at high risk during an epidemic: travel.

You and I knew that. Its multi-millionaire executives knew it, too. They just didnt care. That means:

4. Senior executives must be replaced, and their past compensation must be reviewed for signs of malfeasance, stock manipulation, expense account padding, or any other signs of overpayment. Clawbacks of excess compensation should be considered, where appropriate.

Furthermore:

5. There must be legal and financial consequences for socially irresponsible or criminal behavior. That includes financial accountability and, where appropriate, criminal penalties for illegal behavior. Executives at bailed-out corporations should expect thorough investigations. They may dread them. But these investigations should be welcomed by customers, employees, most shareholders, and the public at large.

These senior executives didnt just fail. They did much worse than that. The extent of criminal malfeasance in a corporation like Boeing isnt known, because it hasnt been investigated. It should be. Boeings role in the recent MAX crashes isnt in dispute. While we dont know how high the culpability goesand we shouldwe do know that corporate leadership failed to act decisively and that people died as a result.

To those who say it will be impossible to replace fired senior executives from the current talent pool of top management, the right answer is: good. They all got it wrong. There will be publicly-minded managerssome retired, some at a second-tier management levelto step forward and lead these companies in a time of crisis.

6. All major bailouts should come with a full management audit. In Boeings case, that means a thorough internal review of all corporate emails, accompanied by interviews with all relevant actors in all levels of the organization. Management should change, but the corporate culture must change, too.

Airline executives have behaved with shocking financial irresponsibility. Theirs is an industry plagued by failures, bankruptcies, and setbacks, even in the best of times. And it is a statistical and managerial reality that the best of times never last. Despite that, executives and shareholders used their cash flow to enrich themselves with a series of share buybacks, leaving no reserves for a crisis. They spent it on themselves and want to be rescued now.

And corporate handouts arent likely to end with a few industries. Regulators broke the rules to rescue GE Capital, and GE is once again standing on the handout line. So is the oil industry, which may get its wishes granted despite its record of knowingly destroying the planet. Health insurers, too, are winning concessions.

That reflects a broken relationship between politicians and corporations. Therefore:

7. A rescued company and its executives may never again make political contributions, directly or indirectlyever. This ban must be permanent and inflexible. While its a start, Sen. Warrens proposal doesnt do enough to end this legalized corruption, especially given shareholder self-interest and the politics of many corporate boards. Political contributions created the absurdity of a government asking aircraft manufacturers to self-inspect, and hundreds died. It created the absurdity of asking major banks to self-regulate, and trillions were lost.

The message is simple. If you want to be rescued, your influence-peddling days are over.

Could this kind of bailout ever take place? CNN writes that Warrens conditions should probably be read more as a wish list. If by wish list it means theyre aspirational, thats undoubtedly true. A look at the Senate deal confirms that theyre not becoming law anytime soon.

But we need to remember that it is corporate CEOs, not Sen. Warren, who have their hands out now. This bailout is their wish list. The cynical hucksters who comprise this sad parade undoubtedly agree with CNNs less-than-neutral characterization of Warrens ideas as extreme interventions into how businesses are run. Once its clear how these CEOs have operated, however, it becomes clear that Warrens ideas arent extreme enough.

What is extreme is the decades-long culture of mismanagement and greed embodied by these imperious executive supplicants. They have failed the public, corporate employees, customers, and their own corporations. These extremist CEOs should be fired, each and every one, and their corporations restructured for the public good.
Amid the deadly coronavirus outbreak, China has reportedly imposed tough travel restrictions and factory suspensions to curb the spread of deadly virus, limiting its labour supplies and sending exporters scrambling to fulfill orders. As the Chinese factories reopen, it reportedly started to fire workers as virus plunged the global trade. As per reports, the overseas orders are being scrapped as the disease cripples the economies of China's trading partners.

Thomas Gatley, senior analyst at research firm Gavekal Dragonomics reportedly said that the sudden shutdown of normal economic activity across Europe, the US and a growing number of emerging markets is certain to cause a dramatic contraction in Chinese exports. The economic activity is expected to drop by 20-45 per cent year-on-year in the second quarter, as per reports.

READ: China Reports No New Domestic Coronavirus Case For Second Consecutive Day

V-shaped recovery

As per reports, economists had already anticipated a V-shaped recovery for Chinas economy and Chinas net exports accounted for 11 per cent of economic growth last year. As per reports, factories in China, struggling to reopen after the coronavirus shut down the economy, face a new threat from US anti-disease controls that might disrupt the flow of microchips and other components they need. The shock threatens to set back the ruling Communist Party's efforts to revive the worlds second-largest economy after it declared victory over the outbreak. It would add to pressures on the global business activity as Western countries close workplaces, limit travel and tell consumers to stay home.

READ: China Reports 67 New Imported Coronavirus Cases

Fashion industry urges people for help

Meanwhile, the fashion industry has urged people to step in and protect the wages of 40 million garment workers in its supply chains around the world who face extreme poverty as factories continue to down their shutters in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic. As per the reports, many factories in the garment-producing countries including Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam have shut down operations due to the shortage of raw materials from China and declining orders from western clothing brands. Self-isolation and quarantine measures are being rapidly imposed by governments across the world and it is expected that there will be a mass closure of thousands of more factories in the days and week to come.

READ: US Provokes China Amid 'Chinese Virus' Spat; Sails Warship Through Taiwan Strait

READ: United Nations Not Interested In Discussing Coronavirus Because UNSC March Chair Is China?

(Image Credit: AP)
A New Jersey man has been charged with making a terrorist threat after allegedly coughing on a grocery store employee on purpose and then claiming he had COVID-19 coronavirus.

George Falcone, 50, of Freehold, was allegedly standing too close to an employee and a prepared food display when the employee told him he was too close, N.J.com reports. He then allegedly stepped closer  within 3 feet of her  and purposely coughed while leaning even closer. Falcone then allegedly laughed and said he was infected with the coronavirus. Falcone also allegedly told two other employees they were lucky to have jobs.

RELATED: 11 ways to make grocery shopping safer as coronavirus spreads

RELATED: Pennsylvania grocery store throws out $35K in food after woman purposely coughed on items

He was charged with terroristic threats, harassment and obstruction, according to the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. The incident occurred around 6:30 p.m. on Sunday at Wegmans in Manalapan, N.J.

There are knuckleheads out there, Gov. Phil Murphy said of the incident. We see them, and we are enforcing behavior."

RELATED: Michigan doctor says leave groceries outside for 3 days if possible, shows how to disinfect

New Jerseys total known cases of coronavirus increased 4,402 with at least 62 deaths on Wednesday. The state is under a stay-at-home" order similar to the one issued in Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer earlier this week. Michigan had 2,295 confirmed cases and 43 deaths as of Wednesday.

RELATED: Stores, apps that will deliver groceries to your home during coronavirus pandemic

PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

READ MORE:

Is Michigan really social distancing? Phone data shows the answer

What Michigans coronavirus numbers tell us and what we still dont know

Michigan hospitals asked to open space for coronavirus patients as facilities reach capacity

Thursday, March 26: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan
The outbreak of COVID-19 has affected almost all facets of private and public life. As people are shutting down and limiting their interaction with the outside world, fake news and rumors are creating a big problem.





Part of the problem is due to the absence of correct information on some important areas related to the viral spread. For example, many people have no idea how long the virus can stay on the surface of metals and other materials.





The ambiguity led to speculation that COVID-19 can travel with merchandise imported from an infected country. This question was of particular interest in the context of China which is the "world factory" and major exporter to almost all countries.





The situation has dramatically changed in China since the first appearance of the disease last December. The government and people of China are now helping other nations to combat it. And, it is also important to explore some of the speculation like the one about the coronavirus moving around the world on goods from China.





Though, we are still in the early phase of defeating the virus and understanding its full deadly powers require more time, experts agree it is nearly impossible for the coronavirus to survive the long haul from one country to another.





The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said last month that there is no evidence so far to prove that COVID-19 has been transmitted via imported goods. "The important big take-home message is that this is probably a small proportion of the transmission of respiratory viruses," said Dr. Timothy Brewer, professor of epidemiology and medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Out in the community, these viruses are probably not surviving for a long time on surfaces."





The ships laden with good go through hard outer conditions with ambivalent temperatures and weather, which makes it highly unlikely for the virus to survive. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, theoretically, it may be possible to be get infected by touching a contaminated surface and then touching one's own mouth, nose or eyes. But in case of imported goods, the time factor is important.





An analysis of 22 earlier studies of similar coronaviruses, including SARS and MERS, published online last month in the Journal of Hospital Infection, showed that coronaviruses can remain infectious on surfaces for up to nine days at room temperature. However, exported goods often pass through volatile outside temperatures and environments that reduce the chances of survival.





A virus needs a combination of environmental conditions such as temperature, lack of UV exposure and humidity to remain viable. However, such a combination is not likely in shipping packages, according to Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, speaking to Live Science's sister site Tom's Hardware.





Scientists also believe that a key element for survival and spread of the virus is presence of human cells. So, naturally, it is not possible for it to live for a longer period and reproduce itself while sitting on the top of a metal, glass or hardboard surface.





Hence, fears that goods imported from China will be contaminated are out of place. Also, one wonders why China is being singled out when the virus has become a global pandemic. The anxiety that imported goods from China can cause infection is misplaced. If products from China can do it, so will be the case for imports from other countries.





Fear and anxiety are quite normal in the face of the pandemic. People should be cautious but not over-reactive or to discriminate. It is desirable to follow the set procedures to avoid infections, but at the same time, we need to be realistic in our fears, and respect facts and science.





Sajjad Malik is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:





http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/SajjadMalik.htm





Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.





If you would like to contribute, please contact us at opinion@china.org.cn.








International House-NYC told some students they must urgently leave after the graduate housing was hit with coronavirus.

New York City  Anuja Jaiswal was in the middle of helping a friend move out of her student dormitory when she got the news: she had eight days to vacate the dormitory and find a place to move to while New York City scrambles to contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

My heart sank to the bottom of my chest, she says of the moment when she confirmed the news through a WhatsApp chat with some other residents of International House, known popularly as I-House, in New York.

The private, non-profit housing facility hosts hundreds of international students attending different universities and colleges across New York City. For many like Jaiswal, a masters student, the news came as a shock.

Even as universities sent their students home to help fight the threat of the virus, students at I-House had been assured by the administration that the dormitory would remain open and they could rely on them, according to more than five individuals who spoke with Al Jazeera.

But late last week, that message changed after an I-House staff member tested positive for COVID-19. Residents living in the south wing of the building, which is designed in a dormitory style and requires sharing of common spaces such as bathrooms, and kitchens, were told they must leave by March 27. I-Houses north tower, which is apartment-style housing, will remain open.

On Saturday, a resident reportedly died from coronavirus related complications. By Monday, a third case had been reported.

Students say I-House is using a loophole in the contract, which states I-House residents are members of the community, and not tenants, to absolve itself of legal responsibilities, especially given that there is currently a 90-day halt on all evictions in New York state.

Nowhere to go

I-House said in a statement it was waving financial penalties and refunding security deposits and unused room and dining fees. It also said it was working with universities and other organisations affiliated with the residents to help identify safe housing options.

I-House added that it would ensure that while residents must vacate the South Building, no resident will be left without a viable housing alternative.

Jaiswal, an Indian from Bahrain, was particularly horrified because the announcement came a day after Canada closed its borders. Otherwise, she could have gone to live with her sister in Toronto. Because she still holds an Indian passport, and owing to her visa concerns, she would not be able to return to Bahrain where her parents live.

Jaiswal is not the only being evicted. Given that more than half of the dormitorys students are from abroad, most of the students are suddenly without a place to go to in the US.

Its definitely putting those of us who are already financially unstable in more instability because we now need to self-quarantine ourselves in hotels or Airbnbs before going into our parents, Grace Wacuka Njoroge, a masters student from Nairobi, Kenya, told Al Jazeera. Not to mention, the risks involved in getting through an Airbnb and trying to find food.

Jaiswal said it also made it very challenging and uncomfortable for the residents to look for a place now, given that they now run the risk of being carriers.

A big factor in this decision making and may be different to a normal eviction is the infection, she said. The real risk isnt whether I get it but whether or not I spread it to someone else and I just dont like being put in that position. Youre forcing me to make morally uncomfortable decisions.

I-House is home away from home for hundreds of students from all over the world. Extremely saddened to hear about the passing of a resident due to covid. Students are being asked to vacate and many have nowr to go in the middle of a pandamic.Pls share/help https://t.co/3KMCiUTHNS  Deepashri V (@deepalearning) March 25, 2020

The saga continued into Sunday evening, when another notice was sent out to students strongly urging them to vacate the premises by Tuesday. But some students, like Njoroge, said they did not know if they could leave right away.

An elected member of a committee that represents residents at I-House told Al Jazeera that since the story broke about Saturdays death, some people have been turned down by apartments or other residences initially willing to host them. The member spoke on condition of anonymity fearing backlash from the administration. Al Jazeera was not able to confirm that students had been turned away.

Al Jazeera spoke to two students who were afraid of sharing their information because of the same fears. They shared similar accounts of the administrations handling of the matter, as well as the panic that ensued.

Workers stand near a fence during the outbreak of COVID-19 in the Manhattan borough of New York City [Carlo Allegri/Reuters]

In a letter seen by Al Jazeera, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer condemned the I-Houses decision and demanded that the institution reconsider [the] eviction of countless students.

We find this plan unacceptable and dangerous to your residents and the public in general, the letter said. We strongly believe that International House, as a member of our community and this city, has an obligation to your students-residents, who may have been exposed to the virus in your facility, to allow them to remain in their units to provide the necessary time for them to observe for symptoms, self-quarantine, and if necessary heal in their homes.

I-House, in a statement to Al Jazeera, said its staff realise and regret the difficulty and disruption these measures have caused to the community and wish a less disruptive option was equally effective in preventing the viruss spread.

It added: The health and safety of residents is our paramount concern.

But experts worry that forcing hundreds of people into the larger society and requiring them to move in with other people can bear dangerous health concerns in this pandemic, where social isolation has repeatedly been named a key factor in helping slow it.

From a public health perspective, it makes much more sense to keep the students where they are: isolate sick individuals and quarantine exposed individuals while encouraging social distancing measures for all, Dr Michael Sinha, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, told Al Jazeera.

He suggested measures that would require limiting access to common spaces such as gyms, dining halls, and recreation rooms.

Eviction exposes them to far greater risk of exposure than allowing them to stay in the International House: homeless shelters, food pantries, crowded public spaces: all high-risk for exposure to COVID-19, he said.

But Dr Sinha also said there is a challenge with strictly-enforced lockdowns similar to the ones that occurred on cruise ships in Japan and Oakland city in California.

These measures lumped sick/exposed individuals with unexposed individuals. In that setting, everyone eventually gets exposed, he said.

Lack of preventive measures

The students said they understood that the institution had to take certain measures, but given the unique demographic, the administration should have been more transparent, clearer in their communication and taken preventive measures.

Anindita Chakroborty, a student from India, said given the large number of students residing at I-House who are parts of different institutions and campuses across the city, it was only a matter of time before someone contracted it.

Being a little prepared for this wouldve been a lot more helpful, Chakroborty said.

She had gone to Philadelphia for two weeks when her classes at Columbia University moved online. When she received the news about the I-House closing, she feared that all her possessions  including important documents  were still in the building. She, too, had relied on what she says were repeated reassurances from the administration that they would be open.

What a shame to see that what I used to call home in NYC @IHouseNYC is throwing people out like this with one week's notice. Most people in these building are international students & have nowhere to go. @CNN @guardian @BBCWorld pic.twitter.com/TbA3hRWNCL  Randistic (@randistic) March 19, 2020

She feared coming back to I-House to clear her room, a process which would require her to commute from Philadelphia and potentially exposing herself either during the journey or at I-House itself. After a day of phone calls and repeated emails with automated responses, Chakroborty said they let her keep her things in the dorm for the time being.

A lot of residents feel like they couldve made provisions for testing or quarantine, Njoroge said. She added that learning about someone testing positive, as well as a notice to leave in the same email was overwhelming.

Despite the panic, students utilised their alumni network to find and share listings and resources for everyone to use within days. A petition by Njoroge demanding the resignation of the president has already received more than 170 signatures.

For now, Njoroge is headed to a friends house in Massachusetts  something that will require her to take a bus, while she nurses an injured foot. Jaiswal is moving in with a friend in Brooklyn, who welcomed her to stay. As they vacate the premises, the students are not carrying with them the sense of security and respect they once felt about the mission of the I-House movement.
4 P.M. MARCH 26, 2020, UPDATE: Alabama schools closed for the rest of year, instruction goes online

Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth is calling for Alabama schools to be closed for the remainder of the year as the state battles the spread of the coronavirus.

In a Thursday tweet, Ainsworth said the spread of COVID-19 is a serious situation and calls for serious measures.

Alabama School Superintendent Dr. Eric Mackey has done a good job protecting our students and families. I recommended he shut down the schools when he did in March. This week I recommended to him to shut down the schools for the rest of the school year. This is serious situation and calls for serious measures, Ainsworth said.

Dr. @egmackey has done a good job of protecting our students and families. I recommended he shut down the schools when he did in March.This week I recommended to him to shut down the schools for the rest of the school year.This is serious situation and calls for serious measures. https://t.co/GLMnnODvIw  Will Ainsworth (@willainsworthAL) March 26, 2020

Alabamas K-12 schools closed last week due to coronavirus. Mackey said he plans to release his recommendations on reopening schools at 4 p.m. today.

Originally, Mackey announced schools would reopen April 6.

A nonscientific survey posted to AL.com yesterday showed nearly two-thirds of the 4,100 who responded by 10 a.m. Thursday morning said schools should stay closed through the end of the school year. Just under 10% recommended schools reopen on April 6 as originally planned.

Just over a quarter of respondents said schools should reopen at some point before the end of the school year. The same nonscientific survey of readers showed just under a quarter of respondents said all learning should be optional, not required. Seven out of 10 said learning, directed by schools, should take place while schools are closed.
The G20 states on Thursday said they would inject more than $5 trillion into the global economy to counter the social and economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and to safeguard jobs and revive growth.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who joined an extraordinary virtual G20 leaders summit, said the pandemic offered an opportunity to forge a new concept of globalisation that wasnt focused solely on an economic agenda. He also called for the reform of the WHO, which was based on last centurys models, according to people familiar with developments.

The summit, convened by G20 president Saudi Arabia following a suggestion from Modi, marked the first time the groupings leaders met via video conference and discussed issues that were not focussed on economy and finance.

A communique issued after the meeting said the G20 will work with the World Health Organization (WHO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and the United Nations to protect lives, safeguard jobs, preserve financial stability and revive growth, minimise disruptions to trade and global supply chains and provide aid to all countries.

We are injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy, as part of targeted fiscal policy, economic measures, and guarantee schemes to counteract the social, economic and financial impacts of the pandemic, the G20 said.

The grouping comprising 19 of the worlds largest economies and the European Union will also undertake immediate and vigorous measures to support our economies; protect workers, businesses  especially micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises  and the sectors most affected.

The people cited above, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Modi, during his statement and interventions at the summit, said the G20 had focused on a purely economic agenda to define globalisation after mitigating the effects of the 2008 financial crisis.

However, this form of globalisation had failed the world order as multilateral forums became platforms to balance competing interests instead of taking up collective interests in areas such as terrorism and climate change, Modi said, according to the people.

The Covid-19 pandemic offers an opportunity for G20 and the international community to look at a new concept of globalisation that focuses on the collective well-being of mankind and collective interests in spheres such as counter-terror or climate change and future pandemics, Modi told the summit.

Modi called for strengthening and reforming inter-governmental organisations such as WHO, which continue to be based on the last centurys model and havent adapted to deal with new challenges, the people said.

He also called for new crisis management protocols and procedures for an inter-connected global village and joint efforts to reduce the economic hardships caused by the pandemic, especially for the economically vulnerable, the people said. There should also be open sharing of the benefits of medical research and development of adaptive, responsive and affordable healthcare systems and resources that can be deployed worldwide.

In a sense, the prime minister spoke for the small, emerging and developing nations that were without a voice at this forum and this approach represented a continuity of our domestic policy, said a person who declined to be named.

Modi pointed out that 90% of the Covid-19 infections and 88% of deaths were in G20 countries, which account for 80% of the worlds GDP and 60% of the global population. He called on the G20 to frame a concrete action plan to fight the pandemic.

It was noted that the world community was still trying to forge a coordinated response three months after the crisis began, though the virtual summit had shown that the world community could come together, the people said.

The G20 summit was held against the backdrop of the failure of the UN Security Council, currently led by China, to call a single meeting focused on the pandemic. The WHO too has faced some criticism for not acting more decisively on the crisis.

The G20 communique said the unprecedented pandemic was a powerful reminder of our interconnectedness and vulnerabilities and combating the virus would require a transparent, robust, coordinated, large-scale and science-based global response.

We will share timely and transparent information; exchange epidemiological and clinical data; share materials necessary for research and development; and strengthen health systems globally, including through supporting the full implementation of the WHO International Health Regulations (IHR 2005), it said.

The people cited above said the discussions were held in a cooperative spirit and there was no reference to the origin of the virus  a reference to efforts by countries such as the US to label Covid-19 as the Wuhan virus.

The WHOs mandate is fairly limited to handle issues that would let it be at the forefront of dealing with such pandemics. There is a need to empower it so that it can take the lead, and to boost its capacity to provide early warnings, help states develop protocols and to forge common solutions to future crises, said a person.

The people said further discussions of the G20 members were underway to frame an action paper with specific steps to be taken to counter the pandemic and its fallout.
A woman wearing a mask walks in Paris. (Getty Images)

Scientists have warned draconian measures to combat the coronavirus should be eased gradually to avoid a second peak in the outbreak.

A team from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) used a mathematical model to simulate the impact of relaxing or extending school and workplace closures in the Chinese city Wuhan, where the new strain emerged.

Results suggest lifting these measures in March may cause a second wave of cases to come to light in late August.

Maintaining restrictions until the beginning of April, however, would likely delay a second peak until October, buying the health service more time.

Latest coronavirus news, updates and advice

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The city needs to be really careful to avoid prematurely lifting physical distancing measures, because that could lead to an earlier secondary peak in cases, said lead author Dr Kiesha Prem.

But if they relax the restrictions gradually, this is likely to both delay and flatten the peak.

While the exact timings will vary between countries, the scientists believe the principal of their findings will apply everywhere.

Medical staff move a patient from a specialist high-speed train to an ambulance during a transfer of coronavirus patients from Strasbourg to Angers, western France. (Getty Images)

The coronavirus is thought to have emerged at a seafood and live animal market in the Chinese city Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, at the end of last year.

Unprecedented measures were taken to control the outbreak, with strict travel restrictions being enforced in the city on 23 January.

This was extended to the rest of Hubei on 26 January.

The province, aside from Wuhan, has since lifted its travel restrictions. Wuhan will partially ease the measure on 8 April.

Travel aside, authorities closed schools, extended the Chinese New Year celebrations to keep adults from their workplace and promoted social distancing.

The coronavirus has spread well beyond China, with cases being confirmed in 175 countries across every inhabited continent.

Story continues

Since the outbreak was identified, more than 492,600 patients have been reported, of whom over 119,900 have recovered, according to John Hopkins University.

Cases in China have been plateauing since the end of February, with Europe now the epicentre of the pandemic.

The UK has had more than 9,600 confirmed cases, of whom 465 have died.

Globally, the death toll has exceeded 22,100.

Healthcare workers applaud in return as they are cheered on by local police outside the University Hospital in Coruna, north-west Spain. (Getty Images)

Crucial for policymakers everywhere

The LSHTM scientists based their model on information showing how often people of different ages mix in varying locations.

Numerous assumptions had to be made, including how long the average patient is infectious for and the coronavirus basic reproduction number.

This is the number of people a patient statistically goes onto infect.

For example, a number of three means every patient is expected to pass the virus to three others.

The coronavirus basic reproduction number has been debated, with Professor David Heymann, also from the LSHTM, previously telling Yahoo UK it changes daily as new information comes in.

When it comes to how long a patient is infectious for, scientists from John Hopkins University looked at 181 people who tested positive 4 January and 24 February.

They found most developed the tell-tale flu-like symptoms within five days, while nearly all (97.5%) endured fever, cough and breathlessness within 11.5 days.

Experts claimed this supported a 14-day quarantine.

After taking these assumptions into account, results of the LSHTM research suggest staggering the relaxation of Wuhans interventions until the beginning of April would reduce the number of infections by more than 92% by mid-2020.

By the end of the year, infections would be expected to be down 24%, the scientists wrote in The Lancet Public Health.

Our results won't look exactly the same in another country, because the population structure and the way people mix will be different, said study author Dr Yang Liu.

But we think one thing probably applies everywhere: physical distancing measures are very useful, and we need to carefully adjust their lifting to avoid subsequent waves of infection when workers and school children return to their normal routine.

If those waves come too quickly, that could overwhelm health systems.

Dr Tim Colbourn, from University College London, called the research crucial for policymakers everywhere.

Writing in a linked editorial, he added: It indicates the effects of extending or relaxing physical distancing control measures on the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.

Given many countries with mounting epidemics now potentially face the first phase of lockdown, safe ways out of the situation must be identified.

New country-specific models should incorporate testing, contract tracing and localised quarantine of suspected cases as the main alternative intervention strategy to distancing lockdown measures, either at the start of the epidemic, if it is very small.

Or after the relaxation of lockdown conditions, if lockdown had to be imposed to prevent healthcare system overload in an already mounting epidemic.

A couple with a bunch of flowers walk in Warsaw. (Getty Images)

The world is holding its breath waiting to see what happens

Dr James Gill, from Warwick Medical School, praised the research, saying: The implications of this are profound.

Maintaining restrictions until April appears to have a significant effect on flattening the curve and has the potential to delay any second peak, benefits which the model shows are significantly lost if restrictions are abruptly lifted, rather than reduced in a staggered manner.

The proposals put forward here align with current practices and support the continuation of the quarantine efforts to reduce the case load burden on health infrastructures.

Given the current levels of assumptions already in use for government public health responses, it is gratifying to see a reasoned model which may be able to further guide policymakers.

Prof Tom Solomon, from the University of Liverpool, added we will only know if lifting restrictions triggers a second outbreak after the event.

The world is holding its breath waiting to see what happens when Wuhan eases the physical distancing measures that it imposed some months ago, he said.

Will easing restrictions lead to a second wave of coronavirus?

The measures clearly brought the outbreak under control, but will easing them lead to a second wave of [the coronavirus]?

This modelling paper suggests rather than easing the measures in March in Wuhan, they should be held in place til April to give the health systems more time to recover and prepare for a likely second wave.

There are so many uncertainties, however, I suspect the only way we will know for sure is to see what happens when the measures are eased.

Prof Solomon suggests authorities in Wuhan very slightly ease the measures for three weeks, perhaps by allowing people to spend more time outdoors, but without social contact.

We would then be able to see the impact on infection rates and lock down again if needed, he said.
The number of COVID-19



patients in Gujarat rose to 43 with four more coronavirus cases reported in the state during the last 24 hours, a senior health official said on Thursday.

One new case each has been reported from Ahmedabad, Surat, Gandhinagar and Bhavnagar, state principal secretary (health) Jayanti Ravi said in Gandhinagar.

Ahmedabad is on top with 15 cases, followed by Vadodara-eight, Gandhinagar and Surat-seven each, Rajkot-four and Kutch and Bhavnagar-one each.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
NAIROBI, March 26 (Reuters) - About half of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa still have a "narrowing" opportunity to curb the spread of coronavirus in the local population, the regional head of the World Health Organisation said on Thursday.

The virus has multiplied across Africa more slowly than in Asia or Europe, but more than 40 nations on the continent have now reported a total of 2,850 with 73 fatalities, according to a Reuters tally.

"It has been a very dramatic evolution," Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO Africa head, told a media teleconference.

Governments across the region needed to invest their efforts in aggressively tracing all those people who have been in contact with imported cases, in order to isolate them and prevent transmission of the disease locally.

"Countries need to work on this containment while preparing for a possible, broader expansion of the virus," she said.

The effort needs to be accompanied by public education campaigns to ensure people are maintaining physical distances, something that could help limit the spread of the virus, and should complement other measures put in place like halting passenger flights.

South Africa has ordered a lockdown of its population for three weeks while Kenya has imposed a night-time curfew to prevent the disease from spreading.

"We still have a window... it is narrowing every day as data on the geographic spread to more and more countries tell us," Moeti said.

John Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a health body of the African Union, said African leaders were preparing to engage with their wealthier counterparts to secure vital supplies like respirators and ventilators in case infection rates worsen.

Nkengasong told the same teleconference that countries with advanced industrial bases like South Africa, Egypt and Morocco could be used to produce such equipment if needed. (Reporting by Duncan Miriri; editing by Omar Mohammed, William Maclean)
The jihadist group Boko Haram this week killed almost 100 soldiers in Chad, badly denting the reputation of an army that President Idriss Deby Itno presents as a regional bulwark against terrorism.

"Bohoma will long be a scar on the face of the army," said a Chadian officer who asked not to be named, after Monday's assault on a base on the Bohoma peninsula in Chad's Lake province.

In the Lake Chad region where the borders of Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger converge, the Nigerian jihadists have this year stepped up attacks, drawing on their knowledge of the marshland and its many scattered islands.

An army used to handling suicide attacks and lesser raids found itself fighting for more than seven hours to stop a dawn offensive by Boko Haram.

The jihadists arose in Nigeria in 2009 before taking their insurgency to neighbouring countries, inflicting escalating losses in lives and economic damage.

At least 98 soldiers were killed, according to the latest official toll. The defeat was the biggest sustained by the Chadian military in one day.

Deby, a military man and former army commander-in-chief who ousted president Hissene Habre in 1990 and took his place, travelled swiftly to the Lake Chad basin to take charge of operations after the attack.

"I reject this defeat and the response must strike like lightning," he said on national television, acknowledging that the army had never known such losses since he became head of state.

 'Stance of a warrior' 

Across the border that same day, the Nigerian army took a heavy blow when another branch of the jihadist front, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), killed at least 70 soldiers in an attack on a convoy.

Where four nations meet: The Lake Chad region, a focal point for the jihadist campaign in the Sahel. By Jean-Michel CORNU (AFP)

The Chadian president "adopts the stance of a warrior", said Marielle Debos, a researcher at Paris-Nanterre University, pointing out that the army has an especially important place in society.

While a civilian Deby has been returned to office in elections every five years, he presents himself as a soldier both at home and abroad, wanting to be seen in the West as the ideal ally to combat regional jihadists.

"We must deconstruct the myth of the invincibility of the Chadian army", said Marc-Antoine Perouse de Montclos, director of research at France's Research Institute for Development (IRD).

In his view, Deby's forces are more like "warriors than a trained and well-equipped military".

Failings in the army became apparent in 2008, when rebel forces swept across the country from the Sudanese border and entered the capital, almost succeeding in overthrowing Deby. He was saved only by French military intervention.

"There's no doubting that it's one of the most experienced armies of the region, even if that doesn't mean that it operates by Western standards," said Vincent Foucher, political scientist at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Bordeaux.

"But the Chadian army is deployed on several fronts at once and the Lake area has apparently seen cutbacks in recent times."

"This regime has many preoccupations apart from the rebellions of Lake Chad, which have little chance of toppling the regime," added Perouse de Montclos.

Other rebel groups are stationed in the distant north on the far side of the Libyan border, apparently determined to remove Deby from power.

 'Risky military outpost' 

Chadian soldiers are active in the Sahel outside the country. N'Djamena promised to send a battalion  480 men  to the vulnerable territory where the borders of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso meet, to fight jihadists there.

The marshlands of Lake Chad provide ideal terrain for jihadists to mount surprise attacks. By SIA KAMBOU (AFP)

"The garrison at Bohoma was drawn down, the troops were headed towards the three borders," a senior officer said on condition of anonymity.

"Why did they cut back equipment in such a risky military outpost?" asked Succes Masra, an opposition politician who also passes on complaints from the soldiers about a lack of means, including recurrent pay delays.

The president "has to rent out his army by sending it abroad, such as in the three-border zone," said Perouse de Montclos.

But Deby "needs to think about the redeployment of his troops", said Remadji Hoinathy at the Institute of Security Studies (ISS).

With just a single attack, Hoinathy said, "Lake Chad has become the biggest hotspot."

The assault "shows that the group (Boko Haram) has pretty strong military capabilities... (especially) in information and intelligence," Hoinathy said.

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Hyderabad, March 26 : Authorities in Telangana have restricted congregational prayers in mosques, saying not more than five persons can offer prayers in view of the lockdown to check the spread of coronavirus.

The State Wakf Board on Thursday issued orders, which apply not only for five regular prayers everyday but also for 'Namaz-e-Juma' or Friday prayers.

The Wakf Board, a government body, directed all mosques in Hyderabad and 33 other districts to ensure that not more than five persons gather for prayers.

The orders were issued a day before Friday when the mosques witness huge gatherings.

The Wakf Board cited 'fatwa' or edict issued by Jamia Nizamia, a renowned Islamic University based in Hyderabad, stating despite high significance attached to Friday prayers, Islam also gives great importance to preservation of human life. Islam asks Muslims not to become cause of harm to anyone, says the 'fatwa'.

The Wakf Board quoted medical experts as saying that congregations could lead to spread of the disease.

It said five 'musallis' or worshippers can gather for regular and Friday prayers so that mosques are not deprived of prayers.

The Telangana government is strictly enforcing the lockdown in the state with curfew during the night hours.

The state has so far reported 40 Covid-19 positive cases.
[March 26, 2020] Colony Capital Names Severin White as Head of Public Investor Relations

Colony Capital, Inc. (NYSE: CLNY) ("Colony" or the "Company") today announced the appointment of Severin White as Managing Director, Head of Public Investor Relations, effective immediately. As Head of Public Investor Relations, Mr. White will, among other things, manage and cultivate relationships with the investment community, oversee the Company's financial communications and shareholder outreach, and act as a liaison between the management team, Board of Directors and Colony Capital's ownership base. He will also support the Colony senior leadership team, as the Company pivots its focus to digital infrastructure and real estate. "With more than 25 years of investment management experience in both private equity and public markets, Severin brings invaluable expertise and leadership to our investor relations program," said Marc Ganzi, Colony Capital's CEO-elect. "Severin will play an important role in building investor engagement and articulating the benefits of our new strategic direction focused on digital infrastructure and real estate." Mr. White said, "Colony Capital is a dynamic business with compelling opportunities ahead. I am excited to join the Company at such an important time in its history and I look forward to communicating Colony's bright prospects for growth and value creation to our shareholders and the broader investment community." About Severin White Over the course of his career, Mr. White has held senior operational and finance positions at several capital management and investment firms. He joins Colony Capital from Niagara Share LLC, a financial advisory practice serving family office investors focused on both public and private investments. Mr. White founded and served as managing member of Niagara Share LLC. Prior to founding Niagara Share, he served for 10 years as a key member of the investment team managed by New Vernon Capital and subsequently Columbia Pacific Advisors. Earlier in his career, Mr. White served as Senior Vice President, Business Development at Smithsonian Business Ventures, where he spearheaded the negotiation and structuring of the Smithsonian Channel, a joint venture television network between the Smithsonian Institution and CBS/Showtime. Mr. White began his career at Bastion Capital, a Los Angeles-based middle market private equity buyout fund. Mr. White holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, with concentrations in Finance and Entrepreneurial Management. About Colony Capital Colony Capital, Inc. (NYSE:CLNY) is a global investment firm with a focus on building the leading digital real estate provider and funding source for the occupancy, infrastructure, equity and credit needs of the world's mobile communications and data-driven companies. The Company has assetsunder management of approximately $49 billion composed of $36 billion of capital managed on behalf of third party institutional and retail investors and $13 billion of investment interests on its own balance sheet. The Company's owns and operates an investment management business with $14 billion in digital real estate investments and $22 billion in traditional commercial real estate debt and equity investments. With respect to investment interests on its balance sheet, the Company owns (a) a controlling 20% interest in DataBank, a leading provider of enterprise-class data center, cloud, and connectivity services, (b) a 71% interest in 358 healthcare properties, (c) a 94% interest in 157 hospitality properties, (d) approximately 67 million shares of Colony Credit Real Estate, Inc. (NYSE:CLNC), and (e) interests in various other equity and debt investments including general partnership interests in funds management by the Company commercial real estate equity and debt investments and other real estate-related securities. The Company is headquartered in Los Angeles with key offices in Boca Raton, New York, Paris and London, and has over 400 employees across 21 locations in 13 countries. For additional information regarding the Company and its management and business, please refer to www.clny.com.



Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This communication may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements relate to expectations, beliefs, projections, future plans and strategies, anticipated events or trends and similar expressions concerning matters that are not historical facts. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "expects," "intends," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," or "potential" or the negative of these words and phrases or similar words or phrases which are predictions of or indicate future events or trends and which do not relate solely to historical matters. You can also identify forward-looking statements by discussions of strategy, plans or intentions. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and contingencies, many of which are beyond the Company's control, and may cause the Company's actual results to differ significantly from those expressed in any forward-looking statement. Factors that might cause such a difference include, without limitation, the impact of the Coronavirus on the Company, the market, economic and environmental conditions in the digital and communications technology, healthcare and hospitality real estate, other commercial real estate equity and debt, and investment management sectors, whether the Company will continue to accelerate or otherwise successfully execute its strategic transition to become the leading digital real estate and infrastructure focused company, the Company's bright prospects for growth and whether the Company will generate long-term, sustainable value for stockholders, the Company's ability to capitalize on compelling global opportunities in the digital ecosystem and simplify its business to deliver value to its stockholders, the amount and timing of purchases of the Company's stock by the Company's joint venture with Blackwells, the Company's liquidity and whether it can continue to maintain ample liquidity and financial flexibility, the Company's use of its liquidity, the Company's ability to pay dividends, the Company's board composition, the impact of the digital transition on the Company's legacy portfolios and assets, including whether such transition will result in significant impairments to certain of its investments, including healthcare and hospitality assets, including whether such transition will result in any of the anticipated benefits, the Company's ability to continue deploying capital in its sponsored Digital Colony fund or to raise additional capital in future funds, whether the Company will enter into a definitive agreement to dispose of its management contract with CLNC, the pace of additional asset monetizations and other risks and uncertainties detailed in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC (News - Alert)"), including but not limited to the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019. All forward-looking statements reflect the Company's good faith beliefs, assumptions and expectations, but they are not guarantees of future performance. Additional information about these and other factors can be found in the Company's reports filed from time to time with the SEC.

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The Chief Executive Officer of Poultry, Aqua culture and Livestock Show (PALS) Africa says the fear of hunger killing many Ghanaians should the nation be locked down, is a testament of the need to take lessons from COVID-19 seriously.

Mr. John Bewuah Edusei expressing worry about the inroads that the pandemic is making in Ghana said the best way to fight it would have been a total lockdown but feared that could be a dire alternative for now.

He said unlike in Nigeria where the government boldly shut down its boarders for several months, there will be chaos in Ghana should the government attempt the shutting down of the nation's boarders for even two months.

This, according to him is because the Nigerian government took that action to protect its local producers and encourage domestication leading to an increase in employment, but in Ghana almost every food is imported.

In 2017, Ghana spent 1.1 billion dollars on rice imports alone and 90 million dollars on dairy products. The country also spent 311 million dollars on fish imports alone in 2018, 275 million dollars and 3.7 million dollars on meat and poultry imports respectively in 2019.

These figures according to the PALS Africa CEO should be alarming to every well meaning Ghanaian and should immediately lead to brainstorming on how Ghana can grow and eat what it needs.

As government considers a lockdown, they should also be considering feeding the nation for that period of time, where is the food? Or should we overlook people who will be dying possibly from hunger and starvation?He asked rhetorically.

Mr. Bewuah Edusei also noted that even if Ghana did not close its boarders, the amount of imports would most probably decline since other countries would be preserving food for its citizens and would put in measures to discourage exports.

Every government will put in measures to protect its citizens and hence food exports will be minimized. So a country like Ghana that has failed in food production needs to take serious lessons in agriculture from what is happening now. He pointed.

According to him Ghana spends about 2.2 billion dollars annually on food imports and this is a huge drain on the nation's economy.

However, if successive governments had some plans on reducing the imports gradually and support local food producers, Ghana would not have been where it is today.

It's high time we took agriculture serious in this country and encouraged ourselves to produce more otherwise we'll all die of hunger the next time any disaster occurs. He noted passionately.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - A total of 82 detainees in the new penitentiary and rehabilitation centre at Tripoli central prison have been released, the city's chief of police, Col
Houston First Corp. will furlough more than half its 200-plus employees, after seeing the COVID-19 pandemic turn its projected $1 million budget surplus into an expected deficit of more than $30 million.

In addition, the downtown city-owned and operated Hilton Americas hotel has furloughed 550 of its 620 employees, general manager Jacques DRovencourt told board members during a virtual meeting Thursday afternoon.

Business for the citys convention agency has screeched to a near halt. Events at the convention center have been canceled  with few exceptions  through June and July, resulting in virtually no revenue, staff told board members Thursday. Occupancy rates at the Hilton Americas are in the single digits, where they are expected to remain into the summer.

Parking revenue also is down 50 to 70 percent, and hotel occupancy taxes are down 35 to 50 percent.

Houston First CEO Brenda Bazan, who in a statement called the furloughs extremely difficult, said the last few weeks have been the most trying in her 40-plus-year career. She said she previously thought nothing could get worse than the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.

I will never ever say that again, she said. Because it can.

Bazan could not say how long the furloughs would last, but said the agency will bring people back as the business demand allows. The affected employees still are receiving benefits, but they have been encouraged to file for unemployment and search for other jobs in the meantime.

This was an extremely difficult decision, but the unprecedented impact from the COVID-19 virus has dealt a devastating blow to our lifeline, the travel industry, Bazan said.

The furloughs take effect Saturday.

The agency plans to cover the projected deficit  Bazan called $30 million a conservative estimate  with $11 million in reserves and $20 million in debt, according to a memo obtained by the Chronicle.

According to the memo, in addition to furloughing 60 percent of its workers  about 135 people  Houston First has suspended convention and theater operations, slashed third-party contracts for services like food, cleaning and parking, and established a hiring freeze.

Board members and staff expressed hope for a strong bounce-back once the virus is contained, and people who were pent up in isolation look to travel.

The nearly-empty Hilton Americas, adjacent to the George R. Brown Convention Center, has 1,200 rooms. Mayor Sylvester Turner announced plans Wednesday to lease two hotels for around 180 rooms for COVID-19 patients and the citys homeless population.

Turners office said Thursday the city cannot use the Hilton for that purpose.

The Hilton Hotel was already partially sealed off and undergoing renovations before the COVID-19 became a health emergency, spokeswoman Mary Benton said. During this time, the property will expand the needed work so it will not be available.

Reporter Mike Morris contributed to this article.

dylan.mcguinness@chron.com
Fair warning.

Because Ive been staying home watching so many briefings, reading too many news and science websites, looking at too many charts and graphs, sifting through too much conflicting stuff, Im feeling a tad edgy.

I fear Im not alone.

President Trump, for example, is itching to reopen the country by Easter after all of us were earlier told (by him) that stay-home/social-distancing could last until midsummer.

He started this new prod last Sunday with an all-capped tweet: "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSLEF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!

That 15-day period, better known as the federal governments 15 Days to Slow the Spread, expires Monday, March 30.

I think everybody knows which way WE WANT to go. But who knows when we safely, sanely can go there?

A large part of the problem is that its increasingly difficult to put much confidence in what the president says. About testing, medical equipment, unproven cures or, well, almost anything.

Take his recent claim that U.S. automakers, including Ford and General Motors, are filling a dire need for ventilators by making them right now.

The Associated Press reports neither company started production, adding, It would take them months, if not longer, to begin production, even if thats possible.

(Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his company is working on ventilators, but didnt say how long that work might take.)

Oh, and it was a little jarring to hear Trump say -- at a briefing on a national health crisis -- that after he decided not to take his $400,000 government salary, Nobody said thank you.

OK, thank you. Now can we get back to us?

18 Pa. House of Representatives vote remotely for first time in history

Closer to home, I think Gov. Tom Wolf is getting edgy, too.

I gave him high marks early in the crisis. He was steady, assertive, in command.

Now, maybe Im watching too much New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (and when do Democrats start that presidential draft movement?); but Wolf seems somewhat less sure than not so long ago.

Im thinking of a briefing from his York County home, wearing a Mr. Rogers sweater, conveying a comforting touch, that suddenly clanked with some inexplicable ducking of questions submitted by media.

This was Monday and his stay-home order for seven counties -- Philadelphia, Allegheny, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, Monroe -- with more than 5.5 million people.

He has since added 15 more counties, including Lancaster, York and Berks. Likely more to come.

But during that initial stay-home briefing, Wolf grimly said, Dont leave your home unless someones life depends on you leaving.

In answering a question about getting groceries, take-out from restaurants, taking a walk, Wolf again said go out only for life-sustaining reasons.

Wow. Pretty serious lockdown stuff.

Yet the Governors Office press releases say people in those counties can leave home for a long list of things, including working in facilities and businesses that remain open, taking a walk or a run, caring for another family member or pet and getting necessary services or supplies for themselves and their family, which you have to figure includes food.

So, not as dire as presented? Then why not say so in that briefing?

All of us, even if we struggle to do so, should cut public officials some slack. The pressure on public service has perhaps never been greater.

But Trumps overstated optimism, or state government orders presented as being more than they are, dont help citizens seeking to navigate a crisis.

Uncertainty is a heavy weight. Weve got enough of it as is.

John Baer may be reached at baer.columnist@gmail.com

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As the federal and state governments grapple with the potential effects of the Covid-19 pandemic across the nation, there has been an increasing call for mobilizing the military to contribute to the pandemic response. In a New York Times opinion piece, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo suggested that the Army Corps of Engineers should be called into service to assist to "retrofit and refit existing facilities" to serve as temporary medical centers

Indeed, the Joint Staff received approval from the Secretary of Defense early in February to refresh their contingency plans for the "response, isolation, quarantine, restriction of movement and community-based intervention" of any potential pandemic. But what does all that actually mean for our country's citizens and government officials as we address the anxiety associated with the coronavirus? What can the military contribute?

Having once served as the J7 on the Joint Staff -- leading the staff office that reviewed contingency (or "war") plans - and also having served as a commander of forces that contribute military personnel to support civilian authorities, I have a pretty good idea of what the military can and can't do as they are tasked to contribute to the overall response.

Whenever military forces are given the mission to "provide support to civil authorities," the Secretary of Defense, Joint Staff and the Commander charged with the mission first consider two competing requirements: how does the military force continue to maintain readiness for their priority task of defending the country, and what forces could the military provide that could be mobilized and that would best contribute to the department -- in this case, Health and Human Services -- requesting the support?

Governor Cuomo suggests that the Army Corps of Engineers -- a force of approximately 37,000 civilian and soldiers spread all over the world -- could assist in overhauling and renovating hospitals.

The Corps is a terrific and professional organization. With an "all-hands on deck" order, the Corps could certainly contribute, but in a very limited capacity, to establishing and reinforcing health care facilities. Those available forces in the US would need prioritization by the Secretary of Defense and would likely be stretched to provide the kind of support desired in more than just a few cities.

There have also been suggestions that the military could provide medical personnel to support civilian authorities. This is certainly a possibility. While I was serving in Europe in 2005, the US Army in Europe (USAREUR) received a request from the US State Department to send a Combat Surgical Hospital (known as a CSH, an acronym slightly changed from the famous Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals, or MASH's, of the past) to support a humanitarian relief operation in Pakistan.

That unit had just returned from Iraq, and had already been tasked to head to Afghanistan, so it was necessary to weigh their military mission against providing support to civilian authorities. This small hospital was deployed and treated over 80,000 patients in a period of a few months. But there are caveats to this kind of mission.

In an excellent piece on this topic Sunday, CNN reporters outlined various aspects of mobilizing the limited active and reserve elements of the military's medical command structure to support civilian authorities.

One thing not addressed, though, was that mobilizing reserve or National Guard health care providers for duty would likely take them away from the civilian hospital from whence they came, as most doctors and nurses in the guard and reserve work full-time in the civilian health care industry.

What's more, a large percentage of our military - Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, as well as doctors, nurses, hospitals and engineers - are stationed overseas. After discounting those, there are about a million-plus "military forces" stationed throughout the United States. All of those are skilled military personnel trained in a variety of jobs and functions, from infantry, artillery, submarine crew, to fighter and bomber airplane mechanics.

Very few of these individuals have the kind of specific skills -- as health care workers or construction engineers, for example - that many politicians need and are now demanding.

To get the kinds of specialties that would best contribute to the pandemic fight would require stripping units of their trained personnel who contribute to other missions. Do we want to close the clinics in Germany, Korea and Japan (and other places), close the hospitals and clinics that support our forces in combat, while bringing home medics from Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places where we're operating?

Do we also understand that there are a very limited number of hospitals and clinics - less than 1% of the hospital facilities currently in our civilian population - where over 2 million family members go for health care?

Additionally, when considering using the Army Corps of Engineers, would the American people be okay with suddenly pulling those who control and service the dams, waterways, flood plains, parks and major construction sites and projects, where a relatively small group of soldiers and civilians are keeping operations safe, and focusing their talents on a relatively few number of locations?

These are the kinds of questions that demand analysis and answers from those in the Pentagon when anyone suggests the sweeping demand that we must "mobilize the military!"

It becomes readily apparent: asking for military forces is never a straightforward or easy "ask."

There are, however, some tasks the military can be mobilized to perform that would significantly contribute to mitigating the Covid-19 pandemic. Primarily, the military could assist with command and control of operations and functions, given that commanders and their staffs continuously practice managing information and deliberations regarding crisis decision making.

Additionally, the military -- both active and reserve forces - are extremely good at logistics, transportation and supply chain activity. Lt. Gen. Russ Honore's actions as the commander of Joint Task Force Katrina is a perfect example of how a military commander can contribute to both command and control as well as logistical support that contributes when mitigating and reducing a crisis.

During the Ebola crisis, America's military provided additional support --under a two-star general -- by establishing a facility in West Africa to train doctors from all over the world before they entered the "hot zone."

Given that medical experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Protection and the Department of Health and Human Services predict that the country's inventory of doctors, nurses and clinicians will soon be overwhelmed by the stresses associated with the pandemic, the military could help to establish a similar training facility that would prepare the next group of health care providers on procedures for addressing various factors of the disease before they "enter the fight," like what was done in Africa.

But again, these kinds of command and control, staff and logistical capabilities and training preparations -- and the number of headquarters available and generals trained in contributing to these kinds of responses - are limited. But the Department of Defense will parse them out and provide what is needed to best support the American people.

It's important to understand that part of any communication plan addressing crisis response must incorporate a transparent approach to what the military can do ... and what they call "the art of the doable." For those uninitiated with military operations or military personnel, resources and abilities, it's appropriate to outline exactly what the civilian authority is asking for, what might be provided ... and what is beyond the capacity of those wearing the uniform.

There are things the military can do, and there are things that are just not aligned with feasible or viable actions.

From experience, I know that the Pentagon knows what they might be able to provide, and they are willing to push the envelope to give what will contribute to defeating this pandemic. That's something they've done in the past and what they are prepared to do in any emergency.

The first step comes, though, when civilian authorities first provide a strategy, request the task that needs to be accomplished and elaborate on the tasks they need the military to perform.
India's soft power diplomacy came into play during this cataclysm affecting the world as the pandemic defies barriers and borders, notes Rup Narayan Das.

IMAGE: Shanghai, March 23, 2020. Photograph: Aly Song/Reuters

The dreaded coronavirus reached India at a time when India was at the threshold of some major diplomatic outreach after hosting President Trump in February and earlier President Xi Jinping in Ocober last year.

Prime Minister Modi had to reschedule at least two of his major diplomatic outreach consequent upon the outbreak and spread of the pandemic.

First he deferred his proposed visit to Brussels to participate in the India-Europe summit scheduled for March 13 and then cancelled his visit to Bangladesh to participate in the birth centenary celebration of Banga Bandhu Mujibur Rahman which was held on March 17.

He, however, made good the loss through a video conference.

The trilateral Russia-India-China ministerial meeting scheduled to be held in Sochi in Russia on March 22 and 23 was also deferred owing to the outbreak of the pandemic.

In fact, the government's time, attention, energy and resource, for all the right reasons, are now directed to deal with the prevention and treatment of covid-19 affected persons.

This, however, has not deterred the government to engage with stakeholders through virtual means and teleconferences.

It is interesting to note how the delicate and sensitive India-China relations played out during the spread of covid-19.

In the first place, it almost disturbed the timeline of events that the two countries had planned for 2020 on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries which were discussed between Prime Minister Modi and Chinese President Xi at the Mamallapuram informal summit last October.

Xi had also invited Modi to visit China for the third informal meeting.

Be that as it may, Modi in a very proactive manner reached out to China when he sent medical supplies including masks and gears to China for the use of those affected with the virus and also wrote letter to Xi, expressing India's solidarity with China in its fight against the deadliest menace.

India had to set aside the ban on export of all kinds of personal protection equipment so as to facilitate the supply of the medical equipment to China at a very critical time.

Earlier, on January 31, External Affairs Minister Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar expressed full confidence that China will eventually win the battle against the coronavirus in a phone conversation with Chinese State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. China responded to the goodwill gesture with gratitude.

The Chinese foreign ministry said that India's acts demonstrate its friendship with China.

The evacuation of Indian and few foreign national stranded in China during the trying time is an instance of coordination and cooperation between the two countries.

Although India and China on earlier occasions have come to the rescue of their nationals in distress in respective countries, the evacuation of Indian nationals from Wuhan is unprecedented in recent history.

The message of the evacuation exercise is very clear: The two countries being neighbours, it is only prudent to learn to live with each other.

The bottom line is mutual sensitivity and concerns.

Hopefully, the covid-19 will pass sooner than later.

The two countries will have to work hard to execute and implement the slew of events lined up in the run-up to the 70th anniversary of the diplomatic relations.

India also reached out to the SAARC fraternity during this period of the virus outbreak.

In a video conference on March 15 with the leaders and representatives of SAARC countries, Prime Minister Modi proposed an emergency fund with an initial offer of $10 million from India to combat the pandemic in the region and to benefit from the best practices.

He also said that India was assembling a rapid response eam of doctors and specialists, along with testing kits and other equipment, to be made available to member countries, if required.

The proposal has been fructified and has received immediate traction.

In response to Prime Minister Modi's appeal, both Bhutan and Nepal each have pledged $1 million to the emergency corpus.

India in the meanwhile has received requests from member countries for assistance in the form of masks, shoe cover, gloves, disinfectants and other items.

Prime Minister Modi also held a telephonic conversation with Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, which now holds the presidency of the G-20 and emphasised the need for coordinated efforts to address the global challenge arising out of the coronavirus outbreak.

Going beyond the perimeter of the region, India also took on board a number of major countries, besides the US to cooperate and coordinate efforts to fight covid-19.

Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla joined a telephonic conference call initiated by US Deputy Secretary of State Steve Biegun.

The teleconference also included senior representatives from Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, New Zealand and Japan.

It was decided that these countries would cooperate on vaccine development, challenges of stranded citizens, assistance to countries in need and to mitigate the impact of covid-19 on global economy.

India's soft power diplomacy came into play during this cataclysm affecting the world as the pandemic defies barriers and borders and it projected Prime Minister Modi as a statesman of substance and stature.

Rup Narayan Das, PhD is a senior fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research at the Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi.
Big and small businesses affected by COVID-19 KANSAS CITY, Kan. - Metro businesses, both big and small, are feeling the impact of COVID-19. Those struggles could impact government tax revenues as well. There were no customers at the Mission Fresh Fashion store on Johnson Drive Tuesday, a business run by Becky Hanf and her husband for 22 years.

Every kind of promo works in some small way . . . And we're not giving ANYBODY biz advice . . . But picking up direct sales by way of any of the social media outlets requires a consistent and expensive promo effort . . . Meanwhile, small time local biz with something to sell and simple transactions to make can't replace simply directing customers to their online store now that retail is taking another horrific hit.Here's more biz insight and a glimpse at locals struggling to survive amid the shut down. Checkit:
From pollution levels reducing drastically to now marine life being able to breathe in peace, it seems like the coronavirus lockdown is seriously helping nature recoup.

Twitter/@_harikrishnan_s

Olive Ridley sea turtles have come ashore for mass nesting at the six-kilometre-long Rushikulya beach of Odishas Ganjam district in the last five days and it's owing to the coronavirus lockdown.

These rare sea turtles are renowned for their mass nesting and come to Indian shores and Odishas coast every nesting season; the areas are their largest nesting site in the region. According to the Odisha Wildlife Organisation ( OWO), nearly 50 per cent of the world population of these rare turtles come to Odishas coast for nesting.

On March 22 at around 2 am, 2,000 female Olive Ridleys started coming out of the sea to the beach, Berhampur Divisional Forest Officer (DFO), Amlan Nayak, told The Hindu.

ARRIBADA ~Spanish Word - means 'Arrival' 

Refers to mass-nesting event when 1000s of Turtles come ashore at the same time to lay eggs on the same beach.

Interestingly, females return to the very same beach from where they first hatched, to lay their eggs.

 Olive Ridley Turtle pic.twitter.com/dvzslqA8zW  Ankit Kumar, IFS (@AnkitKumar_IFS) March 26, 2020

The female turtles reportedly return to the same beach from where they hatched, to lay their eggs. And the coast of Odisha is the largest mass nesting site for them.

According to the Forest Department, over 2,78,502 mother turtles became a part of the day-time nesting activity. Over 72,142 Olive Ridleys have arrived at the beach to dig nests and lay eggs, since Tuesday morning.

Thousands of olive ridley turtles nesting on the beaches of Odisha.

Their normal predators (humans) are in quarantine.

This season, their numbers will explode in the oceans.

There is a silver lining in this dark cloud after all. pic.twitter.com/l0DMLbGp4l  Dr. Ashley Jacob (@DrAshJac) March 26, 2020





According to The Hindu report, each nest dug up by the turtles, on an average, contains around 100 eggs. The incubation period is around 45 days.

Reuters

Forest Department also claimed that this year saw the highest number of turtles, "Every alternate year is either a bad year or a good year. However, in the last two years we have seen a phenomenal increase in nesting numbers. This year we have estimated that at least 4.75 lakh turtles came on to nest on Rushikulya beach."

Mass nesting of Olive Ridley turtles in Odisha coast while nation is at 21 day lockdown. #Nature #21daylockdown #pandemia pic.twitter.com/z7ihzOYu0E  Harikrishnan S (@_harikrishnan_s) March 26, 2020





Tourists have been barred from visiting Rushikulya due to the countrywide lockdown in place since March 24. But turtle researchers and environmentalists have been allowed to visit the nesting sites.

While mass nesting at Gahirmatha is over, it is continuing at Rushikulya. It is estimated that around six crore eggs will be laid this year.
With only the most essential trips now taking place, and many people confined to our homes, the coronovirus has proven far more powerful than the travel bug. You needn't feel trapped though. Despite the global no-fly zone and instructions to stay home, there are plenty of ways to mentally escape while staying responsible and remaining right where you are.

The best books to satisfy your wanderlust

In the much-quoted words of Saint Augustine, "The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." When you're prevented from traveling, there are a few better ways of transporting your mind to exotic destinations than through the pages of a book. And fortunately, almost every title ever published is now available through the click of your phone. Tales focused on travel or set in far-flung locales come in all shapes and sizes. There's book club fare: "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert or Frances Mayes' "Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy," for example. To alleviate the current gloom, you can laugh along with the humorous observations of Bill Bryson, or get out of your head altogether with Bill Burroughs in an intense trip to Mexico and Tangier in "Naked Lunch."

"Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy" is a book based on American author Frances Mayes's purchase of a dilapidated villa named Bramasole in Cortona, Italy. Guglielmo De Micheli/The Life Images Collection

Explore classics of a bygone time with E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India" or the Italy and England-laden "A Room with A View," or dig into the epic collections of adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton. At 15,000-plus pages for just $2.99 on Kindle, his work is an outstanding value at 50 pages per penny. A fellow go-it-alone type, Burton would've gotten along splendidly with Paul Theroux, one of the finest travel writers at work today. Theroux's 1975 travelogue "The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia" details a solo return journey from London through Europe and the Middle East, across India and Southeast Asia, then back through the former U.S.S.R. At the age of 65, Theroux gamely retraced the journey, recounting the trip in 2008's "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star."

Steve McCurry's photo of "Afghan Girl" as seen at an exhibition of his work at Collezioni Comunali d'Arte in Bologna, Italy on Nov. 30, 2018. Roberto Serra - Iguana Press

Though he prefers to travel on his own, for the past three decades Theroux has partnered on numerous occasions with top photographer Steve McCurry, who snapped the famous "Afghan Girl" portrait. The duo's latest collaborations  "Deep South" (2015) and "On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey" (2019)  use McCurry's photos to illustrate Theroux's travels and conversations in the American South and beyond the Mexican border.

Films to whisk you away to faraway lands

Should you prefer movies to the written word, cinema provides ample opportunities to escape the confines of your house and home city.

Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda ride through the desert in a scene from "Easy Rider." Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive

Fancy a virtual trip to the currently shuttered country of India? Go there with "The Darjeeling Limited." A visit to Tokyo and Kyoto is inadvisable for now, but can be safely conducted via "Lost in Translation." Borders are tight stateside, though you can road trip across America with "National Lampoon's Vacation" or get your motor running with "Easy Rider." You can't go to Phuket or Krabi in Thailand, but you can watch "The Beach" or the James Bond classic "The Man with the Golden Gun" (which comes with a "bonus stay" at The Peninsula Hong Kong).

Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Klaus-Maria Brandauer on the set of "Out of Africa," a movie based on the book by Karen Blixen. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis

Getting into Africa is iffy, though an evening with "Out of Africa" is no problem. "The Talented Mr. Ripley" puts Italy in your palm, while "Amelie" presents Paris at its most magical. As for London, would it be wrong given current circumstances to suggest "28 Days Later?" For something lighter, go with "Bridget Jones's Diary."

Take your taste buds on a trip

Film and literature are far from the only avenues for imaginative traveling. Look up interesting recipes from different countries and cook a trip-around-the-world meal  a Thai appetizer, a Peruvian main course and a dessert from Spain, let's say.

Order a mix of bottles from around the world and design your own international wine tasting at home. Westend61

Order in a dozen bottles of vino from both old and new worlds and do a self-guided wine flight of fancy (or maybe just a half dozen if you're isolated on your own).

Facetime with family and friends
As the U.S. prepares an unprecedented $2 trillion stimulus package to respond to a similarly unprecedented shutdown in economic activity, Americans are wondering if its going to be enough to avoid disaster.

Many employees have already been furloughed, others have been let go as employers enact cost-cutting measures on a scale not seen since the Great Recession, which later required billions in stimulus measures signed by then-President Barrack Obama to support a years-long recovery effort.

And yet, despite the fact that the size of the governments response is nearly twice as large and much quicker to respond to what we saw in 2008, Jason Furman, Obamas top economist and former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, warned Yahoo Finance on Tuesday that it still might not be enough.

I think this is the biggest, fastest thing I've ever seen Congress do and I'm still not sure if it's enough, Furman told Yahoo Finances YFi PM. In some sense, I grade them like an A for how quickly they got here and how big it was, [but] to some degree it may be up against a problem that's even bigger and faster."

Jason Furman served as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, helping frame the administrations response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Economists calculating the short-term damage from the coronavirus shutdown are already in agreement. Weekly unemployment claims skyrocketed to 3.283 million Thursday morning, marking the worst weekly job loss number ever recorded. That number never surpassed 700,000 on a weekly level even during the peak of the Great Recession.

As the size of the looming economic fallout grows, so too are the calls for stimulus to help Americans recover. On March 5, Furman himself penned an op-ed calling for $1,000 stimulus checks for every American as part of a $350 billion stimulus. At the time, the plan was rejected by the White House and Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, despite the fact a much larger bill of the same plan looks to be the response now.

The Senate unanimously approved the $2 trillion stimulus bill, which includes $350 billion in loans to small businesses, $500 billion in relief for larger corporations, and stimulus checks for qualifying Americans. As Furman calculates it, the multilevel approach is a solid strategy to make sure stimulus reaches Americans quickly whether or not they are currently employed.

Story continues

I think what you want here is a belt and suspenders type of approach where you do a lot of things at once, he said. Unemployment insurance is really critical for people that lose their jobs, but here's a number of people that see income reduction and face problems that don't get that unemployment insurance, so a blanket check to everyone can provide a bit of a baseline. By itself is it enough? No, but it's better than nothing.

To that extent, Americans earning less than $75,000 are expected to receive a stimulus check amounting to $1,200. Joint filers earning less than $150,000 would be expected to receive $2,400. But beyond that, Furman also complimented the support for businesses looking to avoid having to fire or furlough workers during a slowdown. Pointing back to the $80 billion in auto bailouts during the financial crisis, Furman highlighted that the government was paid back on nearly all of its crisis aid, save for about $10 billion. In the grand scheme of what the alternative costs would have been in unemployment insurance and millions of laid off Americans, Furman defended the strategy as a worthwhile deal for taxpayers.

It ended up having a net cost, but that net cost was small compared to the total support and I think small compared to the million-plus jobs that were saved, he said. If we lose 10% of our money on these bailouts, but these companies continue and jobs are preserved I think that would be fine.

Relief drop in the bucket for states

The one critique Furman did offer based off of what he learned from helping Obama navigate the post-crisis recovery was that stimulus aid to states might need to be boosted as states like New York grapple with the mounting costs of coronavirus testing and hospital visits.

On Wednesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo lambasted the Senates bill for only projecting $3.8 billion in aid for his state. Noting New York has already been hit with an estimated $1 billion in costs associated with the outbreak, Cuomo called the aid a drop in the bucket.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks during a news conference at the Jacob Javits Center that will house a temporary hospital in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Tuesday, March 24, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Not supporting hard hit states like New York would be problematic for a number of reasons, according to what Furman saw play out in the recovery era years of Obamas presidency.

One of the reasons for the slow recovery after the financial crisis in 2007 through 2009 was that even as the federal government was expanding spending, states and localities were cutting back on their spending, he explained, estimating it shaved about 0.5% off of GDP growth a year. That's something from a macroeconomic perspective we want to avoid now. This legislation is very good in providing money that the states need for Covid-related costs. Not enough for New York, but enough for most states. What it doesn't do, though, is replace all they're going to lose because of the recession.

In the case of New York, Cuomo is projecting up to a $15 billion shortfall now as a result of the coronavirus impact. He also warned the same could inevitably happen for other states if the crisis continues to spread. That could lead to more governors facing the tough decision of choosing what spending to eliminate, Furman said.

Under their balanced budget requirements, they'll need to cut spending on teaching and on, you know, police and parks and anything else they do in their states, he said. That is a big, big missing piece in this legislation.

As Congress prepares to pass its third round of stimulus tied to the coronavirus outbreak, Furman said more state aid might need to be the focus of a fourth round if it comes in the future.

Zack Guzman is the host of YFi PM as well as a senior writer and on-air reporter covering entrepreneurship, cannabis, startups, and breaking news at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @zGuz.

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance

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The Senate has passed an unparalleled $2 trillion economic rescue package to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, clearing the way for the House to vote on the measure followed by President Donald Trump's signature.

The bill passed the Senate unanimously by a vote of 96-0 late on Wednesday night after days of contentious debate and negotiations. 'This is a proud moment,' said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as the vote was being finalized.

Trump touted the Senate passage in a tweet after midnight, writing: '96-0 in the United States Senate. Congratulations AMERICA!'

The 883-page measure is the largest economic relief bill in U.S. history, and both parties' leaders were desperate for quick passage as the virus took lives and jobs by the hour.

The package would give direct payments to most Americans, expand unemployment benefits and provide a $367 billion program for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home.

Most Americans making less than $75,000 as a single tax filer would receive a $1,200 direct payment under the bill. The payments would go out by direct deposit for those who have recently paid taxes or received tax refunds that way, but for others physical checks will be sent.

'This is a proud moment,' said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (above) as the vote was being finalized. The bill passed the Senate unanimously by a vote of 96-0

Trump and his point man on the bill, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, are seen at a briefing on Wednesday

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has said that direct payments will be disbursed as soon as April 6, experts say that payments sooner than May are extremely unlikely.

One of the last issues to close concerned $500 billion for guaranteed, subsidized loans to larger industries, including a fight over how generous to be with the airlines. Hospitals would get significant help as well.

A huge cash infusion for hospitals expecting a flood of COVID-19 patients grew during the talks to an estimated $130 billion. Another $45 billion would fund additional relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency for local response efforts and community services.

The package is intended as relief for an economy spiraling into recession or worse and a nation facing a grim toll from an infection that's killed nearly 20,000 people worldwide.

Mnuchin, asked how long the aid package would keep the economy afloat, said: 'We've anticipated three months. Hopefully, we wont need this for three months.'

It comes on a day of fast-moving developments in which:

Dr Fauci said Americans should prepare for the outbreak to 'become seasonal'

Bill de Blasio predicted 'half' of city's 8.6M residents would get coronavirus

The NYC mayor warned against 'false hope' of lifting the lockdown at Easter

Trump began to water down his prior statements about Easter end to shutdown

Said some areas that were hardest hit would not be able to reopen that soon

Wednesday marked deadliest day of the outbreak in the US with 200+ deaths

US deaths have exceeded 1,000 and the total cases now stand at 68,000

Senate passage of the bill leaves final congressional approval up to the Democratic-controlled House on Friday. House members are scattered around the country and the timetable for votes in that chamber was unclear.

The bipartisan Senate vote raises the possibility that the bill could pass the House by a procedure known as unanimous consent, in which only one member of each party needs to be present.

A voice vote would also be an option, in which the Speaker asks for yeas and nays.

Either option could be defeated by a determined House member however, either by objecting to the unanimous consent, or raising an objection that there is no quorum for a voice vote.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is seen on Wednesday night

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, swung behind the bipartisan agreement, saying it 'takes us a long way down the road in meeting the needs of the American people

House Democratic and Republican leaders have hoped to clear the measure for Trump's signature by a voice vote without having to call lawmakers back to Washington.

Insistently optimistic, President Donald Trump said of the greatest public-health emergency in anyone's lifetime, 'I dont think its going to end up being such a rough patch' and anticipated the economy soaring 'like a rocket ship' when it's over. Yet he implored Congress late in the day to move on critical aid without further delay.

Underscoring the effort's sheer magnitude, the bill finances a response with a price tag that equals half the size of the entire $4 trillion annual federal budget.

But the drive by leaders to speed the bill through the Senate was slowed as four conservative Republican senators from states who economies are dominated by low-wage jobs demanded changes, saying the legislation as written might give workers like store clerks incentives to stay on unemployment instead of returning return to their jobs since they may earn more money if they're laid off than if they're working.

Other objections floated in from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has become a prominent Democrat on the national scene as the country battles the pandemic.

Cuomo, whose state has seen more deaths from the pandemic than any other, said, 'I'm telling you, these numbers don't work.'

Ardent liberals like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were restless as well, but top Washington Democrats assured them that a fourth coronavirus bill will follow this spring and signaled that delaying the pending measure would be foolish.

The sprawling measure is the third coronavirus response bill produced by Congress and by far the largest. It builds on efforts focused on vaccines and emergency response, sick and family medical leave for workers, and food aid.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, swung behind the bipartisan agreement, saying it 'takes us a long way down the road in meeting the needs of the American people.'

Working in tandem after days of feuding, McConnell and top Democrat Chuck Schumer had pressed for passage of the legislation in the Republican-led Senate by the end of the day.

Five days of arduous talks produced the bill, creating tensions among Congress' top leaders, who each took care to tend to party politics as they maneuvered and battled over crafting the legislation. But failure is not an option, nor is starting over, which permitted both sides to include their priorities.

'That Washington drama does not matter any more,' McConnell said. 'The Senate is going to stand together, act together, and pass this historic relief package today.'

Dr. Fauci issues stark warning that coronavirus will 'come back in cycles' as Trump waters down his statements about reopening the country by Easter

Top government disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci issued a stark warning Wednesday that coronavirus may come back in cycles as the death toll in the United States hit 1035, with 252 people dying in a single day.

Speaking at the White House daily briefing the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that Americans should be prepared for the outbreak to 'become seasonal'.

His caution came as Donald Trump appeared to soften his desire to lift the lockdown across the county by Easter. The president said he still wants to reopen within that timeframe but acknowledge not all states could meet his timeline.

Opening up the country at Easter rather than two weeks later could kill 450,000 more Americans, graphs published by The New York Times show.

Dr Fauci told reporters: 'Would this possibly become a seasonal, cyclic thing? I think it very well might.'

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr Anthony Fauci issued a stark warning that coronavirus may come back in cycles as the death toll in the US hit 1035

The coronavirus expert explained that evidence of cases in 'the Southern Hemisphere and southern Africa and in the Southern Hemisphere countries' as they go into their winter seasons could lead to second cycles in America.

He said: 'And if in fact they have a substantial outbreak, it will be inevitable that we need to be prepared that we'll get a cycle around the second time.'

Fauci said the possibility of a second cycle 'totally emphasizes the need to do what we're doing in developing a vaccine, testing it quickly, and trying to get it ready so that we'll have a vaccine available for that next cycle'.

He offered optimism, saying he knows 'we'll be successful in putting this down now', adding: 'But we really need to be prepared for another cycle. And what we're doing, I believe, will prepare us well.'

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, backed up Fauci Wednesday, adding: 'We're dealing with Cycle A right now.'

Discussing lifting the lockdown Trump acknowledged: 'Im not going to do anything rash or hastily  I dont do that. But the country wants to get back to work.

'Theres big sections of our country that are very, you know little affected by whats taking place, then there are other sections that are very heavily affected. I would say by Easter well have a recommendation.'

There are more than 68,000 confirmed coronavirus cases across the U.S. as of Wednesday evening; more than 1,000 people have died.

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio predicts HALF of all New Yorkers will get coronavirus

Mayor Bill de Blasio predicted on Wednesday that half of all New Yorkers will eventually contract coronavirus.

New York, now the U.S. epicenter of the outbreak, has at least 30,811 confirmed cases, nearly 18,000 in New York City alone. The statewide death toll is nearing 300.

New York City has a population of about 8.6 million. If the current statewide mortality rate held true, deaths could exceed 40,000 in the city alone if half of all residents contracted coronavirus.

De Blasio said: 'It's a fair bet to say that half of all New Yorkers and maybe more than half will end up contracting this disease.'

Mayor Bill de Blasio predicted on Wednesday that half of all New Yorkers will eventually contract coronavirus

Health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, added: 'We think 50 percent by the end of this epidemic, this pandemic, so by the time September rolls around likely 50 percent, but it could also be much higher.'

De Blasio also told New Yorkers not 'cling to the false hope' of reopening by Easter after President Donald Trump suggested that date for lifting lockdowns.

De Blasio added: 'April is going to be tougher than March, and I think at this point, May could be even tougher than April. People need to be ready for that.'
Chicago, March 26, 2020 -- Researchers from New Mexico State University, University of South Carolina, Zhejiang University (China), and The Ohio State University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing, which examines strategies for restoring customer satisfication.

The study forthcoming in the March issue of the Journal of Marketing is titled "When and Why Saying "Thank You" Is Better Than Saying "Sorry" in Redressing Service Failures: The Role of Self-Esteem" and is authored by Yanfen You, Xiaojing Yang, Lili Wang, and Xiaoyan Deng.

Business leaders worldwide report that consumers' expectations of service quality are higher than ever. It is therefore not surprising that consumers report interactions with service providers as often rife with service failures. Consider restaurant service. A high proportion of U.S. consumers are dissatisfied with various aspects of their dining experience, with 60.8% complaining about slow services, 29.4% about inadequate food and beverage quality, and 21.6% about inefficient staff. In general, service failure consequences to businesses include considerable financial loss and negative word of mouth (WOM). For example, U.S. companies lost $1.6 trillion in 2016 from customer switching caused by poor service with 44% of unsatisfied customers venting their frustrations on social media.

In their initial recovery efforts after a service failure, service providers need to decide what to communicate to consumers to restore their satisfaction. A new study in the Journal of Marketing focuses on two symbolic recovery communications commonly utilized by service providers--appreciation (saying "thank you") versus apology (saying "sorry"). For example, when there is a service delay (e.g., a plumber shows up later than the scheduled time), the service provider could either say, "Thank you for your patience," or "I am sorry for the wait."

This research suggests that appreciation (saying "thank you") is often a more effective strategy than apology (saying "sorry") at restoring consumer satisfaction. That is, in the case of service failures, when service providers redress such failures with the appreciation (vs. apology) recovery communication strategy, consumers are more satisfied with the way service providers redress the failure, report higher overall satisfaction, form higher repatronage intentions, are more likely to recommend the service provider to other consumers, and are less likely to complain.

The researchers reason that a shift of focus in the interaction between service provider and consumer--from emphasizing the service provider's fault and accountability (apology) to spotlighting the consumer's merits and contributions (appreciation)--can increase consumer self-esteem and, in turn, enhance post recovery satisfaction.

The study also identifies situations in which the superiority effect of appreciation (vs. apology) holds or disappears. For example, the superiority of appreciation over apology is more likely to be observed among consumers who are narcissistic and when recovery communications are communicated after (vs. before) the service failure. The appreciation strategy is as effective as recovery messages that combine appreciation and apology, too. The appreciation strategy's superiority over apology also holds when material recovery needs to be provided in severe failures (e.g., a server provides a free drink in addition to expressing appreciation or apology).

These findings have substantial implications for service providers about how to effectively recover from service failures. As an initial step, service providers need to decide what to say to consumers to redress the failure and restore satisfaction. Despite abundant guidance on whether and when to redress a service failure, researchers have offered little advice on what service providers should say, except for recommending that they apologize for the service failure. This study suggests that saying "thank you" is more effective at restoring consumer satisfaction than saying "sorry."

What service providers ultimately say--"thank you" or "sorry"--should be tailored to certain situational factors (i.e., timing of the recovery, severity of failure, and presence of utilitarian recovery) and individual traits (e.g., consumers' narcissism). For example, the superior effect of appreciation disappears if service providers redress potential failures in advance. Furthermore, when the service failure is severe, utilitarian recovery or material compensation is a prerequisite for the superior effect of appreciation. Service providers should use appreciation in their service recovery for consumers with a higher narcissistic tendency (e.g., those who use social networks more, are younger), but should be aware that appreciation is not necessarily better than apology for those low in narcissism.

###

Full article and author contact information available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242919889894

About the Journal of Marketing

The Journal of Marketing develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders around the world. Published by the American Marketing Association since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline. Christine Moorman (T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University) serves as the current Editor in Chief.

https://www.ama.org/jm

About the American Marketing Association (AMA)

As the largest chapter-based marketing association in the world, the AMA is trusted by marketing and sales professionals to help them discover what's coming next in the industry. The AMA has a community of local chapters in more than 70 cities and 350 college campuses throughout North America. The AMA is home to award-winning content, PCM professional certification, premiere academic journals, and industry-leading training events and conferences.

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[March 26, 2020] Argo Group Announces That 2020 Annual General Meeting Will Be Held in Virtual Format

Argo Group International Holdings, Ltd. (NYSE: ARGO) ("Argo" or the "company") today announced that, due to the public health impact of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), the company will not hold its 2020 Annual General Meeting in person and will instead be holding it in a virtual format only. The Annual General Meeting will be held on Thursday, April 16, 2020 in a virtual meeting format only at www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/ARGO2020. In addition, the time of the Annual General Meeting has been adjusted to begin at 11 a.m., local Bermuda time (10 a.m. EDT). As described in the proxy materials for the Annual General Meeting previously distributed, shareholders as of the close of business on March 2, 2020, the record date, ar entitled to participate in the Annual General Meeting. To participate, shareholders will need the 16-digit control number included in the proxy materials delivered to such shareholder.



A notice regarding the change of location and time of the Annual General Meeting (the "Notice") is being filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission together with this press release. Additional information regarding the Annual General Meeting, shareholder participation and voting is provided in the Notice. ABOUT ARGO GROUP INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS, LTD.

Argo Group International Holdings, Ltd. (NYSE: ARGO), is an underwriter of specialty insurance and reinsurance products in the property and casualty market. Argo Group offers a full line of products and services designed to meet the unique coverage and claims handling needs of businesses in two primary segments: U.S. Operations and International Operations. Argo Group's insurance subsidiaries are A.M. Best-rated "A-" (Excellent), and Argo Group's U.S. insurance subsidiaries are Standard and Poor's-rated "A-" (Strong). More information on Argo Group and its subsidiaries is available at www.argolimited.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005721/en/

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Abu Dhabi Airports has appointed Shareef Hashim Al Hashmi as acting chief executive officer, strengthening the Airport Groups senior executive management team.

With a background in aeronautics and advanced technologies, Al Hashmis appointment supports Abu Dhabi Airports vision of becoming the worlds leading airports group through the implementation of cutting-edge technologies that enable the delivery of exceptional services and a smooth and seamless passenger experience.

Shareef Al Hashmi brings with him more than 20 years of experience in various areas of aerospace engineering, aircraft project management, technology development and implementation, defence and security.

In his previous role as the chief defence strategic programs officer, and chief information security officer of the Tawazun Economic Council, Al Hashmi oversaw a wide range of programmes and initiatives within the UAEs defence and aerospace industries.

Prior to joining the Tawazun Economic Council, Al Hashmi served in a number of key executive and management roles within various organisations that include, The Supreme Council for National Security, Outlook Energy Investment, Presidential Flight, and Royal Jet.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, chairman of Abu Dhabi Airports, said: We are pleased to announce the appointment of Shareef Al Hashmi to the position of acting chief executive officer of Abu Dhabi Airports during this crucial period in our journey to becoming the worlds leading airports group. I am confident that his excellent leadership and vast experience will empower Abu Dhabi Airports during this challenging time and further support Abu Dhabis transformation into a destination of choice for local, regional and international travellers.

Al Hashmi said: I am delighted to join Abu Dhabi Airports and look forward to building upon its strong foundations to further enhance its business and operations across the aviation sector. - TradeArabia News Service
Ottawa, March 26 : Canadian Prime Minister has Justin Trudeau announced that more financial aid will go to Canadians and businesses to weather the COVID-19 pandemic after the Canadian parliament approved the emergency package of $82 billion Canadian dollars (about $56 billion).

The parliament passed the legislation of the emergency package of 82 billion Canadian dollars earlier on Wednesday.

Trudeau told a daily news conference on Wednesday that his government is aware of the uncertainty facing the country and has merged two public assistance measures into a single program to make it easier for Canadians who are out of or off work because ofk COVID-19 to apply and receive money, Xinhua reported.

It combines the Emergency Care Benefit (10 billion Canadian dollars) and Emergency Support Benefit (5 billion Canadian dollars) into the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and will provide workers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic with 2,000 Canadian dollars (about $1,400) per month for the upcoming four months.

"If you lost your job because of COVID-19 but are full-time, contract or self-employed, this new benefit will be there for you. If you are sick or quarantined or looking after someone sick or taking care of your kids, it's there for you. If you are still employed but not receiving income because of this crisis, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit is there for you," Trudeau said.

Trudeau said an application portal will be launched quickly and Canadians should be able to get money within 10 days of applying, noting though that money is unlikely to start flowing to people until April 6.

He also indicated his government is reviewing the demands of business groups to substantially increase the wage subsidy so employers can keep workers on the payroll even if they are off in self-isolation.

"We are absolutely looking at more direct help for businesses," he said. "We are working with business groups. We are working with small business groups and hearing their concerns, looking very carefully at the models put forward in other parts of the world, like Denmark and Germany, and looking at how we could make that work and make an equivalency here in Canada," he said.

More than 60 Canadian business groups have reportedly urged Trudeau government to provide direct funding for employees.

The prime minister said the government will provide financial aid to the media companies that have seen their advertising revenue dry up as corporations have had to close their doors because of the COVID-19 crisis.

As of 1:30 p.m. Canada's Eastern Time on Wednesday, there were more than 3,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 30 deaths in Canada.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
The rapid spread of COVID-19 has closed movie theaters nationwide and forced the ailing film industry into a premature coma, but Hollywood isnt about to give up all its profits. Studios have rushed to get their films in front of viewers by collapsing the traditional theatrical/home window.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has closed movie theaters nationwide and forced the ailing film industry into a premature coma, but Hollywood isnt about to give up all its profits. Studios have rushed to get their films in front of viewers by collapsing the traditional theatrical/home window.

Reel World
Growing consumption of energy and fossil fuels over four decades did not play a significant role in increasing life expectancy across 70 countries.

New research, led by the University of Leeds, has quantified the importance of different development factors to improvements in physical health on an international scale.

Because a country's energy use is highly correlated with life expectancy at any single point in time, it has generally been assumed that growth in energy use is required for increases in life expectancy.

However, the findings of the new research revealed an unexpected paradox. Whilst energy and fossil fuel emissions were indeed strongly correlated with life expectancy at any single point in time, over a long period they were not found to be closely linked.

Between 1971 and 2014, increases in carbon emissions and primary energy use per person accounted for at most a quarter of the improvements in international life expectancy. International life expectancy improved by 14 years overall, meaning that expanded fossil fuel use and ensuing emissions accounted for less than 4 of these years.

Increases in energy use were, however, tied to 90% of growth in national incomes, measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per person.

In the context of the climate crisis and the need to dramatically reduce global energy use, these findings provide reassurance that countries could improve their citizens' lives without requiring more energy consumption.

The research was published today in Environmental Research Letters.

Lead author Professor Julia Steinberger, from the University of Leeds, said: "Increased use of fossil fuels and primary energy may have helped make countries richer, but it was not responsible for much improvement in human health.

"Our results directly counter the claims by fossil fuel companies that their products are necessary for well-being. Reducing emissions and primary energy use, while maintaining or enhancing the health of populations, should be possible."

Co-author Dr William Lamb, from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), said: "In terms of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, the challenge is to provide affordable, reliable, and clean energy for all, while ensuring that people enjoy open and equitable opportunities to cover their basic needs, such as nutrition, health care, education, safe water, clean air, among others."

Co-author Dr Marco Sakai, from the University of York, said: "We have to recognise the dual emergency that we face as humanity today. We need to not only stop climate change as soon as possible, but we also need at the same time to bring billions of people out of poverty across the world. Now we have evidence that we don't need to keep injecting fossil fuels into our economies or pursuing everlasting economic growth to face this dual emergency.

"So the question essentially comes down to this: should our societies be prioritising fossil-fuelled economic growth, or instead use clean energy to prioritise people's lives?"

The researchers also found that the growth in a country's income - its gross domestic product (GDP) per person - was only responsible for a minor portion of improvements in life expectancy - at most 29%.

Conversely, a different measure of the economy that removes the differences in the cost of living across countries, called purchasing power parity (PPP), was more closely tied to life expectancy over the 44-year period. Increases in PPP were tied to over half of the increases in life expectancy over the study period.

On this point, Dr Sakai said: "What this suggests is the importance of eradicating extreme levels of inequality within and across countries. Solving this dual challenge does not require adding more stuff in our economies, but prioritising wellbeing and distributing existing resources more equally."

The research was led by the University of Leeds along with Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Germany, and the University of York.

Development paradox

Previous research has established that there is a close correlation between a country's energy use and its average life expectancy at any one point in time.

However, the researchers used a new analysis method, called Functional Dynamic Composition, to understand how energy use, the economy and well-being, change over time, to establish the extent to which they are influencing each other.

Their new method cannot show causality, only association. However, a lack of association is evidence of a lack of causation.

The findings suggest that prioritising economic growth and burning increasing amounts of fossil fuels are not going to lead to significant improvements in human lifespan. Instead development efforts should focus directly on wellbeing goals such as satisfying human needs, including healthcare, good nutrition, and safe dwellings powered by clean energy.

Dr Lamb said: "The implications of this for the climate crisis are profound: rapidly decreasing emissions, even through reductions in energy use, need not be catastrophic in terms of our well-being, so long as human needs, such as food and household electricity, are prioritised.

"In short, this research shows we need to prioritise human well-being and acting on climate change over economic growth, because more fossil fuels do not lead to healthier lives."

What does improve wellbeing?

Whilst total primary energy use and carbon emissions accounted for a small proportion of improvements in life expectancy (26% and 22% respectively), a separate measure, residential electricity, accounted for 60% of the wellbeing improvements.

Residential electricity provides a measure of the amount of high quality and versatile energy being used directly within households.

The final development indicator included in the analysis was a measure of nutrition - the amount of calories per person in a country's food supply. Food supply was found to account for 45% of wellbeing improvements - despite itself only growing by a modest 18% during the period covered by the study.

Professor Steinberger said: "At this moment in history - when we are overconsuming and destroying environmental systems, whilst simultaneously trying to bring billions out of poverty to a good standard of living - it is vital that we re-orient our priorities so that people and planet can prosper as one.

"In terms of policies and politics, we need to face the reality that feeding fossil fuels to the economy is far less beneficial to human development outcomes than directly satisfying human needs."

###

Notes to Editors

The paper, titled 'Your money or your life? The carbon-development paradox', is published in Environmental Research Letters.

The DOI for the article is 10.1088/1748-9326/ab7461

For interview requests please contact David Lewis, Press Officer at the University of Leeds: d.lewis@leeds.ac.uk

University of Leeds

The University of Leeds is one of the largest higher education institutions in the UK, with more than 38,000 students from more than 150 different countries, and a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities. The University plays a significant role in the Turing, Rosalind Franklin and Royce Institutes.

We are a top ten university for research and impact power in the UK, according to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, and are in the top 100 of the QS World University Rankings 2020.

The University was awarded a Gold rating by the Government's Teaching Excellence Framework in 2017, recognising its 'consistently outstanding' teaching and learning provision. Twenty-six of our academics have been awarded National Teaching Fellowships - more than any other institution in England, Northern Ireland and Wales - reflecting the excellence of our teaching. http://www.leeds.ac.uk

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News about COVID-19 in New York is bleak. A rising number of cases and deaths, financial havoc, social isolation and uncertainty have made many residents feel understandably anxious during this time.

Soon, that could become a public health crisis of its own. Experts around the country have already begun to see spiking anxiety and other forms of emotional distress and they are bracing for increased mental health problems.

In New York, which has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, those mental health problems will likely be particularly acute. The general public is going to be traumatized, said Harvey Rosenthal, CEO of the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services, which represents community-based mental health providers, comparing the incoming anxiety with the one that affected New Yorkers in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11.

Though the government-ordered lockdowns to slow the virus spread affect everyone, different communities will face different concerns. Many older adults, especially those who live alone, may already have mental health problems stemming from lack of social connection. That is sure to worsen now that spending time with family and friends is prohibited and public meeting places such as restaurants and senior centers are closed. People with pre-existing mental health or substance abuse problems may be more likely to relapse in this stressful time. For New Yorkers who are losing jobs, the stress of where to find their next meal and support their families will cause a different source of mental health problems.

Mental health kind of overlays and connects with everything that's going on around us right now, said Matt Kudish, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness New York City.

Addressing those rising concerns comes with demand for both individual and collective action, mental health professionals have said. Mental health groups have started a new Strive for Five campaign to encourage people to identify five people in their life that they will check-in with daily over the next 30 days to tackle depression and anxiety associated with distance. Limiting intake of social media and news, while making sure you get exercise, have also been encouraged by mental health professionals.

Professional mental health support in the meantime has also largely shifted to digital therapy sessions, peer support groups and other forms of check-ins online or by phone. The National Alliance on Mental Illness New York City has shifted many of its support groups to phone or open online conferences and plans on creating a new group for people to share their concerns about the coronavirus. Some organizations are creating texting groups. Many have expanded their operating hours, even transitioning to 24/7 hotlines and other services.

This takes a trend that was already fast on the move, and just puts it on steroids, Rosenthal said.

He said the shift is good, particularly if it carries on after the coronavirus outbreak slows, given that it gives geographic flexibility and may allow providers to reach people in new innovative ways. However, poor access to technology may hamper those efforts. Cal Hedigan, who leads Community Access, a nonprofit which operates housing and other social services for people with mental health needs, has had to place an order for hundreds of phones for their clients so they can continue to get varying support.

Traditionally, access to professional therapy has often been hampered because it is costly and not everyone has insurance that will pay for it. In response, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has called on therapists, psychologists and other mental health professionals to volunteer their time so the state can begin to provide free, remote mental health services in the future. Though the details have yet to be fleshed out, Lisa Furst, assistant vice president of the Center for Advocacy, Policy and Education with Vibrant Emotional Health, had praise for the initiatives goals.

I think there are a lot of people that actually want to offer their services, she said. And we've been hearing that from providers even locally, how can I help? How can I make myself a service? How can I volunteer?

One concern for mental health professionals might be if they are opening themselves up to legal liability, as their malpractice insurance doesnt cover volunteer efforts, but the federal stimulus package that is expected to soon be enacted is likely to include an indemnification from liability for medical care providers who volunteer during the coronavirus outbreak. Many psychologists and psychiatrists may also be unsure of where and how they can go about volunteering. Videoconferencing technology does mean, however, that counseling and therapy can mostly be done remotely, and safely, during the pandemic.

State Sen. David Carlucci, who heads the Senates Committee on Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities, called on government officials and mental health professionals to step up in response.

Obviously, we need the commissioner of the state Office of Mental Health to play an integral role, he told City & State. We need the associations of all the medical professionals to really play the lead here and say what will work and what won't work. This is being built on the go, but we have technology in place. We have the workforce that can really step up and fill this need.
International air passenger demand plunged in February with deepening public anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic and abrupt imposition of travel restrictions across the world causing widespread disruptions to airline operations, preliminary traffic figures released on Thursday by the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) showed.

In aggregate, the region's airlines experienced a 43.9 per cent year-on-year fall in the number of international passengers carried to a combined 17 million in February. As measured in revenue passenger kilometres (RPK), demand fell by 34.8 per cent, alongside a 20.6 per cent drop in available seat capacity.

As a result, the average international passenger load factor tumbled by 14.4 percentage points to 66.6 per cent for the month.

Meanwhile, air cargo demand held up remarkably well despite the effects of extended factory closures and lockdowns in China crippling the supply and distribution of manufactured goods nationwide and related international trade flows.

These declines were partly offset by higher demand for air shipments of intermediate goods, including pharmaceutical and food supplies, within the region. Overall, Asia Pacific airlines registered a 3 per cent year-on-year decline in international air cargo demand in freight tonne kilometres (FTK) terms in February.

Comparatively, offered freight capacity fell by a sharp 13.5 per cent with belly-hold capacity declining in tandem with the progressive cuts in the number of passenger flights over the course of the month. As a result, the average international freight load factor increased by 6.5 percentage points to 60.3 per cent for the month.

"Asian airlines saw passenger demand for international air travel demand plunge in February as a result of the rapid spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic," said AAPA Director General Andrew Herdman. "Overall, for the first two months of the year, the number of international passengers travelling on Asian airlines fell by 21 per cent to 50 million passengers."

Herdman said the COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges, both operational and financial, to the airline industry and the wider travel and tourism sector worldwide. "While some governments have moved quickly to provide measures of financial support, much more needs to be done to reduce the risks of permanent damage to critical sectors of the economy.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Derbyshire farmer was punched '15 times' after he told a walker to go home due to fears over the spread of coronavirus.

The Peak District farmer said on social media post that he was attacked by the walker on a footpath next to his farm.

Derbyshire Police confirmed the incident, which happened at around 9:45am on Sunday 22 March in Edale.

The farmer was disinfecting gate handles due to the amount of people who walk through each day.

The post described how one walker gave a 'very funny look' to the farmer after he told him to go home as there were too many people walking.

The farmer was then 'punched about 15 times then kicked in the ribs'.

The Facebook post has been shared more than 1,500 times.

A Derbyshire Police spokesperson said the farmer was left 'shaken and bruised'.

We were called at about 9.45am yesterday [Sunday 22 March] following a report of an assault on a farmer.

The victim was left shaken and bruised, but did not suffer any serious, life-threatening or life-altering injuries," the spokesperson said.

The offender was white, aged about 40, with fair hair and glasses. He wore standard walking gear, a hat and a snood.

Anyone with information is urged to contact police quoting incident number 20*157808.

Residents can also call police on 101, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.
W, the hefty fashion bible known for publishing the adventurous work of top-tier photographers, had long been one of the magazine industrys most august titles. While it costs less to run than Vogue, it is nevertheless expensive.

Now, it appears to be in serious trouble.

The bottom has dropped out of the luxury market, Marc Lotenberg, the chief executive of Ws parent company, Future Media Group, said on Wednesday evening. This, he said, has put the title in survival mode.

On Monday, the magazines editor, Sara Moonves, called her staff to tell them that many were being furloughed. Those who work on online content are staying on at reduced salaries.

Mr. Lotenberg blamed the economic upheaval caused by the new coronavirus pandemic for much of the magazines troubles, though he did not deny that payments to vendors have been late since January, acknowledging that numerous independent contractors have not been paid for their services. (He blamed this in part on the launch of a Chinese edition of W, which was scheduled for January and has now been moved to September.)
Pope Francis was reported Thursday to have tested negative for the novel coronavirus after a person in his residence was said to have contacted COVID-19. Several Italian newspapers with reputable sources in the Vatican said the Italian clergyman who got sick had lived for years in the pope's Saint Martha's residence. Il Messaggero said the person is "one of the pope's closest collaborators, an official of the Secretariate of the State, who was found to have a slight temperature after going in for a routine check". The daily La Stampa said the unnamed person has been hospitalised in Rome and that his office has been disinfected. Il Messaggero later reported that the pope himself was tested for the virus and came out clean. The 83-year-old pontiff has remained largely secluded at his residence since coming down with a cold late last month. La Stampa said he has been "eating alone in his room for some time" and has food brought to him on a tray by secretaries. "He spends much of his time in his apartment, and when he moves inside the residence, he keeps the necessary safe distances," La Stampa wrote. "The anti-contagion cordon has been tight around the pope for weeks." The official Vatican News site said the number of people infected in the city state has risen to four. The ANSA news agency said the Italian clergyman in the pope's residence was a fifth case not reported by official sources. - Unexpected - Life in the Vatican has been shrouded in secrecy and little in known about how popes spend their days. But the Argentine-born pontiff has tried to connect more with the people and do away with some the Vatican's more formal traditions. He refused to move into the luxurious papal palace upon being elected to succeed pope Benedict XVI in March 2013. His Saint Martha's residence is a simple building erected next to Saint Peter's Basilica in 1996. It is also the place where cardinals stay when they gather for conclaves to elect new popes. Francis stayed there for the 2013 election and then never moved out when he was picked. Il Messaggero said only about 30 people live at the residence and "no one would have expected" for one of them would get sick because their circle of contacts was so small. The Argentine-born pontiff has enjoyed a life of good health despite losing part of a lung as a young man and suffering from sciatica -- a nerve condition that causes pain in his hip. Italian news reports said he was not currently considering moving to a more isolated location because of the four cases in the Vatican. "In any case, the pope is constantly surrounded by a staff equipped with disinfectant products," La Stampa wrote. The pope's daily prayer Thursday touched on people's fears in the face of the new disease. "Each one knows what their own fears are," Francis said. Pope Francis has remained largely secluded at his residence since coming down with a cold late last month
During the session, the NASC listened to Deputy PM Vu Duc Dam present a report on the Covid-19 epidemic situation with solutions and plans to prevent and combat the epidemic in Vietnam, as well as looking into and commenting on a number of draft laws on which there remain different views.

Speaking at the closing session, NA Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan emphasised the need to step up application of information technology in management and online public services, and the limiting of meetings of big crowds in the face of the Covid-19 outbreak.

In that spirit, the NASC is scheduled to hold a teleconference of NA full-time deputies from April 6-8, she said, urging relevant agencies to send documents of the five draft laws, to be discussed during the teleconference, to the legislators for study.

Regarding the 44th session of the committee, NA Chairwoman Ngan said the committee will decide the concrete date for the meeting based on the developments of the epidemic in early April.

The session is projected to look into various issues, the top legislator said, asking NA agencies to closely coordinate with their government counterparts in theirpreparations, making it easier for the committee to finalise the agenda.

She also underscored that in the context of the complicated developments of the pandemic, it is a must to observe the legal regulations and instructions of the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control, the Government and the Prime Minister, as well as the recommendations of the health sector.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 13:44:02|Editor: huaxia

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LOS ANGELES, March 25 (Xinhua) -- California has distributed 24.5 million N95 masks and has placed orders for an additional 100 million to address a shortage in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.

The most populous U.S. state is currently going all out to deliver critical medical supplies to healthcare professionals working on the frontlines of the novel coronavirus fight.

"That is a significant number. It's still insignificant to meet our needs," Newsom told a news conference, noting it's good news for California healthcare leaders who are "demanding more and deserve more."

"I want them to know when those get off the docks, when they get through the airport, and customs, we're going to get them out as quickly as we humanly possibly can," the governor added.

"We're working around the clock to secure the personal protective equipment needed for those on the frontlines of #COVID19," Newsom tweeted later.

N95 masks can provide medical workers with better protection than loose-fitting surgical masks from coronavirus infection. Local medical staff welcomed Newsom's announcement.

"As an ICU (intensive care unit) nurse, I appreciate your leadership and your ability to get these masks into our hospitals," commented a twitter user, Karla Kinell.

"Appreciate it. My wife now has a mask to wear at the hospital that she works at. But she's gone weeks with no mask or having to re-use masks," wrote another twitter user, Dan Ford, adding that "Our hospitals, counties and state should have been more prepared."

California and many other U.S. states are suffering from a shortage of medical supplies, including masks, gloves, protective suits and respirators which are essential for health care professionals in fighting COVID-19.

California is one of the hardest-hit U.S. states in the coronavirus outbreak, having registered some 3,000 cases confirmed with 65 deaths so far, according to Los Angeles Times data based on reports from the state's health agencies.

Many of California's medical workers are running out of face masks, especially N95 masks, as well as other personal protective devices and disinfection products. Some have appealed for donations from the public.

Wang Mingli, organizer of a medical supplies donation campaign in Palos Verdes, Los Angeles County, told Xinhua that, within two hours on Sunday, they received 137 N95 masks and 2,207 one-time-use surgical masks from the local Chinese American community.

"We donated all the 137 N95 masks to Community Hospital Long Beach and sent one-time-use surgical masks to a local senior care center," Wang said.

Nationwide, U.S. companies have joined the efforts to tackle the N95 mask shortage.

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced last week that they "have been working to help source supplies for healthcare providers fighting COVID-19."

"We're donating millions of masks for health professionals in the US and Europe," he tweeted.

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, said his company has donated 720,000 masks in its emergency reserve and is "working on sourcing millions of more to donate."

Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO at Tesla, has reportedly pledged to distribute 250,000 N95 masks among hospitals, and he said on Twitter last week that Tesla will donate more than 1,000 ventilators from China to hospitals in Los Angeles.
In a dramatic reversal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's chief rival, Benny Gantz, has agreed to join forces in an "emergency government" to deal with the coronavirus crisis.

Why it matters: This is a big step toward ending Israel's year-long political deadlock and a victory for Netanyahu, who will stay on as prime minister for at least another 18 months even as his corruption trial gets underway.

According to the draft deal with Netanyahu, Gantz will serve as vice prime minister and then become prime minister after 18 months.

Gantz's advisers say they will have the agreement enshrined in law, though it's unclear whether that will be possible. Many of Netanyahu's critics argue he can't be trusted to leave office as promised.

Gantz's faction will also control the Defense, Foreign and Justice ministries, among other roles.

The backstory: Gantz and his Blue and White party ran in three consecutive election campaigns, all in the last year, on a platform of replacing Netanyahu at all costs.

Gantz repeatedly said he would not be serving under Netanyahu while the prime minister was under indictment.

He had even promised to pass laws to prevent a prime minister from taking office after being indicted.

Today's move will enrage members of his political base, the vast majority of whom are vehemently opposed to Netanyahu.

The move is particularly extraordinary because it comes just over a week after Gantz received a presidential mandate to form Israel's next government.

Gantz had said he intended to form a unity government to deal with the coronavirus crisis, but with him as prime minister.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has called on Gantz almost daily to join an emergency unity government.

Behind the scenes: Gantz and his advisers held secret talks with Netanyahu and his aides for several weeks  elements of which were not disclosed even to Gantz's political partners in the Blue and White leadership.

Meanwhile, Gantz's opposition bloc started to use its majority in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, to take control of key committees.

Blue and White even pushed for a vote to remove a Netanyahu ally as parliamentary speaker, leading to an unprecedented constitutional showdown involving the supreme court.

The political drama reached its climax today, ahead of a planned vote for the next speaker.
Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh ordered officials on Thursday to immediately distribute 10 lakh packets of dry ration, containing flour, dal and sugar, among the poor people working in the unorganised sector, such as the daily-wage earners.

Singh said the economic package announced by the central government was a welcome initiative, but unfortunately no immediate relief was provided to the people working in the unorganised sector who had been hit hard by the curfew/lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The chief minister ordered officials to make the ration packets, containing 10kg wheat flour, 2kg 'dal' and 2kg sugar, available at the offices of the deputy commissioners for those who do not get covered under the door-to-door distribution system, according to a government statement.

Separately, during a meeting between Congress president Sonia Gandhi and chief ministers of party-led states via a video link, Singh said all efforts were being made to reach out to the poor in Punjab.

However, many people in Punjab and UT Chandigarh continued to face difficulties in getting essential items such as milk, vegetables and medicines at their doorsteps. People complained that the phone numbers announced by authorities to contact suppliers remained non-responsive.

Many asked when the ATMs would reopen as they would be soon run out of cash.

Chandigarh administration said it has arranged three mobile ATMs and distributed food packets.

Punjab Governor V P Singh Badnore and his adviser Manoj Parida stepped out into the city to check arrangements.

In Mohali, the district administration roped in neighbourhood shops, big retailers and e-commerce chains to supply essential commodities to residents at their homes. It also ordered that all the cold storage facilities be opened till April 10 to store potatoes as the harvesting of the crop was underway.

Meanwhile, the Punjab Truck Operators Association president Happy Sandhu sought the chief minister's intervention to allow loaded trucks stranded in other states because of the lockdown to reach their destinations.

Punjab and Chandigarh have imposed a curfew to check the spread of the virus.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Senate late Wednesday unanimously approved a $2 trillion emergency package intended to stave off total economic collapse in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, bringing an end to more than five days of negotiations between senators and the Trump administration.

The measure  which comes after hours of delays over a dispute on jobless benefits  is the biggest economic rescue package in U.S. history. It includes direct checks to many Americans, a massive fund for beleaguered industries, immediate aid for hospitals and back-up cash for state and local governments.

The Senate voted 96-0 in its last vote before adjourning until April 20, with an extended recess amid the pandemic. The bill now goes to the House where passage on a voice vote is scheduled for Friday.

The Senate has pivoted from one of the most contentious, partisan periods in the nation's history to passing this rescue package 100 to nothing all in one quarter of this year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.

Help is on the way, said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), noting that negotiators packed weeks if not months of legislative dealings into mere days. The final bill text clocked in at 880 pages, with enormously complicated new programs that will likely define the federal response to the crisis for years.

Its been a long hard road, with a remarkable number of twists and turns. But for the sake of millions of Americans, it will be worth it, Schumer said.

In another sign of how quickly the virus is spreading throughout the nation, the Senate grappled with the threat of an outbreak inside the Capitol after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tested positive for the disease  just as negotiators were furiously working toward a deal.

And just hours before the Senate voted on Wednesday, the No. 2 Republican, Sen. John Thune, left Washington with potential symptoms of the virus and decided to head home to South Dakota to self-quarantine. Two other senators  Sens. Mike Lee and Mitt Romney, both of Utah  also couldnt vote on Wednesday because they are quarantining after possible exposure to the virus, though Romney said he tested negative for the virus.

Story continues

Senate leaders had hoped to vote earlier on the legislation, but the timeline slipped after Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) stalled the vote as they sought changes to a massive expansion of unemployment benefits.

The GOP senators argued that the program would allow workers to be paid more on unemployment than what they were making while employed. Ultimately, McConnell agreed to put their proposed changes on the floor for a vote  but the amendment fell far short of the 60-vote threshold.

One of the most urgent components of the package provides $150 billion for hospitals and other health entities that are pleading for help to contain the pandemic, relying on hand-sewn masks and donated ventilators.

It also includes hundreds of billions in direct $1,200 payments to many Americans as well as bigger unemployment checks to people whose jobs are shed in the crisis. For businesses, there are $850 billion worth of loan programs, much of which comes with careful oversight provisions demanded by Democrats.

The swift passage of the mammoth legislation will be a testament to two long-time vote-counters who are each the masters of their own parties: McConnell and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Both leaders spent much of the last several days on conference calls fielding requests and briefing their members on the plan.

Pelosi had originally hoped to bring the bill up via unanimous consent after Senate passage, a voting method that would not force lawmakers to return to Washington. But she said later Wednesday that House leaders were looking at other options, noting that at least some Republicans were on their way to Capitol Hill to object to the legislation when it moves to the House.

What I would like to see, because this is a $2 trillion bill, Id like to see a good debate on the floor, Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol on Wednesday. Overwhelmingly our members want to come back.

Congressional leaders are now planning to pass the package in the House with a voice vote  similar to unanimous consent in that members aren't required to be present but the lawmakers in the chamber can verbally register their opposition or support. House Republican leaders privately acknowledged that there would have been a strong possibility that a member would have objected to a unanimous consent agreement.

Multiple members would not be able to attend votes, including the two lawmakers who are battling the coronavirus  Reps. Ben McAdams and Mario Diaz-Balart  as well as several others who are self-quarantining after possible exposure.

Three additional members, Reps. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), Katie Porter (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) also said Wednesday that they had developed symptoms of the virus and will be self-quarantining at home.

Pelosi and her team reiterated that they will continue to fight for many of those proposals, noting there will be opportunities in the fourth stimulus bill Congress is all-but certain to craft. House Democrats were expected to be briefed on a full caucus call sometime after the Senate text was unveiled.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Pelosi said Democrats want the next phase to include stronger paid leave provisions, a pension fix and additional worker protections  many of which were left on the cutting room floor in negotiations for the previous bills.

"This is not going to be the last bill," Pelosi said on PBS. "This bill is about mitigation for the [economic] damage that is being done  The next phase will be recovery."

That next legislative phase, however, could be even more difficult than this weeks $2 trillion package.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was noncommittal on Wednesday when asked about the prospects for a fourth stimulus bill.

"I'm not convinced yet that we need a fourth bill, McCarthy said.

Marianne Levine contributed to this story.



CLARIFICATION: An earlier alert to this story cited final text of the bill after Republicans began circulating what they said was the final version. However, the legislation is set to undergo some minor changes.
A small explosion has disrupted the funeral services for 25 members of Afghanistan's Sikh community who were killed earlier this week in an attack by an Islamic State gunman on their religious compound.

No one was hurt when the explosive device detonated near the crematorium where the ceremonies were taking place, the Interior Ministry said on March 26.

On March 25, a lone gunman stormed the temple in central Kabul before security forces killed him and released the 80 hostages he had taken.

WATCH: Sikhs Holds Funerals Following Deadly Attack On Kabul Temple

The Islamic State (IS) militant group has claimed responsibility for the attack via the online Amaq news agency, which it uses to distribute statements.

Sikhs, a small religious minority in Afghanistan which numbers fewer than 300 families, have been targeted by Islamist militants before.

A suicide bombing targeting the Sikh community and claimed by IS killed more than a dozen people in 2018 in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

Based on reporting by AP and Pajhwok Afghan News
The push for diversity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has been mostly due to Kevin Feige, something that probably wouldnt have happened at all without his creative power. Not that the MCU has been perfect on this yet.

Marvel | Paras Griffin/Getty Images for Avengers: Infinity War

For instance, the pleading for Feige to create an all-woman MCU film is still just a discussion around a corporate meeting table. Theres better hope anyway in having more women superheroes in the MCU. Following the lead of Captain Marvel and Black Widow, Feige is reportedly wanting a deal with Sony to bring Spider-Woman into the fray.

Fan response has been a little mixed in some social media circles. Would this really be a smart add or is it just more wishful thinking within the MCU executive ranks?

The complicated rights issues over Jessica Drew and Spider-Woman

Can Jessica save the day AND earn her pay? Spider-Woman's new #1 is action-packed! https://t.co/PU2rCZ2Mru  Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) March 19, 2020

Those who know their Marvel comic books know Jessica Drew is the Peter Parker of Spider-Woman stories. Unfortunately, Sony owns the rights to the Spider-Woman name, but Marvel has the right to use Jessica Drew as a character. They havent, because they clearly want to connect her to Spider-Woman if at all possible.

Having a complicated rights issue like this is equivalent to if Marvel no longer had the right to use the name Peter Parker while still using Spider-Man. Of course, name changes are always possible, if causing continuity issues with comic book purists.

Kevin Feige wants to work with Sony to iron this out so Spider-Woman can become a reality in the MCU, despite many fans not always citing the character as a top priority. At least Sony gave some hints that women in the Spider-Verse can happen effectively thanks to appearances by characters like Spider-Gwen. The latter character was already referred to as Spider-Woman in Into the Spider-Verse.

Giving legitimacy to the character through Jessica Drew, though, would also provide hope for those who still read the comic book tales.

Jessica Drew was supposed to become a part of the Avengers team

How Jessica Drew becomes Spider-Woman is a compelling story and a little different from how Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man. She turns into Spider-Woman from her exposure to uranium on her parents property. When she becomes sick, her father injects her with an experimental serum made of arachnid blood.

While the science is basically the same as Peter Parker, the circumstances are certainly different. Jessicas powers are fairly vast as well and sometimes outdo what Spider-Man was capable of doing.

After training by Hydra and Taskmaster, she joins Agents of SHIELD/SWORD, plus becomes friends with Captain Marvel. Later, she becomes a part of the Avengers, something Feige clearly wants to shoot for if he can gain the rights.

Whats most interesting is the fan response. Since theres still a strong male MCU fan base, some on Reddit didnt show overly enthusiastic responses, if not entirely negative either.

What are the fans really saying about Spider-Woman?

New costume, new job, same Jessica?



Catch up on Spider-Woman's backstory before her new #1! https://t.co/nwztsbYhW3  Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) March 16, 2020

A few people on Reddit are worried that Feige will mess up the character, and a few others were not aware of why Spider-Woman was even important. Then, others say the character should be only in the MCU since she truly is an Avenger rather than going to Sony.

Once again, this leaves another negotiation tactic between Marvel and Sony to make a character happen. Whether it will go well is another thing, even if everyone has hope based on how well the negotiations went on keeping Spider-Man going.

However, even Spider-Man will have to face another deal between the two studios. Whether his time in the MCU will be extended is still up in the air. Being able to do that and bring in Spider-Woman would probably be the icing on this cake if it happens at all.

Feige may ultimately become the lone mediator between the two studios rather than the new Disney CEO, Bob Chapek.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) on Wednesday evening called on the warring parties in Libya to cease hostilities and focus on the fight against the coronavirus epidemic
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 12:54:18|Editor: huaxia

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A Chinese team of health experts sent to provide assistance to contain the COVID-19 outbreak in Iraq pose for a group photo outside the new PCR laboratory in Baghdad, Iraq, March 25, 2020. (Xinhua/Khalil Dawood)

The latest diagnosis and treatment plan, prevention and control plan and other technical documents have been compiled by the National Health Commission (NHC) and promptly shared with over 180 countries and more than 10 international and regional organizations.

BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- China has actively carried out international cooperation on fighting the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), sharing epidemic prevention and control experience and technologies with the world, a health official said Thursday.

The latest diagnosis and treatment plan, prevention and control plan and other technical documents have been compiled by the National Health Commission (NHC) and promptly shared with over 180 countries and more than 10 international and regional organizations, said Zeng Yixin, deputy director of the NHC, at a press conference in Beijing.

He said that a meeting to share China's epidemic prevention and control experience was jointly held by the NHC and the WHO, which was attended by representatives from 77 countries and seven international cooperations and was watched by over 100,000 people online.

China has also established an online knowledge center in the field of epidemic control and clinical treatment, as well as an expert database for international cooperation, Zeng said, adding that nearly 30 technical exchange meetings have been held with more than 100 countries and regions by video links.

"The video meetings can respond to the needs of foreign parties in a timely manner, as well as facilitate the accurate utilization of epidemic prevention and control technologies at home and abroad," Zeng said. 
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 14:35:08|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Ministry of Education has launched a campaign recruiting a batch of retired teachers to support the development of universities in western regions.

The veteran teachers are expected to impart advanced teaching methods and scientific research concepts to teachers of the aided universities in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Yunnan Province, said the ministry.

The campaign aims to ease the pressure of talent shortages that are faced by industries and enterprises in the western areas, said the ministry.

About 120 to 140 retired teachers will be selected, said the ministry, adding the first batch of the recruits is scheduled to start in the spring semester of 2020.

In addition, the ministry called for more retired teachers to engage in this campaign to better promote the development of universities in western China.
It was an anxious homecoming for



an elderly couple from Mumbai, who was recently discharged after being cured of COVID-19 infection.

The senior citizens from the eastern suburb of Ghatkopar had tested positive for coronavirus, following their return from a trip abroad.

The couple was worried about how neighbours and others in the locality would treat them on their return, but their fears were put to rest soon enough.

"We were treated well. Everyone enquired about our wellbeing, while maintaining a safe distance," the couple said.

BMC officials had already sanitised the house before they entered the premises.

"People in the society even offered us food and help for the next 14 days, as we have to remain under home quarantine," they said.

Meanwhile, a brother-sister duo, who was discharged on Tuesday, also had a similar experience.

The duo, who had a history of foreign travel, tested positive for coronavirus a couple of weeks ago.

"We were constantly using our phones for latest updates on the pandemic. We were worried about our neighbours' reaction and scared that we may be ostracised," the woman said.

It was a big relief when people waved and seemed genuinely happy, she said.

Maharashtra has so far recorded 124 positive cases of COVID-19, of which 15 have been cured and four have died of the infection.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Latest News Understanding the 'perfect storm' that was the Sydney property market in 2021 Leading expert reflects on the crazy year that brokers and buyers experienced  and throws forward to the 12 months to come

How to manage home buyer regret Tips for brokers on how they can keep their clients onside once they have bought

An SME lender has welcomed the governments stimulus plan which offers aid to the countrys small businesses, and is encouraging brokers to educate themselves on what has been made available to meet the needs of their clients.

Cameron Poolman, CEO of OnDeck Australia explained, Plenty of small businesses are likely to take advantage of the initiatives, especially the expanded instant asset write-off, but it is important for brokers to have conversations with their SME clients around these measures.

The governments support includes:

An uplift in the instant asset write-off from $30,000 to $150,000, effective immediately; further, instant asset write-offs have been expanded to include businesses with annual turnover below $500m, up from $50m previously  until 30 June 2020

SMEs with turnover below $500m will be able to deduct 50% of the cost of an eligible asset on installation, with existing depreciation rules applying to the balance  until 30 June 2021

A payment between $2,000 and $25,000 to help pay wages or hire staff for over 700,000 SMEs

Wage subsidies of up to $21,000 for small businesses with apprentices

Small business owners need to be aware that the stimulus measures are temporary. In particular, the enlarged instant asset write-off only applies until 30 June 2020, giving SMEs just three months to take advantage of this tax break, said Poolman.

It is critical for SME owners to act fast to secure finance to purchase the asset and have it in situ before 30 June to be eligible for the instant write-off.

State governments have announced various initiatives of their own. In New South Wales, the $2.3bn stimulus package includes payroll tax waivers and various fee waivers for bars, cafes, restaurants and tradies. In Queensland, measures include deferring monthly payroll tax lodgements and payments until 31 July 2020. The Tasmanian State Government is providing targeted support to small businesses in hospitality, tourism, seafood production, and export sectors.

Brokers need to remind all their clients that they are still very much open for business despite the social distancing currently being recommended as a precaution against Covid-19, Poolman added.

Brokers can meet electronically with clients via Skype, Google Hang-outs, email or even phone.

As OnDeck is an online-only lender, we do not require face to face meetings with brokers or their clients. Our business model also allows loan approval times of as little as one working day, so we are well-placed to deliver funds to SMEs aiming to take advantage of the $150,000 instant asset write-off.
Colombo, March 26 (IANS) At least 3,700 persons were arrested on charges of violating the islandwide police curfew currently in effect in Sri Lanka as a preventive measure against the coronavirus pandemic, a senior officer sais here on Thursday.

Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Ajith Rohana told Colombo Gazette that the 3,700 individuals were arrested as of 6 a.m. on Thursday.

A total of 702 vehicles, including motorcycles and three-wheelers were also seized by the police, he said.

Rohana added that some individuals were produced before the Magistrates in their relevant areas, while others were granted bail.

The islandwide police curfew, which was imposed on March 20, was in effect until further notice in the Colombo, Gampaha and Kalutara districts, which were identified as high risk areas for the spread of the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, the curfew in the other districts, which was relaxed since 6 a.m. on Thursday, will be reimposed at 12 p.m.

Sri Lanka has so far reported 102 confirmed coronavirus cases with n deaths.

--IANS

ksk/
Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday to discuss the global situation caused by the Coronavirus pandemic.

In a statement, the MEA said, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a telephone conversation today with the President of the Russian Federation H.E. Mr Vladimir V. Putin.

The two leaders discussed the global situation in the context of COVID-19 pandemic.

The Prime Minister conveyed his good wishes for early recovery of all those suffering from the disease in Russia and expressed the hope that Russias efforts, led by President Putin, to fight the disease would be successful.

President Putin conveyed to the Prime Minister his good wishes for the success of measures adopted in India to combat COVID-19.

The MEA further said, The two leaders agreed on further consultation and cooperation in adequately addressing all challenges faced by this major global crisis, including those pertaining to health, medicine, scientific research, humanitarian matters and impact on global economy.

They stressed the significance of international cooperation for unitedly fighting COVID-19, including within the framework of G20.

The MEA added, The Prime Minister appreciated the cooperation of Russian authorities in ensuring well-being of Indian students in Russia and hoped that the same would continue. President Putin assured all help in this regard.

The Prime Minister told President Putin that Indian authorities concerned would continue to facilitate in all possible manner the efforts for ensuring the well-being and organised return of Russian nationals, as and when required.

The two leaders also agreed to continue their close cooperation for maintaining the excellent momentum and the warm of the cordial and time-tested bilateral relations.

They reiterated that they looked forward to several opportunities for their interaction in person during the course of the year.

In its statement meanwhile, Russia said, (Russian President) Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with Prime Minister of the Republic of India Narendra Modi, at the Indian sides initiative.

Ahead of the emergency virtual summit of G20 leaders to be held on March 26, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi discussed the latest developments around the coronavirus pandemic.

Continuing their ongoing trust-based dialogue reflecting the special nature of the Russian-Indian strategic partnership, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi briefed each other on measures introduced in both countries to contain the spread of infection.

Mutual appreciation was expressed for the efforts being taken to protect the health and safety of Russian citizens in India and Indian citizens in Russia. The two leaders agreed to strengthen coordination in the coronavirus response effort.
The Federation of European Publishers (FEP) has made a plea to the European Commission to support the industry through the coronavirus pandemic. Rudy Vanschoonbeek, president of the FEP wrote in a letter, "These are difficult days for the entire profession and for our partners; I think of our authors, the booksellers and the librarians. We are calling on the European Union and the national governments to ensure proper support for the book sector so that we can continue to share good stories, educational content, etc. United, we will stand stronger."

The FEP noted that book publishing is among Europe's largest cultural sectors and accounts for annual revenue of 22-24 billion and employs 150,000 people directly, and as many as a million indirectly through the entire supply chain.

"The impact of the current crisis on the cultural industries is unprecedented and more severe than in other economic sectors, for a very simple reason: culture is built upon social relations in bookshops, cinemas, theatres, museums," wrote Vanschoonbeek. "The measures to limit the spread of the epidemic consist essentially of reducing such relations. Publishing is hit hard by the health crisis and it will take a number of supportive measures to sustain a thriving sector able to contribute to the economy and society in general."

Specifically, FEP asked for guaranteed loans from banks, and increase in the European Union's budget to support cultural enterprises, as well as a plan on how to support the publishing sector in the near term and in the future. Among the areas of focus the FEP asked the EC to prioritize were the finalization and implementation of rules governing copyright and the development of a fair single European market for digital content, including the creation of infrastructure for rights data management.

"It is essential to move quickly: the effect of the crisis is immediate, with sources of revenues and cash flow suddenly stopped, which implies a severe liquidity shortage to the sector," concluded Vanschoonbeek. "Our sector needs both immediate measures, from the existing EU budget, and medium-term measures to allow the industry to restart once the situation changes."
As more people self-isolate to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, experts and police expect to see an uptick in domestic violence cases. But experts say there are plenty of resources available for victims.

In Hoboken, police have received at least five calls a day in the past week involving domestic violence incidents, police Chief Ken Ferrante said. Normally, the department gets two or three a day.

Its consistent with what we thought we would get at this time, he said on Wednesday. Last night, we had five arrests overnight and two were involved with domestic violence for simple assault and harassment.

According to the Department of Children and Families, there could be as much as a 50% increase in domestic violence cases following a disaster, such as a hurricane or an earthquake.

I think its very likely well see an increase in the number of people who experience violence, said Amanda M. Stylianou, an expert on domestic violence and health outcomes at Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care. That violence will increase in both intensity and severity.

Stylianou said social distancing can have a devastating impact on the safety of those victims who escape daily abuse at home through work and school.

Experts caution that the widespread impact of the coronavirus is unprecedented, so its still too early to extrapolate the immediate impact on domestic violence victims and survivors.

The long-range concern is a spike, said Victoria Chase, a clinical associate professor of law and the director of the Domestic Violence Clinic at Rutgers University Law School. This is going to move in waves. The second wave or third wave is where we see the spike.

Adding to the challenge, Chase said, is the limitations on the primary legal response domestic violence victims can take, with courts closed and police departments inundated.

It is the manner in which we try to facilitate assisting our population and that is going to be fraught with difficulty at this point, she said.

A 2015 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found that one in 18 women and one in 20 men will experience sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking from an intimate partner in a 12-month period preceding the study. The same study, which is the most recent available, found that one in four women will experience partner-related violence in their lifetime.

Ruth Glenn, the president and CEO of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said while historically there is a spike in reported cases during states of emergencies, its also important to acknowledge that this shouldnt be considered an excuse for abuse.

I think all of us put up with stressors, such as natural disasters or losing a job, but when we begin to allow abusers to use that as an excuse or a reason to abuse, then we take responsibility away from them, Glenn said.

To deter abuse during disasters, state Sen. Declan OScanlon, R-Monmouth, introduced a bill that would allow prosecutors to impose harsher penalties for domestic violence cases during a state of emergency.

This is a high-stress time and in high-stress times, we always see an increase in domestic violence, OScanlon said in an interview. Everyone needs to do all we can to avoid that. And we need the right people to get the message: It wont be tolerated.

The coronavirus pandemic is a unique situation. Adding to anxieties for domestic violence victims, advocates say, is the state Supreme Courts consent order releasing certain jail inmates.

Richard Pompelio, the executive director of the New Jersey Crime Victims Law Center, said he spoke to a victim who feared her abuser could be coming home. Her family is in Ohio, Pompelio said, but she doesnt have the money to get there. Fortunately, she has close friends who are coming to stay with her at home, he said.

These are scary situations for these poor people, Pompelio said. Weve been trying to get the word out as much as we can so they have a lifeline, someone to call.

In Monmouth County, at least one inmate who qualified to be released had multiple convictions of domestic violence, according to Sheriff Shaun Golden. The Monmouth County Prosecutors Office, which will object the release of that inmate, will get a chance to present its case before a judge today.

What can domestic violence survivors do in this situation?

For starters, Glenn said, survivors and abusers should not divert from whatever safety planning they have already done.

The first step that a victim or a survivor should remember is that they have survived to this point, she said. Whatever they have done to survive, continue to do that.

That can include reaching out to resources such as a program, seeking shelter or speaking to family and friends.

Stylianou, the Rutgers expert, said she wants to get the message out that shelters and support services continue to operate during the pandemic.

There are messages out there to stay home, isolate, people are losing jobs, she said. Victims question, Can I wait a little longer? Can I hold off until things get a little more normal? Dont wait. Were still here.

In a tweet last week, Attorney General Gurbir Grewal offered resources for anyone experiencing domestic violence during the coronavirus pandemic.

People are being told to stay home to curb the spread of #COVID19. But for some, home is where the real threat lies. For those experiencing domestic violence, there IS help. Log onto https://t.co/MdApbv4DJo, text LOVEIS to 22522, or visit https://t.co/Z0JlpQvn48 for resources. pic.twitter.com/VSRfDC49MS  AG Gurbir Grewal (@NewJerseyOAG) March 21, 2020

The New Jersey Coalition to End Domestic Violence also posted on its website a document full of resources, Increasing Survivor Safety During COVID  19."

Remember that survivors are the experts on their own lives, and should be empowered to make their own decisions about what is best for them and their children, the document states.

During this tough time, Glenn said, its important not to forget about victims.

I would just ask us as a society to remember that domestic violence victims and survivors are yet another population that can use the extra support during this time, she said.

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Paul Bailey, a Vietnam veteran and retired prison guard, is close to reopening his refurbished goods store after a fire forced him out of the original location.

Baileys mother Margie opened the store 10 years ago on the east side at the corner of 30th Street and Forest Manor Avenue, and it was there until late January, when an electrical fire burned the shop  named Margies  and other businesses on the little strip.

Its been more like a hobby to run the business for Bailey, 69, who sees the shop as a way to stay connected with people and help the community.

Ive always worked with people, he said. Im a church man, too, a Christian.

Margie died in 2012, but her store continues to serve the area.

Bailey recently took over in a new location, 3007 1/2 N. Sherman Drive, just a few blocks from the original location.

He buys items such as washers, dryers and microwaves from people moving out of their homes and then refurbishes them to sell again.

Were community-oriented, Bailey said. Not trying to make a profit, just to break even most of the time.

The original location was ruined in a fire in late January, which cost Bailey about $5,000. (Photo provided)

Bailey lost about $5,000 worth of assets in the fire, he said, and a Go Fund Me campaign was started in early March to recoup the losses and help Bailey get his shop open again.

Baileys son, Jacko, said hes proud of his father for what hes done over the years to help the community.

Hes looked out after so many people in that community, he said.  Hes a good man. No one ever tried doing anything to him.

Contact staff writer Tyler Fenwick at 317-762-7853. Follow him on Twitter @Ty_Fenwick.

Paul Bailey is close to reopening his refurbished goods shop, Margies, on Sherman Drive. (Photo/Tyler Fenwick)
Loren Remillard, the president of the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, likes to refer to the chamber as the North Star for business.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Loren Remillard, the president of the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, likes to refer to the chamber as the North Star for business.

In this unprecedented time of community lockdown and economic disruption, Remillard says the chamber must play that role more than ever.

"I dont want to be overly dramatic about it, but for so many members, it is just dark times," Remillard said. "We are trying to be that North Star and provide some light with some guidance and direction on how they can manage through this and come out of it."

Leaders of both the Winnipeg and Manitoba chambers as well as Bram Strain, the new CEO of the Business Council of Manitoba, primarily serve as a conduit, getting the urgent needs of business to elected officials and senior government staffers.

WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Loren Remillard, president & CEO Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce.

Remillard, Strain and Chuck Davidson, the president of the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce, say the three levels of government are being responsive and accessible. But there are such great financial and human resource needs that no government has the capacity to fully satisfy them, they add.

For Strains members, the largest employers in the province, he said access to working capital is the biggest issue.

"Cash flow is needed now," Strain said. "We have heard some good things from the province and the federal governments and the city about tax deferrals. Anything that keeps cash in the hands of business versus paying it to government and then getting it back somehow this is absolutely key."

Not surprisingly, business owners are anxious and fear for the future of their livelihoods and businesses.

Ways to support local businesses - Just like individuals, businesses need to stay connected. And with virtually the whole world in the midst of practicing some form of social distancing, that is now so hard to do. Social media and the digital tools are a helpful way for customers to try to let businesses know that they will return when everything returns to normal. click to read more - Just like individuals, businesses need to stay connected. And with virtually the whole world in the midst of practicing some form of social distancing, that is now so hard to do. Social media and the digital tools are a helpful way for customers to try to let businesses know that they will return when everything returns to normal. - Both the Winnipeg and Manitoba chambers' web sites are excellent sources for businesses to tap into government support programs as the are created (www.winnipeg-chamber.com and www.mbchamber.mb.ca) - Many businesses are making their operations available to help with virus containment efforts. In many cases support of material or human resources are needed. - There are a growing number of private sector support funds that are cropping up. Contributions from businesses and individuals with financial resources to spare are encouraged. - Businesses whose employees are being left in a state of uncertainty are organizing charitable undertakings which all need to be supported. Close

"It is heartbreaking to hear what people are saying," Remillard said. "We have worked with many of them to help them grow their businesses. Some are saying theyre shutting their doors and its unlikely theyll ever open them again."

The uncertainty cannot prevent those sorts of thoughts. While larger enterprises need capital to keep things going until the pandemic is under control  and Strain said the big banks are stepping up with some relief  small businesses are concerned about their employees.

"First off, most want to make sure their employees are looked after," Davidson said.

Its not just about de-clogging the overwhelmed Employment Insurance system. It registered 500,000 applicants last week and there is the prospect of another one million this week.

The federal government's support legislation proposes $2,000 per month for four months. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business has been calling for the feds to backstop 75 per cent of workers' wages so that companies can keep their workforces in tact.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Chuck Davidson, president of the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce.

Other than the immediate concerns about having enough money to keep operating, and to ensure the well-being and support of their employees, both chambers are asking members about their other needs.

The Manitoba chamber has hired Leger Marketing and should have survey results by the end of the week while the Winnipeg chamber will try to call each of its 2,100 members.

Jen Zoratti | Next A weekly look towards a post-pandemic future delivered to your inbox every Wednesday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

"This is no time to be proud," Remillard said. "We are reaching out to all members, every single one of them. We are hearing lot of suffering and stress. It can be overwhelming."

"With this crisis, we dont know what is enough. But we do know what is not enough," Remillard said in reference to the federal government's proposal last week to cover 10 per cent of wages.

Both chambers have turned their websites into clearinghouses for links to all the support programs (even though everything is a moving target at this point).

One of the chambers functions is to instil a sense of community among the business crowd. While that job is tougher during the pandemic, it is more important these days.

"We dont want to cause panic by any stretch of the imagination, but the magnitude of the impact to the business community cannot be overstated," Remillard said. "That is why it is so critical to make sure we hear from members and communicate that to the decision-makers at all levels of government."

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
One day after Flavio Briatore revealed he may have had coronavirus in December, Dr Helmut Marko is telling a similar story.

"In the middle of February I had a bad cold with a strong cough," Red Bull's top Austrian official told f1-insider.com.

"The condition lasted for ten days, which was unusually long for me," said the 76-year-old. "Today I am almost certain that it was the virus."

Marko thinks the fact that he may have then become immune to the virus could be why he didn't get sick after travelling through Dubai airport after Australia.

"For me, that was the ultimate corona hotspot, so it shows that even older people can survive this disease," he said.

"I think it's important to have less panic and deal with this pandemic much more rationally."

Marko says he currently works between 7am and 12pm, and then heads into the forest with his chainsaw to blow off steam.

"I am fitter than ever right now," he reports.

"I also clear my head in the forest, which is what you need with all the madness around us right now."

Marko said Graz - where he lives - is a ghost town, and combined with all the panic-buying his familiar surroundings are now "surreal".

"There are extreme restrictions," he said. "All public life in Graz is idle.

"I had to close four hotels and the associated cafes, and am now having them prepared so they can be used as alternative clinics. But that doesn't help with the sheer existential fear that almost everyone has now.

"It feels like a war."

(GMM)
She has been keeping her fans thoroughly entertained during social isolation.

And Cardi B was back at it when on her social media this Wednesday, mock crying into her cereal as she chowed down.

'Like I shouldn't be eating cereal - like I should be in a restaurant eating sushi. Like, why are we going through this? I don't understand it,' moaned the 27-year-old.

Oh no: Cardi B was back at it when on her social media this Wednesday, mock crying into her cereal as she chowed down

Her new video comes a day after she slammed celebrities and the U.S. government, including President Donald Trump, for their response to the coronavirus pandemic.

'If number 45 is getting on a podium saying: "Hey, listen if you do not have any symptoms of the coronavirus" which is coughing, fever and whatsoever etc, etc "do not get tested because we don't have enough tests to test everybody,"' said Cardi.

'But if a celebrity is saying: "Hey, listen I don't have no symptoms, I'm feeling good, I feel healthy, I don't feel like nothing, but I went and got tested and I'm positive for the coronavirus," that cause confusion,' added the Bodak Yellow rapper.

'That make people be like, wait a minute now, I don't have no symptoms, but I know I went out this and that day. S***, I might just have it. S***, I'm scared because I'm around my kid, I'm around my grandparent. What should I do?'

Distraught: 'Like I shouldn't be eating cereal - like I should be in a restaurant eating sushi,' she moaned, adding: 'Like, why are we going through this? I don't understand it'

She added: 'And let me tell you something, the general public, people that work regular jobs, people that get regular paychecks, the middle class, ...the poor, ....they not getting treated like the high, the ones up here, celebrities and everything.'

'I need to know what's going on. If you work at the f***ing Pentagon, let a b**** know,' she fretted on social media last week.

''Cause I need to f***in' know, n****. I need to f***in' know, n****. I don't know if you can tell but I'm losin' my f***in' mind,' she said.

New success: One of Cardi's past online rants about the pandemic was repurposed into a Coronavirus Remix by DJ iMarkkeyz

'I wanna get dressed up. I wanna put a f***in' lace front on, I wanna put my f***in' expensive outfits, and I want to go f***ing OUT, and I can't!'

One of Cardi's past online rants about the pandemic was repurposed into a Coronavirus Remix by DJ iMarkkeyz.

The number has hit the Billboard charts, and Cardi and Dj IMarkkeyz have said they will donate the proceeds to food banks and shelters in their native New York.
Two immigrants detained in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility are at high risk of falling severely ill from the coronavirus if they remain behind bars, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts argued in an emergency petition filed Wednesday.

The ACLU of Massachusetts filed the federal claim against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Plymouth County jail officials. The group is calling for the release of 59-year-old Mario L. Rodas and 63-year-old Ray Anthony Marzouca.

Both are being detained for civil immigration violations, rather than for criminal charges, and are fighting deportation, according to court documents.

Rodas, a Guatemalan national who came to the U.S. in 2006, has uncontrolled diabetes and high blood pressure.

Marzouca, a Jamaican national who came to the U.S. in 2010, has prostate cancer. The disease may have spread to his spine and shoulder.

Immigrant detention centers are institutions that uniquely heighten the danger of disease transmission, said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. Public health officials continue to advise that detention centers  as well as jails, prisons and other similar facilities  must dramatically reduce their population and density for the safety of detained people, staff who work in these facilities, and the communities they live in."

The lawsuit was drafted by numerous immigration lawyers, including Daniel McFadden of the ACLU, Susan Church and Kerry Doyle.

The lawsuit comes as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Massachusetts rises dramatically. At least 15 people have died and 1,838 people have tested positive for the virus, according to figures released by the state Department of Public Health.

Sign up for free text messages about important updates on coronavirus in Massachusetts

In Massachusetts state prisons, at least 11 people have tested positive for the coronavirus. All but one of those confirmed cases were at the Massachusetts Treatment Center in Bridgewater.

In the Plymouth County jail, where Rodas and Marzouca are detained, nearly a dozen workers are in self-quarantine after an employee tested positive for the coronavirus, the Brockton Enterprise reported. The facility learned the unidentified employee tested positive on Sunday, court documents say.

The Plymouth County jail has a beds contract and a 287(g) agreement with ICE. Under the beds contract, the jail houses people detained for civil immigration violations for the federal agency. Under the 287(g) agreement, correction officers are trained to check the immigration status of inmates and notify federal agents of those those facing violations or criminal charges.

In the petition, the attorneys allege that releasing Rodas and Marzouca would help stem the spread of disease. The Plymouth County Correctional Facility had a mumps outbreak among the ICE detainees in 2019.

According to the petition, the ICE detainees are held in four units. Each unit has between 50 and 100 inmates, who share a bathroom and a common eating area. Each cell has five bunks and a communal toilet.

Detainees at PCCF are at high risk for COVID-19 infection, the petition states. People incarcerated at the PCCF live in close quarters and rely on shared spaces to eat, sleep, shower, and use the bathroom. They cannot achieve the physical distancing needed to effectively prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Attorneys across the country have called for the release of immigrant detainees and the complete closure of the Boston immigration courts during the pandemic. Members of Congress, such as Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Sen. Ed Markey, have also pushed the Department of Homeland Security to release detainees who pose no public safety threat.

Prisoners rights advocates have also called for the release of inmates who have been charged with or convicted of low-level criminal offenses.

Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins said last week her office is working to release those in custody who pose no meaningful risk to public safety. Meanwhile, sheriffs in Bristol and Plymouth counties argued against releasing inmates, saying they have the resources to keep inmates safe during a pandemic.

With Rodas and Marzouca, attorneys called for a preliminary injunction and an order granting their release with appropriate conditions. As an alternative, attorneys suggested that the sheriffs department secure separate housing for the detainees, such as at an empty motel room, while remaining under the supervision of the department so that they dont risk becoming infected.

Related Content:
The US-led coalition assembled to fight the Islamic State has transferred another military base to the Iraqi security forces as part of a planned drawdown in the country, the coalition said Thursday.

In handing over Qayyarah Airfield West in northern Iraq, a statement from the coalition noted success in the fight against the militants.

The [Iraqi Security Forces] increasingly conducts independent operations in the fight against Daesh and the defense of their homeland, said Brig. Gen. Vincent Barker, using an alternate term for the Islamic State.

The sprawling base south of Mosul, known as Q-West, was used by US forces during the Iraq War but was captured by the Islamic State when the group swept across northern Iraq in 2014. The airfield, retaken by the Iraqi and coalition forces in 2016, served as a launch pad in the nine-month battle to liberate the city of Mosul and remains a hub for the Iraqi air force.

Troops will depart from Qayyarah in the coming days and continue to relocate and consolidate from several other bases throughout 2020, the coalition said. US personnel are expected to withdraw next from the K1 airbase in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

The coalition will operate from fewer locations, but remains committed to supporting our partners in their fight against Daesh, Barker said.

The United States maintains some 5,200 troops in Iraq as part of the coalition advising and providing training for local forces to defeat the last remnants of the Islamic State.

Earlier this month, US troops withdrew from another base, al-Qaim, on the Iraq-Syria border. The troop repositioning followed a spate of rocket attacks aimed at US forces stationed at Camp Taji and the Basmaya base that killed two Americans and one British service member and were blamed on Iran-backed militias.

Officials have stressed the recent troop movements are unrelated to the attacks and were due in part to the coronavirus pandemic thats left Iraq with at least 346 confirmed cases of the virus.

Col. Myles Caggins, a spokesman for the US military operation in Iraq, said in a tweet Thursday that hundreds of troops were leaving temporarily as a coronavirus precaution.

The Coalition is in Iraq at the invitation of the Government of Iraq to defeat Daesh remnants  this is our only purpose. Period, he wrote. "In fact, were transferring bases to [the Iraqi Ministry of Defense] and 100s of training troops are departing temporarily for COVID-19 safety."

The Iraqi military suspended all training in early March in the face of the coronavirus outbreak. Citing a reduced requirement for training Iraqi security forces, the United Kingdom paused its training mission and redeployed some of its 400 troops. France followed by withdrawing all 200 service members stationed in the country.
A 65-year-old man died of the novel coronavirus in Jammu and Kashmir, the first fatality in the Union Territory, and two siblings, both minors, tested positive for the disease, taking the number of cases to 13, the government said.

There are 3,053 people under quarantine at home and at facilities operated by the government, while 117 are in hospital quarantine, according to a media bulletin.

The number of people under home surveillance is 1,761 and 551 people have completed their 28-day surveillance period, it said.

The 65-year-old man hailed from the Hyderpora area of Srinagar, while the two minors -- seven years old and eight months old -- who tested positive for the coronavirus are also from the city.

The bulletin said 379 samples have been sent for testing, of which 341 tested as negative and 13 cases, including 10 from Kashmir and three from Jammu, have tested positive of which one recovered and one died in the Kashmir Valley on Thursday.

Reports of 25 cases are awaited till March 26, it said.

"Two more positive cases in Srinagar. Siblings (seven-years-old and eight-months-old)... Total number of active positive cases is now at 11," government spokesperson Rohit Kansal had tweeted earlier in the day.

The eight-month-old might be the youngest to be infected with COVID-19 in the country.

He said they are the grandchildren of a person who had tested positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday in Srinagar and had a travel history to Saudi Arabia.

The Jammu and Kashmir government said as many as 5,482 travellers and persons in contact with suspected cases have been enlisted for surveillance.

Authorities in Kashmir have expressed apprehensions that the cases could be more than reported in the Valley as a significant number of people appeared to have concealed their travel history.

The Jammu and Kashmir government has set up helpline numbers for addressing queries on COVID-19 and these are 0191-2549676 (Union Territory level cell), 0191-2520982, 0191-2674444 and 0191-2674115 (for the Jammu Division), and 0194-2440283 and 0194-2430581 (for the Kashmir Division).

People have been asked to stay in their homes and take the lockdown with utmost sincerity as carelessness of few can throw all others into the grave jeopardy, an official said.

"Public in general is advised to avoid unnecessary travel and use of public transport. Avoid unnecessary travel and use of public transport; avoid crowded places and large gatherings, do not spit in public. People must take basic precautions for personal hygiene; frequent handwashing with soap and observing coughing and sneezing etiquette," a government advisory said.

The country, which has 694 coronavirus positive cases and has recorded 16 deaths due to it till now, is under a 21-day lockdown from Tuesday midnight.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Patient readers, this will be an abbreviated Water Cooler, partly because I had to launch this years Water Cooler fundraiser (there is a tip jar on this page as well), but also because I must finish a post on #COVID19 and class. I will be back at full force tomorrow. lambert

#COVID-19

At reader request, Ive added this daily chart:

The data is the John Hopkins CSSE data. Here is the site. I am using a linear, not a logarithmic scale, because the linear scale conveys the alarming quality of the multiplication better (dont @ me, math nerds). I did not adjust for population, because it seems to me that the epidemics spread through a population in a fractal matter; within reasonable limits, the shape of the curve will be the same. Show me Im wrong!

Politics

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? James Madison, Federalist 51

They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery. Frank Herbert, Dune

They had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord

Key dates coming fast now, so I added some counters:

Some of the next primaries. (I picked the major dates; here is a complete calendar.)

* * *

2020

We encourage readers to play around with the polling charts; they are dynamic, and there are a lot of settings, more than I can usefully show here. Here is a link to alert reader dks project. You can also file bug reports or feature requests using the same contact process as for Plants, below. Thanks  but no promises! We have no new national or state polls today. (Indeed, one might question what polling in the midst of a pandemic really means. It would seem that those who are willing to pick of the phone would increase, yes? It does seem that the strategy of keeping Biden out of the public eye pays off. Earlier in the year, we often had occasion to comment on the mysterious strength of the Biden Juggernaut, on display here; but its also true that Bidens ups and downs have been of much greater amplitude than other candidates. As today! * * * Cuomo (D)(1): Sean Petty of @nynurses says NY Governor Andrew Cuomo is the "single most important person in terms of the drive to close down hospital beds in this state over the last 20 years.  We are now 20,000 beds behind where we need to be in terms of trying to scale up our capacity." pic.twitter.com/xjHjoyA6qk  Democracy Now! (@democracynow) March 25, 2020 Cuomo (D)(2): Cuomo Takes Jab At Trumps Priorities: Job One Has To Be To Save Lives. That Has To Be The Priority.' [Forbes].  Well and good. But see above. Sanders (D)(1): Im not impressed with Sanders getting better UI benefits, if indeed he did (I havent seen a paper trail of the amendment), because thats a trivial benefit from handing the very worst sort of billionaires the power to remake the economy with trillions in free money. Ive been impressed with the ability of the Sanders campaign to transition from rallies to digital events; and with using the list for fundraising. But hes got the most dedicated, loyal, and active voter base in the country (and hitherto theyve been willing to fund him). Whats he using his movement for, then? As Madeline Albright said to Colin Powell: Whats the point of having this superb military youre always talking about if we cant use it? Somehow, directing it at the New York primary seems beside the point; especially with Cuomo getting such good press.

Stats Watch

At reader request, I added some business stats back in. Please give Econintersect click-throughs; theyre a good, old-school blog that covers more than stats. If anybody knows of other aggregators, please contact me at the email address below.

Employment situation: Holy moley:

Horrific economic toll. 3.2 million initial weekly jobless claims in one week. Previous crises and recessions are barely a blip on this chart. pic.twitter.com/DzMMhkJCMa  Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) March 26, 2020

There seem to be a lot of lines like that just about now.

Third Estimate 4Q2019 GDP Unchanged at 2.1%. Corporate Profits Improved [Econintersect]. The third estimate of fourth-quarter 2019 Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 2.1 % (unchanged from the second estimate). I am not a fan of quarter-over-quarter exaggerated method of measuring GDP  but my year-over-year preferred method showed a moderate deceleration from last quarter.  The Donald was cruising. And then

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Commodities: Opinion: There is no gold. Bullion dealers sell out in panic buying [MarketWatch]. Theres no gold, says Josh Strauss, partner at money manager Pekin Hardy Strauss in Chicago (and a bullion fan). Theres no gold. Theres roughly a 10% premium to purchase physical gold for delivery. Usually its like 2%. I can buy a one ounce American Eagle for $1,800, said Josh Strauss. $1,800! Major gold dealers have sold out of coins and gold bars amid panic buying as the U.S. economy plunges and the government agreed to a record $2 trillion emergency lifeline.

Marketing: For Influencers, Affiliate Revenue Is Next to Disappear [Business of Fashion]. Some large fashion and beauty retailers have paused affiliate link programmes as the coronavirus pandemic depresses sales, BoF has learned, throwing a cornerstone of the social media economy into turmoil. Macys, Dillards, T.J. Maxx and Ulta Beauty were among the chains to at least temporarily end the practice this week, denying influencers and media companies of the sales commissions they receive from posting links to products. These links have become a multi-billion dollar ecosystem, serving as the main source of income for many influencers and a lucrative revenue stream for media brands. But with stores closed in most major cities, and consumers cutting back their spending on fashion, retailers are slashing costs. Millions of US workers have been laid off across all industries in the last two weeks, and some economists are predicting a global recession as bad or worse than the downturn that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Dillards told its affiliate partners in an email that the decision was made due to the impact of Covid-19 and the realignment of marketing strategy. Now, influencers find themselves scrambling to figure out how to supplement that once-reliable source of income.  Rough business.

Retail: Walmart Was Almost Charged Criminally Over Opioids. Trump Appointees Killed the Indictment. [ProPublica]. A fine would not be a sufficient deterrent, the DEAs Dhillon added, since Walmart has more money than it knows what to do with. Not that theres anything wrong with that, Rosenstein responded, according to five people familiar with the investigation. We are all capitalists here. Rosensteins quip brought the prosecutorial team up short. They werent pursuing Walmart because it was profitable but because, in their view, the company had put its customers at deadly risk. Not long after, Rosensteins assistant entered the room to say he had a call. He left. The prosecutors push to persuade Rosenstein to revive the criminal case had failed.  Wait, I thought Rosenstein was Hero Of The Resistance?

Todays Fear & Greed Index: 21 Extreme Fear (previous close: 17 Extreme Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 7 (Extreme Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Mar 26 at 1:28pm.The chorus of put American back to work must be gratifying to Mr. Market. As is the likely passage of the stimulus bill.

The Biosphere

International regulations have paused a jet-stream shift in the Southern Hemisphere [Nature]. [T]he authors results provide a clear signal that human actions can affect Earths climate: the Montreal Protocol has paused the climate change associated with ozone depletion. This is an object lesson in how the international community should react to global environmental challenges. Restricting dangerous emissions and changing business practices is also the way to combat global warming caused by greenhouse gases.

Health Care

COVID-19 needs a Manhattan Project [Science]. If we want to maximize the chances for success, however, and have enough doses to end the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, current piecemeal efforts wont be enough. If ever there was a case for a coordinated global vaccine development effort using a big science approach, it is now. There is a strong track record for publicly funded, large-scale scientific endeavors that bring together global expertise and resources toward a common goal. The Manhattan Project during World War II didnt just bring about nuclear weapons quickly; it led to countless changes in how scientists from many countries work together. The Human Genome Project and CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) engaged scientists from around the world to drive basic research from their home labs through local and virtual teamwork. Taking this big, coordinated approach to developing a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine will not only potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives, but will also help the world be better prepared for the next pandemic. An initiative of this scale wont be easy.

Canadas Coronavirus Response Shows Why We Need Medicare for All to Fight This Pandemic [Jacobin]. Im a dual American-Canadian citizen, and over the past weeks, Ive read countless stories on social media of exasperated American friends seeking coronavirus testing who describe a complex journey navigating between primary-care providers, hospitals, and local health departments. The fragmented nature of the US health-care system has made it difficult to coordinate a response or testing strategy, especially between completely separate health-care providers that often have different testing equipment and protocols. Meanwhile, in Canada, the provincial government is essentially the only financier of hospitals and health-care providers in each province, making it much easier to coordinate strategies. In Ontario, for example, anyone who suspects they have coronavirus is instructed to self-assess using an online tool, then either call a central Telehealth number, call their primary provider, or visit a dedicated assessment center. All three resources are receiving regular information from the provincial government and are able to determine what steps someone should take next: arranging testing, instructing the person to self-isolate, or providing reassurance. Each province has set up their own similar centralized system, and even before some of the newer resources were created, health departments at the local, provincial, and federal level were acting as central contact points for individuals and organizations. This coordination stands in stark contrast to the confusing and contradicting information provided by different levels of government in the United States, especially in the earlier days of the crisis.

Class Warfare

Thomas Piketty Takes On the Ideology of Inequality [Marshall Steinbaum, Boston Review]. The tendency in economics nowas well as in a great deal of public discussionis to view the economy as a natural force, existing independently from our ideas about what it is and how it ought to work. This book systematically demolishes that self-serving conceit by charting in extensive detail how differently it has operated at different periods of time, and how its operation is conditioned by the ideologies with which it co-develops. The market and competition, profits and wages, capital and debt, skilled and unskilled workers, natives and aliens, tax havens and competitivenessnone of these things exist as such, Piketty insists. All are social and historical constructs that depend entirely on the systems that people choose to adopt and the conceptual definitions they choose to work with. An exhaustive assessment of Capital and Ideology would require more space and expertise than I have, but the basic contours of the book are easy enough to describe. Every human society must justify its inequalities, the book begins. What follows is a comprehensive investigation of how different societies have done precisely that, ranging through what the book terms various inequality regimes.'

News of the Wired

Jure Tovrljan redesigns iconic logos to reflect a world under coronavirus [Dezeen]. The overlapping circles of the Mastercard logo, as well as the iconic rings of the Olympic flag are reimagined safely spaced apart. I tried to send a message for people to stay at home and if they really need to go out, act responsibly, keep your social distance, the designer explained.  Apparently done by MacDonalds Brazil:

McDonald's separates its golden arches in an act of coronavirus solidarity https://t.co/oVecZOg2PI pic.twitter.com/6hklHAbT8D  Ad Age (@adage) March 21, 2020

Solidarity generally talkes a material form; as, fpr example, wages, sick leave and so forth.

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Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, (c) how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal, and (d) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. Todays plant (MF):

MF writes: I took this photo of Heteromeles arbutifolia, commonly known as Toyon, Christmas berry, or California holly, while hiking Mulholland Gateway Park in the Santa Monica Mountains. I think weve got some fringing, but they are lovely berries.

I put out a call for reader projects suitable for a spell of isolation, including model trains. Alert reader RR responded:

RR writes: Work has halted as my train room has been reassigned as my wifes telework office. The beginnings of a tunnel can be seen on the right. My local library has a 3d printer that I used to print a portal. My rocket scientist did the rest during a telecon. Thats super-neat about the 3D printing, and especially in a public library; how amazing! Do any other readers work with 3D printers?

* * *

Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. So if you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldnt see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know Im on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for five or ten days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals:









Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated.

If you hate PayPal, you can email me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, and I will give you directions on how to send a check. Thank you!
TICKERS: BAY; ATBHF, ATY; ATCMF, BAR; BALMF, CMD, HAR, IRV; IRVRF, NVO; NSRPF, , RIO, RRI; RVSDF, SBW

Source: Maurice Jackson for Streetwise Reports (3/26/20)

Jayant Bhandari, in conversation with Maurice Jackson of Proven and Probable, outlines dire consequences for Third World countries as a result of coronavirus, and mentions a handful of investments now at bargain prices.



Maurice: Today we will discuss the Coronavirus and a number of buying opportunities for your portfolio. Joining us for conversation is Jayant Bhandari, the founder of Capitalism & Morality, and a highly sought-out advisor to institutional investors. Sir, the world is a much, much different place since our last interview in January. May I ask, where are you these days?

Jayant: I am currently in India. I came here about two weeks back immediately after the end of PDAC in Toronto.

Maurice: For those of us in the West, can you provide us with some insight on how the overall sentiment is there regarding the coronavirus, and what type of precautions are being taken there by the government and the citizens alike?

Jayant: When I arrived in New Delhi, Maurice, they were testing the temperature of everyone, but they were more focused on collecting a self-declaration form that people were asked to fill up. And apart from the Delhi airport, there was virtually nothing happening in the country. I flew around to a couple more airports after that and there were booths that was supposed to be manned by health officials to test temperature of people, but the booths were empty. So, in a mere 20 days, the dysfunctionality of India was showing up in how they control a problem socially and politically. Those in charge of manning the booths disappeared because they knew there was no one checking on them, so they probably stayed home.

Maurice: Have you seen any estimates on the projections of how serious the situation may get in India?

Jayant: The World Health Organization has come out with a statement with a lot of praise for India. They say that India has been very proactive and India has done extremely well in terms of controlling the virus. The official numbers in India are around 150 people [as of the date of the interview].

But I am of the opinion that those numbers are not accurate. The World Health Organization should employ me as a consultant, and I could advise them on a few things. The reality is that a lot of people who are suspected of having the virus are absconding, a lot of people have run away from quarantine centers, and the Indian government is hardly testing anyone for the virus. And the reason is very simple, India is an extraordinarily dysfunctional place. They don't really have the kits to test people, and people are absconding because they know what they will get into if they surrender themselves to an Indian hospital.

The quarantine centers in India is abysmal: The toilets are dirty, the beds are dirty, you are close to other people who are likely suffering from the virus; and the situation is so unhygienic in most places that people are running away. There was a British person who ran away from the quarantine center because he thought that he would die within the quarantine center because of the conditions.

So that is the situation with India. India is going to be, in my view, something very similar to Iran, except for a difference in temperature. India is a much warmer country, so the virus might lose its potency in this country. But it's a very chaotic place. If the virus is spreading here, we could potentially see thousands of people die. No one knows about it because doctors are not very well trained. The Indian medical system is one of the worst medical systems on the planet.

The reader may recall that, about 10 to 15 years back, people were talking about medical tourism in India. But that all disappeared because people soon realize that the Indian medical system was cheap, meaning [low cost = low quality, versus low cost = inexpensive]. Indians go to the hospitals here to die.

So, in conclusion, if the virus gets hold of people in this country, thousands, and I guess hundreds of thousands, of people can easily die because people are so close together, they're so superstitious, and they are ill equipped on how to deal with these kind of scenarios.

Maurice: Let's expand the narrative here regarding the coronavirus and Third World nations. What are your thoughts on the impact of the coronavirus there?

Jayant: We may see a similar situation in Africa, the Middle East and the Latin American countries. There are not enough cases coming out of these countries. And my suspicion is that this is mostly because their governments are so completely dysfunctional. Nothing ever works in these countries.

And my guess is that if not this, something else will come up, which will be nothing but Malthus and Darwin working together to bring the populations of these societies under control. Certainly, within a few years or within a decadeat some point of time in the futurehundreds of millions of people in the Third World will disappear because these societies are so dysfunctional and so completely dependent on Western technology and Western help. And West can no longer continue to provide help to these people.

Maurice: I'm speaking as a Westerner here, but I noticed back in January and February there was daily reporting from China, almost by hour by hour, with updates there. And everything just seemed to stop. I know you have contacts in China. Do you have any discussions with them on the situation there?

Jayant: I keep in touch with people in China. I know several libertarian friends of mine from Western countries who live in China, and several of them prefer to stay back in China rather than leave China, because they think that China is not only more competent, [but is] better prepared to deal with coronavirus than probably than Western countries.

Now, of course, the virus started in China. . .Once they found out about it, and once they declared it, they have taken very good measures. The whole of East Asia has taken such strong measures, not just because of the governments, but because of how their societies are organized, where people feel individually self-responsible to control these kinds of things, that the virus has come under complete control. China today has fewer sick people from the virus than Italy, Iran, Spain or even Germany.

Maurice: There's been some finger pointing between the China and U.S. regarding where and when the virus actually began. Could this lead to further escalations?

Jayant: It certainly can, and I completely agree with what Trump says, it is a China virus. And China should accept full responsibility and should take measures to control possibility of this happening again in the future. That said, I am very respectful of what the Chinese have been able to achieve. But I'm also completely on the side of Trump. . .because he is pointing fingers in the right direction.

Maurice: Which in today's world seems like the wrong thing to do. Do you believe that the World Health Organization and governments around the world have reacted too late on the spread of the Coronavirus?

Jayant: I don't think they have reacted too late. What has actually happened, in my view, is that governments have become [so] bigthey have taken over control of so much of our livesthat now they suddenly realize that, as this virus continues to spread, it will create complete chaos because they don't really have organizations to put such a virus under control.

If you need 10,000 beds, let's say, in Vancouver, you won't be able to organize those beds at all. There is no system to put in place for such a measure. China can organize those beds. So simply put, our world governments have become very big and right now we have no other choice but to play the tune that the governments are playing for us.

But this is simply a sign that the governments are incapable of dealing with these kind of large-scale problems. They should have decentralized the world. And this virus issue is pointing fingers at over-centralization of governments around the world.

Maurice: What type of impacts are we going to see moving forward on the global economy?

Jayant: Clearly there is hysteria in response to the virus. Governments are overreacting because they don't want to be held responsible if anything goes wrong. People are extremely emotional. I think people should find a refuge in the Bible. People are very emotional, very lustful, very greedy right now. When I see people running for toilet paper, I clearly see there's a lot of fear in these people, and they should find some relief in the Bible. And that's not for superstitious purposes, that's to learn and understand that we have to keep our emotions under control. To become a human being, to become rational, we should keep our sins and our emotions under control, which should lead us, show us, more clarity in terms of what we should do.

Maurice: Amen to that, brother, I'm a Christian.

Well, let's switch topics and discuss junior mining companies, sir. Jayant, it goes without saying you're the most respected name when it comes to arbitrage opportunities. Do you have any to share with us?

Jayant: Oh, there are so many companies right now, Maurice, that I am interested in. A number of quality names have fallen by 50% to maybe 80% in the last few days. So, pretty much you can invest in any of the good names and you should be able to rewarded financially by buying at these depressed prices.

Let me just quote some names and I can't give prices anymore because prices are so volatile. One company is Strongbow Exploration (SBW:TSX.V). The last time I saw the price it was, I think, $0.015. Harfang Exploration Inc. (HAR:TSX.V) is trading at $0.16. Aston Bay Holdings Ltd. (BAY:TSX.V; ATBHF:OTCQB) is trading at $0.03. Commander Resources Ltd. (CMD:TSX.V) is trading at $0.045.

There are two arbitrage opportunities, which if you want take an extra benefit from arbitrage. One is Otis Gold Corp. (OOO:TSX; OGLDF:OTCMKTS). And another one is Balmoral Resources Ltd. (BAR:TSX; BALMF:OTCQX).

Look at how much Novo Resources Corp. (NVO:TSX.V; NSRPF:OTCQX) and Irving Resources Inc. (IRV:CSE; IRVRF:OTCBB) have fallen; Atico Mining Corp. (ATY:TSX.V; ATCMF:OTCBB) and Rio2 Ltd. (RIO:TSX.V). So many of these companies have fallen for no good reason.

Maurice: We've been active buyers of Irving Resources, a company you and I have shared. We're certainly looking at Novo Resources. And in your latest musing, I noticed that you had another one of our sponsors on there as well, which is Riverside Resources Inc. (RRI:TSX.V; RVSDF:OTCQB), which actually caught my attention as I am aware that you're not a big advocate for project generators, so that really surprised me.

Jayant: I like John-Mark, the CEO of Riverside Resources. And this company has fallen to $0.095.

And I'm quite happy investing in companies that have cash in their treasury, which means that they are not going to go back to the market very soon. And such companies have a much better chance of providing me an upside or, in other words, they have a much higher chance of not diluting away my upside by raising money at low prices.

Maurice: Moving on to physical precious metals. For the person reading at home right now that does not own physical precious metals, what words of wisdom would you like to share with them?

Jayant: Everyone should have six months to one year's worth of cash with them. It's extremely important to not have to worry about daily expenses, which also means that once you have enough cash to survive, emotions don't take over the rational part of your brain.

But apart from that, people have to invest where they see a good upside. Rather than sell in hysteria, they should be looking forward to buying companies that have fallen too much, and at the same time, they should keep some of their money in gold and silver because these are the commodities [that] are exchangeable into cash and other resources in a bad time.

Paper currency is going to get inflated away. So you can't really sit on too much cash, and you can't really be assured that your investments will do wellthe way you want them to doat least in the short and medium term. So, for short and medium term, you should also have enough gold and silver supplies with you to be able to do transactions if the emergency situation continues.

Maurice: Now let's discuss a topic that is so vital to all the aforementioned yet so frequently overlooked, and that is philosophy. Mr. Bhandari, how does philosophy fit in today's discussion?

Jayant: It's extremely important. And I like the concept of reason, a concept that I witnessed only while I was living in the West. I grew up in India, a country where critical reasoning, and thinking, and questioning is almost completely absent. And the only sign of reasoning and critical thinking I saw outside the West was in East Asia. And I have become a huge fan of East Asia over the last few years, and that is why I run a philosophy seminar in Vancouver called Capitalism & Morality.

And I think what makes us human is the concept of reasoning that allows us to think into the future, that allows us to calculate and measure the future, and which enables us to take a position where you can improve your life as time goes by.

Maurice: You're the founder of a philosophical forum focused on reason, argumentation and liberty. Please introduce us to Capitalism & Morality.

Jayant: This is a seminar I have been running for 10 or 11 years now. And the next one will be held in Vancouver; downtown Vancouver at the Simon Fraser University, but probably at a different location. It will be on July 25, 2020, which is a Saturday, and this will be immediately after the Sprott conference.

Maurice: In closing, sir, what keeps you up at night that we don't know about?

Jayant: I think the virus situation has become a hysteria, and governments have made it much worse because they were not prepared for things that they told the public they were prepared for. So they are not prepared with the healthcare system, and they are not prepared to take the risks associated with the virus. These politicians are mostly uneducated, populists and demagogues. Look at the demagogue and populist we have in Canada.

Now, the situation in the Western countries is bad enough. The situation is far worse in Africa, Latin America and the Indian subcontinent. So, the situation by itself might not have been so bad, but because of the governments and because of hysteria, it will become much worse.

Two things, I think, will be a very horrible consequence of the current problem, the political, social and hysteria-related problems to do with the virus. One is that the Middle East will implode. I go to the Middle East twice a year. And I'm well aware of the fact that most Middle Eastern people have not worked for the last three generations because they have got easy money from oil. They don't have the concept of owning money, and oil prices are heading toward zero right now. So these people rapidly are not making cash anymore, but also they're depleting their savings because a lot of their savings were in sovereign wealth funds, and the stock market has crashed. So they have lost money there as well, and they have to now sell those shares to keep the societies going. So I think Middle East is in a terrible situation right now.

There's another problem. There are a lot of people in America, probably as many as 50% of American population, who have no emergency cash with them. So now, in a lockdown situation, how will they find money to survive? And this is a problem with a country that is among the richest countries on the planet. What happens with billions of people in the Third World, where 90 to 99% of the people live hand to mouth? In a lockdown situation, these people have no choice but to stay hungry.

So, for a small likelihood of spreading the virus, we actually confined a huge population of world to poverty. But again, as I said, Malthus and Darwin will kick in at some point of time. The Industrial Revolution, Green Revolution, kept away Malthus and Darwin for awhile, but they will kick in, and hundreds of millions of people will perish in the Third World.

Maurice: Jayant, for reader that want to learn more about Jayant Bhandari and Capitalism & Morality, the website address is www.jayantbhandari.com.

Before you make your next bullion purchase, make sure you call me. I'm a licensed representative for Miles Franklin Precious Metals Investments. We provide a number of options to expand your precious metals portfolio, from physical delivery, offshore depositories, precious metal IRAs and private blockchain distributed ledger technology. Call me directly at (855) 505-1900, or you may e-mail [email protected].

Finally, please subscribe to www.provenandprobable.com for mining insights, and bullion sales.

Jayant Bhandari, the founder of Capitalism & Morality, thank you for joining us today on Proven and Probable.

Maurice Jackson is the founder of Proven and Probable, a site that aims to enrich its subscribers through education in precious metals and junior mining companies that will enrich the world.

[NLINSERT]

Disclosure:

1) Maurice Jackson: I, or members of my immediate household or family, own shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: Riverside Resources, Novo Resources, Irving Resources. I personally am, or members of my immediate household or family are, paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. My company has a financial relationship with the following companies mentioned in this article: Riverside Resources, Novo Resources, Irving Resources are sponsors of Proven and Probable. Proven and Probable disclosures are listed below. Jayant Bhandari is a shareholder of all the companies referenced, but they do not sponsor his work.

2) The following companies mentioned in this article are billboard sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees.

3) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of the author and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The author is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. The author was not paid by Streetwise Reports for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports requires contributing authors to disclose any shareholdings in, or economic relationships with, companies that they write about. Streetwise Reports relies upon the authors to accurately provide this information and Streetwise Reports has no means of verifying its accuracy.

4) This article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports.

5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article until three business days after the publication of the interview or article. The foregoing prohibition does not apply to articles that in substance only restate previously published company releases. As of the date of this article, officers and/or employees of Streetwise Reports LLC (including members of their household) own securities of Irving Resources, a company mentioned in this article.

Proven and Probable LLC receives financial compensation from its sponsors. The compensation is used is to fund both sponsor-specific activities and general report activities, website, and general and administrative costs. Sponsor-specific activities may include aggregating content and publishing that content on the Proven and Probable website, creating and maintaining company landing pages, interviewing key management, posting a banner/billboard, and/or issuing press releases. The fees also cover the costs for Proven and Probable to publish sector-specific information on our site, and also to create content by interviewing experts in the sector. Monthly sponsorship fees range from $1,000 to $4,000 per month. Proven and Probable LLC does accept stock for payment of sponsorship fees. Sponsor pages may be considered advertising for the purposes of 18 U.S.C. 1734.

The Information presented in Proven and Probable is provided for educational and informational purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The Information contained in or provided from or through this forum is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice or any other advice. The Information on this forum and provided from or through this forum is general in nature and is not specific to you the User or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investments, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this forum without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or competent financial advisor. You understand that you are using any and all Information available on or through this forum at your own risk.
Photo credit: Dave J Hogan - Getty Images

From ELLE

Angelina Jolie joins Kylie Jenner as the latest celebrity this week to donate $1 million to help with COVID-19 relief. Jolie gave to No Kid Hungry, which focuses on ending child hunger in the U.S. The organization announced the gift in a statement yesterday. Her money will be used to provide meals for children in low-income families across the country.

Jolie said, As of this week, over a billion children are out of school worldwide because of closures linked to coronavirus. Many children depend on the care and nutrition they receive during school hours, including nearly 22 million children in America who rely on food support. No Kid Hungry is making resolute efforts to reach as many of those children as possible.

The organization has so far donated $2 million to 78 organizations across 30 states. This week alone, No Kid Hungry "issued new emergency grants to school districts, food banks and community organizations feeding kids nationwide and in Louisiana, Texas, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Maine, and Oklahoma," according to its statement.

Jolie's donation comes hours after Jenner's $1 million donation to Los Angeles hospitals was announced. The funds Jenner donated will be used to buy protective supplies and masks for doctors on the frontline.

Jenner's doctor, Dr. Thais Aliabadi, shared news of Jenner's donation on her Instagram. She wrote:

I am speechless, my eyes are filled with tears of joy and my heart is overwhelmed with gratitude. I made a wish to the Universe to gather protective masks for our brave healthcare workers and today my dream came true. One of my patients, a beautiful Living Angel just donated $1,000,000 to help us buy hundreds of thousands of masks, face shields, and other protective gear which we will have delivered directly to our first responders, as too many masks at hospitals are disappearing before making their way onto the faces of our front line heroes.



I have never felt more blessed to be a doctor, as helping our brave ER and ICU workers feels just as gratifying as helping my own patients. From the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU @kyliejenner . You are my hero. This generous donation will help save many precious lives. Our world is a better place with you in it. I love you so much.

Thank you X a million....

Story continues

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Webb County Court-at-Law No. 2 is holding all hearings online amid the coronavirus pandemic affecting the city

READ MORE: Laredo and Webb County plan to enact shelter-in-place, curfew due to coronavirus

Consistent with the directives of the Texas Supreme Court, Judge Victor Villarreal held court hearings via video conference in Webb County Court-at-Law his week.

We have held family law, civil law, and probate law court hearings via video conference this week. Our next criminal law docket is scheduled next week and we are prepared for it, said Court Administrator Cesia Y. Rodriguez. There has been no delay in giving people their day in court and we have been able to comply with the Emergency Orders of the Texas Supreme Court and state, county, and local directives to reduce in-person hearings to less than 10 people. Holding court hearings via video conference avoids delays, provides maximum safety and compliance with the law.

Lawyers, litigants, witnesses, Webb County departments, and support staff, including SCAN, have said using video conferencing has been very easy to use, Rodriguez said. She added they are surprised by the ease of use and delighted that they have been able to participate without delays.

Villarreal and his staff had been making video conferencing plans before the order on video-conference court hearings was issued and immediately moved into full implementation.

We have been working overtime to ensure that safe and timely access to justice continues at Webb County Court-at-Law II, Villarreal said.

He added that the Office of Court Administration acquired software licenses for Texas Courts so all courts, lawyers and litigants could continue to have access to the justice system.

From March 18 through March 20, Villarreal hosted three video tutorials for lawyers practicing before his court, judges from Bexar, Dallas, Webb and Cameron counties and their staff and court reporters; and Webb County employees providing support services to the judiciary. More than 100 people participated remotely.

Villarreal said planning and quick action have precluded any delays or resetting of cases.

READ MORE: Laredo Border Patrol supervisor among positive cases for coronavirus, according to local union

Attorneys, litigants, and witnesses have been surprised at the ease of video conferencing, he said. The Webb County Court-at-Law II team has been enthusiastic about quickly learning new technology, revising old methods of conducting the courts business and implementing new solutions. Our faith and a desire to keep cases moving motivates us. We want lawyers and litigants to know we are here for them, he said.
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London Mayor Sadiq Khan has admitted tube services could be cut back even further in the coming days, despite the government ordering him to put more trains on during the coronavirus lockdown.

City Hall and No 10 have been at loggerheads after commuters complained of packed peak time tube services in breach of social distancing measures put in place to tackle the coronavirus crisis.

Yesterday the Prime Minister told Mr Khan he should 'get more tubes on the line', but the Mayor of London earlier blamed the government for the overcrowding, saying the trains would be less busy if construction workers didn't have to travel across the capital.

In a statement yesterday morning Mr Khan revealed that even more train services will go and said: 'Nearly a third of TfL's staff are now off sick or self-isolating - including train drivers and crucial control centre staff.

'Many of them have years of safety-critical training in order to run specific lines - so it is simply not possible to replace them with others.

'TfL will do everything possible to continue safely running a basic service for key workers, including our amazing NHS staff, but if the number of TfL staff off sick or self-isolating continues to rise - as we sadly expect it will - we will have no choice but to reduce services further.'

A carriage on the Central Line packed with commuters after Prime Minister Boris Johnson has put the UK in lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus

In a statement yesterday morning Mr Khan revealed that even more train services will go and said: 'Nearly a third of TfL's staff are now off sick or self-isolating - including train drivers and crucial control centre staff.'

London Underground tube passengers try to squeeze onto a carriage on the Central Line at White City on Wednesday morning

It comes as the mother of a premature baby visiting her son in hospital, a special needs teacher and restaurant staff are among the victims of Sadiq Khan's refusal to increase tube services.

Mary Selassie, 42, was taking the underground from Ealing Broadway to Westminster, the closest station to St Thomas' hospital in South London where her son Elhan is being treated in a specialist intensive care unit after being born three months early. The journey takes around an hour.

She told MailOnline: 'I need the underground at this time because without it I would not be able to spend time with my son. I've been doing this journey for the past three weeks and in the last few days the service has not been as regular.

'I don't understand why they are reducing the number of trains because it just means that we have to wait for longer.

'Many other people are in the same difficult position as me. They're getting the tube because they have to. Of course I'm worried because there's a very high chance that I could become infected using public transport and then I definitely would not be able to see my baby. This is just adding to my stress.'

Today, Boris Johnson has said it should be possible to 'run a better Tube system', fuelling the row about why carriages are packed during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Tube is operating at around 50% of its normal capacity during peak times, leading to overcrowding as many people continue to travel despite pleas for non-essential journeys to be avoided.

As Britain started its second day of mass self-isolation today, it also emerged:

London is on a trajectory for a worse coronavirus outbreak than Lombardy in Italy with deaths doubling every two days and it could run out of intensive care beds by the end of the week;

Parliament is shutting early tonight 'until further notice';

Coronavirus could have infected as much as half of the population of the United Kingdom, according to researchers at the University of Oxford;

FTSE 100 opens up 2% by 108 to 5,555 points after record day of trading yesterday as world markets seesaw;

Commuters crammed on to the Central Line at Leytonstone this morning - where there was only one train every 15 minutes - when it would usually be around every three minutes

Ernesta Juskatie, 38, a dental nurse, is taking the underground to get to work

There is mounting anger among NMHS workers who insist TFL can and must do more to ensure key workers get to work safely throughout the crisis

Coronavirus UK: New lockdown measures in full Boris Johnson tonight announced a lockdown plan to stem the spread of the coronavirus in the UK as he told the nation to stay at home. People will only be allowed to leave their home for the following 'very limited' purposes: Shopping for basic necessities as infrequently as possible. One form of exercise a day. Any medical need, to provide care or to help a vulnerable person. Travelling to and from work, but only where this is absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, the PM has announced a ban on: Meeting with friends. Meeting with family members you do not live with. All weddings, baptisms and other ceremonies but excluding funerals. All gatherings of more than two people in public. The PM said the police will have the powers to enforce the lockdown measures through fines and dispersing gatherings. To ensure people comply the government is also: Closing all shops selling non-essential goods. Closing all libraries, playground, outdoor gyms and places of worship. Parks will remain open for exercise, but will be patrolled. Advertisement

NHS workers are among those who have complained that packed carriages are putting their health at risk.

Edvaldo DaSilva, 42, said he had tried and failed to find space to board the underground on Monday and Tuesday and today decided to stay at home.

Mr DaSilva said: 'I normally leave my home at Bethnal green and take the tube at around 7 am. Last week it was fine and I was able to get on to the trains. '

But on Monday and Tuesday it was impossible because their were less trains running than before.

'The platform was packed and the trains took about 15 minutes to arrive and then I couldn't get on.

'I looked at everybody on the trains and I thought 'they're breathing all over each other. This is so dangerous'.

'We are supposed to be keeping two meters from people and now that they are less trains, people are being pushed together even more and it's dangerous for our health.

'I saw passengers with their faces stuck next to others and it was terrible. It just needs one person on the train to have coronavirus and everybody is at risk.'

Mr DaSilva, who works at the Riverside School in Wood Green, added: 'This is not acceptable.

'It's really hard for me because I teach vulnerable young people life skills and I must be allowed to do my job.

'But my boss understands and now the government needs to understand.

'These tube trains are very dangerous for everyone staff and passengers. Something has to be done.

'They need to put new trains on or restrict people travelling. It's so dangerous and opposite to what we are being told by the Government.

'I feel very sorry for those people who have to ride on those tubes so closely together. It is not right.'

Ana Gomes, 40 and Carlos Maestu, 51 were taking the central line from Ealing Broadway to West Acton following a shopping trip to a supermarket.

Ms Gomes, a waitress who is currently at home after the restaurant she works in closed, said: 'We don't want to get the tube, but we have to. The nearest supermarket to us is here in Ealing Broadway. Both of us are taking all the precautions we can, we'd rather not use public transport but what else are we supposed to do?'

Kim Black, 48, a child protection social worker from Oxford, is taking the underground to Paddington to catch a train to her home

Prime Minister says: 'We should be able to run a better Tube system' Boris Johnson has said it should be possible to 'run a better Tube system', fuelling the row about why carriages are packed during the coronavirus pandemic. The Prime Minister told MPs that more London Underground trains should be running, despite Mayor of London Sadiq Khan insisting services are reduced due to staff being off sick or self-isolating. The Tube is operating at around 50% of its normal capacity during peak times, leading to overcrowding as many people continue to travel despite pleas for non-essential journeys to be avoided. NHS workers are among those who have complained that packed carriages are putting their health at risk. Mr Johnson said: 'My own view is that we should be able to run a better Tube system at the moment, we should be able to get more Tubes on the line.' He claimed 'I do not wish in any way to cast aspersions on what is going on at TfL', and pledged to give the mayor 'every support' to get through 'what seems to me to be his present logistical difficulties'. The Prime Minister's comments come a day after Health Secretary Matt Hancock said there is 'no good reason' why timetables have been cut to the extent they have. Advertisement

Spaniard Mr Maestu, a chef, who is also at home following the closure of the central London restaurant he works in, added: 'In Spain the lockdown is much tougher than in Britain. If you ask me, they need to shut down all public transport except to essential workers because there are still too many people out and about.

'If they did close the tube it would be a big problem for me, but you can't just think about yourself in a time like this.'

Ernesta Juskatie, 38, a dental nurse revealed that she was taking the underground to get to work.

She added: 'The practice where I work is still open, so I don't have much choice. When I'm on the underground, I don't sit, and I don't touch anything. I know that might not be enough to stop me getting infected but I'm doing all that I can.

'Personally, I hope they close the whole network down, except for those who really need to get to work, like NHS staff. That way I would have no choice but to stay at home.'

Kim Black, 48, a child protection social worker from Oxford said that she was taking the underground to Paddington to catch a train to her home.

She added: 'This is my last day at work and then I'll be working from home. I just came into London to collect a laptop from my work and sort out some paperwork.

'It's actually quite pleasant commuting from Oxford at the moment because normally, you don't even get a seat. The underground needs to keep going; there needs to be an increased service, not a decreased one because there are a lot of people who still need to use it.'

The PM has told the Mayor of London to add more trains but London's Tube network is packed again with Mr Khan accused of 'risking lives' after slashing number of trains at a time of national emergency.

Today one in three of TfL staff are ill or in self-isolation - including large numbers of drivers and customer-facing workers - with the sickness figures appearing to be disproportionately higher than among frontline workers in the NHS, police and fire services. Some have blamed the strength of the Tube unions and their threat to pull away members for the high level of staff absence.

MailOnline can reveal that during rush hour today some London Underground lines are currently only running one train every twenty minutes, when it should be one every three to five minutes, causing more crammed conditions in 'death trap' carriages and on heaving platforms.

Mr Johnson said: 'My own view is that we should be able to run a better Tube system at the moment, we should be able to get more Tubes on the line.'

He claimed 'I do not wish in any way to cast aspersions on what is going on at TfL', and pledged to give the mayor 'every support' to get through 'what seems to me to be his present logistical difficulties.'

MailOnline reader Wayne Alexander, who works for Network Rail, took this picture today

MailOnline reader Wayne Alexander, who works for Network

Platforms are also packed with people who have no choice but to travel having been classed as key workers

'Contamination is rife': Boris Johnson faces growing pressure to shut building sites Boris Johnson is under growing pressure to stop non-essential construction workers heading to building sites as Britain attempts to tackle the spread of coronavirus. The Prime Minister has faced calls across the political spectrum for more stringent rules so workers are not placed at risk, and public transport is not overwhelmed. Mr Johnson, who will appear before MPs today for Prime Minister's Questions in the Commons, has so far resisted the pressure. But Conservative former cabinet minister Sir Iain Duncan Smith joined the demands for a rethink, after doubts were also raised by Nicola Sturgeon and London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Meanwhile, it has emerged that plumbers, electricians and other tradesmen are still allowed to carry out routine work in people's homes despite the dramatic lockdown announced on Monday. Pictures shared on social media today show workers sitting beside one another in a cramped canteen at the Hinkley Point C site in Somerset. Advertisement

As deaths in the capital doubled, the Mayor of London is facing mounting fury and pressure to restore services to normal levels with some NHS workers claiming they are now more worried about travelling to work than treating coronavirus patients in hospital.

But in a statement Mayor Khan this morning revealed more train services will go and said: 'Nearly a third of TfL's staff are now off sick or self-isolating - including train drivers and crucial control centre staff.

Many of them have years of safety-critical training in order to run specific lines - so it is simply not possible to replace them with others.

TfL will do everything possible to continue safely running a basic service for key workers, including our amazing NHS staff, but if the number of TfL staff off sick or self-isolating continues to rise - as we sadly expect it will - we will have no choice but to reduce services further.'.

There were grim scenes on the Tube again today where commuters with no choice but to go to work were faced to stand nose-to-nose with strangers on teeming trains.

Key worker Tony Drew tweeted: 'No-one is listening to you and don't need to reduce the service as much as you have. You need to get more trains on and stop putting the lives of key workers like me at risk'.

Kate Mat wrote: 'I have zero respect for Sadiq & TFL! Are they really blind or just heartless??! They are putting key workers life in danger!!!! Nurses, doctors and other key workers can't practice social distancing on cramped tubes!'

A senior nurse named Danny posted on Twitter: 'Another busy tube. Can we not stagger people's start times so we aren't all squashed on the same tube! This is unsafe and not fair!', and Barry Trimble, whose work involves ensuring cancer patients receive chemotherapy, posted: 'The Tube is packed, with social distancing impossible. We need more people to stay at home and more trains running in morning and evening peak.'

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said last night there is 'no good reason' Tube services have been slashed and Boris Johnson also questioned why up to three quarters of services had been axed in a call with Mr Khan yesterday,

Commuters have today vented their fury at the lack of trains, with one tweeting Mr Khan this morning with the plea: 'You are herding key workers into a smaller space.

'Your decision is a difficult one but is directly risking lives. Please rethink this for our health workers so they can at least feel safe going to work'.

Another NHS worker said: 'Please sort the tubes out, this is risking lives. Emergency workers have to use TFL! Help now'.

Today 500 police officers were deployed at major stations to remind passengers that only those making essential journeys for work should be using the Tube and trains - but huge numbers have no choice but to head to work again today.

Mr Khan has blamed commuters for flouting a ban on 'all non-essential travel' and urged people to avoid rush hour 'to save lives' - claiming he does not have enough staff to return services to normal.

Coronavirus UK: New lockdown measures in full Boris Johnson tonight announced a lockdown plan to stem the spread of the coronavirus in the UK as he told the nation to stay at home. People will only be allowed to leave their home for the following 'very limited' purposes: Shopping for basic necessities as infrequently as possible. One form of exercise a day. Any medical need, to provide care or to help a vulnerable person. Travelling to and from work, but only where this is absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, the PM has announced a ban on: Meeting with friends. Meeting with family members you do not live with. All weddings, baptisms and other ceremonies but excluding funerals. All gatherings of more than two people in public. The PM said the police will have the powers to enforce the lockdown measures through fines and dispersing gatherings. To ensure people comply the government is also: Closing all shops selling non-essential goods. Closing all libraries, playground, outdoor gyms and places of worship. Parks will remain open for exercise, but will be patrolled. Advertisement

Mr Hancock went on the attack as he was asked at a Downing Street press conference this evening why NHS staff and other key workers were being forced to put themselves at risk on crowded transport.

He said: 'When it comes to the Tube, the first and the best answer is that Transport for London should have the Tube running in full so that people travelling on the tube are spaced out and can be further apart - obeying the two-metre rule wherever possible.

'And there is no good reason in the information that I've seen that the current levels of tube provision should be as low as they are. We should have more tube trains running.'

Earlier, commuters packed in like sardines hit back at the Mayor, who runs the capital's public transport network, with one victim claiming it was about saving money, tweeting: 'Using the pandemic to save a few pennies. Nice work helping the people you claim to represent'. Another Londoner wrote: 'Utter disgrace. We need professional leadership at this time'.

Sharing a horrifying picture of a packed Tube train this morning, NHS sonographer Nicola Smith tweeted: 'I love my job, but now I'm risking my health just on the journey in?! @SadiqKhan put the tube service back to normal so we can all spread out, or @BorisJohnson start policing who's getting on. Help me!'. After completing her journey to the Imperial College NHS Trust in west London, she said: 'I worry for my health more on my commute than actually being in the hospital.'

And there is continuing confusion over who qualifies as a key worker, especially among London's army of builders, meaning most had no choice but to ride the busy trains to work and run the terrifying risk of catching coronavirus, which has claimed 422 lives so far in the UK.

Boris Johnson also raised concerns about cutbacks in London Underground services with the capital's Mayor in a calland is said to have asked him to put on more trains. His Downing Street spokesman said: 'The Prime Minister raised with the mayor the issue of reduced services on the tube and its impact on people trying to get to work'.

British Transport Police has said its officers will stop non-essential workers travelling on the Tube. A spokesman said the force would 'ensure that only those making essential journeys for work are using the Tube and rail network', adding: 'Our officers will be on hand to support rail operators if people are clearly disregarding the advice'.

Boris Johnson's coronavirus lockdown backed by 93 PER CENT of the public - poll finds Boris Johnson's coronavirus lockdown is backed by 93 per cent of Britons, according to a poll today. But in a potentially worrying sign for the PM, two-thirds believe that the extraordinary curbs will be easy to obey. The announcement by the PM last night mean that everyone must stay inside unless it is absolutely essential. Gatherings of more than two people have been banned in the most dramatic restrictions on freedom ever seen in Britain in time of peace or war. But research by YouGov shows the measures have overwhelming endorsement from the public, Advertisement

Hours after the PM said almost all Britons should should stay at home in the most draconian shutdown in modern history, people were nose-to-nose on the Tube, trains and buses despite being told to be two metres apart to avoid exposure to the killer virus.

To stem the terrifying number of deaths, gatherings of more than two people are now banned and people must only leave their homes for essential supplies, medical help, or to travel to work if it is 'absolutely' unavoidable. Going out for exercise is allowed once a day as long as people stay two metres apart to stop the NHS collapsing under the strain of new cases.

But transport union TSSA today called for police to be deployed to make sure only key workers are getting on trains amid claims Tube staff could walk out unless ID checks start immediately because of 'dangerous' conditions at London stations.

General secretary Manuel Cortes said: 'Sadly, the situation on the London Underground has not improved. We urgently need British Transport Police and other officers at major stations across London's transport network to ensure only those with a valid reason to travel are doing so in this emergency'.

Mr Khan's office hit back at Mr Hancock's claim there was 'no good reason' not to have more frequent services on the Underground tonight.

A spokeswoman for the Mayor said: 'This is simply not true. The Mayor has told ministers countless times over recent days that TfL simply cannot safely run a full service because of the levels of staff sickness and self-isolation.

'Nearly a third of staff are already absent - there aren't enough drivers and control staff to do it.

'The Government must act urgently to get more people staying at home rather than going to work unnecessarily - that means taking the difficult decisions they are refusing to take to ban non-essential construction work and provide proper financial support to freelancers, the self-employed and those on zero-hours contracts to stay at home.'

Mr Khan has demanded that employers enable their staff to work from home 'unless it's absolutely necessary' and avoid rush hour if they can't, adding: 'Ignoring these rules means more lives lost. Some of the people on the Tube yesterday and today are not essential workers, I can tell you that'.

But there is ongoing confusion caused by Boris Johnson's long list of key workers - with many packed on to trains appearing to be labourers legitimately heading to building sites in London after housing secretary Robert Jenrick tweeted last night: 'If you are working on site, you can continue to do so.'

There are growing calls for police to be deployed at all main underground and overground stations to make sure only key workers are getting on trains (BTP officers pictured in Bristol today)

What major world cities have the lowest proportion of people moving around compared to normal? TWO WEEKS AGO (W/ending Mar 15) Milan 9% Rome 16% Seoul 42% Madrid 46% Seattle 47% Tokyo 48% Monaco 51% Copenhagen 54% Paris 57% San Francisco 57% Rhine-Ruhr 60% Barcelona 61% Hamburg 64% Boston 64% Hong Kong 65% Washington DC 66% New York City 67% Amsterdam 68% Vienna 69% Berlin 69% Philadelphia 70% Brussels 71% Los Angeles 71% Stockholm 73% Chicago 78% Singapore 82% Vancouver 83% L ondon 83% Toronto 84% Lyon 86% Lisbon 87% Manchester 89% Montreal 91% Birmingham 91% Sydney 93% Istanbul 93% Mexico City 95% Melbourne 97% Moscow 98% St. Petersburg 101% Sao Paulo 104% PAST WEEK (W/ending Mar 21) Milan 4% Madrid 5% Barcelona 6% Rome 6% Vienna 7% Paris 9% Copenhagen 11% Lyon 11% Amsterdam 12% San Francisco 12% Monaco 13% Brussels 14% New York City 15% Boston 16% Washington DC 16% Chicago 17% Hamburg 20% Lisbon 20% Seattle 20% Berlin 21% Istanbul 21% Rhine-Ruhr 22% Los Angeles 22% Philadelphia 23% Montreal 30% Sao Paulo 33% Toronto 34% Tokyo 35% Stockholm 36% London 36% Vancouver 37% Seoul 40% Manchester 41% Birmingham 44% Mexico City 45% Melbourne 55% Sydney 56% Hong Kong 56% Moscow 68% Singapore 72% St. Petersburg 79% YESTERDAY (Mar 23) Milan 4%

Barcelona 5%

Madrid 5%

Lyon 5%

Paris 5%

Monaco 5%

Vienna 6%

Rome 6%

Amsterdam 7%

Brussels 8%

New York City 8%

San Francisco 8%

Chicago 9%

Washington DC 9%

Copenhagen 10%

Boston 10%

Istanbul 11%

Sao Paulo 13%

Berlin 13%

Lisbon 14%

Seattle 14%

Hamburg 15%

Los Angeles 16%

Rhine-Ruhr 17%

Philadelphia 17%

Montreal 18%

Tokyo 18%

Toronto 23%

Vancouver 24%

London 25%

Manchester 28%

Sydney 28%

Mexico City 30%

Birmingham 31%

Melbourne 33%

Stockholm 35%

Seoul 36%

Moscow 56%

Singapore 61%

St. Petersburg 73%

Hong Kong n/a Data from Citymapper Mobility Index Advertisement

Confusion as shop and office workers are told to stay home amid coronavirus lockdown but builders and delivery drivers can carry on The government has come under pressure to urgently clarify who it counts as a 'key worker' after Britons woke up in a state of lockdown confusion. Last night in his historic address to the nation, Boris Johnson ordered the public to stay at home unless travelling to work was 'absolutely necessary'. It was wrapped into an emergency package of draconian measures to keep people indoors to stem the tide of coronavirus infection, which threatens to overwhelm the NHS. But the wriggle room left by the Prime Minister over exactly who was allowed to travel was seized upon by many workers who continued to commute to their jobs this morning. Construction workers were seen operating in close proximity, causing head-scratching over why they were continuing to work while most of the country was forced to hunker down at home. Responding to claims that details of the lockdown were 'murky', Michael Gove, the minister for the cabinet office, said: 'It is the case that construction should continue on sites. 'People should obviously exercise sensitivity and common sense and follow social distancing measures. But construction sites carried out in the open air can continue'. And Nicola Sturgeon and Sadiq Khan fanned further confusion when they advised construction workers to stay at home. Housebuilder Taylor Wimpey said it has closed its construction sites, show homes and sale sites due to coronavirus. The company said it has a 'large order-book and quality long-term landbank' which provides it with increased resilience. It said UK operations have 'only been meaningfully impacted in very recent days' while its smaller Spanish operations have been disrupted by a nationwide shutdown. Earlier on Tuesday, competitor Redrow said its sites remain open with 'strict precautions in place including enhanced levels of cleaning, additional hygiene facilities and social distancing'. Advertisement

The Department for Transport is identifying those lines that need more trains. It said: 'We are aware of some instances of overcrowding on certain train services this morning, and are working with operators regarding capacity on specific lines as needed to make sure there is space to be safe.'

C2C, which runs commuter services between Essex and London, is thought to have been identified as a line in need of increased capacity.

Passenger watchdog Transport Focus said: 'The Government should continue to review what measures are needed to make sure social distancing on trains services is safe.'

The RMT union said: 'We know that many people who are not traditionally employed, whether they are self-employed, on zero-hour contracts or in the gig economy, feel they have no choice but to go to work because of their financial situation. We therefore call on the Government to do far more to help these workers.'

Vernon Everitt of TfL said: 'To save lives, everyone must follow the Government and Mayor's instructions to stay at home and only travel if absolutely essential. Only critical workers should be using public transport, and no one else.'

The Prime Minister's shutdown will last for a minimum of three weeks and the UK's new state of emergency is unprecedented in modern history.

Gatherings of more than two people will be banned in the most dramatic curbs on freedom ever seen in Britain in time of peace or war, as the government goes all out to stop the spread of the killer disease.

In a grim address to the nation from Downing Street, Mr Johnson said: 'Without a huge national effort to halt the growth of this virus, there will come a moment when no health service in the world could possibly cope; because there won't be enough ventilators, enough intensive care beds, enough doctors and nurses', adding: 'I must give the British people a very simple instruction - you must stay at home'.

He said any family reunions, weddings, baptisms and other social events must be cancelled to stop the NHS collapsing under the strain. Funerals can go ahead attended by just a handful of closest relatives.

People must only leave their homes for essential supplies, medical help, or to travel to work if it is 'absolutely' unavoidable. Going out for exercise will be allowed once a day, but parks will be patrolled to make sure there is no abuse of the rules.

Police will have powers to fine those who do not fall into line, and disperse any public gatherings, in measures to curb movement only seen during the Second World War. Historians have claimed you have to go back to 1666 to find when people were last forced to stay at home en masse, when Britons had to stay at home for 40 days to halt the spread of the Great Plague.

The PM was finally forced into the draconian move amid fury that many people are still flouting 'social distancing' guidance, with parks and Tube trains in London - regarded as the engine of the UK outbreak - still busy despite repeated pleas.

'Though huge numbers are complying  and I thank you all - the time has now come for us all to do more,' Mr Johnson said.
The country's largest group water scheme has been under a 'do not drink' alert for six weeks, forcing residents to abandon isolation attempts to buy bottled water and fill containers from tankers.

More than 6,000 people rely on the Kilmaley-Inagh scheme in Co Clare where high levels of cloudiness and aluminium led to the contamination alert.

Testing is taking place in the hope they can resume drinking the water in the next few days but after six weeks of not being able to use it, even for cooking, frustrations in the region are running high.

Green Party councillor Roisin Garvey said she had been delivering water to older residents who couldn't get out to fetch water or were unable to carry it back to their homes.

"It's heartbreaking to see how grateful some of them have been for a few litres of water," she said.

"It also makes a nonsense of all the 'wash your hands' and 'don't congregate' warnings when 6,000 people are supposed to be turning the taps on a few tankers to get water."

Problems began in early February when turbidity levels, caused by sediment and organic matter in the water, rose to the extent that the treatment plant could not filter it with confidence that it could remove all substances, leaving a risk of microbes getting into the supply.

Cleaning was boosted with extra aluminium which also became a health concern.

On February 13, the HSE issued a 'do not drink' notice.

Since then, scheme operator EPS Water has been working to improve the filter systems but early assurances that it would take a few days quickly fell by the wayside.

Barry O'Toole, EPS operations director, wrote to scheme manager Noel Carmody on March 10 to say he aimed to have it fixed by March 13.

"I would like to stress that EPS are fully committed to finding a solution to this current issue," he said.

A spokesperson for EPS was not put forward yesterday.

Mr Carmody said samples taken in recent days were clear but with 250km of pipes in the scheme and an average of 1.5m litres of water being supplied daily, it was necessary to ensure that every part of the network was fully flushed out.

He said while he was anxious to get the current issue resolved, he had concerns about the source of their water supply, Lough Naminna, which has suffered an unexpected drop in quality recently.

He said the impact of tree felling and land clearing for a wind farm would have to be investigated.

"It's a ground-water lake on top of a mountain with very little water flowing into it so it should be well filtered before it ever gets to the water treatment plant," Mr Carmody said.

"Turbidity increases a bit every winter, particularly with heavy rainfall, but we haven't seen anything like this before."
Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari on Thursday announced donating his one day's salary for the assistance of the people affected by coronavirus.

The Governor said that the amount will be sent to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund.

According to a press release issued by Raj Bhavan, all officers and staff of Raj Bhavan will also be donating their one day salary to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund for the same purpose.

In response to the nationwide lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Koshyari has cancelled all his public meetings and engagements till April 14. The Governor will not be meeting his daily visitors during this period.

Raj Bhavan announced that the Governor will, however, meet visitors and officials in discharge of his important official responsibilities.

A total of 649 confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been reported in India, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said on Thursday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a small laboratory on the University of New Mexico campus, a 3-D printer is busy working its way back and forth, setting down material on something that looks like a microscope slide.

In fact, what the printer is doing is systematically and precisely placing thin layers of biopolymers containing bone, cartilage and ligament tissue on small scaffolds that biomechanics engineer Christina Salas believes will one day transform the way joints are replaced in the human body.

Were looking for something that can serve as a temporary replacement, but ultimately stimulate your bodys own immune system to start producing new cells in order to regenerate your own native tissue, Salas said.

So instead of plastics, metals or ceramic, this would be a degradable material that would be used to implant into the joint space, and over time it would degrade at the same rate your body would regenerate the native tissue  cartilage, bone, ligament the whole thing. Youll have your own tissue thats regrown in its place.

The scaffold could be inserted into the joint in a minimally invasive procedure and be anchored by bone screws or staples. The scaffold itself wouldnt grow; rather it would degrade as the cells attached to it start to multiply and lay down tissue.

Salas also envisions how she and her team could conceivably one day use MRI or CT scans to create on their 3-D printer a scaffold containing the bone, cartilage and ligament material that looks exactly anatomically like the arthritic end of bones that the surgeons remove.

The goal is to make joint implants as we know them today unnecessary. How long it would take for the body to regrow the new material is not yet know. It could take from a couple of months to a couple of years, Salas said, depending on how much of the original joint the surgeons had to remove.

Salas said she anticipates that studies on mice or rats will begin within a year, but it could be 10 or more years before the scaffolds are implanted in people.

Salas, 40, has been on the UNM faculty for nearly six years, and has cross appointments in the UNM Health Sciences Centers Department of Orthopedics, and in the School of Engineering. She has a doctorate in biomedical engineering, a masters degree in mechanical engineering, did a fellowship in computational biomechanics at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and another one in experimental biomechanics at the University of California, San Francisco.

She already holds one patent on a mesh plate she designed for fixing more superficial bones, such as the patella in the knee, the olecranon bone in the elbow, and she has another seven patents pending.

As a child growing up in San Antonio, Salas thought she might like to become a computer engineer, but a teacher subsequently began taking to her about engineers who are astronauts, and engineers who build bridges and buildings, and engineers who build cars, she said.

That resonated with Salas, who became pretty good at fixing her own cars and said some of her first jobs were at auto parts stores.

About six months ago I changed out the furnace in my house. Ive always picked up a book and anytime I needed to do something it was more fun for me to learn how to do it myself, rather than pay somebody else to do it.

That fancy 3-D printer in her lab was a do-it-yourself project cobbled together by Salas and her undergraduate and graduate research assistants from the UNM School of Engineering.

When Salas came to UNM to work on her masters degree in mechanical engineering, she had a graduate adviser who was also a civil engineer.

As a civil engineer, youre working with structures, and the human body is a structure, so youre just working with different materials, she said.

The adviser, who had experience in biomechanics, was looking to do a research project with a graduate student in technical engineering, but who also had an interest in health care.

That set Salas on her current path.

In other labs at UNM, she and her research assistants are testing different configurations of spinal rods on synthetic spines that are placed in machines that simulate human motion and stresses.

Were trying to answer questions for surgeons if they need as much hardware in a patient in order to have a strong fixation, or can they have less hardware but still be able to hold the same load and stabilize the spine, she said.

They are also testing an external, triangular configured fixation device using carbon fiber rods to stabilize a broken tibia bone.

My role in orthopedics is to work with all our surgeons in every specialty, and help facilitate any development of new technologies and new surgical procedures, Salas said. If a new implant comes on the market, we test it to see if its as good as some of the impacts theyve been using for many years.

Salas, who is married and has two young children, acknowledges that she sometimes spends up to 60 hours a week doing research in her labs, mentoring students and teaching.

All my research is focused on health care and patient care, but I wanted to be in the background, she said. Im the typical introverted engineer. I do very well interacting with patients, but I do a better job making implants or devices that are used by those patients  and I can make just as big of an impact.
President Trump with Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House's coronavirus response coordinator. (Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

When the urgent phone call came last month, respected HIV researcher Deborah Birx was meeting with African officials and activists from around the world at a Johannesburg conference to help determine how U.S. AIDS relief funding would be doled out.

It was the White House calling.

Birx was on the next flight out, headed home to Washington to become coordinator of the Trump administrations new corornavirus task force.

Ever since, the tough-minded, data-driven scientist has become one of the administration's key messengers assuring anxious Americans, and one of the daily public faces on television  often framed by colorful scarves  standing behind Trump and speaking at the lectern.

She and her mentor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of infectious disease at the National Institutes of Health, have become crucial voices of science and caution, at times contrasting sharply with Trump and other administration officials eager to downplay the risks.

Supporters say she has brought a cool head and credibility to news briefings often muddled with misinformation and contradictions from the politicians.

"It is probably really tough," said Jen Kates, senior vice president and director of global health and HIV for the Kaiser Family Foundation. "You're dealing with an emergency like we have never faced  and having to navigate the politics."

An immunologist, world-renowned global health expert and U.S. Army colonel, Birx is a rare holdover from the Obama administration. Birx also serves as the State Departments ambassador-at-large for global health and heads the worlds single largest AIDS program, the $85-billion President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, created in 2003 by President George W. Bush.

Those who know her said she managed to establish and maintain good relations with Vice President Mike Pence, who said she was his first call when Trump asked him to lead the government's coronavirus response. He has called her his "right arm."

Story continues

Along with most others who have appeared at the White House lectern with Trump, Birx has heaped praise on the president and rarely contradicted him in public, even when some of his statements seem at odds with hers. That has led to some backlash on social media among those who say she's undermining her own message and risking her reputation.

Birx's aides said she was not available to comment for this article.

Her supporters say that she is a seasoned political operative with the diplomatic skills to handle Trump while also bringing serious technical and medical expertise to a crisis that is unprecedented.

She is very focused on the mission, driven to get the job done, whatever it takes," Kates said. "And its a level of rigor that she demands from everyone around her."

But at times, finding that balance has been challenging. Last week, for example, Birx was one of the first U.S. officials to raise alarm flags that younger Americans were not taking the threat seriously, noting that growing evidence abroad suggested that young people were in fact becoming infected and suffering serious health problems.

This week, she seemed to undercut that warning by suddenly emphasizing that the mortality among young people is very low, a position seemingly more in line with the administration.

On Tuesday, she struggled to reconcile Trump's aim to reopen the country by Easter with the warnings of the scientific community that social distancing and similar prophylactic measures would need to stay in place longer to be effective.

"We have to be willing to adjust our plans as we see impact," she said on NBC.

Asked whether she thought Trump would heed advice from her and other medical experts if they believed a full lockdown were necessary to save lives, she also hedged.

"I am confident that the president has listened to and seen all of our data as it evolves," Birx said. "You can see that in the past few weeks he has been very focused on what the American people need, both economically and public-health-wise."

Birx is very skillful in managing people, both those who work for her and those above her, said Robert Hecht, founder and president of Pharos Global Health Advisors, a Boston-based nonprofit organization that advises on world health policies.

"My hope is she will find a way to navigate" alongside Trump, Hecht said. "You have to take the hand of cards you're dealt."

He and others said Birx wins high marks for her ability to work across political party lines and to deal easily with numerous groups, from adolescent girls exposed to HIV, to presidents and prime ministers of Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

"Her ability to see short-term reality and long-term needs is a defining characteristic of her leadership," said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, a New York-based group promoting HIV prevention.

Data is Birx's essence, as she intimates in her public appearances. She famously shows up at meetings with a bundle of slides under her arm, ready to show the latest PowerPoint with graphs and charts on disease, treatment and the social context of epidemics. Establishing the connection of disease to its environment  poverty, inequality, violence against women or girls, patriarchal discrimination  underlies much of her work, associates say.

Birx, 63, is married to a fellow doctor, has spoken of her two millennial-aged daughters and is also a grandmother. A local newspaper said she channels the the governments collective maternal instinct in her briefing appearances. But those who know her see more military than motherly.

Birx started working on AIDS before much of the world knew what AIDS was. After working her way through medical school and specializing in immunodeficiency disease, she joined the Army to follow her husband and was stationed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. It was the early 1980s, and mysterious cases of young soldiers dying from an unknown infection began arriving on her ward.

"We tried to save these soldiers and we couldnt," Birx said last fall on the "Strategerist," a podcast for the Bush presidential center. "We didn't know what the problem was and we didnt know how to treat it. It was devastating."

Birx credited the Walter Reed experience for her discipline and leadership skills.

"You had to be able to lead troops," she said.

Birx went on to conduct research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NIH. From 2003-10, she was one of the forces behind a massive and controversial AIDS vaccine trial in Thailand. It involved thousands of people and millions of dollars. Numerous U.S. scientists opposed it, saying the trial was wasting money and had little chance for success. Birx, backed by Fauci, insisted it go ahead. Ultimately, the trial, while not stopping infection, reduced it substantially and is held up today as the most successful vaccine experimentation so far.

She showed she could lead a massive program "with courage," said Chris Collins, president of Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. "The issue is, is she going to be given the authority to bring those strengths to this crisis?"

Birx has also attracted notice for her bright silk scarves, which stand out in contrast to the dark men's suits and military uniforms that usually surround her. She told the podcast that they became a habit in her constant travel, when her personal rule was to pack nothing more than a small carry-on bag. "I learned from men," she said. They have one suit but many ties; she said she packs a couple of dresses and all the scarves.

President Obama appointed her to head PEPFAR in 2014, and she has stayed on through the arrival of Trump, when she was faced with drastic cuts in her budget. In briefings with State Department reporters, she defended the cuts, saying with increased efficiency she could focus money in countries most in need, primarily Africa. Some members of Congress, however, as well as a report from the inspector general last year, called into question how the funds were being allocated.

If Birx is reluctant to directly criticize Trump in public, she didn't hesitate to sharply scold Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who disclosed recently that he tested positive for COVID-19. Paul criticized testing guidelines that say no test is needed for people without symptoms, adding that if he had followed them, he would have continued exposing people without his knowledge.

Birx shot back that Paul should have been following social-distancing guidelines in the first place, rather than going to the Capitol gym and sitting next to other senators at lunch.

"If he had been following these guidelines, he wouldn't have been infecting others," she said this week, noting she had skipped briefings over the weekend after registering a mild fever. (She said she tested negative for the virus.)

"Each person has to be responsible," Birx said. "All of us have made sacrifices.... [People] have really made those personal sacrifices. What we're asking every American to do is to make those personal sacrifices for these next weeks."
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 17:57:58|Editor: mingmei

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KUALA LUMPUR, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Malaysian King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah and his wife Azizah Aminah Maimunah Iskandariah will undergo a 14-day quarantine after several palace employees were infected with COVID-19, the national palace said Thursday.

Abdullah and Azizah had themselves tested negative for the virus, Comptroller of the Royal Household Ahmad Fadil Shamsuddin said in a statement.

Fadil said Abdullah was advised against holding the weekly pre-cabinet meetings with Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin until the COVID-19 crisis ends.

"While approving of the government's extension of the movement control order to April 14, he (the king) also expressed hope that all Malaysians will be firm in facing this difficult time and continue their support and cooperation to healthcare workers and security personnel," he said.

Malaysia has implemented the "movement control order" since March 18, including closing shops and schools as well as imposing travel bans. It called for residents to stay at home in an effort to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.

Earlier, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said via social media that he had been observing a 14-day quarantine after contact with a member of parliament who was later tested positive for the disease. Local media reports that the 94-year-old former prime minister had been cleared by health authorities after testing negative.
Union Roads and Highway Minister Nitin Gadkari on Wednesday (March 25) announced that no toll will be collected at all toll plazas across India in the wake of coronavirus pandemic and the 21-day nationwide lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to curb the spread of the deadly virus in the country.

Gadkari tweeted saying that maintenance of roads and the availability of emergency resources will continue as usual at all toll plazas across the country. The Union Minister remarked that the move to suspend toll collection will help in reducing inconvenience to the supply of emergency services.

In view of Covid-19, it has been ordered to temporarily suspend the collection of toll at all toll plaza across India. This will not only reduce inconvenience to the supply of emergency services but also save critical time. #IndiaFightsCorona  Nitin Gadkari (@nitin_gadkari) March 25, 2020

It may be recalled that Road Transport and Highways Ministry had advised the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) to follow the guidelines issued by MHA about toll plaza operations after the announcement of 21-day lockdown.

Gadkari had said that the prevailing condition may be treated as "Force Majeure" of concession or contract agreement in terms of the Finance Ministry.

On Tuesday, an order was issued by Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) providing details of the guidelines for the nationwide lockdown. In its order, the MHA had said that all offices of the government barring for those providing essential services will remain shut. Hospitals and all other medical facilities have been exempted from the lockdown. The exemptions include print and electronic media, shops selling essential items, e-delivery of food, medical equipment, banks, petrol pumps etc.

All commercial establishments and private organizations will be closed and transport and hospitality services will remain suspended during the lockdown.
The University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan Oyo State, has suspended key services due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

The suspension of consultation services to regular outpatients was announced by the Chief Medical Director (CMD) of the hospital, Jesse Otegbayo, on Wednesday.

Mr Otegbayo said other departments in the hospital will also stop rendering services till further notice.

The units affected are outpatients clinics, medicine and surgery and paediatric departments.

Mr Otegbayo said the action became necessary due to the accidental exposure of some doctors in the institution to some suspected Covid-19 patients.

He said that the suspension was to curtail the spread of the deadly disease.

With the suspension of these services, this implies that scores of people who regularly access medical treatment from the institution will no longer have access to it until further notice.

This would affect not just the state or South-west but patients from all over the country.

The teaching hospital, which was established in 1957, is not only a major health facility in the state but the entire country.

Hundreds of people from the state and other neighboring states who are currently accessing health services in UCH will no longer have access to care.

Pandemic

Mr Otegbayo said some doctors in the hospital who were suspected to have been exposed to the virus are currently on self-isolation.

Nigeria since it reported its first case of Covid-19 on February 28 has been battling the scourge across some states.

As at the time of reporting, 51 people have been confirmed positive with the virus from eight states including Oyo where the institution is located.

Meanwhile, contract tracing is still ongoing to identify those who may have come in contact with infected people.

Some of the doctors in UCH, were said to have been in contact with some suspected cases.

PREMIUM TIMES had previously reported that there were some suspected cases of Covid-19 in Oyo but so far only one case has tested positive.

The state governor, Seyi Makinde, who confirmed this, also said another person suspected to be having the virus is under monitoring.

Meanwhile, Mr Otegbayo said some doctors in the hospital who had close contact with the suspected persons at the isolation center are either on self isolation or quarantined.

He, however, did not state the number of doctors affected.

We dont have to wait till we start seeing positive ones before we take appropriate actions. As the CMD, I have the sole responsibility to take care of and protect our staff from unnecessary infection and I just want to be proactive.

As you are aware, the number of cases that are testing positive to COVID-19 is increasing and personally, I believe in prevention rather than all these curative approaches. Some countries have been able to reduce the number of cases because they locked down early.

Initially, we thought we should leave the outpatient department open but we realise that continuing to do that in the absence of enough materials to protect all our staff including our doctors, nurses and health attendants is not the best option, and the best option will be to lock this place down, he explained.

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Mr Otegbayo, however, said measures have also been taken to ensure that emergency services remain open under strict compliance with preventive measures and standard infection control precautions.
Some useful tips on what to do with a single-use or home-made mask.

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The outbreak of coronavirus disease has turned masks into scarce goods.

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Those who are unable to buy them from a pharmacy or through websites are currently sewing their own, with several designs being offered on the internet. The reason is that many recommend wearing the masks or some form of face protection (like a scarf) when going out in public, and they are even required by some means of public transport and in shops.

These forms of protection need to be disinfected too.

>> Read everything about coronavirus in Slovakia here.

For masks made from 100-percent cotton, it is necessary to either wash them at a high temperature (the best is 90-95 degrees Celsius, but 60 degrees Celsius is acceptable) or boil them in water after use. After they are dried, they should be ironed on high temperature.

Scarves or other protection should also be washed and then ironed at high temperature.

Those lucky enough to have single-use masks and non-reusable respirators should throw them away after use. They belong in the unsorted municipal waste. Before being thrown away, people should pack them into a plastic bag or other package and fasten them up so that they do not fall out the waste bin. It is then recommended that you wash your hands carefully, the Health Ministry wrote on its website.

Related article
Africas Dancehall King Shatta Wales unprecedented SMFaithConcert has finally been earmarked for 4th April 2020.

After the artist made his intentions clear, some Ghanaians were unsure if it could be done or would materialize, but it seems the artist like always has proven himself a trendsetter as he tries something new.

READ ALSO: This One Too Shall Pass Diana Hamilton

On Saturday 4th April from 8pm to 9pm all fans and the rest of the world are to experience a phenomenal moment on their phones or laptops as the concert could be streamed live from Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Though an avenue to entertain and encourage his audience, this will give the artist an incredible mileage and win him some more fans all around the world who would probably have the opportunity to see the renowned artist perform for the first time from the comfort of their homes as most people currently remain indoors for the virus to blow over.

Watch video below


Yes, you can still visit Paris  at least virtually for now. In our latest video, Loni Stark spends 3 Days in Paris and we invite (dare) you to follow the adventure.

In this trip of a lifetime things dont exactly go as planned, and there seems to be a force or two that causes Loni to reevaluate the reality and meaning of the visit to the famed City of Lights.

Take a look at the short film below.

We shot most of the footage with the then-new Sony a6500 in 4K. Later studio scenes were shot using a RED Dragon. For some of the travel shots we used an Android phone which worked fine. We edited in Premiere Pro with Lumetri for color.

My biggest gripe with the a6500 mirrorless camera is not the image quality itself, which is perfectly detailed and pretty enough in its color rendition, its that

 jello.

Hello jello. For whatever reason when you move the camera when shooting the footage can look very distorted. Pretty bad in fact. At times unusable. As a tripod steady camera the a6500 is I think fine. For travel Im not so sure. If I were to do a trip abroad like this again Id most definitely use the GH5 as we did for Azul when we were on location last year in Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico (beautiful place). Then again, the GH5 wasnt available at the time of the Paris and Iceland projects (January 2017) so Im working with what we have. Theres always a way to make it work. That out of focus, blurry shot? Thats creative license.

Another odd quirk with the a6500 is that at least once the camera over-heated. In Iceland. During winter. And I dont even shoot long clips as I edit later, rather than capturing event format. So most are about 2-5 min. long. In 15 years of video work for Stark Insider Ive never have a camera overheat, so that one surprised me.

It Was Just a Holiday in Paris or was it?

Special Thanks:

Le Jules Verne, Paris, France

Citadel Art Studios, San Jose, California

All props were bought via our favorite supply house, Amazon. Its amazing how many masks and wigs you can find there. For the curious and want-to-be creative it could be a great way for you to spend lockdown. Script a video, turn off the lights and try to do something silly/creative.

Coronavirus COVID-19 has slightly impacted our next project, the natural successor 3 Days in Iceland (we flew from Paris to Iceland for an extreme diversion before heading back to Paris to finish the trip in 2017). I wanted to shoot some scenes at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. For now thats not possible. So were adjusting and will likely (again) use our garage for some stuff. Amazing what a black tarp and some post-production masks in Premiere can achieve. All with minimal to no cost (aside from a sub to Creative Cloud).

Thanks again to Loni who eggs me on, for better or worse, and is ever willing to participate.

Regarding all the new cameras over the past year or so: pretty amazing stuff. Fujifilm XT-4. Sony Alpha a6600. Canon EOS R/RP. Panasonic S1H.

Take your pick.

Theres a camera here for everyone at just about every price point (I still think the under $1K USD Canon Rebels are good deals too). For me, my favorite remains the Panasonic Lumix GH5 (not the S model). It can do everything  IBIS, flippy screen, highly flexible MFT mount, long battery life, dual SD, 10-bit color with VLog for color grading flexibility, and on and on.

I absolutely love shooting on RED because Redcode is a pretty amazing codec, and you can do just about anything in post before the footage falls apart (and the grain looks so beautifully non-digital). But my Scarlet-W is a bit bulky for extended handheld work. So most of the time I have it on a tripod with a slider and use it in studio, while using the GH5 (or iPhone) when running-and-gunning in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, which were unfortunately not able to do these days. Bigger issues and priorities are obviously far more important.

A West Coast Adventure. A Lifetime in the Making.

Click below to watch Cary Grant and Loni Stark in Movie Star.

Meantime, we continue chip away at 3 Days in Iceland, and a few other projects that Ive story-boarded (terribly) and written up in Microsoft OneNote over the years. Too many ideas. Now time for execution. Thanks for dropping by Stark Insider and visiting every now and then over the years. More to come. Be safe.
The US secretary general has warned that the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe is menacing the whole of humanity.

As the COVID-19 global death toll reached more than 21,000, Antonio Guterres issued the stark message  and said that humanity must fight back against the disease.

Yellow cabs line an empty 42nd Street in New York as the number of people taken to hospital with COVID-19 rose faster than expected. (AP)

#COVID19 is menacing the whole of humanity  and so the whole of humanity must fight back.



Today we are launching a $2 billion global humanitarian response plan to fund the fight against #coronavirus in the worlds most fragile countries.https://t.co/ygvnxjN85D pic.twitter.com/oq1mQoj0Lu  Antonio Guterres (@antonioguterres) March 25, 2020

I have called for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world.



As I told @camanpour, it is time to focus together on the true fight of our lives  the #COVID19 pandemic.



This is what our human family needs, now more than ever. https://t.co/5t1ruZNXXK  Antonio Guterres (@antonioguterres) March 26, 2020

His warning came as global coronavirus infections were set to top half a million people and Italy and the US appeared poised to surpass China, where the pandemic began.

Guterres announced a $2bn (1.7bn) humanitarian response plan to fund the fight against coronavirus in the worlds most fragile countries  and called for an immediate global ceasefire to focus the fight on COVID-19.

Story continues

Healthcare systems in Europe and New York have been buckling under the weight of caring for seriously ill victims of COVID-19.

Spain has converted hotels into makeshift hospitals and turned an ice rink in Madrid into a temporary mortuary. The curve of infections has not slowed in the Mediterranean country, which now has more than 3,600 deaths, second only to Italys death toll of 7,503.

In Italy, doctors and nurses have been begging the government to provide more protective equipment and urged the public to understand how important social distancing measures are.

Global cases of coronavirus since the outbreak begun. (PA)

Global figures

There has now been nearly 480,000 cases of COVID-19 across the globe, with more than 21,000 deaths and 115,000 recoveries.

Wednesday saw Spain overtake Chinas death toll, while Italy has seen over 7,500 deaths since the outbreak began  making it the worst-affected country in the world.

The World Health Organization (WHO) warned this week of the rapid spread of the pandemic.

Latest coronavirus news, updates and advice

Live: Follow all the latest updates from the UK and around the world

Fact-checker: The number of COVID-19 cases in your local area

Explained: Symptoms, latest advice and how it compares to the flu

At least 1.5 billion people are now under severe travel restrictions.

But the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has criticised world leaders for wasting time in the fight against the virus that has also left millions out of work and ravaged the world economy.

He said: The time to act was actually more than a month ago or two months ago. We squandered the first window of opportunity  this is a second opportunity, which we should not squander and do everything to suppress and control this virus.

Virtual G20 meeting

Leaders of the world's most powerful economies are set to convene for a virtual meeting to co-ordinate a response to coronavirus.

The meeting for the Group of 20 nations (G20) will be chaired by Saudi Arabia's King Salman.

The kingdom, which is presiding over the G20 this year, said it organised the extraordinary meeting to advance global efforts to tackle the pandemic and its economic implications as people lose their incomes amid closures, curfews and lockdowns.

The meeting comes amid criticism that the world's wealthiest countries have not taken cohesive action to combat the virus or its economic impact on people around the world.

Meanwhile, EU leaders are convening for their third summit in three weeks as they battle to contain the spread of coronavirus and manage the havoc the disease is wreaking on their 27 economies.

Jon Makay, of Harlem, wears an octopus hat to fend off coronavirus in New York's Times Square. (AP)

US Senate passes rescue package

Faced with the exponential spread of the pandemic, the US Senate has passed a $2.2trn dollar economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and healthcare systems.

Millions of Americans hoped the measure would give them a lifeline as they lost jobs, income and childcare due to the social-distancing rules needed to slow the spread of the virus.

The final vote of 96-0 shows passage of the $2.2trn economic rescue package in response to coronavirus pandemic passed by the US Senate. (Senate Television via AP)

New York hot spot

New York authorities moved to avert a public health disaster in the city on Wednesday as its emergence as Americas biggest coronavirus hot spot sent warnings to the rest of the country.

WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris warned that New York does have that potential to become the centre of the pandemic.

A makeshift morgue has been set up outside Bellevue Hospital in case of a further spike in deaths, and the citys police were told to patrol nearly empty streets to enforce social distancing.

Refrigerated trailers are seen parked at the site of a makeshift morgue being built in New York. (AP)

People make their way inside a near-empty Grand Central Terminal in New York. (AP)

Public health officials in the state sought beds and medical equipment and issued calls for more doctors and nurses for fear the number of sick will explode the next few weeks, overwhelming hospitals as has happened in Italy and Spain.

New York University offered to let its medical students graduate early so they could join the battle.

Governor Andrew Cuomo attributed the cluster to the citys role as a gateway to international travellers and the sheer density of its population, with 8.6 million people sharing subways, apartment buildings and offices.

He said: Our closeness makes us vulnerable. But its true that your greatest weakness is also your greatest strength. And our closeness is what makes us who we are. That is what New York is.

The order to stay at home in New York State did not go into effect until Sunday evening and New York Citys 1.1 million-student school system was not closed until 15 March  well after other districts had shut down.

Coronavirus: what happened today
KABUL: The family of an Indian national, who died in a gruesome terror attack on a Gurudwara in Afghanistans capital Kabul on Wednesday, has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking help from the government, it was reported on Thursday (March 26, 2020).

According to reports, Tian Singh, who was among those killed in the attack, had travelled to Afghanistan along with his family to visit their relatives and friends.

His wife and son have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, apprising him of his death and violence faced by the minorities in Afghanistan.

In their letter, they have also appealed to the Prime Minister to facilitate transportation of Tian Singh's mortal remains to Delhi where they wish to perform his last rites.

The letter mentions that other children of the slain Indian are in the US and UK and are unable to travel to India due to the on-going 21-day lockdown in the country in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.

Responding to the famliy's appeal, External affairs Minister S Jaishankar assured all help to them. "Medical opinion against moving injured at this stage. Embassy

@IndianEmbKabul is working on the return of mortal remains of Shri Tian Singh. Will keep you updated,'' he tweeted.

Medical opinion against moving injured at this stage. Embassy @IndianEmbKabul is working on the return of mortal remains of Shri Tian Singh. Will keep you updated.@HardeepSPuri @HarsimratBadal_ @capt_amarinder  Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) March 26, 2020

In another tweet, the EAM said, ''Understandable grief and anger at the cowardly terrorist attack on Gurudwara in #Kabul. Our Embassy

@IndianEmbKabul is in continuous touch with the families of those killed and injured.''

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on Wednesday expressed his condolences to those killed in the terror attack at a gurdwara in Kabul in Afghanistan.

"I am saddened by the terror attack at the Gurudwara in Kabul. I express my condolences to the families of all the deceased," the Prime Minister said during his interaction with people of his Lok Sabha constituency, Varanasi, via video conferencing.

At least 27 civilians were killed and eight others were wounded in a terror attack on a gurdwara in Kabul on Wednesday morning.

All four terrorists were who attacked the Gurudwara were also killed by Afghan security forces.
President Trump and a detail of "Oedipus and the Sphinx" by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, part of the collection at the Louvre in Paris. (Trump photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images; "Oedipus" image by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Tragedy isnt Donald Trumps natural habitat. As a protagonist, he's bursting with hubris but woefully short on gravitas. His grandiose personality defects  the blustering, mendacity and truculent solipsism  are made for South Park, not Sophocles.

Yet watching Trump perform his carnival barker act on the podium at the daily White House briefings on the coronavirus crisis, I am stuck by the parallel between our president and that quintessential Sophoclean sufferer, Oedipus.

No, Im not making any innuendos about Trumps unconscious desires. Freud elaborated a theory of psychoanalysis from Sophocles play Oedipus Rex, extrapolating from the myth a stage in psychosexual development in which a boy secretly longs to supplant his father in his mothers affections.

The ancient Greek tragedians had bigger fish to fry than the origins of male neurosis. Sophocles tragedy, held up by Aristotle as a model of structural elegance, probes the deepest existential questions. To read the play, to follow Oedipus trajectory from first of men to accursed outcast, is to confront the paradox of humanitys breathtaking majesty and inescapable frailty.

But Oedipus Rex is also a study in political leadership. The play explores the relationship between good governance and humility. Oedipus, the Theban ruler, confronts a plague thats killing the crops and causing widespread sterility. Death and destruction are closing in. A priest flocked by suppliant children entreats Oedipus, renowned for his mental prowess, to find the answer that will rescue the city.

No one could fault Oedipus response. Unlike Trump, he doesnt pretend that the blight is a partisan hoax or an overblown media story that will one day magically disappear. I pity you children, Oedipus says after the priest makes his plea. As sovereign, he bears the weight not just of his individual sorrow but of the sorrow of each of his subjects:

My spirit groans

for city and myself and you at once.

Story continues

You have not roused me like a man from sleep;

know that I have given many tears to this,

gone many ways wandering in thought 

Oedipus has flaws, but a lack of empathy isnt one of them. Theres also no shirking of duty or deflecting of responsibility. After learning from his brother-in-law, Creon, who has just returned from Apollo's temple, that the plague is the result of the still unsolved murder of the previous king, Laius, Oedipus vows to do everything in his power to identify and expunge the culprit. He issues orders to his people and invokes a curse on the guilty party, never imagining that he's hastening his own doom by proceeding with such urgency.

The contrast with Trump is initially stark, but political pressures draw out points of comparison. When Teiresias, an old blind prophet, reveals under duress that the murderer is in fact Oedipus himself, the king, not knowing his true origins, reacts as though hes the target of a political hit job. He imagines that the seer is in cahoots with Creon, who must be scheming to overthrow him.

Insulted and incensed, Oedipus responds as intemperately as Trump when crossed by a politician or held to account by a member of the press. To salve his injured pride, Oedipus harks back to the equivalent of his electoral coup. It was through the sharpness of his wit that he, an outsider not in the royal line of succession, solved the riddle of the Sphinx and won the throne.

The title Oedipus Tyrannos is often preferred by translators to Oedipus the King or Oedipus Rex, as the Greek word calls attention to the way power was obtained through achievement rather than heredity. It also retains for us the sense of tyrant, an ever-present danger when a ruler convinces himself that his authority is unimpeachable.

Insolence breeds the tyrant, the chorus intones, as Oedipus temper grows more combustible as Teiresias once-unthinkable prediction becomes increasingly plausible. Jocasta tries to reassure her husband that oracles dont always get it right by telling him that one once told Laius that he would die by his son's hand. How crazy was that! Shes willing to pooh-pooh religious principle to assuage Oedipus anxiety, but nothing can stop the past from remorselessly revealing itself.

Ralph Fiennes portrays Oedipus and Clare Higgins is his queen, Jocasta, in a 2008 National Theatre production in London. (Robbie Jack / Corbis via Getty Images)

A tragedy as ruthless as Oedipus Rex cannot be domesticated by moralizing bromides. Sophocles didnt dramatize his version of the myth so that we could connect the characters catastrophic fall to a personal shortcoming. Theres nothing in the play to suggest that Oedipus could have outrun the prophecy that he would one day murder his father and sleep with his mother. His leadership style may be choleric, but that is not what caused him to fulfill his horrific fate.

Ironically  and Sophocles' play is built on structures of irony  Oedipus discovers his guilt through his merit. His dogged sense of responsibility and brilliance propel him to unearth the truth of his identity.

In his essay On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex, E.R. Dodds dismantles the notion that Oedipus must be either a victim of fate or a casualty of his own faulty character. While Dodds accepts that Oedipus Rex" is "a play about the blindness of man and the desperate insecurity of the human condition," he insists that it is also a work "about human greatness.

How exactly is Oedipus great? Not in virtue of a great worldly position  for his worldly position is an illusion which will vanish like a dream  but in virtue of his inner strength: strength to pursue the truth at whatever personal cost, and strength to accept and endure it when found.

Oedipus distinction lies not so much in the profundity of his suffering as in the heroism with which he accepts responsibility for crimes he was subjectively innocent in committing. As a man he is fallible and all too human. But his commitment to the truth and to public duty, while unable to spare him his cruel destiny, ennobles him and, by extension, all of mankind.

Donald Trump is no Oedipus. His loyalty ends with himself and his narrow political interests. Im not sure Sophocles would know what to do with a reality TV president, but imagining the prospect is useful.

What separates Sophocles from his ancient Greek rivals, Aeschylus and Euripides, is his genius for character drawing. Sophocles sculptural approach to dramatic poetry allows us to take in the larger pattern of a life even as details of the composition impress upon us the individuality of the figure.

Theres such tumult around Trump, much of it self-created, that the media impression is a blur of noise.

Aristophanes would have fiendish fun whisking our dear leader off to some imaginary circus world. But Sophocles encourages us to stand back and view the human outline against the societal backdrop. Yes, even a raging tyrannos can tell us about our vulnerable humanity.

As the world confronts a new pandemic, it behooves us to consider why the cornerstone text of Western literature is a play about a ruler discovering himself while confronting a plague. Nothing cuts our species down to size quite like a scourge. The fragility of our condition and the illusory nature of our achievements are instantly thrown into relief.

At the same time, there is an opportunity to transcend our limitations through the acceptance of our helplessness  to gain strength by acknowledging weakness. Leaders demonstrate courage when they submit to truths more powerful than themselves. Unfortunately, the last thing Trump wishes to be is a tragic hero, and that right now is our collective tragedy.
On the Frontline Against China, the US Coast Guard Is Taking on Missions the US Navy Can't Do

Competition with China has drawn more Pentagon resources to the Pacific, but the most visible U.S. military presence there...
Medical equipment, NHS ID cards, cash and a handbag have all been stolen in a nationwide crime wave against NHS workers on the frontline of the coronavirus pandemic.

In the last 24 hours an Essex doctor was forced to withdraw cash by three muggers in Harlow, while a community nurse had her car, and all the medical equipment inside, stolen from her home in Longsight, Manchester.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning petty thief Wayne Harvey, 32, stole an A&E receptionist's handbag and assaulted a security guard at George Eliot Hospital in Nuneaton.

Two staff members, thought to be doctors, were attacked outside Lewisham Hospital in South East London (file picture) last week by thieves who tried to steal their NHS badges

Three men wearing balaclavas broke into Victoria Roberts' home in Longsight, Manchester and took the keys to her Peugeot. They drove off in the car, which had her community nurse kit in the boot, Greater Manchester Police is investigating

Harvey, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty to theft and assault at Coventry Crown Court on Thursday and was jailed for 31 weeks.

Victoria Roberts, 33, was due to go to work from her home in Longsight, Manchester, on Thursday morning when she realised her Peugeot 208, with her nurses kit in the boot, was missing from the driveway.

Mrs Roberts works as a nurse practitioner in the community and provides medical care at home to patients, including those who are at high risk of coronavirus and now unable to leave the house.

Her husband Brendan Roberts, 34, has set up a fundraising page after CCTV caught three men on CCTV stealing her car

Mr Roberts, an IT technician also classed as a key worker, said: 'Victorias job is to help look after people who are elderly or have just had surgery.

'Lots of them cant leave the house now and her car is vital for her to get around and see them, but today she hasnt been able to go in.

Wayne Harvey, 32, stole an A&E receptionist's handbag and assaulted a security guard at George Eliot Hospital in Nuneaton. He was jailed on Thursday after admitting theft and assault

'Her work is stressful anyway and this has really hit her hard. She is scared of being in the house now.'

He added: 'All her NHS equipment, probably worth thousands, was in there because her car is like her workplace.'

Greater Manchester Police are investigating, while the colleagues in Essex have arrested a 14-year-old boy thought to be involved in three muggings in Harlow on Wednesday night.

A doctor on his way to a hospital shift was the first to be targeted when he was approached in Market Square at around 9.30pm.

Two other members of the public were approached after the first incident. Officers are working to find the remaining two suspects.

These latest attacks come a week after staff at Lewisham Hospital were attacked for their NHS badges.



** Have you been targeted for your NHS badge? Please email: mark.duell@mailonline.co.uk or tips@dailymail.com ** Advertisement

Health bosses have warned all hospital staff to hide their NHS identification when they are outside work amid fears they could continue to be targeted.

It comes after two staff members, thought to be doctors, were attacked outside Lewisham Hospital in South East London last week by thieves who tried to steal their NHS badges.

The thieves, who approached the staff members as they walked through a park around the back of the hospital, were unsuccessful.

Chief nursing officer for England, Ruth May, condemned the attempts to rob staff.

She said: 'Our NHS staff are pulling out all the stops in the face of an unprecedented global health threat, so these reports are really concerning.

'We have seen some extraordinary acts of generosity from businesses and the public, and this will not be overshadowed by the actions of an idiotic few.

'But I would urge everyone to show NHS staff the gratitude they deserve and help them to do what they do best.'

Staff at Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust's two hospitals were warned about the issue in a memo issued on Monday.

It said: 'Following reports of an attempt to take the ID badges of two members of staff as they were leaving work, please make sure your ID badge is out of sight.'

Companies including Greggs, Pizza Hut and Burger King have offered free food to NHS staff battling to fight the disease.

Chief nursing officer for England, Ruth May, condemned the attempts to rob staff.

Companies including Greggs, Pizza Hut and Burger King (pictured in London on March 1) have offered free food to NHS staff battling to fight the disease

She said: 'Our NHS staff are pulling out all the stops in the face of an unprecedented global health threat, so these reports are really concerning.

'We have seen some extraordinary acts of generosity from businesses and the public, and this will not be overshadowed by the actions of an idiotic few.

** Have you been targeted for your NHS badge? Please email: mark.duell@mailonline.co.uk or tips@dailymail.com ** Advertisement

'But I would urge everyone to show NHS staff the gratitude they deserve and help them to do what they do best.'

A spokesman for Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust said: 'We are giving staff the advice which is being given across the NHS for all staff not to wear name badges outside work.'

And a Scotland Yard spokesman told MailOnline: 'This alleged incident was not reported to police.

'Following articles in the Guardian and Mail, the local police have today made contact with the hospital who confirmed they do not wish to report anything to police.'

Yesterday as forces stepped up their response to the UK lockdown brought in on Monday, some officers were met with resistance.

In Leeds, police had to make a number of arrests after breaking up a large gathering in Banstead Park.

Greater Manchester Police announced they had dispersed 24 large gatherings in less than 24 hours and had to advise 64 businesses, including pubs and shops, that they should not be open.

Other forces reported a surge of mindless violence by bored yobs.

In Merseyside, a hospital worker was attacked with a bike saddle by a group of teenagers as he went to buy groceries.

The radiographer at Arrowe Park Hospital on the Wirral needed seven stitches after he was targeted by four youths outside an Asda supermarket in Birkenhead.

Elsewhere in Merseyside, a group of children became involved in a standoff with police after climbing onto a leisure centre roof for an hour and refusing to come down.

Derbyshire Police revealed they were investigating a vicious assault on a farmer who was punched 15 times and kicked in the ribs when he asked a Peak District walker to 'go home'.

The victim, from Edale, was 'left shaken and bruised' after he was assaulted while disinfecting his gates on Sunday due to hundreds of people walking past.

** Have you been targeted for your NHS badge? Please email: mark.duell@mailonline.co.uk or tips@dailymail.com **
Help.org, a trusted online resource for individuals who struggle with addiction and their loved ones, has announced the Best Rehab Facilities in Tucson, Arizona for 2020. The informational guide recognizes the top 7 rehab facilities based on cost, treatment options, location, accompanying services and more.

According to recent studies, drug overdose is the leading cause of death among people under age 50. In Tucson, deaths related to opioid abuse increased significantly from 2011 to 2015. Substance abuse among adolescents is also escalating in Tucson with 55 percent of high school students reported using alcohol, 38 percent reported using marijuana, 8 percent reported using prescription drugs without a valid prescription, and 2 percent reported using heroin. With the growing need for accessible and high-quality rehab programs, Help.org has developed a unique ranking process to help connect individuals with treatment providers that meet their needs.

The Help.org research team analyzed thousands of facilities across the country and then identified the most cost-effective and highest rated programs in larger cities like Tucson. Each facility was evaluated based on rehabilitation services, treatment approaches, cost, special programs for unique demographics and ancillary services. The website also provides information about drug use and side effects as well as educational articles. For a detailed listing of the Best Rehab Facilities in Tucson, Arizona please visit https://www.help.org/drug-and-alcohol-rehab-centers-in-tucson-az/

2020 Best Rehab Facilities in Tucson, Arizona (in alphabetical order)

Amity Foundation Circle Tree Ranch

10500 East Tanque Verde Road

Tucson, AZ 85749

800-381-3318

Casa de los Ninos

1120 North 5th Avenue

Tucson, AZ 85705

520-624-5600

CODAC Health, Recovery & Wellness, Inc. Alvernon

630 North Alvernon

Tucson, AZ 85711

520-327-4505

CODAC Health, Recovery & Wellness, Inc. Child & Family Services

1600 North Country Club

Tucson, AZ 85716

520-327-4505

La Frontera Center East Clinic

4891 East Grant Road

Tucson, AZ 85712

520-296-3296

La Frontera Center Substance Abuse Outpatient Services

502 West 29th Street

Tucson, AZ 85713

520-838-5600

Southeastern Arizona Behavioral Health Services, Inc. (SEABHS)

611 West Union Street

Benson, AZ 85602

520-586-0800

ABOUT HELP.ORG

Help.org is an online resource for individuals who struggle with addiction and their loved ones. The website provides the latest research through scientifically proven methods, community recovery resources as well as information about local financial assistance. Help.orgs team of researchers, activists and writers work together with addiction counselors and other professionals to offer useful and accurate resources to help individuals seeking recovery. To learn more, visit https://www.help.org/.
Couples at home with 'time on their hands' and a glint in their eyes during the coronavirus lockdown were today urged to help avoid a surge in Christmas babies.

Scotland's chief medical officer Dr Catherine Calderwood stopped short of telling lovers to remain two metres apart at all times.

But she used a press conference in Edinburgh to urge her countrymen and women to take precautions against unwanted pregnancies by using contraception.

A pandemic-related pitter-patter of tiny feet would see mothers heading to hospital around Christmas and the New Year in nine-months time, already a busy time for the NHS.

Appearing alongside Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Dr Calderwood, who is a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, said: 'We do need to be advising people about having time on their hands.

'The labour ward is always much busier nine months after Valentine's Day so we have that to consider.

A pandemic-related pitter-patter of tiny feet would see mothers heading to hospital around Christmas and the New Year in nine-months time, already a busy time for the NHS

Scotland's chief medical officer Dr Catherine Calderwood used a press conference in Edinburgh to urge her countrymen and women to take precautions against unwanted pregnancies

Nicola Sturgeon said: 'It falls into the category of the many things I never thought I would be standing here as First Minister advising the public on'

'The serious point is that almost all maternity services are emergency services - they can't be time limited, you can't pause like elective surgery.'

She added: 'It has been suggested to me that we talk to people about contraception.

'About 50 per cent of pregnancies are unplanned so perhaps think about whether this is the right time to have an unplanned pregnancy.

'This (coronavirus outbreak) will last for some time, the emergency services - the maternity services - will continue to run, though, so we have planned for all of the babies that would have been born to have exactly the same care that they would have had outside of this pandemic.

'But people are making difficult choices and we would always encourage people to think: 'Is this the right time for me, am I in the best of health, is this a good time for me to start thinking about having a baby?''

Later in the press conference Ms Sturgeon said: 'It falls into the category of the many things I never thought I would be standing here as First Minister advising the public on.'

It came after doctors yesterday warned planned pregnancies could rise if women struggle to access contraception services during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare (FSRH) has set out guidance on changes needed to help women avoid unplanned pregnancies and get the care they need.

It recommends consultations for emergency contraception take place via telephone or video, as can repeat contraception prescriptions and counselling for intrauterine contraceptives and contraceptive implants.

Long-acting reversible contraception can be extended with 'minimal loss of efficacy', it says.

And it is calling for online contraception services to be extended across the UK.

Dr Anne Lashford, the FSRH vice president, said: 'Doctors, nurses and other clinicians working in sexual and reproductive healthcare (SRH) services are being redeployed to work in the national response to the outbreak.

'This comes at a time when SRH services were already operating beyond capacity.

'It is crucial that we ensure women of all ages can continue to access effective contraception during the crisis, avoiding unplanned pregnancies which will likely lead to added strain on both maternity and abortion services.'
MOSCOW -- On March 25, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu gave a speech to parliament in which he warned that a "pro-Western opposition division," supposedly trained and funded by outside forces, was sneaking onto military bases and hospitals across the country and publishing classified information relating to the Russian Army.

It was the latest in a string of battle cries against "disinformation" issued by Russian officials, but this time Shoigu called for new legislation that would circumscribe the movements of people who have press accreditation but use it, as he alleged without evidence, for malevolent purposes.

"You can imagine how they'd be punished in countries of the West," Shoigu said, giving no further details. "This sphere requires further legal regulation."

Shoigus monologue was not directed at anyone in particular, but many saw in it a veiled dig at Svetlana Prokopyeva, a freelance journalist in Pskov who is awaiting trial on extremism charges for remarks she made about a November 2018 bomb attack on the offices of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in the northern Russian city of Arkhangelsk.

The defense minister's comments came the day after government-funded news channel Rossia-24 aired a report alleging that Prokopyeva, who has contributed material to RFE/RL's Russian and Ukrainian services, had illegally filmed a Russian military base near Pskov in 2018 at the behest of unspecified handlers in the United States.

Accusing her of engaging in an act of espionage "with roots very likely across the ocean or in Ukraine," presenter Anton Podkovenko called Prokopyeva the "organizer of the unapproved filming of a sensitive Russian military object on orders from foreign media."

He played a recording of a purported telephone conversation between Prokopyeva and an editor at RFE/RL's Kyiv bureau. "I'll try to capture the watchtower, because, as I recall, they react very quickly," Prokopyeva is heard saying in the recording, presumably referring to guards patrolling the base. The two women then discuss details of a $100 payment Prokopyeva would receive for her work.

In a phone interview on March 26, Prokopyeva did not deny the audio clips were real, but said they were completely taken out of context to fit a predetermined narrative. She did not film any military installations during the reporting trip in question, she said, because she knew she'd be banned from doing so.

But the state media report alleges that she was contacted not by a fellow journalist, but by a covert representative of Western intelligence services. "This report is a typical example of black PR," Prokopyeva said. "They distorted everything."

Extremism Charge 'Lacks Merit'

The extremism charge against Prokopyeva stems from a November 2018 commentary she made for the Pskov affiliate of radio station Ekho Moskvy, in which she discussed the motivations of the young man accused of carrying out the bombing in Arkhangelsk.

Russian media reported that the suspected bomber, a teenager who died in the incident, had posted statements on social media in which he accused the FSB of falsifying criminal cases.

In that on-air commentary, Prokopyeva linked the teenager's statements to the political climate in Russia under President Vladimir Putin, suggesting that political activism in the country was being severely restricted, leading people to despair and desperate acts.

In October, Prokopyeva released an open letter outlining her take on the events that led to her prosecution."I did not justify terrorism...I tried to understand why a young man could have resorted to a suicidal crime," she wrote. "I consider this case to be just simple revenge on the part of the offended security agencies."

After the text was republished by nearly a dozen independent Russian media outlets, the editors of several were subsequently summoned for questioning by the authorities in Pskov, Novaya gazeta reported.

In a Facebook post on March 16, Prokopyeva revealed that she had been officially indicted on extremism charges, for which she faces seven years in prison.

RFE/RL President Jamie Fly condemned Prokopyeva's indictment, saying that "the charges lack any merit, and have been brought instead in a cynical effort to silence an independent journalist."

The Rossia-24 report, aired the day before Shoigu's statement, cited a reporting trip Prokopyeva made in 2018, when she was asked by RFE/RLs Ukrainian Service to film several gravestones in the area of a Russian military base near Pskov that were believed to have been erected for Russian conscripts who died fighting with pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Prokopyeva did not connect Shoigu's sweeping allegations to her case. But in recent days, Russian authorities have ratcheted up their campaign against what they call "fake news," doling out fines and even threatening jail time for the publication of rumors about the COVID-19 pandemic and its spread in Russia.

Ending his report on Rossia-24, Podkovenko, the presenter, said Prokopyeva might now be additionally charged with espionage for her alleged activities outside the military base. "That means from 10 to 20 years in prison," he said. "Looks very likely."

Prokopyeva responded with defiance. "They're trying to present normal journalistic work as a serious crime. It's complete nonsense," she said.

"If we had a normal justice system, Id launch a libel suit and would win."
Charlie McDonald suffering from the Covid-19 grabs a bag of food delivered to his house in Naples, Florida. McDonald says "Im freaking loving quarantine. My blood pressure is lower than it has been in years. Im losing weight. I have tons of things to do here. Im reading a novel. Im listening to music while laying in the sun. Even if someone told me to quarantine another two weeks, Id say bring it on. I might just need to go fishing in the everglades for one day."
WASHINGTON  Pressure was mounting on the Trump administration Wednesday to release people from immigration detention facilities where at least one detainee has tested positive for COVID-19 and advocates fear tight quarters and overall conditions could cause rapid spread of the virus.

The U.S. holds around 37,000 people in immigration detention. Detainees and advocates say many are vulnerable because of age and pre-existing medical conditions, and because they are often held in open rooms, beds 3-feet apart, and without adequate supplies of masks or other protections.

Its impossible to stay calm, said Marco Battistotti, an Italian who is among 170 people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Bristol County jail in Massachusetts. People are panicking. People are in fear.

The 54-year-old Battistotti was among about 100 detainees at the county jail near Cape Cod who signed a letter released by a local immigration lawyer detailing conditions inside. They asked to be released to await decisions on their immigration cases.

I dont want to die in an ICE jail, he said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. Why cant I fight my case on the outside?

The agency, which reported the positive test of a 31-year-old man from Mexico held in Bergen County, New Jersey, on Tuesday, has announced steps to protect detained migrants and staff from the virus, but hasnt said whether it plans to review cases for possible release because of the outbreak. It did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the complaints about conditions from the detainees and their advocates.

The administration has tried to balance its overall hard line on immigration, a signature policy of President Donald Trump, and its response to the outbreak, with ICE announcing previously that it would temporarily adjust operations to focus on apprehending people who pose a risk to public safety or are subject to mandatory detention because of a criminal record.

Immigrant advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union, filed lawsuits in California, Maryland, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, seeking court orders for the immediate release of people in immigration detention, especially those at risk because of their age or medical conditions.

Advocates have also asked a court in Los Angeles to order the Office of Refugee Resettlement to release to eligible sponsors around 1,200 migrant children who were apprehended without parents or legal guardians and have been held in government-contracted shelters for more than 30 days. They said two staff members at two such facilities in New York have tested positive for COVID-19.

Its unclear how many immigration detainees overall are at higher risk, but one California suit alone had 13 plaintiffs, all over 55.

A federal judge in Boston on Wednesday ordered the release of a 36-year-old man from the Dominican Republic who was detained in a local jail south of the city where an employee tested positive. The ACLU sued for the release of two others held there.

A panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Monday, citing the rapidly escalating public health crisis, ordered the immediate release of a 37-year-old woman who is fighting deportation to Mexico.

The womans lawyer, Max Carter-Oberstone, said the government told him it would not oppose the decision but she still had not been released as of early Wednesday. The court took the action on its own initiative in a rare move on behalf of a woman who says she has been threatened with death by members of a Mexican drug cartel.

It wasnt something we asked for or were expecting, Carter-Oberstone said. The court is clearly reacting to the greater public health crisis that were in right now and re-evaluating how its going to dispose of its immigration cases in light of that crisis that were all experiencing.

The situation in immigration detention, which include facilities run by local jurisdictions and private contractors, is similar to that facing jails and prisons, with staff also at risk from a virus that already has sickened at least 55,000 people and killed about 800 in the U.S.

One difference is that more than half of ICE detainees have no criminal charges or conviction and are held only for immigration reasons. Under previous administrations, many would likely have been released on bond as they pursued their cases.

ICE has reported one positive test of an employee at a detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and 18 confirmed cases among staff not involved in detaining migrants. A contractor reported a positive case of a staff member at a facility in Harris County, Texas. The agency says it is screening new detainees and isolating detainees who show symptoms of the coronavirus disease.

Detainees say those measures wont do much, with people staying in dorm-like bays with no social distancing possible or in smaller rooms that they sometimes have to clean themselves, with insufficient cleaning supplies.

Francisca Morales Diaz, a 45-year-old from Mexico who was released Friday from an ICE detention center in Louisiana, said she and others were issued soap and toilet paper for their own use once a week and they would run out. When they complained, she says they were told there were shortages on the outside as well.

There isnt enough medicine. Its not well-maintained, Morales told AP. Her fear is that at any moment, theyre going to come and take me back there.

Pepper spray was used Tuesday by guards inside the Pine Prairie jail in Louisiana against migrants who say they were demanding the facility do more to protect them from the virus, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. ICE spokesman Bryan Cox said seven people were sprayed after they refused to follow guards directives.

Ira Alkalay, a lawyer representing some of the detainees at the jail near Cape Cod, said the detainees are responsible for cleaning their unit, which includes a dining area and bathrooms, but arent even given bleach. Some who signed the letter suffer from respiratory ailments such as tuberculosis, emphysema and asthma that put them at higher risk to the virus.

These are not sanitary conditions at all, Alkalay said. If the virus is introduced, many people could get sick all at once. Hospitals in the area can become quickly overwhelmed.

The office of Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, who has made headlines for offering to send the jails ICE detainees to help build Trumps promised border wall, has stressed there are currently no confirmed or suspected cases of the virus at the facility.

We suspect these detainees are working with outside political activist groups to use the coronavirus crisis to advance their political agenda, the sheriffs spokesman, Jonathan Darling, said this week.

Eunice Cho, an ACLU lawyer, warned that if the virus spreads through a facility the number of sick people who would require advanced care could overwhelm nearby hospitals. Many ICE jails are in rural areas with smaller hospitals.

This is closely related to the public health of our entire community, Cho said.

________________________________

Marcelo reported from Boston. Merchant reported from Houston.

Associated Press writer Amy Taxin in Orange County, California contributed to this report.
New Strategic Plan Focuses on Aligning Deeper with the MSOs, LPs, and Leading Brands; Significantly Reducing and Right-Sizing the Company's Cost Structure; and Achieving Positive Adjusted EBITDA

Christopher Tedford to Step Down as Chief Financial Officer

Company's Executive Vice President of Corporate Development Stephen Christoffersen Appointed as New Chief Financial Officer

Latest Reduction in Force of Nearly 50 Employees to Generate an Approximate Annualized Cash Compensation Savings of $4.0 Million

CYPRESS, CA / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / KushCo Holdings, Inc. (KSHB) (''KushCo'' or the ''Company''), the premier producer of ancillary products and services to the legal cannabis and CBD industries, today announced the unveiling of its new strategic plan for achieving positive adjusted EBITDA, including recent changes to its leadership team and significant cost-cutting efforts to right-size the business.

KushCo's Strategic Plan to Achieve Positive Adjusted EBITDA

"After more than doubling sales in each of the last five years, we entered fiscal 2020 embarking on a new strategy to rationalize all aspects of our operations, align ourselves deeper with the best and promising cannabis and CBD operators, and pave an achievable pathway toward near-term profitability," said Nick Kovacevich, KushCo's Co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "While this has been the Company's focus since the start of the new fiscal year in September 2019, executing against this strategy has become paramount to everyone within the organization, as the COVID-19 pandemic creates ever-increasing uncertainty in the cannabis industry, especially for many of our smaller customers that were already struggling financially following the aftermath of the black market vape crisis and ensuing cash crunch. As a result, we have taken quick and decisive steps these past six months, and especially these past few weeks, to significantly reduce our overhead, streamline our warehouses, reduce our inventory, and drastically alter our sales strategy and resources to rely even less on the smaller operators, while doubling down on our efforts to solidify and strengthen our core base of large MSOs, LPs, and leading brands. All these positive changes put us on more solid financial footing and give us an accelerated path toward achieving positive adjusted EBITDA."

Story continues

The Company has developed and formalized a comprehensive strategic plan to focus its resources on a more optimal customer group, realign its sales organization, reduce its warehouse footprint, simplify its SKU count and inventory position, and implement additional headcount reductions.

The Company's new strategic plan includes:

Focusing deeper on larger and more financially stable MSOs, LPs, and leading brands (the "Core" customers): The Company's customer base has gradually shifted in the past few years from predominantly smaller and regional operators ("Legacy" customers) to financially stronger and more creditworthy MSOs, LPs, and leading brands ("Core" customers). These Core customers generated approximately $52 million of revenue, or 80% of total revenue, in the Company's first half of fiscal 2020. KushCo believes that having the vast majority of its revenue being driven by this more stable, predictable, creditworthy, and financially stronger customer base will allow the Company to better forecast demand, reduce inventory and warehouse space, improve collections and cash flow, and benefit from further expansion and consolidation in the marketplace.

Implementing a more profitable, efficient, and automated approach toward doing business with Legacy customers: KushCo intends to continue providing the highest level of customer service to its Legacy customers, but in more efficient and cost-effective ways that minimize working capital and operating expenses. Going forward, transactions with these customers will be moved towards a cash-only basis, will not include any custom projects, and will be performed through a general customer service support line without a dedicated sales representative or project manager. KushCo expects to retain most of the revenue from this customer group, while also significantly reducing costs.

Right-sizing the workforce to better align the Company's resources with its elevated focus on Core customers: Due to the Company's elevated focus on Core customers and more automated approach to transacting with Legacy customers, KushCo took further steps to reduce headcount that was not essential to the new strategic plan. In March 2020, KushCo completed another round of layoffs, letting go 49 employees, which the Company expects will result in approximately $4.0 million in annual cash compensation savings. The reduction in force encompassed a broad spectrum of divisions, including sales representatives that were formerly catering directly to Legacy customers, who will now be better serviced through automation. In total, the Company has reduced its headcount by approximately 50% since September 2019, which it expects will result in an aggregate annual cash compensation savings of approximately $12 million.

Consolidating warehouse footprint and reducing other operating expenses to drive further cost savings: The Company is making further progress toward consolidating and rationalizing its warehouse footprint, while ensuring that all customers continue to receive the same premier level of service and responsiveness. In addition, KushCo is in the process of substantially reducing its third-party consulting costs, as well as other operating expenses.

For its fiscal first quarter ended November 30, 2019, the Company's selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses were $21.1 million, or $15.6 million when excluding non-cash expenses, including depreciation, amortization, and stock-based compensation. Following the full execution of its plan, which the company expects to complete before the start of its fiscal 2020 in September, the Company expects its quarterly SG&A expenses to reduce to $12.5 million in fiscal Q4 2020, which is a decrease of approximately 40% compared to its SG&A expenses in fiscal Q1 2020. Excluding non-cash expenses, the Company expects its quarterly SG&A expenses to reduce to $9.5 million in fiscal Q4 2020, which is a decrease of approximately 40% compared to its SG&A expenses in fiscal Q1 2020.

Jason Vegotsky, KushCo's President and Chief Revenue Officer, added: "We are fortunate to have started this new strategic plan already having secured many of the most valued MSOs, LPs, and leading brands in our client roster. However, executing a broad reorganization and cost-cutting initiative-something that is largely in our control-remains the critical next step, and we're encouraged to have made significant inroads on that front, which should greatly reduce the revenue levels required to achieve positive adjusted EBITDA. We believe it will take a few months for this restructuring to fully take shape, but expect the end result to be a much leaner, stronger, and more focused organization that is truly aligned on all aspects-revenue and cost-with the industry's best and leading operators. Ultimately, we believe we have the right strategy, liquidity, customers, and talent to execute on our plan and to ensure we are in prime position to continue capturing the industry's robust growth."

KushCo expects to provide more details on its new strategic plan when it reports its complete fiscal second quarter 2020 financial results in April 2020.

Changes to the Leadership Team

In order to better execute on its new strategic plan, the Company also implemented changes to its leadership team. Stephen Christoffersen, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development, has been named the Company's new Chief Financial Officer, replacing Christopher Tedford, who will be leaving the Company, effective April 10, 2020.

Mr. Christoffersen has served as KushCo's Executive Vice President of Corporate Development since November 2018, where he oversees and manages the Company's business development functions, including expanding KushCo's hemp trading and retail services divisions. Since Mr. Christoffersen joined the Company, he has played an active role in KushCo's capital raising efforts, partnerships, and strategic investments, including securing the Company's line of credit with Monroe Capital, its partnership with C.A. Fortune, and its investment in and partnership with Xtraction Services, where he currently serves as a Board member. He brings nearly 15 years of capital markets, portfolio management, and corporate development experience to the role of Chief Financial Officer. Prior to joining KushCo, he managed a $500 million equity portfolio for a large bank and served as the Chief Financial Officer of an emerging beef jerky brand, as well as advised on M&A and fundraising initiatives for several seed and growth stage companies. He received his Chartered Financial Analyst designation in 2015 and holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"On behalf of the entire Board and management team, I am truly excited to welcome Stephen as our new Chief Financial Officer," said Kovacevich. "Stephen has made a resounding impact since joining the team less than two years ago, constantly finding new ways to add value on multiple fronts. His intimate knowledge of our business and financial state-as well as his active role in launching and developing our newer, higher-margin services-makes him a perfect candidate to step into this role as we enter this next chapter of our evolution-one that will require a broad cross-section of skills and experiences, including an ability to wear multiple hats and embrace our new ethos of doing more with less.'"

Mr. Tedford had been serving as KushCo's Chief Financial Officer since November 2018, and played an instrumental role in bolstering the Company's financial and risk management capabilities, treasury management, and strategic financial planning and reporting.

Kovacevich continued: "We are beyond grateful for Chris' many contributions and insight while serving as the Company's Chief Financial Officer. When he joined KushCo in late 2018, we were running a very lean finance staff that was grappling with the challenging dynamics of a start-up operating in a hyper growth and constantly evolving industry. Under his leadership, we have been able to significantly bolster our finance and accounting capabilities, and put standards and processes in place designed to ensure we have a well-oiled financial reporting, forecasting, and budgeting machine across the entire organization. I am encouraged by the solid platform Chris and his team have put in place, which can now be easily picked up by Stephen, for whom we have the utmost confidence. Overall, we thank Chris for all his service and wish him nothing but the best in his next endeavors."

About KushCo Holdings

KushCo Holdings, Inc. (KSHB) (www.kushco.com) is the premier producer of ancillary products and services to the legal cannabis and CBD industries. KushCo Holdings' subsidiaries and brands provide product quality, exceptional customer service, compliance knowledge and a local presence in serving its diverse customer base.

Founded in 2010, KushCo Holdings has now sold more than 1 billion units to growers, processors and producers across North America, South America, and Europe.

The Company has been featured in media nationwide, including CNBC, Fox News, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, Los Angeles Times, TheStreet.com, and Entrepreneur, Inc Magazine. While KushCo Holdings provides products and solutions to customers in the cannabis and CBD industries, it has no direct involvement with the cannabis plant or any products that contain THC.

For more information, visit www.kushco.com or call (888) 920-5874.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may include predictions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward-looking within the meaning of applicable securities laws. While these forward-looking statements represent the Company's current judgments, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy and consumer and business practices. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect the opinions of the Company's management only as of the date of this release. Please keep in mind that the Company is not obligating itself to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. When used herein, words such as: "potential," "look forward," "expect," "anticipate," "project," "should," "believe," or variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in any forward- looking statements made by the Company herein are often discussed in the Company's filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which are available at: www.sec.gov, and on the Company's website, at: www.kushco.com.

KushCo Holdings Contact

Investor Contact:

Najim Mostamand, CFA

Director of Investor Relations

714-539-7653

ir@kushco.com

SOURCE: KushCo Holdings, Inc.





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The Narendra Modi government will make an advance payout of its universal cash-for-farmers programme, PM-KISAN, on April 1, 2 or 3, rather than in June, responding to the coronavirus epidemic, which could upend agriculture, the countrys largest employer.

The package announced by finance minister also said two-thirds of Indians, about 800 million people, currently eligible for cheap grains under the National Food Security Act, would be given double their quota of foodgrain ration, up from the usual 5kg per person.

Under PM-KISAN, the government provides an income support of Rs 6000 a year to farmers with a valid enrolment, paid in three equal cash transfers of Rs 2000 -- one every four months. It was launched by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 24 February 2019, when the first instalment was paid.

Nearly 80.5 million farmers will be paid about Rs 16000 crore in all, an official requesting anonymity said, adding that the Centre is gearing up to pay advances of all federally-funded and partially-federally-funded cash and in-kind subsidies, such as old-age pensions and ration.

Small agri business owners will need access to emergency grants, analysts say. Additional money needs to be set aside for the rural unemployed too, according to them.

The cash transfer under PM-KISAN is an unconditional handout, meaning that it doesnt require any proof of how recipients use it, but payments are usually timed with sowing seasons to help finance agricultural inputs. Inputs refer to all materials needed for cultivation by farmers, from seeds to fertilisers.

The proposal for the advance payment of the PM-KISAN tranche, the first this financial year, from the agriculture ministry has been approved by the Prime Minister. The finance ministry is ready to release the amount to the agriculture ministry and so are all states to facilitate it, the official said.

The World Health Organization has lauded Indias efforts to curb the pandemic that is roiling Asias third largest economy, apart from devastating lives. The current 21-day lockdown period, however, has walled off the rural sector from the urban, from where rural incomes flow. Indias has recorded close to 700 cases of Covid-19.

All chief secretaries have finished providing the Centre with their respective lots for the PM-KISAN tranche, a jargon for payout data of each eligible farmer, state-wise, such as land-holding, biometric and bank account details.

The cash-transfer takes the direct benefit transfer or DBT mode. This means all 80.5 million farmers will simultaneously get Rs 2000 each in their bank accounts through electronic release by federal authorities.

There could still be challenges. Aadhaar-based enrolment and cash transfers, slow internet connections in many rural centres, and messy land records have slowed the PM-KISAN programme, the farm ministry told a parliamentary panel in January.

Eligible farmer families are identified on the basis of operational land holding data according to the agricultural Census Data 2015-16, which is then extrapolated to 2018-19, an official said. It is the job of state governments to provide accurate beneficiary data and payments are continuously updated.

This decision is obviously welcome. We also need income lifelines for all vulnerable sections, such as the urban manual workers and agricultural labourers, said Manoj Kumar Panda of the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University.
China on Thursday reported a second consecutive day of no new domestic coronavirus cases as the countrys epidemic epicentre Hubei province opened its sealed borders after weeks, allowing hundreds of people to step out of the province for the first time in several weeks.

If that was a sign of the outbreak weakening in China, imported Covid-19 cases, rose sharply on Wednesday, fuelling fears of a second infection wave returning to China riding on overseas returnees.

A total of 67 new cases were reported as of end-Wednesday, up from 47 a day earlier, all of which were from outside, Chinas national health commission (NHS) said on Thursday.

It brought the total number of imported cases to 541 on the mainland.

The total number of cases now stands at 81,285 while the NHC reported a total of 3,287 deaths at the end of Wednesday, up six from the previous day.

Following the measures taken by Beijing, Shanghai government announced that starting from this (Thursday) evening, all people entering the city from abroad will be required to undergo a 14-day quarantine to prevent the spread of the infection.

Expressing the Chinese governments concern about overseas cases, the vice foreign minister, Luo Zhaohui said on Thursday that around 90 percent of Chinas imported cases of Covid-19 are Chinese passport holders and 40 percent of them were students.

The Chinese foreign ministry, its embassies and hotlines have received 70000 phone calls from overseas Chinese on the pandemic, Luo said at a press conference in Beijing.

Effectively curbing the rise of imported Covid-19 cases has become a priority of Chinas epidemic prevention and control, Luo said.

The minister urged Chinese overseas students not venture to places with high infection risks and avoid non-essential travel.

We understand some overseas students are eager to come home...But under the current circumstances, by staying put, they can avoid being cross-infected in the hurried journey home or getting stuck mid-journey when the countries they transit in tighten border controls, Luo said.

Planning for a new wave of infections from overseas returnees, Beijing and local authorities in other cities have tightened screening and quarantine measures.

Beijing reported six new confirmed Covid-19 cases from other countries Wednesday, bringing the total number of imported cases in Beijing to 149.

Three of the new cases are from Britain, with the others from Canada, France and Hungary.

By the end of Wednesday, a total of 416 indigenously transmitted cases were reported in the city, of which 392 were discharged from hospitals after recovery.

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On 24 March and in the framework of its ongoing drive to combat the spread of the coronavirus, the Egyptian government announced a package of precautionary measures in line with President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisis directives to prioritise the health of the Egyptian people above all other considerations, according to Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli speaking at a press conference.



Foremost among the measures are an 11-hour curfew from 7pm to 6am that started on Wednesday 25 March, a reduction in the working week for commercial establishments to five days with closures on Fridays and Saturdays, the busiest shopping days, the closure of all recreational spaces such as clubs and cafes, restricting restaurant services to home delivery, and suspending government services apart from those related to healthcare.



Violators of these measures will be subject to relevant provisions under the emergency law.



The measures are in response to mounting demands aired in the press and on social media for a curfew because people have in some cases continued to disregard public-health warnings and met in large gatherings. Although some anticipated a stricter curfew complete with a military deployment, official clarifications indicate that the government continues to prefer an incremental approach.



Each stage will be tougher than the previous one, Madbouli said, adding that the decisions will depend on the rate of the virus spread and the ability to contain it.



On 14 January, parliament approved an extension of the nationwide state of emergency for another three months from 27 January to 27 March 2020. Under the emergency law, the Armed Forces and the national police shall take all necessary measures to confront the dangers and financing of terrorism, to safeguard security throughout the country, to protect private and public property, and to protect the lives of the people.



In the light of provisions pertaining to the delegation of executive responsibilities under the emergency law, the president will likely take the helm of decision-making in the fight against Covid-19.



According to Mohamed Qashqoush, professor of national security affairs at the Nasser Higher Military Academy in Cairo, the army is the best institution to turn to in a crisis of this nature. Already a couple of weeks ago, the army had begun to undertake tasks in military and civilian establishments to contain the coronavirus outbreak.



It will continue to perform this role and expand on it as needed, as determined by the political leadership responsible for managing this crisis, Qashqoush said. A current priority is to supply and distribute disinfectants and equipment, which has necessitated changes in the production lines at the Arab Organisation for Industrialisation and firms such as Al-Nasr for Intermediate Chemicals, recently visited by the Armed Forces chief of staff to ensure that they are ready to serve this purpose.



He added that the armys Public Services Authority has been instrumental in making necessary supplies available to the public.



On Sunday, the army announced the deaths of two high-ranking officers, Major General Khaled Shaltout, director of the Water Department at the Armed Forces Engineering Authority, and Major General Shafie Abdel-Halim Dawoud, director of the Major Projects Department at the Armed Forces Engineering Authority, as a result of infection with the Covid-19 virus. Both had been infected while performing their duties in the framework of the sweeping sterilisation and disinfection campaigns being carried out by the Armed Forces.



The Water Department and the Major Projects Department have been out there in the streets from day one of the crisis, Qashqoush said, stressing that the army has instituted health safeguards within the Armed Forces.



According to Gamal Abdel-Gawad, director of the Egyptian Programme at the Egyptian Centre for Strategic Studies, a thinktank, the steps the government have taken so far are appropriate. The main criterion is the number of cases exposed to infection, he said, adding that the measures were proportional to the rate of the spread of the virus.



He said that indexes had confirmed that official reporting on Covid-19 infections had been credible. One gauge is cases of death from coronavirus infection. Such things cant be hidden. If there had been a mistake in the number of reported infections, the hospitals critical and intensive-care facilities would have been overwhelmed, which hasnt happened, Abdel-Gawad said.



He acknowledged that previous governments had built up a legacy of inaccurate reporting during crises, however. But he said this did not apply to the current government, which has been very credible in its approach to the crisis and the measures it has taken.



As for the major challenges in combating the crisis over the spread of Covid-19, Abdel-Gawad said that it was important to look at the situation in terms of two sectors. One was the public sector, which was well-organised and could therefore be controlled and included the civil service and other public-sector organisations.



The second was the private sector and the public at large in urban and rural settings. Here, mandatory measures were needed in order to control behaviour, with some groups even being recalcitrant by nature. He pointed to the case of a small demonstration in Alexandria that had been triggered by provocative messages broadcast by anti-regime channels.



This type of sporadic behaviour will necessitate some deterrents or other forms of discipline, Abdel-Gawad said, stressing that such types of reckless behaviour can be found everywhere in the world and citing criticisms levelled by the mayor of New York in the US against some individuals in the city and the fact that the authorities in Florida had been forced to close down beaches because people had not listened to the advice of the health authorities.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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What is Telemedicine & Tele-health?

What are the Telemedicine Practice Guidelines?

consultations outside the jurisdiction of India.

It does not cover hardware or software, infrastructure building & maintenance, data management systems; standards and inter operability

use of digital technology to conduct surgical or invasive procedures remotely.

Requirements to practice Telemedicine

RMPs should be familiar with the guidelines as well as with the process and limitations of telemedicine practice

All RMPs to take a mandatory online course within 3 years of notification of the guidelines - this is to be developed by MCI

All qualifying RMPs will need to undergo and qualify such a course before they are give license to practice

Video (Telemedicine facility, Apps, Video on chat platforms, Skype/Facetime )

Audio (Phone, VOIP, Apps etc.)

Text Based:

chat based applications (specialized telemedicine smartphone Apps, Websites, other internet-based systems etc.)



General messaging/ text/ chat platforms (WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger etc.)

Asynchronous (email/ Fax etc.)

How to Do a Telemedicine Consult in India

Context Identification of RMP and Patient Mode of Communication Consent Type of Consultation Patient Evaluation Patient Management

Patient's identity -An RMP should verify and confirm patient's identity by name, age, address, email ID, phone number, registered ID or any other identification as may be deemed to be appropriate.

-An RMP should verify and confirm patient's identity by name, age, address, email ID, phone number, registered ID or any other identification as may be deemed to be appropriate. RMP's Identity -The RMP should ensure that there is a mechanism for a patient to verify the credentials and contact details of the RMP. The RMP should introduce themselves and their qualification before starting the consultation. They should display the registration number accorded by the State Medical Council/National Medical Commission, on prescriptions, website, electronic communication (WhatsApp/ email etc.) and receipts etc. given to the patients.

-The RMP should ensure that there is a mechanism for a patient to verify the credentials and contact details of the RMP. The RMP should introduce themselves and their qualification before starting the consultation. They should display the registration number accorded by the State Medical Council/National Medical Commission, on prescriptions, website, electronic communication (WhatsApp/ email etc.) and receipts etc. given to the patients. Check age when prescribing medication - through proof. If minor they should be accompanied by an adult and proof of both should be available including relationship.

Implied Consent - If the patient initiates the telemedicine consultation, then the consent is implied. In an in-person consultation, it is assumed the patient has consented to the consult by their actions. When the patient walks in an OPD, the consent for the consultation is taken as implied. Like an in-person consultation, for most of the tele-consultations the consent can be assumed to be implied because the patient has initiated it.

- If the patient initiates the telemedicine consultation, then the consent is implied. In an in-person consultation, it is assumed the patient has consented to the consult by their actions. When the patient walks in an OPD, the consent for the consultation is taken as implied. Like an in-person consultation, for most of the tele-consultations the consent can be assumed to be implied because the patient has initiated it. Explicit Consent - if a Health worker, RMP or a Caregiver initiates a Telemedicine consultation.An Explicit consent can be recorded in any form. Patient can send an email, text or audio/video message. Patient can state his/her intent on phone/video to the RMP (e.g. "Yes, I consent to avail consultation via telemedicine" or any such communication in simple words). The RMP must record this in his patient records.

First Consult means the patient is consulting with the RMP for the first time; or the patient has consulted with the RMP earlier, but more than 6 months have lapsed since the previous consultation; or the patient has consulted with the RMP earlier, but for a different health condition or if new symptoms appear or the RMP cannot recall earlier consult. In such consults first consults video consults is better as RMP can make a much better judgment and hence can provide much better advice including additional medicines, if indicated.

the patient is consulting with the RMP for the first time; or the patient has consulted with the RMP earlier, but more than 6 months have lapsed since the previous consultation; or the patient has consulted with the RMP earlier, but for a different health condition or if new symptoms appear or the RMP cannot recall earlier consult. In such consults first consults video consults is better as RMP can make a much better judgment and hence can provide much better advice including additional medicines, if indicated. Follow-Up Consult(s) means- The patient is consulting with the same RMP within 6 months of his/her previous in person consultation and this is for the continuation of care of the same health condition. In this type consults other than video should be possible

Provide Health Education as appropriate in the case; and/or

as appropriate in the case; and/or Provide Counselling related to specific clinical condition; and/or

List O: It will comprise those medicines which are safe to be prescribed through any mode of tele-consultation. In essence they would comprise of 'over the counter' medications. For instance, these medicines would include, paracetamol, ORS solutions, cough lozenges etc

It will comprise those medicines which are safe to be prescribed through any mode of tele-consultation. In essence they would comprise of 'over the counter' medications. For instance, these medicines would include, paracetamol, ORS solutions, cough lozenges etc List A: These medications are those which can be prescribed during the first consult which is a video consultation and is being re-prescribed for re-fill, in case of follow-up. This would be an inclusion list, containing relatively safe medicines with low potential for abuse Is a list of medication which RMP can prescribe in a patient who is undergoing follow-up consult, as a refill.

These medications are those which can be prescribed during the first consult which is a video consultation and is being re-prescribed for re-fill, in case of follow-up. This would be an inclusion list, containing relatively safe medicines with low potential for abuse Is a list of medication which RMP can prescribe in a patient who is undergoing follow-up consult, as a refill. List B: Is a list of medication which RMP can prescribe in a patient who is undergoing follow-up consultation in addition to those which have been prescribed during in-person consult for the same medical condition.

Is a list of medication which RMP can prescribe in a patient who is undergoing follow-up consultation in addition to those which have been prescribed during in-person consult for the same medical condition. Prohibited List: An RMP providing consultation via telemedicine cannot prescribe medicines in this list as these medicines have a high potential of abuse and could harm the patient or the society at large if used improperly. These include medicines listed in Schedule X of Drug and Cosmetic Act and Rules or any Narcotic and Psychotropic substance listed in the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, Act, 1985

How to Issue a Prescription and Transmit

Duties and Responsibilities of a RMP in GENERAL

Principles of medical ethics, including professional norms for protecting patient privacy and confidentiality as per IMC Act shall be binding and must be upheld and practiced.

Registered Medical Practitioner would be required to fully abide by Indian Medical Council (Professional conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002 and with the relevant provisions of the IT Act, Data protection and privacy laws or any applicable rules notified from time to time for protecting patient privacy and confidentiality and regarding the handling and transfer of such personal information regarding the patient. This shall be binding and must be upheld and practiced.

Registered Medical Practitioners will not be held responsible for breach of confidentiality if there is reasonable evidence to believe that a patient's privacy and confidentiality has been compromised by a technology breach or by a person other than RMP. The RMPs should ensure that reasonable degree of care is undertaken during hiring such services.

Misconduct It is specifically noted that in addition to all general requirements under the MCI Act for professional conduct, ethics etc, while using telemedicine all actions that wilfully compromise patient care or privacy and confidentiality, or violate any prevailing law are explicitly not permissible. Some examples of actions that are not permissible: RMPs insisting on Telemedicine, when the patient is willing to travel to a facility and/or requests an in-person consultation RMPs misusing patient images and data, especially private and sensitive in nature (e.g. RMP uploads an explicit picture of patient on social media etc) RMPs who use telemedicine to prescribe medicines from the specific restricted list RMPs are not permitted to solicit patients for telemedicine through any advertisements or inducements 3.7.1.5 Penalties: As per IMC Act, ethics and other prevailing laws.



Maintain Digital Trail/Documentation of Consultation

Log or record of Telemedicine interaction (e.g. Phone logs, email records, chat/ text record, video interaction logs etc.). Patient records, reports, documents, images, diagnostics, data etc. (Digital or non-Digital) utilized in the telemedicine consultation should be retained by the RMP. Specifically, in case a prescription is shared with the patient, the RMP is required to maintain the prescription records as required for in-person consultations.

Fee for Telemedicine Consultation

Telemedicine consultations should be treated the same way as in-person consultations from a fee perspective: RMP may charge an appropriate fee for the Telemedicine consultation provided.

An RMP should also give a receipt/invoice for the fee charged for providing telemedicine based consultation.

Other areas covered by the Guidelines

Health insurance reimbursement for telemedicine consults in India will strengthen this form of practise and it is hoped soon that some of the insurance companies will announce their requirement.

Minimum standards requirement for maintaining EMR

Minimum standards requirement for hardware and software

Training and education of all healthcare professionals and healthcare workers

Putting a robust ethical and legal document that will substantiate the already laid down guidelines

These guidelines will be a giant leap in making access to healthcare possible for one and all.India has 597,464 census villages as of 2018 census and each village has several hamlets. Many are in very remote locations with no road access. Our Prime Minister in 2018 said that all of nearly 600,000 villages had been given electricity connection. According to a report from market research firm TechARC over 77 per cent of Indians are now able to access wireless broadband through smartphones and the 3G/4G connectivity can be used by 502.2 million smartphone users. The online payment gateways also seem to be maturing and are becoming easier to use and can be seamlessly integrated into tele-health applications.With having both the connectivity and cash transactions in place, it will certainly help telemedicine take off in India within no time. This telemedicine regulation will change the way we interact with our doctors, it will at last change healthcare in India just like travel, banking and so many other sectors.The guidelines define telemedicine as follows-'The delivery of health care services, where distance is a critical factor, by all health care professionals using information and communication technologies for the exchange of valid information for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease and injuries, research and evaluation, and for the continuing education of health care providers, all in the interests of advancing the health of individuals and their communities.'- 'The delivery and facilitation of health and health-related services including medical care, provider and patient education, health information services, and self-care via telecommunications and digital communication technologies.'The guidelines were prepared in partnership with NITI Aayog and available on Ministry of Health website.- It can be practiced by a REGISTERED MEDICAL PRACTITIONER, who is defined as 'A Registered Medical Practitioner [RMP] is a person who is enrolled in the State Register or the National Register under the IMC Act 1956.'The guidelines recognise the gaps in legislation and the uncertainty of rules pose a risk for both the doctors and their patients and quote the 2018 judgement of the Hon'ble High Court of Bombay that had created uncertainty about the place and legitimacy of telemedicine because an appropriate framework or legislation did not exist.-To provide practical advice to doctors so that all services and models of care used by doctors and health workers are encouraged to consider the use of telemedicine as a part of normal practice.The purpose of these guidelines is to assist the medical practitioner in pursuing a sound course of action to provide effective and safe medical care founded on current information, available resources, and patient needs to ensure both the patient and provider safety.The guidelines do not provide for -In all cases of emergency, the patient must be advised for an in-person interaction with an RMP at the earliest. However if this is not possible emergency consult for immediate assistance or first aid etc. maybe offeredaccording to the Mode of CommunicationThe guidelines gives the liberty of deciding which type of consultation is best suited to the patient on the RMP. The practitioner should exercise proper discretion and not compromise on the quality of care. They should follow 'Seven elements' before considering any telemedicine consultation -health education or counselling or medication. As every patient/case/medical condition maybe different, for example, a new patient may present with a simple complaint such as headache while a known patient of Diabetes may consult for a follow-up with emergencies such as Diabetic Ketoacidosis . The RMP shall uphold the same standard of care as in an in-person consultation but within the intrinsic limits of telemedicine.-Telemedicine consultation is should not be anonymous: both the patient and the RMP need to know each other's identity.- Multiple technologies can be used to deliver telemedicine consultations. All these technology systems have their respective strengths, weaknesses and contexts in which they may be appropriate or inadequate in order to deliver proper care. RMP should decide what is best suitable for the patient and if face to face consult would be better for diagnosis and treatment and advise the patient accordingly- Patient consent is necessary for any telemedicine consultation. The consent can be Implied or explicit depending on the following situations- This is critical for coming to the diagnosis and initiating treatment. All possible information should be obtained including history, examination findings, investigation reports, past records, supplemented further through conversation with a healthcare worker/provider and by any information supported by technology-based tools.If such information is inadequate the RMP can request for additional information from the patient and pause the consult and restart when such info is available or suggest a face to face consultation. If physical examination is critical judgement, he should suggest such an examination by another RMP or in-person consult. Safety for patient is of utmost importance in making a judgment to proceed with tele-consult or not.- There are two types of patient consultations, namely, first consult and the follow-up consult.If the condition can be appropriately managed via telemedicine, based on the type of consultation, then the RMP may proceed with professional judgment to:Prescribing medications, via telemedicine consultation is left to the professional discretion of the RMP. It entails the same professional accountability as in the traditional in-person consult. If a medical condition requires a particular protocol to diagnose and prescribe as in a case of in-person consult then the same prevailing principle will be applicable to a telemedicine consult.RMP may prescribe medicines via telemedicine only when RMP is satisfied that he/ she has gathered adequate and relevant information about the patient's medical condition and prescribed medicines are in the best interest of the patient.Prescribing medicines without an appropriate diagnosis/provisional diagnosis will amount to a professional misconductThere are certain limitations on prescribing medicines on consult via telemedicine depending upon the type of consultation and mode of consultation. The categories of medicines that can be prescribed via tele-consultation will be notified in consultation with the Central Government from time to time. The categories of medicines that can be prescribed are listed below:RMP shall issue a prescription as per the Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics)Regulations and shall not contravene the provisions of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act and Rules.A sample format has been suggested and can be referred on the ministry website. RMP shall provide photo, scan, digital copy of a signed prescription or e-Prescription to the patient via email or any messaging platformIn case the RMP is transmitting the prescription directly to a pharmacy, he/ she must ensure explicit consent of the patient that entitles him/her to get the medicines dispensed from any pharmacy of his/ her choiceIt is incumbent on RMP to maintain the following records/ documents for the period as prescribed from time to time:- in which case authorization by the patient is required. In medical conditions like dementia or physical disability etc. The care giver is deemed to be authorized to consult on behalf of the patient. A detailed requirement is spelled out.- For the purpose of these guidelines, "Health worker" could be a Nurse, Allied Health Professional, Mid-Level Health Practitioner, ANM or any other health worker designated by an appropriate authority Proposed Set up. This would help the upcoming health and wellness center to initiate and coordinate the telemedicine consultation for the patient with a RMP at a higher center at district or State or National level.The guidelines do not permit technology platforms based on Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning to counsel the patients or prescribe any medicines to a patient. New technologies such as Artificial Intelligence , Internet of Things, advanced data science-based decision support systems etc. can assist and support a RMP on patient evaluation, diagnosis or management, the final prescription or counselling has to be directly delivered by the RMP.Overall the guidelines have covered all aspects of telemedicine and the grey areas such as prescription and reimbursement. These guidelines will be the start of a new chapter in healthcare in India. The tele-health inclusion will open up consultations for primary health centers and the health and wellness center. It will also help nurse practitioners to get empowered and be utilised better when they are in the field.The immediate requirements now to follow areSource: Medindia
Congress legislator and leader of the opposition in Assam Assembly Debabrata Saikia on Thursday wrote to Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal on alleged atrocities committed by the police on people during the ongoing lockdown.

In a letter, Saikia brought to Sonowals notice several news reports and videos showing police personnel assaulting and harassing people who had ventured out during the 21-day nationwide lockdown.

He pointed out that both the central and state governments have allowed citizens to venture out in small numbers for emergency purposes like procuring grocery and medicines during the lockdown.

Unfortunately many personnel of the Assam Police are displaying a tendency to beat up and/or humiliate people first and ask questions later, Saikia wrote in his letter to Sonowal who heads the home department.

There were reports that a pharmacy owner in Golaghat district was caned by the police when he was going to open his establishment. In another instance, a newspaper vendor was reportedly assaulted by police in Nalbari.

Even a national emergency cannot justify such blatant violation of a civilians basic human right of living with dignity. If anyone is found to be loitering in the streets without due cause, then that person should be booked and the courts of law should be allowed to penalize him, Saikia wrote.

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Delhi to ease restrictions, if Covid cases come down in next 2-3 days: Health Minister

Lata Mangeshkar health update: Doctor says,'She in ICU with Covid-19 and pneumonia, will be under observation'

Coronavirus: How truck drivers witness lockdown despite committed to deliver essential products

India

oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P

New Delhi, Mar 26: Days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a nationwide lockdown till April 14 over the novel coronavirus pandemic, several truck drivers in West Bengal are left stranded as they fail to find food next to the highway.

These truck drivers travel hundreds of kilometres to carry gas tankers for filling LPG gas cylinders.

More than 1,000 tankers, that are part of the required services in the lockdown, are now stranded on the National Highway 116B in Mecheda to Haldia route.

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In a report, it is said that due to non-availability of vegetables, the services of dhabas and road side food stations, are closed.

With no shops open next to the highway, the truck drivers are finding it difficult even to move their trucks from one point to another after the police has demanded people not to hit the streets and stay home.

Also, it can be seen that the truck drivers are stuck in a situation where they have to deliver these essential items and also respect the law and order.

COVID-19 lockdown: Experts peg Indias cost at Rs 9 lakh crore

On Tuesday, PM Modi announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown to contain the outbreak of coronavirus. The central and the state governments have taken several safety measures to ensure that the supply of all essential goods continue smoothly.

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Story first published: Thursday, March 26, 2020, 10:15 [IST]
Ark. church coronavirus infections rise to 37 as it grieves death of beloved greeter

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Greers Ferry First Assembly in Cleburne County, Arkansas, is now mourning their beloved long time greeter who passed away Tuesday from the new coronavirus as the number of infected persons connected to the church rose to 37 Wednesday, their pastor said.

We currently have 37 that have tested positive, with only a small handful that are still waiting on test results," Pastor Mark Palenske said in a statement on Facebook Wednesday. "Many of us are recovering from a long list of symptoms that seem to be common with this virus, and we certainly appreciate the hints of restored health that are headed our way. We are familiar with the expanding scope of the Covid-19 crisis and that daily individuals are being treated and advised accordingly. Our prayers are that God would strengthen them just as he did with us. Please continue to listen to the public directives that we are being guided with.

Palenske mourned the death of 91-year-old William Bill Barton, who died Tuesday morning at Conway Regional Medical Center.

With the consent of his family, I acknowledge that our 91 year old greeter has passed away. Bill Barton was the first encounter in our First Assembly experience. Each Sunday, the door would be opened for you and a white-haired, well-dressed gentlemen would extend a characteristic smile, the pastor said.

He then revealed how the beloved greeter retired from his post several years ago but returned because it was too difficult for him.

It had been his post for years. He retired from the position several years ago, but returned after only a few months, saying that he really didnt want to give it up. Our hearts are broken, and his family is feeling his loss deeply, he said.

The church will celebrate Bartons life as a precious gift from God church but Palenske could not state when that will be due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

When we are able, and can gather confidently, (I dont know when that will be) we will celebrate his life as a precious gift from God. Bill loved the Lord deeply and his heart was so tender to the presence of God," he said. "His life was immensely transformed by Gods grace, and I am assured that the greeter has indeed been greeted into heaven itself. Your continued prayers for his family are greatly appreciated.

Barton's death was the second coronavirus fatality in the state, according to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. The first was a 59-year-old Sherwood man who had underlying health issues.

Days before, Palenske, who is recovering from the coronavirus along with his wife Dena, warned others not to underestimate how dangerous the virus is and treat it with wisdom and restraint.

There was very little in my training for the ministry that covered the full measure of what our church family has dealt with in the past few weeks, he said in an earlier statement on Facebook.

The intensity of this virus has been underestimated by so many, and I continue to ask that each of you take it very seriously. An act of wisdom and restraint on your part can be the blessing that preserves the health of someone else.

Palenske and other officials at his church previously stated that church members and others connected to the church started getting sick after a childrens crusade earlier this month. On Wednesday, he clarified that the event took place on March 6-8 instead of March 5-8 as previously stated.

He also emphasized to the public that they did not flout any local restrictions on gathering and members of his church started getting sick prior to the first case of coronavirus being diagnosed in the state.

The Kids ministry event was held the weekend of March 6th-8th, several days before there was even a confirmed case in Arkansas. Our last service was Wednesday, March 11th. We canceled services prior to anyone in our church testing positive, and prior to any local, state or national directive. We cherished the wise council of local medical professionals, and their quick and decisive actions more than likely have kept the effects of this virus from going even farther than it has, Palenske stated.

Of the more than 300 cases of coronavirus in Arkansas, officials revealed that more than 10 are children. Data from Johns Hopkins as of Thursday morning showed that more than 69,000 people across the U.S. have been infected with the coronavirus and there are now just over 1,000 deaths. Approximately 25% of those deaths are in New York City. Global figures stood at nearly 500,000 infections and more than 22,000 deaths.

Officials say the outbreak of the virus at Greers Ferry First Assembly of God is responsible for the spread of the disease in the relatively small Cleburne County which has a population of 25,000. The county now has the second highest number of coronavirus cases in the state.

"It appears, from what I know at this time, most of the cases that we have in our county" are related to the Greers Ferry church, Jerry Holmes, county judge of Cleburne County, told the Gazette.
Recovery rate reaches 45 percent in South Korea

This was the 15th consecutive day that South Korea reported 100 or fewer cases.

The recovery rate for coronavirus patients in South Korea is over 44%, local media reported Thursday.

According to daily Korea Herald, 4,144 coronavirus patients -- 44.8 percent of South Koreas total 9,421 cases -- have "made full recoveries" since the country reported its first case on Jan. 20.

4,966 PEOPLE REMAIN UNDER TREATMENT

The number of cases reached 9,421 after 104 more were confirmed by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, along with six fatalities that raised the death toll to 132, Yonhap News Agency reported.

A total of 4,966 patients remain under treatment, 56 of them in critical condition, while 414 were discharged from hospitals on Thursday.

Both reports noted a rise in imported cases in South Korea, with the Korea Herald saying 86 of this weeks new cases were from Europe, 45 from the U.S., and eight from Asia.

The report said 284 of South Koreas total number of cases were people who had come from abroad.


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Crocs, Inc. has launched a new program that offers free shoes to healthcare workers fighting the coronavirus pandemic. The company will give up to 10,000 pairs of shoes a day under 'a Free Pair for Healthcare' program.



The casual footwear maker said that healthcare workers across the U.S. will have the opportunity to get a free pair of shoes while supplies last. They can choose from select Crocs Classic Clogs and Crocs At Work styles, with free shipping.



'Over the past week, we have spoken to healthcare workers, their facilities and even their family and friends, and they have specifically asked for our shoes in an effort to provide ease on their feet, as well as ease of mind as they need the ability to easily clean up before they go home to their families,' said Crocs President and CEO Andrew Rees.



Rees added that Crocs is immediately prepared to fulfill and ship up to 10,000 pairs per day to the healthcare workers. The duration of the giveaway will depend on the company's level of inventory and the amount of requests it receives.



In addition to the free online requests for individual healthcare workers, Crocs said it will donate up to 100,000 pairs of shoes that will be distributed across several select healthcare facilities and organizations.



Currently, the program includes Jobs Ohio and the Dayton Area Hospital Association to distribute a large donation through the local Ohio health systems.



Crocs is also distributing the shoes to St. Anthony North Health Campus in Denver, Colorado; Atlantic Health System which will distribute across multiple facilities within its network, including Morristown Medical Center; and the SONSIEL organization in partnership with its SHARE initiative.



Crocs said it has not confirmed a total donation amount, but will work hard to serve as many as possible every day during the crisis. The website will open for requests at approximately 12 p.m. ET daily, and will remain open until that day's free pair allotment has been fulfilled.



In mid-March, Crocs said it will temporarily close all of its company-operated retail stores in North America in response to the escalating global coronavirus pandemic. The store closures are effective March 17 through March 27.



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The US senate has passed a $2.2 trillion (1.85tn) emergency relief package that will provide support for American workers and businesses as the country battles the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

A unanimous vote for the aid bill was secured despite misgivings between Republican and Democratic senators over whether it goes too far or not far enough, and capped days of difficult negotiations in Washington.

The 880-page support package is the largest of its kind in US history, with its value equivalent to more than half of the nations annual budget.

Its passing comes as the US death toll surpassed 1,000 on Wednesday, while the number of confirmed cases rose to more than 68,000.

Upon announcing the vote, majority leader Mitch McConnell said: Pray for one another, for all of our families, and for our country.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi meanwhile said the bill takes us a long way down the road in meeting the needs of the American people.

The rescue package builds on efforts focused on vaccines and emergency response, sick and family medical leave for workers, and food aid.

It includes direct payments of $1,200 to individuals who earn $75,000 or less, while married couples with a household income of up to $150,000 would receive $2,400 and an additional $500 per each child.

The plan will also create a $500 billion lending program for businesses, cities and states and a $367bn fund for smaller companies. A total of $130bn will be made available for hospitals, while unemployment insurance has been extended.

Businesses controlled by members of Congress and top administration officials  including president Donald Trump and his immediate family members  would be ineligible for the bills business assistance.

The agreement was reached following a number of twists and turns in discussions, as senator Chuck Schumer, the chambers senior democrat, said on Wednesday.

A late speed bump saw Republican senators complain that the bills expansion of unemployment benefits provided a strong incentive for employees to be laid off instead of going to work.

Story continues

Senator Bernie Sanders said he would oppose the bill unless the Republicans dropped their objections, threatening to push for tighter restrictions on corporate companies receiving aid from a taxpayer pool of $500bn.

The amendment was eventually put to senate but failed. Further revisions were made late into Wednesday before the bill was unanimously approved in a 96-0 vote.

Mr Trump said he would sign the bill as soon as it lands on his deck, before passing it to the House for a Friday vote.

The legislation now before us now is historic because it is meant to match a historic crisis, said Mr Schumer. Our health care system is not prepared to care for the sick. Our workers are without work. Our businesses cannot do business. Our factories lie idle. The gears of the American economy have ground to a halt.

Mr McConnell, the majority leader, said: This is a proud moment for the United States Senate and the country and were going to win this battle.

Senators have anticipated that the relief package will keep the US economy afloat for three months amid the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Read more

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Which countries around the world has coronavirus spread to?

The dirty truth about washing your hands
SEATTLE, March 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Alaska Airlines today announced plans to reduce its flight schedule for April and May by approximately 70% following historic and unprecedented falloff in demand related to the COVID-19 outbreak across the U.S. and beyond.

Flight schedules for June and beyond will be based on demand, but it is our expectation that reductions will be substantial for at least the next several months. As a result of the outbreak, government leaders across the country have appropriately encouraged social distancing and discouraged or restricted travel. As a result, Alaska  like other airlines  is seeing demand reductions of more than 80%.

"Alaska's goal, since the onset of this outbreak, has been to keep our employees and guests safe and healthy, and to ensure that our airline is here to support and serve them in the future," said Alaska CEO Brad Tilden. "But we also know that given the lack of demand for air travel and profound impact on the financial management of our business, hard work and aggressive control of costs and cash are required, even with additional support."

Some of the actions being taken to reduce spending and improve liquidity are as follows:

We are announcing today the suspension of our cash dividend and we have previously announced the suspension of our share repurchase program.

We have drawn down $400 million on our line of credit and closed an additional secured loan for $425 million today.

on our line of credit and closed an additional secured loan for today. We are announcing officer pay reductions through Sept. 30 as follows:

as follows: 100% pay reduction for both the CEO and President of Alaska Airlines;



50% for the President of Horizon Air;



30% for EVPs and SVPs; and



20% for VPs and MDs.

Our Board of Directors have voted to take their own cash retainers to zero through Sept. 30 .

. We are actively soliciting employees who are interested in voluntary leaves of absence, under which Alaska would continue to pay both health and travel benefits.

would continue to pay both health and travel benefits. We have suspended annual pay increases, plan to reduce hours for management employees, and will release contractors and temporary workers.

We are aggressively managing all spending, including all spending for aircraft, buildings, equipment, leases, services and other areas. We will of course make all necessary investments in expense items to maintain the safety and integrity of our operation.

We are working with all vendor partners to reduce spending in line with our reduced flight schedule.

Additionally, we have worked actively with the White House, The Treasury Department, and Congress on an aid package that could total $50 billion for passenger airlines if it is passed. "We appreciate that the federal government recognizes the essential nature of airline service to our economy and society, and the importance of aviation jobs," said Tilden. "As we more fully understand the impact of these provisions, we will add to our plans to manage through this change."

"These actions are unprecedented, but these are truly unprecedented times," said Tilden. "Alaska has been here for 88 years to serve our customers and communities and to provide good jobs for our people. It is imperative that we act swiftly and courageously to ensure that we're here to continue our mission in the future."

"We are ultimately optimistic about the future of our great airline," said Tilden. "But it is clear that we are and will be under severe financial pressure for the foreseeable future and that is why these actions are essential."

Learn more about Alaska Airlines response to the COVID-19 outbreak at https://blog.alaskaair.com/coronavirus/.

Alaska Airlines and its regional partners fly 47 million guests a year to more than 115 destinations with an average of 1,300 daily flights across the United States and to Mexico, Canada and Costa Rica. With Alaska and Alaska Global Partners, guests can earn and redeem miles on flights to more than 800 destinations worldwide. Alaska Airlines ranked "Highest in Customer Satisfaction Among Traditional Carriers in North America" in the J.D. Power North America Airline Satisfaction Study for 12 consecutive years from 2008 to 2019. Learn about Alaska's award-winning service at newsroom.alaskaair.com and blog.alaskaair.com. Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air are subsidiaries of Alaska Air Group (NYSE: ALK).

SOURCE Alaska Air Group
Nearly 3,800 citizens of Ukraine who arrived on foot at the border were bussed across the border yesterday.

Over 13,500 Ukrainians were able to return home in the past 24 hours amid the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis.

Yesterday, March 25, almost 22,000 people crossed the Ukrainian border, of which more than 13,500 were Ukrainians who returned from abroad, the press service of Ukraine's State Border Service said.

Read alsoUkraine's Health Ministry reports 156 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 5 deaths as of Thursday morning

Meanwhile, 6,670 foreigners underwent registration for leaving Ukraine.

"Border guards jointly with biosecurity workers carried out body temperature screening and checked health status of about 15,300 people in the past 24 hours," it said. "In accordance with the established procedure, they signed informed consents and got self-isolation instruction sheets."

Also, in the past day, nearly 3,800 Ukrainians who arrived on foot at the border were bussed across the border with the vehicles provided by the local authorities and Ukraine's State Emergency Service.

In addition, two evacuation trains with about 1,240 Ukrainians and one foreigner arrived in Ukraine from Poland's Przemysl. "The border guards, together with biosecurity workers, carried out a set of screening measures aimed at identifying COVID-19 among the passengers," it said.
Richard Reeves, a journalist and author who explored the presidency, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the role of the media and other aspects of American history in muscular, passionate and occasionally acerbic prose, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.

His son, Jeffrey, said the cause was cardiac arrest. Mr. Reeves had been treated for cancer.

Mr. Reeves, who was a lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, wrote more than a dozen books and, from 1979 to 2014, a syndicated column that appeared in more than 100 newspapers. He was also a familiar face on public affairs programs on PBS.

As an author, Mr. Reeves was in particular an insightful and unsparing student of the American presidency, producing well-received portraits of John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

His most recent book, Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II, was published in 2015. In that book, Mr. Reeves accused two Army officers stationed on the West Coast, Lt. Gen. John DeWitt and Col. Karl Bendetsen  both bigots, the former a fool, the latter a brilliant pathological liar  of wildly exaggerating dangers posed by Japanese-Americans there.
Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari on Thursday announced donating his one months salary for the assistance of people affected by the coronavirus in the state.

The Governor declared that the amount will be sent to the Chief Ministers Relief Fund (CMRF), according to a press release issued by Raj Bhavan here.

It said all officers and staff of Raj Bhavan will be donating their one day salary to the CMRF for the same purpose.

In response to the 21-day lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to stem the spread of coronavirus, Koshyari has cancelled all his public meetings and engagements tillApril 14.

The Governor will not be meeting his daily visitors during this period.

Koshyari will, however, meet visitors and officials in discharge of his important official responsibilities, Raj Bhavan added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Local News, National & World News, Community, Charity & Cause

By Long Island Published: March 26 2020

Company Ramping up Availability and Access to Testing

Enzo Biochem, Inc. (NYSE:ENZ), a leading biotechnology and diagnostic company, today announced its wholly owned subsidiary, Enzo Clinical Labs, Inc., has expanded its screening services for COVID-19. Following the companys March 6, 2020 announcement regarding the initiation of accepting specimens for novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) testing, Enzo is now directly collecting specimens at a drive-through facility by appointment in Enzos laboratory complex in Farmingdale, New York. This facility has been set up with support from local and state officials.

As one of the first independent drive-through testing facilities on Long Island, NY, it is easily accessible for Nassau and Suffolk County residents and is now in operation. The goal of this testing site is to help the local community improve virus surveillance and reduce pressure on the regional hospital systems.

Enzo President Barry Weiner commented: Enzo understands and takes seriously its responsibility as a leading and resourceful diagnostic and clinical laboratory to help alleviate the present bottleneck existing around COVID-19 testing in the communities we serve during this rapidly evolving pandemic environment. We are partnering with State and Local officials to bring access and availability to the nearly eight million people in the underserved Long Island, New York, communities. Our technical staff is committed to do what it takes in providing necessary patient care. We appreciate the government and public support that has enabled Enzo to quickly establish this facility and continue to serve the Long Island community with the highest standards. We also are exploring how we can apply our many years of technical know-how and manufacturing experience to contribute to testing alternatives.

To receive testing, patients who are concerned that they or a family member are exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 must initially consult a physician. If directed by the physician, the patient will receive a prescription (script) with which the patient can make an appointment by phone for COVID-19 testing at the Farmingdale facility. Once the patient arrives at the scheduled time for the appointment, he/she will remain in their car and must present a photo-ID for verification as well as any other necessary documentation. A healthcare professional with protective gear will collect a sample using a nasal swab (similar to a flu test). The specimen will be sent to Enzos clinical laboratory facility for processing, and test results will be available in a timely manner through the ordering physician or, by request, directly to the patients.

Further information is available on Enzos website at: http://www.enzoclinicallabs.com/coronavirus
Ukrainian Cabinet Submits IMF-Required Bill On Banks To Parliament

By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service March 25, 2020

Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers has submitted to parliament a revised bill on banking regulations needed to meet requirements set by the International Monetary Fund for a new lending package as the country's feeble economy braces for the effects of the coronavirus outbreak.

The bill appeared on the legislature's website on March 24 and was agreed by the central bank and Finance Ministry.

Its aim is to protect the nation's interests following a decision to nationalize insolvent or troubled banks and prevent tycoons from regaining control over their former assets.

Local media have reported that an extraordinary parliamentary session to vote on the bill could be held on March 26 or later this week.

While the bill could have broad implications in Ukraine, it is widely believed that its main purpose is to prevent Ihor Kolomoyskiy, the former co-owner of PrivatBank, from regaining ownership rights to the bank.

Most of the 103 banks that were either nationalized or had their licenses revoked in 2014-16 were found to have been used as personal piggy banks by their former owners, who engaged in widespread third-party lending.

U.S.-based corporate investigative firm Kroll and attorneys at AlixPartners had found a hole of at least $5.5 billion on PrivatBank's balance sheet.

Kolomoyskiy has denied wrongdoing and maintains he is the rightful owner of PrivatBank.

Ukraine has been in talks with the IMF for months about a three-year, $5.5 billion loan tied to reforms to help the country meet a spike in debt repayments this year.

Ukraine is likely to need to borrow even more money internationally as it increases spending to fight the spread of the coronavirus and support companies and individuals negatively affected by the potential economic fallout.

Ukraine recorded 13 additional coronavirus cases on March 24, bringing the nationwide total to 97. Three deaths have been attributed to the disease known as COVID-19.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/ukrainian-cabinet -submits-imf-required-bill-on-banks- to-parliament/30507910.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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As a board member for the Women for Trump Coalition I thought I would reach out to some of the women I have met through the coalition to learn how they were holding up through the pandemic. I spoke to women in Texas, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Both in Pennsylvania and Ohio several counties are experiencing a Stay at Home Order. Many of the women I spoke to were able to easily make the transition to working from home, and others were stay-at-home mothers, and as a result, not much has changed for them in terms of being at home. However, many expressed frustrations at not being able to go outside the house at will. Women are now looking at a drive to the grocery store, walking the dog, or a stroll with family members as the highlight of their days. Seeing a hugely positive aspect to this, Dr. Shirley Lazorchak, said she always appreciated the nurturing aspects of home so this quarantine is a perfect place to be at this time. In fact, a bit joyous as I see it as stolen time - extra time.

Women have been creative with the extra time they have on their hands. They are finding that implementing a systematic plan to purge every area of their home, as Lawna in Pennsylvania has done, to be a good way to keep sane. She said it has helped to keep her busy and she ultimately experienced a great sense of accomplishment.

Sandy in Florida has her calendar filled for the next few weeks. That may appear to be counter intuitive for those of us who have cleared our calendars. But she was very clever to establish a schedule for exercising, meal planning, making phone calls, or drafting emails to friends and family to check on them. Many others were happy for the opportunity to complete projects that had long been on the back burner. No longer necessary to wait and hope to eventually squeeze in those projects during their daily routine in the days before coronavirus. Dr. Lazorchak encourages women to shower, dress, and put on make-up every day and avoid the temptation to stay in pjs. This is powerful advice. Staying in your pj's all day can lead to a sense of isolation and entrapment. A feeling that you are disconnected from the comings and goings of the world outside, not unlike being in a hospital room.

A very large majority of the women I spoke to have spent increased amounts of time in the Bible or watching sermons on television. More than one person expressed gratitude for the availability of televised religious services. Retired PA Superior Court Judge Cheryl Allen, said she was in constant contact with other like- minded friends and family. We pray together and encourage each other. Facetime has been an excellent way to connect with others as well.

Watching comedies on television has served as therapy. Dr. Lazorchak said; with some imaginative memes circulating on social media, Ive experienced some of the biggest belly laughs that I have had in years. Angela a small business owner in Florida, a girl after my own heart, said: she is consuming more wine than she has since child birth.

All of the women I spoke to have made it a point to avoid too much exposure to news programs and updates, preferring instead to tune in for President Trumps briefings. Limiting the amount of breaking news has helped them to maintain a calm and peace. The news business is more competitive than ever and their goal is to generate clicks. Doom and gloom generate clicks, and we don't need any more panic than we have in the world outside the news bubble. They don't care how it makes you feel, just how you react.

The media wants us to have less information. MSNBCs Joe Scarborough thinks the networks should cut away from Trumps coronavirus briefings. Margaret Sullivan with the Washington Post had a headline that read; The Media Must Stop Live-Broadcasting Trumps Dangerous, Destructive Coronavirus Briefings, and Rachel Maddow said she would stop putting those briefings on live TV. The Fake News doesnt want the American people to receive updates from their President. Is there anything else we need to know about these people? They dont want us to witness his decisive leadership. They would rather you watch their fear-mongering broadcasts instead. Women are rejecting that while embracing the Presidents transparency.

Impressively, the women noted in this story have shown courage in the face of this crisis. Their faith has afforded them the peace they feel is necessary to continue to care for themselves and their loved ones. If there was anything that challenged that peace it was a concern for their fellow Americans. What concerned Monica from Pennsylvania, most was the impression that not everyone was taking the directives about personal responsibility for prevention to heart.

Brittany, a young mother of two in Pennsylvania is worried that we are underestimating the potential economic destruction. She said she is worried less about the virus, than she is about the economy, the loss of jobs, and the disruption of small businesses. Women worry about political partisanship. They wonder; will these people ever get anything done? And when they finally do, how will it play out in my life?

When I asked the women if their support for President Trump has wavered at all through the crisis, Lawna said she completely trusts President Trump and his team to manage this crisis. She believes he will be reelected by a landslide. Barbara, CEO of large manufacturing firm in Texas believes that President Trump is working hard, and listening to the science behind the quarantine. Stopping the spread by limiting the air traffic from China in late January was brilliant. He is the best president in my lifetime she said. Jamie, President of a behavioral health agency in Ohio feels He really has risen to the occasion. His move to integrate the private sector with the government for expedited results...brilliant. Knowing he cares about America as he does, reduces my stress at a time like this.

Judge Cheryl Allen said her views regarding Trump have not changed. She sincerely believes he is doing the best that can humanly be done and he and his team need our prayers not our critique.

Who President Trump is matters to women. One of the reasons he had our vote in 2016  and will again in 2020 is that we see him as a protector of those things we hold dear. Not only do we women recognize that our values are under attack, we believe he is committed to defending those values while the Democrats are not. This could not be more evident than what we have witnessed recently with the Corona Virus Relief package. Nancy Pelosis Coronavirus stimulus includes liberal agenda items like ballot harvesting- which is nothing less than legalizing voter fraud, stricter emission standards for airlines; including a mandate to submit a carbon impact statement for each flight to be provided to passengers ( I guess to make them feel guilty) and bailing out the post office. Add to that 10's of millions for the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, $300,000,000 for public broadcasting and more subsides for wind and solar. Plus a laundry list of progressive wish list they could never get passed on a vote. Bottom line- Democrats are holding aid to the American people hostage unless or until they get their list of demands met. President Trumps transparency and decisiveness through this crisis has left us with the peace of mind that he is combatting this pandemic with true leadership and that the welfare of the American people is his primary concern.

We women are looking very closely at those who have been charged with the preservation of our nation and our people and taking note of those who have served us and those who have failed us. The actions by the Democrats will be remembered long after this virus has gone. The Democrats care more about their liberal agenda than they do about representing and safeguarding American lives. We will remember who interfered with much needed assistance for struggling companies and citizens. We wont forget who it was that thought that the Green New Deal was as important as aid. Or who spoke out against closing our boarders in the time of an invading pandemic. For Democrats it is always about politics, not about the American people.

Their view of government is not that of stewardship over what has been handed down to them. Their view of government is that it is a hammer; a tool of social, cultural and economic architecture. That's why it's always about power for them. Without the power of majority, they cannot wield the hammer of government. The more power they accumulate, the less liberty is left to us.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing and protecting a womans constitutional right to vote. As we head to the polls this year  be assured we women do so determined to wrestle that hammer out of their hands before they can do any more damage.

President Trump has long been considered the Promises Made President. For we women  he continues to be the promises kept president. And we like a man who keeps his promises.

Not surprisingly, women continue to be strident and strong. Courageous for the sake of those they love and confident in the God they worship. Like the woman in Proverbs  they are women who have prepared their households and can smile at the days to come.
(New York, NY - March 26, 2020) - In a series of four studies published today in Gastroenterology, a journal of the American Gastroenterological Association, Mount Sinai inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) researchers, describe the identification of predictive tools and a new understanding of environmental factors that trigger IBD.

"Early identification of individuals at high risk for disease development could allow for close monitoring and interventions to delay, attenuate, or even halt disease initiation. This is highly relevant as we seek to predict and prevent IBD, which continues to sharply increase in numbers across the globe," says Jean-Frederic Colombel, MD, Professor of Medicine (Gastroenterology) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Co-Director of Mount Sinai's Susan and Leonard Feinstein Inflammatory Bowel Disease Clinical Center. "In the absence of a cure, our clinical strategy will center on aggressive and innovative mechanisms to predict and prevent the disease," says Dr. Colombel.

The series of papers published in Gastroenterology provide four unique windows into IBD through the single lens of prevention. "As we approach nearly one hundred years since the discovery of Crohn's by Burrill Crohn at Mount Sinai Hospital in 1932, we see ourselves in a new era where our core scientific innovation will focus on prevention, as a cure continues to elude us. Therefore, our research focus and our team of researchers are aligned as the "Road to Prevention Group," says Dr. Colombel. Prevention of Progression of Early Crohn's Disease

In a study demonstrating the critical impact of deep remission in recently diagnosed Crohn's disease patients, researchers collected and analyzed long-term follow-up data of 122 Crohn's disease patients in the CALM (The Effect of Tight Control Management on CD) study, a large, 31-site study that evaluated the effect of tight control of early Crohn's. The researchers observed that achieving deep remission early on was significantly associated with an 81 percent decrease in the risk of adverse outcomes over a median of three years. "The data suggests strongly that achieving deep remission early in the course of Crohn's disease can lead to disease modification with a significant decrease in long-term complications. The implication is that we can play a big role in slowing the disease progression if we catch and treat Crohn's early, highlighting the relevance of prediction and prevention in treating Crohn's," says lead author Ryan Ungaro, MD, MS, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Gastroenterology) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a member of Mount Sinai's Feinstein IBD Clinical Center. Predicting Crohn's Disease Five Years Before First Symptoms

In a study of serum biomarkers of military personnel collected and stored by the U.S. Department of Defense, researchers derived a predictive model for Crohn's disease. In the PREDICTS study (Proteomic Evaluation and Discovery in an IBD Cohort of Tri-service subjects), researchers identified 51 protein biomarkers that were predictive of developing Crohn's disease within five years before diagnosis with a 76 percent accuracy. In total, the researchers evaluated 200 patients with Crohn's disease, 199 with ulcerative colitis, and 200 controls. "The study suggests that biological processes are activated many years before Crohn's, opening the possibility of developing targeted strategies that could work to prevent or delay disease onset. Although we recognize that a preventive strategy may still be many years down the road, studies analyzing samples taken years before diagnosis will likely contribute to a greater knowledge of disease pathogenesis and have the potential to help us improve treatments. When we combine this finding with the knowledge that early intervention can lead to better outcomes for our Crohn's patients, we have a truly relevant headline for a disease that has no cure," says lead author, Joana Torres, PhD, MD, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine (Gastroenterology) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In contrast to Crohn's disease, no single marker, alone or in combination, provided good predictive performance for ulcerative colitis. First Study to Evaluate Association of Metal Exposure and IBD

In a study of metal exposure in the baby teeth of patients who eventually developed IBD later in life, Mount Sinai researchers and colleagues in Portugal collected data from 28 adult Portuguese patients, taking advantage of the country's long tradition of parents storing their children's baby teeth. Baby teeth, like the growth rings in trees, retain information incrementally, storing evidence of environmental exposure from their initial development in the womb until they are shed. Investigators were able to retrieve the baby teeth of 12 IBD patients and 16 unaffected controls, allowing them to study for the first time the association between early-life metal exposures and future risk of IBD. "The data suggests that metal exposure during a critical window in early life may be a risk factor for IBD," says Manish Arora, PhD, Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Researchers investigated four metals--lead, copper, zinc, and chromium--and the developmental time periods during which exposure took place going back to the 25th week of pregnancy. Study of Ashkenazi Jewish Families Suggests Environmental Link

IBD has a long-established familial incidence, and the Ashkenazi Jewish population has an approximately four-fold increased prevalence of IBD. In a study of IBD within Ashkenazi Jewish multiplex families, researchers studied 38 large families with three or more first-degree family members with IBD. The researchers hypothesized that, in a purely genetically inherited disease, affected siblings would be randomly distributed within the family. The researchers found that affected siblings were significantly more likely to be sequentially affected, with siblings with IBD clustering together within families. "The clustering of affected siblings suggests there are factors beyond genetics that lead to the development of IBD in these multiplex families, likely attributable to a shared environment," says lead author Elizabeth Spencer, MD, Pediatric Advanced IBD Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "We are continuing to follow these families in an effort to pinpoint the precise factors. If we can identify these factors, we could alter them as a preventative measure for those at high risk of developing IBD."

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About the Mount Sinai Health System

The Mount Sinai Health System is New York City's largest academic medical system, encompassing eight hospitals, a leading medical school, and a vast network of ambulatory practices throughout the greater New York region. Mount Sinai is a national and international source of unrivaled education, translational research and discovery, and collaborative clinical leadership ensuring that we deliver the highest quality care--from prevention to treatment of the most serious and complex human diseases. The Health System includes more than 7,200 physicians and features a robust and continually expanding network of multispecialty services, including more than 400 ambulatory practice locations throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, and Long Island. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 14 on U.S. News & World Report's "Honor Roll" of the Top 20 Best Hospitals in the country and the Icahn School of Medicine as one of the Top 20 Best Medical Schools in country. Mount Sinai Health System hospitals are consistently ranked regionally by specialty by U.S. News & World Report.

For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
WESTPORT  Eighty-seven residents and one police officer have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to town and state officials.

Westport continues to lead the state in coronavirus cases, which rose to 87 as of Wednesday. Neighboring Weston has 10 cases.

As of 1 p.m. Wednesday, 13 out of the 63 members of the Westport Police Department had been tested for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. According to the news release, three officers were initially tested.

The three employees initially tested were all either exhibiting symptoms generally consistent with those of the virus and/or had direct contact with a known infected person, the news release said. The results received from this initial group indicated that one officer had tested positive for COVID-19.

According to town officials the officer is not a Westport resident.

An additional 11 tests were conducted based on direct contact with an exposed person from the initial group. None of the 11 individuals tested were exhibiting symptoms at the time of the testing, the news release said. Further results are expected by the weeks end.

The affected individual has since been self-isolating and will not return to work until all all guidelines for recovery set have been met, according to the release.
The U.S. ambassador to London has said China had endangered the world by suppressing information about the coronavirus outbreak thus allowing it to spread far beyond the Communist republic's borders.

"First it tried to suppress the news," Ambassador Woody Johnson wrote in an article for The Times newspaper published on Thursday, adding that Beijing had then selectively shared critical information while stonewalling international health authorities.

"Had China done the right things at the right time, more of its own population, and the rest of the world, might have been spared the most serious impact of this disease," the ambassador wrote.

"When the crisis finally abates we should take stock of the outcome and evaluate the costs of this breakdown in international collaboration," he said. (

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The military is mobilising to play a central role in holding patients exposed to the coronavirus, reports Ajai Shukla.

IMAGE: Indian Army personnel wears a protective mask at Guwahati railway station.

The army, navy and air force has already housed over 1,200 patients in temporary medical facilities at Manesar, Hindon, Jaisalmer and Jodhpur. Photograph: ANI Photo

On Wednesday, March 25, the first day of the 21-day countrywide lockdown that Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi announced on Tuesday to contain the coronavirus pandemic, a military facility in Jodhpur received 277 Indian evacuees flown in from Iran and placed them in quarantine for the next 14 days.

The military has already housed over 1,200 patients so far in temporary medical facilities at Manesar, Hindon, Jaisalmer and Jodhpur. These included evacuees from Wuhan and Japan, who were discharged after observing full quarantine protocol.

'Of the over 1,200 evacuees, medical staff and air crew kept in these facilities till now, only one case of positive covid-19 has been reported so for. This does not include another case reported from the Indian Air Force facility in Hindon,' stated the ministry of defence on Wednesday.

'In addition to the above, more army medical facilities at Jhansi, Binnaguri and Gaya are kept at standby with an additional collective capacity of 1,600,' said the MoD.

The military is mobilising to play a central role in holding patients exposed to the virus. Most countries seriously impacted by the virus, including China, Italy and the United States, have pressed their militaries into service.

In New York City, US army engineers are converting the city's main convention centre -- the Javits Center -- into a 1,000-bed hospital.

The patients quarantined in Jodhpur on Wednesday include 273 pilgrims to Iran, including 149 women and six children. They were transferred on Air India flights from Delhi to Jodhpur and then taken to the medical facility, 'which has been designed not just for isolation but also mental and physical wellness, which includes various activities including sports,' said the MoD.

Meanwhile, the Indian Navy has set up a quarantine camp at Vishakhapatnam, which is fully equipped to quarantine nearly 200 persons.

In addition, the navy has set up isolation facilities at its premier hospital, the Indian Navy Hospital Ship Asvini, at Mumbai.

The naval base at Kochi, which houses the southern naval command headquarters, is coordinating with Kerala health officials and Ernakulam district administration to use civilian hotels/resorts as quarantine facilities for Indian nationals, says the MoD.

The Ordnance Factory Board, which produces arms, ammunition and equipment for the military, has separately designated 285 beds as quarantine facilities.

These include 40 beds in Jabalpur, 30 beds each at Ishapore, Cossipore, Khadki, Kanpur, Khamaria and Ambajhari; 25 beds at Ambernath and 20 beds each at Avadi and Medak.

The OFB is utilising its facilities to try and manufacture personal protection equipment and face masks, in accordance with a pilot order placed by HLL Lifecare, a public sector unit under the ministry of health and family welfare.

While the army continues functioning normally on the borders, officers posted in headquarters -- who amount to 40 per cent of the overall cadre -- have been asked to function from home.
Trump secretly seeks Asian, European allies' medical help amid coronavirus spread

Iran Press TV

Wednesday, 25 March 2020 1:28 PM

US President Donald Trump has privately asked some of the US allies in Europe and Asia, including South Korea, to help the country overcome the shortages caused by coronavirus spread.

The South Korean government announced on Wednesday that it is considering the possibility whether the country has sufficient stockpiles of coronavirus test kits in a bid to send them to the US following Trump's phone call on Tuesday with his South Korean counterpart, Moon Jae-in.

The South Korean presidency, the Blue House, further added that the call was made at Trump's "urgent request."

This comes after Trump assured on Tuesday evening that his administration would not rely on foreign nations for help in fight against coronavirus.

"We should never be reliant on a foreign country for the means of our own survival," Trump said at a White House briefing. "America will never be a supplicant nation."

Meanwhile, Foreign Policy reported that he US State Department has asked all its top diplomats to press the governments in Europe and Eurasia to ramp up exports and production of medical equipment to the US.

"Depending on critical needs, the United States could seek to purchase many of these items in the hundreds of millions with purchases of higher end equipment such as ventilators in the hundreds of thousands," an email sent to embassies in Europe and Eurasia said.

The appeal comes at a time that the EU governments are themselves struggling to deal with one of the worst pandemics to spread around the globe since the 1918 treasury.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 720 people and infected some 50,000 in the United States, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

US health experts have sharply rebuked Trump's administration for initially downplaying the crisis and lagging behind in testing efforts.

The US Defense Department warned on Tuesday that the fast-spreading coronavirus outbreak in the country could continue for months.

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"It has previously unrecognised effects on the immune system which can actually boost it and enable it to protect against numerous different infections." Loading The vaccine activates our innate immunity, which in human evolution is our body's first defence against new bacteria or viruses and causes it to respond faster to fight off disease. "You might ask, why do we think this useful for COVID-19 disease?" Professor Curtis said. "Well, the reason for this is because a number of studies have already shown individuals who had this vaccine have much less viral respiratory tract infections than those who don't."

Other studies have shown that people who have had the BCG vaccination and subsequently contract a virus have less virus levels in their blood than those who haven't had the vaccine. A World Health Organisation-approved study starting next week will recruit 4000 medical workers in hospitals across Australia, half of whomwill be given BCG. The health outcomes of vaccinated medical workers will be compared with those of their colleagues who do not receive the vaccine. The workers will be monitored via an app set up by researchers to track them for six months. "We will monitor them for COVID-19 and more importantly, the severity of disease they suffer if they do become infected," Professor Curtis said.

During the deadly SARS coronavirus epidemic in 2003 about 20 per cent of those infected globally were healthcare workers. "Healthcare workers are at very high risk and there have already been numerous deaths of healthcare workers across the world," Professor Curtis said. "This has major implications because what we have seen in China, Italy and Spain is that large numbers of the workforce become unwell with COVID-19 or have to go into quarantine and that makes it even more difficult for hospitals to cope with the surge of patients." Professor Curtis said because BCG has been around for 100 years it is known to have very few side-effects or medical risks. The most significant is a small scar on the upper arm from where the vaccine enters the body.

The vaccine would not hinder the benefits of other anti-viral medications being trialled to combat COVID-19, he said. Looking for some good news? We could all do with some good news right about now. Thats why we have launched The Good News Group, a Facebook group where well share uplifting, inspiring and positive stories and invite members to do the same. Join the group here. Similar trials are also being undertaken among medics in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK. University of NSW senior medical virologist Professor Bill Rawlinson said it was important to note BCG was not an anti-viral medication, but rather a vaccine able to boost the immune system, and should be used alongside other preventive measures. "The idea is you boost general immunity to fight infection, so it's not specific for COVID-19," Professor Rawlinson said. "However, it's a really great idea to trial alongside things like new anti-viral medications and very important public health interventions that help prevent the spread."

Healthcare workers taking medications which may interfere with the vaccine or who have underlying medical conditions will be omitted from the BCG trial. Researchers at Melbourne's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research are also testing the use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, in a world-first trial aimed at protecting healthcare workers from contracting coronavirus when exposed to it. Sign up to our Coronavirus Update newsletter Get our Coronavirus Update newsletter for the day's crucial developments at a glance, the numbers you need to know and what our readers are saying. Sign up to The Sydney Morning Herald's newsletter here and The Age's here. People can have the BCG vaccine more than once in their life without risk. Doing so would boost the immune system further. As TB has been eradicated in Australia, the vaccine is not widely available here. But if researchers find it works to reduce the risk of COVID-19 they want to roll it out for use among vulnerable groups like the elderly.
Mumbai An NGO employee has alleged that her social media account has been hacked and that she faced a tough time registering a case. The accused also threatened her women friends, saying he would upload their objectionable photos.

The 24-year-old woman claimed that her account was hacked on Wednesday. The accused demanded money from her friends after impersonating as her. Later, he started to message her women friends, stating that their nude pictures and videos have been uploaded on an adult site.

I started to receive calls from my anxious friends. They were receiving messages from my account demanding money. The bank account which he had given was traced to Ghaziabad. I contacted the bank but they said that action can be taken after a police complaint, she said.

The woman registered her complaint with the governments cyber portal. However, she approached Chembur police station after the hacker started to threaten her friends and said he would upload their photos. He even provided his number to be contacted. He claimed that his brother is with cyber police, the woman said.

When I called the police station on Wednesday night, the policeman cited coronavirus outbreak and refused to file a complaint. My request to speak with a woman constable was also not met, the woman said.

On Thursday, she reached the police station but claimed that she received a lukewarm response from the police who initially refused to register a case. The woman tweeted her complaint tagging Mumbai police and National Commission of Women.

After their intervention and spending six hours at the police station, a first information report (FIR) was filed on Thursday.

It took me six hours to file an FIR of identity theft and sexual harassment, she said.

Shashikumar Mina, deputy commissioner of police, zone 6, he said he will look into it.

A complaint has been registered against unidentified person under Indian Penal Code section 509 and relevant sections of the Information Technology (IT) Act.

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[March 26, 2020] ZF 2019 financial results: New orders and high investments ready ZF to face a difficult market environment

FRIEDRICHSHAFEN, Germany, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- In a challenging environment, ZF Friedrichshafen AG has achieved its targets for the full year which were revised in summer 2019. At 36.5 billion, Group sales  adjusted for currency and M&A effects  were slightly below the previous year's figure of 36.9 billion (organically minus 1.9 percent). Adjusted EBIT amounted to 1.5 billion (2018: 2.1 billion) and adjusted EBIT margin was 4.1 percent (2018: 5.6 percent). At the end of December, ZF had 147,797 employees worldwide (2018: 148,969). As well its immediate priorities to deal with the consequences of the coronavirus, ZF is following its long-term goals of its "Next Generation Mobility" strategy to shape mobility needs of the future. "At present, we are witnessing how the markets are collapsing overnight," said ZF CEO Wolf-Henning Scheider on Thursday in Friedrichshafen. "At ZF, we have reacted quickly and decisively to the spread of the coronavirus and have prioritized the health and interests of our employees in line with those of the company in the best way possible. Our aim is to pursue our ZF way by securing employment and income wherever the appropriate tools are available. In doing so, we are acting in a socially responsible way and contributing to protecting the health of our employees. Furthermore, we can help to stabilize the economic situation which is volatile for all companies currently." Scheider emphasized that ZF stays confident even in this serious situation and is preparing to ramp up the plants in Europe and the U.S. after customers resume production. In Asia, production has already been resumed. "We will continue to stand by our customers and suppliers as a reliable business partner  and support them when they need us," said Scheider. 2019 key figures characterized by higher spending and market weaknesses

The ZF Group's sales in 2019 were below the previous year's figure at 36.5 billion (2018: 36.9 billion). Adjusted for currency and M&A effects, organic sales declined by 1.9 percent. "The general economic climate and special challenges connected to the overall transformation of our industry had a tangible impact on our business last year," explained Scheider. "Nevertheless, we won several high-volume orders, for example for the next generation of our hybrid-enabled 8-speed automatic transmission and for electric drives for cars and buses." Adjusted EBIT amounted to 1.5 billion (2018: 2.1 billion); the adjusted EBIT margin declined to 4.1 (2018: 5.6) percent. Earnings were affected by higher research and development (R&D) expenditure and setting up new sites for future technologies  such as production facilities for electric drives in Germany, Serbia and China. In addition, the economic downturn in the automotive industry is reflected in the result. Free cash flow adjusted for M&A amounted to 803 million (2018: 891 million). ZF has reacted consistently to the weaker markets, reviewed and postponed investments, and agreed closing days at several locations  purely through operational flexibility instruments. "We were able to adjust our cost structure to the changed market situation," said ZF CFO Dr. Konstantin Sauer. "This allowed ZF's results to remain within the forecasted range that was revised mid-2019. However, these figures do not meet our long-term strategic goals. We therefore continue working on our cost structure in order to achieve further improvements." The increased digitalization of business processes should also contribute to this. Investments in property, plant and equipment amounted to 1.9 billion (2018: 1.6 billion). At 5.2 percent, the investment ratio was significantly higher than in 2018 (4.3 percent). As CFO Sauer further explained, financing the planned acquisition of the commercial vehicle brake manufacturer Wabco was a success. To this end, ZF placed bonds and bonded loans totalling 4.8 billion on the capital market last October. "Many more investors wanted to subscribe than we offered for this financing," said Sauer. "This shows that the financial market sees and supports the potential of this acquisition." More money for research and development  new partnerships

Despite the challenging environment, ZF once again increased its R&D expenditure to 2.7 billion (2018: 2.5 billion). The R&D ratio rose from 6.7 to 7.3 percent. "When we overcome the current crisis, we want to continue to invest in future technologies in a focused manner," said ZF CEO Scheider. "This will enable us to further expand our competencies as a leading systems supplier." In addition to ZF's own resources, participations and partnerships play a decisive role in the company's R&D  especially in automated driving. These include, for example, the acquisition of a 60-percent majority stake in the Dutch company 2getthere, an established supplier of autonomous electric passenger transport systems, and the recently agreed cooperation with Microsoft to improve development processes and significantly ramp up ZF's software capabilities. "This is important for our customers who require flexible cooperation and short delivery times for software updates," explained Scheider. "In addition, we will be able to develop software even if the hardware is not yet available. ZF will also offer software solutions as individual products in the automotive market." Number of employees slightly below pre-year figure

At the end of 2019, ZF employed 147,797 staff worldwide (2018: 148,969). The 0.8 percent decline reflects the weaker economic climate  the original plan was to increase the workforce by several thousand employees. ZF adjusted its capacities in China (down 9.7 percent to 13,289 employees) and the U.S. (down 7.5 percent to 11,069 employees) due to market conditions. In Germany, the number of employees remained at the previous year's level of around 50,900. Additional jobs were created in the areas of electric mobility, autonomous driving, and software development. This means that there are now around 19,400 (2018: 17,100) employees worldwide working in research and development. Climate neutrality targeted by 2040

As a provider of future-oriented mobility solutions, ZF is committed to the Paris Agreement  both by offering clean and efficient technologies and by reducing the CO 2 footprint of its locations. To this end, the company developed a climate protection strategy last year, which is based on the so-called Corporate Carbon Footprint (CCF). In this strategy, ZF has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (especially CO 2 ) at its plants to a large extent. "Our goal is to be climate-neutral by 2040 in accordance with the specifications of the UN Climate Council," said Scheider. "To achieve this, we are expanding our existing energy efficiency programs and are focusing even more on green energy from our own sources." By producing sustainable energy with its wind power drives, ZF is also making a significant contribution to climate protection outside its plants. 2020 business outlook

The global economic situation has changed fundamentally since the spread of the coronavirus and the certification of the ZF annual financial statements. "When the world comes to a social and economic standstill, we face an unprecedented situation," emphasized Scheider. "Its effects are uncertain which is why we are currently not in the position to make a valid forecast for 2020. We will continue to do everything we can to protect our employees, stop the spread of the virus and ensure the stability of our company. With our 'Next Generation Mobility' strategy, we are well prepared for the long term to make the mobility of the future a reality." With new billion-euro orders for the hybrid-capable 8-speed automatic transmission and new business in the area of active safety technology (Integrated Braking System/IBC), the continued increase in demand for electric bus drives, and R&D orders for automated driving functions, ZF has solid, long-term perspectives. Key figures at a glance









2019 2018 ZF consolidated Group Sales 36.5 billion (bn) 36.9bn Global workforce 147,797 148,969 EBIT (adjusted) 1.5bn 2.1bn EBIT margin (adjusted) 4.1 % 5.6 % R&D expenditure 2.7bn 2.5bn Fixed asset investments 1.9bn 1.6bn Equity ratio 22.0 % 26.2 % Free cash flow (adj.) 803 million 891 million Sales Europe 16.7bn 17.4bn  thereof in Germany 7.1bn 7.4bn Sales North America 10.4bn 10.3bn  thereof in the U.S. 8.8bn 8.4bn Sales South America 1.1bn 1.0bn Sales Asia-Pacific 7.8bn 8.0bn  thereof in China 5.8bn 6.2bn Sales Africa 469 million 233 million

ZF Friedrichshafen AG

ZF is a global technology company and supplies systems for passenger cars, commercial vehicles and industrial technology, enabling the next generation of mobility. With its comprehensive technology portfolio, the company offers integrated solutions for established vehicle manufacturers, mobility providers and start-up companies in the fields of transportation and mobility. ZF continually enhances its systems in the areas of digital connectivity and automation in order to allow vehicles to see, think and act. In 2019, ZF achieved sales of 36.5 billion. The company has a global workforce of 148,000 with approximately 240 locations in 41 countries. ZF invested seven percent of its sales in research and development. For further press information and photos please visit: www.zf.com View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/zf-2019-financial-results-new-orders-and-high-investments-ready-zf-to-face-a-difficult-market-environment-301029765.html SOURCE ZF

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The Shaheen Bagh protesters have questioned the "disproportionate" action by the Delhi police in the forcible eviction and detention of a few women, who were carrying on with their agitation against the CAA-NPR-NRC.

"The ruthless dismantling and thoughtless destruction of the markers of our physical protest, especially the very structures whose placement is in question in a matter that is sub judice in the Supreme Court, reeks of strong vendetta and ill feelings towards our innocent protesters, locals and sympathisers," they alleged.

They also strongly objected to the "destruction of very important symbols of hope and resilience for 100-day resistance" .

In a letter to the Supreme Court, the protesters demanded "a fair probe into the involvement of all the unidentified, non-designated and non-police personnel" present

at Shaheen Bagh between 6 am and 10 am on March 24.

They contended that the disproportionate action in the time of Coronavirus was unnecessary. The huge police force and civilians, who accumulated to dismantle the tent, and remove the remaining protestors added to the crowd going against the mandatory protocol.

Maintaining that they understand the need for stricter imposition of curfew (lockdown) and enforcement of restrictions, they claimed that the police action has heightened the "distrust and the perception of being uncared for'' by the state institutions.

The protesters asked the court to grant them protection during the proceeding of the case.


Ralph Lauren is the latest big name in fashion to pitch in in the fight against coronavirus.

The 80-year-old designer announced on Thursday that the Ralph Lauren Corporate Foundation is committing $10 million to COVID-19 relief, donating money to charities including the Emergency Assistance Foundation and the World Health Organizations COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.

'Now more than ever, in this time of need, supporting each other has become our mission,' reads a message on the brand's website. 'As we face this challenge as a global community, our hope is to continue to be the beacon of optimism and unity that Ralph Lauren and our brands have always been to the world.'

Giving: Ralph Lauren announced on Thursday that the Ralph Lauren Corporate Foundation is committing $10 million to COVID-19 relief

The brand is also 'working to assess the need and technical requirements for medical-grade materials like masks and isolation gowns that guard against virus transmission'.

'The company seeks to support the efforts to produce this equipment with capacity, materials, and production,' the brand said.

W'e recognize that this is a multifaceted crisis that demands different responses for different needs in different places. By supporting our people and our communities, we are hopeful that together we can help make a difference.'

Ralph Lauren is just the latest in a long name of high-profile designers to offer help.

According to WWD, The Armani Group announced today thatits four Italian production sites are now all producing single-use medical overalls for health-care providers.

Armani also pledged to donate 1.25 million euros to Italys Civil Protection and Italian hospitals and institutions.

Charity: Armani also pledged to donate 1.25 million euros to Italys Civil Protection and Italian hospitals and institutions (Giorgio Armani pictured February 21)

Gucci, meanwhile, has pledged 2 million euros for the relief efforts, and Donatella Versace and daughter Allegra donated $222,000 to fight coronavirus in Italy.

'In times like this, it is important to be united and support however we can to help all those who are in the front lines, fighting every day to save hundreds of lives,' the 67-year-old designer wrote on Instagram.

'Our hearts go out to all those who have been affected by this disease and to all the doctors and medical staff who have been working heroically non-stop in the past weeks in the effort to take care of our loved ones.'

Prada CEOs Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli also announced that the brand has donated six Intensive Care Units to three hospitals in Milan.

Pitching in: Donatella Versace and daughter Allegra donated $222,000 to fight coronavirus in Italy

Helping hand: Prada CEOs Miuccia Prada (pictured) and Patrizio Bertelli also announced that the brand has donated six Intensive Care Units to three hospitals in Milan.

Several more brands have made pledges, too.

Everlane is donating 100 per cent of proceeds from their !00% Human Collection to Feeding America, and Aritzia is donating all profits to its Aritzia Community Relief Fund for employees and partners overseas.

Nike has promised one of the biggest heaps of cash, donating more than $15 million to support communities where Nike employees live and work.

And when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo asked for help getting protective gear to healthcare providers, designer Christian Siriano was one of the first to answer the call, tweeting that his team was on it.

They have already made nearly 1,000 medical masks for healthcare workers in New York.

Amazing: Designer Christian Siriano revealed on Good Morning America on Wednesday that he and his team have made nearly 1,000 masks in three days for New York healthcare workers

Keeping safe: Siriano, 34, said he and his team practice social distancing, and they all have their temperature taken every morning before work

Added bonus: Siriano noted that the white masks are 'washable' and 'bleachable'

The 34-year-old Project Runway winner opened up about his efforts during a video chat with Good Morning America on Wednesday, less than a week after he reached out to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to offer his services.

'We have made almost 1,000 in the last three days, which is amazing,' he said. 'We actually got approved by the governor to work so our studio is somewhat back up-and-running.

'We have a lot of precautions, and it's a lot of work. I mean, there are a lot of rules. You really have to regulate,' he added. 'I think that's why it's in such need, just because it wasn't being done here, and it's kind of wild that it wasn't.'

Siriano said he and his team practice social distancing, and they all have their temperature taken every morning before work. They are also dedicated to making sure their masks are as safe as possible.

'You can't just up and start making masks. You really have to make sure they're protected,' he said. 'If this is not going to meet any FDA or CDC regulations, then you can't send it to a hospital. Your friends can wear them, but I would want anyone in the medical field wearing it. You want to make sure it's protecting everyone.'

Consultation: Siriano said he had a healthcare provider at a New York hospital and an MTA worker try out the masks he had created

Dedicated: Siriano has been taking to Instagram to share photos and videos of his team hard at work while making masks

Fighting back: As of Wednesday, there have been over 30,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in New York and 285 deaths

When coming up with the design for the masks, Siriano had his best friend, who works at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and her husband, an MTA, employee, test them out.

Siriano has been taking to Instagram to share photos and videos of his team hard at work while making masks.

On Tuesday, he posted a black and white photo of his employees, writing: 'Powerful women right here! This is what Fashion is right now for us. Making hundreds of masks a day and thats what we can do to help. Thank you to my team for this and thank you to our friends who donated to help!'

The designer had reached out to Gov. Cuomo via Twitter last Friday, writing: 'If @NYGovCuomo says we need masks my team will help make some. I have a full sewing team still on staff working from home that can help.'

'Thank you. Please follow back and we will DM you,' Cuomo responded.

'I think the masks that we are making are actually an upgrade from what they even have. It's washable, bleachable,' he said. 'That was really important that you could rewear it. They wear it every day and are loving it. Even if we help 100 people, that's more people than nothing.'

*

Coming together: Alice + Olivia's Stacey Bendet and Los Angeles Apparel owner Don Charney both shared that their clothing companies will also be making medical masks and gowns

Then there's Alice + Olivia's Stacey Bendet, who told Page Six that her team will be making hospital gowns based on medical specifications for staffers at New York hospitals.

American Apparel founder Don Charney has shared that his company Los Angeles Apparel will also be making medical masks and gowns.

Meanwhile, Gap Inc. announced on Twitter on Tuesday that it will be joining the cause, writing: 'Our teams are connecting some of the largest hospital networks in Calif. w/ our vendors to deliver PPE supplies while we pivot resources so factory partners can make masks, gowns & scrubs for healthcare workers on the front lines.'

Designer Brandon Maxwell and his team are also busy making medical gowns for hospital workers to combat the reported supply shortages.

The 35-year-old Project Runway judge took to Twitter and Instagram on Friday to share that they are helping to fight the spread of the virus by producing much-needed medical supplies.

Big brand: Gap Inc. announced on Tuesday that it will be making medical supplies for healthcare workers

'In response to this global crisis, we are now focusing our creative efforts on manufacturing PPE (personal protective equipment), starting with gowns,' Maxwell wrote.

'We have spent the last week researching the appropriate medical textiles to create these gowns and are proud to provide these much-needed items to the doctors and nurses on the front lines of this crisis.'

The designer, who has collaborated with Lady Gaga, added that they will eventually be making masks and gloves.

'As more information becomes available on how to manufacture medical grade masks and gloves, we will transition in to doing so,' he explained. 'Any information you can share for donation locations or organizations would be greatly appreciated.'

Maxwell also shared that he plans on giving away three gowns to brides whose wedding plans have been impacted by financial hardship due to the coronavirus.

The sneaker brand Allbirds announced last week that it is donating shoes to anyone who works in healthcare in the U.S. and is on the front lines. The offer for the $95 Tuke Matcha Wool Runners is valid while supplies last.

Doing his part: Designer Brandon Maxwell 35, announced that he and his team will be making supplies for healthcare workers, starting with gowns

Another surprise: Maxwell also shared that he plans on giving away three gowns to brides whose wedding plans have been impacted by financial hardship due to the coronavirus

Actress Kristen Bell was happy to use her platform to promote the initiative on her Instagram Stories on Friday, writing: 'Thank u @allbirds.'

Fashion designers and brands around the world are chipping in as well.

The French conglomerate LVMH shared that it will use perfume production lines at three factories to manufacture large quantities of hydroalcoholic gel, or hand sanitizer, amid a 'lack of product in France.'

The Louis Vuitton owner started production last Monday in a bid to enable 'a greater number of people' to 'take the right action' during the global health pandemic.

Inditex, the owner of the fast-fashion fashion retailer Zara, revealed last week that it would be making masks to donate to the Spanish government.

The Spain-based company said that it would make its factories and its logistics teams available to help with the donations for healthcare workers and patients, with a company spokesperson saying that it will 'make a delivery at least once a week of materials we purchase directly'.

Generous: The sneaker brand Allbirds shared that it is donating shoes to anyone who works in healthcare in the U.S., and Kristen Bell promoted in the initiative on Instagram last week

'Inditex has already donated 10,000 protective face masks and by the end of this week expects to be in a position to ship another 300,000 surgical masks,' the statement continued.

And last Thursday, the British Fashion Council took to Instagram to ask designers with production capacity to 'help in the manufacture of essential products including masks.'

'In times of need, the fashion industry can be of service,' the nonprofit wrote.

Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour announced on Tuesday that the Council of Fashion Designers of America/Vogue Fashion Fund is being repurposed 'to provide support for those in the fashion community affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.'
NEW DELHI: The Centre on Thursday (March 26, 2020 ) announced a Rs 170,000 crore worth of financial package to protect the weaker sections of the society from the economic fallout of deadly coronavirus COVID-19, which has claimed the lives of over 21,000 people across the globe. Announcing the relief package, the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, ''A package is ready for the poor who need immediate help like migrant workers and urban and rural poor. No one will go hungry. The package is worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore.''

The Rs 1,70,000-crore scheme, dubbed the "Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan scheme" will "address the concerns of poor, migrant workers and those who need help", she said. The FM also announced Rs 50 lakh per person insurance cover for doctors, paramedic and healthcare workers dealing with coronavirus outbreak. The PM Garib Kalyan Yojana will benefit migrant workers and rural poor and the women. The FM said the scheme will work via direct cash transfer, as one set of measures, while another set will include food security-related measures.

"We do not want anyone to remain hungry, so we will be giving enough to take care of their food grain requirement, protein requirement in terms of pulses," the FM said as she announced the Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief. "On the other hand, they should also not remain without money in hand. So several measures through DBT are being taken so that money reaches them so that they can have money in their hands."

Here are the top announcements made by the FM:

Women Self Help Group

Self Help women groups (7 crore houses holds covered), collateral-free loans doubled to 20 Lakh, to increase money in hand.

DBT Cash transfers

1)Farmers,MGNREGA, Poor widows, Pensioners&divyangs covered

2) Jan Dhan Yojna accounts,Ujjwala scheme,Self help group women dealing with DDU livelihood missions,EPFO organised workers covered

3)Construction workers&district mineral workers covered

Ujjawala scheme near 8.3 crore BPL families covered in this, so that no running short of cooking medium, for 3 months free cylinders.

Women

20 crore Jan Dhan Women account holders covered- Ex gratia amount of Rs 500 per month for the next three months.

Old age and divyang

Old age, Divyang, pensioners: 3 crore people covered, one-time amount of additional Rs 1000 in two installments through DBT (hence no middlemen) over 3 months to be given.

MGNREGA

Wage increase in MGNREGA- 5 crore families benefited, an increase of Rs 2000 per worker on average as additional income.

Farmers

8.69 crore farmers to be immediately benefited through Direct cash transfers. Installment of Rs 2000 in the first week of April will be transferred.

Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Ann Yojna

Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Ann Yojna(for next 3 months):80 cr poor ppl covered(2/3rd of Indias population), in addition to already allotted 5Kg of rice/wheat per person,an additional 5kg will be free. Additional 1kg pulse (acc to regional preference) will be given.

Insurance

There will be Rs 50 lakh insurance per health care worker as a medical insurance cover for them for three months.

Poor/Migrant workers

A package is ready for the poor who need immediate help like migrant workers and urban and rural poor. The package is worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore.

Employees' Provident Fund (EPF)

Govt of India will pay the Employees' Provident Fund(EPF) contribution, both of employer and employee, put together it will be 24%, this will be for next 3 months.

This is for those establishments which have upto 100 employees and 90% of them earn less that 15,000.

Govt ready to amend the regulation of EPF due to this pandemic so that workers can draw upto 75% non-refundable advance from credit in PF account or 3 months salary, whichever is lower.

It will benefit 4.8 crore workers.

District Mineral Fund

District Mineral Fund: Central Govt to request State Govts to use this fund to augment medical testing and screening and providing health attention.

Construction workers

Welfare for building and construction workers, registered 3.5 crore workers to be benefited, Central Govt has given orders to State Govts to use Rs 31,000 crore fund to provide relief.
A Ridgewood Police Officer picking up hand sanitizer from John Herr, RPh., Pharmacist & Owner of Town & Country Compounding Pharmacy in Ridgewood, New Jersey. "We cannot make hand sanitizer fast enough. We also depend on suppliers for ingredients that are running low to supply everyone, but thought the first responders in Ridgewood needed our first batch, expressed John Herr, RPh., Town & Country pharmacist and owner.

With COVID-19 affecting communities in the country and worldwide, sanitation has become a priority. The world is reacting to the pandemic, where certain supplies are limited as demand skyrockets. Thats why Town & Country Compounding Pharmacy is joining a movement to donate hand sanitizer to first responders as a way of keeping them safe from becoming infected.

Town & Country has donated pharmaceutical-grade, alcohol-based sanitizers to first responders and are making these sanitizers while the pharmacy is closed to the public over the weekends, on their personal time. Even with the pharmacys busy schedule, theyre taking the time to make these sanitizers to help authorities and first responders. These sanitizers comply with the World Health Organizations (WHO) guidelines. Most recently, Town & Country donated sanitizers to The Ridgewood Police Department.

The high demand for medication during this health crisis, is urging pharmacies to keep up during the current health crisis. John Herr, RPh., Town & Country pharmacist and owner states, our supply chain has been affected and our workload has increased while having staffing shortages. Our commitment to service remains high and we ask for continued understanding from our patients while we try to process prescriptions as fast as we can. Unfortunately, shipping and delivery time may sometimes be delayed due to other services also being affected by the pandemic.

Town & Country hopes the hand sanitizers provided to first responders will help relieve the stress of the current shortage. We realize the risk that everyone on the front line faces and we wanted to support our local community. We cannot make hand sanitizer fast enough. We also depend on suppliers for ingredients that are running low to supply everyone, but thought the first responders in Ridgewood needed our first batch, expressed Herr. As they are sacrificing exposure through their duties, first responders must take every precaution to protect themselves. Washing hands and utilizing hand sanitizer can help to flatten the curve of COVID-19.

Town & Countrys priority in these trying times is to help prevent the spread and treat COVID-19, while still serving the pre-existing health needs of our community. As the nation takes on this pandemic day-by-day, Town & Country will also try to make hand sanitizer available for current customers to purchase when they pick up their prescriptions or supplements, depending on availability of time and supplies.

About Town & Country Compounding:

Town & Country Compounding works with providers and specialists to formulate the most customized medication regimens to fit specific needs. Vitamins and supplements for boosting the immune system are also available for purchase to stay healthy. Shipping to 12 states and Washington D.C. Visit TCCompound.com for more information. If you are in need of medications, supplements, or prescriber referrals please call (201) 447-2020.
A five-star Sydney hotel is now in lockdown after being turned into a 'human health response zone' where border force officials can keep watch on Australians returning home amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The Swissotel Sydney in Market Street, in the city's CBD, is now under police guard after overseas passengers began filing through its doors about 4am on Thursday.

A total of 288 travellers from the Norwegian Jewel cruise liner are believed to be isolating in the hotel, having arrived in Sydney from Hawaii by plane this morning after being stuck overseas when the pandemic shut border across the globe.

A further five are in hospital, after failing an airport COVID-19 health check. It is not yet known if they have tested positive for coronaviurs.

Those passengers allowed to leave the airport were driven to the hotel by Australian Border Force (ABF) officials - desperate to avoid another Ruby Princess disaster.

Police and security guards are manning the doors to the hotel to ensure no isolated travellers are able to leave.

But permanent residents of the building are furious by the move, telling Daily Mail Australia they had no idea quarantined passengers would be housed there until they saw it in the news on Thursday.

The Swissotel in Sydney's CBD is now under police guard after being turned into a 'human health isolation zone' for passengers returning from overseas

Border Force officials began ferrying travellers through the hotel's doors about 4am on Thursday morning

John Murphy, who owns an apartment in the Swissotel building said it was 'just ridiculous' the hotel was being used as quarantine

John Murphy, who owns an apartment in the high-rise building, left work early so he could find out what the situation was.

The 66-year-old is in the high-risk category of those affected by COVID-19 and said it was concerning that he was about to get in the same elevators used by passengers.

'It's just ridiculous, I can't believe it - I had no idea it was happening at all,' he said.

'We are going to be using the same lifts as these people... this would have to be one of the least suitable hotels in the city, there are 10 floors of permanent residences.

'I own an apartment up there and I didn't know anything about it until this morning.

'I've been told nothing about what measures are going to be taken to keep us apart so I have come home from work early to find out what the hell is going on.

'I'm not particularly concerned about myself, but I have friends who live above me who I am worried about.'

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) confirmed there were 293 people on the Thursday morning Qantas charter flight, and that all had undergone health screenings - with five taken to hospital.

Some travellers from the Norwegian Jewel cruise liner (pictured) are isolating in the hotel, after arriving in Sydney from Hawaii by plane this morning

The hotel (pictured) on Sydney's Market Street was being guarded by police on Thursday morning

A message on the hotel's doors on Thursday morning (pictured) said people could only get access by making a request to the concierge or using a secure access card

As of Thursday afternoon, 12 people have died from coronavirus as the number of cases nationwide surged to 2,675

Sydney's south east has the most confirmed cases of COVID-19, with between 161-320 people, while northern Sydney has between 81 and 160 confirmed cases

Garry Kirstenfeldt (pictured left), a passenger on board the Voyager of the Seas, died from coronavirus on Wednesday afternoon

'This [flight] was met on arrival by biosecurity officers to undertake assessments of all reported ill travellers prior to disembarkation,' the department spokesman said.

'Passengers who passed health screening will spend 14 days under quarantine in a dedicated hotel.

'Five passengers who did not pass health screening have been escorted to hospital for COVID-19 testing.'

The move to keep a close eye on returning overseas cruise ship passengers comes in the wake of the Ruby Princess debacle, which is believed to be a major factor in the rapidly rising total number of coronavirus cases.

Australia currently has just shy of 2,700 confirmed COVID-19 patients, while the death of two Victorian men overnight increased the number of fatalities to 11.

Later on Thursday, Victorian officials announced another person died, taking the state total to three and the national total to 12.

There were 190 new cases identified yesterday in New South Wales alone, taking the state's tally to 1,219.

Queensland man Garry Kirstenfeldt, 68, died on Wednesday afternoon after catching the virus on board a cruise ship that docked in Sydney last week.

Queensland Health said Mr Kirstenfeldt had a 'serious underlying medical condition before contracting the virus.'
" " Emojis have become ubiquitous parts of our lives, but do we need one for every thought and emotion? These are batteries designed as emojis displayed at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. David Becker/Getty Images

Oh poop. If you're like me and you think the cry laughing face, the big thumbs up and other ideograms should be used sparingly and in jest, you may have missed the news. A push to add a sad face poop emoji to the online lexicon wound up never getting off the pot.

The "frowning pile of poo" is going the way of the "man screaming at a spider" emoji, at least for the near future. That's because the people who decide which emojis make the cut concluded that adding a sad face option to the excrement image could be like opening Pandora's box. There's simply no way of predicting the wide variety of options that also would have to be added to the poop emoji to cover its vast, complicated range of emotions.

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If you're wondering where the ideas for new emojis might come from, the answer is that they can come from anywhere. Anyone can submit a proposal for a new emoji, but there are strict standards and certain protocols that must be followed in order for a proposed emoji to have a chance at acceptance.

So who decides which emojis make it to the keyboard? The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization that sets international standards for software products across operating systems. That includes maintaining an official list of approved emojis to ensure that they show up on all kinds of smartphones, tablets, laptops and other devices.

But if you think the Apples, Googles and Microsofts of the world have simply handed over the keys to the emoji universe, think again. All three of those tech giants are full Uniform Consortium members, along with Facebook, Adobe, Oracle and IBM. That means they get to vote on the various standards the organization sets.

So blame them if you're missing the sad poop.

Now That's Interesting The term "emoji" was coined as a combination of the Japanese words "e" for "picture" and "moji" for "character."
Canadian and American flags are seen at the U.S.Canada border in Pittsburg, N.H., on March 1, 2017. (Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)

Trudeau Appoints First Female Ambassador to the US

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is promoting a veteran of the internationaltrade trenches to be Canadas first permanent female envoy to the United Statesjust as a raging international pandemic tests the continents cross-border resolve.

Kirsten Hillman, who is currently the acting ambassador in Washington, is taking over the corner office of Canadas embassy on Pennsylvania Ave. on a fulltime basis, Trudeau announced in the morning of March 26.

Hillman is no stranger to difficult negotiations with the countrys largest trading partner, having played a central role in the 13-month effort in 2018 to negotiate a replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Most recently, she worked closely with partners around the world in the talks to ensure the Canada-U.S. border remained open to two-way trade and commerce despite the global outbreak of COVID-19, Trudeau says in a statement obtained by The Canadian Press.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a news conference at Rideau cottage in Ottawa, Canada, on March 13, 2020. (The Canadian Press/Fred Chartrand)

When we worked together to negotiate the new NAFTA, I saw Ms. Hillmans ability to stand up for Canadians and fight for their interests, Trudeau says in the statement.

She combines exceptional knowledge and skills, and is a gifted diplomat. Ms. Hillman will remain a trusted adviser, friend, and counsellor in Washington and is our point person with Congress and the U.S. administration. I know that Canadians will be well represented by her.

Hillman, who was deputy ambassador from 2017 to 2019, has been acting ambassador since her predecessor David MacNaughton resigned last summer.

A lawyer and an experienced hand on the international trade file, Hillman has been an assistant deputy minister with Global Affairs Canada and was Canadas chief negotiator in trade talks with the European Union and the effort to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Kirsten Hillman has beenI think it would be fair to even call her a friend, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who as foreign affairs minister appointed her as deputy ambassador back in 2017, told a news conference last month in Washington.

Canada is lucky to have such a talented woman working in our public service, and it has been a real pleasure for me to work directly with her today, and its a pleasure for me as deputy prime minister working on the Canada-U.S. relationship to work very closely with Kirsten every day.
The Australian man who opened fire inside two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, has pleaded guilty to 51 charges of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of engaging in a terrorist act.

Details: Brenton Tarrant entered his changed plea via video link from Auckland Prison Thursday morning local time. New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said in a statement sentencing would not take place until all victims who wish to attend the hearing can do so. "Due to the COVID-19 epidemic that will not be possible for some time," he noted.

Why it matters: The March 15, 2019 attacks resulted in the deaths of 51 people and led to sweeping reforms of New Zealand's gun laws, including a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles and the introduction of a buyback scheme that resulted in more than 10,000 firearms being handed in.

Facebook changed its policy on live-streaming video violations in response to the mosque shootings being broadcast on the social media site.

Countries around the world have signed on to the Christchurch Call, an effort to reduce violent extremist content online that was launched by governments and tech companies. (The U.S. government has not signed on to measure, citing First Amendment concerns.)

The big picture: The gunman originally pleaded not guilty last June. Justice Cameron Mander said in a statement the court received indication that from the defense counsel of the plea change earlier this week.

Of note: New Zealand has reported 205 cases of the novel coronavirus and was placed under alert level 4 measures just before midnight Wednesday local time, which essentially place the country on lockdown.

Mander said the 17 people who were allowed in court to hear the guilty plea, including the imams of the Linwood and Al Noor mosques, where the attacks took place, observed the physical distancing requirements of the alert level.

What's next: The defendant has been further remanded in custody until May 1, "at which time the position will be reviewed and either a sentencing date will be set or there will be a further remand in custody," Bush said.

Go deeper: Christchurch mosque attacks: Suspect charged with terrorism

Editor's note: This article has been updated with new details throughout.
GOTHENBURG, Sweden, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Annual General Meeting of Aktiebolaget SKF, parent company of the SKF Group, was held in Gothenburg on Thursday, 26 March 2020.

The income statements and the balance sheets were adopted, together with the Board's proposal for distribution of dividend. A dividend of SEK 3 per share was approved. To be entitled to receive the dividend, shareholders must be recorded in the share register on 30 March 2020.

The Meeting resolved that the Board's fee for 2020 is to be in accordance with the following:

a. a firm allotment of SEK 7,257,000 to be distributed with SEK 2,133,000 to the Chairman of the Board, and with SEK 732,000 to each of the other Board members; and

b. an allotment for committee work of SEK 973,000 to be distributed with SEK 248,000 to the Chairman of the Audit Committee, with SEK 176,000 to each of the other members of the Audit Committee, with SEK 145,000 to the Chairman of the Remuneration Committee and with SEK 114,000 to each of the other members of the Remuneration Committee.

A prerequisite for obtaining an allotment is that the Board member is elected by the General Meeting and is not employed by the company.

The following Board members were re-elected: Mr. Hans Straberg, Mr. Hock Goh, Mr. Alrik Danielson, Mr. Ronnie Leten, Ms. Barb Samardzich, Ms. Colleen Repplier and Mr. Geert Follens. The following Board members were newly elected: Mr. Hakan Buskhe and Ms. Susanna Schneeberger.

Mr. Hans Straberg was elected Chairman of the Board.

The Meeting approved the Board's proposal regarding principles of remuneration for Group Management and the Board's proposal for a resolution on SKF's Performance Share Programme 2020.

The Meeting approved the proposal presented regarding the Nomination Committee.

Aktiebolaget SKF

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For further information, please contact:

PRESS: Theo Kjellberg, Director, Press Relations

tel: +46-31-337-6576, mobile: +46-725-776576, e-mail: [email protected]

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Patrik Stenberg, +46-31-337-2104; 46-705-472-104; [email protected]

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ISTANBUL  Turkey may introduce a full lockdown to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus if current measures to encourage social distancing fail to slow the outbreak that has claimed at least 59 lives, the interior minister said, while the mayor of Istanbul urged the government to declare a curfew in the countrys biggest city.

Fifteen more people died on Wednesday from COVID-19 and 2,433 have been infected in Turkey, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said late on Wednesday. Comparative data shows Turkeys infection rate is among the fastest in the world.

Turkey has already shut some 200,000 businesses, closed schools through the end of April and may free up to a third of the prison population to counter the spread of the virus. Unlike much of Europe, authorities have stopped short of a total shutdown in what the governments critics say is an effort to protect a shaky economy.

Full social isolation is always on our agenda. We can step up restrictions if we arent able to counter this with the current measures, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu told a television station when asked if a curfew was under consideration. If we cannot get ahead of this epidemic with these measures, of course we will take the maximum measure.

Already 80% of life in Turkey has stopped, Soylu said. Restrictions are aimed at keeping the health care system afloat, maintaining public order, ensuring social distancing and safeguarding supply chains, he said.

Nearly a half-million people around the world are confirmed to have contracted SARS-CoV-2 and more than 22,000 people have died since the new virus emerged in China at the end of last year. The pandemic has thrown the global economy into a tailspin and sent governments scrambling to save businesses while protecting lives.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey would emerge from the outbreak shortly if it maintains physical distancing. With good isolation, we will definitely slow the rate of the spread within two to three weeks and emerge from this period in the shortest possible time with the least amount of damage, he said in a prerecorded national address late on Wednesday. But he also warned harsh measures would become unavoidable if current infection-control rules arent observed.

Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, Erdogans outspoken rival, said the city of 16 million people already needs drastic protections. Even if its not for Turkey in general, the government should work on a gradual, controlled curfew for at least Istanbul, Imamoglu said on Twitter. It is of the utmost importance that radical decisions be taken today to protect societys health, the health of our health care workers and for societys morale and psychology.

Unfortunately, this cannot be realized with rhetoric. Of course we will pray but you cannot prepare this city and this nation for whats to come by just praying, Imamoglu said, in an apparent reference to the state-run Directorate of Religious Affairs' support for prayers against the coronavirus every evening from the countrys 85,000 mosques.

Other opposition politicians said the government was falling short in testing, which has been conducted on some 33,000 people to date. Germany, which also has a population of 80 million people, is checking about 120,000 people each week. High levels of testing allow policy-makers to face the scale of the outbreak, develop responses to slow it and ensure those infected are isolated.

We need to immediately reach the goal of 20,000 tests daily.  Without sufficient testing, we absolutely cannot understand the true situation, said Saruhan Oluc, deputy chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, who shared his remarks via email.

Koca has said Turkey set a target of 15,000 tests a day. It has developed its own diagnostic tool and sold the United States a half-million test kits. The health minister said it then ordered a million more of a different type from China.

Oluc said the government's lack of transparency is affecting how seriously people are taking the public health emergency. Officials have not released data on where in Turkey cases have been detected, data on patients age or gender nor where diagnostic kits have been distributed. In his address, Erdogan said Turkey had a total of 8,554 cases, including patients who had recovered, but a few hours later the health minister said the total number was less than a third of that number.

Authorities are cracking down on social media users who make provocative posts, identifying 2,551 problematic accounts and taking action against 449, Soylu said, without elaborating. He said two groups the government lists as terrorist organizations were behind 70% of the accounts.

Turkey is restricting exports of ventilators and other equipment used in intensive care units to cover its own needs, Trade Minister Ruhsar Pekcan said on Twitter. Companies require special permission from the government to sell the equipment overseas, she said.

Imamoglu also delivered a nod to perceptions the government is avoiding a lockdown to keep the economy ticking. When the matter is human life and societys psychological [well-being], economic expectations should wait in line.

In central Istanbul, work on large construction projects continued unabated, with scores of builders leaving their homes, using public transportation and working in close proximity.

On Thursday, in fact, the government held the first tender for its long-planned megaproject to build an artificial waterway from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara that would make half of the city into an island.

Imamoglu, who opposes the $12 billion project because of its economic and environmental impacts, called opening a tender when the country is battling an epidemic mind-boggling."

There are millions of people in Istanbul and Turkey who are on the brink of losing their jobs or who have no income because their workplaces have closed. Why are we spending resources on a weird project like Canal Istanbul and not on the people? he said.
China sends third group of medical experts to Italy

Global Times

Source:Xinhua Published: 2020/3/25 17:12:19

A team of 14 medical experts from east China's Fujian Province departed on a chartered flight to Italy on Wednesday morning to aid the European country's fight against the COVID-19 outbreak.

The team consists of experts from several hospitals and the center for disease control and prevention (CDC) of Fujian, as well as an epidemiologist from the national CDC and a pulmonologist of Anhui Province.

The experts specialize in areas including respiratory, intensive care, infectious disease, hospital infection control, traditional Chinese medicine and nursing.

Their missions will include sharing experience in COVID-19 prevention and control with local hospitals and experts and providing treatment advice.

They will also provide disease prevention and control know-how to Chinese communities and students in Italy, and offer them protective supplies and traditional Chinese medicines.

The experts will mainly work in the Tuscany region of Italy.

The flight took off at about 11:10 a.m. from Fuzhou Changle International Airport and is scheduled to arrive in Milan at 4:45 p.m. local time.

Also on board the plane were about eight tonnes of medical supplies donated by the province, including 30 ventilators, 20 sets of medical monitors, 3,000 protective suits, 300,000 medical masks, 20,000 N95 masks and 3,000 face shields.

Previously, China sent two medical groups with a total of 22 people along with more than 20 tonnes of medical supplies to support Italy's epidemic fight.

COVID-19 had claimed 6,820 lives as of Tuesday evening in Italy, which has lost more lives than any other country to the pandemic. The cumulative number of the novel coronavirus cases in Italy reached 69,176, the largest number outside China.

Huang Yu, a provincial health official and leader of the team, said China has acquired extensive experience in its fight against the disease, and they are ready to share it with their Italian colleagues.

"We are honored to be given the task assigned by our country, and we will do our best to help the Italian people tide over the difficulties," Huang said.

Xu Nengluan, director of the infectious diseases department of Fujian Provincial Hospital, has been treating COVID-19 patients for over two months.

"For our medics, saving lives knows no borders," Xu said, commenting on his new task in Italy.

The Chinese government has announced assistance to 82 countries, the World Health Organization and the African Union, including test kits, masks and protective suits. Many batches of supplies have reached the recipients, China's foreign ministry said last Friday.

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Nippon Paint Marines A-LF Sea chosen by leading LNG carrier operator

Piraeus-based gas carrier vessel operator Gaslog Ltd has opted to apply Nippon Paint Marines A-LF Sea hull coating as part of its current drydocking programme.

The shipowner strives to limit the impact of its operations on the marine environment and pursue optimal operational efficiency across its fleet. With this in mind, anything proven to reduce fuel consumption has a direct impact on environmental and operational costs. A-LF Sea minimises significantly biofouling and hull resistance and, consequently, results in reduced fuel consumption and engine emissions. Gaslog operates a fleet of 27 modern liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier ships of between 145,000m3 and 180,000m3 capacity, and has a further seven ships on order, two 174,000m3 and five 180,000m3 capacity vessels. At Gaslog we are constantly seeking ways to reduce our environmental impact through innovative products and processes that span our entire operating cycle. Antifouling paints is no exemption and so we had our first trial with A-LF-Sea back in 2013 when it was applied on one of our TFDE ships. The excellent results of this trial gave us the confidence to expand the application of A-LF-Sea to our vessels being drydocked in 2020-2021, said Kostas Karathanos, Gaslogs Innovation and Technology manager. He added: Our experience so far indicates that A-LF-SEA is outperforming competition as the rate of power increase is notably less. Nippon Paint Marine Europe General Manager Theodosis Dimopoulos said: Nippon Paint is proud to have been chosen as a supplier to Gaslog Ltd, one of the worlds leading gas carrier operators. This demonstrates Nippons capabilities in coatings technology, technical service and logistics. A-LF Sea is simple to apply, using standard application techniques, can be applied over existing coatings or as a newbuild application. With a fresh layer of A-LF Sea applied at each drydocking, the fouling resistance and water trapping function can be maintained throughout the vessels service life. Dimopoulos continued: Reduction of CO 2 emissions is a global concern. We, as a paint manufacturer, can contribute to a shipowners carbon footprint reduction programmes by reducing drag on the underwater hull surfaces. Following the sulphur cap regulations that kicked in on 1st January 2020, ships that are not fitted with exhaust gas cleaning systems have been forced to use very low sulphur fuels, which carry a high cost premium. A-LF Sea can help those owners, by cutting the amount of high-cost bunker fuels required. As the worlds most advanced ultra-low friction coating system, A-LF Sea employs a patented copper silyl acrylate copolymer technology with a high volume of solids to provide excellent antifouling performance over long periods. The coating is stable in self-polishing and is effective in whatever marine environment the ship sails. A-LF Sea has become the hull coating of choice among a large number of high-end shipping companies including containership operators, car carrier companies and cruise lines. The coating has been successfully applied to almost 3,000 ships worldwide. In December 2019, Nippon Paint Marine Coatings received the 2019 Japans Environment Ministers Award for Global Warming Prevention Activities in the Countermeasure Technology Advanced Introduction Category for its work on reduction of fuel consumption and CO 2 emissions through the use of low-friction bottom paint. A-LF Sea was developed under a project undertaken by Nippon Paint with the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) in conjunction with classification society ClassNK and Mitsui O.S.K. Lines (MOL). It complies with IMO-AFS2001 as a tin-free anti-fouling system and is certified by the major classification societies.




Tzi Ma and Christine Ko in Tigertail. Photo: Sarah Shatz

Alan Yangs first feature film, Tigertail, which comes out on Netflix April 10, began as a file saved as FAMILY MOVIE on his computer, dated August 14, 2016. But when he read the story again later, he shelved it. I just said, This isnt it, man. This is a B. Its because I dont have a personal enough connection to it, remembers Yang. So he started writing again. A lot. He wanted to tell a sprawling, multigenerational Asian-American tale, and ended up writing a 250-page script with multiple points of view that he eventually whittled down into one central character, Pin-Jui, played by Tzi Ma in the present and Hong-Chi Lee in the past. The young Pin-Jui lives and romances in Taiwan, before eventually moving to New York City. It is what Yang calls his fever dream of how he imagines his own fathers immigration story. The movie is kind of my dream of my fathers dream of his past, says Yang. Its emphatically not his story in some ways.

As part of an exclusive release of the trailer and poster art for Tigertail, Yang spoke with us on the phone about how the film changed his relationship with his father, gave us a snapshot of his quarantine life, and discussed why John Cho didnt make the final edit of the film.

How have you been spending the time during the pandemic?

Theres been basically more cooking and cleaning happening in my apartment than has ever happened in the whole time Ive lived in my place here. Grocery shopping. Weve been cooking some decent stuff. Im not a very good cook, but Im learning. I do feel relatively healthy-ish because maybe Im not eating so many restaurant meals. You know I love going out to eat. Its obviously a shame whats happened to all the restaurants and the whole industry.

Are you practicing social distancing right now in Los Angeles?

Yeah, 100 percent. Its basically only leaving to go to the grocery store or go on a walk. Actually, I take that back. My dad lives in Pasadena. To me, thats the person Im most worried about. Hes obviously a little older and has a preexisting condition. Yesterday my girlfriend and I went and gave him some hand sanitizer and gloves. We went and dropped it off outside his house and then spoke to him briefly from like 20 feet away. Its so crazy thats what you have to do now.

Did your relationship with your father change during the course of writing and making this film?

Yeah, it really did. My relationship not only with him but with my entire family; and my own understanding of what it meant to be Taiwanese and what it meant to be Asian all changed over the course of the last five years. Where I grew up, being an Asian person was something that was almost seen as an impediment when I was a kid. It was an impediment to fitting in. It was an impediment to seeming normal. It just sets you apart. When youre a little kid, being set apart is not necessarily the thing you want. Its not necessarily a strength. But when you get older, and especially when youre lucky enough like I have been to be able to start creating your own movies and shows, the stuff that sets you apart is the stuff thats gold. That makes you unique. Being Asian-American is certainly a part of who I was, whether I wanted to come to terms with that or not.

A very simple example of that is, I hadnt gone back to Taiwan since I was 7 years old. Its the place my parents grew up. My sister had gone back many times; in fact, she lived there for a summer. She took Mandarin in college and could speak it, whereas I couldnt at all. I just had no interest. I wanted to prove that I could write all kinds of stuff and be a comedy writer, basically that I could make it in a mainstream way.

What changed?

One of the most seminal moments in the conception of the movie was when I took a trip to Taiwan with my dad. I happened to be in China at the time working on something else. This must have been about four years ago. He showed me around. That was the first time Id been back since I was a kid. I heard him speak Taiwanese to cab drivers. We took the high-speed train down to the middle of the country, to a really rural part of the country, and he showed me where my grandma was laid to rest, which is in the movie. He showed me the factory that he used to work in with my grandmother, at the same factory we shot in the movie. I just didnt have any idea about his life. Also, not to spoil too much of the movie, but it was an inspiration not only for the beginning of the movie but for the end of the movie, where two of the characters take a trip around Taiwan and ride the high-speed train and all that stuff. It was very evocative of my own trip there.

What was it like working with your father on the film? My understanding is that he does the voice-over that bookends the film.

Yeah, it was an idea I had partway through postproduction, where I wanted that voice to be almost haunting in the sense of how matter-of-fact it was. I just had a hunch, so I got my dad in and asked if he would be willing to do the voice-over for a couple hours just to see. I told my editor, I was like, Lets just see what happens. This could be a disaster. It might not work at all. But I knew my dad has a deeper sort of timbre. He has a gravitas to his voice. He also had a Taiwanese accent. He was born in Taiwan; he has the real-deal accent. He really did a good job. I had him do a bunch of different takes, but he came in pretty close to what I wanted almost immediately.

Photo: Netflix

It was really meaningful for me, obviously. I think its very effective, but it was a meaningful moment for both of us. I thanked him. Afterward, we were texting at some point. I was like, Oh, thank you so much. You didnt have to come in and do that. Hes like, Oh, no, no. Im retired. That was the best moment of my year. I got to go into a recording booth and read these lines. My son is the director, and hes directing me how to read stuff. I couldnt be more proud.

My understanding was that John Cho was supposed to be in the film. What happened?

He definitely shot some stuff with us. It was great. He delivered an amazing performance in the movie. As happens sometimes in the course of editing, the movie tells you what it wants to be. It killed me to do it, but his character was in some of the modern-day scenes, and we didnt end up using those scenes. I called John basically as soon as I was thinking about making that decision. He was in Australia filming Cowboy Bebop. We had a fairly long, meaningful conversation. He was so supportive and understanding. Ill always remember that conversation.

He told me that he had a great time working on the movie. In fact, he was doing scenes in this movie that were scenes unlike he had done before in his career. I know how long hes worked and how much hes meant to the Asian-American community, so that meant a lot to me. Hes an executive producer in the movie. The movie would not have been the same without his energy and force behind it, so Im incredibly grateful to everything John gave to the movie.

I guess thats what killing your darlings means.

Yeah. Its like I said, it happened in the writing process as well. Sometimes it happens in the editing booth, but its really figuring out and drilling down on what the heart of the movie is. It really is like, Okay, well, how do I make sure every scene in the movie is pulling toward the ultimate goal? That is where some of the most difficult choices have to be made.

Did you have a pretty good grasp of your fathers immigration story, and does the movie hew closely to it?

Its actually kind of a strange answer. I did not have a very clear picture. I did ask him some questions, but I didnt really want it to be word for word. I almost wanted just enough information to come up with something fictionalized but not so much that it ruled out ideas that I had, because the way Ive been describing the movie is kind of my dream of my fathers dream of his past. Its emphatically not his story in some ways.

Its idealized, right? If you look at the way we shot Taiwan and the way we dressed the characters, and how full of passion and charisma Hong-Chi is in the movie, and how charming Yo-Hsing Fang is, that is all my fever dream of my dads stories melded with some Wong Kar-wai and some Hou Hsiao-Hsien, so its not exactly what happened to him. Obviously, a lot of that is also metaphor. Ill be totally honest, I dont have a word-for-word history of either my dads or my moms experience. Im sure if I were to tell it to you right now, it would be wildly different from their own versions.
A Korean living in Australia votes at the Consulate General of Korea in Sydney for the general election in 2016. / Korea Times file



By Kang Seung-woo



Voting of overseas Koreans for the upcoming general election is facing major setbacks as the nation's election watchdog has decided to suspend polling activities in 17 countries hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.



According to the National Election Commission (NEC), the voting process will be put on hold at 23 diplomatic missions in 17 countries, meaning 18,392 Koreans living in those countries will not be able to cast their ballots for the April 15 general election.



Earlier, more than 177,000 Koreans in 119 countries applied to register to vote in the proportional representation election, with the voting initially being scheduled from April 1 to 6.



The 17 are Germany, Spain, Ireland, Britain, the Kyrgyz Republic, France, Ghana, South Africa, Nepal, India, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia, the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam and Italy  the countries where lockdowns and movement restrictions have been implemented to prevent further spread of the virus.



However, the number could increase as the NEC is keeping close tabs on the United States, which has become the country with the most confirmed cases in the world.



"After monitoring how the situation develops in several regions, including the eastern part of the U.S., we will suspend the process if concluding we will not be able to guarantee voters' health and safety," an NEC official said.



Earlier this month, the NEC decided not to hold voting in Wuhan, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, due to the lockdown and travel restrictions.



Also, the NEC has decided to shorten the period of overseas voting in another 52 countries to April 1 to 4.



In response to the suspension, some Korean communities in Europe call on the government to come up with countermeasures that will allow them to exercise their voting rights until the eve of the Election Day.



Voting count at diplomatic missions



The coronavirus pandemic is also raising the possibility that the counting of overseas Koreans' votes will be conducted at diplomatic missions rather than the ballots being sent directly to Korea.



If this happens, it will be the first such time since overseas voting was introduced in 2012 for the 19th National Assembly election.



Even in some of the countries where the voting will be held, it could be difficult for the ballot papers to be sent to Korea for counting due to reduced or suspended flight operations.



As a result, the NEC is exploring various measures including bringing the ballots back to Korea via a third country or counting them at the diplomatic missions.



According to the Election Law, ballots are sent to each voter's district in Korea and counted on Election Day by the election watchdog. However, when a natural disaster, war, riot or any other similar event occurs and ballot boxes cannot arrive by the deadline at 6 p.m., an overseas voting committee is allowed to count them there. The committee is made up of five people among Korean residents in the area  one picked by the NEC, three by political parties and one by the head of the diplomatic mission.



"In preparation for a possible failure to send ballots to Korea, we have a contingency plan, or counting them at diplomatic missions, despite still needing NEC approval," said a senior official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.



"A decision on whether to count ballots here or there will be made after the foreign ministry receives reports from each diplomatic mission about their situations."



According to the NEC, it is set to pick areas to tally votes at diplomatic missions as late as April 11 in a move to avoid disruption of the election.


Rajiv Shah, who coordinated the U.S. response to the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak centered in Africa as head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, has stressed the need for international cooperation with America in the lead. It has to be all of the United States, and has to be all of the world, Shah, now president of the Rockefeller Foundation, told Bloomberg TV on Monday.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Are we really debating in America right now on whether the health of the economy is more important than saving a lot of lives? Is that who we are?

Thats a question we go deep on in our latest episode of This Week in CLE podcast, where cleveland.com reporters and editors break down the news. We also talk a good bit about the Ohio response to the coronavirus, including the hundreds of companies that appear to be breaking the rules.

We analyze the fascinating new Great Lakes Poll from Baldwin Wallace University, which includes a lot of findings about how Ohioans are thinking about Covid-19.. And we discuss our dismay with the Cuyahoga County Board of Health, which is refusing to provide the community with basic information on this crisis.

Listen to the podcast here.

For the second week, we record the podcast while sheltering in place. None of the five of us who participate are in the same room. Laura Johnston and I cohost.

Politics editor Jane Kahoun and reporters Evan MacDonald and Seth Richardson join us.

We begin with Laura discussing a story our audience cant get enough of, an exploration of why Michigan has three times as many coronavirus cases as Ohio. We consider theories on the cause, including the states primary elections and just how fast the governors put restrictions in place.

We delve into the secrecy at the Cuyahoga County Board of Health, which refuses to release the gender, age or city of coronavirus deaths.

Jane talks about Gov. Mike DeWines methodical shutting down of the state, ending with his stay-at-home order on Sunday, and mulls whether the governor followed a crisis playbook.

She also breaks down the confusion over the definition of essential business in that that order.

While DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted have tried to clarify the list during statehouse briefings, they mainly say, read the order.

One kind of business thats explicity permitted to stay open is gun shops, Jane explains. But some abortions have been stopped because theyre considered elective surgeries.

DeWine has largely received praise for his leadership, from across the nation. And Ohio Health Director Dr. Amy Acton has a Facebook fan page with more than 50,000 followers.

But not everything is ideal, and we discuss where Ohio, DeWine and Acton have come up deficient. DeWine promised to be transparent with state information, but agreed to President Trumps demand to stop releasing daily unemployment numbers. DeWine says he and the president are aligned, even though their actions paint a different picture.

And Acton for more than a week could not release the total number of coronavirus tests done in Ohio, Jane says. Ohio started testing late and was seriously lagging the nation in test results. We still dont have the tests we need to know who is immune to the disease.

The result of the governors order and so much uncertainty is a lot of anxiety. Evan talks about the loneliness people may feel, and the apps people can use to connect with each other during the crisis.

Laura mentions the ways some people are creating solidarity while they social distance. And Evan explains how life might change, even when restrictions are lifted.

Evan digs in deep on two medical pieces: how the coronavirus affects the lungs, and why ventilators are so important.

We close our first segment with a big thought debate: the argument that emerged this week that basically pits the health of people  largely older people like me  against the health of the economy.

Seth joins the second half of the episode to explain the Great Lakes poll, the four-state poll conducted by Baldwin Wallaces Community Research Institute. Its in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, states that decided the 2016 election, and its good news for President Donald Trump.

Seth interprets the approval numbers for Trump, breaking out how hed do against either Democratic presidential hopeful, Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. Numbers were not starkly different between women and men.

The poll also shows how rabidly people approve of restrictions meant to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. They even side with shutting down college and professional sports, Seth says.

He and Jane give the biggest issues for voters in the presidential election.

We also talk to Seth about his story on the hundreds of pleas we received from Ohioans who feel their employers are not following the governors orders to protect them from the coronavirus.

Its an issue, along with the economy, that is sure to continue to play a big role in the news as coronavirus cases continue to grow.

You can get our podcasts delivered directly to your phone, and we have an Apple podcasts channel exclusively for this podcast. Subscribe here.

Do you get your podcasts on Spotify. Find us here.

If you use Stitcher, we are here.

RadioPublic is another popular podcast vehicle, and we are here.

On Google Podcasts, we are here.

On PodParadise, find us here.

And on PlayerFM, we are here.

We also have a weekly bonus episode, usually less than 10 minutes, where we ask the lingering questions that remain of the weeks top news. The bonus episode publishes on Saturdays.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a press conference at the State Department in Washington on March 25, 2020. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

US Government Ramps Up Efforts to Counter Disinformation on CCP Virus

Federal agencies are ramping up efforts to counter an aggressive disinformation push by the Chinese communist regime surrounding the global pandemic by setting up new websites that separate fact from fiction.

A website titled Coronavirus Rumor Control was recently launched by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security to help the public distinguish between rumors and facts.

The sites description states: Do your part to the stop the spread of disinformation by doing 3 easy things; dont believe the rumors, dont pass them along, and go to trusted sources of information to get the facts about the federal (COVID-19) response.

A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email that they are also supporting FEMA with its website efforts, adding that it was part of the the whole of government approach in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The website lists a number of myths that have been spreading and debunks them.

The Pentagon is also setting up a similar page on the Department of Defense website to debunk disinformation. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said on March 24 that the page will be called Myth Busters and will look into any disinformation and knock them down.

A defense spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that the department hopes to have the website up by next week.

Esper made his remarks at a virtual town hall with other military leaders, stating that there are multiple sources of disinformation out there. He said the website will also try to allow people to submit rumors to check if they are true or false.

We probably have external actors, countries who want to sow chaos within the United States, who are injecting some of this into the ecosystem, if you will, Esper said, referring to the disinformation.

In a crisis like this, the most important thing you can do  is to put information out constantly, to be very transparent, he said. But at the same time, the converse of that is knocking down rumors, knocking down myths, knocking down disinformation, all those things that cause further churn and concern.

Esper also directly addressed some rumors that had been spreading rapidly: There has been no talk whatsoever of martial law. There has been no talk whatsoever of mass quarantines of the United States or any of that other nonsense that is out there.

The Epoch Times has reached out to other major federal agencies and asked them what they were doing to combat disinformation. The White House didnt respond to a request for comment on what more the administration was doing on this front.

Meanwhile, in a press release after a virtual meeting with the the Group of SevenCanada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United Stateson March 25, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said they discussed an intentional disinformation campaign by Beijing about the CCP virus, also known as the novel coronavirus.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

Pompeo said China is still delaying sharing information. He said the United States desperately wanted to work with every country around the world, including China, to keep as many people alive, as many people as healthy, and then to restore our economies that have been decimated by the Wuhan virus.

This is a continuing challenge. We still need good information from the Chinese Communist Party about what has taken place there, he said.

The conspiracy theory pushed by Beijing that the virus originated in the United States was dismissed by Pompeo as crazy talk from some senior Chinese officials.

But every one of the nations that was at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place here, Pompeo said.

The CCPs aggressive global disinformation campaign is primarily to deflect blame for its poor handling of the CCP virus, sow discord internationally, and to portray an image that the regime remains in control.Chinese officials and state-run media have in recent times pushed conspiracy theories targeting the United States. Over the past few days, state-run Xinhua News has also promoted the hashtags Trumpandemic and TrumpVirus on its news posts on social media.Robert Spalding, former senior director for strategy at the White House National Security Council, told The Epoch Times previously that the United States needs to actively counter such propaganda by refuting and calling it out within 24 to 48 hours.

If theres no response from the other side, then they [the CCP] can control the narrative, said Spalding, author of Stealth War: How China Took Over While Americas Elite Slept.

Internal government documents from China obtained by The Epoch Times have highlighted how the regime purposefully underreported cases of the CCP virus and censored discussions of the outbreak, helping to fuel the spread of the disease.

Reuters contributed to this report.
MOUNT PLEASANT  Charges are pending against former Racine Mayor John Dickert after he was reportedly involved in a fight in a local grocery store parking lot after an alleged road-rage incident.

At 4:06 p.m. Sunday, the Mount Pleasant Police Department responded to Piggly Wiggly, 5201 Washington Ave., after receiving 911 calls about a fight in the grocery store parking lot. Witnesses reported seeing two people punching each other.

The two suspects involved in the fight were identified as former Racine Mayor John Dickert, 57, and 18-year-old Christian Reynoso, both of Racine, the Mount Pleasant Police Department confirmed.

Dickert was elected as Racines mayor in 2009 during a special election, and was re-elected in 2011 and 2015.

He resigned in 2017 to became president and CEO of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Cities Initiative. He currently works as division administrator for the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.

Road rage sparks alleged fight

Investigation into the incident revealed that Dickert and Reynoso had reportedly been driving in separate vehicles on Highway 20 (Washington Avenue). After an alleged road-rage incident between the two, both of the vehicles pulled into the Piggly Wiggly parking lot.

Shortly afterward, Dickert and Reynoso reportedly got out of their vehicles and started fighting.

Both Dickert and Reynoso were injured in the fight. The South Shore Fire Department responded to provide treatment; however, no one was transported to the hospital.

Charges of battery and disorderly conduct have been referred to the Racine County District Attorneys Office for both Dickert and Reynoso.

There is a referral to the district attorney for both Dickert and Reynoso. At the time point, the district attorney has not made a charging decision, said attorney Patrick Cafferty, who is representing Dickert.

On Mr. Dickerts behalf, I have been in touch with the Racine County District Attorney. We are in the process of exchanging information and we ask that the public withhold judgment until all the facts are available.

Dickert was appointed in 2018 by Peter Barca to be the administrator of the Wisconsin Division of State and Local Finance, a position he still holds.

Other mayoral arrests

Cafferty served as the attorney for former Racine Mayor Gary Becker, who was arrested in 2009 and was later convicted of two charges after he attempted to solicit sex from an underage girl who turned out to be an agent from the Wisconsin Department of Criminal Investigation.

The mayor who preceded Becker in office, Jim Smith, also had a criminal history  albeit less heinous.

Smith was convicted of felony burglary as a teenager in 1958, a fact that was hidden from the public until October 1997.

The public found out in-part because Smith had started seeking a pardon for his crime  which he had called a real stupid thing  because in 1996 the Wisconsin Constitution was amended so that anyone with a felony conviction could no longer hold public office.

Smith was granted the pardon by then-Gov. Tommy Thompson, and served as mayor until being eliminated in a 2003 mayoral primary; Becker eventually won that election.

Reporter Adam Rogan contributed to this report.
Srinagar, March 26 : Authorities in Jammu and Kashmir were vigorously tracking the travel history of Union Territory's first COVID-19 victim as nearly 50 of those who came into contact with the victim have already been shifted to quarantine facilities.

Four of these quarantined persons have already tested positive for the virus.

Health officials said the deceased patient had a chequered travel trajectory and it was logical to assume that he had come into contact with a much higher number of persons than have been traced so far.

"He was in Delhi where he is reported to have come into contact with Indonesian, Malaysian and Italian citizens. He has visited Samba and Jammu towns before he came back to the valley.

"He had attended a religious congregation in Sopore and met dozens of people in Srinagar city", health officials said.

The fact that he had been evading isolation and treatment as per the standard operating procedure (SoP) for such patients, was also worrisome.

"The fact is that he was symptomatically a full blown case before he was isolated and admitted is very worrisome", said a doctor.

Kashmir Divisional Commissioner, P. K. Pole has ordered a magisterial probe to find out whether there has been any lapse by treating doctors in following the SOP in case of the victim.

Additional Commissioner Kashmir, Tasaduq Hussain Mir, the probe magistrate has been ordered to submit the report in two days.

The 65-year old victim, the first COVID-29 fatality in J&K succumbed Thursday morning in Srinagar's Chest Diseases Hospital.

Meanwhile, authorities have detailed the burial procedure for the victim and ordered that only members of the family must undertake the burial after wearing the prescribed protective gear.
Google today said it will resume Chrome releases in two weeks and plans to make good on the multi-week suspension by skipping a version.

Chrome 81, the upgrade that was previously slated for a March 17 debut, will instead launch in two weeks, on April 7.

In the meantime, Chrome 80 will receive at least one more update - at some point next week, Google said - with fixes for vulnerabilities and what the search firm called "critical" issues. Releases of the Beta, Dev and Canary channels, which contain builds of decreasing polish and stability, either have already resumed or will this week.

Google suspended Chrome releases on March 18, citing "adjusted work schedules" but clearly blaming the COVID-19 pandemic and its massive overturning of business and personal conduct.

On March 10, for example, Google recommended that all North American employees work from home. Later, Santa Clara County, where Google's HQ is located, was one of several that told residents to "shelter-in-place."

Chrome 82 was canceled by Google to make up for the time lost by the suspension. That upgrade was to appear April 28.

Instead, the features and other work done on Chrome 82 during its stretches in the Dev and Beta channels will be rolled into Chrome 83, now slated to launch May 19. That's three weeks earlier than its original June 9 date.

The schedule for Chrome 84 and beyond - shown here - has been accelerated by three weeks through at least Chrome 88, the first upgrade of 2021. "[Chrome 84] and beyond dates are still subject to change," Google warned on the calendar, adding, "We will share a future update on the timing of the [Chrome 84] branch and releases" in the announcement of release resumption.

Rival Microsoft had followed Google's lead by halting releases of its Edge browser - built on the same Chromium codebase as Chrome - two days later.

Although the Edge team had not made a similar announcement Thursday as of 2:30 p.m. ET, Microsoft will resume Edge releases at some point, probably on a cadence similar to Chrome's.
Longtime Charleston County Coroner Rae Wooten is not seeking reelection and instead will retire at the end of the year.

Wooten, a Republican, announced her intention Thursday.

She leaves office after serving 25 years and a career that included leading the office during major tragedies, including the Sofa Super Store fire and the mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church.

Wooten endorsed her chief deputy, Bobbi Jo ONeal, as her successor.

Filing for political office in South Carolina closes at noon Monday.

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O'Neal had not filed to be a candidate as of midday Thursday.

One Democrat, Fran Broccolo, has filed.

Charleston Democratic Party Chairwoman Colleen Condon said Broccolo is a longtime county EMT.

"In the performance of my job duties  answering the late-night calls, responding to complicated and heart-wrenching scenes, and delivering life-changing news to loved ones that shake them and you to the core, I can truly say I have been blessed," Wooten said in a media statement.

"This calling is one that I would not trade for the world, as I have been able to assist those I have served in their most difficult times of need," she added.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 22:37:49|Editor: huaxia

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SHANGHAI, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Most Italian companies in Shanghai have resumed work as the local government rolled out targeted policies to facilitate foreign businesses' operations amid the novel coronavirus epidemic.

"Fortunately, all our employees in China are safe and sound, and 90 percent of them have returned to work," said Carlo Nizia, supervisor of the board of directors with UFI Filters (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.

Italy-based UFI Filters, a global leader in filtration technology, has established six factories and one research and development center in China. It employs over 2,200 people in China, accounting for half of its workforce across the world.

Some Italian enterprises resumed work under modified conditions. Bonfiglioli Riduttori, an Italian manufacturer of gear motors, gearboxes and inverters, made special investment in its Shanghai branch to improve living conditions for its employees and arranged separate dining time to better protect employees' health and well being.

In February, Shanghai rolled out 28 measures to cushion companies against the impact of the novel coronavirus epidemic, with foreign enterprises treated on an equal footing.

Shanghai authorities also visited and had discussions with foreign enterprises in the city from February to March, to better understand their difficulties and needs amid the epidemic, such as labor shortage, lack of epidemic prevention materials and disrupted supply chains.

Despite the support measures, some Italian companies in Shanghai, especially those related to consumption and travel, faced difficult times amid the coronavirus outbreak.

In Shanghai's Pudong District, an outlet store operated by an Italian company shut down for a month due to the outbreak. Yet the store still saw sluggish growth of consumers after resuming work for more than a month.

The cruise industry also received a severe blow from the pandemic. According to Costa Crociere, an Italian cruise line, the cruise industry is now facing a common challenge globally -- how to restore consumer confidence and gradually dispel people's safety concerns about getting infected on cruise ships.

Though facing short-term difficulties, these Italian companies were still upbeat about the Chinese market, hoping that the shopping and cruise industries will "recover first in China," so as to lead related industries around the world out of coronavirus woes.

Many Italian companies in Shanghai also expressed gratitude to China for sending medical teams and medical supplies to Italy when the country was in its most difficult days.

"If you are in Italy now, you will know how difficult it was for Wuhan and China to combat the virus over the past two months. Coronavirus is cruel, but it makes us realize the value of mutual care and friendship," said Carlo Nizia.
Lake County Common Pleas Judge John P. ODonnell has appointed Mentor resident Mary Beth Klemencic as grand jury foreman for a three-month term commencing April 1.

Klemencic is a senior attorney at Mazanec, Raskin & Ryder Co. LPA in Solon, according to a news release from ODonnells office. She has 13 years of litigation management defending lawsuits from inception to trial, including negotiations, mediations and courtroom experience. Her areas of practice are liquor liability, premises liability, construction defect disputes, motor vehicle liability and personal injury defense.

Klemencic is a member of many professional organizations, including the Ohio State Bar Association, the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association, and the Lake County Bar Association, according to the news release.

The grand jury consists of nine members and five alternates and meets weekly.

It has two responsibilities: one is to protect innocent persons from needless accusations. The other to assure that evidence against the accused is considered fairly.

Throughout the three-month term, the grand jury hears cases and decides whether the accused should be placed on trial for alleged criminal offenses, which are usually felonies, the release stated.

The grand jury does not decide on the guilt or innocence of an accused person but rather its function is to make certain there is a sound basis for the changes made. If a person is charged by the grand jury, their guilt or innocence is determined at a later trial by a petit jury.

ODonnell stated that he appreciates Klemencics service as well as the service of the other grand jury members, which will be selected for the April-June term March 27.
Reports about an Italian priest who died from coronavirus after he gave up his ventilator to a younger patient has been making rounds in the internet. Because of his selfless act, the news easily got the attention of many online readers.

Don Giuseppe Berardelli, 72 years old, was the archpriest of Casnigo in northern Italy, about 50 miles northeast of Milan. He died in a hospital in nearby Lovere.

Italian news outlet Araberara reports that Berardelli was given a respirator that was purchased for him by parishioners. But he did not accept it and has given it a younger person.

Although this is indeed a story of the priest's heroism, it turns out that the news is false. Berardelli is a selfless man but it was later on clarified that he did not decline using the breathing apparatus so a younger patient can use it.

"There was not a donated respirator. There have not been any respirators coming from outside of the hospital," Fr. Giulio Dellavite, secretary general of Berardelli's diocese, told Catholic News Agency.

Dellevite, who is a friend of Fr. Berardelli for more than 20 years, said that the deceased priest would definitely give up his ventilator if he as one. He would even give up a spot in the intensive care unit so another patient can be given the chance to live.





"Greater love has no person..." (Jn 15:13) pic.twitter.com/uKxRNghire Fr. Giuseppe Berardelli, a 72-year-old priest who gave a respirator (that his parishioners had purchased for him), to a younger patient (whom he did not know), has died from #coronavirus "Greater love has no person..." (Jn 15:13) https://t.co/qXQ6knoE6n via @Araberara  James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) March 24, 2020

Testimonials for the priest

He was a simple, straightforward person, with a great kindness and helpfulness towards everyone, believers and non-believers, said Giuseppe Imberti, the mayor of Casnigo, The Hill reports.

Fr. Berardelli is known to be a happy man. Prima Bergamo said that the priest can be remembered for his smile and dynamism. People also know how he loves his Guzzi Galletto motorcycle which he always rides with joy.

Also read: 17-Year-Old Boy from Lancaster, First Minor to Die of COVID-19 in US

"He was a priest who listened to everyone, he knew how to listen, whoever turned to him knew that he could count on his help," Fiorano Mayor, Clara Poli said. It is know that Fr. Berardelli also served as a priest in this area.

Coronavirus has taken lives of many priests

In Italy, at least 60 priests already died from the coronavirus. With that, Fr. Berardelli is just one of the many Italian priest who did not win their battle against COVID-19.

Most of the priests are at the age of 70s and has underlying health conditions. The youngest priest to die was Fr. Paolo Camminati at the age of 53. Fr. Camminati, who was the parish priest of Our Lady of Lourdes in Diocese of Piacenza, died in the hospital on March 21 .

Among those who died are in Piacenza are Fr. Kidane Berhane, a Cistercian monk from Eritrea and 87-year-old twin brothers, Fr. Mario Boselli and Fr. Giovanni Boselli, who died within a day of each other.

Due the huge number of coronavirus deaths and infections, Italy has emerged as the European epicenter of the pandemic. It has surpassed the numbers of China which is ground zero of COVID-19. The situation of Italy requires them to remain in a nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the deadly disease.

Related article: Two Nurses in Italy and UK, Who Fend Coronavirus Patients, Commit Suicide

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By Associated Press

WASHINGTON: Nearly 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week - more than quadruple the previous record of 695000 set in 1982 - amid a widespread economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus.

The surge in weekly applications was a stunning reflection of the damage the viral outbreak is doing to the economy. Filings for unemployment aid generally reflect the pace of layoffs.

The pace of layoffs is sure to accelerate as the U.S. economy sinks into a recession. Revenue has collapsed at restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, gyms, and airlines. Auto sales are plummeting, and car makers have close factories. Most such employers face loan payments and other fixed costs, so they're cutting jobs to save money.

As job losses mount, some economists say the nation's unemployment rate could approach 13% by May. By comparison, the highest jobless rate during the Great Recession, which ended in 2009, was 10%.

ALSO READ | Coronavirus could become seasonal, says top US scientist

The economic deterioration has been swift. As recently as February, the unemployment rate was at a 50-year low of 3.5%. And the economy was growing steadily if modestly. Yet by the April-June quarter of the year, some economists think the economy will shrink at its steepest annual pace ever  a contraction that could reach 30%.

Many people who have lost jobs in recent days have been unable to file for unemployment aid because state websites and phone systems have been overwhelmed by a crush of applicants and have frozen up. That logjam suggests that Thursday's report on filings for unemployment benefits actually understates the magnitude of job cuts last week.

With layoffs surging, a significant expansion of unemployment benefits for the millions who will lose jobs as a result of the coronavirus outbreak was included in an economic relief bill nearing final approval in Congress. One provision in the bill would provide an extra $600 a week on top of the unemployment aid that states provide. Another would extend 13 additional weeks of benefits beyond the six months of jobless aid that most states offer.

Separate legislation passed last week provides up to $1 billion to states to enhance their ability to process claims. But that money will take time to be disbursed.

Jessy Morancy of Hollywood, Florida, was laid off Friday from her job as a wheelchair attendant and customer service agent at Fort Lauderdale Airport. Morancy, 29, called the state unemployment office Monday to try to file for unemployment benefits but encountered just a recorded message telling her to call back later.

She was also concerned that even a full unemployment benefit of $275 a week would be less than half of what she earned at her job and insufficient to provide for her children, ages 10 and 7.

Im still in a state of shock, Morancy said.

She said she has heard that airline employees might continue to receive salaries if Congress provides financial assistance to the airlines. Yet even so, its not clear that employees like her who work for contractors  Eulen America, in her case  would be eligible.

If these companies are going to get a bailout, why not include us? Morancy said.

Even for those able to file a claim, the benefits will take time to kick in. It typically takes two to three weeks before applicants receive any money. State agencies must first contact their former employers to verify their work and earnings history. Only then can the employees weekly unemployment benefits be calculated.

ALSO READ | Iran reports 157 new coronavirus deaths, raising total to 2,234

Worsening the problem, most state agencies that handle unemployment claims are operating at historically low funding levels and staffing that are intended to handle a trickle of claims. Just weeks ago, the job market was in the strongest shape it had been in decades.

Kim Boldrini-Sen, 41, has also struggled to even file her claim. She has tried in two states: In Connecticut, where she works as an acupuncturist in a private practice, and in New York, where she lives and has her own acupuncture business.

In Connecticut, she thought her application had been submitted. But when she returned last week to re-file as applicants are required to do each week, she found there was no record of her initial filing. After taking an hour to re-file, she received a pop-up notice that she was ineligible to do so online.

In New York, the state's website repeatedly crashed when she was halfway through filling out her request. When she finally managed to press submit, she received a pop-up saying she had to file over the phone. That hasn't worked well, either.

"I've called at all hours of the day, she said. "That's been my life for a week, and I still can't get through to anyone."

On Monday, the New York State Department of Labor tweeted, "If you have been unable to get through our phone and/or online system this week, please keep trying."

"We are working as hard as we can to ensure that all benefits are paid and appreciate your patience," the agency said on Twitter.

Ellen Zentner, an economist at Morgan Stanley, said in a note to clients that 17 million jobs could be lost through May -- twice the entire 8.7 million jobs that were lost in the Great Recession. She expects the unemployment rate to average 12.8% in the April-June quarter, which would be the highest level since the 1930s.

Still, Zentner also expects the economy to start recovering by the second half of the year. It will take time for things to return to something close to normal, she projects: The unemployment rate could still top 5% at the end of next year.
WEST SPRINGFIELD  Two West Springfield residents have been confirmed to have contracted the COVID-19 virus, according to the Health Department.

Jeanne Galloway, director of public health, announced the two cases late Wednesday afternoon on the citys website.

The Health Department is currently on the cases, Galloway said. Those who have been in close contact with the residents are being identified and will be contacted properly in accordance with professional practice.

Galloway said the Health Department awaits additional confirmation from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

The West Springfield Health Department continues to work tirelessly to assure that our community has the most recent and accurate information and resources to protect our public health. The health of our community needs to be protected at this time more than ever, she said.

Galloway said there are noted delays with obtaining accurate information from the state Department of Public Health and The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Due to this identified delay in results  if you are staying at home due to pending test results, are self-isolating due to active symptoms, or have other COVID-19 information please call directly to the Health Department at 413-263-3206 or email us at Covidresponse@tows.org. This will support the timely follow-up necessary to maintain safety and continued monitoring within our community, Galloway said.

Galloway said the department has addressed these delays on local, regional and state levels. Nationally, there are problems being experienced with information sharing among health care providers, labs and public health agencies.

We continue to work with our local health care providers and laboratories to improve information flow and create an ability for effective and timely action at our local level, she said.

Mayor Will Reichelt discussed the confirmation of the two cases in a post on his Facebook page and said the city will likely have more cases as the pandemic continues and testing becomes more readily available.

We knew it was coming, it was only a matter of time, all the communities around us are starting to test positive as well, Reichelt said. We are likely to have more than two cases as this pandemic runs its course.

Reichelt urged residents to stay home, wash their hands and heed social distancing guidelines. Those who feel sick should stay away from others.
The American Academy of Ophthalmology this week issued a warning to its members that conjunctivitis, also known as pink eye, can be an early sign of the coronavirus in some patients. The academy suggested that eye doctors wear full facial protection covering eyes, ears and mouth, particularly when patients who have this inflammation of the thin, transparent tissue that lines eyelids and part of the eye also have fever and respiratory symptoms.

The organization cited two studies from China that involved patients hospitalized for the new disease. One found viral conjunctivitis in 1 out of 30 patients. The other found it in 9 of 1,099 (0.8%) lab-confirmed cases.

British ear, nose, and throat doctors have raised the alarm that loss of the sense of smell can be a symptom.

In a statement, ENT UK said there is good evidence from South Korea, China, and Italy that people with COVID-19 infection can experience total loss of the sense of smell (anosmia) or a decline. In Germany it is reported that more than two in three confirmed cases have anosmia, they wrote. In South Korea, where testing has been more widespread, 30% of patients testing positive have had anosmia as their major presenting symptom in otherwise mild cases.

 READ MORE: What are the first symptoms of the coronavirus?

The three major symptoms  fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath  warrant a call to the doctor and a discussion about whether to be tested. But some people carry the virus while exhibiting no symptoms or only mild ones. Unlike the flu, which announces itself suddenly with fever and muscle aches, the early stages of COVID-19 can go on for a few days.

Daniel Mueller, an infectious diseases doctor at Temple University Hospital, said infected people might feel just slightly under the weather for a few days. They might just feel a little tired or a little achy.

Some clinicians also have seen that sore throat and sometimes gastrointestinal symptoms, are signs of early disease.
The logistics of returning Ukrainian citizens will be significantly complicated - air services will be blocked on March 27

About 20,000 Ukrainians abroad have applied to Ukrainian diplomatic missions to help them return home. This was reported by Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on the air of Ukraine 24 TV Channel, RBC reports.

"20,000 Ukrainians are those who have expressed a desire to return to Ukraine and informed the consulates and embassies of Ukraine," Kuleba said.

However, the Minister stressed that the logistics of returning Ukrainian citizens would be significantly complicated because on March 27, air services would be blocked by other countries.

According to Kuleba, tight control should be exercised in place for everyone who arrives in Ukraine.

As of now, more than 90,000 Ukrainian citizens have returned to Ukraine.

As we reported earlier, on March 25, the plane from Rome arrived at Boryspil Airport, carrying 129 passengers, mostly Ukrainians and foreigners, particularly citizens of Moldova.

Besides the enhanced control, all passengers got the recommendations on how to protect from coronavirus and what to do if the symptoms appear. They promised to self-isolate.
New Delhi [India], Mar 26 (ANI): As the world is combating coronavirus, the DCP North West and her team have gone beyond the call of duty by taking the initiative to adopt a refugee camp in Majlis Park area here.

The Delhi Police officials have decided to adopt these 250 families in the refugee camp for the 21-day nationwide lockdown.

"There are about 250 families of refugees in Majlis Park of Adarsh Nagar who migrated from Pakistan and are resettled here. They were making their ends meet by doing daily wage labour. Since the lockdown, the have been resourceless. So, we decided to pitch in resources by making efforts from our end and have decided to take care of food and essentials requirement for this 21 day period," DCP North West Vijayanta Arya told ANI.

"This is the time when we all should stand together and fight this deadly virus. We will offer all possible help to campers here. Not just food, but also medical facilities if required. I appeal to other citizens also, the ones bestowed with sufficient resources, to help our fellows in this hardship. Its time when we stand united," she added.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country effective from midnight to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 03/25/2020



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winner Chef Floyd Cardoz has sadly passed away after testing positive for coronavirus.The third-season winner's family confirmed Floyd's death at age 59 on Wednesday, India's Scroll.in publication reported The co-owner of the Bombay Canteen and O Pedro restaurants in Mumbai, who also recently launched Bombay Sweet Shop, reportedly tested positive for COVID-19 and then died of an infection in a New Jersey hospital.Floyd, who was raised in Mumbai, had apparently been in Mumbai until March 8, when he returned to the United States.The Hunger Inc, the company that runs Floyd's restaurants, released a statement mourning the chef's death to Mumbai's mid-day.com on Wednesday."It is with deep sorrow that we inform you of the passing away of Chef Floyd Cardoz (59 years), Co-Founder, Hunger Inc. Hospitality, on March 25, 2020 in New Jersey, USA," The Hunger Inc said."He is survived by his mother Beryl, wife Barkha and sons Justin and Peter. Floyd tested positive for Covid 19, in USA, on March 18th and was being treated for the same at Mountainside Medical Centre, New Jersey, USA."The chef revealed in an Instagram post on March 18 he had admitted himself to a hospital in New Jersey, where he lived at the time, because he was experiencing a fever, which is one of the symptoms associated with coronavirus.After apologizing for "causing undue panic," Floyd wrote, "I was feeling feverish and hence as a precautionary measure, admitted myself into hospital in New York. I was hugely anxious about my state of health... I returned to New York on March 8th via Frankfurt."The Hunger Inc subsequently confirmed the chef had tested positive for coronavirus."Floyd Cardoz (59 years), currently admitted in hospital in New York, USA, tested positive for COVID-19 on March 18, 2020. As a precautionary measure we have informed the Health Department in Mumbai about the same," the company told Mumbai's mid-day.com."We are also reaching out personally to people who have interacted with him during his visit to India, so they can take necessary medical advice should they indicate any symptoms (fever, cough, shortness of breath) and/ or self-quarantine. Floyd Cardoz flew back to New York from Mumbai via Frankfurt on March 8, 2020."Bravo released a statement Wednesday on Instagram in regards to Floyd's passing."Bravo and the Top Chef family are deeply saddened by the passing of Chef Floyd Cardoz. Floyd was a talented chef who competed and won . He was thoughtful, kind and his smile illuminated a room. He was an inspiration to chefs around the world and we offer our deepest sympathy to his family and friends," Bravo wrote.Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi also paid tribute to Floyd's life on Twitter and Instagram."I am beyond saddened to wake up today and hear the news of my dear friend @floydcardoz's passing. Nobody who lived in NY in the early aughts could forget how delicious and packed Tabla always was," Padma wrote Wednesday."He had an impish smile, an innate need to make those around him happy, and a delicious touch. This is a huge loss... not only for the professional food world, but for Indians everywhere.""My heart goes out to his wife Barkha and their whole family," she added. "RIP Floyd."Top Chef head judge Tom Colicchio also expressed his thoughts on the unexpected news."Horrible news," Tom tweeted. "Thoughts are with Floyd's family, rest peacefully my friend."And fellow contestant Hugh Acheson tweeted that Floyd was "a gem" as well as "an amazing human and chef.""You were a father and husband full of love and grace. I am so sorry. I love you. Rest in Peace my friend. #floydcardoz," Hugh wrote on Twitter.The coronavirus outbreak has led major cities, including Massachusetts and New York City, to shut down restaurants, bars, schools and businesses as the number of confirmed cases rises.The coronavirus pandemic has also affected production schedules of dozens of television shows, including The Bachelorette, Survivor and The Amazing Race.The third season of aired in Spring 2011 and featured 12 award-winning chefs competing against each other in weekly elimination challenges.Floyd defeated Mary Sue Milliken and Traci Des Jardins for the title of "Top Chef Master."
Thousands of ventilators ordered for critically ill coronavirus patients in the UK will not arrive for months, Downing Street has admitted, even though the peak of the countrys epidemic is expected in the next three weeks.

Boris Johnsons official spokesperson told reporters on Thursday that the government had ordered 8,000 approved machines for the NHS.

We would say we expect thousands of those to arrive in the coming weeks and thousands more in the pipeline to arrive in the coming months, they told a Westminster briefing.

However, Professor Neil Ferguson, a key scientist advising the government in its response, has suggested the majority of those ventilators may be needed sooner than that.

If current lockdown measures have been effective in slowing the spread of the virus, Mr Ferguson predicted that intensive care demand would peak in approximately two to three weeks and then decline thereafter.

Ventilators help critically ill patients who are struggling to breathe on their own by pumping oxygen into their lungs.

Covid-19 is a respiratory disease which can cause breathing problems in severe cases, with as many one in six people becoming seriously ill and developing some difficulty breathing, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The government has said it wants to obtain 30,000 ventilators to deal with demand  compared to the 8,175 it currently has access to  by convincing manufacturers to shift their production towards making the machines.

Mr Johnson received criticism on Thursday for not taking part in an EU scheme to boost the number of ventilators in Europe, with some accusing him of placing his pro-Brexit ideology above the need for essential equipment.

When asked why the UK was not utilising the scheme, the PMs spokesperson said: Well, we are no longer members of the EU.

They added that the decision was not related to Brexit and the UK government was making its own efforts to secure ventilators.

Jonathan Ashworth, Labours shadow health secretary, and Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrats acting leader, have both criticised the prime ministers response to the scheme.

With widespread concerns about our ventilator capacity and the urgent need to scale-up that capacity, we should be co-operating through international schemes to ensure we get these desperately needed pieces of kit, Mr Ashworth said.

Mr Davey said there was no reasonable justification for the UK refusing to participate in the scheme.

Let's be clear: getting more ventilators to our NHS will save lives. Why won't the prime minister put his Brexit views aside, given this crisis? he added.

Downing Street has also contradicted a claim by billionaire entrepreneur Sir James Dyson, who said the government had ordered 10,000 ventilators from his firm.

Sir James emailed Dyson staff to say the company had received an initial order of 10,000 units from the government.

However, the PMs spokesperson said all manufacturers turning their efforts to making ventilators would have to pass tests by expert clinicians and health regulators before purchases are made.

New orders are all dependent on machines passing regulatory tests; this is the case with Dyson, they said.

Their machines must meet the necessary safety and regulatory standards - if they do not, they will not be brought or rolled out to hospitals.

Earlier this month, a spokesperson for the manufacturing organisation Make UK said the use of contracted manufacturers to produce additional ventilators was feasible but would require them to be given designs for the machines.

They can be given plans and designs, and told to stop what they're doing and start work on whatever. Our feeling is that that model would work, the spokesperson said.

Additional reporting by PA
Hundreds of Indian students, stranded in the Philippines, can fly back to India when the temporary travel ban is lifted, the Indian embassy here said on Thursday, assuring all possible help to the distressed citizens.

On March 17, the Indian government banned the entry of passengers from Afghanistan, the Philippines and Malaysia to India with immediate effect amid stepped up efforts against the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.

"Embassy is in regular contact with students in Perpetual Help. Shops & essential stores in area open. Indian restaurants are ready to deliver. 16,000 Indian students in Philippines are advised- can travel to India when temporary ban is lifted. Emergency no. 09477836524," the embassy said in a tweet.

Amid rising cases of COVID-19, India last week banned the landing of all international commercial passenger flights from March 22 to 29 while asking the Civil Aviation ministry and Railways to suspend all concessional travel on flights and trains, except for students, patients and disabled people.

Over 40 people have died from the novel coronavirus disease in the Philippines and the country has recorded more than 700 infections, according to worldometer, a website that tacks the number of global deaths due to COVID-19.

The death toll from the coronavirus has risen to 21,293 with more than 471,518 cases reported in over 170 countries and territories, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bob Cope, Economic Development Manager, City of Colorado Springs, has been the citys lead on several successful economic vitality initiatives.
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Linkedin Apriza Pinandita (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 18:53 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da27e6 1 World COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,Dutch-citizen,Wuhan-coronavirus,Joey-Schouten,Singapore,malang-jawa-timur,East-Java,virus-corona,virus-korona-indonesia Free

Joey Schouten, 21, a Dutch traveler came to Indonesia in January after spending a couple of days in Singapore.

He flew from the city-state to his next destination, East Java, where he suddenly fell ill after a few days.

And two months later, when he was already at home, he received a text message from his doctor in Indonesia, informing him that he had tested positive for COVID-19.

Out of nowhere, I got 41 degrees fever, and I passed out for the first time in my life, Schouten told the Eindhovens Dagblad a local newspaper in Eindhoven, the Netherlands -- on March 20, recalling his visit.

Read also: Netherlands extends bans on public gatherings to June 1

The resident of Helmond in the Eindhoven metropolitan region said he had no idea what had been wrong with him until he got the message from his doctor on March 19, informing him of the positive result of the medical test he had taken at a hospital in East Java  months after the incident.

Schouten said he was baffled when he received the text, adding that the East Java medical workers had to take six blood samples and yet, at the time, had no idea about the cause of his sickness.

A screen grab of an Instagram post of Joey Schouten of the Netherlands who on March 19, 2020 finds he had COVID-19 during his trip to East Java in January. Schouten is already back at home. (Instagram/@dhr_schouten)

In January, Indonesia was oblivious to the coronavirus, as most people in the country thought the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the disease at the time, was far enough away, the paper reported.

I have now experienced how easily you can get [the coronavirus] and that it can make everyone very sick, young people like me, too, he told the daily.

Read also: Friend, hospital in Blitar throw doubts on Dutchman's claim of COVID-19 positive result

The 21-year-old visited Singapore in early January, where he walked through Chinatown. Many Chinese tourists made purchases for the Chinese New Year. People in the country did not feel the need to wear face masks at the time, because the Singaporean authorities only warned about "a mysterious lung disease from China" a week later, Schouten said in the report.

When he was feeling ill during his visit to East Java, some Indonesian bystanders took him to a hospital, where he spent nine days on IVs and ultrasound machines.

"Doctors thought I had a bad flu and gave me all kinds of medicine," he recalled, counting it one of his few vivid moments.

Read also: Dutch floral industry wilting due to coronavirus

As he was in and out of consciousness due to the sickness, the Dutch said the nine-day stay felt like a three-day treatment. "That's how much I slept at the time, because I was completely exhausted."

Two months later, a screenshot of a text message from a person named Dhea Daritsh, who claimed to be a staff member of the Aisyiyah Islamic Hospital in Malang, East Java, circulated on the internet  and was also published by the Eindhovens Dagblad in the report.

However, the hospital issued a statement last week, saying the information was false. There was no patient named Joey Schouten that was hospitalized in our hospital. Such information is irresponsible, said the hospital management on its Instagram account. The hospital also denied information regarding the staffer, let alone a doctor named Dhea Daritsh who claimed to be working at the hospital.

On Feb. 3, Schouten posted a photo on his Instagram account showing himself lying on a hospital bed, geotagged to Saiful Anwar General Hospital (RSSA)  in Malang, East Java.

The hospital has confirmed that it treated Schouten.

We can inform you that a patient named Joey Schouten was registered as a patient at the RSSA on Jan. 23. After receiving treatment, the patient was permitted to go home on Jan. 25, the hospitals public relations department told The Jakarta Post in a text message on Thursday, without elaborating on the cause of Schoutens hospitalization.

As of Thursday, data from Johns Hopkins University showed that Indonesia had 893 confirmed cases, resulting in 78 deaths. Meanwhile, the Netherlands had reported 6,412 cases and 356 deaths.

More than 170 countries have reported cases of COVID-19, which has killed more than 21,300 people in the world. More than 115,000 people have recovered globally.
By IANS

LUCKNOW: BJP MLA from Ghaziabad, Nand Kishore Gurjar, has asked the state police to "break their legs who violate the lockdown orders".

In a video that is now going viral on the social media, the MLA can be seen saying that the police can even "shoot them in the legs if people do not listen".

"Such people should be treated like anti-nationals. If they are not following government orders, they are terrorists," he said.

FOLLOW CORONAVIRUS LIVE UPDATES HERE

Gurjar further said that every constable who breaks the legs and shoots the violators would be given a reward of Rs 5,100 by him.

The BJP MLA also warned the clerics of mosques and said that several Muslims had informed him that people were crowding the markets.

"I am warning the clerics that they should inform the police if people do not listen to them," the MLA said.

Gurjar had earlier hit the headlines when he prescribed cow urine as a cure for coronavirus.
Nearly 650 restaurants/breweries joined to offer takeout/delivery service during mandated shut down

Despite a new "stay at home" order issued yesterday by Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock to help curb the spread of coronavirus, Metro Denver and Boulder residents can still enjoy nearly 650 of their favorite local eateries and breweries that are offering convenient, safe takeout and home or curbside delivery services for food and alcohol. VISIT DENVER, Boulder Convention & Visitor's Bureau, Eat Denver and the Colorado Restaurant Association have collaborated to create ToGoDenver.com, a free resource for Denver and Boulder restaurants that remain open for takeout and/or delivery service during the current dine-in shut down.

As statewide mandated dine-in closures have left Colorado restaurants scrambling to stay afloat and keep their staff employed, ToGoDenver.com offers restaurants free registration to list their current home or curbside delivery and takeout services available. Restaurant seekers can search listings by restaurant name, by neighborhood or by cuisine.

"This crisis is creating immense hardship for our local hospitality community, but this new resource gives us all an opportunity to do our part in supporting our local restaurants that have made Denver and Boulder among the finest culinary scenes in the country," said Richard W. Scharf, president and CEO of VISIT DENVER. "Our hope is that ToGoDenver.com will help fill an urgent need to aid local restaurants as they struggle to remain in businesses through these difficult times."

VISIT DENVER, which also hosts the annual Denver Restaurant Week, has created an easy portal for restaurants to upload their information. In addition, local media partners including The Denver Post, Westword, 5280 Magazine and 303 Magazine are also lending their support to the effort. Restaurants can submit their information to Westword here, and the Denver Post here. The hashtag #coloradocurbside on Instagram is also a helpful resource. More resources for restaurant seekers can be found at Westword, Denver Post, 5280 Magazine and 303 Magazine.\

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The government has passed new emergency powers, known as the Coronavirus Act 2020, aimed at helping ministers deal with the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak across the country.

The measures were drafted in record time and passed in both the House of Commons and House of Lords in just three days, before officially becoming English law at 1pm on Thursday.

The bill strengthens the powers of the state, local councils, police forces, and health professionals in a bid to more effectively enforce the nationwide lockdown and prevent people from undertaking non-essential travel or gathering in groups.

Although the government said an equalities impact assessment was done before the legislation was passed (although it is not publicly available) the Womens Budget Group, a charity which scrutinises government policy from a gender perspective, says the bill has gaps that will disproportionately impact women.

Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson, director of the Womens Budget Group (WBG), tells The Independent: Though significantly more men than women appear to be fatalities of the virus in the UK, there are specific concerns for women [in the bill].

So what are the issues impacting women in the bill and why are they a problem?

Women more likely to be made redundant

Women are more likely than men to be working in sectors now closed including retail, hospitality and teaching, says Dr Stephenson. As a result women are therefore at increased risk of incurring debt  including rent arrears  and poverty [during the ongoing coronavirus].

Women, particularly BAME, disabled women and single mothers are already disproportionately at risk of poverty in the UK so this is more likely to impact them the hardest.

Despite this, the WBG points out there are no provisions in the bill for those who are renting, facing rent arrears or eviction notices because of lost jobs or change in income.

Women are more likely to be self-employed

[At the time of publication there were no self-employment provisions - this has now been changed so the government will pay self-employed people up to 80 per cent of profits up to 2,500 per month].

There are currently no provisions in the bill for self-employed people who are out of work or whose earnings have fallen substantially as a result of the coronavirus.

Women make up the majority of the low paid (69 per cent), zero-hours contracts (54 per cent) and part time self-employed (59 per cent) according to the WBG.

Women are more likely to be in insecure and low paid employment like zero-hours contracts or a disguised self-employment which means they should be on the books as full-time employees but are not, explains Dr Stephenson.

Therefore the governments failure to provide for precarious workers is disproportionately distributed against women.

Women are less likely to get sick pay

There are currently no provisions in the bill to increase the level of Statutory Sick Pay  despite proposed amendments to raise it to 220 per week, it remained at just 94.25 a week in the final draft approved on Thursday.

This is not enough to live on, says Dr Stephenson. And women are less likely to be entitled to sick pay (because of higher self-employment) anyway.

"Despite being less likely to receive sick pay, women are also more likely to be working in professions exposed to the virus like health (77 per cent of workers), social care (80 per cent), teaching (63 per cent at primary level) and in supermarkets.

[And] there are anecdotal reports that PPE (personal protective equipment) designed for men is not keeping women safe. This also means they may be more likely to contract the virus and rely on statutory sick pay, although clearly it needs to be increased for everybodys benefit.

Women are more likely to be carers

There are no provisions in the bill to increase the carers allowance, which is currently just 66.15 per week. Women are overrepresented in care roles, both paid and unpaid and in the health sector. The majority of those in need of care are women too.

The work of women again is being unrecognised and undervalued. says Dr Stephenson.

Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Show all 15 1 /15 Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A rose is delivered by drone to a woman on Mother's Day in Jounieh, Lebanon AFP/Getty Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Women dance on their balcony as a radio station plays music for a flash mob to raise spirits in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A skeleton stands on a balcony in Frankfurt, Germany AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies The film Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna is projected on a building in Rome AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman uses a basket tied to a rope to pull a delivery of groceries up to her balcony in Naples, Italy EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Francesco Cellini plays for his neighbours from the rooftop terrace of his flat block in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman gestures from her balcony in Barcelona EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Cellist Karina Nunez performs for her neighbours at the balcony of her flat in Panama City Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Nash Petrovic live streams a set from his roof in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies People applaud medical workers from their balconies in Modiin, Israel Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A Brooklyn resident relaxes in a hammock hung on their balcony Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Residents toast during a "safe distance" aperitif time between neighbours in Anderlecht, Belgium Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Musician Adam Moser plays for neighbours from his balcony in Budapest, Hungary Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man and his son on their balcony in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man sits alone on a roof terrace in Rome Reuters

Women are more likely to be looking after children

The bill does not make any mention of increasing support for those now taking care of children full time through child benefit or paid parental leave.

And despite many families now all working remotely or working from home (as mandated by the government if you are not a key worker), women will continue to take on the majority of childcare responsibilities and budgeting for the family home, says the WBG.

Increases to Carers Allowance or Child Benefit would provide significant assistance to women, says Dr Stephenson.

Women are more likely to be trapped with abusers

There are also no provisions in the bill for victims and survivors of domestic abuse who will be isolated with their abuser  the majority of whom will be women.

Women are at significantly higher risk of domestic abuse. The lack of provisions (such as accommodation for women who become homeless) for survivors/victims as well as the threat of forcible isolation must be considered, says Dr Stephenson.

Particular groups of women including disabled women, migrant women and Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority women will face specific and often more severe impacts.
Getty Images

Illinois is following the lead of the federal government and extending its tax filing deadline for three months.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced the extension Wednesday, along with several programs to provide more than $90 million in financial relief to small businesses statewide.
Canadas agriculture sector is warning of higher prices and potential food shortages if it it isnt designated an essential service and allowed to do business as usual during the COVID-19 crisis.

Already people worried about food staples have emptied some grocery store shelves, although governments have all said supplies are secure.

Were in unknown territory. We have concerns about potential problems, said Todd Hames, president of the Alberta Wheat Commission. Thats why we need to have governments recognize that farming is an essential service supplying food for the world.

Maria picks broccoli at Stehly Farms Organics located in Valley Center, Calif., on March 25, 2020. (Ariana Drehsler /AFP via Getty Images)

Hames, who has a grain farm near Marwayne in east-central Alberta, said railways, the Port of Vancouver, and companies that supply fuel and farm implements also need to remain open with spring seeding only weeks away.

Its especially important since there have been delays in getting grain to market due to strikes and rail blockades, he said.

Just when prices were starting to see our seasonal rallies in the spring, coronavirus hit. Its just all gone to hell in a hand-basket, Hames said. Who knows what were in for this year?

Canadas cattle industry saw a sharp drop in prices when the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic was declared, although they have stabilized in recent days.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

In 2018, Canada exported $3.7 billion in beef and live animals to 56 countries, but three-quarters was shipped to the United States. The Canadian Cattlemens Association wants to make sure that market isnt affected and is relieved that borders are still open to beef as an essential good.

But first and foremost, said executive vice-president Dennis Laycraft, there must be recognition of efforts to keep an adequate supply of food available to Canadians.

Laycraft said the industry has been working with Agriculture Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to ensure meatpacking plants remain open.

Weve had good assurance that were going to be able to keep the plants up and operating at capacity, he said.

The federal government is exempting temporary foreign workers, including migrant farm workers, from some COVID-19 travel restrictions.

About 60,000mostly from Mexico, Jamaica and Guatemalacome to Canada annually, including 20,000 to Ontario alone.

Bill George, chair of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, said workable safety rules need to be developed for those workers.

We have to have some protocols that make sense. We view it as an essential service, but sometimes it would be very hard to maintain the six feet minimum separation that they want, George said.

We have to find a way around this or potentially look at relying on other countries to supply our [produce], and youre not going to be getting a lot out of Spain this year or the United States.

George said each day of delay increases the risk of crops not being planted in timesomething that Canadians could see reflected at the grocery store.

That would be my concern. Therell be shortages and the prices will be higher if it is available. Therell be a more limited selection for sure.

Not everyone in the agriculture sector is concerned at this point.

Jeff Lewandoski, who runs a cow-calf operation in Jenner, Alta., said any worries are six months away when young calves will be taken to market.

Our payday comes in the fall, so as long as weve got things half way back to normal by then, I dont think this is going to be much of an issue.

Lewandoski is more concerned about the longterm impact.

Its not the virus itself, he said. People panicking worries me and the decisions our government makes worries me that some of this might have some longlasting effects on our whole economy.

Epoch Times staff contributed to this report.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 01:41:29|Editor: huaxia

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JERUSALEM, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Benny Gantz, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's main rival, was selected on Thursday as the parliament's speaker amid an emerging deal on a unity government with Netanyahu.

Gantz, leader of the centrist Blue and White party, was backed by 74 lawmakers, while 18 lawmakers voted against him and 28 abstained, the spokesperson's office of the parliament, or Knesset, said in a statement.

In his first speech as the speaker, addressing an empty planum hall due to the COVID-19 crisis, Gantz said he is "trying every possible way to advance an emergency unity government" with Netanyahu's Likud.

The emerging unity deal has caused a rift in Blue and White, an alliance of three factions, leading to its apparent break up on Thursday. Two of Gantz's senior partners announced they oppose a unity government with Netanyahu as its prime minister, due to the looming corruption trial of the long-time leader. Netanyahu is facing charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate criminal cases.

The two, Yair Lapid, a former finance minister, and Moshe Yaalon, a former defense minister, had officially requested the Knesset to split Blue and White and form instead two separate factions.

Gantz vowed "to bring back the Knesset to normal and routine functioning," referring to the shutdown imposed by his predecessor, Yuli Edelstein. Edelstein, a Netanyahu ally, halted parliamentary work for about a week in order to avoid a vote for the selection of his replacement. On Wednesday, Edelstein resigned, bluntly defying a Supreme Court decision ordering him to hold the vote.

The moves came amid unprecedented political turmoil and as the nation is struggling to halt the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus.

Israel's political arena has been paralyzed over the past year due to three consecutive rounds of elections that produced inconclusive results in less than a year. Both Gantz's centrist Blue and White party and Netanyahu's rightwing Likud party did not gain enough votes to form a government coalition.
China sells useless virus test kits to Spain

Chinese Embassy in Spain says a company that sold ineffective coronavirus test kits does not have an official license.

Spain purchased 9,000 ineffective rapid test kits, a Spanish official confirmed on Thursday.

Earlier Thursday, Spanish daily El Pais reported that the tests Spain had purchased from the Chinese company Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology were only able to detect the virus in 30% of the cases.

THE COMPANY WILL EXCHANGE THE TESTS

With this number, it doesnt make sense to use these tests, an anonymous source that used the tests told El Pais, adding that tests should at least have a 80% level of sensitivity.

When asked about the useless tests in a press conference, Fernando Simon, Spains director of emergency health services, said the country has procured rapid coronavirus tests from a variety of suppliers.

A company sent an initial batch of 9,000 tests it was shown that the specifications of this batch of tests did not correspond to the quality certificates. So, we returned that batch of tests. The company will exchange them for another type of test, Simon said.

Minutes before Simons statement, the Chinese Embassy in Spain tweeted that the company Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology had still not obtained an official license from Chinas National Administration of Medical Products.

The embassy added that none of the donations from China or Alibaba to Spain have included that companys products.
Health bosses say they don't have enough ventilators to cope with an imminent surge of coronavirus patients - as they desperately try to acquire more units.

New South Wales has become the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in Australia and case numbers are rapidly rising.

The World Health Organisation has said that 14 per cent of people who get coronavirus will have serious complications including viral pneumonia.

A further five per cent will need critical care in an intensive care unit, where most will need oxygen from a ventilator machine to treat acute respiratory distress syndrome.

NSW Chief Medical Officer Dr Kerry Chant said on Thursday that the state has about 500 ventilator machines.

Demand is expected to outstrip the number of machines available in less than three weeks.

The World Health Organisation says 5 percent of coronavirus patients will need intensive care. Ventilator machines (stock image) are needed for the acute respiratory distress syndrome caused by the virus in severe cases

Dr Norman Swan warned on Monday that Australia would have more critical coronavirus patients than there are ICU beds by April 10.

There can be a delay of a week or more between the onset of symptoms and admission to hospital, and then a further delay as the patient's condition deteriorates enough to need intensive care.

Once in ICU they may need to remain ventilated there for a week or even more.

ANZIC statistics show in 2018, the proportion of ICU patients needing a ventilator was 35.4 percent.

With more than a third of ICU patients already needing ventilator machines for other conditions, the additional coronavirus demand patients means many more machines will be needed.

Most ventilators in Australia are imported from the US, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland with smaller suppliers in China and South Korea, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

However, all of those countries are battling their own coronavirus outbreaks, leaving the availability of new machines to purchase in doubt.

Dr Chant said NSW Health was working with the Federal Government to explore 'a range of options' with industry to get more ventilators.

'Lets get in place doubling, then move to our tripling, and then our quadrupling, we are doing everything we can to have the greatest capacity appropriate,' she told the Daily Telegraph on Thursday.

Daily Mail Australia has asked NSW Health exactly what is being done to source more ventilators, and whether factories are being asked to be retasked to manufacture them.
ST. LOUIS  As Mayor Lyda Krewson and other city officials deal with the daily challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, theyre also keeping a wary eye on how the related economic slowdown will affect tax revenues and ultimately city services.

But they say its too soon to know exactly how spending allocations will play out in the coming year.

The mayor has said this outbreak is going to be economically devastating, mayoral spokesman Jacob Long said Wednesday. I dont know that we have enough information to put a dollar sign on this (regarding tax revenue). We know its not going to be good.

Long added, however, that the mayor remains committed to carrying out increased pay for civil-service employees. The Board of Aldermen approved legislation just a few weeks ago for much of the workforce and follow-up measures covering police and firefighters were to follow.
He was busy working on his Hollywood star physique, but his dog wanted to be part of the fun.

Justin Theroux shared a sweet video to his Instagram Stories on Wednesday of his Pit Bull mix Kuma trying to join in as he did a series of push ups.

The 48-year-old Leftovers star didn't seem to mind the interruption from the loving pup, whom he adopted in 2018 in the aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Harvey.

Helping out: Justin Theroux, 48, shared a sweet video to his Instagram Stories on Wednesday of his Pit Bull mix Kuma trying to join in as he did a series of push ups

Justin filmed himself head-on for the Insta Stories clip as he settled in for some push ups to aid his bulging biceps.

He was dressed casually for his workout in a Britney Spears 2001 tour tank top with black Adidas track pants and black trainers, along with a charcoal ski cap.

He'd barely gotten in two reps, set to MC Serch's Back To The Grill, before Kuma leaned in to lick his face as he moved up and down.

But the gray Pit needed more affection, so the American Psycho actor stopped what he was doing to let her jump up on her hind leg for a hug and some petting.

Looking for love: Justin was dressed sportily in Adidas track pants and a Britney Spears 2001 tour tank top as he showed off his bulging biceps, but Kuma was in desperate need of attention

Affectionate: After she licked him uncontrollably, Justin paused to let her climb up on him for some kisses while he petted her backside

In the way: But even after he started again, she slid under him to force him not to squish her

Justin went back to his push ups, but now Kuma arched her back and laid underneath him so that he had to tap her on each down stroke.

The actor eventually gave up and just settled for some kisses from his loyal dog.

Kuma has been a fixture in Justin's life since 2018, when he adopted her after she was left homeless and alone in Conroe, Texas, following Hurricane Harvey.

At the time, Kuma was named Sylvia, and she suffered from multiple medical issues that caused her fur to fall out, revealing the pink skin underneath, according to The Dodo.

Her eyes were also nearly crusted shut due to mange caused by a parasite.

Heartbreaking: Justin adopted Kuma, then called Sylvia, from Texas in 2018. She was left homeless after Hurricane Harvey from August 2017, and her fur was falling out and her eyes were nearly crusted shut from mange

Fast friends: The Leftovers star adopted her while in Texas after seeing an online ad about the newly healthy Pit Bull mix in need of a home. He renamed her Kuma, meaning 'bear' in Japanese

But after intensive therapy and treatment for her medical issues, Sylvia's lustrous gray coat returned in full, and she put on weight and muscle.

When a notice was posted online about the Pit Bull mix in need of a forever home, the local shelter got a notice from the president of the Austin-based shelter Austin Pets Alive that a VIP client was interested in the dog.

The VIP turned out to be Justin, who was in Texas at the time and made the multi-hour drive to visit Sylvia, whom he'd rename Kuma, Japanese for 'bear.'

The two have become inseparable since then, and the actor is regularly spotted out and about with her.

Inseparable: The two are now nearly inseparable, and he's regularly spotted out on walks with her. She joined him in a February campaign to get the Denver city council to repeal a Pit Bull ban

She's also a visible symbol of his commitment to dog's and their rights, particularly Pit Bulls.

In February, Justin shared a photo of himself and Kuma sitting down for a morning coffee as he urged the Denver city council to repeal a ban on Pit Bulls.

'All they want is the right to be available for adoption from your shelter facilities, get registered, microchipped and be LEGAL... so they can be the the incredible Denver citizens that Kuma and I know they can be,' he wrote.

But Justin sounded heartbroken after the Pit Bull ban continued in Denver due to a veto from Mayor Michael Hancock.

'A special apology is in order from you @mayorhancock to all the Denver animal control workers who have the truly nightmarish job of putting these beautiful dogs down on repeat in service of your ignorant policy,' he wrote.

'Maybe skip a Broncos game and be courageous enough to attend even one of these murders at YOUR city shelter, to understand the impact of your policy.'
The picture shows the comprehensive supply ship Kekexili Lake (Hull 968) attached to the North China Sea Fleet under the PLA Navy.

By Li Yinchuan

QINGDAO, Mar. 26 --On the afternoon of March 25, the 33rd escort taskforce of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy, consisting of the guided-missile destroyer Xining (Hull 117), the guided-missile frigate Weifang (Hull 550), and the comprehensive supply ship Kekexili Lake (Hull 968), returned to a military port in Qingdao after successfully completing its escort missions in the Gulf of Aden.

On August 29, 2019, the 33rd Chinese naval escort taskforce set sail for the Gulf of Aden and the waters off Somalia to perform escort missions. The taskforce has consecutively worked for 210 days and escorted 24 batches of 41 ships from China and other countries, ensuring the safety of the escorted ships and the taskforce itself.

During the missions, the taskforce took part in the Multinational Maritime Exercise with Russia and South Africa, which enhanced the friendship and military cooperation between the three countries, demonstrating the determination of all parties to work together to address maritime threats and challenges and maintaining maritime security.

On its journey home, the taskforce also made visits to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bangladesh, and Thailand, fully demonstrating the good image of the PLA and helping strengthen and develop the friendly relations with relevant countries.
There was plenty of elbow room at the dais for Wednesday nights meeting of Easton City Council.

City Administrator Luis Campos sat on the audiences far right, with city Clerk Rita Messa on the far left. In the middle, Mayor Sal Panto Jr. used the live-streamed meeting, in part, to urge city residents to take seriously the governors stay-at-home order taking effect at 8 that night for Northampton, Lehigh and Monroe counties in the battle against the coronavirus.

This is a make or break moment as COVID-19 is one of the greatest public health threats of our lifetime, Panto said, using the name for the illness caused by the coronavirus pandemic. "Now is the time for bold, urgent and transparent leadership, not false claims and political games.

But I think it is fair to say that this has been a different but still a very challenging time for all of us. I want to assure all our residents and businesses that your city is fully committed to helping each other through this period of uncertainty and I am tirelessly committed to making sure that Easton comes out of this better, stronger and with more community spirit than ever. We are Rovers and we will remain Rover strong!

The other six members of council participated in the regularly scheduled meeting via telephone, and the public could weigh in or ask questions via email or by calling in, as well.

Lehigh Valley governments are increasingly turning to live-stream and other forms of remote meetings as the coronavirus count continues to climb and a stay-at-home order takes effect through April 6.

The Easton Historic District Commissions review of the parking deck proposed for North Fourth Street is postponed until May at the earliest. (The Pine Street garage is going to need another round of repairs estimated at $200,000 this year to keep it open, Panto revealed Wednesday night.) Also put off until May is the Easton Planning Commissions review of a controversial overhaul to the citys zoning and land development regulations, the mayor said.

Across the Delaware River, Phillipsburg announced the cancellation of Thursdays planning board meeting, and has closed off Town Hall to the public.

To the west, Bethlehem canceled all public meetings through April 3, when officials will reassess the situation.

Bethlehem Mayor Bob Donchez on Wednesday announced the closure of City Hall until further notice. Allentown city government buildings are also closed to the public, officials there announced Wednesday. Easton City Hall has been closed to the public since March 16, though all three cities are having staff members conduct city business by telephone or email.

Among the business conducted Wednesday night by Easton City Council were approvals of contracts with three vendors to take over processing of parking credit card payments, accounts payable and collection of real estate taxes and monthly utility bills.

Council also extended Panto's March 19 state of emergency "until such time that the COVID-19 epidemic is curtailed." It offers the city broad flexibility to keep its government operating, and extends city deadlines for city taxes such as real estate (to Aug. 1 without penalty).

Easton's been a different city than it was just a few weeks ago, as social distancing recommendations built up to Wednesday's stay-at-home order in the effort to deprive the coronavirus of the human hosts it needs to continue its spread.

"It's like Easton I remember from 20 years ago and we certainly don't want to go back to that," Panto said.

He touched on Easton efforts to combat the virus, including County Seat Spirits and Eight Oaks Farm Distillery -- which have a presence in Easton at the Simon Silk Mill and Easton Public Market, respectively -- converting their production lines from making booze to churning out hand sanitizer.

Kaplan Awnings and Mercantile Home have joined the army of sewing machine operators making face masks for health care workers.

But above all, Panto stressed the need to take the coronavirus threat seriously. He called on city residents hosting visitors from New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic, to make sure they self-quarantine for 14 days to see if they develop the fever, cough and shortness of breath that are hallmarks of the viral infection.

"There is a saying that when the enemy is at the gates, its not a time to panic," Panto said. "Rather, its a time to review our strategy, modify and update it as necessary, and work together to get through this challenge.

"My assurance to you is that we will get through this challenge."

You can watch city councils meeting from Wednesday night below, and you can find future meetings live-streamed at easton-pa.com.

For more information on the coronavirus, consult your state health department at health.pa.gov or covid19.nj.gov and the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover or a personal story you want to share.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. If theres anything about this story that needs attention, please email him. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
C oronavirus deaths in America topped 1,000 today as the Senate passed the biggest economic stimulus bill in US history in an attempt to cope with the fallout from the epidemic.

Lawmakers finally mustered the votes to fast-track the $2 trillion rescue package after days of partisan bickering, with President Donald Trump tweeting: Congratulations AMERICA!

The latest official US coronavirus figures show more than 250 infected people dying in a single day, taking the national death toll to at least 1,035.

The rescue bill  passed unanimously by the Senate but still to be ratified by the House of Representatives and signed into law by Mr Trump  includes $1,200 for every taxpayer on less than $75,000 a year, with $500 for each child.

It also increases unemployment benefits for the millions made jobless during the outbreak, a $367 billion programme to help small businesses pay staff they have had to lay off and $500 billion to keep companies afloat.

A $150 billion cash injection for the hospital system should also provide more beds for those seriously ill with the virus. Its been a long hard road with a remarkable number of twists and turns, but for the sake of millions of Americans, it will be worth it, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.

In New York, the worst-hit US state, Governor Andrew Cuomo said there were signs that social distancing was paying off. Hospital admissions from coronavirus in the state are now doubling every five days rather than every two, and Westchester County, which had the first cases in New York, has shown a significant decrease in new infections.

The evidence suggests that the density control measures may be working, said Mr Cuomo. But he added: Were still on the way up the mountain.

Amid fears of a surge in victims in New York City, workers were today putting up rows of white tents as a makeshift morgue outside Bellevue Hospital. The US has the third-largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases after Italy and China, with 68,572.
A supermarket in Pennsylvania was forced to throw away $35,000 worth of food after a woman deliberately coughed over it in a twisted coronavirus prank.

Gerrity's Supermarket in Luzerne County said the woman coughed over the store's fresh produce, as well as a section of their bakery, meat case and other groceries, meaning employees had no choice but to throw everything out and clean the shelves.

The prank comes at a time where shoppers are concerned about dwindling store supplies as people stock up on groceries amid the COVID-19 health crisis.

A supermarket in Pennsylvania was forced to throw away $35,000 worth of food after a woman deliberately coughed over it in a twisted coronavirus prank

Gerrity's Supermarket in Luzerne County said the woman coughed over the store's fresh produce, as well as a section of their bakery, meat case and other groceries on Wednesday afternoon

The woman entered the store at around 2.20pm on Wednesday afternoon before carrying out the apparent prank. Once the supermarket workers noticed what the woman was doing, they quickly escorted her out of the store and contacted the police.

The supermarket co-owner said he had 'little doubt' that the woman was doing it as a 'very twisted prank' but decided to throw out the affected food and disinfect the shelves over concerns for the health of the other customers.

'While there is little doubt this woman was doing it as a very twisted prank, we will not take any chances with the health and well-being of our customers,' co-owner Joe Fasula said.

'We had no choice but to throw out all product she came in contact with. Working closely with the Hanover Township health inspector, we identified every area that she was in, we disposed of the product and thoroughly cleaned and disinfected everything.'

The supermarket co-owner said he had 'little doubt' that the woman was doing it as a 'very twisted prank' but decided to throw out the affected food and disinfect the shelves over concerns for the health of the other customers

Supermarket employees disinfect the shelves after a woman coughed over them in an apparent coronavirus prank on Wednesday

According to Mr Fasula, the woman is known by police to be a 'chronic problem' to the community.

The incident has since been passed to the District Attorney's Office, who are planning to lay charges against the woman in question.

Police will also test her for coronavirus, although Mr Fasula does not believe she has the disease.

'The only silver lining to this travesty is that it gave us the unfortunate opportunity to test our protocols and demonstrate how seriously we take your safety. At one point, we had over 15 employees involved in the disposal and clean up,' the supermarket owner added.

It is not the first time supermarkets have been troubled by sick coronavirus pranksters. A Missouri man was filmed licking bottles on a grocery store shelf earlier this week.

The revolting clip saw the man saying, 'who's scared of coronavirus?', before running his tongue along the shelf.

A Missouri man was filmed licking bottles on a grocery store shelf earlier this week

A subway passenger was arrested in Belgium for appearing to lick or suck his fingers before wiping them on a train's handrail

In the short clip posted online, he can be seen bending down to lick the toiletry items on the shelf while looking at the camera.

Alongside the footage, the caption states: 'I'm a nasty motherf****r'.

A subway passenger was arrested in Belgium for appearing to lick or suck his fingers before wiping them on a train's handrail.

The unidentified man, who appears intoxicated, was filmed removing his mask before bringing his hand to his mouth and licking it.
A huge package of potentially hundreds of billions of pounds of support for the self-employed will be unveiled today after ministers came under pressure from MPs.

Boris Johnson said that while the Government was putting our arms around every worker, he could not guarantee that the self-employed would not face any kind of hardship at all.

But the Prime Minister said he wanted to get parity of support so the self-employed could have similar levels of protection to workers with jobs.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is expected to set out the package supporting self-employed workers at a press conference on Thursday

He told the Commons yesterday: There are particular difficulties with those who are not on PAYE schemes... I think the whole House understands. We are bringing forward a package to ensure that everybody gets the support that they need.

Asked what this would involve, he said: I cannot, in all candour, promise the House that we will be able to get through this crisis without any kind of hardship at all.

But he added: We will do whatever we can to support the self-employed, just as we are putting our arms around every single employed person in this country.

Last week Chancellor Rishi Sunak unveiled a plan that would see the state pay up to 80 per cent of the wages of employees if firms agree to keep them on.

But there are, as yet, no measures for the estimated five million self-employed people, who currently have to rely on welfare payments of around 94 a week.

Mr Sunak is expected to unveil a huge scheme to help subsidise the incomes of self-employed people whose work has evaporated because of the coronavirus, Government sources said.

He is likely to set out the package at a press conference today.

It will feature a bespoke mix of measures but will include an element of direct income subsidy in the form of non-repayable grants.

Sources acknowledge that it wont be direct parity in terms of maths but it will be parity in terms of fairness.

This is partly due to the range of workers in the self-employed bracket. While many have lost their income, others have more work.

Many earn low wages in the hospitality and leisure sectors, but corporate lawyers and barristers on six-figure salaries are also self-employed.

Government sources said that in addition they did not want the taxpayer to have to support the incomes of people who have other jobs.

One source said: With the employee scheme, people are either furloughed or they are not. With the self-employed its different  work may have dried up right now but that might change, and this [lockdown] could go on for months.

The sums involved will be huge because of the scale of the problem and will run to certainly tens of billions, possibly hundreds, according to the source.

Mr Sunak has consulted several organisations representing the self-employed over the measures.

A spokesman for one of them, the association of Independent Professionals and the Self Employed, said: Were quite optimistic. Weve been calling for a fund to guarantee the income of most self-employed people who are going to lose out in this crisis.

'Were calling for 80 per cent of the wages of the self-employed, the same as employees, to be protected. At Prime Ministers Questions yesterday, MPs from all parties lined up to ask what was being done to help the self-employed.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said: The self-employed are having to choose whether they go to work or stay at home or face losing their entire livelihood, relying instead on an overstretched welfare system which could pay as little as 94 per week.

Asked yesterday why the package was taking so long to arrive, Mr Johnson said: We have increased universal credit by 1,000 a year.

We have deferred income tax self-assessments for the self-employed until July, and are deferring VAT until the next quarter. There is also access to Government-financed loans.

But there are particular complexities of the self-employed that do need to be addressed; they are not all in the same position.

London mayor Sadiq Khan has said the lack of support for the self-employed has contributed to the numbers travelling into the capital for work despite the lockdown.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank has estimated that one in three people in self-employment  1.7million workers  are at risk of losing their income.
One night last November, Jon Eagle Sr., tribal historian of the Standing Rock Sioux, spoke at a hearing before the North Dakota Public Service Commission. Three years had passed since the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, and though life on the prairie had returned to some semblance of normalcy, concerns of a potential oil spill remained. Were still here, an ancient people, deeply connected to our environment, deeply connected to this land, this water, and this earth, Eagle said.

The hearing, held in the sleepy ranch town of Linton, would determine whether the volume of Bakken crude oil moving through the Dakota Access Pipeline would increase to 1.1 million barrels dailydouble the flow for which it was originally designed. Two hundred and fifty miles north, in Edinburg, oil oozed from a rupture in a different pipeline.

I sat in the auditorium and took notes. For ten hours, energy company officials had assured commissioners that the proposed expansion was safe, while a group of Indigenous water protectorsmany of whom had boarded a bus at five that morning to be therewaited for their turn to speak.

Eagle was the first Indigenous person the North Dakota energy commissioners had heard from all day. John Pretty Bear, a Standing Rock tribal councilman, was the second. Since the pipeline has been operational, our community has endured the daily stress of an impending oil spill, he said. Doubling the capacity only doubles our distress. It took nearly six hours more to record the testimony of every Lakota citizen present, making it the longest public hearing in the commissions history.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, impeachment inquiries were getting underway. Through the lens of the national media, that was the only hearing that mattered. Except for a swift summary filed by the regional bureau of the Associated Press, the DAPL proceedinga sequel to a global event that spotlighted environmental racism, Indigenous treaty abrogation, and government collusion with a corporate energy projectwas totally overshadowed by the politics of Donald Trump.

Journalists were missing a critical moment for the people of Standing Rockone arguably as important as the 2016 resistance. In this way, the established press continued its pattern of climate coverage, wherein solid enterprise reporting about environmental affairs takes a back seat to breaking-news assignments about extreme weather events. Standing Rock had been no different. Journalists only traveled to the reservation after police doused demonstrators with water on a subfreezing night, an event so shocking that it made the anti-pipeline resistance impossible to ignore.

The oversight also illustrated the medias myopic gaze, its stubborn failure to see the importance of Indigenous stories. Within the conversation about climate change, too little attention is paid to the people who possess wisdom about sustaining the land. The catastrophic bushfires in Australia, predicted by Aborigines years ago, provide one recent example.

Another: Berta Caceres, a Honduran Indigenous environmentalist who was assassinated in March 2016, just before the DAPL protests. I met up with Caceres early that year, in La Esperanza, where she was hiding out from government threats. I attempted to cover her situation, but my pitches were denied; it was only after her death that editors became interested in her story.

To this day, Im burdened by the thought that I should have pressed harder to publish before her murder. When I traveled to Standing Rock a few months later, I demanded from the start that editors recognize the importance of the demonstrations. Caceress death had made something clear to me: the invisibility and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples is inextricable from the harm inflicted on the planet.

Standing Rock represents the most vivid example in recent history of the links between aggressive natural-resource extraction in North America and human brutality, a pattern well documented since the time of the 1840s gold rush in present-day California. Then as now, women and girls have borne the brunt of the abuse. On the reservation borderlands of the Bakken oil fields, in North Dakota, the appearance, in the mid-2000s, of hundreds of male oil and gas workersliving in temporary housing often referred to as man campsled to a dramatic increase in rapes, sex trafficking, and the disappearances and deaths of Native American women. By 2016, crime had gotten so bad that the FBI opened up a new field office nearby.

Only in the past year has the lopsided rate of gender violence in Indian Country finally received the media attention it deserves. But an uptick in readership, on any topic, doesnt guarantee substantive journalism. Few if any publications have held the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation accountable for its complicity in the abuse visited upon its own women in the Bakken, or revealed that the majority of oil production occurs on the tribes trust lands. The Indigenous press, too, falls short; three-quarters of Indigenous media platforms are owned by tribal governments or advocacy groups. The result is coverage that tends to be dictated by political agendas rather than the facts.

Tribal citizens are among the most vulnerable people in the country to climate change. Among Native communities in Alaska, as many as thirty coastal villages will have to be relocated to escape rising ocean waters. Yet, for all the coverage addressing this slow-growing tragedy, little scrutiny has been cast on the contributions of Alaska Native Corporationsthe states largest private property owners, established specifically to capitalize on extracting resources from their lands.

According to the Government Accountability Office, todays tribal nations and their citizens collectively represent the third-largest owner of extractive resources such as oil, gas, and coal. For sovereign tribal economies faced with limited opportunities for revenue, these deposits are an attractive draw. This means Indigenous peoples must contend not only with encroachment from multinational corporations, but also with their own leaderships exploitation of the land. We need clear-eyed reporting on the complexities of these actorsor we risk distorting the public understanding of communities affected by climate change, and of those responsible for it.

Tribal citizens are among the most vulnerable people in the country to climate change.

When the public hearing in Linton concluded, well past midnight, I headed back to the hotel where I was staying on the Standing Rock reservation. As I drove, I wrestled with disappointment in the industry Ive worked in for twenty-one years. The Standing Rock protests had inspired a push by newsrooms big and small to enhance their coverage of Indigenous affairs, and yet on this day, almost no onenot even Indian Country Today, with its recent AP partnershipwas present. Once again, those who raised their voices loudest in a call for environmental justice were muted by the press.

I crossed the Missouri River, vibrant in the moonlight, and thought of the poem Anchorage, by Joy Harjo, a Muscogee Creek citizen and the current US poet laureate. Who would believe the fantastic and terrible story of our survival; those who were never meant to survive, she wrote of Indigenous resilience. In our contemporary emergency, Indigenous peoples are, as ever, on the front lines. It will take fortitude to tell the stories of a warming planet. Unless journalists know that the climate crisis is an Indigenous story, were likely to receive a warped representation of it. And that is perhaps the biggest emergency of all.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Jenni Monet (MA '12) is an independent journalist and a tribal citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna who writes about Indigenous rights and injustice in the US and around the world.
On your mark, get set, go! The race is on to find an effective vaccine against COVID-19, the novel coronavirus that has spread to 471,000 people around the world and claimed more than 21,000 lives.

According to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) chief executive Dr. Richard Hatchett, the current pandemic rivals the deadly 1918 Spanish flu, and thus finding a defense against the virus is of utmost importance. There is a real sense of urgency...because the threat we are facing is unprecedented in the last 100 years in terms of its speed and potential severity, he commented.

As Hatchett estimates that the advancement of a vaccine at the necessary speed will cost $2 billion over the next 12-18 months, its no wonder Wall Street is watching the names taking on this formidable foe. Bearing this in mind, we turned to TipRanks database to get all the data on three biotech stocks racing to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. The platform showed Wall Street pros believe that among these names, some appear more poised to emerge as a long-term winner. Heres what we found out.

Dynavax Technologies Corporation (DVAX)

Using Toll-like Receptor (TLR) biology to modulate the immune system, Dynavax develops innovative vaccines for a number of diseases, with one vaccine against hepatitis B already on the market, Heplisav-B. Since entering the COVID-19 vaccine race, the analyst community has been buzzing about this biotech.

DVAX told investors on March 24 that it agreed to a research collaboration with private China-based company, Clover Biopharmaceuticals, to develop an experimental vaccine to prevent COVID-19. As per the terms of the agreement, DVAX will offer the technology used in Heplisav-B, toll-like receptor 9 agonist adjuvant CpG 1018, in order to advance Clovers vaccine candidate in preclinical studies. Clovers vaccine is a protein-based coronavirus vaccine (COVID-19 S-Trimer) and uses its proprietary Trimer-Tag technology.

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If that wasnt enough, DVAX already stated on March 2 that it will collaborate with the University of Queensland and the CEPI to develop a vaccine candidate for COVID-19. Like its development efforts with Clover, the company will provide its CpG 1018 technology, with a clinical trial set to start in mid-2020.

While H.C. Wainwright analyst Edward White doesnt factor these collaborations into his model, he noted, ...we view them as an upside option on the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Expounding on his valuation, the five-star analyst added, We use the net present value of our revenue forecast through 2028, a discount rate of 20%, and a 2x price/sales multiple. Our P/S multiple of 2x is in-line with Dynavaxs peers at approximately 2-5x. We estimate Heplisav-B sales of $57 million in 2020 and $236 million in 2028.

To this end, White maintained both a Buy recommendation and $12 price target. Should the target be met, shares stand to gain 263% in the next twelve months. (To watch Whites track record, click here)

What does the rest of the Street think about DVAXs prospects? It turns out that other pros agree with the H.C. Wainwright analyst. Receiving 100% Street support, this biotech earns a Strong Buy consensus rating. At $16, the average price target comes in above Whites forecast and suggests 356% upside potential. (See Dynavax price targets and analyst ratings on TipRanks)

Inovio Pharmaceuticals (INO)

Biotech Inovio Pharmaceuticals has already been in the race to develop a vaccine against COVID-19, with it claiming that it had designed its candidate, INO-4800, only three hours after Chinese researchers published the SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence on January 10. It also received a $5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Now, its grabbing headlines for another collaboration, and Wall Street is taking notice.

On March 24, Inovio announced that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) had given privately-held contract development manufacturing organization (CDMO), Ology Bioservices, an $11.9 million contract to partner with INO on a COVID-19 vaccine candidate. Ology will work with the biotech on DNA technology transfer in order to manufacture INO-4800 as well as quickly deliver the vaccine to the DOD for clinical trials or even emergency use. This development is a significant step forward as INO is gearing up for a Phase 1 trial in the U.S. next month.

According to H.C. Wainwrights Raghuram Selvaraju, ...this partnership would scale up Inovios manufacturing capacity and provide sufficient vaccines in a timely fashion to protect the nations military personnel against current and future outbreaks.

Selvaraju points out that there are a few advantages of DNA vaccines that could give INO an edge over its peers. Unlike other players in the race, its vaccines can be stored at room temperature for one year or at 37C for one week, eliminating the need for cold chain logistics. In addition, INOs injection device is battery-operated and highly portable, making the candidate easy to transport and deploy in any place around the world. The analyst noted, Accordingly, we believe INO-4800 could be ready for a Phase 2 trial and available for emergency use as of end-2020.

Even though this race features many strong competitors Selvaraju believes, ...the Moderna, BioNTech and Inovio vaccine programs are the furthest along and anticipate that their testing shall be prioritized by regulators and government agencies in order to attempt to effectively combat the crisis.

Taking this into consideration, Selvaraju reiterated a Buy rating and $13 price target. This conveys his confidence in INOs ability to soar 95% in the next year. (To watch Selvarajus track record, click here)

Looking at the consensus breakdown, 4 Buys and 2 Holds issued in the last three months coalesce into a Moderate Buy consensus rating. With a $10 average price target, the upside potential lands at 45%. (See Inovio stock analysis on TipRanks)

Vir Biotechnology (VIR)

With the help of its antibody platform, Vir Biotechnology was able to select a lead clinical vaccine candidate for COVID-19. As a result, it has climbed 62% higher in the last month, attracting significant attention from members of the Street.

The companys lead candidate was designed using an antibody-based approach that binds a conserved epitope on SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), which is shared with SARS-CoV-1, the most closely related coronavirus to COVID-19. This could allow it to be effective even as the strains mutate. After it identified the experimental vaccine candidate, VIR transferred it to WuXi Biologics and Biogen in an attempt to expedite development, with a clinical trial slated to begin in 3-5 months.

Adding to the good news, Cowen analyst Phil Nadeau points out that Vir modified the Fc region of the candidate to potentially expand the half-life of the compound and also made a vaccinal modification to allow for the generation of CD8+ memory T cells to the virus to potentially provide long-term immunity.

Explaining the implications of these changes, the analyst wrote, This modification would allow the therapy to function both as a therapeutic for those infected and also a prophylactic vaccine... Vir envisions that its clinical program will explore use of antibodies (1) In the prevention of disease; (2) The prevention of progression to severe disease; (3) The treatment of severe disease, and (4) the development of vaccines.

As the biotech has successfully identified other antibodies from patients that have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1 and is using its RNAi platform as well as its innate immunity platform to identify other potential candidates, Nadeau has high hopes for VIR. We are encouraged that Vir is making rapid progress toward clinical testing of candidates for the treatment of COVID-19... Moreover, as Vir is targeting a region conserved between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1, the candidate could have implications for not only the current pandemic, but may have utility in the future both as a vaccine, and a therapeutic should other coronaviruses emerge, he commented.

Based on all of the above, Nadeau stayed with the bulls. While he reiterated an Outperform rating, he declined to set a specific price target. (To watch Nadeaus track record, click here)

When it comes to the rest of the Street, other analysts take more of a cautious approach. 2 Buys, 1 Hold and 2 Sells add up to a Hold analyst consensus. It should also be noted that the $29.33 average price target implies 5% downside potential. (See Vir Biotechnology stock analysis on TipRanks)
Trump has admitted it is not looking good for retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, now presumed dead in Iran.

In a coronavirus taskforce press conference on Wednesday evening, the president said that he assumed the American had died in custody.

Mr Levinson disappeared in Iran in 2007 while on an unauthorized CIA mission. Government officials initially claimed he was travelling in a personal capacity but then six years later officials admitted it was on government business.

'It's not looking good. We feel terribly for the family', Mr Trump said.

He added Iran hadn't yet confirmed Mr Levinson's death.

Mr Trump's comments came an hour after Mr Levinson's own family released a statement.

We recently received information from U.S. officials that has led both them and us to conclude that our wonderful husband and father died while in Iranian custody. We don't know when or how he died, only that it was prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, they said in a statement.

It is impossible to describe our pain. Our family will spend the rest of our lives without the most amazing man we have ever known, a new reality that is inconceivable to us. His grandchildren will never meet him. They will only know him through the stories we tell them.

Those who are responsible for what happened to Bob Levinson, including those in the U.S. government who for many years repeatedly left him behind, will ultimately receive justice for what they have done. We will spend the rest of our lives making sure of this, and the Iranian regime must know we will not be going away. We expect American officials, as well as officials around the world, to continue to press Iran to seek Bob's return, and to ensure those Iranian officials involved are held accountable.'

The family thanked the Trump administration for their assistance in trying to return Levinson home and called the former agent an 'American hero'.

Bob Levinson was a truly remarkable individual - the best husband, father, brother, grandfather and friend anyone could ever ask for. He was an American hero - a true patriot, and his compassion and kindness knew no bounds, the family said. We will miss his warmth, humor, and wisdom, but most of all, we will miss the deep and unconditional love he had for each one of us. He will never be forgotten - we will make sure of it.
T hese photos show the stark contrast on the UK's streets from bustling thoroughfares to desolate strips following the coronavirus lockdown.

With the public only allowed to leave their homes for activities including exercise, medical reasons, buying essentials and for work if they must, usually packed areas have been left deserted.

In the capital, Millennium Bridge, normally a popular site for tourists and commuters alike, with its sweeping views often perused by visitors, was left completely empty.

Outside Buckingham Palace - so often swarmed by those wishing to glimpse the royal residence - a photo showed just one person.

London during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures 1 /66 London during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures A woman jogging near City Hall, London, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown PA An image of Queen Elizabeth II and quotes from her broadcast on Sunday to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA A pedestrian walks past a billboard reading "Please believe these days will pass" on Broadway Market in east London AFP via Getty Images Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge Getty Images Boris Johnson Jeremy Selwyn Sun-seekers cool off in the water and sunbathe on the riverbank at Hackney Marshes in east London AFP via Getty Images Ed Davey is shown on screens as he speaks via videolink during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, London PA A herd of fallow deer graze on the lawns in front of a housing estate in Harold Hill in east London AFP via Getty Images A woman wearing a mask crosses a bridge over Camden Lock, London PA An empty Millenium Bridge PA A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" is seen on an underground station platform Getty Images People push to enter the Niketown shop in Londo AP Jo Proudlove and daughter Eve, 9, follow the daily online "PE with Joe" Joe Wickes' exercise class on "Fancy dress Friday Reuters Waterloo station looking empty PA Police in Westminster Jeremy Selwyn Getty Images A quiet Parliament Square Getty Images PABest A man walks along a passageway at London's Oxford Street Underground station the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown to help curb the spread of the Coronavirus PA Social distancing markers around the camel enclosure at ZSL London Zoo PA A police car patrols Greenwich Park in London PA The Premier League in action in front of empty stands AP Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed. A deserted Piccadilly Circus PA A general view is seen of a deserted Trafalgar Square AFP via Getty Images Getty Images The iconic Abbey Road crossing is seen after a re-paint by a Highways Maintenance team as they take advantage of the COVID-19 coronavirus lockdown and quiet streets to refresh the markings Getty Images A view of 20 Fenchurch Street (the 'Walkie Talkie' building) in the City of London, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus PA A deserted Chinatown PA A person looks at graffiti on a JD Wetherspoon pub in Crystal Palace, south London. Wetherspoons workers have described founder Tim Martin's lack of support for his chain's 40,000 employees as "absolutely outrageous" PA The London ExCel centre that has been turned into a makeshift NHS Hospital and critical care unit to cope with the Coronavirus pandemic PA The Palace Theatre, which usually shows the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child play, sits in a deserted Shaftesbury Avenue PA The Sondheim Theatre, which usually shows the Les Miserables musical, sits in a deserted Shaftesbury Avenue PA Two members of a British Army mounted regiment exercise their horses in Parliament Square AP Westminster Bridge is deserted PA A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA An empty street and bus stop at St James's Park AFP via Getty Images Whitehall Jeremy Selwyn A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA A single pedestrian walks past The national Gallery AFP via Getty Images London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn Kings Cross and St Pancras Jeremy Selwyn Buckingham Palace looking empty in London, PA London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn Kings Cross and St Pancras Jeremy Selwyn London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn London's Carnaby Street empty as shops closed after a lockdown was announced in the latest bid to stop the spread of coronavirus through the UK AP A single pedestrian walks past The national Gallery AFP via Getty Images A quiet Jubilee line westbound train carriage PA A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA Empty Embankment Jeremy Selwyn

London Bridge similarly had but a handful of people on it, despite usually being a well-frequented route through the city.

Tube and train stations were left with empty platforms.

Elsewhere in the UK, Edinburgh's Royal Mile looked completely deserted, having before being used as a site for street performances.

Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures 1 /81 Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures A deserted Westminster Bridge PA A man wearing a face mask or covering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, walks past customers sat outside a restaurant AFP via Getty Images Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the Coronavirus lockdown Andrew Parsons Runners pass cardboard cutouts of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William during the London Marathon in London AP An empty escalator at Charing Coss London Underground tube station Jeremy Selwyn Electronic bilboards displays a message warning people to stay home in Sheffield PA A sign is displayed in the window of a student accommodation building following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Mancheste Reuters People take part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions, in Londo AP People sing and dance in Leicester Square on the eve on the 10PM curfew Reuters Hearts painted by a team of artists from Upfest are seen in the grass at Queen Square, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Bristol Reuters Graffiti reads 'good luck and stay safe', as the number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases grow around the world, under a bridge in London Reuters A sign is pictured in Soho, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London Reuters Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures, during a coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, London AP A person runs past posters with a message of hope, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Manchester REUTERS Riot police face protesters who took part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions in London AP An image of The Queen eith quotes from her broadcast to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the Coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images Durdle Door in Dorset Reuters Captain Tom Moore via Reuters Mia, aged 8, and Jack, aged 5, take part in "PE with Joe" a daily live workout with Joe Wicks on Youtube to help kids stay fit who have to stay indoors due to the Coronavirus outbreak PA An NHS worker reacts at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital during the Clap for our Carers campaign in support of the NHS Reuters Goats which have taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno @AndrewStuart via PA Tobias Weller PA Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed London Landscapes: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, central London. Matt Writtle A newspaper vendor in Manchester city centre giving away free toilet rolls with every paper bought as shops run low on supplies due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus PA Theo Clay looks out of his window next to his hand-drawn picture of a rainbow in Liverpool, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continue Reuters A young man cuts another man's hair on top of a closed hairdresser in Oxford Reuters General view of the new NHS Nightingale Hospital, built to fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London via Reuters Jason Baird is seen dressed as Spiderman during his daily exercise to cheer up local children in Stockport, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters A woman wearing a face mask walks past Buckingham Palace Getty Images A man holds mobile phone displaying a text message alert sent by the government warning that new rules are in force across the UK and people must stay at home PA Medical staff on the Covid-19 ward at the Neath Port Talbot Hospital, in Wales, as the health services continue their response to the coronavirus outbreak. PA Prime Minister Boris Johnson taking part in a virtual Cabinet meeting with his top team of ministers PA A shopper walks past empty shelves in a Lidl store on in Wallington. After spates of "panic buying" cleared supermarket shelves of items like toilet paper and cleaning products, stores across the UK have introduced limits on purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have also created special time slots for the elderly and other shoppers vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Getty Images People on a busy tube train in London at rush hour PA Mia, aged 8 and her brother Jack, aged 5 from Essex, continue their school work at home, after being sent home due to the coronavirus PA Children are painting 'Chase the rainbows' artwork and springing up in windows across the country Reuters Social distancing in Primrose Hill Jeremy Selwyn A general view of a locked gate at Anfield, Liverpool as The Premier League has been suspended PA Homeless people in London AFP via Getty Images A piece of art by the artist, known as the Rebel Bear has appeared on a wall on Bank Street in Glasgow. The new addition to Glasgow's street art is capturing the global Coronavirus crisis. The piece features a woman and a man pulling back to give each other a kiss PA The Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, London, for Windsor Castle to socially distance herself amid the coronavirus pandemic PA A general view on Grey street, Newcastle as coronavirus cases grow around the world Reuters Matt Raw, a British national who returned from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China, leaves quaratine at Arrowe Park Hospital on Merseyside PA Britain's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news conference inside 10 Downing Street Reuters The ticket-validation terminals at the tram stop on Edinburgh's Princes Street are cleaned following the coronavirus outbreak. PA Locked school gates at Rockcliffe First School in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear PA A sign at a Sainsbury's supermarket informs customers that limits have been set on a small number of products as the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases grow around the world Reuters Jawad Javed delivers coronavirus protection kits that he and his wife have put together to the vulnerable people of their community of Stenhousemuir, between Glasgow and Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" Getty Images A man who appears to be homeless sleeping wearing a mask today in Victoria Jeremy Selwyn A pedestrian walks past graffiti that reads "Diseases are in the City" in Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images Staff from The Lyric Theatre, London inform patrons, as it shuts its doors PA A quiet looking George IV Bridge in Edinburgh PA A quieter than usual British Museum Getty Images A racegoer attends Cheltenham in a fashionable face mask SplashNews.com A commuter wears a face mask at London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn A empty restaurant in the Bull Ring Shopping Centre Getty Images A deserted Trafalgar Square in London PA Passengers determined to avoid the coronavirus before leaving the UK arrive at Gatwick Airport Getty Images

Bournemouth beach, previously packed with tourists, was left vacant.

After having urged people to not go out previously, Boris Johnson announced measures enforcing people stay inside on Monday night.

These were put in place for an initial three weeks and will be reviewed after that.

There have been more than 9,500 confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK since the start of the outbreak, while at least 463 people diagnosed with it in the UK have since died.
President Donald Trump on Thursday revealed his administration is working on a new set of guidelines to help the country re-open that would grade every county a high, medium or low risk for coronavirus.

'My Administration is working to publish new guidelines for state and local policymakers to use in making decisions about maintaining, increasing, or relaxing social distancing and other mitigation measures they have put in place,' he wrote in a letter to the nation's governors that was released by the White House.

Trump argued that expanding testing capacities would make it easier to help classify hot spot areas for the virus and the data would then be used to classify counties for their risk level.

This will incorporate robust surveillance testing, which allows us to monitor the spread of the virus throughout the country. Using these data-driven criteria, we will suggest guidelines categorizing counties as "high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk,"' he wrote.

President Donald Trump revealed his administration is working on a new set of guidelines to help the country re-open

'As testing gives us more information about who has been infected, we are tracking the virus and isolating it to prevent further spread. This new information will drive the next phase in our war against this invisible enemy,' Trump added.

The president held a video teleconference with the governors about the nation's response to the virus at noon in the Situation Room of the White House Thursday as the number of cases in the United States topped 73,000 and the number of deaths was over 1,000.

Trump has advocated for a return to normalcy as his original 15 day recommendations - which advised no social gatherings over 10 people and eating take out - will expire early next week.

The president suggested Easter as a good time to reopen the nation's tanking economy although many medical experts have cautioned that April 12 date may be too soon.

Trump back tracked idea a bit on Wednesday and suggested parts of the country could be reopened and hot-spot areas would remain shuttered, which his county by county description would allow him to do.

'I'm not going to do anything rash or hastily,' he said at his daily White House briefing on the coronavirus.

He warned some areas of the country that are battling high rates of infection would likely stay under stricter guidelines.

''Theres big sections of our country that are very, you know little affected by whats taking place, then there are other sections that are very heavily affected. I would say by Easter well have a recommendation,' he said.

He also said he would consult with Dr. Tony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Deborah Birx, who is coordinating the day-to-day response on the coronavirus, on a final decision.

President Trump has been clear he's worried about the economic affect coming from all the businesses being shuttered because of the pandemic. Numerous states have closed restaurants, gyms, bars, and clubs. The hospitality industry has been hit hard by the pandemic. States like California and New York have advised people to stay home as much as possible.

A decision on the matter is expected early next week, which would mark the end of the '15 Days to Slow the Spread' recommendations released last week.

A sign shows the Federal Triangle Metrorail station is closed, in Washington, DC

But the president would need the nation's governors on his side. Several governors have enacted stricter guidelines in their states to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Virginia, for example, has closed bars, restaurants except for take out, salons, gyms, theaters and other facilities in an effort to end social gatherings of more than 10 people. Those restrictions are in effect until April 23. The state's schools have been closed for the rest of the academic year.

Trump argued to the governors that people want their lives back.

'Americans across the country are hoping the day will soon arrive when they can resume their normal economic, social, and religious lives,' he wrote.

The president's letter follows a stark warning from Fauci on Wednesday that coronavirus may come back in cycles.

Speaking at the White House daily briefing the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that Americans should be prepared for the outbreak to 'become seasonal'.

'Would this possibly become a seasonal, cyclic thing? I think it very well might,' he said.

The coronavirus expert explained that evidence of cases in 'the Southern Hemisphere and southern Africa and in the Southern Hemisphere countries' as they go into their winter seasons could lead to second cycles in America.

He said: 'And if in fact they have a substantial outbreak, it will be inevitable that we need to be prepared that we'll get a cycle around the second time.'

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr Anthony Fauci issued a stark warning that coronavirus may come back in cycles as the death toll in the US hit 1035

Fauci said the possibility of a second cycle 'totally emphasizes the need to do what we're doing in developing a vaccine, testing it quickly, and trying to get it ready so that we'll have a vaccine available for that next cycle'.

He offered optimism, saying he knows 'we'll be successful in putting this down now', adding: 'But we really need to be prepared for another cycle. And what we're doing, I believe, will prepare us well.'

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, backed up Fauci Wednesday, adding: 'We're dealing with Cycle A right now.'
Poultry farmers in Punjab and Haryana are facing acute shortage of feed because of the nationwide lockdown to check spread of coronavirus, and fear that their birds will die if supply is not restored.

The farmers claimed that supplies of poultry feed, including maize, soybean, groundnut cake, bajra (millet) and other items coming from other states are stuck because of the lockdown.

"We have not been able to get poultry feed ever since the restrictions have been imposed because of coronavirus," Progressive Poultry Farmers Association Punjab President Mohinder Arora told PTI on Thursday.

Arora said the suppliers in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat could not send feed to poultry farmers of Punjab and Haryana, the major suppliers of chicken and eggs in the country.

"Each farmer keeps feed stock of just four to five days and most of them are left with little or no poultry feed," he said.

"The government is not caring for poultry business," he added.

In Haryana, Karnal-based farmer Randhir Singh lamented that poultry birds would soon start dying if the government did not take appropriate steps to ensure resumption of feed supplies.

Insiders in poultry business, however, pointed out that because of acute shortage of feed, a few poultry farmers were forced to bury their birds, and some have reduced quantity of feed for their birds.

"By reducing feed, at least birds have chance to survive," one of the poultry farmers in Punjab said.

The farmers further said they were not able to deliver eggs because of restrictions on the movement of transport.

The current crisis for poultry industry comes at a time when it is already suffering losses because of decline in sale of eggs and chicken.

The farmers in Punjab and Haryana urged their respective state governments to allow movement of vehicles carrying feed and eggs, otherwise the industry would soon shut.

Punjab Animal Husbandry Department Director Inderjit Singh said that the department has written to several states for allowing supply of poultry feed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Cho Ju-bin walks out of a police station in Seoul, South Korea. Photo: Kim Hong-Ji/Pool Photo via AP

A South Korean man accused of coercing dozens of women and schoolgirls into performing sex acts in pay-to-view internet chatrooms has been paraded in front of the media.

Cho Ju-bin (24), who worked in an orphanage in Incheon, was arrested earlier this month and was awaiting trial before media coverage of the crimes of which he is accused triggered public outrage.

More than five million people signed petitions on the home page of Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, demanding that the authorities withdraw his right to anonymity before his trial.

A committee made up of senior judicial officers, a psychologist and a psychiatrist considered the public's right to know and took the unusual decision to identify Cho.

Yesterday, Cho - who gave himself the name "The Doctor" - was brought out from a police station in central Seoul to face the public.

"I apologise to those that I hurt," Cho, who was wearing a medical neck brace, said. "Thank you for putting a brake on the life of a devil who could not be stopped."

He declined to comment when asked whether he admitted the charges.

According to prosecutors, Cho befriended women on internet chat sites and offered to pay them for nude photos sent through an anonymous chatroom in an app.

An accomplice with access to a government computer network allegedly traced the women and threatened to expose them to friends and family.

Cho then allegedly forced the women to perform obscene acts in one of four chatrooms, with some media reports suggesting that 260,000 users had paid more than 1,000 to access the live feeds.

Media reports claimed some of the videos showed groups of men raping a teenage girl, while others included images of torture. One video featured girls "barking like dogs", according to the 'Kookmin Ilbo' newspaper, while others involved sex acts with insects.

Of the 74 women believed to have been subject to abuse, at least 16 were school students.

The National Police Agency said that 18 chatroom operators had been arrested, along with 106 people who paid to access the feeds. Authorities are still trying to locate others, including a user who is believed to have first set up the chatroom.

Mr Moon has promised the case will be dealt with sternly and will introduce measures to stamp out digital sex crimes.

The alleged offenders' actions were "cruel", he said, and he felt "sympathetic" towards the public anger over the crimes, the president's office said in a statement.

South Korea's Ministry of Justice has attracted criticism over its failure to deal with the growing use of technology to carry out sex crimes, with a ministry official admitting that the case had been "a disaster" and apologising for its "lukewarm response" to digital sexual abuse. ( Daily Telegraph, London)

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 13:01:37|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Vice Foreign Minister Luo Zhaohui said Thursday that China has pledged to provide emergency assistance to more than 80 countries as well as international and regional organizations including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the African Union.

The assistance includes medical supplies such as test reagents and masks, said Luo, adding that China had also donated 20 million U.S. dollars to the WHO to facilitate international cooperation on the cause.

"China relates deeply to the difficulties of the countries hit by the pandemic and voluntarily offered them assistance to the best of its capabilities," said Luo at a press conference.
Ontario plans to be able to run 5,000 COVID-19 tests a day by the end of this week and aims to perform almost 20,000 tests a day by April 17, provincial health officials say.

Thats a big step up from the roughly 2,500 tests Ontario has been processing each day. This is all part of a plan to both clear a massive testing backlog and to prepare for the expected strain on the system as the pandemic spreads in the province.

In Ontario we have taken immediate and important steps to increase our provincial testing capacity, said Helen Angus, Ontarios deputy health minister and chair of the COVID-19 Command Table. She said partnerships with hospital and community laboratories will help ramp up capacity. By April 17, Angus said labs across Ontario will be performing 18,900 tests a day.

Instead of the majority of COVID-19 swab samples going to the provincial lab  as they now do  samples will be sent to private and hospital labs that have the capacity, starting immediately. Other geographical areas in the province, particularly the North, will have added capacity under the new plan.

Despite that increased capacity, there are no plans to test everyone who is sick.

It is not feasible and it is not desirable, said Dr. Barbara Yaffe, Ontarios deputy chief medical officer of health. I know people are worried and there is a lot of fear and concern out there and somehow getting a test result could make you feel better, but it may give you a false sense of security.

Ontario is prioritizing health-care workers and others who by the nature of their job or where they live (residents and workers in nursing homes and homeless shelters as an example) are at risk of infection, and also the very sick who are hospitalized with severe respiratory symptoms. Others are encouraged to stay home, self-isolate, and if they develop severe respiratory symptoms, chest pains or extreme lethargy go to a hospital emergency.

And not everyone at the site of an outbreak needs to be tested, officials said. Using long-term-care facilities as an example, health officials who briefed the media Thursday said that if three people on a nursing home floor test positive, and others are sick on that floor, there is no need to test them as they are presumed to have the virus and will be treated as if they do.

As of Thursday morning, Ontario had increased its daily testing capacity to 2,439, although officials overstated that during the briefing, saying Ontario was currently at 3,000 to 4,000 tests a day. Provincial data showed that as of Thursday morning the testing backlog  number of samples taken but not processed  was 10,965, a number that has been steadily growing but with a slower growth rate in the past few days.

Scientists are learning with each days experience. Officials at the briefing said the testing protocol and testing sensitivity has grown as scientists in Canada and around the world learn more and more about the novel coronavirus. Lab tests are now so sensitive that even the smallest trace of COVID-19 can be detected, Angus said.

Starting Thursday, Ontario is reallocating COVID-19 tests that would normally have been done at the Public Health Ontario laboratories to hospital and private labs. Angus said Ontario has had strong response from private labs that want to help out.

Officials reiterated Thursday that Ontario continues to prioritize health-care workers, people in long-term-care facilities and homeless shelters, patients hospitalized with severe respiratory symptoms, and people in remote First Nations reserves, and returning travellers with symptoms.

We recognize that not everybody at this point can be tested quickly and not everybody really needs to be tested in terms of the clinical treatment they would get, said Yaffe, the associate chief medical officer of health.

The ones we are prioritizing are where there is an impact on a lot of other vulnerable people and so the result needs to be done quickly, Yaffe said.

As to how many the province is missing due to this testing protocol, Yaffe said they do not know. Many, many thousands of people have used the provinces online assessment tool, she said.

RELATED STORIES Canada Was Canada quick enough to declare community spread? Some experts say it started March 1

As we expand the number of tests we will have a better sense of the prevalence in the population, said deputy health minister Angus.

Officials said doctors still have leeway to determine who will be tested, along with the provincial priorities.

Matt Andersen, president and CEO of Ontario Health, said the province estimates it can add 4,000 additional completed tests each week, growing to a capacity of close to 20,000 by the middle of April.

A big concern provincial health officials have is Ontario residents returning from winter vacations. Theres real concern about the snowbirds coming back and make sure we are looking at them and pulling out all the stops to get them to stay home and self-isolate, said Angus.
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A multibillion-dollar government loan would alleviate that concern, especially when it looks like Boeings commercial revenue may be affected for years.

There will be deferrals by airlines, Aboulafia said. Does anyone want a jet right now? Absolutely not.

Boeings cancellations outnumbered new plane orders in January and February, and that was before U.S. airlines felt the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

After the 9/11 attacks, Windau said, Boeing deliveries were slowed for four years as airlines conserved cash while waiting for traffic to return to previous levels. The coronavirus may have an even bigger effect on demand for planes.

There is some demand built up out there because of the 737 Max grounding, Windau noted. Airlines were trying to replace aging airplanes and get a more fuel-efficient fleet, so that might help, but demand might be lower for the next couple of years.

With the outlook so uncertain, a financial backstop from Washington would help the aircraft giant. Boeing has already suspended its dividend and stock buybacks, and Calhoun is working without pay for the rest of this year, so theyve already made some of the sacrifices a bailout would demand.

Other conditions that would accompany a loan arent yet clear, but Calhoun said he would reject any demand for an equity stake. The stock market, however, is betting that Congress will make him an offer he wont refuse.

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Kathy Griffin was in the emergency department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Tuesday. (Kathy Griffin)

Kathy Griffin might have been exposed to the coronavirus. Or she might not have. After a recent trip to urgent care and the emergency room while gravely ill, the comic wasn't able to get tested.

Griffin has an abdominal infection that is being treated with medication, though she won't know whether she's turned the corner for a couple of days, she told The Times in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. She's back home, and she's not going out anytime soon.

The public likely wouldn't have known about her illness at all had President Trump not tweeted a claim Wednesday that the U.S. had outpaced South Korea in COVID-19 testing. Griffin, who had just come home from an emergency room the day before, just had to comment, because what the president was saying didn't match with what she had experienced.

"I was sent to the #COVID19 isolation ward room in a major hospital ER from a separate urgent care facility after showing UNBEARABLY PAINFUL symptoms," Griffin wrote on Twitter after she accused Trump of lying. She said she couldn't get tested because of "CDC (Pence task force) restrictions."

With that response, the 59-year-old posted a couple of alarming photos showing her in a mask, in a hospital bed, in what appeared to be a sealed hospital room. Soon her name was trending on social media.

What happened? On Saturday, Griffin started having what her husband, Randy Bick, described as "mild stomach issues." But then they receded, he said. Temporarily.

Hes lying. I was sent to the #COVID19 isolation ward room in a major hospital ER from a separate urgent care facility after showing UNBEARABLY PAINFUL symptoms. The hospital couldnt test me for #coronavirus because of CDC (Pence task force) restrictions. #TESTTESTTEST https://t.co/18fRiOBsdN pic.twitter.com/0sU9fHu4r0  Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) March 25, 2020

"Two days later," Bick said also by phone, "she woke up very early in the morning and had incredibly intense pain, vomiting, diarrhea, every 20 minutes. Just really sick."

Story continues

"The vomiting felt like a convulsion," Griffin said.

And about a week prior, the couple had traveled internationally.

"We were both nervous because we were still in the incubation period after returning from Mexico, but also we had not left the house in days," Griffin said. "Wed been hearing about a 14-day incubation period [for the coronavirus]. So for me to get what felt like food poisoning after six days, I thought, OK, is this a coincidence or what?"

They'd been self-quarantined since returning home mid-March. After a phone consult with her doctor, she took his advice and went to an urgent care.

"We both put on N-95 masks and gloves and I drove her down there," Bick said. "We got to the front and immediately there was a security officer and some nurses' assistants outside." Once inside, Griffin was hooked up to an IV and got a shot for her abdominal pain, which was considerable. But she was still vomiting frequently, so they sent her along to the Cedars-Sinai emergency room.

"I remember vividly the doctor telling me ... 'Im going to send you to Cedars ER today because I dont think I could get you in 13 days from now,'" Griffin said. She was freaked out.

Kathy Griffin waits backstage with Randy Bick before a July 2019 show at Largo at the Coronet. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

The emergency department setup these days at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is different than usual: There are tents outside where staff see low-risk COVID-19 patients. Patients seen there are mostly well and discharged home, a Cedars spokesman said via email.

Then there's a specific COVID-19 area in the emergency department where staffers see patients who are sicker and may require more testing or hospitalization. That's where Griffin was.

"In all locations, patients wear masks and are isolated, and/or there is a six-foot distance maintained between them,"the spokesman said.

Griffin, who had a mask on in the picture she posted, said she was surprised by the personal protective equipment she saw  or didn't see  on the health-care staff around her. One doctor had a plastic visor-style face guard, she said. Some people had masks; others didn't. The types of masks varied.

"Frankly, when they said the corona ward, I thought I would be walking into the white suits with blue-taped ceilings, everything," she said. "I kind of expected them to put me in a shower room and all that  but as recently as [Tuesday], theres no cavalry thats coming in handing out millions of [test] swabs."

She said she also saw a bunch of "really smart, incredibly brave people" who cared deeply about what they were doing. Griffin said she kept telling everyone they were heroes. She couldn't praise the health-care workers enough.

Griffin wound up getting a chest X-ray that showed clear lungs and an abdominal CT scan that revealed the infection. Her temperature was around normal. But nausea and diarrhea, along with the severe chills and sore throat she had, are all COVID-19 symptoms. The urgent-care doctor told her she should get tested. And the ER doctor seemed to want to test both Griffin and her husband but could not, the comic said.

"The doctor was going through the boxes and going through the boxes [on a form] and she kept saying, like, 'Ugh, because of the lungs, the fever and the kind of cough ... you dont meet the CDC requirements,'" Griffin said. She was given the option to be admitted to the hospital, where she might be more likely to get tested, but after consulting with a few health-care staffers decided she'd be better off self-isolating at home.

So much for those stories about celebrities being able to buy a coronavirus test whenever they want one.

"The realization when they told me the guidelines was, 'Wow ... I now know not to come back unless my lungs are full with what feels like pieces of shattered mirror, unless I cant breathe and unless my fever is 103 ...,'" Griffin said. "Theyre not making the rules at all. That's a frightening feeling.

"I just think its so obvious that those tests have to be accessible to everybody," Griffin said in a tired voice. "A lot of people, when they hear the president saying everyone who needs a test should get one, they shouldn't have to then go to a hospital where, frankly, they may be exposing themselves or exposing others.

"Hopefully sooner than later you can either go to a pharmacy and get one or they could deliver one at home, something like that."

Of course, this isn't the first time Griffin has tangled with the president. Their disputes go back to that day in 2017 when a picture of her raising a rubber replica of Trump's severed head covered with ketchup "blood" went viral  and nearly ruined her career. She had apologized for the gag almost immediately, then retracted her apology a year later. To say there is no love lost between Griffin and Trump is to understate a very public feud.

But the testing problem might not be entirely with the federal government: California has been lagging behind New York and other hot-spot states when it comes to coronavirus testing.

By Sunday afternoon, approximately 26,400 tests had been conducted on California's 40 million residents, according to the states official tally. In contrast, New York had about 78,000 tests done as of Monday.

We are cobbling together various approaches, Susan Butler-Wu, an associate professor of clinical pathology at USCs Keck School of Medicine and a director of a clinical microbiology lab in L.A., told The Times earlier this week. The whole thing is badly discombobulated. ... I think 100% that the system is broken.

Griffin can vouch for that. Despite going to the ER with a slew of symptoms, she said she still has no idea whether she's positive or negative for the novel coronavirus. Only time and testing will tell.

"I just dont have an answer. I dont know," she said. "Someone at Cedars said to me, we cannot give you this test because of the CDC guidelines. Im suggesting that the guidelines are still too strict because they dont have enough tests."

A warning on the CDC website on Wednesday read, "While supplies of these tests are increasing, it may still be difficult to find a place to get tested."

Griffin also didn't get an answer to another important question, she said: Did her infection make her more vulnerable to the coronavirus?

"An active gastrointestinal infection, like any other infection, takes a toll on the body's immune system, which may leave a person vulnerable to other types of infection, including COVID-19," said Dr. John Lipham, division chief of upper gastrointestinal and general surgery at Keck Medicine of USC, in an email Wednesday.

"However, the 2019 novel coronavirus is still very new, and more research is needed before we can conclusively determine how the virus impacts people with different underlying conditions. The best thing for people to do is to follow social distancing recommendations, wash their hands frequently, and self-isolating when they feel sick or may have been exposed to the virus."

As of Thursday morning, the CDC was reporting 68,440 coronavirus cases in the United States and 994 deaths.
ROME, N.Y.  Wagner Farms in Rome is donating popcorn to Vernon-Verona-Sherrill School District to hand out in student lunches.

The popcorn comes from the farm and is packaged so students can pop it at home.

We scrambled and came up with a product that is microwave ready and safe, and able to be popped by the youngest student -- hopefully supervised. And we are trying to make sure it is engineered safe, said Ronald Wagner.

The farm is currently distributing yellow hulless popcorn, but plans to do white and colorful popcorn next.
At least 37 doctors have died after contracting coronavirus in Italy.

The National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists (FNOMCeO) has announced further fatalities as the countrys death toll from Covid-19 continues to rise.

Among the names on a list updated daily are those of GPs, an epidemiologist, a retired doctor, a paediatrician, and specialists.

The federation described the list as a warning, a lesson for everyone.

In Italy  where nearly one-tenth of more than 74,000 infections are among medical workers  doctors and nurses have been begging the government to provide more masks, gloves and goggles.

Dr Francesca De Gennaro, who heads up a small private medical clinic in hard-hit Bergamo, where some 90 of 460 workers have tested positive, wrote an open letter asking for equipment.

Please dont leave us alone: Help us help you, she said.

Scientists say stopping just one person from getting the virus means scores of others will not become infected down the road.

Dr Hugh Montgomery, professor of intensive care medicine at University College London, explained how one person can infect 59,000 others  compared to 14 with flu.

Italys death toll from the coronavirus outbreak rose by 683 on Wednesday to 7,503.

This was a decline in deaths compared to the previous day which saw a spike of 743 deaths following 602 on Monday and 650 on Sunday.

The country recorded 793 cases on Saturday  the highest daily figure since the pandemic began.

The Federation of Italian Pharmacist Orders (FOFI) has also announced deaths among pharmacists, prompting its president Andrea Mandelli to urge the public to stay inside.

Mr Mandelli said: Italian pharmacists are playing their role as far as possible, but I have to reiterate a message to citizens: the pharmacy is a health centre in which one must go only for important reasons.

I also invite you to strictly respect the safety distance and to follow the indications of the staff for the ordered access to the pharmacy premises.

Basically, I ask citizens to help us assist them in the best way: we can only get out of this emergency with the utmost collaboration of all.

The Italian government has imposed strict measures to curb the spread of the virus and harsh punishments for those who ignore them.

These include fines and even a up to five years in prison for anyone caught breaking their quarantine after testing positive.
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland has over 1,031 confirmed coronavirus cases and 14 deaths, Poland's health ministry said on Wednesday, shortly after the government extended border closures until April 13. Poland's government announced earlier this month that it will extend school, theater and cinema closures until Easter and that it will only allow people to leave their homes for essential purposes. (Reporting by Joanna Plucinska)

WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland has over 1,031 confirmed coronavirus cases and 14 deaths, Poland's health ministry said on Wednesday, shortly after the government extended border closures until April 13.

Poland's government announced earlier this month that it will extend school, theater and cinema closures until Easter and that it will only allow people to leave their homes for essential purposes.

(Reporting by Joanna Plucinska)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Srinagar, March 26 : Two more positive cases of COVID-19 have been reported in Kashmir, including an infant, taking the total number of active cases in J&K to 11.

J&K government spokesperson Rohit Kansal said the two siblings - a seven-year-old and an eight-month-old - are the grandchildren of a person who tested positive on March 24.

"Two more positive cases in Srinagar. Siblings (7 years and 8 months old) grandchildren of a confirmed case from Srinagar with travel history to Saudi Arabia who had tested positive on 24th. Total number of active cases now 11," Kansal tweeted.

This comes a day after four persons had tested positive and all of them were from Bandipora district.

Thursday also saw the first death of a corona positive case in Kashmir. The 65-year-old died at a hospital in Srinagar. He had apparently come in contact with many others. Four of them tested positive on Wednesday.

He had reportedly returned from New Delhi recently after being part of a 'Tablighi Jamaat' attended by people from Indonesia and Malaysia.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 02:58:09|Editor: zyl

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Roofs of buildings are covered with snow in Bologna, Italy, on March 26, 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed 8,165 lives in locked-down Italy by Thursday, with the cumulative number of cases reaching 80,539, according to new data released by the Civil Protection Department. (Photo by Gianni Schicchi/Xinhua)

ROME, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The coronavirus pandemic has claimed 8,165 lives in locked-down Italy by Thursday, with the cumulative number of cases reaching 80,539, according to new data released by the Civil Protection Department.

Speaking during a nightly televised press conference, Agostino Miozzo, director of Civil Protection Department and coordinator of the Technical and Scientific Committee, confirmed that there are 4,492 new coronavirus infections compared to Wednesday, bringing the nationwide active infections to 62,013 cases.

Of those infected, 33,648 are under house isolation and 3,612 are hospitalized in intensive care, while 24,753 are in ordinary hospital wards.

He added that there were 999 new recoveries compared to Wednesday, bringing the total to 10,361.

The death toll between Wednesday and Thursday was 662, bringing the total to 8,165 since the pandemic first broke out in northern Italy on Feb. 21.

The numbers are up from an official tally on Wednesday evening of 57,521 actively infected, 7,503 deaths, and 9,362 recoveries.

Miozzo also confirmed that Civil Protection Department Chief Angelo Borrelli has tested negative for the virus, and that Italian citizens have so far donated over 52 million euros to the Civil Protection Department to fight the emergency. (1 euro = 1.10 U.S. dollars)
INDUSTRIES and Trade Minister, Innocent Bashungwa has met with manufacturers and distributors of sanitizers to chart out their availability and increased production.

Speaking during the meeting here yesterday , Mr Bashungwa tasked The Fair Competition Commission (FCC) to ensure that there is unbiased competition in the business, and Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS) carry out a countrywide inspection that sees into it that only quality and reasonable price(s) of the sterilizers, masks and disinfectant handy wash are availed.

Explaining, he asked the manufacturers to exploit the glitch by increasing production that meets local demand and export to the neighbouring countries.

The Minister said the meeting followed a number of tours in Dar es Salaam to see production at the industries, where vast raw materials could pose a challenge for massive production.

There was a huge gap in terms of prices for the sanitizers now that they are highly needed as the country fights coronavirus, thus joint efforts is important to address the issue, said Mr Bashungwa.

However, the Minister cautioned the traders against taking the situation as a loophole to produce substandard sanitizers and make more money, saying that the government will not tolerate that at the expense of lives of Tanzanians.

Mr Bashungwa noted that it has come to their attention after the meeting that ethanol availability was a problem the manufactures were facing in order to produce sanitizers, which meet current demand.

He said TIRDO is producing enough ethanol, and asked the manufacturing companies to visit it, adding We are in discussions with the sugar manufacturing companies on the need to produce more ethanol as a by-product to meet the raw materials demand.
World leaders are to hold online crisis talks Thursday on the coronavirus pandemic that has forced three billion people into lockdown and claimed more than 21,000 lives.

With the disease tearing around the globe at a terrifying pace, warnings are multiplying over its economic consequences, with experts saying it could cause more damage than the Great Depression.

Workers wearing protective clothing disinfect a hotel as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus in Yangon, Myanmar. By Ye Aung THU (AFP)

And amid squabbling between the leaders of China and the US over who is to blame, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for the world to act together to halt the menace.

"COVID-19 is threatening the whole of humanity -- and the whole of humanity must fight back," Guterres said, launching an appeal for $2 billion to help the world's poor.

"Global action and solidarity are crucial," he said. "Individual country responses are not going to be enough."

The death toll from the virus, which emerged in China late last year, continued to grow, with the US becoming the sixth country to hit four figures.

People stand on designated areas to maintain social distancing as they queue outside a medical store in Allahabad, India. By SANJAY KANOJIA (AFP)

At least 1,041 people are now known to have died in the United States, with almost 70,000 confirmed infections, a tally by Johns Hopkins University showed, while globally the number of infections is closing in on half a million.

Gun rush

The rocketing infection rate in the US has sparked a rush to buy weapons, gun store owners told AFP, with customers panicking about social breakdown.

An empty Bolivar square in Bogota, after Colombian President Ivan Duque announced mandatory preventive isolation from March 24 to April 13. By Raul ARBOLEDA (AFP)

"A lot of people are buying shotguns, handguns, AR-15 (semi-automatic rifles), everything," said Tiffany Teasdale, who sells guns in Washington state.

"A lot of people are scared that someone is going to break into their home... to steal cash, their toilet paper, their bottled water, their food."

Around half of the US population is under lockdown, but President Donald Trump said he would decide soon whether unaffected parts of the country can get back to work.

"We want to get our country going again," Trump said. "I'm not going to do anything rash or hastily.

A health worker carries a body on a stretcher outside Gregorio Maranon hospital in Madrid. By OSCAR DEL POZO (AFP)

"By Easter we'll have a recommendation and maybe before Easter," said Trump, who had been touting a strong US economy as he faces an election in November.

The White House, which has been criticised for its lacklustre response to the mushrooming crisis, has repeatedly lashed out at Beijing over the disease.

On Wednesday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Group of Seven powers were united against China's "disinformation" campaign.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman infuriated Washington by suggesting on Twitter that US troops brought the virus to Wuhan, the metropolis where it was first detected late last year.

'Crazy talk'

Scientists believe the new coronavirus came from a market that butchered exotic animals.

Blocked out seats ensure travellers observe social distancing rules at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok. By Jack TAYLOR (AFP)

"Every one of the nations that were at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place," Pompeo told reporters.

China "has been and continues to be engaged in" a campaign through social media that has included conspiracy theories of US involvement.

Egypt's landmark Tahrir Square in Cairo stands empty on the first evening of a two-week long night-time curfew imposed by the authorities. By Khaled DESOUKI (AFP)

"This is crazy talk," he said.

But any notion of unity after the videoconference among the G7, which also includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, was dashed by the lack of a joint statement -- often a formality at such gatherings.

Reports suggested the statement was scuttled by Pompeo's insistence that it use the term "Wuhan virus" -- a formulation frowned upon by medical professionals who say it is stigmatising.

Economists say the coronavirus, and the lockdown that has seen three billion people told to stay indoors, could cause the most violent recession in recent history.

Astaff member sprays disinfectant at a cinema as it prepares to reopen to the public in Shenyang, China. By STR (AFP)

"The G20 economies will experience an unprecedented shock in the first half of this year and will contract in 2020 as a whole," rating agency Moody's said.

Unemployment rates are expected to soar, particularly in countries where levels have recently been at historic lows, such as Britain and the US.

James Bullard, president of the St Louis Federal Reserve, has predicted unprecedented unemployment rates of 30 percent, while Europe can also expect to suffer.

Healthcare workers dealing with the new coronavirus crisis applaud in return as they are cheered on by people outside a hospital in Burgos, Spain. By CESAR MANSO (AFP)

"We think the unemployment rate in the eurozone will surge to about 12 percent by the end of June, giving up seven years' worth of gains in a matter of months," said David Oxley of London-based Capital Economics.

Leaders of the G20 major economies will hold a virtual huddle later Thursday in the shadow of such dire predictions.

"As the world confronts the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges to healthcare systems and the global economy, we convene this extraordinary G20 summit to unite efforts towards a global response," tweeted the king of Saudi Arabia. Saudi currently holds the rotating G20 presidency.

Chart showing the countries where the COVID-19 cases are currently growing the fastest, as of March 25.. By John SAEKI (AFP)

While wealthy nations including the US have unveiled mammoth stimulus packages, there has so far been no collective action plan from the G20, and concerns are mounting for poorer countries without access to capital markets and adequate health facilities.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged G20 nations to offer support to "low and middle income countries", including from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Individual stories of hardship continued to emerge.

At La Paz University Hospital in Madrid, nurse Guillen del Barrio sounded bereft as he related what happened overnight.

"It is really hard, we had feverish people for many hours in the waiting room," the 30-year-old told AFP.

"Many of my colleagues were crying because there were people who are dying alone, without seeing their family for the last time."
A train company has been accused of 'cashing in' on frontline NHS staff trying to get to work amid the coronavirus crisis.

Thousands of 'key workers' up and down the UK are still having to get public transport while the rest of the country is on lockdown.

But Southeastern has been slammed by commuters for taking advantage of doctors, nurses and teachers travelling on their trains after they scrapped their cheaper 'advanced' fares amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

A&E nurse Kirtsty Wickenden, 35, commutes from Tunbridge Wells in Kent to Guy's and St Thomas's in central London every day.

She was furious when she realised her advanced 24 return was no longer available and she had to pay 32.80 a day instead.

Southeastern, who runs trains from Tunbridge Wells to London Bridge, said the move was due to last-minute timetable changes to reduce the number of services in light of the Prime Minister's lockdown.

They promised advanced fares will return on Monday, but Ms Wickenden is still furious.

Southeastern has been slammed by commuters for taking advantage of doctors, nurses and teachers travelling on their trains after they scrapped their cheaper 'advanced' fares amid the COVID-19 outbreak

Ms Wickenden said: 'Since Saturday, Southeastern has stopped people from buying advance tickets. I feel like it is cashing in on key workers who are keeping the country running right now.

'I love my job and I want to stay healthy to continue working but it's hard enough in these circumstances as it is.

'When you're being charged extra to get to work every day it really doesn't help. I feel like it is taking advantage of a really dire situation.'

The 35-year-old, who has been working as a nurse for five years, said there was no information about why advance journeys were unavailable when booking her tickets online.

She added: 'Most nurses, like myself, work three shifts a week so it's not feasible to buy a season ticket.

'I usually buy an outwards and a return journey separately, one to two days in advance.

'Doing it this way saves me about 8 a day which is a considerable amount when I'm a nurse and we don't earn a lot.'

Ms Wickenden's complaint comes amid a row between London Mayor Sadiq Khan and his predecessor and now Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

A&E nurse Kirtsty Wickenden, 35, commutes from Tunbridge Wells in Kent to Guy's and St Thomas's in central London every day, but her ticket prices have increased

Mr Khan came under heavy criticism for reducing London Underground services after Tube carriages were pictured crowded with workers this week.

He argues that construction workers, who make up a large number of those still commuting to work, should be forced to stay at home by the Government and all non-essential projects halted.

But Mr Johnson and Public Health England's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty claims the economic risks of halting construction could outweigh the benefits.

A&E nurse Ms Wickenden described the current situation in the UK as the calm before the storm, as we 'wait for the virus to peak'.

The NHS worker added: 'Everybody knows what's coming, it's just waiting for the virus to peak. This is why we keep saying to people 'stay at home'.

'Our healthcare system is not equipped to deal with the capacity of patients that could come in over the next month if people continue to socialise.

'You can feel a bit of an impending doom coming. It's a bit eerie waiting for stuff to start happening.'

But despite increased pressure on the NHS, Ms Wickenden said staff morale has never been stronger.

Commuters pack onto a Central line train into London this morning as people continue to travel into the capital

She said: 'Having an amazing team is what keeps you going, I couldn't do it without them.

'Everyone is staying so positive despite the situation and that is making a huge difference.

'The support shown by the public has been amazing and it is really appreciated. It would be nice if Southeastern could be a bit more understanding too.'

Southeastern said anyone who has been unable to purchase an advance ticket can request a refund for the difference.

A spokesperson said: 'We had to introduce a new timetable at very short notice - a process that would normally be planned and implemented over many months.

'This meant that it wasn't possible to include advance fares in this week's timetable.

'We'll be able to make advance fares available once again on certain trains from Monday.'
BOSTON - It's now accepted that gut-barrier dysfunction and gut-derived chronic inflammation play a role in human aging, but how that process is regulated is still largely a mystery. A team led by Richard Hodin, MD, chief of the Division of General and Gastrointestinal Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has uncovered an important piece of the puzzle which is described in the journal JCI Insight.

Studying mice and fruitflies, researchers found that the enzyme intestinal alkaline phosphotase (IAP) helped prevent intestinal permeability and gut-derived systemic inflammation, resulting in less frailty and extended life span. "Oral IAP supplementation in older mice significantly preserved gut barrier function and was associated with preserving the homeostasis of the gut microbiota during aging," said Hodin. "In other words, the enzyme maintained the composition of the gut bacteria and controlled the low-grade chronic inflammation that can happen with aging."

Because the scientists were using animal models, they were able to test blood from the portal venous system, which goes from the GI tract into the liver and then on through the rest of the body. "This gave us a more direct measure of what's passing across the gut barrier than blood from a human arm would," said Hodin, who began studying the function of IAP over a decade ago after connecting the dots in a couple of obscure papers suggesting the enzyme blocks an endotoxin called LPS. "I was studying IAP for other reasons, not knowing anything about its function," he said. "No one really did."

Because IAP is a naturally occurring enzyme that almost entirely remains in the gut rather than traveling throughout the system, Hodin believes it should prove nontoxic to humans, and those who are found have low levels, especially as they age, will simply be able to supplement. "Because IAP confers anti-inflammatory properties systemically," Hodin said, "it could have implications not only for inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, but also for other human conditions that we now know are linked to the gut and inflammation, such as obesity and diabetes." The team is already at work on the next steps toward getting FDA approval for a supplement.

###

The study's co-authors are Florian Kuhn, of the Department of Surgery at MGH and the University Hospital of Munich (LMU); Fatemeh Adiliaghdam, Paul M. Cavallaro, Sulaiman R. Hamarneh, Amy Tsurumi, Alexander R. Munoz, Yashoda Dhole, Juan M. Ramirez, Enyu Liu, Robin Vasan, Yang Liu, Shsan Samarbafzadek, Rocio a. Nunez, Matthew Z. Farber, Laurence G. Rahme, and Madhu S. Malo of MGH's Department of Surgery; Raza S. Hoda of the Pathology Department at MGH; Vanita Chopra of the Department of Neurology at MGH.

About the Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with an annual research budget of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 8,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. In August 2019 the MGH was once again named #2 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in its list of "America's Best Hospitals."
WOOD RIVER  With the number of possible coronavirus cases increasing daily, state Sen. Rachelle Crowe, D-Glen Carbon, is urging doctors, nurses and other professionals in Missouri to apply for Illinois new Out of State Temporary Practice Permits.

The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation has issued a proclamation to allow out-of-state physicians, nurses, physician assistants, and respiratory care therapists to provide care to Illinois residents affected by COVID-19.
Measures to stop COVID-19 spread expected to impact Bangladeshi cement industry

26 March 2020

The Bangladeshi cement industry is likely to be affected by the measures taken by government to halt the spread of the coronavirus in the country. All passenger trains and vessel departures, except cargo trains and ships, have been suspended for an indefinate period. In addition, the government announced a 10-day general holiday from 26 March until 4 April as well as a relief package.

Bangladeshi Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, announced a BDT50bn incentive package for export-oriented industries in the wake of the corona outbraek. The money will be used to provide salaries and wasges of workers and employees only, she said and accepted industrial output and export are likely to be impacted.

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The closure of external borders is not a lockdown and in theory, goods transportation and trading activities are basically not restricted. However, according to the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT), the move will still disrupt or slow down economy-trade flows, thus negatively affecting Vietnams exports to the EU. From a broader perspective, the epidemic is also causing world market demand to decline. Difficulties continue to besiege businesses, and may even result in more serious risks.

Shifting from lack of supply to lack of demand

Supplies of raw materials for Vietnams textile-garment and leather-footwear industries depend 65-70% on the Chinese market. Therefore, the outbreak of COVID-19 in the country has led to disruptions in the supply of materials during the past month, affecting the majority of Vietnams textile-garment and leather-footwear enterprises. At present, the epidemic in China has gradually been brought under control, and suppliers have also begun to resume production, with most running at full speed to compensate for the previous period of stagnation. As reported by domestic garment and textile companies, concerns over a lack of raw materials are gradually declining, and the situation is expected to stabilise by the end of April. Under the scheduled scenario, this is also the time when garment and textile firms speed up and focus resources to compensate for deliveries planned for the previous month. However, the market is showing worrying new signs. According to Bach Thang Long, managing director at the Garment 10 Corporation, in the last week, enterprises had managed to arrange materials for the processing of orders, but the customers then proposed to suspend or stop production.

Many businesses had completed orders but were forced to postpone delivery at the request of customers. Obviously, the global economy has been significantly affected by the COVID-19 epidemic, resulting in a decline in both purchasing power and order volumes. This is a worrisome scenario that is impacting businesses and the labour force, while it is hard for enterprises themselves to find solutions.

At present, it is difficult to assess the severity of the coming developments because it depends on disease control efforts around the world. But in my opinion, the impacts will increase in Q2 and Q3, and could possibly last until Q4. Then, there will be no orders to manufacture even though enterprises are able to manage materials. Such a trend is becoming more and more conspicuous. I just hope that it will not last too long and the impacts will be not be so serious as the economy recovers following control of the epidemic, Long stated.

Ready to cope with challenges

The latest developments in the international arena show that Longs worries are completely grounded. Immediately after March 17, the EU officially decided to close the borders for 30 days in an effort to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic. Theoretically, it is likely that the move will not directly impact import-export activities between Vietnam and the EU, because the restrictions are only applied to individuals travel, while goods transportation and trading activities are basically unrestricted. However, according to the MOITs assessment, the aforementioned epidemic control measures will in fact affect the speed of goods circulation from the stages of export, transportation, customs clearance, storage and loading & unloading to the stage of consumption, while disrupting or delaying economy-trade-service flows. In addition, the markets supply-demand volumes, the demand for goods exchange, and trade activities between the EU and partners (including Vietnam) will be somewhat restricted. The demand for non-essential goods such as garments & textiles, leather & footwear, wood items and phones, which are Vietnams major export items to the EU market, will possibly decrease. Not only that, goods imported to EU countries by air may be significantly affected due to delayed and cancelled flights. Regulations concerning epidemic control are also likely to stagnate the signing of export orders between Vietnamese and EU partners and hinder bilateral trade and investment promotion activities in the near future.

Nguyen Anh Duong, head of the general research department at the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), said that major economies such as the US and Europe are all focusing more drastically on COVID-19 prevention and control, and considering it as a top priority. As a small economy with high openness, Vietnams exports depend a lot on the US and European markets. Therefore, an impact on businesses is inevitable. The level of impact will rely on each industry as well as the structure of enterprises supplier networks. Given that fact, in addition to support policies, it is necessary to build an information channel for businesses to directly share experiences and effective measures to cope with the difficulties caused by the epidemic. For example, if they share the utilisation of capacity in the same industry, businesses will be able to increase cooperation in goods consumption.

Some experts have also said that, for the export-specialised enterprises, especially to European and US markets, these are irregular and short-term difficulties due to external impacts, but they could possibly turn into a long-term recession unless effective solutions are found. Therefore, this is the time when businesses must seek ways to survive and to promote the domestic market, because it promises to be very difficult to promote new export markets. Regarding general solutions, the Government has issued Directive No. 11/CT-TTg on urgent tasks and solutions to remove difficulties for production and business activities, which, if properly implemented, will have a positive impact on enterprises. Solutions related to fiscal policies such as tax exemption, reduction and extension will work to assist liquidity so that businesses can prioritise capital flows for production and survive this difficult period, while waiting for opportunities to recover.
EUGENE, Ore. -- As novel coronavirus has forced some businesses to close their doors, many are finding themselves out of work and are frantically searching for employment.

RELATED: LCC LAYS OFF HUNDREDS DUE TO CORONAVIRUS-RELATED CHANGES

Across Oregon, Walmart is planning to hire 1,200 associates in its stores and centers.

KEZI 9 News spoke to Walmarts director of communications Tiffany Wilson about the high demand during this time.

We hope that we can help provide opportunities for people who are eager to get back to work if theyve lost their job, Wilson said. It just means that we can help put some more money in everyones pockets.

Wilson said the corporation has made a major change to the hiring process.

Weve reduced much of the time it takes to bring on new hires, Wilson said. What was formerly a two-week process has been shortened, so we can now hire associates within 24 hours.

Walmart is filling both temporary and permanent positions.

Were hoping many of these positions can turn into permanent roles, Wilson said. Even before the COVID-19 outbreak hit, we were in need of associates in our stores and in our distribution centers, especially in Oregon.

Wilson said Walmarts hope is that those in need of work will be able to provide for their families and feel a sense of relief.

Were hearing every day that layoffs are happening and more and more Americans are worried about how to pay their bills, Wilson said. This situation has left a lot of families with a lot of doubt and uncertainty.

Walmart is increasing their benefits to hourly employees who are currently working during the pandemic.

We are really proud of our associates and their incredible efforts to meet our customers needs over the past few weeks," Wilson said. "We are doing our best to really respond to our customers needs, restock shelves and really provide them with all the items they are looking for to get through this time.

Julie Davidson, area manager at WorkSource Lane, encourages everyone to refrain from getting discouraged while on the job search.

Keep that normalcy, Davidson said. Call us to connect. Let us help you find ways to be looking for work and to sharpen your skills.

Davidson said WorkSource Lane is assisting the community virtually and is determined to help connect those out of work with employment opportunities.

Were looking at all ways we can modify our service delivery so we can meet the current demands. Were being quick on our feet and doing our best to serve.
The Russian aid comes at a crucial time for Italy, which has warm ties with Moscow and has supported lifting sanctions against it (AFP Photo/Alexey Ereshko)

Moscow (AFP) - Since the coronavirus took hold in Europe, Moscow has sent planes of virus experts and aid to Italy while fighting accusations of spreading disinformation, flexing its "soft power" in various ways during the pandemic.

The Russian defence ministry released multiple daily statements after the first planes took off for Italy on Sunday, carrying 100 virus specialists with medical equipment, mobile laboratories and disinfection units.

The experts sent to Italy have worked on international epidemics including African Swine Fever and in developing an Ebola vaccine, the ministry said. They are to work in cities including northern Bergamo near Milan, the hardest hit by the virus.

China and Cuba have also sent experts to Italy.

The Russian aid comes at a crucial time for Italy, which has warm ties with Moscow and has supported lifting sanctions against it. Meanwhile European Union countries have been slow to help their fellow member.

The Russian aid comes as the EU is also divided on a potential rescue plan for the region's economy. Germany has warned against unreasonable expectations while Italy, France and Spain have urged a massive response.

"(President Vladimir) Putin scored a win here," political analyst Alexi Malashenko said of Russia's strategy.

"First of all it's humane, secondly it hints that (anti-Russia) sanctions are inappropriate."

Despite its complex geopolitical relations with the West, Moscow is acting in accordance with a tradition of international solidarity that dates back to the Soviet era.

On Wednesday, Russia's ambassador to Washington even said Moscow was ready to release aid to the United States.

Malashenko nevertheless cautioned that "soft power can improve Russia's image but can't transform it."

Moscow has not let up on criticisms of the West.

- 'Disinformation' claims -

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova last week accused the EU of attempting to mask its own problems in the fight against the virus with the help of "unfounded anti-Russian allegations".

Story continues

Zakharova was responding to accusations of fuelling fears over the virus.

Earlier this month the EU said Moscow is "spreading disinformation about the coronavirus" in a "significant campaign" in social media accounts linked to the Russian state.

This came less than a month after US officials told AFP that thousands of Russian-linked social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram had embarked on a coordinated effort to spread alarm about the virus.

Russia has attributed its relatively low number of officially confirmed cases to swift early measures such as closing its border with China at the beginning of the year.

Moscow is building a new dedicated COVID-19 hospital that is due to open in a few weeks, following China's example.

Russian officials have stressed that the majority of the 658 people with confirmed cases in Russia have recently flown back from western Europe.

Russia has not officially reported deaths from COVID-19.

Many Russians find it hard to trust this tally, however, given a past history of official cover-ups.

In an address to the nation on Wednesday, Putin made a sombre assessment, saying Russia cannot seal itself off from the epidemic and urged the public to stay at home.

"What is happening today in many Western countries -- in Europe and across the ocean -- can become our nearest future," he said.

For now, though, the low numbers are working to improve Russia's image abroad, making it appear well-organised and able to impose strong measures.

"If Russia does manage to deal with the virus quickly, that will be further proof that authoritarian regimes work better in such situations," Malashenko said.

That is the message being put out by pro-Kremlin news outlets and on social media.

If the pandemic proves long-standing and the EU is unable to cope, "respect for Russia will rise," Malashenko said.
After another tie vote Tuesday night, the Boyertown Area School Board abandoned its plan to narrow its seven applicants for a board vacancy down to two finalists, and instead picked from the entire list, thereby choosing Marianne Scott as the newest member.
(TNS) -- Elder advocates are calling them cruise ships on dry land: Close to 200,000 Floridians live in nursing homes and retirement homes, which could become incubators for disease among sometimes frail elders as the coronavirus pandemic spreads throughout the state.The state Department of Health said that, as of Monday, 33 Floridians living in a skilled nursing or assisted living facility had tested positive for the coronavirus, the respiratory infection that has become a global scourge. At least three long-term care residents have died from the infection.But thats about all health administrators, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, are saying.For about two weeks, journalists and elder advocates have pressed state leaders to release information about where long-term care residents and staff have been exposed to the extremely contagious infection. The DeSantis administration has alternated between No and Maybe.For people with parents and grandparents in group homes, the frustration has been compounded by an ongoing ban on visitation related to the worldwide coronavirus outbreakOn Wednesday morning, DeSantis spokeswoman, Helen Aguirre Ferre, told the Miami Herald the governor was continuing to withhold the location of homes where residents or staff members have contracted the infection. DeSantis, she added, also would continue to study the issue.He wants to do the right thing, Ferre said.For Brian Lee, a former Florida long-term care ombudsman who now leads an organization called Families for Better Care, thats not good enough. Lee says the states refusal to identify homes where residents are at risk is like playing Russian roulette with elders lives.This is the worst public health crisis in at least this century, Lee said. I stress the word public, because we are all affected. And the public has the right to know if these facilities are spiraling out of control into an outbreak. By not being transparent, it just fuels fear.The best thing to do is be transparent, Lee added. It calms anxiety.In all, Florida licenses 691 nursing homes, with about 84,448 beds, and 3,081 assisted-living facilities, or ALFs, with 106,103 beds.There is no evidence yet of a significant outbreak in a Florida facility, though data released by the state may not be reliable: Neither DeSantis nor his health administrators have been willing to say whether large numbers of long-term care residents have been tested for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.The state has not disclosed the number of additional known infections within long-term care facilities, if any, since Monday.A deadly outbreak that killed 35 staff and residents in Kirkland, Washington, was the first indication of what the virus could do in a congregate community of largely frail elders in close proximity. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which studied the tragedy, called it the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak in that state in a report released Tuesday.The CDC said that, among 15,000 nursing homes nationwide, 147 facilities across 27 states have reported at least one resident has developed COVID-19.At least 55 coronavirus-related deaths can be linked to such facilities, though the number is likely higher,In the wake of such numbers, elder advocates are pressing for more openness from state leaders, who have touted their efforts to halt the spread of the coronavirus among long-term care residents  but have repeatedly declined to discuss what, precisely, they are finding, and where.The DeSantis administration has based its refusal, so far, to name homes with positive results on its desire to protect the confidentiality of residents. While he has not named the law, DeSantis appears to be invoking the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, which protects patient medical records and privacy.Pamela Marsh, a former top federal prosecutor who now heads the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation, suggested that the HIPAA law is a fig leaf being used to hide vital information.That information should be made available, Marsh, the former United States attorney for Northern Florida, told the Herald. It cant be business as usual for the families of loved ones in care.Families of elders in long-term care, Marsh said, are making decisions in the dark under the excuse of an emergency. You need a better justification for withholding information about facilities where the infection is spreading. I dont think the HIPAA justification holds water, Marsh said.DeSantis has broken his silence  but only to discuss a 180-bed ALF in Fort Lauderdale, called Atria Willow Wood, where three residents died after contracting the infection. DeSantis has called it a problem facility, and has repeatedly invoked the possibility that the home could be criminally charged with negligence.DeSantis said he had named Willow Wood publicly only because that [facility] was clearly non-compliant [with state guidelines], negligent, and it did cost those residents their lives.When asked, his administration declined to specify why the governor breached resident privacy to name the home, except to say: Gov. DeSantis will call out those who are negligent or non-compliant with keeping our most vulnerable seniors as safe as possible from COVID-19.DeSantis, who has met with reporters daily, either by video hookup or in person, since the pandemic took hold in Florida, has said that, in addition to the three deaths, several other Atria residents or staff members have tested positive for the infection, or are awaiting the results of testing.Construction workers, staff and cooks who were not screened were allowed to go and mix with the residents unimpeded, DeSantis said last week. That is exactly what you are not supposed to do.The home, DeSantis said at a news conference Monday, clearly fell below the standard of care. And whether it went into criminal [culpability], I think thats a possibility.The owner of Atria Willow Wood has declined to speak with the Miami Herald. In a statement, Atria said health administrators have been satisfied with the homes efforts to contain and manage the outbreak.Ensuring the health and well-being of Atria residents and employees is our first priority, the company said. Beginning several weeks ago, we put protocols in place that were in adherence to, and in some cases went beyond, the guidelines we received from state and local officials in order to protect our community.As soon as the [Department of Health] office in Broward County notified us of a confirmed case in our community, we immediately escalated our safety and infection control protocols and expanded our extensive emergency-scenarios planning.As of Monday, Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, reported the greatest number of COVID-19 infections at long-term care facilities, with 14.An unknown number of cases were linked to Broward Countys Camellia at Deerfield ALF. Overall, Broward reported 12 infections within long-term care.But if you live in a nursing home or ALF in Florida, or if a loved one lives in one, it has been extremely difficult to gain information about where, specifically, residents are at greatest risk. At a handful of news conferences, DeSantis has has left open the possibility that he might lift the veil. But mostly, his spokespeople have defended his decision to withhold detailed information.On Tuesday, in response to emailed questions from the Herald, DeSantis spokeswoman, Ferre, said the governor is being cautious about revealing the names of the ALFs that have patients testing positive for COVID-19, as it may unintentionally reveal their identities.On Monday, the governor was asked whether he would release the names of homes in which residents had been exposed.His reply: Maybe.Well see what the data is, and look at it, and see whats going on, he added.The Herald posed a series of questions about long-term care residents exposed to the coronavirus to DeSantis and the leaders of two state agencies, the Department of Health and Agency for Health Care Administration. Neither agency, nor the governor, would address the questions directly.On Wednesday, state Surgeon General Scott Rivkees said, in a prepared statement: Long-term care facilities have an enormous responsibility in overseeing the health and welfare of some of our most fragile population. The Florida Department of Health, in coordination with the Agency for Health Care Administration, is providing resources and technical assistance to all long-term care facilities to prevent and mitigate the spread of COVID-19.DeSantis, in speaking to reporters, has referred repeatedly to a problem facility in Broward County, Atria Willow Wood, which includes a specialized unit for elders with Alzheimers disease or other forms of dementia. He has stated that in addition to the three who died, several others who lived or worked at Atria either have tested positive for the infection or are awaiting the results of testing.Dave Bruns, a spokesman for the AARP in Tallahassee, said that long-term care residents, and their family members, deserve to know whats going on.Bruns said his group has been heartened by the response from both the long-term care industry and Florida state leaders to the pandemic: Florida health administrators have sent in strike teams to aid homes affected by the virus, and the homes themselves acted quickly and forcefully to address the crisis.Still, Bruns said, having a loved one in an elder-care facility where there is an outbreak of coronavirus must be extremely frightening.This is an issue that families, and family caregivers, can get very emotional about, and for very good reason, Bruns added.2020 Miami HeraldVisit Miami Herald at www.miamiherald.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.


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The coronavirus death toll has more than doubled in Ireland after the total went from nine to 19 in just one day.

Ten more cases of Covid-19 were reported by the National Public Health Emergency Team on Thursday.

Today Naval personnel were pictured at St John Rogerson's Quay in Dublin, where a testing centre for the virus has been established.

Pictured: The testing centre at Sir John Rogerson's Quay in Dublin, where Navy personnel are assisting medical staff at the testing centre

Ireland has had 1,819 cases of the virus so far as the pandemic sweeps across the globe.

A sporty 28-year-old patient from Kerry revealed earlier this week how the 'cruel' disease almost killed him within days of him first feeling sick.

Micheal Prendergast described having an acute shortness of breath, a sky-high temperature and convulsions which wracked his body as it tried to fight off the disease.

After being placed in quarantine in hospital he said he started contemplating his own mortality, and is sure he would have died without care.

Micheal Prendergast, 28, from Kerry in Ireland, said he caught coronavirus two weeks ago while working in London before flying home to Ireland because he had no symptoms

Speaking to the News Talk show in Ireland, he said: 'I thought [it would be mild] before I got it.

'But once I was experiencing the sickness with it, it brings every sort of existential question with it

'"Am I going to live? Have I lived a good life? Did I waste time?" It's a very emotional time.'

Mr Prendergast explained to Sky News that he likely caught the disease while working in London and a journalist, but had no symptoms for the first few days.

Trying to avoid a lockdown in the UK capital, he caught a flight back to Ireland where he arrived on March 16 and went to visit his mother.

But the following day he woke up with a 'horrific shortness of breath and a sky-high temperature', two tell-tale signs of the illness.

The following day his temperature spiked even higher and he began convulsing in bed as his body tried to fight the infection.

Within 48 hours of falling ill Mr Prendergast was rushed to hospital with acute shortness of breath, convulsions and a soaring fever - and at one point was so ill he thought he would die

On March 19 he called an ambulance and was taken to Kerry General Hospital and placed on their coronavirus ward in isolation, where he has spent the last five days.

Mr Prendergast said the only underlying condition he has is mild asthma, which he has under control and has not suffered a bout in years.

He has previously been in hospital for a broken spine, a collapsed lung and pneumonia - one of the side-effects of the virus - but said this disease is worse.

'It comes in waves,' he added, 'so I could feel... I wouldn't feel great, I would still feel poorly, but I would get a wave that would last four or five hours.

'That would be the most intense, overwhelming feeling, a temperature spike... it makes you just feel like you're not far from death.'

While he now feels like he's through the worst of the disease, he said he is confident that he wouldn't be alive without access to a hospital bed.

In a stark warning to young people, who are thought to be less vulnerable to the virus, he said: 'This is just a warning to anyone out there. I see recently people at beaches, at parks, at gyms.

'If you don't get affected as bad as I have, I guarantee that your parents or your aunts and uncles or your grandparents are going to be, and this virus is a killer.'
Citizens protest outside Jongno Police Station in central Seoul, calling for strong punishment of those involved in the Telegram sexual exploitation case, Wednesday, as a car carrying prime suspect Cho Ju-bin exits the parking lot. / Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul



By Jun Ji-hye



Unidentified members of the Telegram chat rooms that involved the sexual exploitation of over 70 female victims, including minors, are expressing their fear of legal punishment as investigative authorities have declared their intention to punish not only the chat rooms' operators, but all users.



Members of the chat rooms are commenting anonymously online, desperately making excuses in an apparent effort to avoid retribution at a time when investigators are closing in on them. Some claimed that they joined the mobile chat rooms "by mistake," or "by accident," with others saying, "I clicked on the wrong link."



One user took a more novel approach, saying, "I have dreamed of becoming a police officer, so I joined the chat room to catch criminals."



At least 74 people, including 16 underage girls, have been sexually exploited in the so-called "Nth room" case involving multiple Telegram chat rooms whose operators blackmailed the victims into performing violent sex acts and sold access to the videos, according to police.



Women's organizations have claimed that there have been 60 such chat rooms on Telegram, and an estimated 260,000 people are believed to have joined them.



Police have so far apprehended 126 people in relation to the case, with 19, including prime suspect Cho Ju-bin who operated the "Baksa room," formally detained.



More than 5 million citizens signed petitions on the Cheong Wa Dae website, urging authorities to disclose the identities of all users and deliver harsh punishments.



President Moon Jae-in has ordered the police and prosecutors to investigate the users in addition to the operators.



The Ministry of Justice called the users "observers," saying it will work to ensure the users are punished as accomplices.



Police officials said it would have been almost impossible for users to join the chat rooms by mistake as they had to go through at least five stages, including opening accounts that enable cryptocurrency exchanges and verifying themselves with their ID cards, to enter the secret chat rooms.



Professor Lee Soo-jung of Kyonggi University, a renowned forensic psychologist here, said, "It is hard to believe that they joined the chat rooms by mistake as operators of such rooms applied rules encouraging users to participate in illegal acts, such as producing obscene material and sharing it, to upgrade their membership. The users are believed to have played an active role."


Let us thank front-line workers with more than just words  let us reward them with decent pay and conditions.

Around the world, workers in what have been deemed essential services are tirelessly trying to keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and to keep us all going in the meantime.

These are the nurses, farmworkers, grocery clerks, truck drivers and teachers, whose backs many of us stand on so that we can engage in our social distancing.

And guess what  an eight or, perhaps, 10-hour shift in a grocery store, whether stocking shelves in France or working the cash register in the United States, was not a particularly pleasant experience before the coronavirus shocked the world into realising that these essential workers exist.

The question is, will this global health emergency wake us up to the need to change our global economy to more fairly benefit the many who keep it afloat? Or, will we merely recognise the workers in essential services now with a grin when we see them at the store (where you can still shop in stores) or the clinic, or a thank you post on Facebook, only to forget about them tomorrow?

The definition of essential services varies by country but, typically, the same occupations tend to make the list.

For instance, when California established its shelter in place order, which calls upon the states residents to stay at home when at all possible and to refrain from public gatherings, it explicitly exempted professions in what the US federal government deems the critical infrastructure sector.

This sector includes people who work in agriculture, healthcare, water and waste management, education and public security, including specific professions such as police officers, firefighters, first-responders, cable installation workers and journalists.

Let us start with agriculture  what has been going on in food production while so many of us have been staying at home and keeping a safe distance from our neighbours?

In California  Monterey county specifically  farmworkers have been told that they are exempt from the shelter-in-place order and are expected to continue working in the fields.

This means there is no social distancing for farmworkers  that is, unless the space that counts is the one between the people who eat California lettuce from the safety of their homes and the workers who risk their health when picking it.

The message is clear  if you are labouring in the fields in California, where most of the USs fruits and vegetables originate, then you have to go to work, no matter if a virus infects thousands, daily.

To make matters worse, some estimate that between 50 percent and 75 percent of the close-to-three-million people who work in the fields are undocumented immigrants, which makes them subject to detention and possible deportation. Their labour is also poorly paid, with an average salary between $15,000 and $18,000 a year.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron declared those who work in the food industry  grocery store workers included  to be essential. Thanks to this, the French people can rest assured that when they go out and do their shopping, the coronavirus will not shutter the places where they buy their daily necessities.

Were these workers similarly appreciated by the government before the coronavirus came to France? Not really  Macron orchestrated a labour reform that took a knife to the industry, leading stores such as the supermarket chain, Carrefour, to lay off thousands of people just a couple of years ago.

Those still working, because they are expected to do so, are doing so for longer periods of time than before because, during his tenure, their president has given companies greater powers to dismiss workers and to set the payments in cases of unfair dismissal.

The situation is similar in the United Kingdom. There, it is the workers in the key industries who keep the economy going. Looking at healthcare especially, the countrys already understaffed National Health Service  as a result of 10 years of government austerity policies  is being forced by the coronavirus outbreak to take on thousands of unexpected patients.

And in the UK, more than 13 percent of people working in healthcare are foreign nationals. To add insult to injury, these are people who have had to endure arguably racist remarks by the countrys prime minister which have mocked darker-skinned, foreign-born, working people.

Across these many countries, it is unclear what would happen if essential workers decide that they do not want to work and stay at home like the rest of us, as well as for how long they will continue to labour under extreme conditions.

If history is any guide then it indicates that the exploitation of essential workers can go on almost without end.

Remember the Braceros, the farmworkers of Mexican origin who were recruited during World War II to labour in the US. This programme was initially crafted as an emergency measure, which began in 1942, to ensure the supply of food to the American population during wartime. Wages were set prior to the workers arrival, as was their lodging and labour conditions, essentially ensuring that they had no representation and no way to voice complaints.

For this reason, taking both the present situation and our history into consideration, we must make this latest crisis into an opportunity.

This is the precise moment to demand not only progressive policies  living wages for everyone, full citizenship for undocumented workers, extensive and fully-funded social services such as healthcare  but also that our global economy change course.

The people ensuring our survival now need to have more power when dealing with political and economic elites in the future, whether through unions or civil society organisations, so that future crises never compel so many to risk so much again.

The stakes are too high, for everyone. What if workers get sick, or after working under extreme duress, they simply cannot keep up? Or if, when their labour conditions worsen in hospitals, in grocery stores and in the fields, they decide now is the time to protest and demand changes? What then?

We can do our social distancing all we want. But without food, we will see how long that lasts.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
Justice Cameron Mander remanded Tarrant in custody, but has not yet set a date for sentencing, when the summary of facts would be made public. Loading Few people knew of the special hearing, which was only scheduled late on Wednesday, on the eve of an unprecedented nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Six New Zealand journalists attended. Also in court were the imams from both targeted mosques. Al-Noor Imam Gamal Fouda was visibly upset as the guilty pleas were entered. The hearing concluded at 10.30am, NZ time, but the judge suppressed the outcome for an hour to allow victims, who were unaware of the hearing, to be notified.

The decision to hold the hearing amid the national state of emergency was not made lightly. Earlier in the week Tarrant indicated to counsel that he might change his pleas. A formal request was made on Wednesday that the matter be brought before the court. Mander said both the Crown and defence asked to have the hearing expedited, despite the severe health restrictions. The courts were considered an essential public service that was able to deal with "priority proceedings without compromising people's health".

The judge said he felt the court had the capacity to safely hear the matter by limiting the number of people in court. In total, 17 people were present. It was regrettable the victims were unable to attend, but the imams were asked to be present to bear witness to the proceedings. "It was my assessment that taking the defendant's pleas at this time was the appropriate course in the circumstances," Mander said. "The entry of guilty pleas represents a very significant step towards bringing finality to this criminal proceeding and I considered the need to take the opportunity to progress the matter was particularly acute coming as it has at a time when the risk of further delay as a result of Covid-19 was looming as realistic possibility." On March 15 last year, Tarrant drove from his Dunedin home to Christchurch with an arsenal of guns and ammunition he'd amassed since moving from Australia to New Zealand in 2017.

The white supremacist entered the Al-Noor Mosque as Friday prayers were beginning and opened fire, killing and wounding dozens of people. Loading He then drove across town to the Linwood Mosque where he continued his shooting spree. Tarrant was arrested a short time later after his car, a gold Subaru Outback, was rammed off the road by two police officers as he tried to make his way to a third target, thought to be a mosque in Ashburton. When police searched the vehicle they found several guns and petrol bombs.

Tarrant's grandmother, Marie Fitzgerald, had no idea about the plea until called by Stuff. "I feel sorry he did the crime, but he's got to pay the time now." She declined to comment further. Victim Support chief executive Kevin Tso said support was ongoing for hundreds of victims who still need help coping with the trauma and rebuilding their lives. "We're pleased victims no longer have to face the trauma of the trial," Tso said.
The number of COVID-19 cases in Vietnam has reached 148 after the Ministry of Health confirmed seven more cases, including five Vietnamese, one South African and one French, on March 26 morning.

A worker shows people subject to quarantine the way to their quarantine area in Hoa Binh province

Among the new Vietnamese patients, two men, aged 26 and 34, returned from the US; two men, aged 22 and 19, from the UK; and a 17-year-old girl returned from Thailand and had close contact with a person previously testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 in Da Nang city.

The South African patient is a 58-year-old woman who departed Seattle of the US and transited Taiwan (China) before entering Vietnam on March 21.

The French one is a 58-year-old man coming to Vietnam on March 12.

They are currently undergoing treatment in HCM City, Tra Vinh province, Can Tho city, Ha Tinh province and Hanoi.

Earlier, the Ministry of Health on March 25 evening confirmed seven cases who tested positive to SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19.

Of the new cases, six came back to Vietnam from foreign countries like Denmark with transits in Doha and Bangkok, the US, Germany and the UK; and one lives in Vietnam.

The one who lives in Vietnam is a doctor who contracts the disease while treating another COVID-19 patient at a hospital in Hanois outlying district of Dong Anh. Among the rest are four students who studied in the US and the UK.

Vietnam has recorded 14 new COVID-19 cases over the last 24 hours. Among them, 10 were quarantined upon their arrival, one is a doctor getting the virus from patients, and three spent some time living in the community before having test results./.

ADB ready to support Vietnams COVID-19 fight

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is ready to provide Vietnam with timely and flexible support for the Governments response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Asian Development Bank stands ready to provide financial assistance and policy advice to help the Government of Vietnam contain the spread of COVID-19, ADB President Masatsugu Asakawa said.

He added that the bank will consider all options, including quick-disbursing budget support, policy-based lending, and expedited disbursement of existing loans, to ensure any support package can be approved quickly and disbursed in a timely manner.

The ADB President also commended the Vietnamese Government on its timely and effective actions to combat the pandemic. He welcomed its focus on maintaining economic stability and growth in the medium and long-term, including through expanding public investment expenditure and strengthening social safety nets for poor and vulnerable households.

The lender has announced an initial support package of 6.5 billion USD to address the immediate needs of its developing member countries, including Vietnam, as they respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The bank said it will provide additional support as needed./.

PM lauds medical staff in COVID-19 fight

At a hospital in Ha Long city

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on March 25 sent a letter to staff of the health care sector lauding their contributions to the prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the letter, he highlighted the countrys initial but encouraging outcomes in the COVID-19 fight, attributing them to efforts of the entire Party, army, people and political system with strong and drastic measures.

He said images of medical staff and armed forces in localities coming to each household to promptly discover cases at high risk of infection, providing care for patients in quarantine areas, or collecting samples and studying on the virus and vaccine have left a profound impression in the public.

The PM lauded them for upholding the tradition of the sector and creating a driving force for the country to successfully combat the pandemic.

Amid the complicated, uncertain and prolonging development of the pandemic, Vietnam is in the stage of exerting utmost efforts to prevent the spread in the community and stay vigilant.

He called on all doctors and medical staff across the country to stay more determined and show higher sense of responsibility, together with forces and people, to roll back the pandemic.

The leader also urged people nationwide to continue encouraging and joining hands to support soldiers in white blouse in the tough and dangerous fight against the COVID-19.

He wished medical staff good health, deserving public trust throughout the country and accomplishing the task of caring for and protecting public health./.

Vingroup offers additional relief package in COVID-19 fight

The signing ceremony between Vingroup and the Company for Vaccine and Biological Production No.1 under the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology (Photo: vov.vn)

Conglomerate Vingroup recently proposed a relief package worth 100 billion VND (4.23 million USD) to procure medical equipment and chemicals for testing of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19.

Through the Vietnam Fatherland Front Central Committee, the firm presented 100 ventilators, 20 PCR equipment, 800 test kits and 200 COVID-19 fast-tracking test kits produced by the Republic of Korea.

Vingroup has to date allocated nearly 450 billion VND to support the countrys fight against the COVID-19.

Previously, it earmarked an aid of 20 billion VND to the Ministry of Science and Technology for three studies on COVID-19 quick response and another worth 5 billion VND to the Ministry of Health.

The conglomerate also presented support to the central province of Ha Tinh and the northern port city of Hai Phong in the wake of the pandemic.

Medical students pitch in to fight COVID-19

Young people in many provinces and cities are volunteering to take part in COVID-19 prevention and control efforts together with health authorities.

The Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union of HCM City on March 22 launched a voluntary programme to support the health sector.

It attracted 200 young doctors and staff from clinics and hospitals run by universities and medical students.

Phan Thi Thanh Phuong, the unions standing deputy secretary, said there would be communication about COVID-19 preventive measures and its progress to students, their parents, teachers, and workers in the city.

It would also work with local authorities and relevant agencies to install medical equipment at hospitals and collaborate with the Sai Gon Water Supply Corporations Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union and Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper to install wash basin in 25 schools in the city, especially in outlying districts, and spray chemicals to disinfect them, she said.

They would also provide assistance in the citys quarantine areas and help people brought there fill health declaration forms required by the city Centre for Diseases Prevention and Control (CDC), she said.

The volunteers had received training.

Tran Duy Quan, a fifth year student at the HCM City University of Medicine and Pharmacy, said he and his classmates had obtained knowledge about the disease and preventive measures and could correct misunderstanding among the public.

Dr Nguyen Thanh Hiep, vice rector of the Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine in HCM City, said more than 500 senior students had worked with staff at the Centre for Diseases Prevention and Control in the fight against COVID-19.

They helped the centres staff input data about the incidence of COVID-19 and people related to patients, and set up a map genealogy to monitor the spread of the disease. They were also helping the centres team investigate the epidemic by tracking people who pose a high risk of transmission.

Students are providing assistance to authorities in quarantine areas.

All have been trained in how to protect themselves from COVID-19.

Last weekend hundreds of students from the Vietnam National University- HCM City volunteered to clean the universitys dormitory, which is being used as quarantine accommodation for more than 3,000 people.

In the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho, 305 students of the Can Tho University of Medicine and Pharmacy are working to communicate, disinfect and take samples for tests.

Its lecturers have also joined COVID-19 prevention and control efforts.

Three hundred forty students of Hue Universitys University of Medicine and Pharmacy are working with the police to check the temperatures of train passengers and guide them in filling health declaration and other papers.

They include 160 students good at English who are helping foreign passengers.

According to the Hanoi Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), 75 students from the Hanoi Medical University have joined its staff for prevention and control of COVID-19 like the students from Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicines do at the HCM City CDC.

Other students are providing assistance to staff preventing against COVID-19 at Noi Bai International Airport in Hanoi.

Six hundreds of students from the Hanoi University of Public Health pursuing majors in public health, testing techniques and nutrition are pitching in to help health officials.

The Ministry of Health has called on medical students to help in the fight against the epidemic.

Noi Bai Airport produces disinfection chamber

The Noi Bai International Airport in Hanoi officially put into operation a disinfection chamber at the airports operation centre on March 24 as an effort to curb the spreading of the COVID-19 epidemic.

The device was invented and assembled by young engineers of the Noi Bai Aviation Technical Service Centre during only three days.

Its main component is a 360-degree mist sprayer using anolyte solution which is a powerful disinfectant against bacteria and viruses. The disinfection spraying process will be automatically activated once a person steps in the chamber. It only takes 30 seconds to complete a round of disinfection.

Nguyen Duc Hung, Deputy Director General of the Airports Corporation of Vietnam and Director of the Noi Bai International Airport, said that after successful production of the first chamber, the airport will continue researching and installing more disinfection chambers at its subsidiaries and terminals to serve passengers.

Noi Bai airport is willing to share the technology with other companies in need, he added.

By March 24 morning, Vietnam recorded 123 COVID-19 cases./.

15 Hanoi hotels sign up for COVID-19 quarantine sites

As of March 23, 15 hotels in Hanoi had registered to serve as quarantine places for suspected COVID-19 cases, according to the municipal Department of Tourism.

The hotels have a total of 1,437 rooms and 2,850 beds. They have taken precautionary measures like spraying disinfectant, delivering free face masks and offering hand sanitisers at public areas.

The tourism department will work with other hotels that are qualified as quarantine sites in the coming days.

Statistics show that a total of 1,077 passengers, including 561 foreigners, were on the 11 flights that landed in Hanois Noi Bai airport with people who have then tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 on board.

Of the foreigners, 314 stayed in 121 hotels in Hanoi. Currently, 82 foreign visitors are being quarantined in 41 hotels in Hoan Kiem, Tay Ho, Dong Da, Ba Dinh, Hai Ba Trung and Long Bien districts. /.

Hanoi works to prevent cross infection of COVID-19 among community

The fight against COVID-19 in Hanoi has entered a new phase with the occurrence of cross infections in the community and at health facilities, said Chairman of the municipal Peoples Committee Nguyen Duc Chung at a meeting in the city on March 23.

The preparation of resources for hospitals is the most important and decisive factor to prevent the pandemic, he said, adding that it is necessary to promptly detect cases for early treatment and community infection prevention.

He advised people to limit going out from now to April 5 to avoid the risk of infection.

Offices and trade centres should implement seriously preventive measures and reduce offline meetings.

The official ordered relevant forces to make efforts in the next two weeks to discover suspected cases for testing and quarantine.

As of 18:10 on March 23, Hanoi had recorded 39 COVID-19 cases.

The Hanoi Health Department has arranged some hospitals in the capital to receive quarantine cases, and monitor and provide treatment for confirmed cases./.

More than 400 bln VND raised for COVID-19 prevention work

More than 400 billion VND (around 17 million USD) have been mobilised for COVID-19 prevention and control work after Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc called for public support to the fight against COVID-19.

As of March 24, the COVID-19 prevention and control fund has collected nearly 340 billion VND from agencies, businesses and individuals and 62 billion VND who contributed via SMS messages through the National Humanitarian Portal 1400, reported the Vietnam Government Portal.

President of the Vietnam Fatherland Front Central Committee Tran Thanh Man said that the contributions of agencies, organisations, businesses and people have manifested the solidarity of all Vietnamese people in struggling against the COVID-19 pandemic.

These contributions will be transferred to the Ministry of Health for purchasing medical equipment, necessities and support COVID-19 patients and those undergoing quarantine.

On March 19, a text message campaign to call for public support for the countrys fight against COVID-19 was launched in Hanoi.

The campaign is taking place from March 19 to June 18, 2020.

Supporters can join the programme by texting CV n to 1407, of which n is the number of support. Each text message will contribute at least 20,000 VND (0.86 USD) to the fund.

Hanoi pushes up medical equipment preparations to prevent COVID-19

The Peoples Committee of Hanoi has ordered the municipal Department of Health to closely work with relevant agencies to push up the purchase of medical equipment to support the fight against the COVID-19.

Chairman of the committee Nguyen Duc Chung requested agencies to arrange infrastructure and personnel to start the operation of a hospital for the acute respiratory disease based in the outlying district of Me Linh, meeting the citys plan in COVID-19 prevention and combat.

They were also asked to join hands with the Hanoi Military High Command to send people having close contact with COVID-19 patients, who are under quarantine in the citys hospitals, to concentrated quarantine facilities managed by the municipal command.

Departments, sectors and localities of the capital city must stay vigilant and ready to cope with all situations, and determined to curb further transmissions of the disease, he added.

Chung also ordered temporary closure of non-essential services in the city, including karaoke parlours, bars, clubs, gaming venues, cinemas and stadiums.

Businesses providing necessary services like food and petrol can operate as usual.

People are asked to avoid gathering in large crowds, and to work and study from home. Religious and worship places have been ordered not to hold events with large crowds of participants.

As of 6pm on March 25, the total COVID-19 cases in Vietnam stood at 134, of which 17 patients were declared fully recovered.

PM calls for youths stronger engagement in COVID-19 fight

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc urged the youth to engage more strongly in the fight against the COVID-19 while speaking at a working session with the Secretariat of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union (HCYU) Central Committee in Hanoi on March 25, one day ahead of the unions founding anniversary.

At the meeting, First Secretary of the committee Le Quoc Phong said over the recent past, it has actively reformed the unions activities and youth movements to attract more young people.

The theme Year of Youth Volunteers in 2019 received warm response from HCYU cadres and members and other young people. Activities during the year were organised in a widespread and regular manner from the central to grassroots levels, he said, noting that the number of young people taking part in voluntary activities last year rose three folds from 2018.

The Secretariat of the committee hopes that in the coming time, the PM will support the creation of favourable conditions and mechanisms for the union to perform its tasks in representing childrens voices and aspirations, and uniting overseas young Vietnamese, Phong added.

The secretariat also proposed the PM approve the establishment of the Vietnam youth initiative for the community programme and a social skill training system for young Vietnamese people.

Addressing the event, PM Phuc applauded the union and relevant organisations contributions to the country, especially during the Year of Youth Volunteers in 2019.

He said over the last three months, the unions cadres, members and other youngsters have actively joined hands in the combat against the COVID-19 as manifested through their organisation of hand-washing stations, medical students support for anti-coronavirus activities, and distribution of free face masks.

The leader requested the union to get young people involved in the COVID-19 prevention and control more strongly, multiply effective models in the work, and mobilise social resources for the combat.

Stressing the need to capitalise on the golden time to contain the coronavirus spread, he said the 6.3 million unions members have not only to make health declaration but also to help other people do so to help authorities sort persons vulnerable to virus infection.

Additionally, the PM ordered the committee to continue programmes and activities to promote young Vietnameses capacity to meet national development and defence requirements and bring into play the youths role in realising common tasks of the nation.

He also told sectors and all-level authorities to increase coordination to better care for the youths demand and interests and further assist youngsters to access job opportunities.
New Delhi [India], Mar 26 (ANI): Prime Minister Narendra Modi led government at the Centre has asked its ministers to take charge of their States and play the role of leaders in defeating the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sources told ANI that a letter from the PMO has been sent to all ministers, asking them to play an active and effective role in stemming the growing disease.

"The elected representatives have been asked to ensure that poor and underprivileged get food, that the PDS shops in their area do not run out of ration, essential commodities are available in local markets and people are not overcharged for the same," informed one of the ministers.

The ministers have also been asked to maintain constant touch with the local administration and keep themselves updated on the status of COVID-19 in their respective constituencies as well.

"Be in contact with the local district magistrate, make sure all those who have returned from abroad follow quarantine rules and maintain a data of coronavirus positive people and those who have died due to the disease," a source said while giving the detail of the letter.

The ministers who have been given charge are Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, who will look after Jharkhand, whereas Maharashtra has been given to Nitin Gadkari and Prakash Javadekar.

Similarly, UP will be looked after by Rajnath Singh, Mahendra Nath Pandey, Sanjeev Balyan, Krishna Pal Gurjar.

The responsibility of Bihar has been given to Ravi Shankar Prasad and Ram Vilas Paswan. Gajendra Singh Shekhawat will look after Rajasthan and Punjab.

The step assumes significance as Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to ensure that there is no community outbreak of the disease. The senior leadership of other political parties was also taken into confidence.

The elected representatives have also been asked to ensure the community kitchens do not face problems in serving the poor. The ministers have also been asked to create awareness regarding the disease.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that social distancing was the only remedy to contain the spread of the disease.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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A treasure trove of antique furniture and rare tapestries collected by late architect Sir William Whitfield has sold for total of 1.5million.

Sir William died last year aged 98 and the everything-must-go sale was held by his civil partner at the Palladian house in St Helen Auckland, County Durham.

The 570 lots, which included an abundance of fine furnishings and decadent decor, were sold across two days.

A treasure trove of antique furniture and rare tapestries collected by late architect Sir William Whitfield sells for total of 1.5million. Pictured: A set of six George II style carved giltwood side chairs sold for 3,500

Sir William died last year aged 98 and the everything-must-go sale was held by his civil partner at the Palladian house (pictured) in St Helen Auckland, County Durham

One of the finest pieces in the collection was a rare 17th-century Flemish tapestry which was originally valued at 8,000. But the 11ft by 13ft hanging depicting the Triumph of Mark Antony (pictured), which hung on the wall of the country home's saloon, actually sold for 150,000

One of the finest pieces in the collection was a rare 17th-century Flemish tapestry which was originally valued at 8,000.

But the 11ft by 13ft hanging depicting the Triumph of Mark Antony, which hung on the wall of the country home's saloon, actually sold for 150,000.

Other lots included a second historical tapestry of Paris that achieved a price of 33,750 and a George II mahogany dressing commode that sold for 75,000.

The 570 lots, which included an abundance of fine furnishings and decadent decor, were sold across two days. Pictured: An Irish George II carved mirror circa 1740 (pictured) sold for 17,500

A portrait painting of Francesco de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany by a follower of Italian artist Alessandro Allori (hanging above the fireplace) went for 50,000

A Portrait of King Louis XV (left) sold for 13,750 as well as a portrait of Thomas Arthington of Arthington Hall (right) which sold for 10,000

From the drawing room, a George III style carved mahogany sofa (pictured front) sold for 5,000 as well as a George II style mahogany library bookcase (pictured rear) for 16,250

Eight bronzed wood panels made by the Italian carver Anton Leone Bulletti in 1864, which had been in the drawing room, added 66,875 to the total.

A portrait painting of Francesco de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany by a follower of Italian artist Alessandro Allori went for 50,000 as well as a matching pair of George III mahogany library armchairs dated to 1765 selling for 17,500.

In the lead up to the sale Dreweatts auctioneers invited Daniel Slowik of Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler who curated a series of room sets throughout their salerooms at Donnington Priory and Pall Mall gallery.

Daniel was tasked with using items within the auction and incorporating them with fabrics and objects synonymous with the leading design firm.

Jonathan Pratt, Managing Director of Dreweatts said: 'The involvement of Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler has been magnificent and worked to inspire and inform the unconfident buyer.

'Some of the more decorative lots sold for more than 10 times their original estimates.

'Daniel certainly worked his magic to create exquisitely curated rooms characteristic of the level of taste and knowledge possessed by one of the UK's leading interior decorating firms. "Can I move in?" was the most typical response.'

Joe Robinson, house sales and collections manager at auctioneers Dreweatts of Newbury, Berkshire, which held the sale, said: 'It is so rare for such a well curated collection to come to the market.' Pictured: Dining room

Other items among the collection included a gilt brass mounted amboyna musical table clock (left) which sold for 8,500 and a 17th-century Paris tapestry (right) which went for 33,750

In the 1960s Sir William and his partner Andrew Lockwood saved St Helen Hall from demolition and restored it to its former glory over the course of the next four decades

A Victorian walnut and button-upholstered chesterfield sofa (pictured) sold for 2,700

Sir William was acknowledged as being one of the finest architects of his generation.

During the course of his career he developed a design approach that combined modernist trends alongside great historic architectural tradition.

His most notable projects include Richmond House, the Department for Health building in Whitehall, the new chapter house for St Albans Cathedral and the Canterbury Cathedral Lodge.

In the 1960s he and his partner Andrew Lockwood saved St Helen Hall from demolition and restored it to its former glory over the course of the next four decades.

Many items were sold off from the spacious reception room including a large Savonnerie-style woven carpet for 8,125 and a portrait of Lady Margaret Herbert daughter of Thomas, 8th Earl of Pembroke, from above the fire place for 6,850

Eight bronzed wood panels (left), which had been made by the Italian carver Anton Leone Bulletti in 1864, added 66,875 to the total as well as pair of Italian marmo giallo Grand Tour souvenir models of Temple of Castor and Pollux and the Temple of Vespasian (right) fetching 26,250

An Antwerp Tapestry that features The Sacrifice to the Unknown God from The Story of Emperor Octavian Augustus, circa 1660-1690, (pictured) sold for 14,000

A portrait of Portrait of Sir Thomas Heath seen hanging above the fireplace in the saloon (pictured) achieved a sale price of 3,500

Joe Robinson, house sales and collections manager at auctioneers Dreweatts of Newbury, Berkshire, which held the sale, said: 'It is so rare for such a well curated collection to come to the market.

'These works derived from established provenances, known artists and historic styles, which delighted a new generation of collector.

'The collection offered both style and substance, and the market decided.

Mr Robinson added: 'Sales such as these bring an electric atmosphere. Traditional areas of the market such as ceramics are seeing a comeback as today's buyers are opting for comfort and character - this sale proves it.' Pictured: Alcove study

Some of the more decorative lots that had been put up for sale during the auction achieved more than 10 times their original estimates. Pictured: Dining room

Included in the everything-must-go sale was a George II carved mahogany dressing commode, circa 1735, which sold for 75,000 (left) and a carved mahogany seat (right) for 32,500

A flamboyant portrait of Ralph Freeman Jr. of Aspenden in a gold gilt frame (pictured) sold for 5,500

'We experienced record numbers of registrants and new bidders from around the globe.

'Sales such as these bring an electric atmosphere. Traditional areas of the market such as ceramics are seeing a comeback as today's buyers are opting for comfort and character - this sale proves it.

'We are delighted with the result. Some of the more decorative lots sold for more than 10 times their original estimates.'

Mr Robinson said that they had 'experienced record numbers of registrants and new bidders from around the globe'. Pictured: Stairway and landing

A Regency beechwood, parcel-gilt and brass-mounted scroll-end sofa, circa 1815 (pictured) contributed 6,000 to the overall total achieved by the sale

A full-length portrait of William Lloyd of Liverpool posed in a fetching burgundy velvet coat (pictured on the wall, left) sold for 6,000
The U.S. Capitol dome and U.S. Senate (R) in Washington, on Aug. 2, 2011. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo)

Senate Rejects GOP Pushback on Expanded Unemployment Insurance in Relief Bill

Ahead of last nights unanimous passage of the $2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, four Republican senators sought to change enhanced unemployment insurance benefits included in the gargantuan package.

The four senators pressed for the changes to bill over concerns that the final version of the package would incentivize people not to go back to work.

A massive drafting error in the current version of the coronavirus relief legislation could have devastating consequences: Unless this bill is fixed, there is a strong incentive for employees to be laid off instead of going to work, Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in a joint statement on Wednesday afternoon. This isnt an abstract, philosophical pointits an immediate, real-world problem.

Joined by Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the four sought to amend the bill to cap unemployment benefits at 100 percent of an individuals salary before they are laid off.

I plan to support this legislation tonight, but I do want to fix it first, said Scott (S.C.), The Hill reports. The goal is simply to keep you whole while youre unemployed because of COVID-19.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China before it was transmitted worldwide.

The relief bill enhances unemployment benefits to the tune of an additional $600 a week over and above any state benefits, for a period of four months.

It has unemployment insurance on steroids, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday. But, and most importantly, the federal government will pay your salary, your full salary for now four months.

The four GOP senators argued that the agreement would reduce the incentive to work.

Something hit me like a ton of bricks  Under this bill you get $23.15 an hour based on a 40-hour work week not to work, Graham said Wednesday, according to The Hill. Weve created Pandoras box for our economy.

There was bipartisan opposition to the amendment forwarded by the four GOP senators.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said the Department of Labor indicated that a state-by-state cap could not be harmonized nationwide because of differences in state unemployment systems.

The way you want to calculate it, were told cannot be done, Durbin said, the Hill reports.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said in a tweet: Lets not over-complicate this. Several Republican Senators are holding up the bipartisan Coronavirus emergency bill because they think the bill is too good for laid off Americans.

Each state has a different UI program, so the drafters opted for a temporary across-the-board UI boost of $600, which can deliver needed aid in a timely manner rather than burning time to create a different administrative regime for each state, a Senate GOP aide said, as cited by The Hill. Its also important to remember that nobody who voluntarily leaves an available job is eligible for UI.

Senators rejected the amendment in a 48-48 vote and later passed, by 96 votes to none, what is poised to become the largest ever fiscal stimulus measure ever passed by Congress.

The unanimous vote, a rare departure from bitter partisanship in Washington, underscored how seriously members of Congress are taking the global pandemic as Americans suffer and the medical system reels.

The package is intended to flood the country with cash in a bid to stem the crushing impact on the economy of an intensifying epidemic that has killed more than 900 people in the United States and infected at least 60,000.

It follows two others that became law this month. The money at stake amounts to nearly half of the total $4.7 trillion the U.S. government spends annually.

President Donald Trump, who has promised to sign the bill as soon as it passes the House, expressed approval on Twitter. 96-0 in the United States Senate. Congratulations AMERICA! he wrote.
- On March 25, actress and philanthropist Angel Locsin launched a campaign to help solve overcrowding in hospitals amid coronavirus spread

- She announced that she put up the fund drive called #UniTENTweStandPH via gogetfunding.com

- According to Angel, its objective is to accommodate more patients who need immediate treatments while also prioritizing the health workers safety

- Within 24 hours, her initiative has reached almost 1 million worth of donations

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In less than a day, Angel Locsin has raised almost 1 million funds to help solve overcrowding in hospitals combatting the spread of the coronavirus disease in the country.

KAMI learned that on March 25, the actress and philanthropist launched a fund-raising campaign dubbed #UniTENTweStandPH through GoGetFunding which aims to set up tents at hospitals in Metro Manila and nearby provinces that face overcrowding of patients.

To help stop the spread of the corona virus disease (COVID-19) and due to the overcrowding in public and private hospitals, we are launching a fund-raising campaign here in gogetfunding.com to help set up additional tents for patients, Angel posted.

The objective is to accommodate more patients who need immediate treatments while also prioritizing the safety of our health workers.

Angel targets to set up at least two tents sized 12x24 meters in seven hospitals which recently requested for her help such as South City Hospital and Medical Center (Daang Hari, Bacoor City, Las Pinas Doctors Hospital, Las Pinas City Medical Center, St. Frances Cabrini Hospital and Medical Center (Sto. Tomas, Batangas), UniHealth Paranaque Hospital and Medical Center, Binakayan Hospital and Medical Center (Kawit, Cavite), and PNP Hospital.

Each tent would cost around Php50,000 as per our experience when we set up tents at the Taguig Pateros District Hospital she said.

If this campaign will be a success, we are hoping to reach other hospitals in Luzon and eventually in other parts of the country, she added.

I have avoided asking for financial donations but for now, it is best that we gather more resources and funding to be able to widen the reach, service and sustainability of this project. I would appreciate anything you can offer for this cause to help our fellow Filipinos survive this difficult time.

As of this posting, Angel has reached over P999,000 worth of donations and the initiative still has 19 days to receive funds. The page accepts one-peso minimum donation.

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In a previous article by KAMI, Angel set up tents for health workers fighting COVID-19.

Angel Locsin is one of the most generous and kindhearted celebrities in the Philippines. She is known for helping the people in need whenever there is a calamity or unfortunate incident.

Please like and share our amazing Facebook posts to support the KAMI team! Dont hesitate to comment and share your opinions about our stories either. We love reading about your thoughts and views on different matters!

KAMI reviewed the 2020 Oscar Best Picture movie "Parasite" to let you know if it is worth checking out! Check out all of the exciting videos and celebrity interviews on our KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel!

Source: KAMI.com.gh
Weeks before Joe Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign, he released a social media video to address allegations from women who said his uninvited displays of affection had made them uncomfortable.

Social norms have begun to change. Theyve shifted, said the former vice-president, then 76. Looking straight into a cellphone camera, he added: I hear what they are saying. I understand.

Kate Bedingfield, an adviser the same age as Bidens youngest daughter, was first to propose a direct-to-lens declaration. She joined forces with Anita Dunn, an alumna of former president Barack Obamas West Wing and relative newbie to Bidens orbit. Together with two of Bidens longest-serving confidants  Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon  they convinced the almost-candidate it was the right course.

When the boss was ready, Bedingfield held up her phone to record.

Those early days of spring 2019 portended a defining new reality for Biden: His innermost circle for decades was dominated by men, with the crucial exceptions of his wife, Jill, and sister, Valerie. But the 50-year political veteran has expanded his brain trust, and the cadre of women now included have helped shape  and even rescue  a campaign that has whipsawed Biden from early favourite to disappointing afterthought and finally to prospective Democratic nominee.

We dont have a senior meeting on the campaign where women are not at least half the meeting, said Bedingfield, the deputy campaign manager, who had joined Biden during his final years as Obamas vice-president. Biden, she said, is cognizant of the fact that we bring different life experiences to the table, and that that is valuable, while also seeing women and men as equals in presidential politics.

Its a vital dynamic for a politician whose career is marked by both successes and controversies where women are concerned, and also for his party, which again will nominate a man despite a historically diverse field that fuelled many Democrats hopes that a woman finally could win the presidency.

Accordingly, Biden has highlighted that women are leaders on his campaign and assured voters they would remain so in his White House. He pledged days before the South Carolina primary to make a Black woman his first Supreme Court nominee. After taking complete command of the nominating fight over subsequent weeks, he named Democratic operative Jen OMalley Dillon as his campaign manager and promised to select a woman as his running mate.

Biden had previously tasked Dunn, 63, with leading his campaign after an embarrassing fourth-place finish in Iowa last month. Dunn already had bonded with two other top women advisers: Bedingfield, 38, and Symone Sanders, 30, who came to the campaign as one of the partys most high-profile Black women strategists. Dunn also recommended Biden make OMalley Dillon, 43, his permanent manager.

Bedingfield and Bidens first campaign manager, Greg Schultz, meanwhile, had built a team with women atop several divisions: policy, political outreach, research, fundraising and accounting. And Bidens travelling chief of staff is Annie Tomasini, making her the candidates day-to-day shepherd.

Thats a notable lineup for a man who came of age in a staunchly patriarchal era. He joined an all-male Senate in 1973. Hes since authored the Violence Against Women Act, but also has been harangued over his handling of Anita Hills accusations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas before his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation. Biden said that led him to recruit the first women to the Senate Judiciary Committee, though hes never personally apologized to Hill for anything he did as chairman, instead referring generally to how other senators treated her.

Dunn said it is Bidens world view to want women challenging him. But she and other women deflect credit for his campaign turnaround, pointing elsewhere, including at the men who remain fixtures.

Successful campaigns are about addition, Dunn said, not subtraction.

Indeed, while Dunn spent much of her time at Philadelphia headquarters before it was shuttered by the coronavirus, a trio of Bidens old-guard  Donilon, his speech writer and ad guru since the early 1980s, and former chiefs of staff Ricchetti and Bruce Reed  comprised a travelling mainstay with the candidate. Still, interviews with nearly a dozen Biden aides and allies made clear that women are a driving force behind the candidate and his campaign.

Women were in the room when Biden reversed his decades-long support for the Hyde amendment, a prohibition on federal money paying for abortions. Theyve helped soften his defensiveness about lingering criticisms over Hill. And women urged Biden to talk more openly about a debilitating stutter that he learned to manage as a boy, convincing him it wasnt a weakness, but a humanizing strength.

When Biden granted Dunn final decision-making authority after the Iowa caucuses, she moved quickly. She recruited OMalley Dillon, whod never worked directly for Biden, to oversee the Nevada operation. Sanders headed to South Carolina. Those states resuscitated a campaign Dunn said was on the brink of collapse.

Bedingfield and Sanders were especially vocal in pressing Biden to bail on New Hampshire when it became clear hed lose badly there. They helped convince him to visit South Carolina for a rally on friendlier turf before travelling to Nevada.

There was a big difference between a fifth-place finish in a ballroom in New Hampshire and a fifth-place finish being in South Carolina, making the case for where we thought our campaign would turn around, Bedingfield said.

In South Carolina, a day after a crucial second-place Nevada finish, Sanders engineered a private, spur-of-the-moment meeting between Biden and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, as the states most powerful Democrat hosted a welcome reception for the Congressional Black Caucus. Days later, Clyburn delivered an emotional endorsement for his old friend, a move widely credited for turning an expected Biden victory into a romp and setting up his March surge.

Immediately after South Carolina, it was Dunn, Bedingfield and Sanders managing whirlwind negotiations with one-time rivals to rally behind the former vice-president heading into Super Tuesday. They ultimately orchestrated remarkable scenes in Dallas with Biden alongside Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Beto ORourke in a show of force the night before Biden won 10 of 14 primaries.

That consolidation of Democratic factions ended Bernie Sanders hopes for the nomination.

None of this makes up for the fact that a woman wont be elected president this year. But Lily Adams, who worked for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Sen. Kamala Harris this cycle, said Bidens approach is an important recognition of the moment.

Usually, when there are the toughest odds, the most successful people who are ready to walk through fire are women, because in many cases theyve faced down every obstacle, every amount of bias, Adams said. The importance of diversity in teams isnt just because its the right thing to do, but also because its the smart thing to do.

None of the women around Biden see themselves as supplanting anyone. Dunn said Jill Biden and Valerie Biden Owens are now elevated as principals in their own right  veritable extensions of the candidate. Bedingfield texts regularly with the candidates wife.

Val, as Biden calls his sister, managed her older brothers politics for decades, becoming the first woman to manage a modern U.S. Senate or presidential campaign. Biden still trusts Ricchetti perhaps more than anyone other than Jill or Val. And no newcomer matches Donilons comfort with Bidens voice.

The fact that he values relationships and loyalty, Dunn said, doesnt mean he cant establish new ones.

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Governor Gavin Newsom View Photo

Sacramento, CA  Governor Gavin Newsom took up several issued related to COVID-19 during an afternoon live address including mortgage relief, unemployment, testing, and social distancing.

Newsom announced Californians economically impacted by COVID-19 may receive 90-day grace periods to make mortgage payments. He relayed that four of the nations largest banks have agreed to temporarily suspend mortgage payments for those affected by the coronavirus.

Calling it a model for the rest of the nation, Newsom praised Wells Fargo, US Bank, Citi, and JP Morgan Chase while chastising another, Four of the five largest [banks] committed to that 90 days. Unfortunately, Bank of America did not publicly did not commit to that. They just committed to 30 days. I hope they will reconsider and join those other banks that are willing to do the right thing by at least extending that commitment. At the bottom of the page is the outline of the grace period that the governor says also will not negatively impact credit reports.

Newsom cheered the proposed Senate relief bill to fight the coronavirus pandemic. California provides up to $450 per week in unemployment insurance, Newsom noted, The package will provide for an additional $600 on top of that so for over a thousand dollars a week for many Californians. By the way, the reason I say it is timely, we just past the one-million mark in terms of the number of claims just since March 13th. That was reached in under two weeks.

Regarding medical supplies, the governor disclosed that already 24.2 million N95 masks have been distributed in the state with another 100 million having been secured. He also remarked there have been nearly 70,000 tests done, but noted, Tens of thousands of those tests are waiting for the results to be finalized. The backlog now is not just on reagents and on extraction kits and on the swaps themselves, but now also on the delay in getting the results of these tests.

During the address, the governor also suggested that instead of calling it social distancing, it be changed to physical distancing, which he explained is less confusing to younger people. Noting that the stay at home order is not going away anytime soon, he expressed, For the younger folks out there, physically separate from others and strangers. Dont mix and dont think for a second that were a day or two away from lifting that order, were not. Were not even a week or two away.

As the deadly virus is surging, the governor suggested the order could stay in place into May.

Outline of governors mortgage relief:

90-Day Grace Period for Mortgage Payments:

Financial institutions will offer, consistent with applicable guidelines, mortgage payment forbearances of up to 90 days to borrowers economically impacted by COVID-19. In addition, those institutions will:

Provide borrowers a streamlined process to request a forbearance for COVID-19-related reasons, supported with available documentation;

Confirm approval of and terms of forbearance program; and

Provide borrowers the opportunity to request additional relief, as practicable, upon continued showing of hardship due to COVID-19.

No Negative Credit Impacts Resulting from Relief:

-Financial institutions will not report derogatory tradelines (e.g., late payments) to credit reporting agencies, consistent with applicable guidelines, for borrowers taking advantage of COVID-19-related relief.

Moratorium on Initiating Foreclosure Sales or Evictions:

-For at least 60 days, financial institutions will not initiate foreclosure sales or evictions, consistent with applicable guidelines.

Relief from Fees and Charges:

-For at least 90 days, financial institutions will waive or refund at least the following for customers who have requested assistance:

Mortgage-related late fees; and

Other fees, including early CD withdrawals (subject to applicable federal regulations).

Loans held by a financial institution may be serviced by another company.
The planning board has approved a 485-unit residential development on the Carnlough Road in Cabra, Dublin 7, on lands originally purchased from CIE 16 years ago.

The build-to-rent scheme by UK firm Tristan Capital Partners - which acquired the site last year from Pat Creans Marlet Property Group for a reported 39m - includes nine blocks up to eight storeys tall.

In its newly published decision, An Bord Pleanala approved the plans subject to several conditions, including provisions for adequate traffic flow and a parking management plan. These stipulate the development should have a maximum of 403 car parking spaces and a minimum of 529 spaces for bicycles.

It said an environmental impact report would not be required.

The design includes a neighbourhood centre with space for a cafe, a convenience store, a gym and child care facilities, while one block will be devoted to community space, including co-working areas, meeting rooms and a cinema.

Marlet previously had received planning approval for a 420-unit development on the site, which runs parallel to the Phoenix Park rail line and is 1 kilometer from the Phibsborough Luas stop.

Tristan Capital, a London property investment firm, is already one of the States largest residential landlords with sizeable assets on the south side of Dublin.

Its local arm, Seven Cabra Real Estate, applied for planning permission in November under the Governments fast-track Strategic Housing Development rules. These allow developers to apply directly to An Bord Pleanala for approval, bypassing local authorities, to speed housing delivery.
- Museveni warned traders against taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic after cases of COVID-19 shot up in the country from one to nine

- Four traders have since been arrested for allegedly hiking prices of food items in anticipation of a total lockdown

- Museveni warned he will flood towns in the country with spies to catch traders taking advantage of the situation

Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, has warned traders against hiking prices of food commodities amid the coronavirus crisis.

Four traders including three Asians and a Ugandan have since been arrested in Koboko town of Uganda for allegedly hiking prices of food items in anticipation of a total lockdown.

READ ALSO: Uhuru confirms first case of Covid-19 full recovery

Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, has warned traders against hiking prices of food commodities amid coronavirus crisis. Photo: Yoweri Museveni.

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Hero woman forfeits interview, gives desperate single mom the job instead

In a televised address on Tuesday, March 24, Museveni warned that he will flood towns in the country with spies to catch those hiking food prices.

I will send spies in the town to catch those hiking the price of food. I will cancel their licenses. These are crooks, said Museveni.

"The food is produced here, what has happened to make food prices go up? I may organise NRM cadres to bring this food from the village and sell it directly at proper prices," he added.

READ ALSO: Government suspends importation of Mitumba clothes as a health precaution

Four traders including three Asians and a Ugandan were arrested for allegedly hiking prices of food items in anticipation of a total lockdown. Photo: Daily Monitor.

Source: UGC

Residents in Koboko area had filed complaints after traders started taking advantage of a looming lockdown in Uganda.

The suspects included proprietors of Lila-D-Keshwala Enterprise, Home Brothers Investment and Paul Enterprise, all operating in Koboko Municipality.

A packet of salt at the said outlets was being sold at USh 3,000 (KSh 81) up from USh 700 (KSh18.9) while in the rural areas it was going between USh 3500 (KSh 94.9) and USh 4000 (KSh 108.5).

READ ALSO: Coronavirus: Prince Charles tests positive for COVID-19

It is true that coronavirus came with different impact but we shouldnt use it as an advantage to exploit the poor," said Koboko Resident District Commissioner.

"Why must you hike prices just to fleece these poor people! This is against the law and you will have to face the courts of law, he added.

A kilogram of beans is now retailing at USh4,500 (KSh 122) from USh 3,000 (KSh 81) and tomato is at KSh 57 from KSh 13.5 before the outbreak was officially announced in December 2019.

Do you have a groundbreaking story you would like us to publish? Please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690. Contact Tuko.co.ke instantly

Source: TUKO.co.ke
Hiker Taylor Frint started the Pacific Crest Trail last week, then stopped when warnings were issued. (Taylor Frint)

Earlier this month, legions of long-distance hikers gathered near the Mexican border and set off on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail. Then the widening coronavirus crisis dashed their dreams and sent them home  except for some hikers who have defied advice and remain on the trail.

If you have a sheriff at the checkpoint, were going to go home," hiker Micah Romano said Tuesday. "Were not going to resist. But at this point, its all suggestions.

Romano, 28, and his wife, Joanna Vossahlik, 29, of Vancouver, Wash., are hiking with their 8-month-old daughter Solel. They started March 2 at the Mexican border, aiming to reach the Canadian border in about five months.

Theyre near the California mountain town of Idyllwild, having covered more than 150 miles of the route made famous by the Cheryl Strayed memoir and 2014 movie Wild. They know they're bucking advice from several leading hiker organizations, which have called for people to stay away from long-distance trails, but they don't think they're doing any harm, and they say they have encountered few other hikers.

There are no solid numbers, but several experts estimated that 100 to 200 thru-hikers, as theyre known on the Pacific Crest Trail, remain. The hikers are making their way north through California, Washington and Oregon, sleeping in tents or finding beds in towns along the way as they pass through 26 national forests, seven national parks, five state parks and four national monuments.

Other thru-hikers started as recently as Sunday, as legions of others were returning to civilization. One hiker, who blogs under the name Ron, paused Tuesday in the San Diego County mountain town of Julian, told of a pleasant innkeeper who gave him half a roll of toilet paper. Ron laid out his plans to head out after retrieving new shoes from a box waiting for him at the post office.





Extra on the line

Hikers figure safety into the equation of a long trek, especially if they have a child with them. "Because we do, theres a little extra on the line," Romano said. "We had to check with ourselves and check with people we respect, like our parents and community members we know. And we have gotten a lot of good feedback.

Story continues

On social media, theres a been a lot of hate and negativity" over the idea of pressing forward as the country lurches into peril and uncertainty. "Were both just shocked at how intense it is at this point, just the fear in some people.

For many hikers, the decision to stop came Friday, when the Pacific Crest Trail Assn. asked hikers to postpone or cancel their journeys because of the coronavirus.

Given what is known about COVID-19, the association said, It is clear that anyone traveling the PCT and resupplying in communities along the trail represents a serious risk to others on the trail and people in those communities  particularly high-risk individuals for whom the virus could be deadly.

On Monday, as local, state and national parks throughout the West announced emergency measures, PCTA executive director Liz Bergeron warned hikers near the southern terminus that they could "no longer complete a planned long-distance trip due to public land and facility closures.

Among the impediments: the closure of Yosemite National Park; a ban on new developed camping permits in Cleveland National Forest; the closure of California state campgrounds; and local conditions that change daily. Tuesday afternoon brought the closure of another popular stop on the PCT route: Crater Lake National Park in Oregon.

U.S. Forest Service Pacific Crest Trail Administrator Beth Boyst has also asked hikers to think twice, citing the Centers for Disease Control's call for people to avoid nonessential travel.

Leaders of groups devoted to the East Coasts Appalachian Trail and the Continental Divide Trail (which follows the Rocky Mountains across New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana) have given hikers the same message in recent days: Stop now. But not everyone has.

Its not about you and the hike, Sandra Marra, president and chief executive of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, told Outsideonline.com. Its about us belonging to a global community.

Tough choices

Zach Davis, Colorado-based owner and editor in chief of of TheTrek.co, makes much of his living directly and indirectly from hikers on those routes who share blog posts and information. But in recent days, he decided not to post their accounts because I could potentially put peoples lives at risk.

It was a tough call, said Davis, who hiked the PCT in 2017. The logistical hurdles that you have to clear to make a thru-hike happen  its honestly tough to fathom unless youve gone through it.  A lot of people sell their cars, sell their homes, sell their possessions to fund this.

"You have to flip your life entirely upside down to make something like this work. Ive talked to a lot of people who dont have homes to go back to because they were planning on living out of a tent for the next five months.

Given all that, Davis said, he admires the hikers who have stopped. Although he has some empathy for those still going, Davis thinks they're being selfish.

Like Davis, Scott Wilkinson, director of communications for the Pacific Crest Trail Assn., guesses that there could be 100 to 200 people on the trail.

Many people think, What better place to be than in the wilderness on a remote mountain trail somewhere?' Wilkinson said. But its actually a very social undertaking. In a normal year youre hiking in waves of hundreds of other hikers.  They often camp together. And most hikers dont carry more than a weeks worth of food, so theyre always going to have to come off the trail to resupply.

Barney Scout Mann and Sandy Frodo Mann, a pair of longtime trail angels in San Diego who have hosted hundreds of thru-hikers at their home in the last 15 years, arent doing it this year  a choice they called gut-wrenching.

The couple hosted more than 1,200 hikers last year. This year, they hosted just one family: Micah Romano and his wife and daughter, who arrived ahead of most hikers and before many public land restrictions were announced.

The Manns were surprised to meet hikers with such a young child, especially this year. "These two people had made a considered evaluation of what they were doing," Barney Mann said. "And we were impressed with their equipment.

Still, on March 15, the Manns put out word that, for public safety reasons, they wouldnt host any more hikers this year.

Now we have hundreds of packages people have mailed to our house, Barney Mann. "These would have been vital trail supplies. Now, when the frustrated hikers drop by to pick up their no-longer-necessary supply, Mann sits 8 feet away on their driveway and listens.

After such an investment of energy, emotion and money, Barney Mann said, What do you do? What do you do?

18 months in the planning

Hiker Lauren Roerick, 30, who spent a year and a half on planning, then gave up her apartment and job in Raleigh, N.C., to do the trail, is asking herself that same question.

I started on March 7, and I was able to do the first 115 miles, Roerick said Wednesday. The weather was insane. We were getting snow and rain and wind all over the place.

Then, as she reached Warner Springs in northern San Diego County, came the PCTAs postpone-or-cancel email.

She talked with other hikers, including some from Michigan and Norway who kept going, but she decided to bail out. Unlike many others, she had family close. Now shes at her mothers place in San Clemente, trying to decide where to go next, holding out hope that in the next month, circumstances might ease.

Every day, Roerick said, I open my phone, and more people have left the trail.

Taylor Frint, 22, who just graduated from Western Kentucky University, started March 18. Her second night out, as she settled in with about two dozen other camping thru-hikers at Lake Morena in southern San Diego County, the PCTAs email went out.

Probably within 10 minutes, you could see every hikers tent light up, she recalled.

She had been planning the trip for four years, but she left the trail the next day. Now shes back in Bowling Green, Ky., tracking the hiker debate about the PCT.

Theres a lot of arguing," Frint said. "Its not very civil.

Meanwhile, back the trail near Idyllwild, the hiking is good. "Were happy, Romano said. Because theyre carrying a toddler, their backpacks are much heavier than most, and their pace is slow. Stormy weather has forced them to take a zero day or two.

We had some friends who were going to visit, but they got nervous, so we had to make some new arrangements for getting food and supplies, Romano said. But the recent rains have meant theyve been able to carry less water, he said.

As for their interaction with others, Romano said, theyre calling ahead ahead and being as safe and respectful as possible. On the trail they are largely alone, he said. And anyone walking in public in a big city is much more likely to come in contact [with other people] than when youre walking through a small town like Idyllwild. ... Normally this time of year, theres got to be 20 hikers in a day. We see one or two at most.




Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, requesting public support, advised them not to let the situation slip into the imposition of drastic measures like promulgation of total curfew, issuing shoot at sight orders or calling in the Army to keep the situation under control.

Hyderabad: Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao on Tuesday announced on Tuesday, the imposition of curfew in the state from seven pm to six am the next morning as part of measures to contain the spread of coronavirus.

"Evening 7'o clock to morning 6'o clock, throughout the state, night curfew is being imposed from today. It was not there till yesterday Now, the curfew is imposed," Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao told a press conference.

"No one should come on to roads at any cost. Anybody having any trouble, dial 100. The vehicle will come to your house and they will help," he said.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on Coronavirus Outbreak

Rao on 22 March announced lockdown across the state till 31 March to prevent the spread of the disease.

He asked all public representatives from village Sarpanch to MLAs  to assist the administration in the implementation of lockdown.

Rao, requesting public support, advised them not to let the situation slip into the imposition of drastic measures like promulgation of total curfew, issuing shoot at sight orders or calling in the Army to keep the situation under control.

In the wake of some foreign returnees jumping home quarantine, the Chief Minister said officials have been asked to seize passports of those who are supposed to be in-home quarantine.

He also warned that passports of the violators would be recommended for cancellation.

Citing an instance, he said a person at Nirmal town in the state was found violating home quarantine thrice.

According to him, 19,313 people are under surveillance on COVID-19 and that 114 are suspected cases.

On reports of an escalation in prices of essential commodities like vegetables, Rao warned that Preventive Detention (PD) Act would be slapped against those who sell essential goods at inflated prices.

He also said licenses of such traders would be cancelled.

Rao also said the total number of positive cases in the state stood at 36 as on Tuesday, including the first person, who has been discharged after recovery.

The condition of all the patients who are undergoing treatment is stable and nobody is serious, he added.

Rao said the government would allow those vehicles stranded at inter-state borders following the announcement of lockdown on 22 March to proceed for their onward journey.

They are exempted from paying toll fee so that traffic at toll gates is eased.
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Linkedin Suherdjoko (The Jakarta Post) Tegal, Central Java  Thu, March 26, 2020 22:27 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206dada48 1 National coronavirus,COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,Central-Java,Tegal,lockdown Free

The Tegal administration in Central Java has decided to lock the city down to protect its residents from the coronavirus outbreak, which has reached 27 of the country's 34 provinces. The measure will be implemented for four months from March 30 to July 31.

Tegal Mayor Dedy Yon Supriyono announced on Tuesday evening that the city was in "a state of emergency" following the confirmation of one COVID-19 case.

"We need serious efforts [to stop virus transmission]," Dedy said, adding that he would limit access to the city by closing down borders.

"We plan for a full lockdown. All borders will be closed for the safety of all."

Read also: No lockdown for Indonesia, Jokowi insists

The first COVID-19 case in Tegal is a 34-year-old man who recently traveled to Abu Dhabi, and then Jakarta, before returning home by train.

He was first admitted to Kardinah Hospital in the city on March 16, just after arriving from Jakarta. Among his symptoms were fever, cough, diarrhea and shortness of breath. His test results came back positive on March 24.

Dedy said he had contacted state-owned railway operator PT Kereta Api Indonesia to get information about passengers who were in the same car as the patient. They all should be quarantined and tested, he added.

Indonesia had recorded 893 positive COVID-19 cases as of Thursday afternoon, 78 of whom have died. (vny)
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Linkedin Ganug Nugroho Adi (The Jakarta Post) Surakarta, Central Java  Thu, March 26, 2020 17:10 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d9c5a4 1 National Jokowi,Joko-Widodo,President-Jokowi,Sujiatmi-Notomihardjo Free

President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo and his family gathered on Thursday to pay their final respects to Jokowi's late mother, Sujiatmi Notomiharjo, who was laid to rest at Mundu cemetery in Gondangrejo subdistrict, Karanganyar, Central Java.

The burial took place at 1:18 p.m., after the President held a funeral prayer in Surakarta, his hometown and the city where his mother had lived.

Sujiatmi, who passed away on Wednesday at the age of 77 after a four year battle with throat cancer, was buried next to her husband, Widjiatno Notomiharjo.

As the funeral took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the family had arranged it to comply with physical distancing measures.

They allowed only 500 people to attend the funeral, consisting of state officials, relatives and public figures. Chairs for the attendees were placed 1 meter apart.

A number of prominent figures, including East Java Governor Khofifah Indar Parawansa, Peoples Consultative Assembly (MPR) speaker Bambang Soesatyo and Regional Representative Council (DPD) speaker La Nyalla Mattalitti attended the funeral

Indonesian Military personnel, National Police personnel, journalists and members of Presidential Security Detail (Paspampres) were also present.

Read also: Jokowis mother passes away at 77

The attendees were required to undergo health screenings, including temperature checks, and were sprayed with disinfectant before entering the cemetery. They were also given masks to be worn at the burial ground.

During the funeral, Jokowi was accompanied by his eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka. The First Family left the cemetery at 1:50 p.m. without giving an official statement.

The President is scheduled to participate in a video-conference summit with G20 leaders on Thursday evening from Bogor Presidential Palace, West Java.

Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo said Jokowi's family members had asked people and neighbors to pray for Sujiatmi from afar to avoid mass gatherings during the pandemic.

The public appears to have followed the order as no public gatherings were seen at the burial ground or at the familys home.

The Presidents family would be glad if the public could pray for his mother from home, Ganjar said.

Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Mahfud MD also said that Jokowi had asked him and other Cabinet ministers not to attend the funeral and to instead focus on their duties in Jakarta. Therefore, he and fellow ministers decided to perform a ghaib (prayer for the deceased from afar).

Once I heard the news [of Sujiatimi's passing], I initially wanted to borrow planes from the Air Force so ministers could visit him in Surakarta, Mahfud said, "However, the President later said that we didnt have to come there, and he asked us to pray for his mother from our homes. (glh)
Outlander star Sam Heughan is under fire for vacationing in Hawaii amid the coronavirus pandemic. Heughan recently confirmed that he flew to Hawaii after several of his events were canceled, a move that sparked outrage amongst his followers. What did Heughan have to say about his decision to self-isolate in Hawaii?

Outlander star Sam Heughan | Rich Fury/WireImage

Sam Heughan reveals he is in Hawaii amid the coronavirus pandemic

In a recent Q&A session on Twitter, Heughan told Outlander fans that he is staying in Hawaii since most of his scheduled events have been canceled. This includes an appearance at PaleyFest in promotion of his new movie, Bloodshot.

Im in Hawaii, Heughan stated. Came here before travel ban. Rather concerned to return to UK. Certainly safer here for now. Hope youre safe and your family too!

Hey Nuria! Thanks for asking, Im in Hawaii. Came here before travel ban. Rather concerned to return to UK. Certainly safer here for now. Hope youre safe and your family too!x https://t.co/QQjcOwurUJ  Sam Heughan (@SamHeughan) March 22, 2020

Following his response, a fan asked Heughan if he had scheduled the flight before PaleyFest was canceled. The fan then said that Sam Heughans story doesnt add up before informing the Outlander star that this is serious, dude.

Many countries around the world have imposed travel bans as governments do their best to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Hawaii has enacted similar measures and has asked people to avoid flying for the next 30 days.

After the backlash, Heughan cleared up when he bought the plane tickets and defended his decision to go to Hawaii instead of staying in the UK.

Heughan responds to the criticism

Sam Heughan revealed that he purchased the tickets to Hawaii after he learned that PaleyFest was canceled. He also assured fans that he is completely aware of the serious nature of the situation and admitted that things are terrifying at the moment.

Thank you for your concern.Yes people ARE dying. Its terrifying. For your information, I booked once I knew Paley was cancelled. Is that okay with you? he shared.

On March 17, the governor of Hawaii, David Ige, asked people to cancel their upcoming trips to the state in a bid to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Even after Heughans explanation, fans called him out for being irresponsible and potentially adding more strain to Hawaiis health system. According to Page Six, Heughan responded by calling the naysayers rude and delusional and assured fans that he is practicing self-isolation.

Heughan has also announced the launch of his new initiative with My Peak Challenge called 30-Day Social-Distancing Challenge, which he is offering for free.

Sam Heughan joins Quarantine Watch Party

Amid the backlash, Heughan recently took part in the Quarantine Watch Party event, which screened Bloodshot. With movie theaters closing around the world, Sony Pictures is offering a digital version of the movie available to stream.

Heughan plays a character named Dalton in the film, who becomes more of a focus near the end of the flick. Dalton is a former soldier who becomes technologically enhanced via a special suit.

Apart from Sam Heughan, Bloodshot director Dave Wilson also joined the event. Fans were able to take part in the conversation via Twitter and Instagram, with downloads becoming available on March 24.

Fans, of course, can also see Heughan in action when new episodes of Outlander air Sunday nights on Starz. The series is currently in its fifth season and is close to wrapping up another successful run.

Sam Heughan opens up about that James Bond audition

While fans wait to see what Heughan is up to next, the actor recently addressed the rumors that he is in the running to be the next James Bond. Daniel Craig is set to say goodbye to the iconic franchise after his latest 007 film, No Time To Die, hits theaters in November.

A slew of actors have been mentioned as possible replacements for Craig, and Heughan has quickly overtaken them as a clear favorite. With that in mind, Heughan recently told Esquire that he has actually auditioned to play James Bond in the past but was not given the part.

I actually have auditioned for James Bond back when they were rebooting Bond 21. When Daniel Craig came on board, they were talking about making him younger, Sam Heughan explained.

Heughan went on to say that he is aware of the buzz surrounding his bid to become the next Bond, something he says feels random and very strange.

Sam Heughan also said that he believes it is time for the franchise to feature another Scottish 007. Sean Connery is the last Scottish actor to play the role, which has since gone to a Welshman, two British actors, one Irishman, and an Australian.
As the coronavirus took hold in Wuhan earlier this year, staff from the Chinese government-backed global property giant Greenland Group were instructed to put their normal work on hold and source bulk supplies of essential medical items to ship back to China.

A whistleblower from the company has told the Herald it was a worldwide Greenland effort - and the Sydney office was no different, sourcing bulk supplies of surgical masks, thermometers, antibacterial wipes, hand sanitisers, gloves and Panadol for shipping.

The company even posted its efforts of packing pallets in the companys Sydney headquarters on social media.

Chinese property developing group Greenland scoured Australia to purchase bulk medical supplies - including masks, gloves and thermometers - which were flown to China.

"Basically all employees, the majority of whom are Chinese, were asked to source whatever medical supplies they could," one company insider told the Herald. This exercise went on for weeks through January and February, he said.
The chief executive of Just Cuts has called the government's backflip of the 30-minute time limit for haircuts 'bonkers'.

Denis McFadden said it would be virtually impossible for hairdressers to adhere to strict social distancing rules, which dictate there must be four square metres per person.

'This decision is bonkers. It is physically impossible for stylists to do a shampoo or haircut without touching the client,' Mr McFadden said.

Just Cuts chief executive Denis McFadden (pictured) says the government's backflip on the 30-minute time limit for haircuts 'bonkers'

'Its physically impossible for stylists to do their job and keep the 4sqm which national Cabinet now says must be strictly observed'

Hairdressers and barbers were told to minimise contact with people where possible to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

'This is not about what services can and cant be provided in a 30 minute window. This is about health of everyone in our salons, our hairdressers and our clients,' Mr McFadden continued.

'Hairdressing is not an essential service.

'Of course I would prefer this werent happening at all, and calling for the sector to be shut down might seem counterproductive but it simply must happen in the interests of peoples health.'

In a video posted to the Just Cuts YouTube page Mr McFadden pleaded with the state and federal governments to recognise the dangers of keeping hairdressers open.

Mr McFadden said it wasn't about what could be done inside a 30-minute window but, he said it was about the health and safety of all his staff and customers

In the video he psychically demonstrates why keeping hairdressers working is dangerous.

'I am touching this client's hair and our stylists are doing this every day. We need the government now to shut us down,' he said.

'I plead with the state and federal government that this is dangerous.'

The National Cabinet relaxed the rules on 30-minute time limits for hairdressers on Wednesday night after backlash from the industry.

At midnight on Wednesday stage two restrictions over the coronavirus crisis came into effect forcing the closure of non-essential services including beauty services.

As the new restrictions took hold the death toll in Australia continued to rise with 12 confirmed deaths and 2,725 confirmed cases.
Yahaya Bello

According to a report by The Nation, the Kogi State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has advised Governor Yahaya Bello to immediately subject himself to the Coronavirus test, haven had contact with Abba kyari, the Chief of Staff to President Mohammadu Buhari.

Kyari was one of the top Federal Government official that graced the three days prayer for the late mother of Governor Bello, Hajia Hawau, last week, in Okene.

Rumours of Bello testing positive has gone virile, with online postings that he has gone into self quarantine.

The state commissioner for health, Dr. Saka Haruna, has however debunked the rumour.

Haruna late Tuesday night told The Nation that the news of Bello testing positive for the virus is incorrect, and called on the public to ignore such.

The Commissioner had said, That is incorrect; please ignore such lies.

The PDP in a statement signed by its Director Research and Documentation, Achadu Dickson, said that the fight against the dreaded Covid-19 virus can only be won when stakeholders show responsibility beyond lip service, and urged those who had contact with the CoS to the President to go for test.

The statement appealed to the APC-led government not to play politics with the health and safety of kogites, even as it prayed for Bello and wish that he test negative at the end.

The PDP noted that it has yet to seen any concrete preparation by the government to tackle the scourge in the state beyond the shutdown and ban of public gatherings.

It therefore urged the government to take a cue from what is obtained in Borno, Lagos and other states where they have shown serious commitment to fighting the scourge.

The PDP lamented that for an issue that is presently a global phenomenon and requiring of political and other will to fight by the leadership at all strata, it is worried by the sudden disappearance of the governor from the state for no serious reason, is unfortunate.

The PDP called on the state government to remain civil even in the face of the enforcement of the order banning public gatherings, saying it had gotten report of human rights abuse of citizens from across the state.
Two detainees in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alabama threatened to jump from a railing with bedsheets tied around their necks because of concerns they were being kept alongside new arrivals exposed to the coronavirus.

The two men are seen in a traumatic video, streamed on Facebook Live and acquired by the Washington Post, tying their bed sheets to the railings of the upper floor of the detention block and threatening to jump.

The hours-long stand off on Friday, March 20, came after three new detainees on the block said they had been transported with a person who was visibly ill and wearing a mask.

Other detainees believed the arrivals had been exposed to the coronavirus and threatened to attempt suicide if the new detainees were not removed.

Scroll down for video

An inmate streamed a Facebook Live of a protest in which detainee threatened to kill themselves over their fears that new arrivals has been exposed to the coronavirus

Two inmates at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alabama threatened suicide on March 20 in a protest live streamed on Facebook if newly arrived detainees they feared had been exposed to the the novel coronavirus were not removed from the unit

In the terrifying video taken in an immigration detention unit in Gadsden, Alabama, a detainee can be heard telling his fellow inmate that he has gone live as he begins to explain that two men on the opposite side of the floor to his cell are threatening to kill themselves because of coronavirus fears.

'We're not having no more people come in here with that symptom,' an inmate is heard saying.

'We're not trying to put no more lives at risk.'

He explains that three arrivals believe they were exposed to the coronavirus and other inmates want them removed before the whole block was infected.

The detainee then turns the video on himself and his bunk mate who are both wearing face masks to protect themselves.

The man claims that there were three positive tests for coronavirus placed in with the other detainees, who were sleeping and unaware that the men had arrived.

He adds that officers threatened to shoot them with tazers and pellet guns as the detainees protested.

The stand off eventually came to an end several hours later, according to the Washington Post, after the three new arrivals were moved to a different unit in the same facility.

An agency spokesperson said that no ICE detainees had tested positive for coronavirus but did not say whether the three new detainees or the person they traveled with had been tested.

The stand-off lasted for several hours until the three new arrivals were removed

Outbreaks in prisons, jails and detention centers could be severe if the coronavirus hits as inmates lack space to distance themselves from others and have limited access to hygiene facilities that would allow them to adequately eradicate germs.

Fifty-two inmates at New York's notorious Riker's Island have already tested positive. They are believed to have infected convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein who also tested positive last week just days after his prison sentence began.

'This is a real disaster waiting to happen,' David Patton, the executive director of he nonprofit Federal Defenders of New York, told the Washington Post, the day after the first federal inmate tested positive at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

The number of cases in the US has rocketed over the last two weeks

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

'These are places that are particularly susceptible to contagion.'

Criminal-justice reform advocates pushed President Donald Trump on Tuesday to allow for the 'compassionate release' of those most at risk in the country's prisons who pose no threat to society.

On Monday, 14 senators from both parties penned a letter to the Justice Department, which oversees the federal prison system, asking for elderly, terminally ill and low-risk inmates to be released to home confinement.

'We write to express our serious concern for the health and well being of federal prison staff and inmates in Federal custody, especially those who are most vulnerable to infection, and to urge you to take necessary steps to protect them,' the lawmakers wrote to U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal.

Signatories included Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Trump said in a press conference Sunday that he is considering an executive order on the matter.

'We have been asked about that and we're going to take a look at it,' Trump said.

'It's a - it's a bit of a problem. But when we talk about totally nonviolent - we're talking about these are "totally nonviolent prisoners". We are actually looking at that, yes.'

There are about 2.3 million people incarcerated in local jails and state and federal prisons across the United States, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Eight hundred people are under home quarantine after a doctor, working at a mohalla clinic in northeast Delhi, tested positive for coronavirus. Despite the setback, the Delhi government has decided to keep the Aam Aadmi mohalla clinics fully functional during the 21-day lockdown so that people are not inconvenienced.

An official from the Shahdara District Magistrates office said more residents were being identified. The infection began when a woman who returned from Saudi Arabia visited the doctor. The doctors wife and daughter also tested positive for the infection.

In Delhi, a mohalla clinic doctor is suffering from Coronavirus There are rumours that mohalla clinics will be closed... This is completely wrong information because we will ensure every mohalla clinic is fully functional during this tough time, said CM Arvind Kejriwal. Government wont shut clinics as this will inconvenience people. We will ensure the safety of all doctors and their tests will be done regularly. Some doctors working at mohalla clinics are worried about the non-availability of personal protective equipment (PPE) kit and the lack of transportation.



COVID-19 LIVE | 18 dead so far, confirmed India cases near 650 as Sitharaman to address media

We were told that the clinic can be opened but at our own risk. The clinic staff has refused to come as there is no transport. How can a doctor alone operate the clinic? questioned a doctor. Several calls to health officials for a response went unanswered. In a related development, the government has decided that in the next 24 hours, all healthcare workers and doctors directly involved in the treatment of COVID-19 patients or gathering test samples from suspected cases would be tested. Hospitals allocated for the purpose are LNJP Hospital, Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality Hospital, DDU Hospital, GTB Hospital and Baba Saheb Ambedkar Hospital.

ALSO READ | Lockdown not enough to eradicate coronavirus, use this time to 'find, isolate, test, 'trace, treat': WHO

No international flights till April 14

In line with the three-week lockdown, all international flights will remain suspended till April 14

WHOs rebuke

The global community squandered the first window of opportunity in addressing the pandemic, said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The time to act was actually more than a month ago or two months ago, he said

Stay put in the Philippines

Hundreds of Indian students stranded in the Philippines can fly back home when the travel ban is lifted, the Indian embassy said

2 minors infected

Two siblings, both minors, tested positive for coronavirus in Srinagar. One of them is an eight-month-old. His grandfather had a travel history to Saudi Arabia

Hundreds booked

Hundreds of people across India were booked for violating lockdown. Drones, too, were deployed to warn people against stepping out of their respective homes
Andrew McLennan: 1940-2020

Andrew McLennan was a pioneer of Australia's audio art scene whose work  across many creative genres  leaves an impressive legacy.

Andrew McLennan

Starting as a producer for ABC radio drama and features in 1971, he returned from visits to radio stations in England, Europe and Scandinavia in 1976 to found and produce (with Jaroslav Kovaricek as presenter) 360 Shift, a fortnightly six-hour experimental audio and music program.

McLennan once recalled, "we put on everything from soundscapes, sound poetry; we put on all kinds of material, sound documentaries, everything that we thought was new and good for FM radio". Driven by a desire to find the distinctive sounds and voices of contemporary Australia "we had to think of a new way, a new sound", he next devised and produced the acclaimed Scratching the Surface. In 1980, back in Sydney with radio Drama and Features, he established Down Under, commissioning memorable works by Louis Nowra, Frank Moorhouse and David Foster, with whom he continued to work until his retirement.
At least 23 sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, forcing the warship to port in Guam to test all 5,000 on board.

On Tuesday three sailors tested positive for COVID-19. By Wednesday that number jumped to eight and half of those infected were airlifted to a military medical facility in Guam, Navy officials said.

By Thursday the number of infected mounted to about two dozen, prompting Navy officials to dock the ship to test all sailors.

'We found several more cases on board the ship. We are in the process now of testing 100 percent of the crew of that ship to ensure that we're able to contain whatever spread might have occurred there,' Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said from the Pengaton Thursday.

However, Admiral Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, is adamant that the carrier will continue with its operations, according to the Wall Street Journal.

At least 23 sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, forcing the warship to port in Guam to test all 5,000 passengers on board. The USS Theodore Roosevelt CVN-71 pictured above in a stock image

The ship will port at Guam to test all 5,000 sailors on board as a result of outbreak

The ship is currently pulling into Guam where all sailors on board will be tested.

However, once at port the crew will not be permitted to leave the carrier.

At the moment there are 800 COVID-19 test kits on board with more being flown in.

Sailors who have tested positive have been quarantined and those in contact with the infected are also under quarantine.

Modly told reporters that the sailors who have been airlifted off the ship so far due to COVID-19 exhibited 'very mild' symptoms including 'aches and pains' and 'sore throats'.

The disease could be catastrophic on the Nimitz-class as sailors live in close quarters.

The infections on USS Roosevelt mark the first time servicemen have tested positive for the virus while aboard a deployed military ship.

Still, the Navy is determined to keep the warship running.

'This is an example of our ability to keep our ships deployed at sea even with active COVID-19 cases,' Modly said Wednesday.

'Our ships are sailing, our planes are flying, and training is still happening to safeguard our US national interests and those of all of our allies and partners around the world,' he added.

The sailors on the ship had visited the city of Da Nang in Vietnam more than two weeks ago during a port visit. Navy officials believe the sailors could have contracted the virus there.

Modly said the sailors could have contracted the virus from other sources such as flight crew members from a plane that visited the carrier.

Sailors prepare surgical equipment to be sterilized aboard the Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Mercy on March 25

The USS Theodore Roosevelt was deployed from San Diego in January to the western Pacific and made a port call in Da Nang, Vietnam in March 5.

At that time, the number of cases in the country was low and all were in the northern part of the country away from the port.

'At that time, there were only 16 positive cases in Vietnam, and those are well to the north all isolated in Hanoi,' Gilday said.

Adm. Aquilino was one of the crew members who met the Roosevelt in Vietnam earlier this month. He says neither he or his staffers have exhibited any symptoms related to the virus.

'I feel 100 percent fine,' Aquilino said Wednesday, noting he was not considering getting tested. 'My health is no different than anyone elses.'

The USS Roosevelt isn't the only part of the military getting hit by the coronavirus crisis.

Overall 280 U.S. service members have tested positive for the virus.

The Navy reported Thursday that 104 active-duty service members have been confirmed to have the coronavirus - accounting for about a third of all service members.

'Our curve is not flattening,' Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, said in a press conference Wednesday.

Testing for COVID-19 is being conducted on assault ship USS America, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and the 7th Fleet flagship USS Blue Ridge, as the Navy works to increase its testing ability.
Finance Ministry has asked the Reserve Bank of India to consider emergency measures to help borrowers cope with economic pressure triggered by the COVID 19 outbreak.

Also read: Banks free to defer payment of EMIs by 3 months! RBI gives permission

Department of Financial Services Secretary Debashish Panda reportedly wrote a letter to the RBI on Tuesday suggesting a moratorium of a few months on the payment of equated monthly installments (EMIs), interest and loan repayments and a relaxation in the classification of bad loans, The Economic Times quoted a source as saying.

Also read: Coronavirus in India Live Updates: Positive cases near 700; deaths rise to 16

The letter focused on the relief measures for the individuals and businesses as they face massive loss of income due to lockdown in the country.

India Inc faces a big economic challenge going ahead after the government ordered a 21-day lockdown to contain the spread of the deadly virus. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced a nationwide 21-day lockdown from March 25.

Coronavirus outbreak has led to reduced business activity and has already resulted in layoffs and salary cuts.

Earlier today, Congress president Sonia Gandhi wrote to PM Modi, urging the government to defer EMI and loan repayments for a period of six months. "Centre might consider deferring all EMIs for 6 months; interest charged by banks for this period may consequently be waived. All loan instalment deductions from salaries of government employees may also be deferred for six months," she said.

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has announced a comprehensive package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore for the economically weaker sections of the society hit by coronavirus. In her second address to the media within a week, Sitharaman announced Rs 50 lakh medical insurance cover per person for healthcare workers, sanitation workers, paramadeics, doctors and nurses who are exposing themselves to the virus.

She also announced that the government will pay the EPF contribution both of the employer and the employee for the next three months. This scheme will be applicable for organisations with up to 100 employees, where 90 per cent of employees draw less than Rs 15,000 salary.

By Chitranjan Kumar

Also Read: 'Necessary, but devastating': How India Inc reacted to 21-day lockdown

Also Read: Indian Inc faces biggest contraction in over 20 years, says CMIE
The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) has announced a $3-billion facility, named Pandemic Trade Impact Mitigation Facility (PATIMFA), to help African countries deal with the economic and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

PATIMFA, approved by the Banks Board of Directors during its sitting on 20 March, will provide financing to assist Afreximbank member countries to adjust in an orderly manner to the financial, economic and health services shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to information released by the Bank.

It will support member country central banks, and other financial institutions to meet trade debt payments that fall due and to avert trade payment defaults, said Afreximbank. It will also be available to support and stabilize the foreign exchange resources of central banks of member countries, enabling them to support critical imports under emergency conditions.

In addition, PATIMFA will assist member countries whose fiscal revenues are tied to specific export revenues, such as mineral royalties, to manage any sudden fiscal revenue declines as a result of reduced export earnings. It will also provide emergency trade finance facilities for import of urgent needs to combat the pandemic, including medicine, medical equipment, hospital refitting, etc.

The facility will be available through direct funding, lines of credit, guarantees, cross-currency swaps and other similar instruments, according to Afreximbank.

Explaining the rationale for the facility, Prof. Benedict Oramah, President of Afreximbank, noted that the COVID-19 pandemic brought with it considerable suffering and major economic disruptions.

Besides its worrying effect on human life, the pandemic is projected to cost the global economy up to $1 trillion and to result in a significant 0.4 per cent decline in global GDP growth, which is expected to drop from 2.9 per cent in 2019 to 2.5 per cent in 2020, he said.

A rapid and impactful financial response is required to avert a major crisis in Africa, he said, pointing out that Africa is exposed in many fronts, including significant declines in tourism earnings, migrant remittances, commodity prices and disruption of manufacturing supply chains.

Afreximbank had already seen sharp pandemic-induced declines in commodity prices, a sudden significant drop in tourism earnings, disruptions in supply chains, and closure of export manufacturing facilities, said the President. The impact on medical supplies and medical systems in many markets had also been unprecedented.

He said that Afreximbank would work with multilateral development banks that had put in place financial assistance programmes in order to secure support to help African countries deal with adverse external shocks and crises arising from the pandemic.

Afreximbank has a history of providing support to African economies in times of economic crisis.

During the 2015 economic crisis, it introduced a Counter-Cyclical Trade Liquidity Facility under which it disbursed more than $10 billion on a revolving basis to enable member countries adjust to the adverse economic shocks. That facility helped key African economies to manage that crisis and recover swiftly.

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Police have harassed and attacked journalists in Hyderabad and Delhi on alleged breaches of lockdown orders amid the Covid-19 outbreak. The International Federation of Journalist (IFJ) and its India affiliates the Indian Journalists Union (IJU) and the National Union of Journalists (India) condemn the police brutality and urge Indian authorities to allow journalists to work without any restrictions.

These police attacks have occurred despite clear instructions issued by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting on March 23 requesting all states and union territories allow journalists to work freely during the lockdown, recognising the essential role journalists play in disseminating reliable information during a health crisis.

According to media reports, police from Safdarjung police station stopped and beat Navin Kumar, a journalist at Hindi news channel Aaj Tak on March 23. When Kumar showed his identity card, police snatched his car key, wallet and mobile phone, and then three police allegedly beat him inside the police vehicle.

In other incidents in Hyderabad, police abused Ravi Reddy, the Hyderabad bureau-chief with The Hindu and verbally abused Andhra Jyothy journalist Mendu Srinivas. And Mohammed Hussain, a reporter for the English news website Siasat, tweeted that he was beaten by police officials with a baton in Hyderabad on Monday night while returning home from his office. The Telangana Union of Working Journalists (TUWJ)has lodged a complaint against various attacks with Director General of Police (DGP).

NUJ(I) said: We strongly condemn these assaults on journalists and urge the central and state governments to ensure the safety of journalists when doing their job.

IJU said: IJU demands that the government of India give strict directions to police and security forces to respect freedom of press and help journalists who are covering the pandemic so that the society has access to unbiased and accurate information.

IFJ said, Since journalists provide essential news and information to public in this global pandemic, they must be exempt from ongoing restrictions. Police attacks on journalists for alleged breaches of the lockdown are of great concern.
A shocked woman has relived the terrifying moment she realised that an obsessed stalker was inside her home - and stretched out on her bed - as she cowered in a room nearby.

The persistent stalker - 30 years older than her - let himself into her home while she was resting in her underwear in another bedroom.

When she realised what was going on, she barricaded herself into the bedroom and secretly texted family and friends to ask for help and for the police to be called in but was frightened that he would hear her.

Vincent Cutsforth, 54, (pictured) admitted stalking the 24-year-old between September and December 2018

The intruder had, over a period of weeks, repeatedly bombarded her with telephone calls and messages, called her 'babe' and turned up outside her home during a 'horrible' campaign.

The 24-year-old Cleethorpes animal trainer spoke of her long-running ordeal after her unwanted admirer, Vincent Cutsforth, 54, of Riby, appeared in court.

He admitted stalking the woman between September and December 2018.

She told Grimsby Live: 'He was lying on my bed with his shoes off. I was in the spare bedroom in my underwear and I heard his ringtone. His phone was ringing.

'My best friend had just died of cancer and I wasn't sleeping very well. At first, I just thought that, because he had been harassing me, I had just dreamt it.

'Then I heard him speaking. I had one per cent on my mobile and I texted his partner, my mum, my grandma and two friends to tell them that Vinnie was in my house and not to ring me and to call the police.

'I didn't want Vinnie to hear me talk. I spoke to his partner and she said there was nothing she could do because she was in London.

'I barricaded myself in. The police turned up and he was arrested on my bed. He was just waiting. As he was arrested and taken out of my house, he just said: 'I love her, I love her'.

'I ran downstairs with a bedspread wrapped around me.' Cutsforth walked in because the door was open at 8am after the woman had returned from walking dogs at 6am.

'He entered the house and got in my bed,' she said. 'I have cameras in my house and he walked around first.

'Psychologically, it was a lot to cope with and I had my bedroom redecorated.'

Cutsforth (pictured) was given a three-month suspended prison sentence, 20 days' rehabilitation and a five-year restraining order at Grimsby Crown Court

The woman said: 'I couldn't leave the house without somebody coming with me. When I got home, I had to ring my friend to get from my car into my house. I was just scared.

'I just didn't want to be by myself. I live alone. It just put a real strain on my life. It has been a living nightmare for me.

'It's changed my personality and it's made me more guarded in the future.'

She said of Cutsforth: 'It was nothing romantically at all. I think he has just got an addictive personality. He just took my kindness the wrong way and took advantage really.

'I'm the kind of person who would help anybody but I just keep myself to myself. I think that he was sly.

'I also think that what he has done is very unfair and he just seems to have got away with it all.'

Cutsforth was given a three-month suspended prison sentence, 20 days' rehabilitation and a five-year restraining order at Grimsby Crown Court.

The woman said: 'He saw himself as a role model and someone to help me. Then he became obsessed and quite needy.

'I definitely think that he was attracted to me because he made references to sex. He definitely fancied me.

'He asked me one day if I thought he was good looking and I said 'No'. Then he lost it with me.'

She claimed: 'He was name-calling and he hit me across the face with a dog toy. The assault charge was dropped and put into the stalking case.'

In court, Michael Greenhalgh, prosecuting, said that the woman was an animal trainer and ran a dog training class.

Cutsforth met her when he went with others to buy a puppy.

The stalking began when Cutsforth turned up uninvited when she was walking her dog on land and at her workplace, which was in Grimsby at the time.

He monitored her movements and loitered outside her home, spying on her.

Cutsforth sent her messages asking to see her and called her 'babe', saying that he cared for and loved her.

'He would turn up on numerous occasions outside her house,' said Mr Greenhalgh.

Cutsforth would make as many as 250 calls and would sit in a vehicle outside her home. He posted a Facebook message saying: 'All I do is care.'

He told police after they found him on the woman's bed: 'All I have ever done for this girl is look after her and maybe she should be in handcuffs.'

Gordon Stables, mitigating, said that the incidents happened over a period of two weeks and then over another of one week.

There was a long period when nothing happened.

Cutsforth had suffered alcohol and other problems.

'He is turning his life around and doing a good job with it,' said Mr Stables.

Judge Mark Bury told Cutsforth: 'You overstepped the mark quite significantly. 'You walked into her house uninvited and lay on her bed. That must have been quite frightening for her.

'The impact if all this behaviour on her has been quite significant.

'She is 30 years younger than you and it's quite plain that she didn't want to have the sort of contact with you that you wanted with her and you should have left it.

'You caused her really serious distress. This is persistent offending and there are aspects of it that are particularly unpleasant.'
(Newser)  The man who committed the worst atrocity in New Zealand's modern history when he slaughtered 51 worshippers at two Christchurch mosques unexpectedly pleaded guilty to all charges Thursday. The attacks targeting people praying at the mosques a year ago shocked the nation and prompted new laws banning the deadliest types of semi-automatic weapons. It also prompted global changes to social media protocols after the gunman livestreamed his attack on Facebook. The sudden turn in the case, at a hastily arranged court hearing, took survivors and relatives by surprise, and brought relief to people across New Zealand, the AP reports. Many had feared Australian white supremacist Brenton Harrison Tarrant would use his trial as a platform to promote his views. The trial was to begin in June. He previously had pleaded not guilty to all charges.

story continues below

On Thursday, Tarrant, 29, pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of terrorism. He is the first person to be found guilty of terrorism in New Zealand under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US. The change in plea came less than two weeks after New Zealanders commemorated those who died during the attacks on March 15, 2019. "Honestly, I'm still trying to process what just happened," said Aya Al-Umari, whose brother Hussein was killed in the attack on the Al Noor mosque. Temel Atacocugu, who survived being shot nine times, said he hoped the judge would impose the harshest punishment in the country's history to help ensure nothing like this would happen again. "I'm happy that he has accepted that he is guilty," Atacocugu said. Sentencing is not scheduled. Tarrant faces life imprisonment.

(Read more New Zealand mosque shootings stories.)
Officials across the region are searching for solutions. Maryland State Superintendent of Schools Karen Salmon said the state has identified slots for more than 1,200 children of essential personnel across the state at YMCAs, libraries, recreation enters and other facilities. Salmon said she hopes to double the capacity. But some county executives have questioned how many more slots are needed and criticized the state for not using vacant public schools to house the emergency facilities.
T he children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge took part in the nationwide round of applause to thank the NHS for their work treating coronavirus patients.

Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis were on Thursday all seen clapping in a video released by Kensington Palace, where they live.

They joined people around the UK in paying tribute to the NHS staff working hard to treat coronavirus patients.

Grateful members of the public stood at their windows at 8pm to applaud the work of the healthcare workers risking their own health in the fight against the virus.

Some went into the streets, and motorists joined in by tooting their horns.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak also took part in the initiative, which was called Clap for Carers.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan also saluted the initiative.

Notable buildings across the UK lit up in blue to mark the nation applauding the health service.

Blackpool Tower, Newcastle's Tyne Bridge and Tower Bridge were among the landmarks to salute the NHS as part of the #lightitblue campaign.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 21:37:47|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- China firmly opposes the United States repeatedly sending warships and military aircraft to the South China Sea to conduct targeted and provocative joint drills and strategic cruises, according to a spokesperson for China's Ministry of National Defense Thursday.

Spokesperson Ren Guoqiang made the remarks at a press conference when commenting on the U.S. guided-missile destroyer USS McCampbell's trespassing into China's territorial waters off the Xisha Islands, which are in the South China Sea, without permission on March 10.

In response, the Southern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army organized naval and air forces to track, verify, identify and warn the ship off, Ren said, adding that China has lodged stern representations with the United States.

Noting that the Xisha Islands are indisputably China's inherent territory, Ren said the U.S. warship's move had seriously infringed on China's sovereignty and undermined security.

The Chinese military will take all necessary steps to safeguard national sovereignty and security resolutely, Ren said.

At the moment, the situation in the South China Sea sees a continuous positive trend thanks to the joint efforts of China and ASEAN countries, Ren said.

The provocative actions made by the United States under the pretext of "freedom of navigation" have posed a threat to the security of the littoral countries along the South China Sea and undermined peace and stability in the region, which is firmly opposed by China, Ren said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it is currently unknown if COVID-19 would cause problems during pregnancy or affect the health of the baby after birth.

The infectious nature of the disease that is now a pandemic has prompted some New York hospitals to ban even one support person from being present in the labor room at the time of delivery, and for the CDC to issue some guidance for pregnant women and infected mothers who breast feed.

COVID-19 transmits by droplets from an infected person in fairly close proximity or contact with a contaminated surface where it is thought to survive for up to several days.

Dr. Heather Sankey, who chairs the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Baystate Health, was asked about the systems related policies, including at its Wesson Women and Infants Unit.

Some hospitals are now not allowing any partner or support person into a birthing room as a further precaution against COVID-19. Is Baystate thinking of doing this?

At this time we are allowing one designated birthing partner in the room during labor and vaginal birth, until the postpartum period is ended which is up to two hours. For women who are undergoing a cesarean section, the partner will need to wait in the labor room as they are not allowed in the operating room. They will be able to visit with mother and baby during the immediate postpartum period. This could change at any time based on data about the infection.

What is Baystate telling pregnant women in terms of reducing their exposure for COVID-19?

Hand washing, avoid touching the eyes, nose and mouth, and social distancing are the keys to prevention for everyone. They should stay away from anyone with symptoms as much as possible and clean all sources that are touched often on a daily basis.

What are you telling them to do if they have COVID-19?

We provide the same guidance as for non-pregnant as per the CDC: self-quarantine. If symptoms occur or worsen, contact their primary care physician and/or obstetrician. Continue to contact their obstetrician for any pregnancy concerns. We are offering phone and video visits to minimize unnecessary exposure and support social distancing.

Are you taking any special precautions at Wesson?

Anyone with suspected respiratory symptoms is being tested and we care for them under precautions against respiratory droplets and secretions using appropriate Personal Protective Equipment. We are screening all visitors, and only allowing them into the hospital when the pregnant woman is admitted in labor or for a planned birth. We do not allow visitors for women who have suspected or confirmed COVID-19, and we do not allow visitors with symptoms.

Are you testing pregnant women for COVID-19 when they come in to deliver?

If women have respiratory symptoms, such as cough, shortness of breath, or fever we are performing testing for common respiratory viruses, such as influenza, and COVID-19.

What are you doing when a pregnant women with COVID-19 comes in to deliver?

We currently place them in a negative pressure room and institute precautions against respiratory droplets and secretions in accordance with CDC guidance and Baystate Health policy.

What are you doing for any baby born to COVID-19 positive mother?

The baby is tested and isolated until the test is returned. We encourage breast milk through pumping and bottle feeding. If baby is also positive they are reunited.

What are you telling mothers who have COVID-19 about the risk of transmitting to baby?

It is very unlikely to be transmitted during pregnancy or through breast milk, but can be transmitted through close physical contact with respiratory secretions or coughing as with any other child or adult.

The CDC has said that flu is more likely to cause severe illness in pregnant women than in women of reproductive age who are not pregnant. Should pregnant women be concerned about this with COVID-19?

Influenza in pregnant women can be a very serious disease, and we vaccinate to prevent severe infection, then quickly treat with medication. So far, pregnant women do not appear to have a greater risk of severe illness with COVID-19 then non-pregnant people. Nevertheless, we are gathering data and our national organizations are reassessing new information on a continual basis.
Every name on the BrandBucket marketplace is exclusively listed with BrandBucket. That means that all of our sellers are very responsive, making for quick domain transfers.

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With their busy schedule it is very difficult for the actors to spare and spend time with their family. Emraan Hashmi who was recently seen in Bard of Blood turned 41 and celebrated his birthday on Tuesday, March 24, 2020 with his loved ones.



Emraan got candid about how he celebrated his birthday this year. He said, Its a strange time we are living in right now. This is a birthday I will never forget, and I hope its the only one I am spending under quarantine."



Even though Emraan hopes its the only birthday he is spending under quarantine, he also understands the need of the lockdown and says that it has become a necessity to stay at home and break the chain of coronavirus. He said, None of us were prepared for this, but I think its the new normal, which we are all getting used to. Yes, its frustrating being locked up, but its for the greater good".



Emraan spent his 41st birthday with his wife and son in the most beautiful way possible. His wife, Parveen baked a cake while his son helped her since ordering from outside is out of the question at this point. Emraan also said that he spent this special day by reading and watching a film. His son also made a card for his dear dad. The actor went on to say, "We spoke to a few friends, video calling some others who live in the UK and the US to check up on them.".



Being positive during the lockdown, Emraan said, The pandemic is sad, however being locked up in our homes, we have rediscovered family times. Our busy schedule dont allow it under normal circumstances, so its nice to be home for a change. Emraan will next be seen in Rumi Jaffrey's Chehre and Sanjay Guptas Mumbai Saga.
Vittoria DallArmellina was a PhD candidate at Ca Foscari University in 2017 when she realized that a sword at the Saint Lazarus monastery was mislabeled by thousands of years.

DallArmellina, who specializes in Bronze Age weaponry, said that a 17-inch metal sword spotted near the end of a guided tour at the monastery immediately caught her attention, CNN reported Wednesday.

The sword had been labeled as being from the Middle Ages, but after two years of research, DallArmellina confirmed that the artifact actually dates back as far as 5,000 years, making it one of the oldest weapons ever found, according to CNN.

Elena Rova, the professor who supervised DallArmellinas research, told CNN that she was a bit skeptical at first when her student told her she thought it was older than labeled.

Related: Scientists Confirm Vesuvius Eruption Turned Victim's Brain Into Glass

RELATED: Several Christian Relics Saved in Notre Dame Fire While Status of Some Artifacts Remains Uncertain

I had visited the monastery several times throughout the years and never noticed the sword, Rova said, calling DallArmellinas finding unbelievable.

The sword now has its own display at the monastery, which is currently closed amid the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

DallArmellina and Rova worked with the monasterys archival researcher, Father Serafino Jamourlian, to determine the swords history.

RELATED: Hero Priest Helped Human Chain Save Artifacts from Notre Dame: He Showed No Fear Amid Blaze

By searching through the monasterys archives, the researchers were able to find that sword came from Turkey to Italy in 1886 as part of a shipment from Yervant Khorasandjian, a civil engineer in the Ottoman Empire.

Jamourlian told CNN that he believes the sword was a a gift of thankfulness from Khorasandijian to Father Ghevont Alishan, who had been his principal at school in Paris in the late 1800s and died in Saint Lazarus monastery.

This idea was corroborated by correspondences found in the monasterys archives between Father Minas Nurikhan and Father Alishan, CNN reported.

DallArmellina said that Jamourlians research and chemical analysis on the sword brought her initial hunch full circle.
President Donald Trumps statements on COVID-19 over the last few months are the subject of a political ad that his re-election campaign is seeking to block television stations from airing.

The video ad, created by Priorities USA Action Fund, uses for a backdrop a chart with quickly rising coronavirus cases while highlighting several of Trumps statements that have downplayed the coronavirus crisis.

We have it totally under control. Its one person coming in from China. One day its like a miracle, it will disappear, Trump says in various audio clips in the ad. We really think weve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand. No, I dont take responsibility.

But the Trump campaign, which wrote a cease-and-desist letter to TV stations, took specific issue with how the ad stitched together fragments from multiple speeches by President Trump to fraudulently and maliciously imply that President Trump called the coronavirus outbreak a hoax.' Trump, in a February rally, was abundantly clear that the hoax was Democrats politicization of the coronavirus outbreak, the campaign said.

Fact-checkers at The Washington Post, Snopes, Politifact and FactCheck.org have noted that its incorrect to say Trump called the virus itself a hoax, The Hill reported.

Sign up for free text messages about important updates on coronavirus in Massachusetts

Because PUSAs ads central point is deliberately false and misleading, your station has an obligation to cease and desist from airing it immediately to comply with FCC licensing requirements, to serve the public interest, and to avoid costly and time-consuming litigation, the campaign wrote.

Priorities USA, a political action committee thats backed Democratic candidates, paid $6 million to run the ad in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, The Hill reported.

Josh Schwerin, a strategist with Priorities USA, told The Hill that the Trump campaigns threats of legal action were a stunt.

We stand by the facts in the ad and will continue to make sure that Donald Trump is held accountable for his words and actions that are making this crisis even worse, he said.

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This scanning electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2 (yellow)also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes COVID-19isolated from a patient in the U.S., emerging from the surface of cells (blue/pink) cultured in the lab.
China committed to helping Sierra Leone prevent COVID-19

People's Daily Online

By Abu Bakarr Kargbo (People's Daily Online) 10:41, March 25, 2020

The Ambassador of the People's Republic of China to the Republic of Sierra Leone, Hu Zhangliang, has pledged his country's commitment to supporting Sierra Leone's efforts to prevent the coronavirus (COVID-19). Addressing members of Sierra Leone's Parliamentary Press Gallery in Freetown, the Chinese ambassador described the fight against the virus as a great battle that involves a huge financial cost, one that China is going through at the moment not only to protect its people but to safeguard global health security.

"In two months, 99 percent of cases were in China and some countries did not pay attention to it. Now it is everywhere," he said and added that this calls for a collective effort around the globe to fight a common enemy that is currently ravaging lives.

Ambassador Hu said although Sierra Leone is yet to record a single case, the risk and threat posed by COVID-19 is high, especially now that it is in West Africa.

"China will not relent in supporting Sierra Leone should there be a case," he remarked, adding that at present China is helping the government of Sierra Leone to prevent it.

The Chinese Medical Team and other Chinese nationals are currently working hand-in-glove with Sierra Leoneans in helping to see that the coronavirus does not enter Sierra Leone. This is why the Chinese embassy and Chinese community recently provided the necessary equipment to make the country safe because, as the Chinese ambassador puts it, "if Sierra Leone is safe, we as Chinese living in this country will be safe also." The items donated are 500 sets of protective gowns, 500 N95 respirators, 1,000 surgical masks, 1,000 medical gloves, 200 medical goggles and a 50kw generator to the Ministry of Health and Sanitation.

"I am happy to see that the Sierra Leoneans have been resilient. With a concerted effort, the virus will be defeated. Everyone needs to be on board, especially countries like Sierra Leone that do not have a very good medical system," Ambassador Hu remarked, adding that he is impressed with the strong measures taken by the government to stop the potential consequences.

"Sierra Leone has gone through Ebola, which has impeded its development, and having the coronavirus will bring devastating problems. This is why everybody needs to fully comply with the measures the government has put in place. The media should take the lead in motivating people and encourage them in their response," he said.

China and Sierra Leone have a long history of harmonious relations, a common development goal, and a shared future.

Although a smear campaign has been waged against China by some world leaders, Sierra Leoneans have sympathized and empathized with the Asian economic giant since it recorded its first case of COVID-19. Several organizations and individuals have visited the Chinese embassy in Freetown to console and sympathize over the devastating consequences caused by the coronavirus. One such party was the Sierra Leone Parliamentary Press Gallery, whose President, Hassan Y. Koroma, thanked the Chinese for the good job they have done over the years and expressed his organization's heartfelt condolences to the bereaved families of those who lost their lives as a result of COVID-19. He said that the Press Gallery will stand with China to defeat the virus. "We have learned a lot from China and we hope the friendship will continue," he said.

Ambassador Hu Zhangliang responded by thanking the Press Gallery for its support over the years and assured it that the Chinese will continue to work hand in hand with Sierra Leone to bring about common prosperity.

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Mali's government said on Thursday that leading opposition figure Soumaila Cisse had been kidnapped in West African nation's volatile centre, just days before a long-delayed parliamentary poll.

In an unprecedented first for a Malian politician of his rank, unidentified gunmen kidnapped Cisse and his team on Wednesday afternoon, his party said.

The Union for the Republic and Democracy (URD) party sounded the alarm later on Wednesday after Cisse failed to turn up to an appointment and was no longer answering his phone.

Cisse is a former finance minister and has run for the presidency three times.

The circumstances of his disappearance remain unclear, but the government and URD members have said it was a kidnapping.

On Thursday morning, URD spokesman Demba Traore told reporters that Cisse was travelling with a group of 12 people on two jeeps when unidentified gunmen took them.

Five people were freed on Thursday morning, he said, adding that two from the freed group were wounded. One later died.

"During the kidnap, there was shooting," he said, explaining that Cisse's bodyguard had been hit.

"Unfortunately, he couldn't survive his injuries and passed away," Traore said.

Mali has been struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency that erupted in the north in 2012, and which has claimed thousands of military and civilian lives.

Despite the presence of thousands of French and UN troops, the conflict in Mali has engulfed the centre of the country and spread to neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.

Al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists are active in the area where Cisse and his team disappeared.

"All the arrangements are being made to find the missing people and return them to their families," Mali's government said in a statement on Thursday, referring to the disappearance as a kidnapping.

Olivier Salgado, the spokesman for the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, said the United Nations had deployed a helicopter to search for the missing politician and his associates.

The European Union's ambassador to Mali, Bart Ouvry, also said on Twitter on Thursday that Cisse's disappearance was worrying.

Cisse disappeared while campaigning for a long-awaited parliamentary poll which is scheduled to take place in Mali on Sunday, and which has been delayed several times due to insecurity in the country.

Virus vote

The vote on Sunday is viewed by many as a first step towards ending the spiral of violence in Mali.

After being postponed several times, holding a parliamentary election was a key recommendation from crisis talks in December, which aimed at exploring non-military solutions to the country's crisis.

The current crop of MPs in the country was elected in 2013, in a ballot won by President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita's Rally for Mali party.

Another parliamentary vote was meant to take place in late 2018, following Keita's re-election.

But it never did, and the poll was postponed several times for reasons such as a strike by judges and spiralling insecurity in Mali.

Keita announced on Wednesday that a first round of voting would go ahead on Sunday, despite rumours of a possible postponement due to coronavirus.

Mali has recorded two coronavirus cases to date, in two nationals who had recently arrived from France.

Keita said that the vote would take place in "scrupulous respect" of health measures, however.

Mali has stopped flights to and from virus-stricken countries. On Wednesday, Keita also announced a nationwide night-time curfew in order to curb its spread.
Young people who are given a religious upbringing at home by both parents have the strongest faith in God throughout their adolescence. Distancing from and wavering in faith are also less likely among them. They are also clearly different from their peers who are given a religious upbringing by one parent only, or by neither.

The findings were reported in British Journal of Religious Education. The 10-year longitudinal study explored changes in faith in transition to adulthood from the viewpoint of religious upbringing at home. The study participants, 14 -15-year-old adolescents confirmed in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, were followed up until they reached the age of 25. The study especially focused on young people who were not given a religious upbringing at home: how do they differ from those who have been given a religious upbringing, could their faith become stronger in transition to adulthood, and which factors play a role.

"In roughly half of the young people studied, their faith remained fairly stable from the age of 15 to the age of 25. However, one in three became more distant from faith, both according to their own assessment and a longitudinal analysis. One in seven felt they had become closer to God or that their faith had become stronger," says Professor of Practical Theology Kati Tervo-Niemela from the University of Eastern Finland.

According to Professor Tervo-Niemela, other religious influences also tend to accumulate in young people who have been given a religious upbringing at home, whereas young people who do not get a religious upbringing at home are less likely to get it elsewhere, either.

"Many of the young people studied said that they were surrounded by a non-religious atmosphere everywhere, including among friends and family."

Young people who were not given a religious upbringing at home were also more likely to become distant from faith after the confirmation period, although this period was often experienced as faith-growing.

"It is noteworthy that the developmental path of young people who were given a religious upbringing by one parent only is closer to that of young people who were not given a religious upbringing by neither of the parents, than to that of young people who have been given a religious upbringing by both parents."

The findings of the study highlight the importance of both parents as role models in a young person's religious growth.

"However, young people who have not been given a religious upbringing at home aren't necessarily destined to become distant or estranged from faith: other factors outside the home environment can contribute to the growth of their faith," Tervo-Niemela points out.

One such factor for most young people is the confirmation period. Other important factors were the influence of grandparents, parish workers young people had become familiar with, and school. School was regarded as something that contributed to general education, whereas the confirmation period and the influence of grandparents and parish workers was described as something that had a deeper influence on faith.

"Overall, the findings strongly indicate that a young person's faith isn't born and doesn't grow in a vacuum: it needs supporting experiences and people who give an example of what it is like to have faith. The influence of just one person can be course-altering."

###

Article: Kati Tervo-Niemela (2020) Religious upbringing and other religious influences among young adults and changes in faith in the transition to adulthood: a 10-year longitudinal study of young people in Finland, British Journal of Religious Education, DOI: 10.1080/01416200.2020.1740169

For further information, please contact:

Professor Kati Tervo-Niemela: kati.tervo-niemela(at)uef.fi, tel. +358 50 325 3876
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 23:39:53|Editor: yan

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ADDIS ABABA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) on Thursday urged the Group of Twenty (G20) to offer immediate health and human response, and immediate emergency economic stimulus to African countries in their efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"This is a global crisis affecting the whole world. Africa, however, will be hit harder with a heavy and durable economic toll, which will threaten progress and prospects, widen inequalities between and within countries, and worsen current fragilities," the UNECA said in a statement issued on Thursday.

Noting that African countries need support in preparing for the health crisis and for the economic fallout, the UNECA also stressed that "measures being taken in Asia, Europe and North America such as social distancing and regular hand washing will be a particular challenge for countries with limited internet connectivity, dense populations, unequal access to water and limited social safety nets."

The UNECA, which noted that African countries are presently preparing for the worst effects of this pandemic in line with the steps being taken across the globe, also stressed that the G20 must do three major things.

According to the UNECA, the G20 member countries should "support for immediate health and human response, deliver an immediate emergency economic stimulus to African governments in their efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as implement emergency measures to protect 30 million jobs immediately at risk across the continent, particularly in the tourism and airline sectors."

"G20 leaders should support and encourage open trade corridors, especially for pharmaceuticals and other health supplies, as well as support for the upgrade of health infrastructure and provide direct support to existing facilities," the UNECA statement read.

This will enable countries to focus on prevention as much as possible and start building curative facilities, the UNECA said, adding that support should be provided to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Africa Disease Control and Prevention Center Africa (Africa CDC) with funds channeled through the Global Fund, GAVI (a public-private global health partnership) and others."

According to the UNECA, G20 leaders should announce a 100 billion U.S. dollars (in addition to the 50 billion U.S. dollars already committed) to fund the immediate health response, social safety nets for the most vulnerable, feeding for out of school children, and to protect jobs.

"As a proportion of GDP (gross domestic product), this is consistent with measures taken in other regions. To ensure immediate fiscal space and liquidity, this package should include a waiver of all interest payments, estimated at 44 billion U.S. dollars for 2020," the statement read.

The UNECA, which urged G20 leaders to take measures to support agricultural imports and exports, the pharmaceutical sector and the banking sector, also stressed that "an extended credit facility, refinancing schemes and guarantee facilities should be used to waive, restructure and provide additional liquidity in 2020."

"G20 leaders should support a liquidity line available to the private sector operating in Africa to ensure essential purchases can continue and all SMEs dependent on trade can continue to function," the UNECA said, adding that G20 leaders "should ensure that national and regional stimulus packages covering private and financial systems include measures to support African businesses through allowing for the suspension of leasing, debt and other repayments to global businesses."

Last week, the UNECA had also warned that the unfolding coronavirus crisis could seriously dent Africa's already stagnant growth and result in billions of dollars' worth of losses in export revenues.

Vera Songwe, UNECA Executive Secretary, told a press conference in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa that COVID-19 was inevitably impacting Africa's trade.

"Africa may lose half of its GDP, with growth falling from 3.2 percent to about 2 percent due to a number of reasons, which include the disruption of global supply chains," said Songwe, adding the continent's interconnectedness to affected economies of the European Union, China and the United States was causing ripple effects.

The continent would need up to 10.6 billion U.S. dollars in unanticipated increases in health spending to curtail the virus from spreading, though revenue losses could lead to unsustainable debt, she said.

The UNECA estimates COVID-19 could lead to Africa's export revenues from fuels falling by around 101 billion U.S. dollars in 2020.

Remittances and tourism are also being affected, as the virus continues to spread worldwide, resulting in a decline in foreign direct investment flows, as well as capital flight, domestic financial market tightening, and a slow-down in investments -- leading to job losses, she said.
China's much-publicised China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative has a dark future as nations are blaming these projects and it's Chinese manpower for having contributed to the spread of coronavirus.

Baseer Naveed, an environmentalist based in Hong Kong told ANI, "It (COVID-19) is the product of environmental abuse as projects like OBOR did not pay much attention to protection ".

He added, "The whole capitalist and industrial was investing in developing capital and human beings were left without any proper care. The capitalist has ignored the deterioration of the state of the They have taken the poor condition of the as taken for granted,"

He added, "This is the reason that since last two decades many dangerous and fatal viruses have attacked in different parts of the and in major cases, this part of Far East Asia or Chinese dominated parts have lead in promoting such dangerous viruses because China did not follow the instructions about combating the danger of ignorance of environment,"

Countries allying with China on its One Belt One Road (OBOR) Initiative are most suffering due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

In Pakistan and its occupied territories of Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) and Gilgit Baltistan, the pandemic has caused massive damage because of the large presence and frequent movement by the Chinese workers.

There are over 4.7 lakh COVID-19 cases reported from across the world, which includes over 21,000 deaths since the outbreak of pandemic in Wuhan city of China. The situation in Iran, Italy, and Pakistan is also due to ongoing Chinese projects and frequent movement from China to these countries.

Naveed, who hails from Pakistan said, "One example is of CPEC which is the project which has not passed through the environmental impact assessment. If the world controls the Corona virus then the capitalist and industrial powers have to review their environment policies strictly follow the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA)."

He added, "The free world will also insist on investing in human beings not on the latest machinery and arms and ammunition or on the threat to war. Therefore, all such big projects like CPEC and one belt one road will be halted till the world overcome such viruses or at least COVID 19 and it is not going to finish in the near future,"

The multi-billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is one of the largest foreign investments in Pakistan and involves thousands of Chinese personnel spread over all four provinces and Gilgit-Baltistan. It is supposed to link China's Xinjiang with Pakistani and Iranian ports through a network of rails and highways.

Naveed said, "The CPEC is Pakistan based project and Pakistan does not have skill and strength to control Corona nor has the amount to continue the project, though it is China funded. Even Pak military cannot go with CPEC. So, the future of CPEC is not bright".

According to a report, China's One Belt One Road is a major contributor to the spread of Coronavirus infection in Italy and Iran. Despite being so far away from China, the cause of the outbreak of the coronavirus in these countries can be easily explained by OBOR linkages.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Harare, Zimbabwe (PANA) - The Zimbabwe government has brought back the use of the US dollar for transactions after banning it last year due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, in a sneaky move that has redollarised the economy
The Health Minister yesterday visited Northern Irelands first COVID-19 centre which officially opened at Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry.

A network of new Primary Care COVID-19 Centres is being rapidly established to manage the growth of coronavirus cases in the community.

As of 11:15am on Wednesday March 25, testing has resulted in 37 new positive cases, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in Northern Ireland to 209.

To date, seven people who tested positive have sadly died.

A newly published surveillance report by the Public Health Agency provides a breakdown of confirmed cases by district area.

It revealed that Derry and Strabane has between 5 and 10 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at present while Belfast has the highest with 40-60 cases.

The latest information for the south of Ireland, as of yesterday evening, showed that there have now been seven COVID-19 related deaths and 1,329 confirmed cases.

Speaking to the Derry News after completing his first shift at Altnagelvins COVID-19 Centre, local doctor Paul Molloy wished to stress that it is not a virus testing centre.

He said the rise in cases is less than expected - but still bad - which reflects the exceptional social isolation skills being shown. The local GP praised the Derry public for their efforts and urged them to keep it up.

Dr Molloy advised: Please do not ring looking for a test or asking your GP. The only people that will be tested are people being admitted to hospital and they will be low numbers hopefully.

There will be a large increase in tests available soon. The priority will be very sick patients, those admitted with possible virus, healthcare workers so we can maintain a workforce and then nursing home patients.

If you are in the community with flu but overall are well just use the isolation measures and keep yourself hydrated and symptom free.

He added: I repeat there will not be testing for people in the community routinely.

The set-up is very, very safe for patients and staff. We were all shown how to put on and off the protective equipment.

Once your GP decides you need to go to the centre - the out of hours in Altnagelvin - the GP contacts them and an appointment time is given. Then you put on a mask when you arrive, a nurse takes your temperature, pulse etc and a doctor sees you.

You will probably get a treatment and go home. Very sick people will be assessed by the medical team. You may still be sent home or kept on ward 30 or 31.

The vast majority if people phoning your GP will just be given a treatment by the GP and not sent to the COVID centre.

Some people might go by ambulance to the Emergency Department. Children who are lower risk from this virus will be assessed in paediatrics.

RAPID ACTION

Visiting Derrys COVID-19 centre, Health Minister Robin Swann explained that more centres will open in the coming days, with at least one COVID-19 centre in each Trust area.

Minister Swann said: Primary Care COVID-19 Centres are an essential part of the fight against this virus. To ensure vital GP services can be maintained throughout the coming weeks and months, it is absolutely critical that those who show symptoms are separated from the patients with non COVID-19 related conditions.

Patients will not be able to report directly to these centres without being referred by their GP or Out of Hours provider.

Whilst the centres will help to free up GP services to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is vital we balance this with the need for primary care services to continue with the minimum of disruption.

Patients attending these centres will receive appropriate treatment, assessment and, if necessary, onward referral to hospital.

Dr Tom Black, Chair of the BMA in Northern Ireland, is among the GPs working at the new Primary Care COVID-19 Centre at Altnagelvin. He said: GPs have organised themselves very quickly and there has been a huge amount of work done between the Department of Health, the Health and Social Care Board, Trusts and GP Federations to provide the community with these Covid-19 centres.

This method of GPs working in the middle ground is vital to protect hospital services for patients with the greatest need. I have no doubt that this work will save lives.

Concluding, the Health Minister said: I want to pay tribute to the vision, rapid action and commitment shown by our primary care doctors. Without hesitation, they have risen to meet this unprecedented challenge. On behalf of everyone in our community I want to thank them for the hugely important work they are doing.

We must all now do our part to support these healthcare professionals in the fight to stop the spread of this virus. The message is clear - stay home, protect yourself and protect others so that the Health Service can protect us all.
Description

GIS - 26 March, 2020: Mauritius has as date registered 52 cases of Covid-19. This was announced, today, by Dr Zouberr Joomaye, spokesperson of the National Communication Committee on Covid-19, during a press conference at the Treasury Building, in Port Louis.

Regarding the distribution of basic food stuffs and food packs, he pointed out that 35 pick-up points have already been identified and are in operation since this morning to cater for the vulnerable of the society which include those on the Social Register of Mauritius; those drawing Carers Allowance; disabled persons drawing invalidity pension; people in shelters; and also those at the lower rung of the social ladder. This exercise he said will last for two to three days.

He also stated that the Ministry of Commerce and Consumer Protection is examining the possibility for supermarkets to operate online services and the modalities will be communicated to the population very soon. In addition, the Agricultural Marketing Board is also making a distribution of fresh vegetables to shelters.

The Director of Health Services, Dr V. Gujadhur, spoke about the increase in the Covid-19 cases from 48 cases yesterday to 52 today which he said is alarming and spreading at a rapid pace. He again called on the population to abide to the confinement and curfew rules for their own safety so as to help break the chain of transmission. He further explained that out of the four new positive cases reported, two cases where detected through contact tracing while the other two had been exposed in supermarkets. Hence, he called for each and everyone to be more cautious and respect social distancing and appealed to elderly persons who are more vulnerable to the virus to remain indoors.

DCP K. Jughroo, for his part, said that despite the severe legal measures, he observed that some people are still in circulation in some parts of the country mainly in the north and east and also in Rodrigues. Some 175 persons have been booked yesterday, he said. With regard to fake video clips circulating on social media, he cautioned those propagating false news and stated that two persons have already been arrested.
Five years after Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen's civil war, leading a military coalition to prop up the government which had been driven out of its capital, the Huthi rebels are only stronger, more resilient and gaining ground. The Iran-aligned insurgents' capabilities have developed in the past year, with attacks on strategic targets in Yemen and neighbouring Saudi Arabia using sophisticated drones. Experts say that pressure on the Saudis to reduce civilian casualties in air strikes, a drawdown by their coalition partner the United Arab Emirates' in mid-2019, and rifts within the government camp, have strengthened the rebels' resolve. The novel coronavirus sweeping the world could be a wild card in the conflict. Saudi Arabia has reported hundreds of cases and imposed tough lockdown measures, while Yemen appears highly vulnerable even if its broken healthcare system has not yet registered any cases. But after military victories in recent months that have given them the upper hand, the sixth year of the conflict is likely to deliver more gains to the rebels, and more hardship to civilians who have endured the long war. Who are the Huthis? The Huthi tribal fighters belong to the Zaidi minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, that makes up a third of Yemen's Sunni-majority population. They rose up in the 1990s over alleged sectarian discrimination. The movement is named after its late spiritual leader Badreddin al-Huthi and his son Hussein, who was killed by Yemeni government forces in 2004. Between 2004 and 2010, the group -- known as Ansarullah (Supporters of God)-- fought six wars against Yemen's then-government and battled Saudi Arabia in 2009-2010 after storming across the border. They also took part in protests that forced veteran ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh from office in 2012 but later formed an alliance with him before again falling out and killing him in 2017. The Huthi ouster of the government of Yemeni President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and takeover of the capital Sanaa set off the Saudi-led intervention in March 26, 2015. Since then, the coalition has not been able to defeat the insurgents, who have none of their adversaries' high tech firepower but are well-trained, tenacious and accustomed to battling in Yemen's harsh and mountainous terrain. Who arms them? The Huthis have a range of military equipment and weapons, including tanks and ballistic missiles, that they seized from Yemeni army depots after taking control of the capital. They also claim to manufacture and develop their own arms. Last year, they showed off at least 15 unmanned drones and various missiles, including long-range models they say can hit targets as far as 1,500 kilometres (about 900 miles) away. In September 2019, the Huthis claimed responsibility for unprecedented strikes on Saudi Aramco oil facilities, but Riyadh and Washington blamed Tehran, saying the rebels did not have the capability. Saudi Arabia and the US have long said that the Huthi militia is an Iranian "tool" and accused the Islamic republic of supplying them with weapons, a charge Tehran denies. Secret of their success? The UAE, disillusioned with what is fast becoming the Gulf's own "forever war", pulled back its troops in July last year in a blow for the coalition. Meanwhile a heavy civilian toll in Saudi air strikes, which drew UN accusations of violations that could amount to war crimes, forced the regional power to take a step back. "Government forces have been greatly weakened by the sharp reduction in coalition air strikes and the withdrawal of key Emirati 'enablers'," the Washington Institute said in a recent report. "This drawdown lessened the military pressure on the Huthis." Divisions in the anti-Huthi camp -- notably in the south where fighting between separatists and forces loyal to the government threatened to create "a civil war within a civil war" -- also strengthened the rebels' hand. During that time, they were able to rapidly switch elite forces between different fronts with the help of advisors from the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, increase the use of precision rocket and drone strikes, and "consolidate their new territorial gains via tactical minefields", the Washington Institute said. What does the future hold? "The Iran-backed Huthis are consolidating their power in Yemen," the Middle East Institute said in a recent report. A Yemeni government military official, who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity, conceded that the rebels "have become stronger than ever". The Huthis took control of the capital of the northern province of Al-Jawf earlier this month -- a strategic loss that means they now threaten oil-rich Marib province, the source of significant revenue. "Yemen's political map is set to change dramatically," the International Crisis Group said this month of the prospect of the government losing its last stronghold in the north. Smoke billows from buildings after reported air strikes in 2025 by the Saudi-led coalition on arms warehouses at an airbase controlled by Huthi rebels A Yemeni soldier loyal to the Huthi rebels mans a machine gun turret in the back of a pickup truck during a patrol in the capital Sanaa Saudi Arabia and the US have long said that the Huthi militia is an Iranian "tool" and accused the Islamic republic of supplying them with weapons, a charge Tehran denies Sheikh Mohamed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, in February walks past military personnel who served in Yemen The Yemeni conflict between Saudi-backed government forces and Iran-backed Huthi rebels has raged since 2015, sparking what the United Nations terms the world's worst humanitarian crisis
This legislation includes personal protective equipment measures for federal employees at the VA, DHS, Bureau of Prisons and the National Forest System, who are especially vulnerable given their public-facing and essential roles, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said in an emailed statement. This is an improvement over the status quo, but its not enough. I remain concerned that the federal government isnt being flexible enough about expanding telework arrangements for employees who can.
In the Age of Sheltering-in-place, Speed Dating on Long Island Goes Virtual

Business & Finance, Hot Spots & Night Life

By Ls Cohen Published: March 26 2020

Entrepreneur forced to learn how to move his dating and event businesses online.

Finding your true love can be nearly impossible during the coronavirus crisis, and singles might be resigned to give up on any sort of social interaction with a potential mate for weeks, possibly months. That is what Jay Rosensweig was thinking as he contemplated the future of his speed dating business.

My back was up against the wall, he said. Coronavirus obliterated all income from my business.

Like many business owners, Rosensweig found himself in a bind. His business was completely reliant on face-to-face interaction but that was impossible in the current climate of social distancing. The problem: He had no idea how to convert his in-real-life business into something that might work virtually.

I was a technology dinosaur, he said. I had no interest in learning about new stuff.

That might have led to his initially slow response. At first, Rosensweig admitted that he didnt think things would get this bad so he didnt prepare for the worst.

I was still in denial, he said. But once Broadway closed I said were in trouble. I woke up and said basically I have no choice here.

So he did what any entrepreneur might do in this situation. He worked night and day to learn how to adapt his current business to a new model.

I worked five days for 20 hours a day to move from in-person to online.

Previously, Rosensweigs website for singles-only, www.Weekenddating.com, was mostly a place to organize his speed dating and singles mingle events. Rosensweig held about eight dating events per month, mostly on Long Island, at venues in Jericho, Woodbury, Massapequa, and Huntington. He also held a few in New York City.

Now he found that he had to quickly revamp his entire business, harnessing technology to take his services completely online if he was going to save his company.

I created a different version of speed dating, said Rosensweig. For many years it was the same, boy meets girl, girl meets boy and then they move along. I needed to come up with something that would work with the tools available to me.

The backbone that makes it all work is Zoom, a video communications platform for conferencing, chat, and webinars. Its a service whose popularity has boomed as companies adapt to employees forced to shelter-in-place and the closing of non-essential services.

He did beta testing and figured out the procedures. He just needed to answer one important question.

Would it work? he said. It did!

Rosensweigs other business benefited from this new virtual venture. With www.socialevents123.com he hosts group social gatherings across Long Island like his Friendly Feud game, comedy nights, and trivia nights at places like the Nutty Irishman in Farmingdale.

Its been a little less than two weeks since he launched so he doesnt have a lot of data to measure his success.

Its very, very new, he said.

Despite that, early results and feedback have been encouraging. His first two events have sold out and he had 30 people sign up for his next Friendly Feud event.

The situation is horrible but it forced me to be creative, he said. It changed my thought process completely.

He even thinks there is a potential to make even more money with this new online platform while offering people who are shut-in at home a way to interact with strangers and have fun.

Eventually, though people will want real human interaction again. Rosensweig said he will go back to hosting real live events while continuing his online business.

This will be over soon, he said. People will want to meet people again.
Indias approach towards world on COVID-19 will be different compared to US

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Mar 26: The G-20 conference which will be held today is a crucial one. This would be a global fight against the coronavirus and countries would pool in their medical knowledge to tide over the crisis.

The G-20 is a representative body of 46 countries and most of these nations are fighting a huge battle against the virus. This meet would discuss methods to ramp up medical infrastructure. Further the nations would also pool knowledge on how to tackle the crisis and prevent the virus further.

#Stayathome and send us your selfie

On COVID-19, India has a different approach when compared to the United States. US President Donald Trump has been blaming China owing to the fact that the virus generated in Wuhan. India on the other hand will keep all channels open as this would ensure that medical help is available.

China has in the past three months ramped up it medical capabilities. India and China have both agreed to enhance bi-lateral efforts to contain the spread of the virus. India would work closely with China and other countries in a bid to fight the problem.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Thursday, March 26, 2020, 10:28 [IST]
Conglomerate ITC lauded the initiative announced by the government on Thursday saying that it would help thevulnerable and poor sections of society amidst the lockdown of the country.

Terming the steps announced by the government as timely measures, ITCChairman Sanjiv Puri said it will go a long way in providing support to farmers, daily wage earners, SHG women and poor senior citizens during such an unprecedented situation.

The government on Thursday announced aRs 1.7 lakh crore Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Yojana to protect the poor from the economic impact of the 21-day nationwide lockdown.

The relief package includes direct benefit cash transfers, free LPG, grains and pulses for the poor while the middle class would be able to withdraw funds from their Employees Provident Fund (EPF) account.

These measures will greatly benefit the most vulnerable and poor sections of society during these challenging times, said Puri.

He further said: "Following the Prime Minister's announcement earlier of a comprehensive fund fortreating Coronavirus patients and strengthening medical infrastructure to fight this endemic,these timely measures and relief packages announced by the Government today will go a long way in providing support to farmers, daily wage earners, SHG women and poor senior citizens during such an unprecedented situation.

On Tuesday this week, the government had announced three weeks lockdown of the nation to prevent spread of Coronavirus in the country.

According to the latest health ministry updates, death toll due to COVID-19 rises to 16 in India and number of total infected cases soar to 694.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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The Royal Navy has deployed to counter 'unusually high' levels of activity by Russian ships in UK waters as the country is gripped by the coronavirus crisis, it was revealed today.

Nine vessels, along with helicopter support, were tasked with shadowing seven Russian warships in the English Channel and North Sea over a week.

The Navy said 'every movement' of the vessels was monitored, amid fears Vladimir Putin could try to exploit the turmoil over the spread of the killer virus.

Concerns have also been raised that Russia is behind a wave of disinformation about the disease seemingly designed to foster panic among the public.

In a stark message to Moscow, Lieutenant Nick Ward, HMS Tyne's Executive Officer said while the Navy would be helping the coronavirus response in the UK, it would not lose focus on the 'essential' duty to protect national security.

The Royal Navy been countering 'unusual' levels of activity by Russian warships in the English Channel and North Sea. Pictured: HMS Tyne shadowing the Russian corvette, Steregushchiy

Nine Royal Navy ships intercepted seven Russian vessels in UK waters at a time the armed forces are dealing with coronavirus

The Navy completed the concentrated operation after recording unusually high levels of activity in waters around the UK. Pictured: HMS Richmond (stock image)

Type 23 frigates HMS Kent, HMS Sutherland, HMS Argyll and HMS Richmond joined Offshore Patrol Vessels HMS Tyne and HMS Mersey for the operation.

They were accompanied by RFA Tideforce, RFA Tidespring and HMS Echo, and there was support from NATO allies.

Lieutenant Ward said: 'As the Armed Forces are helping the NHS save lives in the UK, it's essential the Navy continues to deliver the tasks we have always performed to help keep Britain safe.

'This is very much part of routine business for HMS Tyne and represents one of the many roles our patrol vessels perform in support of the Royal Navy's commitments.

'This is our core business and represents an enduring commitment to uphold the security of the UK.'

The Royal Navy is currently preparing to help the NHS and other government departments deal with the response to the coronavirus outbreak. Pictured: HMS Echo (stock image)

Three River-class patrol ships join operation to monitor Russian Navel fleet: HMS Tyne The HMS Tyne is one of the three River-class patrol ships built to safeguard the fishing stocks. She is one of the busiest vessels in the fleet and spends nine out of every ten days of the year at sea. HMS Tyne, along with HMS Severn and HMS Mersey make up the Fishery Protection Squadron  the 'Cod Squad'  the oldest unit in the Royal Navy. Role: Inspects around 400 vessels on average per year Number of crew: 43 Top speed: 20 knots Advertisement

The operation, believed to have finished last week, was supported by Merlin and Wildcat helicopters of 814 and 815 Naval Air Squadrons.

Royal Navy sailors and aircrew both monitored the Russian ship activity using state-of-the-art radar, surveillance cameras and sensors which allowed them to track their course and speed as they passed the British Isles.

Three Steregushchiy-class corvettes, two Ropucha-class landing ships and two Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates were observed during the operations, plus their supporting auxiliary ships and tugs.

Portsmouth-based HMS Tyne spent more than a week working in the English Channel, in often challenging seas, keeping a close eye on the Russian vessels as they pass the south coast.

HMS Sutherland, fresh from a demanding period of Arctic training on Exercise Cold Response, watched over the Russian presence as part of her duties with NATO's Standing NATO Maritime Group One  a very high readiness task group made up of frigates and destroyers which patrols northern European waters to provide a reassuring presence.

The Devonport-based frigate's Merlin helicopter carried out a number of intelligence-gathering sorties over the Russian ships as they passed through the Channel.

RFA Tidespring which is one of nine British ships that have been shadowing seven Russian vessels in waters around the UK

MPs ask public to send examples of coronavirus disinformation online MPs are calling for social media users to pass on examples of coronavirus misinformation they discover online. Social media firms will be called in to Parliament after the extended Easter recess to explain what they are doing to combat the spread of false information. Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee chairman Julian Knight said: 'The deliberate spreading of false information about Covid-19 could have serious consequences. 'Much of this is happening on social media through private channels, putting the onus on friends and family to identify whether the information they are seeing is misleading. 'There have been some shocking examples in recent weeks and we want people to send us what they've come across. Advertisement

HMS Sutherland's Operations Officer, Lieutenant Hannah Lee, said: 'Our successful integration into the maritime group proves our ability to adapt to task group operations at short notice.

'Having proved we can work together and contributed once again to NATO operations, we now look to return to UK national tasks in support of the very highest defence priorities.'

NATO duties also saw HMS Sutherland support the French carrier strike group led by aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle in recent weeks.

HMS Sutherland, working alongside French, Norwegian, German and Danish ships, then carried out surface and air defence exercises as well as carrying out joint gunnery training.

The Royal Navy is currently preparing to help the NHS and other government departments deal with the response to the coronavirus outbreak.

It comes after RAF Typhoons were repeatedly scrambled in recent weeks to intercept Russian aircraft encroaching on UK airspace.

MPs are calling for social media users to pass on examples of coronavirus misinformation they discover online.

Social media firms will be called in to Parliament after the extended Easter recess to explain what they are doing to combat the spread of false information.

Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee chairman Julian Knight said: 'The deliberate spreading of false information about Covid-19 could have serious consequences.

'Much of this is happening on social media through private channels, putting the onus on friends and family to identify whether the information they are seeing is misleading.

'There have been some shocking examples in recent weeks and we want people to send us what they've come across.

'We will call in social media companies as soon as the House returns to explain what they're doing to deal with harmful content like this to help give people the reassurances they need at this difficult time.

'Tech giants who allow this to proliferate on their platforms are morally responsible for tackling disinformation and should face penalties if they don't.'

How does the Royal Navy compare to the Russians? Briton has edge with new technology in Type 23 frigates despite increased firepower of Kremlin Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates HMS Kent - Type 26 Frigate Type 23 frigates HMS Kent (pictured stock image), HMS Sutherland, HMS Argyll and HMS Richmond joined Offshore Patrol Vessels HMS Tyne and HMS Mersey Weight 4,900 tonnes Total range 7,800 miles On board 185 personnel Top speed 28 knots Weaponry 1. 4.5 inch Mark 8 gun-mounted at the bow. 2. 2 X 30 mm Mark 2 guns for close quarter engagement - mounted port and starboard. 3. 2 x Torpedo tubes - mounted port and starboard 4. four GPMG machine guns - mounted port and starboard 5. Two mini-guns capable of firing 1,000 rounds a minute , mounted port and starboard. 6. Sea Ceptor (Vertical Launched) missiles system fitted at bow - surface to air threat, 7. Four Harpoon firing tubes - fitted at bow anti-ship missile 8. Wildcat helicopter - fitted with Martlet short range missiles and heavy machine gun RNS SOOBRAZITELNYY - Steregushchiy Class corvette The Russian force included three 2,200 tonne Steregushchiy-class corvettes which are armed with Redut surface to air missiles, as well as ship launched torpedoes and automated machine guns Weight 2,200 tonnes Total range 3,800 miles On board 90 Top speed 27 knots Weaponry 1. Kh-35 missiles. Subsonic cruise missiles with a range of 160 miles. 2. 3M-54 Klub missiles., known as the Kalibr, can be fitted with thermo nuclear warhead range 600 kilometres 3. Two Kashtan anti-aircraft systems on-board provide close-in air defence against anti-ship missiles. 4. REDUT-K Surface to air missile system 120 nautical km. 5. Two 14.5 mm pedestal machine guns port and starboard. 6. Two 330 mm torpedo tubes port and starboard. 7. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle - can carry weapons payload 8. Ka-27 helicopter armed with anti-ship rockets and heavy machine guns. Advertisement

RAF Typhoon fighter jets scramble to intercept two Russian planes north of Scotland for the third time in six days

For the third time in a week, RAF Typhoons were scrambled to intercept Russian aircraft encroaching on UK airspace.

Two jets were launched from RAF Lossiemouth just after 9am. The activity was first noted by Twitter account @MIL_Radar.

A Voyager tanker plane was also launched from RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, in case the Typhoons needed to refuel.

The Russian plane was seen flying over the Outer Hebrides before being maneuvered away

An RAF fighter pilot who intercepted a Russian Tu-142 Bear maritime patrol aircraft yesterday said it was necessary to shadow the bomber as it was endangering civilian aircraft

Air Chief Marshal Mike Wigston said: 'These Russian bombers do not comply with international air traffic rules, are a hazard to airliners and are not welcome in our airspace.'

An unnamed RAF quick reaction alert pilot from RAF Lossiemouth, who intercepted the Russian Bears yesterday, said: 'The UK has some of the busiest airspace in the world and civilian airliners are constantly using the airways in this area, so our presence ensured UK air traffic controllers could continue to manage this busy airspace around the hazard of the Russian activity.'

This comes after six RAF fighter jets were scrambled to intercept Russian bombers on Saturday after they tried to enter British airspace.

Typhoon aircraft from RAF Lossiemouth raced to intercept the Russian aircraft as it approached UK airspace

Today's interception is the latest in a long list of times RAF jets were forced monitor Russian aircraft patrolling the edge of UK airspace

The RAF deployed two pairs of Typhoons from RAF Lossiemouth near Moray and a third pair from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire on Saturday (pictured, Russian Tupolev Tu-142 aircraft intercepted by Typhoon aircraft from RAF Lossiemouth and RAF Coningsby)

THE RAF'S TYPHOON The Typhoon FGR4 provides the RAF with a highly capable and extremely agile multi-role combat aircraft, capable of being deployed in the full spectrum of air operations, including air policing, peace support and high intensity conflict. Engines: 2 Eurojet EJ200 turbojets Thrust: 20,000lbs each Max speed: 1.8Mach Length: 15.96m Max altitude: 55,000ft Span: 11.09m Aircrew: 1 Advertisement

Yesterday, an undisclosed number of Tupolev Tu-95 Bears, Russian aircraft used as strategic bombers and maritime patrol planes, headed towards northwest Scotland.

The RAF deployed two pairs of Typhoons from RAF Lossiemouth near Moray and a third pair from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire to force them to change course.

A Voyager tanker was also deployed from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.

Last April, Typhoons from RAF Lossiemouth were scrambled twice in five days to prevent Russian military planes entering UK airspace.

In the same period, jets from RAF Coningsby were also deployed to a separate incident involving Russian aircraft.

All these incidents come amid heightened tensions between London and Moscow, after Russian GRU agents used chemical weapons in Salisbury in 2018.
More than 7,000 Torontonians are being told their personal information was improperly disclosed to a city councillors office, the Star has learned.

In a March 17 letter to 7,227 people in a program for senior citizens and disabled people who receive free sidewalk snow clearing, Vincent Sferrazza, a city transportation director, tells them of an inadvertent disclosure, which included their names, addresses and their status as either a senior citizen or disabled person.

The data was provided in error to a councillors office, Sferrazza wrote, apologizing and saying his department is working with the city clerks office to stop it from happening again.

After the Star obtained the letter, the city released a report on the incident.

The report says Coun. Josh Matlow asked transportation Oct. 17 for a list of locations in Ward 12, by street, and if the division had information about an area covered by a proposed pilot project to expand sidewalk snow clearing services.

The Councillor at no time requested personal information for those receiving this service, the report states.

But a transportation employee emailed Matlows office an Excel spreadsheet with the personal information  a breach of the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (MFIPPA).

The disclosure of the information is attributed to a lack of understanding of both basic privacy principles as well as the role of elected officials and their right of access to personal information in relation to the City of Toronto as an institution under MFIPPA, the report states.

Ward councillors operating as constituency representatives do not have a special right of access to records containing personal information.

The privacy breach was reported Dec. 10 by another transportation employee. Matlows staff confirmed to the department that the spreadsheet had been deleted.

Inadequate privacy training for staff appears to be behind the incident, which wasnt the first such breach, according to the report, which recommends education sessions and other steps to fix the problem.

Disclosure of over seven thousand individuals personal information to fulfill a request that did not ask for that information demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of privacy and the relationship between the City and the offices of elected officials, the report states.

Moreover, it should be noted that a very similar privacy breach occurred with Transportation Services Division in 2009. That breach resulted in mandatory privacy training for all divisional staff.

Matlow was not aware of the incident when contacted this week by the Star.

The councillor said he was happy to hear from his staff that the data had been destroyed after it was received in error.
Reel World

Cinematic Takeout

With social distancing a top priority in order to slow the spread of COVID-19, movie theaters have closed their doors nationwide. Albuquerque is no exception. But that doesnt mean you cant support your local theaters and catch some cool films anyway. Even as we speak, distributors are coming up with ingenious new ideas for getting films in front of appreciative eyeballs.

Albuquerques locally owned arthouse theater Guild Cinema has hooked up with a number of distributors who are now providing theatrical at home screenings. You stream the film in the privacy and safety of your own home on your computer/ TV/ iPad/ etc. and the theater of your choice gets a portion of the rental fee. A total win-win! Writer-director Gary Lundgrens genial indie comedy Phoenix, Oregon was supposed to open at Guild Cinema on March 20. Now, thanks to distributor Joma Films, its opening online and sharing part of its profits with the theater. The indie comedy tells the story of two middle-aged pals who quit their jobs to live out their dreams of restoring an old bowling alley and serving the worlds greatest pizza. The film costs a mere $6.50 to watch at home and can be accessed for 48 hours. (Be sure to click Guild Cinema on the Choose Theater to Support tabthat ensures that a portion of the profits flows back to Albuquerque.)

Film Movement is also teaming up with Guild (and various other arthouse theaters across America) to offer a slate of watch-at-home options. Theres the Polish drama Corpus Christi, about a young criminal who experiences a spiritual transformation in jail. Although his record prevents him from applying to the seminary, he has no intention of giving up his dream of becoming a small-town minister. Bertrand Bonellos atmospheric fantasy Zombi Child spins a split narrative: A man is brought back from the dead to work at a sugar cane plantation in Haiti, and 55 years later, a Haitian teenager at a boarding school in France spills a dangerous family secret to her friends. Yinan Diaos The Wild Goose Lake is a Chinese crime drama about a gangster on the run who sacrifices everything for his family and a woman he meets while on the lam. Film Movement is offering a couple foreign classics as well: Luchino Viscontis 1976 cynical romance LInnocente (about an aristocrat with a mistress who becomes enamored with his wife again when he suspects she has been unfaithful) and Bruno Barretos 1976 sex comedy Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (in which a Brazilian woman remarries only to find herself pursued by the amorous ghost of her dead husband). These films are all $12 for a three-day streaming rental.

To check out any of these films, simply go to the Guild Cinema website (guildcinema.com) and click on the links.
The Plainview City Council voted Tuesday night to ratify and extend the declaration of local state of disaster put in place as a precautionary measure to protect citizens from and to prevent spread of COVID-19.

The declaration was issued last week by Plainview Mayor Wendell Dunlap at the same time Hale County Judge David Mull issued one for the county. The City of Plainview, like Hale County, is now under the declaration until further notice.

The declarations limit social gatherings to 10 people or less and mandates that they be canceled if they include 10 or more people. It also restricts use of public areas and mandates that local restaurants close their dining areas and resort to other service options, explained City Manager Jeffrey Snyder to City Council members, who met via teleconference for Tuesdays meeting. The restrictions excuse houses of worship and educational institutions, though theyre strongly encouraged to abide by government guidelines as well.

The resolution voted on by the Council also mandates that any COVID-19 testing be reported to Environmental Health Inspector for Plainview/Hale County Health Department Jack McCasland by 5 p.m. every day for the previous 24-hour period. The report will include all the tests conducted, including those that came back with negative results.

The resolution, as presented to the Council, stated that the extension of the declaration would stand until April 14, which is the next scheduled City Council meeting. When Councilwoman Susan Blackerby, District 5, made the motion to accept, she amended it and left the date open-ended, like the County Commissioners did Monday when they ratified the Countys declaration.

The motion was seconded by Councilwoman Nelda VanHoose, District 1, and it was followed by extensive discussion.

Councilman Larry Williams, District 2, said hes fine with an open date but is concerned business people may feel left in limbo.

Well I really dont think any of us can say when this is going to end for the local businesses because this is a global health disaster that we have no way of knowing when its going to end, Blackerby responded. We can make all the plans that we want to for a closing date but that may or may not happen.

Plainview City Attorney Matt Wade, who maintained a neutral informative stance, said setting an end date for the restrictions doesnt mean it has to be definitive. The Council is set to meet again on that date anyway, he added. It gives the option to place the item back on the Council agenda for that date to be reevaluated, if its not lifted before.

It was noted that setting a specific date would require a motion by the Council to rescind the resolution. Leaving the date open-ended creates a more flexible option.

Wade advised that regardless of the decision, the Council could place the item back on the next meeting agenda and review it, which Williams seemed to be in favor of. The Council ultimately opted for the open-ended date option with members expressing interest in reviewing it again at the next meeting.

I just think we need to give business people a hope or wish or a thought that the Council is paying attention to them also, Williams said. Its not going to hurt if we have an agenda item.

Teressa King, councilwoman for District 4, said from a business owners perspective, she agrees with Williams and would like to see the item back on the Councils agenda.

Blackerby noted that the next meeting is three weeks away and worried that saying the Council would review it again as early as the next meeting would give an impression of false hope.

I know that we all hope that the economy is not in a bad situation any longer than it has to be, she said. But considering the condition of the virus, the COVID-19 and so on, the fact that we havent even been hard-hit yet, then I dont want to give false hope either.

Williams agreed.

King said, I think its just being optimistic. If it works, great.

She mentioned she wants the City to react as proactively as possible and be ready to be able to turn things back to normal as quickly as it can when restrictions at the federal state and now the local level are lifted.

VanHoose said she agreed adding, I also think its unrealistic to say in three weeks everything is going to be OK.

Following discussion about whether or not to place the item on the next meetings agenda, King asked about a line in the newly amended resolution that states that consequences of not abiding by the restrictions could include a fine of up to $1,000 and/or jail time not exceeding 180 days.

Williams stated that hes in favor of this stipulation. King then asked what the law enforcement protocol is for this.

Wade advised that this is just like any of type of violation. Police Chief Ken Coughlin said officers have a copy of the order and ask for compliance.

If they refuse to comply, we generate a police report, he said.

After the discussion, the Council voted 7-0 to extend the declaration with an open-ended date until its deemed OK to lift it. Councilman Eric Hastey was absent.

The Council also accepted a financial audit report conducted by Eide Bailly, LLP, and presented on Tuesday by Sarianne Beversdorf, director of finance for the City; an interlocal cooperation agreement for a grant application for a new fire truck; a second reading of a zoning ordinance; and changes to the municipal elections.

All votes were unanimous.
Nimesh Kumar, tore out a page from a notebook he borrowed from his neighbour Thursday morning and frantically jotted down the apartment numbers, shouted out by a group of people wearing surgical masks who stood facing his small makeshift kiosk in south Delhis Khirki village.

There are too many orders and it is difficult to deliver them all within a short interval. The police do not think twice before swinging their lathis at us when they spot us on the streets, said Kumar, who works with a shop that delivers 20-litre drinking water jars in the neighbourhood.

Earlier this week, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, the Union home ministry had issued an order elaborating on a list of exemptions categorised as essentials.

The list clearly states that piped water supply wont be affected by the lockdown but does not explicitly mention about the supply of bottled drinking water, a commodity that 14% households in Delhi depend on, according to data shared in 2019 by the National Statistical Office (NSO).

Several bottled water dealers pointed out how the lack of clarity regarding their operations make them and their delivery persons susceptible to the police crackdown.

We are in a mess. Hundreds of people want bottled water. Currently, we have a decent stock but there are two challenges. One, delivery is a major issue. Two, we dont see supply, which means a major crisis awaits us, said Ankit Naagar, another packaged water dealer in Chirag Dilli.

The same is the plight of cooking gas dealers.

By 8am Thursday, a long queue had formed outside Rajan Pals shop, which had half its shutter down to ward off a police crackdown, in south Delhis Gupta Colony. The queued up people carried portable 4kg cooking gas cylinders that needed an immediate refill.

The government says milk booths, vegetable kiosks and grocery shops will be open. Even if I avail of these essentials today, without cooking gas, how do I cook any of it? said Manoj Parashar, a postgraduate student who migrated from Madhya Pradesh.

By 10am, Pal had locked his shop, having refilled as many as 11 mini-cylinders after charging 110 per kilo. This is an industry that runs more or less in an unauthorised manner in Delhi, given that getting a 14.2kg cylinder from one of the authorised dealers would require one having a proper address and ID proofs. In the absence of such documents, the large migrant population in Delhi  about 63 lakh migrants, according to the 2011 Census data depend on the smaller cylinders that have to be refilled every few days.

The government order says cooking gas agencies will remain functional during the lockdown but, as is the case with bottled water, it failed to take into consideration shops that refill smaller cylinders.

Meat shop owners were the other group that complained of police high-handedness, despite their enterprises also being listed in the governments list of essentials.

A large number of people believe that coronavirus spread has a link with meat consumption. Hence, residents often complain to police and they ask me to close my shop. I tried arguing a few times but that did not yield any result, said Brajesh, a meat shop owner in Malviya Nagar market.

The personnel at the Malviya Nagar police station said the meat shops have not been asked to close but have been told to operate as per the hours prescribed by the government. They said some meat shops have run out of stock and that is the reason why they have shut, and not due to police high-handedness, a senior officer from the south districts deputy commissioners office said.
TOKYO  Japan had only a few dozen confirmed coronavirus infections when the 30-something nurse with a slight sore throat boarded a bus to Osaka, the countrys third-largest city, to attend a Valentines weekend performance by pop bands at a music club.

Less than two weeks later, she tested positive for the virus, and the authorities swiftly alerted others who had been at the club. As more infections soon emerged from three other music venues in the city, officials tested concertgoers and their close contacts, and urged others to stay home. All told, 106 cases were linked to the clubs, and nine people are still hospitalized.

But less than a month after the nurse tested positive, the governor of Osaka declared the outbreak over.
Officials walk into a store that has a 'social distancing' sign on the door during the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York on March 25. (Image courtesy: Reuters)

A woman walks out of a store that has a 'social distancing' sign in the door during the outbreak of coronavirus disease in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, US. (Reuters)

Paramedics move a patient into the hospital during the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in the Manhattan borough of New York City. (Image courtesy: Reuters)

Medical officials aid a resident from St Joseph's nursing home to board a bus, after a number of residents tested positive for COVID-19 in Woodbridge, New Jersey. (Image courtesy: Reuters)

Medical officials aid a resident from St Joseph's nursing home to board a bus after a number of residents tested positive for coronavirus in Woodbridge, New Jersey. (Image courtesy: Reuters)

A medical official is seen while aiding residents from St Joseph's nursing home to evacuate, after a number of residents tested positive for coronavirus in Woodbridge, New Jersey. (Image courtesy: Reuters)

Paramedics move a patient into the hospital during the outbreak of COVID-19 in the Manhattan borough of New York City. (Image courtesy: Reuters)

Paramedics move a patient into the hospital during the outbreak of coronavirus disease in the Manhattan borough of New York City. (Image courtesy: Reuters)

Firefighters, police officers and emergency medical technicians (EMTs) respond to a medical call amid the outbreak of coronavirus disease in Seattle, Washington. (Image courtesy: Reuters)
The Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, located between Ghobeiry (in the southern suburb) and Beirut, is slowly adapting to the directives of the "general mobilization" announced by the Lebanese Cabinet on March 22 to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. "Today, I went for a walk in the camp. I was impressed by the calm prevailing there," said Haytham Takrouri, who who lived many years inside the shantytown before moving out. "I never imagined in my entire life that I would see the streets of the camp so deserted. Confinement orders are not fully respected yet, but it is a start."

Khaled Abu el-Nour, a camp resident and member of the popular committees, underlines however the difficulty of convincing the shantytown residents of the need to stay home. "We have noticed in recent days that most of the people were compliant (with the lockdown measures), but it took too long," Abu el-Nour said. "The problem is that most of the residents are day laborers, with small businesses. They insist on working because otherwise they will not be able to support their families." With many shops remaining open, the popular committees and the various Palestinian factions have asked the Ghobeiry municipality to help force the closure of businesses at 4 p.m., and the cafes to remain closed."

The Shatila camp is a half square kilometer-area, most of which is located in Ghobeiry (bordering Beirut). This small space is very densely populated, like almost all the Palestinian camps in Lebanon, with nearly 5,000 dwellings and between 20,000 to 25,000 inhabitants, according to Abu el-Nour. Families, he explained, live in cramped apartments in buildings where additional floors are being built to accommodate their growing numbers. The camp's narrow streets are generally crowded with passers-by and customers of multiple stalls, attached to one another, selling all kinds of goods. Furthermore, the camp adjoins the famous vegetable and fruit market of Sabra, which attracts many customers and wholesalers, coming from various regions of Lebanon. The Shatila camp population is not exclusively Palestinian: there is a new population of Palestinians who fled Syria, Syrian refugees, as well as Lebanese.





Difficulty in limiting access

"The camp is at risk if the virus does spread (inside the shantytown)," said Khaled Abu el-Nour. He explained that on one hand, it is very difficult to limit access because the camp has several entrances, including some uncontrolled which are well-known to the inhabitants. "It is a camp with continuous interaction with the city and so the possibility of contamination by people from outside the camp is not excluded." The other risk factor is the fact that this is an overcrowded area where families are crammed in small apartments.

"We haven't yet registered any confirmed (coronavirus) cases, Thank God! But if this happens, it is very easy to imagine how quickly the virus would spread," he said. "We are being told about t home quarantine. How can we do that when a family is confined to such a small space? "

Frightened by the prospect of the virus spreading, more and more camp residents are now choosing to stay home, just like Abu el-Nours own family. His wife Amina Hassanein, mother of three children aged 7, 10 and 12, describes what it is like to live in a Palestinian camp under coronavirus lockdown . "I have forbidden my children to go to the streets, even if they become unbearable and hard to handle,"she told L OLJ. Her children are studying online, with only one teacher coming to their house to give them lessons. "Reluctant at first, I finally convinced him that the house is continuously cleaned and sanitized, and that we are taking all necessary precautions."

Amina is afraid for her children as well as for her parents who live nearby. "I don't understand why some people chose to disregard the precautionary measures, whether out of nonchalance, mistrust, or out of need," she said. "They are putting us all at risk. I have noticed that the Syrian newcomers are allowing their children to play outside, as if we are in a normal situation."





Urgent assistance

Amina's fears are well justified. The Shatila camp, like all the other Palestinian camps, has very little resources to face the possible spread of the epidemic. "A spread of the virus in such an environment would be catastrophic, given the popular density," said Khaled Abu el-Nour.

The precautionary measures taken so far are minimal. Streets and public places were disinfected while measures were taken against lockdown violators. Many NGOs, active in the camp, are helping raising public awareness about protection and personal hygiene measures to fight the coronavirus."

Just like the rest of the country, but much more acutely, the Palestinian camps are faced with a double problem: a growing economic crisis and the risk of contamination of a large section of the population. "Our people are tired... and are in a difficult situation," said Abu el-Nour. "If this current crisis lasts indefinitely, it will be a disaster."

What if the epidemic spreads? Haytham and Khaled Abu el-Nour are both worried and warning. "Today I was at the office of the Palestinian National Crescent (the equivalent of the Lebanese Red Cross)," said Takrouri. "They have centers, but they are under-equipped. And if there are cases of coronavirus, they certainly do not have the same means as the CRL (Lebanese Red Cross) to safely transport the infected people.

Abu el-Nour explained that UNRWA is the one providing medical assistance to the Palestinian refugees but the U.N. agency which is already facing great difficulties "has no emergency plan for the camp in case of a widespread contamination."

The two men emphasized that the camp residents must be offered an urgent economic aid to help them comply with strict confinement and cope with the situation. They called on the Palestine Liberation Organization, UNRWA and wealthy Palestinians living abroad, to take action and secure such needed assistance.





(This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour on the 25th of March)




WASHINGTON  Cases of coronavirus multiplied rapidly aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt on Thursday, as 15 more sailors tested positive, prompting testing for all 5,000 sailors aboard, according to Navy and Defense officials.

The Navy first reported Tuesday that three sailors had tested positive and been airlifted to a hospital in the Pacific. Five more sailors were diagnosed on Wednesday. By Thursday, as the ship docked in Guam for a scheduled visit, that number had jumped to 23 sailors, according to a Defense official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

"We expect additional positive tests, and those sailors who test positive will be transported to the U.S. Naval Hospital Guam for further evaluation and treatment as necessary," Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, said in a statement. "During the port visit, base access will be limited to the pier for Roosevelt's sailors. No base or regional personnel will access the pier."

Military readiness: Coronavirus forces cuts to training, recruiting, creating strains

The Naval Hospital Guam in Agana Heights on Thursday, March 26, 2020.

None of the sailors so far have been hospitalized or are seriously ill, Gilday said.

Across the military, officials scrambled Thursday to corral the virus before it rampages through the ranks and limits the Pentagon's ability to meet challenges from adversaries.

Cases of COVID-19 continued to rise on Wednesday, reaching 574 cases among troops, their families and civilian employees, the Pentagon reported. That compares with 415 on Tuesday, an increase of 38%.

Lt. Gen. R. Scott Dingle, the Army surgeon general, told reporters Thursday that he was "absolutely concerned" that coronavirus could damage the military's readiness to accomplish its missions.

By Thursday afternoon, the Army had counted 100 soldiers with coronavirus, according to Gen. James McConville, the Army chief of staff. Concerned that it could spread further, McConville on Wednesday ordered the Army's fast-reaction forces to comply with the Health Protection Condition Delta, its strictest measure. That keeps soldiers at home, limiting them to essential trips such as the grocery store and pharmacy. The concept, he said, was to create a "safety bubble" around soldiers most likely needed for combat missions.

Story continues

Throughout the Army, major training exercises have been canceled and social distancing is being implemented. Doing so should limit spread of the virus and allow the Army to return to more normal operations by summer, Dingle said.

Back in Guam, the Roosevelt and its crew will be confined to the pier during their visit. Deep cleaning of the ship is underway and testing has begun for each sailor.

Gilday made clear that the Roosevelt remained capable of its missions, which in the Pacific include deterring aggression from North Korea and matching the strength of Chinese naval forces.

"We are confident that our aggressive response will keep USS Theodore Roosevelt able to respond to any crisis in the region," Gilday said.

Safe to touch: How long does the coronavirus live on surfaces?

Fact check: What's true and what's false about coronavirus?

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Coronavirus: Navy to test all sailors on Roosevelt as cases grow
Up to 14 per cent of the recovered coronavirus patients in China have tested positive again, medical experts have revealed.

Research showed about three to 14 per cent of the former patients were diagnosed with the virus once more after being given the all-clear.

The news came as experts feared that China is facing a second outbreak due to the increasing number of imported cases as well as the 'silent carriers' who show no symptoms.

Millions of residents of Hubei, the former centre of the pandemic, can now leave the province after officials lifted a two-month draconian lockdown.

Up to 14 per cent of the recovered coronavirus patients have tested positive later, Chinese medical experts have revealed. People line up to get nuclei tests in Wuhan

Medical experts have raised questions about if nucleic acid tests are reliable in detecting traces of the virus in some of the recovered patients. A health worker is seen getting swab samples from an elderly resident in Wuhan, Hubei

Doctors in one hospital in Wuhan found that five of the 147 patients in a study tested positive again after recovery, Wang Wei, director of the city's Tongji Hospital, told the state broadcaster CCTV yesterday.

Meanwhile, 14 per cent of those who recovered were diagnosed with the pathogen later in southern China's Guangdong Province, said Song Tie, deputy director of the provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the study conducted by the Wuhan medics, the recovered patients showed no symptoms after testing positive again. But the researchers found no evidence that they became infectious after recovery as their family members all tested negative.

Guangdong officials also suggested the people in close contact with such recovered patients weren't infected by them.

Medical experts have raised questions about if nucleic acid tests are reliable in detecting traces of the virus in some of the recovered patients.

'It's possible that these recovered patients tested negative before because of false results,' Mr Wang added. 'The accuracy of a nucleic acid test is 30 to 50 per cent.'

The chief doctor said it was crucial to closely monitor recovered patients and put them under two-week quarantine after discharge.

'Our sample size for this study was relatively small,' said the hospital director. 'We are planning to carry out large-scale research among local communities in Wuhan soon.'

About three to 14 per cent of the former patients are diagnosed with the deadly disease again after being discharged from hospitals. The picture shows a 98-year-old recovered patient being discharged from the Leishenshan Hospital in Wuhan

According to classified Chinese government data seen by the South China Morning Post , the true scale and of the hidden number of these 'silent carriers' could be higher than first thought. Medics cheer themselves up before going into an ICU ward at the Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan

Other reports suggested that the number of people infected with coronavirus who show no or delayed symptoms could be as high as one-third of those who test positive for the disease.

According to classified Chinese government data seen by the South China Morning Post, the true scale and of the hidden number of these 'silent carriers' could be higher than first thought.

It said by the end of February more than 43,000 people had tested positive for coronavirus in China without showing symptoms and were quarantined but not counted in official figures, which stood at 80,000 at the time.

Other reports suggested that the number of people infected with coronavirus who show no or delayed symptoms could be as high as one-third of those who test positive for the disease. Medical workers are pictured treating a coronavirus patient at a hospital in Wuhan

This discovery has huge ramifications for the strategies being used by countries to contain the virus.

Scientists are currently unable to agree on what role asymptomatic transmission plays in spreading the disease and how infectious people with no symptoms are.

China had discharged 74,051 patients - over 90 per cent of its infected cases - from hospitals as of yesterday, according to official statistics.

Globally, over 430,000 people are infected with the deadly disease and nearly 20,000 people have died.
Ads for face masks are still appearing on Facebook, Instagram and Google, according to a review of the platforms carried out by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP). This despite pledges by the platforms that they would stamp out ads which seek to profit from the coronavirus pandemic.

Facebook said on March 6 that it would temporarily ban commerce listings and advertisements for medical face masks, in an effort to combat price-gouging and misinformation during the COVID-19 crisis.

Google followed suit a few days later, saying it would temporarily ban all medical face mask ads "out of an abundance of caution."

The risk of online misinformation exacerbating a global public health crisis has been front of mind for policymakers in many Western markets. Meanwhile front-line medical staff continue to face shortages of vital personal protective equipment, such as N95 masks, as they battle rising rates of infection.

There has also been concern that online sellers are attempting to cash in on a public health crisis by price gouging and/or targeting internet users with ads for substandard masks.

Early last week two senators urged the U.S.' FTC to act, blasting Google for continuing to allow ads for face masks to be shown to internet users.

A week later and ads are still circulating.

The TTP -- a research project by the nonprofit Campaign for Accountability, a group which focuses on exposing misconduct and malfeasance in public life -- reported finding web users still being targeted with face mask ads on Google this week.

It also conducted a review of Facebook and Instagram, and was able to find more than 130 pages on Facebook listing masks for sale, including some using the platform's e-commerce tools.

"One Facebook Page called 'CoronaVirus Mask' offers a 'respiratory mask collection,' with prices ranging from $32 to $37, and uses Facebook's 'Shop' feature to display its merchandise and allow people to add purchases to their cart," it writes in a blog post. "Facebook's 'check out on website' button then directs users to complete the purchase on the seller's website."

Story continues

"Facebook pages that use WhatsApp to establish contact with buyers are employing a tactic commonly used by wildlife and other traffickers, who often display goods on Facebook and then arrange the actual purchase through WhatsApp encrypted messages. The Facebook Page 'Surgical Face Mask For Sale,' for example, has a video showing boxes of medical masks and the sellers WhatsApp number scrawled on a piece of paper," it added.

"A visit to one of these Facebook pages often triggers recommendations for other pages selling face masks, a sign that the platforms algorithms are actually amplifying the reach of these sketchy sellers. TTP, without logging into Facebook, went to the page for 'Corona Mask Shop' and was served up 'Related Pages' for 'Corona Mask 247' and 'Corona MASK on sale.' "

TechCrunch conducted our own searches on Facebook today and while some obvious search terms returned no results a little tweaking of keywords choice and we were quickly able to find additional pages hawking face masks -- such as the below example grabbed from a Facebook page calling itself "Face Mask Manufacturer."

From this page Facebook's algorithm then recommended more pages -- with names like "Medical Masks" and "Dispo mask for sale" -- which also appeared to be selling masks.

The TTP's review also found mask ads circulating on Facebook-owned Instagram.

"One Instagram account for @coronavsmask reads, 'Act now before its too late! GET your N95 Respiratory Face Mask NOW!' It only has a single post but already counts over 6,300 followers," it wrote. "An account created on March 14 called @handsanitizers_and_coronamask includes over a dozen posts offering such products."

It also found "several" Instagram accounts that sell drugs had begun to incorporate medical face masks into their offerings.

At the time of writing Facebook had not responded to our request for comment on the findings.

In further searches the group was reproduced examples of Googles third-party advertising display network serving ads for face masks alongside news stories related to the coronavirus -- an issue highlighted by Sen. Mark Warner in a tweet last week when he blasted the company for "still running ads for facemasks and other coronavirus scams."

Why is @Google still running ads for facemasks and other coronavirus scams? Despite promises from the company, all it takes is one Google search for "coronavirus" and "mask" and this is what you get. pic.twitter.com/2UsqviuQzt  Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) March 18, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

"The Facebook mask pages were searched and collected on March 17-18 using the terms "corona mask," "N95" and "surgical mask" in Facebook's search function," a TTP spokesman told us when asked for more info about its review. "Of the more than 130 pages identified, 43 were created in the month of March, more than a dozen of those just days before TTP ran the searches."

"We dont have the same level of data from Instagram/Google. Instagram's search function does not lend itself to the same search ability; it doesn't bring up a list of accounts based on a single term like Facebook's search function does. With Google, our goal was to show examples of Google-served ads; those were identified in news stories on March 18," he added.

We reached out to Google for comment on the findings and a spokesman told us the company has a dedicated task force that has removed "millions" of ads in the past week alone -- which he said had already led to a sharp decrease in face mask ads. But Google said "opportunistic advertisers" had been trying to run "an unprecedented number" of these ads on its platforms.

Here's Google's statement:

Since January, weve blocked ads for products that aim to capitalise on coronavirus, including a temporary ban on face mask ads. In the past few weeks, weve seen opportunistic advertisers try to run an unprecedented number of these ads on our platforms. We have a dedicated task force working to combat this issue and have removed millions of ads in the past week alone. Were monitoring the situation closely and continue to make real-time adjustments to protect our users.

Google declined to specify how many people it has working to identify and remove mask ads, saying only that the taskforce is made up of members from its product, engineering, enforcement and policy teams -- and that it's been set up with coverage across time zones.

It also said the examples highlighted by TTP are already over a week old and do not reflect the impact of its newest enforcement measures.

The company told us it's analysing both ad content and how they're served to enhance its take-down capacity.
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Linkedin Norman Harsono (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020

State-owned electricity company PLN projects lower consumption by corporate users this year as worries over the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus has caused a significant decline in trade and industrial activities.

PLN's executive vice president in charge of marketing and customer service, Edison Sipahutar, estimates electricity consumption will fall between 0.6 percent and 1.2 percent in 2020 from 245.52 terawatt-hours (TWh), assuming sluggish factory, office and retail activities continue over the next nine months.

Household electricity consumption will increase but we also expect a decrease in business and industry consumption, Edison told The Jakarta Post on Monday (23/3).

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Market turmoil from the coronavirus is spilling into the bankruptcy of California power giant PG&E Corp.

Victims of wildfires blamed on PG&Es equipment are concerned the sell-off on Wall Street could hobble stock payments that make up half of a $13.5 billion settlement over claims from the blazes, said Robert Julian, an attorney for the victims.

Lawyers for the victims are being inundated with questions from clients because the coronavirus is causing these impacts in real time, he said during a bankruptcy hearing Wednesday. The attorneys have entered into mediation to resolve how long the victims trust will be required to hold shares, the impact of the sell-off and other issues.

The victims need to know these facts in order to vote on the plan, Julian said.

PG&E shares have lost about half their value in the past month. They rose 4% to $9.18 at 3:09 p.m. In New York.

PG&E is preparing to send out disclosure information about its reorganization plan to about 250,000 shareholders, wildfire victims and other creditors who will vote on the proposal, an attorney for the company said today. The utility is racing to get its bankruptcy plan approved by the court and state regulators before a state deadline of June 30.

The wildfire victims would like to have additional information distributed about stock payments once their issues are resolved, Julian said. PG&E attorney Stephen Karotkin said there was adequate disclosure information about the stock awards in the voting materials.

To the extent that people think additional disclosure is required, then they can bring it before court, Karotkin said during the hearing, conducted by telephone to prevent the virus from spreading.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali said he wouldnt take action until he received a motion on the additional stock disclosure materials.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
The streets and landmarks of Budapest have been empty following the decision by the Hungarian government to close the country's borders as the new coronavius spreads in the central European country. Drone footage of Hungary's capital shows usually busy tourist attractions deserted after the government measures were put in place.

While the Hungarian government has not ordered mandatory curfews, it is recommending people stay at home as much as possible.

Schools and universities are holding classes only through distance learning, public events have been cancelled and the city's public transportation system has reduced services.

As of early Thursday, Hungary had 261 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 10 people with COVID-19 have died, including the deputy head of mission of the British Embassy.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover from the new virus.
"With the constant emergence of new technology, our company continually explores new partnerships in this arena that we feel are going to revolutionize their industry and bring solutions to our customers and businesses. Brainbase is a company like no other. Its innovative, cutting-edge technology platform is sure to transform the IP licensing industry," says Kathy Ireland, Chair, CEO and Chief Designer of kathy ireland Worldwide.

"As our company continues to grow and enter new categories, we look forward to working with Brainbase CEO Nate Cavanaugh and his ingenious team to be the ultimate platform to streamline and manage our complex business needs," adds Ms. Ireland.

"Partnering with Kathy and her incredibly talented team is a tremendous opportunity for Brainbase," stated Cavanaugh. "kiWW is one of the most highly respected brands in the licensing industry, and we are ecstatic to have Kathy's brand acumen and guidance for years to come as we continue our mission to make the IP industry more open, efficient and accessible."

Brainbase's current client base includes Sanrio, the global lifestyle brand best known for pop icon Hello Kitty, BuzzFeed, SYBO Games, MDR Brand Management and other globally-recognized brands.

About Brainbase

Founded in 2016, Brainbase is a platform that helps globally-recognized brands manage and monetize their intellectual property. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles and is backed by leading investors in San Francisco, LA, New York, and Europe.

About kathy ireland Worldwide (kiWW)

kiWW is listed as one of the most powerful brands in the world by License Global Magazine. Kathy Ireland is named one of the 19 most influential women in licensing by License Global magazine and according to Fairchild Publications, Kathy Ireland is one of the 50 most influential people in fashion. Furniture Today names Kathy one of the most influential leaders in the furniture industry. As part of kiWW's advocacy for innovation, the company also recently partnered Stellus Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based startup whose technology is redefining how companies manage and use unstructured data; as well as Padlist, an online real estate database platform which uses smart technology to make it easier and faster for renters and landlords to connect.

Kathy graces the cover of Forbes Magazine twice (2012, 2016). kiWW is responsible for billions of dollars in retail sales. kiWW is the recipient of multiple awards including several Good Housekeeping Seals. Kathy and kiWW support many non-profits including YWCA Greater Los Angeles, for which she is an Ambassador, Dream Foundation, Providence Educational Foundation, 911 for Kids/AEF, and the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Kathy is named an Ambassador for the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation and is International Youth Chair for the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation.

SOURCE Brainbase
Singapores economy could contract as much as 4 percent in 2020, its trade ministry said.

Singapores economy suffered its biggest contraction in a decade in the first quarter, data showed on Thursday, as the coronavirus pandemic prompted the city-state to cut its full-year gross domestic product (GDP) forecast and plan for a deep recession.

The grim data is likely to reinforce fears that global activity will sharply contract in the first half of the year. Singapore is one of the worlds most open economies and one of the first to report growth data since the virus spread from China at the start of the year.

The economy of the Asian financial and trading hub shrank by 2.2 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, preliminary readings from the Ministry of Trade and Industry showed.

The sharp contraction in Singapores economy in [the first quarter] was deeper than expected, and with global growth collapsing, the worst is yet to come, Alex Holmes, Asia economist at Capital Economics said in a note on Thursday.

That marked the biggest drop since the 2009 financial crisis and was below economists expectations for a 1.5 percent decline. On a quarterly basis, GDP shrank 10.6 percent, the lowest since 2010 and well below expectations for a 6.3 percent decline.

The data prompted the trade ministry to cut its 2020 GDP forecast range to negative 4 percent to negative 1 percent, from a previous range of negative 0.5 percent to 1.5 percent, and firmed up investors bets for a significant fiscal and monetary stimulus.

The COVID-19 outbreak has escalated and led to a significant deterioration in the economic situation both externally and domestically, the trade ministry said.

Just weeks after announcing multi-billion dollar schemes to offset the effect of the outbreak on businesses and households in its annual budget, the finance ministry is set to announce more relief packages later on Thursday.

We think the government is likely to expand on the support it announced in the 2020 budget last month. A strong fiscal position means it has plenty of room to do so, said Capital Economics Holmes.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), meanwhile, has brought forward its semi-annual monetary policy statement to Monday, March 30 and many economists are expecting drastic easing not seen since the financial crisis.

The extent of the first two months already tells you  how bad it is going to get, Selena Ling, head of treasury research and strategy at OCBC Bank, told Reuters.

The likelihood is that they will bring out a very big bazooka this afternoon and come next Monday, MAS will also do whats necessary.

Singapore has been battling the virus outbreak which has killed more than 19,000 globally since mid-January. It has seen a surge in mainly-imported infections in recent days and on Wednesday recorded its biggest daily jump in cases, bringing its total to 631.

With a number of major industrial economies now instituting social distancing measures and/or lockdowns, large-scale near-term declines in economic activity are on the way and a global recession is now our baseline, Oxford Economics said in a note to clients this week, while noting growth could rebound quickly once tough containment measures are lifted.
President Donald Trump speaks during the daily briefing on the CCP virus, as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci (L) and Vice President Mike Pence look on at the White House in Washington on March 25, 2020. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Trump Approves Florida Disaster Declaration Due to COVID-19

President Donald Trump on March 25 approved a disaster declaration for the state of Florida, ordering federal assistance to help state and local recovery efforts amid the CCP virus pandemic.

The move comes just days after Florida governor Ron DeSantis asked Trump in a letter to declare the state a disaster area, saying the COVID-19 outbreak is having a drastic effect on Floridas economy and medical providers.

His letter to the president released late Monday says Floridas hospitals and first responders are facing challenges rarely experienced. DeSantis wrote that the state has already spent $208 million and its medical system is burdened.

DeSantis added that a survey of more than 6,600 businesses shows more than half have laid off employees, totaling more than 40,400 people. He also said requests for unemployment benefits have spiked to 130,000 in four days last week, compared to 28,000 for the entire previous week.

As of Wednesday evening, the state of Florida reported 1,977 cases of the CCP virusincluding and 23 deaths, according to the Florida Department of Health. Confirmed infections rose by 510 from Tuesday.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

The declaration will make federal funding available to state, tribal, and eligible local governments and certain private nonprofit organizations for emergency protective measures, including direct federal assistance for all areas in Florida impacted by COVID-19, the White House announced in a news release Wednesday.

It will also provide funding for crisis counseling for individuals impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak in the state, and for emergency protective measures.

The White House added that additional designations may be made in the future if requested by the state.

The president has also approved major disaster declarations for New York, California, Washington, Iowa, Louisiana, and Texas. The disaster declarations will allow federal funding for state and some local governments as well as certain private nonprofit organizations. The president has dubbed the declarations as of legal significance.

.@potus has approved @GovRonDeSantis request for a Major Disaster Declaration for #Florida. This will make available much needed resources in the war against #COVID2019. Thank you!  Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) March 25, 2020

Responding to news of the declaration, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) thanked the president on Twitter.

This will make available much needed resources in the war against #COVID2019. Thank you! Rubio wrote.

Thank you, President @realDonaldTrump for approving Floridas Disaster Declaration which will provide federal funds to help communities recover from the effects of #COVID19. We are prepared for the fight ahead and will come out stronger than ever before. pic.twitter.com/PJXdL687G2  Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) March 25, 2020

DeSantis also thanked Trump, adding that the declaration will provide federal funds to help communities recover from the effects of #COVID19.

We are prepared for the fight ahead and will come out stronger than ever before, he tweeted.

Stay-at-Home Order Inappropriate

DeSantis said on Wednesday he wont be ordering residents to stay at home because of the way the virus has spread in the state.

Theres certain parts of the state where you have more sporadic cases, the governor told reporters in Orlando. To order someone not to be able to earn a paycheck when them going to work is not going to have any effect on what were doing with the virus, that is something that I think is inappropriate.

The Trump administration supports the approach Florida is taking, DeSantis said. He also noted that counties and cities in southeast Florida, where the virus has spread extensively, have told residents to stay at home, including Miami Beach.

I worked with them on that, he said, adding that any local jurisdiction is free to issue a stay at home order.

Zachary Stieber and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
As the country battling coronavirus epidemic, concerns are being raised about well-being of underground mine workers at Coal India arm BCCL in the absence of adequate safety measures, multiple sources in the know said.

Under essential services, these mines, as per information, were given permission to operate by the district administration under strict regulations that include mandatory social distancing of "one metre" but sources say norms are not being followed.

However, as per the management, after initial teething trouble that included requirement of huge quantity of masks, things are being streamlined, while the employees are also donating their one day salary for the measures to battle the epidemic.

"The lives of workers at mines at Putki, Gopalichak, Lohapatti, Tetulmuri, Moonidih, Salanpur, Akshkinari besides other areas have been put at risk as leave apart basic hygiene issues, dust masks or sanitisers some of the mines even lack adequate water to wash hands. Neither regular medical checks ups are being done nor there are temperature measuring devices, a source said.

Another source said that one metre social distancing norm, mandatory for running the underground mines, is not being followed.

"It is impossible to maintain one metre distance. Every work in underground mine involves at least four to five persons to work together like holding drill machines, pushing mine tubs etc. The environment is also confined where almost 50 to 60 workers are present at anytime in close proximity," the source said.

Sources said the workers here mainly come from West Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar and there have been positive cases of COVID-19 in West Bengal.

Bharat Coking Coal Ltd (BCCL) produces bulk of the coking coal mined in the country and meets almost 50 per cent of the total prime coking coal requirement of the integrated steel sector.

However, only about 3,000 tonnes a day of coking coal is produced from its 10 operational Under Ground (UG) mines with about 3,000-4,000 people working in these mines in three shifts, as per a senior BCCL official.

When contacted Chairman and Managing Director of BCCL PM Prasad told PTI that there were some initial constraints like availability of masks which have been addressed and elaborate measures are being taken to disinfect mines that include bleaching powder spray.

"We are bracing up to fight it We are putting all necessary steps in place to protect our workers at the time of this epidemic. As part of solidarity to fight against the epidemic the employees have also agreed to donate their one day's salary," Prasad said.

About 3,000 workers were engaged in underground mining at present in three shifts with restricted activities, he added.

Prasad said Rs 5 crore will also be used for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Fund.

When contacted, Secretary Mines, Aboobacker Siddique said that he has asked the concerned Deputy Commissioner and officials to enquire the issue and take all necessary action, including corrective and preventive steps.

As per the order issued by the Deputy Commissioner, Dhanbad the permission for mining has been granted on the basis of conditions that included "one meter" distancing and regular checkups of the workers involved.

The conditions also mandate availability of sanitisers and masks and use of minimum workforce.

A total of about 43,000 workforce is employed at BCCL. It was incorporated in January, 1972 to operate coking coal mines in the Jharia & Raniganj Coalfields, taken over by the government in 1971 to ensure planned development of the scarce coking coal resources in the country.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
RFE/RL Counters Disinformation To Help Combat Coronavirus In High-Risk Countries

From coronavirus hotspots like Iran to China neighbors like Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, audiences are relying on RFE/RL as a source of trusted news and an alternative to inaction and rampant disinformation in the countries where they live.

INCIDENTS AND THREATS

Accused Of Downplaying COVID-19 Figures, Kremlin Clamps Down On 'Fake News'

Amid skepticism over the governments response to the coronavirus, Russian authorities have ordered the broadcaster Ekho Moskvy to remove a March 16 interview with political analyst and Kremlin critic Valery Solovei, who dismissed official reporting on cases and fatalities and accused the government of failing to cope with the pandemic. Authorities said the order to strike the interview was part of an effort "to prevent the spread of false information related to the coronavirus. Solovei has been threatened with a 100,000 ruble ($1,300) fine. Ekho Moskvy has complied.

Rights Groups Raise Alarm About Use Of Coronavirus Measures To Censor Media

The Committee to Protect Journalists has urged Russian authorities to stop censoring news outlets that report on the coronavirus outbreak in the country. On March 25, OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Harlem Desir expressed concern about new legislation passed in Azerbaijan, aimed ostensibly at combating disinformation related to the virus, that requires owners of Internet information resources to prevent the publication of false information online. The OSCE has also registered concern over the introduction of new measures against spreading panic and "fake news" regarding the coronavirus in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

What Exactly Is Going On With Russias Low Coronavirus Numbers?

As of March 24, Russias official tally of confirmed coronavirus cases stood at just 495, clustered mainly in Moscow but also scattered across at least 46 cities and regions. That put Russia, with a population of about 144 million, at a per-capita level comparable to places in Central America and southern Africa, where the coronavirus is so far almost nonexistent. By contrast, many neighboring and nearby European nations are seeing much higher rates of confirmed cases.

Russia Urged To Drop Terrorism Charges Against Journalist Prokopyeva

OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Harlem Desir has expressed "serious concerns" about the ongoing prosecution of Russian journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva, a contributor for RFE/RL's Russian Service who has been indicted by the Pskov prosecutor for publicly supporting terrorism through use of a media platform.

Azerbaijani Journalist Muxtarli Released

An Azerbaijani court in Baku on March 17 ordered the release of reporter Afqan Muxtarli from prison, flying him the same day to Germany, where he has applied for political asylum. Muxtarli was abducted in Tbilisi, on May 29, 2017, and subsequently transferred to Azerbaijan, where he was convicted of smuggling, illegally crossing the border, and other charges that Human Rights Watch has dismissed as "politically motivated."

Bulgarian Journalist Hospitalized After Being Beaten With Metal Pipes

Bulgaria's Interior Ministry announced on March 18 that veteran investigative journalist Slavi Angelov was attacked by unidentified assailants near his home in Sofia. Angelov, the editor in chief of the weekly newspaper 168 Hours, was beaten with metal pipes late on March 17. Angelov has reported extensively about an investigation into gambling tycoon Vasil Bozhkov.

RFE/RL IMPACT

CURRENT TIME: A March 23 social video documented firsthand the experience of a patient with the coronavirus in a Ukrainian hospital. The video, which attracted more than 1 million views across platforms in just one day, uses footage from the Facebook account of the first person to be diagnosed with the virus in the western Ukrainian city of Zhitomir. The patient also filmed his hospitals lack of toilet paper and paper towels, and the chaotic delivery of low-quality food.

The March 20 episode of Footage vs. Footage, the Current Time platform that debunks disinformation, documented how China has started to blame U.S. soldiers who participated in the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan for spreading the virus. The claim has been propagated by Russian state-controlled media.

In coverage unrelated to the coronavirus, Current Time TV crews took to the streets in Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg, and Kazan to gauge ordinary Russians reactions to President Vladimir Putins assertion last week that anyone with a salary over the monthly minimum wage of about $150 (11,280 rubles)  70 percent of Russias 145 million citizens ranks as middle class. One representative response was, What can I say? Hes laughing at us. Its a beggars life. The vox pops attracted more than 3 million views across Facebook, Twitter, and VKontake in just three days.

CURRENT TIME FEATURESs new program, Unknown Belarus, has received 476,000 views to date on YouTube. The March 22 episode depicts a Minsk shelter for female victims of domestic violence, which is estimated to occur in every third Belarusian household, and is ignored by current legislation.

BALKANS: RFE/RLs Balkan Service has begun issuing the daily newsletter Daily on Coronavirus, to provide audiences with comprehensive reporting about the pandemic, its global impact, and its implications for the Western Balkans, while also debunking disinformation. The newsletter has an average of 19 pick-ups daily by external media outlets this week.

KAZAKHSTAN: The Kazakh Service has sought to debunk disinformation that is undermining effective government and public responses to the coronavirus. Reporting has documented how a dearth of information has created opportunities for speculation and false claims circulated and amplified on WhatsApp and other messaging platforms. It has documented how Chinese Ambassador to Kazakhstan Zhang Xiao is using Twitter and Facebook to propagate distorted, pro-Chinese narratives. Kazakh Service journalists Aigerim Toleukhanova and Torokul Doorov have spoken about Kazakhstans response to the pandemic on programs sponsored by the Washington-based CSIS and TRT-World programs.

PRESSROOM: Six Years On, RFE/RLs Crimea.Realities Stands Up To Kremlin Disinformation
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Linkedin Hyonhee Shin (Reuters) Seoul, South Korea  Thu, March 26, 2020 15:45 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d946fe 2 World coronavirus,South-Korea,foreigners,Deportation,jail,COVID-19,self-isolation,self-quarantine,SARS-CoV-2,novel-coronavirus Free

South Korea warned on Thursday that it will deport foreigners while its citizens could face jail if they violate self-quarantine rules after a surge in imported coronavirus cases.

South Korea has tightened entry rules for travellers from countries suffering big outbreaks, subjecting them to two weeks of mandatory quarantine but at least 11 people violated self-quarantine rules between March 13 and 24, the health ministry said. It did not specify their nationalities.

"We will apply zero-tolerance principles in taking action against those who leave their self-isolation venue without legitimate reasons," Yoon Tae-ho, director-general for public health policy at the health ministry, told a briefing.

"Foreign nationals will be forcibly repatriated and Korean citizens will be reported to police for due penalties and lose financial support provided for those who have faithfully implemented a 14-day quarantine."

South Korean who violate the rules could be jailed for up to a year and fined 10 million won ($8,100).

South Korea reported 104 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, with, for the second day in a row, more imported cases than domestic ones, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC).

That brought its total cases to 9,241, with a new death toll of 142, up from 126.

Of the new cases, 57 had arrived from overseas, 49 of them South Koreans and eight of them foreigners, Yoon said.

Other countries in Asia, including China and Singapore, have also seen sharp increases in imported cases over the past couple of weeks, threatening their largely successful efforts to get domestic epidemics under control.

Many of the people coming back are citizens of those Asian countries who have been studying in Britain and the United States, now leaving as the coronavirus spreads rapidly there and their schools and universities suspend classes.

People arriving in South Korea on long-term visas from Europe must be tested for the virus and spend two weeks in quarantine.

People arriving from the United States will also have to undergo quarantine from Friday, though only people showing symptoms of the coronavirus will be tested.

Nearly 90% of the foreigners subject to the rules have signed up for a smartphone application that tracks their movements while in quarantine while some 60% of South Koreans have, an interior ministry official said.

The KCDC said it was looking in to ways to keep in touch with those who are unable to use the application.

"Up to 90% of the overseas arrivals are our citizens and there were many new cases among them," deputy director Kwon Jun-wook told a separate briefing.

"Travellers please stay home for two weeks upon return and join our efforts to contain the spread of the virus."
Thousands of people are expected to be tested for the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) after two nurses and a patient at a major hospital in Hanoi were recently infected.

The Ministry of Health has tasked Luong Ngoc Khue, head of the Medical Services Administration, with leading a special anti-epidemic team to cope with the COVID-19 situation at Bach Mai Hospital, located in Dong Da District, Hanoi.

On March 20, a 54-year-old nurse who works at the HIV outpatient unit of the hospitals center for tropical diseases and her 34-year-old colleague, who is in charge of reception in the isolation ward, tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

They were the first health workers in Vietnam to be diagnosed with COVID-19.

About 150 employees of the institution were quarantined after the two cases were confirmed.

On March 24, a 66-year-old woman from the northern province of Lai Chau was diagnosed with the disease. She had gone to Bach Mai Hospital earlier in March to have her pre-existing illness treated.

A total of 252 people, including 162 Bach Mai Hospital employees, 36 patients, and 54 family members of the patients, were isolated following the womans diagnosis.

The health ministry has ordered multiple units to carry out COVID-19 tests on all health workers, patients, and patients family members who have been to Bach Mai Hospital since March 10.

The sampling will take place from March 26 to 29, and about 1,000 people are expected to have their sample taken each day.

Bach Mai is a special-grade hospital and the largest general hospital in Vietnam.

It treats a daily average of 6,000 outpatients and 4,000 inpatients, while receiving 4,000 visitors of the sick in addition to having thousands of health workers.

The institution has temporarily stopped its on-demand medical examination and re-examination services, as well as shutting down its funeral home to minimize the number of people present at the facility each day.

The hospital now only receives patients who need emergency treatment.

The novel coronavirus, which first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, has infected over 471,700 and killed more than 21,200 globally as of Thursday afternoon, according to Ministry of Health statistics.

Vietnam has confirmed 148 COVID-19 cases, with 17 having already been discharged from the hospital. No deaths related to the disease have been recorded in the country.

Hanoi has confirmed 51 infections.

Health workers in Vietnam have carried out 30,548 COVID-19 tests to date, with 30,400 returning negative results.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
In just a few months, COVID-19 has upended the lives of children around the world. Hundreds of millions are not in school. Parents and caregivers have lost their jobs. Borders have been closed.

Thats why funding UNs global humanitarian response plan for COVID-19 is so essential, said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore.

UNICEF alone is appealing for $405 million for our response in emergency countries. We are also seeking an additional $246.6 for our response in non-emergency countries. So, our total appeal is for $651.6 million, she said.

With support from the international community, UNICEF can shore up preparedness and response plans in countries with weaker healthcare systems. Besides access to proper handwashing and sanitation services can be ramped up.

In addition to engagement with communities to provide the information they need to avoid contagion, UNICEF can maintain a steady flow of personal protection equipment  such as gowns, masks, goggles and gloves  to support infection prevention and control while keeping essential, hard-working health workers safe, she said.

UNICEF can continue working with governments to strengthen protection services, psychosocial support and remote learning opportunities for all the children, and particularly for the most vulnerable children.

Children are the hidden victims of this pandemic. Were worried about its short- and long-term impacts on their health, well-being, development and prospects. Were worried about their lack of access to water and hygiene services. As you know, washing hands with soap is critical in the fight against COVID-19. And yet, 40 per cent of the worlds population  or 3 billion people  do not have a handwashing facility with water and soap at home, she noted.

Even worse, 16 per cent of healthcare facilities, or 1 in 6, do not have hygiene services. And over one-third of schools worldwide and half of schools in the least-developed countries have no place for children to wash their hands at all.

UNICEF is worried about their education. More than half of the worlds students have been affected by nation-wide school closures in at least 120 countries.

We hope that most of these students will resume their learning as soon as the situation improves. However, we know from experience that for vulnerable children, the longer they stay away from school the less likely they are to return. These closures are not only limiting access to learning  but to school nutrition, health programmes, clean water and accurate information.

Thats why UNICEF is working with education ministries around the world to identify alternative learning opportunities, whether learning classes online or through radio and TV programmes.

UNICEF has also issued guidance, along with WHO and IFRC, to advise parents, teachers, school administrators and others on how to keep children learning while keeping them safe. -- Tradearabia News Service
Charlie Brooker and Konnie Huq attend the 71st Emmy Awards in 2019 (David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

Konnie Huq has told how she just knew that Charlie Brooker was her Mr Right.

The former Blue Peter presenter and the Black Mirror creator tied the knot in Las Vegas in 2010 after a whirlwind romance, and they now have two young children together.

The pair had been friends for a long time before they started dating.

Read more: Konnie Huq hasnt bought clothes for a decade

Huq told the Mirror Online that she didnt start to think of Brooker in a romantic way until a phone call where they chatted about everything and anything for hours and hours, and she realised that she didnt want to hang up.

After that their romance developed.

"It was just a natural feeling that I had when I thought about our future together, Huq said.

Charlie Brooker and Konnie Huq arrive for the Royal Television Society Programme Awards at Grosvenor Hotel in London, Tuesday, Mar. 19, 2013. (Photo by Joel Ryan/Invision/AP)

The 44-year-old went on: They always say that you 'just know', and to be honest, that is really how it was with me and Charlie.

I just knew.

The couple first met when Huq appeared on an episode of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe in 2008.

They remained friends after she was on the show, then got together early in 2010.

Read more: Piers Morgan mocks Konnie Huq on GMB

Just nine months later the pair exchanged vows at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas.

Huq gave birth to their first child, a son named Covey in March 2012. The pair welcomed their second son, Huxley, in February 2014.

Writer and satirist Brooker, 49, has previously said he did not know that he wanted a family until Huq came along.
The United States condemned the attack on a Gurdwara in Kabul which claimed 25 lives after gunmen and suicide bombers stormed the Sikh religious premise on March 25. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US condemns the horrific attack, claimed by the Islamic State, and added that Afghan people ISIS-K and other terrorist activity.

Despite the countrys political challenges, the ongoing Afghan peace process remains the primary opportunity for Afghans to come together to negotiate a political settlement and build a unified front against the menace of ISIS-K, said Pompeo at a press briefing.

Read: US Orders 60-day Freeze On All Overseas Troop Movements Amid Coronavirus Lockdown

'Must be held accountable'

After the attack, an intelligence monitoring group SITE reported that the attack was claimed by the Islamic State. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also condemned the attack expressing deepest sympathies to the victims families and wished a speedy recovery to those injured.

The Secretary-General reiterates that attacks against civilians are unacceptable and those who carry out such crimes must be held accountable, said the Spokesperson for UN Secretary-General in a statement.

The gunmen and suicide bombers stormed the Gurdwara in Shor Bazar area at around 07:45 (local time) when 150 worshippers were inside the Sikh religious premise. The Taliban swiftly denied its involvement and its spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid tweeted that they have no relation with the attack in Shor Bazar.

Read: India's Ambassador To Afghanistan Visits Gurdwara, Shares Grief With Families Of Terror Attack

After the attack, India conveyed sincerest condolences to the immediate family members of the deceased and wish a speedy recovery to the injured. Ministry of External Affairs, in a statement, said that India stands ready to extend all possible assistance to the affected families of the Hindu and Sikh community of Afghanistan.

Such cowardly attacks on the places of religious worship of the minority community, especially at this time of COVID-19 pandemic, is reflective of the diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers, said MEA.

India also commended Afghan security forces for their valorous response to the attack and their exemplary courage and dedication to protect the Afghan people and secure the country.

Read: India 'strongly Condemns' Kabul Gurudwara Attack, Stands With Afghanistan: MEA

Read: 'Find The Perpetrators': Punjab CM Amarinder To Afghan Prez After Gurudwara Terror Attack

(Image: Twitter / @HardeepSPuri)
VODACOM Tanzania has pledged to support the society efforts to fight the spread of corona virus in the country.

Helping to address societal challenges, such as those posed by COVID-19, is part of Vodacoms broader commitment to create a social contract with its stakeholders, Managing Director of Vodacom Tanzania, Hisham Hendi has said.

He said the weeks and months ahead will require collective effort to assist government as it works to cope with additional pressures brought on by COVID-19.

Vodacoms priority is the health and safety of its over 560 employees while continuing to connect, deliver services and support its over 14 million customers to remain confidently connected through this period.

Vodacom can play a critical role in supporting the society during this time. We are rolling out our business continuity plans during this rapidly evolving situation, he said.

Tanzanians can rest assured that they will remain connected to their friends and families and that businesses can continue to run using remote working tools through Vodacom network should the need arise.

At the same time, Hendi said Vodacom is ramping up efforts to support learners with out of school digital learning materials using the globally accredited Khan Academy curriculum.

Now children who find themselves out of school for an extended period of time can continue learning for free, despite measures in place to mitigate the potential spread of the virus, he noted.

Vodacom has well-developed business continuity plan for dealing with events of this nature, including co-ordinated regional and international incident management, response plans and the increased ability for Vodacom employees to work remotely without disruption.

We have given extensive advice to staff and contractors to help minimise the spread of COVID-19 as well as activated hygiene protocols at our places of work, he added.

We have a dedicated COVID-19 team working to maintain the level of service our customers expect from us, and we have made available various digital offerings to support enterprise clients.

The companys day-to-day operations will continue and should not be affected during this period. The data, voice and connectivity services that we offer will allow customers to stay connected especially for those in social isolation.

We emphasize our willingness and commitment to assist government efforts, and will continue to do whatever we can to help, he explained.
Tuesday, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers announced his intention of issuing a Safer at Home Order to the people of Wisconsin in an effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Wednesday, he released the actual details of his order. Law enforcement leaders here in my office have been working together over the past several hours reviewing and interpreting what it means to the people of the great State of Wisconsin and specifically to the people of Dunn County. Numerous inquiries are coming into my office seeking guidance on what this order means to them. Unfortunately, I do not have all the answers at this time as we were given the order at the same time you received it and we are still working actively to fully understand the intended scope.

The Dunn County Sheriffs Office is dedicated to providing a safe and secure community through partnerships that build trust, proactively reduce crime/recidivism, minimize victimization and enhance the quality of life while protecting constitutional guarantees.

During these difficult and unprecedented times, some of our individual rights are certainly being restricted. These rights are being restricted at the recommendation of medical health professionals for the greater good of all, so that others may live. This is a community effort that requires collaboration and cooperation from all. I ask the people of Dunn County to voluntarily comply with the Safer at Home Order issued by Governor Tony Evers Office so that together we can get through these difficult times. I understand and appreciate the great personal sacrifices being made to accomplish this mission. While this is challenging, I know that by taking this seriously and following the recommendations, we can save lives.

My staff and I are committed and dedicated to protecting your constitutional guarantees. This order has not suspended the United States Constitution or the Constitution of the State of Wisconsin. We are not under martial law. You will not be stopped without reasonable suspicion that a violation of law has occurred. This is the same standard that existed prior to this order. You will not be detained or questioned as to why you are leaving your house or questioned about the purpose of your travels.

We will investigate and take enforcement action on blatant violations of this order that put our community at great risk. We are simply asking for voluntary compliance with this order so we can move forward and defeat this pandemic. I want to end by thanking the people of Dunn County for their compliance, understanding, and great personal sacrifice. Like most law enforcement agencies, we have had to change how we operate during this stressful event. I am here to assure you that the entire Dunn County Sheriffs Office is standing ready to protect and serve.

My office has received many questions from business owners relating to what an essential business is. The link (https://wedc.org/essentialbusiness) is from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation website. It is a resource for businesses to determine whether or not they are considered an essential business. There is an inquiry tool at the bottom of the page where you can request an essential business designation.

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By David Ljunggren OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's C$27 billion ($18.8 billion) aid package will give people affected by the coronavirus outbreak C$2,000 a month and delay student loan repayments, among other measures to boost the economy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday.

By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's C$27 billion ($18.8 billion) aid package will give people affected by the coronavirus outbreak C$2,000 a month and delay student loan repayments, among other measures to boost the economy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday.

The bill also includes C$55 billion in the form of tax deferrals. Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau said additional measures would be unveiled "in coming days," with expectations for aid to the struggling airline and energy sectors.

After almost a day of wrangling, the House of Commons agreed early on Wednesday to approve the stimulus. The Canada Emergency Response Benefit bill passed the Senate, and is expected to get royal assent, a formality, later on Wednesday.

A new portal will be set up by April 6, for people who have lost jobs or are unable to work, to apply for the monthly payments, which will run for four months. More than half a million people applied for unemployment insurance last week alone.

"We are hopeful that the system will be up and running by April 6 and the checks and direct deposits will be flowing days after that," Trudeau told reporters outside his house.

The plan also delays student loan payments for three months.

A total of 2,792 Canadians have been diagnosed with the coronavirus and 27 have died, while more than a million people have applied for unemployment benefits in less than two weeks.

Trudeau said Canada was testing 10,000 people a day for COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus, and Canada was ramping up production of emergency medical equipment and medication.

Canadian officials ordered returning travelers to obey a mandatory 14-day quarantine or face fines and criminal charges.

A few dozen legislators - maintaining social distancing in the face of the highly contagious disease - backed the measures after the Liberal government agreed to remove proposals that would have given Ottawa emergency spending powers without parliamentary approval until the end of 2021.

Trudeau, who unveiled the stimulus package last week, said on Tuesday the crisis meant the government needed flexibility to react quickly.

But, faced with opposition threats to drag out approval of the aid, Trudeau officials agreed to dilute some of their demands.

"Because we fought back, the Trudeau government has backed down from its power grab," said Pierre Poilievre, finance spokesman for the official opposition Conservatives.

The modified bill caps Ottawa's emergency spending power at six months. It also says the House of Commons finance committee - which is controlled by opposition legislators - can probe government spending and force Parliament back in 48 hours if it thinks abuses are occurring.

Trudeau's Liberals only have a minority in the House of Commons and rely on other parties to govern.

(Additional reporting by Amran Abocar; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Steve Orlofsky)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Elle Fanning is using her time in self-isolation to test out a new look.

On Wednesday, the Maleficent actress revealed that she ditched her blonde locks and dyed her hair light pink.

In a selfie posted to her Instagram Story, Fanning shows off her pink waves still wet from the shower.

The 21-year-old is seemingly nude in the shot, holding up her phone with a light pink case and a pink Strawberry Shortcake character sticker, all of which match her latest hair color.

Elle Fanning/ Instagram

Fanning isnt the only celebrity altering their hair while stuck at home.

Pink recently decided to give herself a haircut after she got a little tipsy  and shared a hilarious PSA with fans while unveiling her new do.

The musician, 40, has been social distancing at home with her family and she jokingly said shes decided to make drinking a sport during this whole quarantine thing. She added, When I drink, I get really, really brilliant ideas.

RELATED: 35 Fashion and Beauty Brands Giving Back During the Coronavirus Pandemic

And after a few drinks, Pink came to a realization: I can cut hair! I can totally cut hair! Why have I been paying people all this time?

The star, who currently is rocking a short buzz cut, picked up a razor and decided to trim the edges of her hairline by herself. Look what I did, Pink said as she turned her head to the side to reveal a missing chunk of hair.

What do you think? A good look? she added.

Pink also showed the other side she trimmed, which appeared to be more evenly buzzed. I think Im looking pretty good, she laughed. Am I giving like, Alyssa Milano vibes right now? Charlize Theron? I might try to fix it tonight. What do you think?

RELATED: Pink Gives Herself a Bad Haircut While Drinking During Quarantine: I Might Try to Fix It

She signed off her video saying: Stay safe. Stay home. Cut your own hair! Screw it.

With the number of confirmed coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in the United States already climbing past 68,000, several states implemented a mandatory temporary closure of beauty and grooming service businesses earlier this month.

As of Thursday morning, at least 68,534 people across the United States have tested positive for coronavirus and at least 990 patients have died from coronavirus-related illness, according to a New York Times database.

As information about the coronavirus pandemic rapidly changes, PEOPLE is committed to providing the most recent data in our coverage. Some of the information in this story may have changed after publication. For the latest on COVID-19, readers are encouraged to use online resources from CDC, WHO, and local public health departments and visit our coronavirus hub.
Bacon isnt just for breakfast anymore. Heres a sampling of restaurants throughout the region where you can dig into some sinfully delicious strips of bacon from breakfast right through to lunch, dinner and even dessert. Lock 29 with Rebel Hill...
Livelihood of fishermen under threat in Bangladesh

by S Dilip Roy

March 26,2020 | Source: The Daily Star

Hundreds of fishermen in Kurigram and Lalmonirhat are going through hard times as fish stocks in the Brahmaputra and Teesta rivers have drastically decreased over the years. With their traditional livelihood failing to provide for their families, many fishermen have taken loans at high interest from local moneylenders. "Usually, a group of four or five of us fishermen goes together to the river. After trying for hours, we get around five kilograms of fish," said 46-year-old Sadhan Chandra Das of Majhipara village in Kurigram's Chilmari upazila. "The situation worsens from December to June as the water level falls. We have no work during this period," said Sadhan, who fishes in the Brahmaputra.



Bishnu Chandra Das, a 56-year-old fisherman from the same village, said, "We are unable to provide for our families with the money we earn from fishing. So, we have to take loans from the Mohajon (moneylender) with high interest." "We have to repair our fishing boats and nets at our own expense. So you can easily understand our misery," he added.



Hit hard by poverty, many have already left their ancestral profession and others are planning to leave. "Many fishermen in our village have already left and are now working as day labourers, some pull rickshaws, and others work in garment factories," said 55-year-old Surendra Nath Das, a fisherman from Daspara village under Kurigram's Rowmari upazila.



"We are deprived of our rights even if the policy is "Jal Jar Khal Tar" [those who have the net have the canal]. It is only on paper. We are not allowed to catch fish in the government canals as politically influential people have occupied those," said Surendra. "We are instead forced to work as labourers for them." "Following in my grandfather and father's footsteps, I used to catch fish in the Teesta. But it became difficult for me to maintain my family with the little income from fishing. So, I left the profession," said 38-year-old Nikhil Chandra Das of Daspara village in Lalmonirhat Sadar upazila. He now pulls rickshaw. "Around 10,000 families depend on the Brahmaputra and Teesta rivers in Kurigram and Lalmonirhat. Many are frustrated with their ancestral profession," said 70-year-old Narayan Chandra Das of Majhipara under Kurigram's Ulipur upazila.



"The fishermen spend most of their income on repairing and buying fishing nets. That is why they cannot repair their houses while many don't even have their own house," he added. Lalmonirhat Sadar Upazila Fisheries Officer Hasmat Ali told The Daily Star that the canals are not under the control of fishermen. These have gone into the possession of non-fishermen with political influence. "In this case, we can do nothing for the fishermen. But we are trying," Hasmat added.
(Natural News) An influx of new patients with the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) is reportedly overwhelming the hospital system in New York City, which is already on the verge of being maxed out, according to former United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) head Scott Gottlieb.

Speaking to CNBC, Gottlieb, who no longer works in the Trump administration, warned that there simply arent enough hospital beds in the Big Apple to accommodate all of the new patients seeking medical care. Within weeks, he added, sick patients will probably start getting turned away.

New York City hospitals right now are on the brink of what I would call being maxed out in terms of their available capacity, Gottlieb is quoted as saying.

New York has another about five weeks to go for this between now and when theyre going to hit peak hospitalizations, so the fact that theyre stretched right now is worrisome.

More than 15,500 people in New York City are said to have the Chinese Virus (COVID-19), and some 192 people thus far in the city are said to have died from it. Both of these numbers are expected to increase, according to Johns Hopkins University, if hospitals end up reaching capacity as Gottlieb is predicting.

At least 25 percent of the known Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in the U.S. have been identified in New York City, though there are likely many undiagnosed cases all across our land who are carrying and spreading the virus undetected. There have also been delays in ramping up testing and getting medical supplies to where they need to be.

As you may have seen, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo went on a tirade the other day about how there are as little as 3,000 ventilators in his state right now, despite the need for at least 30,000 more. Cuomo also lamented that New York could need up to 140,000 hospitals beds in the next 14 to 21 days, and currently only has about 53,000.

Listen below as Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, discusses how the Trump administrations handling of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is definitely helping to slow its spread:

Medical students at NYU allowed to graduate early to aid in coronavirus combat

Meanwhile, New York University has announced that it will be allowing its medical students to graduate early so they can get to work helping other healthcare staff in the city to combat the spread of the novel virus.

The hospitals really are at the point of getting extremely pressed and perhaps being overwhelmed in cities like New York right now, Gottlieb, a CNBC contributor and board member at pharmaceutical company Pfizer and biotech company Illumina, added.

Once that happens, then the mortality rate is going to start to increase. Its going to accelerate.

Gottlieb predicts that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) will soon create similar localized epidemics in other large cities such as Miami, Chicago, New Orleans and Atlanta, which is why the disinformation coming out of communist China about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) being under control is a threat to public health.

While some states and areas of the country have instituted stay at home lockdowns that prohibit anything other than essential activities from taking place, it would seem as though Gottlieb and others want to see such policies be instituted nationwide.

If other cities start to have epidemics at a staggered period and on the scale of New York, where we have to now marshal resources and move them into those cities, this is going to be a longer epidemic for the entire country, Gottlieb contends.

Italy is locked down. Many parts of Europe are locked down. The United States is not locked down and we havent done that universally, we havent done that federally. Weve done that state by state but the majority of states are still not locked down, he further added.

More up-to-the-minute news about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) is available at Pandemic.news.

Sources for this article include:

CNBC.com

NaturalNews.com
Government has urged Political Parties to support measures to fight the Coronavirus in the country and not politicize the matter.



The call was made by the Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah at a sensitization workshop for Political Parties in Accra on Thursday 26th March 2020.



The meeting was attended by representatives from the NPP, NDC, CPP, NDP and the LPG.



Mr. Oppong Nkrumah said the engagement was important in line with the key pillars of global pandemics which includes risk Communications and Social Mobilization.



One of the groups that requires serious engagement is the Political Parties. It is because political parties among other things have very large following who sometimes belief their following more than experts. So at a time like this when you are trying to get as many people as possible mobilized to follow a particular path as part of the preventive measures, you cannot leave out Political Parties. You literally on a daily basis are part of the national communication exercise and are putting out views and facts and alternative facts, so it is the reason why you have to be engaged on the dos and donts and also take feedback from you he said.



The Minister said the meeting was also to give the Ghana Health Service a platform to engage the Political Parties on the virus and discuss how we can rally the entire national support behind all that is being done to win the fight and not politicize the matter.



The Deputy Minister for Health Alexander Abban who also addressed the gathering stressed on the need to unite as Political Parties in fighting the pandemic and not build political capital on the matter.



When we leave this engagement, we are leaving here as Ghanaians ready to fight this pandemic and not political parties. We need ideas that must not shape partisanship he added.



The meeting with the Political Parties forms part of the governments broader consultation and training to equip stakeholders with the appropriate information on the outbreak of the Pandemic in the country.





Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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DECORAH, Iowa

March 25, 2020

the United States

Heather Mount

Decorah, IA

Sarah Blair

/PRNewswire/ -- During these volatile times we are facing, Iowa Rotocast Plastics is staying informed of the reports about the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) inand abroad, and shares industry concerns of the potential impact the pandemic will have on business operations globally. The company is taking appropriate precautions to not only protect their employees and their families, but to also support the safety of surrounding communities."IRP plans to continue operations during this period of uncertainty. First and foremost, we want to maintain a safe workplace and encourage and/or adopt practices protecting the health of employees, customers, visitors or others. We will continue to meet the needs and expectations of our customers and business partners in the safest manner possible," said, Director of Human Resources.The company's facilities are taking the necessary steps to uphold preventive recommendations from the local, state, and national levels. Not only implementing additional hygiene measures throughout the offices and manufacturing facilities, but also employees capable of working from home have been instructed to do so. And true to its origin as a family-owned business, IRP is working with every employee, on a case-by-case basis, to meet their family's needs during this time.IRP has always placed safety at the forefront when manufacturing products for their customers; many units hold global safety certifications and are UL listed and NSF certified, meaning the products comply with specific standards for safety, quality, sustainability or performance. Today the company plans to continue to do so through its operations, while protecting the well-being of their employees.About Iowa Rotocast Plastics, Inc.Iowa Rotocast Plastics, founded in 1986, is an established manufacturer and supplier of merchandising equipment for the food and beverage industry. Headquartered in, this family-owned business offers brands divided into three main product categories: RotoTough products that include ice-down merchandising solutions and case stackers; wire racks and electronic refrigeration; and IRP's fabricated food & beverage equipment built for on/off premise. IRP caters to beverage brands, foodservice and hospitality groups, as well as working directly with stadiums, venues, and arenas to fulfill year-over-year needs.For more information contact:800-553-0050 sarahb@irpinc.comwww.irpinc.com

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/iowa-rotocast-plastics-update-regarding-covid-19-301029973.html



SOURCE Iowa Rotocast Plastics, Inc.




Japan, spared mass outbreak so far, now sees 'national crisis' after Tokyo surge Passersby wearing protective face masks, following an outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), are reflected in mirrors at a shopping center in Tokyo

By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Linda Sieg

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan, so far spared the mass spread of coronavirus that has hit Europe and North America, took urgent new steps on Thursday to respond to what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe described as a "national crisis" following a surge of cases in Tokyo.

With 47 new cases reported in the capital, Abe banned entry from 21 European countries and Iran, and set up a new crisis task force - a preliminary step towards declaring a state of emergency, although his government said none was planned.

"In order to overcome what can be described as a national crisis, it is necessary for the state, local governments, medical community, and the people to act as one and press ahead with measures against coronavirus infections," Abe said at a task force meeting.

He said he had launched the task force under a recently revised law, after receiving a report of a high chance the chance the virus would spread widely.

The daily total of new cases in Tokyo has nearly tripled over the past four days. After meeting Abe on Thursday evening, governor Yuriko Koike told reporters that she had requested strong support and that Tokyo would work with the central government on a possible declaration of emergency.

Japan was an early focus of the coronavirus outbreak, and for a time last month a cruise ship docked offshore near Tokyo was the biggest source of infections outside China. But since then Japan has averted the widespread transmission that has seen Europe and North America hit by thousands of new cases per day.

Japanese authorities fear a rise in cases with no known source of infection could signal a bigger new wave.

"I told Prime Minister Abe there is a high risk of coronavirus spreading widely," Health Minister Katsunobu Kato told reporters after meeting Abe and Economy Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura.

As of Thursday evening, Japan had 1,369 domestic cases of coronavirus, as well as 712 from the cruise ship, according to tallies from broadcaster NHK. There have been 46 domestic deaths and 10 from the cruise ship.

Story continues

Under a law revised this month to cover the coronavirus, the prime minister can declare a state of emergency if the disease poses a "grave danger" to lives and if its rapid spread threatens serious economic damage.

That would give local authorities legal basis to ask residents and businesses to restrict movement and work. Nishimura, the economy minister, said no such declaration is planned for now.

Japan was already teetering on the brink of recession before the virus struck. On Thursday, the government offered its bleakest assessment on the economy in nearly seven years, saying conditions in March were "severe".

Japanese shares tumbled on Thursday following three days of big gains, after the rise in domestic coronavirus cases stoked worries of tougher restrictions for social distancing.

Hitachi Ltd instructed 50,000 employees at its group companies in Tokyo to work from home and avoid unnecessary outings.

A landmark department store in Tokyo's Shibuya district - popular with young people, many of whom have continued to go out to play and shop - said it would close on the weekend. Toho Cinemas also said it would close its movie theatres in Tokyo and nearby Kanagawa prefecture on Saturday and Sunday.

WORRIES OF SURGE

On Wednesday, Koike warned of the risk of an explosive rise in infections in the capital and asked residents to avoid non-essential outings through April 12, especially over the weekend. She repeated her call on Thursday.

Koike has requested the neighbouring prefectures of Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa ask their residents to refrain from non-urgent, non-essential travel to Tokyo, the Nikkei business daily reported. The governor of Kanagawa later asked residents to stay at home this weekend.

"The government and local authorities will cooperate based on the awareness that this is a very critical time to prevent the spread of the virus," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yosihide Suga told a news conference.

Suga later said the risk of the infection spreading was high, but there was no need to change a plan to reopen schools in early April. Many closed earlier this month at Abe's request.

The International Olympic Committee and the government on Tuesday agreed to put back the Tokyo 2020 Olympics by a year.

If an emergency is declared, local governments will be able to halt gatherings and restrict movement, although there will be few powers to enforce such decrees. "For better or worse, no police at our doors," said Kenji Shibuya, director of the Institute of Population Health at King's College, London.

On a sunny three-day break last weekend, crowds of people were out in Tokyo despite bans in some areas on picnics for the traditional spring "hanami" cherry-blossom viewing. On Thursday, tabloids blared Tokyo Lockdown Panic and Tokyo Destruction".

But a long line of people waited at a chocolate croissant cafe in Tokyo for lunch, while subways were packed and people lined up before drug stores opened to buy masks and sanitary products that are in short supply. Pictures on social media showed grocery store shelves picked clean by shoppers.

(Reporting by Makiko Yamazaki, Linda Sieg, Elaine Lies, Ju-min Park and Kiyoshi Takenaka; Writing by Linda Sieg; Editing by Robert Birsel and Peter Graff)
New Delhi: Amid a 21-day countrywide lockdown, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday (March 26) announced a relief package for the poor and migrant workers to mitigate the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The FM also informed about the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Scheme, which will extend monetary help to poor and needy across the country through direct benefit transfer (DBT).

Under the DBT, farmers, MGNREGA beneficiaries, poor widows, pensioners, and divyangs will be covered.

According to Sitharaman, farmers will get the first installment of Rs 2,000 in the first week of April. About 8.69 crore farmers will get immediate benefits out of it. Under the MNREGA scheme, the wage rate has been increased from Rs 182 to Rs 202, amounting to an increase of Rs 2000 per worker. This will benefit 5 crore people.

For old age pensioners and widows, an additional ex-gratia amount of Rs 1,000 for the next three months available in two installments. It will benefit 3 crore widows and senior citizens.

For women Jan Dhan account holders, a one-time ex-gratia of Rs 500 per month will be given for the next three months. This will benefit 20 crore women.

Under Women Ujwala Scheme, 8.3 crore BPL families will get free cylinders for three months.

Under the Deen Dayal National Livelihood Mission, women self-help groups (SHGs) will be provided collateral-free loans up to Rs 20 lakh from Rs 10 lakh earlier. This will impact 7 crore holders through 63 lakh SHGs.

The FM also extended benefits for the organised sector. The government will pay provident fund contribution of both the employer and the employee put together at 24 per cent for the next three months. However, this will be applicable to those establishments having up to 100 employees and 90 per cent of them earning less than Rs 15,000 per month.

She also said that the EPFO regulation will be amended so that workers can draw up to 75 per cent of the amount for their contingency expenditure. This will benefit 4.8 crore workers.

For 3.5 crore construction workers, state governments have been directed to use the welfare fund for building and construction labourers which has about Rs 31,000 crore to help those who are facing economic disruption because of the lockdown.

Sitharaman added that the State governments have also been asked to utilise funds available under the district mineral fund for testing activities, medical screening, providing health attention needed to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
HFSP raises the value of its fellowship awards granted to 65 young researchers that will challenge traditional thinking by investigating behavioural computation, genomics of fear memories, the dynamics of the blood stem cell niche, or building a new super-resolution microscope.

The International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO) announced today the 65 Fellowship awards to the world's most outstanding young life scientists, chosen through rigorous international selection out of a total of 597 applications from more than 50 countries. The HFSP fellows will begin their research in a new field of biology in a laboratory in a new country, in accord with HFSPO's aim of promoting international collaboration in life science research.

HFSP Long-Term Fellowships are for postdoctoral scientists in biology. A total of 50 Long-Term Fellowships will be awarded to the very best of the world's young scientists who have proposed original approaches at the frontier of life science research.

HFSP Cross-Disciplinary Fellowships support 15 young scientists with a non-life science PhD degree such as chemistry or physics. These fellows will make a bold change in research direction by leaving their non-biological realm to embark on research that is at the interface of biology and neighboring disciplines.

HFSP's Fellowships enjoy an excellent reputation and offer a built-in return component. Starting in their second year of tenure, HFSP fellows can draw up plans for setting up their own independent laboratory. Fellows can then use the remaining time of their tenure to move to the new location. By increasing the fellowship value to about $225,000 spread over three years HFSP provides these outstanding young talents with an enhanced financial package to back their career in frontier research.

###

The lists of all 2020 HFSP awards are available at http://www.hfsp.org/awardees/newly-awarded.

The Human Frontier Science Program is an international program of research support implemented by the International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO) based in Strasbourg, France. Its aims are to promote intercontinental collaboration and training in cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research focused on the life sciences. HFSPO receives financial support from the governments or research councils of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, as well as from the European Union.
TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Gratomic Inc. ("GRAT" or the "Company") (TSXV:GRAT)(FRANKFURT:CB81)(WKN:A143MR) is pleased to announce, supplementary to its February 21, 2020 Press Release, that it has received a Notice from the Ministry of Mines and Energy of Namibia that the Minister is prepared to grant Mining License 215 (ML215) for its Aukam Graphite Property in Namibia. The License area falls within the proximity of the Aukam Processing Plant and the Graphite bearing shear zone for a total of 5002 hectares (5002 ha). Securing the mining license is a critical step towards moving the Aukam Mine into commercial production.

The Company has completed 8 months of pilot testing on historically mined product and conducted an internal study on the efficiency of the pilot processing facility on this material. Through rigorous testing and adjustments to the plant, Gratomic can now produce a concentrate of up to 98% Cg. Management has subsequently decided to build a 20 000 tonne per annum processing plant. To date, 90% of construction is complete. Upon completion of the remaining 10%, the Company will initially start processing material from historical workings left at the surface when the mine last operated in 1974.

The Company has recently appointed Dr. Ian Flint to complete a preliminary economic assessment on the Aukam Processing plant. The study, its recommendations, and their subsequent implementation, will ensure the scale up of the existing pilot plant to a commercial scale processing facility that will provide the desired concentrate grades and production rates.

With respect to site exploration, in the coming months diamond drilling will resume at Aukam Graphite. The drilling will be conducted utilizing Company owned drilling equipment, focusing on areas proximal to graphite mineralization, depicted by previous diamond drilling, underground excavation and surface outcrop sampling. The drill targeting will be systematic with the expectation of producing an NI 43-101 resource estimate.

Arno Brand, President and CEO of the Company stated that "the Company will be able to satisfy all of the conditions in the Notice and proceed to commercialization of its Aukam Graphite Mine. This marks a significant milestone for the Company."

Risk Factors

No mineral resources, let alone mineral reserves demonstrating economic viability and technical feasibility, have been delineated on the Aukam Property. The Company is not in a position to demonstrate or disclose any capital and/or operating costs that may be associated with the processing plant.

The Company advises that it has not based its production decision on even the existence of mineral resources let alone on a feasibility study of mineral reserves, demonstrating economic and technical viability, and, as a result, there may be an increased uncertainty of achieving any particular level of recovery of minerals or the cost of such recovery, including increased risks associated with developing a commercially mineable deposit.

Historically, such projects have a much higher risk of economic and technical failure. There is no guarantee that production will begin as anticipated or at all or that anticipated production costs will be achieved.

Failure to commence production would have a material adverse impact on the Company's ability to generate revenue and cash flow to fund operations. Failure to achieve the anticipated production costs would have a material adverse impact on the Company's cash flow and future profitability.

Steve Gray, P. Geo. has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information in this press release and is the Company's "Qualified Person" as defined by National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.

About Gratomic Inc.

Gratomic is an advanced materials company focused on mine to market commercialization of graphite products most notably high value graphene-based components for a range of mass market products. We have a Joint Venture collaboration with Perpetuus Carbon Technology, a leading European manufacturer of graphenes, to use Aukam graphite to manufacture graphene products for commercialization on an industrial scale. The Company is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol GRAT.

For more information: visit the website at www.gratomic.ca or contact:

Arno Brand at abrand@gratomic.ca or 416 561-4095

"Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release."

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS: This news release contains forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company. Investors are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ materially from those expected. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and, except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. All of the forward-looking statements made in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements and by those made in our filings with SEDAR in Canada (available at www.sedar.com).

SOURCE: Gratomic Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/582710/Gratomic-Receives-Notice-to-Grant-Mining-License
UK Police Get New Powers to Arrest and Fine COVID-19 Lockdown Flouters

British police have received enhanced powers amid the COVID-19 outbreak, including the ability to arrest lockdown flouters and impose higher fines.

The UK Home Office announced that its newly adopted public health regulations would strengthen police enforcement powers in England to reduce the spread of coronavirus, protect the NHS and save lives. The NHS is Britains national health service.

If an individual continues to refuse to comply, they will be acting unlawfully, and the police may arrest them where deemed proportionate and necessary, the Home Office said.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China before it was transmitted worldwide.

Authorities said the aim of the new measures is to ensure people stay at home and avoid non-essential travel amid the outbreak.

Non-compliant members of the public may, from March 26 forward, face a number of police enforcement actions, including arrest.

For example, the police may order people to leave an area or disperse and make sure parents are taking necessary steps to stop their children breaking these rules.

Further, members of the public that disobey police instructions amid COVID-19 movement restrictions could be issued with a fixed penalty notice of 60 pounds ($72), which will be reduced to 30 pounds ($36) if paid within two weeks. Second-time offenders could be hit with a fine of 120 pounds ($144), doubling on each further repeat offence up to a maximum of 960 pounds ($1165).

However, in the first instance the police will always apply their common sense and discretion, the Home Office said.

Protect our NHS and Save Lives

Home Secretary Priti Patel said of the new enforcement powers: The Prime Minister has been clear on what we need to do: stay at home to protect our NHS and save lives. All our frontline services really are the best of us and are doing an incredible job to stop this terrible virus from spreading.

Thats why Im giving the police these new enforcement powers, to protect the public and keep people safe.

Besides receiving new powers, British police forces will receive a resource boost, including around 1,500 newly enlisted police officers across England and Wales since September 2019.

Officers nearing retirement or those already retired will also be incentivized to stay on the job longer and rejoin the ranks of active members.

Additionally, in recognition of their value and expertise and in order to increase capacity and resilience, the government has committed to relaxing tax and pensions rules which could deter officers nearing retirement and those recently retired from returning to serve, the Home Office said.

As part of the Home Office announcement, British authorities listed permissible activities that would not violate the lockdown.

Individuals will only be allowed to leave their home for the following very limited purposes: shopping for basic necessities, as infrequently as possible; one form of exercise a dayfor example, a run, walk or cyclealone or with members of their household; any medical need, to provide care or to help a vulnerable person; traveling to and from work, but only where they cannot work from home.

Gatherings of two or more people in public spaces is also forbidden, the Home Office said, except in very limited circumstances, for example, where it is for essential work purposes.

Jailtime for Coughing at UK Police

Also on Thursday, Britains Director of Public Prosecutions said anyone claiming to have coronavirus who deliberately coughs at emergency workers faces being jailed for two years.

Max Hill said there had been reports in recent days of people coughing in the faces of police, other emergency workers, and shop staff. Those responsible could face charges of common assault, he said.

Emergency workers are more essential than ever as society comes together to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, Hill said in a statement.

I am therefore appalled by reports of police officers and other frontline workers being deliberately coughed at by people claiming to have COVID-19. Let me be very clear: this is a crime and needs to stop.

As of 12:17 p.m. ET on March 26, a Johns Hopkins tally indicated there were 9,962 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom, with 467 deaths.
A call went out to the people of Kazakhstan on March 20 urging them not to stand on the sidelines but to be active in helping the country's president and his government through a batch of pressing problems.

Aydos Ukibay, press secretary for the first president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbaev, announced that "Elbasy" (Leader of the Nation), who is also Nazarbaev, wanted "those who want and are able, to help the country" and donate to a special fund to help Kazakhstan in these difficult times.

The call could indicate how much officials fear the upcoming double impact on Kazakhstan of greatly reduced revenue from oil exports and the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the first cases of which were announced in Kazakhstan on March 13.

As concerns the coronavirus problem, people certainly want to do something to help during a health crisis, and Ukibay said Nazarbaev considered it "important to support doctors, volunteers, servicemen, and police who are on the front lines in the battle with this dangerous infection."

Kazakhstan, a country of some 18 million people, had 80 coronavirus infections but no deaths as of March 25.

In the last major economic crisis Kazakhstan faced, which began in 2014, the government drew on its national fund to compensate for most of the country's financial shortfalls.

Largely due to its oil and gas wealth, Kazakhstan is considered the wealthiest country in Central Asia.

But for this economic crisis Nazarbaev -- who gave up his office in March 2019 after 28 years leading the country -- chose to use a spokesman to beg Kazakh citizens to donate to the state.

Calling For Gold

He asked his fellow citizens for money once before -- 21 years ago, to be precise.

And looking back at the situation then, there are some questions as to who should be first to contribute to this new social fund for Kazakhstan.

In June 1999, Kazakhstan's outlook was bleak.

The country had started pumping more oil but the average price, which had been under $20 per barrel for most of the 1990s, fell to under $12 in 1998 and increased only to some $16.5 per barrel by 1999.

The grain harvest in 1998 was the worst in 40 years (just 7.3 million tons), down some 44 percent compared to the previous year's harvest.

There were power shortages in the country, wages were not being paid, and workers were on strike.

In confused circumstances in early October 1998, the first presidential election in seven years was announced. The short campaign period was marred by the barring of the main opposition candidate and the January 10, 1999, election was harshly criticized for being fraudulent and patently unfair.

In February 1999, Prime Minister Nurlan Balghimbaev said Kazakhstan had posted a $1.7 billion trade deficit in 1998. That was nearly triple the January-May 1999 trade deficit of $664 million.

During the first months of 1999, the government slashed programs and trimmed the number of state employees. The National Bank allowed the national currency, the tenge, to float at the start of April and the rate fell from 88 tenges to $1 to about 131 tenge/$1 by the end of May.

In June 1999, the campaign Deposit Gold To The Golden Fund was started. Citizens were encouraged to hand over their gold and jewelry to the government so it could be sold and the money used to help bring Kazakhstan through the hard economic times.

The idea was modeled on what South Korea did in 1997, when the government asked its citizens donate gold to help the country pay off its debts.

Those in Kazakhstan who donated their gold were promised some compensation within a decade, though reports of how much gold and jewelry was gathered and the promised compensation that was to be paid were not divulged.

In early June 1999, Balghimbaev said some $10,000 worth of gold and jewelry had already been collected from the Karasai district in Almaty Province, which is where Nazarbaev's home village of Chemolgan is located. Some reports suggested that while many people were "donating," not all were doing so enthusiastically. There were reports of wages being garnished and employees being pressured by work managers to contribute.

Nazarbaev mentioned the fund on July 1, 1999, while attending the World Economic Forum in Salzburg, Austria.

"As for the gold and jewelry collection.... Of course, if ordinary citizens are eager to assist us in these very tough economic conditions, if they really want to make contributions to the social fund to help the needs of families with low incomes or many children, to support pensioners, I believe the government will not be against that," he said.

'Kazakhgate'

Kazakhstan's fortunes improved in 2000.

The price of oil increased to more than $27 per barrel that year and by 2005 it topped $50 and continued climbing over the next decade.

Kazakhstan was saved, financially, and the campaign for donating gold and jewelry faded away.

But a curious thing happened in April 2002.

Prime Minister Imangali Tasmagambetov told a session of parliament there was a "secret fund" in a Swiss bank. Tasmagambetov said that in 1996 the government sold 25 percent of its shares in Kazakhstan's Tenghiz oil field to Mobil for about $1 billion, and Nazarbaev had put the money into a Swiss bank.

Tasmagambetov said the secret fund had been used to help pay off pension arrears in 1997 and in 1998 was used to soften the impact the Russian financial crisis was having on Kazakhstan. He did not mention money from the account being used in 1999.

The revelation about the bank account came after two opposition deputies -- Boris Sorokin and Serilbolsyn Abdildin -- wrote to Tasmagambetov on March 13 asking for more information about "Kazakhgate."

Kazakhgate, in brief, was the scandal surrounding U.S. businessman James Giffen, who was accused of paying bribes to Nazarbaev and Balghimbaev so that Western companies would get contracts at the Tenghiz oil field. The two Kazakh parliament deputies wanted to know about government funds deposited into Swiss bank accounts that belonged to Nazarbaev, his friends, and family members.

First Family?

Now back to today's double punch of problems arising from the recent major decrease in oil prices and the oncoming coronavirus crisis.

Certainly, it appears to be a time of crisis.

Some people do want to help. Nazarbaev's press secretary, Ukibay, did say "those who are able" could do so. That seems to definitely be saying that those who do not want or are unable to financially will not have to.

Those best-placed financially to help Kazakhstan, as history shows, would seem to be Nazarbaev, his family, and his friends, as the reports of their wealth have become legendary in recent years. One must wonder how many "secret" accounts exist today.

The wealth accumulated by the Nazarbaev family can be counted by the mansions in the London area belonging to Nazarbaev, or to his eldest daughter Darigha, or her son Nurali.

Or maybe the castle in Switzerland or property in Spain's Costa Brava area that belong to Nazarbaev's second daughter, Dinara, and her husband, Timur Kulibaev.

This list is just the tip of the iceberg from what has been reported.

It seems Nazarbaev and some of those close to him might be the best-positioned people in Kazakhstan to set an example of the spirit of charity to their fellow citizens.
Launching a scathing attack on World Health Organization (WHO), US President Donald Trump on Wednesday (March 25) said that the global health body has "very much" sided with China on coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. Calling the WHO's approach 'unfair', President Trump claimed that people across the world are unahppy with the WHO for this approach towards China.

The US President made the statements while responding to a question by Republican Senator Marco Rubio that the WHO showed "favouritism" to China.

Congressman Michael McCaul has also raised question over the integrity of WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, saying "that there were several red flags in his past with respect to his relationship with China."

"It (WHO) has been very very much sided with China. A lot of people are not happy about it. I think there is certainly a lot of talk that it's been very unfair. I think that a lot of people feel that it's been very unfair," Trump told reporters at a White House news conference.

Congressman Greg Steube also slammed the WHO, calling it a mouthpiece for China during the coronavirus pandemic. He demanded that both China and WHO should be taken to task after the end of coronavirus pandemic.

Senator Josh Hawley also echoed similar views and said, "There need to be consequences here. WHO has sided with China Communist Party against the world in this pandemic."

Meanwhile, Ghebreyesus on Wednesday remarked that a lockdown, which is being implemented by India and many other countries to curb the spread of coronavirus, will not be enough to eradicate the deadly virus.

"To slow the spread of Covid-19, many countries introduced "lockdown" measures. But on their own, these measures will not extinguish epidemics. We call on all countries to use this time to attack the novel coronavirus. You have created a second window of opportunity," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press conference.
BEIJING (AP)  A Chinese citizen who was working as a professor in Japan has been detained in China for alleged espionage and has confessed to spying and other unspecified wrongdoing, Beijing's foreign ministry said Thursday.

Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the case against Yuan Keqin was backed up by clear fact and conclusive evidence" and has been transferred to prosecutors.

He confessed to the crime," Geng said at a daily briefing. The case is being processed according to law" and his legal rights are being fully protected," he said.

Yuan was a professor of East Asian political history at the Hokkaido University of Education in northern Japan. He has not been heard from by colleagues since last June, after he left to attend his mother's funeral in China the previous month.

Chinese state security legislation is often extremely vague and can criminalize acts such as passing on research that could be retroactively labeled as confidential. Confessions are also widely relied on for convictions in lieu of hard evidence, and many who make them later say they were coerced through torture or threats.

China demands strict political loyalty both from academics and students who go abroad and closely monitors their work and social media postings for any content that could be considered subversive or disrespectful to the country's Communist leadership.
As multiple governors issue orders to curb large gatherings and implore residents to stay home in a bid to slow the spread of the coronavirus, at least a half-dozen states have exempted some level of religious activity.

The divergent treatment of faith in some states pandemic-fighting orders comes as a few houses of worship across the nation continue to greet people in person, despite federal public health guidance to avoid gatherings larger than 10 people and decisions by most religious leaders to shift services online. While the pandemic has heightened political tensions, the states including religious exceptions in their orders designed to combat the pandemic are led by governors in both parties.

In Michigan, for instance, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced a stay-at-home order on Monday that banned all gatherings outside of individual households. Guidance on the order noted that a place of religious worship, when used for religious worship, is not subject to penalty for violating it, a standard that the state had applied to its previous order curbing gatherings.

In Tennessee, where Republican Gov. Bill Lee issued a Sunday order limiting gatherings to 10 people, Pastor Greg Locke said he plans to keep having service at Global Vision Bible Church in Mt. Juliet. Locke said that he plans to be in touch with attorneys about remaining open, and that he is providing essential services to locals still recovering from tornadoes that slammed the state earlier this month.

I dont think a church staying open in days of chaos, when people need hope  I dont think that should be controversial, said Locke, describing himself as shocked by the degree of public pushback he received for continuing to hold services.

Religious gatherings were exempted from Ohios stay-at-home order, issued Sunday by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Solid Rock, an Ohio megachurch whose Cincinnati location hosted an event for evangelical supporters of President Donald Trump last month, held an in-person service on Sunday and said on its website that it would exert a constitutional right to continue meeting.

We do believe that it is important for our doors to remain open for whomever to come to worship and pray during this time of great challenge in our country, the church stated, noting that it wants to help keep people safe.

DeWine posted a Sunday warning on his Twitter account, asking religious leaders to think about their congregations as they weigh state guidelines crafted for public health reasons.

We did not order religious organizations to close, but my message to EVERYONE is that this is serious. When you are coming together, whether in a church or whereverthis is dangerous, DeWine tweeted.

Another pastor who took heat for holding in-person service on Sunday, Tom Walters of Pennsylvanias Word of Life Church, posted an apology on the churchs Facebook page and said he would move to online-only worship amid the virus.

Please believe me when I say that it was not out of arrogance or defiance that the church met, Walters wrote, but solely for the purpose of praying for our churches, communities, and nation.

Other states declining to force closures of places of worship include Pennsylvania, where the list of essential businesses permitted to keep operating includes religious organizations, and New York, where all nonessential businesses across the state were ordered closed as of Sunday night. Guidance accompanying that order said that houses of worship are not ordered closed, but it is strongly recommended no congregate services be held and social distance maintained.

Tony Suarez, executive vice president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and a member of President Donald Trumps evangelical advisory board during the 2016 campaign, tweeted on Tuesday that he was thankful to see the number of states listing churches as essential services.

States that did not exempt religious activity in their pandemic-related shutdown orders include Oregon, whose Democratic governor moved to prohibit nonessential gatherings on Monday, and Maryland, whose Republican governors list of activities limited to 10 people on Monday included the spiritual (and) religious.

Californias stay-at-home order, by contrast, classified faith based services that are provided through streaming or other technology as an essential function.

Frederick Gedicks, a Brigham Young University professor who specializes in religion and the law, said arguments exist for both accepting and rejecting exemptions for worship.

On the one hand, Gedicks said, religion could be considered especially important during a national emergency  but from another perspective, its not singling out or targeting religion to constrain worship at a time when most secular activity is also getting reined in.

Gedicks added that states divergent approaches during the current pandemic are no more problematic than theyve been on other issues: What were discovering now is the limitations of federalism in a time of national crisis.

Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke said that since the overwhelming majority of at least Christian congregations are meeting online, state officials may have issued the exemptions in the hopes the impact would be minimal, assuming most people will do the right thing.

Indeed, many faith leaders have gone to creative lengths to continue delivering spiritual support during the pandemic. In states such as Utah, where a mass gathering to welcome back returning Mormon missionaries sparked criticism from the states GOP leaders, Catholic priests have offered to hear drive-up confessions that heed social distancing rules crafted to stop the virus.

But a handful of other houses of worship continued to meet. One Louisiana pastor reportedly welcomed hundreds to his church on Sunday, flouting public health restrictions for the second straight week and earning a rebuke from Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards.

Edwards exempted travel to and from an individuals place of worship in his states most recent stay-at-home order, which restricts gatherings larger than 10 people.

Next-door in Mississippi, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves has not ordered business closures or limits on social behavior. During a Sunday prayer session he led on Facebook, Reeves asked that residents have the wisdom to do whats right, not only for themselves but whats right for all of their fellow Mississippians.

For most people, the virus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover.
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Linkedin Ivany Atina Arbi and Syofiardi Bachyul Jb (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta/Padang  Thu, March 26, 2020 19:35 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da6fde 1 National coronavirus,COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,Malaysia,Bukittinggi,west-sumatra Free

The administration of Bukittinggi in West Sumatra announced its first case of COVID-19 on Thursday, saying it was related to a massive Islamic gathering in neighboring Malaysia.

The patient is a 48-year-old woman whose husband had returned from Malaysia after participating in the four-day gathering held near Kuala Lumpur from Feb. 27 to March 1.

She was admitted to the Dr. Achmad Mochtar General Hospital Bukittinggi on March 21, and her test result came back positive on Thursday, Bukittinggi Mayor Ramlan Nurmatias said.

Authorities, he further said, had contacted the patient's family members and screened them for testing and isolation.

"We're tracing the patient's travel history as well to identify others who have interacted with her recently, he added.

Read also: How a 16,000-strong religious gathering led Malaysia to lockdown

A number of Indonesian citizens who participated in the mass prayer in Malaysia have tested positive for the life-threatening respiratory illness. Malaysia itself has reported hundreds of COVID-19 cases connected to the event, which was attended by roughly 16,000 people from various countries.

The mayor separately informed the public about the findings on his Instagram account @ramlannurmatias, where he also mentioned the death of another patient who had been under observation for COVID-19. The patient was a resident of Solok Selatan regency, also in West Sumatra. He died on Wednesday afternoon.

"I call on all Bukittinggi residents to refrain from going outside their houses to break the transmission chain. Please practice social distancing," the mayor said, adding that he would ban any mass gatherings in the meantime.

As of Thursday afternoon, five cases of COVID-19 have been detected in West Sumatra, according to a statement released by the provincial administration, two in Bukittinggi and one each in Padang city, Tanah Datar regency and South Pesisir regency.

On Monday, Governor Irwan Prayitno issued a circular calling on West Sumatra natives living in other regions not to return home for now so as to curb the spread of COVID-19. West Sumatrans are known for their aptitude to travel outside of the province to other areas of the archipelago. Many of them work as merchants selling various products in their new places of residence.
The EU is mobilizing all its resources for the COVID-19 fight, including the idea of location data share with the European Commission.

EU carriers approve location data share for COVID-19 fight

Eight European Union carriers (Vodafone, T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Telenor, Telia, and A1 Telekom Austria) agree to share data in order to track the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

These carriers want to provide user data for the European Commission. The purpose is to track the encounters of EU citizens. In order to see how, where, and to whom its spreading, user data becomes essential. Without it, theres little else that will stop the disease in its tracks.

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How else can a nation or continent know if its citizens are spreading the disease? Infection tracking. Tracking the number of infections and where theyre coming from. How territories or regions rise in infection and death count all aid in knowledge and prevention. Social distancing can only do so much, particularly if citizens are still traveling about.

To this end, these 8 carriers want to help the EU Commission as much as possible to slow down the disease. Since these carriers, like all others, have access to user data, including location, they want to contribute what they can.

The privacy problem

Whenever smartphone user data is at the helm of the discussion, the elephant in the room becomes the privacy problem. To contribute location data to the fight infringes upon customer privacy. After all, customers entrust carriers with their most intimate phone info. Carriers shouldnt just sell or give it to anyone without consent, should they?

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Theres debate on that, but an EU Commission official says that the data will be anonymous and that no specifics will leak. There is a way to obtain data legally, though: just ask customers. Some customers will reject the offer, but some customers may be willing to part with their location data for certain financial incentives, perhaps. Transparency with customers would go a longer way than disregarding user consent.

EU carriers inspired by China

These 8 EU carriers want to location data share with the EU Commission. Theyre not alone. Already, China is tracking user data to tell people if theyre at risk. Two apps from China show how the country is fighting coronavirus. The first, Contact Close Detector, uses governmental ID numbers to tell users if they could have coronavirus. The app is likely using surveillance, facial and iris scanning, location data, and more. The other, Singapore app TraceTogether, uses location data tracking via Bluetooth. Singapore says that app itself will die after the coronavirus pandemic does.

At this point, theres no telling when COVID-19 will remove its grip from the world. What this means, though, is that EU Commission authorities could have location data access for at least 18 months (according to the latest estimates on the coronavirus timeframe). As the saying goes, Absolute power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Can anyone say for certain that, with unfettered access to location data, authorities wont continue to use it for other reasons after the pandemic ends? There could be a privacy war after the death of this global pandemic.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view of Saturn's hazy moon Titan in January 2013, when it was about 895,000 miles (1.44 million kilometers) from the big moon.

Saturn's huge moon Titan is one of the most intriguing worlds in the solar system.

Titan boasts hydrocarbon rivers and seas that could potentially harbor " strange life ," as well as a subsurface ocean of liquid water where Earth-like organisms might be able to make a living.

Titan also has a thick, nitrogen-dominated atmosphere where complex chemistry  perhaps even the sort that leads to life  is known to occur. And now, researchers have determined that the smoggy haze of Titan-like exoplanets could be visible with the next generation of space telescopes.

Related: Amazing photos: Titan, Saturn's largest moon

While most exoplanet hunts focus on finding worlds similar to Earth, one team wanted to know if upcoming instruments could identify potentially habitable worlds dramatically different from our own. Using simulations, they modeled Titan-like worlds around a variety of star types. They considered worlds "Titan-like" if they were far enough from their star for methane to condense and had a high enough water-to-rock ratio to spew volatile compounds into the atmosphere that could create a haze.

One of the first stars the team modeled was Barnard's Star, a nearby sun that hosts a planet candidate roughly three times as massive as Earth. That potential world, Barnard's Star b, lies near the system's snow line, the region where water and other gases can freeze solid, and where material like methane can solidify.

"We wanted to see if you could detect this planet through direct imaging with LUVOIR [the Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor]," team member Ryan Felton told Space.com.

LUVOIR is a proposed multi-wavelength space telescope under consideration by NASA as a future observatory. Felton, a graduate student at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., presented the results of the project in January at the semiannual winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu.

The team found that a Titan-like haze could be visible from Earth with a LUVOIR-like instrument.

"For Titan-like exoplanets, the atmospheres are characterizable with big space telescopes," Felton said.

Related: 10 exoplanets that could host alien life

Puffy worlds

Titan's air is dominated by nitrogen, along with some methane, a small amount of hydrogen and traces of various other gases.

As the nitrogen and methane gases rise into Titan's upper atmosphere, sunlight and heat break them apart, leading to the creation of bigger molecules that generate a haze in the atmosphere similar to that found above large cities here on Earth. Because the size of haze particles changes based on temperature, Titan-like worlds around different stars should have different characteristics, the researchers reasoned.

First, Felton and his colleagues modeled worlds around sunlike stars like the sun. Not surprisingly, the worlds around these stars resemble Titan in terms of haze size and gas mixtures  with one important difference. While Titan is a moon, the researchers investigated planets.

The differences between the two were fairly minor, however. Titan is about 40% as wide as Earth and 2% as massive, but Felton said this wasn't a serious issue. With the right combination of rock and water, an Earth-size world should be able to capture gas at farther distances from their stars, where temperatures are colder.

"I think it's just the case for our solar system" that Titan wound up a moon rather than a planet , Felton said. Systems that lack gas giants in the same region would be more apt to host Titan-like worlds, he added.

Timing is also important. In the past, Earth once boasted a thick haze, though it was likely not as thick as Titan's is today. "That's further evidence of an actual terrestrial planet having a haze," Felton said.

Felton and his colleagues also modeled haze-rich worlds around cooler stars. The cooler temperatures lowered how high in the atmosphere the haze reached, although Felton said the difference shouldn't be significant enough to impact attempts to image the worlds. "[They] should still be pretty puffy," he said.

Lower temperatures also affected how large the haze particles grew before they fell to the ground. In the models, molecules of gas bound together at the top of the atmosphere to make monomers (molecules that can then link together to form polymers). As they fell through the air, the gas molecules began to clump together to create asymmetrical monomers in fractal shapes .

"Fractals would be like a bunch of grapes stuck together," Felton said. (Actual grapes are much bigger than these haze molecules, of course.)

Those fractals caused the researchers more than a few headaches. Felton said he had been working on modeling the hazes as fractal shapes rather than spheres since 2016. It wasn't until Thanksgiving Day 2019 that he finally managed to make the simulation capable of placing Titan-like worlds around different types of stars.

The dimmest stars the scientists studied were red dwarfs , cool stars known for massive flaring activity, especially in their youth. Because red dwarfs are so dim, planets must orbit closer in to reach the same temperatures they would hit around a sunlike star, making them more likely to be hit by flares. And cooler temperatures would cause the hazes to thin out, reducing their ability to shield the planet from incoming radiation, possibly affecting their habitability, Felton said.

Barnard's Star is a red dwarf that lies about 6 light-years from the sun. In 2018, researchers identified a potential cool super-Earth around the nearby dim star. The cool environment of this candidate planet, which has not yet been confirmed, could have allowed it to gather gases similar to Titan when it formed, enabling it to maintain its haze today, Felton said.

Between red dwarfs and sunlike stars are K-stars. Titan-like worlds around K-stars could feature hazes that form lower down, with smaller particles than those around sunlike stars, according to the new study.

"It's just kind of a midway point," Felton said.

With the next generation of space telescopes, astronomers could probe the haze-rich worlds around all three types of stars. The insights they glean could reveal a great deal about these planets' atmospheres, helping researchers better understand a different type of potentially habitable environment than the more traditional Earth-like world.

"If we get LUVOIR, we'll be able to characterize these planets," Felton said.
Airlines are canceling dozens of flights every day at San Antonio International Airport as business and leisure travel is reduced to a trickle by the coronavirus crisis.

The situation may get much worse, according to industry insiders.

Dallas attorney Nick Oberheiden, who represents pilots before the Federal Aviation Administration, said a phased shutdown of domestic air travel is possible.

Airlines are expected to receive $25 billion to pay their employees under the $2 trillion stimulus program thats expected to clear Congress this week. The money would come from a fund designated for industries hit especially hard by the pandemic, including airlines and hotels.

Oberheiden said airlines are trying to hang until the aid package is locked in.

What I have seen is that airlines are concerned that if they shut down on their own accord, they risk not being part of the stimulus package, he said. They dont want to shut down before the money is in their hands.

Business travel blogger Joe Brancatelli said the FAA needs to work out a basic connectivity arrangement with airlines so that all major routes are at least partially served.

Otherwise, airlines will literally just shut it down, Brancatelli said. In fact, I expect something akin to a voluntary shutdown of almost everything, just as soon as the airlines get their bailout.

FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Cory said the agency doesnt comment on rumors.

A Delta Air Lines official rejected the idea that the airline would shut down its route system.

Oberheiden, however, said commercial aviation is already in a de facto shutdown.

It would be hard to argue the point if you were at San Antonio International on Wednesday.

The first scheduled flights of the day  a 5 a.m. American Airlines departure to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and three Southwest flights to Chicago, Denver and Nashville  were all canceled.

DFW is a hub for American, so the San Antonio cancellation affected passengers traveling throughout its system. The airline canceled five of seven scheduled flights to DFW on Wednesday.

Southwest passengers faced similar problems when their flights were scrubbed. Chicago Midway International Airport and Denver International Airport are major Southwest hubs for connecting flights.

A screen displaying departures at the San Antonio airport on Wednesday showed that 23 of 52 flights scheduled to depart between 10:50 a.m. and 5 p.m. had been canceled.

San Antonio Aviation Director Jesus Saenz said that about 40 percent of scheduled arrivals and departures never materialized on Wednesday. Its been like that all week.

Saenz said 1,543 passengers went through the security checkpoint at the airport on Wednesday  just 15 percent of the passenger volume before the coronavirus crisis.

We are right in line with what other airports are experiencing nationally, he said.

The cancellations were in addition to route reductions imposed in the last several weeks by the airlines. At least in those cases, passengers knew flights had been eliminated.

In the new climate, airlines are canceling flights hours before departure, as they determine whether the cargo load on a particular flight will make up for the lack of passengers.

Whether its five or seven or 15 passengers, airlines are still not making a profit, Oberheiden said. Its how much cargo they can carry in their tummy that will determine if a flight takes off.

Southwest, the airline with the most flights out of San Antonio International, canceled 12 of its 42 flights on Wednesday.

It does come down to demand and impacting the fewest customers, Southwest spokesman Dan Landson said via email. Were focusing our efforts on routes with multiple flights and/or routing options to get our customers to their destinations. And the flights may change day-by-day  so if a flight is canceled today, it might not be canceled tomorrow.

United Airlines canceled three of its seven departures Wednesday afternoon. A ticket agent said the airline was routinely canceling flights when there were too few passengers.

We are no different than the other airlines, he said.

Peter McNally, an equity analyst at investment and research firm Third Bridge, said carriers are trying to balance an immediate cash crunch against the desire to preserve their ability to bounce back once the crisis has passed.

Each airline has to take a view on when travel bans might be lifted and when peoples appetite for flying will recover, he said.

Southwest is the only major U.S. carrier with large cash reserves  approximately $6 billion. The other three  American, United and Delta  all have billion-dollar debt loads.

McNally said Uniteds revenue is down $2 billion this month alone.

Saenz urged passengers to check with their airlines before heading to San Antonio International.

Its very fluid and dynamic, by the hour, he said.

Randy Diamond covers aviation, energy and manufacturing in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read his stories and more local coverage on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | randy.diamond@express-news.net
Astronomers are on the hunt for the remnants of the neutron-star collision that gave Earth its precious metals.

When n eutron stars merge, they spew a wealth of short-lived elements into their surroundings, and these materials become part of later-forming solar systems. Now scientists are trying to close in on the merger that seeded our solar system by tracing the elements produced by the original decaying material. From that work, they believe the responsible merger occurred 100 million years before and 1,000 light-years away from the birth of our solar system.

"It was close," the project's lead scientist, Szabolcs Marka, who is a physicist at Columbia University, told Space.com. "If you look up at the sky and you see a neutron-star merger 1,000 light-years away, it would outshine the entire night sky."

Related: First glimpse of colliding neutron stars yields stunning pics

Marka and his colleague Imre Bartos, an astrophysicist at the University of Florida, used meteorites from the dawn of the solar system to track down the collision. They analyzed the isotopes  flavors of elements with different numbers of neutrons in their atoms  in these rocks.

First, they calculated the quantity of radioactive isotopes in the early solar system; then the researchers compared their measurements with the amount of isotopes produced by neutron-star mergers. Marka presented the results of their research in January at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu.

"Our" neutron-star merger

The universe's heavy elements, such as gold, platinum and plutonium, form when neutrons bombard existing atoms. During such collisions, a neutral neutron can emit a negatively charged electron , becoming a positively charged proton and changing the atom's identity.

This process, known as rapid neutron capture, occurs only during the most powerful explosions, such as supernovas and neutron-star mergers. But scientists continue to debate which of these extreme events is responsible for the bulk of heavy elements in the universe.

So Marka and Bartos turned to ancient meteorites in an effort to understand which type of event may have seeded the early solar system . Locked inside of those rocks from the young solar system is material that spewed from an explosion, and although those initial elements were radioactive and rapidly decayed, they left behind signatures of their past presence.

And as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) begins to identify potential neutron-star mergers , scientists are applying its observations to help identify the most likely contributors of material formed in a nearby merger, what Marka called "the witch's brew of the galaxy," the slowly decaying material that made its way to the solar system.

Previous studies estimated that a supernova occurs in the Milky Way once every 50 years or so. LIGO's new observations suggest that neutron-star mergers occur much less frequently, approximately once every 100,000 years. The amount of heavy elements in the solar system suggested that they came from a nearby neutron-star merger , as supernova origins would have yielded more material.

From there, the pair relied on the individual isotopes to determine where and when the solar system's local neutron-star merger had occurred.

"Each isotope is a stopwatch starting at the explosion," Marka said. By studying how much of each isotope was left when the material was captured, he was able to pin down the age of the collision that showered the solar system. "There is only one point in time when they all agree," he said. That point occurred roughly 100 million years before the solar system formed , an eye blink in astronomical time scales. The team also calculated how far away the stars collided, a distance of 1,000 light-years, based on how much material ended up in the solar system.

What the team could not figure out was the direction at which these heavy elements entered the neighborhood that would become our solar system, a discovery that could theoretically allow scientists to pinpoint the remnants of the collision. The problem is that the sun hasn't been sitting still for the 4.5 billion years since it formed; instead, it's been traveling around the galaxy.

Along the way, it has left behind the stars that formed near it in the same cluster, stars that astronomers have long hunted in vain. Marka hopes that one day, astronomers will find those sister stars and the remnants of the neutron-star merger that formed the solar system.

According to Marka, the new discovery hit close to home. "People were actually crying," he said, referring to members of his team.

He said he thinks that strong emotional reaction arose because this neutron-star merger wasn't just an event that happened out in space. It was one that contributed to each of us, personally.

"This is not esoteric, it's ours," Marka said. "Not ours in the galaxy but ours in the solar system."

Follow Nola on Facebook and on Twitter at @NolaTRedd . Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook .
A repurposed clot-busting drug may work as an emergency measure for Covid-19 patients suffering from acute respiratory distress when ventilators are not available or not all that effective, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Colorado at Denver, Colorado.

The drug is the widely used protein called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), which is administered to people who have suffered a cardiac arrest or stroke to dissolve blood clots.

Emerging data from China and Italy showed that Covid-19 patients have severe blood-clotting disorders that lead to respiratory failure and eventually death. Covid-19 patients suffer from inflammation-linked tissue damage, showed autopsy reports from China and Italy.

Past research also showed that blood clots often form in the lungs during respiratory failure, and tiny clots called microthrombi also form in the blood vessels of the lungs. These tiny clots prevent blood from reaching the airspaces of the lungs.

If this were to work, which I hope it will, it could potentially be scaled up quickly, because every hospital already has it in their pharmacy. We dont have to manufacture a new drug, and we dont have to do the same kind of testing that you would have to do with a new agent, said Michael Yaffe, a David H. Koch Professor of Science at MIT, who is the senior author of the study, which was published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery on Thursday.

While 81% of Covid-19 positive patients have mild disease, 5% of the patients need intensive care, including a ventillator to assist them to breathe as their lungs pack up.

Three hospitals in Massachusetts and Colorado in the United States of America are looking to test this therapy in critically ill Covid-19 patients.

India has an estimated 40,000 working ventilators for a population of around 1.4 billion people. Most ventillators are installed in government-run medical colleges and private hospitals located in metropolises and state capitals, but certainly will not be enough if there is a sudden spike in Covid-19 positive cases.

The blood-clotting drug, tPA, is available across India. It is a natural protein found in the body and works by converting plasminogen to an enzyme called plasmin, which breaks down blot clots. It is very effective when administered between three and four and half hours into people who have suffered an acute ischemic stroke, provided they have no internal bleeding, including gastric haemorrhage, said Dr. Pushpendra Renjen, senior consultant neurologist, Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals.

The recommended dose for stroke is 0.9 mg/kg body weight, with 10% of it being injected and the rest given as an infusion over an hour. Depending on the patients weight, the drug costs between 40,000 and 50,000, said Renjen.

The researchers plan to test tPA in patients under the USs Food and Drug Administrations compassionate use programme, which allows experimental drugs to be used in cases where there are no other treatment options.

The group plans to deliver the drug both intravenously or administer it directly into the airways. One dose will be given rapidly, say over a two-hour period, followed by an equivalent one given more slowly over 22 hours. Applied BioMath, a company spun out by former MIT researchers, is working on computational models to refine the dosage schedule.

What we are hearing from our intensive care colleagues in Europe and in New York is that many of the critically ill patients with Covid-19 are hypercoagulable, meaning that they are clotting off their intravenous therapies, and having kidney and heart failure from blood clots, in addition to lung failure. Theres plenty of basic science to support the idea that this concept should be beneficial. The tricky part, of course, is figuring out the right dose and route of administration, said Yaffe.

India has reported 649 Covid-19 positive cases and 13 deaths to date.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sanchita Sharma Sanchita is the health & science editor of the Hindustan Times. She has been reporting and writing on public health policy, health and nutrition for close to two decades. She is an International Reporting Project fellow from Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and was part of the expert group that drafted the Press Council of Indias media guidelines on health reporting, including reporting on people living with HIV. ...view detail
This is the moment an angry resident drops a bin bag full of water on to a group of people standing beneath their apartment in Spain.

Shocking footage shows the bag drop at least four floors before appearing to hit one of the individuals standing below.

Spain has been in lockdown for 12 days, with residents banned from leaving their homes except to buy essentials. The clip was posted to social media on March 24.

An angry resident appeared to throw a bin bag full of water out of their apartment in Spain

The video shows a group of seven people, possibly children, loitering in the shade below the building.

When the bin bag strikes one the group lets out a high pitched terrified scream.

Viewers have reacted with fury to the clip, saying the falling bag would have felt like rocks to those below and could have easily snapped someone's neck.

It was uploaded to social media by account @witzhappening, and has been viewed more than 870,000 times.

Spain's stringent lockdown measures mean that those found on the street without good reason can be fined as much as 100 for breaking the law.

Spain is the second worst affected country in Europe, and has recorded 56,000 cases of the virus and more than 4,000 deaths.
Unfortunately for some shareholders, the Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare (HKG:3689) share price has dived 32% in the last thirty days. That drop has capped off a tough year for shareholders, with the share price down 55% in that time.

All else being equal, a share price drop should make a stock more attractive to potential investors. In the long term, share prices tend to follow earnings per share, but in the short term prices bounce around in response to short term factors (which are not always obvious). The implication here is that long term investors have an opportunity when expectations of a company are too low. Perhaps the simplest way to get a read on investors' expectations of a business is to look at its Price to Earnings Ratio (PE Ratio). Investors have optimistic expectations of companies with higher P/E ratios, compared to companies with lower P/E ratios.

View our latest analysis for Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare

Does Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare Have A Relatively High Or Low P/E For Its Industry?

Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare's P/E of 6.38 indicates relatively low sentiment towards the stock. If you look at the image below, you can see Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare has a lower P/E than the average (12.6) in the healthcare industry classification.

SEHK:3689 Price Estimation Relative to Market March 26th 2020

This suggests that market participants think Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare will underperform other companies in its industry. Many investors like to buy stocks when the market is pessimistic about their prospects. If you consider the stock interesting, further research is recommended. For example, I often monitor director buying and selling.

How Growth Rates Impact P/E Ratios

When earnings fall, the 'E' decreases, over time. That means even if the current P/E is low, it will increase over time if the share price stays flat. A higher P/E should indicate the stock is expensive relative to others -- and that may encourage shareholders to sell.

Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare's earnings per share fell by 12% in the last twelve months. And it has shrunk its earnings per share by 1.9% per year over the last three years. This could justify a low P/E.

Story continues

Don't Forget: The P/E Does Not Account For Debt or Bank Deposits

Don't forget that the P/E ratio considers market capitalization. That means it doesn't take debt or cash into account. In theory, a company can lower its future P/E ratio by using cash or debt to invest in growth.

Such spending might be good or bad, overall, but the key point here is that you need to look at debt to understand the P/E ratio in context.

How Does Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare's Debt Impact Its P/E Ratio?

With net cash of CN491m, Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare has a very strong balance sheet, which may be important for its business. Having said that, at 51% of its market capitalization the cash hoard would contribute towards a higher P/E ratio.

The Verdict On Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare's P/E Ratio

Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare's P/E is 6.4 which is below average (8.9) in the HK market. The recent drop in earnings per share would make investors cautious, the relatively strong balance sheet will allow the company time to invest in growth. If it achieves that, then there's real potential that the low P/E could eventually indicate undervaluation. Given Guangdong Kanghua Healthcare's P/E ratio has declined from 9.4 to 6.4 in the last month, we know for sure that the market is more worried about the business today, than it was back then. For those who prefer to invest with the flow of momentum, that might be a bad sign, but for deep value investors this stock might justify some research.

Investors have an opportunity when market expectations about a stock are wrong. If the reality for a company is not as bad as the P/E ratio indicates, then the share price should increase as the market realizes this. We don't have analyst forecasts, but you could get a better understanding of its growth by checking out this more detailed historical graph of earnings, revenue and cash flow.

Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking at a few good candidates. So take a peek at this free list of companies with modest (or no) debt, trading on a P/E below 20.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
Two siblings, both minors, were tested positive for coronavirus in Jammu and Kashmir on Thursday, taking the number of cases to 13, officials said.

"Two more positive cases in Srinagar. Siblings (seven-years-old and eight-months-old)... Total number of active positive cases is now at 11," government spokesperson Rohit Kansal tweeted.

The eight-month-old might be the youngest to be infected with COVID-19 in the country.

He said they are the grandchildren of a person who had tested positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday in Srinagar and had a travel history to Saudi Arabia.

With these two, the total number of positive cases in the valley has gone up to 10 and in the union territory to 13.

One person in Kashmir has recovered from the disease, while another one succumbed at a hospital here on Thursday morning, the officials said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Day 2 of COVID-19 lockdown was no different for people who tried to book online delivery of essential items like groceries, milk and vegetables at Bigbasket, Grofers and other online platforms.

To one user's amusement, he got the next delivery slot on Grofers for Monday, April 13.

"When trying to place a new order, the earliest delivery date is coming out to be Monday 13th April. I mean seriously? 19 day waiting period during a lockdown of 21?" Tanmay posted to Grofers on Twitter.

The online delivery platform replied: "Due to the current situation and spike in demand, you have experienced a high turnaround time for the delivery of your order. While we understand that this isn't ideal, we're acting to execute things for you as soon as possible".

The company said it has gone live in a few cities with the help of local authorities nd is hopeful of restarting operations in other cities within a day or two. It, however, did not disclose in which cities it has resumed delivery of essential items.

People experienced similar woes on Bigbasket.

Noida resident Arun Kumar, 42, placed an order for fruits on Thursday morning and got the message from Bigbasket: "Unfortunately, we do not have any available slots to service you right now. Please try again later".

Bigbasket posted on Twitter: "Our delivery executives are working around the clock and overtime to deliver essentials to as many customers as possible".

A Pune resident replied: "Didn't get delivery of Milk today, vegetable orders already canceled. Plz confirm "tomorrow u guys going to deliver milk or not?"

On food delivery platform Swiggy, some new restaurants popped up for Noida Sector 143 residents, although no known restaurants names were available.

Some city authorities late on Wednesday allowed home delivery of essential goods by online apps.

Gurugram Police Commissioner Mohammad Akil said that operators like Zomato, Flipkart, Amazon, Bluedart, Wow Express, Swiggy, Grofers, Bigbasket, Milk Basket, Dunzo, Big Bazaar, and Iffco Tokyo will be allowed to continue delivery services.

Online marketplaces like Flipkart and Amazon along with delivery platforms like Bigbasket, Grofers and FreshToHomes hit a major blockade as local authorities shut warehouses and sent delivery boys back, even harassed them.

Millions of people across cities were left helpless at homes as essential items did not reach their doors despite placing orders well in advance.

Despite the assurance from local authorities, the situation remained grim on Thursday.

Amazon India posted on its website that "considering the prevailing extensive lockdowns and restriction in movement, pending deliveries will be delayed. New ordering is available only on essential products through pre-paid payment methods".

"We are continuously evaluating the situation and working towards resuming deliveries soon".
An image of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases)

Silicon Valley could see a coronavirus-related death toll of 2,000 to 16,000 by the end of May, depending on how seriously people take the order to stay at home as much as possible, according to projections presented at a San Jose City Council meeting this week.

The thinking behind the rough estimates illustrates why health and elected officials across California have sounded the alarm about the exponential rise in coronavirus cases reported since the beginning of March. Officials from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to San Francisco's director of public health, Dr. Grant Colfax, have warned about a surge in gravely ill coronavirus patients needing hospitalization in the next week or two.

"Even in the best case scenario, we were looking at the order  in the next 12 weeks  of 2,000 potential deaths directly from COVID-19," San Jose deputy city manager Kip Harkness said Tuesday of an estimate of the projected death toll for Santa Clara County, California's sixth most populous county.

Harkness emphasized the projections he presented are rough and the county is working on a more detailed and robust estimate. "But given the urgency of the situation, we have decided to share [these] preliminary results with you and the public today, in order to derive the action that is needed to save lives," Harkness said.

If nothing were being done, the death toll from the virus that can cause severe respiratory problems could hit 16,000 people for this county of nearly 2 million people, with just one-fifth the population of Los Angeles County.

But if there's a mediocre compliance with the shelter-in-place order issued across the San Francisco Bay Area on March 16 that was followed by a similar statewide order issued three days later  where "we do something, but [it's] not well complied with"  there could still be a far worse death toll than the best-case scenario, with nearly 8,000 dead in Santa Clara County.

Story continues

"It's the hardest slide to look at," said Harkness, who focuses on emergency preparedness for California's third most populous city.

In the worst-case coronavirus scenario for Santa Clara County, where no one stays at home, 16,000 people could die. A best-case scenario in which everyone complies with a shelter-in-place order results in 2,000 deaths, according to a rough estimate presented at a city council meeting. (City of San Jose)

Why coronavirus cases are still rising despite shelter-in-place order

Cases of coronavirus are still rising in Santa Clara County, despite the sweeping shelter-in-place order issued across the San Francisco Bay Area just a little more than a week ago, because the cases of infection being identified now represent infections that occurred one to two weeks ago, Dr. Sara Cody, the Santa Clara County public health officer, told the county Board of Supervisors at a meeting Tuesday.

"The cases that we're identifying now still reflect the transmission and what was happening in our community one to two weeks ago, so there's that lag," Cody said.

It can take two to 14 days after someone is infected with the coronavirus before the symptoms of the disease known as COVID-19 appear.

But it can take even longer to become seriously ill. Here's the median time it took from the first signs of illness to the following outcomes, according to a study of patients in Wuhan, China:

From illness onset to shortness of breath: 7 days

From illness onset to sepsis: 9 days

From illness onset to acute respiratory distress: 12 days

From illness onset to intensive care unit admission: 12 days

From illness onset to death or hospital discharge: 21 days

That kind of timeline has also been seen in California.

The symptoms can seem relatively mild during the first week, with the main symptom being a cough, and the patient is treated as an outpatient.

It's only in the second week where patients rapidly deteriorate, and in a matter of hours, they're unable to breathe on their own and suddenly need a breathing tube inserted into the throat so they can be hooked up to a mechanical ventilator that pushes oxygen into the lungs, according to an interview that Dr. Stephen Parodi, a Kaiser vice president and infectious diseases physician, gave to the Journal of the American Medical Assn.





Next few weeks are critical

Officials also say the number of coronavirus cases in Santa Clara County is far greater than currently documented. As of Wednesday night, Santa Clara County reported 459 coronavirus cases and 17 deaths. But Harkness, the San Jose official, said it's likely there are actually 9,000 to 19,000 people in Santa Clara County with the coronavirus infection.

"The current number of ... positive tests vastly undercounts the number of actual cases," Harkness said. "That means we have a false sense of security in terms of thinking, 'Oh, everyone who's tested are the only ones who are infected.' No, there are a large number of us walking around who are infected."

So the next few weeks are critical. First, if virtually everyone sticks with the strict stay-at-home orders established by the county and Gov. Gavin Newsom, that "will significantly bend the curve" of what would otherwise be an exponential rise in cases.

But the region still needs to find more intensive care unit beds and ventilators, Harkness said. Without them, the death rate for critically ill patients doubles.





Can rising demand for intensive care unit beds be met?

In the worst case scenario, if there had been no order for people to stay home as much as possible to curb the outbreak, demand for intensive care unit beds during the outbreak's peak would vastly outstrip supply by many times, according to a slide Harkness presented.

A so-so approach, where many people don't comply with the stay-at-home order, could still leave the county with too few ICU beds.

In the worst-case scenario of a coronavirus pandemic where no one stays at home (dark red line), demand for intensive care unit beds outstrips the supply, marked roughly by the two black horizontal lines, which show the range of estimates of exisiting ICU beds and how many more can be created. But strict adherence to shelter-in-place rules could reduce demand for the beds, shown in the light orange line. (City of San Jose)

But strict adherence to the stay-at-home orders, combined with increasing the number of intensive care unit beds, could bring Silicon Valley close to meeting the demand, Harkness said.

"The most important thing that everybody can do is compliance with the public health orders  shelter-in-place. This is this weird moment where the biggest thing you can do to help is this: Do nothing. Go home. Stay on your couch. Watch some Netflix," Harkness said.

"I know it's hard, especially for those of us who think action is the thing we need to do," he added. "But in this particular epidemic, 'being' may be more important than 'doing' for most of us."





County racing to secure more ventilators

Santa Clara County has made efforts to increase its healthcare capacity. A 248-bed federal medical station is being established at Santa Clara Convention Center to be used as a "medical respite unit" for coronavirus-infected patients who don't need to be hospitalized but can't return home to care for themselves.

The county has ordered 211 mechanical ventilators and the state has promised to provide 100 more, Santa Clara County executive officer Dr. Jeffrey V. Smith, who is also a physician and a lawyer, told the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. The county, which operates several hospitals, is also trying to hire more than 100 nurses.

Smith said the county is tracking how many beds are available in the region's hospitals related to COVID-19, particularly in the intensive care unit. As of Tuesday, there are empty ICU beds and available ventilators, "but we're very, very, very concerned that once a couple of weeks have expired, we will be really challenged."

Of the 375 Santa Clara County residents who were confirmed to have the coronavirus infection as of Monday night, the severity of illness among them is still quite high. Cody, the health officer, said at the supervisors' meeting Tuesday that 125 were hospitalized at the time of diagnosis, including 13 who were in the intensive care unit.

San Francisco leaders said Wednesday that it was plausible the city could face a crisis similar to that of New York Citys and fall short 1,500 ventilators and 5,000 hospital beds. It is not even a question as to whether we will need more, San Francisco Mayor London Breed said.





Testing for coronavirus still a challenge

Lab testing for the coronavirus to confirm whether an ill patient has the virus that causes COVID-19 is still a challenge for Santa Clara County. "Despite the announcements from the federal government, testing is not as widespread as we would like it to be, and as it needs to be," Cody said Tuesday.

The local public health laboratory has been able to test for the virus since Feb. 26, but, like other state and local public health labs, was never designed to work like commercial labs. So they don't offer high-volume testing capacity to process thousands of tests daily, Cody said, "which is why we are dependent on the commercial and academic sectors."

Cody and other health officers in the San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday issued a new order requiring labs to report to officials not only the positive coronavirus cases but the negative ones as well. The counties didn't have a clear idea of how much testing was occurring in the region since the negative results hadn't been reported to the local authorities.

"It will also enable us to understand if there are areas where there are higher positivity rates where there might be more intense transmission [of the virus] and that, of course, is very important for us to understand as we try to reduce transmission and bend the curve," Cody said.





Epicenter of California's coronavirus crisis

Santa Clara County has become the epicenter of California's coronavirus crisis, with more deaths than any other county in the state.

Initial hints of problems surfaced when it became clear that, among sick people getting tested in Santa Clara County, the percentage of people testing positive to the new coronavirus was significantly higher than in other communities, Smith said. That was an ominous sign that suggested there was also a high percentage of people infected with the coronavirus who weren't yet showing signs of illness.

About 80% of infected people show mild or minimal symptoms of illness.

Smith said an earlier projection mentioned by Newsom that more than half of Californians could be infected with the coronavirus in a two-month period was based on unfettered spread of the virus and is unlikely to occur.

"However, since Santa Clara has been at the forefront, we certainly need to be prepared, and our focus has been on trying to make sure our system is not overwhelmed," Smith said Tuesday.
CANONSBURG (dpa-AFX) - Mylan N.V. (MYL) and Pfizer Inc. (PFE) announced that due to the uncertainties related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including associated delays in the regulatory review process, the proposed transaction involving Mylan and Upjohn, a division of Pfizer, is now expected to close in the second half of 2020. Mylan's extraordinary general meeting of shareholders to approve certain matters in connection with the deal has been rescheduled from April 27, 2020, to June 30, 2020. The record date for the EGM and the AGM in respect of Mylan's ordinary shares is June 2, 2020. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One minute and 23 seconds.

Thats exactly how long it took Jesse Klym to run around his house three times on Wednesday morning.

Hes used to running around the Ecole Stanley Knowles School gymnasium  but much like the rest of the provinces phys-ed instructors, Klym has been tasked with staying active at home and motivating his students to do the same.

Provincewide, all students are required to take physical education every year, from kindergarten to Grade 12. With schools closed, approximately 700 phys-ed teachers in Manitoba are teaching physical literacy and health from afar.

Its a challenge when students are faced with the ever-present temptations of video games, streaming services and social media. At the same time, they dont currently have the option to play organized sports, hang out at the community centre or visit local playgrounds  so educators like Klym are meeting students and their families online to help them stay active.

Jesse Klym sent his 500 early years students a 21-day schedule of activities to complete before school is expected to resume on April 13. (Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press)

"A lot of these kids depend on coming to school and thats their main source of physical activity: just walking around the school, going to phys-ed, going outside to recess, playing around at daycare," said Klym, who teaches physical education for grades 1 to 5.

"Now theyre just forced to stay at home and its basically just dependent on the parent, and the parent could be OK with their child just sitting in front of a screen."

Klym sent his 500 early years students a 21-day schedule of activities to complete before school is expected to resume on April 13. Every day, hes been posting his own completed activity on Twitter.

Among the list of exercises: creating a dance move; doing as many jumping jacks as total minutes of screen-time in a day; and on Wednesday, estimating how long it would take to run laps outside the house three times, followed by testing the hypothesis.

Also Wednesday, Ecole Morden Middle School teachers Christine Bumstead and Brendan Edie set up a live YouTube stream to teach their students zumba. Bumstead, who can usually be found in her Grade 6 homeroom, was invited to lead the class to show off her moves alongside other educators, who were all spaced out in the gymnasium.

She said Wednesday she received messages from a handful of her students after the workout to tell her theyd been following along; at one point, there were 23 users watching the livestream. By the end of the school day, the video had recorded more than 160 views.

"Because were doing online schooling right now, it sounds like its just a lot of screen time, but its also finding those ways where they can go off the screens," Bumstead said.

If they can see us having fun and doing it and being creative and showing that we care ... I think that goes hand in hand with their engagement."  Brendan Edie

In addition to Edies YouTube channel, hes also been posting video challenges on TikTok  a social media platform on which users can post short-form videos no longer than one minute. The platform is often used to create comedic content and dancing videos.

"If they can see us having fun and doing it and being creative and showing that we care ... I think that goes hand in hand with their engagement. We are going to see some engagement and maybe a little bit more love from middle schoolers," said Edie.

For high school students, Cyril Indomes workout recipe includes a can of tomatoes, heavy books and a backpack. Since the Windsor Park Collegiate weight room is closed, Indome has suggested his teenage students modify their usual resistance training with the contents of their kitchen cupboards.

Jen Zoratti | Next A weekly look towards a post-pandemic future delivered to your inbox every Wednesday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

He has been recording his at-home workouts so his students can access them online, as well as posting links, worksheets and multimedia clips of activities in what he calls his classrooms "digital binder"  Microsoft OneNote. Indome advocates for choice in phys-ed so his students understand physical literacy, meaning they are confident exercising and understand the physical and mental health benefits of doing so.

Not only do teachers videos encourage exercise, but Indome said they also allow students to feel a personal connection with their instructors by getting a glimpse into their home lives.

"Do as the experts, the officials, the government asks so that hopefully this remains just temporary and short," Indome says in his first YouTube video posted March 20. "Take care of yourselves and each other, wash your hands and just know that you will be missed."

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie
WASHINGTON, D. C. - The U.S. Senate on Wednesday unanimously adopted a sweeping relief package that will channel around $2 trillion to hospitals, businesses and workers whose health and livelihoods have been sickened by the global coronavirus pandemic.

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown called the bill a much better deal for workers and their families and communities than a version he opposed on Monday, which he dismissed as a Wall Street giveaway that didnt adequately help hospitals or do enough for workers.

This crisis is different from anything weve ever seen in our country, Brown told reporters on Wednesday. Its going to take a sustained response over many months.

The #coronavirus bill provides direct aid to families, workers, small businesses & health care professionals on the front line of the fight against this virus.



We cant wait any longer.



We need to move this rescue package forward now. pic.twitter.com/M4lDhEyiCs  Rob Portman (@senrobportman) March 24, 2020

Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman said the rescue package would provide $350 billion in loans and grants to help keep small businesses open, assist those who have lost jobs during the crisis and address problems in the health care system that undermined response to the virus. He said it would bolster the unemployment insurance system so states can match the missing salary of low-income workers, and give others enough to be able to put food on the table, maybe make the rent, maybe make the car payment during this period.

The bill also calls for the government sending $1,200 checks to individuals who make less than $75,000 and $2,400 for couples making less than $150,000. Families with children would be eligible for an additional $500 per child. The amount would be reduced by five cents for every dollar that a tax filers adjusted gross income exceeds $75,000, or that a married couple filing jointly exceeds $150,000. Portman said the Internal Revenue Service will be presenting these checks quickly.

Details of the final package were negotiated Tuesday between Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and the agreement was announced Wednesday morning. Its the largest economic relief package in modern history, greatly exceeding the $800 billion stimulus enacted during the 2008 financial crisis.

This is an unprecedented amount of money, said Portman, noting that Congress previously passed two coronavirus relief packages that cost $200 billion and $8.3 billion. Congress has never passed a rescue package like this before.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, called it a wartime level of investment into our nation.

A lot of this money goes to jobs, jobs, jobs and families, families, families, President Donald Trump said at a Wednesday press conference.

To all Americans, I say, help is on the way, big help and quick help, Schumer added in a speech on the Senate floor.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said Democrats who control the House of Representatives will review the package. She said the initial draft of the bill that McConnell presented Sunday was a non-starter and Democratic chairs of committees in the House of Representatives worked to shift its focus from corporations to workers.

No one is ASKING to be laid off, and if you think they are, you clearly havent talked to any workers.



Increasing unemployment insurance benefits isnt a drafting error. Its a critical safety net to make sure workers and their families can weather this storm. https://t.co/aZ7e3tM6ty  Sherrod Brown (@SenSherrodBrown) March 25, 2020

This bipartisan legislation takes us a long way down the road in meeting the needs of the American people," said a statement from Pelosi.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said the compromise wasnt perfect, but was far better than initial versions of the bill. He said the House of Representatives will consider the bill on Friday.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California said he wants to make sure the U.S. House of Representatives reviews the legislation, but doesnt slow it down and moves it to Trumps desk "as soon as possible.

Not everyone was happy with the package. The CEO of Hunger Free America, anti-hunger non profit group, released a statement to express his displeasure that it excluded a boost in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that was sought by Democratic leaders in Congress

The bill will help the newly-unemployed, so thats good, but its pretty appalling that it includes hundreds of billions for many big corporations  run by people who make millions of dollars per year, but not a penny more to increase the food allotment for 36 million SNAP recipients, which now equals a paltry $1.34 per meal," said a statement from Hunger Free America CEO Joel Berg. "This omission will both increase hunger and harm grocery stores, farmers markets, and corner stores. This must be fixed immediately, either by amending the Senate deal to increase SNAP and/or immediately passing a stand-alone bill that does so.

More coronavirus coverage:

$1,200 checks, extended unemployment benefits: Whats in the U.S. Senates $2 trillion coronavirus deal

Ohio Democrats want President Trump to federalize medical supply chain during coronavirus emergency

Ohio health centers get $3.2 million from federal government to address coronavirus

Sen. Rand Pauls positive coronavirus test negatively affects other senators, but Ohio senators still on the job

Democrats including Ohios Sherrod Brown block Senate GOP coronavirus bill

President Trump suspends student loan interest, allows payment delays during coronavirus pandemic

Coronavirus causes suspension of the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals

Senate passes coronavirus relief bill as Ohio legislators seek more aid for workers and businesses

Canadian border will be closed to non-essential traffic over coronavirus, Trump says

U.S. government may issue coronavirus relief checks to workers

Federal judge halts upcoming food stamp cut amid coronavirus concerns

Sen. Sherrod Brown criticizes President Trump over pandemic office closure claim

Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Anthony Gonzalez close DC offices over coronavirus

Ohio gets more than $15 million in federal money to fight coronavirus

Does lack of paid sick days put Ohio at risk of coronavirus outbreak?
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.

Matthew 6:34

About 15 years ago, a mentor told me, Every person we encounter, every circumstance we experience, is a teacher, if we are willing to learn.

If this is true, what could this nasty coronavirus possibly be teaching us?

There is a passage in the Old Testament in which the persecuted Israelites, wandering the desert, are starving, frustrated, angry. God tells Moses he will provide bread (manna from heaven) that will cover the ground. Gods specific instruction is for the Israelites to gather only what they need for that day. Of course they dont, and as a result the bread rots and becomes inedible.

The obvious correlation between this Scripture passage and the COVID-19 crisis we are deeply into has to do with hoarding groceries and, strangely enough, toilet paper. But I think there is a much deeper lesson to be taught here, at least for me.

COVID-19 has made it difficult, if not impossible, for most of us to make many plans beyond today. Vacations, dinner parties, movie nights  all have to be put on hold until we get through this. So, in essence, this awful virus is forcing us to live where we are really meant to live  in today.

The God of my understanding didnt create the coronavirus. Our encroachment into wildlife habitats in the name of progress has made it easier for animal diseases to pass to humans.

God didnt create this virus, but perhaps through grace, which always seems to show itself in unexpected and enigmatic ways, good can come out of it. Im reading that in large cities all over the world, the air is cleaner and the sky is bluer because of the reduction in traffic. In Venice, the water is clear for the first time in decades because gondolas arent churning it up. Hmm, what could be the lesson here?

The other day, I looked out my window into my front yard and saw more birds and squirrels than Ive ever seen, and I have to believe they feel safer to be out and about with fewer cars whizzing by. My wife, Melissa, and I, both cooped up at home, had a beautiful FaceTime call with our good friends in Austin, whom we were supposed to visit this weekend. Thanks to them, I had some belly-laughs, which I really needed.

The coronavirus is awful. But it can also be an opportunity for us to remember to gather only the bread we need for today. In other words, to be present for the people right in front of us, and to fully experience this day instead of worrying about what may happen tomorrow, next week or next year. In reality, none of us knows. In reality, today is all we have.

Tomorrow is tomorrow. Future cares have future cures, and we must mind today.

Sophocles

Mark Stoeltje is the executive director of San Antonio Clubhouse, a mental health recovery community.
With the U.S. Capitol building in the background, motorists drive on Pennsylvania Avenue NW on Wednesday. Read more

TL;DR: The United States now has the most coronavirus cases in the world, and the countrys death toll has surpassed 1,000. President Donald Trump declared New Jersey a major disaster area for its high number of cases. Local health officials are writing guidelines on which COVID-19 patients get priority if ventilators are scarce. In national news, you will soon receive money from the federal government once the House passes the $2.2 trillion stimulus package. Read more below to learn how much money youll get and when.

Make sure you check Inquirer.com/coronavirus for the latest news and please feel free to tell your family and friends to sign up.

 Ellie Silverman (@esilverman11, health@inquirer.com)

What you need to know

 The United States now has the most confirmed coronavirus cases in the world. The nations death toll has surpassed 1,000, the third-highest count globally, behind only China and Italy. The majority of people who have died in Pennsylvania were older than 65.

 Five Philadelphia police officers have tested positive for coronavirus.

The Greater Philadelphia YMCA laid off most of its workforce, cutting 4,000 jobs in what appears to be the largest mass layoff in the state so far during the coronavirus pandemic.

President Donald Trump declared New Jersey a major disaster area. The state remains second in the nation, behind New York, for the number of confirmed coronavirus cases.

The Trump administration is developing new social distancing guidelines.

Local coronavirus cases

 As of Thursday evening, there are more than 1,000 reported cases in the Philadelphia area. Track the spread here.

PHILADELPHIA: 475 confirmed cases (up from 133 on March 25)

SUBURBAN PA: 663 confirmed cases (up from 289 on March 25)

SOUTH JERSEY: 184 confirmed cases (up from 15 on March 25)

If coronavirus cases continue to rise as a rapid rate, the state could face a ventilator shortage, forcing doctors to make tough decisions: which critically ill COVID-19 patients will get access to life-saving technology and which will not, my colleagues Jason Laughlin and Wendy Ruderman report.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said the state has about 1,900 ventilators and asked federal authorities for another 2,500. Through hospitals and Emergency Medical Services, the Pennsylvania Department of Health reported 3,600 ventilators available, which is less than what may be needed if illnesses peak, according to a Harvard study.

New Jerseys triage policy is being crafted while Pennsylvania has an interim policy, which has not been made public, about what to do in this situation. The draft guidelines, according to Arvind Venkat, a Pennsylvania emergency physician who has seen them, include priorities based on the likelihood of a persons recovery.

Its a combination of how critically ill a patient is and determining how long and whether they would benefit from ventilator treatment and prognosis over the short, medium, or long term, Venkat said.

Many of you will soon receive money from the federal government once the House passes the $2.2 trillion stimulus package to help businesses, workers, and health care systems. The economic fallout from the pandemic has been far reaching, with businesses closing, workers being laid off, and a record 3.2 million Americans filing jobless claims.

So how much will you get paid? Do you need to apply? When will you get your money? These are some of the questions my colleague Christian Hetrick addresses.

The short answer, you dont need to apply and the payments will come as early as April, but could also take as long as four months. As for the amount, if you are single with an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or less, youll get $1,200. Those filing as the head of a household and earning up to $112,500 would get that amount too. And if youre married and together make up to $150,000, you would get $2,400.

For every $100 you make over those thresholds, youll get $5 less. The payments stop once you are making more than $99,000 as an individual, $146,500 as head-of-household, and $198,000 as a married couple.

Lets take a quick break

An unusual heart procedure saved Sophie the boxer. It could save other dogs, too.

 Missing the Phillies? Browse this YouTube vault of classic games.

Three Philadelphia-area teens are headed for the circus Big Top.

Social distancing tip of the day: Teach your older relatives to video chat

Easter and Passover are coming up, times when many of us would want to be with our families. But now were all practicing social distancing and staying apart.

That doesnt mean we cant stay connected, my colleague Nick Vadala writes. If your relative has an iPhone or iPad, introduce them to FaceTime. If your loved one doesnt have an Apple product, try out Skype, Zoom, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, or WhatsApp. Stick with whichever app they find easiest.

Have a social distancing tip or question to share? Let us know at health@inquirer.com and your input might be featured in a future edition of this newsletter.

What were paying attention to

Its not all horrible

If youre feeling the quarantine blues and looking for some company, try fostering a dog or cat. Theres been an unprecedented number of people looking to foster and my colleague Grace Dickinson writes how you can do it.

While some rescue centers (Street Tails Animal Rescue and Morris Animal Refuge) are closed as a health precaution, Pennsylvania SPCA is accepting foster applications. And most shelters are open for adopting and fostering. At places like some PAWS locations, ACCT, and Main Line Animal Rescue, you can fill out an application online, have a conversation with staff to discuss your animal-loving history, and then youll be matched.

Everyones home anyway, and a lot of people are grappling with boredom," ACCT Philly executive director Aurora Velazquez said. We have pets in need and people with time and opportunity  it makes sense to put the two together.

Helpful resources

News about coronavirus is changing quickly. Go to inquirer.com/coronavirus to make sure you are seeing the newest information.
As you might expect at a time like this, regulatory concerns in Indian telecommunications have been changing somewhat.

For example, one of the three leading operators, Vodafone Idea, has asked Indias Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to clear its pending applications for spectrum allocation and regularise its backhaul spectrum. Clearly, with a three-week lockdown under way across the whole of India, Vodafone Ideas main focus is on ensuring 4G network availability.

The operator has said that it is deploying capacities using all means, including the addition of cells on wheels (COW) sites wherever appropriate. The operator has also said that a pandemic response plan with risk mitigation protocols is under way while ensuring continuity of mission-critical processes for keeping its networks working.

Vodafone Idea has also set up virtual war rooms through which key team members are able to communicate, and, it says, organised temporary stay arrangements at its data centres, as well as making food and groceries available at critical locations. It is also providing dedicated vehicles to facilitate the movement of technical staff to sites.

The other big regulatory issue  AGR payments  is, for now, no longer being addressed, according to a DoT official: no notices have been sent to the telecommunications companies relating to their AGR payments, nor have any discussions taken place on the topic. The DoT focus, like that of Vodafone Idea, is entirely on smooth running of operations during the pandemic.
If you are looking to embark on some self-improvement while stuck at home during the coronavirus outbreak, consider taking some free online college courses.

In fact, 450 Ivy League schools are among those offering the option, according to Class Central, an online education clearinghouse.

"There's a huge wealth of information" available, said Class Central CEO Dhawal Shah.

Whether you have been laid off in the wake of coronavirus business closures or find yourself working remotely, taking time for personal development could help you once the pandemic has ended.

"Shark Tank" investor Daymond John suggests you take this time to think like an entrepreneur.

That means if you are saving three hours of commuting a day, work for all or part of that time instead of treating it like a Saturday.

"You're educating yourself and getting as much information as you can to be a better person," said John, author of "Powershift: Transform Any Situation, Close Any Deal, and Achieve Any Outcome."

More from Invest in You:

How to ensure coronavirus outbreak doesn't cripple your retirement savings

College students scramble to solve food insecurity and housing challenges

Coronavirus cancellations: How to get your money back

Of course, do what you can depending on your situation  while you may be working from home, you may also be juggling children or aging parents.

It also depends on your interests, but Shah said there is a "big diversity" of courses available through online learning sites Coursera and edX  totaling about 13,000 courses from more than 900 universities. They are free to audit  or listen to  but you can also pay to do homework and receive a certificate.

However, while a certificate may look nice on your resume, auditing a class will help you gain invaluable knowledge that can help you advance in your career  and even help you ace an interview, Shah points out.

Some are even taught by world-renowned experts, like Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller, who teaches a financial markets course at Yale.

If you are new to online learning, Shah suggests first taking Learning How to Learn from the University of California, San Diego.

Here are a few other examples of the courses available:

You can check out all the free online courses available at Class Central.
Many disgruntled Family Court litigants, including a kangaroo shooter, were not fully investigated by police trying to solve the 1980 killing of judge David Opas, a Sydney trial has been told.

Elite and "prized" kangaroo shooters used one bullet to kill the animal in the head so the rest of the meat could be sold, solicitor Alan Conolly said on Thursday at the trial of his client Leonard Warwick.

Accused Family Court bomber Leonard Warwick being escorted from the Supreme Court in Sydney in 2018. Credit:AAP

Mr Warwick, 73, a former firefighter has pleaded not guilty to four murders, including the shooting of Mr Opas, and 20 other offences relating to seven events that occurred between February 1980 and July 1985.

The Crown contends the deaths and bombings are "inextricably linked" to drawn-out Family Court proceedings involving Mr Warwick and his former wife, Andrea Blanchard, which ran from 1979 to 1986.
DANBURY  Homeless individuals will stay at the Danbury War Memorial as officials try to get some clients into hotels amid the coronavirus outbreak.

The citys shelter on New Street is housing a few homeless individuals who may have been exposed to the virus, while other shelters have closed due to space and volunteer shortages.

The city had planned to house the homeless in a dorm at Western Connecticut State University, but the state nixed the idea hours before guests were set to move in.

Now, Mayor Mark Boughton aims to use the war memorial for the foreseeable future, with the hope that the state will make vouchers available for some clients to stay in hotels.

Were still working through that, he said. Thats going to be a while.

Three people were given vouchers on Monday because of a bed shortage, Boughton has said.

Across Connecticut, funding has been provided to place 200 elderly homeless individuals in 100 hotel rooms, the state housing department has said. The goal is to get those who are over 60and thus at higher risk for the virus out of shelters and into hotels.

The department also allocated $735,000 to get people into permanent housing.

The homeless are considered to be at greater risk for the virus because they sleep in close quarters and may already have health problems, experts have said.

Boughton hopes the state can provide staffing, too, but has not gotten word on if or when this would happen. The city had been struggling to man its shelter because of the virus, but recently hired four people directed to the city through various non-profits, he said.

Were getting it covered, but were continuing to onboard people until weve got enough staff, Boughton said.

Homeless individuals have been staying at the war memorial since Tuesday night. About 50 people stayed there Wednesday night, Boughton said.

It goes up some nights, it goes down, he said. A lot of it is weather dependent.

Dorothy Day Hospitality House, a 16-bed non-profit shelter that closed temporarily largely because of space restrictions, moved its grab-and-go meals to the war memorial on Wednesday evening, according to its website.

The Community Care Team, a network of agencies and nonprofit providers that assists the homeless, has continued to work with the population as much as it can, Boughton said.

Theyre doing the best they can under this recent crisis, he said.

Clients have been understanding of the upheaval, Boughton said.

Facing those personal challenges in their life is hard enough as it is, he said. On top of that, having to be shuttled from facility to facility can be upsetting and difficult. Theyve been very cooperative and very helpful
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 13:02:17|Editor: huaxia

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KATHMANDU, March 26 (Xinhua) -- It is a challenge for Nepal to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations Resident Coordinator for Nepal, Valerie Julliand, has said while describing the South Asian nation's virus response so far as "satisfactory."

Nepal, in its third day of a week-long nationwide lockdown Thursday, has reported three confirmed cases.

Julliand said she welcomed the government decision made on Monday to order a lockdown hours after the report of the second case of novel coronavirus infection in the country, adding Nepal is actually learning from China and other countries and implementing similar measures.

"It is hard for the country as it puts geo-economy and life of the country on hold, but it's still a good decision to take," Julliand told Xinhua.

She said the pandemic cannot be fought by only one actor, but there should be individual responsibility from the general public and solidarity from every sector.

"It's definitely a challenge to fight the epidemic" for Nepal considering its development status, but the country's level of preparedness against COVID-19 is "satisfactory," she noted.

"We are closely working with the Ministry of Home Affairs and different entities of government. Instead of having separate plans for UN or for government, we have a joint planning which is more important to make the response more efficient and more coordinated," said the UN official.

According to her, Nepal has made preparations accordingly for response to the projected COVID-19 situation with a few cases, 1,500 cases or over 7,000 cases.

The UN official in Nepal also said more efforts are needed for the government to have a high level of communication with the whole population including those without access to any media.

On the long-term economic and social impacts of the coronavirus on the nation of about 29 million people, Valerie expressed the concern that some Nepali people might become impoverished after the end of outbreak.

"Health response is the central point during such a pandemic, but we also need to have a larger view of social and economic impacts," she said.
Mexican President Lopez Obrador vows to help the poor and not the big companies according to a recently published article.

In this time of economic and global health crisis, poor or those who belong in the poverty line are one of the most vulnerable groups. They need helping hands as they struggle to face their daily needs every day.

PRESIDENT LOPEZ OBRADOR'S COMMITMENT TO THE POOR

It has been the commitment of President Obrador even during his candidacy that he will help the poor and those who belong in the poverty line. In February last year, he said that his administration would embrace on what he called "Franciscan Poverty". This means that his administration would transfer funds to the people and help them achieve jobs, welfare, and development.

During his presidential campaign, the following were the platforms that Pres. Obrador touted to Mexicans:

Greater aid to the poor

Free medical care and food subsidies for the elderly

The rewriting of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement

And the end to the further privatization of the country's oil and gas industries

This time, Pres. Obrador will prove that he will now turn into flesh his Presidential campaign platforms that center towards helping the poor.

PRES. OBRADOR PRIORITIZES THE POOR AMID COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The number of COVID-19 cases in Mexico continues to swell. As of Monday, the officials in the country have tallied 367 cases of Mexicans who tested positive for the virus. There were also four death toll that included two people who had a pre-existing medical condition, diabetes.

As a response to this problem, the Mexican president vows to help the poor and not the big companies. His administration is yet to unveil the plans that are intended to help the vulnerable group who are now struggling because of the economic effect and impacts of COVID-19.

During his daily news conference, he told the reporters:

"If we have to rescue someone, who do we have to rescue? The poor."

This clearly shows how he feels for this vulnerable group.

He also added: "No more rescues in the style of the neo-liberal period, that provided for banks, big companies. They shouldn't even be thinking that there will be tax forgiveness or other mechanisms that were used before."

The Mexican President later on posted on his Twitter account that he will unveil his plans for the poor and to protect the country's most vulnerable group in this time of global health and economic crisis. He also asserted that the country had sufficient public finances.

The action of Pres. Obrador which is to help the poor rather than the big companies is a clear manifestation that he lives with the center of his campaign agenda that centers programs for the poor. This will also give a strong message to other countries to have plans not only for the displaced employees but also for those who belong in the poverty line.

President Obrador is a known leftist and when he took office as the President in the country he took a vow that his administration will prioritize the poor. He also oftentimes blamed the previous administration because of the country's many problems.

Read related articles:
Armenias government formally approved on Thursday a multimillion-dollar stimulus package designed to cushion the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on businesses and ordinary people.

The plan makes most Armenian firms as well as farmers eligible for financial assistance or credit subsidies.

It also calls for one-off cash handouts to citizens who have lost their jobs this month due to economic disruption caused by coronavirus. They will receive 100,000 drams ($200) each if they have children under the age of 14 and are the sole breadwinners of their families.

The main focus of the wide-ranging aid is on struggling businesses. In particular, creditworthy firms and individual entrepreneurs will receive grants worth $500 million (just over $1 million) if they pledge to use that money to pay their workers wages, buy equipment or raw materials or pay taxes. The scheme will not apply to Armenian banks, insurance companies and casinos.

The government promised additional grants to those small businesses that have not laid off any workers in recent weeks. The amount of such funding will depend on the volume of their annual turnover.

The government will also enable small firms to receive low-interest loans with subsidies to be paid to commercial banks.

The banks will also be paid to provide cheap credit to farmers across the country. The latter will be able to borrow up to 1 million drams each and avoid paying any interest for two years.

If farmers set up cooperatives and launch major agricultural projects the government will co-finance between 30 percent and 70 percent of them.

If a cooperative decides, for example, to take a 200 million-dram loan it will only need 60 million drams worth of collateral, Economy Minister Tigran Khachatrian said during a cabinet meeting. The government will cover the rest.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said, for his part, that the government assistance will also boost Armenias banking system. We want the circulatory system of our economy to start working again, he told ministers.

Pashinian insisted that the coronavirus relief package will not only help the domestic economy weather the storm but also lay the groundwork for its renewed expansion during the post-epidemic period.

The premier did not specify the total amount of the emergency funding. He said last week that the government plans to inject at least 150 billion drams ($300 million) into the economy. Armenias overall public spending is projected to total around $4 billion this year.

Opposition leaders dismissed the promised aid as insufficient. During a parliament debate on Wednesday, some of them called on the government to impose a blanket freeze on all loan repayments in the country.

Pashinian rejected those calls. He said the banks should deal with defaulting clients on a case-by-case basis. Some banks have already decided to extend repayment deadlines for consumer and mortgage loans by two months.
The United States continues to see record numbers of new cases of COVID-19, posting 9,707 just yesterday, with 128 further deaths. With 64,563 cases of the infection, only 393 recoveries have so far been reported. More than 900 people have lost their lives thus far, and all these deaths must be considered preventable, had the government acted diligently and in earnest. New York state has faced the brunt of the pandemic, with 30,811 cases. However, many other states are being identified as centers of the disease, as new hot clusters deplete these regions of their already limited resources.

City after city in the United States is going into shutdown, and rapidly experiencing significant declines in revenue, while expenditures are rising dramatically in response to the health crisis. More than 90 percent of US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and wages income stems from economic activities in large cities throughout the country. The pandemic, affecting urban centers predominantly, is quickly reaching a critical juncture in which the cities fiscal crisis could impact their future recovery.

A patient wears a protective face mask as she is loaded into an ambulance at The Brooklyn Hospital Center emergency room, Wednesday, March 18, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

The Senate, meanwhile, is still wrangling over a bipartisan $2 trillion-dollar corporate bailout. Senator Charles Schumer of New York said, To all Americans, I say, Help is on the way. Governor Gavin Newsom, in his update on Californias response to the coronavirus, said yesterday that the state had seen more than one million unemployment claims in less than two weeks. The bill, however, will do little to stem the effects of mass unemployment for millions of working people, who will receive a completely inadequate one-time payout of $1,200.

Furthermore, the bill contains a paltry $150 billion that would provide economic aid to state and local governments. Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York, complained that the legislation would provide his state a mere $3.8 billion (only $1.3 billion for New York City), when the expanding outbreak is already severely straining the states physical and financial response capacity. The state is facing a revenue shortfall of nearly $15 billion, a figure many times larger than the proposed aid from Washington. Cuomo called lawmakers yesterday, pleading for more assistance. At his daily briefing, he told reporters, This is a drop in the bucket. How do you plug a $15 billion hole with $3.8 billion? You dont.

Dani Lever, Cuomos spokeswoman, declared, The gross political manipulation is obvious. Compounding this inequity is the fact that New York State contributes more to the federal government than any other state in the nation. It is just another case of politics over sound policy.

Last week, the United States Conference of Mayors sent a letter to Congress requesting $250 billion for direct emergency assistance to cities throughout the nation. They wrote, Lost revenue from economic contraction will put pressure on the ability to deliver basic servicesincluding police, fire, water, and seweror aid business sectors that serve as the foundation of our metro economies. Without significant federal assistance, we soon will be faced with having to make decisions that could include laying off employees, cutting budgets, and reducing or eliminating critically needed services.

The number of US states that have initiated lockdowns has increased to eighteenNew York, California, Washington, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Hawaii, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, West Virginia and Wisconsin. More states are expected to follow suit, as officials are compelled to respond to increasing cases of COVID-19 showing up in hospital emergency rooms.

It is also essential to note that a significant number of younger people in the US suffer from obesity and the concomitant triad of diabetes, hypertension and elevated cholesterol, putting them at increased risk. Louisiana, which has seen an exponential rise in new cases, reaching nearly 1,800 and with 65 deaths, reported today that 35 percent of those who have died were people under the age of 60. Nine of these people were under the age of 50.

The White House touted a slight modification of its suggestion that the economy could be reopened by Easter Sunday, suggesting that areas that are not as impacted can have restrictions lifted, businesses opened, and workers return to their place of employment. The administration also implied that cases in New York had peaked and thus that social distancing measures were proving successful. Numerous experts and medical sources said it was far too soon to draw this conclusion.

New York has completed more COVID-19 tests than any other state, but, due to strict restrictions on testing, the exact number of cases remains unknown. Additionally, as people begin to escape the city, they are taking the contagion with them, which occurred in Italy after a partial lockdown in the North, as well as in Wuhan, in China, before the Lunar New Year, causing the infection to spread beyond Chinas borders.

Without a national, simultaneous lockdown of the entire country that is kept in place for approximately three to four weeks, the infection will be transferred between states, leading to new clusters of outbreaks. In the US, the number of deaths is almost doubling every three days, with the number of new cases doubling in nearly two days. New York is seeing a doubling of its death rate almost every 1.5 days. Neither the US nor New York has shown an inflection in their curves.

Governor Cuomo is pleading for 30,000 more ventilators on top of the 7,000 presently on hand. With only 53,000 beds, he projected that 140,000 would be required when the apex of the wave slams upon the state. At Elmhurst Hospital Center in Elmhurst Queens, a refrigerated truck has already been stationed outside the 545-bed public hospital to receive the corpses that are beginning to pile up. In the last 24 hours, 13 people have died. As Governor Cuomo grimly forecast at his press conference, Where New York is today, you will be in 3 to 4 weeks. We are your future.

President Trump continues to deny the seriousness of the disaster and ignores the need for urgent and massive medical intervention, instead highlighting the rise of the stock market over the last two days.

Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization (WHO) said during his news conference today that the world had squandered its first chance at containing the virus. He was referring to the time bought by Chinas massive efforts to slow the epidemics progression in Wuhan and Hubei province. He warned that the world could not afford to squander the second opportunity.

The WHO, under immense pressure because of the financial support it receives from the wealthiest capitalist nations, must choose its language carefully. Despite the cautious wording of its statements, it is clear that the US response to the pandemic is one of malign neglect, which is endangering the lives of millions, especially the working class, all over the world.
The hanging of four Nirbhaya convicts on March 20 was widely celebrated across the country as they finally got what they deserved after years of legal battle that Jyoti Singhs parents were brave enough to put up with. However, even with the capital punishment finally coming to pass, many people still believe that the true justice wasnt served.

Given the seven-year delay in carrying out the death penalties, the mental harassment Jyotis family was put through over the years and with a main convict getting off scot-free because he was tried as a juvenile even when he didnt deserve it, dissatisfaction with the functioning of our legal system ran high amongst the masses.

 Twitter

Unfortunately, such is the level of disappointment that people have come to question the Indian legal system. Owing to its many loopholes and liberal extensions, it failed to live up to the expectations of the Indian society which saw convicts manipulating the law to serve themselves and evade punishment for years.



Keeping in mind these grave injustices and the shared frustrations amongst people, we reached out to Mumbai-based lawyer Arka Navle to get a few answers and understand why things went the way that they did.

Problem 1: The Perfectly Flawed Indian Legal System

 Twitter DDNews

Advocate Navle said, Indias litigation system rocks on paper, but it is nowhere close to being practical in reality. In this country, be it a rape case or any other, everyone involved must get a chance to fair trial. Both sides have to be heard. Thats the law. Even when things are out in the open, the crime and the criminal are known, the Indian legal system will still give a chance to both the parties to present their case before the court.



So basically, in our country even an accused cannot be denied his right to life and personal liberty, because Article 21 of the Indian Constitution makes fair trial a part of life and personal liberty for all Indian citizens.

Problem 2: India Loves Its Processes

 Wikipedia

Whether to serve the powerful and give them a chance to evade the justice system, or help lawyers earn their bread and butter, the Indian legal system has set procedures in place which cannot be jumped for anyone, or so it says on paper.



There are due legal processes which have to be followed before a judgement can be passed by the court of law. Though you may fast-track certain special cases as and when those appear but thats it, others will have to follow the procedures given in the books of law, the advocate said.

Problem 3: The Nirbhaya Case Was No Special

 Twitter

Talking about the delay in carrying out the indictment of the Nirbhaya accused, advocate Navle said, The Nirbhaya case took seven years because they were following these very procedures. The case went from the Trial Court to the High Court and then to the Supreme Court - you have to follow the steps. Apart from that, even the accused had their own set of rights, and as we know all four of them did utilise them. Once those were exhausted, the final hanging verdict was given. Now the system is such that it allows people to exploit such loopholes and provisions given to accused, which we witnessed even in this case.



Problem 4: Inherent Public Lethargy Rooted In Litigation Proceedings

 Lawandotherthings(dot)com

Advocate Navle also believes that lethargy in the public and within the system also adds to the extensive time taken in clearing cases. The legal systems approach as well as the mindset of people makes them hate the following-up process, which ends in cases getting extended for years. She gave the example of the entire litigation of Sexual Harassment Of Women At Workplace, the judgement for which was passed in the 90s but went on to become an Act years later only in 2013.



Problem 5: Lack Of Top Manpower, Lack Of Judges

 Masterfile(dot)com

Advocate Navle said that lack of judges in courts is perhaps the biggest factor thats adding to the constant delays. There are too many cases in court and not enough judges to hear and clear them. At times, hearing takes months because there is a heavy board. Now the trial processes are such that one litigation turns into five more litigations along the way, and eventually there are too many hearings to deal with, and with a shortage of judges the entire process ends up taking years at times, Navle said.



In an official document presented by The Union Law Ministry in March 2018, the Ministry stated that on an average, India has only 19 judges per 10 lakh people, with scores of judges seats in courts lying vacant.

Problem 6: People Within The System Exploit It

 Panorama Studios

Advocate Navle also stated, The system is not completely flawed but people within the system are trying to exploit it to serve their own purpose. They knew the system, how it works and exploit it.



However, she also added that the system cannot change on its own, but will only happen when people who are a part of it decide to change things. Now while many of us know about the shortcomings of our legal system and want to change it, the majority of the lawyers dont want that to happen because a lengthy process ensures that money keeps trickling in for them over a longer period of time, she added.

 Benaras Media Works

Besides, she said that the way the lawyers are treated in our country also adds to this woe. If lawyers had the benefit of getting some sort of monthly financial security, or some subsidies or relaxations to take care of their basic needs things may not have been that bad. They wouldnt want to keep things hanging if they know their sustenance wont be under threat with a few closed cases.



Problem 7: Bureaucratic Involvement In Matters Of The Court

 BCCL

Judiciary should be independent and is supposed to give checks and balances to the bureaucracy and the legislature but in practise it is highly influenced. If politics is taken out of the loop, things will surely get faster and quicker. Judges should be independent and unbiased, and work away from external influence.



This interaction was certainly insightful, but if you feel theres more to it let us know in the comments section below.
A leading figure in the popular uprising in Algeria, also known as Hirak, was sentenced Tuesday to one year in prison in a trial denounced by his defense who was not informed about the hearing.

Karim Tabbou, a political activist, in prison since September was summoned in court in capital Algiers Tuesday.

The prosecution charged him with undermining national unity. He was sentenced to six months in prison and an additional six-month suspended sentence.

His lawyers and the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights (LADDH) expect him to be freed on March 26 for time served since he was detained in September, reports say.

His defense Tuesday said he was dragged into an announced trial though he was sick and could not talk. Abdelghani Badi, member of his defense team, said the activist suffered from a stroke and lost the use of some limbs.

The lawyer also indicated that they were not informed beforehand of the trial. Badi argued that the verdict was rendered while Tabbou was taken away to receive treatment.

The judge didnt want to listen, and withdrew to deliberate, Amine Sidhom, another member of the defense told AFP.

When he got out, he announced a sentence of a year in prison.

Tabbou is among the leading public figures of the popular uprising that has rocked the North African country since February last year when thousands of Algerians rose up against the autocratic regime.

Despite the presidential elections held in December, bringing to power Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the movement continued until last week when the President banned all gatherings and demonstrations on the grounds of the fight against Covid-19, which has killed 21 people and infected 302 people.
A 30-year-old Nepal national, who was assaulted by some men, succumbed to his injuries in Mumbai on Saturday. The police investigation found he was thrashed by unknown men in Pune. The police have transferred the case to the Pune police. Dukhi Thapa, 30, arrived in Navi Mumbai on March 18. He was injured after he was thrashed by unknown men in Pune. Thapas relatives in Mumbra admitted him to a hospital in Kalwa on March 20.

The hospital transferred him to KEM Hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries on Saturday. Thapa worked as a security guard.

According to the police, at least three persons thrashed him with bamboo sticks. The reason for the assault is not known to the police yet.

During our investigation, we found a local man had influenced the victims family and made them lie about the place of crime to get the case registered. Since the man was assaulted in Pune. We have registered a case of murder and transferred it to the Pune police, said Kashinath Chavan, senior inspector at Taloja police station.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 11:07:45|Editor: huaxia

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KUNMING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- After scanning a health QR code to register her personal information, Zeng Qingliang and her husband had their temperatures taken and hands disinfected before entering the Chongsheng Temple and Three Pagodas Scenic Area in the city of Dali, southwest China's Yunnan Province.

"We have been stranded at home for over a month due to the novel coronavirus outbreak," said Zeng, from southwest China's Chongqing Municipality. "Now that some of Dali's scenic spots have reopened, we couldn't wait to come here for the beautiful scenery and fresh air."

The scenic area, which reopened to tourists from low-risk regions on March 19, receives a daily average of about 400 visitors, most of whom hail from other parts of Yunnan or the neighboring provinces, said Yang Yanxia, deputy general manager of the scenic spot.

"The number of visitors has been steadily rising since the reopening, despite a sharp decline compared to normal years," Yang added.

The Chongsheng Temple Scenic Area is among a growing number of tourist attractions in Dali that have resumed operations as the COVID-19 epidemic is leveling off across China. The city's hard-hit tourism industry is showing signs of a rebound with the rising influx of visitors.

In the old town of Dali, a major tourist draw dating back more than 600 years, nearly one-third of its stores have resumed business.

Tourists are flocking here to buy silverware and other traditional handicrafts, take a bite of local specialties such as rose cakes and rice noodles, as well as appreciate the imposing Cangshan Mountain and rippling Erhai Lake that sandwich the historic town.

As of March 21, more than 6,900 tourists visited the old town since its reopening on March 10, and the figure is expected to grow steadily as the weather turns balmy and the epidemic subdues nationwide, according to the town's protection administration bureau.

The owner of a rice noodle shop in the old town told Xinhua reporters that her shop has been receiving more and more customers in the past few days and "the old town's bustling scenes are coming back."

However, for Dali's many homestay owners, the post-epidemic recovery has been far from easy. Having lost all their reservations during the peak travel period of the Chinese Spring Festival holiday, the owners are now further troubled by the lack of long-distance travelers and high operational costs.

Liu Yuting, general manager of a bed and breakfast in the old town, said only two out of the 16 rooms in the hotel were booked a day on average over the past few weeks.

But Liu remains optimistic about the recovery of Dali's homestay industry. "The tourists are now coming back and their demand for homestays will rebound," she said.

For Liu Jianqiao, owner of another homestay sitting by Erhai Lake, things have turned around more quickly. "Nearly half of our guest rooms have been booked since we resumed operations in early March, which is on par with the number before the epidemic," she said.

She attributed such a speedy rebound to the livestreaming business she started during the closing of her homestay.

"We have livestreamed our rooms, food and the nice scenery around the hotel, which has helped attract new customers," she said. "Besides, we did a good job maintaining our rooms and training our staff online. That's probably why we are back on track in such a short time."

In a bid to speed up the recovery of the tourism industry, local authorities in Dali are cooperating with financial institutions to issue low-interest loans to tourism companies affected by the epidemic, according to the Dali municipal culture and tourism bureau.
Calls have intensified for developed nations to consider suspending debt repayments by African nations in order to help them tackle the coronavirus pandemic.



Earlier this week, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed issued a memorandum to leaders of the G20 - a group of countries with the largest economies - asking them to consider writing off interests in loans owed by African nations.



As the leaders hold their virtual emergency summit on Thursday, British charity Oxfam has written to them asking for a debt moratorium.



Oxfam says African countries are already using scarce resources to try and stop the spread of coronavirus.



Speaking ahead of the virtual summit, Oxfam Pan Africa Director Peter Kamalingin said:



This is the moment that Africa needs to use all its existing resources to cope with the emergency. This is the moment that Africa needs to use all its existing resources to cope with the emergency.



It makes no sense for African countries to transfer much-needed resources to foreign banks, developed nations with capacity to cope with the pandemic, or international institutions.It makes no sense for African countries to transfer much-needed resources to foreign banks, developed nations with capacity to cope with the pandemic, or international institutions.

Source: BBC









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Irish businesswoman Kate Verling is donating 1,500 face masks to the National Maternity Hospital because she felt a moral obligation to help during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ms Verling, who is nine months pregnant with her first child, owns Mink nail salon with her parents Jim and Orla Verling. With premises in Donnybrook and Ballsbridge, Ms Verling said they were left with a surplus of stock and learned the staff at Holles Street were in need of equipment and so the timing was serendipitous.

Fianna Fails health spokesman Stephen Donnelly said the average spend on personal protective equipment in hospitals will increase from 15million to 240 million and frontline workers are in serious need of he necessary tools to tackle the global health crisis.

On March 16, Ms Verling made the decision to close the doors to her business. She employs over 60 staff.

"We totally overstocked on masks and we felt a bit guilty because we had so many at the salon and realistically we will be closed for the foreseeable future," she told the Irish Independent.

"The surplus was there and we learned that Holles Street was short. We happened to be in the right place at the right time."

Ms Verling said she was especially keen to help staff at the National Maternity Hospital because of her own experience with Hyperemesis gravidarum (extreme morning sickness), crediting the midwives and nurses for their compassion throughout her pregnancy.

"Everyone in there is nicer than the next and my husband and I have been thinking about ways we could help beyond fundraising," she explained. "It was a lovely twist of fate to be able to help in this way."

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Whatsapp Dr Vanessa Creaven has volunteered her dental services to administer coronavirus testing

The salons cater to an average of 800 clients per week and staff are also helping elderly customers who are self-isolating by dropping off 'DIY nail kits' on their doorsteps to facilitate nail care to vulnerable people.

The Irish Spa Association has also launched an online appeal for donations of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment).

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Similarly, Spotlight Oral Care, run by dentist sisters Dr Lisa and Vanessa Creavan, have been ensuring nightly drop-ins of oral hygiene packs like bamboo toothbrushes and toothpastes to medical workers who are working double shifts and therefore unable to stock up on any personal essentials.

"For the healthcare professionals, we're doing a couple hundreds drop-offs to hospitals around Ireland. A lot of nurses and doctors got in touch with us over social media to say they need practical things and are working such long hours they don't have time to brush their teeth."

They are also working with their suppliers from around the world about importing any masks and gloves. As dentists, both Creavan sisters have volunteered to administer coronavirus testing, which is administered through the nose and mouth.

Irish designer Eamonn McGill said he has also been in touch with health service executives about making scrubs.

On a wider scale, H&M Group will be supplying protective equipment for hospitals using their expansive factories and established supply chains.
Bengaluru: Karnataka government has warned strict penal action against landlords or house-owners under provisions of law for forcing doctors, paramedical staff and healthcare professionals to vacate their rented residences citing COVID-19 spread through them as the reason.

Stating that lot of complaints have been received in this regard, an order issued by additional chief secretary, Health and Family Welfare department, Jawaid Akhtar said such behaviour amounted to obstructing public servant in discharging their duties.

Noting that the state government has issued Karnataka Epidemic Diseases (COVID-19) regulations 2020 for prevention and containment of the virus, it directed deputy commissioners of the district, commissioner and joint commissioner of BBMP (civic body in Bengaluru), commissioners of Municipal Corporations and district deputy commissioner of police to take action against such incidents.

"Strict penal action should be taken against such landlords or house-owners under relevant provisions of law and submit an action taken report on a daily basis to office of additional chief secretary, Home Department," the order read.
KYODO NEWS - Mar 26, 2020 - 19:01 | All, Japan, Coronavirus

(File photo )

[Getty/Kyodo]

TOKYO - Hundreds of Japanese nationals are currently stranded overseas due to travel restrictions meant to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, the Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

A ministry official said he could not say precisely how many are stranded in total because the number is fluctuating as circumstances change, but that they are spread out over more than 60 countries and regions.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across North America, Europe and other parts of the world, many countries have closed off their borders and imposed lockdowns on their citizens.

Some 260 Japanese nationals are stuck in Peru, where international flights have been grounded since March 17. Most are tourists and are hoping to return on a chartered flight being arranged by a travel agency.

Another 120 have become unable to return from Uzbekistan, mostly expatriates. They may be able to take a chartered plane back to Japan in early April, another ministry official said.

Other countries and regions include Cote d'Ivoire, Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, with less than 10 Japanese stranded in most cases.

"The circumstances are different for each country. In some cases, they can cross over into a neighboring country and fly home from there," Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi told an upper house committee meeting.

"We are looking at options for how to bring these people back safely."

The ministry on Wednesday raised its travel advisory to Level 2 on its four-point scale, meaning it advises against all nonessential international travel.

Related coverage:

Japan struggling to get a grip on social distancing

Telework, stockpiling spread as Tokyo tightens grip over coronavirus

Gov't panel says coronavirus infections feared "rampant" in Japan
Dixons Carphone has issued a profit warning after shutting all of its stores across the UK following the new coronavirus lockdown regime but said it has not yet decided if it will axe its dividend.

The retailer said recent trading has been strong, with sales of laptops and TVs jumping especially in recent weeks and online, as people prepared for the coronavirus lockdown and already stayed away from shops.

But despite the recent spike in sales, store closures in the UK as well as in Greece mean it will miss out on about 400million of sales for the rest of the year and so does not expect to hit its 210million pre-tax profit target.

Profit warning: The group expects to miss out on about 400m of sales due to store closures

The group said it will decide if to pay a full year dividend once it has a clearer picture of the situation.

Carphone Dixons shares rose 1.3 per cent to 81.74p in morning trading on Thursday.

The group, which earlier this month announced the permanent closure of all of its Carphone stores with the loss of 2,900 jobs, saw strong trading before the coronavirus hit.

And while all its stores have been closed since March 24 due to the coronavirus, it said it has been seeing 'very strong' online trading, which jumped 72 per cent over in the three weeks to 21 March.

'Online trading has been very strong in all countries over the last two weeks as people have been preparing to work from home and use essential technology to continue their lives during the coronavirus outbreak,' it said.

'Early signs are that this strong trading has continued since stores closed and will help to compensate for lost store sales.'

In the eleven weeks from the beginning of January to 21 March, just days before the official shutdown, like-for-like sales of electrical items was up 8 per cent.

And over the last three weeks, as people prepared themselves to be stuck at home, like-for-like sales of electricals jumped 35 per cent.

It said the most in demand items laptops, printers, TVs, games, fridges, freezers and other kitchen appliances.

Working from home: Sales of laptops as well as printers, TVs, games, fridges, freezers and other kitchen appliances soared over the last three weeks and people prepared for lockdown

Mobile sales remain the problem though, plunging 15 per cent in the eleven weeks through to 21 March, with the decline accelerating to 24 per cent in the last three weeks.

Dixons Carphone has faced a turbulent three years in its mobile business as shoppers move online and upgrade handsets less often.

Sophie Lund-Yates, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: 'Coronavirus is a problem for Dixons, with the expected loss of around 400m in sales from stores it's been forced to close. Inevitably a sales hole that big can't be filled, even if some customers now switch to the group's online channels.

'As a result the group's doing what it can to keep cash on the balance sheet, which is the right thing to do. Sadly as is becoming the norm across the market, the full extent of the financial damage simply won't be known until we have a clearer picture.'
Amid nationwide lockdown, the Centre on Thursday said the state governments are working on measures to provide food and shelter to migrant workers.

"The government is taking steps to ensure the production, supply or distribution of essential goods and services do not get affected during coronavirus lockdown. States are working to provide food and shelter to migrant workers," Punya Salila Srivastava, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, told media here.

R Ganga Ketkar of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said the steps taken by the government are so effective that if the people follow them strictly, the coronavirus cases will hardly increase in the country.

Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, said, "On our request, work has started in around 17 states for COVID-19 dedicated hospitals."

A total of 649 confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been reported in India so far, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare informed today.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Philip Pullella VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis and Christians worldwide recited 'The Lord's Prayer' on Wednesday to ask God to stop the coronavirus pandemic which has infected nearly half a million people, disrupted countless lives and shut down churches and other public venues. Francis invited all other Christian leaders and individual Christians on Sunday to recite the 'Our Father' prayer simultaneously at noon Italian time (1100 GMT) on Wednesday. 'In this moment, we want to implore (God's) mercy for a humanity so sorely tried by the coronavirus pandemic.

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis and Christians worldwide recited "The Lord's Prayer" on Wednesday to ask God to stop the coronavirus pandemic which has infected nearly half a million people, disrupted countless lives and shut down churches and other public venues.

Francis invited all other Christian leaders and individual Christians on Sunday to recite the 'Our Father' prayer simultaneously at noon Italian time (1100 GMT) on Wednesday.

"In this moment, we want to implore (God's) mercy for a humanity so sorely tried by the coronavirus pandemic. We do it together, Christians of every Church and Community, of every tradition, of every age, language and nation," he said.

In an introduction to the "Our Father", which is also known as "The Lord's Prayer", he said it was also for "the sick and their families, health workers and those who assist them, for authorities, police forces and volunteers, for the (religious) ministers of our communities".

There are about 2.3 billion Christians in the world, of whom some 1.3 billion are Roman Catholics.

The 83-year-old Francis prayed from inside the Vatican, where he has been holed up for the past few weeks as a precaution as Italy has imposed stringent measures to tackle what has become the world's worst outbreak of the disease.

BLESSINGS VIA INTERNET AND TV

The pope has been holding his general audiences and Sunday blessings over the internet and television from the official papal library instead of before crowds numbering tens of thousands of people in St. Peter's Square.

There are over 420,000 cases of coronavirus reported across 196 countries, according to a Reuters tally at 0200 GMT on Tuesday. About 19,000 deaths are linked to the virus.

Italy has reported more than 5,000 infections in the past day alone and total infections are now almost 70,000. Italy will overtake China's case load of 81,000 within days if the rate of infection continues at this pace.

Italy had reported 6,820 coronavirus-linked deaths as of 1700 GMT on Tuesday, the highest toll in the world.

Francis' Easter activities next month also will be held without the direct participation of the faithful, the Vatican has said.

Masses in Italy and many other countries around the world have been suspended so that people do not gather in large numbers but most churches are still open for individual prayer.

The pope's trip to Malta on May 31 has been indefinitely postponed and a trip to Indonesia, East Timor and Papua New Guinea that had been expected for September will most likely not take place.

This Friday, Francis will deliver an extraordinary "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) blessing - normally given only at Christmas and Easter.

Catholics who receive the blessing, either in person or via the media, can, under certain conditions, receive a special indulgence. An indulgence is remission of punishment for sins.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Gareth Jones)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
The Edo State Government on Thursday begun the fumigation of streets, markets and other public places to check the spread of COVID-19 in the state.

The State Deputy Governor and Chairman, Edo State COVID-19 Response Committee, Philip Shaibu, told journalists during the inauguration of the fumigation exercise in Benin that the efforts was to protect lives of Edo people.

Mr Shaibu said the fumigation which began in Benin would be done simultaneously across the 18 local government areas of the state.

Today we are here to kick off the fumigation of all streets, markets and other public places in Benin.

The exercise will be done simultaneously across the 18 local government areas.

The local government council chairmen have been directed to carry out this exercise and monitor it to ensure that the rural areas are properly fumigated, he said.

On the enforcement of government stay at home order, Shaibu said: we have observed partial compliance and this is not acceptable.

We have therefore directed the security agencies to move swiftly to ensure full compliance.

Seating guidelines have been reviewed after meeting with the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW).

The new seating arrangements will now be for cars one passenger in front and two at the back.

READ ALSO:

For Buses, it will now be one passenger in front and two in each row, he said.

The deputy governor said all transport operators are mandated to ensure correct information on manifest of travellers.

Manifest must be made available on request by government officials for contact tracing, Mr Shaibu said.

(NAN)
Families across the UK are in lockdown, which means parents are spending more time than ever with their children.

While mothers and fathers with active toddlers and younger children are fighting to keep them entertained, those with teenagers and 'grown-up' children who have returned home are finding themselves navigating their own tricky circumstances.

Teenagers and adult children, particularly those at university or who have left home, are used to a far greater level of freedom than they can currently enjoy.

Hannah Martin, a British psychotherapist and founder of the Talented Ladies Club, explained: 'Teenagers are used to more freedom - and for many their friends are everything to them. They're also likely to be worried about what's happening to the world around them, especially if they've been robbed of their exams and the parties afterwards.

'Add this into a swirling mix of hormones and desire to challenge authority and you have a difficult mix for parents trapped indoors with them.'

FEMAIL spoke to Hannah and family counsellor Peter Saddington, of UK-based charity Relate, who shared practical steps every parent can take to help maintain the peace while in lockdown.

Families across the UK are in lockdown, which means parents are spending more time than ever with their children. An expert shared advice for surviving with teenagers. Stock image

Help them understand the rules

Hannah said: 'First of all, it's important to remember that no one likes being told what to do but teenagers have a deep aversion to it. So rather than simply laying down the law, "or else" try to help them understand why we need to take these measures.

Encourage then to watch the news with you, and try to get them to see that we all need to rally together to protect the vulnerable and elderly.

'If you have elderly relatives or friends, you can even bring this home with personal examples. For example, "Wouldn't you hate it if granny fell sick and died? We need to help protect her by staying in for a while".'

Create boundaries

It is a good idea to establish boundaries regarding a teenager or adult child behaviour. For example, you might want to consider discussing how much time your child spends on their phone or alone in their room.

Build a structure A structure can often reduce anxiety as it provides consistency at a time when there are constant changes. University students may have some guidance about what work they should be doing and so they can build a structure around this. Adult children may have things to work on if emails are coming in or they have pieces of work to do at home. Offering advice to children, Mr Saddington said: 'You're wanting to build in a structure so you've got time for connecting with your friends, you've got time for exercise, you've got time for healthy stuff but you've also got to start building in schedule about when you're going to keep up with work.' Advertisement

Any time alone should be balanced with time together as a family. Make clear that everyone will come together for meals, or spend time together in the evenings after dinner. Then there's an expectation for the family to spend time together.

Mr Saddington added: 'It's that negotiating about what's individual, what's family and what's the interpersonal bit between you and the young person.'

Give them options

Hannah said: 'Try to give them options as much as possible - even if it's an illusion of choice - so they can have a sense of control over their situation.

'For example, "Would you like to go for a walk around the park with me this morning or afternoon?" And give them treats to look forward to as much as possible. If you can get their favourite food, do.'

Try to avoid being confrontational by using 'I' rather than 'you' when speaking. Stock image

Have daily 'check-ins'

Make sure at least one parent checks-in with the child every day. Taking time each day to ask about their day and how they are feeling gives the child an opportunity to share any worries or concerns they might have.

Mr Saddington said: 'It's very easy when you're looking at the Internet to feel more anxious because there's different news coming out all the time.

Use 'I' rather than 'you' when speaking Mr Saddington said the language you use to communicate with each other is really important as it sets the tone for the conversation. It can be beneficial, for example, to use 'I' statements instead of 'you' statements. Instead of saying 'you're always on the phone, you never listen to us', you can say 'I've been worried about how you're going to manage'. It is also important to allow time to listen to what your child has to say. Mr Saddington advised asking 'what do you think you need from us?' and 'what do you think you're going to do to help the family in this situation?' rather than 'we need you to do this' and 'you're not doing that'. Advertisement

'It's very easy by talking to friends to have a heightened tension. Whereas some friends will be saying this, some friends will be saying that.'

A daily check-in is beneficial for both sides as the adult knows what the young adult is worried about and they know there's an expectation to share worries every day.

Encourage contact with friends

It's easier for teenagers than children in this lockdown period as they're used to having remote contact with their friends on social media.

Parents should encourage their children to stay in contact with people who are important to them.

It would also help parents to have their own group of friends who they can call and who can support them.

Mr Saddington said: 'It's recognising everybody in the family needs their own support network. It might not be the same for each person.'

Have empathy

Hannah added: 'If they do get cross or lash out, use empathy to calm them down, rather than responding back with more anger. For example, "I know you feel angry and frustrated that you can't see your friends now. And it is unfair, I get it. It's not the same I know, but why don't you FaceTime them?"'
The Canadian Child Care Federation is calling on the federal government to take the lead and develop a uniform approach to child care in the face of COVID-19.

CEO Don Giesbrecht said the "scattershot" response by provinces means that parents are getting "unclear and varied" information depending on where they live.

"It has left Canada's [daycare] sector confused, anxious and wondering why one approach to the COVID-19 exists in one province, but is not the same as another," said Giesbrecht.

In an open letter released on Wednesday, Giesbrecht called on federal and provincial ministers to ensure that all parents are treated the same.

He said provinces should all respond the same way to recent concerns, including which daycares should stay open for essential workers, how to pay child-care staff, and how to fund closed facilities so that they're viable and ready to go when everyone goes back to work.

"Many child-care programs and providers across Canada have either laid off their employees, are considering doing so, or have shut their programs down. ... Those programs and providers still operating and/or paying expenses can only manage to do so for a finite amount of time."

On March 13 in New Brunswick, the government announced that schools would close, but deemed daycares and early learning centres essential for working parents.

Charles Contant/CBC

Three days later, the chief medical officer of health urged daycares to close. Three days after that, they were among the many businesses and operations forced to shut down when the province declared a state of emergency.

Only child-care operations serving children of essential workers can stay open.

Stories soon began to emerge about now-closed facilities continuing to charge families in order to hold spaces.

On March 18, Education and Early Childhood Development Minister Dominic Cardy said daycares that have laid off their staff can no longer charge parents. But daycares that still have staff can continue to ask for payment, even if they're closed.

Story continues

In neighbouring Nova Scotia, licensed daycare operators are still receiving grants and subsidies, early childhood educators are still getting paid, and parents with children in licensed centres aren't paying fees or losing spaces.

Giesbrecht said New Brunswick's situation is not unique  proof that a unified approach is needed in a global pandemic.

For starters, he said daycare workers should continue to get paid if they get sent home, and that parents  whether laid off or not  shouldn't have to pay for services they're not using. Furthermore, essential workers shouldn't have to pay for child care at all.

"Families are going to need every dollar coming in just to put their own food on the table, pay their mortgage and utilities, etc.," said Giesbrecht. "So let's not place an extra burden on families who are already stressing enough."

Giesbrecht said the industry often talks about "paying for the space, not the time" and many parents are being asked to continue to pay in order to save their space.

But these are not the times to be taking that approach, said Giesbrecht.

Francis Ferland/CBC

He said daycare operators shouldn't be "asking anything from any family for a service they're not receiving right now."

The national group says its members include people providing chuild-care services, academics, researchers, parents and policy-makers.

Cardy has said child-care operators that are staying open to care for children of essential workers can still charge regular fees to their current families who are not using the service right now. If those families have lost income because of COVID-19, the government will cover those fees.

In a memo sent to daycare providers, Cardy said essential workers using those daycares will only be asked to pay one fee  not one for their old daycare and one for their new one.

The memo said if a daycare continues to charge parents even after laying off staff, it will "be subject to further measures by the department."

The memo also said all the facilities that closed will still receive grants and subsidies.

The memo points to the federal government's announcement of $27 billion to Canadian workers and businesses. That plan introduces $2 billion addition to the Child Tax Benefit.

It also introduces funding of up to $900 every two weeks for up to 15 weeks "to provide income support to workers who must stay home and do not have access to paid sick leave," but don't qualify for EI, or for parents who do qualify for EI but had to care for sick children.

That plan also includes a 10 per cent wage subsidy for the next 90 days for small businesses, up to a maximum of $1,375 per employee and $25,000 per employer.

But Giesbrecht would like to see a special fund set up to specifically ensure the survival of daycares. Without it, he worries that there won't be enough facilities still in business when workers return to the job post-COVID-19.

Giesbrecht said parent fees represent anywhere from 50 to 80 per cent of the operating revenue of a daycare.

"That is their absolute lifeline. Without that, they will close their doors. No two ways about that."

And if daycares aren't there to look after children when their parents return to work, "we will not recover as a nation without that service being available," said Giesbrecht.

In response to questions asked on Thursday, spokesperson Danielle Elliott said the provincial department said it is working "to ensure that emergency early learning and child care is available to essential workers as the situation progresses."

She said parents whose work is essential should visit the website of the Department of Education and Early Childhood Developent for information.
<! <img width="749" height="501" src="https://onlinenigeria.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/salihu-ex-nnpc-depot-staff-fined-n1m-for-n6-billion-theft.jpg" class="attachment-single-thumbnail size-single-thumbnail wp-post-image jetpack-lazy-image" alt="Abdulkadir Mohammed Salihu: fined N1m for over N6billion theft" data-attachment-id="572619" data-permalink="https://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2020/03/26/salihu-ex-nnpc-depot-staff-fined-n1m-for-n6-billion-theft/abdulkadir-mohammed-salihu-fined-n1m-for-over-n6billion-theft/" data-orig-file="https://onlinenigeria.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/salihu-ex-nnpc-depot-staff-fined-n1m-for-n6-billion-theft.jpg" data-orig-size="749,501" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Abdulkadir-Mohammed-Salihu-fined-N1m-for-over-N6billion-theft" data-image-description="

Abdulkadir Mohammed Salihu: fined N1m for over N6billion theft

 data-medium-file=https://onlinenigeria.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/salihu-ex-nnpc-depot-staff-fined-n1m-for-n6-billion-theft.jpg data-large-file=https://149366101.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Abdulkadir-Mohammed-Salihu-fined-N1m-for-over-N6billion-theft-502336.jpg data-lazy-srcset=https://onlinenigeria.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/salihu-ex-nnpc-depot-staff-fined-n1m-for-n6-billion-theft.jpg 749w, https://onlinenigeria.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/salihu-ex-nnpc-depot-staff-fined-n1m-for-n6-billion-theft-1.jpg 502w, https://onlinenigeria.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/salihu-ex-nnpc-depot-staff-fined-n1m-for-n6-billion-theft-2.jpg 75w data-lazy-sizes=(max-width: 749px) 100vw, 749px data-lazy-src=https://onlinenigeria.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/salihu-ex-nnpc-depot-staff-fined-n1m-for-n6-billion-theft.jpg?is-pending-load=1 srcset=data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7 />Abdulkadir Mohammed Salihu: fined N1m for over N6billion theft >

Abdulkadir Mohammed Salihu, a former sales assistant of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, Kaduna Depot on Wednesday got a kid-glove treatment from a Nigerian court.

Justice Z. B Abubakar of the Federal High Court, Kaduna gave Salihu a N1 million fine or a three-year jail term after a proven theft of over N6billion from the NNPC.

After the assets seized from him were added, it did not appear Salihu got a full measure of retribution for his offence.

The EFCC arrested Salihu on 29 October last year. Before his arrest, he was in charge of loading manifest at the Kaduna Depot of the NNPC.

The EFCC arraigned him on Wednesday on a three-count charge of fraud before Justice

Abubakar.

Salihu pleaded guilty to the charge.

Deborah Ademu-Eteh prosecuting on behalf of EFCC subsequently asked the court to summarily sentence Salihu.

The convict was arrested after several petitions against him were submitted to the Kaduna Zonal office of the EFCC.

Upon investigation, the EFCC discovered that Salihu conspired with some unidentified oil marketers to lift petroleum products without payment to the NNPC at the depot.

The theft was estimated at over N6 billion.

The investigation further revealed that he was part of the cartel behind multiple loading of petroleum products, without corresponding payments. He committed the fraud between 2009 to 2017 at Kaduna Depot

Following his guilty plea, Justice Abubakar sentenced the suspect to a term of three years imprisonment with an option of N1 million fine..

The convict also forfeited the following items:

*One unit of three-bedroom apartment and one unit of two-bedroom boys quarter situated at 2 Kpak Close, off College Road, Kurmin Mashin, Kaduna;

*One-storey building containing four bedrooms and one bedroom self-contained with its appurtenances situated at 4 Kpak close, off College Road, Kurmin Mashin, Kaduna;

*One unit of three-bedroom apartment with two parlours and one self-contained bedroom situated at 6 Kpak Close, off College Road, Kurmin Mashin, Kaduna;

*a water factory known as Ummus Water and Drinks Ltd, situated at Birnin Yero, Igabi Local Government in Kaduna;

*One Fuel Station with four pumps with the name: Aminu and Salihu Ltd, situated at Sabon Gayan, Panturawa, along Saminaka, Jos Road, Kaduna.

*Five vehicles: One Odyssey Space Bus; One Toyota Tacoma Pick-up; One Toyota RAV 4 SUV; One Lexus 350 SUV; One Mitsubishi Petroleum Tanker.

The Judge also ordered the defendant to forfeit his Gratuity and 30 per cent of his monthly pension to the Federal Republic of Nigeria

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Evangeline Lillys Lost co-star has called her out for refusing to self-isolate in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Maggie Grace, who played Shannon Rutherford in the hit series, hit back at Avengers: Endgame star Lilly for undercutting the importance of social distancing after describing the deadly illness as respiratory flu.

Lillys stance provoked consternation among many fans following a post on her Instagram that she captioned: Just dropped my kids off at gymnastics camp. They all washed their hands before going in. They are playing and laughing #businessasusual.

Grace responded underneath Lillys post, writing: Sure, its a free country, but how about choosing to exercise some of that wonderful freedom to have some compassion, trust the extensive science here and not overwhelm health system.

No doctor should have to choose which patients get life saving care and which patients get sent home to die  the sort of triage that is tragically happening in Italy right now, she continued.

Think about how these small decisions effect [sic] your dad and those in your community as ventilators run out.

Lillys father has stage four leukaemia.

Your kids will be just fine without going to the gymnastics, I promise, she said.

Referring to their co-star Daniel Dae Kim, who revealed last week he had contracted the illness, Grace added: PS Daniel said he is doing a lot better btw. I dont know, Maybe you guys want to chat.

Lilly played Kate Austen in the ABC series, while Kim played Jin Soo-Kwon. The show lasted for six seasons and ran from 2004 to 2010.

Earlier this week, a scene from the ABC dramas second season went viral after Boris Johnson told the UK to go into lockdown.
In a fine gesture, the Paralympic Committee of India (PCI) on Thursday decided to donate one-day salary of its office staff to help the country fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

"In such a critical (time), we stand in solidarity with the appeal of Hon'ble PM Shri Narendra Modi. All members of the PCI office and working staff have decided to contribute 1-day of their salary to PM's relief fun," the PCI said in a statement.

It said that PCI chief patron Avinash Rai Khanna has also donated one-month of his pension.

"Let our unity in diversity for this fight against Covid-19 be a trendsetter to others," it added.

The Tokyo Paralympic Games, which was to be held from August 25 to September 6, one month after the Tokyo Olympics, was on Tuesday postponed to next year due to the COVID-19 pandemic which has affected nearly five lakh people globally with more than 22,000 death.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread, people who have been exposed to the virus or to sick patients have been asked to go into self-isolation.

But what exactly does that mean?

A former chief medical officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains to DailyMail.com what self-isolation is and what you should be doing while cooped up at home.

IS SELF-ISOLATION THE SAME AS BEING IN QUARANTINE?

In a word: no. Those who undergo self-isolation do so voluntarily and have to make arrangements themselves while they're at home.

While quarantines are typically voluntary, sometimes they can be mandatory, such as the federal quarantine for US citizens evacuated from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.

People under quarantine are not sick, but they are are separated fro the general public to see if they become sick.

Both self-isolation and quarantine differ from isolation, which separates those who are sick from the general public until they are cured or treated.

WHO NEEDS TO SELF-ISOLATE?

'People who should go into self-isolation are not sick but they've had a credible exposure,' said Dr Robert Amler, former chief medical officer for the CDC and dean of New York Medical College.

'There's reason to believe they may have been exposed. And we wait for the incubation period, in this case about 14 days, to see if they become sick.'

This includes a few groups of people such as anyone awaiting CDC test results or anyone who has been in contact with someone waiting for test results.

Anyone who has traveled to a foreign country where the outbreak is rampant such as China, Japan, South Korea, Italy and Iran.

WHAT DO I DO IN SELF-ISOLATION?

People under self-isolation are expected to stay home and not go to work or school, or take their children to school.

Dr Amler says that people should try to do as much of their normal activities as they can - such as working from home or doing school work - without physically contacting anyone else.

'That means staying in your room, trying to have your own bathroom facility if possible, and not sharing plates or utensils with other household members,' he said.

However, being in self-isolation doesn't mean that you can't have contact with the outside world.

'You can use your TV, your stereo, your phone, FaceTime, go on social media,' Dr Amler said.

'Just anything that does not allow you to get [possibly infected] droplets everywhere else.'

CAN I GO OUTSIDE TO GET FOOD, TOILETRIES OR OTHER SUPPLIES?

People under self-isolation are not allowed to leave the premises under any circumstances.

One option is to have family or friends drop off supplies you need. Alternatively, you can use grocers or online retailers to deliver packages.

Dr Amler offers two suggestions, either wear a mask when the person drops off items or wait until they leave before retrieving them.

He says the latter is more ideal because 'because the person delivering items not enter the air space.'

WHAT DO I DO WITH MY GARBAGE?

Dr Amler says that most people don't produce huge amounts of garbage by themselves so, if you can wait to take it out, that's the best option.

'If there's no harm in keeping it, that's the most protective way,' he said. 'That way nothing going out your room.'

If that's not possible, Dr Amler recommends depositing outside of your doorstep until the 14-day isolation period is up.

WHAT HAPPENS IF I FEEL UNWELL WHILE IN SELF-ISOLATION?

The most important thing is to not visit a doctor's office, a hospital or any other healthcare setting, otherwise you risk infecting others.

Stay home and immediately call your healthcare provider and ask them for advice on what you should do.

'Alert the authorities so you can be transferred to a hospital to be monitored, and undergo testing,' Dr Amler said.
(TNS)  A controversial plan to fly three private surveillance planes over Baltimore could soon be one step closer to getting off the ground.The citys spending board Wednesday is expected to consider an agreement between the Baltimore Police Department and Persistent Surveillance Systems, the Ohio company behind the program.There are only vague details included on the boards routine agenda , including specifying that the pilot program will be funded by Texas billionaires Laura and John Arnold, rather than city tax dollars.The police department declined to provide a copy of the agreement to, pending Board of Estimates approval.Police Commissioner Michael Harrison has described the first-in-the-nation program as a potential investigative tool for police to use in the fight against unrelenting violent crime in Baltimore.Harrison said during a virtual community forum Monday  held on Facebook Live because the state banned mass gatherings due to the coronavirus pandemic  that the planes could launch by the first week of April, with the pilot program authorized to last six months.Harrison, who initially was skeptical of the program, has pledged to ground the planes if they dont generate results. The department plans to partner with outside researchers to analyze data from the first few months and determine whether the surveillance planes helped police solve crimes and deter criminals.The move has been decried by civil liberties advocates who say the surveillance planes violate residents rights and privacy.Theres a complicated history: In 2016, a Bloomberg report revealed that Persistent Surveillance Systems had partnered with the police department to fly a surveillance plane over Baltimore in secret.The ACLU of Maryland submitted a letter of protest Tuesday to request the Board of Estimates postpone its vote.City Council President Brandon Scott, who sits on the spending board, asked for vote to be deferred, but he does not control the majority of votes. Mayor Bernard C. Jack Young is supportive of the pilot program. The two men are running against each other in the Democratic primary for mayor.An item of this significance requires a level of communication that has not been met," Scott said in a statement. "The full City Council has not yet been briefed on the MOU, and the ACLU of Maryland has filed a protest citing concerns.Senior ACLU attorney David Rocah wrote in his letter that there is has been inadequate public information about the citys decision to move forward with the pilot program, especially while so many people are focused on a global health emergency.The very existence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the public health crisis and disruption it has engendered, has significantly impacted the publics ability to focus on or participate in any public discussion of this far reaching new technology, Rocah wrote.Harrison said during the virtual forum that no one knows how long the country will be grappling with the new coronavirus.We have the capacity to introduce something that could be a tool, he said. It would be derelict in our duties if something is available to us that we didnt use only because we were waiting.Rocah also slammed the city for not publishing a copy of the agreement prior to boards vote, keeping the public from being able to meaningfully comment on its contents.According to the Board of Estimates agenda, the resolution on the footage is limited so that people and vehicles are shown only as dots, though their movements can be tracked from a crime scene.This program will be used for investigative look-back after an incident has already occurred and can only be used after receiving a case number or incident number, the document states. It does not allow for real-time surveillance.The program wont be used to gather footage from minor crimes, and is instead focused on solving murders, non-fatal shootings, armed robberies and car-jackings. Footage must be deleted after 45 days if its not needed for an investigation.The agenda also states that independent researchers will be brought on to evaluate the programs effectiveness. Potential partners are Morgan State University, New York University, University of Baltimore, and the RAND Corporation, but a specific arrangement has not been finalized.Wednesdays Board of Estimates meeting will be held virtually, given that the state has restricted gatherings of more than 10 people.
(Photo : Screenshot from: Earther Website ) Coronavirus a Positive Thing... For The Earth; Interactive Map Shows Dropped in Toxic Nitrogen Release Since Quarantine (Photo : Screenshot from: Earther Website ) Coronavirus a Positive Thing... For The Earth; Interactive Map Shows Dropped in Toxic Nitrogen Release Since Quarantine

If Coronavirus had a silver lining on its feet, it would be the fact that the disease has caused a huge drop in global pollution. Since everyone is now staying in the comfort of their homes, no cars, pollution, or any human wastes are available to be released in the world-- which resulted in a cleaner Earth.

How does Earth heals, now that humans are not out there?

The virus has now resulted in more than 400,000 confirmed cases and killed over 21,000 people around the world, as of today, Mar. 26. In the United States of America, which World Health Organization or WHO said to have a possible chance of becoming the newest epicenter of the disease, it has already recorded over 65,000 cases and reached death tolls of over 1,000.

US Government already implemented stricter stay-at-home quarantine to all states. This means that all American citizens-- that do not include on the frontline community such as nurses, doctors, military men, and others-- are required to self-quarantine at their homes. Due to this, fewer humans are outside, taking time for US states to pause for a while.

Google Earth Engine app called Earther identified how America is now drastically healing holistically and environmentally. Using the data from a European Space Agency satellite, the agency showed snapshots of the country from Jan. 2020 through Mar. 20, 2020.

Coronavirus started spreading in Jan. in China and immediately spread out all over the world-- including in the US. As seen in the images, the major metropolitan areas in the country, such as New York, Los Angeles, and California, have seen a tremendous improvement in air quality despite having the most populated cities in America.

The reddish part of the images was the parts wherein nitrogen dioxide are released more. Comparing both images that happened between less than three months, the reddish spots were drastically reduced. As reported, nitrogen dioxide released into the air burns fossil fuels. This might cause an increase in respiratory problems, as it inflames the lining of the lungs and reduces the person's ability to fight off lung infections.

California was seen to be teh first US state to reduce the release of nitrogen dioxide. This is due to the reason that it was also the first to implement a stay-at-home policy earlier this month. The state's drop in nitrogen dioxide began shortly after the system went into effect, with Los Angeles, now self-cleaning than ever recorded before. San Diego and the Bay Area also shares the same success of becoming greener cities.

New York is now self-cleaning

Researchers at Columbia University have also seen a decline in the emissions of carbon monoxide over New York City of more than 50 percent below average levels over the past week. The levels of carbon dioxide have dropped by up to 10 percent, and methane has also fallen 'significantly,' according to the researchers.

Guess once these are all over, we will return on a cleaner and better world.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Putin Announces Delay to Constitution Vote, Measures to Aid Economy Amid COVID-19 Spread

Sputnik News

13:24 GMT 25.03.2020(updated 15:00 GMT 25.03.2020)

Russia has already enacted a series of measures in its COVID-19 response, including travel restrictions, quarantine for infected individuals, and the allocation of funding to the ministry of industry for the purchase of medical equipment. The country's scientists have also begun testing on coronavirus vaccines after sequencing COVID-19's genome.

Russia will delay the April 22 national vote on proposed amendments to the constitution amid the COVID-19 outbreak, President Vladimir Putin has announced.

"The absolute priority for us is the health, life and safety of the people. Therefore I believe the vote should be postponed until a later date," Putin said in an address to the nation on Wednesday.

Emphasizing a need to slow the virus's spread, Putin declared the week beginning March 28 and running until April 5 a paid holiday. He assured that all essential services, including transport, stores, banks, pharmacies, and medical institutions would continue to work as normal during this time.

Putin asked the cabinet to give small businesses in sectors affected by the pandemic a six month tax holiday, apart from sale tax, and asked the Central Bank to take other measures to prevent layoffs and bankruptcies, including a six month holiday on bank credit payments for businesses which have suffered a major drop in monthly income, and for individuals whose earnings have fallen by 30 percent or more.

Putin also urged employers to help maintain stability on the labour market, promising that the government would provide assistance to make this possible. "Our most important task - I am appealing to all employers now - is to ensure stability in the labour market, to prevent a surge in unemployment," he said.

The president also asked the government to raise unemployment benefits to the level of the minimum wage. Families with children will receive additional payments on top of existing support for children to the age of three, according to Putin. All social assistance payments will also be continued on an automatic basis for the time being.

New Taxes on Dividends, Interest for Offshore Accounts

In his address, Putin also proposed a 15 percent tax on dividends and interest taken out of the country, warning that Russia would be prepared to withdraw from taxation agreements with any country which disagrees with these new measures.

"I propose to introduce a tax at a rate of 15 percent for those who withdraw their income in the form of dividends into foreign accounts. Naturally, this will require adjustment of our agreements on avoiding double taxation with some countries. I ask the government to organize such work. If our foreign partners do not accept our proposals, Russia will withdraw from these agreements unilaterally," Putin said.

In addition, a 13 percent tax on earnings from interest on securities in excess of one million rubles will be introduced.

Coronavirus Can Affect Anyone, President Stresses

Addressing ordinary Russians, Putin urged citizens not to give in to the "Russian cross-your-finger mentality" on the coronavirus. "Please do not give in to the idea that 'ah this will not affect me'. It can affect anyone," he urged. According to the president, a nonchalant attitude on this crisis could cause the type of chaos afflicting many Western countries to hit Russia in a similar way.

Putin asked Russians to pay "utmost attention" to the recommendations of doctors and authorities in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, especially the elderly and those who suffer from chronic diseases.

Putin stressed that all of the measures being taken by the government will work only if Russians "show unity and understanding of the complexity of the current situation - if the state, society and citizens act together, if we each do what is required of each of us. We need to remember our personal responsibility for our loved ones, for those who live nearby, who need our help and support. By and large, it is precisely this kind of solidarity in which the strength of a society lies," he said, adding that the degree of solidarity will determine the effectiveness of Russia's response to the challenge.

According to the president, the measures taken in advance have helped Russia to restrain the rapid spread of the virus. "But we must understand that Russia - simply because of its geographic location - cannot isolate itself from the threat. Near our borders are states that have already been seriously affected by the pandemic, and it is impossible to completely block its penetration into our country."

In any event, he noted that Russia is already working in a professional, organized and proactive manner to respond to the crisis. Putin thanked workers in the medical community for the work they've done, as well as the Russian scientists studying the virus and working on a vaccine.

A Sputnik

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New Delhi, March 26 : As India goes into a nation-wide lockdown till April 14, completion of over 15 lakh under-construction housing units are likely to face delay.

According to data by Anarock Property Consultants, more than 15.62 lakh units, launched between 2013 and 2019 are under construction in the top seven cities, out of which projects in Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) and National Capital Region (NCR).

A report by Anarock said that a lot is currently at stake for Indian residential real estate as cities go into complete lockdown mode to battle the spread of COVID-19.

Developers tend to schedule project launches during the auspicious festivals of Gudi Padwa, Akshaya Tritiya, Navratri and Ugadi. The strict advisories for complete lockdown will impact housing sales during the upcoming festivals, usually considered auspicious by several homebuyers to buy homes, as per the report.

Prashant Thakur, Director & Head, Research, Anarock Property Consultants says, "Another fallout of the lockdown is that many key markets will have almost zero construction activity at the project sites. This will further strain several developers' financial health." "As many as 15.62 lakh units across the top 7 cities were in various stages of construction as on 2019 end, reveals Anarock research. These include all under-construction units launched between 2013 till 2019-end. Even this figure is conservative - the number of units will be higher once Q1 2020 data comes in," Thakur said.

According to Dhruv Agarwala, Group CEO, PropTiger.com although the lockdown is necessary to control the coronavirus outbreak, it would have an adverse economic impact.

"While necessary, the virtual lock-down in major cities across India, due to the recent corona virus outbreak, will certainly have an adverse impact on economic activity across sectors including real estate. We too have begun to see a dip in traffic on all our platforms," he said.

Niranjan Hiranandani, National President, NAREDCO said that Indian real estate was already facing a challenging time, the COVID-19 crisis just adds fuel to the fire.

"It has impacted all types of work related to real estate, be it planning or construction or sales and marketing. Even home seekers are impacted, and the festival of Gudi Padwa/ Ugadi/ Cheti Chand which traditionally sees good activity as regards new booking as also taking possession, this year, might see lesser numbers." He further said that the economic response task force is evaluating the scenario from the Indian economy perspective, "so we expect real estate to be on the list, given that 250-plus ancillary industries depend upon real estate; not to forget it being the second highest employer in the Indian economy.

"I am sure the task force will evaluate the situation and take necessary action, at the right time," Hiranandani said.

In a letter to the Finance Minister, industry body CREDAI had sought measures from the government to prevent the sector from collapsing on account of COVID-19 impact.

It said that all interest and principal repayments falling due over the next three months in case of real estate projects should be put off and recovered over the next nine months and south waiver of penal interest charged by banks and financial institutions for a period of one year or until such time as it takes for the pandemic to abate.

Since the spread of the virus in India, developers have also taken precautionary measures.

Ravish Kapoor, Director, Elan Group said, "We are taking all necessary precautions to tackle the COVID-19 threat. We are encouraging employees as well as workers to wash their hands at regular intervals and adhere to the standard hygiene practices. Residents with even a mild cough and cold are being encouraged to consult a doctor immediately." Rahul Singla, Director, Mapsko Group said that similar precautionary measures have been adopted in his company and apartments.

"Employees and residents are also encouraged to wash their hands at regular intervals and take special care of sanitation. Also, we have installed hand sanitizers at various places on the campus as well as chemical spraying is being done to prevent infection," he said.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
People wearing masks attend a vigil for Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, who was reprimanded for warning about the outbreak of the new coronavirus, in Hong Kong, on Feb. 7, 2020. (Kin Cheung/AP Photo)

Its Time to Teach the Truth About Communist China (and the Lies of Howard Zinn)

Commentary

Now that college classes have been forced online because of the CCP virus pandemic, professors are worried that their lessons will be exposed to the public via right-wing sites.

Its no wonder. As Grinnell College music professor Tony Perman revealed in his essay on the NBC News site Think, their sympathies lie with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) more than their own country.

Perman reported that he felt safer in China than he did in the United States, because, when he and his family returned to the United States, the CDC employee trusted them to self-isolate for 14 days and never even asked where we were going.

By contrast, the Chinese states heavy-handed approach seemed to work. There, the obligation to isolate felt shared, and the public changed their habits almost immediately, practicing sterilization, cleanliness and social distancing.

Perman gave credit to the communist regime for the citizenrys collectivist attitude that even encouraged some to rat out others suspected of hiding symptoms. He praised Chinese propaganda that celebrated health care workers and thus led to pride in collective civic responsibility.

A person like Perman would have once been called a useful idiot. The Chinese regime, as Epoch Times reporter Bowen Xiao pointed out, causes crises, blames others, and then uses the crises to clamp down with full force, ultimately praising its own heroism.

Perman made no mention of Dr. Li Wenliang, the health care worker who tried to sound the alarm in December 2019, but was punished by the government and has since died. The Chinese officials suppressed data for two months and then claimed the United States introduced the virus to China via the military. A Southampton University study found that cases would have been reduced by 95 percent had Beijing intervened three weeks sooner.

Perman was displaying the same attitude that one of my international students from China did when I was teaching at Emory University between 2007 and 2013. As we were discussing the documents and speeches of the American Founding that emphasized liberty, freedom of speech, and equal rights, she became visibly disturbed. In her mind, a strong dictatorial government was necessary and good. Freedom scared her.

At a state college where I also taught around the same time, I discovered during a lecture that a third of my college sophomore literature class hadnt heard of the word communism. When I assigned a speech by Mao Zedong as a lesson in propagandistic rhetoric, college freshmen believed the first things that came up on Google searches, i.e., that Mao was a great leader.

At Emory University, most of my American students had been taught that communism was a phantom red scare promulgated by right-wing reactionaries.

According to a survey conducted for Victims of Communism, Only 57% of Gen Z and 62% of Millennials, compared to 88% of Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation think China is a communist country and not a democratic country.

A quarter of Generation Z and millennials say they have gotten a positive presentation of communism in K12, as opposed to 7 percent for Boomers and older. The percentages go up for college. Seventy percent of millennials said they were at least somewhat likely to vote for a socialist. They support Bernie Sanders who, at the last debate, repeated his praise for communist China for allegedly lifting its people out of extreme poverty, and he distinguished his approach to dealing with the pandemic by promising to institute Medicare for All and to work with China.

I think its no coincidence that the precipitous rise in favorable attitudes about communism, and attendant ignorance about it, parallels the increasing use of Howard Zinns A Peoples History of the United States, especially in Advanced Placement U.S. History courses, which were revised to a far-left, Marxist interpretation under the Obama administration.

Zinn, a one-time member of the Communist Party USA, taught at Spelman College and Boston University. In his book, first published in 1980, he claimed American leaders allowed a myth of Soviet expansion to cover for domestic suppression during the Cold War. He said the takeover of countries by the Soviet regime after World War II was a falsehood spread by American imperialists. Really, these were locally led peoples movements, he claimed.

This is Zinns presentation of China: In China, a revolution was already under way when World War II ended, led by a Communist movement with enormous mass support. A Red Army, which had fought against the Japanese, now fought to oust the corrupt dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek, which was supported by the United States.  In January 1949, Chinese Communist forces moved into Peking, the civil war was over, and China was in the hands of a revolutionary movement, the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a peoples government, independent of outside control.

Today, the nonprofit Zinn Education Project pushes Zinns history to primary and secondary schools by distributing curriculum materials in print and online. A recent Zinn Education Project lesson, The Corona Connection, which makes the connection to climate change and indigenous people, is typical fare.

The co-sponsor of the Zinn Education Project, the nonprofit Rethinking Schools, which distributes these materials, on March 18 sent out an email announcing its commitment during the pandemic to providing social justice teaching, storytelling, and resources.

They encouraged organizing against Trumps naked xenophobia and defending especially the rights of children in immigrant detention facilities. The crisis, they urged, was not a time of retreat, but a time to insist on, to organize for, an agenda of human rights and wealth redistribution.

Democrats delayed the stimulus bill by insisting it include pet projects of their freedom-denying, wealth-redistributing agenda, such as green energy, abortion funding, and mandated diversity quotas and regulations for corporations. And China, in its propaganda, is using charges about xenophobia being promulgated by Democrats (including Joe Biden), CNN, and NBC.

After three decades of off-shoring and global citizenship, Americans are being forced to acknowledge the folly of dependence on a communist regimenot only for cheap plastics, but for essential medicines and equipment. Americans should return to their roots of self-reliance. But first we must teach the young the truth about communism and American history.

That begins by exposing the lies of Howard Zinn.

Mary Grabar holds a doctorate in English from the University of Georgia and is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Grabar is the author of Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America, published by Regnery History.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Here are 25 virtual destinations to visit from the comfort of your home.

Childrens Museum Houston: Experiments, activities and exhibits will be shared on the museums social-media platforms and will follow a daily virtual-learning broadcast schedule.

cmhouston.org

Dali Theatre: Museum dedicated to the artist Salvador Dali in his hometown of Figueres, Spain. salvador-dali.org/en/ museums/dali-theatre-museum-in-figueres/visita-virtual

National Gallery of Art: The Washington, D.C., museum offers video tours of current exhibitions, in-depth looks at highlights of the collection, online learning opportunities and audio and video recordings of lectures. nga.gov

National Womens History

Museum: An American history organization that researches, collects and exhibits the contributions of women to the social, cultural, economic and political life of the nation in a context of world history.

womenshistory.org/womens

-history/online-exhibits

The Louvre Museum: The worlds largest art museum and a historic monument in Paris, France, offers virtual tours including Egyptian Antiquities, Remains of the Louvres Moat and Galerie dApollon. louvre.fr/en/visites-en-ligne

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Museum located in New York City, aka the Met, is the largest art museum in the United States. Current online exhibitions include Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara and Kent Monkman: mistikosiwak (Wooden Boat People). metmuseum.org

Uffizi Gallery: Prominent art museum located adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in the Historic Centre of Florence , Italy.

artsandculture.google.com/partner/uffizi-gallery

Van Gogh Museum: The art museum located in Amsterdam is dedicated to the works of Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries. artsandculture.google.com/partner

/van-gogh-museum

Zoos and aquariums

Explore.org: Known for their live nature cams, wildlife photos and educational films, explore.org is the philanthropic multimedia division of the Annenberg Foundation.

explore.org/livecams

Georgia Aquarium: The aquariums webcams allow marine life enthusiasts to see live footage of beluga whales, African penguins and the Ocean Voyager, home to thousands of sea animals, including a green sea turtle.

georgiaaquarium.org/webcam/ocean-voyager

Houston Zoo: The zoos live feed broadcasts from 7 a.m.-7 p.m. daily and features Asian elephants, giraffes, rhinos and chimpanzees. houstonzoo.org/explore/webcams

Monterey Bay Aquarium: Located in Monterey, Calif., viewers can watch penguins, sea otters, sharks, birds, sea turtles and many more ocean animals on exhibit.

montereybayaquarium.org/animals

-and-exhibits/live-web-cams

Reid Park Zoo: The city-owned and operated nonprofit zoo located in Tucson, Az., features zoo cams of elephants, giraffes, lemurs, lions and grizzly bears. reidparkzoo.org/cameras/elephant-cam

San Diego Zoo: Features live-streaming videos of the animals in the zoo. kids.sandiegozoo.org/videos

Seattle Aquarium: The aquariums live web cams broadcast from 9 a.m.-6 p.m. daily and feature seals and otters. seattleaquarium

.org/live-cams

Smithsonians National Zoo: Washington, D.C.s, zoo, commonly known as the National Zoo, is one of the oldest zoos in the United States; their live cams feature naked mole rats, lions, giant pandas and elephants. nationalzoo

.si.edu/webcams

Zoo Atlanta: Broadcasts the daily lives of the zoos giant pandas. zooatlanta.org/panda-cam

Learn about

the world

AirPano: Features thousands of panoramas and information of more than 300 places of the Earth, including the North Pole, the Antarctic, volcano eruptions and the stratosphere. airpano.com

Fullscreen 360: Features 360-degree panoramas and information of iconic destinations around the world. fullscreen360.com

Google Arts & Culture: Offers on-the-ground 360-degree views of historic sites from different countries. artsandculture.google

.com

Great Wall of China: thechina

guide.com/destination/great-wall-of-china

NASAs Interactive Exoplanet Exploration: exoplanets.nasa.gov/alien-worlds/exoplanet-travel-bureau

Statues in the World by AmazingViz: youtube.com/watch?v=WuLq8MTw-YY

Virtual Field Trip to Ellis Island: teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/webcast.htm

Yellowstone National Park: nps.gov/yell/learn/photos
Parrot, the leading European drone group, announced today the addition of enhanced flight data tracking to Parrots ANAFI drone through a partnership with DroneLogbook  which will allow pilots to keep track of their equipments performance, schedule necessary maintenance, as well as record and report all pertinent information to comply with FAA regulation.

Parrots ANAFI and ANAFI Thermal drones provide an ultra-compact tool for professionals, helping them gain new vantage points to make informed decisions with higher precision and efficiency using the drones aerial insights.

DroneLogbook is a flight logging service that provides secure data storage. Its software, accessible through online software and mobile apps, allows pilots to automatically record crucial flight data  including flight time, GPS and altimeter data, weather conditions, airspace status updates and more. DroneLogbook tracks all drone operations to allow for the creation of reports in seconds.

Thanks to a native integration in Parrot flying app, ANAFI users will be able to synchronize all their flight data automatically and seamlessly on DroneLogbook servers directly from the FreeFlight 6 application, as soon as the drone has landed.

This one-stop-shop solution is expected to vastly improve ROI for commercial drone operators and reduce data processing time to help streamline necessary processes like compliance reporting, mission planning and drone inspection.

At Parrot and DroneLogbook, we value customers data and respect privacy. In addition to this technical partnership, Parrot is also really proud to adopt the GUTMA standard for all its flights data. The Global UTM Association (GUTMA) is a non-profit consortium of worldwide Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) stakeholders. Its purpose is to foster the safe, secure and efficient integration of drones in national airspace systems. Its mission is to support and accelerate the transparent implementation of globally interoperable UTM systems. GUTMA members collaborate remotely.

"Our partnership with DroneLogbook is positioned to significantly streamline the various processes and reports that are required from many of our enterprise ANAFI users maintaining large fleets fulfilling a customer demand for a complete enterprise-grade flight logging solution, said Jerome Bouvard, Director of Strategic Partnership of Parrot.

This integration with Parrot provides the DroneLogbook ecosystem with another industry leading drone manufacturer to support commercial drone operations. The depth of this integration results in one of the easiest, most efficient compliance workflows in the industry, greatly improving ROI, said Yves Jusot, CEO & Co-founder.

Through its SDK Partner program, Parrot is working to create a global ecosystem of drone apps to serve the unique and ever-evolving needs of its enterprise and professional users.

ANAFI drone users can now download a free 2-month trial of DroneLogbooks software, DroneLogbook Companion, using the FreeFlight 6 piloting app from Parrot. The software can be downloaded through GooglePlay and the App Store. After the trial, DroneLogbook offers three subscription plans: Free, Professional ($6.95/month) and Enterprise ($19.95). DroneLogbook also offers a private plan for large organizations.

Users with privacy concerns will be permitted to access DroneLogbook using their own server through the FreeFlight 6 app by selecting custom URL upon sign-in, rather than DLB account. These users are still able to synchronize their flights and view them on the DroneLogbook platform.

For more information on Parrot and its ANAFI drone, visit Parrot.com.

To try out ANAFI or ANAFI Thermal in your business environment, apply to Parrots Enterprise Loan Program by filling out this form with as much details as possible about the intended business use.

To learn more about DroneLogbook, visit http://www.dronelogbook.com.
STOCKHOLM (dpa-AFX) - Swedish telecom company Telia Co. (0H6X.L, TLSNY.PK) said that the COVID-19 pandemic will have a negative financial impact on its TV & Media unit. So, the company said its 2020 outlook for Group EBITDA and operational free cash flow will not be reached. Telia said it has witnessed a rapid decline in the advertising revenues, despite an increased TV consumption. In addition, the global cancellation of sporting events has had a negative impact on pay-TV revenues. The company's board has decided to cut its dividend proposal to the Annual General Meeting to 1.80 Swedish kronor per share from the previous 2.45 kronor proposal. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
[March 25, 2020] New Online platform, Girls Nite In Online, launches free service to connect and support women out of work due to coronavirus.

PHILADELPHIA, March 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- An online platform supporting women whose businesses shuttered due to the pandemic such as chefs, fitness instructors, makeup artists, mixologists, artists etc., launched this week. Girls Nite In Online (GNI) connects women virtually by hosting 30-minute online workout classes and workshops led by different women everyday. Classes will be donation-based through each presenter's Venmo "Virtual Tip Jar." GNI guarantees a stipend for all scheduled presenters. 100% of the donations are made directly to the workshop leader - GNI takes no fees from these donations. "Our team is facilitating this experience as a free service with the sole intention of connecting women and supporting displaced female workers," says Shelly Fisher, founder of GNI. "Since we can't connect physically, it is important that we create new opportunities to connect virtually, support others, clear our minds, and learn something new." Classes will be held Monday through Friday:

Exercise Class (7:30-8:00am EST)

Educational or Activity Based Workshop (4:00-4:30pm EST)

Fridays at 4:00pm EST is Happy Hour witha featured mixologist!





More coming soon! Upcoming classes include yoga, makeup tutorials, cookie decorating, coloring your hair at home, and a virtual cooking class from Ireland. GNI is looking for amazing women to lead workshops. Visit gnionline.com for more information! Classes are listed for registration two weeks in advance.

Press Contact Brooke Marano

[email protected]

Office Phone: (No one home)

Cell: 610.613.4076 About PIF Group: Conshohocken, PA, the PIF (Pay it Forward) Group is built on a model of support and giving back. Whether through their online platforms, social media communities, or in person events, PIF Group strives to create and support a positive sense of community. PIF Group is proud to launch GNI. Founded by Shelly Fisher, their initiatives include the Herb it Forward Foundation, (www.Herbie.com). The women empowerment brands: She Knew She Could (SheKnewSheCould.com) & One Tough Bitch (OneToughB.com), founded after a cancer diagnosis. Positivities.com, a platform that spreads happiness. Lastly Shelly co-authored with Jen Jones, Breaking Sad: What to Say After Loss, What Not to Say, and When to Just Show Up. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-online-platform-girls-nite-in-online-launches-free-service-to-connect-and-support-women-out-of-work-due-to-coronavirus-301030159.html SOURCE Girls Nite In Online

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Singaporean shipping company fined $1.65m for concealing illegal discharges of oily water

Unix Line PTE Ltd., a Singapore-based shipping company, was sentenced Mar. 20 in federal court before U.S. District Court Judge Jon S. Tigar in Oakland, California, after previously pleading guilty to a violation of the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships.

Unix Line PTE Ltd. was sentenced to pay a fine of $1,650,000.00, placed on probation for a period of four years, and ordered to implement a comprehensive Environmental Compliance Plan as a special condition of probation. In pleading guilty, Unix Line admitted that its crew members onboard the Zao Galaxy, a 16,408 gross-ton, ocean-going motor tanker, knowingly failed to record in the vessels oil record book the overboard discharge of oily bilge water without the use of required pollution-prevention equipment, during the vessels voyage from the Philippines to Richmond, California. Deliberately concealing illegal discharges of oil waste into our oceans is a federal crime we will not tolerate, said Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark of the Justice Departments Environment and Natural Resources Division. This sentencing shows that polluting our oceans and misleading the Coast Guard will cost you. The defendants crew members intentionally discharged oily bilge waste into the ocean on their voyage to California, said U.S. Attorney David L. Anderson of the Northern District of California. Our district includes hundreds of miles of the beautiful Pacific coast, stretching from Monterey to Del Norte County. We will do our part to protect those natural resources and hold companies responsible when they fail to follow federal and international laws designed to protect our oceans from pollution. The Coast Guard Investigative Service will continue to make criminal investigations that deter maritime organizations from breaking international and U.S. law designed to protect our finite natural marine resources a priority, said Kelly Hoyle, Special Agent in Charge Pacific Region of the Coast Guard Investigative Service. On Oct. 24, 2019, Unix Line was indicted by a federal Grand Jury of obstruction of justice and a violation of the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships. Under the plea agreement, Unix Line pled guilty to one count of a violation of the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships. According to the plea agreement, Unix Line is the operator of the Zao Galaxy, which set sail from the Philippines on Jan. 21, 2019, heading toward Richmond, California, carrying a cargo of palm oil. On Feb. 11, 2019, the Zao Galaxy arrived in Richmond, where it underwent a U.S. Coast Guard inspection and examination. Examiners discovered that during the voyage, a Unix Line-affiliated ship officer directed crew members to discharge oily bilge water overboard, using a configuration of drums, flexible pipes, and flanges to bypass the vessels oil water separator. The discharges were knowingly not recorded in the Zao Galaxys oil record book when it was presented to the U.S. Coast Guard during the vessels inspection. Senior Trial Attorney Kenneth Nelson of the Environmental Crimes Section, with the assistance of Assistant U.S. Attorney Katherine Lloyd-Lovett, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Briggs, Kay Konopaske and Katie Turner, of the Northern District of California, are prosecuting the case. The prosecution is the result of a year-long investigation by the Coast Guard Investigative Service and the Investigations Division of Coast Guard Sector San Francisco.




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What does the legislation do?

The bill  the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act  expands unemployment insurance, a program enacted in 1935 to provide temporary income support for workers who lose their jobs. The legislation does three primary things: offers bigger unemployment checks, increases the duration of those payments and extends jobless benefits to previously ineligible groups of workers, like gig workers and freelancers.

How much will benefits increase?

The legislation offers an additional 13 weeks  roughly three months  of unemployment insurance, funded by the federal government. The bill also gives an additional $600 a week for up to four months. This would be in addition to current jobless benefits offered by the states, which administer their own unemployment insurance programs. Expanded benefits would last through December 2020.

So, how much unemployment will I get?

This depends on several factors, including your prior wages and the state in which you live. States generally base payments on a worker's prior four quarters of wages. In January, state programs paid an average $385 weekly to unemployed workers, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The new legislation restricts the maximum duration of unemployment benefits to 39 weeks  or, almost 10 months. So, under the new legislation, a typical worker could expect $985 a week for four months ($600 in extra relief plus state benefits), followed by up to 23 weeks of $385 a week in standard state benefits. Unemployment benefits are taxable. However, state benefits vary widely. Some are more generous and some (typically southern states) far less so.

Who qualifies for unemployment?

If you were laid off by your employer, you are eligible to collect unemployment. Furloughed workers can also collect  they are on temporary layoff, and those on temporary layoff are eligible for benefits, said Susan Houseman, director of research at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. The legislation extends benefits to previously ineligible workers. This includes self-employed workers, people seeking part-time work, workers who can't reach their place of work as a result of COVID-19 and those don't have sufficient work history to otherwise qualify for benefits. Significantly, it also applies to those who quit their job as a "direct result of COVID-19." People who quit their jobs don't normally qualify for unemployment.

Unfortunately, just because you apply doesn't mean you'll receive benefits  the share of laid-off workers who receive unemployment range from a low of 10.5% in North Carolina to more than 50% in New Jersey, according to the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Can gig workers get benefits?

Yes, the legislation extends unemployment checks to gig workers, like Uber and Lyft drivers, who are generally independent contractors rather than the salaried employees typically eligible for unemployment. The Labor Department should publish guidance shortly about the specific mechanics relative to gig workers, such as the documentation needed to prove wages and work history, experts said. Tax forms such as 1099s and some sort of payment stub should suffice, they said. The guidance should also stipulate if and how gig workers can get benefits for a severe decline in income, rather than outright job loss. Gig workers and contractors are likely to be able to get partial benefits if they don't earn too much, said Stephen Wandner, a labor economist at the Upjohn Institute.

How do I apply for unemployment?

Generally, you'll need to file an unemployment claim in the state where you worked. File a claim as soon as possible after becoming unemployed. Many unemployment offices around the country have closed as a result of rules put in place by state governors, ruling out in-person applications for several Americans. However, you can also apply online or by telephone. Here's a resource to help you get started in your particular state.

How long will it take to receive benefits?
The global death toll from the coronavirus has reached nearly 24,000 with more than 526,000 infections confirmed, causing mass disruptions as governments continue to try to slow the spread of the new respiratory illness.

Here's a roundup of developments in RFE/RL's broadcast countries.

Afghanistan

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has ordered the release of up to 10,000 prison inmates in a bid to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Ghanis decree was directed at women, young offenders, critically ill patients, and prisoners aged more than 55, Attorney General Farid Hamidi told a Kabul news conference on March 26.

Calling the move a responsible decision to safeguard the health of the people, Hamidi said the decree is not for those who have committed crimes against national and international security."

The announcement comes as Afghanistan's government is negotiating a prisoner exchange with Taliban as a confidence-building measure ahead of proposed peace talks under a U.S.-brokered process.

Afghanistan has recorded 90 confirmed coronavirus cases and two deaths, according to a tally on March 26 compiled by Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

However, the true figures are feared to be much higher as the war-torn country struggles to administer tests and screen an influx of Afghans returning from neighboring Iran -- one of the countries hit hardest by the pandemic.

Ghani's decree calls for a special committee to be set up to prepare a list of prisoners to be released.

Prisons chief Ahmad Rashed Totakhail said between 9,000 and 10,000 inmates would be released during the coming 10 days.

An official in Ghani's office said several thousand prisoners will be released soon. He also insisted that those freed would not include members of the Taliban or the Islamic State militant group.

Ukraine

Ukraine has reported 40 new coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours as the government has implemented an additional measure to maintain physical distancing in public transport.



The Health Ministrys Center for Public Health says there are 196 confirmed laboratory cases of the COVID-19 respiratory illness in the country as of 10 p.m. on March 26.

On the same day, the cabinet issued a nationwide directive limiting passengers in all public transportation. All above-ground transportation such as minibuses, buses, trolleybuses, and trams should only ride up to half capacity.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, meanwhile, in an online video address to the nation reiterated the countrys decision to shut cross-border travel after March 27, including for Ukrainian nationals.

He also added that 100,000 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests from South Korea for the coronavirus will be delivered on March 27.



On the same day, Zelenskiy said that "200,000 medical respirators, protective suits for doctors, 100,000 PCR tests, ventilators, [and] a large number of masks for pharmacies will be delivered from China.

Romania

Romania surpassed 1,000 cases of the coronavirus on March 26, one month after the first confirmed infection there, prompting the resignation of the country's health minister.

Authorities on March 26 reported 123 more infections and four more deaths during the previous 24 hours, bringing the total in Romania to 1,029 confirmed cases with 18 deaths.

Health Minister Victor Costache resigned on March 26 amid criticism of the government's handling of the outbreak.

President Klaus Iohannis appointed a deputy minister, Nelu Tataru, to replace Costache.

Tataru has been one of the main public faces of the government's response to the crisis.

Costache on March 25 said all of Bucharest's population would be tested for COVID-19, a plan widely criticized as unfeasible and misguided.

Romania's hospitals have struggled to cope with an increasing number of patients.

Health workers say they do not have access to testing and adequate equipment with only about 16,000 people tested so far.

Out of 18 deaths, eight were patients at a hospital in the northeastern city of Suceava, a facility that has become the center of Romania's coronavirus outbreak.

Eleven other Romanian coronavirus patients have died abroad -- eight in Italy, two in France, and one in Britain.

About 4 million Romanians work abroad, most of them in Italy and Spain, Europe's worst-affected countries.

Romania declared a state of emergency on March 16 and went into a "total quarantine" on March 25, with army troops deployed to help enforce the order.

Iohannis on March 26 reiterated his appeal to Romanians to obey the lockdown order and remain at home.

Russia

The Russian government has ordered the suspension of all regular and charter flights in and out of the country effective from March 27 as the country battles to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.



Russian officials on March 26 reported a total of 840 confirmed coronavirus infections in the country, up from 658 a day before, with 136 of the new cases in Moscow alone.



Russia's coronavirus task force also confirmed the country's first two deaths from COVID-19, describing the victims as elderly patients from the Moscow region who were suffering from pneumonia and complications.



On March 19, Moscow health authorities had reported the death of a 79-year-old woman as coronavirus-related, but hours later a new statement was released saying an autopsy had confirmed the woman had died of a blood clot and not from the virus.



"Regular and charter flights from Russian airports to and from foreign airports are to be suspended starting at midnight on March 27, 2020, with the exception of flights aimed at bringing Russian nationals back from overseasand flights carried out in accordance with the governments decisions, the government said on its website.



Russia had already put restrictions in place regarding air transportation.



As of March 23, Russian airlines were only allowed to service foreign capitals or large cities like New York and only from Moscow airports.



The moves come as countries throughout the world are restricting entry and exit from their borders in attempts to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

On March 25, President Vladimir Putin postponed next month's referendum on sweeping constitutional changes that could allow him to remain in power until 2036 because of concerns over the coronavirus outbreak.

Putin said a new date for the April 22 vote would be determined based on the recommendations of health experts.



Putins announcement came after Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin ordered provincial governors to move at a quicker pace to provide hospital beds for coronavirus patients, while Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin ordered the closure of all the capital's eateries, shopping malls, and parks from March 28 to April 5.

Later on March 26, Putin proposed at a Group of 20 (G20) video conference that a freeze be placed on economic sanctions to allow countries to better combat the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is accusing the Russian government of stepping up control of news reporting in connection with the coronavirus pandemic on the pretext of combating disinformation.

In a statement on March 26, the Paris-based media freedom watchdog said Russian journalists covering the coronavirus crisis are being targeted by Roskomnadzor, the countrys media regulator, which it has included in its list of Digital Predators of Press Freedom.

Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSFs Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, urged the Russian authorities not to take advantage of this epidemic to restrict press freedom.

Cavelier also called for the repeal of the excessively vague fake news law, which she said violates the freedom to inform.

Russia is ranked 149th out of 180 countries in RSFs 2019 World Press Freedom Index.

Iran

Iran has announced 157 new deaths from the coronavirus, raising the official toll to 2,234, as a ban on intercity travel came into effect amid fears of a second wave of infections in one of the world's worst-hit countries



Health Ministry spokesman Kianush Jahanpur told a news conference that a record-breaking 2,389 new cases have been confirmed over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of declared infections to 29,406.



Jahanpur said that the spread of the new coronavirus and its rate of infection was "growing steadily" in Iran.



The travel ban was imposed after officials had complained that many Iranians ignored the authorities' advice to stay at home and cancel travel plans for the Persian New Year holidays that began on March 20.



"Those who have traveled for the Iranian New Year holidays should immediately return to their cities without making any stop in the cities on their way back home," Hossein Zolfaghari, a member of Iran's national headquarters for fighting the coronavirus, said on March 26.



"The closure of universities and schools as well as the suspension of gatherings has been extended," Zolfaghari said, adding that violators of the measures will face legal consequences.

On March 25, the government warned about the danger of ignoring the authorities' travel guidelines.



"This could cause a second wave of the coronavirus," government spokesman Ali Rabiei said, according to state TV.



President Hassan Rohani said Iran will contain the coronavirus spread in two weeks, adding that further measures have been taken to ease the economic impact of the outbreak on lower-income citizens.



"We will send a letter to Iran's supreme leader today to seek permission for the withdrawal of $1 billion from Iran's sovereign wealth fund," Rohani said in a meeting, broadcast live on state TV.



Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has the last say on all state matters.



Iran has rejected an offer from the Geneva-based medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to set up a 50-bed inflatable hospital in the central city of Isfahan to deal with the outbreak.



It has also refused the United States' offer of humanitarian assistance, saying that Washington should lift sanctions if it wants to help Tehran fight the epidemic.



Iran has been under crippling U.S. sanctions in connection with its nuclear and missile programs.

Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan's two largest cities will implement lockdown measures.

The fresh restrictions were announced on March 26 as Kazakhstan's government confirmed the country's first death from coronavirus.

Residents of Nur-Sultan and Almaty will be barred from leaving their homes except for work or to buy food or medicines, starting from March 28, the government said.

Authorities will also close all intercity transport terminals and public spaces in Shymkent, Kazakhstan's third-largest city, in order to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the government said.

Kazakhstan on March 26 had confirmed 109 cases.

Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan has announced the first confirmed death from the coronavirus even as it stepped up measures to stem the spread of the pandemic in the Central Asian nation.

The Health Ministry on March 27 said a 72-year-old man in the city of Namangan had suffered from other medical ailments before contracting the coronavirus.

Namangan, in the Ferghana Valley, is the second-largest Uzbek city after the capital, Tashkent, to impose a lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic.

As of early March 27, Uzbekistan has confirmed 75 cases of infection to the COVID-19 virus. Experts warn, however, that it is impossible to know the true number of infections in any country because of a lack of testing.

Uzbekistan, a country of 32 million people, has locked down several cities and districts, including the capital, Tashkent, where municipal authorities imposed restrictions on movements on March 24.

On March 27, authorities in the province of Navoi said they were locking down the cities of Navoi and Zarafshan.

On the same day, officials in Bukhara, a major tourism area, said they would close the citys borders.

Municipal authorities announced restrictions in Samarkand and in the Ferghana Valley city of Andijon on March 26.

Authorities also said they were offering large bonus payment for workers in the medical field after at least 11 infections were reported among such workers.

Doctors every two weeks are to receive $2,500 -- several times their normal monthly pay -- while nurses and laboratory workers will get $1,500, junior medical workers $1,000, and others $500, according to a Reuters report.

Armenia

Armenia has reported its first death related to the coronavirus outbreak after a 72-year-old female patient died in hospital.

Health Ministry spokeswoman Alina Nikoghosian on March 26 said the patient was being treated at the intensive care department of Yerevans Nork Infectious Disease Clinical Hospital when she passed away.

A total of 290 people have been officially diagnosed with the coronavirus in Armenia -- the highest number among South Caucasus countries.

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said that two elderly patients were in critical condition, one of whom is a U.S. citizen.

Health authorities say 18 people have recovered from the respiratory illness.

Armenia introduced a one-month state of emergency on March 16 in a bid to slow the spread of the outbreak.

Since March 25, police have been enforcing a nationwide lockdown after new restrictions were imposed to limit freedom of movement.

With reporting by Reuters, TASS, AFP, AP, Akipress, and Interfax
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SpiceJet said on Thursday that it will conduct a special flight on Sunday to take 142 Iran-returned Indians from Delhi to Jodhpur so that they can be taken to a government quarantine facility there.

"The special flight will be operated as per Government of India's request and the airline will deploy its Boeing 737 aircraft for the assignment," the low-cost carrier said in its press release.

The airline's entire commercial passenger aircraft fleet of 82 Boeing 737, two Airbus A320 and 32 Bombardier Q-400s is currently grounded as the government has suspended domestic and international flight operations to curb the spread of coronavirus.

However, the airline's five B737 freighter aircraft have been operating as usual as there is no ban on cargo flights.

The aircraft, which will be used for Sunday's special flight, will be thoroughly cleaned and fumigated upon its return to Delhi and the airline will follow all the protocols for its crew members, the release noted.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

The flight will take off at 1.40 am from Delhi's Indira Gandhi International airport and land in Jodhpur airport at 2.55 am on March 29, the airline said.
Collaboration to address product development and scale up challenges posed by current pandemic

Basel, March 26, 2020 - Today, Novartis and a consortium of life sciences companies announced an important collaboration to accelerate the development, manufacture and delivery of vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments for COVID-19 in response to the pandemic. The industry brings a range of assets, resources, and expertise needed to identify effective and scalable solutions to the pandemic that is affecting billions worldwide. Effects on health systems, economies, and livelihoods are significant, and effective response requires an unprecedented collaboration across government, academia, private sector, and philanthropy.

As co-chair of a consortium of life science companies headquartered across three continents, Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis, said, "We feel a deep shared responsibility to see if there are specific areas where collaboration across the life sciences industry and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation can accelerate solutions to this pandemic. In addition to the individual contributions companies are already making, collective action is critical to ensure any promising studies into vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics are quickly scaled to people around the world who are affected by this pandemic."

Trials of existing drugs, diagnostic tests, compounds, and investigational vaccines have begun around the world to identify interventions to slow or end the pandemic. Products that demonstrate efficacy will require clinical study, scale up of manufacturing, and distribution if proven effective. These are areas that the life sciences industry has extensive experience in managing for products that reach billions of people every day.

Mark Suzman, chief executive officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said, "We know that the private sector is where the technical skills from discovery to clinical trials to commercialization know-how sits. We look to harness that knowledge and experience, combine it where possible, to connect with national regulators and the World Health Organization to see if we can help flatten the curve of this pandemic and make sure the results reach everyone around the world, particularly those at highest risk and the poorest."

Following a conference call with Gates Foundation leadership earlier this month, companies are working to identify concrete actions that will accelerate treatments, vaccines, and diagnostics to the field. As a first step, 15 companies have agreed to share their proprietary libraries of molecular compounds that already have some degree of safety and activity data - with the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator launched by the Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard two weeks ago to quickly screen them for potential against COVID-19. Successful hits would move rapidly into in vivo trials in as little as two months.

"This is an encouraging start in a critical area because if any of these compounds are shown to be effective against COVID-19 it dramatically accelerates the path to product approval and scale up," said Suzman. "While each of the partners will also be pursuing other efforts in partnership with national governments and other partners, it is a great example of why we are optimistic that this unprecedented collaboration will provide a platform for a fundamentally different kind of partnership to help address this global health emergency."

Companies participating in the collaboration include:

BD, Boehringer Ingelheim, bioMerieux, Eisai, Eli Lilly, Gilead, GSK, J&J, Merck (MSD), Merck (Merck KGaA), Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi.

Disclaimer

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by words such as "potential," "can," "will," "would," "look," "commit," "investigational," "accelerate," "launch," "encouraging," or similar terms, or by express or implied discussions regarding potential marketing approvals, new indications or labeling for the investigational or approved products described in this press release, or regarding the collaboration to accelerate the development, manufacture and delivery of vaccines, diagnostics and treatments for COVID-19. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations regarding future events, and are subject to significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. There can be no guarantee that the investigational or approved products described in this press release will be submitted or approved for sale or for any additional indications or labeling in any market, or at any particular time. Nor can there be any guarantee that the activities and efforts described in this release will be achieved or succeed, in the expected time frame, or at all. In particular, our expectations regarding such products and efforts could be affected by, among other things, the uncertainties inherent in research and development, including clinical trial results and additional analysis of existing clinical data; regulatory actions or delays or government regulation generally; global trends toward health care cost containment, including government, payor and general public pricing and reimbursement pressures and requirements for increased pricing transparency; our ability to obtain or maintain proprietary intellectual property protection; the particular prescribing preferences of physicians and patients; general political, economic and business conditions, including the effects of and efforts to mitigate pandemic diseases such as COVID-19; safety, quality, data integrity or manufacturing issues; potential or actual data security and data privacy breaches, or disruptions of our information technology systems, and other risks and factors referred to in Novartis AG's current Form 20-F on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Novartis is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

About Novartis

Novartis is reimagining medicine to improve and extend people's lives. As a leading global medicines company, we use innovative science and digital technologies to create transformative treatments in areas of great medical need. In our quest to find new medicines, we consistently rank among the world's top companies investing in research and development. Novartis products reach nearly 800 million people globally and we are finding innovative ways to expand access to our latest treatments. About 109,000 people of more than 145 nationalities work at Novartis around the world. Find out more at

https://www.novartis.com (https://www.novartis.com).

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For questions about the site or required registration, please contact media.relations@novartis.com (mailto:media.relations@novartis.com)

About the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people's health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people-especially those with the fewest resources-have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by CEO Mark Suzman and Co-chair William H. Gates Sr., under the direction of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

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Steven Dick the deputy head of mission at the British Embassy in Budapest has died after contracting coronavirus, the Foreign Office has said.

The 37-year-old died on Tuesday in Hungary.

He had served as Deputy British Ambassador to Hungary since December, according to a biography published on the UK governments website.

In a statement, his parents Steven and Carol Dick said: Steven was a much-loved son, grandson and nephew. He was kind, funny and generous.



It was always his dream to work for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and he was very happy representing our country overseas.

We are devastated by his loss and ask for privacy at this tragic time.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said: I am desperately saddened by the news of Stevens death and my heart goes out to his parents Steven and Carol.

Steven was a dedicated diplomat and represented his country with great skill and passion. He will be missed by all those who knew him and worked with him.

Before taking up his post in Hungary, Mr Dick had roles at the British Embassies in Kabul and Riyadh, and was most recently head of corporate strategy and governance at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

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(Photo : Screenshot from: Made by Google's Youtube Account) Google Pixel Buds 2 Coming in Spring! FCC Approves New Headphones, Here's What Will Happen Next! (Photo : Screenshot from: Office of Engineering and Technology/ FCC) Google Pixel Buds 2 Coming in Spring! FCC Approves New Headphones, Here's What Will Happen Next!

No matter how powerful Coronavirus can be, it will not delay the release of Google's 2nd Generation newest headphones called Pixel Buds. Congratulations to all Google fans out there; the newest and much-awaited headphones might hit the market in spring 2020. This is what may possibly happen after Pixel Buds 2 already received its safety approval from the United States Federal Communications Commission or FCC.

Heads up! Google Pixel Buds 2 will be available in spring 2020, ask FCC!

Heads up to all customers out there waiting for Google's more advanced Pixel Buds, here comes what you're all waiting for. 9to5Google reported a possibility of having these 2nd gen Google headphones in the market sooner than we thought it could be.

As reported, FCC passed yesterday, Mar. 25, both listings of each Google headphone-- which is ahead of what's expected to be the retail release of the device. The testing of Pixel Buds was made in August and was completed between November to December. Google, then, submitted its confidentiality request on Dec. 17, 2019.

All technology devices are required by Federal Law to take the FCC approval before launching their devices to the US market. This is the way of the government to make sure that all gadgets listed in the market are safe to be used, to be distributed, and to be sold to all of its potential users.

FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology released the report that entails both of the product listings of Google's Pixel Buds named G1007 and G1008.

The agency certifies Google headphones as safe to use by the consumers. Since the "devices are too small to accommodate the FCC ID and also too small for the 15.19 statement," the certification above will be put in the packaging and the user manual of each device-- if you want to check out your Pixel Buds 2 for FCC approval.

Google Pixel Buds: Are these worth it to buy?

Since FCC already approved the design of Google Pixel Buds, it is now expected for the company to finally release the gadgets starting this month or until June 2020.

But why would you like to purchase these devices?

According to Digital Trends, one major thing that makes Pixel Buds 2 worthy of being purchased in the stores is that it is way more advanced compared to the first Google Pixel Buds in 2017. Pixel Buds 2 is said to have a longer-range of Bluetooth, which means that you listen to music even far away from your smartphone. It was also said to last for five consecutive hours. Plus, the charging case will no longer have any cables on it-- making it more convenient.

To top all that, it costs $179-- which is less costly compared to AirPods Pro!

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrive at the Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey, London on Commonwealth Day

Meghan Markle will return to the small screen as the narrator of a new Disney film about a family of elephants and their journey across Africa.

In her first post-royal project, Meghan will lend her voice to Disneynature's Elephant.

It will be available to stream on Disney+ from April 3, three days after she and Harry quit as senior members of the British royal family.

A trailer for Elephant, posted on the official Disney Twitter account, revealed that it "follows one family's extraordinary 1,000 mile journey across Africa on an adventure that will change their lives".

Disney said the film follows African elephant Shani and her son Jomo as their herd make a journey across the Kalahari Desert while led by their great matriarch Gaia.

To celebrate its release, Disneynature and the Disney Conservation Fund will support the wildlife charity Elephants Without Borders, an organisation working in Botswana ensuring people and elephants thrive.

It is understood that Meghan was approached by Elephant's filmmakers last summer, who asked if she would consider recording the narration.

Read More

The film was announced along with another new documentary called Dolphin Reef, narrated by Hollywood star Natalie Portman, which will also debut on the streaming platform next Friday.

The announcement of Meghan's role with Disney comes after video footage emerged of Harry at the premiere of The Lion King in London last July praising her ability to do voiceover work.

Video of the Day

The footage, published by the Mail on Sunday in January, shows the duke and duchess talking to the film's director Jon Favreau as well as one of its stars Beyonce and her rapper husband Jay-Z.

Harry told them: "Next time, if anyone needs any extra voiceover work, we can make ourselves available.

Former Suits actress Meghan then said: "That's really why we're here - to pitch."

It was the second clip to emerge from that evening in which Harry highlights Meghan's abilities as a voiceover artist.

Harry was also filmed chatting to Robert Iger, executive chairman of the Walt Disney Company, during the European premiere and said about Meghan: "You do know she does voiceovers?"

The Disney boss replied: "I did not know that," and the duke went on to say: "You seem surprised. She's really interested."

Meghan and Harry will walk away from the monarchy for a life of personal and financial freedom on March 31, and will no longer be able to use their HRH styles or use Sussex Royal as their brand.
Dozens of workers have walked out of a Moy Park food processing site over fears of 'unsafe conditions' in relation to the spread of coronavirus.

Staff for the Northern Ireland-based poultry producer walked out of the Portadown, Co Armagh site due to concerns over the Covid-19 outbreak, Unite union said.

The firm is one of the UKs top 15 food companies and Northern Irelands largest private sector business.

Unite said it had tried to win commitments to ensure a minimum two-metre social distancing between workers to stop the spread of the virus.

Sean McKeever, regional officer for the union, said: "We need to see immediate movement from management to address the workers legitimate fears over coronavirus transmission.

"Workers are refusing to return to work in unsafe conditions. This is an entirely foreseeable outcome of both management greed and total inaction from Stormont."

It comes as the government recently said that workers in the food supply chain are part of an essential service during the outbreak.

A spokeswoman for Moy Park said the health and wellbeing of its staff was the firm's 'most important consideration'.

"We have put new, robust measures in place to keep them safe," she said, "We have thoroughly reviewed our sites and continue to take on board feedback from our team members.

"We had already identified seven areas to enhance social distancing. These measures include staggering breaks, respacing workstations and communal areas, as well as installing screens on appropriate production lines.

"We also continue to make provisions for those who can work from home to do so using remote technology as well as increased cleaning and the availability of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)."

She added: "Our teams are playing a vital role in keeping food production moving and feeding the nation. We are committed to ensuring they are safe and well to keep providing these essential food products.

The firm recently said it would create 'hundreds' of temporary jobs at its food processing sites due to a 'heightened demand for chicken produce'.
Over 1,000 people returning to AP stranded at border

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Amaravati, Mar 26: More than 1,000 people who set off from Hyderabad, the capital of neighbouring Telangana, to various districts in Andhra Pradesh were stranded since Wednesday afternoon at the Garikapadu check-post on the inter-state border as the police refused to allow them passage.

Intervention of the local MLA and Government Whip Samineni Udayabhanu did not help as he blamed lack of coordination between the two states' authorities for the situation.

Local Deputy Superintendent of Police Ramana Murthy said since the lockdown was in force and the inter-state borders have been sealed, no vehicle or person could be allowed into the state.

The stranded passengers were facing hardship as there was no water or food in the vicinity.

Also, the panic-stricken passengers were huddled in a group as they awaited some intervention from the higher-ups to end the impasse.

The passengers, including a few women and children, set off from Hyderabad in cabs after obtaining special travel permits from the local police.

After a smooth ride up to Garikapadu, the border between the two states, the vehicles were stopped around 3.30 pm, leaving the passengers stranded.

"We are a group of students and have been asked to vacate our hostels. The Hyderabad police gave us special travel permit to return to our native place and accordingly we hired a cab and started our journey this morning. We were blocked at this place as the AP police are unwilling to let us in," a student said.

Another person said he was travelling with his wife, who was nine months pregnant, after a medical check-up in Hyderabad.

"Despite our situation, the police are not willing to let us travel to our destination," he said.

The local MLA arrived on the scene on Wednesday night and took up the stranded passengers' case with the police but to no avail.

"Those who were going to Guntur from Hyderabad were allowed via Piduguralla but here they blocked everything. There is a clear lack of coordination between the officials of the two states," Udayabhanu said.

He said the passengers could be permitted to journey further after conducting the required thermal screening tests.

The Andhra Pradesh government or the police were yet to take a decision on the stranded passengers when reports last came in on Wednesday night.

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Story first published: Thursday, March 26, 2020, 8:14 [IST]
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz entered a stay-at-home executive order that will deepen the destructive economic impact of our current shutdown. The stated purpose of the order is to slow the spread of the Wuhan virus: Recent developments, including the presence of community spread in Minnesota, the rapid increase in COVID-19 cases both globally and in Minnesota, and the first COVID-19 related death in our state, require Minnesota to take additional proactive measures to slow the spread of this pandemic. Slowing the community spread of COVID-19 is critical to ensuring that our healthcare facilities remain able to accommodate those who require intensive medical intervention.

The order is premised on modeling performed by state and University of Minnesota public health experts. According to the modeling as reported by the Star Tribune, up to 2.4 million Minnesotans could become infected with COVID-19[.] Further, researchers roughly calculated that 74,000 Minnesotans would have died if no community mitigation measures had been taken, including limitations on crowd sizes and closing schools, restaurants and bars.

The implication is that we have been doing nothing. We have been doing something for the past few weeks. A full set of the governors executive orders is accessible here. Among those insulated from the new regime established by Walzs order are [p]roviders of, and workers supporting, reproductive health care, i.e., abortion services  in the interest of protecting life, of course.

There is reasonable ground to wonder whether the projections on which the governor has relied comport with reality. Even assuming a 40 percent infection rate premised on doing nothing, the virus does not appear to have a fatality rate of 3 percent of those infected. The true fatality rate appears to be substantially lower. See, for example, the Wall Street Journal column by Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya. For more on modeling issues, see here.

Current data compiled by the Minnesota Department of Health reflect these numbers: 11,000 tests, 287 positive, one death. The data also reflect a total of 35 cases requiring hospitalization, including 26 hospitalized as of today.

Our friend Brian Sullivan comments: In other words, Walz used experts who thought the virus could kill 1.3% of all Minnesotans, or 3% of those infected, as their starting point. I think we need some new experts.

The Star Tribune appears to be in the business of suppressing discussion of the underlying issues. See, for example, the case of Kevin Roche (part 1, part 2, and part 3). In its editorial this morning, the Star Tribune cheerleads for the governor and scorns anyone who questions the wisdom of our current course.

In the lingo of the day, New York represents a hot spot for transmission of the Wuhan virus: New Yorks 30,811 COVID-19 cases are nearly 10 times more cases than the nearest states. Serious practical action to protect Minnesotans from the spread of the Wuhan virus should address the immediate shutdown of travel between New York and Minnesota. Short of that, we might wonder why efforts are not focused on the protection of the subset of our population whose lives are most at risk (the most vulnerable, as Walz puts it).

NOTE: Below is the video of Walz announcing his new executive order yesterday. He discusses the data and the model on which his order is premised (no mitigation versus significant mitigation). He promotes smart mitigation as he plays for time. He describes the order as what hes asking us to do.
Ankara, March 26 (IANS) A tradition in Turkey is to offer visitors cologne water to refresh their hands. Now the habit has become an unexpected strategy in te country's fight against the coronavirus pandemic and also an alternative to expensive and scarce hand sanitizers.

"I always carry a bottle of cologne in my car," an emergency health worker at Ankara's May 19 Hospital, told Efe news on the phone.

"Alcohol is a good sanitizer for hands, the most dangerous part of the body because it can spread the virus," says the doctor.

What is now medical advice was already widely spread in the Eurasian country.

Cologne is offered as a sign of hospitality in homes, restaurants and cafes, and is sold in supermarkets and grocery stores.

The services sector, especially gastronomy, has renewed its use in recent years of offering scented wet wipes

Every meal in an Istanbul restaurant ends, without exception, with the waiter offering one of these cloths to customers.

The towels have previously been immersed in a perfumed solution that usually contains a concentration of 80 percent alcohol.

Since the country first announced is coronavirus case on March 10, queues have formed at shops and chemists to buy cologne at a standard price of around seven euros ($7.5) a litre.

Hand sanitizers, like in many other countries, have vanished from store shelves across Turkey.

According to a study by the Ipsos social research institute on how Turks cope with the pandemic, 88 per cent said they use cologne to fight the virus.

Turkish media and experts have recommended its use to avoid spreading the virus in situations where it is difficult to wash your hands with soap.

The government has even announced it will distribute free cologne water and face masks to over 65s, the most vulnerable social group.

Engin Tuncer, president of Eyup Sabri Tuncer, a company that produces various types of cologne, told NTV radio that the lotion's sales have increased five-fold and daily shipments are necessary to replenish store stocks.

It is now common to find sold-out signs in supermarkets and pharmacies.

The most popular brands have also exhausted their online sales although they have issued statements to say stocks will be updated soon.

"We do not have masks, gloves, or cologne. These are the phrases that I have repeated the most in the last days," an Istanbul pharmacist told Efe news.

Given the rapid spread of the COVID-19, the Turkish government has suspended the use of ethanol in other sectors, such as gasoline production, to increase cologne production.

Turkey has so far reported 2,433 confirmed cases with 59 deaths.

--IANS

ksk/
CLEVELAND, Ohio  A new poll shows Republican President Donald Trump leading in Ohio and competitive in three other key Great Lakes states as voters generally approve of his response to coronavirus and the ensuing economic upheaval.

Trump led both Democratic presidential candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, in Ohio. Trump led Biden in Pennsylvania and trailed in Michigan, with the race in Wisconsin a dead heat. The president performed better against Sanders, leading in both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, though trailing in Michigan.

A majority of respondents in all four states said they approved of Trumps response to coronavirus and the economy, though they were worried about their current financial situation.

Researchers at Baldwin Wallace University, Ohio Northern University and Oakland University near Detroit polled 3,817 registered voters in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from Friday through Wednesday for the second of their planned four Great Lakes polls this year. The margins of error range from plus-or-minus 3.3 percentage points in Ohio to plus-or-minus 3.9 percentage points in Pennsylvania. The results are weighted by gender, race and ethnicity, education and annual household income to the 2016 electorate.

The poll results are generally good news for the president, who has been able to maintain support as the virus continues to spread and the stock market  which he frequently brags about reaching record highs under his leadership  craters.

An added political bonus for the president is the stoppage of in-person campaigning across the country. With the nation gripped by coverage of coronavirus, his Democratic challengers have little chances for earned media and a chance to criticize Trump on a wide scale as Washington works through the response, though Trump is also deprived of his favorite campaign tool  large rallies.

Lauren Copeland, associate director of of Baldwin Wallaces Community Research Institute, said Trumps support could be tenuous, however, if the economy continues its skid.

Theres an intriguing finding where Trumps numbers are up, but people are worried about he economy and personal finances in particular, Copeland said. If the economy continues its downward spiral, I dont know if Trumps support will hold up.

Trump vs. Biden

Seth A. Richardson

A hypothetical matchup of Trump versus Biden produced races within the margin of error in all four states.

Trump led Biden in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but trailed him in Michigan. The poll results indicated a dead heat between Trump and Biden in Wisconsin.

The results in the four states for Trump against Biden were:

Ohio: Trump 47%-Biden 43%

Michigan: Trump 42%-Biden 47%

Pennsylvania: Trump 47%-Biden 45%

Wisconsin: Trump 45%-Biden 45%

Trump vs. Sanders

Seth A. Richardson

Trump led Sanders in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, though trailed the senator in Michigan. All four races were within the margin of error, according to the poll.

The results in the four states for Trump against Sanders were:

Ohio: Trump 47%-Sanders 41%

Michigan: Trump 42%-Sanders 45%

Pennsylvania: Trump 48%-Sanders 42%

Wisconsin: Trump 46%-Sanders 42%

Coronavirus response

The likely key factor in Trump remaining strong with voters despite significant upheaval to their lives and the economy is their current approval of his response to the coronavirus pandemic. More than 50% of voters in all four states said they approved of the presidents response to the outbreak. A roughly similar portion of voters said they approved of Trumps handling of the economy.

Robert Alexander, founding director of Ohio Northern Universitys Institute for Civics and Public Policy, said the wartime atmosphere against coronavirus was likely giving Trump a boost in the electoral matchups.

Like most crises, the president is likely to see a rally around the flag effect with a surge of support from the electorate, Alexander said. We find this to be the case with Trump, which may be inflating his numbers a bit. As concerns over COVID-19 persist and economic conditions worsen, it is likely Trumps approval numbers will wane. We are a long way from November, so we should be cautious about over interpreting results right nowespecially given the unprecedented circumstances we are currently experiencing.

Biden and Sanders received tepid responses from voters in comparison. Only around 30% of voters in each state said they thought Biden or Sanders would do a better job than Trump, with a similar amount saying they would do worse.

Soft Democratic enthusiasm

Trump had firmer support among respondents than either Biden or Sanders in all four of the states, with more voters saying they would definitely support the president than those who would definitely support either of the Democrats.

However, more respondents in every state said they were almost certain to vote against Donald Trump than for him.

Seth A. Richardson

That may indicate that voters want to vote against Trump, but dont like either Biden or Sanders as the nominee.

When asked if they would vote for Trump or the Democratic nominee, without either Bidens or Sanders name mentioned, Trump led in Ohio and trailed in Michigan and Wisconsin. The race was tied in Pennsylvania.

The Great Lakes Poll from January showed Trump trailing a generic Democrat in all four states.

Favorability

None of the candidates had a net-positive approval rating, save for Biden in Michigan. Trumps worst favorability rating was in Michigan, where only 41% of voters approved of Trump compared with 52% who held an unfavorable view of the president.

In Ohio, voters were split on their view of Trump, with 47% holding a favorable view of him and 47% holding an unfavorable view of him.

Seth A. Richardson

Ohio voters were more critical of Biden and Sanders. Biden had a net-unfavorable rating, with a 41% favorable to 44% unfavorable. Biden had net-unfavorable ratings in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, though voters in Michigan held slightly more favorable views of the former vice president.

Seth A. Richardson

Voters in the poll did not like Sanders, who held a net-unfavorable rating in all four states, and at more than 10% in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Michigan respondents were much kinder to Sanders, with only 42% holding an unfavorable view to 39% who held an favorable view.

Seth A. Richardson

Read full coverage of the Great Lakes Poll here.

Other poll stories:

Ohio voters strongly back coronavirus lifestyle restrictions, and majority support Donald Trumps re-election, poll shows
After reporting Manitoba's largest same-day surge in coronavirus cases and a troubling backlog in lab testing Wednesday, the chief provincial health officer had better news to share on Thursday.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 26/3/2020 (657 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After reporting Manitoba's largest same-day surge in coronavirus cases and a troubling backlog in lab testing Wednesday, the chief provincial health officer had better news to share on Thursday.

Dr. Brent Roussin reported just one new COVID-19 case  a man in his 20s who lives in Winnipeg, and appears to have a link to a previously announced positive case bringing the province's COVID-19 case count to 36.

Roussin also announced the largest single-day increase in test results  734  after being limited to performing 200 to 250 tests a day because of a global shortage of the reagent used in testing. The Cadham Provincial Lab, which is now able to make its own reagent, has performed more than 5,606 tests so far. Roussin would not say how many samples remain backlogged but promised "there will not be a backlog by end of week."

With the lab able to make its own testing material and increase its capacity, testing for COVID-19 will now be expanded, Roussin said. As a result, it's expected health-care workers will discover many more positive cases, but Roussin would not commit to any new measures such as extending school closures or further restricting the size of public gatherings.

"We'll be moving forward with that in the near future," he said of reducing crowd size limits in Manitoba, currently set at 50. Roussin is pacing the restrictions he imposes, knowing they will be in place for an extended period of time, and has said several times that as soon as there is evidence of sustained community transmission, they'd be put in place. He said he's not getting any pushback from the province about tightening restrictions.

Dr. Brent Roussin said the lab is able to make its own testing material now, which will increase its capacity. (John Woods / The Canadian Press files)

"There's a lot of things to consider when you make changes like this," said Roussin. The same goes for extending school closures past April 10, which appears likely. "In a couple of weeks this is not going to be over," he said. "We're looking at what steps we're going to take We're trying to get a better picture of when we can make announcements."

The only new measures the provincial health officer announced Thursday concerned testing.

"We are expanding our testing criteria to include the groups of people at risk of contracting or spreading COVID-19 and are showing respiratory symptoms," Roussin said. "These would include all symptomatic health-care providers, individuals who live or work in remote or isolated communities, including First Nations and people who live or work in a group setting," including correctional facilities, shelters, long-term care and residential care facilities and work camps, he said.

Testing for COVID-19 is the only way to track the spread of the disease, and so far the most at-risk have been prioritized: long-term care residents, ICU patients, those who've been in contact with a positive case, and international travellers returning with respiratory symptoms.

The Dynacare lab company will be help regional health authorities to contact those with negative test results. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press files)

"Testing is important but what's most important is the overall strategy," he said. Tracing the contacts of those who've tested positive and implementing physical-distancing measures like closing schools and limiting public gatherings to 50 are going to have a major effect on reducing the spread of infection, said Roussin. "Testing won't get us out of this."

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Those who've been waiting several days in self-isolation for negative test results won't have to wait much longer, Shared Health chief nursing officer Lanette Siragusa said. Starting Friday, the private Dynacare lab company will be helping regional health authorities to contact those with negative test results.

"It certainly will be faster than it has in the past," said Siragusa.

Siragusa also addressed concerns about the rationing of masks at health-care facilities. The provincial government is safeguarding several months' worth of personal protective equipment, she said. They're not rationing but "managing inventory" after reports of theft and hoarding before Manitoba had its first COVID-19 case, she said.

Health Minister Cameron Friesen introduced an online form Wednesday for companies to register to provide goods and services needed to respond to COVID-19  including masks and hand sanitizer.

"We're not out of supplies, we're doing this out of an abundance of caution," he said Wednesday. The plan is to make it quicker and easier to procure supplies and services as infection rates rise, he said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca
Maybe youve recently switched insurers and need a new primary care doctor, or maybe youve decided its time to stop relying on urgent care as your main health care source.

Theres no time like the present, especially with the global health crisis caused by the new coronavirus, to make sure you have a doctor who knows your background and medical records well.

Heres how to pick a primary care physician in Houston.

Why you should have a primary care physician

Fewer Americans have primary care physicians, according to a study published in December by Harvard and Northwestern researchers. Over a 13-year period, the number of people with primary doctors dropped by roughly 6 million people, or 2 percent of the nations population.

The number declined the most for people in their 30s and 60s who were healthy. And overall, people who lived in the South and had fewer medical issues were more likely to forgo having a primary care physician, said Dr. Jeffrey Linder, an internist, professor at Northwestern Universitys Feinberg School of Medicine and co-author of the study.

More Information What is this? I'm Gwendolyn Wu, and I'm writing "Houston How To," a series on how to navigate the city and its complexities. Humans have an innate drive to improve themselves, and we're always striving to live better, smarter and more efficiently by throwing countless dollars and hours at our problems. The Houston Chronicle wants to simplify that for you. As a reporter, I usually ask the questions, but I can't be the only one wondering how something works. What are things you need to know how to do, Houston? You can find me on Twitter at @gwendolynawu or by email at gwendolyn.wu@chron.com. See More Collapse

You may not think you need a primary care doctor. But even if youre not in need of a check-up and are otherwise healthy, having a physician who has previously seen you is vital in case you do get sick.

MORE HOW TO: How do you find therapy in Houston?

If one of my patients gets infected, I know them, I know their medical history and could provide more informed advice for them, Linder said.

Others may choose to rely on urgent care or specialists like OB-GYNs as their source of primary care.

While its still important to have those specialists, its best to also work with someone who has a breadth of knowledge in treating common ailments.

If were talking about high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, all that kind of stuff, thats where you need your primary care doctor, said Dr. Angela Guerra, a family medicine doctor and managing physician at Kelsey-Seybold Clinics Baytown location.

And ultimately, it is healthier for you.

If you do have chronic medical conditions, routine follow-ups helping to identify issues earlier on can contribute to the primary care physician decreasing the risk of premature death, said Dr. Leslie Weisberg, market chief medical officer of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas.

Many insurance plans also require you to select a primary care physician.

A doctor for a public health crisis

Even if youre healthy now, that can change quickly. Just look at how COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, has spread in Texas.

As health care providers  and some well-known public figures  have shown, it can be difficult to get a testing kit to prove if youre sick without the right connections. You may not have the money to pay for high-powered doctors, but if you have a doctor who knows your underlying medical conditions, they may be able to get you access faster than others.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: Stay informed with accurate reporting you can trust

Its also for the greater good of hospitals running at capacity.

We really need to try and reserve the ER, urgent care centers and pharmacies for those in need, Ponce de Leon said.

Your physician options

There are three particular types of doctors you should consider:

Family practitioners, who can work with patients of any age, but may have additional training in pediatrics, geriatrics, obstetrics and gynecology Internists, who primarily work with adults and may specialize in treating chronic illnesses Pediatricians, if you have children and would like them to see a doctor who specializes in working with kids

A family practitioner, experts said, can be especially convenient for people who have to arrange appointments for a multi-generational household.

Having that breadth of medical know-how is really good for people with family medicine doctors, said Dr. Anne Marie Ponce de Leon, a Sugar Land-based physician. They can also help with children and elderly parents if you can take them all with you.

And while there are tons of directories out there, such as Zocdoc, the Texas Medical Association directory and your insurance providers doctor database, word-of-mouth is often one of the best ways to go. Ask on community websites such as Nextdoor, or other medical providers you know for their recommendations.

Some of the most established physicians are not out there doing medical advertising that other doctors are doing backed by insurance money, Ponce de Leon said. The physicians in those private practices have been around forever, theyre not spending their budget on marketing.

You can vet potential doctors at the Texas Medical Board website.

Features of doctors offices

If you have chronic illnesses, check where a doctor has admitting privileges. Certain hospitals may have a more expansive staff of specialists, and you should evaluate the hospitals performance based on patient safety and the expertise of its clinicians.

If youre more comfortable speaking in a language other than English, or have family members who face language barriers, look at the doctors office listing to clarify what languages their staff can speak.

Ask about the availability of appointments after business hours and weekends if youd like to avoid going during work or school. Its also key to ask how long itll take, on average, to get an appointment.

With the rise of video conferencing technology, you should also find out if the physicians office offers telehealth options. Sometimes its better for public health to call your doctor and discuss symptoms first to avoid going into the clinicians waiting room and exposing others to contagious illnesses, as in the case of COVID-19. It can also be more convenient than rushing off to an appointment in the middle of the day.

It can be hard to find a new primary care doctor. Doctors recommend going with your intuition when it comes to finding someone who you feel you can trust and talk to about anything, even if it takes a few visits.

Some health care providers also post short video profiles of their doctors to help prospective patients gauge their personalities.

Physicians are all trained to work in a very similar manner, but its (about) their demeanor and warmth, so I use those videos when choosing a primary care physician for my kids, Guerra said.

Looking at insurance

For the roughly 80 percent of Texans who have health insurance, its best to find a primary care physician whos in your network.

Depending on your insurance plan  HMO or PPO  your insurance may not pay out for a doctors visit if you dont see someone in their networks. You also will not need referrals from your primary care doctor to see specialists on a PPO plan.

Insurance usually lowers the cost of going in for a check-up. On most insurance plans, youll pay a co-pay (a set amount per visit) for visiting a doctor in-network, but if you use a person who isnt covered by your insurer, youll be subject to the full costs, which can be astronomically higher.

While insurers offer directories of providers, those can quickly get out of date, doctors said.

You need to call the physicians office and ask them if they really do take that insurance, Ponce de Leon said.

MEDICAL SOLUTIONS: Coronavirus or not, these new doctors are matched and ready to work

Insurers will vet a doctors credentials and ensure they have the proper education and malpractice insurance. They will also issue their own credentials to clinicians.

We re-credential every three years to ensure theres no potential board actions that we would look more closely at, Weisberg said.

You cant predict if your primary care physician will become out-of-network, though. Typically, an insurer will give some notice before pulling doctors out of their coverage plan.

For instance, Houston Methodist and UnitedHealthcare announced their contract end in October, and formally ended it on the last day of December. However, the contract specified that doctors would remain in-network through April 1  effectively giving patients a six-month lead to find a new doctor and transfer their medical records to a new office.

gwendolyn.wu@chron.com

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By Trend

Six more people have tested positive for coronavirus in Azerbaijan, one person died, the Operational Headquarters under the Azerbaijani Cabinet of Ministers told Trend on March 25.

One of these patients, who is the Azerbaijani citizen, came to hospital with high fever and shortness of breath.

The patient, who also had diabetes and coronary heart disease, tested positive for COVID-19. Despite the doctors efforts, the patients health deteriorated and he died on the same day.

Family members of the patient and other persons with whom he interacted were identified and quarantined.

Currently, 81 people with active coronavirus are in special treatment hospitals under medical supervision. The health condition of three of them is serious. The health condition of five patients is moderate, and that of the rest is stable. Necessary measures for their treatment are underway.

Azerbaijan continues to take relevant measures related to check-up of 2,914 people in various quarantine zones to detect infection cases.

Azerbaijan has announced a special quarantine regime from March 24 to April 20 in order to prevent the spread of coronavirus infection and possible complications. According to the rules of the special regime, people over 65 are forbidden to leave home, in accordance with the law, social services are provided to single people of this category of people. Entry and exit to Baku, Sumgayit and Absheron district is limited with the exception of special vehicles, including ambulances, emergency recovery and rescue services, as well as trucks. Crowds of more than 10 people in public places, including on streets, boulevards, parks and other places are not allowed.

Currently, coronavirus infection is detected both among people who have arrived in Azerbaijan from abroad, as well as within the country.

For this reason, we once again urge our citizens to strictly observe hygiene rules, requirements and recommendations of the World Health Organization, the Operational Headquarters under the Cabinet of Ministers. Citizens are required to observe measures of self-isolation, to leave home only in case of serious need, to minimize contacts with other persons, not to visit crowded places and to observe a special quarantine regime.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
China has been frantically trying to contain coronavirus for several months, but it is secretly waging another fight during the crisis  with the countrys journalists.

Chinas journalists say it all started with the death of Dr Li Wenliang  a whistleblower whose attempt to warn the country about the coronavirus outbreak was silenced by the government. He died on 6 February after contracting the disease.

His death set off a wave of outrage across major social media platforms, as citizens initiated a short-lived online campaign demanding freedom of speech. Relevant posts were deleted by the Chinese government within hours, but the incident further strengthened citizens determination to preserve the truth of the coronavirus outbreak.

Li Wenliang was a normal guy with a good conscience and people see themselves in him, Yaqiu Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Independent.

His death illustrates that anyone could die in this system of deception, suppression and zero accountability.

Several prominent citizen journalists tried to take advantage of the brief window of openness to reveal the real situation in Wuhan.

Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin and Li Zehua were briefly popular after uploading rare video footage from Wuhan to Youtube and Twitter. However, all three were soon forced into disappearance by the government in February and have not been seen in public since.

Ethan Chen* said Li Wenliangs death pushed him to challenge Beijings narrative around the disease  but he too fears he might suffer the same fate as his colleagues.

The government doesnt want Chinese citizens to have access to information that contradicts the official narrative, so they always try to silence whistleblowers by taking them out of the picture, Chen told The Independent.

Their disappearance reminds me that as a journalist, there are certain duties that Im supposed to fulfil when the government tries to bury all the truth  I have the responsibility to write down what I have seen and experienced during the outbreak.

Many people have been detained for speaking up about the truth, and I honestly am expecting that something similar will happen to me sooner or later.

Censoring sensitive content online is only one of many ways that the Chinese government silences critics. Hu Jia, a prominent Chinese activist, is no stranger to the wide range of methods that Beijing uses to oppress anyone who hopes to reveal truth during major crises.

On 31 January, hours before he was scheduled to join a talk show on Radio Free Asia (RFA) to talk about the coronavirus outbreak, several police knocked on the door of Hus residence, asking him what hed been up to.

Then they asked whether Ive been accepting media interviews, and warned that I shouldnt be stabbing the Chinese governments back when the whole country was united to fight against the coronavirus, Hu recalled.

The argument lasted for more than half an hour, and in the end, the police warned that if Hu insisted on joining the show on RFA, that would leave them with no choice but to follow the drill.

Then around 11 pm that night, police showed up at his door again. This time, they asked Hu to go downstairs with them. Once he went downstairs, the police got into an argument with him again.

They quarrelled with me until they made sure that I wouldnt be able to make it for the Radio Free Asias talk show, Hu said. I brought my cellphone with me, in case producers from Radio Free Asia wanted to reach me. But the police made it really clear that if I tried to use my phone while quarrelling with them, they would use extreme measures against me.

After that evening, Hu was put under house arrest for 16 days.

I have been detained multiple times since in 2001, yet every time I was arrested for comments I made, it made me understand the reason why freedom of speech is so important to a functioning civil society, Hu said.

Unfortunately, I also paid a huge price for defending freedom of speech. I need to sacrifice my personal freedom, dignity and safety in order to keep raising awareness.

Chinese journalists are now trying to keep the truth about the coronavirus outbreak alive by moving information shared by citizens to places beyond Beijings reach.

Several citizen-initiated projects have been set up on GitHub and other platforms. These projects gather personal narratives and Chinese news reports about the coronavirus outbreak across different social media platforms and online forums in China.

One of the projects is called Memories of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak, which is started by seven volunteers around the world and aims at establishing a database for researchers studying epidemic prevention and internet users.

But rights activists warn that ultimately, it is Beijing who is winning in this tug of war.

The Chinese government has been increasingly restricting the use of VPNs by Chinese citizens, and we can expect that their moves will make circumvention over the internet censorship even harder for citizens in the future, Wang from HRW said.

They can also just silence whoever they want by arbitrarily detaining them.

* Names have been changed to protect identity
Newsfrom Japan

Japan reports 96 new coronavirus cases on Wednesay, the second day in a row that numbers are on the rise, and the country's total reach 2019. Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike asks Tokyo residents to stay home as much as possible.

[ Nippon TV News 24 Japan]

http://www.ntv.co.jp/englishnews/
Until fairly recently, beyond international stalwarts like vodka or whisky, there were certain native drinks that were not made outside their home countries. Now, however, this is beginning to change. From Canadian aquavit to Australian vermouth, we lift the lid on five classic spirits made in non-traditional places

The French have Cognac. The Scots have Scotch whisky. In Mexico they make Tequila, and the US boasts bourbon. There are rules and regulations that tie these spirits to their geographical location. But some spirits arent bound by such legalities. And with a bit of distiller ingenuity, they can be made anywhere in the world  and often with interesting results. Here, we look at five classic spirits made in unusual places

Holland is widely credited as the birthplace of gin. Following the creation of genever  the regions beloved malt-based spirit  gin is thought to have been invented by Dutch physician Franciscus Sylvius, who used it for medicinal purposes back in 1550. By the time the 1600s rolled around, there were hundreds of gin distilleries in the city of Amsterdam alone.

Around the same time, gin started to emerge in England in various forms, giving way to a rather bleak period dubbed the Gin Craze until production was eventually licensed and tamed. Today, the juniper-forward white spirit is produced in countless western countries the world over, but rarely in the east, which is one of the reasons we were particularly excited to see Ki No Bi Gin launch back in 2016.

The inaugural release from the Kyoto Distillery  and the first Japanese gin produced in Kyoto  Ki No Bi is made from a rice spirit base and flavoured with locally-sourced botanicals that include yellow yuzu, green sansho and gyokuro tea. The botanicals are split across six flavour categories  base, citrus, Tea, spice, fruity & floral and herbal  and these groupings are distilled individually before being blended together to make the final liquid.

Historians believe shochu first originated in Persia (or possibly China or Korea) but its best known as Japans national spirit, having made its way to the rural south of the island country sometime in the 16th century. While its typically made from rice, barley, sweet potatoes, buckwheat or brown sugar, Japanese distillers have been known to use chestnut, sesame seeds, potatoes and even carrots to make the clear white liquor  so flavour-wise, its super diverse.

Generally speaking, shochu is little-known outside its east Asian home, with confused westerners sometimes referring to the spirit as Japanese vodka. However in recent years, a handful of experimental distillers, such as those at St. George Spirits, have sought to create their own regional take on the traditional spirit  in this instance, a full-flavoured shochu from California rice that would complement a hearty bowl of ramen.

To create St. George California Shochu, steamed Calrose rice is inoculated with koji spores and fermented (known as sake lees). Once the rice starch has been transformed into sugar, yeast is added, and the mix is fermented cold. Its then blended with non-GMO neutral grain spirit and distilled in a copper pot still. On the nose youll find cashew, pistachio, sweet mushrooms and dried cocoa, they say  with the latter developing on the palate as bittersweet chocolate.

Unlike other spirits categories, we know precisely when and where absinthe was created: the canton of Neuchatel in Switzerland, 1792. It was the handiwork of French doctor Pierre Ordinaire, who set out to capture the powerful healing effects of wormwood in a potable form. Fast-forward 70 years or so, and this potent anise-flavoured spirit had become the alcoholic drink du jour among bohemian Parisian writers and other arty types.

Where traditional absinthes are bottled anywhere up to 74% ABV  and modern variants up to an eye-watering 90%  Hendricks Absinthe stands at an altogether far more reasonable 48%, somewhere in the region of your typical single malt. In a step away from the stereotypical green-tinged liquid were accustomed to seeing, this spirit runs clear.

Crafted by master distiller Lesley Gracie at the gin brands headquarters in Girvan, Scotland, this variant is flavoured with Hendricks signature rose and cucumber botanicals, as well as traditional wormwood and star anise, making it an approachable introduction to absinthe.

Distilled from grain (or sometimes potatoes), this herbaceous tipple has been produced in Scandiavian countries since the 15th century. Aquavit is characterised by its predominant flavours of caraway or dill or both  the style varies depending on whether youre in Sweden, Norway or Denmark  and may be matured in a barrel or bottled unaged.

The spirit has found favour outside its Nordic home in the likes of Iceland, Germany, the US, and Canada  the birthplace of Long Table Langbord Akvavit. Produced at Vancouvers first microdistillery, Long Table Distillery, the liquid is made in small batches according to traditional Scandi style.

Langbord Akvavit is flavoured with six botanicals including caraway, fennel, anise and Seville oranges, and its bottled unaged, so theres no cask influence. Expect complex licorice and orange notes, a smooth, sweet finish of lingering marmalade and prevailing herbal notes on the palate, the team say.

While its more commonly associated with Italy, the history of this fortified wine is rooted in 16th century Germany. In fact, the origin of the word vermouth comes from the way French people would pronounce wermut, the German word for wormwood (an original ingredient that remains a staple to this day). Modern vermouth  as we know it today  was first produced in the 18th century in Italy, with French and Spanish producers creating their own iterations not long after.

Australia may be renowned for its outstanding vineyards, but even so  when Regal Rogue debuted its inaugural new world vermouth, the brand caused a bit of a stir. The four-strong range sees 100% Aussie wines  from Barossa Valley shiraz to Hunter Valley semillon  married with native aromatics including anise myrtle, quandong, pepper berry and more.

This Wild Rose bottling introduces pale, dry Barossa shiraz rose from Adelaide Hills to native illawara plums, rosella and strawberry gum, and rhubarb and kina, resulting in a semi-dry vermouth characterised by tropical fruit and fruit spice notes. Delightful.
The Vice President of the Republic, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has launched Ghanas Universal Quick Response (QR) Code and Proxy Pay system in Accra.

While QR CODE payment systems have been implemented in many countries (especially in Asia), very few countries have successfully implemented a Universal QR CODE.

The launch which took place on March 25, 2020, makes Ghana the first country in Africa, and the third in the world (after Singapore and India) to launch a Universal QR Code.

READ ALSO: 7 biggest coronavirus news of Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Launched online due to the vagaries of the coronavirus pandemic, and under the auspices of the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems Limited (GhIPPS), a subsidiary of the Bank of Ghana, the QR Code and Proxy Pay systems are designed to make secure, convenient and low-cost financial service available to the vast majority of people, and to solve the pain points of traditional finance institutions.

The Universal QR CODE will make it possible for all merchants, service providers and institutions to receive payments from bank accounts, ezwich accounts, mobile money wallets or internationally issued visa or MasterCards instantly, Vice President Bawumia stated at the launch.

The Vice President also explained that the Universal QR CODE will bring about interoperability across all telcos and across all banks and between banks and telcos.

He noted when you go to a merchant with a Universal QR CODE, as long as you have a bank account or a mobile money account from any financial institution, fintech or telco, you will be able to pay the merchant regardless of which bank.

READ ALSO: Coronavirus hits Queen Elizabeths family as Prince Charles, 71, tests positive

The Vice President further stressed that the Universal QR CODE, has provided Ghana with the vehicle to make all payments in the economy digital.

Any owner of a phone, whether it is a smart phone or a yam or feature phone can use the Universal QR CODE to make or receive payments.

YEN.com.gh earlier reported that the Inspector General of the Ghana Police Service, James Oppong-Boanuh, has directed personnel of the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) to suspend all routine motor checks across the country with immediate effect.

The directive is a measure to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 disease which has so far infected 27 persons in the last few days in Ghana.

The checks include stopping and inspection of vehicle documents.

Coronavirus in Ghana: Disinfection of Accra Markets against COVID-19 | #Yencomgh

READ ALSO: Asamoah Gyan calls on celebs to give back to society; says govt cannot carry all the burden

Have national and human interest issues to discuss? Know someone who is extremely talented and needs recognition? Your stories and photos are always welcome. Get interactive via our Facebook page.

Source: YEN.com.gh
China has been urged to share its experience on how it managed to confront and subdue the coronavirus outbreak with Ghana, and the rest of the world, This is crucial to achieving the complete eradication of the virus, which has been declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a global pandemic.



Dr. Benjamin Anyagre, General Secretary of the Ghana China Friendship Association (GHACHIFA), told the Ghana News Agency in an interview on Wednesday, that while China was taken by surprise, by the virus and suffered greatly as a result, there were almost "zero" cases of new infections of the virus in China.



He said this was the result of the accuracy and high sense of urgency with which the Chinese government tackled the outbreak.



"Whilst China constructed 15 temporary hospitals with 8,000 health workers to combat the disease, they have all been closed and local authorities have announced that commerce and industrial activities would resume, with non-essential services to restart," Dr. Anyagre said.



He said it was worth noting that China achieved this through strong leadership, discipline and the dedication of a people towards achieving a national cause for the common good.



Dr. Anyagre said it was also backed with the needed logistical and technical services, effective mass education among a number of measures.



The GHACHIFA General Secretary said what Ghana and the world needed most at this moment, was a united and collaborative approach towards eradicating the virus, and not a blame game scenario that sought to make it appear as though a particular group of people were to be blamed for the pandemic.



"The term Chinese virus indicates a xenophobic attack on a particular race and it is against the United Nation Charter on Human Rights," he said.



Dr. Angare said the World Health Organization (WHO) recently condemned such negative name tagging observing that throughout history, such outbreaks occurred with varied origins, but no country or people was ever tagged, adding that it was impossible to tell ahead of time, what negativity might originate from which territory.



He urged Ghanaians to desist from such xenophobic behaviour and bear in mind, that it was a world of uncertainty, where it paid to be courteous and respectful towards each other.



He commended all health workers in the country for risking their lives to contain and fight off the pandemic, and urged all members of the public to adhere to all the precautionary measures that were spelt out by the country's authorities, in order to help fight off the pandemic.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
While many marriages end in divorce, they rarely end this explosively, or with a body count.

Amanda Peet and Christian Slater star in the second season of anthology true crime series Dirty John, which became a hit when it first premiered in 2018.

In the second installment in the series, titled Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story, Peet plays the titular real-life character Betty, who gunned down her ex-husband Dan Broderick (here played by Slater) and his second wife in 1989.

Back for more Dirty business: Amanda Peet and Christian Slater star in the second season of anthology true crime series Dirty John, which became a hit when it first premiered in 2018

The trailer for the new season, which dropped Wednesday from USA Network, sees the actors in their best Eighties period fashions as they portray the warring couple.

Amanda's Betty looks back on the marriage and what led her to such a grisly act.

'I wanted a husband and a family  Dan needed a wife that could wait on him,' Amanda's character Betty says at the top of the clip, as she's seen playing the perfect wife to Slater's character while laying out a turkey dinner before him and the children on the dining room table.

'I wouldve been treated better if Id been a dog and served my master,' she continues.

In the second installment: Peet plays real-life character Betty Broderick, who gunned down her ex-husband Dan Broderick (here played by Slater, pictured) and his second wife in 1989

Unhappy wife: The trailer for the new season, which dropped Wednesday from USA Network, sees the actors in their best Eighties period fashions as they portray the warring couple

Then, the action suddenly shifts to an interrogation room of sorts, with a stricken-looking Peet dressed differently as she speaks to someone offscreen.

'Im amazed it only took one bullet to kill Dan Broderick,' she states, as-a-matter-of-factly.

Dan and Betty Broderick got together in the 1960s, and went on to marry in 1969.

'Im amazed it only took one bullet to kill Dan Broderick': A stricken-looking Peet sits in an interrogation room of sorts

After having four children, the couple began the process of a much-publicized divorce in 1986, leading Betty to eventually shoot and kill Dan and his second wife, Linda, on Nov. 5, 1989.

The trailer covers much of this time and these events, with a shot of the pair looking happy before things quickly devolve.

At one point, Slater's character serves Betty a 'court order,' which leads to Amanda's Betty stalking out into the yard after him and screaming, 'How am I supposed to see my kids?!'

From their, things go from bad to worse, as Peet is seen in a straitjacket, being forced into the back of a car.

Family: Before splitting, the couple had four children

At one point: Slater's character serves Betty a 'court order'

Messy: The pair began the process of a much-publicized divorce in 1986

Brutal: Soon, things between the former couple go completely out of control, with Dan choking Betty on the ground...

'Dan had me committed to a psych ward,' she says in voice over. 'Im not the crazy one  he is.'

Soon, things between the former couple go completely out of control, with Dan choking Betty on the ground, Betty driving her car directly into his front door... until eventually, a gun is seen.

Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story is set to debut this summer on USA, with an eight-episode season.

Season 1 of the series, which starred Connie Britton and Eric Bana, is available to stream on Netflix.
While most of us are tired of hearing the name Coronavirus, a Chef in Hanoi is trying to boost peoples morale by selling green Coronavirus themed burgers. Yes, you read that right! And we are not sure who is eating it.



 Reuters

Chef Hoang Tung and his team are now spending their days moulding green-tea stained burger buns with crown dough which resembles microscopic images of the virus. Okay, but would anyone ever want to eat it? According to Reuters, Tung said at the Pizza takeaway shop in downtown Hanoi, "We have this joke that if you are scared of something, you should eat it. That's why the coronavirus isn't scary anymore after you eat a burger in the shape of the virus itself. That way of thinking spreads joy to others during this pandemic. Oh, now we know. So, hes trying to spread joy by making people eat Coronavirus themed burgers.



 Reuters

Heres what people think of the green Coronavirus themed burger-



Not cheering me, at least!

That is supposed to cheer us up?  Thomas Paine (@resistandgrow) March 26, 2020

They should put the flag of China as a reminder lol!   PathFinderToVoyager (@MackyBoyExpat) March 26, 2020

Eating Chinese Virus?  Push China Wall (@pushchinawall) March 26, 2020

Total failure.. Nobody's gonna buy..  Poulami Mukherjee (@Poulami0211) March 26, 2020

Lol that is truly sick.   MadGranny (@patticakelv) March 26, 2020

Ouch!NayMy reaction right now..Hainah?True!

In mid-February, Vietnam announced that all of its 16 COVID-19 patients had recovered but then later Vietnamese travellers brought an increase in the cases by returning after overseas travel. There are now around, 148 coronavirus cases of the deadly virus in Vietnam. Eating these burgers while the virus is still killing people across the world sounds like a weird idea! What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!
Bazaar Corporate Radar | Feb 22, 2021, 12:00 AM IST

Bazaar Corporate Radar

Bazaar Corporate Radar is your window into the minds of top CEOs, Boardrooms, global economists, fund managers and sector analysts. If it?s making news, you?ll find it on Bazaar Corporate Radar.
NEW YORK, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- We Are All Human Foundation (WAAH), a non-profit focused on diversity, inclusion and equity, along with more than 75 national Hispanic leaders, launched today the "Hispanic Recovery Plan," a clearinghouse for information and action to support and protect Hispanics whose businesses and jobs have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The initiative is part of the "Hispanic Star," a collective platform to unify Hispanics in the US and celebrate their contributions to the country.

The Hispanic Recovery Plan is a platform to communicate, organize and mobilize individuals nationwide, unify efforts to mitigate the immediate economic impact of COVID-19 and set a path for a solid and speedy recovery, particularly for Hispanic small and medium enterprises, entrepreneurs, and independent workers, who contribute more than $700 billion in sales to the economy annually , and employ more than 2.3 million people .

To drive tangible impact in the community, the Hispanic Recovery Plan will provide access to key leaders and subject matter experts via daily informational webinars on health, policy, business and other topics of interest for Hispanics during this time of crisis. The platform will enable a marketplace for talent and services to provide visibility and available opportunities. Leaders will appeal to corporate America to support the Hispanic community in a number of ways, including advocating to promote retention and increasing Hispanic supplier diversity.

The initiative also will empower the more than 5,000 Hispanic Star ambassadors nationwide to create "Hispanic Star Hubs" to share information and take action on local priorities.

"This is a time for Hispanics to unify efforts and take action together; COVID-19 is already affecting us all, but Hispanics will be disproportionately impacted," said Claudia Romo Edelman, Founder and CEO of the We Are All Human Foundation. Ms. Romo Edelman has been invited to join the United Nation efforts to support global mobilization for COVID-19. "We understand the importance of coordinated action to protect each other today, but to also have a recovery plan so that we can get back on our feet quickly tomorrow," Romo Edelman added.

Romo Edelman is a former UN diplomat with decades of experience in global mobilization for organizations including the World Economic Forum, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB & Malaria. She has led global campaigns during other crises and pandemics.

About We Are All Human

The We Are All Human Foundation is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit devoted to equity, diversity and inclusion. Made up of an experienced group of marketers and sustainability activists with backgrounds from the United Nations, global affairs, media, and the corporate world, our team is committed to making change through collective action.

Media Contact

Isabella Carrillo

[email protected]

SOURCE We Are All Human

Related Links

http://www.weareallhuman.org




A podcast I love, swindled, did an ep on it!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/swindled/id1308717668?i=1000443846038



Actually we later post about a lot of his topics. I wonder if hes a member? She told people and businesses that she was some heiress and was living the good life on other peoples dollar. Had one of her friends max out a company card for something because her money was tied up.A podcast I love, swindled, did an ep on it!Actually we later post about a lot of his topics. I wonder if hes a member?

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You should listen to the podcast on it called Fake Heiress - 6 episodes done by the BBC. They're pretty short too, I blew through them in a day!

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https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/how-anna-delvey-tricked-new-york.html



Anna beyond scammed people. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars here; one person she scammed for 90k alone. It's really fucked up and shows a certain naivete among rich people who think you're rich as well; these people basically loaned her great sums of money because she was charismatic and they thought they would get it back. It's the equivalent of you loaning a friend $10 for drinks, only it was rent, trips, "investments" etc for huge amounts of cash. The article is long, but please read to get the full picture:Anna beyond scammed people. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars here; one person she scammed for 90k alone. It's really fucked up and shows a certain naivete among rich people who think you're rich as well; these people basically loaned her great sums of money because she was charismatic and they thought they would get it back. It's the equivalent of you loaning a friend $10 for drinks, only it was rent, trips, "investments" etc for huge amounts of cash.

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oh shit! in true "ONTD doesn't read" fashion, I posted the BBC podcast they did



gonna check this one out too!

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I LOVE swindled. The host is very deadpan and monotone. He could be better now or maybe Im used to it. But he does some that'll make you hate everything. The world is evil! The Contraceptive & The Formula will make you want to burn everything down.



Im gonna check out your BBC one you posted. I need some more podcasts right now.

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Lol wtf

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Someone has her password? Lol

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i wonder how that shonda rhimes netflix show about her is/was going. i don't trust shonda with anything.

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Lena Dunham is doing the other Anna Delvey production, so

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lol I remember that, and then suddenly she stopped tweeting. I'm guessing the guards found her phone.

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Im friends with a guy on Facebook who posts from jail VERY frequently. I saw the background of his photo of him dressed like he was going out and thought the background of this looks like jail or the military? Then he made a status about jail. Hes on Facebook literally all the time

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I mean guys are doing tick tock challenges from jail lmaooo

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he could have someone post for her. Michael Alig had people posting on twitter for him all the time when he was in prison and he didn't even know what it was. He would tell friends what to post and they would do it.

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I often think this about Making a Murderer. Steven Avery has no clue what Netflix is - he's been in jail for ages. Yet he's a star. Same with Adnan (Serial) and podcasts...

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Yeah Jodi Arias has a Twitter account. It updates every time she reads a new book or buys something from the store, its weird

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they released non violent prisoners at rikers too?? that's amazing. society is really telling on itself rn

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eh, she's only in jail for scamming rich people, i don't care what she does.

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FYI Shonda Rhimes is doing a show on this. Ozark's Julia Garner is playing Anna.

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I needed this like yesterday

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Lena Dunham also bought the rights and I think she's doing something for HBO or Hulu.... gonna be interesting

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Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in Hello! Your entry got to top-25 of the most popular entries in LiveJournal!Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in FAQ

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I find her whole story hilarious. The people she scammed deserved it.

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Eh, I disagree. Obviously they were dumb but no one intends on getting scammed, and are we really going to pretend that Anna (or any scammer) wouldn't scam someone who's less deserving in your eyes if situation suited them?

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Did anyone else read the book by the friend who got scammed?

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The founder of PokerStars admitted Wednesday to running an illegal online gambling business, nine years after he and other online poker executives were indicted by prosecutors in New York. Isai Scheinberg and 10 other principals at three online gambling companies were charged by federal prosecutors in New York in March 2011 with bank fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling. The other executives have all pleaded guilty and been sentenced. PokerStars agreed in 2012 to pay $731 million to settle the charges with the Justice Department, without admitting wrongdoing. Scheinberg, 73, a dual Canadian and Israeli national, was arrested in Switzerland in June and was brought to the United States in January after dropping an extradition challenge. Sentencing has yet to be set.
NHS hospitals in London face a 'wicked combination' of 'unprecedented' staff sickness rates and an 'explosion' in patient demand because of the coronavirus outbreak.

Chris Hopson, a senior NHS figure, said hospital bosses are seeing a 'continuous tsunami' of demand as the crisis worsens daily.

At the same time, up to 50 per cent of staff are off sick because they either have to self-isolate with symptoms or are in vulnerable groups.

Health chiefs are rushing to expand critical care capacity as the peak of the coronavirus looms.

But Mr Hopson said the new 4,000 beds at NHS Nightingale, at the ExCel centre, will be used up 'very, very quickly'.

London is the centre of the UK's outbreak, with a third of all cases - 3,247 as of March 25.



NHS hospitals in London face a 'wicked combination' of 'unprecedented' staff sickness rates and an 'explosion' in patient demand because of the coronavirus outbreak, an official has said. Pictured, St Thomas's Hospital in London

Chris Hopson, a senior NHS figure, said hospital bosses are seeing a 'continuous tsunami' of demand as the crisis worsens daily

Mr Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers - which represents care trusts - told BBC Radio 4's Today programme on today: 'They are struggling with two things.

'The first is the explosion of demand they are seeing in seriously ill patients.

'They talk about wave after wave after wave - the word that's often used to me is a continuous tsunami.

'We are now seeing 30 per cent, 40 per cent and indeed in some places 50 per cent sickness rates as staff catch the virus or are in vulnerable groups or have to self-isolate.

'That's unprecedented absence rate.

'So what we have got is a really wicked combination - trusts trying to deal with a lot more demand than they have ever had before with a lot fewer staff than they have had before.'

Mr Hopson said that, while extra capacity is being brought in - including 4,000 beds at the ExCel centre in London's Docklands - hospital chief executives are concerned that it will be used up 'very, very quickly'.

London is the centre of the UK's outbreak, with a third of all cases - 3,247 as of March 25

Mr Hopson said hospital chief executives are concerned that extra capacity, such as 4,000 beds at the ExCel centre in London's Docklands (pictured), will be used up 'very, very quickly'

A driver shared these pictures of the beds which will fill the NHS Nightingale Field Hospital

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said 500 of the additional 4,000 beds created in the NHS Nightingale Hospital will be available for use next week

NHS DOCTORS WILL DIE WITHOUT PROTECTIVE CLOTHING NHS doctors will die unless they are given adequate personal protection to fight the coronavirus crisis, the British Medical Association warned yesterday. The doctors union slammed the Government for expecting frontline workers to push on through the pandemic despite not having enough masks, aprons or goggles. Without personal protection, called PPE, the infection will spread and the epidemic will worsen. If doctors become sick, it will cause staff shortages at a time when the NHS is needed more than ever. Medics across the nation are being forced to wear the 'same scrubs for the entire day' or have resorted to using cooking aprons and bin liners wrapped around their bodies instead. Staff have told how they are 'terrified' of the consequences, including spreading the deadly virus to family members at home. While the British population isolates themselves indoors to avoid catching COVID-19, NHS workers are walking into a 'warzone' as thousands of infected patients flood hospitals. The BMA's Chair of Council, Dr Chaand Nagpaul said international data shows healthcare workers are significantly at risk of catching of COVID-19, and are dying. He said: 'A construction worker wouldn't be allowed to work without a hard hat and proper boots. Even a bee-keeper wouldn't inspect a hive without proper protective clothing. 'And yet this Government expects NHS staff to put themselves at risk of serious illness, or even death, by treating highly infectious COVID-19 patients without wearing proper protection. This is totally unacceptable. 'We are told that lorries are shipping hundreds of boxes of supplies of PPE to GPs and to hospitals but that isn't the reality for thousands of our members. 'The type of PPE being supplied in not in keeping with WHO recommendations.' Advertisement

To accommodate rising numbers of Covid-19 patients, the Ministry of Defence and NHS are creating other new hospitals from scratch in Manchester and Birmingham.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said 500 of the additional 4,000 beds created in the NHS Nightingale Hospital being set up in London's ExCeL centre will be available for use next week.

But speaking on the same programme, a leading expert said he believes the health system has the capacity to cope and that the lockdown will lead to a 'plateau' of case numbers.

Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College said: 'So we are going to have a very difficult few weeks, particularly in hotspots - London for instance.

'But we think, overall, with the capacity which is rapidly being put in place across the country, that whilst the health system will be intensely stressed, particularly in areas of London, it won't break.

'Perhaps in about three weeks we hope these current measures will start flattening that curve and start bringing numbers down.'

The number of COVID-19 cases is nearing towards 10,000, and the death toll 500. But government officials expect cases to be more in the region of 40-50,000.

NHS Providers said testing for medics has become a top priority as the coronavirus spreads further.

A statement today also said it was focusing on getting protective clothing (PPE) to all NHS workers, amid an ongoing row about failings to provide it quickly enough.

Its deputy chief executive Saffron Cordery said there was 'mounting concern' among NHS staff that World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance on protective equipment was being watered down.

She called for urgent clarification about recent changes in the next 48 hours and added: 'Ensuring NHS staff have confidence in the equipment they work with is an absolute priority for trust leaders.

'There are mounting concerns about the changes to the guidance on personal protective equipment (PPE), with a widespread perception among staff that the approach recommended by the World Health Organisation has in some ways been watered down.

'We know this is causing huge anxiety for frontline staff whose priority is to keep their patients and themselves safe.'
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Linkedin Patrick Galey (Agence France-Presse) Paris, France  Thu, March 26, 2020 19:06 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da46c6 2 Health Britain,study,COVID-19,coronavirus,health,research,pandemic Free

Authors of headline-grabbing research into how many people in Britain may already be infected with COVID-19 insisted Wednesday their research showed the need for widespread antibody testing to contain the pandemic.

Researchers at the University of Oxford used mathematical modelling to examine possible infection rates consistent with the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths in Britain: more than 8,000 and 422 as of Wednesday morning, respectively.

Using several hypothetical transmission rates, the models showed a huge variation in the possible numbers of people who have caught the deadly virus in Britain and Italy but exhibited no serious symptoms, and so would not be candidates for testing.

One possible outcome, according to the models, was that as of March 19, 2020, 68 percent of the British population could have already caught coronavirus.

That outcome led to headlines suggesting the research, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, indicated that over half of Britons were already infected.

Paul Klenerman, an expert in immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Oxford, who contributed to the research, told AFP that was not its point.

"The model was just a way of looking at earlier events," he said.

"There were very wide differential outcomes, it wasn't supposed to predict any particular outcome."

Klenerman said that the main goal of the research was to demonstrate the variability of potential infection rates and to emphasize the need for widespread serologic testing.

This is a form of blood test that scans for antibodies indicating an individual has contracted the virus and developed immunity.

"The point of the paper was that we need to understand the serology," he said.

"Governments in general need to pay attention to this. We'll understand the epidemic better when we have information over who has been exposed and who hasn't.

"It may be that a lot of people have been exposed and it may be that only a few people have been but we can't tell until we start testing people."

Read also: Britain's Prince Charles tests positive for coronavirus

'Gross over-interpretation'

Simon Gubbins, group leader in Transmission Biology at The Pirbright Institute, said that the Oxford pre-paper did not indicate that half of Britons were already infected.

"The estimates for the proportion of the population infected depends on the assumptions made about the proportion of the population at risk of severe disease, which is unknown," he said.

Gubbins said the model used in the research was likely to have overestimated the rate of spread as it treated Britain and Italy as "single well-mixed populations" and couldn't account for behavioral changes such as hand washing and social distancing.

British Health Minister Matt Hancock on Tuesday announced the government had purchased 3.5 million COVID-19 antibody test kits.

James Wood, head of the University of Cambridge's Department of Veterinary Medicine, said the study should "be used to emphasize the need to conduct serological studies in areas where epidemic spread has occurred".

"The current version of the paper does substantially over-speculate and is open to gross over-interpretation by others," he added.
When the research was posted on BioRxiv, it became apparent that there had been some confusion. It was not the entire pangolin virus, only something called the spike protein, that was nearly identical to the same part of the new coronavirus that infects humans.

Several research papers by Chinese scientists have questioned the likelihood of the virus spilling over from pangolins directly to humans, noting differences in the pangolin virus and the human virus.

The paper published Thursday in Nature examined a second set of Malayan pangolins seized from a smuggling operation and also found coronaviruses much like the ones previously studied. The authors concluded that pangolins should not be traded, because although there is no evidence these viruses jumped directly to humans, they have the potential to sicken people.

There are many, many coronaviruses in animals, most of which do not infect people, and although knowing how they get to humans wont affect the course of the current pandemic, such knowledge will help for the future.

Dr. Andersen said there are several paths the new virus could have taken. Assuming that it began with a bat virus, it could have jumped directly to humans, although that didnt happen in the other coronavirus outbreaks of SARS and MERS.

Or it could have passed from a bat to another animal, one of the many that humans hunt, raise for food and sell in markets. Dr. Andersen said that the virus didnt necessarily first spill over to humans at the Wuhan market initially marked as the likely source of the outbreak. It could have happened elsewhere.

Dr. Daszak said that South China has an abundance of mixed wildlife-livestock farms that house chickens, ducks, civets, porcupines, pigs, bamboo rats, altogether all in conditions that would be conducive to viral spillover and spread.
Desperate family members of the 235 Australians stranded on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean have hatched a rescue plan to save them from coronavirus-hit Italy.

The Costa Victoria is docked in Civitavecchia, north-west of Rome, after being denied entry into ports in Croatia, the UAE and Israel.

Family members say they have a solution to airlift the stranded Australians out of Europe through a private chartered plane company but want the government's assistance.

Costa Cruises confirmed an Argentinian passenger, who disembarked in Crete on Sunday for 'medical reasons', tested positive to COVID-19.

Tory Archbold - whose mother Greta, 70, is one of 235 Australians stranded on board - is pleading for the Australian Government to intervene.

Ms Archbold, who is working with the families of passengers stuck on board, told Daily Mail Australia they are fearful Australians will be left to die if they are placed into Italian hotels to isolate and not rescued.

Tory Archbold (centre) - whose mother Greta (right), 70, is one of 235 Australians stranded on board - is pleading for the Australian Government to intervene

Cruiser Costa Victoria arrived n the port of Civitavecchia, in Italy, on Wednesday. The Italian flagged ship had been denied entry to other ports in Asia and Europe due to coronavirus fears

'They are currently locked in their cabins and have been for the past 72 hours, food supplies are running out, limited bacterial wipes, no masks have been given to protect those currently on board where the coronavirus was detected,' she said.

'The Italian health authorities have been on board on Wednesday and given thermal testing to all passengers.

'If they are placed into isolation in a hotel in Italy with no essential medicine to keep them healthy and alive they will likely experience extreme medical issues and die.'

Italy has seen more coronavirus fatalities than any other country, with latest figures showing that 7,503 people have died from the infection in barely a month.

Ms Archbold said there has been 'no formal communication' from the Australian Government on whether the passengers will be left Italy or brought home.

She said the family members of the stranded passengers have come up with a solution with an 'Australian private chartered plane company with European partners'.

The flight could leave Rome tomorrow and bring the Australian passengers home.

Ms Archbold said: 'We are asking Costa Victoria to pay the costs, as they said they would, immediately, so we can bring our families home tomorrow.'

It's understood that the passengers will go into isolation in hotels scattered outside Rome if they are not flown out of Italy.

Rachael Hitch whose mother Alana, 74, is on board has been working behind the scenes with airlines to see who would be able to help.

Passengers of the cruise ship Costa Victoria looking from their balconies after arriving in the port of Italy on Wednesday

Rachael Hitch whose mother Alana, 74, is on board has been working behind the scenes with airlines to see who would be able to help. Pictured: Kirsten Williams-Hitch (back left), Alana Hitch (back centre), Rachael Hitch (front left), Natasha Barber (front right)

Ms Archbold said: 'Families of the passengers on board the boat have been emailing and calling government officials to assist us in our quest to bring them back safely to Australia.'

The families are desperate to liaise with the government.

'If the government have an option, can they please communicate it so that we work with them,' Ms Archbold said.

'Australians want positivity in a time of national crisis. We want Australians to be assured their best interests are a priority and be given the right to return home on a chartered plane tomorrow.'

'We have a solution and want to work as a community, return our calls so we can deliver this solution to your team.'

There are 726 passengers on the vessel, including 235 Australians, and 776 crew members.

A Costa Cruises spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday a Argentinian woman who was on board Costa Victoria tested positive to coronavirus after disembarking in Crete on Sunday.

'The guest is in stable condition at a hospital facility on the island, where she was tested.

'As a precaution, and in compliance with the health procedures provided on board, the people who came into contact with the guest had been placed in immediate isolation.

Ms Archbold (right) says her mother (left) is on antibiotics and is high risk if she gets coronavirus

A small port boat coming alongside the Costa Victoria after it docked at the port of Civitavecchia on Wednesday

'At the moment the health situation on board does not present other suspect cases, but for further precaution the company is proceeding to isolate all guests in their cabins.

'Following the alert of the international health organizations and the regulations defined by the Italian authorities, the health protocol on board had already been raised to the maximum level in the previous days.'

The spokesperson said the ship would return to Italy where Costa Cruises would organise repatriation for guests and part of the crew.

Ms Archbold previously told Daily Mail Australia guests were 'terrified' to learn a fellow passenger contracted the virus.

'All Australian passengers have been messaging their families to say the captain advised coronavirus was onboard last night and they have been told to stay in their rooms  it has caused widespread panic,' Ms Archbold told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday.

'As this is an Italian ship they are only able to dock in Italy.

'It's a death sentence for the Australians on board unless we can find a solution.'

Ms Archbold says her mother is on antibiotics and is high risk if she gets coronavirus.

Ms Archbold said there are many elderly Australians on the cruise who had not set up access to global roaming to communicate with their families.

There are 2,675 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Australia and 11 people have died

'There is a feeling of complete isolation with no solution in sight,' she said.

'We are working together to ensure they focus on the right mindset to get them through this challenging time.

'These people are parents and grandparents. They belong in a country where they can be properly cared for.'

Ms Archbold said they learned something was wrong about one-week ago when they were sailing through the Suez Canal. She questioned why they were in such a dangerous part of the world when everything was beginning to lockdown.

'I feel very concerned. They've got a very uncertain future,' she said.

'They don't know when they're going to be able to dock and how they're going to get back to Australia.

'You don't want anyone to be docked in a country that currently has the worst cases of coronavirus in the world. It just puts peoples lives at risk.'

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Costa Cruises and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) for comment.

A DFAT spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday the government was monitoring more than 30 cruise ships with over 3,000 Australians on board.

The spokesperson said they were in discussion with Italian authorities and Costa Cruises.

More than 3,000 Australians are marooned on cruise ships across the globe as countries shut their borders to slow the outbreak of coronavirus.

The stranded Australians are scattered across more than 30 vessels in waters off South America, Europe, the United States and further afield.

'We want to make sure that those Australians are able to return. We are working directly with them,' Foreign Minister Marise Payne told the Nine Network on Thursday.

The Australian government is working with airlines to try and facilitate limited assisted departures where commercial flights are unavailable.

'We are very focused in the most difficult areas of working with partners who can assist us in returning Australians,' Senator Payne said.

There are 726 passengers on the vessel, including 235 Australians, and 776 crew members

'They are discussions we are having with international airlines and with travel businesses, in Peru in particular.'

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has had more than 18,500 requests for assistance from Australians stranded overseas since March 13.

'We are asking our ambassadors, our high commissioners, to use all the tools available to them ... to make sure they are providing the support to Australians that they can,' Senator Payne said.

'We, of course, though in all of the countries in which we work are constrained by the regulations and the restrictions that are placed on operations by the host country.'

Australians have now been banned from travelling overseas as the government tries to contain the spread of coronavirus.

There are 2,675 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Australia and 11 people have died.
Sydney, March 13, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Just released, this edition of Paul Budde Communications focus report on Morocco outlines the major developments and key aspects in the telecoms markets.

Read the full report: https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Morocco-Mobile-Infrastructure-Operators-and-Broadband-Statistics-and-Analyses





Synopsis

Moroccos mobile market is one of the more mature in the region, with a penetration rate of about 125%. All three mobile network operators offer fixed-line or fixed-wireless services and have developed mobile data services based on the extensive reach of LTE infrastructure. Growth in mobile data traffic is supported by the popular use of smartphones, which account for about 80% of all mobile phones in use.

The mobile operators are the main providers of internet services, accounting for the great majority of all internet connections. The issuing of LTE licences in 2015 included conditions to ensure that services covered at least 65% of the population by 2020, while the promotion of broadband accessibility nationally is also supported by the National Broadband Plan through to 2022 and by the Maroc Digital 2020 strategy. The extensive deployment of mobile broadband infrastructure will further consolidate the dominance of mobile players in the broadband sector in coming years.

The incumbent telco Maroc Telecom has undergone a strategic review following its acquisition of Etisalats mobile businesses in several markets in the region. These additional international markets, including Chad in mid-2019, are providing a welcome boost to the companys overall revenue.

This report analyses Moroccos mobile telephony sector, including statistics, assessments of recent regulatory measures, details on licensing regimes and spectrum auctions, and profiles of the major players.

Key developments:

MNP process amended to make number portings automated;

Inwi launches Moroccos first m-payment service;

Orange Maroc launches Orange Money;

Inwi and Maroc Telecom trial 5G technologies;

Report updates include the regulator's market data to December 2019, telcos' financial and operating data to Q4 2019, recent market developments.

Companies mentioned in this report:

Maroc Telecom, Orange Morocco (Medi Telecom), Inwi (Wana)

Table of Contents

Market analysis

Mobile statistics General statistics Mobile voice Mobile data SMS MMS Mobile broadband

Regulatory issues SIM card registration Licensing GSM 3G 4G (LTE) Mobile Number Portability (MNP) Mobile Termination Rates (MTRs)

Mobile infrastructure Analogue networks Digital networks 5G 4G (LTE) 3G 2G

Major mobile operators Itissalatt Al-Maghrib (IAM, Maroc Telecom) Orange Morocco (Meditel) Inwi (Wana)

Mobile content and applications Mobile payments, m-banking Satellite mobile

Appendix  Historic data

Related reports





List of Tables

Table 1  Growth in the number of mobile subscribers and penetration rate  2009  2024

Table 2  Change in the number of prepaid and contract subscribers  2012  2019

Table 3  Change in the proportion of prepaid and contract subscribers  2012  2019

Table 4  Mobile market share of subscribers by operator  2011  2019

Table 5  Fall in the average price per minute for mobile services  2012  2019

Table 6  Average mobile traffic per subscriber  2012  2019

Table 7  Change in mobile network voice traffic  2005  2019

Table 8  Fall in the number of SMS sent  2005  2019

Table 9  Growth in the number of mobile internet connections, by type  2011  2019

Table 10  Change in market share of mobile internet subscribers by provider  2015  2019

Table 11  Growth in the number of active mobile internet connections, and penetration  2008  2019

Table 12  Growth in the number of mobile number portings  2011  2019

Table 13  MTRs by operator  2011  2019

Table 14  Maroc Telecoms mobile subscriber base and market share  2011  2019

Table 15  Change in the number of Maroc Telecoms mobile subscribers by platform  2012 - 2019

Table 16  Decline in Maroc Telecoms ARPU  2009  2019

Table 17  Change in Maroc Telecoms domestic mobile revenue  2005  2019

Table 18  Change in Orange Moroccos mobile subscriber base and market share  2009  2019

Table 19  Orange Morocco revenue  2015  2019

Table 20  Change in Inwis mobile subscriber base and market share  2011  2019

Table 21  Historic - Mobile subscribers and penetration rate  2000  2009

Table 22  Historic - Average SMS cost  2010  2015

Table 23  Historic - Multiple SIM card use among mobile subscribers  2012  2016

Table 24  Historic - Smartphone penetration  2012  2016

List of Charts
Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell on Wednesday gave all Dane County voters the go-ahead to indicate they are indefinitely confined to avoid having to upload their voter ID when requesting an absentee ballot due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The recommendation, which he said is legal, comes as some older voters have complained they arent able to upload their photo IDs electronically, which is a general requirement to request an absentee ballot.

Its not clear whether McDonells recommendation is actually legal, however. Wisconsin law says people can certify they are indefinitely confined due to age, illness, infirmity or disability.

According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the law does not require any voter to meet a threshold for qualification and indefinitely confined status does not have to be permanent. The commission does not condone abuse of the option, but said voters of a certain age or in at-risk populations may meet that standard of indefinitely confined until the crisis abates.
A New Jersey man was charged with making a terroristic threat after he intentionally coughed near a supermarket employee and told her he had the coronavirus, the authorities said on the same day that the Justice Department warned of similar threats to spread the virus.

The man, George Falcone, 50, of Freehold, N.J., was shopping for groceries at a Wegmans store in Manalapan, N.J., on Sunday evening when a worker asked him to move away from her and a food display because he was too close, the state attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal, said on Tuesday.

The authorities said that Mr. Falcone leaned in close to the worker to cough and allegedly laughed, telling her that he was infected with the virus. Mr. Falcone later told two other store employees that they were lucky to have jobs, officials said.

Mr. Falcone was charged with making a terroristic threat in the third degree and fourth-degree of obstructing administration of law, Mr. Grewal said. Both charges are considered felonies in New Jersey.
When will checks for coronavirus relief go out? How much money will I get?

Congress and the Trump administration finalized a bill on the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, also known as phase three of the coronavirus economic stimulus packages from the federal government. The unprecedented rescue plan includes expanded unemployment benefits; a $367 billion program for small businesses to help pay workers forced to stay home due to the COVID-19 pandemic; $500 billion for subsidized loans to larger industries such as hospitals and airlines; and direct payments to most Americans.

The Senate unanimously approved the bill on Wednesday, and the House is expected to vote Friday.

The payouts will be a one-time payment of $1,200 per adult and $500 per child, but people with higher incomes would get less. The money aims to help the U.S. economy and help citizens through the coronavirus crisis, which has forced schools to close, sent non-essential workers home, and affected other businesses across the country.

Heres what we know about the checks in the mail:

 When will I get my check?

Mid-April, possibly later.

We want to make sure Americans get money in their pockets quickly, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last week. As soon as Congress passes this, we will get this out in three weeks.

President Donald Trump said he wants the checks sent out by April 6, according to Sen. Chuck Schumer; the payouts could arrive by April 15 for most. Individuals who set up a direct deposit with the IRS should expect to see their money sooner than those waiting for checks in the mail.

Could the money take longer? The Tennessean notes the last time the federal government sent checks to Americans was in 2008, under President George W. Bush. The Economic Stimulus Act was signed into law on Feb. 13, 2008, and provided individual tax relief in the form of tax rebates but the money didnt start going out until two months later in April.

 How much will my check be?

Adults will get $1,200 each and children will get $500 each. A married couple could receive $2,400 and a family of four could receive $3,400.

According to Vox, the checks will get smaller for those with higher incomes, ensuring the payouts benefit the lower and middle class. According to the 880-page CARES Act, payments phase out at a rate of $5 per every additional $100 (or 5%) in income starting at $75,000 in adjusted gross income for singles, $112,500 for heads of household, and $150,000 for married couples filing jointly. For example, a single adult who earns $85,000 would get $700 (a decrease of $500 due to their higher income).

Some will receive nothing. A single, childless adult who earns more than $99,000 would get no money, and childless couples with $198,000 would also be phased out entirely. Dependents also do not qualify for checks on their own, so if a family with children earns more than the limits then they are not expected to receive the $500 payments per child.

NBC reports the amount you receive will be based on income calculations from your 2019 tax return if youve already filed it; if not, itll be based on your 2018 return. Look at Line 7 on your Form 1040 for adjusted gross income" to see how much you qualify. (If you need help with the math, The Washington Post has an online check calculator to determine how much youll get.)

 Direct deposit or mail?

If youve used direct deposit in the past two years, thats how youll receive the stimulus payout. Otherwise, the IRS will mail you a check to your last known address from your 2019 or 2018 tax return.

If youve moved recently, notify the IRS of your address change as soon as possible.

 What about people on Social Security? Disability? Zero income?

People on Social Security, retirees, and people on disability are eligible to receive coronavirus relief payments as long as their total income does not exceed the limit. If you received a SSA-1099 form (for Social Security benefits), the federal government will send the stimulus payout the same way as Social Security payment. People with zero income or receiving unemployment are also eligible to receive coronavirus relief checks, if they are below the limits.

People who dont pay taxes, such as those with very low incomes, may be hard to reach the way the program is designed, Politico reports.

 Why only one check?

Mnuchin said last week that families could receive another check in six weeks if the national emergency still exists, but the CARES Act only lists a one-time payment. Its unclear if a second payout could still happen, but President Trump optimistically said he hopes to reopen the country and loosen social distancing guidelines by Easter.

There is tremendous hope as we look forward and we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel," Trump said at the White House on Tuesday. Stay focused and stay strong and my administration and myself will deliver for you as we have in the past.

 Where will the money come from? Are they taxable?

The money comes from taxes, essentially. Fortune reports they are not a loan or taxable, and will not have to be paid back. However, since they are technically based on a persons 2020 income (calculated from 2018 and 2019 returns) -- the rebates may need to be adjusted for Americans who have yet to file their 2019 taxes and saw significant changes in income.

 What if the moneys not enough? Or if I dont qualify?

Additional help is included in the coronavirus stimulus package, including expanded unemployment benefits; financial aid for small businesses to help pay workers forced to stay home; and subsidized loans to larger industries such as hospitals and airlines. NBC notes that could include help for people who have been laid off due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but made too much money in 2019 to qualify for the checks.

Ask Syracuse.com: Will I get a check if I dont file a tax return? What if Im on disability?

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Depending on the state, advance directives come in two parts. One directive is a living will, which describes the kind of life-sustaining medical treatment a person would want or not want if terminally ill or with no chance of recovery. The other is a health care proxy, or a medical power of attorney, which names an agent to make medical decisions.

Advance directives typically cover permanent unconsciousness, an irreversible fatal illness or severe brain damage  all with no expectation a patient would recover and have a meaningful quality of life, Ms. Whitman said.

This is a high standard, she said. Ending life-sustaining treatment would require a very dire situation in the opinion of a physician.

Ms. Barney said it was best to name just one person to be a health care agent. It is very difficult if the doctor needs to talk to two people if they do not act together, she said. And if someone is drawing up documents now, she said, it may make sense to choose an agent who lives close by, given travel difficulties since the coronavirus began spreading.

Also included in the documents should be a HIPAA medical records release form, which would allow health care providers to provide private information to approved family members, friends and others.

Parents of college-age students and single adults in their 20s should ask their children to sign their own HIPAA release and perhaps an advance directive, lawyers say. Without these documents, once a child turns 18 or 21 (depending on the state), a parent cannot make decisions related to his or her care and may be unable, depending on a physicians discretion, to get information on a childs condition.

Also, it is imperative to review, and perhaps update, beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance policies, experts say. A beneficiary designation on an individual retirement account or a company 401(k) account, for example, would override any instruction in a will for that asset.
US President Donald Trump listens as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci speaks during the daily briefing on the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, at the White House on March 24, 2020, in Washington, DC.

U.S. health officials and infectious disease experts are learning about how the new coronavirus behaves by watching outbreaks in other countries such as Southern Africa that are starting to enter their colder seasons, Fauci told reporters.

"Would this possibly become a seasonal cyclic thing? I've always indicated to you that I think it very well might," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said a White House press briefing.

Americans need to prepare for a second cycle of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, a White House health advisor said Wednesday.

"What we're starting to see in the Southern Hemisphere of Southern Africa and the Southern Hemisphere countries, is that we're having cases that are appearing as they go into their winter season," he said. "If they have a substantial outbreak, it will be inevitable that we need to be prepared that we'll get a cycle a second time."

Earlier in the outbreak, U.S. health officials said there was a hypothesis among mathematical modelers that the outbreak "could potentially be seasonal" and relent in warmer conditions.

"Other viral respiratory diseases are seasonal, including influenza and therefore in many viral respiratory diseases we do see a decrease in disease in spring and summer," Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on a Feb. 25 conference call. "And so we can certainly be optimistic that this disease will follow suit."

While that gives hope the disease will subside in the summer, that also suggests that it could thrive year round by passing from country to country.

Fauci said Wednesday that the virus potentially being seasonal emphasizes the importance of producing a vaccine, "so we can have it ready for the next cycle."

U.S. health officials have been fast-tracking work with biotech company Moderna to develop a vaccine to prevent COVID-19. They began their first human trials on a potential vaccine last week.
New York Citys prison system is facing a catastrophic surge in cases of Covid-19, with some jails facing an infection rate more than 80 times that of the US as a whole.

The Legal Aid Society, which has long campaigned for the rights of prisoners in the New York City area, has released figures indicating that coronavirus is spreading rapidly among the prison population.

The society counts some 75 cases, most in the citys main detention facility, Rikers Island. According to the societys figures, Rikers has seven times the infection rate of New York City, which is already the worst-hit metropolitan area in the US by far.

Writing on Twitter as the latest data emerged, the societys Molly Griffin called the numbers gut-wrenchingly awful.

Updated numbers coming out soon from @LegalAidNYC. I cant quite put into words how terrifying it is to see the numbers skyrocket like this, and Im writing from my cozy Brooklyn apartment. Must be so much scarier to watch them skyrocket from inside Rikers, she wrote.

Speaking to the New York Daily News, Ms Griffins colleague Tina Luongo bluntly laid out what needs to happen next: Based on this analysis, NYC jails have become the epicentre of Covid-19. It is imperative that Albany, City Hall, our local District Attorneys and the NYPD take swift and bold action to mitigate the spread of this deadly virus.

The Legal Aid Society has filed multiple lawsuits seeking the release of detained clients whose incarceration it says put them at risk of infection. Most recently, it has sued the city on behalf of several teenagers being held as juvenile delinquents.

Pressure on New Yorks authorities to release prisoners before the epidemic took hold was already mounting weeks before the latest figures came out. The chief physician at Rikers Island has called on judges and prosecutors to release prisoners where they can, pointing out: we cannot change the fundamental nature of jail. We cannot socially distance dozens of elderly men living in a dorm, sharing a bathroom.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has already released dozens of inmates from the citys prisons, and has now promised to release 300 more nonviolent inmates who are serving less than a years sentence. Inmates charged with sexual assault or domestic violence will not be released.

His move echoes a similar initiative in Los Angeles county, where the Sheriffs Department has released more than 600 prisoners and ordered police officers to avoid arresting people wherever possible.
Union Health Minister Dr Harsha Vardhan on Thursday hailed the insurance package for health workers in the country, which was announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today.

"Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today declared an insurance package for health workers working in the country, which includes more than 10 lakh ASHA workers. This is good news. It gives security to all the health workers," Dr Vardhan told ANI after a conversation with senior officials through video conferencing.

The Health Minister said the conversation lasted for around 2.5 hours.

"Even after the lockdown, the states need to take a lot of issues seriously. We have flagged these issues before them. We have especially emphasised that we should have dedicated COVID-19 hospitals, ensure adequate isolation beds, adequate ICU beds and ventilators," he said.

The lockdown was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a bid to curb the spread of coronavirus.

The Union Minister highlighted that the next 2-3 weeks are important. "Because even if today there are no symptoms, they can develop in the next two weeks. So, everyone needs to be aware," said the Health Minister.

A total of 649 confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been reported in India so far, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare informed today.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
ALL IN Coworking of Inglewood Continues to Build Community Virtually Amidst COVID-19

The heart of Inglewood beats heavily for thriving entrepreneurs and small businesses. All In Coworking of Inglewood, founded by serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Matthew Newman, is making its mark as a space for an affordable and accessible hub for enterprising minds to come and collaborate on their dreams as well becoming an epicenter for community engagement.

Matthew, originally from Houston, Texas, came to Los Angeles with an idea to add to the economic development of the neighborhoods in South LA. After pivoting from real estate, he found value in the opportunities that surrounded him within his newfound backyard. How could he bring his own expertise to the community that serves him? How can he be a connecting force for like-minds to add to the financial and cultural ecosystem of Inglewood? Enter: All In Coworking of Inglewood.

All In Coworking of Inglewood launched in November 2019 and is quickly growing into a gateway for creativity and collaboration. Multi-purpose spaces, conference rooms, a multi-media editing bay, as well as a hangout lounge all function together to serve a plethora of industries and objectives for constructive co-work. Newman holds a trifecta of goals for AICI: to serve as a rental space for churches in transition, be an efficient workspace for small businesses in transition, and be the go-to safe space for business-centric social gatherings.

Community engagement is a core pillar for AICI, and with its roster of communal events, the value that is passed down to its members is inevitable. One of those events, called Social Proof, is an event that AICI is looking to launch the second installment in June. Its a mixer for entrepreneurial teachers and students coming together to brainstorm and strategize around a central idea. It serves as a networking powerhouse of influential people in one room.

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Thats the value in itself; that you have other folks around you who are doing phenomenal things. But when you can have billionaires and millionaires show you how to do it, like they say, at least if you could just lick the knife, thats value in itself.

Since November, Newman and All In Coworking of Inglewood have partnered with the American Heart Association and other local organizations to continue to add to the social welfare of Inglewood.

You have to stay true to the community. As an entrepreneur, its easy to get distracted when theres uncertainty or when moneys not coming in. But what Ive learned along the process is that staying true to the community, theres so many people in the community that can help you. If youre a true pillar of the community, one who is honestly and modestly going after helping someone else in that aspect, youll be helped. But it all comes down to community.

No matter the philosophy of business or entrepreneurship that one may follow, being able to pivot in times of distress and continue to serve the community is an undeniable strength. With the turn of the pandemic, Matthew Newman is shifting the conversation of entrepreneurs and addressing the needs for productivity, accountability, and accessibility by taking co-work virtual. The All In owner identified a solution for the chaos that ensued from social distancing and the closing of many businesses. By going virtual, it addresses a multitude of varied concerns: mental health caused by isolation, self and group accountability within a work space, community outside of four walls, a like-minded network to congregate with. The transition of physical co-working to virtual co-working sustains the possibilities that All In Coworking of Inglewood stands for. His plans for a collaborative community of entrepreneurial masterminds is set to launch by the end of March.

For more information, contact the All In team at [email protected]
With healthcare workers hard at work addressing the needs of patients amid the COVID-19 pandemic, QBE North America announced that it is doing its part to support these heroes by donating 95,000 standard ear loop face masks to hospitals around the US.

A release said that the 3M-branded masks were part of QBE North Americas emergency preparedness supply. The masks will be donated to a number of hospitals and medical facilities experiencing shortages, such as Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston and New York Presbyterian in New York City. Some of the masks will also be provided to Hartford HealthCare, for use at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut.
The first significant evidence of marine resource use among Europe's Neanderthals is detailed in a new report, demonstrating a level of marine adaptation previously only seen in their contemporary modern humans living in southern Africa. The results further close the behavioral gap once thought to separate modern humans from their closest evolutionary cousins. For modern humans, coastal adaptations are widely recognized as having roots in southern Africa and dating as far back as ~160 thousand years ago (kya). Whether Neanderthals shared a similar interest in the sea's cuisine is debated. Some suggest that the consumption of the seafood and the brain-boosting fatty acids seafood contains enhanced cognitive development in early modern humans, allowing for the wide variety of technological and cultural innovations that blossomed during the Middle Stone Age (MSA), a period spanning 200-25 kya. This in turn allowed our species to expand out of Africa and outcompete coeval hominins. Archaeological evidence of Neanderthal coastal adaptation, meanwhile, is virtually unknown. Joao Zilhao and colleagues report on recent excavations at the Figueira Brava site on Portugal's coast, which revealed a uniquely preserved record of intense, systematic and long-term coastal resource use by Neanderthals during the Last Interglacial. The seaside site was dated to roughly 106-86 kya and contained middens rich in marine and terrestrial food remains. According to Zilhao et al., Figueira Brava's occupants relied on the sea in a scale comparable to the modern humans of MSA Africa. The results suggest that fisher-hunter-gatherers were widespread and likely relied on the sea earlier than previously thought. The lack of supporting evidence on this to date, they say, is likely a result of Pleistocene sea level-rise, which inundated similar sites across coastal Europe. Manuel Will discusses the study further in a related Perspective.

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Three more people have died from Coronavirus in the North, bringing the total there to 10.

Thirty-two new positives cases were reported, the total number of cases in Northern Ireland now stands at 241.

Belfast has the most number of cases according to Public Health Agency figures.

Northern Irelands health minister has said he doesnt know what the system will look like in a weeks time.

Robin Swann and the regions chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride were questioned by MLAs about increasing coronavirus testing, procuring more protective equipment for healthcare staff and ventilators.

The minister responded by saying the focus is currently on getting front line support to those people suffering from coronavirus.

Earlier, the Department of Health announced new plans for coping with the coronavirus surge, which included prioritising patient care, urgently discharging all medically fit patients and reconfiguring hospital services.

General visiting has also been stopped, with exceptions in place for one visitor for admitted children, mothers giving birth, children in intensive care, critical care areas and end-of-life care.

The departments permanent secretary Richard Pengelly wrote to staff about the plans.

He warned that even if social distancing helped flatten the curve of the surge, the health service was still likely to require more critical care capacity than was currently available.

In some cases, it is recognised that this may mean that other services are temporarily reduced as the focus is on providing essential services and helping those most at risk access the best possible treatment, Mr Pengelly wrote.

It is therefore suggested that clinicians should begin to categorise patients into priority groups. The lowest prioritisation would be where treatment can be delayed for two to three months with no predicted negative outcome. Urgent and emergency treatments should continue to be given top priority.

On Thursday morning, Stormonts health committee chairman Colm Gildernew asked the minister about plans for community testing sites.

Mr Swann said: Were not at a point where we are going to open community testing sites.

Were getting front line support to those people presenting with that mid-range symptom of Covid-19, he said, adding: were not at that stage yet as we dont have that capacity.

Dr McBride said next week the health service will be testing 1,100 people per day.

He told the committee that there have been discussions about making community testing available at a later stage.

Mr Swann also told the committee that there are 650 ventilators currently on their way to Northern Ireland.

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Trinity Provost Professor Patrick Prendergast has reassured Leaving Cert students that they will be starting college in the autumn.

It might be slightly later than in previous years. It might be under slightly-adjusted criteria. But we will be welcoming you, he said.

His comments reflect the ongoing uncertainty over the ongoing impact of the coronavirus crisis on the education system, with schools already not due to re-open until April 20 at the earliest.

The Government is still hoping to run the State exams on schedule, starting on June 3, although that will depend on the evolving situation.

If June 3 is not feasible, the start date would have to be delayed but there remains a commitment to enabling students to start college in the autumn.

Prof Prendergast did not elaborate on what he meant by slightly adjusted criteria, but already Covid-19 has caused the cancellation of the orals and practicals.

The Provosts comments came in a video address to the Trinity community which went out on social media this evening.

And addressing any concerns being felt by Trinitys own students, he said they should be assured that were working tirelessly, to make sure that the exam system this year will be fair, and will reflect the hard work that youve put in.

Almost all exams will be online, and Aprils graduations will be live-streamed, and students conferred with their degrees in absentia.

Prof Prendergast acknowledged that the Covid-19 crisis would hit the universitys finances but said that it was in a good position to weather the storm.

For the medium and long-term, after this crisis has peaked  as it will  we know that there will be consequences and after-effects, some of them severe.

Like almost all institutions, businesses and individuals, we will take a financial hit from this  all our revenue streams will be affected and extra costs will be incurred.

On the plus side, there are no immediate financial issues. In the last five or six years, weve worked tremendously hard to secure the college finances which means we can weather this storm, at least for the moment. We have time to plan. We wont let our mission in education, research and innovation be derailed.

Im not saying there wont be challenges, seen and unforeseen. But we are fortunate in our remarkable global community - we know that you will work with us to secure the future of our great university.

He said an eerie silence had fallen over Trinity and with teaching now entirely online, almost all staff are working remotely from home, conferences, exhibitions and sporting events cancelled, or postponed.

Its sobering to realise that throughout Trinitys long history, our campus has never been this silent, he said.
International Maritime Industries (IMI) announced today (March 26) the completion of the ARO-2003 (SAR201) MRO project with ARO Drilling (ARO), a leading offshore drilling contractor that owns, operates and manages a fleet of high-specification and premium jack-up rigs in Saudi Arabia.

The ARO-2003 (SAR201) is a "Baker Marine" designed jack-up rig that is currently working for Saudi Aramco in the Arabian Gulf. The project was led by IMI at the Dammam Shipyard.

"This successful project completion further strengthens the business relationship between ARO Drilling, IMI and Dammam Shipyard as well as contributing to the development of a localised industry. IMI is delighted to have been able to complete this project for ARO on-time and safely. We look forward to supporting ARO again in the very near future," Darren Macdonald, IMI Chief Operating Officer, Zones A & D said.

Commenting on the project, Thomas Schlueter, Director of Projects, ARO, said: "ARO is committed to increasing our presence in the region and we are pleased to have successfully completed the ARO-2003 (SAR201), on schedule, but most importantly safely. Awarding this project to IMI enabled us to use local manufacturing capabilities; to support our fleet refurbishment objectives."

IMI, located in The King Salman Complex for International Maritime Industries & Services at Ras Al-Khair, Saudi Arabia, will be the largest, full-service maritime facility in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena). When building is complete, the annual capacity of the facility will be four new build offshore rigs and over 43 new build vessels including VLCCs, in addition to servicing more than 260 maritime products.

Major production operations are expected to commence toward the end of 2020 with the facility reaching its full production capacity by 2022. IMI is a joint venture between Saudi Aramco, Lamprell, Bahri and Hyundai Heavy Industries. TradeArabia News Service
(Photo : Image by 1820796 from Pixabay )

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Chinese factories have reopened but experienced a plunge of overseas orders. Hence, despite the resumption of work in these factories, employees were laid off caused by the decrease in demand for its products and services. The decline led businesses to fire their employees due to the lack of funding for employee compensations.



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According to Reuters, the pandemic has disrupted economies of China's key trading partners that led to a significant decline in market demand. Although factories have reopened and resumed business activity, some companies laid off employees due to a lack of financing for their compensation.



The report revealed that requests to cancel orders or delayed shipments have been experienced by many factories in China. The demand for goods and services from the US and Europe has declined and the loss of customers adversely affected the finances of these factories.



Earlier this year, China imposed travel restrictions and factory suspensions to alleviate the public health crisis. As a consequence, labor supplies and the demand of exporters increased, but the companies were unable to meet the supply with demand. At present, a reverse condition happened. There is a lack of demand and a greater capacity to supply goods and services. The lack of the former ended with financial losses of domestic factories in terms of finances.



According to a senior analyst at research firm Gavekal Dragonomics Thomas Gately, the shutdowns of normal economic activity in Europe and the US have caused a dramatic contraction in Chinese exports. He revealed that a 20 to 45 percent yearly drop is to be expected by the second quarter of 2020. He then claimed that the growing number of emerging markets would be greatly affected by this decline.



It was also announced that the slowing production of factories might lead to the suspension of all outputs or lead to factory closures if business activity in China would not improve. He also said that there is an uncertain number of factories that show the capacity to withstand the adverse effects of the pandemic and lead their businesses to survive another year.



Economists allegedly anticipated the imposition of a V-shaped economic recovery in China. The strategy was first seen during the SARS epidemic in 2003. However, it was shown that analysts' forecasts were not met by current markets and that the Chinese economy has underperformed, its worse yields since the Cultural Revolution in 1976.



According to the chairman of Hangzhou Hongli Food Zhu Hongping, the last overseas orders on exports were for April. These were from restaurants in countries such as South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.



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Tagschina business, Business Restart, Employee Fire, unemployment
By Chris Gallagher and Yoshifumi Takemoto

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan will look into offering cash payouts to households as part of a stimulus package that could be worth more than $276 billion to combat the widening fallout from the coronavirus outbreak, joining efforts across the world to roll out huge fiscal support to fend of recession risks.

Economy Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura said the stimulus package, likely to be compiled by the government in April, will be bold enough to fend off a crisis he described as potentially more serious than when the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 jolted financial markets.

"We'd like to look into various possibilities including on the size of any cash payouts," Nishimura told reporters after a cabinet meeting on Thursday, though he could not say at this stage what the size of the package would be.

The Sankei newspaper reported on Thursday Japan's ruling coalition was considering an economic package worth more than 30 trillion yen ($276 billion) to deal with the virus fallout.

That would far exceed the 26-trillion-yen stimulus package the government compiled in December last year to ease the impact from the U.S.-China trade war on the export-reliant economy.

"It's a crisis situation now, so the government will likely use as much money as needed," a senior government official told Reuters.

A roll-back of Japan's 10% sales tax, proposed by some ruling party lawmakers, is a less likely option because of the time it will take to notify the public and get retailers ready for the new tax rate, two other government officials said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to speak publicly.

Finance minister Taro Aso said on Thursday tax cuts could be included in the package, but that rolling back the sales tax was unlikely. He also told reporters that Japan must be mindful of its huge public debt when compiling a stimulus package, as big spending could force it to issue more debt.

The virus epidemic has hit Japan's economy, already reeling from last year's sales tax hike and soft global demand, heightening the chance of a recession.

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The Bank of Japan's decision to loosen monetary policy at an unscheduled policy meeting on Monday did little to turn around market sentiment, soured by fears over the virus fallout.

A BOJ policymaker had warned of the need to brace for recession risks at a January rate review - held before the epidemic spread widely in the country, though other board members fretted over the cost of ramping up an already huge stimulus.

The BOJ on Thursday offered to buy 1 trillion yen of Japanese government bonds (JGB) in an unscheduled operation, as global bond yields surge on fire-sales by investors seeking to raise cash and reduce risk.

Given the BOJ's depleted ammunition, the onus is now on fiscal policy to mitigate the blow from the epidemic that has cooled consumption through school shutdowns, travel restrictions and event cancellations, analysts say.

As of Wednesday morning, Japan had 29 deaths and 868 coronavirus cases, excluding those from a cruise ship that was quarantined near Tokyo last month and returnees on chartered flights from China, a tally by public broadcaster NHK showed.

($1 = 108.8300 yen)

(Additional reporting by Kaori Kaneko, Leika Kihara, Daniel Leussink and Tetsushi Kajimoto, Writing by Leika Kihara; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a press conference at the State Department in Washington on March 25, 2020. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Pompeo: G-7 Countries Agree to Push Back Against Beijings Pandemic Disinformation Campaign

The Group of Seven (G-7) economies have agreed to push back against Beijings sprawling propaganda campaign designed to deflect blame for causing the global pandemic, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on March 26.

G-7 countries discussed the Chinese regimes intentional disinformation campaign during a virtual meeting held on March 25, according to Pompeo.

The G-7 countries yesterday were unanimous in saying we understand that this is a risk, that this is a problem  to the EU and to the United States and the world, Pompeo told The Hugh Hewitt radio show on March 26, in reference to the discussions. They agreed to jointly work alongside us to push back against this disinformation campaign.

He said Japan and the EU countries in G-7 (France, Germany, and Italy) understood that the Chinese regime was reshaping its narrative about the outbreakdisinformation that the Chinese are actively engaged in, even as we speak.

The regime has been trying to defer blame, trying to claim that they are the solution to this, and  [that] they werent the nation that, at the very beginning of this, [was the] one country that had the opportunity and the data set that could have put this virus in a much better place than we are today and failed to do so, Pompeo said.

In recent weeks, Chinese senior officials and scientists have claimed that the virus didnt originate from China. On Twitter, a spokesman for Chinas foreign ministry pushed the unfounded conspiracy theory that the virus was introduced to China by U.S. Army personnel.

Beijing also is actively portraying itself as a global leader in containing the pandemic. Experts say this is part of the regimes goal to promote its authoritarian governance model to countries as an alternative to democracy.

Pompeo again called on Beijing to be transparent about what it knows about the virus.

When you have crises like this one, the most important thing at the onset is to make sure that the world gets access to the data that they need to prevent this, to prevent the spread of this, and the Chinese government did not act in a way thats consistent with  that global demand, he said.

It is important that the world understands how this began, because we need transparency to save lives, he added.

After Chinese doctors sounded the alarm about a SARS-like outbreak in late December, local authorities suppressed vital information about the outbreak in Wuhan. By the time that lockdown measures were implemented on Jan. 23, about 5 million Wuhan residents had already left the city, allowing the virus to spread across the country and eventually around the world.

Instead of cracking down on the virus in a timely fashion, they cracked down on information flow. They kicked journalists out. They punished those who were speaking about this inside of their own country, Pompeo said.

He added that once the United States first learned of the outbreak, we did our best to make sure that we had transparency and information. We offered to send our expert medical providers in. We offered to make sure that we could provide whatever support they needed.

Beginning in January, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly offered to send a team of health experts to help China combat the outbreak. While U.S. officials originally recommended 13 experts to be allowed into China, eventually, only two were admitted.
Rapper-turned-politician released the song to raise awareness about COVID-19 after Uganda reported 14 confirmed cases.

Ugandan musician-turned-politician Bobi Wine has released a song to raise awareness about the coronavirus pandemic as his country imposes new restriction in a bid to stem the spread of the virus.

The rapper, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, teamed up with fellow musician Nubian Li to highlight the importance of personal hygiene in the fight against the disease that has claimed the lives of more than 21,000 people worldwide.

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The bad news is that everyone is a potential victim. But the good news is that everyone is a potential solution, Wine, the member of parliament for Kyadondo East constituency, raps in the song.

Sensitise the masses to sanitise. Keep a social distance and quarantine, adds the 38-year-old.

Ten hours after the song was released it had garnered more than 700,000 views on social media with people praising the legislator for the message.

The country of 42 million people reported its first case on Sunday and has since imposed travel restrictions and banned public gatherings. Uganda has 14 confirmed cases of coronavirus, including an eight-month-old baby.

This is great message  and it's a must play on all TV's and Radios. Per now we are not in politics We.are all on one road No matter the parties   Melvinie Logose Agaba (@Jsissye) March 25, 2020

Thank you so much for the information and adding your voice. Be alart citizens  Pascal Mweruka (@Pmweruka81) March 25, 2020

The government is suspending public transport for 14 days, President Yoweri Museveni said in a public address on Sunday.

This directive affects taxis, coasters, minibuses, buses, all passenger trains, tukutukus [tricycles] and bodabodas carrying passengers. The rationale is to minimise movement and contact among people.

With immediate effect, markets should only be used for sale of foodstuffs. Trading of non-food items in the markets is suspended immediately. We expect this to greatly reduce numbers in the markets and help enforce social distancing, Museveni added.

At least 46 countries in Africa have confirmed more than 1,400 cases of COVID-19.

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) called on African countries to wake up to the growing threat of the virus.

The rapid evolution of COVID-19 in Africa is deeply worrisome and a clear signal for action, Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, said.

But we can still change the course of this pandemic. Governments must draw on all of their resources and capabilities and strengthen their response, Moeti said.
Max Dalban and Viviane Romance in the movie "Panique." (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

Though it would be enthralling and irresistible at any moment in time, Bertrand Taverniers Journeys Through French Cinema is especially satisfying right now.

With movie theaters closed, what could be better use of at-home time than watching an eight-hour documentary series streaming on Amazon Primes Cohen Media Channel detailing the glories of French film culture, a cinematic history that is fully as rich as our own.

But, more than that, by giving us glimpses of this cornucopian wealth of movie narrative, Journeys reminds us what we are missing, why theatrical films continue to matter no matter how dire things become in the wider world.

Filmgoers with sharp memories will think immediately of Taverniers previous documentary, 2016s similarly titled, 3 1/2-hour My Journey Through French Cinema, which was released in theaters.

Both endeavors start with the same opening montage of unforgettable moments in French film, scenes like Jeanne Moreau in Elevator to the Gallows, Simone Signoret in Casque dOr and Michel Simon in Panique.

And both also follow the same format, starting with expertly selected clips (Tavernier knows what the most arresting images are), items like a gorgeous glimpse of newly restored footage from 1936s La Terre qui meurt, perhaps Frances first color film.

And then there are the informative interviews, often vintage ones from French television, but also mixing in savvy contemporary directors like Olivier Assayas, who makes the connection between dialogue-heavy golden age French director Sacha Guitry and Quentin Tarantino because, for both of them, language moves the plot forward.

And, of course, there is Tavernier himself, the most intelligent and formidably articulate of enthusiasts, passing on his knowledge and unexpected insights about the great passion of his life.

Who else but Tavernier, for instance, would notice that the soundtrack to 1952s Jean Gabin-starring The Truth About Bebe Donge, presages Philip Glass.

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But because the French cinematic world is so vast, and Taverniers knowledge of all its aspects so encyclopedic, there is no overlap between these two projects. Consider this a deeper dive, a chance to examine what didnt fit the first time around and enjoy all the fascinating information these hours are crammed with.

The series first two parts examine the directors Tavernier calls my bedside filmmakers, lifelong companions in good times and bad, to whom one returns to warm the heart.

Filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier in the documentary "Journeys Through French Cinema." (Cohen Media Group)

These include the great Max Ophuls, who moved the camera as if life depended on it and the underrated World War II era humanist Jean Gremillon.

This section also includes an examination of the parallels between two directors only Tavernier would couple, the playful Jacques Tati and the somber Robert Bresson.

The series third hour is devoted to one of Taverniers special passions, the use of music in film, and focuses on Julien Duvivier, a director who could be difficult but excelled in songwriting and the use of sound.

Episode 4 focuses on the work of French filmmakers under the German occupation, a subject that Tavernier knows especially well because of directing 2002s Laissez-passer (Safe Conduct), a historical drama set during that era.

Following that, Tavernier devotes an hour to postwar French cinema, including three directors  Claude Autant-Lara, Rene Clement and Henri-Georges Clouzot  whom Tavernier feels were each in his own way precursors the New Wave.

Part 6, poetically called The Forgotten Ones, brings to light directors whose reputations Tavernier feels were unjustly erased, eradicated, followed by Part 7 on Underrated Directors, filmmakers whom Tavernier feels pretty much no one knows about.

The most personal episode is the final one, My 60s, which details Taverniers partnership with the late Pierre Rissient as press attaches who brought Frances attention to Hollywood veterans like Raoul Walsh and John Ford as well as a young director named Clint Eastwood.

Long as it is, Journeys is so continually involving we want it never to end. When Tavernier calls it an exercise in admiration and gratitude, we can only nod in agreement and express our appreciation to be able to share in its riches.
The "patchwork" efforts by local and state officials across the U.S. to curb the spread of the coronavirus are not enough, former Obama White House health policy advisor Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel told CNBC on Thursday.

State and local officials have implemented a variety of "shelter-in-place" orders, shuttering nonessential businesses, bars and restaurants to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Without a national lockdown, the states that have issued shelter-in-place type orders are shouldering a brunt of the economic damage, Emanuel said. Worst yet, those efforts are being undermined by other regions that aren't doing the same.

"If we don't have a full national lockdown ... You are going to have these rollercoasters. You contain it in some area. Then we try to ease it up, then it just blossoms again and we are never going to get it under control in the whole country," Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

A growing number of states are implementing so-called lockdown measures to help stop the spread of the coronavirus outbreak. About eighteen states have stay-at-home orders or advisories and have closed nonessential businesses. Six states and Washington, D.C. have shuttered nonessential businesses. Several cities or counties in Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania have issued individual stay-at-home orders in the absence of statewide mandates.

In other countries, like Italy, regional lockdown measures to cordon off the hardest-hit parts of the country were expanded across the nation as the outbreak grew. However, the U.S. government has only issued advisories, and not mandatory national restrictions.

"If we don't do a national implementation, we will not be able to get the economy going. It'll be in fits and starts and it will not solve the problem," Emanuel said. "We have to have a coordinated national effort. This patchwork, which I've been decrying for three weeks now, is actually undermining the efforts of states that are imposing the stay-at-home orders, the quarantines."
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 02:24:39|Editor: huaxia

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Medical materials from China arrive at the Liege airport in Belgium, on March 18, 2020.(Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)

From the Meuse River to the Dinaric Alps, from Rica to Piraeus, increasing numbers of Chinese enterprises and residents stand side by side with local authorities and frontline health workers in Europe to help attenuate the sanitary shockwave in their second homeland, now the epicenter of the pandemic.

by Liu Fang

PARIS, March 25 (Xinhua) -- "Together we are stronger","l'union fait la force", "Berg und Tal kommen nicht zusammen, wohl aber die Menschen" -- expressions in various languages displaying hope and solidarity circulate on the social media platform WeChat these days as countless Chinese expats living in Europe join people in their host countries in the tough war against the coronavirus.

Chinese medical materials are prepared to be loaded onto the plane to Belgium at Xiaoshan International Airport in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, March 13, 2020. (Xinhua/Huang Zongzhi)

From the Meuse River to the Dinaric Alps, from Rica to Piraeus, increasing numbers of Chinese enterprises and residents stand side by side with local authorities and frontline health workers, mainly by providing much-needed medical protective gears to help attenuate the sanitary shockwave in their second homeland, now the epicenter of the pandemic.

BUSINESSES IN SOLIDARITY

On Monday morning, dozens of boxes containing 50,000 medical masks dispatched from Changsha in south-central China were handed over to Bedburg city officials in eastern Germany. Written on the boxes was a German proverb, which translates as "mountains and valleys don't come together, but humans do."

The donation came from the Sany Group, a leading Chinese construction machinery manufacturer whose European headquarters is in Bedburg. The masks are destined for hospitals in Bedburg and Essen, both in North Rhine-Westphalia, the state with the largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany.

"During the most difficult time of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, Sany Europe's partners and friends from Europe provided great support to the Chinese people. With a grateful heart, the Sany Group quickly prepared the first batch of 50,000 medical protective masks in China to support the prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany," said Martin Knoetgen, chief executive officer (CEO) of Sany Europe.

A staff member of the local public health bureau stands next to packages containing protective suits in Heinsberg, Germany, on March 6, 2020.(Photo by Shen Zhengning/Xinhua)

Across the continent, Chinese enterprises are taking similar actions to fight the coronavirus hand in hand with their host cities.

The Jack Ma Foundation and the Alibaba Foundation have increased efforts to provide support and supplies to countries affected, especially Italy, Belgium, Spain, Slovenia, France, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands.

A plane from Avia Solutions Group with the donation from Huawei Baltic and China Chamber of Commerce lands at an airport in Vilnius, Lithuania on March 20, 2020.(Chinese Embassy in Lithuania/Handout via Xinhua)

Chinese tech giant Huawei has also been busy sending out aid wherever possible, but especially to the European countries where they have a long history of partnership in establishing mobile networks and selling phones.

Alibaba and Huawei have both announced that other vital supplies urgently needed at this critical time will arrive rapidly.

The Paris branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has donated 40,000 N95 respirator masks to the Pitie-Salpetriere University Hospital in the French capital. The Piraeus Port Authority, operated by China's COSCO Shipping Ports Limited, has donated protective suits, single-use gloves and protective glasses to Hellenic Coast Guard officers.

KLM Royal Dutch Airline's partners in China -- China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines and Xiamen Airlines -- have donated tens of thousands of medical masks to the Netherlands.

An exhaustive list would fill pages, but all these could be summarized by what a Chinese official said at a donation ceremony last Friday.

"The virus knows no borders. It is a common challenge for humanity," said Li Xiaosi, Chinese ambassador to Austria, when witnessing the donation of 150,000 protective masks and 3,000 protective suits to the Workers' Samaritan Federation (ASB), an Austrian aid organization primarily active in emergency medical services, by representatives of the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC), the world's largest rolling stock manufacturer.

INDIVIDUALS SHOULDER RESPONSIBILITY

Chinese private individuals are also pulling their weight.

"We, the Chinese living in France, have two homes -- when China was in distress, we were all with Wuhan; now as the disaster falls upon France, we are all Parisians," wrote the Association of Chinese Residents in France in an open letter, urging some 700,000 Chinese expatriates living in their second homeland to collect protective gears and donate them to the frontline health workers.

Chinese associations had mobilized even before this open letter was published, by donating masks and other materials to France's pre-hospital medical emergency body and to hospitals treating coronavirus patients.

A China-Europe freight train carrying anti-coronavirus supplies departs for Spain at the Yiwu west train station in Yiwu, east China's Zhejiang Province, March 21, 2020.(Photo by Gong Xianming/Xinhua)

In Spain, the Chinese community has donated materials, such as face masks, protective clothing and hand cleaning gels, to the local authorities, the police and hospitals in various cities. They also prepared videos to help raise awareness of COVID-19, keep people safe and prevent panic. A lot more people offering donations prefer to remain anonymous, stating simply: "We are the Chinese community."

"We want to thank the Chinese community in Zaragoza for the donation of face masks, gloves and thermometers to the Zaragoza police. There is no doubt that difficult situations promote solidarity, and this is a clear example: a thousand thanks!" read a message on social media from the City Hall in Zaragoza in northern Spain.

The Athens-based Sino-Hellenic Investors' Confederation has offered seven fully equipped apartments in the Greek capital free of charge for use by doctors and nurses treating patients in Greek hospitals.

The Association of Chinese Professionals in Belgium (ACPB) and a fundraising team that calls itself "Keep Going Wuhan!" have sent hundreds of pairs of protective glasses to two hospitals in Brussels. "The Meuse River runs long, so does our friendship with the Belgian people. We stand together with you in these difficult times," said their message posted on the boxes.

"We will continue to donate other supplies that are still on the way, this time from China to Belgium," said Dr. Xu Zhian, chairman of the association.

In Latvia, an online auction launched by Chinese and local artists, previously aimed at helping Wuhan, also decided to give its total proceeds of some 5,000 euros (5,400 U.S. dollars) to the local authorities, explaining that "the situation has changed" and "there is no such thing as an alien grief."

In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Chinese businessmen have donated over 10,000 euros to Banja Luka University Hospital and the Brcko special economic zone since the country's first COVID-19 infection was confirmed.

"Some of us have been in BiH for more than 20 years. When our second home is in trouble, we must do something," He Guoliang, a Chinese businessman who initiated the move, told Xinhua.

Elva Liu, a Munich-based Chinese business lawyer who considers Germany her second home, felt the same urge. She did not hesitate one second when she gave a package of masks she had bought in early March to her doctor earlier this week after watching a video in which a German doctor announced the closure of his clinic for lack of personal protective equipment.

"One more doctor continues working, much more chances patients will have for recovery," she told Xinhua. "I finished my studies, built up my career and my family in Germany. I will try my best to help bring normal life back to my second hometown and help others around me."

Medical experts to Italy prepare to board a plane in Fuzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province, March 25, 2020.(Xinhua/Wei Peiquan)

More and more Chinese are expected to join the fight against the virus and make their contributions to Europe's war against the pandemic, commented Nouvelle d'Europe, a Paris-based daily paper run by and for the Chinese diaspora in its Saturday editorial.

"When our motherland suffers, overseas Chinese rush to the rescue. When our second homeland is enduring a hard time, we will also shoulder our responsibilities," reads the editorial. Enditem

(Reporting by Zhu Sheng in Berlin, Pan Geping in Brussels, Paul Giblin and Wen Xinnian in Madrid, Zhao Feifei in Vienna, Yu Shuaishuai in Athens, Zhang Xiuzhi in Sarajevo, Guo Qun in Rica and Guo Mingfang in Vilnius)
[March 26, 2020] DFRobot: Chinese Makers Unite to Build Thermometers During Coronavirus Pandemic

Earlier in February, when the coronavirus began to spread out of Hubei Province, where it first detected, the Chinese government issued a national warning that fever could be initial sign of an infection. Several days later, on 12th February, they announced a 60,000 shortage of infrared thermometer nationwide. A month later, Xia Qing, cofounder of Mushroom Cloud Makerspace, brought to work an infrared thermometer build by Dy Yong, a member from his maker community. "After the vision sensor recognizes each face passing by, the non-contact infrared temperature sensor detects its body temperature and shows live parameter on screen. The red light turns on when the tested temperature goes above normal range." Xia Qing explained that the project only takes a maker one day to buil and costs ten percent of a similar product on the market. "You could need another 2-3 weeks to make it more accurate, but so far it's suitable for a family or workplace precaution."



The thermometer is among the 87 projects from an online campaign launched by Xia Qing and his maker community, DFRobot Maker Community, the biggest online maker community in China. "The idea was first proposed by one of our members, to call for makers to create projects that can benefit families and students during this special period of pandemic." Gong Chen, who runs DFRobot Maker Community, said that other popular projects from this campaign include a broadcasting system that updates statistics of the pandemic in different parts of the country. The campaign received instant response from the society. "DFRobot (owner of DFRobot Maker Community and Mushroom Cloud Makerspace) received an increasing amount of inquiries in past two months, mostly about non-contact infrared temperature sensors." According to DFRobot, the infrared temperature sensors it provides went out of stock within a week. The company is now working hard to make the products available again before the middle of April.

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New York, March 25, 2020  The Committee to Protect Journalists today welcomed an announcement that Turkish officials have indicted 20 Saudi nationals on charges of murder and incitement linked to the 2018 killing of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and issued the following statement:

Todays indictments represent an important step towards achieving justice for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, but much work remains to be done, said Gulnoza Said, CPJs Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. Saudi and Turkish authorities should ensure that all those involved in the gruesome murder, including the masterminds, are held accountable, no matter how influential they may be.

The Istanbul Chief Prosecutor Office is seeking aggravated life sentences for 18 men for murder charges, charged two others with incitement to first degree murder, and issued Interpol notices for their arrests, according to news reports.

Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, was killed and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. A report released by the CIA found that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the journalists murder, according to The Washington Post.
[March 26, 2020] ClearMetal Offers CDX Platform Free of Charge to Suppliers of Healthcare Products

ClearMetal, a leader in Continuous Delivery Experience (CDX) for Supply Chain and Logistics solutions, announced today that it is offering the power of its CDX platform free of charge for the duration of the pandemic crisis to companies tasked with shipping needed healthcare and medical supplies to combat COVID-19. ClearMetal is committed to onboarding companies as quickly as possible so immediate decisions can be made and solutions implemented based on real-time data. To ensure critical healthcare and medical materials are prioritized, companies must qualify for the free offering based on shipment volume.* "It's important that all of us, companies and individuals, come together to contribute what we can to help mitigate the challenges this pandemic presents," said Adam Compain, ClearMetal CEO. "The reason the shipping industry is so affected when 'black swan' events such as the coronavirus occurs is tht most supply chains are static and not built to dynamically respond nor react quickly to situations like these. Companies tasked with getting critical healthcare materials where they need to go require a better solution and it's our duty to let them use it for free during this crisis."



ClearMetal's data shows that there has been a 20-30 percent increase in delays, 10-15 percent increase in dwell times and 50 to 100 percent increase in rolls since January. The impact of logistics challenges that affect the speed of shipments for essential items in the fight vs COVID-19 brings an enormous financial impact to companies in billions of dollars of lost sales, written-off inventory and more. ClearMetal's continuous methodology learns, adjusts, and drives constant improvement in freight delivery and experience for customers by using proprietary machine learning to cross-reference inputs and canonicalize supply chain data. This differentiated technology enables businesses to make highly intelligent inventory and customer decisions based on continuously live, trustworthy data.

Companies interested in taking advantage of the CDX platform offer should email [email protected] or call ClearMetal at 1 (888) 792-8122. *Companies must be tasked with the shipping of critical healthcare and medical supplies with a minimum number of international containers shipped and/or domestic U.S. rail quantities to qualify. About ClearMetal: ClearMetal, Inc., based in San Francisco CA (News - Alert) (USA), is a leader in the Continuous Delivery Experience (CDX), enabling supply chain organizations to optimize logistics and provide their customers with easy access to trusted, live information about their shipments. The ClearMetal CDX Platform uses proprietary machine learning algorithms to break free from static-visibility paradigms and make sense of supply chain data. ClearMetal was founded by top software engineers, data scientists, and operations researchers from Stanford University, Google, and Silicon Valley and is funded by Eclipse Ventures, Prelude Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, NEA, SAP (News - Alert).io, Prologis Ventures, PSA Unboxed, DCLI, and the founders of GT Nexus, Navis, and Uber Freight. For more information visit www.clearmetal.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005157/en/

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Market safe haven demand has softened slightly this week, and this has made it easier for the Australian Dollar to hold the British Pound to Australian Dollar (GBP/AUD) exchange rate a little lower. The Australian Dollar is benefitting from US Dollar (USD) weakness as well as Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) news, but the currency remains highly volatile overall due to its sensitivity to market risk-sentiment amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Due to slightly calmer markets this week, GBP/AUD has trended lower since opening this week at the level of 2.0129.

Earlier in the week, GBP/AUD touched on a low of 1.9534. This was the lowest level for the pair since the beginning of March. While the Australian Dollar has been unable to hold those multi week highs, GBP/AUD is still trending below the weeks opening levels in the region of 1.9937 at the time of writing on Thursday.

Part of the Australian Dollars gains against Sterling this week have been due to lingering weakness in the Pound.

While the Pound has also benefitted slightly from the markets diminished safe haven demand this week, its potential for gains is limited.

Investors are hesitant to buy the British currency too much due to Britains gloomy outlook amid the coronavirus and Brexit.

According to Christophe Donay, Head of Asset Allocation and Macro Research at Pictet, various factors are keeping Sterling weaker than other relatively risky currencies this week:

We have a strong combination of Brexit and coronavirus uncertainty that creates a difficult situation for the UK in comparison to the rest of the world, Relatively speaking the UK is in a tough situation. The current account deficit is high ...This is all not a great signal for Sterling versus the other currencies.

Traders are also awaiting fresh UK stimulus news before making big moves on the British currency.

The Bank of England (BoE) left monetary policy frozen in its March policy decision today, which is keeping Sterling strength limited. Markets are eagerly hoping for more UK stimulus, awaiting potential fiscal stimulus from UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak soon.

Australian Dollar (AUD) Exchange Rates Find Support in RBAs Stimulus Measures

The Australian Dollar is a currency often correlated to risk and trade sentiments. As a result, this weeks slightly buoyed risk-sentiment is helping AUD to recover from its worst levels.

Impressive stimulus packages from the Federal Reserve and US Congress eased market panic somewhat. This has led to softer safe haven demand, making the US Dollar (USD) slide. The Australian Dollar has benefitted notably from this movement.

The Australian Dollar is also holding its ground a little better thanks to the latest Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) stimulus measures. Speaking on the RBAs recent easing, Chris Rands at Nikko Asset Management said:

While there is some uncertainty around just how much buying the RBA will be doing, the fact that they are pinning three-year bond yields to 0.25 per cent means that the economy can have some certainty around low and stable rates for the foreseeable future.

However, the Australian Dollar outlook is still gloomy overall. Australias economy is expected to fall into a deep recession this year. Plus, as a risk-correlated currency it remains among the currencies most sensitive to the coronavirus pandemic.

GBP/AUD Exchange Rate Forecast: Investors Awaiting UK Chancellors Latest Stimulus

The Bank of England (BoE) and Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) have already taken a lot of action on monetary policy stimulus. Judging by the BoEs frozen policy decision today, the bank is not yet thinking about further action.

As a result, Pound and Australian Dollar investors will be looking more to governments and global news for developments on stimulus and fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

Pound investors are currently awaiting new fiscal stimulus expected soon from UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak. Sunak is expected to ramp up support for Britains self-employed workers.

If the fiscal stimulus fails to impress investors, GBP/AUD may be in for further losses.

On the other hand, impressive stimulus could help the Pound recover. Meanwhile, the Australian Dollars recent gains could reverse if market panic intensifies again and investors seek safer assets.

Overall, fiscal stimulus news and global coronavirus developments remain the biggest focus for Pound to Australian Dollar exchange rate.
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The letters to the editor in the Wednesday, March 25, paper were really over the top. When did President Donald Trump blame the all of the Chinese people for the China virus (In blaming Chinese people, Trump fails again as a leader)? I have only heard him say that the virus comes from China, so it is the China virus.

When has he mishandled the coronavirus, as letter writer Ralph Turek states (A crisis of leadership at the worst possible time")? I saw the president being ahead of the curve with the travel bans and surrounding himself daily with experts.

The letter writers blamed Trump for everything. I am surprised they did not blame him for starting the virus.

Bruce Riley,

Sheffield Village
H ospital staff in Madrid have warned that services are collapsing as wards are overwhelmed with cases.

The number of Covid-19 cases in Spain has now risen to 56,188 from the 47,610 recorded on Wednesday and their death toll has jumped to 4,089 from 3,434.

Only Italy, which has suffered 7,503 deaths, has fared worse, and the number losing their lives in Spain is continuing to rise quickly.

Medical staff in the capital, Madrid, which has converted its major ice rink into a makeshift mortuary, are being cheered by members of the public as they go to work.

But they have warned that they need more help as they grapple with the largest number of cases in the country.

A health worker handling a swab to test a police officer in Madrid (Madrid City Hall/AFP via Getty I) / Madrid City Hall/AFP via Getty Images

We are collapsing. We need more workers, said Lidia Perera, a nurse at Madrids 1,000-bed Hospital de la Paz.

If you had told me three months ago that I would be working in these conditions in Spain, I wouldnt have believed you. If they did [regular testing], they might end up without any workers.

The World on Coronavirus lockdown 1 /60 The World on Coronavirus lockdown Getty Images A UK government public health campaign is displayed in Piccadilly Circus Reuters Chinese paramilitary police and security officers wear face masks to protect against the spread of the new coronavirus as they stand guard outside an entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing AP A usually busy 42nd Street is seen nearly empty in New York AFP via Getty Images Bondi Beach, Australia Getty Images Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images View of the illuminated statue of Christ the Redeemer that reads "Thank you" as Archbishop of the city of Rio de Janeiro Dom Orani Tempesta performs a mass in honor of Act of Consecration of Brazil and tribute to medical workers amidst the Coronavirus (COVID - 19) pandemic Getty Images Rome AFP via Getty Images An Indian man paddles his bicycle in front of a mural depicting the globe covered in a mask, as India remains under an unprecedented lockdown over the highly contagious coronavirus Getty Images Aerial view of the empty 9 de Julio avenue in Buenos Aires in Argentina AFP via Getty Images A view of an empty Grand Canal Reuters Las Ramblas, Barcelona, Spain Getty Images Aerial view of the empty Central cemetery in Bogota, Columbia AFP via Getty Images The facade of the Palacio de Lopez (seat of the government palace) AFP via Getty Images Miami, Florida AFP via Getty Images Aerial view of the empty Simon Bolivar park in Bogota AFP via Getty Images An LAPD patrol car drives through Venice Beach Boardwalk AP Venice Beach, California Getty Images Los Angeles, California Getty Images Surfers Paradise is seen empty in Australia Getty Images Many shops stand shuttered on the Venice Beach boardwalk Getty Images Empty escalators are seen at a deserted train station during morning rush hour after New South Wales began shutting down non-essential businesses Reuters A nearly empty Times Square in New York AFP via Getty Images Caracas AFP via Getty Images Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador AFP via Getty Images A general view of an unusually quiet Midland Park in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images A general view of an unusually quiet Civic Square at lunchtimein Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images A policeman rides his motorcycle wearing a face mask in front of a closed shopping mall in Buenos Aires, Argentina AFP via Getty Images Florida Keys AP The historic Channel 2 Bridge closed to fishermen, bikers and pedestrians in Florida Keys AP The Beach on Scenic Gulf Drive near Seascape Resort in south Walton County, Florida sits empty of tourists AP Surfers Paradise is seen empty in Australia Getty Images A deserted Rajpath leading to India Gate in New Delhi AFP via Getty Images A general view is seen of a closed Luna Park in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A general view is seen of a closed Luna Park in Sydney, Australia Getty Images Empty roads are pictured following the lockdown by the government amid concerns about the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Kathmandu, Nepal Reuters An empty New York Subway car i AFP via Getty Images The empty pedestrian zone is seen in the city of Cologne, western Germany, AFP via Getty Images Place de la Comedie in the city of Montpellier , southern France AFP via Getty Images An empty street in Kuwait city AFP via Getty Images A building is covered by the Portuguese message: "Coronavirus: take precaution" over empty streets in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, AP A general view shows an empty street after a curfew was imposed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Reuters Parliament of Canada is pictured with empty street during morning rush hour AFP via Getty Images A near empty beach on Southend seafront in England PA Near empty Keswick town centre in Cumbria, England PA

The latest figures came as the nationwide state of emergency and accompanying lockdown, begun on March 15, was extended until April 11.

People are banned from leaving home except for buying essential supplies and medicines, or for work.

The situation is calm in some parts of the country. In a rural area near Malaga a British expatriate said today that supermarkets were well-stocked and shoppers were courteous and considerate, although many wore masks.

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Elsewhere there has been tension and occasional violence, including an incident in which a 29-year-old man was stabbed by his 31-year-old flatmate as he tried to leave home with a cough.

Jose Angel Gonzalez, deputy head of the Spanish National Police, encouraged people to ring the countrys equivalent of 999 if they witnessed or heard about other wrongdoing.

More than 1,000 people have been arrested during the state of emergency and 20,000 fines have been issued.

Meanwhile, in France a special medicalised TGV fast train has evacuated 20 patients with coronavirus from eastern France to less affected regions.

The death toll in France has risen to 1,331, including 231 in the latest 24-hour period. Health chief Jerome Salomon said the number of people needing life support had risen 12 per cent.
MIDDLETOWN  A state police trooper has been suspended from duty, officials said Thursday morning, after being arrested in an alleged domestic assault in Rhode Island.

Trooper Marwing Pena was charged with disorderly conduct and simple assault by the Pawtucket, R.I. police department and is due to appear in Providence District Court Thursday.

As a result of the arrest, a state police supervisor has seized Pena's department firearms, badge, identification, and police cruiser, state police said in a press release. Penas police powers have been suspended and an internal affairs investigation is underway.

According to Penas arrest report, police were called to a home on Dagget Avenue in Pawtucket around 3:20 a.m. March 20. A woman there told police dispatch her boyfriend was pushing and shoving her, the report said.

When police arrived, the woman told officers she and Pena had gotten into an argument while having sex and that Pena became angry and pushed her across the face, with an open palm, then used his foot to push her in the stomach resulting in her rolling off the bed, the report said.

She said Pena pushed her and took their two children from her arms and took them upstairs.

Police said the woman did not appear to be injured in the argument.

The woman told police she and Pena had been dating on and off for the past six years, and he had been driving out to visit her on his days off, the report said.

The 30-year-old trooper has been with the state police since 2018 and is assigned to Troop D in Danielson, state police said.

When police spoke to Pena he told officers he may have shoved her in the process of getting the children, the report said. Pena claimed the argument was verbal, and said his girlfriend was drunk.

Police arrested Pena without incident, according to the report. The officers seized his state police-issued handgun and M4 rifle along with magazines and ammunition from his cruiser parked at the home, according to the report.

Connecticut State Police were notified and a sergeant there told Pawtucket police they would retrieve the items.
Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba has agreed with Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto on the urgent signing of Ukraine-Hungary agreement on healthcare cooperation which will allow uniting efforts of the two countries to jointly fight coronavirus pandemic.

This was discussed during the talks between the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Hungary in videoconference format, the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine reports.

Kuleba also reached agreement on the protection and support for the citizens of Ukraine in the territory of Hungary during the transport restrictions and assured of the corresponding attitude towards the citizens of Hungary in Ukraine.

Szijjarto assured that Ukrainian citizens in Hungary will not be fined for expired documents within this special period. The Hungarian government allowed extending the documents and visas to stay in Hungary for the period of restrictive measures.

In addition, the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Hungary agreed to finalize other documents, which are expected to be signed at the meeting between President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban.

"I am pleased to receive a confirmation from my colleague Peter Szijjarto that Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban accepted our invitation and will visit Ukraine... We will quickly agree on a date of the visit of the Hungarian side when the coronavirus pandemic ends," Kuleba noted.

Kuleba also reached agreement on the extension of the term of Hungarys EUR 50 million loan for infrastructure development in the border regions which was due to expire on June 2.

The parties also discussed the importance of protection of the rights of the Hungarian national minority in Ukraine and agreed to continue the dialogue in order to find solutions to the problematic issues with respect for the national interests of both countries.

The foreign minister of Ukraine also drew the attention of his Hungarian counterpart to Russia's attempts to manipulate the subject of coronavirus pandemic, seeking to ease sanctions allegedly for humanitarian reasons. Kuleba stressed that the sanctions had been imposed over Russian aggression, not coronavirus. Therefore, the sanctions have nothing to do with the pandemic. Hungarian Foreign Minister confirmed that Hungary's sanctions policy against the Russian Federation remained unchanged.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 18:03:55|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua)-- From smart fever-screening at subway stations to scan-reading diagnosis, artificial intelligence (AI) is on the frontline of China's battle against the novel coronavirus.

Behind the smart systems are deep-learning frameworks that emulate the way the human brain learns, like recognizing patterns and coping with ambiguity.

Megvii, developer of the fever-screening system and one of China's major AI unicorns, announced on Wednesday it will make its core deep-learning framework MegEngine open-source to the world.

As more leading Chinese AI enterprises embrace open-sourcing, experts expect AI development in China to shift into overdrive, paving the way for more innovation.

Tang Wenbin, co-founder and chief technology officer of Megvii, said in an online press conference that AI infrastructure is composed of AI chips and production platforms. The latter includes data, algorithms and computing power.

Tang used a cooking analogy to explain deep-learning. The data "ingredients" are cleaned and sorted. The training algorithm "cooks" the data so the computer can identify trends and make predictions on unseen data, and the deep-learning framework is like the pot.

With the help of a pre-built and optimized framework, engineers can focus on the high-level structure of their model, without getting into the details of underlying algorithms.

Meanwhile, the government is to expedite construction of "new infrastructure" projects such as 5G networks and data centers, shoring up information services for the growing market.

As digital transformation is expected to boost innovation and underpin economic and social development, it is a good time to release its open-source framework, said the company.

Tang said Megvii hopes its deep-learning framework will become a cornerstone of China's AI development and an integrated part of China's AI infrastructure.

Gao Wen, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said open-source frameworks are a trend in global AI development.

As the source codes are freely available and can be modified and developed in new directions, more opportunities and products are expected to emerge from an open AI ecosystem.

Silicon Valley tech giants have released several deep-learning frameworks, such as TensorFlow by Alphabet's Google and Facebook's PyTorch.

In China, Baidu announced the open-sourcing of its PaddlePaddle framework in 2016. Tsinghua University has released Jittor and Huawei is expected to release MindSpore this year.

Harry Shum (Shen Xiangyang), a former executive vice president of AI and research at Microsoft, who recently assumed a Dual-Professorship position at Tsinghua University, said building responsible AI is a challenge and requires participation by multiple parties.

"Only when a good framework is open-source, more developers, researchers and enterprises can join in, and more people can have a deep understanding of AI," he said.
Cassandra Collyer, who is based in Perth, needed help remembering to shower as soon as she returned home from the hospital, so she asked her partner Aaron for assistance

A doctor working on the front line of the coronavirus pandemic has shared the hilarious way her husband is preventing her from contaminating him and their house.

Cassandra Collyer, who is based in Perth, Western Australia, needed help remembering to shower as soon as she returned home from the hospital, so she asked her partner Aaron for assistance.

That turned out to be an excellent idea as her work-from-home hubby did his utmost to ensure the 37-year-old was following the rules.

'I thought we could all do with a laugh right about now,' Cassandra said, posting Aaron's efforts on Facebook.

What followed were pictures of notes Aaron had pasted at particular points in the house, starting with one that said: 'You are contaminated! Please follow the instructions before interacting with us'

As she entered the house Cassandra saw a second sign that told her to 'stop and get naked here'

'I told him he has to help me remember to shower before doing anything when I get home from work. This is what I came home to today.'

What followed were pictures of notes Aaron had pasted at particular points in the house, starting with one that said: 'You are contaminated! Please follow the instructions before interacting with us'.

As she entered the house Cassandra saw a second sign that told her to 'stop and get naked here'.

The arrow Aaron had drawn led to the laundry room, where his wife was directed to wash her hands in the sink and then place her clothes in the washing machine.

'Next, think True Lies strip scene and walk very slowly,' the note continued.

Cassandra was ushered into the bathroom to take a shower because she is a 'dirty, dirty girl' in the current infectious environment she works in.

The arrow Aaron had drawn led to the laundry room, where his wife was directed to wash her hands in the sink and then place her clothes in the washing machine

Cassandra was ushered into the bathroom to take a shower because she is a 'dirty, dirty girl' in the current infectious environment she works in

Once clean, Aaron instructed his wife to lie on the bed for a 'full inspection', continuing the cheeky nature of his previous letters.

'Thank you for your cooperation,' he finished.

Cassandra's post on social media has since gone viral, despite her fearing it was 'inappropriate', and has brought much-needed cheer to healthcare workers Australia wide.

Once clean, Aaron instructed his wife to lie on the bed for a 'full inspection', continuing the cheeky nature of his previous letters

Cassandra's post on social media has since gone viral, despite her fearing it was 'inappropriate', and has brought much-needed cheer to healthcare workers Australia wide

'Sense of humour is what's keeping a lot of us going at the moment! Glad that people most at risk have kept their humour too,' one woman said in response.

'Oh, that is hilarious. He obviously has too much time on his hands,' said another.

A third added: 'That's brilliant. He's a keeper!'

Healthcare workers are most at risk of contracting COVID-19 because they are working alongside infected patients all day long.

So far Australia has lost 11 individuals to the disease.
ITV journalist Robert Peston appeared to swear this afternoon when he didn't realise he was being broadcast to the nation during Rishi Sunak's press conference.

The Chancellor had just outlined his package of support for the self-employed when he asked for questions from journalists, alongside Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer.

Mr Sunak said 'Could I turn next to Robert Peston from ITV.' But Mr Peston appeared to be having trouble with his home video link and doesn't realise the Chancellor and Dr Harries could hear him when he says 'oh sh**'...hello.'

An unflustered Mr Sunak responded 'good afternoon Robert', and Mr Peston blamed the poor connection at his home for the confusion, saying it 'isn't terribly stable'.

Social media users found the gaffe by the veteran journalist - best known for his work during the 2008 financial crisis - hilarious.

On Twitter Professor Mark Wetherell said: ''oh sh**' Peston experiencing the same issues as everyone else trying to join virtual meetings.'

A user called Ryan Love declared that Peston 'wins the daily press briefing!'

And Katie McNulty declared 'We are all Peston.'

At the press conference Mr Sunak revealed that self-employed workers will be able to claim support worth 80% of their average monthly profits in an 'unprecedented' move to cover the impact of coronavirus.

The Chancellor said the move - worth up to a maximum of 2,500 a month - would cover 95% of self-employed workers.

The package comes after the Government came under sustained pressure as its initial package of financial support only covered employees.

Mr Sunak said: 'To support those who work for themselves, today I am announcing a new self-employed income support scheme.

'The Government will pay self-employed people who have been adversely affected by the coronavirus a taxable grant worth 80% of their average monthly profits over the last three years, up to 2,500 a month.'
UN chief Antonio Guterres has condemned the attack on a Gurudwara in Kabul that killed at least 25 people and injured many others, reiterating that attacks against civilians are unacceptable and those who carry out such crimes must be held accountable, his spokesman said.

On Wednesday, at least 25 worshippers were killed and eight others injured when a heavily armed suicide bomber stormed his way into a prominent gurdwara in the heart of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, in one of the deadliest attacks on the minority Sikh community in the strife-torn country.

The Islamic State (IS) terror group, which has targeted Sikhs before in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Secretary-General condemns the attack...in Kabul on a Sikh-Hindu temple in which dozens of civilians were killed and injured. He expresses his deepest sympathies to the families of the victims and wishes a speedy recovery to those injured, Secretary General Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement on Wednesday.

It added that the Secretary-General reiterates that attacks against civilians are unacceptable and those who carry out such crimes must be held accountable.

The United Nations stands in solidarity with the people and the Government of Afghanistan and will continue supporting efforts to bring peace to their country, the statement said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Global sovereign long-term sukuk issuance will grow modestly this year, continuing the expansionary trend of the past few years, said Moodys in a new report.



Larger issuers are driving growth in overall volumes, even as some smaller issuers have not sought to refinance maturing repayments, leading to greater market concentration.



"Sovereign long-term sukuk issuance will rise to nearly $75 billion this year from $71 billion in 2019," said Christian de Guzman, a Moody's senior vice president and the report's co-author. "We expect that wider fiscal deficits, larger scheduled repayments and a deepening of domestic Islamic financial markets will lead to higher sukuk issuance over the coming years."



Key points:



 Issuance in 2020 would likely surpass our forecasts should oil prices stabilize at the current levels of $25-$35 per barrel, lower than our average oil price assumption of around $43 per barrel for the full year.



 Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Malaysia will continue to increase the share of domestic sukuk in their fiscal deficit financing.



 Furthermore, Moodys expects that Turkey (B1 negative) will be a prominent sukuk issuer as it was in 2019.



 Issuance by GCC governments increased 13.5 per cent in 2019 despite the fall in their combined fiscal deficits to $43 billion in 2019 from $54 billion in 2018.



 Saudi Arabia's domestic issuance, which rose to $19.1 billion from $13.0 billion, accounted for nearly the entire increase in GCC issuance.



 By 2021, however, Moodys expects that total sovereign long-term sukuk issuance will decline slightly to around $70 billion, largely driven by lower funding needs in Saudi Arabia.



 Also, the integration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into investment mandates is likely to be a factor driving the development of green sukuk offerings.  TradeArabia News Service
An employee of Lone Star College-CyFair tested positive for coronavirus March 26, according to an LSC system press release. The employee developed symptoms March 22, four days after being one of a limited number of employees on the LSC-CyFair campus.

This was the LSC systems first employee to test positive for COVID-19, said Vice Chancellor of Strategic Priorities Kyle Scott.

Personnel were allowed on campus March 18 to collect personal belongings, he said, though it is currently unclear how many other employees had been on campus that day.

The campus president and the police force were keeping separate lists of who was going on campus on that day, on the 18th, and now were reconciling those two lists, Scott said.

The LSC system sent an announcement to all Cy-Fair campus employees advising any personnel that had been on campus from March 18 through March 20 to self-quarantine for 14 days; contact the campus president to ensure their name is on the list of employees who were on campus; and if they have symptoms, to seek medical treatment, Scott said.

There were no students on the LSC-CyFair campus at the time, according to the release.

All LSC system campuses are closed, Scott said, and deep cleaning and decontamination efforts for all campuses started on March 23. According to the release, sanitation efforts are scheduled to be finished before April 6 when facilities may open for employees only. Campuses may open to students April 13 at the earliest.

This story is developing and will be updated as information becomes available.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Coronavirus live updates: Hidalgo pushes for compassionate release of inmates at Harris County Jail

mfeuk@hcnonline.com
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Mar. 26

By Ilkin Seyfaddini  Trend:

Three more Uzbek citizens have tested positive for coronavirus, bringing the total number of infected people in the country to 59, Trend reports citing the Ministry of Health.

The first case of Coronavirus infection in Uzbekistan was detected on March 15 in the laboratory of the Research Institute of Virology - an Uzbek woman who had returned from France. The Ministry of Health later said that her son, daughter, husband and grandson also tested coronavirus-positive.

The outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which is an international transport hub - began at a fish market in late December 2019. The number of people killed by the disease has surpassed 21,300. Over 471,000 people have been confirmed as infected. Meanwhile, over 114,800 people have reportedly recovered.

Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019. Several countries are working on a vaccine against the new virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

---

Follow author on Twitter: @seyfaddini
The Woodlands Mall closed at the end of business day on Wednesday night, the latest large commercial property in The Woodlands to close due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gordy Bunch, chairman of The Woodlands Township Board of Directors, said on Wednesday evening that the township received an email from Ted Harris, the general manager of the mall, indicating the massive shopping venue adjacent to Interstate 45 and The Woodlands Town Center district would shutter indefinitely at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

The mall had been an outlier in recent days, staying open for seven hours a day while other large shopping destinations in the Houston region shuttered.

In the email, Harris explained new county regulations going into effect on Thursday was the main reason for the closure.

As of (March 26), the Montgomery County Judge ordered all businesses must comply with certain occupancy restrictions. As a result, the malls common areas must cease operations. Food tenants may continue to operate for pick-up and delivery, Harris said in an email to township officials. Businesses with external entrances will be permitted to operate within the occupancy guidelines.

The email also said mall officials would be consulting closely with county public health officials and working with free-standing businesses outside the malls main shell to develop proper protocols to comply with the new guidelines.

As sales tax revenue dries up during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated business closures continue, township officials are responding in various manners.

Earlier Wednesday during a virtual township board meeting, Bunch appointed township directors Bruce Rieser, John Anthony Brown and Bob Milner to a newly created Budget Planning Task Force subcommittee.

The trio will begin working immediately on solving the economic puzzle that has emerged from the novel coronavirus and corresponding governmental response in closing businesses and enforcing social distancing guidelines.

jeff.forward@chron.com
An active serving member of the United States Forces Japan (USFJ) has been tested positive for the novel coronavirus on Thursday.

In a press release issued on Thursday, USFJ said that the active-duty patient who tested positive had been in "Restriction of Movement status upon his return from the United States on March 15th."

The statement added that since March 11, "United States Forces Japan has required personnel returning to Japan to be immediately restricted to quarters for 14 days." The member who tested positive was assigned to Commander Fleet Activities Yokosuka.

USFJ health professionals are now conducting contact tracing to determine if the patient had interacted with other personnel.

The press release added, "the overall risk to individual USFJ members in Japan remains moderate and the command encourages strict hygiene measures to reduce the risk of transmission. Anyone who believes they are ill should coordinate with their organizations in order to stay home and avoid exposing others to infection.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As the call for social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic quickly disrupted the way people and businesses operate in Massachusetts, changes reverberated into the court system.

Courts are utilizing video and teleconferencing and the start of new jury trials has been put on hold until at least April 21, part of a measure to avoid having groups of people close together as COVID-19 continues to spread. But what does that mean for pretrial defendants who are awaiting trial?

In some cases, district attorneys offices across Massachusetts are considering requests for release, as COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, threatens to spread behind bars.

In Berkshire County, District Attorney Andrea Harrington said a few cases have been considered for release. In one instance, the office did agree to release a defendant who was being held for a 60-day minimum mandatory on a second-offense OUI case, she said.

Another case involved someone else being held on bail that a judge imposed, bail that the district attorneys office had not asked for, Harrington said in a phone interview.

We review them and we do the same kind of analysis that we always did, which was weighing public safety issues versus the individuals rights and now the virus plays into that analysis, she said. Certainly having people incarcerated at this time does create some risk to them and to the community in terms of spread of the virus because you cannot social distance when youre in a jail.

Randy Gioia, the deputy chief counsel of the public defender division of the Committee for Public Counsel Services, said this is an extraordinary time and we need extraordinary measures.

Were really concerned about the virus getting into a detention center where social distancing is very difficult if not impossible, Gioia said in a phone interview. Theres a real possibility if the virus gets into a detention center it will spread like wildfire and become a matter of life or death.

Defendants who fall into categories that the CDC says are at a higher risk for complications of coronavirus, including people 60 and older and people with chronic diseases, are among those who may be considered for early release by district attorneys offices.

These are people that we need to prioritize for release and get them out, Gioia said.

Worcester District Attorney Joseph Early Jr. said those factors will be considered and that defense attorneys should inform the courts if defendants have some of those high-risk conditions, like diabetes or asthma.

Every case has its own nuances, every case has its own factors, said Early, noting that his office will consider motions to release non-violent offenders on a case-by-case basis. My job is to protect the safety of the public and that hasnt changed at all.

The district attorney said his office received a blanket motion from CPCS and the ACLU requesting the release of defendants but only a few individual motions from defense attorneys.

On violent offenses, I have a real problem sending anyone back out with a history or record thats replete with violence, Early said in a phone interview.

For defendants who are awaiting trial on nonviolent offenses, or for people who are about to finish a sentence on a nonviolent offense, Early said his office will consider motions.

If theyve got a place to go, that will certainly play into the courts decision, he said.

Gioia said cases that should be considered for release should include defendants who are only behind bars because they could not afford the cash bail set in their case.

When it comes to recommending bail for new offenses, Early said his office is acting differently with the ongoing pandemic in mind and is not asking for bail unless it is absolutely necessary.

Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins said that her office is operating under the presumption that bail is not requested in new offenses.

People charged prior to trial will continue to hold the presumption of release on personal recognizance. Now more than ever, if we are going to ask the court to detain someone pre-trial on a cash bail, we will do so only after critically weighing any public health risk against our legitimate concerns for public safety, Rollins said in a statement.

Court supervisors are actively reviewing requests for release and a point person from the leadership of Suffolk municipal, district and superior courts is proactively reviewing cases of incarcerated individuals, serving as a secondary source of review for any individual seeking release, the statement said.

There arent many defendants in Berkshire County who may fall into that category of cases that could be considered for release. Harrington said it is her offices policy to only ask for cash bail when there is a flight risk with the defendant in question. But, the office does utilize the 58A statute, which can order a defendant held without bail pending trial if the person is considered a danger to the community.

There are certainly a number of people right now held in the Berkshire County House of Correction awaiting trial who have been found to be a danger and held pretrial, Harrington said.

Harrington said her office is committed to protecting the safety of victims and would not consider motions relating to defendants who have a history of domestic violence, in particular.

I really have stressed to people, law enforcement is still working. if you are in a dangerous situation, you can call the police, they will come, my office will seek to have people held, she said. Especially now, because with the social isolation, victims are even more vulnerable potentially than they were previously.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline has said that abusers can use COVID-19 to manipulate victims, withholding necessary products like disinfectants or preventing a victim from seeking medical care. Travel restrictions could also impact a victims escape plan or safety plan.

Sixth Tone, a news magazine in China, reported that calls to police reporting domestic violence increased as cities were put into lockdown.

Were not looking to send domestic violence offenders back into the homes they just got out of, Early said.

Harrington said her office launched a communication campaign asking people to be aware of whats happening in their communities. Fliers distributed to grocery stores list hotlines for those in need of help.

In Bristol County, District Attorney Thomas Quinn III is reviewing matters on a case-by-case basis, a spokesman said. The district attorney has asked a supervisor for CPCS in the county to contact him if he feels specific cases need to be addressed.

When it comes to violent offenses, Gioia said defense lawyers should think about which cases have the best chance of release.

I wouldnt say its limited to nonviolent offenses because crimes of violence come in all shapes and sizes and its up to the individual lawyer to decide which particular charge, which particular client has a chance for getting out, he said.

Meanwhile, the ACLU of Massachusetts, the Committee for Public Counsel Services and the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers on Tuesday asked the state Supreme Judicial Court to limit outbreaks of COVID-19 behind bars by reducing the number of people in jails, prisons, and houses of correction, filing an emergency petition. The litigation has been sent to the full SJC.

In a response to that petition, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan wrote that her office was taking steps to address the risk coronavirus extends to those incarcerated as well as corrections officials and civilian staff.

Ryan wrote that her office was reviewing the cases of inmates at the House of Correction to identify all nonviolent offenders and medically-compromised prisoners who could be released without posing a risk to the community.

In addition to the risk of COVID-19 transmission posed by the close-quarters housing of inmates in the custody of the Department of Correction, our office is also sensitive to the Due Process and Eighth Amendment rights of defendants incarcerated pending trial or other significant court events, Ryan wrote.

The district attorney wrote that cases are best handled with discussion from all parties and not a blanket policy.

We have concerns about an approach that prioritizes the unconditional release of certain classes of inmates without proper oversight and structure; for example, individuals with addictions who are at an increased risk of overdosing without adequate supervision or who will be released to the streets or a shelter  making themselves and others more prone to exposure and infection," she said.

Ryan suggested the issue could be best handled by convening an emergency committee, including representatives from prosecutors offices, the petitioners, the Department of Correction, the various sheriffs offices, the Parole Board, the Attorney General and the Trial Court.

Harrington said her office had not yet received requests for the release of inmates who have already been sentenced and are serving time in prison. If the office does receive motions for release, Harrington said her office may consider cases involving non-violent offenses like drug convictions.

In Massachusetts, cases of coronavirus have already been detected in Department of Correction facilities.

At least 10 people have tested positive for coronavirus at the Massachusetts Treatment Center in Bridgewater, and a staffer at MCI-Shirley has also tested positive, the DOC said earlier this week.

The defense attorney for an inmate at the Massachusetts Treatment Center has been fighting for his clients release, arguing that the man has been held unlawfully for a probation violation and noting that that man has several illnesses that make him at risk of complications from coronavirus.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 15 Massachusetts residents have died of illness related to COVID-19 and at least 1,838 residents have tested positive, according to the state Department of Public Health.

Globally, at least 492,603 people have had coronavirus. At least 22,184 have died and 119,918, according to a real-time map of cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Related Content:
(Boston)--Thomas Cheng, a first-year medical student at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), is the recipient of the 2020 Student Research Fellowship award from the Society of Vascular Surgery Foundation. Each fellowship consists of a $3,000 award and a two-year complimentary subscription to the Journal of Vascular Surgery.

As part of Cheng's fellowship, he will study patient presentation and outcomes for dialysis in the immigrant and refugee population at Boston Medical Center (BMC). According to Cheng, many immigrants and refugees requiring dialysis in the United States are unable to access dialysis on a regular basis, forcing them to undergo dialysis during emergency situations. "Studies have shown that emergency-only dialysis, compared to regularly scheduled dialysis, carries a higher risk of mortality and increased need for higher levels of care. This research will help identify areas for improvement in this vulnerable population as we will look at healthcare utilization, such as readmissions following their dialysis access creation," explained Cheng.

Born in Taiwan and raised in Burnaby, Canada, Cheng came to the United States after high school and graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2013 with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. He then received a Master of Science in Medical Sciences from Boston University in 2015. Subsequently, he worked as a research coordinator on several clinical trials for four years at BUSM/BMC in the department of surgery where he served as the lead coordinator under Dr. Alik Farber and Dr. Jeffrey Kalish for the Best Endovascular vs. Best Surgical Therapy in Patients With Critical Limb Ischemia trial before starting medical school.

"I am grateful to the Society for Vascular Surgery for awarding me this prestigious student research fellowship. I am also thankful for my amazing long-time mentor, Dr. Jeffrey Siracuse, who will be supervising this research as well as the other vascular surgeons at BUMC/BMC who comprise the fantastic team that I have had the privilege to work with," he added.

###

The Society for Vascular Surgery is a not-for-profit professional medical society, composed primarily of vascular surgeons, that seeks to advance excellence and innovation in vascular health through education, advocacy, research and public awareness. It is the national advocate for more than 5,800 specialty-trained vascular surgeons and other medical professionals who are dedicated to the prevention and cure of vascular disease.
To control coronavirus pandemic, Telangana MPs and MLAs come forward to contribute one month's salary to Chief Minister's Relief Fund. Apart from contributing, Srinivas Goud and KT Rama Rao also came on the streets to control the situation.

Telangana State governments efforts under the leadership of the CM K Chandrashekhar Rao to successfully counter the Corona epidemic in the State yielding results. The measures taken to contain and prevent the virus, all ministers, MPs, and MLAs have come forward to contribute their one months salary and one years Constituency Development Fund totaling Rs 500 Crore to the Chief Ministers Relief Fund as their donation. Each MP gets Rs five crore funds per year to develop its constituency. For this, Rs 80 Crore fund of the 16 TRS MPs for one year will be given to the Chief Ministers Relief Fund. A consent letter in this regard is handed over by TRS Parliamentary Party Leader Dr. K Keshav Rao, Deputy leader Sri Banda Prakash, Party leader in Lok Sabha Sri Nama Nageswara Rao, Deputy leader Sri Kotha Prabhakar Reddy to Chief Minister Sri K Chandrashekhar Rao at Pragathi Bhavan.

In this program, medical and Health Ministers Etela Rajender, Srinivas Goud MPs Ranjit Reddy, M Srinivas Reddy, BB Patil And CM KCRs daughter Kavitha participated. TRS MLAs and MLCs also decided to contribute one months salary to the CMs Relief Fund. Rs 3 crore fund is released for each MLA and MLC for their Constituency development per year. The TRS MLAs and MLCs have decided to donate their one-year Constituency development Funds, the TRSLP has announced.

The CM thanked the Ministers, MPs, MLAs, MLCs who contributed their funds and one-month salaries for the measures taken to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The CM said the spirit demonstrated by the Parliament and Legislature members would encourage the government. He said it was heartening that several prominent personalities in the State have come forward to help the government during the troubled times. While TRSPP Leader Dr. K Keshav Rao said that the Parliament members of the party will contribute one months salary to the CM relief Fund and another months salary to the PM Relief Fund.

Also Read: Coronavirus in India: Health Ministry confirms 553 positive COVID-19 cases, e-tailers allege police dumped 15,000 liters milk, 10,000 kg vegetables

Minister of MA&UD, Industries, and IT&C KT Rama Rao has monitored the lockdown situation across the city of Hyderabad after Chief Minister KCR call, all Ministers in his Cabinet came out and monitored at ground level.

Another young minister for Excise and Prohibition V Srinivas Goud too walked in the streets and asked the people to shut the shops other than groceries and medical stores. He said vegetable markets would be set up in all municipalities of Mahabubnagar district so that there is no shortage of essential commodities like vegetables and meat in his native district Mehabubnagar.

The Minister, as part of his supervision of the lockdown in Mahabubnagar town, visited the newly constructed integrated vegetable and meat markets. He cautioned vendors and shopkeepers not to inflate the prices of essential commodities, as the PD Act would be invoked against those indulging in black-marketing. He also warned people not to venture out of their homes.

For all the latest National News, download NewsX App
Esercito and Police officers control road traffic in Naples, Neighborhood Pianura on March 23, 2020, as Italy shut all stores except for pharmacies and food shops in a desperate bid to halt the spread of a coronavirus.

Glimmers of hope are being seen in Europe as the number of new coronavirus cases continues to decline in Italy, the country that has seen the most acute outbreak of the infection.

Italy's death toll from the virus passed the 7,500 mark on Wednesday, the country's Civil Protection Agency said, however it noted that the rate of new cases of contagion fell for the fourth day running.

It said 57,521 people are currently infected with COVID-19 in Italy, 3,491 more than Tuesday. The daily rise on Tuesday had been 3,612 while on Monday it had been 3,780 and on Sunday 3,957.

Despite some hope at the decline in the rate of new infections in Italy, the contagion continues to take its toll.

The latest data shows that the number of coronavirus deaths in Italy rose by 683 on Wednesday to 7,503. The country saw a record increase in deaths from the virus last Saturday, reporting 793 deaths in one day.

Civil Protection Agency head and Coronavirus Emergency Commissioner Angelo Borrelli, known for his daily briefings on the virus' progression in Italy, was unable to attend the daily press conference Wednesday after developing a fever himself Wednesday morning. He has been tested for the virus with the results pending.

Although Italy has been the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in Europe since mid-February, the rest of Europe has been badly affected too. The region has over 216,000 cases now  out of a total number of just over 472,000 cases worldwide, according to John Hopkins University.
The Competition Tribunal has upheld the agreement between Vodacom and the Competition Commission regarding the reduction of data prices.

The agreement follows the publication of the final report of the Data Services Market Inquiry in December last year.

The Commission implemented the inquiry to investigate factors or features of the market that have historically led to what it labels as high prices for data services.

The Tribunals confirmation means that it has accepted Vodacoms proposed changes and that the consent agreement between Vodacom and the Competition Commission is now officially entered into.

The agreement includes the following:

Significant details to retail data prices  including the reduction of data prices by over 30% across all channels effective as of 1 April 2020.

Lifeline and zero-rated data made available through the ConnectU platform.

Personalised discounts to prepaid customers in all areas where the majority of the population has income below the upper bound of the food poverty line.

Improve transparency regarding personalised price promotions, which will always be better value than headline offers.

Need for spectrum

Speaking at the Competition Commission media briefing, Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub said that data prices would be decreased again on 1 April 2021, resulting in a total data price decrease of around 40%.

Following the release of the Data Service Market Inquiry report, Vodacom decided that instead of fighting with the Commission, it would engage constructively with the issues raised in the report, Joosub said.

However, Joosub added that a lack of available spectrum remains a serious challenge for mobile operators in South Africa.

Vodacom hopes for high-demand spectrum to be allocated this year to help mobile operators improve network quality and reduce data prices.

We make this move proactively in the hope that spectrum will be allocated this year, he said.

The spectrum delays do not affect the agreements that have been made. The trust factor for Vodacom is drop the prices and spectrum will come.

Now read: How networks will use cellphone location data to stop the spread of the coronavirus
By Cassandra Garrison

BUENOS AIRES, March 26 (Reuters) - As Argentina was scrambling to introduce emergency measures to insulate its ailing economy from the coronavirus last week, the Chinese ambassador paid a visit to the home of President Alberto Fernandez to discuss an offer.

At the meeting in the wealthy Olivos suburb of Buenos Aires, ambassador Zou Xiaoli laid out how the Asian giant was ready to help Argentina face the pandemic: donating masks, gloves, thermometers and protective suits.

The donations, welcomed by Fernandez's government, show how China is leveraging its production of medical equipment and expertise in halting the coronavirus as a soft-power tool in regions like South America, where it is jostling for influence against the United States.

From Argentina to Mexico, Brazil to Peru, Latin American nations have accepted offers of support from China as the number of coronavirus cases across the region has climbed, amid growing fears about the preparedness of their healthcare systems.

There have been nearly 500,000 confirmed cases worldwide of the virus, which causes the respiratory disease COVID-19, and over 20,000 deaths.

Although South America has so far not been as hard hit as other parts of the world, experts fear that may change as winter arrives in the southern hemisphere.

"Some countries in the region have reached out to China asking for help," a Chinese official in Buenos Aires, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. "We will share with them our experience in combating COVID-19 and offer sanitary materials within our capacity."

As trade tensions between Washington and Beijing have simmered in recent years, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has warned Latin American nations that they should be wary of becoming too economically reliant on China - to little avail.

In Argentina, the region's third-largest economy, China has made steady in-roads, from solar power investments to the construction of a new space monitoring station. It has supplied over $17 billion of financing since 2007, Inter-American Dialogue data shows. China has also become the top consumer of Argentine soybeans and beef.

As the coronavirus spread in China, Argentina's new left-leaning leader Fernandez - who took office in December - exchanged correspondence with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Story continues

In letters seen by Reuters, Fernandez offered solidarity to China in February as the virus raged from the outbreak center of Wuhan. In March, Xi replied that the situation in China was improving and he called for a deepening of ties between the two nations.

Days later, the Chinese embassy announced its donations, posting pictures on Twitter of large trucks carrying a mobile hospital that was set up within a military base near the Argentine capital.

"China will continue to help in all possible channels. Long live friendship!" the embassy said on Twitter.

The help came at a difficult time for Argentina, which is grappling with a severe economic crisis and re-negotiating $110 billion in foreign debt with creditors, including the International Monetary Fund.

"This is part of the link we have with China, which is a solid relationship of mutual respect and ties that go beyond strong trade," a spokesman for Argentina's foreign ministry told Reuters, when asked about the donations.

INFORMATION CONTROL

China's aid to Latin America reflects a broader global trend, as Beijing looks to steer the narrative away from it being the country where the coronavirus started and was initially downplayed. Instead, China wants to be seen as spearheading the global fight against the pandemic, experts say.

Luo Zhaohui, a vice minister at China's foreign ministry, said at a news conference in Beijing on Thursday that the country would "ride out the storm with people from other countries, strengthen cooperation and strive to win the last victory in the fight against the virus."

While Trump has been criticized by opponents for branding the pandemic 'the Chinese virus,' China has won praise among Latin American governments that have accepted its help. The Chinese government said it has supplied test kits, protective suits and other forms of medical aid to more than 80 countries and international organizations.

"It's remarkable and a credit, in a way, to China's own commanding control of information that it's been able to re-envision itself as a leader in the fight against coronavirus globally," said Margaret Myers, director of the China and Latin American program at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.

Myers said the recent re-start of Chinese industry, as cases have subsided, has enabled the country to be a provider of key products as the rest of the world's production slows.

"This will create opportunities for China in the coming years," she said.

The United States, meanwhile, is struggling with its own battle to contain the virus, with the World Health Organization warning on Tuesday that the country could become a new epicenter of the crisis.

Before the epidemic hit hardest, Washington in February pledged $100 million towards international efforts in combating COVID-19, including for developing nations. A regional breakdown of that funding was not immediately available.

THANK YOU, CHINA

In Latin America, China's hands-on approach has been well received.

Chile, which has among the highest numbers of coronavirus cases in the region, has sought advice from Chinese health officials to guide its response and is sending an air force plane to China to pick up donated supplies, including tests and respiratory equipment, Chile's health minister said.

In Mexico, officials have said they are awaiting 300 ventilators from China, crucial yet scarce equipment in treating patients, while in Panama, government health officials heralded a video conference with Chinese experts to work on strategy, something China has done with more than 100 countries.

In Venezuela, the government of President Nicolas Maduro said China would send protective gear for health professionals and coronavirus test kits. The country has also opened talks with China over possible financial support.

"Thank you China for cooperation and solidarity with Ecuador!" the country's Vice President Otto Sonnenholzner wrote on Twitter, itemizing help from China that he said included 40,000 surgical masks, infrared thermometers, and protective suits.

In Brazil, right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro has moved quickly to heal a diplomatic rift with China and Chinese officials have said Beijing would assist with medical supplies and technical assistance.

Chinese firms, including Alibaba, Huawei, COFCO, China Communications Construction and the Bank of China have pledged donations around the region.

Back in Argentina, Washington is keen to show that it also wants to help.

"We plan this week to make funds available to Argentine authorities to combat coronavirus," an official at the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires told Reuters, adding the country was "looking at the possibility of additional donations." (Reporting by Cassandra Garrison; additional reporting by Yew Lun Tian in Beijing; Aislinn Laing and Dave Sherwood in Santiago; Luc Cohen in Caracas; Jake Spring in Brasilia; Eli Moreno in Panama City, and Diego Ore Oviedo in Mexico City; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Rosalba O'Brien)
(Bloomberg) --

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York said the stimulus package working its way through Congress is inadequate. He also restricted access to a malaria drug that President Donald Trump has touted as a treatment for the novel coronavirus.

Spain had its deadliest day yet. In Britain, the government moved to shut Parliament and Prince Charles tested positive. European Union leaders inched toward a rescue package. Germany unleashed a historic bailout.

Russian President Vladimir Putin postponed a public vote on constitutional changes next month that would allow him to rule to 2036. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro, echoing Trump, urged the country to resume normal life to protect the economy.

Key Developments:

Cases top 458,000; 20,807 dead, 113,687 recovered: Johns HopkinsTrump will stop using the term Chinese virus, easing blame gameTokyo asks people to stay inside as new cases spur lockdown riskIndia locked down, U.K. shuts Parliament; Iran, Singapore tighten curbsFired Americans send state unemployment websites crashingWorld leaders get sweeping powers they may never give upThe humming of Chinese plants returns as rest of world reels

Subscribe to a daily update on the virus from Bloombergs Prognosis team here.

Click VRUS on the terminal for news and data on the coronavirus and here for maps and charts. For analysis of the impact from Bloomberg Economics, click here. To see the impact on oil and commodities demand, click here.

California in Deal With Banks for Mortgage Relief (4:50 p.m. NY)

Wells Fargo & Co., US Bancorp, Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. have agreed to a 90-waiver of residential mortgage payments for Californians affected by the virus, Governor Gavin Newsom said. He also is considering a state-wide moratorium on evictions, a move some cities and counties have already made.

Wed reserve the right to look at a state overlay, Newsom said at a briefing. We have a team reviewing the legal parameters of that issue.

Story continues

There have been 2,535 confirmed cases in the most populous U.S. state, a 17% increase from Tuesday, Newsom said. He praised the stimulus bill being considered by Congress and said more help will be needed, noting that one million Californians have filed for unemployment insurance since March 13.

N.J.s Virus Numbers on Track to Echo N.Y.s (4:20 p.m. NY)

Northern New Jersey is on track for the kind of viral surge that New York is experiencing, the states health commissioner said on Wednesday.

Judy Persichilli said the trends in her state were tracking those of neighboring New York, which projects a peak infection rate in 14 to 21 days.

When we see this peak in New York, I think we can expect Bergen, Essex and Hudson counties will follow the trends, she said at a news conference in Trenton on New Jerseys response to the pandemic.

Read full story here

U.K.s Johnson Threatens Action to Stop Profiteering (4 p.m. NY)

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said hes considering making profiteering illegal as Britain battles the coronavirus, following reports that some firms had been hiking prices on essential products.

We are looking very carefully at whats going on, Johnson said at a press conference Wednesday. I do not want to see people exploiting peoples need at a critical time, a national emergency.

WHO: Countries Wasted Time Amid Spread (2:52 p.m. NY)

The world squandered a window of opportunity to fight the coronavirus and many actions should have been taken one or two months ago, according to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Worldwide lockdowns have created a second window of opportunity that shouldnt be wasted, he said at a press briefing in Geneva. There are 150 countries with fewer than 100 reported cases, he said, adding that those in lockdown should use this time to contain the virus.

The last thing any country needs is to reopen schools and businesses only to close them again because of resurgent cases, he said.

New Cases Decline in Italy (1:50 p.m. NY)

Italy reported that new coronavirus cases fell on Wednesday, after nearly three weeks of lockdown measures. There were 5,210 new cases, compared with 5,249 a day earlier.

Fatalities from the disease over the past 24 hours totaled 683, compared with 743 on Tuesday, according to figures from the civil protection agency. Confirmed cases in the country now total 74,386.

The news came as the government broadened rules that shield companies from hostile takeovers as the virus takes a heavy toll on the economy.

Cuomo: Stimulus a Drop in the Bucket (12:54 p.m. NY)

The stimulus package working through Congress is terrible for New York state, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., Governor Andrew Cuomo said.

The $2 trillion in aid approved by the U.S. Senate includes $3.8 billion for New York state and $1.3 billion for New York City, Cuomo said, which he called a drop in the bucket. Lost tax revenue will cost the state as much as $15 billion, he said.

Cuomo has been a chief critic of the Trump administrations response to the coronavirus outbreak, demanding Trump invoke his national-security authority to speed production of ventilators and other medical equipment.

N.Y. Restricts Access To Malaria Drugs (12:15 p.m. NY)

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo joined other states in restricting access to malaria treatments that President Donald Trump has touted for the novel coronavirus despite a lack of proof they will work.

Cuomo updated an executive order Monday evening to block pharmacists from filling prescriptions for the malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for any uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration unless it is for a patient who has tested positive for Covid-19 and is part of a clinical trial. The medications are not approved to treat coronavirus.

The government doesnt typically impose on the practice of medicine. Doctors are typically allowed to prescribe drugs for any illness or condition, not just those a specific medication is approved to treat. Ohio, Texas, Idaho and Nevada have also moved to limit access to the drugs.

Most NYC Covid-19 Dead Had Other Health Problems (11:30 a.m. NY)

Ninety-five percent of New York Citys almost 200 deaths from the new coronavirus had underlying health conditions, though almost half were under the age of 75, according to data published by the citys health department on Tuesday.

The deaths, as well as data on cases and hospitalizations, mimic the patterns found in other cities with major outbreaks. New York City had more than 15,000 Covid-19 cases as of 5 p.m. Tuesday, the largest outbreak in the U.S.

Read the full story here

Signs of Slowing Spread in Netherlands (10:49 a.m. NY)

New hospitalized cases of the coronavirus in the Netherlands seem to be leveling off after a recent rise, according to the RIVM National Institute for Public Health and the Environment.

That may indicate a decrease in the rate at which the virus is spreading in the Netherlands, RIVM said in its daily update, adding that the next few days should show whether the curve is really flattening.

The daily tally of confirmed cases rose 15% to 6,412. That compares with a rise of 17% on Tuesday.

Home-Testing Kits Coming to U.K. (10:34 a.m. NY)

Sharon Peacock, director of the U.K.s National Infection Service, said 3.5 million virus home-testing kits have been ordered and will be available in days once scientists in Oxford have finished evaluating them for public use.

The blood tests, which check for antibodies, will be sold via Amazon and pharmacy chains so people can test themselves, Peacock told a panel of lawmakers in Parliament. Prime Minister Boris Johnsons government has been criticized for not carrying out enough testing during the coronavirus crisis.

U.K.s Sunak to Detail Support for Self-Employed (10:34 a.m. NY)

U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak on Thursday will announce a package of assistance for self-employed Britons. Itll be Sunaks fourth emergency package to help British companies and workers cope with the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. Last week, he guaranteed 80% of the wages of those with jobs that are at risk because of the outbreak.

Prime Minister Boris Johnsons spokesman also said authorities will crack down on people profiteering from the coronavirus crisis.

Putin Delays Vote on Plan to Stay in Power (9:50 a.m. NY)

President Vladimir Putin postponed a public vote on constitutional changes next month that would allow him to rule to 2036 as Russia attempts to stem the spread of the coronavirus.

Putin, who has promised Russians final say on amendments to the constitution he has rushed through, said the vote planned for April 22 would be rescheduled at a later date.

Saying Russia couldnt cut itself off from the pandemic, he said that people wouldnt work next week, though workers would still get paid. He announced the delay during a hastily arranged national address Wednesday.

Though its totals remain well below those in some big European countries, Russia reported that coronavirus cases jumped by a third over the past day to 658.

Ackman Puts Part of His Fortune in Covid-19 Testing (9:04 a.m. NY)

Billionaire Bill Ackman said he invested a portion of his personal wealth to help manufacture antibody testing kits produced by Covaxx, a newly formed subsidiary of closely-held United Biomedical Inc.

Ackman has repeatedly called for a complete shutdown of the U.S. for 30 days to help combat the spread of the virus. He has also called for antibody testing, like the one Covaxx develops, across the country to determine who has already contracted the virus.

Bullard Says 2Q Will See Most Pandemic Disruption (8:52 a.m. NY)

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard told CNBC the second quarter is likely to see the most disruption from the coronavirus outbreak, but the economy should bounce back by years end. If we can get this to work right, everything will snap back to normal once this is over, he said.

Bullard tempered earlier remarks predicting that the U.S. unemployment rate may hit 30% in the second quarter. This number will be unparalleled, but dont get discouraged.

Switzerland Expands Entry Curbs (8:47 a.m. NY)

Switzerland on Wednesday stepped up the curbs on incoming travel to include all countries within the Schengen area. It previously had limited arrivals from Spain, Italy, Germany, France and Austria.

The Schengen area is a passport-free travel zone among 26 European nations.

Portugal Confirmed Coronavirus Cases Rise (8:35 a.m. NY)

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Portugal increased 27% to 2,995 on Wednesday from 2,362. That compares with a daily increase of 15% reported on Tuesday and a 29% gain on Monday.

The total number of deaths increased to 43 on Wednesday from 33 reported through Tuesday morning; 22 patients have now recovered, unchanged from Tuesday. Almost 80% of coronavirus-related deaths in Portugal so far are of people aged 70 or older.

Schumer Expects Senate to Pass Stimulus Deal Today (8:34 a.m. NY)

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer calls the stimulus deal the art of compromise and says help is on the way for American workers, state and local governments and small businesses. He told CNN he expects the Senate to pass the bill today.

One in 20 Britons has lost a job because of the outbreak and 9% experienced a reduction in hours or pay, according to YouGov. The survey was taken on the first two days of the U.K.s official lockdown, with the government banning all unnecessary movement of people for at least three weeks and requiring the closure of non-essential businesses. There have been about 477,000 new claims for state support payments, according to the Department for Work and Pensions.

EU Leaders Call for Corona Bonds (8:26 a.m. NY)

Nine EU leaders, including Emmanuel Macron and Giuseppe Conte, urged the introduction of so-called coronabonds in a letter cited by AFP on Wednesday.

India Delays Plans for Population Register (7:50 a.m. NY)

The government has indefinitely postponed plans to begin surveys leading to its next census and a comprehensive population register. The process was to have begun in April and was seen as a precursor to a national citizens register that, along with a new citizenship law, had led to angry protests across India since December.

India is likely to agree on an economic stimulus package of more than 1.5 trillion rupees (about $20 billion), Reuters reported, citing two unidentified people familiar with the plans.

Italian Opposition Pushes Takeover Protection for Weakened Banks (7:50 a.m. NY)

Italy must toughen the rules shielding strategic sectors from hostile takeovers because the coronavirus has left banks, insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms vulnerable to foreign predators, according to a senior opposition lawmaker.

Senator Adolfo Urso, vice-president of the parliaments security and intelligence committee, said in an interview Wednesday that he will file amendments to the governments decree on a 25 billion-euro ($27 billion) stimulus package for the economy by Friday afternoon.

Stock Rebound Fades (7:45 a.m. NY)

European equities swung between gains and losses in a volatile session as optimism about a U.S. stimulus package dimmed amid renewed worries over the economic blow from the coronavirus outbreak. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index was up 0.6% after having earlier risen as much as 4.8%. U.S. stock futures declined and Treasuries gained.

Amazon, Walmart Struggle to Cope as India Enters Lockdown (7:45 a.m. NY)

The countrys 1.3 billion people are in a three-week lockdown, sending many to scour the web for food and daily essentials. But unlike in China, where online fresh grocery services offered a lifeline during its Covid-19 outbreak, Indian authorities are stopping food trucks on highways, and shutting down warehouses and rice mills. Theyre also preventing delivery and supply-chain workers from doing their jobs.

(A previous version corrected the day of Governor Cuomos executive order)

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom struck a deal with several major banks in the state to suspend mortgage payments for 90 days for those impacted by the coronavirus crisis.

Four of the five largest banks in the state -- Citigroup (NYSE:C), JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), U.S. Bancorp (NYSE:USB), and Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) -- all agreed to provide a three-month grace period for mortgage payments. Also, nearly 200 state-chartered banks and credit unions have agreed to do the same.

The only large bank that did not commit to the 90 days was Bank of America (NYSE:BAC). Bank of America committed to a 30-day grace period, but Newsom is hoping the bank reconsiders and extends it to 90 days.

"Millions of California families will be able to take a sigh of relief," Newsom said. "These new financial protections will provide relief to California families and serve as a model for the rest of the nation. I thank each of the financial institutions that will provide this relief to millions of Californians who have been hurt financially from COVID-19."

The request a forbearance must be due to COVID-19-related hardships, such as the loss of a job or income or some other reason. Borrowers must also be given the opportunity to request additional relief beyond the 90 days if hardships continue. More than 1 million California residents have filed for unemployment since March 13.

Lenders will be required to waive or refund late fees on mortgages for those who have requested assistance. Further, they will not report the late payments to credit reporting agencies.
OTTAWA - Parliament has passed sweeping legislation designed to blunt the economic impact COVID-19.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA - Parliament has passed sweeping legislation designed to blunt the economic impact COVID-19.

Here's a look at what's in the COVID-19 Emergency Response Act:

 A new Canada Emergency Response Benefit that will provide $2,000 a month for up to four months for workers who lose their income as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 a one-time additional payment under the GST/HST tax credit.

 a top up to the Canada Child Benefit.

 a reduction to required minimal withdrawals from registered retirement income funds by 25 per cent for 2020.

 a temporary wage subsidy for eligible small employers for a period of three months.

 authorization for the government to pay whatever is required in relation to "public health events of national concern," including by making additional payments to the provinces, until Sept. 30.

 authorization for the federal finance minister to increase the limit on insurance coverage for bank deposits until Sept. 30.

 authorization for the finance minister to increase capital available to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

 an expansion of the purposes and powers of Export Development Canada.

 authorization for the federal finance minister, until Sept. 30, to borrow money without going to cabinet, with a requirement that the minister report back on how that money has been spent.

 authorization for cabinet to make regulations under the Food and Drugs Act to require people to provide information to the federal health minister, prevent shortages of therapeutic products in Canada or alleviate those shortages or their effects, in order to protect human health.

 amends the Canada Labour Code to provide leave related to COVID-19 of up to 16 weeks and to provide for a quarantine leave under the medical leave regime.

 amends the National Housing Act to increase, for a period of five years, the maximum total for the outstanding insured amounts of all insured loans.

 amends the Patent Act to allow the government to make, construct, use and sell a patented invention to the extent necessary to respond to a public health emergency that is a matter of national concern.

 amends the Canada Student Loans Act and the Canada Student Financial Assistance Act so that from March 30 to Sept. 30 there's a freeze on requiring student loan repayments. There is also a freeze for the same period under the Apprentice Loans Act.

 amends the Farm Credit Canada Act to the give the federal finance minister the ability to increase how much it can lend.

 amends the Business Development Bank of Canada Act to give the finance minister the power to determine the limit on the aggregate of the paid-in capital  and any related contributed surplus  of the Business Development Bank and any proceeds prescribed as equity.

 amends the Employment Insurance Act to give the employment minister the power to make interim orders for the purpose of mitigating the economic effects of COVID-19.

 changes the Employment Insurance Act and related regulations to remove the requirement for a doctor's note to access EI benefits.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 25, 2020.
An opportunity for face time with industry peers



Like Muhs, Kim Alvis, CFO of Kirby Medical Center in Monticello, Illinois, said her organization joined the Enterprise program because of the educational resources that membership provides at an affordable price for revenue cycle staff. Another benefit is networking opportunities.

We have a broader membership now, so were looking at programs at the local chapter or even that [HFMA] National puts on, she said.

In late March, Alvis planned to accompany a group of 18 to the Womens Conference hosted by the McMahon-Illini Chapter, citing the events proximity and reasonable price, before the conference was postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Such events enable employees at CAHs to connect with their peers at other organizations, which can be challenging in rural locations, Alvis noted. These get-togethers offer the opportunity for an exchange of ideas on new strategies, tools and processes that may help employees in their work, she said.

So, lets get them out of the office, Alvis said. Let them meet other people in our area that do their same job so they can make those networking connections.

A broadening of perspectives

HFMA resources can provide revenue cycle staff and others with a better perspective on pertinent trends and issues beyond the revenue cycle arena. Muhs often would pass along HFMA

articles and other content to employees but found choosing what to send time consuming. Now, he said, employees can access the information on their own.

Through some past training, theyve been very engaged with what HFMA is about, but not to the granular level that I am, Muhs said. So hopefully theyll get more education, more resources out of the material that HFMA puts out.

Alvis said resources such as hfm magazine, the website and webinars provide a wealth of information that educates employees on industrywide trends  information to which staff otherwise would not have easy access. She is considering having health information management leaders take advantage of Enterprise Membership resources.

Its important to understand more of the global picture, and HFMA helps employees understand the global as well as the specific, she said.

The more information people have, the better employees they are and the better well be able to address change as we go forward.
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An exclusive report from Reuters reveals that the Trump administration cut staff members from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who were inside China before its coronavirus outbreak.

The majority of the reductions were made at CDCs Beijing office and occurred over the last two years, according to public documents viewed by Reuters and four individuals with knowledge of the events.

When President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, the Beijing office had 47 staffers. That number has shrunk to 14. Epidemiologists were among those who lost jobs as a result of the cuts.

Reuters reports that the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) also shut their Beijing operations after Trump took office. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was also impacted, losing the manager of an animal disease monitoring program.

We had a large operation of experts in China who were brought back during this administration, some of them months before the outbreak, said one of the people who witnessed the withdrawal of U.S. personnel. You have to consider the possibility that our drawdown made this catastrophe more likely or more difficult to respond to.

The news comes after The Washington Post revealed that the U.S. intelligence community warned the Trump administration about a likely pandemic as early as January and February, but that these warnings were ignored. The president, according to White House insiders, only began to take the pandemic seriously after watching Fox News personality Tucker Carlson deliver a monologue on his program.
The Ministry of Civil Aviation has announced that the ban on commercial international flights will be extended till April 14 as a precautionary measure to curb the spread of COVID-19 in India. In his most recent address on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day lockdown that will be observed throughout the country.

Ahead of this, the central government had moved to harden Indias borders implementing a travel ban that went into effect from March 22, banning the arrival of all international flights for a week.

Indias decision to stop international flights and isolate itself from overseas visitors followed similar decisions taken by governments in Australia and New Zealand to stop the spread of the novel Coronavirus.

The government had earlier already banned flights from several high-risk nations, including those from the European Union, till March 31.

Covid-19, which has infected over 2 lakh people across the globe and led to the deaths of over 9,000, has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO).

According to sources, the earlier ban was suggested to the government by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

Among the other containment measures announced is an advisory to all citizens above 65 and children below 10 years of age to remain at home.

The government has also asked the railways and the civil aviation ministries to suspend all concessional travel, except for students, patients and for persons belonging to the Divyang category, to dissuade travel and encourage social distancing.

States have also been told to advise private companies to enforce work-from-home policies for employees to stop the spread of the highly contagious virus. Several states have already introduced strict containment measures, including suspending exams, shutting down schools, colleges, malls, movie theatres, gyms, spas and restaurants.

The central government has also instituted a work-from-home policy for its employees. According to an order issued by the Union Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions on Thursday, heads of department (HoDs) have been asked to ensure that 50% of Group B and C employees are required to attend office every day, and the remaining 50% staff should be instructed to work from home.

Also Watch:
Solution to Thai Airways woes in 2 months

THAILAND: The Finance and Transport ministries have pledged to work together to find a solution within two months to turn ailing Thai Airways International (THAI) around, according to finance permanent secretary Prasong Poontaneat.

CoronavirusCOVID-19tourismtransport

By Bangkok Post

Thursday 26 March 2020, 11:33AM

The Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand has okayed airlines decision to scale back flights or stop flying due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Photo: Somchai Poomlard

Mr Prasong said the ministries are well aware of the extent of the problems faced by the national carrier stemming from its financial crisis and which have been aggravated by the COVID-19 outbreak.

He said the Finance Ministry was ready to help rescue THAI and see to its recovery as soon as possible.

The permanent secretary said the ministries would discuss rescue measures and finalise the issue within two months.

To ease the liquidity crunch, the practical solution would be to either recapitalise the airline or procure loans to sustain its operations.

However, how the COVID-19 situation unfolds will have a bearing on how measures will be tailored, Mr Prasong said.

We need to do our homework carefully before we decide on measures [to assist THAI], the finance permanent secretary said.

Its crucial to assess developments in the COVID-19 outbreak and how long it will last.

This week, THAI announced it was to suspend all international flights and close its overseas offices in light of the intensifying global coronavirus crisis. (See story here).

Chakkrit Parapuntakul, the national carriers acting president, said THAI was not able to fly to many countries because of border closures, which has caused passenger traffic to dry up.

The airline, already in financial dire straits, decided the best option was to curtail most flights to stop losses.

THAI has now cancelled all flights in the Asia-Pacific region (except Cambodia) starting from today (Mar 26), and will suspend all Europe routes from April 1.

The cancellations will last until May 30, according to information released by THAI offices in Singapore and Vietnam.

This decision made on yesterdays flights to and from countries such as Singapore and Vietnam means it is the carriers last flights there until May 30.
What just happened? As the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage the globe, it's become an all-hands-on-deck situation for corporate entities. Even tech companies that have very little involvement with the medical field have been chipping in to help doctors, nurses, and hospitals as a whole get through this difficult time. Soon, that aid will come from Apple, in the form of a donation of a whopping 10 million medical masks.

This news was announced on Twitter by Apple CEO Tim Cook. The total amount of donated masks was initially going to be much lower -- around two million in total, according to information from US Vice President Mike Pence. However, it seems Apple decided to up that figure after realizing just how high the demand for such supplies is. Notably, the company will also be donating a few million more masks to the hardest-hit regions of Europe.

There could be any number of reasons for Apple's donation, but no matter what, this gift will certainly be appreciated by medical professionals. As Apple itself says, these people are nothing short of "heroes" working on the "front lines" of a devastating battle -- every day, they risk their own health (and possibly that of their families) to treat those who have been struck with Covid-19 (and any number of other ailments).

Our teams at Apple have been working to help source supplies for healthcare providers fighting COVID-19. Were donating millions of masks for health professionals in the US and Europe. To every one of the heroes on the front lines, we thank you.  Tim Cook (@tim_cook) March 21, 2020

Though not foolproof by any means, the medical masks (the once widely-available "N95" respirators) can provide some level of protection against Covid-19-laden discharge droplets ejected from the mouth or nose when worn properly. Perhaps more importantly, they can also help the sick avoid spreading their illness to others.

We don't know exactly how Apple is procuring these masks, but in this case, the end result is all that matters. Hopefully, these masks will make a small but meaningful difference in the lives of millions of healthcare pros, but only time will tell.
The minute Zhao Xingyu saw the message that Chen Binbin posted on WeChat calling for volunteers, she answered the call.





The message, posted on Feb. 24, was meant for setting up a group of people to translate China's knowledge and experience in combating the novel coronavirus into the Persian language for Iranians.





"During this special moment, let's do something that citizen of the earth can do." Zhao was moved by the message. To her, this was something within her power which could help the fight against the disease, which would soon become a pandemic ravaging the world.





Zhao is a fourth year doctoral student majoring in philosophy at Peking University, where the group founder Chen is also studying. Once the message was out, a group of some 280 people was quickly formed. It was made up of around 60% Chinese, 40% Iranians, and two Afghans. "Our members ranged from students in various schools, to scholars studying Iran, to housewives, of all walks of life," Zhao said.





One of the Iranian members, Marzieh Behradfar, studies at Zhengzhou University in central China. She said joining the group has helped to ease her anxiety about the outbreak in her country, and let her contribute to her home while being so far away.





Iran discovered its first COVID-19 case on Feb. 19, and soon became one of the worst hit countries across the world.





The volunteer group decided to translate short videos from Chinese to Persian, as videos are popular and easily disseminated via social media.





The group was divided into several sub-groups tasked with different jobs, including information collection, translation, video production, etc. Under the handle @anticorona_ir, the videos were uploaded to popular social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram as well as Aparat, a video sharing platform widely used in Iran.





There were numerous challenges for such a newly established group with no prior experience. Zhao, who works in the information collection sub-group, said that they did not have a concrete idea on what to translate at first when faced with a sea of materials, but they managed to figure it out in the process.

Her team first collected information aimed at raising awareness. Then, as they published more videos and more people joined -- especially Iranians who know what was most needed -- they turned to working on more targeted information, such as instructions for homemade protective gears and how to care for family members who fall ill.





As more and more videos were translated, a new sub-group was established to collect and translate medical information, which required more professional background. Zhao said: "Many fellow members of the group have the proper background, some are medical students, and some speak Persian. I am not one of them, but keeping in mind Chen's saying that we are all earth beings, I stuck on.





Behradfar also carried on. Despite having a lot of classes and homework in the first year of her postgraduate study, she has been devoting all her spare time to the group. "Though I am very busy, I am extremely happy because I have a sense of accomplishment doing this."





Dedication and solidarity among fellow volunteers also give Behradfar strength. As the leader of the translation sub-group, she is responsible for assigning the translation work among the 30-member team. As most of the translators have study or work to do, she did not set a time limit for them to turn in the work, but Behradfar said everyone has been translating as fast as they could.





The group has so far translated and published more than 50 videos, plus pictures and texts, all turned out to be quite useful, Behradfar said. At the start, she had to ask her friends and family back in Iran to check out the videos that they made, but she soon began hearing friends telling her that they turn to their videos once they had questions about epidemic control.





For Zhao, the group has helped her to deal with regret. When we see the severity of the epidemic in Wuhan, many of us wished the clock could turn back so that we could warn everyone. Of course it is impossible. But when this group was established, it was the early days of the epidemic in Iran, so I wanted to do something that was already beyond possible here.





"I hope our work can reach cross nationality, race, and religion," Zhao said.
Thiruvananthapuram, March 26 : Amid the coronavirus epidemic, Aries Group, a multinational consortium, has announced contribution of 10 ventilators and to support 2,000 families in Kerala.

"Patients will need ventilators. If the number of patients grows at this rate, we will face ventilator shortage. Aries Group will contribute 10 ventilators to 10 districts of Kerala," said the Group's Sohan Roy and requested other companies to make their contributions to fight Covid-19.

Roy also asked his company employees to support one poor family and take up their responsibility during this crisis.

"We plan to support 2,000 needy families under the 'Support a Family' drive. Through this, we have asked our employees to take up their responsibility during the crisis," he said.

The Aries Group had also contributed during the 2018 floods in the state. During the Nepal earthquake in 2015, it took the initiative to build 200 makeshift houses for the quake victims.
Dare2Compete, one of India's largest student communities, has put all stakeholders of the B-School ecosystem under a single umbrella, with Dare2Compete Awards, where efforts of all- Students, B-Schools and Companies, are acknowledged and celebrated.

Today, through its social media handles and website, Dare2Compete revealed the rankings for D2C Competitive B-Schools 2020 amid COVID-19.

The rankings were decided on the basis of students' meritorious performance in corporate campus engagements through student competitions. The true mark of a B-School's success can be gauged by how well its students fare when put up against their peers from across the nation.

IIM Bangalore topped the D2C Competitive B-Schools 2020 ranking, outshining everyone. IIM Kozhikode, known for its lush campus and its enterprising students, was ranked a close second.

Having lifted the trophy last year, IIM Kozhikode had to make room for IIM Bangalore this year. Shots have been fired and things are bound to heat up in the coming academic year.

Not far behind is the Indian School of (ISB), which secured the third rank with the next highest number of students who won laurels to the institute. In the fourth and fifth place are MDI Gurgaon and NMIMS Mumbai, respectively.

Other prestigious B-Schools that managed to rank in Top 10 D2C Competitive B-Schools 2020 are IIM Ahmedabad, SIBM Pune, XLRI Jamshedpur, NITIE Mumbai, IMT Ghaziabad and IIM Shillong, in their respective order.

Rankings drastically changed from last year, with many new entrants like NITIE and IIM Shillong going in for the kill.

Students from IIM Bangalore are the proud owners of a whooping 15 National/International Winner trophies, along with an impressive five First Runners Up and four Second Runners Up titles.

This goes to show that IIM Bangalore not only dominates the word by word every management book there is, but also pushes its students to think outside the box and question the status quo.

Rankings for D2C Competitive Leaders 2020 were also simultaneously released and to no surprise the top four rank holders are from IIM Bangalore. Ameer Iqubal, Vishwajith G Bhat, Kundan Thakan, and Pratiksha Patil respectively sit atop with 5 to 13 competitions under their belt.

Ashwini Kumar Shrivas from FMS Delhi was next after performing well in five competitions closely followed by Bijayeta Pati from IMT Ghaziabad with nine competitions under her.

An impressive eight students from IIM Bangalore have been ranked as top 30 D2C Competitive Leaders 2020. No other B-School comes in close to such a stellar performance. IIM Shillong and NITIE Mumbai have four and three students each, respectively.

In another category, Dare2Compete recognised companies that do such student engagements through D2C Prestigious B-School Competitions 2020 basis 13,800 plus B-School student votes.

Dare2Compete does this under 2 segments - Top 20 from votes across All B-Schools and Top 20 from votes across popular 10 B-Schools.

HUL LIME Season 11 grabbed the limelight there with the first place for second year consecutively in both segments.

Under All B-Schools segment, Reliance TUP 5.0 held the second place while Google Case Challenge 2019, ICICI Bank Beat the Curve 2019 and Flipkart Wired 2019 Campus Case Challenge 3.0 were placed 3rd, 4th and 5th respectively.

In the Popular 10 B-Schools segment, Aditya Birla Group's Stratos retained its second position followed by InvicTAS from TATA Group, ITC Interrobang?! Season 9 and Flipkart Wired 2019 Campus Case Challenge 3.0 in that order.

Visit www.dare2compete.com/awards to know more about Dare2Compete Awards 2020 and to view all categories under it.

This story is provided by PRNewswire. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The countrys first federal immigration detainee to test positive for the coronavirus was released from the detention center at the Bergen County Jail to join his family Thursday afternoon, an official confirmed.

The 31-year-old Mexican man, whose name was not released, had complained of symptoms Monday before being confirmed positive hours later, said a spokesman for the Bergen County Sheriffs Office, which manages the jail.

The man was released to his spouse at his attorneys request shortly after 2 p.m., said Derek Sands, the spokesman for the Sheriffs Office. An immigration official confirmed that the man had been released to stay with his family and that he would be monitored and that public health had been notified.

Since his positive test, the man had been in quarantine and his positive test had thrown the jail into lockdown, severely limiting the movements of county inmates, ICE detainees and staff, Sheriff Anthony Cureton said in a statement. As a response to the positive test, the jail opened an isolation unit for county inmates and ICE detainees who test positive, said Cureton.

The jail would also stop letting in any more federal immigration detainees from ICE until further notice, according to Curetons statement.

The 31-year-old is the countrys first federal immigration detainee to test positive for COVID-19, confirmed Emilio Dabul, spokesman for ICE in New Jersey. As of Wednesday afternoon, no other ICE detainees in New Jersey had tested positive for the coronavirus, he said.

Last week, a Sheriffs Office corrections officer who works at the jail also tested positive for the coronavirus, prompting seven other corrections officers who had contact with him to self-quarantine. The corrections officer self-quarantined at home for 14 days.

As of Thursday afternoon, the Mexican national was the only detainee to test positive for the coronavirus at the jail, said Sands. Two other detainees had been sent out to get tested Wednesday. One was diagnosed with a stomach virus and the others test came back negative, he said.

Immigrant rights groups and public defenders have called for the release of inmates and federal immigration detainees from jails as the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen.

I think its just a wakeup call to everybody who cares about the health and safety of our communities. Of people in detention. Of people working the detention centers and their families," Farrin Anello, senior staff attorney ACLU of New Jersey said in an earlier interview. I think its a wake-up call to take action quickly before its too late to release people and insure they can live safely without getting sick and without dying from this avoidable cause.

When the officer tested positive for the coronavirus, Sheriff Anthony Cureton assured that the confines of the jail was a safer environment for detainees.
President Donald Trumps administration is preparing county-level social distancing guidelines that will rank them from highest to lowest risk of COVID-19 transmission, Trump told U.S. governors Thursday.

In a letter addressed to the nations governors, Trump said federal authorities are working to publish criteria based on expanded testing for the coronavirus that could inform state leaders in maintaining, increasing or relaxing social distancing and other measures currently in place.

Trump wrote that increasingly extensive testing capabilities are giving U.S. authorities a better understanding of the coronavirus path.

As testing gives us more information about who has been infected, we are tracking the virus and isolating it to prevent further spread," the letter said. "This new information will drive the next phase in our war against this invisible enemy.

In Michigan, 52 of Michigans 83 counties have had at least one confirmed coronavirus case. About 84 percent of the states confirmed COVID-19 cases are in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties.

The number of people diagnosed with the coronavirus COVID-19 in Michigan took another big jump Thursday, reaching 2,856. Thats up from 2,295 the day before. Sixty people have died, up from 43 on Wednesday.

The entire state is currently subject to a stay-at-home order Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has said is necessary to curb community spread of the coronavirus. The order directs most individuals to stay home and orders businesses that arent essential to close up shop for the time being.

During a Thursday press conference, Whitmer said if Michigan residents dont abide by the order, more people are going to get sick, and more people are going to die, and this will go on longer than it needs to.

Stopping the spread is really the only tool we have right now to keep our communities safe, she said.

CORONAVIRUS PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

Related coverage:

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Michigan Gov. Whitmer says medics are reusing face masks, asks for donations amid coronavirus spread

Thursday, March 26: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

Another big jump in Michigan coronavirus numbers: Now at 2,295 cases; 43 deaths

Michigan doctor says leave groceries outside for 3 days if possible, shows how to disinfect

Michigan unemployment system overwhelmed

Congress reaches $2 Trillion coronavirus aid deal

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This week, the Department of Correction released its plans to mitigate the impacts of Covid-19 in Connecticut. As a physician, it is terrifying to see that these plans are inadequate to protect our communities. Current strategies include emphasizing cleaning in facilities and altering movement patterns within and between facilities. Visitation and volunteers will be suspended and employees will be screened with temperature checks. However, plans for releasing inmates are expected to function under existing protocols.

The current pandemic calls for leadership that is not afraid to take necessary actions to save lives. The government needs to make plans to systematically reduce the prison population. Utilizing standard protocols is simply is not enough.

People in correctional settings live in overcrowded conditions, with limited access to cleaning and hygiene products in poorly ventilated buildings. These conditions are a breeding ground for a communicable disease outbreak, particularly when the disease of concern is one as highly contagious as Covid-19. Unfortunately, people who are incarcerated have little control over their ability to access cleaning products and have no ability to practice social distancing. Instead they are living in small cells hoping that no one in the building has been exposed. Once someone is exposed, it is likely to become an outbreak quickly.

An outbreak in a correctional setting is dangerous for two main reasons. First, it is likely to cause serious illness and death among those within the facility. The CDC identifies those age 65 and older and those with certain medical conditions as being at higher risk of serious illness. Prison populations are known to have have high rates of chronic medical conditions. The prison population is also aging, which means a significant number of incarcerated people are over the age of 65.

Second, because of the severity of the illness, an outbreak in correctional settings will increase the workload placed on an already burdened community health care setting. Once an outbreak begins, many people will be too ill to be treated in correctional settings and will require transfer to a hospital. This will increase the need for correctional officers to transport and monitor those that are hospitalized, putting further correctional staff at risk of exposure.

With the first case identified in a DOC employee at Garner Correctional Institution and the number of cases growing in the New York correctional system, the time to act is now. It is imperative that the Department of Corrections and the Board of Pardons and Paroles take action to release as many currently incarcerated people as possible. Individuals who are identified to be at high risk of serious illness should be a priority. People who are near the end of their sentence or incarcerated for non-violent offenses should also be considered for release.

It is critical that this action be taken in coordination with community partners to release inmates with adequate re-entry services before an outbreak occurs. In public health, preventative measures perform better than reactive measures. Waiting for an outbreak before expanding release options is irresponsible and places both the incarcerated population and community at risk.

By Dr. Jessica Chaffkin is in the Psychiatry Department at the Yale School of Medicine.
The Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA) - the industry body representing large domestic pharmaceutical companies - expressed concern over manufacturing and supply chain disruption owing to the ongoing lockdown imposed by the government across the country.

IPA drew the attention of the government towards the mistreatment of pharmaceutical industry workers by police. The group noted that workers in pharmaceutical manufacturing and supply chain were beaten up by police and vehicles transporting goods were stopped at checkpoints.

The pharma body urged the government to immediately resolve the issue by asking chief secretaries to direct the police department and district magistrates to follow government instructions. The authorities concerned should accept company identity cards issued to pharma sector employees. Moreover, employees in warehouses, C&F agents, pharmacists, and chemists should be recognised as part of pharma operations. Restrictions on the movement of goods and services to the pharma industry also should be eased.

The industry representatives also called for better coordination between states and inter-government authorities.

The government imposed a 21-day lockdown of the country starting from midnight of March 24 to slow down the spread of COVID-19. Only essential services are allowed to operate. However, the lack of coordination between states and government authorities is leading to disruption of even essential services like the pharma industry, which shouldn't stop making and distributing medicines.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

"There is ambiguity on the ground and it will be important to consider the challenges faced in pharmaceutical production, distribution and supply as essential goods and services. All employees engaged in this sector, like medical professionals, should continue to be involved in their respective

roles for manufacturing and distribution as it is fundamental to saving lives," IPA said in a letter to the government.

IPA brought to the government's notice the problems faced by drug manufacturing facilities as many units are being directed to be shut down by local authorities.

"We have been getting feedback from our companies that Maharashtra, Gujarat, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are relatively better placed in production. However, operations are impacted in Goa, Baddi, Uttar Pradesh, Daman, Silvasa and Indore," IPA said in a letter addressed to various government agencies such as Prime Minister Office, Ministry of Home Affairs and Department of Pharmaceuticals.

The alliance also pointed out that the interstate employee movement from Punjab and Haryana to Baddi in Himachal Pradesh, which is a major manufacturing hub, took a hit. "Employees are scared to come to work due to fear, stoppage of movement and unpleasant incidents that have been reported," it added.

According to IPA, there are shortages of packing materials, protection gear like masks and gloves for workers in the factories, coal to operate boilers and absence of contractors and contractual workers to perform tasks like electric, civil, ducting work, maintenance of equipment, nitrogen supply and scrap movement.

On the distribution front, the pharma industry is unable to move the material from clearing and forwarding (C&F) agents to warehouses of stockists. The stockists are not able to work as they don't come under essential commodities and services.

"Even employees are not able to come to pharmacy and warehouses as they are being stopped by police. Fear has been induced by police and in some cases, employees are beaten up," IPA said.

The industry also said the transportation services are disrupted as vehicles carrying staff to handle critical deliveries are stopped and staff are not allowed to move for handling or deliveries, and in some cases have been beaten up by police. The industry expressed concerns about intra- and interstate transport hampered due to lack of coordination between authorities. Ports are functioning at low capacity and containers are not available.
This type of systematic monitoring and targeted response is proving to be a key component in the fight to stop the spread of COVID-19

Medocity, a leader in enterprise virtual care technology, today launched its COVID-19 screening and remote monitoring solution for Hillcrest Home Care, part of Nebraskas largest post-acute health services provider. Built upon Medocitys flagship Digital Care Platform, the population-based COVID-19 program enables virtual screening, remote symptom monitoring, vital signs tracking, and proactive interventions personalized for any population, including high risk patients with multiple co-morbidities.

We recognized that during this health care crisis, we needed to quickly provide for the safety and well-being of both team members and clients in order to continue personalized skilled medical care in the home, said Lauren Wright, Administrator of Hillcrest Home Care. Coronavirus puts many of our home health clients, particularly those with complex conditions such as COPD and CHF, at far greater risk than before. We can now remotely monitor and track changes to temperature, oxygen levels, and other COVID-19 specific symptoms every day. This allows us to quickly identify those requiring additional healthcare attention, so that we can provide the right service at the right time. This customized service is a game changer to supplement our in-home nursing and therapy visits, and it also provides us with a HIPAA-compliant telemedicine platform for virtual visits as needed."

In response to the expanding global threat, Medocity accelerated development of a targeted digital program with COVID-19 specific clinical protocols to:



Aid in the early identification of possible COVID-19 cases in a population

Proactively push frequent, consistent, relevant communications and guidance personalized to each user

Allow for real-time active monitoring of individuals and reported symptoms

Facilitate timely escalation of care as changes in health status are noted

Track and report evolving COVID-19 related population health statistics and trends over time to ensure resources are appropriately deployed

The Medocity platforms data and reporting capability allow for a systematic view of users' COVID-19 symptoms and status in real-time and by location. There have been examples from around the globe where this type of systematic monitoring and targeted response is proving to be a key component in the fight to stop the spread of the disease, said Robert Epstein, MD, epidemiologist, CEO of Epstein Health and member of Medocitys Medical Advisory Board. As hospitals and doctors-offices become inaccessible, we now see that we have to move away from reliance on in-person patient visits and use digital solutions to shift to remote, cost-effective, large-scale population surveillance and targeted intervention that would otherwise be impossible to do.

Hillcrest Home Care clinical team members will use their own mobile devices to provide daily self-reported symptom checks to ensure they are healthy and able to report to work. Separately, low-risk at-home patients can use their own mobile devices to perform the same self-assessments. For high-risk COPD and CHF patients, Hillcrest will utilize its existing remote monitoring program with pre-configured tablets and devices supplied by Medocity. Any reported patient-vitals such as temperature, heart rate, or oxygen levels (pulse ox) that are outside pre-determined parameters will trigger real-time clinician alerts and appropriate, proactive COVID-19 interventions.

Our remote patient monitoring capabilities can be used for chronic and complex condition management, including co-morbidities, or for crisis management as we are demonstrating with our COVID-19 digital solution, said Raj Agarwal, President, and CEO of Medocity. Backed by recent FDA encouragement, Hillcrest Home Care providers now have visibility to patients at-home health status which may reduce the need for in-person visits and decrease the risk of coronavirus exposure. During this uncertain time, Medocity's highly configurable, cloud-based digital platform allows any sponsor - including health care providers, payers, clinical researchers or public health agencies - to easily and quickly go virtual.

About Hillcrest Home Care

Hillcrest Home Care offers skilled medical home health and telehealth services to aging adults in 11 counties in Nebraska and Iowa. The agency is part of Hillcrest Health Services, which offers the widest array of senior health care and housing services in the region, including independent and assisted living, memory support, post-acute rehabilitation, long-term care, adult day services, outpatient therapy, home health, hospice and in-home personal care. Hillcrests 1,600+ team members enhance the lives of more than 1,500 aging adults every day.

About Medocity

Medocity is the leading healthcare technology company transforming the management of chronic or complex disease. The Medocity Digital Care Platform is the next generation in early and proactive intervention, enabling our clients to deliver comprehensive virtual care programs for patients with any condition, anywhere in the world. The company's award-winning HIPAA compliant solution connects all stakeholders in care, continuously monitors patient-reported data from hundreds of sources, and applies artificial intelligence to identify anomalies, send out alerts, and intervene when necessary  all in real-time, through one common ecosystem. Clinically proven across multiple chronic conditions and settings, the Medocity Platform increases engagement, improves outcomes and lowers total healthcare costs.

For more information, please visit http://www.medocity.com.

Media Contact:

Terence Maytin

(973) 671-5155

tmaytin@medocity.com
A man in his 40s who worked at a Real Canadian Superstore in Oshawa has become the youngest victim of COVID-19 in Ontario as the provinces death toll increased to 15 Thursday, health officials say.

That was a jump of six fatalities in a 24-hour period that saw another 170 cases of the new coronavirus confirmed, a sharp rise of 25 per cent to 858.

Across Canada, there were 3,579 cases and 35 deaths with dry cough, fever and chills being among the most-reported symptoms.

Ontarios chief medical officer of health said he would not be surprised to see the number of new cases in this province start rising by 200 or more daily.

Thats because thousands and thousands of Ontarians who have returned from March break and other travel abroad may be incubating the virus circulating in global vacation spots and airports, Dr. David Williams said.

We are in this upswing, he told a regular daily briefing at Queens Park, urging people to stay at home if they can and stay at least two metres away from others when out and about.

The unidentified worker from the Gibb St. Superstore is one of two COVID-19 deaths below the age of 70 to date, said Williams. The other was a Halton Region man in his 50s region who had underlying health conditions.

Superstore management revealed Monday that the worker, who had no recent travel history, had tested positive but not been in the store for seven days.

The store moved to reassure concerned shoppers on its Facebook page, noting the premises were given a thorough cleaning and assured by Durham Region public health officials the risk to our customers is very low.

At least 12 of Ontarios new cases have been admitted to hospital, including a woman in her 20s from Toronto who had close contact with a person who had tested positive, and a London-area man also in his 20s.

There are now an estimated 50 Ontarians in hospital with the virus, up from 20 last week at this time. Twenty-nine of the patients now hospitalized are in intensive care, with 20 on ventilators.

But plenty of capacity remains in Ontario hospitals, officials said. Still, Health Minister Christine Elliott defended moves by some hospitals to delay some cancer and other surgeries to reserve space for an expected wave of COVID-19 patients.

Im sure its distressing, she said. But we absolutely need to create capacity.

In Ottawa, chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam said authorities are getting a better handle on the impacts of COVID-19 on the health-care system.

About six per cent of cases are being hospitalized, 2.6 per cent becoming critically ill and one per cent fatal.

The fact that Canadas fatality rate is at one per cent indicates that the health-care system is not currently overwhelmed, she said.

But these fatalities could be further reduced by preventing the illness in our most vulnerable population, she added.

Many of the deaths in Canada have been linked to outbreaks in long-term care facilities.

By Thursday, some 158,000 people had been tested, up 58,000 from Monday, Tam said.

With files from Bruce Campion-Smith

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A third man has died from coronavirus in Victoria, bringing the state's death toll to three in less than 24 hours, while another three people remain in intensive care.

The man, aged in his 70s, died at a Melbourne hospital, Victoria's Health Minister Jenny Mikakos said.

His death follows the deaths of two other men, also aged in their 70s, who died overnight.

The three men are the first fatalities of the virus in the state and bring the national death toll to 12. All men are understood to have had pre-existing medical conditions.
The third mass coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in five years is under way, with central and southern regions more badly affected than in the 2016 and 2017 events. Key tourist sites have been spared.

Researchers surveyed more than 845 reefs from the Torres Strait southwards by air as of Wednesday with about 200 more to come in the southern end of the reef region by Friday.

Coral bleaching near Magnetic Island on the Great Barrier Reef. The bleaching is the third such mass event in just five years. Credit:Klara Lindstrom

Terry Hughes, the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies who has helped lead the survey, said the scientists had seen enough to declare the bleaching was a major one.

Eight flights have been made so far over nine days with three more to come on Thursday and Friday.
The Kenya-based Regional Centre for Mapping of Development Resources (RCMRD), which focuses on mapping, remote sensing and related fields in Africa, has launched a web application dedicated to monitoring the spread of Coronavirus across the centres 20 member states in Africa.

Its aim is to offer accurate and real-time statistics on the number of active cases, recovered cases and reported deaths related to the virus.

The centre is using data compiled from the World Health Organization (WHO) Daily Situation Report. The data is crosschecked and compared with information published by the health ministries of each country mentioned before it is updated.

The aim of the application is to provide the public, policymakers and relevant agencies with access to accurate data to keep in touch with the situation around them, particularly with the social distancing and lockdown of all activities and movement in most states.

The information will also, it is hoped, help those who access it to understand the growth of the crisis  and the risk factors associated with the pandemic  and support decision-making.

The application also allows the general public to make contributions on how to improve the data curated by the application.

This and other useful maps can be found at rcmrd.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html
(HedgeCo.Net) The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Donald H. Hunter, an unregistered investment adviser based in Ridgefield, Connecticut, with failing to disclose material conflicts of interest related to the sale of shares of You Angel Finance, LLC.

According to the SECs complaint, in 2012 the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority found that Hunter had committed fraud in connection with the sale of promissory notes to some of his broker-dealer clients, and permanently barred him from associating with any FINRA-registered firm. The complaint alleges that Hunter subsequently established You Angel Finance as a private fund with no FINRA registration. As alleged, from late 2016 through 2018, while acting as investment adviser to You Angel Finance, Hunter raised approximately $430,000 from investors, claiming that You Angel Finance was supplying seed capital to or purchasing shares from a private drug research company. The complaint alleges that Hunter had acquired the companys shares personally or through companies he controlled, but as a result of the FINRA bar he was unable to sell them directly or indirectly to brokerage customers, as he had in the past. The complaint further alleges that Hunter failed adequately to disclose that the fund purchased the shares from Hunter or entities he controlled, or that he set the prices at which he sold those shares to the fund.

The complaint alleges that Hunter violated the antifraud provisions of Sections 206(1), 206(2), 206(3), and 206(4) of the Investment Advisers Act and Rule 206(4)-8 thereunder. The SEC seeks disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, prejudgment interest, financial penalties, and permanent injunctions against Hunter.
A sharp and steady decline in the birthrate since the Great Recession means births are no longer such a powerful driver of growth. Immigration, which would typically pick up the slack, is down sharply too. And deaths are rising as baby boomers age and drug overdoses surge. Now there is the added threat of the coronavirus, which is particularly lethal for older people.

Births fell to 3.79 million in the year ending in July 2019, while deaths jumped to 2.83 million. That difference  the natural growth of the population  is now less than 1 million for the first time in decades. When combined with immigration, which fell to a net gain of 595,348 people  down by nearly half since 2016  the United States had a population increase of just 0.48 percent.

That is the lowest rate since the last time the country was in the midst of a severe pandemic  the flu that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans between 1918 and 1919.

William Frey, chief demographer at the Brookings Institution, said the numbers put the last decade on track to be the slowest 10-year period for population growth since the government started counting in 1790.

The balance of births and deaths is critical to a countrys demographic health. If deaths start to outnumber births  and immigration does not make up the difference  society can strain under the weight of a growing retiree population with too few working-age people to support it. Deaths exceed births in several European countries, including Italy, Greece, Germany and Spain. In some, immigration keeps the populations growing.
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An Arctic plume from Scandanavia will send temperatures plummeting across the United Kingdom this weekend as forecasters warn of freezing temperatures and the possibility of snow.

The Met Office is warning of high pressure systems from the Atlantic and northern Europe crossing towards the eastern parts of the UK from Friday afternoon.

Clear skies will bring harsh frosts on Sunday morning amid warnings showers could turn wintry even across southern England - with temperatures expected to feel around -4C by Monday.

Temperatures will start to fall on Friday afternoon, the Met Office warns, as cold air from the north sweeps across eastern parts of the UK.

The Met Office is warning of high pressure systems from the Atlantic and northern Europe crossing towards the eastern parts of the UK from Friday afternoon

Clear skies will bring harsh frosts on Sunday morning (left) amid warnings showers could turn wintry even across southern England - with temperatures expected to feel around -4C by Monday (right)

Clear and sunny skies will mean temperatures plummet over the weekend as high pressure moves in from northern Europe

A spokesman for the Met Office said: 'The fine weather for many parts of the UK is due to the area of high pressure over Europe.

'Due to the position of this high, warm air has spread across most parts. This high will push eastwards, as another area of high pressure develops towards the west of the UK.

'This area of high pressure is exceptionally high, especially for the time of year. This will bring a cold, northerly flow to the UK. As a result it will turn colder this weekend.'

Temperatures will start to dip on Friday after a period of warmer weather across the UK.

Clare Nasir, a meteorologist at the Met Office, said: 'By Friday afternoon there will be a cold wind coming in from the North Sea. It will certainly feeling a lot colder across the eastern side of the country.

'Temperatures will generally will be a bit lower. High pressure will build across the north-west of the United Kingdom and drag in some very cold air across much of the country.

'And with that and a strong wind towards the east could bring in a few wintry showers. Particularly for the eastern side of England. This will also affect the far north and east of Scotland.'

A spokesman for the Met Office said the area of high pressure is exceptionally high, especially for the time of year and will send temperatures plummeting over the weekend

Temperatures will start to dip on Friday after a period of warmer weather across the UK (pictured, Met Office meteorologist Clare Nasir describes the upcoming weather)

Colder weather is expected across much of the country and there are hopes the change in weather might drive people away from parks and public spaces after concerns Britons were not taking self-isolation seriously.

Warmer weather this week saw police break up a house party in Coventry in the early hours of Thursday where a dozen revellers were flouting the ban on social gatherings of more than two people.

The incident followed West Midlands Police neighbourhood officers having to disperse a crowd of 20 people who had gathered for a barbecue in the Foleshill area of the same city earlier this week on Tuesday.

But on Friday temperatures are expected to dip as colder weather sweeps in from the north.

Joggers go for a run at a park in London today in the morning sunshine as the Prime Minister warned Britons to stay at home

A lady runs through daffodils at Sefton Park in Liverpool after Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered a UK lockdown

Forecaster Bonnie Diamond told MailOnline: 'Things then change heading into the weekend, with a north easterly wind flow making it feel colder and temperatures dropping a few degrees compared to this week.

'Saturday will see cloudier skies mixed with brighter spells. It will be cloudier across Wales and northern England, with a chance of wintery showers in East Scotland and north east England.

'There is a risk of frost and possible icy patches over the weekend so if key workers are still travelling they may need to scrape their windscreens.'

Ahead of the weekend chill forecasters said temperatures could hit 17C (63F) today, prompting fears people could spend longer outdoors than they are allowed.

Yesterday, police were seen dispersing Britons gathered in parks and other public places across the UK amid strict advice to stay at home.

In Shepherd's Bush in West London, people soaked up the sun, seemingly oblivious to the tight restrictions imposed by the government on Monday. Police were seen telling them to leave and go home.

Others were seen enjoying the weather at Battersea Park in south-west London, on the beach in Portsmouth and in the sea off Eastbourne.
We may all feel like our lives are on pause because of coronavirus.

Paused, and irregular: For example, Im writing this column from my living room couch with 10 days of stay-at-home stubble on my face.

But Mother Nature has not pushed the pause button. And thats why, starting today, MLive is presenting an extraordinary reporting project on the health, or unhealth, of the Great Lakes.

Todays installment focuses on steadily rising lake levels, which show no sign of abating and are wreaking havoc in many ways.

High water in the Great Lakes, and especially Michigan, was a major story last fall and into the winter, said Mickey Ciokajlo, a regional news manager for MLive.com who oversees our environmental reporting team. Spring is here, and water levels are even higher. Unfortunately, its going to be an issue all through 2020.

MLives reporters across the state have documented the carnage caused and costs mounting from this unstoppable force  shoreline erosion that is destroying property; flooding; disruption to commercial shipping. The main culprit identified in our reporting is polarizing, but necessary to address.

A recurring theme is that climate change is a major contributing factor, Ciokajlo said. Lake levels have always fluctuated over time, but experts are saying that the fluctuations are becoming more pronounced and more frequent.

In the past several years, MLive has committed more journalistic firepower to environmental issues. We brought the PFAS forever pollution into the national spotlight; reported on the controversy around the Line 5 pipeline under the Mackinac Straits; and have done in-depth reporting on the Nestle groundwater withdrawals.

Now, we are taking that environmental reporting talent and turning it on the Great Lakes. We want to focus it on a topic of great interest and concern to our readers in Michigan, Ciokajlo said.

Todays first installment pivots on a trip by environmental reporter Garret Ellison and photojournalist Cory Morse down through the Great Lakes, to where they empty into the St. Lawrence Seaway at the Moses-Saunders Power Dam in upstate New York.

This is the plug in the bath tub, as Ciokajlo put it, where the surging Great Lakes are trying to drain toward the sea. However, he noted, the faucet is still on full blast, and they had to delay the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

That is one of the many facets of this sprawling, complex topic that MLive journalists will be unpacking for you over this spring and summer.

In the meantime, we wont falter on our coverage of coronavirus. The world isnt stopping, and neither will we.

For ongoing coverage of the Great Lakes environmental series, click here. For ongoing updates on the coronavirus pandemic, click here. You also can sign up for regular text updates directly to your phone by texting 517-200-3045.

John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions youd like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.
The emergency department at Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry is to close on Saturday, a former health minister has said.

DUP MLA Jim Wells said he has been informed by a health service employee that they have been told the unit will shut on Saturday, however the claim has been denied by health officials.

A spokesman from the Southern Trust has said a number of different options are currently being considered regarding the best way to provide treatment during the coronavirus pandemic.

However, he said a final decision on contingency plans, which may include the closure of the A&E at Daisy Hill, has not been made.

It is likely to happen in the next couple of days and when a decision is made, it will be announced, he added.

Mr Wells said he was contacted by a reliable source on Wednesday who informed him that bosses at the Southern Trust have told staff the emergency department will close its doors on Saturday.

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All emergency care will be provided at the casualty unit at Craigavon Area Hospital instead, it has been claimed.

The DUP MLA said while he appreciates services are being restructured in the face of the biggest threat to the NHS in its history, he is concerned the closure of Daisy Hills ED will become permanent.

It is almost certain the current coronavirus crisis will be given as the reason for this decision and there will no doubt be assurances that this is a 'temporary' arrangement which will be kept under review', he said.

The people of Newry and Mourne will fear that once this crucial service leaves Daisy Hill, it will never return.

Similar 'temporary' arrangements were implemented at Belfast City and Lagan Valley hospitals eight years ago and there has never been the slightest suggestion that the A&Es will ever return to either site.

Normally such a major reduction in the service available at a hospital would be the subject of a lengthy public consultation, but the Southern Trust is aware that the sweeping powers given to Government to deal with coronavirus means that this does not need to happen in this case.

The Trust also knows that public meetings and rallies to protest against the decision cannot be held in the present crisis.

A health service source described Mr Wells comments as deeply irresponsible.

They added: It is extremely unhelpful to suggest that this is part of a hidden agenda to do anything other than try to save lives and protect the health service.

Health Minister Robin Swann has said in recent days that sweeping and unprecedented changes to the way services are delivered will be made in the coming days and weeks.

Thousands of retired doctors and nurses are being asked to return to hospitals across Northern Ireland to help cope with a surge in seriously ill patients.

Visitors are being banned from hospitals, countless elective surgeries and outpatient appointments are being cancelled, and hospital doctors are being diverted from their normal duties to care for patients in Covid-19 wards.

Meanwhile, specialist community centres are being set up to provide care to Covid-19 patients in a bid to ease the pressure on stressed GP surgeries struggling to cope with demand.
Keeping in view the possible emergencies in wake of the novel coronavirus outbreak in the country, the Odisha government on Thursday signed agreements with private hospital medical to set up two large COVID-19 hospitals in the state capital.

The new COVID-19 hospitals are likely to come up by April 15, an official said adding that Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has directed to provide state-of-the-art facilities for treatment of COVID-19 patients.

The state government signed two tripartite agreements with SUM and KIIMS Medical Colleges to set up 1,000 bedded state level hospitals in Bhubaneswar for treatment of COVID-19 patients.

SUM Hospital has agreed to create a 500-bed COVID-19 hospital with 20 ICUs, while KIIMs Hospital will have 450 beds.

These hospitals will have the facility for Covid 19 treatment.

The state-run Odisha Mining Corporation (OMC) and Central PSU Mahanadi Coalfields Limited (MCL) will provide the CSR funding for the purpose.

The first agreement signed by the state government was represented by Health Secretary NB Dhal, MD of OMC, Vyneel Krishna and KIIMS Management to set up a 450-bed hospital.

The second agreement was signed by Dhal, S S Panda of MCL and SUM Hospital Management to set up a 500-bed hospital aln with ICU facilities.

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik congratulated the partners and thanked OMC and MCL for coming forward in the interest of the people of the state.

According to official sources, the state government feels that the facilities available in the state were inadequate to handle the highly infectious disease like COVID-19.

Even developed countries such as Italy and USA having matured healthcare systems, have found it difficult to respond to this unprecedented crisis, the official said.

The global experience shows that COVID-19 patients need to be put under observation and treated in a separate hospital instead of a general hospital in order to minimise the chance of transmission to others, he said.

The chief minister has also directed the health department to set up similar facilities for COVID-19 cases in other parts of the state.

The state government currently has provisions for suspected COVID-19 patients in all the state-run medical colleges and 30 district headquarters hospitals.

This apart, the state has also developed special quarantine facilities in above 6,000 gram panchayats across the state.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Amid nationwide lockdown in the wake of coronavirus, former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda said that the government should assure farmers that their crops will be procured. He said that the government will bear the loss incurred to the farmers.

"Government should provide bonus to farmers whose crops are ready in fields as procurement process will not take place before April 15 due to coronavirus lockdown. Government should also assure farmers that their crops will be procured and government will bear any loss," Hooda said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country effective from midnight to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

A total of 694 confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been reported in India, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare informed on Thursday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade will monitor difficulties faced by various stakeholders during the lockdown

New Delhi: The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has set up a control room to monitor in real-time the status of transportation and delivery of essential commodities amid the coronavirus lockdown in the country.

It will also monitor difficulties being faced by various stakeholders during the lockdown period from March 25 to April 14.

"In the event of any manufacturing, transporter, distributor, wholesaler or e-commerce companies facing ground level difficulties in transport and distribution of goods or mobilization of resources, the same may be informed to this department" the DPIIT said.

Grivances can be emailed to "controlroom-dpiit@gov.in" or informed through telephone (011-23062487). This number will be functional from 8am to 6pm.

The issues reported by various stakeholders through this control room would be taken up with the concerned state government, district, police authorities, and other agencies.

It has urged to all "stakeholders, industry associations to report the issues affecting the industry, trade, especially the ground level issues on this control room," it said.

The issue assumed significance as traders and e-commerce companies have raised concerns over police beating up delivery boys in different states, while they were doing their duty.

Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla held a detailed meeting on Wednesday with DPIIT, traders and e-commerce firms on smooth supply of essential goods in the country.
Erin O'Hara had owned her own successful business for nine years before it was ripped out from under her earlier this week.

"It's been a rollercoaster," she said.

Erin O'Hara and her staff. Credit:Erin O'Hara

"There have been times of hope, there have been times of guilt over opening and not knowing if we should  desperation and fear of the unknown.

"Yesterday in particular was very emotional; we worked until 10pm, and packing up the clinic and locking the doors not knowing what the future holds is so devastating."
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley Gets Tested for COVID-19 After Flu-like Symptoms

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) is experiencing flu-like symptoms and has undergone testing for COVID-19, according to her spokesperson.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China before it was transmitted worldwide.

Pressleys spokesperson, Lina Francis, said Wednesday that the Massachusetts congressional delegate is awaiting the results of the COVID-19 test.

Pressley is the second member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation to experience symptoms of the respiratory illness.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said Wednesday he decided to self-quarantine after experiencing symptoms of COVID-19. Moulton, a former presidential hopeful, sought medical advice and was told that because the symptoms were minor and a test would not change his treatment, he did not qualify for a test.

Another recent congressional representative to announce flu-like symptoms is California Rep. Katie Porter, who said she, too, has been tested.

Over the weekend, I had a fever over 100.4 degrees. As instructed, I continued to isolate in my bedroom and phoned my provider. I carefully followed all instructions to visit my doctor and received a test for COVID-19. I am waiting for results, she said in a tweet earlier Wednesday.

P.S. My children are so far healthy and handling things well, and I did make sure to wear a mask! pic.twitter.com/y4wiRL9RHG  Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) March 25, 2020

State Rep. Mike Day is the first member of the Massachusetts Legislature to test positive for COVID-19, according to WBUR. The outlet reported Day announced he would go into quarantine for over two weeks.

The number of people in Massachusetts who have died from COVID-19 reached 15 on Wednesday. Public health officials said the number of residents who have so far tested positive for the disease jumped to more than 1,800. Nearly 19,800 have been tested and 103 have been hospitalized.

The U.S. coronavirus death toll topped the 1,000 milestone as the pandemics mounting economic burden was illustrated by government data on Thursday showing a record number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits and hospitals struggled to treat a surge of infected patients.

For most people, COVID-19 causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with pre-existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death.

The virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person, typically between people who are in close contact with one another and via respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
K Ezhilarasan By

Express News Service

ARIYALUR: All went well until the COVID -19 outbreak. Watermelon cultivating farmers across Ariyalur district suffered huge loss as traders did not procure the product due to the coronavirus lockdown. Farmers in Jayankondam and T.Pazur areas have been cultivating watermelon in about 250 acres land.



Watermons cultivated here are taken to various districts and also states like Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka.



For the past one week, traders stopped sending lorries to procure watermelons.



The sale was completely stalled becuase of three reasons. Firstly, watermelon reportedly lost its market as people refrained buying it out of fear that they would catch cold (symptom of COVID-19) after consuming it.



COVID-19 LIVE | Kashmir records first death, India tally crosses 630 as Maharashtra registers fresh cases



Secondly, transportation of heavy load vehicles almost came to a standstill.



With imposition of curfew and the resultant restrictions, the traders could not set up shop on roadsides and also people could not step out of their houses to buy them.



Thillai Natarajan, a farmer in Gangavadanganallur said I cultivated watermelon in seven acres. I spent around Rs 30,000 an acre for inputs. Normally, I get yield of 20 tonnes from one acre. So, I get approximately Rs 1.15 lakhs from one acre. As it will not last long, I harvested the ripened ones. But there are no traders to buy them.



At Thazuthazaimedu, Veerachozapuram, Guruvalapparkoil, Meikkavalputhur, Kundaveli and Vembukudi, many farmers did not harvest the ripe fruits and left them as crops.



Elangovan, a farmer from Thazuthazaimedu, said If there is some intervention possible at this time, at least 50 percent of the watermelons could be saved. Otherwise everything will go waste. Many ripe fruits already developed cracks and birds are eating them. It is a 70-80 day crop and ours have already exceeded

it.



Another farmer Manikandan of Sambodai, said that since the second week of March the price started declining and now procurement itself has stopped.



He said In the second week of March, traders bought one tone of watermelon for Rs 1,500 - 2,000. Normally the price should have been more than Rs 5, 000. The traders told us that because of corona and cold fears, many stopped taking watermelon. Now they are not even turning up for procurement.
26.03.2020 LISTEN

A lot has been said and discussed about the high incidence and prevalence of the novel *Corona Virus* *Disease* . Across the globe experts in the field of Public Health have given various forms of directives and advice to governments in the name of helping to contain this pandemic.

Fast forward to today, Ghana has confirmed 132 COVID-19 cases with 3 deaths and a zero recovery as at 2:00pm.

This has compelled various experts and stake holders including Ghana Medical Association to call for a lockdown of the whole country.

This has been a subject of interest for discussion as people have different opinions to this. The various discussions has been centered around effect of the lockdown on social life, medical and economic impacts.

Without diving into any of these concerns, I would like ask government to make its decision as early as possible to make the citizens know if we will go under a lockdown or not.

The panic and fear accompanying this pandemic has made towns/ cities like Accra, Tema, Kumasi and Obuasi a feared territory for anyone to travel to and from.

Others have termed these towns as " *corona cities* " hence stigmatizing persons living within these jurisdictions.

Early this week, a rumour of a possible lockdown has been circulating within the airwaves and various media and this has created more panic. People have started travelling to get to favourable location just in case the lockdown is announced. Many people are travelling by buses from cities to cities, cities to towns, and cities to villages because they seek a comfortable and convenient habitat where they can survive the lockdown in case it happens.

People are thinking about how long they can store food items to survive if indeed there will be a lockdown.

This intercity travels and movement is already posing a threat of easy spread of the virus as there is no ban on movement. It is however devastating to project the possible outcome in case two or more carriers are on board any public transport travelling under such reasons.

We understand that many countries including India, China, France, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, and the UK had to undergo a lockdown and still under lockdown in order to contain the spread of this virus. Our situation is different and we suggest some adjustments be made to suit our livelihood.

I write to suggest to the government that;

1. If there will be a lockdown, please impose it early to prevent haphazard movement and travels amongst persons who are panicking and seeking refuge to survive this alleged lockdown so as to contain the spread.

2. If there won't be any lockdown, please come out and tell citizens to prevent those travelling to their hometowns and other places to seek refuge wash away their fears and stay where they are to help contain the situation.

In any case, if there would be a lock down, I would suggest a partial lockdown where movement within the specified community will be allowed so that people will not end up dying from hunger.

If it must be done, it must be done well.

*#StayHome*

*#* *StopTheSpread*

*#* *SpreadCalmNotFear*

*#COVID-19*
LIMASSOL, Cyprus, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- ePlane, the advanced AI driven, B2B Sourcing and Business Intelligence platform for the Aerospace Parts and Repair markets announced today the investment led by major Japanese trading and investing company, Marubeni Corporation, and current investors totaling $9m.

ePlane is changing the way companies in the Aerospace industry are conducting business. The revolutionary online platform enables users to trade aircraft parts, locate repair services, and improve supply chain bottlenecks and the cost structure of its users. The Aviation Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) market is impressive. With an $80b global MRO market and an expected growth to $116b by 2029, the industry is ready for more efficient, modern, and effective methods to improve the way it transacts.

By bringing efficiency to the MRO industry, ePlane has catapulted it into the 21st century, providing centralized sourcing, BI, and a marketplace for buying, selling, repairing, loaning, and exchanging aircraft parts. The platform digitizes the procurement process, syncing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and custom inventories, to ensure that inventories are most up to date in real time.

The platform's unique Autopilot feature utilizes an AI algorithm to match buyers and sellers based on needs, available inventory, past transactions, and required timeframe, even automatically sending Requests for Quotes (RFQs) to appropriate sellers. This enhanced automation tool eliminates the need to send each request manually, significantly saving on time and labor.

Founded in 2016 and launched into full service in 2018, ePlane already receives over $50m in monthly demands from over 4,000 major companies in the Aerospace industry. Each of the network's 6,000 end users are screened and verified to ensure a safe and reliable buying experience. The proper documentation and serial number for each part are also provided in the listing to ensure the highest quality of every purchase.

Marubeni sees ePlane as the most innovative company in the aerospace industry, recognizing their ongoing organic growth. The projected growth of the Aerospace industry over the next years is rapidly increasing, and the need to bring new technologies and methods to the market is critical. Marubeni strongly believes ePlane is the future of the industry.

"We are delighted to see Marubeni joining us and see this partnership as an important one to the ongoing growth and success of ePlane. This is a strategic step," said Mr. Benny Shabtai, one of ePlane's initial investors and Board Members who previously sold mobile instant-messaging, voice and video calling app, Viber, to Japanese tech giant Rakuten.

ePlane is building a leading edge B2B company that brings immediate benefits to the Aerospace community by delivering the industry the tools and insights to make fast and efficient decisions and manage the growing demands of the next decade. The platform fosters intelligence tools for companies that will allow them to become smarter. Digitization is a must for operations at this scale, and those who don't embrace the digital transformation will not be able to provide the required level of service in this new tech-fueled climate. Marubeni is committed to innovation and the investment in ePlane will ensure objectives are met.

About ePlane

ePlane is headquartered in Cyprus and provides an online sourcing and BI marketplace dedicated to transforming the aerospace industry by helping companies worldwide to source & trade aircraft parts on an innovative e-commerce platform. Through advanced machine-learning technology and automation features, ePlane offers a nose-to-tail solution for buyers & sellers alike: a massive selection of parts and repair services for all platforms, reliable real-time inventories uploaded by vetted sellers from across the world, personalized statistics, business insight, and ePlane Autopilot  the revolutionary AI feature that fully automates the RFQ process.

For more information about ePlane:

Please visit www.eplane.com

or contact [email protected] for Media Inquiries

Tel: +1-844-375-2631

SOURCE ePlane

Related Links

http://www.eplane.com


The world is facing the wrath of the Coronavirus pandemic and the numbers are rising even in India. In the scenario of a nationwide lockdown, the only ones out on the streets are the caretakers of the society including the BMC workers.

In order to extend his support to the street level bureaucrats, Hrithik Roshan marked his contribution by providing the Government of Maharashtra with a generous amount, which a highly placed source revealed to be 20 lakh, to procure preventive masks and other requirements for them.

A TOI report quoted the source as saying, "Hrithik has extended his support to the Government of Maharashtra in their endeavour to curb the spread of pandemic. He had been looking for ways to help the street level bureaucrats like the BMC workers and other caretakers who are out there and contributed a total amount of Rs 20 lakh to the cause."

Meanwhile, Hrithik took to his Twitter handle and posted, "In times such as these, we must do whatever we can to ensure the safety of the most fundamental caretakers of our city and society. I have procured N95 and FFP3 masks for our BMC workers and other caretakers. (sic)

His next tweet read, "My gratitude to Aditya Thackeray and Shri Praveen Pardeshi for giving me the opportunity to support the Maharashtra govt in their endeavour to curb the pandemic. It is our duty to help in whatever capacity we can."

In response to Hrithik, Aaditya Thackeray also expressed his gratitude and shared, "Thankful to you @iHrithik for your assistance and support Smiling faceLet's defeat corona. For all those who are wanting to help, most important help you can be of: 1) Stay Home 2) wash your hands 3) can help sitting at home, via Govt/ Orgs working to support others." (sic)

Bringing more essence to the saying, "with great power comes great responsibility", the superstar has yet again set an example by helping those who are helping on-streets to curb the spread of coronavirus. Hrithik holds a massive influence and fanbase all across and this step would further, inspire his fans and citizens to extend their support to the larger cause of assistance to the ones protecting us.

The actor had early put out a strong message for all his fans to help stop the spread of Coronavirus where he reiterated all the steps that people must take in order to prevent the spread of the pandemic.

Hrithik Roshan Thanks Ex Sussanne Khan For Temporarily Moving In With Him Amid COVID-19 Lockdown

Hrithik Roshan Shares Important Advice To Prevent Spread Of Coronavirus
Whether it's served with butter and ham, drowned in hollandaise sauce or topped with a fried egg, nothing says spring in Germany like asparagus. But this year, the cherished vegetable may be a rare sight on dining tables as many of the foreign seasonal workers who would usually harvest the crop are unable to enter the country because of travel restrictions imposed over the coronavirus. "The situation is very tense for us farmers," says Thomas Syring, who runs a farm in Beelitz, a town in the state of Brandenburg known for its white asparagus. Syring is just one of hundreds of farmers faced with the threat that his crops may be left rotting in the fields because of a serious shortage of workers. On Wednesday, his problem grew bigger as Germany announced a complete ban on seasonal workers entering until further notice as part of measures to slow the spread of COVID-19. - Tens of thousands needed - Around 300,000 seasonal workers come to Germany each year, mainly from Poland and Romania, to help with fruit and vegetable harvests. During a normal season, Syring's farm employs about 60 workers from Romania, Poland and Bulgaria. This year, only 10 have arrived. "At the moment, it is cold again, it will slow down the growth of the asparagus. But in a week, at the latest, the asparagus will come out of the ground and continue to grow," he warns at his farm, where rows upon rows of asparagus are waiting beneath sheets of white plastic to keep the soil warm. Juergen Jakob of Beelitzer Spargel, an association for asparagus farmers in Beelitz, says only half of the 5,000 seasonal workers required in the region have made it to Germany. According to German agriculture minister Julia Kloeckner, Europe's biggest economy requires "30,000 seasonal workers in March alone, with the number rising to 85,000 in May". The government has announced measures to ease red tape around the hiring of new workers in the sector, and to allow workers that are available to work for longer. In an interview with Bayerischer Rundfunk, Kloeckner also said she would like to see asylum seekers employed as seasonal workers, though this would require a change in the law. - Double pay - A jobs portal launched on Monday for those seeking work in the farming sector had attracted 16,000 applications by Tuesday evening, Kloeckner said. A similar portal has been launched in Austria, which is facing a manpower shortage of 5,000 to help in fruit and vegetable farms. Likewise in Switzerland, fears are growing that only a fraction of the 33,000 seasonal workers required annually will be available this year. France has meanwhile issued a call for people laid off during the lockdown to head to the fields and help with the harvest. But the farmers say new workers are no substitute for experienced farmhands. Some had been flying workers in on chartered flights to dodge closed land borders, while others tried offering better deals to entice workers. Emese Molnar, who runs a Romanian company that sends seasonal workers to countries including Germany and the Netherlands, said some farms were offering "double salaries, as well as very good conditions on accommodation and catering". But beyond border barriers, some were simply worried about travelling. Responding to the Wednesday's entry ban, Joachim Rukwied, president of the German Farmers' Association, said: "This entry ban must be kept as short as possible. Our farms are prepared to implement and enforce all measures to prevent infection." For Jakob in Beelitz, time might already be running out. "We are now very close to the asparagus harvest, but if we do not have enough harvest workers, we will not be able to harvest the whole crop," he warns. Bringing in workers from other sectors won't solve the problem because of the time it takes to train them, he says. "Perhaps they will have learned how to do it by the end of the asparagus season, but that doesn't help us very much."
Congress chief Sonia Gandhi wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday, supporting the lockdown announced in view of the coronavirus outbreak, while suggesting steps like protecting doctors and seeking deferment of loan recovery.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic sweeping the world had caused serious public health concerns, anguish and apprehensions in India, she wrote in her letter to the prime minister.

"It has imperiled lives and put at risk the lives and livelihoods of millions, particularly, the most vulnerable sections of our society. The entire nation stands as one in solidarity in the fight to halt and defeat the Corona pandemic," Gandhi added.

She noted that the 21-day nationwide lockdown announced by the prime minister as a measure to fight the coronavirus was a welcome step.

"As President of the Indian National Congress, I would like to state that we will support and collaborate fully with every step taken by the Union Government to ensure the containment of the pandemic," Gandhi said.

At this challenging and uncertain time, she said it was imperative for each one of us to rise above partisan interests and honour our duty towards our country and indeed, towards humanity.

"It is in the spirit of solidarity and cooperation therefore, that I would like to suggest some measures that I believe will help us address the massive health crisis we are about to face and ameliorate the immense economic and existential pain that vulnerable sections of our society will soon be subjected to," the Congress chief said.

She stressed on the need to arm doctors, nurses and health workers with personal protection equipment, including N-95 masks and hazmat suits.

"Let us ensure the opening and scaling up of manufacture and supply of these items so that not a single health professional faces the predicament of contracting or passing on COVID-19 owing to unavailability of 'Personal Protection Equipment'," Gandhi said.

Announcing a special "Risk Allowance" for doctors, nurses and health workers for a period of six months retrospectively from March 1 was imperative, she added.

The Congress chief also called upon the Centre to immediately commission and begin construction of temporary facilities with large numbers of ICUs and ventilators in areas where the outbreak is expected to be concentrated in the near future.

She also said a dedicated portal for sharing all necessary information was a way forward.

Gandhi said disseminating all essential information, including the locations of the designated hospitals and their emergency phone numbers, was essential to facilitate the management of the pandemic.

Noting that many businesses and companies were laying off and retrenching large numbers of regular and temporary employees, she said, "It would be in order for the Union Government to immediately put in place broad-based social protection measures, including direct cash transfer, to these sections to tide over the period of difficulty."



Gandhi also sought a deferment of all loan recoveries up to six months, including for the loans given to farmers and the salaried class.

She pointed out that the 21-day lockdown comes at the peak of the harvesting season, as the crop is ready for harvesting in most states by March-end.

"With nearly 60 per cent of India's population being economically dependent on agriculture, it is imperative that the Union Government should take necessary steps to enable harvesting and procurement of crops at MSP. This is also the right time to suspend all recoveries from farmers for a period of six months and consider indebtedness relief liberally," the Congress president said.

She also called for implementing the Minimum Income Guarantee Scheme i.e the "NYAY Yojana" proposed by her party.

Alternatively, she said an amount of Rs 7,500 should be transferred to every Jan Dhan account holder, PM Kisan Yojna account holder, those receiving old-age, widow, differently-abled pensions and MGNREGA workers as a one-time measure.

Gandhi also suggested distributing 10 kg of rice or wheat per family member to every ration card holder through PDS for free.

For the salaried class, she said the Centre might consider deferring all EMIs for six months, adding that the interest charged by the banks might consequently be waived for this period.

"Similarly, all loan installment deductions from the salaries of government employees may also be deferred for six months," Gandhi said.

She said the government must consider announcing a comprehensive, sector-wise relief package, including necessary tax breaks, interest subvention and deferment of liabilities.

"Mr Prime Minister, if implemented, these measures will reaffirm our commitment to each and every one of our citizens when they most need support and protection. We in the Congress Party stand with the people of India at this time of national crisis and we extend to the government our full support and cooperation," Gandhi wrote to the prime minister.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The loss of smell and taste may be a COVID-19 telltale sign that one needs to isolate for at least seven days even without other symptoms, doctors warn. By doing so, exposure to asymptomatic individuals who continue to act as vectors might be reduced. (Photo : Pixabay)

Infectious disease specialist Dr. Judy Stone relates a story of a friend in Italy, citing loss of sense of smell and taste as the most unusual symptoms of coronavirus (COVID-19) infection.

This note from Stone came after Utah Jazz Center Rudy Gobert posted on his Twitter last March 23 that he hasn't been able to smell anything the past 4 days. Gobert was confirmed positive with COVID-19. Last week, another celebrity, Frozen 2 actor Rachel Matthews, reported that she experienced a loss of sense of smell and taste on the 4th day of her quarantine as a positive COVID-19 patient.

According to Dr. Stone, her friend confessed that her symptoms included fatigue, fevers, and cough. Her most peculiar symptom, however, was that she could not smell and taste a thing. She could not smell the bleach when she sanitized the house, the garlic when fried, or the strong smell of fennel. Fortunately, her friend survived the disease.

Physicians in Italy also reported that a significant proportion of their COVID-19 patients have also lost their sense of smell and taste.

A warning sign to self-isolate

The anecdotal evidence led a group of British ear, nose, and throat physicians to give an advisory over the weekend to ask all adults with sudden anosmia (the medical term for a loss of smell), even if void of other symptoms, to self-isolate in seven days.

The group of doctors said, "We might be able to reduce the number of otherwise asymptomatic individuals who continue to act as vectors, not realizing the need to self-isolate".

Medical personnel who are treating people with anosmia are advised to use personal protective gear and refrain from doing nonessential procedures as these precautions are urgent, the doctors warned. This advice is crucial because the virus replicates in the nose and the throat, and an exam can prompt cough or sneezes that expose the doctor to a high level of virus, the president of the British Rhinological Association stated.

The American Academy of Otolaryngology also issued a similar warning to their colleagues in Great Britain: the absence of allergies or sinusitis, the loss of smell or taste should be used as a screening tool for potential COVID-19 infection. The said symptoms also "warrant serious consideration for self- isolation, and testing of these individuals." they add.

According to Dr. Stone, a plausible biological explanation for the loss of sense of smell and taste when inflicted with COVID-19 is that viruses destroy cells or cell receptors in the nose. Other viruses infect the brain via the olfactory sensory nerves. In a study published in the Journal of Medical Virology published last February 27, it was concluded that some coronaviruses could attack the brainstem via a synapseconnected route from the lung and airways. The attack of the said virus may be one reason for acute respiratory failure.

People who recover from COVID-19 are reported to regain their sense of smell and taste, although it would take several days or weeks.
One of the largest unions in Australia is calling for a universal basic income of $740 a week for the duration of the coronavirus crisis.

United Workers Union national secretary Tim Kennedy is pushing for a nationwide 'jobs guarantee' that would keep Australians in work.

Under the scheme, employers would not be allowed to dismiss or retrench workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

The government would guarantee their wages once they return to work when restrictions are lifted and the economy recovers.

One of the largest unions in Australia is calling for a universal basic income of $740 a week for the duration of the coronavirus crisis with so many people sacked and applying to Centrelink

Those not covered by the jobs guarantee would be paid at the full-time minimum wage of $740 a week until the end of 2020.

'The payment is unconditional, meaning the recipient is not required to work or demonstrate willingness to work, nor is the payment means-tested,' Mr Kennedy told The Age.

'Market logics of profit maximisation and unequal distribution must be discarded.'

The UWU reporesents hotels, casinos, warehouses, farms, hospitality, and health workers.

Two million Australians could be out of work as result of the pandemic as the economy crashes and businesses close due to government restrictions

Universal Basic Income is controversial due to arguments it removes the incentive to get a job and contribute to the economy.

Even unions have historically opposed the concept, but Mr Kennedy has decided that desperate times call fro such measures.

The $750 would be $200 a week more than the doubled unemployment payments the government brought in on Sunday in response to the crisis.

Mr Kennedy also wants energy, health, telecommunications, transport, and early childhood education nationalised, the tax-free threshold raised from $18,200 to $25,000, and rent and mortgage payments suspended.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus earlier this week warned two million Australians would be out of work as result of the pandemic.

The $750 would be $200 a week more than the doubled unemployment payments (Centrelink line pictured) the government brought in on Sunday in response to the crisis

She started a petition, signed by 15,000 people, calling for the government to provide wage subsidies of up to $5200 a month for each worker, like in Britain.

Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter rejected the proposal and defended Centrelink payments being the right way to support laid-off workers.

'The lessons that Treasury and the governments learned during the GFC is that if you step outside the normal realms of delivery mechanisms, you run into all sorts of problems,' he said.
Mamata writes letter to 18 CMs; requests aid for stranded Bengal workers

India

pti-PTI

New Delhi, Mar 26: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wrote to 18 chief ministers on Thursday, seeking aid for workers from the state who are stranded in different regions of the country due to the lockdown over the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The letter comes amid reports that migrant workers across the country were trying to walk back home due to unemployment, lack of shelter and food. According to Census 2011, there are around 5-lakh migrant workers from the state who are working in different parts of the country.

"Bengal has many workers - semi skilled and unskilled, working in different parts of the country," Banerjee said in the letter. "Due to complete lockdown in the country for COVID- 19 pandemic, many Bengal workers could not travel back and are stuck at different places."

The chief ministers of Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Delhi, Odisha, Karnataka and Punjab were among those who received the letter. "We have received information that many such workers who are ordinarily resident of Bengal are stuck in your state too," Banerjee said.

"We are getting SOS calls from them." They are generally in groups of 50-100 and can be easily identified by the local administration, the chief minister said.

"Since, it is not possible for us to reach any help to them, I take the opportunity to request you to kindly ask your administration to provide them with basic shelter, food and medical support during this period of crisis," she said. "We, in Bengal, are taking care of such stuck people in our State," Banerjee said in the letter.

She stated that the chief secretary would pass on the details of such people to the respective state chief secretaries to speed up this entire process of humanitarian support in this hour of crisis.

Earlier in the day, the Centre has announced a Rs 1.75-lakh-crore economic bailout to help the poor tide over the impact of the nationwide lockdown that is in place to contain the spread of the deadly COVID-19.

The benefits -- through cash and food -- were targeted at farmers, migrant workers, the poor, women and the disabled, among others.
A popular young politician has asked President Muhammadu Buhari, to pay every Nigerian a sum of N200,000 as stimulus package due to the ravaging scourge, COVID19.

Adelaja Adeoye, the National Publicity Secretary of the Action Democratic Party (ADP), made this call in Lagos on Thursday morning, while having a chat with some newsmen.

According to him, it is necessary for the government to provide some palliatives, to support individuals and families who may no longer work during the stay at home order, over the fear of Corona Virus.

He made a further call to all the State governors that, they should pay double salaries to their State work force, and pay indigenes a sum of N50,000 each.

To make the process seamless and transparent, the government can partner with banks to achieve this, since over 40 million Nigerian citizens have been connected through Bank Verification Number (BVN).

Whatever that is due to each Nigerians, can be paid directly into their accounts.

The issue of data base is gradually being sorted by the National Identification Management Corporation (NIMC), so, the payment process should not be delayed.

Both Federal and State government can agree to make some deductions from the FAAC and JAC, for March and April, and disburse to every citizen from the age of 18 years, to support them.

The call is not strange according to Adelaja, because similar stimulus package is being offered to Americans by President Donald Trump, who has earnmarked Two Trillion dollars ($2tr), to be shared amongst all American citizens.

Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has also announced a stimulus package of $2,000 each for those who have lost their jobs over corona virus, and this will be paid to them for the next four months. Offers are also being made to other Canadians while they are at home pending when the scourge will be defeated.

Nigerian government must learn to treat citizens like humans, and provide them with supports during this trying period.

I would have asked the goverment to supply each and every homes with food items on a weekly basis, like it is being done in United Arab Emirates (UAE), but this cannot work in Nigeria, as majority of those items will end up missing in transit, apart from the fact that we cannot handle such for over 180 million people. The best is to do a direct transfer to them so that they can use the money to buy food, drugs, and other items that will help them to stay alive and be comfortable, Adelaja noted.

Adelaja stated further that the government should put efforts in place to reduce the tension and fear that has been created as a result of the Corona Virus, that if care is not taken, the fear will have severe psychological effect on the people even after the scourge would have been defeated.

He noted further that, all the donations of anti #COVID19 materials, donated by corporate organizations like Access Bank, GTB, multinational, private individual like Alibaba CEO, Jack Ma, Folorunsho Alakija, Atiku Abubakar, Pastor Paul Enechie, Adeboye, and others must be strictly be monitored and should not be diverted by some corrupt individuals.

They must be used for the purpose they are meant for, Adelaja concluded.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 23:21:51|Editor: yan

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GABORONE March 26 (Xinhua) -- The president of Botswana Mokgweetsi Masisi has advised the nation to prepare for the imminent lockdown in a bid to fight the spread of COVID-19.

Masisi, who is on a 14-day self-isolation after returning from an official visit to Windhoek, Namibia on March 21, released a message on Thursday through government facebook page, Bwgovernment, pleading with the southern African nation to take heed of and follow health professionals' advise and instructions pertaining to COVID-19.

"Our experts, led by Dr Masupu with Prof. Alexandra advise us to restrict the movement of people so we are better able to trace and treat any case that occurs," read the message.

The message further advises residents to wash hands with soap and water and refrain from arguing as such behavior does not help in the prevention of COVID-19.

"Protect yourself and everyone else. Look after the old and young," the message concludes.

Botswana is one of the few African countries that have no confirmed case of COVID-19 so far.
Mumbai, March 26 : Inspired by Pawan Kalyan, another Telugu superstar, Ram Charan, has decided to donate to the government's relief fund to battle the COVID 19 pandemic. He will be donating Rs 70 lakh.

On Thursday afternoon, Ram Charan announced on Instagram: "Inspired by Pawan Kalyan Garu's tweet, I would like to contribute Rs 70 lakh towards the centre and states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh relief fund in this moment of crisis.

I would like to applaud the commendable efforts of our Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi Ji and Honourable Chief Ministers of our respective states KCR Garu and Jagan Mohan Reddy Garu in curtailing the vast effects of the pandemic COVID 19.

As a responsible citizen, I encourage all to strictly abide by their rules and recommendations. Jai Hind." On Thursday morning, Pawan Kalyan announced that he would be donating Rs 50 lakh each to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana Chief Minister's relief funds and Rs 1 crore to the Prime Minister's relief fund.

Ram Charan followed his footsteps and announced to make his contribution as India faces a tough time battling the COVID 19 pandemic.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
At a Bengaluru-based recruitment firm, the past two weeks have only been about cancellations of interviews from clients in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. As a result of the 21-day lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to contain the spread, hiring activities have come to a halt.

"There will be a minimum 50 percent dip in hiring in March and April and this will have a direct impact on our revenue," said the chief executive of a firm.

March and April are among the busiest periods for recruitment firms since companies hire talent for the new financial year. However, now corporates have told employees to avail work-from-home facility for non-essential services. Hence, hiring activities have also been delayed.

Track this blog for latest updates on coronavirus outbreak

Recruitment consultants told Moneycontrol that while a few companies have adopted technology to hire people, rest have put hiring plans on the backburner.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

If the situation continues till May, industry sources told Moneycontrol that the hiring firms would have to take a hit of 40-50 percent in revenues.

Also Read: Coronavirus impact: Are you financially prepared for a job loss?

An American multinational corporation in the consumer goods had engaged a Mumbai-based staffing firm to build its India team. However, when this company was told that all positions would have to be filled through e-interviews they backed out.

We ended up losing an almost Rs 2 crore project because the company wanted only face-to-face hiring. Further, four candidates who were shortlisted for senior management positions were not comfortable joining without physically meeting the global team, said the managing director of the firm.

The recruitment industry is currently estimated to be USD 6 billion (Rs 45,000 crore) in India. Both Indian and multinational firms operate in the country and a total of about 23,000 such companies exist in India.

Among sectors, IT/ITeS and consumer goods account for the largest portion of the industrys business by volume while BFSI contributes the largest by value.

Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, corporates are also unwilling to hire since there is no certainty on when business comes back to normal.

The executive director at a specialist IT hiring agency said that since the companies themselves do not want to spend money hiring new people, their business is automatically hit.

With COVID-19 cases rapidly increasing, the recruitment firms themselves have not fully converted to e-operations.

The Vice-President of a pan-India consulting and staffing firm said that their own employees have carried office desktops to their homes due to dearth of laptops.

Some client data is confidential and hence we did not have a policy of allowing customers to bring their own devices. Over the past two weeks business is almost on a standstill and we expect that this will be the case till May, the official added.

A Delhi-based CEO of an executive hiring firm said that they have been worst hit than others due to their nature of business.

"For CXO-level hiring, video interviews are not preferred. Hence over the past 10 days we have just been literally sitting at home waiting for a new project. But none so far," the CEO added.

Among the recruitment firms, the only ones still running operations are those helping companies in internal human resource strategies and succession planning initiatives. The work the hiring firm are involved in, include personnel management and finalising hiring strategies for the next financial year.
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Jacobs was informed about the latest COVID-19 preparedness and response actions taking place on French Saint-Martin, and the Prefet also received an update about Sint Maartens preparedness, response and mitigation measures.

The cooperation of working together to synchronize our islands (Sint Maarten/Saint-Martin) fight against the coronavirus disease COVID-19, has been an on-going effort since it was declared by the World Health Organization as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

This cooperation continues on a daily basis as part of our joint preparedness, response and mitigation measures where various entities exchange information of on-going developments, and this is essential in preventing community transmission on the island.

As Prime Minister, I would like to assure the general public that the Governments of both sides of the island have taken measures to protect public health and safety, and will continue to work together to get through this global crisis, Prime Minister Hon. Silveria Jacobs said on Wednesday.

The Prefet said that the French side is still in a position with local resources to deal with COVID-19, and the tracing of persons is being carried out when necessary. Both the Prefet and the Prime Minister agreed to maintain open communication where it concerns the confirmation of new COVID-19 positive cases.

Both Governments will work towards establishing a protocol of cooperation that would lead to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The Sint Maarten Ministry of Tourism, Economic Affairs, Transport & Telecommunications would also be included when formulating the MOU.

Representatives of the Police Forces from Sint Maarten and Saint-Martin will be meeting to discuss current COVID-19 procedures that have been implemented.

The Republic of France is at a Level 3 (the highest level), but Saint Martin is at Level 2. The current measures will continue to be evaluated and adjusted as needed.

Restrictions on French Saint-Martin will continue for a two-week period. Regarding air travel, restricted charter flights are allowed as well as cargo.

Air Antilles airline is providing limited essential air travel service between Saint-Martin (Grand Case), St. Barths and Guadeloupe for the following reasons: urgent health related matters (dialysis, urgent surgeries, chemotherapy treatment); an essential family member can accompany the patient; and professional travel for crisis management officials.

A similar arrangement is in place with our national airline Winair with respect to limited services between Sint Maarten, Saba and St. Eustatius and Curacao (emergency medical evacuations, health professionals and technical assistants).

Stay Safe, Stay at Home, Wash Hands Frequently for 20 seconds; Dont Touch Your Face; maintain Social Distancing of up to six feet; Avoid Groups of People; Dont Share Items between Each Other such as cell phones etc.; Practice Respiratory Hygiene if you Cough (in your elbow), Sneeze in a tissue and throw it in the bin; & Stay Healthy!

Listen to the Government Radio station  107.9FM - for official information, and news updates or visit the Government website: www.sintmaartengov.org/coronavirus or and Facebook Page: Facebook.com/SXMGOV





The Prime Minister Hon. Silveria Jacobs chair of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) on Monday, March 23, met with Prefet of Saint-Barthelemy and Saint-Martin Sylvie Feucher, as part of their weekly COVID-19 consultations.
COVID-19 is impacting every facet of our daily life, from our health care system to our economy to the very way we go about living day to day. Often overlooked is the impact this is having on our mental health. First responders, medical professionals on the front lines, and the everyday person alike are battling real mental health challenges on a daily basis.

Dr. Asim Shah, chief of Psychiatry for Harris Health Systems Ben Taub Hospital and Professor and Executive Vice-Chair of the Menninger Department of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, has some advice on how we can best maintain our mental well-being in times of crisis.

Remember: Panic Is Bigger Than the Disease

Right now what were seeing is that the panic is bigger than the disease, says Dr. Shah. Its easy to say to someone, Dont Panic. Yet Dr. Shah stresses that its perfectly normal to feel panic in times such as these. People feel anxious when confronted with the unknown, especially when circumstances feel outside of their control.

While no one is saying panic is abnormal, there is a difference between handling these uncertainties in a panicked way and an appropriate, calm way. By looking at the facts, argues Dr. Shah, we can gauge the appropriate response.

The facts with COVID-19 are such that we know it is highly contagious, more so than the flu. In high-risk populations, those with preexisting conditions and the elderly, the death rate is higher than the normal population at about 2%. The 2% is extremely important, says Dr. Shah, but we must also remember the other 98%. Remembering this simple fact can help us gauge our anxiety and panic.

How to Reduce Panic and Anxiety In Your Daily Life

Harris Health System

Because everybodys capacity for anxiety is different, each individual needs to decide how best to reduce ones anxiety. That said, Dr. Shah has 3 easy steps to help us reduce our panic level.

1. Limit televised news intake. Modern cable news uses emotion to elicit a response from their viewers. According to Dr. Shah, our news is best consumed with as little emotion as possible. He suggests reading a trusted newspaper as an alternative to cable news as well as limiting the overall time you spend consuming news.

2. Social media is contributing to the panic people are feeling. Dr. Shah recommends we stop forwarding inflammatory content that you have not personally fact-checked and limit our time spent using sites like Facebook. Instead, focus your social connections by using FaceTime or other apps like Houseparty, Zoom and Google Hangouts to interact with friends and loved ones in a positive way.

3. Stop hoarding. There is no food shortage. Hoarding hurts those of us who cant afford to stock up on essential items by creating scarcity where it shouldnt otherwise exist.

Know Whose Mental Health Is Affected Most by Panic and Anxiety

Dr. Shah sees three main groups who are the most susceptible to mental health issues caused by anxiety and panic. By recognizing who is being hardest hit by these stresses we can help mitigate their negative effects.

1. People With Substance Abuse or Other Mental illness

This category is very vulnerable in times like these, but there is hope. People with pre-existing conditions like depression and anxiety should speak to their doctor about upping the frequency of treatment. Friends and family members of those who struggle with substance abuse and addiction need to closely monitor their struggling loved ones, as being stuck inside without work or friends can lead to increases in the amount of the drugs consumed.

2. Children

Dr. Shah says children fall into three categories, each one needing their own approach to limit the negative effects this time can have on their mental health. Children under the age of 5 are the most susceptible to long term damage that can be caused by repeated viewing of stressful images. Dr. Shah points to research that found children under 5 have a hard time differentiating reality upon seeing repeated images. If your toddler sees the same clip shown over and over on the news throughout the day, their brains are unable to separate the timeline. For a child, that image is not replaying over and over, it is happening over and over in real-time. This can have detrimental effects. Dr. Shah recommends minimizing the news coverage that your under 5 child sees.

Children over 5 but not teenagers understand the world a lot better, but still need to be empowered by knowledge to help them gain some sense of control and avoid feeling panicked. The best strategy for parents is to answer any and all questions your child may ask and then lead by example. If the parent is calm, the child in this age range is most likely to follow suit. Parents can also teach their preteen kids hand-washing techniques and impart to them how important it is they avoid touching their faces or getting too close to other people. When their kids are anxious, parents can point to countries like South Korea as an example of how caution and rationality helped prevent a wider outbreak.

Teenagers, says Dr. Shah, should be included in the solution process in order to help them to avoid the worst effects anxiety and panic can have on their mental health. Teenagers are creative and can often have ideas that parents havent thought of, especially when it comes to ways to help mitigate the effects of quarantine by using todays technology.

3. First Responders and Medical Professionals

For first responders and other medical professionals on the front lines of this fight, Dr. Shah recognizes theres a lot of anxiety present. He stresses the need for what he calls an airplane approach to health care. When on an airplane, youre instructed to put your own mask on before you assist others to do the same. It is the same with critical care. Medical professionals need to make sure their own mental and physical health is okay before trying to help others. Friends and family members of health care providers should do everything in their power to help them decompress, including thanking them for their service on the frontlines.

On the medical nursing side, Leslye Davis-Smith, MSN, RN, Nurse Professional Development Specialist and member of the executive nursing practice group at Harris Health System, says, Research clearly states that doctors and nurses may respond more strongly to the stresses of a major health event, Which is why Harris Health has a number of systems and resources in place to help the hospital staff with their mental health in this critical time.

I want to stress our nurses have been unbelievable with their incredible, cohesive response, says Davis-Smith. She cites the quick and efficient sharing of accurate information, which comes straight from authorities like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization then is assimilated throughout Harris Health System by a network of support managers and nursing teams on the ground.

Nurses, doctors, and first responders are closely monitored by the executive staff as well as appropriately scheduled to help avoid burn out and fatigue. Nurses have formed teams that consistently work together in order to monitor one another and foster an environment of accountability and support within each nursing unit. As an education specialist with a mental health focus, Davis-Smith spends her time walking the floors of the hospitals, checking in with staff in real-time and giving anyone who needs the opportunity to talk a chance to do so. She also cites the presence of chaplains whose job it is to facilitate the mental health of Harris Healths staff.

Most importantly, says Davis-Smith, health care workers need to stay in the here and now. She advises health care professionals to focus on what they can control. Lack of control elicits anxious emotions in humans. Instead, recall that mild anxiety has a protective component and can actually help us do our job better. It can increase alertness and focus, which can be very important during caregiving activities during these critical times.

For health care providers, this means continued adherence to infection prevention guidelines, hand sanitizing, limiting visitors and keeping close watch over PPEs (Personal Protective Equipment).

The rest of her advice is valuable for everyone and echoes what Dr. Shah says we can all do to lessen our anxiety. Do what you can control. Wash your hands. Eat healthily. Practice social distancing. Avoid large crowds. Limit the things that make you anxious. Keep in contact with family and friends. Challenge yourself to stay in the present, says Davis-Smith, and dont try to predict too far into the future.

As for our health care professionals, the public should know how valiant and courageous they are. I cant stress enough what Ive seen in our hospitals, says Davis-Smith. How outstanding, engaged, and selfless the nurses are in providing the care they do.

But this is only possible when we are all aware of our mental health, our anxiety stressors, and who the most vulnerable to these stressors are amongst us. We are counting on our health care providers now more than ever before and we need them at their best. Says Dr. Shah, Health care professionals have a responsibility to take care of themselves first so that they can take care of others.

For information on the Coronavirus, please visit www.harrishealth.org
AN investigation has been launched into how a list which contains the names of people in self-quarantine was leaked to social media sites.

The list contained the names of persons who are supposed to be in isolation, having arrived in the country over the last two weeks.
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - Tartisan Nickel Corp. (CSE: TN) (OTC Pink: TTSRF) (FSE: 8TA) ("Tartisan", or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the Company has completed a Spectral Analysis Survey conducted by Aster Funds Ltd. over the Kenbridge Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Deposit, Atikwa Lake Area, Ontario. The survey covered the patented and single-cell mining claims that make up the historic land position which contains the Kenbridge Deposit and the surrounding area, identifying several new exploration targets not only for nickel, copper, cobalt, but also for potential gold occurrences.

The Spectral Analysis Survey shows the distribution and intensity of up to 304 minerals, with the first pass showing up to16 minerals. Each mineral can be classified into an exploration relevance for base metals, precious metals and industrial metals.

The Spectral Analysis Survey picked up several minerals implicit in the formation of nickel sulphide deposits, and potentially other types of deposits on the Kenbridge Property. These minerals included chlorite*, muscovite, quartz, epidote*, goethite*, smectite, pyrophyllite, pyroxenite*, pyrrhotite*, hematite*, alunite, chalcopyrite*, sphalerite*, pyrite*, talc*, and kaolinite*. Starred minerals in the list are those which are seen in outcrop, surface geology, and drill logs at the Kenbridge Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Deposit.

The key benefit to the Company from the Spectral Analysis Survey is the Target Vector Minerals analysis "TVM" TM. TVM's were structured for metallic sulphides and the oxides that derive from them; gold; copper; and nickel, as well as direct indicators of Kenbridge-style mineralization in pyrrhotite and chalcopyrite. The Kenbridge Deposit was easily picked out by the survey, and shown to be some five TVM's of a possible six TVM's. The survey also picked out several other areas of five/six TVM's and one area of six/six TVM's. These areas will form the basis for a renewed surface exploration program at the Kenbridge Project in summer 2020.

Story continues

Tartisan CEO Mark Appleby said, "the survey picked out the Kenbridge Deposit, and has shown the possible extension to the Kenbridge Deposit and three additional trends that relate directly to underlying geology and structure implicit in the Kenbridge Deposit. Of significant interest, the survey found two gold trends as well, which include the Violet and Nina historic gold occurrences. One of the occurrences is almost 54 hectares in size and covers almost all of three of our staked claims on the border of the Kenbridge property."

Tartisan will use the Aster Funds Ltd. Report as the basis for assessment filing over the single-cell mining claims and will form the basis of expanding the exploration potential of the Kenbridge Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Project.

About Tartisan Nickel Corp.

Tartisan Nickel Corp. is a Canadian based mineral exploration and development company which owns a 100% stake in the Kenbridge Nickel-Copper Project in Ontario; a 100% interest in the Sill Lake Lead-Silver property located in Vankoughnet Township, Ontario; a 100% interest in the Don Pancho Zinc-Lead-Silver Project in Peru just 9 km from Trevali's Santander mine. Tartisan also owns a 100% stake in the Ichuna Copper-Silver Project, also in Peru, contiguous to Buenaventura's San Gabriel property. Company financial strength is provided by a significant equity stake in Eloro Resources Ltd, which is exploring the low-sulphidation epithermal La Victoria Gold/Silver Project in Ancash, Peru and the Iska-Iska project in Bolivia.

Tartisan Nickel Corp. common shares are listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE:TN) (OTC Pink: TTSRF) (FSE: 8TA). Currently, there are 100,563,550 shares outstanding (103,263,550 fully diluted).

For further information, please contact Mr. D. Mark Appleby, President & CEO and a Director of the Company, at 416-804-0280 (info@tartisannickel.com). Additional information about Tartisan can be found at the Company's website at www.tartisannickel.com or on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Jim Steel MBA P.Geo. is the Qualified Person under NI 43-101 and has read and approved the technical content of this News Release.

This news release may contain forward-looking statements including but not limited to comments regarding the timing and content of upcoming work programs, geological interpretations, receipt of property titles, potential mineral recovery processes, etc. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore, involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.

The Canadian Securities Exchange (operated by CNSX Markets Inc.) has neither approved nor disapproved of the contents of this press release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/53836
Healthcare workers can get a free pair of shoes from Crocs.

The company launched a program to give a pair of select Crocs Classic Clogs and Crocs At Work styles to healthcare workers on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19, according to businesswire.com.

The company said it will give away up to 10,000 pairs a day.

The duration of our giveaway will depend on our level of inventory and the amount of requests we receive, said president and CEO Andrew Rees.

Now and always, we need to take care of each other. Sending love to you, #CrocNation  And sending free shoes to our frontline heroes in healthcare. Visit https://t.co/xNp6I2aRd8 to request your pair. #CrocsCares pic.twitter.com/G4fyLe0kQq  Crocs Shoes (@Crocs) March 25, 2020

Medical personnel can go to www.crocs.com/freeforhealthcare for the free shoes and free shipping.

The message there today is, Thank you for the tremendous response to our donation efforts. Due to extremely high volume, we have met our daily free pair limit. Please check back at 12 p.m. ET every day to get in line for your free pair.

The company also plans to donate up to 100,000 pairs by distributing them to healthcare facilities and organizations including Jobs Ohio, Dayton Area Hospital Association; St. Anthony North Health Campus in Denver, Colo.; Atlantic Health System, including Morristown Medical Center; and the SONSIEL organization and its partnership with SHARE, a partnership designed to move supplies across the national to healthcare providers caring for coronavirus patients.

MORE NEWS ABOUT CORONAVIRUS

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A young student at a top London fashion school had no idea she was infected with coronavirus when she hopped on a packed plane back home to Australia.

Isabella Snelson, 23, from Sydney, has been living abroad for nearly a year but decided to cut her time short when the pandemic forced her university to shut.

She wasn't due to return until May but decided to book a last-minute flight last Friday after learning Australia was tightening its borders and cutting its international flights.

Just two days after landing in Sydney, Ms Snelson found out she had contracted the deadly and infectious disease that has killed more than 21,000 people worldwide.

Isabella Snelson, 23, (pictured) found out she had contracted coronavirus on Tuesday after flying home to Sydney from London on Saturday

'I decided to fly back to Sydney because my school turned into remote learning... so I booked a flight 30 hours before getting on it,' Ms Snelson told Daily Mail Australia.

'I was worried that when my visa expired in two months I wouldn't be able to come home.'

Ms Snelson said she didn't think she was experiencing any of the symptoms of COVID-19 when she booked the flight.

'I felt a bit run-down but that's normal when we have a lot of things due at uni,' she said.

The student said three of her classmates were worried they may have been infected but were unable to get tested due to how many cases there were in London.

'And every day I was getting the tube so there's a lot of contact in that,' she said.

Ms Snelson had an entire row to herself from London to Dubai but said the plane from Dubai to Sydney was full.

'In hindsight I'm very worried I may have infected people at the time because I didn't know that I had it,' she said.

'I also think because everyone was coming from Europe I would have likely caught it anyway because everyone was so close.'

She said that during her flight nearly everyone on board were wearing face masks - including staff who also had gloves on - but no temperature checks were done.

Ms Snelson (pictured in face mask) has been isolating in her beach house with her mother after finding out she contracted the disease and said she had lost her sense of smell

Despite not knowing she was infected, she kept her distance from her family and didn't hug her parents who she hadn't seen in more than six months.

'The night I arrived in Sydney I had a sore throat and a bit of a cough so I got tested the next morning,' Ms Snelson said.

'The nurses were pretty certain I had it so within an hour me and my mum drove to our beach house (to isolate).'

Ms Snelson said the worst symptom she experienced was having shortness of breath.

'I just feel really run down and I have no energy. The worst day was on Wednesday when I felt a real shortness of breath and I started to freak out and couldn't breathe properly,' she said.

'I have a bit of a sore throat and I have absolutely no sense of smell, nothing at all.'

Ms Snelson, who has been staying with her mother since Sunday, said she was doing everything to ensure she wouldn't pass on the virus to her mother.

'We use separate bathrooms and separate bedrooms. Mum is the only one who uses the kitchen and prepares meals,' she said.

Ms Snelson who was studying fashion abroad has said the worst symptom was feeling so run down and having a shortness of breath

'I'll wipe down everything I touch and every three hours we wipe down all the surfaces.

'We wipe down the TV remote about every 15 minutes,' she laughed.

Ms Snelson admitted she thought the virus wouldn't affect her so badly.

'I thought because I was so young it wouldn't hit me as hard as it did. Within the last couple of days my body just feels so smashed and I am so exhausted,' she said.

'I'm not scared but I'm wondering how long it'll last. I feel like I've been hit with a second wind.'

The 23-year-old urged others her age to be cautious as anyone can be affected.

'Even though you can fight it because you're young, it's not about you. You could pass it onto your parents or grandparents.

'That's my biggest fear.'
By Ross Kerber and Simon Jessop BOSTON/LONDON (Reuters) - The havoc wrought by the coronavirus crisis could give investors leverage to put new limits on CEO pay packages and link them more closely to a range of social and environmental issues at companies' annual meetings this spring.

By Ross Kerber and Simon Jessop

BOSTON/LONDON (Reuters) - The havoc wrought by the coronavirus crisis could give investors leverage to put new limits on CEO pay packages and link them more closely to a range of social and environmental issues at companies' annual meetings this spring.

Executive compensation is among issues expected to dominate AGMs around the world, many to be held virtually via video-conferencing, as management and shareholders weigh the impact of the pandemic on their businesses.

Even before the economic shock, many companies were linking executives' paychecks to new measures. Now there is more political and reputational risk; bumper pay packages for CEOs, who at the top level can earn hundreds of times more than average workers, could prove a sensitive issue for companies at a time when thousands of people are dying, health systems are buckling and millions of people are losing their jobs.

"There is a massive corporate reckoning coming," said Todd Sirras, managing director of U.S. consultancy Semler Brossy which advise companies on executive pay.

He said he expected boards to increasingly adopt compensation plans tied to new metrics like worker health or carbon emissions.

AGMs are key dates for companies, when directors seek shareholders' blessing for compensation, board lineups and other matters.

Even before the so-called proxy season gets underway, more than 30 major companies have responded to the dire economic situation by cutting executive pay, among them planemaker Boeing Co, Qantas Airways and hotel group Marriott International.

'IT'S GOING TO BE A FOCUS'

In theory, the economic shock from the pandemic could deflect attention from non-financial matters this year, especially as more annual meetings will be held virtually, which could diminish activists' influence.

Nonetheless, heading into the 2020 proxy season, a consensus was already emerging among boards and investors that better management of so-called environmental, social and governance-related (ESG) risks would lead to more sustainable profits.

In a study of roughly 4,800 North American and European companies with some type of pay incentive, roughly 11% included an environmental or social metric for the 2018 financial year, voted on at meetings held in 2019, according to leading investor advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services.

Brett Miller, head of data solutions for ISS ESG, the responsible investment arm of ISS, estimates the figure could reach 25% for the financial year 2019 and rise even further as boards add new targets as a result of the pandemic.

Also at a time of extreme volatility in markets, directors may embrace ESG targets as something over which executives have more control, Miller said.

"When management is willing to put their compensation at risk over this, it's going to be a focus," he added.

For interactive graphics detailing extracts from the ISS ESG Analytics report, click here https://tmsnrt.rs/2wabbQR and here https://tmsnrt.rs/33n6yPJ.

Most meeting agendas were set weeks before the virus was widely acknowledged as a global problem. But, despite the world changing, several big investors say they are standing by their ESG focus, including the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock Inc.

Britain's Aberdeen Standard Investments said it planned to vote against the board composition of larger UK companies with less than a third of female directors, up from a quarter last year, while in the U.S it would oppose those with less than a quarter.

"The coronavirus outbreak will, in principle, have no impact - either way - on the focus that we have on encouraging ESG targets in company executive remuneration plans," said Bill Hartnett, stewardship director at Aberdeen Standard Investments.

French asset manager AXA Investment Managers, meanwhile, said it was "cognizant" of the pandemic's corporate challenges. However it still plans to "target laggard companies, within certain markets, where no part of executive remuneration is linked to non-financial ESG criteria", said AXA corporate governance analyst Irfan Patel.

'WORDS PUT TO THE TEST'

CEOs of S&P 500 companies on average received $14.5 million in total compensation in 2018, according to the most recent data from the AFL-CIO union federation. Among the S&P 500 the average ratio of CEO-to-worker pay was 287 to 1.

In Britain, top bosses earn 117 times the annual pay of the average UK worker, according to think tank the High Pay Centre. High pay inequality makes poor workers vulnerable if they are laid off. Too many layoffs could interrupt consumer spending and put economies at risk.

One of those in the crosshairs of investors this year is retailer TJX Cos, where CEO Ernie Herrman was paid $18.8 million in fiscal 2019. That was 1,596 times the median annual pay for all other employees, which includes seasonal and temporary employees.

TJX said on March 19 it would close all its stores in the United States and Europe for two weeks in response to the pandemic, but would continue pay workers in that period. A spokesman declined to comment on what could happen after that.

A shareholder resolution submitted for its annual meeting this year asks TJX to consider the pay grades and salary classifications of all employees when setting CEO compensation targets, so that CEO pay is "internally aligned" with worker pay.

TJX has argued the change is unnecessary.

Jonas Kron, senior vice president of resolution proponent Trillium Asset Management, said he hoped the measure would draw strong support this year.

"There has been a lot of focus on stakeholder capitalism and things like human capital management. This is a time when those words will be put to the test," he said.

(Reporting by Ross Kerber in Boston and Simon Jessop in London; Editing by Pravin Char)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Rivers State has recorded its first case of Covid-19, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 51, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control has disclosed.

The health agency on Wednesday reported five new cases of coronavirus, with two cases each in Abuja and Lagos, and one in Rivers.

The announcement came less than 24 hours after the Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, said all air, sea and land routes into the state will be closed to traffic at 6p.m. Thursday till further notice.

Mr Wike also banned all vehicular movements in and out of the state, as well as public events such as burials and weddings.

Also, public places such as parks, night clubs and cinemas have been closed.

New cases

The NCDC said out of the five new cases, three are returning travellers into Nigeria and two are close contacts of a confirmed case.

As at 11:25 pm 25th March, there are, 51 confirmed cases, two discharge and one death, it wrote on Twitter.

NCDC classified the cases as 48 active cases, two recovered and discharged and one death.

The death was a Nigerian with an underlying health condition.

Break down

A breakdown of cases by states shows that Lagos State still has the highest number of confirmed cases in the country with 32 cases, followed by Abuja with 10 cases, Ogun State three, and Ekiti, Oyo Edo, Bauchi Osun and Rivers have one case each.

Most of the cases reported are travellers who have just returned to the country. Other cases are people who have come in contact with infected people.

Some senior government officials have tested positive while others have self-isolated.

The positive cases include the Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, and the Chief of Staff to the President, Abba Kyari.

Meanwhile, most state governments have directed that some of its workers stay at home and not report to work.
Six new cases were registered since Wednesday evening.

Kyiv Mayor Klitschko has informed that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the city has risen to 40.

"The number of patients with coronavirus in the capital city increased to 40 people last night and this morning," he said during an online briefing on March 26. "Since today we've received six more laboratory-confirmed cases of the coronavirus from state-controlled Kyiv City Laboratory Center of Ukraine's Health Ministry."

Read alsoKyiv Mayor Klitschko doesn't rule out subway shutdown extension

According to Klitschko, the new cases are a 35-year-old woman and five men aged 28 to 70.

Four patients were hospitalized to Kyiv's Oleksandrivska Clinical Hospital. One man  a 70-year-old serviceman  is in a military hospital now. Another sick person is being treated while in self-isolation at home.

As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukraine's Health Ministry reported 156 confirmed COVID-19 cases and five deaths as of 10:00 Kyiv time on Thursday morning. "As of 10:00 on March 26, there were 156 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ukraine, of which five were fatal. One patient recovered and has already been discharged from hospital," the ministry's press service said on March 26.
Some investors rely on dividends for growing their wealth, and if you're one of those dividend sleuths, you might be intrigued to know that The North West Company Inc. (TSE:NWC) is about to go ex-dividend in just 3 days. If you purchase the stock on or after the 30th of March, you won't be eligible to receive this dividend, when it is paid on the 15th of April.

North West's next dividend payment will be CA$0.33 per share. Last year, in total, the company distributed CA$1.32 to shareholders. Looking at the last 12 months of distributions, North West has a trailing yield of approximately 7.2% on its current stock price of CA$18.23. Dividends are an important source of income to many shareholders, but the health of the business is crucial to maintaining those dividends. As a result, readers should always check whether North West has been able to grow its dividends, or if the dividend might be cut.

View our latest analysis for North West

If a company pays out more in dividends than it earned, then the dividend might become unsustainable - hardly an ideal situation. It paid out 78% of its earnings as dividends last year, which is not unreasonable, but limits reinvestment in the business and leaves the dividend vulnerable to a business downturn. We'd be concerned if earnings began to decline. That said, even highly profitable companies sometimes might not generate enough cash to pay the dividend, which is why we should always check if the dividend is covered by cash flow. Over the past year it paid out 163% of its free cash flow as dividends, which is uncomfortably high. We're curious about why the company paid out more cash than it generated last year, since this can be one of the early signs that a dividend may be unsustainable.

North West paid out less in dividends than it reported in profits, but unfortunately it didn't generate enough cash to cover the dividend. Cash is king, as they say, and were North West to repeatedly pay dividends that aren't well covered by cashflow, we would consider this a warning sign.

Story continues

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

TSX:NWC Historical Dividend Yield March 26th 2020

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Stocks in companies that generate sustainable earnings growth often make the best dividend prospects, as it is easier to lift the dividend when earnings are rising. If business enters a downturn and the dividend is cut, the company could see its value fall precipitously. This is why it's a relief to see North West earnings per share are up 5.5% per annum over the last five years. Earnings have been growing at a steady rate, but we're concerned dividend payments consumed most of the company's cash flow over the past year.

The main way most investors will assess a company's dividend prospects is by checking the historical rate of dividend growth. North West's dividend payments are effectively flat on where they were ten years ago.

The Bottom Line

Is North West worth buying for its dividend? Earnings per share have grown somewhat, although North West paid out over half its profits and the dividend was not well covered by free cash flow. It's not the most attractive proposition from a dividend perspective, and we'd probably give this one a miss for now.

With that being said, if you're still considering North West as an investment, you'll find it beneficial to know what risks this stock is facing. For example, we've found 3 warning signs for North West that we recommend you consider before investing in the business.

We wouldn't recommend just buying the first dividend stock you see, though. Here's a list of interesting dividend stocks with a greater than 2% yield and an upcoming dividend.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
Lets do this once and lets do it properly  thats the message on the national lockdown from a regional community civil defence coordinator.

Anne Dickson is the local contact for Communities Supporting Awareness and Readiness Rodney East (CARRE), which includes volunteers from community response, ratepayer and neighbourhood groups from Upper Waiwera north through Mahurangi. CARRE works closely with Auckland Councils emergency management civil defence team.

Anne says while a number of communities have already established support networks such as phone trees, she believes the formation of Mahurangi Caremongers is the best way to centralise information and support resources throughout the local area, while keeping contact to a minimum.

I welcome this centralised organisation as it means that there are less people doing the running around and increasing the possibility of transmission. They are doing a fantastic job, she says.

I am staying in touch with Auckland Emergency Management for any updates from them, but they are being guided by the National Covid-19 response team.

Anne is also warning that, even in the middle of the crisis, there are scammers trying to take advantage of people via phone calls or emails.

The main ones I am aware of are emails, apparently from Spark, asking people to click a link to confirm email details for emergency contact, and phone calls from bogus medical staff, telling people their tests are positive and they can send antibiotics immediately, they just need your credit card details, she says. More than ever, this is a time to be cautious.

INFO: Mahurangi Caremongers on Facebook, visit bit.ly/CareMongers, email caremongers@freerangemedia.co.nz, or call Peter Henderson on 027 477 6519, Murray Chapman on 027 496 6550 or Grant Henderson on 027 403 9918.
Online teaching on the cards

In the wake of the Covid-19 global pandemic, the Minister of Higher Education Science and Technology, Dr Blade Nzimande, instructed Universities to close and let the students go home.

Rhodes University Vice-Chancellor, Dr Sizwe Mabizela, has emphasised the importance of preparing for online teaching and learning. He said Rhodes University staff should not view the 21-day national lockdown period (27 March to 17 April 2020) as a vacation, but to use these days responsibly to prepare for online teaching and learning methods for when the university reopens on 20 April 2020.

According to Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Innovation, Dr Peter Clayton, national efforts are ongoing to get data zero-rated for the ac.za domain to support students and staff.

Arrangements are being made by Universities South Africa (USAf) and service providers for zero-rated mobile data to access specific institutional online resources, so that students do not have to carry the costs of remote learning. Zero-rating domains was a successful strategy implemented during the 2016 #FeesMustFall student movement that has been allowing for more equitable access to the internet for all students.

Globally, universities have implemented online teaching interventions during this time. While the levels of success are not known yet, lessons from developed countries are of little use as South Africa has unique contextual issues.

Rhodes University has formed a Teaching Continuity Task Team to ensure appropriate plans are in place should the university need to implement alternative teaching methods during the Covid-19 pandemic. The team conducted a survey of student and staff members internet access, device ownership and digital practices to inform teaching and learning support. The Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) has also been collecting second-hand smartphones from university staff to distribute to students in need.

The Educational Technology (EdTech) Unit in CHERTL has coordinated online and face-to-face workshops and developed online resources to assist teaching staff to teach online. The Unit will continue to offer online sessions and provide assistance for staff and students online during the lockdown period and can be contacted via edtech@ru.ac.za. The Units Educational Technology Specialists have been advising staff about strategies to develop online learning materials and activities and advocating mobile accessibility. Their approach has been both technical and social, in that they encourage staff to be sensitive and sensible in their approaches.

An important consideration has been around realistic expectations and what online engagement might mean within the context of Covid-19. Lecturers are encouraged to consider flexibility of deadlines for online assignments and to design their lessons as microlearning opportunities.

Students are already making use of the Android version of the RUconnected app, as demonstrated by CHERTL staff member and PhD student, Kelly Solomon, in this video. The RUconnected mobile app on Android has been installed more than 1000 times and many students are already using it. The Unit hopes to publish the Mac iOS version soon. The EdTech Unit will be developing online orientation for students in collaboration with teaching staff to better prepare students for online learning.

Source: Communications

Please help us to raise funds so that we can give all our students a chance to access online teaching and learning. Covid-19 has disrupted our students' education. Don't let the digital divide put their future at risk. Visit www.ru.ac.za/rucoronavirusgateway to donate
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-25 23:27:48|Editor: ZD

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In this video screenshot, Russian President Vladimir Putin gives a televised address to the nation in Moscow, Russia, March 25, 2020. Vladimir Putin declared on Wednesday a paid leave for all Russians next week to prevent the spread of COVID-19. (Xinhua/Bai Xueqi)

MOSCOW, March 25 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin declared on Wednesday that all Russians would receive paid leave next week as part of measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

All necessary institutions and establishments, including hospitals, pharmacies, shops, banks, transport and government bodies at all levels, will continue their work, Putin said in a televised address to the nation.

He proposed to postpone the referendum on constitutional amendments on April 22 and the new date will be set after consulting experts.

"Now it is extremely important to prevent the threat of the rapid spread of the disease," the Russian leader said.

Putin called on employers to ensure stability in the labor market and prevent a surge in unemployment, promising state assistance to businesses in solving these problems.

He proposed to increase unemployment compensation, raise subsidies for mothers with small children, and hike taxes on incomes going abroad.

The president proposed to freeze consumer and mortgage loans for Russians who are in a difficult situation due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Small and medium-sized enterprises should be granted a deferral of all taxes except value-added tax in the next six months, and micro businesses should also have a deferral of insurance contributions, Putin said.

He also suggested a moratorium on filing for bankruptcy and collecting debts and fines for six months.

Russia has registered 163 new cases of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours, the sharpest daily increase so far, raising the total number to 658, official data showed Wednesday.
Expectations for Potential Impact of COVID-19 on the Company's Clinical Development Activities

Strong clinical progress in lead assets Tedopi, OSE-127 and BI 765063

Bispecific antibody platform BiCKI: First project selected, cytokine IL-7 to be paired with anti-PD-1

5 million milestone payment from Servier accelerated and now expected by the start of a Phase 2 with OSE-127 in Sjogren's syndrome

FY 2019 turnover of 26 million

2019 year-end cash position of 25.8 million

Expected 3 million research tax credit and Servier milestone to provide funding until Q1 2021

Regulatory News:

OSE Immunotherapeutics (Paris:OSE) (ISIN: FR0012127173; Mnemo: OSE) today reported its consolidated annual financial results for 2019 and provided an update on key achievements, as well as the company's outlook for its agonist and antagonist immunotherapies for cancers and autoimmune diseases.

Alexis Peyroles, Chief Executive Officer of OSE Immunotherapeutics, said: "The current COVID-19 situation is a major public health concern and also an important factor impacting our ongoing and upcoming clinical trials. Health agencies and expert groups have said in the past few days that the continuation of clinical trials in hospitals would be very disrupted due to the mobilization of medical teams, containment and the potential risks associated with the epidemic of COVID-19 for fragile patients. Our short-term priority is to do our part to ensure healthcare systems have the resources to fight COVID-19 and to reduce the demands on healthcare professionals, while safeguarding patients currently taking part in our clinical trials.

"OSE Immunotherapeutics made significant clinical progress with our lead assets in immuno-oncology and auto-immune diseases in 2019 and early 2020.

"In 2019, our drug candidates being developed with partners Boehringer Ingelheim and Servier generated 25 million in milestone payments and both achieved key clinical milestones: initiation of the ongoing Phase 1 trial of myeloid checkpoint inhibitor BI 765063 in advanced solid tumors and completion of Phase 1 trial of anti-IL-7 receptor antagonistOSE-127 with positive results. Based on these results, two Phase 2 studies with OSE-127 are planned to start in 2020. Furthermore, a recent amendment to our license option agreement with Servier on OSE-127 confirms our partner's commitment and strong belief in the potential of the product.

"In 2020, we plan to continue the company's value creation by advancing our clinical and preclinical programs while adapting our organization to the COVID-19 crisis. In line with our business model, we will continue to secure financial resources to invest in R&D to discover and develop novel therapeutics for patients. In particular, the milestone payment associated with the recently-amended agreement with Servier on OSE-127 will reinforce our cash position and flexibility to progress on our development strategy. With these considerations in mind, we have provided expectations for the impact that COVID-19 could have on our clinical programs, given the current assessment of the situation. We continue to monitor the situation and will provide updates on any changes in timelines as they arise."

2019 KEY ACHIEVEMENTS

Major clinical progress with four differentiated therapeutic programs in immuno-oncology and autoimmune diseases

Tedopi, a combination of 10 neoepitopes intended to induce specific T-lymphocyte activation, is OSE Immunotherapeutics' most advanced drug candidate and is currently in a Phase 3 pivotal clinical trial, called Atalante 1, to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) following failure of immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment (PD-1/PD-L1).

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak situation and associated considerations of the safety of trial participants, compliance with good clinical practice (GCP), and risks to trial integrity during the COVID-19 pandemic following the specific guidelines of regulatory agencies, OSE Immunotherapeutics is reviewing the potential impact of this outbreak on the Atalante 1 trial. The Company will provide an update on the status of this review and on the results of the trial's pre-defined step 1 as soon as possible in the coming next weeks.

Tedopialso is in Phase 2 development in combination with Opdivo (nivolumab) in patients with pancreatic cancer, called TEDOPaM, a trial sponsored by the GERCOR cooperative group in oncology and supported by Bristol Myers Squibb. Patients screening and accrual in the TEDOPaM study are expected to be impacted by the COVID-19 situation in the coming months.

The Company will maintain an open dialogue with updates to these and other trials as more clarity arises on the overall impact this public health crisis has on expected timelines.

Tedopi's intellectual property in immuno-oncology in HLA-A2 positive patients has been further strengthened and extended by notice of allowance in Japan and in the U.S. for a new patent family related to Tedopi for use in the treatment of brain metastasis originating from cancers, including NSCLC. It was also strengthened by issuance in Japan of a new patent family protecting the product's method for inducing early T-lymphocyte memory response for use in the treatment of cancer.

A new licensing deal was signed with Chong Kun Dang (CKD) Pharmaceutical Corporation for potential registration and commercialization of Tedopi in South Korea. Financial terms of the contract include both upfront and short-term milestone payments of 1.2 million with total milestone payments of 4.3 million, as well as royalties on sales and transfer price in the high twenties percentage.

OSE Immunotherapeutics and HalioDx, an immuno-oncology diagnostic company, have initiated a collaboration to conduct a translational investigation of immune biomarkers as part of the ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial of Tedopi in NSCLC patients. This investigation is focused on identifying potential immune biomarkers in NSCLC. Based on the data generated, the collaboration aims at defining the profile of responder patients to Tedopi treatment in advanced lung cancer.

BI 765063 (formerly OSE-172), a myeloid checkpoint inhibitor and SIRPa antagonist, being developed in partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim, is in Phase 1 trial in advanced solid tumors.

The first patient was enrolled and dosed in June 2019 in the first-in-human Phase 1 trial, a dose finding study of BI 765063 administered as a single agent and in combination with Boehringer Ingelheim's monoclonal antibody PD-1 antagonist BI 754091. The trial aims to characterize safety, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and preliminary efficacy of the immunotherapy in patients with advanced solid tumors. The trial is expected to be impacted by the COVID-19 situation with regard to the screening and accrual of new patients in Q2 2020. Further updates will be made when available

OSE Immunotherapeutics received a 5.4 million payment from Bpifrance triggered by the successful completion of development milestones related to its collaborative program, called EFFI-CLIN, focused on evaluating BI 765063.

OSE-127 is a monoclonal antibody antagonist of the interleukin-7 receptor (IL-7R) being developed in partnership with Servier.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a first notice of allowance for a patent application covering OSE-127 and protecting the product until at least 2035. This new patent validates the product's novel and differentiated mechanism of action as the only full-antagonist of IL-7R in clinical development, a target which has been shown to induce a powerful antagonistic effect on effector T-lymphocytes responsible for causing autoimmune pathologies.

The Phase 1 clinical study of OSE-127 was completed end of 2019 with positive results showing a good safety and tolerability profile for the product. All pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic parameters were consistent and demonstrated a dose-proportionality across the several dose-levels up to 10 mg/kg. Based on these positive data, two Phase 2 trials are planned to start in 2020: in ulcerative colitis (OSE sponsored) and Sjogren's syndrome (Servier sponsored).

In March 2020, OSE Immunotherapeutics and Servier signed an amendment to the two-step global licensing option agreement for OSE-127. Under this amendment, both companies have agreed to modify the provisions regarding the potential exercise of the option, amending step 2 of the option agreement, making OSE eligible to receive a 5 million milestone payment from Servier upon the enrollment of the first patient in the Phase 2a clinical study in Sjogren's syndrome and the remaining 15 million payment upon exercise of an option at the completion of both Phase 2 clinical trials, and in priority upon completion of the Phase 2a clinical study in Sjogren's syndrome. The previous version of the agreement had the full 20 million milestone payment due upon completion of Phase 2 clinical study in ulcerative colitis. The initiation of both Phase 2 clinical trials planned in 2020 is subject to the evolution of the COVID-19 situation and will take place once all preparatory steps are achieved and once hospitals and healthcare professionals are able to ensure safe pratices during clinical research and patients' care.

FR104, a monoclonal antibody antagonist of CD28, is a Phase-2 ready asset with potential to be developed in either autoimmune disease or in transplantation.

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office granted a patent that covers the product and its therapeutic applications in T-lymphocyte-mediated autoimmune diseases, chronic inflammatory diseases and graft applications. At the same time, the USPTO issued a notice of allowance providing additional protection covering the use of FR104 in the treatment of T-lymphocyte-mediated chronic inflammatory diseases. Therapeutic applications of FR104 are thus covered through 2031.

A dynamic partnership business model based on innovative products to generate revenues to broaden R&D programs

OSE Immunotherapeutics received 25 million in milestone payments during H1 2019 (10 million payment from Servier upon exercise of first of two steps of a global licensing option agreement for OSE-127; 15 million in payments from Boehringer Ingelheim upon Clinical Trial Authorization and first dosing of a patient in the Phase 1 clinical trial of BI 765063).

OSE Immunotherapeutics is evaluating the best options for continuing sustainable development of FR104, a Phase 2-ready asset, in autoimmune diseases or in transplantation, including worldwide partnering opportunities.Furthermore, the Company is exploring global partnership opportunities for Tedopi, currently in Phase 3 in NSCLC and in Phase 2 in pancreatic cancer.

Research Development

Focused on novel target discovery to generate innovative agonists or antagonists of the immune response, the Company is pursuing advancement of new innovative research programs.

The Company disclosed its novel bispecific checkpoint inhibitor (BiCKI) platform built on the key backbone component anti-PD-1 (OSE-279) and targeting innovative targets. BiCKI represents the second generation of

PD-(L)1 inhibitors that have been used to increase antitumor efficacy in hard to treat cancers by addressing untapped immune evasion mechanisms. The first cytokine selected to be paired with the anti-PD-1 in the bispecific antibody is Interleukin-7 (IL-7), which has been shown to improve immune functions and cancer immunotherapy efficacy.

PD-(L)1 inhibitors that have been used to increase antitumor efficacy in hard to treat cancers by addressing untapped immune evasion mechanisms. The first cytokine selected to be paired with the anti-PD-1 in the bispecific antibody is Interleukin-7 (IL-7), which has been shown to improve immune functions and cancer immunotherapy efficacy. A new research collaboration agreement was concluded with premier cancer research hospital, Leon Berard Cancer Center in Lyon, France, to use artificial intelligence-based bioanalysis and bioinformatics to analyze gene expression in the human tumor microenvironment and the composition of tumor infiltrates. The findings from this collaboration will be used for the selection and validation of innovative targets for early development of new drug candidates from the platform of bispecific fusion proteins targeting PD-1 and innovative targets (BiCKI).

OSE Immunotherapeutics' "DC-Target" project was selected by the French National Research Agency to be awarded a grant of up to 800,000 as part of the "AAPG 2019" call for proposals. This research program, coordinated by the Leon Berard Cancer Center, aims to identify new targets of therapeutic interest expressed by myeloid cells through in-depth characterization of the role of each cell by single cell RNAseq (scRNAseq Cellenion) and gene editing.

Early 2020, the Company signed a drug development collaboration with innovative deep technology French start-up MAbSilico to use artificial intelligence-based solution for the development of monoclonal antibodies, including novel bispecific antibodies (BiCKI platform).

Governance

Nicolas Poirier, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of OSE Immunotherapeutics, was additionally appointed as Director, representing the employee shareholders.

Walter Flamenbaum resigned from the Company's Board of Directors on February 19, 2020.

2019 RESULTS

A meeting of the Board of Directors of OSE Immunotherapeutics was held on March 26, 2020 according to the ordinance n 2020-321. Following the opinion of the Audit Committee, the Board approved the annual and consolidated financial statements prepared under IFRS at 31 December 2019.

The key figures of the 2019 consolidated annual results are reported below (and presented in the attached tables):

In k December 31, 2019 December 31, 2018 Current operating result (1 469) 4,974 Operating result (1 472) 4,847 Net result (4,652) 5,490 Available cash* 25,842 12,433 Consolidated balance sheet 88,933 76,903

As of December 31, 2019, the Company's available cash* amounted to 25.8 million, giving financial visibility until Q1 2021 taking into account 3 million from research tax credit and an additional planned milestone payment of 5 million from Servier, following amendment to the global license option agreement on OSE-127, and expected at the start of a Phase 2 in Sjogren's syndrome.

During 2019, additional cash influx of 25 million has been generated by milestone payments related to partnerships (15 million from Boehringer Ingelheim upon CTA for the Phase 1 trial with BI 765063 and upcoming first patient dosed and 10 million from Servier upon exercising of the first option under the two-step option within global license agreement). Moreover, the Company received a 5.4 million payment from Bpifrance triggered by the successful completion of development milestones related to its collaborative program EFFI-CLIN, program focused on evaluating BI 765063.

This available cash will enable the Company to finance its clinical development costs and R&D costs on earlier stage products until Q1 2021 at least. If there are significant delays or clinical trial holds as a result of COVID-19, our cash runway will be extended beyond the current Q1 2021 projection, given that the bulk of our expenses are mainly related to clinical development expenditures.

The turnover amounted to 26 million due to the milestone payments from the collaboration agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim and Servier. During 2019, the Company recorded a consolidated operating loss of (1.5) million.

Current operating expenses were 27.4 million (19.5 million in 2018) of which 81% related to R&D. Among R&D expenses of 21.6 million, 85% are dedicated to the Company's ongoing clinical projects, in line with the broadening and progress of its pipeline.

*Available cash and cash equivalents and current financial assets

ABOUT OSE Immunotherapeutics

OSE Immunotherapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on developing and partnering therapies to control the immune system for immuno-oncology and autoimmune diseases. The company has a diversified first-in-class clinical portfolio consisting of several scientific and technological platforms including neoepitopes and agonist or antagonist monoclonal antibodies, all ideally positioned to fight cancer and autoimmune diseases. The most advanced therapeutic-candidate, Tedopi, is a proprietary combination of 10 neo-epitopes aimed at stimulating T-lymphocytes and is currently in Phase 3 development in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in patients in failure after checkpoint inhibitor treatment (anti PD-1 and anti PD-L1) and in Phase 2 testing in pancreatic cancer in combination with checkpoint inhibitor Opdivo. BI 765063 (OSE-172) (anti-SIRPa monoclonal antibody) is under a license and collaboration agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim; this checkpoint inhibitor is currently under Phase 1 clinical trial in advanced solid tumors. BiCKI is a bispecific fusion protein platform built on the key backbone component anti-PD-1 (OSE-279) and targeting innovative targets. FR104 (an anti-CD28 mAb) has successfully completed Phase 1 testing and has potential to treat autoimmune diseases. OSE-127 (monoclonal antibody targeting the CD127 receptor, the alpha chain of the interleukin-7 receptor) is partnered with Servier under a two-step licensing option agreement. The Phase 1 clinical phase of OSE-127 is completed and has shown positive results; two independent Phase 2 studies planned in ulcerative colitis (OSE sponsor) and Sjogren's syndrome (Servier sponsor) to start in 2020, subject to the evolution of the COVID-19 situation.

For more information: https://ose-immuno.com/en/

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Forward-looking statements

This press release contains express or implied information and statements that might be deemed forward-looking information and statements in respect of OSE Immunotherapeutics. They do not constitute historical facts. These information and statements include financial projections that are based upon certain assumptions and assessments made by OSE Immunotherapeutics' management in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends, current economic and industry conditions, expected future developments and other factors they believe to be appropriate.

These forward-looking statements include statements typically using conditional and containing verbs such as "expect", "anticipate", "believe", "target", "plan", or "estimate", their declensions and conjugations and words of similar import. Although the OSE Immunotherapeutics management believes that the forward-looking statements and information are reasonable, the OSE Immunotherapeutics' shareholders and other investors are cautioned that the completion of such expectations is by nature subject to various risks, known or not, and uncertainties which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of OSE Immunotherapeutics. These risks could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed in or implied or projected by the forward-looking statements. These risks include those discussed or identified in the public filings made by OSE Immunotherapeutics with the AMF. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. This press release includes only summary information and should be read with the OSE Immunotherapeutics Reference Document filed with the AMF on 26 April 2019, including the annual financial report for the fiscal year 2018, available on the OSE Immunotherapeutics' website. Other than as required by applicable law, OSE Immunotherapeutics issues this press release at the date hereof and does not undertake any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking information or statements.

APPENDICES

CONSOLIDATED PROFIT LOSS

P&L IN K December 31, 2019 December 31, 2018 Turnover 25 952 24 456 Other operating income 0 0 Total Revenues 25 952 24 456 Research and development expenses (21 655) (15 057) Overhead expenses (3 898) (3 448) Expenses related to shares payments (1 868) (977) OPERATING PROFIT/LOSS CURRENT (1 469) 4 974 Other operating products (badwill) 0 0 Other operating expenses (2) (127) OPERATING PROFIT/LOSS (1 472) 4 847 Financial products 221 86 Financial expenses (213) (227) PROFIT/LOSS BEFORE TAX (1 464) 4 707 Income Tax (3 188) 783 NET PROFIT/LOSS (4 652) 5 490 Of which consolidated net result attributable to shareholders (4 652) 5 490 Net earnings attributable to shareholders Weighted average number of shares outstanding 14 892 496 14 634 760 Basic earnings per share (0,31) 0,38 Diluted earnings per share (0,31) 0,35

IN K 2019 2018 NET RESULT (4652) 5 490 Amounts to be recycled in the income statement: Unrealized gains on securities available for sale, net of tax Currency conversion difference (43) (42) Amounts not to be recycled in the income statement: (37) 12 Actuarial gains and losses on post-employment benefits Other comprehensive income in the period (80) (30) GLOBAL PROFIT/LOSS (4 732) 5 460

CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEET

ASSETS IN K December 31, 2019 December 31, 2018 Intangible assets 52 600 52 600 Tangible assets 1 009 904 Right-of-use assets 1 692 0 Financial assets 287 103 Differed tax assets 283 272 TOTAL NON CURRENT ASSETS 55 871 53 879 Trade receivables 747 2 253 Other current assets 6 474 3 834 Tax accounts receivables 0 4 504 Current financial assets 0 2 861 Cash and cash equivalents 25 842 9 573 TOTAL CURRENT ASSETS 33 062 23 024 TOTAL ASSETS 88 933 76 903 EQUITY LIABILITIES in K December 31, 2019 December 31, 2018 SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY Stated capital 3 001 2 963 Share premium 21 670 21 708 Merger premium 26 827 26 827 Treasury stock (148) (168) Reserves and retained earnings 11 838 4 934 Consolidated result (4 652) 5 490 TOTAL SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY 58 536 61 754 NON-CURRENT DEBTS Non-current financial liabilities 9 211 3 832 Non-current lease liabilities 1 413 0 Non-current deferred tax liabilities 5 066 2 010 Non-current provisions 377 233 TOTAL NON-CURRENT DEBTS 16 067 6 074 CURRENT DEBTS Current financial liabilities 548 628 Current lease liabilities 309 0 Trade payables 6 918 6 555 Corporate income tax liabilities 20 86 Social and tax payables 1 723 1 231 Other debts and accruals 4 812 575 TOTAL CURRENT DEBTS 14 330 9 075 TOTAL LIABILITIES 88 933 76 903

CONSOLIDATED CASH FLOW STATEMENT

In K December 31, 2019 December 31, 2018 CONSOLIDATED RESULT (4 652) 5 490 Depreciation, amortization and provision expenses 323 116 Amortization on "right-of-use" 251 0 Shares based payments (1) 1 511 845 CASH FLOW BEFORE TAX (2 568) 6 450 Financial charges 30 (783) Income tax expenses 3 188 0 Tax paid (70) Working capital variation (2) 8 555 (4 590) CASH FLOW FROM OPERATING ACTIVITIES (A) 9 135 1 077 Tangible assets increase (336) (593) Financial assets variation 2 861 40 Mutual finds units accounted in current financial assets 34 22 Loans and advances variation (184) (27) CASH FLOW FROM INVESTING ACTIVITIES (B) 2 375 (558) Capital increase (including share premium) 0 23 Own shares transactions 0 (67) Warrant subscription 0 7 Loans subscription 5 628 0 Loans repayment (455) (485) Lease debt repayment (3) (251) 0 Financial charges 164 (71) CASH FLOW FROM FINANCING ACTIVITIES (C) 4 759 (592) Currency translation transactions (D) 0 0 CASH VARIATION E (A B C D) 16 269 (73) CASH OPENING BALANCE (F) 9 573 9 646 CASH CLOSING BALANCE (G) 25 842 9 573 DIFFERENCE: E (G-F) 0 0

1. Warrants and free shares awards granted in 2019 and valuated for 1 511 K

2. Mainly explained by:

Decrease of trade receivable for 1 506 K

Decrease of other current assets for 1 864 K

Increase of trade accounts payable for 363 K

Increase of social and tax payable for 493 K

Increase of other debts for 4 237 K

3. Explained by IFRS16 application, which corresponds to reimbursement of lease debt for 251 K

As of December 31, 2019, the available cash is as follows:

In K December 31, 2019 December 31, 2018 Cash equivalents according to IAS 7 25 842 9 573 Current financial assets 0 2 861 AVAILABLE CASH 25 842 12 433

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005565/en/

Contacts:

OSE Immunotherapeutics

Sylvie Detry

Sylvie.detry@ose-immuno.com

+33 153 198 757

U.S. Media: LifeSci Communications

Darren Opland, Ph.D.

darren@lifescicomms.com

+1 646 627 8387

French Media: FP2COM

Florence Portejoie

fportejoie@fp2com.fr

+33 607 768 283

U.S. and European Investors

Guillaume van Renterghem

gvanrenterghem@lifesciadvisors.com
The 21-day lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not going to be just a fight against the coronavirus, but also superstition, rumours and an unscientific temperament among many Indians that is complicating the already uphill task.

The 21-day lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not going to be just a fight against the coronavirus, but also superstition, rumours and an unscientific temperament among many Indians that is complicating the already uphill task.

Before Modi made the announcement, a series of measures were taken to spread awareness about social distancing, scientific understanding and the Janta curfew. But reports from far-flung parts of India  a country already divided by by differences in income, education and geography  emerged that the people were behaving in away that contradicted the essence of this messaging.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

Amid calls by state governments and medical professionals for social distancing, many Indians indulged in behaviour that challenged the basic norms of public health. Soon after the news of the coronavirus, a right-wing group called Hindu Mahasabha organised a gaumutra (cow urine) party.

Hindu Mahasabha president Chakrapani Maharaj said that there would be gaumutra counters and incense sticks made of cow dung at the event to drive away the coronavirus. He also claimed the virus would not affect vegetarians and called on public figures eating meat to apologise to the virus.

Facebook pages were flooded with videos claiming the pandemic was nature's revenge on mankind for eating non-vegetarian food. The Wuhan market in China, thought to be the epicentre of the disease, was the reason cited for this.

Instead of observing precautions to prevent the spread of the virus, some performed pujas. In Agra, prayers were offered to the Yamuna river, which according to Hindu mythology is the sister of Yama, the god of death. There were also reports of a puja where an effigy of the virus was "fed" halwa puri to satiate its hunger.

Some religious preachers, in clips circulating on social media, claimed God sent the coronavirus to punish and destroy their enemies.

Soon after the outbreak Assam health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma appealed to Muslims not to congregate in mosques. Though this appeal was received well by many, others were hostile. In many parts of the state, Muslim men took part in processions claiming this appeal was a "threat" to Islam.

One of the most egregious examples came on the day of Modi's Janta curfew. The people of India were supposed to observe a self-imposed curfew and express gratitude for health workers rising their lives by clapping and banging pots and pans. But in many parts of the nation, many took to the streets in large numbers to sing and dance, thus undoing all the benefits of the curfew.

The fight ahead isn't just against a virus, but also a part of India itself.
Coronavirus infection surged beyond 3,000 on Friday with big jumps in the number of cases in NSW and Victoria.

Authorities are increasingly concerned about the number of transmissions between Australians who haven't been overseas or in contact with someone infected.

NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said there were at least 1,405 COVID-19 cases in the country's worst-hit state on Friday morning, taking the national total to 3,050.

Victoria said the number of confirmed cases was at 574, with infections increasing by about 10 per cent from Thursday.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Australia soared past 3,000 on Friday

In NSW, 877 patients are return travellers and 278 cases had been transmitted locally through close contact with an infected person or a known coronavirus cluster.

NSW Health stressed its concern about 145 cases transmitted locally with an 'unknown source'.

Dr Chant said 134 people were receiving care with 62 of them at home, 19 in ICU and 53 in standard hospital wards.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the state is at a 'critical stage' as the number of coronavirus cases continues to increase in NSW.

'The one figure that we are most worried about is the number of people that are getting it within the community,' she said.

'That's why it is so important that all of us maintain social distancing if we have to be out and about.

'And in the case of my parents, I haven't let them out of the home and I won't.'

Pictured: New South Wales coronavirus hot spots. NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said there were at least 1,405 COVID-19 cases in NSW on Friday

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

Ms Berejiklian encouraged the vulnerable to call Service NSW on 13 77 88 if they need assistance.

The premier said they have seen 'far more limited activity everywhere' and attendance in schools was at 10 per cent or less.

'It is up to all of us to come together to do our part and deal with the disease at this critical stage,' Ms Berejiklian said.

'Because if we keep it contained as much as we can at this stage, we are better off in the next few weeks and months and I can't stress that enough.

'So, please heed the warnings. Please don't move around unless you have to.

'If you're an older or vulnerable person, don't even leave home.'

Professor Brendan Crabb, an infectious disease researcher, told ABC Radio that further measures 'need to be taken immediately' to combat the outbreak.

'The reason being that at this point in time, it's all we've really got, quite a blunt instrument  lockdown,' he said on Thursday.

'I would recommend we pull every suppression lever we have now.

'That means not just flatten the curve, but bend the curve down to a very low level  and then you come out of that.'

NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said 134 people in New South Wales were receiving care for coronavirus, including 19 people in ICU

Meanwhile, new figures show Waverley Council in Sydney's eastern suburbs has recorded the highest number of confirmed coronavirus.

The local government area has had 105 cases of COVID-19, according to data published on the NSW Health website on Thursday.

The Sydney LGA has recorded 69, while Northern Beaches and Woollahra have recorded 68 and 66 cases respectively.

Ms Berejiklian said the government was 'looking very closely' at the impact of Monday's shutdowns on pubs, cinemas and churches. If they weren't sufficient, further action would be taken.

Five people in NSW were handed infringement notices on Thursday for flouting coronavirus public health orders.

Police have the power to hand out fines of $1,000 to individuals and $5,000 to businesses that breach public health orders or ministerial directions.

There are 2,996 confirmed cases of infection in Australia and 13 people have died.
File Image

The Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief package that finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced on March 26 clearly sets the governments priorities about who needs to be protected the most from the devastating disruptions that the coronavirus pandemic and the nation-wide lockdown have caused.

The government has picked those living on the margins, those with limited savings and those with weak borrowing power as the first set of people for handholding. These are daily wage earners, construction workers, farmers and women with low income.

The lockdowns effect is very similar to a mechanical hard stop on a device that was running. What happens when the government asks factories to shut down because people have to be confined at home? What happens when the government asks construction activity to stop overnight because areas with large gatherings have to be emptied out? What happens when restaurants and shops, other than those selling essentials, are ordered to shutter down because peoples physical proximity can add to the diseases spread?

In such a situation, a restaurant, a retail garment seller, a property builder and a road builder will all show a similar first instinct: to cut costs. The temporary staff working at these establishments are often the first ones to find themselves out of work.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Many of these eke out a subsistence living, spending a very large proportion of their income on food, leaving very little to spend on other non-essentials or aspirational products and services. They are a perfect exemplification of the Engel's Law, an economic theory German statistician Ernst Engel propounded in the 19th century, stating that the percentage spent on food purchases decreases as income rises and vice-versa.

With many of them suddenly jobless, their incomes have dramatically collapsed. The uncertainty over when economic activity is likely regain momentum has only deepened anxieties. This hard stop in the economy, unlike other recessions caused by systemic flaws such as the debt bubble of 2008, has been brought upon by the government because of a medical emergency. It is intentional and unavoidable.

Unlike previous occasions, when the meltdown was spread over a few quarters with signals flashing from various corners, the current interruption is more akin to switching of a light bulb. However, unlike a light bulb, an economy cannot be switched on again at the press of a button.

It is elegant to argue that production is plunging since workers are away from work. It is also neat to reason that once the medical crisis passes, production will resume and all jobs will be restored. In the real world though, switching on an economy is considerably more laboured and prolonged that switching it off.

That is perhaps the reason why the government has chosen to adopt a graded action plan, instead of a big bang one-off push to keep the lights on. The package that Sitharaman announced should be seen in this context. It is more of a safeguard package, dictated by the need to safeguard incomes of those who have seen the lockdown shave off a large proportion of their daily earnings.

The first step is to inspire confidence about the State-supported safety net among the most vulnerable. This is precisely what the government has sought to convey.

One would reckon a few more packages are in the works, particularly for the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), traders who have been forced to close operations, and perhaps Indias vast consuming middle class that keeps the economys wheels moving rapidly. Large corporations, who are looking towards that one big stimulus, may have to wait a little longer.
Governments all over the world have been considering cellphone surveillance to help track and contain the spread of the coronavirus.

In Italy, Germany and Austria, Reuters reports , telecoms companies say they are turning over data containing location information to public health officials, though aggregated and anonymized to prevent individuals from being identified. Other media reports say governments in South Korea and South Africa are monitoring individual cellphone locations, and Israel this month authorized security agents tracing the coronavirus infection to access location and other data from millions of cellphone users that The New York Times reports they had been collecting, previously undisclosed, since 2002. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the program would maintain the balance between the rights of the individual and needs of general society.

Separately, authorities in Iran , Poland , and India are among those developing apps to monitor whether people are observing quarantine or interacting with suspected COVID-19 patients, according to international news reports.

Although public health experts say strict limitations on movement are required to contain the coronavirus, journalists are acutely aware of the risks posed to their work when governments and technology companies monitor citizens cellphone activities. In recent years, CPJ has tracked the journalist targets of Pegasus, a technology the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group markets to help government agencies hack into individual phones. (The firm has told CPJ that it investigates allegations of abuse.) CPJ has separately documented how intelligence officials can abuse access to cellphone networks to track and lure reporters and their sources.

CPJ spoke to Bill Marczak, a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Berkeley, and a leading expert on cellphone surveillance technology, about the implications of coronavirus tracking measures for journalists and other targets of government surveillance. Marczak, who is also a fellow at the University of Torontos Citizen Lab and helped identify and analyze the first known use of Pegasus spyware against a civil society target, told CPJ that surveillance powers and technologies that emerge during this crisis could be very tough to roll backand could be turned against journalists in vulnerable settings. His answers have been edited for concision and clarity.

Were at a moment now when a lot of governments are saying they need to ramp up cellphone surveillance to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Are you concerned about how systems may be built out?

Anytime when there's a sense of urgency around proposals to collect more data about people, those are the times when we need to pay attention, because bad things can happen. Systems can be very quickly spun up without careful review, because there's a sense they need to get done now. Privacy and security can become an afterthought.

What we know about location data from cellphones is that even if it's assigned an anonymous identifier, it can be reverse engineered to see where people areat home; at work; on their commute; walking up and down their block; and of course, journalists meeting with a source.

Weve seen lots of proposals for enhanced surveillance of cellphones during this crisishow are you thinking about the range of whats out there?

On one side of the spectrum, we see places like Israel, where the authorities come out and say, Hey, so weve actually been collecting location metadata since 2002. We never told you about it. And now we are going to use it for public health."

Then theres these proposals for apps for people to download on their phones. Some do location tracking. Some claim they dont.=

In Singapore , for example, theyve rolled out an app that claims to do proximity tracking. They use Bluetooth to ping nearby phones that have the app installed, to see which phones are near which people. And if someone is diagnosed, then the Ministry of Health can get that proximity data to map who might be exposed. These proposals sometimes don't require the government to have a central database of everyone's location history.

Proximity data could be problematic too, depending on where its stored. Even if its stored on the phone itself, [that phone] could be seized by authorities. You can imagine a situation where some governments can say, This person is a journalist or activist, lets see who they were meeting with, let's grab their phone.

So we do run into all of these troubling privacy possibilities with proximity trackingthough I would say theres less potential for large scale abuse if the data is stored on a device itself.

Government Technology Agency staff demonstrate Singapore's new contact-tracing smartphone app called TraceTogether, as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus on March 20, 2020. Bill Marczak, an expert in cellphone surveillance technology, told CPJ about the implications for journalists as governments ramp up their capacity to monitor citizens in a time of crisis. (AFP/Catherine Lai)

Theres some confusion about how governments get access to these cell phone records. How does it work?

From a technical perspective, all it would require is for the government to go to cellphone companies and say, Hey, we need to access this data, can you please share it? They could set up some sort of arrangement where the phone companies ship that data over to a government database. Or you could see a situation where it stays with the phone company and the government requests data over time.

But the bottom line is phone companies canand doreceive and log this sort of information.

In the U.S., weve seen cases where bounty hunters have accessed peoples location through brokers who are reselling this data. I suggest an appropriate mental model of this is to assume phone companies are collecting and storing this data, and can be reselling and sharing it.

We see some private companies coming in and making the case they can build a system to gather that location data, and perhaps make it useful for fighting the virus.

There was reporting that the NSO Group was possibly spinning up a new system. It wasnt clear from the limited information disclosed how that monitoring would actually work. But you can imagine a situation where someone is diagnosed, you get their number, and the NSO Group starts doing location tracking on that number. This could be combined with CCTV or facial recognition technology to issue notifications when others come in contact with the infected person. But we dont know. NSO has released no information about this.

[Editors note: CPJ emailed an NSO Group spokesperson in late March asking for more information about its coronavirus system but did not receive a reply before publication.]

The private surveillance industry isn't exactly known for its respect for human rights in general, and press freedom in particular. Last year, the U.N. special rapporteur for freedom of expression even called for a global moratorium on the sale of these technologies. Are you worried about these players stepping in now?

Given the urgency with which a lot of governments are understandably approaching coronavirus, you are going to see authorities reaching for off-the-shelf solutionsthey will look to buy solutions from existing surveillance firms. Its problematic that a lot of the companies in this space have track records of working with intelligence agencies and arent exactly above board. Theyve potentially helped spy on journalists and activists in the past. And thats concerning to me.

Theres another thing I am concerned about. Once a government shells out a bunch of money for a new surveillance system for location tracking, justified by the coronavirus, what happens when the virus is over? How does it get used, how does it get repurposed? Once you implement a system to track a bunch of peopleits not likely its going away in the future.

In this moment where governments are reaching for more authority and technical capacity to monitor cell phones, how should journalists be thinking about these things? Should they be resisting?

I wouldnt encourage people to subvert efforts to track them if they are infected. But when the crisis is over and life returns to normal, people should be aware that this tracking and tracing could be used beyond the length of the crisis. If you are forced to install something on your phoneand you can't really say noyou are going to have to imagine youve entered a country where you have a police minder. Perhaps dont contact a super secret source.

What role can journalists play here?

We need journalists to dig into these new schemes. If the government says we are doing location tracking, or we are doing contact tracing, we need reporters digging into what exactly they are doing. What company did you buy that tool from? Who has access to the data?

Are we at an inflection point here for cellphone surveillance?

Its early, but this is how I am thinking about it. For governments looking for tools to hone their authoritarianismregimes who want to get more control, or get more visibility into their citizens livesthe coronavirus is an issue like fake news or cybersecurity or terrorism that can been used to justify enhanced powers. For a sufficiently authoritarian government, the barrier to knowing where everyone is all the time is basically just cost.

In democratic contexts, its cost, plus getting over whatever oversight or checks are built into the system. We are going to hear more and more that we have to implement these tracking methods so we can go on about our lives.

Report by: Avi Asher-Schapiro/CPJ Global Tech Senior Correspondent
NEW DELHI: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday (March 26, 2020) announced Rs 1.7 lakh crore financial package for the poor to help them deal with the ongoing crisis due to the coronavirus pandemic. Addressing a press briefing, the FM said, ''A package is ready for the poor who need immediate help like migrant workers and urban and rural poor. No one will go hungry. The package is worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore.''

The Rs 1,70,000-crore scheme, dubbed the "Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan scheme" will "address the concerns of poor, migrant workers and those who need help", she said. The FM also announced Rs 50 lakh per person insurance cover for doctors, paramedic and healthcare workers dealing with coronavirus outbreak.

The Finance Minister said the government will front-load Rs 2,000 payment to farmers in the first week of April under the existing PM Kishan Yojana to benefit 8.69 crore farmers.

''8.69 crore farmers will be immediately benefited through Direct cash transfers. Instalment of Rs 2,000 in the first week of April will be transferred,'' she said.

''As many of 20.5 crore women Jan Dhan Account holders will get Rs 500 per month for next three months to run their households. For poor senior citizens, widow and disabled will get an ex-gratia of Rs 1,000,'' the FM said. ''Also, the daily wage under MNREGA has been increased to Rs 202 a day from Rs 182 to benefit 5 crore workers,'' she added.

Also, the beneficiaries of Ujjwala LPG scheme will get free cooking gas for the next three months, she said. This forms part of the Rs 1.70 lakh crore Gramin Kalyan Package.

Sitharaman also announced distribution of 5 kg of wheat or rice and one kg of preferred pulses free-of-cost every month over the next three months to 80 crore poor across the country to deal with the economic impact of the lockdown amid coronavirus outbreak.

''Nearly 80 crore poor people have been covered (2/3rd of Indias population), in addition to already allotted 5Kg of rice/wheat per person, an additional 5kg will be free. Additional 1kg pulse (according to regional preference) will be given,'' the FM said.

FM also announced an ex-gratia of Rs 1,000 to 3 crore poor senior citizen, poor widows and poor disabled.

Making an important announcement, the FM said that the government will pay the Employees' Provident Fund (EPF) contribution, both of employer and employee.

''Put together it will be 24%, this will be for next 3 months. This is for those establishments which have upto 100 employees and 90% of them earn less than 15,000.'' the FM said.

''Govt is ready to amend the regulation of EPF due to this pandemic so that workers can draw upto 75% non-refundable advance from credit in PF account or 3 months salary, whichever is lower, '' the FM said adding, ''This decision is going to benefit 4.8 crore workers.''

The Finance Minister, who is heading the task force evaluating the financial fallout of this outbreak and chart out the course ahead, outlined a bailout package for the people and industry today.

Earlier this week, the Finance Minister had said a package is under works and will be announced. With the coronavirus lockdown hitting the Indian industry hard and causing job losses, Sitharaman had said an economic package to help tide over the crisis will be announced very soon.

Sitharaman told reporters an announcement on the package would be made sooner than later. Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week had constituted a task force headed by the Finance Minister to work out package for economy hit by coronavirus.

As per Union Health Ministry`s latest bulletin, the total number of COVID-19 positive cases has climbed to 649 in the country, including 593 active cases, 42 cured or discharged people and 13 deaths.

It may be noted that the Prime Minister, for a second time in a week, on Tuesday evening announced a 21-day countrywide lockdown from midnight due to the outbreak of the coronavirus.

PM Modi stressed that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly. In his televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Modi said that it is vital to break the chain of the disease and experts have said that at least 21 days are needed for it.

The Prime Minister, who had also addressed the nation last week, said the lockdown has drawn a "Lakshman Rekha" in every home and people should stay indoors for their own protection and for that of their families.

The 21-day lockdown has seen anxious people scrambling to nearby shops for essential supplies and services, prompting the government to urge citizens not to panic. E-commerce companies delivering essentials like groceries, medicines and food, however, alleged harassment from law enforcement officials and security guards, leading to severe inconvenience in times of an unprecedented crisis, calling for an urgent intervention from the government.

Despite the lockdown that has taken buses off the road and trains off the track, many migrant labourers have started on their way home, willing to risk sealed borders and vigilant policemen, who are tasked with ensuring that people not leave their homes except for most pressing need.
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The BJP said on Thursday it is putting in place a mechanism to link various community kitchens, which can serve a minimum of 1,000 people per day, to ensure food to the urban poor, migrant workers and others working in the unorganised sector hit hard by the nationwide lockdown.

Party president J P Nadda held a meeting via a video link with all its state chiefs to scale up the programme to make available food to the poor.

The party also floated an online form seeking details of people or organisations running community kitchens.

"Please make an entry (verifies & seen by you only) of the community kitchens you have in your neighbourhood. We want to create a network so that the last person can be fed during 21-day lockdown," BJP general secretary (organisation) B L Santhosh said on Twitter.

The saffron party on Wednesday announced its plan to feed five crore poor people daily during the lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, with Nadda calling for one crore party workers to provide food to five persons each.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ive been trying to start writing this column for an hour, but I work from home so Ive been distracted. Thats OK.

The thing to know about working from home is its an internal battle with yourself to keep working, but dont beat yourself up about it.

In a 1982 interview the late, prolific writer Italo Calvino said, Every morning I tell myself, today has to be productive  and then something happens that prevents me from writing  something always happens. He was talking about mundane things like paying bills and going on errands, let alone a global pandemic. Give yourself some slack.

If youre new to working from home, welcome to the office! Ive been at this for nearly two decades, after some time spent in real offices. The transition wont be as easy as it seems, and theres no right way of doing it. Pants, of course, are optional.

To get in the mood for work, the writer Gay Talese famously puts on a suit and tie when he goes to work in his Manhattan basement office. I dress, or rather dont dress, the exact opposite of that. Dressing up is for when I finally leave the house. Find what works for you and makes you comfortable.

Working from home remains a love-hate relationship for me as it can be incredibly lonely. When I had an office job, there was a fellow who would come around every day and talk about the weather. He drove into Toronto from Barrie so it was always on his mind. I loathed his visits. I didnt want to talk about the weather. I miss him and wish he would come around again because I love talking about the weather now.

The casual human contact in an office, like chatting about everyday stuff like the weather, kept the day bouncing along and spirits up. At home, my virtual water cooler is social media, filled with great friends and acquaintances. The trouble is their buoyant presence comes alongside endless news and the toxic aspects of social media. It can lead to a dismal, spiralling mood over the day. Be wary of that.

If your new home office is shared with your family, that brings on a whole other set of challenges. Perhaps take regular family breaks as a replacement for idle chats with office mates. Be mindful, too, of how your work affects the people you live with. This is going to be a delicate balance, and your usual work patterns will change.

In that internal struggle to force yourself to work, the guilt over time spent not working is real. Your production level will not be the same at home. Things will take longer to get done, even simple communication. In normal times you might peek your head above a cubicle or through a door to get a question answered. Now youll wait for a message, email or phone call to be returned.

While you probably didnt miss the commute, working from home means less moving around and built-in exercise, like the walk from transit, your parking spot or to lunch. Social and physical distancing may make this difficult, but find a way to get fresh air and movement at regular intervals. Even a walk around the block, if done responsibly, brings new energy.

Like offices, the conditions in your home will differ. Everyone is learning as they go, even us veterans. A good office is an incredibly social place though, and a lot more than work happens in it. Thats the stuff that keeps you going.

Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef
(Editors Note: Dr. Wayne Shearer, 95, is a retired optometrist and retired colonel from the U.S. Air Force Reserve now living in Hixson. In his early 90s, he decided to sit down and write from memory and a few records he still possesses his recollections of going through Army Air Corps pilot training at several bases in the United States during World War II. A lifelong writer, he wanted to pen them as he remembered them happening at the time. He also recreates now-lost letters as best as he recalls writing them and references newspaper articles he collected at the time and still possesses. This is the 35th in a series of regular excerpts from his as yet unpublished book, Under This Arch.)

* * * * *

Setting: Eagle Pass, Texas, Army Air Field and the big blue skies above it.

August 7, 1944:

Today (Monday) weve been busy with ground school sessions concerning the P-40. It is a beautiful airplane that Ive admired since high school reading about the famed Flying Tigers. It is no longer used in combat and my previous instructor flew it in the early war days.

Most of our P-40s are the newer P-40 models with 1,200 horsepower. There may be a few older, war-wearing ones on base. Weve got to pass the blindfold cockpit instrument checklist along with some written tests. Our first flight will be solo, so I must know my way around the cockpit. I have a helpful instructor a year or so older than I am.

The San Antonio Express in San Antonio, Texas, on Tuesday morning, August 8, 1944, announced: U.S. FORCE 120 MILES FROM PARIS. American forces drove to within 120 miles of Paris Monday as their comrades far to the rear smashed the biggest German counter-attack since D-Day. Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradleys tanks and doughboys ran into the first organized resistance.

Other headlines from that days paper: BOMBERS CONTINUE RAIDS ON FLEEING NAZIS FACTORIES. An explosive packed force of up to 1,200 U.S. heavy bombers blasted Europe from British and Italian bases Monday.

JAPS HOLD ONLY TENTH OF GUAM.

August 12, 1944:

Today (Saturday) its been over a week since I graduated. Mostly, we are studying the various P-40 systems. The people, both officers and enlisted personnel, are helpful. As a new member of the officer corps, Ill always remember and be conscious of what Sgt. Gruff (Old Army) told us in basic training: Remember that as an officer, youll still get into your trousers as you did as a private. Good advice!

The Mobile Press Register in Mobile, Alabama, on Sunday, August 13, 1944, stated: ALLIES CLOSING TRAP IN FRANCE. The Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, announced that with U.S. armored spearheads reported by the Germans within 30 miles of a strategic junction with British-Canadian forces near Falaise, all signs pointed early Sunday to a dramatic climax confronting the German 7th Army with a disastrous Stalingrad in France.

Other headlines from that days paper: JAP MILITARY MIGHT DOOMED BY ROOSEVELT. Peace forever will be assured in the Pacific, says President Roosevelt.

CITY OF FLORENCE SEIZED BY ALLIES WITHOUT A STRUGGLE.

August 14, 1944:

Today (Monday) after my instructor decided I could find the instruments with the blindfold test, he got on the wing and helped me get the engine started. Truthfully, upon energizing the starter of the big V-12 cylinder engine, it started with what sounded like an explosion, then settled down smoothly. I thought it had blown up!

With its big, long, elegant nose, it is very necessary to S curve it, as we were first taught with the BT-14, when taxiing this airplane. It is so much larger than the AT-6. It has the needed power to get its four tons into the sky. I only did some easy turns and straight ahead, power back, landing type stalls. I like this airplane. My first landing was OK.

One of the fellows shared an interesting letter from a college friend, who got his pilot wings 5 or 6 months ago and ended up at Thomasville Army Air Field, Georgia, Replacement Training Unit (R.T.U.). He said most of the P-40s were war-weary old tigers that still had the tiger shark art nose work.

He and another pilot flying at 9,000 feet off the Georgia coast were waiting their turn to do target practice, when suddenly he heard a loud bang. His engine quit and the cockpit filled with thick smoke. He quickly opened the canopy, as his training kicked in. He held the stick back to keep the planes nose up, stood on the seat, and climbed out and slid off the wing to avoid being hit by the tail.

Now away from the P-40, he pulled the ripcord ring and gently floated down into the ocean. He landed close to a fishing boat and was picked up by several men in the boat. The very next day, he was flying over the same area doing target practice again. He is now flying P-51s. I dont think weve had any problems occurring with our newer P-40s or any type of accidents recently.

The San Antonio Express on Tuesday morning, August 15, 1944, said: NEW INVASION HIT SOUTHERN FRANCE. American, British and French forces stormed the Mediterranean coast of France by sea and air today, seized beachheads and prepared to strike northward toward a juncture with Allied armies advancing on Paris.

Other headlines from that days paper: BOMBS RIP NAZI PATH TO ESCAPE. Allied headquarters announced that torrents of bombs and shells sealed the narrow corridor open to remnants of the German 7th Army trapped in the Normandy pocket today, dooming perhaps 100,000 Nazis.

HOPELANGFORD PLANE FORCED DOWN. Frances Langford and Bob Hope were unhurt when their plane was forced down yesterday at Northern Newcastle, Australia, as they tour Southwest Pacific battle stations.

Letter home:

August 17, 1944

Dear Mother and Dad,

Yes, your son did graduate and has the rank of Flight Officer. Im now flying the P-40 with the others for these additional two weeks, totaling 10 more hours in the logbook. Its no longer considered a front-line fighter plane; thus, its status as a trainer. There is only one seat in the cockpit, so my first flight was solo. Being a heavier airplane than the others Ive flown, it holds steadier with less bounce in the air.

Im looking forward to being home next week for a short leave. I havent been home since April 1943. Give that cute sister of mine a hug.

Your loving son, Wayne

August 21, 1944:

The more powerful P-40 pulls us much faster through the sky than the AT-6 and were all enjoying the increased performance. Today (Monday), several of us chased each other through the blue skies. We are about finished with the two weeks of P-40 training and have added time to our log book. We all feel at home in the air flying pursuit/fighter airplanes. Weve had good training!

Since we graduated and qualified to become an officer club member, we have heard that 1st lieutenants, captains and above would play a joke game on us called dead bug. We Flight Officers and 2nd Lieutenants have been waiting in the evening at the officers club for a senior officer to yell out loudly, Dead Bug.

Well, Saturday night, it happened. We newly minted Flight Officers and 2nd Lieutenants immediately hit the floor on our back in a dead bug position with arms and legs sticking straight up. Tables were knocked over in the hurry for the correct position among the broken Lone Star and Pearl beer bottles. Above the laughter, we heard the command, Return to Previous Position, and we did. It was a fun moment!

The Mobile Register on Thursday morning, August 24, 1944, announced: ROMANIA TURNS ON ADOLF HITLER. King Mihai orders Army to cease fighting Russians and to join Allied side in war on the Axis powers, it was announced in a proclamation from Bucharest.

Other headlines from that days paper: PARIS LIBERATED AS YANKS SLASH ON TOWARD REICH. With Paris liberated with help from French Patriot forces and Parisian civilians, Lt. Gen. George S. Pattons wide-ranging U.S. Third Army spearheads were racing directly toward the Rhine from several directions.

U.S. BOMBER AFIRE, HITS BRITISH CHURCH SCHOOL. Fifty or more persons, including 34 children and the planes 10-man crew, were killed Wednesday when a flaming American bomber crashed into a church school in the quiet Lancashire village of Freckleton.

August 24, 1944:

Today, some of the fellows received orders to continue as Single Engine pilots. Others of us were told that a larger need exists for C-47 pilots, B-24 co-pilots, etc. Needless to say, those of us that did not continue as fighter pilots are disappointed.

My orders assigned me to attend B-24 co-pilot training with some others. Im gung-ho about it and am headed to South Georgia for two weeks leave. The adventure continues! We have understood, almost since Day 1 of basic training, that the needs and convenience of the Army Air Force come first.

Most of us young Aviation Cadets volunteered to go to war offering our lives to the service of our country. Many times during our training we have searched for meaning in the conflict. And, some have forfeited, and others will, their lives far from home while reaching for the skies in serving our beloved country. We are the best, being the cream of the crop of Americas young men!

* * * * *

To see the previous entry in this series, read here.

https://www.chattanoogan.com/ 2020/3/6/405256/Wayne- Shearers-World-War-II-Memoir. aspx

* * * * *

Dr. Shearer can be contacted at docshearer@epbfi.com
[March 26, 2020] Zoom Certifies Yamaha UC CS-700 Video Sound Bar

Yamaha (News - Alert) today announced that its CS-700 Video Sound Bar is certified for use with Zoom Video Communications, Inc., Zoom Rooms. The all-in-one video conferencing system passed Zoom's extensive testing process for the audio system, camera, and USB interface to ensure it seamlessly integrates with the video conferencing software. The certification verifies that the CS-700 is interoperable with Zoom, making it even easier for users to connect and control the Video Sound Bar while benefitting from the highest quality audio and video. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005017/en/ Meeting image with CS-700 and Zoom (Photo: Business Wire) "With Yamaha's exceptional audio and video technology and expertise, the CS-700 will help us transform any huddle space or meeting room into a modern, easy-to-use, and powerful collaborative workspace to our customers' Zoom Rooms experience," said Eric Yu (News - Alert), Hardware Partnership Manager, Zoom. Desined for huddle rooms, the Yamaha CS-700 Video Sound Collaboration System delivers the highest quality audio, video, and collaboration capabilities in a simple and smart wall-mounted unit that is easy to install and deploy. It features an adaptive beamforming microphone array for perfectly captured conversation; four Yamaha speaker elements to provide the highest degree of audio intelligibility; and a wide-angle HD camera for the far-end participants to see everyone in clear detail. Users can quickly connect to any UC platform, including Zoom, via a single USB, eliminating the frustrations and inefficiencies of operating disparate video, audio, and collaboration components. With Zoom certification, the software automatically detects the CS-700, enabling mute sync and optimizing the audio in the Zoom cloud. The CS-700's integrated network management system allows IT staff to deploy and remotely manage each unit from one location, increasing service response and efficiency.



Along with the certification, Yamaha is releasing new firmware (version 1.4) for the CS-700 allowing all existing devices to upgrade to the new version with audio and video quality enhancement and usability improvements. The update will also provide Bluetooth connection, mute sync and in-app optimizations for more comfortable and intuitive huddle room collaboration. The CS-700 firmware compatible with Zoom Rooms will be provided for free in March 2020 from Yamaha Website. About Yamaha Corporation

Since its founding in 1887, the Yamaha Corporation (TOKYO:7951) has developed its business activities focusing on musical instruments, audio products, Yamaha music schools, semiconductors, and other products and services related to sound and music. With its unique expertise and sensibilities, gained from our devotion to sound and music, Yamaha is committed to creating excitement and cultural inspiration together with people around the world. With 10 years of history in the Japan market, Yamaha's dedicated unified communications department focuses on solutions that enhance communication and help organizations reach their business goals. www.yamaha.com Product and company names and logos that appear in this news release are trademarks of their respective owners. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005017/en/

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The number of COVID-19 cases in Madhya Pradesh rose to 21 with six more patients - five in Indore and one in Shivpur - testing coronavirus positive on Thursday, health officials said.

The tally includes a Ujjain-based woman, who died on Wednesday in Indore, the officials said.

Among the five new cases in Indore, two are women, a government medical college spokesman said.

Shivpuri district reported its second COVID-19 case.

Shivpuris Chief Medical and Health Officer (CMHO) Dr A L Sharma said a 26-year man, a resident of Khaniyadhana, about 80-km from the district headquarters, tested positive for the infection on Thursday.

The man had gone to Hyderabad on March 13 and returned to Shivpuri two days later, he said.

Sharma said family members of the coronavirus positive man have been told to quarantine themselves at home and they will be monitored by health workers.

Besides, the residents of the mans colony have been also told to self-quarantine under medical supervision, he said.

Earlier, the infected man had sought medical help through a video on social media. Following this, the health department kept him in the isolation ward of a government hospital.

Sharma also informed that the mother and father of a 30-year man, the first coronavirus positive case in Shivpuri, tested negative in the medical reports received on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, five more patients admitted in Indore hospitals tested coronavirus positive, health officials said on Thursday.

Besides the death of a COVID-19 positive person, a 47-year-old man, who was admitted to a government hospital here as a coronavirus suspect, also died in the wee hours of Thursday.

The 47-year old man, whose test report is still awaited, was earlier treated at the Ujjain civil hospital and was admitted to the Indore hospital on Wednesday with cough, fever and trouble in breathing, the officials said.

So far, 10 coronavirus cases have been reported in Indore (including deceased woman of Ujjain), six in Jabalpur, two each in Bhopal and Shivpuri and one in Gwalior, they said.

Curfew has been imposed in seven districts linked to coronavirus positive cases.

hey include Bhopal, Indore, Jabalpur, Gwalior, Shivpuri, Ujjain and Chhatarpur.

No positive case has been found so far in Chhatarpur but the COVID-19 patient from Gwalior had travelled to Khajuraho in Chhatarpur, they said.

As a result, curfew was clamped in Rajnagar and Khajuraho towns of Chhatarpur district, officials said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As countries across the Middle East tighten restrictions on movement to curb the spread of the coronavirus, a spokesman for the US Agency for International Development said on Thursday that strict measures are forcing it to halt aid for deficient health care in war-ravaged Yemen.

A spokesman for USAID, one of the largest donors to UN operations in Yemen, told The Associated Press that it will ``partially suspend'' its operations the following day in Houthi rebel-held areas, where 70% of Yemenis live, because of heavy restrictions imposed by the rebels.

Meanwhile, leaders of the world's most powerful economies, who had come under criticism for failing to take cohesive action against the pandemic, convened virtually to coordinate a stronger response.

The G20 meeting, chaired by Saudi Arabia's King Salman, resulted in collective pledges to inject $4.8 trillion into the global economy to counteract the social and financial impacts of the pandemic.

Yemen, reeling from the world's worst humanitarian crisis after five years of war, has not yet reported a case of the coronavirus. But the suspension of USAID threatens to leave the country even more vulnerable to contagion.

``The US government has made the difficult decision to reduce aid until we can be confident that US taxpayer assistance will reach those for whom it's intended,'' the official said on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to brief the media.

Over the past months, the Houthis have blocked half of the UN's massive $8.35 billion humanitarian campaign to assist areas on the verge of famine. In response to the coronavirus, the rebels have taken further steps, shutting down the capital's airport which is used exclusively by aid workers.

As a result of the suspension, OXFAM America said it would be forced to halt services critical to coronavirus prevention, including hygiene promotion and primary health care. Yemen's conflict, which pits Iran-backed Houthi rebels against a Saudi-led coalition, has claimed more than 100,000 lives and displaced millions of people.

The global death toll from the new coronavirus has climbed past 21,000 and the number of infections has surpassed 472,000, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.

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Every six months Penny Wingard's doctor in Charlotte, North Carolina, checks her white blood cell count even though she can't afford the tests. After a brutal round of chemotherapy for stage 2 breast cancer in 2014 left her with chemical burns, Wingard has a compromised immune system and no health insurance.

When she lost that coverage, more medical issues followed: She had a brain aneurysm and then the chemo caused Wingard, 56, to go temporarily blind before she underwent cornea surgery. Her medical debt through all this has ballooned to more than $25,000  an amount she has no hope of ever paying off as a part-time Lyft driver.

Penelope Wingard

"You didn't ask for any of this, and you didn't ask to get sick," Wingard said, as her voice broke and she began to cry. "You know, it's not something that you went out there and said, 'Oh, OK,' you know. You didn't ask for any of it. And it is a burden. It really is a burden."

With required doctor visits and medicine, her bills are still adding up and the debt collectors' calls haven't stopped. The drugs she needs also make her more susceptible to the common cold, the flu and now the coronavirus.

Wingard is just one of nearly 30 million people in the United States living without insurance, and the stress of being hospitalized because of the pandemic is immense.

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

And like Wingard, many members of the working poor without insurance also make up the workforce now deemed "essential": cashiers, stock clerks, agricultural workers, delivery drivers, elderly caregivers, child care workers, health care workers and gas station clerks.

Now doctors and clinics who treat these patients are sounding the alarm that the nation's working poor may be forced to make a difficult calculus if they test positive for the disease that is sweeping across the United States.

'This moment really shows how connected we all are'

Story continues

Congress' coronavirus legislation thus far has made testing free, but it has not addressed the cost of the medical treatment needed for the disease. As the Trump administration discusses opening the Affordable Care Act's health insurance registration window, a number of states have begun to explore options to address private health insurance and Medicaid programs, which provide coverage to low-income Americans.

Advocates argue that expanding Medicaid, or loosening enrollment rules, amid the outbreak would encourage the working poor to receive necessary care, help reimburse medical centers and alleviate medical debt that patients would accumulate.

The debate over the coverage gap in the United States is particularly stark in the 14 states  including North Carolina  that didn't expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

The decision to forgo an increase in state Medicaid programs, an ideological resistance borne of fiscal conservatism in Republican-controlled state legislatures, has left nearly 5 million people across the country without access to health care coverage and meant states turned down billions of federal dollars that would have come with the expansion.

Charlotte, N.C. (Andar Sawyers / for NBC News)

In North Carolina, expansion would have allowed the state to provide coverage to more than 194,000 members of the working poor who earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid but too little to purchase their own insurance plans. The state legislature balked at having to foot 10 percent of the fund by 2020, which means North Carolina also could not receive an estimated $40 billion worth of federal funds since 2014.

"This outbreak is going to bring to light and highlight really strongly the types of disparities and the gaps in our health care system that leave people vulnerable," said Jennifer Tolbert, the director of state health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit that researches health care issues.

Since the start of the outbreak, many governors  such as North Carolina's Roy Cooper, a Democrat  have requested and received waivers from the Trump administration to give their Medicaid programs more flexibility amid the disaster. Many state legislatures and governors, however, are still waffling or arguing over whether to pursue expanded coverage, leaving a huge number of people uninsured while the disease continues to spread.

Without medical coverage, those who remain uninsured may skip a doctor's visit until it's far too late because they fear the cost of going to the hospital. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported the average cost for coronavirus treatment could be more than $20,000. Meanwhile, the same organization concluded that prior to the outbreak, more than half of Americans avoided going to the doctor because they feared the price tag.

For more on this story, subscribe to "Into America," a new podcast from NBC News and MSNBC

"People who live paycheck to paycheck can't miss work," said Hyun Namkoong, a health policy advocate with the North Carolina Justice Center. "People who do not have paid leave can't miss work. This is a really serious issue that for so long the people in power at our general assembly thought that the coverage gap didn't really affect them, that it doesn't affect our public health, but this moment really shows how connected we all are in society."

'All the makings of a disaster'

It's not just the uninsured who are concerned about their coverage amid the coronavirus pandemic. Doctors who treat underserved communities, whether rural or urban, are worried about the spread and if their patients will receive care.

William Luking, a doctor in rural North Carolina who runs a clinic with his brother about 25 miles north of Greensboro, said he treated one of his regular patients last week who had a dry, hacking cough and trouble breathing. The longtime patient turned scarlet when Luking said he should go to the hospital.

Amid wheezing and a severe fever, Luking's patient said he couldn't afford that kind of care. He didn't have insurance.

Dr. William Luking (Courtesy of Dr. Luking)

"How many folks with this virus are going to be making the same decision?" Luking asked, noting that Medicaid expansion would have provided his patient hospital access. "That same scenario will play itself out here real quickly with folks soldiering on doing their minimum wage work while carrying the virus without seeking care. It has all the makings of a disaster."

Luking and doctors like him have gone to great lengths to treat their patients and made personal sacrifices because, as he said, "We're not going to fold up shop now."

But there's a risk that they may have to. Luking said because he will mostly have to move to doctor's visits over the phone, he will see fewer reimbursements and payments and a greater number of uninsured patients. He's prepared to zero-out his own salary but fears he may soon have to lay off members of his staff to keep his facility afloat.

Luking also doesn't have access to N95 masks, protective gear or tests, and he has a sense that this pandemic could be devastating to his community and the country.

"I had my first good cry with my wife last night," he told NBC News, pausing as his words got caught in his throat and he began to cry again. "I just cried like a baby, and I told her not one tear was for myself, but I was thinking about all the older folks I've busted it so hard to keep alive and keep thriving day and night for decades. And if this thing really blows in, I'm afraid they're going to be dropping like flies  and that bothers me."

Download the NBC News app for full coverage and alerts about the coronavirus outbreak

Besides treating patients he has known for decades, Luking has been hit by the pandemic in a personal way. Conscious of his wife's asthma, Luking moved a small camper he owns next to his house. He plans to live in it full time and stop seeing his wife because he fears potentially exposing her to the virus. He also spoke to an attorney last week to update his will.

At 61 and with a growing number of people he will need to treat, Luking knows that he's particularly at risk.

"If this virus gets hot here, I'm definitely not going to see my wife," he said, his voice continuing to crack. "I won't share a room with her. I won't share a house with her. I'm just not going to do that. I can't."

'The virus could be the end'

Community health centers, which treat a large number of uninsured patients, are also facing difficult decisions.

Dr. Meredith Niess, the medical director of Charlotte Community Health Clinic in North Carolina, said 84 percent of her patients are uninsured and pay on a sliding scale  making her margins thinner than most medical centers in the United States.

Dr. Meredith Niess outside the Charlotte Community Health Clinic. (Andar Sawyers / for NBC News)

And while Congress' first coronavirus bill provided $100 million to the nearly 1,400 community health centers across the country, the federal funding that makes up 70 percent of their budget runs out in May. Additional funding could come with Congress' stimulus bill, but the clinics are running out of money and time.

"If this system doesn't change, the virus could be the end of the clinic," Niess said.

With demand growing and the clinic moving more of its care to phone calls and email to limit contact with potentially infected patients, their ability to bill for those visits is as limited as their capacity to pay for basic protective gear and pharmaceuticals.

They are on the front lines, Niess said, but they are ill-equipped to help with the crisis ahead of them with only 25 tests available at the clinic. Each day, staffers  many in tears  are in her office concerned about the challenges ahead of them.

Right now, she said, their model is "just not viable in the long run." Having patients with medical coverage through a program like Medicaid would expand their ability to treat patients by receiving reimbursement for care, Niess said, and it wouldn't cause the spread of the coronavirus to seem quite as existential for them.

That's not only the case for clinics. For the uninsured individuals like Wingard, if the American health care system doesn't change, it could also mean the end  financially or otherwise  of their own futures.

"If we do not come together some kind of way, there are going to be more fatalities," Wingard said. "A lot more people are going to get infected, and this country is just going to fall apart."
For more coverage, visit our complete coronavirus section here.

Most Americans will be receiving checks from the federal government after President Donald Trump and Congress agreed to a $2 trillion coronavirus relief deal Wednesday.

The stimulus is unprecedented in size, and politicians hope it will prevent the country from descending into a recession if a protracted fight against COVID-19 grinds the economy to a halt.

NEXT PHASE OF PANDEMIC: Houston gearing up with makeshift care centers, hotel rooms and quarantines to prepare for surge of patients

So what does it mean for you? Although the final legislative language is still being hammered out, here is what was proposed and passed in regards to stimulus checks:

 Individual taxpayers with incomes up to $75,000 will receive a one-time $1,200 direct payment. If you make more than $99,000, you will get nothing. If you make between that range, you'll get less than $1,200, but the exact number has not been confirmed yet. An earlier version of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act stipulated $5 would be subtracted from the $1,200 for every additional $100 in income.

 For couples, everything doubles. Combined incomes of up to $150,000 will receive $2,400; the cap is a combined income of $198,000.

 Families that qualified for the one-time payment will also receive an additional $500 per child.

 Annual income is based on your 2018 tax returns. If you did not file a tax return in 2018, you must file the 2019 return before qualifying for the stimulus check.

 If you're on unemployment, the bill increased unemployment insurance by $600 per week for four months (this is on top of what individual states pay out for unemployment). It has also been expanded to include freelance and gig economy workers.

COVID-19 SPREAD: Coronavirus spread in Houston could burn out by mid-May under stay-at-home order

 Although Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin spoke of a desire to send checks regularly throughout the coronavirus pandemic, this ultimately didn't make it into the final bill. If Congress wants to send more than one stimulus check, it will have to separately authorize another payout.

As to when checks will arrive, that's still very much up in the air. The last time Americans got stimulus checks  in 2008 under George W. Bush  it took about three months for checks to arrive. Theoretically, Americans should get them faster this time, provided they're signed up with the IRS for direct deposit into their bank accounts (like how you get tax refunds).

Nonetheless, it seems like the earliest estimates for seeing that cash is around mid-April.

Katie Dowd is a senior digital editor with SFGATE. Email her: katie.dowd@sfgate.com
CARBONDALE  Its been more than a week since the state mandated restaurants be closed for dine-in service and, in an effort to help ease some of the burden, the City of Carbondale has pushed back the date its food and beverage taxes are due.

Southern Illinois officials unclear how to enforce parts of statewide 'stay-home' order The first weekend of Gov. J.B. Pritzkers "stay-at-home" order is over, but there are still a lot of questions about who and what is deemed essential, and therefore exempt from the order.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced a number of emergency measures for state residents and businesses in order to fight the spreading COVID-19 virus. This included a stay at home order and the order about businesses.

On Wednesday, the city announced the extension on its website  the Municipal Motor Fuel Tax and Municipal Hotel/Motel Tax are both due April 30, while the food and beverage and package liquor taxes are now due May 20.

Were searching for anything we can do to help  all of our businesses are struggling, Carbondales Economic Development Director Steve Mitchell said Wednesday.

The measure was appreciated, but local business owners say the hurt goes well beyond a delayed tax payment.

If you want to be supportive of your local restaurants, you'll not collect this tax, said William Lo, general manager of New Kahala in Carbondale.

Not long after Pritzker announced the temporary closure of Illinois restaurants, Lo started a petition asking the city to forgive the current quarters food and beverage and package liquor taxes. Lo and others said this most recent effort is nice, but doesnt help cash flow  the money will still be due, even if its in late May.

"While that is great that they are postponing them, it would go a lot further if they would have forgiveness for this quarter, said Leah Maciell, co-owner of Cristaudos.

Many utility services are doing the same delayed payment plan, she said, so it is shaping up to be a big, big bill come the end of May.

Lo said other forms of aid are available, but these mostly come in the form of business loans, which, again, only really help short term  he said these add to the monthly obligations of a business.

Doug Robinson, co-owner of Keepers Quarters in Carbondale, agreed. He said this money could be used to pay employees at least a little bit. But, he questioned whether restaurants would be able to make enough in the next few weeks to earn this amount back before it comes due.

Mitchell said he and the city are sympathetic to this. We totally understand, Mitchell said.

He said the city wanted to act quickly and this was the best it could do without needing City Council to take action. This is significant because the next scheduled City Council meeting is not until April 14.

All Carbondales council members said they see the problem and none said they werent willing to discuss tax relief.

It all sounds really good and, of course, Id be willing to listen to whatever proposals anyone has, Councilperson Carolin Harvey said. However, she added that the city still has to be able to operate. But as a city government, if we are depending on those funds to operate the city  I guess its a chicken and egg kind of thing: Can you do one and not the other?

Councilperson Jeff Doherty, along with councilpersons Adam Loos, Lee Fronebarger and Tom Grant, said they wanted to wait and see what options are going to be offered by the state and federal governments before making any big decisions.

However we can help them out we should, Doherty said. At the same time, we arent the federal government, we dont print the money.

Until all these details about aid packages are worked out, Grant said theres nothing wrong with pushing the pause button on collecting some taxes.

We can always push that date even further out if need be, he said.

Councilperson Jessica Bradshaw was the most direct about her option. I think its a good idea, Bradshaw said about tax forgiveness for local restaurants.

Cody Moake, the Marion Mayors chief of staff, said Marion does not have all the same taxes Carbondale does  it does not have a food and beverage tax, for example. However, he said, like Carbondale, it was pushing back the city's hotel/motel tax due date in order to offer some relief.

There are options for relief coming from the state and federal levels, too. During his daily COVID-19 briefing, Gov. Pritzker announced a laundry list of aid programs aimed across different sectors in the economy that are suffering because of precautionary closures.

Carbondale businesses, city leaders try to find way forward with lost revenue due to coronavirus closures As Southern Illinois enters unprecedented territory in an attempt to curb the spread of COVID-19, businesses and city leaders are trying to find the best path forward to keep restaurants and bars afloat while also paying the citys bills.

One of the programs, the Downstate Small Business Stabilization Program, sets aside $20 million to support small businesses in suburban and rural counties across the state. It will provide grants of up to $25,000 to small businesses in communities served by the Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunitys Office of Community Development.

A news release from the governors office announced the programs Wednesday. It said the grants will offer businesses of up to 50 employees the opportunity to partner with their local governments to obtain grants of up to $25,000 in working capital. The program redeploys Community Development Block Grant funds to support local small businesses.

The release said applications will be available on DCEOs website by Friday, March 27. The grants will be offered on a rolling basis.

In Washington, congressional leaders and the White House are reportedly close to a deal on a $2 trillion relief bill that, among many things, will send checks directly to many Americans and increase unemployment offerings for many who found themselves out of work because of the response to the virus.

A Washington Post article Wednesday said the bill would expand eligibility and offer workers an additional $600 a week for four months, on top of what state unemployment programs pay.

An Associated Press roundup of the stimulus bill said $350 billion would be provided for small businesses to keep making payroll. Companies with 500 or fewer employees could tap up to $10 million each in forgivable small business loans to keep paychecks flowing.
Haalands goals are drawing the attention of every team. At one point, Barcelona was chasing Haaland too but in 2019, Barcelona rejected signing him for a preposterous reason.

They felt Haaland was not technical enough. Back in 2018, Haaland was still playing in Norway for Molde and his playing style was compared to Romelu Lukaku.

Barcelona looked at Haaland, but felt he was too unpolished and they decided instead to sign Kevin Prince Boateng.

In the end, Haaland went to Salzburg and in Austria, he was incredible. Thats where he made a name for himself in Europe and in 2020, Barcelona had another chance to sign Haaland and they passed again.

This time it was down to two major factors and the first factor was that Haaland still isnt Barcas first target. Instead, they were waiting for the summer to sign Lautaro Martinez.

The second factor was the amount of money it would cost. Dortmund got Haaland for a steal of $22 million and Haalands agent is the notorious superagent, Mino Raiola.

In addition of being a known nuisance for clubs, Barcelona and Raiola have a particularly strained relationship. Many thought Barcelona would sign De Light from Ajax but he ended up at Juve.

Many people thought it was due to Raiolas shady tactics. Barcelona wanted to avoid paying Raiola added fees. Dortmund allegedly had to pay Raiola and Haalands father over $25 Million in fees.

Haaland also earns a yearly salary of more than $8 million and in all thats a lot of cash to splash.

PV: 0
Since Russia began its involvement in Syria, Sergey Shoygu has made many trips and has served as an important point of contact between Assad and Putin writes Alsouria Net.

On Jun. 18, 2016, less than a year after the Russian intervention in Syria to support the Assad regime, a Russian military plane landed at the Hemeimeem base in the Lattakia countryside carrying the Russian Defense Minister, Sergey Shoygu. At that time, he met Bashar al-Assad after he was summoned to the base on an unannounced visit, which was the first by a high-ranking Russian military official since the Syrian revolution started in 2011.

The Russian Ministry of Defense published a statement at the time, in which it said that, Shoygus meeting with Assad dealt with the urgent issues of military-technical cooperation between the defense ministries of the two countries, as well as some aspects of cooperation between the two countries in combating terrorist organizations operating in Syrian territory.

The ministry confirmed that Shoygu visited Syria under the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin to inspect Russian forces in Syria.

The visit came amid special circumstances, after American lawmakers called on former US President Barack Obama to carry out a military airstrike against the Assad regime, and after Moscow on Jun. 17, 2016, warned, through the spokesman for the Russian President, Dmitry Peskov, that the Middle East would be thrown into chaos if Bashar al-Assad was toppled.

Messages, political and military

Shoygus first visit to Syria was followed by several similar visits, accompanied by the intensification of the military escalation by Russian forces on the groundfrom southern Syria, to the eastern regions, and then Idleb in the northwest of Syria.

Sometimes in military uniform and in diplomatic dress at others, Shoygu met Assad on his frequent visits. While the Russian Defense Ministry announced that the meetings were business visits, the official Assad regime media has said that Shoygus main mission is conveying Putins messages to Assad with regards to events in Syria, whether on the military or political level.

For example, almost a year after his first visit, in September 2017, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that Shoygu had visited Syria and held talks with Assad, noting that the visit, came at the request of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two sides discussed the issue of stabilizing the situation in Syria, work in the de-escalation areas, providing aid to the population, and military cooperation.

Shoygus visits to Syria over the past five years have not come during stable conditions, but have coincided with radical and sensitive changes, both politically and militarilyperhaps the most prominent of which was in March 2019 during the military campaign against Idleb and the accompanying political moves to start the Syrian Constitutional Committee. In his last visit on Mar. 23, 2020, he met Assad and discussed, military cooperation and combating terrorist organizations, in addition to reviving Syrias economic capacities, according to a statement by the Russian Defense Ministry.

Without Assads knowledge

Since its military intervention in Syria, Russia has completely broken the rules of protocol for the Assad regime. Unlike with other countries and governments internationally, Russian officials suddenly land in Syria from time to timewhich is what Shoygu and Russian President Vladimir Putin did during their visits, whether to Hemeimeem or the capital Damascus.

The Assad regime has not hid the nature of the Russian visits. Bashar al-Assad referred to this in his speech during his meeting with Putin and Shoygu. During Shoygus first visit after the Russian intervention, Russian media published a video recording that showed the moment Assad received the Russian Minister of Defense, expressing his happiness at the meeting, adding that it is a pleasant surprise.

The video also showed, at the time, part of the meeting, in which Assad said, addressing Shoygu, I did not know that you would come personally.

Shoygu is described by Russian media as a minister who does not wear a tie and does not carry a briefcase, but, carries enormous amounts of life experience and leads operations from the ground, where the greatest danger is, and not from his Moscow office.

In October 2015, the French newspaper Le Monde published a report on Shoygu, in which he said that he was leading Russian operations in Syria, and that he was Putins right-hand man, and the most prominent candidate for his succession, given that he masterminded the process of annexing Crimea, where he himself supervised military operationsas well as the media campaign, managing to win the support of the Russian people for this operation.

This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
Latest round follows calls by UN officials to roll back sanctions on Iran as health system battles virus.

As Iran struggles to battle the spread of COVID-19, the United States on Thursday heaped more economic pressure on the country by slapping a fresh round of sanctions on more than a dozen Iranian individuals and five companies.

COVID-19 has killed at least 2,234 people in Iran and the number of confirmed cases in the country is approaching 30,000, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The US Treasury sanctions were announced one day after the family of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing more than a decade ago, said they believed he had died while in custody Iran, citing information from US officials.

Irans foreign ministry spokesman said on Thursday that Levinson had left Iran years ago for an unspecified destination.

Iran employs a web of front companies to fund terrorist groups across the region, siphoning resources away from the Iranian people and prioritizing terrorist proxies over the basic needs of its people, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement posted to the Treasury website on Thursday. The United States maintains broad exceptions and authorizations for humanitarian aid including agriculture commodities, food, medicine, and medical devices to help the people of Iran combat the coronavirus.

On Tuesday the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, called for sanctions against countries such as Iran to be rolled back to allow their medical systems to fight COVID-19 and limit its spread.

The same day, Iran ruled out foreign help to deal with the coronavirus health crisis.

Earlier this month, Tehran asked the International Monetary Fund for $5bn in emergency funding to fight the outbreak.

The US maximum pressure campaign of successive rounds of sanctions kicked off in 2018 after President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal Iran struck with six major world powers. Washington is trying to force Tehran back to the negotiation table by squeezing it economically.

The sanctions imposed by the US Treasury on Thursday targeted companies and individuals involved in the construction and maritime services industries.

The US accuses the targeted entities and individuals of engaging in or enabling smuggling through the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr; money laundering through Iraqi front companies, selling oil to the Syrian regime, smuggling weapons to Iraq and Yemen, intimidating Iraqi politicians and diverting funds and public donations made to an ostensibly religious institution to supplement Iranian military budgets.
P olice sent a family home after they were caught having a day out at the beach during the coronavirus lockdown.

Officers from North Wales Police said they stopped the family as they arrived in Llanfairfechan for a day out on Wednesday and were told to turn around and go home.

Under the new guidelines introduced by the Government to try and stop the spread of Covid-19, the public are being asked to remain at home.

In a post on Facebook, the forces Conwy Coastal unit said its officers told the family, from Merseyside, that a trip to the beach was "not essential travel"

Beaches across the UK are empty despite the good weather / Gareth Fuller/ PA wire

Officers are out patrolling and it is pleasing to see that most people are sticking to the Government advice", the post said.

But Inspector Daf Curry and PCSO Sara Owen did speak to a family of five whod travelled from Merseyside to Llanfairfechan for a day at the seaside, to advise them this was not essential travel and to go home.

Meanwhile, a group of bikers who stopped off in Llandovery on Tuesday were confronted by a member of the public, telling them to go home.

Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures 1 /44 Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures AP Buckingham Palace AP Piccadilly Line tube AP Big Ben AP Millennium bridge AP Wembley Stadium AP St Pancras International train station AP Downing Street AP Victoria Station AP Regent Street AP The Mall leading to Buckingham Palace AP London's National Gallery in Trafalgar Square PA Edinburgh's Royal Mile PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bath PA Bath PA London's Waterloo station PA London Bridge PA London's Canary Wharf Jubilee Line platform PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA London's Buckingham Palace PA London's Tower Bridge PA London's Leicester Square PA London's Millennium Bridge with St Paul's Cathedral PA London's Criterion Theatre PA London's Palace Theatre PA London's Phoenix Theatre PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA Bournemouth beach PA Bath PA Bath PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bournemouth beach PA

They had stopped outside the towns West End Cafe, which is a popular rest spot.

In a video posted on Facebook, the man can be heard saying: Ive come here to tell you to disappear.

If you bring Covid-19 into our town and my father dies because he comes into contact with someone youve been in contact with  thats why its a lockdown you doughnuts.

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There's an Apple promo video on YouTube right called "iPad Pro -- Your next computer is not a computer" that's sitting pretty with more than 22 million views as I write this. Another video, with more than 3 million views, features an old-timey voiceover explaining how to "properly" use a computer, all while showing people flouting those rules with an iPad Pro.

The message is clear: The 2020 iPad Pro doesn't act the way your computer does, but it's just as capable. The company has spent years pushing that message in one form or another, and every time I heard someone invoke it, the notion sort of fell flat for me. Yes, iPads are powerful and clever and user-friendly, but -- and tell me if this sounds familiar -- I've always been able to get more done, and faster, on a proper laptop or PC. Apple sees that, and it's starting to change it.

At the risk of being reductive, Apple took the last version of the iPad Pro, changed a few components and gave it some updated software. Normally, that wouldn't sound like much to get excited over, but taken as a whole, these changes bring the iPad Pro closer than ever to working like a full-blown computer. That doesn't mean I'm ready to give up my MacBook Pro for good, but for the first time, I'm starting to think I actually could.

Configurations

Like last time, there are two new iPad Pros -- 11-inch and 12.9-inch models -- and also like last time, we're testing the latter. Now, these premium tablets have a lot going for them, but one of the biggest practical changes Apple made this year was giving the base-level Pros 128GB of storage, up from 64GB in 2018. Here's what the lineup looks like now:

iPad Pro 11 WiFi: 128GB ($799), 256GB ($899), 512GB ($1,099), 1TB ($1,299)

iPad Pro 11 WiFi + LTE: 128GB ($949), 256GB ($1,049), 512GB ($1,249), 1TB ($1,449)

iPad Pro 12.9 WiFi: 128GB ($999), 256GB ($1,099), 512GB ($1,299), 1TB ($1,499)

iPad Pro 12.9 WiFi + LTE: 128GB ($1,149), 256GB ($1,249), 512GB ($1,449), 1TB ($1,649)

Story continues

A familiar look

There's a lot going on in this year's iPad Pro, but it might be helpful to run through what hasn't changed first. (It's a pretty long list.) Apart from the big new camera hump high on the backside, which we'll get into later, this iPad Pro is the exact same size, shape and weight as the model it replaces. The front-facing camera and TrueDepth Face ID sensor work as well as they did before, though their placement still feels weird. Most people I know are more prone to holding their tablets horizontally, which means the TrueDepth camera used for Face Unlock frequently gets covered up by hand meat.

The three-pin Smart Connector still sits low on the iPad's rear, so the one accessory that uses it -- Apple's magnetic keyboard case -- works fine here. The second-generation Apple Pencil remains a fantastic tool for digital artists and notetakers, and nothing in the new OS seems to improve on it. As far as we can tell, this year's iPad Pro uses the exact same screen as the third-generation Pros.

In case you didn't read our earlier review, that is a good thing. This 12.9-inch display remains a stunner with excellent colors and viewing angles, and it's once again helped by features like True Tone, which adjusts the screen's color temperature automatically. (Trust me, it's more pleasant for your eyes than it might sound.) And like last time, this display refreshes 120 times per second, so on-screen motion looks remarkably smooth compared to earlier iPads -- not to mention most laptops. This is easily the best screen you'll find on a tablet, and it's much easier on my eyes than the one built into my 13-inch MacBook Pro. My only real gripe is that despite being treated with an oleophobic coating, the screen still picks up fingerprints easily. If, like me, you have naturally oily hands, it won't take long for it to start looking... well, kind of gross.

This iPad Pro still packs four speakers, one in each of the tablet's corners. They produce some surprisingly immersive audio when you're just sort of lazing around watching movies, but honestly, a tablet like this needs to have its headphone jack reinstated. Yes, headphone jacks have all but disappeared from premium smartphones, and when Apple axed them from iPhones, it claimed the move required a certain degree of "courage." () Well, Apple, this iPad is meant to be a pro-grade machine. It certainly isn't cheap, and the headphone jack can be especially helpful to musicians and audio professionals. They matter too, right? Admitting a mistake and reversing course because it's the right thing to do -- now that would be courageous.

Subtleties in performance

While the 2020 iPad Pro doesn't look all that different, its internals have gotten some interesting tweaks. Rather than use a variant of the iPhone 11's A13 Bionic chipset, Apple tried something a little different this year: It upgraded the existing A12 architecture to give us the new(ish) A12Z Bionic. I say "ish" because the cluster of CPU cores appears to be unchanged from the A12X chipset used in the last iPad Pro. Apart from some changes to the thermal architecture and performance controllers to help it handle more-sustained loads, the biggest difference is the updated GPU: Apple says it added one additional processing core, bringing the total to eight.

That won't mean much to many of you reading this, because in many cases it doesn't make a difference. Day-to-day performance feels unchanged compared to the 2018 model, which is a testament to how fast that tablet was and how tightly focused Apple's reengineering was this time. Synthetic benchmarks don't always tell the whole tale, which is why I don't rely on them as heavily as I used to, but I think these are particularly telling.

iPad Pro (2020) iPad Pro (2018) iPhone 11 Pro Max Mid-2018 MacBook Pro Gaming PC (Ryzen 7 3700X) Geekbench 5 CPU (single-core) 1124 1117 1337 1089 1261 Geekbench 5 CPU (multi-core) 4710 4674 3338 3960 8105 Geekbench 5 Compute (metal and OpenCL) 9745 9180 6326 7181 59993 Adobe Premiere Rush 4K-to-1080p export time (in minutes) 5:35 6:58 9:52 18:27 4:56

Single-core CPU performance here is basically in lockstep with the earlier iPad Pro, as is multi-core performance. (The iPhone 11 Pro has a slight lead with that first metric, thanks to its more modern architecture.) Geekbench 5's Compute test taps more thoroughly into the device's GPU, which explains why the new Pro edges out last year's model and blows away my work-issued 2018 MacBook Pro with integrated Intel Iris Plus graphics. And for fun, I ran the same benchmarks on a gaming PC I just finished building. The iPad Pro can credibly take on most mid- and low-end laptops, but it's no match for a proper workstation.

That said, it got surprisingly close in one test. Editing and exporting videos can push a system to its limit, so I threw some 4K60 and 4K24 clips at the devices listed above and had them churn out a YouTube-friendly, 1080p30 video in Adobe Premiere Rush. The new iPad Pro got the job done nearly a minute and a half faster than last year's model and more than four minutes faster than the iPhone 11 Pro Max. My MacBook Pro, meanwhile, sat around for almost 18 minutes and change before the job. And that gaming PC I just built? It was the fastest of the bunch, but even with an octa-core AMD Ryzen 7 3700X processor on board, it still only beat the 2020 iPad Pro by about 40 seconds. (Kinda makes me wish I had sunk more money into my PC.)

iPad Pro 12.9 review (2020) iPad Pro 12.9 review (2020)

I obviously can't speak for every "pro" use case, but the stuff I do frequently, like working with big, multilayer Photoshop files and editing RAW photos in Lightroom, were no problem for the iPad. The day-to-day stuff is well taken care of too: I had dozens of tabs running in Chrome while watching YouTube videos in a separate Split View window, and the iPad didn't break a sweat. (For what it's worth, I did try throwing some huge CAD files at this thing, but the apps I tried opening them with all failed to import them correctly.) Thankfully, battery life remains as respectable as ever. I've been using it exclusively to research and write this review as well as edit the photos you see here, and I've generally been able to get just shy of 11 hours before needing to charge it again.

Ultimately, yes, there's plenty of power here. It's just that, after a week of testing, I can't say this year's model feels dramatically faster than the one it replaces. Most people simply won't notice the extra performance headroom we got in this refresh, but it's there, and it does make certain tasks run more smoothly. Here's hoping we get a more pronounced power boost next time though, especially now that I've started using the iPad more like a laptop.

More like a laptop than ever

When I reviewed the third-generation iPad a year and change ago, I half-jokingly wrote,

"I know there's zero chance of Apple listening to me, but I have to try. Hey, guys, can you please figure out how to make a trackpad work on this thing? I work in text all day, and it would make my life so much easier."

Well, about that. After introducing support for mice and trackpads as a somewhat limited accessibility feature last year, Apple embraced them more fully in the new iPadOS 13.4 update. Once that's installed, every iPad that runs iPadOS -- even non-Pro models -- can benefit from this expanded flexibility.





iPad Pro 12.9 review (2020)

That new, $300 Magic Keyboard with its integrated trackpad won't be available for another month and a half at the least, and in the meantime, there's nothing else quite like it to use instead. (For the record, Logitech recently showed off cases with keyboards and built-in trackpads, but those aren't meant for the 11-inch or 12.9-inch iPad Pro.) This means that to get the most out of this new software, you'll have to use something like Apple's Magic Trackpad, and I'm hardly thrilled at the idea of carrying one around for when I need to be productive. Then again, I guess I'm not going anywhere soon: Everyone in New York has been compelled by the state government to stay at home to help contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. That means no meetings or briefings where I need to quickly jot down notes, no idle writing sessions at local coffee shops. But I digress.

After using this new version of iPadOS, it's clear Apple has done something pretty remarkable here: It made trackpad support feel natural. Getting started is easy: Turn on the trackpad, connect to it from the iPad's settings and, uh, that's it. It's not quite Apple Pencil-easy, but it's close. Once that's finished, you can fiddle in the settings menu with the cursor speed, scroll direction and tap to click.

The best thing about the experience is that it works almost exactly the way you'd expect it to. You move your finger around, click things and they respond. That may sound basic, but the sheer efficiency over reaching up to touch the screen is tremendous. And as you whip that tiny, circular cursor around the screen, you'll see it change shape: It'll become a classic I-bar when you hover over text, making it much easier to select exactly what you need. When you get close to one of iPadOS' interface elements, like the back buttons or the Control Center shortcut, the cursor sort of latches onto it. It's a simple, elegant solution, as are the gestures.

iPad Pro 12.9 review (2020)

A three-finger swipe up takes you to the home screen. Three-finger swipes to the left and right cycle you through your open apps. A two-finger tap acts as a right-click. There: You have everything you need to get going. It helps that despite performing somewhat different tasks, all of these gestures are supported in macOS too, so I didn't have much trouble getting comfortable. There is one gesture that continues to throw me though. When your iPad is propped up and you want to unlock it with the trackpad, you move the cursor to the bottom of the screen and continue pushing down. It feels much different than the "swipe up to unlock" I'm used to, and it'll take time before my muscle memory adjusts.

Pro tip: Using trackpads to their fullest extent requires you to have multitouch gestures enabled in the iPad's settings. If you're restoring this new iPad from a backup of an older one, make sure you didn't disable those at some point in the past like I did. Otherwise, you'll waste time wondering why your iPad is busted. Hey Apple, in your next update, can you please enable those gestures to be default when a trackpad is connected? Thanks.

I've mostly been thrilled with how this feature turned out, and I'm starting to think I might have to carry a Magic Trackpad around full time after all. That doesn't mean everything is perfectly peachy here though. While most apps I've tried work fine with a trackpad, I did run into some notable hiccups. When exporting the photos for this review, for instance, I noticed that one of Lightroom's menu options wouldn't respond to a tap on the trackpad at all; I had to reach up to the screen instead. Honestly, it wasn't much of an inconvenience, but I'm sure there are other apps out there with similar issues. More problematic was that Google's suite of productivity apps -- which we lean on extensively for editing around here -- didn't play well with iPadOS' trackpad text selection.

Unfortunately, mouse support is considerably more limited. I've been testing this iPad with a Bluetooth mouse and a Magic Trackpad, and while the basics work much the same way, you lose access to all of those handy multitasking and navigation gestures. (I don't have one of Apple's touch-sensitive Magic Mice, but a few tweets suggest they don't work with those gestures either.) Even though this update makes the iPad more flexible, it's still a touch-first device. The difference is that now you don't have to touch it directly.

These changes are a huge deal, if for no other reason than proving that Apple is serious about giving its users more flexibility in how they use their devices. It won't, however, give you everything you need to let go of your trusty laptop. For that to happen, Apple would have to dramatically reshape the iPadOS experience, from rethinking window management (you can still only run two apps at a time in Split View) to making its arcane multitasking gestures a bit more obvious. Had you asked me when the last big iPad refresh happened if Apple would pour its resources into an endeavor like that, I'd have been pretty pessimistic. Now it seems all but inevitable. I'm especially curious to see what Apple has to say about iPadOS' new path at WWDC. Unless it gets canceled like Google I/O, that is.

New and better sensors

Even in 2020, some people insist on using their tablets to shoot photos. It's not for me. If you're more amenable to the idea though, you're in luck. This year, the iPad Pro comes with two rear cameras: a 12-megapixel wide sensor with an f/1.8 aperture and a new 10-megapixel ultra-wide module that captures a 125-degree field of view.

Whenever possible, you should stick to that main camera; it's not quite iPhone 11 Pro-caliber, but it gets close. Photos are crisp, with nice colors and even exposure, thanks to Apple's on-by-default Smart HDR. The ultra-wide isn't half bad either, but the results are noticeably softer and less satisfying. You'll just have to make sure the grandeur of the sweeping vista you're shooting makes up for the relative lack of detail. Oh, and a note for creators: You can shoot video at resolutions as high as 4K at 60 fps with both cameras, but you can't switch between the two while you're recording.

I'm not going to dwell on these, because there's a decent chance the phone in your pocket will outshoot the iPad Pro. Besides, the most interesting sensor Apple added this year is easily the tiny one-millimeter LiDAR scanner that sits to the right of the main cameras.

LiDAR stands for light detection and ranging, and if you've heard of it before, it's probably because these sensors are crucial to the development of self-driving cars. Here, Apple's using its super-tiny LiDAR array for environmental detection in AR apps: It basically shoots out light and measures how fast it gets reflected back at super-high speeds, which helps it quickly recognize things around you. That's especially important for AR apps that need to "see" your space. Apple says room and scene detection should be faster than on other iOS devices. It was right.

My first test: kit out my living room with new Ikea furniture. Placing a virtual Ektorp couch next to my existing love seat was fast enough with an iPhone 11 Pro, but I started running into issues pretty quickly. As I moved around to see the couch from different angles, I noticed it wasn't firmly rooted in place. Instead, it shifted around as I did, and eventually, this virtual couch had eaten half of my normal one. Once I switched to the iPad Pro, that problem disappeared. I could putz around to see that fine, Swedish craftsmanship from all angles, and my incorporeal couch stayed exactly where I left it.

I saw similarly promising results when playing a few rounds of Angry Birds AR: It took much longer (and lots of panning around) for the iPhone 11 Pro to tell the difference between flat, open space and the surrounding furniture. Bear in mind, these apps weren't optimized to use the LiDAR scanner at all; software using Apple's ARKit just gets better, with no additional work required. That's great news if you're an augmented reality aficionado, but most of us just aren't.

Sure, it's helpful, but in your day-to-day life, you'll probably never actually use this new sensor. More than anything, it's meant to help set the stage for seismic developments in content that haven't arrived yet. Apple has been trying to position itself as the leader in the AR race for years, and adding LiDAR to its devices only helps to cement its standing. Developers, meanwhile, get access to an incredible new stream of data that they can use to build God knows what. The benefits won't be clear for a while though, and all we can do is wait to see what comes next.

Wrap-up

The 2020 iPad Pro is unsurprisingly solid, and more than anything, I love the potential it offers. With software updates and some redesigned components, Apple managed to turn its high-end tablet into a seemingly credible laptop competitor. But should you buy one?

If you already splurged on the last iPad Pro, feel free to move on with your day: You're not missing much. Yes, the new Pro is mildly faster at certain tasks, but I wouldn't call the difference palpable. The additional ultra-wide camera is helpful if you insist on living life as an iPad photographer, but I suspect it'll be a while before that built-in LiDAR becomes truly valuable.

Beyond that, some of the features I've appreciated the most -- elegant trackpad support, the USB-C port for expandability and a great screen/speaker combo -- were already available on the last-generation iPad Pro. This year's version is still a phenomenally useful tablet, and one that can more credibly claim to replace a traditional laptop for grab-and-go use. I'm just a little confused about why we didn't get a more significant performance boost.

Maybe that's just me. It's in a reviewer's nature to dwell on what's changed from last time. The trick is not to get hung up on those differences. This year's iPad Pro is an incremental update, but the many nips, tucks and tweaks Apple made here once again make it the only real choice for people who want a premium tablet. For now, anyway. Some reports, including a note from supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, suggest we're still on track for a more substantial iPad Pro refresh later this year, after the company's new iPhones break cover.

In any case, splurging on this Pro means you're getting performance to last you years, and if you've made it this far without shaking your head in disappointment, you'll probably be pleased with what it offers. If you're in no rush, however, the smart move might be to wait and see what Apple has planned for the rest of 2020.
Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden appeared sombre as she visited a military hospital today in Stockholm amid criticism over the country's response to the coronavirus crisis.

Standing next to her husband Prince Daniel, the heir apparent, 42, could be seen listening intently while speaking with staff members at the institute.

It comes as Sweden refuses to enforce a lock-down, despite seeing more than 2,299 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 41 deaths.

The country's softer line has come under criticism by some, who have called for tougher measures to prevent the spread of the disease.

Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, 42, cut an elegant figure in combat boots and a woolen burgundy coat today during a visit to a military hospital (pictured with Prince Daniel)

Standing next to her husband Prince Daniel, the heir apparent, 42, spoke with staff members at the institute in Stockholm

Crown Princess Victoria appeared in deep concentration as she listened to staff at the military hospital today.

The mother-of-two donned a matching burgundy top with her statement coat and carried a smart-looking black bag over her shoulder.

She teamed the outfit with black trousers and combat boots, while wearing her hair in a tight, sophisticated bun.

Meanwhile, her husband Prince Daniel sported a navy suit and matching coat, along with a royal blue tie.

The royal's visit comes as Sweden refuses to enforce a lock-down despite seeing more than 2,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus across the nation (pictured)

Victoria (pictured next to her husband) appeared in deep concentration as she listened to staff at the military hospital today

The royal visit comes as the number of coronavirus patients in Sweden continues to rise with more than 2,299 confirmed cases.

The country is taking a softer line compared to the rest of Europe and is keeping primary schools, restaurants and bars open and even encouraging people to go outside for a nip of air.

Government recommendations include working from home if you can, staying home if you feel sick, practice social distancing, and stay home if you belong to a risk group or are over the age of 70.

Gatherings of more than 500 people have been banned - compared to more than two people in Britain and Germany - and the government has advised secondary schools and universities to close their facilities and conduct classes online.

Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel were given a description of the different resources available at the hospital in Stockholm during their visit

On Tuesday, the Swedish government announced that restaurants and bars would only be allowed to provide table service to avoid crowding, but stopped short of actually closing them.

Health authorities also urged people to reconsider trips to visit relatives over Easter.

While Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has urged people to 'take responsibility' and follow the government's recommendations, life for many in the country appears to be continuing relatively normally.

The couple appeared sombre throughout their visit, and appeared to listen intently as they spoke with officials

Bars and restaurants were full at the weekend, and Stockholm's city buses have been jam-packed at rush hour despite the social distancing recommendations.

The editor-in-chief of Sweden's biggest newspaper, wrote on Sunday, calling for either tougher measures or more widespread coronavirus testing.

Dagens Nyheter said: 'We cannot allow the human desperation in Wuhan and Bergamo to be repeated in Sweden. That would be a gamble that violates society's most fundamental principle: that every person has an inherent value.'

The couple's visit comes as Sweden faced criticism over their soft approach to the coronavirus crisis

The mounting pressure has not changed the authorities' stance that draconian measures are not effective enough to justify their impact on society.

On Monday, Sweden's former state epidemiologist and current advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO), Johan Giesecke, encouraged Swedes to go out and enjoy the spring sun.

'Bring a friend and walk a metre apart. Don't hug your neighbour. Bring a thermos and sit on a park bench. It's bad for your health to sit at home too,' Giesecke told broadcaster SVT's morning show.
DJ Khaleds over-the-top luxurious mansion has finally found a new owner. The three-story property, which was originally listed for $7.99 million in 2018, recently sold to a Florida-based tech mogul for an undisclosed amount (the most recent asking price was $5.99 million), the New York Post reports. Situated on a half-acre lot on a private island in a gated community called Island Estates, the home comprises five bedrooms and seven bathrooms, with an elevator that travels between all three floors.

Khaled originally bought the Mediterranean-style home for $3.84 million in 2015, but poured an additional $2.5 million into upgrades and renovations over the years, so that it now unmistakably reflects his high-end taste and aesthetic. Among those luxurious additions are 14-karat-gold chandeliers with Swarovski crystals, an impressive walk-in shoe closet with floor-to-ceiling shelves custom-built to hold Khaleds extensive sneaker collection, and a purple-velvet-lined master suite with an elevated platform for the bed.

Photo: ONE Sothebys International Realty

See the video.

Other rooms of note include a velvet-paneled home theater with a coffered ceiling, a wine cellar, a home office with mahogany detailing, and an eye-catching formal living room with a carved wood mantel fireplace and double-height windows that nearly reach the ceilings. The back of the home abuts Biscayne Bay, with a sizable pool, hot tub, fire pit, bamboo grove, and 50-foot boat dock standing between the house and the water. Khaled now resides in a different Miami Beach waterfront mansion designed by Cesar Molina, which he bought in 2018 for $25.9 million.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

In the wake of one death and 178 cases of the novel coronavirus in San Francisco as of Wednesday, city leaders are calling for more federal and state funding ahead of an anticipated surge of cases.

During a briefing at the city's Emergency Operations Center, Mayor London Breed said while the city's hospital system was in good shape to deal with the current cases, she predicted that could change.

"Right now we have about 1,300 medical/surgical beds, and 200 ICU beds. We definitely need a lot more than that," Breed said. "This is not as easy as opening up a bed. It also requires that we have nurses, we have doctors, we have health care professionals and we have sufficient PPE (personal protective equipment) to keep them safe."

Breed estimated the city will need about 5,000 more hospital beds and at least 1,500 ventilators.

Breed said she reached out to both Gov. Gavin Newsom and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday, asking them for more resources for the city's hospitals to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

"I hope that they will deliver to the people of this state and the people of this country. Because time cannot be wasted," she said.

Breed also reminded residents to continue following the city's public health order issued last week to stay home in order to slow the spread of the virus, and to only leave for essential outings like grocery shopping.

Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax said adhering to the shelter-in-place order would help "flatten the curve so fewer people get sick at once."

"This will reduce the likelihood that our health care system gets overwhelmed. The last thing I want, we want, is for those who need care to not be able to access it," he said.

Colfax added that in order to support the city's health care system, the San Francisco Department of Public Health has hired 80 new nurses and has begun processing dozens of coronavirus tests daily, which return results in as little as 24 hours.

Additionally, he said, an entire floor at St. Francis Memorial Hospital will be dedicated to coronavirus patients. The unit, created through a partnership with Dignity Health, University of California at San Francisco and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, will open in early April with just 10 beds, and then expand after that to as many as 48 beds.

"There has never been a more important time for our hospitals to work together," said Dr. David Klein, president and CEO of St. Francis. "No one hospital can do this alone."

Mark Laret, UCSF Health president and CEO, also said Mt. Zion Hospital will reopen sometime in early May and provide some 50-60 additional hospital beds.

"We must flatten the curve. We must get in front of this epidemic. We are going to face some very hard times in the coming weeks," he said.

In regards to shortages of personal protective equipment for medical staff, following two confirmed cases of Laguna Honda staff contracting the coronavirus, Laret said PPE is only being given to nurses, physicians and other staff who need it the most.

"The ideal approach would be to have plenty of PPE for every employee, but the fact of the matter is that we're working with pretty intense shortages right now," he said. "Over time, as we get additional stockpiles of masks, gowns, gloves, hoods and so forth, we will try to expand the circumstances under which those are utilized."

Human Services Agency executive director Trent Rhorer also provided an update on the city's efforts to house homeless people. So far, the city has leased 920 hotel rooms from eight hotels for homeless people in shelters, hospitals or those in single room occupancy hotels needing to be quarantined.

It's also opening a "medical shelter" at the Moscone Center North, where vulnerable homeless people who can't self-care in hotel rooms will be placed.

"With respect to individuals on the streets, we continue to promote social distancing for our outreach teams. We are setting up hygiene stations for them as well," Rhorer said.

Copyright  2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh presented the Friendship Order to Japanese outgoing ambassador Umeda Kunio during a ceremony in Hanoi on March 25.

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh (R) presents Friendship Order to Japanese outgoing ambassador Umeda Kunio

At a reception earlier, Minh lauded the diplomats active contributions to the strengthening of the Vietnam  Japan extensive strategic partnership.

He stressed that during the ambassadors tenure in Vietnam, the bilateral ties have been developed substantially in various areas, with regular high-level visits which helped strengthen bilateral political trust.

On economic cooperation, Japan remained among the top investors, trade and tourism partners of Vietnam, Minh highlighted, thanking and hailing Japan for its continued supply of official development assistance to Vietnam, thus making active and effective contributions to the countrys socio-economic development.

For his part, the Japanese envoy thanked Minh and the Foreign Ministry for helping him fulfill assigned tasks.

According to him, Vietnam has become a top important and trustworthy partner of Japan in the fields of politics, security, economy and human resources training.

He heralded drastic measures undertaken by the Vietnamese Government in response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

The diplomat also pledged to continue contributing to bilateral ties in any position upon returning home.

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh (first right) presents the Friendship Order to outgoing Japanese ambassador Umeda Kunio during a ceremony in Hanoi

Japanese embassador Umeda Kunio thanks Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh and the Foreign Ministry for helping him fulfill assigned tasks

According to the ambassador, Vietnam has become a top important and trustworthy partner of Japan in the fields of politics, security, economy and human resources training

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh and outgoing Japanese ambassador Umeda Kunio at the ceremony

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh presents the Friendship Order to outgoing Japanese ambassador Umeda Kunio

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh presents the Friendship Order to outgoing Japanese ambassador Umeda Kunio

VNA
In a huge victory for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, a federal judge on Wednesday ordered the US Army Corps of Engineers to conduct a full environmental review of the Dakota Access pipeline, nearly three years after it began carrying oil despite protests by people who gathered in North Dakota for more than a year.

US District Judge James Boasberg wrote that the easement approval for the pipeline remains highly controversial under federal environmental law, and a more extensive review is necessary than the environmental assessment that was done.

Standing Rock Chairman Mike Faith called it a significant legal win and said its humbling that the protests continue to inspire national conversations about the environment.

Perhaps in the wake of this court ruling the federal government will begin to catch on, too, starting by actually listening to us when we voice our concerns, Faith said in a statement.

Permits for the pipeline project were originally rejected by the Obama administration, and the Corps prepared to conduct a full environmental review. In February 2017, shortly after Donald Trump took office, the Corps scrapped the review and granted permits for the project, concluding that running the pipeline under the Missouri River posed no significant environmental issues. The Corps said that opinion was validated after an additional year of reviewing the project, as ordered by the court.

Corps and Energy Transfer, which owns the pipeline, said in a statement to The Independent: It is company policy not to comment on current or pending litigation matters.

Craig Stevens, spokesman for the GAIN Coalition, a group that supports large infrastructure projects, said the decision could jeopardise the nations economic and energy security.

This is a stunning decision that flies in the face of decades of widely accepted practice, Mr Stevens told the Associated Press. The Dakota Access Pipeline is already the most studied, regulated, and litigated pipeline in the history of our country and has been safely operating for nearly three years.

Its not clear whether the ruling will shut down the pipeline. Mr Boasberg ordered both parties to submit briefs on whether the pipeline should continue operating during the period of the new environmental review.

The pipeline was the subject of months of protests, sometimes violent, during its construction in late 2016 and early 2017 near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border. The Standing Rock tribe continued to press litigation against the pipeline even after it began carrying oil from North Dakota across several states to a shipping point in Illinois in June 2017.

The $3.8bn, 1,172-mile underground pipeline crosses beneath the Missouri River, just north of the Standing Rock reservation. The tribe draws its water from the river and fears pollution. Texas-based Energy Transfer insisted the pipeline would be safe.

Mr Boasberg said during one of his many opinions on the case that the project largely complied with requirements for the National Environmental Policy Act, but left the door open for the tribes when he said there were substantial exceptions to meeting those rules. He ordered further review on the potential impact of the project.

The ruling issued on Wednesday focused on whether the projects effects were likely to be highly controversial. The judge cited concerns with the leak detection system, operator safety record, the impact of North Dakota winters and the analysis of a worst-case scenario for a spill.

Much of Mr Boasbergs ruling was based on a 2019 case decided by a Washington DC federal appeals court that considered whether agencies adequately dealt with expert criticisms such as those in the Dakota Access Pipeline case. Applying that case, Mr Boasberg wrote that he ultimately concludes that too many questions remain unanswered.

Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman, who represents the Standing Rock Tribe, said the Obama administration had it right when it denied the permits and his group will continue to argue the case until the pipeline is shut down. He said because a full environmental review could take a year or two, it could be potentially conducted under the next presidential administration.

This gives the Army Corps a new opportunity to get this right, Mr Hasselman said.

Associated Press contributed to this report
The Indian government is launching a mobile application named Corona Kavach or Corona Shield, which will act as a preventive tool to contain the spread of global pandemic coronavirus in the country, by identifying and alerting its users who might have come in contact with an infected person. The application is ready for download in Android-based smartphones and a version for Apple users (IOS platform) is in the works. The app is presently under beta testing.

The application is being developed by the ministry of electronics and could be ready for release soon.

The prime minister had recently offered to share such a virus tracking software with member nations of the SAARC grouping that comprises of Indias eight immediate neighbours of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives and Bangladesh.

Corona Kavach, as the name suggests, will use the location tracking aspect of mobile technology to chart the recent locations visited by any user and if any of those locations match with the location data of positive cases of Covid-19, then it will trigger an alert following which the necessary protocols will kick-in, an abplive.com report said.

The government has fed in the data of all positive cases into the application and it will also help the government agencies track any possible breaches of quarantine by positive or suspected cases.

The app will, however, take care to not reveal the identity of positive cases or of suspects in order to safeguard their privacy and prevent any stigmatisation.

Efforts are on to make the app available in several regional languages apart from Hindi and English.

This app is said to be part of governments efforts to limit the spread of the viral disease to the next stage by checking community transmissions by keeping a watch on its spread using the location of its users.

The Corona Kavach will have colour coding to indicate the status of users, said the report. It will flash different colours to indicate if a person has never come in contact with a positive case, been in close proximity of a positive case and if has been declared positive.
CAIRO - Egypt has expelled a correspondent for The Guardian over a report citing a study that challenged the official count of coronavirus cases in the Arab worlds most populous country, the British daily reported Thursday.

The papers correspondent, Ruth Michaelson, left the country last week after Western diplomats informed her that Egyptian security services wanted her to leave immediately, the daily said.

Michaelson had reported on unpublished research by Canadian infectious disease specialists estimating an outbreak size of over 19,000 cases in Egypt. The scientists had used data from early March when Egypt officially had only three confirmed cases, according to Michaelsons report published on March 15.

The following day, Michaelson, along with a New York Times reporter who had tweeted her story, were summoned by Egyptian officials and told that they were accused of misreporting and spreading panic, the Guardian said.

A day later, Egypts State Information Services, the government-body overseeing foreign correspondents, revoked Michaelsons press credentials and released a statement accusing her of citing a misleading study based on false conclusions and speculation.

Egyptian authorities threatened to shut the Guardians bureau in Cairo if the paper refused to retract the story and run an official apology, the statement said.

Egypts heath ministry on Thursday said there have been 495 cases of the new coronavirus in the country, including 24 fatalities. In recent weeks, the government has beefed up precautionary measures to contain the pandemic by shutting down schools, restaurants and recreational facilities, reducing the workforce in public and private businesses and eventually imposing an 11-hour daily curfew. State-run media have called on people to observe social-distancing and stay home.

Michaelson, who lived in and reported on Egypt since 2014, boarded a Germany-bound flight along with stranded foreign nationals last Friday, a day after Egypt suspended all commercial flights to stop the spread of the virus.

The Guardian said it offered to publish a rebuttal by Egyptian authorities of the Canadian study but received no response to the offer.

We regret that the Egyptian authorities have chosen to revoke accreditation from a reporter working for a trusted, independent media organization like the Guardian, a spokesperson for the paper said.

Egypt remains among the worlds worst jailers of journalists, along with Turkey and China, according to the U.S.-based watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists. Authorities have imprisoned dozens of reporters and occasionally expelled some foreign journalists.

As fears of an outbreak keep mounting, Egyptian authorities are seeking to suppress any attempts to challenge the official narrative. Earlier this month, police arrested three people for Facebook posts about the coronavirus, saying they had spread rumours and fake news about reported cases in the country.

A CPJ representative on Thursday urged Egyptian authorities to allow Michaelson back into the country and to let both local and foreign reporters work freely and without fear of arrest or official harassment

Accurate information about the COVID-19 pandemic is of life or death importance to Egyptians and people around the world, and should not be stifled for political convenience, said CPJs Mideast and North Africa co-ordinator, Sherif Mansour.
Self-styled godwoman brandishes sword at cops to defy COVID-19 lockdown

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Gorakhpur, Mar 26: A self styled godwoman has been arrested in Uttar Pradesh after she brandished a sword, when the police tried to prevent a religious gathering. 12 others too were arrested by the police.

May Adi Shakti refused to call off a religious gathering at the Mehwa Pudwa area of Deoria district in eastern Uttar Pradesh. The religious gathering was convened to mark the nine day Navratri festival which began on Wednesday.

Deoria Superintendent of Police, Sripat Mishra said that in the morning they had received a tip off that a religious gathering was underway and some people were performing faith healing. We told them that there is Section 144 CrPC in force in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. The lady however became aggressive and brandished a sword to stop the police, Mishra also said.

Coronavirus could become seasonal: Top US scientist

The police then had to use force to disperse the crowd. Several persons including the woman and her husband were arrested. FIRs have been and relevant sections have been slapped against the accused persons, the police also said.

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Story first published: Thursday, March 26, 2020, 10:04 [IST]
Flying in the face Actor Amitabh Bachchan (pictured) on Wednesday tweeted that a study in a prestigious medical journal had shown that coronavirus lingers on human excreta much longer than in respiratory samples.

Connecting it to the Clean India Campaign, for which he is brand ambassador, Bachchan implored all: Come on India, we are going to fight this! Use your toilet. However, some of his Twitter followers requested him to cite the link to the study, and also reminded him he recently had to delete a tweet in which he had claimed that vibrations from ...
A 21-year-old coronavirus positive patient triggered a scare after he escaped from a quarantine facility in Jhunjhunu district only to be brought back by authorities after he was found at his home.

Health department officials have taken the samples of 10 other family members of Tayub (21) and kept all of them in an isolation ward in the facility, Jhunjhunu Chief Medical and Health Officer Chhote Lal said on Thursday.

Tayub had returned from Saudia Arabia's capital Riyadh on February 29 and was sent to the quarantine facility on March 23 (Monday) based on the symptoms, Lal said.

Soon after getting admitted to the hospital, the suspect dodged the officials at the facility and escaped, the CMHO added.

Police said that based on the information he had provided at the time of admission, he was traced to his residence in Mohalla Batwalan in the district. He was then taken back to the quarantine facility and his swab samples were sent to Jaipur for testing.

"His report came out positive on Wednesday. He had landed at Jaipur airport and come to Jhunjhunu," Lal said.

The CMHO said another man identified as Imtiyaz having travelled to Riyadh was found coronavirus positive on Thursday. He had returned on March 21 from Delhi airport.

Imtiyaz has been isolated as well and the persons he had come in contact with are being traced, he added.

The entire state is under lockdown from March 22 and massive survey and screening is underway to trace out the contagion.

A total of 40 COVID-19 positive patients have been found in the state so far. One patient in Bhilwara district found to be coronavirus positive died due to co-morbid condition.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness has become America's newest obsession since it premiered last Friday on Netflix.

One of the true crime documentary series' most memorable faces is that of Joe Exotic's now ex-husband, John Finlay.

This week the star took to social media to show off his new teeth, which he says are actually not that new.

Say cheese: Tiger King star John Finlay recently revealed his new set of teeth, which has earned quite the reaction from the series' quickly growing fanbase

Hidden smile: He actually got his new chompers in July of 2019, but he claimed that Netflix actively decided not to include them in the limited series

Finlay got his new chompers in July of 2019, but he claimed that Netflix actively decided not to include them in the limited series.

He wrote on his Facebook group The Truth About John Finlay: 'Yes I have my teeth fixed.

'The producers of the Netflix series had video and pictures of this, but chose not to show it. It's all about the ratings for them, not the people they hurt.'

He started the page to correct what he feels Netflix got wrong with the seven-part series, which documented his and Joe Exotic's polygamist marriage with Travis Maldonado.

Fact or fiction? He recently started a Facebook page to correct what he feels Netflix got wrong with the seven-part series, which documented his and Joe Exotic's polygamist marriage with Travis Maldonado

Starting over: He currently lives with his fiancee Stormey in central Oklahoma, where he works as a welder

Fellow subjects Carole Baskin and Joe Exotic have also taken issue with their depictions.

Finlay also clarified to TMZ that his teeth loss was not due to meth abuse but genetic issues.

Although he admitted that he'd done meth in the past, but claimed he had been clean for six years.

He currently lives with his fiancee Stormey in central Oklahoma, where he works as a welder.

The seven-episode docu-series, which premiered on the streaming platform on March 20, follows the true story of a man who goes by Joe Exotic, a tiger breeder who ran an exotic animal park in Oklahoma.

Joe's life has been 'you can make this up' wild, from his three-way wedding to two different men to his years-long feud with Carole Baskin, which culminated in a 22-year prison sentence after he was found guilty of hiring an undercover FBI agent to murder her.

Stranger than fiction: Tiger King tells the wild but true story of big cat enthusiast Joe Exotic's murder-for-hire plot against animal activist Carole Baskin
Some top generals may be able to serve in their posts beyond their planned retirements or duty assignments to maintain service stability as the U.S. military continues to respond to the novel coronavirus outbreak.

As part of a proposed sweeping relief package to respond to the pandemic, lawmakers have given President Donald Trump the authority to keep top brass in their roles longer, according to the bill's language. That would include Air Force Gen. Joseph Lengyel, head of the National Guard Bureau, and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein, both of whom were slated to retire in coming months.

According to "The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act," Trump may extend the appointment "for the incumbent in such position as of the date of the enactment of this act until the date of the appointment of the successor to such incumbent," the bill states. The president could also delegate this authority to Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

The law also applies to Gen. John Jay Raymond, newly appointed chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force; Lt. Gen. Scott Rice, director of the Air National Guard; Lt. Gen. Charles Luckey, chief of the Army Reserve; Lt. Gen. Daniel Hokanson, director of the Army National Guard; and Vice Adm. Luke McCollum, chief of the Navy Reserve.

Related: Massive Relief Bill Would Triple Military Hospital Beds, Fund Guard Deployments

But in some cases, successors have already been named by the White House. Earlier this month, the Pentagon announced that Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown had been chosen to lead the U.S. Air Force, pending confirmation.

The promotion would make Brown, currently head of Pacific Air Forces, the 22nd Air Force chief of staff as well as the first African American officer to serve as the top uniformed officer for any of the military branches.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.

Read More: The Latest on the Military's COVID-19 Response
NEW DELHI: Interim Congress chief Sonia Gandhi has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying her party supports the 21-day lockdown to tackle the deadly coronavirus, which has claimed more than 21,000 lives globally.

In her letter to the PM, the Congress chief said Congress stands with people of India at this time of national crisis. We extend full support to the 21-day lockdown and extend cooperation to the government. She also sought measures to protect doctors, paramedics and ease supply chain during the period of lockdown.

Centre must consider announcing sector-wise relief package, including tax breaks, interest subvention, deferment of liability, Sonia Gandhi wrote to PM Modi in her letter.

She added that all loan instalment deductions from salaries of government employees may also be deferred for six months.

The Congress president had earlier written to the PM seeking extra measures to help the unorganised sector workers and the poor during the times of coronavirus crisis.

Her son and MP Rahul Gandhi had been attacking the Centre over lack of preparations to tackle the coronavirus crisis.

Meanwhile, the total number of positive cases in India has risen to 649, the Health and Family Welfare Ministry said on Thursday, 26 March. While there are total 593 active cases, the number of discharged cases stands at 42, according to the ministry.

Kashmir reported its first coronavirus-related death on Thursday, a day after Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu reported their first deaths.

It may be noted that the Prime Minister, for a second time in a week, on Tuesday evening announced a 21-day countrywide lockdown from midnight due to the outbreak of the coronavirus.

PM Modi stressed that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly. In his televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Modi said that it is vital to break the chain of the disease and experts have said that at least 21 days are needed for it.

The Prime Minister, who had also addressed the nation last week, said the lockdown has drawn a "Lakshman Rekha" in every home and people should stay indoors for their own protection and for that of their families.

The 21-day lockdown has seen anxious people scrambling to nearby shops for essential supplies and services, prompting the government to urge citizens not to panic. E-commerce companies delivering essentials like groceries, medicines and food, however, alleged harassment from law enforcement officials and security guards, leading to severe inconvenience in times of an unprecedented crisis, calling for an urgent intervention from the government.

Despite the lockdown that has taken buses off the road and trains off the track, many migrant labourers have started on their way home, willing to risk sealed borders and vigilant policemen, who are tasked with ensuring that people not leave their homes except for most pressing need.
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Linkedin Ardila Syakriah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 20:11 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da9f44 1 National COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,idul-fitri-exodus,social-distancing,COVID-19-travel-restriction,COVID-19-travel-ban Free

The government is mulling over a plan to ban this year's Idul Fitri mudik (exodus) to prevent city dwellers from spreading the coronavirus to towns and villages across the archipelago, but questions remain as to how such a ban would be implemented.

Ramadan is expected to take place from April 23 to May 23 this year, followed by the Islamic holiday on May 24 and 25.

This Idul Fitri season was expected to see some 20 million people travel to their places of origin, resulting in a massive stream of urbanites to rural areas. In the current coronavirus crisis, with 893 confirmed infections and 78 deaths logged nationwide up until Thursday, government officials and experts have expressed worry that the exodus might trigger an explosion of cases and deaths.



The Office of the Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister conducted a meeting with other institutions on Monday to discuss the matter. The office's spokesperson, Jodi Mahardi, said a mudik ban was an option "seriously considered" by the government.

"The safety of the people is our priority," he told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Read also: Forget 'mudik' this year, govt tells people as Idul Fitri moves closer



He said that a limited Cabinet meeting had been scheduled for Friday to discuss the government's final decision on the issue.



In a press release issued by the office on Tuesday, Jodi explained that three scenarios had been presented to President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo; the first was the business-as-usual scenario--meaning the mudik would proceed just like in the past; the second was to allow people to proceed with the mudik but not to actively support it, such as through companies offering free transportation as they typically do, and the last was to ban the mudik.



The statement also said that the Transportation Ministry's Air Transportation Directorate General would reduce the passenger quota of flights by up to 50 percent and would restrict vehicles from Greater Jakarta, deemed to be the epicenter of the new virus strain within the country, from traveling to Central Java and East Java.

Daily passenger volume through Indonesia's busiest hubs and thoroughfares (JP/Hengky Wijaya)

As several cities including Jakarta have ordered offices, schools and public centers to temporarily close to support the physical distancing policy, several areas in Central Java have seen a surge in incoming traffic, which some have called an early mudik.

Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo said he had obtained reports from regents and mayors that the inflow of people from Jakarta to the province had already begun.

In Jepara, 44 buses arrived, carrying homecomers from Jakarta. It indeed happening early, maybe because the offices and companies where they work had reduced their working hours or even stopped operating, Ganjar said.

In Wonogiri, the local administration recorded 14,000 people coming into the regency last week, with the daily arrival of bus passengers twice the normal number at 2,000 people.

The Transportation Ministry has predicted that, without restrictions, millions of Indonesians will hit the road using private vehicles in the next few weeks to avoid contracting the virus in public transportation.

Land Transportation Director General Budi Setyadi told the Post on Thursday that the ministry was planning to limit toll road access to vehicles from Greater Jakarta, although it had yet to come up with clear mechanisms.

[A toll road restriction] would not be enough to prevent people in the epicenter from traveling to their hometowns, he said, adding that further decisions would be taken during the limited Cabinet meeting.

The ministry previously abolished all free mudik travel programs for this year given the country's emergency status imposed until May 29. Before the program was canceled, the Transportation Ministry alone had planned to provide 1,317 buses to carry 59,265 passengers from Greater Jakarta to 37 destinations across Indonesia.

The statement from the Office of the Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister also revealed that the National Police would carry out their annual security operation, while Indonesian Military personnel would be deployed at toll road gates to oversee the "no mudik" policy this year.

State-owned railway operator PT Kereta Api Indonesia (KAI) said it would reduce the number of trips per day from 532 to 429 starting on April 2, as suggested by the government to suppress COVID-19 transmission. Passengers canceling trips would get a 100 percent refund.

PT KAI spokesperson Yuskal Setiawan told the Post that 878,179 tickets had been sold for exodus trips, and only 120,823 people had canceled their trips so far.

Transportation experts have warned that, because of the outbreak, the mudik had already begun, especially from Jakarta, where physical distancing measures left informal sector workers on low incomes with no option but to return to their hometowns to make a living.

Djoko Setijowarno of the Indonesian Transportation Society (MTI) said the government should ban the mudik as early as possible, such as by imposing community quarantine in the Greater Jakarta area to contain the virus. Sanctions had to be imposed, he added.

The 2018 Law on Health Quarantine stipulates that residents in quarantined regions may not travel outside, with the National Police guarding the exit points of the region.

He added that the government could disburse funds for the free mudik programs to low-income families affected by the measure by using data from participants of the programs in the past.



"If a ban is not imposed, the government will need more funds to conduct health screening on all travelers. The number of passengers in a vehicle must be limited," Djoko said, adding that the ban should at least be imposed on people under surveillance (PDP) and patients under treatment (ODP).

Darmaningtyas of the Institute of Transportation Study (Instran) said that, with the current trend, the peak of the exodus would occur at the end of March or in early April, given how badly informal sector workers in Jakarta were affected by the outbreak.

[The mudik] ban should be announced as early as the start of April, he said, adding that a presidential decree could be issued as the legal basis in times of emergency.

--Suherdjoko and Ganug Nugroho Adi contributed to this report from Central Java.
BERLIN (dpa-AFX) - Fraport AG said it has proposed to the Annual General Meeting to carry forward net profits of the financial year 2019 entirely into revenue reserves, citing the recent developments of the coronavirus pandemic. Since the proposed appropriation of net profits of 2 euros per Fraport share, the intensity of the spread of the coronavirus, as well as related travel restrictions and restrictions on public life, have significantly increased. The changed framework conditions have a clearly more negative impact on the business, revenue and earnings situation of Fraport AG and its Group companies than initially expected. Fraport said it could not make statement regarding the dividend for the financial year 2020, due to the unforeseeable market development. Fraport will publish its first quarter results on May 6, 2020. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and leaders around the world have been told they need a 'war plan' to deal with the coronavirus pandemic during a virtual G20 summit.

Australia and other G20 nations struck a deal to coordinate efforts to tackle the crisis, as they collectively pledged $A7.5 trillion to kickstart the global economy.

Mr Morrison joined US President Donald Trump, Xi Jinping of China and Russia's Vladimir Putin through a video link-up on Thursday night.

The virtual summit was called by Saudi Arabia, which is chairing the forum this year.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison attends a video conference with G20 leaders to discuss COVID-19

Australia and other G20 nations have struck a deal to co-ordinate efforts to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, as they collectively pledged $A7.5 trillion to kickstart the global economy

During the video conference, Australia offered to assist the Pacific region amid the global health crisis.

In a communique issued after the meeting, Mr Morrison and other leaders described the pandemic as 'a powerful reminder of our interconnectedness and vulnerabilities'.

'This virus respects no borders,' they said.

'Combating this pandemic calls for a transparent, robust, coordinated, large-scale and science-based global response in a spirit of solidarity.'

G20 finance, health and trade ministers are set to meet in coming weeks to develop specific action plans to deal with the economic and health impacts.

China agreed to increase its supply of pharmaceutical ingredients and other supplies to the international market, in a move that will ease shortages in many countries.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison joined US President Donald Trump and other members of the G20 through a video link-up overnight

Mr Morrison is seen on a screen attending a video conference with G20 leaders

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres told the leaders they needed a war-time plan.

'It took the world three months to reach 100,000 confirmed cases of infection,' he said.

'The next 100,000 happened in just 12 days. The third took four days. The fourth, just one and a half.

'This is exponential growth and only the tip of the iceberg.'

The Australian Government have spent more than $189 billion in cash and credit on their Federal stimulus package to support businesses and jobs.

The National Cabinet will consider further measures to tackle the virus when they meet on Friday.

The G20 meeting was not open to the media, but some leaders' statements were issued after it.

In a communique issued after the meeting, Mr Morrison and other leaders described the pandemic as 'a powerful reminder of our interconnectedness and vulnerabilities'

Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested setting up a special fund under the IMF that would offer interest-free loans, and he emphasised the need to create 'green corridors' for free movement of supplies and technologies intended to deal with the epidemic.

He also proposed a moratorium on sanctions with regard to essential goods.

International Monetary Fund managing director Kristalina Georgieva asked G20 leaders for their backing to double the fund's $US50 billion ($A84 billion) emergency financing capacity.

She said vulnerable households and businesses need targeted financial support to stay afloat and get back to work quickly.

The final statement pledged 'bold and large-scale fiscal support'.

'We commit to do whatever it takes and to use all available policy tools to minimise the economic and social damage from the pandemic, restore global growth, maintain market stability and strengthen resilience.'
Kylie Jenner has made a large donation to Los Angeles hospitals to help their fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

On Wednesday, it was announced that the 22-year-old billionaire donated $1m to LA area hospitals to buy necessary equipment to fight the Covid-19 outbreak.

Dr Thais Aliabadi, Jenner's doctor, announced the generous donation on Instagram, where she wrote: "I am speechless, my eyes are filled with tears of joy and my heart is overwhelmed with gratitude. I made a wish to the Universe to gather protective masks for our brave healthcare workers and today my dream came true.

One of my patients, a beautiful Living Angel just donated $1,000,000 to help us buy hundreds of thousands of masks, face shields, and other protective gear which we will have delivered directly to our first responders, as too many masks at hospitals are disappearing before making their way onto the faces of our front line heroes, the OB-GYN specialist continued. I have never felt more blessed to be a doctor, as helping our brave ER and ICU workers feels just as gratifying as helping my own patients."

Dr Aliabadi concluded the post thanking Jenner for her generosity and calling the reality star her "hero".

Jenner responded to the heartfelt message with: I love you! And thank YOU for all the love and care you put into everything that you do! Youre an angel on earth.

Healthcare workers around the world have faced shortages of vital supplies amid the sudden influx of patients. Masks, gloves and other protective equipment have been some of the key items in short supply, forcing hospitals and organisations to crowdsource them.

The shortage has been so severe in some cases, television shows including Greys Anatomy, Station 19 (a Greys Anatomy spin-off) and The Resident have donated their props to be used.

Many other celebrities have also made large donations as the Covid-19 outbreak continues to spread around the world.

Actors Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds donated $1m to food banks, many of which have been struggling to keep up with the increased demand.

James Taylor and his wife Kim donated $1m to Massachusetts General Hospital, saying in a statement: "There is no question that it's a point of pride for New Englanders to claim the MGH as their hospital -- our hospital -- and this is especially true today with the threat coming from a new and insidious virus."








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There are many people who automatically reject notions of "conspiracies" as the musings of crazy people which should best be ignored.





However, a realist would appreciate that intrigue and verifiable conspiracies are a well-documented part of history.





Do you remember, for example, when we were all told about "Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq"?





Wikipedia documents is that of Operation Northwoods. This was a proposed

One particularly notorious conspiracydocuments is that of Operation Northwoods. This was a proposed False Flag operation against the Cuban government that originated within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) of the United States government in 1962.





"The proposals called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other U.S. government operatives to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets, blaming them on the Cuban government, and using it to justify a war against Cuba," Wikipedia elaborates.







"The possibilities detailed in the document included the possible assassination of Cuban immigrants, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes to be shot down or given the appearance of being shot down, blowing up a U.S. ship, and orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities."





The proposals were rejected by then President John F. Kennedy.







Having studied history and politics at a top university, I therefore like to "stay on the look out" on whether alleged conspiracies eventually "show their head".





One of the most disturbing allegations of conspiracies that I ever heard was about 10 years ago on Jesse Ventura's show Conspiracy Theory.





Unfortunately, it now seems that his allegations of a horrific conspiracy may unfortunately now be showing their head.





Jesse Ventura is the Ex-Governor of Minnesota. In my view, he has stood out as a true American patriot in a sea of self-serving current and former American politicians.







In the above video Jesse Ventura is joined by now former radio host Alex Jones to look into the plans and procedures by a "Fifth Column" of elites in the United States to "round up and imprison innocent Americans into Concentration Camps called "Residential Centres"."





According to Jesse Ventura's findings, martial law would be "triggered by an influenza pandemic".





Under a plan of martial law, the United Sates Constitution would be suspended and America would be divided in 10 concentration camp precincts run by a fascistic "Council of Governors".





In Season Two and Episode 5 of the ' Police State ', Jesse Ventura and Alex Jones visit a place where tens of thousands of coffins had been put there in preparation of an alleged orchestrated pandemic.





You will see this place in the above video while it remains online.







Jesse Ventura also visited one of the so-called "Residential Centres" where strange non-American military personnel guard which include the kind of bob wire fencing reminiscent of Japanese Internment Camps during World War II and the "holding facilities" of Nazi Germany.





Could the "coronavirus" with its flu and respiratory problems be the very "influenza pandemic" which was to be orchestrated alongside an already built infrastructure of tens of witnessing in one area alone of thousands of mass coffins alongside "Concentration Camps"?





Above you will see a screenshot of a still active report on Amazon.com entitled "Influenza Pandemic" that is published by U.S. Homeland Security which Jesse Ventura links to the 'FEMA camps' that he presents in his documentary.







You may further wonder who would construct such an evil plot to destroy human life and democratic institutions in such a methodical and premeditated way?





But before we can explore such a topic, if you were part of an "evil group" of humans roaming the universe and your group spotted an inhabited planet that you liked and wanted for "your own kind", what would you do?





Would you seek to use your 'superior technology' to wage an open war against the inhabitants of the planet? Probably not if you sought to preserve planetary infrastructure.





The "smart choice" for you would probably be to use your technology to completely destabilize the planet's population with the possible aid of a 'pandemic' that you and your species would be immune to in order to enable take-over and "colonization" by your species.





In ABC's former science fiction hit show called ' The Visitors ', a group of human appearing reptillians were described as having infiltrated human institutions which include the military, the police, justice systems and other levels of society in order to put in place a plan of orchestrated destabilization through disease and other mechanisms to make way for eventual alien colonization





In the video below the Directors of V through their character reveal that "[I]n order to walk among us they disguise their appearance by cloning human flesh over their own reptillian skin.. the Visitors didn't just get here, they have been here for years. They have been implementing a plan which will result in the extermination of every man, woman and child on the face of the planet... They established themselves in all facets of life [including] business; government; religion. It took years, and once embedded among us they set-out to cause worldwide instability -- unnecessary wars and economic meltdown, they twisted into extremism."





The Directors of V through their character elaborate that the "The final stage of the Visitors plan began with them revealing themselves."







This leads to an equally disturbing conspiracy that human elites through formalized Agreements are collaborating with manipulative and demonic aliens in an effort overthrow democratic institutions with the goal to replace humans as the dominant species on our planet Earth. Dr. Michael Salla has extensively documented the operation of such Agreements by a group outside of the formal structures of the U.S. and other elected governments which he refers to as "MIEC" or the " equally disturbing conspiracy that human elites through formalized Agreements are collaborating with manipulative and demonic aliens in an effort overthrow democratic institutions with the goal to replace humans as the dominant species on our planet Earth. Dr. Michael Salla has extensively documented the operation of such Agreements by a group outside of the formal structures of the U.S. and other elected governments which he refers to as "MIEC" or the " Military Industrial Extraterrestrial Complex ". John Lash specifically referred to this alien and human cabal as the "Archons".





In V, the Directors also apparently sought to warn humanity that these reptillian aliens have sought to befriend human elites by providing them with technology in exchange for these aliens gaining the cooperation of these elites in the take-over of our planet where these reptillians would be presented as the "saviours" of the planet.





According to Dr. Salla science fiction like "V" has sought to "hide truth in plain sight".









Dr. Salla has extensively documented such a reptillian group as actually existing and as seeking to control various elites like puppetmasters in support of a regressive alien agenda. This representation has also been well-documented by David Icke





Archons are further described by John Lash in his research on ancient Pagan Gnostic insights as the "humanized face of the aliens".







Pagan Gnostic testimony sought to warn humanity of a demonic reptillian artificial intelligence which has sought to use willing human collaborators in an effort to enslave humanity through the orchestration of planned events encoded in the Bible that would lead to a reptillian take-over in the aftermath of an Apocalypse against humans which would include wars and the spread disease and death.







Justin Trudeau, Judicial Corruption and the Supreme Court Of Canada: Aliens and Archons by Peter Tremblay, and review the extensively documented work of Dr. Michael Salla and his learned colleagues in Exopolitics, could the coronavirus be the formal launching mechanism of a systematically planned scenario to overthrow democratic institutions and oppress human rights? If we read the book entitled







In the article titled " Coronavirus is a mass-deception of 5-G radiation warfare suggests scholar on aliens " which includes the research testimony of Dr Michael Salla's evidence is presented which suggests that coronavirus suggests that coronavirus is the execution of "biogenic" weapon with the use of 5G technology which is used to simulate a naturally occurring contagious virus. This could explain why the coronavirus seems to have its epicentres at 5G focal points.





Furthermore, the current enforcement of "social distancing" appears to be an attempt to use the orchestrated pandemic to outlaw public assembly which include the eventually the political protests which the alien and elite collaborators foresee when the public eventually discovers that they have been subjected to real conspiracy.






Singapore on March 25 recorded its biggest single-day jump in coronavirus cases taking the toll to 683 in the country. According to reports, Singapore logged in 73 new cases of coronavirus on March 25, 38 new imported cases and 35 local cases. The health ministry of Singapore said that the 38 imported cases had a travel history to Europe, North America and other ASEAN countries. According to reports, there are currently 509 active coronavirus cases in Singapore, of which 17 remain under critical condition. So far two people have died in the country due to the disease.

Read: Trump Slams WHO For Allegedly Siding With China On Coronavirus Crisis

Singapore said that from March 27 all travellers arriving in the city-state will have to submit a health declaration before proceeding with immigration clearance following which will be notified on the need of self-quarantining themselves for 14 days. Singapore also said that the number of coronavirus cases is estimated to rise in the coming weeks as more residents will return home from overseas travel.

Read: Coronavirus May Not Spread Through Tears, But Can Enter Through Eyes: Study

Coronavirus outbreak

COVID-19 has claimed more than 22,100 lives across the world and has infected nearly 4,91,000 people globally since it first broke out in December 2019. China was the most affected country until last week, however, Italy and Spain have surpassed it to record the most number of deaths anywhere in the world due to COVID-19. The virus is believed to have originated from a seafood market in China's Wuhan city, the epicentre of the disease, where animals were reportedly being traded illegally.

Read: Bolivia Announces Nationwide Lockdown And State Of Emergency To Combat COVID-19

France and the United States have also joined the list of countries that have recorded more than 1,000 deaths due to Coronavirus. Health experts believe that the hotspot could soon shift to the United States, where 1,032 people have died so far, out of the 68,489 confirmed cases that the country has recorded since January 2020.

Read: US Orders 60-day Freeze On All Overseas Troop Movements Amid Coronavirus Lockdown

(Image Credit: AP)
Just because a business does not make any money, does not mean that the stock will go down. For example, although Amazon.com made losses for many years after listing, if you had bought and held the shares since 1999, you would have made a fortune. But the harsh reality is that very many loss making companies burn through all their cash and go bankrupt.

So, the natural question for Rockfire Resources (LON:ROCK) shareholders is whether they should be concerned by its rate of cash burn. For the purpose of this article, we'll define cash burn as the amount of cash the company is spending each year to fund its growth (also called its negative free cash flow). Let's start with an examination of the business's cash, relative to its cash burn.

Check out our latest analysis for Rockfire Resources

Does Rockfire Resources Have A Long Cash Runway?

A company's cash runway is the amount of time it would take to burn through its cash reserves at its current cash burn rate. In June 2019, Rockfire Resources had UK181k in cash, and was debt-free. Looking at the last year, the company burnt through UK1.1m. So it had a cash runway of approximately 2 months from June 2019. To be frank we are alarmed by how short that cash runway is! You can see how its cash balance has changed over time in the image below.

AIM:ROCK Historical Debt March 26th 2020

How Is Rockfire Resources's Cash Burn Changing Over Time?

Rockfire Resources didn't record any revenue over the last year, indicating that it's an early stage company still developing its business. Nonetheless, we can still examine its cash burn trajectory as part of our assessment of its cash burn situation. With the cash burn rate up 3.1% in the last year, it seems that the company is ratcheting up investment in the business over time. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but investors should be mindful of the fact that will shorten the cash runway. Rockfire Resources makes us a little nervous due to its lack of substantial operating revenue. So we'd generally prefer stocks from this list of stocks that have analysts forecasting growth.

Story continues

How Hard Would It Be For Rockfire Resources To Raise More Cash For Growth?

While its cash burn is only increasing slightly, Rockfire Resources shareholders should still consider the potential need for further cash, down the track. Issuing new shares, or taking on debt, are the most common ways for a listed company to raise more money for its business. One of the main advantages held by publicly listed companies is that they can sell shares to investors to raise cash to fund growth. By looking at a company's cash burn relative to its market capitalisation, we gain insight on how much shareholders would be diluted if the company needed to raise enough cash to cover another year's cash burn.

Rockfire Resources has a market capitalisation of UK3.6m and burnt through UK1.1m last year, which is 31% of the company's market value. That's fairly notable cash burn, so if the company had to sell shares to cover the cost of another year's operations, shareholders would suffer some costly dilution.

So, Should We Worry About Rockfire Resources's Cash Burn?

As you can probably tell by now, we're rather concerned about Rockfire Resources's cash burn. Take, for example, its cash runway, which suggests the company may have difficulty funding itself, in the future. While not as bad as its cash runway, its increasing cash burn is also a concern, and considering everything mentioned above, we're struggling to find much to be optimistic about. After considering the data discussed in this article, we don't have a lot of confidence that its cash burn rate is prudent, as it seems like it might need more cash soon. On another note, we conducted an in-depth investigation of the company, and identified 5 warning signs for Rockfire Resources (2 are potentially serious!) that you should be aware of before investing here.

Of course Rockfire Resources may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of companies boasting high return on equity, or this list of stocks that insiders are buying.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
Better to leave crew onboard than risk catching virus during changeovers, warns Danica boss

A crew specialist has urged ship operators to exercise caution when making crew changeovers while the coronavirus outbreak continues to rampage across the globe.

Responding to industry calls for seafarers to be given special travel dispensation, Henrik Jensen, managing director of Danica Crewing Services, warns that crew face a bigger risk of catching the virus while they travel to and from postings using public transport networks.



Better to extend contracts where possible, he advises, warning that merchant vessels are ill-equipped to care for seriously ill seafarers.



Mr Jensen commented: I understand why the ITF, ICS and others are arguing that seafarers should continue to travel to and from vessels for regular crew changeovers. However, with a potential 100,000 seafarers transiting each month, I do not believe this is the best approach at this present time.



Some vessel operators think it is stressful for crew to stay onboard for longer and better for them to go home  I disagree. That may well be the case for crew who have completed postings of more than nine months, such as many Filipino ratings do. However, for those with contract lengths of four to seven months, or less, I think it is not a problem to stay longer, rather than risk becoming infected as they transit home, or to jeopardise the health of those remaining by potentially bringing infected seafarers on to the vessel in replacement, he explained, pointing out that the MLC does allow a maximum term of 12 months at sea.



Mr Jensen warns that the risk to seafarers falling ill at sea is far greater than for those coming ashore: If the homebound seafarer gets infected then hopefully the medical care systems in their home country will be able to cope. What really concerns me is what will happen to an infected seafarer onboard.



Firstly, no commercial vessels are equipped to deal with a crew member seriously ill from coronavirus Covid-19 who may be in need of ventilation and intensive care. Help could be very far away if the vessel is on a long voyage  and even may not be readily available in port. Secondly, if the virus comes onboard then it will almost certainly affect several persons, if not the entire crew. Will the ship then be able to operate in a safe way? How can vessel operators provide medical care to an entire crew far out at sea?



In my opinion, the safest way  although inconvenient and potentially stressful for the individual seafarer  is to halt the crew changes until the situation is under better control.



He added that measures should be put in place to mitigate the problems faced by seafarers undertaking long postings. Owners need to bear in mind that some seafarers may start to suffer from fatigue and that it might be necessary to adjust the crews workload where possible, he said.



Mr Jensen acknowledged seafarers could face unpleasant situations while the virus spreads among the population at home. Owners should prepare for the unfortunate  but inevitable  situation where some of the onboard seafarers relatives will become ill or even pass away and, sadly, it will not be possible to repatriate the seafarer as it normally would be done, he said.



In Danica we have set-up contingency plans to deal with such situations, which include ensuring that external experts in mental health and well-being are ready to speak with the seafarers and relatives in their native language if needed and to give advice on how to cope with the stress.



These are difficult times and we must all pull together and make sacrifices to help each other. The world owes seafarers a great debt in keeping international trade  especially food and medicines  flowing, said Mr Jensen.








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Linkedin Dani Muhtada (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 11:34 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d7c9ef 3 Opinion COVID-19,mitigation,pandemic,infectious-diseases,religion Free

One of the difficult challenges in efforts to combat the spread of COVID-19 is the counterproductive attitude exhibited by some religious communities. Although the government has called on the public to stay put and avoid the crowds (physical distancing), some religious groups still intend to hold gatherings involving many people. The Ijtima Jamaat Tabligh in Asia conference in Gowa, South Sulawesi, showed the difficulties the government faces in dealing with religious communities.

The government almost failed to cancel the event, which was predicted to be attended by 25,000 participants. The organizers were reluctant to call off the planned gathering and said they were more afraid of God than COVID-19. Although the event was finally canceled, 8,695 participants had arrived at the site. Ironically, the police refused to disperse the gathering despite the absence of a permit, and only planned to localize the activity, for fear disbandment would do more harm than good.

The government's indecisiveness in dealing with religious communities who defy the threat of COVID-19 transmission was also obvious in the ordination of the bishop of Ruteng in East Nusa Tenggara, Mgr. Siprianus Hormat. Manggarai Regent Deno Kamelus said the local government encountered difficulties in canceling the event because it had been scheduled several months in advance. As a result, the ordination Mass proceeded with thousands of people and a number of regional heads and government officials in East Nusa Tenggara present.

Apart from the two cases, social media content and messages ignoring the governments calls for physical distancing have been rife. By using religious arguments, they remind believers to fear only Allah and to flock to places of worship. In Bandung, West Java, a group of people removed an official notice regarding the temporary suspension of Friday prayers and five-time daily congregational prayers at a mosque.

The people were angry and thought that the takmir (mosque management) was more afraid of Governor Ridwan Kamil than of Allah. Another viral video showed a middle-aged man angry at the takmir for locking the mosque. He even claimed the suspension was the work of the now-defunct Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

Why is it difficult for some religious communities to work together to combat COVID-19? One of the reasons is religious understanding, which tends to be fatalistic and deterministic. They assume everything happens by God's will and has been well arranged by Him. Life and death are part of a destiny that need not be feared. Fear of something outside of God, including COVID-19, is considered a deviation from the faith.

In fact, resistance from religious communities to calls for physical distancing has not only happened in Indonesia. In other parts of the world, the phenomenon has complicated the efforts of local governments to deal with the spread of COVID-19. The Orthodox Jewish community in New York, United States, for example, continues to hold wedding ceremonies that gather hundreds of people, despite the local governments ban on crowds.

In the Indonesian context, the fatalism and determinism of religious understanding can be complicated further when fueled by political sentiments spurred by the wounds that remain from the 2019 election. Groups that remain unable to accept the results of the presidential election have extra reasons to reject the government's call. The refusal to close the mosque in Bandung because of the COVID-19 outbreak reflected this political ill will against the government.

That said, the government cannot ignore the factor of religion in its handling of COVID-19. In fact, religion greatly influences community perspectives and attitudes toward the emergency. Unfortunately, in the context of COVID-19 mitigation, religious communities are the most vulnerable to virus transmission. Daily worship that sees many people gather at one site and pilgrimage rituals pave the way for virus transmission. Therefore, involving religious organizations in mitigating this pandemic is imperative.

There are two main reasons why the government must cooperate with mass religious organizations. First, religious groups, especially large ones like Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, have strong authority to rectify the incorrect religious understanding of disaster management. Religious leaders from these organizations, both structural and cultural, can fend off fatalistic understandings in responding to the COVID-19 outbreak. Traditional clerics can exercise their religious authority to explain to the community what must be done in dealing with COVID-19 from a religious perspective.

Clerics are often more effective than civil servants in conveying the governments messages to the community. By using religious idioms that are well known to the public, clerics can communicate with their congregants about why a religious ritual can be performed in their respective homes for greater benefit. This kind of religious cultural approach will enable the religious community to understand and accept the government's call for physical distancing.

Second, apart from religious authority, these mass organizations also have multilevel structures, from the national level to the grassroots throughout the archipelago. This multilevel structure with a national network is what the government needs in its disaster mitigation efforts. In addition, the organizations also have autonomous bodies, which can work independently to support the duties and functions of their umbrella organizations.

The NU has strong female wings, Muslimat and Fatayat, student wings, PMII and IPNU-IPPNU, and the youth wing Anshor, while Muhammadiyah has womens wings Aisyiyah and Nasyiatul Aisyiyah, student wing IMM and youth wing Muhammadiyah Youth.

Both the NU and Muhammadiyah also have supporting social institutions, universities, schools and especially hospitals with very wide networks. They also have their own disaster mitigation centers.

Other religious organizations also have significant power and influence in society. Other Islamic mass organizations such as the Indonesian Ulema Council, Al-Irshad, Al-Washliyah and Mathla'ul Anwar play pivotal roles in society. It is likewise with non-Islamic religious organizations such as the Indonesian Communion of Churches (PGI), the Indonesian Bishops' Conference (KWI), Parisada Hindu Dharma Indonesia (PHDI), Representatives of Indonesian Buddhists (Walubi) and others. The government should partner with these organizations to work together to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Considering the great potential possessed by these religious organizations, the first step the government has to take is to invite the groups leaders to sit together and discuss strategies as well as to gather inputs related to disaster management. Some religious organizations have taken the initiative to educate their followers by, for example, announcing the closure of mosques and calling on people to worship at home.

But there is much more these religious organizations can do to help mitigate COVID-19. These groups muse be provided with a comprehensive explanation of mitigation strategies, including what the government has done and not yet done in dealing with the plague. From there, religious leaders can provide insights about what they can contribute, with all the resources they have at hand.

Remember, this pandemic can develop beyond the governments control, so it requires all forces and elements of society to fight together.

***

Head of the Center for the Study of Regulation and Public Policy, School of Law, Semarang State University, Central Java. This article is part of CSIS Commentaries.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
Terming India's 21-day nationwide lockdown as a "bold and difficult" decision, a top Indian-American pharma industry expert on Thursday said the country is using a multi-pronged strategy to contain the deadly coronavirus.

To lockdown India for 21 days to contain COVID-19 was a bold and difficult decision based on scientific reasoning. No other country in the world has taken such a courageous decision to implement social distancing, Karun Rishi, president of USA India Chamber of Commerce (USAIC) told PTI.

So far, it has appeared to dodge the full hit of the pandemic, said Rishi.

Based out of Boston, which is the hub of health and pharma sector in the US, USAIC every year organizes a US-Indian pharma summit attended by top industry and government leaders and officials from the two countries.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has used multi-pronged strategy to contain and manage the COVID-19 virus in India, he said.

The first step taken, he said, was a policy initiative last week to boost manufacturing of bulk drugs and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).

Substantial financial package announced by India in these difficult economic times to encourage domestic manufacture of Key Starting Materials (KSM), drug intermediates, and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) show the political will and resolve of the leadership to make India self-reliant for the domestic and export markets, he said.

Only economies of scale in manufacturing can ensure affordable drug prices for patients. This policy envisions a set of schemes to reap economies of scale and ready availability of inputs in the production of APIs via the cluster approach. This will help India achieve drug security through self-sufficiency in manufacturing of at least 53 critical bulk drugs, he added.

Asserting that social distancing is the only way to combat the spread of coronavirus, he noted that India with 1.3 billion people is the world's second most populous country and the fifth biggest economy. And so far, it has appeared to dodge the full hit of the pandemic, he observed.

There are less than 10,000 ICU and fewer than 40,000 isolation beds in India. A vast majority of these are already occupied by existing patients, he said.

If India follows Italy's trajectory, for example, it would be a catastrophe, especially in the poorer Indian states, which have next to zero capacity to cope with this pandemic.

"Priority of the government was saving lives of people. India has shown effective leadership by announcing a nationwide lockdown to tackle coronavirus. This will save millions of lives, Rishi said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Scottish co-operative has announced it will link up with online company SellMyLivestock to support those who are not able to attend marts.

ANM Group, based at Thainstone Mart, Inverurie, has teamed up with the platform as part of its response to the Covid-19 outbreak in the UK.

The co-op said its new partnership will help continued trade and ensure farmers' businesses are not impacted by the coronavirus restrictions.

SellMyLivestock is the UK's largest online marketplace for beef and sheep, with almost 50,000 UK farmers registered to trade.

From Friday 27 March, the platform will include the services of an ANM auctioneer and valuer for farmers in Scotland.

It comes as livestock marts recently announced an array of new measures to help battle the spread of the virus.

ANM Group Chief Executive, Grant Rogerson, said: "The launch of the partnership has been in the pipeline for some time but fast-tracking seems the sensible thing to do given the public health advice surrounding coronavirus, particularly for those in at-risk groups.

"Although our marts are trading as normal - responsibly and within government guidelines - being at the live ring is unfortunately not an option for some of our buyers and sellers at this point in time.

"We hope this service coupled with live online bidding directly into the auctions ring will provide additional routes to market for livestock producers across Scotland.
Virgin Australia will make all pilots at its budget arm Tigerair redundant as part of a round of layoffs, which will see more than 1000 workers lose their jobs in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

The airline on Wednesday stood down 8000 of its 10,000 workers as it slashed domestic flight capacity by 90 per cent. On Thursday, chief executive Paul Scurrah said more than 1000 of those workers would lose their jobs permanently.

Virgin insists its low-cost subsidiary will continue to operate after the COVID-19 crisis passes, with plans to use a single workforce of pilots across both the Virgin and Tigerair fleets. Credit:Paul Rovere

The move comes as Virgin's larger rival Qantas stands down 20,000 of its 30,000 employees while also making large cuts to its flying capacity.

Ratings agency S&P on Thursday further downgraded Virgins credit rating, from B- to CCC, saying Virgins grounding would intensify its cash outflow and liquidity pressures.
A novel social ritual is emerging along with the novel coronavirus: sharing the news that one has COVID-19.

Actor Tom Hanks did it on Twitter with folksy fatalism and a promise that he and his wife, actor Rita Wilson, who also tested positive, would follow the advice of medical professionals. Actor Daniel Dae Kim did it in a lengthy straight-to-camera video, which included admonishments against Asian-American racism that has spread along with the virus. Non-celebrities have shared stories through interviews and social media, including oxygen-tank selfies.

As the number of confirmed cases mounts, along with the likelihood of people nearly everywhere being exposed to this highly transmissible disease, it raises the question: Is there a best way to do this? If you test positive for COVID-19, who has a right to know?

The short answer: Its complicated. All these ethical and moral decisions and your social obligations are all context-specific, says Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

In times of pandemic, privacy concerns must be balanced with efforts to protect others, yet that equation is affected by infinite individual variables. Do you live in a multi-generational household? Are you a CEO with a fiduciary duty to shareholders? Are you in a part of the world that is already under mandatory stay-at-home orders or are cases just beginning to pop up in your community?

Regardless, there is good reason to tell at least one group of people: those youre in close contact with every day, including your family, your partner, your roommates. Anybody you live with has to know your condition, says Stuart Finder, director of the Center of Healthcare Ethics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. This is in part so they are aware they need to stay quarantined as well. It might mean instituting stricter protective measures within a household, like splitting up the space and practicing hyper-hygiene (think: more showers, more hand-washing). And it could help everyone get the care they need down the line.

Story continues

Actors Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson at the 92nd Academy Awards in Hollywood, Calif., on Feb. 9, 2020, a month before they announced they had tested positive for the coronavirus. | Amy SussmanGetty Images

Timothy Brewer, a professor at UCLAs Fielding School of Public Health, gives the example of a person with COVID-19 who has close contact with elderly parents. Should one of the parents develop a fever, being able to tell their healthcare provider that theyve been exposed to someone with an infection would be very valuable, Brewer says, especially at a time when tests are in short supply. A physician or lab that performs a test and gets a positive result will likely alert public health authorities, who could then begin tracing others possibly infected. Thats essential for our ability to track the outbreak, Brewer says.

Healthcare providers, including caregivers, should also be looped in. While most nurses and doctors will be operating under the assumption that everyone has COVID-19 at this point, knowing it for certain can help them decide how to deploy limited resources like face masks.

Beyond that, decisions about whether to tell ones wider circle of contacts and friends get trickier. If you live in a place that is not under shelter-in-place orders and work in a field where people have still been going into the office, for example, then sharing the fact that you have tested positive with HR makes sense. And because it is believed that much transmission occurs through close contact, telling colleagues who sit in close proximity to you would be a socially responsible thing to do, Brewer says.

But if, like more than 191 million Americans, you live in a city or state where people have been ordered or urged to stay home, the obligation to share this information decreases, assuming you have been abiding by those rules. Once you have the stay-at-home order, whats behind that is a presumption that anybody could be positive, Finder says, hence the obligation for everyone to avoid close contact.

The key question to ask is what you are achieving by sharing the information. When Tom Hanks announced his COVID-19 diagnosis to the world through social media, he helped make the threat real by sending a message that even the richest, best-loved among us are not immune. And he used his clout to help spread the instructions of public health officials. In his message, Hanks emphasized that getting tested and staying isolated for as long as public health and safety requires was the right thing to do.

At a time when politicians are sending mixed messages about how crucial social distancing is to prevent the viruss spread, any public figure, be it a senator or athlete, can help encourage people to stay home and take the disease seriously when they share their diagnosis and the fact that theyre abiding by such recommendations. Theyre leveraging their status in society to try to normalize what is otherwise a really not normal thing  isolating ourselves, Finder says.

Sen. Rand Paul, (R-KY), arrives at the U.S. Capitol for a vote on March 18, 2020, four days before announcing he had tested positive for the coronavirus. | Win McNameeGetty Images

You dont have to be famous to do this. On March 18, a 22-year-old Californian named Bjonda Haliti said she debated whether to post about her positive COVID-19 test on Twitter but eventually decided that it would help spread the message that young people, some of whom have acted cavalier about a pandemic that has hit older people the hardest, can contract the disease too.

But that doesnt mean everyone should run to Instagram to tell all their friends, even if theyve recently been mingling with crowds at restaurants or events. If you live somewhere without strict stay-at-home measures, you might tell the public health department if you test positive for COVID-19, says Arthur Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York Universitys Grossman School of Medicine. Then they can make the necessary calls to alert others who might have been exposed. Blasting a message out on Facebook is not going to achieve any public health protection, Caplan says. The health department will track faster than freaking out people who cant remember if they had dinner with you three nights ago or not.

There are legal obligations to be open about ones condition that come into play with some infectious diseases. Many states have laws that criminalize the transmission of illnesses like HIV/AIDS and may require individuals to tell public health authorities that theyre positive. In some instances, people can sue others for making them sick, explains Aziza Ahmed, a professor of law at Northeastern University. But given the way COVID-19 is believed to be transmitted, lingering on surfaces and in the air, it would be very difficult for anyone to prove that a particular person caused them to become ill, Ahmed says.

All this is complicated by the fact that the novel coronavirus can manifest in both obvious and elusive ways, with some individuals exhibiting severe symptoms that force them to stay in bed and some showing no symptoms at all, which might lead them to wander around a workplace for days before mentioning to anyone that they were waiting for test results. Many people will inevitably be unsure of their status because they are unable to get tested. We are faced as a community, says Schoch-Spana of Johns Hopkins, with navigating profound uncertainty.

Amid the pandemic, some might have privacy-related objections if employers demand that workers relay information about their health status to HR. But they might also have concerns about being viewed as patient zero in their workplace due to the stigma attached to infectious diseases, whether H1N1, tuberculosis or COVID-19. In some small communities like Westport, Conn., individuals have reported finger-pointing and shaming related to the spread of COVID-19, as if sharing a positive test result is tantamount to announcing you have an STD.

Schoch-Spana cautions against using words like disclosure when speaking about the coronavirus because the language itself is stigmatized by its association with STDs. It suggests, she says, that the alternative is concealment, rather than making a choice to keep medical information private.

Fear of stigma is one of those context-specific variables. On the one hand, when public figures ranging from Hanks to Prince Charles are sharing that they have tested positive for the disease, it helps combat the notion that having COVID-19 is anything to be ashamed of. On the other hand, it cant erase the anti-Asian prejudice and xenophobia that have cropped up in the wake of a disease that President Trump has called the Chinese Virus. (The first known outbreak was in the Chinese city Wuhan.)

That sort of stereotyping is problematic in myriad ways. It can lead people not to get tested for illnesses when they should. It can lead them not to share positive results with anyone. And it can compound the stress theyre already under.

Stigmatization creates another public health problem, which is the mental health impacts of being ostracized, Schoch-Spana says. If people think, in the context of this community-spread disease, that they can easily know who and who does not pose a threat, they are poorly mistaken.

Schoch-Spana suggests that the whole question of whether one should share the news that they have COVID-19 is somewhat beside the point at this stage in the pandemic. If we go down the rabbit hole of trying to pinpoint who has it and doesnt have it, we are going to get this stigmatizing effect, she says. People will try to pin this on the person as opposed to pin it on the pathogen. And it might give people a false sense of security: even if no one around you has tested positive, experts warn, that doesnt mean you havent been exposed.

She instead recommends adopting what are known as universal precautions: presume everyone has it, including yourself, and act in everyones best interest: Cough in your sleeve, keep six feet away from other people, wash your hands regularly. Adopting a mindset of solidarity rather than suspicion is important, because the only way to fight a pandemic is for people to put the needs of others on par with, if not before, their own. Its a novel disease, any one of us is at risk of getting it. So were in it together, Schoch-Spana says. We have to be in it together and we have to feel and believe and treat each other like were in it together.

As COVID-19 becomes more widespread, any stigmatizing effect should wane. Finger-pointing will become more moot. People will likely start adopting the universal-precaution mindset too. The numbers we expect to have been exposed to this virus are probably half us, if not more, says NYUs Caplan, so telling each other that I may have been exposed becomes kind of pointless after a while.
A criminal investigation may be launched into claims a coronavirus patient was reported too late at an Austrian ski resort, which later became a hotspot for the spread of the disease.

Ischgl resort has reportedly been linked to hundreds of COVID-19 cases in Germany, Iceland, Norway and Denmark as well as Austria.

Prosecutors in Austria are now considering opening an investigation into whether a case in Ischgl was reported too late.

According to reports, the inquiry would focus on claims that a worker fell ill at the resort, in the province of Tyrol, in February.

Other popular ski regions in Tyrol, including St Anton, have also emerged as hotspots for the European spread of the virus , which lead to a complete lockdown of the province last week.

Austria has reported nearly 4,000 cases with 21 deaths so far.

The country is mobilising its military reservists for the first time since the Second World War, asking them to fight the outbreak by helping food supplies, medical support and police operations, defence minister Klaudia Tanner said.

Austria still has compulsory military service and men must serve six months in the army or nine months in a civilian service when they reach 18.

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Around 3,000 soldiers - 10% of the reserves - will take over coronavirus-related tasks from soldiers whose military service expires in May for three months, Ms Tanner told a news conference.

Elsewhere in Europe, Germany's parliament is set to approve a series of measures that will allow the government to offer aid totalling more than a trillion euros (900bn) for its 83 million-strong population.

Spain is now the world's second-highest tally of COVID-19 deaths after 738 more were reported on Wednesday, the country's deadliest toll in one day.

With 3,434 coronavirus patients dead, Spain surpassed China's toll of 3,285.

Italy still has the most deaths of any nation in the world with 6,820.

There have been more than 435,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus around the world, with more than 19,600 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
KABUL/NEW DELHI: Last rites of Tian Singh, the Indian national who was among those killed in Wednesday's attack on a Gurudwara in Afghanistans capital Kabul, were performed on Thursday (March 26, 2020). Mothers, sisters, daughters of the Sikhs who were killed in the Kabul Gurudwara terror attack broke down when their last rites were being performed.

Meanwhile, blasts were also reported near the cremation site of those killed during the attack on Gurudwara Sahib in Kabul.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar expressed deep concern on reports of blasts near the cremation site of those killed in an attack on gurudwara in Kabul by Islamic State. "Deeply concerned at the blasts reported near the cremation site of those killed during the attack on Gurudwara Sahib in Kabul," the EAM said in a tweet.

Tian Singhs family had earlier written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking help from the government. Tian Singh, who was among those killed in the attack, had travelled to Afghanistan along with his family to visit their relatives and friends.

His wife and son had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, apprising him of his death and violence faced by the minorities in Afghanistan. In their letter, they had appealed to the Prime Minister to facilitate transportation of Tian Singh's mortal remains to Delhi where they wish to perform his last rites.

Their letter mentioned that other children of the slain Indian are in the US and UK and are unable to travel to India due to the on-going 21-day lockdown in the country in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.

In response, the EAM had said that the government is working to bring back the mortal remains of Tian Singh, who was killed during the attack.

"Medical opinion against moving injured at this stage. Embassy is working on the return of mortal remains of Tian Singh. Will keep you updated," he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on Wednesday expressed his condolences to those killed in the terror attack at a gurdwara in Kabul in Afghanistan.

"I am saddened by the terror attack at the Gurudwara in Kabul. I express my condolences to the families of all the deceased," the Prime Minister said during his interaction with people of his Lok Sabha constituency, Varanasi, via video conferencing.

The terror attack took place on Wednesday leaving at least 27 dead and eight others injured.
Ramesh Rambiya, a Navi Mumbai-based trader, has rice loaded in five trucks waiting to be unloaded. Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, there are no labourers available in an otherwise busy Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) market teeming with people ready to do the job. The trucks came from Delhi on Monday.

But the unloading has yet to be done as most of the labourers have left for their villages. With great difficulty, I managed to get some of them from the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation and get two out of five trucks unloaded, said Rambiya. ...
Coronavirus cases across the globe jumped on Thursday as G20 leaders said they were committed to presenting a united front against the pandemic, the International Labour Organization warned of far more than 25 million job losses, and the U.S. Senate unanimously backed a $2-trillion aid package.

Deaths, Infections



* Almost 489,000 people have been infected globally and over 22,000 have died, according to a Reuters tally.

Europe



* The number of cases in Italy's northern region of Lombardy increased by some 2,500, a steeper increase than in previous days.

* Spain extended its lockdown to at least April 12.

* Switzerland's infections topped 10,000 as the government pumped money into the economy and army medical units helped hospitals handle the spreading epidemic.

* President Vladimir Putin said he hoped Russia would defeat the virus in 2-3 months, as authorities suspended international flights, ordered most shops in the capital to shut and halted some church services.

* In Lisbon, a "drive-thru" clinic is performing five-minute swab tests through car windows on people with symptoms, as Portuguese authorities ramp up testing facilities.

* Britain has placed an emergency order of 10,000 ventilators from Dyson.

* Slovakia aims to sharply increase daily testing in the next few weeks.

Americas



* The US death toll topped 1,000 as government data showed a record number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits and hospitals struggled to treat a surge of patients.

* New York, experiencing more deaths and infections than any other US state, is showing tentative signs of slowing the spread of the virus, while New Orleans is on track to become the country's next epicentre.

* Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro faced a political backlash for calling the coronavirus lockdown a crime.

Asia and The Pacific



* Japan banned entry from 21 European countries and Iran, and set up a new crisis task force.

* China ordered airlines to sharply cut the number of flights in and out of the country as Beijing worries that travellers from overseas could reignite the outbreak.

* Three more people died overnight in India as the government sought to improve basic services to 1.3 billion people locked indoors.

* South Korea warned that it will deport foreigners while its citizens could face jail if they violate self-quarantine rules after a surge in imported cases.

* Australia entered 4,000 healthcare workers into a trial to see if a century-old vaccine for tuberculosis can fight off the new coronavirus.

* New Zealand started a one-month compulsory lockdown, with warnings from authorities to stay at home or face big fines and even jail.

* Armenia and Kazakhstan reported their first deaths on Thursday.

Middle East and Arica



* About half of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa still have a "narrowing" opportunity to curb the spread of the virus, the regional head of the World Health Organisation said.

* Turkey's death toll from the coronavirus increased by 16 to 75 on Thursday, as the number of confirmed cases rose by 1,196 to 3,629, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said. Turkey could order the public to stay at home if infections continue to spread, the government said as it clamped down further on medical equipment leaving the country.

* Iran started an intercity travel ban, a day after Tehran warned the country might face a second outbreak. Iran has reported 2,234 deaths and 29,406 infections so far.

* Lebanon will begin an overnight shutdown from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m., as it steps up measures to combat the virus. Lebanon said on Thursday it had recorded 368 cases of coronavirus and six deaths.

* The United Arab Emirates which has 333 confirmed cases of the virus and two deaths, will impose overnight curfews as a temporary measure this weekend, when it will carry out a nationwide disinfection campaign.

* Qatar which recorded 12 new cases of the virus on Thursday, taking its total to 549, signed agreements to increase its strategic food stuff reserves.

* The number of cases in Saudi Arabia passed 1,000 after authorities on Thursday announced 112 new infections, most of them in the capital Riyadh and the holy city of Mecca, also reported the third death. Saudi Arabia has released 250 foreign detainees held on non-violent immigration and residency offences.

* Bahrain reported 419 coronavirus cases and four deaths, most of them linked to travel to Iran.

* South African President tested negative for the virus, as the country begins a countrywide lockdown.

Economic Fallout



* A Wall Street rally powered global gains in stocks despite a record number of new unemployment filings in the United States, as traders focused on the Senate's passage of the relief bill and the possibility of more stimulus to come.

* The number of jobs lost around the world due to the coronavirus crisis could be "far higher" than the 25 million the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated just a week ago, a senior ILO official said.

* European Union leaders will back plans to defend healthcare, infrastructure and other firms considered strategic from hostile foreign takeovers, draft EU summit conclusions show.

* The Group of 20 major economies will do "whatever it takes" to overcome the coronavirus crisis and are injecting $5 trillion into the global economy though national measures as part of their efforts to lessen its impact.

* The United States "may well be in recession" but progress in controlling the outbreak will determine when the economy can fully reopen, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said.

* India announced a $22.6 billion stimulus plan that provides direct cash transfers and food security measures to millions of poor people hit by a nationwide lockdown.

* China is implementing $344 billion of mainly fiscal measures in its fight against the outbreak.

* Japan's government offered its bleakest assessment on the economy in nearly seven years, saying conditions in March were "severe."

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In this case, that (loss) would be enough to put this particular business out of business for good, with its landlord and local suppliers also suffering, Lucas said.

Local food service, hospitality and travel businesses already have been laying off employees, he said, as have beauty salons and fitness gyms.

He said those are the types of businesses most in need of help that the SBAs loan program could provide, along with other businesses likely to lose 30% to 70% of their income to COVID-19.

If the City Council approves the $250,000 QGF allocation, Lucas said, the chamber will put together a list of bankers, accountants, lawyers and others willing to help with SBA applications. A few already have volunteered, he said.

QGF committee member Pat Keenan relayed support for the request from Kert McKeone, a Western Nebraska Bank executive vice president with extensive experience in SBA loans.

McKeone told him for a small-business person to take this (process) on themselves is so overwhelming, and unless you know the ropes ... it would be easier to walk away and give up, Keenan said.

We need to do this, and we need to do it ASAP.
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Market Research Future published a research report HTS Market Research Report - Global Forecast till 2025 Market Overview, Segmentation, Progress, Regional analysis, key Trends, Major Players and Forecast to 2025. Global Wearable Sensors Market is likely to value of USD 13,460 million with a CAGR of 7.5% during the forecast period

Competitive Landscape:

Better integration of diverse plans in the global high throughput screening market and introduction of several strategic moves that encompasses mergers, acquisitions, tie-ups, and others are expected to inspire growth. Companies impacting the growth in the market are Danaher (US), Aurora Biomed Inc. (Canada), Tecan (Switzerland), PerkinElmer (US), Axxam (Italy), Hamilton (US), Corning (US), Merck Group (Germany), Beckman Coulter, Inc. (US), BioTek (US), Luminex Corporation (US), Agilent Technologies Inc. (US), and Roche (Switzerland).

Overview

High-throughput screening (HTS) can be defined as a method that includes scientific experimentation needed for various drug discovery and deciding typical moves in the the fields of biology and chemistry. The procedure includes data processing/control software, liquid handling devices, robotics, and sensitive detectors. This allows the system to get into the procedure of conducting tests for millions of chemical, genetic, or pharmacological processes. The process has evolved as necessary to find active compounds, antibodies, or genes that can cover various biomolecular pathway. This process assists in the designing of various market process.

The HTS Market is getting traction from high technological advancements in HTS and hike in expenditure for research and development. The government funding for the procedure is also providing better scope for growth.

Segmental Analysis

The global market for high throughput screening, by product & service, can be segmented into instruments, reagents & assay kits, consumables & accessories, and software and services. The reagents & assay kits segment can find growth with increasing demand from the diagnostic segment.

By technology, the global market report on high throughput screening can be segmented into cell-based assays, Bioinformatics, 3D cell culture, 2D cell culture, perfusion cell culture, 3D cell culture, Ultra-high-throughput Screening, lab-on-a-chip (LOC), and Label-free Technology. The 3D cell culture segment includes scaffold-based technologies and scaffold-free technologies. The scaffold-based segment comprises hydrogels, inert matrix, and micropatterned surfaces. The scaffold-free technologies segment consists ultra-low binding plates, hanging-drop plates, microplate, and other scaffold-free technologies.

By application, the global market for high throughput screening includes primary and secondary screening, toxicology assessment, target identification & validation, and others. The application segment is showing signs of fastest CAGR owing to its inclusion in the research and development sector.

By end user, the global market for high throughput screening can be segmented into contract research organizations, academic & government institutes, pharmaceutical & biotechnology companies, and others.

Global High Throughput Screening Market Research Report- https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/high-throughput-screening-market-1280

In October 2019, researchers at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute revealed that they have developed a machine-learning algorithm that would assist in the high throughput screening of epigenetic drugs.

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Overall, there are four cases in the Odesa region

Three new coronavirus cases have been detected in the Odesa region. The head of the Odesa regional state administration Maksym Kutsyi informed about it on his Facebook page, citing data from the Healthcare Ministrys laboratory center in Odesa.

According to the results, two men (born in 1963 and 1973, respectively) and one woman (born in 1965) were infected with the coronavirus.

Kutsyi specified that four cases of coronavirus infection had been recorded in the region.

As of 22:00, on March 25, there were 145 officially confirmed cases of Covid-19 infection in Ukraine. 32 new cases were detected during the day.

Overall, five people have died of the coronavirus.

As we reported earlier, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and Federal President of Switzerland Simonetta Sommaruga discussed international coordination of efforts to combat the coronavirus and prevent the negative effects of its spread during the telephone conversation.

During the conversation, Zelensky praised the official steps taken by Berne in order to evacuate the citizens of Ukraine and Switzerland who wished to return home.
New Delhi, March 26 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend the G-20 conference on the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday through video conferencing.

An unprecendented move, the conference has been named G-20 Virtual and is being chaired by Saudi Arabia. It is expected that an action plan will be prepared to fight the coronavirus.

According to sources, the video conferencing will take place from 5.30 p.m. on Thursday evening till 7 p.m.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Modi tweeted that the G-20 is going to play an important role in facing the COVID-19 threat. It is believed that in the meeting there will be an effective discussion on how to prevent the spread of coronavirus and the measures to mitigate its effect.

Prime Minister Modi himself has said that he is expecting an effective and beneficial discussion on this issue.

During the G-20 meeting, a wide-ranging discussion on the treatment of coronavirus is also likely to take place. The member countries may also discuss and announce a package to deal with the crisis.

Currently, over 150 countries are affected by the coronavirus. According to data from the John Hopkins University, 4,38,000 people worlwide have been infected with this disease, and the death toll has crossed 20,000.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Brits all over the country have been slapped with parking tickets, with traffic wardens accused of taking advantage of the coronavirus lockdown to hand out fines.

Motorists have reacted with fury after receiving penalties, with even NHS workers being hit with fines after working long shifts in the battle against the killer pandemic.

Taking to social media, many have shared their anger, while others have questioned why wardens are still on the street during the government's lockdown.

Only 'key workers' - whose work is vital to maintaining public health and safety such as doctors, police, firemen, and utility workers - are permitted to continue their crucial duties, but traffic wardens are categorised as civil enforcement, meaning their presence on the street varies from area to area.

Generally, traffic wardens are employed by the council, which means it is up to councils to relax rules or continue forcing wardens to patrol streets.

Some officials have relaxed regulations amid the pandemic but others haven't, so in some places, nurses, doctors and medical staff are being hit with fines, despite the British Parking Association putting out guidelines which state that no health or social care worker should have to pay parking charges.

A parking warden slaps a ticket on Neville Sidebottom's car as fines continue to be given out despite coronavirus lockdown

NHS nurse Adele Buttress shared this parking ticket that she got after coming back from her hospital shift

With people forced to stay indoors, there are more cars parked on the street, leading to potential fines for families who have more than one vehicle.

Other drivers have reported being fined while dropping off food to elderly or isolating relatives.

Nurse Adele Buttress posted a picture of a penalty charge notice she received when she came back from her shift at Nottingham City Hospital.

She said: 'So after my shift finishing at midnight working as a nurse - this is what I receive.

'Thanks NHS city hospital Nottingham - you should feel ashamed.'

After her post went viral, she added: 'Didn't expect that - just finished work again and I think they are letting all staff park on site for free now.

Why are parking wardens still out? Britain has been locked down to help fight the spread of coronavirus. 'Key workers' - whose work is vital to maintaining public health and safety such as doctors, police, firemen, and utility workers - are permitted to continue their crucial duties, but traffic wardens are categorised as civil enforcement, meaning it varies. Whether parking wardens are still out depends on the authority employing the civil enforcement officer. Generally, traffic wardens are employed by the council - so some areas have seen the rules relaxed, while in others wardens are still being spotted. East Sussex County Council said on March 24 that parking contractor NSL had judged it safe for wardens to carry out parking enforcement duties, according to the Eastbourne Herald. But Ashford Borough Council has now allocated traffic wardens to community duties during the coronavirus emergency. In Bath, traffic wardens seem to be continuing their work, Somerset Live reports. A parking attendant was seen on the morning of March 25 telling a motorist to move from double yellow lines in the city. Advertisement

'Takes social media for them to realise the error of their ways!!! Hopefully my charge will be revoked.'

Laura Mosedale replied to Adele's ticket on Twitter, saying: 'Hospital car park wardens issuing tickets during #COVID2019?

'Scandalous, disgusting, unbelievably nasty.... we have to stop this! Get the police involved.'

One warden had been doing his rounds at a hospital in Stevenage and was seen putting a ticket on a vehicle parked outside a hospital.

The warden, who works for Stevenage Borough Council claimed he was 'only doing his job' after a passerby spotted him handing out the ticket outside Lister Hospital.

Outraged Kieran Tompsett had been at the hospital to see the birth of his daughter on Monday when he witnessed the unnamed man giving out tickets.

As he left the hospital he gave the bumbling warden a piece of his mind.

NHS medical director, Dr Mehdi Veisi, was given a parking ticket while helping in the battle against COVID-19 .

Ms Buttress' ticket was written a short while after 6pm - hours before the UK's lockdown came into effect. She has now said she has been told that parking fees for staff at Nottingham University Hospital are being waived, but was still waiting to see if her fine on Monday would be revoked.

In north London Dr Veisi was shocked to finish work to find a fine notice placed on the windscreen of his car - right next to his NHS emergency badge.

The medical director for Barnet, Enfield, and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust took his complaint to Twitter where he told others he doesn't have the time to fight the ticket and so will have to pay.

Generally, traffic wardens are employed by the council - so some areas have seen the rules relaxed, while in others wardens are still being spotted

Steve Birch took this photo of his ticketed car and tweeted at Swindon council after it announced the relaxation of ticketing

In a sarcastic message to the Haringey Council he said: 'Thank you Haringey Council for giving me a ticket whilst I'm fighting COVID-19.

'You could see my NHS emergency badge too. Nicely done. Instead of saving patients, now I need to appeal a ticket. Get your priorities right for NHS staff.'

A spokesperson for Haringey Council said: 'We contacted the doctor soon after he received the fine and have now cancelled it.

'We want to thank him, and all of the UK's fantastic NHS workers, for the brave work they are doing in tackling COVID-19.'

In Swindon, Steve Birch shared a photo of his ticketed car and tweeted the council: 'Given the current situation, do you think this is reasonable? Ticketed on my driveway two days ago, all wheels on my drive but the bumper protrudes.

'If you cancel the fine, I'll donate the full amount to a more worthy local cause (I'm very much open to suggestion).'

Sammy Leighton Clay took pictures of wardens ticketing in Brighton and Hove.

He added: 'Just blows my mind .. I'm self employed as you know and have no government backing (apart from the offer of 94 a week)

'I go outside to make a call to try and get advice , get cut off cos of busy lines then see this .. just unbelievable given what's going on.'

One business owner in Ledbury, Herefordshire, said they were ticketed after being forced to close their restaurant.

Posting a picture, the fuming restaurateur said: 'Just days after being forced to close our restaurant until further notice this woman gives us a parking ticket as we are clearing the restaurant!!! Absolutely appalling, shame on you. Utterly shameful.'

In Streatham, south London, one driver took a video of a traffic warden at work, while a business owner in Cheshire reported seeing a handful of vehicles ticketed.

Neville Sidebottom snapped images of three cars with PCNs near his business, including his own.

Kieran Tompsett (pictured above with his wife Katie) had been at the hospital to see the birth of his daughter on Monday when he witnessed the unnamed man giving out tickets

And Cllr James Hill, on Northampton Borough Council, said he spotted wardens standing around and chatting on march 23.

He said: 'Hi @mycountycouncil for the sake of others & their own, can you please tell your traffic wardens that they should be social distancing as per your own and government advice issued?

'On another note should enforcing parking restrictions really be a priority right now?'

Clrr Hill added: 'I think that it's important that roads are still kept clear for emergency services access. But in terms of enforcing car park time limits and on street parking restrictions there surely must be more pressing priorities right now?

'In Northampton a lot of restaurants who now operating take away only services have had difficulty with wardens trying to give their delivery staff tickets outside their restaurants for example.

Traffic wardens have also been seen at work in Eastbourne and Birmingham, as well as in several London boroughs.

On the other hand, Maidstone Borough Council took the decision to temporarily relax parking restrictions for resident parking bays on March 20.

Restrictions in all residents parking bays have been relaxed until July.

Jeff Kitson, Parking Services Manager, said: 'We have been made aware of increased difficulties from families with multiple vehicles.

'They would normally park close to their home address within resident parking bays in the evening when the resident parking bay restrictions finish.

'Normally by the time the restrictions come into force again the following day, residents would have already left for work.

'As some residents are self-isolating and many are now working from home, we have seen a significant increase in parking within residential areas as the evening peak demand has now moved to the day when the limited waiting restrictions are applied for non-permit holders.

'We are reacting to a situation which is new to us all and have done so as quickly as we can.

'It is important to stress that all double yellow lines and single yellow lines which are of course placed to protect junctions and ensure highway safety, will remain active as it is vital to ensure the free flow of traffic, particularly for emergency services and refuse collections.'

In a statement, a British Parking Association spokesman said: 'We are urging all councils to suspend parking charges for health and social care workers for on-street parking and open car parks.

'These critical workers will be encouraged to display supporting evidence in their windscreen, such as photocopies of their work pass with sensitive information removed, or a letter of evidence from their employer.

'We are also urging councils to waive all fines received by health and social care workers while carrying out their duties in recent days. These workers should be encouraged and supported to appeal the fines, with supporting evidence of their work.'

The BPA went on to say that it advised the 'majority' of enforcement action should cease altogether during the lockdown period.

'Authorities may need to continue to deploy their front line teams in some capacity to focus their reduced parking resources on priority areas and controls,' the guidelines added.

'Enforcement officers should be focused on providing help and advice about where people can and can't park and encouraging poorly parked vehicles to move where possible rather than issuing PCNs.

'It is recommended that any enforcement activity focuses on incidents of obstructive or dangerous parking that could have a more significant impact on safety and access for emergency and essential services.

'This would include yellow lines at junctions, loading restrictions and obstruction of dropped kerbs.'

A council has now reassigned parking wardens to help with the coronavirus crisis after enraged residents spotted them issuing fines as normal.

The council wardens are now completing 'community duties' and will only punish 'significant' parking violations after a row erupted.

Residents spotted two wardens 'sweeping' through a high street in Tenterden, Kent, which eyewitness Mike Carter described as 'abhorrent.'

The builder said: 'Tenterden looked eerie, like a ghost town and drivers of the few cars parked there were probably picking up shopping or prescriptions.'

Mr Carter, who is also a town councillor, added: 'It's a disgrace that they were issuing fines when we are dealing with the coronavirus as you don't know what connotations it is having for people's lives.

'They may have lost their jobs or be caring for someone who is ill.'

Paul Webster was also outraged after seeing cars being ticketed on Saturday evening.

He said that he was 'flabbergasted' to see wardens at work when key workers are all 'stepping up' during a period of national emergency.

Mr Webster called for fines to be waived from last Friday when the government ordered all bars, cafes, shops and restaurants to close.

He added that he was not attacking the parking inspectors, but the council's inappropriate allocation of council resources in 'unprecedented' times.

Ashford Borough Council has now allocated traffic wardens to community duties during the coronavirus emergency.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / A2Z Technologies Canada Corp. ("A2Z" or the "Company") (AZ.V)(FSE:A23), a pioneer in military robotics, services, and innovation in the auto industry, announces that the Company has been classified as an "essential service" company in Israel, and its business operations continue and remains strong.

Bentsur Joseph, President and CEO of A2Z states, "We wish to reiterate that our core business, working with government agencies, has been classified by the Israeli government as essential, and thus, we are operating at full capacity. We are taking every precaution possible to ensure our employees safety while remaining available to fulfill our various contracts with so many important divisions of the Israeli government, including the Army, Police, Ministry of Defense, among others, all of whom are also deemed "essential services" and remain open, enabling us to fulfill our contracts as per relevant agreements."

Additionally, with the recently completed financing and improved payment terms from our clients, the Company's balance sheet remains strong, enabling it to continue to grow its business.

Bentsur continues, "The Company's cash flow remains strong, and our business is robust, alive, and well. Our Canadian and Frankfurt listings give us the platform to a whole new level of investor exposure and a nexus from which to expand our visibility to promising potential clients within North America and the European Union."

The Company wishes to thank its employees, shareholders, and clients for their strong support, and looks forward to providing material updates on its exciting technologies and business developments in the near future.

BUSINESS OF A2Z

A2Z Technologies Canada Corp. is an innovative technology company based out of Israel, specializing in military technology and expanding into the civilian markets. A2Z has been operating for over 30 years and has a client base with 75 recurring clients, including the Israel Defense Forces, Security Forces, and Ministry of Defence among others. A2Z plans to leverage their cash flow-generating core-business to expand into the civilian robotics and automobile markets.

Story continues

According to Zion Market Research, the Military Robotics space is expected to reach $53.93B by 2027 for a projected CAGR of 13.5%.(Summary of Report)

Highlights:

Core Business: A2Z's line of products include unmanned remote-controlled vehicles of various sizes designed for intricate bomb disposal, counter terrorism, and firefighting, as well as energy storage power packs/generators. A2Z also provides maintenance services to both external and in-house complex electronic systems and products to over 75 clients.

A2Z has been an Israel Ministry of Defense contractor for over 30 years and a significant portion of its business is long-term service contracts.

Expansion into Civilian Markets: To drive growth, A2Z plans to adapt its military technologies for the much larger civilian markets. One patent-pending product is a capsule (FTICS) that prevents vehicle fires resulting from collisions. A2Z has also been granted a patent for a smart vehicle cover device that protects automobiles from the elements while the vehicle is parked and is stowed away safely in the vehicle's bumper when not in use.

Fuel Tank Intelligent Containment System (FTICS): In the event of a collision, the FTICS system installed into the fuel tank prevents the ignition of fuel, thereby mitigating the spread of fire and explosion, minimizing risk to human life and property damage. According to the NFPA, from 2014 to 2016, an estimated 171,500 highway vehicle fires occurred in the United States, resulting in an annual average of 345 deaths, 1,300 injuries, and $1.1 billion in property loss annually.

Management: CEO Bentsur Joseph's previous venture, Comfy Interactive, was acquired by Shamrock Holdings, the family investment firm founded by Roy Disney. Previously, Bentsur Joseph was the chairman of Elad Hotels whose holdings include the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

Bentsur Joseph has a ~64% ownership stake in the business with 30,000,000 shares subject to an escrow agreement.

For more information regarding A2Z, please visit the Company's website at www.a2zas.com.

Twitter: @A2Z_Advanced

On Behalf of the Board,

Bentsur Joseph, CEO

Investor Relations Contact

Trenton Kwan, KIN Communications

Toll Free: 1-866-684-6730

az@kincommunications.com

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release may include forward-looking statements that are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties. All statements within this news release, other than statements of historical fact, are to be considered forward looking. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements include fluctuations in market prices, including metal prices, continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. There can be no assurances that such statements will prove accurate and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable laws.

SOURCE: A2Z Technologies Canada Corp.





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https://www.accesswire.com/582575/A2Z-Technologies-Canada-Deemed-Essential-Service-in-Israel-and-Operations-Unaffected-in-Midst-of-COVID-19-Coronavirus-Pandemic




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Linkedin Ghina Ghaliya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 27 2020

After extending its recess from March 22 until March 29 following the emergence of the COVID-19 outbreak in Indonesia, the House of Representatives has decided to commence its next session on Monday.

The legislature is located in Senayan, Jakarta, the epicenter of Indonesias COVID-19 epidemic. The House has been in recess since Feb. 28.

It has been decided that the third session will begin on March 30, lawmaker Arsul Sani of the United Development Party (PPP), who is also a deputy speaker of the Peoples Consultative Assembly, told the media on Thursday.

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Flanked by Vice President Mike Pence (L) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on the coronavirus pandemic, in the press briefing room of the White House on March 25, 2020. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Networks Cut Away From Trumps CCP Virus Briefings, Despite Massive Ratings

Cable and network broadcasters have begun to cut away from President Donald Trumps daily briefings on the CCP virus epidemic, despite their apparent popularity with Americans.

ABC, CBS, and NBC all covered Trump at the beginning of the March 23 briefing, which began about 6:10 p.m. Washington time. After 20 minutes, they switched to the network evening newscasts, never to return to Trump. The president spoke until shortly after 8 p.m.

Trump has been informing the public about the governments steps to counter the CCP virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, which broke out in the central Chinese city of Wuhan around November 2019 and was allowed to spread around the world due to a coverup and mismanagement by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The cable news networks have given Trump blanket coverage for his briefings, but CNN cut away on March 23 at around 7:20 p.m. MSNBC followed within five minutes.

If the White House wants to ask for time on the network, they should make an official request. Otherwise, we will make our own editorial decisions, CNN commented on its decision.

MSNBC, through a spokesperson, said that we cut away because the information no longer appeared to be valuable to the important ongoing discussion around public health.

The networks top host, Rachel Maddow, had said on the evening of March 20 that television networks should no longer cover the Trump briefings live. She cited examples of what she called false or misleading statements the president had made in past briefings.

All of us should stop broadcasting it, honestly, she said. Its going to cost lives.

Conservative political commentator Bill Whittle called the broadcasters decisions an indication that the president is doing a pretty good job.

In his view, the media are tuning out because airing the briefings unedited shows Trump acting counter to a narrative pushed by a number of media outlets that hes incompetent and tyrannical.

Why on earth would a news agency carry the presidents daily address, buttressed by any number of scientific experts, on the daily progress of this worldwide pandemic? he said jokingly in a March 26 video posted on his YouTube channel.

Why on earth would you want that live? Why cant we just send cameras there so that we can edit out the parts that we dont like, edit together the things that were actually said in such a way as to make him look like an idiot or a tyrant and then we can re-control the media, rather re-control the story, re-control the narrative?

When you hear people saying that President Trump should not be giving the press conferences live, thats all the evidence you need that hes doing a good job.

Soaring Ratings

Trumps briefings have had droves of Americans tuning in, nearly tripling ratings for that time slot.

Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC attracted 8.28 million viewers for Trumps March 20 briefing, with nearly half of them watching Fox. The audience for those networks a year earlier was 2.82 million, according to ratings agency Nielsen.

The March 23 briefing had 12.2 million viewers, with Fox capturing more than half, The New York Post reported.

Meanwhile, Trumps approval ratings have continued to climb. A Gallup poll had him at 49 percent on March 22, the best of his presidency so far by the pollster, which also reported that 60 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the virus.

On the virus response, nearly all Republicans (93 percent) approved of Trump and almost a third of Democrats (29 percent) did, too.

Democrats approval on this measure well exceeds their overall 13% rating for Trump in the same poll, Gallup stated.

The pandemic pushed out much of the focus previously on the 2020 presidential elections, including the Democratic primary, now reduced to two contendersformer Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

The virus has forced both of the candidates to cease much of their campaign activities. Sanders held a live online town hall on the outbreak on March 24. By the afternoon of March 26, the video had attracted less than 80,000 views on Sanderss official YouTube channel and nearly 800,000 on Facebook.

Biden held a virtual briefing on the viruss impact on young Americans on March 25. The video had some 10,000 views on his YouTube channel and less than 200,000 on Facebook by the afternoon of March 26.
Great Britain is a little ahead of the U.S. with regard to the COVID-19 virus: it got there sooner and they have more per capita fatalities than we do, but a similar order of magnitude. The London Times headlines: NHS now likely to cope with coronavirus, says key scientist.

The virus death toll could end up being substantially lower than 20,000 with most of the fatalities in people who would have died later this year anyway, a government adviser has said. Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College scientist whose research precipitated tougher government measures last week, told MPs: It [the deaths of those who would have died anyway] might be as much as half or two thirds of the deaths we see, because these are people at the end of their lives or who have underlying conditions.

This is a key point. When the dust settles a year or two from now, it will be interesting to see how many total excess deaths actually occurred in 2020. The number may be quite a bit lower than most assume. In Italy, reports indicate that anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 and dies is listed as a Wuhan virus casualty, even though that person may have been, for example, in a cancer ward at the time.

He said that through a combination of enforced social distancing and a nationwide scramble to set up thousands more intensive care beds, he and his colleagues were now reasonably confident that the health service would cope with the crisis. We think that in some areas of the country ICUs will get very close to capacity but we wont breach them at the national level, he said, predicting that the worst of the first wave was likely to pass within three weeks.

The major downside risk is economic:

But, he added, there would be a cost. Thanks to the stringent measures used to save the health service from disaster, we will be paying for this year for many decades to come in terms of economic impact.

Many decades may be stretching the point, but the basic idea is right, I think.

British authorities have acknowledged that locking down the country for a year is unacceptable. It sounds like the goal is to hav[e] it over by the summer. Which is a little later than President Trumps Easter hope, but in the ballpark.

The challenge that many countries in the world are dealing with is how we move from an initial intensive lockdown . . . to something that will have societal effects but which will allow the economy to restart. He added: That is likely to rely on very large-scale testing and contact tracing. By following up the people who have been in contact with the infected this could allow local outbreaks to be controlled and maintain infections at low levels indefinitely, he said.

Paul emphasized this point during our VIP Live show tonight. South Korea seems to have had great results with its policy of early testing and aggressive contact tracing to quarantine not the whole country, but those who have been exposed to the virus. It is presumably too late for such a policy in, say, New York, but it may not be too late in other areas of the U.S.

Ultimately, though, he said: The long-term exit from this is clearly the hopes around a vaccine.

Yes, but that will take a long time. Vaccines need to be tested extensively because they have the potential to cause neurological damage. I think a more immediate hope is that medicines that already exist, or can be quickly developed and tested, will be brought to bear. Advanced medical technologies are being used to analyze the COVID-19 virus and identify existing, already-approved medicines that might be effective. I believe there are several dozen that could be in that category. (Fish tank cleaner is not among them, contrary to recent news reports.)

Scientists are rushing to analyze the virus and identify potentially helpful therapies. They can act fast, and they are; lets hope that the inherently slow-moving federal bureaucracy doesnt slow them down.
WALLINGFORD  More than 20 people were displaced by a fire of an apartment building on Tuesday afternoon, according to fire officials.

At 2:23 p.m., Wallingford firefighters were dispatched to an activated fire alarm at 53 Parker St.
T he number of people who have tested positive for coronavirus in the UK has risen by almost 1,500 as the death toll passed 460.

Some 9,529 people had tested positive by 9am on Wednesday, the Department of Health confirmed. That's up from 8,077 at the same point a day earlier.

The latest figures were released after it was confirmed that the Prince of Wales had tested positive for Covid-19.

Meanwhile, officials said 463 people who tested positive for coronavirus had died as of 9am on Wednesday. It added that the latest figures do not cover a full 24-hour period with some media outlets reporting a total of 465 fatalities.

Coronavirus in numbers: UK deaths rise to 463

A total of 97,019 people have been tested - with 87,490 negative results.

Earlier, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the UK is "coping very well indeed under the most challenging possible circumstances".

NHS England said on Wednesday night that a further 28 people aged between 47 and 93, have died after testing positive for coronavirus in England.

The 47-year-old did not have any underlying health conditions, NHS England said.

Wednesday's death toll for England was significantly down on Tuesday's figure of 83.

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Mr Johnson said the Government was "massively ramping up" testing for coronavirus, as he announced that 405,000 people have now signed up as volunteers to help vulnerable people.

He said it was hoped that "very soon" 250,000 tests would be carried out each day.

London during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures 1 /66 London during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures A woman jogging near City Hall, London, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown PA An image of Queen Elizabeth II and quotes from her broadcast on Sunday to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA A pedestrian walks past a billboard reading "Please believe these days will pass" on Broadway Market in east London AFP via Getty Images Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge Getty Images Boris Johnson Jeremy Selwyn Sun-seekers cool off in the water and sunbathe on the riverbank at Hackney Marshes in east London AFP via Getty Images Ed Davey is shown on screens as he speaks via videolink during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, London PA A herd of fallow deer graze on the lawns in front of a housing estate in Harold Hill in east London AFP via Getty Images A woman wearing a mask crosses a bridge over Camden Lock, London PA An empty Millenium Bridge PA A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" is seen on an underground station platform Getty Images People push to enter the Niketown shop in Londo AP Jo Proudlove and daughter Eve, 9, follow the daily online "PE with Joe" Joe Wickes' exercise class on "Fancy dress Friday Reuters Waterloo station looking empty PA Police in Westminster Jeremy Selwyn Getty Images A quiet Parliament Square Getty Images PABest A man walks along a passageway at London's Oxford Street Underground station the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown to help curb the spread of the Coronavirus PA Social distancing markers around the camel enclosure at ZSL London Zoo PA A police car patrols Greenwich Park in London PA The Premier League in action in front of empty stands AP Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed. A deserted Piccadilly Circus PA A general view is seen of a deserted Trafalgar Square AFP via Getty Images Getty Images The iconic Abbey Road crossing is seen after a re-paint by a Highways Maintenance team as they take advantage of the COVID-19 coronavirus lockdown and quiet streets to refresh the markings Getty Images A view of 20 Fenchurch Street (the 'Walkie Talkie' building) in the City of London, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus PA A deserted Chinatown PA A person looks at graffiti on a JD Wetherspoon pub in Crystal Palace, south London. Wetherspoons workers have described founder Tim Martin's lack of support for his chain's 40,000 employees as "absolutely outrageous" PA The London ExCel centre that has been turned into a makeshift NHS Hospital and critical care unit to cope with the Coronavirus pandemic PA The Palace Theatre, which usually shows the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child play, sits in a deserted Shaftesbury Avenue PA The Sondheim Theatre, which usually shows the Les Miserables musical, sits in a deserted Shaftesbury Avenue PA Two members of a British Army mounted regiment exercise their horses in Parliament Square AP Westminster Bridge is deserted PA A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA An empty street and bus stop at St James's Park AFP via Getty Images Whitehall Jeremy Selwyn A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA A single pedestrian walks past The national Gallery AFP via Getty Images London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn Kings Cross and St Pancras Jeremy Selwyn Buckingham Palace looking empty in London, PA London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn Kings Cross and St Pancras Jeremy Selwyn London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn London's Carnaby Street empty as shops closed after a lockdown was announced in the latest bid to stop the spread of coronavirus through the UK AP A single pedestrian walks past The national Gallery AFP via Getty Images A quiet Jubilee line westbound train carriage PA A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA Empty Embankment Jeremy Selwyn

Speaking at the daily press conference inside Number 10, he added that he wanted to offer a "special thank you to everyone who has now volunteered to help the NHS.

"When we launched the appeal last night, we hoped to get 250,000 volunteers over a few days.

"But I can tell you that in just 24 hours, 405,000 people have responded to the call.

"That is already, in one day, as many volunteers as the population of Coventry."

The figure was given as the Foreign Office announced that Steven Dick, 37, the deputy head of mission at the British Embassy in Budapest, had died after contracting coronavirus.

Clarence House earlier announced that the Prince Charles, 71, was self-isolating at home in Scotland with his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, 72, who does not have the virus.

A statement said the prince had "mild symptoms" and the couple had received tests on the NHS in Aberdeenshire after meeting the requirements for testing.

During the press conference, England's chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, dismissed claims made earlier by Professor Sharon Peacock, director of the National Infection Service at Public Health England (PHE), who said members of the public will be able to carry out coronavirus antibody tests at home very soon.

She said 3.5 million tests, which will tell people whether they have had the virus, would be made available and distributed via Amazon and in places like Boots.

But Prof Whitty said members of the public would not be buying these tests via the internet next week.

He stressed that frontline NHS workers would need the tests first, so they could get back to work if they have had already had the virus.

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The NHS is also carrying out separate tests to see if people currently have the virus, which are being given to patients in hospitals alongside some community sampling.

Earlier, NHS England's medical director, Professor Stephen Powis, said hundreds of thousands of these tests for Covid-19 per day could become a reality within weeks.

Replying to a question about how well the country was coping, Mr Johnson said that "never in our history has the Government put its arms around people in the way we are doing now to help them get through this time".

He added that a tailored package of support would be announced on Thursday to help self-employed people.

The PM said: "I do think when you look at the sheer scale of what the Government is doing to get this country through, we will cope and are coping very well indeed under the most challenging possible circumstances."

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Prof Whitty said it will be a "close run thing" for the NHS to get through the coming weeks without the coronavirus crisis overwhelming critical care capacity.

Everybody needed to follow the strict lockdown measures designed to slow the spread of the virus in order to give the NHS the best possible chance, he said, adding that the NHS was ramping up its capacity.

Although there was "not enormous pressure" at present, the NHS was braced for demand for critical care beds to rise over the next fortnight.

"Because of the actions that people are taking, and provided everybody continues to keep the social distancing measures - which are very difficult, in terms of staying within households, only doing absolutely essential things apart from exercise - that will help to pull down the demand a very long way," he said.

He continued: "This is going to be a close run thing, we all know that. Anybody who looks around the world can see this is going to be difficult for every health system."

Elsewhere, the British Medical Association (BMA) warned that doctors and patients will die without adequate personal protective equipment (PPE).

It said doctors are risking serious illness and death due to a lack of stock or local rationing, and it warned many more could go off sick unless immediate steps are taken.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said millions of pieces of PPE have been sent out in recent days and a hotline has been set up so staff can report where there are shortages.

Speaking to the Commons science and technology committee earlier, leading expert Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London and a member of the Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), which advises the Government, said current predictions are that the NHS will be able to cope if lockdown measures are followed and capacity increases as planned.

"There will be some areas that are extremely stressed but we are reasonably confident - which is all we can be at the current time - that at the national level we will be within capacity," he said.

Prof Ferguson said widespread testing is needed to help move the country from suppression measures and lockdown into something it can manage long-term.

He added: "We clearly cannot lock down the country for a year.

"The challenge that many countries in the world are dealing with is how we move from an initial intensive lockdown ... to something that will have societal effects but will allow the economy to restart.

"That is likely to rely on very large-scale testing and contact tracing. It should be stated that the entire world is in the very early stage of developing such strategies."

Prof Ferguson said the hope is that once the lockdown is lifted, the infection can be kept at manageable levels.

He said the demand on intensive care in the UK will peak in approximately two to three weeks and then decline thereafter.
The East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) on Tuesday issued an order to shut the Ghazipur slaughterhouse  the national Capitals only legal facility to butcher sheep, goats and buffaloes. The slaughter of poultry and fish is permitted elsewhere in the city.

This has been done to restrict close proximity of human involvement in compliance with guidelines to control and contain Covid-19, the order issued by the corporation to the private company that runs the 25-acre facility near NH-24, read. The slaughterhouse delivers over four lakh kilograms of meat daily, under an agreement with east civic body.

At least 500 butchers and supervisors work here, whose health would have been at risk. This is not related to any scare regarding transmission of the Coronavirus infection from humans to animal meat or vice versa, at all. Alongside, the livestock market in the slaughterhouse premises has also been closed for now, spokesperson, EDMC, Arun Kumar, said.

A stakeholder in the private company, however, said the order does not conform with guidelines set out by both the state and central governments.

The Delhi and union government notifications say selling meat, dairy and poultry is allowed . But where will supply to the shops come from if the Ghazipur slaughterhouse is closed? As far as World Health Organization standards on hygiene and sanitation of the staff are concerned, we are taking care of it, Fauzan Alavi, a director with the company, Frigorifico Allana, said.

Besides, this is a basic food product for a large section of population. They will obviously not change their food habits overnight for next 21 days, he said.

EDMC officials said while the union government order talks about keeping meat shops open, the slaughterhouse is a large space that has a complex web of activities. Between so many people [the staff], it is impossible to maintain a one-metre-distance, Kumar said.

Senior veterinary officers of the corporation said they had other reasons to shut the slaughterhouse as well.

Most animals processed here would come from neighbouring states. These are unproductive animals, such as infertile or non milk-producing buffaloes. Since inter-state movement has been banned, the feed to the slaughterhouse will reduce from now, said a senior officer with EDMC.
BREAKING: No Tsunami Threat for Oregon, Washington Coast, Hawaii

Published 03/24/2020 at 9:24 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Portland, Oregon)  The National Tsunami Warning Center (NTWC), part of the National Weather Service (NWS), has issued an updated special statement about an earthquake offshore from Russia, saying there is no threat to Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska or California. (Graphic courtesy USGS).

About 8 p.m. an analysis was under way to determine if there may be any tsunami threat for British Columbia, Alaska and the west coast of the U.S. A tsunami watch had been issued for Hawaii, however that is now canceled.

A quake offshore from Russias Kuril Islands happened about 7:49 p.m. (Pacific Time) at a magnitude 7.5. Some postings indicate it was a magnitude 7.8, but others say that has been downgraded to 7.5. In either case, this is strong enough to generate a tsunami, but after earlier statements were issued about the analysis the most recent update indicates no issue.

Based on all available data a tsunami may have been generated by this earthquake that could be destructive on coastal areas even far from the epicenter, the NTWC said earlier in the evening.

The agency has officially issued a special statement saying there are no threats to the coasts of Washington and Oregon, as well as California, Alaska and British Columbia.

For Hawaii, the agency said the earliest a wave would have arrived in the state would have been 10:42 p.m. HST (7:42 p.m. Pacific Zone), which was almost two hours ago. Hawaiian media outlets are reporting it canceled, however.

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HELENA  State and local law enforcement officers in Montana do not have the authority to arrest people on federal civil immigration detainers, the Montana Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

"This is a major victory for immigrants in Montana," Alex Rate, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana, said in a statement. "Immigrants throughout Montana must be treated the same as every other individual who is charged with a crime. They will enjoy the presumption of innocence, have the right to post bail and be free pending trial, and be free to step out from underneath the boot of over-aggressive federal immigration officials."

The 7-0 ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Montana and others against Lincoln County in October 2018 after Agustin Ramon  a dual resident of Mexico and France  was arrested on charges of stealing prescription medication from a neighbor's house in Eureka in August 2018.

Ramon's bail was set at $25,000. But he did not post bond because the sheriff said he would comply with a Department of Homeland Security request to detain Ramon on their behalf for up to another 48 hours after any potential release date.
Published on 2020/03/25 | Source

Actor Kim Sung-kyu is looking forward to "A Piece of Your Mind".

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He talked about various things regarding "Kingdom - Season 2", the Netflix original series, in an online video chat.

Kim Sung-kyu is currently starring in the tvN drama "A Piece of Your Mind" as a renowned classic pianist named Kang In-wook.

We asked him what he was most familiar with between romance and action and he said, "I'm more familiar with action, since I've been in many action films".

About "A Piece of Your Mind", Kim Sung-kyu said, "It's my first drama. I wondered how well I could do it since it has everything to do with love. I don't think it's the soft kind of romance all the way".

"I'm working hard and filming the drama, but I think it's going to be alright. It's fun working with the cast".

Meanwhile, "Kingdom - Season 2" is a mystery thriller about the struggles of Crown Prince Yi Chang (Ju Ji-hoon), who can no longer trust anyone in Joseon, where the dead have come alive and the royal throne is being sought after.

___________

"A Piece of Your Mind" is directed by Lee Sang-yeob-I, written by Lee Sook-yeon, and features Jung Hae-in, Chae Soo-bin, Lee Ha-na, Kim Sung-kyu, Kim Jeong-woo-I, Woo Ji-hyun. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2020/03/23~Now airing, Mon, Tue 21:00 on tvN.
Dadi-Dada Foundation, which works for the welfare of senior citizens, on Thursday lauded the government's decision of providing a financial aid of Rs 1,000 to poor senior citizens "in the times of extreme crisis".

The government announced an economic package worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore to provide relief to the poor, workers, and other needy sections while the country is facing lockdown due to the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus.

In her announcement, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said senior citizens, poor widows and divyang will get an ex-gratia amount of Rs 1,000 in two tranches over the next three months.

he scheme will benefit three crore people of our society.

"We laud government's announcement approving the scheme to give an ex-gratia amount of Rs 1,000 to three crore poor senior citizen widows and divyang for a period of 3 months in times of extreme crisis," Director Dadi-Dada Foundation Muni Shankar Pandey said.

The country is passing through a very challenging period. "Our senior citizens are very prone to the highly contagious virus which has already taken so many lives of citizens," the director said.

"We appeal to the senior citizens to avail the releif which is being provided to them, stay safe and follow the government's safety guidelines," Pandey said.

The foundation's volunteers educate senior citizens on their rights besides helping them in availing necessarily livelihood services such as legal aid, arranging fooding and lodging and other basic amenities.

Recently, the foundation alongwith a group of parliamentarians held a round table in the national capital to create awareness among senior citizens about the schemes being run by the governments at various levels.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 02:09:30|Editor: huaxia

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Palestinian artists Dergham Qraiqea (L) and Samar Saad paint protective masks in Gaza City, on March 25, 2020. Two Palestinian painters from the the Gaza Strip draw patterns on medical masks, in order to encourage people to wear them as protective measure amid the COVID-19. (Photo by Yasser Qudih/Xinhua)

by Sanaa Kamal

GAZA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Two Palestinian painters from the the Gaza Strip draw patterns on medical masks, in order to encourage people to wear them as protective measure amid the COVID-19.

Dergham Qraiqea and Samar Saad have launched the initiative to paint on medical masks, presenting them to the people for free.

They came up with the idea after they noted the majority of people do not wear gloves and facemasks, especially after the rise of cases infected with the new virus in the impoverished coastal enclave.

"We are facing the most dangerous epidemic, which has killed thousands of people around the world in only a few months," Quraiqea, 23, told Xinhua, as he finished his drawing on one of the masks.

"It is really hurt when you see the people walk in the streets without following the protective measure," he said, adding that "I establish my initiative, in collaboration with Saad, to persuade people to wear it as soon as possible."

Quraiqea believes that the blockaded Gaza Strip, which lacks medical supplies and equipment, is facing risk from the virus.

He works about 10 hours a day, drawing on masks patterns such as flowers, smiles, trees, seas, and landscapes.

Meanwhile, Saad seeks to overcome women's shame of wearing the facemasks in the streets.

She expressed her happiness because she let some Gaza women get rid of their shame and wear gloves and masks. "We have managed to change this perception of some women, especially those who have to go to work," she said.

"People are afraid of the death wherever," she said, adding that "we should let our community be optimistic through our initiatives."

For her part, Ghazal Mahmoud, 25, wore for the first time a facemask. "It is important for us to abide by the protective and precautionary measures to avoid the virus," she added, noting she will care for her health rather than traditions.

On Wednesday, Gaza Health Ministry reported that seven new cases were infected with COVID-19, adding that all of them are security officers who have contacted with previous cases.

Hamas authorities, which have been ruling the Gaza Strip since 2007, have taken tight precautionary measures to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 in the enclave, a home for two million people.

The total number of infected Palestinians has climbed to 86, including nine in the Gaza Strip and 77 in the West Bank.


U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (R) and visiting Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar attend a press conference in Washington D.C., the United States, on Dec. 18, 2019. The United States and India held their second "2+2 Ministerial Dialogue" at the State Department in Washington on Wednesday amid a disagreement over India's decision to purchase Russian-made S-400 air defense systems. (Xinhua/Tan Yixiao)

By Fang Xiaozhi

With its continued economic development and military buildup, India has had a growing demand for weapon equipment modernization. Since India doesnt have the technological and industrial capabilities to produce the weapons it needs, it has to buy weapons and equipment from other countries and has been the worlds largest weapon importer for many years in a row.

The US is the second-largest weapon exporter for India after Russia. For the US, India is an important force in maintaining the political stability and economic development in the Indo-Pacific and South Asian region. Its critical position in the Trump administrations so-called Indo-Pacific strategy has largely decided the strategys nature and prospects. Washington attaches great importance to its relationship with India as the South Asian country holds the key to the successful implementation of the strategy, without whose engagement the US military wont be able to establish an effective military presence in the Indian Ocean.

Arms deal has been taken as leverage for deepening US-India defense cooperation in recent years. Incomplete statistics show that Washington has supplied over USD15 billion of weapons and equipment to New Delhi in the past decade, featuring anti-submarine equipment, maritime oversight, and plateau operations. The two sides also reached a USD3billion arms deal during American President Donald Trumps first official visit to India on February 24-25this year, pushing bilateral defense cooperation to a new height.

However, due to a string of irreconcilable structural conflicts, the two countries have deep divergences on such topics as global strategic layout, regional security, national security interests, and relation with other major countries, and they have a different understanding of strategic threats and expectations. As a result, there is a limit to what extent the US-India relationship can go.

First of all, India is a major country with strong independence awareness.

The major country strategy it has pursued over the years conflicts with Americas global strategy, and the country brooks no American interference in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, regions it regards as its traditional sphere of influence, which clouds the prospects of the Indo-Pacific strategy. For example, India has stepped up patrol on the Indian Ocean in recent years, provided humanitarian aid for South Asia, and doubted the necessity of theUS military baseon Diego Garcialocated in the Indian Ocean. Through these moves, New Delhi is demonstrating its willingness and capability of independently shouldering the responsibility for regional security and expressing its unwelcoming attitude to Americas Indo-Pacific strategy.

Second, India and the US hold different positions in several major international issues, such as the WTO Doha Round negotiations, climate change, human rights, and international governance.

Especially, the Trump administration is trying to bring back the manufacturing industry under the America first policy, which contradicts with Modi administrations Made in India campaign that aims at international industrial transfer. Not only did Washington vigorously control technology transfer when selling weapons to New Delhi, but it also raised tariffs on Indian goods too, and has constantly accused India of stealing American jobs as many American businesses outsource their services and software to India. These have seriously dissatisfied New Delhi.

At last, India, under US pressure, paid a heavy price for accommodating the US foreign policy.

After the US pulled back from the Iranian nuclear deal and imposed heavier sanctions on Iran, it demanded Indian oil companies to cut back on oil imports from Iran too. But Iran and India are friendly countries without any contention of their own. Giving in to the USs pressure not only harmed the Iran-India relations, but was also against New Delhis diplomatic principle of strategic independence, bringing immense damages to its national interests and international image.

Moreover, India has been demanded several times to join the sanction against Russia, Syria and other countries, and the US even pressed it with the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act on the grounds of its purchase of the S-400 air defense missile system from Russia, which is truly intolerable for India. Russia is Indias biggest weapon supplier and the two countries have a tradition of friendly ties. New Delhi has declared repeatedly that it will by no means give up the long-standing military cooperation with Moscow, which will be the key consideration in its handling of the US relation.

(Fang Xiaozhi, a researcher at the Institute of Strategic Studies and International Security, Fudan Institute of Belt and Road & Global Governance)
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow and infect several thousands of patients worldwide, doctors on the frontlines are drawing up their wills.

Dr. Michelle Au, an anesthesiologist at Emory St. Josephs Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, knows firsthand the dangers involved in treating vulnerable patients during the current outbreak.

'Have you seen the HBO show "Chernobyl?" There are invisible risks that trail you,' Au told The New York Times.

These invisible risks are all too real to Au, whose job is one of the most dangerous procedures while tending to infected patients - intubating people who can't breathe.

She is tasked with snaking a tube into patients' trachea, placing her close to mouths that are constantly shedding the illness.

Dr. Michelle Au (pictured) revealed she and her husband have updated part of their will as she continues to work on the front line of the coronavirus pandemic

Early research said health care workers (pictured) were at greater risk of contracting coronavirus due to their close proximity to the disease

'Youre aware of every moment youre in there. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. You feel radioactive,' she said.

Au's already began taking measures to keep her family safe by using a diluted bleach solution to meticulously wipe down surfaces and taking extra care to wash before entering her home.

But now Au, and other doctors, have begun drafting their wills as another precaution.

Over the weekend, Au and her husband updated the list of potential caretakers for their three children if both of them succumb to the coronavirus.

She said: 'We have it four deep now. The top two choices are older and these people are in a high-risk group. The third person is a doctor.

'So we added a fourth person who is a low risk for contracting this thing. As the backstop in case it comes to that.'

Early reports said that health care workers are more likely to contract coronavirus due to close proximity and, unfortunately, are likely to suffer more severe symptoms.

Many health care workers have been forced to ration supplies like protective gowns, gloves and masks to keep them safe amid shortages.

Pictured: Paramedics move a patient into the hospital during the outbreak of coronavirus disease in Manhattan, New York, this week

Dr. Dr. Jane van Dis, an OB-GYN in Los Angeles, California, and the medical director for Maven, is a single mother.

'I realized that if something happened to me that my life is all in my head,' she said.

'So on Saturday I combed through all of my policies  life insurance and disability  and all of my credit cards, my mortgage, my auto loan, trying to think of all of the details of my life so that if someone were trying to take it over for me they could.'

Dr. John Marshall is the chairman emergency medicine at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, and has encouraged co-workers who haven't drawn up their wills to do so.

Marshall said: 'We know whats coming. There are a good number of people who are going to die here [and] health care workers will be part of that number.'

Thus far, there are more than 83,000 positive cases in the United States and more than 1,200 deaths as of this week.

Globally, the distressing numbers have reached almost half-a-million cases and more than 21,000 deaths.

There are nearly half-a-million COVID-19 cases worldwide and more than 21,000 deaths. Pictured: Cremona Hospital Intensive Care where the most serious patients infected with the coronavirus virus are being treated by health care workers

Chief of palliative care and geriatrics at Mass General Dr. Vicki Jackson said she told her husband that she wants him to remarry if she dies because of the outbreak.

'But its important to me that she be spunky,' she said to him. 'No milquetoast role models for the kids.'

Jackson also pointed out that people's lives can change in an instant and the coronavirus has only highlighted this reality.

'Most people are in complete denial that your life can change on a dime. In medicine we know it, and we are more likely to talk about it,' said Jackson.

Because of the coronavirus, Jackson said: 'the veil is less opaque right now. And I dont think thats bad.'

Some doctors have already fallen ill with the virus, including gastroenterology fellow Dr. Richa Bhardwaj of at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.

She tested positive for coronavirus on Wednesday and has since isolated from her husband, who is also a doctor, as well as their five-month-old daughter who is still breastfeeding.

In the meantime, Bhardwaj is waiting for test results at home; her husband is staying with family in Yonkers; and their baby is in the guest room at he in-laws home.

Bhardwaj said: 'I havent seen my baby since yesterday. Im so conflicted.'

Medical workers have been forced to ration important tools like gloves and face masks amid shortages

Marshall said a level of uncertainty that has surrounded both the coronavirus and how best to protect loved ones.

'We know what to do when a gunshot wound comes in; we know what to do when someone comes in with sepsis or a heart attack,' said Marshall.

'In this instance there isnt certainty about how to protect yourself. And so there is also uncertainty about how to protect your family.'

Many doctors, including Marshall, have taken to sleeping in separate rooms or even homes to keep their families healthy. Some doctors have rented Airbnbs.

In an effort to help health care workers, Columbia University of New York City is planning to convert some of its dorms to bedrooms for doctors who wish to avoid long commutes or fear infecting others.

Another mounting fear is the lack of available medical supplies for patients as hospitals scramble to accommodate new patients.

Doctors are acutely aware of the diminishing number of ventilators and face masks, and are surprised by the apparent downfalls of the U.S. health care system.

'Who would imagine that in the United States of America doctors would have to go on social media begging for supplies?' Au said.

'Patients are calling in and saying: I found three N95 masks in my toolbox. Can I bring them by? They came to drop them off to me in the hospital driveway.

Dr. Au (pictured): 'Who would imagine that in the United States of America doctors would have to go on social media begging for supplies?'

'In first world medicine, there are certain supplies we assume are there...[it's] very, very shocking to see how close we were to the knifes edge.'

Jackson agreed, adding that doctors are doing their best in uncharted territories.

'We are standing on the edge of the ocean in the dark. Were waiting for the wave to hit and we have no idea how high the wave is going to be,' Jackson said.

Au recently spoke to a friend from high school who doesn't work in medicine.

'And he said: "How are you feeling aside from all this?" And I said: "There is nothing besides this".'

Since entering into U.S. borders, coronavirus has quickly spread across state lines and infected several thousands.

Wednesday became that deadliest day in the U.S. with more than 200 deaths.

Dr. Anthony Fauci issued a stark warning Wednesday that coronavirus may come back in cycles as the death toll in the United States hit 1074, with 252 people dying in a single day.

Pictured: A patient arrives at Mount Sinai West Hospital in New York, New York, on Thursday

Speaking at the White House daily briefing, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that Americans should be prepared for the outbreak to 'become seasonal'.

While medical staff continues to request supplies, the U.S. Senate recently passed a 2.2trillion coronavirus bill in an unanimous vote. The bill will continue to the House for a vote and then needs Trump's signature to release funding.

The package would give direct payments to most Americans, expand unemployment benefits and provide a $367 billion program for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home.

Most Americans making less than $75,000 as a single tax filer would receive a $1,200 direct payment under the bill.

The payments would go out by direct deposit for those who have recently paid taxes or received tax refunds that way, but for others physical checks will be sent.

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths
Editor's take: Daily deals provider Groupon recently announced that Rich Williams is no longer serving as chief executive officer. Furthermore, Steve Krenzer has also stepped down as chief operating officer effective immediately. It may not seem like the best idea to change leadership in the middle of a global pandemic but with virtually everyone hurting, perhaps it is better to rip the band-aid off and absorb the sting now?

Details of the respective decisions werent provided although Groupon said that both will continue to be employed by the company.

Williams has been replaced on an interim basis by Aaron Cooper who most recently served as the president of the companys North American division. Before becoming the companys first chief marketing officer, he held marketing jobs and consulting roles with firms like Obitz, AOL and AEG Partners.

Chairman Eric Lefkofsky said Cooper is well-positioned to lead Groupon as they conduct a search for a permanent successor. We have a deep bench of senior talent and the team is intensely focused on executing against our strategy during this unprecedented moment in time, Lefkofsky added.

Cooper said that in his 10 years with the company, he has seen it grow from a small email-based platform into what they believe will be the leading online destination for experiences. That said, the executive isnt turning a blind eye to the ongoing pandemic that is ripping the economy to shreds.

The disruption created by the global pandemic, however, is significant, and our immediate goal is to help millions of Groupon merchants, customers and employees navigate the massive challenges they face, Cooper said.

Groupon is no stranger to hard times. In 2015, the company axed some 1,000 employees and exited seven markets as part of a $35 million restructuring effort. Earlier this year, it got out of the consumer goods marketplace, vowing to move forward as a pure local experiences facilitator.

Image credit: Nicole Lienemann
In a testing laboratory (Photo: VNA)

Two out of the five patients returned from abroad and entered Vietnam from March 21-23 and have been quarantined since their entry. The remainders were infected with the virus from patients inside the country.

The 149th patient is a 40-year-old Vietnamese man who worked as a freelancer in Hessen state of Germany. He arrived at Van Don Airport in northern Quang Ninh province on flight VN36 (seat number 55C) on March 23 along with his mother (seat number 55A). He tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 on March 25.

The man is treated at the Hospital No.2 in Quang Ninhs Ha Long city.

The 150th patient is a 55-year-old Vietnamese man. On March 13, he and his wife flew from the US, transited in Taiwan (China) and boarded flight BR395 of EVA Air (seat numbers 2D and 2K) back to Vietnam. They arrived at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City on the same day.

He had contact with many people after his entry. He has been quarantined at Can Gio districts COVID-19 treatment hospital since March 18.

The 151st patient is a 45-year-old Brazilian woman, who is residing in HCM Citys district 2, and working at two branches of her footwear company in Dong Nai province and HCM City.

She had close contact with the 124th patient. She also visited restaurants and supermarkets in HCM City and Dong Nai.

The patient is now treated at a quarantine area in HCM Citys Cu Chi district.

The 152nd patient is a Vietnamese woman, 27, residing in HCM Citys Tan Phu district. She is an older sister of the 127th patient, who worked as a waiter at Buddha Bar.

She has been under quarantine since March 23 at Can Gio districts COVID-19 treatment hospital.

The 153rd patient is a 60-year-old Vietnamese woman residing in central Da Nang citys Hai Chau district.

She visited her relatives in Australia and returned Vietnam on March 21 on flight VN772 to the Tan Son Nhat airport. Upon her arrival, she was quarantined along with the 143rd patient and two other people in the same room at the dormitory of Vietnam National University-HCM City.

After the 143rd patient was confirmed to contract the disease, she and the two remainders were transferred to the acute respiratory disease hospital in Cu Chi district for quarantine and testing on March 23.
Shi Xiaomin, who used to export suits and blazers by the thousands to South Korea, the Netherlands and the United States, was luckier than many other Chinese factory owners.

When his factory in the eastern city of Wenzhou reopened last month after an extended shutdown due to the coronavirus outbreak, the local government sent a bus to a nearby province to ferry back more than 20 of his stranded workers. Staff with cars volunteered to fetch colleagues.

Shi's optimism was short-lived.

In the past week, requests to cancel orders or delay shipments from his European and U.S. clients have flooded in.

Early in the outbreak, China imposed tough travel restrictions and factory suspensions to curb the spread of the virus, squeezing labor supplies and sending exporters scrambling to fulfill orders.

Now, the reverse is happening - overseas orders are being scrapped as the pandemic ravages the economies of China's trading partners.

"The unprecedented shutdown of normal economic activity across Europe, the U.S. and a growing number of emerging markets is certain to cause a dramatic contraction in Chinese exports, probably in the range of a 20-45% year-on-year drop in the second quarter," said Thomas Gatley, senior analyst at research firm Gavekal Dragonomics.

Shi said his fabric supplier in hard-hit Italy suspended operations on Sunday, meaning no fresh raw materials from May. His stockpile of fabric will last until the end of April.

Shi said he would slow production and might suspend all output soon if business does not improve.

He also told the 50-odd workers who have yet to return from Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak in China, to find jobs elsewhere.

"We know this year is bad and next year would be better, but the question is how many factories can make it to next year?" Shi said.

SLUMPING EXPORTS

Economists had initially anticipated a V-shaped recovery for China's economy, similar to that seen after SARS epidemic in 2003. But analysts have since slashed their forecasts to levels not seen since the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976.

China's net exports accounted for 11% of economic growth last year.

"The last overseas orders we received were for April," said Zhu Hongping, chairman of Hangzhou Hongli Food, a supplier of precooked food to restaurants in Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Normally, at this time of the year, orders can stretch to June and July, Zhu said, adding he may have to suspend production in three months.

Even when they do have orders, exporters are worried about constantly changing restrictions countries have adopted to curb the spread of the virus.

"Even if we finish the products, we don't know if the countries we are shipping to will be locked down," said Yi-Cheng Sung, who helps manage a factory that produces makeup brushes and accessories in Shenzhen.

On Tuesday, state-owned Securities Times reported Good Will Watch Case Manufacturing, a supplier to the U.S. watch brand Fossil (FOSL.O), would put its more than 600 workers on leave for at least three months.

UNEMPLOYMENT

China's manufacturing sector, accounting for about 40% of gross domestic product and over 20% of jobs, was already suffering from the U.S.-China trade war.

More big layoffs would be a concern for the ruling Communist Party and its focus on social cohesion and economic stability, particularly in a year when Beijing aims to double GDP and disposable incomes from a decade ago.

China's urban jobless rate hit 6.2% in February, up one percentage point from the end of 2019, and a record since the statistics bureau started publishing the data in early 2018.

Dan Wang, an analyst with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), said the jobless rate could go up by another 5 percentage points this year, which corresponds to an additional 22 million in urban unemployment, on top of an estimated 5 million jobs lost in January-February.

Another 103 million workers could be affected by salary cuts of 30%-50%, Wang said.

A 23-year-old salesman at a mirror factory in Yiwu in Zhejiang province said U.S. clients canceled over $500,000 of orders on Saturday alone.

Some of the factory's more than 1,000 workers have since been suspended while others are given more days off per week, the salesman said, declining to be named.

"I think the company will start to lay off people soon," he said.

Also read: Coronavirus in India Live Updates: 65-year-old COVID-19 patient dies in Kashmir; number of deaths rises to 15
Tough times call for greater resilience, patience and just soldiering on. There are numerous reports across media on the severe impact of Covid-19 on the economy and various sectors. Talks of recession and job losses are looming large. Amid such a gloomy scenario, Adgully is seeking to highlight the bright spots in India Inc and how the countrys corporates are keeping their employee morale high and moving ahead despite all odds.

In a letter to the workforce of Bajaj Finserv, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company and Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company, CMD Sanjiv Bajaj sets a positive tone, encouraging his team that is working from home, and the commitment to continue to strengthen the companys 130-year old legacy of trust.

He begins his letter by acknowledging the dedication and speed with which all employees have driven a host of activities to support the businesses, working around constraints to keep critical services up in offices and branches and all this while taking measures to stay safe.

He enumerated the necessary precautions taken to keep the companys people out of harms way, stating, Our support helplines, work-from-home and social distancing measures to reduce density at the workplace, increased cycle of facility sanitisation, medical support for the ailing, and many other such initiatives are ensuring our biggest strength  our people  and your dear ones stay healthy and safe.

Talking about the customer-centric measures, Bajaj said keeping in mind the current situation, capacities across the companys digital assets have substantially enhanced to ensure the customers can reach the company in a quick and secure manner, as well as to issue new loans and policies. This is our time to demonstrate our commitment to Customer-Obsession and I urge each one of us to step up and help our customers tide over this challenge, he urged.

He did not forget about the tens of thousands of our partners  retail stores, online portals, collection agencies, partner banks, auto dealers, hospitals and clinics, tens of thousands of our agents and others. He called the employees to check in regularly with them, especially the smaller partners, and assure them that the company is standing by their side through thick and thin.

Bajaj also urged all employees to comply with the Governments lockdown orders and stay within the confines of their safe surroundings.

Adding further, he wrote, While we hope these times shall pass by soon, should it take longer, we must show the resilience to stay committed and be confident so that we come out of this even stronger. We have always built our companies on the foundation of long-term orientation. I am sure this will continue to strengthen our 130-year old legacy of trust.

He affirmed that the fundamentals of the companys businesses continue to stay strong. Both our Insurance businesses have amongst the highest solvency margin in the industry and are very well positioned on liquidity and also maintain significant portion of our investments in safest instruments like Government Securities. Our Lending business is having a great FY20. We enter this crisis with a strong business model, large liquidity chest, very strong capital position and a phenomenal team. We expect to come out of this with an even stronger position in the market, he stressed.

He also mentioned about the company putting together a plan to do its bit for the community, the details of which would be revealed soon.

Bajaj concluded his letter by stating, I want each of you to know that we are in it together and that we are here for you. I am sure together we will shine through.

Also Read:

Bajaj Allianz Life launches AI enabled Chat Bot for an integrated WhatsApp Service

Bajaj Allianz Life reiterates the importance of Social Distancing
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 20:45:32|Editor: huaxia

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TOKYO, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Japanese Foreign Ministry said on Thursday that hundreds of Japanese nationals are now stranded overseas due to travel restrictions amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

According to ministry officials, the total number of people stranded abroad is not precisely known because of changing circumstances. However, they are currently stranded in more than 60 countries and regions.

Among them, around 260 people are in Peru, where international flights have been grounded since March 17. Most are tourists hoping to return to Japan on a chartered flight being arranged by a travel agency. Another 120 are stuck in Uzbekistan, who may be able to take a chartered plane back to Japan early next month.

"The circumstances are different for each country. In some cases, they can cross over into a neighboring country and fly home from there," Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi told an upper house committee meeting.

"We are looking at options for how to bring these people back safely," he added.

The ministry on Wednesday raised its travel advisory for the rest of the world to Level 2, meaning it advises against all nonessential international travel. It is the broadest warning the ministry has ever issued. The alert system uses a four-point scale, with level 4 being the highest.
Words and Images By George McCalman

Artist and creative director George McCalman captures the style and personality of attendees at Bay Area events with his illustrations.

GOLDEN GATE PARK / MARCH 15

Its a cosmic coincidence that the theme of this section celebrates the underappreciated splendor of Golden Gate Park. This month it seems to be a welcome reprieve from the omnipresent conversation around COVID-19. I walked around the park for hours, got lost in grooves and pathways, met colorful strangers (from a healthy distance, of course) and was reminded that most of us dont spend enough time here. What I saw amongst the variety of human beings I met was an urgent sense of gratitude for this patch of the natural world in the middle of our chaotic urban lives.

Every time I walk through the park I discover something Ive never seen before. Grounding myself to the earth, its bringing some balance to the uprooting intensity that is all around us right now. Reminding me of the health, abundance and beauty that we have around us.

 Margo Moritz, photographer

My first trip to Golden Gate Park to check out the skate scene and they (were) having a skate competition put on by Red Bull. This was 1999! Next Sunday we get there and the place was buzzing with skaters circling the rink, dance skaters in the middle and people just watching. One of the skaters comes over as were standing, staring in awe, and tells us if we want to learn the dance moves, go ask that guy over there. So we check it out and later the same guy comes over and asks if wed tried the slalom course over by the conservatory. We head over there, and in about half an hour, Im like OK this time were going down boy/girl and youre doing one foot, youre doing crisscrossing, youre slaloming! I was hooked on skating and learning as much as I can to keep on improving. Its the closest thing to flying! Skating is my fountain of youth!

George McCalman

 Colleen Jones, skate diva

Ill tell you whats more amazing than this coat ... the person inside. Do you know how much therapy it took to get here?  Lonnie Leben, gift to the world

Weve been friends and enemies, and friends again, since we were 5 years old. Weve been mainly walking and laughing all this time. Only 69 years of material!

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

 Ronnie Z., artist

Theyre old, but theyre still puppies. They boss me around. They go through so much

conditioner, you wouldnt

believe.

 Emanuele Bariani, owner, Bariani Olive Oil

Follow George McCalman on Instagram and Twitter at @mccalmanco
The Sudanese Sovereignty Council member said that Khartoum believes in safeguarding the interests of all three riparian countries affected by the Ethiopian mega-dam

Sudanese Sovereignty Council member Siddiq Tawer believes his countrys stance on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has been misunderstood, saying that Khartoum has sought to take into account the interests of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan when dealing with the issue.

The issue is not a fight between Cairo and Addis Ababa. Our country was neutral, but the whole issue should be managed in a manner that preserves the interests of all parties involved, Tawer commented to Sputnik news agency.

In a statement on 8 March, Egypt's foreign ministry expressed disappointment with a statement issued by the Sudanese foreign minister concerning Khartoums reservations to an Arab League resolution supporting Egypt in its dispute with Ethiopia over the GERD.

The Sudanese foreign ministry statement said that it had reservations concerning the draft resolution proposed by Egypt because it was issued without any consultation with the Sudanese government.

The Egyptian foreign ministry, however, said it had been keen to inform the Sudanese representative at the Arab League about the draft resolution since 1 March, adding that Sudan had confirmed it had received the draft resolution, but did not share any comments with the Egyptian authorities.

According to the Egyptian foreign ministrys response, the resolution stressed Arab solidarity with Egypt's water rights and international law concerning the GERD issue, and called on Ethiopia to sign the agreement drafted by the US Department of Treasury in February to regulate the operation of the mega-dam and the filling of its reservoir.

Tawer affirmed that his countrys stance may have been taken with some sensitivity, as Sudan is supposed to incline toward the Egyptian position.

Egypt is a sister country and its people are our brothers and Ethiopia is a neighbour and sister state and we are keen on not harming the interests of both countries and likewise not harming the Sudanese interests, and this formula is not hard to overcome for the three countries, he added.

In February, Ethiopian officials skipped the final round of US-sponsored trilateral talks in Washington over the giant hydropower project.

Ethiopia said it needs more time to deliberate the matter, and that it would commence filling in parallel with construction of the dam even though outstanding issues about the operation and the filling have yet to be resolved.

The US Treasury Department said that the subsequent agreement was drafted with input from the three countries and the World Bank and called on Ethiopia to sign it "at the earliest possible time."

Egypt, the only country of the three that has initialled the agreement, described it as "fair and balanced" and said it "achieves the interest of the three countries."

Ethiopia hopes the mega-dam will make it Africa's biggest power exporter.

Cairo, however, fears the dam, which is under construction near Ethiopia's border with Sudan, would significantly diminish its water supply from the Nile, its major source of freshwater.

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Technavio has been monitoring the commercial vehicle fuel tank market and it is poised to grow by 7.47 million units during 2019-2023, progressing at a CAGR of almost 6% during the forecast period. The report offers an up-to-date analysis regarding the current market scenario, latest trends and drivers, and the overall market environment. Request latest free sample report of 2020-2024

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005667/en/

Technavio has published a latest market research report titled Global Commercial Vehicle Fuel Tank Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire)

The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. Continental, Magna International, Textron, TI Automotive, and Yachiyo Industry are some of the major market participants. The demand for M&HCVs will offer immense growth opportunities. To make the most of the opportunities, market vendors should focus more on the growth prospects in the fast-growing segments, while maintaining their positions in the slow-growing segments.

Demand for M&HCVs has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market.

Commercial Vehicle Fuel Tank Market 2019-2023: Segmentation

Commercial Vehicle Fuel Tank Market is segmented as below:

Application LCV M&HCV.

Geographic Landscape Americas APAC EMEA.



To learn more about the global trends impacting the future of market research, download latest free sample report of 2020-2024: https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR30206

Commercial Vehicle Fuel Tank Market 2019-2023: Scope

Technavio presents a detailed picture of the market by the way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources. Our commercial vehicle fuel tank market report covers the following areas:

Commercial Vehicle Fuel Tank Market size

Commercial Vehicle Fuel Tank Market trends

Commercial Vehicle Fuel Tank Market industry analysis

This study identifies increasing adoption of plastic fuel tanks to reduce vehicle weight as one of the prime reasons driving the commercial vehicle fuel tank market growth during the next few years.

Commercial Vehicle Fuel Tank Market 2019-2023: Vendor Analysis

We provide a detailed analysis of around 25 vendors operating in the Commercial Vehicle Fuel Tank Market, including some of the vendors such as Continental, Magna International, Textron, TI Automotive and Yachiyo Industry. Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the Commercial Vehicle Fuel Tank Market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.

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Commercial Vehicle Fuel Tank Market 2019-2023: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist commercial vehicle fuel tank market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the commercial vehicle fuel tank market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behaviour

The growth of the commercial vehicle fuel tank market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of commercial vehicle fuel tank market vendors

Table Of Contents :

PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT

PART 03: MARKET LANDSCAPE

Market ecosystem

Market characteristics

Market segmentation analysis

PART 04: MARKET SIZING

Market definition

Market sizing 2018

Market size and forecast 2018-2023

PART 05: FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS

Bargaining power of buyers

Bargaining power of suppliers

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Threat of rivalry

Market condition

PART 06: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY APPLICATION

Market segmentation by application

Comparison by application

LCV Market size and forecast 2018-2023.

M&HCV Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by application

PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE

PART 08: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

Americas Market size and forecast 2018-2023

APAC Market size and forecast 2018-2023

EMEA Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Key leading countries

Market opportunity

PART 09: DECISION FRAMEWORK

PART 10: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES

Market drivers

Market challenges

PART 11: MARKET TRENDS

Increasing adoption of plastic fuel tanks to reduce vehicle weight

Increasing fuel tank capacities due to rising penetration of SUVs and crossovers

Hybrid electric vehicles would increase the demand for plastic fuel tanks

PART 12: VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Overview

Landscape disruption

PART 13: VENDOR ANALYSIS

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Continental

Magna International

Textron

TI Automotive

Yachiyo Industry

PART 14: APPENDIX

Research methodology

List of abbreviations

PART 15: EXPLORE TECHNAVIO

About Us

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005667/en/

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Stimulus checks are on the way, but when will Americans get the cash in hand?

That has been the talk of the day and, thus far, the story of the day on PennLive.

But its not all the coronavirus-related news going out Wednesday.

People are reading about Pennsylvanias school districts preparing as though students may not return to the classroom this year as well as the new count of those infected with the virus in Pennsylvania.

Check out the top headlines below:

Stimulus checks: How many months until payments go out, and what could you receive?

Pa. school districts prepare for possibility of students not returning to classrooms

Pa. coronavirus cases top 1,100; 276 new cases reported

Pa. businesses are challenging Gov. Tom Wolfs emergency powers. So far, Wolfs winning.

Coronavirus cases by day in Pa. (3/25/20): How fast is COVID-19 spreading?

Texas Roadhouse owner provides hot meals for teachers, first responders: coronavirus hero

Stimulus checks: How many months until payments go out, and what could you receive?

Not since World War II has the country been asked to step up and sacrifice so much

Texas Roadhouse owner provides hot meals for teachers, first responders: coronavirus hero

Pa. unemployment claims skyrocket to 540,000 since statewide coronavirus shutdown, shattering records

How to volunteer, donate in central Pa. during coronavirus pandemic

Pa. school districts prepare for possibility of students not returning to classrooms
The Public Utility Commission is expected to establish a emergency fund to help pay the residential electricity bills of Texas residents struggling during the coronavirus pandemic.

DeAnn Walker, chairman of the commission, recommended this week that the commission should immediately provide financial help for strapped Texans who buy electricity in a deregulated market, including Houston and Dallas. She made the suggestion after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster March 13 in response to the growing threat of the coronavirus.

The cost of the program would be paid by all types of ratepayers who would be assessed a special charge of 0.065 cents per kilowatt hour, about 78 cents a month for residential customers who use 1,200 kilowatt hours of electricity each month.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: Stay informed with accurate reporting you can trust

The proposal is a relief to retail electric providers worried they would be saddled with customers unpaid electricity bills. It comes a week after the commission met in an emergency meeting to discuss the surge of disconnections as Texans lost their jobs when restaurants, bars and other businesses werer closed in an effort to stop transmission of the coronavirus.

The commissioners thanked utilities that had already issued orders to suspend disconnections for customers who hadnt paid their bills. Several retail electric providers also said theyd waive late fees and ask customers to request extensions if they couldnt pay their bills on time.

But the suspension of disconnections posed a problem for retail electric providers, who rely on the threat of cutting power to get delinquent customers to pay up. Retail electricity sellers still have to pay their bills, including the cost of providing energy and reimbursing utilities for transmission and distribution expenses.

An emergency fund would reduce exposure to a growing pool of debt that could lead to industry upheaval and bankruptcies, Walker said in her memo. The commissioners are expected to consider establishing the program during a meeting Thursday.

Residential customers who have lost their jobs or meet other unspecified qualifications would be placed on deferred payment plans and would not face disconnection. In exchange, retail electricity providers could require customers to agree to whats known as a switch-hold, a mechanism that prevents customers from switching to another electricity provider until they have paid their bills.

The proposal would reimburse the energy portion of power bills at the rate of 4 cents per kilowatt hour and cover the cost of local delivery and transmission, which is about another 4 cents per kilowatt hour. Consumers would be credited for those amounts on their bills yet would still be responsible for reimbursing their retail electric providers for any energy portion that exceeds 4 cents per kilowatt hour through a deferred payment program.

CORONAVIRUS IN HOUSTON: All of the latest news, numbers and analysis to keep you up-to-date, only on HoustonChronicle.com

Many consumers currently shoulder energy rates much higher than 4 cents a kilowatt hour, said one energy expert. The average Texas electricity customer pays about 8 cents per kilowatt hour for the energy portion of a power bill, said Fred Anders, founder of the electricity shopping website Texas Power Guide.

Under the rules, those customers would likely be locked into their current provider until they pay their debt, he said.

The fee that would help establish the emergency fund would kick in within 10 days of the commissions order to establish the COVID-19 Electricity Relief Program, according to the proposal. It is expected to end after the governor lifts the disaster declaration.

The state had a program called Lite-Up Texas that subsidized summertime electricity bills for about 700,000 low-income Texans who lived in the deregulated parts of the state but it was eliminated by lawmakers four years ago. The program was funded by utility customers who paid a fraction of a cent per kilowatt hour into a special fund.

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A small family run farm in Kent which provides food for those in self-isolation due to the coronavirus has been burgled.

Street Farm Dairy in High Halden, near Ashford, was targeted at around 9pm and 11:30pm on Tuesday (24 March).

Highlighting the incident on Facebook, the farm said thieves stole bread, yogurts and juice which were to be delivered to vulnerable people.

"We can't believe we are having to write this - but this evening all our bread and yoghurts were stolen," Street Farm Dairy said.

"We are so, so sorry but anyone who was expecting our lovely locally baked bread and yoghurts won't be able to have them delivered tomorrow. You of course wont be charged for them.

"To all our new and existing customers, we really apologise and we'll restock these items as soon as we can.

"Most of these products were due to be delivered to those who are self-isolating."

The post has since been shared 200 times, with dozens of comments expressing outrage at the incident.

One Facebook user said: "What is wrong with people, we are in this together so why steal the food. If everyone was sensible there would be plenty for us all."

Another person offered help: "I will deliver all your missing goods as soon as possible, even if have to do an extra run."
Social media posts are being used to track whether people are adhering to strict coronavirus lockdown rules in Italy.

Researchers claimed to have identified places where lockdowns were being breached this month after analysing half a million photos and videos uploaded to people's Instagram stories earlier this month.

It follows similar efforts in China, South Korea and the US to use people's data to track the spread of the virus, isolate potential cases, and identify rule-breakers.

Italian and US researchers fed half a million Instagram photos taken in Italian hotspots such as Bergamo (pictured) in March into recognition software

Italy has the most coronavirus deaths of any country in the world at more than 7,500 people, but is struggling to trace the spread of the virus amid a lack of testing kits

Ghost Data, a US and Italian research company, was behind the latest effort to help control the spread of the virus which has killed more than 7,500 people in Italy alone.

Between March 11 and March 16 the company collected photos and videos from Instagram stories from people in Italy, totalling just over half a million posts.

The was then anonymised by blurring faces, obscuring exact locations and fed into LogoGrab image recognition software.

The software identified some 25,000 posts where it thought lockdown rules were being broken, either by people being outdoors or in public indoors settings.

Further analysis by people and machines then produced a final list of 1,317 posts that were uploaded during quarantine and showed lockdown breaches.

Andrea Stroppa, found of Ghost Data, said the aim of the study was to help governments enforce lockdowns without breaching people's privacy.

He added: 'In our view, privacy is very important. It's a fundamental human right.

'However, it's important to give our support to help the government and the authorities. Hundreds of people are dying every day.'

It comes after South Korea, which has overseen one of the most impressive responses to coronavirus anywhere in the world, employed similar tactics to get its infections under control.

Police in the hardest-hit Lombardy region are now using drones to make sure people adhere to strict rules meaning people cannot go outside except for emergencies

While the country employed some tactics that are being used the world over - including mass testing at drive-through sites - it has so-far avoided mass lockdowns of the kind used in China and western countries.

Seoul did this by aggressively 'contact tracing' people who had encountered infected people, allowing them to build up a much more detailed picture of how the virus was spreading and who might have it.

Health officials retraced patients movements using security camera footage, credit card records, and GPS data from their cars and cellphones.

Messages would then be sent out to the phone of anyone who might have come into contact with that person urging them to get tested.

Websites and smartphone apps are used to alert people to where patients have been hour-by-hour, allowing them to identify if they might have been infected.

And those forced into self-quarantine are forced to download an app that monitors whether they are breaching self-isolation guidelines with fines up to $2,500 for non-compliance, the New York Times reports.

While China made liberal use of lockdowns now being seen in the West - at one point restricting the movement of an estimated 760million people - it also used phone and social media data to track potential cases.

Russia has deployed a network of 100,000 security camera equipped with facial recognition software in Moscow to track people violating self-isolation rules

The cameras are fed images of people who should be isolating and report them to a coronavirus command centre if they are spotted outside

A WHO report into China's response noted that: 'New technologies were applied such as the use of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to strengthen contact tracing and the management of priority populations.'

Data from WeChat, China's equivalent of WhatsApp, and Alipay, which is similar to PayPal, was also used to check the movements of infected people and to stop them travelling after they had been placed in quarantine.

In the US, a company called Unacast is using GPS data from mobile phones to track how closely people are adhering to lockdown and social isolation rules.

By comparing data on how far people travel in a typical week to how far they have travelled since the outbreak began, the company created a 'heat map' showing how well guidelines are being adhered to.

The data can be broken down county-by-county within states, but provides a general overview rather than data on specific individuals that was collected by the likes of China and South Korea.

South Korea used data from patients' mobile phones, cars, bank accounts and social media to aggressively 'contract trace' anyone they might have infected (file image)

A firm called Unacast is using GPS phone data to monitor how well people are adhering to social distancing rules by comparing movements on a typical day to movements after the rules were put in place, identifying places where people are less compliant (in orange)

Meanwhile the Russian government is taking matters into its own hands by deploying facial recognition software via CCTV camera in Moscow to ensure that people who have been quarantined with suspected infections stay in isolation.

100,000 cameras in the city have been fed images of people who are supposed to be self-isolating, and will inform staff in a purpose-built coronavirus control centre if they venture out.

The same centre is also being used to monitor the internet for 'fake news' about the virus, the Kremlin said, and to track foreign arrivals from virus hotspots.

So far, Russia has not put in place a lockdown.

Elsewhere, Taiwan is using phone location-tracking to ensure quarantined people stay in their homes.

In Hong Kong those under quarantine are being made to wear location-tracking wristbands.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed at least 20,500 people worldwide since it first appeared in China in December, official figures released on Wednesday said.

More than 452,160 confirmed cases of infection have been diagnosed in 182 countries and territories since the start of the pandemic.

The tallies, using data collected from national authorities and information from the World Health Organisation (WHO), are likely to reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections.

Many countries are now only testing cases that require hospitalisation.
P eople who deliberately cough at emergency workers while claiming to have coronavirus could face up to two years in jail, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has said.

The warning follows a string of threats linked to the deadly Covid-19 virus.

The CPS said assaults against emergency workers were punishable by up to two years in prison.

It added that coughs directed as a threat towards other key workers or members of the public could be charged as common assault.

London during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures 1 /66 London during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures A woman jogging near City Hall, London, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown PA An image of Queen Elizabeth II and quotes from her broadcast on Sunday to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA A pedestrian walks past a billboard reading "Please believe these days will pass" on Broadway Market in east London AFP via Getty Images Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge Getty Images Boris Johnson Jeremy Selwyn Sun-seekers cool off in the water and sunbathe on the riverbank at Hackney Marshes in east London AFP via Getty Images Ed Davey is shown on screens as he speaks via videolink during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, London PA A herd of fallow deer graze on the lawns in front of a housing estate in Harold Hill in east London AFP via Getty Images A woman wearing a mask crosses a bridge over Camden Lock, London PA An empty Millenium Bridge PA A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" is seen on an underground station platform Getty Images People push to enter the Niketown shop in Londo AP Jo Proudlove and daughter Eve, 9, follow the daily online "PE with Joe" Joe Wickes' exercise class on "Fancy dress Friday Reuters Police in Westminster Jeremy Selwyn Waterloo station looking empty PA Getty Images A quiet Parliament Square Getty Images PABest A man walks along a passageway at London's Oxford Street Underground station the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown to help curb the spread of the Coronavirus PA Social distancing markers around the camel enclosure at ZSL London Zoo PA A police car patrols Greenwich Park in London PA The Premier League in action in front of empty stands AP Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed. A deserted Piccadilly Circus PA A general view is seen of a deserted Trafalgar Square AFP via Getty Images Getty Images The iconic Abbey Road crossing is seen after a re-paint by a Highways Maintenance team as they take advantage of the COVID-19 coronavirus lockdown and quiet streets to refresh the markings Getty Images A view of 20 Fenchurch Street (the 'Walkie Talkie' building) in the City of London, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus PA A deserted Chinatown PA A person looks at graffiti on a JD Wetherspoon pub in Crystal Palace, south London. Wetherspoons workers have described founder Tim Martin's lack of support for his chain's 40,000 employees as "absolutely outrageous" PA The London ExCel centre that has been turned into a makeshift NHS Hospital and critical care unit to cope with the Coronavirus pandemic PA The Palace Theatre, which usually shows the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child play, sits in a deserted Shaftesbury Avenue PA The Sondheim Theatre, which usually shows the Les Miserables musical, sits in a deserted Shaftesbury Avenue PA Two members of a British Army mounted regiment exercise their horses in Parliament Square AP Westminster Bridge is deserted PA A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA An empty street and bus stop at St James's Park AFP via Getty Images Whitehall Jeremy Selwyn A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA A single pedestrian walks past The national Gallery AFP via Getty Images London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn Kings Cross and St Pancras Jeremy Selwyn Buckingham Palace looking empty in London, PA London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn Kings Cross and St Pancras Jeremy Selwyn London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn London's Carnaby Street empty as shops closed after a lockdown was announced in the latest bid to stop the spread of coronavirus through the UK AP A quiet Jubilee line westbound train carriage PA A single pedestrian walks past The national Gallery AFP via Getty Images A quiet Canary Wharf Underground Station PA Empty Embankment Jeremy Selwyn

Max Hill QC, Director of Public Prosecution said on Thursday: "Emergency workers are more essential than ever as society comes together to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

"I am therefore appalled by reports of police officers and other frontline workers being deliberately coughed at by people claiming to have Covid-19.

"Let me be very clear: this is a crime and needs to stop. The CPS stands behind emergency and essential workers and will not hesitate to prosecute anybody who threatens them as they go about their vital duties."

Director of Public Prosecutions Max Hill QC / PA

It comes as Home Secretary Priti Patel announced on Thursday that new enforcement powers would be rolled out with those flouting lockdown rules potentially facing prison time.

The warning also comes after Darren Rafferty, 45, admitted on Wednesday to deliberately coughing at Metropolitan Police officers before claiming he was suffering from coronavirus.

Priti Patel announced that new enforcement powers would be rolled out / Getty Images

He admitted causing grievous bodily harm to his former partner and three counts of assault on an emergency worker and faces sentencing next month.

David Mott, 40, was jailed for 26 weeks on Wednesday after threatening to spit at police in Blackburn after officers questioned him about being with two others following the announcement of stricter social distancing rules on Monday night, the CPS said.

West Midlands Police said 35-year-old Mehdi Razmdideh has been charged with shoplifting and assault after he allegedly spat and coughed at shop workers while shouting: "I've got coronavirus."

Police at Stratford station during the nationwide lockdown / Evening Standard/eyevine

Razmdideh, who was assessed by a nurse and found not to have the virus, is accused of stealing two beard trimmers before targeting security staff at the B&M store in Stechford Retail Park, Birmingham, on Wednesday.

And a group of teenagers spat in the face of an RSPCA officer as she rescued a swan on Saturday, shouting "have corona bitch", according to the animal charity.

The CPS said new guidance published in January strengthened its approach to assaults on emergency workers after analysis revealed it had prosecuted almost 20,000 cases since legislation doubling the maximum sentence first came into force in November 2018.

London on lockdown / Jeremy Selwyn

John Apter, national chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, welcomed Mr Hill's intervention, but said emergency laws must be put in place if the attacks increase.

"Reports of a vile minority using the virus as a weapon against police officers trying to keep them safe beggars belief," he said.

"Coughing and spitting, threatening to spread Covid-19 to my colleagues is a disgusting act and must not be tolerated on any level.

"I have raised this serious issue of people using the virus as a weapon or to cause fear with the Home Secretary this week - suggesting there must be emergency legislation put into place if we see an increase of these kind of incidents."

Mr Apter said charges currently available do not "attract the level of seriousness they deserve."

He added: "We need to see a strong response for those who assault our 999 colleagues in this way - those dedicated men and women who are putting their lives on the line during this crisis.

"Until then, I will keep pushing this as an issue because our emergency service workers deserve nothing less."
Steam Packet Statement Regarding Travel Restrictions

Official Release from the Steam Packet (17:30 26/03/20)

Following the decision of the Isle of Man Government to close its borders to all but essential workers, the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company is rescheduling its services effective from 27th March. Sailings affected will be those from 27th March until 16th April 2020

Manannan will no longer be starting her seasonal services as scheduled on Friday 27th March. All passengers booked on fast craft sailings to or from Liverpool until Friday 16th April will be given the option to transfer to the nearest available Ben-my-Chree service to or from Heysham or receive a full refund, including those booked on non-refundable special offers. Refunds will be available within a month.

Customers booked on Irish services during this period will also be offered a refund.

The Ben-my-Chree will continue to operate twice-daily services between Douglas and Heysham to maintain lifeline freight services. At this time passengers are still permitted to travel to Heysham, but Government restrictions mean they cannot return during the 21 day period from 27th March.

Any passenger intending to arrive on the Isle of Man after 06:30hrs on Friday 27th March must hold an authorisation issued by the Chief Secretary to confirm that they are required to perform specific essential work on the Island. Authorisation requests must be made 24 hours prior to the intended date and time of travel by contacting iomgexemptions@gov.im

Isle of Man Steam Packet Company Chief Executive Mark Woodward said: We kindly ask for your patience as we work through this period of extremely high demand for our Reservations team. We anticipate there will be a large number of requests via telephone and email to be dealt with by our staff, and will be working through these as efficiently as we can for our customers.

We are committed to transporting essential food and goods to the Island and wish to reassure the Island community that our lifeline freight services are secure and will continue.

Steam Packet Company customers with an online account can make amendments or cancellations online directly, with no need to contact the Reservations Team. Passengers that do not have an account can register online and link their booking to the new account, as long as the registered email address is the same as the one used for the initial booking.

Sailings beyond 16th April will remain under regular review and, depending on Isle of Man Government travel restrictions, may also be revised as necessary. The Company will contact passengers on any future revisions.
H ow typical of lawyers to disagree.

Two firms today took totally opposing views of how to rank the interests of shareholders against those of staff. Both admitted they could not tell what the future holds, but while Ince cut its dividend, Knights cut its staffs wages.

Across the UK, boards are making the same decision: is it responsible to eat into rainy day funds to pay investors when unprecedented chaos is sweeping into every one of their markets?

The default answer has to be No. Unless there are specific reasons Covid-19 puts you in a particularly strong position  and I cant think of any  it cant be worth the risk.

Not only are directors obliged to look after the long-term safety of their business, but the chances are they will at some time be relying on some form of state support. Either directly through loans or grants for furloughed staff, or indirectly through the fact that the public is paying hundreds of billions of pounds to prop up the private sector. They have a moral duty to reduce the risks they pose to staff or the state.

If you dont like the moral argument, take the selfish one. Had EasyJet not just paid out

174 million to its shareholders, the Government might not have refused its plea for aid.

Most companies get it. A further 14 cut the divi today, taking the total scrapped up to 4 billion. But others still dont.

Daily Mirror publisher Reach says its minded to pay, while banks are still doling out billions.
The Syrian Artists Union have stopped work, to protect their health and prevent the spread of coronavirus in Syria reports Enab Baladi.

The Syrian Artists Union issued a decision to stop all dubbing work in Syria to prevent the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19).

On its Facebook page on Wednesday, the union issued Circular 19, calling for a halt to all artistic works including dubbing, threatening to take legal action if this is not implemented.

The Syrian regime prime minister agreed to stop the filming of all artistic works in Syria in order to prevent the spread of the virus.

The Syrian official news agency SANA reported on Tuesday, that the council had called on the Information Ministry to issue the necessary instructions to stop all filming operations, whether those were in the public sector (the National Film Organization and the National Television Production Organization in the Information Ministry) or in the private sector.

The union also said in another statement that the official shifts in the union were limited to three hours, from 12:30pm to 3:30 pm for two days a week (Sunday and Tuesday).

The decision applies to all branches of the union in Syrias provinces.

This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
LONDON (Reuters) - The U.S. ambassador to London has said China had endangered the world by suppressing information about the coronavirus outbreak thus allowing it to spread far beyond the Communist republic's borders.

"First it tried to suppress the news," Ambassador Woody Johnson wrote in an article for The Times newspaper published on Thursday, adding that Beijing had then selectively shared critical information while stonewalling international health authorities.

"Had China done the right things at the right time, more of its own population, and the rest of the world, might have been spared the most serious impact of this disease," the ambassador wrote.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said Beijing should have acted faster to warn the world after the outbreak of the disease there. He also dismissed criticism that his labeling it as the Chinese virus was racist.

Last week, he brushed aside a reporters question as to whether it was potentially harmful to Asian-Americans to give the disease that name, as well for an unnamed White House official to have privately termed it the "kung flu".

On Monday, the president said Asian-Americans were not responsible for spreading the disease and needed to be protected.

"When the crisis finally abates we should take stock of the outcome and evaluate the costs of this breakdown in international collaboration," Ambassador Johnson wrote in The Times.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Kate Holton; editing by Michael Holden)
The global health crisis caused by the novel coronavirus is prompting calls for global unity, but the Trump administration is showing no sign of pulling back on one of its most divisive foreign policy initiatives: "Maximum pressure."

Instead, it's doubling down.

The administration upped the ante on Venezuela on Thursday, unsealing indictments against President Nicolas Maduro and several members of his inner circle on narcoterrorism charges and offering a $15 million bounty for information leading to Maduro's capture and conviction.

"While the Venezuelan people suffer, this cabal lines their pockets with drug money and the proceeds of their corruption," Attorney General William Barr said.

The move came through the Justice Department, not the Treasury or State departments, the main drivers of President Donald Trump's "maximum pressure," with sanctions designations. U.S. Attorney Geoff Berman in Manhattan said the charges were based on more than a decade of work.

Analysts suggested the move was in keeping with similar efforts against countries including Iran, North Korea and China.

The United States was "clearly using law enforcement tools as part of the maximum pressure campaign," said Joshua Glazer, a former Justice Department and National Security Council lawyer.

"This is definitely part of the maximum pressure campaign on the Maduro regime," said Eric Lorber of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "Justice Department indictments and other legal actions beyond sanctions have played a very important part in a number of ways."

Q: What's the impact of the charges against Maduro?

A: Thursday's criminal indictment is only the second the United States has brought against a foreign head of state. But it's not clear whether the previous example holds any clues for future U.S. moves against Maduro.

In February 1988, federal prosecutors in Miami indicted Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega on drug dealing and conspiracy charges. In December 1989, President George H.W. Bush ordered troops into Panama to oust him from power; Noriega surrendered on Jan. 3, 1990.

Noriega was convicted of conspiracy to commit drug trafficking in Miami federal court and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He was eventually enmeshed in a prolonged legal tustle that saw him released early by the United States, extradited to France and then extradited back to Panama, where he died in 2017.

Maduro and Noriega were both Latin American strongmen and adversaries of the United States accused in large-scale drug trafficking conspiracies. But Venezuela is a far larger country than Panama, with a more formidable military, and Russian backing.

Q: If the charges don't immediately result in Maduro's capture, they could be used to add further economic pressure on the country.

A: The evidence compiled by the Justice Department could be used in new sanctions, including possibly the State Department designation of Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism - a rare move currently applied to only North Korea, Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Lorber, a former undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence said it was unclear how the administration could do this when it doesn't consider Maduro legitimate. The United States recognizes opposition leader Juan Guaido, head of Venezuela's National Assembly, as the nation's rightful president.

"The United States would both be recognizing Guiado's government as the legitimate government while simultaneously calling the country a state sponsor of terrorism," Lorber said.

Q: Where else is the administration increasing maximum pressure?

A: Venezuela isn't the only nation facing growing U.S. pressure while also battling covid-19. Over the past month, the Treasury has announced new sanctions designations related to Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela.

"The administration's tactic of choice toward adversaries is all pressure, all the time," said Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment.

The government of Iran has complained that sanctions on its economy made it difficult to gather the equipment needed to contain an outbreak that has killed more than 2,200.

Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif blamed deaths on "unlawful U.S. sanctions."

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has dismissed such criticism. U.S. sanctions "do not target imports of food, medicine and medical equipment, or other humanitarian goods," he said in a statement Monday, and "Iranian documents show their health companies have been able to import testing kits."

There are some signs of restraint in the maximum pressure campaign. Deadly attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq this month, widely seen as perpetrated by groups backed by Iran, have prompted only a muted response from the Trump administration, without the discussion of a direct strike against Iran seen only months ago.

Q: Is humanitarian aid being offered to targets of maximum pressure?

A: The Trump administration has offered Iran aid as it battles the coronavirus, funneled through the Swiss government because Washington cut diplomatic relations with Tehran 40 years ago.

"The United States has offered over $100 million in medical assistance to foreign countries, including to the Iranian people," Pompeo said this week.

Iran rejected the aid. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said "you could be giving medicines to Iran that spread the virus or cause it to remain permanently."

The United States has also said it would facilitate humanitarian assistance to North Korea, which has not reported any cases of covid-19. No such offers have been made publicly to Venezuela.

At the same time, the United States has threatened to pull back aid from other countries, including $1 billion from Afghanistan, an ally, in a bid to force the government to support a future peace accord with Taliban insurgents.

Critics of maximum pressure say that by refusing to relent in exceptional circumstances as previous administrations have, the Trump administration is missing an opportunity amid the outbreak.

"At a time when our allies are looking to us for leadership, or at least partnership, on the covid-19 crisis, we're not rising to play that role," said DiMaggio.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and a critic of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, said the move against Maduro wasn't prompted by concerns about international drug trafficking, but by domestic politics - such actions are believed to be popular among the large Venezuelan and Cuban communities in the presidential battleground state of Florida.

"It is very dangerous and irresponsible at the moment of the coronavirus pandemic," Sachs wrote in an email. "The U.S. should be helping Venezuela and other countries to contain this devastating pandemic."
SOUTHBURY  A Connecticut State Police trooper admitted he messed up shortly before fellow troopers took him into custody on a DUI charge last week, according to body camera footage and audio released Thursday.

It was around 12:50 a.m. on Monday, March 16 when Troop A in Southbury got a 911 call about a state police cruiser parked on the right shoulder of I-84 west in Waterbury.

The 911 caller said the vehicle had its hazard lights on and that the driver was either asleep or unresponsive, according to the 911 recording, released by state police on Thursday.

In that cruiser was Trooper Shaquille Williams. Assigned to the patrol division out of Troop I in Bethany, Williams had been with state police for two years.

While troopers are allowed to use their assigned vehicles while off duty under the police union contract, state policy prohibits state police from having any amount of alcohol while driving their department vehicle.

The troopers can be seen on body camera footage approaching Williams cruiser, before one of them  identified verbally as a sergeant by the other troopers  knocked on the drivers side window.

The troopers have a brief conversation with Williams before the sergeant told Williams that he had to take field sobriety tests based on everything.

Williams was off duty at the time of the incident.

After the exams  of which Williams did several, including nine heel-to-toe steps in one direction and nine more in the other direction  the trooper who conducted them spoke with the sergeant who asked if Williams passed.

In my expert opinion, hes borderline, the trooper told the state police sergeant, according to body camera footage.

When the troopers returned, Williams admitted he messed up.

I messed up. I really did, Williams can be heard on the audio of body camera footage. Im not even gonna lie to you guys. I messed up.

The sergeant asked Williams where he was drinking and how much. Williams told the sergeant he was in New Haven and had three shots.

The sergeant went back to his cruiser to call a lieutenant about the situation. The two other troopers had Williams sit in his cruiser.

Body camera footage from one of the troopers showed that on the backseat of Williams cruiser was his department-issue duty belt with his service weapon still holstered.

I dont think hed go for it, but we gotta make sure he doesnt, the trooper can be heard saying on body camera footage after closing the door behind Williams.

What? the other trooper questioned.

The weapon, he responded.

Soon after, the trooper who performed the tests again spoke with the sergeant, who told him the lieutenant indicated that if Williams failed field sobriety tests, he should be taken into custody.

A fourth trooper arrives on scene  later identified by the sergeant as a union representative  and gets in to the passenger seat of Williams cruiser briefly before he leaves the scene.

Soon after, the troopers placed Williams in handcuffs and put him in the front passenger seat of a cruiser.

From there, he was taken to Troop A and processed on the charge of illegal operation of a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

In the cruiser on the way to Troop A, the sergeant and Williams spoke candidly about what happened and how he ended up pulled over on the side of the road, all captured on a camera within the cruiser, pointed directly at Williams.

Williams explains to the sergeant that he and his wife had just bought a house.

Its gonna be bad for us, Williams said. And I messed up  its me, my fault.

What am I supposed to do, you know what I mean? the sergeant replied. Listen, I hear you. It will work out. It will work out for you.

I made a wrong decision, Williams said.

After he was processed at Troop A, Williams was released on a $500 bond.

Williams was suspended from state police after his arrest. His badge, ID, cruiser and weapon were all turned over to state police. An Internal Affairs investigation is underway.

Court records show Williams is scheduled to appear in Waterbury court for arraignment on May 15 at 10 a.m.
Absent sweeping quarantine plans at the federal level, state and local officials are combatting the coronavirus pandemic, leaving an inconsistent plan of attack that varies between state lines and, in some areas, school districts.

All 50 states have declared states of emergency, and several states have sought major disaster declarations from the White House to activate critically needed aid to support their rapidly depleting resources, from diminished stocks of medical supplies to a lack of hospital beds.

These three maps illustrate how states are facing the Covid-19 crisis.

New York has emerged as the "epicentre" of coronavirus transmissions, Governor Andrew Cuomo has said. Nearly 400 people in the state have died as of Thursday, with a spike in 100 reported deaths over the last 24 hours. There are more than 33,000 confirmed cases in the state, including more than 21,000 in New York City.

The state has also led the US in testing, with more than 103,000 tests performed.

New Jersey has more than 4,400 confirmed cases. California and Washington state  which experienced the first confirmed case in the US  have also experienced surges in cases.

Quarantine efforts in California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Washington state, West Virginia and Wisconsin appear to be the most comprehensive yet, with closures of all bars and restaurants and bans of all gatherings, in addition to school closures.

Mississippi and Oklahoma, however, have not imposed any quarantine efforts other than school closures.

Schools in California, North Dakota and New Jersey schools are closed until further.

Kansas, Oklahoma and Virginia schools have closed through at least the end of the academic year, which ends this spring.

Schools in most other states are closed until May, though officials are eyeing likely returns to campuses in the fall, at earliest.

School closures and re-openings in Iowa, Nebraska and Maine were determined at the district level.

Nationwide closures have created other problems and exposed significant gaps in social safety nets, including meals for children from low-income households who rely on school meal plans, to families experiencing homelessness who have been ordered to shelter in place.

Lack of comprehensive child care and sick leave has made it difficult for parents and caregivers who continue to work to juggle caring for out-of-school children.

Many public school districts have made free meals available for pickup throughout the week on their campuses.

The closures also present unique challenges for teachers moving to online classes and remote learning for dozens of students in their care, and how to support students without computers or reliable internet access

Administrators and school districts also are determining what safe re-openings look like for their campuses, how to administer crucial exams and the state of class graduations as students prepare to enroll in the 2020-2021 school year

The recently passed Families First Coronavirus Response Act is the first federal-level paid sick leave policy in the US.

Employees with coronavirus can receive up to two weeks of paid leave for up to 100 per cent of their salary (up to $511 a day) and another 10 weeks of paid family and medical leave at 67 per cent of their pay rate for people caring for sick family members.

But it doesn't apply to people who work in a company that employs more than 500 people, which is nearly 50 per cent of American workers.

Business owners can try to exempt themselves from the law if they believe the policy will put them out of business.

Absent an overarching federal law for decades, those policies were largely left up to individual businesses until relatively recently, as states began passing legislation for mandatory paid sick leave.

Only 13 states and Washington DC have laws requiring companies to provide coronavirus sick leave, patching up some loopholes in the federal law.

Gig workers and freelancers and millions of other working Americans without employer benefits are not covered by sick leave policies.
Several states are reporting only positive COVID-19 test results from private labs, a practice that paints a misleading picture of how fast the disease is spreading.

Maryland, Ohio and others are posting the numbers of new positive tests and deaths, for instance, but dont report the negative results, which would help show how many people were tested overall.

This matters because it gives you a false sense of what is going on in a particular location, said Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. He said states should be required to report both positive and negative results for review by public health experts.

They should all be pulled together, Topol said. It should be automatic.

Many states display a more comprehensive picture of their pandemic data, including the total numbers of tests run and those yielding negative results.

The COVID Tracking Project, a private effort to collect testing information nationwide, has found at least nine states that have reported complete results only from state labs, or are missing some reports on negative results.

Melanie Amato, press secretary for the Ohio Department of Health, said her state is collecting only positive test results as many private labs have begun testing residents. As of Tuesday afternoon, the state reported 564 confirmed cases, 145 hospitalizations and eight deaths on its website.

We dont require private labs to report negative labs in any infectious disease, she said. Asked if that policy might change, she said: That is a discussion for later down the road.

Similarly, the Maryland Department of Health is currently reporting the number of positive cases only. We are working on a process to provide timely testing number data, the department told KHN in a statement, adding: We will provide additional information as soon as it is available. As of Tuesday afternoon, the state was reporting 349 confirmed cases.

In states that do report all test results, the rate of infections varies widely, with some reporting 5% or fewer tests as positive, while others confirm the virus in 10% or more of specimens. The results can change by the day. As of Tuesday, Utah reported 298 confirmed cases out of 5,823 tested, or about 5% positives. Officials noted that some results may have a lag time of up to 72 hours.

Florida officials had conducted 10,338 tests as of Sunday, of which 1,007 were positive, for a rate just under 10%. Florida officials said they partnered with commercial labs to increase the number of tests conducted each day and ensure Floridians receive the critical health information they need in a timely manner.

As of Monday afternoon, hard-hit Washington state had reported 2,221 positive test results and 31,712 negatives, for a positive rate of 7%. The state also reported 110 deaths.

Having a more complete picture in those states that limit reporting could provide useful information of tracking transmission and timing, said Charles Root, a veteran laboratory consultant in Chicago.

The U.S Surgeon Generals Office on Sunday tweeted: not all labs are reporting yet (or promptly), but the ones that do, report that 90% of tests (which are usually people exposed or w/ symptoms) are #COVID19 negative. That means even among the highest risk people, most dont have #coronavirus

Its unclear how federal authorities are adjusting to underreporting of negative tests, which could blur whats actually happening across the country.

On Monday, the White House task force took steps to ramp up nationwide reporting.

We also reminded the governors today that all state laboratories, all hospital laboratories are now required by law to report the results of coronavirus tests to the CDC, Vice President Mike Pence said, according to a transcript of the White House briefing.

Topol said the nation wasted precious time by not marshaling the resources to test large numbers of people over the past two months -- and tallying all results.

We should be doing a massive screening, a million people randomly by age and gender to get our arms around it, he said. If we do that, we would get answers. Until then, we dont have any clue. It is all very fuzzy.

Complicating things further, criteria for testing people have changed as COVID-19 cases soared. At a New Jersey drive-thru testing site on Monday, an electronic sign flashed the message: No symptoms. No Test. Other areas have allowed doctors to order tests when people suspect they might have been in contact with someone who had the disease.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website says: Not everyone needs to be tested for COVID-19.

The CDC also notes that most people have mild illness and will recover at home, adding there is no treatment specifically approved for this virus.

Decisions about testing are at the discretion of state and local health departments and/or individual clinicians, it says. The agency notes that older adults and individuals with chronic medical conditions and/or an immunocompromised state may be at higher risk for poor outcomes.

And as the disease has spread, hard-hit areas have asked that tests be reserved for people in the hospital and health care workers, both to ensure they can stay on the job and to conserve protective gear.

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb in a tweet last week noted that the nationwide 10% figure for positive test results is significantly higher than in the United Kingdom, South Korea and China.

Until we see the positivity rate decline significantly, we are still not screening enough, Gottlieb wrote.

This article was first posted by Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
Guest Column COVID-19: ASEAN Must Act More Boldly

Travelers wait to board their buses at the Mor Chit terminal in Bangkok on Sunday. Migrant workers from Thailand's neighboring countries are among those reported to have returned home over the weekend. / Nutthawat Wicheanbut / Bangkok Post

The past 12 weeks have displayed ASEANs strengths and exposed weaknesses as the grouping has had to respond to an unprecedented common catastrophic crisis, the coronavirus pandemic.

While the ASEAN foreign ministers were quick to organize a video conference in early February to ensure that all the members were on the same page, somehow as days passed by they seemed to allow the bureaucratic polity within their countries to take its course, which has inevitably slowed down whatever plans they pledged to undertake.

The joint statement from ASEAN foreign ministers in February clearly set out a guideline of key tasks that the member countries must work together on to combat the coronavirus. They identified nine priorities they could hold in common. One of the two most important resolutions is the strengthening of the coordination of national and regional efforts to ensure the groupings readiness and responsive measures to mitigate and subsequently eliminate the threat of COVID-19. The other one is the real-time exchange of information related to virus development.

Both economic and defense ministers also met and issued joint statements on their common actions. To ensure the economic well-being of ASEAN, the groupings economic ministers stressed the importance of maintaining ASEANs supply chains and facilitating access to input materials by business, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises.

During the ASEAN Defense Ministerial Meeting last month, ASEAN defense ministers also stressed the importance of organizing joint drills on disease prevention and control among their military medicine forces. They also agreed to tap the expertise of the dialogue partners of the ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting Plus (ADMM Plus) to enhance the overall capacity of military medicine in responding to disease outbreaks.

Both ASEAN and China are closely cooperating with each other following their ministerial meeting recently in Vientiane, Laos. China has been providing COVID-19 test kits, surgical gloves and masks to the grouping. There is a possibility that ASEAN and Chinese leaders will meet in a summit to further consolidate their joint efforts to combat the outbreak. Both the US and European Union have just started to discuss with ASEAN the impacts of the virus on their relations.

The newly set up ASEAN Center for Military Medicine also sprang into action to discuss joint efforts and mutual concerns. They also came up with measures to quell the virus.

So far, the exchange of information has been carried quite efficiently among various ASEAN officials responsible for public health. They have done so in two ways: through teleconferences and diplomatic channels.

Now that the 36th ASEAN summit has been postponed to the end of June, there is an urgent need for ASEAN leaders to have a video conference to come up with additional measures as the coronavirus has reached pandemic level. The World Health Organization has already asked the countries in the region to take aggressive measures to combat the virus.

COVID-19 infections have been recorded in all ASEAN member nations. [Updated to reflect the announcement of COVID-19 cases in Laos and Myanmar]. Malaysia, Vietnam and Singapore have issued a two-week national lockdown after infections in their countries increased, affecting ASEAN citizens who are returning to their countries. Unfortunately, these ASEAN members decided to implement these policies on their own.

Singapore was the first country to announce that specifically, travelers from ASEAN countries would also need to stay in quarantine for 14 days if they choose to enter the island republic from now on. Then Vietnam followed suit.

Among ASEAN members, Malaysia was the first country to seal off its borders. However, last week, other ASEAN nations followed. Singapore banned all short-term and long-term visits to the island. In the case of Thailand, given its desire to continue to attract tourists, the government waited until Wednesday to seal off the country, continuing to allow foreigners to enter the country as long as they meet its stringent requirements. [Updated to reflect the fact that the Thai government banned entry for all non-resident foreigners on Wednesday].

However, over the weekend, the Thai Interior Ministry ordered the closure of all 68 border checkpoints around the country and granted governors of 31 provinces bordering Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Malaysia the authority to shut down borders entirely if needed. Exemptions were given yesterday at borders in certain provinces to mainly allow Myanmar and Lao migrant workers to go home.

Given the worsening of the virus spread, it is imperative that the grouping maximize existing agreements to provide additional consular assistance to ASEAN citizens stranded in foreign ASEAN countries during an unexpected crisis. For example, Thailand must allow Lao citizens or others to transit to return home but with some waivers. The requirements set by the Thai government could further delay their mobility.

Thailand as well as other ASEAN countries must and need to display magnanimity to their ASEAN friends. First of all, Thailand must allow ASEAN citizens to get access by land to travel home with special border passes. Secondly, equal health treatment should be given to all ASEAN citizens like with COVID-19 testing access or treatment if they test positive. Finally, all members should utilize the ASEAN Communication Master Plan to raise awareness of the dangers of COVID-19 so that they will be able to protect themselves and mitigate the spread within the region.

Thailand can do a lot more to help neighboring countries. The government needs to reach out to Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, which share long borders with Thailand. Their regular and irregular migrant workers need to be taken care of whenever they cross these borders to contain the spread of the virus.

Kavi Chongkittavorn is a veteran journalist on regional affairs. This column first appeared in the Bangkok Post on Tuesday, March 24, 2020.

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Strikes and social anger are growing among workers across Europe against attempts by national governments and business groups, aided by the complicity of union bureaucracies, to force them to work at non-essential jobs amid the raging coronavirus pandemic.

After over a week of lockdown in Italy and France, and with lockdown now underway in Britain, Spain and much of Germany, the number of cases still is growing rapidly. As the number of global confirmed cases rose to 464,683 yesterday, Europes total rose to 254,619 including 14,375 deaths. There were 5,553 new cases and 454 deaths recorded in Spain, 5,210 new cases and 683 deaths in Italy, 4,332 new cases and 47 deaths in Germany, 2,929 new cases and 231 deaths in France, 1,452 new cases and 43 deaths in Britain and 1,020 new cases and 31 deaths in Switzerland.

Across Europe, testing and hospital care are unavailable to the broad mass of workers, who are told instead to take painkillers and wait at home to see if they develop severe pneumonia. This leads to tragedies like the death last week of Kayla Williams, a 36-year-old mother of three in south London. On March 20, paramedics told her she could not be admitted to hospital as she was not a priority. Williams died of COVID-19 the next day, untreated at home.

The Colosseum, that will be closed following the government's new prevention measures on public gatherings, is reflected in a puddle where a face mask was left, in Rome, Sunday, March 8, 2020. . (Alfredo Falcone/LaPresse via AP)

Workers are bitterly angry at big corporations, flush with cash from multi-billion-euro government bailouts, who demand they return to work to produce profits for investors whose bloated fortunes depend on constant handouts of public money. It is imperative for as many workers as possible to shelter at home, on full pay, to avoid spreading the disease. With more social contact at work inevitably leading to more COVID-19 deaths, the question posed to workers is: how many workers want to die for the profits of the super-rich?

Yesterday, in the regions of Milan and Rome in Italy, metalworkers mounted a one-day strike called by the unions, two weeks after launching wildcat strikes across Italy that compelled Prime Minister Giuseppe Contes government and Italys corrupt unions to agree to a nationwide lockdown. The metalworkers strike came amid repeated strikes at Amazon plants, including the giant Torrazza Piemonte facility, and threats of a walkout by petrol station attendants and owners.

Far broader layers of workers still forced to work in Italy and across Europepostal, grocery and bank workersare also discussing strike action and their anger at being kept on the job, often for non-essential purposes, without proper masks and protection equipment against the coronavirus.

A grocery store attendant living in a working class district of southern Madrid told the press about his fear and anger at being kept on the job under unsafe conditions, after at least 12,000 people have been infected, 1,500 have died, and over 1,000 are in intensive care in the city. We are the third class passengers on the Titanic, he said. We are playing with our lives just for shit. We have been sold out.

Similarly, workers at the Amazon facility in Saran, France overwhelmingly called in sick last week and a few hundred attended a meeting with union officials and management to demand the right to get paid time off if there is an imminent threat to life at worka right guaranteed under French law. One worker at Saran commented, A package can be manipulated twenty times by different people. We come to work every day with fear in our throats. It cant go on like this.

Workers at Saran receive no protective equipmenteven as they ship face masks, hand sanitizing gel and other critical equipment internationallyand are often packed together, violating rules requiring a minimum 2-meter distance between workers. Faced with managements attempt to buy workers agreement to these deadly conditions with a measly offer of a two euro pre-tax wage increase, another worker refused, saying, That is just shameful.

Workers there join their brothers and sisters at PSA auto plants at Mulhouse and Tremery, the Toyota plant at Onnaing, the Renault auto plant at Sandouville, the Bombardier plant in Crespin and the Chantiers de lAtlantique shipyard at Saint Nazaireall of whom have walked off the job, citing their right to avoid imminent threats to life at work.

Representatives of the ruling class are intensely aware and fearful of the growing challenge from workers for control of the factories. In every industrial sector, including in many where activity is not banned by health measures, there is an extremely brutal shift in workers attitudes, warned the vice-president of Frances MEDEF business federation, Patrick Martin. Callously denouncing workers over-reaction to the deadly threat of COVID-19, he complained that management can no longer continue production due to pressure from workers.

Yesterday, workers at multiple food-processing plants in Northern IrelandABP Meats in Lurgan and Moy Park at Seagoe, Portadown and Co Armaghwalked out. Workers at these facilities have key worker status, as their continued work is critical to ensuring the populations food supply. However, despite this supposedly critical status, workers at these plants are left to work in deplorable, even lethal conditions.

Striking workers at ABP, whose owner Larry Goodman is worth an estimated 2.45 billion, demanded social distancing measures at work and the deep cleaning of workstations previously used by workers who tested positive for COVID-19. Workers at Moy Park, a UK-based transnational with operations from the Republic of Ireland to France and the Netherlands, posted pictures on Twitter showing workers forced to cram into a crowded canteen, violating basic safety guidelines for avoiding infection.

For workers, the way forward against the pandemic and the irresponsible policies of the capitalist class is to organize their struggles via committees of action, independent of the trade unions. No confidence can be given to the union bureaucracies, financed and controlled by the same corporations and governments trying to force workers back to work. If the pandemic has already shown the need for workers to take control of industrial facilities to save public health, it is also increasingly showing the need for workers to take political power.

This is the lesson of the trade union talks with Conte and the Confindustria business federation in Italy yesterday amid the one-day trade union strike. While Confindustria demanded a halt to all strikes, and Conte claimed Italy cant afford strikes by workers, the unions gave their blessing to a rotten deal for police authorities and businesses to jointly issue certifications that their operations are essential. This would allow them to force workers back to work.

The affluent operatives of the union bureaucracy signed a deal consciously hostile to workers demands to shelter at home. Police prefects, the unions boasted in a document jointly published with Confindustria, will involve territorial organizations to assist self-certification by companies that they are engaged in functional activities to maintain the continuity of essential supply chains.

The claim that Italy or Europe cannot afford strikes is a political lie. In fact, what Europe cannot afford is more mass deaths caused by policies designed to enrich the financial aristocracy.

Corporations and billionaire investors have gotten a 750 billion bailout from the European Central Bank, a 1.1 trillion bailout in Germany and hundreds of billions in subsidies overwhelmingly benefiting big business from every major European state. A small but not insignificant part of these funds are earmarked to fund the union bureaucracy. And as the super-rich exploit the COVID-19 pandemic to grab trillions of euros, they adopt policies that ensure the pandemic will continue.

A decisive confrontation between the workers and the financial aristocracy is being prepared.

Fury is building among workers across Europe at governments failure to undertake an aggressive response to the pandemic. In France, an Odoxa poll found that 70 percent do not believe the government tells the population the truth, 79 percent do not believe it has a clear policy, and 88 percent believe confinement of the population should have begun earlier. Yet the main lines of the French pandemic policyopposing sheltering at home, contempt for security measures and denying the sick testing and hospital carewere shared across Europe.

The way forward is a revolutionary struggle by the working class to expropriate the vast sums of public money handed to the super-rich, putting those resources toward socialist policies, including an internationally coordinated struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic.
PHILADELPHIA, PA / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Kaskela Law LLC announces that it is investigating Benefytt Technologies, Inc. ("Benefytt") (BFYT), f/k/a Health Insurance Innovations, Inc. (HIIQ) on behalf of the company's stockholders.

Current Benefytt stockholders who purchased shares of the company's stock prior to September 25, 2017 are encouraged to contact Kaskela Law LLC (D. Seamus Kaskela, Esq.) at (484) 258 - 1585 or (888) 715 - 1740, or online at http://kaskelalaw.com/case/hiiq/, for additional information about this investigation and their legal rights and options.

In February 2019, a shareholder securities fraud complaint was filed against the Company in federal court on behalf of certain purchasers of Benefytt's common stock. Among other things, the shareholder complaint alleged that Benefytt violated the federal securities laws by issuing a series of materially false and misleading statements to investors about the Company's business, operations and prospects.

The firm's investigation seeks to determine whether Benefytt's officers and/or directors breached their fiduciary duties to the Company and its stockholders in connection with the above alleged misconduct.

Benefytt shareholders are encouraged to contact Kaskela Law LLC for additional information about this investigation. Kaskela Law LLC represents investors in securities fraud, corporate governance, and merger & acquisition litigation. For additional information about Kaskela Law LLC please visit www.kaskelalaw.com. This notice may constitute attorney advertising in certain jurisdictions.

CONTACT:

D. Seamus Kaskela, Esq.

KASKELA LAW LLC

18 Campus Blvd., Suite 100

Newtown Square, PA 19073

(484) 258 - 1585

(888) 715 - 1740

www.kaskelalaw.com

skaskela@kaskelalaw.com

SOURCE: Kaskela Law LLC





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Late last month, Mick Mulvaney, who was still the acting White House chief of staff at the time, told a crowd of conservative activists that the media was exaggerating the threat posed by covid-19 because "they think this will bring down the president, that's what this is all about. . . . It's not a death sentence, it's not the same as the Ebola crisis."

But unbeknown to attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mulvaney had already received a coronavirus test, at the recommendation of the White House physician. The test, which has not been reported until now, was followed by a second this month after a niece with whom Mulvaney shares an apartment was around members of a Brazilian delegation who later tested positive for the virus.

Mulvaney is one of three President Donald Trump confidants to get a coronavirustest while exhibiting no symptoms of the disease. And on Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., announced he tested positive despite being asymptomatic, refusing to disclose how he was able to get tested in Washington on March 16.

The easy access Paul and other high-ranking politicians have gotten to coronavirus tests highlights the extent to which members of America's elite continue to have greater access to medical care during the pandemic, even as federal officials emphasize that testing should be reserved for health care providers and people who are seriously ill. Even in the nation's capital, hospitals are reporting a shortage of tests and the protective gear needed to administer them.

"It's a horrible flouting of our public health recommendations," Robyn Gershon, a clinical professor of epidemiology at the New York University School of Global Public Health, said in a phone interview.

In the cases of Mulvaney, Trump's incoming chief of staff Mark Meadows and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., White House medical staffers arranged for their tests on the grounds that they risked infecting the president. Both Meadows and Gaetz came into contact with someone at last month's CPAC gathering who then learned he had contracted covid-19.

People close to Mulvaney and Meadows said it was necessary to get a test because they spend so much time with the president and other powerful lawmakers and advisers.

William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University, said in an interview, "We continue to emphasize that we test people who have a fever, and have some evidence of the lower-respiratory-tract infection."

For individuals who might have been exposed to the virus through personal contact, Schaffner added, "The recommendation would be to continue and be very rigorous about social distancing, to shelter at home, to monitor yourself for symptoms, and to take your temperature twice a day."

Meanwhile, the U.S. Capitol's Office of Attending Physician has declined multiple test requests from senators and members of Congress because they did not show symptoms, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private medical consultations.

The Office of Attending Physician has applied a stricter criteria for testing than the White House medical office, according to a screen shot of its internal website obtained by The Washington Post.

"At the OAP, individuals considered for testing must exhibit symptoms," the site states. "They must have no alternative explanation for illness (such as influenza A), and they must have a nexus to risk."

That statement was added to the website Monday, a day after Paul tested positive, amid growing concern inside the Capitol complex that the 57-year-old senator had either received special treatment from the doctor or had shown symptoms despite his public denials. Paul and his advisers have refused to say who provided the test, beyond that it was completed in Washington on March 16. An adviser to the attending physician did not respond to a request for comment on whether Paul had been tested there.

Monday's statement also made clear to House and Senate members and their staffs that no exceptions have been made to the "exhibit symptoms" rule, and that anyone who receives a test should self-isolate while awaiting results, which Paul did not do.

"The OAP has never performed a test on an asymptomatic patient," the statement read.

Paul, who has a damaged lung, defended his decision not to self-isolate in a statement Monday.

"For those who want to criticize me for lack of quarantine, realize that if the rules on testing had been followed to a T, I would never have been tested and would still be walking around the halls of the Capitol," Paul said.

Utah's two GOP senators, Mike Lee and Mitt Romney, placed themselves in quarantine after having interacted with Paul. Romney, 73, has gotten tested in Utah and the results were negative. Lee, on the advice of the attending physician's office, has not sought a test because he is asymptomatic.

The officials in the president's orbit who got access to tests though the White House doctor - Gaetz, Meadows, Mulvaney - have all said they voluntarily went into quarantine for two weeks.

Three lawmakers have tested positive so far for the coronavirus. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., got tested at the Office of Attending Physician after falling ill after a late-night vote session that stretched into the early morning of March 14.

Rep. Ben McAdams, D-Utah, who had flown home shortly after that voting session ended, felt what his spokeswoman Alyson Heyrend called "mild symptoms" that same day.

"He was eventually tested here in Utah, after following the protocol of the state Health Department's COVID-19 hotline," Heyrend said in an email. "He went to one of the drive-through testing sites established by the University of Utah medical center. He received the results about a day later." McAdams was hospitalized Tuesday but said he is expected to be released soon.

On Wednesday Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., announced that he and his wife were experiencing some coronavirus symptoms and, upon advice from the attending physician, were self-isolating and not seeking an immediate test.

For people in direct contact with the president, however, testing has been rapid.

Gaetz, who had no symptoms but learned he might have been exposed to the virus while traveling with Trump aboard Air Force One on May 9, went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on the advice of the White House doctor that same day. Two days later, he tweeted that he got the rapid test "because I had been in close contact with President Trump over several days. Of course we have a national interest in keeping the President safe."

Mulvaney received two tests - even though he never showed symptoms. One took place before the president went to India in late February, because he was scheduled to go but felt sick.

He tested negative for the coronavirus but skipped the trip. After Mulvaney's niece showed symptoms after being around Brazilians at Mar-a-Lago, Mulvaney consulted the White House medical office and received a second test.

Even as some politicians are getting rapid diagnoses, local and state officials in the Washington area say they lack enough materials needed for coronavirus testing. Trump officials have said for weeks that tests should be widely available any day. But right now the country is testing at a rate of 1,220 per million residents - or 0.12%. South Korea is testing at a per capita rate more than five times that.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, said this week that the state has bought coronavirus tests from China, is trying to buy them from South Korea and is "beating on the federal administration every day to get us more tests."

"There are no tests - there is a huge shortage of tests," he said at the Baltimore Convention Center, where 250 beds will be set up to accommodate the expected surge in coronavirus patients. "People should not be going out to get a test. The tests that are currently available are for people in hospitals that need tests."

Even when a patient can get tested, delays in results have left some in limbo, unsure whether they have exposed friends, family and co-workers to the virus. One 27-year-old woman who was tested for the coronavirus at Washington's MedStar Georgetown University Hospital did not learn her results for more than a week.

"President Trump was tested after me and got his results before me," she said. "NBA players were tested after me, and they've gotten their results before me."

- - -

The Washington Post's Rachel Chason, Kyle Swenson and Andrew Ba Tran contributed to this report.
The EU will launch its new naval mission to enforce an arms embargo on Libya by the end of the month, after member states agreed its terms on Thursday.

Diplomatic sources told AFP that ambassadors from the 27 EU countries approved the mission, dubbed Operation Irini after the Greek word for peace, after clearing last-minute objections.

Greece has agreed to be the landing point for any migrants rescued in the course of the mission, though its primary purpose is to enforce the embargo.

An effective arms embargo is seen as crucial to stabilising Libya, where the UN-recognised Tripoli government is under attack from the forces of strongman Khalifa Haftar, who controls much of the country's south and east.

The new mission replaces Operation Sophia, set up in 2015 to fight people-smuggling across the Mediterranean at the height of Europe's migrant crisis.

What to do with any migrants picked up during Irini's operations was the last major sticking point, with Italy earlier this week insisting it would not receive them.

EU naval vessels, provided and crewed by member state navies, will operate in the eastern Mediterranean with the authority to board ships suspected of delivering arms, a diplomatic source said.

Irini will start when Sophia ends on March 31, with a renewable one-year mandate, though ministers will review it every four months to check it is not having a "pull effect" -- encouraging migrants to set out on risky crossings over the Mediterranean.

The agreement in February was finally reached over objections from Austria and Hungary, which feared that reviving the mission would create a de facto rescue fleet that would ferry migrants across the sea to Europe.

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Yancy: This is fascinating, especially the point about the emphasis placed on life, not death. Might it be said that Judaism places more emphasis on life because the mission should be to live observant lives, good and decent lives in the here and now?

Vidas: I think thats a fair characterization of a great deal of Jewish tradition: Its intellectual and spiritual energy aims at the shaping of a particular kind of life. But you certainly also find opposite tendencies. For example, the Mishnah, the earliest Rabbinic text (third century A.D.), records Rabbi Jacobs teaching that our world is merely a vestibule for the afterlife in the world to come. There are periods in Jewish history in which the self-sacrifice or martyrdom was seen as the ultimate expression of the love God demands. And there is a strong pattern, especially in some of the mystical texts of kabbalah, that aspires to become closer to God by transcending this life; sometimes these texts invite practitioners to a meditation in which they simulate their own deaths, imagining their souls as having already departed from their bodies.

Different Jewish interpretations of the story of the binding of Isaac reflect this range between an emphasis on life, on the one hand, and the spiritual possibilities presented by death on the other hand. According to the Bible, Abraham was asked by God to sacrifice his son, Isaac, but just before the sacrifice was executed, an angel of God intervened and told Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead. Many Jews see in this story precisely the Jewish celebration of life: sacrificing life is opposed to Jewish values. But there are other Jewish understandings of this story  we find, for example, interpretations that celebrate Isaac as a willing sacrifice, providing a role model for future martyrs prepared to die for God; or representations of Abraham as eager to kill his son; and even the interpretation that Abraham did actually kill Isaac, who was then resurrected by God.

Yancy: Say more about sheol, especially as I understand it to have different interpretations. Is it a place? And are we all bound for such a place, Jews and gentiles?

Vidas: In the Hebrew Bible, sheol is the underworld, located below the earth, where all dead are destined to go, regardless of their deeds or ethnicity. But beginning with sources dating from the third century B.C.E., we find this idea that after death the souls of the righteous and the souls of the wicked have different destinies. The usual name for the place where the wicked souls go is gehenom; but at some point, Jews began understanding the word sheol in the Bible as referring to gehenom. This is the Jewish equivalent of the Christian hell. But the dominant view in Judaism has been that the punishments of hell are temporary, lasting up to 12 months. Once transgressors have paid for their transgressions in hell, they can move up to heaven.

There is a range of other views, including that at least for some offenses the punishment in hell is eternal; but the utmost punishment in traditional Judaism is not such eternal torments but the complete annihilation of body and soul  the lack of any type of afterlife.

Regarding the second part of your question, in the earliest rabbinical literature, we find the idea that gentiles, just like Jews, are judged according to their deeds: They can be punished but they also can be saved. Many later texts indeed assume the punishment of non-Jews by definition. That idea appears alongside the dominant idea, originating in the biblical prophets, that in the world to come gentiles will worship the same God as the Jews in a harmonious existence.
Throughout her reign the Queen has held a weekly 20-minute audience with the prime minister of the United Kingdom.

While this is typically held in-person at Buckingham Palace, the coronavirus pandemic has prompted the monarch to make some adjustments to her regular meeting as she practices safe social distancing at Windsor Castle.

On Wednesday, Buckingham Palace shared a side-by-side photograph showing the Queen holding the weekly catch-up with Boris Johnson over the phone.

The top image showed Her Majesty using an old-fashioned white phone as she sits in her Berkshire residence wearing a purple shirt and matching cardigan, surrounded by a menagerie of porcelain corgi figurines.

Meanwhile, the bottom showed Boris Johnson, at 10 Downing Street, taking her call in front of the national flag.

The Queen held her weekly Audience with the Prime Minister today by telephone, the caption read.

Her Majesty - pictured this evening at Windsor Castle - has held a weekly Audience with her Prime Minister throughout her reign.

The photo of the Queen at Windsor Castle comes after her son, Prince Charles, was revealed to be the first British royal to have contracted coronavirus.

The 71-year-old is currently self-isolating at his Scottish home in Balmoral, after a test confirmed he had Covid-19.

The Duchess of Cornwall, 72, who does not have the virus, is also staying at the residence but is separating herself from the prince.

Buckingham Palace has confirmed that Queen Elizabeth II is in good health.

The Palace spokesperson said: Her Majesty The Queen remains in good health.

The Queen last saw The Prince of Wales briefly after the investiture on the morning of 12th March and is following all the appropriate advice with regard to her welfare.
The coronavirus pandemic has led to a global shutdown of many shops and services. The Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (ABC) will still remain open in the coming weeks. However, ABC's work hours have been reduced all across the US to protect customers, as well as employees, from the coronavirus outbreak. Moreover, ABC stores have also announced special senior hours, during which only senior citizens will be allowed to purchase liquor from the stores.

ABC liquor store hours and senior hours during the coronavirus lockdown

Also Read | Ogden liquor store hours for seniors amid the COVID-19 outbreak

Due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, most shops in the US are shutting down in order to prevent the spread of the virus. However, many supermarkets and government stores will still be open but will have shortened working hours. ABC liquor stores will also be open and will be selling alcohol for a few hours every day. Starting from March 27, 2020, the ABC Liquor stores in Virginia will be open from 12 PM to 7 PM. In the state of North Carolina, ABC liquor stores will be open from 11 AM to 7 PM, starting from March 25, 2020.

Also Read | Netizens ask Rishi Kapoor if he's stocked up on liquor, actor lashes out at trolls

Moreover, some ABC liquor stores will also have special senior hours. The senior hours will start at 9 AM and will end at 12 PM. The senior hours will be applicable from Monday to Friday, during which only customers over the age of 65 will be allowed to purchase alcohol. According to the board, the selection during the senior hours will be limited. The board has also asked senior citizens to ask for assistance if they cannot find their desired selection.

Also Read | Maryland Line liquor store hours and senior hours during the Coronavirus pandemic

In a public statement, Travis Hill, the Chief Executive Officer of ABC Virginia, said that ABC decided to make these adjustments to their business after consulting with the Virginia Department of Health. He added that the changes were made to protect ABC's employees and customers from the Coronavirus pandemic. He also claimed that ABC stores would remain open, as long as it was safe for them to continue their business.

Also Read | Utah State liquor store hours during COVID-19 outbreak: Know when to shop & other details


Congress Interim President Sonia Gandhi on Thursday wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi supporting the 21-day nation-wide lockdown that has been put in place to curb coronavirus. She said that the lockdown is a "welcome step" while also suggesting health and economic measures should be taken to flight coronavirus.

"As president of the Congress, I would like to state that we will support and collaborate fully with every step taking by the union government to ensure the containment of the pandemic," Sonia Gandhi wrote in the four-page letter. "At this challenging and uncertain time, it is imperative for each one of us to rise above partisan interests and honour one's duty towards our country and indeed, towards humanity," added Gandhi.

The Congress President has also said that the party extends its full support and cooperation to the government.

Sonia Gandhi suggested that the centre should consider deferring all EMI payments for the next few months and also waive interests charged by banks for this period. She added that the government should immediately put in place several social protection measures which should include direct cash transfers to daily wage workers, MNREGA workers, construction workers, farmers and others part of the informal sector.

The Congress President recommended her party's NYAY scheme for minimum income support, she called it "the need of the hour". She said that the implementation of the scheme will provide the poor with basic economic resources to fall back on.

"Alternatively, a cash transfer of Rs 7,500 to every Jan Dhan account holder, PM Kisan Yojana account holder, all old-age/widow/differently-abled persons' pension, MNREGA worker's accounts, as a one-time special measure to tide over the 21-day lockdown period should be considered," she wrote.

Sonia Gandhi said that 10 kg of rice and wheat should be distributed to ration cardholders free of charge during the lockdown. She also suggested a sector-wise relief package for all sectors severely hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

The deadly COVID-19 virus has claimed 13 lives in India so far, taking the positive cases to 649, including 593 active cases. The Maharashtra tally has reached 121, including three deaths. Gujarat too has reported three deaths. Delhi has also seen the number going up to 36, while one patient has died so far.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have hit 11.4 million followers on Instagram, just beating the Sussexes by 100,000 followers.

Prince William, 37, and Kate Middleton, 38, who run the Kensington Palace Royal account have overtaken Prince Harry, 35, and Meghan Markle, 38, who run Sussex Royal, in the past week.

The Sussexes had seen their following skyrocket since announcing their retreat from the public eye in January, but over the past week were overtaken by the Cambridges as they begin to post less amid their new life in Canada.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have hit 11.4 million followers on Instagram , just beating the Sussexes by 100,000 followers. Kate Middleton, 38, is seen in a picture released on Mother's Day

Prince William, 37, and Kate Middleton, 38, who run the Kensington Palace Royal account have overtaken Sussexes

The Sussexes, who currently boast 11.3 million followers, initially experienced a surge in followers after their final week of royal duties this month, which saw them attend the Endeavour Awards, the Mountbatten Festival of Music and Commonwealth Day Service.

Meghan and Harry were also seen attending church service with the Queen, and visiting The National Theatre and Robert Clack Upper School in Dagenham.

The couple apparently bid a tearful farewell to their staff during an intimate dinner, and Meghan has returned to Canada to be with baby Archie.

The Sussexes, who currently boast 11.3 million followers, initially experienced a surge in followers after their final week of royal duties this month

The Sussexes had seen their following skyrocket since announcing their retreat from the public eye in January, but over the past week were overtaken by the Cambridges as they begin to post less amid their new life in Canada

A look at their respective Instagram accounts shows that while Kate and William have shared 2,039 posts, Harry and Meghan have only posted 215 times since last April.

The Kensington Royal account gets an average of 300,000 likes for their posts, with statement posts including Kate Middleton's birthday racking up 1.2 million likes.

Meanwhile Sussex Royal gets a similar average, but their recent post announcing they would be stepping down garnered almost 2 million likes from supportive fans.

While William and Kate's account follows just under 100 people, Harry and Meghan follow new accounts each month to highlight charitable causes - this month following just one account which promotes positive news.

In January night the Duke of Sussex has said he is 'taking a leap of faith' in stepping back from his life as a member of the royal family, but 'there really was no other option'

Prince Harry , 35, and Meghan Markle , 38, who run Sussex Royal, saw their following skyrocket since announcing their retreat from the public eye in January

This is despite the Cambridges' account Kensington Royal being around for much longer, while the Sussexes only started their account last April. They stood at 11m in January

In January, the Duke of Sussex said he is 'taking a leap of faith' in stepping back from his life as a member of the royal family, but 'there really was no other option'.

Harry gave an emotional speech, where he told the 'truth' about leaving royal duties behind in a bid for a 'more peaceful life' for his family.

From the spring, the duke and duchess will stop using HRH, spend the majority of their time living in Canada, and pay back the taxpayers' money spent renovating their Frogmore home.

In a speech at a private event for his charity Sentebale on Sunday night, Harry told invited guests: 'What I want to make clear is we're not walking away, and we certainly aren't walking away from you.

'Our hope was to continue serving the Queen, the Commonwealth, and my military associations, but without public funding. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible.

'I've accepted this, knowing that it doesn't change who I am or how committed I am.

'But I hope that helps you understand what it had to come to, that I would step my family back from all I have ever known, to take a step forward into what I hope can be a more peaceful life.'
Four more Laredoans tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday, bringing the number of confirmed cases up to 13.

READ MORE: Some Laredo officials call for more restrictions as confirmed coronavirus cases climb

Two of the patients were recently hospitalized but are in stable condition, as are the 11 other positive cases, according to the Laredo Health Department. All 13 patients are in quarantine; the Health Department checks on them three times a day, officials say.

United Independent School District notified parents in a letter Wednesday that one of these cases is an employee of United High School. A small group of people may have been exposed to the virus via direct contact with this employee, but not all students and staff are at risk, the letter stated.

UISD also confirmed that an employee at Lamar Bruni Vergara Middle School and the relative of an employee at LBJ High School have tested positive for novel coronavirus. In both cases the onset of symptoms began during spring break, and therefore the Health Department believes there has been no exposure at either campus, according to the school district.

This means that five of the 13 positive cases are employees of Laredos public school system. Two employees at Zaffirini Elementary School and an employee at Dovalina Elementary have also tested positive for novel coronavirus.

At the citys daily teleconference with local media, Health Department Director Dr. Hector Gonzalez noted that only two of the citys cases are travel-related, while the rest were spread in the community.

Three of Laredos COVID-19 patients will finish their 14-day quarantine this week. Gonzalez noted that guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed on Tuesday, and these patients no longer have to test negative for the virus before being released from quarantine.

The city is working on creating a drive-thru testing site in the near future. Gonzalez said that Clear Choice Emergency Room is working to obtain rapid tests, which would be able to confirm negative cases. If a test came back positive, the patient would then need to take the CDC-approved molecular test to confirm the outcome.

Were anxiously waiting for that, because thats a good indicator that we could test more persons, Gonzalez said.

The health director also noted that the rapid test is not free. The city is trying to make sure they could be reimbursed by FEMA and offer the test to anyone who needs it, regardless of whether or not they have insurance or can afford it.

The nationwide shortage of personal protective equipment for medical professionals is an issue in Laredo as well.

City Manager Robert Eads said they are even asking local nail salons and tattoo parlors to donate masks and gloves.

Officials confirmed Wednesday that they are not yet moving forward with stricter enforcement measures such as a shelter-in-place to make sure people are staying home. However Eads noted that the documents are being prepared in case the situation changes rapidly and City Council votes to enact stricter measures.

Currently the city and county are operating under an emergency order that bans all gatherings of more than 10 people.

Laredo Police Chief Claudio Trevino said on Tuesday police visited 153 businesses, 82 parks, received 45 complaints related to the emergency order and issued six citations to individuals and businesses. Stores that were accused of price gauging were determined to be in compliance, he said.

READ MORE: Here's how much money you're set to receive under the $2 trillion aid package

Family violence has risen 5.4% over this week last year with 14 more cases, Trevino said. But the most severe uptick has been in petty theft, which has seen a 49% increase over this time last year, he said.

Julia Wallace may be reached at 956-728-2543 or jwallace@lmtonline.com
German flag carrier Lufthansa operated a repatriation flight from Frankfurt to Delhi on Wednesday to evacuate German citizens from India following the 21-day nationwide lockdown imposed in the wake of coronavirus outbreak.

Lufthansa A380 aircraft departed at 12:45 pm CET as repatriation flight LH9912 from Frankfurt to Delhi to bring back German citizens.

The flight arrived around midnight at Indira Gandhi Airport in Delhi. The return flight, LH 343 to to Frankfurt, departed from Delhi at 1:30 am (local time).

George Ettiyil of Lufthansa group said, "Carrying out repatriation flights and bringing people back home is the responsibility that Lufthansa Group airlines bear being part of the critical infrastructure in the home countries of Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Belgium."

"For us being able to operate the repatriation flight with the A380, it was very helpful that Indian authorities decided to extend visas of foreigners in India last week," Ettiyil added.

Walter J. Lindner, German Ambassador to India tweeted on Wednesday, "Today's update on our repatriation efforts. First evacuation flight (A380) with 500+ people left last night. The second one to be airborne tonight. Thanks also to the Indian authorities for the great cooperation!"

The second repatriation flight will land in Delhi tonight to evacuate 500 more German and European tourists stranded in the country.

Linder on Thursday tweeted, "Getting ready for our second evacuation flight from Delhi to Frankfurt tonight. Again an A380 with 500 stranded tourists from Germany and Europe. Individual characters for sure - distance yoga to fill waiting time ...

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Pentagon warns coronavirus outbreak could last for months in US

Iran Press TV

Wednesday, 25 March 2020 7:19 AM

The US Defense Department has warned that the fast-spreading coronavirus outbreak in the country could continue for months and the American military would continue to support efforts to counter the COVID-19 crisis.

The highly contagious disease could last for "a period of months," US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Tuesday when asked how long the outbreak may last and how long the military would continue the support efforts to counter it.

"I think we need to plan for this to be a few months long at least and we're taking all precautionary measures to do that," the Pentagon chief added.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 720 people and infected over 55,000 in the United States, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

US health experts have sharply rebuked President Donald Trump's administration for initially downplaying the crisis and lagging behind in testing efforts.

On Monday, Esper announced more security restrictions on those entering the Pentagon. He said that Defense Department employees teleworking should expect to continue to do so for "weeks for sure, maybe months."

Separately, US General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the outbreak could last into July, citing models from the experience of other countries.

"If it does apply, you're looking at probably late May, June, something in that range, could be as late as July," Milley said.

Three sailors on board US aircraft carrier have coronavirus

A US Navy officials said Tuesday three American sailors on board the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean have tested positive for the coronavirus, underscoring the impact the virus was having on the US military.

US Navy Secretary Thomas Modly told a news conference at the Pentagon that the three had been quarantined and were being flown off the ship.

Trump, New York state governor clash over federal response to virus

New York State has become the US epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic, overwhelming hospitals after suffering another quick and brutal rise in the number of cases on Tuesday, as California said it could be facing the next major wave of the disease.

Trump and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo have attacked each other over the federal response to the coronavirus crisis in the hard-hit state.

Speaking on Tuesday at his daily news conference, Cuomo expressed frustration that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was sending his state 400 ventilators from a national reserve when he needed 30,000 to treat the rising number of coronavirus victims.

"You want a pat on the back for sending 400? We need 30,000," said Cuomo. "The rate of new infections is doubling every three days" in New York and threatening to overwhelm hospitals, he added.

Trump, who like Cuomo was born and raised in New York City, dismissed Cuomo's complaints.

The president said during a Fox News interview that Cuomo "should have ordered the ventilators" in previous years before the outbreak, adding that the federal government is taking steps to help New York, including building temporary hospitals.

Trump says restrictions will lead to thousands of deaths

Speaking at the same Fox News interview, Trump said the coronavirus restrictions, which have halted businesses in many places across the country, could themselves lead to suicides or other fatalities, citing no evidence to support the claim.

"You're going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression. You're going to lose people. You're going to have suicides by the thousands," the president said.

Trump administration sows confusion over emergency measures to combat coronavirus

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continued to sow confusion over the use of a decades-old emergency law to acquire coronavirus test kits amid severe shortages of testing supplies, ventilators, masks and other equipment for medical workers fighting the highly contagious disease.

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) told CNN Tuesday the White House had decided to use the so-called Defense Production Act of 1950 to obtain 60,000 coronavirus test kits, the first time the act has been used to confront the coronavirus crisis.

But Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the Trump administration's coronavirus task force, said in comments on Fox News that it has not been necessary to put the emergency measure to use.

Trump, Congress agree on $2 trillion virus rescue bill

US Senate leaders of both parties and the White House announced an agreement Wednesday on unprecedented emergency legislation to provide assistance to companies, workers and medical centers overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic.

The urgently needed pandemic response measure is the largest economic rescue measure in US history and is intended as a weeks- or months-long patch for an economy spiraling into recession and a nation facing a potentially ghastly toll.

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Fr. Racho Ibrahim of Kenyas Diocese of Marsabit and Director of Radio Radio Jangwani 106.3fm -the desert radio.

Kenyas Catholic radio stations and Capuchin-run TV have published times and details for the broadcast of the daily Holy Eucharist in view of the coronavirus pandemic.

Rose Achiego - Nairobi, Kenya & English Africa Service  Vatican City

The radio and television Masses are a way to continue giving spiritual nourishment to the more than 11 million Kenyan Catholic faithful who are no longer able to assemble at their various places of worship. The move comes in the wake of the Kenyan governments suspension of all Church, Mosque, and other religious gatherings in a bid to combat the spread of COVID- 19.

Some religious institutions accused of non-compliance

Some Christian Churches and Mosques were over the weekend accused of non-compliance. Sections of Kenyan media labelled defiant Churches and Mosques as the weak link in Kenyas combat against the spread of the coronavirus.

Kenyas Health Cabinet Secretary, Mutahi Kagwe lamented non-compliance by religious institutions to the social distancing requirement imposed by health authorities. Kagwe has since reminded Kenyans that the new health instruction includes weddings, funerals and other social gatherings.

These directives take effect immediately until further notice. Once again, we are aware that these measures may be inconvenient at the moment, but I assure that they are necessary for meeting our indicated objective of keeping all Kenyans safe, Kagwe said.

Catholic broadcast media announce times for various Masses

Kenyas Director of Capuchin Television, Fr. Peter Waweru announced that in response to the signs and needs of the time, Capuchin TV would air Holy Mass twice a day.

Almost all Kenyas Catholic radio stations also announced similar daily arrangements and times in their broadcast schedules.
Conover Consulting Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of the new website http://www.conoverconsulting.com intended to showcase the capabilities of Laura Conover, its principal. The refreshed website offers easier to find information, faster to navigate capabilities, as well as a more user-friendly interface.

Conover Consulting, Inc. has built a reputation around Conovers remarkable skillset. An introvert/extrovert hybrid, she excels at navigating each business biggest expense: employee pay. She does so via data analysis, focusing on pay scales, incentive plans, compensation structures, and pay equity compliance.

Meanwhile, Conovers high emotional intelligence quotient (EQ) lends itself to leadership and cultural development. For instance, to combat employee churn, Conover deploys quantifiable assessments to ascertain and correct organizations qualitative weaknesses, including lack of communication, stagnant compensation, and unfulfilling work.

Through its upgraded new site, Conover Consulting aims to offer visitors a simple, stress-free way of learning more about the company's services as well as its solutions promoting ROI. This new site enables visitors to browse vital information in a straight-forward manner. More responsive and interactive, it also provides access to recent blogs evidencing thought leadership.

For more than 25 years, Conover has provided invaluable expertise to companies in numerous industries, including non-profit organizations. Using the numbers side of her business acumen, married with her people skills, she integrates compensation, leadership, and culture to help her clients triumph in the never-ending talent war.

According to Conover, People still make all the difference in every company. Want to win and keep great talent? Then you need true leadership  and a strong culture where people are thrilled to contribute.

A recognized expert in her field, Conover has been profiled in Forbes for her insights into compensation, culture, and leadership. Additionally, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has appointed her to consult on compensation matters, including a violation with the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in the Fall of 2017.

Conover Consulting leverages Townsend Leadership methodologies to build tomorrows leaders and align winning cultures. She has also testified in litigation matters (plaintiff and defense) relating to compensation and employment, including for Fortune 50 companies. Her litigation support and research assisted in over 100 cases as an associate of Phillips, Fractor, & Company.

Conovers real-world management experience, combined with specialized knowledge and expertise, provides her a unique business pedigree. A Certified Compensation Professional (CCP) through World at Work, she holds a B.A. in Economics from Grinnell College and earned her MBA from San Diego State University. An in-demand speaker for businesses groups, she keynotes on the intersection between HR, pay, and leadership.

###

For more information about Conover Consulting and the services offered, please visit http://www.conoverconsulting.com or call 949-388-3200.
A truck carrying medical equipment, including ventilators, meant for the West Bengal Health Services has been detained by authorities at Nagpur in Maharashtra, the eastern state's Transport Secretary N S Nigam said on Thursday.

The West Bengal government has written to the Maharashtra transport secretary seeking intervention for immediate release of the vehicle, Nigam said.

The equipment have been urgently sought for facilities treating coronavirus patients in the state, an official here said.

West Bengal Truck Operators' Association Secretary Subhas Bose had said on Wednesday trucks with national permit that carry essential goods were being detained by police and other authorities in some states, citing the nationwide lockdown.

Bose said it was proving to be a time-consuming task for truck drivers to convince the authorities to allow their movement.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - RIWI Corp. (CSE: RIW) (OTC Pink: RWCRF) (the "Company" or "RIWI"), a global trend-tracking and prediction technology firm, has signed an agreement with ThinkData Works Inc. ("ThinkData"), a data access solution company. ThinkData has engaged the Company to service a healthcare client, which needs RIWI data in 16 countries facing challenges posed by COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

RIWI's work under this first agreement with ThinkData is valued at US$1,037,200 and will be completed over six months. ThinkData enjoys the right to renew and increase the duration and value of the agreement. ThinkData can expand the contract's scope to cover all countries and health systems in the world.

"We join forces with ThinkData, a leader in data access solutions, to serve the critical, ongoing data needs of a Fortune 500 US healthcare corporation in its mission-critical efforts to combat the pandemic and the associated health and economic crisis," said Neil Seeman, RIWI's Chief Executive Officer.

"Partnering with RIWI means helping researchers get predictive around COVID-19. We're doing everything we can to help - the data flowing through our platform, Namara, puts diverse and critical information into normalized formats so that the people who need it can use it to fuel solutions," said Bryan Smith, ThinkData's co-founder and Chief Executive Officer.

About RIWI

RIWI is a global trend-tracking and prediction technology firm. On a monthly or annual subscription basis, RIWI offers its clients tracking surveys, continuous risk monitoring, predictive analytics and ad effectiveness tests in all countries - without collecting any personally identifiable data. https://riwi.com.

About ThinkData

ThinkData Works, Inc. is a Toronto-based data access solutions company founded in 2014. The Namara platform by ThinkData enables businesses to access, manage, enhance, and integrate data in order to develop new products and gain insight. To learn more, please visit Namara and follow us @ThinkDataWorks and on LinkedIn.

RIWI CORP.

Signed: "Neil Seeman"

Neil Seeman, Chief Executive Officer

For more information, please contact:

Daniel Im, Chief Financial Officer

danielim@riwi.com | +1-416-205-9984 ext. 2

CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION:

Information and statements contained in this news release that are not historical facts are "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation that involves risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking information included herein is made as of the date of this news release and RIWI does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update forward-looking information unless required by applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information relates to future events or future performance and reflects management of the Company's expectations or beliefs regarding future events. This forward-looking information is based, in part, on assumptions and factors that may change or prove to be incorrect, thus causing actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by forward-looking information.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/53857
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed a report that Donald Trump is trying to send US troops to the Canadian border.

Global News reported:

American government officials inside Donald Trumps White House are actively discussing putting troops near the Canadian borders in light of U.S. border security concerns around the coronavirus pandemic, sources tell Global News.

Few people cross from Canada into the United States at an unofficial point each year but the goal of the policy would be to help border guards detect irregular crossers, the sources said.

Trudeau confirmed that Trump is trying to militarize the border with Canada:

#BREAKING PM Trudeau confirms @globalnews story White House wants to put American troops near the Canadian border to monitor for illegal border crossers. Trudeau says they are in discussions with US officials & in best interests of both countries to remain demilitarized #cdnpoli  Mercedes Stephenson (@MercedesGlobal) March 26, 2020

Trump is responded to the coronavirus, not by dealing with the public health crisis, but by using the epidemic to carry out his immigration goals. Trumps dream has always been to seal the borders to make sure that no immigrants can get into the country.

It doesnt matter that illegal crossings from Canada are a virtually non-existent problem. Militarizing the Canadian border is the most pointless response imaginable to the virus, which is why Trump is pushing for it to happen.

Illegal immigration from Canada isnt the issue. The problem is the inept president who ignored all warnings in the Oval Office.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

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Plot Duckies

Staying in? How about reading a good story from a local author right here in New Mexico? That is the idea behind the new subscription service that brings a new short story by a New Mexican author to the tablet or other such e-reading device every week. Author and publisher Sonja Dewing came up with the concept after working with writers to develop their work for years in workshops and then not seeing it get the attention it deserves. Dewing decided to skip the middleman and bring this work to readers directly. Its a bold idea, but one thats perfect in this time of staying home. Weekly Alibi spoke with Dewing from a safe distance about the stories, the subscriptions and a bit about the De Anza Motor Inn. The following is an edited version on that conversation.

Weekly Alibi: How did the stories subscriptions begin?

Sonja Dewing: My company Plot Duckies holds an event called the Short Storyathon and idea behind that was to get people to come to an event, write a short story in a weekend and publish to Amazon. I know a lot of people who've written a story and they're concerned about publishing it, like, they don't want anybody to see it. So, the whole idea is to get people all the way through the process, but it's not an easy weekend. By Friday night, you have to have your idea. Saturday is writing, editing and then we review each other's work. We edit again, then it gets sent off to professional editors. Sunday morning, we edit again from what the editors sent us. We either hire a cover artist, though one person usually wins a free cover, or we design our own covers for the stories, and then we publish to Amazon.

I started realizing we have all these great short stories from all these writers. Some of these have made Amazon Hot Reads for weeks, so they're pretty fantastic stories, but a lot of these writers don't have their own ability to advertise. They don't have the time or they don't know how. I decided it would be great to share their stories to a wider audience by offering this subscription and I would do the advertising for them. The royaltyI'm actually going to be paying them a 50 percent royalty during this month and next month just so hopefully they get a little more income from their stories.

These are all New Mexican authors?

Yes, they are.

How long are these stories?

Anywhere from 3,000 words to 5,000. It's a 15-to-30 minute read.

What kind of kind of stories are they?

There are all kinds. The first story everyone gets is a fictionalized story, but it came from someone sharing a true story. Its about two people traveling and deciding to stay in Albuquerque about 10 years ago. They stopped at the De Anza Motor Inn. That one was fun because it was a conversation between a cover artist and a writer. The cover artist was talking about, Oh yeah, me and my husband did this thing and we showed up in Albuquerque at midnight at the De Anza. Then we were like, we don't know if we're going to stay. It ended up changing their lives. So, the writer wrote the story. That's the first one. The next story they get is a roller derby mystery [titled] Deadly Derby: Heads Will Roll. Its a big mix of different genres.

These are delivered once a month?

Normally, yes. If they want, they can pay $1.99 a month and they'll get it once a month. But if they want [to] and they pay $23 upfront, they'll get one story a week for 12 weeks. I'm thinking people might want more content right now.

Have you seen subscriptions increase since we've been homebound?

I have gotten more purchases of the subscription. I emailed those people who purchase the subscription already and most of them do want it weekly. There's also a gift option if someone wants to gift it to family and friends.

How many authors do you have?

I think I have 17 different authors.

So, this is an ongoing process of finding new local authors and stories?

Correct. Its a bit stalled right now.

How do potential authors get involved?

If they're interested, they should follow our Facebook page or sign up for our newsletter on our website. We'll keep them updated on the next event because they need to come to the Short Storyathon. I know that if they can make it through a Short Storyathon, they can write a great story.
Bristol, PA -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/26/2020 -- As a first-rate provider of emergency roof repair in Philadelphia, C.R. Thompson understands how important it is to be proactive in roof and gutter maintenance. But when disaster strikes or damage goes unchecked, it's imperative that homeowners take action before the problems grow worse, so much so that their indoor comfort is compromised and the eventual repair costs come out to a higher total than need be. The company would like to inform readers of the benefits homeowners can reap by not delaying their necessary roof repairs.



Gaps and leaks in a roof make the residence far less efficient than it could be when it comes to keeping conditioned air inside. Having a roofing professional eliminate the worst among them can help homeowners save significantly on energy costs since the desired temperatures stay indoors instead of escaping through the roof.



Unaddressed water and moisture problems increase the likelihood of a home sustaining severe structural damage over time in addition to mold, dry rot, and additional health hazards for those residing in the house itself. Professional inspections will also deter animals from wreaking havoc on a roof's materials and its underlying attic spaces. These pests can range from squirrels and bird nests to termites making their way inside.



C.R. Thompson Roofing knows that there are plenty of great D.I.Y. projects to get done around the house this spring, but when it comes to roofing, it's best to call on a professional. C.R. Thompson Roofing's experts have the resources and expertise needed to service all types of residences and commercial properties, including slope and flat roofing in Philadelphia. For more information, homeowners are encouraged to contact C.R. Thompson today.



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To learn more about this top-rated, family-owned and operated roofing company located in Philadelphia, please visit http://www.crthompsonroofing.com/.
The only world that I have known is one in which anxieties are reined in by hope. The privilege of Indias middle class is defined by its investment in Indias growth story, its lust for consumption and its quest for a legacy. But Indias economy has been floundering, and the fall in trade coupled with the lockdown will bring it to its knees. It is unclear how many will still have jobs and businesses by the end of the year.

And it is not just the economy that is struggling. A nationwide lockdown strikes at the very roots of civilization  museums, theaters, cinemas, bookshops, schools, universities, libraries, playgrounds, are all out of bounds. Print-newspaper readership is steeply declining amid fears that papers can be carriers of the disease.

With just one bed for every 2,000 people, Indian hospitals will be unable to accommodate patients by the end of June at the current rate of growth of cases, and as early as the end of April if the infection rate goes up. The huge gulf between the health infrastructure available to Indias poor and to its wealthier classes is closing fast.

As fear escalates, the middle and upper classes trapped in their homes are surrendering to their worst instincts  hoarding food, supplies and medicines without sparing a thought for the millions of poor who stand to starve and die.

People from the northeast of India are being threatened and abused for being racially similar to the Chinese. Houses where people have been quarantined are being marked by authorities, and neighbors are circulating photographs of notices pasted on their doors to encourage ostracizing them.

Perhaps worst of all, doctors are being evicted from their homes for fear they are carriers. In a country that has only one doctor for every 1,404 people, discouraging doctors from doing their jobs is nothing short of self-destruction.

This comes at a time when courts have closed and liberal democracy is threatened by the excessive power the state takes on during a national emergency. Even liberals are demanding that the police be tough on people breaking curfews as panic about the virus spreads. And police patrols are unleashing indiscriminate violence in the name of enforcing the lockdown.
CAIRO - The leader of Yemens Houthi rebels on Thursday declared his willingness to free several Saudi captives in exchange for the release of Hamas members recently detained in the kingdom, an unprecedented statement that signalled Irans regional reach.

In a lengthy televised speech to mark the five-year anniversary of Yemens devastating war, Abdel-Malek al-Houthi announced the rebels complete readiness to release a pilot abducted in the downing of a Saudi warplane last month, along with four other soldiers and officers.

Unfortunately, the regimes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have generally presented as worse than Israel, he said, demanding the release of dozens of Palestinian Hamas members and supporters on trial in Saudi Arabia. They had been arrested on charges of fundraising for Hamas, according to an official in the militant group.

The regional proxy war in impoverished Yemen pits the Iran-backed Houthis against a U.S.-supported coalition led by Saudi Arabia. After the Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa, and much of the countrys north in 2014, the coalition intervened to restore the internationally recognized government and remove what Saudi Arabia considers to be an Iranian threat on its southern border.

Irans patronage of local Shiite militias as a way of expanding its regional influence and undermining its Sunni foe is not limited to the Houthis. The Islamic Republic also supports the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, and Lebanons Hezbollah, among others.

The Houthis unprecedented intervention in the cases of Hamas members appears to come straight out of the Iranian playbook.

In a statement, Hamas said it followed with interest the Houthis call for the release of detainees, thanking the faction for its spirit of brotherhood and solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Last month, the Houthis shot down a two-pilot coalition Tornado warplane, drawing fierce retaliatory strikes that killed over 30 civilians in the northern province of Jawf. Al-Houthi did not comment on the second abducted pilot in Thursdays speech. The wave of indiscriminate Saudi-led coalition attacks brought international condemnation, the latest measure of civilian suffering in a war that has killed over 100,000 people and brought millions to the brink of famine.
Parliaments activities will be suspended until at least 12 April. A statement issued by parliaments Secretary-General Mahmoud Fawzi on 23 March said the Houses coming plenary meetings will be held on 12 April instead of Sunday 29 March.

The postponement comes in line with state efforts to ban gatherings that might lead to an outbreak of the coronavirus, the statement said, noting that as MPs come from different governorates, it has become a necessity that they should not gather in one place.

Fawzi indicated that the decision is also in line with Article 277 of the Houses internal by-laws which grants the speaker a mandate to change the date of plenary meetings whenever necessary.

As a result, Speaker Ali Abdel-Aal decided that the Houses plenary meetings which were scheduled for 29 March be postponed to 12 April.

A statement issued by the House on 20 March said people should leave home only when necessary. It is the behaviour of citizens and their adherence to the governments precautionary measures, including curfew hours beginning on Wednesday, that will put an end to the coronavirus in Egypt, the statement said. Citizens should stay at home and go out only in case of urgent necessity so that they do not give the virus room to spread and help the state fight it, the statement said.

The House praised the measures taken by President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi to help the public mitigate the impact of the virus on their daily life. It is also good that most basic foodstuffs are available and so there is no need for citizens to hoard goods or help spread malicious rumours that might affect the morale of the nation, the statement said.

Parliaments decision to put off its plenary meetings until 12 April was expected by many. MPs predict that the recess might extend beyond that. Parliament will convene only if state authorities manage to declare the country free of the coronavirus, MP and journalist Osama Sharshar said.

Meanwhile, MPs said a partial curfew should be implemented to prevent the coronavirus outbreak from reaching a crisis point. I think the Houses decision on Monday to postpone its plenary meetings came because its leading officials knew beforehand that a curfew would be imposed for two weeks, Sharshar said.

Inas Abdel-Halim, an MP and physician from Mansoura city, said in a statement on Sunday that a two-week curfew from 7pm to 6am would go a long way to help authorities fight the virus.

A partial curfew would be a temporary measure that would help state authorities carry out the sterilisation and isolation efforts necessary to stem any possible [outbreak] of the virus, Abdel-Halim said, adding that, a partial curfew would also help prevent the virus from entering a terrible and deadly phase as we see in Italy, Iran and France.

Deputy Parliament Speaker Suleiman Wahdan said the government of Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli has been pro-active in combating the spread of the coronavirus.

The governments approach was also very necessary in order to not let the country face the disastrous consequences we saw in Italy and Iran, Wahdan said. But in the battle against the coronavirus, I think other emergency measures such as imposing a partial curfew from 7pm to 6am will help prevent an outbreak on a mass scale.

Other measures should include the Ministry of Industry allocating the production of hospital beds, sterilisation materials, drugs and ventilators, Wahdan said, adding that youth centres and sporting clubs should be also used as field hospitals in emergency cases.

Magdi Malak, an MP from Minya governorate, said the partial curfew will help prevent Egypt from reaching a crisis point, which would be 1,000 citizens infected with the coronavirus.

We are still in control of the virus, but a partial curfew is a necessity to eliminate it completely.

MP Sharshar said prevention is much better than treatment and this means that a curfew is a good preventive measure that will be highly effective in eliminating the virus.

MP and journalist Mustafa Bakri said the curfew was a necessity. Countries like China which took this measure very early were able to stem the tide of the virus. Here in Egypt the two or three-week curfew is a necessity, particularly ahead of the holy month of Ramadan which will begin on 23 April, Bakri said.

Two MPs, however, said they are not in favour of imposing a curfew.

Galal Awara, an MP from Tanta, said a curfew is a step that is difficult for millions of citizens to deal with.

The curfew will push citizens to hoard goods and this is not good for the economy. I think that the recent measures, such as suspending flights and tourist traffic and shutting down malls, restaurants and cafes from 7pm to 6am, are quite enough to contain the virus to zero in the next few days, Awara said.

Ahmed Al-Sigini, head of parliaments Local Administration Committee, said a curfew would have grave economic and social consequences.

It is not an easy decision. There could be a limited number of curfew hours which would help deter gatherings at night and prevent any spread of the virus, Al-Sigini said.

Parliament has taken a number of measures in recent days to protect MPs from contracting the coronavirus.

MPs, media correspondents, and visitors will be allowed to enter parliament only after they test negative, and those who test positive will be sent to hospital, parliaments Secretary-General Fawzi said on Saturday.

Parliaments decision to meet on 12 April means that its activities will be in limbo for at least three weeks. The postponement means that meetings of parliaments 25 committees will also be suspended until further notice, Fawzi said.

Parliaments Foreign Affairs Committee was scheduled to hold a meeting on 17 March to discuss the latest developments on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The meeting, however, was cancelled in line with the precautionary measures taken by the government to contain the coronavirus.

Hussein Eissa, head of parliaments Budget and Planning Committee, said discussions on a number of economic and budgetary affairs will be in limbo for at least three weeks. Parliament is scheduled to have a summer recess at the end of June or 1 July, but because of the emergency situation the schedule will dramatically change. If we are able to meet in the second half of April, we would be required to hold an intensive number of meetings, Eissa said.

MP Tarek Metwalli said all meetings on government-drafted laws such as the public enterprise law, and the labour law and the governments auto industry, will be suspended.

MP Bakri also said that amendments to political laws regulating the election of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the electoral districts and the exercise of political rights will be suspended.

By Monday, Egypt had registered 366 coronavirus cases, and 19 fatalities.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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When Mak Kapetanovic reads peoples jokey tweets and Facebook messages about the prospect of self-isolation with overbearing relatives as COVID-19 traverses the globe, he wants to see the funny side. But mostly, he feels a sense of deep disquiet. The 23-year-old anthropology student understands how feelings of loneliness, anger and alienation can consume you. And he knows the very dark places they can take you.

A few years ago, seeking refuge from uncertainty and turmoil, Kapetanovic found himself sucked into the narratives of white supremacist groups online. Now he fears the same conditions that sent him on the path to hate are fomenting in homes across the world.

If people who are self-isolating together are angry at each other and not talking, that would be pretty bad, says Kapetanovic from his home in Jacksonville, Florida. He worries that tensions at home would compound an environment already fraught with fear and confusion. Feelings of isolation, anger, grief and frustration, all of those things are happening. A lot of people are scared, and people are not sure what to think.

It is the far right who always seem to take advantage of these insecurities, he adds.

Millions of people around the world are now stuck in their homes, consumed by worry and fear and contending with a barrage of misinformation over a virus which seems to have changed their lives overnight. Some politicians seek scapegoats in marginalized communities and ethnic groups, with the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban blaming migrants and President Donald Trump provoking outrage with his Chinese flu comments. And during long, isolated days, many people seek distraction online companies are reporting a 12 to 15% increase in Internet use  and much of that time is spent in poorly regulated Internet forums and on social media.

People working across counter-extremism are raising the alarm at the potential for hate groups to exploit this fearful and confusing situation. Brad Galloway, a specialist with the support group Life After Hate, has been monitoring far right forums and has already seen an alarming number of anti-Semitic, xenophobic and racist posts related to COVID-19.

Story continues

They pray upon any kind of societal or community division, he explains. Right now people are pretty fragile, and this is the time that they will try to take advantage.

Kapetanovic can see clear parallels with his own life. In 2013, when he was 16 years old, his mother died suddenly and unexpectedly from a stroke. With his dad working night shifts and no brothers or sisters, Kapetanovic found himself alone with his grief. He withdrew and sought solace online, where he became immersed in far-right narratives on 4Chan talk boards, spending up to six hours a day reading the material.

I started thinking, here are the reasons why I feel so bad, he says. You get to be mad at something. And sometimes being mad at something can feel good.

The child of two Bosnian Muslims who came to the United States as refugees, Kapetanovic is not an obvious recruit for white supremacist groups. But he describes the alarming speed at which anti-Semitic, racist and xenephobic narratives started to take root.

It is just a constant onslaught of layers of irony, sarcasm, misinformation and shallow information. And it is a nonstop flood of generally racist rhetoric, he says. But my views intensified because I was left alone to look at this stuff for a long time. I kept consuming it, and a lot of these ideas ended up sticking in my head. And it didnt take terribly long before I started believing it all  probably months.

Kapetanovics extremism never went beyond obsessive reading and occasional posting on 4Chan chat boards. By 2015 he had managed to see the flaws in the narratives, a slow process which began when he looked for other sources to back up far right claims about race and intelligence  and realized that no such reputable sources existed. He now disavows any white supremacist ideology and want to use his experiences to show how far right groups exploit digital spaces. He shares his story as widely as possible, and hopes that when he graduates in anthropology, he will be able to work in counter-extremism. But today, he is deeply worried when he looks online and sees friends sharing coronavirus misinformation, and white supremacist narratives around eugenics and survival of the fittest seeping into the mainstream: Some of the rhetoric surrounding this is very, very scary.

Keep up to date with our daily coronavirus newsletter by clicking here.

A close up of President Trump's notes shows where Corona was crossed out and replaced with Chinese Virus as he speaks with his coronavirus task force in during a briefing at the White House on March 19, 2020. | Jabin BotsfordThe Washington Post/Getty Images

What worries Life After Hates Galloway is that some of the divisive rhetoric is coming from the President of the United States. If you look at what Donald Trump tweeted out the other day calling it the Chinese virus, this inspires the far right, he tells TIME.

President Trump appeared to row back from the rhetoric on Monday, saying on Twitter that it was important that we totally protect our Asian American community. But much damage had already been done. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Asian-Americans had been subjected to an increase in hate speech and attacks since the Coronavirus emerged, and said that Trumps comments were creating a climate of hate that is permeating the country and putting people at risk. This comes at a time when support for far right extremist groups is rising worldwide, with the Global Terrorism Index reporting a 320% increase in far right terror attacks in the past five years .

Galloway says a sub-set of the white supremacist movement known as accelerationists seem to be the ones mobilizing the most. The coronavirus pandemic plays into their narrative of fermenting social unrest to provoke conflict and bring about an end of days scenario, whereby current regimes can be replaced with white supremacist societies.

Other researchers reported similar online chatter, while there are also signs that extreme Islamist groups will try and take advantage, with a recent Islamic State newsletter referring to the coronavirus as painful torment against crusader nations.

Robert Orell, a Swedish counter-extremism consultant who advises the European Union, says extremist groups also exploit perceived failings by governments: They look at the distress in society and try to show that they are the ones capable of providing security and safety.

That makes it crucial for governments to provide that sense of reassurance, confidence and security. It is a lot about political leadership, communication, and building this sense of community instead of splintering or polarization, he says.

And there are positive signs from many communities, where people are coming together across societal divides to tackle the crisis together.

Hadiya Masieh, a counter-extremism advisor to the British government and founder of the Groundswell Project, sees hope in the singing from balconies; the co-ordinated city wide clapping for health workers; neighbors dropping round fliers to help out the vulnerable; the thousands of people volunteering to help out their health services.

If that goodwill can be harnessed and sustained even when the specter of Coronavirus recedes, she believes it will be harder for extreme groups to take hold.

The mosques, the synagogues, the churches are all helping each other, she says. If you create that and make that as abundant and strong as possible, when you have groups trying to come in to destroy that, they are seen for what they are.

With that in mind, she has launched a map to try and bring together all the British locations offering assistance for the vulnerable and is promoting these messages in socially deprived communities which could be vulnerable to extremism. Extreme groups try and change the hearts and minds of the people  we need to do the same but in a positive way, she says.

When Mak Kapetanovic looks back on his years in white supremacist circles, he wishes there had been more people around to help break his loneliness  and urges people to make sure they are there for each other as world events take this dark turn. Check up on your friends and make sure everyone is doing OK, he says.

It is these small gestures of kindness, says Masieh, that may one day have a bigger impact. We need that as human beings right now  as much as food and sustenance, we need a psychological way to help as through this crisis, she says. That is what will kill this virus of extremism.

Please send any tips, leads, and stories to virus@time.com.
Researchers studying the strain of coronavirus wreaking havoc across the world have found that it is not mutating at a level that would make it significantly more deadly.

The findings by a veteran coronavirus research team have raised hopes that when a vaccine is eventually discovered for Covid-19, it will be effective for most people.

When you look at the sequences that are available from around the world, what youre finding is that youre not getting a dominant mutation, said Dr Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in an interview with The Independent.

The good news is that because its not changing appreciably, we could reasonably argue that vaccines would work against most of the strains out there, he added.

Dr Menachery has been studying coronaviruses for 10 years, including work on the SARS virus. Much of his research has focused on the interaction between viruses and the host immune system. He has also studied the threat of bat viruses and what makes them transmit to humans.

Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Show all 26 1 /26 Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town An empty street in Manhattan borough following the outbreak of coronavirus disease in New York City Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town A cab drives down at Seventh Avenue in Times Square Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Syracuse University campus is seen almost empty as number of universities are moving all classes to e-learning, due to the coronavirus outbreak Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Empty street is seen near Lincoln tunnel Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan An empty restaurant Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Empty chairs are seen near Hudson yards Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan An empty restaurant Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town A mobile souvenir shop sits in an empty parking lot at Allianz Field as a match between the New York Red Bulls at Minnesota United FC is postponed USA Today Sports/Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan An empty Jacob K Javits Convention Center Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Syracuse University A person sits in an empty eating hall Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Empty parking lots Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Jacob K Javits Convention Center Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Seventh Avenue Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Empty retail stores Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Empty street is seen outside the New York Times building Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Empty parking lots Reuters Coronavirus turns New York into a ghost town Manhattan Reuters

His teams research may be crucial in better understanding the deadly coronavirus outbreak as it continues to spread.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says at least 20 coronavirus vaccines are being developed around the world. The first human trials have already begun in Seattle, led by the Boston-based biotech firm Moderna.

Although the speed with which the vaccine went to trial is almost unprecedented, experts say it could still take about 18 months for any potential vaccine to become available to the general public.

According to Dr Menachery, some viruses can develop resistance to drugs and vaccines intended to treat it. But the early findings of this research suggest that is not happening quickly enough to increase the deadliness of the coronavirus. Thats good news, he said.

That doesnt mean it cant happen, but if we can develop either drugs or vaccines, they likely will work for the vast majority of people for the vast majority of time, he said.

Despite working on coronavirus research since 2010, Dr Menachery said the scale of the current outbreak took him by surprise.

I dont know I would have predicted the size and scope of this. I would have expected it to be on a smaller scale, something like the original SARS outbreak, which was 8,000 people. It was a significant outbreak at the time, he said.

This was surprising in how transmissible it was and how quickly it spread. Were looking at approaching over half a million cases here in less than three months.

The total number of coronavirus infections worldwide has likely already passed that number. The current number of confirmed infections stands at around 450,000, but many people are thought to have contracted it without being tested.

The US is fast becoming a new epicentre of the outbreak. Nationwide, about 60,000 people have been diagnosed with Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus that is particularly perilous to the elderly and people with pre-existing medical conditions, with at least 812 deaths.
Italy might have had its new case peak four days ago. This would mean that the infection peak was 11-15 days ago. This would suggest that the quarantines did bend the curve on infections.

If Italy can follow China reduction in infections then Italy could see new cases drop below 3500 in another week and below 1500 in two to three weeks.

On 9 March 2020, the government of Italy under Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte imposed a national quarantine. On March 8, 2020 there was the quarantine on 16 million people in Northern Italy.

5210 new cases and 683 new deaths in Italy. 4th day in a row with daily new cases below the 6557 peak reached on March 21. Protezione Civile chief Borrelli, the person usually holding the daily press conference, is at home with a fever, while the former chief Bertolaso is now hospitalized in Milan after having tested positive to the virus.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced March 20 that all New York residents must stay home to the maximum extent possible, an order that became effective at 8 p.m. Sunday March 22.

The San Francisco Bay Area has had a shelter in place order since March 16.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a statewide shelter-in-place order on March 19.

SOURCES  San Francisco & California shelter orders, Worldometers, John Hopkins

Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Motorola is the latest brand to halt manufacturing operations. The company has also mandated all its employees across multiple offices in India to work from home till April 14.

With India under total lockdown and major districts of the country showing COVID-19 positive cases, the smartphone industry has come to a staggering stop at least for the time being. It will get difficult to buy a new smartphone or even get it repaired since most OEMs have halted production in their factories and closed service centres.

Motorola is the latest brand to issue a statement regarding the same. The Lenovo-owned smartphone brand introduced the Moto Razr, its first foldable smartphone a week or so back. However, obeying government directives, Motorola has stopped operations at its manufacturing plants in Tamil Nadu starting March 23rd. The company has also mandated all its employees across multiple offices in India to work from home till April 14.

"Safety of our employees and their families is of utmost importance to us and we are 100% compliant with all relevant guidelines issued by the various state governments. We have stopped operations at our manufacturing facility in Tamil Nadu, starting March 23rd. Further, all employees across our various offices in India have been advised to exercise a mandatory Work From Home policy till 14th April. Along with this, we have issued strict guidelines and advisory for all precautions to be taken by them and their respective families, Motorola said in a statement.

Furthermore, Motorola has also shut operations in its service centres and retail stores. However, Motorola said they have enough stocks of the newly announced Moto Razr, but the delivery of the smartphone might get delayed since Flipkart and other e-commerce companies are prioritising deliveries of essentials only. Flipkart is still listing most Motorola smartphones to be available to buy but delivery may happen at a later date, possibly after the lockdown lifts.
Rikers Island  New York City's main jail that's supposed to be closed by 2026  is a natural hotbed for coronavirus spread. Beds are closer than the CDC-recommended 6 feet apart, facilities are entirely shared, and prisoners are shuffled around in large groups, Slate notes. And as Brooklyn Defender Services, an advocacy group providing legal defense, reports, there are plenty of reasons to believe the complex is home to more than the 52 cases it has reported so far.

Brooklyn Defender Services' clients in Rikers have so far reported "overflowing sewage in a housing unit" that was used "before, during, and after the incident;" "squalid conditions" that staff refuse to clean out of fear of catching COVID-19; "symptomatic people not being tested for COVID-19;" a total lack of soap; and many more disturbing conditions. People who were in contact with a guard now believed to have COVID-19 weren't given any precautions to prevent spread, and many are now symptomatic, Brooklyn Defender Services also said in a Thursday press release.

THREAD: As #COVID19 spreads like wildfire through Rikers Island, we worry every hour that passes brings us closer to disaster & death. Officials must take immediate action to initiate mass release and halt new admissions before it's too late. Conditions are dire. pic.twitter.com/y005KPrRoN  Brooklyn Defender Services (@BklynDefender) March 26, 2020

With cramped cases and new people coming and going every day, prisons across the U.S. are at high risk for coronavirus spread. That's prompted calls for releasing elderly and other at-risk prisoners; New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has so far ordered 300 prisoners released from Rikers amid the pandemic.

More stories from theweek.com

5 cartoons about Dr. Fauci's impossible task

Trump has never been worse  but his approval is surging. Why?

Why Minnesota's coronavirus response is different


CHICAGO, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --According to the new market research report "Enzymes Market by Product Type (Industrial enzymes and Specialty enzymes), Source (Microorganism, Plant, and Animal), Type, Industrial Enzyme Application, Specialty Enzymes Application, and Region - Global Forecast to 2025", published by MarketsandMarkets, the Enzymes Market is estimated to be valued at USD 10.0 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 14.7 billion by 2025, recording a CAGR of 6.7%, in terms of value. The growing concerns about the environment among people and the increasing demand for biofuels are factors that are projected to drive the growth of the enzymes market, globally.

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The microorganism segment is projected to witness significant growth during the forecast period.

Based on source, the enzymes market is segmented into microorganisms, plants, and animals. The microorganism segment is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period, as enzymes obtained from microbial sources lead to low production costs. Furthermore, they contain more predictable and controllable enzyme content. In addition, as enzymes obtained from microbial sources can be cultured in large quantities in a short period, microorganisms are the primary source of industrial enzymes.

Browse in-depth TOC on "Enzymes Market"

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The carbohydrases segment is projected to account for a major share in the enzymes market during the forecast period

By type, the enzymes market is segmented into carbohydrase, proteases, lipases, polymerases & nucleases, and other enzymes. The carbohydrases segment is further segmented into amylases, cellulases, and other carbohydrates. This segment is estimated to account for a significant share in the enzymes market, as carbohydrase, such as amylase and cellulase, has been used in industrial applications, including food & beverage, textiles, and pulp & paper. In addition, the enzymes market is dominated by the carbohydrase segment, as the majority of biofuels are manufactured by sugars and amylases and are used as an economical alternative for the modification of starch into sugars.

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The Asia Pacific region is projected to witness the fastest growth during the forecast period.

The enzymes market in Asia Pacific is expected to witness the highest growth due to the increasing demand for enzymes in industrial and specialty applications. Technological innovations in machinery, synthetic fibers, logistics, and globalization of business have made the textile & leather industry one of the essential sectors in the Asia Pacific region. Furthermore, the shift of industrial operations from developed regions, such as North America and Europe to Asia Pacific, has further contributed to the growth of the enzymes market in this region. The use of enzymes in the biofuel industry will grow further due to the increase in bioethanol production and its usage in fueling automobiles and electricity. In addition, the majority of the population resides in the Asia Pacific region, which is contributing to the growth of the pharmaceutical industry. Enzyme usage in pharmaceutical products will further drive the enzymes market in the Asia Pacific region.

This report includes a study on the marketing and development strategies, along with the product portfolios of leading companies. It consists of profiles of leading companies, such as BASF (Germany), DuPont (US), Associated British Foods (UK), Novozymes (Denmark), DSM (Netherlands), Dyadic International (US), Advanced Enzymes Technologies (India), Aumgene Biosciences (India), Chr Hansen (Denmark), Amano Enzymes (Japan), Roche Holding (Switzerland), Codexis (US), Sanofi (France), Merck (Germany), Enzyme Supplies (UK), Creative Enzymes (US), Enzyme Solutions (US), Enzymatic Deinking Technologies (US), and Biocatalysts (UK).

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Food Enzymes Market by Type (Carbohydrase, Protease, Lipase), Application (Beverages, Bakery Products, Dairy Products, Confectionery Products, Processed Foods), Formulation (Lyophilized Powder and Liquid), Source, and Region - Global Forecast to 2023

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/food-enzymes-market-800.html

Specialty Enzymes Market by Source (Microorganism, Plant, Animal), Type (Carbohydrases, Protease, Lipase, Polymerases & Nucleases), Application (Pharmaceutical, Research & biotechnology, Diagnostic, Bio-Catalyst) & Geography - Global Trends & Forecasts to 2018

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/specialty-enzymes-market-21682828.html

Browse Adjacent Markets: F & B Ingredients Market Research Reports & Consulting

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Linkedin Adrian Wail Akhlas (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 14:12 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d8b27a 1 Business Indonesia,government-bond,debt-paper,COVID-19,coronavirus,business,Perppu,BI Free

Indonesia is planning to offer government debt papers to the market, the proceeds of which would be used to fund programs that rescue businesses suffering from COVID-19 and prevent layoffs.

Secretary to the coordinating economic affairs minister, Susiwijono Moegiarso, said Thursday the government would issue a government regulation in lieu of law (Perppu) on Friday to facilitate the plan.

The so-called "recovery bond" can be bought by Bank Indonesia (BI), as well as exporters and importers, Susiwijoyo said, adding the Perppu would enable the central bank to buy government bonds not only in the secondary market. The existing law on BI prohibits the central bank from buying government bonds except in the secondary market.

"The government will handle the proceeds of the funds to finance all businesses. This is to awaken business activities," Susiwijono said during a media briefing.



Companies looking to receive funds from bond sales were barred from employee layoffs, he said. "If they need to lay off employees, then they must keep at least 90 percent of their employees with the same salary amounts [as before the crisis]."

Read also: Battered by virus: Businesses across Indonesia feel the pinch

The governments plan comes as European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde asks euro zone finance ministers to seriously consider a one-off joint debt issue of coronabonds to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, Reuters reported.

The COVID-19-driven slowdown was likely to slash Indonesias growth to just above 4 percent this year, the lowest in 15 years, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said as the government prepares for the worst-case scenario of zero growth. From empty malls to factory disruptions, micro and small businesses have suffered the most.

The government would reallocate Rp 62.3 trillion (US$3.9 billion) of state spending from the 2020 budget to tackle COVID-19 in Indonesia, on top of the Rp 120 trillion allocated to stimulate the economy.

BI has also spent Rp 168.2 trillion so far this year, buying government bonds in the secondary market to stabilize the rupiah as foreign investors dump Rp 125.2 trillion worth of government bonds. The rupiah, now at around Rp 16,277 per US dollar, is the worst-performing currency in Asia.



The central bank will continue to intervene through the spot market, domestic non-deliverable forwards and bonds if needed," Perry pledged as the rupiah weakened almost 20 percent since January.

As of Wednesday, Indonesia had 790 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 58 deaths. Globally, the pneumonia-like illness has infected over 471,000 people and has claimed at least 21,000 lives.



President Joko Jokowi Widodo has revealed that government officials and legislators are in talks to raise Indonesias budget deficit cap, which would allow the state to borrow more money to fund emergency response measures to the pandemic. The budget deficit cap could be raised to 5 percent from the current 3 percent ceiling.
Erongo gold project covers 606 km2 in the Navachab-Otjikoto gold belt in proximity to Osino Resources Twin Hills gold discovery

Priority target area underlain by favourable stratigraphy and structures identified at Twin Hills

Soil geochemical survey has collected 2,500 samples covering 30% of priority target area, analyses pending; additional sampling planned

Company continues to monitor and manage Namibian responses to Covid-19 and announces planned changes in senior management

HALIFAX, NS / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Namibia Critical Metals Inc. ("Namibia Critical Metals" or the "Company") (TSXV:NMI) today provided an update on progress of exploration on its Erongo Gold Project (EPL 6440 "Erongo") located near the town of Karibib in central Namibia. Erongo is one of three prospective gold projects in the company's portfolio within the emerging gold belt which hosts the Navachab and Otjikoto gold mines (Figure 1). The Company is undertaking a regional geochemical soil survey at Erongo to assess the potential for the discovery of orogenic/hydrothermal gold deposits similar to the nearby Navachab Gold Mine which is operated by QKR and the Twin Hills discovery of Osino Resources Corp. ("Osino").

The Erongo Gold Project comprises 606 square kilometers situated 20 kilometers north of the Navachab gold mine and 10 kilometers northwest of the Twin Hills discovery (Figure 2). The project area is centered on the Erongo granitic intrusive complex which was emplaced into the older metasedimentary rocks of the Damaran orogeny which host the gold mineralization of interest at Navachab, Twin Hills and at the Otjikoto gold mine operated by B2 Gold which is located 230 kilometers to the northeast.

Don Burton, President of Namibia Critical Metals stated, "Most investor attention is understandably focused on our heavy rare earth project at Lofdal where we have recently entered into a joint venture with the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation ("JOGMEC"). However, an important aspect of the Company's assets lies in the diversity of the commodities within our portfolio. Given the increasing recognition of the significance of Namibia's emerging gold belt, it is an appropriate moment to direct more attention to the gold potential in our Erongo, Otjiwarongo and Grootfontein projects."

Erongo Gold Exploration Program

The area of interest at Erongo lies along the northern limb of the Krantzberg anticline and is underlain by metasedimentary rocks equivalent to the stratigraphy noted on the southern limb of the anticline at Twin Hills, with associated structural features defined by airborne magnetics (Figure 2). The area is largely covered by aeolian sands and/or calcrete with very little outcrop. As Osino has successfully demonstrated, gold mineralization can be detected by surficial geochemical sampling (soils and calcrete) in this environment. The discovery at Twin Hills was announced in August 2019 (Osino Resources company press release August 26, 2019) and Osino is working towards development of a maiden resource estimate as part of a 20,000 meter drill program.

The Company has collected 2,500 soil samples to date on a systematic grid with a line spacing of 200 meters and sample spacing of 100 meters over the central sector of the priority area (Figure 2). These samples cover roughly 30% of the area of interest. Samples will be sieved and analyzed by handheld XRF over the next 3-4 weeks prior to submission for gold analysis. Selected samples will then be analyzed for gold using low level detection limits (down to 0.2 ppb Au) to define areas of interest. Results from gold analyzes are therefore expected in mid-May and continuing sample coverage is planned to progress to the south.

Impact of Covid-19 to Operations

The Company continues to closely monitor recommendations from Namibian health authorities and the World Health Organization concerning the mitigation of the Covid-19 pandemic. Current restrictions by the Namibian health authorities are being respected with regards to operations in the Khomas and Erongo Regions (encompassing the Windhoek-Swakopmund corridor) where travel restrictions have been implemented. This has affected continued field activity at Erongo for the time being however operations at Lofdal in the Kunene Region are continuing. The Company has completed the first four drill holes at Lofdal and expects to report on first results in April.

Planned Changes in Management

The Company also announced today that Pine van Wyk will be stepping down as CEO of the Company at the end of his current contract term on May 31, 2020. Donald Burton, the current President of the Company will assume the responsibilities previously undertaken by Mr. van Wyk. Mr. van Wyk will be available to the Company on a consultancy basis after May 31 to ensure a seamless transition of responsibilities.

Donald M. Burton, P.Geo. and President of Namibia Critical Metals Inc., is the Company's Qualified Person and has reviewed and approved this press release.

Figure 1 - Location of Namibia Critical Metals' projects highlighting position of gold projects (Erongo, Otjiwarongo and Grootfontein) in relation to important gold projects within the Navachab-Otjikoto gold belt

Figure 2 - Erongo Gold Project (EPL 6440) showing area of priority soil sampling over meta-sediments on northern flank of Krantzberg anticline. Twin Hills gold discovery in meta-sediments on southern flank of anticline. Airborne magnetics in background is analytic signal response from government survey by Geological Survey of Namibia.

About Namibia Critical Metals Inc.

Namibia Critical Metals Inc. holds a diversified portfolio of exploration and advanced stage projects in the country of Namibia focused on the development of sustainable and ethical sources of metals for the battery, electric vehicle and associated industries. The Company also has significant land positions in areas favourable for gold mineralization.

The Lofdal Heavy Rare Earth Project is the Company's most advanced project having completed a Preliminary Economic Assessment in 2014 and full Environmental Impact Assessment in 2017. An application has been made for a mining licence at Lofdal. The project is now in joint venture with JOGMEC who are funding the current $3,000,000 drilling and metallurgical program with the object of doubling the resource size and optimization of the process flow sheet.

At the Erongo Gold Project, stratigraphic equivalents to the sediments hosting the recent Osino gold discovery at Twin Hills have been identified but not yet sampled. Detailed soil surveys are planned over this highly prospective area.

The Epembe Tantalum-Niobium Project is also at an advanced stage with a well-defined, 10 km long carbonatite dyke that has been delineated by detailed mapping with over 11,000 meters of drilling. Preliminary mineralogical and metallurgical studies including sorting tests (XRT), indicate the potential for significant physical upgrading. Further work will be undertaken to advance the project to a preliminary economic assessment stage.

The Kunene Cobalt-Copper Project comprises a very large area of favorable stratigraphy ("the DOF") along strike to the west of the Opuwo Co-Cu-Zn deposit. Secondary copper mineralization over a wide area points to preliminary evidence of a regional-scale hydrothermal system. Exploration targets on EPLs held in the Kunene project comprise direct extensions of the DOF style mineralization to the west, sediment-hosted cobalt and copper, orogenic copper, and stratabound Mn and Zn-Pb mineralization.

Earlier stage projects include the Grootfontein Project which has potential for magmatic Cu-Ni mineralization, Mississippi Valley-type Zn-Pb-V mineralization and Otjikoto-style gold mineralization.

The common shares of Namibia Critical Metals Inc. trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "NMI".

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

For more information please contact -

Namibia Critical Metals Inc.

Don Burton, President

Tel: +01 (902) 835-8760

Fax: +01 (902) 835-8761

Email: Info@NamibiaREE.com

Web site: www.NamibiaCriticalMetals.com

The foregoing information may contain forward-looking information relating to the future performance of Namibia Rare Earths Inc. Forward-looking information, specifically, that concerning future performance, is subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. These risks and uncertainties are detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with the appropriate securities commissions.

SOURCE: Namibia Critical Metals Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/582689/Namibia-Critical-Metals-Provides-Update-on-Erongo-Gold-Project
Washington: US President Donald Trump has said that the World Health Organization has "very much" sided with China on coronavirus crisis, asserting that many people are unhappy with the global health agency and feel that "it's been very unfair".

President Trump was responding to a question on allegations by Republican Senator Marco Rubio that the World Health Organization (WHO) showed "favouritism" to China.

Congressman Michael McCaul, ranking member on the House Foreign Relations Committee, has questioned the integrity of the WHO's director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, saying "that there were several red flags in his past with respect to his relationship with China."

"It (WHO) has been very very much sided with China. A lot of people are not happy about it," Trump told reporters at a White House news conference on Wednesday.

Trump was asked if he agreed that the WHO showed favouritism and the US should re-explore its relationship with the health agency once the dust settles.

"I think there is certainly a lot of talk that it's been very unfair. I think that a lot of people feel that it's been very unfair," Trump replied.

In a tweet Congressman Greg Steube alleged that the WHO has been a mouthpiece for China during the coronavirus pandemic.

Both the WHO and China must face consequences once this pandemic is under control, he demanded.

Senator Josh Hawley echoed Steube's view and demanded the same.

WHO director Ghebreyesus has faced criticism for praising China's leadership for its "determination to end the new coronavirus outbreak".

He has also been accused of conspiring with Beijing in its "propaganda" to hush-up coronavirus cases.

Ghebreyesus had gone to China in January to meet President Xi Jinping, and a WHO team comprising of international health experts working in the country.

Globally, the death toll from the coronavirus has risen to 21,293 with more than 471,518 cases reported in over 170 countries and territories, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The president of Canadas largest academic hospital is calling on Ottawa to invoke the Emergencies Act, warning that lives are hanging in the balance as the COVID-19 epidemic worsens.

If that means for the short term, for the next two to four weeks, there will be loss of some civil liberties in order to protect our most vulnerable, Im ready to sign up for that, said Kevin Smith, president of the University Health Network.

He said he is dismayed that people continue to leave their homes and socialize in groups despite public health recommendations not to.

Based on what we saw on the weekend, people are still not taking seriously the need for physical distancing, said Smith, who oversees a hospital corporation that includes Toronto General, Toronto Western and Princess Margaret hospitals, as well as Toronto Rehab.

So go all the way. The only thing we will regret is what we dont do, he continued.

Invoking the Emergencies Act would give the federal government sweeping powers, including regulating or prohibiting travel and movement within the country.

The legislation was passed in 1988, replacing the War Measures Act.

The act would also empower Ottawa to regulate the distribution of essential goods, order people to provide essential services and establish emergency hospitals and shelters, among other things.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has warned that all options are on the table to ensure compliance with public health recommendations.

But after speaking to the premiers by phone earlier this week, he said most of them do not think its necessary at this time to invoke the act.

On Wednesday, Health Minister Patty Hajdu announced that the government is imposing mandatary quarantines on travellers returning to Canada.

Using her authority under the Quarantine Act, she said all travellers must enter 14 days of isolation. Essential workers, including those who work in health care, are exempted.

Those who violate quarantine orders risk fines or jail time.

The Quarantine Act only applies to people entering Canada, not to those already in the country.

Smith said that invoking such legislation may seem extreme, but so is the threat facing Canadians.

We are in an extreme situation and we continue to see behaviours that are shocking in terms of the fact that people are willing to take their own degree of high risk. What is unconscionable and unacceptable is that they are forcing that risk on the broader population, he said.

Canada has reached a tipping point in the epidemic with half of new cases being acquired through community spread, Smith warned.

He noted that the spread of the virus is also placing health workers at risk and putting incredible demands on the health system.

Hospitals across the country are now gearing up for an expected crush of COVID-19 patients.

Dr. Barry Rubin, medical director of the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre at UHN, said work is being done to make more beds available while ensuring patients and staff are kept safe. At the same time, the hospital is monitoring international developments and responding to new evidence and directives.

Everybody understands that there is something coming in terms of increasing COVID-19 cases, but right now nobody really knows what it looks like, he said.

I dont think any of us have ever seen anything like this in terms of how quickly this is moving, he added.
(TNS)  The tornadoes that tore through my former congressional district that spring day in 1985 took 42 lives, injured dozens more and leveled three towns. Tornadoes are rare in northwestern Pennsylvania, but the three that clobbered Albion, Atlantic and Wheatland, near Erie, left a lasting mark  not just on the residents of those communities, but also on their second-term congressman. A lousy federal response to the disaster spurred me to author what would become known as the Stafford Act.Thirty-five years after those devastating tornadoes, the changes we authored about how our federal government responds to natural disasters are now being deployed in our national effort to suppress one of the great public health challenges of our time. Some have asked whether it is an appropriate use of the law. As the man who wrote it three decades ago, I can tell you that it is.When the relief efforts in response to those enormous tornadoes were long underway, I remember sending surveys from my congressional office in Washington to measure my constituents attitudes about the response.The Red Cross and local first responders got high marks. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had established a large presence in the disaster area, scored horribly. Local residents found it to be bureaucratic and limited in what it could do.The federal government should have provided some kind of safety net but provided little to nothing at all. It seemed to me that if there was any purpose at all for FEMA it was to be a significant source of financial support  certainly in the short term as families literally tried to rebuild their lives.I was determined to do something about changing FEMAs mission and capabilities, to rewrite the law, but as a second-term congressman who sat on all the wrong committees to address the subject, it would take some time. My argument was that the real cost of recovery after a major disaster is far beyond the capacity of any local district to address.These are exactly the conversations governors are having with the White House now. The anticipated impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our local communities are expected to overwhelm resources and the ability of the states, localities, tribes and territories to respond, necessitating FEMAs involvement. Back in 1985, those communities could have used money to help remove massive amounts of debris. Today they need it to obtain ventilators, hospital beds and other needed equipment.The result of about two years work was to get a bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives to widen the scope and responsibilities of FEMA. It was named after Vermont Sen. Robert Stafford on my recommendation so that we could pass the bill in the Senate and send it to President Ronald Reagan for his signature before that legislative session ended in 1988.Thereafter, FEMAs role greatly expanded. It participates much more completely and aggressively than the FEMA that existed prior to those northwestern Pennsylvania tornadoes. And it brings a more orderly and systematic means of federal natural disaster assistance for state, local, tribal and territorial governments as they carry out their responsibilities to help Americans respond and recover.While the White Houses National Biodefense Strategy has languished for far too long, the presidents use of the Stafford Act has been entirely appropriate.Ive heard some argue that the Stafford Act was designed to trigger a federal response only from natural disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes or earthquakes. But thinking back to the emotional and economic toll left behind on those communities in my congressional district, one can easily anticipate that cities such as Seattle and New York  which are already dealing with large numbers of COVID-19 cases  will need similar federal assistance, on a much larger scale.The Stafford Act can only be used at the request of governors and tribal leaders. By proactively approving such requests, the president essentially has allowed FEMA to take control of the disaster response, which can then cover much of the costs for the state, local, tribal and territorial emergency operations. The law was designed exactly for this purpose.In the aftermath of 9/11, when I was asked to lead a massive reorganization of the federal government as the first U.S. secretary of homeland security, I was privileged to meet and work with many of the outstanding men and women of FEMA. It felt good knowing that legislation I authored years before as a young congressman had significantly boosted their ability to help devastated communities.Knowing their commitment to our country and to their fellow citizens, I have every reason to believe FEMA will be there yet again, to provide the needed assistance to those communities hit hardest by this public health crisis.ABOUT THE WRITERTom Ridge, former governor of Pennsylvania and U.S. secretary of homeland security, co-chairs the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense.2020 New York Daily NewsVisit New York Daily News at www.nydailynews.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. PHOTO (for help with images, contact 312-222-4194):
Bengaluru, March 26 : Karnataka government warned all landlords not to evict tenants from the healthcare industry, in the wake of the increasing coronavirus spread, a top official said on Thursday.

"Take strict penal action against such landlords and house owners under the relevant provisions of law," ordered Additional Chief Secretary, Health and Family Welfare Department Jawaid Akhtar, coming in rescue of the doctors, paramedical staff and healthcare workers.

Akhtar passed the order to all district deputy commissioners, Bengaluru civic body commissioner, police and other senior officials across the state.

"A lot of complaints have been received from doctors, paramedical staff and healthcare personnel within the jurisdiction of the state of Karnataka that their landlords and house owners are forcing them to vacate their rented residences," he said.

According to Akhtar, such kind of evicting behaviour amounts to obstructing public servants in discharging their duties.

The senior bureaucrat invoked Karnataka Epidemic Diseases (COVID-19) Regulations, 2020 under the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 and Hyderabad Infectious Diseases Act, 1950 for prevention and containment of the virus.

The state officials will derive powers from the invoked laws to rein in the offending evictor landlords and house owners.

Karnataka confirmed 51 Coronavirus positive cases, including a death till 2 p.m. on Wednesday.

Similarly, Bengaluru Police Commissioner Bhaskar Rao said that paying guest and hostel owners cannot evict students, working professionals and others from their facilities.

"If paying guest and hostel owners ask inmates to leave, it is illegal, they must provide food too, and they will be prosecuted, it is loud and clear," tweeted Rao.

Bengaluru is an education hub, attracting thousands of students from across the country, who find refuge in temporary accommodations such as private hostels and paying guest facilities.
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Bangkok, March 26, 2020  Thailand should uphold press freedom and refrain from harassing and restricting reporters while emergency rule is imposed to contain the coronavirus outbreak, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha today imposed a state of emergency in the country, set to last until at least April 30, according to news reports.

The prime ministers office published an emergency decree which bars reporting or spreading of information regarding COVID-19 which is untrue and may cause public fear, as well as deliberate distortion of information which causes misunderstanding and hence affects peace and order or public morals.

The decree empowers authorities to order journalists and media groups to correct reports deemed incorrect, and allows for authorities to pursue charges against journalists under the Computer Crimes Act, which allows for five-year prison penalties for violations.

Thai authorities should not use the COVID-19 emergency situation as a pretext to censor or restrict journalists or media organizations, said Shawn Crispin, CPJs senior Southeast Asia representative. Journalists serve a crucial role in keeping the public informed during health crises. They should be allowed to do their jobs without fear of reprisal.

The decree was issued under Thailands 2005 Emergency Decree on Administration in Emergency Situations.

During a press conference yesterday announcing the plan to enact emergency rule, Prayut warned journalists and social media users against disseminating false information, saying that he will use every measure of the law with firmness and resolve to deal with violations, according to an English translation of his speech, reviewed by CPJ.

Prayut also called on media outlets to check their facts with the governments newly created COVID-19 Administration Centre, according to the Bangkok Post.

Authorities have investigated and arrested social media users for criticizing the governments response to the health crisis and allegedly spreading rumors, according to local news reports.

Prayut, who controlled Thailands military junta from 2014 to 2019, was elected prime minister in March 2019. During his military rule, CPJ documented Thai authorities use of national security laws and military orders to restrict the press. Following his election, CPJ sent a letter to Prayut calling on him to restore press freedom in the transition to civilian leadership.
London: The British government is just "days" away from releasing 3.5 million self-administered finger-prick tests that could prove a game-changer in easing the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

The tests will probably be stocked in retailers such as the major pharmacy chain Boots and available to order online via Amazon, however the first stage of the rollout will be reserved for doctors, nurses and other essential workers.

The public will eventually be able to take the test at home to determine whether they have had coronavirus and developed antibodies, meaning they can avoid lockdowns and go back to work because they are immune and cannot infect others.

Australia will get similar finger-prick testing kits soon, with three just approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration and federal Health Minister Greg Hunt announcing on Tuesday they would soon be rolled out to GP clinics.
I happened to be in Florida when the corona virus crisis struck.

That offered two advantages.

One was that Florida has a much lower rate of incidence than New Jersey. The other was that I had a ringside seat for a confrontation that brought to mind a classic episode in the career of our own Chris Christie.

That occurred when Floridas former governor and current U.S. senator, Rick Scott, told people to Get off the beach because of the virus. Many commentators compared that statement to the Get the hell off the beach proclamation our former governor made as Tropical Storm Irene approached in 2011.

Theres certainly a valid comparison. But it is not favorable to either ex-governor.

In Christies case, he shut down all southbound traffic on the Friday evening before the storm hit - forgetting about the many commuters among the million-plus people who live year-round in Ocean and Monmouth counties. (As this Wikipedia page points out, when Hurricane Sandy hit the following year many people refused to evacuate because of the inaccurate warnings about Irene.)

I heard from plenty of irate drivers who were shunted into traffic jams on two-lane roads. I also heard from some Shore residents who were so panicked that they moved to hotels further inland. That put them at Ground Zero for Irene, which largely spared the Shore but caused catastrophic flooding inland.

It was a major screw-up. But the many people around the country who viewed the viral video clip proclaimed him a hero. A politician can rarely go wrong by over-reacting to a threat.

It was much the same in Florida after a video clip of spring-breakers going wild on a beach went viral last week. Many people called for the current governor, Ron DeSantis, to shut down all the beaches in the state.

The governor responded by pointing out that those beaches occupied by the spring-breakers were just small strips of sand in a state that has a coastline stretching through two time zones. The states role would be limited to breaking up parties of more than 10 people, he said.

Were certainly not seeing big crowds on all the beaches, he said in a TV interview. We seeing many families and small groups.

That was my observation as well. At every beach I visited I saw small parties spaced comfortably apart. They were getting fresh air and soaking up sunshine rich in vitamin D. That vitamin strengthens the immune system against viruses, according to the National Institutes for Health.

As for the risks, I saw one really nasty flying beach umbrella. But that was it.

Things didnt look a lot different when I came back to my home in Bay Head, where Christie now has a summer place. The ocean block was packed with people walking and biking in the sun. That executive order recently issued by Gov. Phil Murphy says people should stay indoors. But it wisely makes an exception for exercise, said a Republican state senator from Monmouth County.

A typical beach in Florida of the sort that Governor Rick DeSantis declined to order closed. Note how few people are on the beach and how widely spaced they are.

You have to have some faith in the intelligence of the people of New Jersey to not touch things other people are touching, said Declan OScanlon of Little Silver. You dont need to be locked in your house. If you want to do this for several weeks, then people cant be locked up or theyd go crazy.

The several weeks in question fit in with President Donald Trumps recent statement that he would like to see the federal restrictions lifted by Easter, which is on April 12.

I think its absolutely possible, Trump said the other day. Now, people are going to have to practice all of the social distancing and things were doing now. But we have to get our country back to work.

We certainly have to do so at some point. On that point, Trump is much more like Floridas governor than its former governor. DiSantis argued from the beginning that the impact was mostly in the Miami area. Therefore decisions were best made locally, he said.

Trump is now making a parallel argument, and OScanlon said it makes sense. He noted that Murphy and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo have already indicated they will keep tougher restrictions in place in the two states that have the highest number of cases.

They should be free to do so, OScanlon said, but at some point we have to get back to business.

There are two things that are vital: Stay closed long enough to break the back of the virus. And make sure we get business moving as quickly as possible after thats done, OScanlon said.

As for that other ex-governor given to bold pronouncements that affect the innocent as well as the guilty, Bay Head has issued a state-of-emergency decree asking the owners of second homes not to visit until this crisis is over.

So hed better stay the hell off the beach.

ADD - NO ONE KNOWS THE EXTENT OF THE THREAT:

My fellow members of the media have publicized many estimates of mortality for which we dont yet have evidence, says this one Stanford University specialist with expertise in that area. Until we get a full picture of how many people have had coronavirus we have no way of knowing what percentage of them die from it.

This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror  and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.

Read the whole thing. The math is somewhat complicated, but it boils down to basic division: You cant discern a percentage unless you have both a numerator and denominator. And until a lot more testing is done, we wont know the denominator.

BELOW: Not all is darkness and gloom in Florida. Jersey guy Kenny Kooyenga surfing in a photo by Jersey guy Mike Vuocolo in Melbourne Beach.
The United Nations has condemned the terrorist attack on a Gurudwara in Kabul that killed at least 25 people, with the UN chief calling for perpetrators of such crimes to be held accountable and the world body emphasising that there can be no justification for the killing of civilians at a religious house.

At least 25 worshippers were killed and eight others injured when a heavily armed suicide bomber stormed his way into a prominent Gurudwara on Wednesday in the heart of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, in one of the deadliest attacks on the minority Sikh community in the strife-torn country.

The Islamic State (IS) terror group, which has targeted Sikhs before in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack on the Guridwara in Shor Bazar area at about 07:45 (local time) as 150 worshippers were inside the building.

The Secretary-General condemns the attack... in Kabul on a Sikh-Hindu temple in which dozens of civilians were killed and injured. He expresses his deepest sympathies to the families of the victims and wishes a speedy recovery to those injured, Secretary General Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement on Wednesday.

It added that the Secretary-General reiterates that attacks against civilians are unacceptable and those who carry out such crimes must be held accountable.

"The United Nations stands in solidarity with the people and the Government of Afghanistan and will continue supporting efforts to bring peace to their country, the statement said.

In a tweet, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said it is "outraged" by the attack.

"There can be no justification for the killing of civilians at a religious house. Our condolences to the victims and their families."



High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) Miguel Angel Moratinos expressed his "dismay" at the terrorist attack at the Gurudwara, which killed 25 victims, including a child.

The "despicable attack comes at a time when the world is facing a pandemic which adversely impacts all of us, requiring us to stand together as "One Humanit', Moratinos said.

He stressed that attacks targeting sacred sites and worshippers are intolerable and have to stop. Recalling the UN Plan of Action to Safeguard Religious Sites, he called on all governments and relevant stakeholders to support the implementation of the plan to guarantee the sanctity of worship places and the safety of worshipers.

Moratinos said the latest attack adds to an expanding number of attacks targeting various faith communities around the world. He reiterated that such outrageous acts of terror should not dissuade us from working together to promote solidarity, respect, and peace globally.

On behalf of the UNAOC, the High Representative expressed his condolences to the victims' families and conveys his solidarity to the people and the Government of Afghanistan.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
SPRINGFIELD  Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker is on a pace to set a modern-day record for issuing the most executive orders by an Illinois governor.

Since 1999, which is as far back as the executive orders page of the governors website goes, the most executive orders any governor issued in a single year was 20. That mark was set by Gov. Pat Quinn in 2009. The average from 1999 through 2019 was 11.2 executive orders per year.

But in just the first three months of this year, Pritzker has already issued 12 executive orders, including 10 since he declared a public health disaster on March 9 due to the outbreak of the coronavirus disease, COVID-19.

Some of the orders Pritzker has issued deal with multiple, unrelated issues. On Tuesday, for example, he issued an order to expand the states health care workforce by suspending portions of a law requiring former or retired certified nursing assistants to undergo background and fingerprint checks in order to practice again and limiting them to just three months under a temporary license while the background checks are being completed. Under the order they may now work for six months on a temporary license.

That same order, however, also contained a provision suspending a law requiring the Department of Juvenile Justice to give local prosecutors at least 30 days advance notice before releasing an offender from custody. And it contained another provision suspending a portion of the Coal Mining Act that requires the Miners Examining Board to conduct examinations at least once a month.

Some of the executive orders have made headlines, such as the one he issued Friday, March 20,the stay-at-home order directing people essentially to shelter in place except for limited purposes, imposing social distancing rules and ordering certain non-essential businesses to close. That order also contained a provision halting residential evictions throughout the state for as long as the disaster proclamation remains in effect.

The following Monday, March 23, he issued a follow-up order amending the March 20 order to clarify that people could leave their homes to work for or obtain human services provided through the Department of Human Services, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services or Medicaid.

That order also suspended a law requiring the Illinois Department of Corrections to provide relevant local prosecutors with 14 days advance notice of an inmate being given early release.

On March 19, he issued an order requiring health insurance companies to cover telehealth services. That order also allowed for the reinstatement of medical licenses for practitioners whose licenses have been lapsed or inactive for less than three years, as long as they meet certain conditions.

The first executive order Pritzker issued after the disaster proclamation came on Thursday, March 12, when he extended the deadline for people to submit cannabis license applications for craft growers, infusers or transporters. That deadline was moved back to March 30 instead of March 16.

A full list of all executive orders dating back to 1999 is available on the governors office website.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought India, along with the rest of the world, to a standstill. Thirty-two states and Union Territories in India are under lockdown as per Government orders in a bid to check the spread of the virus infection. Citizens have been asked to stay indoors, while organisations have been asked to allow their employees to work from home (WFH).

For the first time, the industry is faced with an unprecedented situation where the entire workforce is working from home. Some have had the experience of working from home for a day or two while unwell, but rarely has one been faced with the WHF situation over a sustained period of time. This new work reality is going to hit people in the coming days more as there is no abatement in the Covid-19 spread situation.

The most important aspect for every individual and company is to keep productivity levels up while maintaining quality and motivation. For the creative minds in advertising, who are used to working in teams, churning out campaigns remotely is a different ball game.

Looking at this challenge, Adgully approached some of the best creative minds in the business of advertising to join us in the latest Twitter chat  Managing Creativity while Working from Home.

Join us in the conversation on Friday, 27th March between 3 pm to 4 pm by following us on @adgully. Experts in the panel will share their candid stories on the challenges posed in a work from home environment.

Joinin us for the conversation will be:

Moderator - Naila Patel, Executive Creative Director, Mirum India (@nailamateen)

Ashish Khazanchi, Managing Partner, Enormous Brands (@trrippp)

Satbir Singh, Founder & Chief Creative Officer, Thinkstr (@theSatbir)

Senthil Kumar, Chief Creative Officer, Wunderman Thompson (@senthilspeaks)

Sumanto Chattopadhyay, Chairman and Chief Creative Officer, 82.5 Communications (@Sumchat)

Swati Bhattarcharya, Chief Creative Officer, FCB Ulka (@FcbUlka)

Also Read:

TwitterChat: Being responsible in times of Covid-19, ad honchos show the way

This is how top ad & communications honchos plan to spend their Curfew Sunday
Iraq's military on Thursday said at least two rockets hit inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, the seat of Iraq's government and home to the US Embassy, in the first attack following a brief lull in violence from earlier this month.

The two projectiles struck near the Baghdad Operations Command, which coordinates Iraq's police and military forces, the military statement said. The command center is a few hundred meters away from the US Embassy, which is a regular target of rocket attacks.

There were no casualties, said an Iraqi security official who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

The attack occurred as a state-imposed curfew to contain the spread of the new coronavirus continued for a second week. The effective lockdown has prohibited large public gatherings and shuttered all but essential businesses such as pharmacies and supermarkets.

The statement said the rockets were launched from the al-Nahda area of Baghdad.

It was the latest rocket attack to strike the Green Zone since three rockets hit an area near the embassy last Tuesday. That attack was the fourth to target US interests in Iraq in the span of a week following assaults on the Basmaya training camp and two separate attacks on Camp Taji. Both bases are near the Iraqi capital.

The first attack on Camp Taji killed three coalition servicemen including two Americans. That prompted US airstrikes against what US officials said were mainly weapons facilities belonging to Kataib Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Iraqi militia group believed to be responsible for the attack.

However, Iraq's military said those airstrikes killed five security force members and a civilian, while wounding five fighters from the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella organization including an array of Iraqi militias, including some Iran-backed groups.

Iran-backed Iraqi militias have vowed revenge for the attacks.

The attacks come as the US-led coalition has announced plans to draw down its presence from bases across Iraq and consolidate in Baghdad and Ain al-Asad in western Iraq. The plan was in the works since late last year, a senior coalition military official said last week, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Troops have already pulled out from al-Qaim, on the border with Syria. France said on Wednesday that it will pull out its military forces from Iraq, citing the need for French forces to help fight the new coronavirus at home.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A woman aged in her 70s is accused of punching an off-duty nurse in the face after deliberately coughing in her direction.

The 25-year-old nursing assistant was in her uniform when she visited a takeaway shop on the Great Western Highway in Blackheath, north-west of Sydney, on Tuesday.

Police said an elderly woman entered the store about 4.30pm and began to purposely cough in the direction of the healthcare worker.

A woman aged in her 70s is accused of punching an off-duty nurse in the face after deliberately coughing in her direction (stock image)

The 25-year-old nursing assistant was in her uniform when she visited a takeaway shop on the Great Western Highway in Blackheath, north-west of Sydney, on Tuesday (stock image)

The 25-year-old woman was again confronted by the older lady when she went to leave the store.

Police said the woman verbally abused the nursing assistant and then punched her twice in the face.

After escaping the attack and leaving the store, she reported the assault to officers from Blue Mountains Police Area Command.

They are now asking for public assistance to find the elderly woman.

She is described as white, aged in her 70s and about 150cm tall with white shoulder-length hair.

Police said she was wearing beige-coloured overalls with yellow stripes, a white shirt and a silver necklace and pendant at the time of the physical altercation.

Witnesses as well as anyone who may have footage of the incident are urged to contact Katoomba Police Station or Crime Stoppers.
The COVID-19 stimulus package President Donald Trump will likely sign by the end of the week makes billions of dollars available to small businesses across the country, injecting a boost into what Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh described Thursday as the lifeblood of the American economy and a crucial piece of any recovery in the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis.

The $2.2 trillion response deal, approved unanimously by the Senate on Wednesday night, paves the way for small businesses to acquire grants and loans to cover payroll and other expenses. The bill also lets workers  including self-employed and independent workers hit by the diseases economic fallout  obtain extended and increased unemployment benefits if they are laid off or furloughed.

One of the best things that happened in the bill last night is that it reflects an understanding in Washington about the importance of small business in dealing with this crisis, and promoting a recovering and coming out the other side, Warren said Thursday on a conference call with reporters and nearly 1,000 small business owners. This is an unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis. Everyone is working in good faith to try to both respond to the health needs of people across this country and to cushion the economic blow from the coronavirus.

Warren and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said that once the historic package is signed by the president, federal agencies and state governments must coordinate quickly to help reboot the economy and keep the public informed.

This is going to take a few weeks, Walsh said, noting the last two weeks of businesses shuttering and consumers staying at home to help prevent spreading COVID-19 already felt like a lengthy period. A lot of the concerns and fears that businesses and individuals have were addressed in this legislation. Were going to continue to work with businesses to help you move through this very difficult time.

$10,000 advances on SBA loans

Warren noted that the stimulus package makes $10 billion available to provide grants in the form of $10,000 advances to small businesses who apply for a Small Business Administration economic injury disaster loan. The advances should come within just three days of applying, Warren said.

Businesses need not repay the advances, even if applicants are eventually denied a loan. Small businesses, private nonprofits, sole proprietorships, independent contractors, tribal businesses and co-ops are eligible.

The bill also authorizes more banks and financial institutions to provide SBA loans, so most SBA members can apply through their current institution.

$17 billion for small business and economic development loans

The package provides $17 billion for immediate relief for small businesses that have existing SBA loans, including 7(a) loans for financial assistance and 504 loans for economic development.

The SBA will cover all loan payments for existing borrowers, including principle and interest, for six months, Warren said. There is also a six-month window after the bill is signed when small businesses can get protection on payments and forgiveness on the loans.

The bill also waives fees for veteran small business owners and their spouses who take out 7(a) express loans, which Warren described as a permanent fix.

Sign up for free text messages about important updates on coronavirus in Massachusetts

$350 billion for no-fee loans up to $10 million

For businesses seeking assistance outside the SBA, the stimulus package creates a new $350 program offering small businesses no-fee loans up to $10 million.

Warren said businesses can borrow up to 125% of average payroll costs over eight weeks, using the money to support payroll plus any other expenses with the 25% boost. These loans are administered directly by banks, and underwriting will essentially be waived; businesses must simply demonstrate that they were a viable business in early February and show their payroll costs before layoffs across the country began, Warren said.

Additionally, principal and interest payments are deferred for a year, and if businesses can rehire employees and get their payroll back up to where it was in early February, then the loans can be waived in part or in their entirety, Warren said.

Some businesses are operational, some are only in a skeleton manner, some are entirely closed, Warren said. The hope is that the money will both help cushion during this time of crisis and mean that we get these small businesses to survive so that they will be there to hire people and help us create a stronger recovery.

Expanded unemployment package

Unemployment insurance will see both a bump in payments and an expansion to cover pretty much everyone who was out there working in one form or another when this crisis hit, Warren said.

Those who work at for-profit businesses, nonprofits and others that typically have not been eligible for unemployment including part-time workers, gig workers and self-employed individuals will be able to apply.

The package allows furloughed workers to receive their salaries for four months, and adds $600 on top of what state unemployment departments currently provide to impacted workers.

In Massachusetts, unemployment will amount to 100% income replacement for the average worker, Warren said. For workers who earn less than the median income, the additional $600 will mean that for many of them, theyre earning 100% above of what they were earning before they were laid off," she said.

Warren added that once the bill is signed, the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies will work with state governments, banks and other financial institutions to get procedures set up as quickly as possible to expand unemployment."

Everyone is aimed at getting this money into peoples hands as quickly as possible, she said.

Personal checks for taxpayers

Warren noted that taxpayers who filed electronically will receive direct deposit payments approved as part of the stimulus; others will receive paper checks in the mail.

Most taxpayers who earn less than $75,000 will receive at least $1,200 and $500 for each child in the coming weeks, with some experts saying to look for checks by May. Married taxpayers filing jointly and earning less than $150,000 will receive $2,400 and $500 for each child.

The checks decrease incrementally, at 5%, or $5 for every additional $100 in income, above the thresholds. The decreases begin at $75,000 for single filers; $112,500 for heads of household and $150,000 for married couples filing jointly. The checks phase out entirely for single taxpayers who earn $99,000 and have no children and $198,000 for married couples with no children.

The mayor noted Boston.gov/coronavirus has a data dashboard and information available for residents and business owners, including directories of businesses and restaurants open for delivery or takeout.

Walsh said the city is providing one-on-one technical assistance and other support to businesses, and recently created a guidebook for establishments looking to provide takeout and delivery only.

Its a challenging time, he said. You put your whole life savings into keeping a business open. Everyones working as hard and fast as we can to create opportunities to make sure you stay successful and stay open.

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The Ministry of Health Wednesday announced 55 new COVID-19 cases in Morocco.

The total number of people infected in the North African country increases to 225 as of Wednesday 6 p.m. with around 14 patients being in critical condition.

The ministry also announced the recovery of a 69-year-old patient from Casablanca, bringing the number of recoveries so far to seven.

Fatalities, meanwhile, have also increased to six after the death of a 65-year-old Moroccan man from Meknes, who was suffering from a chronic illness.

The percentage of people infected locally increases by the day and stands now at 49%, an increase of 2% compared to the percentage disclosed the previous day.

The past two days were marked by a strong progression of the virus, with the record of 55 new cases each day.

The ministry revealed that coronavirus primarily affects people aged 51 and up, and that no cases among people aged 5 to 15 have been recorded. In the under 5 age group, the percentage is of 1.1%.

The Minister of Equipment and Transport, Abdelkader Amara, who tested positive after a trip overseas was confined home, but his condition deteriorated and he was admitted to hospital Tuesday.

The Moroccan Health Ministry also talked about the use of anti-malaria medications, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, as treatment options for COVID-19, saying it allowed, earlier this week, health facilities to use the medication as potential treatment for the virus.

The ministry said that many countries have started treating coronavirus patients with chloroquine, which has promising effects. Hydroxychloroquine is also now used in several countries, the ministry said.

The health department warned that Chloroquine should only be used under medical supervision. Doctors are very familiar with the medicine, as it is used for several illnesses.

Morocco has a sufficient stock of chloroquine, both locally-produced and imported, assured the ministry.

Authorities have supplied all university, regional, and provincial hospitals with the drug.

Patients who suffer from a chronic illness that requires a medicine containing the chloroquine substance can receive the drug for free after presenting their medical files.

Globally, Coronavirus Cases numbered 468,012, while deaths reached 21,180.
An Australian man who has been in lockdown in China has issued a warning to Australians as he is allowed outside for the first time in ten weeks.

Tim McLean, from Ulladulla on the New South Wales south coast, was confined to his small apartment in Ezhou in Hubei after authorities put the region into lockdown earlier this year.

Hubei province in China is ground zero for the COVID-19 outbreak which has now spread across the globe and infected more than 400,000 people.

The 52-year-old moved to the province last year to be with his partner Qiong Xu just months before the outbreak began.

An Australian man issued a stark warning from his home in the Hubei province, China

In a video uploaded to YouTube on Friday, Mr McLean revealed the lockdown restrictions were being eased and he and Ms Xu were allowed outside for their first supermarket shop in two months.

'I've unfortunately been through this for the last two-and-a-half months and you guys are unfortunately just going into it,' Mr McLean said.

He said he was given a pass which allowed him out of lockdown for one hour a day.

In the footage crowds can be seen lining up outside the supermarket in the city as officials check their temperature with thermal scanners.

Inside the supermarket the checkout workers can be seen wearing full protective hygiene gear including facemasks, gloves, and medical gowns.

Despite the precautions, Mr McLean said he did not witness any panic-buying.

'Look no chaos,' he can be heard saying on the video, adding that Australians should take note.

Tim McLean, from Ulladulla on the New South Wales south coast, was confined to his small apartment in Ezhou in Hubei after authorities put the region into lockdown earlier this year

Mr McLean assured people that, as someone who had been through the coronavirus lockdowns, they should remain calm.

'Relax, prepare, keep yourself busy, and keep positive.'

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

'If I can survive 100 metres from a hospital full of coronavirus victims anybody can, just take precautions,' Mr McLean said.

Food had been delivered to Mr McLean and Ms Xu through a network of shops organised by the Chinese government while they were confined to their apartment.

He has previously said Chinese authorities severe lockdown restrictions were effective at halting the spread of the virus.

'Out of 30million people the numbers are pretty low. The government's extraordinary measures with this have been really effective. We're in lockdown to stop other people getting to us and us getting to other people,' he said.

In Australia, the federal government on Monday imposed lockdown restrictions forcing businesses such as restaurants, pubs, gyms and cinemas to close.

They have also brought in measures to limit social gatherings, close borders, and quarantine people returning from overseas.

Packs of sanitiser wipes can be seen in the Chinese supoermarket as checkout workers wear full protective gear
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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to hold a press conference on the coronavirus outbreak that has infected more than a half million people across the world and 21,300 in the city.

The city is the epicenter of the major outbreak in the state, where cases have been doubling every three days and now account for more than half of all U.S. cases.

On Wednesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he plans to close some streets in the city and may close playgrounds and parks to contain the coronavirus outbreak. Later in the day, de Blasio told reporters that he will consider closing the city's parks if people didn't practice proper social distancing and would announce a decision by Saturday.

De Blasio said on Tuesday that he plans to release about 300 nonviolent inmates from Rikers Island after the city's first prisoner tested positive for the coronavirus.

The coronavirus has infected at least 79,785 people in the U.S. and had killed at least 1,135 people, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Read CNBC's live updates to see the latest news on the COVID-19 outbreak.
The travel industry is (temporarily) screwed. But not all airports are shutting at the same rate. This means awkward times where some flights are able to leave but not stopover.

Qantas has a creative solution. Instead of cancelling flights between March the 24th (the date Singapore Changi Airport shut its doors to transiting passenger) and March the 27th (the day of Qantas last scheduled Sydney  Singapore  London flight), they have found a way out of the jam.

As reported by CNN Travel, By a strange twist of fate, Qantas will  for a matter of days  be running the first-ever A380 passenger flight between Australia and London.

CNN Travel reports this switcheroo on the kangaroo came about as Qantas flagship QF1 Kangaroo Route from Sydney to London via Singapore still had a few days flights to run when Singapore Changi Airport decided to ban transiting.

So, in a switcheroo on the Kangaroo Route, Qantas will now be doing a 90-minute fuel stop at Darwin in Australias Northern Territory instead, before flying the 16-plus hours on to London, CNN Travel wrote.

Its the first time that Darwin and London will be linked by a direct service  but not the first time Darwins been a stop on this prestigious route.

Funnily enough, this is a trip down memory lane, as Darwin was a stop on the original Kangaroo Route in the 1930s, which took 10 stops a and 37 days  not so much a red-eye as a red month (and even then only the rich and famous could afford it).

Why Darwin, you might ask? Surely theres more to it than nostalgia. Youd be right: Darwin is on the most direct path from Sydney to London, making it better positioned for the quick stopover than any other Aussie city, before the 17-hour flight onwards to London.

Qantas last fight on the returning QF2 flight from London to Sydney via Darwin will take off March 27, landing the next day, CNN Travel reports. The Asia-Pacific travel focussed website then added that, due to this months changes, Qantas is having to say a premature adieu to the superjumbo.

Qantas is grounding all 150 of its planes until at least the end of May, including their 12 A380s. However, with Airbus ceasing production of the superjumbo by 2021, and airlines already retiring those in their fleet, it could well be the last chance for passengers to ride in one of Qantas red-tailed A380s, CNN Travel wrote, crediting aviation website One Mile At A Time with noting the insight.

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A six year-old boy who was seriously injured when he was thrown from the 10th floor of London's Tate Modern art gallery is now managing to sit up, his family have said.

The French infant is "slowly but surely continuing to progress, his relatives revealed, after he was attacked by autistic teenager Jonty Bravery at the tourist attraction on August 4.

In a post on a GoFundMe page, which has raised more than 199,000 for the boy's treatment and rehabilitation, his family said their smiling little boy is on the mend.

They said: "He has gained muscle tone and regained enough strength to manage to sit longer in a sitting position and straighter in his chair without the help of his corset.

Jonty Bravery pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to attempted murder over the incident at the Tate Modern / PA

The post continued: "He can now eat all soft foods and can almost eat all of his meals on his own, holding his spoon himself with his right hand.

"As he has more strength, he also has more breath and for that reason, we understand better what he says and he manages to speak to us more.

"At last, he continues to train to open his left hand during the exercises but he now manages to move his left arm a little to the right and a little to the left, in front of him.

"Only few movements, very approximate and they exhaust him so much that he very quickly starts yawning, but for him, it's the beginning of the reconquest of his left arm!"

The family said that "after a slump", their "smiling little boy" seems to be coming back.

They also had a message for their supporters during the coronavirus pandemic.

They added: "We are very moved to see that you continue to think of our little knight in these difficult times.

"At the hospital, the situation is more complicated with the coronavirus epidemic and containment measures, but you are still there for us: how to thank you?

"Please stay safe and take care of yourself and those you love."

The boy, who can not be named, was thrown from a viewing platform at the gallery.

He suffered a bleed to the brain, fractures to his spine and broken legs and arms following the fall.

The boy was visiting the UK capital with his family at the time and spent several weeks in intensive care.
Chinese Australians are being targeted by phone and email fraudsters, with almost 100 cases of coronavirus scams reported since January 1.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission branch Scamwatch, said fraudsters are attempting to obtain personal financial information from victims by impersonating government officials and threatening them with extreme punishments if they refuse to comply.

Scamwatch warns that fake websites selling miracle cures for COVID-19 have also been on the rise.

Fraudsters are targeting Chinese Australian community with coronavirus scams as anxiety about the virus grows

Sydney's Chinatown district (pictured March 24, 2020) left deserted following government announcement to close restaurants, bars and non-essential businesses

'Understandably, people want information on the pandemic, but they should be wary of emails or text messages claiming to be from experts,' Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Deputy Chair Delia Rickard said in a statement.

'Unfortunately, scammers are using the uncertainty around COVID-19, or coronavirus, to take advantage of people.'

In some cases, phishing scams are being sent out via text message or email claiming to have vital information on the coronavirus, while in other instances callers speaking in Mandarin will threaten their victims over the phone claiming to be from Chinese authorities, the World Health Authority or the Department of Health.

'The scammer will tell their victims, usually students, that they have been involved in criminal activity, and threaten them and even their family, with criminal sanctions unless they pretend they have been kidnapped, including by taking photos of themselves bound and gagged,' Ms Rickard said.

'Scammers will then use these photos to extort money from the student's family by claiming the student has been kidnapped.'

With around 900 cases of scams targeting the Chinese community across Australia in 2019, Scamwatch said fraudsters reeled in more than $1.5 million from their victims.

Sydney's Chinatown (pictured March, 24, 2020) remains a virtual ghost town with all non-essential travel banned in Australia to combat the spread of the deadly coronavirus

A man (pictured March 24, 2020) eats alone at an empty foodcourt in Sydney's Chinatown, after the shutdown of all non-essential services was put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus disease

'The most important thing members of the Chinese community in Australia can do to protect themselves from this scam is be aware about how it works and warn their friends and family,' Ms Rickard said.

'If you're ever called by someone making threats about arrest or deportation, it is a scam. It's very frightening to receive these calls and scammers use your fear against you so you'll send them money or participate in a bogus kidnapping.

'Don't fall for their threats. Instead, hang up the phone and report it to your local police. If you think the scammer has your bank account details, contact your bank immediately.'

If you think you may have been the victim of a scam, you should contact your bank or financial institution immediately and file a report with Scamwatch.




Trump is using President George H. Bushs 1989 Panama strategy used to remove Manuel Noriega from power and put him on trial for drug trafficking. Trump hopes to invade Venezuela and arrest its President Nicolas Maduro and other top officials for drug trafficking.

Department of Justice officials announced yesterday that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been charged with federal drug trafficking crimes as part of a far-reaching U.S. investigation involving prosecutors in New York, Washington, and Miami.

Attorney General William Barrs announcement of charges being filed against more than a dozen other current and former Venezuelan officials, including the countrys supreme court chief justice and the minister of defense, has given away President Trumps real goal. To justify the invasion of Venezuela and the potential massacre of tens of thousands so he can take their oil reserves.

Asked about the likelihood of obtaining Maduros arrest, Barr is quoted as saying

We do expect to gain control of these defendants.

This may well prove later that the AG is aware of Trumps plans to invade the South American country.

Meanwhile, our sources from Venezuela tell me they think Maduro and those indicted will wind up getting asylum in Cuba, Russia, or even China before any invasion would take place. It would mean Trump may not get the countrys oil if theres a peaceful transfer of power.

Maduro is surrounded by Cuban, not Venezuelan security because he fears being assassinated.

A peaceful transfer would also serve as a catalyst for oil to drop to as low as $12 a barrel. The prospect of all its oil coming to the market would be a disaster for oil producers worldwide but especially for the U.S. fracking industry.




Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 10:50:33|Editor: Liu

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WELLINGTON, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The man accused of the Christchurch mosque attacks admitted on Thursday charges of murder, attempted murder and terrorism in a surprise court hearing.

Brenton Tarrant, 29, appeared via video-link in the Christchurch High Court on the first day of the national lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

He admitted 51 charges of murder, 40 charges of attempted murder and a charge of engaging in a terrorist act in a closed court hearing, local media reported.

Fifty-one people died in the Christchurch mass shootings on March 15, 2019, the darkest day on New Zealand's history.

"The guilty plea today will provide some relief to the many people whose lives were shattered by what happened on March 15," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in a statement after the court hearing.

"These guilty pleas and conviction bring accountability for what happened and also save the families who lost loved ones, those who were injured, and other witnesses, the ordeal of a trial," Ardern said.

The accused pleaded not guilty to all the charges during previous hearings.

Tarrant, imprisoned at an Auckland Prison, was silent and emotionless throughout the court hearing, local media reported.
Philadelphia is intimately familiar with the detrimental effects of hospital closures following the recent shutdown of Hahnemann University Hospital. As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies, hospitals throughout the country, including Philadelphias, are staring down a financial crisis. The costs of hospital preparation, patient care, and contingency planning are beginning to add up.

Like our patients, hospitals are not immune to the effects of this crisis. The American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Nurses Association have lobbied Congress for an aid package of $100 billion, which looks like it will go through in the national stimulus deal. It is urgently necessary. Even successful hospitals have low operating margins, and many hospitals were on the brink of financial collapse even before this pandemic hit. Rural hospitals, in particular, were entering bankruptcy with alarming frequency. With health care representing one-sixth of the U.S. GDP, losing more hospitals would have wide-ranging effects throughout the whole economy, not to mention public health.

 READ MORE: Philly should reopen Hahnemann for coronavirus  and keep it open after | Opinion

Hahnemanns closure led to large-scale disruption in the health care delivery system and economy of Philadelphia: Over 2,000 jobs were lost, including about 40% of clinical employees. Over 500 residents and fellows were displaced, forced to complete training elsewhere. The job losses affected businesses that directly depend on, or support, the hospital ecosystem. The loss of safety-net hospitals disproportionately affects the health needs of those in society with the fewest resources. Out of 44 acute care hospitals in Pennsylvania, only 29 were profitable in 2018. Of the profitable hospitals, only the top six had net incomes greater than $50 million.

Despite the apparent density of hospitals in Philadelphia, much of the citys population lives in areas with high needs and disparities in access. Among the 47 zip codes in Philadelphia County, 35 fall within the top two highest quintiles for need, according to the Community Needs Index, a measure of barriers to care. Losing Hahnemann severely disrupted access to care for these vulnerable populations. The possibility of additional hospital closures in Philadelphia or the surrounding rural areas poses a grave threat to our communities, both during the pandemic and in its aftermath as we refocus on subacute and chronic care needs.

Hospitals within Pennsylvania and across the country face a significant financial burden that preceded, and will outlive, their emergency COVID-19 response. Many care-related costs are not reimbursable under current payment mechanisms, legislation so far has not covered preparatory expenses, and there is significant lost revenue from canceled elective outpatient procedures and appointments. Nationally, outpatient services account for $472 billion dollars in annual net revenue, or $1.85 billion dollars per day of operation. Some regions like New York, California, and Washington State are already suspending outpatient operations to maximize capacity for COVID-19 patients. These service suspensions will save lives, but they will come at great cost to our hospitals. Pennsylvania and other states will undoubtedly experience their own surges in the coming weeks.

Based on disease modeling simulations, patient surges above the capacity of baseline ICU care could be expected to last eight to 14 weeks; loss of outpatient revenue for this long could total $130 billion. Hospitals may need up to 7.3 billion respirator masks at a cost of approximately $11.4 billion. Insufficient protection means higher staffing costs to replace infected or quarantined workers. Stand-up testing centers operating nationwide screenings will cost millions of dollars per day. Additional costs include hospital floor reconfigurations, extra ventilator procurement, mobile treatment and quarantine facilities, telehealth upgrades, laboratory expansions, enhanced sanitation procedures, and staff/community education.

 READ MORE: Coronavirus hasnt hit rural Pennsylvania hard yet, but its already causing problems

This pandemic response will require coordinated, proactive, and expensive preparation by hospitals. Congressional action is key to provide hospitals with the reassurance that patient-focused planning can continue without concern for financial solvency. Hospitals will need more than $100 billion to cover lost revenue. Loans can also be provided to satisfy shorter-term payroll obligations and ensure the liquidity necessary to prepare. Additional legislative options to quickly free up extra dollars include suspending upcoming statutory Medicare and Medicaid payment cuts. State and local governments can do their part by exploring the conversion of empty dormitories, conference centers, or hotels to quarantine or care facilities for nearby hospitals.

Recent history has demonstrated the devastating effects that hospital closures can have on their surrounding communities, especially here in Philadelphia. It is incumbent on our leaders in Washington to provide the fiscal support necessary for hospitals to survive this crisis. The future cost of delays in funding, both in lives and hospitals lost, could dwarf the aid needed today.

Joseph Cavallo is a fellow in radiology at the Yale School of Medicine, and a student at the Yale School of Management. @JCavallo972 Benjamin Albright is an obstetrics and gynecology resident at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. @BenAlbrightMD Howard P. Forman is a professor of public health, management, economics, and radiology at Yale. @TheHowie
CLEVELAND, Ohio  The FBI on Thursday warned of an increase in scams related to the coronavirus pandemic.

Scammers, in some cases, pretended to be from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from fake charities seeking to help people suffering during the pandemic and from people offering quick access to coronavirus economic stimulus checks.

Cleveland FBI spokeswoman Vicki Anderson said in a statement that along with proper hygiene to protect against the spread of coronavirus that people should also practice cyber hygiene.

The statement said to no open attachments or links in emails from unrecognized senders, dont provide personal information like social security numbers and financial information during robocalls or in emails and to verify web addresses of legitimate websites.

Some of the scams include:

Fake CDC emails

Be wary of emails that claim they are from the CDC or other organizations claiming to be sharing coronavirus information, including websites and apps claiming to track Covid-19 cases worldwide.

The emails contain links that infect computers with malware that hackers use to steal personal information, or lock computers and demand ransom payments in exchange for unlocking the computers.

Phishing emails

Fake emails are sent to people asking them to verify personal information to receive an economic stimulus check from the government. No government agencies are sending unsolicited emails seeking private information, the FBI said.

Other emails where scammer target peoples personal information include solicitations of money for fake charities, for general financial relief, airline refunds, fake cures and vaccines, fake testing and counterfeit treatments and equipment.

Fake protective gear

The FBI also warned people to be wary of anyone claiming to sell products that prevent, treat, diagnose or cure Covid-19. Counterfeit personal protective equipment, including N95 masks, goggles, face shields, protective gowns and gloves.

The FBI said to use these websites for guidance and reporting counterfeit equipment:

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Oakville, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - Cardiol Therapeutics Inc. (TSX: CRDL) (OTCQX: CRTPF) ("Cardiol" or the "Company"), a leader in the production of pharmaceutical cannabidiol (CBD) and the development of innovative cannabidiol medicines for heart disease, today filed its audited Year-end Financial Statements and Management's Discussion and Analysis for the year ended December 31, 2019. Both are available under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on the Company's website at www.cardiolrx.com.

"2019 was a pivotal year for Cardiol Therapeutics," stated David Elsley, President and CEO. "We attracted industry-leading talent to our management team, world class stewardship and experience to our Board of Directors, and global thought leaders in cardiology to the Steering Committee for our Phase 2 international trial in acute myocarditis. We also established the commercial infrastructure and pharmaceutical supply chain necessary to support the commercial launch of the purest cannabidiol in the world - a product specifically formulated for consistency, stability, and purity to meet the needs of millions of people who should not be exposed to THC.

The Company's most significant achievement to date followed our 2019 fiscal year end with the signing of an exclusive supplier agreement with Canada's largest pharmacy retailer, Shoppers Drug Mart, to supply our pharmaceutical cannabidiol formulation to patients nationwide. Formulated purely for medical purposes and manufactured under the most stringent quality standards set by the pharmaceutical industry, the commercialization of our pharmaceutical high purity, THC free (<5ppm) cannabidiol oil aims to address a growing market need for patients who should not be exposed to THC.

2020 is expected to witness significant growth for Cardiol, as the Company builds brand awareness of the purest pharmaceutical cannabidiol formulation in the world with its commercial launch in Canada's $1.2 billion medicinal cannabinoids market, the development of plans for expansion into Europe and Latin America, and the initiation of its international trial in patients with acute myocarditis, an inflammatory form of heart failure that represents a leading cause of sudden cardiac death in children and young adults. This international study is being planned at world-leading heart institutes, including the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, the Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center, the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and Charite Hospital Berlin.

Story continues

Highlights during the 2019 Fiscal Period

The appointment of Mr. Thomas Moffatt, BBA, as Chief Commercial Officer. Mr. Moffatt is a senior operations and retailing executive with an extensive background in the pharmacy retail space. Mr. Moffatt spent more than 20 years with Shoppers Drug Mart ("Shoppers") where, as National Vice-President Operations and Strategy, he led the repositioning of Shoppers in the Canadian market. Mr. Moffatt was most recently the Chief Operating Officer and Vice-President, Operations at Rx Drug Mart Inc., where he was responsible for the growth, marketing and development of all operations for more than 45 stores, including marketing, personnel and strategic activities.

The appointment of Andrea B. Parker, MSc, PhD, as Director of Clinical Affairs. Dr. Parker is a Clinical Epidemiologist with more than 30 years' experience in clinical trials design, management, and execution in industry and academic settings. She was involved in the organization and execution of many large-scale international clinical trials, specializing in cardiovascular disease, pain management, and imaging techniques and is the former Chief Scientific Officer at Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, University Health Network. Dr. Parker holds a MSc in Clinical Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health and a PhD in Medical Sciences from the University of Toronto.

The completion of the manufacturing scale-up for commercialization of the Company's CardiolRx 100 cannabidiol formulation. CardiolRx 100 (100 mg/mL CBD with 3,000 mg of cannabidiol per bottle) is designed to be the safest and most consistent high concentration cannabidiol formulation available to Canadians that is THC free (<5ppm). It is pharmaceutically produced in a Health Canada approved, FDA registered and inspected, cGMP facility.

The formation of a Clinical Steering Committee, comprising world-renowned key opinion leaders in acute myocarditis from North America and Europe, for a Phase 2 international trial in acute myocarditis using the Company's CardiolRx 100 cannabidiol formulation.

The appointment of Mr. Colin Stott to Cardiol's Board of Directors. Mr. Stott is the former Scientific Affairs Director, International and R&D Operations Director for GW Pharmaceuticals plc, a world leader in the development of cannabinoid therapeutics that created Epidiolex, the first FDA-approved cannabidiol therapy for use as an orphan drug in the treatment of rare forms of paediatric epilepsy.

Highlights Subsequent to Year-End

The signing of a supplier agreement to become a medical cannabidiol supplier to Shoppers, Canada's national pharmacy retailer. Under the terms of the agreement, the Company will supply Cardiol's pharmaceutical cannabidiol products to Shoppers for sale in all provinces and territories in Canada through Shoppers' online store, Medical Cannabis by Shoppers. Products will be sold initially in three dosage formats: 100mg/mL, 50mg/mL, and 25mg/mL. Shoppers also has the right to purchase all future products available from Cardiol's product line, subject to any and all regulations.

The receipt of a No Objection Letter from Health Canada to conduct a Phase 1 study of the Company's pharmaceutically produced high concentration, pure cannabidiol formulation. The Company plans to initiate the study in Q2, 2020. The Phase 1 study is designed to measure the pharmacokinetics (blood levels of drug) following single and multiple doses of the Company's extra strength 100mg/mL concentration pharmaceutical cannabidiol formulation in up to up to 55 healthy subjects, both in the fasting and fed states. The study will also measure standard safety parameters at escalating doses to help select the optimal dosing levels for the Company's planned international Phase 2 study in acute myocarditis later this year.

Outlook for 2020

The Corporation expects that its current working capital will be sufficient to fund operations and capital requirements through March 31, 2021, notwithstanding its plans to generate revenues in the Canadian and international markets.

During the remainder of 2020, Cardiol expects the following catalysts for growth:

The commercial launch throughout Canada of the Company's pharmaceutical cannabidiol, which is expected to set a new industry standard for product purity and consistency. The initiation of a clinical trial program to begin in H2 2020, designed to demonstrate impact of the Company's proprietary pharmaceutical cannabidiol formulation on acute myocarditis. The development of global expansion plans to support the commercialization of CardiolRx pharmaceutical cannabidiol in Europe and Latin America.

About Cardiol Therapeutics

Cardiol Therapeutics Inc. (TSX: CRDL) (OTCQX: CRTPF) is focused on producing pharmaceutical cannabidiol (CBD) products and developing innovative therapies for heart diseases, including acute myocarditis and other causes of heart failure. The Company's lead product, CardiolRx, is formulated to be the most consistent cannabidiol formulation on the market. CardiolRx is pharmaceutically produced, manufactured under cGMP, and is THC free (<5 ppm). The Company also plans to commercialize CardiolRx in the billion-dollar market for medicinal cannabinoids in Canada and is pursuing distribution opportunities in Europe and Latin America.

In heart failure, Cardiol is planning an international clinical study of CardiolRx in acute myocarditis, a condition caused by inflammation in heart tissue, which remains the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in people less than 35 years of age. The Company is also developing proprietary nanotechnology to uniquely deliver pharmaceutical cannabidiol and other anti-inflammatory drugs directly to sites of inflammation in the heart associated with heart failure. Heart failure is the leading cause of death and hospitalization in North America with associated annual healthcare costs in the U.S. alone exceeding $30 billion. For further information about Cardiol Therapeutics, please visit cardiolrx.com.

For further information, please contact:

David Elsley, President & CEO +1-289-910-0850

david.elsley@cardiolrx.com

Trevor Burns, Investor Relations +1-289-910-0855

trevor.burns@cardiolrx.com

Cautionary statement regarding forward-looking information:

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, that address activities, events or developments that Cardiol Therapeutics Inc. ("Cardiol") believes, expects or anticipates will, may, could or might occur in the future are "forward- looking information". Forward-looking information is frequently identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "projects", "intends", "believes", "anticipates", "forecasts", and other similar words and phrases, including variations (and negative variations) of such words and phrases, or may be identified by statements to the effect that certain actions, events or conditions "may", "could", "should", "would", or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking information contained herein may include, but is not limited to, statements with respect to: future events; the future performance or the intended business strategy of Cardiol, including, but not limited to, the plan to commercialize CardiolRx100 and the planning of an international clinical study of CardiolRx in acute myocarditis; the potential for Cardiol's licensed drug encapsulation and delivery technologies to enhance the bioavailability of pharmaceuticals; management's expectations regarding estimated future pharmaceutical research and development opportunities, collaborations and prospects; the success and proposed timing of Cardiol's product development activities; the ability of Cardiol to develop its product candidates; Cardiol's plans to research, discover, evaluate and develop additional products; Cardiol's proposed future collaborations to advance Cardiol's lead nanoformulations into clinical development; and the potential for Cardiol's cannabinoid-based products to provide sources of future revenue. Forward-looking information contained herein reflects the current expectations or beliefs of Cardiol based on information currently available to it and is subject to a variety of known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause the actual events or results to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. These risks and uncertainties and other factors include that the success of Cardiol's product candidates will require significant capital resources and years of clinical development efforts; the results of clinical testing and trial activities of Cardiol's products; Cardiol's ability to obtain regulatory approval and market acceptance of its products; Cardiol's ability to raise capital and the availability of future financing; Cardiol's lack of operating history; unforeseeable deficiencies in the development of Cardiol's product candidates; uncertainties relating to the availability and costs of financing needed in the future for Cardiol's research and development initiatives; Cardiol's ability to manage its research, development, growth and operating expenses; the potential failure of clinical trials to demonstrate acceptable levels of safety and efficacy of Cardiol's product candidates; Cardiol's ability to retain key management and other personnel; risks related to fluctuations in medicinal cannabinoid markets in Canada and worldwide; uncertainties regarding Cardiol's ongoing collaborative and manufacturing partnerships; uncertainties regarding results of researching and developing products for human use; Cardiol competes in a highly competitive and evolving industry; Cardiol's ability to obtain and maintain current and future intellectual property protection; and other risks and uncertainties and factors. These risks, uncertainties and other factors should be considered carefully, and investors should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking information. Any forward-looking information speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, Cardiol disclaims any intent or obligation to update or revise such forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. Although Cardiol believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, they do involve certain assumptions, risks, and uncertainties and are not (and should not be considered to be) guarantees of future performance. It is important that each person reviewing this news release understands the significant risks attendant to the operations of Cardiol.

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Migrant workers from other states, who are stranded at different locations in Bengal and local people stranded in other states have become a cause of concern for chief minister Mamata Banerjee in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak.

On Thursday, Banerjee wrote to the chief ministers of 18 states, urging them to provide basic shelter, food and medicine to migrant workers from Bengal. We, in Bengal, are taking care of such stuck people in our state, wrote Banerjee.

While the state government is providing food to people stranded at bus terminus and railway stations the government has so far succeeded in sending back people only to Assam. The rest are stranded.

Around 170 labourers from Bihars Bhagalpur are stranded outside the railway station at Katwa in East Burdwan district since the movement of trains stopped.

Acting on the decision of the state government the state railway police made an attempt to send back these people in trucks but the vehicles were stopped at the Jharkhand border and sent back, said Bikash Dutta, officer-in-charge, Katwa police station.

There are many women in this group which is now dependent on supplies provided by the state administration. Please do something to reunite us with our families. We cannot live here forever, said Meena Devi, a labourer.

At Kankinara in North 24 Parganas, where the majority of labourers working in the local jute factories are from Bihar and have permanently settled down in Bengal, some are migrants. I am stranded. Luckily, I have relatives there and hence not facing many problems, said Sudharshan Shaw, a migrant.

For those who hail from Bengal, buses are being provided to take them to their home districts. A group of 52 people from Murshidabad district, who were stuck in West Midnapore were sent home on Wednesday.

State transport secretary N S Nigam said migrant labourers from Assam, hundreds of whom were stranded at Howrah station, were sent home in buses.

However, Bengalis stranded in other states are not so lucky.

Samudra Saikat Dey, a resident of Hakimpara in Siliguri, his wife and their seven-year-old daughter went to Chennai for the childs treatment. The family is now stranded in a hotel.

We are helpless. Many people in Bengal spend a lot of money and sometimes go beyond their means to come to Chennai for treatment. There are migrant labourers as well. Many hotel owners are asking people to vacate, said Dey.

Bipul Dutta, a daily wage earner from Assams Bhujai is also stranded in Chennai where he went for the treatment of his 11-year-old daughter. We have exhausted all resources and cannot sustain for long. We will die if this crisis continues, said Dutta.

On Thursday Banerjee wrote to the chief ministers of Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Delhi, Odisha, Karnataka, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Telengana, Goa, Jharkhand, Bihar, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

We have received information that many such workers who are residents of Bengal are stuck in your state too. We are getting SOS calls from them. They are generally in groups of 50 to 100 can be easily identified by the local administration, the letter said.
As the COVID-19 virus continues its relentless march across the nation, the looming crisis inside Americas jails and prisons appears to be deepening, as corrections officials dig in to prevent outbreaks in the nation's more than 6,000 prisons and jails.

So far this week, a total of 23 inmates have escaped correctional facilities in two states after at least one inmate had tested positive at each of two facilities -- and by late Wednesday a dozen remained at large, officials said.

In the past week, judges from coast to coast have ordered thousands of inmates released  both those detained before trial and convicted inmates, but calls for release -- including today from the country's top law enforcement officer -- have broadened to all medically-vulnerable inmates, as reports of medical and cleaning supplies shortages at correctional facilities nationwide climb as well.

In New York City -- Americas current epicenter of infection -- tension is building inside some units of Rikers Islands sprawling jail complex, where a sharp spike in inmates testing positive for COVID-19 this week is driving fears that the situation will bloom into the nations first major outbreak inside a correctional facility.

As of Wednesday, 75 New York City inmates have tested positive for COVID-19 and 37 city corrections staff members, up from 50 inmates and 30 staffers the previous day, city Department of Corrections officials said.

Tune into ABC at 1 p.m. ET and ABC News Live at 4 p.m. ET every weekday for special coverage of the novel coronavirus with the full ABC News team, including the latest news, context and analysis.

Outside jails, federal officials have encouraged citizens to keep at least 6 feet away from each other to better protect against the spread of the virus. Inside, however, inmates are facing crowded conditions in some city jails, including dorm-style sleeping quarters tight enough for an inmate to reach out and touch the next bed over, and in at least one instance, 29 people sharing a single toilet, according to interviews with New York City public defenders with clients behind bars, and friends and family of city inmates.

Story continues

"The conditions on Rikers were horrific and inhumane before coronavirus. That is nothing new," Scott Hechinger, a public defender in Brooklyn, told ABC News.

"The difference is those conditions have now become imminently deadly. Weve seen the hell of Rikers. We see human misery. Were all terrified, he said. "It's bad and it's only going to get worse. Every day that goes by is only setting us up for more pain and death."

MORE: Fearing outbreaks and riots, nations prison and jail wardens scramble to respond to coronavirus threat

Ive never seen anything like this'

One frustrated New York City woman whose 25-year-old boyfriend has been incarcerated at Rikers for less than a year after violating parole on an assault charge, said conditions in his unit are deteriorating. With two months left to serve and a history of asthma, her boyfriend feels like a sitting duck, she told ABC News.

When people have been taken out who were tested positive ... they just leave the mattress there and they're like, 'well, if you want to, clean it up, [and] basically leave it up to the inmates, said the woman, who requested anonymity because she said she fears retaliation against him in response to her complaints.

Theyre crammed together in one building, she said, describing dorm conditions.

PHOTO: The Rikers Island jail complex stands in New York with the Manhattan skyline in the background, June 20, 2014. (Seth Wenig/AP, FILE)

Her boyfriend was sleeping in the bunk next to somebody who's been infected, she said. And when they transferred him to another building, he was handcuffed to another guy who got tested positive, and half of them don't even know their result yet.

Over the weekend, eight inmates at Rikers Island were reportedly pepper-sprayed while trying to go to the jail medical clinic after an inmate they were housed with was removed from the area for displaying flu-like symptoms.

"I understand everybody's going to want to go to the clinic if they're worried," New York City Department of Correction press secretary Jason Kersten told ABC News on Wednesday. "But there needs to be procedures in place ... I know it's being investigated. We referred it to the investigation division right away." Still, he said, staffers "have to be careful about how people are moved in these facilities."

City corrections officials said they are doing all they can to contain the spread of the virus at Rikers Island and all city facilities.

"This is something none of us has ever faced, Kersten said. "The longer this goes on, the more staff is going to be out. And the harder you know, the harder it's going to be."

"This is really challenging, a crisis like this -- things start to fray," he continued. "It's really going to test everybody's strength and [the] ability to perform their jobs. So, I mean, he said, pausing. "I've never seen anything like this."

In terms of cleaning supplies, Kersten said city inmates have supplies to maintain good hygiene.

"Theres plenty of soap and water," he said. "We cant give them hand sanitizer because its very flammable. And it can also be used to distill their own alcohol. But its unfortunate because you want to give it to them to make them feel better."

Kersten said that reports of dangerous conditions emerging from the city's jail facilities are isolated and not representative of the entire system.

"These do not paint an accurate widespread picture of what's going on on the island," he said. "Were following very specific protocols related to containing outbreaks in jails and confined areas. Unfortunately, jail is not a good place to have something like this happen, because it's a confining place, naturally. So we're doing everything we can to separate people. People are working really hard to contain this."

One inmate at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn has tested positive for the virus and remains in isolation, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Elsewhere, two inmates at Manhattans Metropolitan Corrections Center have tested positive, a federal law enforcement sources told ABC News late Wednesday.

There are about 1.3 million people in state prisons, about three-quarters of a million in local jails and less than 200,000 in federal prisons, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

Additionally, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is currently detaining about 38,000. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions from ABC News about the agencys plans for the detainees during the pandemic or whether any detainees had yet tested positive for the coronavirus.

Some inmates released in shadow of virus

While a growing number of states have begun releasing some inmates, advocates said that more needs to be done for the vulnerable behind bars.

On Sunday, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued a consent order based on an agreement reached between the New Jersey Public Defenders Office, state Attorney Generals Office, County Prosecutors Association and American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey to release about 800 inmates serving time for low-level offenses in county jails.

According to the consent order some of the inmates may be called to return to complete their sentences after the public health emergency is over.

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff said that about 1,700 inmates  or 10% of the county jail population  has been released so far and more could be released this week.

PHOTO: Inmates John Moore, left, and Mark Garrett one of two cleaning crews at the Vanderburgh County jail clean holding cells, March 13, 2020. (Mike Lawrence/Courier & Press via USA Today Network)

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said late Wednesday that 200 additional city jail inmates are being released, in addition to the 75 that have already been released.

"That number will keep growing in the short term, with a particular focus on those who are really older, particularly over 70, and inmates who have pre-existing conditions, de Blasio said. "I think youll see substantial number of the next few days.

On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced that he has issued new recommendations to the Federal Bureau of Prisons to explore releasing certain at-risk prisoners to home confinement in order to reduce the overall prison population.

He said that of the 146,000 inmates currently serving time in federal prison facilities, one third are believed to have pre-existing medical conditions and roughly 10,000 are over the age of 60 years old.

"I don't want people to think we're doing it out of panic because we feel we've lost control," Barr told ABC News of the home confinement plan in a phone interview after a press conference on Thursday. "We haven't lost control but I'm still concerned that we keep each of these facilities from becoming vectors of infection."

High-risk inmates behind bars

On Monday, the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released interim guidance for corrections facilities  though the guidance does not address the issue of releasing some inmates to guard against the spread of the virus.

In separate guidelines issued earlier this month, the CDC identified those at higher risk for contracting the contagion: Americans 55 or older, and those with underlying health conditions.

MORE:No days off for police departments during coronavirus outbreak

Based on those guidelines, a large swath of the roughly 2.3 million Americans serving time behind bars appears to be at elevated risk of contracting COVID-19.

Among the higher-risk category of inmates are the aging  about 12% of all inmates are over 55, or more than 171,000 -- according to Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative.

A large portion of the nations prison population also suffers chronic health conditions including diabetes, high-blood pressure and heart disease. About 65% of state prisoners were smokers in 2016, and 45% of federal inmates, the last year for which data is available, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

PHOTO: Mark Garrett cleans a holding cell at the Vanderburgh County jail, March 13, 2020. (Mike Lawrence/Courier & Press via USA Today Network)

At the federal level, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators took up the call for the care of vulnerable inmates.

It is important that consistent with the law and taking into account public safety and health concerns, that the most vulnerable inmates are released or transferred to home confinement, if possible, the legislators wrote in their letter.

Two escapes, fugitives still on the loose

Fourteen inmates in Washington State escaped a correctional facility yesterday and nine female inmates, who fled a minimum-security prison in Pierre, South Dakota on Monday after being housed with an inmate that tested positive, state governor Kristi Noem said at a Tuesday press conference.

Seven of the escaped 14 in Washington were recovered by Wednesday morning, and four of the nine in South Dakota have been recaptured  but seven men and five women remained at large as of late Wednesday.

ABC News' Aaron Katersky, Lee Ferran, Bill Hutchinson and Alexander Mallin contributed to this report.

What to know about coronavirus:

How it started and how to protect yourself: coronavirus explained

What to do if you have symptoms: coronavirus symptoms

Tracking the spread in the US and Worldwide: coronavirus map

Releases, infections, fear: U.S. coronavirus crisis in jails and prisons looms originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
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Eerie images of New Zealand city streets completely empty reveal what life might look like in Australia under a stage three lockdown.

The photographs taken on the first day of New Zealand's month-long shutdown show a deserted urban landscape with no traffic, open shops or pedestrians.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered the strict draconian measures on Monday after a surge in coronavirus infections.

The country of around 4.8 million people now has a total of 283 COVID-19 cases, however no deaths have been recorded.

To initiate the unprecedented shutdown, ominous air-raid-style sirens rang out across the nation's major cities on Wednesday night warning residents to stay inside.

Photographs taken on the first day of New Zealand's month-long shutdown show a deserted urban landscape with no traffic, open shops or pedestrians

Queen Street in Auckland, New Zealand, (pictured March 26, 2020) is completely empty on first day of nationwide lockdown

A security guard (pictured March 26, 2020) stands outside the Willis Street Countdown Supermarket in Wellington, New Zealand, during the first day of the nationwide lockdown

A man wearing a mask makes his way through the normally-busy central business district (CBD) after the Level 4 lockdown came into force, in Wellington

'I wouldn't expect us to see a slowdown any sooner than 10 to 12 days... it will get worse before they will get better,' Ardern said when she declared a state of emergency on Wednesday.

'There is a lag between the transmission and the manifestation of COVID-19 symptoms.

'Over the next few weeks cases will go up, particularly as we have New Zealanders returning home (who) still represent the vast majority of cases.'

Ordering all Kiwis to stay in their homes, she warned the number of cases would soon be in the thousands if no action is taken.

'I know how hard this will be, especially for New Zealanders who face the first day unemployed and with an uncertain future,' Ardern said.

'It won't be easy, but the alternative is worse. You are not alone. You will hear us and see us daily as we guide New Zealanders through this period.'

Ordering all Kiwis to stay in their homes, Ms Ardern warned the number of cases would soon be in the thousands if no action is taken

New Zealand at midnight on March 26 imposed a four-week lockdown in a bid to smother coronavirus infection rates

An intersection in Auckland, New Zealand, which is usually full of morning commuters is deserted on first day of the mandated coronavirus shutdown (pictured March 26, 2020)

Queen Street in the CBD of Auckland, New Zealand, is seen nearly empty of people due to the COVID-19 virus lockdown (pictured March 26, 2020)

A notice board is seen in the window of a pharmacy in the normally-busy central business district (CBD) of Wellington

Australia has had 3,050 confirmed cases of coronavirus as of Friday morning, including 13 deaths

Meanwhile, Australians are currently in the midst of a level two lockdown with all travel, public gatherings and non-essential services including bars, clubs, restaurants, cinemas and gyms now closed.

However schools, public transport, takeaway food shops remain open.

'Australian governments are working together to slow the spread of coronavirus to save lives,' Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Tuesday when he announced the strict new measures.

'Every extra bit of time allows us to better prepare our health system and put measures in place to protect Australian lives.'

'We will be living with this virus for at least six months, so social distancing measures to slow this virus down must be sustainable for at least that long to protect Australian lives, allow Australia to keep functioning and keep Australians in jobs.'

A deserted State Highway One is seen in Wellington after the New Zealand government imposed a four-week lockdown

Two people practising social distancing wait for a bus in the normally-busy central business district (CBD) after the Level 4 lockdown came into force, in Wellington on Thursday

Wellington locked down: New Zealand at midnight on March 26 imposed a four-week lockdown in a bid to smother coronavirus infection rates and avoid the mass fatalities seen elsewhere in the world

A map showing how the world is reacting to coronavirus. Countries in red have announced restrictions on movement of all or most of their citizens around the clock in response to the virus. Those in amber have restricted the movement of only some citizens or for only part of the day, such as evening curfews. Those in green have either light restrictions or no restrictions on their own citizens, but may have brought in other international measures such border closures and flight bans

Countries in either partial or total lockdown 1. Italy 2. Spain 3. France 4. Germany 5. UK 6. Ireland 7. Belgium 8. Denmark 9. Austria 10. Portugal 11. Czech Republic 12. Norway 13. Poland 14. Colombia 15. El Salvador 16. Argentina 17. China 18. India 19. Sri Lanka 20. Nepal 21. Malaysia 22. Egypt 23. Turkey 24. Saudi Arabia 25. Iraq 26. Israel 27. Kuwait 28. South Africa 29. Kenya 30. Tunisia 31. Rwanda 32. Senegal 33. Madagascar 34. Australia 35. New Zealand 36. Switzerland 37. Austria 38. Luxembourg 39. Thailand 40. Ecuador 41. Greece 42. Romania 43. Philippines 44. Slovenia 45. Peru 46. Panama 47. Croatia 48. Lebanon 49. Serbia 50. Dominican Republic 51. Armenia 52. Algeria 53. San Marino 54. Lithuania 55. Morocco 56. Jordan 57. Albania 58. Cyprus 59. Republic of Moldova 60. Burkina Faso - curfew 61. Senegal - curfew 62. Ukraine 63. Venezuela 64. Georgia - partial 65. Kazakhstan - partial 66. Guadeloupe 67. Palestinian territories 68. Martinique 69. Uzbekistan - partial 70. Bangladesh 71. Democratic Republic of Congo - partial 72. Mauritius - curfew 73. Puerto Rico 74. Honduras 75. Bolivia 76. Cote d'Ivoire - curfew 77. Monaco - Curfew 78. Montenegro - partial 79. Togo - partial 80. Kyrgyzstan - partial 81. Haiti 82. Cayman Islands - partial Advertisement

But according to Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, it's only a matter of time before further restriction will be put in place.

'I'll be up front with you, there will also be a stage three,' he said.

'We need more time to get our health system ready for what's coming. Every country in the world that is running ahead of us would give anything to have had more time.'

'We don't take these actions lightly but to put it bluntly: if we don't slow this thing down, we won't just have people waiting in line for Centrelink  we'll have people waiting in line for machines to help them breathe.'

Urging the public to follow social-distancing advice and obey the current lockdown measures, he added 'there is no social occasion or celebration that's worth more than a human life.'

'We are all being asked to make sacrifices. Because if we don't, people will die,' Andrews said.

A police car patrols the streets in the normally-busy central business district (CBD) after the Level 4 lockdown came into force

Premier Daniel Andrews (pictured right) addresses the media at the State Parliament of Victoria in Melbourne on Wednesday, March 25, 2020, warning further shutdown measures are imminent, as the state's confirmed coronavirus cases jump by 55 to 466.
YEREVAN, MARCH 26, ARMENPRESS. The Ministry of Finance informs that a total of 660 million and 766 thousand drams has been donated to the Armenian government for its anti-coronavirus efforts, ARMENPRESS reports the government said.

The treasury account (900005001947) was opened on March 17th for citizens and organizations willing to make donations.

The government said a total of 2698 payments were made since.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
Investigation into alleged leader of Russias Aum Shinrikyo cell completed

 flickr.com/jpellgen

13:19 26/03/2020

MOSCOW, March 26 (RAPSI)  Probe into Mikhail Ustyantsev, an alleged organizer of a Russian cell of Aum Shinrikyo organization prohibited in Russia, has been completed, a statement of the Investigative Committees press service reads.

The case has been forwarded to a prosecutor for the indictment to be approved.

The man stands charged with creating a terrorist community, organizing activities of an organization banned in Russia.

Ustyantsev, then 46, was arrested in Russias Volgograd during a meeting aimed to involve local citizens in illegal activities of the organization and receive money from them on May 1, 2018. Several days later, he was placed in detention upon a Moscow court order.

According to investigators, the defendant was in contact with unknown Japanese leaders of Aum Shinrikyo quite a long time, prepared and held the organization members' meetings in Russian cities and coordinated fundraising and cash management from 2010 to April 2018.

In 2016, the Russian Supreme Court declared Aum Shinrikyo a terrorist organization and banned its activity in the country.

Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) was set up in 1987 by Chizuo Matsumoto (aka Shoko Asahara). It combined Buddhist and Hindu meditation practices and apocalyptic teachings and was believed to have between 30,000 and 50,000 followers, with more than 10,000 members in Russia, where Aum was engaged in missionary activity and economic enterprise. The sect was banned worldwide in 1995, with Russia leading the crackdown.

In 1994, Aum Shinrikyo members dispersed sarin gas in Matsumoto, Nagano, killing seven people. After the March '95 attack on Tokyo, police arrested about 30 of the sect leaders, some of whom, including Shoko Asahara, were sentenced to death.

Now operating under the name of Aleph, the cult is still in business and is believed to have between 1,000 and 2,000 members in Japan.




Actor Courteney Cox says she is revisiting her iconic sitcom series "Friends" during her self-quarantine period.

The 55-year-old actor, who played Monica across the hit NBC sitcom's 10 season run, told Jimmy Kimmel that she is trying to relive all the wonderful experiences she had during the making of the series.

"I keep getting asked all these questions about 'Friends'. But I don't remember even being on the show. I have such a bad memory.

"I don't even remember even being on the show. I have such a bad memory. I remember loving obviously everybody there, and having fun, and I remember certain times in my life that I was there. But I don't remember episodes. I would never pass. I fail every test," Cox said during Kimmel's "Quarantine Minilogue" series on YouTube.

"Friends", which aired from 1994 to 2004, was a phenomenon and later went on to find cult status with new audiences through TV reruns and Netflix.

The show also featured Jennifer Aniston as Rachel, Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe, Matt LeBlanc as Joey, Matthew Perry as Chandler and David Schwimmer as Ross.

During her chat with Kimmel, Cox also talked about the much-anticipated "Friends" reunion special, set up at HBO Max. The production of the special was recently suspended in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

"We were supposed to do it Monday and Tuesday of this week... We did speak with the producer one time and we had a meeting -- except for David Schwimmer, he was in New York -- so we were all in the same room which was really fun," the actor said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In times of "crisis" like this  and I question whether the Wuhan Virus rises to the level of an actual crisis, unless every flu season is to be regarded as its own "crisis"  it might seem strange to look to an old comic strip for guidance. Yet such is the loss of perspective and common sense amid the current panic, and so frightening the assumption of powers by state and federal governments we the people never granted them, that it might be helpful to remember "The Case of the Poisoned Beans" from the old Fearless Fosdick strip.

You don't remember Fearless Fosdick? That might be because it last appeared in 1977, or because it was a strip within a strip, inside another comic, Li'l Abner. It was a parody of Dick Tracy, but it was also a more general satire of certain social pathologies  in this case, the great harm that can be done by those with good intentions, especially if they wield the full power of the state.

Here is the basic plot: aware that one can of "Old Faithful" brand beans has been contaminated (I forget if it was a maniac or a criminal with an extortion plot), Detective Fosdick decides to save lives by shooting anyone who is about to open a can of beans. The media, corrupted by money from the Old Faithful bean company, refuses to print or broadcast safety warnings (compare to our media, corrupted by progressive ideology and TDS, that are doing the opposite by overhyping the danger), while criminals take advantage of the situation by supplying citizens with the beans the government is denying them (an obvious satire of Prohibition, still fresh in everyone's memory at that time) and by giving cans of beans to the men they want bumped off, who are duly shot dead by Fosdick. I don't remember how Al Capp, Abner's creator, portrayed the politicians in this story, but our own modern-day Democrats have shown themselves to be utterly ruthless and single-minded in exploiting the Wuhan Virus to expand their own power.

Did Fosdick save lives? Yes, he did  exactly one: whoever it was that would have eventually opened the poisoned can. His approach to the problem guaranteed that no one would die from eating the poisoned beans. Of course, he racked up hundreds of corpses in the process, but he did "save one life," to echo Joe Biden's formula. (Actually, Biden and the gun-grabbers are worse than Fosdick, because gun control wouldn't save even one life, although it would pile up the bodies of the innocent who were unable to defend themselves from criminals and criminal governments.)

We could save hundreds of people from drowning each year by closing all pools and beaches. We could save thousands of people from dying in traffic accidents by banning the automobile. And if gun control actually kept guns out of the hands of criminals, lunatics, and terrorists, we could save some small number of lives by means of gun control measures (while, to repeat, losing many more). We haven't done these things, although the Democratic left wants to do at least two of them, because we recognize that the great harm these actions would cause outweighs any possible good  and, perhaps, if we think about it more deeply, because we realize that it isn't the job of government to weigh such matters at all. "If it saves lives" is not a serious standard for judging the morality of an action because it ignores the negative consequences of that action.

For the first time in American history, government is seizing the power to confine healthy people in quarantine on the basis that they might become sick and infect others without so much as showing that they have a dangerous disease or have been exposed to someone who has, and the power to close businesses without showing them to be harboring any contagion. (And the power to declare which businesses are "essential" and which are not, the consequences of which no one seems to have thought much about. We all know Democratic politicians would never use such power to single out their political opponents for harm.) These actions may prevent some people from contracting the Wuhan Virus, which will in turn save some small percentage of those who contract it from dying. But they are also depriving millions of perfectly healthy people the ability to support themselves by productive work, the full consequences of which are almost unimaginable if continued for any length of time.

Government is not production, a hospital, or a medical research institute; it is force. It is a man with a gun, pointed right at us. Most of a time, that man with a gun has no more brains than Fearless Fosdick. We should remember that before acquiescing to government assuming frightening powers just because it declares a "crisis" or "emergency."

N.A. Halkides is a mathematician, systems analyst, and writer.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has informed that as of March 25 over 414,000 cases of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, have been recorded.

As per WHO's daily situation report, since the outbreak as many as 414,179 confirmed cases and 18,440 deaths have been reported. All data was collated from national authorities as of 10 am Central European Time (CET) or 2.30 PM IST on March 25.

Since WHO's previous update, two new countries/territories/areas have reported their first cases of coronavirus. Out of these, one was in the Western Pacific Region and the other in the Eastern Mediterranean region.

China, the country where the outbreak took place, has reported a second consecutive day of no new local coronavirus infections as of March 26. The country, however, recorded fresh imported cases as it begins opening its borders.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

In India, over 600 cases have been recorded so far and 10 people have lost their lives, according to the health ministry. Out of the confirmed cases of COVID-19, as many as 43 have recovered in India.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on March 25 called the coronavirus pandemic Public Enemy No 1.

We have overcome many pandemics and crises before. We will overcome this one, too. The question is how large a price we will pay, he said, as quoted by CNBC
A ustralian zoos have launched a live streaming service aimed at keeping animal lovers connected with their favourite creatures as facilities close because of the coronavirus outbreak.

Zoos Victoria's three sites - Healesville Sanctuary, Melbourne Zoo & Werribee Open Range Zoo - have all been shut since Tuesday as Covid-19 cases rise throughout the country.

With visitors temporarily shut out, the zoos have encouraged people to get online and watch life carry on inside the gates via live-streamed footage of the animals' activities.

In Australia, there have been 2,800 confirmed cases of coronavirus, with 13 deaths.

"We are first and foremost a not-for-profit conservation organisation, but we know our role is to also bring everyone some joy and a touch of magic right now," Zoos Victoria said in a statement.

"Our animals can keep making you smile through our #AnimalsAtHome live stream as well as other videos and photos that we'll share with you via our social channels."

"So please, stay at home if you can, look after yourself and look after your loved ones while we keep looking after the animals."

Among the stars of the live stream experience have been a fleet-footed dancing penguin, tree-kangaroos, an echidna and three adorable, albeit elusive, snow leopard cubs.

Footage of their daily escapades is just the latest in a string of animal-friendly behind-the-scenes content that has circulated online as zoos and conservation centres worldwide close their doors to the public.

Attracting particular attention last week were the penguin inhabitants of the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, who took the opportunity to go "on a field trip to meet other animals" while their home was closed to the public.
LONDON  A British prime minister from the party of Margaret Thatcher has effectively nationalized the national railway system, while forsaking budget austerity in favor of aggressive public spending. Germany has set aside its traditional detestation for debt to unleash emergency spending, while enabling the rest of the European Union to breach limits on deficits.

The European Central Bank has transcended a legacy often marked by calamitous inaction in the face of crisis to produce something that has frequently seemed impossible: a decisive and timely response.

The coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe with lethal and wealth-destroying consequences has proved so jarring to the powers-that-be on the European side of the Atlantic that they have discarded deep-set taboos to forge atypically swift and pragmatic responses.

This pandemic is really like a war, said Maria Demertzis, an economist and deputy director of Bruegel, a research institution in Brussels. In a war, you do what you have to do.
Assuming the Senate can finalize language on its $2 trillion coronavirus relief legislation and sort through last-minute senatorial ego trips, the package will soon clear the chamber and migrate to the House. Then its up to House leaders to figure out how to move it through the chamber swiftly, without any mischief that might require the majority of House members to fly back to Washington.

The House recessed and members flew home after passing a separate, $100 billion coronavirus relief bill nearly two weeks ago, leaving the Senate to write the next, substantially larger part of the plan. Now the House leaders need to figure out how to turn their tacit agreement to go along with the Senates plan into legislative action.

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Their preference for passing the bill would be through unanimous consent, in which a member asks for everyone to agree to the bill and, in the absence of an objection, the agreement would become official. Similarly, the House could try to pass the measure by voice vote: The speaker asks for the yeas, then the nays, and the loudest side (in practice, whichever side the speaker chooses) wins.

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But a single, determined member can obstruct either of these options. A unanimous consent request can, by definition, be stopped if any member objects. On a voice vote, meanwhile, any member can raise a point of order that a quoruma majority of the Houseis not present, forcing a roll call vote.

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These and other possibilities were outlined in a report released earlier this week by the House Rules Committee, which, along with leadership, is still sorting through how the chamber should proceed. Similar problems materialize with other ideas the report brainstorms. One option, called enhanced unanimous consent, would increase the number of members required to object to a unanimous consent request. Sounds great! But such a new rule would first have to itself be adopted by unanimous consent, to which a lone rogue could, of course, still object. Theres the same problem with proxy voting, by which an absent member would authorize another member to vote for them: You first have to successfully adopt proxy voting.

Another option thats garnered a lot of public attention is remote voting, something that neither Speaker Nancy Pelosi nor Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown much interest in. The Rules Committee report suggests its worthy of more study but essentially not feasible in the immediate future. First, it would entail serious security and logistical concerns before such a system could be up and running; secondly, there are yet more constitutional concerns about what it means for members to assemble and be Present in a place. While those constitutional concerns arent insurmountable, they are litigable, and its reasonable to expect that opponents of some piece of legislation passed under remote voting would tie the question in courts. And, again: You cant pass remote voting with everyone out of town except for the one person sticking around to object.

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So how is the House going to pass this $2 trillion sucker, as leaders hope to do, without flying hundreds of old people back to the coronavirus mothership that is the United States Capitolsomething that would likely only delay, and not block, passage anyway?

With unanimous consent and voice vote as the most realistic, though risky, methods, House leaders will be scanning their radars for potential disruptors. They held numerous conference calls with members on Wednesday, walking through expected pieces of the Senate legislation. Theyre explanatory, sure, but also a means of temperature taking: Which blocs of members (Progressives, Blue Dogs, the Freedom Caucus) might have serious issues with pieces of itand more specifically, which individual members might be just mad enough to come back to Washington, go to the House floor, object to proceedings on one ground or another, require a recorded vote, and earn the enmity of their colleagues for eternity?

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There are candidates to watch. On the Republican side, Texas Reps. Louie Gohmert and Chip Roy have a history of either threatening to block unanimous consent requests or blocking them. Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, the ex-Republican independent, is disgusted with the legislation but said Wednesday that he wouldnt block a unanimous consent request as it merely delays the inevitable. On the Democratic side, meanwhile, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told CNN that she was open to calling for a recorded vote if necessary.

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With the health risks of travel, there is no easy choice here, Ocasio-Cortez said. But essential workers are showing up and putting their health at risk every day, and if the final text of a bill is set up to hurt them, it may be something we have to do.

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And then theres Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, a consistent thorn in Republican leaderships side who has stuck around to block unanimous consent legislation in the past. There was, I was told Wednesday afternoon, a rumor on the Hill that Massie was in D.C. (One imagines Hill leadership staffers scouring alleys throughout the city while Massie cools his heels in a safe house.) Massies staff did not respond to inquiries as to his whereabouts, but Massie did confirm to the Washington Post early Wednesday evening that he would be in D.C. on Thursday. He wasnt ruling out any of his options.

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It was Amash, though, who may have pointed toward a way to resolve this in the same tweets in which he said he wouldnt block a unanimous consent request.

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Only the Democratic Caucus and Republican Conference can decide the outcome. If they have majorities to pass it, then objecting to unanimous consent merely delays the inevitable. I wont do that. But members MUST BE REQUIRED to go on the record with how they would have voted.  Justin Amash (@justinamash) March 25, 2020

Otherwise, members of Congress have the opportunity to escape accountability for this legislation, which creates a moral hazard that leads to even less representative government and worse bills. We cannot let that happen.  Justin Amash (@justinamash) March 25, 2020

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There are many ways to implement a mandatory record, but it wont occur unless the speaker makes it a priority. She is obligated to the institution and to the American people to ensure the House remains a representative body.  Justin Amash (@justinamash) March 25, 2020

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The Rules Committee report laid out options for getting members on the record. Members could submit a statement for the Congressional Record stating how they would have voted had there been a recorded vote, the report said. Congress could even vote on a symbolic resolution supporting the legislation after the crisis passes and Members return to Washington.

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Passing the legislation via unanimous consent or voice vote, while finding a way to get members on the record either through a submitted statement or a later proxy resolution, might offer the easiest path. Those statements or symbolic votes still wouldnt perfectly simulate the results of a proper, in-person vote. A good number of members, who might vote for the legislation if they were there in person, with the economy on the line and with leaderships guns to their heads, might say they reject the deal over one provision or another when their submitted statement or proxy vote doesnt actually matter. It would be a move that allows the legislation to pass while members cowardly look out for themselves.

In other words, it might hit the sweet spot.
Jair Bolsonaro followed U.S. President Donald Trumps playbook as he urged Brazilians to resume normal life to protect the economy even as cases of coronavirus swell.

Defying the medical advice to pursue social distancing, the Brazilian president lashed out at state governors who have ordered shops and schools closed to slow down the pandemic that threatens to overwhelm the health system in Latin Americas largest nation.

Our life needs to go on, jobs must be maintained, families livelihoods must be preserved, Bolsonaro said in a nationally televised speech on Tuesday evening. We must return to normalcy.

Bolsonaros approach is a high-stakes gamble, since the public health system in Brazil is underfunded and ill-equipped to handle the potential influx of sick people if coronavirus spreads as quickly as some health experts suggest. But it is not without precedent: Trump is pushing to reopen the U.S. economy by Easter, even as the number of cases of COVID-19 in the country soars.

As Bolsonaro spoke, Brazilians banged pots and pans from their windows in several neighbourhoods of the countrys main cities, a traditional form of protest in the region which has been going on for days now as criticism of the president mounts.

Bolsonaros laid-back and often contradictory response to the pandemic may become the defining moment of his presidency. His popularity, already suffering amid criticism of his handling of the coronavirus crisis, may take a bigger hit as the economy falls into recession and job losses mount.

The presidents stance risks sending confusing signals to the country of some 210 million, as state governors take the lead in imposing lockdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the virus. Sao Paulo Gov. Joao Doria brought in a full quarantine starting March 24 and Rio de Janeiro Gov. Wilson Witzel restricted public transportation while shutting down shopping malls and even the beach.

As well as deploying police to enforce the measures, firefighters are joining the fight to persuade the public to observe the guidelines, using megaphones to implore beachgoers to return home and do your part and help control the coronavirus.

By contrast, during his speech, Bolsonaro said those under 40 rarely die of coronavirus and that even he, at 65, shouldnt be worried because he was an athlete in the past.

Brazil had 2,201 cases identified and 46 deaths due to coronavirus as of Tuesday night. Among those to test positive are Bolsonaros press secretary and members of the Senate.

Still, Bolsonaro is not alone in Latin America. Mexico, too, has been slow to implement measures to curb the viruss spread, with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador continuing to hold public engagements and even kiss supporters.

Dont stop going out  we are still in phase one. I will say when not to go out, Lopez Obrador said in a video filmed at a traditional Mexican restaurant in the state of Oaxaca and posted on his Facebook page this weekend. Keep taking the family out to eat.

Trump, who is campaigning for a second term in November, said he wants to wind down social distancing and see the U.S. economy restart after his 15-day strategy to slow the spread of the virus ends next week. I would love to have it opened up and just raring to go by Easter, he told a Fox News virtual town hall on Tuesday.

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The coronavirus pandemic has reached Ecuadors Galapagos Islands, a UNESCO World Heritage site, an official source said on Tuesday.

Norman Wray, president of the Galapagos Government Council, told the state EcuadorTV channel that tests results on Monday established that four people had contracted the COVID-19 disease.

The four permanent residents of the archipelago had returned to the islands from the port of Guayaquil, the worst affected city in Ecuador with more than half of its near 1,000 confirmed cases.

The archipelago of volcanic islands lies just over 900 kilometers to the west of Ecuador.

English naturalist, biologist and geologist Charles Darwin developed his Theory of Evolution after studying endemic species in the Galapagos islands.

More than 30,000 people live on the islands, which have a limited medical infrastructure.

A week ago, the government ordered a total ban on visitors to the islands, where measures are already in place to restrict the movement of people.

In 2019, more than 270,000 people visited the Galapagos islands, including many from countries that have been badly affected by the coronavirus, such as France, Spain and the United States.

Without giving more details, Wray said there was still a large number of people who went to Galapagos more than 14 days ago who havent been able to leave, both foreigners and Ecuadorans.

Ecuador, one of the worst coronavirus-affected countries in Latin America, has taken a number of steps to combat the spread of the disease, including closing its borders, nighttime curfews, restrictions on the circulation of vehicles, a closure of schools and universities, a lockdown, and a state of exception.

The infected people in the Galapagos will undergo health protocols before being transferred to the mainland, the regional government said.

(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.)

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The African Airlines Association (AFRAA) in November announced its picks for the best airlines in Africa in 2019Kenya Airways for having the best improved intra-Africa connectivity in 2018 and Royal Air Maroc for its remarkable financial performance and profitability.

Kenya Airways introduced the highest number of new routes in 2018, including flights to Malindi, Mauritius and Mogadishu. The airline is also increasing capacity and frequency of flights to about a dozen other cities in Africa, including Cape Town, Zanzibar and Kigali.

The African Continental Free Trade Area came into effect in 2019, becoming the worlds largest free trade area by number of member states. By rewarding intra-Africa connectivity, AFRAA is encouraging its members to take advantage of it.

Kenya Airways award comes soon after the airline marked one year since it launched a non-stop flight from Nairobi to New York, cutting travel time between Africa and the US by at least seven hours. Now travellers no longer need to transit through European or Middle Eastern cities. The company announced that after just 12 months of operating the NairobiNew York route, it has carried 100,000 travellersa great success, it said.

Yet despite all these accolades, there is no denying that the airline, like many others in Africa, has gone through turbulent times. Surges in operating costs from ambitious expansion and rising fuel costs continue to eat into the airlines profit. In the middle of this year, the airline posted a $740 million net loss after taxes in 2018, compared to a loss of $640 million for the period between April and December 2017. It has plans to re-nationalize and to explore public-private partnerships.

To some extent, the travails of the Kenyan carrier reflect the struggles faced in operating a profitable airline in Africa today.

High taxes, restricted market access, high operational coststhe cost of jet fuel runs 35% higher in Africa than in the rest of the worldare some of the challenges African airlines face, according to Abderahmane Berthe, Secretary General of AFRAA.

Africa represents 16% of the global population but accounts for only 3% of global air traffic, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA). However, demand is slowly growing.

Over the last two years, it grew by an estimated 2%, a study by global air travel consultancy firm Sabre. Published in November 2019, the study also revealed that travellers are willing to spend up to 27% more on air travel if they can move around easily and freely.

So why are there still obstacles to tap into the growing number of passengers in Africa?

According to Christian Folly-Kossi, a Lome-based aviation consultant and a former Secretary General of AFRAA, the reason lies in national ambition. Every country wants to have a national carrier at all costs: A flag, a national anthem and an airline are considered the basic attributes of sovereignty, he says.

So as passenger numbers grow, countries are relaunching their national carriers. Uganda is the latest to start operating a national company. Ghana and Zambia are making plans to relaunch theirs, while Senegal is trying for the third time in two decades to put its own in the air.

Let me give you an example to buttress my point, Mr Folly-Kossi said. Professional boxers have known this for a long time: you cant have a heavyweight compete against a featherweight. One of them will not make it out of the ring. Smaller African airlines may be run out of business in their own countries by the bigger international carriers. This is why African air regulators are reluctant to liberalise their air spaces. Recent data on airline routes profitability in Africa appears to confirm Mr. Folly-Kossis misgivings.

According to OAG (originally the Official Aviation Guide), a UK-based air traffic analysis company, the most profitable air routes in Africa are operated by Emirates, which connect South Africa to Asia and Europe through Dubai.

South African Airways and TAAG Angola Airlines were the only African airlines operating any of the 10 most profitable African routes between April 2018 and May 2019. The most profitable intra-African route, between Johannesburg and Cape Town, is operated by South African Airways.

Yet South African Airways, just like Kenya Airways and Air Cote dIvoire, is struggling to stay afloat. Over the last two decades, the South African carrier has had to rely on massive bailouts by the government, estimated by local media to be to the tune of $1.96 billion.

Still, while IATA says that the continent can expect millions of passengers by 2036 and to grow the numbers by 5% annually over the next 20 years, more airlines in every African nation competing for the same routes would not solve the industrys issues, aviation experts say.

Mr. Folly-Kossi advocates for airlines operating between regional hubs that smaller airlines would then feed. In Europe, smaller countries such as Belgium, Switzerland and the Scandinavian nations understood as early as the 1980s and 1990s that their airlines would only survive if they operate around the concept of hub-and-spoke, he said. This is a system of air transportation in which local airports offer air transportation to a central airport where long-distance flights are available.

For instance, Ethiopian Airlines partners with ASKY, a West and Central African regional carrier, to operate a West African hub out of Lome, Togo, for its transatlantic flights to Brazil and New York and soon to Houston, Texas in the US. Similarly, Kenya Airways also plans to make Nairobi a major hub in East Africa around its regional expanded network.
BERKELEY (BCN)

A biostatistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Public Health said on Wednesday that it will take at least a few weeks before the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus in the U.S. is made clear.

Speaking at a virtual town hall with other UC-Berkeley health experts, professor Nicholas Jewell said, "The first indication if the rate is slowing down in California and the U.S. will come in a few weeks."

Jewell said lowering the rate at which COVID-19 is reproduced from one person to others is a key factor in trying to control the spread of the disease.

Jewell said, "A reproduction rate of less than 1 percent is necessary to prevent a significant percentage of the population from being infected."

But he said if the reproduction rate is 2 percent or more at least 50 percent of the population will contract the virus.

Jewell said there's "an ironic tradeoff" if current shelter-in-place rules and social-distancing mandates are followed by everyone and result in slowing the spread of COVID-19.

He said the good part of such a "flattening the curve" scenario is that it will prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed by a sudden influx of coronavirus patients.

But Jewell said the bad part of limiting the number of people who get the virus at this point is that there could be a spike in new cases in a few months because most people wouldn't have developed an immunity to COVID-19.

He said, "We could be vulnerable to a rebound because not many people would be infected."

It's believed by some health experts that people who contract the coronavirus will develop an immunity to it.

Jewell said that even in a best-case scenario in which the spread of COVID-19 is limited, the virus won't be eradicated and will remain endemic until a vaccine for it is developed, a process that is expected to take at least 12 to 18 months.

Copyright  2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 26

Trend:

Volunteers of the leading New Azerbaijan Party (NAP), having joined the initiative of President Ilham Aliyev in the fight against coronavirus, are participating in the campaign, Ali Ahmadov, Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Chairman  Executive Secretary of the NAP told reporters, Trend reports.

Ahmadov said that the party is contributing to the effectiveness of measures taken in the country to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Deputy Prime Minister emphasized that everyone should show solidarity in the fight against coronavirus.

"With joint efforts, we will provide our support so that Azerbaijan can defeat coronavirus with minimal losses, which has become a global problem for the whole world," Ahmadov said.

In connection with the quarantine regime, President Ilham Aliyev noted the importance of the active work of volunteers in providing assistance to citizens in need. NAP volunteers helped 2,500 lonely people in need of support, said the deputy prime minister.

Ahmadov added that in connection with the quarantine regime, NAP volunteers, together with employees of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of Population, launched a campaign to support elderly and lonely people.

Over 200 volunteers in Baku and over 550 throughout Azerbaijan were mobilized as part of this campaign, Ahmadov said.
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Among cases reported outside Hubei, 515 cases had a known travel history to Wuhan and a symptom onset date before 31st January 2020, compared with only 39 after 31st January, illustrating the effect of travel restrictions in decreasing the spread to other Chinese provinces."Our findings show that early in the coronavirus outbreak travel restrictions were effective in preventing the import of infections from a known source," said Dr Moritz Kraemer from the Oxford Martin Programme on Pandemic Genomics and the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. "However, once COVID-19 cases begin spreading locally the contribution of new importations was much smaller. This is where a full package of measures including local mobility restrictions, testing, tracing and isolation need to work together to mitigate the epidemic. Chinese provinces and other countries that have successfully halted internal transmission of COVID-19 need to consider carefully how they will manage reinstating travel and mobility to avoid the reintroduction and spread of the disease in their populations."Professor Samuel V. Scarpino of Network Science Institute (NetSI) at Northeastern University adds, "The political will in many countries is lagging behind the spread of COVID-19. Travel and mobility restrictions are the most useful right at the start, when local transmission has not yet become a factor. After transmission is established, physical distancing and the quarantine of sick individuals will work, but it takes time. "Source: Eurekalert
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Home Office reveals new powers to tackle people flouting the coronavirus lockdown Up to two years in prison if you cough deliberately on someone after spate of attacks on police and emergency service workers

People who continue to flout coronavirus lockdown rules will be breaking the law and can be arrested as part of new enforcement powers announced by the Home Office.

Officers can also tell them to go home, leave or disperse an area and ensure parents are taking necessary steps to stop their children breaking the law.

Those who refuse to comply could be issued with a fixed penalty notice of 60, which will be lowered to 30 if paid within 14 days.

Second-time offenders could be issued a fixed penalty notice of 120, doubling on each further repeat offence.

Those who do not pay the penalty can be taken to court, with magistrates able to impose fines up to 1,000 or more; Advertisement

Police were accused of an 'over the top' response to the UK's unprecedented coronavirus lockdown today as it emerged they have set up road blocks to stop and quiz drivers on a whim and even chased dog walkers and ramblers with drones in the Peak District.

Officers were this afternoon given sweeping new powers to arrest people who go on 'non essential' journeys and ignore Boris Johnson's plea to 'stay at home' for the next three weeks.

Those who defy tough restrictions on movement could be hit with a 60 fine initially and 120 for a second offence reaching 1,000-plus for repeat offenders, the Home Office warned today.

After a spate of coughing and spitting attacks on police officers and paramedics, deliberately spreading coronavirus will now be treated as a serious assault punishable with a jail term of up to two years.

But as the new powers emerged, Derbyshire Police took the extraordinary step of using one of its drones to film dog walkers, ramblers and a group posing for Instagram pictures on a cliff top at sunset last night - highlighting their movements and accusing them of making an 'unessential' trip.

Using the unmanned aircraft they also gathered number plates from parked cars and traced their owners to their homes in Sheffield saying: 'Walking your dog in the Peak District: Not essential.'

The government has said those in self-isolation are allowed to leave the house for one form of exercise a day - a walk, run or cycle alone or with other members of your household. Dog owners are allowed to walk their pets, but groups of more than two people are not allowed.

The advice has proven problematic for those in built-up areas whose only nearby green-space is a park shared by thousands of others looking to exercise at the same time.

A Derbyshire Police spokesman said: 'Travelling to remote areas of the #PeakDistrict for your exercise is not essential travel. PLEASE, #StayHomeSaveLives. Daily exercise should be taken locally to your home. Under government guidance all travel is limited to essential travel only'.

But some believe the force is going too far. One senior Tory MP told MailOnline: 'Probably what will happen is a quiet word from the policing minister to the Chief Constable of Derbyshire saying: 'can you ease off here, we don't want to give you a haranguing, but we have got enough to worry about without you telling off people who are just taking their dog for a walk.'

The MP added the government was in a difficult position where looser advice saying people could be 'reasonable' would risk being exploited by 'idiots'.

A spokesman for the Big Brother Watch civil liberties group said it's understandable why police are dispersing parties and barbecues but demanding drivers give journey details at road checkpoints is over-the-top.

'It's not at all clear what police powers are being used to do this. It's critical we protect public health and critical we protect basic democratic norms too. Arbitrary policing will not help the country to fight this pandemic.'

On Tyneside, Northumbria Police broke up a football match because only two people can gather together for the next three weeks. While North Yorkshire Police and Devon and Cornwall Police said they will now be using unannounced checkpoints to stop vehicles and order drivers to divulge details of their journeys and decide if they can continue on.

Police patrols have also started to stop train passengers in cities across the UK including Swansea and London to make sure their travel is 'essential' and maintain two-metre social distancing.

Experts have said the enforcement will divert officers from investigating other crimes, but forces including the Met insist it can form part of their usual patrol duties.

And as Britain entered its third day of lockdown, it also emerged:

Chancellor Rishi Sunak will finally today unveil a coronavirus bailout for millions of stricken self-employed workers;

One of the government's top advisers said the UK's epidemic will get worse before it gets better but could peak by Easter;

Dyson has been handed an order of 10,000 ventilators from the Government - as long as the machines pass early tests;

Retailer Boots begged people not to turn up demanding coronavirus tests because it has yet to receive any;

Royal aides tried to trace anyone Prince Charles has met in the last fortnight after he tested positive for the disease;

The latest coronavirus figures for the UK showed 9,529 positive tests and a death toll of 465;

Derbyshire Police sent up their drone and filmed people on 'not essential' trips to the Peak District including people posing for an 'Instagram snap'

The force says that people should not be heading to the Peak District to admire the sunset while Britain is in lockdown

Police in Devon have started to check whether drivers are on essential journeys or if they are flouting the government's plea to stay at home

A police officer is pictured directing traffic at a checkpoint in Plymouth today. All non-essential travel has been banned by the government

Meanwhile Broadway Market in East London was packed with people this afternoon - with no police officer in sight

The apparent need for the new police powers to break up gatherings has been illustrated by reports of officers being called to friends having barbecues, house parties and games of football

A survey for ITV's Peston programme found millions of people are not complying with the government's lockdown measures

Police stop people on trains to check their journeys as coronavirus clampdown ramps up Police patrols have been stopping train passengers for spotchecks in a bid to enforce the coronavirus lockdown. Officers have been seen patrolling train stations in Swansea to check passengers should only be making 'essential' journeys. Passengers at Swansea train station were asked for proof of their travel plans - and urged to take a single journey to their destination and home again. Police are being given powers to issue 30 on-the-spot fines to those breaking the lockdown - and court appearances for non-payment. South Wales Police declined to comment on the specifics of what officers were doing at Swansea station. The force's chief constable, Matt Jukes, has previously said: 'South Wales Police has a track record of maintaining public order and safety in huge events and at times of emergency. We have always done so positively, with pride and professionalism. 'So, we will continue to do what we do best - engage with people. We will ask them to support their communities and stick to these important restrictions. 'As the public would expect, we will also enforce the existing law when this is necessary and new legal powers, as they come into effect.' Advertisement

The drone surveillance and travel checks emerged as the Home Office revealed its new powers for police to enforce the coronavirus lockdown as a minority of Britons flouted the rules by holding house parties, community barbecues and other events of more than one person.

Officers will also have the powers force people to go home if they fail to listen to police direction, and will be fined 60 - reduced to 30 if paid within a fortnight. For second offences it will rise to 120 and will doubling each time for further offences. The worst culprits will be taken to court and face fines of 1,000 or more.

The use of travel checks sparked fierce criticism from civil liberties groups with police officers now seemingly being tasked with deciding how important someone's journey is amid reports of dog walkers being told to go home after driving to a public space for exercise and of builders being stopped from driving to a job.

Nicola Sturgeon appeared to pre-empt the Home Office's official announcement as she set out her plans for police in Scotland at lunchtime which will see people who refuse to adhere to the ban on groups 'made to return home'.

It is not the first time the Scottish First Minister has acted before the UK government on a coronavirus issue after she did the same on banning large gatherings to ease pressure on emergency services and on school closures.

Members of the public have been urged by Andy Cooke, the chief constable of Merseyside Police, to report large gatherings as the authorities move to enforce the Prime Ministers 'stay at home' message.

Mr Cooke said he would 'expect' people to report large groups but not to bother officers if it is 'two or three people stood at the end of the road'.

The apparent need for the new police powers to break up gatherings has been illustrated by reports of officers being called to friends having barbecues, house parties and games of football.

Police will now ARREST anyone who flouts the travel ban People who continue to flout coronavirus lockdown rules will be breaking the law and could be arrested by police. Those who ignore tougher restrictions on movement could be hit with a 60 fine initially and another for 120 for a second offence, the Home Office warned. Officers will have the power to enforce rules on staying at home and avoiding non-essential travel from Thursday. They can order members of the public to go home, leave an area and have the power to disperse a group. Police can also take steps to make sure parents are stopping their children from breaking the rules. According to the guidance, the cost of initial fixed penalty notices will be cut to 30 if paid within 14 days and those who do not pay could be taken to court and risk facing costs for unlimited fines. The Home Office said: 'If an individual continues to refuse to comply, they will be acting unlawfully, and the police may arrest them where deemed proportionate and necessary. 'However, in the first instance, the police will always apply their common sense and discretion.' Home Secretary Priti Patel said: 'The Prime Minister has been clear on what we need to do: stay at home to protect our NHS and save lives. 'All our frontline services really are the best of us and are doing an incredible job to stop this terrible virus from spreading. 'That's why I'm giving the police these new enforcement powers, to protect the public and keep people safe.' Advertisement

It came as a new poll conducted for ITV's Peston programme suggested almost six million people across the UK are continuing to go about their daily lives as normal amid fears spring sunshine could tempt even more to flout the rules.

Mr Johnson's lockdown means people should only leave their home for food, medicine, exercise or to go to work if it is 'absolutely necessary'. Group gatherings of more than two people have also been banned.

But the survey found seven per cent of Britons are still going out to see friends, eight per cent are doing 'non-essential shopping' and five per cent are not washing their hands more than they normally would.

Meanwhile, six per cent of people - approximately three million - are continuing to hug others and shake hands, despite warnings this will increase the spread of the deadly Covid-19 virus.

The government expects the 'overwhelming majority' of people to stick to the lockdown measures but it is bolstering police powers to ensure officers have the tools they need to enforce the rules amid concerns some people could continue to meet in groups.

North Yorkshire Police said its officers will now be stopping motorists to ask them where they are going, why they are going there, and reminding them of the message to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives.

Assistant Chief Constable Mike Walker, said: 'The new and significant restrictions announced by the Prime Minister on Monday evening spell out very clearly what each and every one of us must do to save lives. The message is clear and the warning stark. Stay at home, save lives.

'These are the lives of the people we know and love. Our partners, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, grandparents.

Coronavirus tracker app suggests more than six million people in UK could be infected An app tracking people's coronavirus symptoms in their own homes has revealed that more than 6.6million people in the UK could have had the infection already. The COVID Symptom Tracker, created by scientists at King's College London, was downloaded around 650,000 times in the first 24 hours after it launched on Tuesday. By today it had been signed up to by 1.25million people and has become the third most popular download in the UK's App Store, with some 50,000 new users per hour. Analysis of the first 650,000 users found that 10 per cent of them have had the symptoms of the coronavirus, which causes fever, coughing and tiredness. Health authorities in the UK aren't testing anyone for the virus unless they're in hospital so the app could be one of the clearest pictures of how many people are ill. If its infection rate of one in every 10 people is applied to the UK's population of 66million, that could mean 6.6m or more have already had the illness which has sent the world into hiding. Advertisement

'You may never be in such a position again where your simple actions will lead directly to saving lives.'

The force said the checkpoints will be unannounced and could appear anywhere any time with other constabularies expected to now follow suit.

Meanwhile, Avon and Somerset Police has apparently told people they are not allowed to drive anywhere to walk dogs or exercise due to the government's ban on all non-essential travel.

Officers from the force were reportedly handing out leaflets to dog walkers stating that 'the government restrictions currently in place do not permit you to use your vehicle to travel to this location to exercise'.

The document said government guidance stated people can exercise outside once a day and that 'you should not be driving to a location away from home to carry this out'.

A Facebook user posted a picture of the leaflet and said: 'I wasn't aware that you couldn't drive somewhere to walk dogs.

'My husband was given this by police officers at Quarts Moor and told they hoped they wouldn't see him up there again.'

The dog walker advice is likely to spark confusion given that many who drive to a location to walk their pet will not come into any contact with another person.

But the government is likely to argue that its ban on all but essential travel could not be clearer.

It came as Mr Cooke, speaking on his first day back at work after contracting the virus himself, said members of the public needed to be 'sensible' when it came to reporting gatherings of people.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak to unveil big bailout for self-employed today Rishi Sunak will finally unveil a coronavirus bailout for millions of stricken self-employed workers today - with signs they could get cash payments of up to 1,700 a month. A week after announcing a massive rescue package for employees, the Chancellor is set to go further to stop those who work for themselves and in the 'gig' economy being plunged into poverty by the government's 'social distancing' lockdown. Boris Johnson said yesterday that the new proposals will offer 'parity' with the eye-watering measures already brought forward to protect other parts of the workforce. There is speculation that around two million workers could benefit, potentially getting 80 per cent of the net income they declared on previous tax returns, up to a limit of 1,700 a month. Unlike the bailout for employees, which is being channelled through businesses in grants, the government money would go directly to individuals. The help is also expected to be means-tested, with those earning over 50,000 not covered to avoid the system being exploited. Advertisement

Asked what people should do if they see a gathering of dozens of people, he told The Times: 'We would expect people to call us ... [but] would urge them to be sensible.

'When you've got two or three people stood at the end of the road we don't need to be told.

'The great thing is we police by consent. Staff have been instructed to encourage people, convince people, interact with people. The use of the powers will be very much a last resort.'

Mr Cooke said 12 per cent of his staff were currently off sick or self-isolating - a figure likely to be replicated at other forces across the country, illustrating the resourcing challenge the lockdown could present.

Police broke up a house party in Coventry in the early hours of this morning where a dozen revellers were flouting the ban on social gatherings of more than two people. Eight of them were 'removed' and sent home.

That incident followed West Midlands Police neighbourhood officers having to disperse a crowd of 20 people who had gathered for a barbecue in the Foleshill area of the same city earlier this week on Tuesday.

Police have already started to adopt their own methods for dispersing groups with Manchester police reportedly using sirens and a loud hailer while officers in Leicester have been using drones.

West Midlands Police echoed a similar sentiment to Mr Cooke and said people should only 'advise us if there are large scale breaches with large numbers of people congregating'.

Anthony Stansfeld, the police and crime commissioner in Thames Valley, reportedly said he did not think 'snitching to the police' was necessary. He said it should only take place in the 'most extreme circumstances'.

Joggers go for a run at a park in London today in the morning sunshine as the Prime Minister warned Britons to stay at home

A lady runs through daffodils at Sefton Park in Liverpool after Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered a UK lockdown

People formed a queue outside a Morrisons supermarket in Canning Town, East London, first thing this morning

It came as the government was believed to be planning to hand police in England the power to use force to make people go home during the lockdown.

More details of the approach officers will be asked to take are expected to be announced later today but it is thought they will be told to follow a 'four point' plan.

That plan will likely see them initially engage with people who are outside, then explain to them the terms of the lockdown, then encourage them to go home.

Only then would they move onto enforcement action, starting with imposing a fine.

According to The Guardian, the government could allow the police to use reasonable force as a last resort if people do not comply with the fine.

Ms Sturgeon announced something similar for police in Scotland.

'It will now be the rule that you should only be outside for a reasonable purpose, buying food or essential household or medical supplies, travelling to or carrying out essential work, exercising once a day or providing care or assistance to others,' she said at a lunchtime press conference.

'And those found not to be acting in line with the regulations can be directed to return home or made to return home.

'They could also be subject to prohibition notices and if people don't follow prohibition notices or instructions to return home they could be liable to an on the spot fine and ultimately if necessary prosecuted.'

Fines will start at 30 but Downing Street has said it will increase it significantly if it proves to be an inadequate deterrent.

Non-payment of the fine will lead to a court appearance and a criminal record. People will have 14 days to pay.

It is thought children in groups could be taken home to their parents but it is unclear whether they would be fined and whether it would be up to their parents to pay.

Concerns have been expressed about what enforcing the lockdown could mean for the relationship between the police and the public.

Stephen White, acting police and crime commissioner for Durham, said: 'We don't want to have a society when you step out the door there is a cop saying: 'Where are you going?''

Mr White said the application of the new powers was going to be a 'minefield' as he asked on what grounds fines would be issued and how the use of the powers would be monitored.

Government adviser says UK coronavirus epidemic could peak by Easter One of the government's top coronavirus advisors said the UK's epidemic will get worse before it gets better but the peak of it could pass by Easter. Professor Neil Ferguson added that around a third of people dying from the disease could be considered healthy. But he believes the NHS will now be able to cope with the outbreak thanks to the nationwide lockdown that was put in place this week. He told the BBC: 'All I would say is, with the lockdown now in place, those numbers are going to start to plateau. The challenge we have is there's a lag. 'The people being admitted to hospital right now were infected a week, two weeks, even sometimes three weeks ago, so without doubt the next one [or] two weeks are going to be very difficult.' Advertisement

Sunny spring weather which has been forecast for the next few days has sparked warnings that people must comply with the lockdown.

Weather forecasters said Britons can enjoy the sunshine and temperatures over 60F but only for their permitted daily exercise.

Forecasters said temperatures could hit 17C (63F) today. Forecaster Bonnie Diamond told MailOnline that the Met Office is reiterating government advice and urging people to stay indoors.

She said: 'Spring is in the air and there is plenty of sunshine - in different times we would have enjoyed this more than were able to at the moment.

'But we are reiterating advice from NHS England and the government - have your exercise once a day safely - it is nice and it is sunny and we can enjoy that exercise, but please practise safe social distancing.'

On the forecast, she said: 'It's been a lovely week for England and Wales. Today is generally cloudy across Scotland and Northern Ireland to begin with. But for all of England and Wales, it will be another bright and sunny day with maximum temperatures of 16C or 17C.

'Tomorrow will be a similar story - some cloud around for Northern Ireland and central and southern Scotland but otherwise bright and sunny with temperatures of 13C or 14C - another bright sunny spring day.

Last night, a shock poll conducted for ITV's Peston programme found seven per cent of Britons are still going out to see friends, eight per cent are doing 'non-essential shopping' and five percent have not started washing their hands more.

The survey also showed six per cent are continuing to hug others and shake hands and some 11 per cent of people are still going to public places.

An estimated 33 per cent are stockpiling and ignoring pleas from supermarkets to save goods for the elderly, vulnerable and NHS workers.

A further eight per cent (5.8 million) are continuing to shop for goods when not absolutely necessary and seven per cent are meeting people outside of the immediate family they are living with, according to the JL Partners survey.
Reusable Bags Temporarily Banned; Aid Set for Low-Income Renters

BOSTON  The administration invoked a number of measures on Wednesday to continue efforts to contain the novel coronavirus that has killed nearly a thousand Americans.

Gov. Charlie Baker announced that schools and non-essential day cares would remain closed through at least May 4, with plans being made for remote learning supports.

Public Health Order for Retailers

 Requires groceries and pharmacies to provide disinfecting wipes and hand sanitizers for shoppers' hands, carts and purchases.

 Prohibits reusable bags from groceries and lifting any local bans on plastic bags. Retailers cannot charge for bags.

 Stores must provide at least one hour a day for adults over 60 years of age shop.

 Employees and customers must remain at least 6 feet apart at all times with social distancing lines from the checkout and close self-serve stations.

 Store employees must stay home if ill or who fall into high risk populations.

Housing Stability for Vulnerable Populations

 The Department of Housing and Community Development is temporarily suspending terminations of federal and state rental vouchers under its purview.

 MassHousing is transferring $5 million to DHCD for a COVID-19 Rental Assistance for Families in Transition fund to assist families facing rent insecurity.

 The Division of Banks has issued new guidance to Massachusetts financial institutions and lenders urging them to provide relief for borrowers and will advocate for a 60-day stay on behalf of all homeowners facing imminent foreclosure on their homes.

 DHCD is issuing guidance for owners of state aided low-income housing, including Local Housing Authorities and private owners, to suspend both pending non-essential evictions and the filing of any new non-essential evictions.

 Affordable housing operators are urged to suspend non-essential evictions for loss of income or employment circumstances resulting in a tenant's inability to make rent.

 Operators recommended to establish reasonable payment plans, notify Section 8 or public housing residents about interim income recertification to adjust rent payments, and to consider offering relief funding for residents ineligible for income reassessment.

"Everyone has a part to play in this. And so far, there's no doubt that people in Massachusetts are meeting this challenge head on," Baker said. "There's a lot left to do. We are all in this together, and we hope you all appreciate how grateful we are to the people of Massachusetts decision and desire to do all they can to make sure they keep themselves, their families, their neighbors, and their communities and the commonwealth safe."
UPDATE 12:35 p.m. Thursday, March 26 - Chico Police confirmed the identity of a woman killed in a crash Thursday morning in south Chico.

29-year-old Ashley Leon of Chico was identified as the driver, according to police.

At this time, officers said it's unknown if drugs or alcohol played a factor in the collision.

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CHICO, Calif. - One person is dead after a single-vehicle crash that blocked traffic for hours in south Chico early Thursday morning.

The wreck happened at about 1:15 a.m. at the intersection of Notre Dame Boulevard and the Skyway.

Chico police say the vehicle crashed into a retaining wall on the northeast corner of the intersection, close to a Starbucks coffee shop.

The driver was found dead by officers inside the vehicle.

The wreck closed that portion of road for nearly 3 and a half hours.

Officers are asking anyone who witnessed the crash to call them at 897-4970.

Action News Now is working to find out the name of the driver killed in that wreck.
The governor of Texas has ordered anyone arriving in the state from the top U.S. coronavirus hotspots to quarantine themselves for 14 days, or face criminal penalties including jail time.

Governor Greg Abbott issued the executive order on Thursday, saying anyone arriving at an airport in Texas from either New York, Connecticut, New Jersey or New Orleans must register with the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Those travelers will then be under orders to self-quarantine at a home or a hotel for 14 days, and not allow any visitors aside from qualified healthcare professionals.

Anyone found in violation of the order will face criminal charges including a $1,000 fine or 180 days in jail.

Governor Greg Abbott issued the executive order on Thursday, saying anyone arriving at an airport in Texas from either New York, Connecticut, New Jersey or New Orleans must register with the Texas Department of Public Safety

Passengers wearing masks and gloves walk through a terminal at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston earlier this month

Abbott said that DPS officers will be checking on people under quarantine and enforcing the order.

'During this period, a quarantined person shall not allow visitors into or out of the designated quarantine location, other than a physician or healthcare provider, and cannot visit any public spaces,' Abbott said at a press conference.

'The New York Tri-State Area and the City of New Orleans have become major centers of this pandemic, and it is vital that we take necessary precautions to prevent additional exposure that could originate from people traveling from these areas to Texas,' he said.

The governor's order to self-quarantine does not apply to people traveling in connection with military service, emergency response, health response, or critical-infrastructure functions.

Abbott said that the goal of the order is to attempt to limit the further spread of coronavirus in Texas. That state now has at least 1,500 confirmed cases and 17 deaths.

A park bench is cordoned off Wednesday in Houston. A stay-at-home order was issued Tuesday for Houston and Harris County residents to help fight the spread of COVID-19

Traffic in and out of downtown Houston is lighter than normal Wednesday. All visitors to Texas from the tri-state and New Orleans will now have to quarantine for 14 days

New York is now the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, with 37,258 confirmed cases and at least 385 deaths.

New Orleans has seen the fastest growth in the nation. The number of cases in Louisiana jumped by 510 in a single day on Thursday, to 2,300, up 28 percent from the night before, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.

Abbott's order follows a similar executive order in Florida demanding all travelers from New York self-quarantine for 14 days.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issued the order on Tuesday, saying local law enforcement and the Florida Department of Health would meet people after they got off planes and register them for self-quarantine.

'There'll be some information taken and I think they're going to do temperature checks,' he said.

However, on Wednesday it was apparent that stringent checks had yet to be put in place.

The number of cases in the US has rocketed over the last two weeks

Three people who arrived at Fort Lauderdale's airport told the Sun-Sentinel that they did not have their temperatures checked.

And there was no visible sign that any screening was in place for in-bound passengers, they said.

Passengers said that forms warning of the quarantine order had been distributed by the airlines before landing, which they were told to sign and deposit in a box at the arrival gate.

However it was unclear whether anyone was monitoring the boxes, and airlines don't appear to have to authority to force passengers to sign the forms.

The U.S. now leads the world in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases.

According to a running count by Johns Hopkins University, the number of people infected in the U.S. topped 82,000 on Thursday. That's just ahead of the 81,000 cases in China and 80,000 in Italy.

Italy has the most confirmed deaths of any country with more than 8,000. More than 1,000 people have died in the U.S.
live bse live

nse live Volume Todays L/H More 

Here are the stocks that are in news today:

NTPC: Company added 2nd unit of 660 MW of Khargone Super Thermal Power Project to installed capacity.

Delta Corp board meeting on March 28 to consider the proposal for buyback of equity shares

IndiGrid completes acquisition of its 9th transmission asset from Sterlite Power with an enterprise value of USD 134 million

LT Foods: CRISIL reaffirmed long term rating at A- and revised outlook on long term loans to stable.

Mangalam Organics has terminated its alliance with M/s Les Derives Resiniques et Terpeniques w.e.f March 24, 2020.

Monnet Ispat & Energy - CARE Ratings has revised the ratings of the company

Zensar Technologies - Guidewire Software announces promotion of the company as PartnerConnect Consulting Advantage partner

Usha Martin - Temporarily halt operations at its manufacturing facility situated at Jharkhand until further notice.

Endurance Tech: Company temporarily closed operations in India and Italy due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Yes Bank: The bank's board will meet on March 26 for general purposes.

Ashok Leyland: Long-term rating by ICRA downgraded to 'ICRA AA (negative)'; short-term rating reaffirmed at 'ICRA A1+'.

Shankara Building Products: CRISIL has downgraded its rating on bank facilities of the company to 'CRISIL BBB+/Stable/CRISIL A2' from 'CRISIL A-/Negative/CRISIL A2+'. CRISIL also has downgraded its rating on the commercial paper to 'CRISIL A2' from 'CRISIL A2+'.

Kolte-Patil Developers: Company announced the shutdown of offices and project sites due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Cummins India: Company announced the temporary suspension of offices and plants across India due to COVID-19.

Triveni Engg: Company announced the suspension of manufacturing operations due to COVID-19.

Mangalam Organics: Company terminated its alliance with France-based Les Derives Resiniques et Terpeniques.
(CNN)  The man accused of murdering 51 worshippers at two Christchurch mosques last year has changed his plea to guilty, according to New Zealand Police.

Last year, Australian citizen Brenton Tarrant plead not guilty to 92 charges, including 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one charge under the Terrorism Suppression Act, the first time such a charge has been laid inside the country.

But, appearing via audiovisual link from a prison in Auckland, Tarrant plead guilty on all counts at a hearing in the Christchurch High Court on Thursday morning. He is expected back in court in May. New Zealand Police say Tarrant will not be sentenced until it is possible for all victims who wish to attend the hearing to do so -- something that may be delayed by the current pandemic.

The High Court hearing comes as New Zealand goes into lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus, with only essential services -- including courts -- allowed to stay open.

Tarrant's admission of guilt also comes just days since the anniversary of the deadly attack, which took place on March 15 last year and was New Zealand's worst mass shooting in modern history.

Under New Zealand law, murder carries a life sentence, and convicted murderers must spend at least 10 years in prison before they are eligible for parole.

Guilty plea welcomed

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that the guilty plea would "provide some relief to the many people whose lives were shattered" by the attacks.

Arrangements for the court hearing were made at a short notice after Tarrant indicated on Tuesday via his lawyers that he wanted to be brought before the court, New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said in a statement.

"Police appreciate this news will come as a surprise to the victims and the public, some of whom may have wished to be present in the courtroom," Bush said. The two Imams from the Al Noor and Linwood Islamic Center -- the two mosques targeted in the attack -- were in the courtroom to represent victims, Bush added.

"While the sentencing hearing is still pending, today's guilty pleas are a significant milestone in respect of one of our darkest days," Bush said. "I want to acknowledge the victims, their families and the community of Christchurch -- the many lives that were changed forever."

Ahmed Khan, who was inside Linwood Islamic Center in Christchurch during the attack, said that he heard about Tarrant's plea in an email sent by the court to victims on Thursday morning.

"It's pretty surprising," said Khan, who held an injured man as he died in his arms. "I'm quite happy that he's pleading guilty to all the charges so we don't have to see his face during a long trial."

He said victims were worried that the trial -- which had been scheduled for June -- would be dragged out by Tarrant so that he could get extra attention.

"(People in the court room) were really angry and got really emotional because it seemed like the offender was not sorry," Khan said. "Now we are hoping for a good outcome."

Aftermath of the deadly attack

Tarrant was arrested on March 15, last year, within 21 minutes of the first emergency calls being received by police.

Almost all of the victims died at Al Noor mosque and Linwood Islamic Center. Only two died later in hospital, including a Turkish citizen who died in May.

The victims hailed from all around the world, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Less than a month after the shooting, New Zealand lawmakers voted to change the country's gun laws to ban military-style semiautomatic weapons.

This story was first published on CNN.com. "Accused Christchurch mosque shooter pleads guilty to killing 51 people."
The stock market is currently in a state of turmoil, with investors spooked by the COVID-19 pandemic and its potential effects on the global economy. Year to date, the S&P 500 is down by 21% after climbing by about 29% last year.

However, this sell-off might have created opportunities to buy cannabis stocks at much more reasonable prices. For instance, Canopy Growth (NASDAQ:CGC), one of the largest pot companies by market cap, has seen its shares plunge by 34% since the beginning of the year. Canopy Growth's stock is now worth about $14 (at time of writing), but is now a good time to buy shares of the pot grower?

The buy thesis

In my view, the best reason to consider buying shares of Canopy Growth is the company's position in the Canadian recreational (adult-use) cannabis market. Canopy has a leading presence in many Canadian provinces. To quote the company's CEO, Mark Zekulin:

Canopy also continues to hold the strongest market share in the Canadian recreational market, with still over $1 in every $4 spent at the till being spent on a Canopy product in our estimation. Canopy is No. 1 still in Ontario, No. 1 in Nova Scotia, No. 1 in PEI and No. 1 in Alberta, the country's most developed market at over a 35% market share. In Quebec, we are No. 2, only behind HEXO.

Canopy's leading share in the Canadian recreational pot market could become critical as the company looks to profit from potentially lucrative cannabis derivatives. Canada officially opened the market for derivative products -- such as vaping products, edibles, and cannabis-infused beverages -- on Oct. 17, 2019. Canopy unveiled its portfolio of derivative products in November. This portfolio included such products as Tweed RTD, a line of canned nonalcoholic beverages with several flavors, each containing 2 milligrams of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Canopy's portfolio of derivative products also includes a dark-chocolate product called Tokyo Smoke which contains 2 mg of THC and negligible traces of cannabidiol (CBD).

Canopy started launching its derivative products -- to be sold in legally licensed cannabis retail stores -- back in December 2019, and according to Zekulin, some of these products have been "selling out very quickly."

And the company could profit from the opening of more cannabis retail stores in Canada. Last year's slow rollout of retail cannabis stores hindered the sale of cannabis products, particularly in Ontario, the largest province by population. This problem arose in part because Health Canada was too slow to issue retail cannabis licenses. However, the government implemented some changes to the approval process for these licenses this year.

For instance, the government of Ontario previously had a cap on the number of retail cannabis stores allowed in the province; this cap has been removed. Also, cannabis companies were not previously allowed to open retail cannabis stores on their premises; that is no longer the case. Thanks to these changes, the number of retail cannabis stores will increase significantly in the coming months, which will benefit Canopy immensely.

The avoid thesis

There are several reasons to steer clear of Canopy. First, the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak could harm the company. Canopy recently decided to close its corporate-owned stores across Canada temporarily. And while Canopy set up e-commerce platforms to continue serving its customers during the outbreak, it isn't clear what effect the pandemic will have on the company's sales.

Second, Canopy's balance sheet isn't pretty. In particular, the company had a little more than 2 billion Canadian dollars in goodwill at the end of 2019. This much intangible value on the company's balance sheet could lead to significant writedowns in the future, which could hurt Canopy's bottom line.

Speaking of the bottom line, Canopy continues to post steep losses. During its latest reported quarter -- the third quarter of its fiscal 2020 -- Canopy recorded a net loss of CA$124.2 million. And although this was a significant improvement from its net loss of CA$374.6 million recorded during the second quarter, given the current market conditions, it might not be a great idea to invest in companies that haven't shown they can post consistent profits.

Finally, even after the recent market correction, Canopy is still an expensive stock. The company is currently trading at 13.95 times forward sales.

The verdict

Canopy's stock is still far too expensive, and investors would be purchasing shares of a company that is not yet profitable amid a time of turmoil for financial markets and uncertainty for the global economy. In light of these factors, and although Canopy looks well positioned to profit from the Canadian pot market, investors would be better off staying away for now.
This primer was first published in March 2020 and has been updated to reflect recent developments

The Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR) is the EUs answer to the Financial Stability Boards policy framework for addressing shadow banking risks in securities lending and repo. The regulation is centred largely on transaction reporting, and impacts firms in the EU and beyond.

What is SFTR?

First proposed in 2014, SFTR came as a response to the Financial Stability Boards (FSB) review of shadow banking following the 2007-8 crisis. Its goal is to enhance transparency and keep track of the risks associated with the securities market  the last bastion standing of the financial industry.

Partly in force since January 2016, the regime introduces extensive transaction reporting requirements for SFTs (securities financing transactions). All details related to an SFT and its lifecycle  including its conclusion, as well as any modifications or termination  are to be reported to a trade repository (TR) no later than the next working day. The TR is then responsible for validating and reconciling the data and making it available to the regulator. There are only four European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) approved TRs for now: DTCC, Regis-TR, UnaVista and KDPW.

If the reported SFT involves funds, these have to meet disclosure requirements relating to the use of SFTs and to total return swaps in pre-investment documentation. They are also required to regularly report to their investors. In addition, all in-scope firms have to report on a daily basis collateral market values, collateral reuse and margins.

According to the International Capital Market Association (Icma), the regulation introduces extremely granular daily reporting requirements for repos and other types of SFTs, which pose a significant challenge for the industry.

SFTR sets out 155 reporting fields, most of which require the data from both sides of the trade to match with no or very limited tolerance.

The introduction of reporting for SFTs is significant, says Pauline Ashall, capital markets partner at Linklaters.

See also: SFTR market still needs critical data

The SFTR regime is equivalent to derivatives reporting introduced under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (Emir) in 2012. There was no prior requirement to report these transactions. It covers a very broad range, adds Ashall. This includes securities lending, repurchase agreements (repos), and collateralised operations that consist of a transfer of ownership.

Who does it apply to?

SFTR applies to any counterparty and all its branches, irrespective of their location, to an SFT established in the EU. It also applies to counterparties to a third country SFT if the transaction is concluded in the course of the operation of an EU-based branch.



The regime also applies to management companies of undertakings for the collective investment in transferable securities (Ucits), as well as to authorised managers of alternative investment funds (AIFs).



Finally, it applies to any counterparty engaging in a collateral reuse established either in the EU or in a third country, if the reuse is completed in the course of the operation of an EU-based branch.

Non-EU parties are also subject to the regulation if any part of the transaction involves work within an EU branch or using a financial instrument in the EU.

SFTR is unique in that it introduces big changes around systems and controls, says Catherine Talks, product manager at UnaVista, referencing the transparency requirements for investor protection. SFTR requires firms to report in an accurate, complete way.

See also: SRD2, lessons learnt from Covid-19 must not be forgotten

As noted in Article 13 of the regulation, Ucits management companies, Ucits investment companies and AIFMs are obliged to inform investors on their use of SFTs and total return swaps. Information to be included in the Ucits prospectus and AIF disclosure to investors includes a general description of the SFTs and total return swaps used by the collective investment undertaking and the rationale for their use, as well as the overall data to be reported for each type of SFT and total return swaps.

How will this impact the market?

Ashall warns that, at present, the regimes scope is grey around the edges, with questions remaining for commodity lending and margin loans in particular.

Reporting requires an enormous system-build with a lot of repapering and documentation to agree on, as its not always clear who is responsible for what  for example, generating the unique transaction identifier (UTI), she says.

Regardless, Ashall does not think the legislation will change what people are doing significantly in terms of driving market practice. Its more of a cost issue, she adds, speculating that at the margin, the costs could push some smaller participants out of the market.

Effectively, firms will have to provide reports on a daily basis during the life of the transaction as changes occur, and adjust to 155 reporting fields, she says.

UnaVistas Talks thinks data is the biggest issue. SFTR is written in a way that you wont just need to know what youre doing but also what your counterparty is doing, she says. It means that, in a number of circumstances, firms will have to reach out to counterparties and understand what they are doing. This ranges from UTI generation and dissemination to backloading techniques.

What is the industry doing?

I think the industry has evolved quite quickly, says Talks, who adds that ESMA has been explicit about reporting action but not delegation, which although not ideal, does mean that firms have been able to adapt infrastructure to prepare for the reporting involved.

In Emir we saw firms delegating to their counterparties  they may have eight or nine counterparties reporting to numerous trade repositories, she says. Oversight of that data held in so many different places can be complex. Ive found that firms arent talking about electing to delegate their reporting for SFTR as they do not want to add additional fragmentation.

Theres a general feeling that these rules are cumbersome. Jonathan Lee, senior regulatory reporting specialist in SFTR at Kaizen Reporting, pointed out that firms are genuinely doing their best but have been repeatedly frustrated by rules that dont reflect how the market functions and a lack of clarity and instruction about how to report certain transactions and lifecycle events.

What have been the key challenges for firms?

Market participants largely reported a smooth implementation process for phases one and two of the regimes go-live. However, challenges remain, and some argue that certain elements will become fully visible only when all firms have begun reporting. What we saw in phases one and two is that best practices really came into play, said Sunil Daswani, senior securities lending and repo consultant at MarketAxess. Engaging with industry groups and adopting best practices early on helped to fade potential grey areas and drove better statistics.

While there is good engagement on behalf of hedge funds and asset managers, pension funds and insurance companies are yet to get actively involved, Daswani added.

Pairing and matching remain challenging, but this was anticipated given the complexity of the reporting rules and their late finalisation, said Alexander Westphal, director of market practice and regulatory policy at Icma. There are also inherent issues beyond the control of reporting firms, such as the inability for trade repositories to identify counterparties that havent yet started reporting. These issues still create significant noise in the reconciliation data, which makes it hard for us to understand where we are, and challenging for firms to focus on the resolution of actual breaks.

See also: Poll shows that MAR is successfully combatting abuse

Due to the inherent complexity of the reporting rules, some market participants expect other issues to crop up over time. Beyond the TRs, we have no idea of the quality of the data or how complete it is, said Richard Comotto, repo consultant and member of Icmas SFTR taskforce. Some firms seem to have done really well, but others are asking surprising questions at this stage. Given the incomplete and challenging nature of the reporting rules, there will clearly be problems.

The quality of the reported data is also expected to improve as firms become more familiar with the rules. The SFTR go-live is the culmination of several years of intensive cross-industry discussions and preparations, Icma said in a statement. The implementation of this highly complex reporting regime will be an iterative process as not all aspects have been finalised. The quality and consistency of the reported data should gradually improve over time, [and] discussionswill continue as firms learn the lessons from the first weeks of reporting.

What are the different phases of the regime?

Collateral reuse rules began applying as soon as July 2016. The following year, disclosures required by funds on the use of SFTs were implemented, and in April 2019, technical standards in relation to reporting requirements and requirements for TRs entered into force. This year, however, is by far the most important as it brings all financial counterparties subject to the regime into scope.

Since July, all banks and investment firms (phase one), as well as central counterparty clearinghouses (CCPs) and central securities depositories (CSDs) (phase two) have begun reporting. Originally scheduled for April 13, the phase one go-live date was pushed back to match phase two in the aftermath of Covid-19.

Esma made the bold decision to postpone the original SFTR deadlines for reporting obligations in response to the adverse developments resulting from the coronavirus outbreak, said Linda Coffman, executive vice-president at SmartStream. Despite having an additional three-month window to prepare, we found that many firms needed extra help to get them across the finish line.

October 13 saw phase three firms, including asset managers, hedge funds, Ucits and AIFs, as well as pension funds and insurance companies, come into scope. While the Covid-19-related delay has helped sellside firms be better prepared, some market participants argue it has had the opposite effect for the buyside.

The phase one reporting delay basically compressed the time available to the sellside to develop delegated solutions, which means clients havent always been able to get the answers they need to prepare themselves, said Adam Jacobs-Dean, global head of markets, governance and innovation at the Alternative Investment Management Association (Aima).

Although theres still time to work things out, there would have been some merit in delaying phase three to maintain the appropriate sequencing.



While the onus is now on the buyside to get ready in time, the sellside still has a role to play. The regulatory delay has created an ambitious timeline for sellside firms to assist those buyside firms who have opted for delegated reporting models, as several outstanding issues  such as the reporting of collateral reuse  remain, said Val Wotton, managing director of product and development strategy at DTCC. Sellside market participants are now turning their attention to finalising their operations to be able to support buyside clients.

Phase four, which came into effect on January 11 of this year, brings Non-Financial companies (NFCs) into the regulations reach. There is not too much crossover between NFC and FC transactions when it comes to SFTR reporting, and as a result, this change is not expected to have a huge impact on financial services

How has Brexit impacted things?

Although some parts of the regime require further work and clarification, preparations for the earlier go-lives are now complete and both buyside and sellside firms can move on. The focus is now to make sure firms have ascertained how and where their trades are reported: either to a UK or EU trade repository (TR)," said DTCCs Wotton.



While DTCC does not anticipate regulatory divergence on SFTR between the EU and UK, Brexit will still have an impact on firms reporting and compliance efforts. Some trades that were previously assigned to an EU TR may now have to be transferred to a UK TR or vice-versa, which in turn will impact some of the matching and pairing, she added. As for TRs, they have to go through a process of migrating certain transactions, with some of them potentially having to review their business model.

See also: Capital markets union, the Brexit factor

To operate in the EU and handle EU transactions, a TR needs to have an established presence there. For some entities, this could indeed be synonymous with cutting off some operations if activity isnt core in the region. DTCC, for instance, has set up a new entity in Dublin. Were working to ensure theres a smooth product delivery on reporting, both for SFTR and Emir [European Market Infrastructure Regulation], added Wotton. TRs need to be domiciled in both jurisdictions if they were to provide services in both places.

Some firms may also have to do dual reporting  meaning transactions could need to be reported in both jurisdictions. This is a complication that banks could have done without, said David Field, senior adviser at Delta Capita. The UK was a strong contributor to the drafting of SFTR, and although it does believe that securities transactions need to be reported  it doesnt necessarily believe it to the degree to which Esma has pushed the regulation.









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Africa/Global: Coronavirus Reflections and Updates

AfricaFocus Bulletin

March 26, 2020 (2020-03-26)

(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor's Note Like the climate crisis and economic inequality, the COVID-19 pandemic may not at first glance seem to be a foreign policy issue. But it powerfully points up the need to forge a global perspective  and global alliances  without delay. Progressives must lead the way, and the coronavirus is an immediate opportunity to change the way we think to always recognize domestic and global realities as intertwined. Both self-interest and moral values make this imperative. This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains a new essay by William Minter and Imani Countess, entitled Can Coronavirus Be a Catalyst for Thinking Globally? and an op-ed in the Financial Times by the prime minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed, entitled If Covid-19 is not beaten in Africa it will return to haunt us all. In addition, it includes a selection of links related to COVID-19 in the United States, globally, and on the African continent. All of us are undoubtedly in danger of overload from a profusion of information, but I hope find useful this selection of a few of the analyses and sources of data that I have found most useful in the 10 days since the last AfricaFocus on this issue on March 16 (http://www.africafocus.org/docs20/covid19.php). ++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++

More on social distancing

Key evidence on social distancing

Kentucky vs. Tennessee on coronavirus may be the best example of elections matter in decades, Alternet, March 22, 2020.

Updated graphs and comments on this comparison are available on the Facebook page of Dr. Stephanie Jolly (https://www.facebook.com/scjolly)

Testing is also essential, and personal protective equipment

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/24/820157519/to-end-the-coronavirus-crisis-we-need-widespread-testing-experts-say

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/germany-coronavirus-death-rate/2020/03/24/76ce18e4-6d05-11ea-a156-0048b62cdb51_story.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/coronavirus-face-mask.html

Country comparisons

This site contains the latest data available, based on the same underlying sources as other on-line sources with maps, but also allows you to drill down for many countries. You can look particularly at the daily new cases and active cases graphs to see how different countries are doing. Thanks to my son Samuel Minter for recommending this site. He is not a health expert, but is an expert in interpreting data and data visualizations (see his site on the U.S. elections at https://electiongraphs.com/).

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Can Coronavirus Be a Catalyst for Thinking Globally?

by William Minter and Imani Countess

Originally published on March 25, 2020 in Organizing Upgrade

https://organizingupgrade.com/can-coronavirus-be-a-catalyst-for-thinking-globally/

Imani Countess is an Open Society Fellow focusing on economic inequality. William Minter is the editor of AfricaFocus Bulletin. This article builds on a multipart essay series entitled Beyond Eurocentrism and U.S. Exceptionalism.

The COVID-19 pandemic is global, but national responses have spanned a wide spectrum. After initial denial, China mobilized massively and appears to be winning its battle against the virus. Several close neighbors of China  Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea  reacted quickly and decisively, taking advantage of systems set up to counter earlier epidemics.

But Italy and other European countries, as well as Iran, were slow to respond, and the United States is even more laggard, making all these countries vulnerable to exponential growth.

African countries, with the help of the World Health Organization, responded quickly, and the case count at this writing still mainly consists of imported cases from Europe. But the rapid growth that is almost inevitable in Africa could quickly overwhelm poorly resourced health systems. And social distancing is impossible for the majority of Africas population.

On March 23, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown intended to curb the virus, with plans to mobilize national resources to protect South African formal and informal workers as well as businesses. His speech, available on YouTube and as a transcript, was detailed and determined. But implementation will be extraordinarily difficult.

Much of Latin America and South Asia is in a similar situation, along with many countries in other regions. And, as in the United States, investments in public health institutions have been eroded by austerity policies in countries around the world.

The Trigger, Not The Cause

At national and global levels, the pandemic has already led to drastic economic consequences, for the stock market and for the real economy. But the disease is the trigger rather than the only cause of these problems, notes Marxist economist Michael Roberts in an extended blog post. Thats because  now the profitability of capital is low and global profits are static at best, even before COVID-19 erupted. Global trade and investment have been falling, not rising.

Households and government institutions at all levels face challenges that are coming fast, and a fast learning curve is imperative if we are to survive. At an individual level, we are learning rapidly that social distancing, which is really physical distancing, is essential. Along with reaching out to our families and personal networks, we know we must mobilize support for essential health workers, grocery workers, and others who are required to work on the frontlines despite personal risks. One among many such creative efforts is a project in New York City that organizes unemployed gig drivers to deliver meals to vulnerable seniors.

At national level, the pandemic is revealing the failures of our institutions and testing their capacity to adapt. Policy debates show sharp contrasts between those who would use the crisis to blame others and accentuate inequalities and those who are questioning entrenched assumptions about the role of government in defending common interests.

Resistance to learning lessons is most firmly entrenched in the Trump administration and the Republican Party. But the pressure to bail out the rich and neglect the most vulnerable is widespread, despite calls for a different course, such as Senator Elizabeth Warrens conditions for corporate bailouts, or this proposal to follow Denmarks ambitious stimulus example.

At the global level, it is past time both for mutual learning and for solidarity. And on both counts, the United States is behind the curve.

Global Learning

Within specialized scientific communities, scientists from China, the United States, and other countries are in contact regularly to share research about the virus. Preprint articles appear daily on sites such as medRxiv. Although these articles have not been formally peer reviewed or published, they are an important means of airing new ideas and receiving scientific feedback. When one such article in early February sparked the viral spread of a conspiracy theory on Twitter, pushback was immediate, and the faulty article was withdrawn within days of its release.

At the policy level, however, ingrained institutional and cultural biases block rapid learning. This is particularly true in the United States, with its longstanding hubris and belief in U.S. exceptionalism.

Mainstream commentators, such as foreign policy veteran Dennis Ross, are already lamenting the U.S. failure to provide global leadership. But their emphasis is on how the United States is losing geopolitical ground to China rather than on the missed opportunity to learn from other countries experiences, including South Korea as well as China. Such learning is happening, but the pace is still limited by assumptions of U.S. exceptionalism and the lack of established bilateral channels at the level of governmental institutions.

There is also the need for more fundamental questioning of the models of industrial agriculture that analysts say have fueled the rise of zoonotic diseases, as natural habitats are invaded by human populations. According to a new report from the African Centre for Biodiversity:

Most pandemics in fact, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more, have their roots in environmental change and ecosystem disturbances. These infectious zoonotic diseases originate from animals, wild and domesticated. These diseases are magnified through the erosion of ecosystem health, deforestation, biodiversity loss, ecosystem destruction and the removal of essential, natural, protective barriers.

The point is also developed in a recent interview with Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu.

Analyst Walden Bello argues that both Western and Chinese models of capitalism share this extractivist orientation.

Global Solidarity

With the United States struggling to confront the coronavirus at home, the countrys capacity to provide solidarity to other countries is very limited. Help will have to come from elsewhere when, as expected, the global pandemic and its economic impact land with full force on Africa and other vulnerable regions. If the United States wanted to help efficiently, it could immediately provide additional financial support to multilateral agencies such as the World Health Organization, UNICEF, as well as a UN special fund being launched.

The UN Secretary General on March 19 eloquently called for global solidarity:

We are facing a global health crisis unlike any in the 75-year history of the United Nations  one that is spreading human suffering, infecting the global economy and upending peoples lives. A global recession  perhaps of record dimensions  is a near certainty.

Saudi Arabia, the current chair of the G-20 group of major economic powers, has called a virtual summit for this week at the urging of India. Although the potential for agreement on common action is uncertain, it is very likely that China will play a major role, and that the United States will be irrelevant at best.

Already China is taking the lead, not only in dealing with the virus at home, but also in providing supplies and expertise to other countries. Initiatives are coming both from the Chinese government and from the Chinese private sector. Billionaire Jack Ma, for example, has provided 500,000 test kits and 1 million masks to the United States. He has also shipped 1.1 million testing kits and 6 million masks to Ethiopia to be distributed by Ethiopian Airlines around the African continent.

Cuba is not a member of the G-20, but it has continued its decades-long tradition of medical solidarity. When a British cruise ship in the Caribbean was denied entry by the United States and other countries, Cuba accepted the almost 1,000 passengers, including 50 with symptoms of coronavirus, and provided secure transport to meet chartered planes to fly them back to Britain. And last week, Cuba sent more than 50 doctors to northern Italy to join the battle there against coronavirus. A Facebook video of their arrival on March 22 gained almost 4 million viewers within 24 hours.

Like the climate crisis and economic inequality, the COVID-19 pandemic may not at first glance seem to be a foreign policy issue. But it powerfully points up the need to forge a global perspective  and global alliances  without delay. Progressives must lead the way, and the coronavirus is an immediate opportunity to change the way we think to always recognize domestic and global realities as intertwined. Both self-interest and moral values make this imperative.

*************************************************************

If Covid-19 is not beaten in Africa it will return to haunt us all

Only a global victory can end this pandemic, not a temporary rich countries win

Abiy Ahmed

The writer is prime minister of Ethiopia and the 2019 Nobel Peace prize laureate

Financial Times, March 25, 2020

https://www.ft.com/content/c12a09c8-6db6-11ea-89df-41bea055720b

There is a major flaw in the strategy to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Advanced economies are unveiling unprecedented economic stimulus packages. African countries, by contrast, lack the wherewithal to make similarly meaningful interventions. Yet if the virus is not defeated in Africa, it will only bounce back to the rest of the world.

That is why the current strategy of unco-ordinated country-specific measures, while understandable, is myopic, unsustainable and potentially counter-productive. A virus that ignores borders cannot be tackled successfully like this. We can defeat this invisible and vicious adversary  but only with global leadership. Without that, Africa may suffer the worst, yet it will not be the last.

We are all in this together, and we must work together to the end. Fragile and vulnerable at the best of times, African economies are staring at an abyss.

Let me illustrate this with the situation in my own country. Ethiopia has made steady progress in the provision of health services over the past two decades. But nothing has prepared us for threats posed by Covid-19.

Access to basic health services remains the exception rather than the norm. Even taking such common-sense precautions as washing hands is often an unaffordable luxury to the half of the population who lack access to clean water. Even seemingly costless social distancing is hard to implement. Our lifestyle is deeply communal, with extended families traditionally sharing the burdens and bounties of life together, eating meals from the same plate. Our traditional and rain-dependent agriculture is dictated by the fixed timeframes of weather cycles in which planting, weeding and harvesting must happen. The slightest disruption to that chain, even for a brief period, can spell disaster, further jeopardising already tenuous food supply and food security.

Take Ethiopian Airlines, the countrys largest company, which accounts for 3 per cent of national output and is a major source of hard currency. It will be pushed to the brink as its business is upended by the pandemic. Shortage of hard currency will then make it all but impossible to source essential medical supplies and equipment from abroad. The cost of servicing our debts is already often more than our annual health budgets. The list continues.

This grim reality is not unique to Ethiopia. It is shared by most African countries. But if they do not take appropriate measures to tackle the pandemic, no country in the world is safe.

Momentary victory by a rich country in controlling the virus at a national level, coupled with travel bans and border closures, may give a semblance of accomplishment. But we all know this is a stopgap.

Only global victory can bring this pandemic to an end. Covid-19 teaches us that we are all global citizens connected by a single virus that recognises none of our natural or man-made diversity: not the colour of our skin, nor our passports, or the gods we worship. For the virus, what matters is the fact of our common humanity.

That is why the strategy to tackle the human and economic cost of this global scourge must be global in design and application. Health is a worldwide public good. It requires global action guided by a sense of global solidarity. But Covid-19 has also exposed our dark underbelly. The world community desperately needs global-level leadership to tackle swiftly pandemics such as this, and in a way that is institutionalised rather than ad hoc.

A good place to start is with the World Health Organization. As countries with the necessary resources focus on fighting the pandemic through their national institutions, the WHO must be empowered and resourced sufficiently to co-ordinate responses globally and directly to assist governments in developing countries. In the meantime, the G20 must provide collective leadership for a co-ordinated global response.

There is no time to waste: millions of lives are at risk. Building on what has been announced by international financial institutions, the G20 must launch a global fund to prevent the collapse of health systems in Africa. The institutions need to establish a facility to provide budgetary support to African countries. The issue of resolving Africas debt burden also needs to be put back on the table as a matter of urgency.

Finally, all of Africas development partners must ensure that their development aid budgets remain ringfenced and are not diverted to domestic priorities. This is where true humanity and solidarity must be demonstrated. If such aid were ever necessary in Africa, it is now more than ever before.

***************************************************

Links on recent articles of interest: USA and Global

"It It Wasnt Just Trump Who Got It Wrong: Americas coronavirus response failed because we didnt understand the complexity of the problem, The Atlantic, March 24, 2020. By Zeynep Tufekci .

[Short excerpts below.]

Many will be tempted to see the tragic coronavirus pandemic through a solely partisan lens: The Trump administration spectacularly failed in its response, by cutting funding from essential health services and research before the crisis, and later by denying its existence and its severity. Those are both true, but they dont fully explain the current global crisis that has engulfed countries of varying political persuasions.

As it turns out, the reality-based, science-friendly communities and information sources many of us depend on also largely failed. We had time to prepare for this pandemic at the state, local, and household level, even if the government was terribly lagging, but we squandered it because of widespread asystemic thinking: the inability to think about complex systems and their dynamics. We faltered because of our failure to consider risk in its full context, especially when dealing with coupled riskwhen multiple things can go wrong together. We were hampered by our inability to think about second- and third-order effects and by our susceptibility to scientismthe false comfort of assuming that numbers and percentages give us a solid empirical basis. We failed to understand that complex systems defy simplistic reductionism.

Widespread asystemic thinking may have cost America the entire month of February, and much of what wed normally consider credible media were part of that failure.



None of this erases the administrations failures, which are grave, but the painful truth is that we could have tried to do a lot at the local level that would have helped. Not everything had to wait for the government. Hong Kong, too, had a largely unresponsive government, but great popular pressure and peoples own actionsimmediate adoption of social distancing in January, universal mask wearing, calling for closures and cancellations even when the government dragged its feethave meant that the city had a very low rate of infection until late March, despite its nearness to China and its status as one of the most densely populated places in the world. Hong Kong is now facing a second wave, but even that uptick, which has caused the anti-government and pro-democracy Telegram channels I follow in Hong Kong to burst with exhortations to the people not to let their guard down, still brings it to only about 360 cases total. Thats a minuscule number compared with, say, the more than 15,000 cases just in New York.

For full article click here.

The coronavirus threatens all of humanity. All of humanity must fight back, Washington Post, March 24, 2020. By UN under-secretary general Mark Lowcock and WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

UN launches major humanitarian appeal to keep COVID-19 from circling back around the globe, UN News, March 25, 2020

https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/03/1060222

European Center for Disease Prevention and Control

Another useful site with global and national background, updated statistics, and comparisons

https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/novel-coronavirus-china

"The 5 WWII Lessons That Could Help the Government Fight Coronavirus, Politico, March 19, 2020.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/19/coronavirus-defense-production-world-war-two-lessons-135814

It Takes a World to End a Pandemic: Scientific Cooperation Knows No BoundariesFortunately,

Foreign Affairs, March 21, 2020. By Mahlet Mesfin.

Links on recent articles of interest: Africa-Specific

Direct link to WHO Africa Dashboard  regularly updated

https://who.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/0c9b3a8b68d0437a8cf28581e9c063a9

Note: you may have to sign in but you can do with Facebook or Google.

Regularly updated on coronavirus in South Africa

https://mediahack.co.za/datastories/coronavirus/dashboard/

March 19, 2020

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51960118  Update, including WHO statement on Africa

https://www.news24.com/Africa/News/who-sounds-coronavirus-siren-in-africa-prepare-for-the-worst-20200319

https://www.fin24.com/Economy/South-Africa/govt-announces-strict-new-rules-to-curb-price-hikes-on-toilet-paper-masks-and-others-goods-20200319?

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-51952739/coronavirus-in-africa-what-impact-could-virus-have-on-the-continent

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/19/can-africa-avoid-being-next-europe-fight-against-coronavirus/

March 20, 2020

https://mailchi.mp/groundup.org.za/covid-19-the-worlds-unprecedented-experiment-and-other-stories-tqkrawrdb7

https://www.passblue.com/2020/03/20/from-africa-news-of-an-evolving-coronavirus-threat/

https://theconversation.com/pandemics-dont-heal-divisions-they-reveal-them-south-africa-is-a-case-in-point-134002

March 21, 2020

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/21/818894991/african-countries-respond-quickly-to-spread-of-covid-19

March 22, 2020

https://qz.com/emails/africa-weekly-brief/1818748/

https://theconversation.com/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-will-affect-informal-workers-insights-from-kenya-134151

March 23, 2020

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/africa/article/3076493/coronavirus-africa-braced-more-cases-next-two-weeks-extremely

March 24, 2020

COVID-19  Africa's Looming Humanitarian and Security Crisis, Guest column by Dr. Mehari Taddele Maru

https://allafrica.com/stories/202003240907.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-24/un-sees-africa-sliding-into-recession-without-debt-service-help

Additional particularly useful links from previous AfricaFocus Bulletin of March 16, 2020

For general background one of the most usable sites is https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/, the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. Among useful pages on that site are an infographic with basic facts and an explanation of social distancing.

Much additional information can be found on the website of the World Health Organization (https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus) and the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html).

For regularly updated statistical data on cases around the world, there are two sites which provide good visualizations of the situation. https://ncov2019.live/data was launched by a 17-year old student in Seattle, Washington, the earliest location of large-scale transmission of the virus in the United States. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html provides more fine-grained data.

A very useful explanation of how the virus spread in South Korea is available from Reuters.

The Africa office of the World Health Organization regulates updates data on coronavirus on the continent, including situation reports, news articles, and a map-based dashboard. The link to the website is https://www.afro.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus-covid-19>

For articles on coronavirus in Africa in the last 7 days (from the time of your search), you can use this customized Google News search: https://tinyurl.com/corona-africa

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please write to this address to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about reposted material, please contact directly the original source mentioned. For a full archive and other resources, see http://www.africafocus.org
The coronavirus is challenging governments around the world with the obstacles of a COVID-19 world. New York State is turning to the technology community to create a SWAT team to combat the virus, but it is not alone in taking this type of an approach.

NHSx, the UKs National Health Service innovation arm announced Techforce19, a 500,000 funding competition for startups and innovators to create solutions to assist citizens impacted by the coronavirus.

Specifically speaking, PUBLIC will manage the program and is looking for projects aimed at social care needs and mental health support. Expect to see solutions to assist alleviate strain on services and processes in place currently, address remote social care as well as care and volunteer optimization.

Startups and innovators have until April 1st at 12pm to get applications in, with finalists selected on April 3rd. Each project chosen will receive up to 25,000 to be deployed at scale in the coming weeks.

Matthew Gould, Chief Executive of NHSX noted, Tech can play an important role in helping the country deal with the challenges created by coronavirus. This competition is focused on the problems created by isolation, which lend themselves to digital solutions. It will allow NHSx to accelerate the development of those solutions, so within weeks they can help those in isolation suffering from loneliness, mental health issues and other problems.

While the world was in the midst of widespread digital transformation, COVID-19 is accelerating deployment and adoption. The tools are there for the remote workforce to remain productive, but what about their sanity  just a question.

Edited by Maurice Nagle
Getty Images

En espanol | The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) says its facilities are equipped to handle an influx of cases amid the spread of the novel coronavirus. In addition, the VA says it is prepared to test and treat non-veterans and non-military personnel, if needed. So far, the VA has administered 2,736 COVID-19 tests and still has 130,000 available, according to VA press secretary Christina Mandreucci.

VA has taken a number of significant steps over the past few weeks to maximize capacity and resources so that the department will be ready if called upon by FEMA and HHS to provide assistance to select non-VA health care systems and communities, Mandreucci said.

These steps include maximizing the use of telehealth, canceling elective surgery and prescreening all patients and visitors for flu-like symptoms.

However, a report by the VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) said that the inventory of medications used to manage symptoms, treat critically ill patients to support cardiovascular functions, and sedate intubated patients may be insufficient. Hence, there may be a need for VA medical centers to refer patients to other VA facilities or community providers.

The report comes after 52 OIG staff, most with clinical experience, made unannounced visits to 237 different facilities from March 19 to 24.

VA has a world-class medical team doing incredible work on the front lines of this fight, said VA secretary Robert Wilkie a day after the reports release. We will continue to share best practices and lessons learned with other government agencies and the private health care system as appropriate so we can defeat COVID-19 as a nation.

How can a veteran get tested for COVID-19?



If you have symptoms of the virus  fever, cough or shortness of breath  have been in close contact with someone infected or traveled to an area with widespread or ongoing community spread of COVID-19, do not make an in-person appointment with your local clinic or military hospital.
Bhopal, March 26 : A 47-year-old man admitted to a hospital in Madhya Pradesh's Indore after being suspected of coronavirus, died on Thursday morning, an official said.

The man has no travel history and his test reports are awaited, the official said.

Earlier treated at the Ujjain civil hospital, he was admitted to the Indore hospital on Wednesday with symptoms of breathlessness, the official said.

The state reported its first coronavirus death on Wednesday after a 65-year-old woman from Ujjain who had tested positive died.

At present, 19 patients are admitted to different hospitals of the state.

Among the latest five new cases found positive in Indore, two are women and three men from different localities of the city, a spokesman of the Government Medical College said.

Curfew has been enforced in Indore and Ujjain since the cases were reported on Wednesday. Earlier, six positive coronavirus cases in Jabalpur and two in Bhopal were detected, sources said.

Most of the 52 districts in the state are under lock down.

No positive case was found in Chhatarpur but the patient found in Gwalior had a travel history of Khajuraho (in Chhatarpur). District authorities therefore clamped curfew in Rajnagar and Khajuraho towns of Chhatarpur.
[March 26, 2020] iBio Supporting AzarGen Biotechnologies' Development of a Rituximab Biosimilar

NEW YORK, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- iBio, Inc. (NYSE AMERICAN:IBIO) (iBio or the Company) today announced that it has entered into a second Statement of Work under its Master Joint Development Agreement (the MJDA) with AzarGen Biotechnologies (Pty.) Ltd. (AzarGen). Signed in 2018, the MJDA contemplates initial contract development and manufacturing of AzarGens biosimilars at iBios Bryan, Texas facility. Ultimately, iBio plans to transfer its proprietary FastPharming Manufacturing System to AzarGen in South Africa for production of critical biological medicines for the African continent.

We are proud to be supporting AzarGen in the development of their lead biosimilar product, commented Thomas F. Isett, iBios Co-Chairman and CEO. Rituximab is an important treatment for certain autoimmune diseases and cancers. By using our FastPharming System to produce rituximab in plants, we are confident that AzarGen will not only benefit from the speed, quality and safety advantages of the platform, but also enjoy iBios continued support for their efforts to transfer the technology to make newer biologics more readily available at lower costs to people living in Africa. In September 2019, AzarGen contracted with iBio to manufacture research quantities of rituximab for bioanalytical testing. Having successfully completed the initial work, iBio will now manufacture and characterize additional supplies to enable pre-clinical studies comparing plant-made rituximab to the original molecule made using genetically engineered mammalian cells. We are pleased with the progress iBio has made toward helping us advance our rituximab biosimilar toward preclinical studies, said Dr. Mauritz Venter, CEO of AzarGen. We are looking forward to the results of the analyses in hopes of developing a more affordable alternative for the African market. About AzarGen Biotechnologies (Pty) Ltd AzarGen is a biotechnology company focused on developing huan therapeutic proteins using advanced genetic engineering and synthetic biology techniques in plants. The companys lead therapeutic candidates are: a biosimilar version of an anti-cancer monoclonal antibody and a recombinant human surfactant protein targeted for various respiratory disease conditions. AzarGen has developed proprietary synthetic DNA promoters for various expression platform applications in plant-made pharmaceuticals, synthetic biology and GM-crop improvement. The AzarGen management team is supported by an experienced advisory board for strategic guidance and intellectual property management. Based in Stellenbosch, South Africa, AzarGen is supported by South Africas Industrial Development Corporation (IDC). Further information is available at www.azargen.com .



About iBio, Inc. iBio is a global leader in plant-based biologics manufacturing. Its FastPharming System combines vertical farming, automated hydroponics, and glycan engineering technologies to rapidly deliver gram quantities of high-quality monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, bioinks and other proteins. The Companys subsidiary, iBio CDMO LLC, provides FastPharming Contract Development and Manufacturing Services via its 130,000 square foot facility in Bryan, Texas. Originally built in 2010 with funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), iBios FastPharming Facility was part of the Blue Angel initiative to establish factories capable of rapid delivery of medical countermeasures in response to a disease pandemic. iBios FastGlycaneering Development Service includes an array of new glycosylation technologies for engineering high-performance recombinant proteins. Additionally, iBio is developing proprietary products which include IBIO-100 for the treatment of fibrotic diseases and IBIO-200, a COVID-19 vaccine. For more information, visit www.ibioinc.com .

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

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(646) 274-3580

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday pitched for 'humans at centre' vision to the global leaders at the G20 virtual summit on the COVID-19 pandemic hosted by Saudi Arabia, which holds the G20 presidency in 2020. "Let's put human beings rather than economic targets at centre of our vision for global prosperity, cooperation," said PM Modi.

At the G20 summit, PM Modi pushed for developing more adaptive, responsive, and affordable human healthcare system to be deployed globally. He stated that 90 per cent of COVID-19 cases and 88 per cent of coronavirus deaths took place in G20 countries

PM Modi called for sharing freely and openly medical research for the development of humankind. He highlighted that international organisations like the World Health Organisation (WHO) needs to be strengthened and reformed. "WHO initially did not have the mandate to deal with the pandemic of this sort, which is why empowering of WHO is necessary be it in terms of its capacity of early warning or development of effective vaccines, or capacity building," said PM Modi.

The PM said at many levels, globalization has failed us, whether it is in combating terrorism or climate change. He also offered an opportunity to look at a new concept of globalization--one that also focuses on humanity, climate change, and terrorism other than economic and financial aspects.

"Thousands of precious lives have been lost and equally alarming is its economic and social costs," he said at the G20 summit. PM Modi stressed the need to build early warning systems, to deal with future pandemics.

PM Modi pitched for developing new crisis management protocol and procedures for an interconnected world.

UN chief Antonio Guterres has warned that the world is not winning the war against the deadly novel Coronavirus and needs a war-time plan to fight it as the number of infected cases across the world grow exponentially every day. The UN Secretary-General was speaking at the G20 Virtual Summit.

"We are at war with a virus and not winning it. It took the world three months to reach 100,000 confirmed cases of infection. The next 100,000 happened in just 12 days. The third took four days. The fourth, just one and a half. This is exponential growth and only the tip of the iceberg. This war needs a war-time plan to fight it," Guterres said.

The COVID-19 pandemic has killed over 22,000 people and infected more than 490,000 people globally.
Jamia Millia Islamia University suspended Dr Abrar Ahmad, Assistant professor, who claimed he has failed 15 non-Muslim students for supporting the Citizenship Amendment Act.

Dr. Abrar Ahmad, Asstt Professor of @jmiu_official tweeted in public domain as to failing 15 non-muslim students in an exam. This is a serious misconduct inciting communal disharmony under CCS CONDUCT RULES.The university suspends him pending inquiry.@DrRPNishank @HRDMinistry  Jamia Millia Islamia (Central University) (@jmiu_official) March 25, 2020

In a Twitter post in atrociously mangled English, the professor claimed that he failed 15 non-Muslim students for supporting CAA.

He also threatened the 15 non-Muslim students in his class that he enjoys the support of 55 students and if they did not give up protesting against the anti-CAA protests, the majority of the class i.e 55 students will teach them a lesson through riots. Professors know the roll numbers and we have to put them on mark sheets. So it is easy for them to identify non-Muslim students, a source in Jamia said.

He, apparently, claims he was trying to explain how CAA is discriminatory towards a community. Here, it should be noted that CAA is not applicable to Indian citizens. CAA only fast-tracks Indian citizenship to persecuted religious minorities from three neighbouring Islamic countries, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Muslims of these countries, too, could obtain Indian citizenship, should they so wish, by following the regular procedures. So one really is baffled about the discrimination Ahmad is talking about.

Meanwhile, the Jamia administration has suspended him pending inquiry.
Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay



Rupani has been holding telephonic conversations with coronavirus patients, their doctors and those in home quarantine to boost their morale.

During these telephonic talks, he gathers first hand information about the treatment and steps taken by the administration to contain the spread of the virus.

While he held telephonic chats with some doctors on Thursday, similar conversations were held on March 23 and 24 when he engaged in talks with coronavirus patients and those kept under home quarantine upon their return from abroad.

A video of Rupani talking with doctors using 'CM Dash Board' system was released by the Gujarat government on Thursday.

In one of the conversations, Rupani told a doctor the entire medical fraternity is no less than God for people.

"I thank everyone of you for doing such selfless service. You have put your own lives at risk to save others. I want to assure you that doctors and health staff are on the top priority of my government.

"We will provide all necessary facilities to doctors and health staff," Rupani told a doctor, identified only as Seema, during one such call.

ON March 23, the CM held similar talks with some patients of the coronavirus and assured them of best possible treatment to them.

The next day, Rupani spoke to seven persons who were put under home quarantine upon their return from abroad.

In another video, he can be seen urging them to strictly follow self-isolation norms to defeat the coronavirus.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
This blended family is quarantining under one roof amid the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo courtesy of Denise Albert)

Families everywhere are hunkering down together in order to stay close during the indefinite coronavirus self-quarantine. But for those that have separate households as a result of divorced parents and also share custody of children, decisions about how and where to quarantine arent so straightforward.

Denise Albert and Jordan Fisch, however  exes of eight years  came up with a unique solution when they decided to rent a house, away from their New York City apartments, so that their 11-year-old son, Jaylan, didnt need to go back and forth between them. Now the two are living together as part of a modern-day quarantine setup that also includes one of their two children, Fischs new wife Laura Goldstein, Goldsteins ex-husband Dan Bassichis, and two of Goldstein and Bassichiss children.

Albert explains to Yahoo Lifestyle that the decision to all come together under one roof was a difficult one to reach. Still, during unprecedented times, it seemed to be the only option.

We first decided to stop the back-and-forth between homes for everyone's health, Albert says of her co-parenting arrangement with Fisch. We both live in doorman buildings with a lot of elevator traffic and wanted to limit that for all of us. So we made the very hard decision to put an end to that and just have walks with dad. That was devastating for everyone.

Meanwhile, Bassichis had his two daughters  Abby, 15 and Caroline, 13  on a spring break trip in Vermont, and couldnt fathom bringing them back to the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in New York City. But instead of keeping them away from their mother, Goldstein, she and Fisch discussed going up to meet them in Vermont for the quarantine. Albert then had to make a decision about whether or not to get on board with the plan.

I was the lone holdout, she explains, noting that the absence of her and Fischs other son, Jaron, 15, who is still away at boarding school, made her reluctant. But she decided it was in everyone's best interest, as it was the only situation in which Jaylan would be with both of his parents.

Story continues

Now, the blended family  with seven people in total  are in one house in Vermont. And although Albert says all of the adults have worked to develop a good relationship throughout the years, theyre actively trying to maintain healthy boundaries as they live as one big family.

Everyone comes together for group game night. (Photo courtesy of Denise Albert)

Everyone is really pitching in and really respectful of each other, Albert says, as all of the adults are working from home. We are coordinating wi-fi usage since there are so many of us. They have even worked out separate bathroom and bedroom situations that feel most comfortable for the adults and step siblings.

More importantly, Albert says that the group is making time for activities that have allowed them all to become closer. We are working out together using apps on my iPad. We are having family dinners and then a family activity after that  either a board game or kids doing art projects while we talk or each have our own friend FaceTime happy hours, she says. My exs step daughters are going to teach me TikTok dances soon, I can't wait.

While the longevity of the quarantine is still uncertain, Albert, who is a journalist and co-founder of media and event company The MOMS, is certain that the decision to join together in this time was the right one. Shes even been documenting the experience by blogging about it, telling Yahoo Lifestyle that she hopes the journey inspires other families.

I know not everyone can do this, but I sure hope even if it inspires one person, then that makes us happy because it truly is the best thing for the kids. There's nothing better than that, she says. We all now know we can do anything and are confident this is the beginning of even more kindness and cooperation between all. This is the best way to be divorced.

For the latest news on the evolving coronavirus outbreak, follow along here. According to experts, people over 60 and those who are immunocompromised continue to be the most at risk. If you have questions, please reference the CDC and WHOs resource guides.

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McGregor gives one million euros for protective hospital equipment

MMA/UFC: Conor McGregor has spent one million euros (36 million baht) on protective equipment for hospital staff treating patients with the coronavirus in Ireland.

MMA

By AFP

Thursday 26 March 2020, 01:15PM

Conor McGregor has paid one million euros to give hospital staff protective equipment. Photo: AFP

McGregor sent a message to the Republic of Irelands Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe and revealed the contents on his Twitter page.

Donohoe had written to McGregor asking him to tell his 7.9 million Twitter followers to practise social distancing.

Today I am purchasing myself, one million euro worth of personal protective equipment to be deployed to all the fighting hospitals in the Leinster region. Our most affected region, to this date, McGregor said.

St Jamess, Mater, Tallaght, Beaumont, Vincents (hospitals). Where we would be without these brave men and women, I do not know. May God bless over them and keep them safe!

McGregor called on the Irish government to go further in their efforts to fight the virus and implement more stringent lock-down measures.

I feel like we are moving in the right way, it just feels to me like it is not all the way, he said.

I urge all the way! All in is the term we must use here. Bit by bit will cost us lives.

To see what is happening here in Ireland and all across the globe is heartbreaking to me. I pray.

God speed Minister and thank you for the message, and your service to our nation.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  Health Secretary Francisco Duque III on Thursday denied rumors that he pressured Makati Medical Center to admit Senator Aquilino Koko Pimentel IIIs wife who was about to give birth.

Sa kumakalat na balita ukol sa pagtawag ng inyong lingkod sa Makati Medical Center para tulungan o bigyang pabor ang sinuman, ito po ay walang katotohanan. Hindi po ako tumawag sa Makati Medical Center para makiusap na kanilang tanggapin sa kanilang ospital ang asawa ni Senator Pimentel, Duque said in a press briefing.

[Translation: There is no truth to the rumors circulating that I called Makati Medical Center to help or favor anyone. I didn't call Makati Medical Center to plead to them to admit Senator Pimentels wife.]

Duque also said the Health Department agrees with Makati Medical Center in saying that Pimentels decision to accompany his wife, Kathryna, to give birth despite having been tested for COVID-19 is a breach of quarantine protocols.

While at the hospital, the senator said he found out through a call that he is positive for COVID-19.

Hindi dapat nangyari ito," Duque said. "Susundan po natin ang yapak ng mga lead agencies na inatasan upang panatilihin ang peace and order kasama na ang pag-handle ng violations sa quarantine protocol."

[Translation: This shouldnt have happened. We will follow our lead agencies tasked to maintain peace and order, including handling violations in quarantine protocol.]

Malacanang is keeping a hands-off approach on the matter, saying there is still a need to determine the facts surrounding the alleged breach of quarantine procedures by officials and if a case has to be filed against them.

However, the palace said quarantine protocols apply equally to all, regardless of their socio-political status.

There are no exemptions for any person on these health protocols," Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said in a statement. "Those holding high positions in the government are enjoined to set an example to their constituents by strictly observing them."

Any transgressor therefore must be dealt with in accordance with law," Panelo added.

#KokoKulong

Pimentel drew flak for his trip to the hospital with his wife, with some calling for his resignation and for charges to be pressed against him.

Following his visit to Makati Medical Center, at least two health workers had to be quarantined, while the entire delivery room complex had to be disinfected.

He had also gone to members-only supermarket S&R in Bonifacio Global City in Taguig six days before he found out that he is positive for COVID-19. This was also two days after he began to experience body pain.

A number of employees at that S&R branch are now on quarantine, while the premises had to be disinfected.

The hashtag #KokoKulong landed on the top trending topics on Twitter in the Philippines on Thursday.

Meanwhile, an online petition for Pimentel to be charged for supposedly violating the Mandatory Reporting of Notifiable Diseases and Health Events of Public Health Concern Act and the Quarantine Act has garnered over 92,000 signatures as of this writing.

University of the Philippines law professor John Molo said Pimentel can face a string of charges and penalties.

Among the possible penalties are disbarment and suspension or expulsion from the Senate for unparliamentary behavior.

Molo said Pimentel may also be fined up to 50,000 or face a jail term of one to six months for failing to disclose that he is suspected of having COVID-19.

For violating the enhanced community quarantine, Molo said Pimentel can be fined between 10,000 and 50,000 or jailed for up to a year.

Molo added that Pimentel could also be sued for criminal negligence, disobedience to agents of a person in authority, graft and corruption and for damages.

Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said they will temper the rigor of the law with human compassion as people are prone to commit violations during abnormal times like these.

But this is not to say that the DOJ (Department of Justice) will not act upon the filing of a proper complaint by any interested party, Guevarra said.
The illness struck out of the blue.

Thats how Azar Ahrabis son, Amir, described what happened to his mother. Last month, the 68-year-old woman had been living a simple but satisfying life in Santa Clara County: running errands, cooking and caring for her own elderly mother and befriending people in the grocery store with her sweet smile.

But one week after going to the doctor with a cough and fever, Ahrabis illness made headlines and triggered public health alarm: At the time she was thought to be the first person in Santa Clara County to contract the new coronavirus with no known source of infection. Eleven days later, on March 9, Ahrabi died in a hospital bed without her family by her side.

She became one of the first in the Bay Area to succumb to COVID-19 at a time when people in the region were just beginning to grasp the seriousness of the situation: Soon it was declared a pandemic, prompting orders for people to stay 6 feet apart and shuttering schools, restaurants and parks.

It really came as an extreme shock to everybody, said Amir, the first in his family to learn of his mothers death. I said, Oh yeah, we have so much time ahead of us.... I still cant wrap my head around how this couldve happened.

Amir, a 31-year-old tech worker, spoke on the condition that only his first name be used, and The Chronicle agreed not to fully identify him in accordance with its policy on the use of anonymous sources. The Chronicle sought Amir out after seeing an online fundraiser for Ahrabi. Amir said he is concerned about the stigma associated with having infected family members.

More Information Inside the newsroom Anonymous sources: The Chronicle strives to attribute all information we report to credible, reliable, identifiable sources. Presenting information from an anonymous source occurs extremely rarely, and only when that information is considered crucially important and all other on-the-record options have been exhausted. In such cases, The Chronicle has complete knowledge of the unnamed person's identity and of how that person is in position to know the information. The Chronicle's detailed policy governing the use of such sources, including the use of pseudonyms, is available on sfchronicle.com. See More Collapse

The story he shared, confirmed by two others close to Ahrabi, offers a glimpse into the wrenching experience countless families could face as coronavirus cases surge across the United States. He urged people to be cautious, heed official health guidance and not underestimate the virus.

Take this situation very seriously, Amir said.

His mother, he said, developed a fever and cough in mid-February when there were just two confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the county. Both of those infected people had traveled to Wuhan, China, where the pandemic originated, and no one  neither family nor doctors  initially suspected that Ahrabis symptoms were related to COVID-19 because she had not recently traveled.

Ahrabi, an Iranian immigrant, lived in an apartment she shared with her mother, who is in her mid-80s. She gave Amir traditional immune-boosting herbs each time he visited despite his initial protests, he said. She had a knack for Turkish coffee reading  a fortunetelling practice that involves interpreting symbols left by coffee grounds inside a cup, which Ahrabi learned as a girl in Iran. She made friends with the mailman, the checkout workers at Safeway, the front-desk attendant at her apartment complex.

Given the small radius of Ahrabis daily routine, her family wonders how she became infected.

Ahrabi visited her primary physician with a fever, cough and heavy congestion on Feb. 20 and received a pneumonia diagnosis, Amir said. She was sent home to hydrate, rest and take a prescribed antibiotic.

But two days later, concerned by his mothers shortness of breath, Amir took her to the emergency room at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View. Doctors kept her there on oxygen. Amir stayed beside his mother, attentive but not overly concerned, and looked forward to the upcoming Persian New Year, or Nowruz, celebration. He knew the holiday, which welcomes new life and good health, would restore his mothers good spirits with many of her favorite things: gatherings with friends and family, cooking a traditional rice and fish dish and giving gifts.

Amir said doctors informed him that Ahrabi did not have pneumonia. He figured that was good news. Perhaps his mother was recovering. But three days after she checked in, a new thought occurred to Amir: What if his mother had the coronavirus?

When he asked the doctors about that possibility, they questioned Amir about his mothers travel history. Because she had none, they informed him the probability that Ahrabi was infected with the coronavirus was low. It wasnt until an infectious disease doctor intervened that Ahrabi was tested, but other doctors continued to tell Amir that a coronavirus infection was highly unlikely. At the time, no one without a travel history or known exposure to a confirmed case had been infected in the county. Health officials were advising people that risk to the general public remained low.

Thats why the positive result, which came back on Feb. 27, blew Amirs mind.

Most concerning was the new directive from county health officials: Amir had to self-quarantine for 14 days.

Beyond that point, Amir said, she was completely alone.

Meanwhile, two family members  Ahrabis mother and 27-year-old nephew  tested positive for the virus. Amir tested negative.

Amir wanted to be with his mother at the hospital to receive frequent updates, consult with the medical staff and ensure she was receiving the best care. Instead, forced to stay away, he kept in touch through phone calls with doctors and nurses, who werent always available to fill him in, and called his mother on her cell phone.

But Ahrabi wore a high-pressure oxygen mask that made it difficult to talk for long. Their conversations were brief, and each time Ahrabi was focused on her familys well-being.

This person is still in the ICU fighting for her health, but yet shes still questioning how were doing and how her mothers doing, Amir said.

Overnight, however, a drastic decision made all communication impossible. Doctors told Amir that his mothers oxygen levels dropped to critical lows so suddenly that they were unable to notify him before they intubated her. The process involved inducing an artificial coma and inserting a tube attached to a ventilator through her mouth and into her airway to facilitate breathing.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

When reached to comment on this story, a representative of El Camino Hospital said federal health care privacy laws prevent the hospital from giving specific details about any patient. Doctors treating COVID-19 patients at other hospitals in Santa Clara County have reported that some stable patients rapidly deteriorate, requiring intubation within hours.

Now Playing: Here is what you need to know about the coronavirus. Video: Manjula Varghese

Amir woke up on March 9 to call the hospital to check on his mother. Before he could place the call, his phone rang with news from a nurse: Ahrabi fought through the night, but by morning, her heart had stopped  before her son, mother or friends could say goodbye.

There were many things Amir had wanted to tell his mom, he said. That he was proud of her. That he knew she had always done her best for him. That he would never meet anybody as selfless and caring.

Ahrabis mother had not seen her daughter since she was whisked away to the hospital in late February. The family had not wanted to risk the elderly womans health since she tested positive for COVID-19 but remained asymptomatic. Besides, there had been no reason to think Ahrabi wouldnt return home.

The natural grieving process for Amir and his family was hampered by the regions shelter-in-place order. Ahrabi would have wanted a funeral filled with family and the many people she counted as friends, old and new, her son said. Instead, seven immediate family members and close friends were allowed to mourn her life together. Ahrabis mother was not among them  she could not bear to see her daughter buried, Amir said.

Her body had to be concealed in a protective bag, Amir said, preventing the important body-washing procedure that is customary to the familys Iranian culture.

The family must find a new caretaker for their grandmother, who has health problems, takes several medications and cannot be left alone during the day. Amir created the GoFundMe page to help with that expense.

But for now, while he has the flexibility to work from home, Amir has stepped into his mothers shoes as his grandmothers keeper. He wears a mask, sprays dishes with disinfectant and strictly follows all public health guidelines. Risking his own health to care for family, he embodies his mothers self-sacrificing nature.

Omeed, Amirs cousin, said the family will strive to keep Ahrabis compassionate spirit alive, and hopes others will do the same.

If everyone can just try to have the level of compassion and the level of care and generosity and support that she gave others, he said, this world would be left a better place.

Anna Bauman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: anna.bauman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @abauman2

Editors note: This story has been updated with additional information to reflect emerging details that show Azar Ahrabi was not the first Bay Area person to die from the coronavirus.
[March 26, 2020] HealthTap Announces Free COVID-19 Virtual Doctor Visits In Partnership With Doctors Across U.S.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- HealthTap , a leading virtual primary care provider, today announced that it will offer a free virtual doctor visit to anyone in the U.S. who is worried about symptoms that could be related to COVID-19. Doctors from the company's network of 90,000 US board-certified physicians are volunteering their time to provide these visits by text, phone, or video. HealthTap uses proprietary technology similar to those of ride-sharing and delivery companies to match patients with doctors in real time and at scale. The company will continue to offer one free virtual visit per person for as long as it has capacity. HealthTap is calling on all U.S.-based doctors with active medical licenses in good standing to join this important effort. Consumers can get more information and access their free visit at www.healthtap.com/covid . Doctors can get more information and sign up to join HealthTap at www.healthtap.com/for-doctors . "HealthTap is in a unique position to help because of the generosity of volunteer doctors, the fact that our product is accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and our ability to match patients with doctors," said Geoff Rutledge, M.D., chief medical officer of HealthTap. "Volunteering to provide virtual care with HealthTap is a way for doctors to do tremendous good in a time of crisis, especially for those doctors who aen't able to work at a clinic or hospital."



Hundreds of HealthTap doctors have already volunteered to provide "COVID consults," and all HealthTap doctors get ongoing training on the latest medical protocols for providing COVID-19-related care. HealthTap is completely independent of insurance benefits and does not require a previous or existing doctor relationship. In addition to the free virtual visit, the company is offering unlimited virtual doctor visits for $119 per year to individuals. Previously, this price was available only to people who had access to HealthTap through an employer.

"Our goal is to provide access to virtual primary care at the most affordable price possible for anyone and everyone," said Sean Mehra, chief strategy officer at HealthTap. "In addition to virtual doctor visits, HealthTap offers free digital tools that can often eliminate the need to see a doctor at all, like getting personalized, doctor-written answers to individual questions and our AI-powered symptom checker." HealthTap offers care through its website, as well as iOS and Android native mobile applications, where members can: Connect with a U.S.-based, board-certified doctor by text, phone, or video, 24/7, from any device, with an average wait time of one minute or less Submit written questions and get personal, doctor-written answers within hours Instantly assess and triage symptoms with HealthTap AI, the company's artificial intelligence-powered symptom checker Search a library of patient-asked, doctor-answered medical questions, particularly those related to COVID-19 and other viruses Access care guidelines for prevention, management, self-quarantine, caregiving, and supporting high-risk individuals, all updated daily based on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) For more information, visit www.healthtap.com . About HealthTap HealthTap uses proprietary technology to match patients with U.S.-based board-certified doctors to deliver real-time access to high-quality, affordable primary care. HealthTap members enjoy 24/7 access to virtual doctor visits from any digital device, with an average wait time of less than one minute. HealthTap AI triages symptoms and gives guidance based on a person's specific traits and even geographical area. With HealthTap, businesses can offer primary care to workers for less than they typically spend providing free coffee. HealthTap is available throughout North America, and has provided more than 100,000 virtual doctor visits to date. For more information, visit www.healthtap.com. HealthTap Media Relations Team:

[email protected]

415.723.2129 (accepts texts) View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/healthtap-announces-free-covid-19-virtual-doctor-visits-in-partnership-with-doctors-across-us-301030189.html SOURCE HealthTap

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UK Judge Vanessa Baraitser yesterday refused an application to grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange bail. He is currently held on remand in Londons HMP Belmarsh, pending completion of a hearing to decide on his extradition to the United States on charges of espionage carrying a life sentence.

Assanges legal team made the bail request due to the very real and potentially fatal risk posed to his fragile health by the coronavirus pandemic. The judges decision is more proof that the British government, in collusion with the Trump administration and US security services, want nothing less than to see the world-famous journalist dead.

Baraitsers refusal came amid mounting calls for the release of vulnerable, low-risk prisoners from the UKs overcrowded and woefully unprepared prison systems during the coronavirus crisis.

Allan Hogarth of Amnesty International UK said elderly prisoners and those with underlying medical conditions should immediately be considered for release if they do not pose a threat to themselves or society. The Prisoners Advice Service is calling for the old or infirm, those on indefinite imprisonment for public protection sentences, and those who simply do not pose threat to be released now.

Before the hearing began, over 17,000 people had signed a petition to Home Secretary Priti Patel demanding Release Julian Assange from Belmarsh Prison before COVID-19 spreads.

Due to the UK lockdown, the court was sparsely attended, with several lawyers participating online. Physically present were Baraitser, one clerk, Assanges leading defence barrister, Edward Fitzgerald QC, five journalists and six WikiLeaks supporters.

Baraitser began by informing the court that HMP Belmarsh had allowed Assange just 15 minutes access to a video link. The rest of the hearing would have to proceed in his absence. Assange was unable to participate properly due to audio issues with the lawyers dialling in to the court: I cant hear half of them, he said at one point.

Proceeding under these flagrant abuses of due process, US prosecutors delivered a volley of lies to justify keeping the WikiLeaks founder in prison.

Lawyer Clair Dobbin first said that it was not a matter for the court to release individual prisoners, but for the Ministry of Justice. The court, she said, cannot pre-empt the government. But it is on Baraitsers say-so of September 2019 that Assange is still held in a maximum-security prison on remand, despite his sentence for absconding bail having expired that month.

Dobbin repeated the now doubly absurd claim made by the prosecution to keep Assange held on remand; that the risk of flight posed by the most famous political prisoner in the worldnow in the midst of a national lockdown and closure of international travelis insurmountable.

There exists concrete evidence of his absconding, she said. He has been tested and failed.

This refers to Assange using his right to asylum to shelter in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 and escape an international manhunt launched by a murderous US government. Assanges persecutors are using their past criminality as justification for todays.

Dobbin then claimed that Assange is not within the high-risk groups for coronavirus and implied that there was little risk of infection anyway since, It's widely publicised that visits to prisons by all family members have stopped.

Assange has a chronic lung condition and has been severely physically weakened by brutal mistreatment amounting to psychological torture over the past decade. On Tuesday, the campaign group Doctors for Assange tweeted, Medically, legally, ethically, & morally, Assange should be granted bail tomorrow.

Lissa Johnson, a spokesperson for the group, tweeted, If Julian Assange is not granted bail on Wednesday, and he succumbs to Covid-19 in prison, his death will be a politically-motivated, state-sanctioned killing, by wilful medical neglect.

Assanges case, Doctors for Assange said, represents a significantly increased risk of death amid Covid-19 pandemic to a low-risk prisoner, citing World Health Organisation guidance, the statement of the President of the Prison Governors Association that Covid-19 related deaths in prisons were inevitable and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Professor Richard Cokers warning of the substantial risk of virus spreading at particularly fast rate in prisons.

There are clear signs that this risk is becoming a reality. On Tuesday, 4,300 prison staff12 percent of the totalwere away from work because they were ill or self-isolating. The Ministry of Justice has announced that 19 prisoners across 10 jails have been diagnosed with the infection, plus four prison staff across four jails and three prisoner escort and custody services staff. London, where Belmarsh prison is located, is the epicentre of the UKs epidemic.

On the prosecutions claim that Assange is a flight risk, Fitzgerald said, It is extremely unlikely he would forsake the legal battle he is engaged in. He outlined the strict conditions of release which the defence would be prepared to accept to ensure Assanges safety, including house arrest with his partner and father, GPS tagging which would alert authorities if he even leaves the interior of the house, and 12 sureties to offer bail.

On the risks to Assanges health and life, Fitzgerald explained that medical expert Dr. Sondra Crosby considers that he is particularly at risk, one, of developing coronavirus and, if he does, that it develops into very severe complications for him.

If he does develop critical symptoms it would be very doubtful that Belmarsh would be able to cope with his condition, Crosby concluded.

Assange, Fitzgerald continued, will be seriously endangered in circumstances from which he cannot escape if he continues to remain in prison. This danger is exacerbated by the risk to his mental health and his human contact posed by lockdown procedures, which will also further restrict Assanges already minimal contact time with his lawyers.

Responding to the prosecutions suggestion that Assange was at little risk of coming into contact with the virus, Fitzgerald said, When we sought to have access to Belmarsh we were told that 100 members of staff were off sick due to the coronavirus. That does not suggest that there's no coronavirus problem in Belmarsh.

Baraitser responded with a declaration that the global pandemic does not provide grounds for Mr Assanges release. She had no reason not to trust the governments advice on protecting prisoners from the virus as both evidence-based and reliable and appropriate.

Following the ruling, Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, tweeted, No surprise. If UK cared for Assanges health, justice or [the] rule of law, he would not be persecuted, imprisoned & tortured for the purpose of suppressing press freedom & facing extradition to a country claiming total impunity for torture & war crimes.

Speaking for Doctors for Assange, Dr. Stephen Frost told the World Socialist Web Site, We are astonished that Julian Assange has been denied bail, despite expert witness medical evidence having been submitted to the Court strongly recommending that he be released on bail. On the evidence available, in the absence of access to proper medical care since 2012, Mr. Assange must be assumed by doctors to be severely immunocompromised and therefore at greatly increased risk of contracting and dying from coronavirus in any prison, but especially in a prison such as Belmarsh. Every extra day Mr. Assange is incarcerated in Belmarsh prison constitutes an increased threat to his life.
The energy company told Utility Dive that the stolen data was not confidential information related to our critical or customer operations. Ameren also added that it has investigated the breach.

As part of our procurement process, standard schematics or drawings may be shared with suppliers to support procurement of materials, but the documents in question do not contain any information that would put Ameren assets or customer data at risk to external threats, the energy company said in a statement.

Read more: Ransomware remains top concern for businesses - report

The news comes just days after Beazley published its annual report on data breach trends, which found that ransomware remains a top cybersecurity threat for many businesses. That report found that there was a 131% increase in the number of ransomware incidents reported by Beazleys clients, from 2018 to 2019.
These are the easy cases. What about the harder ones? Chief Justice Roberts achieved unanimity in Hosanna-Tabor by treating the facts of that case in a way that put it in the easy category while pushing the hard questions down the road. The plaintiff, Cheryl Perich, taught kindergarten, but she was more than simply a lay teacher. She had been designated a called teacher following completion of an intensive course of theological study and a vote of the congregation. She led students in prayer and sometimes led chapel services. Her church referred to her as a commissioned minister and she held herself out as a minister, even receiving the federal income tax break available to clergy members.

Ms. Perich went on disability leave following a diagnosis of narcolepsy. When she tried to return after several months, she was told that her position had been filled and that she should seek a peaceful release from her call. After she refused and indicated that she would invoke the Americans With Disabilities Act, the school fired her for insubordination and disruptive behavior. When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought suit on her behalf, the school argued that it had dismissed her for religious reasons, namely that her threat to go to court violated the Lutheran belief that Christians should resolve their disputes internally. (The E.E.O.C. has switched sides and supports the schools against the teachers in the case now before court.)

In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts said the court should be reluctant to adopt a rigid formula for deciding when an employee qualifies as a minister. He continued: It is enough for us to conclude, in this our first case involving the ministerial exception, that the exception covers Perich, given all the circumstances of her employment. The circumstances the chief justice cited were the formal title given Perich by the church, the substance reflected in that title, her own use of that title, and the important religious functions she performed for the church.

Now, eight years after the court first announced the ministerial exception, the justices are faced with deciding whether the two teachers in the new case are so like Ms. Perich as to shield their employers from the consequences of treatment that could ordinarily be unlawful, or whether they are sufficiently different as to have the right to go court like any other plaintiff claiming discrimination. (Ms. Biel died of breast cancer last year, and her case is being carried on by her husband, Darryl.)

Two separate three-judge panels ruled in favor of the teachers. Each applied the holistic approach of the chief justices opinion in Hosanna-Tabor and concluded that while the teachers performed some religious functions, they lacked not only the title but the training Ms. Perich had received and the status she enjoyed. No federal court of appeals has applied the ministerial exception in a case that bears so little resemblance to Hosanna-Tabor, the panel majority said in Ms. Biels case, adding, A contrary rule, under which any school employee who teaches religion would fall within the ministerial exception, would not be faithful to Hosanna-Tabor or its underlying constitutional and policy considerations.

The schools, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, offer a very different interpretation of Hosanna-Tabor. What really mattered in that case, their brief argues, was not title or training, but whether the employee performed an important religious function. Both teachers carried out the important religious function of teaching the Catholic faith to the next generation, each serving as a messenger or teacher of the faith, their brief asserts. Far from being faithful to Hosanna-Tabor, they argue, the Ninth Circuit imposed the kind of rigid formula that Chief Justice Roberts had dismissed as inappropriate.

Its important to look behind the curtain here. What is an important religious function, and whos to say? Solicitor General Noel Franciscos brief is explicit in calling for complete deference to the religious employer: Facts that demonstrate a religious organization sincerely regards its employee as performing such important religious functions should be dispositive. And who judges sincerity? Recent Supreme Court precedents make clear that judges are not to question the sincerity of a religious claim.
Will the European Union be one of the casualties of COVID-19?

The worldwide pandemic has dealt a dramatic and obvious blow to the liberal ideas of free trade and freedom of movement that inspired and were inspired by the EU. The openness that made it possible to travel and do business seamlessly across a continent has provided the virus with a cornucopia of vectors for transmission. If the refugee crisis of the mid-2010s put strengthened borders back on the continent's political agenda, the pandemic has made the case for hunkering down nationally as well as individually hard to dispute.

But the EU could survive a change to its freedom of movement rules. In fact, the only practical way to address problems like chaos at the Austria-Hungary border as EU citizens try to get home is through coordinated action at the EU level. The same is true of other efforts to fight the virus, like tracking the infected and providing emergency medical assistance. The goal of effectively containing and eradicating the virus no more militates against the need for Europe-wide policymaking than it does against the need for coordinated national action in the United States. "Europe" may be based on certain ideals, but it is embodied in institutions, and it is the effectiveness of those institutions in meeting novel challenges that matters to its survival far more than perfect fidelity to those ideals.

And that's the problem. The threat to the EU's future stems from the fundamental weakness of its central institutions. And what may finally tear it apart are the economic divides that have dominated in prior crises.

The EU is already divided over the coronavirus, and along the same axes as obtained in the wake of the financial crisis and in the subsequent sovereign debt crises: the southern countries are getting hit much harder. As of this writing, Italy and Spain between them account for nearly 60 percent of the cases of COVID-19 within the Eurozone (EU members that use the Euro as their currency), and over 80 percent of fatalities. The death rate in Italy and Spain together is 9 percent; in the rest of the Eurozone, it's 2.5 percent.

Story continues

Those numbers may well change as the virus spreads  but they also reflect different demographic and organizational realities. Germany did far more effective testing and tracking in the early phases of the epidemic, for example, and the virus was initially brought into the country by young people who did not spread it to the older population as quickly as took place in Italy. But even if Germany looks like Italy in four weeks' time, Italy looks like Italy right now. And the nature of membership in the Eurozone puts real limits on Italy's ability to respond effectively to the economic challenge before it.

Before the crisis, Italy's debt-to-GDP ratio was well above the limits all Eurozone members are supposed to maintain, and its economy had been lagging for years. Now, its economy is at an enforced standstill in an effort to break the back of the epidemic. But its troubles won't end when the virus has run its course. Given the prominence of tourism in the Italian economy (13 percent of Italy's GDP versus 8.6 percent of Germany's), the country faces a much harder long-term headwind to return to prosperity than many other EU states.

These would be daunting problems for a country with sovereign control of its currency. But Italy, as a Eurozone member, does not have any such control. The Italian state cannot print money to sustain its citizenry while the economy is in lockdown. It has to beg Brussels for permission to spend  and Europe's finance ministers are bickering about the terms under which such spending would be permitted in much the same manner that America's senators have been.

Even if a solution is found to cushion the Italian economy in the short term, what about the recovery? If the 2008 financial crisis and the debt crises of the 2010s are any guide, Brussels will labor mightily to force states like Italy and Spain to bring their budgets back into line, no matter the cost to those countries' citizens. Italy, with Spain right behind it, could face the worst physical suffering within Europe due to the pandemic, and could then be required to suffer disproportionate economic harm in the aftermath, while priority goes to facilitating recovery in the northern European states.

All this could perhaps be tolerated if European institutions had greatly benefited Italy during the crisis. But that is not the case. Italy received far more help from China than it received from its fellow Europeans, who (reasonably enough) preferred to prepare their own countries for the onslaught of the virus. But the Italians have noticed this dereliction, to the point where, in a recent poll, 88 percent of Italians thought the EU was of no help during the crisis, and only 21 percent thought EU membership was beneficial overall. If those kinds of numbers persist, how can the EU expect to survive?

A country is built on a felt sense of solidarity between its far-flung citizens. In a crisis, that solidarity is tested; where that feeling comes to the fore, and dominates decision-making, the country gets stronger, however much it might suffer materially. The European Union is not a country, and its founders have never quite agreed whether it ought to evolve into one over time or not. The current pandemic may finally and conclusively demonstrate that, if it isn't a country, it ought not have the powers normally reserved for a sovereign nation.

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African nations fighting the novel coronavirus face a foe as stealthy and dangerous as the microbe itself: misinformation and apathy, fuelled by deep distrust of government. Bogus news and indifference to official warnings are emerging as giant obstacles in a region where poor healthcare infrastructure, sanitation and overcrowded slums provide fertile ground for COVID-19 to spread. Africa has recorded nearly 2,800 cases and at least 70 deaths, according to an AFP compilation as of Thursday. The tally may lag far behind that of other continents, but the World Health Organization (WHO), backed by the top names in medicine, has bluntly warned: "Prepare for the worst". African countries have begun to implement strict rules including lockdowns, curfews and even prison terms for those sharing false claims. But such measures appear futile in stopping the spread of misinformation. AFP Fact Check in Africa has debunked dozens of claims in various languages that have fanned out across the continent via social media platforms and messaging services. Viral messages on Facebook and WhatsApp carry unfounded advice that gargling with vinegar eliminates the virus or that black people are resistant to it because of their skin colour. "This is a new challenge that we are facing and it's a big challenge," South African infectious disease expert Thumbi Ndung'u told AFP. "If governments are not forthcoming... or seem to be hiding information, then there are people who step into that space and some of those people may not necessarily have good intentions." While Facebook has toughened its policy toward those spreading potentially harmful information, Twitter now slaps warning labels on manipulated images or videos. But many claims in Africa circulate in private groups on the encrypted WhatsApp platform, making it harder to target them. - Prevent panic - In South Africa, currently the region's worst-hit country, misinformation started to circulate long before the first of its more than 700 cases was confirmed. Many viral claims have the potential to cause real-life harm, such as doctored government documents with misleading coronavirus advice. To counter the trend, officials are holding regular press conferences and have launched a coronavirus information website, toll-free number and WhatsApp support line. On March 19, the government went a step further when it announced that peddling fake coronavirus information would be punished with up to six months in jail. "We must stop spreading fake news that either ridicule the efforts of the health workers or that frighten people... We need those communities to be well-informed so that they do not panic in the wrong way and end up causing more problems for ourselves," Health Minister Zweli Mkhize warned earlier this month. But many South Africans remain wary of the official narratives amid perceptions of widespread corruption and incompetence. There are also memories of the disastrous mishandling under ex-president Thabo Mbeki of the HIV crisis in the early 2000s. His policies caused 300,000 avoidable deaths, according to a Harvard study. However, the current government has been "very forthcoming with information", Ndung'u said. "I think they have learnt from the HIV epidemic and this can only be a good thing." - Arrests in Kenya - Kenya has already detained two people, including popular blogger Robert Alai, for sharing coronavirus misinformation under controversial cybercrime laws introduced in 2018. Alai was released on bail this week after being charged over a tweet saying the government was concealing the deaths of two coronavirus victims. There have been nearly 30 confirmed infections in the East African nation but no reported deaths so far. If convicted, Monday faces a fine of up to five million Kenyan shillings ($47,000, 43,000 euros) and up to 10 years in prison. Opponents, who have unsuccessfully tried to challenge the legislation in court, say it violates media freedom and allows authorities to clamp down on critics. But the government insists the measure is needed to fight the deluge of false claims circulating on social media. "Kenyans should desist from misinformation... rumours must stop. Those who do not will be arrested," the health minister warned in one of his daily coronavirus briefings. Distrust in the government's handling of the crisis was fuelled by the fact that flights from China were still allowed to land in the initial stages of the epidemic despite growing concern. This sparked allegations that officials were trying to hide the first cases to avoid criticism for failing to ban flights early on. - 'Grassroots' distrust - When the first infections were confirmed in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, conspiracy theories abounded that the government in the corruption-plagued country had made up the cases to cash in on international funds. "Nigerians at the grassroot (sic), where (the) majority live, think coronavirus is a ruse or even a ploy by the government to 'steal' more money," Nigerian investigative journalist Damilola Banjo tweeted. Central to the claim, shared online by politicians and celebrities, was the government's refusal to name an Italian businessman who was the first confirmed case in Nigeria Hakeem Olayemi, a customer at a food stall in Lagos, told AFP he did not believe the official argument of "patient-doctor confidentiality". "Why have they not named the Italian man?" he asked. With the number of confirmed cases nearing 50, opinion polls show the government is struggling to share accurate COVID-19 information despite launching an extensive online campaign. A recent Gallup-backed survey by NOIPolls showed 26 percent of Nigerians believed they were immune to the disease. Fifteen percent thought eating garlic and ginger would protect them against the virus -- a scientifically unproven claim circulating across Africa. Observers say the government is also failing in efforts to reach rural communities. Kunle Omotosho, a doctor in southwest Nigeria, told AFP little had been done in local languages to raise awareness among the general population. "You will be surprised many aren't even aware (of the coronavirus)," he said. - 'Doubled-edged knife' - Government distrust also runs deep in the sprawling Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The conflict-riddled central African nation was already battling deadly Ebola and measles outbreaks when the coronavirus claimed its first two victims earlier this month. State efforts of disease control are viewed with suspicion fanned by false social media claims, and attacks on healthcare workers are frequent. Online posts show many in DRC believe the viral diseases either don't exist or were created by the government to control the population. "Every epidemic also triggers an epidemic of false rumours," virologist Jean-Jacques Muyembe told AFP. Muyembe, who led the fight in the waning Ebola outbreak, has now been tasked by the government with tackling the coronavirus crisis. "Social media are a double-edged knife. It's a very dangerous instrument and you need to know how to use it," he said. burs-nla/ri Grassroots against coronavirus: A Kenyan group called Shining Hope for Communities promotes hand hygiene in the Nairobi slum of Kibera False claims: Hawkers in Madagascar are doing a roaring trade in leaves from the rose gum tree (Eucalyptus grandis), saying a herbal infusion can fend off coronavirus Former health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang became the symbol of the disastrous mismanagement of South Africa's HIV pandemic. She was dubbed 'Dr. Beetroot' for insisting the vegetable was a remedy for AIDS A policeman in Lagos distributes flyers about measures to prevent coronavirus Dangerous times: Health workers are pictured through a bullet-holed window at an Ebola treatment centre in the eastern DR Congo city of Butembo. The facility was attacked twice in early 2019 by armed men hostile to its work
Sergei Konkov | TASS via Getty Images

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates  Calls for the UAE to lift its ban on internet calling platforms like Whatsapp and Facetime are growing louder by the day as residents hunker down in their homes amid the coronavirus lockdown, unable to travel, meet or go outdoors. "Given the pandemic, can you lift the Skype and WhatsApp video ban please? Would love to speak to relatives in the rest of the world without the extra hurdles the ban causes right now," Matt Watson-Power, a British designer working in Dubai, posted in a tweet addressed to the UAE's Ministry of Human Resources on Tuesday. The UAE announced Tuesday that it was lifting its ban on two VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) platforms: Microsoft's Skype for Business and Google Hangouts. It also has made video calling platform Zoom available, which is widely used by the millions now working remotely around the world, teachers carrying out online classes, and friends and family unable to physically get together.

Banning VoIP to protect the telephone industry is akin to banning the fax machine to protect the carrier pigeons. It's completely irrational. Sultan al Qassemi Emirati writer and art collector

But the UAE's longstanding ban on nearly all VoIP calling has frustrated many expats and locals alike, preventing people from making free calls to their loved ones overseas and complicating efforts to carry out conference calls and business operations. Popular services like WhatsApp, Facetime and Skype (but not Skype for Business, as of Tuesday) remain blocked for voice and video calls, meaning residents typically have to use fee-based services from one of the state's telecoms providers, Etisalat and Du. Some try to use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access VoIP platforms, but those are often quickly dismantled by the state and can carry heavy legal penalties including fines and even jail time.

A signboard show that the beach is temporarily closed is seen on March 22, 2020 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Authorities announced that all beaches in Dubai will be closed until further notice to slow the spread of COVID-19. Photo by Francois Nel | Getty Images

Now that the majority of the country of 9.4 million  and its more than 80% expat population  has to work from home and travel is forbidden, some calls by residents have grown increasingly desperate. "JUST. LET. US. USE. THE. APPS. THE. REST. OF. THE. WORLD. USES.," Dubai resident Nick Regos tweeted last week, in response to Du announcing its offer of free internet calling for its customers on a new app called Voico. Tweet1 Nearly all the replies to the Du tweet were critical, with people lamenting having to ask all their contacts overseas to download an app just for them and the difficulty of getting their elderly family members to use a new and unfamiliar product. "No one uses Voico or whatever it is called. You want me to ask my 85 year old father to download this onto his phone do you and set it all up? Ridiculous," tweeted user James Raff. Du did not reply to CNBC requests for comment.

'A time that requires radical changes'

High-profile Emiratis have been among those calling for access to VoIP services, notably Sultan al Qassemi, an academic and member of the UAE emirate of Sharjah's ruling family. "The excuse that Etisalat contributes several billion dollars to the federal budget  which is the excuse that we've heard many times, and that's why the VoIP is not allowed in the UAE  is an understandable reason," he said. "But we are in a time that requires radical changes, and so I really hope that the UAE federal government reconsiders this, even if it's a temporary lifting of the restrictions for the next few weeks or months." "Banning VoIP to protect the telephone industry is akin to banning the fax machine to protect the carrier pigeons," al Qassemi added. "It's completely irrational."

Abu Dhabi city skyline, United Arab Emirates. kasto80 | iStock | Getty Images

Mahmoud Adi, founding partner of Abu Dhabi-based venture capital firm Shorooq Partners, shared the sentiment. "The productivity gained from having VoIP, in my humble opinion, is significantly more rewarding for our local economies than the revenue generated for the government from international calls," he told CNBC. "That is the critical point here  how much connectivity is lost when we don't have VoIP, how much productivity is gained when we have VoIP available for all those businesses, and how we reinforce our position as a city, as a country that we are leaders in trade, in business, leaders in connectivity as well." Etisalat and the UAE's Telecoms Regulatory Authority also did not reply to requests for comment.

State security concerns

The VoIP ban also has to do with state security concerns and the ability to monitor communications, something that digital rights advocates say explains why the UAE government favors state telecoms platforms that it can control, rather than encrypted services like Whatsapp. But al Qassemi pointed out that highly security-oriented states like Singapore allow VoIP calling, as well as Saudi Arabia, which ended its VoIP ban in 2017. Last week, neighboring Oman lifted its ban on Skype for Business, Webex, Zoom and Google Hangouts. Qatar, meanwhile, still bans Whatsapp calling, Facetime and Skype. "We have to make sure that the security procedures also take into account the economic dimension of the country," al Qassemi said. "And I believe that there is a possibility for them both to coexist."
A health worker holds a sign calling for better safety protocols for nurses and doctors during a rally outside the National Childrens Hospital in Quezon City, near Manila, Feb. 7, 2020.

Nine doctors on the frontlines of battling COVID-19 in the Philippines have died, officials said Thursday, amid widespread calls to protect the Southeast Asian nations last line of defense against the deadly virus.

This came as public anger escalated over news that a senator, Aquilino Pimentel III, who had tested positive for COVID-19, ignored protocols and potentially spread the virus when he accompanied his pregnant wife during her visit at one of the countrys most advanced hospitals, the Makati Medical Center.

Hospital officials said Pimentels action put nurses and doctors at risk, straining the already depleted number of health workers. Pimentel, who had tested positive for the virus on March 20, told reporters he learned about the results during a phone call when he was at the hospital.

The Philippine Medical Association (PMA) lashed out at Pimentel for ignoring protocols and for potentially putting the lives of health workers at risk.

Publicly known is the already dwindling number of frontline doctors and nurses and we could not afford more of this to happen, the group said.

The PMA said that at least nine doctors have died, including at least two senior physicians. Several others have been intubated as the country grappled with the coronavirus outbreak that has so far killed 45 people and infected 707 others, according to health officials.

More than 22,100 people have died and at least 492,000 have been infected worldwide, according to the latest data compiled by disease experts at Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

We are saddened by the deaths of our frontline colleagues for responding to COVID-19. I hope somebody will help us because almost every day doctors are [being taken to] the intensive care unit under respirator or ventilator, Dennis de Guzman, a former PMA official, said over DZBB radio in Manila.

De Guzman urged the government to provide more personal protective equipment despite earlier assurances from health authorities that units already were being procured.

Protocols breached

Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said that Pimentel clearly breached quarantine protocols and should not have gone to the hospital, adding the agency would back any government investigation of the case.

On Thursday, another senator, Sonny Angara, said he also tested positive for COVID-19. He is the third member of the upper chamber known to have contracted the virus.

Former Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said he might be infected, but was awaiting results. He released a photo of himself in bed.

Eric Yap, a member of the House of Representatives, on Thursday said tests showed that he was positive. Yap interacted with Sen. Bong Go, President Rodrigo Dutertes former aide, and could have potentially transmitted the disease. Go, a frequent companion of Duterte, has gone into self-quarantine.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson, meanwhile, said regulatory agencies must grant some flexibility to allow more testing kits in the country, which is in the second week of a government-imposed lockdown.

The senator pointed out that hundreds of thousands of rapid-test kits that local businessmen bought from South Korea and China for donation have arrived in the country over a week ago, but all were held by Customs officials.

Duterte earlier placed the countrys armed forces and national police in charge of the countrys fight against COVID-19 just as the Congress approved a law granting him emergency powers in dealing with the viral outbreak.

Philippine police ask a man to present his pass at a checkpoint in Manila, March 24, 2020. [Luis Liwanag/BenarNews]

Respect basic rights, HRW says

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Philippine authorities should respect the basic rights of people detained for violating the governments COVID-19 regulations. It alleged that police and local officials have confined some of those arrested to dog cages and forced them to sit in the midday sun as punishment, among other abuses.

Police and local officials should respect the rights of those they arrest for violating curfew and other public health regulations, which can be done while still allowing the Philippines government to take appropriate measures to combat COVID-19, said Phil Robertson, a deputy Asia director at HRW. Any mistreatment should be immediately investigated and the authorities responsible held accountable.

HRW said since Duterte put the main Philippine island of Luzon on lockdown on March 16, police have arrested hundreds in Manila and other parts of the country on charges of violating curfew and social-distancing regulations.
Queen Elizabeth will be making a special address to the public this weekend, regarding the current coronavirus pandemic.

The royal family announced the news Friday in an Instagram post. On Sunday 5th April at 8 pm (BST). Her Majesty The Queen will address the UK and the Commonwealth in a televised broadcast, they captioned the post. As well as on television and radio, The Queens address will be shown on @theroyalfamily social media channels.

We first learned of the queens address last week, when The Times revealed that the speech would be only the fourth of its kind that she's delivered.

It is a question of when, not if," a Buckingham Palace aide told the Times. "The value of an address by the Queen is that it is so rareits a case of when is the optimum time to do it. The Queen wants to get it right.

Her Majesty hasn't made a speech like this since 2002, when she spoke on the eve of her mothers funeral. Last month, the monarch penned a powerful note addressing the British peoples ability to come together.

As Philip and I arrive at Windsor today, we know that many individuals and families across the United Kingdom, and around the world, are entering a period of great concern and uncertainty, she wrote. "We are all being advised to change our normal routines and regular patterns of life for the greater good of the communities we live in and, in particular, to protect the most vulnerable within them. At times such as these, I am reminded that our nations history has been forged by people and communities coming together to work as one, concentrating our combined efforts with a focus on the common goal.

Well definitely be tuning in.

RELATED: The Royal Family Says Prince Charles Remains in Good Health After Testing Positive for Coronavirus
The Greater Regional Branch of the Ghana Private Road Transport Union (GPRTU) says it may reduce the number of passengers on board commercial buses.

GPRTU said the move is part of precautionary measures the union is considering to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in Ghana which also falls in line with directives by President Nana Akufo-Addo for the public to observe social distancing.

Explaining how it will be implemented, the Industrial Relations Officer of the Greater Regional Branch of GPRTU, Abass Ibrahim Moro said the number of passengers per seat will be reduced to avoid crowding in the trotros.

We, GPRTU Greater Accra, thought it wise to show concern about how to protect ourselves from the Coronavirus. We suggested the reduction of the number of passengers. For instance, in the cars which take three passengers per row, we will reduce it to two, while the Sprinter buses which take four passengers per row would be reduced to three, he said.

He, however, suggested that passengers may be paying more to make up for the losses as a result of the fewer numbers, adding that the government could come up with other suggestions as to how to ensure that they are not adversely affected by such a move.

But we can do that if the government will agree that the number of passengers that we are going to reduce, they will calculate the cost and share with and we will reduce it to the other passengers that are going to use the vehicle or if the government can come up with coupon travel or any other thing they will decide which will cater for the number of passengers that we are going to reduce, he said.

Some Ghanaians have been calling for adequate precautionary measures by transport owners to protect them since the majority still depend on public transport for their commute in the country.

Among the suggestions was the reduction in the number of passengers to comply with the social distancing directive given by President Nana Akufo-Addo.

---citinewsroom
Ms. Feinberg said that because routine is so crucial for dementia patients, caregivers should provide security and comfort as much as possible. Its a time to help the person with dementia have the most normalcy in this most unnormal time, she said. This could include trying not to watch the television news, playing soothing music and participating in small tasks together, like folding dish towels or winding a ball of yarn. Going for regular walks to get fresh air, even if its just in the back yard, can be helpful as well, she said. Staying in the present with something you have control over, Ms. Kallmyer said, is the best way to get through the day with those youre with.

Sherri Snelling, a corporate gerontologist and chief executive of the Caregiving Club, which provides consulting services to employers on caregiver wellness, especially Alzheimers caregivers, said its important to acknowledge the changes to routine with your loved one and address them. For example, if a caregiver is sick, you could say, Susie is sick, so Jane is coming to help us out. Youll really like her. Or if bingo and arts-and-crafts outings have been canceled, you could say, Everybody is off, so well do those activities at home today.

Those who do not live with their loved ones may feel anxious that they are not able to visit them at long-term care facilities now. Ms. Kallmyer suggested using phone calls or video chats, and she urges families to keep in mind that staying away is best for the health of those residents. Its hard, but you need to keep them safe, she said.

Dr. Langa said the priority for caregivers should be to keep themselves healthy and act like emergency medical workers, because if they get sick, two people are going to be in trouble. He urges caregivers to get out, take walks by themselves and set up a pool of people who might be able to come in and give them breaks, perhaps while the patient is taking a nap. He acknowledges that this can introduce a risk of exposure, but says the downsides can be significant. Going it alone means youre putting yourself at risk of burning out and in danger of getting exhausted, he said.

Mr. Mehta has kept his morning caregiver and asks her to take her temperature and change clothes when she arrives. Ms. Snelling says getting support from others through virtual support groups can be extremely beneficial. In this crisis, theres a fear of the unknown. If we can share those fears with other caregivers and get their insights, that is really key. She says caregivers can also take time to practice mindfulness as a way to stay calm for their loved ones in a high anxiety environment.

Mr. Mehta said his greatest fear is that he and his wife could be infected simultaneously and that he would not be in the position to take care of her. Though he has a power of attorney and guardianship for his wife, he fears those documents could get lost if he is not with her, should she be taken to the hospital. He worries that if she becomes agitated, his wife, who is unable to communicate and takes no medication, could be medicated with anti-psychotic drugs.

To safeguard against this situation, Dr. Langa recommends developing a contingency plan outlining the logistics and points of contact if the patient or caregiver gets sick. Ms. Kallmyer said advance directives are essential. Wherever the patient goes, those should go with them, she said.




Haiti - News : Zapping...





USA : return to the country...

Several hundred American citizens were able to leave Haiti and return to the United States aboard commercial and direct charter flights with the airlines American and Eastern Airlines on March 23 and 24, and JetBlue and Eastern were authorized to operate flights from Port-au-Prince to the United States on March 25 and March 26. At this time, it is unclear whether airlines will be allowed to operate additional flights after March 26.



PNH: new dragnet

Haitian National Police officers arrested Leogane "Gros Blanc" an individual thus known, member of a gang operating in Village de Dieu denounced by the population. For some time now, he had been taking care of transportation and organizing the escape and hiding places for his band members.



Haiti among the 11 least happy countries in the world

Haiti ranks 142nd out of 153 countries according to the United Nations' 2020 world ranking of the happiest countries in the world. The Dominican Republic comes in 68th place in this ranking dominated by Finland in 1st position for the 3rd consecutive year.



Quarantine failure at Belladere

Macklish Ledoux the mayor Belladere failed to put his municipality in quarantine https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30354-haiti-news-zapping.html to control the migratory flow between his city and the Dominican Republic, for lack of sufficient police force. Despite the border closure, the Haitians (the majority) and a few Dominicans continue to come and go carefree.



Postponement of the flight to Paris

The flight from Port-au-Prince to Paris-Charles de Gaule (CDG) originally scheduled for March 26 is postponed to Friday March 27, 2020 at 11:10 a.m. Arrival in Paris CDG on Saturday March 28 at 00:30. It is a direct flight. Registrations are closed.



Donation of buckets and soaps

Official delivery of 1,000 buckets and 10,000 soaps to the Ministry of Health by Maria Luisa Fornara, UNICEF representative in Haiti. By enabling more people to have access to clean water and soap, UNICEF is helping Haiti to limit the spread of Covid-19.



HL/ HaitiLibre


















BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 26

Trend:

The budget for the fight against coronavirus in Azerbaijan exceeds 1.1 billion manat ($647 million), Vusal Gasimli, Executive Director of Azerbaijans Center for Analysis of Economic Reforms and Communication (CAERC) told Trend.

Initially, when an Operational Headquarters under the Cabinet of Ministers was created on behalf of President Ilham Aliyev, 10 million manat ($5.8 million) was allocated to combat the coronavirus. Currently, over 86 million manat ($50.5 million) has been transferred from the state budget, and by individuals and legal entities to the Fund to Support Fight Against Coronavirus, Gasimli noted.

At the same time, in accordance with the decree of the head of state, 1 billion manat ($588.2 million) was allocated from the state budget to eliminate the negative impact of the pandemic on the country's economy. It is also worth considering that Azerbaijan, in order to support the fight against the pandemic at the global level, transferred $5 million to the World Health Organization (WHO), said Gasimli.

CAERC Executive Director noted that further replenishment of the mentioned fund is expected, adding that funds mobilized against coronavirus in the amount of 1.1 billion manat reach 2.2 percent of non-oil GDP (gross domestic product).

The support from the government, business and the public into the fund is an excellent example of social solidarity and national unity in accordance with the calls of President Ilham Aliyev and First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva, said the executive director.

While Azerbaijan is independently fighting against coronavirus, more than 80 countries of the world have turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for financial assistance. At the same time, the IMF and the World Bank Group appealed to the Group of Twenty (G20) to make concessions due to the debts of 76 countries with national per capita incomes of less than $1,175. The income thus obtained can be used to combat coronavirus in poor countries, Gasimli added.

The ease of central banks of large developed countries in monetary concessions to developing countries is absent. Moreover, since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, investors have withdrawn $83 billion from developing countries, thereby exacerbating their already difficult situation in the fight against coronavirus, he emphasized.

It is planned to provide SDR (Special Drawing Rights) assistance for developing countries, and liquidity support with the opening of swap lines is provided. Amid immersion in the recession of the global economy and the difficulties of developing countries in a single fight against the coronavirus crisis, Azerbaijan shows stability in the fight against global shock and pandemic, Gasimsli said.

The executive director emphasized that the Fund to Support Fight Against Coronavirus, mobilized in Azerbaijan, covers expenditures in three following directions: support that will be provided to the sectors that are suffering losses, entrepreneurs and employees; social programs; cost for combating pandemic.

(1 USD = 1.7 AZN on March 26)
Iranian FM Mohammed Javad Zarif responded to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's accusations, noting that even the coronavirus pandemic could not deter him from third-rate propaganda, Mehr reported.

Even a pandemic wont stop @SecPompeo from spouting 3rd-rate propaganda. One wonders whether hes Sec. of State or Secretary of Hate. No amount of trolling will gloss over his infamous warmongering & #Economic Terrorism; killing innocents & impeding the global fight against #COVID-19, he wrote in his Twitter account.

Although international organizations and various countries emphasize the need for cooperation with Iran in containing COVID-19, US Secretary of State Pompeo said on Wednesday that maximum pressure on Iran will continue.

Despite the US claims that medicine is not subject to sanctions, sanctions have prevented Irans access to the medical supplies for recovering coronavirus patients.
Coronavirus has hit companies hard and fast over the past several weeks  prompting calls for industry bailouts and dramatic measures to cut costs. Among the steps some major corporations are taking to mitigate the consequences of the outbreak are pay cuts to CEOs and other top executives.

Executive pay cuts alone aren't likely to have a significant impact on companies' bottom lines or provide a boost to lower-paid employees further down the org chart. But they send an important message.

"A lot of it is symbolic," Itay Goldstein, professor of finance University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, said. "When we come into a crisis like the one we have right now  where it's a difficult time for the economy, for workers, people are losing their jobs, people don't know what to expect  I think for CEOs to come out and say, 'We are going to give up our pay,' it's a signal that they are sharing the pain."

Airlines and travel companies, one of the industries hit hardest by the outbreak early on, were among the first to take such a step, including Delta, Alaska, United Airlines and others, which all announced CEO pay cuts, and other executive compensation reductions.

Marriott, the world's largest hotel chain, said last week that CEO Arne Sorenson will not take home any salary for the rest of the year, and the rest of the executive team will take a 50% pay cut. The announcement came at the same time that the company said it would begin furloughing what could be tens of thousands of hotel workers, from housekeepers to general managers.

Online travel company Booking Holdings said Monday that CEO Glen Fogel, as well as the CEOs of the company's three brand divisions, would forgo his salary. Booking's board directors also volunteered to give up their cash retainers.

On Wednesday, Dick's Sporting Goods also announced its CEO Ed Stack and President Lauren Hobart will forgo their salaries, except for an amount covering company-provided benefits. The company's other named executive officers will take a 50% reduction in base salary.

Other companies, including Ford, GE and Lyft have taken similar steps.

"Every single dollar, euro, bhat, etc., counts in this effort to ensure we can continue to be the leader in online travel on the other side of this crisis, said Booking's Fogel said in a letter to employees Monday. "Every employee has a responsibility to contribute to our cost-saving efforts and be as efficient as possible."

A symbolic gesture

But at companies of that size, while CEOs and other top executives generally bring home millions of dollars, their salaries are insignificant relative to the company's overall revenue  certainly not enough to keep a distressed operation's finances afloat, Goldstein said. Many of the companies are taking other steps, too, such as changing their operating schedules and cutting unnecessary capital expenditures.

However, the pressure on top executives to take some sort of action may be particularly high at the moment.

The amount of money that top executives at big corporations make relative to other workers has been a growing conservation since the 2008 recession, when federal officials mandated that companies publicly disclose that ratio. And the gap has continued to expand in recent years. Even Abigail Disney, granddaughter of company co-founder Roy Disney, called out the Disney CEO for his massive pay package.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian's total pay in 2018, for example, makes 184 times the median of the total compensation of all employees, according to the company's most recent proxy statement.

Coronavirus also hit at the same time most companies are calculating yearly bonuses for executives and other staff from the prior year, making it a particularly awkward time to lay off employees, said Eric Talley, professor of law and faculty director of the Millstein Center at Columbia University.

Although a CEO foregoing their salary typically won't mean game- changing savings for their company, it's still a move workers likely want to see.

"It's about having an appropriate tone at the top," Talley said. "There might be companies that did really well in 2019 and suddenly your company has hit a brick wall. So at the same time you're laying off a bunch of rank and file employees, you're awarding yourself (millions in bonus pay). It just doesn't look very good."

How it's done matters

But the effect of the gesture may also depend on the details of executives' pay reductions. Some companies have said their executives will forgo their base salaries, while others have indicated that execs will give up virtually all of their pay. Base salaries typically make up a small part of named executive officers' total compensation, which is often largely comprised of performance based compensation such as stocks, options and bonuses.

United Airlines, for instance, said its CEO Oscar Munoz and President Scott Kirby are "foregoing 100% of their respective base salaries through at least June 30," according to a March 10 filing with the SEC. But in 2018, per United's most recent proxy statement, Munoz's base salary made up just 9% of his total compensation  or $1.25 million of the nearly $10.5 million total he earned that year. Kirby's base salary comprised 16% of his total compensation.

Executives' performance-based compensation will also suffer at a time when companies are bleeding money and stocks are down because of the disruption coronavirus has caused to their business and to financial markets.

Even if giving up their pay won't be enough cost savings to let companies avoid laying off workers amid the crisis, sending a strong message of solidarity to employees may prove important for executives when companies start to recover, Talley said.

"It's a message I think many employees want to hear," Talley said. "Some of these employees are reliable, skilled, good employees, so these companies are anticipating, thinking, 'We want to be in a position to have these employees to come back, and we want to hire them back, when the economy starts turning around.'"

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Abigail Disney's relationship to the Walt Disney Company's co-founders.
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the lives of nearly everyone across the globe. Employers have told millions of workers to stay home, in many cases in response to orders from state and local governments for nonessential businesses to close their doors temporarily. That's creating a flood of people being out of work and needing to take advantage of the programs available to the unemployed.

Every week, the Labor Department announces the number of people making claims for unemployment benefits for the first time since losing their jobs. Today's number of 3,283,000 initial unemployment claims was by far the largest ever for the program, and the sudden jump will inevitably put pressure on the unemployment benefits system to ensure that so many people get the money they need. Below, we'll look in more detail at exactly what today's jobless-claim numbers are and what they mean.

What jobless claims are

If you lose your job and are covered by unemployment insurance, then you have the right to collect unemployment benefits from the government. The insurance aspect of unemployment benefits stems from the fact that your employer has to pay taxes each pay period based on the amount of pay you receive, with the proceeds going toward covering benefits to out-of-work employees. When you combine what the federal government and the applicable state government charge, the typical amount of unemployment tax that employers pay is 6% of the first $7,000 in wages per employee, or $420 per year.

When workers are laid off or are otherwise eligible for benefits, they can file a claim within a short period of time. The benefits aren't enough to replace what the workers got from their job. But the amounts -- which vary from state to state -- are designed to help with essential living expenses and to bridge the gap until the employees can find other work.

Just how big a jump did we see?

To put the 3.28 million number in context, the typical level of weekly jobless claims we'd seen in the month leading up to the latest figures was 232,500. There'd been a spike higher the previous week to 282,000. This week's jobless claims came in at nearly 12 times the previous week's level.

Just about everyone watching the economic data expected the jobless claims to soar from previous levels, but estimates of the exact number varied greatly. Some believed that as few as 1 million would need to file for unemployment, while a few others had projected as many as 4 million. In general, the 3.28 million figure was higher than the consensus forecast among economists.

Which states saw the biggest changes?

Different areas of the country saw varying effects on employment from the coronavirus outbreak. Pennsylvania saw the biggest jump in claims, rising by more than 363,000 from the previous week. Ohio, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Texas, and California were the next five hardest-hit states, and joining them with increases above the 100,000 job mark were Michigan, Washington, Minnesota, and Illinois.

Even in smaller states, the proportional increases were extraordinary. In New Hampshire, for instance, prior-week claims of 642 jumped to 21,878, a rise of 34 times. Elsewhere around the nation, New Mexico saw claims jump nearly 20 times to 17,187, and Louisiana's claim numbers rose from 2,255 the previous week to 72,620, a rise of 3,120%.

More to come?

The big question looming is whether this week will prove to be the big one in terms of newly unemployed people claiming benefits. If it's a one-week phenomenon, then it could provide some confidence about the potential scope of the problem. If the number of new claims stays at heightened levels for a while, then it will show that the size of the economic impact of the coronavirus could be far larger than many have thought until now.
The unproven claim that an antimalarial drug can cure coronavirus - called a 'game-changer' and a 'gift from God' by Donald Trump - has been promoted by a crypto-currency lawyer who has made a string of bogus claims, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Gregory Rigano made a series of Fox News and conservative and Christian radio appearances to tout the idea that chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine 'cures' conronavirus.

The anti-malaria drug is now the subject of series of clinical trials, including in New York, where the state received 10,000 doses.

It has been praised by Trump repeatedly - but the first time he did, at the White House last Friday, epidemiologist Tony Fauci stepped in to warn it was not scientifically proven to be effective and safe.

Trump amplified the case for the drug again on Twitter Monday amid apparent public tensions with Fauci.

Now a DailyMail.com investigation reveals how:

Rigano falsely claimed to be an adviser to Stanford University's School of Medicine;

He also falsely claimed to have consulted with the University of Alabama at Birmingham;

The Google document which he used to first promote his claims was removed by Google after being formatted to look like a scientific paper when it was not;

Other academics and apparent backers of the original claims in the Google document said they had nothing to do with it;

He set up an LLC in mid-February;

Rigano previously set up a cryptocurrency firm which he said was 'designed to cheat death';

He has also tried to source funding to 'cure aging,' 'end Alzheimer's,' 'live forever' and 'cure cancer;'

Did not correct a television interviewer who repeatedly called him 'doctor';

Has enlisted a doctor for 'trials' who is a serial entrepreneur whose other plans include a 'personalized nutrition engine'.

DailyMail.com has made repeated attempts to contact Rigano, a 34-year-old lawyer from Melville, Long Island, who lists being an Eagle Scout on his resume.

He uses his parents' home as his address on public documents.

Rigano first touted the use of chloroquine on Monday March 13, publishing a document on Google which was presented to look like a scientific paper, but which is not and which Google has now removed because it is in violation of its terms of service.

It was written by Rigano and by James Todaro, a former ophthalmologist in Dearborn, Michigan, turned cryptocurrency investor.

Chloroquine advocate: Gregory Rigano claimed he was working 'in consultation with Stanford University School of Medicine' as he made a series of Fox News appearances - but he is not

Looks like a scientific paper: This is the Google document which Rigano published but which contains a string of bogus claims, including the involvement of Stanford and the University of Alabama at Birmingham schools of medicine

Big boost: Elon Musk tweeted Rigano's document to his 32.7 million followers, earning it a huge readership - but Musk did not know the bogus claims in the document

Removed: Rigano's original Google document which he used to push chloroquine has been taken down by Google. Its terms of service include provisions on false claims

'Game-changer,' 'miracle,' and 'gift from God.' Donald Trump has touted the use of chloroquine repeatedly in the days after Greg Rigano appeared on a series of Fox New shows to push the drug as a 'cure' for coronavirus - with the backing of bogus claims he was a Stanford researcher

It claimed to be 'in consultation with Stanford University School of Medicine, UAB [University of Alabama at Birmingham] School of Medicine, and National Academy of Science researchers.'

Rigano used a Johns Hopkins email address in the document, although his own LinkedIn profile says he is a student, not a member of faculty there. DailyMail.com has reached out to the college to check his enrollment status.

The text was in the format which a scientific paper would follow, and included drawings of the structure of the chemical structure of chloroquine.

At the bottom of the text it says: 'Special thanks to Stanford University School of Medicine, SPARK Translational Research Program, Steve Schow, PhD, The Lab of Louise T. Chow, PhD and Thomas R. Broker, PhD, Bruce Bloom DDS, JD of HealX and Adrian Bye.'

However DailyMail.com can disclose that the paper was not a scientific one - and that all of the academics and institutions named in it have asked to be disassociated from it.

They include Stanford University, which said it and its SPARK unit asked to be removed from the document.

Rigano has also described himself as an 'advisor' to Stanford School of Medicine.

But Julie Greicius, senior director of external communications at Stanford said: 'Stanford Medicine, including SPARK, was not involved in the creation of the Google document, and we requested that the author remove all references to us.

'In addition, Gregory Rigano is not an advisor with Stanford School of Medicine and no one at Stanford was involved in the study.'

When asked if Professor Steve Schow, a Stanford adjunct professor in chemical systems biology, who was thanked in the document, had any involvement, Greicuis said no.

First appearance: Gregory Rigano's initial publicity of Fox News was on the Laura Ingraham show, hours after Elon Musk tweeted his claims

Bogus: When Greg Rigano appeared on Fox Business Network he presented himself as being part of Stanford University's School of Medicine - which he is not - and did not correct anchor Stuart Varney who called him 'doctor' three times

Bogus again: Rigano appeared on Fox News with Tucker Carlson and again was presented as being an 'adviser' to Stanford, which he is not

Count us out: Professor Thomas Broker, who was named in the 'white paper' before it was removed from Google, asked for his name to be disassociated with it, while the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he works, said a claim that Nobel Prize winner Dr. Louise Chow's laboratory was involved was also false

The University of Alabama at Birmingham also said it had no involvement in the Google document.

Prof Broker, who the document named, asked for his name to be removed, while the university's public relations manager Bob Shepard added that Dr. Chow, a Nobel-prize winner mentioned in the acknowledgments, was no part of the study.

'No one at UAB has any connection to this paper,' Shepard said.

Shepard said that Broker 'had previously done research into chloroquine as a possible therapy for human papillomavirus' which is more commonly known as HPV.

Shepard said: 'He had some contact with one of the authors of that paper at that time. He had no involvement with the work on coronavirus and is not affiliated with that research in any way.'

THE OTHER PROJECTS RIGANO IS LOOKING FOR CASH TO FUND On his cryptocurrency firm's website, Rigano has also sought funding for: End Alzheimer's, Stop neurodegeneration: asking for less than $1m Repurposed drug combination for Pancreatic Cancer: less than $1m Cannabis Cancer: less than $1m New antibacterial compound: less than $1m Cure Aging: less than $25m Its Time to Live Forever: greater than $100m Gene therapy for x: less than $10m Cure to Diabetes: greater than $100m Nootropics + ALS Cognitive Enhancement: less than $100m Treatment for MS: unknown Cure for Cancer: unknown Advertisement

Google removed the document last Thursday, saying that it was in breach of their terms of use. It did not specify why but publicly available documents are banned from 'impersonating any person or organization you do not represent.'

But the removal of the document was long after it was tweeted by Elon Musk on Monday March 16.

Later that day he started a week as a serial guest on Fox News' opinion shows and on Fox Business Network.

He appeared on Laura Ingraham's The Ingraham Angle on Monday 16, a few hours after Musk tweeted it was 'maybe worth considering.' He was presented as a co-author of the 'study' into the drug.

He claimed that a '30-patient controlled study' had cleared patients taking hydroxychloroquine and claimed 'we have strong reason to believe a preventative dose' would get rid of the virus completely.

Ingraham called it a 'game-changer,' a phrase which was used by Trump later in the week.

On Wednesday 17, the following morning, he appeared on Christian Outlook with Kevin McCulloch. It was turned into a podcast version called 'The Cure for COVID-19 Has Been Found,' and saw Rigano boast about being tweeted by Musk.

Rigano said in the interview that it was 12 hours till the release of the first 'controlled' study into chloroquine and claimed to have a 'team' standing by. He also claimed medical staff were going to take it as a preventative measure as part of a trial.

Then Rigano appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Thursday 18. He was presented as a 'Stanford University Medical School adviser.'

In his interview with Carlson, Rigano praised Trump for cutting 'red tape at the FDA.'

Rigano said: 'I'm here to report that as of this morning a well-controled peer reviewed study carried out by the most eminent infectious diseases specialist in the world,' he said, claiming it 'showed a 100 percent cure rate against coronavirus.'

Carlson said: 'It's very unusual for any study of anything to produce results of 100 percent, that's remarkable or am I missing something?'

In response Rigano compared the effect of chloroquine to a breakthrough which allows Hepatitis C to be 'cured' by anit-virals.

'To be able to cure a virus was said to be mathematically impossible and the first company that did was a small biotech...in the cure to hepatitis C,' Rigano said.

'What we're here to announce is the second cure to a virus of all time.'

The following morning, March 19, he appeared on The Glenn Beck Program, the conservative host's syndicated show, to again tout his claim of a 'well-controlled, peer-reviewed clinical study,' with a '100 per cent cure rate.'

Asked 'are you talking to the White House,' he boasted contradictorily: 'We have a direct line to them and are waiting for them to reach out.'

'We know that President Trump received our "white paper" within 24 hours after it being published. Dr. Fauci is doing an excellent job and we know they will make the right decision,' he said.

Profile: Gregory Rigano has used his twitter account to promote his claims about chloroquine

Profile: Gregory Rigano is an attorney - and boasts of being an Eagle Scout on LinkedIn

Family affair: Gregory Rigano (left) is an attorney in his family's legal firm along with brother Nicholas (right)

Rigano then appeared on Fox Business Network's Varney & Co later in the morning, and was again presented as an 'adviser' to Stanford, which he is not.

He told Stuart Varney that Trump 'has the authority to authorize the use of hydoxychloroquine against coronavirus immediately.'

Grigano claimed that '100 per cent of patients were cured within six days,' prompting Varney to call it a 'cure.'

Varney called him 'doctor' three times - which he is not, and Rigano did not correct him.

And at 11.30am that day, Rigano's initiative gained its biggest public reward, when Trump used a White House briefing to tout it for the first time, claiming that its use had been 'approved.'

That was walked back by the FDA administrator at the same briefing, but on Friday it became the subject of a heated back and forth with reporters as Trump was asked about giving 'false hope.'

Asked by a reporter about research into the use of the drug, Fauci said: 'The information you're referring to is anecdotal, it was not done in a controlled trial so you can't make a definitive statement about it.'

At this point Trump interjected: 'I'm probably more of a fan [of chloroquine] than maybe anybody but let's see what happens.

'We understand what the doctor said, it's 100 per cent correct, it's early but I've seen things that are impressive, we're going to know soon, including safety.

'This has been prescribed for many years to combat malaria, it's a strong drug.'

In a Tweet on Saturday he went further and said: 'HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine

'Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents) be put in use IMMEDIATELY. PEOPLE ARE DYING, MOVE FAST, and GOD BLESS EVERYONE!'

And on Monday Trump tweeted another link to a video of Rigano's interview with Carlson.

Rigano has referred repeatedly to a study, carried out in Marseille, in the south of France, by Didier Raoult, an infectious disease specialist at l'Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Mediterranee Infection.

But the French study touted by Rigano was not in line with his claims.

Raoult used both hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, the antibiotic, which Rigano did not mention.

The anecdotal study said that 95 percent of patients showed no signs of COVID-19 after six days when they took the combination of the drugs, not 100 percent.

Professor Gilles Pialoux, an infectious disease specialist at Tenon Hospital in France, told Medscape, the medical news site: 'The idea is interesting but we need large, randomized, controlled trials.'

In fact it showed that of the 26 in the trial, 20 completed it, one left hospital before it ended, one was intolerant of the drug and three moved from general care to ICU - and one died.

The rates of death and movement to ICU are higher than for normal coronavirus patients, CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta pointed out.

Dr Scott Gottlieb, Trump's former FDA commissioner, told CBS' Face the Nation that the trial was far too small to be useful and that it traced the presence of the virus in the upper nasal passages, not the clinical outcome.

Rigano's involvement is surprising as background is working as a lawyer at his family's firm, Rigano LLC, in Melville on Long Island, New York.

The 34-year-old appears on public records at the same home as his father James, 67, who runs the law firm, and his mother Dorothy, 65.

Researcher: Rigano has referred repeatedly to a study, carried out in Marseille, in the south of France, by Didier Raoult, an infectious disease specialist at l'Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Mediterranee Infection.

Skepticism: When Donald Trump talked up chloroquine at a White House press briefing, Tony Fauci warned: 'The information you're referring to is anecdotal, it was not done in a controlled trial so you can't make a definitive statement about it.'

When DailyMail.com called the family home an older woman said: 'He's not here at the moment' and took a message.

In his biography, repeated on a string of websites, Rigano claims to have 'provided counsel to over $1 billion in transaction volume at global scale'.

On his LinkedIn page he says he is the inventor of IKU, a blockchain platform for financing pharmaceutical research. IKU's Facebook page says it was set up to 'cheat death.'

And a separate website for IKU has a list of highly ambitious projects such as 'End Alzheimer's, Stop neurodegeneration' for which he is seeking funding of less than $1m.

Another is called 'It's Time to Live Forever' and is demanding less than $100m - the website says this one is 'underway'.

On February 11 this year, just as the coronavirus outbreak was becoming a crisis, he set up a company called Jonas Research LLC in Albany, New York.

Rigano has appeared as a speaker at tech conferences where he has been described as a 'corporate tech lawyer with a deep interest in cryptocurrencies and intellectual property'.

He has offered classes about blockchain technology and hosted meetups about including one which said in its description: 'Big Pharma has given up on the search to cure Alzheimer's. But we don't have to!'

Rigano and Raoult are now looking to do their own clinical trial and have enlisted the help of a Dr Chandra Duggirala.

He is a serial entrepreneur based in California whose previous projects include tryfuel.com which he describes as a 'personalized nutrition engine'.

In another peculiar twist, among the other people thanked in the Google document was Adrian Bye who runs a networking company in China.

On his website he says that he grew up in Australia and currently lives in a 'sacred daoist mountain known as Wudang Mountain' in central China.

On his personal website there is no mention of any medical or scientific qualifications however he did a YouTube interview with fringe Canadian commentator Jean-Francois Gariepy, whose previous guests include white supremacist David Duke.

DailyMail.com reached out to Rigano for comment via various email accounts, social media and by phone but did not hear back.

Raoult did not respond to questions via email, nor did Fox News.
A 65-year-old woman who had



tested positive for COVID-19 died at a hospital here on Thursday evening, taking the death toll of coronavirus patients in Maharashtra to five, officials said.

The woman died at civic-run Kasturba Hospital, said the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

She was also suffering from diabetes and hypertension, the BMC statement said.

In the morning, health officials had informed that test report of a woman from Navi Mumbai who had died on March 24 came out positive for coronavirus.

Of the five persons who have died in the state so far, three were from Mumbai and two from the peripheral Mumbai Metropolitan Region.

The woman who died on Thursday evening had been admitted to the Kasturba Hospital on March 23 after she complained of breathlessness.

Number of coronavirus cases in Maharashtra increased by three to 125 during the day.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The US State Department on Thursday announced rewards for information leading to the arrest or conviction of various Venezuelan nationals, including President Nicolas Maduro who Washington aims to push out of power.

"The Department is offering a reward of up to $15 million for information related to Nicolas Maduro Moros," the State Department said in a statement.

The move came as the US Justice Department announced charges against Maduro and others on narco-terrorism.
In context: To prevent the spread of the coronavirus or any other for that matter, the World Health Organization and the US Center for Disease Control recommend washing your hands with soap and water for 20 seconds. It is sound advice that has been given by health professionals for decades. But how do you time yourself?

The CDC suggests that you can time your handwashing by singing "Happy Birthday" to yourself twice. However, singing a song that many people only croon on occasion, and mostly out of obligation, every time you go to the sink quickly becomes monotonoussinging it twice, doubly so.

Fortunately, technology design firm Deeplocal has developed plans for a soap dispenser called "Scrubber" that plays 20 seconds of your favorite songs from Spotify. Best of all, it has released the design with full instructions on GitHub for free, so you can build one yourself while cooped up in your home.

In a nutshell, the project rigs up a soap dispenser with a Raspberry Pi and speakers so that when you press down on the nozzle, it selects a song from your Spotify account's most played tracks of the week list. A timer cuts the song short at 20 seconds, signaling you that it's okay to rinse off.

The project is very affordable, costing only about four hours of your time and $30 to $35 depending on what kind of soap dispenser you use, you may already have one suitable. The main costs are the Raspberry Pi Zero W and a speaker bonnet and speakers, both of which you can buy from Adafruit for $10 and $13, respectively.

If you are a DIYer, many of the other parts might already be lying around the shop. Some of them can also be substituted for items you can find around the house. For example, if you're fresh out of copper tape, you can use aluminum foil and super glue instead.

Deeplocal's Scrubber dispenser sounds like a practical and fun project to do with the kidsthat isafter they finish their distance leaning for the day.

Image credit: Deeplocal
Schools could remain open over Easter and at weekends

Schools in Northern Ireland could remain open over Easter and at weekends to care for the children of essential workers involved in the fight against the coronavirus.

The BBC has reported the Department for Education (DoE) has updated their guidance around schools remaining open.

Education Minister Peter Weir has revealed that just 1,172 pupils attended school on Tuesday March 24, despite 580 schools remaining open.

Schools closed indefinitely last Friday, but many have remained open to provide care for the children of key workers, for example health care staff.

On Tuesday there were no more than 17 pupils at any one school, with 5,686 members of staff on hand to care for the just short of 1,200 who attended.

Some data we have collated (24/03)

Schools open: 580

Children in school: 1,172

Staff available: 5,686

My sincere thanks to all staff who are supervising key worker children. You are making a real difference in this fight #COVID-19  Peter Weir (@peterweirmla) March 25, 2020

The new guidance says that one school in an area could act as a "hub" if an agreement can be reached between schools, this would allow them to pool resources and centralise the childcare effort instead of opening a large number of schools to care for a few pupils each.

It said that public sector workers with the necessary security clearance could be used to help care for children in schools in place of staff who were ill, self-isolating or at risk.

It has been suggested that schools may need to remain open at weekends and during holidays to provide childcare for staff in essential roles.

Schools are being asked to facilitate key workers as best they can during the coronavirus outbreak.

"Where possible, we would encourage, pre-education settings and schools to continue to look after critical workers' children and vulnerable children throughout the Easter holidays and consider whether weekend provision can be facilitated," the Department of Education's updated guidance said.

All schools and pre-school education settings are being asked to work together Department of Education's updated guidance

"This will be kept under review."

Schools have been urged to work together in the face of the coronavirus threat.

"All schools and pre-school education settings are being asked to work together," the guidance said.

"This may include the attendance of staff at a setting other than their own or the attendance of children at a setting other than their normal setting."

"Where schools wish to work together to create a localised cluster arrangement, whereby certain schools in a close geographical area wish to agree collectively to have a 'hub' school to service all children within the area, this is permissible where it is sensible to do so."

The Education Minister paid tribute to staff who were continuing to work through the coronavirus outbreak.

"My sincere thanks to all staff who are supervising key worker children. You are making a real difference in this fight," the Education Minister.

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Speaking on Tuesday the NASUWT, Northern Ireland's biggest teachers' union, said it would not agree with teachers having to work over the Easter period.

Northern Ireland national officer Justin McCamphill said: "During the period of continued closures, some schools may seek to provide childcare to priority households outside of term time (e.g. during the Easter holidays).

"However, I have not been made aware of any plans by the Department of Education to direct schools to open.

"The NASUWT recognises that some staff may agree voluntarily to support such provision.

"It is important that where teachers volunteer in this way there is clarity on how staff will be appropriately remunerated and with regard to insurances and indemnification.

"The NASUWT does not agree that teachers may be compelled to work during holiday periods."
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 26/3/2020 (657 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lied to the country.

Thats not an easy thing to write about the most visible authority figure tasked with trying to inform and keep the nation calm during a worldwide pandemic.

But he did. "Right now its more important than ever that Canadians have access to the latest news and information," Trudeau said during his daily news conference on Wednesday.

"To ensure that journalists can continue to do this vital work, our government is announcing new measures to support them."

Then his government reannounced measures to support journalism that were first announced more than a year ago, which have been mismanaged and delayed and, to date, have provided zero dollars to news outlets such as the Winnipeg Free Press.

There was nothing new. No new support. Nothing to help journalists do the essential work the prime minister said they are doing. In fact, there was not even a promise to fix problems that have all but stalled the existing programs.

Lets be clear. Journalists may be doing essential work, but the COVID-19 restrictions now in place could kill the businesses behind news outlets in general, and newspapers specifically. A lot of our revenues depend on advertising, which has disappeared as businesses shutter and events are cancelled.

Some newspapers have closed already. A large group of community papers in Atlantic Canada suspended publication. A group of French daily newspapers in Quebec stopped publishing printed papers except on Saturdays.

Were not alone. We know many other businesses face the same threat. Were all in this together. We understand the federal government is buried under an avalanche of need right now  millions unemployed, businesses failing, a pandemic still looming. We did not ask to be singled out.

So why did Justin Trudeau stand in front of the nation and lie about helping us?

One thing we know for certain is that everyone needs information from trusted sources, and we are providing that. Our digital traffic is soaring. Governments are depending on news media to get out the message.

More importantly, everyone is depending on news media to get it right, to help them navigate a confusing tsunami of information about something that could threaten their health and their livelihoods.

So it looks good to say you are helping news media do their job.

After Trudeau spoke, the federal government announced it was appointing a "new independent advisory board on eligibility for journalism tax measures." This is a panel to help the Canada Revenue Agency determine which journalism organizations qualify for tax measures that were detailed in the March 2019 budget, and first announced in November 2018  16 months ago.

This program is worth $595 million over five years. Among other things, it is to provide refundable tax credits to pay for 25 per cent of the salaries of journalists working for qualified news outlets. To date, not a single dollar has been paid out to any news outlet, even though the program is retroactive to Jan. 1, 2019.

The program is rife with problems and delays. As currently written, the legislation disqualifies almost all newspaper companies in Canada from receiving tax credits, including the Winnipeg Free Press and its parent company, FP Newspapers.

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News Media Canada, the national association of newspapers that I chair, has repeatedly brought this to the attention of federal officials. They have promised changes; none has been forthcoming. All newspaper companies desperately need the cash now to stay open. But there is no word on when it will flow.

The government also announced it will be easier to apply for another, smaller aid program, known as the Canada Periodical Fund. This program has also been beset by delays and a lack of information, leaving publishers without funding they desperately rely on. Simplifying an application for the 2020-21 program will not get any money to them during the current COVID-19 crisis.

In short, as the prime minister gave a heartfelt thanks to journalists "for everything they do today and every day," his government failed to provide a single dollar of support for journalism. He lied.

I work with a dedicated team that is committed to providing news to this community in good times and bad. Many still come to our building on Mountain Avenue each day, knowing they have to be here to produce the print edition of the paper. Our carriers still show up in the wee hours so they can deliver to doors across the city. No one has run away to hide.

They do not deserve to be insulted by a prime minister who promises false hope.

Bob Cox is publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press and chairman of News Media Canada, which represents daily and community newspapers across Canada.
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Ivetter Serrano spent part of last Friday morning working the register at the Vallarta in Sylmar, the Latino supermarket chain's flagship store.

"We did get a big shipment of rice this morning," Serrano said. "A lot of people were very happy to find rice and toilet paper and water bottles here at the store."

Things are much more orderly now, Serrano assured me. There are limits on items and the number of people who can come into the store at the same time. And the shelves have mostly been replenished since a panicked run depleted some of the Vallarta locales in affluent neighborhoods of Sylmar, Downey and Burbank.

Toilet paper is in high demand across Los Angeles but at this corner store in Boyle Heights, you can still find toilet paper being sold by the roll. (Chava Sanchez/LAist)

When I talked to Serrano, she was getting ready to jump on Univision to assure Vallarta's target audience that there is no need to panic buy. "We've restructured. We've refocused all of our efforts to ensure that we have these products coming on a continuous basis," she explained.

She also assuaged one of my biggest fears. "I was ringing up Peruvian beans earlier, so we do have beans," she said. Pandemic or no pandemic, a life without beans would, for me, be the hellish apocalypse most of Twitter likes to propagate.

Serrano is part of Vallarta's coronavirus taskforce, a necessity for Latino supermarket chains that remain on the frontlines of providing food during the pandemic. They aren't alone. Carnicerias, liquor stores, tienditas, even gas station markets, have long been the heart of many neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Full shelves at a corner store in Boyle Heights. (Chava Sanchez/LAist)

These mom and pop shops have played a key role keeping their shelves stocked and neighborhoods fed in places like Eastside Long Beach, HiFi, West Adams and Exposition Park, where my friend and fellow writer Cesar Hernandez lives.

While people were turning Costco into the Wild West, Hernandez was finding everything he needed at his local tiendita. Hernadez said it wasn't just about avoiding massive lines and empty shelves. He wanted to shop where and how he normally does because it was important to maintain some sense of normalcy and keep "the neighborhood economic ecosystem intact."

"In the midst of all that's going on, tienditas remain an anchor in communities of color, keeping families fed and stocked even during a worldwide pandemic," Hernandez said.

A plethora of fresh veggies at Palomina Meat Market in Boyle Heights. (Chava Sanchez/LAist)

The ampm near Olympic and Soto is almost always cracking, according to Anthony Sanchez, who lives in a nearby apartment complex.

"We don't really have time to mess around with no 'rona panic. Plus, I don't have a car so I just stroll over here like every other day and pick out what I need," he said. Sanchez grabbed a large gallon of water, some bananas, a roll of toilet paper and some packaged sandwiches.

"Corner markets are great if you don't need a hundred rolls of toilet paper," he added.

Gina Anderson, a car service driver, said she's been shopping at the same butcher shop in her Pico-Union neighborhood for years. "I knew they got me. Even when I saw the chaos on TV at Costco. I knew my shop had me covered," she said.

I gave her five stars although she refused to tell me where the shop was. "I don't want a bunch of people pulling up and running my spot. That's how it starts," she said. "It" being gentrification.

Cuts of meat at a small corner market in Boyle Heights. (Chava Sanchez/LAist)

Another writer friend of mine, Lexis-Olivier Ray, said he has done most of his pandemic shopping at his local corner liquor store. "I go there pretty regularly, regardless, so it's still been my go-to these whole past few weeks," he said.

Whatever he can't find at the liquor store, Ray gets at the Numero Uno Market in MacArthur Park. "Same with the liquor store, I just can always count on them. I hadn't been grocery shopping in weeks, before the crisis. I went to a few other places and they were completely sold out. But when I went to Numero Uno they were completely in stock," he said.

Ray loves going to these neighborhood spots because they foster a sense of community and you form a bond with your local shop owner.

"Slowly the person behind the counter becomes your friend," he said. "They're just good people that actually care. And there's the fact that it's good to be friends with a person that has a store full of liquor."
We are not going to address the total digital divide in weeks, Sotelo said. There is a reason why we had a five-year plan. So I also want to make sure we put this in context, because while we prioritize where the greater needs are, by the way, that was already in the works. We were already planning to do so, we already had inventory available, we already had inventory we were going to repurpose ... to make sure the people that need those resources get it.
JERUSALEM  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus chief rival was chosen on Thursday as the new speaker of parliament, an unexpected step that could pave the way to a power-sharing deal between the two men as the country grapples with a worsening coronavirus crisis.

The sudden turnabout by Benny Gantz, who has spent the past year trying to topple Netanyahu in three inconclusive elections, appeared to give the embattled prime minister a new lease on life as he prepares to go on trial for corruption charges. It also drew angry criticism from his political partners and looked likely to rip apart his Blue and White party, an alliance of thee-anti-Netanyahu factions.

The vote passed by 74-18, with many of Gantzs former allies, including half of Blue and White, skipping the vote.

Democracy has won, Gantz declared in his first speech as speaker, saying he had taken the unpopular step to deal with the national emergency.

These are not regular days and they demand irregular decisions. Therefore as I said, I intend to examine and advance in every way the establishment of national emergency government, he said. We will not compromise on the principles that more than 1 million citizens voted for. Netantyahu knows that well.

But in a string of speeches ahead of the vote, a string of opposition lawmakers who had all previously backed Gantz streamed into the empty parliament chamber one after another to rail against him. Only a few people were allowed in at a time due to restrictions on public gatherings.

This is a dark day, said Nitzan Horowitz, leader of the liberal Meretz party, in a speech ahead of the vote. There are no other ways to describe the runaround going on here.

Israels Channel 12 TV reported that Gantz and Netanyahu had agreed on a broad coalition in which Netanyahu would remain as prime minister and Gantz would become his foreign minister. In September 2021, the two are to swap posts, the report said.

There was no comment from Blue and White, while Likud dismissed the reports as rumors.

The political fireworks come just as the government enacted new restrictions requiring Israelis to almost completely stay at home, under threat of fines. Over 2,600 Israelis have been infected by the new virus, with 41 in serious condition. Eight Israelis have died.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms that clear up in two weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or even death. The virus is highly contagious and can be spread by those showing no symptoms.

With the countrys coronavirus crisis worsening by the day, Netanyahu has called for an emergency unity government, most recently in a nationally televised speech Wednesday night.

Gantz has previously rejected Netanyahus overtures, citing the prime ministers upcoming trial on corruption charges. Members of Blue and White believe Netanyahu is using the crisis to shield himself from prosecution and expressed skepticism that Netanyahu would keep his word to relinquish power next year.

But after an appeal for unity by the country's figurehead president, Gantz agreed on Thursday to resume unity talks with Netanyahu.

Netanyahus Likud emerged as the largest party in the March 2 election, but along with his smaller religious and nationalist allies, fell short of security the required majority in parliament.

Gantz is backed by a slim majority in the newly elected Knesset and has been pushing for the countrys legislature to continue functioning at such a critical time, even without a permanent government in place.

Blue and White had been marching forward in parliament with planned legislation that could have made Netanyahu ineligible from continuing as prime minister.

Parliament had been expected to approve Meir Cohen of Gantz's centrist Blue and White party late Thursday as the new Knesset speaker. That would have allowed the bloc to proceed with planned legislation that includes a ban on indicted politicians, such as Netanyahu, from serving as prime minister.

But at the last minute, Gantz vetoed Cohen's nomination and proposed himself instead. Cohen's Yesh Atid faction, a member of the Blue and White alliance, planned to skip Thursday's vote in protest.

Parliament called Thursday's vote at the order of the country's Supreme Court. The previous speaker, Yuli Edelstein, resigned in protest Wednesday, after attempting to stall the vote.

Edelstein, a close Netanyahu ally from the prime minister's Likud party, had cited restrictions on large gatherings due to the spread of the coronavirus in suspending parliamentary activity.

But opponents accused him of clinging to his seat even though he lacked majority support in order to shield his party leader Netanyahu from legislation that would limit his lengthy rule.

Netanyahus caretaker government has passed a series of emergency executive measures to try and quell the spread of the new virus. They have included authorizing unprecedented electronic surveillance of Israeli citizens and a slowdown of court activity that forced the postponement of Netanyahus own pending criminal trial on serious corruption charges.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 18:06:49|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- China's military medical experts have wasted no time stepping up drug and vaccine research as well as virus source tracing to aid the country's battle against the novel coronavirus, a Defense Ministry spokesman said Thursday.

Ren Guoqiang made the remarks at a press conference.

On March 16, a recombinant novel coronavirus vaccine developed by a research team led by Chen Wei, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a researcher at the Institute of Military Medicine under the Academy of Military Sciences, passed a review by authorities and was greenlighted for clinical trials, Ren said.
What are Adinkra symbols? The symbols were invented by Gyaman King Nana Kwadwo Agyemang Adinkra. He also named them after him. Following Gyaaman's defeat, its use spread from Bono Gyaaman to Asante and other Akan Kingdoms. Here are Adinkra symbols explained in detail to help you understand their significance.

Adinkra symbols style variations. Photo: @akanadinkras

Source: Facebook

Adinkra is widely used in textiles, logos, and pottery. The symbols serve as aesthetic elements, but they also represent objects that hold emotive ideas about ancient wisdom, life, and the environment. In addition, there are a variety of symbols with varied meanings that are frequently associated with proverbs.

What does the word Adinkra mean?

Adinkra are Ghanaian symbols that express ideas or aphorisms. Adinkra is widely used in textiles, logos, and pottery. They're built into walls and other architectural elements.

What do Adinkra symbols mean?

These symbols represent famous proverbs and maxims. Additionally, they record historical events, express specific behaviours or attitudes related to unique concepts, and depict figures that are related to abstract shapes.

What countries use Adinkra symbols? They originate in West Africa, notably in the countries of Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana.

Where do Adinkra symbols come from?

They belonged to Asante (Ashanti) people who would print them on metalwork, pottery, and cloth. These people resisted British colonial rule when it arrived in West Africa. This may be the main reason why most of the symbolism and cultural traditions survives until today.

Are you interested in the Adinkra symbols and meanings pdf? The article below covers this topic in detail, which includes Adinkra symbols in PNG format.

How many Adinkra symbols are there?

There are about 122 known symbols.

What are the names of Adinkra symbols?

The following are the Adinkra symbols and their meaning:

1. Aban

Vector icon with African adinkra symbol Aban. Symbol of Strength and authority. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

The Akan word Aban means "fortress" or "castle." Therefore, it is a symbol of power, authority, and magnificence and a sign of strength.

2. Adwo

Adinkra symbol Adwo which signifies peace and tranquillity. Photo: @Adwo

Source: Facebook

Having a sense of calm and tranquillity within you helps decrease the impact of the turmoil on the outside, even in the midst of obstacles and hardships.

Peace of mind is essential, and you can obtain it by remaining calm and cool during difficult situations. Adwo is a word that means "quiet." It is a sign of tranquillity, peace, and quiet.

3. Adinkrahene (Chieftain of Adinkra symbols)

Adinkra symbols Adinkrahene that signifies leadership, greatness and charisma. Photo: @bestthingcreated

Source: Instagram

Adinkrahene is an African symbol of leadership, greatness and charisma. It has played a critical role in designing other signs. It shows how essential leadership is in any community. Most of the great leaders are charismatic, and therefore this symbol denotes the honourable features of a good leader.

4. Agyindawuru

Adinkra symbol Agyindawuru is a symbol of loyalty, vigilance, and responsibility. Photo: @ricochet64

Source: Getty Images

Agyin's gong is a symbol of loyalty, vigilance, and responsibility. They were designed to honour the faithfulness of one Agyin, the Asantehene's diligent servant and gong-beater.

5. Akoben

Akoben "war horn" symbol of vigilance and wariness. Photo: @Codecliq

Source: Facebook

Akoben translates as "battle horn." It represents a call to action, being ready to be called to action, readiness, and voluntarism.

6. Akofena

Akofena means "sword of war" and is a symbol of courage and heroism. Photo: @Codecliq

Source: Facebook

Akofena means "battle sword" and refers to the state ceremonial swords. It is a sign of governmental power, legality, a ruler's legitimised authority, and acknowledgement of bravery and heroic actions. In the top left quadrant of Ghana's coat of arms, one of these ceremonial swords is crossed with a linguist's staff.

7. Akoma Ntoaso

Akoma Ntoso "linked hearts" is a symbol of understanding and agreement. Photo: @Codecliq

Source: Facebook

Akoma Ntoaso translates as "the merging of hearts." It may also refer to "joined hearts." It is a symbol of agreement, oneness, unity, or a charter, an extension of the Akoma notion.

8. Akoma

Akoma "the heart" symbolises patience and tolerance. Photo: @Codecliq

Source: Facebook

Akoma is a symbol of endurance and understanding from the Asante people of modern-day Ghana, and it can be identified as the modern-day standard heart. It denotes love, unity, endurance, patience, tolerance, benevolence, and faithfulness.

Its literal meaning is "the heart." It also represents forbearance in the face of adversity and emphasizes the importance of patience. Akoma symbolises love, benevolence, patience, constancy, tenderness, perseverance, and consistency.

9. Ani Bere A Enso Gya

Adinkra Ani Bere A Enso Gya Ring - Self discipline. Photo: @aflebijoux

Source: Facebook

Ani Bere A Enso Gya is an Akan adage that translates as "No matter how red-eyed one grows (i.e. how serious one becomes), his eyes do not kindle fires." It represents patience, self-control and self-discipline.

10. Ananse Ntontan (Spiders web)

Ananse Ntontan is a symbol of creativity, complexities of life and wisdom. Photo: @beimaginativecollective

Source: Facebook

Ananse Ntontan is a symbol of creativity, complexities of life and wisdom. Creativity is the creation of something new and different. Understanding relates to knowledge, experience and well as reasonable judgement in decision making and taking necessary actions.

11. Asase Ye Duru (Earth has mass)

Adinkra symbol Asase Ye Duru (Earth has mass). Photo: @amarelo_terra

Source: UGC

Asase Ye Duru represents the divinity and the providence of Mother earth. The symbol promotes the importance of the Earth in sustaining the existence of life to every living thing. Therefore, people should not act in a way that they are going to harm the Earth.

12. Aya (Fern)

Vector icon with African adinkra symbol Aya. Symbol of defiance and endurance. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

This symbol depicts endurance, tolerance, and willpower. The fern is known to be a robust plant that grows in harsh climatic conditions. Those who wear this symbol suggests that they have endured many difficulties in life.

13. Abe Dua (Palm tree)

Adinkra symbol Abe Dua (Palm tree). Photo: @thiossane.afrika

Source: Instagram

Abe Dua means palm tree. Therefore, the palm tree is a symbol of wealth, self-sufficiency, and resourcefulness. This is because some products such as oil, brooms, wood, roofing materials, and wine are extracted from it.

14. Akoko Nan (A hens leg)

Adinkra symbol Akoko Nan (A hens leg). Photo: @snaqcreations

Source: Facebook

Akoko Nan is one of the Adinkra symbols that represents discipline and caring. Like the name suggests, a hen tramp on its chick but can not kill them. In addition, the emblem portrays the protective and caring nature of parents.

15. Bese Saka (A bag of cola nuts)

Adinkra symbol Bese Saka (A bag of cola nuts). Photo: @Bernadette Champion

Source: Facebook

Bese Saka represents power, togetherness, plenty, abundance, unity, and affluence. The cola nut is a cash crop that played a vital role in the economic life of Ghana. It shows the position of trade and Agriculture in bringing people together.

16. Bi Nka Bi (No one is supposed to bite the other)

Adinkra symbol Bi Nka Bi (No one is supposed to bite the other). Photo: @kah_leekst

Source: Instagram

Bi Nka Bi represents peace and unity. The image is based on two fish locking on each other's tails. The sign means that people should watch out against any devious acts of provocation or civil strife.

17. Dame-Dame

Dame-Dame represents intelligence, innovation, and strategy. Photo: @Codecliq

Source: Facebook

Dame-Dame is the name of a board game played in Ghana. It represents intelligence, innovation, and strategy. The two players start with 14 pawns neatly arranged on one end of the board in Dame dame, which is played on a 9x9 board.

This game demands a great deal of focus and intelligence, and the symbol represents the inventiveness required to play a standard game of Dame Dame.

18. Denkyem (Crocodile)

The Denkyem Adinkra symbol. Photo: @jaydzignz

Source: UGC

Denkyem is a symbol of versatility. It shows the ability of a crocodile to survive in water for a long time and still survive outside water. In addition, the sign demonstrates the capability of adapting to the prevailing conditions.

19. Dono Ntoaso

Adinkra Dono Ntoaso Ring - Jubilation. Photo: @Afle Bijoux - Creations Akan

Source: Facebook

Dono Ntoaso translates as "dono extension" or "the double dono"two tension talking drums connected. It represents unity, awareness, kindness, praise, rejoicing, and ability.

20. Dono

Vector icon with African adinkra symbol Dono. Symbol of Praise and Goodwill. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

Dono is a tensile talking drum with animal hide-wrapped strings connecting both ends. The drum is held under the armpit, and the sound it produces is determined by how hard it is grasped. It represents the appellation, praise, goodness, and rhythm.

21. Duafe (Comb)

Ghanaian Adinkra symbol Duafe (Comb). Photo: @instabeautyinc

Source: Instagram

This symbol depicts cleanliness and beauty (desirable feminine features). It is one of the Ghanaian Adinkra symbols that spotlight the qualities of a woman like care, love, and goodness. The wooden Duafe was used to plait and comb hair, and it was a highly treasured object by Akan women.

22. Dwennimmen (Rams horns)

Adinkra symbol Dwennimmen (Rams horns). Photo: @larissaamarachi

Source: Instagram

Dwennimmen is a beacon of strength with virtues of humility. For example, it shows how a ram fights aggressively against any rival but will give in humbly to be slaughtered. The symbol means that even strong people should be humble.

23. Eban (Fence)

Adinkra symbol Eban (Fence). Photo: @Bernadette Champion

Source: Facebook

Eban is an African symbol of love and security. According to the Akan people, a residence that is well secured with a fence is an ideal homestead. The fence represents the protection of the family from external and harmful factors.

24. Epa (Handcuffs)

Adinkra symbol Epa (Handcuffs). Photo: @heritagecollage

Source: Facebook

Epa is a mark of law and justice, captivity, and slavery. It represents the experiences of Africans in the hands of Arabs during the slave trade. It is one of the many Ghanaian symbols that depict oppression. However, this symbol does remind the offenders of the uncompromising nature of law and discourages all forms of slavery.

25. Ese Ne Tekrema (The teeth and the tongue)

Ese Ne Tekrema (The teeth and the tongue). Photo: @videlartstudio

Source: Instagram

Ese Ne Tekrema is a symbol advocating for interdependence and friendship. It shows the interdependence that exists between the teeth and the tongue in the mouth. Sometimes they may conflict, but they need to work together.

26. Fafanto

Vector icon with African adinkra symbol Fafanto. Symbol of tenderness and gentleness. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

The word "fafanto" means "butterfly." The butterfly is a delicate and gentle creature with gorgeous wings that flutter around. The emblem represents the butterfly's essence: fragility, delicacy, and tenderness. It's also comparable to the butterflies' unbridled joy in soaring around without a care in the world.

27. Fawohodie (Freedom)

Adinkra symbol Fawohodie (Freedom). Photo: @boutique.grandeur

Source: Instagram

Fawohodie is a symbol of independence, liberty, and autonomy. In other words, it means that freedom comes with its responsibilities, which is translated in Akan as "Fawodhodie ene obre na enam."

28. Fihankra

Adinkra symbol Fihankra meaning "house" a symbol of security and safety. Photo: @CodeCliq

Source: Facebook

Fihankra represents fraternity, safety, security, completion, and solidarity. Among the Akans, communal living is the norm. "It takes a village to raise a child" is not just a cliche; it is a genuine experience.

In the past, the most severe punishment for a misbehaving member of society was exile.

29. Fofo (Yellow flowed plant)

Adinkra symbol Fofo (Yellow flowed plant). Photo: @EthnicEarring

Source: Facebook

This emblem denotes envy and jealousy. The moment Fofo's petals drop, they turn into black spiky-like seeds. The nature of the Fofo petals is compared to a jealous man. The Fofo plant wishes that the Gyinantwi seeds turn black is one of the Akan proverbs associated with Fofo.

30. Gye Nyame (Except for God)

Adinkra symbol Gye Nyame (Except for God). Photo: @xplorefrica

Source: Facebook

Gye Nyame is one of the traditional Ghanaian symbols that shows the power of God. This beautiful and unique symbol is ubiquitous in Ghana. However, it is mainly used in decoration and as a reflection of a profoundly religious character.

31. Hwehwemudua

Adinkra symbol Hwehwemudua meaning "measuring stick" a symbol of examination and quality control. Photo: @CodeCliq

Source: Facebook

Hwehwemudua translates as "rod of enquiry," which is a measuring rod. It represents excellence, exceptional quality, perfection, knowledge, and critical thinking.

32. Hye Won Hye (That does not burn)

Adinkra symbol Hye Won Hye (That does not burn). Photo: @polyvore (modified by author)

Source: UGC

The symbol denotes endurance and imperishability. Its meaning has been derived from the traditional priests walking barefooted on the fire without getting burned. Its role is to inspire other people to endure and overcome all types of challenges.

33. Kwatakye Atiko

Adinkra symbol Kwatakye Atiko meaning "hairstyle of an Asante war captain" a symbol of bravery and valour. Photo: @CodeCliq

Source: Facebook

Kwatakye Atiko translates as "the back of Kwatakye's head." It is a symbol of bravery and courage. Gyawu Atiko is another name for this symbol. It is claimed to be the hairdo of Kwatakye, an old Asante war captain.

34. Kramo Bone Amma Yeanhu Kramo Pa

Adinkra symbol Kramo Bone Amma Yeanhu Kramo Pa represents a warning against lying and hypocrisy. Photo: @Black History Festival

Source: Facebook

Kramo Bone Amma Yeanhu Kramo Pa translates as "the terrible Muslim makes it impossible to recognize the good." It represents a warning against lying and hypocrisy. This emblem is also known as Papani amma yeanhu kramo, which means that the profusion of excellent men made identifying Muslims difficult.

35. Kuronti ne Akwamu

Vector icon with African adinkra symbol Kuronti Ne Akwamu. Symbol of democracy and council. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

Kuronti and Akwamu are two groups that make up a town or village council. As a result, the sign represents democracy, sharing ideas, and seeking advice.

They may each have their particular interests as two distinct groups, but an acceptable agreement to control the entire is born out of this conflict.

36. Mako

Vector icon with African adinkra symbol Mako. Symbol of opportunity and development. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

Mako translates as "peppers." It is a symbol of inequity and uneven development. Mako is a shortened variant of the Akan adage "Mako nyinaa mpatu mmere," which means "All peppers (probably on the same branch) do not ripen simultaneously."

This proverb advises the wealthy to assist the less fortunate, with the underlying assumption that circumstances may change and they, too, will require assistance. As the Akans say, Mmer dane, or Time Changes, any advantage one may have now may not last forever.

37. Mate Masie (What I hear, I keep)

Adinkra symbol Mate Masie (What I hear, I keep). Photo: @ucanturnitaround

Source: Facebook

The symbol is a beacon of prudence, knowledge and wisdom. Mate Masie means, "I understand." Therefore, understanding means knowledge and wisdom, but it also denotes the sense of considering what another person has said.

38. Menso Wo Kenten

Icon with African adinkra symbol Menso Wo Kenten. Symbol of industry and self-reliance. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

Menso Wo Kenten translates as "I am not carrying your basket." It represents the industry, self-sufficiency, and economic self-determination.

39. Mpuannum (Five Tufts of hair)

Adinkra symbol Mpuannum (Five Tufts of hair). Photo: @tgnuk

Source: Instagram

This Adinkra symbol denotes cleverness, loyalty, and a priestly office. It is said to be a priestesses' hairstyle. It also shows the faithfulness and devotion that an individual displays when doing the delegated duties.

40. Mpatapo (Knot of pacification /reconciliation)

Adinkra symbol Mpatapo (Knot of pacification /reconciliation). Photo: @videlartstudio

Source: Instagram

This Adinkra symbol is a representation of pacification, peacemaking and reconciliation. It denotes the knot or bond that brings together different parties in a dispute to a harmonious and peaceful reconciliation.

41. Mframadan

Adinkra symbol Mframadan. Photo: @CodeCliq

Source: Facebook

Mframadan translates as "well-ventilated dwelling." A symbol of fortitude and willingness to tackle life's ups and downs.

The Akan house is not only well ventilated, but it is also resilient, able to survive the perils of storms, rain, and tropical heat.

42. Mmere Dane

Adinkra symbol Mmere Dane. Photo: @CodeCliq

Source: Facebook

Mmere Dane translates as "times change." It represents the fleeting nature of good events.

Because good things do not last, the fortunate should not brag; similarly, bad things do not last, so the less fortunate should not quit up. Because no state is permanent, man should be humble, cooperative, and optimistic in all his endeavours.

43. Nea Onnim

Adinkra symbol Nea Onnim. Photo: @CodeCliq

Source: Facebook

Nea Onnim translates as "He who does not know." It is derived from the Akan saying "Nea onnim no sua an ohu," which translates as "When one who does not know learns."

44. Nea Ope Se Obedi Hene (He who desires to be king)

Adinkra symbol Nea Ope Se Obedi Hene (He who desires to be king). Photo: @r3d4.4nkh

Source: Instagram

Nea Ope Se Obedi Hene is a beacon of leadership and service. It means that anyone who wants to be a leader must have learnt how to serve.

45. Nkonsonkonson

Adinkra symbol Nkonsonkonson. Photo: @CodeCliq

Source: Facebook

Nkonsonkonson translates as "chain." It is a symbol of community and unity and is mentioned in Akan proverbs about unity.

46. Nsaa

Adinkra symbol Nsaa. Photo: @CodeCliq

Source: Facebook

Nsaa is a kind of woven fabric. It is a mark of excellence, genuineness, and authenticity, like in the Akan saying "Nea onnim nsaa na oto n'ago," which means "He who does not know excellent nsaa will buy the counterfeits."

The uncritical and inexperienced and those uneducated in quality principles may not differentiate the real from the counterfeit, but not the wise. They can detect quality from a long distance.

47. Nsoromma

Vector icon with African adinkra symbol Nsoromma. Symbol of ward and guardianship. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

The Akan word for "star" is Nsoromma. It means "child of the heavens." It is a symbol of faith and the belief in divine patronage and reliance on a higher power.

48. Nteasee

Vector icon with African adinkra symbol Nteasee. Symbol of understanding and cooperation. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

The Akan term for "understanding" is Nteasee. It is an African symbol that represents understanding and cooperation.

49. Nyame Biribi Wo Soro

Monochrome icon with Adinkra symbol Nyame Biribi. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

This sign means "God; there is something in the heavens," symbolising hope and inspiration.

This Adinkra is a prayer to God for a wish to be granted. The Akans believe that God is in the heavens, listening to their prayers, blessing them, and watching them. They also think he is present to see that his intentions on Earth are carried out.

50. Nyame Nwu Na Mawu

Icon with African adinkra symbol Nyame Nnwu Na Mawu. Symbol of eternality and omnipresence. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

Nyame Nwu Na Mawu translates as "God will not die for me to die." It is a symbol showing faith in God to maintain one's soul, expressing the immortality of the human soul.

To state that God will not die for me to die is to assert that the only way I can fail is for God to die; yet, since God's immortality is a given, this also means I cannot break.

51. Nkyimu (The crossed divisions made on Adinkra cloth before stamping)

Adinkra symbol Nkyimu (The crossed divisions made on Adinkra cloth before stamping). Photo: @54kibo

Source: Facebook

This symbol is a beacon of precision and skillfulness. The artisans start by blocking the Adinkra cloth with lines in a rectangular grid using a broad tooth comb. The process happens before stamping it with symbols. This technique symbolises the preparations to be made to get high-quality products. The emblem represents those people who are innovative in life.

52. Nyame Dua (Gods tree/altar)

Adinkra symbol Nyame Dua (Gods tree/altar). Photo: @luna_lu80

Source: Instagram

The symbol denotes God's existence and guardianship. What is Nyame Dua? It is a unique pot used to perform rituals. First, the pot is crafted from a tree with three conjoined branches. Then it is used to hold herbs, water and any other symbolic material used during blessings and purification rituals.

53. Nyame Nti (By Gods grace)

Adinkra symbol Nyame Nti (By Gods grace). Photo: @sekei_thia

Source: Instagram

This symbol represents trust and faith in God. Many cultures consider that stalk represents the staff of life. The whole plant reminds the Akan people that God's food is essential for nourishment, and humans could not survive without it.

54. Nyansapo (Wisdom knot)

Adinkra symbol Nyansapo (Wisdom knot). Photo: @r3d4.4nkh

Source: Instagram

Nyansapo denotes patience, intelligence, ingenuity and wisdom. It means that a wise person can easily know the best means to use in attaining a goal. Being wise indicates broad knowledge, experience, and learning.

55. Okuafo Pa

Icon with African adinkra symbol Okuafo Pa. Symbol of diligence and hard work. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

The words Okafor (farmer) and pa (good) are combined to make the phrase "good farmer." A good farmer is conscientious and dedicated.

Farming necessitates a high level of devotion to the task if you want a plentiful harvest, and at the end of the day, farmers strive for a large harvest, therefore they must be dedicated to their work. It represents tenacity, hard effort, and entrepreneurship.

56. Osram Ne Nsoromma (The Moon and the Star)

Adinkra symbol Osram Ne Nsoromma. Photo: @thepriestesspages

Source: Instagram

The symbol represents love, unity, and harmony. It signifies the critical importance of a bond that exists between a man and a woman. The Adinkra proverbs "Kyekye pe aware" means that the North star represents deep love for marriage. It is always in the sky, waiting for the moon to return. Thus, the symbol represents how a woman always waits for the return of her husband.

57. Okodee Mmowere (The talons of the eagle)

Vector icon with African adinkra symbol Okodee Mmowere. Symbol of strength and bravery. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

Okodee Mmowere shows power, bravery, and strength. The sign means that the eagle is the most powerful bird in the sky, and it gets its strength from its talons. This symbol is usually used by the Oyoko clan as their clan emblem.

58. Owuo Atwedee (The ladder of death)

Vector icon with African adinkra symbol Owuo Atwedee. Symbol of mortality. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

The symbol denotes mortality. It reminds the people of the transitory nature of existence on this Earth. Therefore the logo emphasises the importance of living a great life to remain a meaningful soul after this life.

59. Pempamsie (Sew in readiness)

Vector monochrome icon with Adinkra symbol Pempamsie. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

The symbol represents steadfastness, hardness, and readiness. The design of this symbol resembles the link of a chain. It shows the power through unity and the importance of being always prepared.

60. Sankofa (Return and get it)

Pan African colours Adinkra symbol Sankofa Bird isolated. Adinkra Folk art imitation vector illustration. Photos: tatadonets

Source: Getty Images

The emblem is characterised by a bird retracing its steps to get a lost egg. The Adinkra symbols Sankofa means that it is not taboo to collect what has been left behind. Therefore, each experience in this life should leave an individual wiser than it met them. If the incident was not good, a person should learn how to deal with such situations in the future.

61. Wawa Aba (Seed of the Wawa tree)

Vector monochrome icon with Adinkra symbol Wawa Aba. Photo: iSidhe

Source: Getty Images

The emblem signifies toughness, perseverance, and hardship. The seed of the Wawa tree is very hard. In Akan culture, the symbol represents someone strong. Therefore, this symbol inspires an individual who is passing through hardships in life.

62. Wo Nsa Da Mu A (If your hands are in the dish)

Adinkra symbol Wo Nsa Da Mu A (If your hands are in the dish). Photo: @CodeCliq

Source: Facebook

This Adinkra symbol is a beacon of participatory government, pluralism, and democracy. It means that if you have already put your hands in the container, people will not eat everything and leave nothing for you.

Above are Adinkra symbols explained in detail to help you understand their significance. Many Ghanaians still use these symbols in their daily lives. Read through the above list before purchasing Adinkra clothing, jewellery, or accessories to learn about their significance.

Yen.com.gh recently covered an interesting piece on The Golden stool in Ghana. It is a mystical object surrounded by a plethora of intriguing facts and myths.

Did you know that locals believed that the stool carried supernatural powers? Find out everything about this artefact, including its history, meaning, facts, and location.

Source: YEN.com.gh
Private hospitals have won a one-week extension to perform non-urgent elective surgeries, against the advice of the federal government's expert medical panel.

Just hours after Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Wednesday announced all non-essential elective surgery would be suspended "until further notice" from midnight, his office quietly disclosed the change at the bottom of a media release late on Wednesday night.

Private hospitals will continue to perform non-urgent elective surgeries for another week. Credit:Glenn Hunt

The delay, while private hospital operators negotiate a rescue package with the federal government, has sparked fury among doctors.

Royal Australasian College of Surgeons president Tony Sparnon on Thursday described the decision as a "sell-out to the private hospitals". "It's putting commercial forces ahead of patient safety and the use of vital resources," he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
In this healthcare crisis, we realized that repurposing our unique filter design could potentially help with the current mask shortage occurring across the country. - Scott Cohen, President and CEO of IST

Innovative Sterilization Technologies (IST)/ONE TRAY in Dayton, Ohio is making a donation to help protect in the fight against the spread of COVID-19 in the form of 500,000 filters. These can be used as an alternate resource for personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare/first responder personnel. This announcement comes in the wake of the medical mask supply shortage now gripping our nation as more infected patients fill healthcare facilities.

The IST/ONE TRAY team is no stranger to innovation so they set out to find a way to support the community at this time of crisis. Used as an accessory with the ONE TRAY sterilization containers, the filters being provided offer the user materials that create a barrier against fluid and particulates.

The filters are not meant to be a replacement for PPE devices, merely an alternative solution during this pandemic. Facilities can determine the intended use. These filters are used as a microbial and fluid barrier to maintain sterility after sterilization. The ONE TRAY team has come up with two versions of potential use: a decontamination protective option and an over-mask barrier that can be used as a cover to extend the usability of the n95 PPE masks.

BFE & Delta P test methods comply with ASTM F2101 and AS4381 standards on this material for fluid resistance and particulate filtration. All test method acceptance criteria were met. Testing was performed in compliance with US FDA good manufacturing practice (GMP) regulations 21 CFR Parts 210, 211 and 820.

Scott Cohen, President and CEO of Innovative Sterilization Technologies states In this healthcare crisis, we realized that repurposing our unique filter design could potentially help with the current mask shortage occurring across the country. We will be donating these items to any facility in need, they just need to contact us and we will expedite them.

In an effort to service more than 1000 facilities nationwide, the filters will be shipped in boxes of approximately 250, with a limit of 2 boxes per facility. To see instructional videos, step by step instructions, or to order your free box of filters, visit http://covid19.onetray.com. You can also contact IST/ONE TRAY at 937.619.0138, or email info@onetray.com.

Media inquiries please contact Dave Billman dbillman@iststerilization.com or Walt Oko woko@iststerilization.com.

About IST - Innovative Sterilization Technologies (IST) was founded in 2013 with the goal of delivering products that ensure effective reprocessing efficiencies and economic savings in medical device sterilization. Our mission is to provide the highest quality sterilization container products supported by years of reliable service to our customers.

We are committed to educating our industry on how new technology affects current practices and guidelines to help create an environment that benefits not only the user but supports our customers in their effort to provide One Standard of Care. Notice of Acknowledgement: IST would like to credit Assembly Tech of Dayton, a local business for their donation of time, effort and facilities assisting IST with our efforts.
New Delhi: Equity benchmark Sensex jumped over 1,100 points in opening session on Thursday led by gains in HDFC twins, Infosys, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank amid mixed global cues.

The 30-share BSE barometer was trading 1,183.12 points or 4.8 per cent higher at 29,728.30.

Similarly, the NSE Nifty was up 167.95 points, or 2.02 per cent, at 8,485.80.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack, rallying up to 20 per cent, followed by Axis Bank, Bajaj Auto, ICICI Bank, HDFC and Bajaj Finance. On the other hand, ITC, Maruti and ONGC were the top losers.

In the previous session, the BSE gauge Sensex shot up 1,861.75 points or 6.98 per cent to settle at 28,535.78, and the NSE barometer Nifty spurted 516.80 points or 6.62 per cent to end at 8,317.85 the biggest single-day gain for the indices.

According to traders, investors are weighing the economic impact of the 21-day lockdown in the country.

All eyes are Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's economic package to cushion the economic impact of the lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19, expected to be announced shortly, they said.

Bourses in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Seoul were trading on a mixed note.

Stocks on Wall Street ended with firm gains in overnight trade.

Incessant foreign fund outflow also kept domestic market participants risk-averse, traders said.

Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) remained net sellers in the capital market, as they sold equity shares worth Rs 1,893.36 crore on Wednesday, according to provisional exchange data.

Brent crude futures, the global oil benchmark, fell 0.51 per cent to USD 27.25 per barrel.

The number of deaths around the world linked to the new coronavirus has crossed over 21,000. In India, more than 600 coronavirus cases have been reported so far.
Director General of Disaster Response Force (NDRF), SN Pradhan on Thursday said 400 personnel have been geared with Personal Protective Equipments (PPEs) in every battalion for assisting states amid coronavirus outbreak.

"12 battalions and 50 sub-units are deployed across the country on standby and 400 personnel geared with Personal Protective Equipments (PPEs) are present in every battalion. We are ready to act anytime if states need," Pradhan told ANI.

According to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the total number of positive coronavirus cases in the country now stands at 649, including 593 active cases. (ANI)

Meanwhile, the Centre said the state governments are working on measures to provide food and shelter to migrant workers amid countrywide lockdown.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Amid the spurt in COVID-19 cases, a total of 31 hotels in the city and nearby Rajarhat and New Town areas have agreed to offer pay-and use rooms to people who have been asked to live in isolation for 14 days

Kolkata: Amid the spurt in COVID-19 cases, a total of 31 hotels in the city and nearby Rajarhat and New Town areas have agreed to offer pay-and use rooms to people who have been asked to live in isolation for 14 days, a senior official said.

The state government had requested the hotels to let out some of their rooms as quarantine units, following which necessary arrangements were made at these properties, in accordance with the protocols set by the health department, he said.

"The decision was taken in view of the increasing demand for quarantine centres. We had approached the Hotel and Restaurant Association of Eastern India (HREEI), following which 31 hotels were selected for the purpose," he said.

According to the health department, the rooms should have an attached bathroom facility.

The department also stated that windows be "kept open during daytime, and the floor and other surfaces in the rooms be mopped with bleach solution".

"Soiled linens, clothes, towel shall not be mixed with those of others and shall be disinfected with bleach, washed properly and sun-dried daily and also before next use. Freshly prepared bleach solution (that is one per cent hydrochloride solution) must be used to clean furniture wash basin and toilets," the department said.

All housekeeping and room service staffers have been asked to wear masks and gloves while serving the guests. "No visitors other than doctors, medical officers or authorised officials shall be allowed inside the hotel to meet a quarantined person," the department noted.

According to the state government directive, after completion of the 14-day quarantine period "the guests will be allowed to leave subject to the permission from the health department".

"If any person develops (COVID-19) symptoms such as fever, cough and respiratory Illness during his or her stay, the hotel management must mandatorily inform the nodal officer immediately for taking appropriate action," it said.

The state health department will designate a medical officer, who will visit and monitor the pay-and-use quarantine units at these designated hotels from time to time, the order added.

According to reports, the state government is also building two more facilities one in the city and the other in Rajarhat for suspected coronavirus patients.
An official of the outlawed opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) was arrested and detained Thursday by police in his house in Cambodias Komapong Chhnang province, the latest target of Prime Minister Hun Sens crackdown against CNRP members.

Court officials and police stormed the residence of CNRP Provincial Chief Keo Thai without an arrest warrant and took him into custody, his family told RFAs Khmer Service.

Keo Thais daughter, Keo Chan Rachana, told RFA that she had no idea what crime her father is accused of. She said her father, an English teacher, had been doing his job remotely through online classes when schools were ordered to close due to COVID-19 outbreaks in the country.

A prosecutor said he wanted to see my father but when he [came to talk] they arrested him instantly, dragging him away barefoot, said Keo Chan Rachana.

Police also confiscated three of the familys mobile phones.

Police attempted in March 2019 to arrest Keo Thai for criticizing the government on Facebook. He was able to evade capture when police surrounded his house.

After self-exiled CNRP leader Sam Rainsy failed in his promise to return to Cambodia by Nov. 9, 2019, Hun Sen scaled back arrests of CNRP members suspected of being involved in the repatriation efforts. This provided a window for Keo to return to his home.

RFA attempted to contact Provincial Police Chief Khouv Ly for comment but he did not respond. Provincial Court Spokesman Long Sy refused to comment when asked about the case.

Ny Sokha of the The Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (ADHOC) told RFA that the police broke the law by arresting Keo Thai without a warrant.

Even if they were in the presence of a prosecutor, they need to explain the reasons for arrest. Without a legitimate reason, the arrest is illegal, he said.

Stepped-up harassment

Authorities in Cambodia stepped up their harassment of CNRP activists and supporters in August 2019, when acting party leader Sam Rainsy announced he would return to Cambodia on Nov. 9, calling on supporters and members of Cambodias armed forces to join him in a restoration of democracy in the Southeast Asian nation.

Many CNRP activists and supporters are now believed to be held in the countrys jails, mostly without a warrant, with many more having been summoned to appear in court related to their support of Sam Rainsys plan to return late last year.

Sam Rainsy has been living in self-imposed exile since 2015 to avoid a string of what he calls politically motivated convictions and charges, and Cambodias Supreme Court dissolved the CNRP in November 2017 for its role in an alleged plot to topple the government.



The ban on the political opposition, along with a wider crackdown by Hun Sen on NGOs and the independent media, paved the way for Hun Sens ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) to win all 125 seats in parliament in the countrys July 2018 general election.



Hun Sen and other leaders in his government have vowed to arrest Sam Rainsy as soon as he sets foot inside Cambodia.

Reported by RFAs Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
1975 was the final year of President Nyereres  leadership term which commenced in 1970. But that was to be in October, when the general elections were to be held.

We will therefore discuss that event at the appropriate time later on. In the meantime, we will pick up from where we left-off last week, when we ran out of editorial space, namely, at the point where we had just listed the major decisions which had been taken in 1974, by TANUs National Executive Committee relating to the education sector.

The Musoma NEC meeting had also placed new emphasis on the provision of Adult Education in our country.

Thus, for the purpose of implementing that directive, a new Institute of Adult Education was established in 1975, which did an excellent job in its delivery; For, as a result of its magnificent performance, only two years later in 1977, Tanzania was granted The Commonwealth Literacy Award for having eliminated illiteracy in the country by 96 percent.

Other developments during that year Another major decision that was made by the Musoma meeting of the National Executive Committee, was the decision to make TANU, the constitutionally supreme organ of governance in this country.

After that directive had been issued in 1974, the government started preparing the necessary amendments to the Constitution, which were eventually adopted by the National Assembly in May, 1975.

Soon thereafter, President Nyerere himself issued further clarification regarding this issue, as follows: Under our One-party Constitution, TANU is supreme.

It has the mandate to give directions to the Government about the general policy which must be adopted for national development; or to give specific instructions about the priorities to be adopted, in any aspect of our national life.

This was intended to put a close to what had come to be known as the great supremacy debate in the National Assembly; Which had started in 1968, regarding the question which of the two Institutions, the National Assembly and the TANU National Executive Committee is supreme over the other in terms of making policy?

This matter had generated some fierce debate in the National Assembly for nearly two years until 1969, when it was finally settled by the National Executive Committee in its favour; When, at its meeting in Tanga, NEC resolved to expel from party membership all those troublesome members who had been questioning the fact of TANUs supremacy in policy making matters.

Consequently, they also lost their membership of the National Assembly, simply by operation of the countrys Constitution.

Madaraka Vijijini legislation enacted The 1974 decision to grant greater decision-making powers to the Villages (by creating Village governments and Village Assemblies), was also finally implemented in 1975; When the Local Government laws were amended to make provision for these new Village governance organs to be established.

The major events of 1975 As already stated above, the year 1975 was general election year in Tanzania, but that fact alone did not give it any additional significance.

What gave that year special significance, were two historical pronouncements by President Nyerere; Which he made at the time of his nomination by his party, to stand as the partys presidential candidate in the said general elections.

One was his surprise announcement, that he was accepting such nomination for the last time; as he would like thereafter to retire from Government leadership positions which he has held for a long time since independence, in order to give a chance to another person also to lead our country.

We will discuss this matter at a later stage. The other, equally unexpected, was his advise (read directive), to the two ruling parties in Tanzania, namely TANU on Mainland Tanzania, and the Afro-Shirazi Party in Zanzibar; To consider merging into one strong, unified party, for the purpose of carrying the revolution forward.

He said thus : Our country is governed by a one-Party Constitution. But, in fact, we are operating two separate political parties; TANU on one side of the Union; and ASP on the other side; Which is clearly contrary to the requirements of the countrys Constitution.

Work began immediately on this merger directive The party nomination conferences were actually joint conferences, which brought together both the TANU conference delegates, and those from the Afro-Shirazi Party.

This was because the candidate to be nominated, if elected, would serve as President of the entire United Republic. For that reason Aboud Jumbe, President of Zanzibar and of the Afro- Shirazi Party, was present at the conference, leading the Afro-Shirazi delegation.

Thus, at the appropriate moment, as was standard practice, he rose to address the joint conference. And among his other remarks, he also made reference to President Nyereres proposal to merge the two parties; which, he said, he and his ASP delegation welcomed whole heartedly; and undertook to have the matter discussed by the relevant decision-making organs of the Afro-Shirazi Party, with a view to having the proposal endorsed.

Work started immediately thereafter, to have the proposal discussed by all the TANU Branches in Mainland Tanzania, as well as in all the ASP Branches in Zanzibar.

Both party records show, that of the existing 6,639 TANU Branches, 6,427 did discuss this proposal, of which 6,424 (99, 95 percent) approved it, and only 3 Branches rejected the proposal.

While on the Afro-Shirazi side, which had a total of 257 Branches, all of them discussed the proposal, and gave their approval to it.

What followed thereafter The whole of the following year was devoted mostly to activities related to the achievement of that grand objective; Which now took absolutely first priority.

The Presidents of TANU and the ASP had agreed that each individual member of both parties, should be given the opportunity to express his or her views on this proposal, a kind of referendum among all the members.

The necessary preparations for this referendum were made and completed during the remaining months of 1975; Which enabled the actual referendum process to commence in February, 1976, and was completed by June 1976.

The referendum had produced positive results, with the vast majority of the members having accepted the proposal.

Thereafter, the two parties agreed to hold joint meetings of their National Executive Committees, to handle the decision-making aspects of this matter.

At the first such joint meeting, which was held on 2nd October, 1976; they decided to appoint a joint 20-person Commission, 10 from either side, which was tasked to prepare the Constitution of the proposed new party.

I was fortunate to have been appointed a member of this Commission on the TANU side, and was later appointed its Executive Secretary; While mzee Thabit Kombo, Secretary-General of the ASP, was appointed its Chairman.

The Commission was given one month within which to complete its assignment, which we dutifully did. But in the meantime, we were required to present progress to the Joint meeting of the two National Executive Committees, which, for that purpose, was convened twice during that short period of one month.

And we were every time ready with our progress reports. And we were able to present our final Report to that body, on 5th November, 1976; At which it was decided to call a joint meeting of the congresses of the two parties, in order to adopt the proposed Constitution of the new party.

The joint Congress was duly held on 21st January, 1977; Which decided that the new party should come into existence on 5th February, 1977. The other events of 1977 The other events that occurred not long thereafter, were wholly negative to the countrys economy; for there occurred two serious unforeseen events, which had a very negative impact on Tanzanias economy.

One was the collapse of the East African Community; And the other was the sudden sharp rise in the world oil prices.

Because of their huge impact on the Government budget, the occurrence of these two events negatively affected the implementation of the entire Government development plan; But in particular, they affected President Nyereres plan for shifting the government capital to Dodoma; Which had to be put in abeyance for the time being.

The break-up of the East African Community actually happened on the same day that CCM was born, on 5th of February, 1977; When Kenyas Attorney General, Charles Njonjo, suddenly announced Kenyas withdrawal from the East African Airways, and the nationalisation of that Companys planes which were parked overnight on that day, at Nairobi, the companys headquarters.

On receiving the strange news, President Nyerere called President Kenyatta by phone, to enquire what was happening, and why.

We were later informed, that President Kenyatta pleaded ignorance of these developments, but promised to find out and let his counterpart know.

But it took much longer than President Nyereres reasonable patience waiting for an answer, which in fact never came! President Nyerere thus decided to close Tanzanias border with Kenya immediately. And that, effectively, was also the closure of the East African Community itself.

The negative impact of the break-up of the East African Community on Tanzanias budget, became created by the need to establish new Government Ministries, as well as large Public Corporations, such as the Railways and Harbours; Posts and Telecommunications, the Research Organisations, and others; all of which had hitherto been funded by the East African Community.

This now brings us to the events of 1978; One of which was equally disastrous to the countrys economy. That was the sudden, unwarranted, invasion of the West Lake (now Kagera) Region, by the armed forces of President Iddi Amin Dada of Uganda; and the other was an important lesson to be learnt; Which was the punishment meted out by President Nyerere to two Ministers, plus two Regional Commissioners, for offences that they themselves had not personally committed; But which had been committed by the government Security officials who were serving under their direct political responsibility and/or supervision; Which is commonly known as vicarious responsibility.

The military invasion by Iddi Amins forces The people of Bukoba area in what was then the West Region of Tanzania, woke up one morning to find themselves under fierce attack by Idd Amins forces from neighbouring Uganda.

And later that day, Iddi Amin himself declared from Kampala, that he had annexed that part of Tanzania and returned it to Uganda, where it rightly belongs.

President Nyerere, who was at that time touring Songea in Ruvuma Region, returned immediately to Dar es Salaam, and called an urgent meeting of the Dar es Salaam elders at the Diamond Jubilee Hall, through whom he addressed the whole nation; To announce his declaration of war against Iddi Amin Dada. He did so in the following immortal words: Sababu ya kumpiga tunayo; Uwezo wa kumpiga tunao; Na Nia ya kumpiga tunayo.

TUTAMPIGA. The rest of the story is well-documented elsewhere. The other grave event was the inhuman offences that had been committed by some security personnel operating in Shinyanga and Mwanza Regions; Who were duly punished by President Nyerere; But who went further and, along with them, also punished two Ministers, Ally Hassan Mwinyi of Home Affairs; and Peter Siyovelwa of the Tanzania Security Services (TSS); Plus the two Regional Commissioners of Shinyanga, Marco Mabawa; and Mwanza, Peter Kisumo; for vicarious responsibility.

(Will be continued next week).
Working in an NHS hospital, you get used to gruelling 13-hour shifts that leave you wrung out from exhaustion.

Yet somehow, even when things are difficult, my colleagues and I have always coped.

Until now.

A doctor on the frontline of Britain's coronavirus response has shared their day-to-day experience as the number of cases in the country continues to climb

For in the past two weeks, since coronavirus struck the hospital where I work in the south of England, chaos has descended.

The reason? Just as our hospitals face their biggest challenge in a century, vital staff  from doctors and nurses to cooks and cleaners  are being unnecessarily kept away from the front line.

I use the term unnecessarily as many of these people dont have anything wrong with them.

Yet thanks to the shameful decision not to dedicate our woefully inadequate supply of coronavirus tests to highly skilled NHS staff, huge numbers of them are being sidelined as they self-isolate at home for 14 days.

Many are fighting fit but someone in their household has symptoms, such as a tickly cough that may not be coronavirus related. As they cannot be tested, they stay at home.

Trucks deliver urgent supplies to the NHS at a hospital in London, on Wednesday, the anonymous doctor says the original protective gear they were supposed to receive never arrived and was eventually downgraded

While I dont begrudge them for following the rules, the consequences have been devastating for those of us left to pick up the pieces.

With wards desperately understaffed, I watch helplessly as more of our patients suffer needlessly. I normally work on a ward looking after vulnerable patients with serious health conditions.

But since increasing numbers of staff have been told to self-isolate, I have also started working in coronavirus medical wards.

As a result, the safety of those of us left on the wards is in peril. Coronavirus patients need to be examined regularly and at close quarters.

This brings a high risk of contamination for doctors like me who now have to rush from one job to another.

Of course, it doesnt help that theres a dire lack of adequate equipment as well as staff.

Two weeks ago, we were all fitted for personal protective equipment, which included visors to cover faces, a specialist mask and a gown that covered our neck and arms.

But the gear never arrived. It transpired that our protective equipment had been downgraded  leaving us to combat this deadly virus in plastic aprons that leave our neck and clothing exposed, and ill-fitting, flimsy face masks that dont properly cover our mouths or cheeks.

We havent been given anything to protect our eyes. So we are left both dangerously short-staffed and utterly defenceless in our battle to care for our coronavirus patients.

As I rush around my ward, most of these people are struggling for breath, coughing and spluttering, spraying droplets over my face, scrubs and stethoscope as I examine them.

The air in the room is thick with contamination  it gets on your skin, hair and, inevitably, in your eyes and mouth.

Not only does this imperil my safety, but the fact that Im carrying coronavirus droplets could also be fatal for my patients on other wards.

The situation is so unhygienic that weve been banned from getting fresh air during our shifts, in case we infect anyone else.

Military personnel walk inside the Excel Centre in East London on Wednesday. The events centre is being transformed into a field hospital that will initially contain 500 beds with ventilators, oxygen and have an overall capacity of up to 4,000 Covid-19 patients

Of course, I do everything I can to decontaminate before going back to my other patients.

But because I cannot change my scrubs due to insufficient supplies, and since it is impossible to ensure I have fully decontaminated my stethoscope as wipes are in short supply, its impossible to be certain that Im safe.

And when home, whats to stop me from infecting my wife?

Many of our cleaners are so terrified by the lack of protective clothing that they refuse to enter the coronavirus wards, leaving nurses to do their jobs as well.

NHS Urgent Supplies delivery trucks are working to distribute essential kit to hospitals around the country as Britain tries to cope with the coronavirus pandemic

And given that our cowardly hospital managers have gone home to protect themselves, leaving us without a leader, who can blame them?

If hospitals are to survive this, we urgently need adequate protective clothing. Otherwise we are lambs to the slaughter.

But if we want to beat this virus  not just survive it  we also need more staff.

The Governments announcement of mass testing was encouraging  and should go some way to bringing healthy NHS workers back to the front line.

In the meantime, those of us on the wards risk our lives  and those of other patients and our families  every day.
Health awareness

Routine doctor visits are down. Heres why we shouldnt skip them

Wondering when to go back to the doctors office again? The time is now.
MORRIS  The signs are high-contrast, at eye level and difficult to miss. Bold, white letters set against a red background spell out a word of caution and a plea to customers stopping at stores along Highway 75: Do not enter if you have been travelling.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MORRIS  The signs are high-contrast, at eye level and difficult to miss. Bold, white letters set against a red background spell out a word of caution and a plea to customers stopping at stores along Highway 75: Do not enter if you have been travelling.

Business owners in rural communities south of Winnipeg have posted the notices on their front doors in a bid to keep Manitobans returning from the United States off their sales floors and away from staff amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Theyre not taking that seriously, and thats a really big problem," said Pat Schmitke, owner of Bigway Foods in Morris. "If they happen to be bringing this virus with them from a foreign country, we really dont want it in our community."

Pat Schmitke, owner of Bigway Foods in Morris, doesn't want travellers spreading the virus to his staff and community. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press)

Schmitke has owned the medium-sized grocer just off Highway 75  which connects Winnipeg to the Emerson border crossing  for 11 years.

The number of out-of-town customers has increased dramatically since last Friday, when the federal government announced the closure of the U.S.-Canada border to non-essential travel, Schmitke said.

"The people who are coming back from the states  snowbirds  and theres been a ton of them in the last little while," he said. "Theyve been stopping here and picking up the essential items. If theyve been in the states for two or three months, theres nothing in the fridge when they get home.

"Theyre either not understanding or they dont care that they should be self-isolating themselves."

All returning international travellers have been directed by the federal government to go directly home and head into self-isolation for 14 days  that means no stopping for groceries or visiting stores once on Canadian soil.

"Theyre not taking that seriously, and thats a really big problem. If they happen to be bringing this virus with them from a foreign country, we really dont want it in our community."  Pat Schmitke, owner of Bigway Foods in Morris

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland doubled down on the directive Wednesday morning, announcing a mandatory 14-day isolation period for international travellers, including those returning from the United States, to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus in Canada. The formal quarantine took effect at midnight Thursday and citizens found in violation of the mandated isolation can face fines and arrest.

Canadians began flocking back to the country at the federal governments request that people head home, and retirees who have spent the winter in places like Arizona, Texas and Florida  colloquially referred to as snowbirds  have also begun their migration north.

In a town of 1,800 people, its easy to know those who are just passing through, Schmitke said, and he can spot a snowbird by their suntan. Schmitke said employees will ask customers who have come from south of the border to politely leave the store and instead call in to place an order for staff to fill and run out to their vehicle.

Signs warning customers not to enter if they've been travelling or have symptoms of COVID-19 in front of the Co-op gas bar in Morris on Wednesday. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press)

According to the Canadian Border Services Agency, 959,600 Canadians and 43,890 permanent residents returned to Canada between March 14 and March 20. A CBSA spokesman said the agency was unable to provide statistics for the Emerson crossing due to resource constraints related to the COVID-19 response. At the crossing Wednesday, temporary highway signs notified drivers of the mandatory isolation period and border agents provided information to travellers about recommended COVID-19 precautions and potential fines if the mandatory quarantine was not respected.

Rural Municipality of Emerson-Franklin Reeve David Carlson said residents in his community are not too concerned about travellers balking quarantine as most choose to bypass Emerson due to construction.

"Any snowbirds who live in the community, that might be a bit of a concern for some people. The one good thing here is that we know who they are."  Emerson-Franklin Reeve David Carlson

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"Any snowbirds who live in the community, that might be a bit of a concern for some people," Carlson said. "The one good thing here is that we know who they are."

Premier Brian Pallister appealed to travellers Tuesday to go directly home from the border and avoid public places.

"I am hearing reports that some are not adhering to the self-isolation recommendations. To anyone who has just come back from a foreign location to Manitoba, please make sure, absolutely sure that you adhere to the self-isolation recommendations," Pallister said. "They are very important for your protection. They are very important for the protection of others.

"Stay in and stay out of the company of others you may infect, because that is the right thing to do."

 with files from The Canadian Press

danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca
The challenge of the present pandemic should not be taken as a challenge for this country or that country; this party or that party; or this system or that system. Even the total neoliberalism is not the sole culprit, but its degrading aspects. Even the old welfare state might not be the sole answer, if it is without a responsible and a duty abiding citizenry. Therefore, the public education on human rights and human duties is important in finding long term solutions.









by Laksiri Fernando





Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.

- John Donne





It has been now for some years that the World Health Organization (WHO) and other experts have been repeatedly emphasizing that the climate change has an adverse effect on endemic disease spread in the world. Today COVID-19 has become a pandemic. By this morning over 198 countries are affected with the total infected cases nearing 500,000. It is not merely the climate change that the WHO emphasized as a challenge for disease control, but also our present ways-of-living.













Today, worldwide, there is an apparent increase in many infectious diseases, including some newly-circulating ones (HIV/AIDS, hantavirus, hepatitis C, SARS, etc.). This reflects the combined impacts of rapid demographic, environmental, social, technological and other changes in our ways-of-living. Climate change will also affect infectious disease occurrence. (WHO, Climate change and human health). [1]





These ways-of-living, as the WHO has called them, have exploited the natural resources to the brim (oil, coal, gas etc.), destabilizing the geology of the globe, and polluting the environment, rivers and the oceans. What should be added to this list is the moral, ethical and also spiritual degradation of the people. Today all young people want to live in cities or rather megapolises, understandably so because the governments do not supply basic amenities to the rural people, in both the so-called developed countries and developing ones. High alcohol and drug use among some of the young and the old are rampant.





higher than after the World War II (11m.). If the COVID-19 attacks them, there is no one to stop the unimaginable disaster. The young also move from developing and poor countries to the developed and rich countries in millions, as refugees, because there are unnecessary and horrendous political and social (tribal?) conflicts in developing countries than in developed ones. The refugee problem today is seven times (77m.)higher than after the World War II (11m.). If the COVID-19 attacks them, there is no one to stop the unimaginable disaster.





Some Reasons Behind





During the last three-four decades the humans discovered highest forms of technology through science which undoubtedly could resolve many of the social and industrial problems including the global warming. Solar energy was one. However, many of these innovations were used lopsidedly for mere profit making and rather aggravating the prevailing problems and creating new problems. Even during the present COVID disaster, some countries use the situation to surreptitiously experiment nuclear arsenal detrimental to all human endeavors.





Capitalism without any control or monitoring has gone into extreme extents under neo-liberalism depriving billions of people without basic needs and safeguards particularly when economies go into slightest depressions, not to speak of the presently evolving economic crisis. Various forms of neoliberalism has destroyed the welfare principles of state management not only in neoliberal and capitalist countries, but also in many previously social-democratic or even socialist countries.





There is no wonder how and why the COVID-19 first emerged in Wuhan, China. It has nothing to do with the country, people or the ethnicity/race. It is to do with its lopsided industrial development and new lifestyles of some of the young people. This is common in many parts of the world. Wuhan is the largest city in the central China with over a 11 million population within a small area size. It is during the preventive lockdown that one could clearly see the level of pollution of the city which came down by 30% percent after the preventive measures.

It is not the origin that matters much in understanding the grave danger of such pandemics. This is similar to the Spanish Flu, during 1918-1920, after the end of the World War 1, still some experts arguing about its origin. The term Spanish Flu itself is wrong. While at present, China has managed to control the spread and effects of the pandemic, the epicenter has shifted to Southern Europe (Italy and Spain) which might possibly shift to North America, if necessary steps are not taken soon. The situation in New York is already pandemic.





The Present Situation





At present, the picture of the pandemic can be summarized as follows.





By this morning (26 March), there were total of 467, 594 confirmed cases in 172 countries with the death toll nearing half a million. This is an increase of over 50,000 cases within 24 hours. There are 25 countries mainly in the developed regions, exceeding the cases over 2,000. The next tier exceeding 1,000 total cases are also in the developed or highly developing regions. When the pandemic spreads into the developing and poor countries, the situation would be devastating for the dearth of resources, hospital beds, doctors and medical workers. Indonesia is already experiencing the crunch.





The following Table 1 gives basic figures for the ten highest affected countries, which confirms that now the epicenter of the virus has shifted from China and East Asia to Europe and US without sparing the Middle East or more specifically Iran.





Table 1: Ten Highest Affected Countries



Cases Deaths Recovered China 81,661 3,281 71,957 Italy 74,386 7,503 9,342 US 65,778 552 N.A. Spain 49,515 3,647 5,362 Germany 37,323 206 3,547 Iran 27,017 7,077 8,376 France 25,600 1,331 3,900 Switzerland 10,897 153 3,507 UK 9,640 465 135 South Korea 9,137

336 3,730

[2] Source: Johns Hopkins University, 26 March





The above figures are quickly outdating while some are questionable. In respect of China, the recovered cases are reported for some regions while they were not included in the reported cases initially. In the case of US, the recovered figures are not available even for the Johns Hopkins University! It is a fast moving country in the disaster, the President of the country making contradictory statements. During the last 24 hours, the new cases have increased by 10,000 in the US, while the deaths by 800.





Comparable to Spanish Flu?





The present pandemic is similar to the Spanish flu during 1918-1920 period, while recent SARS, HIV and similar diseases being the early warnings. A quarter of the world population of that time or 500 million got infected, and at least 15 million tragically dying. Then, even the young were not spared, but this time young would be most affected (if not by the disease), by the economic fallout as a result. It is not purely the fault of the young that they are at present being little callous, but the fault of public information and public education in general. The world is already is in a recession. The single digit unemployment in many countries soon would be double digit. All stock markets are falling. Businesses are closing and millions are out of work.





Coming back to the comparison, the WW1 that triggered the Spanish Flu was different to the WW2. At the second world war, Fascism and similar regimes were there to fight against, although some powers experimented the atomic bomb as for fun. The first one (WW1) was purely a power competition for markets, new colonies and imperial pride. The Spanish flu was the return from the nature, for the devastation that was done by the major powers. The situation today is similar although there was no world war (but small wars adding up to a third or a fourth). Instead of worldwide war, there is a worldwide economic and power competition between major and medium scale powers aggravating the air pollution, sea pollution, river pollution and resulting in devastating climate change. Coronavirus is the return from the nature.





Unreasonable Social System





In addition, during the last three-four decades, the gap between the rich and the poor in all countries has increased three-four times. In the case of the US, the richest 0.1% receives income 200 times more than the 90% of the total population. This is not a reasonable system and even some of the richest people might agree. The main defect is not with those people, but with the system.

Even in a country like Australia, 2.9 million people are considered to be below the internationally accepted relative poverty line. This is about 13.3% of the population. The situation in EU-28 is no better, except in some Nordic countries. At present 120 million people in the EU are considered at risk of social exclusion. This is about 22% of the entire population. The situation in China also has been going in the same (neoliberal) direction in recent times, 1% of the rich population possessing 35% of the countrys wealth.





[3] Under the present socio-economic systems, welfare measures are reduced to the minimum. Health and education in the public sector are neglected or underfunded. That is part of the present health crisis in many countries. The most affected country in this context would be the ultra-neoliberal US. Given the disastrous competitions between States and the fear of each other, military expenditures have exponentially been increased. Disregard for the global warming, pollution and devastation of the nature is at the center of this coronavirus pandemic. Millions and millions of workers have no permanent employment; they are only casual workers. Within days of imperative lockdowns, these workers would be out of work. Only some countries have taken measures to assist them in their daily living through social security payments. If these countries had policies on Universal Basic Income (UBI) for all, the situation should have been much better.





Some Lessons





The challenge of the present pandemic should not be taken as a challenge for this country or that country; this party or that party; or this system or that system. Even the total neoliberalism is not the sole culprit, but its degrading aspects. Even the old welfare state might not be the sole answer, if it is without a responsible and a duty abiding citizenry. Therefore, the public education on human rights and human duties is important in finding long term solutions.





There are countries which give priority to saving the economy, rather than saving the lives of the people, even at this catastrophic stage. There is no question that the economies should be saved, but not necessarily in the old mold. At the moment, the first priority should be given to the peoples health, young or old. More spending should be on the health sector and for research in finding solutions and a vaccine for coronavirus. Giving up on the old, who are apparently on the forefront of the dying, is completely immoral.





The challenge is for the whole humanity. It is a challenge not only in the health and the economic sphere, but also in the moral and the spiritual sphere. When the COVID-19 is going to hit the poor third world countries, who is going to help them? Early signs are already there in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This is a challenge for the United Nations and other international and multilateral organizations. We are yet to see their constructive responses. Cooperative approaches are necessary within and among countries to face the present crisis.





The major powers should immediately give up their nuclear arms race, and all countries should cut down their arms spending for the barest minimum, keeping military personnel (if necessary) only for internal security and law enforcement purposes. However, those forces should not be used against the political enemies or the ethnic enemies/minorities.











[1] See https://www.who.int/globalchange/summary/en/index5.html [2] See https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html [3] Laksiri Fernando, Universal Basic Income (UBI): Conceptual Background and Possible Implementation in Sri Lanka, Colombo Telegraph, 25 May 2018.




[March 26, 2020] Udacity To Provide Free Scholarships To Workers Laid Off As A Result Of Covid-19, Starting With Marriott & GE Aviation

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Following the recent announcement of layoffs by major employers including Marriott International and GE Aviation, Udacity , the global online learning platform that trains the world's workforce for the careers of the future, announced today that it will offer free Nanodegree program scholarships to individuals who have experienced job loss in the United States due to the Coronavirus pandemic. These scholarships will provide valuable retraining for people seeking to rebuild careers in today's technical workforce, offering access to Nanodegree programs in a range of in-demand fields including artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital marketing, product management, data analysis, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles, and programming. Udacity is offering these scholarships as part of its ongoing commitment to the White House's Pledge to America's Workers . Job-displaced workers who would like to receive a Udacity scholarship can learn more by visiting udacity.com/pledge-to-americas-workers . Udacity's Pledge to America's Workers job training initiative will grant 100,000 technical training scholarships to Americans by 2025. Udacity is also calling on corporations who may be facing similar downsizing challenges to include retraining as part o their severance planning, helping to ensure their employees are best positioned to secure a new opportunity and maintain financial stability.



"America is facing a massive shortage of workers with the right technical skills, and as employers, retraining your existing workforce to address that shortage is the most efficient, cost-effective way to fill those gaps in your organization," said Gabe Dalporto, CEO, Udacity. "But if retraining for new positions internally isn't a viable option and you need to reduce your workforce through layoffs, providing new skills training to your exiting workforce can put them in the best position to secure new work in an increasingly competitive job market. It's the right thing to do to set them up for success." Employees who have experienced job loss as a result of Covid 19-related layoffs can apply for Udacity's scholarship opportunity at udacity.com/pledge-to-americas-workers . This initiative is limited to 50 laid-off employees per company. Companies interested in learning more about retraining options, including additional resources to assist employees impacted by downsizing and layoffs, should contact Udacity at enterprise.udacity.com/covid19-impact .

About Udacity

Udacity is a global, online learning platform powering digital transformation and accelerated time-to-market initiatives for Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises. Udacity programs provide industry created practitioner skills through a series of "Nanodegree" programs consisting of online courses and real-world projects in artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, autonomous systems, and cloud computing, among other disciplines. Udacity collaborates with expert instructors and over 200 global industry partners including AT&T, Google, Facebook, Mercedes-Benz and NVIDIA to power technical education. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., the private company has operations in the United Kingdom, Egypt, Germany, India, and the United Arab Emirates. Udacity has raised $163 million in funding to date from investors including Bertelsmann, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and Drive Capital. For more information, please visit www.udacity.com . Media Contact

Andrea Heuer for Udacity

[email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/udacity-to-provide-free-scholarships-to-workers-laid-off-as-a-result-of-covid-19-starting-with-marriott--ge-aviation-301028681.html SOURCE Udacity

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A Covid-19 testing centre is opened opposite the Mater Hospital in the Crumlin Road Health Centre on March 26th 2020 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph)

Temporary regional respiratory hospitals are to be set up across Northern Ireland to treat patients when the coronavirus outbreak reaches its height.

The announcement comes as the Department of Health (DoH) admitted that Northern Ireland's existing hospitals would not have the capacity to cope with critical care patients when the pandemic reaches its forecasted peak.

Efforts are also being made to procure ventilators for the treatment of Covid-19. There are currently 139 ventilators with a further 40 having been ordered and set to be operational before the end of March.

A further 650 ventilators are "currently being procured", while talks are also ongoing with a company in the Republic of Ireland.

Further orders have also been placed for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).

The DoH announced sweeping changes to the health service to prepare for the Covid-19 surge.

Northern Ireland's first Covid-19 primary care centre opened at Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry on Wednesday.

Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry is expected to follow suit as specialist treatment centre for the virus.

Other measures announced by the DoH included the recatogorisation of patients based on need, with patients deemed least urgent facing months of delays.

There will also be an end to general hospital visiting, with "very limited exceptions".

Hospital services will be reconfigured and all medically fit patients will be urgently discharged. Trusts will also be maximising and utilising all spare capacity in residential, nursing and domiciliary care.

Trusts have also been asked to provide hotel accommodation for health staff affected by isolation in their own households so they can continue to work.

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The plans are detailed in a letter to health trust chief executives from the Departments Permanent Secretary Richard Pengelly.

Mr Pengellys letter to colleagues states: "Our modelling suggests that at the peak of the outbreak in Northern Ireland, our existing hospital estate may not have sufficient capacity to provide critical care to the number of patients who will require it.

"We are therefore moving immediately to develop large regional, temporary, respiratory hospitals. These will be a regional resource and will require a regional approach in terms of staffing and access. More details of how these will work in practice will be shared when they are ready.

Even if the social distancing measures have the impact we hope, our modelling still indicates that we will require more critical care capacity than is currently available.

Patients not deemed in need of urgent care will have their treatment delayed by a number of months.

In some cases, it is recognised that this may mean that other services are temporarily reduced as the focus is on providing essential services and helping those most at risk access the best possible treatment," Mr Pengelly's letter stated.

It is therefore suggested that clinicians should begin to categorise patients into priority groups. The lowest prioritisation would be where treatment can be delayed for 2-3 months with no predicted negative outcome. Urgent and emergency treatments should continue to be given top priority.
The Foreign Ministry on Wednesday raised the nationas travel alert level, asking that people avoid nonessential overseas trips due to the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic.

The move is aimed at preventing the spread of the virus, as the nation has seen an increasing number of individuals who have returned from overseas trips who later tested positive for the virus. The government is also concerned that travelers may find it hard to return to Japan due to the possibility that international flights may be halted.

The government had already issued a Level 1 warning for worldwide travel, which calls on Japanese citizens to stay alert. For parts of China, Italy and Spain, the ministry already had a Level 3 alert in place urging that all travel to those destinations be avoided.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 22:23:35|Editor: huaxia

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BUCHAREST, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The Romanian authorities announced Thursday that the confirmed COVID-19 cases increased by 123 in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number to 1,029.

It took exactly one month for the country to see its COVID-19 cases surpassing 1,000 since the first case was confirmed on Feb. 26.

So far, 94 people have recovered, while 17 people have succumbed to the disease, the Strategic Communication Group, the government agency authorized to publish information on COVID-19, informed in its daily announcement.

Also on Thursday, Health Minister Victor Costache announced his resignation.

The resignation came after he announced late Wednesday that a screening test through the door-to-door method would be conducted on all residents of the capital Bucharest.

His deputy, State Secretary at the Health Ministry Nelu Tataru, was immediately nominated by the prime minister to take over the leadership of the ministry.

Tataru told local media that he advocates the testing be carried out in conformity with broad epidemiological investigations, where certain priorities exist, such as contacts, medical personnel, risk factors.

Romania announced a nationwide lockdown from Wednesday morning, after a curfew, which had been introduced previously since Sunday evening. The country entered a state of emergency on March 16 after the number of COVID-19 cases exceeded 100.
T wo cruise ship passengers have died after catching coronavirus, following a journey on a vessel quarantined due to the outbreak.

The Grand Princess ship, ran by Princess Cruises, was held off the coast of California earlier this month after a former passenger died after contracting the virus.

American nationals aboard the ship were taken to US military bases for quarantine after it was eventually permitted to dock in the port of Oakland.

The nation's department of health and human services, which has overseen their quarantines, told the Standard the two passengers died "due to complications from the coronavirus".

They had been housed at the Travis Air Force Base in California. They died on different days, one on March 21 and the other patient on March 23.

The vessel was left unable to dock for days / AFP via Getty Images

A department of health and human services spokeswomans said: "The staff from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) working with quarantined cruise ship passengers housed at Travis Air Force Base in California is deeply saddened by the recent deaths of two passengers due to complications from the coronavirus.

"Both passengers were on board the Grand Princess cruise ship and were transferred to area medical facilities immediately after developing COVID-19 symptoms.

"Grief support for both families is being provided by HHS and Princess Cruise Lines. Our heartfelt condolences to both families."

A Princess Cruises spokesman expressed the company's condolences.

He said: "Our hearts go out to the families, friends and all who are impacted by these losses. All of us at Princess Cruises offer our sincere condolences."

The Standard has contacted the department of health and human services for comment.

More than 3,500 people were stuck aboard the ship, with more than 100 UK nationals among them.

A flight was arranged to bring Brits stranded due to the incident home, which landed in Birmingham on March 11.

They were all transported home to self-isolate following their journeys.
A Kilkenny woman who was due to return home from New Zealand has been stranded in the country because of the Covid-19 emergency.

Lynn Boland from Thomastown, Co Kilkenny is stranded in Wellington, New Zealand with her partner Oisin from Dublin.

There is a full four week lockdown in place the country so it is looking unlikely that she and her boyfriend will be able to get back to Ireland anytime soon.

They had both resigned their jobs there in preparation for coming home to Thomastown to self-isolate during the Covid-19 emergency.

They have been there since April last year and are not entitled to money or assistance while there.

We are in a grey area with no support here. We have savings but they are running out. Globally its all a bit crazy in efforts to get home - its so difficult. Flights have been quoted at 11,000 to Ireland. The demand exceeds the supply.

All travel in the country bar for health workers or essential suppliers has stopped. The authorities here said on Wednesday night that we are on full lockdown for four weeks.

Its just a crazy time and we are trying to keep our cool. We dont have a source of income between the two of us. We have savings but they wont last forever.

The couple have temporary working visas but are not entitled to any financial help from the New Zealand authorities.

Ms Boland added: Weve been on to the Embassy over here but they dont have the answers either but they are trying to do their best for us and trying to so hard to sort this.

We are sitting tight for now but we are wondering for how long we will be here. We are in limbo totally and we are in a precarious situation but there are thousands of people out there like us.

There is a repatriation plane flying to Perth from Dublin and the Embassy is trying to get us on that but there is no update yet. We are trying not to worry but just focus on a day-to-day basis.
Newark police will start to use loudspeakers to move people off streets when they see residents violating a statewide stay-at-home order that was put in place to stop the spread of coronavirus.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka in an announcement Wednesday stopped short of saying police would arrest residents who violate the citys shelter-in-place order. But, he urged residents across the city, not just in three of Newarks hotspots, to stay at home unless it was for an essential purpose.

We have to take this situation very, very seriously, Baraka said. The majority of our residents understand this and are following the rules. But some are not and continue to congregate on the streets and not maintain proper social distance. Those people are putting their own health at risk, as well everyone they come into contact with. Its dangerous and it has to stop.

The citys so-called shelter-in-place mandate does not differ much from Gov. Phil Murphys executive order, which only allows New Jersey residents to leave their homes for activities such as exercises, obtaining food, or seeking medical attention. Only residents who work in essential industries, like health care, should leave their homes.

These social distancing techniques are necessary to flatten the curve of coronavirus cases and reduce the strain on hospitals caring for patients, officials have said.

Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose urged residents to call the police if they see groups of people violating the mandate.

We will begin with verbal warnings, Ambrose said. We want to save lives, not make arrests.

There have been instances of police in other municipalities issuing summonses to people who gather in groups. Lakewood Police issued a disorderly persons summons to a homeowner who was holding a wedding, the state Attorney Generals Office said.

State Attorney General Gurbir Grewal has said non-essential retail businesses that have not closed despite the governors order could face criminal charges as well.

Newark has 123 cases of the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and two city residents have died after being diagnosed with the virus, the city has said.

There were 381 coronavirus cases throughout Essex County and 4,402 in New Jersey, according to the state health department. Essex County has the second-highest rate of coronavirus infections in the state, with only Bergen County having more.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share.

If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

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Rebecca Panico may be reached at rpanico@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @BeccaPanico.
The family-run business is dedicated to growing and stone milling heritage and ancient grainsfor better flavor, better health, and a better future

Most of the flour on our grocery store shelves is essentially the same thing, says Emma Zimmerman, co-founder of Hayden Flour Mills in Queen Creek, Arizona. Its made from a couple strains of modern wheat, grown in the United States and sent to one mill in Italy to be milled. They just put it in different bags, she said.

The flours that Hayden Mills produces, on the other hand, have character. Theyre freshly milled from ancient wheat varietals, cultivated by their partner and neighbor Sossaman Farms, then carefully blended for specific usespizza, pastry, bread, and more.

These ancient wheats are special. From mild, sweet White Sonora to robust, nutty Emmer Farro, each has a distinct flavor profileand its own story.

White Sonora was Americas first wheat, brought over and planted in the Sonoran desert by Spanish missionaries, thanks to the papal decreestill in effectthat communion could only be taken by way of a wheat product. In some ways, noted general manager Debbie La Bell, the wheat being grown in Arizona again is a homecoming.

Red Fife wheat was named after David Fife, the farmer who discovered it in the 19th century. Blue Beard durum takes its name from the blue whiskers that grow on the stalk. Emmer farro is thought to have been served to the Pharaoh, and was named such by the Italians who Italianized the word Pharaoh into farro. (Others say it is simply derived from the Latin farrum, meaning a kind of wheat.) The emmer mentioned in the Bibles book of Exodus, La Bell said, is the same stuff.

Since Emma and her father Jeff started the company in 2011, Hayden Mills has been committed to nurturing and sharing these old varietals.

The Makings of a Movement

When Jeff Zimmerman was young, his family owned a wheat farm in North Dakota. It was the 1960s and the grain revolution was taking hold in America. Wheat, a grass that has fed humanity for 10,000 years, was being crossed with other grasses in order to increase its yield.

Wheat farmers were riding high, said La Bell. Their first few years, they couldnt believe the prices they were getting. Growing modern wheat tripled their yields. The Zimmermans bought a new combine to store their bounty.

But as the wheat supply drastically rose, prices fell. A few years after transitioning to modern wheat, the Zimmermans sold the farm and moved to Arizona, leaving wheat farming behind.

A few decades later, Jeff, now with a family of his own, had become an enthusiastic home bread baker. But even as his skills grew better and better, he found that he could only get his bread to a certain level. He considered the organic, farm-fresh fruits and vegetables he was buying and their range of flavors. He wondered if there were interesting grains he was missing, too.

He learned about heritage grains, sometimes called ancient grains, an alternative to the modern varieties that had been bred for higher yield. Heritage grains were never hybridized, and thus retained their unique flavors and textures. After eating them and using them in his baking, Jeffwhom Emma calls a serial entrepreneurwanted to try growing them himself in Arizona.

Jeff Zimmerman. (Courtesy of Hayden Flour Mills)

Emma had just left her doctoral program in neuroethics in Montreal, feeling unsatisfied with academia, and became her dads business partner almost immediately. Together, they began looking for farmers to grow heritage grains for them.

We asked basically everyone we knew, said Emma, but the 10-acre experiment they wanted to start out with was much too small for most commodity growers. Eventually, Steve Sossaman of Sossaman Farms in Queen Creek, an old friend of Jeffs, agreed to try it out.

Then, there was the problem of seed. The Zimmermans reached out to Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tuscon, a conservation organization specializing in seeds suitable for the southwest region. They are all about getting people to eat these rare foods and preserve the foodways, Emma said, and they were eager to help.

How many packets do you want? they asked.

But packets wouldnt do it; the project needed a few tons of seeds to begin. The organization connected them with Anson Mills in South Carolina, who specializes in organic heirloom grains, and founder Glenn Roberts donated two tons of White Sonora wheat seeds. Sossaman and a few other local farmers grew the grain. Chris Bianco, iconic Phoenix restaurateur, gave them space in the back of one of his restaurants to mill.

We had the makings of a little grain movement, Emma reminisced. It was very exciting.

Emma Zimmerman in the fields. (Courtesy of Hayden Flour Mills)

A New World of Flavor

Today, after plenty of trial and error, Hayden Mills is still going strong. The business is partnered with Sossaman Farms, who grows the wheat for milling, and has since expanded to around 10 new types of wheat. White Sonora remains their most popular.

They mill in their own space, next to the wheat fields, on a stone mill purchased from Italy. Next to the mill is a building where they host bread and pasta classes and sell specialty foods made by other Arizona artisans.

Jeff went back to his day job for the Arizona state government, but he still does a lot for the business, including assembling the newest mill, which was shipped over from Italy still in parts. Emma cut her teeth on the business and still runs it today.

Theyve done well in recent years: their products are carried by select Whole Foods stores across the country, and their White Sonora Wheat Berries just won a Good Food Award. But theres still plenty of work to be done.

Because heritage grains have lower yields per acre, Hayden Mills must pay their farmers three times as much in order to ensure the farmers can make a living. That translates to higher price tags on their products, so they must educate consumers on the differences in their wheat and in their process. Why is this flour worth paying more for?

For most people, flavor is the primary draw. In a world of homogenous, mass-produced flour, wheat with nuances in flavor and texture is a revelation.

I first became acquainted with Hayden Mills while working at a cheese shop in New York City. I taught classes on cheese and pairing and noticed that the same reverence and attention paid to cheese and wine was not paid to the bread or crackers. Why do we revere the stories of grapes and not of wheat? So, I started serving Hayden Mills crackers, made with different heritage grains, when I taught.

Hayden Flour Mills line of heritage grain crackers. (Courtesy of Hayden Flour Mills)

The hearty Red Fife Wheat crackers, with their graham cracker-esque flavors, went beautifully with hard mountain cheeses like Gruyere. The sweeter, more delicate White Sonora ones enhanced the ethereal creaminess of a triple cream cheese like Brillat Savarin. Peoples minds were opened to wheat being as varied and nuanced as their favorite wine.

Our inspiration started as a search for food with really good flavor, Emma said. Id say that discovering the true flavor of grain continues to be a daily inspiration for us.

For a Better Future

But their motivation also goes beyond thatto a vision of a healthier, more sustainable food future.

It starts in the fields. Take White Sonora wheatit can get up to 6 feet high, not uncommon for ancient varietals. What you see above is mirrored underneath, said La Bell: the roots go 6 feet below as well, burrowing far down into the earth to find water tables. In Arizona, it can be watered as little as twice a season.

Wheat is actually a drought-tolerant crop, La Bell explained. [It] originated in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, which Arizona shares a climate with.

Modern wheat, on the other hand, grows to about six inches tall. The roots go down around six inches, too. It needs an immense amount of water and can erode topsoil.

Before wheat can be milled, it must be dried out. For wheat farmers up north, this means either putting the already-harvested wheat on a drying rack, or spraying it with chemicals to dry it out before harvest. In Arizonas arid Sonoran desert, though, this step is easy: Farmers harvest in the summer, so its just baking out there, said Emma. No extra drying required.

Then comes the milling. Most industrial mills order wheat by the train car, to be processed in a giant roller mill that leaves only the endosperm (which La Bell compares to the white of an egg).

Hayden Flour Mills orders grains 2,000 pounds at a time, to be processed in a stone mill that keeps the whole wheat intact: the bran (like the shell of an egg), endosperm, and germ (like the yolk). The bran, the protective husk, is then sifted away, leaving the germ and endosperm. This, said La Bell, is both tastier and better for our bodies.

People arent giving up wheat because they dont like it, they are giving up wheat because its making them sick, she said, speaking to the large number of consumers who dont have celiac disease, but find that their stomachs hurt when they eat wheat. Maybe its the chemicals used in industrial agriculture, maybe its the homogeneityits hard to say what exactly the problem is. But whatever the reason, these people find that they can still eat our wheat, La Bell said.

How did we get to this point in our food system? Emma wondered aloud. Its largely wasteful and inefficient, and she worries about the loss of biodiversity, and of our connection with the people who bring the food to our tables.

But in reviving these heritage grains, and the tradition of locally, sustainably grown and milled flours, Hayden Mills sees a solution for the futurelooking to the past.

Hayden Flour Mills products are available for purchase at HaydenFlourMills.com

Christine Clark is a professional food and beverage nerd. She is a Certified Cheese Professional by the American Cheese Society and teaches cheese classes across the United States. Her work has appeared in VinePair, Bon Appetit, Fine Cooking, and Travel + Leisure.
LONDON  When Rishi Sunak was elected to Parliament in 2015, he recalled a piece of advice from his father-in-law, Narayana Murthy, a technology billionaire who is one of Indias richest men. In God we trust, Mr. Murthy told him, but everyone else needs to bring data to the table.

Now 39 years old and Britains top finance official, Mr. Sunak is trying to apply that lesson to the greatest economic rescue in the post-World War II history of the country. As chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Sunak has orchestrated a series of increasingly desperate efforts to protect Britains 66 million people from the sudden dislocation brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

On Thursday, Mr. Sunak rolled out the latest  a package to pay 80 percent of the earnings of self-employed people who lost income because of the lockdown of the country. That came on top of measures last week to compensate people laid off from companies and more than $300 billion in aid for distressed businesses.

In the process, Mr. Sunak, who was thrust into his job six weeks ago, has become one of the stars of this crisis. On one level, that is not surprising: his job, after all, is to dole out money. But beyond that, commentators say, Mr. Sunaks grave, self-assured delivery and empathetic tone are proving a better match for the moment than the shambling levity of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Israel's Ambassador to India, Ron Malka, on Thursday thanked the Indian government for the evacuation of Israelis amid the nationwide lockdown in a bid to contain the spread of coronavirus, which has infected more than 600 people in the country.

"Today, we are evacuating 317 Israelis. In another flight tomorrow, 200 more Israelis will be evacuated. The Indian government has helped us a lot. I want to thank them," he told ANI.

"Israel took dramatic measures from the beginning when this crisis started. The situation there is under control," the envoy said.

Sandeep Kumar, who was a crew member in the flight, said that all safety precautions are being taken.

"We are not going to interact with passengers. We are just going to take them safely," he said.

Earlier in the day, ANI reported that Air India will evacuate over 300 Israeli nationals from New Delhi to Tel Aviv on Friday, amid the coronavirus outbreak situation which has claimed over 18,000 lives globally.

Boeing 777 AI-139 planes have been deployed for the evacuation operation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
This time of the year is considered to be happening in Cannes. However, because of the outbreak of Coronavirus, the scene inside a part of the venue for the Cannes Film Festival looks different.

Instead of prepping to welcome the biggest names of the film industry from all over the world, Palais des Festivals has chosen to open its doors to the towns homeless who have no place to head to, following the coronavirus lockdown.

Just a few days ago it was announced that the annual film festival in the palm-fringed French Riviera resort which was scheduled for May 12-23 had been postponed until late June. However, the organizers decided to open its doors, and hearts, for the destitute.

We have between 50 and 70 people here every night, said Dominique Aude-Lasset, an official at Cannes Town Hall was quoted in a Reuters report.

Just a few days ago, President Emmanuel Macron had ordered Frances 67 million people to stay at home to protect themselves from the pandemic, so that they don't spread the community outbreak of the disease.

Because of the lockdown, the countrys estimated 12,000 homeless who live on the streets had no place to go. But now, as soon as someone enters the venue, a worker in a face mask takes the temperature of each homeless person each time they enter the site.

AFP

The venue has now been divided into an eating area, shower block and communal space with television and games.



Also, in a cavernous, low-ceiling room, camp-beds are set up in three long lines. There are also four kennels that can house dogs We know dogs are precious for people living on the streets, Aude-Lasset added.



This disease may have taken many lives but it has also proved that humanity exists and at the time of crisis, people open their hearts and gates to home the needy!
'Ive been blown away by the quality' Photo: Adrian Weckler

Once again, Huawei has made a flagship smartphone with a jaw-dropping camera system.

But will it matter? Or will the new P40 Pros lack of Google apps  Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Search or Google Pay  edge people away from considering it?

Ive been fortunate enough to have had the P40 Pro to test for the last couple of days.

As a cameraphone, it is truly extraordinary. Huaweis last model, the P30 Pro, was already a groundbreaking device in terms of its cameras telephoto abilities.

But again, its zoom (50x using 10x optical) is extraordinary.



This is a screen recording which, if anything, underplays the resolution and quality. pic.twitter.com/Sc4imfntkp  Adrian Weckler (@adrianweckler) March 26, 2020

But the P40 Pro takes it a notch higher with a considerably larger (1/1.128) camera sensor. This gives the phone the ability to deliver higher megapixels, better low light quality and clearer, sharper photos at resolution. Add to that some of the extra engine power under the hood and you have better stabilisation and improved autofocus. This means that the 50x zoom (a 5x optical telephoto lens thats stretched out) is absolutely usable at its maximum range, an astonishing feat.

So far, Ive been blown away by the quality. I had thought that Samsungs recently-launched S20 Ultra would be a difficult bar to match for raw camera power, but the P40 Pro has matched it with its trio of ultra wide, wide and telephoto lenses.

Ill give a more considered camera test review when Ive had a bit longer to mess with it.

The rest of the hardware is almost as impressive.

Expand Close 'Huaweis P40 Pro is the ultimate cameraphone' Photo: Adrian Weckler / Facebook

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Huawei has moved the 6.6-inch Oled display on the P40 Pro up to 90hz, meaning even more fluid, smooth scrolling.

I cant definitely comment on battery life after just a day and a half, but its 4,200mAh capacity should mean that its on par with the all-day performance you typically expect from flagship phones at the moment.

And theres loads of power (via Huaweis 7nm Kirin processor and 8GB of Ram) and storage (256GB).

But theres no avoiding the elephant in the room here: the lack of Google apps or Googles Play Store.

This is the first real mass market Huawei phone to launch without apps for Google Search, Maps, YouTube and Gmail. It does still run on Android, but youll immediately notice the app gap within a few minutes.

Huawei has sought to play down the lack of the Play Store, arguing that workarounds are there in the form of its phone clone app (which copies the apps from your other Android phone onto your P40, although not the Google apps themselves).

But its a very major consideration for anyone who leans on their Google apps  or the Play Store  a lot.

Without a native YouTube, Maps or Gmail app, youre accessing these through the (non-Google) browser. Its a second rate experience.

There is a standalone Huawei app store, called App Gallery. It has lots of apps there, but not many of the giant ones you use every day. Snapchat is in there, but not Facebook or Instagram or Whatsapp or Messenger, let alone recent breakouts like HouseParty.

Ill go into this a bit more when Ive had more time experiencing the reality of life without Google apps, but so far its not a happy story.

Huawei is selling the P40 Pro at 999, though its not yet clear which operators will range it.
Insurance companies are facing political pressure to pay what could be a crippling sum of coronavirus-related claims  even though many of them say their policies don't cover pandemics.

Anger on Capitol Hill is growing over moves by insurers to deny claims filed by restaurants, retailers and other businesses that believe they have coverage to financially protect themselves from a major disruption like the one they're now enduring. The insurance industry is so alarmed at the prospect of a massive payout that it's rushing to put together a plan to get Washington off its back.

With lawmakers and the Trump administration hungry for new ways to support small businesses, insurance trade groups are weighing whether to propose a federal program that would direct funds to businesses disrupted by the pandemic. One early iteration was described as something similar to the victims compensation fund set up after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Industry insiders argue that its a way insurers can help the country during a deep economic slump while also heading off bipartisan pressure from Congress to pay out tens of billions of dollars or more in claims to businesses that have been forced to close their doors to slow the spread of the pandemic.

The industry is looking to be part of the solution, said Tom Glassic, a consultant who served as senior insurance counsel to the House Financial Services Committee.

The behind-the-scenes negotiations underscore the pressure that many industries are facing to prop up the economy in the face of what's expected to be a historic level of business closures and layoffs.

As restaurants and shops across the country scramble to make ends meet, they're finding that business interruption insurance policies didn't necessarily cover losses from outbreaks  just physical damage to their property.

Jason Berry, co-founder of Washington-based KNEAD Hospitality + Design, said his company paid $100,000 per year in insurance for its four restaurants only to have insurers deny business interruption claims in recent days. He's speaking with a lawyer and considering going to court, underscoring why the insurance industry is bracing for a massive wave of litigation over disputed payouts.

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"Business owners everywhere  not just restaurants  are flabbergasted that they've been paying on a timely basis thinking they're covered if something bad happens only to find out it's not the case," Berry said.

Stories like Berry's are prompting a growing outcry in Washington, and lawmakers are eager to intervene. Insurance lobbyists have already been fighting off attempts at legislation that would have made policies retroactively cover the pandemic.

Last week, 18 House lawmakers led by Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.) told insurance trade groups that their members should recognize financial losses triggered by the coronavirus outbreak as part of their customers business interruption coverage. The bipartisan letter was signed by 12 Democrats and six Republicans.

FILE- In this Jan 12, 2016 file photo, Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y. speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. Velazquez visited the Metropolitan Detention Center in the Brooklyn borough of New York on Friday, Feb 1, 2019, after reports that inmates housed at the facility have had no heat or electric power for almost a week. She plans to return to the jail with other elected officials on Saturday, Feb. 2. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

During times of crisis, we must all work together, they said.

The controversy prompted state insurance regulators on Wednesday to issue a stark warning that said forcing insurance companies to pay the massive number of business interruption claims would threaten the solvency of the insurance sector and exacerbate the economic turmoil.

Sean Kennedy, executive vice president of public affairs at the National Restaurant Association, said that finding a way for the federal government to help with business interruption insurance claims is a top priority for his group's members. The association has called for the creation of a $100 billion federally backed business interruption insurance program to get funds to businesses in an expedited time frame.

We will definitely be at the table with our members asking for some kind of solution that will allow restaurant owners to claim their benefits under these policies, Kennedy said.

In recent days, major insurance trade associations, including the American Property Casualty Insurance Association and the Reinsurance Association of America, kicked off discussions with other business trade groups about the design of a potential federal program that could direct money to affected businesses, possibly via the insurance industry.

One early proposal that circulated among insurance lobbyists in the past few days envisioned a "Federal Business Interruption and Workers' Protection Recovery Fund"  patterned after the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund  that would make assistance available to all businesses. Insurance industry sources said the plan was being revised.

David Sampson, president and CEO of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, confirmed the group was discussing public policy options with many industry and stakeholder groups." He acknowledged the need for "liquidity solutions" for the business community during the crisis and said the association hasn't settled on any specific proposal.

"Ideally, if they want to deliver the money quickly, they wont put insurers in the middle, said Jimi Grande, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies. But we want to be available to help if thats ultimately the way they go."

The issue is expected to attract greater attention as Congress pivots from the "Phase Three" coronavirus economic rescue package being debated this week and lawmakers turn to follow-up legislation.

Its a very sensitive negotiation, said Joel Wood, senior vice president for government affairs at the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers. I wouldnt want to jeopardize the conversations between all the stakeholders. But there is anticipation that much more beyond Phase Three is going to be required for many of our clients to survive. Its all about liquidity, liquidity, liquidity.

For members of Congress pressing insurers to act, its a step in the right direction.

Im glad my letter to the insurance industry drew their attention to this mammoth problem, Velazquez said. "Im hopeful it motivates them to work constructively with Congress so all businesses harmed by the virus can receive badly needed assistance.
Actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie is helping those in need as schools across the globe have shut down, creating obstacles for many families in getting kids their meals.

Jolie donated $1 million to provide food for children from low-income families, according to No Kid Hungry, a campaign of the nonprofit Share Our Strength, which seeks to end hunger and poverty.
The total number of COVID19 cases in Delhi has now risen to 36 after a mohalla clinic doctor along with 4 others were tested positive on Thursday, as per the latest information released by Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain. The mohalla clinic doctor and others had allegedly come into contact with an infected woman who had returned from Saudi Arabia. The doctor's wife and daughter have also tested positive, said Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain. Apart from them, around 800 people who came in contact with the mohalla clinic doctor have been quarantined for 14 days.

Read: "We Will Ensure Nobody Goes Hungry," Assures Delhi CM Kejriwal As India Enters Lockdown

Meanwhile, the Delhi Police has launched a 24-hour helpline number for the citizens to address their queries on the lockdown, officials said on Wednesday. The helpline number 011-23469526 will address all queries related to the novel Coronavirus.

Read: Netas Not Exempt: Puducherry Congress MLA Booked For Allowing 200 To Gather Amid Lockdown

Police detains over 5000 people in Delhi for violating lockdown

More than 180 cases were registered and 5,103 people were detained in Delhi on Wednesday for violating government orders during the coronavirus lockdown, police said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country effective from midnight of March 25 to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly. The 21-day curfew is applicable to all states, districts, and villages - irrespective of whether they were earlier under curfew or not.

Read: Delhi Police Sets Up 24X7 Helpline Number To Address Queries On Lockdown

Coronavirus crisis in India

As of date, over 604 positive cases have been reported of the pandemic Coronavirus (COVID-19) with Maharashtra reporting the highest at 107. Thirteen deaths have been reported to date. India has suspended all visas and barred travel from Afghanistan, Philippines, EU, UK, China, Malaysia and mandatory 14-day quarantine from several other countries and shut down over 75 districts across the nation.

Read: Delhi CM Kejriwal Asks People To Stay At Home During Lockdown, Avoid Panic-buying
Meaning 'dream' in Turkish, Ruya in Mayfair is certainly a place to head to for some culinary dreams to come true. This tucked away luxe lair is a delight for the senses, from the sultry interiors to a salivating meze of scents wafting over from the open kitchen. Settle in for a feast that will turn your vision of Turkish food on its head. The menu features a wide selection and the staff will be more than happy to recommend a mix of dishes. Dont leave without trying the moreish truffle cheese pide, the melt in the mouth 24-hour slow cooked short rib and the traditional Kekek risotto dish punctuated with wild mushrooms. To wash it all down, there is a sommelier on hand to recommend regional and international wines, while the cocktails go down a treat with the Turkish coffee infused negroni being a standout mix. To finish, theres a tempting tipple of desserts, with the bergamot ice cream and hazelnut baklava scoring the thumbs up. A top date spot or restaurant for group dining.
Drugs that are used to treat conditions of the eyes, or ones that simply use the eyes as a route into the rest of the body, can be very difficult to test in pre-clinical trials. Rabbits are often utilized for this, as they lack tear ducts and so dont blink very often, allowing substances to penetrate the eye without being washed away first. But humans blink all the time, and our blinking is more complex, has greater consequences, and is more important than may first meet the eye, if you will forgive the pun.

To study what impact all this blinking has on the eyes, and to study how blinking will affect trial drugs that are delivered through the eyes, researchers at Kyoto University in Japan have developed a device that mimics blinking using living corneal cells and microfluidics. The new device will hopefully help not only to test new drugs, but also to study the impact of blinking on the cornea.

The device has four upper chambers within which corneal cells are allowed to grow. These are linked up to four lower chambers via a porous polyester membrane. As the cells grow in the upper chamber, they create a corneal barrier to block off the lower chamber. Pushing liquid up into the upper chambers and over the corneal cells simulates the forces that the cornea experiences when we blink. The four identical parallel channels within the device allow four different compounds or scenarios to be tested under similar conditions in a single experiment.

The device has already led to some new discoveries, including the fact blinking seems to affect the overall shape of corneal cells. Moreover, it looks like blinking also promotes the growth of filaments that provide flexibility and elasticity to the cornea.

Study in Lab on a Chip: Multi-corneal barrier-on-a-chip to recapitulate eye blinking shear stress forces

Via: Kyoto University
Drones were deployed to warn people against breaching restrictions and more booked for the violations on the second day of the three-week coronavirus lockdown on Thursday, as central and state authorities ramped up measures to ensure there was no supply disruption of essential commodities.

The unprecedented national lockdown also had a tragic fallout when a 28-year-old man allegedly killed his younger brother for stepping out of their home in Mumbai's western suburb of Kandivali.

Police said Rajesh Laxmi Thakur killed his younger brother Durgesh after the latter stepped out of the house despite repeated warnings about the lockdown on Wednesday night, an official from Samta Nagar police station said. The official said Rajesh has been arrested.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made a fervent appeal to the countrymen on Tuesday night not to cross the 'lakshman rekha' of their homes in the next three weeks to make the lockdown a success in a bid to halt the spread of coronavirus.

According to data from the Centre and states, at least 15 people have died of COVID-19 and the number of infected cases rose to 649.

Roads wore a deserted look as police personnel kept a tight vigil but violations relating to prohibitory orders continued.

A ruling Congress MLA in Puducherry was booked for allegedly violating lockdown rules and distributing dole in the form of vegetables in bags to about 200 people outside his home, Lt Governor Kiran Bedi said.

In a WhatsApp message to mediapersons, she said an FIR had been registered against A John Kumar and also the people who had assembled ouside his home in Nellithope village on Wednesday. The Orleanpet police also confirmed the filing of the cases.

Police vehicles fitted with public address systems went around the residential areas in several places to announce that restrictions under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) that prohibits assembly of more than five persons are in force and advised people to stay indoors.

In Srinagar, police were also using drones to announce the restrictions on the movement of people, an official said.

In Tamil Nadu, police booked over 1,200 people for violating the Section 144 CrPc order.

Police personnel also adopted novel ways to create public awareness as well as punish violators.

In Sivaganga, police made violators carry awareness banners for a while, even as they were made to stand apart from one another, in an obvious effort to implement social distancing to prevent any spread of the virus.

At Gudiyatham in Vellore district, police administered a pledge to those who were loitering in public defying prohibitory orders, to abide by the law.

In Uttar Pradesh, police have registered 2,802 FIRs and booked 8,649 persons persons for violating the orders in the last three days.

Reports of people being booked for violating prohibitory orders as well as home quarantine conditions also came from other parts of the country.

People were allowed to buy essentials like groceries, vegetables and medicines keeping social distancing in mind with customers allowed only in batches to purchase items and medicines.

Amid reports that trucks and food delivery personnel were being stopped by police in several cities, authorities were taking steps to sensitise the police and asking them not to intimidate anyone while enforcing the lockdown.

In the national capital, the Delhi Police directed all its personnel to allow persons and vehicles engaged in essential services to remain operational in the national capital.

All traffic, picket and beat staff have been briefed to allow identified retailers, operators and online delivery services to operate.

This comes a day after the Delhi Police held a meeting with representatives of e-commerce websites and assured them help in ensuring smooth movement of essential services.

A Delhi Police constable was also suspended for allegedly damaging vegetable carts during the lockdown period, officials said.

The constable, who was identified as Rajbir, was posted at Anand Parbat Police Station, they said.

The order came a day after a video of the incident went viral on social media.

In the short clip, the constable can be seen overturning three vegetables carts one by one.

The Delhi government also decided to allow shops selling essential items to operate round the clock so that there is no rush of people, Lt Governor Anil Baijal told reporters.

Also, the SDMs and ACPs hconcerned ave been directed to ensure shops selling groceries, vegetables and milk remain open and essential items are adequately stocked in their respective areas, Baijal said.

In Chandigarh, buses operated by the Chandigarh Transport Undertaking were deployed for delivery of essential items to people.

With people across the country confined to their homes, the National Book Trust (NBT) provided its select and best-selling titles for free download to encourage reading during the period.

"The PDFs are for reading only and any unauthorised or commercial use is not allowed," an official said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
U.S. Is Poised to Top China With Most Infections: Virus Update

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. surpassed Italy in cases, with more than 80,700, and is poised to overtake China as having the most infections in the world.

President Donald Trump offered a plan that may help restore normal business. U.S. stocks jumped on optimism the $2 trillion U.S. stimulus package will blunt the pandemics impact.

China, where the outbreak began, will temporarily suspend the entry of foreigners holding valid visas and residence permits starting Saturday.

Key Developments:

Cases top 523,000; 23,000 dead, 122,000 recovered: Johns HopkinsU.S. fatalities top 1,000; confirmed cases in Canada surge 72%Fauci warns of potential for another cycle of infectionsWashington states new-case rate slowsChinas Wuhan lockdown may delay feared second wave: studySpanish doctors are forced to choose who to let die from virus

Subscribe to a daily update on the virus from Bloombergs Prognosis team here.

Click VRUS on the terminal for news and data on the coronavirus and here for maps and charts. For analysis of the impact from Bloomberg Economics, click here. To see the impact on oil and commodities demand, click here.

U.S. Poised to Have Worlds Largest Outbreak (5:06 p.m. NY)

The U.S. has at least 80,703 confirmed cases of coronavirus, surpassing Italy and positioning the country to overtake China as the site of the worlds largest outbreak.

The American tally was bolstered by a large jump in New York, which had 6,448 new cases Thursday, bringing the states total to 37,258. That accounts for almost half the outbreak nationwide, according to data collected by Bloomberg.

New Jersey and California also saw large increases in patients, and smaller hot spots in states like Michigan and Illinois began to grow more quickly.

Italian health officials reported 6,153 new cases Thursday, the most in five days, bringing the countrys total to 80,539. The outbreak in mainland China remains the largest globally

Washingtons New Cases Slow (3 p.m. NY)

Story continues

Washington state has seen a drop in the rate of new cases being reported, Governor Jay Inslee said at a press conference, led by improvement in three counties in near Seattle where the outbreak began a month ago. Other counties arent seeing the pace of new cases slow, he said.

While hospitals are not yet full, the state -- which ranks fourth in U.S. cases -- needs to see a significant further reduction in cases in order to avoid running out of beds and equipment in the coming days, he said.

We should not be within 10,000 miles of champagne corks on this, Inslee said. Without further decreases to the case count a lot of people in the state of Washington are going to die.

Inslee called for a national system for buying personal protective equipment and other supplies in order to use the federal governments buying power and avoid putting Washington in a mad scramble with all the other states for supplies.

U.K. Helps Self-Employed Workers (2:30 p.m. NY)

The U.K. government offered self-employed workers cash grants of as much as 2,500 pounds ($3,040) a month.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced the three-month plan, at a cost the Treasury estimates will be about 9 billion pounds, after his offer last week to pay a portion of citizens wages was widely criticized for omitting self-employed workers.

About 95% of self-employed workers, 3.8 million people, will be eligible for the grants, Sunak said.

Full story here.

Latin Bank Offers Aid (2:30 p.m. NY)

The Inter-American Development Bank will make $12 billion available to countries for responding to the crisis and its aftermath. That includes $8.8 billion for other purposes that the nations can redirect, and $3.2 billion added to the the 2020 lending program.

The IDB wants to support the immediate public health response, safety nets for economically vulnerable people, aid for small- and medium-sized businesses and fiscal policies that support member countries.

The Washington-based IDB provided loans and technical assistance in a region with chronic infrastructure and financial shortages.

Trump Considers Plan to Rank Counties by Risk (2:15 p.m. NY)

President Donald Trump said his administration is working on a plan that would rank U.S. counties into one of three categories as a step toward the relaxing the tight restrictions put in place to halt the spread of the coronavirus.

The administration, using criteria developed based on expanded testing capabilities and in consultation with health officials, proposes to designate counties as high-risk, medium-risk and low-risk. This ranking will help local officials decide on maintaining, increasing or relaxing social distancing and other measures, the president said in a letter to U.S. governors.

Americans across the country are hoping the day will soon arrive when they can resume their normal economic, social and religious lives, Trump wrote in the letter released by the White House.

Read the full story here

Italy Virus Cases Rise, Fueled by Lombardy (1:11 p.m. NY)

Italy reported its biggest rise in coronavirus infections in the past five days, as the disease spread further in the northern Lombardy region, even after weeks of rigid lockdown rules.

The civil protection agency reported 6,153 new cases on Thursday, up from 5,210 a day earlier.

Fatalities from the outbreak over the past 24 hours totaled 662, down from 683 for the previous day, according to figures provided at the agencys daily news conference on Thursday. Confirmed cases in the country now total 80,539.

Read the full store here

N.Y. Patients Staying on Ventilators (12:20 p.m.)

Some New Yorkers are staying on ventilators as long as 30 days, dimming hopes for their recovery and adding to the shortage of the lifesaving machines, Governor Andrew Cuomo said.

Cuomo reported 100 more fatalities, for a total of 385, as hospitals brace for more. The city is deploying refrigerated trailers for use as temporary morgues. Until the outbreak is under control, Cuomo said officials are focused on reducing the rate of increase, not the reducing the number of cases, so hospitals dont run out of beds.

New York added almost 6,500 cases, for a total of more than 37,000.

China Blocks Foreigners (11:55 a.m. NY)

China will temporarily suspend the entry of foreigners starting Saturday as cases worldwide surge, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Immigration Administration said on its website.

China has to take necessary and temporary measures in response to the current coronavirus situation, using practices of various countries as reference, the agencies said. Adjustments will be made according to the situation, they said.

U.K. Police Get Extra Powers (11:50 a.m. NY)

The U.K. government gave police strengthened enforcement powers to ensure people stay at home unless their trip is essential. From Thursday, the police may issue a penalty of 60 pounds ($73), rising to 120 pounds for second-time offenders.

Those not paying the fine can be taken to court and police can arrest those who continuously refuse to comply.

U.S. Delays New ID Deadline by Year (11:40 a.m. NY)

The U.S. delayed by a year, until October 2021, the deadline for states to issue new identification documents that meet the federal Real ID standards. Chad Wolf, acting Homeland Security secretary, said states needed time because motor vehicle offices that issue drivers licenses have been closed in response to Covid-19.

U.K. Warns on Coughing as Harassment (11:26 a.m. NY)

The U.K. is ready to crack down on coughing as a way to threaten or intimidate police officers and shop workers. The nations prosecution office issued a statement after reports that emergency workers were coughed at by people claiming to be infected. That could lead to assault charges and two years in jail, the prosecution service said.

Expo in Dubai Could be Delayed (11:26 a.m. NY)

A global exposition set for Dubai in late October could be delayed for up to a year, a setback for organizers who for years have touted the event as a potential bonanza for the United Arab Emirates. Dubai has spent billions of dollars building hotels and facilities in anticipation of attracting 25 million visitors during the six-month event.

A final decision must be made by member states of the Paris-based International Bureau of Expositions, which awarded the event to Dubai and the U.A.E. in 2013.

Iran Bans In-Country Travel (10:15 a.m. NY)

Iran banned travel between cities and ordered people to return to their hometowns or face fines after millions defied calls to stay indoors and went out to celebrate the Persian new year. President Hassan Rouhani warned of a second surge of the disease after new cases surged followed the holiday period.

Emergency services and cargo vehicles are exempt from the travel ban, the semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted Irans police chief as saying.

Europe Shies Away from Retooling Production for Gear (9:36 a.m. NY)

The European Union signaled that efforts to increase the supply of medical gear will involve ramping up existing production capacity. The European Commission said converting production lines at the likes of automotive and aeronautics businesses would be time-consuming and not always necessarily successful. The EUs executive arm commented after President Ursula von der Leyen and European Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton held a phone call with representatives of various businesses.

U.K. Should Brace for $240 Billion Budget Deficit (9:28 a.m. NY)

Britains budget deficit could easily exceed 200 billion pounds ($240 billion) in the coming fiscal year as the coronavirus crisis hammers the economy and forces the government to unleash a huge package of fiscal stimulus. The warning came Thursday from the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Caterpillar Withdraws Forecast, Halts Some Operations (9:11 a.m. NY)

Caterpillar Inc. is suspending operations at some U.S. facilities and withdrawing its 2020 financial guidance. The heavy-equipment maker said Thursday that the virus is starting to affect its supply chain.

U.S. Jobless Claims Surged to Record (8:31 a.m. NY)

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits surged to a record 3.28 million last week. Initial jobless claims in the week ended March 21 were up from 282,000 in the prior week and more than quadruple the previous record of 695,000 in 1982, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. The figures date to 1967.

Economists projections had ranged as high as 4.4 million.

Faster Virus Tests (8:30 a.m. NY)

Henry Schein said an antibody rapid blood test, known as Standard Q COVID-19 IgM/IgG Rapid Test, is now available. The test is intended to be administered at the point of care and delivers results within 15 minutes from a pinprick with no instrumentation required.

Earlier, Robert Bosch GmbH said it developed a test that can diagnose Covid-19 in less than 2.5 hours. The new test uses the Vivalytic molecular diagnostics platform made by Boschs healthcare division, used in hospitals, laboratories and medical practices. Patients typically must wait one or two days before they get test results.

Separately, U.K.-based Mologic Ltd. has sent prototypes of a 10-minute coronavirus test to laboratories for validation before it can begin full-scale manufacturing. The company and its partner, the Senegalese research foundation Institut Pasteur de Dakar, have developed a finger-prick test to determine whether a person had the illness and the state of their immune system. The company is also working on a separate saliva test to detect the presence of the virus.

Walmart Hires Thousands (8:25 a.m. NY)

Walmart Inc. has taken on 25,000 new employees and given offers to thousands more in the first week of a hiring push, as the biggest private employer in the U.S. scrambles to keep its shelves stocked and checkouts staffed.

The retailer has compressed a hiring process that can often take two weeks into as little as three hours by eliminating formal interviews and written job offers.

German Tour Operator TUI Said to Near State Aid (8:20 a.m. NY)

TUI AG, the worlds biggest tour operator, is close to securing almost 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion) in government aid in whats seen as a litmus test for Germanys pledge to rescue businesses ravaged by the pandemic.

The company and its adviser reached an agreement with Germanys state-owned KfW development bank on the terms of loans earlier this week, said the people, who asked not to be identified because discussions are private. That financing package is now with TUIs lending banks, which are expected to sign off in the coming days, they said.

BOE Warns of Long-Term Damage; Holds Rates (8 a.m. NY)

The Bank of England left rates unchanged, but said its ready to provide more support for the economy after warning that a very sharp reduction in activity was likely. The pound stayed stronger in a broad trend for a weaker dollar across global markets and gilts continued to gain.

Given the severity of that disruption, there is a risk of longer-term damage to the economy, especially if there are business failures on a large scale or significant increases in unemployment, the central bank said.

Ford Plans Gradual Restart of Plants (7:30 a.m. NY)

Ford Motor Co. plans to resume production in Mexico on April 6, with some U.S. plants cranking up again about a week later. After halting North American production as of March 19, Ford said its aiming to restart production first in Hermosillo, Mexico, which builds the Fusion and Lincoln MKZ sedans.

Ford then plans to restart production on April 14 at Michigan, Kentucky and Ohio plants that assemble profitable F-Series pickups and commercial vans. Other factories that make transmissions and press metal parts for those vehicles are due to resume that day.

Powell Says Fed Will Keep Credit Flowing (7:18 a.m. NY)

We will keep doing that aggressively and forthrightly, as we have been, Powell said in an interview on NBC Thursday. When it comes to this lending were not going to run out of ammunition. Over the past three weeks, the U.S. central bank has introduced an unprecedented series of measures pushing it deep into uncharted territory.

Powell said the U.S. may well be in recession, but expects activity to resume and move back up in the second half of the year. He said we would tend to listen to the experts on when normal activity should resume and added that the virus would dictate the timetable.

Spain Reports Fewer Deaths, Cases Surge (6:32 a.m. NY)

Total cases rose to 56,188 from 47,610 and fatalities jumped by 655, fewer than on Wednesday, to 4,089. Hospitals in the country are struggling to cope with the surge.

Europe Accounts for 7 out of 10 Virus Deaths, WHO Says (6:20 a.m. NY)

The number of cases tripled in the past week in Europe, with the disease spreading faster in Spain, France, Germany and Switzerland, Hans Kluge, the World Health Organizations director for Europe, said at a press briefing in Copenhagen. Italys infection rate has slowed slightly, but its too early to say the disease has peaked there, he said. The country has 6,200 infected health-care workers, he added.

Kluge said Europe needs to attack the disease in solidarity, because if the European Union manages to fight it but it takes hold in eastern Europe, it will just come back.

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Elton John could definitely "feel the love" Wednesday as he celebrated his 73rd birthday!

The Lion King composer and legendary performer had a low-key gathering at home as the world socially distances amid the coronavirus pandemic.

In a video John posted to social media, it appears his two young sons  Elijah, 7, and Zachary, 9,  helped take the lead in singing their dad Happy Birthday.

Grateful for the best birthday ever with my family, John captioned the video. He also shared snaps on his Instagram story of the cards the boys had made him in honor of his special day, and the message they left for him on a window that read HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

John shared the cards and sweet messages his sons made for him on his birthday on his Instagram story. (@eltonjohn / Instagram)

John has said that even though he became a father later in life  with his partner, David Furnish, 57  it was the best choice hes ever made.

"That was the greatest decision I've made  well  we've made  is to have those boys," the proud dad explained to TODAY in 2016. "They're our primary concern. They're the things that come first and foremost."

Despite his usual panache, John seems to relish doing small birthday parties at home. Hes posted birthday pictures with his family before, sharing a cute photo several years ago of his sons together with a birthday cake for him that said Happy birthday, Daddy.

Life is beautiful, he captioned the photo.

John has a busy few days ahead of him as he prepares to host a remote charity concert to support people affected by the coronavirus pandemic in the United States on Sunday.

Musicians and performers  including Alicia Keys, the Backstreet Boys, Billie Eilish, Billie Joe Armstrong, Mariah Carey and Tim McGraw  will be singing from their own homes, filmed with personal video and audio equipment, according to a news release from Fox.

The concert will run without commercials on Fox this Sunday at 9 p.m. ET.
Amid the ongoing nationwide lockdown to contain COVID-19 outbreak, the Union Health Ministry on Thursday allowed doorstep delivery of essential medicines as part of an effort to restrict people's movement further.

IMAGE: People queue-up outside a chemist store during the nationwide lockdown in Mumbai. Photograph: Kunal Patil/PTI Photo

According to a notification issued by the health ministry, medical retailers will be allowed to provide drugs to people at their doorstep.

This order shall come into force on the date of its publication in the official gazette, the notification said.

'The central government is satisfied that retail sale of drugs to doorstep of consumers is essential to meet the requirements of emergency arising due to COVID-19 and in the public interest, it is necessary and expedient to regulate the sale and distribution of drugs for their delivery to consumers,' it read.

The notification further said that any such sale of a drug that falls under Schedule H of the Drugs and Cosmetic Act shall be based on receipt of prescription physically or through email.

Further, the licensee shall submit an e-mail ID for registration with the licensing authority if prescriptions are to be received through email for these drugs.

It also read that the prescription shall be dispensed only if it is presented to the licensee within 30 days of its issue and in acute cases, the prescription shall be dispensed only if it is presented to the licensee within seven days of its issue.

The bill or cash memo shall be sent by the return email and records of all such transactions shall be maintained by the licensee, the notification said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 01:45:12|Editor: yan

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WASHINGTON, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday indicted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his aides on narco-terrorism charges, a rare move to further pressure the Maduro government.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced the indictment at a news briefing, accusing Maduro and other Venezuelan officials of conspiring "with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), causing tons of cocaine to enter and devastate American communities."

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department offered a reward of up to 15 million U.S. dollars for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Maduro.

U.S. media reported that the indictment of a head of state was highly unusual, and this action served as an escalation of the Trump administration's campaign to pressure Maduro to step down.

The United States has been pursuing a policy of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation against the Maduro government in support of opposition leader Juan Guaido.
All schools in Queensland will have a student free week next week while still remaining open for the children of essential workers, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has announced.

The Premier said the move would ensure more students could stay home and children of essential workers only could go to school.

It follows days of public calls to close schools entirely, but Ms Palaszczuk said they had tried to find the right balance between avoiding transmission of coronavirus and ensuring essential workers were free to go to their jobs.

Everyone is listening to the concerns that communities have, but we are making it very clear that student-free days mean that teachers are going to be at school, the schools are going to be open.
At the meeting, First Secretary of the committee Le Quoc Phong said over the recent past, it has actively reformed the unions activities and youth movements to attract more young people. The theme Year of Youth Volunteers in 2019 received warm response from HCYU cadres and members and other young people. Activities during the year were organised in a widespread and regular manner from the central to grassroots levels, he said, noting that the number of young people taking part in voluntary activities last year rose three folds from 2018.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc (C) at the meeting (Photo: VNA)

The Secretariat of the committee hopes that in the coming time, the PM will support the creation of favourable conditions and mechanisms for the union to perform its tasks in representing childrens voices and aspirations, and uniting overseas young Vietnamese, Phong added.

The secretariat also proposed the PM approve the establishment of the Vietnam youth initiative for the community programme and a social skill training system for young Vietnamese people.

Addressing the event, PM Phuc applauded the union and relevant organisations contributions to the country, especially during the Year of Youth Volunteers in 2019.

He said over the last three months, the unions cadres, members and other youngsters have actively joined hands in the combat against the COVID-19 as manifested through their organisation of hand-washing stations, medical students support for anti-coronavirus activities, and distribution of free face masks.

The leader requested the union to get young people involved in the COVID-19 prevention and control more strongly, multiply effective models in the work, and mobilise social resources for the combat.

Stressing the need to capitalise on the golden time to contain the coronavirus spread, he said the 6.3 million unions members have not only to make health declaration but also to help other people do so to help authorities sort persons vulnerable to virus infection.

Additionally, the PM ordered the committee to continue programmes and activities to promote young Vietnameses capacity to meet national development and defence requirements and bring into play the youths role in realising common tasks of the nation.

He also told sectors and all-level authorities to increase coordination to better care for the youths demand and interests and further assist youngsters to access job opportunities./.
An Accra High Court has granted a request by the Deputy Attorney General Godfred Yeboah Dame to have it hear an injunction case against the National Identification Authority (NIA) earlier than usual.



The case was slated to be heard on April 9. The court has now fixed Friday, March 27 to hear the case.



Two citizens Mark Oliver Kevor and Emmanuel Okrah filed a case in court asking that the NIA be stopped from carrying out its registration exercise. They maintain the exercise is contrary to the social distancing directives issued by President Akufo-Addo in the wake of the Covid-19 cases recorded in Ghana.



A different division of the High Court presided over by Justice Daniel Mensah on March 23 granted a similar request filed by businessman Prince Tabi and 29 others.



This injunction is to be in force for the next 10 days since March 23.



The NIA has since Saturday morning called of its exercise citing the application filed by Kevor and others. The AGs office which is joined as a defendant in this action filed two applications in court.



The first asking the court to hear the injunction motion filed by the two citizens earlier than usual. The other asking the court to dismiss the application for an injunction.



Lawyer for the two citizens Nii Kpapko Samoa Addo on Thursday urged the court to dismiss the request to have the case heard earlier than usual. He maintained the rules of court required that they be served with such an application three days before the court date.





He also argued that the High Court differently constituted had already granted an injunction in respect of the same facts.



Deputy Attorney General Godfred Yeboah Dame disagreed maintaining the states request is legal.



He also urged the court to disregard the reference to a granted injunction since that was not a matter before the court.



Justice Anthony Oppong granted the request to hear the matter early.



He described as paradoxical the opposition by the two citizens to an application that will ensure early determination of a matter they say infringes their rights.



He, however, admitted that the Deputys AG application does not meet the three-day requirement.



The court, however, stated that it is exercising its right to allow the application and correct the anomaly as though a request had been made to the court allowing the three-day rule not be followed.





The National Identification Authority has also entered an appearance with its lawyer Kwaku Essilfie filing documents in opposition to the application for an injunction.



Justice Oppong adjourned proceedings to Friday, March 27 to enable the lawyers for the two citizens study the documents filed by the NIA.

Source: JFM/Ghana









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Italy Wednesday announced disbursement of 50 million to help Tunisia support local companies and address social economic impacts of the COVID-19.

The financial aid was announced following this week telephone call between President Kais Saied and his Italian counterpart Sergio Mattarella. Saied proposed to send health workers to the European country, which is the worst affected by the pandemic around the world.

However, Italys envoy to Tunisia, Lorenzo Fanara, told a local radio station that the credit to be disbursed by Savings bank for deposits and loans is not linked to discussion between the two leaders.

Italy recorded 74,386 COVID-19 cases and over 7,500 deaths, while Tunisia reported 173 confirmed cases and six deaths.

This week, the Tunisian Finance Ministry announced $400 million in form of assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help combat the pandemic. The aid will be disbursed in the next two to three weeks.
An emergency room doctor on the front lines of New York City's coronavirus outbreak has offered a harrowing look inside Elmhurst Hospital Center, where 13 people died in the span of 24 hours this week.

Footage recorded by Dr Colleen Smith on Tuesday shows rows upon rows of beds filled with critical COVID-19 patients hooked up to ventilators.

Scenes from outside the 545-bed public hospital in Queens show hundreds of people lined up waiting to get treated and tested, with the queues growing longer each day.

Smith says she and her colleagues are facing a constant shortage of supplies as they treat up to 400 coronavirus patients on a daily basis, double the rate on a typical day before the pandemic.

'Leaders in various offices from the president to the head of health and hospitals saying things like we're going to be fine, everything's fine,' she said in the video shared with the New York Times and ABC News.

'From our perspective everything is not fine. I don't have the support that I need and even just the materials I need physically to take care of my patients.'

Scroll down for video

Colleen Smith, an emergency room doctor on the front lines of New York City's coronavirus outbreak, recorded footage inside Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens on Tuesday

Smith's video shows rows upon rows of critical COVID-19 patients hooked up to ventilators at the 545-bed public hospital where 13 people died in a period of 24 hours this week

Scenes from outside the hospital show hundreds of people lined up waiting to get treated and tested, with the queues growing longer each day (pictured Thursday)

As of Thursday afternoon, 21,393 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in New York City and 280 have died

'The frustrating thing about all of this is it really feels like it's too little too late,' Smith said as she walked down a hallway in the hospital. 'We knew, we knew it was coming.'

'It's America. We're supposed to be a first-world country,' she added.

Smith made the comments on Tuesday, as the number of cases in New York City hovered around 14,000, with more than 130 deaths.

By Thursday morning, the case count jumped to 21,393 and nearly 200 deaths.

'Today is kinda getting worse and worse, we had to get a refrigerated truck to store the bodies of patients who are dying,' Smith said.

'We are right now scrambling to get a few additional ventilators or even C-PAP machines, if we could get C-PAP machines we could free up ventilators for patients who need them.'

Smith filmed a row of only five ventilators that were not in use at the time, saying: 'Unless people die, I expect we'll be back to needing to beg for ventilators again in another day or two.'

Smith said she and her colleagues are facing a dangerous shortage of supplies as they treat up to 400 coronavirus patients on a daily basis

Smith filmed a row of only five ventilators that were not in use at the time, saying: 'Unless people die, I expect we'll be back to needing to beg for ventilators again in another day or two'

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

The hospital received another shipment of ventilators a few hours later, which Smith said was the third emergency re-supply in the past week.

The head of the NYC public hospital system has denied that Elmhurst has ever come close to running out of ventilators.

In a statement to the Times, the system said: 'Elmhurst is at the center of this crisis, and its the number one priority of our public hospital system right now.

'The front line staff are going above and beyond in this crisis, and we continue surging supplies and personnel to this critical facility to keep pace with the crisis.'

FEMA has also promised to ship more equipment to Elmhurst, but Smith said she isn't optimistic that the agency will follow through as many of its previous promises have fallen through.

People are seen lined up in front of Elmhurst Thursday as they wait to get tested for COVID-19

A medic is seen carting a patient into the Intensive Care Unit at Elmhurst on Saturday

The shortage of equipment is also taking a toll on hospital staff, who don't have what they need to protect themselves from infected patients.

'The anxiety of this situation is really overwhelming. All of the doctors, its hard for us to get tested, even if we want to, even if we have symptoms,' Smith said, noting that ten residents, 'many, many nurses', and 'a few' attending physicians have already fallen ill.

'We're exposed over and over again, we don't have the protective equipment we should have.

'I put on one N95 mask in the morning, I need to have that N95 mask on for every patient I see, I don't take it off all day.

'The N95 mask I wore today is also the N95 mask I wore on Friday. We're always worried that we'll run out of N95 masks.

'The anxiety of this situation is really overwhelming. All of the doctors, its hard for us to get tested, even if we want to, even if we have symptoms,' Smith said

Smith said the hospital is adapting as fast as it can and has set up a tent outside to test mildly sick patients - but that hasn't alleviated the pressure.

'At first we were trying to isolate people with cough and fever and be more careful around them, but we weren't necessarily being extra careful around other patients,' she said.

'And then we started to realize that patients who were coming in with no fever but abdominal pain actually had findings on their X-rays and chest CTs that were consistent with this coronavirus, COVID-19.

'So someone in a car accident gets brought in, we get a CT scan of them, and their lungs look like they have coronavirus.

'We're seeing a lot of patients who probably had COVID but we didn't realize.'

EMTs in protective masks bring a person into the emergency room at Elmhurst on Thursday

The hospital set up a temporary tent outside to test people who have mild symptoms

She said she's also seen a shift in the state of patients checking into the hospital, as well as the demographics.

'What's scary now is we're getting patients that are much sicker,' she said.

'Many of the young people who are getting sick don't smoke, they're healthy, they have no co-morbidities.

'They're just young, regular people between the ages of 30 and 50 who you would not expect to get this sick.'

Smith said she was speaking out because she grew tired of hearing leaders like President Donald Trump downplay the situation.

'So many people are saying its going to be okay, everything's fine, we have what we need,' she said.

'If this goes on for a month, or two, or three, or five, like it did in China, and we're already this strained, we don't have what we need.'

'I don't really care if I get in trouble for speaking to the media,' she added.

'I want people to know that this is bad, people are dying, we don't have the tools that we need to take care of them. It's really hard.'

An Elmhurst spokesperson released a statement on Wednesday confirming that 13 patients at the hospital had died from COVID-19 over the past 24 hours.

'Staff are doing everything in our power to save every person who contracts Covid-19,' the statement said, asserting that the death toll was consistent with the number of Intensive Care Unit patients being treated there.

Elmhurst is at the center of the crisis in New York state, the statement said.

As of Thursday afternoon, 37,258 people have tested positive for coronavirus and 385 have died in the hard-hit state, which accounts for more than half of the 73,939 cases across the US and 1,074 of the nation's deaths.
Haya Power, an author writing books for Christians and other individuals interested in Christianity, has completed her new book He Came to Destroy the Church, a thought-provoking narrative warning church members to be very careful when selecting new leaders.

Author Power emphasizes the need for Christian believers to stay steadfast in their faith when confronted with attacks by the enemy. She thinks that her book is a must-read for all God-fearing, Bible-believing pastors who are retiring or leaving their position for any reason. It is also a must-read book by readers who are searching for a Christian church led by a God fearing, Bible-believing pastor. The book gives examples of some tricks and techniques used by pastors who are pretenders and are devil worshippers, not godly pastors. Her hope is that after reading this book, Christians will thank God and become stronger in faith, realizing that God is the only way and stronger than any devil.

In summary, Power prays that her book will help make the readers faith in God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) stronger!

Published by Page Publishing, Haya Powers book may increase Christians awareness of the dangers that could face their church family if they are not careful when selecting a new pastor.

Readers who wish to experience this perspicacious work can purchase He Came to Destroy the Church at bookstores everywhere or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708.

About Page Publishing:

Page Publishing is a traditional full-service publishing house that handles all of the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing knows that authors need to be free to create, not bogged down with complicated business issues like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and the like. Its roster of authors can leave behind these tedious, complex, and time-consuming issues, and focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com.
The nurses never say no, they are always there, eight, 12, sometimes 15 hours a day, and then they do it again the next day and the next. They are the front line.

Michael Dewar

Guilford, Conn.

The writer is a cardiac surgeon at the Yale School of Medicine.

To the Editor:

Re New Type of Outbreak Hoarding: Doctors Prescribe for Themselves (front page, March 25):

Physicians and all medical professionals are taking an enormous personal risk, for themselves and their families, in caring for the sick right now. My daughter, a physician, and all those she works with do not have all the personal protective equipment required. In Italy about 10 percent of those infected are medical professionals.

Physicians and nurses are now being asked to work even if exposed to Covid-19, as long as they are asymptomatic. I know they find the idea of taking this infection home to their families and communities intolerable. My daughter will no longer see me or her grandparents.

As a retired physician, I put myself on the New York State volunteer list, but wondered how I would face treating patients without an N95 respirator mask. I have not prescribed hydroxychloroquine for myself or family members, but I do not begrudge physicians and other medical personnel who have. It may help them continue to fight Covid-19, even if only psychologically, and we need them to keep fighting!

Connie DiMari

New York

To the Editor:

As a member of the veterinary profession, I suggest that equipment, masks, gowns and gloves could be used by our human counterparts in medicine.

Further, perhaps theres a place for doctors, technicians and nurses who care for beloved pets in helping to care for patients during this crisis. There isnt a veterinarian who cant put in an IV catheter or adjust a ventilator. All of us have been trained and use such techniques every day, and we could be useful in these trying times of staff shortages.

Seth A. Koch

Philadelphia

To the Editor:

At 86, I am absolutely fine with dying  although Im healthy and active and would not turn down another five or 10 years. So if I wind up with Covid-19, give the ventilator to someone else.
A 35-year-old woman and five men in the age from 28 up to 70 are infected

Another six cases of coronavirus spotted in Kyiv. The number of Kyiv citizens infected with Covid-19 increased up to 40 people as 112 Ukraine TV channel reported citing Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko.

In the capital, during yesterday and todays morning, the number of Kyiv citizens who infected with coronavirus increased up to 40 people. Today, we have received from the government agency Kyiv city laboratory center of the Healthcare Ministry of Ukraine another six confirmed cases of the infection with coronavirus, Klitschko said.

A 35-year-old woman and five men in the age from 28 up to 70 are infected. Four patients hospitalized to Oleksandrivsky hospital. One 70-year-old man was taken to the military hospital as he is the military. One person stays in the self-isolation at home.

According to the mayor, as for today, 1,437 Kyiv citizens passed express tests and laboratory analyses. Over 30 samples are currently tested for the presence of the coronavirus

I want to appeal to the law enforcement bodies to strictly control the observation of the legal procedures by the private clinics. As some of them hold express tests for coronavirus and do not pass the positive results to the state bodies. And we get them from Germany or do not get them at all. I believe it is unacceptable, he added.

As of Thursday morning, March 26, 156 cases of coronavirus have been officially confirmed in Ukraine.

Besides, Ukraines government has introduced an emergency situation throughout the country for 30 days until April 24, 2020 and prolonged a lockdown across the country for 30 days.
Why is the ISI chief against the release of his photos and videos

Kabul Gurdwara attack to avenge Indias amended citizenship law?

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Mar 26: The Indian Intelligence agencies suspect the role of the ISI in the Kabul Gurudwara attack that killed 25.

An Intelligence Bureau official told OneIndia that the ISI backed the attack which was carried out by the Islamic State of Khorasan. While the initial suspicion was on the Taliban, the same was denied by its spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid.

The Indian agencies say that while the role of the ISIS is clear, it is also confirmed that the ISI backed the outfit in carrying out the strike. When asked if this was done to target the Sikh community in the wake of the newly amended citizenship law, the officer cited above said that it cannot be ruled out.

The Sikhs are a persecuted religious minority in Afghanistan. The citizenship law offers citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Buddhists and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Terrorists had stormed a religious gathering of Sikhs, who are a minority in Afghanistan and killed 25 people. Those killed included a child. 15 persons were injured in the attack.

Moments after the attack, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the same. The Islamic State has a considerable presence in Afghanistan. It may be recalled that it has also recruited several Indians for the ISIS Khorasan.

Islamic State claims attack on Sikh worshippers in Kabul Gurdwara, death toll rises to 25

The security forces have cordoned off the area, located in old Kabul, and are trying to counter the attack. They are locked in a continuing battle with the gunmen.

Police in Kabul said that at least 11 children were rescued from the gurdwara.

Sikh lawmaker Nardendar Singh Khalisa told reporters close to the scene that up to 150 people were praying inside the gurdwara when it came under attack.

"Afghan forces have cleared the first floor of a Sikh worship area in PD1 of Kabul, where suicide bombers are battling security forces," Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian was quoted as saying in the report.

"A number of people have been rescued who were trapped inside the building," he said.

Earlier, the country''s main militant group, the Taliban, denied involvement in the attack.

Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid said in a statement that the militant group had no link with the attack in Shor Bazar area of Kabul, Khama News agency reported.

War-torn Afghanistan is currently mired in a political stalemate with two politicians- Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah - both claiming victory in the presidential election.

The US, keen to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, has been trying to break the deadlock and also save a historic deal it signed with the Taliban militant group that is supposed to pave the way for peace in the country.

The attack comes a day after the US said it would cut its aid to the government by USD 1 billion over frustrations that the political leaders could not reach an agreement and form a team to negotiate with the Taliban.

India strongly condemns terror attack in Kabul

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Kabul on Tuesday in a bid to resolve a standoff between President Ghani and his rival Abdullah, who also proclaims himself president following a contested election.

Sikhs have been target of attacks by Islamist militants before in Afghanistan.

Two years ago, the Islamic State group targeted a Sikh gathering in Afghanistan, killing 19 people.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Thursday, March 26, 2020, 9:53 [IST]
Countries around the world are now extending their warm appreciation to China for the assistance the latter has offered in midst of the COVID-19 epidemic.

The cabin crew of the charter flight of Air Serbia pose for a picture with a Serbian and Chinese national flags on March 20, before they depart for Beijing to pick the Chinese experts and medical supplies donated by the Chinese government. (Photo courtesy of the official SNS account of the Chinese Embassy in Serbia)

The Chinese government has announced assistance to 82 countries and regions, the World Health Organization and the African Union, including testing reagents, masks and protective suits. Batches of these supplies have been delivered to the recipients.

Besides, China has so far shared epidemic prevention and treatment guidelines with more than 100 countries and regions, and over 10 international and regional organizations around the world.

Such solidarity is forged as the world needs to cope with the challenge together. When China is consolidating its epidemic control efforts at home, it is also rendering help to other countries as much as possible, which contributes to the global public health security and showcases the sense of responsibility of a major country.

A team of Chinese medical staff with experience in fighting COVID-19 arrived in the Serbian capital of Belgrade on March 22, local time, to help with the Balkan state's battle against the virus.

They were received by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic at the Belgrade Airport. The President gave an elbow bump to each of the team member and kissed the Chinese national flag to express his gratitude.

A Chinese and a Serbian national flag were also knotted together at one end, as a manifestation of mutual help between the two countries.

Many buildings were illuminated in the color of the Chinese national flag in Belgrade on the same evening as a sign of Serbia's gratitude to its ironclad friend China.

Such practice revealed the deep friendship between the two peoples sharing weal and woe, reflected the brilliance of humanity and deeply touched the two peoples at this difficult time.

Vucic announced a state of emergency in the country to fight the spread of the novel coronavirus on March 15. Under the measures announced by the president, Serbia banned entrance to all foreigners. However, "the only ones allowed will be Chinese doctors," the president expressed, saying that it was the only country that would help.

A team of Chinese medical staff with experience in fighting COVID-19 arrived in the Serbian capital of Belgrade on March 21, local time, together with medical supplies donated by the Chinese government. They were greeted with an elbow bump from Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic (L) at the Belgrade Airport. (Photo courtesy of the official SNS account of the Serbian president)

On the same evening, the first batch of testing kits donated by China arrived in Belgrade. Two days later, the Chinese side expressed the willingness to send medical experts to the country.

By delivering on its promise, China has spread the power of solidarity to the world.

A friend in need is a friend indeed. Stories of mutual help keep on emerging in the joint fight against the disease, bringing warmth to this tough spring.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the European Union is grateful for support from China, in a speech videotaped in English, French and German.

Czech President Milos Zeman said, "I would therefore like to thank the People's Republic of China, which was the only country that has helped us deliver these supplies."

Similar stories are way many, and thats why Thank you, China has gone viral on social networks where people speak different languages but convey the same appreciation.

A growing number of countries have seen the value of friendship in Chinas pursuit for greater love and common interests, and realized that solidarity and cooperation are the sharpest weapon to prevail over this rampant disease that concerns all.

China has set a good example for the international community by lending a helping hand to other epidemic-hit countries in a timely manner, said Russian President Vladimir Putin.

An official of Bosnia and Herzegovina noted that a friend in need is a friend indeed, adding that Chinas generous donation reflected the sincere friendship between the two countries.

Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Teodoro Lopez Locsin lauded China for being a global model in the fight against the coronavirus. He called for countries around the world to "start working together to help each other", instead of blaming each other.

Mankind is a community with a shared future, and combating the epidemic through cooperation is a joint responsibility for all players in the international arena. The world should carry on concerted efforts and fight to the last until the epidemic is terminated in every single country around the globe.

In the joint fight against the epidemic, people have come to realize the value of friendship, built up the confidence to go through the difficult times, as well as seen the hope for victory over the disease.
By Trend

Uzbekistans Namangan city is closing borders for all modes of transport due to the coronavirus outbreak, Trend reports via Uzbek media.

"From March 26, entry and exit from Namangan will be closed for all types of transport, including buses, cars, air and rail transport," the message said.

Restrictions on entry and exit from Namangan do not apply to freight transport. Only citizens, permanently residing (registered) in Namangan city, as well as heads and staff of state authorities, law enforcement agencies, departments and organizations (NGOs), doctors and nurses, employees of the State Sanitary and Epidemiological Surveillance from the regions, working in Namangan, as well as responsible persons assigned to the districts by a separate order of the regional mayor.

The first case of Coronavirus infection in Uzbekistan was detected on March 15 in the laboratory of the Research Institute of Virology - an Uzbek woman, returning from France, tested coronavirus-positive. The Ministry of Health later said that her son, daughter, husband and grandson also tested coronavirus-positive.

The number of people infected with coronavirus in Uzbekistan is 60.

The outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which is an international transport hub - began at a fish market in late December 2019. The number of people killed by the disease has surpassed 21,300. Over 471,000 people have been confirmed as infected. Meanwhile, over 114,800 people have reportedly recovered.

Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019. Several countries are working on a vaccine against the new virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
The head of Malis main opposition party, Soumaila Cisse, is missing, along with 11 members of his group, his party, the Union for the Republic and Democracy (URD) said in a statement on Thursday.

Cisse and his delegation were slated to reach Koumaira village in the northern Timbuktu region, an area notoriously frequented by jihadists.

The URD said it could not reach Cisse nor others in his entourage via telephone late Wednesday afternoon, when they were expected to arrive in Koumaira. The party believes they went missing after campaigning near Niafunke town in the centre of the country.

Mali is due to go to the polls at the weekend for legislative elections that have been postponed four times since 2018. The government says the elections will be held on Sunday, despite fears of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Malis first two coronavirus cases were reported on Wednesday.

The URD party claim that Cisse and other party members have been kidnapped, but did not give any details.

Still no news of him or his delegation, URD Vice President Madani Traore told the Reuters news agency.

Traore said that the URD has set up a committee and has called on the government, the military, and UN peacekeeping forces to help them in finding their party members.

The region is known as a place where al-Qaeda and Islamic State launch attacks on civilians and military targets.
By Express News Service

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Kerala Government on Wednesday ordered to shut down all liquor outlets and toddy shops in the state until a further order is issued in the wake of the Covid-19 scare.

Bars were closed on Monday. There have been widespread calls to shut the outlets, which attract big crowds and long queues. As many as 265 outlets run by Bevco and 36 managed by the Consumerfed have been shut.

The state government is reportedly exploring the possibility of selling liquor via online. But the Abkari Policy, as it stands, does not have the provision for it. Rules have to be amended and the state government is expected to take a decision in two days.

Despite strong demand from the Opposition, the state had been reluctant to shut down bars and liquor outlets, which are the states major sources of income.
The head of the WHO has said that the time to act against the coronavirus was actually more than a month ago, while urging countries not to squander a second opportunity to stem the disease.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, told reporters that certain countries had not marshalled their resources quickly enough.

He said: "We have been saying to the world that the window of opportunity is narrowing and the time to act was actually more than a month ago, two months ago.

"But we still believe that there is opportunity. I think we squandered the first window of opportunity. This is a second opportunity which we should not squander and do everything to suppress and control this virus, he added.

The WHO chief is to join a summit of G20 leaders on Thursday to discuss the outbreak and to raise issues such as funding.

On Wednesday, the WHO also said that countries that had enforced lockdowns needed to identify new cases and to do all they could to suppress and control the virus.

The world's biggest lockdown began in India at midnight on Tuesday local time.

Its 1.3 billion citizens have been asked by President Narendra Modi to comply with the restrictions for a minimum of 21 days.

According to Reuters, 470,800 people have tested positive for the disease and 21,221 have died as a result of it.
Supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables in Europe could dwindle, suppliers say, as the coronavirus pandemic hampers the global movement of produce and of people needed to gather crops.

Governments are looking at ways to ease any shortage, including green lanes to allow fresh produce to move quickly across EU borders.

A shadow army of harvesters could be recruited and travel rules for migrant workers loosened.

Workers being prevented from travelling to farms in Africa and the grounding of flights and a shortage of lorry drivers are all starting to affect the usual plentiful supplies.

In the UK, farmers are working on plans to hire more pickers. A National Farmers Union (NFU) spokesman told The Independent it was working with the government to consider schemes such as recruiting university students and people who had lost their jobs in the coronavirus crisis to pick fresh produce, with migrant numbers down.

Europes supermarkets say they are still receiving most produce, but in Kenya, a major supplier of green beans and peas to Europe, half of the sectors workers have been sent home on mandatory leave because orders cannot be shipped.

Their [European] stocks are being depleted by the day, said Okisegere Ojepat, chief executive of the Fresh Produce Consortium of Kenya, which represents more than 200 growers and exporters.

Those planes that are flying are charging more. Operators have tripled the price per kg of produce in the past two weeks, said Hosea Machuki, head of the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya, representing 117 growers and exporters.

Shipments from South Africa are also becoming tougher, with the country beginning a 21-day lockdown this week.

We were in reasonably good shape until earlier this week but now things are becoming very difficult, said Hans Muylaert-Gelein, managing director of Fruits Unlimited, which exports to the UK. More flights are being grounded so I expect there are going to be disruptions.

He said even longer-lasting produce such as citrus fruit, which is normally transported by sea, could be stranded because of a shortage of shipping containers resulting from Chinas shutdown.

Oranges and lemons, the old ambassadors of vitamin C, are in high demand, he said.

A shortage of migrant workers also threatens to disrupt production at suppliers including Spain, the biggest exporter of fruit and vegetables in the EU.

Some 16,000 Moroccan seasonal workers, mostly women, were expected to arrive in the Huelva region in Spain to pick strawberries and red fruits. But less than half had made it by 12 March, as Morocco closed its borders to passenger traffic, according to a Moroccan job promotion agency. The countrys lockdown is due to last until 20 April.

Recommended How storing your food can help to avoid coronavirus panic buying

Farmers and unions in Spain said the production, processing and export of fruit and veg was still going smoothly.

In the UK, the NFU said that with restaurants closed, it was also pressing to allow those supplies to be redirected to stores, a spokesman said.

He added: British farmers are continuing to work around the clock to produce food for the nation in these exceptional circumstances and we are seeing the importance of a robust and secure domestic food supply chain.

However, due to significant disruption in the hospitality and out-of-home sector we are beginning to see farmers who supply them become affected by the disruption. For example, some farmers supplying this market have had prices cut and heard that payments will take longer to arrive.

A spokeswoman for Tesco said she could not comment specifically on fruit and vegetables but in general there had been a surge in demand and there had been some empty shelves as a result.

We would ask our customers to buy only what they need so that there is enough for everyone, she said in a statement.

Additional reportting by Reuters
TDT | Manama

Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) expressed solidarity with Bahrains efforts to combat the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) with the company introducing numerous Safety initiatives across the plant and various departments as early as January 2020. Alba said it is holding COVID-19 awareness sessions for employees and contractors by Alba Health Care team regularly via video-messaging and online platforms.

Other key measures include sanitisation of different departments and shop-floor areas, social distance markings, distribution of protective kits comprising gloves and masks as well as hand sanitizers, increasing hand sanitiser dispenser units across the Company, providing only take-away or delivery service from its canteens and sharing the governments directives and news regularly via different channels.

Alba, on 23 March 2020, announced remote working for all employees, in particular women and senior staff. Employees and contractors were also invited to join Albas volunteering team, which is part of TEAM Bahrain, to help fight the spread of COVID-19. Alba has over 500 volunteers to-date.

Commenting, Albas Chief Executive Officer, Ali Al Baqali said: The health and safety of our human assets, employees and contractors, are paramount to Alba. We will go above and beyond for the Safety of our people to maintain smooth operations. We also remain committed to ensuring the sustainable supply of our raw materials along with delivering our products to clients across the globe.
Paris, 3/26/2020

Consolidated growth of 29% up sharply thanks to France;

up sharply thanks to France; Creation of a four-solution portfolio through R&D and acquisitions;

through R&D and acquisitions; International operating capacity by strong indirect sales network;

by strong indirect sales network; Robust balance sheet capable of absorbing growth investments;

capable of absorbing growth investments; Strategic plan objectives confirmed.

WALLIX (Euronext - ALLIX), a software company providing cyber-security solutions and the European specialist in privileged access management, today announces its 2019 results.

Jean-Noel de Galzain, Chairman of the WALLIX GROUP Management Board, said: "In 2019, WALLIX resumed its steady growth in France and secured the resources required to step up its worldwide development over the coming years. We have expanded teams and the partner network, broadened our geographical scope and made our first-ever acquisitions, which will bolster our portfolio of cybersecurity solutions.

As 2020 kicks off, WALLIX is therefore in prime position to scale up and maintain the trajectory outlined in its Ambition 21 strategic plan. We're also keeping a very close eye on the economic consequences of the current Covid-19 health crisis. Teams are at the ready to support our clients' essential operations and the additional protections required to ensure the success of their business continuity plans, through the widespread introduction of remote working solutions. This crisis demonstrates the importance of cybersecurity solutions in preventing a digital pandemic and protecting corporate assets.

Although investments inevitably weighed on profitability in 2019, WALLIX's rigorous management has enabled it to handle the current situation with confidence, maintain a customer-focused approach and secure the resources required to ensure its development through organic growth and acquisitions.

Flanked by its network of partners, WALLIX has also joined in the war effort by helping prepare for the reconstruction that will strengthen and secure the digital foundation of our entire society."

000, French GAAP* 2018 2019 Turnover 12,640 16,335 Other operating income

(capitalized production, subsidies, etc.) 4,047 4,196 Total operating income 16,687 20,531 Total operating expenses (19,969) (27,369) o/w Other operating expenses (5,425) (7,158) o/w Payroll (11,678) (16,304) o/w Depreciation, amortization and provisions (2,148) (3,317) Operating profit/(loss) (3,281) (6,837) Net financial income/(expense) (5) (5) Non-recurring income/(expense) - (2) Tax (3) - Net profit/(loss) (3,288) (6,845)

Strong growth and increase in recurring business

WALLIX posted 2019 turnover of 16.3 million, up 29% year-on-year thanks to the symbolic crossing of the 1,000-customer mark.

France posted a strong performance with sales up 36%, benefiting from the renewed ANSSI certification for its WALLIX Bastion solution and its capacity to forge alliances with major partners, including Atos, Orange Cyberdefense and Schneider Electric, and position its solutions within global offerings with very high value-added.

In the international segment (up 18%), WALLIX developed its distribution network considerably by forming ties with strategic partners in priority regions, representing a major step towards achieving its medium-term goals. The Group also hired 21 new employees during the year.

Revenues from recurring business comprising maintenance, subscriptions and the recurring portion of managed services increased sharply, up 40% year-on-year. Recurring turnover now represents over 39% (up 3 points year-on-year) and is expected to benefit from the development of new SaaS offers and subscriptions (managed services).

WALLIX also boosted its 2019 sales growth by strengthening its offering. The Group made its first two acquisitions - technology marvels Trustelem and Simarks - which bring with them a cutting-edge offer in privileged access management (PAM) and extended to other cybersecurity segments, where demand for User identity management (IDaaS[1], the IAM[2] market segment with the most potential) is growing rapidly.

Increase in operating expenses in line with the strategic plan

The Group's investments to bolster its offering and expand its international footprint naturally resulted in an increase in operating expenses. Operating expenses were up 37%, mainly due to the increase in staff costs (45 new hires during the year) and in depreciation and amortization charges on products reaching commercial maturity, reflecting the steady pace of R&D. The operating loss ultimately came to 6.8 million, up from 3.3 million in 2018, reflecting the ramp-up of the 2021 Ambition plan. Given the company's healthy balance sheet, Group share was equal to the operating loss of 6.8 million.

Robust balance sheet maintained following acquisitions

WALLIX generated operating cash outflow of 3.1 million, kept under control thanks to a positive change in working capital (up 900,000). Investment cash outflows amounted to 6.2 million, including 2.4 million relating to the Simarks and Trustelem acquisitions and 500,000 in share buybacks. Excluding these operations, recurring capital expenditure was kept under control at 3.4 million, compared to 3.2 million in 2018, with a focus on R&D to develop new offers. As of December 31, 2019, the Group had free cash flow of 29.3 million, net cash of 25.7 million, and shareholders' equity of 32.2 million.

Ambitions confirmed

The Group's achievements in 2019 have laid the groundwork for strong medium-term growth, in line with its strategic plan.

In France, the ramp-up of framework agreements resulted in 2019 turnover of 3.7 million and represent 2020 sales potential of some 8 million. Worldwide, the Group is aiming to gain a foothold on 80% of its target markets, up from 60% in 2019, and will draw on its solid network of partners to further its commercial reach.

In the short term, disruptions appear inevitable during the epidemic. The company has implemented a business continuity plan involving the widespread roll-out of remote office solutions in order to protect its employees. Although WALLIX hasn't recorded any order cancellations to date, it is anticipating deployment delays.

The widespread roll-out of remote work solutions in order to comply with lockdown orders in France has made secure access to sensitive corporate data even more vital, and highlights the essential nature of WALLIX's easy-to-deploy software solutions. As such, and in order to prevent Covid-19 from generating a digital pandemic, the Group has decided to make WALLIX Bastion remote access licenses available free of charge during the lockdown.

Thanks to its new, comprehensive offering, an enhanced sales network, solid cash position and high-growth market, WALLIX has confirmed its ambition to rapidly position itself as a leading European cyber-security provider.

About WALLIX

WALLIX is a cybersecurity software vendor dedicated to defending and fostering organizations' success and renown against the cyberthreats they are facing. For over a decade, WALLIX has strived to protect companies, public organizations, as well as service providers' most critical IT and strategic assets against data breaches. Founded in 2003, WALLIX is the first European cybersecurity software vendor to be publicly traded in 2015 (EuroNext ALLIX code).

WALLIX accompanies more than 1 000 worldwide companies and organizations on a day-to-day basis. WALLIX is being named among the PAM leaders in the Product categories of the KuppingerCole 2018 Leadership Compass report. In 2017 and 2018, WALLIX was included in Forbes France's Futur40 ranking of fastest-growing listed companies.

For more information, visit the WALLIX website at: www.wallix.com

www.wallix.com | info@wallix.com



ACTUS Finance & Communication

Investor Relations

Theo MARTIN

Tel. 01 53 67 36 75 / wallix@actus.fr



Press Relations Finance

Nicolas BOUCHEZ

Tel. 01 53 67 36 74 / nbouchez@actus.fr

Agence MCC

Martine Camilotti

Tel. 06 60 38 20 02 / martine.camilotti@agencemcc.com





[1] Identity as a service

[2] Identity and Access Management

------------------------

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Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba drew the attention of Romanian Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu to the inadmissibility of Russia's attempts to ease sanctions amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

"I would like to draw your attention to Russia's urges to ease sanctions under the pretext of coronavirus pandemic and the associated global economic distress. These urges are irrelevant and inadmissible. It is very important that no one can take the advantage of the current difficult situation to achieve political goals. Sanctions have been imposed as a result of Russia's aggression against Ukraine, and the coronavirus pandemic has nothing to do with this, Kuleba said in a telephone conversation with Aurescu, the Ministrys press service informs.

Romania's Foreign Minister assured his Ukrainian counterpart that he agreed with the approach to maintaining sanctions against Russia.

Aurescu confirmed that Romania firmly supported Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as its integration into the EU and NATO. He also assured of support for Ukraine in the international organizations and formats Romania is a party to. Bogdan Aurescu also invited Dmytro Kuleba to pay a visit to Romania.

The Foreign Minister expressed his gratitude to the Romanian colleague for the unwavering support to Ukraine.

The ministers also discussed the importance of protecting the rights of the Romanian minority in Ukraine.

ol
Harpreet Bajwa And Vineet Upadhyay By

Express News Service

CHANDIGARH/DEHRADUN: At a time when the coronavirus has forced people indoors, good Samaritans in various states are coming to lend a helping the hand to the poor, who have been rendered jobless, with food and protection against the disease.

A Sikh Charity Khalsa Aid is providing hygiene kits to the poor and needy in Punjab, while Kanhaiya Khewariya of Haridwar and Mahendra Adhikari of Haldwani are making arrangements to feed daily wage labourers and the shelterless.

Amarpreet Singh, director (Asia-Pacific) of Khalsa Aid, said, We felt there is a great need to take hygiene to the poor. Our teams prepared hygiene kits consisting of alcohol-based sanitizers, two soap bars, three to four masks with dos and donts literature to be given to the poor. Some 20,000 kits have been distributed in Jalandhar, Batala, Patiala, Barnala, Amritsar and Bhatinda.

Khalsa Aid teams are visiting the slums, labourers clusters and explaining how to beat the virus.

They are planning to deliver another 50,000 kits to the poor, besides full-body gears to doctors, nurses and para-medical personnel who are working at the frontline. Some 2,000 full-body suits have been delivered, Singh said.

Meanwhile, Haridwar-based . businessman Khewariya has started a full-time kitchen to feed at least 1,000 poor in Dehradun. I will do this for 21 days as the poor are hungry, he said. Khewariya is adding to the government support systems in 13 districts to feed the poor. In Haldwani, Mahendra Adhikari is distributing pulses, rice, flour and vegetables among the poor. Many just cannot afford it. They dont have the money, said the businessman.
Gov. Tom Wolf, in what seemed like an effort to change a dialogue with businesses that has been mostly about forced closures in recent days, announced the availability Wednesday of $60 million in state zero- or low-interest loans for firms with 100 or fewer employees to help them recover from economic damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic and the states resulting restrictions on commerce.

Wolf said the new COVID-19 Working Capital Assistance Program, is a down payment on his pledge to do what he can from Harrisburg to help those businesses recover.

I vowed to save Pennsylvanians lives, and then save their livelihoods, Wolf said.

Under the new program being run through the Pennsylvania Industrial Development Authority, loans of up to $100,000 per qualifying firm would be available to provide working capital to any business who applies through a certified economic development agency.

The money could be used, based on common definitions of working capital, to cover cash-flow needs for bills owed, wages or taxes due. It can not, according to the program guidelines, be used for physical renovations or investment in new machinery or equipment.

There are no job retention or creation requirements.

So far, much of the burden of responsibility (for stopping the spread of coronavirus) has been borne by business owners, Wolf said at a mid-day press conference. Weve had to close bars, restaurants and stores because the virus quickly and easily spreads in crowds. The employees of these businesses have lost their income, and many business owners are wondering if theyre going to be able to survive.

Loan amounts would be pegged to shortfalls from COVID-19 impacts, including forced closures. Applicants will also have to document how they plan to use the loan proceeds to finance business operations.

The federal government may be on the cusp of offering a more lucrative assistance program in its economic rescue program.

One component of that $2 trillion plan is federally guaranteed loans for small businesses that pledge not to lay off their workers. The loans would be made available during an emergency period ending June 30, and would be forgiven if the employer continued to pay workers for the duration of the coronavirus crisis.

Business owners will have to mine the details of both programs as they become available to see which is the best fit.

Wolf called the state program a step in the right direction, and then folded it into a renewed call for all Pennsylvanians to heed his administrations constant admonitions to stay home as much as possible to stop the spread of the highly contagious virus.

Its going to help provide a little peace of mind to hundreds of small business owners and their employees, but Im not going to pretend that its enough to cover the devastation that COVID19 is bringing to our Commonwealth, so I will continue to develop ways to assist Pennsylvanias business community as well as our workforce, Wolf said.

But I also need every Pennsylvanian to step up and do their part. The best way we can preserve our economic future is by minimizing the spread of COVID 19 right now.

Pennsylvania now has confirmed 1,127 cases of the coronavirus, with 276 new cases reported, the state Department of Health said earlier Wednesday. The virus has now been found in 44 of Pennsylvanias 67 counties. The new figures also mark the largest one-day increase to date.

There have been 11 deaths.

Wolf earlier Wednesday expanded standing stay-at-home orders to Lehigh and Northampton counties Wednesday. Ten counties in total with a combined population of more than 6 million - about half the states total - are now under stay-at-home orders, including the Philadelphia region and the Pittsburgh area. The order also includes Monroe and Erie counties.

Wolf has drawn heavy fire in recent days - but also praise in some quarters - for his call last week for all non-life sustaining businesses to close across the state. Wolf gave police agencies the authority to begin enforcing the order as of 8 a.m. Monday.

Closures that have already occurred led to a single-week record last week in new filings for unemployment benefits.

Business owners interested in the new program should contact the state Department of Community and Economic Development or their local Certified Economic Development Organizations for application information.
The sign in front of the Feast of Justice food pantry at St. John's Lutheran Church in Mayfair offers encouragement as people await food. The pantry has changed the way it distributes food, offering pre-filled bags rather than allowing clients to enter the pantry. Read more

Many food pantries supplied by the hunger-relief agency Philabundance are facing dual crises: Growing unemployment is causing need to spike, and at the same time, supplies are dwindling because panic buying in supermarkets has left the stores with little food to donate.

Adding to the difficulties, the corps of mostly senior citizens who help run pantries has been decimated, not by the coronavirus but the fear of it, resulting in at least 70 of 350 pantries supplied by Philabundance shutterering.

On top of that, Philabundance on Thursday morning closed its two main buildings in South and North Philadelphia for deep cleaning over three days after executives discovered that an employee had been in contact with a person who tested positive for the coronavirus. A second employee, they also learned, lives with a person who has a fever but whose COVID-19 status has not yet been determined. Its not clear what effect the closures will have.

The unprecedented combination of soaring demand, locked pantries, and decreasing food reserves is stressing an already-taxed system that feeds the hungry in the Delaware Valley. Prior to the coronavirus, Philabundance said it supplied food for about 90,000 people a week.

Its ironic, some hunger fighters noted, that residents of poverty-plagued neighborhoods that cant attract supermarkets are being harmed by hoarders from better-off areas who are denuding shelves of items typically left over and donated to those of meager means.

 READ MORE: As grocery deliveries surge due to the coronavirus, the most vulnerable have to wait

This domino effect is nothing like weve seen before, said Stefanie Arck-Baynes, communications director at Philabundance. Were also losing our older volunteer drivers that deliver food. And part of whats frightening is we havent hit the worst of the emergency yet.

Normally, Philabundance distributes 26 million pounds of food in a year, 10 million of which are donated by supermarkets like Acme.

Any products still good to eat but not bought in our stores are given to Philabundance, said Dana Ward, communications manager for Acme Markets, whose corporate headquarters is in Malvern. "But theres a much smaller amount of donations we can give now because people are buying us out of house and home.

At this point, we dont know when well be back in a position to donate food.

Complicating matters, Philabundance has turned away donated food from the public out of concern that the products could be contaminated by COVID-19, Arck-Baynes said. The agency is still accepting monetary donations, she added.

Rare good news

In some rare good news, George Matysik, executive director of Share Food Program, the Hunting Park food distribution site that gives out more than 30 million pounds of food a year to 500 regional pantries, said he believes his agency can sustain and perhaps surpass its normal giving.

Our main source of food comes from federal government commodities, Matysik said. We get only 2% to 3% of our food from supermarkets.

Share feeds 700,000 people a month, he said, including 305,000 students eating school lunches, which Share distributes.

 READ MORE: Free Philly school meals will now be offered at district, charter, PHA sites only, with limited hours

Matysik added that, like Philabundance, Share has lost some pantries. To mitigate that, Matysik has teamed with new partners that never served as pantry sites before: Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Association Coalition (SEAMAAC) in South Philadelphia, which helps immigrants, and Crest Auto Store in Overbrook, working with Overbrook West Neighbors.

I think well withstand increased need without question, Matysik said.

Thats vital assurance given the difficulties some pantries are facing.

I cant open my pantry or distribute food because its not safe for me as an older cancer patient, said Thelma Kennerly, 68, who normally runs a meal service and pantry at Devereux United Methodist Church in North Philadelphia. "But that means my people cant get their food. Folks are bum-rushing the supermarkets, which arent donating to the other pantries my people could go to.

April will be a scary time. Thats when the scarcity will hit."

 READ MORE: How to help, or get help, in Philly during coronavirus

Its little-known that most of the pantries in this area "are run by people my age and up, said Derek Felton, 69, in charge of Fresh Start pantry in West Philadelphia.

Pantries were never meant to serve as day-to-day food suppliers when they were begun in the 1970s. Yet, what started as a stopgap effort to help strapped families has morphed into an informal but crucial system that literally keeps the Philadelphia area alive.

And now that structure is endangered as churches also close their pantries because of the coronavirus.

I really dont know what people will do for food, said Lorraine Beaton, 86, who runs the now-shut Harambe Baptist pantry in Germantown. Our pastor closed our church, and its a time when the community really needs us.

Another concern is that coronavirus warnings are scaring the elderly out of shopping for food, said Tanya Sen, community nutrition program manager for the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger. We have to figure this out quickly before people start panicking.

Around 20% of Philadelphias 300,000 residents ages 60 and older are at risk for hunger, according to Allen Glicksman, director of research and evaluation for the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging.

Outrageously dedicated seniors

Problems are accruing even at the larger pantries in the area that are remaining open but are losing precious senior volunteers.

Our pantry is run by outrageously dedicated seniors, and Im concerned for their health," said Patrick Walsh, pantry manager at Marthas Choice Marketplace in Norristown, run by Catholic Social Services. We ask the vulnerable to wait this out at home.

 READ MORE: As the coronavirus spreads, staving off hunger is a challenge in Kensington, Philadelphias poorest neighborhood

The trouble is, he added, clients now losing their jobs are coming in here at double and triple the normal rate.

Usually, the pantry is frequented by 1,000 families in a month. But, Walsh said, we saw 700 just last week. And with supermarkets selling out, were really getting hit.

The story is much the same at Feast of Justice in Mayfair, one of the citys largest pantries, accustomed to serving 5,500 clients a year at its site in St. Johns Lutheran Church. Like many other pantries, Feast of Justice has changed the way it gives out food, offering premade bags rather than allowing clients to congregate inside.

Im trying to figure out which pantries are still operating alongside us here in Northeast Philadelphia, and its amazing to see how many arent, said Pastor Tricia Neale, who runs Feast of Justice. Chaos is increasing. I wake up some days and ask, Really, can we still do this?

 READ MORE: Restless and eager to help, residents in the Philadelphia region are joining volunteer groups aiding coronavirus response

Neales staff of 50 senior volunteers is down to 25. At the same time, she has to continue to push out 10,000 pounds of food a week  more, now that unemployment threatens to reach all-time highs.

Theres been a notable uptick in the number of families coming, said Neale, 47, a married mother of three and a former biomedical engineer who gave up a high-paying job at the Mayo Clinic to feed those in poverty.

Now shes feeling overwhelmed. I pray this virus does not take me down, she said. "But Im holding up poorly. Im exhausted.

"Food from our grocery partners through Philabundance is really drying up. But families keep knocking at the door. I have to have a level of trust that Gods got this.

Buying beef

Not awaiting divine intervention, Ken Ross, who runs the Honey Brook food pantry in Chester County, was at a nearby BJs Wholesale Club buying ground beef and bread on Wednesday to feed his clients.

Grocers who normally give to us canceled a bunch of our orders, Ross said, citing over-shopping by others. "The food supply chain is totally disrupted.

A month ago, he received 65 boxes of free food from a grocer he declined to name. The other day, he got three.

Hoarding, Ross said. Theres nothing left. So I have to take peoples donations and buy the food. But earlier this month, we had to cancel our fund-raiser.

Hunger fighters see this as only the beginning of troubles, said Suzan Neiger Gould, executive director of Manna on Main Street, a social-service agency in Lansdale, Montgomery County, that runs a food pantry.

I have seen the reductions in supermarket donations, I am starting to see the increases in need as peoples last paychecks come in, she said. "We are being asked to do things we are not prepared to do.

If this continues for months, it will be beyond us.

Staff writer Samantha Melamed contributed to this article.
Readers hoping to buy Illinois Tool Works Inc. (NYSE:ITW) for its dividend will need to make their move shortly, as the stock is about to trade ex-dividend. Investors can purchase shares before the 30th of March in order to be eligible for this dividend, which will be paid on the 15th of April.

Illinois Tool Works's next dividend payment will be US$1.07 per share. Last year, in total, the company distributed US$4.28 to shareholders. Last year's total dividend payments show that Illinois Tool Works has a trailing yield of 3.0% on the current share price of $143.53. If you buy this business for its dividend, you should have an idea of whether Illinois Tool Works's dividend is reliable and sustainable. We need to see whether the dividend is covered by earnings and if it's growing.

See our latest analysis for Illinois Tool Works

Dividends are typically paid out of company income, so if a company pays out more than it earned, its dividend is usually at a higher risk of being cut. Illinois Tool Works is paying out an acceptable 53% of its profit, a common payout level among most companies. Yet cash flows are even more important than profits for assessing a dividend, so we need to see if the company generated enough cash to pay its distribution. Fortunately, it paid out only 49% of its free cash flow in the past year.

It's encouraging to see that the dividend is covered by both profit and cash flow. This generally suggests the dividend is sustainable, as long as earnings don't drop precipitously.

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

NYSE:ITW Historical Dividend Yield March 26th 2020

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Stocks in companies that generate sustainable earnings growth often make the best dividend prospects, as it is easier to lift the dividend when earnings are rising. If business enters a downturn and the dividend is cut, the company could see its value fall precipitously. Fortunately for readers, Illinois Tool Works's earnings per share have been growing at 11% a year for the past five years. Illinois Tool Works is paying out a bit over half its earnings, which suggests the company is striking a balance between reinvesting in growth, and paying dividends. This is a reasonable combination that could hint at some further dividend increases in the future.

Story continues

Another key way to measure a company's dividend prospects is by measuring its historical rate of dividend growth. Illinois Tool Works has delivered an average of 13% per year annual increase in its dividend, based on the past ten years of dividend payments. Both per-share earnings and dividends have both been growing rapidly in recent times, which is great to see.

Final Takeaway

Is Illinois Tool Works an attractive dividend stock, or better left on the shelf? We like Illinois Tool Works's growing earnings per share and the fact that - while its payout ratio is around average - it paid out a lower percentage of its cash flow. There's a lot to like about Illinois Tool Works, and we would prioritise taking a closer look at it.

With that in mind, a critical part of thorough stock research is being aware of any risks that stock currently faces. In terms of investment risks, we've identified 2 warning signs with Illinois Tool Works and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

A common investment mistake is buying the first interesting stock you see. Here you can find a list of promising dividend stocks with a greater than 2% yield and an upcoming dividend.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
The current crisis has forced the government to announce measures to ensure that India becomes self-sustaining for any kind of bulk drug.

The government says India will not depend on any other country for vital key ingredients for drugs within six years, reports Sheela Bhatt.

IMAGE: Patients consult with a doctor at the Civil Hospital, Lucknow, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Photograph: Nand Kumar/PTI Photo

The coronavirus crisis has suddenly raised national drug security at the top of India's national priorities.

Due to its relaxed environmental restrictions and cheaper cost of production, China has produced cheaper raw materials known as active pharmaceuticals ingredients, API, and key starting materials, KSM, to make vital medicines.

For the last 25-plus years Indian drugs manufacturers have been increasingly dependent on China for raw materials to pare the cost of their final products.

A top government source reveals that a shipment carrying API bulk drugs arrived from China a few days ago, indicating that Chinese API manufacturing firms have restarted production sooner than expected.

However, the current crisis has forced the government, a bit late in the day, to announce measures to ensure that India becomes self-sustaining for any kind of bulk drugs.

The government claims that India will not depend on any other country for vital key ingredients for drugs within six years.

Dharmesh Shah, chairman and managing director, BDR pharma, one of the biggest cancer drugs manufacturers, says India has 60% drug security currently.

In the late 1990s, says Shah, Indian drug researchers and technologists were hired by China for 10-fold salaries to work on technologies to make API and KSM drugs.

Eventually, adds Shah, India became dependent on China for around 30% of the supply of KSM and around 20% of API.

"We Indians are responsible for where China is in the drugs industry today," states Shah.

His point: India was always strong on API production and ahead of China, but many years ago, a few Indian technocrats went to China for small gains and taught them forward integration to make API and also taught the Chinesee regulatory aspects.

Today not just India but most countries of the world, small and big, depend on China for bulk drugs for only one reason.

Chinese bulk drugs are 20% cheaper than Indian bulk drugs.

Not only does the Chinese government provide a lax environment and pollution management, but also cheap electricity as result of which Chinese drug manufacturers have been successfully attempting to control the global market.

Notwithstanding the increasing Chinese stranglehold on bulk drugs, Shah says India is fortunate to have the knowhow and capacity to produce enough drugs needed for the covid-19 crisis right now.

Even though dependence on China is decades old, India started thinking in terms of 'drug security' three years ago.

The government formed a task force on drugs which discussed in detail about 53 APIs/KSMs, including 26 fermentation-based bulk drugs, with all stakeholders.

Drug manufacturers wanted to develop all capacities to produce inhouse KSMs, but for which they need special zones with a good treatment plant and common utilities to bring down costs.

Given the current urgency over covid-19, the government has accepted many suggestions of the task force and announced a policy to manufacture bulk drugs and medical devices.

Following the unexpected crisis, the Union Cabinet approved on March 21 a package of Rs 13,760 crores to ensure that India does not depend on imports of any essential raw materials for medical emergencies of any kind.

Mansukh Mandaviya, minister of state for chemicals, pharmaceuticals and fertilisers, told a press conference that India aims to achieve 'national security in drugs' in six years's time.

The government's announcement, in a nutshell, is to give 20% incentive in various forms to overcome competition from China. Three bulk drugs park will be given a grant of Rs 1,000 crore each.

Similar is the case for medical devices. Post-covid-19 the government has announced a medical devices park.

Embarrassingly for India, it imports 85% of its modern medical devices, ranging from advanced X-ray machines to pacemakers to ventilators and dialysis machines, worth more than Rs 38,000 crores.

Again a little late in the day, on March 21, the Union Cabinet announced a Rs 3,420 crore package to boost the domestic manufacture of medical devices.

If bulk drugs and medical devices are made largely in India, then the country can save more than Rs 190,000 crores every year.

Currently the Indian pharma industry is approximately worth Rs 3 lakh crore.

India's domestic drugs consumption is more than Rs 1 lakh crore. Pharmaceuticals are top traded Indian items, with 12,000 drugs manufacturers including 56 giant pharma companies.

However, due to market competition and logistics issues, 40 per cent of the installed capacity in the drugs manufacturing industry is under-utilised.

Covid-19 has given a wake-up call to Indian industry and the government.
As the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread in Oregon, and residents continue to hunker down at home, people are finding solace in walks or runs at local parks and trails close to home.

On Monday, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced a new executive order that bans all non-essential travel, but still allows people to leave their homes to get outside for exercise or a breath of fresh air.

Many parks and trails around Oregon have already closed  including all state parks and many popular trails in the Columbia River Gorge  but parks in Portland and the surrounding metropolitan area are allowed to remain open, as long as people strictly maintain six feet of social distance.

As people begin to abide by the latest change in social norms, new behaviors are necessary to ensure the public health and safety of the community. For those venturing outside their homes during the outbreak, here are six tips to help you keep six feet from everyone else.

1. Make sure you know how far six feet actually is

How far is six feet? It may be hard to estimate that out of thin air, but a few common objects might help. Most dog leashes are six feet long, so just make sure nobody gets between you and your pup. An average bicycle is also just a little less than six feet long. Most kayaks are 10 feet long, so if you imagine yourself kayaking around a park, you have about five feet to the front of your boat.

2. Stick close to home

Youre far less likely to come into close contact with other people if youre just walking through your neighborhood or local park, compared to a popular hiking trail away from home. Trails tend to attract crowds, and it can be especially difficult to maintain six feet of social distance with so many people cramped onto a narrow trail.

3. Slow down, step back

Awareness and consideration are key. If you find yourself coming up behind a slower walker, and theres not six feet to pass safely, slow down instead. If somebody is getting too close to you, step back to allow enough space. Imagine a bubble that extends six feet around you and do everything you can to keep other people outside of it. Of course, you can still be friendly about it. A smile, a wave or a pardon me goes a long way these days.

Barbara Walker Crossing

4. Dont gather in groups

Gov. Browns executive order prohibits gatherings of any size, if six feet of social distance cannot be maintained. And while it sounds like thats doable in a park, youre better off not taking the risk. It can be easy to start to bend the rules once youre hanging out with friends, and it could encourage other people to start doing the same. Walking with people from your own household, however, is OK.

5. Try not to touch anything

The coronavirus can survive on objects for several days, and that applies to several commonly touched surfaces outdoors. Playgrounds are closed, so no one should be playing on equipment, no matter how tempting it might be. Also consider railings, fences, signs and trash cans. Then there are public restrooms (the ones that are still open), which are only as clean as the last person who used them. Keep your hands to yourself and use the bathroom before you go out. And always make a habit of washing your hands when you return home.

6. If you cant maintain social distance, just dont go at all

This comes directly from Gov. Browns order, which says that people are prohibited from engaging in outdoor activities where it is not possible to maintain appropriate social distancing. Even if youve washed your hands, even if youre super careful, if you cant stay six feet away from other people, just dont go at all.

--Jamie Hale; jhale@oregonian.com; 503-294-4077; @HaleJamesB

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Two employees of Tesla, the electric vehicle company founded by Elon Musk, have tested positive for coronavirus, multiple news outlets reported on Thursday, citing internal company email.

The two staffers were working from home for nearly 2 weeks, and not symptomatic when they were in the office, the internal Tesla email states.

Both are quarantined at home, and recovering well, says the company-wide memo obtained by Bloomberg News.

Excerpt from Bloomberg News:

Tesla didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on the memo, which doesn't specify which office the employees worked in. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk last week capitulated to pressure from police and county health officials to suspend production at Tesla's lone U.S. assembly plant in California. The state has confirmed more than 3,100 coronavirus cases, trailing only New York and New Jersey. Tesla kept the factory open for several days despite shelter-in-place orders first made by San Francisco-area counties and then the governor. While the company said internally that its factory was an essential business, local officials publicly said otherwise.

Tesla told some employees Thurs morning that two workers had tested positive for coronavirus. It marks the first confirmed cases at the automaker. Not all workers were informed. One person who works from the Fremont factory says they did not get an email. https://t.co/lxcLNGrFgm  Ryan Mac  (@RMac18) March 26, 2020

Two Tesla employees have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to an internal email https://t.co/IIGf2HaT1K  Bloomberg (@business) March 26, 2020

Two Tesla employees test positive for coronavirus: Business Insider https://t.co/dbDIkBNvja pic.twitter.com/oRjamfXaOf  Reuters Tech News (@ReutersTech) March 26, 2020

Tesla says two employees tested positive for coronavirus https://t.co/wHiOzpwzvQ pic.twitter.com/gyrOytpvuP  Automotive News (@Automotive_News) March 26, 2020

2 Tesla employees have tested positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus, according to an internal email. https://t.co/x1m3u7FAy7  CNBC (@CNBC) March 26, 2020
South African police have charged two men with attempted murder for allegedly continuing to go out after they tested positive for the coronavirus, exposing others to the infection.

Police minister Bheki Cele announced the charges on Wednesday during a press conference detailing the enforcement of an incomong lockdown meant to curb the spread of coronavirus.

If you break these laws of regulations you are six months in, or fined, or both, said Cele.

Two people have been charged already... who deliberately moved around after they were told not to, he warned.

So its not a fairytale to say the law will act and act very harsh on you. The first case was a 52-year old salon owner diagnosed with coronavirus on March 18 and instructed to quarantine for at least 14 days.

Police spokesperson Vish Naidoo said local officials raised the alert on Tuesday after the man was seen around the western city of Ladysmith, in KwaZulu-Natal province.

(He) allegedly continued with his business... and in doing so disregarded the instructions by a doctor, Naidoo said, adding that the man had since been arrested and taken to hospital.

The second charge was filed against a male tourist who tested positive for COVID-19 while on holiday at Kruger National Park.

Naidoo said the man ignored instructions to remain in his hotel and went to the nearby town of Saint Lucia, where he interacted with an unknown number of people.

South Africa has recorded the highest number of coronavirus infections on the continent, with 709 cases confirmed so far.

President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a 21-day lockdown after the number of infections multiplied six-fold in just eight days.

Only essential trips to grocery stores, pharmacies and medical appointments will be permitted during the lockdown, which will be enforced by army troops.

The simplest and best way to combat the spread of the coronavirus is STAY HOME, the police said in a statement on Wednesday.

It is exactly that stubborn behaviour that has caused us a national lockdown.
Prophet Daniel Adufori, Founder, Vibrant Faith Chapel Worldwide on Wednesday urged Ghanaians to trust in the Lord for his deliverance even in the battle against the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in the nation.



He said COVID-19 did not know boundaries or was a respecter of persons and had defied human policies in many developed countries hence the need to trust in God to heal the country and the world from the pandemic.



He said this through his Facebook handle as he transmitted live from his church in Dambai as part of the National Prayer and Fasting day declared by the President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Saturday, March 21 through his nations address.



Prophet Adufori said the Nation of Nenevi as recorded in the Bible called on the Lord through fasting and prayer and the Lord delivered them, so did the Jews in the Book of Easter call on the Lord through fasting and were delivered from death.



He said Psalm 91 assured believers of Gods divine intervention in times of plaques, epidemics and pestilence and would not neglect his nation Ghana in such a difficult moment.



Father your nation is looking up to you, he said.



The Prophet said the church was united in prayer and by that the nation should rest assured of Gods deliverance from COVID-19.



He, however, encouraged viewers and citizens to trust in the Lords deliverance, remain steadfast in Him as they observed preventive measures as prescribed by the World Health Organisation and directives given by the President of the republic to curtail the spread of the virus.



Various church platforms, media houses, individuals, were also observed streaming live prayer, worship, praises and reflective sections through their social media handles via Facebook.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Indian liquefied natural gas importers have declared force majeure on imports as a nationwide lockdown on the 1.3 billion-strong nation has slashed consumption of the fuel, Reuters reported, citing an unnamed source familiar with the situation.

India is among the largest importers of liquefied natural gas, as is China, where importers issued a force majeure on imports earlier this year, in the peak of the coronavirus outbreak.

This force majeure will immediately place additional pressure on already depressed gas prices, suffering the combination of excessive supply and subdued demand, pretty much like crude oil, except for the price war.

India had been the saving grace for the spot LNG market over the past month, buying the fuel when it was cheap, Reuters quoted an S&P Global Platts analyst as saying. Ira Joseph, head of global gas and power analytics, referred to India as the most aggressive, price-sensitive buyer out of the market.

Indeed, low gas prices were a bounty for mega importers, just as low oil prices prompted China and India to fill up their storage facilities. However, the demand collapse has put an end to that, and LNG prices, which in late January fell to the lowest in a decade, continued down, after a brief respite driven by increased buying from India.

Only fertiliser, power and refineries are running at parcel loads. Other local buyers have already issued force majeure so where should we sell LNG? Reuters source said.

Another source, a prominent Indian LNG importer, told Reuters that most of its clients have shut down because of the lockdown as their business does not qualify as essential commodities.

These developments, as expected, will cast a shadow on the future of LNG production projects at the planning stage, already uncertain because of the glut-driven gas price slump.

The Indian lockdown will be in effect for 21 days.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Tenancy groups are seeking a six month ban on evictions and no rent increases for months.

But landlords are in a bind, as their mortgage repayments to the banks are likely due, although some lenders have offered mortgage payment relief without lodging a bad credit notice.

The PM Scott Morrison indicated the resolution was "complicated."

It is an issue that goes back to Friday's national cabinet meeting.

More and more workers are losing shifts, or losing jobs so the prime minister announced that states would work on model rules to provide relief to tenants in hardship conditions.

On Sunday, the federal government moved to replace some of the income households have lost, temporarily doubling some social security payments and making grants to businesses.

It is not known how quickly these funds are adequately getting through given overloaded website systems.

Landlords who have insurance for loss of income have been told they to make a claim they would have to take the requisite steps for eviction.

Sydney academics have urged governments to implement a moratorium on evictions as long as the crisis lasts.

Similar changes have already been made overseas as a sudden loss of wages puts renters at risk of arrears.

Renters who miss a payment can face termination orders in about eight weeks.

A government-imposed moratorium on evictions for the duration of the crisis could be done through legislation, or through an emergency executive direction to authorised officers to stop evictions.

In the United States, many states and cities have suspended eviction proceedings against tenants.

Ireland has suspended evictions and temporarily frozen rent increases.

In the United Kingdom, renters in the private or social sector are to be protected from eviction.
India-born celebrity chef Floyd Cordoz died of complications from Covid-19 in New York City, the epicentre of the pandemic in the US, as authorities ramped up medical supplies in the city and asked those who left it recently to self-quarantine for 14 days.

Cordoz, the culinary director of Mumbais Bombay Canteen and NewYorks Tabla, died in a hospital where he had been under treatment since March 18. He had returned to the city from Mumbai earlier this month.

More than 800 people have died from Covid-19 in the US so far and some 60,000 people have tested positive. The surge in cases has prompted the WHO to warn that the US could potentially be the next epicentre of the outbreak.

New York City has been hit the hardest with more than 15,000 confirmed cases and nearly 200 deaths. Americas most populous city accounts for 56% of all US cases, 60% of all new cases and 31% of mortality.

As a consequence, the state of New York is the worst affected among the 50 states, with 30,811 confirmed cases and 285 deaths, followed by California. It is feared that, with 2,643 cases and 55 deaths, the West Coast state could be the next hot spot. Washington, another state on the West Coast, reported 2,469 cases and 123 deaths.

Were still on the way up the mountain, New York governor Andrew Cuomo said at his daily briefing on Wednesday. Both the NY state and New York City are facing an acute shortage of medical supplies including hospital beds and ventilators.

Cuomo has said the state needs upwards of 140,000 beds and currently has around 50,000 and is way short of ventilators. The government has sent four mobile hospitals with thousands of beds and is moving a US navy hospital ship also; likewise for ventilators, 4,000 on the way from the national stockpile.

New Yorks medical facilities are under unprecedented pressure with new coronavirus infections doubling every three days, Cuomo said. NYC hospitals have seen a 10-fold increase in positive cases, officials have said.

US authorities are now also focusing on preventing New Yorkers fleeing to safety elsewhere in the country and people who travelled to New York City recently from spreading the virus. For anyone in the New York metropolitan area who has travelled, our task force is encouraging you to monitor your temperature, be sensitive to symptoms, vice-president Mike Pence, who heads the Trump administrations coronavirus task force, said at a briefing. And we are asking anyone who has travelled out of the New York City metropolitan area to anywhere else in the country to self isolate for 14 days.

Two leading medical experts on the task force had first made that case at the briefing, citing high incidence of new cases and the danger of travellers and New Yorkers leaving city for their own safety, carrying it to other areas. And that there have been cases that suggested infected people have left the city.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and a member of the task force, added that self-isolation for these people was necessary because we dont want that to be another seeding point to the rest of the country, wherever they go.

Stay-at-home orders are in effect in 17 states, covering 175 million people - more than a third of the population of the US - to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.
Governor Whitmers prudent decision to ask Michigan residents to suspend activities not necessary to sustain or protect life reflects the type of courageous and compassionate leadership that places the health of our citizens above all other considerations.

The governors executive order is not a trade-off between the health of our citizens and the health of our economy. A healthy public enables a healthy workforce, healthy health systems, healthy small and large businesses and a healthy economy. It also requires a responsible and strong response from each of us as Michigan residents.

Perhaps you have already seen first-hand the ravaging impact of COVID-19. Or, like most of us, youre feeling tremendous anxiety of not knowing what will be the effect on the health of your loved ones.

Many are worried about how this situation will affect their own livelihoods. And theres widespread concern over the state of our economy with failing global markets and the impact on retirement savings and long-term employment.

Youre not alone.

Making sure we win this battle against COVID-19 requires traits that are always needed in difficult times, traits that Governor Whitmer exhibits  courage and compassion.

Over my career as a physician, health system administrator and university president, Ive seen up close how courage and compassion provide the strength and common purpose that are vital in persevering.

In these challenging times, a simple three-fold prescription can be very effective in relieving stress and anxiety and increase strength and productivity. We must take care of ourselves; we must take care of our loved ones; and, we must reach out to help our broader community.

First, take care of yourself by eating healthy foods, get enough sleep and get lots of exercise. Even with the current restriction to stay home, you are encouraged to get outside to exercise as long as you maintain a distance of six feet from other people. Start reading a new book or learn a new language on-line or try to gain a new skill. Download a meditation app or start keeping a daily gratitude journal, in which you track things for which you are grateful.

Second, keeping social distance does not mean that you must be distant socially. Stay in touch with friends and loved ones. Call, text, write, use social media and the Internet tools we have to reconnect with your grandmother or stay in touch with your college roommate!

Finally, do what you can do to support our communities. There are few times in our recent history when others have needed you more. People are isolated in their homes, unable to get food, medications, comfort, socialization, financial support, and love.

Parents must work from home with no child care and no relief; children have no one to tutor them or with whom to play; hospitals are beyond capacity and health care providers are working in dangerous circumstances, selflessly exposing themselves to COVID-19, while working to save lives.

At Oakland University, we initiated The Engagement and Mobilization team (TEAM), which coordinates relief efforts among OU volunteers, county agencies and nonprofits. Our volunteers provide crisis-line assistance, tutoring, babysitting and food to those in need. Volunteering is done only under strict supervision where the health and safety of volunteers and those they serve can be maintained.

Furthermore, we have offered the Oakland University campus as a potential site for COVID-19 testing and our residence halls, should there be a need to quarantine COVID-19 positive individuals.

As all of us face the unprecedented challenges from the spread of COVID-19, theres a pressing need for perspective, patience and persistence, especially with the frenzied media coverage and doomsday predictions.

During these past weeks, the way we work and live has changed dramatically. At a time when people around the world are isolated in their homes, remember that your acts of courage and compassion will help you through these challenging days and will ensure that our collective future will be secure.

Ora Hirsch Pescovitz is president of Oakland University. In the past, she has served as Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs and Health System CEO at the University of Michigan Health System; President/CEO, Riley Hospital for Children (Indiana); and, Senior Vice President and U.S. Medical Leader for Lilly Biomedicines, Eli Lilly.
A leap of 100,000 in the number of children living in poverty has been branded shocking, even before the coronavirus lockdown of the economy bites.

The increase, part of a 600,000 surge since the Conservatives came to power a decade ago, means 4.2 million youngsters in the UK  or 30 per cent  are living below the breadline.

Overall, the number of people living in poverty soared by 500,000 to 14.5 million in 2018-19, the highest total since the statistics were first collected in 2002.

The bleak figures follow years of criticism that George Osbornes austerity drive hit the poorest the hardest, with steep cuts to benefits for families, the disabled, the low-paid and the jobless.

We are facing a child poverty crisis, warned Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group  urging ministers to prevent the current crisis triggering a further increase in the months to come.

Recommended Pandemic poverty could spell disaster for single parents

Unless concerted action is taken now, this week's laid-off workers and their children will be adding to next year's poverty statistics.

Sam Royston, director of policy at the Childrens Society, warned the figures showed poverty was not just rising, but deepening with two-thirds if children now in severe hardship.

The current coronavirus crisis is likely to see this number continue to rise as parents face job losses and falls in earnings.

Becca Lyon, head of child poverty at Save the Children, said: Even before coronavirus, our country's safety net was failing too many children. Now there's a danger that even more children will fall through the net.

Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Show all 12 1 /12 Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Agnetha Septimus, Matthew Septimus, and children Ezra and Nora Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Husband and wife filmmakers, Claire Ince and Ancil McKain pose for a portrait for the series by Shutterstock Staff Photographer, Stephen Lovekin, shot around the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Khadijah Silver and son Eliot Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Anna Beth Rousakis and daughter Mary Rousakis Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Mike Pergola and Denise Pergola with children Henry, Jack, and Will Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Artist Shirley Fuerst Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Jean Davis and Danny Rosenthal, with children Simone, Naomi, and Leah Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Robert E Clark Jr Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Lisa Draho and Josh Zuckerman, with children Ruby and Ava Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Professor and activist Dr Kristin Lawler Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Tom Smith and Laura Ross, with daughters Caroline, Elizabeth, and Abigail Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Callie Lovekin and Lucas Lovekin Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock

And Margaret Greenwood, Labours shadow work and pensions secretary, said: These figures are shocking. After the four-year freeze of working-age benefits, poverty has increased and food bank use has soared.

The figures have been released in the year  2020  when Tony Blairs government pledged to abolish child poverty altogether, a vow put into legislation in 2010.

However, it was abolished by Iain Duncan Smith who called it an unsustainable commitment  as he prepared to make 12bn of further social security cuts.

The relative poverty measure incorporates people living on or below 60 per cent of the average household income in the UK, after housing costs have been paid.

The Child Poverty Action Group called for a modest increase in child benefit of 10 per week, arguing it would cut the numbers below the breadline by 5 percentage points.

Therese Coffey, the work and pensions secretary, insisted the government was wholly committed to supporting the lowest paid families, pointing to a higher national minimum wage and the end to the four-year benefits freeze.

All my efforts are currently focused on providing support to those affected by Covid-19, but we will not lose sight of our commitment to address and tackle the root causes to unleash potential, she said.
Japan has reportedly set up a vital task force as the government warned of a high risk of the coronavirus spread across the country. The task force was formed to handle the crisis. The economy minister, however, told the press that the administration was not thinking of declaring a state of emergency.

Japan had recorded over 1,314 mainland cases of COVID-19 as of March 26, in the afternoon, excluding the 712 cases that were detected on the Diamond Princess cruise liner docked off the coast in Yokohama, a local broadcaster reported. Over 45 fatalities have been confirmed in Japan, including 10 on the vessel, as per the reports.

Health Minister Katsunobu Kato told a press conference, after meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Economy Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura, that there was a high risk of the widespread of the disease. He added saying that he informed the prime Minister of the crisis impact in the weeks ahead. He urged the ministry to "proceed swiftly with setting up the government task force", he was quoted saying. He further confirmed that the government hadnt considered to declare a state of emergency yet.

Read: Japan And Skorea Markets Open Down, Taiwan Up

Read: Delayed Olympics Will Be 'testament To Defeat Of Virus': Japan PM

Special measures can be enacted

According to reports, the revised law in Japan would allow the prime minister to declare a state of emergency only when the disease poses a "grave danger" endangering the lives of several people, and if threatened brutal economic damage. Japan, although, had been facing the recession prior to the pandemic hit. A state of emergency granted the governors in hard-hit regions the power to make absolute decision to impose curfews, shutter facilities, and suspend any event with, or without consent when deemed necessary. Japan, however, has recorded a highest single-day jump in cases as of March 25.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told the press conference that by establishing the task force, each prefecture will be able to establish its own individual special force based on the special measures law. By doing so, the government can further promote efforts to curb the infection from spreading further, he added.

Read: The Latest: Japan To Begin Quarantining All Visiting From US

Read: Delayed Olympics Will Be 'testament To Defeat Of Virus': Japan PM
Tuy Kdong, 39, drove his wife, Yun Pi, and young daughter in their Indian-made tuk tuk to the center of Siem Reap town last week. He stops outside the Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient (EFEO), where a number of his former colleagues are ready to begin their protest. The out-of-work temple worker was helping to restore the Western Mebon temple within the Angkor Archaeological Park, a craft he had mastered over the years. But a dispute involving EFEO, the French Embassy and the Apsara Authority, which administers the tourist site, over wages and employee benefits has left 126 workers without any work for nearly two years. And, in the meantime, the Apsara Authority has hired other workers for allegedly lower wages. I still urged them to help me get back my job, Tuy Kdong said. I dont have high hopes, [but] we will keep protesting so that we would be able to return to our work. For Tuy Kdong, getting reinstated would mean he could pay back the monthly installment on the $6,500 in loans, which he took from Prasac and AMK microfinance institutions (MFIs) to fund construction of his home and to buy the tuk tuk he sits in as he speaks to VOA Khmer.

To make matters worse, Yun Pi, Tuy Kdong's wife, lost her job at a massage parlor in Kampong Cham province, as the coronavirus pandemic causes tourist-related businesses to shutter their operations. If the [MFIs] want to take the [tuk tuk] back, let them take it, Yun Pi said. I dont have any more ability to make money and what else can I do because my skill is to give massages? With his wife unable to earn the $7.5 to $10, Tuy Kdong's daily income from riding his tuk tuk was making it hard to make ends meet. For the last few days, there is no income because there are no guests and no bookings, he said. I couldnt even get 10,000 riels ($2.5) because there are no bookings. The controversy has left the skilled temple workers in limbo for the last two years, leaving some of them indebted and with little opportunity to use their skills, which is a precious commodity in the restoration of Cambodias Angkorian temples.

The project to restore the West Mebon was first funded by the French Embassy, under the stewardship of EFEO and in collaboration with Apsara Authority. In light of giving workers better benefits, EFEO and the workers union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement, which considerably benefited these workers. However, after EFEO said the French had stopped funding the project in 2018 it handed the project over to Apsara Authority. Temple workers said the government body slashed their salaries and reduced benefits, a move made possible because the collective bargaining agreement had lapsed. Even as 126 workers protested Apsara Authoritys new terms, the temple administration went ahead and hired new workers, effectively terminating these workers, EFEO and the French Embassy kept passing the buck. Since then, the workers have pushed the French and Apsara Authority to find them a resolution, including compensation for loss of salary over the last two years. Apsara Authority in a statement issued March 15 maintains that the workers are free to return if they accept the government bodys terms, though this would be done following a review of the projects requirements. Long Kosal, spokesperson for the Apsara Authority, said the current dispute was between the EFEO, the French embassy and workers, and not the temple-governing body. This is not the obligation of the Apsara National Authority, the [workers] should stop this issue, Long Kosal said. The ones who made promises to them is the party who agreed verbally with them.

Long Kosal is referring to a verbal agreement between EFEO and workers to continue in principle the collective bargaining agreement, even after it lapsed in 2016. There are already workers who are working there currently. So, we cant accept them back at the construction site because enough workers and experts are fulfilling the tasks, he said, adding that the terminated workers could apply for future job vacancies. The workers, who are now represented by the Building and Wood Workers Trade Union of Cambodia, have targeted their protests at EFEO and petitioned the French Embassy in Phnom Penh. At last weeks one-day protest outside EFEO, workers could be seen holding signs that read We Preserve Khmer Culture; Give Us Our Jobs Back, in English, Khmer, and French.

Ung San, who lives in Siem Reap towns Kork Chak commune, said the group of workers had expected to be laid off for only a few months as the project transitioned from EFEO to Apsara Authority. She was still waiting to get back to work. It is difficult to raise my children. I am just waiting for them [EFEO] to reinstate us, so I dare not to look for another job, she said. Her colleague, Khon Khorn, was a stone sculptor and had helped with restoration work at the famous Baphoun Temple for 15 years, before joining the West Mebon team in 2012. Like many of his fellow temple workers, Khon Khorn has had to take to other odd jobs, such as rearing cattle, to make a meager living to support his family. I cant do anything else. I just stay at home, raising cows, he said. Sou Chhlonh, vice president of BWTUC, said Long Kosals suggestion that workers had been compensated by EFEO, bringing the conflict to an end, was untrue. He said temple workers had received some seniority payments and their last few salaries but had not been compensated for the last two years of lost remuneration. The worker representative said the union had unsuccessfully sent multiple letters to the French Embassy, and workers were considering approaching Prime Minister Hun Sen next. They are skillful workers who have worked for more than 20 years in fixing the temples from one to another. So, please Samdech [Hun Sen] help them get back to work, Sou Chhlonh said.
China has recommended doctors to use a type of medicine made from parts of wild animals to treat coronavirus patients even though the disease is believed to be caused by the eating of wildlife.

The country's National Health Commission endorsed a list of treatments for sufferers in critical condition, and one of them turns out to have bear bile as part of the ingredients.

The official instruction was quickly met with criticism from animal activists, who slammed the order as 'extremely disappointing', 'tragic' and 'ironic'.

The drug (pictured) is produced by a Shanghai pharmaceutical company following traditional Chinese medicine theories. It is made from bear bile powder, goat horns and different herbs

Bear bile refers to the digestive fluid in the gallbladder of Asiatic Black Bears (pictured). A significant proportion of bile bears die because of the stress of unskilled surgery or infection

The exact source of the coronavirus remains unconfirmed. Scientists speculate that it originated in bats, snakes, pangolins, or some other animal.

Chinese health officials said in January that the coronavirus had been passed onto humans by wildlife sold as food in a Wuhan food market.

The drug in question, Tan Re Qing, is a solution produced by a Shanghai pharmaceutical company following traditional Chinese medicine theories.

It is made from bear bile powder, goat horns and three types of plant.

The medicine can treat patients with respiratory diseases, including pneumonia, acute bronchitis and chronic bronchitis, according to its producer.

Earlier this month, the government recommended the remedy, together with six traditional Chinese medicine products, in a directive to doctors who were treating patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The Chinese National Health Commission endorsed a list of treatments for sufferers in critical condition, and one of them, Tan Re Qing, turns out to have bear bile powder. In the picture, a doctor writes encouraging words for a COVID-19 patient in a hospital in Wuhan on February 25

Bear bile has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. It refers to the digestive fluid in the gallbladder of Asiatic Black Bears.

The Asiatic Black Bear, also known as the Moon Bear, is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), mostly because of deforestation and bile harvesting.

A significant proportion of bile bears die because of the stress of unskilled surgery or infection.

Animal rights activists have condemned the Chinese government for encouraging the use of wild animals to fight the contagion.

The Asiatic Black Bear is commonly and illegally traded for their body parts throughout Asia

Dr Jan Schmidt-Burbach, Global Head of Wildlife Research and Animal Welfare of animal charity World Animal Protection, called the move 'extremely disappointing'.

He said in a statement to MailOnline: 'Wild animals being used as a source for traditional medicine is one of the cruellest abuses in the world, having the potential for severe public health consequences.

'It's tragic and ironic that the recommended treatment for severe cases of COVID-19 is suggesting the consumption of a wild animal product in response to a pandemic born from handling wild animals.'

The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 22,300 people and infected over 500,000

Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said in January that the coronavirus had been passed onto humans by wildlife sold as food in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

The provincial government of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital, this month passed a law to ban the eating of wild animals completely, including those bred or raised by people, in response to the pandemic.

The wildlife protection law took effect on March 6 and covers wildlife and wildlife products.

It forbids the consumption of all wild animals on land as well as endangered and protected wild aquatic species.

The directive also cracks down on the wildlife trade.

Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (pictured), where the coronavirus pandemic is believed to have started, was one of the largest marketplace in Wuhan with throngs of customers daily

No organisations or individuals are allowed to produce, process, use or conduct commercial operations with wildlife or wildlife products which are banned by the document, officials say.

Any related hunting, breeding, transporting, trading, carrying or mailing is illegal.

Citizens are forbidden from encouraging or persuading others to eat or conduct illegal trading of wild animals. Such activities include releasing advertisements, installing relevant signboards and publishing recipes.

Scientific and medical teams must undergo strict applications and quarantine inspections should they need to use wild animals for non-food-related work purposes.

China's central government last month blocked all trade and consumption of wildlife, but it did not specify if farm-raised ones would be covered.

The coronavirus pandemic has so far killed more than 22,300 people, infected over 500,000 and reached nearly 200 countries and regions.
David Plouffe, who oversaw Barack Obamas storied 2008 bid for the White House, says he has an overarching concern about Joe Bidens campaign strategy against a media-savvy incumbent with a large financial advantage. Plouffe said he is particularly alarmed by the former vice presidents failure to leverage social media and dazzling visuals while President Trump dominates headlines during the coronavirus pandemic.

Its a challenge for Joe Biden, Plouffe told Skullduggery podcast hosts Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman in an interview. But Trump gets this, and his campaign gets this: Its blunt force communication. ... What Im very worried about is [that] were going to see tens of millions of dollars of advertising in battleground states any moment.

Plouffe said he expects a massive online advertising onslaught that tries to re-create reality and hero worship Trump as a formidable leader throughout the coronavirus crisis. Even allowing for doubts about the administrations slow response to the coronavirus and the economic recession that has resulted from it, Plouffe said, this election will be decided on the margins.

After a string of primary wins in Florida, Illinois and Arizona on March 17, Biden pulled back from the spotlight, attracting questions about his low public profile as Trump began holding daily press briefings in response to the public health crisis. After his decisive primary victories, Biden never delivered a big speech. He stayed at home in Delaware, webcasting remarks from what Politico called a low-quality personal computer camera against a straight-out-of-YouTube black backdrop.

Plouffe was also critical, saying, Time is of the essence for the Biden campaign to really begin running the general election. Trump has polled relatively well in the wake of the virus, and even seen a slight uptick in support, which Plouffe attributed to citizens wanting our president to succeed.

The unprecedented scale of the COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly shortened the campaign season this cycle, Plouffe said, making it more important for Biden to get a running start. Campaigning wont intensify until as late as May, he said, so Biden must become more visible on multiple platforms in the near term to stay in the public eye.

Story continues

Trump is well financed and knows how to use the media to his advantage, Plouffe warned.

The Trump campaign has a huge organization [and] all the money in the world to drive turnout as high as they can in every battleground state, which is what Im most concerned about, he said.

The Biden campaign has an acute need to really up their game and understand how people receive information today, Plouffe said. Its a weakness of most Democrats.

An early pioneer in how to use the internet to build a winning coalition, Plouffe was most critical of what he regards as Bidens old-fashioned media strategy and his teams lack of apparent understanding of social media.

If youve got something to say or something to announce, you better think first about, How am I going to do it on each of those platforms  and each of those platforms is different, he said. I have an overarching concern, independent of the coronavirus, that we really have to make sure that the Biden campaign and progressives are meeting people where they are in the year 2020.

Plouffe called on Democratic voters and organizers to get moving even without encouragement from the nominee.

Joe Biden speaks on Wednesday during a virtual press briefing. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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Everyones got their role to fight the social media wars, which we have to do because we dont have Fox and Sinclair and Breitbart and all of these online publications that seem to pop up every day that the right uses in a coordinated way, Plouffe said. I really hope that any day were going to all get emails from the Biden campaign, Hey, we need you to write postcards.

Plouffe recently published two books, A Citizens Guide to Beating Donald Trump and Ripples of Hope. Both books focus on how Democrats can take back the White House in the 2020 election (the latter title is meant for a preteen audience). He emphasized the importance of all Democrats engaging more than they are currently, particularly on social media.

The primary is over, Plouffe said. Jump into your game here.

Trumps use of television throughout the coronavirus crisis is simply an advantage any sitting president has, Plouffe said, adding that he is not worried about Trumps center-stage role in communicating the federal response. Plouffe said Biden can be himself, as his familiarity to voters and fundamental goodness will be a comfortable place to go for swing voters.

But Biden, 77, needs to bring his messaging up to date with online memes, GIFs and short video clips. The Democratic officeholders who powered their candidacies in 2018 with technology are normal people, not career politicians, Plouffe said, adding that they may be on the presidential stage by 2024 and 2028.

Democrats have a tricky few months in front of them because they will need to plan for both a virtual convention and an in-person convention, Plouffe said. Biden also needs to prepare for two debate scenarios because Trump may decline to participate, causing Biden to lose big moments in a campaign. While he believes Trump will debate Biden in the end, an event he likened to a geriatric cage match, Plouffe said the campaign still needs to plan for the possibility that Trump backs out and have a plan B for creating commensurate drama.

Plouffe did praise the former vice president for recently agreeing to more TV interviews but said he remains glaringly absent from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, which he called vital platforms for driving turnout, especially among younger voters. Snapchat and TikTok are particularly popular with the young voters Biden has so far had trouble attracting support from. TikTok, a China-based social media platform, doesnt accept advertising and promotes content based on whether it goes viral.

They really need to do a lot more videos, really think Facebook and Instagram and YouTube first, Plouffe said of Bidens team. Im a little worried about that. They do statements, they did a conference call last week, now theyre doing interviews  interviews are good because theyre video, and those clips can be edited and put out for reach. But I think they need to think much more social media first. And I would say that without the coronavirus situation. ... The public square now is Facebook, Instagram and YouTube and, for younger people, Snapchat and TikTok.

Trumps team has long spoken publicly about its plans for an expensive shock-and-awe media campaign to try to make it hard for Biden to take the stage as the nominee, Plouffe said. While the coronavirus has delayed that launch, which he called a break for Biden, Plouffe said it is coming soon and Democrats must be ready.

Regardless of what many Democrats and public health officials have called a botched response to the coronavirus, Plouffe underscored that the Republican electorate is firmly behind the president.

Trumps support numbers among Republicans, he said, are just rock solid.

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The housing market was all but frozen last night after the Government said moves should be suspended during the coronavirus crisis.

Buyers were strongly urged to postpone their completion dates to avoid breaking the rules on social distancing.

Lenders said they would extend mortgage offers for up to three months  allowing purchasers to move in at a later date.

The UKs largest lenders had earlier slashed access to mortgages in the biggest cull since the financial crisis. There are warnings of a price crash and a plunge in sales of up to 60 per cent over the next three months [File photo]

Banks had lobbied ministers for a full freeze on the property market amid concerns over valuations and loans during the economic crisis.

Has your house sale fallen through because of the coronavirus crisis? Email lara.keay@mailonline.co.uk Advertisement

The shutdown came as the Chancellor unveiled another astonishing bailout package, this time for self-employed workers.

Rishi Sunak said they could apply for a grant worth 80 per cent of their average monthly profits to help them stay afloat.

But he hinted that taxes would have to rise to pay for the unprecedented bailouts for businesses and workers.

As the nation burst into applause in tribute to NHS workers fighting the virus:

The number of UK victims jumped by more than 100 in a day for the first time;

Police began using roadblocks and drones and were handed sweeping powers to punish breaches of the virus lockdown;

The Director of Public Prosecutions threatened anyone coughing deliberately at a key worker could face a sentence of as long as two years in prison;

The deputy chief medical officer suggested some social distancing measures could be needed for six months;

Boris Johnsons pledge to buy thousands of ventilators descended into farce as No10 was forced to admit it had not joined an EU scheme because the Government had allegedly not received an email;

Next closed its online operation amid a row over staff being made to work;

Health officials launched an urgent review into reports of doctors and nurses putting themselves at risk through a lack of protective clothing;

Volunteers for a new scheme to help the NHS surged toward 700,000;

Banks were forced into a humiliating retreat after ministers warned them not to exploit an emergency loan scheme set up to support struggling firms;

It emerged it would be weeks before rapid virus tests are available to identify whether someone can return to work;

Britain became the biggest contributor to the worlds mission to find a coronavirus vaccine and save millions of lives;

The probation service abandoned faceto-face meetings with all but the most serious offenders;

Routine cancer screening and cervical smear tests could be halted;

Global cases surged past half a million, with the US increasingly badly affected;

Petrol prices dropped below 1 a litre for the first time in recent memory.

A government spokesman said: Home buyers and renters should, as far as possible, delay moving home while emergency measures are in place to fight coronavirus.

If moving is unavoidable for contractual reasons, people must follow advice on social distancing to minimise the spread of the virus. In line with the Governments advice, anyone with symptoms, self-isolating or shielding from the virus, should follow medical advice which will mean not moving house for the time being, if at all possible.

All parties should prioritise agreeing amicable arrangements to change move dates for individuals in this group, or where someone in a chain is in this group.

The shutdown came as the Chancellor unveiled another astonishing bailout package, this time for self-employed workers. Rishi Sunak said they could apply for a grant worth 80 per cent of their average monthly profits to help them stay afloat

The Government said there was no need to pull out of transactions.

In earlier talks between lenders and ministers, banks said it had become impossible to survey properties and their call centres had been flooded by anxious homeowners asking for mortgage holidays.

Jeremy Leaf, a north London estate agent and a former chairman of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, said the Government shutdown of the property market was unheard of.

He added: Its going to put a lot of peoples lives on hold. From our perspective, we just hope everyone presses the pause button rather than the stop button.

The UKs largest lenders had earlier slashed access to mortgages in the biggest cull since the financial crisis.

There are warnings of a price crash and a plunge in sales of up to 60 per cent over the next three months.

Has your house sale fallen through because of the coronavirus crisis? Email lara.keay@mailonline.co.uk
5 Seconds of Summer's Calum Hood is currently entering Day 8 of self-isolation amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

'It's definitely a crazy time. I never thought I would live to see a pandemic like this', the 24-year-old told The Daily Telegraph on Thursday.

With Calum feeling sick - his management said there is no evidence he has COVID-19 - it means 5SOS had to get creative to promote their fourth studio album, CALM.

'The music comes second': 5SOS's Calum Hood self-isolates after feeling ill... as the pop group are forced to get creative while promoting their new album due to coronavirus pandemic

'It has redefined the way we approach our album release because we can't be together or around large groups of people,' he told the publication.

As a result, the band have released a series of behind the scenes videos to satiate the appetite of their worldwide fanbase.

Last week, 5SOS drummer Ashton Irwin, 25, also revealed wasn't feeling the best, in a lengthy note shared to his Twitter page.

Under the weather? Last week, 5SOS drummer Ashton Irwin, 25, also revealed wasn't feeling the best, in a lengthy note shared to his Twitter page

'The world seems quite chaotic at the moment and lots of people are sick. And lots of people are really struggling at the moment. I'm starting to get sick. Which I'm sure a lot of you are starting to have symptoms as well.'

'Luckily enough I am young and hopefully my immune system will be able to fight this off,' he wrote.

The Australian rockers recently proved how far they've come as a band after their third studio album Youngblood racked up a billion streams, joining Australasian Performing Right Association's list of billionaires.

Milestone moment! On Tuesday, 5 Seconds of Summer notched up a billion streams. Pictured: L-R Michael Clifford, Luke Hemmings, Ashton Irwin and Calum Hood on January 25

Last month, the Who Do You Love? hitmakers put on an energetic show for 75,000 Fire Fight Australia attendees in Sydney to raise money for the recent bushfire crisis.

As of late Thursday evening, there are 2,806 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia. The virus has resulted in 12 deaths.

5 Seconds of Summer's fourth studio album CALM is out now.

New album: 5 Seconds of Summer's fourth studio album, CALM, is out now
Five private hospitals in Rajasthan's Bhilwara district have been acquired by the district authorities with immediate effect. The acquisition was done by the order of Bilwara District Collector under the Rajasthan Epidemic Diseases Act 1957.

According to the district administration order, the hospitals will be handed over to the Chief Medical Officer, Bhilwara district with immediate effect. Guest houses and resorts are also being acquired by the state government to prepare for an influx of patients in the event of an outbreak.

The five hospitals acquired by the district administration are Smt Kesarbai Soni Hospital, Shri Siddhi Vinayak Hospital, Ramsnehi Chikitsalaya, Keshav Porwal Hospital and Arihant Hospital. The hospitals have been taken along with buildings, medical equipment and staff.

Bhilwara has become the epicentre of Rajasthan's coronavirus outbreak after 14 cases reported from a private hospital in the city. The state's medical team is yet to find the source of infection in the first case.

Rajasthan has been under lockdown since March 22. The total number of positive cases in the state have risen to 43 after two positive cases, including one each in Jaipur and Jhunjhunu that have been found today.

The decision came hours after a 73-year-old man, who had tested positive for coronavirus and was in coma due to kidney failure, died in Bhilwara earlier today. The patient with chronic kidney and diabetes issues was admitted to a Bhilwara private hospital. Three doctors and nine nurses at the establishment later tested positive for coronavirus.

The local authorities, however, did not attribute death of the septuagenarian patient directly to coronavirus infection. "A death has occurred but the patient was in coma due to kidney failure and diabetes before coronavirus spread in Bhilwara. So, it would not be appropriate (to say) that he died of COVID-19 as the death occurred due to pre-existing diseases," Additional Chief Secretary (Health) Rohit Kumar Singh reportedly said.

On Monday, state health minister Raghu Sharma had confirmed that community transmission has started in Bhilwara and Jhunjhunu.
A year after Zac Higgins was badly hurt in a hit and run, his parents have posted a video to thank everyone who helped their son.]

The parents of toddler Zac Higgins, who was seriously injured in a hit and run in Cork City a year ago, have posted an emotional video tribute to their little warrior and to all whove helped him.

Zac was just two years old when was knocked down outside his home in Mahon on the citys southside at around 4pm on March 25 last year. The car left the scene.

Zac suffered multiple injuries and was rushed in critical condition to Cork University Hospital before being transferred to Temple Street Childrens Hospital in Dublin for treatment for a serious brain injury.

There were fears that he may never walk again.

He spent several months in hospital before he was finally able to return home last summer.

Video Still: On the one year anniversary of the hit-and-run incident brave Cork boy, Zac Higgins, has made incredible progress. In a heartwarming video, posted by Zac's parents, they expressed their sincere gratitude to everyone who has helped their son.

Thanks to his strength and determination, the support of his family, and the work of several medical professionals, he has made a remarkable recovery.

In a moving six-minute video posted by his father Paul on Facebook a year on from the accident, viewers see family photographs showing Zac in hospital when he was most critically injured.

The video charts his slow but steady recovery over the last 12 months.

It shows him undergoing physio, learning to walk again, visiting Anfield to watch a Liverpool game, trips to the beach, and images of him enjoying time with family and friends.

It finishes with a clip of him sitting on the couch at home, kissing a favourite cuddly toy and saying: Thank you everybody.

Paul said he made the short video to say thank you from his family to everyone involved in Zacs recover and to show them his progress.

Many long nights in dark places but this fellas smile makes it all worth while, he said.

He paid a heartfelt tribute to his wife, Aishling, who he said has been incredible over the last year.

He thanked Evolve Therapy in Mallow, including Aine and Emily, who have worked intensively with Zac, and to all the hospital staff who he said have gone above and beyond for his son.

He paid tribute to the people who work with Zac every day at Mahon Community pre-school and to the staff at the Brothers of Charity for their ongoing work with him.

But he paid a special tribute to the doctors and more importantly the nurses of St Gabriels ward in Temple Street hospital, describing them as true everyday superheroes.
Yakov Rozenberg, a Ukranian-born mechanical engineer who served two years in a Soviet prison as a political dissident, was granted political refugee status after his release, and became a proud American citizen in 1993, has published his latest book Dreamchaser: a compelling true story of personal courage, survival, and the realization of an elusive dream of freedom and pursuit of happiness.

Dreamchaser relates stories that occurred during two years in the Soviet military and two years in the Gulag, a Soviet prison camp, as a political dissident. Written sometimes in anecdotal form, they provide a window into both the authors life and experiences in the Soviet Union and the feeling of horror for everyday existence there.

The book begins with the harshness of military life, from the bizarre humor of painting living trees to suit a generals color preference to the perils of detonating old mines and explosives left buried during the Second World War, told in the voice of one young sergeant major. From the beginning, it is clear that whenever possible, he followed his own path to chase his dream.

The difficulties of burying a grandmother in a society with so much red tape and prejudice that it seems surreal in its idiocy. The violence and deception that permeated all aspects of the Soviet society also fill these stories. The injustice and waste are illustrated throughout. The KGB is as malevolent and pervasive as the worst Cold War movie ever depicted it. After being sentenced to two years in the Russian Gulag, the author describes the terror of surviving in a prison of about 2,500 criminal inmates. The circumstances of several individual prisoners are described, and together they shed an awful light on some of the darkest parts of life in the USSR. And yet in the midst of the horror, there are also moments of humor and an unwavering belief that someday there would be escape to freedom in the outside world.

Dreamchaser provides a new angle on life in a Communist Bloc country, beyond the imagination or understanding of anyone born in a free society. It ends with a train ride across the border that is filled with heart-stopping moments, bringing the author out of the stone age and into freedom to catch his dreamfreedom and pursuit of happiness.

Published by Page Publishing, Yakov Rozenbergs engrossing book is a gripping and potent story of principles, determination, and hope in a better future.

Readers who wish to experience this engaging work can purchase Dreamchaser at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708.

About Page Publishing:

Page Publishing is a traditional, full-service publishing house that handles all the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing knows that authors need to be free to create - not mired in logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and so on. Pages accomplished writers and publishing professionals allow authors to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues to focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Tasseli McKay, MPH, a social science researcher at RTI International, a nonprofit research institute, is available to comment on the need for more domestic violence services when individuals are released from incarceration.

Experts across the nation are calling for a release of inmates in hopes of avoiding a COVID-19 outbreak in prison systems. Findings from a recent study by McKay of nearly 170 participants evaluated instances of domestic violence by interviewing men and women around the time of a male partner's return from prison. Half of the participants reported physical violence during the first six months after the male partner's return from prison.

With more than a decade of experience, her research examines intimate partner violence in marginalized communities, couple and family relationships in the context of justice system involvement, and strategies for improving health coverage and access to care among justice-involved persons.

To request an interview, contact the RTI Newsroom at [email protected].

About RTI International

RTI International is an independent, nonprofit research institute dedicated to improving the human condition. Clients rely on us to answer questions that demand an objective and multidisciplinary approach  one that integrates expertise across the social and laboratory sciences, engineering and international development. We believe in the promise of science, and we are inspired every day to deliver on that promise for the good of people, communities and businesses around the world. For more information, visit www.rti.org.

SOURCE RTI International

Related Links

http://www.rti.org


Ukraine's Cabinet proposes amendments to 2020 budget over coronavirus spread

19:20, 26.03.20 3184

To cover the deficit, the government proposes raising domestic borrowings by US$5.3 billion and external ones by US$4.7 billion.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 15:26:07|Editor: huaxia

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SEOUL, March 26 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in's approval rating rose to the highest this year on positive assessment over the government's efforts to contain the COVID-19 outbreak, a weekly poll showed Thursday.

According to the Realmeter survey, support for Moon advanced 3.2 percentage points over the week to 52.5 percent this week. It was this year's highest figure, the pollster noted.

The negative assessment on Moon's conduct of state affairs declined 3.8 percentage points to 44.1 percent.

It came as the positive public sentiment grew over the Moon government's efforts to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases topped 9,000 here, but the daily caseload slowed down in recent days.

Support for Moon's ruling Democratic Party rose 2.9 percentage points over the week to 45.0 percent, but approval score for the main conservative opposition United Future Party slipped 3.8 percentage points to 29.8 percent.

It was followed by the minor progressive Justice Party with 4.7 percent of support, the centrist People's Party with 3.6 percent and the center-left Party for People's Livelihoods with 2.1 percent each.

The results were based on a poll of 1,518 voters conducted from Monday to Wednesday. It had plus and minus 2.5 percentage points in margin of error with a 95 percent confidence level.
By Jeff Lewis

TORONTO (Reuters) - Shares in Teck Resources <TECKb.TO> <TECK.N> plunged as much as 21.7% on Wednesday after the Canadian miner suspended construction at a massive copper project in Chile to limit transmission of the novel coronavirus, as falling copper prices also rattled investors.

Teck joins global miner Anglo American Plc <AAL.L>, gold producer Newmont Corp <NEM.N> and others that have shuttered mines or wound down operations in resource-rich Latin America as governments tighten curbs to fight the fast-spreading virus.

Vancouver-based Teck said it would halt work effective immediately at its $4.7 billion Quebrada Blanca Phase 2 (QB2) expansion for an initial two-week period, a move that would affect roughly 15,000 workers who travel in large numbers to the site from all over Chile.

"This is the right decision to protect the health and safety of workers and their families, and to support the Chilean government efforts to halt the spread of COVID-19," Teck Chief Executive Don Lindsay said in a statement.

The miner has billed QB2 as key to reducing its heavy reliance on steelmaking coal, but the expansion has been beset by delays and rising costs. Teck said it would resume construction "as soon as possible" subject to the ongoing virus threat but did not provide a timeline.

The stock was trading at C$8.93 after hitting a four-year low.

Teck owns 60% of the expansion project, with the balance held by Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. Ltd <5713.T> and the Chilean government. Production is expected to start in late 2021 and rise to 316,000 tonnes at full capacity.

Copper prices crashed below $5,000 a tonne for the first time in more than three years on Wednesday as growing expectations of surplus metal were reinforced by large deliveries to London Metal Exchange-registered warehouses.

Teck said there have been no confirmed cases of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus, associated with QB2 employees or contractors to date.

(Reporting by Jeff Lewis in Toronto; additional reporting by Arundhati Sarkar in Bengaluru; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Nick Zieminski)
SUNNYVALE, California, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Plug and Play announced today the 167 startups chosen for their Summer 2020 Batches. These startups were selected by Plug and Play's corporate partner network and will enter one of the following programs for the next three months: Energy , Enterprise Tech , Fintech , Health , Insurtech , Internet of Things , Mobility , and Real Estate & Construction . 30% of companies are based outside of the U.S. and represent 18 countries from five continents. The full list of startups can be viewed on Plug and Play's website: https://bit.ly/pnpsummer2020

"I am proud to welcome these startups into our summer programs," said Saeed Amidi, Founder and CEO of Plug and Play. "We are here to connect them with new customers and opportunities and I look forward to seeing all of their successes in the upcoming months."

The selected startups will now have the opportunity to engage with Plug and Play's global network of corporate partners, venture capitalists, alumni, and industry leaders. Due to current challenges surrounding COVID-19, companies will be connected virtually to partners in private deal flow sessions and have the opportunity to be featured in different industry-specific webinars hosted by Plug and Play. These virtual events and meetings will help increase the startup's chance to pilot technology with new clients and for potential investment. There is no equity requirement for startups to participate.

For a list of Plug and Play's upcoming virtual events, visit: https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/events/

Plug and Play recently released their 2019 Company Performance Report. To see all their new programs, locations, investments, and more, read the full report: https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/2019-report/

About Plug and Play

Plug and Play is a global innovation platform. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, we have built accelerator programs, corporate innovation services and an in-house VC to make technological advancement progress faster than ever before. Since inception in 2006, our programs have expanded worldwide to include a presence in over 25 locations globally giving startups the necessary resources to succeed in Silicon Valley and beyond. With over 10,000 startups and 300 official corporate partners, we have created the ultimate startup ecosystem in many industries. Companies in our community have raised over $7 billion in funding, with successful portfolio exits including Danger, Dropbox, Lending Club and PayPal. For more information, visit https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/

Media Contact

Allison Romero

allison@pnptc.com

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One more person tested positive for the coronavirus in Jammu's Rajouri district, said an official on Thursday.

"Another COVID-19 positive case was reported just now; a patient from Rajouri district in Jammu. The patient has a history of close contact with a (now deceased) positive case," Rohit Kansal, Jammu and Kashmir Principal Secretary (Planning Commission) said.

Earlier, Srinagar confirmed its first death due to coronavirus in which a 65-year-old man succumbed to the disease.

The officer earlier stressed on social distancing to prevent coronavirus spread and said: "It is still not too late. Help Break The Chain. Stay indoors. Self declare. Report travel history or any symptoms."

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

In a televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Modi said that it is vital to break the chain of the disease and experts have said that at least 21 days are needed for it.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Kerala government,



which had stopped sale of liqour through bars and state-run retail outlets following the lockdown due to COVID-19 outbreak, has not taken any decision to sell it online, Excise Minister T P Ramakrishnan said.

Those who have withdrawal symptoms due to non consumption



of alcohol can make use of the de-addiction centres in the districts, the minister said.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had earlier said that the government will also "consider" the possibility of liquor sales through online platforms following the closure of outlets of the Kerala State Beverages Corporation (KSBC).

"We have not taken any decision to sell liquor through online platforms. As of now, the present situation will prevail. All the shops and retail outlets will remain closed until further notice," Ramakrishnan said.

Asked about the addicts, minister said the policy of the government is to reduce the usage of liquor and other drugs.

"We want people to stay away from the use of drugs and liquor. We have de-addiction centres in all districts of the state.

Those who feel some difficulties can approach the centres and make use of the facility," Ramakrishnan told reporters.

Meanwhile, Excise Commissioner S Aananthakrishnan said the department had initiated strong steps to counter the sale and use of spurious liquor in the state.

"As the Beverage outlets and the bars have been closed, the use of spurious liquor and other drugs are likely to increase.

We have given strict instruction to monitor the sale and trade of such substances," he said.

Aananthakrishnan also said that stern ation will be taken against the bars which initiates backdoor sale of liquor during the lockout period.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  Senator Koko Pimentel tested positive for COVID-19. Aside from him, Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Migz Zubiri and Juan Edgardo Sonny Angara also contracted the viral disease.

Pimentel admitted showing virus symptoms before the release of his of COVID-19 test result on March 24.

He also admitted he was in different places days before and after he felt the symptoms. Here is a timeline of the senators activities.

March 10  March 11

In an interview with CNN Philippines on March 25, Pimentel said he attended two birthday parties and a meeting on these days.

March 11

Pimentel attended the last session of the Senate before Congress went on a seven-week break.

He also attended the Commission on Appointments plenary session. Present at the event were senators, congressmen, and Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio.

The CA confirmed Duterte-Carpios appointment as colonel in the Army reserve force.

March 12

Senators learned that one of the resource persons in a Senate panel hearing tested positive for COVID-19. Some senators said they will undergo self-quarantine.

In a text message, Pimentel said he would love to self-quarantine but there are things I still need to do.

Pimentel explained that the presence of a COVID-19 positive resource person in the Senate was not good enough scientific basis to go on self-quarantine.

March 14

Pimentel said he felt body pains like flu.

Pimentel went on self-quarantine, using a room separate from his wife, Kathryna, the wife said. This would go on for 10 days.

March 16

Pimentel was at S&R BGC on March 16, where he checked out at a counter at exactly 1:59 p.m. This was confirmed by the members-only supermarket in a statement issued March 26.

March 18

Pimentel said he had a fever. His temperature reached 38 degrees. He also had mild cough, and diarrhea. He added he had mild sore throat and colds felt in the throat area.

March 20, 11:00 a.m.

Pimentel got tested for COVID-19

March 24, 6:00 p.m.  7:00 p.m.

Pimentel went to Makati Medical Center. He accompanied his wife, who was scheduled to give birth via caesarian section on March 25.

Pimentel said he did not enter the delivery room. He was only at the waiting area.

Despite exhibiting symptoms, Pimentel said he accompanied his wife because he has yet to confirm if he has COVID-19.

He said it was his responsibility as a husband to bring his expectant wife to the hospital. In a statement, Yu-Pimentel said her husband accompanied her because he was excited to see her deliver their first child.

March 24, 9:00 p.m.

Pimentel said he received a call from the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine that he tested positive for COVID-19. He said he immediately reported his test results to his wifes doctor, who told him to leave the hospital immediately.

He said he went out peacefully and did not loiter in the hospital.

Meanwhile, Kathryna was required to have a COVID-19 test before giving birth.

March 25

Pimentel announced that he is COVID-19 positive.

He still has a slight sore throat. He has since been staying at home.

Pimentel said he talked to Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, who asked him about his situation.

The senator denied reports that Duque was responsible for getting her wife a room at Makati Medical Center. Pimentel said his sister informed Duque about his situation.

March 26

The result of Kathrynas COVID-19 test is expected today, Pimentel said.
Skillsoft and SumTotal Systems today announced that Tara Westover, Shawn Achor, David Meerman Scott, Dr. Heidi Grant, Jez Rose and Lucy Adams will keynote this years Perspectives. Perspectives 2020 is a digital-first experience, reimagined to responsibly unite attendees during a time of uncertainty. The free, follow-the-sun, 24-hour digital experience will bring together learning and talent professionals, business leaders, learners and university students from across the globe to explore critical issues and immerse in best practices.

These passionate individuals understand the power of learning and the possibilities it unleashes in our world. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we use our expertise to contribute positively to the world, said Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, Skillsoft CMO. Perspectives is all about providing access to big, but pragmatic, ideas from experts and practitioners to leaders and learners alike. Learning is a lifelong journey  and embraced by the work that our speakers do. Each is a natural extension of our mission: bringing people together in the name of knowledge.

Keynotes will be spread throughout the day, and center around the theme of learning as a positive force in a time of persistence. Woven between sessions like head-to-head discussions on industry topics, interactive case studies and specialized content tracks, these keynotes include:

- Tara Westover, author of Educated

Tara was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education. Lacking a formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge.

- Shawn Achor, author of Big Potential and The Happiness Advantage

Did you know that happiness can turn on the learning centers of the brain and increase productivity? Shawn Achor, international bestselling author, former Harvard University Teaching Fellow, and TedTalk rock star, has spent years researching the connection between positive thinking and work success. His research has helped thousands of leaders awaken positive thinking to drive greater creativity, increase energy and focus and grow happiness alongside a remarkable 31 percent productivity boost.

- Heidi Grant, Author, Named Most Influential Management Thinkers Globally

Dr. Heidi Grant, social psychologist and researcher, will explore the mindsets needed to ensure growth. In her talk, Dr. Grant will focus on the "Get Better" mindset, one in which learning is key. In this mindset, we welcome risk and are less afraid of failure, both of which are critical to personal and professional success and resilience. Learn not only how to identify your own mindset, but also determine how your mindset can influence persistence, creativity, and engagement. Create a "Get Better" mindset culture on your team and in your organization.

- David Meerman Scott, author of Fanocracy

A Wall Street Journal bestseller,David spotted the real-time marketing revolution in its infancy and has authored five books about it, including The New Rules of Marketing and PR. With tech-weary and bot-wary people hungry for true human connection, Davids latest book Fanocracy shows how the most powerful marketing force is fandom.

- Lucy Adams, founder of Disruptive HR

Founder of Disruptive HR, Lucy Adams most recently oversaw HR at the BBC. Through innovative approaches and fresh perspectives, she helps business leaders and HR professionals around the world lead, engage and develop their leaders differently.

- Jez Rose, broadcaster, award-winning writer, speaker and host

Jez Rose lives on the worlds first certified carbon neutral honey farm, helping to reverse Britains honeybee decline. You might recognize him from over 100 appearances on TV and radio!

In addition to compelling keynotes, the virtual event offers a blend of pre-recorded, live and simu-live events with main stage and always-on content including:

Five content tracks to tailor the learning experience to specific interests

Head-to-head debates on critical industry topics like remote work and upskilling

Interactive case study presentations

Free access to curated learning content for learners and buyers on Skillsofts Percipio platform

Opportunity to earn unique, digital badges to showcase learnings

Executive tracks and SaaS user group programs

Product demonstrations and ask-an-expert access

Perspectives 2020 will be held on May 13 beginning at 9 a.m. AEST in Sydney (7 p.m. EDT on May 12) and ending the day at 4 p.m. PDT in San Francisco (7 p.m. EDT on May 13).

Click here to register to attend, or visit www.skillsoft.com/perspectives for more information.

About Skillsoft

Skillsoft helps companies unlock the potential in their most valuable asset  their people  by delivering engaging content and powerful technology that drives business impact for modern enterprises. Skillsoft comprises three award-winning systems that support learning, performance and success: Skillsoft learning content, the Percipio intelligent learning experience platform and the SumTotal suite for Talent Development.

Skillsoft provides a comprehensive selection of cloud-based corporate learning content, including courses, videos, books and other resources on Leadership Development, Business Skills, Digital Transformation, Technology & Developer and Compliance. Percipios intuitive design engages modern learners and its consumer-led experience assists in accelerating learning. The SumTotal suite delivers measurable impact across the entire employee lifecycle via award-winning technology that powers talent acquisition, learning management and talent management.

Skillsoft is trusted by thousands of the worlds leading organizations, including many within the Fortune 500. Learn more at www.skillsoft.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005094/en/
Scientists think that dark matter produces a bright and spherical halo of X-ray emission around the center of the Milky Way.

Scientists studying a mysterious signal from far-off galaxies didn't find dark matter as they'd hoped. But the inventive new technique they used to detect this strange signal, which uses our own galaxy to hunt for dark matter, could elevate the hunt for the elusive material.

For decades, scientists have been searching for dark matter, an invisible material that doesn't interact with light but which permeates our entire universe. And a signal coming from a nearby galaxy spotted in a 2014 study gave scientists hope that this was the long-sought evidence for dark matter.

Some current models predict that dark matter particles slowly decay into ordinary matter, a process that would produce faint photon emissions that X-ray telescopes could detect. And in 2014, scientists spotted an X-ray emission from a galaxy in a dark matter hunt, as it's known that dark matter collects around galaxies.

Related: The 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter

Researchers think that the emission, known as the "3.5 keV line" (keV stands for kilo-electronvolts), is likely made of sterile neutrinos, which have long been thought of as a candidate for dark matter, study co-author Chris Dessert, of the University of Michigan, told Space.com.

Sterile neutrinos are hypothetical particles that are a close relative of the neutrino, a neutral subatomic particle with a mass very close to zero. They are released in nuclear reactions like those in nuclear plants on Earth and in the sun. Because the tiny amount of mass in neutrinos can't be explained by the Standard Model of particle physics, some think that sterile neutrinos could make up this mystery mass that is actually dark matter.

But in this new study of objects in the Milky Way, which analyzed a mountain of raw data over the past 20 years from the XMM-Newton space X-ray telescope, researchers found evidence that this signal seen in the 2014 study wasn't coming from dark matter. In fact, in searching for dark matter with their new technique, they didn't see the signal at all. However, this doesn't rule out sterile neutrinos as a strong candidate for dark matter, the researchers said.

To come to this conclusion, researchers looked for the 3.5 keV line in the sky. Since we live in the Milky Way's dark matter halo, any observation made through the halo must have dark matter in it.

So when the team found no trace of a 3.5 keV line in the data, they determined that "the 3.5 keV line isn't due to dark matter," Dessert said.

Now, while the 3.5 keV signature is caused most likely by sterile neutrinos, this might seem to rule out the hypothetical particle as a candidate for dark matter. But it's still possible that different mass sterile neutrinos, which wouldn't put out the same signal, could explain the elusive material.

"Even if you find this evidence compelling, that that 3.5 keV line is not necessarily there or is not necessarily dark matter, that does not rule out sterile neutrinos as a dark matter candidate," Kerstin Perez, an assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in this study, told Space.com. There are "still a lot of different masses that sterile neutrinos could have and it could still constitute all or some of the dark matter in the universe."

New dark matter hunting techniques

While Dessert admitted it was fairly disappointing that the researchers didn't observe a 3.5 keV line, the technique they developed could further the search for the elusive material.

"While this work does, unfortunately, throw cold water on what looked like what might have been the first evidence for the microscopic nature of dark matter, it does open up a whole new approach to looking for dark matter, which could lead to a discovery in the near future," co-author Ben Safdi, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Michigan, said in a statement.

"In the past, people have said, 'Well, let's look at a part of the sky that has a huge amount of dark matter in it and let's see if we see [dark matter] there,'" Perez said.

But, with this team's technique, which is similar to a technique that Perez uses in her own work, they use our place in the universe to their advantage because, "if this signal really is dark matter it should be all over the sky with some varying intensity because we live within the halo of dark matter."

"I think that that is a really exciting way to think about these searches because it allows you to use essentially the full sky," Perez added. "Previously we were kind of taking snapshots of the sky and looking at them kind of separately."

While looking through the Milky Way's dark halo for this signature helped the team to determine that the signal didn't come from dark matter, it did have additional benefits. "Looking through the dark matter halo in the Milky Way, you're not actually losing any sensitivity," Dessert said.

"The previous techniques are basically you point your X-ray telescope at a cluster of galaxies or just a galaxy that has a dark matter halo, and you look for the dark matter decay signal which is going to show up as a line," Dessert continued. He added that, with their technique in which they look through our galaxy's dark matter halo, they are able to get better results in their search.

"The dark matter halo around our galaxy is much closer to us, and that means that you're more likely to get the photons resulting from dark matter decay in our galaxy than you are if you're looking at some cluster far away."

Dessert added, "This technique we've developed can be used in other searches so, for example, this 3.5 keV line."

This work was published today (March 26) in the journal Science.

Follow Chelsea Gohd on Twitter @chelsea_gohd . Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook .
(CNN) - President Donald Trump has in recent days criticized how China handled the coronavirus outbreak, saying Thursday that the "world is paying a very big price for what they did."

But as the virus spread rapidly across China in the month of February, Trump repeatedly praised Chinese President Xi Jinping's response to the crisis, saying he's handled it "really well" and that he was doing "a very good job with a very, very tough situation."

A CNN KFile review of Trump's public statements identified at least 12 occasions in which the President praised or projected confidence about China's response to coronavirus.

This shift in tone from Trump represents a broader change in the President's view of China, as he attempts to deflect responsibility for the ongoing global pandemic to Beijing's initial handling of the crisis. It also shows how the President sought to downplay the threat of the virus in the weeks before the uptick of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US.

CNN White House correspondent Jeremy Diamond on Saturday asked Trump about his shift in attitude toward China.

"China has worked very hard," he said. "China was transparent at that time but when we saw what happened, they could have been transparent much earlier than they were."

He went on to criticize what he said was China's waiting to tell the US.

"They knew they had a problem earlier. I wish they could have said that," he said.

A spokesperson for the White House did not return a request for comment.

Early praise for China

"China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus," Trump tweeted on January 24, "The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!"

Speaking on Fox News on January 30, Trump said China was "working very hard" to stop the coronavirus outbreak.

"And we are in great shape," he said. "China is not in great shape right now, unfortunately. But they're working very hard. We'll see what happens. But we're working very closely with China and other countries."

Complimented the Chinese President over his handling of the crisis

In a series of tweets on February 7, Trump again praised the Chinese President's handling of the crisis.

"Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus. He feels they are doing very well, even building hospitals in a matter of only days. Nothing is easy, but he will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone. Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!"

That same day in a press conference, Trump said he spoke to Xi, who said the country was handling it "really well."

"I just spoke to President Xi last night, and, you know, we're working on the -- the problem, the virus. It's a -- it's a very tough situation. But I think he's going to handle it. I think he's handled it really well. We're helping wherever we can."

Three days later, on February 10, Trump again praised China on Fox Business saying they had the outbreak under control.

"I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control," Trump said. "I really believe they are going to have it under control fairly soon. You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather. And that's a beautiful date to look forward to. But China I can tell you is working very hard."

Called China 'extremely capable'

On February 13, Trump was asked by Fox News' Geraldo Rivera if he thought China was being truthful about coronavirus. The President called China "extremely capable" and professional in handling the outbreak.

"Well, you never know. I think they want to put the best face on it. So you know, I mean, if somebody -- if you were running it, you'd probably -- you wouldn't want to run out to the world and go crazy and start saying whatever it is because you don't want to create a panic," he said. "But, no, I think they've handled it professionally and I think they're extremely capable and I think President Xi is extremely capable and I hope that it's going to be resolved."

The next day, while speaking to National Border Patrol Council members, Trump said China was "working very hard on this."

"It's a tremendous problem," he added. "But they're very capable and they'll -- they'll get to it."

Speaking to the press on February 18, the President praised the Chinese government again.

"I think President Xi is working very hard," Trump said. "As you know, I spoke with him recently. He's working really hard. It's a tough problem. I think he's going to do -- look, I've seen them build hospitals in a short period of time. I really believe he wants to get that done, and he wants to get it done fast. Yes, I think he's doing it very professionally."

Asked if he trusted the data from China, the President declined to answer the question, instead, again, praising the Chinese President.

"Look, I know this: President Xi loves the people of China, he loves his country, and he's doing a very good job with a very, very tough situation," he said.

Thought China didn't need to do anything differently

Speaking to reporters on February 23 on the White House South Lawn, Trump was asked if Xi should be doing anything differently in his handling of the crisis.

"No, I think President Xi is working very, very hard. I spoke to him. He's working very hard. I think he's doing a very good job. It's a big problem. But President Xi loves his country. He's working very hard to solve the problem and he will solve the problem. OK?"

In news conferences on February 25 and 26,Trump again praised China for "working very hard" to fight coronavirus. On February 29, he praised measures put in place by China and said similar measures could be put in place in the US to prevent spread.

"We've been in very close contact with China, including myself with President Xi. He very much wanted this to happen," said Trump. "He wanted this to get out and finished and be done. He worked -- he's been working very, very hard, I can tell you that. And they're making a lot of progress in China."

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Trump repeatedly praised China's response to coronavirus in February"
By Tangi Salaun and John Irish

PARIS, March 18 (Reuters) - France's army transferred six patients in critical condition due to coronavirus to a military facility on Wednesday as it sought to ease the strain on hospitals in the east of the country that are struggling to cope with the spiralling number of cases.

The decision to move patients in intensive care to the southeastern city of Toulon, where several military medical hospitals are located, comes as doctors in the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in the eastern French cities of Mulhouse and Colmar warn that the system is at breaking point.

"In the last three days, we have been submerged by emergencies and an incessant flux of patients who need to be hospitalised," an internal memo from a doctor on the ground and seen by Reuters read.

The French government on Tuesday put its 67 million people under lockdown, in an unprecedented act during peacetime, after an almost 20 pct rise in deaths and reported cases in just 24 hours.

Eastern France has been worst hit. Doctors are reporting 10 new critical cases a day, a shortage of equipment and masks, increasing fatigue and growing number of hospital workers also falling ill. They have said they may need to start deciding which patients to prioritise.

France in total has about 5,000 intensive care beds across the country. Out of more than 7,500 cases in France, Mulhouse has some 1,800 with the numbers increasing by 300 a day.

President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday France was in a "health war" against the illness. As a result the government ordered the army to begin using its 'Morphee system', which has been in use by the military since 2006.

This involves military transport planes that are equipped with intensive care units and are used to evacuate troops from conflict zones. Until now it has only ever been used five times in Afghanistan and Kosovo.

"It is the first time that the Morphee system is used for the benefit of civilian patients," a French military spokesman said. "The critical situation in Alsace justifies this."

The transfer is likely to be the first of several. Five other military hospitals across the country are also on alert.

Story continues

In Mulhouse, at least 30 people are in intensive care, with a further 10 each day and the hospitals in the region are running out of bed space.

The French army is also preparing to put in place a field hospital with 30 more intensive care units near the main Mulhouse hospitals.

"The implementation on the site in Mulhouse should be completed in the coming days," the army said. (Reporting by John Irish Editing by Gareth Jones)
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current-affairs-trends India fights coronavirus | Govt announces slew of economic measures: Here's the full text Here's the full text of the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Package announced by the FM today.
Islamic State Claims Deadly Attack on Afghan Sikh Temple

By Ayaz Gul March 25, 2020

Officials in Afghanistan say heavily armed suicide bombers Wednesday stormed a minority Sikh worship place in Kabul, killing at least 25 worshippers and injuring at least eight others.

The local television station TOLO TV said at least 11 members of the minority community were also injured.

Islamic State claimed credit for plotting the deadly raid in a central part of the Afghan capital, according to the Site Intelligence Group provides alerts and translations of jihadist media outlets.

Shortly after the early morning attack began, Afghan security forces surrounded the temple and killed all four assailants in a standoff that lasted more than five hours, said Tariq Arian, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. He did not immediately offer details about the number of casualties.

He noted dozens of people trapped inside the temple during the siege were also rescued. Some 150 people were inside the temple and adjacent community center, Anar Kali Hunaryar, a minority parliamentarian, told VOA.

The Islamist Taliban swiftly distanced itself from the attack saying the insurgent group was not involved.

Afghanistan's minority Sikh and Hindu communities have been targeted numerous times by Islamic extremists in recent years. A suicide bomber killed 17 members of the two religious minorities, including a parliamentarian, in the eastern city of Jalalabad in 2018.

Islamic State also took responsibly for that attack.

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A Delhi Court Thursday dismissed the interim bail application of corporate lobbyist Deepak Talwar in a money laundering case related to receiving foreign funding illegally.

In a hearing held through video conferencing, Special Judge Chandra Shekhar dismissed the application moved on medical grounds in view of coronavirus, noting that Talwar was lodged in Tihar central jail here where all the facilities were available.

The court passed the order after ED's special public prosecutors Amit Mahajan and Nitesh Rana said that the jail authorities have not filed any report about Talwar's health condition which suggests he risks the infection.

In his application, Talwar's lawyer had claimed that he had diabetes and hypertension which made his condition critical in view of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the ED, Talwar was the founding member of NGO Advantage India that had received foreign contribution of Rs 90.72 crore from MBDA England, a leading European missile manufacturer, and Airbus France under CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) funding between 2012-13 to 2015-16,.

"Investigation has revealed that the NGO booked ''bogus'' expenditure under various heads to show that foreign donation was utilised for various purposes," the agency had said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
WASHINGTON  Congress is about to pass a $2.2 trillion emergency relief bill to keep the economy afloat amid the coronavirus pandemic, sending a massive infusion of aid to individuals, hospitals, small businesses and the newly-unemployed.

New York state, the epicenter of the pandemic, will receive about $115 billion from the aid package, according to U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, the Senates top Democrat who helped negotiate the deal.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo slammed the aid bill Thursday, calling it reckless and irresponsible.

Cuomo said New York will receive $5 billion earmarked directly for state government. He said the money can be spent only on the states response to the virus  not to help make up for the $10 billion to $15 billion in revenue the state will lose because of coronavirus.

Schumer, D-N.Y., said the final relief package for New York will be much broader when accounting for aid to individuals, businesses, hospitals and cities and counties across the state.

Here are the big items in the bill passed by the Senate and awaiting a vote in the House as early as Friday:

Direct cash payments to individuals

New Yorkers will receive about $15 billion in direct cash payments to help ease their financial burden during the pandemic. The payments will be $1,200 for individuals who reported making less than $75,000 on their 2018 or 2019 tax returns, or $150,000 for couples. The payments will include an additional $500 per child.

Those with adjusted gross incomes above the limits will receive reduced payments, and individuals with incomes above $99,000 will receive no payment. Senior citizens who didnt file a tax return will receive the full payment.

Schumer said the payments should arrive around April 6, either by direct deposit for those who file electronically or by mail.

Emergency loans for small businesses

New York small businesses will be eligible for $33.8 billion of the $350 billion set aside nationally for a new emergency loan program to help small businesses retain their employees during the pandemic.

Businesses will be able to apply for 4 percent loans to help keep employees on the payroll and cover operating expenses such as rent and utilities.

If employers maintain their full payroll through the pandemic, loans will be forgiven and turned into outright grants from the federal government, Schumer said.

Hospitals and medical facilities

New York hospitals and medical facilities will be able to access $25 billion set aside for the state to pay for personal protective equipment for health care workers, testing supplies, staffing and new construction to expand services, Schumer said.

U.S. Rep. John Katko, R-Camillus, said the aid is important because hospitals operate on thin margins with little cash on hand.

The financial strain on hospitals increased when they were asked to cancel elective surgeries to free up hospital beds patients infected with COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus.

When you cancel elective surgeries like all of our hospitals had to do, you cancel one of the biggest money streams coming into a hospital, Katko said.

Extra unemployment compensation

The bill in Congress sets aside about $16 billion for New York to pay for increased unemployment compensation to those who lost their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic, Schumer said.

Unemployment benefits will be extended to those who may not have lost a job but were unable to work because they are sick, quarantined or had to take care of a child as a result of coronavirus.

Schumer calls the aid unemployment on steroids because it adds an additional $600 a week in unemployment payments for up to four months. Those payments currently average about $300 per week.

Congress also extended eligibility for unemployment insurance by 13 weeks. All told, New Yorkers will now be eligible for up to 39 weeks of benefits.

Federal disaster response aid

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay $10 billion to New York for its emergency response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The money will be paid out in monthly installments of about $2 billion per month for five months, Schumer said.

FEMAs aid can help pay to test New Yorkers for the coronavirus, as well as medical supplies to protect doctors and nurses. Those supplies include face masks, gloves and surgical gowns.

State and local government relief fund

New York and its cities and counties will receive about $7.5 billion in aid through a new Coronavirus Relief Fund.

The money is intended to help local governments stay solvent amid the loss of tax revenue and the strains of paying for the local response to the pandemic.

The fund will distribute $5.1 billion to New York state, about $1.5 billion to New York City, $257,000 to Suffolk County, $235,000 to Nassau County, $168,000 to Westchester County, $160,000 to Erie County and $129,000 to Monroe County.

Those cities and counties with populations below 500,000 (including Syracuse and Onondaga County) will have to apply to the state for the remaining $2.4 billion in aid to localities.

Aid for mass transit systems

The bill passed by the Senate includes about $4.1 billion for mass transit systems in New York, according to Schumers office.

Most of the money, about $3.8 billion, will be paid to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City. The MTA receives most of its budget from state taxpayers.

Aid totals for Upstate New York transit systems, including Centro in Central New York, were not available Thursday.

Airport improvement grants

New Yorks airports, hard hit by the rapid decline in passenger traffic because of coronavirus, will receive $690.4 million in grants.

Airports in New York City and across Upstate New York will be eligible for the money. The exact breakdown by airport has not been determined.

Small business disaster loans

New York will receive a share of $10 billion made available nationally for a new Economic Injury Disaster Loan Emergency Grant Program.

When small businesses apply for the loans, they will receive an emergency grant of $10,000 from the federal government within three days of filing an application.

The expedited loan is intended to help cover operating expenses for businesses while their loan application is processed.

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Do you know of a business thats providing products or services to help combat the new coronavirus? We want to hear from you. Contact Mark Weiner anytime by: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751
A towering paean of Freemasonrys prominence in Jacksonville and Illinois is for sale, with the board of the Jacksonville Masonic Center saying Wednesday that expenses and declining membership mean it is time for a change.

Harmony Masonic Lodge No. 3 and Zingabad Grotto still meet at the historic art deco-style building at 345 W. College Ave. and will remain active.

Due to the decrease in membership in the lodge and in the renting organizations, they can no longer afford to preserve this  building as it should be, Chairman Frank Cline and other board members  Vice Chairman Matt Doss, Secretary Eddie Carpenter, Treasurer Bill Martel and Director Daniel Murphy  said in a statement.

At its peak, there were nearly 1,200 dues-paying members; now that number is about 250. Some space in the three-floor, 15,000-square-foot building is used by companies, but the number of renters also has dropped off.

Rental and investment income barely covers the expenses, according to the directors. Although it breaks our hearts, the time has come to sell the building and downsize into something more affordable.

Existing members might try to rent a portion of the building once it is sold or may find a new location.

The building will be sold through an online, no-reserve auction by Cory Craig Auction Service at corycraig.com. Bidding will begin April 1 and continue through 6 p.m. April 30.

Because it was built in stages during the Great Depression, the building is not Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant. It is zoned for business and includes a 0.55-of-an-acre lot with a 14,500-square-foot parking area. The facility includes a full commercial kitchen and an auditorium.

Although the Jacksonville Masonic Center is not the first home to the Masons, it reflects a renaissance of Freemasonry in the state and has a storied history.

According to a history of Masonic activity, the first grand lodge  which has jurisdiction over other lodges in the state  was established in 1822 but dissolved five years later because of anti-Masonic sentiment. By 1840, Freemasonry grew again and a new Grand Lodge of Illinois was established in Jacksonville.

There are an estimated 57,000 Freemasons in the state today.
Ritwika Mitra By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: On Monday night, 23-year-old Mahesh Damor, along with five other migrant workers, realised they have no source of income to rely on in Gujarats Surat.

So they decided to walk - over 300 km from Surat to his village in Jhalod taluka in Dahod  with two brief breaks in Vadodara and Godhra. The initial coronavirus measures and the subsequent 21-day lockdown have rendered thousands of migrant workers jobless.

According to the Economic Survey of 2018-19, over 90 per cent of the total workforce is 'informal'. The worrying part is that the NITI Aayog estimates showed that Indias informal sector employees approximately 85 per cent of all workers.

"We were out of work and there were no busses or trains. So we decided to walk to our village," said Damor, who belongs to the Bhil community. A construction worker, he returned to his family with Rs 1,000 on Wednesday after walking for over 40 hours.

He is worried about the future. The bigger worry now is fighting the stigma in his village. "Other households in the village are saying I have returned with the virus and not letting me enter," he said.

As the 21-day lockdown kicked in, reports poured in from different parts of the county of migrant labourers being stranded. With railways and buses suspended, several walked for kilometres to reach their villages. Many were unable to make it across state borders.

"The narratives that are emerging from across the country indicate large-scale human distress. Most wage workers are employed by private contractors, which means they have lost their sources of livelihood," said Sudhir Katiyar, secretary, Centre for Labour Research and Action.

The Economic Survey 2016-2017 indicated an annual average flow of close to 9 million migrants between states for the period 2011-2016. The patterns of flows of migrants showed less affluent states saw more out migration while the affluent states were the largest recipients of migrants.

Umi Daniel, director, migration and education at Aide et Action International said the main question now is who will come to the rescue of migrant workers.

"States need to step up coordination and have a dialogue on how they can provide a safe passage to them. There needs to be an immediate helpline for the workers. State governments which have a significant migrant population need to reach out to this population through special packages," said Daniel.

While some states have announced such packages, the biggest hindrance in accessing them is the lack of documents, pointed out Divya Varma, programme manager  policy and partnerships, Aajeevika Bureau.

"We know the major migration corridors in the country and figure out a mechanism to transport this population. If they cannot, they should find ways to fiscally contribute to the workers who are stranded," she added. The psycho-social impact on the daily-wage workers on losing their livelihood cannot be ignored, said Ranu Bhogal, director of policy, research and campaigns at OXFAM.

"They are also likely to suffer from trauma given the distance they are walking to reach their villages. Also, a lot of villagers are resisting the return of the migrant workers. This may boil over. The administration needs to put screening so that people are cleared by the government on not being positive for COVID-19," said Bhogal.

Organisations working at the grassroots level pointed out a bigger window to the lockdown would have given people in the informal sector a sense of preparedness. The smaller window also posed health challenges with workers trying to reach their destinations in cramped conditions, said Prameela V, project director of Bangalore-based NGO Sampark.
The Easter school holidays will start early for public schools in South Australia and Western Australia due to the coronavirus pandemic as educators across the country transition towards flexible learning.

Both states announced on Thursday they decided to cut Term 1 short to give educators the opportunity to prepare and transition towards flexible teaching and learning.

The moves come as two more Australians die from coronavirus, taking the nation's toll to 11.

Leaders in Queensland also chose to bring school holidays forward, in a similar move to what Victoria and the ACT have already implemented.

The Easter school holidays will start early in South Australia and Western Australia due to the coronavirus pandemic as educators across the country transition towards flexible learning

The school term in SA was originally due to break the day before Good Friday on Thursday April 9.

But students will now get an extra week away from lessons with the Department for Education announcing four pupil free days from Monday April 6 to Thursday April 9.

In Western Australia, formal classes will also end one-week early on Friday April 3.

WA Premier Mark McGowan said the government is encouraging parents to keep their children at home if they can from Monday March 30.

'I know the situation around our public schools has been causing angst for parents, teachers, staff and students,' he said on Thursday.

'I understand that it may be confusing, but we've kept them open, consistent with the best medical advice at hand through the National Cabinet process.

Government of Western Australia announced the changes on Thursday

'Today, as the pandemic situation moves forward, we move to the next step.'

Mr McGowan said students who stay at home from Monday will continue their education through accessing the online learning resources made available.

'However, all children who do attend public schools will continue to be taught,' he said.

'Where parents need children to attend school to enable them to maintain employment, and for those children in vulnerable families, like children living with grandparents, they are encouraged to continue to attend school.'

Mr McGowan said the extra time off will allow teachers and education assistants to plan and prepare for a 'new way of teaching' for the start of Term 2.

'It is crucial for us to strike the right balance between keeping the community safe, allowing essential services to continue and provide a quality education to our students in this difficult time,' he said.

The school term in South Australia was originally due to break the day before Good Friday on Thursday April 9. But students will now get an extra week away from lessons with the Department for Education announcing four pupil free days from Monday April 6 to Thursday April 9

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

SA Education Minister John Gardner said the additional four days would give teachers time to prepare for Term 2.

'With the increasing number of children absent from our schools, our teachers need this time to prepare for the difficult challenge of meeting the needs of learners who are at home,' he said.

'For those parents and carers who are able to keep their children at home, well supervised and in an environment of learning, we support this.'

Mr Gardner said they are providing support to families through the Learning SA website.

'These pupil free days, which are consistent with the Prime Minister's announcement on Tuesday night, will ensure our teachers are best prepared to deliver lessons regardless of whether the student is in the classroom or learning from home,' he said.

'The Government is delivering a strong response to deal with the significant challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, and we will do whatever we can to ensure young South Australians continue to thrive in their education with a learning program that is engaging, meaningful and accessible.'

There were more than 2,600 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia on Wednesday

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said heath advice that has kept schools open so far has not changed, but the pupil-free directive provides the right balance given community concerns.

NSW schools remain open but Premier Gladys Berejiklian has urged parents to keep their children at home if possible.

On Thursday, she flagged her state was readying to move into a full lockdown over the weekend, possibly ahead of federal government action, if the situation with the spread of the virus doesn't improve.

Victorian leader Daniel Andrews made similar comments on Wednesday.

Australia currently has 2,675 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 11 people have died.

Queensland joined the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Tasmania and South Australia at midnight on Wednesday by closing its borders.

New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT still have open borders.

In Western Australia, formal classes will also end one-week early on Friday April 3. WA Premier Mark McGowan said the government is encouraging parents to keep their children at home if they can from Monday March 30

Victoria's total number of coronavirus cases rose to 520 on Thursday morning, an increase of 54 from Wednesday.

A 68-year-old Queensland man died on Wednesday afternoon after catching the virus on board a cruise ship.

Queensland Health said the man had a 'serious underlying medical condition before contracting the virus.'

Sydney's eastern suburbs has the highest number of coronavirus cases in the state after a surge overnight, bringing the New South Wales total to 1,219.

Of the state's cases, seven people have died and 16 are currently in intensive care.
The coronavirus outbreak has prompted an increased number of people to open up their homes to pets in need of adoption.

On Monday 23 March, it was announced that the UK had been placed in a state of lockdown, meaning that members of the public can only leave their households for specific reasons such as going to the supermarket or doing one form of outdoor exercise a day.

The greater amount of time people have been spending at home for the past few weeks has inspired many to provide new homes for pets, Battersea Dogs and Cats Home revealed.

For the week starting Monday 16 March, the animal shelter found forever homes for 86 dogs and 69 cats.

This marked a considerable increase from the same week last year, when 42 dogs and 29 cats were adopted.

Furthermore, for the week starting Monday 9 March this year, 39 dogs and 52 cats were rehomed, demonstrating the huge difference a week can make.

Rob Young, head of operations at Battersea Home, said it is not surprising that people in self-isolation are seeking companionship.

As many people are preparing to spend a significant amount of time at home over the coming weeks, it is only expected that some may be thinking about the companionship a pet could offer, Mr Young said.

People are now having some more time to settle pets into their home, and are looking to do some good by rescuing animals who are waiting for their own home.

Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Show all 15 1 /15 Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A rose is delivered by drone to a woman on Mother's Day in Jounieh, Lebanon AFP/Getty Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Women dance on their balcony as a radio station plays music for a flash mob to raise spirits in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A skeleton stands on a balcony in Frankfurt, Germany AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies The film Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna is projected on a building in Rome AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman uses a basket tied to a rope to pull a delivery of groceries up to her balcony in Naples, Italy EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Francesco Cellini plays for his neighbours from the rooftop terrace of his flat block in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman gestures from her balcony in Barcelona EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Cellist Karina Nunez performs for her neighbours at the balcony of her flat in Panama City Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Nash Petrovic live streams a set from his roof in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies People applaud medical workers from their balconies in Modiin, Israel Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A Brooklyn resident relaxes in a hammock hung on their balcony Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Residents toast during a "safe distance" aperitif time between neighbours in Anderlecht, Belgium Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Musician Adam Moser plays for neighbours from his balcony in Budapest, Hungary Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man and his son on their balcony in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man sits alone on a roof terrace in Rome Reuters

Mr Young explained that while the nation is in lockdown, prospective owners can still view animals who need homes on the Battersea website.

Potential owners can still register to rehome through our online applications and as soon as were able to, well be reopening and working to continue finding new homes for our wonderful animals.

Mr Young expressed his gratitude to all the new owners for thinking of rescue pets at such a challenging time.

All three of our Battersea centres are now closed to the public, but many of our animals are now in loving homes or out on temporary foster with our staff and volunteers, he said.

Battersea are still caring for around 100 animals at our three centres and working hard to ensure each and every dog and cat continues to get the treatment, care, love, play and interaction they need.

Mr Young added that if people would like to support Battersea while the centres are closed, they can do so by providing a donation that will go towards the care of the dogs and cats at the animal shelter.
[March 26, 2020] FreeCast Hires DTV America & Frontier Executives as IPO Moves Forward

ORLANDO, Fla., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Irwin Podhajser has joined FreeCast's executive team where he will become the EVP of Media and Network Partnerships. He will supervise media buying and major network partnerships for the company which is a unique entry into the "cable alternative" arena.

Mr. Podhajser was previously the VP of Business Development for DTV America which held 450 television licenses throughout 118 top markets in the United States, and distribution of media brands such as: Laff, Bounce, Movies!, Comet, GetTV, Escape, COZI, BUZZR, MyTV, QVC, Telemundo, Azteca, Estrella, Antenna TV, Decades, GRIT and many others.

Under Mr. Podhajser's leadership, DTV America garnered distribution agreements with some of the nation's largest content providers including, Comcast/NBC/Universal, FOX Television, Sony Television, Katz Broadcasting, Tribune Media, Weigel Broadcasting Co, MGM, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and Freemantle Media. DTV America was acquired in June 2017 and majority owned by telecommunications conglomerate HC2 Holdings.

FreeCast is also exited to add new enterprise revenue opportunities with the addition of Roy Labrador to the company's leadership team. Mr. Labrador is FreeCast's new EVP of IOT and Partnership Sales and was the ormer National Vice President of Channel Programs for Frontier Communications, the nation's 8th largest provider of broadband internet in the United States with 3,735,000 subscribers. Frontier is also the 11th largest pay television provider in the United States with 838,000 subscribers.





Prior to his work with Frontier Communications, Mr. Labrador was an Executive with IBM-ZeroChaos, and held VP of Sales roles with EarthLink and Windstream Communications. Mr. Labrador will lead FreeCast's commercial licensing sales to broadband providers, wireless carriers, and hospitality/multi-dwelling operators nationwide.



FreeCast has long touted a complete end-to-end OTT ecosystem mimicking and ultimately replacing cable TV's hard-wired infrastructure across multiple platforms through its SelectTV and SmartGuide services. The company's motto "We do for streaming, what cable did for TV" is a base description of this targeted initiative.

Bill Mobley, CEO of FreeCast stated, "we are super excited to continue top executive hires for our team which have the institutional knowledge to understand what it takes to move forward in this new cable alternative landscape. Additionally, with our intention to continue IPO efforts we are establishing our leadership moving forward."

More Information:

Company: https://FreeCast.com

Product: https://SelectTV.com

This press release was issued through 24-7PressRelease.com. For further information, visit http://www.24-7pressrelease.com. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/freecast-hires-dtv-america--frontier-executives-as-ipo-moves-forward-301030136.html SOURCE FreeCast

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While many people are suffering because of the COVID-19 pandemic, when we look back, the ugliest part of this mess might be how incarcerated people were treated.

Social distancing is impossible in crowded prisons, even under the best faith efforts. And under negligent oversight, jails are readymade coronavirus hotspots, where victims already lack access to sanitation, adequate medical care and communication with the outside world.

We've already seen this reality unfold on New York City's Rikers Island, one of the world's largest jails. There are currently 52 cases out of the prison's population of slightly over 5,000. Cleaning materials like masks, hand sanitizer and bleach aren't available to corrections officers or inmates, reports TIME, and no protocol has been established for isolating people with symptoms despite the fact that inmates are forced to sleep and eat mere feet apart.

Inmates are also not receiving sufficient information about the disease or how it spreads. Though Rikers has the most cases, prisons across New York State are at extremely high risk given that despite a freeze on inmate movement, inmates are still being transported to and from facilities on a "case-by-case" exception basis. Notably, Harvey Weinstein is thought to have contracted coronavirus on Rikers, before being transferred to a facility near Buffalo, New York.

A spokesperson for the New York City Corrections Officer Benevolent Association (COBA) told TIME that NYC jails are "the epicenter of the epicenter" of the pandemic. The Department of Corrections has confirmed at least one death.

"Unless @NYGovCuomo, @NYCMayor, & all DAs do something ASAP, we're looking at mass death," writes Scott Hechinger, a public defender in Brooklyn who's been highlighting on-the-ground conditions for his clients.

Advocates are calling on the city to immediately release as many prisoners as possible, prioritizing elderly or high-risk inmates. Thus far, Mayor De Blasio has released 300 Rikers inmates, although according Slate, 551 people are currently serving less than a year, and many more are on Rikers "due to a technical parole violation" or for crimes that would have been processed as a misdemeanors except for "their status as parolees." De Blasio has said he "wants" to release inmates over 70 or with preexisting health conditions, but "doesn't have the authority." In contrast, New Jersey has already released 1,000 inmates to stop the spread of the virus.

Here's a few ways you can help:

Call, email and Tweet at Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill De Blasio.

For those in New York or concerned about the state's crisis, call on the state's leaders to demand an adequate emergency response for New York's criminal justice system. You can reach Cuomo's office at 1-518-474-8390 and email here. Supporters are trying to flood Cuomo with the hashtags #ClemencyNow, #FreeOurElders and #LetThemGo. Call De Blasio's office at 1-212- 788-7585 and email here.

Beyond reducing populations in general, The Prison Policy Initiative has laid out five key policy asks that will mitigate the effect of COVID-19 on the criminal justice system.

Release medically fragile and older adults Stop charging medical co-pays in prison. Lower jail admissions to reduce "jail churn." Reduce unnecessary parole and probation meetings Eliminate parole and probation revocations for technical violations.

Check what your state is doing to protect incarcerated people during COVID-19, and call on your elected officials to take action.

Although New York City is the epicenter, all prisons and jails are at high risk. The Prison Policy Institute is currently tracking which prisons, jails and other criminal justice agencies are taking meaningful policy changes to slow the spread of COVID-19. If your state isn't taking adequate action, contact your governor, mayor, sheriff, attorney general's office and city council to demand an emergency response.

Here are easy scripts from The Justice Collaborative about COVID-19 helpful for phone calls and emails to governors, prosecutors, sheriffs and county commissioners and city council members.

Sign or signal-boost an open letter to Mike Pence written by public health and legal experts.

Over 700 experts in public health, law and human rights have signed an open letter demanding a fair and effective response to COVID-19, that addresses prison populations. Sign if you're in these fields, or pass along to those who are.

Tell Governor Cuomo to protect bail reform in New York, and call on your own state to take action.

Bail reform keeps people out of jail. Keeping people out of jail saves lives. This January, New York ended cash bail for low-level offenses and non-violent misdemeanors (which reduces pre-trial detainment or "jail churn"). These reforms have already saved countless people from exposure to coronavirus in jail, but they're facing push-back, however, New York officials including Cuomo are trying to roll back bail reforms midst of the outbreak. Call on Cuomo and New York's legislature to preserve bail reform here.

Check out your own state's bail policy and call on your officials to take action.

Donate to advocacy groups fighting to protect incarcerated people during COVID-19.

The Legal Aid Society, New York's largest law firm for low-income families, is leading a lawsuit to release incarcerated New Yorkers at a high risk of COVID-19 from Rikers and other NYC jails.

The Release Aging People From Prison (RAPP ) campaign is leading the charge to pressure Governor Cuomo to release elderly prisoners.

State ACLU chapters around the country are fighting to reduce prison populations at the state level.

The National Bail Fund Network has proposed 10 demands for freeing people from the criminal legal and immigration detention systems during the crisis.

Color of Change is leading the #JusticeNotFear campaign to protect bail reform in New York, among other COVID-19 responses.
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Cyto CBD, the CBD company that created precision medical dosing, is partnering with Cumberland Medical Associates and Purple Lotus Aesthetics to help transition patients from opioid-focused treatments to Cannabidiol (CBD) for chronic pain management.

A highly anticipated study, published in January 2020, in Postgraduate Medicine Journal showed that 53% of chronic pain patients that were on opioids for over a year at least were able to reduce their opioid usage and/or completely discontinue opioids with daily supplementation of CBD in just eight weeks. This is why Dr. Sanjiv Dalvi and his wife, Dr. Sumedha Dalvi, who are both certified Addiction and Regenerative Medicine Specialists, started integrating Cyto CBD into their practice at Cumberland Medical.

"The potential benefits of CBD are undeniable, as we are seeing more and more data to support its use in our chronic pain patients. Additionally, given the holistic nature of the product, we are seeing an improvement in overall quality of life, as patients are getting better sleep and experiencing lower stress levels," said Dr. Sanjiv Dalvi, MD, PhD. "We use Cyto CBD because it is a medical grade product with research to confirm its quality. The company owns the entire production chain, including the farm where the hemp is cultivated, and their pharmaceutical approach to quality gives us confidence in recommending it and using it with our patients."

Cumberland Medical focuses on holistic health, pain management, mental health and sleep medicine. The clinic now serves as a hub where patients can access Cyto CBD products through their team of specialists and/or by purchasing the products in office, for personal use.

"With all of the attention that CBD is getting, it is important to remember that this is a product that is ultimately being ingested or applied to our bodies. That is why CBD products should be no less than medical grade and the reason Cyto CBD is manufactured at facilities that are cGMP certified and fully registered with the FDA," said Dr. Cohin Kakar, Chief Marketing Officer of Cyto CBD. "We are thrilled to bring an alternative therapy to the community in North Carolina that we can confidently endorse as safe with high purity."

Cyto CBD is now available at Cumberland Medical and will be available at their upcoming partner practice, Purple Lotus Aesthetics, scheduled to open in the summer of 2020. To schedule an appointment or learn more, please contact Cumberland Medical at (910) 864-0689 or visit their practice located at 5085 Morganton Road, Suite 100, Fayetteville, NC 28314.

About Cyto CBD

Headquartered in Los Angeles, California and part of The Anthos Group, Cyto CBD is exclusively available at clinics and pharmacies that focus on health and medical care. Cyto CBD has pharmacists and physicians on staff, endorsements from physicians all over the world, and they serve on the National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA) Board. Cyto CBD also won the Global Health & Pharma Award for Most Innovative CBD Company in 2019. Cyto CBD is an educator in the industry, as the team hosts regular educational webinars, keeping the medical community updated and informed around new science in CBD and cannabinoids.

For more on Cyto CBD visit cytocbd.com , and follow on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram .

SOURCE Cyto CBD
Nike Inc (NYSE: NKE) reported fiscal third-quarter results that came in better than expected and prompted a rally in the stock.

Here is a summary of how some of the Street's top analysts reacted to the print and management's commentary.

5 Takeaways

The five main takeaways from Nike's report according to Credit Suisse analyst Michael Binetti include:

EPS of 78 cents came in better than the Street's estimate of 59 cents, which solidifies its status as a company that "shines bright" in a downturn. Revenue in China was down 4% in the quarter versus expectations of 10%. The pace of the company's recovery is a "game-changer." The company prioritized sales over margins. Fiscal fourth-quarter EPS estimates are now revised "significantly" from a 30-cent loss to 5-cent growth. Near-term revenue visibility remains low and the pace of recovery in each country will be different.

See Also: Here's How Much Investing 0 In Nike Stock Back In 2010 Would Be Worth Today

Credit For China

Nike's showed the company managed any coronavirus-related disruptions in China "exceptionally well" as it pivoted towards digital channels throughout February, Wells Fargo analyst Tom Nikic said. The company is now seeing a "fairly rapid" recovery with stores and can be used as part of a "playbook" to manage the crisis elsewhere.

Any timeline for similar recoveries across the world can't be modeled at this time so management can't issue any guidance.

View more earnings on NKE

"NKE once again demonstrated the strength of their business model, as a focus on innovation and consumer engagement are helping them navigate one of the biggest disruptions we've ever seen," the analyst wrote in a note.

Three-Year Outlook

Nike's fiscal 2021 sales are likely to fall just 1% and the company resume EPS growth in the back half of the fiscal year, UBS analyst Jay Sole wrote in a note. Looking forward to fiscal 2022, sales in North America and Europe are likely to bounce back and 2023 could mark a "new EPS peak."

Story continues

Even if Nike's next six to eight quarters remain negatively impacted in some form, Sole said it's a "relatively short" period as part of a 12-year discounted cash flow analysis. Under a bull case model, shares of an upside potential of 183% and under a bear case shares can still rise 74%.

'Strongest Positioned

Nike's encouraging earnings makes the case for the company to be the "strongest positioned" in a post coronavirus world, Wedbush analyst Christopher Svezia wrote in a note. Granted, the virus and its impact on the economy is "nowhere near over," Nike's performance in the quarter shows it can get back on track faster than its peers.

Svezia said the company's unique digital business, successful innovation in the product pipeline, SG&A optionality are likely to help push consensus estimates higher. Meanwhile, the stock was trading at 21 times the research firm's fiscal 2022 EPS (after hours Tuesday) which represents an 18% discount to its historic average.

Piper Sandler: 'More Hope'

Nike noted an improving business not only in China but in Korea and Japan, including week-on-week traffic with a double-digit increase, Piper Sandler analyst Erinn Murphy wrote in a note. Encouragingly, Korea and Japan are both showing a recovery similar to what was seen in China.

Nike's report should give investors "more hope" around a potential recovery in North America and other regions, although at a different timeline.

NKE Ratings And Price Targets

Credit Suisse maintains at Outperform, $92 price target.

Wells Fargo maintains at Equal Weight, $87 price target.

UBS maintains at Buy, price target lowered from $123 to $114.

Wedbush maintains at Outperform, price target lifted from $91 to $93.

Piper Sandler maintains at Overweight, price target lifted from $82 to $94.

Nike's stock closed higher by 9% at $79.01 per share.

Latest Ratings for NKE

Mar 2020 Raymond James Maintains Outperform Mar 2020 Credit Suisse Maintains Outperform Mar 2020 UBS Maintains Buy

View More Analyst Ratings for NKE

View the Latest Analyst Ratings

See more from Benzinga

 2020 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
United States Navy medical Hospital corpsmen at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in 1918.

Navy Medicine

In 1918, social distancing measures like school shutdowns and travel restrictions were put into place in order to avoid spreading the Spanish flu, one of the deadliest events in history.

In 2020, over 100 years later, we are following the same social distancing measures to mitigate the effects of COVID-19.

From hourly workers panicking about lost wages to a cultural obsession with face masks, historians told Insider that both pandemics have a lot in common.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Closing stores, shutting down schools, wearing masks, and self-quarantining. In 1918, these were the social distancing methods used to mitigate the effects of the Spanish flu pandemic, and they're the same methods being used to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus more than 100 years later.

Global pandemics tend to occur every 30 to 40 years, but experts have been warning for years that the world isn't prepared for the next one. In fact, some say the world today is about as well-prepared for an outbreak as people were in 1918.

"What we're hearing now, in terms of washing your hands or stay home if you're sick, are almost the same measures that were recommended in 1918," said Tom Ewing, history professor at Virginia Tech.

"When you don't have a vaccine, and when you don't have a treatment, you don't have the medical countermeasures," said medical anthropologist Monica Schoch-Spana, currently a Senior Scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "So you have very little left in your toolkit."

That's hardly the only similarity historians are seeing.

In many American cities in 1918, retail hours were cut short, public transportation was limited, and essential services including mail delivery, garbage pickup, courts, and grave digging were interrupted. Schools, universities, dance halls, pool rooms, and theaters closed. Parades and social club gatherings were cancelled. American life ground to a virtual halt, and influenza became one of the deadliest events in history, killing an estimated 50-100 million people.

Story continues

Historians told Insider there are many similarities between the events of 1918, which many public health experts often examine as the worst case scenario for a pandemic, and the events of 2020, from the hourly workers concerned about losing wages to the cultural obsession with masks.

People called it 'the Spanish flu,' even though it had nothing to do with Spain or Spanish people. Similarly, the coronavirus has been falsely associated with China.

The Red Cross Home Service arrived just in time to rescue a woman named Mrs. Brown from the clutches of influenza.

Library of Congress

Pandemics are defined by their global reach, and this was true for the flu and the novel coronavirus.

"The flu spread quickly across the United States, cities, towns, rural communities, and I think we're seeing that today with the coronavirus," said Ewing. "This is not concentrated within a particular geographic region or among certain populations."

The sickness was first noticed in the United States in Fort Riley, Kansas, and then in Europe in the summer of 1918. But the disease picked up the name "Spanish influenza" because Madrid seemed to have the first major widespread outbreak in the world, during World War I.

Since, it's become clear that Madrid's outbreak was not much greater than other cities'. Rather, unlike the nations embroiled in a world war, Spain, which had remained neutral, was free to report on the outbreak in detail, without worrying about affecting morale. Because most of the accounts of the flu came from Spanish news sources, people assumed the outbreak began in Spain, and it became known as the Spanish flu.

Similarly, the novel coronavirus was long closely associated with Wuhan, China, where the virus first emerged in December 2019. Though it has since spread globally, President Donald Trump has referred to the virus as the "Chinese Virus"  an inaccurate phrase, public health experts say, is a misnomer, and fuels xenophobia.

There was a lot of backlash to the closure of schools and shops.

A barber in Ohio gives a customer a shave while wearing a mask.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Many schools shut their doors in 1918, but New York and Chicago refused to. Their thinking was that they had been working on hygiene and public health for decades already, and reasoned that children, many of whom lived in tightly packed tenement homes, were likely to be better off in a clean school building, where nurses could see if they were sick.

"I believe that the children are better protected in the schools than they would be in the streets," New York City health commissioner Dr. Royal S. Copeland said. Chicago public schools also remained open, although school nurses were eventually instructed to drop all their other work and concentrate solely on student inspections.

As the current pandemic took hold and reached the US, there was concern that closing schools would mean children did not have access to food or the internet, to take their online courses.

But as the virus has progressed, there has been broad support for school closures.

The shutdown of religious institutions angered many.

Demonstration at the Red Cross Emergency Ambulance Station in Washington, D.C., during the influenza pandemic of 1918

Library of Congress

The suspension of worship upset many people in 1918. The city of Baltimore delayed postponing closing houses of worship for as long as they could, until the cases began to surge.

"People felt that at the very moment they needed comfort and spiritual guidance, that was taken away from them," said Schoch-Spana. "So there were major complaints in the newspaper and from the pastors at the time, saying that you are taking away a very important source of solace for people when they're seeing people get sick and die."

Likewise, in 2020, some people have railed against the idea of canceling religious gatherings. The Diocese of Rome pushed for churches in Italy, a country under lockdown, to remain open. In Iran, Shiite Muslims stormed shrines that had been closed due to coronavirus, demanding to enter. Thousands of Hindu people attended Holi celebrations, despite the Indian government suggestion that they avoid public gatherings.

But most religious groups in America pivoted to digital services in the wake of the new coronavirus. Many rabbis, priests, and imams turned to digital meeting services like Zoom for to provide inspiration to worshippers.

Hourly workers worried about losing income due to closures.

A New York City typist wears a flu mask while at her desk, October 16, 1918.

The National Archives and Records Administration

When store hours were curtailed in Baltimore, hourly workers at retail stores and groceries were upset.

"These restrictions came in the fall, and in the winter when it was cold," said Schoch-Spana. "People argued at the time, how am I supposed to buy fuel to heat my house when I don't have an income? There was worry that you could catch cold, literally, because you were cold."

At the time, people thought it didn't make sense to cancel work for hourly workers, creating a burden that was both financial and health-related.

In 2020, many hourly workers without a safety net voiced similar concerns.

"Missing shifts for an illness would have definitely affected our ability to pay for our expenses," one woman previously told Business Insider.

For the easily-fired hourly employees of the gig economy, the new coronavirus meant they might soon be without an income. And it wasn't just hourly workers that were concerned. Millions of Americans with full-time jobs worried about losing their jobs due to the coronavirus, as the financial markets saw the effects of American life shutting down.

A surge of cases overwhelmed the medical system.

The Oakland Municipal Auditorium in use as a temporary hospital during the Spanish flu.

Photo by Edward A. "Doc" Rogers. From the Joseph R. Knowland collection at the Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library.

In 1918, a surge of cases swamped the American healthcare system.

"There just weren't enough doctors or nurses," said Navarro. Because the pandemic occurred during wartime, there was a severe shortage of doctors and nurses, as many of them had been sent to military camps abroad. And of the nurses and doctors that remained, many of them were getting sick. In Chicago, the American Red Cross called for volunteers and in Massachusetts every able-bodied person in the state with medical training was asked to help.

There weren't enough beds in the hospitals for all the new influenza cases, so schools and other buildings were converted into makeshift hospitals.

In 2020, makeshift hospitals are being hastily constructed constructed around the world. China built one in six days, using a prefabricated module, and four sites in New York are quickly being converted into hospitals. The US Navy is also planning to deploy two of its hospital ships into action, and experts say the process of quickly building hospitals is likely to extend to California and other states.

Many experts are warning the public that the American healthcare system isn't ready for a surge in COVID-19 cases. There are fewer than 100,000 intensive care unit beds in America, and on an ordinary day, most of them are in use. If the coronavirus continues to spread, American doctors will soon be faced with the weighty ethical dilemmas doctors in Italy are facing, of how to ration their limited resources.

"Starting now, everyone should try to avoid going to the ER," one emergency physician wrote.

They were constantly changing estimates of how long the outbreak was going to last.

A nurse taking a patient's pulse in the influenza ward of Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Library of Congress

"In 1918, there were a lot of swings in public perception, of people saying things were going to pass quickly, and then changing estimates of how long the process would take," said Navarro. It was a balancing act between trying to reassure the public and inform the public.

"Early on, there were a lot of recommendations to not panic, this isn't going to be really dangerous," said Ewing. "Once the number of cases and the number of deaths go up, then you see health officials really sounding the alarm with front page articles in newspapers."

In America, warnings about COVID-19 followed a similar pattern. In January and February, many public health experts were telling Americans not to panic. Many news outlets, like the Washington Post, Yahoo Finance, and the LA Times, wrote pieces advising people not to panic.

By March, that tone was gone, and many news outlets had shifted their tone to sounding the alarm and advising people to be cautious when leaving the house, and mindful of the fact that not social-distancing could harm many people.

On Sunday, Donald Trump reignited confusion over the timeline by saying he planned to reopen the country on April 12, which public health experts say is an unrealistic goal.

People were obsessed with masks.

Red Cross women at the New York County chapter sew masks to help fight influenza.

Library of Congress

As people began to panic about influenza, face masks became a symbol of American patriotism. "The man or woman or child who will not wear a mask now is a dangerous slacker," a Red Cross public service announcement said.

Very few places made it compulsory, said Ewing, but in San Francisco there was a $5 fine and jail time for those who didn't. At a Congressman's wedding in St Louis, the wedding guests wore face masks.

At the time, department stores advertised veils as masks for women, said Ewing, and New York Health Commissioner Copeland told people to kiss their spouses or children through a handkerchief.

Experts believe that the masks were not very useful. They were often made of gauze, which allowed droplets to pass through, and few wore them in private, where diseases are more likely to spread.

In 2020, the CDC has advised healthcare workers to wear bandanas or scarves if they can't get masks, since the general public has been buying them in droves, for extortionate prices on Amazon and Ebay, leading to a shortage.

There was a state-by-state patchwork of responses, rather than a federal mandate to cancel public gatherings.

A Cincinnati Board of Health sign put up in streetcars during the epidemic.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Then, as is the case now, there was no mandate handed down from the federal government telling all the states what to do, said Navarro. It made for an uneven patchwork of state responses.

Some mandates were enforced by law enforcement, Navarro said, though it's hard to quantify exactly how well that worked.

In Baltimore, the state's attorney said he would indict any business owner who didn't restrict hours. In Oakland, the city commissioned 300 people to act as undercover cops and take down the names and addresses of those walking outdoors without masks on. Albany declared anyone sneezing or coughing in public without covering their mouths would receive a $500 fine.

In America in 2020, mandating and enforcing health measures has also been left to individual states, though governors have been asking for federal help.

China enforced a complete shutdown due to coronavirus, with police patrolling the blocks to ensure no one left their homes without permission, but in the US, people were still gathering in large numbers for spring break.

Medical misinformation flourished, as people desperately looked for answers.

A pharmacist at a Washington, DC drugstore. People rushed to drug stores to purchase supposed cures for influenza, most of which offered no medical benefits.

Library of Congress

"Human nature has always been the same," said Navarro, "and people have always tried to profit off of these things." In 1918, people considered alcohol and qiuinine, a soda water, to be medicinal, and thought rubbing half an onion on your chest could have healing properties, he said.

In 2020, influencers are shilling colloidal silver, herbal remedies, and antiviral essential oils on Instagram, and people mistakenly thinking vitamin C can help prevent COVID-19. QAnon supporters even claimed that drinking bleach could kill COVID-19. Misinformation was so prevalent that the World Health Organization had to address a few wrong claims on its site, writing that alcohol, saline solutions, garlic cloves, and antibiotics were not viable coronavirus treatments.

There were disparities in treatment for the wealthy and the poor.

A child of a migrant keyworker near Jefferson, Texas that had a high fever and was ill with influenza, but was receiving no medical attention.

Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. 1939.

"As it's been for the history of the American healthcare system, the rich had access to better treatment," said Navarro. While the Spanish flu outbreak occurred during wartime, meaning people were already rationing food, the wealthier were able to stock up on necessities, although there was no panic-buying at the time.

The 1918 pandemic also happened during Jim Crow segregation, when African Americans could only go to certain hospitals. "Everyone was sick, but there were more healthcare facilities that were open to whites than there was for blacks," said Schoch-Spana. "And so there was an unevenness of evenness and the availability of healthcare."

If you were of a higher class, you would likely have a family doctor who could tend to you or get you into a hospital, or you could flee the city, said Ewing.

In 2020, as thousands of Americans with symptoms waited for an opportunity to get tested for COVID-19, celebrities, athletes, and Congressmen announced that they had gotten tested quickly and easily. Wealth also enabled some people to stock up on necessities like toilet paper and hand sanitizer, or even pay price gougers for what they needed, and the super-wealthy were able to jet off to private disaster bunkers in the midst of the outbreak.

"While they didn't have a cure in 1918, money made for a more comfortable experience with the disease," said Navarro. The same could be said for 2020.

Both now and then, the US heavily relied on volunteers to bolster an overwhelmed healthcare system.

Volunteers with supplies of linen, blankets, and clothing to give to the sick, arranged by the Red Cross office.

Library of Congress

In 1918, visiting nurses were often dispatched to check on families that had people sick with the flu, to clean and feed the children. If the nurses took the trolley, their routes would be limited. So people with cars lent their cars so nurses could cover more ground in a day, said Spoch-Spanos. People also brought foods like custard and broth to households where people were sick with flu.

In 2020, thousands of people have volunteered to work at the coronavirus testing drive thrus. Medical volunteers have stepped up to offer their support during the pandemic, with some even emerging from retirement to do it. 1,000 formerly retired healthcare volunteers vowed to offer their services in New York City in March. Many Americans are also virtual volunteering from home at organizations like Crisis Text Line, BeMyEyes, and BookShare.

And, just like in 1918, volunteers are sewing face masks for the healthcare workers that need them.

Read the original article on Insider
HighByte Co-Founders (left to right): John Harrington, Tony Paine, Torey Penrod-Cambra

HighByte, a Portland, Maine-based industrial software company, raised $875k in pre-seed funding.

Backers included Maine Venture Fund and Switzerland-headquartered Momenta Ventures.

Funding was received as $625K in convertible debt matched by a $250K long-term, low-interest loan from Maine Technology Institute (MTI). Angel investors include Corson Ellis, previous Founder and Chairman of Kepware and Brett Austin, previous President of Kepware.

The company intends to use the funds for business development activities and additional R&D headcount in 2020.

Co-founded by (left to right) John Harrington, Tony Paine, Torey Penrod-Cambra, HighByte is building a DataOps solution purpose-built for industrial environments that address the data architecture and security challenges created by Industry 4.0., its assets, products, and processes at the Edge. To date, the company was funded through founder contributions and $100K in grants awarded by the aforementioned MTI.

FinSMEs

26/03/2020
President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya has announced that he is taking an 80 percent salary cut alongside the vice-president to help fight ...





President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya has announced that he is taking an 80 percent salary cut alongside the vice-president to help fight the coronavirus pandemic.





Speaking at a press briefing on Wednesday, Kenyatta also announced members of the federal cabinet would have their salaries slashed by 30 percent.





He added that salaries of chief administrative secretaries and principal secretaries would also be reduced by 30 percent and 20 percent respectively.





He said the salary cut was voluntarily agreed upon by him and the officials, and that the measure is aimed at making more funds available to help Kenya manage the pandemic.

The country has 28 confirmed cases of the virus as of Wednesday.





Kenyatta further announced a raft of other measures meant to cushion the effect of the pandemic, including a 100 percent tax relief for all Kenyans earning below Ksh24,000.





He said his administration also decided on a 25 percent tax relief for other workers, as well as a reduction of the Pay as You Earn (PAYE) tax rate from 30 percent to 25 percent.





As of Wednesday, there were 2,475 cases of the coronavirus across 46 African countries, with 64 deaths recorded.





Nigeria has so far recorded 46 cases of the infection while one person have died.
KILL CHAIN: THE CYBER WAR ON AMERICAS ELECTIONS (2020) 9 p.m. on HBO. In the Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy, the filmmakers Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels presented evidence for the unreliability of electronic voting machines. This new doc, directed by Ardizzone, Michaels and Sarah Teale (an executive producer of Hacking Democracy), follows the Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti, who makes the case that Americas election systems are still critically vulnerable. The problem is, Hursti says early on, once you understand how everything works, you understand how fragile everything is, and how easy it is to lose this all.

MALCOLM X (1992) 8 p.m. on TCM. A couple years after collaborating on Mo Better Blues, Denzel Washington and Spike Lee joined forces again for this three-hour biographical drama about Malcolm X, played here by Washington. Based in part on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the film chronicles Malcolm Xs life before and during his time as a civil-rights leader. Spike Lee has attempted the impossible and almost brought it off, Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The Times in 1992. His new Malcolm X is not exactly the equal, or even the equivalent, of the book, but its an ambitious, tough, seriously considered biographical film that, with honor, eludes easy characterization.
Riyadh, March 26 : Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have reviewed the efforts to maintain stability in the global energy market and to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

The two, in a telephone call on Wednesday, expressed their deep concern over the coronavirus outbreak around the world and the need for all countries to work together to contain this pandemic, Xinhua reported citing the Saudi Press Agency.

No further details of the call were revealed by the report.

As the three-year pact between the OPEC and Russia will end later the month, a price war was triggered after the two sides failed to reach a new deal on curbing oil production.

This has sent shock waves through the global energy market, as the oil price took a nosedive at a time when the global demand for oil was already hit by the raging coronavirus pandemic.
Press Release

26 March 2020

In partnership with the French Government, Airbnb is today launching a local expansion of their Open Homes program to connect medical staff and caregivers battling the coronavirus outbreak in France with free places to stay offered by local Airbnb hosts.

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"Unprecedented times call for an unprecedented response and as the world unites to fight the coronavirus outbreak, we have made it our priority as a community to provide what support we can." - Emmanuel Marill, Airbnb Director, France

Across the world, hosts are already mobilizing and offering free accommodation to frontline staff fighting the outbreak, as thousands of doctors, nurses, caregivers and social workers join the battle to protect communities and save lives.

Following the launch of a similar initiative in Italy last week, Airbnb will help connect hosts willing to offer their place for free to medical staff in need of a place to stay close to their place of work.

Airbnb will waive all fees for the stays and will give 50 to hosts to help with cleaning costs.

Emmanuel Marill, Airbnb Director in France said: "Unprecedented times call for an unprecedented response and as the world unites to fight the coronavirus outbreak, we have made it our priority as a community to provide what support we can. By standing with our host community to offer free accommodation for caregivers and social workers we hope we can help heroic professionals on the frontlines as they work to protect us all and save lives. Our thoughts go to everyone affected by this outbreak and our sincere thanks go to medical staff across the country. We will continue to gather learnings on this initiative to see if they can be applied to other communities across the world."

Julien Denormandie, French Housing Minister, said: "I would like to thank Airbnb for answering my call. I know many French citizens want to help with this crisis. Through this solution, and thanks to their generosity, housing will be provided for healthcare workers and people working in centers helping homeless people, to get closer to their place of work."

This new pilot is part of the Open Homes program, which provides free, temporary housing to people going through a difficult time. To date, over 50,000 people who have been impacted by disaster, illness, or conflict have found temporary housing thanks to Open Homes hosts around the world.

Are you a host who can make your place available to medical staff?

Register now on Airbnb if you have an entire home available for at least 15 days next to a hospital, nursing home or emergency shelter. Importantly for health reasons only entire homes are eligible.

Are you a doctor, healthcare worker or social worker looking for accommodation?

Register now through this form. Starting from Tuesday, March 24 you will receive an email with a link to browse our platform for a choice of accommodations availablefor freeclose to your place of work.
London: Palace officials say it is impossible to know whether Prince Charles contracted coronavirus at a packed London fundraiser for Australian bushfire victims, as health officials defend their decision to test the wife of the heir to the throne even though she had no symptoms.

The 71-year-old Prince of Wales announced on Wednesday that he had tested positive to COVID-19, making him the most high-profile figure affected by the worsening global pandemic.

He travelled to the royal family's Balmoral Estate in Scotland over the weekend and was tested by National Health Service staff in Aberdeenshire after developing mild flu-like symptoms. His wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, was also tested even though she had no symptoms. Her test came back negative.

Work is underway to determine whether people who had contact with the future king over recent weeks are at risk, however Clarence House warned there was little chance of pinpointing the source of the infection.
PennLive wants to shine a spotlight on people whose acts of kindness provide some good news in these dark times. If you know a coronavirus hero  someone who has inspired you with their generosity or a selfless act  please tell us about them by emailing newstips@pennlive.com

A Hershey mom saw there were hungry kids in her community, so she started an organization to help feed them.

Five years and many full bellies later, Christine Drexler is not going to let the coronavirus stop her Cocoa Packs program. But it is temporarily changing the way she and her battalion of volunteers operate as they provide food to kids in need.

I wish I could put into words what its like seeing the faces of these children. Its very personal to me, I know whats at stake. I know what it means to them, Drexler said Wednesday. On a normal day, they would run towards me with hugs. We cant do that now, but I can still provide assistance to them.

As the world deals with the coronavirus pandemic, good will seems to live on in organizations like Cocoa Packs as they do what they can to help their community.

Cocoa Packs has temporarily moved to the Spring Creek Church of the Brethren, 335 E. Areba Ave., Derry Township, where they have been handing out breakfast, lunch and weekend food five days per week to kids in need. They are currently serving 532 children.

Our criteria is pretty simple, she said. If you have a child facing food insecurity, were going to help you.

Drexler, a mother of five, founded Cocoa Packs in 2015. Its an organization that helps children with their physical and emotional wellbeing, from offering food, clothing and personal care items to toys during the holidays. During normal times, they also host educational programs.

They normally operate out of the Derry Township Middle School, running a pantry there to give students assistance. When the Derry Township School District had to close with all of the other schools in the state, Cocoa Packs relocated to the church.

Christine Drexler founded Cocoa Packs and gives food to kids in need at the Derry Township School District. March 25, 2020. Sean Simmers | ssimmers@pennlive.com

Usually, Cocoa Packs role is to augment whats available through the school district, said district spokesman Dan Tredinnick. Since breakfast and lunch is not available at the school right now, we partnered up with them to makes sure the students are getting the nutrition they need.

The school is providing the breakfasts and lunch they normally serve, and Cocoa Packs is handing those out, along with the additional food they would normally provide, he said.

This is a community effort. The way were going to get through these trying times is helping one another out, Tredinnick said.

Other than her children and her faith, Drexler said helping out children in need has been the most rewarding thing she can do, and she finds, in these trying times, Cocoa Packs motto still rings true.

How love wins.

She sees love winning with donations and with volunteers coming out to help. She sees love winning through the generosity of others.

Love still exists, she said. Its just at a distance for now.

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Le Monde reports that the official number of Covid-19 infections worldwide is now close to half-a-million, with nearly 21,000 people dead as a result.

And half of those half-a-million cases are here in Europe, with Italy and Spain the worst affected, both countries now having overtaken the total number of deaths reported in China.

Iran is also suffering terribly, with an official death toll this morning of 2,234. Based on the latest update from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, France had 25,600 confirmed infections this morning, and 1,333 dead. But those statistics probably conceal more than they tell us.

France puts sufferers on the train

The main story in Le Figaro, for example, concerns a specially commissioned train which is, as we speak, transferring 20 infected patients from the north-eastern region of Alsace to the central Loire valley.

That's another effort by the authorities to re-distribute patients from the worst-hit and medically overwhelmed area close to the German border to parts of France where the hospital emergency services are not yet inundated.

Here in Paris, according to a separate article in Le Monde, the hospitals are very close to breaking-point. Of the fifteen hundred beds available in intensive care in the French capital, eleven hundred were occupied last night. And ambulances are delivering more than 100 new seriously ill patients every day.

The crucial question is whether the nationwide confinement will have a sufficiently rapid impact of the rate of infection, and so reduce that growing pressure on health facilities and on medical staff, themselves also suffering terribly.

In London, some hospitals are reporting up to 50 percent of their medical personnel unable to work because they are themselves infected. In the worst-hit parts of Italy, several endangered patients are being kept alive by sharing breathing apparatus.

President Macron sends in the army

Yesterday, French President Emmanuel Macron launched the operation which has been baptised "Resilience" under which the army will join the fight against Covid-19.

We've already seen the construction of an army field hospital in Alsace. Navy vessels have been despatched to the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, to provide assistance to French overseas departments. And, apart from that, the military seem to be on stand-by with a broad mandate to react to local requirements as requested.

One piece of good news concerns the reaction to the call for volunteer helpers. The site "Je veux aider," "I want to help" in French, has had over 100,000 offers, forty thousand of them medically trained. And there has been a huge response to the appeal launched yesterday for volunteers to help farmers and vegetable growers harvest food crops, a job normally done by migrant workers. They, of course, are confined to their own countries by the health crisis. So 40,000 French citizens have volunteered to roll up their sleeves and give a hand.

To test or not to test . . .

There has been some criticism of the government's slowness in organising mass testing. Of course, when your national health services are in danger of collapse, it's hard to get beyond the emergency reaction of trying to save as many lives as possible. And tests are costly in terms of time and lab facilities. They can't be administered while maintaining the safe hygenic distance. You need a blood sample, and that means close contact.

France has been carrying out 9,000 tests every day.

The scale of testing is soon going to change, with 30,000 tests per day promised. That will have the double advantage of freeing those who are already immune from confinement, and of giving a clearer idea of how close France is to the peak of the epidemic.

Experimental treatments being evaluated

Finally, we're no further along the road to a possible "cure" or vaccine against Covid-19. The time-scale for the development of a dependable vaccine is something like 20 months. But four different treatments are currently being tried on volunteers in seven European countries.
The Russian army is rush-building 16 emergency coronavirus hospitals amid warnings of an 'explosion' of cases in the country.

Three thousand troops are working 'around the clock' to build the hospitals, which will be able to hold 1,600 patients when finished.

Russia has just 840 confirmed cases of coronavirus, but there are signs the infection rate is starting to spike as has been seen in other badly-affected places like Italy.

Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu has announced that the country is building 16 new coronavirus hospitals, with 3,000 soldiers working around the clock to finish them

The hospitals will be built in addition to a new 93million specialist hospital in Moscow (pictured), and will be finished between mid-April and mid-May

Russia has 840 cases of coronavirus, but that increased by a record 182 on Thursday amid fears the disease is starting to spike as it has in other badly-hit countries

Meanwhile Moscow has announced that cafes, shops, parks and other non-essential services will shut for a week starting Saturday in an 'unprecedented' move to slow the spread of the virus.

President Putin has already enforced a week of holiday on Russians between March 28 and April 5 and told them to stay at home to help flatten the curve of infection.

Announcing the construction of new hospitals on Thursday, defence minister Sergei Shoigu said that half will be ready by mid-April and the other half by May 15.

The total being spent on the project is 94million, which includes a specialist 93million hospital in Moscow.

Additional 'modular' military hospitals are being built in Kaliningrad, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Odintsovo, Podolsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Smolensk, Pushkin, Rostov-on-Don, Sevastopol, Volgograd, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Orenburg, Ulan-Ude, Ussuriysk, and Khabarovsk.

'We started the construction on March 20,' Shoigu announced at a government meeting in Moscow.

'At present 3,000 people are employed with 750 units of equipment. Work is carried out around the clock.'

Russians have already been ordered to take next week off work and stay at home in order to slow the spread of coronavirus (pictured, a testing lab in Moscow)

Russia has been using facial recognition software to track people violating self-quarantine measures, but is now looking to go a step further by telling everyone to stay at home

Moscow's mayor has announced that, in addition to sending everyone home from work, all bars, cafes, parks and most other businesses in the city will shut next week

The move came as epidemiologist Professor Nikolay Malyshev warned numbers infected with coronavirus are expected to soar.

'We are now preparing for explosive development, like a nuclear chain reaction,' he warned.

Similar concerns led to Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin shutting down large parts of the city until the end of next week.

Sobyanin had already ordered Muscovites aged over 65 to stay home starting Thursday, but stopped short of ordering a strict quarantine.

The closures announced Thursday 'are not a holiday, it is a serious measure to prevent COVID-19,' the mayor said in a statement on his website.

All cafes and restaurants must stop admitting customers and may only deliver food or prepare orders to go, according to the decree.

Vladimir Putin answers questions during a meeting with business leaders in Novo-Ogaryovo, having ordered Russians not to go into work next week

Putin has so-far resisted a state-wide lockdown of Russia, but has ordered businesses to close for a week to slow the spread

The 16 new hospitals will be built in addition to a 93million specialist hospital in Moscow (pictured, Putin visits a coronavirus ward at a Moscow hospital)

Stores selling non-essential items must close, as well as beauty salons and spas. Moscow's parks will also shut.

The mayor first hinted at the new measures in a televised interview Wednesday evening, saying 'there will be nothing to do in Moscow' next week.

'The restrictions ordered today are unprecedented in Moscow's modern history and will create many inconveniences,' Sobyanin said in his message Thursday.

'But trust me, they are absolutely necessary to slow the spread of the coronavirus infection and decrease the number of the ill,' he said, also asking Russians from other regions to put off travel to the capital.

Moscow registered two coronavirus-linked deaths on Wednesday, the first nationally. A total of 840 cases have been recorded nationwide, according to official statistics on Thursday.
KYIV, Ukraine  The streets of Kyiv are empty. Restaurants, bars and shops are closed. Only a few passersby can be spotted on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square in the Ukrainian capital, where thousands gathered during the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014.

The massive protests led to the ouster of the proRussian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and fueled proRussian uprisings in the eastern Donbass region.

Now, like much of the rest of Europe, Ukraine is on lockdown, but the spread of the coronavirus comes at a critical time for the future of the country and how it might resolve the war still raging in its eastern fringes. Restrictions on movement not only could slow the peace process but also could hinder a protest movement that is passionately calling for Ukraine not to give two breakaway regions run by Russian rebels, Luhansk and Donetsk, any legitimacy.

Public protests and other gatherings are forbidden on Ukraine's streets, because of a virus that has already infected more than 460,000 people worldwide and killed more than 21,000.

Image: Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel (Ian Langsdon / Reuters file)

With 156 confirmed cases so far and five deaths in Ukraine, according to the country's Health Ministry, the government has closed public institutions and limited transportation within and outside of the country.

However, Yaryna Chornoguz, 24, a military medic who fought in the Donbass war, is not following the rules. She is one of many protesters demanding that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who took office last year, reverse a decision to include representatives from Luhansk and Donetsk on a new advisory council tasked with coming up with peace solutions in the Donbass.

Download the NBC News app for breaking news and politics

Like others, she fears that the new council will oblige Kyiv to lead negotiations directly with the separatists and Russia, which is widely seen as having a direct hand in the conflict and which protesters fear will step back from the talks, leaving the rebels in charge.

Story continues

"When I found out about the new deal in Minsk that would legitimize Russian proxies and turn Russia from an aggressor into just an observer, I understood our novice president just spit upon six years of the Ukrainian diplomacy and years of our resistance to the Russian invasion," Chornoguz told NBC News. "He needs to back down and cancel the decision, or he should be impeached."

News

Chornoguz's boyfriend, Mykola Sorochuk, 22, was killed on Jan. 22 in the Donbass war. "It was Russian sniper who killed him," she said.

She took her sleeping bag and went to a protest at the building of the Presidential Office in central Kyiv on March 13, when the advisory council was announced in Minsk after talks among Ukraine, Russia and a group of other European nations, four days before the coronavirus lockdown.

Soon Chornoguz's friends, also war veterans, joined her protest. On March 17, in direct contravention of a ban on public gatherings, 500 more Ukrainians came to the Presidential Office to protest  but they left as fears over the coronavirus intensified.

"Many people called me to explain they didn't show up because of the coronavirus," said Pavlo Bilous, 50, a protest organizer. "Some were afraid to get infected. Others were afraid to infect people, because they felt sick."

He added: "We are not afraid to come back even despite the lockdown. We don't want to be healthy but wake up in Russia after the epidemic."

Now, in defiance of the lockdown, around a dozen people still keep watch during the night near the Presidential Office. There have been no arrests so far, but the Interior Ministry has warned that police and the National Guard will patrol the streets to arrest people who violate the lockdown rules.

The official name for their protest movement translates to "Spring on Granite 2020," and a Facebook page encourages others to join.

"I think a lot more people would have joined us," said Viktor Pylypenko, 33, a Donbass war veteran and protester. "However, the coronavirus is an important constraining factor."

Image: A Ukrainian soldier (Oksana Parafeniuk / NBC News file)

The new advisory council is proposing to give people who live in Luhansk and Donetsk the right to vote on the future of the territories, which have been torn apart by a war that had killed more than 13,000 people as of January, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

While Zelenskiy's office called the decision to form the council risky, its proponents defended it as a possible breakthrough that could break Russia's influence over the occupied territories. The agreement said the council should be created after Wednesday March 25, after consultations with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, France, and Germany.

But on Wednesday Dmytro Rezikov, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister, said in an interview with the Liga.net news website that there will be no agreement signed in Minsk this week on the new advisory council, due to Covid-19. Instead, the meeting will be held via Skype and the signing postponed.

Nevertheless, many in Ukraine still see the council as surrendering national interests to the Kremlin.

"The socalled coordination council is a direct step towards Russia," Pavlo Klimkin, a former Ukrainian foreign affairs minister, wrote on Twitter. "It is the acknowledgement of the occupation authorities of the Donbass. While Russia is going to be turned from the aggressor into a mediator, like Germany or France."

Despite the wave of criticism, Ukraine's government continues to defend the decision.

"During the March 11 meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk the sides agreed to create the council as a mechanism needed to bring full ceasefire and achieve the longawaited peace with the representatives of the rebelheld regions of the Donbass," said Iuliia Mendel, a spokesperson for Zelenskiy.

Mendel added that there will be no Russian proxies in the new council.

Image: A Ukrainian armored personal carrier (Anatolii Stepanov / AFP - Getty Images file)

In a bid to stop the war, Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany signed the socalled Minsk Peace Agreements in Belarus in 2015. Ukraine agreed to lead the local election and decentralization reforms with the representatives of the occupied parts of the Donbass. However, it demanded that Russia cede control over parts of the border that Ukraine lost in 2014. The Kremlin has so far refused to do so.

Although international watchdogs and journalists have alleged that Russia is an active participant in the war in the Donbass, the Kremlin has denied sending soldiers to fight in Ukraine.

A Dutchled team of international investigators confirmed the work of the opensource news outfit Bellingcat in 2018 when it said that a mobile Buk missile that brought down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over the contested part of Ukraine in 2014 had come from the Russian military.

The trial of four men, three Russians and a Ukrainian, charged with murder in the downing of the plane, which killed all 298 people on board, has been adjourned until June 8. Russia has consistently denied any involvement in the attack.
As part of his collaboration with Likee, India's one-man-band Gladson Peter has posted a number of short videos on the app

Locked down in your homes in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, you are most certainly reading this from self-isolation. Many of you must also be jostling with the office work that has entered your family territory. What do you do in such a situation to calm yourself and relax? I am sure the answer to this question for many would be listen to music.

An absolute treat for music lovers during these trying times is Gladson Peter, who himself plays more than 40 instruments to form Indias first and only one-man band. His journey has been supported by Likee, the pioneering short video platform by Singapore-based BIGO Technology Pte Ltd.

Gladsons love for music was evident when he was as little as three-year-old and started playing a toy keyboard. As he grew older, his love for music, especially rhythm, gradually turned into a passion. Hailing from a Christian household, the music prodigy was always a part of church choirs while pursuing his education.

In the words of Gladson, being a part of the choir helped him learn and understand music in a much better way.

Though Gladson never had any formal training, he says, My dad was my first and only teacher. He taught me how to play guitar and keyboard when I was a kid... its my curiosity, interest and God-given talent that made me the musician that I am.

But the basic tryst for any artist is finding an appropriate platform to reach out to millions, and this is what led Gladson to the world of short video apps. His journey in the short video domain began with Likee in October 2019. As part of his collaboration with the pioneering platform, Gladson has posted a number of videos on the app. He was also a part of the #LikeeDreams initiative, which chronicled his struggles in life, battle against a disease called pleural effusion, and evolution as a musician.

Born in Tirunelveli and raised in Mumbai, Gladson was always a passionate musician and an active sportsperson during his school days. By the end of Class 10, he was already playing 30 instruments, and currently, he has mastered as many as 45 instruments, thereby constituting the only one-man band in the country.

As mentioned earlier, his biggest roadblock in the journey was pleural effusion, which led to non-functioning of almost 40 percent of his lungs. Advised by doctors to refrain from playing any instrument, Gladson was heading towards depression.

But then God sort of spoke to me. I was reminded of a picture that I had drawn in school wherein a man was surrounded by several musical instruments, he recalls. It was sort of a Christmas gift for Gladson from the almighty himself and resulted in the artist rising from the ashes like a phoenix.

Talking about the road ahead, Gladson plans to strategise his profile on Likee. Apart from creating increased number of entertaining videos, also on the anvil is providing Hindi tutorial for Ukulele, a niche member of the lute family of instruments.

Bollywood too is on his mind. I am exploring all the avenues, including Bollywood. But I would wait for something good to happen, he says.
A man cleans up on the trading floor, following traders testing positive for Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., March 19, 2020. Lucas Jackson | Reuters

There was considerable trepidation among trading desks over the weekend as many in California, New York, and Massachusetts were told to start trading from home. The two main concerns: Would the technology work and would traders be able to effectively interact with each other and their clients? For the most part, it appears traders are adapting. "Ninety-three percent of our staff has been trading at home for the last week and a half, and 98% are fully functional," said Steve Starker, who runs BTIG, one of the larger institutionally-focused trading desks. He too was calling from his home. Starker, who had been preparing to have his staff work from home for weeks, said the technology is working fine. The biggest concern: Broadband capacity on the internet with so many working at home. But there have been no interruptions. What about the ability to communicate among traders and clients? "We have instant messenger services, we have WebEx, we have Zoom, but we also have our hoot," he said referring to the squawk box that traders use to communicate with each other on trading desks. Starker said he has one hoot that connects to all 16 of his traders simultaneously, and another global hoot that simultaneously connects to all the sales people in the U.S. and Europe. "People are making more of an effort to communicate via voice" using the hoots, he said. For Starker and other Wall Street trading firms, it helps that equity volumes have doubled in the past month, greatly increasing the need for Starker's brand of personalized, high-touch trading. "Our business is up 50%," he said.

Same 'juice'

Even traders outside the main centers in New York, San Francisco, and Boston are moving their people to work from home. Jack Miller is the head of trading at Baird, a privately held firm that offers wealth management, investment banking, and research. Half of Baird's trading staff is in Milwaukee, and most of the other half are in New York. "Sixty percent of our traders are working from home, up from nothing two weeks ago," he said, calling from his home in Milwaukee. "Three weeks ago we were talking about whether it was even feasible." They too were worried that a home setup would not have the "juice," or the reliability to handle the traffic in home systems. But for the most part, that has not been an issue. Communication between traders has also been better than feared. "Other than standing up and yelling across the room, it's the same as before," Miller said, noting Baird traders also have hoots, that allow them to communicate with each other.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

As for the New York Stock Exchange, officials are grappling with when  and under what circumstances  to reopen the iconic trading floor, which remains temporarily closed while trading continues electronically. "We will re-open when we are confident we can keep people safe and not add any additional strain on the medical community ," New York Stock Exchange President Stacey Cunningham said in an email this afternoon. The situation has been complicated because several floor traders have tested positive for coronavirus. The NYSE has been urging those on the floor last week to self-quarantine. One bit of good news: The switch to all-electronic trading appears to have gone smoothly. Few if any technological glitches have been reported. As for the floor community, while there was considerably anxiety going into floorless trading, most seem to be adopting. "I am in front of a Mac computer, I have a large 27-inch screen, I have my Bloomberg and my order management system," John Monaco of Wellington Shields said in a phone call. "I am able to trade off-floor, and I am one of the fortunate ones that is not lacking for business."

Missing the floor
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fortuna Silver Mines, Inc. (NYSE: FSM) (TSX: FVI) is pleased to report updated Mineral Reserve and Mineral Resource estimates as of December 31, 2019 for the Caylloma Mine located in Peru and the San Jose Mine located in Mexico and reiterates the Mineral Reserve and Mineral Resource estimate as of March 31, 2019 for the Lindero Project located in Argentina.



Jorge A. Ganoza, President and CEO, commented: Our infill drill program at Caylloma was successful at replenishing the majority of Mineral Reserves mined in 2019 with higher grade mineralized material. Mr. Ganoza continued, At San Jose, upgrading through infill drilling proved more challenging, as mining is transitioning from the central Stockwork zone to the Trinidad North area where mineralization tends to be narrower and more variable in nature. As the mineralization style changes, the operation is implementing various initiatives, such as pillar recovery and narrow vein mining methods, to optimize mineral extraction.

Highlights of Mineral Reserve and Mineral Resource Update

Combined Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves for the Caylloma and San Jose mines are reported at 6.4 Mt containing 37.2 Moz silver and 220 koz gold, representing year-over-year decreases of 18 percent and 19 percent in contained silver and gold ounces, respectively

Combined Inferred Mineral Resources for the Caylloma and San Jose mines are reported at 7.9 Mt containing an estimated 30.9 Moz silver and 168 koz gold, reflecting a year-over-year decrease of 6 percent in contained silver ounces and no change in reported gold ounces

Lindero Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves are reported at 84.2 Mt containing 1.7 Moz of gold. Inferred Resources are reported at 8.6 Mt containing 106 koz of gold (refer to Fortuna news release dated April 4, 2019)

Mineral Reserves - Proven and Probable Contained Metal Property Classification Tonnes

(000) Ag

(g/t) Au

(g/t) Pb

(%) Zn

(%) Ag (Moz) Au

(koz) Silver

Mines Caylloma,

Peru Proven 99 101 0.34 2.19 3.09 0.3 1 Probable 2,361 80 0.20 2.41 3.86 6.1 15 Proven + Probable 2,460 81 0.21 2.41 3.83 6.4 16 San Jose, Mexico Proven 232 311 2.12 N/A N/A 2.3 16 Probable 3,704 239 1.58 N/A N/A 28.5 188 Proven + Probable 3,936 243 1.61 N/A N/A 30.8 204 Total Proven + Probable 6,396 181 1.07 N/A N/A 37.2 220 Gold

Mine Lindero, Argentina Proven 25,352 N/A 0.76 N/A N/A 0.0 618 Probable 58,875 N/A 0.58 N/A N/A 0.0 1,096 Proven + Probable 84,226 N/A 0.63 N/A N/A 0.0 1,714 Total Proven + Probable 37.2 1,934





Mineral Resources - Measured and Indicated Contained Metal Property Classification Tonnes (000) Ag

(g/t) Au

(g/t) Pb

(%) Zn

(%) Ag (Moz) Au

(koz) Silver

Mines Caylloma, Peru Measured 681 110 0.37 1.96 3.28 2.4 8 Indicated 1,671 104 0.31 1.56 2.96 5.6 17 Measured + Indicated 2,352 106 0.33 1.67 3.06 8.0 25 San Jose, Mexico Measured 17 104 0.80 N/A N/A 0.1 0 Indicated 538 105 0.70 N/A N/A 1.8 12 Measured + Indicated 555 105 0.70 N/A N/A 1.9 13 Total Measured + Indicated 2,907 106 0.40 N/A N/A 9.9 37 Gold

Mine Lindero, Argentina Measured 2,092 N/A 0.55 N/A N/A 0.0 37 Indicated 16,774 N/A 0.49 N/A N/A 0.0 265 Measured + Indicated 18,866 N/A 0.50 N/A N/A 0.0 302 Total Measured + Indicated 9.9 339





Mineral Resources  Inferred Contained Metal Property Classification Tonnes (000) Ag

(g/t) Au

(g/t) Pb

(%) Zn

(%) Ag (Moz) Au

(koz) Silver

Mines Caylloma, Peru Inferred 4,056 112 0.37 2.58 4.00 14.6 48 San Jose, Mexico Inferred 3,889 131 0.96 N/A N/A 16.3 120 Total Inferred 7,945 121 0.66 N/A N/A 30.9 168 Gold

Mine Lindero, Argentina Inferred 8,600 N/A 0.38 N/A N/A 0.0 106 Total Inferred 30.9 274

1. Mineral Reserves and Mineral Resources are as defined by the 2014 CIM Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves

2. Mineral Resources are exclusive of Mineral Reserves

3. Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability

4. Factors that could materially affect the reported Mineral Resources or Mineral Reserves include; changes in metal price and exchange rate assumptions; changes in local interpretations of mineralization; changes to assumed metallurgical recoveries, mining dilution and recovery; and assumptions as to the continued ability to access the site, retain mineral and surface rights titles, maintain environmental and other regulatory permits, and maintain the social license to operate

5. Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves are estimated as of September 25, 2019 for the San Jose Mine and as of June 30, 2019 for the Caylloma Mine and reported for both mines as of December 31, 2019 taking into account production-related depletion for the period through December 31, 2019. Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves for Lindero are estimated and reported as of March 31, 2019

6. Mineral Reserves for the San Jose Mine are based on underground mining within optimized stope designs using an estimated NSR break-even cut-off grade of US$64.54/t, equivalent to 138 g/t Ag Eq based on assumed metal prices of US$17/oz Ag and US$1,380/oz Au; estimated metallurgical recovery rates of 91 % for Ag and 90 % for Au and mining costs of US$33.24/t; processing costs of US$17.12/t; and other costs including distribution, management, community support and general service costs of US$15.18/t based on actual operating costs. Mining recovery is estimated to average 91% and mining dilution 11%. Mineral Resources are reported at a 110 g/t Ag Eq cut-off grade based on the same parameters used for Mineral Reserves and a 15% upside in metal prices. Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves include 2.36 Mt containing 20.4 Moz of silver and 124 koz of gold reported at a 142 g/t Ag Eq cut-off grade, in addition to Inferred Resources totaling 2.71 Mt containing 10.9 Moz of silver and 78 koz of gold reported at a 110 g/t Ag Eq cut-off grade, located in the Taviche Oeste concession and subject to a 2.5 % royalty

7. Mineral Reserves for the Caylloma Mine are reported above NSR breakeven cut-off values based on the proposed mining method for extraction including; mechanized (breasting) at US$ 85.26/t; mechanized (enhanced) at US$ 78.90/t; and semi-mechanized at US$ 86.03/t using assumed metal prices of US$17/oz Ag, US$1,380/oz Au, US$2,170/t Pb and US$2,590/t Zn; metallurgical recovery rates of 84 % for Ag, 25 % for Au, 91 % for Pb and 90 % for Zn with the exception of the Ramal Piso Carolina vein that uses a metallurgical recovery rate of 75 % for Au. Mining, processing and administrative costs used to determine NSR cut-off values were estimated based on actual operating costs incurred from July 2018 through June 2019. Mining recovery is estimated to average 93 % with mining dilution ranging from 10 % to 22 % depending on the mining methodology. Mineral Resources are reported at an NSR cut-off grade of US$65/t for veins classified as wide (Animas, Animas NE, Nancy, San Cristobal) based on the same parameters used for reserves, and a 15% upside in metal prices and US$135/t for veins classified as narrow (all other veins) based on narrow vein mining methods

8. Mineral Reserves for Lindero are reported based on open pit mining within a designed pit shell for variable gold cut-off grades and gold recoveries by metallurgical type. Met type 1 cut-off 0.27 g/t Au, recovery 75.4 %; Met type 2 cut-off 0.26 g/t Au, recovery 78.2 %; Met type 3 cut-off 0.26 g/t Au, recovery 78.5 %; and Met type 4 cut-off 0.30 g/t Au, recovery 68.5 %. Mining recovery is estimated to average 100% and mining dilution 0%. The cut-off grades and pit design are considered appropriate based on long term gold prices of US$1,320/oz, estimated mining costs of US$1.28 per tonne of material, total processing and process G&A costs of US$8.29 per tonne of ore, and refinery costs net of pay factor of US$6.90 per ounce gold. Lindero Mineral Resources are reported within the same conceptual pit shell above a 0.2 g/t Au cut-off grade based on the same parameters used for reserves and a 15% upside in metal prices

9. Eric Chapman, P. Geo. (APEGBC #36328) is the Qualified Person for Mineral Resources and Amri Sinuhaji (APEGBC #48305) is the Qualified Person for Mineral Reserves, both being employees of Fortuna Silver Mines Inc.

10. Totals may not add due to rounding procedures

11. N/A = Not Applicable

San Jose Mine, Mexico

As of December 31, 2019, the San Jose Mine has Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves of 3.9 Mt containing 30.8 Moz of silver and 204 koz of gold, in addition to Inferred Resources of 3.9 Mt containing a further 16.3 Moz of silver and 120 koz of gold.

Year-over-year, Mineral Reserves decreased 24 percent in terms of tonnes and 21 percent in contained silver and gold ounces after net changes resulting from production-related depletion and the upgrading and conversion of Inferred Resources to Mineral Reserves due to a limited infill drill program focused primarily on the Stockwork zones. Silver grade increased 3 percent and gold grade increased 4 percent to 243 g/t and 1.61 g/t, respectively due to an increase in the break-even cut-off grade from 134 g/t to 138 g/t Ag Eq.

Measured and Indicated Resources tonnes exclusive of Mineral Reserves increased slightly year-over-year from 0.3 Mt to 0.5 Mt due primarily to the change in the breakeven cut-off grade for reserves.

Year-over-year, Inferred Resources increased 61 percent in terms of tonnes and 7 percent in contained silver and gold ounces. Silver and gold grades decreased by 33 percent. The net variation is due to reductions resulting from the upgrading of high-grade Inferred Resources related to infill drilling in the Stockwork zones counteracted by exploration drilling discovering new resources in the Victoria mineralized zone.

Caylloma Mine, Peru

As of December 31, 2019, the Caylloma Mine has Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves of 2.5 Mt containing 6.4 Moz of silver and 16 koz of gold, in addition to Inferred Resources of 4.1 Mt containing 14.6 Moz of silver and 48 koz of gold.

Year-over-year, Mineral Reserve tonnes decreased by 6 percent, while silver grade increased 5 percent to 81 g/t, lead grade increased 14 percent to 2.41%, and zinc grade increased 4 percent to 3.83%. Changes are primarily due to mining related depletion and the upgrading and conversion of Inferred Resources to Mineral Reserves due to a successful infill drill program focused primarily on the Animas NE vein.

Measured and Indicated Resource tonnes, exclusive of Mineral Reserves, increased by 9 percent year-over-year to 2.4 Mt.

Inferred Resources tonnes decreased by 1.3 Mt or 24 percent year-over-year. Silver, lead, and zinc grades increased 10 percent, 8 percent, and 4 percent, respectively. The decrease in Inferred Mineral Resources is primarily due to a successful infill drill program of the Animas NE vein resulting in the upgrading of Inferred Mineral Resources to Mineral Reserves coupled with an increase in cut-off value from US$50/t to US$65/t for the reporting of resources in wide veins.

Lindero Project, Argentina

The Lindero Project has Proven and Probable Mineral Reserves of 84.2 Mt containing 1.7 Moz of gold, in addition to Inferred Resources of 8.6 Mt containing 106 koz of gold (refer to Fortuna news release dated April 4, 2019 ).

Qualified Person

Mr. Eric Chapman is a Professional Geoscientist of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of the Province of British Columbia (Registration Number 36328) and has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information contained in this news release.

About Fortuna Silver Mines Inc.

Fortuna is a growth oriented, precious metals producer focused on mining opportunities in Latin America. Our primary assets are the Caylloma silver Mine in southern Peru, the San Jose silver-gold Mine in Mexico and the Lindero gold mine, currently under construction, in Argentina. The Company is selectively pursuing acquisition opportunities throughout the Americas and in select other areas. For more information, please visit our website at www.fortunasilver.com .

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Jorge A. Ganoza

President, CEO and Director

Fortuna Silver Mines Inc.

Trading symbols: NYSE: FSM | TSX: FVI

Investor Relations:

Carlos Baca- T (Peru): +51.1.616.6060, ext. 0

Forward-looking Statements

This news release contains forward looking statements which constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation and forward looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (collectively, Forward looking Statements). All statements included herein, other than statements of historical fact, are Forward looking Statements and are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those reflected in the Forward-looking Statements. The Forward looking Statements in this news release may include, without limitation, statements about the Company's plans for its mine sand mineral properties; the Companys business strategy, plans and outlooks; the merit of the Companys mines and mineral properties; mineral resource and reserve estimates; the Companys ability to convert inferred mineral resources to indicated mineral resources and to convert mineral resources to mineral reserves; timelines; production at the mines, the future financial or operating performance of the Company; the effects of laws, regulations and government policies affecting our operations or potential future operations; future successful development of our projects; the estimates of expected or anticipated economic returns from the Companys mining operations including future sales of metals, concentrate or other products produced by the Company; the Companys ability to achieve its production and cost guidance; capital expenditures at the Companys operations; approvals and other matters. Often, but not always, these Forward-looking Statements can be identified by the use of words such as estimated, potential, open, future, assumed, projected, used, detailed, has been, gain, planned, reflecting, will, containing, remaining, expected, to be, or statements that events, could or should occur or be achieved and similar expressions, including negative variations.

Forward-looking Statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the Forward-looking Statements. Such uncertainties and factors include, among others, risks inherent in mineral exploration; the reliability of Mineral Resource and Mineral Reserve estimates; uncertainties inherent in the estimation of Mineral Reserves, Mineral Resources, and metal recoveries; the Companys ability to replace mineral reserves; changes to current estimates of mineral reserves and resources; changes to production estimates; changes in general economic conditions and financial markets; uncertainty of production, development plans and cost estimates for the Caylloma Mine, the San Jose Mine and the Lindero Project; changes in prices for silver and other metals; technological and operational hazards in Fortunas mining and mine development activities; market risks related to the sale of the Companys concentrates and metals; future development risks, the Companys ability to obtain adequate financing for further exploration and development programs and opportunities; governmental and other approvals; the ability to obtain necessary licences and permits; claims and legal proceedings, including adverse rulings in litigation against the Company; challenges to the title to the Companys properties; political unrest or instability in countries where Fortuna is active; labor relations issues; as well as those factors discussed under Risk Factors in the Company's Annual Information Form. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in Forward-looking Statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended.

Forward-looking Statements contained herein are based on the assumptions, beliefs, expectations and opinions of management, including but not limited to expectations regarding the accuracy of the Companys current mineral resource and reserve estimates; mine production costs; expected trends in mineral prices and currency exchange rates; that the Companys activities will be in accordance with the Companys public statements and stated goals; that there will be no material adverse change affecting the Company or its properties; that all required approvals will be obtained; that there will be no significant disruptions affecting operations and such other assumptions as set out herein. Forward-looking Statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company disclaims any obligation to update any Forward-looking Statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by law. There can be no assurance that Forward-looking Statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, investors should not place undue reliance on Forward-looking Statements.

Cautionary Note to United States Investors Concerning Estimates of Reserves and Resources

Reserve and resource estimates included in this news release have been prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") and the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves. NI 43-101 is a rule developed by the Canadian Securities Administrators that establishes standards for public disclosure by a Canadian company of scientific and technical information concerning mineral projects. Equivalent U.S. reporting requirements are currently governed by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") Industry Guide 7 (Industry Guide 7) under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Canadian standards, including NI 43-101, differ significantly from the requirements of the SEC currently in effect under Industry Guide 7, and reserve and resource information contained in this news release may not be comparable to similar information disclosed by U.S. companies. In particular, the term "resource" does not equate to the term "reserves". Under the SEC's disclosure standards currently in effect under Industry Guide 7, mineralization may not be classified as a "reserve" unless the determination has been made that the mineralization could be economically and legally produced or extracted at the time the reserve determination is made. While the SEC recognizes the reporting of mineral deposits which do not meet the Industry Standard Guide 7 definition of reserve as of February 25, 2019, the effective adoption of the Modernization of Property Disclosures for Mining Registrants, such rules are not required to be compiled with until the first fiscal year beginning on or after January 1, 2021. As a result, the SEC's disclosure standards currently in effect normally do not permit the inclusion of information concerning "measured mineral resources", "indicated mineral resources" or "inferred mineral resources" or other descriptions of the amount of mineralization in mineral deposits that do not constitute "reserves" by U.S. standards in documents filed with the SEC. You are cautioned not to assume that resources will ever be converted into reserves. You should also understand that "inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. You should also not assume that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource" will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian rules, estimated "inferred mineral resources" may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies except in rare cases. You are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource" exists or is economically or legally mineable. Disclosure of "contained ounces" in a resource is permitted disclosure under Canadian regulations; however, the SEC's disclosure standards currently in effect under Industry Guide 7 normally only permit issuers to report mineralization that does not constitute "reserves" by such standards as in-place tonnage and grade without reference to unit measures. The requirements of NI 43-101 for identification of "reserves" are also not the same as those of the SEC's disclosure standards currently in effect under Industry Guide 7, and reserves reported in compliance with NI 43-101 may not qualify as "reserves" under such SEC standards. Accordingly, information concerning mineral deposits set forth in this news release may not be comparable with information made public by companies that report in accordance with U.S. standards.
Ralph Morana has been in business through the 1992 recession, the 2008 financial crisis, and SARS. The Toronto restaurateur has never been as worried as he is now, in the era of COVID-19.

Along with hydro bills, taxes and line of credit payments, hes also got rent coming due on his two restaurants April 1, including Bar Volo, which opened near Yonge and Bloor six months ago after a million-dollar renovation.

Like thousands of other small business owners across the country, hes worried about being able to pay rent when hes got almost no revenue coming in. While some landlords have offered rent deferrals or discounts, many others are holding tenants to the terms of their lease.

Business owners are urging governments to provide subsidies, and landlords to be far more understanding.

One of my landlords said were working on something. The other, I didnt really hear much. And theyre a corporation, said Morana, whos already decided to cancel his annual Cask Days beer festival for this year. The Morana familys Keep6 Imports is offering online beer sales, but Moranas unsure how much longer that will be happening  not that its bringing in enough to cover the bills anyway.

He told the landlords for Bar Volo, and its sister bar Birreria Volo on College Street that the postdated rent cheque theyre holding for April may as well have been made out of rubber.

I told them not to bother cashing it, because its gonna bounce, said Morana, adding that hed like to see landlords offer rent deferrals or breaks to businesses who are struggling because of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Hes not, he insisted, looking for a handout.

Give me three months without lease payments, and tack it onto the end of the lease. Please. Theres got to be some kind of deferral. Ive got zero revenue coming in from the restaurants, said Morana. Hes not doing take-out orders because it wouldnt bring in enough revenue to bother with, he said.

Morana says it would be short-sighted of landlords to force struggling tenants like him to pay their full rent right now; theyd also be hurting themselves.

Good luck finding another tenant in this economy, said Morana.

Corinne Pohlmann, an executive at the countrys biggest small business association, says governments need to step in, either with rent subsidies, tax breaks for landlords, or both.

Governments need to defer property taxes, and landlords need to pass that along to their tenants. Wed encourage everybody to use some common sense. Theres no precedent for this, said Pohlmann, senior vice president of national affairs at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. The CFIBs latest survey shows that a third of Canadian small businesses might close permanently within the month without more financial assistance.

In Toronto, the city gave 60-day deferrals for business and residential property taxes. But not all jurisdictions have done the same, and Pohlmann says not all landlords are passing along the savings to tenants.

For Thomas Vecsey, who runs Concord-based framing shop Picturesque Frames Co., the fear is even more acute. Business has dried up completely.

While hes been late with rent by a few days here and there in his 30 years in business, he has always paid in full. He was stunned when he heard back from his landlord after saying that he needed a few extra weeks to pay March rent, ordinarily due the first of the month.

We were two weeks behind, and they sent the bailiffs after me and threatened to seize all my equipment, said Vecsey.

After paying off the March rent this week, hes facing another rent day April 1. Given what happened in March, hes not optimistic what will happen.

Hes willing, he says, to pay back whatever rent he owes, after the crisis is over.

Tack it onto the end. Ill make full restitution, pay whatever interest is needed. Im not looking for a handout, Im just looking to survive, Vecsey said.

Kristin Jeffery, who runs downtown Torontos Scull House fitness studio, says shes fed up after getting a note from her landlord saying her $13,500 rent would be due as usual.

We had a month of working capital set aside, so well be able to make rent for April, but after that? I dont know. My banks been helpful, so I think Ill probably be able to get a line of credit, but it would be nice not to have to worry about rent, at least for now, said Jeffery.

While shes disappointed in her landlord, shes equally frustrated that governments havent provided any assistance for commercial rents.

I have yet to see any help being provided in terms of specific rent programs for small businesses like myself, Jeffery said.

Still, some businesses are getting a different response from landlords. At Annex Cafe Grapefruit Moon, owner Rhiannon Wicks was grateful to get an email from her landlord Wednesday morning saying that April rent would be deferred.

We sincerely hope that this reduces any stress or anxiety that you are experiencing at this time. Take care and stay healthy, the note from Wickss landlord ended.

Wicks says while shes bringing in a small amount of revenue from takeout, its not nearly as much as full restaurant service would normally bring.

Weve gotten about $650 over the last week. It would normally be $12,000, so its really tough, said Wicks. She was grateful for the note from her landlord.

Its not just me, its my kids, and my staff. There are 20 people counting on this place staying in business, said Wicks.
A worker shows people subject to quarantine the way to their quarantine area in Hoa Binh province (Photo: VNA)



The number of COVID-19 cases in Vietnam has reached 148 after the Ministry of Health confirmed seven more cases, including five Vietnamese, one South African and one French, on March 26th morning.

Among the new Vietnamese patients, two men, aged 26 and 34, returned from the US; two men, aged 22 and 19, from the UK; and a 17-year-old girl returned from Thailand and had close contact with a person previously testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 in Da Nang city.

The South African patient is a 58-year-old woman who departed Seattle of the US and transited Taiwan (China) before entering Vietnam on March 21st.

The French one is a 58-year-old man coming to Vietnam on March 12th.

They are currently undergoing treatment in HCM City, Tra Vinh province, Can Tho city, Ha Tinh province and Hanoi.

Vietnam has recorded 14 new COVID-19 cases over the last 24 hours. Among them, 10 were quarantined upon their arrival, one is a doctor getting the virus from patients, and three spent some time living in the community before having test results./.
Governments in Latin America are taking different approaches for virus containment but residents accross the region are in confinement.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday stuck with his contention that concern about the new coronavirus is overblown, and accused Brazilian media of trying to stoke nationwide hysteria.

States such as Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are under partial lockdown by local authorities, measures that Bolsonaro criticized, calling them to abandon their "scorched earth" policy of prohibiting public transport, closing business and schools, and calling for mass confinement at home for their residents.

Colombia entered its first day of lock-down, with police and military officers patrolling the streets to enforce the measure in several checkpoints around the streets of capital Bogota.

Streets and parks in Bogota were almost deserted.

Days after imposing the lockdown in Argentina, most streets and avenues in Buenos Aires remained empty with only a handful of public buses, taxis, and cars circulating. Grocery stores are allowed to open and people can go out to buy food items to stores nearby.

Alessandra Petrilli, 24, who is originally from Venezuela, said she has no option but to work but wished people would use more restraint to make the orders.

On Wednesday the World Health Organization confirmed 2,201 COVID-19 cases in Brazil, 301 in Argentina and 306 in Colombia.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks.
A court here on Thursday granted bail to seven people arrested in connection with the recent communal violence in north east Delhi over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

Metropolitan Magistrate Vijayshree Rathore granted relief to Mohd Arman, Shakir, Dilshad, Zakib, Bhure Khan, Razi and Shabir on furnishing a bail bond of Rs 20,000 with one surety of like amount.

The court granted bail on the ground of principle of parity since two people were earlier enlarged on bail in the case.

During the hearing in the courtroom, the police opposed the bail pleas saying the investigation was at its initial stage and the allegations against them were serious in nature.

Advocate Abdul Gaffar, appearing for the accused, argued that the allegations against the seven arrested were false and they did not cause any harm or damage to public property as claimed by the police.

Nine people were arrested from north east Delhi's Dayalpur area and a case was registered against them for the offences under sections 147 (rioting), 148 (rioting armed with deadly weapon), 149 (unlawful assembly) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and relevant sections of Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act.

The court had on February 28 sent them to judicial custody.

Communal clashes broke out in northeast Delhi on February 24 after violence between citizenship law supporters and protesters spiralled out of control leaving 44 people dead and around 200 injured.

Frenzied mobs torched houses, shops, vehicles, a petrol pump and pelted stones at residents and police personnel.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Fear of a coronavirus epidemic in the country worries international observers. Healthcare facilities are collapsing and unable to offer adequate care. Houthi and Saudi-led Arab coalition in favor of a ceasefire, but expect practical implementation on the ground.

Sana'a (AsiaNews / Agencies)  There is a small glimmer of hope for peace in Yemen. In these hours the different warring factions welcomed a United Nations request for a ceasefire with immediate effect while the country, which has entered its sixth year of war, faces a serious humanitarian crisis and the danger of a possible coronavirus epidemic.

As the Vicar of Arabia pointed out to AsiaNews in recent days, the virus would have a "devastating" impact.

Last night a spokesman for the Saudi-led Arab coalition said he supported the Yemeni government's decision to follow up on the UN peace appeal. The same position was also held by the opposite front, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who control the capital Sana'a, who however demand that there be a concrete application on the ground of the ceasefire.

In the background, the danger of a coronavirus epidemic in the country also appears, the poorest of the Arab Peninsula and tormented by six years of conflict that have caused over 100 thousand victims and pushed millions on the threshold of hunger. There are currently no official cases of Covid-19, but verification is also difficult due to a collapsing healthcare system.

Colonel Turki al-Malki, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, says he supports the efforts for a truce, launched in these hours by the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres who invited parties to resume peace talks interrupted in December 2018. "The coalitions announcement ... is welcome. We are waiting for it to be applied practically,

The Houthi front political leader Mahdi al-Mashat says they are also open to "a prisoner release".

Fears of a possible impact of coronavirus on the country are confirmed by experts and health professionals. We have a global coronavirus pandemic threatening to overwhelm an already broken health care system, said Tamuna Sabadze, country director at the International Rescue Committee, adding that Yemen is already battling a large cholera outbreak.
Medical materials from China arrive at the Liege airport in Belgium, on March 18, 2020.(Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)

From the Meuse River to the Dinaric Alps, from Rica to Piraeus, increasing numbers of Chinese enterprises and residents stand side by side with local authorities and frontline health workers in Europe to help attenuate the sanitary shockwave in their second homeland, now the epicenter of the pandemic.

PARIS, March 25 (Xinhua) -- "Together we are stronger","l'union fait la force", "Berg und Tal kommen nicht zusammen, wohl aber die Menschen" -- expressions in various languages displaying hope and solidarity circulate on the social media platform WeChat these days as countless Chinese expats living in Europe join people in their host countries in the tough war against the coronavirus.

Chinese medical materials are prepared to be loaded onto the plane to Belgium at Xiaoshan International Airport in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, March 13, 2020. (Xinhua/Huang Zongzhi)

From the Meuse River to the Dinaric Alps, from Rica to Piraeus, increasing numbers of Chinese enterprises and residents stand side by side with local authorities and frontline health workers, mainly by providing much-needed medical protective gears to help attenuate the sanitary shockwave in their second homeland, now the epicenter of the pandemic.

BUSINESSES IN SOLIDARITY

On Monday morning, dozens of boxes containing 50,000 medical masks dispatched from Changsha in south-central China were handed over to Bedburg city officials in eastern Germany. Written on the boxes was a German proverb, which translates as "mountains and valleys don't come together, but humans do."

The donation came from the Sany Group, a leading Chinese construction machinery manufacturer whose European headquarters is in Bedburg. The masks are destined for hospitals in Bedburg and Essen, both in North Rhine-Westphalia, the state with the largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany.

"During the most difficult time of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, Sany Europe's partners and friends from Europe provided great support to the Chinese people. With a grateful heart, the Sany Group quickly prepared the first batch of 50,000 medical protective masks in China to support the prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany," said Martin Knoetgen, chief executive officer (CEO) of Sany Europe.

A staff member of the local public health bureau stands next to packages containing protective suits in Heinsberg, Germany, on March 6, 2020.(Photo by Shen Zhengning/Xinhua)

Across the continent, Chinese enterprises are taking similar actions to fight the coronavirus hand in hand with their host cities.

The Jack Ma Foundation and the Alibaba Foundation have increased efforts to provide support and supplies to countries affected, especially Italy, Belgium, Spain, Slovenia, France, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands.

A plane from Avia Solutions Group with the donation from Huawei Baltic and China Chamber of Commerce lands at an airport in Vilnius, Lithuania on March 20, 2020.(Chinese Embassy in Lithuania/Handout via Xinhua)

Chinese tech giant Huawei has also been busy sending out aid wherever possible, but especially to the European countries where they have a long history of partnership in establishing mobile networks and selling phones.

Alibaba and Huawei have both announced that other vital supplies urgently needed at this critical time will arrive rapidly.

The Paris branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has donated 40,000 N95 respirator masks to the Pitie-Salpetriere University Hospital in the French capital. The Piraeus Port Authority, operated by China's COSCO Shipping Ports Limited, has donated protective suits, single-use gloves and protective glasses to Hellenic Coast Guard officers.

KLM Royal Dutch Airline's partners in China -- China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines and Xiamen Airlines -- have donated tens of thousands of medical masks to the Netherlands.

An exhaustive list would fill pages, but all these could be summarized by what a Chinese official said at a donation ceremony last Friday.

"The virus knows no borders. It is a common challenge for humanity," said Li Xiaosi, Chinese ambassador to Austria, when witnessing the donation of 150,000 protective masks and 3,000 protective suits to the Workers' Samaritan Federation (ASB), an Austrian aid organization primarily active in emergency medical services, by representatives of the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC), the world's largest rolling stock manufacturer.

INDIVIDUALS SHOULDER RESPONSIBILITY

Chinese private individuals are also pulling their weight.

"We, the Chinese living in France, have two homes -- when China was in distress, we were all with Wuhan; now as the disaster falls upon France, we are all Parisians," wrote the Association of Chinese Residents in France in an open letter, urging some 700,000 Chinese expatriates living in their second homeland to collect protective gears and donate them to the frontline health workers.

Chinese associations had mobilized even before this open letter was published, by donating masks and other materials to France's pre-hospital medical emergency body and to hospitals treating coronavirus patients.

A China-Europe freight train carrying anti-coronavirus supplies departs for Spain at the Yiwu west train station in Yiwu, east China's Zhejiang Province, March 21, 2020.(Photo by Gong Xianming/Xinhua)

In Spain, the Chinese community has donated materials, such as face masks, protective clothing and hand cleaning gels, to the local authorities, the police and hospitals in various cities. They also prepared videos to help raise awareness of COVID-19, keep people safe and prevent panic. A lot more people offering donations prefer to remain anonymous, stating simply: "We are the Chinese community."

"We want to thank the Chinese community in Zaragoza for the donation of face masks, gloves and thermometers to the Zaragoza police. There is no doubt that difficult situations promote solidarity, and this is a clear example: a thousand thanks!" read a message on social media from the City Hall in Zaragoza in northern Spain.

The Athens-based Sino-Hellenic Investors' Confederation has offered seven fully equipped apartments in the Greek capital free of charge for use by doctors and nurses treating patients in Greek hospitals.

The Association of Chinese Professionals in Belgium (ACPB) and a fundraising team that calls itself "Keep Going Wuhan!" have sent hundreds of pairs of protective glasses to two hospitals in Brussels. "The Meuse River runs long, so does our friendship with the Belgian people. We stand together with you in these difficult times," said their message posted on the boxes.

"We will continue to donate other supplies that are still on the way, this time from China to Belgium," said Dr. Xu Zhian, chairman of the association.

In Latvia, an online auction launched by Chinese and local artists, previously aimed at helping Wuhan, also decided to give its total proceeds of some 5,000 euros (5,400 U.S. dollars) to the local authorities, explaining that "the situation has changed" and "there is no such thing as an alien grief."

In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Chinese businessmen have donated over 10,000 euros to Banja Luka University Hospital and the Brcko special economic zone since the country's first COVID-19 infection was confirmed.

"Some of us have been in BiH for more than 20 years. When our second home is in trouble, we must do something," He Guoliang, a Chinese businessman who initiated the move, told Xinhua.

Elva Liu, a Munich-based Chinese business lawyer who considers Germany her second home, felt the same urge. She did not hesitate one second when she gave a package of masks she had bought in early March to her doctor earlier this week after watching a video in which a German doctor announced the closure of his clinic for lack of personal protective equipment.

"One more doctor continues working, much more chances patients will have for recovery," she told Xinhua. "I finished my studies, built up my career and my family in Germany. I will try my best to help bring normal life back to my second hometown and help others around me."

Medical experts to Italy prepare to board a plane in Fuzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province, March 25, 2020.(Xinhua/Wei Peiquan)

More and more Chinese are expected to join the fight against the virus and make their contributions to Europe's war against the pandemic, commented Nouvelle d'Europe, a Paris-based daily paper run by and for the Chinese diaspora in its Saturday editorial.

"When our motherland suffers, overseas Chinese rush to the rescue. When our second homeland is enduring a hard time, we will also shoulder our responsibilities," reads the editorial.
miDiagnostics Raises 14m to Accelerate the Commercialization of its Disruptive, Lab-quality Silicon Chip Diagnostics Platform

Supported by existing shareholders and new investors, including tech entrepreneur Urbain Vandeurzen and life sciences entrepreneur Rudi Pauwels

Technology has potential to deliver rapid test results in multiple settings, including future pandemics

Leuven, Belgium  26 March 2020  miDiagnostics, which is using silicon chip technology that will bring miniaturized, rapid, easy-to-use, lab-quality tests with built-in connectivity direct to the patient and clinician regardless of location, today announces the completion of a 14m investment round. The round was supported by existing shareholders as well as leading life science and tech investors Dr. Rudi Pauwels and Dr. Ir. Urbain Vandeurzen.

The funds will be used to accelerate the development of miDiagnostics proprietary nanofluidic processor on a chip, and to prepare it for industrial-scale manufacturing. miDiagnostics unique technology will enable fast, comprehensive and cost-effective analysis of a wide range of health conditions. The technology has potential in multiple settings:

Monitoring chronic patients at home;

Fast screening for physicians or remote health centers in developing countries; and

Widespread monitoring during pandemics

miDiagnostics technology was invented by imec, the world-leading R&D and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies in Belgium, and Johns Hopkins University, the leading US research and medical centre.

miDiagnostics is currently working with NASA to evaluate its technology under simulated zero gravity conditions.

Dr. Ir. Urbain Vandeurzen, a serial entrepreneur and founder and Chairman of Smile Invest and former co-founder, Chairman and CEO of LMS International, participated through his family office VMF Invest, which has made a number of investments in fast growing technology and life sciences companies. LMS International was sold to Siemens in 2013 and is the most successful technology spin-out of KU Leuven University.

Dr. Rudi Pauwels and Dr. Ir. Urbain Vandeurzen join the existing investors and successful serial entrepreneurs Marc Coucke (Alychlo) and Michel Akkermans (Pamica) as well as PMV (the investment fund of the Flanders Region) and the technology founders imec and Johns Hopkins University.

Nicolas Vergauwe, Chief Executive Officer of miDiagnostics, commented: The continued commitment of our founding partners imec and JHU, our existing shareholders and this latest endorsement by two highly successful serial entrepreneurs further strengthens our confidence in the future of miDiagnostics. They share our view that miDiagnostics has the potential to disrupt and transform the industry by making diagnostic information as readily accessible as digital information on a smartphone. Together with the recent progress in advancing our technology and bringing in the right expertise on board to deliver commercial success, we are well placed to make rapid progress.

Dr. Rudi Pauwels, Chairman of miDiagnostics, commented: Since joining the Board of Directors in 2018, Ive been impressed by the rapid technical progress of miDiagnostics proprietary nano-fluidic processor on a chip and its real disruptive potential in the global diagnostics market. Ive been actively working with the excellent team at miDiagnostics to accelerate commercialisation.

Urbain Vandeurzen, Chairman of VMF Invest, said: Thanks to its unique silicon chip technology, miDiagnostics has the potential to become a significant international player in screening, diagnosis and monitoring. Its easy-to-use and cost-efficient tests will revolutionize point-of-care testing by directly engaging with patients and enabling speedy intervention.

As weve seen with efforts to contain the coronavirus, the need for technology that can provide rapid answers to clinicians and patients is becoming ever more critical. We believe that with further financing and support from investors, the strong management team at miDiagnostics is well positioned to take its unique technology to the market, offering clinicians and patients reliable, lab-quality tests outside the hospital setting.

Luc Van den hove, CEO and President of imec, further said: We are delighted to see miDiagnostics significant progress towards bringing imec originated technology to the wider market. We welcome this financing round and are pleased to see the engagement of Urbain, Rudi alongside existing shareholders to support the further development of the business. I am convinced that this unique microfluidics technology will create a revolution in the diagnostics industry, similar to what the micro-processor has done for the computer industry.

For further information please contact:

miDiagnostics

Marijke Van der Auwera

Director Strategic Marketing



info@midiagnostics.com



Consilium Strategic Communications (PR Adviser)

Amber Fennell

Jonathan Birt

Lucy Featherstone

Aidina Brownlow







+44 20 3709 5700

midiagnostics@consilium-comms.com

About miDiagnostics

miDiagnostics is using silicon chip technology which will bring miniaturized, rapid, easy-to-use, lab-quality tests with built-in connectivity direct to the patient and clinician. Combining a nanofluidic processor on a chip and a compact reader, miDiagnostics can measure virtually any biomarker from an easily accessed sample such as drops of fingerprick blood. The Company is developing an extensive portfolio of tests for screening, diagnosis and monitoring of a wide range of health conditions, including infectious diseases. Spun out of the world-leading R&D and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, imec, and a research collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, the leading US research and medical centre, miDiagnostics goal is to enable fast, comprehensive and cost-effective health analysis, regardless of location. Based in Leuven, Belgium, miDiagnostics is a privately held company created in 2015.
Pune, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/26/2020 -- The market scenario included in the Global Financial Reporting Software Market report provides key information of the competition in the competitive analysis. The global Financial Reporting Software Market report by wide-ranging study of the Financial Reporting Software industry which covers comprehensively all aspects of the different industry verticals. This includes its past performance analysis, latest market performance estimation for the current year based on the drivers, challenges and trend. Furthermore, the future projection for the forecast period is also covered within the global Financial Reporting Software industry report. The Financial Reporting Software market segmentation provides the customer a comprehensive overview of the overall Financial Reporting Software industry, assisting them in making informed decisions through key insights into the Financial Reporting Software market. The segmentation is done on the basis of product, region, and application.



Request a sample of Financial Reporting Software Market report @ https://www.arcognizance.com/enquiry-sample/690724



Summary



The report forecast global Financial Reporting Software market to grow to reach xxx Million USD in 2019 with a CAGR of xx% during the period 2020-2025.

The report offers detailed coverage of Financial Reporting Software industry and main market trends. The market research includes historical and forecast market data, demand, application details, price trends, and company shares of the leading Financial Reporting Software by geography. The report splits the market size, by volume and value, on the basis of application type and geography.



First, this report covers the present status and the future prospects of the global Financial Reporting Software market for 2015-2025.

And in this report, we analyze global market from 5 geographies: Asia-Pacific[China, Southeast Asia, India, Japan, Korea, Oceania], Europe[Germany, UK, France, Italy, Russia, Spain, Netherlands, Turkey, Switzerland], North America[United States, Canada, Mexico], Middle East & Africa[GCC, North Africa, South Africa], South America[Brazil, Argentina, Columbia, Chile, Peru].

At the same time, we classify Financial Reporting Software according to the type, application by geography. More importantly, the report includes major countries market based on the type and application.



Finally, the report provides detailed profile and data information analysis of leading Financial Reporting Software company.



Access this report Financial Reporting Software Market @ https://arcognizance.com/report/global-financial-reporting-software-market-research-2015-2019-and-future-forecast-2020-2025



Key Content of Chapters as follows (Including and can be customized) :

Part 1: Market Overview, Development, and Segment by Type, Application & Region

Part 2: Global Market by company, Type, Application & Geography

Part 3-4: Asia-Pacific Market by Type, Application & Geography

Part 5-6: Europe Market by Type, Application & Geography

Part 7-8: North America Market by Type, Application & Geography

Part 9-10: South America Market by Type, Application & Geography

Part 11-12: Middle East & Africa Market by Type, Application & Geography

Part 13: Company information, Sales, Cost, Margin etc.

Part 14: Conclusion



Market Segment as follows:



By Region:

Asia-Pacific[China, Southeast Asia, India, Japan, Korea, Oceania]

Europe[Germany, UK, France, Italy, Russia, Spain, Netherlands, Turkey, Switzerland]

North America[United States, Canada, Mexico]

Middle East & Africa[GCC, North Africa, South Africa]

South America[Brazil, Argentina, Columbia, Chile, Peru]



Buy The Report @ https://www.arcognizance.com/purchase/690724



Key Companies:

Zoho

Intacct

IBM

QuickBooks

Microsoft

Xero

SAP

NetSuite (Oracle)

Sage

FreshBooks

KashFlow

Float

Workiva Inc

Qvinci

Host Analytics

Cougar Mountain

Multiview

Aplos Accounting

Adaptive Insights

Deskera

WorkingPoint



Market by Type:

On-premise Financial Reporting Software

Cloud-hosted Financial Reporting Software



Market by Application:

Small Businesses

Midsized Businesses

Large Businesses



Some of the key information covered in the Financial Reporting Software market report includes the market size, share for the segments, and the revenue generation in the market that includes the cost and profit statistics. This overall market outlook is the mainstay of the global Financial Reporting Software market report. The report does not shy away from going the extra mile for the customers by providing them with all the latest developments in the Financial Reporting Software market such as the news, updates, latest surveys conducted, as well as the substantial amount of statistics in tabular and graphical formats.



Each company covered in the Financial Reporting Software market report includes a detailed company profile as well as their latest updates such as new product development, expansions, and acquisitions and mergers. The performance of each player in all Financial Reporting Software industry verticals is covered in the report. The report concludes with a detailed SWOT analysis to sum up the information covered in the global Financial Reporting Software market report, making it easier for the customers to plan their activities accordingly and experience great success in their endeavors. For more information on the Financial Reporting Software report, get in touch with arcognizance.



Access this report Financial Reporting Software Market @ https://arcognizance.com/report/global-financial-reporting-software-market-research-2015-2019-and-future-forecast-2020-2025



Major Point of TOC:



Chapter One: Financial Reporting Software Market Overview

1.1 Financial Reporting Software Market Definition

1.2 Financial Reporting Software Market Development

1.3 By Type

1.4 By Application

1.5 By Region



Chapter Two: Global Financial Reporting Software Market Status and Future Forecast

2.1 Global Financial Reporting Software Market by Region

2.2 Global Financial Reporting Software Market by Company

2.3 Global Financial Reporting Software Market by Type

2.4 Global Financial Reporting Software Market by Application

2.5 Global Financial Reporting Software Market by Forecast



Chapter Three: Asia-Pacific Financial Reporting Software Market Status and Future Forecast



Chapter Four: Asia-Pacific Financial Reporting Software Market by Geography



Chapter Five: Europe Financial Reporting Software Market Status and Future Forecast



Chapter Six: Europe Financial Reporting Software Market by Geography



Chapter Seven: North America Financial Reporting Software Market Status and Future Forecast



Chapter Eight: North America Financial Reporting Software Market by Geography



Chapter Nine: South America Financial Reporting Software Market Status and Future Forecast



Chapter Ten: South America Financial Reporting Software Market by Geography



Chapter Eleven: Middle East & Africa Financial Reporting Software Market Status and Future Forecast



Chapter Twelve: Middle East & Africa Financial Reporting Software Market by Geography



Chapter Thirteen: Key Companies

13.1 Zoho

13.1.1 Company Profile

13.1.2 Products & Services Overview

13.1.3 Sales Data List

13.2 Intacct

13.3 IBM

13.4 QuickBooks

13.5 Microsoft

13.6 Xero

13.7 SAP

13.8 NetSuite (Oracle)

13.9 Sage

13.10 FreshBooks

13.11 KashFlow

13.12 Float

13.13 Workiva Inc

13.14 Qvinci

13.15 Host Analytics

13.16 Cougar Mountain

13.17 Multiview

13.18 Aplos Accounting

13.19 Adaptive Insights

13.20 Deskera

13.21 WorkingPoint



Chapter Fourteen: Conclusion



If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.



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Analytical Research Cognizance (ARC) is a trusted hub for research reports that critically renders accurate and statistical data for your business growth. Our extensive database of examined market reports places us amongst the best industry report firms. Our professionally equipped team further strengthens ARC's potential. ARC works with the mission of creating a platform where marketers can have access to informative, latest and well researched reports. To achieve this aim our experts tactically scrutinize every report that comes under their eye.
France on Thursday carried out its first train evacuation of coronavirus patients from the hard-hit east of the country, which has registered over 1,300 hospital deaths in the fast-spiralling epidemic.

The specially adapted high-speed TGV train, which in normal times whizzes travellers between France's main cities and to other European capitals, evacuated 20 patients from the Alsace region bordering Germany and Switzerland to help relieve overstretched facilities there, officials said.

The patients were destined for hospitals in the Pays de la Loire region along the western Atlantic coast.

President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday visited the eastern city of Mulhouse, home to a cluster of infections, where the army has set up a field hospital to help relieve hospitals.

He announced on the trip that the French military would also start supporting public services strained by the epidemic.

"The whole nation has been mobilised" in the fight against the disease, Macron said while wearing a face mask, while promising more investment for hospitals.

Thursday's TGV evacuation, a first for Europe, saw the train's carriages transformed into intensive care units that can accommodate four patients and six medical personnel apiece.

The country has over 11,500 coronavirus patients in hospital, of whom more than 2,800 are in critical care.

France's national health agency, Sante Publique France, estimated Thursday that at least 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 infection were diagnosed by general practitioners last week, nearly double the roughly 25,000 people who have officially tested positive, most of those in hospitals, since the start of the outbreak.

Most cases were in the larger Paris region, the east, and the Pays de la Loire.

The agency's chief, Jerome Salomon, warned Thursday that "the crisis will be long, and the coming days will be particularly difficult."



The government is expected to announce soon an extension of the initial 15-day home confinement period that came into force on March 17 in a bid to brake the spread of the virus.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
MIAMI, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Americas Market Intelligence (AMI) has launched a series of services to help companies operating in Latin America to navigate the COVID-19 triggered economic crisis. These services are complimentary in some cases and fee-based in others. They are designed to help companies leverage the expertise of AMI's practice leaders in key sectors, including payments, healthcare, logistics, mining, energy, industrial and consumer services.

An illustration of the coronavirus

"COVID-19 will disrupt economies, industries and companies across Latin America," explains John Price, Managing Director of AMI. "Almost three decades (including five previous economic crises) of experience, deep sector knowledge and a proven ability to forecast makes our team of practice leaders ideal sources of knowledge and guidance for companies struggling to redraft their strategies and business plans in Latin America," says Price.

Among the fee-based options offered by AMI are:

AMI's complimentary COVID-19 consultation services include:

Strategic phone consultations for existing or previous clients

for existing or previous clients Webinars covering the coronavirus' impact on e-commerce, cross-border trade and logistics, and the healthcare industry in Latin America

Weekly calls for professionals in various sectors to engage with each other and AMI practice leaders, sharing news, challenges and best practices

"In times of disruption and uncertainty, companies must first react by getting their bearings, informing themselves and repositioning their teams and strategies to confront both the crisis and the new market reality that awaits. Those who make well-informed and guided decisions over the next three months will be the firms who come out ahead two years from now," emphasizes Price.

About Americas Market Intelligence

Americas Market Intelligence (AMI) is the premier market intelligence and strategy consultancy for Latin America, providing powerful research insights for companies to succeed in a wide range of verticals in the region, including payments, healthcare, logistics, mining, energy, infrastructure, consumer services and the industrial sector. Its customized research reports deliver data-based clarity and far-reaching strategic direction based on expert sources.

Press Contact: Abel Delgado, Director of Digital Marketing, [email protected]

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Coronavirus Crisis Market Consultations for Latin America

An illustration of the coronavirus

SOURCE Americas Market Intelligence
Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, Raveena Tandon And Swara Bhaskar Condemn Kabul Gurdwara Attack; Call It Heartbreaking And Inhumane
A 70-year old woman, who died after being found positive for the coronavirus in an initial test, has become Karnataka's second COVID-19 fatality with results confirming the infection on Thursday as the total number of affected by the contagion in the state rose to 55, the health department said.

Results of three other people, including a 35 year-old resident of Mysuru with no travel and contact history so far, returned positive on Thursday, besides that of the woman who died on Wednesday, it said.

"Till date 55 COVID-19 positive cases have been confirmed which includes 2 deaths and 3 discharges," the department in a mid-day situation update said.

It said, the 70-year old woman, a resident of Chikkaballapura district with a history of travel to Mecca, Saudi Arabia and returned on March 14, died on March 24, at designated hospital in Bengaluru.

Her funeral rites have been done with all the precautionary measures as per the guidelines issued by Government of India for COVID-19 suspect deaths, it added.

Karnataka Medical Education Minister K Sudhakar and Health and Family Welfare Minister B Sriramulu had earlier in the day said the COVID-19 test results of the patient who died has come out as positive.

This is the second coronavirus fatality in the state.

Earlier this month, a 76-year old Kalaburagi man died "due to co-morbidity and was also tested positive for COVID- 19," becoming the country's first coronavirus death.

Sharing details about the 35-year old man, a resident of Mysuru, who has been tested positive and had no travel and contact history, the department said, however, he was with quality assurance section of a pharmaceutical company in Nanjangud and has been in contact with many healthcare professionals.

"The case is isolated at designated hospital in Mysuru. The detailed investigation is under process. Seven primary contacts have been traced and are under house quarantine," it added.

A 64-year old man, who is a resident of Anantapura in Andhra Pradesh, with a history of travel to France and returned to India on March 1 has been tested positive.

Later he had travelled to Himachal Pradesh, Puttaparthi and arrived in Bengaluru on March 31, the report said, adding that the case is isolated and treated at designated hospital in Bengaluru Rural District.

A 45-year old man, who is a resident of city, and contact of a patient who earlier tested positive and currently under treatment, has also been confirmed for infection.

Meanwhile, an order has been issued by Government of Karnataka allowing all Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs) to practice tele-medicine consultation with certain restrictions, keeping in view the lockdown across the state.

The government has also directed officials to take strict action against landlords or house-owners forcing doctors, paramedical staff or healthcare personnel to vacate their houses under the Karnataka Epidemic Disease (Covid-19) regulations 2020.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Coronavirus pandemic has led to a nationwide lockdown in India until April 14. During the lockdown, citizens are required to stay isolated at home under quarantine and only head out when extremely essential. To help citizens understand the quarantine measures even better, the Mumbai Police has taken reference from the popular show Friends.

A Twitter post shared by Mumbai Police lists out the preventive measures every individual should take in order to prevent themselves from being infected by coronavirus. The post takes inspiration from Friends where, in the original scene, Phoebe is helping Joey learn French.

The post by Mumbai Police shows Phoebe and Joey have a conversation about the Dos and Donts during a quarantine.

The post highlights the three measures that one should take when in quarantine. These include washing hands frequently, not touching the face, and practising social distancing by staying at home.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Mumbai Police's Twitter handle is known for such posts that have a lot of resonance with youth and this post was along the same lines.

Earlier, the city police shared an interesting post on daily horoscopes for all zodiac signs and advised people to stay at home if they wanted the zodiac stars to be in their favour.
Bengaluru, March 26 : A 70-year-old woman with travel history to Saudi Arabia succumbed to COVID-19 on Tuesday evening in the city, emerging as Karnataka's second COVID-19 death, an official said on Thursday.

"The patient died on Tuesday at a designated hospital in Bengaluru. The funeral rites have been done with all the precautionary measures as per the guidelines issued by the Government of India for COVID-19 suspect deaths," said a health official.

With the woman's death, Karnataka recorded its second coronavirus death.

"I regret to inform that the COVID-19 test result has come out as positive for the woman.... The government stands committed to curb the spread of coronavirus in the state," tweeted Sudhakar earlier.

The woman hailed from the Chikkaballapura district.

Karnataka's first COVID-19 death, a 76-year-old Kalaburagi man, was also India's such case.

Sudhakar appealed to the people to stay at home and be safe.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
A shop worker in south Belfast has been left shaken after a robber held a pair of scissors to his neck and demanded money.

The raid has been condemned as "reckless" at a time when emergency services are stretched.

Police said that shortly after 10.30am yesterday, it was reported that a man entered a shop on the Lisburn Road.

"He approached a male member of staff and threatened him by holding a pair of scissors to his neck and demanded money," a PSNI spokesman said.

"The male made off on foot from the premises towards the Lower Windsor Avenue area with a sum of money."

Although the male staff member was not injured, he was left badly shaken.

A short time later, it was reported that the man had attempted to take a van parked in the Lower Windsor Avenue area.

"The driver of the vehicle then chased the male towards the Edinburgh Street area, then the male ran towards the junction of Edinburgh Street and the Lisburn Road," the officer said.

"It was reported the male made off towards the Edinburgh Street area following the incident.

"No damage was reported to the vehicle and the driver was not injured.

"The male is described as being aged in his 30s, 5ft 10ins in height with short, dark hair and wearing a black hooded top with a scarf pulled over his face and blue tracksuit bottoms.

"Enquiries are continuing and we would appeal to anyone with any information regarding either incident to contact detectives on 101, quoting reference number 380 25/03/20."

Alternatively, information can also be provided anonymously on 0800 555 111.

Alliance South Belfast MLA Paula Bradshaw said it was a "reckless and crazy" act.

She said it was particularly alarming during the coronavirus pandemic.

"At a time of the biggest health crisis we have faced for over a century, for anyone to rob one of the few stores remaining open and providing essential services is reckless and crazy," Ms Bradshaw said.

"That the perpetrator then proceeded also to try to steal a van defies belief.

"The PSNI now has to divert resources at a time when they should be keeping the community safe and ensuring that we manage the burden on our Health Services.

"That is utterly appalling.

"My sympathies first of all go to the shopkeeper affected.

"This is a difficult enough period for anyone without going through such an ordeal."
During the coronavirus epidemic, Seth Davis' support dog Poppy waits patiently in a quiet Los Angeles International Airport on Monday. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Air traffic at Los Angeles International Airport and other local aviation facilities has taken a huge hit due to the coronavirus.

Sean Burton, president of the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners, said at a commission meeting Thursday that air passenger traffic is now down 85% nationally compared with a year ago. At LAX and Van Nuys, the effect is just as extreme, he said.

LAX air passenger traffic numbers are down 85%, concession revenues are down 50% and rental car transactions are down 80%, he said.

The currency exchange is down 70% and duty-free revenues are down 60%, he added.

"Clearly, the magnitude of what we are facing is immense," Burton said.

He told the commissioners that "we must continue to seek out new solutions to address the financial impacts and reduce our expenses and operate more efficiently, while maintaining safety and security. In addition to the austerity measures already in place, our executive leadership team is looking at all existing contracts and identifying where there are opportunities to stop, reduce or defer activities. We're also looking at all of our planned future capital projects to determine if now is the right time to start them, or if they can be deferred.

Under the coronavirus relief bill, which is making its way through Congress, Burton said $10 billion in federal assistance would help publicly owned commercial airports like LAX, as well as general aviation airports like Van Nuys.

He said that money will be critical, as the aviation sector grapples with the most steep and potentially sustained decline in air travel history.
In addition, the establishment of a stabilization fund is being negotiated with the leadership of Ukrainian parliament and faction representatives

Open source

Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmygal presented proposals for the sequestration of the state budget (its limitation or reduction of expenditures  112 International) due to the spread of coronavirus. It was reported by RBC-Ukraine with reference to a source in the parliament.

"Prime Minister Denys Shmygal has yet submitted documents that were prepared by the government. All factions and groups have been provided with budget sequestration proposals," the source said.

It is also noted that the establishment of a stabilization fund is being negotiated with the leadership of Ukrainian parliament and faction representatives.

"There is no final agenda yet. This is still the subject of final discussions with factions, groups and the government. We may not all be able to vote on Saturday," the source added.

As we reported earlier, European Investment Bank (EIB) plans to provide Ukraine with 40 million euros.

As it was stated by Ukraine's Minister of Communities and Territories Development, these funds would be used in order to take the necessary measures in overcoming the spread of coronavirus in Ukraine.
Canadian oil companies ask government for cash, credit to survive FILE PHOTO: An oil pump jack pumps oil in a field near Calgary

By Rod Nickel and David Ljunggren

WINNIPEG, Manitoba/OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian oil and gas companies are urging Ottawa to free up credit and cash to help them survive the twin shocks of COVID-19 spread and a crude price war, pitching ideas ranging from tax deferrals to backstopping bank loans.

The country's oil patch is on "life support" after the Saudi-Russian oil price war coincides with the spread of COVID-19 through the major oil-consuming regions of Asia, Europe and North America.

Ottawa is considering ways to backstop banks to ensure they allow oil companies to access existing and new lines of credit, preventing massive job losses, said an industry source who has participated in meetings with Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Natural Resources Minister Seamus O'Regan.

The source spoke on condition of anonymity because discussions are confidential and at a sensitive stage.

The energy industry has also asked for cost relief, including postponement of royalty collection and waiving or deferring Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance premiums, as well as federal sales tax, the industry source said.

A separate source directly familiar with government thinking said negotiations are still active with the oil-producing provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland & Labrador.

Addressing liquidity is the main federal priority, the source said. The government is mulling whether to help the energy industry by expanding a C$10 billion credit support package for businesses that it unveiled on March 13, the source added.

Morneau said on Wednesday that small- and medium-sized energy companies are "particularly vulnerable." He has previously said the oil aid package will include funds to clean up non-producing wells that have no legal owner.

Legislators approved on Wednesday a broad C$107 billion ($75.4 billion) support package, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government has said it is also planning targeted support for the energy, hospitality and aviation sectors.

A spokesman for Alberta's Energy Minister could not be immediately reached.

Story continues

Marty Proctor, chief executive of Seven Generations Energy Ltd <VII.TO>, said he has spoken directly with both the federal and Alberta governments about upcoming support, and left feeling assured.

"They are talking about trying to encourage banks to work with their business partners, so that gave me some confidence," Proctor said in an interview.

"It sounds to me like both governments are working hard to find good solutions."

While banks are facing stronger demand for short-term cash flow, they are unlikely to lower their lending standards, said David Beattie, senior vice president at Moodys Investors Service.

Aiding oil companies would be the wrong move in light of climate change, and workers should get the support instead, dozens of environment, health and other groups said in a joint letter to Trudeau on Monday.

Service companies who work for oil producers face especially great difficulties, said Gary Mar, chief executive of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada.

"Unlike (producers), we don't have oil and gas to sell. If we're not working, we don't have cash flow."

(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba and David Ljunggren in Ottawa; additional reporting by Nichola Saminather in Toronto; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
The United States Senate has approved a USD 2 trillion emergency aid package -- the largest in the US history -- to rescue the country's economy reeling under impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Senate passed the bill late Wednesday night by a vote of 96-0, sending it to the US House of Representatives, CNN reported.

The legislation will provide a massive infusion of financial aid into a struggling economy hard hit by job losses. The proposal includes: Setting aside USD 250 billion for direct payments to individuals and families, USD 350 billion in small business loans, USD 250 billion in unemployment insurance benefits and USD 500 billion in loans for distressed companies.

Under the plan, individuals who earn USD 75,000 in adjusted gross income or less would get direct payments of USD1,200 each, with married couples earning up to USDS 150,000 receiving USD 2,400 -- and an additional USD 500 per each child.

The development comes after US Senate leaders and Trump Administration reached an agreement early Wednesday on the package early.

President Donald Trump has indicated he will sign the measure.

The United States has over 51,000 cases of COVID-19 with over 600 deaths, as per the Heath Organisation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
China has asked Pakistan to open the border between the two countries for one day on Friday so that medical supplies to combat the novel coronavirus could be transported, a media report said.

The Khunjerab Pass is usually opened on April 1 which marks the end of winter in that part, but due to the global pandemic, the border between Pakistan and China has been closed for an indefinite period, the Dawn news report said.

Under a border protocol agreement of 1985, the Khunjerab border crossing remains closed from the end of November to April. Trade and travel activities between the two countries take place through Khunjerab Pass, also known as Sust Dry Port  the only land route between China and Pakistan.

A letter, written by the Chinese Embassy in Islamabad to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with copies to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), the government of Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) and the Ministry of National Health Services, states that the governor of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China would like to donate a batch of medical materials to GB.

According to the letter, the governor has donated 200,000 ordinary face masks, 2,000 N-95 masks, five ventilators, 2,000 testing kits and 2,000 medical protective clothes mainly used by doctors and paramedics.

The donation is in response to a request made by GB Chief Minister Hafeezur Rehman to the governor of Xinjiang region to combat coronavirus in the province.

"The materials are ready to be delivered to GB through Khunjerab Pass at 9 a.m. on March 27. Therefore, it is requested to temporarily open (border) the same date," the Dawn news report quoted the letter as saying.

"In this regard, it is also highly recommended that Pakistani side should agree and make due preparation before the date so that all materials could enter Pakistan smoothly," it added.

Gilgit-Baltistan, which has a high percentage of coronavirus cases in the country compared to its population, has a negligible number of operational ventilators and remoteness leading to a severe shortage of medical equipments.

The federal government is yet to take a decision regarding this development.

As of Thursday, Pakistan has reported 1,098 confirmed coronavirus cases with eight deaths.
ATLANTA, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- To better serve employees and customers, Rollins, Inc. (NYSE: ROL), a premier global consumer and commercial services company, has announced company-wide increases to Paid Time Off (PTO) for all full-time and part-time employees impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Rollins, Inc. and its brands will remain open during the pandemic as the Department of Homeland Security and the states/municipalities under shelter in place orders have deemed our business an essential service.

Rollins is now offering up to 80 hours of PTO to full-time employees for emergency leave for qualifying needs, and up to 40 hours of PTO to part-time employees. Employees can use the time for themselves or to care for an immediate family member who has tested positive or is being quarantined for a suspected case of COVID-19. Rollins is also following the guidelines of states that may have different requirements for additional paid time off.

"As we have long said, our employees are our most valuable asset, and our highest priority is the safety and well-being of these valued associates and our clients," said Gary W. Rollins, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Rollins. "We believe these measures will allow our employees to have the support and resources they need while also protecting their health and the safety of those around them."

As the situation evolves, Rollins will continue to update employees on company benefits and employee assistance programs to help alleviate the economic and emotional impact of the pandemic on its employees. To learn more about Rollins, Inc., please visit https://www.rollins.com/.

About Rollins, Inc.

Rollins, Inc. is a premier global consumer and commercial services company. Through its wholly owned subsidiaries, Orkin, HomeTeam Pest Defense, Clark Pest Control, Orkin Canada, Western Pest Services, Northwest Exterminating, Critter Control, The Industrial Fumigant Company, Trutech, Orkin Australia, Waltham Services, OPC Pest Services, PermaTreat, Rollins UK, Aardwolf Pestkare, and Crane Pest Control, the Company provides essential pest control services and protection against termite damage, rodents and insects to more than two million customers in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia from more than 700 locations. You can learn more about Rollins and its subsidiaries by visiting our web sites at www.orkin.com, www.pestdefense.com, www.clarkpest.com , www.orkincanada.ca, www.westernpest.com, www.callnorthwest.com , www.crittercontrol.com, www.indfumco.com, www.trutechinc.com, www.orkinau.com, www.walthamservices.com, www.opcpest.com, www.permatreat.com, www.safeguardpestcontrol.co.uk, www.aardwolfpestkare.com , www.cranepestcontrol.com and www.rollins.com. You can also find this and other news releases at www.rollins.com by accessing the news releases button.

CAUTION CONCERNING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This release contains statements that constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements include statements about the Company's expectation that it will remain open during the COVID-19 pandemic due to its designation as an essential service and the Company's belief that its increased PTO measures will allow its employees to have the support and resources they need while also protecting their health and the safety of those around them. The actual results of the Company could differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements because of various risks and uncertainties, including without limitation, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and its potential impact on global economic conditions and on capital and financial markets, changes in consumer behavior and demand, the potential unavailability of personnel or key facilities, modifications to the Company's operations, and the potential implementation of regulatory actions; economic and competitive conditions which may adversely affect the Company's business; the degree of success of the Company's pest and termite process, and pest control selling and treatment methods; the Company's ability to identify and integrate potential acquisitions; climate and weather trends; competitive factors and pricing practices; the Company's ability to attract and retain skilled workers, and potential increases in labor costs; uncertainties of litigation; changes in various government laws and regulations, including environmental regulations; and the impact of the U. S. Government shutdown. All of the foregoing risks and uncertainties are beyond the ability of the Company to control, and in many cases the Company cannot predict the risks and uncertainties that could cause its actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements. A more detailed discussion of potential risks facing the Company can be found in the Company's Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the year ended December 31, 2019.

Media Relations:

Lia Vaughn

Rollins, Inc.

404-888-2575

[email protected]

Investor Relations:

Eddie Northen

(404) 888-2242

SOURCE Rollins, Inc.

Related Links

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Burma Myanmar Medics Volunteer to Combat COVID-19 Menace

Volunteers from nursing training schools check the temperatures of migrant workers at the border control checkpoint in Myawaddy in Karen State. / Aung Thiha / The Irrawaddy

YANGON  Shortly after one of the countrys first COVID-19 cases was reported in a small hill town in remote Chin State, five young doctors volunteered to go to an understaffed and ill-equipped hospital to fight the coronavirus.

Tedim General Hospital is where the 36-year-old patient who came back from the United States and tested positive is being quarantined. It has only two doctors, very few nurses and insufficient protective equipment.

So far Myanmar has reported three cases while the virus has infected more than 470,000 people and killed more than 21,300 across the globe.

Dr. Khin Khin Gyi, a director of the Department of Public Health at the health ministry, said the ministry asked for doctors to volunteer to control a possible spread of the virus in Chin State.

Dr. Nung Mun Thawn, Dr. Lalram Zau-a, Dr. Bawi M. Lian, Dr. Wit Yee Win and Dr. Kaung Myat Oo traveled to Tedim on Wednesday with medical equipment.

As a health worker, we just go where we need to be, Dr. Bawi M. Lian, an ethnic Chin doctor, told The Irrawaddy on his way to Tedim Townships Keptel village where the patient visited before he was admitted to hospital. The village is now under lockdown.

He said all government employees were working to control the virus and other doctors were willing to go to the frontlines.

This will be a long fight, he answered when asked about what challenges he expected to face from the coronavirus.

We need to send our human resources where they are needed, instead of concentrating on one place. And everyone needs to be ready to support in the long term.

Dr. Zaw Myint Naing, the superintendent at Tedims hospital, posted on Facebook that the patient was stable.

We still need more volunteer doctors, nurses and lab technicians, he wrote, while expressing gratitude to the five volunteer doctors.

Hundreds of medical staff and volunteers are also taking risks and working in Yangon and at the Myawaddy border.

In Yangon, there are two confirmed cases and most of the suspected cases are being quarantined in the city. And thousands of migrant workers are coming back to Myanmar after factory closures across Thailand.

Trainees from Yangon and Karen States Hpa-an nurses training schools and university students from Hpa-an are working on the border to check the health of the thousands of migrant workers who have headed home overland from Thailand. Volunteers are stressing the importance of home quarantine when they return home in a bid to contain the coronavirus.

Karen States social affairs minister Saw Bo Bo said 140 volunteer doctors, nurses and students from Yangon, Hpa-an and Naypyitaw were checking migrant workers temperature at the border checkpoint, taking personal information and detailing their health awareness.

They are doing a good job, the minister said, adding that the volunteers were essential in allowing the returnees to enter the country.

Dr. Win Zaw, general secretary of the Myanmar Medical Association (MMA), said the limited health infrastructure, insufficient masks and other protective equipment are the major challenges for health care workers who at the most at risk of contracting the virus.

I wish them to be well-equipped. And only then can they effectively and confidently continue the fight, he said, calling for equipment donations for hospitals.

The MMA has been calling for volunteer medics and non-medical volunteers.

Dr. Win Zaw said 1,078 medics and 11,557 other volunteers signed up with the association in less than two weeks.

Freelance photojournalist Ko Kaung Htet, who was a doctor, said he volunteered to help.

He said Myanmar faced greater challenges than other countries because of limited health care infrastructure and the problem of returning migrant workers.

Ko Kaung Htet helped conduct public awareness campaigns in 10 Yangon townships on Thursday. He said many people would be unable to follow the health ministry guidelines, such as avoiding crowded places, if they were to make a living.

Dr. Win Zaw said his association was working closely with the health ministry and the volunteers were ready to support anywhere required.

We all must collaborate to fight the virus as our country did during previous crises. And that will be the main strength for all of us.

You may also like these stories:

Myanmar is Combating Fake News in the Time of Coronavirus

Myanmar-Based Diplomats Told to Cancel Events Amid Coronavirus Fears
Believe it or not, for a lot of people, the first step to breaking into the film industry was modelling. Not necessarily being ramp models, but being catalogue models in some way or the other.

We know that there are a number of actresses who started out with having a career as models, before signing their first films. What many people don't realise, is that there are a number of men as well, who started out as male models, either walking the ramp or shooting for product catalogues before they signed their first film.

 Viral Bhayani

There is no denying the fact that as Indians we are obsessed with films and Bollywood. Not only in just watching the odd 200+ films that get released every year, but in some way, being a part of it, in some vicarious manner.

It wouldn't be farfetched to say that at some point in time, almost all of us have harboured a fantasy of being an actor in the Indian film industries, just to have that rock star lifestyle.

 BCCL

Here are seven male models who started out as models, but eventually went on to act in films and make a name for themselves:

1. Milind Soman

 Instagram/milindrunning

We begin with Milind Soman, who at one point, was the go-to face for a number of national as well as international brands and advertising agencies when it came to selling their product.

There was a point in time when Milind just dominated the market when it came to advertising - from sneakers to clothes, there really wasn't anything that the man couldn't sell. He was also cast in a number of music videos, with Made In India by Alisha Chinai being one of the most memorable and recognised ones.

Although he was never the lead actor in any film that went on to do commercially well, he did quite a few supporting roles in films which were cult classics, and a number of international projects which were critically acclaimed.

The last time we saw him in a mainstream Bollywood film was Chef, and before that, in Bajirao Mastani, beside Ranveer Singh.

2. Randeep Hooda

 Instagram/randeephooda

Although Randeep Hooda made his acting debut in 2001, prior to that, he had a number of jobs, ranging from being a taxi driver, to being a waiter, while he was studying for his MBA in Australia.

Upon his return to India, he started working for an airline after which he joined with a number of amateur theatre companies and started simultaneously working as a model.

As a model, Randeep has walked the ramp a number of times, all the while appearing in a number of advertisement campaigns for well known Indian fast fashion brands.

3. Sidharth Malhotra

 Instagram/sidmalhotra

Sidharth Malhotra started his modelling career at the age of 18. However, once he realised that modelling isn't really his calling, he started working as an assistant director with Karan Johar.

This turned out to be a good thing, as a lot of factors eventually led him to Student Of The Year, where he made a remarkable debut.

4. John Abraham

 Instagram/thejohnabraham

John Abraham, kind of had the same trajectory as Milind, barring a few minor details. He also modelled internationally, after winning the Gladrags Manhunt Contest in 1999. John was also cast in a number of music videos by notable artists like Jazzy B, Pankaj Udhas and Babul Supriyo.

Apart from all this, he was also seen on a number of advertisement campaigns and fashion events, before making his debut in Jism, in 2001.

5. Muzammil Ibrahim

 Instagram/muzamilibrahim7

A ramp model through and through, Muzammil Ibrahim was nothing short of a star when he was active as a model. He had a massive fan following, even as a model, which a number of notable designers wanting him to walk down their ramps, flaunting their creations.

He also won the Gladrags Manhunt Contest in 2003. He made his Bollywood debut in Dhokha, after Mukesh Bhatt cast him in the Pooja Bhatt-directed film that was released in 2007.

6. Arjun Rampal

 Instagram/rampal72

Arjun Rampal was a highly celebrated, and immensely successful model before making his Bollywood debut in 2001.

Having walked the ramp for a number of designers, to being the face of a number of print advertisement campaigns well before he was considered an actor, Arjun Rampal is considered by many in the media to be the quintessential Indian Hunk thanks to his good looks.

7. Salman Khan

 Viral Bhayani

We bet you're surprised to seem him on the list, aren't you? Well, it's true.

Even though Salman's father was a massively popular writer who had some incredible connections, Salman did his fair share of struggling for breaking into the industry. Much before he made his full time debut in Maine Pyaar Kiya, Salman had a number of odd assignments, shooting for an apparels company.

We bet a lot of us are glad that his debut was such a massive hit and a cult classic, aren't we?
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 03:12:39|Editor: yan

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TUNIS, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Tunisian Prime Minister Elyes Fakhfakh on Thursday said the total number of COVID-19 cases in Tunisia has risen to 200, including six deaths.

Twenty-seven new cases from the novel coronavirus were reported on Thursday, as well as two more deaths.

During a plenary session of the Assembly of People's Representatives (parliament) devoted to a dialogue with the government on the health situation, Fakhfakh underlined the need to respect general confinement and mandatory quarantine for people arriving from abroad.

"The general confinement was respected, up to 80 percent across the country, ... thanks to the strict application of the law and the sanctions taken against offenders," he said.

Tunisia is in "state of war" against the pandemic, the Tunisian leader said, adding that the government has mobilized 2.5 billion dinars (about 875 million U.S. dollars) in funds fo fight the pandemic.

On Wednesday, Italy granted Tunisia a loan of 50 million euros (54 million U.S. dollars) to help control the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The loan will be used to support Tunisian companies to cope with the impact of the COVID-19 on the socio-economic environment in Tunisia.
In these tough and sensitive times, when the entire population is in the grip of Covid-19 fear, the onus on news media to check the spread of fake news and allay peoples fears has become all that more. The Indian Newspaper Society (INS), Kerala Regional Committee, has released a print ad in all Malayalam newspapers re-affirming its commitment to fighting fake news. Print players have banded together in a concerted effort to fight fake news and misinformation. In an earlier report, we showed how print players were fightining fake news with public service announcements.

The print ad copy reads, In times like these, fake news can be fatal. As Covid-19 grips our world, we are beside you, fighting fake news and rumours that are spreading faster than the virus itself. We are aware of the great responsibility to deliver the truth to you every morning. Which is why each fact, image and word is painstakingly checked and rechecked by a team of true, experienced and dedicated journalists. More than ever, at this crucial time, we are committed to safeguarding our centuries-old tradition. And with it, the trust of millions of our readers. We shall always be there for you.

The ad ends with the affirmation, This is our promise, in black and white.

All newspapers in Kerala carried this ad on their front pages on the March 25, 2020 edition in Malayalam.

Consumers are panicked across the country as fake information is spreading that print media might be a carrier of the virus. However, leading newspapers have declared that after consulting doctors and virologists there isn't any evidence to suggest that newspapers can spread the campaign.

The initiative by print media came into full force after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's nationwide address to the people to observe a self imposed Janta Curfew on Sundays. More recently, the PM addressed the nation once again requesting them to remain indoors for 21 days to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. More than 500 cases have been reported in the media with the deaths rising to 9 people.

Read More: Newspaper operations halt amidst Coronavirus panic

COVID-19 impact: Print media battling on many fronts
A furious Premier Doug Ford says his government will clamp down on price-gouging by profiteers hoping to cash in on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Were coming after, were going to come after you hard  and Im going to protect the people of this province, Ford said Thursday, taking aim at one of Torontos most posh grocery stores.

I have zero  zero  tolerance for price gouging. Im calling them out  Pusateris. I hear that theyre selling hand wipes for $30 a tin. Thats disgusting, absolutely disgusting, the premier said.

A company like that would be selling hand wipes for that cost? People would have the nerve to actually jack up their prices to $30 a container for hand wipes? Its beyond belief, he said.

Nothing gets me more furious than someone taking advantage of the public that are in desperate need of these items. That hits a nerve when people are being taken advantage of.

Ford said were bringing this to cabinet and were going to put an order that it is going to be illegal for price-gouging.

His comments came after a photo went viral on social media of the Lysol disinfecting wipes being sold at Pusateris for $29.99. Retailers typically sell them for a fraction of that price.

When contacted by the Star, an employee at the Avenue Rd. and Lawrence location, where the picture was apparently taken hours earlier, said Lysol wipes were sold out.

Another employee at the Bayview Village location also said the wipes were sold out, but they didnt know how much they were being sold for because they had to scan the item for the price to register.

Pusateris president and CEO Frank Luchetta insisted in a statement that it was all a mistake.

While no excuse, our stores are facing immense pressure on all levels of operation. As a result of this mounting pressure, critical elements were overlooked including the incorrect pricing of the product, said Luchetta.

This was our mistake, our error, our oversight and we apologize to everyone impacted, he said.

We are promptly reviewing and adjusting any and all products that may have been improperly listed.

Luchetta said refunds will be issued to anyone who asks.

We are a family-owned and operated and we share in the concern of the new realities that COVID-19 has created for everyone, he said.

This should never have happened and it will never happen again.

Robert Benzie is the Stars Queens Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie

Read more about:
| By Laura Lee

The University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) is committed to keeping students informed during this unprecedented period of rapid change due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. On Monday, March 23, the University of Maryland School of Social Work and the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law held virtual town halls to address students' questions.

Richard P. Barth, PhD, MSW, dean of the School of Social Work, speaks to students via Webex technology during a virtual town hall on March 23, 2020.

Using Webex technology, the town halls brought students into the same virtual room with administrators and faculty for an informative discussion and question-and-answer period.

Speaking directly to students from his office at the School of Social Work, Dean Richard P. Barth, PhD, MSW, said he prefers to use the term physical distancing rather than social distancing. We need to maintain social works historic commitment to social integration and integrating, not distancing, he said.

As social workers, were dedicated to strengthening society, and I know youre looking for ways to do that, he continued.

Barth, who was joined remotely by several faculty members and administrators, including, Amanda Lehning, PhD, MSW, associate dean for academic affairs; Cherita Adams, MBA, MS, assistant dean for administration and strategic initiatives; Dawn Shafer, MSW, associate dean of student affairs; Danielle White, MBA, MS, assistant dean of records and registration; and Samuel Little, PhD, associate dean for field education.

Barth said he was confident the transition from the field work required for graduation to remote field work would be successful. Options include videoconferencing, tele-behavioral health technology, and select volunteer opportunities in the community. Every school of social work across the nation will be doing something like this, he noted. Were in close contact with the Council on Social Work Education, and theyre very supportive of what were doing.

Donald B. Tobin, JD, dean of Maryland Carey Law, addressed his students with words of pragmatic optimism during a town hall from his home that registered 175 attendees at its peak. Our goal is to make sure that the remaining part of the semester is as academically rigorous and interesting as we can make it in this new world, he said.

Tobin told students that online learning methods and clinics are being treated on a case-by-case basis by faculty. We do expect that the faculty are going to work with their students and clinics to make this work, he said, whether its with more projects, more research papers, or other experiences.

Despite having different career paths, UMBs future social workers and future lawyers had strikingly similar questions. Grades, convocation, job fairs, technology issues, licensing exams, and questions about fees and tuition were on everyones mind.

Tobin and Barth emphasized that while administrators are working hard behind the scenes to make adjustments during this period of uncertainty, flexibility and patience from all involved is crucial.

We will move through this crisis in a way that continues you along your academic journey while working to preserve the health and safety of our community, Tobin said. (The Law School Town Hall can be viewed here. Questions can be submitted at a form found here.)

Barth encouraged students to keep the questions coming to ssw@umaryland.edu or to submit them here. In the meantime, stay safe and continue your great work to strengthen your own skills to help those who need so much at this time, he concluded.
A Caltrans Changeable Message Sign (CMS) warns motorists on the Interstate 5 freeway in Anaheim, Calif., on March 14, 2020. (David McNew/AFP via Getty Images)

As COVID-19 Cases Increase in OC, Community Call Centers Extend Hours

SANTA ANA, Calif. (CNS)Orange Countys COVID-19 cases jumped from 152 on March 24 to 187 on March 25.

Orange County health officials on March 24 announced the countys first death from COVID-19.

The 75-year-old man, whose name was not released, was hospitalized March 17 and died two days later. Doctors tested him for COVID-19 while treating him, but the test results were not received by Orange County officials until March 24.

I am deeply saddened to announce that last night we got our first death to coronavirus in Orange County, Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Michelle Steel said at a news conference on March 25. Our thoughts and prayers are with this man, his family, and loved ones.

Orange Countys number of confirmed COVID-19 cases increased by 27 on March 24 to 152, and another 35 on March 25 to bring the total to 187.

Of the total, 62 cases were contracted by residents while traveling, 17 by person-to-person spread and 57 were community acquired, according to Orange County Public Health officials. Fifty-one are under investigation as to how the patients were infected.

The male-female ratio is 117 to 70. The hardest-hit age range is 18 to 49, with 101 cases; 54 cases involved individuals 50 to 64 years old; and 31 patients are 65 and older. One is a child.

There have been 2,442 people tested, leaving county officials with enough tests for 1,328 people.

Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine) is among those awaiting test results. The first-term congresswoman announced on social media that she developed cold-like symptoms last week, called her doctor and was tested for COVID- 19.

Porter, who posted a photo of herself wearing a surgical mask, said she would remain quarantined until shes given the clearance by her doctor to leave the house.

I am participating by telephone in congressional business and listening to the concerns of our Orange County community, Porter wrote, adding that her children are so far healthy and handling things well.

Community Service Call Centers Extend Hours

Effective March 25, Orange County Community Services expanded call center hours to meet the needs of seniors, veterans, business owners, and the unemployed affected by the CCP virus.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

Orange County Community Services oversees the Orange County Veterans Service Office, Office on Aging and Community Investment Division programs.

Call Center operators will be available to take calls at 714-480-6450 on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on weekends from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The Call Center is staffed and operated by caring, skilled, bilingual and bicultural information assistance professionals who can assess situations and offer resources tailored to meet individual needs, according to a county statement.

The Call Center has translation available in more than 240 languages.

For additional information on programs, visit www.occommunityservices.org.

For general information about COVID-19, call the OC Health Care Agencys Health Referral Line at 800-564-8448, visit http://www.ochealthinfo.com/novelcoronavirus, or follow the HCA on Facebook (@ochealthinfo) and Twitter (@ochealth).

For non-medical questions, contact the County of Orange Public Information Hotline at 714-628-7085.
Australian Brenton Tarrant, accused of murdering 51 Muslim worshippers in last year's mass shooting at two New Zealand mosques pleaded guilty to all charges on Thursday. The plea means no trial will take place.

Brenton Tarrant, 29, had previously denied 51 charges of murder, 40 of attempted murder and one of engaging in a terrorist act but changed his plea after a hurriedly arranged court hearing.

"Yes, guilty," Tarrant told Christchurch High Court via videolink from Auckland Prison as the charges were read out to him.

Tarrant, wearing a grey top, stared intently at the camera while making his plea.

No reason was given for the change, which means Tarrant will no longer stand trial, a process authorities had feared he would use as a platform to promote his racist ideology.

Some relief

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the admission of guilt would provide some relief to the many people whose lives were shattered in the attack.

"These guilty pleas and conviction bring accountability for what happened and also save the families who lost loved ones, those who were injured, and other witnesses, the ordeal of a trial," she said.

Judge Cameron Mander recorded convictions on all charges and said Tarrant would be sentenced at a date yet to be determined.

"The guilty pleas represent a very significant step towards bringing finality to this criminal proceeding," he said.

The plea came with New Zealand in its first day of a four-week COVID-19 lockdown.

Mander said sentencing would take place "at a time when victims and their families can attend the court in person", he said.
Crocs on display in an archival photo. The company recently announced it was donating its shoe  already a favorite of the medical community  to healthcare workers fighting the coronavirus pandemic. (Charlie Neibergall / Associated Press)

The Colorado-based maker of Crocs announced Wednesday that it was prepared to donate  and ship free  up to 10,000 pairs a day of its colorful, molded-resin clogs to members of the medical community workers across the country.

The "Free Pair for Healthcare" program will work like this: Every day, at approximately 9 a.m. Pacific, the Crocs' website will begin taking orders for one pair of shoes per healthcare worker from select classic clog or Crocs At Work styles up to a daily limit of 10,000 pairs. (Shoes in these two categories usually retail from $34.99 to $59.99.)

Once that number of orders has been reached, a notification advises visitors to return the next day and try again. (On Thursday  Day 2 of the program  a check of the website shortly after noon Pacific found the daily limit had already been reached.)

Crocs' molded-resin fabrication makes them easy to clean, a fact that has made them popular with healthcare workers. (Timothy A. Clary / AFP via Getty Images)

Like everyone, weve been closely monitoring the news and working hard to map out a way to most effectively help where we can," Crocs President and Chief Executive Andrew Rees said Wednesday in announcing the initiative. "Over the past week, we have spoken to healthcare workers, their facilities and even their family and friends, and they have specifically asked for our shoes in an effort to provide ease on their feet as well as ease of mind as they need the ability to easily clean up before they go home to their families."

Rees went on to say that the duration of the giveaway was subject to the level of inventory and number of requests received.

The shoes have long been a popular part of many a healthcare worker's wardrobe thanks to their comfort, their ability to be slipped on and off easily and that most of the styles (especially the ones in the nursing and hospital shoe category) can be easily cleaned with soap and water. That might also be of interest to the wider shoe-buying community given recent reports in the Huffington Post and other media that a coronavirus might live on shoes for as long as five days. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tips about how to protect yourself from COVID-19 here.)

Story continues

Beyond the 10,000-pair-per-day Crocs has pledged to individual applicants, the company has also announced plans to donate up to 100,000 pairs of shoes to be distributed to a number of select healthcare facilities and organizations across the country, including JobsOhio and the Dayton Area Hospital Assn. (which will disperse them through Ohio's healthcare system); St. Anthony North Health Campus near Denver, and New Jersey-based Atlantic Health System, which will distribute the shoes within its network.

Crocs is the latest company in the apparel and accessories space to help make up the shortfall of personal protective equipment for members of the medical community on the front lines of fighting the coronavirus pandemic. Other include Italian luxury label Prada, which is using its factories to make overalls and face masks for Italian medical personnel, and designer Christian Siriano, who has offered his help to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to make much-needed face masks for that state's healthcare workers.

Closer to home, local labels Hedley & Bennett and Citizens of Humanity are among the brands turning their attention to creating face masks for members of the medical community.
New Delhi/Noida, March 26 : Day 2 of COVID-19 lockdown was no different for people who tried to book online delivery of essential items like groceries, milk and vegetables at Bigbasket, Grofers and other online platforms.

To one user's amusement, he got the next delivery slot on Grofers for Monday, April 13.

"When trying to place a new order, the earliest delivery date is coming out to be Monday 13th April. I mean seriously? 19 day waiting period during a lockdown of 21?" Tanmay posted to Grofers on Twitter.

The online delivery platform replied: "Due to the current situation and spike in demand, you have experienced a high turnaround time for the delivery of your order. While we understand that this isn't ideal, we're acting to execute things for you as soon as possible".

The company said it has gone live in a few cities with the help of local authorities nd is hopeful of restarting operations in other cities within a day or two. It, however, did not disclose in which cities it has resumed delivery of essential items.

People experienced similar woes on Bigbasket.

Noida resident Arun Kumar, 42, placed an order for fruits on Thursday morning and got the message from Bigbasket: "Unfortunately, we do not have any available slots to service you right now. Please try again later".

Bigbasket posted on Twitter: "Our delivery executives are working around the clock and overtime to deliver essentials to as many customers as possible".

A Pune resident replied: "Didn't get delivery of Milk today, vegetable orders already canceled. Plz confirm "tomorrow u guys going to deliver milk or not?" On food delivery platform Swiggy, some new restaurants popped up for Noida Sector 143 residents, although no known restaurants names were available.

Some city authorities late on Wednesday allowed home delivery of essential goods by online apps.

Gurugram Police Commissioner Mohammad Akil said that operators like Zomato, Flipkart, Amazon, Bluedart, Wow Express, Swiggy, Grofers, Bigbasket, Milk Basket, Dunzo, Big Bazaar, and Iffco Tokyo will be allowed to continue delivery services.

Online marketplaces like Flipkart and Amazon along with delivery platforms like Bigbasket, Grofers and FreshToHomes hit a major blockade as local authorities shut warehouses and sent delivery boys back, even harassed them.

Millions of people across cities were left helpless at homes as essential items did not reach their doors despite placing orders well in advance.

Despite the assurance from local authorities, the situation remained grim on Thursday.

Amazon India posted on its website that "considering the prevailing extensive lockdowns and restriction in movement, pending deliveries will be delayed. New ordering is available only on essential products through pre-paid payment methods".

"We are continuously evaluating the situation and working towards resuming deliveries soon".

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
S upermarkets are in urgent talks with delivery firms that usually supply restaurants and hotels to massively ramp up the number of vans available for home food deliveries.

Retailers such as Ocado, Tesco and Sainsburys have been overwhelmed with demand for slots over the past week leaving thousands of vulnerable people, or shoppers in self-isolation, unable to secure home deliveries.

However, today Ocado chairman Sir Stuart Rose said that discussions with distribution companies which have spare capacity could soon lead to fleets of extra vehicles being made available.

Sir Stuart, 71, said he ventured out to the supermarket for the first time after two weeks of self-isolation yesterday.

He has likened symptoms of suspected coronavirus, which appeared shortly after he returned from a Middle East trip, to being run over by a bus.

He told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: There are some opportunities. Many of the companies that supply restaurants and hotels and other venues have currently got no business.

"There are specialist people like Bidvest and [drinks wholesaler] Matthew Clark that have now effectively got no demand so there is capacity. People are coming together to try to shift that capacity to get the food to the people who need it most.

He was speaking after one listener Norman Phillips, 68, who is a carer for his wife and mother, complained that he had to queue around the block to get into his local Sainsburys, exposing himself to potential infection.

Sir Stuart added: There is no shortage of food. Nobody will starve. What we need to do is make sure the Normans of this world are given priority.

Whether that is through the 400,000 volunteers, whether that is through the Army, whether that is through the extra capacity we need to make sure we find routes to get food to these people who I understand are in need.

Sir Stuart, a former chief executive and chairman of Marks & Spencer, also called on shoppers to show restraint.

He said: We must ask people to restrain themselves. There is 1 billion more food in peoples larders than there was a couple of weeks ago.

"If you buy a chicken, roast the chicken and have a roast chicken dinner. Then the following day have a stir fry and the next day turn it into soup.

"You can make a relatively small amount of food go a long way. We live in a very profligate society. We buy too much, we eat too much and we have to learn new ways.

Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium, said: There has been a surge in demand for online deliveries as many more people self-isolate.

Retailers are working incredibly hard to expand capacity but as this accounts for around seven per cent of total food sales, physical stores will remain the most important way of getting food.
The advice to slow and curb the spread of the novel coronavirus is by now familiar: Practice social distancing. Dont congregate in large groups. And always, always wash your hands.

But what if you live with another personor two or threein a 6-by-8 foot cell, and you eat every meal in a cafeteria that seats dozens, and you have no soap?

Thats the situation facing around 1.5 million people in state and federal prisons in America and another 700,000 in local jails. As the COVID-19 pandemic escalates, detention facilities risk becoming superspreader sites, rapidly overloading inmates medical resources. The United States has the largest prison population and highest known incarceration rate in the world, and incarcerated people are uniquely at risk in this pandemic.

As Christians, we are called to their aid. Jesus listed proclaim[ing] freedom for the prisoners among the Spirits purposes for his ministry (Luke 4:14-21), and he described care for those in prison as an identifying mark of his followers, connecting those imprisoned to himself (Matthew 25:31-46). Scripture is replete with stories of the wrongfully detainedJoseph, Daniel, Peter, Paul, and Christ, for a nightyet it never makes innocence a condition of our call to care. Rather, as in Hebrews 13:1-3, we are simply exhorted to remember those in prison as if [we] were together with them in prison, to treat them as we would hope to be treated were we, but for the grace of God, in their place.

Polling commissioned by Prison Fellowship finds Christiansand especially evangelicalsare more likely than most Americans to want safe and humane detention conditions. COVID-19 creates a desperate need to put our faith into action (James 2:14-18).

The single best and most achievable way to do that is to get people out of jail. Most people held in American jails are in pre-trial detention, meaning theyre presumed innocent and havent been convicted of their alleged crimes. Thanks to changes in pre-trial procedures, jail populations have exploded in the last three decades, leaving many facilities dangerously overcrowded. This isnt about public safety: Three in four jail inmates are low-level offenders accused of nonviolent infractions, and many have been cleared for pre-trial release. They remain locked up only because they cant afford bail.

Some jurisdictions, including Los Angeles County, Ohios Cuyahoga County (which includes Cleveland), and Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I live, are evaluating their jail populations to release low-risk inmates to reduce the risks of infection.

There are two ways individual Christians and congregations can help. One is advocacy. Your city or county jails policies are significantly controlled by local government: judges, the police chief or sheriff, and the mayor or city council. You can contact these officials (make sure to call, not email) and ask them to release all jail inmates eligible for bail.

If advocacy doesnt work, the other option is contributing to a bail fund. Bail funds have their roots in the black churchs fight against slavery and Jim Crow, when congregations pooled their money to buy their loved ones freedom. Most modern bail fundslike the state-based funds listed in the National Bail Fund Network or local branches of The Bail Projectdont have a church affiliation. However, you may be able to find a church-connected bail fund where you live.

Look for something like Restoring Justice, a Christian legal aid nonprofit in Houston which partners with area churches as well as Baylor University. Restoring Justice operates a community bail fund, and it is making emergency, research-based compassion bond motions and arguments in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Article continues below

State and federal prisons pose a thornier problem for pandemic aid. Because prison inmates have already been convicted and sentenced, unlike jail inmates, early release is an unlikely solution. And once coronavirus gets into a prisonwhich is already happeningit will be incredibly difficult to control.

There are distinctive reasons for the risks in prisons: Americas inmate population is aging and also more likely to have chronic illness or history of drug use. Prisoners lives are high-stress, low-nutrition, poorly ventilated, and crowded together in close quarters. And even under ordinary circumstances, inmates frequently dont have access to adequate medical care. In some states, prisoners are expected to make copays of up to $100 on wages as low as 12 cents an hour.

Prison medical care wont improve as the novel coronavirus multiplies. If our hospitals are forced to make triage decisions like those in Italy, precious resources likely wont be allotted to prisoners. That makes prevention paramount. Shockingly, some prisoners are not guaranteed access to hygiene products as basic as soap or tampons; theyre expected to purchase these items from the commissary or go without.

Because policies for state and federal penitentiaries are set at less accessible levels of government, advocacy for prison inmates will be much more difficult than with a local jail. The sort of systemic reform of mass incarceration that would be most useful cant be accomplished overnight. However, a prison ministry with an established relationship with a local detention facility is likely to know the needs and circumstances of inmates in your area, as well as what you and your church can realistically do to help. It may be that prayer is the only recourse, and Prison Fellowship has put together a guide for how we can pray.

This is a frightening time, and fear tells us to react to scarcity and turmoil by caring only for ourselves. As COVID-19 spreads, our fear will tempt us to forget those in prison. But fear has no part in the generous love we, though weak and wayward, seek to emulate as followers of Jesus (1 John 4:17-18)the love that came to free us when we were sick with sin. The nature of pandemic keeps us from visiting the least of these brothers and sisters in prison, but we can still seek to care for them as for Christ (Matt. 25:40).

Bonnie Kristian is a contributing editor at The Week, a fellow at Defense Priorities, and the author of A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (Hachette).
- Platform to facilitate rapid deployment of trials to test vaccines and treatments

Hoboken, New Jersey, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Castor, a health-tech company that enables medical researchers to capture machine readable data to optimize medical decision making, announced the launch of its global COVID-19 monitoring and research platform to facilitate the rapid deployment of trials to test Coronavirus vaccines and COVID-19 treatments. After offering free access to their platform for all COVID-19 research projects in mid-February, Castor is now supporting over 50 studies.

Castor's platform includes an online enrollment portal for patients, an eConsent module, and a Symptom Tracker app, all integrated with Castor's Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system. This platform is freely available for everyone fighting COVID-19, including biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. The platform was designed to be rapidly configured and deployed.

Following easy online enrollment and eConsent, patients are randomized in the EDC. Depending on country protocols, vaccines can then be shipped to enrolled subjects and administered in their homes. In addition, real-time dashboards enable study personnel to monitor the population and proactively reach out to patients who are showing symptoms of COVID-19. These patients could then be enrolled in further interventional studies or triaged in a hospital.

Launching the platform, Castor CEO Derk Arts, MD, PhD, said: "High-quality data and real-time access are critical in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. We are proud to support the global research effort by launching a mobile-enabled solution that allows decentralized patient participation and remote monitoring of study participants. This will help reduce hospital crowding, protect staff, and prioritize patients that need to be hospitalized."

Craig Serra, Global Head of Strategy and Innovation, Data Operations at Novartis, and Castor Advisory Board member, added: "With increased disruption to clinical trials, it is essential for medical research to adopt methods for remote engagement and monitoring, outside of a clinical setting. Now is the time, more than ever, to stop talking about solutions and take action on them."

Alongside this platform, Castor is supporting research into the disease by providing free access to their research data platform for all COVID-19 studies. By enabling large-scale decentralized trials, Castor aims to accelerate the work of researchers who are trying to combat the disease. Castor is currently supporting more than 50 COVID-19 studies across nine countries. This includes research projects at the University Hospital Southampton in the UK, Policlinico Universitario A. Gemelli in Italy, Vall d'Hebron Research Institute in Spain, and UMC Utrecht in the Netherlands.

Denise Van Hout, MD, an Epidemiologist and member of the team at UMC Utrecht using Castor to study COVID-19 preparedness of healthcare workers, added: "In the race to understand and develop treatments and vaccines for this disease, Castor's platform is making a difference by supporting free research projects that can be rapidly built and deployed."

For more information about Castor and the COVID-19 monitoring and research platform please contact:

Castor

COVID-19 support team

covid19@castoredc.com



John Ambrose, Esq

Head of Marketing

john.ambrose@castoredc.com

Media & IR Enquiries

Optimum Strategic Communications

Mary Clark/ Hollie Vile/Manel Mateus

Castor@optimumcomms.com

Tel: +44 (0) 20-3922-1906

NOTES TO EDITORS

About Castor

Based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and New Jersey, US, Castor is an international health-tech company founded by CEO Derk Arts, MD, PhD to leverage machine readable data to increase clinical trial efficiency. Castor's Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system enables every researcher worldwide to easily capture and integrate medical research data from any source in real-time, including clinicians, patients, devices, wearables, and EHR systems.

More than 40,000 researchers across 90 countries are using Castor to supercharge their research. Castor's platform has supported more than 4,100 commercial and academic studies that cover a broad range of disease areas including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, rare diseases, infectious diseases, and oncology. Researchers on the platform generate vast amounts of data from traditional and decentralized trials, and Castor recently reached milestones of 140,000,000 data points and 1,500,000 enrolled patients. Castor's goal is to make the world's research data reusable, enabling AI-driven clinical trials, and ultimately creating a future in which they maximize the impact of data through reuse.

In 2018 Castor raised $6.25m in funding from early-stage investor INKEF Capital in the Netherlands.

Castor encourages all COVID-19 researchers in need of standardized, high quality data to start their studies by registering here , and to visit their online academy to become familiar with the platform. The WHO-defined CRFs can be downloaded here .

Website: www.castoredc.com

Twitter: @Castor
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 23:48:23|Editor: huaxia

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JERUSALEM, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Israeli army said on Thursday that a drone belonging to the Lebanon-based group of Hezbollah has entered Israeli airspace before being intercepted.

"A model airplane belonging to Hezbollah was downed while crossing from Lebanon into Israeli airspace," a military spokesperson said in a statement.

The spokesperson added that the Israeli forces have captured the drone.

The military said that the incident was a "violation of Israeli sovereignty" and is seen "with great severity," adding that Israel holds the Lebanese government responsible for it.

"The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) deploys multilayered defense efforts along all Israeli borders to detect and down aerial infiltrations," the spokesperson warned. "The IDF will continue to thwart any attempt by the Hezbollah terror organization to violate Israeli sovereignty or harm its residents, using various defensive and offensive means."

Israel and Lebanon share a controversial border, occasionally crossed by reconnaissance aircrafts.

Hezbollah, an Iran-backed group, and Israel have fought a full-fledged war in 2006, which took place mostly on the Lebanese soil.






By Tom Plate




DUBLIN, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Mobile Map Market 2020-2024" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global mobile map market 2020-2024 and it is poised to grow by USD 5.24 bn during 2020-2024, progressing at a CAGR of 17% during the forecast period. The report on the global mobile map market 2020-2024 provides a holistic analysis, market size and forecast, trends, growth drivers, and challenges, as well as vendor analysis covering around 25 vendors.



The report offers an up-to-date analysis regarding the current global market scenario, latest trends and drivers, and the overall market environment. The market is driven by increasing adoption of technologically advanced mobile devices. In addition, increasing adoption of mobile map in industrial sector is anticipated to boost the growth of the global mobile map market 2020-2024 as well.



Market Segmentation



Application:

Outdoor Mobile Map

Indoor Mobile Map

End-user:

Automotive Navigation

Mobile And Internet

Public Sector And Enterprise

Geographic Segmentation:

APAC

Europe

MEA

North America

South America

Key trends for global mobile map market 2020-2024 growth



This study identifies increasing adoption of mobile map in the industrial sector as the prime reasons driving the global mobile map market 2020-2024 growth during the next few years.



Prominent vendors in global mobile map market 2020-2024.



The report provides a detailed analysis of around 25 vendors operating in the global mobile map market 2020-2024, including some of the vendors such as:



Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Alphabet Inc.

Apple Inc.

Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc.

HERE Global BV

Microsoft Corp.

NavInfo Co. Ltd.

TomTom International BV

Trimble Inc.

Verizon Communications Inc.

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/khhhpi

About ResearchAndMarkets.com

ResearchAndMarkets.com is the world's leading source for international market research reports and market data. We provide you with the latest data on international and regional markets, key industries, the top companies, new products and the latest trends.

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

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SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

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English French

Bollene, March 26, 2020  07 :00 a.m. (CET)

Press Release

2019 ANNUAL RESULTS





2019 Turnover: 31.8m (+0.1% YoY),

2019 Order Book: 34.8m (+25% YoY)

2019 EBITDA: -0.1m* vs 0.67m in 2018

2019 Operating Results: -1.4m

A transitional year 2019 with positive developments for 2020: +13% growth in H2 after a difficult H1

2020: Focus on profitability and growth

To this day, impact of Covid-19 still minimal on customers' global production and delivery requirements

Restructuring of Egide SA completed in December 2019



* Excluding restructuring

The results presented below are unaudited consolidated financial statements for 2019 but reviewed by the Audit Committee on March 24, 2020; certification of accounts is expected in the coming weeks.

2019 Consolidated P&L

(In M) FY 2018 As a percentage of revenues FY 2019 As a percentage of revenues Sales 31.7 31.8 Material (12.5) -39% (13.2) -41% Personnel costs (13.5) -43% (13.7) -43% External charges & others (5.1) -16% (5.0) -16% EBITDA from operation 0.7 2% (0.1) 0% Restructuring expenses (0.7) Restructuring reserve (0.3) Depreciation, amort. & reserves (2.2) (1.3) EBIT (1.5) -5% (2.3) -7% Financial items (0.6) (0.5) Income Taxe (0.1) 0.0 Net result (2.3) -7% (2.8) -9%

CONSOLIDATED FINANCIALS 2019

REVENUE

Egide Group's unaudited consolidated revenue grew slightly to  31.8 million in 2019, in line with the forecasts published at the time of the publication of the H1. North American sales account for 62% of the group's total turnover.

The second half of the year showed a marked improvement with a 13.8% growth in revenue, as previously announced. Compared to H2 2018, there was 9.3% increase at real exchange rate (5.8 % at constant exchange rate). The difficult environment in which Egide SA operated in H1 2019 has impacted the group's turnover for the year with key customers delaying contracts into 2020. Santier was impacted in H2 2019 due to the cancellation of two radar systems by the US Defense industry. Egide USA continues to see growth in the power market, both using GTMS and HTCC components.

Order intake for the year was 34.8 M, resulting in a book to bill ratio of 1.09.

For information, the average euro / dollar parity in 2019 was 1.12, against 1.18 in 2018. Given that, the US subsidiaries saw an increase in revenues of 7.6% in US Dollars.

RESULTS AS OF DECEMBER 31, 2019

2019 did not see any positive impact yet from the restructuring.

The material costs increased by 2% because of unfavorable product mix and lower revenue generated by Santier in San Diego where the material portion of costs is lower than in the rest of the group.

The restructuring was reserved at 730K in June 2019 and 682K have been spent; the remainder is still reserved for and will be spent in 2020. An additional reserve of 200K was booked for social litigation linked to the restructuring.

The depreciation of assets is back to normal after exceptional 936K depreciation in 2018 because of an impairment test.

2019 numbers take into account the new IFRS16 regarding rents and 2018 have not been restated. The impact on 2019 P&L is as follows: elimination of Rent expenses for 689K, increase of depreciation for 407k and increase of financial charges for 213K. This also impacts the Ebitda computation.

CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEET AS OF DECEMBER 31, 2019

ASSETS LIABILITIES 2018 2019 2018 2019 Fixed assets 6.7 6.6 Equity 11.0 10.5 Usage rights of leased assets 2.9 Other financial fixed assets 0.5 0.9 Accruals 0.7 0.8 Differed tax assets 1.2 1.3 Financial debt 6.9 6.3 Inventory, AR and other assets 12.7 13.4 Rent debts 3.1 Cash 2.4 1.5 AP & other 4.8 5.8 TOTAL 23.4 26.5 TOTAL 23.4 26.5

The fixed assets include 945k of Capex for the year spread over the 3 factories and relates essentially to production equipment.

IFRS16 created the usage rights and rent debts for similar amounts around 3M on both sides of the Balance Sheet.

The deferred tax assets is only liked to the US operations and is actually in USD. It grew from year to year only because of the exchange rate. A tax planning based on future business expectations in the US shows the usage of this tax asset within 4 to 5 years. Therefor no impairment was booked.

The Equity takes into account a Share capital increase performed in June 2019 for 2.5M which enabled to finance the restructuring.

The inventory is growing from 6.5M to 7.5M essentially in preparation for a strong H1 in 2020 anticipated with the good bookings.

The working capital represents 88 days of revenue.





2020 OUTLOOK

IMPACT COVID-19

For the time being, the impact of the Covid-19 remains minimal on the production and delivery requirements from customers worldwide. The Group operates in structurally resilient markets such as Defense, Telecom or Medical. The industrial facilities in Cambridge and San Diego are considered essential for defence as they provide products for DX/DO rated programs. Similarly, the Bollene site produces and contributes to advanced research projects for the French and European defence and aeronautics sectors. The French ministries concerned have been in close contact to support the Bollene teams since the beginning of the crisis.

The Egide Group has taken the necessary initiatives to minimise future risks, in particular by securing its supply chain with a 2nd qualified source on at least 2 continents and by implementing strict health rules in all its plants, with increased restrictions on travel and reduced visitor access to its sites, as well as a two-shift production organisation at Bollene facility and home working for administrative teams.

Developments are being closely monitored. The purchasing department is in regular contact with key suppliers and strictly monitors delivery times. To date, no major supply disruptions in Europe and the United States have been seen. The supply chain in China is constantly improving

OPERATIONS

Egide Group forecast growth in 2020, supported by 34.8 million in new orders registered at the end of 2019, compared to 31.8 million in revenues in 2019.

The Group anticipates growth in profitability at all its sites.

In 2020, Egide Group intends to continue its efforts to diversify its revenues. In particular, the priority will be to develop our presence in additional geographical markets in Europe for microwave applications used in defence markets and to meet new demands such as thermal batteries, solid oxide fuel cells (clean energy), optical gyroscopes, sensors, etc.

In addition, the Covid-19 crisis and the questioning of the supply chain strategy by companies are opening up new prospects for Egide in traditional optoelectronic applications.

At the same time, the Egide Group will continue its strategy of continuous optimisation of its activities in France and the United States. This will be achieved by accelerating the modernising of the Bollene plant to continue to optimise operations in order to produce more efficiently and at lower cost. The implementation of a new ERP system is planned at Bollene for H1 and of the CRM software Salesforce for the commercial activities in Q1.

Egide USA and Santier will be integrated under a single operational and legal structure to reduce costs and enable better cash management.

The Cambridge unit will intensify its expertise of HTCC ceramics for microwave applications in order to reach other markets other than the thermal imaging one.

Jim Collins, Chairman and CEO, comments: For the Egide Group, the number one priority is the safety of our staff during this Covid-19 pandemic. Each of our factories is following the recommended protocol for a safe working environment and social distancing. We continue to operate each of our facilities because our products are essential to the government programs for which they are intended. .

He adds, "2019 has been a year of transition for the company. We restructured our French operations to improve efficiency and reduce costs. In this context, the profitability of Groupe Egide has been impacted in 2019. While we continue to feel the volatility in some of our markets, particularly in the European and US thermal imaging markets and some defense contracts in the United States, the completion of the restructuring in France, as well as the significant improvement in order intake at the end of 2019, allow us to remain confident for the year 2020. 

Financial Agenda :

2019 H1 revenue: July 23, 2020

To find out more about Egide: www.egide-group.com

About Egide

Egide is a group with an international dimension, specialized in the manufacture of hermetic packages and heat dissipation solutions for sensitive electronic components. It operates in cutting edge markets with strong technology barriers to entry in all critical industry segments (Thermal Imaging, Optronics, High-Frequency, Power Units). Egide is the only pure player in this market niche with manufacturing bases in France and the United States.

Egides eligibility for tax efficient French innovation-focused mutual funds (FCPI) was renewed on May 14, 2018.

Egide is listed on Euronext Paris- Segment C - ISIN code: FR0000072373  Reuters: EGID.PA  Bloomberg : GID





CONTACTS

EGIDE  Finance Department - Luc Ardon - +33 4 90 30 35 94  luc.ardon@fr.egide-group.com

INBOUND CAPITAL  Investor Relations  Frederic Portier - +44 7802 533333  fportier@inbound.capital

FINEXTENSO  Press Relations - Isabelle Aprile - +33 1 39 97 61 22  i.aprile@finextenso.fr





Attachment
'A pandemic like this will leave behind a trail of political, economic, social and psychological scars.'

Coronavirus is going to impact every being on earth even if they do not contract it.'

'Everyone will pay a price,' cautions Ramesh Menon.

Photograph: PTI photo

When the film, Contagion, was released in 2011, we dismissed it as fiction.

It dealt with how a virus spread so fast and decimated lives.

Today, it is the story of our times.

Already, thousands have died and many more psychologically maimed.

Imagine. 1.3 billion people locked within our homes.

Streets deserted.

Trains and flights not operating.

Shops and businesses shut.

Millions working out of home.

People learning to manage without household help.

There is fear everywhere.

Photograph: Uttam Ghosh/ Rediff.com An empty railway station in Panvel, Navi Mumbai.

The unimaginable is happening.

Parliament has been shut.

Suburban trains in Mumbai ground to a halt that operates 2,342 trains ferrying over 7.5 million commuters.

Most Indian states went into a lockdown mode as the stealthy COVID-19 spread to various nooks of the country.

As the country steps into the dangerous terrain of Stage 3 where transmission happens through the community, India has gone into a complete lockdown.

That is the only way to break the chain and ensure that the daily rate of ascending cases slows down and ultimately grinds to a halt.

IMAGE: The Vaishno Devi shrine wears a deserted look on the first day of Navratri, March 25, 2020. Photograph: PTI

A complete lockdown is the only way because of the country's peculiar nature.

It is saddled with an inexplicable chalta hai attitude.

We saw it when numerous individuals who tested positive did not quarantine themselves but merrily moved around attending functions and weddings.

We saw it when thousands thronged the streets after the Janata Curfew call by Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi.

They were dancing and celebrating throwing social distancing to the winds.

As if there was no tomorrow.

That day, many new cases must have been incubated.

We saw it when thousands who returned from countries that were severely affected, chose to not get tested or self quarantined. Some even attended weddings and parties.

Administrative and health officials in Punjab are desperately looking for over 40,000 NRIs who have entered the state after the pandemic blew up.

Tracking each of them and also all those they are in contact with is no easy task.

This is practically impossible as there is an acute shortage of staff especially now as there is a tremendous strain on both the administrative and health systems.

When the Kamal Nath government fell in Madhya Pradesh, there were huge crowds of BJP supporters making merry on the streets.

This, when the world was hurting with the pandemic.

It was followed by numerous photos of the new chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan with his supporters sticking to each other to get into the frame.

This is why India is peculiar.

IMAGE: A policeman wields his baton at a man riding a motorcycle as punishment for breaking the lockdown rules in Mumbai. Photograph: Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters

India's policy response to the pandemic has to be coherent and uniform.

It has to be very strictly enforced.

In Noida, Uttar Pradesh, cars are moving around despite the lockdown.

Only a punitive regime that takes them to task will work.

Some arrests have been made for defying the curfew and for evading tests.

But, not enough to discipline all of us.

IMAGE: Police officers stop vehicles and check their papers on a highway in Kochi. Photograph: Sivaram V/Reuters

At the human level, we realised how frail we are.

A microscopic virus has held the world to ransom.

We may value our lives more holistically.

We may realise the magic of simplicity and minimalism.

Maybe, at the end of it, we may become more humble, more humane and less arrogant.

We may get a new lens to look at the world and ourselves.

Global fights and differences may look so puerile.

We suddenly saw how our differences of religion, caste, creed, and colour were so pointless.

The virus did not discriminate.

Isolation helped many of us look inward, something we never did as we raced down the road of life.

Self-realisation came automatically as danger knocked on the door.

Even the temples were empty.

Maybe, our lives will never be the same again.

IMAGE: Migrant workers and their families board an overcrowded passenger train in Mumbai, March 21, 2020. Photograph: Prashant Waydande/Reuters

The challenges are huge.

The novel coronavirus pandemic is going to impact every being on earth even if they do not contract it.

Everyone will pay a price.

The poor will be hit the most.

The economy, which was tanking in India, will plummet further with the pressures of mounting losses due to the lockdown, job cuts and businesses struggling to get back on its feet.

Jamie Metzl, author of Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity says we are never going to go back to normal and the need now is to focus on what we are going to do to make the new normal a good one.

That makes sense.

A pandemic like this will leave behind a trail of political, economic, social and psychological scars.

Some of them are going to fester for long.

There has to be a new preparedness, a new visionary leadership the will pull us out with minimum collateral damage.

One has yet to see any signs of it anywhere in the world.

The last time the world rattled was in 2001 when terrorists flew airplanes into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

We saw how that changed the world forever.

Thousands died in events that tapered off from that event.

Millions were maimed physically and emotionally.

This pandemic will have greater spiraling effects than the 2001 attack as 170 countries look at the prospect of struggling with emerging geopolitical implications.

International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva has warned that the global recession in the wake of the pandemic would be worse than 2009.

Be ready.

We are currently seeing how no country or institution is equipped to deal with the crisis or has easy solutions.

All are trying to fathom some meaning with a trial and error method.

The economy and healthcare are surviving on a fragile survival system and will compound the crisis in India.

Healthcare in most states is poor.

Bihar has only one government hospital bed for a lakh of its people.

Scary.

The only exception is Kerala.

This is why when the Nipah virus broke out, it had the wherewithal to contain it within the state.

IMAGE: Firefighters in Mumbai disinfect the exteriors of a government-run hospital to limit the spreading of coronavirus. Photograph: Prashant Waydande/Reuters

Our lifestyles have to change.

Our value systems need to be examined.

Our political beliefs and our political culture need to change.

We need to inclusively engage our people to shoulder the shocks that are threatening to arrive sooner than later.

Each one of us has become a victim in some way or the other.

As the psychological shocks will continue, we need to be there for each other with a new sense of empathy and belonging.

Many who live alone feel very isolated and fragile.

Even others are seeing anxiety disorders as they do not know what is going to happen tomorrow.

Panic attacks, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder will add to the health emergency.

It is not going to be easy.

There is no choice but, we have to fight back and steer ourselves out of this mess.

Ramesh Menon is an author, journalist, film-maker and corporate trainer,
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro (Associated Press)

The Trump administration announced sweeping indictments Thursday of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and some of his associates on federal drug-trafficking and related charges, in a major escalation of the U.S.-led campaign to topple Maduro and his socialist government.

The indictments, described by Atty. Gen. William Barr at a news conference in Washington, allege that Maduro and members of his inner circle conspired with rebels from neighboring Colombia to create a vast and lucrative criminal enterprise in Venezuela "flooding" the United States with cocaine and generating billions in illicit dollars. Maduro and his allies pocketed profits, and the rebels received weapons, prosecutors allege  all while Venezuela descended into poverty and social collapse.

"The Maduro regime is awash in corruption and criminality," Barr said. It has "betrayed the Venezuelan people and corrupted Venezuelan institutions. While the Venezuelan people suffer, this cabal lines their pockets with drug money and proceeds of the corruption. This has to come to an end."

The indictment naming Maduro means he would be subject to arrest if he leaves Venezuela. The U.S. State Department immediately put out a $15-million reward for information leading to his capture.

Barr would not discuss whether the administration might attempt to extradite Maduro  or extract him in a military operation. He said he expected Maduro and others charged in the multiple indictments and one complaint to be tried in U.S. courtrooms.

In Caracas, Maduro responded even before Barr finished speaking. It's a conspiracy from the United States and Colombia, he railed, and "they have given the order to fill Venezuela with violence!" He said he would defend "peace and homeland" against "whatever circumstances present themselves."

It is unusual for the U.S. government to indict a sitting president. The last time such an action was taken was the 1988 indictment of Gen. Manuel Noriega, the powerful and wildly corrupt leader of Panama. A year later, then-President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama and captured Noriega, and he was convicted on trafficking and money-laundering charges.

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Although U.S. officials often draw parallels between the ways Noriega and Maduro transformed their countries into criminal havens, an invasion-and-capture scenario for Venezuela is seen as highly unlikely. Panama is a small country and at the time had a U.S. military presence tied to the Panama Canal. Venezuela by contrast is vast, and Maduro enjoys formidable military support from Russia and Cuba.

The Trump administration  propelled by hawks like former national security advisor John Bolton  has sought for more than a year to oust Maduro while the country plunges into economic decay. But the effort has floundered. The administration does not recognize Maduro and has thrown its support behind Juan Guaido, head of the opposition.

The timing of the action raised questions within the foreign policy community and those who follow Venezuelan issues. It comes as Venezuela  its health system already teetering  is being overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic, which may make Maduro more open to political negotiations.

"For the first time in a long time, Maduro needs the opposition" for access to international aid to fight the pandemic, said David Smilde, a Tulane University professor who is a fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. Indicting Maduro now will make him feel cornered and less likely to cooperate.

"This ups the pressure, but it ups Maduro's exit price even more," he said. "It's hard to imagine he would not hunker down. Why negotiate now if you have an indictment hanging over your head?"

Electoral politics have long been at the core of President Trump's focus on Venezuela, former officials say, and, with the voting seven months away in the U.S., he may be eager to topple the government in Caracas to energize conservative voters in southern Florida.

Barr said the investigation had been underway for quite some time. Prosecutors were going to announce the charges a week or so ago, he said, but held off to figure out how to manage a news conference and unveiling of charges amid social distancing requirements aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

Barr said announcing the indictments during a pandemic could help further motivate Venezuelans to jettison Maduro from power.

"Its good timing, actually," Barr said. "The people in Venezuela are suffering, and they need an effective government that responds to the people.

The regime feeds at the trough, blocking supplies and help to the Venezuelan people from coming in, he added. This is the best way to support the Venezuelan people: to rid this country of this corrupt cabal."

Charges were also filed against 14 other Venezuelan government officials, including the head of the supreme court and military commanders, who were allegedly part of a drug-trafficking effort that started more than a decade ago under the government of the late Hugo Chavez.

Vladimir Padrino Lopez, the defense minister, was indicted on charges of allowing drug dealers who paid him bribes in a five-year span starting in 2014 to safely transit his country's airspace while ordering others to be shot down or forced to land.

Maikel Jose Moreno Perez, the chief justice of Venezuela's supreme court, was charged in a criminal complaint with conspiring to commit money laundering by accepting tens of millions of dollars in bribes to "illegally fix dozens of civil and criminal cases," the Justice Department said. The complaint alleges that Perez authorized the seizure and sale of a General Motors plant worth about $100 million in exchange for a percentage of the proceeds. He also released Venezuelans from custody who paid him bribes, including one accused of participating in a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme, the complaint alleges.

Indicted by a federal grand jury in New York on charges of participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy, conspiring to import cocaine to the U.S. and related charges were: Maduro; Diosdado Cabello, the head of the constitutional assembly; Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, former director of military intelligence; and Cliver Antonio Alcala Cordones, a former general.

The indictment alleges that Maduro and the others for years had been members of the Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, named for the sun insignia affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking military commanders.

They are accused of helping rebels in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, export cocaine into Venezuela and fly it to Central America to be distributed to the United States. Barr characterized the shipping effort as an air bridge.

The FARC signed a peace agreement with the Colombian government in 2016, ending one of the hemisphere's longest wars, and most rebels entered civilian life. But some dissidents retained their weapons and have mobilized inside Venezuela near its border with Colombia, where U.S. and Colombian authorities say the group has maintained a robust drug-smuggling operation.

Starting in 1999, the indictment alleges, the FARC agreed with the Cartel of the Suns to relocate some of its operations into Venezuela under the drug rings protection. By 2004, the U.S. government estimated that about 250 tons of cocaine annually were transiting Venezuela. The indictment alleges that Maduro, as the leader of the cartel, negotiated multi-ton shipments of FARC-produced cocaine and directed the cartel to provide military-grade weapons to the FARC, the Justice Department said.

Special correspondent Mery Mogollon in Caracas contributed to this report.
A farmer in Latur said the price of watermelons he has harvested has collapsed because of lack of mobility.

Two days before Narendra Modi announced a lockdown of the country, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Uddhav Thackeray, had put in place several restrictions to combat the spread of the coronavirus, among these, was intra-state travel. However, the restrictions did not apply to those providing essential services, which include the supply chain of groceries.

But, in several parts of rural Maharashtra, the state police is yet to distinguish between what is and isn't on the list of essential services.

Raju Shetty, a farmer leader from western Maharashtra, said his phone has not stopped ringing with reports of farmers "across the state" complaining about police harassment.

Farmers cannot follow 100 percent curfew, he said in a telephonic interview. If a farmer does not go to the farm, how will you get vegetables? But at the moment, farmers have harvested large amounts of vegetables that they are not able to take to the market.

A farmer in Latur said the price of watermelons he has harvested has collapsed because of lack of mobility.

I invested Rs 2.5 lakh in 1.5-acre land and I have now harvested 40,000 kilos of watermelon. At Rs 12 per kilo, I would have normally made Rs 4.8 lakh. But I am currently being offered only Rs 2 per kilo. I stand to lose around Rs 4 lakh, the farmer said.

Ajit Navale, an agriculture activist based in Ahmednagar, said drivers are scared to take their vehicles out because of the police.

Vegetables are perishable, he said. Allowing grocery stores to function wont be enough if the farmers supplying goods to them are not allowed to sell it in the market.

Across India, according to a report, 15,000 litres of milk and 10,000 kilos of veggies were dumped as a result of police action.

Maharashtra agriculture minister Dada Bhuse accepted these things happened at a few places but said the state is facilitating the transport of farmers harvest to the consumer.

Click here for Coronavirus Outbreak LIVE Updates

The police cannot see what is inside when the truck emerges in front of them, Bhuse said. But after inspection, there are clear orders to let the farmers function. And if anyone is still facing difficulties, they can call me directly.

While the orders from the top may be taking a while to percolate down to the bottom, the farmers are facing two kinds of problems. The short-term problem of not being able to transport their harvest to the market, which, the agriculture minister has assured, would be ironed out soon. The second, long-term problem is of those who have not yet harvested their Rabi crops because the workers cannot get to the farms.

Farmer Umakant Patil said his relatives in Badgaon taluka of Maharashtras Jalgaon district are not able to harvest sweet corn. Once harvested, it has to be sold quickly when it is moist, Patil said. If it dries up, it is of no use. We are staring at a loss of about Rs. 2 lakhs if the government does not act quickly.

Bhuse said that the orders of letting farm labourers work have also been given to the police. They can work in farms by maintaining two meters of distance, he said.

Navale, however, said that the crops could perish if the state orders do not percolate down to taluka and village level police soon.

It has rained twice already, and the farmers need to harvest the onions in Ahmednagar soon, he said. Right now, the labourers are not being allowed to move. Farming is a time-bound profession. If the farmers are not able to harvest on time, their effort of the entire season goes down the drain.

March and April is also the time when farmers prepare their land for the upcoming Kharif season beginning June or July.

With nationwide lockdown, there is a serious shortage of fertilisers and pesticides. Kishor Tiwari, who was appointed to the task force of welfare of farmers by former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, and is currently with Shiv Sena, said if the farmers fall short in preparing their land, their miseries would continue even after the lockdown ends.

The entire Kharif crop could lose its productivity, he said. It is difficult to say how much the agriculture sector would suffer, but it is likely to be a setback of over Rs 50,000 crore.

The losses include the farmers cultivating dairy products. Shetty said most of the distress calls he has received have come from dairy farmers.

They have not been able to distribute their milk, he said. Because of the shutdown, hotels are shut. So there is no demand for products like paneer, rabdi, and so on. Because several labourers have been laid off, there is no one to process milk and make butter or milk powder. So the farmers milk is only being procured on alternate days. It is a big loss for them.

Bhuse said every sector is going to suffer in varying degrees, and the state is doing everything it can to mitigate losses.

We are working towards making seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides available to the farmers, he said. We are also planning to distribute advance ration of two months to the poorest of the poor.

Navale said the states Public Distribution System normally constitutes of rice and wheat but in these circumstances, he said, It should add pulses, oil and sugar as well.
ATHENS, Greece, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Diana Shipping Inc. (DSX), (the Company), a global shipping company specializing in the ownership of dry bulk vessels, today announced that, through a separate wholly-owned subsidiary, it has entered into a time charter contract with C Transport Maritime Ltd., Bermuda, for one of its Capesize dry bulk vessels, the m/v P. S. Palios, for a period of about thirteen (13) months to maximum fifteen (15) months. The gross charter rate is US$6,000 per day for the first thirty five (35) days of the charter period and US$12,050 per day for the balance period of the time charter, in each case minus a 5% commission paid to third parties. The charter commenced on March 24, 2020.



The P. S. Palios is a 179,134 dwt Capesize dry bulk vessel built in 2013.

This employment is anticipated to generate approximately US$4.31 million of gross revenue for the minimum scheduled period of the time charter.

Diana Shipping Inc.s fleet currently consists of 41 dry bulk vessels (4 Newcastlemax, 13 Capesize, 5 Post-Panamax, 5 Kamsarmax and 14 Panamax). As of today, the combined carrying capacity of the Companys fleet is approximately 5.1 million dwt with a weighted average age of 9.52 years. A table describing the current Diana Shipping Inc. fleet can be found on the Companys website, www.dianashippinginc.com. Information contained on the Companys website does not constitute a part of this press release.

About the Company

Diana Shipping Inc. is a global provider of shipping transportation services through its ownership of dry bulk vessels. The Companys vessels are employed primarily on medium to long-term time charters and transport a range of dry bulk cargoes, including such commodities as iron ore, coal, grain and other materials along worldwide shipping routes.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Matters discussed in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides safe harbor protections for forward-looking statements in order to encourage companies to provide prospective information about their business. Forward-looking statements include statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events or performance, and underlying assumptions and other statements, which are other than statements of historical facts.

Story continues

The Company desires to take advantage of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and is including this cautionary statement in connection with this safe harbor legislation. The words believe, anticipate, intends, estimate, forecast, project, plan, potential, may, should, expect, pending and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements.

The forward-looking statements in this press release are based upon various assumptions, many of which are based, in turn, upon further assumptions, including without limitation, Company managements examination of historical operating trends, data contained in the Companys records and other data available from third parties. Although the Company believes that these assumptions were reasonable when made, because these assumptions are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and contingencies that are difficult or impossible to predict and are beyond the Companys control, the Company cannot assure you that it will achieve or accomplish these expectations, beliefs or projections.

In addition to these important factors, other important factors that, in the Companys view, could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements include the strength of world economies and currencies, general market conditions, including fluctuations in charter rates and vessel values, changes in demand for dry bulk shipping capacity, changes in the Companys operating expenses, including bunker prices, drydocking and insurance costs, the market for the Companys vessels, availability of financing and refinancing, changes in governmental rules and regulations or actions taken by regulatory authorities, potential liability from pending or future litigation, general domestic and international political conditions, potential disruption of shipping routes due to accidents or political events, vessel breakdowns and instances of off-hires and other factors. Please see the Companys filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a more complete discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statement, or to make any other forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Corporate Contact:

Ioannis Zafirakis

Director, Interim Chief Financial Officer,

Chief Strategy Officer, Treasurer and Secretary

Telephone: + 30-210-9470-100

Email: izafirakis@dianashippinginc.com

Website: www.dianashippinginc.com



Investor and Media Relations:

Edward Nebb

Comm-Counsellors, LLC

Telephone: + 1-203-972-8350

Email: enebb@optonline.net
 NY Times Shows How Framing Slants Coverage | Main | CNNs Amanpour Condemns power grab By Israels Prime Minister and Others 

March 25, 2020

Italian Artist Posts Image of Jewish Ritual Murder on Facebook Page

Giovanni Gasparro being interviewed on a news show in Italy at the unveiling of one of his paintings at a basilica in Italy. (YouTube screenshot)

Giovanni Gasparro, a popular artist in Italy, has posted images of a painting of a Jewish ritual murder on his Facebook page. The title of the painting, which appears to have been produced by Gasparro during the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, is The Martyrdom of Saint Simon of Trent, For Jewish Ritual Murder. Images of this painting can be found on Gasparros Facebook page. The painting is apparently in a private collection. Gasparro has been commissioned by Catholic officials in Italy to adorn their basilicas and churches with his work.

The painting (which CAMERA will not show) depicts numerous hook-nosed Jews of varying ages looking on in glee as one of their fellows prepares to plunge a dagger into the babys chest. Another hook-nosed Jew holds a silver chalice in place, ready to catch the blood from the ritual murder. It is a truly horrific painting clearly intended to reawaken age-old hostilities toward the Jewish people.

CAMERA has contacted the artist himself via email asking why he would post such a horrific image during a time of plague. CAMERA has also contacted the Papal Nuncio in Washington, D.C. asking that he alert the proper officials in the Vatican about this outrage.



Posted by dvz at March 25, 2020 02:11 PM

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The Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany. (Stuart Franklin/Getty Images)

Germanys car giants are preparing to put tens of thousands of employees onto part-time hours after shutting down their European plants last week.

Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler (DAI.DE) will send thousands of staff on forced leave from 6 April for several weeks. A spokesperson told Reuters (link in German) that the exact number of staff who will be put onto Kurzarbeit  short-time work  has not been decided, but it is likely that a large part of the companys 170,000 workforce in Germany will be affected.

Read more: Germany bids goodbye to black zero with 750bn coronavirus package

Volkswagen (VOW3.DE) in Germany also plans to stand-down some 80,000 workers for lack of work. "The current spread of the coronavirus means that Volkswagen has to adjust the production programme," said a VW spokesman this week, noting that a drop in sales coupled with delivery bottlenecks meant downtime for production.

VW has applied to put its staff on reduced-hours contracts at some plants until 3 April. Audi and Porsche, who belong to the VW Group, are also planning similar measures.

Kurzarbeit was introduced by the German government during the financial crisis in 2008 with the aim of avoiding mass layoffs. The government pays 60% of a workers salary to the company  to pay the person while they are temporarily laid off. If the worker is forced onto part-time hours, they get paid for those as normal by the company, and the government subsidises for the shortfall.

Read more: German economy 'could shrink up to 20%' as business morale gets 'extraordinarily dire'

As well as securing peoples livelihoods, it means that companies dont lose skilled staff that they would need again once the situation improves  a lack of skilled workers is a perennial headache for German businesses.

As part of its multibillion-euro package of measures to safeguard jobs and avoid bankruptcies during the coronavirus pandemic, the German government last week announced that it would relax its rules on Kurzarbeit to allow more firms to take advantage of it.
The woman burnt her husbands house down

According to Vanguard, the Osun State Police Command has arrested a housewife, Kehinde Salamat for allegedly setting ablaze her husbands six-bedroom bungalow, worth N3 million.

The incident was said to have occurred on March 18, 2020, around Adio, Ori Eru in Iwo local government area of Osun State.

A source in Iwo informed the medium that her husband, identified as Lamidi Kehinde alerted the Police about the alleged arson by his second wife.

It was gathered that the enraged wife took the action because Lamidi took another wife.

According to the source, all the household properties inside the house were completely burnt by the raging fire allegedly set on the building.

Confirming the incident to journalists in Osogbo on Tuesday, the Assistant Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO) of Osun State Police command, Mustafa Katayeyanjue said the suspect had been arrested.

He explained that no life was lost in the incident, saying the State Criminal Investigation Department (SCID) was already investigating the matter after which the suspect would be charged to court for prosecution.
CANNES, May 26, 2019 (Xinhua) -- Jury members pose on the red carpet of the closing ceremony of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France, on May 25, 2019. The curtain of the 72nd edition of the Cannes Film Festival fell on Saturday evening, w Image Source: IANS News

Paris, March 26 : After the Cannes film festival got postponed to the end of June, the authorities have opened the doors of the French Riviera, the resort where the event takes place, to the destitute.

"We have between 50 and 70 people here every night," said Dominique Aude-Lasset, an official at Cannes Town Hall, on Wednesday.

Eight days ago, President Emmanuel Macron told France's 67 million people to stay at home to protect themselves from the pandemic, and to slow its spread. That's a big problem for the country's estimated 12,000 homeless who live on the streets, France 24 reported.

There is concern the coronavirus could have an outsized impact on the homeless who often live without access to proper sanitation and sometimes suffer underlying illnesses. Many rely on handouts from a public now confined indoors.

At the entrance, a worker in a face mask takes the temperature of each homeless person each time they enter the site. Inside, there is an eating area, shower block and communal space with television and games. In a cavernous, low-ceiling room, camp beds have been set up in three long lines.

There are also four kennels to house man's best friend.

"We know dogs are precious for people living on the streets," Aude-Lasset said.
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A ski resort known as Austria's 'Ibiza of the Alps' has been accused of covering up coronavirus infections and started spreading it to Britain weeks earlier than was thought.

Daren Bland, 50, of Maresfield, East Sussex, is understood to have infected his wife Sarah and children after returning from Ischgl in mid January where he attended a party.

A video emerged of a party at the resort where a group of people were singing and dancing to Highway to Hell by AC/DC - showing how close they were together, increasing the chances of the virus spreading.

Mr Bland joined three friends there from January 15 to 19, with the others travelling home - two to Denmark and one to Minnesota in the US - sick. Prosecutors are now investigating the destination for possible negligence due to hundreds of foreigners leaving with the illness.

Mr Bland told the Telegraph: 'We visited the Kitzloch [bar] and it was rammed, with people singing and dancing on the tables. People were hot and sweaty from skiing and waiters were delivering shots to tables in their hundreds.

'You couldn't have a better home for a virus. I was ill for 10 days. It was like wading through treacle. I couldn't get up, I couldn't work, it knocked me for six. I was breathless.'

However it has not yet been confirmed whether or not Mr Bland and his family contracted coronavirus.

A video emerged of a party at the ski resort where a group of people were singing and dancing to Highway to Hell by AC/DC

Daren Bland, 50, from Maresfield, East Sussex, fears he infected his wife Sarah (pictured) and children after returning from Ischgl in mid January

The 50-year-old (left and right) had been there with three friends from January 15 to 19, with the others travelling back to their native Denmark and Minnesota in the US sick

The popular Ischgl resort, in the province of Tyrol, Austria has been blamed for hundreds of coronavirus cases in Europe

Mr Bland said he passed the sickness on to his family - with his youngest daughter off school for two weeks - before symptoms spread through his neighbourhood ahead of half term.

The Kitzloch bar in the 'Ibiza of the Alps' Punters from across the world flock to the Kitzloch bar in the 'Ibiza of the Alps'. They drink and dance on the tables into the early hours as they enjoy their holidays. Others spread saliva playing beer pong on the tables down below or down shots passed around by one of the numerous waiters. The revellers are all packed in tightly and, as Mr Bland says, people are 'hot and sweaty... the perfect home for a virus'. Around 1,000 are now locked in the popular Ischgl resort after the area was put into lockdown on March 14. Town Mayor Werner Kurz told Germany's Spiegel magazine: 'Essentially, it's a disaster for Ischgl. We aren't talking about the economic consequences yet. 'We will overcome them, just as we have been able to overcome flooding and avalanches in the past.' Advertisement

The Bland family have not been tested for coronavirus, but if their results came back positive it means the infection hit the UK a month earlier than thought.

Officially the first recorded case in the UK was on January 31, with the first transmission on February 28.

The virus has since spread across the four countries, racking up 465 deaths and 9,529 cases.

Mrs Bland, 49, has called for the family to be tested to try to help authorities understand how the bug has swept across Britain.

Ischgl, dubbed 'Ibiza of the Alps', faces tough questions over how revellers are feared to have been transmitting the illness across Europe.

Austrian officials have launched a probe into whether the popular resort in Tyrol province purposefully chose not to report cases because it would hurt the tourist industry around the time of a key local election.

Leader of the opposition Dominik Oberhofer said questions need to be asked about the relationship between hoteliers and politicians who were in charge of overseeing the coronavirus response.

An investigation has been launched over whether an outbreak of the disease was covered up to protect trade around the time of local elections

The inquiry centres around reports a 36-year-old German barman at the popular Kitzloch pub who fell ill with COVID-19 in February.

Mother 'dies of coronavirus' after being told she was not a priority Kayla Williams died of suspected Covid-19 at her apartment in Peckham. The 36-year-old's life was cut short on Saturday, when paramedics came to her south London address. Kayla Williams (pictured) died at home in Peckham, south London, after being told she was not a priority Husband Fabian Willams told the Guardian his wife was suffering a cough, high fever and severe chest and stomach pains on Friday. Documents say she was being treated as a suspected coronavirus case when she was told to stay at home. Advertisement

The resort has been linked to hundreds of cases in Austria, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Denmark.

Despite concerns the virus was running rampant there, the slopes and bars were allowed to stay open for weeks.

German media has branded Ischgl 'the breeding ground' of coronavirus, while Norway believes almost half of the country's cases were imported from Ischgl.

The number of infections in Ischgl - a small town of about 1,500 people - is double that of Vienna, the country's capital, which has a population of 2million.

There have been at least 1,020 confirmed infections in the town, compared to 456 in the capital.

Europe has become the new epicentre of the pandemic, with more than 100,000 people confirmed to have been infected across the Continent. Italy makes up more than half of cases.

Reports say a German barman at the Kitzloch pub fell ill with coronavirus symptoms at the end of February, although it has not been officially confirmed.

Tourists from Scandinavia, Germany and other parts of Austria all started testing positive for the illness after returning from Ischgl in early March.

German media described the resort as a 'breeding ground' for the virus, but local authorities played down concerns.

Werner Kurz, the mayor of Ischgl, told German newspaper Der Spiegel the shut down was 'a catastrophe' for the town, saying: 'We implemented all regulations in a timely manner'.

The number of infections in Ischgl is double that of Vienna, the country's capital, which has a population of 2 million

Police at a roadblock outside the Ischgl, which has now been put on total lockdown

Austria's Health Minister Rudolf Anschober announced the number of tests would 'massively' rise, with more regular checks for hospital staff.

'The number of tests is increasing and will continue to increase dramatically over the next two to three weeks,' he said in a statement.

It comes after Austria announced it was mobilising its military for the first time since the Second World War.

Soldiers will be deployed to fight the outbreak by helping with food supplies, medical support and police operations.

Austria still has compulsory military service. Men must serve six months in the army or nine months in a civilian service when they reach 18.

Around 3,000 soldiers - 10 per cent of the reserves - will for three months take over coronavirus-related tasks from soldiers whose military service expires in May.

Is it working? UK records 43 coronavirus deaths in past 24 hours compared to 87 yesterday... and new infections level out

Footage shows police dispersing members of the public intent on flouting the government's lockdown rules

Police dispersed members of the public soaking up the sun in Shepherd's Bush in West London

Groups of people were pictured enjoying the good weather in part of Cheltenham on Wednesday

It comes as a Twitter user whose grandmother has died from the virus pleaded with people to stay indoors

On Monday, Boris Johnson addressed the nation and ordered a lockdown for at least three weeks

Shoppers have also been pictured continuing to squeeze together at supermarkets across the country

The Prince of Wales has tested positive and is in self-isolation at his home on the Balmoral estate, Scotland

The UK has recorded 43 coronavirus deaths in the past 24 hours compared to 87 on Tuesday, but new infections have increased by a record 1,452 to 9,529 as Britons continued to flout the lockdown.

Twenty-eight more patients died overnight in England. Six more patients died in Scotland, five in Wales and four in Northern Ireland - bringing the total death toll to 465 in Britain.

They included a 47-year-old who did not have an underlying health condition. The others who died, including one person aged 93, did have underlying health conditions.

In contrast, eighty-seven infected Brits died the day before. Despite the death rate falling by half, the country saw a record spike in cases on Wednesday, with 1,452 more patients known to have caught the deadly virus, bringing the total number of cases to 9,529.

The Department of Health and Social Care late on Wednesday evening confirmed a total of 97,019 people have been tested with found 87,490 negative. The update said that 463 people had been killed by the virus, but they said the data did not cover a 24 hour period.

The update for the death toll on Tuesday was at 1pm, so the data only covers from then until 9am Wednesday, which would explain the slight difference in the death rate.

Scotland only announced two deaths yesterday, while Wales confirmed just one. Both countries have now had 22 coronavirus victims.

Northern Ireland this afternoon announced two more fatalities as well as two last night, taking their total to seven deaths.

The true size of the outbreak is being hidden because of the Government's controversial decision to only test patients in hospital. The true size of the outbreak is likely to be closer to the 400,000 mark.

Despite clear government guidance members of the public are continuing to the rules by heading out to sunbathe on the second day of the coronavirus lockdown.

Footage has emerged showing police dispersing Britons gathering in parks and other public places, with people gathering despite strict advice to stay at home yo avoid the outbreak overwhelming the NHS.

In Shepherd's Bush in West London, people soaked up the sun, seemingly oblivious to the tight restrictions imposed by the government on Monday. Police were seen telling the sun worshipers to leave and go home.

Others were seen enjoying the weather at Battersea Park in South West London, on the beach in Portsmouth and in the sea off Eastbourne today despite the Prime Minister urging people to stay at home.

Meanwhile in Manchester, officers today dispersed groups, some of which greeted each other with a hug, along with sunbathers in Piccadilly Gardens. Police also used megaphones to tell people to stay at home unless absolutely necessary, saying 'this is serious, we need to beat corona.'

It comes as:

The Prince of Wales has tested positive for coronavirus but is only displaying mild symptoms, Clarence House announced.

The Foreign Office announced that Steven Dick, 37, the deputy head of mission at the British Embassy in Budapest, had died after contracting coronavirus.

NHS England's medical director said hundreds of thousands of tests for Covid-19 per day could become a reality within weeks.

Boris Johnson urged London Mayor Sadiq Khan to 'get more Tubes on the line' but resisted calls to ban non-essential construction workers from heading to building sites.

Parliament is set to adjourn for an early Easter break after emergency legislation to tackle Covid-19 is approved.

The Prime Minister confirmed that ministers are considering asking black taxi drivers to act as a transport service for NHS workers.

Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London , yesterday told MPs that he is confident the health service will remain 'within capacity'.

Professor James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, University of Oxford, said: 'Every one of the deaths is, for the families and friends, a tragedy. That the number of deaths is less than yesterday is a relief.

'However, just as the headlines of death toll 'worse than Italy' were misguided and based on over-interpretation of a single day, a lower number today on its own is not a reliable guide. The Government's measures will take time both to have their effect and to be confirmed as working.

'I would urge people neither to panic nor celebrate on the basis of the numbers on any single day, rather we all need to focus on social distancing and kindness. We have the best epidemiologists in the world, only their complex mathematical analysis of the data can tell us what is happening.

'No-one has ever claimed that the virus would leave apparently healthy younger people completely untouched, the sad death of the 47-year-old confirms what the Chinese data had told us - no-one is entirely safe. We must all follow the Government advice on social distancing, not just for the benefit of the vulnerable but for all our sakes.'

In Westminster, the Prime Minister insisted the Government is 'working as fast as we possibly can' on a package of support to help the self-employed despite 'particular complexities' amid growing political pressure.

It comes after an expert government adviser said NHS hospitals are expected to just about cope with the thousands of coronavirus patients, even at the peak of the outbreak, according to an expert government adviser.

Despite fears over a lack of intensive care beds and staff going off sick, Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, yesterday told MPs that he is confident the health service will remain 'within capacity'.

That is because of the current lockdown, which could also mean the worst of the outbreak in intensive care units is likely to be over in two-and-a-half to three weeks' time.

Deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries agreed yesterday that the peak of the virus could be finished by Easter.

Earlier this month Professor Ferguson, a key member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), produced a report suggesting more than 20,000 people might die from coronavirus.

But yesterday he told the Commons science and technology committee the death toll could be 'substantially lower than that'.

In even more hopeful news, Andrew Pollard, professor of paediatric infection and immunity at the University of Oxford, who was also called before the committee, said a vaccine could potentially be available within six months.

Last week, the Government announced an unprecedented plan to underwrite the wages of millions of workers who face being laid off as activity dries up - but it has been criticised for doing nothing for the country's five million freelancers, contractors and other self-employed workers.

People enjoy the sun in Battersea Park in South West London while the UK is in a coronavirus lockdown

On Monday the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson addressed the nation and told Britain's 66million people they must stay at home unless they are front-line workers, need to shop infrequently to buy food or medicine or are helping a vulnerable person.

He also said one form of exercise was permitted each day, such as dog-walking - but not sunbathing or merely sitting outside.

Mr Johnson ordered the immediate closure of all non-essential shops and threatened people with fines or even arrest if they did not 'stay at home'.

The Prime Minister's shutdown will last for a minimum of three weeks and the UK's new state of emergency is unprecedented in modern history.

Gatherings of more than two people are banned in the most dramatic curbs on freedom ever seen in Britain in time of peace or war, as the government goes all out to stop the spread of the killer disease.

The footage showing brazen sunbathers comes as families who have lost loved ones after testing positive for coronavirus have appealed on social media for people to stay inside as the outbreak tightens its grip across the UK.

Twitter user, @mollyacejay, paid tribute to her grandmother on Tuesday and urged members of the public to stay indoors.

'please please please stay indoors. I will forever be grateful for the love my grandma had for all of us, for the kindness she showed. we sadly lost her to covid19 earlier today. please stay inside,' she wrote.

Underneath her Tweet @mollyacejay retweeted a message her grandmother had sent her earlier in the year.

'my grandma crocheted a pride blanket for me after I finally spoke to her about being gay at christmas. lucky, blessed, loved.'

The UK's coronavirus death toll stood at 437 on Wednesday with more than 8,200 cases.

Mark Foran took to Twitter to pay tribute to his dad who was one of those who died yesterday.

'After suffering a brain hemorrhage back in November and being in hospital ever since fighting to survive, our Dad got diagnosed with Covid-19 last week and he sadly passed away today. Rest In Peace Dad x'

The humanitarian cost of the pandemic continues to mount globally as more than 415,000 people have been infected with the deadly disease, and more than 18,000 have been killed.

Meanwhile Prince Charles has tested positive for coronavirus and is self-isolating at his home on the Balmoral estate, it was revealed today.

The Prince of Wales, 71, has a 'mild' form of the illness and is with his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, who has tested negative and is without any symptoms of the virus, which has killed 435 and infected 8,000 more in the UK so far.

A royal source said Charles' doctor's most conservative estimate was that the prince was contagious on March 13 - 24 hours after 'briefly' meeting his 93-year-old mother the Queen.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman has said: 'Her Majesty remains in good health. The Queen is following all the appropriate advice with regard to her welfare'.

Shoppers have also been pictured squeezing together at supermarkets Wednesday morning, ignoring social distancing rules and raising fears that stores could become the new superspreaders of coronavirus.

Under government guidelines, people are supposed to stay 6ft apart from others if they have to go outside, but shoppers at several supermarkets all over the UK this morning have been flouting the rules while stocking up on essentials.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday ordered Brits to stay at home to halt the spread of the virus, imposing curbs on everyday life without precedent in peacetime.

However, people are still allowed to leave their homes to shop for basic necessities, leading to supermarkets being flooded with customers and fears that they will become hotbeds of the virus.

Several major chains are now introducing new measures to try and enforce social distancing and protect staff.

Morrisons, Lidl, Aldi, Iceland and Sainsbury's have brought in protective screens for staff, and Waitrose - which is introducing 'two-metre marshalls' who will manage queues outside shops - has ordered screens and visors for its workers.

Waitrose calls its policies 'a set of strong, new measures' to help its customers shop safely.

The company said the number of customers allowed in at any one time will be limited so that social distancing can be observed, and a 'one in, one out' policy will be operated when it is judged that the shop is at capacity.

Customers coming to Waitrose will see marshals who will help to manage queues outside shops and if necessary remind people to respect the two-metre social distancing rule.

Waitrose will also dedicate the first opening hour to elderly and vulnerable customers and those caring for them, while NHS staff will continue to be given priority checkout service.

There will also be 'safe distance' floor signage, protective screens at checkouts, and additional security.

Morrisons, which has already put up perspex screens, is introducing signage in stores to support social distancing, including floor stickers, posters and banners which will ask customers to keep one trolley distance apart, as well as giving guidance on where to wait and where to queue.

Asda has also announced similar measures, saying it will introduce floor markers and directional barriers to help customers keep their distance, and will install perspex screens at its checkouts.

Hand sanitiser will be available for customers to use when entering and departing.

A number of self-service machine will also be shut in order to enforce the two-metre rule, a spokesperson told MailOnline.

Sainsbury's said it is 'working through the detail' but expects to restrict the number of people allowed in stores at any one time, and will also be introducing barriers outside to ensure people queue at a safe distance when waiting to get in.

The supermarket said it will also have reminders to keep two metres apart displayed throughout stores, screens at manned checkouts, and will close every other payment point to help keep people apart.

On Tuesday afternoon, Marks & Spencer said its 31 outlet stores selling only clothing and homeware will be temporarily closed.

M&S said when customers arrive at its food stores, they will see a 'greeter' who will ensure the number of customers in the store at any one time is managed.

Lombardy, Italy, replaced Wuhan in China, as the most badly impacted region in the world, with authorities in the European country announcing that 743 more people had died in the country on Tuesday, bringing the total dead to 6,820.

Italian authorities believe some of the restrictive measures taken may be beginning to have an impact after officially registered new infections rose by just eight percent, the same percentage increase as Monday- the lowest level since Italy registered its first death on February 21.

The trajectory of the rapidly spreading virus shows that Madrid and London could become the next hotspots of the disease, with deaths now doubling every two days in the respective capital cities.

In the UK, 87 more patients died overnight in England, including 21 at the one NHS trust in London. The UK's death toll has risen almost six-fold in the space of a week, with just 71 fatalities recorded last Tuesday.

And in Spain the armed forces asked NATO for humanitarian assistance to fight the novel coronavirus as the national death toll touched 2,700 and infections soared towards 40,000.

The Madrid region has suffered the brunt of the epidemic with 12,352 infections - just under a third of the total - and 1,535 deaths, or 57 percent of the national figure.

Outside of Europe, in the United States, the death toll has risen quite slowly compared to other nations so far, but the trajectory for New York's mortality curve is much steeper, suggesting it could overtake Madrid.

More than 12,000 people have tested positive in the city and 125 have died. A state-wide lockdown took effect on Sunday night.
Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman told his employees that despite the upheaval caused by the coronavirus pandemic, their jobs will be secure through this year.

"I am sure some, if not many, of you are worried about your jobs," Gorman said Thursday in a staff memo.

"While long term we can't be sure how this will play out, we want to commit to you that there will not be a reduction in force at Morgan Stanley in 2020," Gorman said. "Aside from a performance issue or a breach of the Code of Conduct, your jobs are secure."

Morgan Stanley, a top player in wealth management, investment banking and equities trading, had 60,431 employees at year-end. Citigroup, a far bigger employer with more than 200,000 workers, will at least temporarily refrain from layoffs as CEO Mike Corbat doesn't want to impose hardship on his staff, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

While Morgan Stanley's move is sure to calm frayed nerves on Wall Street, the bank had just completed a reduction in force of about 2% of its staff late last year, as CNBC first reported. The job cuts at the time, part of an annual cull typical of Wall Street's cost-cutting moves in recent years, focused on technology and operations personnel.

"At the end of this year, we will know what we are dealing with, and hopefully the economy will be on the mend by then," Gorman added.

About 90% of the bank's employees were working from home to reduce the spread of the coronvirus, according to Gorman.

The CEO also praised the actions of governments around the world to combat the job losses and economic impact of the pandemic.

"Governments across the world are putting aside their politics to arrive at blockbuster support and stimulus packages," he said. "Way too many people have lost their jobs overnight, and it is essential for governments to act as aggressively as they can. Now governments are focused on the surge in unemployment and putting in place significant measures in support of consumers, small businesses and corporations."
Boeing will suspend operations at its Seattle area facilities due to the spread of coronavirus, idling tens of thousands of aerospace workers, the company said Monday.

At least 110 people have died from COVID-19 in Washington state, mostly in the Seattle area. Boeing employs about 70,000 people in the region. The company said 32 employees have tested positive for the virus, including 25 in the greater Seattle area.

Operations would be reduced beginning Wednesday, Boeing President and CEO Dave Calhoun said in a statement, and production would be suspended for two weeks.

This necessary step protects our employees and the communities where they work and live, he said.

Production is continuing at a Boeing plant in South Carolina where Boeing 787 jetliners are assembled.

The company said employees in greater Seattle who can work from home will continue doing so and those who cant  like the tens of thousands of machinists who build airplanes  will receive paid leave.

We will keep our employees, customers and supply chain top of mind as we continue to assess the evolving situation, Calhoun said. This is an unprecedented time for organizations and communities across the globe.

Boeings shutdown comes after a worker died of COVID-19. The Seattle Times reports that co-workers and a union official confirmed Sundays death of the man who worked in Everett. The newspaper said the man was an inspector who had worked for Boeing for 27 years.

The machinists union said it supported the decision to suspend production, according to a message on its website. Boeing said it was still trying to confirm the employees death.

Boeing operates two commercial aviation production facilities in the Seattle area, one in Everett and another in Renton. Its Everett facility, north of Seattle, is the largest building in the world and produces airplanes like the 777s, 787s, 767s and 747s- along with the KC-46A military refueling and transport plane. About 30,000 people work there.

Its plant in Renton, south of Seattle, produces the 737 line and military P-8s. About 12,000 work there.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee applauded Boeings decision. Now is a time for bold actions like these, he said in a statement.

Boeing shares rallied Monday, however, gaining 11.2% to $105.62. Goldman Sachs had upgraded the shares to buy from neutral. Analyst Noah Poponak said the shares have hit a trough after a one-year drop of about 80%, making them attractive to investors.

Poponak thinks Boeing has enough liquidity to get through a lean 2020, and the long-term outlook for the industry remains good. We think travel by flight will be as popular as ever once COVID-19 is resolved, he said in a note to investors.

The virus has added to Boeings crisis surrounding the 737 Max, which remains grounded more than a year after two deadly crashes. The outbreak has caused airlines to cancel tens of thousands of flights. Analysts expect cash-strapped airlines to defer deliveries of new planes through 2020 and possibly longer.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics COVID-19 Aviation Aerospace
Maritime security of Ukraine has detected a craft of an aggressor country at the Odesa gas field

A Russian guided-missile boat has invaded Ukraine's exclusive offshore zone at the Odesa gas field. The press service of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine reported it.

Thus, during patrol, the Ukrainian Maritime Guard, with the support of border aviation, surveyed areas of gas condensate fields and found captured self-lifting floating drilling rigs "Ukraine" (renamed the "Crimea-1") and "Tavrida". Flags of the aggressor country are raised on the drilling rigs.

As it was approaching the field for five nautical miles, Navy watchdog identified patrol boat of Black Sea Fleet nearby.

As we reported earlier, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba believes that Russia tries to manipulate the COVID-19 pandemic in order to get sanctions against it lifted on.

This is manipulation because the EU has imposed sanctions not because of a coronavirus, but because of Russia's aggression against Ukraine. Accordingly, they can only be related to Russia's fulfillment of its obligations in the context of the peaceful settlement and de-occupation of the Ukrainian territories of Donbas and Crimea, Kuleba stated during his conversation with his Danish counterpart Jeppe Kofod.
Supermarket workers have offered a glimpse into the incredible pressure they're under as Australians struggle to make ends meet after losing their jobs during the coronavirus crisis.

Exhausted staff at Woolworths, Coles, Aldi and IGA are struggling to keep up with the high demand as shoppers continue to strip shelves bare - and some frustrated customers are lashing out at workers.

All four major outlets have imposed strict rationing measures on products such as toilet paper, pasta, rice and meats to curb panic buying.

Supermarket workers have offered a glimpse into their hectic schedules as they struggle to keep up with the soaring demand for essential items (pictured - Woolworths store in Melbourne)

One Woolworths employee told Daily Mail Australia she spends her shifts putting 17 trolleys full of essentials back on shelves after staff were forced to confiscate them from customers who tried to buy more than the imposed limit

How supermarkets are keeping the working environment safe A Woolworths employee told Daily Mail Australia she has seen a number of drastic measures enforced at her local store which are helping to keep the working environment safe. 'There is certainly social distancing at checkouts. So every second register is closed at the moment including self serve,' she said. 'We have gloves supplied to us, hand sanitiser as well. However it's currently a personal preference to wear gloves or not.' She noted there were cleaners coming in to wipe down registers, screens and eftpos pinpads who walk around every 20 minutes to do their job. Advertisement

One Woolworths service team member said her day-to-day role has consisted of constantly restocking shelves and having to put up with 'fed-up, cranky and upset customers'.

'I've been feeling a rush of emotions throughout the day. Happy, sad, angry and grateful. Being praised for the work we are doing which soon gets kicked down after someone yells at us over the limits,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'We're physically getting abused over toilet paper. One customer threw it at me after I told him he could only have one.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Woolworths for comment.

She said she spends her shifts putting 17 shopping trolleys worth of essential items back onto shelves after staff were forced to confiscate them from customers who tried to buy more than the imposed limit.

'People wonder why the shelves are always empty. Instead of putting new stock on show, we are spending our time and resources putting back the stock which are taken off customers,' she said.

'We constantly get yelled at and abused for just doing our jobs. We don't make the rules, we can only enforce them.

'Our groceries and night-fill teams are working around the clock to fill all shelves to ensure customers have access to products but if the delivery doesn't come until 1am there's really not much we can do.'

She said the worst part about her job is missing out on purchasing essential items at the end of her shifts - as she urged shoppers to only buy what they need.

We constantly get yelled at and abused for just doing our jobs. We don't make the rules, we can only enforce them - a Woolworths employee

'The workers are the ones who miss out. We are so busy all day that we don't even get the items our families need as we aren't allowed to leave our post and run when the toilet paper comes in,' she said.

'We always miss out. For customers, it's a luck of the draw. For staff it's always a guaranteed no by the time we finish our shift.

'Please only take what you are allowed to have so we can focus on putting other items like toilet paper and tissues on the shelves. Before you say "put more staff on", it doesn't work that way. We are at full capacity with team members every single day.'

Shoppers have been sharing confronting pictures showing empty shelves at their local supermarket stores after panic buyers stripped shelves bare in recent weeks

Employees have been busier than ever with the increased workload to ensure shoppers get their essential items, including Australia's the elderly and the vulnerable

One Woolworths employee said she has been stocking old items back on shelves after staff were forced to take them off shoppers who tried to hoard more items than the limit

Another Woolworths employee told Daily Mail Australia his shifts have been busier than ever with the increased workload - as his Sydney store struggles to keep up with soaring demand.

'Our stock levels have increased so every shift is crazier than usual but we've been adequately resourced,' he said.

'Advice to everyone panic buying, please stop. We're doing 12-hour days because people think they need to stock up, you do not need to stock up, supermarkets will still be open even if a lockdown occurs - an Aldi warehouse worker

The worker, who spends most of his shifts stocking shelves, said his store has had to hold back on stock just so they have enough essential items for other customers to buy over the following days.

'A lot of customers complain about the lack of stock, and our managers have to decide to keep some stock from going on shelves so they have something available for when the store opens the next day,' he said.

One Aldi employee - who has been working 12-hour shifts in the company's warehouse on the Gold Coast - desperately urged shoppers to 'stop panic buying'.

'Advice to everyone panic buying, please stop. We're doing 12-hour days because people think they need to stock up, you do not need to stock up, supermarkets will still be open even if a lockdown occurs,' he said.

'If everyone just shopped how they have been before the coronavirus, then you will find it easier to go about your day without the panic. Kind regards, the team at Aldi.'

Meanwhile, two Woolworths employees shared a video on TikTok revealing how they have been bombarded with questions on whether their store is hiring

One young woman has turned to Centrelink for employment benefits after she lost her job as a cruise ship dancer. When lodging a claim online, she was asked 'how much cash on hand do you have?' to which she responded $7 - as she shared a video of her struggles on TikTok

Meanwhile, two Woolworths employees shared a video on TikTok revealing how they have been bombarded with questions on whether their store is hiring.

Many who have lost their jobs have asked questions like: 'Is your work hiring?', 'can you put in a good word for me at your work?' and 'is there any positions available in night fill? I'm desperate'.

We're physically getting abused over toilet paper. One customer threw it at me after I told him he could only have one - a Woolworths worker

Tens of thousands of Australians were laid off earlier this week after dine-in restaurants and cafes, gyms and pubs were forced to shut indefinitely under the government's tough restrictions to slow down the spread of COVID-19.

One young woman has turned to Centrelink for employment benefits after she lost her job as a cruise ship dancer.

Australia has reached 3,573 positive coronavirus cases, with 13 deaths, on Friday morning

When lodging a claim online, she was asked 'how much cash on hand do you have?' to which she responded $7 - as she shared a video of her struggles on TikTok.

A physiotherapist told Daily Mail Australia she had lost her job and was was feeling 'really s**t' about receiving government assistance for the first time in her life.

'I'm just trying to get any money I can really. I worked at a physiotherapist as practice manager and in client rehabilitation, I'd been there for seven years but my work wasn't considered essential so I've now lost my job,' she said on Monday.

'It's the first time in my life I can't get a job anywhere - even with qualifications. I've got my own place too so I'm going to have to call the banks, I've got no way to pay at the minute.'
Indias use of religion as a basis of admission is regressive compared to the tried and tested regimes in the developed world that moved away from a social sorting logic towards an economic and human capital-based approach.

Determining who is a citizen requires determining who is not a citizen. This simple truism underlies the discourse that India has been propelled into having with the CAA and NRC. The exclusionary tendencies enshrined in these are not unique.

Citizenship, migration, and asylum policies in countries in the developed world (Canada, UK, US etc.) govern population movements at their borders and protect their sovereignty. But citizenship is not only about exclusion, but it is also about articulating policies on inclusion, integration, and tolerance, which can be a complex and imperfect process.

The experiences of traditional immigrant-receiving countries provide a useful starting point to discuss the terms of exclusion and inclusion for Indian citizenship. Despite the violence and contestation in India around the implementation of the CAA and NRC, this critical juncture offers a chance to imagine the possibility for more inclusive terms of belonging in India.

There are no easy comparisons of the trajectories of citizenship among former imperial states such as the UK, settler-colonial states such as Canada and Australia, and postcolonial nations such as India. Each of these countries bears their unique imprint and legacy of violence and colonisation.

For instance, countries like Canada, the United States, and Australia are created on indigenous land and their very existence and citizenship is a violation of indigenous rights. In fact, indigenous groups often cite the ways in which newer migrant groups are complicit in ongoing processes of colonization because of their limited acknowledgement of indigenous exploitation and land disputes.

Historically, citizenship policies across Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand enshrined colonial relations by restricting the rights and entitlements of non-white persons, particularly from former colonies. They introduced measures such as the 1885 Chinese Immigration Act and 1908 Continuous Journey Act in Canada and the White Australia Policy (formally Immigration Restriction Act of 1901).

These measures served to categorically restrict the admission, settlement, and family reunification of non-white persons. For example, in Canada, the 1885 Chinese Immigration Act in Canada applied a head tax, a fixed fee to each Chinese person entering Canada.

Similarly, the Single Continuous Journey regulation prohibited the landing of any immigrant who did not arrive on a continuous journey. This regulation targeted many Indian labourers who often had to stop in Japan before heading to Canada. In addition to higher fees and impossible requirements, early Chinese and Indian labourers to Canada were not permitted to bring their families in order to eliminate any chances of permanent settlement.

Over time, these traditional immigration-receiving countries have removed explicit discrimination and preferential treatment based on social identity factors (race, gender, religion, etc.) from their citizenship laws in recognition of economic and societal needs. For example, Canada and Australia introduced a points system to select newcomers based on careful consideration of migrant contributions to economy, society, and politics.

This system favoured skilled persons wherein, skill served as a proxy for educational and work experience. Existing familial, kinship and community relations were also considered in different classes of migration, such as the Family Class in Canada and allowed for migrants to sponsor dependents. While these policies continue to be critiqued for systemically excluding poorer racialised minorities, they have evolved in response to these concerns and incorporated inclusive measures.

In contrast to the above countries, India does not have a comprehensive and integrative framework for migration, refugee determination and citizenship. The 1955 Citizenship Act employed years of residency to determine eligibility for naturalisation.

Despite further amendments, including the 1985 Assam Accord and the 2003 CAA, which added notions of illegality and recommendations for the NRC, India maintained largely porous borders. India is also host to one of the largest refugee populations in South Asia. Currently, it accords rights to migrants and refugees largely on an ad-hoc basis.

For example, Tibetan and Sri Lankan refugees were accorded documentation and access to some government support. But the same treatment was not extended to the Bangladeshi refugees and more recently Rohingya refugees were turned back. At a fundamental level, the 2019 CAA and announcements to rollout an NRC can be seen as an attempt to formalise the citizenship process for migrants in India, which historically has been informal and therefore unpredictable.

In principle, the 2019 CAA does not question the citizenship of Muslims already residing in India. It is intended to create pathways to citizenship for persons fleeing religious persecution from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. However, it is the use of religion as a basis for exclusion that is highly contentious and has raised suspicions about the Indian state's desire to be less accessible to Muslims.

Indias use of religion as a basis of admission is regressive compared to the tried and tested regimes in the developed world that moved away from a social sorting logic towards an economic and human capital-based approach. Moreover, the idea of selection articulated in the CAA is only one part of what can become Indias vision.

An integrated framework of citizenship is incomplete without an articulation of the rights, responsibilities, and entitlements of incoming migrants as well as policies to successfully integrate them into the host society while ensuring that one group, culture, or religion does not dominate.

Exclusionary tendencies must be developed alongside inclusionary measures with the aim of negotiating a legal, economic, social, and cultural contract between migrants and citizens. In addition to points systems, border walls, and a gamut of visas, Western democracies have introduced their unique renditions of multiculturalism and integration policies to achieve this goal.

A prime example is multiculturalism in Canada, which was introduced in 1971 with the intention to manage French nationalism in Quebec and increase Canadas cultural diversity. In the 1980s and 1990s multiculturalism removed European preference systems and introduced human-capital based immigration policies, which describe, prescribe, and enforce the coexistence of different cultures, traditions, and practices.

Multiculturalism articulates a social contract, which recognises the integration of new citizens is a two-way street. Just as immigrant citizens are expected to make a commitment to their new society and to learn about its language, history, and institutions, so too the larger society must express a commitment to its immigrant citizens and adapt its institutions to accommodate their identities and practices.

Concurrently, multiculturalism entails policy measures such as cultural diversity training for police and health care professionals, government funding of ethnic cultural festivals, and ethnic studies programs among others.

Despite its ability to bring discussions of cultural tolerance and diversity in the mainstream, multiculturalism has been critiqued for remaining at a symbolic level and not challenging forms of structural racism and discrimination. Moreover, multiculturalism policy has been perceived as prioritising group rights and fueling ghettoisation of ethnic groups and disintegration of the nation.

This sentiment has been mobilised by a growing number of populist parties to support acts of white supremacist violence or far-right terrorism in several countries in the developed world (e.g. shootings in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, El Paso Walmart, and a synagogue and shisha bars in Germany in 2019). Britains public divorce with the EU (Brexit) rehearsed these same arguments of gaining control over borders and protecting against the threat and costs of foreigners.

The argument here is not for India to reproduce western multiculturalism but rather, use the current tension and existing constitutional principles such as secularism to facilitate greater dialogue around fairer naturalisation policies and develop an Indian notion of inclusive citizenship. While implementing modes of detection and selection such as CAA and NRC, the Indian government and people must grapple with some difficult questions: what is the vision of Indian society and culture that migrants/newcomers are expected to integrate to? Which economic, social, and political compromises are Indians willing to make to facilitate the integration of newcomers? What are the economic, social, and civic expectations of the host society from newcomers? As India grapples with the idea of citizenship, these conversations, which remain to be had, capture the tensions inherent in determining a larger cultural contract between migrants and citizens.

Nagpal is an assistant professor in the School of International Affairs at OP Jindal Global University, and Hari, an associate professor at Carleton University, Canada.
Photo: Contributed

As I write this, we have just finished a special, all-night session of Parliament, passing Bill C-13  An Act respecting certain measures in response to COVID-19.



Despite some initial challenges and delays, it was reassuring to see that we were able to reach consensus.



As much as I would like to share the contents of this bill with you, it is far more important to share the program that was announced today enabled by the passing of measures in C-13.



This program is the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).



Last week, the Prime Minister announced two COVID-19 Employment Insurance (EI)-like programs:

The Emergency Care Benefit

The Emergency Support Benefit.

The fact that there were two programs was complicated and also required more administration.



It also became evident that, despite the best intentions of these programs to help people most in need, they were creating many gaps that would result in Canadians not getting the help they needed, at a critical time.



As a result, these programs have now been rolled into a single Canada Emergency Response Benefit program (CERB) that has significantly increased criteria to help eliminate the gaps from the previously announced programs.



CERB is a taxable benefit that can provide $2,000 a month, for up to four months, to workers who lose their income as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.



CERB is intended to cover citizens who have:

lost their job, are sick, quarantined, or taking care of someone who is sick with COVID-19, as well as working parents who must stay home without pay to care for children who are sick or at home because of school and daycare closures.



This program applies to wage earners, as well as contract workers and self-employed individuals who would not otherwise be eligible for Employment Insurance (EI).



CERB will also apply to:

workers who are still employed, but are not receiving income because of disruptions to their work situation due to COVID-19.



The details of exactly how that will work in practice are as yet undefined.



Once the online application portal is open through a "My CRA" or "My Service CANADA" account, and a yet to determined toll free number, the intent is that eligible applicants would begin to receive their CERB payments within 10 days of application.



A CERB payment would be made to applicants every four weeks.



My thoughts on this?



I commend the federal government for recognizing the programs they announced last week were not the response that Canadians needed and for coming back with a simplified, comprehensive and, I hope, an effective solution.



However, the greatest challenge that remains is the capacity of government to deliver this program to Canadians most in need, in a timely manner.



As many will know, close to one million Canadians have applied for EI benefits  most applying due to layoffs.



This is the largest week of unemployment in Canadian history.



As of Monday, 143,000 of these EI claims have been processed, also the most ever in a single week.



The challenge is, at that current pace, it will be close to six weeks before all the current claims can be processed.



This does also not take into account the increasing layoffs that are occurring daily.



As the Official Opposition, we are continuing to raise the need to increase capacity to deliver these much-needed services and also to raise concerns if there are those who are still falling through the cracks.



My question this week:
David Rockwell is first. He elected to look at Broadways hibernating theaters.

Winner of a Tony, an Emmy and a James Beard Award, he founded the New York-based Rockwell Group, which designed over 70 productions on and Off Broadway, as well as hotels, restaurants and other institutions around the world.

On a cool, sunny Sunday, we met outside the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street. The conversation has been edited.

[Broadway is shuttered, but its buildings sing: Take a virtual tour.]

The theater is closed. What do you have in mind?

Entrances are important with all architecture, of course, but on Broadway its where a lot of things are set in motion, drama-wise. A good example is the New Amsterdam, built in 1903. In 1913 it took off as the home of the Ziegfeld Follies, with a risque nightclub on the roof.

The New Amsterdam has this teeny entrance onto the street. A person has no idea theres a massive theater behind here.

Now weve walked back west to the heart of Broadway.

Were now standing on 44th Street in front of the Shubert Theater, which shares its facade with the Booth to the north along Shubert Alley.

The two theaters were conceived together. They use a wonderful kind of Venetian rustication framing deeply carved details made with layers of colored cement called sgraffito.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 07:53:14|Editor: huaxia

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Medical workers arrive at an airport in Yinchuan, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, March 25, 2020. A total of 323 medical workers returned from Hubei to Yinchuan on Wednesday. A total of 785 medical workers of 6 batches have gone to Hubei to aid the novel coronavirus control efforts there since the outbreak of the epidemic. (Xinhua/Feng Kaihua)
The United States on Thursday took the grim title of the country with the most coronavirus infections and reported a record surge in unemployment as world leaders vowed $5 trillion to stave off global economic collapse. More than 500,000 people around the world have now contracted the new coronavirus, overwhelming healthcare systems even in wealthy nations and triggering an avalanche of government-ordered lockdowns that have disrupted life for billions. In the United States, more than 83,000 people have tested positive for COVID-19, edging out Italy, which has reported the most deaths, and China, where the virus was first detected in December in the metropolis of Wuhan. The US has recorded 1,178 deaths, while the global death toll stood at 23,293. "We are waging war on this virus using every financial, scientific, medical, pharmaceutical and military resource, to halt its spread and protect our citizens," US President Donald Trump said. With about 40 percent of Americans under lockdown orders, Trump urged citizens to do their part by practicing social distancing: "Stay home. Just relax, stay home." With fears mounting of a global recession if not depression, leaders from the Group of 20 major economies held crisis talks by video link Thursday, pledging a "united front" to fight the outbreak -- along with an enormous financial injection. "The virus respects no borders," the leaders said in a statement. "We are injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy, as part of targeted fiscal policy, economic measures, and guarantee schemes to counteract the social, economic and financial impacts of the pandemic." They also pledged "robust" support for developing nations, where coronavirus could next take hold after ravaging China and then Europe. But the unity pledged by the G20 has been in short supply, with China and the United States trading barbs over their handling of the coronavirus crisis. And Italy as well as Spain, which has the second-highest death toll, objected to a draft economic plan by the European Union which they saw as too weak. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte wants a "strong and sufficient" financial response that deploys "innovative financial instruments truly adapted to a war," his office said. - Record one-day toll in France - Alarmed by the rapid spread of the sickness in Italy, France has taken aggressive action to stem the virus and went under lockdown on March 17. But the 365 deaths reported Thursday was its highest in a one-day period and, alarmingly, included a 16-year-old girl -- a rare case of a young person succumbing to a virus that has devastated the elderly. "It is very difficult to estimate when the peak will come," French health official Jerome Salomon said. "People who are ill now were infected before the confinement began." "Now there is less contact, people are going out less and get infected less. So we hope there will be fewer people getting sick next week and fewer people going to hospital," he told reporters. With hospitals under severe strain, medical workers in Italy and Spain are making painstaking choices. "If I've got five patients and only one bed, I have to choose who gets it," Sara Chinchilla, a pediatrician at a hospital near Madrid, told AFP. "People are dying who could be saved but there's no space in intensive care." In Britain, the National Health Service said London's hospitals are facing a "continuous tsunami" of seriously ill COVID-19 patients, despite a lockdown imposed this week. And in New York, the virus hotbed in the United States, authorities hope to stem infections as the city struggles to more than double the number of available hospital beds. "Almost any scenario that is realistic will overwhelm the capacity of the current healthcare system," Governor Andrew Cuomo warned. First responders in New York were receiving more than 6,000 calls to the 911 emergency line a day, many from people seeking virus testing. It is "breaking records. We didn't have this many calls on 9/11," said Anthony Almojeria, a leader in the emergency medical services union, referring to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. - Economic devastation - The pandemic has already, and rapidly, been catastrophic to the global economy. In the United States, the world's largest economy, the Labor Department reported that 3.3 million people applied for unemployment benefits last week -- by far the highest number ever recorded. Job losses have swept across sectors from food services to retail to transportation, as nearly half of the country has closed to "non-essential" businesses. "It is staggering. We are only seeing the initial numbers; they will get worse, unfortunately," New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters, estimating that half a million people in the city would lose work. But Wall Street soared for a third straight day, recouping more of this month's hefty losses, on expectations for the largest stimulus in US history. The Senate early Thursday unanimously passed a $2 trillion package that will provide cash payouts averaging $3,400 for a family of four. Speaker Nancy Pelosi voiced confidence that the House of Representatives would follow suit on Friday. - Glimmer of hope - The global lockdown -- which also hemmed in India's huge population this week -- tightened further on Thursday as Russia announced it was grounding all international flights, while Moscow's mayor ordered the closure of cafes, shops and parks. Tokyo's millions of citizens have been told to stay home, too, just days after the city was forced to postpone the 2020 Olympic Games for a year. China said it was barring entry to most foreigners, fearing that imported cases were undermining its success in bringing domestic transmissions way down. And South Africa came under a nationwide military-patrolled lockdown as its cases climbed to more than 900 -- about a third of Africa's 3,200 cases. The impact of the virus has stretched well beyond frontline health workers, with billions trapped in their homes and facing what experts say could be lasting psychological harm. But offering a glimmer of hope, both Italy and Spain have seen lower daily rates of new infections this week. The World Health Organization called Italy's numbers "encouraging signs," but warned it was "still too early to say whether the pandemic is peaking." A study from Britain's Imperial College provided a grim prediction, saying 1.8 million people could die worldwide this year even with swift action to halt the virus. burs-acb/ch
EU leaders on Thursday gave eurozone finance ministers a fortnight to come up with a stronger response to the economic havoc wrought by the coronavirus pandemic. During six hours of fraught summit haggling by video conference, the 27 leaders struggled to agree a unified response to the COVID-19 crisis. Nine countries, including hardest-hit Italy and Spain, had pleaded in a letter ahead of the summit for "corona bonds", pooled borrowing to cushion the economic blow of the virus, which has sent economies into hibernation and markets into chaotic flux. But the call was given short shrift by wealthy northern countries and instead a summit declaration tasked the Eurogroup of single currency zone finance ministers with coming up with options within two weeks. "These proposals should take into account the unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 shock affecting all our countries and our response will be stepped up, as necessary, with further action in an inclusive way, in light of developments, in order to deliver a comprehensive response," the summit statement said. - 'Adapted to a war' - The talks dragged on as Madrid and Rome blocked the statement, holding out for a stronger response. According to Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte's office, the Italian leader wanted a "strong and sufficient" financial response that would deploy "innovative financial instruments truly adapted to a war". And Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez warned: "If we do not propose a unified, powerful and effective response to this economic crisis now, not only will the impact be harder, but its effects will last longer and we will be jeopardising the whole European project. "We cannot make the same mistakes of the 2008 financial crisis, which sowed seeds of disaffection and division with the European project and caused the rise of populism. We must learn that lesson," he said, in a statement that recalled "the need to work on a common debt instrument issued by a European institution to raise funds on the market." But northern countries led by Germany and the Netherlands were against what they see as efforts by their southern neighbours to push their long-standing demands for eurozone members to pool public debt. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that support for corona bonds was not shared by all member states, while Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte gave a more blunt assessment. "We are against it, but it's not just us, and I cannot forsee any circumstances in which we would change that position," Rutte said. Rutte and Merkel both pointed to existing crisis tools such as the European Stability Mechanism as more suitable to the task. At a videoconference last week, Conte suggested the creation of corona bonds to pool the debt of the 19 countries in the eurozone. France, Spain and Italy have long called for some kind of eurobond that would in effect allow joint borrowing by the 19 members of the euro single currency. They say it could serve as the bedrock of a safer and more unified European economy and would become a globally respected asset on par with US Treasury bills. But sceptics see the eurobond as an attempt by over-spending southerners to take advantage of the cheap borrowing rates enjoyed by Germany and other paragons of balanced budgets. - 'There for each other' - Meanwhile, many millions of the bloc's citizens are holed up at home, during lockdowns imposed to help slow the pandemic that has killed more than 15,000 Europeans and crippled business. As the global outbreak first took hold, member states privileged national responses by shutting borders, hoarding medical supplies and waving through major spending plans regardless of EU rules. "When Europe really needed to be there for each other, too many initially looked out for themselves," European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said ahead of the talks. "When Europe really needed an 'all for one' spirit, too many initially gave an 'only for me' response," she added, speaking at a sparsely attended session of the European Parliament. The summit statement said measures should include building an emergency stock of medical equipment and easing inter-EU border closures. The leaders also rubber stamped the suspension of EU deficit rules to allow countries to spend freely to fight the virus regardless of, in some cases, already yawning budget deficits. The 27 leaders tasked EU officials to work on an "exit strategy" and recovery plan to help rebuild the economy after the havoc wrought by COVID-19 and the drastic measures taken to fight it.
A manda Holden hs returned to the studio to record her Heart Radio Show after a series of shows hosted from home.

The Britains Got Talent judge, 49, had been completing her presenting duties from her house but is now back in action in at Global Radio's Leicester Square HQ.

On Thursday morning, Holden posed a series of videos and photos in support of NHS workers, urging fans to join in with the #ClapForOurCarers event happening at 8pm today.

In one video, she is in front of the Heart Radio backdrop and explains how important it is to support the staff keeping the NHS going.

Holden also posed at her desk, wearing a chequered dress and sporting glasses, sharing the picture with the caption: Take a note ... join us @thisisheart at 8pm to applause the #nhs #clapforourcarers."

Clap For Our Carers will see Brits taken part in a nationwide round of applause tonight in honour of NHS and key workers who are continuing to do their jobs during this pandemic.

In another picture, Holden is joined by Ashley Roberts, who is the Heart Breakfast Show's showbiz correspondent, fanning herself with cue cards.

While she was working from home, Holden frequently shared updates on what she and her family her up to.
By Trend

The number of coronavirus patients in Turkey increased by 561 on Wednesday, taking the total number of infections to 2,433, while the death toll topped 59, Trend reports citing Daily Sabah.

Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announced the figures with a bit of a warning, saying that precautions bind us to life.

Some 5,035 tests have been conducted in the last 24 hours, 561 of which returned positive, Koca said. 15 of our patients have passed away, he added.

Number cannot explain the grief of loss or anxiety. Lets try to live with zero risks, he stated.

Turkey has so far conducted nearly 28,000 tests.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the country was monitoring a further 53,000 people at their homes and 8,554 others in hospitals.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
President Donald Trump, with (from L) Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr, Response coordinator for White House Coronavirus Task Force Deborah Birx and Rear Admiral John Polowczyk, speaks during the daily briefing on the CCP virus at the White House, in Washington, DC on March 23, 2020. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

President Trump Announces Extension of Real ID Compliance Date

President Donald Trump confirmed that his Administration will extend the deadline for States to comply with the Real ID security requirements. The president told reporters that because of the social distancing requirements initiated to combat the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, citizens cannot be standing in lines at the DMV.

Im also announcing that were postponing the deadline for compliance with REAL ID requirements. At a time when were asking Americans to maintain social distancing, we do [not] want to require people to go with their local DMV. We will be announcing the new deadline very soon.

The Real ID Act was a security measure that was enacted after 9/11 and requires basic and uniform standards for how licenses are issued across the United States and Federal agencies cannot accept for certain purposes drivers licenses and identification cards from states not meeting the Acts minimum standards.

The Department of Homeland Security previously set Oct. 1, 2020, as the date travelers had to have the Real ID, but has not yet announced the new compliance date.

The United States Travel Associations issued a statement Monday applauding the Trump administrations decision to postpone the Real ID deadline.

The already difficult task of bringing the country closer to REAL ID compliance is now clearly impossible due to the coronavirus crisis. Clearly the administration understands that the economic damage of coronavirus is already massive, and as we move toward a recovery phase it would be terrible if the REAL ID deadline hits and creates yet another obstacle to people traveling. To get this economy moving again, people need to be able to move again.

Senator Jon Tester (R-Mo.) also voiced his support the Real ID extension.

Montanans should be worried about keeping their families healthy, not standing in line at the DMV to fill out government paperwork, Tester said. This measure will help slow the spread of the coronavirus and ensure Montanans remain compliant with the law while keeping Montana families safe.

U.S. Travel Association further clarified why the extension is necessary, as citizens anxieties about the CCP virus make staying healthy a priority, not standing in line at their local DMV.

As of October 2019, an estimated 99 million Americans do not have a REAL ID-compliant drivers license or an acceptable alternative identification (e.g. passport), and a majority of Americans (57%) are unaware of the October 1, 2020 deadline for enforcement. This could mean tens of millions of passengers are turned away on October 1, 2020 for not having the necessary documents to fly.

Whenever the new compliance date is announced, any person 18 years of age and older will need a REAL ID-compliant drivers license, state-issued enhanced drivers license, or another acceptable form of ID to fly within the United States.

A star at the top of the card distinguishes REAL ID-compliant cards.

DHS originally announced the Real ID as part of a comprehensive national security strategy. The Real ID would enable law enforcement officials to vet travelers and trust that they are who they claim to be.

The REAL ID Act, was first passed by Congress in 2005 enacts and recommends that the federal government, set standards for the issuance of sources of identification, such as drivers licenses.
Martial Law & Pestilence

Among many good things which have come of the coronavirus, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is hugged and kissed by President Donald Trump at the 37th annual Friends of Ireland luncheonWell, lets count it all joy! Anyway, whats going on now? What do I see? Almighty God took control of schedules, bypassed time and space and broadcast to the world! Watch this. Hes not finished. My return is imminent. Pay attention. He reminds us of biblical prophecy and clearly demonstrates to those who believe by showing forth another warning using pestilences. (Matt. 24:7) What are they? Raging epidemic diseases (coronaviruspandemic (worldwide); sweeping off multitudes of people at once. A pestilence is recorded as raging in Babylonia 40 a. d. before the destruction of Jerusalem.

(Barnes Notes) Martial Law: military government, involving the suspension of ordinary law. During frightening events like the coronavirus, many people prefer to give up their rights and listen to the government. What can they do?. Martial law is the imposition of direct military control of normal civilian functions by a government, especially in response to a temporary emergency. It can be used by governments to enforce their rule over the public, Mar 12, 2020  It is a law administered by the military rather than a civilian government. And may be declared (e.g.) in an emergency or response to a crisis. What would actually happen if martial law was declared in America? (ABC News) Well, the first thing that you need to know is that the U.S. Constitution would be suspended. In other words, you would suddenly have no rights at all. (Huuum) (imaginable, but not desirable) A pandemic defined (Merriam-Websters on-line dictionary) occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally high proportion of population.

An outbreak of any disease such as typhoid or influenza (the flu). Martial law in the United States refers to several periods in United States history wherein a region or the United States as whole are placed under the control of a military body. On a federal level, only the president has the power to impose martial law. The Defense Production Act (recently enacted) or DPA gives the president the power to direct civilian businesses to help meet orders for products necessary for the national defense. The law is intended to help with the allocation of resources, products and facilities and essentially makes available several authorities to the president. The executive branch, under this law, can essentially dictate industry production and force companies to sign contracts telling them how to allocate materials. The president can also impose wage and price controls, settle labor disputes and control consumer and real estate credit, and other authorities given by the law. I want to define virus from the standpoint of a sign. It shows the world is in turbulence. Is see it as an apocalyptic term for : you know that word that no one likes to say publicly (SIN!) because it is running rampant worldwide. You see many refuse to listeneven until the end of this age, will not hear. The term virus is a now, but yet to come judgment term for final eventuality. (my definition) Our attention is drawn to a survival mode. Its a sign to look forward to heavenly end. What must we do? I can offer only my irreversible recommendation for everyone who listens to have the peace that surpasses human understanding. That can only be found in Jesus Christ which carries great rewards: peace of mind, no fear, having all needs met and opportunities to explore and seek Him in His heavenly abode. Never give up! Keep asking, seeking and knocking. Youll have indescribably great rewards.

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Thanks for reading!!!!

Ask Dr. Jeanette Parkertm Ask Dr. Jeanettetm www.AskDrJeanetteParker.comtm; Articles copyright  Inquiring Minds Want To Know Jeanette Parker Founder-Superintendent:Todays Fresh Start Charter School www.todaysfreshstart.org [email protected] Ref: Barnes Notes. ABC News
Max Verstappen and Alexander Albon did not participate in the virtual Grand Prix of Bahrain last weekend. Instead Red Bull Racing chose DTM veteran and BMW driver Philip Eng. A driver who was part of Red Bull's junior program for the last time fourteen years ago.

By now it was so long ago that Eng was part of the junior program, that many people were surprised when they saw his name on the starting list. It proves once again that the ties with Red Bull are never completely severed. Eng did not hesitate to agree with the proposal.

Read more Honda works with Red Bull on new schedule during Lockdown

Red Bull connection is important

"It went through BMW and a mutual friend," says the Austrian in an interview with Motorsport-Total.com. The team Eng is driving for in the DTM has also been sponsored by Red Bull since 2018. "Because of my Red Bull past, it was only logical that they came to me via this route. I agreed immediately and that's also because it's Red Bull".

Read more IndyCar does get almost all their drivers at the start of virtual championship

Eng finished third in the virtual GP of Bahrain. No undeserving performance as he normally uses the simulator for iRacing. The F1 game from Codemasters is therefore not a real simulation. "It's all a bit less direct and mistakes are not nearly as hard to punish. I don't want to ruin the game, but it's not a simulation, it's made for the masses, but it's still fun".

Read more Formula 1 broadcasts old Grand Prix again this weekend on Youtube and Facebook
Kate Garraway voiced her fears on Thursday's Good Morning Britain, after meeting with Prince Charles just days before he tested positive for coronavirus.

The GMB presenter spoke about her meeting live on air, revealing that the pair had got 'relatively close' at the Prince's Trust Awards on March 11.

Discussing the royal's diagnosis, which was revealed by Clarence House on Wednesday, Kate said she has no symptoms but admitted the many people who have come into contact with Charles in recent weeks 'are going to be concerned.'

Meeting: Kate Garraway voiced her fears on Thursday's Good Morning Britain, after meeting with Prince Charles just days before he tested positive for coronavirus (pictured on March 11 at the Prince's Trust Awards with Alexander Armstrong)

Kate, 52, recalled her meeting with Charles, 71, to ITV's Royal Editor Chris Ship.

She said: 'I actually saw him on the 11th of March. It was the first day he'd stopped shaking hands, and we did the namaste greeting at the Prince's Trust.'

GMB played footage of the meeting between Kate and Charles, with Kate pointing out: 'We're relatively close there, as indeed were all the other people that were involved in that.

'I don't have any symptoms, so I'm not blaming him for anything at all, but people are going to be concerned. He's a man that meets a lot of people.'

Concerns: The GMB presenter spoke about her meeting live on air, revealing that the pair had got 'relatively close' at the Prince's Trust Awards on March 11

Prince Charles is working at his desk 'as usual' it was reported Thursday, despite having coronavirus as his aides try to trace anyone who met him over the past fortnight to warn them they may have been exposed.

The Prince of Wales has a 'mild' form of the illness and is on the Balmoral estate with his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, who has tested negative and is without any symptoms of the virus, which has killed 465 and infected 9,500 more in the UK so far.

Charles' doctor believes that the royal may have been contagious from March 13 at the earliest - just 24 hours after he last saw his 93-year-old mother the Queen, who is in self-isolation at Windsor Castle with Prince Philip, 98.

On air: Kate, 52, recalled her meeting with Charles, 71, to ITV's Royal Editor Chris Ship

His team have been informing anyone who met or came close to him while he was contagious - and those people are expected to go into self-isolation if they haven't already, according to the Telegraph.

It came as NHS Scotland's Chief Medical Officer Dr Catherine Calderwood defended the decision to test the royal couple, saying there were 'very good reasons' but she couldn't disclose them because of patient confidentiality.

But Clarence House refused to comment on the Prince of Wales' health after Dr Calderwood appeared to hint Charles and Camilla might have underlying medical conditions that made a coronavirus test necessary.

Namaste: She said: 'I actually saw him on the 11th of March. It was the first day he'd stopped shaking hands, and we did the namaste greeting at the Prince's Trust,' Kate explained

Charles and Camilla are said to be 'upbeat' despite being watched carefully by the Royal household medical team at their Aberdeenshire home, Birkhall, where they will remain in self-isolation for at least another two weeks.

Clarence House has declined to give an update on the Prince of Wales' health status after announcing on Wednesday he had tested positive for coronavirus.

But a spokesman said the heir to the throne, who is at his Scottish home Birkhall, was working at his desk as usual. He added Charles had received hundreds of 'get well soon' wishes sent to Clarence House - a mixture of cards but mostly digital messages.
As the world reels under the economic and social fallout of the coronavirus outbreak, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday pitched for developing a new crisis management protocol to deal with global health crisis and urged the powerful G-20 grouping to work towards addressing shockwaves triggered by the pandemic.

IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi interacts with fellow world leaders during the virtual G20 Summit, to advance a coordinate global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and its human & economic implications, in New Delhi. EAM S Jaishankar, NSA Ajit Doval and Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla are also seen. Photograph: Courtesy @MEAIndia/Twitter

In his address at an extraordinary video conference of the G-20 leaders, Modi also urged the grouping to come out with a concrete action plan to fight the pandemic and said human beings rather than economic targets should be put at the centre of its vision for global prosperity and cooperation.

The powerful grouping of world's 20 major industrialised nations at its meeting decided to inject over $5 trillion into the global economy to counter the social and economic impact of COVID-19.

The G20 held the video conference to discuss ways to deal with the coronavirus pandemic which has killed over 21,000 people and infected more than 4,70,000 globally.

Government sources said there was no discussion on the origin of the coronavirus or on China at the summit and that the spirit during the deliberations was of collaborative approach in dealing with the crisis.

There were no efforts to ascribe blame to anyone for the outbreak of the virus, they said.

The leaders, including US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, also agreed to contribute to the World Health Organisation-led COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund on a voluntary basis.

In his remarks, Modi noted the alarming social and economic cost of the pandemic, adding that 90 per cent of the COVID-19 cases and 88 per cent of deaths were in G-20 countries.

The G-20 grouping shares 80 per cent of world GDP and 60 per cent of world population.

The External Affairs Ministry said Modi underscored the need for free and open sharing of the benefits of medical research and development and sought developing an adaptive, responsive and humane health care systems.

It said he also sought strengthening and reforming intergovernmental organisations like WHO and work together to reduce economic hardships resulting from COVID-19 particularly for the economically weaker nations.

The prime minister also called for ushering in a new globalisation for collective well being of entire humankind, noting that medical research should be freely and openly available for all countries, government sources said.

He said empowering the WHO was necessary for development of effective vaccines to deal with global pandemics.

"Let us put human beings rather than economic targets at centre of our vision for global prosperity and cooperation," Modi was quoted as saying by the sources.

He also stressed on developing a more adaptive, responsive, affordable and human healthcare system that can be deployed globally to deal with healthcare crisis.

At the meeting, the G20 leaders agreed to take all necessary measures to contain the pandemic and protect people.

They also supported strengthening of the WHO's mandate in the fight against pandemics, including delivery of medical supplies, diagnostic tools, treatments, medicines and vaccines.

The leaders committed to use all available policy tools to minimise the economic and social cost of the pandemic and to restore global growth, market stability and strengthening resilience.

According to the sources, Modi said the coronavirus pandemic has offered an opportunity to look afresh at a new concept of globalisation and that the grouping has to focus on problems being faced by the humanity.

They said the G-20 leaders also appreciated India's efforts at the regional level to fight the pandemic.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA - Nineteen prominent Libyan personalities including doctors, academics and activists have appealed for unity and solidarity in dealing with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, urging priority to saving lives at the expense of all other interests
WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI -- Confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, including hospitalizations, rose again Thursday in Washtenaw County, according to the health departments daily update.

There are now 92 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and 22 hospitalizations as of Thursday, March 26, according to the Washtenaw County Health Departments database. That is an additional 19 cases and five hospitalizations from the day before.

No additional deaths were reported as of noon on Thursday. Ten people have recovered from their infection.

Thursday, March 26: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

Nearly 50% of the countys cases are in people between 18 and 39 years old. No cases have been reported in children 17 and younger. Fifty-three percent of cases have been in women.

One person between 18 and 49 years old was hospitalized this week, according to the county.

The number of coronavirus cases in Michigan has more than doubled in the past three days, although health officials say thats partly due to a significant increase in testing. As of Thursday, there are 2,856 confirmed cases. Sixty people have died.

Michigan coronavirus numbers now at 2,856 cases, doubling in three days

The University of Michigan Health System, which shares data on its COVID-19 cases in the health system daily, is currently treating 41 patients with the disease as of Wednesday afternoon -- up from 24 the previous day. Some patients may not be Washtenaw County residents. Nearly 350 Michigan Medicine patients await their COVID-19 test results.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared a state of emergency on March 10 after the first Michigan cases were identified. She has since closed schools, bars, restaurants and other establishments to limit the further spread of COVID-19, although take-out and delivery services remain available and grocery stores remain open.

Coronavirus leads to staggering increases in unemployment claims in Michigan and across U.S.

On Monday, March 23, Whitmer issued a stay home order, requiring Michigan residents to stay at home except for essential business.

Coronavirus symptoms include fever, cough and shortness of breath. Many infected people exhibit mild symptoms and dont necessarily need to be tested or treated in-person, as theres currently no known vaccine or cure for the disease.

Read all of MLives coverage on the coronavirus at mlive.com/coronavirus.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

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At Least Four Killed, 150 Trapped as Terrorists Enter Sikh Temple in Kabul, Massive Fight Underway

Sputnik News

05:47 GMT 25.03.2020(updated 06:08 GMT 25.03.2020)

New Delhi (Sputnik): Preliminary reports suggest that two suicide bombers entered the Sikh temple in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, and started to fire indiscriminately. Eyewitness also confirmed a massive explosion inside the house of worship.

Narender Singh Khalsa, a member of the Afghan parliament, says that three to four people had been killed in the clash, while nearly 150 people are trapped inside the Dharamshala, a Sikh area of worship, in the Shorbazar neighbourhood of Kabul, where suicide bombers entered on Wednesday morning.

Afghan security forces have reached the site and a gunfight is underway, said Tariq Arian, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior. Tolo News reported that the incident began at around 7:45 a.m. local time.

 Sputnik

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New Delhi, March 26 : When Digital India took birth, little did we know that in an unprecedented situation like a total lockdown, the apps and services that helped us sail through the day with ease will immediately hang up on millions.

From Uber to Ola, Swiggy to Zomato and Bigbasket to Grofers - and thousands of app-based services in between - the digital dream has taken a 21-day long pause, and workers in the digital industry are in for job losses along with deep salary cuts.

Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal has announced that several employees have taken deep voluntary salary cuts as the business has been hit owing to the COVID-19 lockdown.

Uber and Ola drivers are confined to their homes and delivery boys for food and online grocery delivery platforms are afraid to come out on roads owing to the fear or being beaten up.

Uber India has reportedly given no help to its driver partners as of now, other than telling its employees to do yoga at home.

Ola has reportedly taken the next step, asking the government to waive the loans of its drivers and delay the tax payments for them so that they can survive the Novel Coronavirus onslaught. The company, however, refused to comment on the reports.

According to the ride-hailing company, it is providing certain insurance and medical benefits to its drivers as well as waiving rental charges.

"We can confirm that we are fully waiving away lease rentals, akin to an EMI, for driver partners who operate vehicles owned by Ola's subsidiary, Ola Fleet Technologies under its leasing programme," Ola said in a statement.

The company also said it will give benefits on insurance for drivers and their spouses against loss of income due to contraction of COVID-19, as well as other medical support during this time will continue to be offered to all its driver-partners across the country.

Thousands of daily-wage workers, low-end hotel staff and delivery boys have left metros for their home towns - some even on bikes - as establishments locked themselves.

Smartphone-based leading food delivery platforms Zomato and Swiggy are in almost in no man's land - with thin presence amid huge manpower shortage.

Bigbasket and Grofers are unable to fulfil orders owing to huge supply-demand issue along with thin delivery staff to go out and deliver.

All eyes are now on the government to bail the online service providers from this mess.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday indicated that concerns of India Inc, small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) segments and other segments hit by the lockdown might be looked at and the government could announce a plan later.

"Our first priority is to provide food to the poor and money in their hands. We will think about other things later," she said.
WASHINGTON  The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday announced a sweeping relaxation of environmental rules in response to the coronavirus pandemic, allowing power plants, factories and other facilities to determine for themselves if they are able to meet legal requirements on reporting air and water pollution.

The move comes amid an influx of requests from businesses for a relaxation of regulations as they face layoffs, personnel restrictions and other problems related to the coronavirus outbreak.

Issued by the E.P.A.s top compliance official, Susan P. Bodine, the policy sets new guidelines for companies to monitor themselves for an undetermined period of time during the outbreak and says that the agency will not issue fines for violations of certain air, water and hazardous-waste-reporting requirements.

Companies are normally required to report when their factories discharge certain levels of pollution into the air or water.
NEW HAVEN  A city resident shot Monday afternoon in the area of Whalley Avenue has died, prompting a homicide investigation, according to the Police Department.

Capt. Anthony Duff identified the victim as Nathaniel Henry, 24, of New Haven Thursday.

Henry was wounded Monday on Whalley Avenue, then found by police after a car crash near the streets intersection with Broadway at approximately 1:30 p.m., Duff said.

Investigators learned the incident began in the parking lot of a restaurant at 75 Whalley Avenue between Sperry Street and Dwight Street. The two men in the sport utility vehicle were stopped in the drive-thru lane when a gunman in the parking lot fired into the vehicle, Duff said in a release. After the gunfire, the vehicle fled onto Whalley Avenue toward Broadway and the unknown gunman fled on foot toward Sperry Street.

Henry was transported to the hospital, where his condition worsened, Duff said. He died Wednesday evening.

Mayor Justin Elicker said during an afternoon press conference that Henry initially was in stable condition but the case took a turn and he later died. It was the second homicide of the year in the city, Elicker said

It is sad for that loss of the member of our community, Elicker said.

Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call the New Haven Police Department at 203-946-6304.

Duff said that callers may remain anonymous or submit tips anonymously by calling 1-866-888-TIPS (1-866-888-8477) or texting NHPD plus (a) message to short code 274637 (CRIMES).

Henry is the second homicide victim of the year in New Haven. Dashown Myers, 18, was killed in a Quinnipiac Avenue apartment complex in February.

william.lambert@hearstmediact.com
In a bid to help the poor and daily wage labourers who are facing the brunt of the lockdown in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Bihar government on Thursday announced a relief package of Rs 100 crore and has decided to convert schools into shelter homes.

The Nitish Kumar-led government said it will provide food to the needy in these temperoray shelter homes.

For the migrants stranded in other states or who have returned to the state, the government has released Rs 100 crore from the Chief Minister Relief Fund.

According to data by the Union Ministry of Health Bihar has reported 3 positive cases of COVID-19 including one death.

The total number of COVID-19 cases in India has risen to 649, including 593 active cases and 42 people who have been cured or discharged from hospitals, the Ministry of Health said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country effective from midnight to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Brazoria County Judge Matt Sebesta issued a Stay Safe at Home order today that will close many businesses and limit residents activities away from home in an effort to thwart spread of the novel coronavirus.

His order, to go into effect at 6 p.m. Thursday and last until 11:59 p.m. April 3, will require closing of businesses including gyms, barber shops, hair and nail salons, tattoo parlors, hotel meeting spaces, outdoor plazas and markets and commercial amusement centers. The closures will apply to businesses the county says are non-essential businesses during a public health emergency.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Coronavirus live updates: 40 new cases in Harris County

This action is not being taken lightly. As cases rise, the advice across the board has been to take action (now) to slow the spread of this disease, Sebesta said during a live Facebook address on March 25.

Essential businesses, to be exempted from closing through the order include healthcare facilities, industrial and chemical plants, news media, grocery stores, big-box retailers, gas stations and companies doing residential and commercial construction.

RECORD SALES: Houston-area gun store reporting increased demand for weapons during coronavirus pandemic

The order follows action taken by Harris and Galveston counties to slow spread of the virus.

The video can be viewed on the countys Facebook page at www.facebook.com/brazoriaco. The order can be read in full at www.brazoriacountytx.gov.

Sebesta said he hopes the order will help prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, give manufacturers time to produce more needed medical equipment and buy time for medical experts and researchers to study the disease and search for treatments.

Using guidance from the Department of Homeland Security, Sebesta encouraged residents to use delivery or pickup services if they can. Additionally, he encouraged residents to order takeout from restaurants, help elderly residents with errands while practicing social distancing  keeping 6 feet apart at all times  and to take walks, bike rides, hikes or other forms of outdoor exercise.

CLOSURE POSTPONED: Bereaved families, Houston-area funeral homes in suburbs adjust to coronavirus threat

We encourage you to do these things, just dont do them in groups, he said of outdoor exercise.

The judge also encouraged those businesses allowed to remain open to take pains to operate in a safe way, including implementing social distancing practices.

If someone in a household tests positive for the virus, members of the household will stay at home for 14 days or unless otherwise directed by the local health authority.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Tracking coronavirus: Interactive maps, charts show spread of COVID-19 across Houston, rest of Texas

County public health director Cathy Sbrusch, a registered nurse who has a background in infectious diseases, said in the Facebook address that as of March 24, the county had 33 cases of patients with the virus, including 14 new cases in the last two days.

Most of these cases have been stable and able to do self-care at home, she said, but she added that three people required hospitalization and have since been released. This is a very contagious disease. I urge you to not become complacent with your behaviors. You must maintain social distancing.

Sbrusch urged businesses to find ways for employees to practice social distancing and not congregate in the workplace, including during lunch or in meeting rooms.

She also urged sick people and the elderly to stay home.

Sebesta said the county will continue to update its website and social media channels as information changes.
Anyone caught deliberately coughing at emergency workers while claiming to be infected with coronavirus could face up to two years in prison.

People who cough at NHS staff and police officers using Covid-19 'as a weapon' will be charged with common assault by the Crown Prosecution Service.

Assaults against emergency workers can be punished with up to two years in prison, as police are given sweeping powers to enforce Boris Johnson's lockdown.

Max Hill QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, said: 'Emergency workers are more essential than ever as society comes together to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

'I am therefore appalled by reports of police officers and other frontline workers being deliberately coughed at by people claiming to have Covid-19.

'Let me be very clear: this is a crime and needs to stop.

'The CPS stands behind emergency and essential workers and will not hesitate to prosecute anybody who threatens them as they go about their vital duties.'

People who cough at NHS staff and police officers using Covid-19 'as a weapon' will be charged with common assault by the Crown Prosecution Service

Assaults against emergency workers can be punished with up to two years in prison, as police are given sweeping powers to enforce Boris Johnson's lockdown (stock)

North Yorkshire Police officers have set up road blocks to ensure that motorists and passengers are complying with Government restrictions and making 'essential journeys'

It comes after two suspects were convicted of coronavirus-related crimes yesterday, in the days following Mr Johnson's unprecedented shutdown.

Darren Rafferty, from Dagenham, east London, admitted three counts of assaulting an emergency worker after claiming to have coronavirus and directing coughs at Met Police officers arresting him for GBH at Barkingside Magistrates' Court.

The 45-year-old will be sentenced at Snaresbrook Magistrates' Court next week.

David Mott, from Blackburn, Lancashire, was sentenced to 26 weeks in prison yesterday after threatening to spit at police officers.

Officers asked him what he was doing out with two others after the PM placed Britain under de facto house arrest on Monday.

The 40-year-old admitted possession of an offensive weapon, possession of a Class B drug, and threatening behaviour at Blackburn magistrates' court.

A police officer speaks to a couple in Greenwich Park, London, to enforce social distancing rules after the PM's lockdown - announced on Monday night - escalates

West Yorkshire Police officers also reported being coughed and spat at by a large group of youths at a serious incident on Saturday night.

Man jailed after spluttering over police officer in Covid-19 age David Mott, who coughed over police A man who spat at a police officer after being stopped to be given advice about social distancing for Covid-19 has been jailed for 26 weeks. David Mott, 40, of no fixed address, appeared at Blackburn magistrates yesterday where he was sentenced for offences including using threatening behaviour towards a police officer. Mott was also charged with possession of an offensive weapon and possession of a controlled class B drug. He was arrested after being stopped whilst out in a group following the Government guidelines to stay at home. Officers carried out the stop and check on Green Lane, Padiham, on a vehicle containing three individuals, including Mott, on March 24 when Mott became abusive 'coughing and spitting' at the officers on several occasions. His crime was called 'particularly offensive and dangerous public order offence at this particular time coughing and spitting towards an officer' by the court. Advertisement

An RSPCA office rescuing a stranded swan in Hull was told 'have corona b***h' as a gang of youths spat in her face after she asked them to move away.

New coronavirus-related crimes have been slammed by human-rights advocates fearful of the new powers afforded to police and the state.

Liberty group called the incoming Coronavirus Regulations 'without doubt the biggest restriction on our individual and collective freedoms in a generation'.

Director Martha Spurrier warned people of 'the extent of its powers, and how long they can be in place for'.

She claimed: 'It gives the authorities new powers to detain any one of us that they deem to be potentially infected with the coronavirus. It also removes vital safeguards in care standards, leaving many people who are already at risk, such as disabled people, at further risk, not only of poor care but also of potentially inhumane treatment.

'The breadth of this legislation is also extraordinary. It runs to more than 300 pages and includes some spectacular restrictions, including powers to rearrange or cancel elections.'

Ms Spurrier added: 'We'll beat this virus, but these measures must be a last resort in that battle and these powers must be removed as soon as possible.

'We cannot and must not sacrifice all of our hard-won rights and freedoms.'

In November 2018, the Assaults on Emergency Workers Offences Act was brought into power to bring stricter punishments for anyone who abuses frontline staff. Since then, the CPS has prosecuted 20,000 such cases.

The Ministry of Justice said: 'An assault on any individual or citizen in our society is a terrible thing, but an assault on an emergency worker is an assault on us all.

'An attack on them is an attack on us and on the state, and it should be punished more severely than an attack simply on an individual victim'.
A senior UK health chief said the country could be in lockdown for another six months in order to prevent the coronavirus coming back.

Deputy chief medical officer, Dr Jenny Harries, said some, but not all, of the dramatic measures imposed this week could last until September.

It comes as one of the government's top coronavirus advisors admitted the UK's epidemic will get worse before it gets better but the peak of it could pass by Easter.

Professor Neil Ferguson said that if the current nationwide lockdown works, the demand on intensive care units should peak within two or three weeks.

The virus expert, from Imperial College London, was one of the authors behind a study which may have saved Britain after warning the Government its plan could kill thousands of people. He later caught the virus himself and recovered.

He now says he believes the NHS will be able to cope with the outbreak thanks to the stay-at-home measures that were put in place this week.

Despite fears over a lack of intensive care beds and staff going off sick, Professor Ferguson yesterday told MPs that he is confident the health service will remain 'within capacity' and that strain would 'peak in approximately two to three weeks and then decline thereafter'.

But the CEO of NHS Providers, which represents hospitals around the country, warned medics are already facing a 'continuous tsunami' of patients and that the 'explosion' of cases was bigger than they had expected.

Dr Jenny Harries agreed yesterday that she hoped the worst of the outbreak could be done by Easter.

This could mean the UK faces its darkest days in the next two weeks but suggests there is light at the end of the tunnel and normality could begin to return in summer.

It chimes with predictions made earlier this month by one disease expert who predicted Easter would mark the height of the first wave and the virus would return in the autumn.

Dr Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer to the Government, said officials did not want to make people change their lives for unnecessarily long periods of time but they also need to avoid a second big wave of infections like the country is experiencing now

People Enjoy the sun in St James' Park in central London The prime Minister Boris Johnson has insisted at the pubic should stay at home to slow the spread of the coronavirus

Professor Neil Ferguson, director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, speaking via video link about the coronavirus outbreak at the Science and Technology Committee at the House of Commons in London yesterday

Dr Harries said on BBC Radio 4's Women's Hour that the Government did not want people to have to change their lifestyles for an unnecessarily long time.

But, she added: 'We don't want to lift those measures [too soon] and find that we have a sudden upsurge and our efforts will have been wasted.

'Overall we are looking at a scenario of over a six-month period but not necessarily with a lock down of this level going on throughout that time.

'We are likely able to raise some of the measures as we go forward and keep in a very controlled pattern.'

Her comments come after she said in a Q&A on Mumsnet yesterday that the current surging numbers of cases should have come under control by Easter, which falls on the weekend of April 10.

She said: 'What we hope is that in about two to three weeks, if people have continued to do as we have asked, and cut down their social interactions, we would start to see a change in the slop'e of the graph,' The Telegraph reported.

'That means the peak will be pushed forward, but the height of it will be lower and we can manage all those who need hospital and health care safely through our NHS.'

Dr Harries' comments suggest the fast increase in new daily coronavirus patients, which is happening now, could start to plateau as the spread of it is slowed by people staying at home.

In the past week at least 6,903 new cases of the coronavirus have been diagnosed in the UK.

By comparison, the week before saw 2,170.

Because almost all the tests are being done in hospitals the majority of these people are needing medical care and rapid increases put extra strain on the hospitals.

Reducing the number of new cases each week - even if it means the overall number is bigger in the long run - will make it easier for the NHS to cope, and this is what the Government is trying to achieve by forcing people to stay at home.

But there is still a backlog of already-infected people that will descend on hospitals in the coming days.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Professor Neil Ferguson said: 'London is going to be very difficult in the next two to three weeks.

'All I would say is, with the lockdown now in place, those numbers are going to start to plateau. The challenge we have is there's a lag.

'The people being admitted to hospital right now were infected a week, two weeks, even sometimes three weeks ago, so without doubt the next one [or] two weeks are going to be very difficult.'

Chief of NHS Providers, Chris Hopson, said on Today that hospitals in London were already struggling but were coping with a huge rise in cases.

He said extra capacity which had been added to deal with the crisis was welcome but was being filled up very quickly  and the Excel conference centre, which is being turned into a field hospital with 4,000 beds  would fill up quickly, too.

Mr Hopson said hospitals had been staggered by 'the number of patients that are arriving, the speed with which they're arriving and how ill they are.

'They talk about wave after wave after wave; the word that's often used to me is a continuous tsunami and I think, as one CEO said to me yesterday, this is much bigger and much larger numbers with a greater degree of stretch than you ever have possibly imagined.'

The prediction of an Easter peak fits with one made by Dr Peter Piot three weeks ago, when he said the virus could return in the autumn if this happens.

Dr Piot, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: 'We've got a reasonable worst-case scenario... that involves 80 per cent of the population and we think the mortality rate is one per cent or lower. I expect it to be less than that.

'It takes about 12 weeks to reach the peak then maybe about 12 weeks to go away again.'

Prince Charles, pictured with the Queen on March 9, has been diagnosed with the coronavirus

People enjoy the sun in Battersea Park in South West London while the UK is in a coronavirus lockdown

HOPES LOCKDOWN COULD 'KEEP INFECTION AT MANAGEABLE LEVELS' It is hoped that once the coronavirus lockdown is lifted the infection can be kept at manageable levels, an expert has said. Professor Neil Ferguson, who is recovering from COVID-19 himself, told the Science and Technology Committee measures taken by the Government could tip the outbreak from a growing epidemic to a declining epidemic. He also explained there was some uncertainty, but that if current measures work as expected, then intensive care demand would 'peak in approximately two to three weeks and then decline thereafter'. Professor Ferguson, of Imperial College London, told the committee current predictions were that the NHS would be able to cope if strict measures continued to be followed. He said: 'There will be some areas that are extremely stressed but we are reasonably confident - which is all we can be at the current time - that at the national level we will be within capacity.' Drinking from a Keep Calm and Carry On mug, he explained: 'There will be some resurgence of transmission but the hope is that by employing more focused policies to suppress those local outbreaks, we can maintain infection levels at low levels in the country as a whole indefinitely. 'It remains to be seen how we achieve this and how practical it proves to be.' Appearing via videolink, he added that it was 'plausible' COVID-19 could behave like other coronaviruses and transmission could be somewhat reduced in the summer months but perhaps not by more than 10 per cent to 20 per cent. Professor Ferguson said it was clear that the country could not be in lockdown for a year, and that 'the long-term exit from this is clearly the hopes around a vaccine'. 'The challenge that many countries in the world are dealing with is how we move from an initial intensive lockdown... to something that will have societal effects but will allow the economy to restart,' he said. 'That is likely to rely on very large-scale testing and contact tracing. 'It should be stated that the entire world is in the very early stage of developing such strategies.' The committee heard that the current strategy aim is to suppress transmission indefinitely until other counter-measures are put in place, including a vaccine. It was also told that widespread testing was needed to help move the country from suppression measures and lockdown into something the country can manage longer-term. Advertisement

Earlier this month Professor Ferguson, a key member of the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), produced a report suggesting more than 20,000 people might die from coronavirus.

But yesterday he told Parliament's science and technology committee that the death toll could be 'substantially lower than that'.

On Radio 4 today he added that most of the people who were dying were already sick, potentially terminally ill, and would probably have died soon without the virus.

'Looking at the profile of deaths we see and looking at the expected mortality in those groups... about two thirds of people who are unfortunately affected by this virus are towards the very end of their lives anyhow, we estimate,' he said.

'I should say it still leaves a third, and we have heard cases of really quite healthy, young and, indeed, old people who have been affected and died because of this virus.

'I think this is important to bear in mind but really shouldn't affect the decisions we make.'

Old people  in their 70s, 80s and above  are the most at risk of developing severe cases of the coronavirus, statistics have shown.

In even more hopeful news, Andrew Pollard, professor of paediatric infection and immunity at the University of Oxford, who was also called before the science committee, said a vaccine could be available within six months.

Previously many experts have said a vaccine which could end the devastation of the pandemic is at least a year away.

'I believe that six months is possible, but it needs a lot of things to fall in place in order for that to happen,' Professor Pollard said.

On the NHS, Professor Ferguson said: 'With the strategy being adopted now, we think that in some areas ICUs (intensive care units) will get very close to capacity but that it will not be breached at a national level.

He said some regions would be 'extremely stressed' by the surge of patients.

But he added: 'We are reasonably confident  its all we can be at the current time  that at the national level we will be within capacity.'

A study involving Professor Ferguson had predicted 250,000 people could die in the UK under the Governments previous strategy, which was focused on controlling the disease spread rather than trying to stop it.

He said: 'We assessed in that report that fatalities would be probably likely to exceed about 20,000 with effectively a lockdown and social distancing strategy, but it could be substantially lower than that.'

But chief medical officer Chris Whitty said there was no guarantee the NHS would not exceed its capacity, although the lockdown and NHS work to increase resources would narrow the 'gap'.

Officials, scientists and doctors will all be watching UK hospitals in the coming days and weeks to see whether the dramatic lockdown measures are working.

The UK has recorded 43 coronavirus deaths in the past 24 hours compared to 87 on Tuesday, but new infections increased by a record 1,452 to 9,529 as Britons continued to flout the lockdown.

Twenty-eight more patients died in England, six more patients died in Scotland, five in Wales and four in Northern Ireland  bringing the total death toll to 465.

A man and a woman embrace in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester on Wednesday despite the strict lockdown

Members of the public on the seafront in Portsmouth today after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown

They included a 47-year-old who did not have any other health problems. The others who died, including one person aged 93, did have underlying health conditions.

Despite the death rate falling by half between Tuesday and Wednesday, the country yesterday saw a record spike in the number of cases, with 1,452 more patients known to have caught the deadly virus, bringing the total number of cases to 9,529.

The Department of Health and Social Care late on Wednesday evening confirmed a total of 97,019 people have been tested with found 87,490 negative. The update said that 463 people had been killed by the virus, but it added that the data did not cover a 24 hour period.

The update for the previous death toll on Tuesday was at 1pm, so the data only covers from then until 9am Wednesday, which would explain some if not all of the difference in the death rate.

Scotland only announced two deaths on Tuesday, while Wales confirmed just one. Both countries have now had 22 coronavirus victims.

Northern Ireland this afternoon announced two more fatalities as well as two last night, taking their total to seven deaths.

The true size of the outbreak is unclear because only patients in hospital are routinely tested. The true size of the outbreak is likely to be closer to the 400,000 mark, experts have said.

Despite clear government guidance, members of the public are continuing to the rules by heading out to sunbathe on the second day of the coronavirus lockdown.

Footage has emerged showing police dispersing Britons gathering in parks and other public places, with people gathering despite strict advice to stay at home yo avoid the outbreak overwhelming the NHS.

In Shepherd's Bush in West London, people soaked up the sun, seemingly oblivious to the tight restrictions imposed by the government on Monday. Police were seen telling the sun worshipers to leave and go home.

Others were seen enjoying the weather at Battersea Park in South West London, on the beach in Portsmouth and in the sea off Eastbourne today despite the Prime Minister urging people to stay at home.

Meanwhile in Manchester, officers today dispersed groups, some of which greeted each other with a hug, along with sunbathers in Piccadilly Gardens. Police also used megaphones to tell people to stay at home unless absolutely necessary, saying 'this is serious, we need to beat corona.'
By IANS

COLOMBO: To encourage physical distancing due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Sri Lnkan government hs started a special programe to deliver essential goods including medicines and food items, to homes, it was reported on Thursday.

The new program titled "Wait for us, stay at home", will be implemented through a local system in collaboration with Cooperative Societies and supermarket chains, The Daily Financial Times quoted Head of the Presidential Task Force on Continuous Supply, Operation and Coordination of Essential Services, Basil Rajapaksa as saying during the launch on Wednesday.

ALSO READ: Sri Lanka's first COVID-19 patient recovers, discharged from hospital

"The entire process should be in line with the coronavirus control initiatives carried out by the health sector. It is imperative to maintain the day-to-day life of the public. Steps have been taken to distribute food items, while protecting domestic farmers and the national economy," a statement released by the President's Media Division (PMD) said.

The PMD statement said there was no shortage of rice, coconut, vegetables, eggs, and chicken.

In the meeting, Rajapaksa had pointed out the possibility of distributing these items through a combined effort between Cooperative outlets and supermarkets after purchasing from domestic farmers.

A decision was also taken to deliver medicines to the homes of regular patients who have registered at hospitals, with the support of Divisional Secretaries, Public Health Officers, and the security forces, said te Daily Financial Times report.

CLICK HERE TO READ CORONAVIRUS LIVE UPDATES

It was also discussed to implement a system to distribute medicines through a few locally selected pharmacies, to patients who purchase medicines from private pharmacies.

Heads of banks were also advised to take action to keep commercial banks open, to facilitate trade and other essential activities.

Rajapaksa requested the authorities to implement a program to supply domestic gas at consumers' doorsteps, responding to telephone orders.

"The objective of the entire project is to prevent the public from gathering at marketplaces, so that the health sector's efforts to combat the coronavirus could be a success."

It was also decided to facilitate cultivation and fisheries activities without any interruption.

Sri Lanka currently has 102 coronavirus cases with no deaths.
Every year, many thousands of people die of what is called ordinary flu. Tens of thousands die in traffic accidents. Then there are industrial accidents, household mishaps, and huge numbers of avoidable deaths attributed to tobacco and illegal drugs.

We have, sad to say, learned to live with these deaths. We do not close down society because of them.

The coronavirus (COVID-19), tragic though it is, pales in comparison, so far, with other causes of death.

While we should never downplay the effects of the current pandemic, we must keep it in perspective. To allow the counter-measures to bring about an economic collapse would kill untold numbers of people, directly or indirectly. In addition, the economic collapse of one large, bellicose nation could trigger a war, with millions of dead in a short time.

North Korea claims to have had no COVID-19 infections. Even if that doubtful claim were true, it is but a matter of time before there is an outbreak of the virus there. Faced with the imminent prospect of his entire army being debilitated, Kim Jong-un, mercurial and reckless in the best of times, is likely to roll the dice militarily.

Iran is another case of modern-day but psychologically medieval leaders with their fingers on triggers. They hold an apocalyptic view that commits them to bringing about world chaos in order to prompt the return of their Twelfth Imam. COVID-19 seems to be running rampant in that nation, which rejects U.S. assistance in controlling the disease. Instead of wearing suicide vests, might the newest jihadis choose self-sacrifice by contagion?

Italy is not a military threat, but many nations watch Italy as a case in point, observing what can happen once the virus rampages through a population. They are taking notes, both those who seek to control the spread of the disease and those who would weaponize it.

The mirror image of Italy is South Korea, where immediate, decisive action forestalled what otherwise could have been a massively disrupted society, open to invasion by North Korea. South Korea is, as is Japan, a nation of people who are culturally homogenous and compliant regarding government edicts during national emergencies.

The U.S. is, by contrast, a mosaic of subcultures in which internecine conflict is the rule rather than the exception. Distrust of government and of big business is a common theme.

It would be wrong to casually dismiss the pandemic as being just another health issue, but on the other hand, overreaction carries risks of adverse consequences of catastrophic scales. Knowing how much to do, or how little, involves the concept known as "the fog of war," in which major decisions must be made with minimal information.

I have no great wisdom to offer, but of one thing we can be certain: we had better get this right.
 Flash

U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper issued an order to stop movements of overseas U.S. forces for up to 60 days to curb the spread of the coronavirus among military, according to media reports.

In a Wednesday interview with Reuters, the Pentagon chief said the order applied to all U.S. forces, civilian personnel, and families, while noting that there would be some exceptions.

Esper said that the U.S. force's withdrawal from Afghanistan would continue. Under the U.S.-Taliban deal that was inked last month, the United States would reduce its forces in Afghanistan to 8,600 within 135 days. Currently, there are about 13,000 U.S. troops in the country.

The exceptions might also include naval vessels scheduled to return to the United States, according to CNN, adding that the order will affect 90,000 expected scheduled deployments, including both troops scheduled to return home and deploy overseas.

The Pentagon on the same day also raised the Health Protection Condition (HPCOM) level to its second-highest level "Charlie" at all Defense Department installations globally, which directs to cancel large-scale meetings, implement remote work procedures, among others.

The Department of Defense reported 435 COVID-19 cases as of 5 a.m. March 25. A contractor at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) died on Saturday due to the coronavirus, the first such fatality related to the Pentagon.
Washington: A retired FBI agent who went missing in Iran 13 years ago, has died in Iranian custody, his family said.

"Today with aching hearts, we are sharing devastating news about Robert Levinson, the head of our family," Levinsons family said in a statement on Facebook and on a website.

"We recently received information from US officials that has led both them and us to conclude that our wonderful husband and father died while in Iranian Custody. We dont know when or how he died, only that it was prior to the COVID 19 pandemic, the family said.

An FBI poster showing how former agent Robert Levinson would look like after five years in captivity. A federal US judge held Iran responsible for the kidnapping in 2012. Credit:AP

Levinson disappeared under murky circumstances in March 2007 while on Kish Island, a tourist spot off the coast of Iran, during an unauthorised trip for the CIA to gather intelligence on Iran's nuclear program.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, 26 March)  A key official in the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said travel restrictions are inadequate to contain the spread of the coronavirus disease.

Dr. Sarah Bennett, head of CDC's International Task Force for COVID-19, said governments should focus instead on what to do when the coronavirus hits inside a country, stating that every nation across the globe must be prepared for the next outbreak.

We at CDC and WHO think that travel restrictions alone are not enough to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus around the world, Bennett told reporters from across the globe in a phone-in press briefing held Thursday evening, Manila time.

Bennett also said cultural and social differences should be considered when responding to the outbreak of any infectious disease.

I think thats why its really important that governments and partners be familiar with the guidance WHO and CDC are recommending, she said.

Bennett said guideline documents are available on the websites of both the WHO and the CDC.

She added that the CDC remains committed to help countries figure out which of these measures can be adapted to various nations.

The U.S. government works closely with international partners and host governments around the world to prepare for, prevent, identify, and respond to health threats, Dr. Bennett said.

For this pandemic in particular, the U.S. CDC is working closely with the World Health Organization, our Ministries of Health colleagues, and other partners to respond to requests to assist countries to prepare for and respond to COVID-19," she also said.

Bennett said some forms of assistance the U.S. government has provided are support measures for laboratories and the coordination of emergency responses, as well as training for public health workers.

The Philippines main island of Luzon was placed under enhanced community quarantine since March 16 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the measures imposed were restrictions on land, sea, and air travel to and from the entire island, which will remain effective until April 14, 2020 unless extended.

As of press time, the Philippines has at least 700 confirmed cases of the disease, with at least 45 confirmed deaths. Twenty-eight people have also recovered from the virus.
The company also announced the promotion of Stephanie Zarate to Corporate Controller and Treasurer. Ms. Zarate will continue in her role as Investor Relations Manager, a position she has held since 2016.

Mr. Farr and Ms. Zarate will assume their new management roles starting on March 30, 2020.

"The McClatchy operating team and the board have had the pleasure to work alongside Peter over the past two years and he has demonstrated an impressive depth of corporate finance and technical knowledge, strong business leadership and talent that will make him a successful CFO at McClatchy," said Craig Forman, President and CEO of McClatchy. "He succeeds a renowned figure in the media industry, Elaine Lintecum, who recently celebrated her 32nd year at McClatchy and will remain at the company until the end of the second quarter when she will retire, as planned. I am delighted to work with Peter and Elaine in their new roles to ensure a smooth transition for the company."

Prior to joining McClatchy, Farr held leadership roles in accounting at The Boeing Company, Allianz SE and Deloitte & Touche, LLP., and served as a Captain in the United States Marine Corps. He holds a Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters of Professional Accountancy from Montana State University. He is also a certified public accountant.

"I am honored to take on this leadership role at McClatchy and support the company's strategy of digital transition at a time when local news in our communities is more vital than ever," said Farr. "I am also delighted with the expansion of Stephanie Zarate's role as controller and treasurer. Her career progression at McClatchy over the past six years is impressive; she has been a strong leader in our finance department and, coupled with her insight and financial fluency, Stephanie will ensure the finance team at the company continues its strong performance."

In her new and expanded role, Zarate will report to Farr. Zarate is a CPA and is working to complete her MBA in Finance at the University of California, Davis. She joined McClatchy six years ago as a compliance and digital accounting manager. She was then promoted to Investor Relations and Technical Accounting Manager, and most recently has been the company's Investor Relations Manager and Assistant Treasurer. Prior to joining McClatchy, she worked in audit at Deloitte for more than seven years.

About McClatchy

McClatchy operates 30 media companies in 14 states, providing each of its communities with strong independent local journalism in the public interest and advertising services in a wide array of digital and print formats. McClatchy publishes iconic local brands including the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee, The Charlotte Observer, The (Raleigh) News & Observer, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. McClatchy is headquartered in Sacramento, Calif. #ReadLocal

Contact: Stephanie Zarate Investor Relations Manager (916) 321-1931 [email protected]

SOURCE McClatchy

Related Links

http://www.mcclatchy.com


A crowded boardwalk or beach on the first warm day of spring is typically a welcome sight in New Jersey. But as more and more restrictions on social gathering have been put in place during the coronavirus pandemic, a number of seaside towns have made the decisions to close their beaches or boardwalks.

Some beaches do remain open for passive activities, but like at any park, sunbathers are asked to keep at least six feet apart from people outside those they live with.

Asbury Park

Police in Asbury Park are currently monitoring the boardwalk to make sure visitors are practicing social distancing, and closing it is not off the table.

We cannot not listen to the governors executive order, Mayor John Moor previously told NJ Advance Media. We cannot put our head in the sand and be ostriches. This is for real.

Atlantic City

The beach is open, but many of the other draws of Atlantic City are closed. Casinos, bars and clubs have all been ordered closed, and restaurants can only offer take-out or delivery.

Deal

Deal is also asking that season residents and visitors hold off on visiting its beaches, particularly those coming from New York City.

This is necessary to stop the spread of this highly infectious disease. If you already have, or decide to relocate please self-quarantine for 14 days so as not to inadvertently spread the virus to anyone. This includes our vital first responders, police said in a Facebook post.

Lavallette

Lavallette closed its boardwalk Thursday afternoon, police said in a statement. A municipal ordinance also barred the rental of any homes on AirNB or any other online marketplaces.

These bans are in effect until the statewide State of Emergency is lifted.

Long Beach Township

Dogs are currently banned from the bay beaches because of limited space and overuse of these areas, Township officials said. Parks and playgrounds are closed.

Officials are asking that those who keep a second home in the township not take a pandemic vacation and risk overwhelming local hospitals.

We are strongly recommending that you remain in your primary service area and DO NOT relocate to the shore area. Be mindful if you do travel you will not access to your local health care providers with a better appreciation of your medical history, the Joseph Lattanzi, the township commissioner, said.

Margate

Have a second home in Margate? Please postpone your visit, city commissioners said.

Please be mindful, health care and emergency services are not equipped to handle a large influx of individuals at this time of the year, commissioners said in a Facebook post.

Ocean City

All beaches and boardwalks are closed in Ocean City as of Wednesday afternoon.

I want to take every measure I can to protect the community, Mayor Jay Gillian said in a statement. We have a large senior population, and its of utmost importance to take their well-being into consideration.

Point Pleasant Beach

Although the beach is open, Point Pleasants popular boardwalk is not, Mayor Paul Kanitra said. The decision was made after a warm Friday drew large crowds to the narrow boardwalk.

While access to the beach is still allowed, that could be changed if officials notice people arent practicing social distancing.

Sandy Hook

The beach remains open at Sandy Hook, within the Gateway National Recreation Area. All park buildings and restrooms have been closed. That means you cant get a fishing permit at the park during the pandemic, its website says.

Sea Girt

The boardwalk was closed Thursday morning, Sea Girt police said on their Facebook page. You can still access the beach.

Seasonal residents coming from New York or other virus hot spots are asked to self-quarantine for 4 days, police said.

Seaside Heights

All crossover gates have been closed at the ocean and the bay in this popular tourist town, Seaside Heights Mayor Anthony E. Vaz said Monday. The boardwalk is not closed.

Vaz said they decided to close the beaches ahead of the warmer weather and the usual prom season tourist push. We know from Floridas experience with their beaches that people cant help themselves and do stupid things, he said.

Spring Lake

The Spring Lake boardwalk was closed to the public effective Tuesday evening, police said earlier this week. You can still visit the Spring Lake Beaches.

The Mayor and Council have taken this step for the safety of our residents and visitors, as it is impossible to achieve realistic social distancing on the boardwalk, the police department said.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share.

If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

Katie Kausch may be reached at kkausch@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @KatieKausch. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Have a tip? Tell us: nj.com/tips. Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.
Coronavirus Scare Hit Rawlings To Closes Office

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AFP/Archivos

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Mr. Farid Antar, MD Republic Bank

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What pledges have the G20 leaders made?

By BBC News

Earlier, we reported the pledge by G20 leaders to inject $5 trillion into the global economy for the fight against the coronavirus outbreak.

It comes after the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, called for action from the group, asking for an "immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world" to "focus together on the true fight of our lives".

We have gone through the joint statement from the G20 leaders after their meeting today with a fine-tooth comb, and here's what else you need to know:

The leaders have "strongly committed to presenting a united front against this common threat"

They pledge to take "all necessary health measures" to protect people, especially the most vulnerable

They promise to share research and best practices on the virus and vaccines, and to increase manufacturing capabilities for medical equipment

The leaders say they will use "all available policy tools to minimise the economic and social damage from the pandemic"

Finance ministers from the countries and Central Bank governors will work together to develop a G20 action plan on the economy

They will work together to ensure the flow of trade - especially medicines - isn't disrupted

They will support developing and the least developed countries - notably countries in Africa and small island states, where health systems and economies may be less able to cope

They also pledge to provide assistance where necessary to repatriate citizens

Finally, the G20 leaders say they "stand ready to react promptly and take any further action that may be required"
Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine are launching a pair of studies to answer critical questions regarding the roles COVID-19 may play in breast milk and pregnancy.

Breastmilk and COVID-19

The University of California San Diego School of Medicine and the Family Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation (FLRF) are collaborating to launch studies into breastfeeding and breast milk as they relate to COVID-19. As part of a larger consortium, researchers will address two critical questions:

Is COVID-19 transmitted via human milk?

Can breast milk protect infants from COVID-19?

"We already know breast milk contains properties that help protect infants from diseases, such as diarrhea and pulmonary infections. We urgently need to determine whether or not the virus is found in breast milk and discover breast milk components with antiviral properties that could protect infants from COVID-19," says Lars Bode, PhD, principal investigator and director of UC San Diego's Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation Mother-Milk-Infant Center of Research Excellence (MOMI CORE).

FLRF is donating $100,000 in an expedited, streamlined process to assist researchers at MOMI CORE. "This generous donation from FLRF will help us to mobilize immediately," said Bode, professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

"We have been establishing top-level research resources around the world over the past five years, and now, with that infrastructure in place, we and our research partners are better prepared to respond to emergency situations in an agile manner," said Goran Larsson, chairman of the FLRF Board. "We are proud to support MOMI CORE's work, and hope others can do the same."

In a concerted effort with other human milk research labs, MOMI CORE is developing sample collection protocols and assays to determine whether or not the virus is present in breast milk. These technologies will be available for clinical studies planned at UC San Diego and elsewhere. In parallel, MOMI CORE is teaming up with UC San Diego virologists and infectious disease specialists to screen breast milk components for their potential antiviral properties.

"We have very limited data on how breastfeeding and human milk bioactives impact COVID-19, but we need to find out to help stop the pandemic," said Bode. "In these extraordinary times, health professionals need reliable information to both protect the practice of breastfeeding and ensure the health of breastfeeding mothers and their children."

Pregnancy and COVID-19

Another new and related study with researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine involves a newly launched effort to examine the short-and long-term effects of the novel coronavirus in pregnancy and breastfeeding.

The observational study is being conducted by the Organization of Teratology Information Specialists (OTIS), the professional scientific society that includes the MotherToBaby service, which provides evidence-based information on the safety of medications and other exposures during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

"Women and their health care providers need answers as quickly as possible regarding the effects of COVID-19 during pregnancy and while breastfeeding," said Christina Chambers, PhD, MPH, principal investigator, professor in the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of OTIS and MothertoBaby. "We know that pregnant and breastfeeding moms are contracting COVID-19, but the fact of the matter is that we know very little about its short-and long-term effects on a developing baby.

"To date, there are only a few case reports of pregnancy outcomes following maternal infection with this new virus. However, prior research on respiratory infections, such as seasonal influenza, has indicated that pregnant women in general are at higher risk than non-pregnant women for complications from the infection, which in turn can lead to more common pregnancy complications, such as preterm delivery. In addition, a high fever early in pregnancy may pose a risk for the developing fetus, and women should discuss treatment options with their health care provider."

The study will recruit pregnant women who reside anywhere in the United States or Canada. Mothers will be interviewed by telephone over the course of their pregnancy and postpartum period and will be asked to release relevant medical records from their health care providers. This information will be used to assess the course of pregnancy and outcomes for both mother and the infant.

Researchers will also track infant growth and development, via the child's pediatrician, for at least one year. This work will be coordinated with other efforts being initiated throughout the U.S. and other countries.

Additionally, women who are breastfeeding and come into contact with COVID-19 will be asked to enroll in UC San Diego's Human Milk Biorepository, a related study of breastmilk. Using a common protocol developed in coordination with MOMI CORE, breast milk and infant samples will be collected along with an interview regarding the mother's symptoms and treatments, as well as information on the growth and developmental outcomes of the breastfed infant or toddler.

"We hope pregnant and breastfeeding women see the importance in helping the world understand this novel virus and consider volunteering for the study. There is much to be learned in a short period of time that can help women who are currently or may become pregnant or breastfeed," said Chambers, director of clinical research for the Department of Pediatrics.

###

Pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers can learn more about the study or how to enroll by visiting mothertobaby.org/join-study or by calling MotherToBaby at 877-311-8972.
It's overwhelming to see Indian film actors come together at the time of crisis to help all those who are in need. After superstars from South, who took over the responsibility to provide aid to daily-wage workers, Hrithik Roshan has come to the aid of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation amid Coronavirus outbreak.

According to a TOI report, the Super 30 actor has pledged Rs. 20 Lakh for municipal workers and care-takers to ensure they have all safety aids in place for themselves.

bccl

A source has been quoted in the report as saying,



Hrithik has extended his support to the Government of Maharashtra in their endeavor to curb the spread of the pandemic. He had been looking for ways to help the street-level bureaucrats like the BMC workers and other caretakers who are out there and contributed a total amount of Rs 20 lakh to the cause.

Hrithik had also posted a series of tweets today in order to urge people to come forward and be empathetic towards people who are helping the state of Mumbai run without any bumps.

His tweets read,

In times such as these, we must do whatever we can to ensure the safety of the most fundamental caretakers of our city and society. I have procured N95 and FFP3 masks for our BMC workers and other caretakers... 1/2  Hrithik Roshan (@iHrithik) March 26, 2020

My gratitude to @AUThackeray for giving me the opportunity to support the Maharashtra govt in their endeavour to curb the pandemic. It is our duty to help in whatever capacity we can. @mybmc #coronavirusoutbreak #stayhomestaysafe  Hrithik Roshan (@iHrithik) March 26, 2020





The actor made headlines recently after he posted how co-parenting needs during pandemic has made Sussane move in with him.

Almost six years after being divorced with ex-wife Sussanne Khan, Hrithik Roshan on Wednesday announced that she has temporarily moved back to his house so that their children remain connected to both of them during the period of lockdown.

In a very sincere and sensible note, Hrithik shared a picture of Sussanne seated in the house and wrote, "It is unimaginable for me, as a parent, to think of having to be separated from my children at a time when the country is practicing lockdowns."


The central government on Thursday announced a relief package for the poorest of the poor hit hard by the loss of jobs and income as a result of the coronavirus outbreak, but stopped short of announcing a lump sum amount as cash transfer into the accounts of the needy.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman gave out details of how this Rs 1.7 lakh crore package would help nine segments of the poor and vulnerable, but did not explain how such a package will be funded. No one will go hungry, she assured, adding that "other concerns" would be "considered separately".

She also swept aside questions on whether this package will create further pressure on an already tough fiscal deficit target since government revenues are already squeezed. As it was aimed at the lowest sections of society, the latest relief package does not address the common middle class woes of looming EMIs as a new month approaches.

All they got from the FM was a promise to slowly address their needs in the coming weeks. She has already provided some concessions in terms of tax compliance deadlines for the middle class.

From the announcements, it is clear that the intention of the government is to first help the weakest sections of society when businesses, large and small, and the middle class are clamouring for mega relief measures, suited to their needs, due to the significant economic impact of Covid-19 pandemic. Whether the government provides further relief to these sections of society remains to be seen.

Below is a point-by-point rundown on what the package includes, the positives and the shortcomings, the questions that arise from it and the challenges that the government will face in fulfilling its commitments.

1. Rs 50 lakh per person insurance cover for health and sanitation workers. This should benefit about 20 lakh such workers. It is not clear how such insurance would be provided, whether private sector insurance providers would be roped in and how much will the premium cost the government.

2. Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Anna Yojana: About 80 crore poor people, who are already entitled to get five kg wheat or rice every month, will be get double this entitlement each month for the next three months. Additionally, a kg of pulse (according to regional preference) would be provided per family.

Agricultural experts point out that while the intention may be good, the actual implementation of this scheme is fraught with practical difficulties. The governments godowns are stuffed with grain so availability wouldnt be an issue but the huge logistics involved in doubling the grain entitlement would mean additional grain can reach the beneficiaries well after three weeks.

If the intention was to help the poor tide over the 21-day lockdown period without going hungry, then additional foodgrain allocation wouldnt solve this problem.

3. First instalment of PM KISAN, the direct cash transfer scheme for farmers, to be disbursed immediately. This would mean Rs 2,000 to be front loaded or advanced for the beneficiaries. Again, this doesnt really enhance the cash in hand for the farmers, merely allows the 8.3 crore beneficiaries to get a part of the allocation sooner.

4. MGNREGA wages to be increased from Rs 182 to Rs 202 per day. This will benefit five crore families by providing an additional around Rs 2,000 each over three months. Again, experts have questioned this relief, since works against which MNREGA wages are paid are already hard to come by.

5. Women Jan Dhan Account Holders will get an ex-gratia amount of Rs 500 per month in cash transfers for the next 3 months. The government says this step will benefit 20.5 crore women. A welcome initiative though the amount involved is too meagre to make a significant difference to a large section of the deprived.

6. Elderly, widows, disabled to get Rs 1000. This will be given in two instalments over the next three months to three crore beneficiaries. Once again, the amount is too meagre for it to make a significant difference to a large section of the deprived.

7. Free gas cylinders: the 8.3 crore BPL Ujjwala Yojana beneficiaries will be given free cylinders for the next three months. Unless these families have grain and vegetables to cook, offering free cooking gas is hardly going to solve matters.

8. Collateral-free loans to 63 lakh Women Self-Help Groups to be doubled from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 20 lakh. The FM said this will money immediately in the hands of seven crore households.

9. For the organized sector, government said it will pay the EPF contribution of both of the employer and employee (12% each) for the next 3 months. This is only for those establishments which have up to 100 employees, where 90% of employees are earning less than Rs 15,000 per month. The EPF scheme regulation will be amended to allow non-refundable advance of up to 75% of the amount or 3 months of wages, whichever is lower. This should affect 4.8 crore workers.

10. For construction workers, the Centre has asked state governments to use the existing welfare fund for building and construction workers which has a corpus of Rs 31,000 crore. It is not clear how much comes to the share of each state and how many states will acquiesce to this diktat from the Centre.

The government has neither explained the source of this Rs 1.7 lakh crore package nor can it ensure that the poor get immediate relief through many of the measures announced.

The critical need to provide food and shelter to migrant workers, for example, who are trudging along on foot for thousands of kilometres to reach home amid a nationwide lockdown, may have been better addressed through a cash transfer into at least those accounts which are linked under the Direct Benefit Transfer Scheme.

As former agriculture secretary Siraj Hussain pointed out, even for providing additional foodgrain through PDS systems, the movement of grain from godowns to fair price shops would take weeks.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi had, earlier today, sought Rs 7500 cash transfer to the Jan Dhan accounts and 10 kg of free grain to the poor amid the ongoing 21-day lockdown. Although only the latter demand was fulfilled, the package received a rare thumbs up from Rahul Gandhi, who called it the "first step in the right direction" in a tweet.

The author is a senior journalist. Views expressed are personal.
New Delhi, March 26 : India's largest paramilitary force CRPF on Thursday announced that its over 3.5 lakh personnel will contribution their one day salary to Prime Minister's National Relief Fund in the fight against novel coronavirus pandemic.

The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) -- one of the seven Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) under Ministry of Home Affairs -- initiated the move to extend helping hand to the government which earlier on Thursday announced its first Rs 170,000 crore Covid-19 relief package to protect the weaker sections of society.

"The CRPF personnel have decided to make a humble contribution of one day salary to Prime Minister's National Relief Fund. We are dutifully committed to stand firmly with our nation in this challenging time of COVID-19 spread," the CRPF said in statement.

The force, which is mandated to provide internal security in Jammu and Kashmir and Maoist-affected states, said that it is an unanimous decision and a sincere effort by its personnel.

"The effort was to make an immediate contribution with the noble intent to keep it unrevealed. The CRPF remains steadfast towards its motto of service and loyalty." The paramilitary force soon made the announcement after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman declared Rs 170,000 relief package under the PM Garib Kalyan Yojana which would benefit migrant workers and the rural poor and women among others.

The relief package was announced two days after the Prime Minister announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown till April 14 to break the spread chain of Covid-19, which has claimed 15 lives and infected over 600 people across the country.
Chandigarh, March 26 : Even as 18 coronavirus positive cases have so far been reported in Haryana, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Thursday announced an increased ex gratia to state employees involved in the battle to contain the spread of coronavirus.

Now doctors will be entitled to Rs 50 lakh, nurses Rs 30 lakh and other employees, government or contractual, Rs 20 lakh. Earlier, the ex gratia amount was Rs 10 lakh.

He said that the state would soon announce a new scheme to overcome the problems of farmers owing to the lockdown.

The Chief Minister said this in a televised address, during which he also talked about steps being taken to fight coronavirus.

Khattar appealed to the people not to believe rumours on the social media or on other platforms.

Allaying the fears of Haryana farmers, the Chief Minister said the entire agricultural produce would be purchased by the state.

There might though be some delay in the procurement, he said.

The government has made arrangements so that the procurement of mustard and wheat would start on April 15 and April 20 respectively, if the situation is favourable. He appealed to the farmers to stock the grain till then.

According to him, the state has launched website covidssharyana.in for registration of shopowners/suppliers of groceries, vegetables and fruits, milk and medicinces, to deliver these goods to the people at their doorsteps. E-passes would be issued to them.

The Chief Minister urged the people to adhere to the lockdown by staying at home for their own safety.

He said in the last four days, as many as 33,000 people have registered themselves as volunteers in Haryana, including 546 doctors, 255 nurses, 1,108 paramedics, 4,700 home delivery assistants, 5,700 each for social distancing communication and public communication and 6,200 for supporting the district administrations.

The Chief Minister said five laboratories have been made available for testing of suspected coronavirus cases and two more testing labs would be set up.

Similarly, 2,500 isolated beds and 6,500 quarantine beds have been made available.

Till date, 18 coronavirus positive cases have been reported in Haryana. Gurgaon has the highest 10, Faridabad two, Panipat three and Panchkula, Palwal and Sonepat one each.
The streets are so dead now you can hear the ambulance sirens from a long way off. And you hear them more and more.

Yesterday, one came for an old lady at the end of my block, a squad of masked medics milling around the stretcher as she was wheeled into an ambulance and away to a hospital system that many fear will be overwhelmed when the stream of patients becomes a deluge.

The ambulance sirens are now competing to be heard over 1,000 police cars cruising the city, blaring out a recorded message outlining the social distancing rules to anyone gathered outside in groups. With New York fast threatening to become the global epicentre of coronavirus, the state governor, Andrew Cuomo, has warned that it has spread there faster than a bullet train.

A man crosses a nearly empty 5th Avenue in midtown Manhattan as the coronavirus crisis hits New York City

Whether the train can be slowed or will crash spectacularly largely depends on a mercurial President whose assurances that the pandemic is under control  hes pushing for business as usual by Easter  flatly contradict his medical experts.

Donald Trumps obstinacy is compounding a sense of dread in a city facing its greatest challenge since 9/11 and perhaps the countrys greatest domestic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

There were scenes of chaos across the citys hospitals as doctors told of being overwhelmed by a cacophony of coughs. Staggering figures revealed almost 31,000 have tested positive for the virus in New York State. That is more per capita than in Italy and almost 7 per cent of the worlds confirmed cases, with more than 5,000 new ones in the last 24 hours alone.

In a dire warning, Mr Cuomo described the number of infections as breathtaking and warned that the citys healthcare system would crumble without support.

He added: New York is just the canary in the coal mine. What happens to New York is going to end up happening to California, in Washington State and Illinois.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention yesterday reported 54,453 cases across the country, an increase of 10,270 from its previous count. It said the death toll had risen by 193 to 737, marking Americas deadliest day so far. Cases have been reported in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Times Square, pictured, remains mostly empty as staggering figures revealed almost 31,000 have tested positive for the virus in New York State

Mr Cuomo said with cases doubling every three days in New York City alone, 140,000 people might need urgent care in the next few weeks. New York doctor Craig Spencer, who survived ebola after contracting it in Guinea in 2014, said: What we are seeing in the emergency room now is dire. It is only a matter of time now before this spills out on to the streets.

New York Citys population density  28,000 people per square mile  has been a key factor in its vulnerability. All non-essential workers have been told to stay at home while White House officials have advised people who have passed through or left New York to quarantine themselves for 14 days. The silence on the streets is perhaps more sharply felt here than anywhere else in the world. This, after all, is the city that never sleeps.

There is none of that famous vibrancy now. The National Guard has been called in to help turn a convention centre into a 1,000-bed hospital.

A giant US Navy hospital ship is on its way, too, but experts fear these wont be nearly enough. Soldiers have been building a makeshift morgue outside a Manhattan hospital  the first of several planned around the city.

New York state has 53,000 hospital beds but is estimated to need 140,000. Hospitals are reporting they are already nearing full capacity, with some saying they are putting a breathing tube into a new virus-hit patient at the rate of one an hour.

The crisis is not only uncomfortable for New York, its also shameful. More billionaires have homes in New York than anywhere else and yet the richest city in the richest country in the world is scrambling to get hold of even the most basic tools to combat the virus.

Much like in the UK, all non-essential workers have been told to stay home, which has seen the usually busy Union Square Park, Manhattan, pictured, almost deserted

One reason is the escalating feud between Mr Trump and Mr Cuomo, the citys Democrat governor, who wants the President to enforce a law that could compel US manufacturers to make much-needed medical supplies. Mr Trump has complained it smacks of socialism while Mr Cuomo has accused him of playing politics with peoples lives. Just as in London, hospital staff are short of protective gear. Some are wearing makeshift masks made from coffee filters.

Maintaining law and order is a growing concern. The New York Police Department has 200 confirmed cases of the virus, with 3,000 more officers off sick. It is also working its way through New Yorks prisons  up 34 per cent in a day  and infecting, among others, rapist film mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Officials have started releasing the most medically-vulnerable inmates and those jailed for lesser offences.

Theyll join a New York population whose famous devil-may-care spirit has been ground down by a lockdown that started on Sunday night.

All non-essential shops have closed, all non-essential gatherings have been banned and those who must go out have to stay at least six feet apart  just like in the UK.

Yellow cabs line an empty 42nd St. waiting for fares outside Grand Central Terminal in a city facing its biggest challenge since 9/11

New Yorkers love their brash image. But they now move cautiously, always on the look-out for anyone getting too close.

With restaurants only allowed to deliver food or sell takeaways, many New Yorkers are discovering cooking for the first time  and the average Manhattan kitchen is minuscule. To make things worse, New Yorkers adore their therapists but cant see them any more. Its left to radio stations to offer tips on coping with anxiety.

After five days of bickering, Democrats and Republicans have finally agreed a $2trillion economic aid plan  the biggest in modern US history.

Extraordinarily, Mr Trumps popularity is actually rising in the polls. His critics cannot understand it given his bizarre handling of the crisis, regularly contradicting the advice of his experts. Please do not take medical advice from a man who looked directly at a solar eclipse, Hillary Clinton tweeted yesterday, alongside a video of the President doing just that.

There is a very real concern here that he may start to distance himself from public health messages in a matter of weeks rather than let the pandemic further damage the economy  and his political prospects.

And that is making many Americans sick with worry.
COVID-19 is putting our communities under extraordinary pressure. As we all scramble to adjust to our new realities, we must be especially mindful of risks that prolonged school closures and social distancing policies will pose to the safety and security of our most vulnerable children. With each passing day, the risk factors for abuse and neglect are not only increasing, but also becoming harder for us to identify. In particular, children under state supervision because of reported abuse or neglect now face both greater inequities in educational opportunities and also limited access to resources and protections they rely on through their schools.

We havent experienced this level of social disruption in our lifetimes. School districts across Connecticut are doing an admirable job of continuing to provide meals for children who rely on school for daily nutrition and providing remote learning opportunities. As we shift to virtual learning across the state, some districts are also making laptops available to children who cannot afford them. Despite these interventions, there is no question that children living in unstable home environments are more at risk today than they were two weeks ago.

In 2019, 10,478 children were under the jurisdiction of Connecticuts Superior Court of Juvenile Matters because of abuse or neglect. There are undoubtedly more children not currently under the courts jurisdiction quarantined at home facing heightened risk factors for abuse or neglect as parents grapple with even greater economic and social pressures. School closures and social distancing complicate our ability to identify such risks. Former Commissioner of the Department of Children and Families Joette Katz illuminated some of these issues in a March 20 Op-Ed published in the Connecticut Law Tribune. In the absence of teachers and school administrators who play a vital role in identifying abuse or neglect of children, Katz warns that many reports may not be made at all. Affirming Katzs concerns, Jacqueline Rabe Thomas reported recently in the CT Mirror that the number of daily calls into the DCF care line dropped from 126 to just 39 in the first week of school closures.

At the same time, DCFs ability to attend to both existing cases and new reports is complicated by social distancing policies. As DCF Commissioner Vannessa Dorantes noted in her recent guidance to DCF staff regarding COVID-19, the department faces the extraordinary challenge of keeping children safe while also protecting front line staff from the viruss spread. Home visits and investigations of reports that come in through the DCF care line have to be weighed against a series of COVID-19 risk factors, adding additional considerations to the agencys triage process. This further limits the number of children to whom the agency can respond.

Compounding the increased safety challenges at-risk children are facing is the unrealistic expectation that these children will have the resources and support with which to succeed in a virtual learning environment in the weeks ahead. Stark contrasts in our school districts plans for addressing COVID-19 related school closures run the risk of exacerbating longstanding achievement gaps between Connecticuts low-income students and their more affluent peers.

As we implement emergency measures to protect our economy, we must also consider additional measures to protect the health, safety and access to education for our states most vulnerable children. Connecticut Court Appointed Special Advocates stands ready to do our part. Our programs train and supervise citizen volunteers to work one to one with children who have experienced abuse or neglect. Under Connecticuts 2016 CASA Statute, any child who is under the courts jurisdiction because of abuse or neglect is eligible for a CASA volunteer. CASA program leaders have worked tirelessly in recent weeks to shift volunteer training to an exclusively online curriculum so we can continue training new volunteers as long as social distancing policies persist. Existing volunteers are quickly adapting to engaging with children by phone or through video conference.

Our volunteers can help ensure that urgent safety risks are readily brought to DCFs attention. They can keep in close touch with children who are not an urgent safety risk but who will benefit from the extra support of a consistent adult to add stability to their lives. They can also offer routine academic accountability to take pressure off parents and caregivers who dont have the capacity to provide that kind of support. We typically require volunteers to check in with the child they support monthly at a minimum. We can increase the frequency of contact to accommodate increased needs through this crisis.

We have to take dramatic action to protect the public from this new, alarmingly contagious virus. As you look for ways to have an impact, in addition to social distancing, please consider donating to local nonprofits like Connecticut CASA. With proper funding, we are equipped to share the load with state agencies and keep our most vulnerable children not only safe, but emotionally supported, through this unprecedented period of social isolation. We must also pursue creative collaboration across agencies and organizations to address this growing child welfare crisis. If we come together to forge joint solutions in pursuit of shared goals, we will achieve more meaningful outcomes for the children and families relying on our help.

Lauren Gibbons Messner is executive director of Connecticut CASA Association.
(Natural News) As more governors and mayors issue stay-at-home orders in the wake of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak that include mandatory orders to close non-essential businesses, weve begun to see a pattern here.

Most of the city and state leaders issuing the orders are from Left-wing, Democrat-run jurisdictions.

But were also seeing another pattern: Increasingly, gun stores are being placed into the non-essential category and ordered closed, even as the virus spread threatens to get out of hand while grocery store shelves go bare and the stock market tanks  leaving Americans more vulnerable to chaos and death by disorder.

As local Fox11 reported Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Office, acting on orders from mayors and governors, has begun ordering gun shops closed for an indefinite period of time  until the stay-at-home orders are lifted, which is impossible to know at this point.

The local station reported:

In a sit-down interview with FOX 11, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva declared gun stores as nonessential businesses that will be forced to close.

Sheriff Villanueva also said hes adding 1,300 deputies to patrol, that hes released 1,700 nonviolent inmates from county jails, and criticized how local politicians have handled the messaging behind the numerous stay-at-home orders.

This is about taking care of people, not elected officials or politicians, he said, adding that press conferences held to discuss the spread of the virus and what officials are planning to do are often long on congratulatory phrases and short on actually dissemination of important information.

We will be closing them, they are not an essential function

When I see the same faces and theyre saying a lot but theres no substance, you eventually become background noise and people just tune you out, he said.

He pointed out that until Monday of this week, neither he nor any other law enforcement officials had been invited to or included in any Los Angeles County coronavirus press conferences. He said he believes that most residents have simply stopped listening to the chattering classes in officialdom. And he intimated that the decision to close gun stores was made without any participation from his department or other police agencies. (Related: There may be 10 million Americans infected with the coronavirus right now, based on the trend of confirmed fatalities.)

When were communicating the shelter in place or the safer at home, theres a lot of anguish, however, the people who have to enforce it are public safety, and we were totally out of the process, we were not involved, he said.

But what he also said about gun stores is disturbing.

We will be closing them, they are not an essential function, Villanueva told Fox11. Im a supporter of the 2nd amendment, Im a gun owner myself, but now you have the mixture of people that are not formerly gun owners and you have a lot more people at home and anytime you introduce a firearm in a home, from what I understand from CDC studies, it increases fourfold the chance that someone is gonna get shot.

Hes not the only legal authority to deem gun stores non-essential.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court approved mandatory gun store closures as part of coronavirus-related shut-downs of businesses.

The order to shut down gun stores was part of a larger plan set forth by the states Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, mandating the closure of businesses not deemed life-sustaining. Gun-rights advocates asked the states Supreme Court to block the order as it applied to gun retailers, but the seven-member court denied the request, the site reported.

So, just to make this crystal clear, what were seeing from local officials in times of declared emergencies that the Second Amendments shall not be infringed clause isnt a hard-and-fast requirement but merely a suggestion that can be ignored.

This is dangerous.

Sources include:

FreeBeacon.com

FoxLA.com

NaturalNews.com
TIGO Tanzania, a unit of Millicom International Cellular, bids to go public has reached over 80 per cent and share sales may start before the second quarter ends.

However, experts raised doubt of staging initial public offer (IPO) roadshow due to the coronavirus pandemic that limited public gathering in the country.

According to the sources close to Tigo IPO issuance matter, the prospectus preparations are almost ready and only minute details remains to be dealt at.

Tigo public share is almost readyat 80 per cent and IPO may take off before end of June, the source told 'Daily News' yesterday.

The source said I dont have the specific date yet, but the process has reached an advanced stagethey are currently working on a few final issues before the IPO is announced.

The source, however, said the IPO may be delayed by public ban on gathering after the country register 12 cases of the deadly virus disease.

The virus may delay the IPO since road show will depend heavily on experts containing the contagion before the government 30 days public gathering ban, the source said.

Since last year media has been reported possible date of Tigos IPO but failed to materialise ever since. However, the source is certain this time around the primary will go through in this first half.

If Tigo IPO sailed through it will become the second telecom to list on DSE after Vodacom successful raised 476bn/-in 2017.

Amendment to the Electronic and Postal Communications Act of 2010 made it a legal requirement for the countrys telecoms operators to float 25 per cent of their shares on the DSE.

Tigo plans were, however, delayed by a legal dispute over ownership which was decided late last year.

Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TRCA) latest data showed Tigo is the third largest telecom in the country controlling 26.3 per cent of total subscribers in the country.

Tigo had 12.57 million subscribers at the end of quarter four of last year.

The largest telco was Vodacom controlling 33 per cent of market share with 15.67 million subscribers followed by Airtel with 26.6 per cent share and 12.72million customers.

Tanzania has seven telecommunication companies. Others are Halotel controlling 10 per cent and TTCL and Zantel commanding 2.0 per cent each while Smile is below 1.0 per cent.
Pastor Tony Spell disregarded a state-wide order to not hold gatherings larger than 50 people.

WVLA

Pastor Tony Spell, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, held a service for 400 people at his Apostolic Life Tabernacle Church on Tuesday.

He also held a service on Sunday, where he had 1,000 people show up.

Spell's decision to hold services disregarded a state-wide order to not hold gatherings larger than 50 people.

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A Louisiana pastor has defied state-wide orders not to hold large gatherings multiple times this week by hosting services for hundreds of people, and he says he has no plans to stop.

Pastor Tony Spell, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, told CNN reporter Daniel Burke that he held a service at his Apostolic Life Tabernacle Church for 400 people on Tuesday. On Sunday he held one for more than 1,000.

"If they close every door in this city, then I will close my doors," Spell told CNN on Tuesday. "But you can't say the retailers are essential but the church is not. That is a persecution of the faith."

Spell told CNN that he believes the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has infected 436,000 worldwide, and more than 26,000 in the United States, is "politically motivated." It's unclear what exactly he meant.

Louisiana Governor Jim Bel Edwards issued an order earlier this month that banned groups of 50 or more from congregating. On Sunday he urged residents to stay home, and to only leave when necessary.

Edwards told CNN affiliate WVLA: "I would urge that faith leaders ... heed this directive and not necessarily engage in mass gatherings where this coronavirus can spread."

Still, Spell decided to go forward with his services, where he served lunches and carried out water baptisms.

He told WVLA that pastors should act as first responders in the pandemic when paramedics and law enforcement "can't get there."

Spell said he's still trying to follow social distancing guidelines  he said he's holding the services outside and making parishioners stand six feet apart.

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Photos of Sunday's service shared by CNN, however, show parishioners hugging and touching under a tent.

Spell has no plans of stopping the services, even while other churches have put measures in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19, including a drive-thru confessional at a Maryland Catholic church and a drive-in service in Ohio. Some churches are even live streaming services for their congregations.

A Change.org petition has been launched calling for Spell to be charged with reckless endangerment.

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Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison said Wednesday he's been personally buying shares of the home improvement retailer during the difficult times of the coronavirus outbreak because he's optimistic about the future.

"I'm a believer in my company," CEO Marvin Ellison told CNBC's Jim Cramer. "I'm here for the long term."

"We think that we will create a great value and we'll create a great opportunity for shareholder value over the long term," Ellison said in the "Mad Money" interview. "As CEO, if I don't have confidence in the company, then I don't know who will."

Earlier Wednesday, Ellison told CNBC that Lowe's has seen an increase across nearly every store category as customers not only stock up on cleaning supplies, but fix up and maintain their homes.

Ellison also commended employees who are working hard in stressful circumstances. Lowe's staff has been helping customers with urgent home repairs, delivering refrigerators, fixing leaking pipes or electrical problems, he said.

Lowe's announced Wednesday that it will give special payments of $300 to full-time employees and $150 to part-time and seasonal employees to express the company's appreciation.

The company is extending emergency paid leave for up to four weeks for people who are at a higher risk of COVID-19.

It is offering free telemedicine to all employees and their families, even if they are not enrolled in the company's health benefits, Ellison said.

Lowe's also committed $25 million to relief efforts for its employees and the business community, including a $10 million donation of protective products to medical professionals.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that the Lowe's CEO was talking about his personal purchase of company shares during the coronavirus downturn.
Police at the scene on Galgorm Road in Ballymena

Detectives investigating the murder of a man in Ballymena are trying to trace a man and woman who may hold information on the crime.

Inayat Shah (67), who ran the Traveller's Rest at Galgorm Road, was stabbed to death on Saturday.

A 51-year-old man has been remanded in custody charged with Mr Shah's murder.

In a fresh appeal for information, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Montgomery said police were particularly keen to trace two people.

"Our investigation into the murder of Inayat Shah continues and I would like to make a specific appeal at this time to a man and woman who spoke with security staff at the front sangar of Ballymena PSNI station on Saturday afternoon," he said.

"The man and woman, who were accompanied by a small child, spoke briefly to security at around 3.30pm."

Anyone with information on the murder can contact detectives at Seapark on 101 quoting reference 863 of 21/03/20, or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Thursday spoke to Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani and urged him to ensure availability of essential commodities for migrants from Rajasthan.

He said that the Union cabinet secretary has given instructions to completely stop the movement of migrants between different states in view of the lockdown.

In such a situation, the movement of the poor and labourers from Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Delhi will be stopped, Gehlot said



This movement is also not appropriate in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, the chief minister said.

State governments concerned should ensure the availability of food, water and medical facilities to people wherever they are, he said.

Rajasthan Medical and Health Minister Raghu Sharma said that thousands of people from neighbouring states are walking down to their homes.

They are being screened at the border, he said.

The minister said intensive screening is also being done and people are being quarantined if needed, Sharma said.

Following the nationwide lockdown that came into force from Wednesday, unemployed people from neighbouring states are walking to their homes in Sirohi, Jalore, Banswara and Dungarpur areas, he said.

Sharma said the number of coronavirus positive cases has increased in the last three to four days.

The government is paying special attention to the districts of Bhilwara, Jhunjhunu, Jaipur, Jodhpur and Pratapgarh, the health minister said.

He said that out of about 28 lakh people of Bhilwara, 24 lakh people have been screened by the health department.

The government has prepared one lakh quarantine beds in the state. The facility of investigation of suspects was earlier confined to five districts, but has now been expanded to nine districts in Rajasthan, Sharma said.

He said that a list of 735 doctors has been submitted to CMHO for appointment of doctors as per the requirement in different districts of the state.

Sharma said an amount of Rs 1 crore has been given to the collector for meeting emergencies in Jaipur district. Fund of Rs 75 lakh has been given to the district collectors of divisional headquarters and Rs 50 lakh to other district collectors, he said. PTI AG



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Ebro Foods, S.A. (BME:EBRO) is about to trade ex-dividend in the next 3 days. Investors can purchase shares before the 30th of March in order to be eligible for this dividend, which will be paid on the 1st of April.

Ebro Foods's next dividend payment will be 0.15 per share, and in the last 12 months, the company paid a total of 0.57 per share. Based on the last year's worth of payments, Ebro Foods stock has a trailing yield of around 3.3% on the current share price of 17.42. Dividends are an important source of income to many shareholders, but the health of the business is crucial to maintaining those dividends. So we need to investigate whether Ebro Foods can afford its dividend, and if the dividend could grow.

Check out our latest analysis for Ebro Foods

Dividends are typically paid out of company income, so if a company pays out more than it earned, its dividend is usually at a higher risk of being cut. Ebro Foods paid out 70% of its earnings to investors last year, a normal payout level for most businesses. A useful secondary check can be to evaluate whether Ebro Foods generated enough free cash flow to afford its dividend. It paid out 97% of its free cash flow in the form of dividends last year, which is outside the comfort zone for most businesses. Cash flows are usually much more volatile than earnings, so this could be a temporary effect - but we'd generally want look more closely here.

Ebro Foods paid out less in dividends than it reported in profits, but unfortunately it didn't generate enough cash to cover the dividend. Were this to happen repeatedly, this would be a risk to Ebro Foods's ability to maintain its dividend.

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

BME:EBRO Historical Dividend Yield March 26th 2020

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

When earnings decline, dividend companies become much harder to analyse and own safely. If earnings decline and the company is forced to cut its dividend, investors could watch the value of their investment go up in smoke. That's why it's not ideal to see Ebro Foods's earnings per share have been shrinking at 3.3% a year over the previous five years.

Story continues

Another key way to measure a company's dividend prospects is by measuring its historical rate of dividend growth. Ebro Foods has seen its dividend decline 5.5% per annum on average over the past ten years, which is not great to see. It's never nice to see earnings and dividends falling, but at least management has cut the dividend rather than potentially risk the company's health in an attempt to maintain it.

To Sum It Up

Should investors buy Ebro Foods for the upcoming dividend? Ebro Foods had an average payout ratio, but its free cash flow was lower and earnings per share have been declining. Bottom line: Ebro Foods has some unfortunate characteristics that we think could lead to sub-optimal outcomes for dividend investors.

So if you're still interested in Ebro Foods despite it's poor dividend qualities, you should be well informed on some of the risks facing this stock. Case in point: We've spotted 2 warning signs for Ebro Foods you should be aware of.

We wouldn't recommend just buying the first dividend stock you see, though. Here's a list of interesting dividend stocks with a greater than 2% yield and an upcoming dividend.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
When the governor of Connecticut ordered all restaurants in the state to close on March 16, Colt Taylor quickly applied for a disaster loan from the Small Business Administration and called an emergency meeting to tell the 31 employees at his two restaurants that he could no longer pay them.

Before all that, Mr. Taylor had gone online and set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for his unemployed staff.

GoFundMe, which allows anyone 13 or older to raise money for almost any cause, has become a go-to for emergency fund-raising, especially in the wake of disaster. As the new coronavirus has created unforeseen expenses for most Americans and shut down the U.S. economy, the platform is facing the greatest demand it has seen since its founding in 2010.

Between March 20 and March 24, the number of coronavirus-related campaigns on GoFundMe shot up by 60 percent, from 22,000 to 35,000. The stories told on those fund-raising pages convey the breadth of destruction that the new coronavirus has wreaked  grieving families facing costs for funerals that few will be able to attend, food pantries stretched thin, and unemployed artists, bartenders, substitute teachers and manicurists simply trying to survive.
Royal watchers are worried about the possibility that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have contracted the coronavirus following Prince Charles positive test results. The royals just confirmed that Charles, 71, has contracted COVID-19 and is now in self-quarantine. Given how Charles recently appeared in public with Harry and Meghan, fans are wondering if they are at risk as well.

Prince Charles with Prince William, Kate Middleton, Prince Harry, and Meghan Markle | Phil Harris/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Prince Charles tests positive for coronavirus

Buckingham Palace recently confirmed that Charles has tested positive for COVID-19. The royals do not know how Charles contracted the virus, mainly because of the number of people he has come into contact with over the past few weeks.

While Charles is in the early stages of the virus, the palace assured royal watchers that he is in self-isolation and is doing well. The Prince of Wales is currently at Birkhall, where he is expected to remain for several weeks.

Prince Charles did not jump the queue for a coronavirus test, UK says https://t.co/Xl475qICf8 pic.twitter.com/dmrnjvPee4  Reuters (@Reuters) March 26, 2020

Exactly when a person becomes contagious remains uncertain, but doctors believe that Prince Charles could have been passing the virus along as early as March 13. According to Express, this is one day after Charles visited Queen Elizabeth.

Doctors most conservative estimate is that the Prince is likely to have been contagious from around March 13  the day after he carried out his last official public engagement, royal correspondent Rhiannon Mills shared.

This timeline has raised concerns over other members of the royal family who may have come in contact with Charles. His wife, Camilla Parker Bowles, has tested negative for the coronavirus and is distancing herself from him.

When was Prince Charles last public engagement?

The last time Charles took part in a public engagement was on March 12. The Prince of Wales was present for a dinner at Mansion House in support of a bushfire relief charity.

At some point prior to the dinner, Charles and Queen Elizabeth held a private meeting at Buckingham Palace. It is unclear what the two discussed, but that puts Charles and Her Majesty in the same room a day before doctors believe he was contagious.

The doctors are not 100 percent positive when Prince Charles may have been contagious, and we still do not know if he and Queen Elizabeth made any physical contact. Charles has been avoiding handshakes in recent weeks, so it is likely that they observed social distancing measures.

Charles has reportedly been in contact with his two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, who have been very supportive. Harry, of course, is currently in Canada with his wife, Meghan Markle, and son, Archie Harrison.

Fans worry about Prince Harry and Meghan Markles health

Following the announcement, fans raised concerns about Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussexs, health. The couple wrapped up their final round of public engagements on March 9, when they appeared alongside Prince Charles at the Commonwealth Day service.

Did Harry know and Meghan know? If Charles got this thing thats like all the Royals got to be in danger now surely #CoronavirusLockdown, one fan wrote, while another added, He better stay the F away from her majesty the queen and Prince Harry and the amazing Meghan Markle.

Meghan lays down the law and forbids Harry from going back to UK to see coronavirus-infected Prince Charles https://t.co/6pMVZTPcqM  Daily Mail U.K. (@DailyMailUK) March 25, 2020

Meghan immediately returned to Canada after the event. Harry reunited with his family a few days later. The Sussexes have been in Canada ever since and are now self-isolating as a precaution against the coronavirus pandemic.

Considering how doctors believe that Prince Charles was not contagious until March 13, Harry and Meghan had a very low risk of contracting the coronavirus from him.

Even still, there is always the possibility that they got the virus from somebody else, as we still do not know how Charles contracted it in the first place. Hopefully, Harry and Meghan are safe and are in good health.

Has Queen Elizabeth been tested?

With Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth being in the same room a day before he was contagious, royal experts believe that Her Majesty should get tested just in case.

According to Express, royal expert Sarah Campbell raised the question about Queen Elizabeth being tested, especially considering how she is in her 90s. If Her Majesty contracted the disease, there is a high chance that she would suffer serious side effects.

This does beg the question has the Queen been tested, Campbell stated. The statement on Prince Charles has just been released and we are expecting to get some more details about this.

The royal family has taken precautions against getting the coronavirus. Last week, the royals canceled several events and are expected to make more cancelations unless the pandemic takes a major turn for the good.

Queen Elizabeth has also left Buckingham Palace as is currently staying at Windsor Castle with Prince Philip. The two are no longer accepting audiences and are expected to remain out of the public eye for several weeks.

Prince Charles is in self-quarantine in Scotland.
The Court of Appeal in Abuja, on Wednesday, dismissed an appeal filed by Slok Nigeria Limited challenging the jurisdiction of the Federal High Court, Lagos, which convicted former Abia State governor, Orji Uzor-Kalu.

Mr Kalu, a serving senator, was jailed alongside Udeh Udeogu, his Director of Finance and Accounts at the Abia State Government House during Mr Kalus tenure.

The former governor was sentenced to 12 years in prison for stealing public funds while in office. Mr Udeogu was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

A third defendant, Mr Kalus company, Slok Nigeria Limited, was ordered to be wound up and its assets forfeited to the Nigerian government.

They were convicted for defrauding the Government of Abia State when Mr Kalu was governor.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission(EFCC) had brought the criminal charge against the duo for conspiring and diverting N7.65 billion from the coffers of the state.

After their conviction, Slok and Mr Udeogu filed an appeal on technical grounds. They claimed that the Federal High Court in Lagos did not have the power to try them because that was not where the offence was committed.

The appellants were Slok and Mr Udeogu while the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, Federal Republic of Nigeria, the EFCC and Mr Kalu were respondents respectively.

However, the argument of the appellants was rejected by the court of appeal. The three judges who presided said in a judgement delivered by one of them, Olabisi Ige, that the appeal was lacking in merit, Punch Newspaper reported.

READ ALSO:

Justice Ige held that section 98(3) and (4) of Administration of Criminal Justice Act(ACJA) 2015, were not applicable to the appellants case.

The appellate court held that a petition must relate to an allegation of wrongdoing by the trial judge.

Nothing is perverted with the decision of the trial court. The complaint of the appellants is a non-issue.

If a court has jurisdiction/power, the fact of doing so under a wrong law is no reason to set it aside. The rights of the appellants were not infringed, the judge said.

The appellate court further held that the appellants did not show mala side (bad faith) by the chief judge and EFCC.

The court added that there was no element of forum-shopping in the case.

The judges upheld the judgement of the lower court, meaning Messrs Kalu and Udeogu will continue to serve their jail terms while Slok would be wound up as ordered by the lower court.
MASSENA, NY  The spillway gates are open at the Long Sault Dam on the mighty St. Lawrence River. Below, mist throws a tiny rainbow in the sunlight as the relentless force of water escaping five inland seas billows into a static roar.

Water rushing over the dam is an unusual sight. For most of its 61 years, the gates have been closed to divert the river flow to the dams electricity-generating companion, the Moses-Saunders Power Dam, about three miles downstream.

But these are extraordinary times along the Great Lakes. High water records are falling throughout the region less than a decade after the lakes hit record lows. Millions are being spent to combat erosion threatening homes and infrastructure. The annual St. Lawrence Seaway opening is delayed by efforts to drop levels on Lake Ontario  the first time in decades such efforts have impeded movement of goods on the lakes.

On the St. Lawrence River, dam operators are attempting to carefully drain Lake Ontario and, by extension, lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan and Superior in a complicated, and lately, controversial process that engineers liken to emptying a series of bathtubs through a straw.

Everything that comes through the Great Lakes eventually ends up here, says Patrick Davis, regional manager for the New York Power Authoritys St. Lawrence River dams.

Were the valve at the end of everything.

That valve has been open wide this year. A mild winter and minimal ice cover helped the international agency which controls outflow pass record volumes through in January and February. The flow averaged 368,300 cubic-feet of water per-second through Long Sault and the Moses-Saunders dams during the initial weeks of 2020. For comparison, thats more than four times the average annual flow over Niagara Falls.

Unfortunately, efforts to pass more flow havent made much dent. Theres simply too much water. Last year, Lakes Erie and Ontario each broke all-time record high marks. Lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron each came within about an inch of record highs set more than 30 years ago in the mid-1980s. The last time Erie or Ontario hit such levels, in 1918, Woodrow Wilson was president and women werent yet allowed to vote.

The lakes are in uncharted territory and signs point to another year of extremes. Levels never saw their typical decline in the fall or winter. In fact, Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie set new monthly records in February. Another wetter-than-normal spring is expected. Seasonal rise across the lakes has already begun. Hydrologists predict water levels in 2020 will peak at or near those seen last year, in large part because water is entering the system in record volumes.

Last year was the wettest on record in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, and precipitation was well above average for every other state and province in the watershed. That, coupled with increasingly intense storms and rainfall, is seen as evidence that climate change, not just natural historical variability, is fueling the rapid swing from low to high water.

It wasnt long ago people worried about too little water in the lakes, not too much. Lake levels bottomed out in 2013. The water started its persistent climb in 2014 after a 15-year span of lows that was the longest in recorded history for several lakes. Now, the high-water is sending the roughly 4.2 million people who live within two miles of the coast scrambling.

Youd better get your butt in gear, said Ron Wilson, a Manistee, Michigan, cottage owner and president of the Great Lakes Coalition for Shoreline Preservation. The group has been pushing state regulators to expedite permitting for seawall repairs and other efforts to combat the storm-driven erosion that has sent homes tumbling off lakeside bluffs.

Its going to be hard to find a contractor in the spring if you wait, Wilson said. There are people you can find, but youve got to act now to get in line.

Along miles of shoreline, high water carries major price tag

The 10,000-mile Great Lakes shoreline winds around eight U.S. states and Canada. Across the region, contractors are booking into the fall to move or demolish homes, or repair and install seawalls, revetments, riprap and other rock armor thats being used to protect beaches and near-shore structures from the relentless waves.

Shoreline armoring continues despite the economic downturn and social distancing caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

But the lake is affecting more than just homes on the beach. Coastal towns were already sweating the potential impact on tourism from sand loss and event cancelations before the outbreak. Many are juggling the potential revenue decline with the rising cost of infrastructure repairs.

In Minnesota, the city of Duluth wants $13.5 million in state bond dollars to reinforce waterfront infrastructure, such as the popular Lakewalk, which is crumbling under Lake Superiors onslaught. In Pennsylvania, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is spending more than $3 million to replenish sand lost to Lake Erie at Presque Isle State Park.

In Wisconsin, scientists, authorities and conservation groups are trying to build an artificial reef structure to blunt Lake Michigans appetite for the Kenosha Dunes. The natural area is disappearing so quickly that some fear it could vanish within five years if erosion continues unabated.

In Michigan, transportation officials estimate long term costs of repairs and rerouting some roads away from problem areas could reach $100 million. The Michigan Municipal League estimates high water has already caused $63.7 million in damages to public land and infrastructure along the states 3,288 miles of shoreline.

In testimony before state lawmakers, Ludington city manager Mitchell Foster expressed frustration at the prospect of paying millions to protect critical infrastructure from flooding and erosion when the lakes are going to recede again. What kind of infrastructure are we going to put in thats not going to be a waste of time and money in four years? Foster said.

Shoreline residents, officials and some lawmakers have been pushing for state emergency or disaster declarations. In some states, theyre getting them. Wisconsin and Illinois declared emergencies along the lakeshore in February, opening the door to federal funds to combat erosion. In Illinois, the Chicago mayors office estimated a January storm caused $37 million in damages. In Wisconsin, damages in three shoreline counties was pegged at $10 million.

Other states have been more circumspect about a declaration. Indiana officials say there isnt enough damage to public resources along Lake Michigan to warrant federal relief. Michigan has also refrained. Gov. Gretchen Whitmers administration says counties havent exhausted their own resources, the threat is mostly to private property and legalities make erosion difficult to define in disaster terms because it doesnt have a defined timeline.

Lakeshore residents are finding a sympathetic ear in state and federal lawmakers. Ohio legislation that took effect last year lets property owners finance erosion protection efforts through a voluntary special assessment. Michigan legislators are considering whether to let contractors armor the shoreline without a permit. Wisconsin lawmakers want to create a revolving loan program for homeowners and municipalities to invest in erosion mitigation.

In Washington, D.C., the Congressional homeland security committee unanimously approved a bill this month that would offer any shoreline community access to $300 million in a low-interest revolving loan funding. U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., said every dollar spent on preparedness will save taxpayers $6 in repair costs. The proposed funding would not be available to individual homeowners.

Once these loans are set up, we should be able to provide support to communities in a much more efficient manner than under current federal operating programs, Peters said.

Coastal flooding felt acutely along Lake Ontario

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency last spring and pledged $300 million to dredge bays, rebuild roads and sewers, armor the shore and assist Lake Ontario homeowners through a special commission.

Lake Ontario coastal flooding has rekindled longstanding debates across the region about government management of water levels. Civil works like the St. Lawrence River control dams and other manmade changes to the natural flow  such as the Lake Michigan diversion through the Chicago River and two dams in northern Ontario that divert water from the Hudson Bay watershed into Lake Superior  have come back under the spotlight.

Thats not all Mother Nature out there, said Doug Dobson, gesturing to the lake that battered his seawall to pieces and forced him to kayak down his Greece, N.Y. street to help neighbors get the mail. Its manmade. The water is held back by a manmade plan. Water coming in from diversions is manmade. And climate change is a manmade effect.

Doug Dobson, vice president of the Lake Ontario St. Lawrence River Alliance (LOSLRA), and his wife, Judy, pose for a picture inside their home in Greece, New York, on Friday, Jan. 31, 2020. Their property has sustained damage from Lake Ontario water levels.Cory Morse | MLive.com

Lake Ontario is unique among the Great Lakes. Its water levels are managed and cannot influence the upstream system because the cliffs at Niagara Falls prohibit backflow into Lake Erie. The International Joint Commission (IJC), a binational agency created in 1909 to help resolve boundary water disputes between the U.S. and Canada, regulates lake outflows through the St. Lawrence River dams under a controversial plan that took effect in early 2017 just months before severe flooding struck the coastline.

That water regulation plan, named Plan 2014, has angered lakefront property owners and politicians whove accused the IJC of failing to adequately manage the lake. Cuomos administration sued the agency last fall. The IJC blames the flooding on abnormally wet conditions, but, under mounting pressure, it recently announced creation of an advisory board to review the plan. The IJC has been deviating from the plan in recent months to increase lake outflows.

Bill Werick is a technical advisor who sits on the IJCs lake management committee. He helped draft the plan and denies it caused the recent flooding. Rather, the problem is the result of excessive rainfall and inflow from Lake Erie, he said.

There are cycles in the lake and we were overdue for a high water cycle, Werick said. We know with a fair degree of certainty the plan had no role in the 2017 floods.

Politicians like Cuomo, he said, are pretending to blame us.

Werick says Plan 2014 aims to juggle competing interests. The shipping industry opposes increased outflows because they quicken the St. Lawrence current, making navigation difficult. Downstream cities like Montreal say more water escaping Lake Ontario will flood their area  which also contends with inflow from the Ottawa River, a major St. Lawrence tributary.

Coastal residents argue the IJC is too deferential to downstream concerns. Bernard Gigas, a technical advisor to the Lake Ontario St. Lawrence River Alliance, says Plan 2014 results in fewer impacts and shorter flooding in Montreal compared to the Ontario coast.

If you think thats balanced, then you must be from Quebec, Gigas said.

The wettest conditions weve ever experienced

Although the lakes are swallowing shorelines these days, scientists say the region doesnt face the type of long-term sea level rise that climate change is bringing to marine coastlines. Instead, impact on the Great Lakes may be felt through extreme variations in lake levels occurring on a tighter timeframe than most are used to.

It was only about six years ago that Lakes Michigan and Huron hit their record low of 576.02 feet in January 2013. Since then, the surge has been dramatic. The first couple years were the most rapid rate of water level rise ever recorded. The two lakes (which are treated as one for hydrologic purposes) reached a near-record high of 581.92 feet in July 2019.

Thats a 5-foot, 9-inch rise in average monthly lake levels in the same amount of time it takes a kid to reach first grade. By comparison, it took 22 years for Michigan and Huron to rise more than five feet from the record low in 1964 to the record high of 582.35 feet in 1986.

Experts say the lakes are feeling the effects of long-term, increased precipitation that has lasted several decades while evaporation rates have varied. Soggy conditions today align with forecast models developed to account for climate change.

The best explanation is not just natural variability, said Andrew Gronewold, a professor at the University of Michigan and former federal scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Ann Arbor and who studies lake level fluctuation.

Were dealing with unprecedented conditions with regard to precipitation and soil moisture across the region, he said. These are the wettest conditions weve ever experienced.

Its almost indefensible to say climate change had nothing to do with it, Gronewold said. Climate change has everything to do with our natural environment right now.

Related: Read MLive coverage of the Great Lakes

Water floods the area around a picnic table at Presque Isle State Park in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020. Cory Morse | MLive.com

On a typical month-to-month scale, the primary forces driving water level changes are precipitation over the lakes, evaporation, and overland runoff water entering through tributaries. Precipitation pushes lake levels up while evaporation pulls them down.

But Gronewold said the tug-of-war between those forces appears to be getting stronger. In January 2014, precipitation brought a ringer and won the fight. A huge mass of arctic air known as the polar vortex dipped south into the United States for months, bringing a wave of extremely frigid air to the region that froze the lakes over.

Huge arctic air masses have major impact on Great Lakes hydrology. They drop water temperatures, cause ice formation and slow evaporation. Gronewold said the polar vortex halted a multi-year period of high evaporation that pushed lake levels downward, allowing precipitation to help drive the lakes on their steady march upward.

Reduced evaporation should help maintain high levels this year, said Lauren Fry, lead lake level forecaster at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Detroit District office. Even though winter has been mild and ice cover minimal, the temperature difference between lake water and the air has also been low, resulting in low evaporation and energy exchange.

A melting snowpack over the region should also help.

Were definitely looking at another tough year, Fry said. To drop the lakes back to average water levels would require an extended period of extremely dry conditions, and that alone might not be enough to restore balance this year. Even if we saw the driest 12-month water level sequence weve ever seen, well still be pretty well above average.

Manmade diversions send water into Lake Superior

One thing that scientists such as Fry and Gronewold dont believe has significant impact on lake levels are manmade alterations to the natural flow.

Shoreline property groups disagree. They are lobbying the IJC to step-in and halt the flow through two dams in northern Ontario, which divert water into Lake Superior that would otherwise naturally flow into Hudson Bay. The dams are known as the Ogoki and Long Lac diversions.

The IJC says the dams, which are operated by Ontario Power Generation, have a minimal impact on lake levels. The agency points to a 1988 report commissioned after the last high water period, which concluded that halting the diversions would drop levels on Lake Michigan and Huron by two to three inches. The effect would take a couple years to be noticed.

Similar to Lake Ontario, the outflow from Lake Superior is regulated by the IJC through a lake control board, which operates according to a plan named Plan 2012. The flow is managed through a gated dam in Sault Ste. Marie. Like the St. Lawrence River dams, flows through the St. Marys Compensating Works have been higher than normal this winter.

The arguments made by groups like Restore Our Water International (ROWI) echo those made by counterparts along Lake Ontario  that the agency is favoring Lake Superior interests above those on those lower lakes. The group is asking state and provincial governors to issue disaster declarations and is threatening litigation.

We have pleaded with (the IJC) that allowing inflows into the Great Lakes during this crisis is unconscionable," said ROWI co-chair Roger Gauthier, a retired Army Corps hydrologist living near Cheboygan. "They have ignored our legitimate complaints. Is our only recourse to sue them to do their jobs?

By and large, lake level scientists tend to back up the IJC. The control that Mother Nature has on the situation is really quite a bit more than what humans can actually exert, Fry said.

Lake Michigan erosion claimed Patricia "Tish" Gancer's beach house, pictured on Thursday, Jan. 2, 2020, in White River Township, near Montague, Mich.Cory Morse | MLive.com

In Manistee, Wilson countered that inches matter when the lake threatens to swallow your home. Anything that would reduce water in the lakes  even selling it to arid regions, a controversial idea thats a non-starter for many  is worth considering, he said.

It may not seem much for the people in their ivory towers, but for the people facing the high water and the storm effects, well take any amount of reduction we can, he said.

Shoreline communities wrestle with unruly lakes

Any reduction in Lake Superior levels would be welcome to Paula Carrick.

The lake is creeping closer to the small Bay Mills tribal burial ground near Sault Ste. Marie in Michigans Upper Peninsula. The cultural site includes mass graves that date back to intertribal battles of the 1600s. The closest graves are about 30 feet from the water now. And theyre shallow, buried as little as three feet in some spots.

Its really starting to wash out with the water being so high, said Carrick, tribal historian. Passing ships exacerbate the problem by creating waves. Its hitting where the burials are and kind of getting scary. I keep checking to make sure nothing is coming out.

In Rogers City, Mayor Scott McLennan gets emotional talking about the impact Lake Huron is having on his city. The harbor breakwall is damaged. Trails are washed out. The beach is gone.

We watched our beaches this past summer erode away, he said. On some stretches, the water comes up and laps against brush. You used to be able to stretch a towel out. That wont even be an option this summer unless the water drops significantly.

In New Buffalo, Warwick Shores condominiums used to feature a 100-foot beach on Lake Michigan. Thats gone. So are steps to the water and a deck that neighbors used to watch the sunset. This winter, the shoreline featured an excavator, boulders and a work boat. All were part of a $4.5 million effort to re-build a stone revetment to protect the bluffs.

The U.S. Army Corps says sand loss in the New Buffalo area is significant and began before the lake began to really rise. Warwick resident Karen Kingsley says people who dismiss the problem facing shoreline residents dont realized how much the lakeshore has changed.

We werent built that close to the lake to start with, she said.

In Ontario, Canada, Gary McNamara worries about a flood that might stick around.

McNamara, mayor of Tecumseh in Essex County, estimated 5,000 households could be flooded if Lake St. Clair breached the city. If the water surges into homes through storm sewers, that could inundate another 2,000 homes.

Essex County has 100 miles of shoreline in southwest Ontario. Its right across the river from Detroit and borders both Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. Municipal leaders have been mapping low-lying areas, identifying vulnerable populations, buying sandbags, armoring the shoreline and making plans to evacuate the area, if it comes to that.

In 2019, the area was under a flood watch or warning for 182 days. If the water rises and stays up, McNamara says pumping stations used during flash floods wont help because they cant operate in perpetuity. You cant pump the lake."

If theres anything that keeps me awake at night, its that close to 50 percent of the municipality could be in harms way, McNamara said. We are flat as a pancake and surrounded by water. Right now, the only thing holding it back is the berms and breakwalls.

Across the lake in Ohio, windy days on Lake Erie can spell trouble now in Port Clinton, which sits at the mouth of the Portage River about 45 mile east of Toledo.

Water levels can rise and fall rapidly in Port Clinton when a wind-driven phenomenon called a seiche sloshes the lake water back-and-forth along Lake Eries long, shallow axis. It happened frequently last year and can cause the lake to rise inches in a matter of minutes.

Lake Erie seiche debris at Times Beach Nature Preserve in Buffalo, New York, on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020. The area sustained damage in 2019 due to seiches combined with record high water levels in the Great Lakes region.Cory Morse | MLive.com

At The Bait House bar and restaurant along the river, owner Don Clemons said water would lap at his patio entrance during extended periods of spring flooding. The bar must close when water gets high. Its a safety hazard when patrons cant differentiate between the patio edge and the river.

People get up and leave, Clemons said. Bartenders close down the bar, take their shoes off and go out the back door.

Other businesses along the river struggled. Every day, it was a battle as to whether or not we could even open our business, said Roy Bemiss, owner of the Great Lakes Popcorn Co. store. Everyone down here in May, June was wading through thigh-high water. It was something.

Port Clinton Mayor Mike Snider has been getting on-the-job training in lake hydrology. As the lake rises, it pushes water into storm sewers and the wastewater plant. On high water days, Snider estimated the city could be treating 20 million gallons  much of it lake water. The city even had to close its beach when erosion uncovered buried utility lines.

Lake Erie is particularly prone to those seiche events due to its orientation from southwest to northeast  its pretty well aligned with our typical wind patterns, said Fry. You often have water stacked up on one side of the lake.

On the other end of the lake, seiches can strike with surprising intensity.

On Halloween, a storm-driven seiche struck with force in Buffalo, N.Y., where high water levels have already caused substantial damages to harbor breakwalls. The storm blasted water across the citys Outer Harbor area, flooding the state park, a controversial residential tower development site and the Times Beach Nature Preserve, which was forced to close from the damage.

Months later, the preserve remained closed. Weathered wood, concrete chunks and other debris littered the waterfront areas near the Buffalo River mouth.

Jay Burney, a Buffalo environmental activist, says smaller seiches are flooding areas that larger seiches hadnt touched before due to deteriorating breakwalls. Burney and others are pushing to expand shoreline green space to help absorb flooding, arguing the former industrial waterfront area known as the Outer Harbor is ideally situated for that purpose.

The group opposed plans to build an apartment tower known as Queens City Landing on the Outer Harbor, arguing that it violated coastal resiliency principles, put people in harms way and would have been a drag on city services because of frequent high-water problems. This month, the developer killed the project.

The future of our city is really going to be characterized by how we handle the high water and these storms driven by climate change, Burney said.

MLive reporter Paula Gardner contributed to this report.

Related stories:

Great Lakes high water is going to affect everyone in Michigan

Michigans shoreline towns struggle to survive Great Lakes high water

Indiana town files federal lawsuit over shoreline erosion

More Great Lakes coverage
The former President of the Musicians Union of Ghana (MUSIGA), Bice Osei Kuffour, aka Obour, has rated himself as having done a good job while serving as the president of the union for eight years, despite claims by some artistes that he was a 'bad' leader.

Artistes such as Shatta Wale, Criss Waddle, Jedu-Blay Ambolley and D-Black have accused Obour of mismanagement, calling on Ghanaians not to vote for him.

The artistes who believe Obour is not 'clean' have started intensive campaign against Obour's decision to contest the parliamentary seat of Asante Akyem South on the ticket of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP).

According to them, until he (Obour) accounted for his stewardship and how the finances of the union were managed, Ghanaians should not vote for him.

In his reaction, Obour said anybody who sought to judge him on his presidency needed to remember the state MUSIGA was in before he took over as its president and what he had done to change the image of the union.

He told ABC News, I came to MUSIGA with a plan and to the best of my understanding and to the best of my abilities, I executed the plan fully.

Reacting to campaign against his parliamentary ambition by some of his colleagues which included Criss Waddle and D-Black, Obour said the people of Asante Akyem and by extension Ghanaians were discerning and could decide who to vote for in the upcoming NPP primaries.

I can sue them for defamation but I feel strongly that people who are discerning will not just join the bandwagon. We know that if people are corrupt, they are prosecuted and I think the whole musician body cannot be fooled. Supposing it is some group saying this, we have the whole musician body.

---Daily Guide
TICKERS: LUG; FTMNF

Source: Streetwise Reports (3/26/20)

Why it is a good time to get into Lundin Gold stock and the company's major move in response to COVID-19 are covered in an Echelon Wealth Partners report.



In a March 23 research note, Echelon Wealth Partners analyst Ryan Walker wrote that the big recent pullback in Lundin Gold Inc. (LUG:TSX; FTMNF:OTCMKTS) stock "represents an excellent entry point as we look for the company to recapture the lost ground post COVID-19 on expectations of gold strength during the balance of 2020 and longer term."

Walker highlighted that with most of Lundin Gold's year-to-date gains gone, a rerating could be imminent. It is well below its recent high of $12.69 achieved when the company became a producer and gold prices were high.

Vancouver-based Lundin recently announced it achieved commercial production at Fruta del Norte, Walker noted. It successfully ramped up production to an average throughput of 70% of mill capacity and maintained that level for 90 consecutive days

Though no coronavirus infections have been reported among workers at Lundin Gold's Fruta del Norte gold mine in Ecuador, the company, in a proactive move, temporarily halted production there in light of COVID-19, reported Walker. To minimize the effects of the shutdown, care and maintenance and special projects will be undertaken until production is resumed.

Walker also relayed that the Ecuadoran government waived for its mining industry the new restrictions on the domestic transport of goods and services initiated due to the coronavirus. Lundin is working with its contractors to ensure the export of its concentrate and dore continues uninterrupted and to secure the goods the company needs.

Echelon has a Buy rating and a CA$12.75 per share price target on Lundin Gold; the stock is trading now at around CA$8.62 per share.

[NLINSERT]

Disclosure:

1) Doresa Banning compiled this article for Streetwise Reports LLC and provides services to Streetwise Reports as an independent contractor. She or members of her household own securities of the following companies mentioned in the article: None. She or members of her household are paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None.

2) The following companies mentioned in this article are billboard sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees.

3) Comments and opinions expressed are those of the specific experts and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

4) The article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports.

5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article until three business days after the publication of the interview or article. The foregoing prohibition does not apply to articles that in substance only restate previously published company releases.

Disclosures from Echelon Wealth Partners, Lundin Gold Inc., March 23, 2020

Echelon Wealth Partners compensates its Research Analysts from a variety of sources. The Research Department is a cost centre and is funded by the business activities of Echelon Wealth Partners including, Institutional Equity Sales and Trading, Retail Sales and Corporate and Investment Banking.

I, Ryan Walker, hereby certify that the views expressed in this report accurately reflect my personal views about the subject securities or issuers. I also certify that I have not, am not, and will not receive, directly or indirectly, compensation in exchange for expressing the specific recommendations or views in this report.

Important Disclosures:

Is this an issuer related or industry related publication? Issuer.

Does the Analyst or any member of the Analysts household have a financial interest in the securities of the subject issuer? No

The name of any partner, director, officer, employee or agent of the Dealer Member who is an officer, director or employee of the issuer, or who serves in any advisory capacity to the issuer. No

Does Echelon Wealth Partners Inc. or the Analyst have any actual material conflicts of interest with the issuer? No

Does Echelon Wealth Partners Inc. and/or one or more entities affiliated with Echelon Wealth Partners Inc. beneficially own common shares (or any other class of common equity securities) of this issuer which constitutes more than 1% of the presently issued and outstanding shares of the issuer? No

During the last 12 months, has Echelon Wealth Partners Inc. provided financial advice to and/or, either on its own or as a syndicate member, participated in a public offering, or private placement of securities of this issuer? No

During the last 12 months, has Echelon Wealth Partners Inc. received compensation for having provided investment banking or related services to this Issuer? No

Has the Analyst had an onsite visit with the Issuer within the last 12 months? No

Has the Analyst or any Partner, Director or Officer been compensated for travel expenses incurred as a result of an onsite visit with the Issuer within the last 12 months? No

Has the Analyst received any compensation from the subject company in the past 12 months? No

Is Echelon Wealth Partners Inc. a market maker in the issuers securities at the date of this report? No
Greg Hatala/For NJ Advance Media

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Vintage photos of mom and pop stores in N.J.

Andrew Blumenthal wrote in Investopedia that Mom-and-pop is a colloquial term used to describe a small, family-owned or independent business. Mom-and-pop stores are often operations that struggle to compete with more substantial establishments, such as big-box retailers, who generally boast more buying power than smaller players. In the last few years, "shop local" and "shop small" have been used as slogans in marketing campaigns.

Those of us who grew up with them dont need a definition. They didnt necessarily have to be run by a husband and wife (mom and pop) but often were brother-and-sister, father-and-daughter or mother-and-son. Sometimes, you could meet the entire family shopping at one of these stores.

A small store wasnt necessarily a mom-and-pop and it didn't have to be a food store. The proprietors lived in the community, often next door to or right above the business. They were invested in the neighborhood, got to know each and every one of their customers, and gave back in ways that were for good instead of free publicity.

Heres hoping that this is one of the things from the past that makes a big comeback.

Here's a gallery of good ol' 'mom and pop' stores in New Jersey. Click on the links in the final slide to see more vintage photos. And if you have vintage photos you'd like to see in our slide shows, send them in an email to greghatalagalleries@gmail.com.

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Courtesy of Evelyn Ross

James Ross and his wife, Willie Freda, pictured, operated a grocery store on Ridgedale Avenue in East Hanover; this photo is from the 1940s.

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Courtesy of the Matawan Historical Society

Matty's General Store in Aberdeen Township is shown in the late 1920s. It was a pop-and-brother-in-law, started by Homer Matteson and offering groceries, general merchandise and a deli.

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Courtesy of James Gleason

James Gleason captioned this photo: "This is my mom, Pat Gleason, at Tamarack Deli in Byram; it was sometime in the '70s."

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Courtesy of Bobby Cole Photo Archives

Bart Pestrichella inspects bread made in the 100-year-old brick ovens at Marie's Bakery in Hoboken in 1982.

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Courtesy of Linwood Historical Society

It was Mom and Pop  and every other member of the family at Stuber's Store in Linwood in 1901. Adolph Stuber, far rght, was the patriarch of the family business.

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Courtesy of Bobby Cole Photo Archives

The Savannah Market on West Kinney Street in Newark is shown in a photo from the 1930s.

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Courtesy of the Gloucester County Historical Society

A 1940 photo of Thompson's Grocery Store in Woodbury. Standing for the photo were, from left, Frank Hobbs, Albert Thompson, George Thompson, Bill Rambo, Courtland Thompson and John Thompson.

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Courtesy of James Youngelson

Max and Bella Youngelson ran this small department store on Blackwell Street in Dover for decades, catering primarily to the local miners. It's pictured in the 1930s.

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Courtesy of the White family

White's Food Center was located on the corner of West Park Avenue and Monmouth Road in Ocean Township from 1946 to 1974. Shown in this undated photo were, from left, butcher Frank Smith, Clyde White, Ailene White and Edwin White.

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Courtesy of Bobby Cole Photo Archives

Myron Ogonowsky prepares the casings for stuffing kielbasa at his Jersey City meat market aptly named Ogonowsky's Meat Market on Warren Street in 1987.

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Courtesy of the North Plainfield Public Library

The Somerset Fish Market as located on the corner of Somerset Street and Craig Place in North Plainfield and sported a large crustacean to attract customers. The photo is from the 1970s.

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Courtesy of the Trenton Historical Society

Samuel Kohn smokes a cigar in front of Kohn's Bakery at Market and Broad streets in Trenton in 1920. His daughter, Frieda, and an unidentified employee are also pictured.

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Courtesy of Hector Vazquez

Family-run Cumberland Cleaners and Launderers on East Avenue in Vineland had a different feature - a drive-through. The photo is undated.

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Courtesy of Anthony Zoppina

In season, produce was sold outdoors at the Wayside Stand in Beverly, seen in this undated photo. It was also a year-round mom and pop store for various foods and household items. The youngster in the foreground and the adult in the background are unidentified.

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Courtesy of Richard Moser

The interior of Moser's Delicattesen on Olive Street in Neshanic Station, photographed in 1958. Grace Moser, pictured, ran the business with her husband, George.

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Courtesy of the Denville Historical Society

Flormann's Hardware Store in Denville was also a five-and-dime; it operated from 1935 to 1947. The two gentlemen are not identified.

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Courtesy of Eduardo Pena

An unidentified woman and man are photographed in the doorway of the E. Mason Fish Market in Jersey City in the 1930s.

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Courtesy of Lenny Debrango

This photo of the Gold Star Market at 8014 Grand Ave. in North Bergen was taken in the 1960s. The fella in the picture is unidentified.

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Courtesy of the Hudson County Genealogical and Historical Society

Minnie Daubenberger stands behind the counter of her store on South Fourth Street in Harrison in this nearly century-old photo.

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Courtesy of Carol Montero

A 1929 picture of a market on 205 Speer Ave. in Clifton. The woman behind the counter is identified as Adela Stesko.

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Courtesy of Diane Hodge Hess

A photo of the R.D. Shaw Grocery Store on Davenport Street in Somerville taken in 1906. Arthur Hayes, age 14, is identified as the fella wearing the hat.

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Courtesy of Beverly Casserly

Revelli's Market was located in Gloucester City. The photo is from the 1970s, and you would be able to figure out it was in south Jersey from the sign advertising 'lunch meats,' not 'cold cuts.'

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Courtesy of Bobby Cole Photo Archives

The man in front of the Newark Nut Company, photographed in the 1930s, is identified only as Sol.

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Greg Hatala/For NJ Advance Media

Vintage photos of N.J. foods for every taste

https://www.nj.com/news/2018/09/vintage_photos_of_nj_foods_for_every_taste.html

Vintage photos of shops and stores in N.J.

https://www.nj.com/news/2016/11/vintage_photos_of_shops_and_stores_in_nj_1.html

Vintage photos of eclectic eats in N.J.

https://www.nj.com/news/2015/10/vintage_photos_of_eclectic_eats_in_nj.html
Joe Biden told a group of young supporters during a virtual town hall that he worked as an Ivy League professor when he left the Senate.

On Wednesday, the presidential hopeful talked to a virtual roundtable of young people about student loan debt on NBC News.

During that discussion, he claimed to be around young people a lot because of his work as a college professor.

'When I left the United States Senate, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,' Biden said. 'And I've spent a lot of time - and the University of Delaware has the Biden School as well, so I've spent a lot of time on campus with college students.'

In 2017, the University of Pennsylvania gave Biden the honorary title of 'Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor.'

So Biden just said "when I left the United States Senate, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania."



That's not true. He never taught a class.https://t.co/zaLzTNDXmn pic.twitter.com/e4fZNUlTUM  Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 25, 2020

Joe Biden spoke about student loan debt during a virtual town hall this Wednesday hosted by NBC News, when he mentioned becoming a 'professor' at the University of Pennsylvania

Biden told the virtual roundtable that he had spent a lot of time around young people because he was a University of Pennsylvania professor

Biden was actually given the honorary title of 'Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor by the University of Pennsylvania

The university also opened the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. in honor of the former vice president, according to the The Daily Pennsylvania.

However, the university released a statement that read, 'Although he is not scheduled to teach a formal course at this time, we are certain that there will be opportunities for our students to benefit from his presence at Penn.'

Biden spokesperson Kate Bedingfield followed up with a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian saying, 'He will not be teaching classes.'

On February 28, Biden also made the same claim of being a professor during another campaign event.
India on Thursday announced a Rs 170,000 crore package under a new scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Yojana (PMGKBY), to address the immediate economic distress in the wake of the lockdown prompted by the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic, and ensure food and cash reaches the marginalised segments of society.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, at a press conference in the Capital, announced a series of measures which focused on additional food transfers at no cost, cash for vulnerable segments, concessions on government schemes aimed to help households reduce their expenditure, and support those on the frontline of the battle against the pandemic. The primary beneficiaries of these measures include those below the poverty line, farmers, women, elderly citizens, the physically challenged, construction workers, and workers in both the unorganised and organised sectors.

Sitharaman underlined that within 36 hours of the lockdown  Prime Minister Narendra Modi directed a national lockdown for three weeks on Tuesday night  the government had come up with measures to immediately take care of welfare concerns of the poor. She, however, did not address questions about the fiscal implications of the scheme, or announce measures for other sectors which have also got severely affected in the wake of the restrictions and the lockdown. There has been a talk of a stimulus aimed at businesses, large and small, as well as salaried individuals, but there was no mention of this during Thursdays conference  nor any indication as to when one such package could be expected.

Sitharaman announced a medial insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh per person for doctors, health care personnel and sanitation staff, acknowledging their contribution at this crisis hour.

The PMGKY had two broad components: the first was centred on ensuring food availability and support; and the second, on income support.

On food, Sitharaman said 800 million people  two-thirds of the countrys population  would now be eligible for, in addition to the existing allocation of five kg of wheat or rice, another five kg of wheat or rice per month, for the next three months, for free. They will also get one kg of pulses, according to the specific regional variant of the pulse in their geographical area, in this period. This is meant to ensure that no one stays hungry, emphasised Sitharaman.

In terms of direct financial support, the FM announced support under eight distinct categories using the direct benefits transfer framework.

The first was targeted at farmers who get direct cash support of Rs 6,000 annually under the PM-Kisan scheme. Sitharaman said that the next instalment of the money  Rs 2000  would be front-loaded and given immediately. This will benefit 86.9 million farmers, said the FM.

The second was for workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS). From a daily wage of Rs 182, they will now be entitled to get Rs 202. It will help increase the income to 2,000 per worker, said Sitharaman.

The third measure was for economically poor widows, citizens above the age of 60, and the physically challenged. They will get an ex-gratia amount of 1,000. The measure will benefit 30 million poor citizens, the FM said. The amount is to be given in two instalments.

The fourth measure was targeted at women who held Jan Dhan Accounts. There are 200 million women Jan Dhan account holders. The government will give them 500 per month, for three months, to ensure they can run their households in this period of disruption.

A related announcement was for the beneficiaries of the PM Ujjwala scheme, in which over 83 million households got gas cylinders. For three months, these households will get free cylinders. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many households have found the cost of refilling their gas cylinders burdensome. Minister of state for finance Anurag Thakur, sitting alongside Sitharaman, underlined that with these measures, the government was seeking to ensure that poor families had access to food, to incomes, and to cooking gas.

The fifth measure was targeted at women self-help groups (SHGs). Sitharaman pointed out that there were 6.3 million SHGs in the country, with members from 70 million households being members of these groups. They were eligible for collateral-free loan up to Rs 10 lakh till now. This amount will now go up to Rs 20 lakh. Self-help groups are eligible for increased collateral free loans, which will give more money in their hands, said the finance minister.

The sixth measure was targeted at organised workers. This had two components. The government, the FM announced, would contribute both the share of the employee and the employer of the Employer Provident Fund for the next three months. The government will give both the 12% share of the employees, and the 12% share of the employers  so a total of 24% per month for three months, to ensure there is no break in the continuity of EPFO contributions. This will apply to establishments which have fewer than 100 employees, and where 90% of the employees earn less than Rs 15,000 per month.

The second inter-related measure was the governments decision to amend the provident fund regulation scheme, to allow employees to withdraw, on a non refundable advance basis, 75% of the amount, or up to three months of wages, whichever is lower, from their accounts.

The seventh announcement was for construction workers. The FM said that there already existed a fund for the welfare of construction and other workers. This had, at the moment, Rs 31,000 crore and 35 million workers were registered under it. We have given directions to state governments to utilise the funds to provide assistance to construction workers to protect them.

And the final announcement was with regard to district mineral funds, with the FM requesting state governments to utilise these funds to supplement medical testing and screening activities to fight the coronavirus.

Congress parliamentarian Rahul Gandhi said the governments announcement of a financial assistance package is the first step in the right direction. ...India owes a debt to its farmers, daily wage earners, labourers, women & the elderly who are bearing the brunt of the ongoing lockdown, he tweeted.

Trinamool Congress MP Derek OBrien said the measures were similar to what states have already announced. Centre takes cue from relief plans already rolled out by state governments like West Bengal a week ago free six months ration for the poor, health insurance for champion frontliners fighting corona and ~1000 for daily wagers under new Prochesta scheme, he said, adding that the Centres move will supplement state efforts.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) said that Rs 1,000 to the aged, widows, differently abled, is too little; and that the health workers insurance comes at no cost to the government.

Experts welcomed the announcement of income support to farmers. But its implementation may confront challenges. Aadhaar-based enrolment and cash transfers, slow internet connections in many rural centres and messy land records have slowed the PM-Kisan programme, the farm ministry had told a parliamentary panel in January.

Deloitte India partner Gokul Chaudhri hoped for a larger comprehensive economic stimulus package and said the efficient implementation of the Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief for the poor is the key. The first set of measures rightly focused on basic welfare for the weaker section of society. The concerns of other stakeholders in society, such as those impacted in tourism, aviation and hospitality sector is awaited.

Confederation of Indian Industry director general Chandrajit Banerjee said, The entire package is expected to alleviate the difficulties currently being faced by the poor and the distressed. However, the government could be more aggressive in its spending with an overall fiscal stimulus at 2.5-3% of GDP if the disruptions continue for the next three months.

Experts also said the 24% relief for employees provident fund (EPF) contribution is a measure to dissuade retrenchments. Richa Mohanty Rao, partner, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, said, In the midst of such uncertain times, the decision of the government to bear the provident fund cost under the EPF Act for three months, will provide much needed relief to both employers as well as the employees. However, this initiative will largely benefit the MSME (medium and small enterprises) sector.

The Sensex rallied over 5% in anticipation of a comprehensive economic stimulus package ahead of the finance ministers press conference, but lost some of the gains immediately after the announcement to close at 29,947, 4.9% up.
Twenty-five lives were taken by gunmen and suicide bombers after raiding a Sikh religious complex in the Afghan capital of Kabul before security forces wiped them out, Wednesday.

Responsible for the attack, the Islamic State militant group released a statement that it was a revenge for India's treatment of Muslims in its portion of Kashmir, threatening further attacks.

With less than 300 families in Afghanistan, Sikhs' have been targeted by Islamist militants in South Asia.

Not disclosing the number of attackers, Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian stated that the operation by the security forces was over and all of the attackers were killed, hours after the morning attack.

Despite the loss of 25 lives and eight wounded persons, the ministry shared that 80 were rescued in the religious compound.

Sikh community representative and member of the parliament, Narender Singh Khalsa received reports that there are up to 200 people trapped in the complex during the attack as three suicide bombers entered a Dharamsala, the sanctuary area in a temple and gunmen started their attack when the sanctuary was full of worshippers.

Read also: Spring Breaker Apologizes for Viral 'If I Get Corona, I Get Corona' Remark

According to Sikh community members, the day began normally for more than 100 living in the complex and some joining from outside at around 6 a.m., the start of the worship, but after an hour, prayers were interrupted as the attackers killed the guard and began shooting in the shrine forcing residents to fled elsewhere in the compound while waiting for rescue from the security forces.

Gurnam Singh, one of the witnesses shared that the children are in bad mental states, as they are still crying and shouting after the incident.

Attack Condemned by International Community.

In tears, Harinder Singh narrated the incident after the loss of several family members in the incident, stating that the attackers initially fired the women and his nephew shouted that he needs to go downstairs but afterward he was shot in the head, he also recalled that his daughter was wounded and pleading and calling him 'Dad' before she died.

After years of civil war and the rise of the Taliban, the 500,000 Sikhs across Afghanistan in the 1980s diminished.

On Twitter, one of the Taliban's spokesmen denied the responsibility for the attack.

Condemning the attack along with rights activists, Afghan officials, India and Pakistan, the United States Secretary Mike Pompeo urged Afghans to come together to negotiate a political settlement.

Killing more than a dozen people in 2018, an Islamic-claimed suicide bombing in Jalalabad, an Eastern Afghan city targeted the Sikh community.

Directing deputy ministers, President Ashraf Ghani wants to save $1 billion in security and defense while maintaining the quality of his forces.

The response to the attack was led by Afghan forces with some advice and assistance from NATO as shared by an official with Afghanistan's NATO mission.

The incident is the second big attack against a minority group claimed by the Islamic State this month, with more than 30 people killed and shot dead in a gathering of the Hazara community on March 6 topped the biggest attack this month.

Related article: Three Suspects Arrested for Shooting Victim in Parking Lot

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
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In an effort to further mitigate the spread of COVID-19, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has invoked the Quarantine Act requiring those returning from abroad to self-isolate. Ontarios former information and privacy commissioner says if deaths increase exponentially the government could enact measures to track cellphone data to further limit the spread.

Lets say the number of COVID-19 [deaths] in Toronto or Ontario tripled. Maybe they would use that as the excuse or a reason needed to invoke it, Ann Cavoukian said in an interview.

I dont know because I dont want to think about it. I dont want my mind to go there. But I would think a dramatic increase would possibly get them doing that.

As of March 26, there are a total of 13 deaths reported in Ontario that are related to the coronavirus; there are 35 deaths in the country.

During a press conference on March 25, Trudeau indicated that the government was not taking measures like collecting anonymous cellphone data to track the spread of the virus.

We recognize in an emergency situation we need to take certain steps that wouldnt be taken in a non-emergency situation, but that is not something we are looking at now, Trudeau said. But all options are on the table to do what is necessary to keep Canadians safe.

Cavoukian said that Trudeau said nothing was off the table because he is aware of these rules.

There are, unfortunately, privacy laws that can be invoked by the government that will enable them to engage in behaviours that wouldnt be permitted under the [privacy] act. All privacy acts have these kinds of emergency measures, theyre supposed to be a last resort, she said.

Theyre supposed to be time-limited, clear sunset clauses, full transparency associated with what the government is doing.

Cavoukian said that she didnt think we were at that point yet for the prime minister to invoke rules and said we should never get to that point.

When you are collecting all the personal information of citizens that just encroaches upon their freedom without privacy, she said.

Story continues

Toronto Mayor John Tory initially said the city was collecting anonymous location data already, as first reported by The Logic, but later retracted his statements. A spokesperson clarified in an email that Toronto was not collecting any data.

Bell, Telus, Rogers, and Shaw Communications Freedom Mobile confirmed in emailed statements that they have not been approached by the City of Toronto to gather cellphone data.

Jesse Hirsh, president of Metaviews, said in an interview that these measures should have already been invoked.

Im surprised that they have not already collected anonymized location [data] because given that both the federal government and the provincial government over the last few days have been escalating language around voluntary self-isolation, this would be one way to verify and find evidence instead of the government guessing, he said.

Id rather the government instead of guessing that people are or are not complying. Id rather that they have accurate evidence.

He added that collecting this data raises privacy concerns but theyre minor privacy concerns as this data is helpful in terms of informing public health policy.

Hirsh noted that if the government drafted policy they would be able to work with the Privacy Commissioner to ensure the protection of the data and how it would be used.

We can have our cake and eat it too, he said. The expertise exists within the federal government.

Stephanie Carvin, a security expert and assistant professor at Carleton University, doesnt think these measures will be taken any time soon and most likely would be taken at a later date when things have restored back to normalcy.

You would almost want to implement something like this if the situation improved and we had an open society again, she said.

Lets say if you were able to flatten that curve and then over a period of 18 months, youre waiting, and all of a sudden there are flare-ups in the country and you want to contain it. Thats when something more targeted might be useful.

Carvin indicated that even if the government were to take these measures it would require a lot of moving parts and individuals to get on board to make it happen.

People think that theres some kind of switch we can flick, and its not that easy, she said.

She also added that even if the government were able to track the data, they would have to be explicit in terms of what they were collecting and how it was to be used.

Its just not clear to me, how that would be done, by who, under what circumstances, she said.
More Australians will be tested for COVID-19 from Thursday after a national panel of medical experts urged governments to expand the current criteria.

Those to be tested will now include people suffering from fever or acute respiratory infection in a variety of vulnerable occupations and demographics.

More Australians will be tested for coronavirus after the government expanded the criteria of eligible candidates. Credit:Bloomberg

All health, aged and residential care workers will be eligible to be tested as well as those who are in geographically localised areas where there is elevated risk of community transmission as defined by the local public health unit.

Tests will also be done on people in high-risk settings where there are two or more plausibly linked cases, including aged and residential care, rural and remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, detention centres and correctional facilities, boarding schools and military bases that have live-in accommodation.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has agreed with President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev on further coordination of efforts and assistance in overcoming the coronavirus pandemic and its impact.

This was discussed during a telephone conversation between the leaders, the press service of the President of Ukraine reports.

The presidents agreed on the further coordination of efforts and assistance in overcoming the coronavirus pandemic and its impact, the statement reads.

As noted, Zelensky informed Aliyev about the measures taken by Ukraine to counteract the spread of coronavirus and protect people.

Volodymyr Zelensky expressed gratitude to Ilham Aliyev for Azerbaijans assistance in the evacuation of Ukrainians.

The President of Ukraine also thanked for the fact that Azerbaijani investors and big businesses continue their activity in Ukraine and implement important projects despite the difficult situation.

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Humble ISD trustees committed to continue to provide education and food for its students as the region copes with the coronavirus during a virtual school board meeting on March 24.

After postponing the March 16 board meeting, the Humble ISD Board of Trustees held their monthly board meeting through a Zoom video call to maintain their social distancing efforts and limit the spread of COVID-19.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Coronavirus live updates

The district approved a resolution that declared a state of emergency within Humble ISD, delegated various tasks to Superintendent Elizabeth Fagen and established a plan to educate students remotely until in-person classes resume.

The district found that at least 23,000 students have devices for online learning and about 1,700 students do not during a technology access survey sent during the first week of school closures on March 19. The district is developing a plan to provide Chromebooks to students who do not have a device at home.

CORONAVIRUS CLOSINGS: Humble will close city-owned buildings to prevent spread of COVID-19

The district is continuing to identify students who do not have a device, Fagen wrote in an email. To date, we have received survey responses from more than half of our students, and schools continue to reach out.

Humble ISD will also be temporarily raising pay for hourly workers who are at a higher risk while working outside of their homes.

School cafeteria staff members are distributing food to children. Bus drivers are driving to deliver food and supplies. Custodial staff are cleaning and disinfecting buildings. This involves increased personal risk over and above the requirements normally performed in their assigned roles, Fagen wrote. Humble ISD joins other employers like H-E-B, Starbucks, and Safeway in temporarily raising pay for hourly workers who are serving the public outside their homes.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Tracking coronavirus: Interactive maps, charts show spread of COVID-19 across Houston, rest of Texas

The 14 point resolution is effective immediately and will continue through June 30. At this time, Humble ISD schools will continue to be closed through April 10 with distance learning measures in place.

The resolution allows Humble ISD to act efficiently and expediently during this public health crisis, Fagen wrote. The resolution included formal approval by the School Board to continue to pay all regular employees, including hourly workers. Employees are working countless hours to teach students and meet needs in new ways.

GIVE BACK: Here's how to help Houston during the coronavirus pandemic

After implementing at-home learning, teachers have had to find ways to adapt their in-person classroom into a new platform, creating a demand for more resources.

The resolution provides the authority to execute contracts quickly with vendors that provide resources for teachers and students when needed. Digital platforms in use right now include Google Classroom, Schoology, video conference via Zoom or Google Hangouts Meet, email, SchoolWires, Class DoJo, SeeSaw, Wixie, and Edgenuity, according to Fagen.

Schools and teachers choose the learning platforms that work best for their students and their academic content. With more than 45,000 students in various grades and courses, one size does not fit all, Fagen wrote. Continued learning provides opportunities to stay connected, provide instruction in other formats, engage students in authentic learning, and work collaboratively when face-to-face interaction isn't possible.

Fagen also acknowledged the uncertainties of upcoming tests and events for the end of the school year, including prom and graduation. SAT and ACT tests have been moved back to likely June or July, Fagen said, and AP testing has been moved online.

Just remember right now that the governors order restricts us to groups of 10, and so whatever the orders are that are in place at that time are going to be a big factor in what we can and cannot do, Fagen said in the board meeting. Theres a high likelihood of postponement of those events until those orders are lifted and were exploring open-air options because we believe there might come a time in the nearer future where if we were outside, separated with a little space between people we might be able to have a ceremony sooner than later.

Annual report shows student learning trends

The Annual Performance Report for 2019 covering data from the 2017-18 school year to the present found that 93.7% of the cohort graduated in 2018, ranking 3.7% higher than the state average. College readiness indicators were above the state and the region; 58.6% of graduates from the 2017-18 school year were considered to be college ready, 64.1% of AP or IB scores above a three or four, and of graduates from the 2016-17 school year, 55.6% were enrolled in Texas Higher Education.

For more information on the Annual Performance Report, visit https://www.humbleisd.net/Page/117397.

savannah.mehrtens@chron.com
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The technology - published in the journalTo date ultrasound imaging uses what is a called a contrast using gas-filled microbubbles. However according to Dr Corrie these last only 10-20 minutes making long term tracking within a body impossible.The new technology which was developed with colleagues at Monash University and the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, can be inserted deep into the tissues and measure biomarkers such as, pH (as a measure of whether a tumour is shrinking following chemotherapy) and in the near future more complex markers such as oxygen (as an indicator of stroke injury) or disease-related proteins.According to Dr Corrie the advantage of the technology is that, eventually, it will be able to be "read" by "something as simple as a mobile phone which can currently record ultrasound, making it able to monitor patients in remote areas, without the need for big hospital labs," he said.The technology has been tested in an animal model to detect changes in pH levels. It will now be tested in an animal models of disease to determine whether it can accurately monitor rapidly changing pH levels, initially focussing on cancer and stroke.The goal, according to Dr Corrie, is to give clinicians the power of being able to have a patient sit in a chair and, as they are infusing the drugs, using commonly available ultrasound to monitor drug levels or organ response in real-time, adjusting dosages as a function of the patient's needs.Source: Eurekalert
To ensure sufficient supply during the lockdown, the government on Wednesday decided to increase monthly quota of subsidized foodgrains by 2 kg to 7kg per person through ration shops for 80 crore beneficiaries.

A decision in this regard was taken by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"The government has decided to provide 7 kg per person of foodgrains to 80 crore people under the Public Distribution System (PDS), which the world's largest food security system," Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar told media after the meeting.

The cost of wheat is Rs 27/kg, which will be provided at a subsidised rate of Rs 2 kg, while the cost of rice is about Rs 32/kg but will be supplied at Rs 3/kg through ration shops, he said.

All states have been asked to take foodgrains from the Centre in advance for distribution through the PDS, he added.

Under the National Food Security Act (NFSA), the government is supplying 5 kg of foodgrains per month to over 80 crore people at a highly subsidised price.

The decision to allocate additional foodgrains through the PDS has been taken as state-run Food Corporation of India (FCI) is saddled with wheat and rice stock. With some foodgrains stock kept in open space, the FCI is under pressure to clear stock before monsoon.
Plaintiffs attorneys in a decades-old lawsuit against California prisons filed an emergency motion on Wednesday to reduce prisoner populations amid the coronavirus pandemic, in an effort to get ahead of what they say could be a disastrous outbreak.

The inmates attorneys are asking a federal three-judge panel to release or relocate prisoners especially vulnerable to severe illness from the disease, including those 65 and over, those with lung or heart conditions and those who are immunocompromised.

Michael Bien, an attorney who represents the prisoners, said the institutions are too crowded to practice social distancing, and any measures short of releases would be ineffective.

We think there is a window of time  which we are still in  where the state can avert a public health crisis, Bien said. Were already in one. But can avert an aggravation... by not allowing a major COVID-19 outbreak in the California prisons.

Dana Simas, a spokesperson for CDCR, said prison officials will be reviewing the motion.

Public safety is a top priority for CDCR, as is the health of our community, Simas said in a statement. The department has been diligent in implementing proactive efforts to ensure health and safety, including recent actions to limit the risks and spread of COVID-19.

To date one prisoner in the states 35 adult institutions has tested positive for COVID-19, along with nine prison staffers. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials have conducted 159 tests, including 16 at the California State Prison in Los Angeles County, where the first prisoner tested positive resides.

The motion is the first of its kind in California sprawling prison system, which houses approximately 123,000 people.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

No California state prisoners have yet been released because of coronavirus concerns. but some county jail inmates have.

On Tuesday, 13 immigrants detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at two California facilities filed a federal lawsuit demanding to be released, citing health conditions make them prone to getting severely ill if they get infected with the coronavirus.

State officials in the last several days have adopted several policies to try to curb a coronavirus spread behind bars. Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on Tuesday suspending intake from county jails for 30 days, and directing the Board of Parole Hearings to begin conducting parole suitability hearings through videoconferencing for 60 days, beginning April 13.

The system has additional enhanced screening for employees entering the facilities, canceled almost all visitations and implemented practices to encourage social distancing, according to their website.

Megan Cassidy and Jason Fagone are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com, jason.fagone@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganrcassidy, @jfagone
The US Senate passed the nation's largest-ever rescue package late Wednesday, a USD 2 trillion lifeline to suffering Americans, depleted hospitals and an economy all ravaged by a rapidly spreading coronavirus crisis.

The monster deal thrashed out between Republicans, Democrats and the White House includes cash payments to American taxpayers and several hundred billion dollars in grants and loans to small businesses and core industries. It also buttresses hospitals desperately in need of medical equipment and expands unemployment benefits.

The measure cleared the Senate by an overwhelming majority and was headed next to the House of Representatives, which must also pass it before it goes to President Donald Trump for his signature.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As coronavirus cases keep rising, Gov. Tom Wolf is urging Pennsylvanians to be prepared for a long war to deal with this crisis.

We dont know how bad the surge will be or when it will end," Wolf said at a news conference Thursday. We must prepare ourselves mentally and physically to be in this for the long haul.

Wolf said this is not a battle. This is a war, he said.

Pennsylvanias diagnosed coronavirus cases grew by the hundreds today. At least 16 people have died.

Wolf and Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine provided an update on COVID-19 in the state in a news conference that ran about 30 minutes.

You can watch them live online here.

The state has confirmed 1,687 patients have tested positive for the coronavirus, including 560 new cases reported today, the largest one-day increase to date. On Wednesday, 276 new cases were reported.

This demonstrates that exponential rise that we have been discussing, Levine said.

Levine offered more information on the ages of those who have tested positive. She said 46 percent of all cases have involved adults 50 and over.

She said 39 percent of those who have tested positive are between 25 and 49 years old.

Its very important younger adults not be complacent about their susceptibility to Covid-19," Levine said.

Among those who have been hospitalized, 46 percent are over 65. All of those who have died in Pennsylvania are adults, Levine said.

The governor was asked about the possibility of schools re-opening during this academic year. Wolf has ordered schools to be closed until at least April 6 and possibly longer if necessary. Some school leaders have said they are bracing for the possibility that schools wont re-open this spring.

Were going to have to decide what happens with the rest of the school year, Wolf said. "Were woking with educators to be fair to the students and the educators to keep all of them safe.

The bulk of the cases have been concentrated in Philadelphia and its suburbs. There are 402 cases in the city of Philadelphia alone, while neighboring Montgomery County has 282 cases.

However, cases have been found in 48 of Pennsylvanias 67 counties, state officials said. More people are testing positive in central and western Pennsylvania.

Businesses considered non-life-sustaining have been closed across the state. Also, 10 counties, most of them in eastern Pennsylvania, are under stay-at-home orders, which means people shouldnt go places except for life-saving reasons.

Wolf said he projected unemployment claims would reach 800,000. Pennsylvanians filed about 650,000 unemployment compensation claims over the past 11 days, the Associated Press reported.

Wolf was asked about releasing the names of businesses which have been granted waivers by the state to remain open. He said if disclosing the names is in the public interest, hell do it.

I want to be as open and transparent as I can, Wolf said. I also dont want to make this process subject to all kinds of pressures that will make it work less well."

Wolf thanked lawmakers for approving $50 million in coronavirus relief measures.

Nationwide, the coronavirus has killed more than 1,000 people.
BOK adopts Korean version of quantitative easing



The Bank of Korea (BOK) has taken the unprecedented step of supplying "unlimited liquidity" to the market for the next three months. This measure is intended to prevent a credit crunch arising from the coronavirus pandemic. It is also designed to finance the government's massive economic stimulus package.



On Thursday, the central bank said it had decided to provide an unlimited amount of liquidity to financial firms to help minimize the economic fallout from the public health crisis. The goal is to supply as much as money as possible to banks and other financial firms to keep them from sliding into a liquidity trap.



The BOK's action is unheard of in Korea. It is tantamount to quantitative easing, an unconventional monetary policy whereby the U.S. Federal Reserve purchased government bonds and other securities to provide limitless liquidity to the market following the 2008 global financial crisis. The measure is surprising given that the BOK had never used such a radical policy even in the face of the 1997-98 Asian financial turmoil and the 2008 crisis.



The central bank's adoption of quantitative easing is a clear reminder that COVID-19 is bringing about a far more severe economic catastrophe than any previous turbulence. Some experts even warn of apocalyptic consequences unparalleled since the 1929 Great Depression. Against this backdrop, the BOK cannot sit idly by after cutting its key rate by a half percentage point to a record low of 0.75 percent March 16.



The unprecedented move came after the Moon Jae-in administration doubled its economic stimulus package to 100 trillion won ($80 billion), Tuesday, to help hard-hit businesses, particularly small and medium firms, and to stabilize the bond and securities markets. Monetary easing should go hand in hand with the government's fiscal expansion to ride out the looming economic woes more effectively.



The BOK will purchase local bonds in repo operations every Tuesday until the end of June. It has added 11 securities companies to the list of financial firms eligible for the purchase. It has also decided to buy bonds issued by eight state-run enterprises, including the Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO), the Korea Gas Corp., and the Korea Land & Housing Corp.



The Korean version of quantitative easing is seen as a no-holds-bar approach toward regaining economic and financial stability. Some critics may denounce the central bank for taking a reckless and risky step by printing money to calm down market jitters. They have already criticized the Moon administration for mobilizing an astronomical amount of taxpayers' money for the rescue package at the sacrifice of fiscal health. Opposition politicians have also accused the government of using "helicopter money" for populist purposes ahead of the April 15 general election.



Their criticisms appear to be out of touch with the harsh reality: the increasing disaster of the pandemic. Nevertheless, the government and the central bank need to ensure the money will be properly used to help severely-hit businesses and individuals, without any waste. The best option is to maximize the intended effects of the unprecedented stimulus program.




A physician is seen outside at Elmhurst Hospital Center in the Queens borough of New York City on March 26, 2020. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

NYCs Elmhurst Hospital, at Center of COVID-19 Crisis, Sees 13 Patients Die in 24-hour Span

New York Citys Elmhurst Hospital is dealing with an influx of patients with the CCP virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease, as 13 patients died there within 24 hours.

The 13 deaths that occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday was consistent with the amount of ICU patients being treated there, a spokesman for NYC Health + Hospitals said in a statement.

Elmhurst is at the center of this crisis. Its the number one priority of our public hospital system right now. Staff are doing everything in our power to save every person who contracts COVID-19, the spokesman said. But unfortunately this virus continues to take an especially terrible toll on the elderly and people with preexisting conditions.

Nearly one-third of the COVID-19 cases in the United States are in the city, which saw the death toll increase to 280 on Wednesday, accounting for about a quarter of all deaths in the country from the new illness. Six hundred and sixty patients are in intensive care units.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

General view of Elmhurst Hospital as people line up to get tested due to coronavirus outbreak in New York City on March 23, 2020. (Eduardo Munoz/Getty Images)

Scores of people went to the hospital in the borough of Queens this week to get tested for the virus. Six hundred and sixty patients are in intensive care units. Queens has seen the most hospitalizations out of any borough, with 1,363 so far.

About two dozen doctors and nurses from other hospitals arrived at Elmhurst on Wednesday, Councilman Francisco Moya told a local website.

Its very accurate to say its overrun. Ive spoken to workers at the hospital and you can hear it in their voiceits a sign of desperation that they need help, said Moya, who was born at the hospital and used to work there.

While some assistance is coming  its not enough, he added. If we dont address this, its only going to get worse. And Im afraid of what will happen then.

Moya said on Twitter that the hospital is critically short on everything, including ventilators.

COVID patients are dying in the emergency room before they even get a bed. Elmhurst Hospital needs ventilators. I dont care where they come from, he said.

Workers are suffering from a shortage of personal protective gear. An emergency room doctor told Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) that workers are forced to use equipment that should be used for a single patient over the course of their entire shift, she wrote in a letter to President Donald Trump, urging him to provide more equipment for the city.

Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters late Wednesday that from what hes seen, April will be tougher than March for the city.

At this point, May could be even tougher than April, and people need to be ready for that, he said, urging people not to let their guard down.

People line up outside Elmhurst Hospital to get tested due to coronavirus outbreak in Queens, New York City on March 24, 2020. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)

The situation is causing intense stress on the healthcare system, as well as people working in hospitals, he said.

Speaking at his daily briefing on Tuesday, de Blasio disputed the characterization of any hospitals in the city being overrun.

NYC Health + Hospitals CEO Mitchell Katz has been very open about the fact that theres been a disproportionately high number of cases at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, and yet, at the same time, its an extraordinary facility thats very well run and theyve been making constant adjustments to deal with it, he added.

2009 Outbreak

A 2009 policy alert (pdf) from the citys comptroller at the time said that the H1N1 influenza was threatening to overwhelm Queens.

With Queens as the epicenter of the illness, hospital emergency rooms in the vicinity of the closures are seeing unprecedented numbers of patients, William Thompson wrote at the time after speaking with emergency room workers in the borough.

To be sure, while the timing of the H1N1 virus itself was not foreseeable, the likelihood of some event of a similar nature causing a sudden surge in demand was both foreseeable and inevitable, Thompson added. In fact, it is one of the core missions of the City and State Departments of Health, as well as other State and municipal agencies, to prepare for and respond to this type of healthcare emergency.
There are some signs of restraint in the maximum pressure campaign. Deadly attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq this month, widely seen as perpetrated by groups backed by Iran, have prompted only a muted response from the Trump administration, without the discussion of a direct strike against Iran seen only months ago.
Atlanta

There is no 12th Democratic presidential debate on the horizon now that the nominating process is in a holding pattern because of the coronavirus pandemic.

One of the Democratic National Committee's lead debate organizers, Xochitl Hinojosa, said the party has not set a date or secured a television broadcasting partner for what would be the final encounter of the dozen that DNC Chairman Tom Perez promised at the campaign's outset.

There's no evidence that either Joe Biden, the prospective nominee, or Bernie Sanders, Biden's last remaining rival, is clamoring for a debate, and there's doubt among the candidates' advisers that one will occur.

"We are taking things day by day," Hinojosa said.

The uncertainty reflects both the political realities of Biden's lead and the public health realities of the virus, which could make another debate logistically difficult because of the social distancing orders from public officials.

Biden made clear Wednesday that he'd be fine if debates were finished. "Our focus is just dealing with this crisis right now," he said during a video news conference from his Delaware home. "I think we've had enough debates. I think we should get on with this."

The first 10 Democratic debates were held in public venues before audiences of party officials and candidates' supporters. CNN and the DNC moved the March 15 debate, the first after U.S. officials publicly urged a massive coronavirus response, from Phoenix to the network's Washington studios. There was no live audience, and the candidates stood 6 feet apart, recognizing the public health recommendations.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Since then, Mayor Muriel Bowser of the District of Columbia has issued a stay-at-home order urging only nonessential workers to move about the nation's capital. New York, where national television networks are based, now has among the most serious coronavirus outbreaks of any U.S. city.

The next debate was expected to be in an East Coast location before the April 28 primary anchored by New York. That primary remains scheduled for now, but several states, including Maryland, Rhode Island and Connecticut, have pushed their primaries back to join New Jersey on June 2.

The 11th debate, the relocated one, was the first between just Biden and Sanders and came after the rest of the field had either dropped out or failed to meet debate qualifications. Biden had established a clear delegate lead over Super Tuesday and March 10 primaries. Sanders' aides said at the time that the Vermont senator wanted to use the forum to trumpet his progressive agenda as a democratic socialist against the former vice president's more establishment approach.

Sanders' team is making no such noise now. "If there is a debate in April, he plans to be there," Sanders spokesman Mike Casca said. It was a notably muted tone for a campaign and candidate often critical of the DNC and the "establishment media" for alleged unfair treatment.
The 2020 Democratic presidential primary began with over 20 governors, senators, congressmen, and political outsiders vying for the nomination. The field has now winnowed to two: former vice president Joe Biden, and Senator Bernie Sanders, a 30-year member of Congress.

How did such a wide-open primary come down to the oldest, whitest, and best-known candidates? Inquiring minds may begin their investigation with the partys turn against super PACs.

Unlike regular PACs, a super PAC  created ten years ago this week  can accept unlimited amounts from donors. This can include contributions from unions, businesses, and nonprofit organizations, although the vast majority of super PAC money is contributed by individuals. The catch is that super PACs must spend their money on independent speech rather than contributing to candidates like traditional PACs do. Like traditional PACs and other political entities, super PACs must publicly disclose donors who give over $200.

Super PACs are the result of a unanimous ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, ten years ago this week. Following the courts ruling in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, super PACs have made it easier for Americans to pool their resources to speak about candidates. This is good for democracy.

Though often derided as a nuisance, campaign advertising has been shown to make voters more informed and engaged in elections. The potential for significant independent support has also bolstered candidates who are a thorn in the side of party leaders or media elites.

From the start, however, some politicians have been trying to do away with super PACs. Theyre not used to citizens having a megaphone and soapbox as big as their own. They dont like the extra competition.

The anti-super PAC frenzy reached new heights in this years Democratic primary. Candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and others effectively told their supporters to stay on the sidelines, either explicitly requesting that super PACs not support them, or blasting the groups at every turn.

Story continues

As things got desperate, many of these candidates appeared to realize their mistake. They scrambled to get a new message out: Ill take any help I can get. Joe Biden was the first to reverse his opposition to super PACs, doing so by late October. A month later, as California senator Kamala Harriss campaign was falling apart, she, too, dropped her rejection of independent support.

The partys backtracking on super PACs came full circle in February when Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren reversed course. Her early and forceful rejections of super PACs had set the tone for the field, and she went even further by making corruption and money-in-politics the top themes of her campaign. But that was when her campaign was a powerful front-runner  after poor showings in the early primary states, Warren needed a Hail Mary, and so changed her tune.

For every candidate except Biden, the reversal was too late, and the campaign could not be saved.

Warren claims she only dropped her opposition to super PACs because her opponents were accepting their help. But she surely knew that not every candidate would play by her rules. The pledges to reject super PAC support were an electoral ploy by candidates to brand themselves as cleaner than the other guy. It simply didnt pay off.

Instead, with independent speakers on the sidelines, the candidates who entered the primary with the biggest advantages coasted. The main function of campaign spending is simply to increase name recognition  hence all those yard signs that say Johnson for Congress and not much else. It is not surprising that with super PACs quieted, the primary came down to the former vice president, and the only candidate who waged a major, publicity-gathering campaign in 2016.

The substantial majority of political spending in campaigns still comes from the candidates themselves. But super PACs have helped lesser-known candidates compete in races at all levels, allowed voters to hear new and diverse views (often on issues that the candidates would prefer not to discuss), and generally created a campaign system that is more fluid and open.

Fears of independent political advocacy by super PACs contributed to exactly what many Democrats had hoped to avoid: a once-diverse field reduced to a showdown between two old, white men who have held power for decades.

More from National Review
The Holiday Inn Express in Center City Philadelphia will be turned into a coronavirus quarantine site for people who need a place to go. Read more

This story was produced as part of a joint effort among Spotlight PA, LNP Media Group, PennLive, PA Post, and WITF to cover how Pennsylvania state government is responding to the coronavirus. Sign up for Spotlight PAs newsletter.

HARRISBURG  With the number of coronavirus cases in Pennsylvania projected to rise sharply in the coming weeks, state officials are looking at all possible solutions to an expected shortage of hospital beds, including making use of hotels and convention centers.

Medical facilities statewide reported about 3,400 intensive care beds at last count. But a recent Harvard Global Health Institute study found the state would need from 2.5 to 7 times that number depending on how effective social distancing efforts are in avoiding a spike in patients.

Theres a substantial likelihood we are going to see a surge that might reflect the worst-case scenario, said Jeremy Kahn, a professor of critical care medicine and health policy at the University of Pittsburgh. Id be hard-pressed to think of anything as too extreme.

State officials have repeatedly declined to detail exactly what their planning entails, but they are likely to follow the example of other states that have taken significant steps.

In New York, now the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, officials are transforming the massive Jacob Javits Center to accommodate nearly 2,000 hospital beds. Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, which has reported less than half of Pennsylvanias number of confirmed cases, announced plans Monday to convert the Baltimore Convention Center and a nearby Hilton Hotel into field hospitals to add 900 beds.

Kahn, a practicing doctor in the intensive care unit at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh, said transforming these kinds of spaces into field hospitals is challenging.

Even rudimentary hospital rooms are usually equipped with oxygen, suction, lighting, and telemonitoring equipment to track a patients blood pressure and heart rate. All of that requires a stable electricity supply that may be difficult to add to a building not designed for it.

Frankly, Im a little skeptical this is the most efficient solution to meet the demand for this influx of patients, he said.

The more likely solution, Kahn said, is that these makeshift hospitals would be used to care for less severe cases or those who are recovering and no longer need intensive care.

When asked about the possible bed shortage Wednesday, Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine said: We might use hotels or other spaces to have people convalesce with limited medical care that they might need."

The best course the state could take, Kahn said, would be to move less severe cases to another facility before putting critically ill patients in an ad-hoc ICU at a dorm or hotel.

This would, in essence, require authorities to shift patients downstream. As patients with COVID-19 begin flooding the ICU, he said, less severe patients could be moved to other wards in the same hospital, while patients from those wards could move to skilled nursing homes and the patients from those nursing homes could move into the new makeshift hospitals in places like college dormitories, convention centers, and hotels.

John Longstreet, president of the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association, said a number of hotels have volunteered their facilities through the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agencys sheltering task force. The coronavirus rendered most of them vacant, he said.

Its much more like a war setting than anything Ive ever experienced, said Longstreet, whos been in the hotel business for five decades. But I want to clarify: The hotels are not being commandeered. Theyre willingly entering into relationships to help.

PEMA spokesperson Ruth Miller said there are no plans to force hotels to serve as hospital space, noting There are private-sector partners that are volunteering space and resources. As of Wednesday, the agency didnt yet have details on how it would pay for such a move.

Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, commanding general of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, announced a $1 million plan, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to convert some 10,000 rooms in hotels and college dormitories into hospital space to treat COVID-19 patients in New York City. The agency was looking at similar operations in California, New Jersey, and Washington state.

Semonite said such facilities would have to be sanitized and retrofitted to keep individual patients in isolation, according to a report by McClatchy. COVID-19 patients would also have to be separated from other ICU patients.

That involves using a hotel rooms air-conditioning unit to create a negative pressure room, Semonite said, creating a vacuum that isolates that patients space from the rest of the facility.

The last step, he said, is a big piece of plastic with a zipper on it over the door. (Think the isolation units in Hollywood films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or Outbreak.)

Just a few weeks ago, Heidi Howard coordinated events and meetings for the lodging association in Pennsylvania. That work evaporated with the spread of the coronavirus, and instead the trade group was asked by the Wolf administration to help with emergency preparations.

Howards job now includes passing along information about hotels willing to serve as field hospitals.

This is just preparation at the moment, she said. But its important to have this information so they can act on it quickly if they need to.

Messages left at several of the hotels that have volunteered were not returned as of Wednesday, but one of them, the Holiday Inn Express in Center City Philadelphia, was announced as a site for homeless people or other people without a place to quarantine who test positive for COVID-19. That project, which would set aside 100 beds, was coordinated through the city rather than the state.

There arent many recent precedents for the efforts being undertaken today.

The military commandeered resort hotels in places like Atlantic City to treat soldiers returning from World War II. During the last major pandemic, the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918, triage centers were set up in auditoriums, gyms, and hotels across the country. Ice rinks and warehouses became makeshift morgues.

Longstreet said hotels today feel a bit as they did in the weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when air traffic was grounded, leaving hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded. Demand for hotel space was initially high, then it cratered and slowly returned.

Hotels that averaged about 65% occupancy before the coronavirus outbreak are now reporting 10% or less, he said. They generally need about 50% occupancy to break even.

Converting hotels into hospital space, Longstreet said, would be a win-win situation because we can help and, secondly, theres some relief for the workers who may not have anything to do otherwise.

Correction: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story suggested the quarantine at the Holiday Inn Express in Center City Philadelphia was just for homeless individuals. It is reserved for anyone who cannot quarantine at home.

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Warren County has stopped issuing news releases on each new confirmed case of the coronavirus, and is no longer identifying patients by gender, age and hometown.

Instead, the county each evening is updating a list of confirmed cases and recovered patients by municipality on its website, co.warren.nj.us.

As of Wednesday evening, Warren County had 29 confirmed cases, up from 17 a day earlier. The current cases are spread among Belvidere (1), Hackettstown (5), Phillipsburg (4) and Washington Borough (2) along with the townships of Allamuchy (2), Greenwich (3), Harmony (1), Hope (2), Independence (2), Liberty (1), Lopatcong (3), Mansfield (1), Washington (1) and White (1).

Hunterdon County has also begun releasing a town-by-town breakdown of positive coronavirus cases, at co.hunterdon.nj.us. Its count stood at 26 as of Tuesday, the most recent data available as of Wednesday evening.

New Jerseys total known cases of the coronavirus rose to at least 4,402, including at least 62 known deaths as officials announced another 736 new positive test results Wednesday during an afternoon briefing on the expanding outbreak.

In Pennsylvania, officials on Wednesday reported 276 new positive cases of COVID-19, more than any other single day yet in the state, pushing the statewide total to 1,127. The Pennsylvania Department of Health also reported 11 deaths from the novel coronavirus, up from seven the prior day. Among them is the 3rd death in the Lehigh Valley, all from Northampton County.

The Warren County Health Department is continuing to work to trace the close contacts of those cases and provide notifications to those close contacts. With the caseload increasing daily, officials say there is little time to share details with the public on each new patient.

"Unfortunately our epidemiologist and nurses no longer have the time to provide even limited details on the cases in Warren County," county Health Officer Pete Summers said in an email. "The county will continue to provide data on total cases by municipality and will update the community on cases that have resolved. Our intent is to update this information on our website around 6 p.m. each evening.

For more information on the coronavirus, consult your state health department at health.pa.gov or covid19.nj.gov and the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover or a personal story you want to share.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. If theres anything about this story that needs attention, please email him. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Mark Blum, who starred in films such as Desperately Seeking Susan and the recent TV series You, has died of complications from coronavirus.

The actor was 69 years old.

His representative confirmed the news to The Independent.

Blum, a native of Newark, New Jersey, recently appeared as bookstore owner Mr Mooney in You, the stalker-themed drama starring Penn Badgley. He also played Bill Lockheart on Succession, as well as Ira Langstrom in Elementary.

Born on 14 May, 1950, Blum got his start in the Eighties, joining the cast of Lovesick, Desperately Seeking Susan, Crocodile Dundee, Blind Date and more.

In the Nineties, he was seen in Miami Rhapsody, The Low Life, Denise Calls Up, and Stag, among other programmes.

The decade also brought a string of TV credits for Blum, in shows such as Roseanne, New York Undercover, CPW, The West Wing, NYPD Blue, and Frasier.

In recent years, Blum was seen in Billions, The Good Fight, and Mozart in the Jungle.

Playwrights Horizons, a New York theatre, was among the first to honour Blums memory on social media.

(Alli Harvey/Getty Images)

With love and heavy hearts, Playwrights Horizons pays tribute to Mark Blum, a dear longtime friend and a consummate artist who passed this week. Thank you, Mark, for all you brought to our theatre, and to theatres and audiences across the world. We will miss you, the company wrote.

Rebecca Damon, SAG-AFTRAs executive vice president and New York president, also paid tribute to Blum, writing: It is with such deep sorrow that Im writing to share the news that our friend and former board member Mark Blum has passed away as a result of complications from the coronavirus. Mark was a dedicated Screen Actors Guild and SAG-AFTRA board member serving from 2007-2013, a passionate champion for merger, and a tireless advocate for members.

Those of us lucky enough to have known him will treasure our memories of a gifted actor, a master teacher, a loyal friend, and a beautiful human.

On a personal note  I always appreciated Marks clear perception of complex situations. He always spoke the truth and did a great service in informing members of our community about the ins and outs of the union whenever he had the opportunity.

Mark was smart, funny, and a true actors actor. He will be deeply missed.

She urged others to stay home to limit the spread of the virus.
Despite what some would have us believe, there's no reason to deny yourself ice cream

There is a message currently being widely shared on Facebook which offers advice on "what you can do to safeguard yourself" against the coronavirus. In the short voice recording, an unidentified woman, citing unattributed medical guidance, says people can ward off the coronavirus by avoiding eating or drinking cold things, and by taking zinc.

Her number one tip is to take a sip of warm water every 20 minutes, in order to wash the virus, if present, into the stomach, where - she says - it will be killed by stomach acid.

Why should we believe this? Well, because the unknown woman tells us she has "heard the same thing from a lot of sources so it seems to me this is now very credible advice".

In fact, it's complete and utter rubbish. Pure hocus pocus. You might as well tell people to fight the virus by boiling up a cauldron of frog toes and snake eyes, straining it, then consuming the liquid at regular intervals throughout the day.

Staying hydrated is a reasonable general health practice. But, as Professor Trudie Lang of the University of Oxford - you know, a real expert, not some faceless randomer on Facebook - recently told the BBC, there is "no biological mechanism" that would support the idea that you can simply wash a respiratory virus down into your stomach and kill it.

If it was just a case of swigging hot water, then we wouldn't have a global pandemic on our hands, would we?

Another social media post that has circulated throughout the world, wrongly attributed to Unicef, also has the hot water nonsense, plus the advice to avoid cold food stuffs like ice cream.

Charlotte Gornitzka, Unicef's specialist on coronavirus misinformation, says the notion that avoiding ice cream can help prevent the onset of coronavirus is "of course, wholly untrue".

So good news, you don't need to deny yourself the mint choc-chip - after all, it's at times like this that comfort food really comes into its own.

It may seem incredible that anyone would take such unsolicited, unsubstantiated instruction seriously, let alone pass it on to others. But fear does funny things to people.

When our everyday lives have been completely upended, and hysteria is rarely far below the surface, it's not surprising that reason and good sense flies out the window.

Many of us feel helpless, confined in our homes, bombarded with frightening news updates. So if a message pings in from a trusted friend or family member, telling us we can save ourselves by slurping hot liquids every few minutes or giving up the ice cream sundaes, it's not hard to see why some people succumb - and perpetuate the chain of misinformation by passing it on to others.

But let's be clear - this bogus health advice is dangerous and sharing it is morally irresponsible.

It's much more harmful than the other conspiracy guff out there, such as coronavirus being caused by 5G technology damaging people's immune systems in Wuhan, where the virus originated, thus making them more susceptible to the common cold. (There is zero evidence connecting the new coronavirus to 5G.)

The reason why it's especially wrong to pass on evidence-free medical "advice" is because it offers people false reassurance: if they take these steps, they will be safe.

This could easily lead to complacency about essential measures like hand-washing and social distancing. And that could lead to infection with the virus itself and the spread of that infection, which will only fuel the pandemic.

Dr Joshua Wolrich, an NHS surgical doctor who often debunks medical myths, has called for it to stop.

"Misinformation doesn't keep people safe, it just confuses and creates distrust when official guidance doesn't match," he says.

Wolrich also warns against chowing down food supplements like zinc, vitamin C, vitamin D, elderberry, colloidal silver or anything else, in the hope of out-foxing the virus.

"It's all incorrect and potentially harmful," adds Dr Wolrich.

Tom Phillips, the editor of Full Fact, the UK's independent fact-checking charity, urges people to think before they share, thus making them less likely to pass on bad information that puts family and friends at greater risk.

"We face a global public health crisis in the age of unprecedented and rampant misinformation," he writes. "Good health advice can make the difference between life and death."

Meanwhile, bad health advice - transmitted instantly from device to device - is spreading faster than coronavirus. So next time someone passes on the secret tips that will supposedly protect you from the pandemic, you know where they belong: in the bin.
World leaders are to hold online crisis talks Thursday on the coronavirus pandemic that has forced three billion people into lockdown and claimed more than 21,000 lives.

With the disease tearing around the globe at a terrifying pace, warnings are multiplying over its economic consequences, and experts say it could cause more damage than the Great Depression.

Amid squabbling between the leaders of China and the US over who is to blame, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for the world to act together to halt the menace.

COVID-19 is threatening the whole of humanity, he said. Global action and solidarity are crucial. Individual country responses are not going to be enough.-

The global lockdown  which also took in Indias huge population this week  tightened further Thursday as Russia announced it was grounding all international flights, while Moscows mayor ordered the closure of cafes, shops and parks.

Tokyos millions of citizens have been told to stay home and tourism-dependent Thailand has shuttered its borders.

Economists say the restrictions imposed around the world could cause the most violent recession in recent history.

The G20 economies will experience an unprecedented shock in the first half of this year and will contract in 2020 as a whole, ratings agency Moodys said.

Unemployment rates are expected to soar  as much as 30 percent in the US  according to James Bullard, president of the St Louis Federal Reserve.

Leaders of the G20 major economies will hold a virtual huddle later Thursday in the shadow of such dire predictions.

As the world confronts the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges to healthcare systems and the global economy, we convene this extraordinary G20 summit to unite efforts towards a global response, tweeted the king of Saudi Arabia. Saudi currently holds the rotating G20 presidency.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said richer nations needed to offer support to low and middle income countries.

The devastating effect on poorer nations was laid bare Thursday when the Philippines announced that nine frontline doctors had died after contracting COVID-19.

Three large Manila hospitals said this week they had reached capacity and would no longer accept new coronavirus cases.

Hundreds of medical staff are undergoing 14-day self-quarantines after suspected exposure, the hospitals said.

 Gun rush 

The death toll from the virus, which emerged in China late last year, continued to grow, with the US becoming the sixth country to hit four figures.

Almost 1,050 people are now known to have died in the United States, with nearly 70,000 confirmed infections, a tally by Johns Hopkins University showed. Globally the number of infections is closing in on half a million.

The rocketing infection rate in the US has sparked a rush to buy weapons, gun store owners told AFP, with customers panicking about societal breakdown.

A lot of people are buying shotguns, handguns, AR-15 (semi-automatic rifles), everything, said Tiffany Teasdale, who sells guns in Washington state.

A lot of people are scared that someone is going to break into their home to steal cash, their toilet paper, their bottled water, their food.

Around half of the US population is under lockdown, but President Donald Trump said he would decide soon whether unaffected parts of the country can get back to work.

We want to get our country going again, Trump said. Im not going to do anything rash or hastily.

By Easter well have a recommendation and maybe before Easter, he added.

The White House, which has been criticised for its lacklustre response to the mushrooming crisis, has repeatedly lashed out at Beijing over the disease.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Group of Seven powers were united against Chinas disinformation campaign.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman infuriated Washington by suggesting on Twitter that US troops brought the virus to Wuhan, the metropolis where it first emerged late last year.

 Stigmatising 

Scientists say the new coronavirus was first detected at a market that sold wild animals.

Every one of the nations that were at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place, Pompeo told reporters.

But any notion of unity after the videoconference among the G7, which also includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, was dashed by the lack of a joint statement  often a formality at such gatherings.

Reports suggested the statement was scuttled by Pompeos insistence that it use the term Wuhan virus  a phrase frowned upon by medical professionals who say it is stigmatising.

The origins of the virus notwithstanding, its human cost continued to rise, as did the volume of the alarm bells being rung all over the world.

Irans death toll surpassed 2,200 Thursday and Spains topped 4,000. Meanwhile health experts cautioned that the sewage-soaked alleyways and bamboo shacks that are home to one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh provide fertile ground for the spread of the disease.

Britains National Health Service said Londons hospitals faced a continuous tsunami of seriously ill COVID-19 patients.

SOURCE: AFP
Ramallah, March 26 : A Palestinian official has announced the first death from the COVID-19 in Palestine.

A woman in her 60s who had tested positive for the coronavirus passed away on Wednesday evening, Ibrahim Melhem, spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, said at a news briefing, Xinhua reported.

The daughter and son-in-law of the woman were also confirmed to be infected with coronavirus in the evening, he said.

The number of coronavirus cases in the Palestinian territories has reached 64 since March 5, with 62 in the West Bank and two in the Gaza Strip, according to Melhem.

"Palestine must follow the pioneer experience of China in restricting and combating the virus," he noted.
JOHANNESBURG - South Africas president appeared in full military uniform for the first time since the end of apartheid and told troops to be a force of kindness as a three-week lockdown begins at midnight and they ensure that 57 million people stay home. The mission is the most important in the history of our country as coronavirus cases near 1,000, the highest in Africa.

Our people are terrified right now and we should not do anything to make their situation worse, President Cyril Ramaphosa told police earlier Thursday. Psychologically they are already scared that they could get the virus, lose income, lose jobs, get sick without medication.

Anxiety has been especially high for low-income South Africans squeezed into townships, sometimes with an extended family sharing a shack of corrugated metal and little income. Fears of an increase in domestic violence and rape have been expressed by civil society groups. And economic pain is widespread, with a recession and unemployment at 29%. South Africa remains one of the worlds most unequal countries a quarter-century after the racist apartheid system ended in 1994.

I have even resorted to selling face masks so as I can be able to raise money and return to my homeland outside (Johannesburg), said street vendor Dinko Seroka, as people lined up to take buses to more rural areas. As you can see here, everyone is leaving for their homelands, and if I stay behind I dont know how Im going to survive.

South Africa has 927 virus cases, with no reported deaths. Africas total cases are now 3,037 with South Africas latest cases added to the toll of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Forty-six of the continents 54 countries have the virus.

South Africas lockdown is one of the worlds strictest, with alcohol sales, running and dog-walking banned. Citizens should expect to be sober for 21 days, authorities have said, but sales at liquor stores were brisk on Thursday. Borders have closed except for transport of essential goods.

Without naming countries, the World Health Organization regional chief for Africa, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, told reporters that draconian restrictions must include strong public health measures to truly contain the virus spread. Humanitarian corridors might be needed as well, she said.

The window is narrowing every day but theres still a chance to contain the virus spread in many countries, Moeti said. About half of African nations with the virus have only imported cases from abroad.

More countries are expected to impose lockdowns. On Thursday, the president of Botswana, who has been in self-isolation as a precaution after a weekend trip to Namibia, told citizens to Please prepare yourselves for an imminent one.

Rwanda locked down over the weekend, and police denied that two people shot dead had been killed for defying the new measures. Police spokesman John Bosco Kabera said the two were riding a motorbike on Monday in the south when they were stopped by an officer and attacked him, prompting his colleague to fire in self-defence.

In Rwandas capital, Kigali, streets were empty while authorities used megaphones to urge people to stay indoors. The government has promised to provide food to vulnerable people.

I ask our government to please have a good heart for your people during these difficult times, shopper Jacqueline Murekatete said as officers wearing face masks and gloves instructed people at a market how to stand in line.

We need to eat and we are desperate for your help. Now we have two pandemics. We have hunger and we have the coronavirus, and our hunger is the new pandemic we are faced with. This is just dreadful.

In Uganda, police with guns and sticks enforced a new two-week ban on public transport. Gunfire rang out in one street in the capital, Kampala, as officers chased people and roughed up suspects accused of defying the presidents orders.

Elsewhere, Nigeria said it would ban travel between its states in Africas most populous country. Eritrea closed schools and public transport. Kenya reported its first death. And Somalia, with one of the worlds most fragile health systems after nearly three decades of conflict, reported its second virus case.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.

African officials have showed varying levels of sensitivity to their own health measures. While South Africas president said he tested negative for the virus as a precaution, some people in Kenya were appalled after national health officials met to discuss the coronavirus and then shared a group photo  with people standing shoulder-to-shoulder.

___

Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda; Ignatius Ssuuna in Kigali, Rwanda and Cara Anna in Johannesburg contributed.

___

Follow AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
Finally, India has got into a lockdown fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. About 130 crore people have been advised not to get out of their homes except for essentials, as part of a mammoth effort to break the chain of infection.

Prime minister Narendra Modi, announcing the decision in a televised address to the nation on Wednesday, advised people not to breach the 'Lakshman Rekha' for the next 21 days, lest we set the nation back by 21 years. The prime minister has also announced a Rs 15,000 crore package to boost the healthcare sector. Modi has assured the nation that the Union government is working with the states to ensure that the supply of essential commodities is not disrupted. The home ministry has followed up on the prime ministers statement with detailed guidelines on how to enforce the lockdown.

While whatever the government has announced is welcome, what has been left out is worrying. The Lakshman Rekha poses no hazard to those who have an assured income but what about the 50 crore daily-wage earners India has? The prime mnister was silent on them.

Several states, including Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab have announced schemes to ensure that marginalised people dont go hungry. But we see no national effort to put in place a comprehensive plan, backed by the Union government with its financial muscle, for their well-being during the lockdown period. There are thousands of migrant labourers who have set out for their homes anticipating the lockdown but are stranded en route with no food, money or transport. We dont know who will take care of them as the prime ministers advice to people is to remain wherever they are.

The industrial sector has been asked not to cut down on salaries or wages but has been given no assurance on a help from the government. Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharamans announcements on easing statutory filings have come as a disappointment; her assurance to come up with plans later are less than reassuring for the economy. All that we have seen till now from the Union government are pieces of advice to the people on their conduct.

Now, the Centre must come up with its own action plan. Nations have already done it: The United States has prepared a $2 trillion economic stimulus package. Britain, another big casualty, has announced a 330 billion pound programme while France has come up with a 45 billion euro booster dose for the economy. Various estimates say Covid-19 could bring down Indias GDP by about 0.3 per cent to 0.4 per cent, which could impact people at the lowest level of the economic ladder the most. The states which are in the forefront of the fight against the pandemic have been given no assurance on Central support; many are asking the Centre to at least clear the GST arrears that are due to them. It is time that the Centre comes up with a definite plan to mitigate the fear that more people will die of hunger than of Covid-19 during the lockdown and to handhold the economy out of the tough times.
Left: An engraved portrait of American newspaper publisher Adolph Ochs, published on 1918. (The Cyclopdia of American Biography via Wikimedia Commons) Right: William Bennett, former education secretary under Reagan, speaks at the Values Voter Summit in Washington on Oct. 20, 2011. (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0)

From the Seminar to the Newsroom

Commentary

If you clicked over to Salon.com on March 23, it was like stepping into another universe. Here were five of the top ten headlines on the site:

Rally round the president? Oh, hell no

Coronavirus: its driving Trump nuts

Trumps most dangerous flim-flam: False Hope and quack advice

Fauci on Trumps coronavirus briefings: I cant jump in front of the camera and push him down

Trump refuses to promise his own company wont get a taxpayer bailout: Lets just see what happens

Read through the stories beneath those headlines and you feel like youre back in the 19th century when newspapers functioned openly as party organs. Theres some reporting in each one, yes, but the facts are embedded in so tendentious a perspective that they have no truth-value.

You quickly realize that the specific occasion for the story is but a pretext for an enduring political goal of discrediting the president.

Establishment of Impartiality

It wasnt so long ago that this kind of bias brought a journalist down in the eyes of his colleagues. In 1896, Adolph Ochs purchased The New York Times and valiantly steered the paper away from that. He pledged to report on happenings impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.

The impartial approach caught on, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors made it official by issuing a statement in 1923 laying out Canons of Journalism, which included:

Partisanship in editorial content which knowingly departs from the truth does violence to the best spirit of American journalism; in the news columns it is subversive of a fundamental principle of the profession, and: Impartiality: Sound practice makes clear distinction between news reports and expressions of opinion. News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind.

By that time, reporters prided themselves on their independence. They would be embarrassed to be identified with a political faction. Editors could opine, yes, but not a reporter on the beat. Journalism was now a profession, which meant that it observed established norms of conduct and judgment, along with erecting an accredited body of officials that monitored the field. You had to be certified in order to claim a press pass.

Sounds quaint, doesnt it, the outlook of another era, an age of innocence or naivete. We are so much more reflective and honest about our perspectives. The very idea that a journalist can free himself of bias and issue a neutral presentation of the facts is just an old myth. Nobody can do that, not even a trained inquirer such as an investigative reporter. Thats what enlightened thinking holds to now: the inescapability of bias.

And it wasnt President Donald Trump who opened their eyes. However much hes the target or instigator or clarifier of journalistic bias, and notwithstanding the political character of media practice, the breakdown of impartiality began far away from newsrooms and Washington and state capitols. It started in higher education, in the humanities classroom.

What Is Truth?

Thirty-five years ago, when conservatives and traditionalists such as Bill Bennett first objected to what they termed the politicization of the humanities (see the National Endowment for the Humanities study from 1984, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education), they worried that students would emerge from college with no trust in the values of objectivity and reason.

English professors and cultural theorists were peddling ideas of relativism and subjectivism and identity politics that undermined the old Enlightenment norms of inquiry and truth-seeking. Against the ideal of the fair-minded observer who suspends his personal inclinations and follows evidence where it leads, the humanities professor highlighted the prejudiced interpreter, a figure compromised by his identity, his class membership, private aims, and social/historical positionality.

To old-fashioned types who held to the high regard for truth (the word was understood by advanced thinkers as ever in quotation marks), humanities professors had Pilates dismissal ready at hand: What is truth?

Nietzsche once said that Pontius Pilate was the only figure in the entire New Testament who deserves any admiration. (See The Anti-Christ, Section 46.) Pilate, you see, stands above these petty disputes among the Jews, taking an ironic distance from their charges of blasphemy and sin, washing his hands of the whole affair. He is a worldly cynic, a cosmopolitan stuck in a society of primitive fanatics ready to kill a rival to religious truth.

I was in graduate school in the 1980s, and Pilates disdainful shrug was the going attitude. We read Nietzsche and quoted his aphorisms all the time (There are no facts, only interpretations). Marx taught us that intellectuals only pretend to objectivity while advancing the interests of those who support them.

Jacques Derrida announced, There is nothing outside the text, an axiom that ensnared us in a dynamic game of interpretation after interpretation after interpretation.

Michel Foucault explicitly tied truth claims to expressions of power, while Richard Rorty the pragmatist insisted that every truth is merely a provisional stopping point that enables us to get on with our lives in a better way.

These French and German forebears, along with their leading American importers, were the cutting edge. Graduate students and young professors realized quickly that this relativism and perspectivism was a dogma of the discipline. Anyone who maintained the Adolph Ochs division of opinion from observation was judged a throwback. He hasnt read his Foucault  hes out of touch  lets move on.

If you wanted to get ahead, if you wanted to get and keep a job, you had to voice the dogma in your teaching and research. It was the professional way to be.

And so we passed it along to our students, the millions of kids moving through college in the 1990s and 2000s. We pledged to school them against absolutes, to disabuse them of silly notions such as self-evident truths and the Laws of Nature and of Natures God.

Intellectual Training Ground

All undergraduates had to learn the lesson, which they got in freshman composition, U.S. history, and Sociology 101. That includes all journalists and reporters under the age of 50. Every one of them went to college, and every aspiring journalist today goes to college. This is their intellectual training ground: four-plus years in an environment in which the only universal truths are political truths, the truisms of political correctness. Everything else is an opinion, a position, a Well, this is how I look at it postulation.

Its only a small step from the general relativism that the ambitious reporter absorbed in college to opinionating in his reportage five years after graduation. For him, the notion of journalism as an activity separate from or somehow prior to political contests is, at best, an uninformed assumption.

Besides, the willing suspension of political passions is a laborious condition. It takes discipline and training. If it didnt, we wouldnt need to make journalism into a profession with standards everyone must uphold. How much easier it is to give in to partisanship! The reporters at Salon despise Trump; to choke down that feeling can only cause them pain.

In the past, they had to suffer that self-vigilance or get another job. The mayor who they knew was a jerk had to be covered with fairness and objectivity. They overcame that disgust through an ethic of impartiality that was central to their identity as journalists. No longer. For the past 50 years, the humanities have assailed that ethic as spurious and blind. Were living with the consequences.

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory college. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, TLS, and Chronicle of Higher Education.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
The world trade is expected to witness a sharp fall due to COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis, and global solutions will be required to deal with the pandemic, according to the WTO.

In a video message, World Trade Organization (WTO) Director-General Roberto Azevedo said cross-border trade and investment flows have a role to play in efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, and will be vital for fostering a stronger recovery once the medical emergency subsides.

He said global solutions are needed to address the global challenge brought about by the pandemic.

WTO economists are analysing the fallout from the crisis and will report their findings and projections for trade in 2020 and 2021, Azevedo added.

"Although the report is still a few weeks away, the economists foresee a very sharp decline in trade," he said.

This does not augur well for WTO member countries like India which are not recording healthy growth in exports.

"Once the medical crisis begins to recede, trade will allow countries to help each other grow, bringing faster and stronger economic recovery for all of us. The WTO will do its part," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The world is changing by the hour. The biggest global health challenge in living memory is shutting the planet down. Countries from India to South Africa and the US to Brazil have seen what happened in China, and see what is unfolding in Europe. They are closing down travel, movement and commerce. The world is now on a war footing to fight the outbreak and its economic consequences.

The Irish government, like its counterparts across the world, is putting in place measures that would have been unthinkable just four weeks ago. Mistakes will be made, but in an emergency it is necessary to move fast. The cost of non-decisions can exceed the cost of bad decisions.

As the most powerful actor in any society, the State is the only entity that can mobilise and co-ordinate the resources to handle the sort of emergency that is unfolding. The multiple arms of the State also spend more money than even 100 of the largest companies. Targeting that vast financial firepower can make the difference between an awful outcome and an utter catastrophe.

On Tuesday, the Government announced a new support mechanism for workers in companies whose business has declined significantly or disappeared entirely. It will cost billions of euro over its 12-week timeframe. This (borrowed) money will bolster the incomes of workers who are laid off and those who fall ill.

This response is not as revolutionary as it might appear at first sight. Many continental countries have unemployment insurance schemes which pay out a high share of the income that has been lost in the initial period of unemployment. The payments then taper over time.

This is a much better system than the one we have long had in Ireland because it means that, for most people, the effect of losing one's job is not as damaging for a household's finance as going to Ireland's standard flat-rate jobseekers' allowance/benefit. From an economy-wide perspective, it also means that in a recession overall consumer firepower doesn't contract excessively.

Many of those who lose their jobs will spend all their welfare benefits meeting existing commitments. For those who have spare cash, it is vital for the wider economy that they spend it. The purpose of these much increased welfare payments is not that they end up sitting in banks. If they do, they won't go to businesses which are now starved of cash.

If you have the wherewithal, support local businesses as much as you can during the shutdown - in person if that is safe and online if it is not. Spending will benefit everyone.

It is imperative that as many businesses as possible come through the shutdown so that they can re-employ their staff and get trading again once the health issues become manageable. If that can happen, then there is still hope that the economy will have bounced back by mid-year.

Indeed, there is much more hope of this happening than there was the last time the country suffered a major shock - in September 2008 when the property bubble burst and the banks were on their knees.

A dozen years ago, tens of thousands of construction workers lost their jobs in a matter of months. It would have been madness for any government to try to save those jobs (a well-designed welfare system is about protecting the worker, not the job). It was clear by the nature of the collapse that too many houses and commercial premises were being built. The sector had to shrink.

As of a few weeks ago, there were no significant sectors in the Irish economy which were in such an unsustainable position and which needed to downsize. On the contrary, the economy was in a sweet spot - it was lean, competitive and growing rapidly.

It will not be possible simply to stop the clock and restart the economy when the health emergency is contained. Some businesses will die and some jobs will disappear permanently. But if the duration of the shutdown can be kept to weeks, rather than months, everything could be humming again by high summer.

Central to minimising the economic damage of the virus outbreak will be the capacity of the Government to borrow money. In this column last week, the risks around that were discussed. As the Thursday edition of this newspaper was being printed late on Wednesday night, some very reassuring news emerged from Frankfurt.

Ultimately, the European Central Bank will have to act as lender of last resort to governments in the euro area during the emergency. Up to midnight last Wednesday that looked considerably less certain than it does now. In the preceding days, two members of the ECB's main decision-making body had questioned the role of their institution in performing its function as the currency bloc's lender of last resort.

Then, after a night-long meeting, the ECB announced its 'Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme' which will see it effectively print 750bn in order to lend to governments (that will happen in an indirect way because direct ECB lending to governments is forbidden).

The bank left the door wide open to printing "as much as necessary and for as long as needed".

Agreement among the 19 countries which form part of the eurozone could yet break down on the role of the ECB. As such it would be wise for the State agency which borrows money on behalf of the Government - the National Treasury Management Agency - to start issuing IOUs with all due haste. As of yesterday, the only thing it had issued since the crisis erupted had been a rather bland statement about how "well placed" it is to borrow more.

The ECB announcement of last Wednesday night has meant that borrowing costs for the Government remain near historic lows - as of the close of business last evening, money could be borrowed for 10 years at a rate of interest of less than a third of 1pc. That's a steal in the current circumstances. The NTMA should bite the arms off investors willing to lend to it at those rates. It needs to hoover up as much cash as it can as fast as it can.

The Government is betting everything on a mass bailout of the economy. The bet is not without risk, but it is the least risky option now. Let's all hope that it pays off.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine condemns the signing of the decree of the President of Russia, No.201, which grants only Russians the right to own land in occupied Crimea.

The signing of the decree is another illegal step of Moscow to the appropriation of a piece of Ukrainian state and private property in the territory of the illegally occupied Crimea, a gross violation of Ukrainian law and international humanitarian law, the Foreign Ministrys press service reports.

Ukraine uses all the possibilities of international law and international institutions to repeal the decree and hold Russia accountable for this offense, the ministry noted.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry also called on the international community to continue to increase pressure on the aggressor state, including through the imposition of sanctions.

As reported, on March 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that includes practically the entire territory of the annexed Crimea to the list of territories where the land plots can be owned only by citizens of the Russian Federation.

The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine said that this decree reinforced the basis for international sanctions.

ish
Department of Homeland Security officials had a conference call Wednesday to figure out what to do with the masks, which are part of the U.S. Customs and Border Protections emergency supplies. DHS officials decided to offer the respirators to the Transportation Security Administration, whose workforce has been clamoring for protective equipment, according to three of the people who described the plans on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Anna Moneymaker / New York Times

The U.S. Senate on Wednesday approved the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, an economic relief bill estimated at around $2.2 trillion to provide relief to people affected by shutdowns amid the coronavirus outbreak.

That bill will make its way through the U.S. House Friday, where it is expected to pass as well. Once approved, U.S. residents will receive as much as $1,200 through a stimulus payment.
Dr Lawrence Tetteh, the President of the Worldwide Miracle Outreach, says the novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) will at the end of the crisis turn people across the world to God.



Coronavirus is turning people to God like has never happened before. The enemy might have meant it for evil, but God is turning it for our good and even more people will turn to God by the time it ends, he said.



He said this in a video he recorded and circulated on social media to encourage the citizenry to make God the centre of their lives as the nation battled with the COVID-19 outbreak.



The President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Saturday March 21, 2020, while addressing the nation on the COVID-19, appealed to the public to observe Wednesday March 25, 2020 as a National Day of Fasting and Prayer.



However, after having called for suspension of social gatherings to curb the spread of the Coronavirus, churches and other religious bodies had to resort to reaching out to their congregants via traditional and social media platforms.



Dr Tetteh believed many people globally, who did not believe in God would believe in His might and wondrous works and find reasons to believe in Him by the time the global canker ended.



He quoted II Chronicles 7:14 that says: If my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.



By this, he called on all to turn from every ungodly behaviour, and take note that this period is not one for destroying or undermining other peoples credibility especially using politics.



I tell you that if we do this, God will make a way for us. Coronavirus will not destroy us. We will rise above it and God will give us a way out, he said.



Dr Tetteh said the COVID-19 was no respector of persons, and all humans should therefore change their ways and repent from their sins to succeed in the fight against the dieasese.



Weve been too arrogant, weve been too proud, weve been too selfish and done things our own way. But now God is telling us, none of the developed countries can have it their own way except they believe in Him.



The sickness is no respecter of persons and has humbled everybody on the earth. The healing of the land wont be done by an ideological, medical, scientific, or political power, but by a divine intervention from the Most High God, he added.



Although the outbreak was disastrous, he said it had brought all political parties together to seek the face of the Lord in its fight, which was positive.



He encouraged all Ghanaians to come together in a massive united front to seek the face of the Lord, to have an answer to their plight.

Source: GNA









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Last weekend, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders made what may seem like a radical proposal to give people some financial protection as the country deals with the coronavirus outbreak.

Suspend evictions, foreclosures, and utility shut-offs nationwide, the socialist senator from Vermont tweeted Saturday.

But by the time Sanders sent the tweet, San Antonio and Bexar County had already done so.

I think were a step ahead of most places, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said.

In recent weeks, city and county officials have strung together a temporary social safety net aimed at those who cant pay their bills as COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the economy  and as they force certain businesses to scale back their operations or shut their doors for the time being.

On ExpressNews.com: SA workers, businesses feeling economic shock of coronavirus pandemic

What is being made clear through all of this is that, whatever happens at the federal and state level, it invariably falls to local government to ensure the well-being and safety of our residents, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said. Theres no other net below.

Broadly, the crisis has forced a re-evaluation of the nations social safety net.

Congressional leaders and President Donald Trump bitterly debated the fine print of a $2 trillion economic stimulus package almost until the final minutes of its passage in the Senate late Wednesday. The proposal that won approval contains measures that never would have drawn Republican support before the start of the outbreak.

Chief among those is the proposal to distribute direct cash payments to Americans  $1,200 for individuals, $2,400 for couples with an added $500 for each child.

It now heads to the House.

The battle in Washington forced local officials into the breach to try to provide a measure of security for citizens amid the coronavirus pandemic  elements of which they hope to extend after the crisis is over.

Part of the reason why weve seen such a heavy toll so immediately in the national economy is that there have been such inequities built into its very foundation, Nirenberg said. That is a reality that every community in the country is going to have to reckon with and rectify as we build our cities and towns states and nation back up.

On ExpressNews.com: SAWS, CPS wont disconnect utilities during coronavirus pandemic

Both city-owned utilities  CPS Energy and San Antonio Water System  have temporarily ceased shutting off power and water for customers who cant pay their bills. It made no sense to shut water off for some of the citys most vulnerable residents during an outbreak that called for people to frequently wash their hands.

So far, its not clear how many customers who normally would have been cut off have benefited from the pause. But the utilities leaders said shutoffs for non-payment typically make up a small fraction of all monthly shutoffs. Both utilities try to work with customers through financial assistance and long-term payment plans, utility executives said.

Officials with CPS have discussed creating a new pot of funds to help residents adversely affected by the outbreak, CEO Paula Gold-Williams said.

But neither utility would consider ending shutoffs in the long-term.

Youve got to ultimately be able to collect, Gold-Williams said. Because, other than that, how do you support all of the work that happens to actually keep the grid going?

SAWS CEO Robert Puente concurred.

Why would anybody pay their bill? Puente said. Youd have to some kind of method to encourage people to pay their bill.

The San Antonio Housing Authority has halted evictions for noncriminal activity or lease violations at its properties for the duration of the crisis. And Wolff ordered a 30-day pause in evictions and foreclosures for property owners behind on their property taxes.

On ExpressNews.com: What to know about eviction changes during coronavirus crisis

Unclear is whether tenants will face eviction anyway when the crisis abates.

The first press is to stop it right away, Wolff said. Thats what weve been able to do.

Though most foreclosures dont go through the court system, the thinking goes that those seeking to oust residents who are behind on their mortgage payments would still need an eviction hearing  effectively pausing all foreclosures.

Wolff also enacted controls on the price of groceries, beverages and medicine in an effort to halt price gouging.

Bexar County plans to issue more than $5.2 million in interest-free loans and grants to local businesses over the next four years, a way to try to encourage business activity and boost job opportunities.

And city and county officials are pressing Gov. Greg Abbott to freeze property values for a year. That measure would have the dual purpose of minimizing year-over-year tax increases  which in many cases would be passed along to renters  and keeping thousands of angry homeowners from descending upon the Bexar Appraisal District offices during a pandemic.

Meanwhile, city leaders are weighing their own stabs at economic stimulus.

Last week, District 4 Councilwoman Adriana Rocha Garcia unveiled a wide-ranging proposal  dubbed the Revitalize SA Plan  that would boost funds to existing city programs that aim to help those in poverty and provide loans to struggling businesses.

Among the measures in Rocha Garcias proposal: the city would increase funding for affordability programs at SAWS and CPS and expand whos eligible for the programs, including households that are at 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines.

City Council members are also eyeing the citys risk mitigation fund as a source to help needy families. The funds purpose is to give financial assistance to residents struggling to stay in their homes or who have been forced out by drastic rent increases, residential development or health and safety problems.

Rocha Garcias proposal would double the fund to $2 million.

She also wants to set up a Small Business Continuity Fund that would give no-interest loans of up to $75,000 to San Antonio businesses that have seen at least a 25 percent dropoff in revenue during the outbreak. Rocha Garcia said shes already heard from local businesses that have seen their revenue fall by 30 percent.

We have, unfortunately, a very real experience now to show folks that this can happen at any moment and why its important to offer these types of services and think of those who are most vulnerable, Rocha Garcia said. Because we are one community.

But theres a limit to how much relief the city can provide. San Antonio already is facing potential tax revenue losses stemming from emptying hotels, falling retail sales and fewer flights in and out of San Antonio International Airport.

Thats a reality not lost on District 1 Councilman Roberto Trevino, who has pushed many of the measures put in place by the city and county.

We still dont know what the actual impact is going to be on the city just yet, Trevino said.

On ExpressNews.com: Get the latest update on coronavirus and a tracking map of U.S. cases

But the main tool at the disposal of city and county governments to protect residents livelihoods is lockdowns to prevent more people from getting the virus and prolonging the outbreak, said Dick Lavine, senior fiscal analyst at the left-leaning Center for Public Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan policy institute in Austin.

Stay-at-home orders for residents of San Antonio and the countys suburbs went into effect Wednesday. But officials have said they dont want to penalize people who violate the order and will focus instead on businesses that arent in compliance.

It seems clear that what you need to do is to stop the virus, Lavine said. And the way you do that is really strictly-enforced local lockdown provisions. That, local governments can do.

Joshua Fechter is a staff writer covering San Antonio city government and politics. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFReports
26.03.2020 LISTEN

Mrs Barbara Oteng Gyasi, the Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture said the ministry would engage government on a stimulus support system to cushion the tourism industry in the wake of the COVID-19 scare.

She said government recognised the immense contribution of the industry to the economy and would put in place measures to ensure that the sector does not suffer as a result of the pandemic.

The Minister announced this on Wednesday at a stakeholders meeting in Accra to brainstorm how best to seek support from government due to the effects of the disease on the sector.

The meeting brought together representatives from the Ghana Tourism Federation which represent 23 institutions to chart the path forward in addressing challenges faced by the industry.

The stakeholders has developed a proposal to the Ministry on the effects of the disease on their operations and the Ministry promised to engage the leadership of the Federation to President Akufo-Addo for assistance.

This, the Minister explained was necessary because the sector employs a huge number of people across the value chain sector for socio-economic development.

She was optimistic that the engagement with the President would yield positive results and explore ways of discussing with the financial institutions to extend the payment of moratorium with the industry players.

Mrs Gyasi commended the hotel industry for availing their facility to government to be used as a quarantine centre, stressing that their efforts had demonstrated love and service to humanity in this difficult situation.

She urged members to register with the Federation for a united front, priority would be given to groups affiliated or aligned with the Federation.

Mrs Bella A. Ahu, President of the Federation appealed to Government to grant its members incentives to compensate negative impact of the pandemic on the industry, as confirmed cases in the country rise to 68.

"The Federation is seeking for subsidy in water and electricity tariffs, suspension of taxes such as VAT, Tourism Levy, National Health Insurance Levy, Property rate and Business Operating Permit", she said.

The Federation called for more stakeholder engagements during and after the crisis and urged its members to stay calm and adhere to the directives of the World Health Organisation and the Ghana Health Service.

Some of the members suggested the introduction of an emergency levy to help the industry in times of global crisis.

A representative from the Airline industry said there has been adjustment due to the pandemic, stating that individuals who have bought ticket on their names could be allow to change the names.

Also the Airline system is flexible that the tickets could be used as voucher for a longer period of time without expiry dates.

GNA






There was one piece of good news in President Trump's coronavirus briefing two days ago: The Transportation Security Administration's Oct. 1 deadline for obtaining a Real ID compliant driver's license in order to board a commercial flight has been suspended. No new deadline has been given.

We are postponing the deadline for compliance with Real ID requirement at a time when we are asking Americans to maintain social distancing, Trump said.

Obtaining a Real ID compliant driver's license in most cases requires an in-person visit to the DMV, and this change should reduce the number of people who need to do so. Furthermore, several states have temporarily closed their DMV offices in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus, including New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and several others.

A Real ID compliant driver's license will have a star on it. Certain states (New York, Minnesota, Michigan, and Vermont) issue Real ID licenses but also special enhanced driver's licenses, which are compliant. Washington state issues enhanced driver's licenses that are compliant.

Travelers whose license is non-compliant would need an alternate form of ID, such as a passport or a DHS trusted traveler card, in order to board a plane. It's estimated that nearly one-third of Americans do not have either a compliant driver's license or an alternate ID.

A bill to extend the deadline by one year was introduced into the U.S. Senate on March 20. The bi-partisan legislation is sponsored by Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).
The oil market will not be a topic of discussion at the G-20 video summit later on Thursday, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about the agenda of the summit.

The virtual host for the G-20 event will be Saudi Arabia, OPECs leader and Russias former partner in managing the oil market.

The topic of oil  no, but the topic of the economic repercussions of the coronavirus on the global economy will not remain undiscussed, Peskov, spokesman for Russias President Vladimir Putin, told Russian media on Thursday, as carried by TASS.

I repeat, the main topic will be the international efforts to combat the coronavirus, Peskov said, answering a question whether the G-20 leaders would discuss the situation on the oil market.

Due to the Saudi-Russian oil price war and the plunging demand as economies remain under lockdown, the situation on the oil market is such that no major oil-producing nation will exit unscarred. Oil at below $30 a barrel is unsustainable for the indebted U.S. shale industry, which cannot make any money at these prices. But the situation on the market is not forever sustainable, even for Saudi Arabia and Russia. They both will need to tap into their sovereign wealth funds to patch up budget shortfalls from lower revenues at $30 oil. Related: Worlds Largest Oil Trader Says Demand Could Plummet By 20 Million Bpd

The G-20 call is expected to touch on the situation on the oil market, not least of the oil and oil demands importance in the global economy, a person with knowledge of the plans told Bloomberg.

The U.S. is said to be pressing Saudi Arabia to rise to the occasion and reassure the oil markets. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Wednesday, and we agreed all countries need to work together to contain the pandemic and stabilize energy markets, Secretary Pompeo said.

The U.S. plans to press the Saudis to give up on their plans to significantly boost production from April 1, using the G-20 summit to do so, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
- A Catholic priest has reportedly passed away in Anambra state

- The priest was found dead inside his car on Tuesday, March 24

- It was reported that the priest showed no sign of illness before the tragic incident

A Catholic priest identified as Reverend Father Charles Okeke-Odogwu in Anambra state has reportedly passed away. The cause of the death of the priest has not yet been confirmed.

According to reports, the priest attended a regional meeting of his region of Archdiocese on Monday, March 23. It was said that he showed no sign of illness before the incident and he participated actively at the meeting.

The priest, who managed Fr. Ohai Memorial Secondary School located in Oroma- Etiti area of the state, was said to have allegedly vomited in the car before he died.

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It was gathered that the priest was found dead inside his car on Tuesday, March 24, in front of Vicarage gate, on the school field. It was stated that the priest's car engine was still running when he was found.

Legit.ng came across the sad news on the Facebook page of Fr. Ohai Memorial Secondary School. In the Facebook post, the priest was wished a peaceful rest.

An On-Air Personality in Anambra state, Mc Ikebobo Cfr, also shared a post on Facebook to wish the priest a peaceful rest.

He said: "A Roman Catholic Vicar of Holy Cross Parish, Oroma-Etiti in Anam, Anambra State was found dead in his car at the front of Vicarage gate. The priest identified as Rev Fr. Charles Okeke-odogwu was found dead before the gate of the vicarage on the steering. It is still unclear what killed the priest. May his soul RIP.Amen."

PAY ATTENTION: Do you have news to share? Contact Legit.ng instantly

Meanwhile, Legit.ng had earlier reported that Nollywood lost another actor to the cold hands of death. 36-year-old Alkali Matt reportedly passed away while shooting on a movie set on Tuesday, March 24.

The young actor, who was known as Dareng on the popular Nollywood series Halita, was said to have been filming an epic movie in Masaka village in Karu local government area, Nasarawa state.

According to Halita production company, Familiar Grounds Media, he was one of the much-valued cast on the set. The executive producer, Dimbo Atiya, announced the sad news on her Instagram page. Atiya prayed that the Lord will grant Matt's family the fortitude to bear the loss and wished him a peaceful rest.

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WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.  New York nurses on the front line of the coronavirus outbreak are afraid their safety is being sacrificed so hospitals can stretch dwindling stockpiles of protective equipment.

Central to the fear are new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines seeking to help hospitals conserve medical masks as thousands of New Yorkers are infected with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Some nurses asserted hospital officials asked them to make a typically single-use surgical mask last a week, leaving them to store it in paper bags between shifts.

Other nurses described begging for access to higher level N95 masks and watching fellow nurses get quarantined after suspected COVID-19 exposures amid shortages.

Lori Glazer of Ossining, N.Y., rides the empty local 7:14 a.m. Metro-North train in to New York City during what would typically be morning rush hour on March 25. Glazer is a registered nurse in the Children's Hospital at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center.

Mostly, they talked of living in constant dread of infecting themselves or loved ones with the virus that has killed more than 18,000 across the globe and confirmed cases mounted in New York, surpassing 30,000 on Wednesday.

Were really just beginning this, which is the scary part, said Mary-Lynn Boyts, a nurse at Westchester Medical Center, about 30 miles north of New York City. I feel like were going into a battle were just not prepared for."

Treating coronavirus: ER doctor who moves into garage, away from newborn and family, praised by Obama

Even with millions of masks being distributed since last week in the greater New York City area, Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned hospitals could run out in coming weeks.

The burn rate on this equipment is very, very high. I can't find any more equipment. It's not a question of money. I don't care what you're willing to pay, he said at a news briefing Tuesday. Cuomo said about 2 million N95 masks could shore up supplies at the hardest-hit hospitals for anywhere from two to six weeks.

To avoid that grim fate, Cuomo has urged the federal government to take control of protective equipment production and get more supplies to New York as soon as possible.

Story continues

He noted that the shortages threaten countless other communities across the country just starting to get hit by the virus.

Cuomo also praised health care workers and first responders for their bravery.

Most of us are in our home hunkered down, worried. They're worried and they're going out there every day despite their fear. ... Overcoming their fear, and not for their family, they're doing it for your family, he said.

What nurses say about equipment shortages

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks during a news conference against a backdrop of medical supplies at the Jacob Javits Center that will house a temporary hospital in response to the COVID-19 outbreak on March 24 in New York.

Some nurses described a disconnect between Cuomos comments at daily news briefings and what some hospitals are demanding of workers.

Theyre being asked to do things that jeopardize their health and make it hard to take care of their patients, said Boyts, who gathers Westchester Medical Center nurse grievances for the New York State Nurses Association union.

You wouldnt ask police to go into a gun battle without a gun, but were being asked to put our lives on the line each day without the equipment that we need to do it.

Lori Glazer, a registered nurse from Ossining, also is worried by the lack of gear.

"We don't have N95 masks, we just have (surgical masks). They're protecting other people, not us," Glazer said. "It's scary going in because you never know when you're going to get sick."

At Montefiore Healths hospital in the Bronx, nurses with suspected COVID-19 exposures are being told to break the typical 14-day quarantine and return to work early, according to Karine Raymond, a Montefiore nurse and union leader.

The order apparently came as the CDC recommended loosening quarantine rules for medical workers, joining the already diminished infection control practices that nurses say put them at risk.

They keep lowering the guidelines as we fall sicker and sicker. Im afraid were going to lose some of our colleagues, Raymond said.

At Montefiore Healths hospital in the Bronx, where Karine Raymond works, nurses with suspected COVID-19 exposures aren't following the typical 14-day quarantine.

The federal agency in late February recommended extended use and reuse of masks connected to COVID-19 related shortages, deviating from long-held infection control standards. The quarantine strategy for medical workers was last updated on March 16, records show.

It is all part of what state and federal health officials say is a dire attempt to keep hospitals afloat in the face of potentially overwhelming COVID-19 infections.

Yet amid debate over the emergency actions, nurses at Montefiore were being warned they could be fired if they didnt adhere to the hospitals new protective gear rules, according to Montefiore records reviewed by the USA TODAY Network  New York.

Order for protective gear use in Montefiore sites

Eventually, Montefiore sent out a message Friday canceling the original order threatening termination and said it was "sent in error," the records show.

Michele Brailsford-Paul, a home care nurse for Montefiore, said she recently filed a complaint with federal worker safety regulators in Tarrytown about the shortages in protective equipment.

She compared the crisis to workers sickened while working at Ground Zero after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

"What's at the back of my mind is 9/11 and the trouble those workers had in getting health care coverage, so I wanted to take an active role in noting the lack of protective gear," Brailsford-Paul said.

What hospitals say about nurses equipment complaints

Montefiore officials asserted the Bronx-based health system with 15 hospitals is following CDC guidelines on COVID-19 and prepares for all types of emergencies.

Comprehensive plans have been in place to reduce risk of potential exposure to our patients, staff and community, the officials said in a statement.

Westchester Medical Center Health Network officials disputed that nurses have limited access to N95 masks and asserted the health system with 10 hospitals across the region is following CDC guidelines.

"Like every other hospital and healthcare organization, we are managing our supply pipeline and use very carefully, the officials said in a statement.

They added the health systems workforce is coming to work every day to help and serve their friends and neighbors. They truly are healthcare heroes.

Montefiore likewise disputes the allegations that nurses are short of protective gear.

Protecting our staff is also of utmost importance so we can continue to provide care as this pandemic continues to worsen. We are working tirelessly with state and federal governments to secure appropriate protective gear for our providers and equipment for our patients, the Montefiore officials said in a statement.

Meanwhile, some nurses criticized the CDC guidelines for giving hospitals the green light to limit access to protective gear, regardless of the safety ramifications.

What theyre telling us to do is not based on the science of the virus; its based on what is available for any given day, Boyts said.

A medical worker walks out of a coronavirus screening tent set up outside the emergency room at White Plains Hospital on March 21.

CDC officials didnt immediately respond to a request to comment on the nurses complaints in New York.

The state Department of Health would not say if it is investigating complaints from nurses about the conditions at hospitals. It noted the CDC continues to issue revised guidance regarding the use of protective gear.

"The (Health) Department takes the safety of New Yorkers very seriously and is also working to provide additional guidance to hospitals, agency spokeswoman Jill Montag said in a statement.

More: Coronavirus: White House asks NYC travelers to quarantine. Andrew Cuomo was just there.

How one hospital adjusted protective equipment rules for COVID-19

Hospital officials, in many ways, have been tasked with finding the balance between implementing the new CDC guidelines for stretching protective equipment supplies and worker safety.

One is Dr. Erick Eiting, vice chair of operations for emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Downtown, which includes an emergency department and urgent care in New York City that handles about 97,000 patients a year.

Eiting compared the effort to implement new mask-use guidelines to the rapidly evolving outbreak response in New York.

Splash guard, gown and gloves used by medical staff to prevent contamination

It is all seemingly part of a daily stream of drastic actions, such as converting the Javits Center in Manhattan into a temporary hospital, aimed at helping prepare the health system to handle surging infections.

A lot of it is there is so much anxiety about this because were dealing with a totally new phenomenon and trying to take the best practices weve built with other diseases and apply them here, but were also learning on the fly, he said.

For example, the rise in potential COVID-19 patients is forcing Eiting and colleagues to devise ways for some staff in high-traffic roles to use N-95 masks more efficiently.

Were having to come into contact with so many different patents in such a short time.  Does that mean keeping that mask on the whole time? he said.

Homemade masks: People are making DIY masks to fight coronavirus. But do they actually work?

Medical workers typically had used the N95 masks for brief periods to care for the limited pool of patients with airborne infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis.

Its an adjustment, because anybody whos worn one of these masks before knows just having to keep them on for a few minutes isnt the most comfortable thing, but having to keep it on for the entire shift is something else altogether, Eiting said.

The decisions at Mount Sinai are made by a team of doctors and nurses with infectious control expertise, Eiting said, adding the practices in place protect staff and patients.

Eiting on Monday noted Mount Sinai hasnt faced protective equipment shortages yet. But the need to gear up more often to handle people walking into the ER with COVID-19 symptoms is running through stockpiles at a historic rate, he said.

Maritza Duarte of Spring Valley shows one of the masks she made for health-care workers as part of The Masked Warriors Project (Rockland County, NY) Facebook group.

I think that creates an anxiety and knowing the supply chain has been disrupted adds to the uncertainty, Eiting said. We have a lot of work to do to make sure we continue to secure the equipment.

Follow David Robinson on Twitter: @DrobinsonLoHud

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: NY nurses treating coronavirus don't have N95 masks as COVID-19 surges
The first series of Ozark (Netflix) was a tightly wound thriller about Marty and Wendy Byrde (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney), a professional couple forced to move from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks after they got entangled in a drug cartels money laundering scheme. Sticking to the Breaking Bad formula, it showed the formerly middle-class family coming to relish their criminality. Considering its subject, it was surprisingly credible, anchored by excellent performances from Bateman and Linney. If there is a formula for prestige television, it is murderous gangs plus domestic strife, and Ozark served up plenty of both.

Having established the Byrdes in their new environment, the writers didnt seem to know what to do with them, and the second series was flabbier. It wouldnt have been the first drama in recent years to run out of imagination before it ran out of budget. So its a relief that for Ozarks third outing, it seems to have got its mojo back. It begins six months after the end of series two, and the Byrdes riverboat casino, The Missouri Bell, is up and running, a legitimate enterprise relieving holidaymakers of their dough. Looking after things day to day is Ruth Langmore (Julie Garner), an anxious cobra of a manager, alternately charming and vicious, especially when it comes to local small-time mobster Frank Jr (Joseph Sikora).

Marty and Wendy have more to worry about. Wendy previously worked in political strategy and craves more money and power. Never let a good crisis go to waste, she tells her husband. With a few calculated risks, they could wind up running things. She sees an opportunity to go into bigger business with the Novarro cartel, who are under pressure from an ongoing drug war, and seeks out their lawyer, the steely Helen (Janet McTeer), to assist. Marty is happy with things as they are, seeing a path to stability, especially for their children, out of the chaos of their recent past. Marriage therapy sessions are failing to reconcile them on this or their other problems. Whatever else might be said for becoming a large-scale money launderer, it strains the conversation over the lasagne.

Ozark mostly makes up for any deficiencies in originality with its crisp execution. The leads are superb, especially Linney and Garner, and the direction keeps things at a high point of tension, lit so dimly that even the sun seems depressed. The deep, looming score helps, too. Given that the Byrdes are never more than five minutes from cataclysm, they remain remarkably well put together. The difference between how the Byrdes present themselves and the objective reality of their situation gives the programme a restless energy. We will follow them down the rabbit hole, even though it cant end well, and its to the writers credit that the characters remain plausible while they take more and more extreme decisions. You might be able to evade the FBI and rampaging drug gangs. Escaping your family is another matter entirely.
Doctors, nurses, paramedics, technicians, and other health care professionals involved in the care of Covid-19 patients will get a special insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced on Thursday.

We want to attend to the front-line warriors first, not forgetting the risks that they are putting themselves in by dealing with patients affected with coronavirus. For them, we are providing an insurance cover. In the three months that they are exposing themselves to this virus  hopefully, by then this will be contained  we shall be providing 50 lakhs to each person as medical insurance cover in case they need it, said Sitharaman.

Any health professional who while treating Covid-19 patients meets with some accident ... would be compensated with ... Rs 50 lakh under the scheme, a government document says. Around 2.2 million health workers will get the cover.

Associations of doctors have been in talks with the government seeking such a health cover. We would request you to ensure the protection of doctors working in health care institutions in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic by providing health insurance cover and an adequate number of masks and personal protective equipment, the Federation of Resident Doctors Associations (FORDA) said in a letter to Union health minister Harsh Vardhan on March 16.

FORDA president Dr Shivaji Dev Barman said they were assured of health insurance for all those working with Covid-19 patients when they met the health secretary. As of now, most of the resident doctors who are at the forefront do not really have any insurance cover. And, if you see data from other countries doctors and healthcare workers are at a higher risk of getting the infection, he said.

Nurses, too, have been seeking a risk allowance.

All India Government Nurses Federation secretary general GK Khurana said it is very encouraging that Prime Minister Narendra Modi acknowledges their role and it motivates them. This is a good move by the government to protect the healthcare workers. However, it is just for a period of three months. We work with various infections throughout the year and we have long been fighting for a risk allowance. I have worked with patients during the H1N1 pandemic and even when HIV/AIDS first came to India.

More than health insurance, most want personal protective equipment. It [insurance cover] is a good move, of course, if people get the infection or die they should get compensated. But more important is to ensure that they get the proper protection so that they do not get the infection in the first place. We have been writing to the government about the same, said Delhi State Paramedical Federation general secretary Jai Prakash.

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: Hundreds of people were left



stranded at various checkpoints on the Andhra Pradesh- Telangana borders since Wednesday night as authorities refused to let them into the state in view of the coronavirus lockdown, exposing the communication gap and lack of coordination between the authorities of the two States.

After frantic SOS calls by the stranded persons, including pregnant women and children, AP authorities finally agreed to let them in, on the condition that they be shifted to a quarantine facility.

While those who accepted the government directive were allowed in, others were left at the border points.

As came in that the student hostels and paying guest facilities were being re-opened in Hyderabad, most of the students chose to turn back.

The AP government said in a release on Thursday morning that 44 people who came from Hyderabad were shifted to a quarantine facility at Nuzividu.

While some others went back to Hyderabad, over 200 persons who refused to move into quarantine were also being sent back, the release said.

"Only those persons with a 'clean certificate' for valid medical reasons are being permitted to enter into the state. Others will not be allowed under any circumstances," the release added.

It all began since late Wednesday evening when people started reaching the border checkpoint at Garikapadu on the National Highway-64.

They carried a special travel permit issued by police authorities in Hyderabad after student hostels and paying guest facilities were abruptly shut down.

Intervention of the local MLA and Government Whip Samineni Udayabhanu did not help as he blamed lack of coordination between the two states authorities for the situation.

Local Deputy Superintendent of Police Ramana Murthy maintained that since the lockdown was in force and the inter-state borders have been sealed, no vehicle or person could be allowed into the state.

The stranded passengers faced severe hardship as there was no water or food in the vicinity.

Also, the panic-stricken passengers were huddled in a group as they awaited some intervention from the higher-ups to end the impasse.

Vijayawada Sub-Collector H M Dhyanachandra visited the spot and said the passengers would be moved to a quarantine facility at Nuzividu, some 40-km away, for isolation and medical examination.

Over 600 people, including a few women and children, set off from Hyderabad in cabs after obtaining special travel permits from the local police. After a smooth ride up to Garikapadu, the borderline between the two states, the vehicles were stopped at around 3.30 pm, leaving the passengers stranded.

"We are a group of students and have been asked to vacate our hostels. The Hyderabad police gave us special travel permit to return to our native place and accordingly we hired a cab and started our journey this morning. We were blocked at this place as the AP police are unwilling to let us in," a student said.

Another person said he was travelling with his wife, into her ninth month pregnancy, after a medical check-up in Hyderabad. "Despite our situation, the police are not willing to let us travel to our destination," he lamented.

The local MLA arrived on the scene and took up the stranded passengers' case with the police but to no avail.

"Those who were going to Guntur from Hyderabad were allowed via Piduguralla but here they blocked everything. There is a clear lack of coordination between the officials of the two states," Udayabhanu said.

He said the passengers could be permitted further journey after conducting required thermal screening tests.

The issue was taken to Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy's notice but to no avail, as the officials did not relent.

On Thursday, Guntur district Joint Collector Dinesh Kumar said medical teams were being sent to the border checkpoints to screen the passengers.

"As per rules, the passengers cannot be sent to their villages and they only have to go to a quarantine facility. Only those who agree to this will be allowed into the state," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
(TNS)  California drivers have few reasons to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles during the coronavirus outbreak.President Donald Trump has said hell postpone an upcoming deadline for people to obtain Real ID cards, while the DMV put drive tests on hold and urged law enforcement to exercise discretion when dealing with drivers whose license and registration records expire over the next two months.The DMV also wont let people come in without appointments, which has contributed to an 82 percent drop in daily visits compared to this time last month.Despite the lack of activity, DMV locations remain open, and thousands of state workers are going into offices that some consider unsafe. The new coronavirus has already struck one major call center, and some fear more of their colleagues could soon test positive.DMV Director Steve Gordon says the department still has important transactions to process, such as reclaiming impounded vehicles, reinstating suspended or revoked driver licenses, adding endorsements to commercial driver licenses and getting identification to those in underserved populations.Governor Gavin Newsom issued a stay at home order for all Californians, except as needed for essential critical infrastructure sector, Gordon said in a written statement. DMV services are essential. The DMV licenses drivers, enforces driver safety, licenses local delivery vehicles, and long-haul fleets, as well as commercial truckers. DMV continues to assess how to accommodate customers in support of critical services in the state while following public health guidance.Newsoms administration has given California state agencies guidance on expanding telecommuting opportunities for state workers. Its up to supervisors to decide who can work for home and who is essential at a workplace.While some at the DMV have been given the opportunity to get paid to work from home, others are facing a difficult choice: Arrive in person or lose money or vacation time by not coming in.Nearly 1 in 4 call center workers did not show up to work on Wednesday, while an additional 13 percent of field office employees had unscheduled absences, according to the DMV.Riverside call center employees are particularly concerned. The DMV told them the branch would reopen one day after a deep clean was performed on Tuesday due to a worker testing positive for COVID-19, according to an internal memo obtained byOne Riverside employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of workplace retaliation, expressed concerns the DMV wasnt taking the issue seriously enough and had not been providing employees enough space for recommended social distance.The worker explained there were typically about 200 employees in the call center at any given time, with many of them being tightly packed into cubicles with low partitions at shoulder level.Im frustrated, the employee said. You really dont matter. The public does, but you dont because youre qualified essential. If youre not supposed to go anywhere, why are you still there?A month ago, the DMV saw about 95,000 field office visits per day. Since it moved to appointment-only service on March 19, visits have dropped to about 17,000 per day  a reduction of 82 percent.The DMVs message to Riverside workers encouraged the employees to discuss telework or other options with their supervisors if they had concerns. It also informed them that the Riverside Public Health Department confirmed it is okay to occupy the building.The department did not share details about how many of its employees across the state have tested positive for coronavirus, though it expressed a commitment to protecting its workforce.The health and safety of our employees and customers is the DMVs top priority, Gordon said.
Police have booked an owner of an Urdu newspaper for allegedly publishing a fake about the coronavirus in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district, officials said.

A case has been registered against an owner and reporter of an Urdu newspaper for publishing a fake in his daily that six persons have tested positive for the COVID-19 in Poonch, creating fear and confusion among the local populace, they said.

Acting on a complaint, police under the direction of SSP of Poonch Ramesh Angral registered an FIR against the owner of the daily, the officials said, adding investigation in the case is on.

The Jammu and Kashmir administration has appealed to the media outlets not to publish or broadcast any about the coronavirus without being verified by the officials.

It has also requested the general public to stay at home to prevent the spread of the deadly virus and not believe in fake and malicious news reports.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A near-complete lockdown of cities can potentially beat back the Covid-19 outbreak to such an extent that people can be allowed within weeks to return to work without causing the virus to take hold again, and in the absence of any countermeasure by countries, the virus would have infected 7 billion of the worlds population.

Thats the finding of a statistical analysis of several cities in China, led by a team from Londons Imperial College.

The findings lend weight to the strategy adopted in India, where virtually all of the countrys 1.3 billion people are now confined to their homes for a three-week period in what is the strongest counter measure adopted by any country in the world in terms of scale and duration. While announcing the lockdown, Prime Minister Narendra Modi underlined that there was one  and only one  way to defeat Covid-19. This was through social distancing, which the lockdown would ensure.

The analysis published on Tuesday compares disease spread data in Chinese cities with indicators of how people moved (derived from GPS tracking devices) between January 1 and March 17.

Initially, within-city movement and transmission were very strongly correlated in the five provinces most affected by the epidemic and Beijing. However, that correlation is no longer apparent even though within-city movement has started to increase, said the report.

The Imperial College team warned that the disease would have infected almost everyone on the planet  7 billion people  if countries had not taken any countermeasures.

The lockdown in China began on January 23 with the Hubei province, the epicentre of the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus outbreak that has since raced across the world, infecting close to 500,000 and killing 23,000 people in less than three months. The administration in Hubei began allowing some factories to reopen on March 11  roughly seven weeks after everything had ground to a halt.

For the first time since the outbreak began, China reported no new local spread of the infection for the five consecutive days till March 23. After one brief local infection on March 24, it again reported no new such cases till Wednesday  all of its new cases are now being imported from other countries.

A similar analysis for Hong Kong shows that intermediate levels of local activity can be maintained while avoiding a large outbreak, added the report by the Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team.

A previous analysis by the team  which is credited to have jolted the administrations of United States and United Kingdom into action  said countries across the world will need to put in place aggressive social distancing measures for at least two-thirds of the next 18 months, the period at the end of which scientists expect a viable vaccine to halt Covid-19.

The remaining period will need a tiered action plan that countries can use to pare back some of these restrictions when the outbreak relents, but immediately reimpose if infection rates pick up. But, the scientists added in that report, countries will need to set in place a strong mechanism to monitor the outbreak.

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Australians rushing home from potential coronavirus hot spots, including Indonesia and the Philippines, pose a huge threat to containing the spread of the disease, University of Queensland professor of virology Ian Mackay says.

With international flights to Australia becoming increasingly scarce and as Qantas prepares to ground its international fleet from March 31 - barring possible repatriation flights - Professor Mackay said passengers travelling back from Indonesia were a particular concern. The country has recorded a high death toll from relatively low rates of detected positive cases.

It is estimated there are 7000 Australian travellers in Indonesia, including 4700 in the holiday hot spot of Bali, though this number is a big drop from the usual figure of about 30,000 in Indonesia.

Military officials check the body temperature of a boy before prayers at a mosque in Bali, Indonesia last Friday. Credit:AP

About 16,000 Aussies have left Indonesia in the past week and more are expected to leave in the coming days. More than 1 million Australians visit Bali each year and the exodus of Australian travellers, along with tourists from other countries including China, will have a hugely deleterious impact on the tourist destination's economy and people.
TDT | Manama

A ban on exporting hand sanitisers from Bahrain has been announced. This is in line with the extraordinary measures undertaken by the government to help in the fight against coronavirus (COVID-19). The ban comes within Resolution 28 of the year 2020, recently taken by Industry, Commerce and Tourism Minister Zayed R. Al Zayani.

Announced on Sunday, the Resolution also bans the export of disinfectants. It is not permissible to export all types of disinfectants and hand sanitisers, except with prior permission from Industry, Commerce and Tourism Ministry, for a period of three months from the date of implementation of the provisions of this Resolution, it said.

The Resolution also specified the prices of disinfectants and hand sanitisers in all local markets for the next three months. The second article of the resolution banned limiting the flow of all sorts of disinfectants and hand sanitisers in the market, whether by unjustly hiding or storing them or by refraining from trading them.

Additionally, the resolution mentioned that violators would be subjected to the punishments mentioned in Law 35 of the year 2012 with regards to consumer protection, including imprisonment of up to five years, fines of up to BD10,000 and closure of the establishment. The ministry published the table of the new prices on its official page on Instagram.
MADRID -- Spain struggled to cope on Wednesday with a mounting coronavirus crisis as its death toll exceeded Chinas with another 738 lives lost in a single day, and a third senior government minister was diagnosed with the virus.

With 3,434 fatalities, Spain now has the second-highest number of deaths globally after Italys 6,820.

Nursing homes across the country have been overwhelmed and a skating rink in Madrid has been turned into a makeshift morgue.

Police stood guard on Wednesday outside the rink, normally a popular venue for childrens birthday parties, as hearses arrived at the building.

Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo became the third cabinet member to test positive for the virus, but the government said she was doing well.

Parliament sat late into the night for a session aimed at approving extending to 30 days a 15-day state of emergency which has shuttered schools, restaurants and most shops. The extension was guaranteed after the opposition Peoples Party pledged support.

People have been largely confined to their homes since the lockdown began on March 14.

We have achieved a near total reduction in social contact, health emergency chief Fernando Simon told a news conference, adding that Spain was nearing the peak of the epidemic.

Diagnoses increased by a fifth to 47,610 on Wednesday but the total could be higher: 137,000 workers are known to have taken sick leave associated with the virus, including to go into preventative isolation.

A priest serves a mass inside a chapel of an almost empty church in the Raval neighbourhood, as the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak continues, in Barcelona, Spain March 25, 2020. Photo: Reuters

Basic equipment needed

Medical staff, thousands of whom have become infected, have taken out lawsuits against the government, complaining of a lack of basic protective equipment like masks, scrubs and gloves.

The army has asked NATO for ventilators, protective gear and testing kits, Armed Forces Chief Miguel Villarroya said.

The government had ordered 432 million euros ($467 million) worth of masks, gloves, testing kits and ventilators to be delivered over the next eight weeks, with the first large batch expected this week, Health Minister Salvador Illa said.

In an example of how companies are changing assembly lines to produce medical products, a shoe factory in northern Spain has switched to making simple protective masks - first for its own personnel and then for distribution.

Now we are working hard to ... make something a little more sophisticated for it to reach medical use, Basilio Garcia, chief executive of the Callaghan shoe factory, told Reuters.

Lockdown has dealt a punishing blow to the Spanish economy, with tens of thousands of workers temporarily laid off as sectors like retail, tourism and manufacturing grind to a halt.

One of Spains biggest employers, El Corte Ingles, said it would temporarily lay off 22,000 workers at its department stores.
Axios

Democratic leaders have found a mechanism to enable them to bypass an initial Republican filibuster and debate the party's sweeping elections reform bills, according to a new leadership memo obtained by Axios.Why it matters: The strategy is the latest example of how Democrats are seeking new ways to try to bypass Senate procedures that are blocking their agenda. But the ultimate outcome will likely be the same: insufficient support to change the 60-vote threshold needed to pass sweeping voting r
EAST ST. LOUIS  Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Thursday activated about 60 additional soldiers and airmen in support of coronavirus response operations.

About 50 soldiers from the 1844th Transportation Company based in East St. Louis will support medical warehouse operations in Central Illinois. Another six service members were activated to work at the State Emergency Operations Center to help with communications, analyze COVID-19 response operations and provide analysis for potential flood response operations.

This brings the total number of Illinois National Guard service members directly supporting the COVID-19 response to about 200, with about 180 on state active duty.

About 50 soldiers with the 1844th Transportation Company based in East St. Louis are assisting with distribution operations at two warehouses in central Illinois housing medical supplies and equipment. They are working with the Illinois Department of Public Health, the Illinois Department of Transportation, the Illinois State Police and county and municipal agencies to ensure supplies are received and distributed as quickly and securely as possible.
CLAY, N.Y. -- A United States Postal Service employee who works at the Taft Road post office and processing center has tested positive for the coronavirus, the agency said Wednesday.

The USPS did not provide any other information about the employee, including what route the employee may have worked or whether the employee worked in the office.

In a memo obtained by Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, the postal service told workers that the risk is low for employees working in the facility. The memo said federal law prohibited them from releasing the name of the employee or medical information about the person.

Onondaga County has reported 81 positive cases of COVID-19 so far, including one death.

As of 3 p.m. on Wednesday, 248 people were in mandatory isolation. The county currently has results for roughly 1,550 tests of the nearly 2,400 tests taken countywide.

Experts told USA Today its unlikely that the coronavirus could spread via the mail because of the virus livability on paper and cardboard.

Organizations have released information regarding cases throughout Onondaga County that could pose a possible public threat. Those are listed below.

Possible public threat:

Bethany Baptist Church: Infected person attended on Sunday, March 15.

Asciotis Market, located at 3249 Milton Ave. in Solvay: Infected employee worked from 12:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday, March 17.

Americas Best Contacts & Eyeglasses, located at 3401 Erie Blvd East, DeWitt: Infected employee worked:

Monday 3/9 8:30 am-5:30 pm

Tuesday 3/10 9:30 am-6:30 pm

Wednesday 3/11 10:30 am-7:30 pm

Thursday 3/12 9:30 am-3:30 pm

No known public threat:

North Syracuse schools: Infected employee was not symptomatic while at work, has not been to work since March 13, superintendent said. No further information has been released.

Solvay schools: Infected employee confirmed Tuesday, March 24. District says everyone who came into contact with the staff member has been notified. No further information has been released, including where the staff member worked.

Two Syracuse schools, Roberts Elementary and Institute of Technology: Infected staff members did not appear to have contact with children or others, teachers union says. Infections apparently happened since schools closed on March 16.

Syracuse Veterans Hospital: Infected employee suspected of getting disease outside the hospital. No other information announced. VA says those with contact to employee being monitored.

Syracuse Hancock Airport: Officials have said that the infected worker did not appear to have extensive contact with travelers or other employees. No other information announced.

Got a tip, comment or story idea? Contact Chris Libonati via the Signal app for encrypted messaging at 585-290-0718, by phone at the same number, by email or on Twitter.

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NHS and social care staff will be given free car parking during the coronavirus pandemic, the government has announced, following pressure from campaigners.

It came after more than 400,000 people signed a petition on Wednesday calling on the government to scrap charges during the nations hour of need.

Petition organiser Anthony Gallagher welcomed the move but said fees and fines for NHS workers should be axed permanently.

Making the announcement, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said: I will do everything I can to ensure our dedicated staff have whatever they need during this unprecedented time.

Officials have vowed to provide NHS Trusts  or hospitals  with cash so they can also offer free car parking spaces to workers at hospital car parks.

Meanwhile, Local Government Secretary Robert Jenrick said he made an agreement with local authorities in England that will enable them to provide free car parking on council-owned on-street spaces and car parks.

Local councils will ensure NHS staff, care workers and volunteers can provide suitable evidence to be displayed in their vehicles in order to avoid charges, Mr Jenrick added.

The National Car Parking Group earlier confirmed it would offer free parking to NHS staff at its 150 car parks in England.

Mr Gallagher, a GP said: I hope after this nightmare has passed, that the government will still notice how NHS workers go above and beyond every day.

Mr Gallagher also added that government needed to go further and permanently scrap all fines and charges for NHS staff.

Last year, private firms pocketed 272 million from patients, families and NHS staff parking at hospital sites  up 46 million from the previous year.

In total, NHS staff were forced to pay 86 million to park their cars while helping the sick, according to NHS digital figures.

Parking charges at three Scottish hospitals will be scrapped for the next three months, Health Secretary Jeane Freeman confirmed on Tuesday.

Ms Freeman told MSPs that charges at Dundees Ninewells Hospital, Glasgow Royal Infirmary and Edinburgh Royal Infirmary will be waived from Monday.

Charging for parking at other NHS car parks in Scotland was scrapped in 2008.
About one in every 50 tests conducted for Covid-19 in India as of March 25, 2020, have returned positive. In comparison, about a quarter of all tests in Italy, about a sixth in Austria and a tenth in the UK were positive, our analysis of data shows.

This could be due to varying testing criteria in different countries, experts said. As the disease spreads in India, the percentage of tests coming out positive may increase, they said. India tested 25,254 samples as of 8 p.m. on March 25, of which 581 (2.3 per cent) were positive, according to the latest update from the Indian Council ...
The state security prosecution decided on 19 March to release 15 members of a mix of leftist and liberal political parties pending trial.

Sources said the release comes in response to the coronavirus. Khaled Ali, a lawyer defending political prisoners, said the move to release the activities was taken amid fears that inmates safety could be jeopardised by a possible coronavirus infection.

By Monday, Egypts death toll from the coronavirus was 19 and 366 infected.

Those released include political analyst and Cairo University professor Hassan Nafaa, regime critic Hazem Abdel-Azim, and a leading member of the liberal-oriented Dostour Party, Shadi Al-Ghazali Harb.

They are facing trial on charges of spreading false news, misusing social media to spread rumours, broadcasting false statements and news, and joining an outlawed group.

Most were arrested following minor protests on 20 September 2019.

The prosecution said the defendants sought to serve the objectives of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood whose satellite television channels broadcasting from Qatar and Turkey were heavily involved in inciting citizens to protest on what they called the Friday of Salvation on 27 September.

Activists Abdel-Azim and Harb were, however, arrested in May 2018 on charges of spreading false news, joining an outlawed organisation and inciting the overthrow of the regime.

Those released also includes seven members of the Dostour Party Ahmed Fadel, Ahmed Al-Rassam, Hilal Samir, Ramadan Ragab, Amir Eissa, Khaled Sweida, and Wael Abdel-Hafez.

Founded by Egyptian Nobel Peace Prize laureate and diplomat Mohamed Al-Baradei in 2012, the Dostour Partys objectives are mainly to promote the ideals of the 2011 January Revolution. Its activities, however, came to a standstill after internal rifts between party leaders.

Two members of the opposition Egyptian Socialist Democratic Party were also freed: Ahmed Al-Sakka and Amr Hasouba. The party was founded in April 2011 by a number of liberal and socialist activists calling for social justice and political freedoms.

The list comprises two members of two leftist political parties: Abdel-Aziz Al-Husseini, deputy chairman of the Nasserist Karama Party, and Abeer Al-Safti, a member of the Bread and Freedom Party.

Karim Abbas, a political activist and blogger, was the only independent defendant on the list.

Osama Al-Ghazali Harb, a prominent journalist and political analyst, said in an Al-Ahram column on 21 March that the move was a very good one. I hope that more political activists will be released in the coming period so that malicious human rights organisations which target Egypt do not use this issue as a weapon in their war against the regime, Harb said.

Yehia Qalash, former chairman of the Press Syndicate, wrote on his Facebook account on 23 March, we have high hopes that all defendants in custody or arrested pending investigation be released as soon as possible. This step is necessary to deter any expected spread of the coronavirus among prison inmates, Qalash said.

Following his release, political science professor Hassan Nafaa tweeted on 22 March that he hoped other detained political activists, particularly Khaled Dawoud, an Al-Ahram Weekly journalist and former head of Al-Dostour Party, are also released as soon as possible. I spent six months in prison with colleagues Hazem Hosni and Khaled Dawoud and I hope they will be released as soon as possible, Nafaa said, adding: let me also warmly thank all police officers who treated me well during my six months in prison.

Haitham Al-Hariri, a leading member of the leftist 25-30 group in parliament, said in a statement that the prosecutions decision to free 15 political activists is a very progressive step, but we need more steps in the coming stage so that all political detainees be released from prison.

In October last year, the prosecution-general announced the release of 500 detainees who were arrested in the wake of anti-government protests on 20 September 2019. The announcement followed the release of 200 other detainees a week earlier in September.

The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) said in a statement on 16 March that prosecution authorities should take a number of precautionary measures that can prevent any infection with the coronavirus among the prison population. The prosecution should move quickly to release all those who are in custody pending investigation, particularly those who suffer from heart and chronic problems, EHOR said, adding that the Interior Ministry should also be keen on disinfecting prison cells as those which are overcrowded could lead to the spread of the virus.

On 18 March the prosecution also released four activists who protested for the release of a number of detainees to prevent the spread of the coronavirus among prisoners.

They include writer Ahdaf Soueif, rights activists Laila Soueif and Mona Seif, and political science professor Rabab Al-Mahdi who were arrested while protesting in front of the cabinet and parliament buildings in downtown Cairo.

They were demanding the release of political prisoners over fears of a coronavirus outbreak in Egyptian prisons. Lawyer Mohamed Abdel-Aziz said the women were arrested for organising an illegal protest. Downtown Cairos Qasr Al-Nil prosecution ordered they be released after paying LE5,000 in bail each, Abdel-Aziz said.

Seif said in a Facebook video that the protest aimed to exert pressure on prosecution authorities to release prisoners, including her family members placed in custody, pending investigation into a number of charges.

Seif is the sister of Alaa Abdel-Fattah, a political activist who was arrested in 2013 for staging an illegal protest in front of the Shura Council.

An informed legal source said police officers guarding the cabinet building asked the four women to leave and stop taking videos, warning that it violated the protest law. They did not receive a prior licence to protest and police officers asked them to leave, but they refused, and as a result they were taken to the nearby Qasr Al-Nil police station to be questioned, the source said.

A security source told reporters on 18 March that security apparatuses observed that there was coordination among some radical leftist politicians and leading members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood to start a campaign aimed at releasing the groups prisoners under the claim that there could be an outbreak of the coronavirus among them. They used AlJazeera TV and other Brotherhood media outlets to propagate this campaign, said the source, adding that the family of political prisoner Alaa Abdel-Fattah and the head of a political party are trying to serve this campaign.

Abdel-Fattah was released from prison in March 2019 after serving a five-year prison term. He, however, was arrested again last September on charges of spreading false news and joining a terrorist group.

Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry decided on 19 March to suspend prison visits nationwide until the end of March.

The decision aims to safeguard general health and protect inmates in light of the Egyptian governments decisions and the Health Ministrys recommendations to halt large gatherings and events as a preventive measure to combat the spread of the coronavirus, a statement said.

The Interior Ministry initially halted prison visits on 10 March over coronavirus concerns.

The decision would be in effect immediately and run through 31 March, the cabinet said in a statement.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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These tanks were seen in Southern California this week. Officials say they were for routine work and not related to the coronavirus. (Naval Base Ventura County)

Amid concerns about the coronavirus, officials are trying to debunk rumors of various types about government actions.

Tanks

The latest involved photos showing a train carrying tanks in Southern California. Naval Base Ventura County said in a tweet that the armored vehicles had nothing to do with coronavirus preparation and the movements, which included trains routed through Los Angeles, were routine.

"Any logistical movements at Port Hueneme and Naval Air Station Point Mugu are just routine in nature to keep Americas deployed forces ready," the base said.

The base said it continues to support the "Department of Defense in routine air and port operations."

National Guard

At a news conference on Wednesday, Mayor Eric Garcetti stressed there were no National Guard troops in Los Angeles.

They have armories, they travel through Los Angeles, but officially have not been mobilized, he said.

Officials on Monday said the Guard was being used purely for humanitarian purposes:

Assisting in a medical supply warehouse in Sacramento

Working in Pacific Grove, where 19 quarantined passengers from the Grand Princess Cruise ship are staying.

Working at food bank facilities in Sacramento, Amador, Monterey, Riverside, Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties.

Filling in at various agencies that have seen a drop-off in volunteers because of the states stay-at-home order.

Policing

The Los Angeles Police Department said its officers are not stopping people for violating the citys Safer at Home restrictions.

Weve heard the rumors, so lets put an end to them. No, the LAPD is not stopping or ticketing people for exercising outdoors. Spreading false rumors during this time does no good, tweeted the department.

Asst. Chief Horace Frank said the department is not conducting DUI checkpoints or towing or impounding cars.

Santa Monica city officials said they arent about to cite anyone as they seek to insure the heath of residents.

We are not citing people. Our local order on this allows us to cite if that becomes necessary, but our focus is education, the city said in a statement.

City Manager Rick Cole said it would be absurd to suggest that police there would be stopping anyone related to the order. We are most certainly not doing that, he said.

The order language is standard language that gives law enforcement broad authority but given the current situation, people have a right to get exercise, go to essential jobs and perform necessary errands, Cole said. Our compliance efforts are focused on enforcing specific violations of the state and county orders, such as businesses that should be closed.




Health officials are imploring all Australians to practice measures placed by the government to help slow the spread of coronavirus.

Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Nick Coatsworth said cases will continue to rise before seeing a dramatic decrease in positive COVID-19 results as Australians undertake safety measures.

He stressed that most positive cases thus far have come from overseas and with borders closed off from international flights, then Australia could contain the virus.

Dr Coatsworth commended the government for taking advice from health experts and for not ruling out further restrictions.

'What the Prime Minister has announced is already the toughest measures that we have seen since war-time,' Dr Coatsworth told Today on Thursday.

'What we really need to do is have Australians get on board with that and by getting on board we mean social distancing, staying at home when you are unwell.

'The virus is not a long-jumper. If you keep yourself more than 1.5m away from another person, COVID-19 does not stay suspended in the air, it drops to the ground.

'If you wash your hands after touching that surface you will not get the virus.'

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

'We are expecting the cases to keep rising and that's because the measures announced this week are going to have a lag time between when they are introduced and when they actually start to see effect.

'But what we have to remember is that the majority of cases are still travel-relied and the contacts of those who have travelled.

'So although there is community transmission in Australia and it is worse in Victoria and NSW, we do know that those cases are mainly still travel-related, which is good news.'

His comments come as the nation's positive coronavirus cases soared to 2,675 on Thursday morning, with 11 dead.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the closure of Australia's borders from international flights amid the coronavirus outbreak.

As of March 20, only Australian permanent residents and citizens will be allowed to enter the country.
: Four more people, including a a doctor couple, tested positive for COVID-19 in Telangana on Thursday, taking the total number of cases to 45, even as the government initiated steps to contain spread of the virus.

Those tested positive are a 49-year old male resident of Qutbullapur in Medchal district, a 36-year-old doctor and her 41-year-old husband, also a doctor, and a 45-year-old man, resident of Secunderabad, a medical bulletin on COVID-19 said.

It said the four had not travelled to any foreign country, while all the 45 confirmed cases had a history of travel or contact with suspected or confirmed cases.

"There is no evidence of community transmission", it said.

The Quubullapur resident, who had travelled to Delhi, was now in stable condition and has been admitted at the designated hospital, it said.

The male doctor's mother had tested negative, while reports of his father and two children were awaited, it said.

A COVID application has been developed to facilitate online capture of live data of persons under surveillance, who are being monitored at their houses on a daily basis by frontline workers, it added.

State Health Minister E Rajender said both docctors, working in a super specialty hospital in the city and it was found that they recently toured several places in the country adding We are examining all the persons who came in contact with the doctor couple.

Both the patients are stable and have been admitted at the designated hospital, the bulletin said.

Rajender held a review meeting with health officials on the measures taken to prevent the spread of coronavirus in case it reaches the third stage in the state.

As of now the virus is in second stage in Telangana. As on March 26 afternoon, there are 45 COVID-19 cases in Telangana. While one has been discharged after treatment the others are recuperating, he said in an official release.

He instructed the officials to convert the state-run Gandhi Hospital as full-fledged coronavirus hospital.

He also ordered that health department officials not be granted permission to go on leave.

Rajender said the Health Ministry had lauded the steps being taken by the Telangana government to contain the spread of the virus.

He requested Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, through video conferencing, to allow city-based Public Sector Units like DRDO, BDL and ECIL to manufacture personal protect equipment, ventilators and ICU instruments.

The Minister requested the Centre to ensure that the movement of medical equipment and other essential items across state borders be hassle-free.

He sought supply of N-95 masks, personal protect equipment and ventilators from the Centre.

Meanwhile, another official release said several business houses had contributed to the Chief Ministers Relief Fund.

City-based Megha Engineering and Infrastructure Limited (MEIL) announced a donation of Rs 5 crore to the CMRF.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A nursing home in New Jersey has been evacuated after officials said that a coronavirus outbreak left all 94 patients presumed positive for the infection, and just three heroic nurses were left on staff to care for them.

St. Joseph's Senior Home in Woodbridge, New Jersey was evacuated on Wednesday, with workers fully clad in personal protective equipment moving residents one by one to a backup facility.

New Jersey health officials said that many of the residents of the home had taken ill, and more than a dozen were out sick, leaving just three nuns from the Little Servant Sisters of the Immaculate Conception.

Of the 94 total residents, 24 are now positive for coronavirus and the other 70 are 'presumptive positive,' government sources told WNBC-TV.

St. Joseph's Senior Home in Woodbridge, New Jersey was evacuated on Wednesday, with workers fully clad in personal protective equipment moving residents one by one

New Jersey health officials said that many of the residents of the home had taken ill, and more than a dozen were out sick, leaving just three nuns to care for them

Of the 94 total residents, 24 are now positive for coronavirus and the other 70 are 'presumptive positive'

In addition to nurses and therapists, the nursing home is staffed by the Little Servant Sisters of the Immaculate Conception (above) who stepped in after all other staff were out sick

Residents of the nursing home are being moved to a CareOne home in Whippany, roughly 30 miles to the north.

Relatives of the residents of St. Joseph's praised it as a well-run facility, and said that they hoped it would reopen after the crisis.

One relative, whose 92-year-old mother is a resident at St. Joseph's, told The Daily Beast that the home had been 'phenomenal' at dealing with the outbreak and said that he hoped it won't shut down permanently.

'There's a reason why they are so highly rated,' said the relative, who asked not to be named. 'They are incredibly caring and very good at what they do... I would, in an instant, get my mom back into the facility once it re-opened.'

It is just the latest outbreak at a nursing home housing some of those most vulnerable to coronavirus, following incidents in Washington, Illinois and elsewhere.

The deadliest single spot in the nation's coronavirus crisis has been the Life Care Center in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland, where federal investigators believe a contributing factor in 35 deaths so far was low-pay workers who came to work with the illness and potentially even spread it to other nearby facilities where they took shifts.

Residents from St. Joseph's Senior Home are helped on to buses in Woodbridge, New Jersey=

All 94 residents from the nursing home in Woodbridge are being moved Wednesday by Morris County officials to a CareOne facility in Whippany

Beyond that outbreak, at least 15 more have died and dozens have been infected at long-term care facilities across the nation, with major outbreaks of 46 infected in the Chicago suburb of Willowbrook, four deaths in at least two other facilities in New Jersey, 13 infected in Little Rock, Arkansas, and 11 infected in Troy, Ohio, with 30 more showing symptoms.

'Nursing homes would always have been ground zero, but given we already have huge staffing shortages, this will be magnified,' said David Grabowski, a Harvard Medical School professor who has studied staffing problems at homes. 'It could be worse for todays nursing homes than ever.'

Most troubling, he said, is that 75 percent of the nation's nursing homes don't meet federal suggested minimum levels for staffing and many workers are inexperienced. Four out of five nursing home employees are hourly workers, and given the low wages often leave for retail and restaurant jobs just as they become familiar with proper care procedures.

And staffing problems at the nation's 15,000 long-term care facilities could only be exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis, experts said, because lockdowns and school closures have left many such workers with no choice but to stay home and take care of their children.

The CareOne facility has moved its residents to other facilities to accommodate the new arrivals

Relatives of the residents of St. Joseph's praised it as a well-run facility, and said that they hoped it would reopen after the crisis

A resident of St. Joesph's is helped onto a van for evacuation from the facility Wednesday

'We have the most vulnerable people in a situation where ... nursing homes don't do what they have to do because they are understaffed, not sufficiently trained and there is high turnover,' said Steven Levin, a Chicago lawyer who has sued nursing homes over their practices. 'I am extremely frightened.'

Sherry Perry, a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home in Lebanon, Tennessee, has been working through the coronavirus crisis and believes her employer has been taking extra precautions to prevent infections, such as cleaning hand rails multiple times a day.

But she knows the effect worker shortages have on her life - shes often responsible for the care, washing and feeding of 13 patients on a given shift.

'Its challenging. We dont get to spend as much as time as wed like with the patients,' said Perry, who after 34 years on the job makes $17 an hour. Those just starting out make $10 or $11. 'The work is hard, theyre underpaid and theyre underappreciated.'

Residents from St. Joseph's Senior Home are helped on to buses on Wednesday

Health Commissioner Judy Persichilli said that St. Joseph's Senior Home (above) in Woodbridge is transferring its patients out of the facility and may have to close

At the same time, nursing homes have been struggling to control infections. Nearly 10,000 homes in the U.S. - almost two thirds of the total - fell short on at least one infection control measure over the past four years, according to an analysis of inspection reports by Kaiser Health News.

Some 'deficiencies' cited seem relatively minor, such as incomplete record keeping. Others are more serious, such as staff not washing hands before helping residents put on a diaper or leaving open sores on a foot exposed to a dirty floor.

Lapses are common even at homes with high government ratings for overall quality. Four of 10 of the highest ranked homes have been cited for infection problems. Among the lowest rated facilities - those with a single star - 8 in 10 have been cited.

The Chateau Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Willowbrook, Illinois, which had a two-star overall federal rating at the time of this weeks outbreak, was found in a 2018 inspection to have big gaps in basic care.

In the space of a few hours, three staffers cleaning the buttocks of residents not only failed to wash their hands afterwards, they didn't even remove their dirty gloves before walking into the hall, changing bed linens or helping residents put on diapers and clothes. Nearby a resident was lying in bed sheets that were stained from a spill from a rectal tube - a recurring problem, two relatives told investigators, because staffers don't check in enough.

One reason for all the sloppiness, according to Toby Edelman, a senior policy attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy: The vast majority of care deficiencies dont come with a fine.

'One thing this coronavirus has shown is that the enforcement system is way too tolerant of facilities not meeting the standards of care,' she said.

Just months before the outbreak, the Trump administration proposed easing up more in a key area: stopping infections. The administration said it planned to change the rule requiring homes to have an infection control specialist on staff 'at least part-time' to having one working a 'sufficient' amount of time, drawing protests from industry critics and watchdogs that the change left too much wiggle room.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees long-term care facilities, said the change was intended to make clear the specialist does not have to be limited to a part-time position, but that it is reviewing public feedback to determine its next steps.

Despite its five-star rating, state inspectors at Life Care in Kirkland last April found infection-control deficiencies following two flu outbreaks that affected 17 residents and staff. A follow-up inspection found that it had corrected the problems.

Several family members and friends who visited residents at Life Care in the days before the outbreak told The Associated Press that they didnt notice any unusual precautions, and none said they were asked about their health or if they had visited China or any other countries struck by the virus. They said visitors came in as they always did, sometimes without signing in. Staffers had only recently begun wearing face masks. And organized events went on as planned, including a Mardi Gras party Feb. 26 attended by dozens of residents, visitors and staffers.

Although federal and state health authorities havent tied the Kirkland outbreak and infections at 23 other area nursing homes to any one staffer, they found homes in the area were vulnerable because staff members worked with symptoms, worked in more than one facility, and sometimes didnt know about or follow recommendations about protecting their eyes or being careful while in close contact with ill patients.

'They need the money. They dont have sick leave. They dont recognize their symptoms. They deny their symptoms,' Dr. Jeff Duchin, public health officer for Seattle and King County, told reporters this week.

Dr. David Gifford, chief medical officer for the American Health Care Association, an industry group, said that such problems cant suddenly be fixed, and that the outbreaks at nursing homes reflect the nature of the virus, which can be spread by asymptomatic patients, rather than underlying staffing issues.

'Any sort of crisis unmasks systematic problems that have been around for awhile.'
Mumbai, March 26 : Contrary to the general perception that COVID-19 affected only senior citizens, latest data released by the Medical Education and Drugs Department (MEDD) in Maharashtra on Thursday shows that the majority of the infectees in the state fall in the 21-70 age group, with those between 31-40 grabbing the lion's share.

Of the total 122 cases till March 26 - subsequently the number has risen to 125 - 33 persons were affected in the age group of 31-40, 24 each in the age groups of 21-30 and 41-50, 15 in the 51-60 age group and 13 in the 61-70 age groups.

Shattering another myth that children below 10 are immune to coronavirus, the state MEDD data shows two minors in the 1-10 age group and three very senior citizens in the age group of 71-80 were also infected.

Interestingly, however, all four deaths in the state till date have been reported in the 61-70 age group only, but their COVID-19 condition was aggravated by several other health problems, and males account for 69 per cent of the total cases.

In another shocker, China has escaped the needle of suspicion for COVID-19 spread in India as the maximum number of cases in the state comprise people with travel history to United Arab Emirates, followed by the USA, and Saudi Arabia.

The other significant number of infectees had a history of travel to the UK, Philippines and Turkey, and a small number each from Australia, Scotland, Thailand, Russia, Congo, Spain and Oman.

The maximum number of cases - 54 per cent - comprise those who have travelled to one or the other above countries, another 29 per cent are those infected by coming in contact with the first category of foreign travellers, the reports of six per cent were inconclusive and the results of another 11 per cent are still awaited, said the MEDD.

With Maharashtra having the highest number of cases in India, the country's densest city and its commercial capital Mumbai tops the national list with 56 infected, followed by Pune at 31, Sangli 9, Thane 6, Nagpur 5, Yavatmal 4, Ahmednagar 3, Satara 2, and one each in Raigad, Aurangabad and Ratnagiri.
Hyderabad, March 26 : With the new positive coronavirus (Covid-19) cases surfacing on Thursday, the number of Covid-19 cases in Telangana has shot up to 43. According to a media bulletin issued by the state Public Health and Family Welfare Department, all the three new cases have been admitted to the designated hospitals and their condition is reported to be stable.

One of the samples testing positive belongs to a 49-year old male from Medchal district who is a contact and had a travel history to Delhi.

The remaining two positive cases belong to a Hyderabad based husband and wife, both doctors, aged 41 and 36, respectively. They are both contacts and have no travel history.

With this, the total number of Covid-19 cases identified in Telangana stands at 43.

Apart from the imposition of a total lockdown, the state has beefed up surveillance, contact tracing and containment measures to prevent the possible spread of the dreaded disease.

The health department said that the containment process has been put in places where confirmed cases have been diagnosed. The department has appealed to the citizens to adhere to the lockdown regulations and remain indoors.

"This will enable us to break the chain of transmission and prevent infection," it said.

The health department has directed that any person who has returned from any foreign country or has been in transit shall be in self-home quarantine for 14 days from the time of arrival in India, irrespective of having any symptoms or not.
Advanced computers have defeated chess masters and learned how to pick through mountains of data to recognize faces and voices. Now, a billionaire developer of software and artificial intelligence is teaming up with top universities and companies to see if A.I. can help curb the current and future pandemics.

Thomas M. Siebel, founder and chief executive of C3.ai, an artificial intelligence company in Redwood City, Calif., said the public-private consortium would spend $367 million in its initial five years, aiming its first awards at finding ways to slow the new coronavirus that is sweeping the globe.

I cannot imagine a more important use of A.I., Mr. Siebel said in an interview.

Known as the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, the new research consortium includes commitments from Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, as well as C3.ai and Microsoft. It seeks to put top scientists onto gargantuan social problems with the help of A.I.  its first challenge being the pandemic.

The new institute will seek new ways of slowing the pathogens spread, speeding the development of medical treatments, designing and repurposing drugs, planning clinical trials, predicting the diseases evolution, judging the value of interventions, improving public health strategies and finding better ways in the future to fight infectious outbreaks.
Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday urged the Armed Forces, other departments, organizations, Defence PSUs to gear up their preparedness and provide all required assistance to the civilian administration at various levels during the 21-day lockdown period due to the coronavirus COVID-19.

He held a review meeting in the national capital with senior officials of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on the action plan of the Ministry to deal with the COVID-19 situation. During the meeting, he also expressed appreciation on the proactive role played by the Armed Forces and various departments of MoD in evacuating Indian nationals as well as foreigners from COVID-19 affected countries and ensuring them proper care at various quarantine facilities.

Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat, Defence Secretary Dr Ajay Kumar, Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Karambir Singh, Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal R K S Bhadauria, Chief of Army Staff General M M Naravane, Secretary (Defence Production) Shri Raj Kumar, Secretary (Ex-Servicemen Welfare) Smt Sanjeevanee Kutty and Secretary Department of Defence R&D and Chairman DRDO Dr G Satheesh Reddy attended the meeting.

At the meeting, officials briefed Singh on various measures and assistance provided so far. The Indian Air Force (IAF) has made several sorties and evacuated Indian nationals from affected areas in China, Japan and Iran.



Various quarantine facilities of the Armed Forces have, so far, handled 1,462 evacuees and discharged 389. Presently, 1,073 persons are being provided care at the facilities in Manesar, Hindan, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Mumbai. Additional quarantine facilities are on standby with 950 beds capacity.



Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) laboratories have manufactured 20,000 litres of sanitizer and supplied to various organisations, including 10,000 litres to Delhi police. DRDO has also supplied 10,000 masks to Delhi police personnel. It is tying up with some private companies to make personal protection equipment such as bodysuits and also ventilators.



Ordnance Factory Board has also ramped up production of sanitizers, masks and bodysuits. Bharat Electronics Limited is also engaged in manufacturing of ventilators.



Army medical teams deployed in the Maldives have since returned after completion of their mission. Army medical teams and two ships of Navy are on standby to provide the required assistance to friendly countries in the neighbourhood.

All these organizations have been directed to work in close coordination with the Ministry of Health and other concerned entities to meet the exigencies emerging out of coronavirus situation.
A Boston Intensive Care Unit doctor has revealed the heartbreaking reality of treating coronavirus patients in critical condition on the front line.

Critical care doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Daniela J. Lamas detailed how many patients suffering from the illness die alone as loved ones are banned from visiting.

For Dr Lamas, the 'lonely deaths' of COVID-19 victims are one of the hardest aspects of the pandemic to come to terms with as a medical practitioner.

Critical care doctor Daniela J. Lamas (pictured) detailed how many patients suffering from the illness die alone as loved ones are banned from visiting

For Dr Lamas, the 'lonely deaths' of COVID-19 victims are one of the hardest aspects of the pandemic to come to terms with as a medical practitioner (Stock image)

She described the crushing moment she had to inform a COVID-19 patient who also suffered from cystic fibrosis that her husband was no longer able to visit as the hospital changed its rules.

'I watched their faces shift. My patient's breathing quickened, and her ventilator alarm sounded. Her husband quickly moved his hand to her shoulder and her breaths slowed; the alarms silenced. He knew how to calm her,' she wrote in the New York Times.

'But now, as we tighten our protocols to protect our patients from the threat of Covid-19, she's alone.'

In another case, Dr Lamas described how a patient was on FaceTime with his daughter when he began coughing up blood on the hospital floor and had to be placed on a ventilator.

Dr Lamas works at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston (pictured)

'So that is the last image she has of her father  on a shaky computer screen, blood staining his hospital gown,' Dr Lamas lamented, adding that she wasn't sure if or when the daughter would be able to see her father again.

Even end-of-life visits by close family members sometimes had to be refused to prevent the spread of the killer virus to hospital patients.

On another recent shift, a doctor was forced to refuse a visit from a daughter to her critically ill parents who were intubated with severe respiratory issues, as she had lived with them and had a fever herself, putting her at risk of infecting other patients.

It means, if her parents die of this, 'they will do so in separate sterile hospital rooms, far from anyone who loves them,' Dr Lamas said.

Dr Lamas (pictured) described the crushing moment she had to inform a COVID-19 patient who also suffered from cystic fibrosis that her husband was no longer able to visit as the hospital changed its rules

'The devastating image of the lonely deaths of coronavirus patients in Italy hangs over us all,' she said, saying she wished she could provide a level of comfort to patients, but that she, too, is 'scared'.

'So I do what I need to do and then I leave. I don't take the time to reassure, to explain, surely not to hold a hand. Truth is, I am scared.'

The state of Massachusetts reported four new coronavirus deaths on Wednesday, bringing the statewide total to 15.

The state Department of Public Health recorded a total of 1,838 coronavirus cases, an increase of 679 since the day before.
FILE PHOTO: Airplane fuselages bound for Boeing's 737 Max production facility sit in storage at their top supplier, Spirit AeroSystems Holdings Inc, in Wichita

(Reuters) - Spirit Aerosystems <SPR.N>, Boeing Co's largest supplier, is temporarily suspending production for the airplane maker at many of its facilities in the United States for two weeks, as the global coronavirus pandemic saps demand across the industry.

The company said on Tuesday it would suspend production beginning March 25 until April 8, including at its main Wichita, Kansas facility, a day after Boeing <BA.N> halted production at its Washington state twin-aisle jetliner factory.

The highly contagious coronavirus outbreak has spread to almost all countries of the world, prompting large-scale lockdowns that have crimped travel demand.

Boeing's airline customers have deferred taking new aircraft and making pre-delivery downpayments, compounding its troubles related to the grounding of its once fast-selling 737 MAX jet after fatal crashes. Boeing halted 737 production in January.

Spirit said it would continue to pay employees who are sent home during the two-week period due to the suspension of Boeing work. It will also continue to support 787 work for Boeing's Charleston, South Carolina, facility.

Smaller rival Triumph Group Inc <TGI.N> said following Boeing's plan to close its Washington State factories for 14 days, the company plans to lay off 250 salaried employees and 250 contractors, while Chief Executive Officer Daniel Crowley and his reports will forgo 10% of their base pays starting April 1.

(This story corrects last paragraph to say "following Boeing plan" to close Washington State factories and not "Triumph")

(Reporting by Rachit Vats in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Arun Koyyur)
LEHIGH VALLEY, Pa., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Air Products (NYSE:APD) and N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie held a groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of three new nitrogen plants near Zuidbroek, Groningen.

The groundbreaking on March 9 occurred after receiving project approval from The Netherland's Economic Affairs and Climate Minister Eric Wiebes. Construction of the nitrogen plants, to be in operation by mid-2022, is an essential building block of the cabinet's plan to end gas extraction at its Groningen Field.

Replacing the Groningen gas with higher heat content imported natural gas will require conditioning. Air Products will build three plants for Gasunie to produce the nitrogen needed to meet the specification required in commercial and consumer applications throughout the country.

"Building on the legacy of our relationship with Gasunie, we are proud to have been selected as the technology partner on a project of such strategic importance," said Air Products' Executive Vice President, Dr. Samir Serhan. "Air Products world class expertise enables us to provide Gasunie with a plant designed to meet their stringent requirements for safety, reliability, and efficiency."

Han Fennema, Gasunie Chief Executive Officer, said "We are fully committed to helping accelerate the end of gas extraction in Groningen. This installation is thereby a necessary measure to ensure that, from 2022, gas from the Groningen field is no longer needed for security of supply."

The installation of the nitrogen plants at Zuidbroek will cover approximately 12 hectares and has a capacity of 180,000 m3 of nitrogen per hour. This capacity is more than 10 times larger than the existing nitrogen plant at Zuidbroek.

Air Products has vast experience in the natural gas supply chain around the globe with its world-leading liquefied natural gas (LNG) technology. Air Products' LNG process technology and equipment is the heart of an LNG production plant. The technology, in place at some of the most remote locations around the world, takes natural gas and unlocks its value by liquifying it and making it possible to economically ship it. The LNG is eventually re-gasified for energy use. A majority of the total worldwide LNG is produced with Air Products' technology.

About Air Products

Air Products (NYSE:APD) is a world-leading industrial gases company in operation for nearly 80 years. Focused on serving energy, environment and emerging markets, the Company provides essential industrial gases, related equipment and applications expertise to customers in dozens of industries, including refining, chemical, metals, electronics, manufacturing, and food and beverage. Air Products is also the global leader in the supply of liquefied natural gas process technology and equipment. The Company develops, engineers, builds, owns and operates some of the world's largest industrial gas projects, including gasification projects that sustainably convert abundant natural resources into syngas for the production of high-value power, fuels and chemicals.

The Company had fiscal 2019 sales of $8.9 billion from operations in 50 countries and has a current market capitalization of about $50 billion. More than 17,000 passionate, talented and committed employees from diverse backgrounds are driven by Air Products' higher purpose to create innovative solutions that benefit the environment, enhance sustainability and address the challenges facing customers, communities, and the world. For more information, visit airproducts.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

NOTE: This release may contain forward-looking statements within the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management's reasonable expectations and assumptions as of the date of this release regarding important risk factors. Actual performance and financial results may differ materially from projections and estimates expressed in the forward-looking statements because of many factors not anticipated by management, including risk factors described in the company's Form 10K for its fiscal year ended September 30, 2019.

SOURCE Air Products

Related Links

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The leadership of the National Assembly on Wednesday met with the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, and the Finance Minister, Zainab Ahmed, over the planned review of the 2020 budget.

Also present at the meeting were the Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Clem Agba and Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva.

Others were the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mele Kyari, and Senior Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly Matters, Babajide Omoworare.

The meeting which lasted for over four hours in Abuja was also aimed at tackling the economic impact of the coronavirus on the nations economy and the recent oil price crash.

The participants also discussed the need to review the Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper passed late last year by the National Assembly.

This comes about a week after the Senate resolved that the review of the 2020 budget was inevitable.

The resolution was sequel to the receipt and deliberation of the interim report of the Senate joint committee on finance, appropriations, national planning and petroleum resources (upstream).

Review

In her presentation, Ms Ahmed said the Nigerian economy was already fragile and vulnerable prior to COVID-19 and oil price decline.

She said the impact of the pandemic which resulted in international crisis created a disruption in travel and trade, and put increasing pressure on the naira and foreign reserves as the crude oil sales receipts decline and the countrys micro-economic outlook worsens.

The decline in international oil prices or domestic production may be magnified if a severe outbreak of the pandemic occurs in Nigeria, she added.

The official proposed a review of the 2020 budget using a $30 per barrel price benchmark to prepare for the worst case scenario, as well as insulating the Nigeria economy against any form of unexpected crisis.

She also informed that budgeted revenues for the Nigeria Customs Service had been reduced from N1.5 trillion to N943 billion due to anticipated reduction in trade volumes; and privatisation proceeds to be cut by 50 per cent, based on the adverse economic outlook on sales of the Independent Power Projects (IPPs) and other assets.

Cuts in revenue

Ms Ahmed disclosed that the federal government has undertaken cuts to revenue-related expenditures for the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for several projects included in the 2020 Appropriation Act passed by the National Assembly in December, 2019.

The federal government is working on Fiscal Stimulus Measures to provide fiscal relief for taxpayers and key economic sectors; incentivise employers to retain and recruit staff during the economic downturn; stimulate investment in critical infrastructure; review non-essential tax waivers to optimise revenues; and compliment monetary and trade interventions to respond to the crisis, she said.

She added that the federal government had made provision for health sector interventions by introducing import duty waivers for essential input for pharmaceutical firms; tax waivers on new equipment; and deferment of tax to increase production.

Specific interventions

The minister disclosed that the federal government would be releasing N6.5 billion in two tranches (N1.5 billion and N5 billion) to the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) as intervention to assist in the fight against the spread of the COVID-19 disease in Nigeria.

The Lagos State Government would also receive financial support from the federal government to the tune of N10 billion to combat coronavirus spread in the state, she said.

She also informed the lawmakers that Nigeria had received a grant of $18.2 million from Japan for strengthening seven NCDC centres across the country. And N1 billion would be released by government to pharmaceutical firms in the country, she said.

On his part, Mr Emefiele said, while we would expect to see a decline in our expected growth projection for 2020 relative to 2019, the exact impact will be dependent on how well the coronavirus is contained over the next few month, and how long low oil prices persist.

Lawans remark

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On his part, the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, stressed the need for the government to provide services even in sickness.

We should have concepts that can deliver fast and are sustainable, he explained. Anything that we do that cannot provide succour and relief to our people will lead to catastrophe.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, described the meeting as timely.
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Market Research Future Published a Half-Cooked Research Report on Global Bio-Based PET Market Research Report- Forecast to 2023

Key Players:

Some of the prominent market vendors present in the Global Bio-Based PET Market Trends include Braskem (Brazil), Gevo, Inc. (U.S.), TEIJIN LIMITED (Japan), Anellotech, Inc. (U.S.), TORAY INDUSTRIES, INC. (Japan), Indorama Ventures Public Company Limited (Thailand), M&G Chemicals (Italy), NatureWorks LLC (U.S.), Novamont S.p.A (Italy), Plastipak Holdings, Inc. (U.S.), Amyris (U.S.), and Toyota Tsusho Corporation (Japan).

Market Segmentation:

The report on Bio-Based Pet Market by Market Research Future (MRFR) includes a detailed analysis of various types of Raw Materials Used, Applications of Bio-Based PET, as well as specific regional analysis. The raw materials studied in the report include sugar, corn, and molasses. Alternatively, the applications of Bio-Based PET products, as included in the report are bottles, automotive, electronics, and consumer goods. Bio-Based PET is expected to garner the highest demand for the manufacture of bottles during the forecast period.

Industry Update:

September 2018: PepsiCo formed a partnership with NaturALL Bottle Alliance to develop packaging made from 100% sustainable and renewable sources. This partnership was established with the intention of creating beverage bottles that have a lower carbon footprint. Following this, the Alliance aims to make 95% Bio-Based PET bottles.

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Detailed Regional Analysis:

MRFR has analyzed the Global Bio-Based PET Market for different regions for providing specific insights to its clientele. These regions include Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa. Among these five regions, North America is leading the Global Bio-Based PET Market during the assessment period. Elevated consumption of polyethylene terephthalate for the manufacturing of bottles and other consumer goods is contributing to the burgeoning of the Bio-Based PET Market in North America. The U.S. is expected to spearhead the country-specific Bio-Based PET Market in the region. This can be attributed to the mounting demand for the same from the automotive sector residing in the country. Similarly, Canada is anticipated to consume higher Bio-Based PET to satiate the increasing demand from the countrys automotive industry.

Asia Pacific is assessed to witness the fastest CAGR in Bio-Based PET consumption. Raw material availability, lower cost of production, and rapid industrialization of the region are factors causative of accelerated growth in the region. Additionally, the production and exportation of consumer goods and automotive in various emerging economies such as India and China are anticipated to contribute to the augmentation of the market.

Europes Bio-Based PET Market is expected to ascend at a significant rate. This can be owed to the elevating demand for Bio-Based PET from automotive industries residing in the UK, France, and Germany.

Alternatively, the demand for Bio-Based PET in the Middle East & Africa is primarily driven by the growing environment safety issues and rapid industrialization witnessed by the region.

Browse Key Industry Insights spread across 100 pages with 37 market data tables & 12 figures & charts from the report, Bio-Based PET Market Information: By Raw Material Source (Sugar, Molasses, Corn), Application (Bottles, Consumer Goods, Automotive, Electronics, And Others) and Region  Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast 2023 in detail along with the table of contents: https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/bio-based-pet-market-5823

Global Bio-Based PET Market Overview:

Bio-Based Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) is produced from ethylene glycol that is obtained from plants. These plant sources include non-toxicity, recyclability, reduced carbon footprint, and a high resistance to shattering. Market Research Future (MRFR) has reported that the Global Bio-Based PET Market is anticipated to expand at a significant rate through the conjecture period.

Attributable factors to the ascension of the Bio-Based PET Market include the increasing adoption of environment-friendly products to curb climate change and its impact on human health and the fluctuating cost of petroleum-based products. The hazardous nature of traditional plastics is pushing governments all over the world to introduce stringent regulations to curb carbon emissions and the usage of harmful plastic products. This is also estimated to provide momentum to the upscaling of the Global Bio-Based PET Market.

Moreover, rising demand for eco-friendly packaging in several end-use industries is leading to a surge in the consumption of Bio-Based PET products. Such industries include automotive, food & beverages, electrical & electronics, as well as consumer appliances. Such an upsurge in demand for Bio-Based PET products is expected to contribute significantly to market growth. Additionally, technological developments have allowed the production of 100% Bio-Based PET. For instance, the Plant PET Technology Collaborative (PTC) by Virent, Inc uses paraxylene using beet sugar instead of fossil fuels. These technological developments are anticipated to promote higher adoption of Bio-Based PET products, fueling growth in the market.

Read our Blogs @ http://mrfrblog.com

Related Chemicals and Materials Market Research Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/categories/chemicals-market-report

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At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.

MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by Components, Application, Logistics and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.

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Iran, which had invited Doctors without Borders to send a team of doctors to help address the fast-spreading Covid-19, made a U-turn, fearing the doctors of the international humanitarian organization would be spies.

Iranian officials rejected the offer of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to build a hospital in Isfahan despite new documents that show Tehran was the one to reach out to the organization for help, The New Arab reports.

The MSF was set to fly in doctors, erect field hospitals and provide beds in Iran to help the Islamic Republic, which has emerged the worst-hit country in the Middle East by the disease, at the request of the Iranian ministries of health, interior and foreign affairs.

At least 29,400 people have been infected with the virus and over 2,200 killed in the country.

However, the countrys top leader argued that the MSF doctors could go to Iran to spy on how the country is grappling with the disease.

You might send people as doctors and therapists, maybe they would want to come here and see the effect of the poison they have produced in person, he said.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has also accused the US for creating the virus.

I do not know how real this accusation is but when it exists, who in their right mind would trust you to bring them medication?

The health ministry later said the country will use its own resources and forces to cope with the contaminations.

Due to Irans national mobilisation against the virus and the full use of the medical capacity of the armed forces, it is not necessary for now for hospital beds to be set up by foreign forces, and their presence is ruled out, said Alireza Vahabzadeh, adviser to Irans health minister.

The MSF in a statement said it is surprised by the cancellation. The NGO however said it is fully committed to send a team whenever Tehran changes its mind.

Iran has rejected the US offer for help but the UAE has already sent two shipments of health equipment. The European Union (EU) also this week said it would send 20 million in the form health assistance.
Fever and a dry cough are the most common symptoms of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) .

The Sars-Cov-2 virus, which that causes Covid-19, enters the human body by attaching to receptors in the respiratory tract. Initially, the virus attacks the back of the throat and then trickles down to inflame the lungs. Covid-19 has afflicted over 471, 790 people across the globe and claimed more than 21,290 lives since last December. In India, the total number of Covid-19 positive cases stands at 649 and 13 reports have been reported to date.

Fever is the first sign of the disease and starts showing after an average five-day of the incubation period, showed an analysis of the disease progression in 191 hospitalised patients from central Chinas Wuhan, the epicentre of the initial outbreak, in February. It found that 94% of patients developed a fever of 37.3 degrees Celsius or more, 79% had a cough, 23% reported fatigue, and 15% muscle pain.

How it spreads

During the first three days of the symptoms showing up, the virus uses a spike-like protein to bind with a receptor called angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE-2) found on the respiratory cells at the back of the throat, which leads to a dry cough.

Between day four and nine of the onset of the symptom, the virus starts attacking the lungs, causing laboured breathing and may lead to pneumonia, inflammation in the alveoli or lung sacs filled with fluid and pus.

The current advice is to watch out for these initial symptoms  fever, dry cough, and breathing difficulties. Patients might experience a variety of symptoms including gastric symptoms such as diarrhoea, but these appear later in the course of the infection. It is important that we detect the cases early on to ensure that they dont spread it to others, said Dr Raj Kumar, director, Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute, Delhi.

Doctors from the United Kingdom have warned that a sudden loss of a sense of smell or taste could be a new marker of the Covid-19 disease.

Gastrointestinal signs

Hospitalised patients may also develop gastrointestinal symptoms, as around 5% may suffer from diarrhoea, and another 4% experience nausea and vomiting, according to a study conducted on 191 patients in Wuhan. A newer pre-print version of another study of 204 patients from central Chinas Hubei province, whose capital is Wuhan, released on March 23 pegs the gastrointestinal symptoms as high as 50% of all the Covid-19 positive cases studied.

In India, diarrhoea has been recorded in a few patients but it does not seem to be a predominant symptom. Predominant symptoms are fever, cough and shortness of breath. A sudden loss of a sense of smell or taste has not been recorded. But I cannot rule it out because that history is being taken, said Dr Nivedita Gupta, a senior scientist with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), which is spearheading the Covid-19 diagnosis efforts.

Of the patients who experience gastrointestinal symptoms, about 79% complain of a lack of appetite, 34% diarrhoea, 4% vomiting, and 2% abdominal pain.

It does look from the emerging data that more people have gut symptoms. This is not at all surprising as the ACE 2 receptor that the virus uses to enter the host cells are most highly expressed in the small intestine along with the respiratory tract. The numbers reported initially must have been lower because the patients would have been more critical due to severe respiratory symptoms, and doctors would be worried about tackling those complications, said Dr Gagandeep Kang, director, Translational Health Science and Technology Institute.

So, should we be worried about diarrhoea? When you have a viral illness, you tend to suffer from viral prodrome  fatigue, aches, loss of appetite etc. So watching out for diarrhoea does make sense, especially in a situation where you are out and about and can pass on the infection to others. If you have such symptoms, it is better to either isolate yourself or get tested, said Kang.

The higher rates of gastrointestinal symptoms may lead to scientists to research more on whether they could be a mode of transmission, she added.

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Cases of the coronavirus could reach peak levels in New Jerseys hardest-hit counties in three weeks, officials said Wednesday as positive tests for the virus increased to at least 4,402, with at least 62 deaths around the state.

Hospitals in Bergen, Essex and Hudson counties are already under strain from cases, Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said at a daily briefing in Trenton.

Weve asked the hospitals and the healthcare providers in those counties to just be aware," Persichilli said.

Northern New Jersey continued to see a flood of people sick with the virus. Doctors described dire conditions at Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, a facility at the epicenter of the states outbreak. Officials said they were preparing for cases to reach a peak in the weeks ahead.

Theres a good a possibility that theyre going to see a peak after that  probably 21 to, it could be 60 days even," Persichilli said. Our exponential growth rate based on the number of positive cases reported daily is similar in northern New Jersey."

Heres a roundup of coronavirus news from around New Jersey:

New Jersey coronavirus cases surge to 4,402 with 62 deaths: Officials on Wednesday said New Jersey now has least at 4,402 cases of the coronavirus including at least 62 known deaths. There were another 736 new positive test results announced.

Who will receive stimulus checks from coronavirus relief bill? Congress early Wednesday agreed to a massive $2 trillion stimulus package designed to help families and businesses through the coronavirus pandemic.

Her daughter was high-risk. Now she has coronavirus and is in a coma: A 14-year-old girl, who has cerebral palsy and epilepsy, remains hospitalized in Hackensack University Medical Centers pediatric intensive care unit.

Another N.J. ShopRite employee tests positive for coronavirus: A second ShopRite employee in New Jersey has tested positive for the coronavirus, company officials said. The latest worker was from a Morris County location of the grocery chain.

Drive-thru coronavirus testing center coming to South Jersey for one day: A drive-thru coronavirus testing center will be set up in Burlington County for one day, officials said Wednesday. The center will be open for residents who make an appointment to use it.

State launches website to combat rumors about coronavirus: The New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness created a site to push back against rumors and disinformation spreading online about the pandemic.

N.J. nursing home shut down by coronavirus. All 79 residents moved to new facility: The St. Josephs Senior Nursing Home and Assisted Living Facility in Woodbridge was closed Wednesday and its residents moved after multiple residents at the facility have been diagnosed with coronavirus.

Coronavirus cases in the United States: There were 64,764 cases reported in the country as of Wednesday afternoon, according to information from the the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The center logged 919 deaths nationwide.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share. If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

Sign up for text message alerts from NJ.com on coronavirus in New Jersey:





NJ Advance Media staff writers Matt Arco, Brent Johnson, Jeff Goldman, Karin Price Mueller and Michael Sol Warren and Katie Kausch contributed to this report.

Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Congolese troops killed 10 members of a rebel group accused of ethnic massacres in the restive east of the country and seriously wounded its commander, the military said on Thursday.

The fighters belonged to a local militia called the CODECO, based in Ituri province -- one of scores of armed groups operating in the region.

Troops came under attack in the district of Djugu, the armed forces' regional spokesman, Jules Ngongo, told AFP.

"During the combat, the rebel chief... was badly wounded," he said.

"At present our troops are scouring the area until we find him dead or alive." Seven of the 10 killed were the commander's bodyguards, he said, adding that a soldier had been wounded.

CODECO -- whose official name is Cooperative for the Development of Congo -- is an armed political-religious sect in Ituri drawn from the Lendu ethnic group.

Conflict erupted between the Lendu, mainly farmers, and the Hema, herders and traders, in the gold-mining and oil-rich province between 1999 to 2003, killing tens of thousands.

According to the UN, most victims were targeted because they were Hema.

The conflict has reignited and more than 700 people have been killed in Ituri since late 2017, a UN report said in January, adding that some of deaths might constitute a "crime against humanity." More than half a million people have been displaced by the violence since February 2018, the report said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In view of the heavy rush of



people witnessed in the busy central market here to purchase groceries in the last two days, the Dakshina Kannada district administration has decided to suspend retail sales inside the market.

Taking into account the surge of coronavirus cases in neighbouring district of Kasaragod, public will not be allowed inside the market from Thursday, an official release said.

However, proper arrangements have been made for the public to buy from nearby grocery shops from 6 am till 12 noon, it said.

The district administration has said that strict social distancing has to be ensured by the vendors and the public also are directed to adhere to regulations.

BJP state president and Dakshina Kannada MP Nalin Kumar Kateel had Wednesday said he was discussing with officials a scheme to distribute essential items at the doorsteps of the public to avoid overcrowding in the market.

Meanwhile, the city corporation, in association with the fire force department launched a second disinfectant spraying machine in the city on Wednesday.

The new machine also has fire service equipment.

The first disinfectant spraying machine was launched on April 23.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
PRESS RELEASE

GROUPE RENAULT SHUTDOWNS PRODUCTION ACTIVITIES AT ITS INDUSTRIAL SITES IN LATIN AMERICA

Boulogne Billancourt, March 24, 2020  Groupe Renault announces the shutdown of production activities at industrial sites in Latin America until further notice, depending on the evolution of the health situation.

In order to protect its employees in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and in compliance with the measures taken by the various governments, Groupe Renault suspended production activities in the plants of Santa Isabel in Cordoba in Argentina, Curitiba in Brazil (4 sites), Envigado in Colombia and is ready to do the same in Cormecanica in Los Andes, Chile starting March 26.

These suspensions of industrial activities therefore concern nearly 9,000 employees spread over seven sites in four countries.

The group plans to restart production activity as soon as conditions permit and will implement appropriate measures to respond effectively to commercial demand.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT

Rie Yamane

rie.yamane@renault.com

Press Officer

+33 6 03 16 35 20

Attachment
Two rockets struck inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses government buildings and foreign missions, early on March 26, but there were no casualties, the Iraqi military said.



"Two Katyusha rockets fell near Baghdad operation command. Details to follow," the military statement said.



An Iraqi security source said the intended target appeared to be the U.S. Embassy, located several hundred meters south of where the rockets hit.



It is the 26th such attack targeting installations where foreign troops and diplomats are based across Iraq since late October. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP
If Wall Street's first quarter feels bad, next quarter may feel worse.

J.P. Morgan Private Bank's Anastasia Amoroso, who's firmly in the recession camp, expects the coronavirus pandemic to slash U.S. economic growth by 14% in the second quarter which starts next Wednesday.

Yet, Amoroso suggests there's hope.

"We would see something on the order of double digits [upside] in Q3. It would definitely make up for a lot of what we lost in Q2," the firm's head of cross-asset thematic strategy told CNBC's "Trading Nation" on Wednesday. "We could see a snap back in activity headed into the second half."

The coronavirus began hitting the U.S. late in the first quarter, so the brunt of the damage is likely ahead.

According to Amoroso, the most significant question for the Street is how long will the economic shutdowns last.

"The containment measures do need to work," she said.

She also acknowledges a lot hinges on a coronavirus aid package for Americans and businesses.

Without the package, Amoroso doubts this week's market comeback will hold.

"That does need to become a reality to make sure the lows have actually put in," said Amoroso.

On Wednesday, the Dow saw its first back-to-back gain since February. But the major indexes closed off their highs after Sen. Bernie Sanders threatened to hold up the virus aid bill.

"It is very constructive to have back to back days of market increases, and it does seem like there's a bit of performance chasing," she said. "We have to make sure we don't throw caution to the wind too early."

However, she hasn't priced in a worst case scenario either.

"We're hopeful that over the next few weeks we will start to see fewer cases emerge in places like New York and elsewhere," Amoroso said "If that base case develops, that would give us more confidence."

Disclaimer
The Belarusian news website ej.by says state authorities have detained its director and editor in chief on suspicion of accepting a bribe.

Syarhey Satsuk was detained on March 25 during a special operation by officers from the Financial Investigations Department, the website said on March 26.

The editorial office of the online publication was searched following the detention of the site's editor in chief, the Belarusian Association of Journalists said, adding that documents were seized during the operation.

Calling the accusations against Satsuk lies and nonsense, his brother, Alyaksandr Satsuk, told RFE/RL that he did not rule out that the detention may be connected with investigative reporting he's done into alleged corruption at the Health Ministry related to the import of medical drugs.

The OSCE representative on freedom of the media, Harlem Desir, on March 26 said he was very much concerned by Satsuks detention.

Desir noted that the journalist is known for his previous reporting on corruption issues in the health sector and also recently published articles critical of the countrys response to the coronavirus outbreak.

The OSCE representative insisted that journalists should not be intimidated, prosecuted, or detained for reporting on issues of public interest and on the COVID-19 situation.

Journalists have a key role to play in reporting on the pandemic and in providing important information to the public, he added.

With reporting by Interfax and RFE/RLs Belarus Service
English Estonian

Due to the emergency situation in the Baltic States until at least May 1, 2020, EfTEN Real Estate Fund III AS announces that the Fund's general meeting is expected to take place in June this year. The Fund will announce the exact time, place and agenda of the general meeting through a stock exchange release and the newspaper Postimees by May 31th, 2020 at the latest.

The Fund Manager is managing the potentially negative economic impacts and mitigating the risks due to the COVID-19 and the state of an emergency on a daily basis, and if necessary, enters into additional temporary lease agreements with tenants. The goal of the Fund is to keep a close contact with tenants, find solutions to encountered difficulties, and to minimize as much as possible monthly operational costs of the Fund until the end of the state of an emergency. To achieve this goal, we also actively communicate with the banks to ensure that the lenders are properly informed about the potential economic impact of the crisis measures. We are also taking steps to agree the temporary grace periods to postpone the monthly loan principal repayments. The Fund has a consolidated cash balance more than EUR 10 million in bank accounts and short-term deposits, of which the planned dividend including income tax expense is EUR 3.7 million and not yet invested capital, raised from latest share issue, is EUR 4.3 million. Currently, the Fund does not have any large-scale development projects other than the construction of KFC stand-alone building on the site of the Saules Mestas Shopping Center in Siauliai with total budget of 600 thousand euros. Fund Manager considers the liquidity buffer to be sufficient also in the potential long-term development of the crisis.

On the basis of information available, the negative influence of the state of emergency on the commercial real estate sector will be expected mainly in the hotel and larger shopping centers. EfTEN Real Estate Fund III AS owns a large shopping center in Siauliai, Lithuania. The Fund does not own any hotels. According to the decision of the Lithuanian Government, shopping centers are closed, except for grocery stores and pharmacies. Out of the 115 tenant spaces in Saules Miestas, 14 are currently open, including the centres anchor tenants RIMI grocery store. The Fund does not have large shopping centers in Estonia and Latvia. The Fund will publish more detailed financial information on the impact of the temporary agreements on the Fund's rental income with the announcement of the Fund's net asset value by 13 April 2020 at the latest.

Although the Fund Manager believes that the merger of EfTEN Real Estate Fund III AS and EfTEN Kinnisvarafond AS is in the long-term interest of the shareholders of both Funds, it has been decided to suspend the merger activities and to terminate the merger agreement. The merger of Funds requires a stable economic environment and a clear financial outlook for the future of the both funds assets. We plan to return to the merger subject in next year, when the economic outlook for the Baltic States is expected to stabilize.

Viljar Arakas

Member of the Management Board

Phone 655 9515

E-mail: viljar.arakas@eften.ee




By Online Desk

Extending gains for the third consecutive session, Domestic stock markets started Thursday's session on a bullish note tracking gains in Asian peers. The S&P BSE Sensex index opened 537.93 points higher at 29,073.71, and the NSE kick started the at 8,451.00, up 133.15 points from the previous close.

Asian equities soared again on Wednesday after US lawmakers finally agreed a mammoth stimulus package to support the world's biggest economy against the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

To sketch a global plan to contain the coronavirus pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold a virtual summit via video conferencing, with leaders of G20 nations today.

FOLLOW CORONAVIRU LIVE UPDATES HERE

The COVID-19 cases in India have crossed 600 including 43 foreign nationals, who have been quarantined in different parts of the country. An 84-year-old woman, who had a travel history to Saudi Arabia passed away at a hospital in Ahmedabad on Wednesday, taking the national toll to 15. Globally, the coronavirus positive cases have risen drastically, denting major economies and disrupting supply chains.
Moscow is closing all restaurants, cafes, bars, shops and parks from March 28 until April 5 for the stay-at-home holidays announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, the citys mayor said in a statement.



"The restrictions introduced today are unprecedented in the modern history of Moscow and will create many inconveniences for the everyday life of every person, said Mayor Sergey Sobyanin on Thursday. "But believe me, they are absolutely necessary in order to slow the spread of coronavirus infection and reduce the number of cases."



Exceptions will be made for grocery stores and pharmacies, and restaurants that deliver food are also allowed to stay open. Moscow residents were urged to refrain from attending religious sites.



Russia has seen its sharpest spike in numbers in the past 24 hours, adding 182 confirmed coronavirus cases, 136 of which are in Moscow. The total number of cases in the country now stands at 840, with three deaths, according to Russian health authorities.



The Russian government has also moved to ban all regular and charter international flights starting from March 27, per government decree.



Putin said last week Russia had managed to slow the spread of coronavirus thanks to early and aggressive measures -- and the number of confirmed cases is surprisingly low, despite Russia sharing a border with China and recording its first case back in January.

Source: CNN









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A FORMER teacher in a Limerick secondary school has been charged with 11 counts of indecent assault.

It is believed the complainant was a pupil at the school where he was working.

The defendant, who is aged in his early seventies, cannot be named for legal reasons. He did not speak apart from confirming his identity during the brief case at Limerick District Court.

Evidence of arrest, charge and caution was given by way of schedule. The 11 indecent assaults are alleged to have taken place in the mid 1980s.

Sergeant Sean Murray informed the judge that directions had been received from the Director of Public Prosecutions.

They are for trial on indictment, said Sgt Murray. This means the case will be tried in Limerick Circuit Court.

The accused was represented by Darach McCarthy, solicitor. The State made no objection to bail.The matter was adjourned until September for service of the book of evidence.

Judge OLeary imposed strict reporting restrictions on the media in attendance.

The alleged injured party or the defendant is not to be identified, said Judge OLeary.
The largest hospital in Boston is already digging into its emergency stockpile, weeks before the coronavirus is expected to peak in the U.S.

Massachusetts General Hospital has begun use of its emergency goggles, antiseptic wipes and N95 masks, according to NBC News.

The emergency stockpile was supposed to last through the worst two weeks of the crisis.

Almost everything in this outbreak has come faster than we were expecting, Dr. Paul Biddinger, the hospitals chief of emergency preparedness, told NBC News.

We have best-case and worst-case scenarios, Biddinger told the television station. I would say this is following our worst-case scenario in terms of how fast this is evolving. ... and thats not good.

NBC reported as of Wednesday, Mass. General has had at least 41 staffers contract the virus and 29 confirmed patients with COVID-19, with 11 of them in the intensive care unit. Around 110 other patients are currently awaiting coronavirus test results.

We think we are still several weeks away from the potential peak of the outbreak, Biddinger said. And obviously, we have to pace ourselves to get through this.

Biddinger told NBC the hospital is taking unprecedented measures including canceling elective admissions, locking down entrances and mandating that staff wear masks everywhere in the hospital.

Ed Raeke, the hospitals director of materials and management, told NBC, We quickly realized that a two-week backup was not enough, and our central supply team has done an amazing job bringing in the PPE and clinical products needed for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. Supply is certainly tight, but we are managing it as best we can through extreme inventory controls and conservation practices.

Ventilators are another cause for concern, NBC pointed out.

Biddinger remarked that the hospital typically has 150 ventilators on hand and they are looking to bring 200 more on board.

In terms of drugs, the hospital is taking a precautious, conservative approach as well, only distributing them to patients in need.

We just need to use those products in the proper way and for the proper patients, Chris Fortier, chief pharmacy officer at Mass General told NBC. Not just saying, Well, I might have COVID symptoms. I need to get put on albuterol. Thats really not where we need to go. We need to continue to utilize these for patients that need them most.

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I waited for Banat Thanawi (High School Girls)  the new Egyptian movie starring Jamila Awad, Huda El Mufti, Mayan Elsayed, May Elghety, and Hanady Mehanna  for a long time but it was not what I expected. The movie is about five high-school girls , each with a unique personality and lifestyle, who are supposedly representing the reality of our female culture, and what we have to face in our teens.



I thought Id be able to identify with the characters but the script turned out to be focused on a specific social class and that was my first disappointment. Even though the main character is from a wealthy family that has fallen on hard times, all five girls are clearly from the working class, with plain lifestyles and struggling with money. The film couldve been much more powerful if it had presented a girl from each class. The stories too were extreme and unconvincing: one girl is married to a man without being told, another tries to kill herself at school, a third has a secret marriage even though she is strictly religious  only to end up with her bridegroom dead. She calls her friend so that she will help her to bury him. But what is the moral of the story? It is easy to misunderstand the purpose of the movie as a way to judge and criticise this underclass, whereas we all know that problems exist all across society.



The lower classes count for a big percentage of the Egyptian population so I understand why the film wants to focus on it. But that has been done many times already: there are many examples including all the superstar Mohamed Ramadan movies. Of course every movie has its own idea and purpose. But working-class mores and problems are too prevalent in film and in maharaganat music these days. What also makes this film a cliche is that we already have Mudhakirat Murahiqa (A Teenage Girls Diary) and Al-Gil Al-Rabi (Fourth Generation), both high-school flicks, and it is a little too similar to La Muakhza (Excuse me), even though La Muakhza is about religious discrimination. Both have a character that has to move from a private to a state school when their wealthy family goes bankrupt. Unlike La Muakhzas viewer rating of 7.7, Banat Thanawi has a rating of 2.5, showing that I am not alone in my opinion of the new film.



Based on a true story, though it doesnt take an interesting angle on it, the films choice of actors is actually perfect, its the choice of characters that is questionable. If the character went to an expensive private school she would be able to speak good English  she doesnt, and since she keeps reminding her peers of her previous status, it is not because shes trying to fit in. Still, a positive message in the film is how the characters, all female, manage to help each other. They dont need a man, they even manage to use the man who helps them bury the corpse illegally, and they remain loyal to each other. This is what I like the most about Banat Thanawi: the young womens strength and solidarity and their trust for each other, something Egyptians are known for.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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San Antonios USAA and the USAA Foundation announced they will give a total of $2.3 million to military-related and national nonprofits to aid in the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Some of the support will also go to San Antonios Texas Biomed Research Institute to create virus therapies and vaccines.

The aid will help provide meals and emergency financial assistance for military families and care packages for troops overseas.

On ExpressNews.com: Get the latest update on coronavirus and a tracking map of U.S. cases

It also will go toward developing policy recommendations and ways to respond and recover from COVID-19, USAA said in a statement Thursday.

Among the organizations that will receive the support:

The Association of Defense Communities/Blue Star Families COVID-19 Military Support Iniative

Fisher House Foundation

Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors

USO

We Care for America Foundation.

All Americans are feeling the effects of the pandemic, including those who protect our freedom and their families, USAA CEO and President Wayne Peacock said. These organizations are on the front lines providing much-needed resources for military families.

In addition, the American Red Cross will receive support to address the blood-supply shortage.

Last week, USAA announced it had donated $1 million to San Antonio nonprofits, including the San Antonio Food Bank, Meals on Wheels, Haven for Hope, the United Way of San Antonio and the South Texas Blood & Tissue Center.

On ExpressNews.com: H-E-B, USAA give millions to San Antonio nonprofits responding to coronavirus

USAA, an insurance and financial services company, also said it was donating $1.1 million to nonprofits in areas where it has operations. Those areas are Dallas/Fort Worth, Phoenix, Colorado and southeastern Virginia.

USAA also is matching employee donations of up to $500 to nonprofits.

About 19,000 of USAAs 35,000 employees work in San Antonio, where it is one of the citys largest employers.

Company spokesman Matt Hartwig said Wednesday about two-thirds of its workforce is working remotely in an effort to limit the spread of the novel virus.

USAA Federal Savings Bank, meanwhile, has a number of programs in place to help members deal with the pandemic, Hartwig said. They include consumer loan payment assistance, credit card payment assistance and mortgage payment assistance options.

USAA serves about 13 million members, comprised of current and former members of the military and family members.

Patrick Danner is a San Antonio-based staff writer covering banking and civil courts. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD
The Bono Regional Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party Kwame Baffoe Abronye has said Ghana officially has two viruses threatening the lives of its citizens, which is the COVID-19 pandemic and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC).



Speaking on UTVs 10pm late news, Abronye DC was reacting to news of the NDC formation of a COVID-19 Response team which he believes is mischievous adding that the NDC has always been a virus in the lives of Ghanaians.



According to him, NDC is Ghanas major problem as Bokoharam is Nigerias major problem.



NDC who have formed a committee we wont work with them. When you go to Nigeria their main problem is Boko Haram, when you go to Iran it is ISIS. When you come to Ghana it is NDC, so we have coronavirus plus coronavirus so it will not work. The Ghana coronavirus is more deadly than the new one. He fumed.



You see, NDC has been Ghanas problem. The NDC who couldnt buy an ambulance with all their experts. They bought Aboboyaa not ambulances. This people, where were their experts when they were saying we should evacuate our people in China? Who gave them that advice? added.



Reacting to comparisons between the Ebola outbreak and the COVID 19 Abronye said it is ignorance to compare the two.



Ebola was an African epidemic; coronavirus is worldwide so the NDC should stop comparing the two. Those who agree with the comparison dont know anything. he said.

















Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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[March 26, 2020] Global Digital Accelerator NEORIS Releases NEORIS Health Check, A Software Platform To Help Companies Manage And Track Coronavirus (COVID-19) Risks For Their People And Organizations

MIAMI, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- In response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, NEORIS, a global digital accelerator with 20 years on the market, today announced the release of its NEORIS Health Check app, an advanced software platform to help companies assess and manage the risks of the coronavirus pandemic to their employees and operations. The application, enables companies to share information and remain closely in touch with their employees, monitor their well-being and anticipate how the pandemic might impact their lives. Employees are provided with a powerful web app where they opt-in and provide updates about their well-being by answering questions about symptoms, travel history, testing status and contact with others who might be infected. The app also enables employees to be part of a corporate bulletin board to share pertinent data with their colleagues about the virus. The software leverages NEORIS' intelligent KnowledgeTabs platform which provides powerful dynamic dashboards to enable authorized personnel to monitor in real-time the impact of COVID-19 on the organization. KnowledgeTabs provides trending data that combines employee provided data with geolocation information and data about the virus gathered from various publicly available resources. "These are extraordinary times and we have a responsibility to make a social impact in any way possible. Our advanced platform provides companies with a way to stay closely in touch with their employees, provide support and ultimately help save lives," says Martin Mendez, CEO at NEORIS. "We are proud to step forward and to contribute what we can to the quick recovery of countries and communities being impacted," said Mendz.



"Our global development teams have worked intensely to launch this platform in record time," said Anthony DeLima, Global CTO at NEORIS. "We are leveraging advanced technologies such as real-time data streaming pipelines, secured encryption frameworks to protect data privacy, graph database technology and an advanced virtual private cloud infrastructure to deliver a high-availability and secured platform," said DeLima. Visit NEORIS' page to learn more about the platform and engage with our teams: www.neoris.com/healthcheck

About NEORIS

NEORIS is a leading global digital accelerator that co-creates disruptive solutions for digitally aspirational companies to boost their connections with customers, employees and stakeholders; ignited by creative teams with deep industry knowledge and technical expertise. Headquartered in Miami, FL., NEORIS has a network of global delivery centers, design studios and operations in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and India. More information is available at www.neoris.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. Contact

Jorge Lukowski

Marketing and Communication Global Director at NEORIS

[email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-digital-accelerator-neoris-releases-neoris-health-check-a-software-platform-to-help-companies-manage-and-track-coronavirus-covid-19-risks-for-their-people-and-organizations-301030060.html SOURCE NEORIS

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ROMEItalys nationwide lockdown is showing the first small signs of payoff. The number of coronavirus cases is still rising, but at the lowest day-on-day pace since the outbreak began. The World Health Organization calls the slowdown encouraging. The health chief in the hardest-hit region says theres light at the end of the tunnel.

The temptation, for a cooped-up and stressed-out country, is to embrace the first sign that the crisis may be easing at last.

But while President Donald Trump has talked about revving up the U.S. economy by Easter, Italy has set no such timetable  and experts say the country, if it loosens its guard, is still at risk of the virus resuming its extraordinary, deadly trajectory.

Italy was the first western country to contend with a mass-scale outbreak and order a lockdown. But it is now at the forefront of a more delicate calculation, in trying to figure out how long the restrictions should last.

If we loosen (restrictions) too early, we risk to jeopardize all the results, said Roberto Burioni, a professor of microbiology and virology at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan. My recommendation is: dont go after wishful thinking. You have to face the reality of an extended lockdown.

Officially, Italys lockdown  which restricts peoples movement outside their homes and includes the closure of restaurants and retail stores  is supposed to end on April 3. But the government has signalled that the measures will surely be extended, something of little surprise to most people in the country.

As a way to guard against potential restlessness, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said this week that he is increasing fines, from 400 euros to 3,000 euros (from about $620 to $4,650), for people who left their apartments or houses without a valid reason. Fines are steeper still for people in vehicles who violate the lockdown. People who go outside after testing positive for the coronavirus could face up to five years in prison.

Conte did not specify how long the lockdown might last, although he batted down rumours in the Italian media that it might be extended through the end of July.

We are actually confident that, well before this hypothetical deadline, we can truly go back to our life habits, he said.

Some virologists say that, rather than an end date, Italy and other countries will have to release the brakes gradually  as China is now trying to do. Still, there are many uncertainties that could influence when to begin letting up the pressure, including whether the virus will wane during hotter and more humid months.

Even the size of Italys outbreak is unknown. Government officials and experts have said that, because of limitations on testing, the spread of the virus could be significantly larger than what the official data suggest. Andrea Crisanti, a virologist advising the Veneto region, said the country would have to conduct granular testing for the virus  in several geographic areas  to better gauge the true size of the outbreak and then determine more accurately how it is changing.

You aggressively sample a big part of the population in a few infected areas before you can consider changing the lockdown, Crisanti said. Then, you maybe start to open some factories, test all people. I dont think the lifting of the quarantine will be in one go.

In the four-and-a-half weeks since Italy detected the first signs of the outbreak, the country has lost more than 8,000 people to the virus. The rate of spread has appeared to slow, with cases growing day on day this week at about eight per cent, compared with 20 per cent two weeks ago. But the daily toll remains staggering. The Italian government on Thursday reported that 662 people had died in the previous 24 hours. Reuters suggested that the government had omitted 50 deaths in one region and the count should be even higher.

Although most of those deaths have taken place in the north, a nationwide sense of horror has helped with the enforcement of the restrictions. The lockdown has had widespread support: between 76 and 90 per cent approve of the measures, according to various polls.

And although some Italian politicians, such as the mayor of Milan, encouraged people in the early days of the outbreak to stay calm and socialize responsibly, that messaging has stopped cold. Italian politicians have not embraced Trumps argument that the economic price of fighting the virus may be worse than the virus itself.

The main opposition, the far-right League, has its stronghold in the north, the area hit hardest by the virus. League regional governors in the north have criticized Conte for ordering the lockdown too late, and for initially allowing too many loopholes.

Politically, that means Conte does not face much pressure to relieve the restrictions prematurely. But Italians, under de facto house arrest for more than two weeks, have a natural desire to get back to normal.

If at the first signs (of) improvement we break ranks, we could have another peak on our hands in two to four weeks, said Paolo Setti Carraro, an Italian doctor who was also involved in the global response to Ebola.

The temptation to get out of the house at the first chance was evident last weekend in Tokyo, when cherry blossoms were blooming, and people packed together in parks and restaurants, dropping the restrictions of social distancing. Japan has had a far smaller outbreak than Italy, but experts there worried that the impulse to socialize as they did before could allow the virus to rapidly spread.

Elsewhere, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan appeared to have controlled the spread of the virus, but they are again experiencing an increase in infections.

The risk is for the emotional feeling to prevail and to have people say, Things are going better, lets get rid of all this anguish, said Paolo Cruciani, a retired professor of psychology and a former deputy head of the psychologists association in Italys Lazio region. Then, boom  the virus comes back. The way to prevent this is a carefully considered mass communication to strengthen their rational vision. Its a delicate moment: people cant wait for all of this to end.
Due to the Quebec's government directive to close all non-essential businesses, Probe Metals (TSX-V:PRB) and Radisson Mining Resources (TSX-V:RDS) both announced today in separate news releases that they are suspending exploration activities.

Radisson is exploring its OBrien gold project located along the Larder-Lake-Cadillac Break, halfway between Rouyn-Noranda and Val-dOr in Abitibi-Temiscamingue, Quebec. Probe is focused on its Val-dOr East project in Quebec.

Both companies said they have no confirmed cases of COVID-19. Both have implemented a specific COVID-19 protocol on March 12 to protect its employees.
As colleges and universities wrestle with the logistical and financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic, two Springfield institutions say they are not reducing staff.

Springfield College and Western New England University will remain at full staffing levels as these schools, like others throughout Massachusetts and beyond, enter a new and unanticipated world of vacated campuses and remote learning.

According to a MassLive report, American International College has furloughed some of its employees.

The temporary reduction in administrative staffing was a result of AIC moving fully to distance education beginning on Monday, March 23, an AIC spokesperson said. That person, not identified by name, declined to share the specific number of employees impacted.

On Monday, AIC restated its policy on information regarding staffing.

As a private institution, AIC does not comment or provide details on confidential human resources matters, said Thomas Cole, vice-president of marketing and communications in response to an email request.

Springfield College and Western New England University said they are not reducing staff.

"At this time, Springfield College has not laid off any of its employees and that concern is currently not on the table,'' said Stephen Roulier, the colleges vice-president for communications and external affairs.

"We are not currently planning any layoffs of university employees,'' said Western New England assistant vice-president for marketing and communications David Stawasz, who relayed an administration statement.

No other local universities or colleges have publicly announced layoffs or furloughs.

Higher education institutions have been grappling with staff-related questions since the coronavirus outbreak caused a universal switch to remote learning. The issues include whether to maintain on-site staff to keep services and business activities functioning, even in the absence of students who will be doing their academics from home.

Ultimately, some of those decisions involve not only whether full staffing is needed but whether it can be afforded, especially given how no timetable for the end of the pandemic is known - and many colleges have already committed to distance learning and empty dormitories for the rest of the academic year.

Their decisions have varied based on need, safety and the ability to maintain safe practices with a reduced on-site staff, while other employees work from home. Professors and other teaching staff have also faced the impact of the virus, but more so in terms of developing course structures that can be done remotely, but not eliminating or discontinuing them.

The March 20 Masslive story about AIC presented the human side of coronavirus effect on staff.

It was pretty interesting watching happy smiling employees go into the (human resources) building and come out totally shell-shocked and pale, said a recently furloughed employee who wished not to be identified.

If the virus and hoarding of food and sanitary products wasnt bad enough, now the employees have to deal with not having a paycheck to rely upon.
State Attorney General Xavier Becerra warned Californians Thursday to beware of fraudulent charities during the COVID-19 coronavirus public health emergency.

"Californians have a big heart," Becerra said. "Sadly, there are also scammers out their attempting to profit off of your generosity. I urge everyone to be vigilant. Do your research before donating," Becerra said in a consumer alert.

He said genuine charities and telemarketers soliciting donations in California must be registered with the Attorney General's Registry of Charitable Trusts, which can be viewed online at www.oag.ca.gov/charities.

The online registry can be used by the public to research whether a charity is genuine, how it spends its donations and how much goes to overhead and employee salaries.

Becerra urged Californians not to give out personal information by phone, to be cautious of fraudulent "look alike" websites imitating real charities and to be wary of telemarketers.

"Give to organizations you trust," he said.

The attorney general said that anyone who is aware of a charity scam can file a complaint on his office's website at oag.ca.gov/report.

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A Nigerian man residing in Abuja, has recounted how he was allegedly physically assaulted by a police officer who accused him of attempting to steal his rifle.

The man, identified as Sphinx_Diff shared his story on Twitter and claimed he was walking with his brother when a police officer hit his head with a rifle.

According to Sphinx_Diff, the police officer identified as John Utakah, accused him of attempting to steal his rifle at a market place and proceeded to assault him.

READ ALSO Stealing and Prostituting Are The Same  Actor, Bishop Umoh Defends Abuja Police Officers

Sphinx also claimed the policeman shot at his brother who tried to step in, but missed. The policeman and his colleague then continued to beat him up.

See His Post Here:
Workers install a segment of the Mariner East pipeline in Chester County in November prior to it being pulled underground. Read more

A Texas company will be permitted to complete pipeline construction work at 17 locations across Pennsylvania, most of them associated with its contentious Mariner East project, after appealing directly to Gov. Tom Wolfs office for waivers from the emergency coronavirus shutdown.

Energy Transfer LP announced Wednesday night that the states Department of Community and Economic Development had approved the requests, which it said it made to ensure the continued safety, integrity, and stabilization of these construction sites.

The approvals include a mix of partially completed horizontal directional drills (HDDs), road bores and open excavation sites across the commonwealth. Several of the sites are in Chester and Delaware Counties, where the companys Sunoco Pipeline subsidiary is working on a trio of Mariner East pipelines that carry natural gas liquids such as propane to a terminal in Marcus Hook.

Following the coronavirus emergency, Sunoco Pipeline was initially permitted to work on the pipeline, then forced to halt almost all activity on the project last week after Wolf did not designate pipeline construction as a life-sustaining business permitted under his emergency order. The state agreed to allow the pipeline to stabilize the construction sites, and also to continue maintenance work on the operating pipeline, the Mariner East 1.

All work must be conducted in compliance with social distancing and other mitigation measures recommended by health officials.

The state granted the exemptions Wednesday after Energy Transfer appealed directly to Wolfs office last week for the waivers, according to communications that pipeline opponents obtained from state officials. In the letters, Joseph McGinn, ET vice president of public affairs, said cessation of construction activities at several specific locations presents a serious concern for safety and security" or may result in potential adverse impacts to human health or the environment.

Pipeline opponents, including State Sen. Andy Dinniman (D., Chester), had pressed the state to halt all Mariner East work. They expressed outrage Wednesday that the company would appeal directly to the governors office. The multi-billion-dollar Mariner East project, much delayed by mishaps and regulatory violations, is one of the states biggest construction projects.

Dinniman on Thursday expressed disappointment that the state granted the waivers, but said it was nothing new when it comes to Mariner East. While families and small businesses are asked to sacrifice, its just business as usual for large companies that, potentially due to political influence, get waivers to move ahead in the face of an emergency situation," Dinniman said in a statement..

He said the Wolf administrations on-again-off-again posture toward Mariner East construction was not helpful.

 READ MORE: Gov. Tom Wolf revises mandatory shutdown list as businesses mount challenges

One area where construction will be allowed to resume is along Pottstown Pike in West Whiteland Township, Chester County, where the company said it has completed 161 feet of the 850-foot bore beneath the roadway.

In its waiver application, the company said halting work would require the removal of equipment midway through the boring process, leaving an open bore hole underneath Pottstown Pike, creating the possibility of a road closure and/or collapse. In addition, the excavated pits to either side of the Pottstown Pike would remain open, creating a public safety hazard.

Sunoco Pipeline said it would need until April 27 to complete the Pottstown Pike segment.

The company also received permission to:

Maintain groundwater flows that are surfacing from partially completed horizontal drilling projects at Milford Road/Little Conestoga Road in Chester County, and at Bow Tree/Matlack Strasburg Road, also in Chester County. The company said maintenance work is needed to prevent flooding.

Complete drilling and pipeline pullback at Arch Bishop/South Chester Road in Chester County, where horizontal drilling of a 6,366-foot section is about half-finished.

Complete geophysical bores at Valley Road in Delaware County to confirm whether a subsurface void may exist and to develop a grouting plan, as necessary.

Most of the waivers pertain to work on the 350-mile-long Mariner East project, which links Marcellus Shale gas fields in Western Pennsylvania to the Delaware River export terminal.

Energy Transfer is also allowed to continue erosion and stabilization work in Beaver County on its Revolution Pipeline, which it agreed to complete under a January consent order. Under the consent order, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection fined Energy Transfer a record $30.6 million related to the 2018 explosion.
ANN ARBOR, MI - A new, Ann Arbor-based website -- saveMIfaves.org -- is encouraging you to buy gift cards to help support the restaurant industry in our state.

This small team of Ann Arbor entrepreneurs launched the site this week to help people easily find/buy gift cards to their favorite local businesses.

Our mission is to help keep these vital-but-struggling establishments afloat during the COVID-19 crisis, said co-founder Josh Botkin, who works in Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan.

Botkin said visitors buy directly from the small businesses on the website.

Were not involved in and dont benefit from the transactions in any way, he said in an email to Michigans Best.

The site currently features (as of Thursday morning) 100-plus+ restaurants, cafes and bars that sell gift cards online. The majority are in the Ann Arbor area, but, the founders are in the process of adding more restaurants every minute.

Right now you will find restaurants in Ypsilanti, Detroit, East Lansing, Albion, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Dexter, and many more from the across the state.

True to the domain name, our goal is to expand the directory, Botkin said.

The site reads: Your favorite Michigan restaurant might close forever. Help save it.

Its a message Botkin and those who developed the site want everyone to hear.

Restaurants have tons of fixed costs: rent, labor, loan repayments, insurance, supplies, repairs  the list goes on, the site reads.

Even successful restaurants have razor thin margins of 3-5%, and a third have struggled to pay employees at least once. For some, the loss of business due to COVID-19 could tip the balance into bankruptcy.

Is it a bit extreme?

We dont want to foster pessimism and panic by any means, but we were trying to reflect the perception and feelings in the community," Botkin said in an interview this morning.

"Were seeing headlines every day of beloved local businesses like Literati Bookstore and the Bar at 327 that are reaching out, asking for financial support from the community to keep their doors open. Were very hopeful and optimistic that everyone will be able to rally together.

READ: Literati Bookstore seeks immediate support to stay open

READ: 327 Braun Court Staff fund

Botkin said inspiration for the site came over this past weekend after reading how Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger launched a similar site in the Bay Area, called SaveOurFaves.

He reached out to local tech friends in the start up community, including Steve Schwartz of software consulting company Alfa Jango and co-founder/CTO of Genomenon, and it came together quickly.

He took the tech lead, and we spent 48 to 72 hours pulling the site together and launching it, Botkin said.

Information about how to add your local business is on the website under Submit a Fave (in the upper right), as well as information for other states and communities that want to build their own sites. The source code is available through GitHub and can be found under the sites FAQs.

A new, Ann Arbor-based website -- saveMIfaves.org -- is encouraging you to buy gift cards to help support the restaurant industry in Michigan. Josh Botkin, who works in Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan, and Steve Schwartz of software consulting company Alfa Jango and co-founder/CTO of Genomenon, were two of the key people who pulled it all together. Here is Josh in front of the Blue Nile in Ann Arbor.Josh Botkin

Botkin, who said he just purchased seven gift cards to his favorite places, was excited to share this site with our Michigans Best Team of Amy Sherman and John Gonzalez because he knows we travel around the state looking for the best food and drink.

We want to keep everybody on the MLive Michigans Best list open for business so that people can continue to enjoy their food for years to come, he said.

For more stories and Podcasts about the restaurant community, and other good news, check out the Michigans Best Facebook page: Facebook.com/MLiveMIBest.

The site for SaveMIFaves is savemifaves.org.
A funding crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the grounding of Ireland's first charity-funded air ambulance.

Lives will now be at risk, the service operators warned last night when the plug is pulled on the service next Friday.

The helicopter emergency medical service provided a vital frontline medical service to over 500,000 people living in the south of Ireland, responding to cardiac arrests, strokes, farming accidents and road traffic collisions.

Run by Irish Community Rapid Response (ICRR) and staffed by National Ambulance Service medical personnel, the aircraft will be grounded from April 3.

The service has flown over 351 missions since its launch eight months ago from its base near Millstreet in North Cork.

But it has been struggling in recent months to raise enough money to stay airborne.

ICRR's operations manager Ruth Bruton said the Covid-19 crisis has cut off all of its fundraising avenues.

She said members of the ICRR board are distraught at having to cease operations and withdraw this service during the current crisis at a time when Ireland's frontline health and medical service needs support more than ever before.

She said ICRR had already implemented harsh cost cutting measures in an effort to keep the service flying, including reducing its hours of operation from seven days to five days a week, laying off non-essential staff and cutting the hours of current staff.

Our sincere thanks to the people of Ireland who supported this service and kept it flying for the last 8 months, you have all been part of a community that has saved hundreds of lives and impacted many, many families," she said.

We could not have gotten off the ground without every single person who donated money, gave their time to fundraise or share our mission.

She said as a last resort, ICRR sought interim support from government but it has yet to get a reply.

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When Sundar Pichai revealed Google's initial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, he promised to give business owners a quick way to mark themselves as "temporarily closed." That way, people can look up which local shops are open and what hours they're operating, so they don't have to wander outside longer than they should. Now, the tech giant has finally published instructions on how businesses can update their profiles and mark themselves as "temporarily closed" on Maps and Search.

Google My Business users can go to "Close this business on Google" in the menu to find the new feature. As SearchEngineLand notes, that section now shows three options: "Mark as temporarily closed," "Mark as permanently closed" and "Remove Listing." Prior to launching the capability, Google only relied on information from governments and other authoritative sources.

Of course, the feature's usefulness still depends on whether businesses take the time to update their status. Google previously said, however, that it's using an AI technology where possible to ask businesses to confirm and update their operating hours.
A Dollar General store in Tishomingo, Miss., is completely destroyed after a suspected tornado swept through the area on March 24, 2020. (Kayla Thompson/WTVA via AP)

Possible Twister: Damage Reported at Mississippi-Alabama Line

Teresa Hazelwood stopped by a Dollar General store in northern Mississippi to get some chips, and soon found herself riding out a suspected tornado in the parking lot and felt it lifting her car. She gripped the steering wheel and prayed.

I just prayed to God, oh please God help me, Hazelwood recalled after storm on March 24. And things was going every which way. I could feel the vehicle move. It lifted, it moved me out of the parking spot. And I just kept praying please God help me.

The suspected tornado heavily damaged the store in Tishomingo and other structures in northern Mississippi and Alabama as a severe storm system crossed the Deep South, authorities said.

Tishomingo Police Chief Mike Kemp told WTVA minor injuries were reported in that community.

National Weather Service meteorologist Mike Johnson said there were reports of widespread tree damage and some structural damage in Tishomingo County, which is in northern Mississippi abutting the Alabama border.

He said the tornado touched down about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Its a pretty compact system that produced the tornado and its moved into parts of Alabama and Tennessee, Johnson said.

The National Weather Service had issued multiple tornado warnings through the early evening, including a tornado emergency for an area of northwest Alabama.

The National Weather Service in Huntsville tweeted shortly before 6 p.m. that TORNADO HAS BEEN REPORTED ON THE GROUND and told residents in an area of Colbert County in north Alabama to seek shelter. That county also abuts the Mississippi state line.

The weather service also said there were preliminary reports of falling debris in the area.

Robert Boyd, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Huntsville, Alabama, said severe weather warnings had been issued for northwest Alabama on Tuesday evening.

Severe weather watches also were posted for parts of Georgia and Tennessee as the storm system moved across the South during the nighttime hours.
Jaipur, March 27 : The apprehensions regarding Bhilwara turning into Rajastan's Wuhan seemed to be turning true as the state's first Covid-19 death was reported in the textile town on Thursday.

The deceased was identified as Narayan Singh, 73, a resident of the city.

Also, two new cases have been reported and both are close contacts and Singh's family members - his son and his grand daughter, Additional Chief Secretary Rohit Kumar Singh said.

Bhilwara has seen Covid-19 cases increasing soon after its Bangad Memorial Hospital, leaked infections to become the disease epicentre of the state, Health Department officials.

Presently, it accounts for 19 of total 42 patients in the state, as on Thursday.

Singh, who was on dialysis, suffered from several other ailments including blood pressure, and breathing problems, and had suffered brain stroke. From March 4 to March 11, he was hospitalised in Bangad Hospital - the same facility where many doctors and staff tested positive for Covid-19 recently.

Singh was, however, sent home when his condition didn't improve.

On March 20, when Dr Alok Mittal and other hospital staff tested positive for Covid-19, all patients treated in the hospital were traced and screened. Health officials hence reached out to Singh and he was finally found Covid-19 positive when his samples were tested, said state Health Minister Raghu Sharma.

In fact, the virus chain spread started from this private hospital where a pneumonia patient was admitted on March 8 without checking his travel history.

After being treated by DMittal, this patient was shifted to Jaipur-based hospital which yet again failed to check his travel history. This man died on March 13.

Mittal was conveyed the news of his patient's death and going cautious, he got himself tested and was declared a corona positive patient. Since then, there has been no let up in the numbers of patients been found positive there.

The town has been reeling under curfew for last seven days, and witnessed the most aggressive screening exercise in the nation.

Sharma said that out of 28 lakh people residing in this city, 24 lakh people have been screened. Their samples have been collected and testing is under process.

As many as 700 more samples shall be tested in next two days, he said on Thursday.

Health Department teams are searching the city to trace the suspects. In rural areas, four lakh people who are yet to be screened will be screened within next two days, he added.

As many as 600 quarantine beds have been made ready in this town by acquiring hotels and dharamshalas.

Out of the 19 corona positive patients been reported in the city, 15 comprise doctors, nurses and other staff of this hospital.

The authorities say that coronavirus was confined to this particular hospital but now it seems to be spreading towards community stage which is worrying.

Earlier only doctors and staff of this hospital were affected, but now those who came in touch with them are also affected. More than 5,000 people are home isolated, and 144 are hospitalised in 4 newly-converted health centres.

Meanwhile, the residents who have been asked to stay inside their houses have many unanswered questions.

Ruchi Saraswat says: "We have been trusting the hospitals and doctors. How can they fail to check the patient's travel history when he was admitted with pneumonia symptoms on March 8. We all know how China and Italy witnessed infection being spread via hospitals and doctors. So wasn't a little alacrity essential on their part or should we be seeing Italy and Wuhan story been scripted in Bhilwara too?"

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
A Virgin Australia flight attendant has given an emotional message to passengers on her final flights before thousands of staff are stood down due to coronavirus.

The airline on Wednesday announced it would cut domestic travel by 90 per cent and ground 125 planes, with 8,000 staff members to be stood down without pay.

Domestic travel cuts will come into effect from midnight on Friday while all international flights will be cut off from Monday onward.

Virgin Australia cabin supervisor Cassy Appleton left a heartfelt message for passengers on a flight landing in Dunedin in New Zealand on Wednesday and thanked guests for choosing to fly with them.

Virgin Australia announced it would cut domestic travel by 90 per cent and ground 125 planes, leaving 8,000 staff members to be stood down without pay

'I'd like to just say that there's every chance possible that this can be our last operating flight and most certainly is the last for the foreseeable future,' Cassy said.

'As crew we've called the skies our home for so long it's a little surreal knowing we've come back down to earth this one last time.

'On behalf of the entire Virgin Australia team, we wish you all the best during these testing times. Please take care of yourselves, your neighbours and stay safe.'

Ms Appleton elaborated on her final sign off on her Facebook page.

'Today we received confirmation that Virgin are shutting down our NZ bases. Emotions are undescribable,' she wrote.

'Having this opportunity was the best thing that happened to my life and to say I'm beyond grateful is an understatement.

Virgin Australia cabin supervisor Cassy Appleton left a heartfelt message for passengers landing in Dunedin on Wednesday

'Whilst I'm hurting for my loss I'm also counting my lucky stars to have been so blessed with this incredible opportunity.'

Virgin Australia's international and domestic flights are not expected to resume until at least the middle of June, with all Tiger Air flights also suspended.

The airline has maintained the remaining 10 per cent of domestic travel to allow for essential services, critical freight and logistics operations to continue.

The majority of staff will be stood down until at least the end of May but the airline group will help them seek out job options for temporary work to fill the gap.

Virgin Australia CEO Paul Scurrah said the mass closure was unprecedented.

'There has never been a travel environment in Australia as restricted as the one we see today and the extraordinary steps we've taken have been in response to the federal and state governments' latest travel advice,' he said.

'We are now facing what will be the biggest grounding of aircraft in this country's history.

'We plan to return Tigerair Australia and Virgin Australia to the skies as soon as it's viable to do so, however I am mindful that how we operate today may look different when we get to the other side of this crisis,' he said.

Mr Scurrah applauded the actions of staff who had worked tirelessly to help passengers get home before states around Australia shut down their borders.

Those with flights booked with the airline between Wednesday and June 30 are entitled to claim back the cost of their flights as credit to use when service resumes.
LOS ANGELES, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The COVID-19 pandemic requires us all to become global citizens and unite to fight-off this world-wide crisis. ECA Partners is playing their role in this battle. They are a 100-person recruiting firm headquartered in Los Angeles that also has a large back-office support team in the Philippines. Traditionally, they focus on recruiting c-suite executives for Private Equity clients.

For the next few months, however, they will be shifting their recruiting efforts towards helping essential businesses recruit and hire front line workers that are fighting this battle on society's behalf. They will provide these services at or below cost.

They can help essential businesses and their staffing firm partners recruit for the following positions (just to name a few):

Physicians, nurses, pharmacists, healthcare workers

Warehouse workers

Delivery workers

Bank tellers

Grocery and convenience store workers

Gas station attendants

Truck drivers

Maintenance workers (e.g. telecom, plumbers, electrical etc.)

And more...

Their highly qualified and experienced team will help essential businesses ensure that they have the teams in place to stay at the front line of this battle. They can help with:

Reaching out to qualified candidates for the job

Scheduling interested candidates for interviews

Interviewing candidates

Conducting background and reference checks

Managing the contract signing process

They're looking forward to playing their part in this global effort to combat COVID-19. Please reach out to Atta Tarki, CEO of ECA Partners, if you would like to find out more about how they might be able to help. Stay safe!

Media Contact:

Atta Tarki

Phone: + 1 310 880 6116

Email: [email protected]

Related Links

ECA LinkedIn

ECA Twitter

SOURCE ECA Partners

Related Links

https://www.eca-partners.com


Chief Medical Officer Michael McBride during a media briefing in the Long Gallery at Parliament Buildings, Stormont PHOTO PACEMAKER PRESS

A ban on hospital visits is set to be announced as health officials battle to slow the spread of coronavirus.

It comes as Northern Ireland's Chief Medical Officer Dr Michael McBride said he believed many thousands of people here were infected with Covid-19.

Seven people have died here to date, the Public Health Agency (PHA) said on Wednesday.

The ban on hospital visits comes after the daughter of a woman, who died after contracting Covid-19, spoke out saying people were not respecting hospital rules.

Ruth Burke (82) became the fourth person to die from coronavirus in Northern Ireland after she passed away at Antrim Area Hospital on Monday night.

Her daughter Brenda Doherty claimed that after the hospital introduced the one visitor per person rule "not everyone was respectful of the rules".

Elsewhere, Dr McBride said he believes that "many thousands" of people are currently infected with coronavirus here.

He made the astonishing claim at the daily Covid-19 press conference at Stormont Castle.

This came after the PHA earlier confirmed that the total number of people who have tested positive for the virus was 209.

Health Minister Robin Swann also revealed a number of new measures being brought in by the health service to help slow down the virus' spread.

Meanwhile, First Minister Arlene Foster and deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill both slammed businesses in Northern Ireland for not making provisions for social distancing and threatened to "shut" them down.

The PHA's daily Covid-19 surveillance bulletin stated that another 37 people tested positive for the virus as another three people passed away.

Of those who have tested positive, 72 (34%) were aged 0 to 44; 73 (35%) were 45 to 69, and 64 (31%) were aged 70 or older. Ninety-two were female and 117 were male.

Testing will increase to more than 1,000 a day by next week - and that will help give a better idea of the infection's spread, Dr McBride added.

As part of the Executive's bid to combat Covid-19 a new mobile app will be launched today to provide information to the public and help identify those self-isolating after developing symptoms.

"At this point in time I suspect there are many thousands of individual cases in Northern Ireland and in terms of the app, that will allow us to identify those individuals who are self-isolating at home with those symptoms," commented Dr McBride.

"That will give us a picture of the numbers of individuals and some idea of the spread of the virus.

"That's very good intelligence and that will allow us to monitor the percentage of the population with a new and continuous cough or fever."

Mr Swann explained that the Department of Health is currently finalising around 40,000 letters that will be sent to vulnerable people across the province.

It is expected that those letters will tell people to self-isolate for 12 weeks.

He added that his department is also planning to develop a "volunteer army" not just for the health service but "across the community", while a free phone helpline will also be available from the end of the week.

Meanwhile, some workers at the Moy Park poultry producer in Portadown walked out for a period over safety concerns linked to Covid-19 and social distancing.

The company said it was taking their welfare seriously.

Commenting on employers' responsibilities around social distancing, Mrs Foster said that emergency legislation will allow the Executive to take action against those flouting the guidelines.

"The Minister for the Economy has asked the Health and Safety Executive to urgently ensure that employers are now following those health and safety practices," she stated.

Mrs O'Neill added: "You are compromising not just your workers' health but you're compromising our response to this crisis.

"I saw again for myself travelling here today, many men travelling to work together in a van," she said.

"That is not acceptable.

"It's time to get real because this virus is killing people."
- President Hage Geingob of Namibia has appointed a 23-year-old lady as the country's deputy information and technology minister

- The appointed deputy minister identified as Emma Theofilus has become Namibia's youngest minister and member of parliament

- In reaction to criticism that she is inexperienced, she says she is not inexperienced and she is able to do anything she sets out to do

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A 23-year-old Namibian lady, Emma Theofilus, has been appointed as the country's deputy information and technology minister.

Emma's appointment has made her Namibia's youngest minister and member of parliament, Face 2 Face Africa reports.

YEN.com.gh gathers that the deputy minister said Emma's appointment was criticised by the country's old elites, questioning her capacity and competence.

Emma Theofilus. Photo credit: Face 2 Face Africa

Source: UGC

In reaction, the deputy minister said she is not inexperienced and she is able to do anything she sets out to do.

She said: I do not think I am special, but I do not think I am inexperienced, and I do not think being young or female has anything to do with my appointment.

"Anything I set myself to and any environment I want to work into, I can do it; so the issue of inexperience does not hold any water."

In other news, as governments look for solutions to the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a doctor, is leading efforts to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus.

Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a viral immunologist by training with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), began her research in January 2020 when researchers first gathered knowledge of the novel COVID-19 that was similar to pneumonia.

If you don't have money, you can't date plus-size women - PM cautions broke men | #Yencomgh

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Source: YEN.com.gh
President Klaus Iohannis sent a message on Thursday on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Romanian Intelligence Service, underlining that its role in the context of the coronavirus pandemic is essential.

"The 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Romanian Intelligence Service, as the authority of the state with attributions within the national defense and national security system, comes at a complicated time, in which the whole of humanity goes through a crisis without precedent. We are in the middle of a pandemic caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and the role of your institution is essential at this time. We are faced with a complex situation, with an accentuated dynamic, in which new, often unpredictable features add to the classic challenges and threats to the state security. In this context, all the more valuable becomes your contribution, the excellent capacity for analysis and anticipation of the Service being of real use to the decision-makers involved in a difficult fight to stop the spread of infections with the new coronavirus," reads the president's message.He shows that in the three decades of activity, the SRI missions have been fulfilled with professionalism, patriotism and within the strict limits of the duties provided for by law and expresses his appreciation for the Service's sustained effort to maintain the national security state."The Romanian Intelligence Service has permanently adapted to the challenges of the new international security climate, while fulfilling the specific requirements for achieving the commitments assumed by Romania, as a full member of the North Atlantic Alliance and of the European Union and as a strategic partner of the United States of America. The reputation you enjoy today among partners, collaborators and beneficiaries is mainly the fruit of the quality of human resources available to the Romanian Intelligence Service," says Iohannis.He thanks the SRI employees for their "remarkable effort and seriousness" with which they carry out their tasks and for their devotion to the country and the institution.
A woman who says she used to live in a home in the 100 block of East Goepp Street in Bethlehem broke in Wednesday night, assaulted two women and smashed a television, authorities report.

Kristie L. Batista, who gave a New York City address, was told at 8:30 p.m. to stay away from 138 E. Goepp St. after an altercation with a woman in the home, Bethlehem police said in court papers.

A little more than two hours later, Batista pushed her way through the front door and hit the same woman several times in the head and face, causing scrapes and bleeding, police said. When the second woman tried to break up the fight, Batista shoved her, causing redness and swelling to her neck, police said.

Batista smashed the screen of the first victims 55-inch Toshiba TV, valued at about $400, police said.

Batista said in court she knew one of the victims but not the other, an official reported.

Batista was arraigned before District Judge John Capobianco on Thursday morning by video from the city police station on charges of burglary, simple assault, criminal mischief and harassment, court papers say. Bail was set at $25,000, and the judge allowed a 10% option if recommended by PreTrial Services after an investigation. Batista was taken to Northampton County Prison for processing.

Batista doesnt appear to have a criminal record in New York or Pennsylvania.

Her preliminary hearing is tentatively scheduled for 9 a.m. April 9 in District Judge Roy Manwaring IIs court in Bethlehem.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. If theres anything about this story that needs attention, please email him. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Third Day of Fighting Rocks Libyan Capital Amid Country's First Coronavirus Case

By Edward Yeranian March 25, 2020

Libyan fighter jets flew over the strategic al-Watiya Airbase near the capital Tripoli, amid conflicting reports over which side now controls the area. Sporadic fighting also continued in the capital Wednesday, as residents reported artillery shells falling in various parts of the city.

The fighting came as the Tripoli-based National Unity Government reported the country's first confirmed case of the coronavirus.

Health Minister Dr. Ehmid Mohammed Bin Omar urged Libyans to heed the health ministry's safety recommendations, adding that the ministry is taking measures to care for the infected patient.

Hatem al Oraibi, spokesman for the rival government based in Tobruk, told journalists that measures were being taken in eastern towns and cities to address the coronavirus crisis. He said equipment and medication to treat the virus have been sent to area hospitals and that a hospital was being readied in Benghazi to accommodate suspected victims.

Meanwhile, areas in and around Tripoli experienced what some residents were calling the "worst fighting" in the city since the fall of former Libyan leader Moammar Ghadafi in 2011.

Video posted on social media showed black smoke rising into the air in the southern Tripoli district of Bou Salim as forces loyal to the two rival governments tried to advance.

Heavy fighting occurred at the western al-Watiya Airbase after a Tripoli-based commander tried to wrest it from forces loyal to eastern military commander Gen. Khalifa Hafter. Both sides are claiming control of the base.

Hafter's forces provided video on social media showing a Syrian mercenary whom they say was captured in the fighting. The man said in the video he was sent to Libya by the Turkish government, which pays his salary.

Turkey backs the national unity government, while Hafter's forces are backed by Russia and the United Arab Emirates.

Fighting erupted in and around Tripoli three days ago, after a coronavirus cease-fire broke down after being agreed to by both sides. It was not immediately clear which side was responsible for the renewed fighting.

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(TNS)  Governments have long struggled to get more people to take mass transit.Not surprisingly, ridership has plummeted in San Diego and across the nation amid the COVID-19 crisis. That could have devastating consequences for transit districts.But the real long-term question is whether they can convince commuters to board buses, trolleys and trains in sufficient numbers in the post-coronavirus world.Hundreds of billions of dollars in sweeping transportation proposals in San Diego County, controversial before the health crisis hit, could be jeopardized in a future where both employees and employers are more comfortable with telecommuting.If working remotely becomes permanent in a big way once the crisis subsides, that will raise questions about the plans for miles and miles of high-speed trains under a plan being developed by the San Diego Association of Governments, as well as how much San Diego Metropolitan Transit System should eventually expand service.SANDAG Executive Director Hasan Ikhrata has said the goal is to increase transit ridership by 10 percent in the coming decades. That may not sound like much on its face, but he said it was enough to create "100 years of capacity" to local freeways, which would also become more efficient with new technologies smoothing traffic flow.Another goal of the system would be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to levels mandated by the state.It would seem squeezing 10 percent out of automobile commutes can eventually be achieved by increased telecommuting, avoiding the huge costs of a vastly expanded transit system."It's really hard to say now," Ikhrata said in an interview Monday. "First of all, it's a crisis for all of us and we have to get through it."Clearly, the long-term reality is uncertain. How and whether the outbreak may ultimately reshape thinking on transit, not to mention so many other aspects of daily life, remains to be seen.Ikhrata said it's highly unlikely in the future that people will be working remotely at the level they are today. He questioned whether enough would continue to do so to make an impact on transportation needs, though he would welcome it."That would be great news. . . If it does, we might have to adjust our plan accordingly," he said.He also noted that the emerging proposal is multi-faceted. It's not just about high-speed trains, but integrated transportation corridors that involve various modes of transportation, including cleaner and zero-emission cars.Ikhrata also said the plan won't be fully completed until 2021 and will have built-in flexibility because it would cover many decades.Telecommuting has been growing for years, but as of 2019 only about 5 million U.S. employees, or 3.6 percent, worked at home half or more of the time, according to data compiled by Global Workplace Analytics. (The numbers do not include the self-employed). That has increased exponentially during the crisis, though it's unclear by how much.What those figures will be when coronavirus is no longer deemed a threat is anybody's guess. As thepoints out, there's a lot of discussion about whether the crisis will trigger a work-at-home revolution.Global Workplace said 56 percent of employees said they have jobs where at least some of their work could be done by remote.Many jobs can't be done remotely, of course, though 80 percent of employees said they want to telecommute at least some of the time. As for businesses, Global Workplace said employers can save an average of $11,000 per half-time telecommuter a year. Again, all this data was compiled before the coronavirus outbreak.There are still a lot of issues to be worked out if vast populations are to work at home regarding people who don't have access to computers, equipment and energy costs, and liability, to name a few.Still, the world is experiencing what amounts to a forced trial run."This was a true test to all this telecommuting and technology," Ikhrata said.He noted that SANDAG personnel are working remotely and, after a disruptive first couple of days, things are going smoothly. He expects business and government eventually will make deeper assessments on the potential for telecommuting to expand.Societal adjustments and innovations during events like the COVID-19 crisis sometime carry over for generations. But Ikhrata said predictions that past crises would foster certain changes, such as reduced travel, haven't always come to pass.Taking an even longer view, Ikhrata said big catastrophes have not necessarily altered the human trend toward socialization."Through history, these viruses, these episodes, are not scarce. . . but even with that, the population migration to the urban core continued," he said.At least in the short-term, there's something beyond the logistical changes for the workplace and transportation.Even when the outbreak has run its course, will it have created a lingering concern, even fear, of being in close quarters with a lot of other people?"How quickly that awareness recedes will be different for different people, but it can never completely vanish for anyone who lived through this year," Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, wrote in one of several essays published bylooking at potential long-term consequences of the crisis, bad and good.Ikhrata agreed that will be an issue, but questioned whether it will remain an ongoing concern."People will be thinking twice, but people forget" he said. "Will it last? We don't know."In the here and now, transit agencies are becoming financially stressed, particularly those like San Diego MTS that rely on a relatively high farebox recovery rate for their budgets.In the larger picture, the world is changing in ways that will be tough to reverse, if that's even possible. Climate change remains an existential threat along with the likelihood of recurring viruses that scientists say likely will be exacerbated by global warming.Adapting may require considerable adjustments. Widespread telecommuting may be among the most minor.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tennessee Supreme Court has issued an amended order directing that all in-person proceedings in all state and local courts in Tennessee are suspended until Thursday, April 30.

Chattanooga City Court will remain open under this directive, but will not hear any cases during this time. All cases set during this time will be rescheduled.



To limit contact with the public, the City Court Clerks Office is suspending any in-person operations, but will be available via telephone and email during regular business hours.

Payments may be made through the mail to City Court Clerk, 600 Market St., Room 104, Chattanooga, Tn. 37402, online at www.chattanooga.gov or at the City Court Clerks Office drop box.



For any questions, contact the Clerks Office at 423-643-7541 or 311.
Two people have died at Chattanooga hospitals from the coronavirus, Hamilton County Health Department Administrator Becky Barnes said Wednesday afternoon.

She said one was over 65 and had underlying health conditions.

Ms. Barnes said, It is with a heavy heart that we announce this COVID-19 death. We extend our condolences to the family; however, this reminds us to continue our prevention efforts and to fight this disease with firm resolve.

She said the second person who died was from out of the county, but had come to the hospital in Chattanooga.

She also said that there were 11 new cases of coronavirus in Hamilton County, bringing the total to 27.

Ms. Barnes seven of the local cases were ages 18-49, and three were 50-64. Eleven were 65 or older.

She said 19 were white, one black and one Asian.

There are 126 in quarantine in Hamilton County, including 56 who are being actively monitored.

Eight persons with confirmed virus cases in Hamilton County have recovered.

County Mayor Jim Coppinger called it "rather sombering news."

At the state time, the state Health Department said Tennessee conoravirus cases have increased from 667 to 784.

There earlier were reports of two deaths in the state from the virus - both in Davidson County.

Bradley County has moved to three cases with the addition of a Lee University student.

Marion and Grundy each have a single case.

McMinn and Monroe have two each.

Davidson County health officials said the county is up to 257 cases. Health officials in Nashville said, "Of the confirmed cases, one patient has died from complications due to the coronavirus. Three others remain hospitalized. Thirty-four people have recovered from the virus. The remaining 219 cases are self-isolating at home and have mild and manageable symptoms.

Shelby County has climbed to 117.

It is now in 52 of the state's 95 counties.

The virus is not just striking the elderly. Twelve children ages 0-10 have had confirmed cases in Tennessee, and 46 are ages 11-20. Officials said 224 have been 21-30, and 144 31-40.

Hamilton County health officials said, "In order to address this growing public health threat, on Thursday the Health Department will close three of their satellite health centers in Birchwood, Ooltewah, and Sequoyah. The Third Street campus and Homeless Healthcare Center will remain open. This is part of the Health Departments Continuity of Operations Plan. Staff from these health centers will be reassigned to COVID-19 response duties. The satellite health centers will reopen at a later date."

Governor Bill Lee said the CDC has pledged $10 million for Tennessees efforts to fight COVID-19. Tennessee has purchased additional testing capacity and supplies per guidance from the CDC.

He said, "In looking at the testing response of other states, Tennessee continues to be a proportional leader compared to states much larger in the region."

He said the Department of Human Services has deployed on the $10 million emergency response and recovery grants for existing child care facilities. A church, gym, or non-profit can open an emergency temporary child care facility by registering with the Department of Human Services. Additional information can be found here.

Governor Lee has directed the Department of Human Services to personally reach out to each existing child care facility in the state to help organizations secure supplies.

County health officials said symptoms of COVID-19 include fever, cough, and shortness of breath. Anyone who has been experiencing these symptoms or has had close contact with a person known to have COVID-19, should contact their healthcare provider before presenting at a healthcare facility.

If an individual is tested for Coronavirus (COVID-19) and they are not hospitalized, they are required to go home and self-isolate until the test results come back. They must assume they are positive until they receive the negative result. If the individual tests negative, they should continue to follow CDC, Health Department, and community directives of social distancing.

The foundation of a community-wide response is the everyday actions we can take to protect ourselves and prevent the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) in our community. These actions include:

 Wash your hands often with soap and water. If soap and water are unavailable, use hand sanitizer.

 Avoid close contact with people who are sick.

 Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth.

 Stay home if you are sick to protect others.

 Cover your cough or sneeze with your sleeve, elbow, or tissue. Discard the tissue immediately after use.

 Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects.

 Stay informed using reliable information sources, such as the Tennessee Department of Health.

For the latest information about COVID-19, please visit the Health Departments Coronavirus (COVID-19) webpage, or call the information hotline at (423) 209-8383.
A man was shot multiple times in an east Birmingham alley, one of at least two shootings under investigation in the city Thursday afternoon.

The adult black male victim was found unresponsive at 1:15 p.m., said Birmingham police Lt. Franklin Majors. He was taken to UAB Hospital with life-threatening injuries.

Majors said an East Precinct officer was initially dispatched to the area on a burglary call. He went to a nearby apartment complex but then citizens started waving him over to their location.

A man was shot multiple times and critically injured Thursday, March 26, 2020 in the 7800 block of First Avenue North in Birmingham.

The shooting is believed to have happened in a nearby alley. The victim was found between two buildings in the 7800 block of First Avenue North.

The suspect had fled the scene by the time police arrived.

A short time later, West Precinct officers responded to a shooting across town Details of that incident werent immediately available, but police said it was a shootout that left one person injured with non-life-threatening injuries. Cars were also struck.

This story will be updated if more information is released.
Democrats in Congress are right to demand real transparency and oversight before signing on to the inevitable bailout. The bailout would be rife with potential for abuse in the most honest and open administration, which does not describe the Trump administration.

Even before we reached this urgent moment, Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, have argued that the presidents constitutional power is plenary and illimitable, and that the president can ignore legislation that encroaches on that power. Congresss foundational checks on the president are the power of oversight of the executive branch, what Woodrow Wilson called the informing function of Congress, and the power of the purse.

They must use those checks now.

Trump to New York: Youve Been Mean to Me, Drop Dead

Trump will argue that he can spend the bailout money however he wants, no matter what conditions Congress writes into the law, and that Congress and the American people will have to make do with whatever information he decides to provide. Trump has said that he will be the oversight for hundreds of billions distributed to private businesses.

Congress must act accordingly.

First, Congress should except the bailout from the presidents various emergency powers scattered about the federal statutes. When Congress refused to fund Trumps signature border wall, Trump declared an emergency and shifted funds that Congress appropriated for other purposes. There was little pretense that there was a real emergency. I dont need this, Trump said, but I want to get it done faster, thats all.

Congress should expressly remove the bailout from the presidents emergency powers. If Trump thinks he needs additional power or to spend funds differently, then he can come back to Congress.

Second, Congress should require a special inspector general and a congressional oversight panel for the bailout, both of which were part of the bank bailout in 2008, and both of which are part of House Democrats current bailout legislation. Both should have subpoena power and sufficient staff and funds for the duties that Congress assigns them, and both should report to Congress and the public. The inspector general must be appointed based upon integrity and demonstrated ability, not loyalty to Trump.

Story continues

Third, Congress should require an independent counsel as part of the bailout legislation specifically for criminal investigations and prosecutions arising from the bailout. The decision to prosecute cannot be in the discretion of the Department of Justice, which may well look the other way if Trumps allies are implicated. The federal court for Washington should have the power to appoint an independent counsel where there is evidence of criminal conduct. The special inspector general should refer criminal charges for prosecution to the federal court for appointment of an independent counsel, not to Barrs Department of Justice.

The people most likely to be implicated in criminal conduct include Trump administration officials and Trumps business associates. Trumps own businesses will undoubtedly receive bailout funds. An independent counsel is more than justified.

The independent counsel provision in the bailout should also apply to defiance of subpoenas issued by congressional committees, the IG or the congressional oversight panel. Barr has stymied enforcement of congressional subpoenas by refusal to prosecute criminal contempt of Congress. That part of the bailout legislationan independent counsel for criminal contempt of Congressshould be permanent and apply to all congressional oversight.

Fourth, there should be an independent office of legal counsel for legal issues that arise under the bailout, and any advice the office gives should be public. Congress must wrench authority from the Department of Justices Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which reports to Barr. The OLC supposedly exists to provide detached legal advice to the president and the executive branch. Trump does not want detached lawyers. OLC has increasingly provided contrived legal opinions that allow whatever the president wants to do. OLC has frequently advised that the administration can ignore congressional subpoenas as well as duly enacted laws. It is almost impossible to prosecute an employee of the federal government if OLC advised at the time that the conduct was legal. In effect, OLC grants pardons for acts not yet committed. OLCs opinions and the conduct that the opinions approve are often secret, and therefore beyond challenge.

Congress has broad power to structure executive branch agencies to provide independence when independence is needed. The conflict of interest when OLC determines the presidents legal power is not hypothetical.

The Constitution almost certainly requires that the president appoint the head of any office of legal counsel for the bailout, but Congress can require that the appointment be based on legal ability and integrity, not partisan loyalty. To assure independence, Congress can require that the president appoint the head of the office from a short list of candidates recommended by congressional leadership, Democrats and Republicans alike.

Trump and his allies will argue that these measures will delay the legislation and complicate administration of the bailout. Our economy must survive this crisis, but so must our democracy.

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By Mohammed Ghobari and Lisa Barrington

ADEN (Reuters) - Yemen's warring parties welcomed a U.N. call for an immediate truce on Thursday as the country entered its sixth year of a conflict that has unleashed a humanitarian crisis, rendering it more vulnerable to any coronavirus outbreak.

In response, the United Nations' Yemen envoy Martin Griffiths said he would call the parties to a meeting to "put their words into action".

A Saudi-led military coalition said late on Wednesday that it backed the Yemeni government's acceptance of the U.N. appeal. Their foe, the Iran-aligned Houthi movement, welcomed that stance but said it wants to see implementation on the ground.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) meanwhile said it had started to reduce aid to areas controlled by the Houthis, on concerns the group hinders the delivery of assistance, a spokesperson told Reuters.

The new coronavirus has yet to be documented in the impoverished Arabian peninsula nation where conflict has killed more than 100,000 and left millions on the brink of starvation.

Following his call for a global ceasefire to focus on combating the pandemic, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday urged Yemen's parties to end hostilities and restart peace talks last held in December 2018.

The Sunni Muslim coalition, which intervened in Yemen in March 2015, supports efforts for a ceasefire, de-escalation, confidence-building measures and work to prevent a coronavirus outbreak, spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki said in a statement.

"The coalition's announcement ... is welcome. We are waiting for it to be applied practically," a senior Houthi official, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, wrote on Twitter late on Wednesday.

Yemen had witnessed a lull in military action after Saudi Arabia and the Houthis launched back-channel talks late last year. But there has been a recent spike in violence that threatens fragile peace deals in vital port cities.

Story continues

"We have a global coronavirus pandemic threatening to overwhelm an already broken health care system," said Tamuna Sabadze, country director at the International Rescue Committee, adding that Yemen was already battling a large cholera outbreak.

Yemen has been mired in conflict since the Houthis ousted the government from power in the capital, Sanaa, in late 2014. The group still controls most major urban centres despite years of war.

Millions are dependent on humanitarian aid in Yemen, but aid agencies in recent months have increasingly complained of interference and obstruction from Houthi authorities and threatened to scale down aid if conditions did not improve.

"The Houthis have failed to demonstrate sufficient progress towards ending unacceptable interference in these operations," the USAID spokesperson said, adding that it would continue to support the most urgent life-saving assistance.

"The coronavirus crisis demonstrates now more than ever the need for our partners to be able to deliver aid to those who need it most without interference or delay."

Aid agency Oxfam warned that USAID's approach would endanger an effective coronavirus response, "leaving Yemen uniquely vulnerable to the most deadly pandemic in generations", it said in a statement.

BAHA'I RELEASES

The head of the Houthi political office said on Wednesday the movement was open to de-escalation efforts with its foes, including prisoner releases.

Mahdi al-Mashat, in comments carried by al-Masirah TV, then ordered the release of all Baha'i faith members imprisoned by the Houthis, including Hamed bin Haydara whose death sentence was upheld earlier this week by a Sanaa court.

The Baha'i International Community welcomed the decision, which it said in a statement applied to six people "wrongfully imprisoned" for religious beliefs.

It said the order should lead to the lifting of charges brought in 2018 against around 20 members of the faith, which regards its 19th-century founder as a prophet. Muslim countries, including Iran where the sect originated, consider it an heretical offshoot of Islam.

Amnesty International said the move to release Baha'i prisoners was a "positive signal", especially in light of the coronavirus.

"We reiterate our call on all parties to the conflict to immediately and unconditionally release all those imprisoned solely for their peaceful activism, expression or political views," Amnesty Middle East Research Director Lynn Maalouf said.

(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari, Nayera Abdullah and Lisa Barrington; Writing by Ghaida Ghantous; Editing by Nick Macfie and Daniel Wallis)
The Ghana Independent Broadcasters Association (GIBA), Ghana Journalists Association(GJA) and Private Newspapers Association of Ghana(PRINPAG) have been trained on risk communication to help spread facts in the fights against COVID -19.

The training led by the chairman of the national risk communication and social mobilisation committee of COVID-19, Dr Da Costa Aboagye sensitised participants on the coronavirus disease with some of the frequently asked questions , managing rumours, providing accurate , factual and up to date information to the public .

Dr Aboagye stressed the need to use only developed and approved materials from the Ministry of Health and Ghana Health Service for public education in the fight against COVID-19.

He said the developed materials are in a form of a poster, leaflets, banners, pull ups and billboards.

He explained that effective communication using media tools will help create public awareness for behaviour change in the fight against COVID -19.

On authentic sources of information, Dr Aboagye sensitise participants to use the

COVID-19 GHS website, updates from the minister of health, updates from the Director General of the Ghana Health Service, updates from both Director of Public Health and Director of Health Promotion as accurate sources of information.

He therefore cautioned Practitioners against sensationalism and publishing opinions, as such publications would undermine the national efforts of fighting the coronavirus pandemic in Ghana.

Such reports would also stigmatise patients and discourage those suspected to be exposed to the disease from stepping out for testing.

Dr Aboagye, therefore, urged practitioners to only report facts and rely on the information on the disease provided by Ghana Health Service portal to arm the public with the knowledge they needed to stay protected and seek treatment when necessary.

We would intensify public education, which would be in a form of documentary, drama, information on mandatory and self-isolation to ensure adequate understanding for behavioural change, he said.

Citizens should maintain proper personal hygiene, eat healthily, have enough sleep and drink a lot of water, in addition to the prescribed social distance protocols.

He further his training presentation with an advise and education on social distancing.

The General Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association , Dr Justice Yankson admonished participants to follow their professional ethics in addition to the WHO protocol for reporting pandemics.

The being the first to break the news syndrome will be fatal if we do not check certain facts, he declared. We will always want you to follow the best steps and in instances where you have the best lead, confirm with the appropriate person, otherwise in your rush, you might send out messages that can be detrimental to the national efforts and confuse a lot more people.

Dr Yankson said in order not to crowd the media space with people who were not professionals, a list of resource persons had been made available nationwide who could be contacted to speak with the media on the issue in accordance with national protocols.

Since in health matters, prevention was better than cure they should send out messages on the preventive measures to prevent a crisis.

The other resource persons were Dr Anthony Nsiah Asare, the Presidential Adviser on health; Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, Deputy Information Minister Pius Hadzide and Mr Alex K. Abban, the Deputy Minister of Health and Mr Affail Monney, the President of the GJA.

Daily Guide
26.03.2020 LISTEN

Chief Stephen Ejueyetsetsi Aganbi, the Olare-Aja of Koko, will be remembered as a modern and progressive community leader, a committed citizen and one of the most effective leaders in the history of Nigerias Second Republic.

Aganbi died Tuesday night.

He was 99.

The death of the international lawyer, renowned politician, Itsekiri community head and Baptist Deacon was announced Wednesday morning.

"Chief Stephen Ejueyetsetsi Aganbi died Tuesday night at home in Koko, a statement in Koko, headquarters of Warri North indicated.

"We have lost the unique focus of our community and festive light in our lives, but the inspiration of his self-confidence, cheerfulness and determination will live on in our hearts forever."

The statement described Chief Stephen Aganbi as an icon of dedicated and upright public and private service, a man amongst men and one of the nations greatest political leaders.

Specifically, the statement praised Chief Aganbi for his roles in the unity and development of the country, particularly the Itsekiri nation.

"Chief Stephen Aganbi was a quintessential Nigerian. Throughout his political years, he proved to be an honest and courageous administrator. He also added charisma to education and astuteness both of which he displayed at difficult times Business mogul," Mr. Felix Aganbi noted.

Trained in the United Kingdom, the Second Republic Politician, lawyer, community leader and chairman of defunct Nigerian National Shrimp Company Limited, Oghara was on Tuesday, November 19, 2019 conferred the Alare Aja (community head) of Koko by the Olu of Warri, His Majesty, Ogiame Ikenwoli.

"Chief Stephen Aganbi dedicated his life to the empowerment of his people. His contribution to the history of the Itsekiri nation will never be forgotten, Felix Aganbi said.

Before ascending the throne, the late community head had distinguished himself as a lawyer, politician and religious leader.

"Chief Stephen Aganbi was more than a political leader. He loved the company of children and younger persons. He was both a father-figure and mentor to people from all parts of the world. Indeed, he was a living legend. May his soul rest in eternal peace."

The chieftain of the defunct National Party of Nigeria (NPN) recently decried the abandonment of some health care facilities in Warri North.

He called on DESOPADEC to develop all health care facilities in Koko.

Meanwhile, the member representing Warri Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives, Hon. Thomas Ereyitomi on Wednesday paid glowing tribute to Aganbi who he said played key roles in the nations development.

He described Aganbi as a great man whose wealth of knowledge and advice will be greatly missed by all.

"Pa. Aganbi was a lawyer per excellence, a community leader and a lover of God," the lawmaker said.

Similarly, a former chairman of Warri North Local Government, Chief Francis Maku-Eyituoyor described Stephen Aganbi as a defender of the faith.

"We are encouraged and inspired by the example of Christian Service," he said.
Since the spread of the coronavirus, many countries have been weighed down with stressed health care systems. But worse is the effect of coronavirus to the frontline medical personnel, who suffer stress amidst deaths of their patients at the hand of the coronavirus. For this reason, two nurses - one from Italy and another from UK, commited suicide.

Daily Mail reports that Daniela Trezzi, 34 years old, did not die from the COVID-19, but after testing positive for it. The fear that she passed the coronavirus to others weighed on her heavily. She felt guilty for passing the coronavirus to other people after knowing that she is now a carrier.

Trezzi was working at the intensive care unit of San Gerardo Hospital in Lombard. This is the first area that was struck worst when the disease came to Italy.

The National Federation of Nurses of Italy reported her death was caused by stress, which was affected by her daily job at the ICU.

The condition and stress to which our professionals are subjected is under the eyes of all. A similar episode had happened a week ago in Venice, with the same underlying reasons, the federation said according to New York Post.

All in all, 450,000 professionals are supporting the grief felt by relatives and family of Trezzi. Most nurses and health workers are now at the mercy of fatal stress and shortages of workers.

Mario Aparone, the Director of the San Gerardo Hospital, added that Trezzi's death is sad, and authorities are examining the circumstances of her suicide.

Also read: VIRAL VIDEO: Brit Couple Shares Terrifying Flight to UK With Coronavirus Positive People in Metal Box

Coronavirus outbreak in Italy

The Italian outbreak is the worst hit with 7,503 death toll and 74,386 patients who are suffering from coronavirus infection. The number of cases and death toll in China, where coronavirus started, is now surpassed by Italy.

Italy has been in a long lockdown as an effort to stop the spread of coronavirus, especially in the worst-hit northern region of Lombardy.

Last March 12, all public congregations were prohibited and businesses shut down to contain and delay the spread but still, to no avail.

An extended lockdown has been declared by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to help stop the collapse of the system.

Coronavirus is everywhere and has taken 16,000 lives or more.

Nurse in UK also commited suicide

In another news, another nurse died due to suicide. The 20-year old nurse, whose name is kept private was found dead at the King's College Hospital (KCH) where she worked. She is said to have taken an overdose.

It was 5.36 pm on Monday when she was found unresponsive in the hospital. Medics did their best to keep her from dying, but she expired despite all efforts. Later, her relatives were informed of her untimely death as reported by the Mirror.

The death of the nurse is not considered suspicious and the authorities prepared her files for the coroner.

Most serious coronavirus patients who are severe end up in the intensive care unit (ICU), which are fended by nurses round the clock. Her stress originated from this which led to her unfortunate demise.

Both Trezzi and the young English nurse where overworked and experienced too much stress which eventually lead to their death. The coronavirus frontliners face not just physical harm but even mental harm as well.

Related article: Coronavirus to Last Spring 2021 with Possible Worse Tidings in the UK

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Provision of equipment and specialised personnel, support for hospital staff, scientific studies

Research Luxembourg, a joint initiative of the main players in Luxembourg's public research sector, is mobilising its knowledge and its human and material resources to help address the challenge of Covid-19. A task force has been set up in order to offer the health system the combined expertise available within the Luxembourg public research sector (LIH, LISER, LIST, LNS, University, FNR, under the coordination of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research).

The missions of this working group are to:

Coordinate the provision of support from the national research community to healthcare providers and the government in order to contain the current Covid-19 pandemic;

Help identify and centralise a variety of priority activities, leveraging on the cross-sectoral expertise in molecular biology, epidemiology, clinical trials and fundamental research;

Be the point of contact between the national research ecosystem, the clinical community and the authorities.

The task force will focus on three pillars:

A prevalence study to assess the extent of the spread of the virus and the number of asymptomatic individuals;

A stratification study in which researchers attempt to identify risk factors that contribute negatively to disease progression;

Statistical simulations on the evolution, impact and spread of the Covid-19 pandemic to provide short- and medium-term projections and thus facilitate decision-making on when restrictions could be lifted.

Concrete actions have already been put in place. Research institutions have provided the health sector with equipment and specialised personnel. In this context, it is worthwhile mentioning the important mobilisation of doctors in training in the framework of the "formation specifique en medecine generale. Indeed, many of these future general practitioners have volunteered to support hospital staff in the four hospital establishments in Luxembourg. To enable this initiative, the government, with the support of the University of Luxembourg and the doctors involved in this training, has adjusted the relevant regulatory framework and adopted the necessary measures to enable the deployment of these volunteers in the coming days. Likewise, nurses working in research as well as students in medicine are also being trained to support hospital staff.

Due to the international pressure exerted by governments and research funding agencies, almost all scientific data and publications on Covid-19 are freely accessible in digital form (machine readable). This data is a very valuable resource, easily amenable to text and data mining using artificial intelligence techniques. This is an area in which Luxembourg has strong expertise.

To accelerate these efforts and to stimulate new ideas and new collaborations between researchers, additional funding will be provided by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR). Given the urgency of the situation, quick funding decisions will be ensured.

Further information

Research Luxembourg is a joint initiative of the main players in Luxembourg public research [Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH); Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER); Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST); Laboratoire National de sante (LNS); University of Luxembourg; Fonds national de la recherche (FNR)], under the coordination of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. The main aim of the initiative is to promote scientific cooperation in Luxembourg and to communicate the activities of the sector as a whole.

Press release by Research Luxembourg and the Ministry of Higher Education and Research
Idris Elba has claimed he and his wife Sabrina will become immune to COVID:19, according to their doctor, after they tested positive to having the virus.

The quarantined actor, 47, tweeted on Thursday that he is now 'on the mend and he and his wife feel OK with no changes'.

He said his doctor told him: 'they will be immune for a certain time as their antibodies fought this.'

Update: Idris Elba tweeted on Thursday that doctors have told him that he and wife Sabrina will become immune to COVID:19 after they tested positive to having the virus

Experts have said that people who do get infected for a second time are likely to have a milder case of illness than the first time.

The star admitted the couple can't wait to return home to London as they are quarantined near to where Idris was filming upcoming Netflix film The Harder They Fall in Sante Fe, New Mexico.

Sharing a selfie, Idris wrote: 'Hoping everyone is coping with this $@@!! Currently still quarantine.. Sab and I still feel ok so far with no changes. Dr told us that after quarantine we will be immune for a certain time since our antibodies fought this.'

'At some point we'd like to go home to London. Bsafe.'

Idris also spent time replying to followers, telling one who asked if he had had any symptoms at all: 'No not really... the day I got tested I had body aches and a headache.'

He told another fan that he thought he was on day 13 of the virus.

Speaking to fans: Idris also spent time replying to followers, telling one who asked if he had had any symptoms at all: 'No not really... the day I got tested I had body aches and a headache.'

Idris appeared to confirm in a video message last week that he had contracted the virus from Canadian Prime Minister's wife Justin Trudeau Sophie, 44, after the two met shortly before they both tested positive for COVID-19.

The actor revealed that he was exposed to the deadly disease on 4 March, the same day he posed with Sophie at the We Day UK charity event, in Wembley.

Idris said: 'It's hard to say when I got the disease or when I contracted COVID-19, it's hard to say when. I will say that I know I've been exposed to it from March 4.

Also positive: Posting on Twitter on Thursday, the British actor said he and his wife Sabrina, who has also tested positive are 'still feeling OK'

'That's when the person that came up positive, that was the time I got in contact with that person.

'So essentially, I could have been positive from March 4, but it's hard to say when I contracted someone with corona, you can contract it at anytime but my known exposure was March 4.'

Idris met Trudeau's wife Sophie, who has also been tested positive for COVID-19, on 4 March at a We Day UK charity event, in Wembley.

Posing for photos together at the event, the pair were in close proximity to each other, as well as other celebrities such as Lewis Hamilton, and attendees.

Interaction: Idris appeared to confirm in a video message last week that he had contracted the virus from Canadian Prime Minister's wife Justin Trudeau Sophie, 44, after the two met shortly before they both tested positive for COVID-19

Idris then addressed backlash as to why he was tested for COVID-19 after he had 'no symptoms' and 'felt ok'.

'I am on location about to start filming. The news breaks that this person, who is also in the public eye, has tested positive.'

Idris previously explained he was on location and about to start filming when he got tested: 'It was definitely something I had to do as I was about to start filming and be around a lot of people,' he said.

'My job made me test immediately, I had to test anyway, as it meant I was putting a lot of people at risk if I had been exposed. We were lucky to get a test very quickly because of the shortages of the test.

Message: Idris confirmed he had tested positive for coronavirus in a social media video posted on March 16, with his wife choosing to remain by his side

'It was the best thing to do, I was going to be around a lot of people starting this film.'

Earlier this week it was revealed Idris' wife Sabrina Dhowre-Elba had also tested positive after choosing to remain with her husband in self isolation when he was diagnosed.

Defending their decision to isolate together following The Wire star's diagnosis, she told Oprah Winfrey 'I wanted to be with him' and claimed she felt 'the instinct of a wife' to take care of him.

In an interview on Winfrey's new Apple TV+ series Oprah Talks, the couple opened up about being quarantined together in New Mexico, where Elba's latest film was in production.

Updates: Idris has been reassuring fans in regular updates that he has been feeling well

'Actually, I found out this morning, Oprah, that I tested positive,' Sabrina told the host on Facetime on Saturday.

Idris, 47, told Oprah, he 'hasn't witnessed any major symptoms' and is 'feeling okay.'

'It's interesting and worrying that people are possibly carrying this disease and are seemingly okay, but can spread it easily,' he said of not being symptomatic.

Sabrina, who also feels healthy, said: 'I don't feel anything that would come to what people would now expect to be a symptom of coronavirus, which is really strange. It might change in the coming weeks, and we'll keep everyone updated.'

To stay entertained in isolation, the pair are focusing on the 'silver lining' of spending quality time together and playing video games, chess and 'staying creative.'
Almost 250,000 UK students have called for a refund of their tuition fees after universities were forced to close down due to the coronavirus while thousands face rent demands on accommodation they are unable to use.

The online petition, which had been signed by 270,000 UK students on Thursday evening, demands a refund of all tuition fees from this academic year due to overall dissatisfaction with university experience amid the coronavirus outbreak.

'University quality is poor this year and certainly not worth up to 9,250,' reads the petition, posted by Sophie Quinn, 21, a geography undergraduate at the University of Liverpool.

'Universities are now online only due to COVID-19, with only powerpoints online for learning materials which is not worthy of up to 9,250.'

The online petition, which had been signed by 270,000 UK students on Thursday evening (pictured), demands a refund of all tuition fees from this academic year due to overall dissatisfaction with university experience amid the coronavirus outbreak

Sophie Quinn, 21, a third year Geography Undergraduate at the University of Liverpool, said that the 9,250 per year tuition fees should be refunded this year due to the poor experience of students

Fears of the spread of COVID-19 in the UK over the past two weeks has led universities across the country to shutter down, banning on-campus activities, but asking students to continue working towards their degrees from home.

'Field trips have also been cancelled which our tuition fee was to pay for,' the petition added.

Quinn, who is from Maidenhead in Berkshire, told the Guardian that students no longer have a graduation date to look forward to and 'a lot of people are demotivated to do the work'.

She also claimed students are 'not getting what we paid for', as tuition fees are often used to pay for 'libraries and upkeep of buildings'.

Pictured: An undated file photo of the University of Liverpool. Fears of the spread of COVID-19 in the UK over the past two weeks has led universities across the country to shutter down, banning on-campus activities, but asking students to continue working towards their degrees from home

Industrial action in February, where teachers stopped teaching for 14 days at 74 UK universities, also disrupted student experience this year, Quinn said.

She told the Tab earlier this week that despite 'pushing through' during the the strikes and meeting the deadlines she was set, teachers failed to reach their marking deadlines.

The 21-year-old added that 'this year has now been moved online and last time I checked I didnt sign up to The Open University.'

While Quinn voiced dissatisfaction with the quality of teaching and university experience, others have found themselves locked in to accommodation contracts for properties they are unable to use.

One first year student, a resident at Dobbie's Point private halls in Glasgow, Petros Passos, told the Guardian that the hall management provider, Student Roost, had sent warnings that his case could be taken to a debt recovery agency after he was unable to make his monthly payments.

He left the halls to stay with his mother in London, who he said is a key worker.

'Its very stressful,' Passos said. 'Its very unfair and unethical to do this, theyre not worried about reputational damage because they can open another building and move on.'

A spokesperson for Student Roost told the Guardian they would be making an exception to their normal cancellation policies to help the students. They agreed to cancel payments from 1 May if they planned to leave the accommodation.
Researchers from the University of Pittsburghs Center for Vaccine Research (CVR; Pittsburgh, PA; USA) are developing a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine using a measles vector  meaning a measles vaccine engineered to express SARS-CoV-2 proteins on its surface  to generate immunity to the virus. CVR is a part of an international consortium led by Institut Pasteur (Paris, France) in collaboration with Themis Bioscience GmbH (Vienna, Austria) to develop a SARS CoV 2 vaccine and take it through phase I clinical trials in humans. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international, intergovernmental organization, is committing about USD 5 million to the consortium.Measles is an attractive vector as the measles vaccine has proven safe and effective for billions of children over the past 40 years. Creating new measles vector vaccines is a well-established process. There are experimental measles vector vaccines for Chikungunya, dengue, Ebola, HIV-1, Lassa, MERS, RSV, SARS, West Nile and Zika, with several of them even advancing through clinical trials. Researchers from the three institutions have begun working on creating the vaccine, while CVR scientists are designing animal testing protocols that require special biocontainment measures for safe handling of potentially lethal, airborne pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2.The researchers expect to have a candidate vaccine ready for animal testing in Paris and Pittsburgh by April, which will be complemented by the development of an aerosol model of COVID-19 disease at CVR. The vaccine will be administered to 60-80 human volunteers at the two sites in Europe by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Themis will begin generating a stockpile of the candidate vaccine in anticipation of a phase II trial starting early next year.There are virologists all around the world who have been trained for this moment, said CVR director and Jonas Salk Chair for Vaccine Research Paul Duprex, Ph.D. We have colleagues in many parts of the world who collaborate and work with us to share information and share knowledge because this is important.Our versatile, plug-and-play manufacturing technology affords us the advantage of accelerating the discovery and development of a vaccine candidate against the highly infectious and pandemic coronavirus, said Erich Tauber, M.D., CEO of Themis.We are delighted to continue our long-lasting collaboration with Themis and CEPI that has already delivered high potential vaccine candidates for Chikungunya, nearing phase 3, and Lassa fever in phase 1, both emerging infectious diseases representing a threat to global health, said Stewart Cole, Ph.D., President of the Institut Pasteur.
P arking charges at hospitals and other medical facilities throughout the UK have been scrapped for NHS staff amid the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

The move, announced by the Government on Wednesday, came after more than 400,000 people signed a petition calling for the charges to be lifted for healthcare workers.

NHS Trusts set their own parking charges, but the Government will cover the cost of any income lost from daily fees paid by staff, the Department of Health said.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said: "Our NHS is facing an unprecedented challenge, and I will do everything I can to ensure our dedicated staff have whatever they need during this unprecedented time.

Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures 1 /44 Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures AP Buckingham Palace AP Piccadilly Line tube AP Big Ben AP Millennium bridge AP Wembley Stadium AP St Pancras International train station AP Downing Street AP Victoria Station AP Regent Street AP The Mall leading to Buckingham Palace AP London's National Gallery in Trafalgar Square PA Edinburgh's Royal Mile PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bath PA Bath PA London's Waterloo station PA London Bridge PA London's Canary Wharf Jubilee Line platform PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA London's Buckingham Palace PA London's Tower Bridge PA London's Leicester Square PA London's Millennium Bridge with St Paul's Cathedral PA London's Criterion Theatre PA London's Palace Theatre PA London's Phoenix Theatre PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA Bournemouth beach PA Bath PA Bath PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bournemouth beach PA

"So we will provide free car parking for our NHS staff who are going above and beyond every day in hospitals across England.

"My enormous gratitude goes out to the many NHS Trusts and other organisations already providing free car parking and I urge other Trusts to do the same with our backing."

NHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens meanwhile said the move would make a "big difference" for thousands of frontline healthcare workers battling the Covid-19 pandemic.

"Our NHS staff are working round the clock gearing up to deal with this unprecedented global health threat, which will be a major challenge for health services across the world, and we have listened to what they have told us would make their lives easier," he said.

"But this is just the start, and we will setting out further support offers over the coming days and weeks, to ensure the NHS looks after those who look after all of us."

Private company the National Car Parking Group earlier this week confirmed it will provide NHS staff free parking at all 150 of its sites in England, and the Government said it was urging "all businesses and other organisations located near hospitals to work with their local NHS Trusts to consider allowing NHS staff use their car parks".

The scrapping of charges for frontline healthcare workers will also apply in council parking bays nationwide, Local Government Secretary Robert Jenrick promised.

The changes will apply to all on-street parking and open, council-run car parks, including pay and display sites. Charges for social care workers and NHS volunteers will also be suspended.

"Our NHS staff and social care workers are working round the clock to save lives and should not have to worry about the cost or time restrictions of parking," Mr Jenrick said.

TV personality Piers Morgan, who has routinely called on the Government to make the change in recent days, was quick to welcome the Government's moves.
26.03.2020 LISTEN

The Graduate Physician Assistants Association of Ghana (GRAPAG) is calling for the immediate lockdown of towns and cities with the most confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the country.

Ghanas current count of recorded cases stands at 68 , with a death toll of three.

All the cases were recorded in the Greater Accra and Ashanti Regions.

In a statement signed by their President, Anthony Asare Arkoh, the physician assistants said the government should either conduct mass testing of all towns and cities with most cases immediately or immediately lock down the towns and cities with most cases.

Among other things, they also called on the government to immediately enforce social distancing at the OPDS at all health facilities and amongst health professionals who were super-spreaders in Wuhan and Italy. Restrict the number of passengers for public transport (taxis, trotro and buses). Direct that all public transport on long journeys to have first aiders to monitor the clinical features of passengers before taking off and arrival.

The leadership of the Association anticipates the Ministry of Health opens the application portal for the recruitment of the over 200 Physician Assistants in accordance with the orders of His Excellency Nana Addo-Dankwa Akuffu Addo, President of the Republic of Ghana to assist in the COVID-19 pandemic immediately, the statement added. Click here to read the full statement.

Ghanas epicentres of coronavirus

Two cities  Accra in the Greater Accra Region and Kumasi in the Ashanti Region have been identified as the hotspots of COVID-19 in Ghana , Health Minister, Kwaku Agyemang Manu has said.

More 90% of the recorded cases are in Accra alone, while the remaining are in Kumasi.

Addressing the press on Tuesday, March 24, 2020, in Accra, the Health Minister said following the case management by health officials, what we have identified so far is that we can describe two areas in Ghana now as our own epicentres. Accra and Tema together and Kumasi.

In Accra, we have deployed 98 field officers, epidemiologists and community health nurses who have been trained in tracing people. In Kumasi, we have deployed about 50 trained people who are also doing contact tracing, the Minister added.

---citinewsroom
New Delhi: Telugu superstar Mahesh Babu has come forward to help the government fight against the deadly coronavirus pandemic, which has brought the world to a standstill. Mahesh Babus team announced on social media that he will contribute Rs 1 crore to the CM Relief Fund of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to help combat the deadly virus.

In a statement, the actor urged everyone to donate as much as they can towards the cause and appealed to people to abide by the rules and support the Centres decision of a 21-day lockdown.

In these tough times, we have to stand by each other and protect ourselves. Humanity will rise and we will win this war. Until then, #StayHomeStaySafe, Mahesh Babu added. His wife Namrata Shirodkar also took to her Instagram account to post about Mahesh Babus contribution.

Superstars Pawan Kalyan and Ram Charan have also announced that they will donate Rs 1 crore and Rs 70 lakh, respectively, to combat the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Pawan Kalyan, who is also a politician, would donate Rs 50 lakh each to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana governments while he would give contribute Rs 1 crore towards the Prime Ministers Relief Fund. Ram Charan, meanwhile, would donate Rs 70 lakh to the Centre and states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in this crisis situation.

I will be donating Rs.50 Lakhs each to both AP and Telangana CM relief funds to fight against Corona pandemic.  Pawan Kalyan (@PawanKalyan) March 26, 2020

I will be donating Rs.1 crore to PM relief fund to support our https://t.co/83OmZ9biYX Sri @narendramodi ji,in turbulent times like this. His exemplary and inspiring leadership would truly bring our country from this Corona pandemic.  Pawan Kalyan (@PawanKalyan) March 26, 2020

Hope this tweet finds you in good health. At this hour of crisis, inspired by @PawanKalyan garu, I want to do my bit by contributing to aid the laudable efforts of our governments...

Hope you all are staying safe at home! @TelanganaCMO @AndhraPradeshCM @PMOIndia @KTRTRS pic.twitter.com/Axnx79gTnI  Ram Charan (@AlwaysRamCharan) March 26, 2020

In India, the total number of positive coronavirus cases is at 649 as of Thursday afternoon while the death toll is at 13. To contain the spread of the virus, the government has called for a 21-day lockdown in the country.
On Feb. 7, 2018, James Carey III received a heart transplant. Two days later, he received a kidney from the same donor.

His life was a blessing, Carey said of his donor. And I will take care of the gift.

After being diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2002, Carey, 48, had to make several life changes, including significant weight loss, to get on the waiting list for a transplant. After the disease caused severe damage to the right side of his heart, Carey underwent 23 hours of dialysis a day for a week to remove fluid from his kidneys to treat the heart problem. After being approved for the heart transplant waiting list in 2017, Carey learned his kidneys were failing due to the aggressive dialysis treatments.

Luckily, after meeting with the kidney transplant team at Methodist Hospital, Carey was cleared to be placed on both the heart and kidney transplant waiting list just four days after being diagnosed with kidney failure.

While waiting on the transplants, Carey was one of the nearly 114,000 Americans on the waiting list to receive an organ donation, according to the American Transplant Foundation. While he said he wasnt on the waiting list as long as other patients, Carey described the waiting period as feeling like a lifetime. Had it not been for his faith, he said, he wouldnt have gotten through it.

God showed me a dream of two angels holding a box, Carey said. And my heart was in there.  My faith was stronger than it ever had been. If my faith wasnt there, I wouldnt have been able to go through such a time.

Carey, who has type O blood could only receive a heart and kidney from someone who was also type O, just one of the many obstacles that stand in the way of organ donation recipients finding a match.

According to Donate Life America, only 54% of Americans are registered organ donors. Of that 54%, only 1% of people will have viable organs at the time of their death, according to Ebony Chappel, the multicultural community relations coordinator for Indiana Donor Network.

A large factor in organ viability has to do with time and location. While some organs, such as kidneys, can be held for up to 72 hours before transplantation, a heart must be transplanted within five hours of being procured.

Another obstacle for organ donation? Misconceptions held by the American public.

According to Chappel, one of the biggest misconceptions she hears is doctors not doing everything in their power to save someone if they are an organ donor.

There are so many things that has to happen for a match to occur, Chappel said. They have to have the right blood type, body size  the person has to be located geographically close enough that the organ can be transported quickly enough. Its considered a miracle because all of these things have to match up. It eliminates the idea that doctors are sitting around intentionally letting people die.

Chappel believes a large reason for misconceptions and mistrust toward health care, especially among African Americans, has to do with systemic discrimination and inaccuracies in popular media.

I think it is an overall issue of people of color and people from impoverished communities having an earned mistrust of the medical community, she said. Earned mistrust stems from being discriminated against from certain systems  if you grew up in a community where you heard grandparents or parents say certain things, even if it was a myth, theres enough discrimination going around that you think everything is nefarious.

Portrayals of organ donation and procurement in television and movies are often inaccurate, creating more misconceptions about organ donation and procurement  including the idea that organs are harvested for transplant use, and that organs can be bought and sold to the highest bidder. Both are untrue, Chappel said.

Through educational events and programming, Chappel and the Indiana Donor Network hope to continue to dispel the myths that surround organ donation. More importantly, they hope to share the message that one donor has the ability to help 83 people through organ, eye and tissue donation.

People of color make up 60% of the organ donation waiting list, Chappel said. The need is growing and eminent. One thing I love to share with people is how donation gives you the ability to leave a legacy on this planet when youre no longer here.

For Carey, his heart and kidney transplant gave him a second chance at life. While he hasnt contacted the family of his donor yet, he is working on a letter thanking them for respecting the donors wishes.

Two years after his transplants, Carey is an advocate for organ donation and hopes to encourage others to join the donor registry.

You can help so many people, he said.   If you never did nothing in life, you left doing something.

Contact staff writer Breanna Cooper at 317-762-7848. Follow her on Twitter @BreannaNCooper.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 23:45:29|Editor: huaxia

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JERUSALEM, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's main opponent party, Blue and White, was breaking up as its leader, Benny Gantz, was heading a unity government with Netanyahu.

Gantz, Israel's former military chief and Netanyahu's main rival, was in final talks on forming a unity government with Netanyahu in an attempt to break a yearlong political deadlock, Channel 12 TV news reported on Thursday.

Gantz has pressed ahead with the move despite his partner, Yair Lapid, a former finance minister and number two on the Blue and White list, objects it. Lapid has repeatedly said the centrist party will not seat in a government with Netanyahu due to the prime minister's corruption trial, scheduled to begin on May 24.

Lapid and Moshe Yaalon, a former defense minister and a senior Blue and White member, filed an official request to split Blue and White, a unity of three factions that includes Lapid's Yesh Atid, Yaalon's Telem, and Gantz's Israel Resilience.

Under the emerging deal between Netanyahu and Gantz, Netanyahu will keep his position as prime minister and will be replaced by Gantz in 18 months.
Mumbai, March 27 : While there is no scientific evidence yet to prove the coronavirus was first transmitted from a bat to a person who might have consumed the animal, actor Emraan Hashmi made such a case in his latest tweet with mock conviction.

"And all this because some person thousands of miles away wanted to have a freakish culinary experience like eating a BAT," tweeted @emraan hashmi, venting ire on someone in the faraway Chinese city of Wuhan who might have consumed an infected bat to contract COVID-19, and then pass it on to others, thereby planting the seed of the ongoing global pandemic.

At the last count, over half a million coronavirus cases have been confirmed worldwide, with more than 22,000 deaths. In India so far, there have 16 deaths reported and the number of cases that have tested positive has risen to 694. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has declared a 21-day national lockdown to stem the spread of the virus.
The front page of this weeks Co Down Spectator which will temporarily close

Several local newspapers across Northern Ireland are introducing pay cuts or halting publication amid the outbreak of coronavirus.

Spectator Newspapers said that the County Down Spectator, Newtownards Chronicle and Mourne Observer would not publish from next week due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The move was announced on this week's front pages.

A spokesperson said the publisher "awaited further guidance from the government".

Meanwhile, staff at the Impartial Reporter in Co Fermanagh have been told they will be temporarily laid off or face a pay cut due to a downturn in revenues.

The Impartial is owned by UK media giant Newsquest, which emailed staff on Tuesday informing them of measures it was taking in reaction to the economic impact of coronavirus.

Newsquest owns 165 news brands around the UK and is itself owned by US media giant Gannett Inc.

The email to staff from chief executive Henry Faure Walker - which has been seen by the Belfast Telegraph - said the pandemic was "having a profound impact on day to day living and business activity across the UK and across the world".

"Despite the sterling efforts of our teams, we are seeing very significant declines in our revenue, particularly from advertising, as many of our customers cancel or put their plans on hold.

"Standing still is therefore not an option."

Newsquest, which has owned the Impartial since 2015, said that in order to "weather the storm" the business would be participating in the government's coronavirus job retention scheme.

The email explained: "This enables us to respond to the clear downturn in activity by placing a significant number of our employees on leave... they do not work in this period, but they will continue to receive 80% of their basic salary."

And while the government scheme is officially limited to 2,500 a month, Newsquest said it would ensure staff received 80% of their basic monthly salary even if over 2,500.

Staff whose roles are regarded as suitable to be placed on to furlough are to be told over the next two days. The newspaper is thought to have around 20 staff, including editorial and advertising.

However, other staff not on furlough will see a 15% cut in their wages above 18,000 - so that a staff member on 22,000 would be hit by a 15% reduction on the 4,000.
Sri Lanka: No fishing, transport restrictions for fishermen

March 26,2020 | Source: Daily News LK

The Ceylon Fisheries Corporation has accelerated the purchasing of fish from fishermen, the Fisheries and Aquatic Resources Ministry said today, It said a programme to buy fish from the owners of fishing vessels commenced at Dickovita Fisheries Harbour on Tuesday and this would be extended to all other fisheries harbours in the next couple of days. Minister Douglas Devananda visited the harbour to inspect the progress of this project. The release said that Minister Douglas Devananda would discuss with the President and the Prime Minister and put in place a mechanism shortly to speed up fish purchases from fishing vessels.



This assurance came in the wake of complaints from some Fisheries Associations that they have been unable to sell their catch. The minister said the Fisheries Corporation would do its best to buy the fish from the fisheries community. The government has also given permission for transporting and unloading of fish during the curfew hours, considering appeals made by the fisheries community. Transport Services Management Minister Mahinda Amaraweera said those who are engaged in the fisheries sector will be allowed to transport fish. Fisheries communities are also allowed to engage in all fisheries-related activities during the curfew hours without any interruption.



This decision was taken during the Party Leaders meeting chaired by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa. Party Leaders stated that fisheries communities were facing great difficulties since their catch was not allowed to be transported during the curfew hours. Prime Minister Rajapaksa instructed the Acting IGP to take steps to ensure that fishermen can transport their produce without any trouble.
Christopher Myers appointed as CFO of BLDV, will provide financial support and guidance

Denver, Colorado--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - Blue Diamond Ventures, Inc. (OTC Pink: BLDV). Christopher Myers has been named Chief Financial Officer of Blue Diamond Ventures Inc. Myers was most recently the Global CEO of Yellow Express, a Sydney-based on-demand logistics company that built a complete logistics platform to send, move, and deliver anything at the tap of an app. Prior to leading Yellow Express in the US, Chris was the Co-Founder and CEO of BodeTree, a financial technology company focused on serving small businesses, and has served as both a columnist for Forbes Magazine and regular contributor for MSNBC.

In addition to his responsibilities as the CFO of BLDV, Myers also holds the position of CEO, of the newly formed goPronto Inc. Based in Denver, goPronto will be working closely with Clement Hayes, BLDV General Counsel from Block45 Legal, and Sebastain Nassau, the COO of BLDV. Harvest 360 will provide business development services to goPronto, and work toward holding an equity position in the company.

goPronto will focus on Cannabis Transport & Delivery for Testing Labs, Cultivators, Processors, Dispensaries and where allowed by law, Consumer Delivery. "The newly formed company will support the current activity of H360 Labs Inc. in Puerto Rico by supplying the vehicles required for mobile testing. This also supports the lab effort in Missouri, where the vechicles provided by goPronto will actually pick up the test samples from the growers," said Myers. "We had an aggressive rollout strategy for goPronto that included startup in Denver in May, Missouri in August, Puerto Rico in September, and Illinois in Jan 2021, today when we talk about testing and delivery we are synchronized with the need for community support and service in those areas which adds even more urgency to the rollout."

"Myers will immediately take over the responsibility for financial reporting to the OTC for BLDV and we expect that the YIELD sign will come down shortly," said Josh Alper CEO of BLDV. "Chris can provide the financial expertise required to allow BLDV to complete the audit process in progress, and allow the company to achieve SEC reporting by the end of the year."

Block45 Legal is preparing PPM documents for goPronto Inc. and H360 Labs, Inc. to allow direct equity investment in GoPronto Inc., and debt investment into H360 Labs, Inc., where direct investment is not allowed by law.

Following the appoint of Myers as CFO, these positions at BLDV have been confirmed by written consent:

Todd Scattini - Chairman of the Board

Christopher Myers - Chief Financial Officer

Joshua Alper - Chief Executive Officer

Sebastian Nassau - Chief Operations Officer

Todd Scattini, CEO of Harvest 360 and Chairman of BLDV is providing bold, courageous and innovative leadership to the group during this period of rapid expansion that is occuring during uncertain times. Scattini's work with veterans and leaders from across a wide array of industries, and across international and domestic governments, continues to set the bar for cannabis CEOs. "David Serrano, H360's, Chief Business Development Officer has taken BLDV to a new place with this deal" said Scattini, "his commitment to Puerto Rico, and his ability to integrate these engagements to the benefit of all parties, is what makes this work."

About BLDV & Harvest 360 Technologies LLC

Blue Diamond Ventures, Inc. and their wholly owned subsidiaries seek to partner with individuals and companies that share a common synergy, mission and vision to enable products/services that are produced ethically, delivered and consumed responsibility, while utilizing fewer natural resources and providing a sustainable alternative to traditional methods in the market today. As a diversified customer centric Management / Holding Company; Blue Diamond Ventures, Inc. seeks opportunities in Cannabis & CBD markets and is driven by critical thinking and the scientific method.

About Block45 Legal

Block45 Legal is a full service business law firm. Our attorneys have years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies and emerging startups, offering straightforward business consulting along with legal counsel. Our attorneys are deeply knowledgeable in all types of business formations and will advise on which one(s) are right for your situation. Block45 Legal is driven to see opportunities for our clients, along with adding value through insightful business and legal counsel.

Safe Harbor:

This press release contains forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are subject to several risks, assumptions and uncertainties that could cause the Company's actual results to differ materially from those projected in such statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date made and are not guarantees of future performance. We undertake no obligation to publicly revise any forward-looking statements.

Contact:

info@bldvinc.com

www.bldvinc.com



Joshua B. Alper

CEO, BLDV

josh@repla.com

Harvest 360 Technologies LLC

https://www.harvest360.co/ todd.scattini@harvest360.co

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/53851
President Xi Jinping attends the 14th G20 summit held in Osaka, Japan, in this June 28, 2019 file photo. [Photo/Xinhua]

President Xi Jinping will attend in Beijing on Thursday an extraordinary virtual G20 leaders' summit on coping with the novel coronavirus, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying announced on Wednesday.
Storyful

A cat owner in Sao Paulo may need to pack for vacations in private from now on, as it appears their kitty is quite fond of curling up in a suitcase.Natalia Cara de Medeiros, who runs an Instagram account dedicated to her pet cat Jazz, shared footage of the feline sitting happily in her half-full suitcase to her YouTube channel.In a caption for the video, de Medeiros said Jazz was abandoned along with four other cats.They all got adopted and she was the only one left. One of the neighbors tried to take her in, but she didnt want to; she had chosen us and slowly made her way into our home, she wrote.And it looks like de Medeiros home isnt the only thing Jazz has made her way into: Like all cats, she is very curious and loves enclosed spaces, so of course, she couldnt resist it when she saw an open suitcase lying around, de Mederios added. Credit: Natys Adventures via Storyful
If you know of local business openings or closings, please notify us here.

 Pocono Dessert Co. opens women owned coffee and dessert shop at 2185 PA-611 in Swiftwater

 Handmade Mystic opens crystal shop at 2 S. 4th Street in Emmaus

 Anne Baum named first president of Lehigh Valley Reilly Children's Hospital

 Lashes by Gab opens location at the Promenade Shops of Saucon Valley, across from the movie theater

 Elite Salon & Suites to open at the Promenade Shops of Saucon Valley in 2022. Independent salon owners will have their own suite space within the store

 Purr Haus opens at 27 South Seventh Street in Emmaus. The boutique will offer a collection of pet supplies and cat-themed apparel.

. The Hummus House opens Bethlehem location at 518 E. Third Street

 New beauty studio, Glow Factory, opens at 1708 Washington Blvd. in Easton

 New salon, Mirror Beauty Studio, to open at 2002 Hanover Avenue in Allentown. Grand opening set for Dec. 3.

 A Red Wing shoe store will open on Airport Road in Allentown at the site of the former Zoup! restaurant.

 Paisley & Company Bath Boutique & Fragrance Bar in Kutztown reopens for in-person shopping

 Bitty & Beau's Coffee opens at 74 W. Broad Street in Bethlehem

 American Family Care opens urgent care center in the County Line Plaza, off of Route 113 near Souderton, Bucks County

 Charming Charlie, a women's contemporary fashion and accessories retailer, will return to the Outlets at Wind Creek.

 All Weather Selvedge Denim Co. (AW) opens at The Promenade Shops at Saucon Valley in suite 608, next to Evolve Salon & Spa.

 PrimoHoagies, the casual restaurant known for its gourmet hoagies, plans to open two restaurants in Stroudsburg.

 Laura McLain, executive director of the Slate Belt Chamber of Commerce, will retire at the end of 2021 after 21+ years of service.
We are living in extraordinary times. One wonders will the world be the same when the days of Covid-19 disappear in the rear-view mirror.

Of course things will have changed: lives will be lost and the dynamics of families, friendships, organisations and businesses will be forever altered.

The whole world of work, health-care and welfare could be completely reshaped. The reality of home-working will, perhaps, be revisited based on the experience of these days.

Health services and health systems may well be re-imagined when, for example, questions will be asked about our tendency to rush to A&E with every complaint. A few days into the crisis, the numbers on hospital trolleys in our A&E departments dropped from the hundreds to the tens.

But will anything fundamentally change aside from a temporary rearrangement of priorities, as happens in wartime? The precedents are not good, and previous experience doesn't bode well for those hoping this virus will rearrange the world order.

Look at the experience of women during and after WWI and WWII. With men fighting at the front women were recruited to undertake jobs in factories, transport and policing, and they took on tasks traditionally regarded as the preserve of men.

But when the wars finished, things reverted to the way they were before and women were sent back to the cradle and the kitchen.

Even 70 years later, the glass ceiling is as robust as ever, and there is still a gender gap in many wage packets.

Stuff of utopia

Our government and governments around the world are now doing extraordinary things like guaranteeing wage and welfare supports that were regarded as the stuff of utopia only a few wet weeks ago.

The fact that so many people are affected personally, interpersonally, financially, socially and economically by this crisis means that a whole re-imagination of the way we conduct the entire gambit of our affairs has to happen.

Profit and inexorable growth have been forced into the back seat while public health and well-being and the common good are in the driving seat.

The policies and practices being implemented in the face of Covid-19 are not as extraordinary or as novel as they may seem at first glance. Farmers are quite familiar with them. The Common Agriculture Policy is a child of WWII and the hunger that followed it.

The emergence of the EEC and the EU are the political expressions of Europe's promise that it would never go to war again and that the people of Europe would be never be hungry again. In that regard the CAP was put in place so that Europeans would never lose the capacity to feed themselves.

This system of farm supports means that farmers have a basic income and can build on that income depending on their particular farm enterprise, their size of holding and the location of the holding. I know it is more complex, but that is the essence of it.

There is no reason we cannot expand the CAP model to include everybody and ensure a basic living income for all citizens.

This will not prevent anyone from seeking to build substantially on that income. At the same time it will protect from poverty those whose chosen way of life or circumstances mean that a basic income is vital to sustaining them.

I can hear people ask, who is going to pay for this? Who pays for the CAP? The taxpayers of Europe, both individuals and corporations.

The most important thing that will get us through Covid-19 crisis will be social solidarity, people acting in consort for the good of all. In responding to the current crisis, the government has chosen to put the state's coffers and the state's capacity at the service of social solidarity so that collectively we will get through this.

It is to be hoped that when the crisis passes, and we look back at the practices and policies that got us through it, we will remember what stood us in good stead in terms of a solid public purse, good public services and deep social solidarity.

Let those who pride themselves in shrinking public services and cutting taxes take heed of what is happening.

Twice in just over a decade the public purse and our public institutions have been called on to protect us from the forces of unbridled greed and a pandemic, in that order.

The sacred market was nowhere to be seen.

When peace returns and things settle down let's hope strong public institutions and social solidarity don't get the same treatment women got after the wars.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo opened up about his newfound friendship with Dr. Anthony Fauci and claims he calls him 'late at night' for advice, during his press conference Thursday.

Cuomo praised the doctor, who has butted heads with President Donald Trump at White House press conferences on the coronavirus outbreak, saying they've forged a friendship through the crisis.

'Dr. Anthony Fauci has been so kind and helpful to me. I speak to health care professionals all across the globe, literally. But Dr. Fauci, I think, is just brilliant at this, and he has been so personally kind,' Cuomo said Thursday.

'I call him late at night. I call him in the middle of the night. I call him in the morning, and he's been really a friend to me personally and the State of New York,' he added.

On Thursday New York Governor Andrew Cuomo hailed Dr. Anthony Fauci of the White House Coronavirus Task Force as a 'friend' who he calls in the middle of the night

'I call him late at night. I call him in the middle of the night. I call him in the morning, and he's been really a friend to me personally and the State of New York,' Cuomo said of the Brooklyn native immunology expert

NY Gov. Cuomo says Dr. Fauci has been "so kind," helpful" and "brilliant" at offering guidance during the coronavirus outbreak in NYC.



"I call him late at night. I call him in the middle of the night ... he's been really a friend to me personally and the state of New York." pic.twitter.com/FqNbZcgh0W  MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 26, 2020

Twitter users are praising the duo's friendship, with some suggesting Cuomo and Fauci lead official coronavirus press conferences instead of President Trump.

'Lol Cuomo's talking about how Dr Fauci is a personal friend and they talk all the time. That was totally a dig at Trump,' one Twitter user wrote.

'These two can lead us through the plague,' Rosie O'Donnell tweeted.

'This is going to trigger the manchild for sure,' one Twitter user shared with a gif of Michael Scott from The Office.

Fauci is an prominent immunologist who serves as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and is a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Cuomo and Fauci likely have much to talk about as Fauci is a Brooklyn native.

Twitter users are praising the duo's friendship, with some saying the statement was a deliberate dig at President Donald Trump

'This is going to trigger the manchild for sure,' one Twitter user shared with a gif of Michael Scott from The Office

Rosie O'Donnell shared this post praising both Cuomo and Fauci for their leadership during the pandemic saying: 'These two can lead us through the plague'

'Just imagining Cuomo laying in bed alone...calling Dr. Fauci,' Twitter user Addy Bird wrote. Another Twitter joked that Cuomo would ask Fauci 'U up?'

This Twitter user noted that Cuomo respects Fauci and listens to his advice, unlike President Donald Trump, who has contradicted Fauci's medical advice in press conferences

'Just imagining Cuomo laying in bed alone...calling Dr. Fauci,' Twitter user Addy Bird wrote. Another Twitter joked that Cuomo would ask Fauci 'U up?'

One Twitter user noted that Cuomo respects Fauci and listens to his advice, unlike President Donald Trump, who has contradicted Fauci's medical advice in press conferences.

Both Cuomo and Fauci have clashed with President Donald Trump when it comes to disseminating information about the COVID-19 crisis crippling America as over 73,000 cases are reported across the nation.

Cuomo and Trump have a long history of beef in politics. In the coronavirus crisis Cuomo has lambasted Trump for his slow action and has demanded the president send more COVID-19 tests to states and create space for hospital beds.

In New York alone there are 21,393 cases of the virus and over 300 deaths.

A Business Insider poll conducted this week found that Fauci and Cuomo scored first and second respectively on a list of US leaders trusted to inform the public about the coronavirus outbreak, over Trump.

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

On Thursday Cuomo warned that the COVID-19 outbreak is on pace to last nine months and said 80 percent of the state's 19 million residents could become infected.

He revealed that he's asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to set up four hospitals within Manhattan's Javits Center as the state struggles to prepare for the expected influx in COVID-19 patients.

'This is literally a matter of life and death,' he said. '[If] we get these facilities up, we get the supplies, we will save lives. If we don't, we will lose lives. That is the simple fact of this matter.

'From my point of view, construction can start tomorrow.'
Alicia Keys has no doubt that she and Swizz Beatz, her husband of nearly a decade, are meant to be together.

Hes definitely like a confidant to me, and I am to him, says Keys, 39, opening up in this weeks issue, which includes an exclusive excerpt from her new autobiographical book More Myself. In it she shares never-before-told details of her and Beatz rollercoaster ride to romance.

The New York City natives first met when Keys, born Alicia Augello-Cook, was 14 and Beatz, born Kasseem Dean, was 16, brought together by a mutual high school friend. But Keys wasnt interested then and she remained that way for years to come.

Angela Pham/BFA/REX/Shutterstock Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys

We ended up in the same circles at various awards shows and industry events, she writes. Hed usually pull up in some fancy car, rolling deep with his Bronx crew and shining with diamonds. I wanted nothing to do with that scene or with Swizz.

But that started to change when the two were first brought together for a music project years later. The more we talked the more I noticed how his mind worked. Beyond the baggy jeans and arm tats there was depth. He was so aware of what was happening around the world.

For more on Keyss journey to find love and love herself, pick up this weeks issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday or subscribe here.

This weeks issue of PEOPLE

Still, Beatz almost lost his shot with Keys during their first date. But he masterfully made up for it.

I finally agreed to have lunch. I made a reservation for noon at an outdoor restaurant in downtown Manhattan. I arrived at twelve on the dot. Swizz was nowhere in sight. He finally came strutting in at 12:20. As much as I wanted to stay mad at Swizz he lifted the mood with a steady stream of humor and fascinating conversation.

RELATED: Alicia Keys Reveals Her Lifelong Struggle to Find Herself in New Book: Ive Been Putting on a Mask

She continues, Later as we approached my car I noticed something enormous attached to its top. He smiled. Thats why I was late, he said. It was a painting of a grand piano with paintbrushes attached to the keys. When I saw this, he explained, it seemed like the perfect representation of our friendship. Youre the keys, Im the brushes.

Story continues

The pair went on to form their friendship into a relationship and Beatz, 41, proposed before whisking Keys off to Hawaii in 2010, where he kept the artfully romantic gestures coming.

DIGGZY/SplashNews.com Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz

Open it, Swizz said as he slid the box toward me. I lifted the cardboard flaps and looked inside to see several large canisters. Ive always wanted you to be my canvas, he whispered. The canisters were full of body paint, in every vibrant color imaginable, she writes.

It was the beginning of something magical. Later, stroke by stroke in the shadows of dusk, he turned me into his masterpiece, covering me in swirls of yellows, reds and purples. Never have I experienced anything more sensual. Which is why, when I missed my period a few weeks later, I wasnt exactly surprised. As that winter gave way to spring, we relished two pleasures: the engagement and the pregnancy.

Stephanie Pistel Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz on their wedding day

The couple, married in Corsica in 2010, the same year they welcomed son Egypt. Keys credits no holds barred honesty and strict rules about quality time with keeping their love strong.

Swizz and I are striving to keep our promise never to go more than two weeks without seeing each other, she writes in the book. Swizz has even flown from New York City to Sydney to be with me, in order to keep that promise intact. We also set aside one weekend a month to go away together, just the two of us.

RELATED: Alicia Keys Opens Up About Tough Decision to Move Forward with Her Second Pregnancy in 2014: I Wasnt Ready



And the best part, says Keys, theyre on the same pageat least most of the time. We dont fight because we talk so much, she tells PEOPLE. But hes also so opinionated. Sometimes Im like I know thats what you think, and Im glad you know what you think, but you have to be conscious about how sometimes your opinion can be a little overbearing.

Thankfully, says Keys, We can both be genuinely honest. Its the first time Ive ever had a relationship that has been so genuine.

Excerpted from More Myself, copyright  2020 by Alicia Keys, with permission from Flatiron Books. More Myself the book and audiobook are available March 31. Keyss upcoming seventh studio album ALICIA is currently being promoted on Apple Music.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 18:18 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da0805 1 Entertainment COVID-19,PPFI,Deddy-Mizwar,Fajar-Nugros,Vanesha-Prescilla,Sissy-Prescilla,Upi,film,Movie Free

The Indonesian Motion Picture Producers Association (PPFI) has appealed to all film producers to halt production to help contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

As an effort to prevent the virus outbreak, we suggest all film companies, especially PPFI members, halt all production temporarily and follow the Indonesian governments policies in the battle against the spread of the coronavirus, read a letter signed on Tuesday by PPFI head Deddy Mizwar and PPFI general secretary Zairin Zain, as quoted by kompas.com.

In recent days, several filmmakers announced that they had stopped production.

Director Fajar Nugros said on his Twitter account that he had suspended shooting for his upcoming movie, Yowis Ben 3.

Hari ini saya bersama Produser memutuskan syuting Yowis Ben 3 dihentikan..  pic.twitter.com/plfJjxNgPa  Fajar Nugros (@fajarnugros) March 16, 2020

Fajar said that the film shoots, which took place in several towns across Java, such as Surakarta, Kediri, Surabaya and Banyuwangi, had drawn the attention of nearby residents. They would gather at the shooting site and watch as the shooting took place. At a time like this, he said, such large gatherings could spread the highly contagious virus.

When the circumstances are better, Insha Allah [God Willing], Yowis Ben 3 will continue shooting. Bismillah [In the name of God], Fajar wrote.

Read also: COVID-19: XXI, CGV cinemas to close theaters for two weeks

Another upcoming film, Backstage, starring sisters Sissy Priscillia and Vanesha Prescilla, has also halted its production.

The film's producer announced the decision on March 17 on Instagram.

Backstage is a very personal film for us that we're making with all our hearts. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is not possible for us to keep shooting. The government has suggested physical distancing. Our health and safety is more important than any film. We've decided to postpone shooting and will come back when the situation gets better, read the post.

On Twitter, director Upi urged the suspension of all film production.

Bubarin kalo di daerah tempat tinggal kalian masih ada yang dipergunakan untuk shooting! Tegur langsung atau minta petugas keamanan, atau Pak RT untuk bubarin! Keselamatan warga, keselamatan kalian, dan keluarga kalian yang utama! pic.twitter.com/NnLprdPiVg  upi (@upirocks) March 25, 2020

Disperse any shooting activity if you find any near your homes! Tell them directly or ask for help from security or the community head! The most important thing is public safety, your safety and your families' safety! she wrote. (gis/wng)
MEXICO CITY, March 25 (Reuters) - Mexicans on Wednesday feared measures to contain the coronavirus outbreak would lead to widespread looting after criminals robbed stores that were closed and posted calls on social media for people to ransack businesses.

Police in Mexico City arrested 10 people on Tuesday night who tried to rob shops in four neighborhoods, the city's security ministry said in a statement.

Authorities have tried to reassure residents that this is not the beginning of a wave of looting, saying the supply of supply of food and medicine is guaranteed.

Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said at a news conference on Wednesday that authorities are conducting "permanent surveillance of social networks in case there are any calls" to loot and explained that the thieves targeting shops to steal televisions and the like "has nothing to do with" poverty.

That did little to assuage the fears of some shopkeepers as criminals organized heists on social networks and instant messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp.

"In the middle of this pandemic in Mexico, it's incredible people are still organizing looting," a shop owner in populous Mexico state, which neighbors capital Mexico City, said online.

"I ask authorities to vigilant because many business owners are afraid of being attacked by looters."

The public security ministry of Mexico state said that on Tuesday it detected 29 Facebook accounts inciting residents to ransack stores that had closed due to the pandemic, which has so far infected 405 and killed five people in Mexico.

The head of the public security ministry of Mexico state, Maribel Cervantes, told local television station Milenio that the authority was coordinating with the Mexican retailers' association ANTAD to beef up security.

In the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, home to tourist hotspot Cancun, police chief Alberto Capella took to Twitter to warn alleged looters plotting on WhatsApp that authorities were onto their scheme.

"We are watching you, along with the other members of your WhatsApp chat. After identifying you, we will charge you," Capella said, directing his message to the administrator of the group. (Reporting by Raul Cortes Fernandez; Additional reporting by Diego Ore; Writing by Anthony Esposito;Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
YEREVAN, MARCH 26, ARMENPRESS. Minister of Emergency Situations Felix Tsolakyan has donated his monthly salary for the coronavirus response efforts, the ministry said.

As of yesterday, a total of more than 1 million dollars in donations were received.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
The ongoing coronavirus outbreak has evidently sent a scare down the people's lives across the globe. The ongoing Coronavirus pandemic has shown an exponential number of cases in Italy, where the total number of cases are now nearing 75,000 with over 7,000 reported deaths. Amidst the conundrum and paranoia, fake news about the situations in Italy has surfaced on the internet. Now, a new rumour is suggesting that Italy has surrendered to the Coronavirus pandemic as all their resources have been exhausted.

Also read: Fake News Debunked: The Italian PM Did Not Breakdown Publically Due To COVID-19 Outbreak

Claim -

The viral post is suggesting that the Italian Prime Minister has announced Italy's surrender to the Coronavirus outbreak. The fake news suggests that Italy has lost control over the pandemic and thus given up on the chance of flattening the virus' curve. The false news also suggests that Italy has officially lost control on the pandemic.

Rating -

No evidence suggests that the following message was conveyed by the Italian Prime Minister thus the information is false.

Origin -

The fake news first started going around on social media platforms like Twitter, where netizens shared posts about Italy's surrender to the coronavirus pandemic. After that, various WhatsApp forwards were also suggesting that Italy has announced its surrender. But none of those claims holds any credibility.

Also read: Fact Check: Did an Italian TV broadcast predict the COVID-19 outbreak in 2015?

Also read: Fact Check: Is The Video Of Italian Military Trucks Carrying Dead Bodies Real Or Fake?

Google Trends analysis of Italy's surrender to the coronavirus pandemic

As the fake news about Italy's surrender to the coronavirus pandemic started going around the internet, various netizens were quick to search about the same and the search volumes showed an upward spike.

Image courtesy - Google Trends

Also read: Dr Ramesh Gupta's Book Jantu Vigyan Page 1072 Claims Coronavirus Medicine? Fact Check!

Many netizens were quick to share the fake news of Italy surrendering to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. Some netizens also asked their local authorities to reflect upon the scenarios in Italy without cross-checking whether the news was fake or not. The photo going around the internet states that the comments were made the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, but instead showcase the photo of the Italian President Sergio Mattarella. Neither the Italian Prime Minister nor the President has made any comments about surrendering to the Coronavirus pandemic. Instead, they have been overtly vocal about their fight against the outbreak. Thus, the news about the Italian Prime Minister surrendering to the coronavirus pandemic is absolutely fake.

Also read: Fact Check: Can sanitizer catch fire? Debunking the burnt hands photo
Panaji, March 26 : The three patients who tested positive for COVID-19 have been shifted to the designated coronavirus hospital in Goa and health authorities in the state are in the process of quarantining the persons they were in contact with, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant said on Thursday.

The trio aged between 25 and 55 years, who represent the first positive cases of coronavirus in the state, have a history of international travel and had returned to Goa after visiting Spain, Australia and the US earlier this month.

"Their condition is stable at present. We have also traced their contacts and we are quarantining them," Sawant said, after the state Directorate of Health Services made the announcement in the early hours of Thursday.

The trio, who were quarantined at the isolation ward at the Goa Medical College in Panaji, have been now shifted to the Employee State Insurance hospital in South Goa district, which is the designated hospital for COVID-19 treatment.

Leader of Opposition Digambar Kamat wished the trio early recovery.

"I pray for early recovery of all three patients. I am sure our medical team will provide them with the best healthcare. Let us not panic and take more precautions. Urge @goacm to notify an isolated complex as quarantine centre," Kamat tweeted on Thursday.

Another opposition MLA Vijai Sardesai has now demanded details about the travel history of the trio and has said that the government should not hide facts about the three cases.

"As Goa opens its account with 3 COVID-19 positive cases, details like their travel history, when they were tested would be interesting and nobody should hide they facts. The state's preparedness for remedial measures now, becomes the focus and government should come clear on these," Sardesai said.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
This editorial appeared in the March 20, 2020, edition of the Chicago Sun-Times:

Most of us are understandably preoccupied with the latest news about COVID-19. So much else goes unnoticed.

But we want to remind you that the 2020 Census is underway, despite huge roadblocks put up by the coronavirus, and it matters greatly.

If you havent responded to the census notice that arrived in most mailboxes last week with instructions on how to complete the form online, we urge you to do so now.

An accurate count of every person who resides in our country will grow only more difficult to achieve in the next few weeks and months as the coronavirus continues to shut down normal social interactions. At risk is Illinois fair share of more than $675 billion in federal funds. The results of this census, which is conducted every 10 years, also will decide how many seats Illinois continues to hold in the U.S. House of Representatives.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Census Bureau suspended some field operations because of the coronavirus outbreak. That means there will be a two-week delay, at the very least, in sending census workers door-to-door and building to building to survey people who live in group quarters, such as nursing homes and prisons. A three-day local count of the homeless also has been delayed.

In addition, in-person outreach sessions at churches, community centers and the like have been put on hold. And census kickoff events in some cities, such as Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, have been called off.

In Chicago, a plan to set up computer kiosks in public spaces so that people can get information and respond to the census has been put on hold. And community groups are being forced to turn to social media and phone banks, rather than face-to-face interactions, to reach hard-to-count groups, such as immigrants.

The hope is we stem this tide and see how everything shakes out, Nubia Willman, of Chicagos Office of New Americans and a member of the Illinois Complete Count Commission, told us. We want people to fill the form out online. The sooner people fill it out, the better, so no one has to come to their home.

The census is being conducted online for the first time this year. Thats an obvious and unexpected advantage for getting the job done at a time when Americans are hunkering down at home because of the virus. But our nations digital divide  not everybody has easy access to the internet, even in 2020  works against a full census count in rural and high-poverty areas.

For now, census workers still are scheduled to fan out in May to homes that have not responded online or by phone.

Nationally, 11 million people so far have completed the census. In a country of some 327 million people, thats just 3% of the population  a drop in the bucket. It will take a herculean effort, this time around, to count everyone.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross suggested days ago that the census could be extended beyond the current July 31 deadline. On Friday, he extended that deadline two weeks  not long enough, in our view, to make sure the count is as complete as possible.

Theres every reason to believe, scientists say, that the coronavirus pandemic will continue at least into early summer. It could also mimic the flu and return next fall.

Everyone is coming to terms with what this new normal means, Willman said. If we could delay (completion) until the fall, that would be helpful.

Chicagoans can expect to see more public service announcements encouraging online census participation starting next week. Much is at stake. In 2010, Chicago managed only an abysmal 66% participation rate, among the worst rates for all big cities. The city must do better.

Illinois receives about $34 billion a year in federal funds that are distributed based on population, according to a 2017 report from George Washington University. Every uncounted resident costs the state $18,000 for everything from transportation projects to public schools to housing to health care services to crime-victim assistance.

Illinois also stands to lose a seat in Congress because of declining population. That could become two lost seats if there is a significant under-count.

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An international team, including scientists of Indian origin, has identified 69 drugs and experimental compounds which may be effective in treating COVD-19.

According to the researchers, some of the medications are already used to treat diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, and repurposing them to treat COVID-19 may be faster than trying to invent a new vaccine.

In the new study, published on the pre-print website bioRxiv, the scientists investigated 26 of the 29 coronavirus genes, which direct production of the viral proteins.

"The team took a different approach, targeting host proteins, not viral proteins. 26 out of 29 SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins were studied in human cells to find out what human proteins they interact with," Gina T Nguyen, Assistant Director of Communications & Events, Quantitative Biosciences Institute, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the US, told PTI in an email.

Around 332 human proteins were found to interact with the SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins, the researchers, including Advait Subramanian, Srivats Venkataramanan, and Jyoti Batra, all from UCSF, said.

These are the proteins that the virus, which has killed over 2,1000 people and infected more than 4,71,000 globally so far, relies on to reproduce and carry out the infection in people, they said.

"69 drugs were identified that can target these proteins, of which 25 are already US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved and could be used off-label.

"The drugs identified include those that are safely taken to treat conditions such as: Type II diabetes, cancer, and hypertension," Nguyen said.

Some viral proteins seemed to target just one human protein, while others are capable of targeting a dozen human cellular proteins, the researchers explained.

They noted that there are currently no antiviral drugs with proven efficacy, nor are there vaccines for preventing COVID-19.

"Unfortunately, the scientific community has little knowledge of the molecular details of SARS-CoV-2 infection," the team wrote in an abstract.

The identification of host dependency factors mediating virus infection may provide key insights into effective molecular targets for developing broadly acting antiviral therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2 and other deadly coronavirus strains, according to the researchers.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
These eight counterfeit Rolex watches were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Philadelphia on Tuesday, March 24, 2020. Read more

While U.S. Customs and Border Protection is heavily engaged in the whole-of-government response to the coronavirus, its still on the lookout for counterfeit goods and unlawful trade activities, the agency announced Thursday.

On Tuesday, its agents seized eight fake Rolex watches that arrived in a cardboard box as an express parcel sent to a facility near Philadelphia International Airport, said spokesperson Steve Sapp.

If they had been real Rolexes, they would have been worth a total of $100,400, the agency said.

The watches arrived from Hong Kong and were examined March 9 by agents, who detained the shipment because of its quality. They were seized after the agencys trade experts verified that they were counterfeit.

The watches had been destined for an address in Delaware County, but Sapp declined to elaborate. He said the intended recipient is aware that the agency has the watches and that if the person continues to import counterfeit goods, the agency would investigate. Possible charges include trafficking in counterfeit goods, Sapp said.

Joseph Martella, the agencys area port director for Philadelphia, said in a statement: The quality of counterfeit consumer goods, like these fake Rolex watches, is getting better every year, but Customs and Border Protection officers, especially here in Philadelphia, are experts at detecting counterfeit products."

China remains the primary origin of seized counterfeit goods, the agency said.

It was the third significant counterfeit shipment that customs agents recently seized in Philadelphia. On March 10, the agency seized 32 counterfeit designer-brand handbags worth a total of $113,000 that had arrived in Philadelphia in an express delivery parcel from Turkey destined for Atlanta.

Last month, the agency seized $317,080 in counterfeit designer-brand products while inspecting express delivery parcels near the airport. That shipment, also from Turkey, had been destined for a different address in Delaware County, Sapp said.
Nearly half of the patients at Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center have or are believed to have COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, a Kaiser executive told a medical association.

Dr. Stephen Parodi, a Kaiser executive vice president, said in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association last Thursday that the San Jose facility actually has almost half the hospital filled with either COVID-confirmed or persons under investigation.

Parodi said Kaiser needed to increase staffing at the San Jose hospital, which has 242 beds, where one intensive care unit was serving only COVID-19 patients.

In the interview, Parodi said the San Jose hospital had repurposed a separate unit to care for regular ICU patients with one ICU unit dedicated to COVID-19 response.

Weve literally had to revamp the hospital to make sure weve got enough capacity from a personnel standpoint, Parodi told JAMA editor-in-chief Howard Bauchner.

Parodi offered a stark overview of the COVID-19 response in the region. At two hospitals in Santa Clara County, he said, about a quarter of patients were in intensive care, including some who had previously sought outpatient care and then rapidly deteriorated.

A person is relatively stable and (then) can rapidly deteriorate within hours, requiring intubation or a rapid response, Parodi said.

Parodi said the jurys still out on whether certain age demographics are likelier to end up in the hospital, but its clear the virus can affect younger patients.

We have people as young as their 30s or 40s who have clinically deteriorated or required mechanical ventilation, Parodi said. There is, of course, the other cohort thats the older cohort, in their 80s and 70s, that are also in the ICU.

Patients requiring ventilators typically need between 10 and 14 days of mechanical ventilation, said Parodi, who said hes concerned about having enough ventilators nationwide to respond to a potential surge in ICU patients.

This thing can come on very quickly, Parodi said. When you go from zero to having 10 patients - that happened for us in terms of in the ICU within one week.

On Wednesday, Irene Chavez, senior vice president and area manager at the San Jose hospital, said the percentage of COVID-19 patients this week is lower than it was last week. She declined to provide numbers.

The number of patients in our hospitals suspected or confirmed to have COVID-10 changes daily and we do not provide daily figures. However, the percentage of patients at our San Jose hospital is currently lower than this report from last week.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Given that it is located in a COVID-19 hotspot, and that we count so many South Bay residents as our members, it should not be surprising that we would care for a significant number of our patients in our San Jose hospital. We are grateful to our physicians, nurses, and staff for the excellent care they are providing to all our patients, including those with COVID-19.

Health officials in Santa Clara County reported 84 new cases of the virus on Wednesday, a 22% increase from the previous day, bringing the countys total positive cases to 459. The county has reported 17 deaths from COVID-19.

As of last week, Parodi said Kaiser had seen significant increases in confirmed COVID-19 cases in Washington and Northern California. Overall, Parodi said Kaiser typically gets about 4,000 calls per day from people reporting cold and cough symptoms. He said that number has jumped to 14,000-to-15,000 calls per day.

Some primary care workers were assigned to work from home to help handle the call volume, Parodi said. For those working in ICU, Parodi said Kaiser has been trying to preserve personal protective equipment. Canceling elective surgeries has helped Kaiser stockpile 30 days worth of protective equipment, he said, while Kaiser is also trying to replicate equipment by going to hardware stores and other sources for material.

Parodi said Kaiser at that point had a couple health-care workers who had tested positive for COVID-19, including one who required hospitalization, but determining a source of infection is difficult partly due to testing limits. Parodi said most locations are still doing manual testing; in-patient results can take one or two days and out-patients results can take up to five days.

On Wednesday the California Department of Public Health reported that as of 2 p.m. Tuesday, about 66,800 tests for COVID-19 had been conducted in California, with about 48,600 pending results.

Matt Kawahara is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mkawahara@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @matthewkawahara
Kylie Jenner, who has been honored as the youngest self-made billionaire, has made a $1 million donation to buy medical supplies for hospital frontliners and first responders.

The reality star is now part of the growing list of celebrities who have donated to aid the coronavirus relief.

Jenner's doctor, Dr. Thais Aliabadi (who also delivered Jenner's daughter Stormi Webster), shared on her Instagram about the massive donation of the Kylie Cosmetics owner.

"I am speechless, my eyes are filled with tears of joy, and my heart is overwhelmed with gratitude. I made a wish to the Universe to gather protective masks for our brave healthcare workers, and today, my dream came true," Dr. Aliabadi said.

The beauty mogul's sizeable donation will help pay for protective gear that will allow doctors and nurses to properly treat patients infected with the COVID-19, without putting themselves at risk of catching the virus.

"From the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU @kyliejenner. You are my hero," Dr. Aliabadi furthered.

The "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" star responded to the Instagram post, thanking her doctor for her work.

"I love you! And thank YOU for all the love and care you put into everything that you do! You're an angel on earth," Kylie replied.

Jenner's representative also confirmed to Page Six about the donation.

This is not the first time Jenner did her part in trying to fight against the coronavirus. After the US Surgeon General urged the her to use her influence by telling her followers to stay home, she went on Instagram to ask fans to take the disease seriously and self-quarantine.

"The coronavirus is a real thing," she told her 167 million followers. "Please stay inside. Please practice social distancing and self-quarantining."

Donation After Backlash

Kylie Jenner's million-dollar donation came after the mother-of-one caught head for showing off some high-fashion chopsticks on her Instagram early this week.

The youngest Kar-Jenner sister craved some sushi, and as many fans of the reality star know, she and her daughter are fans of the famous sushi joint, Nobu, and would really love to use her chopsticks that time.

Her Instagram Story showed a video of her opening up a fancy pair of Louis Vuitton chopsticks, which, according to Us Weekly, carries a hefty price tag of $450.

"Gotta start traveling with these," Jenner captioned the post.

While fans let celebrities live their luxurious lives without saying too much about their spending habits, considering everything that has been going on with the world right now, many people are not happy with Kylie's post.

They rushed to social media to call out Jenner's splurging on expensive chopsticks instead of, that time, donating money to aid coronavirus relief.

"Stop for a moment showing your life of luxuries, including sushi sticks that are worth more than our houses. Kylie, stupid!" one Twitter user said.

Sure enough, it is not the first time Kylie has caught heat for flaunting her wealth amid a crisis.

Early this year, fans of the beauty and skincare influencer shared an insensitive post while Australia was burning down because of bushfires. She shared a picture of herself with the caption, "Find ur fire," which she quickly deleted.

Fans then pressured her to donate money to help Australia instead of posting selfies. Fortunately, the KUWTK star donated $1 million to the Australian wildfires relief efforts.
Covid-19 patients are being treated at the National Hospital of Tropical Diseases in Hanoi, March 24, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Thanh.

Among 136 Covid-19 patients being treated in Vietnam, 37 have tested negative between once and four times, the health ministry confirmed Thursday.

Four patients received negative results four times in a row, four tested negative thrice, two tested negative twice while 27 others did so once.

Among the patients who tested negative four times are three patients in Da Nang who have declared to recover and are set to be discharged on Friday morning.

Two of the patients who tested negative three times in a row are a 70-year-old British woman infected with the virus while touring Lao Cai, home to the northern highlands resort town of Sa Pa, and 26-year-old Nguyen Hong Nhung, a Hanoi woman who was confirmed infected four days after she returned from London.

Both are being treated at the National Hospital of Tropical Diseases in Hanoi. It remains unclear whether they are eligible to be discharged or not.

Under Health Ministry regulations, a person infected with the novel coronavirus is deemed healthy once she/he shows no sign of fever for three days and tests negative twice in three days. Other signs include improved clinical symptoms, overall stable status and vital signs, normal organ function and improved chest X-ray readings.

The two patients who showed negative results for the second time are a 67-year-old Irish tourist and a female flight attendant on Vietnam Airlines flight VN54 from London that landed in Hanoi on March 2, the same as Nhung's. Both are being treated at the National Hospital of Tropical Diseases in the capital.

Among 27 active cases that tested negative for the first time was a 61-year-old man in Hanoi who boarded Vietnam Airlines flight VN54 from London to Hanoi on March 2 along with Nhung, and a 55 year-old man living in Saigons District 8, returning from a crowded Islamic religious event in Malaysia.

So far, the nation has confirmed 148 infections, including 131 active cases. The earlier 17 cases were discharged after treatment.

Many active cases are Vietnamese nationals returning from Europe and the U.S. and foreigners visiting from the same regions. Starting March 22, Vietnam has suspended entry for all foreign nationals, including those of Vietnamese origin and family members with visa waivers.

Vietnam has reported over 81,000 people entering Vietnam from March 7 to 24. Among them were 36,911 foreigners. They have been asked to enter quarantine for 14 days and submit health declarations.

The Covid-19 pandemic has killed more than 21,000 people globally as it spread to 198 countries and territories.
March 25, 2020

News

By Terri Moon Cronk

Defense.gov

Navy Officials Announce 3 COVID-19 Cases Aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt

Three sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt underway in the Pacific Ocean were diagnosed with COVID-19 and were evacuated from the ship, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas B. Modly said.

"We've identified all the folks they've had contact with, and we're quarantining them as well," Modly said at a Pentagon news conference today, where he appeared with Navy Adm. Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations. "This is an example of how we are able to keep our ships deployed at seas and underway, even with active COVID-19 cases. Our force remains on watch throughout the world [during] this crisis, and they're continuing to execute their primary mission under the National Defense Strategy."

Navy ships are sailing, Navy planes are flying, and training is still happening to safeguard U.S. national interests and those of the nation's allies and partners around the world, Modly said.

In the meantime, the hospital ship USNS Mercy deployed 1,128 military personnel and civilians yesterday to Los Angeles in support of the nation's COVID-19 efforts, providing a spectrum of medical care, including critical and urgent care for adults, he said. The Mercy was off the coast of California today and should be in Los Angeles in the next couple of days, he added.

Another hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, is preparing to do the same mission for the city of New York, Modly said, noting that both ships will operate under the operational control of the commander of U.S. Naval Forces Northern Command. "We will coordinate closely with state and local public health authorities to ensure the well-being of our personnel and the local population," he said.

The ships will serve as referral hospitals for dockside patients not infected with COVID-19, Modly emphasized. Rather, he said, they will handle the overflow of acute trauma cases and other urgent needs, and they will not handle pediatrics or OB/Gyn cases. "This will allow our shore-based hospitals to focus their medical care and resources on patients with COVID-19," the acting secretary told reporters.

This is a perfect example of how the Navy and Marine Corps can respond to the needs of the American people wherever and whenever they're needed, Modly said. "The Navy and Marine Corps front lines are constantly being redrawn, and we're realizing today that unpredictability is with us," he added. "And that's why we need to be ready at all times to adjust and adapt to any emerging threat, even one too small to be seen by the human eye."

Modly said he wrote to the force recently to urge sailors and Marines to always be ready, not just as an organization, but also as individuals, to exhibit the personal qualities of speed, transparency, adaptability, collaboration, humility, trust and "a healthy dose of skepticism as we address these challenges."

"And I can say every one of these people has exhibited these qualities in getting the Mercy and Comfort prepared for these missions, as well as the many other ways our force is supporting the whole-of-government response to this pandemic," he said.

Military families are at the top of his mind daily, Modly said, and the Navy is committed to doing everything it can for their well-being while minimizing the impact on their daily lives as much as possible.

"I'm confident the agility of the Navy and Marine Corps team will help to save lives and protect this nation as it always has, and always will," Modly said.

Gilday said that overall, the Navy has 86 COVID-19 cases: 57 active-duty service members, 13 Navy civilian employees, 11 Navy family members and five contractors.

About one-third of Navy personnel is at sea, aboard fewer than 100 Navy ships out of a fleet of about 300, the chief of naval operations said.

The Roosevelt was in port about 15 days ago, Gilday said, but it would be difficult to tie the three active cases to one particular port visit.

"We took great precautions when the crew came back from that shore visit, and did enhanced medical screenings of the crew," he said. "We are moving very quickly to isolate those cases. [We]  understand who they came in contact with over the recent days and weeks, so we've begun to look inside the ship and at how we can isolate and contain as best we can. We're taking this day by day."

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Spies have come up with countless bizarre and wacky devices to help them in their line of work.

But this one, designed by the CIA, really is nuts.

The 'scrotum concealment device' was designed to enable pilots to hide an escape radio in a place that would remain undiscovered even during a strip search.

The 'scrotum concealment device', which was designed by the CIA

Only one prototype of the device was ever made and it was never used in the field

It was created in the late 1960s by Tony Mendez, the former chief of disguise at the CIA, and is now on show at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC in its Tools of the Trade display in the Spies and Spymasters room.

According to the museum, the thinking behind the device was that male security guards would be less likely to 'thoroughly search the genital area', so it made for a good place to hide an escape radio.

The concealment device was created by Tony Mendez, the former chief of disguise at the CIA

The latex object, which would need to be glued on, is believed to have been created from a mould of genuine anatomy.

However, only one prototype of the device was made and it was never used in the field.

According to the museum, this was because CIA director Richard Helms never approved it for use after blushing when he saw it demonstrated.

The object was eventually donated to the spy museum by H. Keith Melton, a historian and intelligence collector.

A spokeswoman at the International Spy Museum told MailOnline Travel: 'Some people dont seem to notice it  we have the largest collection of espionage artefacts ever placed on public display, so there is a lot to see and engage with at the museum.

'But if you stand near the artefact, you can see something light up in visitors eyes when they notice it and you typically get some kind of reaction like oh my god! or oh man!  particularly our male visitors who may have an easier time envisioning wearing the artefact.

'There is a level of wonder we see when people try to figure out how it wouldve worked and how/why someone wouldve come up with such a crazy concept. We love seeing the reactions to it.

'This artefact speaks to the creative and out-of-the-box problem-solving Tony used to solve challenges that came his way. As goofy as it may look, at the same time, this sort of item could have saved lives.'
Cardio drumming is a popular class at Fitt4Life in Angola. As things shutter due to coronavirus, classes and workouts have been taken online instead for people to do at home.
A safe haven in the semis.

That's what traders sought on Thursday as the VanEck Vectors Semiconductor ETF (SMH) rose more than 6% on the back of some analyst upgrades in the space and a historically strong day for the overall stock market.

Micron and Intel were the targets of some Wall Street praise early Thursday. Analysts at Bank of America upgraded Micron to buy from underperform, while Bernstein upgraded Intel to market perform from underperform, both citing a possible near-term demand lift.

Micron ended the day nearly 5.5% higher at $44.79, while Intel traded up more than 8% to $55.54.

"You do have incremental demand," Nancy Tengler, chief investment officer at Laffer Tengler Investments, said Thursday on CNBC's "Trading Nation," adding that her firm was still overweight semiconductor stocks.

Her top picks were Intel, Broadcom and Texas Instruments, with Intel being her favorite of the three for what she called its "fabulous" balance sheet, ample free cash flow and healthy dividend. She added that while she "would love to be able to buy Micron," it was still too expensive to meet her buying criteria.

"We actually raised our guidelines in this stock last week, and so, I think this is a safe port in a storm for investors," Tengler said of Intel. "China's open for business. I think that portends well for the U.S. So, I think this is a place where you can put some money and just have the confidence that you're going to do well in the near term and very well in the long term."

Todd Gordon, managing director at Ascent Wealth Partners, agreed that Intel stood out from the pack.

"We're seeing a lot of relative strength here in the semis going back all the way to the credit crisis lows," he said, pointing to a chart of the SMH.

"We did not break support right around $100 in that SMH ETF, plus you have the 200-week moving average, the average closing price of the last 200 trading weeks. It held as support quite well," he said.

Intel has also shown "nice uptrend support," even during the sharp recent downturn in the broader market, Gordon said.

"That uptrend support, that purple line, again, is the 200-week moving average. For some reason, this is offering a lot of support here," he said. "We like it."

Tengler added that if technology companies start to cut or suspend their dividends to shield themselves from the economic blow of the coronavirus outbreak, Intel's solid cash position could give the chipmaker a leg up.

"I'm confident they have lots of levers to pull. They can cut back a little bit on capex," she said, referring to capital expenditures. "But this demand is not demand pull like we've seen at places like Walmart, Kroger or Costco. This is incremental demand with employees working from home, companies ordering new equipment. So, I'm pretty optimistic that they'll be able to pay their dividends."

The SMH ended trading at $121.72 on Thursday.

Disclosure: Laffer Tengler Investments owns shares of Intel, Broadcom and Texas Instruments. Gordon and Ascent Wealth Partners both own shares of Intel.

Disclaimer
by Shafique Khokhar

About 80-90 per cent of sanitation workers are Christian as few other jobs are available to them. The government does not provide them with the safety gear needed to do their work. Women work barefoot. Sanitation workers do not use gloves to empty sewers or manholes. They deserve as much respect asd doctors and paramedical staff. Doctors in Punjab refuse to work for lack of protective measures.

Lahore (AsiaNews)  Pakistan's sanitation workers, mostly Christian, continue to work despite their lack of masks and other protective gear.

However menial and unprotected their job is, these workers cannot afford to stay home to protect their health, unlike hospital doctors in Punjab who refused to go to work because of the lack of masks amid the coronavirus outbreak.

"I am very worried about them, said Saleh Diego, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Karachi. Sanitation workers are the most neglected and marginalised in society, he told AsiaNews.

In Pakistan the number of coronavirus cases reached 1,102 today with eight deaths. In light of the situation, the federal government decided to lock down the whole country, calling on Pakistanis to stay home as much as possible to avoid spreading the virus.

In Sindh province 80 per cent of sanitation workers are Christian; in Punjab, 90 per cent. This type of degrading and inhuman work is reserved primarily for Christians who otherwise might not have the means to survive.

The job, which comes with great health risks, involves collecting waste, emptying sewers, cleaning the streets, all by hand. Now the workers could become the carriers of the new virus.

"We see them in the streets without masks or gloves, explained Fr Diego. They clean toilets, empty pits and septic tanks, clear sewers and manholes.

According to Hyderabad activist Sooba Bhatti, these people face a serious predicament, and put their lives at risk. Even women sanitation workers perform their tasks without gloves, protective masks and even shoes.

Meanwhile, whilst government officials are on holiday, Christian sanitation workers are on duty. They too should take time off as well or be paid twice their regular salary if the government wants them to work.

Abrar Sahotra, a Christian sanitation workers union official in Faisalabad, notes that We have been complaining for a long time that these workers must be taken seriously and all the necessary gear be provided to them. The authorities however seem indifferent to this serious matter.

He goes on to say: We must pay tribute to all these people who continue to tirelessly serve the country without protective gear. They deserve the same respect as doctors, paramedics and those who fight against coronavirus to save lives.
A hairdresser responsible for refreshing the locks of celebrities and top models has been criticised for releasing a 10-part series on how to touch up your roots and find the perfect colour at home because it gives away 'trade secrets'.

Jaye Edwards is the mastermind behind premium hair salon Edwards and Co which operates outlets across eight locations in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales.

Always a firm believer in sharing his skills with a broader audience, Mr Edwards - who has coloured Lara Worthington's tresses - has consistently provided educational workshops for other hairdressers in the industry - before turning his attention to the customers themselves during the coronavirus pandemic.

Scroll down for video

Jaye Edwards is the mastermind behind premium hair salon Edwards and Co which operates outlets across eight locations in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales

'I have received a lot of backlash but I think people are acting out of fear at this point,' he told the Today Show on Thursday morning about his decision to release a 10-episode series

'I have received a lot of backlash but I think people are acting out of fear at this point,' he told the Today Show on Thursday morning.

'There has been nearly no backlash from customers, they are supportive. It has more been backlash from the industry, and I do understand why they are saying what they are saying.

'They're not happy at me showing people how to do the whole root touch up or colouring process.'

Comments like 'stop giving away our trade secrets, you'll put us out of a job' and 'did you really have to do this?' were shared on Instagram - before being deleted by the posters themselves.

Alongside the 10-episode series on IGTV which will teach viewers how to master a stylish five minute up-do and create the perfect ponytail, Mr Edwards also launched a range of 'home colouring kits'

Mr Edwards and his team are also offering $25 FaceTime consultations for existing customers to help them find their perfect colour match

Alongside the 10-episode series on IGTV, called The Lockdown with Edwards and Co, which will teach viewers how to master a stylish five minute up-do and create the perfect ponytail, Mr Edwards also launched a range of 'home colouring kits'.

They come with a choice of dye, brush and mixing bowl, towel, gloves, foils to prevent colour transfer and detailed instructions on application.

Basic kits start from $119.95 with free shipping and contain enough dye and equipment to colour hair three times, making them a purchase for anyone practicing social distancing or living in self-isolation.

Mr Edwards and his team are also offering $25 FaceTime consultations for existing customers to help them find their perfect colour match.

Despite choosing to shut his eight salons when the 30-minute rule was announced on Tuesday evening (pictured), Mr Edwards confirmed to FEMAIL that he won't be starting them up again now that it has backflipped

The elite hairdresser said he's not 'worried' about the negativity because nothing will ever replace the one-on-one care and professional abilities of a barber.

It's just a welcome fix if the Australian government decides to close down the industry, after banning all 'personal services' like tanning, nail salons and laser hair removal on Thursday morning.

Hairdressers and barbers were stunned by Prime Minister Scott Morrison's decision to invoke a 30-minute session allowance with patrons, only to reverse the restrictions 24 hours later - although they still have to keep a four square metre radius around each customer.

Despite choosing to shut his eight salons when the 30-minute rule was announced on Tuesday evening, Mr Edwards confirmed to FEMAIL that he won't be starting them up again now that it has backflipped.

His decision to keep them closed is one that allows for the safety and care of his customers and staff to remain a top priority.

His decision to keep them closed is one that allows for the safety and care of his customers (pictured) and staff to remain a top priority

Some of Mr Edwards' tips are already being employed by women who have purchased his at-home kits.

He says the trick to a perfect dye job lies in covering the hairline with a 'barrier cream' or oil-based lubricant, which prevents colour from spilling over onto your forehead and staining your skin.

'Because you'll be doing this for yourself at home, you don't need to colour the whole regrowth - only do what you can see,' he said.

'If you're covering grey hair, be careful not to overlap the colour. If you're doing a root shadow, you need to paint past where your regrowth is.'

Mr Edwards (left) will close his doors on Wednesday evening because he would 'rather close than let the quality of his work slip'

JAYE EDWARDS' TIPS ON CARING FOR HAIR AMID COVID-19 As Australia braces for an avalanche of business closures and weeks - if not months - of social distancing, Mr Edwards says this is the perfect opportunity to let your hair rest and breathe. He shared these tips with Daily Mail Australia. 1. Avoid heat styling: Take the chance to air dry your hair and leave straighteners, curlers and crimpers to the side until this is all over. 2. Invest in a good leave-in conditioner: Mr Edwards' favourite is the $42 'Refresh and Purifying Leave-In Conditioner' from Virtue Labs. 3. Start bonding your hair: Bond building products are designed to prevent damage and protect your hair from chemicals found in permanent dyes. High quality bonding products repair hair and reconnect damaged strands, making hair softer and stronger. Mr Edwards' go-to bond builder is Redken's pH Bonder which costs $33 for 150ml. 4. Treat yourself to a mask: Hair masks are famous for adding shine, softness and moisture to dull, lacklustre locks. They also reduce frizz and hydrate the scalp, making it healthier and less inclined to flake. Mr Edwards recommends the $30 Restorative Treatment Mask from Virtue Labs, which should be left on for five minutes for best results. Source: Jaye Edwards Advertisement

To maintain hair between colouring, Mr Edwards recommends investing in a toner from acclaimed French label Christophe Robin and leaving the product to soak in for up to 30 minutes.

'Christophe Robin toners are amazing - they get rid of the brass in blondes, the reddish undertone in brunettes and also make copper more vibrant in redheads,' he said.

THE BEST SUPERMARKET HAIR DYES IN AUSTRALIA For all hair colours: Clairol Natural Instincts -$28 AUD For blondes: Brilliant Silver White Hair Toner For brunettes: Revlon ColorSilk - $19 AUD For black hair: Clairol Nice 'n Easy - $43 AUD For red hair: Revlon ColorSilk -$19 AUD For highlights: L'Oreal Superior Preference Glam Lights - $22.50 AUD Source: Good Housekeeping Advertisement

And when it comes to perfecting a blow out at home, Mr Edwards says it's best to keep it simple, using only a standard hairdryer and a large round brush to boost volume and enhance texture.

Addressing the changing face of life in Australia as the coronavirus pandemic unfolds, Mr Edwards said businesses must monitor developments and always stay one step ahead of the curve.

'We are a premium salon, but right now we need to adapt,' he said. 'People are going to need to do stuff at home and make themselves feel good, and we are here to help them do that.

'If you don't feel good about how you look on the outside, you don't feel good on the inside - and we all need that right now, more than ever.'
Boris Johnson is coming under increasing pressure to explain why he has refused EU help to bulk-purchase medical equipment that Britain desperately needs in the fight against coronavirus.

The prime minister was branded "ideological" and told he should do "whatever it takes" to help patients despite his dislike of the EU  after he ducked out of the procurement scheme.

The programme, set up by the European Commission, uses the bulk-buying power of the 500 million person single market to get priority for ventilators and protective equipment  which doctors have warned are in short supply in the UK amid a time of extreme global demand.

Britain was invited to participate in the EU scheme because it is still in the Brexit transition period and being given the advantages of a member state, but turned the offer down.

Downing Street has however offered no coherent explanation for the refusal to join  leading critics to suspect the prime minister's own ideological and political concerns are keeping the UK out.

The coronavirus pandemic does not recognise borders or ideology, and it is vital that the UK government does not turn its back on collaboration to tackle this virus and to protect our citizens," said Dr Philippa Whitford MP, the SNPs Brexit spokesperson. She added that "cooperation with our EU neighbours, particularly in sourcing vital supplies, should be welcomed and engaged with  not shunned".

Jonathan Ashworth MP, Labours Shadow Health Secretary said: "We raised this with ministers in the commons earlier this week and did not receive a satisfactory response.

"With widespread concerns about our ventilator capacity and the urgent need to scale-up that capacity, we should be co-operating through international schemes to ensure we get these desperately need pieces of kit."

Acting Leader of the Liberal Democrats Ed Davey added: "There is no reasonable justification for Boris Johnsons refusal to participate in the EUs procurement of ventilators. Surely we should be trying every possible means to get people seriously ill with coronavirus the ventilators they need.

"Let's be clear: getting more ventilators to our NHS will save lives. Why wont the Prime Minister put his Brexit views aside, given this crisis?

A health worker dressed in personal protective equipment (PPE) awaits new patients at a drive-thru coronavirus testing station (Getty Images)

"By working together with other countries and using the strength of the single market, the government can help get PPE for NHS frontline staff and ventilators to those fighting the virus.

"Of course we want factories in the UK manufacturing ventilators and lets source them from abroad where we can, but it looks deeply irresponsible not to work with our European neighbours on this too.

No.10 has declined to elaborate on why the UK would not participating. Asked why at a regular briefing of journalists in Westminster, the prime minister's spokesperson said: We are no longer members of the EU." However, the UK has been invited to participate in the scheme because it is in the Brexit transition period.

The PM's spokesperson added: "We are doing our own work on ventilators and we have had a very strong response from business. We have sourced ventilators form the private sector and international manufacturers.

But the spokesperson conceded that new orders, such as one placed with vacuum cleaner maker and Brexit supporter James Dyson, were "dependent on machines passing regulatory tests".

The first order placed by the EU, which will go to 25 of the 27 member states, covers masks type 2 and 3, gloves, goggles, face-shields, surgical masks and overalls  all of which are needed in the UK. Britain was invited to participate as it is still in the Brexit transition period and so is still being treated like a member state.

Commenting on the first order of the EU scheme, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: All over the world, theres right now a tremendous need for protective clothing and medical equipment. It is therefore a success that the Joint European Procurement Initiative has been able to secure on the world market concrete offers of considerable scale on shortest notice.

This is EU solidarity in action. It shows that being part of the Union pays off. This material should soon provide considerable relief in Italy, Spain and in 23 more member states.
Amid Coronavirus outbreak in the country, a video surfaced of AIMIM Malegaon MLA Maulana Mufti Ismail and his supporters creating ruckus at a local hospital. They had allegedly pushed and made things difficult in the local hospital wherein two suspected COVID 19 patients were isolated. The incident took place even as Section 144 has been imposed in the state. Furthermore, sources informed that following the incident the doctors went on strike and will continue till the MLA and his supporters get arrested. The staff of the hospital is now sitting on a dharna outside Malegaon General Hospital.

Coronavirus LIVE Updates:

Coronavirus crisis in India

As of date, 649 positive cases have been reported of the pandemic Coronavirus (COVID-19) - 41 have been discharged and Maharashtra reporting the highest at 124. Ten deaths have been reported till date. India has suspended all visas and barred travel from Afghanistan, Philippines, EU, UK, China, Malaysia and mandatory 14-day quarantine from several other countries and the Prime Minister has issued a 21-day countrywide lockdown starting from 25 March to April 15.

Chidambaram suggests '10-point plan' to Centre to help India's poor amid 21-day lockdown

India has also closed the India-Pakistan border and restricted passenger movement at the border with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Myanmar. The government is monitoring all suspected cases and issued preventive advisories with states declaring the disease an epidemic shutting down all educational institutions, monuments, parks, gyms, swimming pools, pubs and banning large gatherings. All domestic airplanes and trains have ceased operation. Visit the official government here: MINISTRY OF HEALTH & FAMILY WELFARE

Middle-class localities in Mumbai ban entry of outsiders amid rising coronavirus cases
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 18:07:09|Editor: huaxia

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NANCHANG, March 26 (Xinhua) -- East China's Jingxi Province will send a group of medical experts to Uzbekistan to help the country fight against COVID-19 with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), according to the province's TCM administration.

The group consists of five doctors from the surgery, cardiovascular, emergency and lung departments of the Jiangxi Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital.

Scheduled to depart from Nanchang, the provincial capital city, the chartered flight organized by Uzbekistan for the experts has been on hold due to epidemic control and is expected to arrive in Uzbekistan within the next week.

Jiangxi has closely cooperated with Uzbekistan in the area of TCM in recent years.
Philadelphia City Council members on Thursday took steps to approve Mayor Jim Kenneys request for $85 million to respond to the coronavirus crisis, but only after adding a late provision that would give them $400,000 to spend as they see fit.

Tacked on as an amendment to the emergency spending bill, Council approved the provision in a closed meeting, its first since the pandemic shut down the city government.

The citys coronavirus response has so far been handled by the executive branch, but Council President Darrell L. Clarke told reporters after the meeting that the $400,000 was necessary to get the word out about this coronavirus and encourage residents to practice social distancing. As of Thursday, Philadelphia had reported 475 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, with 40 patients hospitalized and one death.

Council will be using a series of different initiatives to ensure we get information out to individuals, using social media, using public service announcements, Clarke said. Council members "all have their niches in terms of their ability to get the word out. You are going to see a very aggressive social media campaign, one like you probably have never seen before.

 READ MORE: Phillys stay at home order to curb coronavirus: Heres what it means.

On the same conference call, Councilmember Maria Quinones-Sanchez said residents may be more likely to heed the guidance from the city  such as limiting contact and intermingling  if the messaging comes directly from their representatives on Council.

I can tell you that in districts like mine, people are not listening," she said. "Weve had situations at parks, people hanging out in front of houses.

In a memorandum sent to Council members, Clarkes office said the $400,000 would be used for mailings with details about testing locations, unemployment benefits, meal pickup locations offered by the School District, and other information.

Council also asked to have updates every two weeks on the citys spending in response to the pandemic.

Kenney said Thursday that he was OK with Council spending money to share information because the city needs to get as much information as possible out there." He also called appropriate its request to monitor spending.

Managing Director Brian Abernathy said the $85 million could be used to secure facilities for quarantine space, or to buy protective gear, medical equipment, or vehicles needed to respond to the pandemic.

The funds will be redirected from unspent money in the budget to Abernathys office, which oversees operational departments, although Abernathy said it was difficult to predict how exactly the money will be spent.

I cant tell you today that Im not going to need something different tomorrow, because that is likely to happen," he said at a news conference Thursday. I need to have the flexibility to respond to the crisis in real time.

 READ MORE: Can Philly use eminent domain to take over Hahnemann hospital for coronavirus response?

In a written explanation to Council members, the administration did project some likely expenses: $3 million for N95 masks; $2 million for IT needs; $2 million in relief for small businesses; and $500,000 to help nonprofits through the PHL COVID-19 Fund established last week. The city also estimated that it would spend an additional $20 million per pay period in salaries and benefits during the pandemic; essential workers are being paid 50% more than their base salary.

Local businesses have already submitted grant or loan applications for more than $10 million from the city, Sanchez said. Councilmember Cherelle L. Parker said 1,093 of the 1,760 requests for aid were from businesses with annual profits below $500,000 that would qualify for micro-loans.

Lawmakers plan to return to work next week to give the spending bill final approval. Clarke said technology would likely be in place to hold that meeting remotely.

Despite meeting in person as usual on Thursday, Council took steps to enforce social distancing practices, including preventing members of the public or media from joining lawmakers in Council chambers. At least one member was wearing gloves during the meeting. Public comment was collected online prior to Thursdays meetings.

Although members of the public could watch the meeting on TV or online, Council members did not explain the amendment adding $400,000 for their own use as they approved it. Clarke later acknowledged that the process may have lacked transparency.

We were trying to move this process as expeditiously as possible, so that could have potentially been an oversight, he said. A little different times for us, and every now and then we dont necessarily get it completely right.
Many foreigners are fretting over their legal status in Vietnam amid uncertainty over visa extensions and the pandemic risk of traveling.

"Im just sort of hoping the government would pardon those who overstay [their visa]," Eva* said.

The 29-year-old American citizen, who has lived in Saigon for two years, said she has no idea if her business visa could be extended, which will expire in three weeks.

Eva, a digital nomad working for an overseas tech company, said a three-month extension would cost her between $170 and $350, according to quotes from different agents.

"It is expensive, but cheaper than heading home. And going home would be horrible too," she noted.

The U.S. publicly advised its citizens to immediately return "unless they are prepared to remain abroad for an indefinite period" on March 19.

Eva is not the only foreign resident whos been kept awake at night by the visa limbo. In the past week, several expat groups on Facebook have been flooded with threads about visa extension for foreigners in Vietnam, with many complaining about agencies charging exorbitant fees.

As boarding a plane home is not a safe option with the risk of being exposed to the virus, many who are nearing the end of their current stay in the Southeast Asian nation are getting increasingly anxious about their immigration status.

Their distress is compounded by the fact Vietnam has shut its borders with the world by suspending all international routes starting Wednesday and halting the issuance of new visas for all nationalities starting March 18.

Previously, Vietnam had decided no more visa waivers would be issued for South Koreans and Italians of Vietnamese origin, and nationals of Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, Spain, and the U.K., as well as Belarus, Russia, and Japan.

Visa regulations for those already residing in Vietnam have also fluctuated, according to several visa agencies.

Vietnam-based Domicile Corporate Services company wrote on its website on Wednesday: "We did see a period last week where visa extensions were being denied to some, but as at the date of writing we believe everyone can get an extension."

Those in Vietnam with existing visas are able to extend them. However, the process and extension period, ranging between one to three months, depends on the visa type and original sponsoring party.

In practice, according to the company, Vietnamese authorities have temporarily stopped accepting new applications for work permits and only approve a limited number of renewals. For temporary residence card holders, the company said there were some approvals for extension before and that the authorities will now issue the cards "for valid cases again."

Legal status uncertainty has put Holland in a bundle of nerves. The former English teacher who has lived in Hanoi for three years will only know if his tourist visa can be extended two weeks before the expiration date on May 20.

"I want to extend my visa for another three months. Im not a hundred percent sure if I am able to. My agency has explained that between now and then its very possible that many policies could change," the American citizen said.

Holland is deeply concerned if he were to be forced to return to the U.S. "where the situation becomes worse every day" and leave his Vietnamese girlfriend.

For Paolo*, an Ecuadorian citizen in Saigon, the fee he has to pay to get his three-month tourist visa extended is VND9 million ($385), four times more than what he usually paid and more expensive than his monthly rent.

"I don't know if it's reasonable. But I don't have too many options. I have to suck it up," Paolo said.

The temporarily out-of-work English teacher paid the fee for the application 10 days ago but there has been no good news from his agency. Time is running out for him as his visa expires on April 6.

From March 16, his home country Ecuador officially closed its borders to everyone, including its citizens and residents, for 21 days.

The ambiguity of the situation also puts a weight on Anna*. The Filipino teacher at an international school has called Saigon home for over two years where she lives with another expat partner.

Anna was applying for a work permit but since her school suspended operations, just like hundreds of others in Vietnam since the Covid-19 outbreaks emerged following the governments directive to protect students, her school had halted her application.

She does have a business visa, but whether it can be extended is unclear.

"My business visa expires on May 1. I can still extend it for another three months but am just hoping there wont be changes in getting it," she said.

The visa limbo has also alarmed foreign diplomats in Vietnam. On Tuesday, the Australian Embassy in Vietnam posted on its Facebook page it is working with the Vietnamese government to clarify arrangements for those Australians whose Vietnamese visa is due to expire and will provide updated information as soon as possible.

On the same day, the British Embassy in Hanoi voiced their concern on social media, saying "it is unclear whether work permits for foreign nationals in Vietnam will be extended and the mechanism or timeline for doing this."

In an emailed response, the embassy said it is seeking clarity on wider policies on the extension of work permits and visas so that British nationals can be informed of the mechanisms and timelines.

"We have asked Vietnamese authorities for continued flexibility when British nationals have flights canceled," an embassy spokesperson said.

In another emailed response, Rachael Chen, spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, said it and the U.S. Consulate General in HCMC will provide emergency services to U.S. citizens in need and provide information via its website and through messages sent to those registered in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (step.state.gov) on entry restrictions, foreign quarantine policies, and urgent health information provided by local government.

Spokeswoman of the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Le Thi Thu Hang said a press conference on Thursday that amid the pandemic, foreigners in Vietnam can still extend their visa at the Immigration Department under the Ministry of Public Security.

As the pandemic continues to ravage countries, Anna has made up her mind about not going home to the Philippines.

"Although I know it is good to be with my family right now, it's better not to go anywhere. I don't know if I go to the airport, I will get the virus there. So, it's better to stay. I am safer here."

*Names have been changed to protect identities.
The Narendra Modi government will make an advance payout of its universal cash-for-farmers programme, PM-KISAN, between April 1, 2 or 3, rather than in June, responding to the coronavirus epidemic, which could upend agriculture, the countrys largest employer.

Under PM-KISAN, the government provides an income support of 6000 a year to farmers with a valid enrolment, paid in three equal cash transfers of 2000 -- one every four months. It was launched by the Prime Minister on February 24, 2019, when the first instalment was paid.

Nearly 80.5 million farmers will be paid about 16000 crore in all, an official requesting anonymity said, adding that the Centre is gearing up to pay advances of all federally funded and partially-federally-funded cash and in-kind subsidies, such as old-age pensions and ration.

Small agri business owners will need access to emergency grants and millions in loans, analysts say. Additional money needs to be set aside for the rural unemployed too, according to them.

The cash transfer under PM-KISAN is an unconditional handout, meaning that it doesnt require any proof of how recipients use it, but payments are usually timed with sowing seasons to help finance agricultural inputs. Inputs refer to all materials needed for cultivation by farmers, from seeds to fertilisers.

The proposal for the advance payment of the PM-KISAN tranche, the first this financial year, from the agriculture ministry, has been approved by the Prime Minister. The finance ministry is ready to release the amount to the agriculture ministry and so are all states to facilitate it, the official cited above said.

The World Health Organization has lauded Indias efforts to curb the pandemic shrivelling Asias third largest economy, apart from devastating lives. The current 21-day lockdown period, however, has walled off the rural sector from the urban, from where rural incomes flow. Indias has recorded more than 600 cases of Covid-19.

All chief secretaries have finished providing the Centre with their respective lots for the PM-KISAN tranche, a jargon for payout data of each eligible farmer, statewise, such as land-holding, biometric and bank account details.

The cash transfer takes the direct benefit transfer, or DBT mode. This means all 80.5 million farmers will simultaneously get 2000 each in their bank accounts through electronic release by federal authorities.

There could still be challenges. Aadhaar-based enrolment and cash transfers, slow internet connections in many rural centres and messy land records have slowed the PM-KISAN programme, the farm ministry told a parliamentary panel in January.

When teething problems began showing, the government relaxed the requirement of Aadhaar till November 30, 2019. But all farmers must complete their Aadhaar details after this date to get cash transfers. The government has made Aadhaar compulsory for all welfare handouts to plug leakages.

Eligible farmer families are identified on the basis of operational land holding data according to the agricultural Census Data 2015-16, which is then extrapolated to 2018-19, an official said. It is the job of state governments to provide accurate beneficiary data and payments are continuously updated.

The country has 140 million operational land holdings, which refers to the number of land parcels owned by total households. The eligible farmer count shows that registrations of about 59 million farmers are yet to be authenticated.

This decision is obviously welcome. We also need income lifelines for all vulnerable sections, such as the urban manual workers who have migrated out and also agricultural labourers, said Manoj Kumar Panda of the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) leaves the Senate floor at the Capitol in Washington on March 25, 2020. (Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images)

Senate Passes $2 Trillion Emergency Relief Package for Families, Businesses Amid Pandemic

House to vote on Friday

The U.S. Senate unanimously voted late Wednesday to pass a $2.2 trillion emergency relief package to help protect American livelihoods, hospitals, and an economy rattled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 96-0 vote in the Senate means the bill will now move to the House of Representatives, which is expected to vote on Friday.

I encourage the house to pass this vital legislation and send it to my desk for signature without delay. I will sign it immediately, Trump said earlier on Wednesday during his daily White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing.

The Senate is going to stand together, act together, and pass this historic relief package today, said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

The 880-page measure, the third coronavirus response bill produced by Congress, is the largest-ever rescue package in U.S. history. It builds on previous funding efforts focused on vaccines and emergency response, sick and family medical leave for workers, and food aid.

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act or the CARES Act (H.R. 748) includes $350 billion in job retention loans for small businesses that will supply eight weeks of salaries, with loan forgiveness available as long as businesses keep up with overheads and employing their workers.

It also includes a $500 billion program for guaranteed, subsidized loans to larger industries, including airlines.

Hospitals are expected to receive at least $100 billion to deal with the incoming flood of COVID-19 patients. The bill also provides $45 billion to fund additional relief efforts through the Federal Emergency Management Agency for local emergency response and community services.

Americans are set to receive a one-time direct payment of $1,200 per adult making up to $75,000 a year, and $2,400 per married couple making up to $150,000, with $500 payments per child.

The package also provides up to $250 billion in expanded unemployment benefits, intended to help replace the salaries of furloughed workers for up to four months. Furloughed workers will get whatever amount their state usually provides for unemployment, plus a $600 per week add-on. Independent contractors and those who are self-employed will, for the first time, be eligible for the benefits.

Several Republican senators on Wednesday insisted that the bill be amended to ensure that laid-off workers would not be paid more in unemployment benefits than they earn at their job. But an amendment that would have changed the provision failed just before the Senate approved the relief package.

Democrats earlier twice blocked the $2 trillion emergency package.

Last night, White House official Eric Ueland said that the White House and the Republican senators seeking the amendment had reached an agreement on the relief package, allowing the amendment to go to vote.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

The pandemic has killed more than 1,000 people in the United States and infected more than 69,000 to date, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Confirmed cases of the CCP virus continue to rise in the United States as testing improves and testing centers work through the backlog in samples.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
YEREVAN, MARCH 26, ARMENPRESS. Three Armenian military servicemen have tested positive for COVID19. They are hospitalized, Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan said in a statement released through his spokesperson.

The three servicemen were tested on March 25 because a family member of one of the soldiers had earlier been diagnosed with the disease. The three cases are connected and are linked to one of the clusters that was recorded earlier in our country, Tonoyan said in the statement.

He said comprehensive preventive measures were being taken in the military, but nevertheless, it is impossible to prevent the virus spread into the army because a big portion of the servicemen are in daily contact with the civilian population. He said the three soldiers are from a military base which is not on combat duty. The three soldiers were isolated before the confirmation.

The servicemen are now hospitalized, they are in normal condition, they havent developed pneumonia. One of them has mild fever, the other two dont have any symptoms, Tonoyan said, adding that the troops will receive high-quality treatment.

All direct contacts of the servicemen have been quarantined and another 32 soldiers have been tested pending results.

He said the military base where the cases were confirmed is located on a significant distance from the frontline. Tonoyan said heightened measures are being taken, with medical personnel monitoring the troops.

At the same time, Tonoyan noted that the heightened disinfecting and other anti-epidemic measures which are being taken in military bases for the past one month have resulted in an abrupt decrease of other not-less dangerous infectious diseases, which definitely proves the effectiveness of these measures. He said that acute respiratory disease cases, chickenpox cases, tonsillitis cases have dropped 4 times, while not a single gastro-intestinal infection case has been reported whatsoever.

It is noteworthy that during the past years, pneumonia cases dropped 5 times, while severe pneumonia cases dropped 10 times, he said, adding that fatal pneumonia cases havent been recorded at all.

I am sure we will in this front as well, Tonoyan said.

The total cumulative number of COVID19 cases in Armenia is 290, 18 of whom have recovered.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
Tuolumne County Public Health View Photos

Sonora, CA  Tuolumne County Health officials released the Wednesday Coronavirus testing update. There were no new cases reported today. Total tested* 2163, total negative 2154, total Tuolumne residents positive 9, hospitalized 0, in isolation 2, total recovered 7.

Tuolumne County Public Health provided details about Stage 3 businesses that can reopen as detailed here.

Active** Coronavirus cases by county (as of 6/17/20 5:00 PM)

Alpine  0, Amador  2, Calaveras  11 as detailed here, Mariposa  2, Madera  106, Merced  191, Mono  1, San Joaquin  672, Stanislaus  329, Tuolumne  2

**Active cases as reported by the county or recovered and deceased known positive cases minus total known cases. For Mono County new cases with in the last 14 days and for San Joaquin a rolling 14-day total of new cases which is less than their total minus recovered and deceased.

* Tuolumne County testing numbers include those routed through Public Health to a Public Health Laboratory and those reported through the State infectious disease reporting system. All positive cases of Tuolumne County residents must be reported to Public Health. State data is here.

An updated overview of myMotherLode Coronavirus news stories is here. For previous public health testing updates go here.

Latest Updates

Details about delayed test results are detailed in the news story here.

Case investigations are ongoing.

The state testing site Calaveras County fairgrounds Mark Twain Building has new operating hours beginning this week: Tuesday-Saturday 7 A.M. to 4 P.M. Individuals are encouraged to schedule appointments at: https://lhi.care/covidtesting Walk-ins are also accepted. Some screening questions may be asked, but they will not exclude you from getting a test. There is no cost to the individual. Individuals in the following groups should get tested: Those who have traveled outside of the county (test 3-5 days after travel) Those who interact with the public as part of their job and/or work in essential critical infrastructure jobs (every 14-28 days) Those who have interacted with people outside of their household, including constitutionally protected gatherings (3-5 days after exposure)

The updated local health order is detailed here.

It is important that people continue to follow prevention guidelines to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, including: Practice physical distancing at all times. Keep 6 feet space between yourself and others who are not part of your household. Stay in your household bubble! Wear a face mask if you arent sure you can maintain physical distancing while in public. Wash your hands thoroughly and frequently. Stay home if you are sick. Avoid unnecessary travel, and limit your outings to essential tasks.



LINKS TO MORE INFORMATION & RESOURCES

Community Resources Portal: https://bit.ly/TCcovidPortal

Tuolumne County Public Health Website: www.tuolumnecounty.ca.gov/publichealth

Public Health COVID-19 Call Center: (209) 533-7440

California COVID-19 website: www.covid19.ca.gov

State Testing Site info and Appointments: https://lhi.care/covidtesting

Tuolumne County Business: www.tcdisasterassistance.com

CDC COVID-19 website: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html

Thank you for your support and efforts to protect the safety and health of our community
BEIJING  Worried that international travelers might trigger a second wave of coronavirus infections, China announced late Thursday night that it was suspending practically all entry to the country by foreigners and was halting almost all international passenger flights as well.

The announcement came after official Chinese data indicated that the country had almost completely halted domestic transmission of the virus but was struggling to handle a growing number of people who were infected overseas.

Foreign residents of China and foreigners with previously issued visas will no longer be allowed to enter the country as of midnight Friday, Chinas foreign ministry declared late Thursday. The announcement represents one of the most comprehensive international travel bans imposed anywhere in the world, as governments try to slow the spread of the coronavirus that has already infected more than a half million people and killed more than 22,000.

Other leaders who have imposed travel bans, including President Trump, have tended to allow long-term residents from other countries to keep coming and going, even as they restricted most other arrivals. President Trumps travel ban on China on Jan. 31 also exempted immediate family members of American citizens.
Celeste Ford, Chair of the Board of Directors, Stellar Solutions 25 years ago, I founded Stellar Solutions with the vision of delivering high-impact solutions to clients critical needs while realizing our employees dream jobs. Today these complementary core business principles have never been more important. -- Stellar Solutions Board Chair Celeste Ford

Woman-owned global aerospace and systems engineering provider Stellar Solutions, Inc. is honored to mark its 25-year anniversary during Womens History Month, extending deep appreciation to the customers and employees that have made this journey possible.

The star of Stellar Solutions symbolizes five sectors of businesscommercial, defense, intelligence, civil and international, among which the company actively works to cross boundaries creatively in pursuit of the best solutions for its clients, delivering aerospace and systems engineering capabilities involving satellites in space, sensors on Earth, and intricate technology connections across multiple frontiers. With physical operations in California, Colorado, the greater Washington DC area, London and France as well as employees throughout the U.S. and the globe, Stellar Solutions has become a recognized leader in delivering end-to-end critical expertise and problem-solving skills to dozens of significant programs.

25 years ago, I founded Stellar Solutions with the vision of delivering high-impact solutions to clients critical needs while realizing our employees dream jobs. Today these complementary core business principles have never been more important in upholding the agility and expertise that has made us built to last, said Board Chair Celeste Volz Ford.

The company was launched in 1995 based on this compelling vision, and a determination to fill a marketplace need based upon Ford's 17 years of experience as an aerospace engineer and technology manager for programs such as the Space Shuttle Program. Stellar Solutions enlisted an elite cadre of like-minded scientists and engineers within the first year, including the companys current CEO, Michael Lencioni.

We are proud of the relationships we have built with our clients over the years with mission focus on their high-performance projects. We have partnered with them to advance, both in times of disruption and innovation, and we will continue to devote ourselves to critical solutions, Lencioni said. These capabilities have included space situational awareness, continuity of operations, satellite communications, and next-generation defense and cyber systems.

Stellar Solutions works with federal organizations within the Intelligence Community, the Department of Defense (primarily U.S. Air Force), and the Civil Space Community (primarily NASA and NOAA). On the Commercial side, Stellar Solutions has engaged numerous established space systems companies, as well as new entrants to the aerospace industry. The company expanded globally in 2004, strengthening its efforts with International programs. The Government Programs sector was spun off to serve specific Intelligence customers in 2011, and the Defense Support and Cyber group was created in 2014 as a subset of the companys Defense sector addressing a new critical customer need.

Stellar Solutions maintains an extraordinary record of women in top leadership positions: three of eight technical Vice Presidents as of March are women, in addition to Ford who remains as the Chair of the Board of Directors. These female leaders include Vice President, Defense Programs, Betsy Pimentel; Director of Emerging Space Capabilities, Janet Grondin; Vice President, Commercial Programs, Melissa Farrell; and Vice President, Civil Programs, Amy Chaput.

Key Milestones for Stellar Solutions:

1995: In the first year of business, company secures contracts with pioneering satellite company Space Imaging (now DigitalGlobe) and begins a long history of commercial and defense support.

1998: Stellar Solutions Foundation established to support community-based organizations and charities.

2000: Stellar Ventures launched as an investment enterprise and incubator fostering early-stage technology development and market applications. It was re-launched in 2017 to take advantage of the venture backed disruption to the aerospace industry (new space).

2000: Stellar Advisor program initiated to engage experienced senior engineering experts on a part-time basis to complement a full-time workforce.

2001: QuakeFinder is founded as the Humanitarian R&D division of Stellar Solutions. It becomes the world's leading private earthquake forecasting research organization, dedicated to the discovery of methods for warning communities of imminent destructive earthquakes.

2003: QuakeSat, a collaboration between QuakeFinder and Stanford University, is among the first CubeSats ever launched to space--on a two-year proof-of-concept mission for collecting earthquake-precursor signals from orbit. Stellar Solutions becomes the first small business to successfully build, launch and operate its own satellite.

2003: Betsy Pimentel, VP, Defense Programs, joins Stellar Solutions.

2004: Stellar Solutions Aerospace Ltd. is launched for customers in the United Kingdom and Europe, headed by Melissa Farrell, VP, Commercial Programs.

2004: Kevin Girkins joins Stellar Solutions; named VP for new sector, Government Programs, in 2011.

2004: Walt Eilers joins Stellar Solutions; promoted from Director to VP, Intelligence Programs, in 2018.

2009: Celeste Ford receives the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of The Year Award.

2012: Punch Moulton becomes VP of new Stellar Solutions sector, Defense Support and Cyber.

2014: Stellar Solutions wins the first of continuous annual recognitions (2014  2019) as a Fortune Magazine Great Place to Work Award for small- and medium-sized businesses.

2017: Stellar Solutions wins the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nations highest honor in performance excellence and sustainability.

2018: Stellar Solutions Aerospace France founded to serve customers in overseas markets.

2019: Michael Lencioni is named Stellar Solutions CEO, and Celeste Ford transitions to Chair of the Board of Directors.

2020: Richard Rogers is named first corporate Executive Vice President for Stellar Solutions; Amy Chaput fills position of VP, Civil Programs.

2020: Celeste Ford named a winner of the 2020 Enterprising Women of the Year Awards, an annual tribute that is widely considered one of the most esteemed recognitions for women entrepreneurs.

2020: Stellar Solutions celebrates 25 Years of Service.

For more information, please see https://www.stellarsolutions.com
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TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Black Tusk Resources Inc. ("Black Tusk" or the "Company) (CSE:TUSK)(OTCPINK:BTKRF)(FRANKFURT:0NB) is pleased to announce that the application for a permit to conduct exploration drilling on the McKenzie East Gold Project has been submitted to Quebec Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks. The application process was prepared by Sulviculture La Verendrye of Amos, Quebec. The location of proposed drilling was determined by Black Tusk's geological team.The McKenzie East Project permit will allow for the construction of 18 drill pads, 11 water supply stations and 3 kilometres of access trails. Black Tusk anticipates conducting this work during the 2020 exploration season.Prior to conducting diamond drilling on the property, Black Tusk plans to undertake surface prospecting, mapping and sampling once access to the property is conducive for this work, expected to be later this spring. Areas of interest were determined from the results of the recently completed magnetic survey over the property combined with the results from historic exploration work.The Company is looking forward to the start of the 2020 exploration season at the McKenzie East Gold Project in Val-d'Or, area, Quebec.Figure 1 - Diamond drill hole and gold mineralized showing locations from SIGEOM database. For a more detailed picture, please click here: https://www.accesswire.com/media/582447/BLACKTUSK.png The Company also announces that it has issued 2,000,000 stock options of which 1,600,000 of the issued options were issued to directors and officers of the Company. The options have an exercise price of $0.05 per share and expire on March 24, 2022.About Black Tusk Resources Inc.Black Tusk Resources is engaged in mineral exploration of its gold projects in world-class mining regions across Canada. The company currently owns a 100-per-cent undivided interest in 3 separate gold properties. The South Rim Gold Project, situated in the Smithers mining camp B.C., The Golden Valley Project, located 35 kilometres north of La Sarre, West Abitibi, Quebec, and Black Tusk's flagship property, The McKenzie East Gold Project, which is located 30 kilometres north of Val-d'Or, Quebec in the prolific Abitibi greenstone belt.Perry Grunenberg, P.Geo, a "Qualified Person" as that term is defined under NI 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical information contained in this news release. Mr. Grunenberg is also a director of the Company.On behalf of the Board of DirectorsRichard PennCEO(778) 384-8923Forward-looking Information Cautionary StatementExcept for statements of historic fact, this news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements including, but not limited to delays or uncertainties with regulatory approvals, including that of the CSE. There are uncertainties inherent in forward-looking information, including factors beyond the Company's control. There are no assurances that the business plans for the Company as described in this news release will come into effect on the terms or time frame described herein. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change except as required by law. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Additional information identifying risks and uncertainties that could affect financial results is contained in the Company's filings with Canadian securities regulators, which are available at www.sedar.com The CSE and Information Service Provider have not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the accuracy or adequacy of this release.SOURCE: Black Tusk Resources Inc
These changes are leaving health care providers, industry associations and patients reeling as they try to make informed decisions. Its changing day by day, said Thorild Urdal, a nurse in the San Francisco Bay Area with almost 35 years of experience in labor and delivery.

Coronavirus is straining a U.S. health care system that, for years, has had the worst maternal mortality rate in the developed world. In 2007, 12.7 of every 100,000 women died during pregnancy, labor or within 42 days of giving birth, the measurement set by the World Health Organization. In 2018, that number had risen to 17.4 deaths per 100,000, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Health outcomes are even worse for women of color, especially black mothers, with C.D.C. data showing that in 2018, black mothers died at twice the rate of white mothers. Other studies suggest that the C.D.C.s numbers are conservative, and that black mothers are dying at 3.3 times the rate of white mothers.

With this kind of maternal health baseline, many birth workers are concerned that efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic will have unintended consequences on mothers and infants that will only become visible after the pandemic ends.

Meanwhile, hospitals are struggling to keep up.

Last week, the Permanente Medical Group, Kaiser Permanentes Northern California network, which collectively delivers 45,000 babies a year, became the first major hospital group to offer induced labor to women at 39 weeks, which is considered a full-term pregnancy, or offer earlier dates for women with already-scheduled inductions. Typically, it is only offered for medical reasons at 39 weeks.

The network is intentionally trying to get patients delivered before this pandemic gets worse, as long as they are past 39 weeks, said Dr. Amanda Williams, the head of ob-gyn at Kaiser Permanente Oakland in California. That way, they can get delivered and get back home before they get sick, their partner gets sick and staff gets constricted.

We cannot force anyone to have an induction, Williams added, but we can very strongly recommend it if this continues to get worse.
Will out-of-state operators be allowed to pile into Maine's recreational marijuana industry?

If a new lawsuit against the state is successful, the answer might be yes. Privately held dispensary operator Wellness and Pain Management Connection, and its affiliate Wellness Connection, have brought a suit in federal district court challenging Maine's requirement that majority ownership of recreational marijuana businesses is held by in-state residents.

The legal action specifically targets Kirsten Figueroa, commissioner of the state's Department of Administrative and Financial Services, and the department itself. Addressing language used on the department's website, the Wellness businesses claim that "[t]he purpose of the Residency Statute is to discriminate against non-residents." The pair is therefore asking the court to rule that the statute is in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Wellness and Pain Management Connection is a Delaware-registered company. It says that the vast majority of its stakeholders reside outside Maine.

Neither Figueroa nor her department have commented on the lawsuit.

Maine legalized recreational cannabis in 2016, but it has only recently begun licensing dispensaries selling this form of the drug.

Medical cannabis has been legal in the state for longer, which is why there are numerous retailers selling it. One is Wellness Connection, in Auburn, Maine.

Multistate operators (MSOs) in the cannabis industry are likely to keep an eye on how the companies' lawsuit develops. If the residency statute is struck down, it's possible that at least a few will try to enter the market. One suitable candidate is Curaleaf Holdings (OTC:CURLF), headquartered in nearby Massachusetts. Curaleaf is Wellness' neighbor, operating a medical dispensary in Auburn.

In contrast to the broader stock market, Curaleaf shares sank on Wednesday, dropping by over 10%.
A convicted paedophile who wants to travel to Indonesia has fought to stop the Australian Federal Police revealing his criminal history to officials in that country.

Wilfred Mentink, a former high school teacher in Brisbane, was convicted in November 2017 of two counts of indecent treatment of a child under 16 after a jury found him guilty of molesting two 14-year-old boys on a camping trip in 1976.

Convicted paedophile Wilfred Mentink was seeking an order preventing the AFP telling Indonesian officials about his criminal history. Credit:Louie Douvis

He was sentenced to nine months in prison, suspended after four months, and released in March 2018.

Mr Mentink's name is entered on the Queensland child protection offender register and Commonwealth law imposes restrictions on his ability to travel overseas.
U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo says that G7 foreign ministers at a meeting on March 25 spoke a lot about Russia and holding it accountable for its aggression in Ukraine.

"The group also spoke a great deal about Russia and holding it accountable for its aggression in Ukraine. Real progress on eastern Ukraine must begin with Russia honoring its commitments under the Minsk agreements," Pompeo told reporters, according to the U.S. Department of State.

Pompeo also noted that the United States will never recognize Russia's territorial claims on Crimea. I also reiterated the simple truth: Crimea is Ukraine. The United States will never recognize Russias attempted annexation, he added.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the United States decided to host the G7 ministerial virtually by video teleconference instead of gathering in Pittsburgh, March 24-25.

Virtual G7 Ministerial wasnt the format wed envisioned for the meeting when we drew it up, but Im glad we had the chance to meet, if only by teleconference, Pompeo said.

The meeting was mainly dedicated to the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

ish
A warm and humid weather is linked to slower spread of the novel coronavirus, according to a study which suggests that Asian countries experiencing monsoon may experience lesser transmission of the virus.

The scientists, including Qasim Bukhari from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, assessed data on the number of COVID-19 infections in different parts of the world and compared it with two parameters of weather from all the regions -- temperature and humidity.

The findings, described in SSRN repository, show that 90 per cent of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, transmissions until March 22, 2020 have occurred in regions with temperature between 3 and 17 degrees Celsius.

They added that these regions also had between 4 to 9 gram per cubic metre (g/m3) of absolute humidity -- a measure of the amount of water vapour per cubic metre of atmosphere.

According to the MIT scientists, the total number of cases in countries with mean temperature greater than 18 degree Celsius and absolute humidity more than 9 g/m3 in January-February-early March is less than 6 per cent.

Based on their analysis, the scientists noted that Asian countries experiencing monsoon may see a slowdown in transmission as absolute humidity is generally above 10g/m3 during monsoon.

"Within the US, the outbreak also shows a north-south divide. Northern (cooler) states have much higher growth rates compared to southern (warmer) states. The spread of 2019-nCoV has been limited in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona," they reported in the study.

Even in California, which spans a large climatic zone, the scientists said, the number of cases is double in the northern part of the state than in its south.

"Within the US, Oregon and Louisiana are two outliers, with Oregon having less than 200 cases even though it is straddled between the hotspots of California and Washington and Louisiana having approximately 1,000 cases by March 22 2020, even though it is relatively warm and humid," the researchers said.

They said the overall growth rate is lower in many parts of Asia, Middle eastern, and South American countries even though the countries in these regions have not implemented drastic quarantine measures such as those in China, Europe and some US states.

While it could be argued that there may be lower number of testings such as in India, Pakistan, Indonesia and African countries, the researchers said, many countries like Singapore, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, have performed more 2019-nCoV tests per million people than US, Italy, and several European countries.

Based on this observation, they suggested that non-testing is not an issue at least for the countries listed above, and that many of these countries are also global travel hubs with thousands of people entering and exiting the country everyday.

Citing these factors, the researchers argued that factors other than mobility and quarantining might play an important role in slowing the transmission of the virus.

"With more than 10,000 cases being reported in regions with mean temperature above 18 degree Celsius after March 15, the role of warmer temperature in slowing the spread of the 2019-nCoV as suggested previously, might only be observed, if at all, at much higher temperatures," the scientists wrote in the study.

However, the scientists cautioned that there are several unknowns in the data currently used to arrive at the conclusion.

"Our conclusions are based on currently available data with several unknowns including how the virus is mutating and evolving, case fertility ratio, reproductive numbers and direct versus indirect transmissions," they said.

The researchers also emphasised that the results "in no way suggest that 2019-nCoV would not spread in warm humid regions."



They said effective public health interventions should be implemented across the world to slow down the transmission of 2019-nCoV.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Shoes hang on a bar stool in a closed brothel in Dortmund, Germany, where many activities came to a halt due to the coronavirus. (Ina Fassbender / AFP / Getty Images)

Some German brothels closed with hardly any warning. Sex workers who had been fully employed suddenly feared homelessness. Many sought ways to keep working, at home or on the streets.

The coronavirus-induced changes to prostitution in Germany, where sex work has long been legal, in recent days has left many in the business with as many troubles and fears as anyone, scrambling to find a way to adjust.

Its impossible to know now what the long-term economic impact of this crisis will be  and harder to predict what the impact will be for us, said Undine de Riviere, a sex worker in Germany for the last 25 years. What we offer is a luxury article, not a daily need. This could be the first thing people cut back on.

The nation saw Chancellor Angela Merkel solemnly announce last week that all brothels had to close to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the same order issued for bars, clubs, betting parlors, opera houses, museums and theaters. To bolster Europes largest economy, the government pledged $55 billion to support 5 million independent workers  including tens of thousands of sex workers  as part of its overall promise to inject $750 billion in aid to companies and industries.

The government in 2002 had improved the rights of sex workers by taking 1927 laws legalizing prostitution even further, allowing workers to advertise and enter formal contracts. Health insurance and pensions were also obtainable. That helped Germany become an even more popular destination for sex workers and customers from around the world. It has since become an $18 billion per year industry, according to the Verdi service sector union.

In addition to Germany, prostitution is legal in dozens of countries, including the U.S. (in parts of Nevada), as well as Mexico and Canada, with a wide range of regulations. There are an estimated 40 to 42 million prostitutes worldwide, according to a 2012 Business Insider report that cited a 2010 survey by the Fondation Scelles of France.

Story continues

Prostitution is openly embraced by the government and society in Germany, where local municipalities collect hundreds of millions of euros in taxes every year.

They come from Romania, Bulgaria, as well as Ukraine, Poland, Thailand and South America, said Susanne Bleier Wilp of the Assn. for Erotic and Sexual Services Providers industry lobby group in Berlin. But there are also sex workers and clients from the United Kingdom and the United States. The whole world is active in Germany.

As essential as the government bailout will be for many, Bleier Wilp said about 80% of the sex workers are foreigners only temporarily in Germany  and are unlikely to see any rescue funds.

The coronavirus crisis is hitting the poorest of the poor the hardest, she said in a phone interview. Their income dried up. They dont have a permanent address and they dont have health insurance. Its a dire situation.

While some brothels forced to close sent their sex workers packing, others such as the Leierkasten in Munich decided to allow those unable to travel home because of the closings of many borders in the European Union to reside in the brothel. A few weeks ago there were 700 clients each weekend coming to the famous 40-year-old brothel as patrons of the women working its 45 rooms.

Most of our women left when we closed but some had nowhere else to go, said managing director Dennis Miller in a phone interview.

Fourteen women stranded in Munich were staying in their rooms at the Leierkasten without paying the usual $200-per day room rental fee.

It was the only humane thing to do," Miller said. "We have to stick together in tough times. We couldnt just throw them out on the street.

Miller said that while the sex workers, as independent contractors, wouldnt get any financial support from Leierkasten during the shutdown, the 20-member full-time support staff at one of the countrys largest brothels would continue to receive their paychecks thanks to the governments short-hours support program.

Many staff members were doing renovations, repairs, painting and cleaning the building during the unplanned interruption, he said.

The mood is pretty good all in all except for some of the women are starting to worry that their money will run out, Miller said. Were just sitting tight and waiting for this to pass.

Bleier Wilp said other sex workers in shuttered brothels were in a precarious position because many health offices ordered brothels closed and vacated  which forced some into homelessness. Were trying to organize help, she said.

She said the pandemic was especially causing stress for sex workers who do not have enough savings to cover their living costs for a while.

Some just cant afford to sit this out, said Bleier Wilp, 52, who had 10 years' experience as a sex worker before becoming a lobbyist 15 years ago. The brothels are closed so theyre forced out on the streets. But its risky. Some customers are offering to pay a 50% bonus.

Other sex workers are trying to adapt to the situation caused by the coronavirus by moving their services  like much of the rest of the world  online into the home office mode.

Some are trying to sell adult content online and experimenting with webcamming, said Bleier Wilp. It may take a while for that to catch on.

Sex workers in Germany have bounced back from crises that followed terrorist attacks as well as global financial turmoil. Some brothels turned to modern marketing tools such as offering rebates or discounts and other gimmicks to win back customers and keep their businesses going.

De Riviere, 46, who is independent and works out of her apartment in Hamburg, said she has enough savings to get her through a few months and stopped seeing clients several weeks ago.

The news was getting scarier so I decided not to take any more appointments at the start of the month, she said in a phone interview, referring to the growth in the numbers of people infected that had shot up to more than 39,500 confirmed cases in Germany with at least 222 deaths as of Thursday. Business was already slow in February. I was getting worried about being infected so I stopped.

Another sex worker, who asked to be identified only by her artistic name Madame Kali, said she does not want to start working out of her own apartment. She uses a rented studio for her dominatrix activities in the western city of Bielefeld to maintain a clear break between her work and private life.

I dont want any whips lying around at home, she said.

I was able to continue working up until a week ago so Ill just take a break now for a month or two, she said. Its frightening. A close neighbor has lung disease and I worry that I could unintentionally infect him.

Madame Kali, who said she is older than 40, said she was surprised that some customers continue calling to book appointments.

You would think pretty much everyone would have got the message but there are still some weirdos out there, she said. I usually ask them if theyve been watching the news or if theyre just insane.

Kirschbaum is a special correspondent.
And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all is the line that famously ends Edgar Allan Poes short story The Masque of the Red Death, a story that has been resurfacing again and again lately. On March 10, in a letter to the New York Times, a reader said that one article about the wealthys response to the virus reminded her of the storys prince, partying in an abbey while destruction reigns outside. In response to a Guardian piece headlined Super-Rich Jet Off to Disaster Bunkers Amid Coronavirus Outbreak, Twitter user @lyon_laurel wrote, The attentive reader may be reminded of the Edgar Allen Poe story, The Masque of the Red Death. Spoiler alert: it doesnt end well for the self-isolating super-rich. And last week, to make up for the fact that the final concert of her world tour was canceled, Amanda Palmer livestreamed an event in an empty church in Wellington, New Zealand. Her husband, the author Neil Gaiman, read Red Death at the pulpit.

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In The Masque of the Red Death, a gruesomely masked guest inexplicably crashes the apocalyptic soiree and is eventually revealed to be the plague itself personified, killing the prince and his fellow revelers alike. As a historic pandemic further highlights the economic and social disparities in societies around the world, Poes story underlines how the selfish, limited purview of entitled members of a society more concerned about comfort and capital during a disaster only causes more destruction. In the end, no one gets out alive.

Its easy to read Red Death, which was published in 1842, as a morality tale, though some critics resist it, insisting that Poe was simply interested in telling a horror story. Perhaps thats true, but here Poes definition of horror extends beyond the gruesome presentation of the disease itself. After opening the story with a grotesque description of its symptoms (bleeding at the pores, scarlet stains, and various other nightmarish Romero-style affects), he strikes us with a gauche contrast: But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. More important than the image of the foolish prince hidden away in his castle is the society he represents, one in which the privileged are insulated from the biological reality of the sickness outside the abbeys walls, or at least believe themselves to be.

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In Poes story, the outside world appears as a distant fiction, one we have no occasion to imagine beyond the briefest mentions. The people are absent, and their deaths are only mentioned dismissively, with no reckoning of the human loss. Poe casually refers to Prince Prosperos dominions being half depopulated, before launching into an account of the princes invitation to his friends to join him in seclusion. The bloodless fraction echoes the growing insistence, from the White House on down, that its worth risking a small percentage of American lives in order to get the economy moving again.

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This isolated framing of an emergency, the close-quarters perspective that values dramatic and ornate circumstances while turning away from the larger societal ramifications, is as much of a horror as the Red Death itself. In the economy of crisis, industries often supersede individualsthough recessions (like the one were inevitably facing) have more vulnerable casualties who arent as able to bounce back. The administrations approach to the crisis has gone from laissez-faire to willful tunnel vision, and has advanced to the point now where its actively arguing that its worth risking the lives of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, to keep the economy afloatnot that the people making those suggestions plan to be anywhere near the front lines. An administration that ushers people back to work during a global health emergency, risking its population for a financial bounce back while also denying its citizens basic access to care, is a disgraceful representation of an American politics hypothetically versed in high standards of equality and justice. Like Poes revelers, our leaders will stay safe inside while the less fortunate suffer elsewhere: All these and security were within. Without was the Red Death. 

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The pandemic has highlighted the fact that the ability to either draw borderswhether between nations or individualsor reject them is a matter of privilege. Prince Prospero has the means to isolate himself and a thousand of his BFFs for months; similarly, many of us also have the privilege to define the means of our isolation for the sake of our own health. We may be able to work from home and hoard bread and toilet paper, or, if were young and medically sound, we may be confident in our advantaged state of health. Like Poes prince, in New York, the wealthy and able have been fleeing their Manhattan penthouses to shelter at their Hamptons summer homes, hoping to outrun the rona. But even beyond the commonly referenced high-risk individuals like the elderly and the immunocompromised, there is a whole stratum of citizens disadvantaged and at risk for various other reasons of circumstance: the disabled, the pregnant, the people in essential jobs like grocery store clerks and hospital staff, young children, and the incarcerated, like the inmates at the densely packed and populated Rikers Island, where confirmed infections continue to grow. If Trump pushes on with the plan to allow people back to work in a matter of weeks, many will be forced to go in, because the alternative would put them in a position where they could not seek medical care if they did get sick.

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What Poe created in The Masque of the Red Death was not simply a disease but a monster, a terror once rooted to the host and now divorced from anything human, anything material at all. We have given other diseases form, condensed them to an image: a child with a distended belly or a young man covered in pox. The horror, like the masked guest in Prosperos party, is suddenly identifiable. We see it and empathize with the victims; the disease becomes real. Our tale of the coronavirus is missing this image and scope. It is either everywhere or nowhere, depending on how privileged you are, how much your circumstances can allow you to dismiss it as fearmongering or simply irrelevant to your life. But whether we acknowledge the masked guest at the party or not, the end of Poes story still holds true. A society that opts for blind privilege is nothing but a party of fools, unaware that the disease is very much present, both outside and in.
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians are losing their jobs as the COVID-19 pandemic causes businesses across the country to shut their doors or cut back on operations.

Its a tough time for many, but the Canadian government has stepped in with new, previously-unseen levels of aid for workers who have been laid off or lost their income because of the pandemic.

How you proceed will depend on whether you have been officially laid off, or youre just not getting shifts or work.

Heres what to do next, from applying for income support to taking care of your mental health.

Figure out which income support applies to you

The Trudeau government announced a new benefit called the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) on March 25 that will provide $2,000 a month for four months to Canadians who have lost their income due to the pandemic, after the government was flooded with applications for employment insurance (EI).

EI generally doesnt include self-employed or freelance workers, said Vancouver employment lawyer Andrea Raso. But the new benefit does. So, its important to check out both options and decide which one fits your situation before you apply for income support.

People who are independent contractors or, you know, gig workers, they are typically left out.

Workers who have lost their income generally fall into one of three camps: Those who have been temporarily laid off, those who have been terminated and self-employed, contract or freelance workers whose income has been cut off due to the pandemic. How you proceed depends on which group you fall into.

Figure out whether youve been laid off or terminated

If you fall into either of the first two groups, the first thing you need to do is determine if the situation is permanent or temporary.

In other words, you need to figure out exactly what the terms of your layoff are. If its a temporary layoff, meaning your employer plans to bring you back later, you dont get severance pay, Raso said.

What it enables the employer to do is to keep the employees, because most employers in this situation want those employees back, she said.

However, most provinces have a time cap on these types of layoffs (for example, in Ontario, its usually 13 weeks, with some exceptions). If the 13 weeks passes and youre still not working, your employer has officially terminated you and you should check your contract to see what you are owed.

You also want something in writing stating whether youve been temporarily laid off or terminated, said Toronto employment lawyer Andrew Langille  and dont sign anything without fully reading it, or even having it vetted by an employment lawyer.

You have to clarify what the employers intention is in writing.

If you have trouble getting termination pay from your former employer, Raso said you can escalate the situation.

Employees have recourse through their employment standards tribunals, and those are very, very simple to access, she said. (In Ontario, you can start here.)

Regardless of whether youve been laid off or terminated, Raso said the most important document you need from your former employer is a record of employment. This document is what will help you apply for employment insurance or CERB.

Langille says you should also get your T4 from the previous year, just in case.

Apply for government support, and keep track of your application

Next, its time to apply for either EI or the new Canada Emergency Response Benefit.

If youve been temporarily laid off or terminated, you can apply for either one. If youre self-employed, freelance or contract, you likely only qualify for the CERB.

The CERB pays $2,000 per month for four months to workers who wouldnt otherwise be eligible for employment insurance, such as contract workers or self-employed individuals; people staying home without pay to self-isolate or care for loved ones; and anyone else who hasnt been permanently laid off, but has stopped receiving paycheques.

Applications open online and by phone on April 6, with payments arriving within five days by direct deposit and within 10 days for cheques by mail.

If you applied for EI within the last two weeks and were approved, youll be moved over to the CERB when it becomes available. And if you applied before March 15, your EU payments will mirror the CERB amount for the first 16 weeks.

When it comes to applying for EI, Raso warned that you will be in charge of keeping track of your application, and that with the higher volume of applicants, the process could take a while.

Langille said its important to create a My Service Canada account so you can track your application using the four-digit code youll receive in the mail. You will also be responsible for making reports every two weeks, he said.

You have to be very proactive in pushing your claim forward, especially in these circumstances.

Raso said its also important not to expect EI to amount to what you were being paid before, especially if you were laid off from an industry that includes tips, such as food service or hairdressing. With some exceptions, tips are not EI insurable, she said.

Look for other ways to save

Raso said depending on your province and city, there may be ways for you to reduce your costs temporarily, while your income is lower than usual. For example, some provinces have made it impossible for landlords to evict you, and some cities are allowing residents to defer their utility bills.

As well, some landlords are allowing leniency for their tenants, and your bank may also have some flexible options for you. Raso said you should check every avenue and make decisions about what you want to prioritize during this time.

The situation is very fluid, she said, adding that though the news can be difficult to read or watch during such a stressful period, you should stay updated on what your city and province are doing to help you out.

Keep track of your mental health

David Grauwiler, executive director of the Alberta division of the Canadian Mental Health Association, said monitoring your mental health is paramount for everyone during this time.

The longer this goes on, the more vulnerable everyone is to depression and anxiety, he said.

For people with pre-existing mental health concerns, these challenges may be exacerbated by the uncertainty around work, Grauwiler said. And for people who dont have pre-existing conditions, its important to look out for depression and anxiety even if you havent experienced them before.

Listen to the feedback of those who are closest to you, Grauwiler said. If people seem concerned about you, or tell you that you seem different, maybe its time to call a mental-health hotline or find another resource.

Stay connected

During this time of social distancing and isolation, Grauwiler said its more important than ever to stay connected to family and friends.

It can be hard talking about getting laid off or about your emotions and worries. But remember that everyone is going through something similar, he said. So text, call or Skype more than you usually would. It could help you and your loved ones get through this difficult time.

People who find themselves in a time of uncertainty and find themselves suddenly jobless are in need of human interaction.

With files from Canadian Press

Read more about:
The Democrats stalled the $2 trillion stimulus for three days, in an attempt at stuffing the initiative with all the leftist policies they knew they could never foist upon the electorate through legislation or the ballot box.

China infected the world to save its reputation and provide for itself enhanced income-producing opportunities -- and is now not only lying about it but also using the death and chaos they caused as a weapon in its quest to rule the world.

The media is backing both plays. Twisted millenarianism is one thing they all have in common.

Parties, countries, and media have priorities and if you die, you die.

You see, to the iniquitous Chinese, the Democrats, and the media, your life, or anyones life or millions of lives, is a mere quibble when ruling the world is the potential prize.

China, the true sick man of Asia, seeks to export their diseased system, their fetid ideology, Mandate of Heaven strongman rule, and their home-grown pandemic upon free nations the world over. They want a world paying tribute to them and eternally grateful for the Chinese characteristics our societies will be required to assume.

On January 18, authorities allowed a communal feast in Wuhan attended by 40,000 families celebrating the Lunar New Year. By the last week of January, seven million people had left Wuhan (population, 11 million) for parts unknown. Now, we know where they went; Google pandemic deaths. All this before anyone in the West had even an inkling of the Chinese Virus. The world didnt know because China withheld the information.

The communist leadership of China, though, knew what they had on their hands. Armed volunteers were welding shut the doors of infected peoples homes to enforce their day late and a yuan short quarantine while they told the rest of the world there was still nothing to fear.

Communist leaders, to save themselves and China, washed their hands of it and dumped it on the rest of humanity. China, the Harry Lime of nations, was willing to sacrifice western lives for money and their plans of global domination.

China fully intends to profit from a worldwide disaster of their making by selling a lie based on their innocence and benevolence -- taking over more of the worlds supply chain in the process. Theyve told us so.

And, most surprising, the Democrats and American media have been complicit with China in their plan to rule the world. Talk about selling someone the rope for his own hanging.

Having successfully built an economy on technology theft, product dumping, unfair trade practices, currency manipulation, lying, and various other legerdemain, China undoubtedly is feeling its oats (along with eating its pangolins, bats, and monkeys). Aware of the coming worldwide pandemic, because they caused it, the first order of action was to buy up the globes supply of surgical masks and pandemic medical supplies.

They needed to act fast, before anyone else became aware of their perfidy and malintent. Thats good business if youre Scrooge, Mr. Potter, Stalin, Hitler, or Mao -- hes the guy whose face was on an ornament hanging from President Obamas Christmas tree, way back when. Maybe someday Xi can hang too.

The die cast, they threatened to withhold Americas medications, throwing America into the mighty sea of the Coronavirus. Then they blamed our country for their virus and demanded an apology -- while seeding the cloud with false memes of stalwart Chinese bravery and technological superiority coming to the aid of a humanity beleaguered by a plague they accused American GIs of deliberately causing.

Its easy to sell lies when you have the Democratic Party and the media of the freest nation on earth willing to prostitute themselves for renminbi and power.

Americans are expected to forget China nationalized an American-owned company producing N95 masks as their navy stopped a container ship bound for the free world with the coveted masks, redirecting it back to China where the cargo was immediately seized for resale when the price was right. In the future, it shouldnt surprise anyone were it to become known that China is buying up the worlds supply of chloroquine.

The left controls the media, the academy, and the Democratic Party. They have always had the power to set the narrative. Thats why they hate Trump so much; he can seize any discussion and force talkers and listeners to talk and listen to what he wants them to talk about and listen to.

The Chinese Pandemic is the perfect opportunity for them to retake the initiative and make this about Trumps failures -- if only people would just die faster. Americans, those selfish bastards, its always all about them, if they would just die quickly and in mass quantities, all this could be over, and Trump would be out.

Well, at least they were able to destroy the economy and are doing their levelheaded best to create Chinese primacy.

Wake up, America -- China is our enemy, and now that the media has dispensed with merely being biased and are actively working to aid and abet Chairman Xi in his battle to make America a vassal state paying tribute to the country the elite believe should be running the world, Americans need to understand the war we are in.

We are told, there are no new cases of "Wu-Flu" in China.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Take 7th Avenue.

How do you get zero new cases of the Chinese Virus? Stop testing.

Breaking: Xi, through diligent work and world-class leadership, along with prescient planning & superior Chinese technology, has begun a program to bring back from the dead early Chinese victims of the American pandemic. CNN 04/01/2020

The Chinese, just like the Democrats, and the media, understand to never let a pandemic go to waste. And the Democrats and the media are just fine with that.

Imagine what theyll do when they have all the power.
 Flash

A hospital in Suining, southwest China's Sichuan Province donated 7,000 surgical masks to two medical institutions in Spain and the Netherlands Thursday, according to the hospital.

After hearing of these institutions' shortage of medical protective materials, Suining Central Hospital donated the masks to Mutua De Terrassa University Hospital in Spain and Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands. The hospital also shared its novel coronavirus treatment experience with these institutions via video chat and mail.

In 2016, the hospital established a cooperative relationship with Mutua De Terrassa University Hospital in the fields of medical treatment, teaching and scientific research. The two sides have sent experts and scholars to each other for academic exchanges and cooperation.

The hospital also started cooperation with Maastricht University Medical Center in 2019.
In a move that indicates India is readying for massive novel coronavirus (COVID-19) testing, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has sought price quotes for the supply of 10 lakh antibody kits (serological test) for diagnosis of COVID-19. It will also procure 7 lakh RNA extraction kits, for a method which is currently used for COVID-19 testing in the country.

The decision marks a clear shift in India's approach towards COVID-19 testing as ICMR, which is spearheading the coronavirus diagnosis efforts, has till March 25 tested only 25,144 samples from 24,254 individuals. As per the body, the number of positive cases has touched 581 so far.

The agency has invited kit manufacturers to quote their prices. It has also asked them about supply timeline and capacity available for COVID-19 testing kits that are approved by ICMR or international authorities like USFDA and EUA.

The quotes should reach ICMR on March 26. The supply locations for the test kits are Dibrugarh, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bhopal and Delhi. The ICMR letter says the requirement is to ensure the supply as soon as possible.

In addition to over a 100 government laboratories that have been approved for the COVID-19 testing, the health ministry has recently roped in close to 30 private laboratories with over 17,000 collection centres all over the country to carry out COVID-19 tests based on the ICMR protocols.

The laboratories are in the process of procuring the test kits and readying themselves for scaling up testing capabilities. The ICMR has also indicated that it might go for parallel contracts to more than one vendors to ensure timely supply.

Also read: ICMR revises testing plan to combat coronavirus spread

Also read: Combating coronavirus: Hydroxychloroquine makers face supply chain hurdles
Pakistan has sought USD 3.7 billion additional loan from three multilateral creditors to cope with the economic crisis being posed by the coronavirus outbreak, as the pandemic spread further in the country, infecting nearly 1,200 people and killing nine so far.

In addition to USD 1.4 billion loan from the IMF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank will extend loans of USD 1 billion and USD 1.25 billion respectively to the country, Adviser to the Prime Minister on Finance Abdul Hafeez Shaikh said at a conference on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Imran Khan had earlier announced a Rs 1.2 trillion economic relief package.

The number of coronavirus patients in Pakistan has reached to 1,179, according to the latest official data.

There were 421 patients in Sindh, 394 in Punjab, 131 in Balochistan, 123 in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), 84 in Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), 25 in Islamabad and 1 in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, according to the website of ministry of health services.

There was another death due to the virus, taking the toll to 9, while 28 patients have recovered so far and 5 were in critical conditions. So far 77 new cases have been reported on Thursday, according to official website.

Slight improvement was seen in worst-hit Sindh as the number of new cases slowed but it was increasing in Punjab, Balochistan, KP, GB and federal capital areas.

Balochistan government spokesperson Liaquat Shahwani said 12 more coronavirus cases were reported, taking the total provincial tally to 131.

KP health official reported 43 new cases as the provincial tally rose to 123. Its worst hit area was Manga village of Mardan district where the virus spread when a man returned from Saudi Arabia after performing pilgrimage (Umra) and invited 2,000 villagers to celebrate it. Reportedly, he hugged everyone.

Later, he was tested positive and incidentally was the first to die in Pakistan due to the coronavirus.

Pakistan President Arif Alvi has urged religious scholars to stop all congregational prayers to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The move came following a 'fatwa' (edict) issued on Wednesday by the Grand Imam Shaikh of Jamia Al Azhar and the Supreme Council in Egypt, saying that head of the state is empowered to stop collective prayers in the current situation.

The clerics informed the president that over 3 million madrassa students were sent homes after closing seminaries.

Prime Minister Imran Khan on Thursday paid a visit to an isolation centre in Islamabad, where he was briefed about the arrangements by the chairman of National Disaster Management Authority.

Separately, Prime Minister Khan chaired a meeting of National Core Committee to evaluate response to contain the virus.

Planning Minister Asad Umar told the media after the meeting that it was decided to keep education institutions across the country shut until May 31.

Also, the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) was not allowed by the government to fly four special flights to Toronto, London, Manchester and Birmingham amid a rise in the number of coronavirus cases across the United Kingdom and North America.

Earlier, the PIA announced that it will be operating exclusive premium flights for those passengers who need to return home immediately.

Pakistan has already suspended international flights this week. However, cargo flights are exempted from the flight suspension ban.

Despite increase in the number of positive cases, Khan was still ambivalent on the issue of complete curfew like lockdown, which he said would hit hard the daily wagers and those living below the poverty line.

He asked the provinces to continuously reassess the lockdown as it may have serious impact on the economy.

Meanwhile, to ease the burden on jails and reduce chances of infection in prisons, Sindh province has decided to release 829 under-trial prisoners on the directives of the Sindh High Court Chief Justice Ahmed Ali M. Shaikh.

Similar steps were already taken in the federal capital areas on the direction of the Islamabad High Court.

Also, all 104 members of the Senate or the upper house have decided to donate one month's salary to the emergency fund set up by the government to deal with the coronavirus pandemic in the country.

However, Senate Chairman Sadiq Sanjrani would donate three months' salary to the fund.

The Pakistan economy was feeling the heat of local and global lockdown and the currency lost Rs 4.40 to reach at Rs166 against the US dollar in intraday trade in the interbank market.

It showed that rupee tanked to all-time low of Rs 164.05 on June 27, 2019.

The lockdown in various provinces and areas was going on and the number of people on road was considerably low. Though, there was instances where people were seen together and some of them arrested by police.

Police also arrested a groom and wedding guests in Pakpattan area of Punjab after they assembled for the marriage ceremony in violation of ban on all such gatherings.

The novel coronavirus - which originated in the central China city of Wuhan towards the end of last December - has now spread to all over the world. The COVID-19 has so far killed over 21,000 of people and infected close to half a million others across the globe.

COVID-19 cases witnessed a sharp surge in Pakistan after hundreds pilgrims, who returned from Iran, one of the worst-affected countries, tested positive.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
DETROIT - Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Honda and Toyota took steps Thursday to restart North American factories that have been closed to protect workers from the coronavirus.

The plants would reopen in early or mid-April, restoring the largest source of cash for automakers that generally book revenue when they ship vehicles to dealerships.

Auto companies, like other businesses, are trying to manage their way through the coronavirus crisis, which has forced factories to close amid employee concerns that they could catch the virus while working close to others at factory work stations.

Ford said it wants to reopen five North American assembly plants, starting with one in Mexico on April 6 and continuing with four in the U.S. on April 14. The move was immediately met with skepticism by the United Auto Workers union, which represents 56,000 Ford factory workers.

The UAW continues to review with great caution and concern decisions being made about restarting workplaces, especially at advanced dates, union President Rory Gamble said in a statement.

Honda wants to reopen U.S. and Canadian factories on April 7, a week later than originally planned, while Toyota plans to restart North American plants on April 20. Fiat Chrysler intends to reopen U.S. and Canadian factories April 14 depending on state restrictions and plant readiness. General Motors says it hasnt decided yet when factories would restart. Most automakers said they would monitor the virus and adjust decisions if needed.

The factory decisions contrast with Italy, which on Thursday expanded a nationwide lockdown to include most heavy industry. Auto plants in Italy, which leads the world in virus deaths, already had been closed voluntarily.

The automakers moves in the U.S. come as new auto sales are expected to fall dramatically for the month of March. Edmunds.com expects March sales to fall nearly 36% from a year earlier.

Ford, in a release before the markets opened Thursday, said its aiming to reopen its factory in Hermosillo, Mexico, followed by its Dearborn, Michigan, truck plant, Kentucky truck plant in Louisville, the Ohio Assembly Plant near Cleveland, and the Transit van line at the Kansas City plant. The company also wants to reopen some parts-making plants on the same day, including four in Michigan, which is among the states hardest hit by the virus.

The Dearborn, Michigan, automaker says it will introduce additional safety measures to protect workers, but said it would give details later. Ford wants to reopen five North American assembly plants in April that were closed due to the threat of coronavirus.

All three Detroit automakers suspended production at U.S. factories a week ago under pressure from the United Auto Workers union, which had concerns about worker safety.

The Ford decision comes as the number of people infected by the virus spikes in Michigan. On Wednesday the state reported at least 2,294 infections and that the number of deaths nearly doubled from 24 to 43.

Two Detroit-area hospital systems said they are caring for more than 1,000 COVID-19 patients at 13 hospitals. At Beaumont Health and Henry Ford Health System, operating rooms were being converted into intensive care units and clinics had been turned into rooms for patients needing other medical care.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is hoping the United States will be reopened by Easter as he weighs how to relax nationwide social-distancing guidelines to put some workers back on the job during the coronavirus outbreak.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins, said by April 14, experts will have a better idea what the trajectory is for new coronavirus cases and whether factories can be run with appropriate social distancing. Its important, he said, to find was to operate factories safely. I would say we have to think about what the path forward is going to be, he said.

The decisions on whether to reopen factories should be based on local virus transmissions and infections, he said, adding that the number of people infected is going to rise because of additional testing that is now being done.

Cole Stevenson, a worker who installs steering wheels at Fords huge pickup truck plant in Dearborn, said a reopening three weeks into the future is probably long enough to protect workers.

If theyve researched up enough on how long the virus lives on surfaces and things like that, and theyre doing their part to keep that at a minimum, I guess Im not too inclined to worry, he said.

Stevenson said other workers may be more apprehensive about the virus, but he says he keeps his distance to guard against the coronavirus.

The UAWs Gamble, though, suggested that Ford keep worker safety at the top of its list before restarting operations.

The only guideline in a boardroom should be management asking themselves, Would I send my family  my own son or daughter  into that plant and be 100% certain they are safe? Gamble said.

The Ford Motor factories, which largely make highly profitable pickup trucks, commercial vans and big SUVs, are key to Fords financial health. The Ford F-150 pickup made at the Dearborn Truck plant is the top-selling vehicle in America thats responsible for much of the companys profit.

The Ford factories were to be closed until March 30. Combined, the Detroit automakers have about 150,000 unionized factory workers.

Two union workers from Fiat Chrysler plants in the Detroit area and Kokomo, Indiana, have died this week from complications due to the virus, but its not clear whether they got it at the factories or elsewhere.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death.

The effort to reopen the plants comes as Amazon and other operators of large warehouses continue operations, although some of the goods theyre distributing are considered essential.
France is pulling out its troops from Iraq due to the coronavirus outbreak which has affected more than 25,000 people in the country and claimed over 1,000 lives.

The withdrawal of the French military contingent from Iraq was announced on Wednesday by the Iraqi military command, Sputnik reported citing the local media.

"In cooperation with the Iraqi government, the coalition decided to adjust its presence in Iraq and temporarily suspend its training of the Iraqi security forces, especially taking into account the health care crisis," the Le Figaro newspaper quoted the General Staff's communique.

The troop withdrawal will start from March 26 onwards.

France has confirmed 25,233 coronavirus infection cases, among which 1,331 people have died, Director General of Health Jerome Salomon announced on Wednesday.

According to the WHO's daily situation report, more than 4,14,000 cases have been confirmed worldwide, over 18,000 people have died. Meanwhile, Europe has registered a total of 2,20,516 confirmed cases with more than 11, 986 deaths.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
President Ram Nath Kovind is likely to address all governors and lieutenant governors soon through video conference to discuss the coronavirus outbreak and ask them to help the state administrations combat the endemic, an official said on Thursday.

The move came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a series of meetings with various stakeholders, including chief ministers, industrialists, doctors and healthcare workers, representatives of the pharmaceutical industry and senior editors.

The president is expected to address the governors and lieutenant governors soon to encourage them to be involved in the fight against coronavirus, the senior government official said.

The involvement of the constitutional heads is seen as an all-out effort of the central government to deal with the emerging medical crisis engulfing the world.

Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister P K Mishra, Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba, Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla also held several meetings with chief secretaries of all states and asked them to ensure full compliance of the 21- day lockdown and at the same to ensure the availability of essential commodities.

COVID-19 has so far claimed 13 lives in India and there are 649 postive cases.

On Thursday, the Union Finance Ministry unveiled a Rs 1.70 lakh crore economic package, involving free foodgrain and cooking gas, to the poor for the next three months, one-time doles to women and poor senior citizens among other benefits.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The coronavirus shutdown did not knock down cyber charter schools the same way it has brick and mortar schools because the bulk of instruction already was being delivered to cyber students online.

But state officials have warned cyber charters against trying to take advantage of the crisis to recruit new students during the shutdown, while school districts across the state grapple with how to provide instruction remotely. Brick-and-mortar school advocates say students jumping ship for cyber charters could further financially destabilize traditional school districts at an already vulnerable time.

An emergency school bill unanimously approved by the Pa. House and Senate Wednesday, however, put that issue to rest. The bill, which Gov. Tom Wolf is expected to sign, included language that freezes payments to school districts based on enrollments March 13, the day Wolf announced the shutdown.

That means cyber charter schools could accept new students during the shutdown, but they would not get compensated for those students until the shutdown is lifted.

As it stands, the shutdown could get lifted April 9. Thats the date Wolf set for schools to possibly reopen, but it depends on the spread of the coronavirus and many experts believe schools will be shuttered longer.

The Commonwealth Charter Academy, which provides virtual instruction to students across the state, had applications from 50 families pending on Monday, a spokesman told public news station WHYY. The applications were put on hold while CCA awaits direction from the state.

The executive director for the PA Coalition of Public Charter Schools said cyber charters werent trying to profiteer, but that they should not be penalized for being exceptionally prepared for distance learning at a time distance learning is in demand.

We accept that cyber charters will not get paid for any new students. Are we happy about it? No, said Ana Meyers. We would like to be paid for kids were educating just like traditional schools are paid for the children they are educating.

Meyers said cyber charters have offered to assist the Pennsylvania Department of Education or any school district in the Commonwealth with questions or concerns about how to pivot to distance learning, since that is their speciality. Interested school districts can fill out a survey circulating on social media to get linked up with a cyber charter for professional insight and assistance, she said.

She said PDE nor any school district has accepted their offer so far. But Meyers noted two school districts participated in a free webinar offered by a charter that contained professional guidance for successful distance learning.

Politics should be put aside and we should work together, Meyers said. Our goal is not to take students away, but we believe students should be educated.

Meyers said they have accepted that cyber charters will not be reimbursed by school districts for educating transfer students during the shutdown, but she said cyber charters are further hampered by being unsure if they can legally enroll students at all during the shutdown.

She said language on the state education website is unclear.

We are in a crisis, she said. We need clarity. I just wish we could get an answer.

Cyber charter schools currently educate more than 37,000 students in Pennsylvania, according to the charter school coalition. The education is free to parents, but home school districts must pay the annual tuition, which varies by district but ranges from $9,000 to $15,000 for non-special education students.

The recent conflict between cyber charters and traditional schools emerged shortly after the shutdown when a cyber charter leader proclaimed they were still open, in a newspaper article, said Mark DiRocco, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators.

All public schools, including cyber charters, were supposed to close their physical buildings, so the statement prompted the state department of education to warn cyber schools that they too, should have closed their physical buildings and be practicing social distancing with any online instruction that was still being offered.

Meyers said the issue was a misunderstanding and that the statement about being open merely reflected the charters ability to offer continued education at a time when many traditional school districts did not know how they were going to proceed with instructional days. Cyber schools were offline for a day or two as they regrouped, she said, canceling field trips and any in-person instruction that was planned and getting teachers set-up to teach from their homes.

DiRocco said the legislation approved Wednesday allows districts to focus on getting back to instruction instead of worrying about potential unexpected budget deficits due to a spike in tuition payments to cyber charters.

It would be very disruptive for everyone involved if students tried to pivot the last few months to cyber charters, DiRocco said. It could have been a huge financial hit at a time school districts need all the resources they can. There is already so much going on, we didnt need to add to it.

The new law keeps everything in place, DiRocco said.

If parents want to transfer students to cyber charters after schools reopen, then that would be their choice, he said. Thats when payments to charters for new enrollments potentially could be authorized.

But if schools dont reopen this school year, its unclear how those potential payments would be handled.

Our association is not against cyber charters, DiRocco said, adding that he thought it was great that cyber charters were offering free assistance and a webinar. We think they have a place in the educational environment. We just want to make sure the rules are the same for all.

READ: Pa. school districts prepare for possibility of students not returning to classrooms
Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the G20 leaders to come out with a plan which focused on human lives and reduced the hardships faced by economically weaker sections of society due to the unprecedented challenges presented by the Coronavirus pandemic that has taken over 18,500 lives and infected over 400,000 people globally and sent multiple nations into an economic tailspin, said ANI.

PM Modi said there was a need to put human beings at the centre of the groupings message.

Lets put human beings rather than economic targets at centre of our vision for global prosperity, cooperation, PTI quoted PM at G20 meet on coronavirus.

The prime minister also said that there was a need for a new concept of globalisation if there had to be an effective global response to the present crisis, the agency said.

Covid-19 has offered an opportunity to look at a new concept of globalization. One that also focuses on humanity, climate change, and terrorism other than economic & financial aspects, ANI said.

The G20 grouping met on Thursday through video conferencing and pledged $5 trillion to be injected into the global economy by member nations especially to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.

PM Modi, according to ANI, during the virtual summit, made a point that the forum has become a platform to address financial & economic issues and at many levels, globalization has failed us, whether it is in combating terrorism or climate change.

NSA Ajit Doval & External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar were also present during the conference.

ANI also said that there was no discussion on the origins of the deadly virus, an issue, that had led to an international debate after US President Donald Trump described Covid-19 pandemic as the Chinese Virus.

The spirit was collaborative & discussions were held on how to deal with the current crisis. There were no efforts to ascribe blame to anyone for the outbreak of the virus, ANI said .
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Linkedin News Desk (Reuters)  Thu, March 26, 2020 19:18 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da5651 2 Business ford,production,automaker,US,North-America,plants Free

Ford Motor Co said on Thursday it planned to restart production at some plants in North America as early as April 6, in a sign of hope for US automakers as the industry grapples with the damages from the coronavirus pandemic.

The No. 2. US automaker said it was bringing key plants back online, while introducing additional safety measures to protect returning workers from the coronavirus pandemic.

"We will continue to assess public health conditions as well as supplier readiness and will adjust plans if necessary," the company said in a statement.

Ford plans to begin production at its Hermosillo Assembly Plant on one shift.

Earlier this week, Reuters had reported citing sources that Ford did not plan to restart production until at least April 6, warning it could be further delayed into April.

Detroit's Big Three shut plants and curtailed production to limit the number of workers on the job to prevent the spread of coronavirus among roughly 150,000 factory employees.

The global auto industry is bracing for worldwide sales to plummet more than 12% from 2019, worse than the two-year peak-to-trough decline of 8% during the global recession in 2008-2009, research firm IHS Markit predicted on Wednesday.

Detroit auto companies are in a far better financial health than they were ahead of the 2008-2009 crisis. Their balance sheets are healthier. Earlier this month, GM and Ford moved to build cash reserves further by drawing down a combined total of more than $30 billion from credit lines.

Shares of the company were down 4.8% in premarket trade.
COVID-19 Update from Cedars-Sinai President and CEO

Cedars-Sinai is fully prepared to take care of all its patients during the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, says Thomas M. Priselac, president and CEO. In a three-minute video address to the community and staff members, Priselac discusses Cedars-Sinais important role in the current health crisis.

We are seeing extraordinary events. It is a stressful time for Los Angeles and of course the world, Priselac says. As you adapt and adjust, I want you to know, to have full confidence, that Cedars-Sinai is ready. We are responding quickly with the full range of our capabilities and resources. Our care teams are experts in treating new and emerging diseases and working with federal, state and local authorities.

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We have this in hand. We are doing what we always do: making sure that our patients getting the best possible care, he said. As always, we have patients with a wide variety of needs, and at present that includes COVID-19 patients, along with the hundreds of other patients with other medical needs

To ensure it can serve all its patients, he noted, Cedars-Sinai is postponing elective procedures for the next few weeks, and some patients are doing visits by phone or video. Thank you for your understanding and all of the significant adjustments you are making, he said.

Priselac concluded: As you go through these difficult times, please know that Cedars-Sinai is ready. We have been serving our city for 118 years. We are here for you now We will continue to be here. And together we will manage this challenge.

For more information about COVID-19, please visit Cedars-Sinais COVID-19 page.
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Prime Minister and Chair of the EOC Silveria Jacobs visited PJIA on March 25th, to accept the donation of 5000 medical masks on behalf of the Government of St. Maarten. The donated masks are to be used by the Medical Professionals on St. Maarten who are on the frontlines of the battle to block the spread of COVID-19 and care for our patients.





On Monday, Royal Dutch Airlines KLM transported 8,000 masks to St. Maarten on the request of PJIA. The remainder of the masks will be used for the protection of PJIA employees against the COVID-19 virus while they are at work. This is specifically important in areas where passengers frequent. The multiple pallets arrived on a passenger-empty flight from Schiphol, Amsterdam.





Brian Mingo, the CEO of PJIA, expressed his thanks to Schiphol for making these masks available and to KLM for transporting it. Additionally, PJIA Task Force Manager Connelly Conner, stated that PJIAs objective is to minimize the spread of this virus, protect staff, the airport community, tourists, and the public from becoming infected.





Prime Minister Jacobs recognized PJIA as a key stakeholder in the Emergency Support Function ESF 10 along with Port St. Maarten. Prime Minister Jacobs said, PJIA has worked towards implementing measures to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 and I thank them for their close cooperation."





The Government of St. Maarten is appreciative of the 5000 masks that arrived from Schiphol. This is one of PJIAs best gestures despite their great cooperation thus far seeing these trying times, Prime Minister Jacobs stated.





Prime Minister Jacobs encourages other businesses to exercise their social responsibility and explore how their business can contribute within the community or via the government, which can get help to those persons most vulnerable in our society. We need all hands on deck, Prime Minister Jacobs concluded.




STAMFORD  A Norwalk homeless man, who was held this week on a $100,000 court-appearance bond after being implicated in the death of another man, was released Thursday morning after it was determined an altercation between the two had nothing to do with the other mans demise, police said.

Police have also released the name of the man who died last weekend as Anthony Santiago.

Ricky Hickman, 57, had a morning hearing Thursday before Judge Gary White at the Stamford courthouse where it was revealed that an autopsy on Santiago determined a push by Hickman was not the cause of the mans death, Assistant States Attorney Mike Nemec said.

When Hickman was arraigned on Monday morning, Senior Assistant States Attorney Joseph Valdes said police in Norwalk were concerned that some marks found around the neck of Santiago, 30, could have revealed foul play as to the cause of his death.

Following his arraignment, Hickman was not due back in court until April 29 but was returned earlier after the autopsy was competed.

Valdes said it was Hickman who called 911 after Santiago, who was also homeless, did not get up after the two had an altercation in the Webster Street parking lot late on Saturday.

Nemec said Hickman told investigating officers that he pushed Santiago during the altercation and told the 911 dispatcher that Santiago would not get up afterwards. The push, however, did not lead to Santiagos death, Nemec said in court Thursday morning.

Supervisory Assistant States Attorney Paul Ferencek said an autopsy did not reveal the cause of Santiagos death and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is awaiting a toxicology report to wrap up its investigation.

Although the original charges of second-degree assault and criminal trespassing remain lodged against Hickman, the results of the autopsy allowed the state to reduce Hickmans bond to a promise to appear in court and he was released.

White asked Liz Reid, Norwalks lead public defender, if she would be able to get Hickman back to the Open Door shelter where he resides in Norwalk and Reid said she would.

No plea has been made to the charges and the case was returned to the Part B docket in Norwalk.

jnickerson@stamfordadvocate.com
A professor pretended he was on an expedition in Africa so his daughter wouldn't know he was in self-isolation in a camper van behind the family home.

Julian Bayliss, 50, told the white lie to his daughter Poppy, four, to prevent her getting upset.

For the past ten days he has been calling her on Skype  from 300 yards away. The noted butterfly expert from Wrexham took the extreme measure after returning from Ethiopia where he had contact with a virus carrier.

Professor Julian Bayliss (right with daughter Poppy), 50, from Wrexham, told his four-year-old daughter Poppy that he was on an expedition in Africa

The father had been self-isolating inside a camper van behind the family home after returning from Ethiopia where he had contact with a virus carrier

For ten days, Mr Bayliss (pictured in camper van) called his daughter on Skype from 300 yards away and told her he was on an expedition

After finally being reunited with his daughter yesterday, he said: 'It was worth every single cold night in that camper to see the look on her face. It's very good to be home.

These have been very long days, the boredom has been difficult and so has the cold. Having just got off a plane from Africa it didn't feel great to suddenly find myself in a camper van in temperatures of minus five for a couple of nights.'

He added: 'The most difficult thing has been keeping this secret from Poppy.'

The butterfly expert (left and right with daughter) said he had just got off his plane from Africa when he did't feel himself and decided to isolate in his van

The father (pictured with Poppy and partner Malaika) was away from his family for ten days

The father added that the most difficult part of self-isolating in his van was keeping it a secret from Poppy

Danny Hughes, a paramedic from Newhaven in East Sussex, is living in a camper van to protect his family from Covid-19.

The 28-year-old RAF veteran said he was in daily contact with high-risk virus patients, adding: 'I may not have symptoms but there is nothing to say I won't pass it on to my family.'

Mr Hughes works for the South East Coast Ambulance Service in Polegate.
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(TNS)  Doctors and physicians assistants have joined the states hospitals in urging Gov. Roy Cooper to go further in limiting unnecessary contact between people to try to stem the spread of coronavirus. The N.C. Medical Society called on Cooper to issue an executive order to stop the publics in-person access to non-essential businesses for two weeks. Though it did not use the phrases shelter in place or stay at home, the societys letter to the governor Wednesday echoed the states hospital association, which on Monday urged Cooper to order people to shelter in place.Like the hospitals, the medical society cited potential shortages of supplies, equipment and hospital beds as the number of COVID-19 cases grow across the state. The societys letter was signed by its president, Dr. Palmer Edwards, and Robert Seligson, its executive vice president and CEO.Now is the time to take decisive action to limit the spread and preserve our precious resources to fight this pandemic, they wrote. If action is delayed, we fear we will not be able to handle the surge in the health care needs.The medical society has about 10,000 members across the state.Local governments in North Carolina began this week to order residents to shelter in place or stay at home . They include the states two largest counties, Wake and Mecklenburg, and the City of Durham But Cooper has so far resisted calls to do the same statewide. At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, he stopped short of ordering people to stay home but suggested more restrictions will be coming.Local communities are doing what they think is right, and I understand that, Cooper said. Its important for us to make sure that we are deliberate and that we get this right. Were telling people now that we want them to stay home. ... And we will be issuing additional orders soon.Not everyone is eager for more restrictions on commerce and peoples movements in the face of coronavirus. On Saturday, the N.C. Chamber of Commerce published a statement saying it thinks ordering people to stay home should be done only as a last resort.While some states have taken the drastic step of resorting to shelter-in-place orders endeavoring to control the spread of COVID-19, North Carolinas practiced response to natural disasters and disciplined emergency management has us well positioned to avoid a total shutdown in the near term, wrote Gary Salamido, the chambers president and CEO.Undoubtedly, public health and safety sits prominently as our lodestar, Salamido continued, but tripping the main breaker can only be a last resort  this position of the NC Chamber and the business community has been communicated to Governor Roy Cooper.The chamber includes hospitals and physician groups among its members, and some were not pleased with its position. Carl Armato, president and CEO of Novant Health, which operates clinics and 15 hospitals in four states, sent a letter to Salamido on Monday urging him to reverse his position.In short, your message places the economy above the lives of the people of North Carolina, and I cannot stand by and allow that to continue unchecked, Armato wrote.Like other crises, history will remember those who took bold action to protect the lives of their communities, he continued. I ask you to join the doctors, nurses, and other experts whose wise counsel, if heeded now, will protect what matters most  the lives of those who are depending on us to call for what is needed, even when what is needed is difficult.2020 The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.)Visit The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) at www.newsobserver.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Easton Hospital remained open Thursday, following Wednesdays deadline set by its for-profit owner to get a commitment of $40 million to continue operating.

During Thursdays daily briefing on the expanding coronavirus crisis, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf said his administration is doing everything possible to keep the Wilson Borough facility open. The state has not, however, committed to the bailout.

"We need to keep our hospitals operating in this very important time," Wolf said.

The state health secretary, Dr. Rachel Levine, added that the administration is working with all departments to keep Easton Hospital operating, saying it's "essential" to keep all acute care hospitals open in the face of the worsening pandemic.

A representative of Easton Hospital owner Steward Health Care confirmed it sent a letter earlier this week to Wolf saying it needed around $40 million to continue operating. According to a report by The Morning Call, Steward had notified the state Department of Health in January the hospital would be sold to St. Lukes University Health Network by April 21 or close before that date.

Since then, Steward Health Care said March 19 that Easton Hospital had joined over local health networks serving the Lehigh Valley in canceling elective surgeries as the COVID-19 caseload continued to increase. The loss of that revenue led to the point the hospital cannot remain open, Steward said in its letter.

Steward's spokeswoman did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and a call to the hospital administration was directed to the spokeswoman.

In an email exchange with state officials, state Rep. Robert Freeman emphasized the importance of Easton Hospital to the community and noted Steward Health Care's projection it would have to shutter Easton Hospital by April 1 without the $40 million.

They are a critical hospital in the Easton area for providing medical care in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and to close at this time when the CORVID-19 is expected to surge would be catastrophic, Freeman, D-Northampton, wrote in the exchange shared with lehighvalleylive.com. If they were to close we would be deprived of access to their 200 licensed beds, ICU facilities, and important medical equipment such as life saving ventilators. In addition, some 700 employees would lose their jobs should Easton Hospital close.

In response, Kate Roberts, deputy secretary in the governors Office of Legislative Affairs, confirmed active efforts to see how the state can help. Roberts also noted U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., has been working on the request and that there may be some funding available in the coronavirus stimulus bill passed Wednesday night by the Senate.

Included in the bill is a provision for qualified hospitals to request up to 125% of six months' worth of Medicare payments to provide a "reliable and stable cash flow to help them maintain an adequate workforce, buy essential supplies, create additional infrastructure, and keep their doors open to care for patients," according to a description of the bill provided by Toomey's office.

The House is projected to pass the overall $2.2 trillion bill Friday and send it to President Donald Trump for his signature.

Department of Health spokesman Nate Wardle on Thursday added context to the states efforts, saying discussions are continuing and the department is working to see what options are available in regard to Easton Hospital.

"The administration is working with stakeholders to determine the needs of hospitals throughout the commonwealth, and to ensure we are prepared," Wardle wrote in an email. "We know that during normal circumstances, many of the hospitals across the state run with a very limited operating margin, without a lot of wiggle room. We know that the postponement of elective procedures, the cost of responding to COVID-19, etc. could be difficult for many hospitals and health systems.

"However, we are in the midst of a public health crisis, and it is essential that hospitals are able to care for those in need, whether with COVID-19 or with other health emergencies."

New cases of coronavirus in Pennsylvania surged by 560 on Thursday, more than double the 276 new patients reported the day before and the states highest daily count yet. The new reports of COVID-19 bring the state total to 1,687 cases as of midnight Wednesday, the Pennsylvania Department of Health reported in its daily update. The number of coronavirus-related deaths also rose from 11 to 16, including a fourth death from COVID-19 in the Lehigh Valley.

Across the Delaware River, New Jerseys total known cases of the coronavirus increased to at least 6,876 with 81 deaths as officials announced another 2,492 new positive test results Thursday, by far the largest single-day increase since the outbreak.

For more information on the coronavirus, consult your state health department at health.pa.gov or covid19.nj.gov and the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover or a personal story you want to share.

Reporter Steve Novak contributed to this report. Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. If theres anything about this story that needs attention, please email him. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Perth, Australia, Mar 26, 2020 - (ABN Newswire) - Cardinal Resources Limited (ASX:CDV.AX - News) (HAM:C3L.F - News) (OTCMKTS:CRDNF - News) (TOR:CDV.TO - News) is pleased to advise that it has received approval for the expansion of the current Mining Licence from 19 km2 to 63 km2, more than tripling the size of the Mining Licence for its world-class Namdini Gold Project in Ghana.

HIGHLIGHTS

- Mining Licence increased to a maximum allowable area of 63 km2 from 19 km2 for a term of 15 years and is renewable

- Expanded Mining Licence allows for further financial optimisation by repositioning infrastructure such as tailings storage facilities, stockpiles and waste dumps

- Exploration potential enhanced within expanded area along the Namdini shear to the south

Cardinal's Chief Executive Officer / Managing Director, Archie Koimtsidis stated:

"It is most pleasing to have the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources and the Minerals Commission of Ghana support our Mining Licence area expansion. The expansion aligns with the Company's plan to not only significantly optimise the location of key infrastructure such as tailings storage facilities, stockpiles and waste dumps but also to further explore financial benefits during the Front-End Engineering and Design (FEED) of the Namdini Project. Further, it allows the Company to expand its exploration activities immediately south of Namdini which has great potential along the southern extension of the Namdini shear."

Namdini Mining Licence

The Minerals Commission of Ghana has approved a significant expansion of the Namdini Mining Licence. The new Mining Licence area covers a total of 63 km2 which is the maximum allowable area (Figure 1*).

A Large-Scale Mining License covering the Namdini Mining License was granted to Cardinal Namdini Mining Limited ("Cardinal Namdini"), a wholly owned subsidiary of Cardinal Resources Limited, by the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources under the Ghanaian Minerals and Mining Act 2006 (Act 703) in 2017.

Story continues

The Large-Scale Mining Licence originally covered 19km2 in the Dakoto area of the Talensi District in the Upper East Region of Ghana. The expanded Large-Scale Mining Licence now covers 63 km2 (Figure 1*) and has been granted for an initial period of 15 years commencing in 2020 and is renewable. The expanded Large-Scale Mining Licence allows Cardinal to optimise and de-risk mine and infrastructure design and optimise financial outcomes as the Company continues to progress the FEED programme.

Cardinal is readying for development of the world-class Namdini Gold Project located in Northern Ghana, subject to concluding project development financing. Once developed, the Namdini Gold Project is expected to produce over 360,000 ounces per annum for the first two years of operation and over the life of mine is expected to produce an average of 287,000 ounces per annum. The Definitive Feasibility Study completed in late 2019, indicated compelling economics, including a post-tax NPV5 of over US$958 million which is capable of generating over US$1.55 billion in undiscounted project cashflow (assuming a gold price of US$1,550/oz).

*Cardinal's Project development timetable is outlined in the link below.

https://abnnewswire.net/lnk/H269M2MU



About Cardinal Resources Ltd:

Cardinal Resources Ltd (ASX:CDV.AX - News) (TSE:CDV.AX - News) (OTCMKTS:CRDNF - News) is a West African gold exploration and development Company that holds interests in tenements within Ghana, West Africa.

The Company is focused on the development of the Namdini Project with a gold Ore Reserve of 5.1Moz (0.4 Moz Proved and 4.7 Moz Probable) and a soon to be completed Feasibility Study.

Exploration programmes are also underway at the Company's Bolgatanga (Northern Ghana) and Subranum (Southern Ghana) Projects.

Cardinal confirms that it is not aware of any new information or data that materially affects the information included in its announcement of the Ore Reserve of 3 April 2019. All material assumptions and technical parameters underpinning this estimate continue to apply and have not materially changed.

Contact:

Archie Koimtsidis

CEO / MD

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NEW DELHI: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday said that people need not panic as essential services shops will remain open 24X7 in the national capital during the 21-day lockdown announced by the Prime Minister to tackle coronavirus. The Delhi CM said that food delivery has also been allowed in the national capital.

He said this while addressing a joint press briefing with Delhi Lt Governor Anil Baijal.

Food home delivery services have been allowed; the delivery persons can show their ID cards that will be sufficient, Kejriwal said.

The AAP chief further informed that Mohalla clinics will continue to function but with all precautions.

Speaking on his turn, Lt Governor Anil Baijal said, Online service providers/e-retailers delivering essential services & goods to be allowed. All essential services shops can remain open 24 hours so that there is no rush of people.

Chief Minister Kejriwal had on Wednesday too assured people that the supply of essential commodities will not be hampered at any cost and added that personnel manning shops and engaged in other essential services would be issued E-passes promptly to facilitate their movement in the national capital during the 21-day lockdown period.

As per Union Health Ministry`s latest bulletin, the total number of COVID-19 positive cases has climbed to 649 in the country, including 593 active cases, 42 cured or discharged people and 13 deaths.

It may be noted that the Prime Minister, for a second time in a week, on Tuesday evening announced a 21-day countrywide lockdown from midnight due to the outbreak of the coronavirus.

PM Modi stressed that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly. In his televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Modi said that it is vital to break the chain of the disease and experts have said that at least 21 days are needed for it.

The Prime Minister, who had also addressed the nation last week, said the lockdown has drawn a "Lakshman Rekha" in every home and people should stay indoors for their own protection and for that of their families.

The 21-day lockdown has seen anxious people scrambling to nearby shops for essential supplies and services, prompting the government to urge citizens not to panic. E-commerce companies delivering essentials like groceries, medicines and food, however, alleged harassment from law enforcement officials and security guards, leading to severe inconvenience in times of an unprecedented crisis, calling for an urgent intervention from the government.

Despite the lockdown that has taken buses off the road and trains off the track, many migrant labourers have started on their way home, willing to risk sealed borders and vigilant policemen, who are tasked with ensuring that people not leave their homes except for most pressing need.
If, that is, you're lucky enough to have a bottle. On eBay, travel-size Purells went for $10 or $20 as coronavirus made its way into the United States. In gyms and yoga studios, before the gyms and yoga studios closed, communal bottles were padlocked to prevent theft, like engagement rings at Zales. In Tennessee, a former Air Force technical sergeant hoarded nearly 18,000 bottles from dollar stores across two states, hocking them for up to $70 apiece on Amazon until the retailer pulled the plug. When the New York Times reported what he had been doing, he received death threats and said he would donate his stockpile to churches.
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Linkedin Inforial (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia  Thu, March 26, 2020 10:11 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d75176 4 Inforial Free

Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration Minister Abdul Halim Iskandar has said that the allocation of village funds should be focused only on the Padat Karya Tunai program andhandling the COVID-19 pandemic and has instructed all village heads to revise their village budgets (APBDes).

The Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and TransmigrationMinistry has issued a circular letter to regents, mayors and village heads in regard to the policy, said the minister in Jakarta on March 24.

According to Abdul, the Covid-19 pandemic would have a serious impact on the economy and public health. For that reason, at President Joko Jokowi Widodos direction, he said village funds should be primarily used to handle theproblem.

The minister explained that prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, the allocation of village funds followed the guidelines on village fund utilization prioritiesenshrined in Permendes No. 11, 2019.

Under the regulation, village funds can be allocated for a range of programs, including Padat Karya Tunai, community empowerment, human resources development and building integrated health service posts (Posyandu). However, the government is now calling on villages to channel the funds into the two priority programs.

So today, villages that have already set their APBDes according to Permendes No. 11, 2019 should revise them, with focus given to the Padat Karya Tunai program and the Covid-19 prevention program, he said.

According to Abdul, the circular letter issued by the ministry explained in detail how to revise the APBDes and how to utilize the village funds for the two programs.

He added thatvillages must discuss with regional administrations and regional disaster mitigation agencies (BPBD) to determine the percentage of funds that should be earmarked for the two respective programs.

The percentage allocatedfor the Padat Karya Tunai program and the percentage allocated for Convid-19 should be adjusted to the circumstances of the respective villages. The allocations should be discussed with the regional administration and the BPBD to ensure the correct balance is achieved, explained the former head of the East Java Legislative Council (DPRD).

He added that the Padat Karya Tunai program was aimed at increasingthe economic resilience of rural areas. As we know, Covid-19 has caused global economic turbulence, he said.

The Padat Karya Tunai program has boosted peoples purchasing power. The working wage is to be paid daily so that money continues to circulate, which will lead to improved purchasing power. Hopefully, this will increase the economic resilience of rural regions, he remarked.

Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration Minister Abdul Halim Iskandar has said that the allocation of village funds should be focused only on the Padat Karya Tunai program andhandling the COVID-19 pandemic and has instructed all village heads to revise their village budgets (APBDes).

The Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and TransmigrationMinistry has issued a circular letter to regents, mayors and village heads in regard to the policy, said the minister in Jakarta on March 24.

According to Abdul, the Covid-19 pandemic would have a serious impact on the economy and public health. For that reason, at President Joko Jokowi Widodos direction, he said village funds should be primarily used to handle theproblem.

The minister explained that prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, the allocation of village funds followed the guidelines on village fund utilization prioritiesenshrined in Permendes No. 11, 2019.

Under the regulation, village funds can be allocated for a range of programs, including Padat Karya Tunai, community empowerment, human resources development and building integrated health service posts (Posyandu). However, the government is now calling on villages to channel the funds into the two priority programs.

So today, villages that have already set their APBDes according to Permendes No. 11, 2019 should revise them, with focus given to the Padat Karya Tunai program and the Covid-19 prevention program, he said.

According to Abdul, the circular letter issued by the ministry explained in detail how to revise the APBDes and how to utilize the village funds for the two programs.

He added thatvillages must discuss with regional administrations and regional disaster mitigation agencies (BPBD) to determine the percentage of funds that should be earmarked for the two respective programs.

The percentage allocatedfor the Padat Karya Tunai program and the percentage allocated for Convid-19 should be adjusted to the circumstances of the respective villages. The allocations should be discussed with the regional administration and the BPBD to ensure the correct balance is achieved, explained the former head of the East Java Legislative Council (DPRD).

He added that the Padat Karya Tunai program was aimed at increasingthe economic resilience of rural areas. As we know, Covid-19 has caused global economic turbulence, he said.

The Padat Karya Tunai program has boosted peoples purchasing power. The working wage is to be paid daily so that money continues to circulate, which will lead to improved purchasing power. Hopefully, this will increase the economic resilience of rural regions, he remarked.
With thousands of hapless daily-wagers trudging along desolate interstate highways on way back to their villages from various places outside the state, the Rajasthan government has begun receiving them and taking step to ferry them to their destinations after screening them for coronavirus infection.

The imposition of 21-day nationwide lockdown to break the coronavirus transmission chain has triggered large-scale influx of Rajasthan's labourers and workers from cities outside the state, including Gujarat, to which they had migrated for work, said state government officials.

The borders of Rajasthan's Jalore and Sirohi districts with Gujarat have been witnessing such large-scale, on-foot migration by labourers to their home from various places in the neighbouring state after the lockdown ever since March 24-25 midnight, said Jalore Superintndednt of police Himmat Abhilash Tak on Thursday.

Most of these people are coming on foot and are labour class workers. They are dropped a few kilometers from the state borders, from where they begin to walk to the Rajasthan border, said Tak.

The phenomena is not limited the two districts bordering Gujarat alone, but is spread over to Rajasthan's borders with other state's including Punjab, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh too, he added, quoting reports from the state's other parts.

Reports from other parts of the country too suggest the nationwide lockdown for 21 days has triggered large-scale interstate migration of labourers in other parts of the country too with several groups of such workers being seen returning in hordes to various cities in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar from Delhi, Haryana on foot.

Tak said the Sirohi and other borders in Rajasthan were sealed till Wednesday but opened on the direction of the state government from Wednesday evening.

Joint teams of police, administration and the medical and health department have set up camps at the border posts. They are being screened on reaching the boarder and their names and addresses along with the phone numbers are being noted down before letting them go to their destinations, said Tak.

Tak said 700 persons entered the state on Wednesday evening and are counting but according to some estimates, 32,000 people have returned from other states till now.

Sirohi district too has been witnessing a large influx of people from Gujarat and other states for the past few days.

Abu Road and Mandar are two main check posts, where the people have assembled in large number, waiting to enter the district on way back to their homes.

Jalore District Collector Bhagwati Prasad said the flow of the people returning from other states was low till Wednesday but has recorded a spurt since Wednesday evening.

Many of them are coming from buses and other vehicles and are being dropped at the border. We are screening them and recording their details. We have roped in roadways buses there, from which, we have been transporting them to their places, said Prasad.

He, however, did not rule out the possibility of some people escaping the administration's radar but said that local public representatives like panches and sarpanchs have been asked to keep an people returning home and report their arrival to the administration instantly.

Sirohi shares a 175-km border with Gujarat and most of its part is rocky. So there are the chances that many of those coming in private vehicles or on foot, avoid the entry from border posts and use alternative rural entries, Prasad said.

Though, none of the districts have reported any positive case so far, the possibility cannot be ruled out in such a massive influx, if some corona-positive person too enter the districts.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A high speed TGV train is preparing to take patients from Alsace, one of the regions hardest hit by the Covid-19 coronavirus, to hospitals elsewhere in the country, on Thursday. Patients have been transported from eastern France around the country for a week, but using a train to do so is a first, for France and for Europe.

Twenty patients infected with the coronavirus and needing intensive care are being transported from Strasbourg to hospitals around France to the Loire region, which has been one of the least hit.

The double-decker TGV usually transports hundreds of passengers. This one will have fewer than 100 people on board, with about 50 logistical staff and medical personnel from hospitals in Nantes, Angers and Paris accompanying the 20 patients.

The rail operator, SNCF, had put in place the possibility of medicalising trains, notably to transport people injured by terrorist attacks from one part of he country to another. Now the theory is being put into practice.

Train cars transformed

Early Thursday morning ambulances were seen approaching the platform in the Strasbourg station where the train was parked Wednesday night.

Patients will be distributed in five cars, four in each one, on stretchers laid out over seats that will not be removed.

Each car will have a doctor, an intern, an anesthesiologist and three nurses. Patients will be on the bottom levels, with the top levels used by medical personnel to get around and move material.

The rail operator, SNCF, has decided to double the train, to ten cars. An empty five-car train at the front will absorb any shocks, like collisions with animals on the tracks.

Spreading out patients

Using a train to transport patients like this is a first for Europe, according to France's Health minister Olivier Veran. It could be repeated, as hospitals in the east of France are overwhelmed with coronavirus cases, are reaching critical capacity.

For the last eight days, patients have already been distributed away from overwhelmed hospitals. Military planes evacuated 18 patients from a Mulhouse hospital to Marseille, Bordeaux, Quimper and Brest.

Helicopters have brought some patients to neighbouring countries, like Germany. On Sunday a helicopter carrier with a hospital on board brought patients from Ajaccio, in Corsica, to Marseille.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Thursday his goal of reopening the city's schools by April 20, despite the dramatically escalating coronavirus outbreak which saw 100 deaths in the state in one day.

De Blasio predicted that the city is to see the worst of the pandemic in April and May but still hopes to see students return to class before the crisis eases up.

On Thursday afternoon, the mayor visited Brooklyn Navy Yard where 120,000 face masks are expected to be made by local business in the coming days to ease the growing strain on the healthcare system severely lacking in supplies.

He teased an announcement that desperately needed ventilators will be soon be produced locally.

Nearly 22,000 people have been infected with the coronavirus in NYC and the death toll stood at 281 by Thursday afternoon.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio holds a face shield as he speaks to the media during a visit to the Brooklyn Navy Yard Thursday where he announced 125,000 masks would be made by Tuesday

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio visits the Brooklyn Navy Yard Thursday where local industrial firms have begun manufacturing Personal Protective Equipment for local hospitals

A view of temporarily closed Lillie Devereaux Blake School as the coronavirus continues to spread across the United State. De Blasio hopes to open schools again by April 20

De Blasio revealed his aim to reopen schools during a daily briefing Thursday in which he answered questions on the city's ability to provide meals to children through the end of the school year despite closures.

The school year was scheduled to end on June 26.

The mayor said that meals would be available even if students even if the schools don't reopen.

'We hope to get schools back up on April 20, but that's going to be a big challenge,' de Blasio said.

As of Thursday morning, there are 21,873 cases of coronavirus confirmed in the five boroughs, according the the Health Department.

Of those, 11,967 people, or 55 percent, are younger than 50 years old but the majority of those who have died have been older.

Nobody under 17 has died of COVID-19 in New York City and 96 percent of deaths have had an underlying illness.

Members of SchoolFood prepare a cart for school breakfasts and lunches to go for parents to pick up for students at Yung Wing School in Manhattan. Meals will continue until June 26

Students at Stuyvesant High School before all New York City Schools were closed

Workers making face masks for local hospitals in Brooklyn Navy Yard

Mayor Bill de Blasio is shown around the new workshop making face masks in Brooklyn

On Thursday afternoon, de Blasio visited Brooklyn Navy Yard to thank workers from three separate companies who have joined forces to deliver between 15,000 and 18,000 new face masks a day for health care workers.

Businesses have pivoted from making whiskey and retail displays to hand sanitizer and face shields.

Duggal, New Lab, and Bednark Studio, which was originally forced to lay off staff last week, have called their workers in to begin on the task.

The companies first created a prototype for the mask on Saturday and quickly began production on Wednesday as the Mayor announced that the city has called on local businesses to do what they can to help produce more supplies for hospitals.

All wearing masks and separated on different tables, the workers from Duggal Visual Solutions and Bednark showcased their products to the mayor, who announced that 125,000 masks are expected to be produced in this center alone in the coming days and shipped to local hospitals by next Tuesday.

'Every one of you are heroes right now because you are providing us with supplies that are going to save lives and protect out health care workers,' he told workers.

'And you make me very proud of New York City and of Brooklyn, seeing that this has been created in a matter of days to protect people and it is an example of how we are going to fight back.'

Three companies - Bednark, Duggal, and New Lab - have joined forces to make the mask

People make face shields at the Brooklyn Navy Yard where local industrial firms have begun manufacturing Personal Protective Equipment to deal with the intense shortage in supplies

While at the Navy Yard the Mayor also teased an announcement of locally produced ventilators that could come in a second briefing later Thursday, according to New York Daily News reporter Shant Shahrigian.

The city is currently in the process of signing contracts with local industries that will produce 1.5 million face shields over the next three months, according to Carl Rodrigues, who is handling the administrations production mobilization.

Other companies are expected to provide an estimated 1.2 million medical gowns.

'The mayors made a pretty concerted effort to get into peoples brains that this is a wartime scenario and we have to come together,' Rodrigues told the Wall Street Journal.

'New Yorkers are really responding.'

Just before his visit, de Blasio announced that Elmherst hospital in Queens has become 'the number one priority of our public hospital system right now' after 13 deaths from coronavirus were registered there in one day on Wednesday.

'Weve moved in 40 more ventilators and added more staff to increase capacity. Yesterday Elmhurst was running nearly three times the number of ICU beds than usual,' the Mayor added.

'Right now Elmhurst hospital is holding its own, but we are in a race against time and we need more federal help IMMEDIATELY.'

Roughly 6,420 people in Queens have tested positive for the coronavirus

Health officials believe the cases confirmed in New York City is still just a fraction of the number truly infected in the city as hospitals and health care structures begin to buckle under the weight of patients, the high number of deaths, and the extreme lack of ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE).

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo delivered a somber update on Thursday morning as the number of deaths in the state was revealed to be 100 in the past 24 hours alone.

'That's what comes first: the rate of increase in the number of cases,' he said.

'That's what we are looking for.'

The governor was bashed by a city nurses' union, however, for claiming that healthcare workers have all the protective gear they need for the immediate future.

'Right now, we have enough protective equipment  gloves, masks, gowns  for all the hospitals statewide,' he said.

'Today, no hospital, no nurse, no doctor can say  legitimately  I don't have protective equipment. Right now and for the foreseeable future, we have a supply.'

But Pat Kane, executive director of the New York State Nurses Association, said he is wrong.

'A statement like that can be dangerous,' she said. 'If you're saying there's enough, but that "enough" involves following guidelines where there are a lot of risks involved, it's misleading.'

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

The number of cases in the US has rocketed over the last two weeks

The criticism came as it was revealed some nurses are still being asked to reuse their face masks and that a healthcare worker died from coronavirus in a hospital where workers had been asked to wear trash bags instead of hospital gowns.

Assistant nursing manager Kious Kelly, who tested positive for coronavirus about two weeks ago, was admitted to Mount Sinai's flagship hospital on the Upper East Side on March 17 and died Tuesday night.

'Kious didn't deserve this,' one nurse said. 'The hospital should be held responsible. The hospital killed him.'

'If I get sick and take a bed from an ICU patient, how is that working?' Kane said. 'I'm not pointing the finger to blame anyone at this point. But we're not at the table. They're not asking us for this information.'

New York's Elmhurst Hospital is the city's ground zero as doctors say it's a 'war zone' with 13 people dying from coronavirus in 24 HOURS and queues of patients waiting for hospital beds send it to breaking point

The Elmhurst Hospital Center in New York City is fast becoming 'ground zero' for the city's battle with the coronavirus, with 13 patients dying at the facility in the span of just 24 hours.

A spokesperson with the hospital described the number of deaths as being 'consistent with the number of ICU patients being treated there.'

Health and Hospitals Deputy Press Secretary Stephanie Guzman explained to Patch: 'Staff are doing everything in our power to save every person who contracts COVID-19, but unfortunately this virus continues to take an especially terrible toll on the elderly and people with preexisting conditions.'

'Elmhurst is at the center of this crisis, and it's the number one priority of our public hospital system right now.'

A spokesperson with the hospital described the number of deaths as being 'consistent with the number of ICU patients being treated there'. Long lines have been forming extensively around the facility

Patients not suffering from coronavirus have already been transferred from the facility, which has 545 beds.

The hospital has added 25 staffers since Tuesday and more ventilators, according to City Council Member Francisco Moya. Moya previously worked at Elmhurst Hospital.

Health officials say Elmhurst Hospital, part of the city's municipal hospital system, already is running at more than 125 per cent capacity compared to its typical 80 per cent capacity rate.

Guzman did assert that the hospital was one of the top priorities of the municipal health system.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a legitimate crisis we should take seriously, but our response to this virus is putting us on course for a far worse disaster. The instructions from the CDC, the World Health Organization, and all government officials at the federal, state, and local levels are ringing out with one clear message. Weve all heard it: Wash your hands with soap and water, dont touch your face, and stay home. Two of these three are sound advice but instructing everyone to stay home instead of going to work is not going to end well if we attempt to do it for more than a few weeks. Quarantining is a reasonable measure to protect our at-risk populations, but a quarantine will not kill the virus. All the quarantine is designed to do is slow the spread of the virus to a level where we dont all get it at once and overwhelm the hospitals.

The medical challenge is only one factor in this crisis. We no longer have just a medical crisis. Our reaction to the virus is causing second and third order effects that are rapidly growing larger than the initial health problem. The first step in solving a problem is identifying the problem, so we need to start considering all the factors. If we dont get off the path were on (quarantining everyone), the next few years will not be a bear market or a recession. This is full-scale depression behavior we are currently in the process of kicking off. Were swatting a mosquito while sitting on railroad tracks facing an oncoming train. Were focusing all our concern on the mosquito, paying no attention to a more catastrophic problem coming right at us. The good news is that we still have time to step off the track, but every day we prevent commerce from happening by recommending that everyone remain in quarantine is a moment closer to our economy getting wrecked by the oncoming train.

An economy is not a light switch. We cant just turn it off for a few weeks then come back and expect to flip it back on. Its more like muscle fiber -- use it or lose it. The American economy is strong and resilient, but we are foolish to think we can shut down massive amounts of travel and commerce and then expect to come back and just turn it back on weeks later.

Here is another analogy: Our economy is like a patient with an acute blood clot blocking significant blood supply to the brain. Every passing moment, irreparable damage is caused to the brain. Rapid medical treatment is available to dissolve the clot and allow blood to return to normal levels to the brain. The sooner the patient gets treatment the less brain damage will be sustained.

The clot in our economy is the drastic reduction in commerce we are self-imposing right now with this quarantine effort. Treatment for the clot is everyone going back to work and business operating as usual. If we instead choose to let the clot stay in place, we are going to see irreparable and lasting damage to our economy that will prove to be much worse than this virus.

The virus remains a real threat, but this is how we should pivot and still take it seriously: If you own a business -- keep it open. If you have a job -- go do it. If you can do equivalent work from home -- continue doing it. If you are in management or in a decision-making role -- influence your organization to resume normal operation. At the same time, we need to influence our government and media to change the instructions they are communicating to the public. The message needs to change from: everyone stay home, to: stay home only if you are sick or suspect you may be getting sick, or if you have a compromised immune system. Actions our government should take in addition to encouraging people to do their normal work are: Advise/allow all business, organizations, and industries to resume normal operation. Create and publish a list of health factors that would define someone as high-risk for the virus and advise only the high-risk individuals and their care-givers to remain in quarantine.

We all need to take courage and pull our collective heads out of the sand. Just because the ostrich thinks his predator goes away when he sticks his head in the sand doesnt make it go away. The virus will still be here no matter how long we quarantine. Prudent measures to prevent contracting the virus like washing our hands, not touching our face, and not touching other people should and can still be accomplished as we return to work.

Western civilization has saved the world more than once in the last century and we can lead the way again, but it might take a little courage. We are Americans and we dont just blindly follow our government. We use critical thinking and we keep our government in check. We do the right thing even if it goes against what the television is telling us. Together we can thread the needle of taking the most prudent medical actions, while at the same time taking the most prudent economic actions to preserve the lives of those truly at risk, and prevent the impending disaster to our economy.
91 per cent consumers said they would hoard hygiene products like sanitisers during the lockdown, while 67 per cent said they would hoard food essentials.

The demand for masks between March 15 and March 21, has gone up by 80 per cent, prices have increased by 38 per cent.

94 per cent consumers are aware of the importance of washing hands multiple times, but only 62 per cent practise it.

85 per cent respondents know about social distancing, but only 52 per cent adhere to it.

As the number of the deadly COVID cases rise in India and the country is on a three-week lockdown, anxious Indians as per a Nielsen study are not hoarding as much food and vegetables as they are hoarding hand sanitisers, handwash, soaps and other hygiene products. Hand sanitisers as per the Nielsen report has grown by an enormous 53 per cent in the month of February compared to a humble 11 per cent growth during the months of November, December and January. In fact, 91 per cent of consumers said that they would hoard hygiene products like sanitisers during the lockdown, while 67 per cent said they would hoard food essentials. No wonder, by the beginning of March, most traditional retailers and online grocers had run out of stocks of handwash and sanitisers. Even cash and carry retailers such as Metro and Tesco had complained of running out of stock. This explains why manufacturers such as HUL, ITC and Godrej Consumer announced that they were ramping up production. The government also directed them to reduce prices of sanitisers and handwashes.

Sanitisers and handwash till recently were premium products, and less than 2 per cent of the SKUs of most FMCG companies. While hand sanitisers between middle of February and middle of March 2018-19 saw an impressive growth of 72 per cent in traditional stores, it has shot up to 144 per cent in February-March this year. Similarly, liquid handwash has grown from 28 per cent (in 2018-19) to 42 per cent. However, it is the online grocers which have seen the maximum growth in orders for hygiene products between February 20 and March 20. While orders for hand sanitisers have grown by 1425 per cent in the last one month, face-mask orders have increased by 408 per cent. The online orders for handwash have increased by 86 per cent, while floor and toilet cleaners orders have gone up by 77 per cent.

As people started preparing for quarantine, the Nielsen report says that they not only have been stockpiling essential food items like atta (which saw a 25 per cent growth in demand in traditional trade and 16 per cent in e-commerce platforms) and pulses (which grew by 72 per cent in traditional trade), a lot of them also bought indulgence food items such as biscuits, chocolates and salty snacks. While orders for salty snacks grew by 84 per cent online platforms, there was a 31 per cent growth in orders for biscuits.

Nielsen also ran a survey among chemist shops to find out the demand for mask and gloves. The demand for masks between March 15 and March 21, has gone up by 80 per cent, while the demand for gloves for the same period has gone up by 27 per cent. The prices of masks have doubled by 38 per cent, while those of gloves have increased by 10 per cent.

Though 90 per cent Indian consumers across 15 cities are aware of the prescribed methods of safeguarding themselves from the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, the Nielsen study says that 40 per cent of its respondents are not abiding by the guidance. For instance, 94 per cent are aware of the importance of washing hands multiple times, but only 62 per cent practise it. Similarly, 85 per cent of the respondents know about social distancing, but only 52 per cent adhere to it.

Also Read: Coronavirus update: Odisha first state to set up 2 hospitals for COVID-19 patients

Also Read: Coronavirus Live Updates: Essentials, medicines to be available 24X7 in Delhi, Maharashtra
Arts organizations worked behind the scenes to soften the blow of the COVID-19 shutdown this week and prepare for an eventual return to live shows.

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven announced a new partnership with the City of New Havens Department of Cultural Affairs in establishing a New Haven Creative Sector Relief Fund.

The new initiative will distribute (starting immediately) up to $1,000 in financial assistance to help low-income individual artists and arts institutions with small budgets to help them survive and adapt to the shutdown.

New Haven Symphony Orchestra touted a 7:30 p.m. Thursday fireside chat with conductor Alasdair Neale in an online hangout on the symphonys YouTube channel, New Haven Symphony Orchestra.

Waterbury Symphony Orchestra maestro Leif Bajaland urged healing via music in a WSO email blast: Music offers us a refuge and a haven in which we can remember our most important values and qualities  qualities about being human, like compassion and comfort. These are needed now more than ever. So I encourage you to listen to music on recordings and YouTube, to stream a live performance and to sing in the shower.

And Hartford Stage, which had layoffs recently, announced its 2020-2021 season, the first full season selected by Obie Award-winning Artistic Director Melia Bensussen.

Bensussen and Managing Director Cynthia Rider announced four of the plays comprising the mainstage season  As You Like It by William Shakespeare; the world premiere of Simonas Search by Martin Zimmerman; Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous by Pearl Cleage; and Mary Shelleys Frankenstein by David Catlin. Two additional shows will be announced in the coming weeks, they said.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Ohioans support by overwhelming margins sweeping public health orders that have shuttered bars, restaurants, schools and daycares to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, a newly released poll shows.

The same poll also found similarly large majorities of voters in the Buckeye State fear that the virus will inflict longterm damage to the economy and worry about a hit their finances could take as the pandemic continues to grow.

Researchers at Baldwin Wallace University, Ohio Northern University and Oakland University near Detroit polled 3,817 registered voters in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from Friday through Wednesday for the second of their planned four Great Lakes polls this year. The margins of error range from 3.3 percentage points plus or minus in Ohio to 3.9 in Pennsylvania, and higher for subgroups.

The poll was conducted from March 17-25, so researchers did not ask respondents specifically about Ohio Gov. Mike DeWines stay-at-home order that went into effect at 11:59 p.m. Monday.

The poll comes as politicians and entrepreneurs, including Cleveland-area car and Blockchain mogul Bernie Moreno to President Donald Trump, drew criticism for questioning how long to leave restrictive public health measures in place at the expense of damaging the U.S. economy.

Lauren Copeland, associate director of Baldwin Wallaces Community Research Institute, said the polls results taken together show that citizens in Ohio and the other Great Lakes states seem willing to accept restrictions and tolerate damage to the economy.

Closing schools

Nearly nine out of 10 Ohioans -- 87.7 percent -- polled said they supported the decision to close schools.

Similarly, high numbers of men (86.2 percent) and women (89 percent), as well as self-identified Democrats (91.2 percent) and Republicans (86.9 percent), support the measures, the poll found. Eighty-three percent of self-identified Independents supported the moves.

Only 6.7 percent of respondents from Ohio said they opposed closing schools.

The moves garnered similar levels of overall support in Michigan (87.9 percent), Pennsylvania (88.5 percent) and Wisconsin (85.9 percent).

Closing daycares

Ohioans also supported the closure of daycare centers by a considerable clip. A full 81.5 percent of respondents approved the measure, while just nine percent opposed it.

Like the closing of schools, support crossed both gender (79.8 percent of men/82.8 percent of women) and party (83.8 percent of Democrats/81.9 percent of Republicans) lines.

Again, Ohios numbers closely track Michigans and Pennsylvanias. But voters in Wisconsin were slightly less likely to support the measure, with 72.8 percent still in support.

Copeland said she was surprised to see such strong support for restrictions, particularly the daycare and schools, because those make life much harder for working parents.

To me, the high levels of support for these restrictions tell me that people are taking public health very seriously, Copeland said.

Closing bars and restaurants

Ohioans approve of public health measures in place to slow the spread of coronavirus, the Great Lakes Poll released March 26, 2020 found.

The order closing bars and restaurants was the least popular among the restrictions polled, but it still earned the approval of three out of every four Ohioans.

The poll found 76.5 percent of Ohioans supported the closing of their local eateries and watering holes, compared to 14.3 percent opposed. Women and Democrats (81.8 percent and 84.2 percent, respectively) were more likely to support this measure than men and Republicans (70 percent and 72.9 percent, respectively), though support was still broad.

The poll was again consistent among voters across all four states.

Limiting public gatherings

Ohioans overwhelmingly agreed it was important to restrict large groups. As terms like social distancing have become ubiquitous in recent weeks, 86.2 percent of Buckeye voters said they supported limiting public gatherings, with just 7.8 percent opposed.

Voters in Michigan (85.4 percent) Pennsylvania (84.8 percent) and Wisconsin (84.5 percent) supported the measures at similar rates.

Economic concerns

While respondents in the four Great Lakes states expressed such high support for restrictions, they also signaled equally widespread fear that the coronavirus would cripple the economy.

In Ohio, a combined 88.6 percent of voters said they were somewhat or very concerned about the pandemics effect on the economy, with 62.5 percent answering that they were very concerned.

And 76 percent of Ohioans said they were worried about how their finances would fare as COVID-19 continues to spread. Forty-five percent of voters said they were very concerned.

The numbers are nearly the same for voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In the past year, 41.6 percent of Ohioans said the economy had gotten either somewhat or much worse. Another 44.5 percent said they expected it to get either somewhat or much worse in the coming year. Thats compared to 36.1 percent who said the economy has improved in the last year and 29.7 percent who think it will improve over the coming year.

Americans and Great Lakes citizens are very aware that this virus is impacting our economy and will have a long-term impact, Terri Towner, a professor of political science at Oakland University, said.

Debate

That sentiment could explain some public officials signaling this week that is time to begin planning for when the country pivots back to normal, despite warnings from health officials that the spread of the virus will not likely peak for several weeks.

The U.S. Department of Labor and the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services on Thursday announced that jobless claims in Ohio and across the country smashed decades-old records.

President Trump has floated the idea of lifting the federal governments recommendations on social distancing and measures designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus as early as April, saying he hoped the economy would be back up and running as early as the April 12 Easter Holiday.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick drew condemnation when he suggested in a TV interview that many older Americans who are particularly at risk of severe illness from COVID-19 would be willing to risk death to preserve the economy.

Locally, Moreno sparked furor Tuesday night when he sent a Tweet from a near-empty Spirit Airlines flight to Florida in which he quipped that planes/cars crash every year and kill people; are we banning planes/cars next or do we keep working to make them safer?

Moreno attached #ReopenAmerica to the post. He has deleted the tweet.

There is this growing concern that if we dont reopen American and open businesses that were going to fall into an economic recession that is so deep we may not be able to crawl out of it, Towner said.

Copeland noted that, while the poll showed just north of 50-percent approval rating for Trumps handling of the coronavirus, vast majorities of voters in Ohio and the other states support their governors. DeWine, whom the poll found enjoyed a 79.9-percent approval rating for his response to COVID-19, said at news briefings this week that he shared Trumps frustration at the economic toll, but warned that the virus is not expected to peak until May 1.

The short-term consequences of slowing this economy down which is what were certainly seeing, far outweighs long-term economic meltdown, meltdown, from a deadly virus that is left unchecked, DeWine said when asked about Trumps messaging.

Read cleveland.coms comprehensive coverage of the poll here.

Read more cleveland.com politics and coronavirus coverage:

Ohio voters strongly back coronavirus lifestyle restrictions, and majority support Donald Trumps re-election, poll shows

Poll shows Donald Trump ahead in Ohio, competitive in three other Great Lakes states as coronavirus pandemic disrupts election

Sacrificing sports during coronavirus crisis is OK with most Great Lakes voters
Download your rainbow picture to support emergency services during Coronavirus outbreak

This article is old - Published: Thursday, Mar 26th, 2020

Rainbow colouring sheets for youngsters across the region to download and use have been created by North Wales Police.

The trend of painted rainbows being placed in windows has been seen across the world and has become hugely popular in the UK after schools closed last week in response to the Coronavirus outbreak.

To help spread some cheer amongst communities across North Wales, the force has created a colouring sheet and is encouraging children to colour them in and place them in their windows.

We have already received many messages of support, including some lovely, thoughtful cards and photographs from local children, said Deputy Chief Constable Richard Debicki.

This has been truly heart-warming during a time of uncertainty and worry.

Our colouring sheet is aimed at spreading some happiness across our communities so we would encourage people to visit our website and print a copy.

As a father of two young children myself, I know how difficult it can be to keep them entertained. Hopefully this will help lift peoples spirits, even if its just a smile. We also hope it will send a message to our NHS colleagues that we are thankful and grateful to them as they work hard to protect our communities.

I would also like to take this opportunity to re-iterate that we are working closely with our key partners to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, and despite the current climate we are still out there working to keep our communities safe.

However we need our local communities to work with us like never before  by staying at home. Please listen to UK and Welsh Government advice and Id encourage everyone to visit their websites for all the latest advice and guidance.

Parents or carers are encouraged to send photos of the creations to the Force by tagging North Wales Police on their social media channels. The Force will then share onto their Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts. Some of the best designs will be entered into a prize draw.

A PDF copy of the colouring in sheet is available for download from the website www.north-wales.police.uk
C hiquito is to permanently close the majority of its restaurants due to the downturn in business caused by coronavirus.

The Restaurant Group, which owns Chiquito, said it would also close down its 12 Food and Fuel chain pubs in London.

The move will put up to 1,500 jobs at risk.

It comes as businesses across the country struggle to stay afloat while the economy takes a disastrous hit due to the Covid-19 lockdown.

Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures 1 /44 Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures AP Buckingham Palace AP Piccadilly Line tube AP Big Ben AP Millennium bridge AP Wembley Stadium AP St Pancras International train station AP Downing Street AP Victoria Station AP Regent Street AP The Mall leading to Buckingham Palace AP London's National Gallery in Trafalgar Square PA Edinburgh's Royal Mile PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bath PA Bath PA London's Waterloo station PA London Bridge PA London's Canary Wharf Jubilee Line platform PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA London's Buckingham Palace PA London's Tower Bridge PA London's Leicester Square PA London's Millennium Bridge with St Paul's Cathedral PA London's Criterion Theatre PA London's Palace Theatre PA London's Phoenix Theatre PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA Bournemouth beach PA Bath PA Bath PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bournemouth beach PA

The chain is thought to be the first major UK restaurant casualty during the coronavirus crisis.

The owners of Chiquito restaurants put the chain into administration less than a week after the company said sales plummeted 12.5 per cent over two weeks.

The Restaurant Group, which also owns Wagamama and Frankie & Benny's, said a total of 60 Chiquito sites will remain shut.

A spokesman said: "Covid-19 has had an immediate and significant impact on trading across the Group.

"We have conducted a review of the performance of our business divisions, with a particular focus on the expected future cash generation profile of each of our business units."

He added that both groups are expected to hit losses this year, "as a result, the Group has taken the very difficult decision to appoint administrators for Food & Fuel Limited and filed a notice of intention to appoint an administrator for Chiquito Limited.

"The decisions have been incredibly difficult and we recognise the significant impact on all of our colleagues that are affected. We thank them for their hard work and commitment during these very testing times."

Pubs and restaurants have faced a tough week, with the Government announcing their closure, although takeaway services are allowed to continue.
New Delhi, March 26 : In a major relief for certain private sector companies and their staff, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced that the government will make 24 per cent contribution to the Employees' Provident Fund (EPF), 12 per cent each for employer and employee for the next three months.

The government will make this contribution only in case of establishments with up to 100 employees, 90 per cent of whom draw less than Rs 15,000 per month, Sitharaman told the media here.

The scheme would benefit 80 lakh employees and 4 lakh establishments, she added.

"That (24 per cent) will be paid for the next three months by the government of India, so that nobody suffers, because the EPF contribution has lost continuity and as a result they could be lot more difficulties. So 12 plus 12, a 24 per cent contribution, which has to go into the EPF account of an employee will be borne by the government of India for the next three months," she said.

Announcing the second measure for the organized sector, she said that employees would be allowed to take non-refundable advance for 75 per cent from credit in provident fund account or the wages for three months, whichever is lower.

Sitharaman said that around 4.8 crore workers registered with the EPF will be able to withdraw the money.

The decisions come as a major relief for the working class and the private companies which would go through financial stress amid the 21-day nationwide lockdown. The coronavirus crisis has already hampered businesses and normal life across the country.

Of late, the government has announced a slew of measures to provide support to the common man and enterprises, including extension in the deadline for filing I-T and GST return for the financial year 2018-19.

On Thursday, the Finance Minister also announced a Rs 50 lakh per person health insurance cover for the doctors, paramedics, nurses, 'Asha' workers, cleaning workers who have been involved in the fight against coronavirus pandemic and treating the affected patients.

She also announced an economic relief package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore for the poor and migrant workers under the Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Scheme.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
The first to disembark from the Grand Princess will be those requiring hospitalization.

Two passengers who had been on Princess Cruises' Grand Princess, the second Princess Cruises ship with cases of coronavirus, have died.

The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the deaths, indicating both passengers died due to complications from the coronavirus.

A statement from HHS to USA TODAY said both passengers were on board the Grand Princess.

Immediately after developing COVID-19 symptoms, one passenger was transported directly from the ship to the hospital, according to HHS. The other was quarantined at Travis Air Force Base in California and then developed symptoms and was transferred to the hospital.

One person died March 21, and the other died on March 23. Both passengers were in their early 60s.

"Princess Cruises was notified that two guests who sailed onboard Grand Princess have passed away," read a statement from the cruise line sent by spokesperson Alivia Owyoung Ender. "Our hearts go out to the families, friends and all who are impacted by these losses. All of us at Princess Cruises offer our sincere condolences."

USA TODAY has reached out to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than 3,500 people on board the Grand Princess for a Hawaii voyage were potentially exposed to COVID-19, a revelation that came to light after a 71-year-old man died from coronavirus after sailing on the ship's previous voyage. More than 60 passengers from that trip stayed aboard for the second voyage.

The ship docked in Oakland, California, on March 9 after reporting 21 coronavirus cases. Before it docked, the Grand Princess was kept at sea for several days before being allowed back into port.

Of the 1,103 passengers from the Grand Princess that elected to be tested, 103 tested positive, 699 tested negative. The remaining results are pending, HHS said.

Over the course of several days, passengers were let off the ship in groups. Then, passengers were spread between four military bases in California, Texas and Georgia to complete a two-week quarantine.

Story continues

Grand Princess passengers began leaving their quarantine at Travis Air Force Base, east of the San Francisco Bay Area, Monday.

Passengers were expected to be released from quarantine over the next four days.

The Diamond Princess, another Princess Cruises ship, was quarantined off the coast of Japan in February with a coronavirus outbreak that ultimately would infect more than 700 passengers and crew. Ten people who were on the ship have since died from the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins data.

Diamond Princess, Grand Princess: Cruise line had high rates of illness even before coronavirus

Contributing: David Oliver, Chris Woodyard

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Coronavirus: Two Grand Princess cruise passengers with coronavirus die
Prosecutors allege that Maduro and other Venezuelan officials have operated the Cartel do los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, since at least 1999, corrupting Venezuelas government institutions so they could flood the U.S. with hundreds of tons of cocaine. They say the cartel worked with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to ship the drug by air and sea through the Caribbean and Central America to the United States. (The FARC, a Marxist guerrilla movement that engaged in a decades-long war against the Colombian government, officially disbanded with the Colombian peace accord of 2016, but more than 2,500 dissident members remain active.)
Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Thursday that his cabinet is planning to issue an order that will make price gouging illegal.

While Ford did not provide specifics about the order, he said that government will come after any company engaging in price gouging during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A message to anyone who price gouges  were coming after you. Were going to come after you hard, Ford said during his daily press briefing on Thursday.

I have zero, zero tolerance for price gouging, he said. The Premier specifically called out Pusateris Fine Foods, a Toronto-based grocery chain, which had reportedly been selling Lysol disinfecting wipes for $29.99.

Thats disgusting, absolutely disgusting (that) a company like that would be selling hand wipes for that cost, Ford said.

Pusateris has since apologized, saying the price hike was a mistake. Anyone who purchased the wipes will receive a full refund.

Steve Szentesi, a competition and advertising lawyer based in Toronto, said that it is not illegal for companies to raise prices on products as they see fit under the Competition Act. The exception within the Act is when there is a conspiracy between companies to fix prices of a product, as was the case with the alleged bread price-fixing scandal.

Szentesi said the government has several options when it comes to capping pricing.

The route that some government may consider in Canada is to enact legislation where they regulate the price of certain products, Szentesi said.

My guess is they would pass legislation and regulations that lists products that would be subject to price control and then determine on a pricing mechanism  whether thats a specific price, a cap on it or that a company cannot increase the price more than (a certain amount.)

Price gouging has been a particular concern during the coronavirus pandemic, as supply chains strain to keep up with a surge in demand for specific products, such as hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes and even toilet paper.

Story continues

Canadas Commissioner of Competition Matthew Boswell released a statement late last week that said the Competition Bureau remains vigilant against anti-competitive conduct as the country grapples with the coronavirus outbreak.

We encourage anyone with information about potential collusion, false or misleading advertising or other forms of deceptive marketing to contact the Bureau, Boswell said.

We will do everything in our power to crack down on these and any other anti-competitive activities in order to protect Canadians.

Loblaw chief executive Galen Weston has vowed that the grocery store chain would not raise a single price on any item to take advantage of COVID-19.

Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android and sign up for the Yahoo Finance Canada Weekly Brief.
Neighbours around the world have very good relations. Similarly, there is a relationship between India and Nepal. This is why people of both countries marry their sons and daughters in each other's country. Now the effect of Corona is visible on marriage. On Monday, two grooms were returned from Sonauli border without marrying. Both these grooms wanted to go to Nepal with their marriage, but the Nepal government has banned the entry of any citizen. They did not even get a chance to get married. Mehboob Alam resident Mithaura Maharajganj, who was to be married to Shabnam Khatoon at Padari intersection in Kapilvastu district, Nepal. The second groom, Rafiq Ahmed resident Ramchaura Campierganj, who was to be married to Bhairahwa Galla Mandi.

Corona spread across the world, 20 percent population home quarantined

While talking to the media, both of them said that we were going to Nepal with our marriage, but the Nepali administration stopped us from going to Nepal. Now we are going back to our home.

South Korea stopped 'corona' by doing just these three things

Two corona infected patients have been found in Nepal. Nepal Health Minister Bhanu Bhakta Dhakal gave this information. He said that corona infection has been confirmed in two Nepali citizens. Told that the 19-year-old is undergoing treatment at the Venus Raj Tropical Hospital at Teku in Kathmandu. The said student came to Nepal from China. The second infected is a young woman. She came to Nepal from France via Kuwait. After coming to Nepal, he was kept in the isolation room for 14 days. Where corona infection was not detected. When he was examined again on Sunday, corona infection was confirmed in him.

Prakash Javadekar thunders on mistreatment of doctors and journalists during lockdown
The Speaker of Parliament, Professor Aaron Mike Oquaye, has explained that his advice to some Members of Parliament (MPs) and members of staff of the Parliamentary Service to go into the mandatory 14-day self-quarantine should not be considered as punishment.



He said it was rather a protective move that would safeguard their health, that of their family members, Parliament and its guests, as well as the public.



As we are speaking now, 10 MPs who travelled abroad in these circumstances have been asked to stay in self-isolation for the mandatory number of days. Five members of staff who also went abroad and came back have been asked to do same, the Speaker said.



The returnees were on official assignment.



Significance



Addressing Parliament last Tuesday, Prof. Oquaye said: Self-quarantine is for the protection of all people in Parliament, as well as the unsuspecting members of the public who may also happen to visit the premises for genuine business.



He gave the explanation in a meeting with some reporters in his office to spell out measures the legislative body had initiated to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 in Parliament.



Present at the meeting were a medical doctor, marshalls, the Clerk and other officials of Parliament.



Prof. Oquaye said the measures were in line with the protocol of the World Health Organisation (WHO) as part of steps to stop the spread of the COVID-19.



Included in the protocol is social (physical) distancing, for which Parliament has, in the interim, advised members of the House to sit two seats away from one another.



As you know, people are required by WHO regulations not to sit too close to one another, including family members, and we all have to obey, in the interest of all.



There are matters of important national interest which would have to be tackled, whether it is a war of weapon or war of disease by members of Parliament, the Speaker added.



Safety measures



He said Parliament had instituted some measures to deal with the COVID-19 to ensure the safety of legislators, staff of Parliament, the media, as well as the public.



He outlined some of the measures as the circulation of notices of current information on the disease, the installation of sanitiser dispensers at vantage points, the frequent washing of hands with soap, as well as the wearing of protective nose masks by staff of Parliament and visitors.



Also, people who handled certain items within the Chamber and other relevant places, including those who took the temperature of MPs, staff and the media at various entry points, had been made to use surgical gloves, he added.



Additionally, the entire premises of the legislative House had been fumigated, the Speaker said.

Source: Daily Graphic









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FLINT, MI-- YWCA of Greater Flint will still be offering services to victims of domestic violence, including its shelters, amid Michigans Stay Home, Stay Safe order brought on by the COVID-19 coronavirus.

Although YWCAs administrative offices are closed, its domestic violence services are still available and fully operational, said CEO Michelle Rosynsky.

That includes its 24-hour, free and confidential help hotline, 810-238-7233; its domestic violence shelter; advocates to talk to and support victims; and the SAFE center, which offers 24-hour access to free rape examinations.

Rosynsky said its important that domestic violence services like YWCAs are available during this time because isolation is one of the key ways perpetrators express their power and control over their victims.

We know when people are in close proximity with one another for extended periods of time, stress levels rise, Rosynsky said. Its a mechanism through which which a perpetrator can control their victim and can keep them under that control.

Rosynsky encouraged anyone who is experiencing domestic violence or is worried about someone who might be experiencing it to call their hotline.

Were here 24/7, Rosynsky said. You are not alone.

Read more here:

Complete coverage at mlive.com/coronavirus

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Wednesday, March 25: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

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The Regional Group of Independents, the Labour Party and the Social Democrats are all to be courted by Fianna Fail and Fine Gael in a bid to form a government now that the Green Party have chosen to absent themselves.

As talks between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are to escalate from policy-based discussions to a process of mapping out a programme for government, the decision by the Green Party to withdraw from such talks necessitates the other groups to be spoken to if a majority government is to be formed.

The Green Party has made it clear that it only supports the formation of a national government to deal with the coronavirus crisis.

With 160 TDs in the Dail, 80 seats is required for a majority, but senior sources in Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have said they ideally would like to have over 90 TDs on board to ensure any government would last a full term.

The nine-person Regional Independent Group has emerged as the most attractive coalition partners.

Unlike the Greens, they would not be driving you mad every day of the week. We may not get all nine on board, as Peadar Toibin is shakey, but the rest are rock-solid, whether they decide to take up a ministerial role, or whether they support the government from opposition, said one senior source.

With eight of the nine on board, with Fianna Fails 37 seats and Fine Gaels 35, a Government made of those three elements would have only 80 seats.

Several Regional Independents have said they would be slow to enter coalition with the two parties without another smaller political party present.

Although both the Social Democrats and the Labour Party have previously ruled themselves out of such talks, their position may be open to change, given the scale of the Covid-19 crisis.

After negotiating teams from the Fianna Fail and Fine Gael met on Wednesday afternoon, further formal meetings are expected in the coming days.

Both parties have agreed that there is a need to form a strong stable government that will help Ireland recover post Covid-19.

They are working to develop a programme for government that provides stability and majority support in the Dail, the statements said.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Ceann Comhairle Sean O Fearghail have expressed concern that the Oireachtas will not be able to pass legislation after next weekend as the new Seanad cannot be fully formed without the 11 senators nominated by a new taoiseach.

Meanwhile, other smaller indepedent groups have said they have not yet been approached, but that they remain open to discussions.

Tipperary TD Mattie McGrath of the Rural Group of six TDs said that it had not spoken to any party in the past 20 days, but was still exploring options.

Another group, the so-called Independent Group also has six TDs, but not all of their members support entering government.

Roscommon TD Michael Fitzmaurice submitted a policy paper to the parties outlining a number of priorities.
With more than 25,000 positive tests and 210 deaths, New York has become the epicenter of coronavirus cases in the United States, but in recent days, the numbers in Louisiana, New Jersey and several other states also have been skyrocketing.

Louisiana, which reported no cases until mid-March, topped the 1,000 mark and the state has seen more than 500 new cases reported since the weekend, with 1,388 cases and 46 deaths by Tuesday afternoon.

Gov. John Bel Edwards requested a federal major disaster declaration.

In his request to the President, Edwards said Louisiana has more cases per capita than any state, except for New York and Washington.

"We have overwhelmed our stocks of key resources needed for our hospitals, first responders and emergency managers," he wrote.

New Jersey added more than 800 cases from Monday to Tuesday, for a total of 3,675 positive tests and 44 deaths. That makes New Jersey the second-highest state case total in the nation. Last week alone, New Jersey cases increased tenfold.

The state is under a stay-at-home order. Gov. Phil Murphy said not everyone is adhering to the mandate.

"We must have 100% compliance. This is about public health and it's about people's lives. Your employees' lives, their families' lives, and your life," he said.

Michigan's total rose from just 65 cases about week ago to 1,791 on Tuesday afternoon, including 15 deaths. Pennsylvania saw a spike of more than 200 cases overnight, bringing the total to 851 cases statewide. Of those cases, seven people have died.

Florida and Georgia -- two states where political leaders have faced criticism over their timing on enacting restrictions -- both crossed the 1,000-case mark over the weekend and continue to rise significantly each day. As of Tuesday evening, Florida recorded 1,461 cases and 17 deaths, while Georgia reported 1,097 cases and 38 fatalities.

Additionally, Indiana went from a handful of cases about a week ago to 365.

California teen's cause of death is 'complex'

The death of a Los Angeles County resident may be the first juvenile to have died from the novel coronavirus in the United States.

But hours after saying the person died from Covid-19, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health issued another news release, saying there might now be an "alternate explanation" for the death.

The department characterized the case as "complex" and despite early testing indicating a positive result for Covid-19, further investigation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be required.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told CNN the person who died was a teenager.

The teen lived in Lancaster, California, according to county officials.

The news came as more than 52,000 coronavirus cases were reported in the country by Tuesday evening, with nearly half in New York. At least 701 people have died.

Coronavirus-related deaths in children remain relatively rare.

"In the mortality data that has been provided to us, there has been no child under 15 that has succumbed to the virus in Europe," Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, said during a briefing Monday. "There was the one 14-year-old in China. So we still see that there is less severity in children, and so that should be reassuring to the moms and dads out there."

According to studies, two children, a 10-month-old infant and a 14-year-old boy, died in China after being infected with the novel coronavirus.

The 10-month-old who died had a preexisting condition. The child experienced multi-organ failure and died four weeks after being admitted to a hospital in Wuhan, according to research published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The 14-year-old boy from Hubei province died February 7. No further details were available on his death, which was reported in a study published last week in Pediatrics that looked at 2,143 children with confirmed or suspected coronavirus.

New York governor demands ventilators

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo demanded the federal government take dramatic action to send thousands of stockpiled ventilators immediately to his state first, saying the Empire State's immense coronavirus caseload threatened catastrophe in days without it.

He said New York needs 30,000 more ventilators on top of the 7,000 it has.

Cuomo wants all of what he called a current federal stockpile of 20,000 ventilators to brace for the coming "apex" in cases, which he says will arrive in as soon as 14 days.

"We need the federal help, and we need the federal help now," Cuomo said. "New York is the canary in the coal mine. New York is going first -- we have the highest and fastest rate of infection."

"(After) we get over that curve ... I'll send ventilators, I'll send health care workers ... around the country."

The governor said his state was trying to address two other needs: more hospital beds and more medical staff.

He said the state needed 140,000 hospital beds for an anticipated patient apex in as in soon as two weeks, yet the state now has only 53,000 beds. Cuomo said he was speaking to hotel owners "about taking over their hotels" to place some patients.

"I will turn this state upside down to get the number of beds that we need," he said.

About 1,000 beds are being set up in Manhattan's Javits Convention Center. Those beds generally will be for noncritical overflow patients, freeing up intensive care units in hospitals, Cuomo said.

More than 40% of US live in states with stay-at-home orders

Cuomo's comments come as general stay-at-home orders -- intended to slow the spread of the disease so medical professionals can better handle incoming cases -- will be in effect in at least 17 states by Wednesday.

While President Donald Trump has expressed a desire to soon transition away from social distancing to help the economy, public health experts and physicians are generally urging they stay in place longer, as cases are nearly overwhelming health care systems in New York City and other areas.

"The (distancing) we have put in place over the last eight days ... you won't see the impact of that for at least another seven or 14 days," said Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, on NBC's "Today" show.

"What we're seeing in hospitals right now are people who most likely got exposed and sick more than two weeks ago," she said on "Today."

White House aides are scrambling to find a compromise option. Discussions include a phased system in which younger people -- potentially under 40, according to one option -- return to the workplace or business first, followed gradually by people slightly older until most of the country is back to normal, officials say.

Last week, the White House released guidelines urging Americans to avoid eating at bars or restaurants and skip out on gatherings with more than 10 people for the rest of March.

Health officials have said a lack of firm federal direction and residents ignoring social distancing guidelines could result in more sharp increases of cases and hospitalizations that will overwhelm the country's health system.

"I think we're far away from (the end of social distancing), quite frankly," said Dr. Celine Gounder, a CNN medical analyst and infectious disease specialist at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center.

'Like going to war with a water gun'

Supply shortages aren't unique to New York. Doctors have sounded the alarm on dwindling medical supplies across the country.

When it comes to personal protective equipment, Dr. Jason Halperin of Crescent Care in New Orleans told CNN staff was in "urgent need of everything."

Working in a hospital without that protective equipment, a nurse in a South Texas hospital told CNN, is like "going to war with a water gun."

"Everything is limited," the nurse said, "PPE, ventilators, beds, negative pressure rooms, nurses, etc."

One Seattle intensive care nurse told CNN she was told to wear a single N95 mask "indefinitely."

"We're being told that we have to use these until they're soiled, and if they get to that point, we have to show them to our (supervisor)."
These are challenging times when we all need to pull together while staying apart. It is not normal to be physically separated from family, friends and work colleagues for several weeks but we must focus on the greater good.

Already we have seen tens of thousands answer Irelands call by signing up to enter the health service. Since this crisis began, the Irish Independent has reported on the everyday heroes who are helping the most vulnerable in our communities

And today we want to create something positive ourselves. Over the coming weeks, the promise of a hopeful future will be our motivation to help stem the spread of Covid-19. The Irish Independent is asking readers to make a promise for when normality returns.

It could be to yourself, somebody in your family, a neighbour or even wider society. Maybe a trip to the zoo for the children, a hug for granny or even to finally meet that long-lost friend for a pint.

Submissions should be no more than 100 words and emailed to stories@independent.ie. A selection of submissions will be published in the Irish Independent and on Independent.ie.

And as Nelson Mandela said: May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.
In 2011, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Yemen to demand the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The protesters called not only for extensive political change but also for the president to be held accountable for the human rights abuses and other crimes he committed during his decades-long political career. One of the issues Yemenis wanted Saleh to answer for was the 1977 assassination of the president of North Yemen, Ibrahim al-Hamdi.

Al-Hamdi, viewed by many as a reformer and modernist, came to power in a bloodless coup in June 1974, when Yemen was divided into two countries: North Yemen, supported by Saudi Arabia and the United States, and South Yemen, supported by the Soviet Union. During his short tenure as head of state, al-Hamdi instituted several reforms to fight corruption and establish an egalitarian system, earning the publics support and respect. He also implemented policies aimed at reducing his countrys dependence on Saudi Arabia and attempted to unify the North and the South.

In October 1977, just two days before a scheduled visit to South Yemen to negotiate unification, al-Hamdi was assassinated. The exact circumstances of his death remain a mystery to this day.

Vice President and Army Chief of Staff Ahmad al-Ghashmi, who succeeded al-Hamdi as president, claimed at the time that al-Hamdi was killed in a murder-suicide involving his brother Abdullah and two French prostitutes. While officials refused to reveal the details of al-Hamdis death, it was widely rumoured that the bullet-ridden corpses of the president, his brother and two French women were found in a flat in Sanaa that belonged to one of the women.

Al-Hamdis family and political allies, however, never accepted the bizarre story as told by al-Ghashmi and the rumours that followed. Instead, they believed the president was assassinated by al-Ghashmi and his ally and eventual successor, Saleh. They also argued that the French women were added to the story simply to damage al-Hamdis reputation. There were several witnesses who came forward to say that the president was invited to al-Ghashmis house on the day of his murder and was last seen alive inside the home in the company of al-Ghashmi and Saleh. The Yemeni public also overwhelmingly believed that the president was killed by his political adversaries, mourning him as a respected national hero.

Despite the claims, questions and accusations surrounding al-Hamdis assassination, there has never been an official investigation into the circumstances of his death. Al-Ghashmi was himself assassinated in June 1978 before answering any questions about the death of his predecessor. Saleh, who took over the presidency in July 1978, also refused to talk about al-Hamdis death during his time in power.

This is why, in 2011, when people took to the streets to protest against the excesses and abuses of President Salehs government, some were carrying large posters of al-Hamdi. Young activists, most of whom were not even born when the tragedy occurred, were chanting slogans demanding justice for the reformist president, because they viewed his assassination as a breaking point in their countrys history.

Saleh was forced to resign in November 2011, but the overthrow of the president did not stop Yemenis from demanding answers about the murder of al-Hamdi. In 2016, Saleh finally addressed the issue in an interview with the RT network and denied playing any role in the killing. Nevertheless, he revealed that the official story pointing to a sexual scandal was completely fabricated, and claimed that agents paid by Saudi Arabia staged the assassination. Saleh later threatened to continue to talk about Yemens past political crimes, but he was killed in December 2017 before revealing anything more about al-Hamdis assassination.

In April 2019, an investigative documentary by Al Jazeera, titled Yemen: The Last Lunch, traced the events leading up to al-Hamdis murder using official documents, witness reports and expert testimonies. Beyond answering questions about who might have carried out the assassination, and how, the documentary also explored the possible motivations behind the crime.

Explaining how al-Hamdis efforts to make his country a strong, independent actor in the southern Red Sea region by building a strong economy and uniting with South Yemen disturbed the Saudi leadership, the documentary added weight to Salehs assertion that Riyadh was behind the assassination. The film also presented several other reasons why Saudi Arabia opposed the presidency of al-Hamdi: His policy to diminish the political influence of tribes in Yemen; his marginalisation of the Hashid tribes Paramount Sheikh Abdullah bin Hussayn al-Ahmar, who was a top agent of Saudi Arabia in Yemen; and his refusal to settle a border issue with Saudi Arabia, which had existed since the 1930s when the kingdom conquered three provinces of North Yemen and arranged a decades-long lease to keep possession.

Al Jazeeras documentary clearly showed that Saudi Arabia had strong motivations for eliminating al-Hamdi at the time. But no one has yet provided indisputable proof that Riyadh was behind the assassination. Moreover, it is widely believed that it was impossible for Saudi Arabia to carry out a plot to assassinate the president of Yemen inside his own territory without assistance from powerful local players.

Yemens former presidents, al-Ghashmi and Saleh, were perhaps the only two people who were in a position to shed light on al-Hamdis murder. As they are both gone, finding out exactly what happened to the reformist president who wanted to unite Yemen and make it an independent powerhouse in the Middle East appears to be an impossible task.

As Yemens devastating civil war enters its fifth year, the mystery surrounding the death of al-Hamdi continues to loom over Yemenis collective political memory. If and when the country succeeds in leaving the conflict behind, any post-war government will face the difficult task of uniting a divided nation and gaining the trust of all its citizens. By launching an official investigation into al-Hamdis death and revealing the people and powers behind his murder, the future leaders of Yemen could help the nation heal. Moreover, such an investigation can help Yemenis see the powers that hinder their countrys development and encourage them to take collective action to stop history from repeating itself.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
Three more people infected with coronavirus died overnight in India as the government sought on Thursday to improve basic services to 1.3 billion people locked indoors to slow the spread of the disease.

Streets were silent across India's cities and towns on the second day of a three-week, 24 hour shutdown as people heeded Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call not to step out of homes except in emergencies or to buy food and other necessities.

Lines of people, wearing masks and some with gloves, could be seen outside small neighbourhood shops in Delhi and Mumbai, among other cities.

Trucks were stranded at state borders and public transport was withdrawn. Police have strictly enforced the lockdown even though Modi said essential services would be maintained.

Ram Prakash, a shopkeeper in Delhi's Nizamuddin area, said supplies of some essential goods had improved although bottled water was still a problem.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

"We are still facing supply issues with a few things, but slowly things are getting better,a he said.

The health ministry said the number of cases of coronavirus had risen to 649, of which 13 had died.

The numbers are still small compared with those in China, Italy and Spain, but health experts have warned that the world's second most populous country faces a tidal wave of infections if tough steps are not taken.

Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO's top emergencies expert, told a Geneva news conference that with the lockdown in place, India had a window of opportunity to expand testing, surveillance and quarantine facilities and said its success with eliminating polio was an example.

"India got rid of polio by breaking it by breaking it down to the village level. All the way through the system, it broke down the problem, it went after the polio virus district by district by district by district. And India won."

A A A "If India does the same thing, breaks down the problem, puts in place the measures that are needed, then there is a way out."

India has tested 24,254 people as of Wednesday, according to the government run Indian Council of Medical Research, a small number compared to the population.

Only recently has the government authorized the private sector and some nongovernmental research laboratories to run the tests for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

HIKERS STRANDED NEAR EVEREST

The number of cases rose to 1,102 in neighbouring Pakistan with eight deaths, with most cases in Sindh province that is under a lockdown. But infections in Punjab, the most populous province, are picking up now, government data showed.

On Wednesday, Pakistan said it was seeking a fresh $1.4 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help it deal with the economic slowdown from the coronavirus.

Pakistan is already on a three-year rescue package that began last year as the country of 208 million people wrestles with a balance-of-payments crisis.

In Nepal, authorities were trying to evacuate tourists stranded in different parts of the country due to a nationwide lockdown, bring them to Kathmandu and arrange to send them home, the government said.

Shyam Thapa of the Himalayan Expedition company said about 125 foreign hikers were stranded at Lukla, the gateway to Mount Everest. aThey are safe and have no problem,a Thapa told Reuters.

Following is the spread of the coronavirus in South Asia's eight nations:

Confirmed cases, government figures

Pakistan 1,102

India 649

Sri Lanka 102

Afghanistan 84

Bangladesh 39

Maldives 13

Nepal 3

Bhutan 2

TOTAL 1,871
Impeached president Donald Trump today tells governors he plans to issue guidelines to rank U.S. counties as high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk, and tell state and local authorities that it is up to them to decide whether to increase or relax social distancing measures to combat coronavirus.

We are in the heat of a global pandemic that has not yet peaked in the United States. This proposed approach makes no sense, and will needlessly lead to preventable deaths, according to public health officials.

Here's a copy:

From the WSJ:

In a letter to governors on Thursday, President Trump said the administration's growing testing capabilities would enable it to publish, in consultation with public-health officials and scientists, criteria for classifying counties by risk.

President Trump in letter to governors on coronavirus says, "There is still a long battle ahead, but our efforts are already paying dividends." He says the administration is working on "new guidelines" to possibly increase or relax social distancing and mitigation measures. pic.twitter.com/QcWQg0e7G8  Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) March 26, 2020

As testing has ramped up, it has become clear that in states like New York and Louisiana the coronavirus could have been spreading undetected for weeks. Now Trump administration says it will use data to suggest "categorizing counties as high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk."  Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) March 26, 2020
Laganside Court in Belfast. (PA Images via Getty Images)

A 39-year-old Belfast man has been released on bail after denying he had purposely coughed in the faces of two police officers and claimed to have COVID-19.

Brendan Walker, of Clanmorris Street, is accused of two counts of attempted grievous bodily harm and two counts of common assault.

He appeared in the dock of Belfast Magistrates Court on Thursday, where he denied all the charges.

Latest coronavirus news, updates and advice

Live: Follow all the latest updates from the UK and around the world

Fact-checker: The number of COVID-19 cases in your local area

Explained: Symptoms, latest advice and how it compares to the flu

The court heard that two Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) constables went to arrest Walker on Wednesday following allegations that he had assaulted his partner on Monday and Tuesday.

She claimed that, in one incident, he pushed her over, causing her to suffer a miscarriage.

Walkers defence lawyer contended there is no evidence that she was pregnant.

A PSNI officer told the court: When he was arrested he stated that he had coronavirus and continued to cough into the faces of (the two constables) from a distance of less than one metre.

A Belfast man has been charged after coughing on police officers and claiming to have COVID-19. (PA Images)

It was confirmed that Walker is not currently known to have coronavirus.

His lawyer said the couple had been self-isolating because Walker has asthma and a suspected chest infection, adding that he had become distressed when placed in a mask, pulling it off and coughing because of his difficulty in breathing.

District Judge Fiona Bagnall granted bail to an address to be approved by police.

Walker must abide by a curfew and is banned from contacting his partner.

Coronavirus: what happened today
Gardnerella bacteria in the cervicovaginal microbiome may serve as a biomarker to identify women infected with human papillomavirus (HPV) who are at risk for progression to precancer, according to a study published March 26 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Robert Burk and Mykhaylo Usyk of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and colleagues. According to the authors, the findings could lead to therapeutic strategies that manipulate the microbiome to prevent disease progression.

HPV infection is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections and the causal agent of cervical cancer. But it is still not clear why only a small proportion of high-risk HPV infections progress to cervical cancer. To investigate the potential role of the cervicovaginal microbiome, Burk, Usyk and their collaborators evaluated cervical samples from 273 women who had high-risk HPV infection and were participating in the Costa Rica HPV Vaccine Trial.

They found that the abundance of Lactobacillus iners was associated with clearance of high-risk HPV infections. By contrast, Gardnerella bacteria were the dominant biomarker for progression of a high-risk HPV. Additional analyses revealed that the effect of Gardnerella is mediated by increased cervicovaginal bacterial diversity directly preceding the progression of a persistent infection to precancer. The findings suggest that monitoring the presence of Gardnerella and the subsequent elevation in microbial diversity could be used to identify women with persistent high-risk HPV infection at risk for progression to precancer. If future studies support a causal role of the cervicovaginal microbiome and disease progression, then it might be possible to manipulate the cervicovaginal microbiome in a manner to activate a local immune response and prevent disease progression.

The authors add, "The investigators prospectively demonstrate that progression of a persistent high-risk HPV infection to cervical precancer is in part explained by unique features of the cervicovaginal microbiota."

###

Research Article

Funding: The Costa Rica HPV Vaccine Trial is a long-standing collaboration between investigators in Costa Rica and the NCI. The trial is sponsored and funded by the NCI (contract N01-CP-11005), with funding support from the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women's Health. GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals (GSK) provided vaccine and support for aspects of the trial associated with regulatory submission needs of the company under a Clinical Trials Agreement (FDA BB-IND 7920) during the four-year, randomized blinded phase of our study. MU, RDB, CPZ and AG were funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) (U01 CA78527). The original Costa Rica vaccine trial was sponsored and funded by the NCI (contract N01-CP-11005). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: I have read the journal's policy and have the following conflicts: John T. Schiller and Douglas R. Lowy report that they are named inventors on US Government-owned HPV vaccine patents that are licensed to GlaxoSmithKline and Merck and for which the National Cancer Institute receives licensing fees. They are entitled to limited royalties as specified by federal law.

Citation: Usyk M, Zolnik CP, Castle PE, Porras C, Herrero R, Gradissimo A, et al. (2020) Cervicovaginal microbiome and natural history of HPV in a longitudinal study. PLoS Pathog 16(3): e1008376. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1008376

Author Affiliations:

Department of Pediatrics (Genetic Medicine), Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, United States of America

Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, NYU School of Medicine, New York, New York, United States of America

Department of Biology, Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York, United States of America

Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, United States of America

Agencia Costarricense de Investigaciones Biomedicas (ACIB), formerly Proyecto Epidemiologico Guanacaste, Fundacion INCIENSA, San Jose, Costa Rica

Prevention and Implementation Group, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France

Roche Molecular Diagnostics, Pleasanton, California, United States of America

Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG), National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America

Departments of Microbiology and Immunology, and Obstetrics and Gynecology and Women's Health, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, United States of America
2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Fauquier community has proven resilient. The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning --

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We are dedicated to providing the reliable, local journalism you have come to expect. We are committed to serving you with renewed energy and growing resources. Let the Fauquier Times be your community companion throughout 2021, and for many years to come.
T he bad news is that Londons museums and galleries have shut their doors. The good news is that this doesnt have to stop you looking at their collections. In fact, virtual visiting is the best way to go when it comes to at least some items in great institutions.

Just how easy is it to see the most famous pieces at peak tourist season, and how likely that you can afford a beautiful object your full attention with a school party in the same room? The websites of almost all museums and galleries allow for digital viewing, and its the perfect way to see detail. There are extraordinary high-resolution images online which allow you to see brushstrokes, surface texture and tiny details.

Lawrence Chiles, head of digital services at The National Gallery, is cheerfully unfazed by the crisis. The gallery has a strong digital presence, he says. All of our main painting collection is available on our website, and some of it on other platforms that bring together cultural institutions, such as Art UK. He recommends #museumsfromhome, where developments and content are shared on social media. Google Street View, meanwhile, allows for a virtual wander through museums, or theres the Google Arts & Culture app which, among other things, lets you transport a van Gogh into your own living room via your smartphone.

Here are some suggestions for objects from wonderful institutions to look at online. Some arent on display in the physical gallery because of space or fragility, or theyre on loan or being restored; some are, in fact, best viewed virtually.

Equestrian Portrait of Charles I, Anthony van Dyck, National Gallery

This is an imposing portrait of the king  the greatest British royal patron of the arts  by his pre-eminent court painter. The king was tiny; on horseback he seems a man of stature. The picture has been under restoration for some time and was due to be returned to the gallery soon. Close inspection reveals the exquisite painting of the horses mane, reflecting the lustrous mane of the king himself.

Rinaldo and Armida, Nicolas Poussin, Dulwich Picture Gallery

(By Permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery) / By Permission of the Trustees of

The gallerys online collection includes 250 paintings that arent currently on display. One is this dramatic 1630 picture by Poussin, of a scene from the epic poem Jerusalem Liberated by Torquato Tasso  an encounter between the crusader Rinaldo and the Saracen sorceress, Armida. A little cupid stays Armidas arm as she is about to strike Rinaldo, and she falls in love with the curly-headed youth. Then again, it could be an allegory of the martial virtues restrained by prudence. She wears a cloak of Poussins characteristic blue.

The Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, Sir John Soanes Museum

The Explore Soane page on the museums website lets you digitally visit the Model Room, where theres a cork replica of the celebrated temple  you can twizzle it around in 3D. The building was a particular favourite of the architect Soane, who declared that the uncommon taste, lightness and elegance of every part of this beautiful composition has never been surpassed, nor can be sufficiently admired. It was adapted by Soane in a number of his own works.

The Admonitions Scroll, British Museum

There are several ways to view the museums collections digitally through its website  Id especially recommend the treasures of the Waddesdon Bequest  but this scroll viewed via the museums page on Google Arts & Culture is an example of how a digital view can enable you to examine an object that is never on view in its entirety. It is a handscroll in nine scenes on silk and paper by the fourth-century painter, Gu Khaizi. It illustrates a parodic poem by Zhang Hua concerning the excesses of an empress. The level of detail, including the surface texture, is astonishing.

Bust of Nefertiti, Neues Museum, Berlin

This is an extraordinary and famous piece, apparently sculpted by Thutmose in 1345 BC. Its the bust of the Great Royal Wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten, reputedly the most beautiful woman in the world  and she still conveys this beauty, notwithstanding a missing eye. The effect of the bust is pretty terrifying. The virtual view shows you the piece in situ.

Ship Automaton, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

This is just fabulous: a ship model from 1585 which moves across a table centrepiece with the men on board beating drums and, as a piece de resistance, its little canons fire (hear it on the YouTube video). Its in the Kunstkammer, the Renaissance and Baroque treasure chamber of the museum.

Joseph Moxon Pocket Globe, British Library

(British Library)

The British Library offers online access to parts of its enormous collection, including maps (check out the Klencke Atlas), a sound archive and some illuminated manuscripts. It is now launching close virtual viewing of 30 of its historic globes, which are fragile and normally inaccessible. The first seven go online this week, including Joseph Moxons pocket globe from 1679: a little terrestrial globe tucked inside a celestial shell showing the stars with figures of the Zodiac.

The Cole Astronomical Compendium Dial, National Maritime Museum

The senior curator at the museum, Robert Blyth, describes this as the Tudor equivalent of the smartphone. Its an extraordinary object, made up of five brass leaves with a number of different scientific instruments. It can be used as a compass, a calendar and a geometric square, from which it is possible to calculate anything from high and low tides and the phases of the moon to the height of buildings. Its rather beautiful too, and is said to have belonged to Sir Francis Drake.

The Medici Venus, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

This glorious sculpture  originally brightly coloured  has had a chequered history, moving from Rome to Florence to (briefly) France and back; its owners include Ferdinand de Medici and Napoleon. Unusually, we know the sculptor: Cleomenes, son of Apollodorus, a sculptor working in Athens during the 1st century BC.
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BOISE, Idaho (AP)  Idaho Gov. Brad Little has vetoed a transportation funding bill citing his concern that it takes money that might be needed elsewhere at a time of economic uncertainty due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Republican governor on Tuesday vetoed the bill that would have shifted about $18 million in sales tax money to roads from the state's general fund.





. . .
The war of words between the US and China over the origins of the deadly coronavirus has extended to the WHO as Chinese President Xi Jinping praised its role in advancing global battle against COVID-19 amid his American counterpart Donald Trump's criticism that the UN health agency sided with Beijing and people are unhappy with its position.

President Xi on Thursday appreciated the World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus' efforts to advance the global battle against the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a reply letter to Ghebreyesus, Xi said China will continue to provide support for the international community in combating the coronavirus disease.

Under Ghebreyesus' leadership, the WHO has been actively advancing global cooperation against the contagious illness and gained wide recognition from the international community, Xi said.

China, he added, will continue to firmly support Ghebreyesus and the WHO in playing an active and leading role in the global fight against the pandemic.

China has also contributed USD 20 million to WHO for its fight against COVID-19 in different countries.

Xi's praise of WHO and Ghebreyesus' leadership came after Trump said the UN health body has "very much sided" with China on the coronavirus crisis and claimed that many are unhappy with the "very unfair" praise by the agency on Beijing's handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in the country.

President Trump was responding to a question on allegations by Republican Senator Marco Rubio that the WHO showed "favouritism" to China where the disease originated.

Congressman Michael McCaul, ranking member on the House Foreign Relations Committee, has questioned the integrity of the WHO's Director-General, saying "that there were several red flags in his past with respect to his relationship with China."



"It (WHO) has been very very much sided with China. A lot of people are not happy about it," Trump told reporters at a White House conference on Wednesday.

Trump was asked if he agreed that the WHO showed favouritism and the US should re-explore its relationship with the Geneva-based UN health agency once the dust settles.

"I think there is certainly a lot of talk that it's been very unfair. I think that a lot of people feel that it's been very unfair," Trump replied.

In a tweet Congressman Greg Steube alleged that the WHO has been a mouthpiece for China during the coronavirus pandemic.

Both the WHO and China must face consequences once this pandemic is under control, he demanded.

Senator Josh Hawley echoed Steube's view and demanded the same.

"There need to be consequences here. WHO has sided with China Communist Party against the world in this pandemic," he said in another tweet.

WHO chief has faced criticism for praising China's leadership for its "determination to end the new coronavirus outbreak".

He has also been accused of conspiring with Beijing in its "propaganda" to hush-up coronavirus cases.

Ghebreyesus had gone to China in January to meet President Xi and a WHO team comprising of international health experts was working in the country.

"Today I met with Xi Jinping, President of China, in Beijing to discuss next steps in battle against the new coronavirus outbreak. WHO appreciates the seriousness with which China is taking this outbreak & the transparency authorities have demonstrated," he had said in a tweet after his meeting with Xi.

"Just back from China where I held frank talks with President Xi Jinping, who has taken charge of a monumental national response to the coronavirus outbreak. Based on cooperation & solidarity, China has committed to protecting its citizens & all people globally from the outbreak," he said in another tweet.

Subsequently, WHO sent a team of experts to Beijing, Guangzhou and the virus epicentre Wuhan. The team included a specialist from the US.

The team coordinator, Bruce Aylward, a Canadian epidemiologist, also heaped praise on China for handling the crisis.

The US-China spat came as Trump has termed COVID-19, Chinese virus, which Beijing refuted saying that it amounted stigmatisation.

Globally, the death toll from the coronavirus has risen to 21,293 with more than 471,518 cases reported in over 170 countries and territories, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Although the epicentres Hubei province and its capital Wuhan have been reporting zero cases for a while, death toll there continued to rise.

On Wednesday, six deaths were reported from Hubei province, taking the death toll in China to 3,287 people and total number of cases to 81,285.

In Hubei and Wuhan alone as of Wednesday 3,169 people died since January. The virus was first reported in Wuhan in December last year.

According to WHO, China has reported 81,869 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 3,287 deaths.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As organisations around the world grapple with the idea of operating within the increasing confines of a coronavirus lockdown, so too are Parliaments. At times like now, more than ever, it is imperative that our democracy continues to operate.

Democracy need not stop for the virus: Jonathan O'Dea, Speaker of the NSW Legislative Assembly.

Yet while many thousands of people around the state began working from home these past few weeks, and organisations tested their technological limits, NSW Parliament resumed its proceedings in person, with appropriate coronavirus risk-mitigation measures in place.

Members in both houses were paired with others from the opposing side, meaning both those MPs would agree to stay home, with the effect of neutralising each others votes, while almost half of the members, reflective of the normal make-up of the chamber by party, came in to Macquarie Street.

It is in the public interest for Parliaments sittings to continue, not only to pass any urgent legislation, but to allow the Opposition and cross-benchers to question the government, and hold it to account for the action it takes at such a crucial time. As constitutional expert Anne Twomey said this week: In an emergency, maintaining public confidence is essential. One way of supporting this is to ensure Parliament can operate."
By adding 472 residents in 2019, Philadelphia narrowly escaped its first population decline in years, new Census population estimates show.

More than 10,000 people moved out of the city last year, but that loss was offset by 5,363 more births than deaths and 5,649 immigrants moving to the City of Brotherly Love. The citys population rose to 1,584,064, its smallest annual population growth in a decade.

The Pennsylvania suburbs had a strong showing in attracting new residents in 2019, according to the Census. Montgomery County led the way with a population increase of nearly 4,000, followed by Chester County with 2,903, and Delaware County with 1,516. The South Jersey suburbs had much smaller increases: Burlington County added 604 residents, Camden and Gloucester Counties just more than 100 each.

The estimates are derived from a yearly comparison of births, deaths, and migration since 2010, and the calculations are factored into federal funding programs. Next years decennial census will rely instead on questionnaires that are arriving in mailboxes this month.

Philadelphias growth has been slowing in recent years  from a surge of 12,000 added residents in 2011 to between 3,000 and 4,000 in each of the last three years. But the 2019 numbers may point to a population decrease in the future.

It is a striking trend after a period of high growth in the early part of the decade, said Ben Gruswitz, manager of socioeconomic and land use analytics at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

Gruswitz cautioned that preliminary population numbers tend to change. For example, the 2018 estimates released last year had pegged Philadelphias population increase at close to 4,000, but the Census Bureau has since adjusted that figure to just under 3,000.

Its definitely a different trend this year even than what it was last year, he said of Philadelphias break-even numbers.

Gruswitz said one possibility for the slow growth in Philadelphia is that after the Great Recession, millennials flocked to Philadelphia and other urban areas looking for job opportunities. Now many of those millennials are marrying and having children and perhaps looking at better school options in the suburbs.

Another reason could be city-like options in the suburbs. Gruswitz said multi-family housing developments have sprouted all over the suburbs, enabling people to walk to the grocery store and other places.

In all, the eight-county region, home to nearly 5.4 million people, grew by more than 10,000 people who came from other countries in 2019, the Census estimates. Bucks, Chester, Montgomery and Burlington Counties also benefited from increases in people moving from other areas of the U.S.

Since 2010, the Philadelphia region has grown by 113,439 people, far slower than counties in Texas, Florida, and California.

Were still a slower-growth region, Gruswitz said. None of the counties are growing as fast as they used to.

As for long-term predictions, Gruswitz said it could all change drastically given the coronavirus and likely recession to come. There may be a baby boom, but there may also be a shift in how people live.

People shifted toward density in the last decade, but that might reverse course and people may want more single-family homes and be better positioned to quarantine, Gruswitz said.
THE Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) has confirmed that two new prosecutors for Limerick will be appointed shortly.

Solicitor Padraig Mawe is set to succeed Michael Murray as State Solicitor for Limerick City following his retirement from the role after more than 35 years of service at the end of this month.

It is understood Mr Mawe, who is originally from County Kerry has strong connections in East Limerick.

While he previously worked in General practice in Listowel, he has been working for the Chief Prosecution Solicitors Office (CPSO) in Dublin since 2008 where he was the Legal Training Officer within the office for three years.

Mr Mawe, who is expected to take up the ten year contract in the coming weeks, came to national prominence a number of years ago through is involvement in the so called Anglo Trials.

Separately, Cephas Power BL has been selected as the new prosecutor for County Limerick.

Mr Power, who currently practices in Dublin and on the South Eastern Circuit is set to take over the role from Michael Collins BL who recently announced he is to pursue a new career path.

In his new role, Mr Power will work closely with State Solicitor for County Limerick Aidan Judge and will be responsible for prosecuting the majority of county cases before Limerick Circuit Court.

His appointment will have no impact on the position of John OSullivan BL who is the State prosecutor for Limerick city.

While there has been no official announcement relating to the new appointments, a spokesperson for the Office of the DPP confirmed to the Limerick Leader that both Mr Mawe and Mr Power had recently been selected for appointment following competitive processes.

It is understood a number of Limerick-based lawyers applied for both roles but were unsuccessful.
CHARLOTTE  Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina has received $47,000 from the Duke Energy Foundation to address food relief in 14 counties in North Carolina, including Mecklenburg and the surrounding region, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The grant will fund hunger relief for K-12 students and their families by providing food boxes and other food distribution to families in need and impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Duke Energy Foundation recently pledged $250,000 to Feeding the Carolinas, the network of foodbanks, including Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina, that serve and address hunger in all 100 counties across North Carolina.

We recognize the critical needs in our communities right now, and community groups like Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina are on the front lines responding to the COVID-19 crisis, helping those who need it most, said Stephen De May, Duke Energy North Carolina president. We are grateful for the work they are doing to feed communities in need.

Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina is grateful to the Duke Energy Foundation for their support of North Carolina food banks. During this time of unprecedented need, we will use these funds to provide food boxes to families in need.
Kody Brown has been at odds with his fourth wife, Robyn Brown, throughout TLCs Sister Wives Season 14. Robyn accused Kody of breaking his promises and letting her down after the Brown family moved from Las Vegas to Flagstaff.

When Robyns rental was sold by the owner, she wanted to move her five children to another rental to avoid delaying the whole familys move out to Coyote Pass, their communal property in Arizona. But Kody insisted it wasnt a renters market and that they had to buy immediately.

On the Mar. 22 episode of Sister Wives, Robyn vs. Kody, the polygamist couples argument came to a head as they arrived at an impasse. Kody took to Twitter to call himself a warrior in the wake of his massive fight with his youngest wife. Meanwhile, his third wife, Christine Brown, called him out on social media for his behavior.

Kody Brown | Denise Truscello/Getty Images for Global Gaming Expo

Robyn and Kody were at each others throats as their fight about buying vs. renting escalated

During the latest episode of Sister Wives, Robyn admitted she was having trouble trusting Kody in recent months. I dont want to insult him, but I dont know how to make sense of his thought process, the Sister Wives star confessed.

While Robyn was willing to move to Arizona for the greater good of the family, she explained, Kody hadnt come through with his promises to bring them all together on one piece of real estate. Our family culture is just eroding, she cried, and I feel like Im contributing to that by being okay at all with the idea of buying a house.

As Kody and Robyn continued to fight during the house hunting process about renting or buying, the Sister Wives patriarch said things were beyond urgent. We are running on borrowed time right now, Kody said, adding that he and Robyn were fighting more than they ever had before. Were in a state of anger with each other, he admitted.

Kody said he was having a hard time being a good husband to Robyn

Kody told Sister Wives producers that the dire situation and constant stress had left him feeling unable to be empathetic with Robyn anymore. She said he was getting really pushy about having his way, while he insisted that it only his protectiveness towards his family that was making him come across as so harsh and aggressive.

Im having a hard time not getting really stupid, Kody explained of his fight with Robyn, and when I get really uncomfortable, Im not a good husband. I cross the point of no return. And Im trying to stay kind throughout this process. Im angry, and Im scared, and that doesnt make for a good person.

Robyn knew that Kody wanted her to finally accept his decision and go along with it, but the 41-year-old mom of five said she just wasnt ready. He wants me to lay down my sword and stop fighting with him, she cried in desperation. But I dont know how. I cant. I just cant.

The Sister Wives star took to Twitter to call himself a warrior

Kody took to Twitter as the Sister Wives episode aired to share more of his marital frustrations. For the life of me, I really didnt know why @LuvgvsUwngs [Robyn] wouldnt budge on this, he wrote. I was literally losing my mind. I see her acquiescing here a little, but it is breaking her heart.

In another, even more telling tweet, Kody admitted that he sometimes felt pushed to the edge and driven to demand his way when things got tough or stressful in his four marriages. My sweet ladies dont understand that when a warrior goes to war, Mr. Nice Guy exits, he explained on Twitter. This situation feels like war! Retrospectively I realize that kindness would accomplish more. The stress of the situation over so many months has weakened my goodness.

Some fans werent buying it and warned the polygamist dad of 18 about pushing his wives too far. When the bear moms come out, who do you think will win? one Sister Wives viewer wrote to Kody in response.

Another fan thought Kody wasnt being protective, just rude. Its called a bad temper, the Twitter user argued.

Even Christine, Kodys third wife, called him out for his pushy and unyielding attitude on Twitter. Wow! @realkodybrown you look like a bully! she wrote during the episode. I know youre not trying to but man, go easy on my sister wife.
Countries across Latin America have tightened measures to halt the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus, with more lockdowns, border and school closures as well as increased aid to the region's poorest. As cases of COVID-19 continue to rise -- numbering more than 7,400 and 123 deaths as of Wednesday -- Bolivia and Colombia became the latest countries to impose a total lockdown, while Chile extended its school closures until the end of April. Here are the latest measures taken in several Latin American nations: - Bolivia - Bolivia is closing its borders and ordering a strict lockdown until April 15 starting at midnight Wednesday, President Jeanine Anez said as she declared a state of "sanitary emergency." The steps are designed to add teeth to a lockdown that was ordered on Sunday but has largely been ignored. More police and soldiers have been deployed to enforce the measures, Anez said. There would be narrow exceptions to who can cross the borders and the times at which people can be outside their homes, she added. - Colombia - A three-week total lockdown began just after midnight Tuesday and is set to last until April 12. "Stay at home, prevent the virus from spreading and save lives," said President Ivan Duque. Nearly 500 cases of the deadly virus have been reported in Colombia, which has a population of 48 million. The capital city Bogota had already been on lockdown since Sunday on the orders of the mayor. - Chile - About 1.3 million residents of Santiago -- including those of the Chilean capital's most affluent neighborhoods -- will be on lockdown for least a week starting at 0100 GMT Thursday, officials said. This follows an order by authorities to extend school closures until May. Classes were suspended on March 16, just under two weeks after the first coronavirus case was recorded. Chile has reported more than 1,100 infections and three deaths. - Panama - Panama will allow the cruise ship Zaandam -- operated by the Holland America cruise line -- to sail through its canal even though there are 42 people aboard with flu-like symptoms, Health Minister Rosario Turner said Wednesday. The vessel, with 1,800 passengers, set sail on March 7 from Buenos Aires headed for San Antonio on the central coast of Chile. But the ship had to alter its plans when ports along the way stopped it from docking due to coronavirus fears. Every ship that reaches Panama must present a list of sick people, "and if we suspect there are people with respiratory problems, they cannot land," Turner said. The Zaandam is set to cross the 80-kilometer inter-oceanic Panama Canal on Thursday and meet up on the Caribbean side with another cruise ship, the Rotterdam, which is to deliver supplies and kits to test for COVID-19. The aim is to reach Fort Lauderdale in Florida on March 30, its operator said. There have been 558 cases of the virus in Panama, including eight deaths. - Honduras - Soldiers have begun distributing food to locked-down residents in the poorest neighborhoods of the capital Tegucigalpa. President Juan Orlando Hernandez said 800,000 poor families -- 3.2 million people -- would receive food to ensure they stayed indoors. Honduras has recorded 36 COVID-19 cases so far. - Brazil - President Jair Bolsonaro has warned of possible "chaos" and "looting" of supermarkets if state shutdowns ordered by the governors of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are not ended. Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly scoffed at the severity of the deadly pandemic, previously criticized the closing of schools and businesses in Sao Paulo and Rio, two of the country's most populous states. "Companies aren't producing anything. They can't pay their employees. And if the economy collapses, there won't be any way to pay public officials. We are facing chaos," Bolsonaro said. If that happens and supermarkets are looted, he added, "we'll have chaos plus the virus." - Mexico - BBVA, the largest bank in Mexico, has predicted the coronavirus outbreak will cause the economy to contract by 4.5 percent in 2020. The Spanish bank said Mexican exports would be hard hit by a reduction in demand from the United States, the largest trading partner, if virus containment measures continue. BBVA also said remittances sent to family members in Mexico could be hit by rising unemployment in the United States. Other banks, such as Barclays and Credit Suisse, predicted the economy would shrink by 2-4 percent. On Wednesday, the Mexican government announced it would suspend all non-essential activities starting from the following day to help stem the spread of the virus.
A Spring Breaker who said he would continue to party despite the Covid-19 pandemic now realises he is not "invincible" to the coronavirus.

President Donald Trump urged people to avoid mass gatherings but despite this, beaches in the US were swarmed with nonchalant party-goers for Spring Break.

Brady Sluder, who travelled from Ohio to Miami for the holiday, was filmed last week saying he didn't care about the coronavirus, with his comments being shared widely on the internet.

"If I get corona, I get corona. At the end of the day, I'm not gonna let it stop me from partying," he told CBS.

Spring Break party in Miami during Coronavirus 1 /13 Spring Break party in Miami during Coronavirus AP AP AP Reuters Reuters Reuters AP AP AP AP AP AP AP

"We're just out here having a good time. Whatever happens, happens."

Now, the US is one of the worst hit country, with more than 1,000 deaths.

On Monday, Brady posted a lengthy apology on his Instagram in which he warned others against feeling "arrogant and invincible" as he had.

He said: "I wasn't aware of the severity of my actions and comments.

"Our generation may feel invincible, like I did when I commented, but we have a responsibility to listen and follow the recommendations in our communities.

Spring Breakers flocked to beach resorts / Reuters

"I will continue to reflect and learn from this and continue to pray for our wellbeing.

"I deeply apologise from the bottom of my heart for my insensitivity and unawareness of my actions."

The 22-year-old said like many others he had elderly people and family members who are at risk in his life.

Images from Fort Lauderdale showed swathes of young revellers dancing and drinking, rubbing shoulder-to-shoulder despite health warnings.

Brady isn't the only party-goer who regrets travelling for the annual party holiday.

David Anzarouth went to Miami in early March for Spring Break. Ten days later and the 25-year-old from Toronto was in a hospital emergency room and was diagnosed with Covid-19.

He told CBC News that the coronavirus was "definitely on everybody's mind but at the time we thought, 'Let's not lose all this money'. I myself have been needing a vacation."
New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi leaves after casting his vote for the Delhi Assembly elections 2020 at a polling booth in central Delhi's Nirman Bhawan on Feb 8, 2020. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News

After the Centre announced a financial assistance package of Rs 1,70,000 crores, the Congress on Thursday hailed the decision with former party president Rahul Gandhi terming it as the first step in the right direction. (File Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News

New Delhi, March 26 : After the Centre announced a financial assistance package of Rs 1,70,000 crores, the Congress on Thursday hailed the decision with former party president Rahul Gandhi terming it as the first step in the right direction.

"The Govt announcement today of a financial assistance package, is the first step in the right direction. India owes a debt to its farmers, daily wage earners, labourers, women & the elderly who are bearing the brunt of the ongoing lockdown," wrote Rahul Gandhi in his tweet.

The Congress has been demanding an economic package in view of the coronavirus spread and the subsequent lockdown. On Thursday, party interim president Sonia Gandhi wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi demanding the implementation of its proposed Nyay scheme and aid for the health workers.

The Finance Minister announced an economic relief package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore for the poor and migrant workers under the Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Yojana.

The package focuses on providing food and money to the poor to help them overcome the problems in the wake of the COVID-19 spread and the lockdown.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday also announced that doctors, paramedics, nurses, 'Asha' workers, cleaning workers involved in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic and treating affected patients would be extended a medical insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh each.

Addressing the media here, Sitharaman said that the scheme will help 20 lakh health professionals and workers across the country, in case they want to avail of it.
The Mizoram government has started shifting patients from the state-run Zoram Medical College (ZMC) to convert the facility into an isolation and treatment centre for patients suspected to be infected with coronavirus, an official said on Thursday.

All OPDs in the hospital have been closed after the government's announcement to convert the only medical college in the state into an isolation and treatment facility for COVID-19 patients, ZMC director T. Lalhmangaihi said.

About 98 patients are being shifted to Aizawl civil hospital and private healthcare units, she said.

The exercise is likely to be completed by Friday, she said.

Lalhmangaihi said a 7-bedded Intensive Care Unit of the medical college has also been vacated.

The state reported its first COVID-19 case after a 50 -year-old pastor, who recently returned from Amsterdam, tested positive for the deadly virus on Wednesday.

He was admitted to the isolation ward of ZMC.

His condition is stated to be stable, Lalhmangaihi said, adding that the patient's wife and two children were quarantined in the isolation ward.

Doctors and health workers treating the patients are equipped with personnel protective equipment and also staying at a special ward at ZMC.

State nodal officer of Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme Dr. Pachuau Lalmalsawma said that 10 samples of patients with coronavirus-like symptoms were sent to Guwahati Medical College and Hospital (GMCH) on Thursday for tests.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Professor Chahl, working alongside Dr Ali Al-Naji and Asanka Perera, achieved global recognition in 2017 when they demonstrated image-processing algorithms that could extract a human's heart rate from drone video.Since then they have demonstrated that heart rate and breathing rate can be measured with high accuracy within 5-10 metres of people, using drones and at distances of up to 50 metres with fixed cameras. They have also developed algorithms that can interpret human actions such as sneezing and coughing.He says the technology could be a viable screening tool for the COVID-19 pandemic."It might not detect all cases, but it could be a reliable tool to detect the presence of the disease in a place or in a group of people."Professor Chahl says the technology was originally envisaged for war zones and natural disasters as well as remotely monitoring heart rates of premature babies in incubators."Now, shockingly, we see a need for its use immediately, to help save lives in the biggest health catastrophe the world has experienced in the past 100 years."Draganfly CEO Cameron Chell says his company will use its sensor, software and engineering expertise to work with UniSA to integrate and deploy for government, medical and commercial customers."We are honoured to work on such an important project given the current pandemic facing the world with Covid-19. Health and respiratory monitoring will be vital not only for detection but also to understand health trends," Mr Chell says.Source: Newswise
The Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) has introduced a temporary billing regime to bill customers on an average of their last three months consumption.



Thus, all GWCLs customers will for the next few months, be billed on estimated consumption, based on an average of their consumption from January to March 2020, the company said in a press release Thursday.



According to GWCL, this has become necessary so as to reduce the frequency of visits by our Meter Readers to the premises of customers in order to reduce the spread of the covid-19 pandemic.



The management assures customers that, when the situation normalizes, meter readings by our Meter Readers will resume and all anomalies will be rectified.



In effect, if you have consumed more or less than you have been billed over the period, it will reflect in the meter readings, and subsequently be corrected by the billing system.



Management wishes also to advise customers that, although all offices of the GWCL remain open during this period, customers are encouraged to pay their bills via Mobile Money with all the telecommunication networks.









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Adult streaming giant P.o.r.n.hub has made its Premium service free around the world in a bid to get people to stay inside.

It comes after people across the world were ordered to stay indoors over the coronavirus outbreak.

Among them are Brits, who on Monday were dramatically told they must stay indoors unless to make essential trips.

Corey Price, the vice president of P.o.r.n.hub, said: With nearly one billion people in lockdown across the world because of the coronavirus pandemic, its important that we lend a hand and provide them with an enjoyable way to pass the time.



We hope by expanding our offer of free P.o.r.n.hub Premium worldwide, people have an extra incentive to stay home and flatten the curve.

The offer will last until April 23.

The site has also sent 50,000 masks to staff in New York City as they bid to fight the pandemic.

Joe Calderone, senior vice president at Long Islands Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital, told New York Post: These masks are mission critical in the fight against the COVID pandemic.

They will help keep our nurses, physicians and support staff safe from infection while caring for those who are stricken with the disease.

His hospital got 20,000 of the masks.

Follow Us on Facebook  @LadunLiadi; Instagram  @LadunLiadi; Twitter  @LadunLiadi; Youtube  @LadunLiadiTV for updates
London Court Refuses Defence Plea to Release Assange from Prison Amid Coronavirus Concerns

Sputnik News

13:44 GMT 25.03.2020(updated 14:52 GMT 25.03.2020)

Assange's defence team earlier applied for bail over concerns for their client's health in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Westminster Magistrates' Court in London has rejected a plea from Julian Assange's lawyers to release the WikiLeaks founder from the high security Belmarsh prison on concerns for his health amid the coronavirus epidemic. Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange should remain in prison, citing the lack of COVID-19 cases in the facility.

Assange himself took part in the hearing via a video call for a couple of minutes. He agreed that the discussion of his release could continue without him.

Barrister Edward Fitzgerald QC attended the hearing in person on behalf of the WikiLeaks publisher, who remains on remand at Belmarsh maximum security prison. Other legal representatives and journalists joined the hearing via telephone link. The court room was sparsely populated as social distancing measures were observed as part of moves to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

After listening to detailed arguments from representatives of the US government and Assange's defence lawyer Judge Baraitser concluded that, "as matters stand today this global pandemic does not of itself yet provide grounds for Mr Assange's release".

"It is government's responsibility to protect both the vulnerable and those outside the category and I have no reason to doubt that Public Health England will provide the [appropriate] advice to the government [in terms of how to ensure the health and well-being of the prison population]", she said.

Baraitser noted that while there is, "a presumption in favour of bail for all those like Assange not convicted of an offence" and while "[n]o court wishes to keep a person in custody, and even less so during an emergency however Mr Assange's past conduct shows the length he is prepared to go to avoid extradition proceedings".

She said that Assange "breached" the trust given to him when he "absconded" in 2010.

"After a warrant was issued for his arrest he remained unlawfully at large for many years, he has every reason to [try and abscond]. In my view there are substantial grounds to believe if I released him today he would not return to face his extradition hearing... There are no conditions that could allay this concern and this application is therefore refused", the judge said.

Fitzgerald said that the defence would likely be appealing the judges decision.

Earlier, the WikiLeaks founder's defence announced via its Don't Extradite Assange Twitter page that they would apply for bail for Assange, citing concerns over prison conditions which could put him in 'imminent danger' of coronavirus infection.

The United Kingdom has registered 6,654 cases of COVID-19. The infection claimed the lives of 335 people.

Assange's Case

Assange, accused of sexual harassment and rape in Sweden in 2010, had been hiding since June 2012 at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. On 11 April 2019, he was detained at the request of the United States. A court in London found him guilty of violating bail conditions and sentenced him to 11 months in prison. Hearings on his extradition began on 2 May.

Soon after, US authorities announced that they had charged Assange with 17 counts of breaking the law on espionage and the disclosure of classified information. If extradited to the United States, Assange could face up to 175 years in jail.

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When Grace Poland tumbled over, banging her head, twisting her leg and praying that someone would respond to her panic alarm, she felt anything but lucky. But that was six days ago.

Now Ms Poland, a 36-year-old cerebral palsy sufferer, may be the only Australian who feels blessed to be in hospital, a place most are avoiding due to the risk of COVID-19 infection.

Grace Poland, who has cerebral palsy and requires intensive support, says she is lucky to have ended up in hospital.

Ms Polands predicament underlines a crisis looming in Australias huge disability and home aged care sectors. Poorly paid and often casual workers in both sectors travel from house to house performing an essential service  assisting the elderly and disabled with the most vital and intimate tasks so they can continue to live independently.

Last financial year more 957,000 elderly Australians received help to remain in their homes under the Commonwealth Home Support Program or a Home Care Package and hundreds of thousands more were funded by the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Mr. Rogers used to say that in a time of crisis, we should always look for the helpers. Throughout history, in times of crisis, Christians have been among the helpers and, often, leading the efforts and innovation in order to bring relief and healing to victims. In the early days of the coronavirus crisis in Wuhan, China, Christians were helping. Today, American Christians are helping their neighbors.

For example, when Rev. Charles Cheek of the Peninsula Baptist Association in Hampton Roads, Virginia learned that local homeless shelters were closing on account of the pandemic, he and his church started a community donation drive to help get food for those who are impacted.

Another example is the Alabama megachurch, Church of the Highlands, who turned their parking lots into drive-through coronavirus testing centers. Within two days, nearly 1,000 people across the state had been tested for the virus in an effort staffed by two doctors and church volunteers dressed in protective gear. This effort was not wholly unexpected for this church who, since 2009, has operated a health clinic that sees 18,000 patients a year.

And then, theres a remarkable story happening in my backyard. Not only in Colorado Springs, but about a stones throw from my house, my friend Josh Imhoff and his group YWAM Emerge is being used by God to bless my community through lettucethousands of heads of lettuce.

As Josh told me on the latest episode of the BreakPoint podcast, YWAM Emerge works in 15 countries around the world teaching orphanages, churches, widows homes, and more how to grow self-sustaining food through aquaponics. Aquaponics is a system for growing vegetables that involves raising fish, whose waste produces fertilizer for growing vegetables hydroponically, and the plants, in turn, purify the water for the fish.

YWAM Emerge has sustained its ministry of training others through their own lettuce production. Their greenhouse produces 2,700 heads of lettuce a week which, until just a few weeks ago, was sold to restaurants and colleges and other local ministries and businesses. But when the coronavirus hit, and restaurants and schools had to close down, nearly all of their accounts were canceled within days. As Josh told me, We lost a lot of money.

Fearing hed have to shut down the operation, Josh went to God in prayer. Actually, Josh admitted in our podcast interview, I went in to cry and give up.

As he prayed, Joshs mind was turned to Exodus 4, where Moses was protesting his new job assignment to God. God replied, What do you have in your hand? As Josh told me, Moses had a staff. And I looked, and what we had in our hands was lettuce. A lot of lettuce.

Josh became overwhelmed with the idea of giving the lettuce away to the community. Weve been blessing other countries, he told me. Its time to bless Colorado Springs. To bring hope, and to turn something bad into something good.

One of the most amazing parts of this story is how Josh and his team managed to pull this off in just a few days, not only pivoting from business accounts to food distribution but doing it in the middle of a snowstorm! Hundreds of cars arrived at the YWAM Emerge property to pick up two heads of lettuce: one for themselves and one to give away to someone in need.

The YWAM staff were there, with hands washed and gloved and, in a socially distanced way encouraged people, took prayer requests, and served them lettuce. I would have elderly people driving in with their masks on, Josh said. You could see the fear in their eyes. But so many told us, thanks for giving us hope.

Of course, Josh doesnt think he can feed a whole community with lettuce. But this week, several churches will be involved in serving the community, providing volunteers to help Josh and his team, to encourage and to pray for all those who ask for it, a while picking up their lettuce. And, this has pushed YWAM Emerge to expand operations, so that when sales resume, they can continue to bless the community.

Dont miss Josh Imhoff telling this amazing story of how God is using lettuce to bless Colorado Springs. Its the latest episode of the BreakPoint Podcast. Come to BreakPoint.org to listen, or subscribe to the BreakPoint Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or whatever podcast service you use.

Sometimes being a helper is as simple as asking: Whats in your hand?

And I want to alert you that on Tuesday March 31, Ed Stetzer will be with me online to talk about how Christians can love their neighbors during the coronavirus pandemic. Its part of our next online Short Course. Sign up for it here.

And then, find out whats in your hand.

Publication date: March 26, 2020

Photo courtesy: Phuc Long O./Unsplash

BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931  2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.

John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
A Belfast man allegedly coughed in the faces of two police officers and declared that he had Covid-19, a court heard today.

Brendan Walker is accused of targeting the pair as he was arrested on Wednesday for suspected episodes of domestic violence.

The 39-year-old, of Clanmorris Street in the north of the city, claims any coughing was due to his asthma and a chest infection.

He appeared before Belfast Magistrates' Court charged with two counts of attempting to inflict grievous bodily harm on the officers.

Police went to detain him following allegations that he had attacked his partner on two separate occasions this week.

She claimed that she suffered a miscarriage due to being pushed over on Monday, the court heard.

Walker then allegedly shoved her against a wardrobe at their home a day later.

A PSNI officer contended: "When he was arrested he stated that he had coronavirus and continued to cough into the faces of (the two constables) from a distance of less than one metre."

It was confirmed that Walker, who also faces two counts of common assault, is not currently known to have Covid-19.

Defence lawyer Eoghan McKenna stressed his client denies the charges.

He told the court the accused has suffered severe asthma from the age of 11, and had also picked up a suspected chest infection.

The couple were self-isolating as a precaution when police arrived, according to the solicitor.

Mr McKenna argued that Walker's medical condition caused him to react when put in a mask during the arrest operation.

"He pulled the mask off because he was distressed by his breathing and started to cough," the lawyer said.

District Judge Fiona Bagnall was also told there is currently no medical evidence that the accused's partner had been pregnant.

Granting bail to live under curfew at an address to be approved by police, Mrs Bagnall banned Walker from any contact with the woman.

He is due to appear back in court in four weeks time.
The coronavirus pandemic is at present so monumental it has the ability to overshadow everything else  including pressing problems that already exist. In Philadelphia, that includes gun violence. According to data from the Philadelphia Police Department, in the four weeks ending March 22, almost all crime categories  including overall violent crime  saw large declines compared with the prior four weeks. An exception is shootings, which have risen 22%, to 106, in the last four weeks.

The bitter irony is that social distancing required by the coronavirus has the potential to make gun violence more deadly  not just because it limits violence interventions, but because it forces gun-wound victims to compete with COVID-19 patients for essential health services.

COVID-19 is imposing serious demands on units of blood, ventilators, and personal protective gear for health-care workers. Treating gun victims requires a lot of blood, a product in short supply due to canceled drives. Similarly, gun victims are at high risk of needing ventilators. Trauma surgeon Mark Seamon says that in his hospital, Penn Presbyterian, there are 5 to 15 gun-wound patients on ventilators at any given moment.

 READ MORE: Philadelphia area hospitals conserving blood amid nationwide donation shortfall

 READ MORE: Six health workers inside a Philly trauma bay share their most powerful memories of treating gun violence

Reaching the most at risk from a distance

Social distancing can prove problematic to Philadelphias gun violence prevention efforts. Since last June, Philadelphias Office of Violence Prevention has disbursed $1.7 million in grants to nearly 100 small community-based nonprofits. Grantees have been told to postpone their projects until further notice to allow them to comply with the citys stay-at-home order, according to OVP. The city also deploys outreach workers to defuse conflict before it turns to violence. According to an OVP spokesperson, outreach continues its work, but the office could not provide specifics on how. Given the severity of the gun violence problem, the Kenney administration should be pressuring the OVP to adapt more quickly  and communicate more.

Meanwhile in Chicago, a city that successfully reduced shootings in recent years, gun violence prevention nonprofits are adapting to social distancing. The Institute for Nonviolence Chicago is continuing its outreach work but with new precautions. READI Chicago, which provides jobs and cognitive behavioral therapy, rapidly surveyed the tech capacity of participants and responded to their needs  including at times reimbursements for data plans  to move CBT sessions online.

 READ MORE: Important lessons for Philadelphia from Chicagos three-year decline in gun violence | Editorial

In the coming months, as resources continue to get scarce, focusing efforts on those at risk for violence is going to be more important than ever. City and state officials should not pull the funding out from under the feet of one health crisis to address another. The coronavirus has forced all to make significant alterations in their lives; the citys efforts at solving gun violence should be no exception.

Wolfs gun store mistakes

Given the trends we are seeing in Philadelphia, there should be no question that Gov. Tom Wolf must shut down all gun stores. The news of the coronavirus led to a spree of gun purchases, including by first-time gun owners. On March 19, Wolf ordered all non-life-sustaining businesses to close, originally including gun stores. But on the following Tuesday, after pressure from state Supreme Court justices, Wolf reversed course, allowing gun stores to see customers by appointment. This strikes us as unnecessary and dangerous.

The case for closing gun stores is even more compelling considering that one crime category that could see an increase because of the coronavirus is domestic violence and child abuse, according to Loyola University New Orleans criminologist Kelly Frailing. People are trapped at home, together, during a very stressful and uncertain time. There are enough terrifying statistics showing that a gun in the home exponentially increases the risk of domestic killings and suicides  as well as accidental shootings. Guns also make for lucrative burglary opportunities. At this time, with high stress and kids out of school playing in the house all day, more than ever, we need fewer guns  not more.

Responding to all crises

If both gun violence and coronavirus continue at their current rates, both COVID-19 and shooting victims will not be able to receive the care they need and deserve. Increased wait times, lack of units of blood, and short supply of ventilators could turn nonfatal shootings into homicides. The greatest challenge at this moment, both for community and government, is to effectively respond to all health threats  especially those that can be just as deadly as the pandemic.
By ANI

NEW DELHI: Over 500 German citizens stranded in India amid the nationwide lockdown were flown back to their homeland on Wednesday night, German Ambassador to India Walter J Lindner informed on Thursday.

"Today's update on our repatriation efforts. First evacuation flight (A380) with 500+ people left last night. Second one to be airborne tonight. Thanks also to the Indian authorities for the great cooperation!" Lindner tweeted.



COVID-19 LIVE | Kashmir records its first death, positive cases in India near 650

Countries like Russia, Japan, Germany, and Ukraine have been carrying out special operations to evacuate their citizens stranded in India following the announcement of a nationwide 21-day lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Russia on Wednesday had evacuated 464 of its nationals from India.



It may be noted that the Central government has banned the operations of international commercial passenger flights to India from March 22 to March 29

Todays update on our repatriation efforts. First evacuation flight (A380) with 500+ people left last night. Second one to be airborne tonight. Thanks also to the Indian authorities for great cooperation! @GermanyDiplo @AuswaertigesAmt @GERonAsia @AA_SicherReisen pic.twitter.com/yVpbNH31lO  Walter J. Lindner (@AmbLindnerIndia) March 26, 2020

India has reported 649 cases of the novel coronavirus, of which 593 are active cases, according to the Union Health Ministry update on Thursday morning.
[March 26, 2020] Contact Center Software Market growth predicted at 15% till 2024: Global Market Insights, Inc.

SELBYVILLE, Del., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the latest report "Contact Center Software Market by Component (Software [Automatic Call Distribution, Dialer, Call Recording, Computer Telephony Integration, Workforce Optimization, Customer Collaboration, Reporting & Analytics, IVR, IVA], Service), Deployment Model (On-Premise, Cloud), Application (BFSI, Consumer Goods & Retail, Government, Healthcare, IT & Telecom, Travel and Hospitality), Regional Outlook, Competitive Market Share & Forecast 2024", by Global Market Insights, Inc., the market valuation of contact center software will cross $40 billion by 2024. North America dominates the contact center software market and is poised to witness around 13% gains through 2024. The cloud adoption rate of the North American contact center industry increased from around 5% in 2012 to approximately 15% in 2016 with a positive impact on market demand. Companies operating in this region are shifting from product-based to customer-centric approach, creating a substantial demand for the market. Request a sample of this research report @ https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/2972 Elaborating further on the regional landscape, the Asia Pacific contact center software market is anticipated to exhibit a relatively higher CAGR of 20% during the forecast period. The emergence of various SMEs in the region is a key factor contributing to the market growth. Besides, the rising government efforts toward enabling industrial automation and the expanding BFSI, consumer goods & retail, healthcare, and IT & Telecom industries are some of the major factors fueling the APAC market revenue. The IT & telecom sector is demonstrating massive interest in the deployment of contact center software and is likely to observe more than 17% growth until 2024. Telecom companies are utilizing this software to register customer complaints, deliver value-added services, send follow-up reminders for payments, and maintain proactive engagement with customers. The cloud-based deployment model in the contact center software market will expand at 22% between 2018 and 2024. In addition to offering faster and easy implementation, the cloud-based model also offers other additional advantages such as enhanced scalability & flexibility, real-time data visibility, customization capabilities, greater security, and others. The software component segment accounted for majority of market revenue hare, with over 70% in 2017. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) dominates the software segment as it assists in quick resolution of customer queries by providing them with pre-recorded responses for frequently asked questions or routing the customers to the responsible representative or department for complex queries. Various sectors including BFSI, hospitality, retail, and healthcare are deploying IVR software for enterprise websites for easy and continuous interaction with customers.



Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @ https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/2972

Table of Contents (ToC) of the report: Chapter 3. Contact Center Software Market Insights 3.1. Introduction 3.2. Industry segmentation 3.3. Industry landscape, 2013-2024 3.4. Contact center software ecosystem analysis 3.4.1. Contact center software providers 3.4.2. Contact center providers 3.4.3. Contact center component integrators 3.4.4. Distributors 3.4.5. End users 3.5. Contact center software architecture analysis 3.6. Contact center software evolution 3.7. Technology & innovation landscape 3.7.1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning 3.7.2. Cloud-based technology 3.7.3. Big data and predictive analytics 3.8. Regulatory landscape 3.8.1. European Contact Centre Standard (ECCS) 3.8.2. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 3.8.3. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) 3.8.4. Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) 3.8.5. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) 3.8.6. Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) 3.8.7. California Online Privacy Protection Act (CalOPPA) 3.9. Industry impact forces 3.9.1. Growth drivers 3.9.2. Industry Pitfalls and Challenges 3.10. Porter's Analysis 3.10.1. Threat of new entrants 3.10.2. Threat of substitutes 3.10.3. Bargaining power of buyer 3.10.4. Bargaining power of supplier 3.10.5. Industry rivalry 3.11. PESTEL analysis 3.12. Growth potential analysis Browse complete Table of Contents (ToC) @ https://www.gminsights.com/toc/detail/contact-center-software-market About Global Market Insights, Inc. Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider. Offering syndicated and custom research reports, growth consulting and business intelligence services, Global Market Insights, Inc. aims to help clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data that aid in strategic decision making. GMIPulse, our business analytics platform offers an online, interactive option of exploring our proprietary industry research data in an easy-to-use and dynamic manner. Clients get to explore market intelligence across 11 top-level categories and hundreds of industry segments within them, covering regional, company level and cross-sectional statistics that make our offering a stand-out for decision-makers. Contact Us: Arun Hegde

Corporate Sales, USA

Global Market Insights, Inc.

Phone: 1-302-846-7766

Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688

Email: [email protected] Related Images global-contact-center-software.png

Global Contact Center Software Market revenue to cross USD 40 Bn by 2024: GMI

Asia Pacific contact center software market is anticipated to exhibit CAGR of around 20% during the forecast period. The emergence of various SMEs in the region is a key factor contributing to the market growth. Related Links Contact Center Analytics Market Trends Chatbot Market Trends View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/contact-center-software-market-growth-predicted-at-15-till-2024-global-market-insights-inc-301029713.html SOURCE Global Market Insights, Inc.

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Kathy Griffin has hit out at President Donald Trump after being refused a coronavirus test despite experiencing unbearably painful symptoms.

On Wednesday, the comedian shared a photograph on her Twitter and Instagram accounts of herself lying in a hospital bed wearing a face mask.

In the caption, the 59-year-old said she had been sent to an isolation ward after visiting an urgent care facility.

Despite experiencing symptoms consistent with the coronavirus, Griffin said her attempts to get tested had proved unsuccessful.

The star blamed Mr Trump and Vice President Mike Pence saying they had not made enough tests available in the USA, and shared a tweet from President Trump saying the country had more testing than any other nation.

I was sent to the #COVID19 isolation ward room in a major hospital ER from a separate urgent care facility after showing UNBEARABLY PAINFUL symptoms.

The hospital couldnt test me for #coronavirus because of CDC (Pence task force) restrictions. #TESTTESTTEST.

In the initial tweet posted by Mr Trump, the president boasted about the large number of Americans currently being tested for coronavirus, writing: Just reported that the United States has done far more 'testing' than any other nation, by far.

In fact, over an eight day span, the United States now does more testing than what South Korea (which has been a very successful tester) does over an eight week span. Great job!"

According to the BBC, the latest data shows that 359,161 people have been tested in the US.

While this is marginally more than the amount of people tested in South Korea, it is important to note that the US has a population of 328 million, compared to around 51 million in East Asian nation.

The number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 continues to grow in the US, with 69,117 so far. However, the true number of cases is likely to be significantly higher.

In January, Mr Trump told CNBC he was not at all concerned about the virus, saying: Its going to be just fine  we have it totally under control.

However, the president later wrote in a tweet that he had always taken Covid-19 seriously, referring to it as the Chinese virus and adding: The Fake News new narrative is disgraceful [and] false!
Twitter on Wednesday temporarily locked the account of a conservative website after it promoted an article suggesting that the medical community should consider intentionally infecting people with the coronavirus at chickenpox parties to help slow the spread of the virus.

The article, titled How Medical Chickenpox Parties Could Turn The Tide Of The Wuhan Virus, argued that a controlled voluntary infection program could allow young people to return to work after contracting and recovering from the virus.

Such a strategy, the article stated, could promote herd immunity and help save the economy.

Many figures on the right have expressed concern about the toll on the economy from prolonged social distancing and from the closing of businesses. President Trump on Tuesday said he would love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter, a timeline that top health professionals said was far too soon.

Twitter said the article posted by the conservative website, The Federalist, as well as a tweet about it, violated the companys rules, which ban content that flouts the recommendations of public health officials on the coronavirus.
JASPER, Ind., March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kimball Electronics, Inc. (KE), (the Company), provides the following update on the current impact of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak on the Company.

Our primary focus is on the well-being and safety of our employees and doing our part to stop the spread of COVID-19. We have taken steps to safeguard the health of our employees in our facilities worldwide in accordance with recommended protocols established by government authorities and country-specific, federal, state, and local public health organizations, including mandatory work-from-home for those whose responsibilities make it possible. Our employees are also impacted by burdens imposed by COVID-19, such as travel restrictions, limitations on public gatherings, shelter in place orders, and mandatory closures of schools and child-care facilities which impact the ability of certain of our employees to report for work.

The Company has a diversified portfolio of markets, geographies, and customers we serve, some of which will be impacted more significantly than others. While we have experienced and are expecting sales declines in certain product categories, we are experiencing increasing demand in other product categories, specifically for our medical assemblies, such as those related to respiratory care.

I cannot express enough my great gratitude for the direct link our employees continue to play when it comes to making the important products we provide to our customers, says Chairman and CEO, Don Charron. We have customers whose products are essential to the health and safety of people around the globein their personal lives and at work. Supporting customers with their specific needs is a good reminder of how important we are to the value streamand to people's healthespecially during this pandemic. I am proud of what we are doing as a company right now.

COVID-19 has disrupted the Companys global operations since its initial outbreak. While our facilities in China were initially adversely impacted, they have now resumed normal operations. The Companys other non-U.S. operations in Poland, Romania, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, India, and Mexico are all affected to varying degrees by government measures restricting the movement of citizens and operation of businesses. In the U.S., our manufacturing operations located in Jasper, Indiana, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Tampa, Florida, will maintain normal operations, based on recent federal, state, and local government mandates. This is because they fall under the general exception criteria as Essential Businesses due to our production and supply of medical assemblies critical to a variety of respiratory care products and drug delivery devices. We are working closely with our customers and suppliers to support worldwide critical public health needs.

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The Company cannot predict the duration or scope of the COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, the negative financial impact on results cannot be reasonably estimated but could be material. The Company will provide an update during our fiscal year third quarter 2020 earnings release conference call and webcast.

About Kimball Electronics, Inc.

Kimball Electronics is a multifaceted manufacturing solutions provider of electronics and diversified contract manufacturing services to customers around the world. From our operations in the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Thailand, and Vietnam, our teams are proud to provide manufacturing services for a variety of industries. Recognized for a reputation of excellence, we are committed to a high-performance culture that values personal and organizational commitment to quality, reliability, value, speed, and ethical behavior. Kimball Electronics, Inc. (KE) is headquartered in Jasper, Indiana.



To learn more about Kimball Electronics, visit: www.kimballelectronics.com .

Lasting relationships. Global success.
Stop & Shop is hiring at least 5,000 new employees across five states, including Connecticut, to keep up with customer demand as the coronavirus spreads.

Officials with Massachusetts-based grocery chain didnt say how many positions it is looking to fill specifically in Connecticut. But a spokewoman for Stop & Shop said the part-time jobs the company is hiring for are permanent positions in its stores, distribution centers and delivery operations across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Maria Silvestri, senior vice president of human resources for Stop & Shop, said the companys employees are doing extraordinary work to serve our customers and local communities during this unprecedented time.

We are looking forward to adding great new members to the team, Silvestri said in a statement. Recognizing the enormous impact that the coronavirus emergency is having on local employment, we also hope these new positions will provide an important base of new growth and opportunity for many of our neighbors across the region.

Among the part-time positions the company is hiring for are night crew, cashiers, porters, and workers in the bakery, deli, grocery, produce, seafood and meat departments.

Cashiers and baggers must be at least 16 years old, while the other positions require applicants to be 18, according to the company.

Interested applicants can find out more information on available jobs and apply for on the companys website.

News of Stop & Shops plan to hire new workers comes on the heels of an announcement the company made last week that it had reached an agreement with the United Food and Commercial Workers union to give workers a 10 percent pay increase during the pandemic. The agreement also calls for workers to get two additional weeks of paid leave if they were to become sick.

Stop & Shop, which is owned by Dutch grocery giant Ahold Delhaize, has nearly 60,000 employees and more than 400 stores.

luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.com
To help the poor fight the battle against Corona Virus

The Union Finance & Corporate Affairs Minister Niramla Sitharaman has announced Rs 1.70 Lakh Crore relief package under Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana for the poor to help them fight the battle against Corona Virus.

While addressing the press conference in New Delhi, the Finance Minister said Todays measures are intended at reaching out to the poorest of the poor, with food and money in hands, so that they do not face difficulties in buying essential supplies and meeting essential needs.

The FM has also announced insurance scheme for health workers fighting COVID-19 in Government Hospitals and Health Care Centres-

Safai karamcharis, ward-boys, nurses, ASHA workers, paramedics, technicians, doctors and specialists and other health workers would be covered by a Special insurance Scheme.

Any health professional, who while treating Covid-19 patients, meet with some accident, then he/she would be compensated with an amount of Rs 50 lakh under the scheme.

All government health centres, wellness centres and hospitals of Centre as well as States would be covered under this scheme approximately 22 lakh health workers would be provided insurance cover to fight this pandemic.

District Mineral Fund
Hillary couldnt manage it. A tsunami of smears about collusion with nefarious Russians wasnt sufficient. Not even a hysterical impeachment circus led by bug-eyed ringmaster Adam Schiff did the job.

All hopes of a Trump removal are now pinned on coronavirus fever.

Indeed China, liberalism, and germs are all more preferable than Trump's second term, to the mainstream media.

Until recently, President Trump has weathered everything hurled at him in part because he has presided over the best economy Americans have known since the 1960s. Millions of Americans have never known times this good. A booming stock market. Unemployment almost nonexistent -- especially among groups who have often benefitted less from previous economic recoveries, such as black Americans and those working in service-sector jobs.

America energy independent. The cost of gasoline about half what it was during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the diminished expectations presidency of Trump's predecessor, who lectured Americans that slow-to-no-growth of about 2 percent annually was the "new normal" -- and they'd better just get used to it.

Trump almost doubled it -- in less than three years.

He accomplished what was considered impossible by undoing things his predecessor did. He reduced the tax burden on Americans, who suddenly had more of their money back in their pockets -- rather than the pockets of the government.

Businesses could do business again, the president having greatly reduced federal regulations that had made it hard to be in business. The best case in point being the president's lifting of stifling restrictions on oil exploration and discovery within the United States, which led to America becoming the world's single greatest producer of oil -- even more so than Saudi Arabia.

And now it's all coming undone -- but not for economic reasons.

Nothing has changed about the economic fundamentals over the past two weeks. But Americans are terrified by what theyve been hearing and reading over the past two weeks.

Which raises the question: Should Americans believe the Worst Case Scenarios being peddled by the same media that has so blatantly been out for President Trumps blood since he was elected president? Can they be trusted to give Americans the straight dope about the coronavirus -- or are they trying to play the people for dopes again?

In order to achieve what they have obviously been after for the past three years but -- so far -- havent been able to achieve: The political -- and electoral -- destruction of a president they despise, at the expense of the American people, who will pay the price?

Consider the facts:

As of mid-March, about 50,000 Americans have been diagnosed with coronavirus; of this cohort, about 700 have died. This is not pleasant -- but is it catastrophic? The same CNN that posts almost hourly Corona Fever updates -- often accompanied by snarky anti-Trump news analysis such as "Trump Unwilling to Accept Full, Sobering reality of Coronavirus" -- took a much less alarmist line back in December, when it reported on the 2.6 million cases of flu during the 2019 season, the 23,000 hospitalizations and the 1,300 people who had died from the flu.

Businesses werent closed. The stock market didnt tank. Arguably, because the media didnt hype.

Perhaps because people are used to the flu. But coronavirus is all new, exotic, and scary. Did it come from a lab or from bat-eaters? No one seems to know what it is, exactly -- nor what to expect, precisely. Will they die if they contract it? Or just feel bad for a week or two?

Few seem to realize that its proved to be far less of a threat to Americans than the flu -- or even driving, which results in about 35,000 deaths each year.

But terror about the coronavirus and the solutions it triggers could prove extremely lethal to their jobs, their businesses -- and their 401ks. The harm being caused to Americans financial security has already been catastrophic. The roughly 20 percent loss in value the market has suffered over the past week translates into tens of thousands of dollars vaporized from the retirement funds of millions of Americans, many of whom counted on the value of their retirement funds to enable them to retire over the next few years -- as opposed to waiting (and working) for another decade for their balance sheets to recover.

Small businesses are losing business; some of them all of their business -- due to government closure decrees, as in Ohio, New York, and Virginia and a growing number of others that prevent them from doing business. Hardest hit will be restaurants and bars, which always operate on the razors edge of viability. They cannot afford to be even partially closed for weeks or months.

Many will go out of business for good.

This will have a cascading effect as the weeks go by; the people who lose their jobs -- or even fear they will lose their jobs -- close their wallets and purses, buying nothing more than they have to. This hurts other businesses -- including even online businesses such as Amazon. Unemployed people -- and people terrified they soon will be unemployed - stop being customers.

The media hopes the president will get the blame for all this. But it's not the president who is hyping this. In fact, they want him to stop holding daily press conferences.

If it turns out the coronavirus is not a catastrophe that justifies the cratering the economy and with it, the economic lives of millions of Americans, then heads should roll.

But not the president's.

A.J. Rice is CEO of Publius PR, a premier communications firm in Washington D.C. Rice is a brand manager, star-whisperer and auteur media influencer, who has produced or promoted Laura Ingraham, Donald Trump Jr., Judge Jeanine Pirro, Monica Crowley, Charles Krauthammer, Alan Dershowitz, Roger L. Simon, Steve Hilton, Victor Davis Hanson, and many others. Find out more at publiuspr.com.
Beginning in May, Microsoft plans to halt the delivery of all non-security updates to Windows, another step in its suspension of non-essential revisions to the OS and other important products.

The optional updates, which Microsoft designates as Windows' C and D updates, are released during the third and fourth week of each month, respectively.

"We have been evaluating the public health situation, and we understand this is impacting our customers," Microsoft said to some understatement in a March 24 post to the Windows 10 messaging center. "In response to these challenges we are prioritizing our focus on security updates."

Security updates, labeled as B updates, are better known as those released on Patch Tuesday - Microsoft prefers Update Tuesday - or the second Tuesday of each month. The stoppage of C and D updates will not affect the company's patching efforts. "There is no change to the monthly security updates; these will continue as planned to ensure business continuity and to keep our customers protected and productive," the message read.

The C and D updates are used to test non-security fixes which are to be officially released the following month as part of the all-encompassing Patch Tuesday cumulative update. According to Microsoft, the C and D updates should not be distributed to all Windows client systems. Instead, the D update, which Microsoft ships two weeks after one Patch Tuesday and two weeks before the next, should be used to "...test the updates included in the release and provide feedback, reducing the amount of testing necessary following Update Tuesday and, thereby, improving our ability to solve issues before they even happen."

Because they're optional, some customers simply skip them.

The most recent D update was released Tuesday for Windows 10 1903 and Windows 10 1909._

Windows 10's C updates are relatively rare. In the five months since Microsoft released Windows 10 1909, for example, the version has been served three D updates but zero C updates.

Wednesday's May shuttering of C and D updates is the latest move by Microsoft to limit update efforts to security fixes or reduce IT overhead while the COVID-19 pandemic upends business, businesses in general and business processes. So far this month, Microsoft has extended support for Windows 10 1709 an additional six months for customers running Windows 10 Enterprise or Education, and curtailed feature upgrades for its Edge browser.

Microsoft gave no explanation as to why it's waiting until May to suspend the non-security updates, rather than put the policy into immediate effect and thus block potential updates expected on April 21 (C) and/or April 28 (D).
GPS sophomore Julia Caroline "J.C." Wiedmer found out that she had been selected as the winner of the top prize in the 5th Annual Paideia Institute High School Essay Contest, a full scholarship to the Paideia Institutes 14-day Living Greek in Greece High School Program.

The contest prompted students from across the country to imagine themselves as a figure from the Classical past and to provide a first-person account of how things went from their perspective, not just the official version as contained in the sources or literature.

In Latin III this semester, GPS students have been reading adapted Latin texts to help them master their grammar and vocabulary. Sample texts included accounts of battles during the Crusaders and Columbus voyages in the Era of Discoveries along with the usual tales of Romans and mythological stories such as those of Perseus and Hercules. J.C. wrote her essay, Hercules Doesnt Give Second Chances, as a part of an enrichment opportunity for class and submitted it to the contest at the start of March. She will be working with the editor of the institutes journal, In Medias Res, before it is published online later this year.

Over the past two years in Latin, J.C. has been one of my most reliable students, always very keen to learn more about the Romans," said Dr Ralph Covino, J.C.s advisor as well as Upper School Latin teacher. "For the activity, I naturally thought she would pick a Roman topic. It shocked me when she chose to write about Hercules and make reference in her essay to Pseudo-Apollodorus ?????????. I actually e-mailed J.C. to warn her, jokingly, that because of the choices she had made with her topic and the sources she consulted, shed have to learn some ancient Greek as well as Latin if she won! Little did I know it could come true! It will be such a great opportunity for her.

J.C. and her parents have been in contact with the Paideia Institute about what to do if the summer school does not run this summer because of on-going travel restrictions. The Institute will decide by May 1 whether or not the program will run; if it does not, she will be able to use her scholarship to attend next summers course.
Many of the large insurers have moved into the telemedicine arena. While not a large part of their business yet, I believe it will grow much larger, with coronavirus acting as an accelerant to this new business line, explains Eddy Elfenbein, editor of Growth Stock Advisor.

Here are three large companies that are already providing a telemedicine option.

Anthem (ANTM) delivers doctor visits to your phone through its telemedicine platform called LiveHealth Online. Anthem has set up a clean, easy to use website that provides visitors with short videos on how LiveHealth works, and what the process is like to see a doctor.

More from Eddy Elfenbein: "Stay at Home" Stocks

This is an important piece of the puzzle for customers who may be elederly and not be as familiar with technology as younger users.

The process is very much like seeing a doctor in person. The patient tells the doctor what their symptoms are, the doctor conducts an exam via the telephone or tablet, and then a treatment plan is devised. This can include a prescription if that is what is needed.

Anthem, like other stocks, has been volatile the past month but has held up well overall. The company trades at a PE of 15.5 and yields 1.3%. Full year 2019 revenue grew 12.9% year-over-year to $103.1 billion.

UnitedHealth Group (UNH) offers its Virtual Visits to anyone needing to see a doctor with a wide range of symptoms and afflictions, from seasonal flu to fever to pinkeye.

And, the platform offers the opportunity to speak directly with a doctor in 20 minutes or less, from the time you initiate the visit. I dont know about you, but I dont remember the last time I spent less than a half-hour in any waiting room for a doctors visit.

Like the other companies here, if your insurance plan covers a doctor visit, it also covers a telemedicine visit. Even mental health visits, if covered under your plan, are also available using the Virtual Visit.

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UnitedHealth had revenue of $242 billion last year, which was a 7% year-over-year increase. Fourth-quarter earnings came in at $3.90 per share, representing 19% year-over-year growth for the company.

See also: Genuine Parts: A Long Track Record

A few years ago, Humana (HUM) accelerated its technology push across a broad range of areas. This includes building a customers health history into a cradle to grave system, and a focus on areas such as telemedicine.

Humana emphasizes in its virtual visit that the doctor you are visiting on their telemedicine platform is board certified and that the connection for your virtual visit is secure.

This is an important selling point to an elderly clientele that wants assurances they are seeing the same caliber of doctor via a virtual visit. And, to both the elderly and younger market that wants a secure way to provide their confidential medical information.

Humana earned $3.84 per share in Q4 2019, a 48% year-over-year increase. The company is expected to grow its Medicare Advantage membership base by between 7.5% and 9.2% in 2020, which should provide a nice boost to 2020 earnings.

Each of these three companies has held up well in this market, have outstanding growth overall, and should continue to benefit from telemedicine offering long after coronavirus is a distant memory.

More From MoneyShow.com:
If a mother tests positive for the coronavirus, the infant will be isolated until the mother is no longer infected or the baby is found to be infected, Petinaux said. She would still be able to pump breast milk, which would be given to the infant by a nurse. George Washington is allowing women delivering babies to have one person accompany them, but that person must remain in the hospital for the duration of the womans stay.
Hachette is the latest Big Five publisher to reconsider and decline to exhibit at the postponed BookExpo and BookCon 2020.

In a statement released today by the Hachette Book Group, the publisher said with the impact of the coronavirus still an unknown, Hachette Book Group has decided to withdraw our participation in BookExpo and BookCon 2020 in the interest of the health and well-being of our employees and authors. Well miss having the opportunity to engage with booksellers, librarians, and readers but are committed to finding new ways to connect these audiences with our books and authors.

Despite the rescheduling of BookExpo and BookCon from May to July, such major exhibitors as Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and now Hachette, have decided to withdraw from participation in the annual trade show and events around it.

BookExpo organizer Reedpop rescheduled BookExpo and BookCon 2020 events following an emergency degree by New York State banning large public gatherings in an effort to control the spread of Covid-19. However this week, New York State announced plans to place as many 2000 hospitals beds in the Javits Convention Center making it unavailable for its usual activities for an indefinite period.

Reedpop executives have said they still plan to go ahead with the show. "We are working closely with the Javits Center to ensure the health and safety of our customers. I think it is noble what they are doing, opening their doors to overflow patients so that those who are infected with COVID-19 will have focused care in the citys hospitals," said event director Jenny Martin. "We are all doing the best we can during these times, and what that means for BookExpo is to work hard to provide the place that gives our customers the tools to bounce back from this."
Four countries led by war-ravaged Mali on Wednesday joined the lengthening list of African countries hit by the novel coronavirus as Kenya ordered a curfew and unveiled tax breaks in the fight against the pandemic.

Mali, mired in an eight-year-old conflict, said two nationals who had returned from France had tested positive for the virus.

Libya, another conflict-torn country, as well as the volatile West African state of Guinea-Bissau and Uganda in East Africa also reported their first cases of COVID-19.

Follow live updates of coronavirus cases in India here

More than 2,400 cases were recorded in all of Africa as of Wednesday, according to an AFP tally, with 64 deaths.

Although Africa's toll is far lower than in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, health experts say the world's poorest continent is especially vulnerable to the virus and the figures likely fall far short of the reality.

"We must prepare for the worst (because) we have no idea of the scope of the propagation" in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2018 Nobel Peace laureate Denis Mukwege said Wednesday.

Mukwege called for "large-scale" testing across the vast former Belgian colony of 80 million inhabitants, which reported 48 cases of COVID-19 as of Tuesday, with three deaths.

Poor healthcare infrastructure, weak governance and crowded slums present ideal conditions for the respiratory disease to spread.

Conflict, in particular, is a major factor in aggravating the risk.

Also Read: Coronavirus India update: State-wise total number of confirmed cases

Mali is struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency that erupted in the north in 2012 and has since claimed thousands of military and civilian lives.

The government earlier banned commercial flights from virus-stricken countries.

The UN on Wednesday put the spotlight on the Central African Republic (CAR), also gripped by conflict.

CAR "is one of the least prepared countries to face a COVID-19 outbreak, with 2.2 million people already in need of health assistance and about 70 percent of health services provided by humanitarian organisations," the country's coronavirus Global Humanitarian Response Plan warned.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta meanwhile ordered a nighttime curfew to curb the spread of the coronavirus, while taking a massive pay cut and unveiling tax breaks to ease the economic impact of the crisis.

In a lengthy address to the nation, Kenyatta warned he would not hesitate to take "more drastic measures" if Kenyans did not make efforts to limit the spread of the virus, which has sickened 28 in the country.

African states have been adopting increasingly restrictive measures against the invisible peril.

Senegal and Ivory Coast have declared states of emergency and ordered nighttime curfews, similar to South Sudan, which has ordered a nightly lockdown from 8:00 pm to 6:00 am.

South Africa, the continent's largest economy, is set to enter a lockdown from Thursday.

Ethiopia announced Wednesday it would free more than 4,000 prisoners to help prevent an outbreak in overcrowded prisons.

The measures will apply to those jailed for "petty crimes" and drug offences or have less than a year remaining on their sentences.

Conditions in Ethiopia's prisons are "harsh and in some cases life-threatening," marred by "gross overcrowding and inadequate food, water, sanitation and medical care," according to the latest annual human rights report on Ethiopia from the US State Department.

In the Nigerian capital Abuja, meanwhile, fears the spread of coronavirus infection among senior politicians.

A number of state governors, as well as Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, were in self-isolation after coming into contact with two individuals infected with COVID-19.

According to the president's office and local media, one of them is President Muhammadu Buhari's chief of staff, Abba Kyari, one of Nigeria's most influential figures.

The political elite "is in panic mode following the confirmed case of the chief of staff,"a source close to the presidency said.
Seven people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the besieged enclave, brining the total number of cases to nine.

According to health officials in the besieged Gaza Strip, at least seven people have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the enclave to nine.

In a statement released on Wednesday night, Gazas Health Ministry said the new patients had been in contact with the first two who tested positive earlier this week.

The new cases were security guards who were guarding the quarantine facility in southern Gaza, the ministry added.

The security guards have not left and remain in the quarantine centre, and have not mixed with anyone outside the facility  near the Rafah border crossing, local media reported the ministry as saying.

Gazas nearly two million residents have been urged to take precautionary measures and to practise social distancing by staying home in a bid to halt the spread of the virus.

Shadi al-Tabatibi is the grandson of Mohammed al-Tabatibi  the 79-year-old man who was one of the first two to test positive for the virus earlier this week.

Shadi al-Tabatibi told Al Jazeera he and his family members were shocked to learn that the new patients had contracted the virus from his grandfather.

My grandfather suffers from diabetes and blood pressure  and were worried about the possibility of his health deteriorating, the 26-year-old said.

His grandfather is among dozens of others who are currently in quarantine centres in the southern Gaza Strip, where many have raised concern about the lack of hygiene and medical care available.

Shadi al-Tabatibis grandfather has said there is not enough equipment to deal with the disease and there is no appropriate medical care in the facility, according to his grandson.

The people here are afraid, the streets are empty  it is like the days of the war in Gaza.

Scarce resources

The potential outbreak of the disease in the densely populated Gaza could be catastrophic, doctors and NGOs have warned.

Earlier this week, authorities shut down restaurants, cafes and reception halls. Friday prayers at mosques have also been suspended until further notice.

Rami al-Abadleh, director of the infections prevention department in Gazas Health Ministry, said it is likely that new cases of the virus will be detected.

We took new samples for PCR testing, and we will expand our efforts to test 150 samples a day, al-Abadleh said, referring to a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test  the test of choice utilised to diagnose COVID-19.

We have repeatedly called for medical devices that are needed to cover the huge shortage in the health sector, he said, noting that the Health Ministrys capabilities are very limited.

Gazas healthcare system is severely depleted and its war-affected residents are especially vulnerable as they have lived under an Israeli-Egyptian siege for nearly 13 years.

The air, land and sea blockade has restricted the entry of essential resources such as healthcare equipment, medication and building materials, among others.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned Gazas healthcare system would not be able to deal with an outbreak, given that the strips hospitals are overstretched and under-resourced.

Our ventilators are hardly sufficient and would only be able to accommodate a maximum of 100 patients across the strip, al-Abadleh said.

Currently, there are 45 intensive care beds in all of Gazas public hospitals, and they are often occupied by other patients with heart and lung diseases, al-Abadleh added. This is why the spread of the virus in Gaza would constitute a real catastrophe.

Additional reporting by Maram Humaid.
After spending nearly 20 years on death row, a Cumberland County man must receive a partial retrial to decide whether he should indeed be executed for a young womans gruesome murder, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The justices limited that retrial for William Howard Housman solely to the death penalty issue.

In an opinion by Justice Debra Todd, they rejected his argument that he should receive a new trial regarding his guilt for the October 2000 slaying of Leslie White, an 18-year-old Harrisburg Area Community College student from East Waterford, Juniata County.

The states highest court weighed in on the case after Houseman, now 44, and county prosecutors both appealed a ruling by Berks County Judge Linda K.M. Ludgate granting a retrial on the death penalty issue. Ludgate heard Housmans appeal on special assignment after Housman sought the recusal of the Cumberland County judges.

Investigators said Housman and his live-in girlfriend Beth Ann Markman killed White because Markman was jealous due to Housmans romantic relationship with White.

Housman lured White to the couples Newville-area home by calling her at her job at the Mechanicsburg-area Walmart and claiming he needed consolation because his father had just died. That was a lie. Police said when White arrived Housman hit on the head with a hammer and then bound, gagged and strangled her with speaker wire.

Housman and then Markman then placed Whites body in her Jeep, drove to Virginia and dumped the corpse in the truck of an abandoned car.

Housman received his death sentence after a county jury convicted him of first-degree murder in 2001. Markman, who claimed during their joint trial that she was under duress at the time of the slaying because Housman physically abused her, also was sentenced to death initially. The Supreme Court ordered a retrial in 2007 but before it occurred Markman pleaded guilty in 2010 to charges including homicide and kidnapping in return for a life prison term.

Justice Todd concluded in the opinion issued Thursday that Housman must receive a retrial on the death penalty because his defense attorney in 2001 was ineffective for not fully exploring factors that might have swayed the jurys verdict on whether to impose capital punishment.

Todd accepted Housmans argument that his lawyer should have presented additional evidence regarding Housmans inpatient hospital treatment for mental health issues and physical abuse as a child by his father, stepmother and others.

Had that evidence been presented to the jury, the verdict regarding the death penalty might have been different, Todd found.
For more coverage, visit our complete coronavirus section here.

With no end in sight for the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, schools across the Bay Area shuttered last Monday  including San Franciscos 113 public schools  leaving Bay Area parents, teachers and students to try their hands at distance learning.

So howd the first full week of virtual classrooms go? Well, we decided to find out.

Over the last week we polled parents and kids from pre-K to high school in a mix of both private and public schools in every county in the Bay Area  and while this is far from a full snapshot of every school and experience, it was nonetheless incredibly revealing. Based on this sample, Bay Area experiences with school-from-home can best be described as uneven.

Distance learning began as early as March 11 for Bowman International Montessori, a private school in Palo Alto, and as late as March 19 for Gardner Bullis in the Los Altos School District and Prospect Sierra, a private school in El Cerrito.

The approaches to distance learning from educators were wildly varying, from "optional" assignments sent home by teachers, to full-on, daily Google Classroom interactions with teachers, to Guidepost Montessori in San Francisco's 'AltSchool'  a proprietary platform that students had been using for online submissions and feedback well before the coronavirus was even part of our lives (hello, preparedness). Other tools used by educators included: Canvas, Flipgrid, Edpuzzle, Zoom, Google Chat, email, PowerSchool, Google Hangouts, text books, Mobymax and RenWeb.

San Francisco Unified School District, for one, leaned as far as you could on the optional side of the scale, leaving some parents unhappy.

Parents, including myself, are incredibly frustrated with the district's lack of leadership in providing our children with adequate distance learning opportunities, said Shanna Abeloff, who has a sixth and eighth grader at Rooftop School in San Francisco.

Abeloff pointed to the schools website which states, No teacher can require students to do school work at this time, and a video posted on the SFUSD Twitter account featuring Superintendent Vincent Matthews saying Many people are at different places, some people want learning to continue and urgently need it, and others are at a place where theyre just saying I just need to get me and our family together.

And while the district has been hugely successful with free school lunch distribution and also planned to work with families who need to borrow computers from the district starting Wednesday, everyday distance learning has been harder to come by  and sometimes completely absent, according to at least one parent.

We are also incredibly frustrated with Rooftop's lack of leadership in this arena as well. Our principals have not required our teachers to provide consistent, constructive work for our kids. The learning experiences have varied from class to class and teacher to teacher, Abeloff said. Principals should be providing clear direction and support for teachers to educate our kids at a time when kids are looking for structure and education.

Several parents in SFUSD and elsewhere have turned to free online learning tools like Khan Academy and/or reasonably priced ones like Outschool (as low as $5 a class) as days have gone by with little distance learning guidance from some schools.

We are fortunate enough that my wife and I both [work from home] but it is still a challenge to juggle being a worker, a parent and now a teacher, said Kenny Corbett, who has a first and third grader at Peralta Elementary in Oakland Unified School District. I honestly am unsure how I can keep this up for months.

Corbett said that there wasnt any online learning for 1st grade and parents were expected to fill the gap.

Many teachers have managed to stay virtually present for their students, setting up Zoom office hours or regular Zoom gatherings (one teacher in the San Carlos Unified School District hosts a Breakfast Club morning Zoom), while others have needed more time to get up and running.

"We got nothing the first two days at all, and by Wednesday they were doing 30 minutes of Zoom in the morning with homework assignments. It has not been enough to keep my son busy  he needs help with his school work, which I can't always give him doing a full-time job. Working from home is really hard with an 8-year-old home indefinitely, says Dabney Lawless, who has a third grader in the East Bay. I have been using Outschool.com to keep him busy. He has taken 10 classes this week. I have also signed him up for some clubs on the platform for fun too like a chess club and Minecraft discussion group."

San Jose Unified School District, in particular, has lagged, dealing with a diverse population and access to technology for Santa Clara Countys largest school district. Superintendent Nancy Albarran sent a letter to parents that stated, There is no online solution that is appropriate for students in advanced placement courses, students in foster care, English learners, and students with special needs, among our many student populations. And continued saying SJUSD was in the process of preparing long-term educational experiences and would share those as soon as possible. Suggested schedules are posted on the district website for entire ranges of grades (TK-5, 6-8, 9-12) that point parents to things like Khan Academy, and distance learning is just getting underway this week  a week-plus after the closure.

And while most parents said there were no pros to remote learning (none, not really, no), some found silver linings  in particular the children.

Its good to stay home so that we dont get sick, said Samantha Horny, a 6-year-old at St. Matthews Catholic Elementary School in San Mateo.

On Wednesday, six Bay Area counties extended that stay home to May 1  leaving most kids out of school for seven weeks since the shelter-in-place was issued. It was a tough pill to swallow for a lot of parents who all came to the same realizations over the past week: It requires a lot of parent involvement, said Heidi Mayon, who has a kindergartener and third grader in Los Altos Unified School District. Turns out the teacher is a key part of the school.

Grant Marek is the Editorial Director of SFGATE. Email: grant.marek@sfgate.com | Twitter: @grant_marek

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

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Unionized hospitality workers, including Luis Estrada, wait in line in a basement garage to apply for unemployment benefits at the Hospitality Training Academy on March 13, 2020, in Los Angeles. (Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press)

With coronavirus cases continuing to rise across much of California and many workers unemployed indefinitely, several major banks and other lenders have agreed to provide mortgage relief to homeowners struggling to make their monthly payments.

The assistance arrives as more than 1 million Californians applied for unemployment benefits over the course of just 12 days through Wednesday because of layoffs or reduced hours amid the pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.

Eligible homeowners would be able to defer mortgage payments for at least three months and perhaps longer if they suffer hardship due to the pandemic. Late payments would not be reported to credit agencies.

Along with the mortgage assistance, Newsom is urging the lenders to extend financial relief to small businesses and student loan recipients in the days and weeks to follow, according to an email sent recently to financial institutions by state Department of Business Oversight Commissioner Manuel P. Alvarez.

The moves came as public health officials reported a continued increase in COVID-19 cases, including in Los Angeles County, where the county health officer on Wednesday ordered that all those who test positive for the coronavirus self-isolate, along with those in close contact with the infected.

Officials confirmed 138 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday in the states most populous county, for a total of more than 800. Three additional deaths brought the total in Los Angeles County to 13. Statewide, more than 3,100 of those tested have been confirmed to have infections, while 67 have died.

Public health officials emphasized that the actual number of people infected is almost certainly higher, but an accurate count is impossible because so few tests have been given.

The mortgage relief package that Newsom described at an afternoon news conference will come from four of the nations largest banks  Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase  as well as 200 state-chartered banks and credit unions.

Story continues

"We still have people that are struggling to get back to where they were before the Great Recession, Newsom said of the financial struggles Californians have experienced, now exacerbated by the coronavirus outbreak.

Newsom noted that another huge lender, Bank of America, agreed only to allow customers to defer mortgage payments for one month, but said he is hopeful the institution will do the right thing in the near future.

Bank of America disputed Newsoms assertion that it resisted providing more generous mortgage relief to homeowners. Bank of America is deferring mortgage payments on a monthly basis until the crisis is over, spokesman Bill Halldin said.

The continued spread of the coronavirus and the resulting wreckage of the economy suggest the need for even greater financial relief for consumers, Alvarez said in his email.

As we continue the battle on the public health front, we must also brace ourselves for a financial crisis that is only beginning, Alvarez wrote. Now is the time for all institutions, public and private, to do our part in staving off a tsunami of financial harm barreling toward California consumers.

The governors announcement came a week after he ordered all California residents to stay home to help stem the spread of the virus, with limited exceptions for essential workers, including doctors, nurses, grocery store employees and truckers.

Thousands of Californians have lost their jobs or have seen their working hours dramatically reduced, particularly in the hospitality and service industries. And the hardships fall on millions in the state who already struggle to make mortgage and rent payments, given skyrocketing housing costs.

The federal government this month announced that Americans with loans backed by the government-sponsored agencies Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac would be eligible to defer mortgage payments and be shielded from foreclosure if they could not afford to make payments because of the outbreak.

More than 30 state lawmakers on Wednesday sent a letter to Newsom asking for a statewide eviction moratorium. They say fewer than 50 local governments  out of the 539 cities and counties statewide  have passed moratoriums, as the governor urged last week.

Housing advocates called for an eviction ban statewide, particularly for those who arent working as a result of the coronavirus. Newsom has said he will take additional steps if he believes local jurisdictions are failing to protect their residents.

Officials warned that the worst days of the pandemic in California are yet to come.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said the city could be six to 12 days from seeing a spike in infections and hospitalizations like the one now afflicting New York City, where the death toll has dramatically increased in recent days.

Its coming, Garcetti said. The peak is not here yet. The peak will be bad. People will lose their lives.

San Francisco leaders issued a similar warning, saying it was plausible the city could face a crisis similar to the one in New York and fall 1,500 ventilators and 5,000 hospital beds short of the numbers needed.

It is not even a question as to whether we will need more, Mayor London Breed said during an hourlong news conference. "Sadly, things are going to get worse."

Anticipating a surge of patients in the coming days, government officials were working to find additional hospital beds. More than 1,000 beds will be provided by the Navy ship Mercy, which will arrive in Los Angeles on Friday, earlier than expected, according to Pentagon Press Secretary Alyssa Farah.

Officials in Los Angeles and San Francisco rejected suggestions from President Trump that there could be a quick easing of restrictions.

Garcetti said Angelenos should be prepared for a couple months like this.

I know that everybody is hopeful, and some are putting out that hope of us being back in churches by Easter or synagogues by Passover or restarting the economy in a couple weeks, Garcetti said. I think we owe it to everybody to be straightforward and honest. We will not be back to  that level of normal in that short period of time.

Dr. Grant Colfax, director of health for San Francisco, concurred.

I know there are people out there who will lead you to believe our efforts are too aggressive," Colfax said, "but I cannot stress enough just how vital they are."

Los Angeles County Public Health Department Director Barbara Ferrer also said residents should not expect an immediate return to normality.

We would be foolish to not prepare for a similar scenario in L.A. County, she said. We talk about numbers, but these arent numbers  these are peoples lives.

Times staff writers Rong-Gong Lin II, Maura Dolan, Taryn Luna and Colleen Shalby contributed to this report.
Michael Power, of Midland, recently joined Century 21 Signature Realty, located at 409 Ashman St., Suite 3, Downtown Midland.

Power, a full-time realtor, stated he's "proud to join a great local firm that represents the quality, dependability, and dedication to the profession that the Century 21 brand represents nationally."

"The best part about being a realtor for me is maximizing the potential that buyers and sellers have while protecting their interests and connecting them with the best opportunities in the marketplace for their next stage in life," he added.

A native of Massachusetts, Power was raised on the south coast of Boston. He and his partner moved to Midland last year from the Boston area, where he worked as a realtor and a public school behavioral teacher. Prior to working in education, Power worked in the Massachusetts State House for 11 years. In addition, he enjoyed serving his community as an elected School Committee member for six years, as a member of the local Council on Aging Board, and as a charter member of a nature preservation committee.

Today, he's enjoying his new experiences in Midland.

"We love being a part of the Midland community. We find Midland friendly, modern, and filled with fun things to do," Power said. "We love kayaking from The Tridge, walking our puppy, Piper downtown (where she loves to greet people), taking in performances at the local performing arts center, hiking, and being out on the Great Lakes, " he added. "Midland is a great home for us! I'm excited to help prospective buyers take advantage of all the benefits and opportunities of living in Midland through my profession! I want to help our community grow."

Power can be reached via email at michaelpower.c21.com.
For a change, senior Congress leader P Chidambaram is supporting Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the measures the Central Government has taken to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The former finance minister is suddenly playing the role of a constructive opposition leader. He is not vitriolic, not unduly critical and not seeing it in black and white as he is generally used to be on anything relating to Modi and his government.

Note what the former finance and home minister said in the opening paragraph of his statement on Modis 24 March address to the nation: "The Prime Minister's announcement yesterday of a nationwide 21-day lockdown is a watershed moment in the battle against COVID-19. We should put behind us the debates that took place before 24 March 24 and look upon the nationwide lockdown as the beginning of a new battle in which people are the foot soldiers and the prime minister is the commander. We owe a duty to extend our total support to the prime minister and the Central and state governments.

The usage of phrases like watershed moment, people are foot soldiers and the prime minister is the commander, "owe a duty to support the prime minister" for actions taken by Modi are surely very noticeable to a student of politics.

If the name of the author of the above paragraph is not specifically mentioned to a reader, he or she would ordinarily assume it to be written by a BJP leader or a professed Modi supporter. It's true that Chidambaram has been advocating for a complete lockdown and Modi did so, but the former finance minister is not fighting to claim the credit. In fact, a week ago he had also supported Modi after his first address to the nation on the COVID-19 disease.

Tough democratic ideals say that the Opposition shall play a constructive role, but in the last several years  more so since the arrival of Modi at the national scene and assuming the Office of the Prime Minister since 2014  the Opposition, the Congress, in particular, has seen nothing good in Modi and his government.

Even on COVID-19 Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has been tweeting against the Union Government. He even hinted at a "criminal conspiracy" and accused the Central Government of acting against national interest at the behest of some unnamed power centres.

  , WHO   1. 

2.  

         19           ?        ?      ?#Coronavirus https://t.co/tNgkngZ936  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 23, 2020

I am feeling sad, because this was completely avoidable. We had time to prepare. We should have taken this threat much more seriously and have been much better prepared. #CoronavirusPandemic https://t.co/dpRTCg8No9  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 24, 2020

Quick aggressive action is the answer to tackling the #Coronavirus . India is going to pay an extremely heavy price for our governments inability to act decisively.  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 18, 2020

Chidambarams line is, however, different. The former finance minister has given a 10-point suggestion to the government, one should say constructive suggestions.

Between Wednesday and Thursday, the Modi government has initiated a series of measures to help the poor and the needy  a 1.70 lakh core economic package to support 80 crore poor people including direct benefit transfers and additional free ration to farmers, women and Jan Dhan account holders, Ujjawala beneficiaries getting three LPG cylinders free for next three months. The BJP-ruled government in Uttar Pradesh has been transferring money through DBT to needy persons. That is being done with or without Chidambarams suggestions.

The big question, therefore, is: has Chidambaram changed or has he simply become more pragmatic? This question becomes even more relevant in view of the recent developments  Jyotiraditya Scindia a childhood friend and one of the star leaders of Congress has left the party and joined the BJP pulling down Congress government in Madhya Pradesh and setting the stage for the return of a BJP government in the state.

Besides, Chidambarams close confidante and senior party leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi is moving a private member bill on population control (a highly contentious subject for the Congress) in the Parliament. The list would go on.

Chidambaram has spent months in jail in an alleged corruption case. He is currently out on bail. As the home minister in the UPA government, Chidambaram was believed to be proactively pursuing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case against Amit Shah and by extension against Modi. There were some other cases and issues where he was believed to be specifically targeting the current leadership of the BJP.

It, therefore, becomes interesting when Chidambaram tells India Today in an interview that it is time that the iron or bamboo curtain between the Modi government and the Opposition is removed and a process of dialogue begins, and that it is time India stood as one nation and one people. Also interesting is when Chidambaram's remark about the economy when he said that under the current circumstances nobody will blame the Modi government even if the GDP slips below 3 percent.
Tatfondbanks $2.3 bln claim its ex-chair Musin suspended

 TASS, Yegor Aleyev

14:37 26/03/2020

MOSCOW, March 26 (RAPSI) - The Tatarstan Commercial Court has put a stay on the 141.3 billion-ruble (about $2.3 billion) debt proceedings initiated by Tatfondbank against its ex-chairman Robert Musin, according to court records.

The claim has been suspended until a judicial act on the application of the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) seeking to recover 141.39 billion rubles from Musin and other ex-bank manager is taken

In late February, the bank filed a petition to put a 141.3 billion-ruble debt of Musin on his list of creditors demands.

In February, the same court ordered the seizure of assets held by Musin and ten other former managers of the bank totaling 96.7 billion rubles (about $1.5 billion).

The court ruling also prohibited the Federal Service for State Registration, Cadastre and Cartography (FSSRCC) to register transfers of ownership of several premises and land plots belonging to defendants.

Petition filed by Russias State Corporation Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) to introduce interim relief was satisfied in part: the agency demanded to seize in total assets worth 141.39 billion rubles (about $2.3 billion).

In substantiation of the claim, DIA cited the facts evidencing that the persons in control over the bank committed actions aimed to defraud it of its assets, in particular, to form simulated debts, replace valuable assets with unrealizable ones; purchased non-marketable securities; transferred liquid assets in trust of an affiliated organization and made other dubious deals.

Besides, the persons in control of the bank failed to undertake measures aimed to prevent Tatfondbank bankruptcy, the DIA statement reads. As a result, the financial standing of the bank has been seriously undermined, what was the reason, the claimant believes, of the situation where it could not meet the demands of its creditors.

Earlier, the Tatarstan Commercial Court has extended the procedure of sale of property of Musin for six months.

On July 18, 2018, the court granted a motion of Tatfondbank and declared Musin bankrupt.

Before that, the court initiated a procedure of restructuring Musins debt. The DIA sought 16.7 million rubles ($255,000) from the banker.

Notably, Musin is charged with embezzlement. According to investigators, in August 2016, employees of the bank provided false data to the Central Bank of Russia to obtain a credit and subsequently embezzle the funds. Later, the money was transferred to the accounts of affiliated companies.

Investigators believe that overall damage in criminal cases against Musin reaches 50 billion rubles (about $765.6 million). Thirteen cases over abuse of office opened against Musin are allegedly connected with embezzlement of 18 billion rubles ($275.6 million) belonging to Tatfondbank.

Criminal prosecution

In July 2019, the Investigative Committee reported that Musin would stand trial on charges of abuse of office.

According to investigators, in December 2016, Musin siphoned liquid collateral security amounting to more than 20 billion rubles ($315 million) prior to the appointment of temporary administration in the troubled bank. Thus, he caused damage in the form of credit outstandings worth over 7 billion rubles to Tatfondbank, the statement reads. Over 19 billion rubles have not been returned, investigators claim.

There are 517 volumes in the case against Musin. Moreover, investigators believe that the defendant was involved in other crimes. The total damage caused by Musins actions is estimated at more than 53 billion rubles (nearly $835 million), according to the Investigative Committee.

A court has seized his assets worth more than 4.2 billion rubles.




A prisoner remanded in custody pending his trial for attempted murder has brought a High Court challenge over his detention at the Midlands Prison's segregation unit.

The proceedings have been brought by Caolan Smyth who claims that since being moved to the prison some months ago he has been locked in his cell for 23 hours a day.

Mr Smyth claims that he has been told by the prison authorities that he is being kept away from other prisoners for his own safety due to an existing threat to his life.

Mr Smyth strongly disagrees with that assessment and rejects claims that his life is in danger from other prisoners and says his segregation from the general prison population is taking its toll on his physical and mental health.

Mr Smyth aged 28 of Cuileann Court, Donore, Co Meath is charged with the attempted murder of James 'Mago' Gately who was injured but survived after being shot five times at a Topaz garage in Clonshaugh, Co Dublin, on May 10 2017.

Mr Smyth's trial is pending before the non-jury Special Criminal Court.

Mr Smyth, represented by Keith Spencer Bl and instructed by Niall O Connor and Co Solicitors, claims that in addition to his continued detention in solitary confinement he is only permitted screened visits and is not given regular exercise.

As he barred from associating with other inmates he cannot avail of the educational. vocational and recreational facilities given to other prisoners.

It is claimed that the prison service has not provided any information to justify its claim that Mr Smyth's has been isolated from other prisoners for his own safety.

The conditions of his detention, it is alleged, amounts to the imposition of a punishment without any disciplinary hearings being conducted.

Mr Smyth has never been asked nor consulted about his continued segregation.

His incarceration in the segregation unit and being placed in a 23 hour a day lockup for a period of months, he claims amounts to a breach of his constitutional rights, including his right to bodily integrity, it is also claimed.

He also claims that his right to prepare for his trial is not being respected and cannot get professional visits form his Dublin-based lawyers after 5-30pm on weekdays.

Arising out the conditions of his detention Mr Smyth has brought judicial review proceedings against the Governor of the Midlands Prison, the Irish Prison Service and the Minister for Justice and Equality.

As a result of the conditions of his incarceration, Mr Smyth seeks various orders from the court including one quashing the Governor's decision to detain him in the prison's segregation unit.

In the alternative, he seeks an order quashing the Minister and the Prison Service's refusal to move him to the general population in the Midlands Prison or to another prison.

He also seeks declarations from the court including that being held in segregation from other prisoners in a 23-hour lock-up for an extended period of time without reasons amounts to a breach of his constitutional and ECHR rights and is unlawful.

Permission to bring the challenge was previously granted by the High Court.

The case was briefly mentioned before Mr Justice Senan Allen this week, who was told that a timetable had been agreed between the parties that should result in the case being heard in the coming weeks.

The judge adjourned the matter to a date in April.
: 'Don't worry child, we will try and find a solution", were the comforting words Chief Minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, said to a stranded woman, who called him in the wee hours of Wednesday from the Kerala- Karnataka border seeking help.

The time was around 1 am on Mar 25 and Athira, who was travelling with 13 of her TCS techie colleagues from Hyderabad-- all women and a man, was desperate for help as they were coming through the dense forest route to Tholpetty near Muthunga wildlife sanctuary on the Kerala-Karnataka border in darkness.

Athira said she googled the Chief Minister's number and got it.

"As I dialled his mobile, I never thought he would pick up as the time was 1 am. But to my surprise, Chief Minister, answered my call in the second ring," she added.

As she explained to him their plight and realising the gravity of the situation from her voice, he asked her not to worry.

'Don't worry child. We will try and find a solution", he said.

The 14-member group had started from Hyderabad on March 24 in a tempo traveller and were stopped by police on the Telangana-Andhra border as there was a lockdown in Hyderabad, Athira told.

The nation-wide lockdown, announced by Prime Minister, came into force on March 24 midnight and by then all states had shut their borders, causing further problems for the group.

On the Telangana-Andhra border, police was not allowing to cross and hundreds of people were waiting.

"We were also asked to return. But thanks to the intervention of the Kozhikode Deputy Collector, they could manage to cross the Andhra and Karnataka borders," she said.

The tempo driver also told them that he would drop them at the border instead of Kozhikode, as he had to go back due to the lockdown.

Though after reaching the Kerala-Karnataka border, Athira said they tried to get help, but failed.

It was then she decided to try her luck and gathered courage to directly call Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and seek his help.

Athira said the CM gave her the numbers of Wayanad Collector and SP and asked her to get in touch with them and also said he would give them necessary directions.

She contacted Wayanad SP and by the time they reached Tholpetty, the Thirunelli Sub-Inspector was waiting for them with a vehicle for their forward journey.

Their temperatures were checked before they left for kozhhikode, she said.

On reaching home safetly, Athira once again called the CM and thanked him profusely for his help.

"I am happy that everyone has reached safety", he said and asked us to strictly observe home quarantine, she said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
On behalf of WPP Liquid, the team at Grey Africa is excited to announce the appointment of Khanya Sijaji as the new creative director at WPP's agency for Distell, Team Liquid.

Khanya Sijaji, creative director at Grey Africa

Sijaji is an energetic change-maker with an enthusiastic approach to life and work. A Western Cape born-and-raised creative with dual Sotho and Xhosa heritage, Sijaji is a graphic designer turned creative director with a wealth of knowledge and experience from stellar agencies, such as M&C Saatchi, Leo Burnett and JWT, where he had first-hand experience working on premier accounts, such as Diageo brands, Heineken brands, McDonalds, Ford, Dairy Maid, Danone and Standard Bank. Sijaji is also the co-founder ofmagazine, a quarterly publication that documents the work of local artists, designers, photographers and restaurants. The magazine is becoming one of South Africas go-to creative publications.Sijaji loves everything that does it for the culture. He merges his creative design background and art direction to give clients the best of both worlds in one package  with a ribbon to top it off. Considering the portfolio of WPP Team Liquid, created as a bespoke solution for Distells Tier One brands, Sijaji will be the creative director working with mega-brands, such as Hunters, Viceroy and Amarula. Sijaji officially took over the reins in early March this year.Felix Kessel, chief creative officer of Liquid, is excited by Sijajis appointment and explains: "Talent gets you far but energy and determination are essential to carry ideas into the world today. Were excited as a creative team to have found someone with that in spades. We cant wait to see what he brings to the fabulous Distell set of brands."
New Delhi, March 26 : The Delhi government on Thursday released mobile numbers of zonal officers for the common man to file complaints against shopkeepers selling essential items for more than the MRP.

Delhi Cabinet minister Imran Hussain tweeted the numbers and asked people to file complaints.

"If you find any shopkeeper selling sealed commodities like milk, bread, oil, flour, pulses, etc. at prices higher than the MRP, then contact at the phone number of the zonal officers given, to complain about it," Hussain tweeted in Hindi.

Numbers of nine zones were shared by him.
Gujarat has so far reported total of three deaths linked to COVID-19 and the number of people infected with the novel coronavirus in the state has gone up to 43, state health department briefed on Thursday.

"Till now, 43 positive cases of coronavirus have been detected in the state," Gujarat Principal Secretary, Health and Family Welfare, Jayanti Ravi told mediapersons here.

"The three deaths include one 85-year-old woman with a travel history to Saudi Arabia and the 70-year old man from Bhavnagar, whose positive report we got today. Both had comorbid conditions," Jayanti Ravi said.

Earlier, a 69-year old male had died in Surat, making him the first death from COVID-19 in the state.

AS per data shared by the state health department Ahmedabad has15 cases, Surat has 7, Rajkot 4, Gandhinagar 7, Vadodara 8, Kutch 1 and Bhavnagar 1.

Out of the three new cases, one patient has history of travel to Dubai, while the two others are cases of local transmission of the viral infection, the official added.

According to report from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) India had tested 24,254 people as of 8 p.m. on March 25.

The country is now in its second day of a 21-day lockdown that was announced by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
External Article

26 March 2020

New York (CNN Business)Domestic air travel in the United States has virtually come to a halt, but thousands of planes are still flying. How long does it makes sense to keep doing that?

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Figures from the Transportation Security Administration show that only 331,000 people passed through TSA checkpoints Monday, a drop of more than 2 million passengers, or 86%, compared to the same Monday a year ago.

That's not surprising with 16 states, comprising 43% of US population, issuing orders that people should stay home whenever possible. Health professionals are saying that people should not gather in groups of 10 people or more or engage in any non-essential travel.

The Trump administration clearly does not want to order such a shutdown, especially as it negotiates a possible bailout of the airline industry.

"Although we've told people nonessential travel they shouldn't do, but [for] essential travel, we want to have airlines that operate, maybe on a more limited basis," said Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin when speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill a week ago.
Advocates across Canada are calling for the release of non-violent offenders and a unified plan to deal with the health and safety of inmates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What we have is people in very close contact who have little or no say in the level of hygiene and no ability to self-isolate, said Amanda Hart-Dowhun, president of the Alberta Prison Justice Society.

She said Alberta inmates in courthouse holding cells do not have easy access to soap and water, and prisoner transport vehicles are only cleaned if someone inside shows COVID-19 symptoms.

Once COVID hits an institution, it will be very difficult  if not impossible  to stop it from spreading within the entire institution.

In Ontario, the government confirmed Thursday that an inmate and a correctional officer have tested positive for COVID-19 at the Toronto South Detention Centre.

Dozens of organizations have sent letters to provincial and federal officials asking them to release non-violent inmates and people in remand centres awaiting trial.

They have also suggested granting some inmates early parole, as well as releasing all youth, asylum seekers and immigrants in custody.

Alberta is allowing people who serve jail time on weekends to self-isolate under house arrest, Hart-Dowhun said. Its also assessing cases of youth in custody who could be sent home.

Ontario announced this month that intermittent inmates serving on weekends will be granted temporary absences and the Ontario Parole Board can use alternatives to in-person meetings. The provinces correctional services can also issue temporary absences beyond the current 72-hour maximum and early release will be granted to some inmates nearing the end of their sentences.

In Quebec, civil rights group Ligue des droits et libertes said prisoners who are sick or elderly, who are near the end of their sentences, who are pregnant, who are in immigration detention centres and those awaiting trial for non-violent crimes should be freed.

Spokeswoman Lucie Lemonde said in a statement Thursday that the only measure proposed so far  the suspension of intermittent sentences  is inadequate.

What we are hearing from inside is alarming, she said, citing a lack of masks and protective gear for staff, a failure to distribute soap in one provincial jail and double occupation of cells.

Its simple. To avoid a catastrophe, the release of prisoners must be accelerated.

In an open letter earlier this week, the Canadian Prison Law Association said Ontarios measures need to happen all over Canada.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged Wednesday that prisoners are at higher risk of contracting and spreading the virus, but did not say whether federal officials have been in contact with provinces about a countrywide plan.

Sen. Kim Pate, a former executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, said its important to look at implementing those measures across the board to improve safety for inmates and the public.

It would require co-operation of every province and territory, as well as the federal government, to roll it out throughout the country.

Pate said there is also a section of the Criminal Code that allows the federal cabinet to grant prisoners who arent deemed a public safety threat a conditional pardon and immediate release.

So far, federal officials have not said whether it is being considered.

Public Safety Minister Bill Blair said in a statement Wednesday that the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) is taking preventive measures to keep staff and inmates safe, but he did not provide specifics.

CSC continues to examine available options in collaboration with the Parole Board of Canada, he said. As COVID-19 impacts countries around the world, the response from our government and agencies will continue to evolve as needed to keep Canadians safe.

Pate said she has heard concerns that if conditions dont improve, there could be prison riots similar to those in Italy, where at least six inmates died.

My hope would be that we do not get to that stage in Canada as it has in other countries where these issues were ignored.

Pamela Palmater, a Mikmaq lawyer and Indigenous governance chair at Ryerson University, said the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 shows that Indigenous communities suffer higher infection and death rates.

To make matters worse, she added, they are also disproportionately incarcerated.

She said Indigenous people in prisons also have higher rates of autoimmune diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, which could cause serious health complications if they contract COVID-19.

The last thing we need is ... COVID-19 to break out, Palmater said.

It risks the lives of these prisoners, who are not there on a death sentence.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  A group of designers have come up with easy-to-build disinfection tents to boost protection against the novel coronavirus.

SaniTents PH, composed of designers, engineers, and chemists of the University of the Philippines Diliman, revealed the first design prototype for COVID-19 decontamination tents, which should serve as a guide for hospitals and other establishments looking to increase safety protocols amid the public health crisis.

The structure is estimated to cost 7,030 for its materials, mainly composed of PVC pipes, plastic cover, and matting. A cut-off machine and hand drill are recommended during construction, but a hacksaw and screwdriver may be used as alternatives.

The designers estimate the structure to be completed in one-and-a half days, but may entail additional costs if hiring a laborer. Without a helper, the construction could take three days.

The booth will have a diffuser system that will spray disinfectants from head to toe whenever a person walks in. The design for the diffuser and the exact chemical solution to be used are still being finalized. For now, SaniTents PH recommends a plastic knapsack sprayer that comes with a built-in motor. This can be mounted inside the tent.

The tents are easy to assemble and can placed in different locations. The goal is to create "sanitation corridors" which local government can easily produce. A few towns, cities, and government offices have been using improvised sanitation tents, although some use manual spraying.

The SaniTents PH design is publicly available. The company says anyone can use or modify it to build the structure.
Joe Exotic Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

The tables were turned in 2019 on roadside zookeeper and Netflixs Tiger King documentary subject Joe Exotic, whos now behind bars after (spoilers!) he was found guilty of attempted murder for hire and several counts related to violating the Endangered Species Act. According to legal documents obtained by TMZ, Exotic is now claiming that he has been falsely arrested and that he is the victim of malicious prosecution and discrimination. Specifically, Exotic wants $78,840,000 in damages from the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Federal Wildlife Service, claiming that they added generic tiger to their endangered species list with the sole intent of directly targeting businesses like his. Exotic claims that listing tigers as an endangered species is the equivalent of stealing my property and promoting an animal rights agenda, which is rich coming from someone who sings about letting them run the jungle and roam their land. He bolsters his lawsuit with claims that the government enforcing the statute on him was discriminatory, as he is an openly gay male with the largest collection of generic tigers and crossbreeds. Hes seeking an addition $15 million for a claim that his former colleagues informed and planted evidence against him, contributing to the death of his mother.

Contrary to Exotics claims of a targeted U.S. government conspiracy, tigers are a globally listed endangered species on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species. They have been protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora since 1975. Still, Exotics claws are out.
As the new coronavirus risks throwing the world into the most violent recession in recent history, authorities in the Nordic region are urging their banks to forego paying out dividends to shareholders.

At a time when tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs in the crisis, the banks' plans to issue generous dividends have not been well-received by authorities and some of the public -- who recall the banks' tendency to ask for taxpayer bailouts when things go south.

Among the most radical proposals has been the call by Norway's Financial Supervisory Authority on Wednesday for a ban on financial institutions paying out 2019 dividends "until further notice".

"A ban on dividend payments and other distributions will have a profound impact," the government agency said in a statement.

It added that "in view of the widespread crisis the country is in" that it believes "that such a measure is necessary to promote financial stability." Late Wednesday evening, the Norwegian government said it would not introduce a ban -- though it did not rule out the possibility "in the future" -- but urged all banks to postpone their dividends until the economic uncertainty had passed.

"I'm counting on financial institutions to have understood the severity of the economic situation and postpone their dividends to shareholders," Finance Minister Jan Tore Sanner said in a statement. In other Nordic countries, authorities have so far stopped short of suggesting regulation, instead urging the banks to reconsider their shareholder payouts.

The Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority said it would "monitor closely" that banks allocate relief measures for their intended purpose instead of paying dividends or bonuses.

"When people risk losing their jobs and companies risk keeling over, it is not the time for banks to pay dividends to their owners," Sweden's Minister for Financial Markets, Per Bolund told a press conference on Tuesday.

In Denmark, the government and the banking sector agreed on Monday to encourage banks to "reconsider dividend payments and share buy-backs already planned in view of the serious financial situation."



"During the financial crisis, society supported the banks. Now we are in a corona crisis and here banks should support society," said Simon Kollerup, Denmark's Minister for Industry, Business and Financial Affairs.

The Nordic region's typically robust economies have not escaped the economic turmoil brought on by the new coronavirus pandemic: businesses have closed and tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs. Norway expects GDP to fall by one percent this year and many of the top Nordic companies are feeling the pinch.

Clothing giant H&M has temporarily closed nearly 3,500 stores worldwide and toy maker Lego has closed more than 150 stores.

Airlines SAS and Norwegian Air Shuttle have suspended most of their flights and sent home most of their staff.

As in many other parts of the world, many Nordic companies have suspended or reduced their planned dividends, or are under pressure to do so.

But the region's banks have so far not followed suit.

Sweden's three largest banks have proposed paying out dividends totalling 34.3 billion Swedish kronor ($3.4 billion, 3.1 billion euros), according to a calculation by agency TT, though they have said they could potentially postpone the payouts.

Finland's Nordea has announced plans to pay out dividends totalling about 1.5 billion euros. In Norway, leading bank DNB, which is planning on paying out 14 billion Norwegian kroner ($1.3 billion, 1.2 billion euro) in dividends for 2019, said its board of directors would "assess" the situation ahead of its general meeting at the end of April.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Indian cops using hand sanitizer to prevent the spread of coronavirus. (PTI)

Mumbai: To ease the publics concern over country-wide lockdown to check the spread of coronavirus pandemic, the Mumbai police has stated that a team has been assigned with the task of felicitating doorstep service in case citizens need to lodge a complaint or grievances during lockdown.

The move was announced by Mumbai city police commissioner Param Bir Singh, appealing to the people not to step out of their homes for any reason.

The police also stated that those who fail to adhere to the lockdown restrictions will be prosecuted under the Indian Penal Code for disobeying public servants and orders.

The officials have so far prosecuted over 150 persons as per section 188 of the IPC for disobeying the order.

The lockdown has curbed the movement of people and the officials have said that going to the complainants doorstep would be a safe option as the personnel are on a round the clock patrol currently.

The police have also started a coronavirus traffic helpline for assistance of the vehicles transporting essential commodities.

The officials said that the carriers should carry valid identity while travelling and stick a banner on their vehicles with the name of goods and services they are ferrying.

The officials added that the same will be available through the police helpline number 100.

Mumbaikars, @MumbaiPolice will be at your doorsteps when you are in need. You please just don't step out if not necessary! Dial100, tweeted Param Bir Singh, Mumbai police commissioner.

Mumbai police spokesperson Pranay Ashok also confirmed that the police are coordinating with the e-commerce platforms for supply of essential commodities at the customers doorstep.

The police have also begun taking action against those violating the lockdown orders banning gathering outside.
Tokyo Metropolitan Police have arrested a 23-year-old man over the alleged molestation of a woman in Kodaira City earlier this month, reports TV Asahi (Mar. 25).

At around 9:00 p.m. on March 1, Shun Saito, an employee at a cleaning company, came up from behind the woman, aged in her 20s, on a road and embraced her, causing her to fall. The suspect then allegedly fondled her chest and lower body.

aI wanted to touch inside her skirt,a the suspect was quoted by police in admitting to the allegations.

Shun Saito (Twitter)

Prior to the incident, the suspect followed the woman from a nearby railway station as she commuted home. The incident took place place on a darkened street with no pedestrians, police said.

Police are now investigating whether the suspect was behind 5 other similar cases that have taken place in the area since last November.
A Mexican-born man held at Bergen County Jail in Hackensack, New Jersey, has become the first person in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to test positive for COVID-19. The man, who is 31 years old, has been isolated and is receiving medical care, according to ICE. Bergen County and ICE have suspended the intake of federal immigration detainees at the jail. In addition, staff have opened an isolation unit for other detainees who become sick.

The still-unidentified detainee had been brought to Bergen County Jail during the third week in February, according to Sheriff Anthony Cureton. Because most people who are exposed to coronavirus develop symptoms within 14 days, the detainee likely was infected after his arrival at the jail.

Less than a week before the detainee showed symptoms and underwent testing, a corrections officer at the facility had tested positive for coronavirus. The Bergen County sheriffs office said at the time that no detainees had been exposed, yet 15 detainees and several other officers were later quarantined. It is a near certainty that other detainees at Bergen County Jail have been infected with coronavirus.

In addition to this, a medical employee at Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey as well as two officers at the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark, and two inmates who are being held on criminal charges at the Hudson County Detention Center in Kearny have all tested positive, authorities said.

Two detainees at the jail, under condition of anonymity, told northjersey.com that they were worried that the virus could spread. They reported that several detainees had been coughing and complaining of headaches and fevers.

ICE is currently holding approximately 37,000 immigrants at numerous detention centers across the country. In New Jersey, about 1,200 immigrant workers are being detained at three county jails and one private facility. All of the New Jersey jails have now reported a coronavirus case among guards or detainees.

Immigrant advocates, doctors, and civil rights groups had warned that a coronavirus outbreak at a prison would be inevitable unless crowding and unsanitary conditions were addressed. This is what public health experts have assured us would happen: People in detention centers are sitting ducks for the spread of this virus, Andrea Flores, a deputy director of policy at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. The same experts have also predicted that once outbreaks in detention centers begin, they will spread rapidly. The suffering and death that will occur is unnecessary and preventable. ICE must take immediate and drastic steps to reduce the number of people in detention. If it doesnt, it will be to blame for a humanitarian crisis.

Several days before the detainee tested positive for coronavirus, two doctors at the US Department of Homeland Security had issued a letter urging Congress to consider releasing all immigrant detainees who do not pose a threat to public safety. The doctors were gravely concerned about the consequences of a coronavirus outbreak among ICE detainees, according to their letter.

That ICE endangers detainees health is a matter of public record. Last week, immigrants detained by ICE at Essex County Correctional Facility, New Jersey, began a hunger strike to protest their lack of basic sanitation and to demand their immediate release. In June 2019, Bergen County Jail was the site of a mumps outbreak. In 2017, surprise federal inspections of several jails holding ICE detainees found that detainees with painful conditions, such as knee injuries and infected teeth, waited for days to receive medical care.

The Trump administration has allowed conditions at ICE facilities to deteriorate to a shocking extent. The 2017 inspections, which were conducted by the Department of Homeland Securitys Office of Inspector General, found bathrooms with mold, mildew, and peeling. Some bathrooms had no hot water, and some showers had no cold water. Inspectors found leaks in many units that housed detainees, some which dripped onto detainees beds. The fact that ICE inspects these facilities weekly indicates that it is maintaining these filthy conditions deliberately.

On Sunday, people in over 100 cars organized by the immigrant rights group Never Again Action protested at the Hudson County Detention Center, which detains 280 undocumented immigrants apprehended by ICE, and 650 other detainees. Drivers honked their car horns and bore signs that said, Free them all and Release them now.

On Tuesday, an anonymous source told the media that the Elizabeth Detention Center and the Essex County Correctional Facility would release some inmates because of the coronavirus pandemic, although no information was given on how many people would be released.

The release of these detainees is likely too few and too late, and thousands of undocumented workers remain behind bars in New Jersey and across the United States as the deadly coronavirus pandemic spreads.

The confirmation of COVID-19 infections in New Jersey at ICE jails, as well as the filthy conditions that prevail, shows the criminal indifference not only of the Trump administration but of the state government run by the millionaire Democratic governor Phil Murphy as well as both parties in the state legislature, towards the health of prisoners or the public at large. As one ICE detainee told Gothamist, Were sitting here like ducks, like mice, we dont know whats going on. Theyre killing us, man.
A full lockdown was ordered Wednesday at Laguna Honda Hospital, San Franciscos 780-bed nursing home, as five staff members tested positive for the virus and officials scrambled to protect elderly and vulnerable residents.

As the city sought to reassure the public that it is taking the appropriate measures to contain the virus, staff members at Laguna Honda say they are working in an atmosphere of confusion, growing anxiety and shortages of crucial supplies.

On Wednesday, a fifth staff member at the nursing home tested positive for the new coronavirus, a second unit was placed under quarantine and the city health department barred residents from leaving the facility and coming back for fear that they may contract the virus outside.

Of the infected staff members, four are nurses and one is a porter. The porter has been on quarantine since March 5. The department publicly acknowledged that any staff members had contracted the virus this week.

None of the 750 residents had tested positive for the virus as of Wednesday afternoon, which is notable given that many of the elderly patients have underlying health conditions that make them particularly vulnerable to the illness. But the department said it has tested only 15 people with symptoms.

It is unclear if the staffers are getting infected at Laguna Honda or if they are contracting the virus outside. Any outbreak that took hold inside the 780-bed facility likely would be devastating; the majority of patients are over 65 years old with underlying health conditions.

The city took early steps to mitigate the risk at the hospital; since March 6, visitors and nonessential personnel have been barred from entering the hospital.

As the situation at Laguna Honda escalated Wednesday, Dr. Grant Colfax, director of the health department, did not mention Laguna Honda in his prepared remarks at an afternoon news conference; he mentioned it only in response to a question from a reporter.

From the beginning, it (Laguna Honda) has been a key focus of the departments efforts, he said.

Colfax said the hospital has increased its screening of staff who may have come in contact with infected co-workers and that all the proper precautions are being taken at this time. The department also said front-line health workers have enough protective equipment to keep themselves safe  even though city officials put out a call for donations of masks, gowns and hazmat suits.

All supplies, PPE and the like, have been centralized to ensure they are available to front-line staff when needed, said Deirdre Hussey, a veteran spokeswoman in the city, who has been put in charge of communications for the hospital. As a result, Laguna Honda, like many city departments, has centralized distribution. Laguna Honda is adequately supplied and PPE is available when staff makes a request.

The official remarks contradict the experience of some front-line workers on the ground.

In interviews with The Chronicle over the past week, multiple Laguna Honda medical professionals have said they dont have enough N-95 respirators, face shields and regular surgical masks.

In a Wednesday email to city health leaders, Tim Jenkins, senior representative for the union that represents doctors at the nursing home, the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, asked for a current inventory of protective gear at Laguna Honda, including N-95 masks, surgical masks, shoe covers and face shields.

Doctors I have spoken with are suffering significant anxiety created by the uncertainty of their safety at work due to a lack of information about the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE), he wrote. The union representing nurses and other hospital staffers, SEIU Local 1021, made similar demands in a statement Monday evening.

Meanwhile, Quoc Nguyen, an administrator at the nursing home, posted a request on the site donateppe.org for N95 masks, surgical masks, hospital gowns, hazmat suits, noting that Laguna Honda hospital is a 780 bed nursing home with a vulnerable population. The site was created by UCSF students and other volunteers. Nguyen did not respond to a call and email requesting comment.

The lockdown means that residents no longer will be able to re-enter the hospital. They will continue to have access to outdoor areas of the 62-acre campus. The lockdown was to begin at 5 p.m. Wednesday and will last as long as California is under a stay-at-home order.

The city health department also mandated Wednesday that all staff in the city who come into contact with patients wear masks.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

A medical professional at Laguna Honda said staff members are largely being left in the dark about the situation. The medical professional, who is not authorized to speak publicly and asked for anonymity, found out on Wednesday that another staff member was infected only because the professional read The Chronicle news feed.

The citys increasing secrecy is both baffling and infuriating, the medical professional said.

Lizette Medrano, 36, said she is worried about her father, Jose, an 82-year-old resident of the nursing home who suffers from dementia. Medrano, a nurse at another local hospital, said Laguna Honda hasnt sent her family any emails or letters about staffers testing positive for coronavirus.

If employees are infected, most likely patients will be infected as well, Medrano said. We havent gotten any information from them.

It is unclear how many doctors and nurses at Laguna Honda may be out sick themselves or on mandatory quarantine, the medical professional said. Some employees who work in South 5, one of the units placed on quarantine, called in sick Tuesday morning, the medical professional said: Dont know how many had COVID symptoms and how many were just scared out of their wits.

An investigation is ongoing to determine how many people the infected staff members came in contact with. The South 5 unit and the South 4 unit are currently under quarantine. A total of 120 patients reside in both units, and they are being checked three times per day for any sign of infection, Hussey said.

Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley, said it is now terribly important for the city to figure out exactly how the Laguna Honda staffers became infected.

If they got infected outside the hospital, then we need to look at the patients to see who they may have exposed, Swartzberg said. And if they got it in Laguna Honda, then where did they get it and who is infected there that we need to know about?

Trisha Thadani, Jason Fagone and Cynthia Dizikes are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: tthadani@

sfchronicle.com, jason.fagone@

sfchronicle.com, cdizikes@

sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani, @jfagone, @cdizikes
(@FahadShabbir)

US Special Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad said on Wednesday that to reach peace, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his political rival, Abdullah Abdullah, needed to be under pressure and they should knew that the people are not satisfied with the current situation

KABUL (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 25th March, 2020) US Special Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad said on Wednesday that to reach peace, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his political rival, Abdullah Abdullah, needed to be under pressure and they should knew that the people are not satisfied with the current situation.

"The purpose of our current peace efforts is to pressure and understand both leaders [Ghani and Abdullah]. The people are not satisfied with this situation and the problem will be solved," Khalilzad told reporters.

The US envoy also said that a government delegation should be formed for negotiations with the Taliban and should be inclusive to avoid leaving the populations out of the process.

"All parties must be included in the delegation for peace negotiations. Without any inclusive delegation, the problem will not be resolved ... If important people are not part of the delegation, then they will not accept it, challenges will arise and foreign interventions will be allowed," Khalilzad added.

In addition, the envoy called the release of the Taliban detainees, which is one of the conditions of the peace deal, a positive step toward building trust between the Afghan government and the Taliban and initiating intra-Afghan dialogue, which has now progressed. However, there are still concerns that the parties will not find a compromise.

Meanwhile, National Security Council spokesman Javid Faisal told reporters that the president's position regarding the detainees' release remained the same and prisoners would be released when the war was over and guarantees were made.

After the signing of a peace deal between Washington and the Taliban, the latter continued its attacks in the wake of Kabul's refusal to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners. Ghani later conceded to the demands and ordered the release of the prisoners. However, the group rejected the phased release of its members.
3 1 of 3 Chris Ehrmann / Associated Press Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Tyler Sizemore / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 3 of 3





Our state government has been timely and decisive in responding to the COVID-19 crisis. The governor, with bipartisan support, has issued a series of executive orders to close schools, promote social distancing and curtail non-essential activities. Our state did not waiver like New York City and wait to close schools and essential businesses. At the same time, we did not enact a lockdown and martial law, which was being advocated by some. At the state and municipal level, we acted firmly and appropriately. This head start should allow us to plan calmly and focus on next steps in fighting this crisis. Our policy needs to reflect that the solution to this crisis will come from science  better, faster tests and an effective cure. Containment measures should be temporary. School and business closings and other curtailments should be re-evaluated every two weeks. Our policy has to be based on science, data and risk management and not be based on fear. Our policy has to reflect confidence and faith that our scientists will deliver.

Containment and social distancing are short term strategies and are essential for a few weeks. Our residents have stepped up and are doing their part in this difficult process. As we go beyond the first 2-4 weeks, our containment strategy has to evolve. For example, at this stage we need to stop the inflow of spread from New York City. That can be done by quarantining and/or testing those who are coming into Connecticut from NYC. Our focus has to continue to be on availability of testing. We should also explore a plan which will limit containment and distancing for the demographic above 75. Data is unequivocal about the fact that the maximum impact of COVID-19 is on that demographic.
Susan Hall is the Leader of the Conservative Group on the London Assembly.

London is facing an unprecedented challenge  we have mere weeks to turn the tide on the coronavirus before the capital reaches the dreaded peak. The actions the government has taken to stop the spread of the virus will save thousands of lives and Londoners are looking to Mayor Khan to lead the way.

Every single morning this week, we have seen shocking pictures of crowded platforms and Tube trains, despite government instructions to stay at home and avoid public transport. Khans failure to manage the Tube properly is putting Londons doctors, nurses, police officers, and teachers, who must still travel to work to keep our city safe, at risk of catching the virus.

Its distressing to see NHS workers taking to Twitter to vent their anger about their commute, putting them at greater risk for their crucial hospital work. One such nurse Julia Harris, who commutes to Imperial College NHS Trust, tweeted travelling to and from work at the hospital is starting to scare me, and an NHS sonographer Nicola Smith tweeted her plea Sadiq Khan  put the Tube service back to normal so we can all spread out.

Its hard not to think that the Mayors decision to reduce Transport for Londons services has inadvertently turned the Tube into a petri dish for coronavirus. This dangerous situation is not only putting Londons essential workers at risk who must continue to travel, but also turbocharging the spread of the virus in London. Unless the Mayor can urgently resolve this situation, he will have failed Londons NHS heroes on two fronts: by putting them at risk on their commute to work and failing to stop the spread of the virus which threatens to overwhelm them.

Clearly, some Londoners are using the Tube unnecessarily when they should be at home. Thats why earlier this week, I called for the Mayor to deploy police officers to deter non-essential workers from using the London Underground. I am pleased that Khan adopted the suggestion and we saw British Transport Police at busy Tube stations on Wednesday morning. However, the Mayor should consider using the Met to give a greater police presence on the Underground to stop irresponsible journeys.

However, it may be the case that the reduced service TfL is providing is just not sufficient for essential workers to travel across the city safely. The Mayor must be guided by the evidence on this; if its clear more services are needed to protect Londons NHS heroes, he must provide them. However, its not clear that the Mayor is even in the control of Transport for Londons services.

During the course of one day, the number of TfL staff who are sick or self-isolating rose from 20 per cent to a third while Sadiq Khan toured TV studios to explain why his hands were tied on tube services. Worse still, the Mayor believes this number will rise, and TfL may have to reduce their services further.

The Mayor must urgently take action to bolster TfL staff to sustain Londons transport network and provide more services to protect NHS workers. Former Deputy Chairman of TfL Daniel Moylan set out excellent questions on actions Khan must be taking to address TfLs staffing problem. I put these questions in a letter to Sadiq Khan yesterday to see what, if any, action he is taking. I asked the Mayor:

How many TfL managers with station operator licences have been deployed? How many recently retired/redundant staff have been asked back to work? Have all the Night Tube drivers been redeployed to day shifts? Have drivers been asked to defer leave and to work additional hours (for extra pay)? Is the absence rate amongst operations staff consistent with broader London experience? If not, what steps will be taken? Have the Tube unions been asked to relax restrictive practices?

The Mayor needs to answer these questions and explain why he isnt taking these actions to keep Londons essential workers moving. While the rest of the country is digging deep and coming up with solutions to keep everyone safe, Khan needs to act now. TfL is an essential service; more trains may be required, and he needs to be able to deliver them to keep our city safe.
Half of all pregnant women infected with the novel coronavirus deliver their babies early and they may even pass the disease to their newborns, two small studies find.

In one study, researchers from China examined 33 newborns whose mothers had COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, while pregnant.

Nearly 10 percent of the babies - three of them - were found to have the virus - including one that needed to be put on mechanical ventilation.

In the second study, looking at 32 pregnant women from China and Hong Kong, researchers found that 47 percent delivered their babies prematurely.

Worldwide, there are more than 463,000 people infected - including at least 83,000 in the US - and 21,100 people have died.

Researchers studied 33 babies born to women in Wuhan - where the novel coronavirus originated - who had the virus while pregnant. Pictured: Chinese baby diagnosed with the virus whose mother also had it

Of those newborns, just three, about 10 percent, were diagnosed with COVID-19. Pictured: A staff member attends to a baby with novel coronavirus at Wuhan Children's Hospital, March 6

One of the infants, who was born prematurely, had severe complications and required mechanical ventilation and antibiotics. Pictured: Medical personnel test people for coronavirus in the parking lot outside Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, March 25

For the study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, the team examined the medical records of 33 newborns born to women with COVID-19.

All the women were recruited from Wuhan Children's Hospital, in Wuhan - where the virus is believed to have originated.

Of the 33 babies, three - all males born by Cesarean section - were diagnosed with the virus.

All three babies had pneumonia, a major complication of COVID-19. However, only two had fevers, and the other had shortness of breath and respiratory distress syndrome.

The first baby was born at 40 weeks' gestation and started experiencing lethargy and fever on day two.

After a chest scan showed signs of pneumonia, he tested positive for the virus. By day six, however, he was negative.

The second baby, born at 40 weeks' and 4 days' gestation, similarly began experiencing lethargy, fever and vomiting soon after being born.

He tested positive on day 2 for COVID-19 and by day 6, he was negative.

The third infant, born prematurely at 31 weeks' and two days' gestation, had several more health issues than the other two.

He required mechanical ventilation and antibiotics after contracting sepsis, a life-threatening condition in which the immune system attacks itself.

By day seven, he tested negative.

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

The number of cases in the US has rocketed over the last two weeks

'Consistent with previous studies, the clinical symptoms from 33 neonates with or at risk of COVID-19 were mild and outcomes were favorable,' the authors wrote.

They added that of the three babies born with COVID-19, the most seriously ill infant 'may have been symptomatic from prematurity, asphyxia, and sepsis' rather than from viral infection.

The team says that, because doctors implemented strict infection control and prevention procedures during delivery, it's likely that mother transmitted the virus to their babies either in the womb or in childbirth.

'It is crucial to screen pregnant women and implement strict infection control measures, quarantine of infected mothers, and close monitoring of neonates at risk of COVID-19,' the researchers write.

In the second study, an OB/GYN from West Virginia, said he saw an increase in premature births in study of about 32 women from China and Hong Kong.

'There was an increase in the pre-term birth rate. It was at 47 percent in that study,' Dr Brandon Lingenfelter, an OB/GYN at Princeton Community Hospital told WVNS.

'While it was small, that's what it looks like we're getting the most reports of is pre-term delivery.'

Both reports come just days after a three-week-old baby in New York was confirmed as the youngest patient to be diagnosed with coronavirus in the US.

The infant was treated at NYU Winthrop Hospital in Mineola, on Long Island, for several days, but has since been released and is now recuperating at home.
Rami Abd survived a war in Syria and seven years of living in refuge in Turkey.

Now, with the world under siege as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Toronto man says what he fears most is not the novel coronavirus, but keeping up with his English lessons.

And thanks to the Together Project  and modern technology  not only is Abd able to practise his language skills, he and his family can also stay connected with volunteers of his welcome group and get support while in social isolation.

It is not easy to be in the house all the time and the kids get bored, said Abd, 49, who arrived in Canada last June with his wife, two boys and two girls as government-assisted refugees.

If you compare this to our experience in Turkey and Syria, where we feared of dying all the time, this is 100 times better because of the support of our Canadian friends.

While it is hard enough for ordinary Canadians to stay on top of the rapidly changing crisis and dealing with the new normal, newcomers are faced with the extra barriers in accessing information and support because they have little English and few friends, says Anna Hill, a co-director of the Together Project, which matches volunteers with newcomer families to help with their integration.

The pandemic affects everyone and its difficult for all of us to adapt to the new social distancing reality even though we have lived in Canada and have neighbours and friends that we know well, said Hill, whose group has matched 130 newcomer families with volunteers since 2017.

Maintaining social contact is a major challenge for all, but newcomers, particularly refugees, are among the most vulnerable. We want to ensure they have access to accurate information and social connection.

Since the pandemic has escalated in Canada with school closures and government officials limiting social interaction on March 13, Hills group has suspended in-person meetings between volunteers and their matched families and scrambled to move their activities online. Volunteer screening and training has also been moved online while the office is closed.

Hills co-director Andrew Lusztyk, who conducted a need assessment last week, said the families are concerned about maintaining social connection and worry about the health of the elderly, access to food and basic necessities, and keeping their kids engaged while in isolation.

Although not every household has internet or computers, he said they all have smart phones and are familiar with social media apps like WhatsApp and Facebook  their lifeline during war and crisis.

Most of them just want to have someone to talk to as a sounding board and ask questions in uncertain time with the spread of misinformation, noted Lusztyk. Social connection means a lot to the individuals.

While nothing can replace interpersonal interactions, he said volunteers have managed to continue to help the newcomers practise English, fill out forms and access information and activities such as online museum tours through social media apps.

Abd, a former construction worker from Damascus, said he was connected with Together Project in November and its volunteers have since showed them the community and helped them with doctors appointments and their kids transition in school.

At the onset of the outbreak in Toronto, a volunteer of the familys welcome group, who is a nurse, sent him health information about the coronavirus through an Arabic website while others, including a teacher, posted school exercises and activities for the kids through WhatsApp.

When Abd was hospitalized for three days last week due to a pancreas inflammation, volunteer Alex Katsabouris even dropped off food to his wife, Sharifa Atto, and children, who were too afraid to step out of the house.

Rami is the head of the family and was in hospital. With everyone stranded at home, he was still hesitant to ask for help, said Katsabouris, a retired teacher, who came to Canada in 1969 as a kid with his parents, fleeing a military junta in Greece.

These newcomers are my super heroes. They are such resilient people. They have dodged bullets and explosions. They are survivors. But community connections are important and social support is what we are providing.

Abd said the COVID-19 pandemic is just another test and what he worries about most is getting behind in his English class at Gooderham Adult Learning Centre, where he was enrolled in Level 2 of its English language program until all schools were shut down.

Learning English is very important to me, said Abd with help from one of his groups Arabic-speaking volunteers, Lubna Fares.

Im not scared of the virus. I have my Canadian friends around me. This is the most beautiful friendship in my life.

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Lucknow Commissioner of Police Sujit Pandey urged the people of the city to stay indoors in order to stay safe amid the coronavirus pandemic.

"At the time of a lockdown, please come out of your houses only if there is an emergency or a medical reason," said Pandey.

"All essential necessary food, vegetables, ration, milk, fruits and medicines would be available just like before. There is no need to create panic. The shops of essential commodities will remain open from 6 to 11 in the morning," he added.

He also urged the public to cooperate with the police and administration and not to crowd shops. "Go to the shops one at a time rather than crowding them," he said.

In his address to the nation on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country beginning Tuesday midnight to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

The total number of people who have been confirmed positive for COVID-19 in India has risen to 649, according to the recent update by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) on Thursday morning.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
M ore than 1,000 people have died in the US after testing positive for coronavirus, as the global death toll from the outbreak topped 21,000.

It came as the Senate passed the biggest stimulus bill in American history in a bid to cope with the economic fallout from the pandemic, steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems.

But with the latest, dramatic spike in the death toll, US health experts fear the crisis is far from over. More than 250 infected people died from the virus in a single day for the first time to bring the nationwide tally to at least 1,035.

The bill passed unanimously by the Senate still has to be ratified by the House of Representatives and signed into law by the president.

It includes a massive cash giveaway of $1,200 to every US taxpayer earning less than $75,000-a-year, with an additional $500 for each child.

Pennsylvania Avenue, one of the largest avenues in Washington, is almost deserted / AFP via Getty Images

It also increases unemployment benefits for the millions made jobless by the pandemic, a $367 billion program to help small businesses pay staff they have been forced to lay-off during the shutdown and another $500 billion to keep ailing companies afloat.

A $150 billion injection of cash into the nations hard-pressed hospital system should also provide more beds for those seriously ill with the virus.

"Its been a long hard road with a remarkable number of twists and turns, but for the sake of millions of Americans, it will be worth it," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Covid-19 cases around the world / Evening Standard

Earlier, he said: "This is a strange and evil disease. When we pass this bill, instead of hugging each other, well wave from a distance."

There was a glimmer of hope in New York, the worst-hit US state, where Governor Andrew Cuomo said there were early signs that social distancing was paying off with a slight slowdown in the rate of hospitalisations from the disease.

Hospitalisations in the state are now doubling every five days rather than every two days and Westchester County, which had the first cases of the virus in New York, has shown a significant decrease in the number of new infections.

A nearly empty 42nd Street is seen on March 25, 2020 in New York City / AFP via Getty Images

The evidence suggests that the density control measures may be working, said Mr Cuomo. In Westchester we have dramatically slowed what was an exponential increase.

But the governor insisted: Were still on the way up the mountain.

Amid fears of a surge in victims over the next fortnight in New York City, workers were today building a makeshift morgue with rows of white tents outside Bellevue Hospital and health officials repeated pleas for desperately needed ventilators and medical equipment.

In New York alone, there have been more than 30,800 cases and at least 290 people have died, the majority of them in New York City.

Mr Trump has given emergency relief funds to help several states cope with outbreaks / AFP via Getty Images

Last night, Donald Trump softened his claims that America could be open for business by Easter, acknowledging that some states wouldnt be able to meet his deadline.

He went on to attack the media for questioning his plan to loosen Americas social distancing efforts and try and get the country back to work as soon as possible.

A man boards a streetcar amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease in New Orleans, / REUTERS

The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success, he tweeted early today. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!

Meanwhile, speaking at the White House, Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned the coronavirus may become seasonal and return in cycles after the initial pandemic calms.

We really need to be prepared for another cycle. And what we're doing, I believe, will prepare us well, he added.

The World on Coronavirus lockdown 1 /60 The World on Coronavirus lockdown Getty Images A UK government public health campaign is displayed in Piccadilly Circus Reuters Chinese paramilitary police and security officers wear face masks to protect against the spread of the new coronavirus as they stand guard outside an entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing AP A usually busy 42nd Street is seen nearly empty in New York AFP via Getty Images Bondi Beach, Australia Getty Images Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images View of the illuminated statue of Christ the Redeemer that reads "Thank you" as Archbishop of the city of Rio de Janeiro Dom Orani Tempesta performs a mass in honor of Act of Consecration of Brazil and tribute to medical workers amidst the Coronavirus (COVID - 19) pandemic Getty Images Rome AFP via Getty Images An Indian man paddles his bicycle in front of a mural depicting the globe covered in a mask, as India remains under an unprecedented lockdown over the highly contagious coronavirus Getty Images Aerial view of the empty 9 de Julio avenue in Buenos Aires in Argentina AFP via Getty Images A view of an empty Grand Canal Reuters Las Ramblas, Barcelona, Spain Getty Images Aerial view of the empty Central cemetery in Bogota, Columbia AFP via Getty Images The facade of the Palacio de Lopez (seat of the government palace) AFP via Getty Images Miami, Florida AFP via Getty Images Aerial view of the empty Simon Bolivar park in Bogota AFP via Getty Images An LAPD patrol car drives through Venice Beach Boardwalk AP Venice Beach, California Getty Images Los Angeles, California Getty Images Surfers Paradise is seen empty in Australia Getty Images Many shops stand shuttered on the Venice Beach boardwalk Getty Images Empty escalators are seen at a deserted train station during morning rush hour after New South Wales began shutting down non-essential businesses Reuters A nearly empty Times Square in New York AFP via Getty Images Caracas AFP via Getty Images Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador AFP via Getty Images A general view of an unusually quiet Midland Park in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images A general view of an unusually quiet Civic Square at lunchtimein Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images A policeman rides his motorcycle wearing a face mask in front of a closed shopping mall in Buenos Aires, Argentina AFP via Getty Images Florida Keys AP The historic Channel 2 Bridge closed to fishermen, bikers and pedestrians in Florida Keys AP The Beach on Scenic Gulf Drive near Seascape Resort in south Walton County, Florida sits empty of tourists AP Surfers Paradise is seen empty in Australia Getty Images A deserted Rajpath leading to India Gate in New Delhi AFP via Getty Images A general view is seen of a closed Luna Park in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A general view is seen of a closed Luna Park in Sydney, Australia Getty Images Empty roads are pictured following the lockdown by the government amid concerns about the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Kathmandu, Nepal Reuters An empty New York Subway car i AFP via Getty Images The empty pedestrian zone is seen in the city of Cologne, western Germany, AFP via Getty Images Place de la Comedie in the city of Montpellier , southern France AFP via Getty Images An empty street in Kuwait city AFP via Getty Images A building is covered by the Portuguese message: "Coronavirus: take precaution" over empty streets in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, AP A general view shows an empty street after a curfew was imposed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Reuters Parliament of Canada is pictured with empty street during morning rush hour AFP via Getty Images A near empty beach on Southend seafront in England PA Near empty Keswick town centre in Cumbria, England PA

Globally, the death toll has now passed 21,000. The number of fatalities in Spain has risen past 3,400, eclipsing that of China where the virus was first detected in December, after a one-day spike of 700 fatalities.

Spains count is now second only to that of Italy, with more than 7,500 deaths.

Lidia Perera, a nurse at Madrids 1,000-bed Hospital de la Paz, said more workers were desperately needed, adding: We are collapsing.

A paramedic wearing a suit along with a face mask and goggles as a protective measure against the strain / AFP via Getty Images

The Spanish parliament voted to allow the government extend strict stay-at-home rules and business closings until April 11.

In other developments, South Korea reported 104 new cases and five more deaths, bringing its totals to 9,241 infections and 131 deaths.

Chinas National Health Commission on Thursday reported 67 new Covid-19 cases, all of which it says were imported infections in recent arrivals from abroad.

Once again, there were no new cases reported in Wuhan, the city where the virus emerged in December. After a months-long lockdown, Wuhan residents are allowed out of the city, but cannot leave the surrounding province of Hubei until April 8.

Citing the coronavirus, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday postponed a nationwide vote on proposed constitutional amendments that include a change potentially allowing him to stay in office until 2036. The country reported its first two deaths from the virus on Wednesday.
A Texas appeals court Thursday rejected an effort by city attorneys to block lawyers for relatives of two people killed in a deadly Houston police drug raid last year from deposing police supervisors and seeking documents to shed light on the incident.

This is the key were hoping will unlock what happened and who was involved, said Mike Doyle, an attorney representing the family of Rhogena Nicholas, one of two people killed in the botched raid on Jan. 28, 2019.

Doyle filed a legal petition last summer asking for permission to question police officials under oath about the raid and about alleged abuses throughout the narcotics division.

Related: Lawmakers call on Chief Art Acevedo to release audit on Houston police's narcotics division

During the incident, undercover narcotics officers burst into a small home in Pecan Park looking for heroin. A gunfight erupted, resulting in the deaths of Nicholas and her husband, Dennis Tuttle, and injuries to five officers.

The Harris County District Attorneys Office, the Houston Police Department and the FBI all launched investigations into the incident. In the weeks afterward, authorities said the officer at the center of the incident had lied repeatedly, including about the drug buy he used as the basis for the raid. That officer, Gerald Goines, who retired amid the investigations, is charged with murder and violating the couples civil rights.

The Goines case has led to the dismissal of dozens of active cases, and prosecutors now say they believe at least 69 people may have been convicted on false evidence from the former officer. Two men who were convicted and did time because of Goines testimony and casework have already seen their cases overturned.

The Houston Chronicle has detailed supervision failures in Goines cases, errant raids by narcotics officers, and problems in oversight of confidential-informant funds in undercover units.

After Doyle filed his petition seeking permission to depose some narcotics division supervisors  including Lt. Marsha Todd and Commander Paul Follis, who has since been transferred  the city appealed that request to Texas 14th Court of Appeals, arguing that the probate court did not have jurisdiction and other claims.

Doyle filed the petition in probate court because it was already handling legal matters related to Nicholas estate, the attorney said.

Narcotics investigation: Botched Houston drug raid not the first

In a 13-page ruling dated March 26, three justices from the 14th Court of Appeals picked apart the citys argument, concluding the probate court where Doyle first filed the legal petition did in fact have jurisdiction over the case, and the claims arising from it.

City officials said they were evaluating their options.

Today the Fourteenth Court of Appeals affirmed a probate court ruling that it has subject matter jurisdiction over an application for pre-suit depositions, city spokeswoman Mary Benton said in a written statement. The ruling addressed only the jurisdictional issue, and not the merits of the motion. The City disagrees with the decision and is evaluating its options for seeking further review.

The appellate filing comes as federal and state prosecutors continue to pursue cases against Goines and his former partner, Steven Bryant, who also retired under investigation.

A Harris County grand jury indicted Goines on charges of felony murder because the deaths occurred in the course of another alleged felony, tampering with a government record.

In federal court, he is charged with violating the slain couples civil rights and multiple instances of tampering. His former partner is charged  in both state and federal court  with tampering with government records. County prosecutors allege Bryant lied in an offense report.

The defense attorney representing Goines said she was continuing to review discovery documents.

Were eager to see the details of their investigations, Nicole DeBorde said.

DeBorde said she wasnt surprised Doyle was pursuing a possible lawsuit against the city.

I think thats what this has always been about for them, she said.

st.john.smith@chron.com
WHILE health experts warn of the public transports high potential to increase the transmission of COVID-19, bus operators and passengers in most parts of Dar es Salaam are hardly paying attention to the big threat around them.

Overcrowded bus stops during rush hours, and buses packed to the brim remain a common facet of the public transportation in Dar es Salaam, the countrys most populated region, with an estimation of 6.7 inhabitants.

According to the Land Transport Regulatory Authority (LATRA), Mbagala and Gongolamboto routes to and from other parts of the countrys commercial city remain the most worrying directions as far as the prevention of coronavirus is concerned.

The government warned recently that public transport sub-sector is one of the conduits in which the virus could spread, given the number of people using it on a daily basis.

And looking to combat spread of the COVID-19 in the country, the LATRA was directed by the government to take deliberate measures in collaboration with bus operators to curb the spread of the novel virus, which has claimed over around 20,000 lives across the world.

One of the interventions taken by Authority is to prevent overcrowding in busesas that would help avoid direct body contacts that increase the chances of contracting the virus.

But the directive is apparently ignored especially by operators and passengers of commuter buses plying from Gongolamboto and Mbagala to other parts of the city, LATRA Director General Mr Gilliard Ngewe noted.

A survey by this paper also showed that a chunky number of commuter buses in the city are ignoring the rules set by the government to protect them, as public transport was still packed with commuters.

Speaking to the Daily News in a telephone interview, Mr Ngewe said the authority has already formed a committee comprising members from different sectors within the industry to oversee the implementation of the safety measures as proposed by health experts.

The committee is chaired by the Head of Police Traffic Department Fortunatus Muslim and it has members from Tanzania Bus Owners Association (TABOA), health officers from all municipal councils, Local government authorities and Dar es Salaam Commuter Bus Owners Association (DARCOBOA), and the Association of Transporters in Dar es Salaam (Uwadar), he said.

Right now, he said, they are controlling the number of people boarding Usafiri Dar es Salaam Rapid Transit (UDART) buses, while warning commuter busses across the country should also carry passengers according to their seat capacities.

Its a cross cutting issue that needs participation of all members of the community, the agency cannot do everything alone if there is no response from the general public, he said, urging Mbagala and Gongo la Mboto residents to adhere to the instructions for their own safety.

Similarly, the Dar es Salaam Regional Commissioner (RC) Mr Paul Makonda reminded passengers to adhere to all preventive measures, including washing hands with clean and safe water as well as being sanitized before boarding in any public transport.

He insisted that the city dwellers must avoid overcrowding in commuter buses in a bid to curb the deadly virus.

Sometimes, its good and wise to be late than rushing in a bus that is overcrowded. Beating this virus needs the collaboration of authorities and every member of the society, noted Mr Makonda.

Over the weekend, the Dar Rapid Transit (DART) Agency, looking to curb the coronavirus outbreak, started instituting measures to avoid congestion in buses by limiting the number of passengers.

Other measures included, introducing queues of passengers boarding the buses as well as increasing the number of buses operating on trunk routes by relocating those plying on feeder routes especially Kimara and Mbezi areas.

It has also set up hand -washing facilities at the major bus stations to allow passengers to wash their hands or use hand sanitizer before getting onto buses.

So far, Tanzania reported to have recorded 12 cases of COVID-19, with the Minister of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children Ms Ummy Mwalimu saying all patients were doing fine, and that the first patient Isabela Mwampamba has tested negative three times.

Globally, as of yesterday, there were around 436,623 cases with the number of deaths reaching 19,644; this is according to the statistics from the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Southeast Texans have been spared for now from the more comprehensive stay at home orders in place in larger Texas cities like Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso and Austin. That pause seems justified, but local officials should not hesitate to take that additional step if medical conditions warrant such a move. The overriding goal here, and everywhere, must be to stop the spread of new coronavirus infections and the possible overwhelming of our medical facilities.

The local decision was reached by the county judges in the six counties that have banded together so far to fight this threat. But residents of Jefferson, Hardin, Orange, Newton, Jasper and Tyler counties will now be limited to sending one adult per household into stores and retail businesses that are still open.

Admittedly, enforcing an order like that will not be easy, but heres how area residents can help: They can cooperate with the spirit of this order and not try to get around it by splitting up couples or family groups and trying to enter a store a few minutes apart. Lets help each other. One person can do the shopping for a family. That will limit the traffic within stores  and possible coronavirus exposure to clerks and cashiers who are trying to keep the shelves full.

And while were on this subject, theres no need for hoarding either. You dont have to build up a months supply of toilet paper or hand sanitizer. Stores should not hesitate to place limits of one or two items per customer for things that are in demand now.

These are trying times, with students learning at home and many of us working from home. Countless people have been laid off from restaurants and other businesses that have been hit hard by this crisis. Many of them didnt make a lot of money to begin with. They dont have nest eggs to fall back on. Their stress levels are high  and valid.

Lets all try to help people like that as much as possible. Buy a bag of groceries or a tankful of gasoline for a neighbor. Help them pay the rent if you can  and hope that their landlords will ease up on that debt while this crisis is raging.

The county judges should not hesitate to issue stricter requirements if they feel those changes are needed. No one likes all this disruption, but the quickest way to end it is to stop the pandemic. Thats several weeks away at best, so lets all be patient. Lets get through it one day at a time, for as long as necessary.
Ottawa has directed experts to draw up new standards for keeping workers safe  especially those in trucking and food processing  during the COVID-19 pandemic, says federal Labour Minister Filomena Tassi.

The guidelines will be distributed to labour ministries across the country, after a rare caucus  via telephone  of Tassi and her provincial counterparts to deal with the risk of workplace infection.

The health and safety of workers is a top priority for our government, Tassi said in an interview with the Star.

Theres never been a call like that that I have been a part of.

The guidelines will be drawn up by the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) and focus specifically on safety measures for truck drivers and those working in food processing  sectors that are critical to the supply of goods during the pandemic.

All these workers are extremely important, Tassi said.

The CCOHS has already issued general recommendations on infection-control measures in the workplace including proper ventilation, social distancing and regular cleaning.

Theres a cry for the sharing of materials that will help support workers, Tassi said.

Ottawa oversees labour standards for around one million federally regulated workers, in sectors like trucking and rail. The vast majority of workers fall under provincial labour laws.

Tassi said federally, added inspection and enforcement measures are currently not needed.

If we feel that other needs arise ... then of course we as a government are going to look to additional measures, she said.

Jim Brophy, an occupational disease expert whose research focuses on the health-care sector, said enforcement was critical to ensuring workplace safety  especially at the provincial level.

Those grocery stores, were counting on those workers to provide for us. The food workers that are making food in plants, were counting on them. So we should have their backs, he said.

In the wake of the 2003 SARS outbreak, a Royal Commission tasked with investigating Ontarios response to the crisis issued a damning picture of workplace safety. It pointed to poor enforcement and meagre involvement from the provincial labour ministry.

The commission recommended that during future outbreaks, the ministry be given a clearly defined decision-making role on worker safety issues; that it take a proactive approach to addressing safety concerns; and that it expeditiously prosecute employers who didnt comply.

Brophy says he doesnt believe those lessons have been learned.

The regulatory system that is supposed to ensure workplace safety is totally broken, he said.

Theyve been downsizing and understaffing, he added. They dont have the capacity to deal with this.

In response to questions from the Star, Ontario Ministry of Labour spokesperson Janet Deline said inspectors are visiting workplaces and performing both proactive and reactive inspections each and every day including weekends and evenings.

During this time, the ministry is responding to inquiries regarding worker protections for COVID-19 and continues to investigate all complaints related to workplace health and safety to provide support, advice and enforcement, Deline said.

Since Monday, they have responded to more than 100 construction-related events and issued 16 orders, she added.

Last year, the provincial government cut $16 million from the Ministry of Labours prevention office  the body tasked with preventing occupational illness and injury in Ontario.

The ministrys latest annual report from 2018-19 projected a 7 per cent reduction in funds dedicated to occupational health and safety this year. (The government has delayed this years budget in light of the COVID-19 outbreak.)

Many of the workers occupying jobs now deemed essential are low-wage and precariously employed, Brophy noted.

In the crisis economy were in, theyre in even a worse position, he said.

Theyre really going to feel the pressure to do what theyre told, no matter what the situation is.
South Africas police minister says dog-walking is banned during the countrys three-week lockdown that begins Friday to combat the spread of the coronavirus.

Bheki Cele also said people cant go running, contradicting the health ministers comments earlier in the day.

And Cele warned South Africans to essentially stay sober for 21 days, emphasizing that alcohol sales are prohibited.

The military and police will patrol to regulate movement, and all ports of entry are now closed. South Africa has the most COVID-19 cases in Africa with more than 700.
President of Ukraine thanked the Federal President of Switzerland for preparing humanitarian cargo for the needs of hospitals in eastern Ukraine

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has discussed international coordination of efforts to combat the coronavirus and prevent the negative effects of its spread with the Federal President of Switzerland Simonetta Sommaruga during a telephone conversation. This was reported by the press service of the President of Ukraine.

During the conversation, Zelensky and Sommaruga drew attention to the need to provide social assistance to the population and support national economies.

Zelensky praised the official steps taken by Berne in order to evacuate the citizens of Ukraine and Switzerland who wished to return home. He also thanked the Federal President of Switzerland for preparing humanitarian supplies for the needs of hospitals in eastern Ukraine.

The presidents of the two countries also discussed support for the initiative of Ukrainian and Swiss companies to quickly establish the production of artificial lung ventilation apparatus in Ukraine.

According to Swissinfo, the number of coronavirus infected in Switzerland continues to grow rapidly: at midday, on March 25, 9765 confirmed cases were reported, up 929 more than 24 hours before.

As we reported earlier, Google company allocated a $500,000 grant to Ukraines Healthcare Ministry for information campaign against panic amid coronavirus spread.
First order of business will be to get the spread of virus under control, then resume economic activity, Powell said.

The United States may well be in recession, but progress in controlling the spread of the coronavirus will determine when the economy can fully reopen, US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Thursday in a rare network television interview on NBCs Today Show.

Powell spoke just about an hour before federal data showed a record-breaking spike of unemployment claims to 3.28 million, evidence that social distancing to fight the pandemic has taken hold, and may have ended the countrys more than decade-long economic expansion.

Powells choice of venue  a network morning show when many Americans are homebound and paying close attention  was itself part of a message that seemed meant to prepare people for the dismal economic data to come, counsel patience in any rush back to work, and reassure that the Fed would act aggressively to keep firms and families afloat.

We are not experts in pandemic  We would tend to listen to the experts. Dr Fauci said something like the virus is going to set the timetable, and that sounds right to me, Powell said, in reference to Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is on the White Houses coronavirus task force.

The first order of business will be to get the spread of the virus under control and then resume economic activity.

The US central bank chiefs remarks are a contrast to the urging by some of President Donald Trumps advisers for a faster reopening. The president himself has said he wants the economy to be roaring by Easter, in a little over two weeks.

The Fed officials who have spoken to the issue, now including Powell, have taken a more sombre approach, focusing on the need to first control the virus, then restore confidence among workers and consumers that it is safe to go back to business.

Enforcing the message

Powell used the television appearance, outside the confines of the news shows or economic conferences where Fed chairs typically appear, to enforce that message and take what for a central banker is the unusual step of acknowledging the economy may be contracting even before economic data has confirmed it.

But the situation is so unusual that policymakers have become atypically blunt, arguing that a deliberate choice to close stores in the name of public health, as Powell said, is not a typical downturn  There is nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy.

But as with the unemployment claims, upcoming reports are expected to show such large jumps in joblessness and lost output that the focus has shifted toward ensuring businesses and households get through the period with their finances intact.

The aim of the trillions of dollars in lending and bond purchases the Fed has authorised over the past two weeks is precisely to let an otherwise healthy economy pause long enough to keep people safe, Powell said, before what could be a strong rebound later in the year.

He said the central bank would lend aggressively to ensure that happens, with an expected $424bn commitment from the US Treasury to cover any losses, allowing the Fed to unleash perhaps $4 trillion for credit to Main Street.

The sooner we get through this period and get the virus under control, the sooner the recovery can come, Powell said. We know that economic activity will decline probably substantially in the second quarter, but I think many expect and I would expect economic activity to resume and move back up in the second half of the year.
Citrus growers are expecting to see a huge rise in sales in the coming months as people find ways to stay healthy during the coronavirus pandemic.

As fear rises from the spread of COVID-19 across the country, many people have been looking to fresh fruits and vegetables to take in extra nutrients and vitamins.

The winter of 2019-20 has provided ideal growing conditions for Florida oranges, and now, the coronavirus pandemic is expected to drive a large demand for the citrus. (AccuWeather / Bill Wadell)

Oranges have been said to help support a healthy immune system, which can help combat diseases. Orange growers in Florida are seeing their crop as an opportunity to help the fight for staying healthy.

"Florida orange juice is the most nutrient dense juice in the marketplace. Chuck-full, of course, with Vitamin C," CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual Mike Sparks told AccuWeather Multimedia Journalist Bill Wadell.

CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual Mike Sparks discusses the demand for orange juice amid the coronavirus pandemic. (AccuWeather / Bill Wadell)

During cold and flu season the demand for orange juice typically rises, as people seek a dose of vitamin C to help prevent illness. Now with residents being ordered to stay home, orange industry experts are projecting that Americans will be looking for ways to get vitamin C again by drinking more orange juice.

"There's no question in my mind, there's going to be a run on orange juice," said Sparks.

Weather has also helped play a role in helping the orange juice industry this season. The mild winter has kept orange trees healthy and undamaged.

"It was a very, very mild winter. Zero frost. We've had no frost this year whatsoever... Pretty good year for growing oranges," said Archie Ritch, owner of Ridge Island Groves.

Archie Ritch, owner of Ridge Island Groves, told AccuWeather's Bill Wadell that orange growers are "trying to capitalize on the health benefits of drinking 100 percent pure Florida orange juice." (AccuWeather / Bill Wadell)

Ridge Island Groves is located in Haines City, Florida, which had temperatures drop into the 30s just once all winter, in late January.

Story continues

This week, temperatures are expected to climb into the 90s F, and over the weekend, could reach near 100 degrees. This is expected to prompt more customers coming in to buy oranges and orange juice.

As for if oranges can help prevent coronavirus, officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) told AccuWeather that other than a general benefit to one's individual health, there is no evidence that orange juice can help prevent COVID-19.

Latest coronavirus COVID-19 coverage from AccuWeather.com

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released blog posts to dispel rumors about coronavirus remedies that were ubiquitous on social media early on in the outbreak. A CDC blog post titled the "Best Remedy for COVID-19 Is Prevention" does not address whether orange juice can boost your immune system directly but stresses the importance of preventative measures such as avoiding close contact with others and proper hand washing and sanitation.

"Don't fall for claims about remedies that will immunize or cure you of the disease. While there isn't currently a vaccine or cure for coronavirus, there is a lot that you can still do to protect yourself and your health. Many of these are common practices that you already do every day," the CDC said.

Reporting by Bill Wadell.

Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier and Verizon Fios.
Former Bangladesh Prime Minister and leader of the main opposition party, Khaleda Jia, was released in the wake of the Coronavirus scare on Wednesday. Has been released for.

India has ability to beat 'Corona', but lockdown is not enough - WHO

Be aware that Khaleda Zia has been ill for a long time. Reports of heart disease, besides high blood pressure, have also come to the notice of 74-year-old Jia.

Lockdown: BJP workers will feed five crore people due to this reason

74-year-old Jia, the head of Bangladesh Nationalist Party, is serving a 17-year sentence in two corruption cases. He was sent to jail on February 8, 2018. That Jia was released on humanitarian grounds with conditions.

Congress MLA seen violating 'Lockdown', police registered case
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) said in a Twitter post Wednesday that he rejects "dictatorship models like China," a day after he signed an executive order in response to the novel coronavirus.

Details: Reeves' order Tuesday aims to limit people's physical interactions, but the Jackson Free Press notes it "seems to declare that most types of businesses in Mississippi are 'essential' and thus exempt from social-distancing requirements," including public and private industries and institutions. The move caused confusion as to whether it overrides stay-at-home orders issued by local authorities, Mississippi Today reports.

A tweet previously embedded here has been deleted or was tweeted from an account that has been suspended or deleted.

What he's saying: "We're following our experts and Ive spent many sleepless nights praying for wisdom in this unprecedented time," Reeves tweeted.

Context: Reeves made the comments in response to a segment on "The Rachel Maddow Show" Tuesday on Mississippi not enacting a stay-at-home order, and a subsequent post of a video on MSNBC's website Tuesday, headlined: "Mississippi governor untroubled by COVID crises in neighboring states." Reeves called the report a "dangerous lie."

The big picture: Mississippi had confirmed 377 cases and five deaths from the virus Wednesday, per the state health department.

21 state governors, mostly Democrats, had issued stay-at-home orders by Wednesday night.

Go deeper: Coronavirus: The states that have ordered people to stay home
Special Operations, Delaware County's emergency operations department, seen here working on their response to the coronavirus at the Glen Mills School. Read more

WASHINGTON  The closed Glen Mills Schools, now notorious for abusing children, could soon be turned into a federal medical station to help doctors cope with a potential regional overflow of patients caused by the coronavirus.

Timothy Boyce, the head of Delaware Countys Department of Emergency Services, said Thursday that state and federal authorities had approved the schools conversion, and that equipment was expected to begin arriving at Glen Mills on Friday.

There are no borders in this pandemic, Boyce said. Delaware County has been planning for this as a region, and were capable of hosting this facility. Were not hopeful for it, but we are grateful to be able to play this role.

Over the last few days, discussions between Boyce and his counterparts across Southeastern Pennsylvania centered on where to establish a medical shelter to help ease the burden on area hospitals.

Boyce said the shuttered school was an obvious choice: Two of its buildings are shovel-ready, meeting the requirements set by the federal government for space and utilities. Additionally, the nearly 800-acre school has ample room for helicopters to land, which would allow any medical shelter installed there to serve other nearby counties, including parts of the state of Delaware.

Its really a matter of where to place sensitive people as these cases continue to mount, Boyce said. And since Glen Mills is an existing facility, were not displacing anyone.

 READ MORE: Very Temple proud: Philly to use Liacouras Center as overflow hospital space as coronavirus cases rise

The Army Corps of Engineers visited the school this week, followed by the Pennsylvania State Police and federal Department of Homeland Security, representatives of which gave the final security approval late Thursday.

Earlier in the day, a bipartisan group of local lawmakers, led by Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D., Pa.) of Delaware County, wrote to the Federal Emergency Management Agency asking for approval of the site as a federal emergency station. Joining Scanlon were Pennsylvania Democrats Sen. Bob Casey, Rep. Dwight Evans, and Rep. Madeleine Dean and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, and Republicans Sen. Pat Toomey and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick.

Based on the observed progression of COVID-19, we expect that hospitals in our region will require significant assistance from a Federal Medical Station in order to provide high quality care to our constituents, the group wrote to FEMA.

The Delaware County campus, shuttered after an Inquirer investigation exposed a pattern of abuse at the once-prestigious reform academy, could be used as a medical center to host noncritical patients and free up space at medical facilities swamped by coronavirus cases, according to Scanlons office.

It may be used, for example, for patients who dont have critical needs but are at critical care hospitals, or those who are stable but too ill to be discharged.

 READ MORE: Demand for ICU beds will greatly outstrip availability if coronavirus hits Pa. hard

Christopher Spriggs, Glen Mills acting executive director, said in a statement Thursday that the school was eager to help the efforts, and committed to host the facility for as long as its needed.

We have a campus that is being underutilized and want to step up and be a resource for the community as well as partner to the broader region, Spriggs said.

The school has already been repurposed as a hub for volunteers to distribute supplies, coordinate communication and provide a place for first responders who have been exposed to the virus.
Its Day 17 of Michigans coronavirus crisis, and the number of cases is increasing at a steep pace.

Meanwhile, businesses are trying to interpret Gov. Gretchen Whitmers stay-at-home order; hospitals are looking at capacity issues, and Congress is trying to pass a massive economic stimulus package.

One positive note on Wednesday: It was a beautiful spring day that allowed people to spend time outdoors, one of the few permitted activities right now outside the home.

Below is a look at the most recent developments related to the crisis.

Coronavirus cases in Michigan have another big one-day increase. The total number of cases now stand at 2,856, up from 2,295 on Wednesday. There have been 60 deaths.

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What Michigans coronavirus numbers tell us and what they dont. Theres still much we dont know about coronavirus COVID-19 in Michigan. The states daily update on the number of cases and deaths provides some details, but its a picture with many, many gaps.

Third law-enforcement death attributed to coronavirus. A 63-year-old Wayne County sheriffs commander has died after testing positive for COVID-19, raising the total number of known Michigan law enforcement deaths attributed to the coronavirus to three. All three victims worked in Detroit or Wayne County.

Dont fall for coronavirus stimulus scams, state says. Scammers are already trying to profit off of people set to receive one-time federal stimulus checks during the COVID-19 pandemic, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said Thursday.

Whitmer seeks disaster declaration for Michigan. Whitmer has requested a major disaster declaration from President Donald Trumps administration, she announced during a Thursday press conference

How Michigans stay-at-home order compares to other states. In all, 17 states have issued statewide stay-at-home orders or advisories: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Another 11 states have local stay-at-home orders in populous counties or communities.

Coronavirus patients being shifted to other hospitals around the state. Southeast Michigan hospitals overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients will begin shifting patients to other hospitals around the state, Chief Medical Executive Dr. Joneigh Khaldun said Thursday.

Michigan reports staggering increase in unemployment claims. Michigan had 129,298 new unemployment claims filed for the week ending March 21, a staggering increase from the 5,338 filed the week before and a sign of how hard the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the states economy.

17 Jackson police officers self-quarantine after potential exposure. A total of 17 law enforcement employees in Jackson County have self-quarantined after potential exposure to the novel coronavirus. The Jackson County Sheriffs Office has two employees in self-quarantine and Blackman-Leoni Department of Public Safety has 15, officials said.

Senate passes massive stimulus bill. The Senate late Wednesday passed an unparalleled $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems engulfed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Whitmer eases limits on prescription orders. Whitmer has issued an order to ease restrictions on prescription refills and also allows pharmacists to dispense coronavirus COVID-19 treatments according to government protocols.

7 prisoners diagnosed with coronavirus. Since Monday, March 23, the number of Michigan prison inmates confirmed to have the coronavirus has increased from one to seven, the Michigan Department of Corrections says.

Meijer installs sneeze-guards at checkout lines. Meijer has announced plans to install sneeze guards at all checkout lanes to offer more protection for both store staff and customers because of the coronavirus outbreak. The guards -- essentially plexiglass shields that go between customers and cashiers -- will be installed at the companys 248 Midwest stores beginning next week.

Michigan hospitals eye capacity issues. Capacity is something hospitals are considering as they prepare to treat patients with respiratory issues caused by COVID-19.

Michigan gun sales spike. While the gun shops across Michigan fell silent Tuesday following Gov. Gretchen Whitmers stay-at-home order that closed non-essential businesses through April 13, they were bustling last week.

Pure Michigan offers virtual travel. With all of Michigan under executive order to stay safe, stay home to quell the spread of COVID-19, Pure Michigan is now offering creative ways to travel the state. The new #VirtualPureMichigan campaign aims to bring Michigan travel experiences directly into peoples homes by way of virtual tours, live streams, web cams and other interactive technology.

Michigan employers want to comply with stay-at-home order but need clarity. On Monday, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ordered Michigan residents and business to suspend activities not necessary to sustain or protect life. The order has since created uncertainty among workers and businesses due to a broad set of exemptions that allow critical businesses to remain open and essential employees to report to work.

Michigan system for filing unemployment claims is overwhelmed. With tens of thousands of people laid off in the past two weeks because of the coronavirus outbreak, a system that normally handles 5,000 claims a week has been overwhelmed, with phone lines jammed and the website freezing up.

West Michigan businesses hustle to produce medical supplies. As the global health emergency deepens, supply chains for personal protective equipment have dried up, leaving hospitals critically short of the materials healthcare workers need to safely treat the growing number of coronavirus patients. Now, businesses from across the region are stepping up to meet that demand.

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Is Michigan really social distancing? Phone data helps provide an answer. Michigan received a top score in social distancing from a project that is using phone GPS data to track mobility amid calls for isolation to slow the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.

Michigan attorney general asks local police to handle violations of stay-at-home order. The Michigan Attorney General is asking workers who believe their employer is violating the governors stay home order to contact local law enforcement instead of their office. The offices consumer complaint hotline was quickly overwhelmed Tuesday with calls from employers and employees confused about whether they are deemed essential and allowed to continue operating as usual.

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Read all of MLives coverage on the coronavirus at mlive.com/coronavirus.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

CORONAVIRUS PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.
KV Navya By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: After much confusion, e-commerce companies delivering essentials can resume their operations from Friday as the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, Edappadi K Palaniswamy and top police officials clarified that they are allowed to work. However, many of the delivery staff are very hesitant to join work for various reasons.

Speaking to The New Indian Express, delivery people said they are scared that the police would beat them as numerous such videos are doing the rounds on the internet. Besides, they are also scared of contracting the virus since a lot of people are involved in production and delivery and they have to go to areas where quarantine notices are stuck by the city corporation.

"Though we received a nod from the police and we have purchased protective gear for the delivery personnel, a lot of them are hesitant to join. As a reason, we will first begin operations in North and Central Chennai. We will be able to expand it to other areas only after more people join for delivery," a spokesperson from Dunzo told Express.

As of the last update from e-commerce companies on Thursday afternoon on Twitter, Grofers and Big Basket mentioned that they are working with the local authorities for permissions and will begin operations soon. However, their delivery personnel too said they may not return to work.

"One of my friends in Telangana who also delivers essentials for an e-commerce site was bashed up on Wednesday by the police. It is so scary to even step outdoors as this can happen to us. In my area at Adambakkam, I have seen a police hitting a watercan delivery man. If he can be hit, anyone can be hit," said K Ravi, one of the delivery personnel.

Another delivery boy at Purasawakkam, P Kannan, said, "Ever since there has been a positive case from the location, we have been very scared here. For deliveries, we have to go to different areas and I have decided to forgo my salary for my life. Though the firms promise that everyone will be wearing safety gear, we are scared. At least 30 people I know have also decided to stay at home."

Speaking to Express, Chennai city police commissioner A K Viswanathan, clarified that there is no restriction on delivery agents of e-commerce platforms continuing their services. He said, "Delivery agents of e-commerce platforms are not restrained and this order has been clearly told to all the police personnel. We have received a few incidents of police not allowing the agents to ply on roads and that has been addressed. Hereafter, there won't be any restriction imposed on them."
For the fourth time in a fortnight, Chancellor Rishi Sunak has unveiled a virus bailout for the British economy.

The recipients of his largesse will be the 3.7million self-unemployed, and Sunak acknowledged that the cost could be tens of billions of pounds.

He left little doubt the bill will have to be paid by all taxpayers. Meanwhile, the self-employed can expect to see their tax advantages greatly eroded. Yet these are desperate times.

The Chancellor had qualms about his latest move, but pressure from small business lobby groups, the property and music sectors, as well as the trades unions and politicians on both sides of the House required him to take decisive action

The measures designed to avoid mass unemployment, hardship and bankruptcies are on a scale never attempted before by any British government, Tory or Labour.

It signals an abrupt change in the way the UK runs its economy.

In a matter of weeks Britain has moved from the traditional values of fiscal discipline and monetary prudence to a regime of Big State spending and easy credit.

The sheer dimensions of state support offered underline the seriousness of the life-and-death public health challenge we face as well as the gravity of the economic fallout.

The Chancellor had qualms about his latest move, but pressure from small business lobby groups, the property and music sectors, as well as the trades unions and politicians on both sides of the House required him to take decisive action.

Britain has gone further than the rest of the Group of Seven richest countries to rig a safety net under commerce and business during the period Britain is in lockdown. The theory is that these steps will ease the economy gradually out of hibernation and back to life. A woman is pictured above wearing a face mask in London

Crucially, this rescue package has the fingerprints of No10 all over it.

The traditional role of the Treasury as the proud guardian of fiscal probity, Britains credit rating overseas and the value of the pound on the foreign exchange market has been swiped away as easily as a credit card transaction.

Supporting the self-employed is infinitely more complicated than guaranteeing 80 per cent of the wages of employees in the PAYE system, as Sunak did last week.

Self-employment and freelance income are less certain than a salary. But Sunak has done his best to offer the self-employed parity with their PAYE colleagues.

If their paperwork is in order, they will receive 80 per cent of average income based on three years of tax returns, capped at 2,500 a month.

The money will be paid out in June directly into bank accounts the tax authorities already have on record.

How freelance workers will support themselves before then is not clear. If claimants dont have full records, then the payouts will be on the basis of last years declared income.

Anyone earning over 50,000 a year will be ineligible for a grant. Life for the self-employed may never be the same.

At the moment, they pay far less national insurance than those in full-time work.

They are also able to charge almost all working expenses from utility bills, to equipment, specialist clothing and transport against tax, reducing liability considerably.

When the crisis is over and the economy starts to bounce Sunak will revisit these concessions.

The sheer dimensions of state support offered underline the seriousness of the life-and-death public health challenge we face as well as the gravity of the economic fallout. Am ambulance is pictured outside St Thomas' Hospital in London

Those self-employed who lobbied hardest for assistance may find that, in years to come, they must make much higher contributions to the Exchequer in the name of parity with PAYE counterparts.

Britain has gone further than the rest of the Group of Seven richest countries to rig a safety net under commerce and business during the period Britain is in lockdown.

The theory is that these steps will ease the economy gradually out of hibernation and back to life.

But the Johnson government has shown a proclivity to intervention and subsidy that in different circumstances might be described as socialism.

Capitalism red in tooth and claw has been put on hold, and the UK has moved back to the kind of Big State last seen under Labour of the Sixties and Seventies.

Restoring Britains entrepreneurial spirit will be a gargantuan task.
The US on Wednesday said it was in contact with the Indian government to help find accommodation for American citizens stranded in the country because of the Covid-19 lockdown till the time it can arrange flights to evacuate them.

The Indian government imposed a 21-day lockdown from Tuesday midnight to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The exact number of stranded Americans could not be ascertained, but it is believed to be in hundreds. The US Mission to India continues to work with @StateDept & airline companies to arrange flights from India to the US for US citizens. Once flights are arranged, we will work with the GoI to arrange to the greatest extent possible safe passage to airports for US citizens, ambassador Kenneth Juster tweeted.

In a separate tweet, the US embassy said, We are in contact with the Indian government to emphasize the need for hotels to continue to lodge US citizens during the nationwide curfew.

The US embassy said daily updates will be provided about its repatriation efforts through the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) application and asked US citizens to enrol online for the programme.

On Tuesday, French officials said they were working with the Indian government to arrange flights to evacuate about 1,000 French travellers.
The Executive Director of the World Health Organisation's Health Emergencies Programme, Dr Mike Ryan has said that the new criteria for testing introduced in Ireland on Wednesday are in keeping with the WHOs best practice guidelines.

The former trauma surgeon and epidemiologist specialising in infectious disease and public health told RTE radios Sean O'Rourke show that there needs to be rapid testing of suspect cases and that they are processed quickly to take the heat out of the epidemic.

Dr Ryan cautioned that there tends to be a slow down of cases before the peak.

Thats when we have to double down and become more aggressive.

"Countries that have implemented slow down or lock down measures have seen the number of contact cases dropping, as has happened in Ireland. Such measures are vital to save lives," he said.

Dr Ryan also warned that if we have to live with the virus until there is a vaccine, we cant lurch from lock down to lock down.

"Less contact means less spread of the virus," he said.

One of the key factors in fighting the spread of the virus was how best to use finite resources, he explained. Its about using what you have in a more effective way.

Testing kits and personal protective equipment (PPE) have to be used at the highest levels of effectiveness. Extending the lifespan of PPE can be done, he acknowledged, but it needs to be done very carefully.

"A strong public health service and a health service with the capacity to cope with a surge were vital," he said.

At present most health services had very little capacity to expand when things go wrong, he said.

Dr Ryan warned that the world needed to fight the virus together at the same time. We are only as strong as the weakest link. None of us are safe until all of us are safe.

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The coronavirus is a global crisis, but it does not raise the same issues and probably will not have the same repercussions in every the region. The Middle East, for instance, has a significant advantage facing this pandemic: The median age of its population is 26 (compared to 42 in Europe), and while Covid-19 doesnt spare the young, the elderly are much more vulnerable. But it is the only bright spot in a rather dark picture.

The Middle East is not really prepared to face this epidemic, which is a ticking time-bomb for the region where health infrastructure is most often deficient. Also, two humanitarian disasters are already underway, in Syria and Yemen, where millions of refugees live in camps. Fierce political tensions complicate, even more so than elsewhere, the indispensable cooperation between states to weather the storm. The new coronavirus epidemic is a crisis that adds to the other crises without eliminating them. Moreover stability of most countries in the region, not to say their survival, is at risk. And for good reason, the crisis hits where it hurts the most: the shortcomings and incompetence of states which most often lack economic means, administrative agencies or scientific skills to face such a challenge.

Health facilities in the region are not prepared to cope with a large influx of patients coming in at the same time because of an infection, said Fadi el-Jardali, health policy professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB). "The countries of the region are either at war (Syria, Yemen), out of breath (Iraq, Jordan, Egypt), bankrupt (Lebanon, Iran), or relying on increasingly fragile economic models (the petro-monarchies of the Gulf)."

El-Jardali noted that in addition to the fragility of these states, transparency is lacking and people distrust their leaders in most cases. "This only complicates the fight against the virus spread. It is impossible to trust the data provided by the authorities, which treat the dead as mere numbers. How could an effective screening be carried out under such extremely precarious conditions? "





Denial and Concealment

Ironically, Iran, the country at the heart of most controversies in the region, is the worst-hit by the coronavirus in the Middle East, with a death toll rising to 2077 and 27,017 infections in total on March 25. The US sanctions have clearly not helped Irans authorities cope with the crisis, as the country lacks medical equipment. But Iran's lies and attempts to hide all signals of weakness are the main cause of the viruss spread and leads many experts to doubt the real number of deaths announced. With such denial and concealment, several countries in the region have followed suit.

For example, Syria admitted to its first coronavirus case on March 22; after the regime had long denied the presence of the virus in the country, against all logic. On March 23, it announced the closure of its borders with Lebanon. After nine years of a war that killed hundreds of thousands and ruined the economy, the Syrian regime, crippled by international sanctions, isnt equipped to contain the epidemic. What can be said then about Idleb Governorate, the last region still in the hands of the rebels and Jihadists and where the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century is unfolding according to the UN?

Not to be outdone, Egypt has initially turned a blind eye to the virus s spread, resorting to lies and repression, while several tourists who visited the country have tested positive upon their return home. With 100 million inhabitants, a very high population density and weak infrastructure, the Egyptian authorities could be quickly overtaken by the epidemic, while the official figures are set at 327 cases and 14 deaths. The authorities have decided to close schools and universities, places of worship, museums and archaeological sites and airports, as well as a night-time closure of cafes, restaurants and discos until March 31.





Conflicts in the Background

Gulf countries seem to be better armed to respond to the epidemic. In general, the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have a well-developed health system compared to the rest of the Arab world, said Salman Rawaf, professor of public health at Imperial College London. Riyadh reported on March 25 its second coronavirus death and a total of 900 registered cases, the highest in the Gulf. But the petro-monarchies will be hurt most economically with the collapse of oil prices to $25 per barrel which would incur losses in tens of billions of dollars for these oil-producing countries. The Gulf countries will be forced to tap into their reserves and may even have to accelerate their economic transition model. This would mean revising the social pact on which these countries are founded, a move that may ultimately cause unrest.

Furthermore, the economic crisis in the Gulf countries would affect the whole region as millions of expatriates from Middle East countries work there. With a "cushion of protection", the GCC countries have an advantage over the other countries in facing the crisis. Faced with plummeting oil prices, Iraq, for example, may be unable to secure the cost of its public administration because of the shortfall.

The coronavirus epidemic seems to have pushed the region's conflicts to the background as countries are too busy facing this new challenge. But one cant exclude the likelihood that some parties would benefit from the situation to restart hostilities, as evidenced by the regular strikes against US forces in Iraq, attributed to pro-Iranian Shiite militias.

With several Gulf countries, including the United Arab Emirates, providing Iran with medical supplies can Covid-19 help ease tensions in the region? This will be one of the main challenges posed by this crisis, especially for the Palestinians. Gaza, turned into an open-air prison, would particularly need the help of its enemy Israel, probably the most equipped country in the region to weather this storm.





(This article was originally published in French on the 24th of March)








OLYMPIA, Wash., March 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Gov. Jay Inslee signed into law ESSHB 2528, legislation acknowledging the essential role Washington state's forestry industry and working forests play in removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and affirming it is in the public's interest to support all aspects of a fully integrated forest sector in the state.

The legislation formally establishes a state policy recognizing and supporting the complete forest products sector as a climate solution, which includes landowners, mills, bioenergy, pulp and paper, harvesting and transportation infrastructure necessary to continue sustainable forestry, production and transportation of the state's wood products.

Leaders of the Washington Forest Protection Association (WFPA) and the American Forest Resource Council (AFRC) say the new law represents an important step toward ensuring a robust forestry industry while promoting sustainability.

"This legislation recognizes the importance of trees, wood and paper products in absorbing and storing carbon," said Mark Doumit, WFPA Executive Director. "Recognition that the forest and wood products sector, including landowners, mills, bioenergy, pulp and paper, and the related harvesting and transportation infrastructure is part of our state's natural climate solution, also supports rural communities and jobs."

Once enacted into law, state agencies would recognize and support efforts by the timber industry to sequester carbon through reforestation and transference to long-lived wood products. The legislation also encourages landowners to grow more trees that promote air quality and sequester carbon from the atmosphere by promoting investments in sustainable forestry and wood production.

"We thank Gov. Inslee for approving this legislation, and we appreciate the overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the Legislature for recognizing our entire industry is essential to state climate solutions," said AFRC President Travis Joseph. "The state understands the enormous potential for sustainable and renewable Washington-grown and manufactured wood products, which not only store carbon for generations, but support thousands of family-wage jobs as well."

Washington private forests and wood products sector sequesters 12% of the state's carbon emissions, and working forests play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gases. Sustainably managed forests provide a renewable timber supply of wood-based goods that retain the stored carbon throughout the life of the wood product, making the forestry industry one of the most effective and natural ways to sequester carbon.

The bill will go into effect 90 days after March 12th, when the session ended.

About the Washington Forest Protection Association

The Washington Forest Protection Association (WFPA) represents private forest landowners growing and harvesting trees on about 4 million acres in Washington State. Members of the 110-year-old association are large and small companies, individuals and families who practice sustainable forestry in Washington's private forests. For more information, go to wfpa.org.

About the American Forest Resource Council

The American Forest Resource Council (AFRC) is a regional trade association whose mission is to promote the responsible management of our public forestlands through active management. AFRC members include manufacturers, producers, forestland owners and other professionals who work within the forest products industry. Learn more at amforest.org.

SOURCE Washington Forest Protection Association

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RIO DE JANEIRO, March 26 (Reuters) - Brazilian iron ore miner Vale SA said on Thursday it planned to install more than 80 thermal cameras in select locations around the country, enlisting digital age technology in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

Containing the fast-spreading disease marks an onerous challenge for the global mining industry, given the difficulty of employing "social distancing" measures in confined spaces.

Vale said in an emailed statement it had earmarked 7.5 million reais ($1.5 million) for the thermal cameras, which will be imported from Sweden and China and begin arriving at the end of March.

The cameras will scan the body temperature of all people entering buildings or other facilities, such as mines and ports, and facilitate barring entry to those with elevated temperatures in a bid to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Thermal cameras for body temperature scanning are already used in a number of international airports. "Employers or visitors that have (a high temperature) won't be allowed to enter and will be approached by an appropriately trained Vale professional, who will offer information about the sickness and send them home or to a healthcare facility," Vale said.

The company reported the first two cases of coronavirus among its employees last week.

Among other miners, Barrick Gold Corp checks the temperatures of every mine visitor while Polyus , Russia's largest gold producer, is handing out masks at office entrances. In a bid to combat the coronavirus, Vale has temporarily stopped activity at a distribution center in Malaysia and has slowed activity at its mine in Voisey's Bay, Canada.

(Reporting by Marta Nogueira Writing by Gram Slattery; Editing by Christian Plumb and Tom Brown)
UNION CITY, Calif., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- SW, a leader in single-use glove manufacturing, R&D, and hand health technologies, recommends bracing for a global glove shortage amid the current coronavirus pandemic. As the global demand for single-use gloves increases, and personnel restrictions have decreased factory production, there will be an inevitable shortage of nitrile and latex gloves. To address this, SW recommends that we immediately begin to reserve nitrile and latex gloves for frontline mission-critical workers and offer thermoplastic extruded (TPE) and vinyl gloves as alternatives to the general population.

"This pandemic has placed a strain on many industries and many people. At SW, we plan to focus on support of the healthcare industry and first responders to ensure their safety. We feel that, at this time, only if we work together, manage our critical resources, attend to the welfare of others, and maintain a larger global perspective, will we be able to better manage this crisis," stated Belle Chou, President, SW.

The worldwide impact of the COVID-19 outbreak has placed increased demand on personal protective equipment (PPE). Many news reports have focused on N95 respiratory facemask shortages, but other PPE sectors have been impacted as well. Several factors are contributing to an eventual glove shortage that needs to be addressed.

Many PPE sectors, such as coveralls and facemasks, can increase production with relative ease, in a short period of time, as they require minor capital investments and have few regulatory requirements. In contrast, single-use gloves require significant capital investment and EPA regulatory approvals to increase production. It can take 4 to 6 months to add a new production line and a minimum $2 million investment. Factories seeking to increase their capacity also require access to more raw materials and skilled workers who may be constrained due to coronavirus restrictions.

Adding to this, demand has more than doubled at a time of low worldwide production. The beginning of the coronavirus outbreak coincided with the Chinese Lunar New Year and many factories were closed. China accounts for 10% of the global supply of single-use nitrile and latex gloves. As the Chinese government extended the Lunar New Year holiday as a result of the virus outbreak, many factories were delayed by almost two months in ramping up their production. Only now have most Chinese factories resumed full capacity production and relatively few could add additional capacity to meet this new demand at a time when they are filling months of backorders.

On March 16, Malaysia announced a Movement Control Order (MCO) to address the coronavirus pandemic. This country-wide partial lock-down stopped production for a short time, but now essential factories can operate with only 50% of their workforce if there are no COVID-19 infections. As Malaysia manufactures between 60% and 65% of global single-use nitrile and latex gloves, this will immediately place additional strains on supply. The MCO has placed also requirements on factories to ensure their employee safety through health checks and environmental sanitation. And, since packaging manufacturing is not considered essential production, these elements must be imported to fulfill orders. These new requirements have added to Malaysian operating costs and strained their ability to produce products in an economically feasible manner. This has already resulted in increased glove costs.

More recently, Thailand, which manufactures 18% of the world's glove supply, announced a month-long state of emergency. It is too soon to fully understand the implications of how this will affect supply, but it is expected to have negative impacts.

The ripple effect of these factors, at a time of increased demand, has set a path towards a global shortage of single-use gloves. It is essential that we start to build awareness and encourage those in non-critical care environments, to help manage the available supply of single-use nitrile and latex gloves the same way they have for N95 masks. We are asking those who are not in frontline care situations to please use plastic and vinyl gloves. They are ideal for most, less demanding, personal protection situations and production can better meet demand. And, exam grade versions are also available for use in lower risk healthcare environments.

About SW

Through its global offices, SW specializes in the manufacturing, R&D, and implementation of hand health technologies to provide premium hand protection products that enhance worker performance. SW brings a different approach to the category. An approach that involves applying industry insight and an investment in manufacturing innovation to find better ways to advance worker safety, improve hand health, and increase job performance. It is a difference you can feel.

For more information on SW, call +1 510.429.8692 or visit www.SWSafety.com.

Media Contacts

+1 510.429.8692

[email protected]

SOURCE SW

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There are many problems associated with COVID-19, but one major issue caused by the global pandemic is its virtual destruction of the travel industry.

An AirBnB host offers his place in Ha Noi for long term rental.  From the group Facebook

Tourists simply stopped coming, and now Viet Nam has completely pulled the plug on all international arrivals, many small businesses are left counting the cost. None more so than the short-term house share industries, like Airbnb.

In 2019, the short-term rental industry catering for tourists experienced a major boom in Viet Nam since the concept came into play three years ago.

A survey by Grant Thornton, one of the worlds leading independent assurance, tax and advisory firms, showed that in 2019 Airbnb grew impressively with 30,000 additional accommodations sprouting up in Viet Nam.

In the first few months of this year, as COVID-19 takes a firm hold around the world, the industry has nose-dived.

On March 18 tourist visas were suspended then on March 21 all visitors, barring diplomats and those in certain positions, were told they could no longer come to Viet Nam.

This has hit Nguyen Kim Oanh particularly hard.

She has a five-storey building Ngoc Ha Street, near the Presidential Palace, where she offers five rooms on a short-term rental basis.

Normally, due to its ideal locations, her rooms are always occupied and Oanh has to tell potential customers she is fully booked. Not anymore.

Now, she tells Viet Nam News: "Tourists have cancelled all reservations because they could not get a visa and many are also afraid of travelling.

She has not had a single guest in the past week. And more than 80 per cent of her guests due to arrive in the next two months have cancelled.

Oanh has also had to take her own steps, despite the financial implications, refusing to take new bookings to avoid the potential spreading of the virus.

They dont want to be at risk of transferring the virus from an unknown source, she said.

I dont think I will be able to use my house for Airbnb for the next two to three months.

Oanh is not alone. In a community group of more than 35,000 local Facebook users running Airbnb services, many share the same problem.

According to data, the occupancy rates of short term house-sharing still remained about nearly 70 per cent in February but demand has plummeted this month.

Airbnb allowed all guests who booked rooms from March to April 14, to cancel their booking free of charge.

Brian Chesky, Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb when announcing the new policy said they knew many hosts depended on revenue from Airbnb with around half relying on the income to pay their mortgages.

He did say the company was working on a number of new ideas in an attempt to support hosts during these troubled times.

However, until now there has not been any further announcement from the company.

Longer rent is an alternative solution

So, instead of a short-term rent, some local Airbnb hosts are looking for longer contracts to find more stable revenue.

This is something being considered by Oanh.

She said: In February, a company asked to rent a room, albeit at a much lower rate than if I was to offer the room on a short-term deal.

Although I would lose at least VND15 million(US$650) a month, I accepted their booking.

A deposit has been paid, but Oanh is still concerned.

The new tenant will move in next month, she said.

I really hope that they dont change their minds. Other landlords I know have had cancellations after deposits have been paid.

Nguyen Thi Toan, owner of a house in Yen Phu Street has a similar story to tell.

After Tet, she reduced prices by a third, but still, tenants have had second thoughts about staying in her rooms.

Toan told Viet Nam News: I wish I would have eased the house for the longer term. If I agree a-year-long contract I would not be facing the losses I am now.

From now on she is only looking for longer term deals.

Dinh Gia Huy told wrote on Facebook: There is no way to keep calm. If you change the renting type now, it is difficult to run short-term renting when the market is back.

But Huy also shares he will find other solution if the pandemic continues.

Some of those on the group are clearly struggling, resorting to selling off home appliances to make ends meet.

Until the threat lifts, many will continue to suffer, as tourists have no choice, but to stay away.  VNS
In the midst of the uncertainty and fear of a modern-day plague, Megan and Ben Capili arent lending helping hands, given the constraints on social contact.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the midst of the uncertainty and fear of a modern-day plague, Megan and Ben Capili arent lending helping hands, given the constraints on social contact.

They are, however, lending their ears and offering advice to people finding it challenging to manage the emotional and psychological impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic that looms over daily life.

The married couple are registered therapists, offering free phone counselling evenings and weekends through their private practice Liminal Space Therapy.

Need to talk to someone? Click to Expand Liminal Space Therapy offers free, brief phone counselling from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, and anytime weekends. Call 204-799-3806 or 204-290-5165. Sara Riel Inc.s Seneca Services has a 24-hour peer-support line at 204-942-9276 or 204-231-0217. The Anxiety Disorders Association of Manitoba has a support line from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekends. Leave your name, phone number or email address and someone will contact you. You can also email adam@adam.mb.ca. Klinic Community Healths Crisis Line is open 24 hours at 204-786-8686 or 1-888-322-3019.

"Working in health care in the largest hospital in the province, there is a tension everywhere you go," says Ben Capili, also a family therapist specializing in child and adolescent health at Health Sciences Centre. "Health-care workers are stressed; they dont know what to expect."

That got him thinking about how the public might feel, and that many may need someone to listen to their concerns and fears. More pointedly, many people may just need someone to connect with in this new world of imposed isolation.

"We wanted to do the right thing and show compassion," he says about the decision to offer the free service.

Although social distancing and quarantines may be necessary to stem the spread of COVID-19, the increased isolation also increases the risk of developing mental-health problems, experts say.

"We know that social connection is one of the most important things for mental health," says Marion Cooper, executive director of the Canadian Mental Health Association, Manitoba chapter.

"Probably above anything else, its our connections with one another that are our most protective."

While everyone is at risk of increased mental-health challenges in the current context, many care providers are worried about people with existing mental illness.

"Everybody is an individual, so its hard to generalize, but we know there is increased vulnerability for an individual struggling with a mental illness," Cooper says.

Ben and Megan Capili, pictured with daughter Azazel, are lending their ears and offering advice to people finding it challenging to manage the emotional and psychological impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic that looms over daily life. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press)

She further notes individuals with depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses already may face social stigma that tends to make them feel isolated.

Now that social-distancing measures are often eliminating regular social connections, such as group therapy, this segment of the population may feel even more alone.

"Im really worried about people," says Tara Snider, executive director of Sara Riel Inc., which works with more than 600 clients with mental illness or addiction.

The organization has been racing to restructure services, moving one-on-one counselling and group therapy to online, virtual sessions. As well, the service has set up a 24-hour hotline for anyone feeling the need for psychological and emotional support.

"Im afraid of people sitting at home without any interaction," she says. "A symptom of mental illness is isolation; so much of what we do as an organization is visiting people."

Im afraid of people sitting at home without any interaction. A symptom of mental illness is isolation; so much of what we do as an organization is visiting people.  Tara Snider, executive director of Sara Riel Inc.

Social-distancing measures now make keeping vulnerable populations connected more challenging. Especially at risk are those surviving on Employment and Income Assistance, who often do not have a phone or internet connection to reach out for help.

"The way to get well is through connection with others, so when youre isolated, your mental health has a very significant chance of deteriorating," Snider says.

Yet its not just people with existing mental-health challenges at risk of feeling intense distress from the onslaught of frightening news and staying at home alone or with close family.

Megan Capili, who also works part time as a therapist at Riverview Health Centres neurology rehabilitation unit, notes many studies demonstrate the negative effects of loneliness and isolation. That includes research suggesting being alone for prolonged periods is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

"Isolation is linked to depression, poor sleep, cognitive decline and can even impair our immunity," she says.

Megan Capili, who also works part time as a therapist at Riverview Health Centres neurology rehabilitation unit, notes many studies demonstrate the negative effects of loneliness and isolation. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press)

Like others in the mental-health field, she says individuals must be proactive in preparing for what could be months of social distancing and potentially weeks of being quarantined, or even a widespread lockdown.

One means to combat the impacts of being at home all the time is to create a new routine. Find activities, from spring cleaning to hobbies, to help fill the day. Practise self-care, she adds.

"Its important to take part in soothing and pleasing activities."

Going outside is also important. Cooper says social distancing does not mean entirely isolating yourself. You can still go for a walk and talk to your neighbours so long as you keep a two-metre distance.

"Unless youve been quarantined, there are ways to have social distance without being isolated."

Rather than having anxiety about whats out of your control, just accept it. Thats called radical acceptance, where we say, OK, this is whats happening, and Im OK with it.  Megan Capili

Connecting virtually is also important. Snider says its somewhat ironic that social media  once considered a cause of social isolation  may now be a linchpin to stay connected.

"But thats to a point," she says. "This is also a time for people to actually hear a voice on the other end of the line."

Snider urges us to think about the people in our lives who might be more isolated, including aging family members who are more likely to be homebound due to their higher risk of developing severe symptoms.

Although staying connected is vital, so too is keeping a positive headspace, Megan Capili says.

"Rather than having anxiety about whats out of your control, just accept it," she says. "Thats called radical acceptance, where we say, OK, this is whats happening, and Im OK with it."

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Then act on what you can control, she says, taking constructive steps to improve life in ways you can.

Of course even being cooped up with family  while not lonely  has its challenges, too. Irritability, along with other negative emotions, is likely to come up more frequently as the days and weeks pass. As such, Capili suggests not focusing on suppressing these negative thoughts.

That doesnt mean acting on them, she adds.

"Instead its like riding these emotions like a wave," she says. "Youre surfing the feeling, so the wave comes and then sinks into the sand and quickly disappears."

In other words, hold on and take a deep breath; those negative emotions will soon pass.

Just like the pandemic will eventually, too.
Three more persons have tested positive for the highly contagious virus that causes the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in Noida, pushing the total number of cases in the district to 14 by Thursday morning. The three new cases have been linked back to the Noida firm that was visited by a British national earlier this month.

The British national was in Noida from 15-19 March before heading back home in the UK, a Noida administration official said, adding that the man may have been a carrier of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen.

Healthcare officials have so far identified 19 people who came in contact with the foreign national and are being tested. Two executives of the Noida fire safety firm appear to have contracted the infection from the foreigner at work and spread it at home, an official said.

Of the three new cases confirmed on Thursday is a 19-year-old.

Her father works at this firm in Sector 135. But he did not have any symptoms. His wife, 47, who is believed to have contracted the infection from him, however, fell ill. The couple was tested and found to be infected with the SARS CoV-2 pathogen on March 24. The daughter was also tested with them; her results, however, came today.

The family has been admitted to the Government Institute of Medical Sciences (GIMS) in Greater Noida.

A health department official said a second couple from Sector 150 has also tested positive for the virus after the husband came in contact with the same Briton at work. The 39-year-old man and his wife, 33, live in an apartment block of Noidas Sector 150.

The couple will be admitted at the Super Speciality Children Hospital in Sector 30, Noida.

The health department has sealed the Sector 150 society for two days and all the residents have been quarantined.

Officials are now getting in touch with all the residents to identify neighbours who came in contact with the couple.

The health department is going to put around 150 employees of the company visited by the British nation under home quarantine.

Officials have also sealed the Sector 135 hotel where the British national stayed during his visit. Employees of the hotel who came in contact with the British national are being put under home quarantine and the premises sanitized.

According to the officials, 19 persons had come in direct contact with the British national.

We are getting in touch with all the 150 employees attached with the firm to put them under home quarantine. We will also be sanitizing the hotel where the British national stayed. We are tracing all the people who came in contact with the British national and the identified patients from sectors 137 and 150. We will take samples of people who will be found symptomatic, said Dr Anurag Bhargava, Chief Medical Officer.

Administration officials have reached the Sector 150 society to start the sanitizing work of the premises and the building where the patients live.

We have sealed the society as per the protocol and residents have been asked to home quarantine themselves. We are trying to find out people who came in contact with the couple, said Prasoon Dwivedi, sub-divisional magistrate.

e.
China has asked Pakistan to open the border between the two countries for one day on Friday so that medical supplies to fight coronavirus pandemic could be transported into the country, according to a media report.

The Khunjerab Pass is usually opened on April 1 which marks the end of winter in that part, but due to the global outbreak of COVID-19, the border between Pakistan and China has been closed for an indefinite period.

The Chinese embassy in a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the governor of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China would like to donate a batch of medical materials to Gilgit-Baltistan, the Dawn reported.

According to the letter, the governor has donated 200,000 ordinary face masks, 2,000 N-95 face masks, five ventilators, 2,000 testing kits and 2,000 medical protective clothes mainly used by doctors and paramedics to fight with virus, which originated in China late last year.

The donation is in response to a request made by GB Chief Minister Hafeezur Rehman to the governor of Xinjiang region to combat coronavirus in the province.

Gilgit-Baltistan has high percentage of coronavirus cases in the country compared to its population, but the underdeveloped region has a negligible number of operational ventilators and remoteness has led to a severe shortage of medical equipment.

The province has reported 84 positive cases so far while the national tally has reached to 1,102 and the death toll to eight. Earlier, National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) Chairman Lt Gen Mohammad Afzal had said said Pakistan had sought to purchase medical equipment, including ventilators, but these were in short supply around the world and only China had assured that it would provide such items to Pakistan.

Under a border protocol agreement of 1985, the Khunjerab border crossing remains closed from the end of November to April. Trade and travel activities between the two countries take place through Khunjerab Pass, also known as Sust Dry Port  the only land route between China and Pakistan.

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(CNN)  "I don't normally work from my garage," Adam Mosseri said when asked what it's like to run one of the biggest social media platforms in the world from his San Francisco home.

For years, Instagram has been synonymous with travel and experiences. Its users fill their feeds with carefully filtered and cropped photos of exotic locations and colorful venues. But now, from his plywood-lined garage, Mosseri, Instagram's CEO, is telling his users to do what he's doing: stay at home.

Over the past week the company launched a dedicated "Stay at Home" tab featured prominently in the Stories section at the top of its feed. As the name suggests, the feature offers a way for users to share updates on their stay-at-home life at a time as people in vast parts of America and across the world have essentially been not to go outside except for essentials to limit the spread of the coronavirus. And it might actually help raise awareness of the need to stay in. Mosseri revealed Tuesday that the "Stay at Home" Instagram stories were so popular it almost crashed the site in the hours after it went live.

The fact that a well-intentioned new feature nearly took down the entire service is a reminder of just how many fires Instagram and Mosseri are working to put out at once amid the coronavirus outbreak. Among other pressing issues, he and his team must: keep their servers up and running while much of the world is forced to shift their lives online; try to encourage people on the platform to maintain social distancing; combating inaccurate and potentially dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus at a time when there is apparently an unprecedented amount of traffic on the site; and do all this while working outside the office.

"Having our workforce, particularly our moderators, work from home, is creating all sort of challenges that we need to work through," Mosseri said in an interview with CNN Business over Skype on Tuesday from inside the garage that is now his de facto command center.

"Just generally, the amount of output we should be able to expect on a per person basis is just going to go down," he said. "There is no way around that, which is why it is so important we get creative and make sure that we continue to make sure we keep people stay safe on the platform." Mosseri added that the company still needs to stay on top of a range of challenges like content related to child exploitation and terrorism.

For years, Instagram's parent company, Facebook, has been trying to combat the spread of misinformation on its platforms. The coronavirus presents a whole new challenge as people around the globe are desperate for just about any information.

Instagram's struggles in dealing with the anti-vaccine movement might not inspire much confidence in the company's ability to get ahead of false information about the coronavirus.

But over the past few weeks and months it has brought in new rules and features specifically for the coronavirus crisis. Some of those features  like not recommending accounts that spread medical misinformation when people search terms related to the virus (which the company says will roll out in the coming days)  are steps critics of anti-vaccine accounts have been calling for for some time.

Mosseri said the company's focus has been getting users accurate information about the virus  links to official government agencies have appeared at the top of users' Instagram feeds around the world. The company, like other social media platforms, has taken other steps to highlight information from the World Health Organization.

"I actually think search in general on platforms like ours gets way too much attention because it is not something people do that often. It is more important that people get good information when they come to the app in the first place," he said.

Like other companies, Instagram and Facebook instructed employees to work from home before it became mandatory in many states. "We need to take care of our people if we are going to be able to help address the crisis and live up to our responsibility," Mosseri said.

But new rules to tackle coronavirus misinformation and other initiatives, like banning ads for the sale of face masks (to help ensure they are available for medical workers in most need of them), require new protocols, staff training and sometimes new systems to implement, all of which is more difficult to do with staff working remotely.

As a result, Mosseri said Facebook and Instagram staff that don't normally work on moderation are volunteering to help.

Twitter and YouTube also warned that the shift to working from home and reliance on automated content moderation may lead to more mistakes.

The heightened anxiety felt by users will likely only amplify errors. For example, last Tuesday there were widespread reports of Facebook suddenly marking posts from users about everything from the coronavirus to their pets as violating the platform's rules. The problem was fixed within a few hours and Facebook said it had nothing to do with the changes in its workforce

With false claims about purported cures and preventative steps that can be take against the virus circulating online, ensuring the spread of accurate information is now literally a matter of life or death.
In late February, as it became increasingly clear that the coronavirus was going to spread widely in the U.S., Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told Congress, We would want to ensure that we work to make [COVID-19 drugs] affordable, but we cant control that price because we need the private sector to invest.

We do need the private sector to invest. But the U.S. government is investing too, and it deserves a say here, on behalf of taxpayers. Since the outbreak of SARS in 2002, the National Institutes of Health has invested nearly $700 million in coronavirus research, and the first COVID-19 package passed by Congress included another $826 million for the development of coronavirus treatments, vaccines, and tests. All told, that means the U.S. will invest at least $1.5 billion in the development of treatments and vaccines for coronaviruses. This research will then get handed off to private companies, which will finish development and patent their intellectual propertybut we dont know what they will spend. Without knowing that information, its impossible for the public to say what a fair price for them should be. A lot of evidence suggests that drug corporations could end up with a windfall, and that Americans may not see a fair return on our governments investment in the form of fair prices. We probably wont even know what the fair price is. We are hostages of our lack of information, and that makes our government a bad investor.

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Transferring research to private corporations shouldnt essentially be an open-ended blank check. The public should see some reward for its investment. We need an in-depth study of the costs of innovation to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of our current drug discovery system. That could go a long way toward bringing down drug prices and increasing access for Americansin the pandemic and beyond.

Public funding plays a huge role in drug discovery. One study found that every single drug of the 210 approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2016 started or benefited from research funded by the National Institutes of Health. The NIH invests about $41.7 billion annually in medical research, which is largely given in grants to more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and publicly funded research institutes.

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Many people think that publicly funded research is responsible for the basic research, things like identifying the disease pathways, and finding promising points of intervention, and the private market then does everything else, including the research needed to discover the drugs. But publicly funded research plays a big role in actual drug discovery. One study found a significant number of drugs discovered and patented through public funding, including 36 drugs to treat infectious disease. These also include those drugs that became many well-known and top-selling drugs like Allegra, Cialis, Humira, Botox, Lyrica, Enbrel, and Pepcid Complete. An estimated one-third of NIHs annual funding given to universities goes to clinical trials.

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But we dont know how much money private corporations need to invest to finish development to the point that a drug is available to patients. One study using industry self-reported data estimated these private costs at $2.8 billion, including failures. The most recent study estimated these costs at $985 million, and other studies have estimated as low as $314 million.

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An understanding of how great of a role the public plays in drug development can also help us demand better deals when passing the torch from the public to the private. There are many examples of companies being accused of anticompetitive practices with drugs that were at least partially developed through public funding. Take Humira, whose method of treatment and formulation were at least partly discovered through public funding. The company behind it, AbbVie, built a wall of more than 100 patents to prevent competition on Humira until 2023. As a result, prices in the U.S. have been driven higher, while in other countries prices have come down significantly since 2018, when generics became available. The maker of Namenda, an Alzheimers drug, was successfully sued for product hopping by the state of New York. Restasis, a dry-eye drug, was the subject of a scheme to transfer patents to a Native American tribe to avoid a patent challenge by claiming sovereign immunity. In each of these instances, the U.S. public has been treated unfairly in purchasing drugs that taxpayer dollars helped fund the discovery of. Its particularly galling because the profitability of large drug corporations is already almost double that of other large corporations.

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For COVID-19 drugs, it is especially important that Americans get a fair deal, but that might not happen even when we do know how much companies are spending. For example, the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen examined government funding for COVID-19 treatments and found one contract where the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority announced it would partner with a private company and pay 80 percent of the research and development and manufacturing costs. This is a substantial public investment. However, industry lobbying successfully removed language from the first COVID package that would ensure fair pricing.

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Fortunately, there are lawmakers working on this problem. For example, last July Sens. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, and Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, introduced the We PAID Act, which would require private corporations that purchase publicly funded technology through the Bayh-Dole Act to meet certain fair pricing requirements. Its an interesting idea that could be helpful in dealing with high drug prices. It also may take some time to gain enough traction to move. Fortunately, the bill includes a study to determine reasonable drug prices that can be separated from the main bill and should be passed now. This study would look at what reasonable prices should be in the U.S. when balancing things like how the costs and risks are shared and what the return on investment needs are for drug manufacturers. At the very least, we should use this type of study to look at how COVID-19 drugs are jointly developed and ultimately priced.

Right now, our lack of transparency probably means we will end up giving the drug industry whatever it wants to get COVID-19 drugs as fast as possible. But we dont need to stay in the dark. Information gathering should be a key part of how we learn from this pandemic to better prepare for the future. Hopefully, that means being armed with the information needed to be good investors with our public dollars.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
Washington

President Donald Trump's "beautiful" idea to reopen the U.S. economy by Easter Sunday and pack church pews that day was dreamed up during a conference call among business leaders desperate to get the country back up and running.

But his target date for easing coronavirus restrictions is another outstretched hand to a group he has long courted: evangelical Christians.

Cooped up at the White House and watching the stock market tumble, Trump had already been eager to ease federal guidelines aimed at halting the spread of COVID-19 when about a dozen business leaders convened a conference call on Sunday.

"There was a concern  not unanimity, but consensus  that you had to have a reopening of the economy at some point soon," said Stephen Moore, a conservative economist and informal Trump adviser. On the call, Moore said, he argued in favor of setting a specific date as a goal by which point the economy could gradually begin to be reopened.

While many wanted to see that date set even sooner than Easter, "it's something that's coming up that would be obviously a mark on someone's calendar," Moore said. "I had made this point that we should call this 'economic resurrection day.'"

On Tuesday, Trump formally endorsed the idea of an Easter goalpost during a Fox News Channel virtual town hall.

"Easter's a very special day for me. Wouldn't it be great to have all of the churches full?" Trump later told Fox. "You'll have packed churches all over our country. I think it would be a beautiful time."

The idea drew alarm from many public health experts, who warn that unless Americans continue to isolate themselves for weeks, the virus will continue to spread like wildfire across the nation, overwhelming hospitals already starved of needed supplies.

But for conservative evangelicals who remain among Trump's most ardent supporters, the president's choice of the holiest date on their faith's calendar was meaningful even as a purely aspirational goal to reboot American life.

The timeline "injected hope into an indefinite ordeal," said Johnnie Moore, an evangelical adviser to the administration. "And it was very clear in hearing him speak that not only is there an end to this ... but when we do win it, we're going to have a celebration, and that celebration will partly include gratitude to God."

Pastor Tony Suarez, executive vice president at the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said Trump's choice of an Easter target was a fresh signal of the "respect within the administration for the word of God and for Christian faith."
The European Parliaments first-ever remote vote will see MEPs taking photos of their ballots and emailing them in.

European Union representatives are expected on Thursday to approve emergency funds to cushion the blocs economic slump triggered by the coronavirus pandemic and shore up hard-hit airlines by preserving their landing slots.

It will be the European Parliaments first-ever remote vote, following the suspension of sessions at headquarters due to the risk of coronavirus transmission. Only a handful of members gathered in a Brussels plenary chamber with the rest of more than 700 MEPs scattered under lockdown across Europe.

From one day to the next, our lifestyles changed. Our streets emptied. Our doors closed. And we moved from a daily routine to the fight of our lives, the head of the EU executive, Ursula von der Leyen, told the gathering.





Wearing white, latex protective gloves, she called on the chamber to vote into law a special 37 billion euro ($40.6bn) fund to allow the 27 member states to spend more to prop up their economies.

The legislation, to be voted on in the evening, will also allow an existing natural disaster fund to support strained public health services across the EU.

The assembly is also due to greenlight the suspension of a rule requiring airlines to run most of their scheduled services or else forfeit their landing slots  a move to give carriers some breathing space during the coronavirus pandemic.

After holding two test votes earlier in the week, members of the EU legislative arm will print their ballots at home, scan or photograph their signed vote and send it from their official email address for counting.

Democracy cannot be stopped by this virus, said David Sassoli, the Italian president of the European Parliament.
The top health official in Donald Trump's administration warns that the coronavirus spread in the US is likely to return once it subsides, following trends in countries that have gone through different phases of the outbreak.

As the southern hemisphere prepares for its winter season, Dr Anthony Fauci says "it will be inevitable" for the US to prepare for a second outbreak: "Be prepared for another cycle."

He says that the potentially cyclical nature of the virus stresses the need for a vaccine to be developed and tested quickly, as well as other drugs, so that there is a "menu of drugs" available to combat the virus.

His warnings came moments after the president doubled down on resuming business as usual  saying "it's time"  despite a growing crisis with nearly 1,000 deaths and overwhelmed hospitals across the US, underlining the lack of clarity and consistency from the federal response as state and local officials ration diminishing medical supplies.

Mr Trump has suggested re-opening the country by Easter, though on Thursday he said it would begin in "sections" of the country first that are "little affected" by the virus. (There are confirmed infections in every state.)

He said: "Then there are other sections that are very heavily affected, so there's a big difference ... I would say by Easter we'll have a recommendation and maybe before Easter."

The president has routinely contradicted members of his own administration, as well as warnings from health officials across the US, as he looks to resume "normal" operations as the virus takes its toll on unemployment figures and a plummeting stock market  two markers of he attributes to his own success in office.

The president and Dr Fauci have denied there is a rift in their relationship, though Dr Fauci has expressed frustration with correcting his false claims.

At a briefing on Tuesday, Dr Fauci said the president's Easter timeline must be "flexible."

He said: "You can look at a date but you've got to be very flexible and on a literally day-by-day and week-by-week basis. You need to evaluate the feasibility of what you're trying to do."

The timeline has been criticised as a dangerous precedent, with both Democrat and Republican lawmakers urging officials to reconsider.

Recent polling also shows that a majority of Americans want more stringent quarantine efforts rather than return to work and potentially sicken millions of people.

Results of a Morning Consult and Politico survey show that 74 per cent of Americans support a national quarantine, and 40 per cent would support a "lock down" to prevent the spread of the virus.
Representative image

In an urgent move towards expanding the coronavirus diagnostics in India, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has invited quotations from manufacturers for supply of kits for the testing of COVID-19.

The move comes in the wake of the number of coronavirus cases crossing the 600 mark in the country with 13 deaths recorded so far.

According to the apex health research body, it will procure seven lakh US FDA-EUA/CE-IVD/ICMR-NIV Pune-approved RNA extraction kits.

Any manufacturer with an Indian-based supplier can submit quotations by Thursday 2.30 pm, the ICMR said.

The kits have to be supplied to the ICMR's regional facilities at Mumbai, Delhi, Dibrugarh, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bhopal.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

The ICMR has asked the kit manufacturers to quote the prices of the kits, along with the number of tests that can be performed with one kit. It has also sought to know the timeline for the supply of the seven lakh kits.

"The ICMR has estimated a tentative requirement of 7,00,000 test kits for which quotations are invited. The requirement is to ensure supply as soon as possible. Hence, please quote your maximum supply capability in the first week, along with a firm commitment for subsequent weeks," it said.

It added that it might opt for parallel contracts to more than one vendor to ensure a timely supply.
Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

New Mexico is expected to receive up to $1.25 billion for state and local governments to fight the coronavirus through a $2 trillion congressional stimulus package, U.S. Sen. Tom Udall said in a floor speech Wednesday ahead of a Senate vote on the legislation.

He called the legislation a good compromise that included changes he and fellow New Mexico Democrat Martin Heinrich backed to the original plan pushed by Senate Republicans.

The states senior senator said changes included an extra month of unemployment insurance for workers laid off by the outbreak, additional funding for small business loans, more money for health care and funding for tribal governments.

Udall cited statistics in New Mexico that saw unemployment claims rise from 800 in the week of March 9 to 11,000 last week. And now we are receiving 7,000 per day, he said.

Many workers will receive their full pay under this expansion, Udall said.

But that is where the legislation hit a late snag before the vote. Four Republican senators discovered language that indicated some workers could receive more pay while they were laid off than when they were working. They were trying to solve the problem with an amendment.

Udall touted small business relief in the bill, which he said includes loans of up to $10 million that can be forgiven and turned into grants if employees are kept on the payroll.

This relief will go through the Small Business Administration and be available to any business or nonprofit with under 500 employees, he said.

He also backed an increase of $55 billion for hospital and health care worker resources. He said the total public health investment in the bill is now $150 billion.

He said the package would establish a $150 billion relief fund for state, local and tribal governments to help cover costs of fighting this virus. That is where New Mexico could claim up to $1.25 billion, he said.

Udall said the legislation also includes provisions for tribes and urban Indian health programs that were originally excluded from the Senate bill.

The legislation will establish an $8 billion Tribal Government Relief fund to ensure Indian tribes have direct one stop access to COVID-19 resources for economic recovery and continuation of essential government services based on local needs, Udalls office said.

The agreement also contains more than $2 billion in emergency supplemental funding for Indian tribes, urban Indian health programs and Native communities.

Udall and Heinrich opposed the original bill because they claimed lack of transparency and oversight in the $500 billion relief funding for industries and large corporations.

Udall said the negotiated package has transparency and oversight provisions.
FOLLOWING heavy rains that have affected several infrastructures in most parts of the country, Tanzania Rural and Urban Roads Agency (TARURA) has assessed that more than 7bn/-is needed to construct Berega Bridge in Kilosa District, Morogoro Region.

The bridge that has been washed away connects villages in the areas with important community social services including the Berega Hospital, which of late is not easily reached because of impassable roads and damaged bridge.

Commenting on the situation, area Regional Administrative Secretary (RAS), Engineer Emmanuel Kalobelo, said there is an urgent need to construct the bridge that connects the Hospital in Magole Division, Kilosa District with several villages.

We need 7bn/-to facilitate the construction of a new bridge in the future, as soon as the funds are available, he said.

His call was perhaps after President John Magufuli issued directives on 16th March, this year, that he oversees the construction of the bridge within seven days to allow vehicles and people to pass.

He said that currently the bridge being built would enable the citizens to have access to the main road and continue with their economic and social activities.

''I came here to see the development and inspect the bridge after the instructed seven daysthis is also to satisfy myself that the construction is being completed within the allocated time.

"The bridge is now in use, especially by pedestrians and motorcycles, and there is ongoing construction to enable transit vehicles weighing not more than three to five tonnes pass by March 28, 2020, stated Eng Kalobelo.

However, he called upon TARURA officials in the region to conduct regular inspections of their bridges to avoid such challenges.

In response, Tarura Regional Manager for Morogoro, Engineer Benjamin Maziku, said that the bridge in question was built in 2013 as a temporary solution after the initial one was washed away by floods.

''In July 2017 after Tarura was launched, we decided to have a permanent bridge, though the bridge has history of being flooded, and carrying things like logs, but a permanent one of four pillars would soon be built, he said.
The number of coronavirus cases in California has surged past 3,000, and officials say the growth rate is so big that it could overwhelm hospitals in the coming days and weeks.

The stateside death toll now stands at 67, far less than the 285 deaths in New York, which has become the national epicenter of the coronavirus crisis. But officials said California needs to brace itself for far more cases and deaths.

The worst days are still ahead, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday. Weve taken actions earlier and swifter [than other cities], but no one is immune from this virus.

If that rate holds, California hospitals could see a surge in patients in one to two weeks, Dr. Mark Ghaly, the states secretary of Health and Human Services, said during a Facebook news conference.

We originally thought that it would be doubling every six to seven days; we see cases doubling every three to four days, Ghaly said. [Were] watching that trend very, very closely.

San Francisco leaders said Wednesday that it was plausible the city could face a crisis similar to that of New York City and fall short 1,500 ventilators and 5,000 hospital beds.

It is not even a question as to whether we will need more, Mayor London Breed said during an hourlong news conference.

Nicholas Jewell, a biostatistics researcher at UC Berkeley who has been tracking the pandemic, said the coronavirus is spreading rapidly throughout the U.S., at a rate quicker than or on par with countries hit the hardest.

While the state continues to struggle to gain a clear picture of the outbreak, Jewell cautioned that the expected surge in the coming weeks does not mean social distancing and shelter-in-place orders are not working.

We knew going in we will not see any impact of shelter in place for at least two to three weeks, he said. We have to be patient at this point and stay the course.

Gov. Gavin Newsom echoed that message as well, and said the state had early data indicating that the measures may be slowing the virus spread.

We know its had an impact on bending that curve and buying us time, Newsom said. Every day, that is another day that were getting more assets, more physical and human resources, prepared for a worst-case scenario.

Across the state, public health officials reported a continued increase in COVID-19 cases, including in Los Angeles County, where the county health officer on Wednesday ordered that all those who test positive for the coronavirus self-isolate, along with those in close contact with the infected.

Officials confirmed 138 new cases Wednesday in the states most populous county, for a total of more than 800. Three additional deaths brought the total in Los Angeles County to 13. Statewide, more than 3,100 of those tested have been confirmed to have infections.

Public health officials emphasized that the actual number of people infected is almost certainly higher, but an accurate count is impossible because so few tests have been given.

Newsom announced that testing in the state had been conducted on more than 66,800 people but said that its not good enough to predict an accurate picture of what is happening or meet medical needs.

So far in L.A. County, more than 6,300 people have been tested for the virus. Of those, 11% have tested positive. Officials said 160 people who tested positive have been hospitalized at some point. There are currently 44 hospitalized individuals, including four in their 30s.

Roughly 1% of those who have tested positive in the county have died. The United States mortality rate for COVID-19 is 1.5%, a rate higher than that for the flu.

Editors Note: Because of the health implications of the COVID-19 virus, this article is being made available free to all online readers. If youd like to join us in supporting the mission of local journalism, please visit napavalleyregister.com/members/join/.
In India, the poor are always an afterthought. It seems strange, given that it is a country where millions of people live in extreme poverty, but that is how things have always been. And, it wasn't any different on Tuesday night either, when the Indian government announced a nationwide lockdown for a period of 21-days to curb the spread of coronavirus.

The decision, although necessary, wasn't inclusive of many marginalised sections of the society like daily wage labourers, the homeless population, beggars, slum-dwellers, several low-income groups as well as the elderlies who live alone. Also, as we enter the lockdown phase it is becoming increasingly evident that the true challenge for such people won't be to evade the coronavirus but just to get enough food to stay alive. In fact, economists like Jean Dreze claims that the recession we are dreading in future is already here for such informal section workers.

As the privileged section of the society panicked and hoarded up for their Netflix and chill sessions at home during the lockdown, many remained blithely oblivious to the fact that thanks to their hoarding, food prices are skyrocketing. Which means most informal sector workers, who do not have any job right now and are perhaps stuck in a city where they are migrant labourers and therefore have no home, will soon not have the money to feed themselves the bare minimum required to stay alive.

State governments of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala and a few others have announced special packages and relief funds for such individuals. Today, the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman also announced a relief package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore to help the poor of the country navigate through these bad times. However, state and central government efforts alone will not be enough. Therefore, it is important, for citizens, civic bodies, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) as well as industry leaders, to come together to help the marginalised section.

So far, some NGOs and companies have shown great enterprise and tried to ease the distress of marginalised individuals during the lockdown. Listed here are few NGOs and companies which have started campaigns to gather funds for the poor, or organised volunteer services to help elderly citizens.

1. Zomato's Feeding India

The food delivery giant may not be getting as many orders online at the current moment, but they are trying to make sure that daily wage workers of India and their families don't go without food during the lockdown. Zomato has started an initiative called 'Feeding India' to collect funds to get food supplies for such workers in collaboration with various Indian NGOs. So far, they have raised Rs 6 crore.

Learn more about the campaign here: https://www.zomato.com/blog/feed-daily-wager

2. Uday Foundation

This NGO aims at providing 100000 hand wash, 100000 sanitizers, and deliver a month-long food supply to 50000 people with the funds they raise for homeless people. Their fund donation page on their website reads:

"Homeless are hardly aware of the dangers of Coronavirus and the solutions available to fight against it. The current Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak continues to spread, with growing numbers of confirmed cases in India. This makes lakhs of homeless living on the streets with lack of ability to self- quarantine, access to medical care acutely vulnerable. Uday Foundation is providing all necessary help and services to this vulnerable section of the society in the time of crisis."

Here's the link to the donation page: https://www.udayfoundation.org/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/

3. Give India

Give India is an online donation platform through which one can donate money to verified NGOs and beneficiaries. The platform has two featured mission related to coronavirus that one can donate for. The first one is for daily wage earners affected by the lockdown for which the goal is to raise Rs 1,50,00,000 and the second one is to provide hygiene kits for the poor for which the aim is to raise Rs 10,00,000.

Here are the links to the donation pages:

Link 1: https://indiafightscorona.giveindia.org/

Link 2: https://indiafightscorona.giveindia.org/prevention-kit/

4. Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action - YUVA

This NGO has been giving food to the slum dwellers and needy individuals amid coronavirus outbreak. They conducted a survey recently and identified households which are in desperate need of help -- like families of icecream walas, garland makers, waste collectors etcetera. However, their food services have been affected by the strict lockdown in Mumbai. on their Facebook page they recently posted:

"Thanks for supporting #TogetherWeCan. We've reached 688 households already. We are awaiting permission before we can do more emergency relief, given the #Maharashtra curfew announcement. We are actively speaking with the govt for this #COVID19."

Here's the link of the NGO's Facebook page for volunteer work and/or donation: https://www.facebook.com/YUVAINDIA84/

5. Goonj

Goonj is a Delhi based NGO that has started bracing for the aftermath of the pandemic and collecting donations for relief work. On the website of NGO, it says that the amount collected will be used to provide daily wage workers with essentials like 'dry ration, and personal care material.' The target is to reach out to over a million people (2 lac families) in areas well known for migration and in geographies, Goonj is already working in.

Here's the link to Goonj's donation page: https://goonj.org/support-covid-19-affected#

6. Action For Pune Development

Senior citizens about 70, who need groceries and medicines, are being helped by volunteers of Action For Pune Development. Anyone interested in volunteering can reach out to them on Facebook, or Instagram.

Here's the link: https://www.instagram.com/apdindia/

7. Samvedna Senior Care

A Delhi based Eldercare, nursing and attendant care and counselling services for senior citizens have also offered their mental health experts who can be contacted if senior citizens experience anxiety issues due to the lockdown.

here's the detail: https://twitter.com/SamvednaSeniorC/status/1242846898345480192

8. Janta Rasoi

The kitchens of Shanghai Surprise, a cloud kitchen based in DLF 3 in Gurgaon, is currently functioning as the centre of the community-led initiative Janta Rasoi which is offering food to the daily wagers who are out of work due to the lockdown. From 150 meals a day they have reached 300 meals a day and plans to grow to 3000 meals a day (their capacity to produce is maximum 3000 portions of Khichdi a day).

For donations visit: https://www.facebook.com/ShanghaiSurprise.in/
Ford Motor CEO Jim Hackett warned employees Thursday that "tougher actions" such as job cuts could be needed depending on the severity and length of the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on operations.

In a letter to employees, Hackett said the automaker's goal is "to manage through the crisis without eliminating Ford jobs," but noted that there are circumstances that could force the company's hand. He said if the "effects of the coronavirus on the global economy and Ford go on for longer -- or are more severe -- than we currently anticipate, we may have to take tougher actions. But not today."

"Our people are dealing with enough challenges without being out of work, too," he said. "Plus, on the other side of the crisis, we will need our talented team to quickly ramp up to our full potential."

Hackett also said Ford will defer merit-based salary increases, partially defer executive salaries, suspend overtime for salaried workers and freeze hiring for noncritical skill positions. He said work schedules and compensation may be "temporarily reduced" for workers whose jobs can't be done from home and that others may be offered voluntary sabbaticals.
COLUMBIA  The number of COVID-19 cases in South Carolina is expected to climb to more than 8,000 by early May, nearly 20 times the confirmed cases so far, according to a forecast released Wednesday by the state's public health agency.

That projection could decrease significantly if residents practice social distancing as requested. When cases could peak in the state and, consequently, when restrictions on work and activities could start to be lifted are unknown, agency officials said.

"Its hard to predict the future because the future is going to be determined on how we follow the key instructions to help flatten the curve," Rick Toomey, director of the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, said.

Asked about the likelihood of South Carolinians being back at work by April 12, as President Donald Trump has set as a goal, Toomey said, "It would certainly be a wonderful occurrence for us to have a wonderful Easter Sunday, but its hard to predict."

As of Wednesday afternoon, there were 424 known cases of COVID-19 in 39 of South Carolina's 46 counties, including seven coronavirus-related deaths. Kershaw County remains the hardest hit, with 63 confirmed cases, according to DHEC.

Based on the spread so far, the agency projects there will be about 2,700 total cases by April 2 and 8,050 by May 2, though Toomey stressed those are cumulative cases that include patients already recovered.

Residents should not expect to be notified if they're exposed to a case, said Dr. Linda Bell, the state epidemiologist, who again urged people to stay home, keep 6 feet away from each other if you must go out and wash your hands frequently.

A nationally renowned researcher with the University of South Carolina predicts much high numbers.

That forecast by James Morris, a USC biology professor, predicts that by March 31, South Carolina will have about 2,500 people who have tested positive. By April 10, though, that number skyrockets to about 40,000.

"Right around the first of April, it's going to get dicey. From that point on, it really explodes," said Morris, who has done groundbreaking work on the impacts of rising sea level on marshlands.

Morris, who usually studies changes over decades, began tracking South Carolina's cases in mid-March and plugging numbers into a mathematical model he likened to a high school algebra problem.

That's the problem with an exponential projection, Bell said.

It's based on dramatic rises in confirmed cases from one day to the next, but some of those jumps were due to delayed reports to the state agency from labs processing the tests, not actual day-to-day increases, she said.

She noted that Morris' forecast for South Carolina is higher than the current cases in New York, where millions of people live much closer to each other than here, she said.

But Morris said he plotted the model's accuracy over the coming days, and the actual rise in cases came close to his forecast. If anything, he said, the model underestimated the pace. Initially, the number of cases in South Carolina doubled every three days. Now it's down to 2.5 days.

He wrote a letter to Gov. Henry McMaster earlier this week urging the governor to take stronger actions to prepare for an upcoming flood of sick patients. He believes the state and its universities should consider setting up temporary hospitals in arenas and other large spaces.

About 20 percent of people who get the virus are expected to need hospitalization.

McMaster has urged people to stay home and on Monday authorized law enforcement officers statewide to break up gatherings of more than three people that pose a risk. But, while he's ordered schools closed and restaurants to stop dine-in service, he has stopped short of officially ordering people statewide to stay home.

Morris said his forecast of 40,000 cases in South Carolina by mid-April is based on the assumption that the state's medical infrastructure can test that many people.

"Testing capacity is being ramped up dramatically," Toomey said, as there will soon be about 30 labs approved to process tests.

Trying to identify everyone is no longer the goal.

As the state shifts from containing the disease to lessening the severity, "testing strategies transition from attempting to test all possible cases in a community to testing a reasonable sample of those who are ill," focusing on those at higher risk of exposure or of getting seriously ill, Bell said.

"Our goal is to monitor disease spread in a community and not identify every case," she said.

That means we don't have accurate numbers of who does and who doesn't have the disease, Morris said.
Elmore Leonard was already a well-known writer of westerns during the 1950s and 60s. But after he shifted his focus to crime thrillers, often using Detroit, California and Florida as locales and relying more on realistic dialogue and humor (while keeping his writing tight), he found his true calling.

And Hollywood soon followed.

Considered his crime magnum opus, Get Shorty is now celebrating its 30th anniversary with a beautifully illustrated 30th anniversary edition from art publishers Folio Society. Undoubtedly, more people know the book from its 1995 film adaptation, but its influence in literature and Hollywood really starts with the source material.

While the argument of who is the best American crime writer of the 20th century could encompass at least 20 candidates and rage as long as the century itself, it would be hard to characterize Elmore Leonards creative burst during the whole of the 1980s as anything but a sustained  and quite possibly unequaled  bout of excellence, as author Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Gone, Baby, Gone) notes in The Guardian (Lehane also provides the intro to Get Shortys re-release).

The 30th anniversary edition of Get Shorty (Folio Society) Folio Society

Leonard, who passed away in 2013 at the age of 87, was a prolific author with 27 novels under his belt before Shortys release. The plot of his most famous book is admittedly a bit scattershot (Lehane: Where other novels zig, Leonards zagElmore Leonards plots feel less like plots and more like life), involving mobsters, a stolen leather jacket, faked deaths and narcissistic movie stars. But the idea of equating loan sharks and crime with movie producers certainly appealed to Hollywood, which always loves a story about itself.

And Get Shorty is an incredibly meta and self-aware novel. Lehane sums it up as thus: Loan shark Chili Palmer ultimately end(s) up in Hollywood, pitching [producer] Harry Zimm the story of the dry cleaner, which is a story the author himself invented. So Chili is, in essence, pitching an Elmore Leonard story within an Elmore Leonard novel to an Elmore Leonard character. And that character would ultimately be played by Gene Hackman in the film  which was an in-novel casting suggestion five years before the Barry Sonnenfeld adaptation came out.

The 1995 Get Shorty film with Hackman and John Travolta was a financial and critical success, opening the floodgates to other movie adaptations of Leonards crime works, including Quentin Tarantinos 1997 Jackie Brown, Steven Soderberghs Out of Sight (1998) and 2005s Get Shorty sequel Be Cool.

And as Leonard influenced Hollywood, the film industry returned the favor. Quentin Tarantinos rise has so much to do with Elmore Leonards world, as he would be the first to admit, that by the time a real Leonard adaptation showed up in the form of Get Shorty, everyone had been prepared by Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction for that tone, as Soderbergh told Sight and Sound magazine.

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Nutrition Officer, Lubango, Angola

Organization: Unicef

Country: Angola

Field location: Lubango, Angola

Office: UNICEF in Lubango

Grade: P-2

Closing date: Tuesday, 31 March 2020

Nutrition Officer, P-2 (Temporary Appointment - 6 months), Lubango, Angola #113149 (Open to non Angolan nationals only)

Job no: 530742

Position type: Temporary Appointment

Location: Angola Division/Equivalent: Nairobi Regnl(ESARO)

School/Unit: Angola

Department/Office: Lubango, Angola

Categories: Health, Nutrition, P-2

UNICEF works in some of the worlds toughest places, to reach the worlds most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

For every child, Health

How can you make a difference?

Key end results

1. Accurate, complete and up-to-date information made available for effective budget preparation, programme and project design, implementation, management and evaluation, including inputs needed for addressing gender inequalities.

2. Project efficiency and effectiveness enhanced through effective implementation support.

3. Progress reports and project work plans timely prepared, and effective technical assistance provided in the identification of required supplies and equipment, and in the drafting of Country Programme Recommendation and other project documentation.

4. Appropriateness and completeness of financial and supply documentation as well as adherence to established allotments ensured.

5. Knowledge sharing with donors and media promoted.

6. Effective communication and networking achieved through partnership and collaboration, that builds shared understanding of strategies to address gender inequalities.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have...

University degree in one of the disciplines relevant to the following areas: Public Health & Nutrition, Health Sciences, International Health & Nutrition, Public Health & Nutrition Policy and Management, Family and Community Health & Nutrition, Nutritional Epidemiology, Health & Nutrition Education, Health & Nutrition Promotion and Disease Prevention, Public Health Preparedness, Health Emergency Preparedness, or other relevant discipline(s).

Training in gender and in nutrition programmes that promote gender equality are an asset.

A minimum of 2 years of relevant professional experience in planning, programming, implementation monitoring and evaluation of health programmes. Professional work experience in a programme management function or a technical expert capacity in child survival & health care.

Tags central africa child survival disease prevention emergency preparedness health programmes knowledge sharing monitoring and evaluation nutrition education nutrition policy nutrition programmes portuguese programme management

Experience in monitoring gender inequalities and in programming interventions that reduce thee disparities an asset.

Developing country work experience (for IP) or field work experience.

Background/familiarity with Emergency is considered an asset.

Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of Portuguese, Spanish, Italian or another Latin based language is a strong asset. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian) or a local language is an asset.

For every Child, you demonstrate...

UNICEFs core values of Commitment, Diversity and Integrity and core competencies in Communication, Working with People and Drive for Results.

The competencies required for this post are....

View our competency framework at

http://www.unicef.org/about/employ/files/UNICEF_Competencies.pdf

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will, therefore, undergo rigorous reference and background checks, and will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles.

Remarks:

Mobility is a condition of international professional employment with UNICEF and an underlying premise of the international civil service.

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

Advertised: Mar 24 2020 W. Central Africa Standard Time Application close: Mar 31 2020 W. Central Africa Standard Time
Chinese medical team experts and Italian doctors pose for a photo in Padua, Italy, March 18, 2020. (Chinese Medical Team/Handout via Xinhua)

The G20, which accounts for two-thirds of the world's population and about 85 percent of the global GDP, should lead the way in the fight against COVID-19 as virus knows no borders and no country could win the battle alone.

BEIJING, March 25 (Xinhua) -- As the novel coronavirus epidemic further extends its global reach, a united and coordinated response is in urgent need. The Group of Twenty (G20) has an important role to play in the fight, just as it did in the global financial crisis in 2008.

Virus knows no borders and no country could win the battle alone. When millions of lives and the global economy are in peril, not a second should be squandered. The G20, which accounts for two-thirds of the world's population and about 85 percent of the global GDP, should lead the way in addressing medical and economic problems and restoring confidence.

A special G20 leaders' video summit on responding to the COVID-19 pandemic will be held on Thursday. Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend in Beijing.

Governor of Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority Ahmed al-Kholifey (L) and Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan (Rear) attend the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Virtual Meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 23, 2020. (G20 Saudi Arabia/Handout via Xinhua)

The world has seen enough blame game and finger-pointing since the outbreak of the pandemic. The pointless bickering comes at the cost of an efficient and effective response to the pandemic. It is high time for the G20 to build consensus to inject positive energy into global cooperation to fight the common enemy of mankind.

In the war against the virus, China has firmly upheld the vision of building a community of a shared future for mankind. China has and will continue to share medical supplies, therapeutic and treatment experiences, and solutions with the world. As the epidemic situation in China eases, China will be able to spare more resources to help other countries within its capacity.

The G20 should bring the international community together quickly. Member countries should enhance unity and jointly meet challenges and boost the confidence of the international community.

G20 members should make every effort to properly handle domestic prevention and control. China will do its best to provide timely help to countries in difficulties. It is hoped that G20 members will help each other and cooperate closely to jointly safeguard international public health safety.

Chinese medical experts discuss with members of academic committee and epidemiologists from Veneto via internet in Padova, Italy, March 18, 2020. (China's Anti-Epidemic Expert Team/Handout via Xinhua)

The pandemic has taken a heavy toll on the global economy. It is critical for G20 members to strengthen macroeconomic policy coordination, adopt necessary fiscal, monetary and structural policies, promote market openness, and ensure the open, stable, safe and smooth operation of global supply chains.

An important lesson the world has learned from past crises is that a global crisis should be met with a global response. Uncoordinated or unilateral actions by a single economy will produce limited effects and could lead to a vicious cycle of "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies.

The G20 summit is held at a time when the global fight against the COVID-19 has come to a critical moment. The health of millions of people is at stake. We hope and believe the G20 meeting will inject new confidence and energy into the ongoing anti-pandemic efforts.
That didnt take long.

Hours after the U.S. Senate reached agreement on a $2 trillion bill intended to provide relief to American families impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, the Better Business Bureau warned that scammers are already attempting to dupe people into entering their bank account numbers on mock websites purporting to be gateways to the federal funds.

The scams are being distributed by email, text, telephone and social media posts, according to BBBs Connecticut office in Cromwell, with websites tricked up to mimic the look of actual government agencies.

Those with social media accounts should not assume an offer in a social media message from a friend is legitimate, BBB warned, noting scammers have the ability to impersonate real people and urged people to cross-check any such solicitations through another channel.

The state Department of Consumer Protection and the office of Attorney General William Tong had warned Connecticut residents as early as mid-February to be wary of schemes pegged to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Better Business Bureau has an online scam tracker at BBB.org/ScamTracker where it collects information about fraudulent schemes, including a heat map that as of Thursday listed a few scams related to coronavirus, but otherwise addressed complaints of scams that did not appear linked to the virus.

BBB has an additional page online at BBB.org/Coronavirus offering tips for a range of consumer protection issues during the pandemic, including on the topics of price gouging and charitable donations.

Connecticut residents reported losing nearly $14 million last year to fraudulent schemes, according to the Federal Trade Commission, with identify theft and impostor scams accounting for nearly a third of the total.

Includes prior reporting by Amanda Cuda.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
The Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre could become a massive makeshift intensive care hospital, treating hundreds of seriously ill coronavirus patients under a plan being considered by the state government.

Government and industry sources with knowledge of the plans told The Age that preparations were also under way to use part of the riverside landmark as a temporary morgue to store what is feared could be a large number of bodies of victims of the pandemic.

Jeff's Shed: the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. Credit:Matthew Piper

Victorias government is bracing for up to 2000 intensive care admissions at the peak of the pandemic here, expected in late May or early June. The state only had about 475 ICU beds before the crisis developed, compared with about 875 in NSW.

The conversion of the Convention Centre, known to locals as Jeffs Shed after former premier Jeff Kennett, would follow the lead of other cities including New York and London, which have re-tooled similar structures to treat large numbers of coronavirus patients.
Drones were deployed to warn people against breaching restrictions and more booked for the violations on the second day of the three-week coronavirus shutdown on Thursday, as central and state authorities ramped up measures to ensure there was no supply disruption of essential commodities.

The unprecedented national shutdown also had a tragic fallout when a 28-year-old man allegedly killed his younger brother for stepping out of their home in Mumbai's western suburb of Kandivali.

Police said Rajesh Laxmi Thakur killed his younger brother Durgesh after the latter stepped out of the house despite repeated warnings about the lockdown on Wednesday night, an official from Samta Nagar police station said. The official said Rajesh has been arrested.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made a fervent appeal to the countrymen on Tuesday night not to cross the 'lakshman rekha' of their homes in the next three weeks to make the lockdown a success in a bid to halt the spread of coronavirus.

According to data from the Centre and states, at least 15 people have died of COVID-19 and the number of infected cases rose to 649.

Roads wore a deserted look as police personnel kept a tight vigil but violations relating to prohibitory orders continued.

A ruling Congress MLA in Puducherry was booked for allegedly violating lockdown rules and distributing dole in the form of vegetables in bags to about 200 people outside his home, Lt Governor Kiran Bedi said.

In a WhatsApp message to mediapersons, she said an FIR had been registered against A John Kumar and also the people who had assembled ouside his home in Nellithope village on Wednesday. The Orleanpet police also confirmed the filing of the cases.

Police vehicles fitted with public address systems went around the residential areas in several places to announce that restrictions under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) that prohibits assembly of more than five persons are in force and advised people to stay indoors.

In Srinagar, police were also using drones to announce the restrictions on the movement of people, an official said.

In Tamil Nadu, police booked over 1,200 people for violating the Section 144 CrPc order.

Police personnel also adopted novel ways to create public awareness as well as punish violators.

In Sivaganga, police made violators carry awareness banners for a while, even as they were made to stand apart from one another, in an obvious effort to implement social distancing to prevent any spread of the virus.

At Gudiyatham in Vellore district, police administered a pledge to those who were loitering in public defying prohibitory orders, to abide by the law.

Reports of people being booked for violating prohibitory orders as well as home quarantine conditions also came from other parts of the country.

In several cities and towns, people were allowed to buy essentials like groceries, vegetables and medicines keeping social distancing in mind with customers allowed only in batches to purchase items and medicines.

Amid reports that trucks and food delivery personnel were being stopped by police in several cities, authorities were taking steps to sensitise the police and asking them not to intimidate anyone while enforcing the lockdown.

In the national capital, the Delhi Police directed all its personnel to allow persons and vehicles engaged in essential services to remain operational in the national capital.

All traffic, picket and beat staff have been briefed to allow identified retailers, operators and online delivery services to operate.

This comes a day after the Delhi Police held a meeting with representatives of e-commerce websites and assured them help in ensuring smooth movement of essential services.

A Delhi Police constable was also suspended for allegedly damaging vegetable carts during the lockdown period, officials said.

The constable, who was identified as Rajbir, was posted at Anand Parbat Police Station, they said.

The order came a day after a video of the incident went viral on social media.

In the short clip, the constable can be seen overturning three vegetables carts one by one.

The Delhi government also decided to allow shops selling essential items to operate round the clock so that there is no rush of people, Lt Governor Anil Baijal told reporters.

Also, the SDMs and ACPs hconcerned ave been directed to ensure shops selling groceries, vegetables and milk remain open and essential items are adequately stocked in their respective areas, Baijal said.

In Chandigarh, buses operated by the Chandigarh Transport Undertaking were deployed for delivery of essential items to people.

With people across the country confined to their homes, the National Book Trust (NBT) provided its select and best-selling titles for free download to encourage reading during the period.

"The PDFs are for reading only and any unauthorised or commercial use is not allowed," an official said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Born in Patna, Amit Singh hails from a well to do family who has always believed in hard work and perseverance and thats what has helped Amit achieve his goals. All thanks to his parents.

Amit who is a proud owner of Fusion Gym in Mumbai dedicates his success entirely to his parents who stood behind him rock solid and motivated him to achieve what he desired.

Amit has always been a bright student during his school days. His craze for fitness and automobiles got built ever since his childhood. Bullied by many rich brats in his school, Amit never lost hopes and kept moving forward. His parent's teachings to never give up in life have helped Amit a lot.

We all have heard of the phrase that Rome was not built in a day, this was the mantra shared by Amits parents to achieve the path of success with patience and will power.

Amit has always followed his parents to date and owes a major part of his success to them.

Amit Singh is a well-known fitness freak and is also one of Indias biggest automobile followers. His journey since the start has been an inspiration too many and has garnered immense popularity in recent times owing to his huge body of work.
We know our priorities and we know our challenges. We have taken very bold measures in stopping international flights into the country, and we hail the state governments that have take equally bold measures in their states, which include the closure of markets and the prohibition of large congregations.
By Barani Krishnan

Investing.com - Crude prices fell almost 8% on Thursday after the $2 trillion U.S. Covid-19 fiscal rescue left out the Trump administrations plan to top up the countrys oil reserves in a bid to throw a lifeline to shale drillers.

Also weighing on crude were record jobless claims filed by Americans and signs of no ceasefire yet in the crude production-and-price-war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

West Texas Intermediate, the New York-traded benchmark for U.S. crude prices, settled down $1.89, or 7.7%, at $22.60 per barrel.

Brent, the London-traded global benchmark for crude, slid 89 cents, or 3.3%, at $26.50.

U.S. Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said last week the Trump administration has asked Congress for $3 billion to buy 77 million barrels to top up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Under the plan, 30 million barrels was to have been purchased immediately and the balance between 60 and 90 days. But the stimulus passed by the Senate did not allocate any funding for SPR crude purchases.

Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) forecast that global oil demand, which stood at around 100 million barrels per day last year, will fall by 10.5 million bpd in March and 18.7 million bpd in April. For the year, oil consumption is expected to contract by around 4.25 million bpd, the Wall Street bank said.

Further depressing oil prices was data from the Labor Department, showing that a record 3.28 million Americans have filed for first-time unemployment benefits  a figure higher than even Chicago's population of 2.7 million. That was a signal that mending the labor market could take a lot longer than anything afforded by the stimulus.

Oil was also hit by Saudi Arabias decision not to include any discussion or support measures for oil on the G20 virtual meeting it hosted on Thursday. The exclusion indicated that the kingdoms production-and-price war with Russia would continue to the detriment of U.S. shale drillers, despite Washingtons plea this week for a ceasefire and return to production cuts.

Story continues

There is no doubt that the Russian and Saudi price war destroyed any shred of credibility they had as the global stabilizer of oil, said Phil Flynn, analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago.

Instead of acting to soften the economic blow from record demand destruction from the coronavirus, they let their egos allow the oil market to cause the world more economic pain. They used this crisis to gain more power and market share at the expense of the world community that is facing deaths and economic destruction from this virus. Instead of stabilizing the market, they created a situation where oil market volatility is at an all-time high.

Separately, Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia was struggling to find customers for its extra oil as demand plummets due to the coronavirus and as freight rates surge.

Royal Dutch Shell (LON:RDSa) and U.S. refiners were taking less Saudi crude. Finlands Neste was not taking any in April. Indian refiners had sought delayed deliveries and Polish refiners were easing up on purchases, the report said.

Saudi plans to hike its production from 9.7 million bpd to 12.3 million bpd will kick in five days, IBW Daily Oil Brief noted.

Now the actual physical product from the Saudis will hit the market. This is what you call the second Kiss Cool-effect  the first being the freshening effect of mint candy, and the second being something unexpected, said Igor Windisch of IBW.

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In oil markets, it's back to 1998 crisis pricing
As New Jersey continues to struggle with testing, the states two major government-run centers that test for the coronavirus will change their schedules starting this weekend and will set aside days just to test those working on the frontlines of the outbreak, Gov. Phil Murphy announced Thursday.

On Saturday, both drive-thru sites  at Bergen Community College in Paramus and PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel  will test only symptomatic health-care workers and first responders with valid credentials, Murphy said.

Then, starting Sunday, the two sites will operate on alternate days for anyone showing symptons, with Bergen running one day and Holmdel running the next.

Each day, the center that is open will collect 500 samples a day  instead of the usual 350 a day at both sites, Murphy said. Only people showing symptoms of the virus  which causes the illness COVID-19  will be tested, he stressed.

Then, starting Saturday, April 4, and continuing every Saturday after that, the PNC Bank Arts Center site will be dedicated only to testing symptomatic health-care workers and first responders.

This is a very manpower intensive operation, Murphy said Thursday at the Trenton War Memorial during his daily coronavirus press briefing. We have got to preserve our assets, and our most precious assets are people.

Nurses, doctors, and nursing home employees have said theyre nervous theyre spreading the virus to families and patients.

State Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said she does not know how many health-care workers have tested positive for COVID-19 in New Jersey.

Murphy said more information on the schedule changes will soon be available at the states coronavirus website: Covid19.nj.gov.

New Jersey  which has 9 million residents  has at least 6,876 known cases of the virus, including at least 81 known deaths, officials announced Thursday. Thats by far the states largest single-day increase of cases in the state since the outbreak.

Only New York has more cases in the U.S.

Officials said 31.7% of tests done in the state so far have come back positive. They have not provided numbers for how many New Jersey residents with the illness have been hospitalized or recovered.

Officials expect the number of cases to keep growing as testing increases. In addition to the state-run sites  both of which are supported by the Federal Emergency Management Agency  some counties, hospitals, and private companies are running their own testing.

But while testing in New Jersey has ramped up in recent weeks, an NJ Advance Media analysis shows it lags far behind other states.

Murphy has said the state needs more supplies from the federal government to increase capacity at the Paramus and Holmdel sites.

The Paramus and Holmdel sites have been overrun by visitors, often turning away cars shortly after they open at each day. Until now, they have both run from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. seven days a week.

Murphy said in a radio interview Thursday afternoon that the the state may face a fork in the road in the next couple of weeks between using equipment and health-care workers for testing or caring for the sick.

In a perfect world, I want to test everybody, Murphy said on The Michael Kay Show on ESPN Radio. But we may have that tradeoff sooner than later. And thats something I want to make sure folks are prepared for."

Murphy has tried to slow the spread of the virus in New Jersey by closing all schools and non-essential retail businesses and ordering people to stay at home.

As some commentators push to restart the U.S. economy, Murphy has vowed to keep New Jerseys restrictions here until science shows its safe.

If we go too early, Im fearful we will throw gasoline on the fire, and well have a much bigger challenge on our hands," the governor said Thursday morning during an appearance on MSNBC.

NJ Advance Media staff writer Susan K. Livio contributed to this report.

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Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01.

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Connecticut colleges, having moved classes online and sent students home because of the coronavirus, are trying to figure out a refund plan for room and board payments.

UConns Board of Trustees voted Wednesday to authorize administrators to issue refunds for student housing and dining fees, which have been repeatedly requested by students since the campus closures were announced.

The refunds will total about $30 million, Executive Vice President Scott Jordan said.

About 12,000 students live on UConns Storrs and Stamford campuses. About 1,200 students are remaining in residence halls in Storrs and 63 in Stamford because they are unable to return home or do not have a safe place to go.

The refunds will be calculated by prorating housing and dining costs for the remaining seven weeks of the semester, starting March 23 through the end of the academic year. The amounts will be credited to students accounts through the university bursar by the end of the semester, Jordan said.

Graduating seniors, students leaving the university or others who request it will receive cash refunds, while returning students will have that amount carried over to the next semester.

Amounts will range from about $1,600 to $3,200 for housing and $1,200 to $1,400 for dining for Storrs students while Stamford students will receive about $2,800 to $3,100.

Board Chairman Dan Toscano said the university needed to act quickly, and has not yet assessed the impact on UConns budget or how to make up for the financial loss.

We hope, and hope very loudly, that there is federal and state assistance with this, but we couldnt afford to wait and find out, he said.

Connecticut State Universities, including Southern, Western, Central and Eastern, were directed by CSCU President Mark Ojakian to credit student accounts for unused room and board by next week, said spokesman Leigh Appleby. If there is a credit balance, students will get a refund.

Each institution is in the process of reaching out to students to outline the timeline and procedures. The refunds are projected to be about $24.5 million, Appleby said.

Amounts will vary based on university, type of housing, and other factors, but students who paid room and board fees should expect a credit covering the period beginning with the closure of residence halls through the end of the spring 2020 term, Appleby said.

This is a complex process, but our universities are working to issue credits and refunds as expeditiously as possible, Ojakian said in a statement. We understand that these housing refunds are important monetary sources for our students as they begin to adjust to a new normal of online learning.

Prorated refunds are also planned for students at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Quinnipiac University in Hamden and Yale University in New Haven.

In an email to the University of Bridgeport community, President Laura Trombley said she would address the topic of room and board fees in a message this week.

At Fairfield University, President Mark Nemec said in an online message to students that the university intends to make certain equitable adjustments for room and board to families as a result of the pandemic.
New Delhi, March 26 : The new coronavirus which has infected close to 5 lakh people, including over 22,000 deaths globally, is now looking to wreak havoc in three countries it has spared so far - India, Russia and South Africa.

Russia which seemed virtually untouched to date - with just seven confirmed infections as recently as March 10 - reported 840 infections on Thursday (about two-thirds of them in the Moscow region), according to data from Johns Hopkins University's Coronavirus Resource Center.

The African continent that seemed to have dodged the bullet till now reported 72 deaths as confirmed positives cases surpassed 2,746 as of Thursday.

India - sitting on a COVID-19 'time bomb' - reported close to 700 positive cases, with 16 deaths.

The highly coronavirus-affected African countries include South Africa with 709, Egypt with 456 cases, Algeria with 302 cases and Morocco with 225 cases as of Thursday morning, according to the Africa CDC.

The number of coronavirus cases in the northern region of Lombardy, which includes Milan, increased by nearly 2,500 on Thursday, regional Governor Attilio Fontana was quoted as saying.

"Today's numbers are not good, unfortunately. There has been a steeper increase compared with previous days," Fontana told reporters.

The number of cases in the region, which has borne the brunt of Italy's contagion, increased by some 1,643 to roughly 32,346, media reports said.

The US death toll from COVID-19 has hit 1,000. More than 37,000 people have tested positive for coronavirus in New York alone.

For the first time in a week, coronavirus deaths in Spain slowed down. Spain recorded 655 deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 4,089, according to the health ministry said on Thursday.

The number of confirmed cases in Spain stood at 56,188.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Saudi Arabia's King Salman on Thursday asserted that the coronavirus COVID-19 crisis requires a global response, adding that it is the responsibility of the G20 nations to help developing countries to overcome the crisis and its repercussions. Addressing a virtual G20 summit, he said, "It is our responsibility to extend a helping hand to developing countries and least developed countries to enable them to build their capacities and improve their infrastructure to overcome this crisis and its repercussions."

In his opening remarks, he said, "We are holding this meeting to carry out our responsibilities as the leaders of the worlds largest economies, in order to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, which requires that we take firm measures on various fronts. In the beginning, Id like to welcome all of you to this Extraordinary Summit, thanking you all for your participation."

Expressing his grief at the losses of human lives worldwide, he said, "This pandemic has greatly taken a toll on human lives and I would like to extend our deepest condolences to all countries around the world and to their respective citizens over the lives lost to this pandemic, wishing a speedy recovery for all those who are infected."

"The impact of this pandemic has spread to reach the global economy, financial markets, trade, and global supply chains, hampering growth and development and reversing the gains accomplished in the previous years. This humanitarian crisis requires a global response. The world counts on us to come together and cooperate in order to face this challenge," he added.

On the health front, the Saudi King said that all necessary actions should be taken in order to contain the spread of COVID-19 and safeguard peoples health. "We value the effective measures adopted by different countries in this regard. We reaffirm our full support for the World Health Organization in coordinating the efforts to counter this pandemic. To complement these efforts, the G20 must assume the responsibility of reinforcing cooperation in financing research and development for therapeutics and a vaccine for COVID-19 and ensure the availability of the vital medical supplies and equipment."

He added, "We must also strengthen the global preparedness to counter infectious diseases that may spread in the future."

On the economic front, amid the slowdown in global growth and the turmoil in financial markets, the G20 has a pivotal role in countering the economic and social impact of this pandemic, he said. "We must have an effective and coordinated response to this pandemic and restore confidence in the global economy."

He welcomed the policies and measures taken by countries to revive their respective economies, including stimulus packages, precautionary measures, sector targeted policies, and job protection measures. "It is our duty to strengthen cooperation and coordination in all aspects of the adopted economic policies," he added.

On the trade front, the G20 must send a strong signal to restore confidence in the global economy by resuming, as soon as possible, the normal flow of goods and services, especially vital medical supplies, he added.

"The G20 has previously proven its effectiveness in mitigating the severity of the global financial crisis and its ability to overcome it. Today, through our cooperation, we are confident that we, together, will overcome this crisis, and move forward towards a future where all people thrive, prosper and are healthy," he further said.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, An Air India special flight carrying 314 Israelis back to their country landed safely here on Thursday evening with many passengers carrying Indian and Israeli flags while deplaning.

The Israeli embassy had put up a request with the Ministry of External Affairs, which, in turn, asked Air India to operate such a flight.

The national carrier had earlier organised rescue flights for Indians stuck in China, Italy, Iran and Madrid.

According to a senior official of the airline, the Boeing 777 aircraft had departed from Delhi around 4 pm.

Israel's Ambassador in New Delhi, Ron Malka, came to the airport to see off the passengers and thanked Air India for the selfless service.

"I thank and appreciate the @airindiain flight staff who are responsibly and selflessly ensuring that Israelis get home safe. Dhanyavad from the bottom of our (heart in emoji)", Malka tweeted before the flight took off from India.

Air India's country manager in Tel Aviv, Pankaj Tiwari, praised the entire team of "Ground Staff, Engineering personnel, Catering Staff and the Crew of the flight who in such difficult circumstances rose to the occasion keeping aside their personal interests to make this flight a reality".

"Whenever such call of service is made, Air India will always be in the forefront and do their best to safely unite the passengers to their families", Tiwari told PTI.

India is on lockdown from March 25 to April 15 to curb the spread of the virus. Consequently, domestic and international flights have been suspended too. However, cargo flights, special flights conducted with the approval of aviation regulator DGCA, offshore helicopter operations and medical evacuation flight operations have been exempted from the flight ban imposed in India.

Air India used a Boeing 777 jet instead of the regular dreamliner that operates on this route, in view of more than 300 passengers. The jet went back empty without any passengers as it had come on a "rescue" mission.

Israel's national carrier, El Al, had earlier organised two flights from Mumbai to bring back several hundred Israelis.

There was a festive spirit among returning passengers both at the airport in Delhi while boarding and at the Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv after deplaning.

Israel is under total lockdown with people not allowed to even walk beyond 100 metres from their homes and have been generally advised to go out only to stock up food.

The returning passengers went through check ups at the airport and would be in self quarantine or special supervision depending on their condition.

The number of people infected by Coronavirus in Israel went up to 2666, with 8 casualties so far, official sources said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
German Health Minister Jens Spahn on Thursday described the coronavirus crisis in the country as merely the calm before the storm, warning that things could get worse in the coming weeks.

"Doctors, caretakers and other medical professionals are bracing for the biggest challenge in 75 years. We already have many infected in Germany and are grieving over many lost lives. But this is only the calm before the storm," he told reporters, Sputnik reports.

Germany reported a jump of 4,954 infection cases in the past 24 hours, taking the tally to 36,508.

The Robert Koch Institute for disease control has confirmed a total of 198 virus-related deaths.

Spahn assured reporters that the government was doing everything to slow down the spread of the virus "flatten the curve" in order to take the pressure off the national health system.

Food and Agriculture Minister Julia Kloeckner said at a separate press briefing that Germany was well-supplied with basic food items but admitted that all parts of the food supply chain were under pressure due to exceedingly high demand.
TOKYO, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Nippon Express Co., Ltd., has received Good Distribution Practice (GDP) certification indicating compliance with industry-accepted standards for the proper distribution of pharmaceutical products for its in-transit air cargo storage services at the Narita Temperature Controlled Hub ("NTCH"), a temperature-controlled facility within a company logistics center near Narita Airport, effective February 6.

Logo: https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/img/202003248352-O1-zCCQk18W

Photo1: Facility entrance https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/prwfile/release/M103866/202003248352/_prw_PI2lg_F69NkDK7.jpg

Photo2: Sorting room within facility https://kyodonewsprwire.jp/prwfile/release/M103866/202003248352/_prw_PI3lg_seYL1q94.jpg

Nippon Express positioned the pharmaceutical industry as a priority industry in the Nippon Express Group Business Plan 2023 -Dynamic Growth- that began this fiscal year, and accordingly is setting up four key locations in Japan (East Japan, West Japan, Kyushu and Toyama) to construct a pharmaceutical product supply network enabling the total optimization of pharmaceutical logistics. It is also making steady progress in establishing import/export locations to link these four hubs in Japan with overseas locations, and this most recent certification is part of this effort.

Obtaining GDP certification in the Narita area, one of Japan's principal air cargo gateways, will better enable Nippon Express to provide high-quality and safe pharmaceutical transport services on a global level.

Profile of facility

Name: Narita Temperature Controlled Hub (NTCH)

Address: 2nd Floor, General Building, Narita Airport Logistics Center, Higashi-izumi Sakaimae 443-50, Narita, Chiba Prefecture

Floor area: 1,320 square meters

Certifications: ISO9001 (quality), ISO14001 (environment), AEO Bonded Warehouse

Services: Temporary storage of temperature-controlled cargo, packing, customs clearance, etc.

Nippon Express website: http://www.nipponexpress.com/

Official LinkedIn Account: NIPPON EXPRESS GROUP

https://www.linkedin.com/company/nippon-express-group/

SOURCE Nippon Express Co., Ltd.
Two people were found nearly lifeless early Thursday morning inside a burning north Houston home.

Paramedics performed CPR on the man and woman as they were rushed to Memorial Hermann Hospital in serious condition, according to Houston Fire Department Deputy Chief Blake White. What sparked the fire remains under investigation.

STIMULUS: Senate unanimously passes massive coronavirus aid plan

Firefighters were called to the home in the 900 block of Walton Street around 1:30 a.m. There was smoke coming from the rear of the home.

One person managed to escape the blaze through a window and quickly told firefighters there were two others trapped inside. Firefighters pulled the two out of the home and performed CPR as paramedics loaded them into ambulances.

Their condition was last listed as critical, White said. Arson investigators are working to determine the cause.

Jay R. Jordan covers breaking news in the Houston area. Read him on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and our subscriber site, HoustonChronicle.com | Follow him on Twitter at @JayRJordan | Email him at jay.jordan@chron.com
Tamil Nadu Governor K Banwarilal Purohit has decided to donate his one month salary to the Chief Minister's Public Relief Fund to assist the government in its measures to contain the spread of coronavirus, the Raj Bhavan said on Thursday.

The state government was taking a lot of preventive measures and making elaborate arrangements to overcome the prevailing critical situation of COVID19 pandemic and to safeguard the human life as a whole, a release said.

"As a part of helping and shouldering the measures to alleviate the sufferings of the people and to bring situation under control, the Governor has decided to donate his one month salary to the Chief Minister's Public Relief Fund meant for containment measures of COVID19", it said.

Earlier in the day, Tamil Nadu government announced extending of the ongoing shutdown till April 14 in view of its measures to control the spread of coronavirus and coinciding with the 21-day nationwide lockdown by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Chief Minister K Palaniswami had previously announced a statewide lock-down till March 31.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
B illionaire entrepreneur SIr James Dyson has said the race is on to get a new ventilator into production after the Government ordered 10,000 to help tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

In an email to staff, the inventor said his eponymous company had designed the CoVent at the request of Boris Johnson, and promised to donate 5,000 to the international relief effort.

Sir James said teams of engineers had been working solidly on the design since receiving the call from the Prime Minister 10 days ago.

The company is now waiting for the design to receive regulatory approval so manufacturing can commence.

Dyson has promised to donate 5,000 to the international relief effort / Dyson

Created in partnership with Cambridge-based science engineering firm TTP, the new ventilator had to be safe, effective, efficient in conserving oxygen and portable, Sir James said.

It also had to be bed-mounted, easy to use and not require a fixed air supply.

The battery-powered machine has been designed for use in different settings including field hospitals and when patients are being transported.

In an email to staff, Sir James said the device drew on technology used in the companys air purifier ranges, and was powered by a digital motor.

The core challenge was how to design and deliver a new, sophisticated medical product in volume and in an extremely short space of time. The race is now on to get it into production, he said.

James Dyson said the company received an initial order of 10,000 units from the UK / AP

He added: Ventilators are a regulated product so Dyson and TTP will be working with the Medicine and Healthcare Regulatory products Agency and the Government to ensure that the product and the manufacturing process is approved.

We have received an initial order of 10,000 units from the UK Government which we will supply on an open-book basis. We are also looking at ways of making it available internationally.

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[Machine beeping] The frustrating thing about all of this is it really just feels like its too little, too late. Like we knew  we knew it was coming. Today is kind of getting worse and worse. We had to get a refrigerated truck to store the bodies of patients who are dying. We are, right now, scrambling to try to get a few additional ventilators or even CPAP machines. If we could get CPAP machines, we could free up ventilators for patients who need them. You know, we now have these five vents. We probably  unless people die, I suspect well be back to needing to beg for ventilators again in another day or two. Theres a mythical 100 vents out there which we havent seen. Leaders in various offices, from the president to the head of Health and Hospitals, saying things like, Were going to be fine. Everythings fine. And from our perspective, everything is not fine. I dont have the support that I need, and even just the materials that I need, physically, to take care of my patients. And its America, and were supposed to be a first-world country. On a regular day, my emergency departments volume is pretty high. Its about 200 people a day. Now were seeing 400 or more people a day. At first, we were trying to isolate patients with cough and fever and be more careful around them, but we werent necessarily being extra careful around all the other patients. And then we started to realize that patients who were coming in with no fever but abdominal pain actually had findings on their X-rays and chest CTs that were consistent with this coronavirus, Covid-19. So someone in a car accident gets brought in and we get a CT scan of them, and their lungs look like they have coronavirus. We were seeing a lot of patients who probably had Covid, but we didnt realize. Ten residents and also many, many of our nurses and a few of the attending physicians got sick. The anxiety of this situation is really overwhelming. All of the doctors, its hard for us to get tested even if we want to, even if we have symptoms. Were exposed over and over again. We dont have the protective equipment that we should have. I put on one N95 mask in the morning. I need to have that N95 mask on for every patient I see. I dont take it off all day. The N95 mask I wore today is also the N95 mask I wore on Friday. Were always worried that well be out of N95 masks. Whats a little bit scary now is the patients that were getting are much sicker. Many of the young people who are getting sick dont smoke, theyre healthy, they have no co-morbidities. Theyre just young, regular people between the ages of 30 and 50 who you would not expect to get this sick. So many people are saying its going to be OK, everythings fine, we have what we need. And if this goes on for a month or two or three or five like it did in China, and were already this strained, we dont have what we need. I dont really care if I get in trouble for speaking to the media. I want people to know that this is bad. People are dying. We dont have the tools that we need in the emergency department and in the hospital to take care of them, and  and its really hard.
As the nation-wide lockdown entered the third day, life for migrant workers in various parts of Kerala, with no wages, is an uphill task

Thiruvananthapuram: As the nation-wide lockdown entered the third day, life for migrant workers in various parts of Kerala, with no wages, is an uphill task.

Many workers staying at Pullad in Pathnamthitta complained that they had to go without food in the past two days and wanted to return to their respective states.

"We want to go back to our homes. We do not want to die here," a worker from north India said and appealed to the state government to arrange a bus to take them home.

"We are daily wage workers. When there is no work, how will we get the money?" he asked.

"We want to go home to be with our parents. We will manage some how there. We do not know the language here," the man said in Hindi.

Another worker said they came out of the building asking for help from police, but were driven away.

"We are not getting anything. We do not have money as there is no work," he added.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

In Kannur, hundreds of people from neighbouring Tamil Nadu gathered at the collectorate on Thursday to tell the district authorities their woes.

The Additional District magistrate met them and said arrangements had been made for them to provide food in community kitchens. Food kits would also be distributed, the

official said.

The workers, including many women, were insisting on returning to their homes to see their children.

"We have told that we cannot go now due to the lockdown," she said.

Some of them had tried to leave for TN in a lorry, but were stopped.
Moroccan pension fund CNSS will start distributing a monthly compensation to the people who lost their jobs due to the consequences of coronavirus.

Since Morocco imposed a quarantine and banned all travel, many employees of the tourism sector, services and non-essential sectors lost their jobs or were unpaid.

The economic monitoring committee said the people who are registered with pension fund CNSS will be compensated with 2000 dirhams monthly and will have their loans delayed.

CNSS issued a statement saying that it will pay the unemployed 1000 dirhams this month and 2000 for the next three months.

The fund created a website for the beneficiaries to submit their compensation requests.

The economic monitoring committee held another meeting to look at measures to support the purchasing power of the larger informal sector.

Morocco reported up to Wednesday evening 225 coronavirus cases including 6 deaths and 7 recoveries. The percentage of people infected locally increases by the day and stands now at 51%, an increase of 2% compared to the percentage disclosed the previous day.

The quarantine will end on April 20 in the North African country, which created a special fund to meet the economic and social challenges posed by the pandemic and equip the health infrastructure.
PHILIPSBURG (DCOMM):--- The Prime Minister Hon. Silveria Jacobs chair of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) on Monday, March 23, met with Prefet of Saint-Barthelemy and Saint-Martin Sylvie Feucher, as part of their weekly COVID-19 consultations.



Jacobs was informed about the latest COVID-19 preparedness and response actions taking place on French Saint-Martin, and the Prefet also received an update about Sint Maartens preparedness, response and mitigation measures.



The cooperation of working together to synchronize our islands (Sint Maarten/Saint-Martin) fight against the coronavirus disease COVID-19, has been an on-going effort since it was declared by the World Health Organization as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.



This cooperation continues on a daily basis as part of our joint preparedness, response and mitigation measures where various entities exchange information of on-going developments, and this is essential in preventing community transmission on the island.



As Prime Minister, I would like to assure the general public that the Governments of both sides of the island have taken measures to protect public health and safety, and will continue to work together to get through this global crisis, Prime Minister Hon. Silveria Jacobs said on Wednesday.



The Prefet said that the French side is still in a position with local resources to deal with COVID-19, and the tracing of persons is being carried out when necessary. Both the Prefet and the Prime Minister agreed to maintain open communication where it concerns the confirmation of new COVID-19 positive cases.



Both Governments will work towards establishing a protocol of cooperation that would lead to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The Sint Maarten Ministry of Tourism, Economic Affairs, Transport & Telecommunications would also be included when formulating the MOU.



Representatives of the Police Forces from Sint Maarten and Saint-Martin will be meeting to discuss current COVID-19 procedures that have been implemented.



The Republic of France is at a Level 3 (the highest level), but Saint Martin is at Level 2. The current measures will continue to be evaluated and adjusted as needed.

Restrictions on French Saint-Martin will continue for a two-week period. Regarding air travel, restricted charter flights are allowed as well as cargo.

Air Antilles airline is providing limited essential air travel service between Saint-Martin (Grand Case), St. Barths and Guadeloupe for the following reasons: urgent health-related matters (dialysis, urgent surgeries, chemotherapy treatment); an essential family member can accompany the patient; and professional travel for crisis management officials.

A similar arrangement is in place with our national airline Winair with respect to limited services between Sint Maarten, Saba and St. Eustatius and Curacao (emergency medical evacuations, health professionals and technical assistants).



Stay Safe, Stay at Home, Wash Hands Frequently for 20 seconds; Dont Touch Your Face; maintain Social Distancing of up to six feet; Avoid Groups of People; Dont Share Items between Each Other such as cell phones etc.; Practice Respiratory Hygiene if you Cough (in your elbow), Sneeze in a tissue and throw it in the bin; & Stay Healthy!

Listen to the Government Radio station  107.9FM - for official information, and news updates or visit the Government website: www.sintmaartengov.org/coronavirus or and Facebook Page: Facebook.com/SXMGOV

The cooperation in working together to synchronize our islands (Sint Maarten/Saint-Martin) fight against the coronavirus disease COVID-19, has been an on-going effort since it was declared by the World Health Organization as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. This cooperation continues on a daily basis as part of our joint preparedness, response and mitigation measures.

Essential Air Transportation Services

Air Antilles airline is providing limited essential air travel service between Saint-Martin (Grand Case), St. Barths and Guadeloupe for the following reasons: urgent health-related matters (dialysis, urgent surgeries, chemotherapy treatment); an essential family member can accompany the patient; and professional travel for crisis management officials.

A similar arrangement is in place with our national airline Winair with respect to limited services between Sint Maarten, Saba and St. Eustatius and Curacao (emergency medical evacuations, health professionals and technical assistants).

As Prime Minister, I would like to assure the general public that the Governments of both sides of the island have taken measures to protect public health and safety and will continue to work together to get through this global crisis.

Stay Safe, Stay at Home, Wash Hands Frequently for 20 seconds; Dont Touch Your Face; maintain Social Distancing of up to six feet; Avoid Groups of People; Dont Share Items between Each Other such as cell phones etc.; Practice Respiratory Hygiene if you Cough (in your elbow), Sneeze in a tissue and throw it in the bin; & Stay Healthy!
UN sends humanitarian aid trucks to Syria's Idlib

Total of 51 trucks to provide help to people living in Idlib and nearby rural areas.

The UN on Thursday dispatched a total of 51 truckloads of humanitarian aid to Idlib, a northwestern Syrian city where millions of people are in desperate need of assistance.

ASSAD REGIME BREAKS THE TERMS OF THE CEASE-FIRE

Trucks entered the city through the Cilvegozu border gate in southern Hatay province of Turkey bordering Idlib.

The humanitarian aid items are going to be distributed to the needy people struggling to live in Idlib and nearby rural areas.

Idlib falls within a de-escalation zone laid out in a deal between Turkey and Russia in late 2018. The Syrian regime and its allies, however, have consistently broken the terms of the cease-fire, launching frequent attacks inside the zone.

The de-escalation zone is currently home to four million civilians, including hundreds of thousands displaced in recent years by regime forces throughout the war-weary country.
After preaching calm, the Kremlin sounds like it's ready to take the coronavirus pandemic a lot more seriously, The Guardian reports.

There was a healthy amount of skepticism over the low coronavirus numbers Russia had been reporting in recent weeks, which seems to have been validated after Russian President Vladimir Putin changed his tune Wednesday, delaying a public vote (which was mostly a formality) on constitutional amendments that will allow him to remain in power until 2036, requesting people to remain at home, and announcing a week-long holiday during which workers will receive their salaries.

Moscow's Mayor Sergei Sobyanin told Putin on Tuesday that the government was underestimating the number of coronavirus cases in the country, arguing "a serious situation is developing" and Russia's health care system could be overwhelmed as the spread accelerates. Before that the Kremlin's message was mainly to avoid panic.

The Russian parliament is reportedly prepared to get tough if they have to, as well. Parliament said Wednesday it will review legislation that could put quarantine breakers in prison for anywhere between three and seven years, while anyone found guilty of infecting others could face terrorism charges. Read more at The Guardian.

More stories from theweek.com

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TSA to receive 1.5 million expired N95 masks that had been sitting in a warehouse


An employee controls surgical masks at a leather workshop turned into a mask factory, close to Vigevano, Lombardy, Italy, on March 19, 2020. (Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images)

Let the De-Globalization Begin

Even before the CCP virus pandemic, globalism brought with it serious trade and standards violations, and other risks

Commentary

Over the past four decades, globalism has seen much of the worlds manufacturing shift from the West to Asia, and especially China.

But as Ive written before, President Donald Trumps trade war with China has been a major factor in the effort to reverse that trend. Now, in the pandemic era, regionalization looks like a reasonable alternative to the destruction that China-centric globalization has brought to major Western nations economies.

In all likelihood, the current pandemic has only added a new urgency and potentially even permanence to the de-globalization trend that the world is experiencing. Global decoupling from the China-centric manufacturing model will be, in the long term, good news. It will be the push that Western countries need to revitalize their industrial sectors.

As weve seen, China-centric supply chains, while profitable for multinational corporations, have several downsides that are now being felt around the world.

Medical Supply and Pharmaceutical Risks

Of primary importance, of course, is the medical equipment and pharmaceutical shortages that are hamstringing Americas efforts to combat the CCP virus pandemic. For example, the United States has been critically dependent upon China for N95 medical masks. Unfortunately, China hasnt been as helpful as needed, with acrimony and logistical problems holding up supplies.

Similar problems are occurring with other medical supplies, such as ventilators, face shields, and other crucial medical equipment. The pandemic has revealed the danger of countries not being able to protect their populations due to reliance on another countrys goodwill, or in the case of China, ill will.

Indeed, in an article by Xinhua, the state-run media agency, Chinese authorities said: If China retaliates against the United States at this time, in addition to announcing a travel ban on the United States, it will also announce strategic control over medical products and ban exports to the United States. Then the United States will be caught in the ocean of new coronaviruses.

Put politely, the pandemic has shown China to be an unreliable and high-risk trading partner.

The reaction in the West to Chinas behavior has been predictable. Key medical and pharmaceutical capacities will soon be repatriated to Europe and the United States. This will cut their reliance on distant supply chains that have proven unable or unwilling to meet their needs when it counts.

Strategic Manufacturing Exposure

But medical dependency isnt the only risk that weve seen from relying on China-centric supply chains. Beijing has tremendous leverage over the United States ability to wage war due to Chinas control over materials that are critical to many of Americas strategic weapons systems.

For instance, the United States is almost totally dependent on China for some F-35 fighter jet components and rare earth metals, among other high-risk dependencies. Those are crucial for U.S. missile guidance systems, satellite communications, lasers, and other critical systems. These are the same military systems that the U.S. military relies upon to deter Chinese aggression against U.S. allies such as Japan, South Korea, and even Taiwan.

With 85 percent of the worlds processing capacity for rare earth metals, China has roughly five times the capacity of the rest of the world combined. The vulnerability level is unacceptable.

How long will it be before China decides to militarily take advantage of that leverage?

Thats an especially relevant question given the rising trade and military tensions between the United States and China. The irony would be comical were it not so dangerous.

Intellectual Property Risks

The risk of intellectual property theft in China is now known throughout the world, costing the United States alone $300 billion to $600 billion every year. The trade war, and of late, the global pandemic, have given the United States, the UK, and the eurozone the impetus they needed to redirect manufacturing back to their countries.

Thats a good thing for not only stimulating employment but also for maintaining a competitive advantage. The calculation is simple. Repatriation largely eliminates the need to share or expose IP to Chinese business or manufacturing partners that will only steal it and then compete against their Western partners.

Breaking that cycle can only be a win for Western companies.

Dishonesty in Disease Reporting, Containment

The pandemic has revealed the existential risk that China poses by its criminal lack of honesty and utter disregard for the rest of the world. By knowingly allowing millions of its citizens to travel to points far and wide for up to two months after knowing about the deadly virus in its midst, China has lost all credibility. It has literally infected the entire planet by its silence and deception.

The current pandemic isnt the first incidence of dangerous pathogens being released into the world from China, and probably wont be the last. The domino effect is likely to be much less trust and travel by Western countries and businesses. Video conferencing will likely increase as in-travel to in-person meetings to China greatly decrease.

A Clash of Civilizations

What has become apparent over the past couple of decades is that cultural differences are a bigger factor in trade and supply chains than we realized. From legal recourse and competing ideas on intellectual property, to labor practices and fair trade, China and the West hold differing views that are, often as not, in conflict with one another.

These differences arent only a product of differing political and economic systems, but also from conflicting cultural outlooks. The wide gap between the two is not likely to narrow anytime soon.

Not surprisingly, the divisions between the West and China have actually grown greater these past two decades than they seemed to be in the past. That is likely because China has become a major player on the world stage for the first time in history, which has exposed those deep cultural differences as it vies with the West for strategic global pre-eminence.

Its deeply inhumane behavior that caused the pandemic and thousands of deaths around the world has made its inevitable rise highly doubtable and vastly undesirable. Who, after all, would want a world led by Beijing?

With any luck, de-globalization will prevent that.

James Gorrie is a writer and speaker based in Southern California. He is the author of The China Crisis.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
'Why not simply make some more ventilators and find some more beds? How much would it cost?' asks Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.

IMAGE: People hold their ears while doing sit-ups as a punishment for breaking the lockdown in Ahmedabad, March 24, 2020. Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters

Even as Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi was addressing the nation on Tuesday, March 24, announcing a total lockdown in the country, Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro also took to a televised address to dismiss such health measures against coronavirus as 'scorched earth' tactics.

Bolsonaro is a familiar face to Indians -- a good friend of Modi who invited him as the chief guest at our Republic Day celebrations in January.

Both are far-right politicians and yet their attitude to coronavirus is diametrically opposite.

Modi ordered the world's largest lockdown in human history.

Almost one-fifth of mankind has been put under lockdown.

Modi said, 'To save India and every Indian, there will be a total ban on venturing out.'

According to Modi, coronavirus has the potential to 'spread like wild fire'.

He said, 'You must remember that you will invite a grave pandemic like coronavirus to your homes if you step out.'

Bolsonaro, on the other hand, rubbished the efforts to contain coronavirus with large-scale quarantine.

Dismissing coronavirus as a 'media fantasy' and a 'trick', he said calmly, 'The virus has arrived and we are fighting it and soon it will pass.'

He repeatedly called on authorities in his country to abandon their scorched-earth ideas.

Bolsonaro urged his countrymen, 'Our lives have to go on. Jobs must be kept... we must, yes, get back to normal.'

He added, 'What is happening around the world has shown that the at risk group are those over 60 years old. So why close schools?... Ninety per cent of us will show no sign (of infection) if we are infected.'

Of course, while Modi has risen in stature as a 'strong' leader, Bolsonaro's address went down badly with his critics.

A prominent Brazilian journalist tweeted, 'The first political suicide broadcast live on national radio and television.'

Compare it with what an Indian television anchorman wrote on his Tweeter page: 'PM at his emphatic best in address to the nation tonight. Realistic. Forceful. Passionate... has done as good a job as can be done...'

Which side of the Modi-Bolsonaro divide is rational is difficult to estimate at this point since this is a story in progress.

To borrow the words of former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld when asked at a Pentagon briefing in 2002 about the lack of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to terrorist groups, 'Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.'

Interestingly, a study on covid-19 has just been completed by a British team of scientists led by Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford.

It suggests that the coronavirus was already circulating in the UK by mid-January, around two weeks before the first reported case.

The study found that less than one thousand of people with covid-19 became ill enough to need treatment in hospital, with the vast majority developing mild symptoms or none at all.

Which, of course, means that since the virus had enough time to have spread widely, many people in the country acquired immunity.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Professor Gupta said, 'I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model (read UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's decision on a lockdown)'.

Her thesis is expected to be put to testing later this week.

If confirmed, Professor Gupta's results would mean that Britain has already acquired substantial 'herd immunity' through the unrecognised spread of the illness -- meaning, coronavirus will stop spreading when enough people have become resistant after being infected.

The implications are profound.

For, it means that the shutdown across the UK could be removed much sooner than expected.

More than 90,000 people have been tested for covid-19 in the UK, 82,359 of which came back negative.

Importantly, those who died were between 33 and 103 years old and all were in vulnerable groups with underlying health problems.

Modi's lockdown is even harsher than Johnson's who announced that British people should only leave their homes for four reasons: to shop for essentials, for one form of exercise per day, for medical need or to provide care to a vulnerable person and travelling to and from essential work.

Modi insists coronavirus is lurking right in front of our doorstep.

Simply put, it poses a tricky question: Does the mathematics of a virus with a mortality rate of roughly 1.5 percent justify quarantine that is sure to inflict an unimaginable economic carnage?

But politicians, including those who prided to be strongmen, tend to play it safe when faced with decisions of seismic implications.

The heart of the matter is that short of a miracle -- a vaccine is rapidly developed, mass-produced, and distributed; the virus dies in the scorching heat of Indian summer; or God intervenes, as in the H G Wells novel War of the Worlds -- coronavirus is not a genie that will be easily put back into the bottle.

We must, therefore, understand the gravity of what is before us as a nation.

The choice is between remaining quarantined indefinitely and accepting social, economic, and political Armageddon or to take special care to protect the vulnerable and for others to get back to work, knowing that many will, in any case, die.

The BBC featured an article (external link) recently by its health and science correspondent James Gallagher asking that million dollar question: When will the outbreak end and life get back to normal?

Gallagher wrote: 'Even if the number of cases starts to fall in the next three months, then we will still be far from the end. It can take a long time for the tide to go out -- possibly years. It is clear the current strategy of shutting down large parts of society is not sustainable in the long-term.'

'What countries need is an 'exit strategy' -- a way of lifting the restrictions and getting back to normal. But the coronavirus is not going to disappear. If you lift the restrictions that are holding the virus back, then cases will inevitably soar.'

Indeed, what could be an 'exit strategy'? Gallagher listed essentially three ways out of this mess: Vaccination; enough people develop immunity through infection; or permanently change our behaviour/society.

He concludes, 'Each of these routes would reduce the ability of the virus to spread.'

But coronavirus is 'not going to disappear' and the current strategy of lockdown is not sustainable in the long term, since the social and economic damage would be catastrophic.

We need to figure out a way of easing out restrictions and getting back to normal life.

What is happening is that we are indefinitely destroying our basic freedoms because of a projected acute shortage of ventilators and hospital beds.

Why not simply make some more ventilators and find some more beds? How much would it cost? I would imagine, a fraction of the Central Vista Project (external link) in Lutyens's Delhi?

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar served the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years. He has served as India's ambassador to Turkey and Uzbekistan and has been a contributor to Rediff.com for well over a decade.
Gantz lost the support of those factions, as well as that of the wider opposition, including a group of Arab Israeli parliamentarians who had been willing to back him for prime minister. But he won the speakers job with the votes of lawmakers from Netanyahus Likud party and from members of a right-wing bloc that has repeatedly criticized Gantz over the past year.
It's no coincidence that a song called "Supalonely" is one of the most popular songs on TikTok during an era of self-isolation and social distancing; it's also no coincidence that 20-year-old New Zealand breakout star Benee wrote it. The second track on her most recent EP Stella & Steve, "Supalonely" is a clicky pop song that fits squarely into the elevated bedroom pop sub-genres that have emerged as victorious among Gen Z listeners in recent years.

"I'm a lonely bitch," Benee says, punctuating her post-chorus la-la's with a type of blase and self-deprecation that points to a concealed yearning for connection. Between the daydream runs that bookend the chorus, however, is the crux of the TikTok dance trend that the likes of Charli D'Amelio and Emma Chamberlain have indulged in this past month. Shoulder pops, pearly smiles and hip rolls are hallmarks of the cheery viral dance  a clear alignment with the bright acoustics, but not the lyrics.

Benee is just naturally attracted to sad songs, though, she says. Funk guitars, tambourine claps and all, she's still able to hone in on and perfect the making of a "sad banger," an increasingly popular category of songs catapulted into the mainstream by artists like Mark Ronson on Late Night Feelings. Similar to her contemporaries, Benee admits to wanting to write from experience, so her tracks often sound like glimpses into depressive episodes rather than celebratory bops.

For someone who began her career doing covers on SoundCloud and writing in her bedroom, the intimacy isn't stunted. Songs like "Blu" ("Don't look pretty when I cry/ Do you feel bad when you lie?") and "Find an Island" ("Find an island far away from me/ A shipwreck lost at sea") feature the same sort of uptempo melancholy. It's surround-sound honesty, another prime example of pop-gone-wild as we head into the new decade; for a genre that's propped up to be widely palatable, artists like Benee are subverting it to be hyper-personal.

Jacket: Moncler Genius x Richard Quinn, skirt and blouse: Jordan Dalah, earring: Acne Studios

Continue on to read about Benee's journey from bedroom songstress to studio maven, the blurred lines of pop in the new decade, and the viral success of "Supaloney," exclusively for PAPER.

I've been in an amazing rut of downtempo electro-pop lately. Is that how you would typify your music? I go through phases  a little of a mix, which is most likely indie-pop. I'm really into making music that I'm interested in, but then also trying to convey R&B with pop melodies. I'm trying to do a mix of it all.

It's very of-the-moment too, because nobody's really making one genre. Exactly. It feels like a cross, like I'm crossing over.

Is there an artist who stands out for you that does this perfectly, this crossover of many different Gen Z genre blends? I feel like James Blake is someone who has been an inspiration to me for a very long time. I do like the electronic elements, and kind of giving them to trap and like hip hop now, collaborating with big rappers and stuff. I feel like he's done a pretty good job of mixing genres.

T-shirt: Matt Finish, shirt: Romance Was Born

For Stella and Steve, what were you looking to distinguish it apart from the first EP? I don't know. I just know that I'm constantly trying to make a different-sounding song. When it comes to making EPs, for these last two, I wasn't really thinking about how the EP would come to be when I was making the songs. When I'm making a body of work, I like the idea of being able to pick songs of mine that I already checked and build them up and arrange it again. I think of it as like a puzzle, how it all fits together. I like the idea of being able to put "Supalonely" and "Blu" together. They're written about the same thing, but with very different ideas.

Do you prefer the EP structuring, where it's succinct? Or has a full-length album always been the pinnacle of creation for you? Sometimes doing the EP is a lot of work, but I want to make the album. I'm looking to make an album now, I think. I've done my EP, I've done that, and now it's kind of a bigger "something" to work towards.

It mirrors from where you started, with GarageBand and the SoundCloud releases, to now these sort of mastered track worlds and new wealths of resources. It's been wild. To be honest, when I was making my SoundCloud stuff on GarageBand, I had no idea what working in a studio would be like when I was with a producer and recording my vocals properly, but it's been awesome. Being able to work in a studio, I love it, it sounds so much bigger than doing it at home.

Were you familiar with a lot of the larger production tools, or is it all still a learning process for you? No, I'm still terrible at working with Logic and stuff. My producer, Josh Fountain, kind of taught me how to navigate myself around it all, but someone could tell me how to produce a song and it would not really work out very well.

Dress: Moncler Genius x Simone Rocha, hoodie: Walter Van Beirendonck, tights: Comme des Garcons, shoes: Acne Studios

Are there sounds or genres that you want to explore that you feel like you're still learning how to craft. A lot of writers find it a bit harder to resist pop structuring. I always lean towards making more pop-y songs because they're a lot easier for me. The more indie and sad songs I really enjoy making, and I think that making a song like "Blu" was like nothing I had ever done before. I've always wanted to make a rap song, but I can't rap. I really want to make a cool hip-hop song. I've trial'd a bunch, but it just doesn't work, but it might in the future. I really want to experiment with different genres.

What attracts you to making these songs that are lyrically sad, but sound happy. I just love sad songs. They flow so easily. It's so easy to pause and feel these depressed and sad emotions and just to write about them. I prefer writing these sad songs, which is kind of weird.

Where does that comfort come from, because you were a bit more isolated in your songwriting process prior to getting into a studio? It's very much me becoming more comfortable in the studio. I don't think when I first got in there, I wasn't sure if I would be able to do "Supalonely." It's about becoming comfortable, forming this relationship, telling the producer what's going on in your life and what you're going to write about. I think I'm just drawn to the feeling of being super sad and just writing songs about it.

Coat: Moncler Genius x Richard Quinn, dress: Romance Was Born, Shoes: Acne Studios

What was it like getting Gus Dapperton to have a feature on that track ["Supalonely"]? I had the song, already written. I thought that it was finished. Me and my guy Dan from the Republic, he's my A&R guy, he's mates with [Gus]. He had lunch with him and showed him the song and he was just like, "What would you think about Gus coming in and building something on here?" I was just like, "Oh my gosh, what about a bridge?" and it just happened. I'm a big fan of his work, and had been for a while.

Do you find that you and Gus match up from time-to-time in terms of occupying a similar pop sound space? I feel like he's also kind of experimental in the way that he's playful with his work and he's got pop elements and an indie vibe going on. Overall, it's just a fresh sound. He brought a lot to the song.

You also seem to have a very solid aesthetic vision for yourself and your videos. Do you see style and sound as going hand-in-hand? I think that style has become something that is more experimental within music. I think there's a line, and it's also just another way that you can express yourself. It adds to the sound  it adds to the movement.

Jacket: Moncler Genius x Richard Quinn, skirt and blouse: Jordan Dalah, earring: Acne Studios

Have you seen your style change as you've been putting out the EPs? Or is your fashion sense pretty core to you? A little bit. To be honest, working with stylists  they're kind of like a teacher, telling you about all these like brands you've never heard about before. I've found out about all these different kinds of designers. Same with the "Supalonely" video, I'd been working with a stylist named Sarah, and my style has definitely changed.

The way you come up with ideas for your videos, is that similarly collaborative? Definitely. It does change depending on who I'm working with. With the "Glitter" music video and the "Soaked" one, which is an old one, I was super hands on. I made a Pinterest board, where I had this idea in my head of what I wanted it to be. For the "Supalonely video, I talked to the director, ROME, and I told him exactly what the song was about, gave him other contexts about it as well. He got to see what it was all about, but I have gotten more creative control.

Dress: Moncler Genius x Simone Rocha, Hoodie: Walter Van Beirendonck

Do you enjoy the filming process? That's a whole new experience compared to making songs at home. It's very hard work, especially the "Supalonely" video, and for some things we'd be up til 4 AM doing stuff and we're very tired, but you do it and it ends up being cool.

One of my favorite questions to ask is what an artist's favorite song to play on their setlist is. Do you have one? I think it might've changed. I recently toured Australia, and "Glitter" was going off of TikTok, and it used to be my other song "Find An Island," that when I played that everybody went crazy, dancing wild. Now it's "Supalonely."

How crazy has that TikTok-ification of your songs been? People just have your song at their fingertips to use. It's crazy, man. I didn't even know it! I didn't actually completely understand the app until a few months ago. I'd be getting people on Instagram DM'ing me, and scrolling and seeing all the dance videos, seeing that Emma Chamberlain made a video to it. I used to watch her YouTube videos, it's crazy!

T-shirt: Matt Finish, shirt: Romance Was Born

Stream Benee's Stella & Steve EP, below.
INVESTORS appetite for the 10-year Treasury bond auctioned by the Bank of Tanzania (BoT) on Wednesday was high amid declining yield rates.

The Central Bank auction summary shows that the amount tendered jumped to 204.72bn/-against 122bn/-sought to be raised.

The weighted average yield to maturity declined slightly to 12.89 per cent compared to 14.52 per cent of the previous session that took place in December last year.

The 10 year bond auction came on the back of 33.4 per cent under subscription of the debt instrument auctioned last December.

The 12.41 per cent coupon rate was offered to the 10-year instrument held on Wednesday slightly down compared to 13.63 per cent of the session held in December.

The minimum successful price/100 for the 10 year instrument went up to 87.88 compared to 83.11 offered in the session held in December last year.

The weighted average price for successful bids also rose to 92.13 compared 83.90 that was offered in the preceding session.

The total number of bids received in the session was 108 but only 43 became successful.

Tanzania Securities predicted in its weekly blast report that this year treasuries appetite has been higher for both short-term and long-term as have been witnessed in the over-subscriptions.

Government securities yield curve may continue to remain normal and weighted average yields are expected to decline due to higher appetite of the government treasuries, the report showed.

The government raises funds through the 10 years Treasury bonds and other debt instrument to finance the long term projects that will start generating income before the instrument matures.

Some of the long term infrastructural projects that benefit from the funds include hydropower, roads, railways, bridges, ports, airports as well as social services like hospitals and schools.

The implementation of the projects would stimulate business growth, contribute to improved living standards and the government collects more revenue.
Bank of Ireland yesterday announced a new service designed to help customers self-isolating during the Covid-19 pandemic - including older customers and those in vulnerable situations  access cash for groceries, newspapers and other day-to-day expenses.

Customers who are already self-isolating  or who may need to in the coming weeks and months  can nominate another person to make in-branch cash withdrawals and lodgements on their behalf.

The new facility, available from yesterday, will have built-in safeguards such as limits on withdrawals and daily monitoring by Bank of Irelands dedicated Vulnerable Customer Unit.

Customers who wish to avail of this service are advised to complete the Cocooning Support form which is available on the Covid-19 Customer Hub on www.bankofireland.com. This hub is a new, one-stop online resource which includes all of Bank of Irelands Covid-19 supports for personal and business customers. The Cocooning Support Form is available here: www.bankofireland.com/coronavirus-update/

Speaking this week, CEO of the Banks Retail Ireland division, Gavin Kelly said, "On St Patricks Day the Taoiseach specifically called out that cocooning the elderly and those with long-term illnesses at home for several weeks would help save many lives among the most vulnerable in our society. However, that presents an immediate challenge in accessing cash for day-to-day expenses which we wanted to help solve."

He added, "Thats why we have developed Cocooning Support. This will make it easier for a trusted friend or next-door neighbour to help those in isolation with their daily essentials. Many of our customers find themselves particularly vulnerable at the moment and relying more than ever on the help and support of others. Cocooning Support gives them one less thing to worry about, during what is a really challenging time for us all and for the country."

Source: www.businessworld.ie
WILTON, N.Y.  Local leaders joined with supporters of the Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park and a new Scouting museum group at the trailhead at Camp Saratoga on Scout Road in Wilton.

They were there, not to start out on a hike, but to announce a project to develop a year-round Visitor Center that will become the focal point for visitors and users of Camp Saratoga.

It is being named after Larry Gordon, a long-time Town of Wilton resident and community leader, who spent most of his life protecting, enhancing, and promoting the conservation of the landscape of Camp Saratoga.

The Visitor Center will allow the Town of Wilton and Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park to better meet the needs of the parks users, said John Lant, Supervisor for the Town of Wilton and one of the earliest advocates of the project.

Park visitors will be able to come to a central location to gather information or maps and to learn about upcoming events and programs. Exhibits at the Visitors Center will be used to inform the public about the important historical and ecological features of Camp Saratoga and the Saratoga Sandplains.

The Visitor Center will be a place where staff and volunteers will be present to share their knowledge, enhancing the park visitors experience.

The Center will also feature exhibits from the Larry Gordon Historic Scouting Collection.

My dad, Larry Gordon, was an avid collector of documents and materials related to the history of Scouting at Camp Saratoga and Saratoga County, said Scott Gordon.

The family is so pleased to know that with his passing, the collection will have a permanent home in a museum located in the Visitor Center.

Camp Saratoga held a special place in Larrys heart, agreed Trish Watkins, Mr. Gordons widow. He loved sharing his knowledge of the property and all that it has to offer with others. It is so fitting that a building named in his memory will continue to enhance the enjoyment of this property by its visitors.

This new facility will be filled with information and exhibits about the history, flora, fauna, and environment of the Saratoga Sandplains; will provide spaces for public programs; and will be an important part of our mission to encourage people to get outdoors, said Margo Olson, Executive Director of Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park.

The Visitor Center will be owned and maintained by the Town of Wilton and will serve a dual purpose of housing the Nature Center for Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park and the Larry Gordon Historic Scouting Collection.

According to former Town Supervisor Art Johnson, It will encourage visitation to the area and bring people in to learn about the history and natural history of this important part of New York State. It will enhance the conservation, education, and outdoor recreation efforts in the Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park of which Camp Saratoga is an integral part. Visitor Centers like this one are drivers of economic growth in their communities, and we expect to see similar outcomes here.

Linda Baker, former board chair of Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park and a local and national level Scouting leader, noted that Camp Saratoga serves as the gateway for most people to their experiences in the area known as Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park. The welcoming new building would be located at the previous site of the caretakers cabin for Camp Saratoga, a former Boy Scout camp which forms the central hub of activity for the Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park.

The excellent facilities that the Town of Wilton maintains at Camp Saratoga include trails, pavilions, several former camp buildings, new restrooms, the historic Cornell Hill Fire Tower, and camping sites.

The Wilton Preserve area protects approximately 2,400 acres, includes a diversity of habitats, is the home of the endangered Karner blue butterfly, and provides public access through an extensive, multi-use trail system of more than twenty-five miles. The success of the unique public/private partnership between the Town of Wilton, Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park, Saratoga County, and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, has contributed greatly to the year-round use of Camp Saratoga and the significant growth of the Wilton Preserve over the past years.

Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park uses Camp Saratoga for a large portion of its public and group programming. Most school groups start their visit from the trailhead at Camp Saratoga and utilize Delegan Pond in these programs.

The annual Wildlife Festival and Moonlight Ski and Snowshoe take place at Camp Saratoga. Camp Saratoga is also the location for the Nature Preschool Hours, the Nature Arts Hours, the Pond Exploration Programs, and many more public programs. The winter groomed trails are at Camp Saratoga and snowshoe and cross-country ski rentals are located in one of the old scout buildings.

Having a physical Visitor Center for people to visit and to utilize as a resource for these programs and activities will greatly improve the educational and recreational programming, stated Jennifer Benaman, board chair of Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park.

We are thrilled to have so much community support as we move forward with this exciting project. We were able to quickly raise over $40,000 this January with a matching grant that was offered by the Parillo Family and Scottys. We have a long way to go, and more money to raise, but with community support we are confident that we will see this project through to completion.

For more information about the Larry Gordon Camp Saratoga Visitor Center, please call the Wilton Preserve office at 518-450-0321 or email info@wiltonpreserve.org.

For up-to-date trail conditions or program information, please visit the website at www.wiltonpreserve.org.
Economists are slashing forecasts for the Japanese economy as exports are hit from overseas lockdowns and rising domestic virus cases force the Tokyo governor to request residents to stay home.

The economy is heading for its weakest period since the financial crisis, according to the latest economist projections. Goldman Sachs Group Inc on Wednesday cut its 2020 expectations for gross domestic product to a 3.1% contraction from a 2.1% drop. Barclays Plc said Thursday its latest projection is for the economy to shrink 2.6%.

The downgrade is due to the triple whammy of fiscal contraction linked to the consumption tax hike, the COVID-19 outbreak and the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, Barclays economists Tetsufumi Yamakawa and Kazuma Maeda wrote in the report.

Goldmans Naohiko Baba and Yuriko Tanaka see Japans exports taking a significant hit as the U.S. and Europes strict measures to slow the spread of coronavirus halt economic activity. They see the impact of the delayed Olympic Games as quite limited compared with the shock from the pandemic.

Risks of further downgrades remain. Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike asked her residents on Wednesday to stay home this weekend. She didnt rule out the chance of ordering a complete lockdown earlier this week.

Olympic Delay Puts Pressure on Japan to Pick Up Spending Pace

The bleak economic outlook has increased pressure on the government to step in. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is expected to unveil a bold fiscal package next month as ideas of cash handouts and delaying corporate tax payments have been floated.

Tokyo accounts for around 19% of the nations economy, so lockdowns could have a profound impact on overall activity. Capital Economics estimated that it would reduce national output by 5% for as long as it lasted.
Ministers of the G7  the Group of 7 intergovernmental economic group including the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan  havent been able to issue a joint statement because the US insists on calling the coronavirus the Wuhan Virus.

The group was scheduled to meet in Pittsburgh this week, but cancelled its summit due to the coronavirus pandemic. Rather than cancel outright, the organisation planned to hold a four hour video conference on Wednesday, but US Secretary of State Mike Pompeos insistence on calling the coronavirus the Wuhan Virus caused issues for the group.

Germany newspaper Der Spiegel reported the other members of the G7 wanted to use the term Covid-19, which is the term the World Health Organisation uses.

Apparently discussion about the virus at-all has been an issue for the group. France suggested the organisation discuss the virus during its meeting, while Mr Pompeo refused. The State Department argued that heads of state had already discussed and dealt with the issue, so the organisation shouldnt make a statement.

He eventually gave in to pressure from the other ministers and agreed to discuss the virus, but then insisted it be called the Wuhan Virus.

Mr Pompeo did not deny the reports about the disagreement, and suggested the G7 didnt agree on everything.

His language is in line with President Donald Trumps frequent use of the phrase Chinese virus when talking about the coronavirus.

The virus originated in Wuhan, China and Chinese authorities have come under fire recently by the US over allegations that the government covered up cases of coronavirus during the early stages of the outbreak.

During the address, the G7 ministers discussed whether China used an intentional disinformation campaign to obfuscate its role in the worsening of the pandemic.

Mr Pompeo repeated claims that China concealed evidence of the virus, according to US News and World Report.

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Chinese officials have launched their own theories about the virus aimed at painting the US as a bad actor, claiming the virus was created in the US and brought to China.

Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs, built his theory on comments made by US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield that suggested some Americans who died of the flu early this year may have actually died from the coronavirus.

When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation, he wrote on Twitter.

The ministers suggestion that the US Army brought the virus to Wuhan is a reference to a popular conspiracy theory in China that infected US soldiers brought the virus with them last year while participating in the Military World Games, which was held in Wuhan. There is no evidence to support that theory.

Mr Pompeo said officials proposing the idea were crazy talking.

The Secretary of State claimed the Chinese were trying to paint themselves as a benevolent force by emphasising their dispersal of medical supplies to afflicted regions of the world.

But every one of the nations that was at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place here, he said.
26.03.2020 LISTEN

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. - Albert Camus

IT IS A SHAME. Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (K.M.A) must bow or hang its (or their) head in shame, instead of holding its (or their) head high in pride. No, not K.M.A alone, but also Ministry of Tourism or Ghana Tourist Authority; not Ministry of Tourism alone, but also the government's protocol staff all users of the road that passes through the Airport Roundabout in Kumasi.

The issue? The billboard depicting the 63rd Independence Day anniversary with the picture of the Asante King, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, and the President of the Republic of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo. The King, as usual elegantly attired with arm bands of gold, showing the abundant wealth of Asante, waving as if to tell Asantes: Thank you for accepting me as your King; just like my predecessors, I will never disappoint you. Then the picture of Nana Addo bedecked in lovely Kente cloth of variegated colours but with his left shoulder exposed; his wrist watch worn on the right hand, his two rings (engagement and wedding rings?) on the fourth right finger, with an infectious smile  a 'benkum ntoma'.

If Nana Addo were left-handed like the biblical Ehud, a Benjamite, we could pardon the way he had worn the cloth. Left-handed people numbering only about 10 per cent of the world's population may be pitied, because even Jesus said, rather metaphorically, sheep would be separated to the right and goats to the left. Left-handedness is associated with evil or darkness. Such people are usually called 'southpaws' and people can hardly detect that some of us are 'southpaws'.

But we know, or are supposed to know, that Nana Addo is 'ambidexterous'  able to do things well with both hands. (Those who are unable to use either hand well are called 'ambisinistrous'). And Nana Addo, despite his U.K. education, knows how to wear the cloth, exposing his right shoulder, and his watch and wedding/engagement rings at the left. So, how come the picture? We would want to believe it was the transposition of the photographic film when the picture was being processed.

Don't be surprised to learn that the people responsible for ensuring that the right thing is done with these billboards enjoy Daddy Lumba's song: 'Na nka be ye den na aye wo ya; woresu koraa na meye' no more In the same vicinity is the picture of Matthew Opoku Prempeh, the Honourable Minister of Education, kind at heart and eager to serve the people- dressed in a well -fitting coat (sui?).

We have nothing against the Mayor. As has been the custom of Kweku Baako, when he wants to criticize a colleague, we make bold to say: The Mayor is our friend but we would have wished he had taken some of these observations seriously. The other time we were commenting on the billboards on the funeral of Barima Akwasi Agyemang, and pointed out that it was not proper to write laying in state so boldly as if it was a correct form to depict a body which lies in state  a fixed idiomatic expression, we pointed out that the proper expression is lying in state because he is a 'big' man guarded by a guard of honour, unlike a lowly, simplistic villager whose body is said to be 'lying in repose'.

We do not want to believe that it is pride that has prevented the correction. If it is a question of pride, note what William Shakespeare says in 'Troillus and Cressida': He that is proud eats up himself; pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle. Jane Austen says in 'Pride and Prejudice': Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

In his book: 'Mind Your Language', Annor Nimako writes: A few years ago, during the period of military rule, a popular columnist saw the hoarding in front of the Military Academy and Training Schools. On it was: 'We train to defend Ghana by Land, Sea and Air even to the peril of our lives'. In unfailing good humour, he wrote in an article that he would correct the error even if it meant being invited to Burma Camp and drilled for his impertinence. He corrected it to read even at the peril of our lives. The authorities did not make any effort to have the error corrected. So a couple of years later, this writer drew attention to it again in an article. Happily, the hoarding was taken down in 2002. When it was brought back and remounted, the correction had been effected to read at the peril of our lives.

Readers may not be surprised to learn that the author of that article referred to by Annor Nimako was no less a person than I. K. Gyasi who had written for: 'The Ghanaian Times', 'The Ashanti Independent', 'The Mirror' and dished out snippets in 'Daily Graphic' and oversea newspapers like 'West Africa'. We are fascinated by the aphorism of Hippocrates; Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future and some us have sworn to do exactly that even at the peril of our lives. Hippocrates was the physician who wrote the aphorism: Vita brevis, ars longa (or Ars longa, vita brevis) (Life is short, and art is long). In full, the expression is: Vita brevis ars longa, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile (Life is short, and art is long, opportunity fleeting, experience perilous, and judgment difficult. Geoffrey Chaucer in The Assembly of Fowls re-phrased this: The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. Thus, arts which includes medicine (at that time of writing) has a long duration while life is short.

It was not for nothing that Hippocrates (460-370BC), the Father of Medicine, supplied us with the 'Hippocratic Oath', the oath of ethics historically taken by doctors: I swear by Apollo Physician, by Aesdepius, by Hygieia, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgement, this oath and this indenture. To hold my teacher in this art equal to my parents; to make him partner in my livelihood;  I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgement, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so Now if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain for ever a reputation among all men for my life and my art; but if I break it and forswear myself, the opposite befall me'. Of course, premum non nocere (First do no harm).

Among the many functions of the public and civil servants, as per the Civil Service Law, PNDC Law 32 are monitor, co-ordinate and evaluate government policies and plans. If ensuring that the right picture of the President is mounted is not part of the functions of the civil and public servants, then we shall rather bow our heads in shame.

We do not have diffidence (shyness, because of lack of self-confidence) nor conceitedness (false pride, narcissism) in our DNA, and some will say: we don't fear huu!

africanusowusu1234.com

By Africanus Owusu-Ansah
The Australian man accused of carrying out New Zealand's worst mass shooting in history pleaded guilty to 51 charges of murder in a surprising move on Thursday (March 26).

Brenton Tarrant has been in police custody since March 15 of last year, when he was arrested and accused of using semi-automatic weapons to target Muslims attending Friday prayers at two Christchurch mosques.

On Thursday Tarrant admitted to 40 charges of attempted murder and one charge of terrorism.

Tarrant had previously pleaded not guilty but he switched his plea unexpectedly.

That change now renders the six-week trial that was due to begin in June redundant, and the court will instead move directly to sentencing Tarrant on all 92 charges.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who has stuck by a pledge not to name the gunman in public, said she was relieved to hear the news.

(SOUNDBITE) (English) NEW ZEALAND PRIME MINISTER JACINDA ARDERN, SAYING:

"The guilty plea today will provide some relief to the many people whose lives were shattered by what happened on March 15."

Tarrant, who faces a lifetime prison sentence, had posted a social media manifesto ahead of the attacks referring to "white genocide" a term used by white supremacists to describe the growth of minority populations.

Tarrant's lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
Well, the debates out there now, thanks to Trump. Will the cure  shuttering the economy  be worse than the disease, COVID-19? Turns out its an old debate in new garb.

For example, a Canadian economist once claimed that smoking is an economic boon because early cancer deaths reduce overall medical costs. Its arisen now because most governments have reflexively (and IMO surprisingly) chosen to prioritize saving lives at the cost of stifling the economy.

Let me propose another way of viewing this grisly debate. Does the economy exist to serve people or vice versa?

This eliminates the issue of trade-offs. If you choose option 1, you pursue it, closing the economy till the plague passes, or settles into normal patterns, like the flu, which can be handled in normal ways (vaccine, built-up immunity) instead of people bringing out their dead as they did of old.

Another angle: Choose the economy, and  consequently  people die, theyre gone forever. Choose people, and the economy doesnt die. It gets mothballed, put into a coma, to be revived. People die. Economies, which arent alive, can be put on hold, then come roaring back.

Everything will still exist afterward: skills, labour force, demand, plant. Because the economy isnt a living being, you can tuck it away awhile.

In that case, the economy gets subordinated to human well-being. Rent, mortgages, debt are forgiven or delayed though money must still be found for repairs etc. Only governments can finance these dislocations. Private businesses cant because theyre under constraints like competition.

Where will government find the money? I leave this to finer minds but there are answers, along with counterclaims that they dont work. May those disputes persist forever. Governments always find the money when theres a war to fight.

They print it or issue bonds. When the bill comes due they either owe it effectively to themselves or pay bondholders, which are largely pension funds, so its all good. At the moment they dont seem worried.

This choice  for the people  is arduous yet seemed to come easily. Maybe it springs from a deep sense of what being human is: creatures whose existence has meaning only in relation to others. In the past when such choices arose, like the Spanish flu in 1918, the options available were different and the choices mayve seemed inevitable, lacking todays deliberative quality.

A remarkable thing about this debate, or nondebate since leaders have overwhelmingly opted for the people choice, is the range represented. Canadian right wing austerity buffs like Jason Kenney, Francois Legault and Doug Ford leapt in enthusiastically, alongside Justin Trudeau.

Not so the federal Tories, who balked at this weeks emergency bill supposedly on democratic grounds, though below the surface, austerity lingo lurked. But theyre in opposition and dont bear the burden of actual decision. It turns out ideology mightnt be as deeply imprinted as some (guilty mlord) thought. This revelation is as clarifying as the sudden clearing of murky waters in Venice so that suddenly, without tourists and traffic, citizens can see the fish again.

Responses have also been impressive elsewhere. Wasnt China supposed to be a callous, top-down society where, if the fingers infected, they dont hesitate to cut off the hand? Yet they acted in Wuhan to save lives, built hospitals, quarantined  if only GDP mattered, they mightve locked it tight and let victims die.

Even Boris Johnson signed on, though tardily. Its only the U.S. where the debate is bubbling  though if you look at New York, theres no real debate aside from one in Trumps head. If they do next to nothing, as they have so far, itll be such a wasteland they wont have opted for life or the economy: theyll have chosen door three: neither.

Is this socialism? Its more like Marxs primitive communism, where the community took responsibility for everyones basic needs. Keynesianism? No, since it doesnt spur demand but throttles it  though it does require vigorous government intervention.

And its only for the duration: a noble, if short-lived government centrality. Normal will return. One wonders if people like those right wing premiers, might by then have acquired a taste for another kind of public action than theyre accustomed to.
Journalist are reflected on the glass of a room near a board showing the products of the Mengniu dairy factory in Beijing on Feb. 27, 2020. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

S Murlidharan

Prime Minister Narendra Modi exhorted industrialists to keep the wheels of production of essential commodities going as usual, notwithstanding the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown to prevent its spread.

At first blush, this may sound contradictory, given the fact that a number of factory workers may have to be exempted from confinement at home, in addition to healthcare professionals and support staff, bankers, skeletal government staff, petrol pump and restaurant employees and grocer shops, to name a few.

There may also be questions about what exactly are essential goods. While cars, computers and textiles may not fit the bill, there can be doubts about truck body building shops and soft-drink factories. Indeed, there can be grey areas galore  but its not an insurmountable problem.

Yet, what the PM is worried about is genuine and should worry every one of us. Already, large pockets of the affected states in the United States, namely New York and California, are experiencing shortage of medical supplies  thanks to the unprecedented demand for hospital beds, consumables, ventilators and masks. A similar or worse situation can arise in India if we do not keep our production lines going uninterrupted.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

The need for balancing the lockdown with keeping the supply chain going can be highlighted as follows:

Imports are not a promising option, especially in a milieu of international air and shipping traffic coming to a standstill as well as the reluctance of nation states to export in view of their own growing need to conserve whatever is available.

The needs of the medical and paramedical community must be met fully. Already, there are reports of huge shortage of coveralls and other safety gears, including masks. A section of doctors has given dark hints that they will strike work should their safety concerns not be addressed immediately. The news that an on-duty doctor at the King George Medical College in Lucknow being infected with COVID-19 raises an alarm. Before you put on the oxygen masks of your fellow passengers, put on yours first is the advice given by the cabin crew before a flight takes off. In a pandemic, the medical personnel must similarly ensure they do not get infected before ensuring their patients are not infected or if infected are treated.

Essential goods, including food, medicines, vegetables and fruits must be made available in neighbourhood stores. To keep these stores stocked, the supply chains must go on as usual.

Work from home is not an option for everyone, especially if the work demands physical presence. Like Modi hinted, those working at the production lines indeed have to stir out to their factories. Robots manning production lines are not an idea that is far-fetched, but to ramp up our factories for robots at short notice is unthinkable and unworkable.

To ensure that our supply chain production is not disrupted due to the nation-wide lockdown, here are a few suggestions:

Let government and private buses be pressed into service by factory owners in co-operation with the local administration to ferry workers to factories and back home. The buses need to be sanitised regularly as indeed the factories.

To such production facilities car pools must be encouraged so that executives and supervisors can travel without much ado. Special passes must be provided in such cases.

Hotels near factories, which are in any case going without business, must be opened to house factory workers so that they do not have to travel long distance.

Local rickshaw-pullers, construction and factory workers laid off by the lockout should be allowed to work as temporary workers to fill the void left by the regular workers.

The local administration and factory owners must think of one or more of such fleet-footed responses so that production lines are not shut down. Otherwise, there is an imminent danger of lurching from one crisis to another  from a pandemic to a shortage of essential commodities, even malnutrition.

In addition, the government would be spared of the burden of doling out more relief measures, including cash transfers, especially at a time when the government finances are in a precarious state. Workers, too, would have the satisfaction that they have contributed to the nation in the hour of crisis.
Big change: Sean Condon from Fanningstown, Crecora, Co Limerick made the switch to organic farming in 2005

Fifteen years ago, dairy farmer Sean Condon realised he had to make some changes if he wanted to stay afloat.

With about ten years left of the milk quota system, he took a step back to evaluate his set-up, and he knew he had to do something drastic.

Doubling the number of cows he was milking for a similar income was not a prospect he relished. His family were young and he wanted a life/work balance so he decided to move to once-a-day milking (OAD).

Sean, from Fanningstown, Crecora, Co Limerick, had always had an interest in organic farming; he looked at it seriously and decided to also make the transition to organic dairy production.

Certified by the Irish Organic Association, he obtained his full organic symbol in 2007.

Dairy breeds and replacements

The dairy herd are a mixture of breeds including Friesian, Jersey and Norwegian Reds. He uses an AI Aberdeen Angus bull. The average herd EBI is 130, compared to the national average of 106.

Sean is currently milking 65 cows and has an average livestock unit of 1.3/ha. He owns 40ha and rents an additional 19ha; of this 59ha the milking platform is 36ha.

"The replacement rates are lower in OAD milking as there is not as much pressure on the cows., I think that working in this way actually gives an extra lactation and I average seven lactations per cow," he says.

One of the breeding priorities for organic dairy farmers is to get heifers in calf at a suitable age, and Sean performs well with 85pc of his heifers calved at 22-26 months compared to the national average of 70pc.

Spring calving

For many dairy farmers milking through the winter months is not appealing, yet the consumer wants milk 365 days a year so continuity of supply is a necessity.

On Sean's farm the emphasis is on producing as much milk as possible from forage, and winter milking challenges this system as feeding meal is required during the winter months to supplement forage.

In 2012 Sean and a number of other dairy farmers started the Little Milk Company and he switched back to spring milk production and still received a premium for his milk.

"I operate a low-input system here that does not rely on importing expensive feed due to the environmental impacts associated with that," he explains.

"My aim is to produce milk from what I grow on the farm, and while this means lower yields, that is something that I am fine with as it is all about inputs and outputs and attempting to achieve a balance in that system."

Grazing and silage management

Sean has re-seeded 75pc of the farm over the past ten years with both red and white clover and perennial ryegrass.

Approximately 36ha are in the grazing platform and as cows calve in March they are moved outdoors to graze. The paddocks are between 1-1ha and are rotated throughout the grazing season.

He spreads slurry from the overwintering animals on the grazing ground as early as possible in the year, and all the farmyard manure is spread on the silage ground, of approximately 14ha.

Weather depending the silage is cut in early June and early July and yields on average 7-9 bales an acre.

In addition, Sean brings in 250-300 round bales of straw per year from a conventional source for bedding in the housing period.

"Straw is very important, and it has a dual purpose as a fertiliser and for bedding," he says. "In particular it is a source of potassium, which is essential for good silage production. I would certainly have mined nutrients over the past 13 years if I had not been using straw.

"During the winter I bed the animals every second day, which is not particularly labour-intensive.

Animal health management

The farm is not intensively stocked and in general there are few health issues. Like all organic farmers Sean must have an Animal Health Plan to outline his preventative health approach for the dairy herd and what steps will be taken when problems arise.

"I was never one for bottles and needles anyway so reducing the veterinary inputs when I went organic was not a concern," Sean says. "I used to vaccinate for leptospirosis and scour in calves but I stopped all that in 2006 and things have worked out fine.

"Obviously if issues arise you can use veterinary inputs and then increase your withdrawal periods. However, generally I have good animal health with the closed system that I operate."

Milk outlets

Sean has three outlets for his milk products: the Little Milk Company, who make a range of cheeses; the Natural Milk Company; and a local organic farmer rearing beef cattle. The milk sold to the Little Milk Company is paid based on constituents and not volume, which Sean feels is a good way to pay.

He sells raw milk under his own brand Temple Roe Farm to the Urban Co-op in Limerick and to the Natural Milk Company.

"I am adjusting my calving system to calve down some cows in the autumn to enable continuity of supply for my raw milk markets," he says. "I undergo testing twice monthly to check for pathogens and bacteria as hygiene is hugely important when supplying raw milk.

"In addition, I carry out stringent testing for listeria, which enables me to use a longer shelf life of one week on the product.

"There is a specific market for this product but overall there is a growing demand for all organic dairy products, which is something farmers need to look at - and seriously consider making the switch to organic production."





Lingering in the denial phase is not good enough - climate emergency is not going away

While Covid-19 presents unprecedented challenges for everyone, the farming community is also faced with the climate crisis, writes Grace Maher.

Increased flooding, droughts and crop failures are predicted to become the norm. Agriculture is a significant contributor to climate change yet it is also one of the first sectors to suffer when climate extremes occur.

The agricultural industry needs to rise to the climate challenge and adopt climate-friendly farming techniques at production level - and this must be carried through to processing and distribution.

The EU definition of organic production will change slightly in new regulations which come into force in January 2021 to give recognition of its climate change attributes.

The regulations state: "Organic production combines best environmental and climate action practices, a high level of biodiversity, the preservation of natural resources and the application of high animal welfare standards and high production standards"

Danone own Horizon Organic, who are based in the US. Horizon milk comes from more than 600 organic family farms across 22 US states; the average herd size is 90 cows. Recently Danone announced that Horizon Organic milk has committed to be carbon-positive across its supply chain in the next five years.

Horizon is the world's largest certified organic dairy brand, and by using innovative technologies they are taking on the difficult challenge of making dairy production climate-friendly.

We need to see more action like this taken by all stakeholders in agriculture, and lingering in the 'denial phase', to borrow a term from the Corona Virus pandemic, is simply not good enough: the climate emergency is not going away.

Grace Maher is development officer with the Irish Organic Association, grace.maher@irishoa.ie
Passengers from Germany arrive at the Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, Thursday. All passengers from the U.S. and Europe should undergo COVID-19 tests. /Yonhap



By Bahk Eun-ji



All passengers arriving from overseas should be placed under a mandatory two-week self-quarantine regardless of their place of departure as Korea has seen the number of "imported" coronavirus infections soar over the past week, according to medical experts, Thursday.



The government has already implemented measures for the coronavirus tests on all arrivals from Europe, and those from the United States who show symptoms beginning Friday while it has kept travel restrictions at minimal levels.



The strengthened measures came as the country has been observing an increasing number of COVID-19 cases among people coming from abroad despite a gradual decline in domestic numbers.



Doctors have strongly warned that all arrivals from overseas should be under stricter monitoring and quarantine measures to contain any possibility of a further spread of the virus.



"No country in the world is safe from the coronavirus. All passengers from abroad, regardless of their departure points and their symptoms should self-quarantine for two weeks," said Eom Jung-sik, a professor at Gil Medical Center.



According to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), 104 new infections were confirmed Wednesday, bringing the nation's total to 9,241. Among them, 39, or 37.5 percent, were considered to be imported infections.



Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province, the nation's two worst-affected regions, reported 26 and 12 new cases, respectively. Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province, which surrounds the capital, saw their infections rise by 28 to 804, Wednesday.



The KCDC confirmed one more death from the virus Thursday, raising the toll to 132.



The authorities said foreigners who enter the country must download a self-check mobile application to regularly report on the state of their health online. If a foreigner does not download the app, they will not be allowed to enter the country, the KCDC said.



In addition, foreigners who do not follow the self-quarantine rule without giving proper cause will be immediately deported.



"The quarantine measure is a legal enforcement. Foreigners who leave their quarantine place without notification will immediately be deported," said Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun during a press briefing at the Government Complex in Seoul.



Chung said the country is in an urgent situation and must implement stricter quarantine measures as part of a zero-tolerance policy. It will be implemented for both Koreans and foreigners who leave their home during a self-quarantine period, and police officers will be immediately dispatched to their location.



Meanwhile, the Seoul Metropolitan Government said it has canceled the permit for a foundation associated with the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, which has been under fire for the rapid spread of the infectious virus in the country. The religious sect, estimated to have more than 200,000 followers, is accused of hiding information that could have helped contain the pandemic. The group is linked to more than 50 percent of the country's confirmed patients.



"The religious group significantly damaged public health by prioritizing its own interest in the situation where a contagious virus put many people in the country at risk," said Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon in a separate briefing.



Park also said the religious sect caused unnecessary expense and hindered government efforts to contain the virus outbreak by providing false information and ordering its followers to lie to the health authorities.


Radio star Andy Lee has revealed he is doing everything he can to ensure health precautions are taken amid the recent COVID-19 outbreak.

And on Thursday, the 39-year-old shared a photo of himself having his temperature checked, in order to plant a kiss on his girlfriend's cheek.

'Checking my temp before giving Bec a kiss,' he wrote alongside the photo.

Safety first! Comedian Andy Lee (pictured) shared a selfie checking his temperature before he planned to give his girlfriend Rebecca Harding a kiss on Thursday

After revealing that he was clear, Andy joked: '... She wants a second opinion.'

The comedian-turned-author then told his followers: 'Please self isolate my Insta buddies - Australia is relying on us all'.

In the photo the radio personality is seen holding a temperature gun to his forehead, while he looked into the camera.

Public service announcement: The comedian-turned-author then told his followers: 'Please self isolate my Insta buddies - Australia is relying on us all'. Pictured with Rebecca Harding

Australians have been advised by the Australian government to only leave the house when necessary amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Andy has been in a relationship with his on-off girlfriend Rebecca Harding for close to five years.

Andy and Rebecca met in 2015 at a Melbourne cafe where Rebecca was working as a waitress.

Funny: After revealing that he was clear, Andy then joked: '...She wants a second opinion'

In July last year, Rebecca addressed talk that the couple were getting engaged.

'[I've had] a lot of people ask lately, but no,' Rebecca said at the time. 'We are just loving how life is right now.'

Meanwhile, coronavirus (COVID-19) is a respiratory illness accompanied by fever, coughing, sore throat, shortness of breath and fatigue. It can produce pneumonia.

The spread of the disease, which began in Wuhan, China, has seen over 472,760 cases worldwide and more than 21,306 fatalities.

As of Thursday evening, there are 2,725 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia, including 12 deaths.
Marissa Carollo is 29 weeks pregnant with identical twins, two baby girls.

"Having twins is stressful enough," Carollo said. "Adding in the coronavirus with it is even more stress for me."

This is her second pregnancy. She has a 15-month-old son, A.J.

But this time around is much different. She is hoping her husband will be allowed to be there when she gives birth.

"Not having my husband with me is a fear just because I'm having twins it's a high risk pregnancy," Carollo said. "Just the emotional support he gave me last time, I want him there this time."

Carollo plans to give birth at Rome Memorial Hospital. She is concerned because some New York City hospitals have banned all visitors in the delivery room. Rome Memorial Hospital hasn't, they're allowing one support person in the delivery room upon passing a health screening.

You just never know if it's going to get worse and they're not going to let anybody in there by the time I deliver," Carollo said.

She is due June 8, but she says with twins, it could be earlier.

"With identical twins you don't usually go past 37 weeks so sometime in May," Carollo said.

There are other concerns that have crossed her mind, like keeping all three of her children safe.

"I have a 15-month-old so I wouldn't want him to catch anything obviously," Carollo said. "Also too, when I deliver the babies, how do I keep them safe in the hospital, and going forward with this virus that's spreading around."

Carollo has been talking with her doctors who are guiding her through this process.

"They have great, they have provided great moral support to me and just helping me to relax more and telling me it's going to be okay," Carollo said.

She says she just wants to do what is best for her family.

"If I can't have him there, I have to do what I have to do for the health of my babies," Carollo said. "It's a disappointment, you can't be around the people you love around an exciting time."

While gatherings with friends and families have been put on hold, Carollo is looking forward to many celebrations still to come.
Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, the Minister of Education, has appealed to telecos operating in the country to zero-rate educational materials.



He said the zero-rating of educational materials by the telecos, would enable distance learning content to be provided for students for free in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak in the country.



Speaking at the Meet the Press Series in Accra, Dr Opoku Prempeh said, he was hopeful that through the support of the Ministry of Communication, they would get all telecos companies to zero rate content delivery in education; so that Ghanaian students could participate.



He noted that the programme was very much dependent on collaboration between the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Communication.



We also hope, through the Ministry of Information; radio stations and TV stations will see the national agency in participating in their quota to ensure that educational content is delivered, he said.



Dr Opoku Prempeh said some TV stations had informed his outfit that they were having 24-hour channels and that they would turn them up for educational content; stating that and we need more.



We need free to air broadcast so that everybody, everywhere in the country; as soon as there is a TV you can get access to that, he said.



Likewise we want to implore radio stations to help as much as they can. To me, broadcast, when we start (will have) periods in kindergarten, periods in lower primary, periods in upper primary, periods in junior high school and senior high school.



Dr Opoku Prempeh said the Centre for Distance Learning Organisations had developed an online programme for the course contents in the Senior High School and was ready to go.



He said it had already even given every senior high school student password and access to an icampus system; where on the icampus system they have notes with exercises, over 20,000 interactive quizzes, audiovisual learning including virtual laboratories.



Others are interactive lessons and over three thousand sets of notes and audiovisual resources form opened educational resources.



The Minister said these materials were already available to every senior high school student who accesses with his password on icampus and was available for free.



He said one of the reasons why they wanted the Ministry of Communication to come in, was that in certain parts of the country it was only one telecos network, which was predominantly; however, when they got all the networks to buy into it and zero rate it for them, they could be sure for all senior high school students it was available for them.



For the junior high school students, we have an institution that is already broadcasting it in the junior high school and upper primary in parts of Eastern Region and Volta Region; that have made their studios available for us to develop the content and also broadcast it.



He said the group prime international had made available five studios for them so that they could bring in more teachers to help them deliver the core subjects content area.



He mentioned that collaborating with non-state actors included Scholastic, Plan International, Edumundo, and development partners and other telecommunication networks that had spoken to.

Source: GNA









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Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - Talon Metals Corp. (TSX: TLO) ("Talon" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has filed a final short form base shelf prospectus (the "Prospectus") with the securities regulatory authorities in each of the provinces of Canada, other than the province of Quebec.

"Recent worldwide events should be a strong reminder that market conditions can change rapidly", said Sean Werger, President of Talon. "Over the next 25 months, the base shelf prospectus will provide Talon with the flexibility to close on capital raisings quickly in tranches, when access to capital is available on reasonable terms".

Pursuant to the Prospectus, Talon may issue common shares, debt securities, subscription receipts or warrants or any combination of such securities as units (the "Securities"), in amounts, at prices, and on terms to be determined based on market conditions at the time of sale and set forth in an accompanying prospectus supplement, for an aggregate offering amount of up to C$40 million during the 25-month period that the Prospectus remains effective.

Talon filed the Prospectus to give it flexibility to take advantage of financing opportunities as they may arise and as the Company deems appropriate, subject to market conditions and other relevant factors. There is no certainty that any Securities will be offered or sold under the Prospectus within the 25-month period.

The Securities have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements. This news release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the Securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

About Talon

Talon is a TSX-listed base metals company in a joint venture with Rio Tinto on the high-grade Tamarack Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Project located in Minnesota, USA, comprised of the Tamarack North Project and the Tamarack South Project. Talon has an earn-in to acquire up to 60% of the Tamarack Project. The Tamarack Project comprises a large land position (18km of strike length) with numerous high-grade intercepts outside the current resource area. Talon is focused on expanding its current high-grade nickel mineralization resource prepared in accordance with NI 43-101; identifying additional high-grade nickel mineralization; and developing a process to potentially produce nickel sulphates responsibly for batteries for the electric vehicles industry. Talon has a well-qualified exploration and mine management team with extensive experience in project management.

For additional information on Talon, please visit the Company's website at www.talonmetals.com or contact:

Sean Werger

President

Talon Metals Corp.

Tel: (416) 361-9636 x102

Email: werger@talonmetals.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains certain "forward-looking statements". All statements, other than statements of historical fact that address activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements reflect the current expectations or beliefs of the Company based on information currently available to the Company. Such forward-looking statements include expectations with respect to the future offerings of Securities. Forward-looking statements are subject to significant risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements, and even if such actual results are realized or substantially realized, there can be no assurance that they will have the expected consequences to, or effects on the Company.

Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/53846
Vijay, the Thalapathy of Tamil cinema was supposed to release his much-awaited project Master, this April. But the release of Master has been pushed indefinitely due to the all India lockdown which has been observed to prevent COVID 19. Interestingly, Vijay is now practicing social distancing with the Master team.

Recently, Malavika Mohanan, the leading lady of the project shared the picture of a group video chat including Vijay, music director Anirudh Ravichander, and producer Jagadish, on her official social media pages. Malavika revealed that the Master team is observing social distancing and has been using video chat facility to connect with each other.

Problems will come and go..konjam chill panu maapi!  How we hang out when we cant really hang out 

Team Master is social-distancing. Are you? @actorvijay @anirudhofficial @Jagadishbliss pic.twitter.com/OiUelLDUi1  malavika mohanan (@MalavikaM_) March 26, 2020

The pretty actress shared the picture with a special caption, that includes the lines of 'Kutti Story' the viral song from Master. 'Problems will come and go..konjam chill panu maapi!  How we hang out when we can't really hang out  Team 'Master' is social-distancing. Are you? @actorvijay @anirudhofficial @Jagadishbliss', wrote Malavika Mohanan on her post.

Malavika Mohanan's post has already taken social media by storm, and the netizens are heaping praises over the Master team for promoting social distancing. However, a group of audiences is upset about the fact that Vijay Sethupathi, the actor who appears as the lead antagonist in the project, and director Lokesh Kanagaraj are missing in the picture.

The release of Master might get postponed to June 2020, since the countries like the USA have opted for a complete theater shut down for the next 6 to 12 weeks. The makers decided to push the release because of the absence of overseas releasing centers, which will definitely affect the box office collections of the movie.

Master, which is said to be an out and out action thriller, marks Vijay's first onscreen collaboration with Vijay Sethupathi and director Lokesh Kanagaraj. The project is produced by Xavier Britto, under the banner XB Creations.

Also Read:

Master Trailer: Reason Why Makers Of The Vijay Starrer Didn't Release The Trailer on 25th March!
VAUGHAN, ON, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/  CannTrust Holdings Inc. ("CannTrust" or the "Company", TSX: TRST,NYSE: CTST) today provided a status update in accordance with its obligations under the alternative information guidelines set out in National Policy 12-203  Management Cease Trade Orders ("NP 12-203"), which require the Company to provide bi-weekly updates until such time as the Company is current with its filing obligations under Canadian securities laws. As previously announced, the Company is subject to a management cease trade order ("MCTO") issued by the Ontario Securities Commission. The MCTO prohibits the directors and executive officers of the Company from trading in or acquiring securities of the Company until two full business days after the Company files an interim financial report for the three and six month periods ended June 30, 2019, an interim management's discussion and analysis for the corresponding period and certifications of interim filings. The MCTO does not affect the ability of investors who are not insiders to trade in the Company's securities.

CannTrust remains in default of its disclosure obligations under securities legislation, has no meaningful revenues, has terminated or laid-off a significant portion of its workforce, is facing a variety of regulatory investigations, and has significant contingent liabilities in both Canada and the United States, including for potential civil damages and potential criminal, quasi-criminal or administrative penalties and fines, which cannot be reasonably quantified.

As of March 20, 2020, CannTrust had a cash balance of approximately $145 million. CannTrust and its Board of Directors continue to monitor the Company's cash balance and other factors carefully to, among other things, assess various strategic alternatives while pursuing the Company's remediation work. CannTrust reiterated that the nature, timing, and outcome of the Board of Directors' ongoing strategic review process will be influenced by, among other things, the Company's ability to extend or renew insurance coverage on acceptable terms, whether or when Health Canada reinstates the Company's licenses, how long it will take to restore operations and expectations regarding the resolution of the Company's contingent liabilities, and potential civil, criminal, quasi-criminal, administrative and regulatory actions in both Canada and the United States. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic could adversely affect the completion of the Company's remediation plan for its Vaughan facility and Health Canada's consideration of the adequacy of CannTrust's submissions for reinstatement of the Company's license for its Niagara facility. Ultimately, any decision to reinstate the Company's licenses, and the timing and conditions of any such reinstatement, will rest solely with Health Canada. No assurance can be given that Health Canada will reinstate the Company's licenses at either its Niagara or Vaughan Facilities.

As previously announced, the Toronto Stock Exchange has advised CannTrust that a meeting of its Listings Committee will be held on April 14, 2020 to consider whether to delist the Company's securities.

CannTrust further noted that:

(i) Other than as disclosed above, there have been no material changes to the information contained in the Company's August 16, 2019 news release, August 29, 2019 news release, September 12, 2019 news release, September 26, 2019 news release, October 10, 2019 news release, October 24, 2019 news release, November 7, 2019 news release, November 21, 2019 news release, December 5, 2019 news release, December 19, 2019 news release, January 2, 2020 news release, January 16, 2020 news release, January 30, 2020 news release, February 13, 2020 news release, February 27, 2020 news release, and March 12, 2020 news release;



(ii) The Company intends to continue to comply with the alternative information guidelines of NP 12-203; and,



(iii) Except as previously disclosed, there are no subsequent specified defaults (actual or anticipated) within the meaning of NP 12-203.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian Securities laws and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other applicable United States safe harbor laws, and such statements are based upon CannTrust's current internal expectations, estimates, projections, assumptions and beliefs and views of future events. Forward-looking information and forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "believes", "expect", "likely", "may", "will", "should", "intend", "anticipate", "potential", "proposed", "estimate" and other similar words, including negative and grammatical variations thereof, or statements that certain events or conditions "may", "would" or "will" happen, or by discussions of strategy.

The forward-looking information and statements in this news release include statements relating to the corrective actions being taken by the Company, and Health Canada's pending determinations. Forward-looking information and statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks, including, without limitation: actions taken in respect of the Company's products by its customers and regulators; results of Health Canada's investigation, including orders and compliance measures required by Health Canada and their impact on the operations, inventory, assets and financial condition of the Company; the Company's implementation of remediation plans and related actions; regulatory approval; the outcome of the Company's contingent liabilities; the impact of potential regulatory investigations; the Company's review of strategic alternatives; risks associated with general economic conditions; adverse industry events; loss of markets; future legislative and regulatory developments in Canada, the United States and elsewhere; the cannabis industry in Canada generally; and, the ability of CannTrust to implement its business strategies.

Any forward-looking information and statements speak only as of the date on which they are made, and, except as required by law, CannTrust does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information or statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for CannTrust to predict all such factors. When considering these forward-looking information and statements, readers should keep in mind the risk factors and other cautionary statements in CannTrust's Annual Information Form dated March 28, 2019 (the "AIF") and filed with the applicable Canadian securities regulatory authorities on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and filed as an exhibit CannTrust's Form 40-F annual report under the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on EDGAR at www.sec.gov (the "March 2019 Form 40-F"). The risk factors and other factors noted in the AIF could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those described in any forward-looking information or statements. Readers are also reminded that CannTrust remains in default of its periodic disclosure requirements under applicable securities laws and stock exchange requirements, that its most recent AIF, Form 40-F and other disclosures do not reflect all risk factors that currently face the Company, and that the Company has not completed or filed the restatements of the financial statements included in the AIF or the March 2019 Form 40-F or otherwise filed an amendment to such Form 40-F.

The TSX and NYSE do not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE CannTrust Holdings Inc.

Related Links

https://www.canntrust.ca/


Philadelphia Medical Reserve Corps volunteer and nurse Stephen Bonett (left) gives hand sanitizer to fellow nurse Marina Spitkovskaya at the city's coronavirus testing site next to Citizens Bank Park last week. Read more

Just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, many U.S. physicians feel that they are at war. War metaphors are now being invoked across the country. The president of the United States even declared himself a wartime leader. Media outlets now make regular reference to physicians as front-line soldiers who go into battle on a daily basis.

As practicing physicians just out of training  physicians who have never practiced in war or during a pandemic  it is easy to picture ourselves as warriors, donning whatever equipment we can and taking a deep breath before we enter the hospital and clinic.

But unlike traditional wars, this battle extends outside of the battlefield. These soldiers do not sleep in trenches; they return home each night. Their babies need to nurse. Their partners may be soldiers who also need relief.

Each trip home requires a renewed commitment to containment  to isolate their families from the disease that they have spent the day fighting. Sometimes, it is easiest to isolate themselves. Anything to avoid exposing their families to the invisible enemy they are fighting and may have even contracted. Yet they continue to fight, because thats what they signed up to do. It is their solemn duty, an oath they took with their fellow soldiers. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

But unlike the U.S. military, many of us are going to battle without appropriate armor or ammunition. We want to help. But we never signed up to die.

Frontline healthcare workers include the physicians, nurses, emergency responders, respiratory therapists, and other staff that will take care of the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands who will be affected by COVID-19. The battleground is our communities, hospitals, clinics  and, unexpectedly, our homes.

We are terrified to work in facilities that lack the environmental controls and personal protective equipment (PPE) needed to protect us and our babies, parents, and sick family members and patients. What if we bring the virus home?

When it comes to PPE, we are witnessing a national shortage, a great deal of intrahospital rationing, and repeated violations of do no harm  to ourselves and families. For reasons that remain unclear, physicians have suffered a higher death rate than the general population in countries ravaged by COVID-19. In the face of these developments, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released guidance stating that as a last resort doctors might protect their faces with bandanas.

This official statement has been interpreted in physician circles as a quiet surrender. The country may not beat this virus, and healthcare workers may not be protected in this defeat. And if we fall sick to the illness  or worse? Weve been coerced by a new hidden curriculum, compelled to adopt a soldiers mentality that dying on the battlefield is better than being labelled a deserter.

Yet there is a belief in each person who chooses to be a doctor that the fortitude that guided us through training will lift us and our patients out of this war.

Just as soldiers have advocated for appropriate military equipment, we can advocate for appropriate PPE. We can draw precedent from wartime efforts.

From February 1942 to October 1945, Franklin Roosevelt stopped production of cars, trucks, and auto parts by executive order through the War Production Board. Overnight, for the sake of the war effort, an entire industry was repurposed to conserve industrial materials and promote mass production of military transportation, weapons, and combat armor.

Federal leaders today are encouraging but not requiring capable manufacturers to produce PPE for medical personnel. This strategy is unlikely to achieve the target goal of producing 3.5 billion masks a year during pandemics like this one, and would be essentially impossible to do in time to deal with the incidence expected by the summer of 2020.

We as physicians and health care workers should partner with our patients in a broad education campaign about the necessity for PPE, and the sacrifices we may have to make to ensure adequate supplies.

A cooperative effort might also help restore the trust between patients and physicians, which has eroded over the last several decades with the commodification of health care.

Initial strategies may include:

Applying lessons from successful public health campaigns for screening mammograms and influenza vaccinations, to cultivate widespread and lasting support for PPE production and adherence.

Continue to share stories with patients and media, about how lack of PPE will exacerbate community transmission of COVID-19.

Encourage patients to call their lawmakers to emphasize that PPE ranks among their top concerns in the upcoming elections.

Explain to patients during every visit that PPE for physicians and health professionals protects everyone in the community, akin to vaccines.

Imperial College London recently published an analysis indicating that the war on COVID-19 will last 18 months, maybe more. So what happens in long wars? Citizens rally around the soldiers. We now need our patients as much as they need us.

As early career physicians, we worry that many of our colleagues  strapped by student loans and the costs of starting a practice  may exit the profession far too early. We need our patients to hold policymakers accountable for lessons already learned from the COVID-19 crisis. And most importantly, we need them to advocate for wartime production of PPE.

Otherwise, the scars of this war will mark us for the rest of our careers in medicine.

Fatima Syed is an internist in Durham, N.C.; Deep Shah is a community primary care physician in metro Atlanta; Ravi Parikh is a medical oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania and Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center.
On March 25, as news filtered in of Chef Floyd Cardozs tragic death due to COVID-19, it left the Indian and American culinary worlds reeling.

Chef Cardoz was the genius brain behind iconic restaurants  The Bombay Canteen (TBC) and O Pedro in Mumbai, Tabla and Paowala in the US. Known as one of the leading lights of India Modern cuisine, his imaginative blend of regional Indian cuisine, home recipes and indigenous ingredients and spices helped focus spotlight on dishes that no one had ever heard of outside a specific region. Delicacies such as Gharbandi Bhakri Taquito, Moras Bhaji Falafel, soft-shell crab and Phodshi.

A multiple James Beard Award nominee for his three Michelin-starred restaurant Tabla, Chef Cardoz went to culinary school in Mumbai before studying at the Global Hospitality Management School at Les Roches in Switzerland. He competed on Top Chef, won Top Chef Masters, and authored two cookbooks, Once Spice, Two Spice and Flavorwalla. In 2008, he launched a line of ready-to-cook entrees in collaboration with the online grocer Fresh Direct in the US.

But it was for his restaurants  Tabla in New York, The Bombay Canteen in central Mumbai and O Pedro in BKC for which he was most known. The Mumbai restaurants are often rated among Indias best-known restaurants on several lists, including The World Best Restaurants list.

Related stories

Five years ago, Chef Cardoz got together with Mumbai-based Sameer Seth and Yash Bhanage, friends and Cornell University graduates, to set up a restaurant that would redefine how Indian food is cooked and served. Chef Cardoz had already enjoyed success in New York with his restaurant Tabla, which adopted a novel approach to Indian food. He was a partner in The Bombay Canteen, O Pedro and Bombay Sweet Shop which is what brought him to Mumbai in March this year.

Ammini's Duck Curry at The Bombay Canteen.

Seth, who met him in New York, has said, We were looking to fill the gap that existed between traditional Indian cuisine and contemporary or modern cuisine and Chef Cardozs vision fitted right in.

Bombay Canteen celebrated wholesome Indian cooking, using Indian ingredients and spices that were either confined to home cooking in different parts of India.

In his interviews to me, Chef Cardoz has often said that he wanted to rediscover and reinvent regional Indian food in new ways. So when Seth approached him, he was more than game. He spent almost a year travelling across India, scouring local recipes and ingredients to create a menu that is fun, Indian, regional. There was a hint of nostalgia, of course, but there was also the adventure, the thought of adopting different approaches. It is what Chef Cardoz had done with Tabla ten years ago, but in exciting new ways, with newer recipes and rediscovered ingredients.

Arbi tuk.

At The Bombay Canteen (TBC), initially, the central focus was hyperlocal and vegetables, meats and fish were sourced strictly from within a 150-mile radius. After a while, he expanded the restaurants ambit to entire India as he travelled deeper. TBC rustled up a salad of Lal bhaji, beetroot and paneer rather than the ones popular, and used sesame and mustard oil instead of olive oil. My idea is to make food more sustainable, to rediscover Indian ingredients such as Kashmiri morels and local rice varieties from states like Goa and Chattisgarh, he has said.

Somewhere down the line, Chef Cardoz, who lived between New York and Mumbai, decided to hire a resident chef in his own with great technique and an understanding of authentic Indian food. He found one in Chef Thomas Zacharias, who interestingly cut his teeth on European cuisine, having worked with Chef Manu Chandra in India. Chef Zacharias, who ultimately headed TBC kitchens in his absence, said, He encouraged me to travel across India, hone my understanding and techniques, meet people, chefs, home cooks, and learn the cuisine thoroughly before attempting to reimagine it.

Among the dishes, Chef Cardoz revived is Kejriwal Toast, a Wellington Gymkhana classic. The fried egg atop toast generously slathered with melted cheese was a nod to the famous dish named after a former Willingdon Club member, Devi Prasad Kejriwal, who requested an egg-and-cheese toast cooked his way so frequently that they put it on the menu and named it after him. What endeared all of these dishes to our guests, I believe, is our approach of working not just with recipes but with flavours that they associated with the food they ate at home and flavours that they grew up tasting Chef Cardoz once said. He also drew from his Sindhi wifes home recipes, such as arbi tuks, which he liked for its crispy texture and sweet and sour flavour balance.

Eggs Kejriwal.

Many restaurants followed in the wake of TBCs success, but the number of regional cuisines that TBC highlighted, from Tamil Nadu right up to Odisha, was staggering. That was pretty much the case with O Pedro, a restaurant dedicated to Goan cuisine, where he revived moribund recipes from the state. The vision for O Pedro was to go deeper into the cultural context of Goan cuisine. I feel said that Punjabified food has taken over the authentic regional cuisine in Goa, Chef Cardoz had rued in one of his interviews with me.

Chef Hussain Shahzadhad, who was chosen to lead O Pedro, said he travelled extensively across Goa with Chef Cardoz, who brought the same lens of his innovative approach to Indian cuisine to the restaurant.

Goa is more than just charcuterie, vindaloo and kings beer, Chef Cardoz said on the opening of O Pedro. Pickling, for instance, was big in Goa and so was a technique by which they smoked sausages. We discovered an exciting dish called Arroz, a Portuguese rice dish. But O Pedro was more than Portuguese. It also had cuisines of Saraswat Brahmins and Ponda Muslims two major communities in the state.

From Goa to New York, via Mumbai

Chef Cardoz spent part of his childhood in Goa and his teenage years in Bandra, in Mumbai. In his essay Floyds Canteen in the book, Chillies and Porridge, by Mita Kapoor, he said that his food philosophy is inspired by his childhood days in Goa. He remembers his grandmother baking poee (Portuguese bread made from wheat flour and bran), chicken curries using, well, fresh chicken from their backyard, or the flavourful pork sorpotel, and used absolutely the freshest of fruits, from guavas to jackfruit in her cooking. Thats where he draws inspiration for his locavore food philosophy, he has often said, crediting his mother, grandmother and great-grandmother for all the early food influences. To him, farm-to-fork was a reality of his childhood not just in Goa but even in Mumbai.

Barley 'n Jowar Salad at The Bombay Canteen.

In Mumbai, his favourite haunts were A1 Bakery, Wanton House and Hearsch Bakery, besides kheema pav at Yacht and not to mention the butcheries where he could buy fresh meat. A day at the Cardoz home would start with mom and Ermine planning the days menu; Ermine would then go to the market with a grand shopping list. My entire focus for the day was what was going to be on the menu for my two meals! Early each day, local Kolis would walk our neighbourhood, hawking the days fresh catch. Every home would bargain and try to get the best price. I was always on the lookout for shrimps, crabs, mackerels and cockles knowing that one of them would be hitting our table that day, he wrote. The one constant was that our food was always local and seasonal.

Chef Cardoz, who was studying for masters in biochemistry, often held that the book Arthur Haileys Hotel changed his life. He decided he wanted to work in luxury hotels, drawn by their glamour, and enrolled to study hotel management at IHM. But then he discovered he could cook well enough to be a chef and so, in 1986, he flew to Switzerland to study at Global Management School at Les Roches.

He picked up skills as a junior chef at local restaurants. But in 1987, Chef Cardoz decided to head back home, to apprentice at The Taj Mahal Intercontinental Hotel (now The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai), and then work as Sous Chef at The Oberoi Mumbai. In 1988, he travelled to New York for his brothers wedding and never returned home, except for occasional holidays, till five years ago he opened TBC and spent far more time travelling to innards of the country.

Of his life in New York, Chef Cardoz has said, I began with a job at the Indian Cafe on the Broadway, which led to bigger and better things. Those included a job as Sous Chef at the famous restaurant Raga, Executive Sous Chef at Lespinasse at St Regis, New York, and then Executive Chef at Tabla.

Interestingly, Chef Cardoz had credited Chef Gary Kunz, a Singapore-born Swiss restaurateur based in New York, for giving him the freedom to introduce Indian regional dishes at Lespinasse. The more I cooked, the more I started to play with Indian ingredients and the more innovative Indian dishes I put on the table.

In 1997, he moved on, to establish Tabla with restaurateur Danny Meyer, where he further honed his food philosophy. It, unfortunately, shut in 2010. We fought for nearly 13 years trying to fill 280 seats with food that is tightly focused but the worldwide recession pulled the rug from beneath our feet, he had said. But New Yorkers still speak about it in awed tones. In 2016, he opened another restaurant, Paowala, which he renamed as Bombay Bread Bar.

Black Rice Payasam.

Critics have always had nothing but good things to say about the chef. The famous The Times critic Pete Wells recalls that a lot of the menu was made up of small plates, the first for Indian food. The melting roasted bone marrow was a terrific spread on a sliced pan and drizzled with thrilling chutney of fresh herbs and curry leaves. Potato fritters were sandwiched between halves of pao in a fun evocation of wada pao.

At Paowala (later renamed Bombay Bread Bar), according to Eaters Ryan Sutton, he served bread New York had never eaten before whole wheat rotis, puffy kulchas, Tibetan tingmos, tandoori-bruised naans, besides his fabulous room-temperature fish pies and pecan chai sticky buns.

In mid-2019, Chef Cardoz had to close down even Paowala. Christ Crowley, a writer with New York Magazine says that the restaurant didnt stick enough for todays New York. Unlike Mumbai, where his restaurants continue to lead the tribe of fine dine restaurants, wooing connoisseurs and junta alike.

Deepali Nandwani is a journalist who keeps a close watch on the world of luxury.
Bagsvrd, Denmark, 26 March 2020 - Today, Novo Nordisk A/S held its Annual



General Meeting (AGM). To comply with all instructions and precautions taken by the Danish authorities in response to the coronavirus pandemic, shareholders were requested not to attend the meeting in person and instead follow the meeting via the live webcast.

"The global outbreak of coronavirus is a worldwide humanitarian crisis with serious and tragic consequences for thousands of people, and it is putting our societies under immense pressure" said Helge Lund, chairman of the of Board of Directors.

"Our key priorities are to safeguard the wellbeing of our employees and secure the continued supply of lifesaving medicines to the millions of people around the world who rely on these every day. Furthermore, we support impacted societies through different measures" said Lars Fruergaard Jrgensen, president and chief executive officer. "We follow the situation closely and adhere to the local authorities' recommendations as circumstances change, and many employees across the company are currently working from home using digital tools".





At the AGM Novo Nordisk further reviewed the coronavirus situation

Novo Nordisk continues conduct of all already-initiated clinical trials and no significant delays are expected in trials already close to finalisation. To reflect the current strain on the healthcare system, no new clinical trials are initiated.

All Novo Nordisk manufacturing sites are currently in operation ensuring continued supply of medicine to patients worldwide.

Most Novo Nordisk products are used for chronic treatment. However, during the period of social distancing implemented in many markets, fewer new patients are temporarily expected to initiate treatment.

Novo Nordisk maintains the financial outlook for 2020 as communicated on 5 February 2020. This is based on a number of assumptions in relation to impacts of the coronavirus including normalisation of patient flows in the beginning of second half of 2020.

Further update on the coronavirus impact will be provided in connection with the release of the financial results for the first three months of 2020 on 6 May 2020.

Resolutions adopted at the AGM

Financial year 2019

The Company's statutory Annual Report 2019.

The actual remuneration of the Board of Directors for 2019 and the remuneration level for 2020.

The final dividend for 2019 of DKK 5.35 for each Novo Nordisk A or B share of DKK 0.20. The total dividend for 2019 of DKK 8.35 includes both the interim dividend of DKK 3.00 for each Novo Nordisk A and B share of DKK 0.20 which was paid in August 2019 and the final dividend of DKK 5.35 for each Novo Nordisk A and B share of DKK 0.20 to be paid in March 2020.

Elections

Re-election of Helge Lund as chairman of the Board of Directors.

Re-election of Jeppe Christiansen as vice chairman of the Board of Directors.

Re-election of Brian Daniels, Laurence Debroux, Andreas Fibig, Sylvie Gregoire, Liz Hewitt, Kasim Kutay and Martin Mackay as members of the Board of Directors.

Re-appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers Statsautoriseret Revisionspartner-selskab as the Company's auditor.

Shares and capital

Reduction of the Company's B share capital by cancellation of part of the Company's own holding of B shares. The Company's B share capital is reduced by DKK 10,000,000 from DKK 372,512,800 to DKK 362,512,800. The Company's A share capital of DKK 107,487,200 remains unchanged, whereby the Company's share capital will amount to DKK 470,000,000.

Authorisation to the Board of Directors until the Annual General Meeting 2021 to allow the Company to repurchase own shares of up to 10% of the share capital subject to a holding limit of 10% of the share capital.

Authorisation to the Board of Directors to increase the Company's share capital for a period of one year until 26 March 2022 by a total of nominally DKK 2,000,000 for the authorisation under Article 5.3 in the Articles of Association (for employees without pre-emptive rights for shareholders) and a total of nominally DKK 47,000,000 for the authorisation under Article 5.4, (with or without pre-emptive rights for existing shareholders) subject to a total cap of nominally DKK 47,000,000 for both authorisations under Articles 5.3 and 5.4.

Other

A new Remuneration Policy.

Amendment of the standard agenda of the Annual General Meeting in the Articles of Association.

Donation to the World Diabetes Foundation.

A proposal from a shareholder to disclose information in the Annual Report on the ratio between executive and employee remuneration was not adopted.



Composition of the Board of Directors and its committees

After the Annual General Meeting, the Board of Directors held a board meeting to appoint members of its committees.

The Board of Directors, including its committees, is now composed as follows:

Helge Lund (chairman of the Board and chair of the Nomination Committee)

Jeppe Christiansen (vice chairman of the Board and chair of the Remuneration Committee)

Brian Daniels (member of the Remuneration Committee and the Research & Development Committee)

Laurence Debroux (member of the Audit Committee)

Andreas Fibig (member of the Audit Committee)

Sylvie Gregoire (member of the Audit Committee, the Nomination Committee and the Research & Development Committee)

Liz Hewitt (chair of the Audit Committee and member of the Remuneration Committee)

Mette Bjer Jensen (employee representative and member of the Nomination Committee)

Kasim Kutay (member of the Nomination Committee and the Research & Development Committee)

Anne Marie Kverneland (employee representative and member of the Remuneration Committee)

Martin Mackay (chair of the Research & Development Committee)

Thomas Rantzau (employee representative and member of the Research & Development Committee)

Stig Strbk (employee representative and member of the Audit Committee)

Further information



Media: Mette Kruse Danielsen +45 3079 3883 mkd@novonordisk.com (mailto:mkd@novonordisk.com) Ken Inchausti (US) +1 609 240 9429 kiau@novonordisk.com (mailto:kiau@novonordisk.com) Investors: Daniel Muusmann Bohsen +45 3075 2175 dabo@novonordisk.com (mailto:dabo@novonordisk.com) Valdemar Borum Svarrer +45 3079 0301 jvls@novonordisk.com (mailto:jvls@novonordisk.com) Ann Sndermlle Rendbk +45 3075 2253 arnd@novonordisk.com (mailto:arnd@novonordisk.com) Mark Joseph Root +45 3079 4211 mjhr@novonordisk.com (mailto:mjhr@novonordisk.com) Kristoffer Due Berg (US) +1 609 235 2989 krdb@novonordisk.com (mailto:krdb@novonordisk.com)

Company announcement No 19 / 2020

Attachment
[March 26, 2020] Edgewater Midstream Adds Strategic Horsepower with New CFO

Edgewater Midstream, LLC ("Edgewater") today announced David Anders has joined the company as its chief financial officer. Edgewater is an independent midstream energy company targeting the acquisition and greenfield development of pipeline, bulk liquids storage and terminal operations serving North American energy demand hubs. Edgewater's business plan is to provide midstream logistics solutions to refiners, producers and marketers of crude oil, refined products and other bulk liquids. The company is backed by an initial $400 million capital commitment from EnCap Flatrock Midstream. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005138/en/ Edgewater Midstream Chief Financial Officer David Anders (Photo: Business Wire) Mr. Anders comes to Edgewater after a 17-year tenure in Bank of America's Energy Investment Banking Group, where he focused on the midstream sector. Dring his tenure, he led the evaluation, structuring and execution of mergers, acquisitions and divestitures as well as initial public offerings, follow-on equity offerings and debt offerings for public and private companies and partnerships in the midstream sector.



Mr. Anders most recently served as managing director in Bank of America's Natural Resources Group. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Harvard University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business. "We are excited to have David join Edgewater," said Edgewater CEO Stephen Smith (News - Alert). "He adds depth to our bench strength, bringing with him considerable M&A and capital markets experience in the midstream space. His strategic insight and broad range of financial capabilities will be tremendous assets and complement our experienced management team as we seek M&A and greenfield opportunities that benefit all parties at the table."

Edgewater is led by its three founders: Chief Executive Officer Stephen Smith, Chief Commercial Officer Brian Thomason and Chief Operating Officer Mike Truby. The addition of Chief Financial Officer David Anders rounds out the C-suite. The Edgewater management team now has approximately 90 years of energy industry and energy finance experience, including senior leadership roles at companies that include Genesis Energy, LP (NYSE: GEL); Motiva Enterprises, LLC; ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP), NuStar Energy, LP (NYSE: NS). About Edgewater Midstream, LLC Based in Houston and established in late 2019, Edgewater Midstream provides independent midstream solutions to refiners, producers and marketers of crude oil, refined products and other bulk liquids. The company will focus on the acquisition or organic development, development and operation of pipeline, bulk liquids storage and terminal solutions between and in proximity to major North American petroleum demand hubs. Visit www.edgewatermidstream.com for more information. About EnCap Flatrock Midstream EnCap Flatrock Midstream provides value-added growth capital to proven management teams focused on midstream infrastructure opportunities across North America. The firm was formed in 2008 by a partnership between EnCap Investments L.P. and Flatrock Energy Advisors, LLC. Based in San Antonio with offices in Oklahoma City and Houston, the firm manages investment commitments of nearly $9 billion from a broad group of prestigious institutional investors. EnCap Flatrock Midstream is currently making commitments to new management teams from EFM Fund IV, a $3.25 billion fund. Further information is available at www.efmidstream.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005138/en/

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As many as 800 people have been quarantined for 14 days after they came in contact with a mohalla clinic doctor in Delhi, who was tested positive for the lethal infection, said the state's Health Minister Satyendar Jain.

New Delhi: As many as 800 people have been quarantined for 14 days after they came in contact with a mohalla clinic doctor in Delhi, who was tested positive for the lethal infection, said the state's Health Minister Satyendar Jain.

The Minister informed that a mohalla clinic doctor and four others have tested positive after they came in contact with a woman who returned from Saudi Arabia. The doctor's wife and daughter have also tested positive for lethal infection.

"COVID-19 cases in Delhi have risen to 36. A mohalla clinic doctor and four others have been tested positive after they came in contact with an infected woman who returned from Saudi Arabia. The doctor's wife and daughter have also tested positive," Jain told media here.

According to the Delhi Health Department, 800 people have been quarantined for 14 days as they came in contact with mohalla clinic doctor.

"A total of 800 people who came in contact with the mohalla clinic doctor have been quarantined for 14 days," he said.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday assured people that the supply of essential commodities will not be hampered at any cost and added that personnel manning shops and engaged in other essential services would be issued E-passes promptly to facilitate their movement in the national capital during the 21-day lockdown period.

As per the Union Health Ministry's latest bulletin, the total number of COVID-19 positive cases has climbed to 649 in the country, including 593 active cases, 42 cured or discharged people and 13 deaths.
By Online Desk

NEW DELHI: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has announced a Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief package for the poor to help them deal with the impact of coronavirus outbreak.

FOLLOW LIVE CORONAVIRU UPDATES HERE

With the coronavirus lockdown hitting everyone - particularly the poor - these relief measures were widely expected.

It comes at a time when countries across the world are rolling out measures to help their citizens. The US, most noticeably, will be pledging an unprecedented 2.2 trillion dollars.

ALSO READ: FM says withdrawals from all ATMs will be free; extends Aadhaar-PAN linking deadline too
Footprints Center for Autism has kept its third annual fundraising dinner and fashion show on the calendar in 2020, although it will now happen later in the year because of concerns over novel coronavirus.

The event  A Blue Carpet Affair  originally was scheduled for 5 to 10 p.m. March 28 at Patrician Party Center in Eastlake.

However, earlier this month when Gov. Mike DeWine issued an order prohibiting gatherings of more than 100 people, Footprints leaders realized they would need to revise plans for A Blue Carpet Affair.

Footprints Center for Autisms annual event draws in upwards of 350-plus each year, and already had 250 people registered for the upcoming event on March 28, said Erin Bolyard, the organizations executive director in a letter posted March 15 on Facebook. Because of (the governors decree), Footprints Center for Autism had no choice but to postpone the event.

While DeWine has since issued a mandate that requires all Ohio residents to stay at home unless engaged in essential work or activity, Footprints is optimistic that the governors order will be lifted by July, when the rescheduled fundraiser is set to take place.

A Blue Carpet Affair will now be held at Patrician Party Center from 5 to 10 p.m., July 18.

Though disappointed by the postponement, we are happy that we were able to reschedule and keep everyone safe and healthy in the meantime, Bolyard said.

All tickets already purchased for A Blue Carpet Affair will still be honored at the July gala. Any ticketholders who cannot attend the event either can receive a refund or donate their tickets for someone else to use. To discuss either option, contact Erin Bolyard at 440-622-0218 or ebolyard@footprints-ohio.com.

In addition, Bolyard said during a March 24 telephone interview that about 150 tickets are still on sale for the event. Tickets can be purchased directly at the footprintscenterforautism.com website, or Bolyard said she also can mail invitations and order forms to anyone interested.

Everyone who is going to the July 18 celebration can look forward to a dinner provided by Patrician Catering, a cash bar, and an inclusive fashion show featuring local children of all abilities.

This years fashion show theme is Superheroes!, Bolyard said.

Another highlight of the event will be a large Chinese auction.

The event is called A Blue Carpet Affair because it had been scheduled, at least during its first two years, around the same time as World Autism Month in April. People wear blue or light up blue light bulbs on their porch in April to increase awareness about autism, Bolyard said.

All proceeds from A Blue Carpet Affair will benefit the Footprints Center for Autism, a nonprofit organization located in Perry Village.

The center, which opened in 2018, provides comprehensive, collaborative, and child-centered programming for children with autism. Occupational therapy, speech therapy, and special education services are offered by the center in both on-site and outpatient formats.

Although Footprints Center for Autisms campus is currently closed because of the threat of COVID-19, the organizations teachers and therapists are still working with students through videoconferencing, and have come up with activities and lessons for students so theyve been able to continue learning at home.
Afghan Government, Taliban To Discuss Prisoner Release 'Face To Face'

By RFE/RL March 25, 2020

KABUL -- Afghan government officials are set to meet with a Taliban delegation in the coming days to discuss an initial release of militant prisoners, Afghanistan's National Security Council says.

After the two sides spoke via video conference on March 25, council spokesman Javid Faisal tweeted, "A Taliban team will meet with the government face-to-face in Afghanistan in the coming days" to further discuss the release of 100 prisoners by March 31.

The detainees would be freed on humanitarian grounds "after guarantees by Taliban and the prisoners that they will not re-enter the fight," Faisal wrote.

The development could help break a deadlock that has held up negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government under a U.S.-brokered peace process.

The video conference "decided that the release of the prisoners will practically start by the end of March," Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said on Twitter.

Shaheen said the Taliban would send a team to the Bagram detention center north of Kabul, where Afghan authorities are holding many Taliban prisoners.

U.S. envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, who attended the "technical meeting," said the sides "agreed prisoner releases by both sides will start March 31."

All sides consider the release of prisoners a prerequisite for the beginning of intra-Afghan talks.

But Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has said the government would initially free 1,500 prisoners, while the Taliban has demanded 5,000 as a precondition to talks with Kabul.

Khalilzad has said a prisoner release has become more urgent because of the spread of coronavirus.

An agreement signed in Doha on February 29 by the United States and the Taliban could lead to the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan as part of a peace process aimed at bringing an end to the conflict in Afghanistan.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, and AIP News

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/taliban-says-kabul- vows-to-start-releasing-prisoners-by -end-of-march/30509465.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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This week, while we all do what we can to stop the spread of Covid-19, Cultural Pittsfield would like to offer you this useful guide. It is by no means exhaustive, and hours and offerings are subject to change. Please call businesses directly for up-to-the-minute info. Thank you!
The agencies are working with mortgage servicing companies on procedures to carry out the orders. Borrowers whose incomes are being slashed by the coronavirus should contact the company where they send their monthly payments as soon as possible to let them know about their current circumstances, according to the agencies.
NEW DELHI, March 26 (XInhua) -- A spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy to India has refuted the arguments on stigmatizing China for the COVID-19.

The spokesperson said such arguments ignore the facts and confuse right and wrong, thus they are "irresponsible and do nothing to help international cooperation on epidemic prevention and control."

"We are strongly opposed to these arguments," said Ji Rong, counselor and spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy, in a statement published on the embassy website on Wednesday.

"There is a clear consensus by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the international community that a virus should not be linked to any specific country, region or ethnic group and such stigmatization should be rejected," she said.

Ji stressed that in the fight against the COVID-19, WHO has consistently called on the international community to respect science and respond rationally, and urged all governments to educate the public about the correct name of the disease.

"WHO has stressed that any discriminatory practices should be condemned, the use of "China" and "Wuhan" naming the virus by some media must be corrected, and the international community should focus on China's swift response to the epidemic rather than stereotyping the Chinese people," she noted.

"China has neither created the virus nor intentionally transmitted it," the Chinese diplomat said, adding that the so-called "Chinese virus" is absolutely wrong.

"We hope some people could heed the reasonable voice from the international community and stop making wrongful remarks that stigmatize China."

"The COVID-19 is no longer the battle of one country or one city," she said. "It is now a battle for all. We hope this pandemic can bring us greater solidarity, trust, international health cooperation and better global governance in the public health sector."

Ji said China and India have maintained communication and cooperation and lent support to each other in coping with the epidemic in this difficult time.

"China will continue to fight the epidemic together with India and other countries, enhance cooperation in multilateral platforms such as G20 and BRICS, contribute our wisdom and strength to better addressing global challenges and promote the health and well-being of all the mankind," she said.
Why it matters: The digital footprints used by advertisers to track users around the web will now be blocked by default in Safari, following in the footsteps of Firefox, Tor Browser, and Brave. Google has yet to ship its own block on third-party cookies, presumably because it needs to figure out the tech to replace them.

Apple recently seeded iOS and iPadOS 13.4 as well as macOS Catalina 10.15.4 to users, with several new productivity features as well as performance and bug fixes.

With those updates, the company also delivered an interesting change to how Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention works. It's no secret that Apple is a privacy-focused company, but now it wants to take a step forward and block all third-party cookies in Safari by default, which means advertisers won't be able to track and follow you around the web.

This makes it the first mainstream browser to implement these changes, with the Tor Browser being the first to actually feature full third-party cookie blocking by default. Then there's Brave, a browser used by over 10 million people and which is close in terms of privacy, save for a few exceptions. Mozilla joined the club with Firefox 69, which also included protection from websites trying to do cryptocurrency mining on your hardware.

Most Safari users won't notice the changes, as ITP has been doing this in some capacity for some time now. As noted by Apple's John Wilander, the WebKit engineer that developed the feature, "it might seem like a bigger change than it is. But weve added so many restrictions to ITP since its initial release in 2017 that we are now at a place where most third-party cookies are already blocked in Safari."

Anti-tracking measures aren't the only new thing is Safari, which will now limit local storage for websites to just one week, after which it will be automatically deleted. This move could potentially break Offline Web Apps, which is only further indication that Apple never really wanted to support them.

Earlier this year, Google made a similar commitment to make user tracking via third-party cookies obsolete in Chrome, but has planned to achieve that by 2022. The case could be made that the company can do it a lot sooner if it really wanted to, but advertisers have asked it in an open letter to drop the idea altogether, as it would "choke off the economic oxygen from advertising that startups and emerging companies need to survive."

For its part, Google itself initiated this new direction, so it's probably working on an alternative technology that could successfully replace third-party cookies and make advertisers happy while protecting user privacy - only time will tell.
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and state health officer Dr. Scott Harris have issued sweeping emergency and public health declarations which they hope will slow the spread of the Coronavirus which currently has the nation at or near a standstill.

On Friday, March 20, an amended public health order issued by Dr. Harris and released by the governors office limits public gatherings to no more than 25 people and requires all other gatherings to be held while maintaining a six-foot space between individuals, a practice known as social distancing.

The order, originally published on March 19, also closes all beaches, forbids activity at senior citizen centers, closes all educational institutions and limits restaurants, bars, and other such establishments to providing only take out or delivery service and bans all on-premises consumption of food and drink, among other things. The amended order specifically claims not to prevent any employers from making continued necessary staffing decisions. In a statement released with the amended order, Governor Ivey said, I have no intention of slowing down our workforce through unnecessary, burdensome regulations.

The original order, she added, was intended to apply to non-work-related gatherings, as the amended order makes clear. Though few argue with Ivey and Harriss abilities to legally issue such orders, or with the prudence of the orders, there does appear to be some concern about the extent and length of the measures being implemented, and whether Iveys desire to not harm Alabamians economically is realistic under the emergency actions taken by the state.

What is at question is why there has been no communication as to what success at bending the curve looks like or what milestones are needed to ease restrictions on individuals and businesses. Those with concerns about the order are also troubled with the growing trend of local governments issuing stricter and more restrictive orders than the state.

On March 24, the City of Birmingham issued a Stay in Place Order limiting the reasons an individual can leave his or her home and what one can do when in a public space.

This action comes just days after the Jefferson County Public Health Officer had ordered a closure of most businesses throughout the county, which has been the hardest hit in Alabama in terms of coronavirus infections.

Tuscaloosas Mayor Walt Maddox has instituted a city-wide curfew as part of his emergency power efforts.

The need for benchmarks

Earlier this week President Donald Trump said he would reevaluate the nations response to the pandemic and said he hoped the country, particularly economic engines, would return to normal by Easter Sunday (April 12). In citing the effort known as 15 Days to Limit the Spread, the President pointed to the need to take action against the virus while also setting timelines to help the nation return to some form of normalcy.

We cant have the cure be worse than the problem, the president said.

That sentiment seems to be echoed by Ivey in her desire to not hinder business activity in the state despite the public health orders. We will only be able to mitigate the risk of the virus through the efforts of our hardworking manufacturers that will produce life-sustaining supplies, our truckers who move these goods down the road, and our valued retailers that will make them available to our citizens, Ivey commented in a statement. But some question how the economy can truly be protected when it is essentially shutdown by the government.

We must have a plan to stop the spread and bend the curve of the virus, said Caleb Crosby, president of the non-partisan think-tank The Alabama Policy Institute, based in Birmingham. However, we need to know what the benchmarks are and what we are looking for in order to get back to normal.

Crosby said there needs to be clear communication of what level of progress in slowing the spread of the virus would lead to what level of easing the public health orders and social restrictions.

The people of Alabama want to do our part to stop this, and we respect the opinion and leadership of our health officials to stop the spread of this dangerous virus, commented Crosby. However, we also need to know from our leaders what the end-goal is and what milestones will trigger the lessening of government rules and regulations on the people of Alabama.

Crosby further said that he has heard from people across the entire state who are concerned with the lack of clarity on what has to be accomplished to lead to a relaxing of restrictions. Essentially, he lamented, the state government has used its extraordinary emergency powers to put in place extreme and freedom constraining rules without telling the people exactly how long they will be under those limitations or what needs to be achieved for the directives to be relaxed or removed entirely.

Crosby is not alone in his concerns, says Birmingham businessman Ward Neely. The government must help small businesses survive the stoppage of the economy, while also being clear on how and when things will return to full-speed, Neely commented.

Neely is also concerned with the liquidity of small businesses. The government can best help by helping businesses manage rent and mortgage payments right now, rather than offering loans for payroll which will have to be paid back, a plan which is part of the economic stimulus package currently being debated in Washington, he said.

Businesses need two things to survive this crisis, according to Neely. Specifically, a level playing field and the ability to make decisions based on reality.

The level playing field is achieved by a quick influx of cash into small businesses and good decisions come from quantifiable and measurable targets set by the government so that business leaders know what to expect and when.

Businesses and individuals need some idea of when the current chaos will dissipate he said. Small businesses including medical clinics and others could also face legal problems if they do operate and something goes wrong.

This creates a gray area in which business owners want to meet their communities needs but are uncertain as to whether doing so will put their entire business at risk. This, according to Neely, is another reason that state and local leaders should pick milestones which will trigger the process of drawing back the public health and safety measures currently in place.

There is no one size fits all solution

Just what targets the government is looking for to revoke the current measures is unknown, which is unacceptable according to Huntsville physician Dr. Michael Brown.

What works in other places may not be needed here  there is no one size fits all solution," Brown said.

Dr. Michael Brown, believes that the Alabama Department of Public Health needs to provide more specific guidelines for seeing patients and performing surgeries. With the present statewide order, there is too much uncertainty, which has led many practices and hospitals to greatly restrict access to care. I am concerned that many more folks will be harmed by this restriction of care than will be affected by Covid-19, Brown said in response to the State Health order.

According to Brown, in this present circumstance, many patients will be left with no option but to go to the emergency room for conditions which could otherwise have been treated in a clinic or other outpatient setting. The concern is that such an influx to emergency rooms will put a critical strain on emergency care, when it needs to be readily available for patients potentially suffering from coronavirus infection. An additional unintended consequence of this approach will be the increased exposure of patients to those who potentially have the coronavirus in an environment where it may be difficult to implement social distancing.

There are certainly a number of unknowns regarding this coronavirus outbreak, but careful attention to good hygienic practices and social distancing is clearly most important.

What is less clear is whether or not more extreme measures really have any major impact on the spread of the virus. We need to know what the end-game is, lawyer and former State Senator Phil Williams of Gadsden said in a recent interview. The government should be trying to control this outbreak, but we must also be asking the right questions. Nothing we are doing will end the threat, but only slow it down. What costs are we willing to go to in order to simply control, yet not eradicate, this virus?

For Williams, the issue is one of knowing what right looks like. Our leaders need to set benchmarks and say we will stop doing A when B occurs.

Too, according to Williams, leaders need to understand the people are willing to be a part of the solution, but that they dont want the solution to make their lives harder than the problem ever would. Drawing from his military background, Williams added, In every battle plan the Commanders establish phase lines. The crossing of a phase line controls the flow and establishes the next scheme of maneuver. The public has been given no phase lines in the battle against Covid-19.

The government action being taken on both the state and federal levels is simply unprecedented, added Crosby of the state think-tank. We understand the need to work together to stop this health crisis, but every citizen of this state and country deserves to know what our goals are and what milestones will need to be met to move us out of this unprecedented moment in history.

For Crosby and others like him, that means state leaders need to communicate not just what the people cant do, but when the people will be allowed to live free from government intervention again. The president has set a goal of Easter Sunday. What is the goal or timeline being set by our local and state leaders? Yes, these extraordinary powers are being enacted to help people, but we must ensure we arent cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Joshua Pendergrass is a lawyer and the former communications director for Alabama Governor Kay Ivey. Currently he serves as the chief communications officer at the non-partisan, non-profit think-tank, the Alabama Policy Institute.

API is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to strengthening free enterprise, defending limited government, and championing strong families. If you would like to speak with the author, please e-mail communications@alabamapolicy.org or call (205) 870-9900.
A British tourist has died from coronavirus in Lanzarote.

The OAP became the second Covid-19 fatality on the holiday island.

Regional health officials said he was more than 70 years old and confirmed he was a tourist, but offered no more details about his identity.

A spokesman for the regional health authority said: 'I can confirm a British tourist on the island has died after testing positive for coronavirus.'

'He had underlying health issues.'

The British tourist was said to have taken ill after checking into the five-star Hotel Riu Karamboa on Boa Vista

He lost his fight against the killer virus today at Molina Orosa Hospital in Lanzarote's capital Arrecife.

It was not immediately clear where on the island he was staying before he was taken ill and how long he had been in hospital.

He became the second person to die in Lanzarote from coronavirus. The first victim was a 71-year-old German expat.

On Monday a British tourist became the first person to die from coronavirus in Cape Verde.

Cape Verdian Health Minister Arlindo do Rosario confirmed the news on Tuesday.

The unnamed Brit died in hospital around 11pm local time on Monday.

He was taken ill after checking into the five-star Hotel Riu Karamboa on Boa Vista, one of the archipelago's most visited islands, on March 9.

He was admitted to Sal Rei Hospital on March 16 where he failed to recover from the killer virus.

Health chiefs confirmed after the holidaymaker tested positive that the hotel would go into a 14-day lockdown with 640 tourists and 210 staff inside.

Cape Verde's Prime Minister subsequently announced the island of Boa Vista would also go into lockdown.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 22:44:50|Editor: huaxia

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CHANGSHA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Du Xu, a postgraduate from Central South University of Forestry and Technology (CSUFT), turned on his laptop and prepared for his dissertation pre-defense online.

While at home in eastern China's Shandong Province, Du presented his dissertation to five professors for the first time through the remote video connection.

"Half a month ago, the university informed us to prepare an online pre-defense, find out the tutors' opinions on the first draft and then revise it," the 26-year-old said. Although he had experience with an opening thesis defense and other face-to-face forms, he was not familiar with the process of online defense, which made him feel nervous.

According to the CSUFT, all the postgraduate dissertations must be pre-defended before being submitted for examination to ensure the quality. The graduate school of the university adjusted the arrangement amid the epidemic. Online defense started on Feb. 10 to ensure that the graduate students could graduate on time.

"Since our defense is open and anyone can click the link to join, there were 55 students online when I spoke," Du said. The open online defense can help us check missing key points and learn from each other. Some students also recorded the defense process to follow up on the comments of the tutor to further modify their dissertation, according to Du.

The university said the pre-defense would be submitted via the Internet, and the degree management office has set up an online platform for it.

Feng Jiajin, a graduate of the Hunan Railway Professional Technology College (HRPTC), who works as an intern at the Nanchang Railway Bureau in eastern China's Jiangxi Province, also needs to demonstrate his graduation project through an online defense.

On March 18, Feng launched a video conference for his final project defense in the office via software on his mobile phone during his lunch break. More than 10 teachers from his college attended the meeting.

In front of the camera, Feng talked about his graduation project "Ultrasonic Ranging and Reversing System" and displayed the slides on the screen with explanations.

When displaying his final product, he showed the results of the graduation project in different situations.

"Vocational schools focus on students' practical ability. Before the formal defense, the instructor first reviewed the students' graduation projects and the statements. Only when the work is qualified are the students are allowed to participate in the defense and display," said Xiong Yi with HRPTC.

According to the college, members of the dissertation defense committee ask questions about the relevant theoretical knowledge and the design methods, which the students should answer one by one. Finally, the members of the defense committee discuss the defense process and results. The results will be announced after a secret ballot. The entire process of the dissertation defense will be recorded, screenshot and saved as the defense record.

"The outbreak of coronavirus won't affect the students' graduation and seeking employment. Before the start of the new semester, the university will use online defense to ensure their graduation on time," said Zhang Ying, vice president of HRPTC, adding that in March, the school will have more than 600 graduates participate in online defense.
The federal government is not getting the kind of cooperation it deserves from Nigerians, the Minister for Information, Lai Mohammed, has said.

Mr. Mohammed said many Nigerians are busy with meaningless criticisms instead of complying with the stipulated directives to keep people safe.

The minister said this on Thursday at a press conference in Abuja

Some Nigerians who flew into the country from overseas filled wrong addresses and phone numbers in their forms, making it difficult to trace them when the need arises.

Some Nigerians defied orders to stay away from large gatherings while some religious leaders willfully flouted the directives to ensure social distancing.

The government is doing its best but we need the citizens to do their best too. We have now gone past the stage of persuasion. Its time for strong enforcement, he said.

Stiffer measures

He said even though the federal governments strategy at containing the pandemic is working, the government is working on stiffer measures to enforce measures aimed at containing the spread of the virus.

He listed the measures as social distancing, contact tracing, testing, isolation of suspected cases and ensuring that messaging gets down to the grassroots.

We are considering tougher measures to enforce compliance, stop the exportation of the disease to states that do not have it and minimise spread. Possible measures include:

Stopping inter-state/inter-town travels, except for essential services

Closing all motor parks and inter-state rail stations. Already, all train movements nationwide have been stopped, and

Using fire fighting and other adaptable vehicles and personnel to fumigate cities and towns.

He also said new measures will be considered and announced from time to time.

Fake news

The minister, again, said the epidemic of fake news is now competing with the pandemic of coronavirus, and this, he said, is not helping the fight against the disease.

He cited the instances of such fake news to include;

That there are only two ventilators in Abuja, out of which one has been commandeered for a top government official

That a British Airways Flight was due to land in Nigeria on Wednesday despite the closure of all international airports.

That President Muhammadu Buhari has been coughing and is now on a ventilator.

He also said that a section of the traditional media has also been engaging in scaremongering and irresponsible reporting on the disease.

He said it is wrong to speculate on those who are positive or negative for coronavirus without any empirical information.

In any case, being positive to coronavirus is not a death sentence, as we can see around the world.

Suspension of flights

The minister said five domestic airlines (Air Peace, Aero, Azman, Dana and Arik) have commendably decided to suspend their operations.

The suspension is a boost for the efforts of the government to check the spread of the pandemic. Some of the airlines have also announced one form of support or another for the governments efforts to tackle the pandemic.

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Mr Mohammed said the federal government is also aware of the support of the private sector and pleaded for the support and cooperation of more capable individuals and organisations in order to defeat the pandemic.
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Image: Image courtesy of Colette Loll / Art Fraud Insights

The Museum of the Bible displays 16 fragments of the Dead Sea Scrollsand all of which are fake, according to an independent analysis contracted by the museum. The forgeries will remain on display, with an updated exhibit that attempts to use the embarrassing situation as an educational opportunity.

Our goal is to educate the public about these items, educate the public about the academic process, and make a contribution to the field, said Jeffrey Kloha, the museums chief curatorial officer. We are currently developing content for updating our exhibit.

The Museum of the Bible purchased the forged fragments in four different lots from four different antiquities dealers between 2009 and 2014. The Dead Sea Scrolls were one of most important discoveries in biblical archaeology in the 20th century. It was felt that a museum dedicated to the history of the Bible had to have examples of them, if they were available.

The ancient scrolls were discovered by Bedouins in 1947. A cobbler in Bethlehem named Khalil Eskander Shahin and known as Kando served as an intermediary between the Bedouins and the institutions that wanted to buy them. The Kando family kept some of the fragments, as an investment.

When a number of scroll fragments began to come on the market in 2002, some were directly connected to the Kando family, and few questions were raised about their authenticity. Before the Bible museum opened, however, a group of scholars examined the fragments while writing a book about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Questions began to surface about five of the 16.

When the museum opened, the Dead Sea Scrolls were displayed with signs acknowledging the questions about their authenticity.

Some scholars insisted they were authentic, some insisted they were not, Kloha said. We felt as a museum it was important to help the public understand that these are challenging questions.

Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby and chairman of the Museum of the Bible, was also fined $3 million and forced to return 5,500 ancient cuneiform tablets and seals in 2017, after a federal investigation determined they were from war-torn Iraq and not Turkey or Israel as customs forms had claimed.

Faced with some strong criticism and increased suspicion about the museums exhibits, the organization decided to hire an outside firm to independently examine all 16 of the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments. The Museum of the Bible contracted with Colette Loll, of Art Fraud Insights, who specializes in detecting forged artwork. Loll assembled a team of experts and launched a nine-month investigation.

The investigation revealed that most of the fragments were leather, rather than the parchment typical of the Dead Sea Scrolls. To the naked eye the materials look very similar. Under a microscope, the difference was obvious. More evidence of forgery mounted.

We saw things like ink waterfalling off the edges, ink going into cracks, ink going over thick surface deposits, she said. That would mean that when the text was written this material was already decomposing, Loll said, which provided more physical evidence of forgery.

Investigation Reveals Deliberate Forgeries

When the experts finished, Lolls team had no trouble drawing a conclusion.

After an exhaustive review of all the imaging and scientific analysis results, it is the unanimous conclusion of the advisory team that none of the textual fragments in the Museum of the Bibles Dead Sea Scroll collection are authentic. Moreover, each exhibits characteristics that suggest they are deliberate forgeries created in the 20th century with the intent to mimic authentic Dead Sea Scroll fragments.

The investigative report, which was paid for by the museum and is now available on the museums website, includes videos and images which will help people understand the forgery.

The museum hosted an academic symposium on March 13 to report the results of the investigation. A panel of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars were responded, including Christopher Rollston, professor of Semitic languages at George Washington University; Sidnie White Crawford, professor emerita of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judiasm at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Lawrence Schiffman, professor of Judaic studies at New York University. All three praised the museum. Even though the fragments were one of the museums most prized possession, it did the right thing, funding an investigation and publicizing the results.

They didn't have to fund these tests, Rollston told CT. Many other museums have not come clean like this. I think the museum deserves some credit for that.

The three scholars also called for an inquiry into the fake artifacts, to figure out who perpetrated the fraud. We need a full-scale criminal investigation, Schiffman said.

Rollston hopes an investigative journalist will go to work on the scandal and find the perpetrator. He suspects it may be someone he knows, someone in the community of Dead Sea Scrolls experts, a trained scholar who perverted professional expertise to engage in criminal activity.

I believe forgers do great harm to the field, he said. They prey on the hopes and desires of good people. I would love to see this person exposed and prosecuted.

Other Scroll Fragments may be Suspect

There are about 70 other Dead Sea Scrolls fragments in other collections around the world that may be forgeries as well. The Museum of the Bible is encouraging the owners of those fragments to launch their own investigations.

We hope to set a benchmark here for other collections and hopefully uncover the truth about all of these fragments, Kloha said. The ultimate goal is to have the truth and to be able to present it accurately and make it available to the world.

He added: Weve learned a lot more about how forgers go about their methods. We have also learned that documentation from dealers cant always be trusted.

The news of the fakes may have damaged the credibility of the museum, but Rollston said he would not hesitate to visit with family members and friends who come to Washington, DC. The serious blunders of the museum, these breeches of ethics and law, are part of the past, he said.

Rollston recommends visiting the Israel Antiquities Authority room on the sixth floor, one of the largest exhibits of material excavated in Israel on display outside of Israel. And the changes that are coming in its Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit will make the museum even better.

It will be really fabulous to put together an exhibit focusing on modern forgeries, Rollston said. Its a useful thing for the public, a way to make lemonade out of lemons.
Flight Centre will temporarily stand down 3,800 Australian workers as airlines across the globe suspend travel amid the coronavirus crisis.

The travel agency will be standing down a total of 6,000 support and sales staff across the company globally, either permanently or temporarily.

In a statement to the ASX on Thursday Flight Centre said travel restrictions and social-distancing meant staff levels were unsustainable.

Flight Centre will stand down 6,000 support and sales staff, 3,800 of which are Australians, as airlines across the globe suspend travel

'These never-before-seen restrictions, which have forced airlines to ground their fleets and heavily reduce their flight schedules, have virtually halted travel demand and led to the stoppage of the vast proportion of work that Flight Centre's people previously carried out,' the statement read.

The company said it intends on returning temporarily stood down staff, including all Australians, to the work force once restrictions have lifted and 'demand increases'.

Over the last month transaction numbers for Flight Centre were between 20 and 30 per cent of regular levels.

In the meantime the company has engaged in discussions with employers to secure 10,000 call centre jobs they hope will go to their stood-down staff.

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

As the coronavirus crisis continues to escalate travel bans and airspace closures have seen more than 50 airlines across the world temporarily suspended.

On Thursday Virgin Australia said more than 1,000 of 8,000 workers asked to take leave will probably be made redundant.

The airline had asked 80 per cent of its 10,000 staff to take a mixture of holiday, long service leave and leave without pay.

'Of the 8,000 that we asked to stand down yesterday, there is probably going to be more than a 1,000 of those (who) we do make redundant,' Virgin Australia managing director Paul Scurrah told the ABC on Thursday.

'This is the worst airline crisis the world has ever seen.'

Virgin Australia is also looking to redeploy staff to other companies - including major supermarkets and big banks - that need extra workers to cope with the pandemic.
Coronavirus in India Live Updates: Coronavirus cases in India have touched 649, including 13 deaths. While India is undergoing 21-day lockdown till April 14, Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with leaders of the G-20 countries will soon hold a crucial virtual meeting to discuss efforts that are being taken to contain the deadly virus. The government today announced Rs 1.7 lakh crore worth package for poor people, health workers, employees and poor women to mitigate the crisis that have emerged due the pandemic outbreak. Globally, the virus has killed over 21,000 people, with over 4.8 lakh people already being affected.

Check all the latest updates on the coronavirus outbreak on BuisnessToday.In live blog

7.00 pm: Coroonavirus impact: International flights banned till April 14

Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has closed all international commercial passenger flights till 6:30pm (GMT) on April 14. This ban will not apply to approved international all-cargo operations and flights.

It has been decided that scheduled international commercial passenger services shall remain closed till 18:30 hrs (GMT) of April 14, 2020. This will not apply to approved international all-cargo operations & flights: Directorate General of Civil Aviation pic.twitter.com/NKQAw89rMd ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

6.52 pm: Coronavirus impact: CMIE predicts biggest contraction for India Inc in 20 years

India Inc is currently facing a deep contraction and it is broad-based across sectors and industries, according to a latest report Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). The Mumbai-based think tank warned that the coronavirus outbreak could make it even bigger, longer and broad-based.

6.50 pm: Coronavirus impact: Finance Ministry urges RBI to pause EMI, loan repayments

Finance Ministry has asked the Reserve Bank of India to consider emergency measures to help borrowers cope with economic pressure triggered by the COVID 19 outbreak. Department of Financial Services Secretary Debashish Panda reportedly wrote a letter to the RBI on Tuesday suggesting a moratorium of a few months on the payment of equated monthly installments (EMIs), interest and loan repayments and a relaxation in the classification of bad loans.

6.41 pm: Coronavirus in delhi: Essential shops allowed run 24X7

Delhi government has allowed establishments that sell essential items or are part of a supply chain for such items to function 24X7, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal informed. No additional permits or licences will be required for this, he added.

We have decided to allow all establishments that supply essential items or are part of the supply chain for such items to function 24x7 to prevent overcrowding during the day. This will require no additional permits and licenses. Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) March 26, 2020

6.30 pm: Coronavirus in Maharashtra: Groceries, medical stores to remain open all day

All stores of essential commodities, groceries and medicine have been allowed to stay open round the clock in Maharashtra. Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray issued orders allowing such stores to be open 24 hours. These shops, however, have to adhere to social distancing, sanitisation and cleanliness norms.

6.09 pm: Coronavirus relief fund: Insurance for health workers great relief, says Harsh Vardhan

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan appreciated the insurance package declared by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today for health workers working in the country which includes more than 10 lakh Asha workers. This is good news and it gives security to all the health workers, the Health Minister told ANI.

5.55 pm: Coronavirus in India: 13 active cases in J&K

Jammu and Kashmir government informed that 13 people have been tested positive for COVID-19 till now in the state. 5,482 people who came in contact with possibly infected or positive cases have been put under surveillance, government said.

5.42 pm: WATCH: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee directs officials, street vendors to practice social distancing

#WATCH West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee seen directing officials and vendors to practice social distancing, in a market in Kolkata. #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/dwkDbvcraR ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

5.25 pm: The govrenment announcement today of a financial assistance package, is the first step in the right direction, tweeted Rahul Gandhi.

The Govt announcement today of a financial assistance package, is the first step in the right direction. India owes a debt to its farmers, daily wage earners, labourers, women & the elderly who are bearing the brunt of the ongoing lockdown.#Corona Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 26, 2020

5.13 pm: Yogi Adityanath praises coronavirus relief fund

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has appreciated the economic package released by Centre today to mitigate economic impact of coronavirus lockdown. The step taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of a Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan package is a step which should be welcomed by all, the UP Chief Minister told ANI.

4.31 pm: "Community transmission of COVID-19 will start if the community and we don't work collectively and follow guidelines. But it would never happen in India if we follow social distancing and treatment properly," says Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Union Health Ministry.

Community transmission phase of #COVID19 will start if the community & we (the govt) don't work collectively & follow guidelines. But it would never happen in India if we follow social distancing & treatment properly: Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Union Health Ministry pic.twitter.com/7mBg30g6bF ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

4.30 PM: While the numbers of COVID19 cases are increasing, the rate at which they are increasing appears to be relatively stabilising. However, this is only the initial trend: Lav Aggarwal

4.24 PM: Govt is taking steps to ensure that production, supply or distribution of essential goods and services do not get affected during #CoronavirusLockdown. States are working to provide food and shelter to migrant workers: Punya Salila Srivastava, Joint Secretary, MHA.

4.24 PM: 42 fresh cases in 24 hours

42 fresh coronavirus cases and four deaths related to COVID19 have been reported in the last 24 hours. Total number of cases stands at 649. On our request, work has started in around 17 states for COVID-19 dedicated hospitals: Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Union Health & Family Welfare Ministry

4.15 PM: Government of India allows doorstep delivery of medicines/drugs to people in view of the COVID19 pandemic. Notification to be published soon.

4.10 PM: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has written to 18 Chief Ministers in connection with the people from West Bengal that are stuck in various parts of the country, amid the lockdown. In the letter, she has appealed to the CMs to provide basic amenities to them.

4.07 PM: Delhi Metro: We have received a few queries regarding the tenure of the closure of the Metro services. It is hereby informed that, in light of the lockdown issued by the government, Metro services will remain closed till 14 April 2020.

4.05 PM: Mahindra, Maruti to make ventilators

Pawan Goenka, the managing director of the company's automotive division on Thursday tweeted that the company has embarked on a two pronged strategy to produce ventilators at its factories. "At one end, we along with two large PSUs are working with an existing manufacturer of high spec ventilators to help them to simplify design and scale up capacity. Our engineering team is right now with them working on it," his tweet read.

Also read: Coronavirus: Here's how Mahindra, Maruti will produce ventilators at plants

3.48 PM: Liquor factories to produce sanitisers in Rajasthan

Nine liquor factories in seven districts of Rajasthan will be used to produce sanitisers. Four private companies and 5 production units of state-owned Gnaganagar Sugar Mills have been directed by the government to start manufacturing sanitisers and licences to do the same has been issued to them.

3.45 PM: Follow lockdown protocols: Dr Harsh Vardhan

We need to ensure and ascertain that the lockdown protocols are effectively followed to prevent spread of the disease: Dr Harsh Vardhan

#IndiaFightsCorona



Union Health Minister @drharshvardhan interacts with Health Ministers of States through a Video Conference to discuss & review status, preparedness and measures to manage & contain #COVID19.#CoronaOutbreak #SwasthaBharat #HealthForAll pic.twitter.com/VXZadLpJdD Ministry of Health (@MoHFW_INDIA) March 26, 2020

3.43 PM: Coronavirus cases in J&K

As the number of persons infected with coronavirus has gone up to three, in an effort to contain the spread of infection in Srinagar, the District Magistrate has ordered the closure of all places of worship: Government of Jammu and Kashmir.

3.29 PM: 73-year-old man who tested positive for coronavirus dies due to co-morbidity in Bhilwara in Rajasthan: Officials

3.26 PM: Coronavirus cases in Maharashtra

A 42-year-old man in Nagpur tests positive for Coronavirus. The tally in state rises to 125.

3.25 PM: Exchanges cut trading hours for commodity trading

Leading stock exchanges BSE and NSE on Thursday cut down trading hours for commodities derivative segment till 5 pm, instead of current practice of allowing it up till mid-night, in the wake of coronavirus pandemic. The trading will begin at 9 am and close at 5 pm and the new timings will be effective from March 30 till April 14, the exchanges said. In separate statements, commodity exchanges -- MCX and ICEX -- announced about the reduced trading hours. Commodity markets trade between 10 am to 11.50 pm, while equity markets close at 3.30 pm. - PTI

3.21 PM: SMG to extend plant shutdown

Suzuki Motor Gujarat Pvt Limited (SMG) will be extending their plant shutdown till 14th April 2020 in wake of the coronavirus outbreak in India. SMG manufactures cars on a contract basis for Maruti Suzuki.

3.18 PM: Coronavirus cases in Haryana

The total number of positive COVID-19 cases in the state now stands at 18. These include two cases in Faridabad; 10 in Gurugram; one in Palwal; three ub Panipat; one in Panchkula; and one in Sonepat.

3:01 PM: Uttarakhand helpline number

Uttarakhand government has announced a helpline number to assist COVID-19 affected. People who are stranded in other states can get in touch with the Uttarakhand government through 0135 2722100 on landline or 9997954800 on WhatsApp.

2.57 PM: Israel evacuates Israelis from India

The Israel government evacuated 317 Israelis from India amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Israeli government will evacuate 200 more of its citizens from India tomorrow.

Israel's Ambassador to India Ron Malka:Today,we'are evacuating 317 Israelis today. In another flight tomorrow,200 more Israelis to be evacuated.Indian govt has helped us a lot,I want to thank them;Israel took drastic measures to fight Coronavirus, situation there is under control pic.twitter.com/fjLbHSrKPs ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

2.51 PM: Moody's said Delhi and Benglauru airports may be downgraded

Ratings agency Moody's has said that Delhi and Bengaluru airports may be downgraded as a result of coronavirus. Amid the lockdown, air traffic would reduce drastically. DIAL and GMR that operate the airports repay loans from aeronautical and non-aeronatuical avenues that are linked to airport traffic.

2.41 PM: Indian Army draws up a multi-point plan to tackle coronavirus

Indian Army is identifying lands to set up quarantine facilities. It is also extending its hospital network for civil use. It is also planning to train army personnel on coronavirus.

Indian Army issues fresh instructions reiterating enhanced measures to fight #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/nJX9rV8hiX ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

2.36 PM: Coronavirus cases in Rajasthan

Two more people test positive in the state, a 45-year-old man in Jaipur and a 35-year-old man from Jhunjhunu. Both have a foreign travel history. Contact tracing underway. The total number of cases in the state rises to 40.

2.31 PM: Coronavirus cases in Telangana

Three more persons have been tested positive for #coronavirus, taking the total number of cases to 43 in Telangana. One person has been cured/discharged: State Health Department.

2.09 PM: Workers to be allowed to draw non-refundable advance of 75 pc from credit in PF a/c or 3 months salary, whichever is lower: FM

2.08 PM: Amid travel restrictions due to the 21-day lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus, a 26-year-old daily wager walks more than 135 km without food from Nagpur to reach his home in Chandrapur.

2.00 PM: Under cash transfers (largely based on DBT), 8 specific announcements have been made for:

Farmers

MREGA

Poor widows

Pensioners/divyang

Jan Dhan Yojana (women who have accounts)

Ujjwala scheme

Self-help groups (women dealing with national rural livelihood missions)

Organised sector workers, construction workers and district mineral fund.

1.59 PM: Govt to pay EPF contribution for three months

The government will pay EPF contribution for both employer & employee (12% each) for the next three months. This is for all establishments that have upto 100 employees & 90% of whom are such employees earning less than Rs 15,000/month. This will benefit 80 lakh employees and incentivise 4 lakh establishments. Provident fund scheme regulations will be amended because of COVID to allow non-refundable advance of 75% of the amt standing to the credit of a members of 3 months of wages, whichever is lower.

1.58 PM: Over 20 crore women Jan Dhan Account holders to get Rs 500 per month for next three months to help them run their households: FM

1.56 PM: Ujjwala beneficiaries to get free cooking gas (LPG) cylinders in next three months; this will benefit 8.3 crore BPL families: FM

1.54 PM: Collateral-free loan doubled to Rs 20 lakh to 63 lakh women self-help groups; to impact 7 crore households: FM

1.53 PM: Wage increase to Rs 202

Wage increase from 182 rupees to 202 rupees, under MGNREGA, resulting in an additional income of 2000 rupees, benefitting 5 crore families.

1.52 PM: Rs 1,000 to be given to senior citizens: FM

One-time amount of Rs 1,000 to be given to senior citizens, widows and Divyang people, in two installments over the next three months. Expected to benefit 3 crore people.

1.49 PM: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has announced Rs 100 crore relief package for the poor in wake of Coronavirus.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has announced a Rs 100 crore relief package for the poor in wake of #CoronavirusLockdown pic.twitter.com/F4sQl6DFOI ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

1.40 PM: Direct Cash Transfer to farmers

Over 8.69 crore farmers to be immediately benefited through Direct Cash Transfers. Instalment of Rs 2000 in the first week of April will be transferred: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman

1.39 PM: Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Ann Yojna (for next 3 months)

Over 80 crore poor people covered(2/3rd of India's population), in addition to already allotted 5 kg of rice/wheat per person,an additional 5kg will be free. Additional 1kg pulse (acc. to regional preference) will be given, announces the FM.

1.34 PM: Per person 5 kg rice or 5 kg wheat for free for three months; 1-kg pulse per household also announced.

1.33 PM: Rs 50 lakh insurance per health care worker

There will be Rs 50 lakh insurance per health care worker as a medical insurance cover for them for three months. Hopefully, we would be able to contain the virus in this period: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

1.29 PM: FM announces Rs 1.7 lakh crore package

Finance Minister Nirmala Sithraman: A package is ready for the poor who need immediate help like migrant workers and urban and rural poor. No one will go hungry. The package is worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore.

1.27 PM: Watch live coverage on Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's press conference.

WATCH: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman addresses the media in Delhi https://t.co/SvDinw5db0 ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

1.18 PM: The special COVID-19 economic task force, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week, was working on an economic package for the sectors most affected by the coronavirus outbreak, including informal sectors.

1.15 PM: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will address a press conference in New Delhi shortly.

1.10 PM: Locals in Chennai distribute food and fruits to the needy, amid lockdown due to coronavirus.

Tamil Nadu: Locals in Chennai distribute food and fruits to the needy, amid lockdown due to Coronavirus. #CoronavirusLockdown pic.twitter.com/chdQGheRbW ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

12.55 PM: Won't shut clinics: Kejriwal

The Delhi CM says unfortunately, a Mohalla clinic doctor is tested positive, but Delhi govt won't shut clinics as this would cause lot of inconvenience to people. "Mohalla clinic will remain open. We will ensure safety of all Doctors and their tests will be done regularly," says Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Food home delivery services have been allowed, the delivery persons can show their ID cards that will be sufficient. Mohalla clinics will continue to function but with all precautions: CM @ArvindKejriwal pic.twitter.com/LmJC7f2nSJ AAP (@AamAadmiParty) March 26, 2020

12.49 PM: Essential supplies stores to be allowed to operate 24*7 in Delhi

As a special measure, grocery and essential supplies stores to be allowed to operate 24*7. This will help in staggering customer visits and help in maintaining social distancing norms. #IndiaFightsCorona LG Delhi (@LtGovDelhi) March 26, 2020

12.44 PM: Madhya Pradesh COVID-19 tally reaches 20

Madhya Pradesh rose to 20 with five more patients in Indore hospitals testing coronavirus positive, health officials said on Thursday. The tally includes a Ujjain-based woman, who died on Wednesday in Indore, the officials said. Among the five new cases in Indore, two are women, a government medical college spokesman said.

12.41 PM: Warm, humid weather linked to slower COVID-19 transmission: MIT

A warm and humid weather is linked to slower spread of the novel coronavirus, according to a study which suggests that Asian countries experiencing monsoon may experience lesser transmission of the virus. The scientists, including Qasim Bukhari from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, assessed data on the number of COVID-19 infections in different parts of the world and compared it with two parameters of weather from all the regions -- temperature and humidity. The findings, described in SSRN repository, show that 90 per cent of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, transmissions until March 22, 2020, have occurred in regions with temperature between 3 and 17 degrees Celsius. - PTI

12.35 PM: Nirmala Sitharmaan to address media today

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will hold a press conference at 1 pm on Thursday. The Finance Minister is expected to announce a much-anticipated relief package for the coronavirus-hit economy.

12.30 PM: Mohalla clinic doctor in Delhi tests positive

According to news agency ANI, the Shahdara Sub-Divisional Magistrate has ordered that all those who visited the mohalla clinic in Mohanpuri area of Maujpur between March 12 and March 18 must practice home quarantine for the next 15 days. The magistrate also asked these people to immediately contact the control room if they start to display any symptoms of the coronavirus.

12.22 PM: 800 quarantined in Delhi's Maujpur area

Around 800 people have been quarantined in Delhi's densely populated Maujpur area after a Mohalla Clinic doctor was tested positive for the deadly coronavirus. Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain told NDTV these people had been kept in isolation for 14 days.

Along with the doctor, who had a travel history to Saudi Arabia, his wife and a teenager daughter also tested positive

12.14 PM: Karnataka issues warning to landlords

Karnataka government has warned strict penal action against landlords or house-owners under provisions of law for forcing doctors, paramedical staff and healthcare professionals to vacate their rented residences citing COVID-19 spread through them as the reason. Stating that lot of complaints have been received in this regard, an order issued by Additional Chief Secretary Health and Family Welfare department Jawaid Akhtar said such behaviour amounted to obstructing public servantin discharging their duties.

12.13 PM: 48 people quarantined in Kashmir

Forty-eight people, who had come in contact with the first coronavirus fatality in Kashmir, are in quarantine and authorities are in touch with the states visited by the man to track those who may have been infected by him, an official said on Thursday. The 65-year-old man, hailing from Hyderpora area of the city here, died on Thursday morning -- becoming the first fatality in Jammu and Kashmir due to coronavirus.

12.09 PM: Defer all EMIs for 6 months: Sonia Gandhi

"Centre might consider deferring all EMIs for 6 months; interest charged by banks for this period may consequently be waived. All loan installment deductions from salaries of government employees may also be deferred for six months," says Congress Interim Chief Sonia Gandhi, in her letter, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

11.59 AM: Here's the list of government laboratories approved by ICMR to test covid-19.

11.52 AM: Sonia Gandhi writes to PM Modi

Congress Interim President Sonia Gandhi writes to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, suggesting measures that can be taken during the lockdown.

11.35 AM: Coronavirus cases in Gujarat

Till now, 43 positive cases of coronavirus have been detected in Gujarat, including 3 deaths. These include a 85-year-old woman who had a travel history to Saudi Arabia and had comorbid conditions and a 70-year-old man from Bhavnagar who also had comorbid conditions due to coronavirus: State Health Department.

11.34 AM: Defence Minister Rajnath Singh chairs a review meeting with the Chief of Defence Staff and Chiefs of Army and Navy on the Ministry's preparedness for tackling COVID-19.

11.30 AM: Indian students currently in Pakistan should observe precautions against COVID-19 and stay safe. They may contact High Commission at 03028514549: High Commission of India, Islamabad.

11.20 AM: DPIIT sets up a control room

DPIIT sets up a control room to monitor the status of transportation and delivery of goods, manufacturing, and delivery of essential commodities. "In the event of any manufacturing, transporter, distributor, wholesaler or e-commerce companies facing ground level difficulties in transportation and distribution of goods or mobilization of resources, the same may be informed to the Department at the following telephone number/ email:- 91 11 23062487 and controlroom-dpiit@gov.in," he added.

11.11 AM: Coronavirus cases in Delhi

Positive cases in Delhi have risen to 36. "A mohalla clinic doctor and 4 others have tested positive after they came in contact with an infected woman who returned from Saudi Arabia. The doctor's wife and daughter are also among those who tested positive," said Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain.

11.08 AM: Daily wage workers leave for their native places

Daily wage workers walk near Delhi-Ghazipur border for their homes in different districts of Uttar Pradesh. A woman says, "We have no money left as we don't get any work here. What shall we eat? If we would not leave the city, we would die of hunger".

10.50 SM: Death toll rises to 13 in India; cases soars to 649

According to Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, total number of COVID-19 positive cases have climbed to 649 in India. Outof 649 cases, 593 are active cases and 42 have been cured or discharged. Toll rises to 13, as of March 26.

10.45AM: Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain informed that a total of 800 people who came in contact with the mohalla clinic doctor, have been quarantined for 14 days

10.36 AM: Health Ministry Update

Total number of COVID-19 positive cases rise to 649 in India (including 593 active cases, 42 cured/discharged people and 13 deaths): Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

10.35 AM: Coronavirus cases in Maharashtra

Another coronavirus death reported in Maharashtra. Two new positive cases of coronavirus have been reported in Mumbai and Thane. Till now, the total number of positive cases in the state is 124. The total number of coronavirus deaths in India now stands at 15.

10.30 AM: Kashmir reports first COVID-19 death

Kashmir sees first death as 65-year-old COVID-19 patient passes away in Srinagar.

Congress President & CPP Chairperson Smt. Sonia Gandhi writes a letter to PM Modi with suggestions that the govt should immediately undertake in this lockdown period. pic.twitter.com/YGsjUUFGKe Congress (@INCIndia) March 26, 2020

10.15 AM: New cases in UP

A 21-year-old woman (whose parents tested positive), a 32-year-old man with travel history to Dubai, a 33 year-old woman and a 39 year-old man have been tested positive for Coronavirus: Dr Sudhir Singh, Incharge, Isolation Ward, King George's Medical University.

10.00 AM: Coronavirus cases in Telangana

Two fresh cases of COVID-19, including a three-year-old boy, have been reported in Telangana, taking the total number of people infected with the virus in the state to 41, according to a government bulletin on Wednesday. The other case is a 43-year-old woman from Hyderabad city who is "the family/primary contact of a previous positive case", it said. The woman "does not have any history of international travel. She is presently admitted and stable. She is a contact of another patient in Telangana," the bulletin said.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh chairs a review meeting with the Chief of Defence Staff and Chiefs of Army and Navy on the Ministry's preparedness for tackling COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/n2sxXC4E8j ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

9.44 AM: Extensive testing, isolating cases and contact tracing must: Chetan Bhagat

A lockdown only buys time, while other steps are must to prevent spread post lockdown, says author Chetan Bhagat. "Are their numbers/addresses/methods on how daily wage labor is getting their payments from states? Or is it automatic. Please do share the process. Will help spread and encourage others to," asks Bhagat.

9.43 PM: US Senate passes $2 trillion coronavirus economic stimulus bill

US Senate overwhelmingly backs $2 trillion bill aimed at helping unemployed workers and industries hurt by the coronavirus epidemic, as well as providing billions of dollars to buy urgently needed medical equipment. The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 96-0, sending it to the House of Representatives. - Reuters

9.42 AM: Private hospitals to start treating patients from today

Private hospitals will start treatment of COVID-19 patients from today. The government has roped in private hospital to contain the deadly virus outbreak in India.

9.41 AM: Watch a British woman taking self-isolation "very seriously"

Delhi: Daily wage workers walk near Delhi-Ghazipur border for their homes in different districts of Uttar Pradesh. A woman says, "We have no money left as we don't get any work here. What shall we eat? If we would not leave the city, we would die of hunger". #CoronavirusLockdown pic.twitter.com/WcZHY4jt9X ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

9.40 AM: PM Modi dials Putin

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a telephone conversation today with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two leaders discussed the global situation in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. The two leaders agreed on further consultation and cooperation in adequately addressing all challenges faced by this major global crisis, including those pertaining to health, medicine, scientific research, humanitarian matters and impact on global economy. They stressed the significance of international cooperation for unitedly fighting COVID-19, including within the framework of G20.

9.35 AM: Attack the coronavirus together: WHO

"To slow the spread of #COVID19, many countries introduced "lockdown" measures. But on their own, these measures will not extinguish epidemics. We call on all countries to use this time to attack the #coronavirus. You've created a 2nd window of opportunity," says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organisation.

9.32 AM: Bihar Covid19 lockdown status on March 25

Fine imposed: Rs 15,87,800

FIR registered: 41

Seizure of vehicles: 531

Arrest: 9

9.30 AM: Where does India's health infrastructure stands? Checkout this infographic

A 65-year-old man from Hyderpora, Srinagar passes away due to Coronavirus; Four of his contacts also tested positive yesterday: J&K Principal Secretary (Planning Commission) Rohit Kansal (file pic) pic.twitter.com/HKgVLciSkK ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

9.25 AM: Delhi mohalla clinic doctor tests positive

A mohalla clinic doctor in Delhi's Mohanpuri area in Maujpur has tested positive for coronavirus. The administration has issued a notice, asking all who visited the mohalla clinic between March 12 and 18 to self-quarantine for 15 days.

9.20 AM: The Resident Doctors' Association of Punjab writes to Chief Minister Capt. Amarinder Singh; says no mask, sanitisers, gloves available, let alone PPE kits for those working in emergency.

9.15 AM: Current tally in India (as on March 25, 06:45 PM)

Total cases: 563

Foreigners: 43

Discharged/cured: 43

Deaths: 10

9.05 AM: Nobody will starve in Kerala: Pinarayi Vijayan

Nobody will starve in Kerala, says state Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. "No family will starve. Every panchayat will have a community kitchen. People might be reluctant to contact individuals for food. So there will be a service phone number. If anyone calls that number, food will be delivered," he maintains.

9.00 AM: Coronavirus cases in India

The total number of COVID-19 cases in India stands at 606, including 553 active cases, 42 cured/discharged people and 10 deaths, according to the Ministry Health and Family Affairs data (as on March 25, 06:45 PM).

8.45 AM: Coronavirus cases in United Kingdom

The number of coronavirus deaths in the United Kingdom has risen to 463 as on Mar 25, the British government said. The total number of positive cases in the country right now is 9,529.

8.41 AM: Covid-19 cases in Thailand and South Korea

Thailand recorded 107 new cases on Wednesday, bringing its total to 934, while South Korea's tally rose to 9,137 with 100 new infections.

8.40 AM: Coronavirus death toll in United States

Nationwide, more than 53,000 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus that is particularly perilous to the elderly and people with pre-existing medical conditions, with at least 730 deaths. World Health Organisation officials have said the United States could become the global epicenter of the pandemic, which first emerged late last year in the Chinese city of Wuhan. - Reuters

8.30 AM: Italy coronavirus death toll reaches 7,503

The death toll from an outbreak of coronavirus in Italy has grown by 683 to 7,503, the Civil Protection Agency said on Wednesday, a decline in the daily tally of fatalities following a spike the day before. On Tuesday 743 people died. That followed 602 deaths on Monday, 650 on Sunday and a record of 793 on Saturday - the highest daily figure since the contagion came to light on Feb. 21. The total number of confirmed cases in Italy rose to 74,386 from a previous 69,176, the Civil Protection Agency said. - Reuters

8.15 AM: Spain's coronavirus death toll overtakes China's

Spain struggled to cope on Wednesday with a mounting coronavirus crisis as its death toll exceeded China's with another 738 lives lost in a single day, and a third senior government minister was diagnosed with the virus. With 3,434 fatalities, Spain now has the second-highest number of deaths globally after Italy's 6,820. Nursing homes across the country have been overwhelmed and a skating rink in Madrid has been turned into a makeshift morgue. - Reuters

8.00 AM: No new local coronavirus case in China

Mainland China reported a second consecutive day of no new local coronavirus infections as the epicentre of the epidemic Hubei province opened its borders, but imported cases rose as Beijing ramped up controls to prevent a resurgence of infections. A total of 67 new cases were reported as of end-Wednesday, up from 47 a day earlier, all of which were imported, China's National Health Commission said in a statement on Thursday. The total number of cases now stands at 81,285. The commission reported a total of 3,287 deaths at the end of Wednesday, up six from the previous day. - Reuters
The largest government economic stimulus in US history is approved, despite a last-minute row.

The US Senate has passed a $2tn (1.7tn) coronavirus disaster aid bill that is the largest economic stimulus in US history.

The vote was delayed by a last-minute row between Republican and Democratic senators over unemployment benefits.

The plan includes direct payments of $1,200 to most American adults and aid to help small businesses pay workers.

US coronavirus deaths are around the 1,000 mark and there have been nearly 70,000 confirmed infections.

More than 21,000 people with coronavirus have died across the world since it emerged in China's Wuhan province in December, while the number of infections is racing towards half a million

Southern Europe is now the centre of the pandemic, with Italy and Spain recording hundreds of new deaths every day.

What was the snag in Congress?

President Donald Trump, a Republican, said on Wednesday he would sign the fast-tracked bill as soon as it reached his desk.

But the plan hit a speed bump as Republican senators Tim Scott, Rick Scott, Ben Sasse and Lindsey Graham said its major expansion of unemployment benefits provided "a strong incentive for employees to be laid off instead of going to work".

They said they would oppose the bill unless it was fixed to ensure workers could not have a higher income while unemployed than in a job.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he would oppose the bill unless the Republicans dropped their objections.

He also demanded tougher conditions on the legislation's "corporate welfare".

In the end the Republican senators were allowed a vote on their amendment, which failed.

The bill does have cross-party support but it must still be passed in votes in the Senate and House of Representatives before the president signs it into law.

With revisions being made to the bill late into Wednesday, the Republican-majority Senate finally, and unanimously, approved it with a 96-0 vote. It now moves on to the House which is expected to vote on Friday.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was "proud" that not a single senator voted against the bill.

The chamber's senior Democrat, Senator Chuck Schumer, said: "And so this is a good ending, twists and turns were enormous. I always had faith we would [pass this bill] because America and the American people demanded it."

What do we know about the deal?

The agreement reached by Republican and Democratic leaders in the Senate includes tax rebates, loans, money for hospitals and rescue packages.

Though the nearly 900-page bill's price tag amounts to roughly half the size of the US government's annual budget, little has emerged of its finer details.

Individuals who earn $75,000 or less would get direct payments of $1,200 each. Married couples with household income of up to $150,000 would receive $2,400 and an additional $500 per each child.

Mr McConnell described the package as a "wartime level of investment" in the US nation.

The Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said she hoped the bill could be passed by voice vote.

That would allow members of Congress - several of whom have coronavirus or are self-isolating - to stay away from the chamber in order to cast their votes.

But if any member objected, lawmakers would be asked to return to Washington and vote over the course of an entire day, in order to limit how many people are present on the House floor at one time.

What's the latest from the virus hotspot of New York?

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday it is likely half of America's most populous city of more than eight million would catch coronavirus by the time the pandemic ran its course.

By Wednesday morning, 199 New Yorkers had died from the disease and confirmed cases had reached 17,856.

According to the New York Times, 13 patients died in a matter of hours on Tuesday at a hospital in the Queens borough of the city, with a young doctor there describing "apocalyptic" scenes.

But there were signs of hope.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo spoke on Wednesday of tentative indications that the spread of the disease may be slowing.

On Sunday, hospital admissions were doubling every two days. But by Monday that rate had fallen to every 3.4 days, and on Tuesday every 4.7 days, Mr Cuomo said.

The whole of New York state had 285 coronavirus deaths and more than 30,800 patients as of Wednesday morning - about half of the total US caseload.

What is the situation elsewhere in the US?

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency said New York, North Carolina and Hawaii had requested special mortuary teams to be ready for mass casualties.

New Orleans, Louisiana, where crowds celebrated Mardi Gras last month, has recorded the world's highest growth rate in coronavirus cases.

California's Governor Gavin Newsom said one million Californians had registered as unemployed just this month.

The US is more than midway through a 15-day attempt to slow the spread of the virus through social distancing.

Two more states - Minnesota and Idaho - issued state-wide "stay at home" orders on Wednesday, joining at least 17 others.

The president said on Tuesday that reopening the country by Easter would be a "beautiful timeline".

But Dr Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who is helping lead the US response to coronavirus, told CNN on Wednesday: "The virus makes the timeline." BBC
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A hospital in Southern California is giving nurses just one mask per shift, which goes against typical safety protocols.

Anonymous source to Business Insider

Nurses have shared photos that depict the mask and equipment shortage that hospitals across the country are facing.

Images both posted on social media and shared with Business Insider show nurses storing disposable masks in paper and plastic bags for use across multiple days and using alcohol swabs to sanitize phones.

Nurses worry they are endangering themselves and other patients without proper protective equipment. "The scariest thing for us who work at the bedside is to end up making a choice between who lives and who dies bc we don't have enough staffing and equipment," one nurse said.

If you are a nurse working during the COVID-19 outbreak, email aakhtar@businessinsider.com.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

One nurse in Oklahoma City attempted to bring her own protective gear to work amid the ongoing shortage of equipment like masks and gloves.

The rapidly spreading novel coronavirus, a respiratory virus that infected 51,000 Americans as of March 24, has flooded US hospitals with new patients. Nurses and other healthcare workers told Business Insider they lack enough masks and gloves to account for the influx.

The Oklahoma City nurse, who requested anonymity for fear of losing her job, said she ended up unable to wear her own personal masks and gloves, as doing so violated the hospital's policies.

She shared a photo of the hospital's dwindling supply of protective gear:

An anonymous nurse from Oklahoma City shared an almost empty mask and glove cabinet at her hospital.

Anonymous source of Business Insider

Nurses across the country shared photos of their hospital or health system's lack of protective equipment and cleaning supplies amid the novel coronavirus outbreak. Images show hospital nurses needing to reuse disposable masks for entire shifts or multiple days; storing equipment in paper and plastic bags for use across multiple days; using alcohol swabs to sanitize phones; and wearing torn paper masks.

Nurses said the lack of protective equipment results from a lack of preparation on the part of health systems, as well as little support from federal and state governments with providing more supplies.

Story continues

A nurse in Wisconsin shared a photo of what her mask looked like after one shift.

An anonymous source of Business Insider

Many nurses spoke to Business Insider under the condition of anonymity, for fear of losing their jobs. Business Insider confirmed their identities and verified their nursing credentials before publishing this article.

Nurses around the country are asking for more protective equipment, like masks, gloves, and gowns. The US needs 270 million more particle-resistant masks than it currently has.

Ali R. Tayyeb Ph.D., RN-BC, PHN (@artayyeb) March 18, 2020

On March 10, the National Nurses United union called on the White House and hospital systems to ensure that nurses have enough protective equipment. A union survey found only 30% of nurses reported having enough equipment to deal with the outbreak.

In late February, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said the US needs 270 million airborne particle-resistant N95 masks for healthcare workers. Hospitals in Los Angeles and Seattle, desperate for equipment, have asked seamstresses to volunteer making fabric masks for healthcare workers.

Nurses are being asked to reuse disposable masks, sometimes multiple times a week. Hospital administrators have told nurses to store disposable masks in paper bags and plastic bags.

Multiple nurses confirmed that hospitals have been asking nurses to use just one mask per shift due to the shortage.

John Pearson, an ER nurse at Alameda Hospital in California, said his managers had told nurses to store disposable masks in paper bags to wear them on multiple shifts. Maeleigh Soper, a registered travel nurse in Seattle, said her hospital went through a month's worth of masks and hand sanitizers in three days. She said she suspects patients and families have been stealing medical supplies amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Marie Spaner, a hospital nurse in the Los Angeles area, previously told Business Insider she felt frustrated about her hospital's lack of planning. Her hospital had not changed cleaning or sanitation protocols since the outbreak, nor had it limited visitors.

Nurses are being asked to reuse disposable masks and place them in paper bags.

Courtesy of Hector Torres

"It's frustrating and frightening. If we can't have things implemented properly in the hospital, then it's a danger for us and to the patients," Spaner told Business Insider. "We're just grossly unprepared."

Some nurses said they their hospitals haven't increased cleaning or sanitation of commonly touched surfaces since the coronavirus outbreak.

Pearson, a member of the SEIU 1021 union, shared photos of the lack of cleaning equipment on his Twitter. One photo depicted nurses cleaning phones with alcohol swabs, which should be used to clean injection sites. Other photos showed empty hand-sanitizing stations and broken paper-towel dispensers at different places in the hospital.

Pearson shared a photo of what nurses are being told: to clean equipment with alcohol swabs in lieu of sanitizing equipment.

Courtesy of John Pearson

Pearson said the equipment shortage at his hospital was "dire." Pearson added that his hospital hasn't trained healthcare workers on what to do if they come across a possible COVID-19 patient, and that he's received all communication regarding the disease through email.

"The scariest thing for us who work at the bedside is to end up making a choice between who lives and who dies bc we don't have enough staffing and equipment," he said.

Other nurses revealed to Business Insider their hospital had not increased cleaning or sanitizing since the outbreak. The virus spreads when you touch surfaces where the virus is present and then touch your face, according to the CDC.

Pearson shared a photo of empty hand-sanitizing stations at his hospital in Alameda County, California.

Courtesy of John Pearson

Two hospital nurses in Oklahoma, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of losing their jobs, said they attempted to wipe down crowded waiting rooms to protect families from contracting the virus. Their head of nursing told them to stop, as housekeeping comes through once at night to clean the area, they said.

"We voiced our concerns for how often we should be wiping down the waiting room, and we went out and wiped the remote and newspaper," one of the nurses said. The hospital wasn't "doing anything" to protect the nurses or the patients, the nurse added.

A nurse from the Los Angeles area, who wished to remain anonymous, shared a meme that nurses have been posting that depicts the difference in PPE in the US versus China, Iran, and Italy.

Anonymous source of Business Insider

Nurses worried that without enough masks, they were running the risk of contracting the disease and spreading it to their families.

The Oklahoma nurses said without proper protective gear, they feared contracting the disease or spreading to their families. One nurse said her husband has lung problems, and she was especially worried about exposing him to the disease.

The other nurse said due to her asthma, she had to make a difficult decision to cut back on work hours. She had been working additional hours to earn extra income because her husband had lost his job due to business closures brought on by the coronavirus.

Nurses came into their shifts at Reading Hospital in Pennsylvania with messages of support: "not all superheroes wear capes" and "thank you to all hospital staff."

Anonymous source of Business Insider

"I love being a nurse, and I feel guilty that I am scared to be out there," the nurse said, "but given that I'm not given the proper protective equipment, I can't run the risk of not being here for my family in the future."

Read the original article on Business Insider
As Indians brace themselves and navigate through the 21-day lockdown period announced by the government to curb coronavirus, a big challenge for all parents is to keep their children in the confines of their homes, thereby ensuring that they do not infect others or themselves with the virus.

So far, the only wafer-thin silver lining attached to the gloom of the spreading virus has been that kids have been least affected by it. In India, in fact, there has only been one confirmed case where a child had tested positive of Covid-19 in Kerela. However, it is increasingly becoming obvious that children are not immune to the virus. In Los Angeles, a teen died of coronavirus this week, and there have been several cases across the world where young kids have been severely affected.

Leera Lobo, Developmental Pediatrician at Nanavati Super Specialty Hospital and Ummeed Child Development Center said, "Studies have shown increased severity of the virus in infants and young children (less than 5 years)."

"Children with chronic heart/lungs/kidney diseases or leukaemias are also at a higher risk of being affected because of their compromised immune systems and frequent visits to hospitals/health care facilities." added the doctor.

According to a Forbes report, Dr Andrea Cruz, an associate professor of Paediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, who co-authored a new study titled 'Epidemiological Characteristics of 2143 Pediatric Patients With 2019 Coronavirus Disease in China' stated that "more than 60 per cent of the 125 children who became severely ill or critically ill were age 5 or younger. Forty of those were infants less than 12 months old."

"However, so far, kids in general, have been either spared or were less severely affected by the virus. Studies done in China show no conclusive evidence behind this anomaly, although Infectious disease experts at the American Academy of Pediatrics offer two reasons that may be the cause for kids being less affected," said Lobo.

"Firstly, the Immune response of children to the virus may be different as the immune system in children is young and evolving. Receptor for the virus in children may be different. Another reason can be that young children have less exposure to the virus compared to adults as they usually move in protected environments and travel less," pointed out the paediatrician.

A third reason why children seem less prone to contract the virus could be because they have antibodies that protect them against the virus, propounded Consulting Paediatrician of Apollo Clinic (Colaba), Nehal Shah.

"Children are quite likely to have cross infections with a lot of other viruses because they are generally more susceptible to such infections. So, they produce antibodies, which may be cross-reacting now, and acting as a protective shield against the corona antigen in their bodies," said Shah.

However, the doctor warned that just because they are being less affected, doesn't mean that there won't be dangerous consequences of them contracting the virus.

Silent carriers of corona

Children can remain asymptomatic or are likely to show mild symptoms of the virus but they pose a great threat to the health of the adults, especially elderlies around them because they are basically silent carriers of coronavirus.

"During the lockdown, if a child gets affected, then he may be protected, but his chances of infecting the adults in the house are magnified because everyone is in their homes all the time these days. So, if you have senior citizens or grandparents at home or adults who are suffering from asthma or have had a prolonged illness, it may be prudent to make extra sure that your child does not touch any virus-contaminated surfaces, or mingle with individuals who are symptomatic," said Shah.

Here are a few steps to follow to ensure the protection of your child from the virus, thereby ensuring that adults in your household stay protected.

No playdates

With the schools closed, and the entire nation in a lockdown mode, it is natural for kids to feel bored in their confinement, and showing signs of irritation. But, it is important to keep them at home, said Shah.

"They should not be allowed to play with other kids in the neighbourhood or in their housing society. Many have returned from trips in corona affected countries are still in self-quarantine mode. If your child plays with children of such quarantined parents and contract the virus, while they themselves may not be affected at all, or at least not show any severe signs of the infection, they can infect the elderlies in the household, which could very well be fatal," said Shah.

Limit outdoor access

"The easiest way Covid-19 can spread is through contaminated surfaces. If you have a common terrace in the building, or a parking lot where your child can go and play, or at least run-around, it may be prudent to restrict them from doing so at this point," said Shah.

"While it is tempting to take them out for a walk, after being cooped up in the apartment for the entire day, it is also important to remember that kids tend to touch everything. Chances are, they would touch the railings of the staircases that lead to the terrace or parked cars, none of which are sanitized. It has already been proven that the virus can linger on metal surfaces for days, so don't take kids out." she added.

Strict hygiene routines

Kids, especially toddlers, have very poor sense of hygiene, pointed out Shah.

" Kids should be told not to fidget with their hands. Many kids have a habit of nose-picking or putting their fingers in their mouth -- these habits should be discouraged. Some kids who have allergies throughout the year, and they often rub their noses and eyes. They have to be repeated but gently told not to do so. They should be taught to use tissues, or napkins which should be carefully discarded by parents afterwards. Washing hands correctly should also be taught." said the paediatrician.

" They should strictly be told not to touch anything outside the house. It will be good if they were clothes with pockets, and the parents tell them to put their hands in their pockets if they have to step out," she added.

If they have some other health emergency which cannot be sorted out by medical experts over the phone, and the kids have to step out to visit a nearby medical centre, it is absolutely imperative they use sanitizer on their way home and take a bath immediately after return. The clothes they wore to the clinic should be put away separately for washing. Ideally, parents should try to take their kids to a clinic rather than a big hospital if they absolutely have to take them to a health centre.

Sensitize kids about Covid-19

Since schools are suspended, there are no teachers who would tell the kids about the deadly virus. So, parents should take the initiative to explain to children how coronavirus can impact individuals, and why social-distancing is essential. Pre-teens and toddlers should be sensitized specifically as they may not be as updated as the teens are, about the virus.

If working-from-home is keeping parents busy, then the easiest thing they can do is to show their kids a two-minute-long clip shared by the government of India, where a superhero named Vayu explains to kids what the virus can do to people and how to keep themselves protected. Here's the video:

Parents should not panic

Many parents are now relating every other small and big illness, or symptoms of ill health in their kids to coronavirus.

" A little cough and cold aren't uncommon for kids to have nowadays. However, with the coronavirus scare, there is a lot of panic among parents. Health workers should, under such circumstances, try to pacify parents, and offer them guidance over the phone so that they can manage the health of their kids better." said Shah.

"It is important to remember that the virus doesn't spread. You spread it. So, as long as you don't do those practices that facilitate the spreading, you and your child should be okay." she added.

When should a child get tested?

If any or both the parents test positive or are symptomatic, then it is imperative to get the child tested. " For young kids, it may be hard to convey the symptoms appropriately. For instance, if they have a sore throat, they may not be able to say it, but may tell you that are experiencing difficulty swallowing. For babies, the signs may be a refusal to eat, crying, drooling etcetera. Parents should also watch out for any signs of breathing difficulty, or dry cough, apart from fever. Disproportionate fatigue is also a telling sign of the virus," said Shah.

"There are also some non-respiratory symptoms such as diarrhoea, vomiting, eye irritation or itching," she added.

Can Corona Virus affect newborn babies?

There has been only one case of a newborn child in London contracting the virus so far. The baby's mother too had tested positive of Covid-19 after she was rushed to the hospital with fever-like symptoms few days before the delivery. However, the experts were unable to infer if the child had contracted the virus in the womb of the mother, during birth, or after birth.

In the absence of any concrete evidence, a general rule of thumb that can prove helpful for new mothers would be to leave the hospital as soon as they can after the delivery of the child. The chances of both the mother and the child contracting the virus is far greater at the hospital than at their homes. During the delivery as well, the number of family members visiting the hospital should be limited, and should not comprise of elderlies.

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A swarm of desert locusts flies over an acacia tree in a remote part of Somalia. (Will Swanson / For The Times)

In the distance, it looked like a cloud of confetti.

Faisa Abdi Alleh had never seen anything like it. Neither had anybody else here in the tiny town of Beer in this self-declared republic within Somalia.

With the cloud hovering over her farm about a mile away, Alleh and several of her children ran to investigate.

As they got closer, they could make out the whirring wings and the ridged torsos no longer than a finger.

We saw them before they landed, Alleh recalled.

For the next week, she and several of her children used clothing, sticks and anything else they could find to fend off the invaders. But eventually they could only watch as the insects devoured every green leaf in sight, including all 14 acres of sesame and beans they planned to sell this season.

A desert locust sits on the branch of a stripped-bare acacia tree near Sool, Somalia. (Will Swanson / For The Times)

"We couldn't stop them," Alleh said.

Schistocerca gregaria, better known as the desert locust, has smitten East Africa like a plague from the Bible.

On a continent that has suffered repeated outbreaks of Ebola and is now fighting the coronavirus, the locusts may pose no less of a challenge. Hundreds of billions of them have conquered territory in at least eight countries, overwhelming governments and aid organizations while consuming crops and grazing land so rapidly that experts fear widespread famine.

Here in Somalia  where 2.6 million people are already displaced because of armed conflict and drought  no field or family has been spared.

Faisa Abdi Alleh walks to her farm in Beer, Somalia, which was devastated by locusts. (Will Swanson / For The Times)

Alleh estimated that the locust attack on her land in November resulted in lost crop sales amounting to $10,000, leaving her family and six others that help her farm deep in debt and unable to cover school fees or other basic expenses.

"My entire life in the world, I haven't seen something like this before," said Alleh, who has been raising 10 children on her own since her husband died of a heart attack two years ago.

Scientists blame a pair of 2018 cyclones in the Indian Ocean, a region they say is likely to experience more such storms as global temperatures rise.

Story continues

The cyclones dumped unusually large amounts of rain on the locusts main breeding ground, a swath of the Arabian Peninsula known as the Empty Quarter.

That led to optimal breeding conditions. Locusts lay their eggs in the sand, and when that sand is moist, the eggs can hatch in as little as two weeks and the larvae can mature in as little as two more to start reproducing again.

In just nine months and three rounds of breeding, the population exploded by a factor of 8,000.

From the Empty Quarter  which encompasses parts of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen  the swarms crossed the Red Sea to the coast of Somalia in the summer of 2019 and laid more eggs there before carving a path of destruction west and south, deeper into Africa.

The storms of 2018 also reached Somalia, ending several years of drought and raising the hopes of Alleh and her neighbors in Beer for a lush growing season and a profitable harvest.

A boy helps collect the remains of a sesame crop that was devastated by locusts in Somalia. (Will Swanson / For The Times)

But by January, the locust swarms had damaged 100% of Somalias staple crops of maize and sorghum, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

In neighboring Kenya, up to 30% of pastureland has been lost. Farther west, locusts have gorged on crops in South Sudan, already reeling from years of civil war and widespread hunger.

And they have laid new eggs in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Uganda. The U.N. is still trying to assess the damage in many places.

A swarm of desert locusts flies over over land used for grazing animals in a remote part of Somalia. (Will Swanson / For The Times)

In a single day, a swarm can travel nearly 100 miles and eat its own weight in leaves, seeds, fruits and vegetables  as much as 35,000 people would consume. A typical swarm can stretch over 30 square miles.

The most effective way to combat the infestation is spraying pesticides from airplanes. But most governments in the region lack the resources to carry out the large-scale operations that would require.

The response has been especially weak here in Somaliland.

We dont have, actually, anything to combat with these locusts, said Hassan Mohamed Ali, the Somaliland minister of planning and national development.

We don't have planes," he said. "It's a financial issue. It's a technical issue.

That left farmers to fend for themselves.

"People were spraying it," said Shukri Haji Ismail, the minister of environment and rural development. "You can imagine when you're using hands, or when you're using a car, it's not fast enough. The locusts will destroy acres and acres of land.

Faisa Abdi Alleh holds the remains of a sesame crop that was devastated by a swarm of desert locusts in late 2019. (Will Swanson / For The Times)

The government response is now being coordinated by the newly formed Somaliland Locust Management Task Force, which includes experts from around the world.

In public service announcements on radio and television, and in text messages directed at local leaders, communities will be encouraged to report locust sightings and carry out control exercises such as burying eggs in trenches.

The Food and Agriculture Organization said it is working to improve monitoring and eradication efforts across East Africa.

"We need swift action to inhibit another round of reproduction," Keith Cressman, who holds the title of senior locust forecaster at the U.N. agency, wrote in an email.

"This is not the first time that East Africa has seen locust upsurges approach this scale," he said. "But the size of the current situation is unprecedented in recent memory  its a sort of 100-year storm.

Back in Beer, after so many years of droughts and bad harvests, residents were still trying to understand why the locusts befell them. One popular superstition is that the insects come only when everything else is going well.

I don't have any idea, but people said if the locusts are coming it means there is prosperity, Alleh said.

Alleh lies awake at night thinking about the debts she will struggle to pay off. There are the costs of planting last season  tractor rental, seeds and labor.

In addition, after one of her sons crashed a water tanker and killed nine people last year, Alleh had to borrow $1,000 to pay the families of the victims and get him out of jail. She still owes $600.

It can happen that your land is auctioned off, she said. It can happen.

On a recent Friday evening, Alleh hitched a ride to a nearby village to join other women from the community in a weekly sitaad, a ceremonial gathering of about 40 local women to dance, sing and pray.

Most had been by affected by the locusts.

Workers collect the remains of a sesame crop that was eaten by a desert locust swarm in late 2019. (Will Swanson / For The Times)

It had been four months since the locusts destroyed Alleh's crops and left. Workers were still raking up the last of her dead crops and loading them onto an open-bed truck to be used as fodder for livestock.

When a field mouse, one of the few remaining signs of life on the land, scuttled out from under a rotting pile, children gleefully started kicking it around.

Alleh planned to plant again as soon as this month.

I don't think that there will be another [swarm of] locusts or droughts," she said. "But only Allah knows that.

What she didn't realize is that another locust storm was brewing.

About an hour east of Beer, workers from the aid group Oxfam were driving through the desert when they saw in the distance what looked like snow falling from the clear blue sky.

As the SUV drew closer, a low hum could be heard through the windows as a swarm came into clearer view.

"Stop the car!" shouted one of the workers.

She and her colleagues jumped out, spending the next hour shooting video and photographs to share with the group's food security team.

"I can't believe they're here," another worker said.

These locusts most likely hatched from the eggs deposited last year on the coast of Somalia. That population is expected to grow through March.

Locusts feed on thorn trees in the Sool region of Somalia. (Will Swanson / For The Times)

Wadekar is a special correspondent.

This article was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Security personnel stands guard along a road during lockdown in the wake of deadly coronavirus, in Srinagar. PTI photo

Srinagar: A 65-year-old man admitted to a Srinagar hospital earlier this week after testing positive for Novel Coronavirus or COVID-19 died at Srinagar's government-run Chest Disease (CD) hospital on Thursday morning.

With this Jammu and Kashmir has recorded first death due to the virus. Ten other people are being treated including seven in the Valley and three in Jammu region of the Union Territory after testing positive for COVID-19. Thirteen more such patients are admitted at a Leh hospital.

The man who died in Srinagar hospital had a medical history of illness with sugar, hypertension and obesity. The doctors said he suffered a massive cardiac arrest and their effort to revive him failed.

"Despite our best efforts, the COVID-19 positive patient at Chest Disease Hospital, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The patient had medical history of prolonged illness with sugar, hypertension andobesity," one of them said.

Originally a resident of the Valley's north-western Sopore town, he had contracted the deadly virus while attending the public outreach programme of Tablighi Jamaat for spreading the faith in various parts of the country.

"The patient had returned from New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu recently after being part of a Tablighi Jamaat attended also by people from Indonesia and Malaysia", a government official said.

The J&K government has ordered inquiry into the alleged mishandling of the patient after he was tested positive for COVID-19 at the CD hospital. "Apparently, he was not handled as per the protocol required for treating such patients", said an official who wished not be named.

He said that the hospital administration even after knowing the travel history of the patient and observing the symptoms of COVIC-19 in him did not bring it into the notice of divisional or district or the police authorities when he left the hospital without getting admitted.

As per official sources, the patient was given ample time to spread the virus by intermingling with the public and relatives.

Kashmir's Divisional Commissioner Kashmir P. K. Pole was quoted by local news agency KNO as saying I have ordered for a probe to find out whether the case was mishandled and protocol was followed or not."

On Wednesday, chaotic scenes were witnessed at hospitals and various other medical facilities in the Valleys Baramulla and Bandipore districts with panic-stricken residents who had met this person or attended religious gathering he too was a part of arriving at these in large numbers to offer themselves for COVID-19 tests.

Meanwhile, the J&K police and Central armed police forces are on the eighth day running Thursday enforcing restrictions strictly across the Valley as part of a lockdown aimed at limiting the spread of COVIC-19.

The police have arrested more than three hundred people or registered cases against them under the relevant provisions of law after they were found violating restrictions in force in the Valley since Thursday last.

The police and district administrations have also sealed a couple of dozen hotels and restaurants across the Valley after these were found functioning despite the closure order issued by the government under Section 144 CrPC and the Disaster Management Act, 2005. The official sources said that as many as 218 FIRs were registered against the lockdown violators till Wednesday.

The lockdown is being enforced strictly also in Jammu region of the UT whereas tougher measures are in place in Ladakh. Lieutenant Governor, Girish Chandra Murmu, on Wednesday appealed the people to observe the 21-day lockdown earnestly to break the transmission chain and contribute in the fight against the spread of deadly COVID-19.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 05:08:31|Editor: ZD

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Photo taken on March, 25, 2020 at the United Nations headquarters in New York shows that participants attending the launch of the COVID-19 global humanitarian response plan via video teleconference. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday launched a 2-billion-U.S. dollar global humanitarian response plan to fight COVID-19 in some of the world's most vulnerable countries. (Xinhua/Xie E)

UNITED NATIONS, March 25 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday launched a 2-billion-U.S.-dollar global humanitarian response plan to fight COVID-19 in some of the world's most vulnerable countries.

"COVID-19 is menacing the whole of humanity, and so the whole of humanity must fight back. Individual country responses are not going to be enough," said Guterres at the launch, a virtual event.

"We must come to the aid of the ultra-vulnerable -- millions upon millions of people who are least able to protect themselves. This is a matter of basic human solidarity."

The response plan will be implemented by UN agencies, with international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and NGO consortia playing a direct role in the response, said Mark Lowcock, the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

The plan will be coordinated by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which Lowcock heads.

The plan will deliver essential laboratory equipment to test for the virus, and medical supplies to treat people; install handwashing stations in camps and settlements; launch public information campaigns on prevention; and establish airbridges and hubs across Africa, Asia and Latin America to move humanitarian workers and supplies to where they are needed most, said Lowcock.

Guterres said the world faces an unprecedented threat as COVID-19 has rapidly covered the globe. "It has spread suffering, disrupted billions of lives and endangered the global economy."

Wealthy countries with strong health systems are buckling under the pressure. Now, the virus is arriving in countries already in the midst of humanitarian crises caused by conflicts, natural disasters and climate change. These are places where people who have been forced to flee their homes because of bombs, violence or floods are living under plastic sheets in fields, or crammed into refugee camps or informal settlements.

Those people do not have homes in which to socially distance or self-isolate. They lack clean water and soap with which to do that most basic act of self-protection against the virus -- washing their hands. And should they become critically ill, they have no way of accessing a health care system that can provide a hospital bed and a ventilator, said Guterres.

Helping the vulnerable people is crucial for combatting the virus, he said. "The world is only as strong as our weakest health system. If we do not act decisively now, I fear the virus will establish a foothold in the most fragile countries, leaving the whole world vulnerable as it continues to circle the planet, paying no mind to borders."

Properly funded, the plan will save many lives and arm humanitarian agencies and NGOs with laboratory supplies for testing, and with medical equipment to treat the sick while protecting health care workers. The plan also includes additional measures to support host communities that continue to generously open their homes and towns to refugees and displaced persons, said Guterres.

The response plan asks for 450 million dollars for the World Health Organization (WHO), 405 million dollars for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), 350 million dollars for the World Food Programme, 255 million dollars for the UN Refugee Agency, 120 million dollars each for the UN Development Programme and the UN Population Fund, 110 million dollars for the Food and Agriculture Organization, and 100 million dollars for the International Organization for Migration.

It asks for 100 million dollars for NGO response.

Guterres appealed to governments for their full support to the humanitarian response plan, which, he said, is a necessity for global health security.

The plan is a moral imperative and in everyone's interests. And it is a crucial part of winning the fight against the virus, he added.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore also joined Wednesday's launch via video teleconference.
HONESDALE, Pa.

March 25, 2020

March 12th

Todd Wolfenberg

Community Partners

Christie Ann Rochette

Maine

Yoga International

Jim Jennings

/PRNewswire/ -- Yoga International, a membership platform specializing in online yoga classes, has quickly pivoted in order to help keep independent yoga studios across the country afloat during the Coronavirus pandemic.As of, many yoga studios were closing their doors to students. Yoga International began receiving inquiries from studio owners concerned about their ability to hold on to both customers and revenue during a time when they would have to close their businesses.CEO: "We were uniquely positioned with technology and a platform, and we listened to the needs of yoga teachers who were reaching out to us, unsure of how they would keep their communities together during a time when people need yoga's benefits the most."Within hours, Wolfenberg and team developed the "" program, allowing studios to stay connected with students by publishing their original content on Yoga International's platform. The program allows partners to collect an ongoing percentage of the revenue Yoga International collects from the membership sales of their customers. Yoga International worked closely with studio owners, Yoga Alliance, and other partners to ensure the program was fair for everyone involved, while simultaneously providing a much-needed service for yoga students everywhere.Wolfenberg continued: "We were scrambling to make sure our employees were healthy and prepared, but couldn't help but think that Coronavirus would have a huge impact on local studios. In a few days, we redeployed our workforce to create a true partnership to help studio owners, teachers, and their students during these challenging times, and beyond. The interest and turnaround has been immediate; currently, 600+ studio applicants have reached out expressing interest.", a certified yoga instructor in: "Thank you! I was just considering how important an online presence is in light of everything that is currently happening but wondering how I could even compete with larger online offerings. To be part of this solution, and be able to offer this option to collaborate instead is fantastic! Not only presently, but moving into the future."is an online platform with 1 million+ users worldwide, specializing in yoga and meditation content. YI's mission is to help make yoga more accessible and inclusive by partnering with teachers and organizations to bring classes online for students to practiceany time, anywhere.Contact:jim@yogainternational.com (215) 430-3364

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/amid-uncertainty-yoga-international-has-a-plan-to-help-save-your-local-yoga-studio-301029780.html



SOURCE Yoga International




BAKU, Azerbaijan, Mar. 26

By Nargiz Sadikhova  Trend:

The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Kazakhstan amounted to 109, Trend reports with reference to Kazakhstans Ministry of Healthcare.

The ministrys data said that over the period from 00:00 to 15:00 (GMT +4) on Mar. 26, a total of 29 coronavirus cases has been confirmed in Kazakhstan, including 20 cases in Nur-Sultan and 9 in Almaty.

Thus, out of 109 coronavirus cases in Kazakhstan, 61 cases account for Nur-Sultan, 40 for Almaty city, 2 for Karaganda city, 2 for Shymkent, 1 for Almaty region, 1 for Aktobe region, 1 for Zhambyl region, 1 for North Kazakhstan region.

By a decision of State Commission on Provision of Emergency State under the president of Kazakhstan, quarantine regime has been introduced in Kazakhstans Nur-Sultan and Almaty cities at 00:00 (GMT +6) on March 19, 2020, due to the coronavirus outbreak.

On March 15, 2020, Kazakhstans President Kassym Jomart Tokayev signed a decree introducing an emergency state in Kazakhstan due to coronavirus outbreak, which came in force from 08:00 (GMT +6) on March 16 and will last till 08:00 on April 15, 2020.

First two cases of coronavirus infection were detected in Kazakhstan among those who arrived in Almaty city from Germany on March 13, 2020. The latest data said that the overall number of coronavirus cases in Kazakhstan is 109 people.

The outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which is an international transport hub - began at a fish market in late December 2019.

As of today, over 480,400 people have been confirmed as infected. The number of people killed by the disease has surpassed 21,500. Meanwhile, over 115,800 people have reportedly recovered.

Several countries are working on a vaccine against the new virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11.
Crip Camp pays homage to them by arguing that the camp was a foundational moment for the disability movement that followed. Though LeBrecht jokes that the conversations about how life could be better happened more in the girls bunk than the boys bunk, the environment at Camp Jened sowed the seeds of a revolution for kids who had grown up accepting the limits society had imposed on them. The way we were treated by staff, LeBrecht says, some of whom had disabilities themselves, you realize that your life could be better than what you were experiencing outside of camp.
Davenport University is bringing a new sense of space to its online learners and remote staff with the introduction of virtual reality software. Davenport is the first university in Michigan to adopt a new platform that mimics a traditional college campus classroom experience through an online community.

Davenport has a 20-year history of offering bachelor and graduate programs online, said Dr. Richard J. Pappas, president of Davenport University. That is why we are well-positioned, during this challenging time of a pandemic, to expand our universities use of online technologies and create an even more effective classroom experience for both our professors and their students.

To make this cyberspace a reality, Davenport uses virtual reality software VirBELA, a virtual campus that is dedicated to changing the way businesses, and now universities, think about and adapt to the needs of their online stakeholders.

Davenport University staff began piloting the software nearly a year ago, said Brian Miller, dean of the global campus at Davenport University. It was first introduced as a way to provide our online learning community with a heightened sense of togetherness while simultaneously gamifying and adapting the college experience to individuals of all learning and working styles.

Since being introduced to the platform, the university has been using it as a classroom for select online classes and as an internal team management space for its remote staff.

Both students and staff enjoy the adaptability of the software and the real-life interactions that the software replicates, said Jeff Wiggerman, director of instructional technology and delivery systems at Davenport University. Even after leaving the software, the virtual space persists just as it would in a physical setting  providing our online students, staff and faculty with a sense of place and community.

This new virtual platform is bringing with it unique features and experiences that cannot be replicated in a standard video chat or conference call. Such as:

 Creation of a personal avatar to represent the student

 Sticky notes that a user can hang on the wall and use to take notes

 TVs that a presenter can use to display a slide presentation

 Privacy zones that give users a safe space to interact

VirBELA has recognized the university for its progressive, forward-thinking use of the technology and asked both Miller and Wiggerman to share their learnings virtually at their annual conference this past October.

Davenport University is set to introduce the software into its online bachelors in health information management degree program this spring. At the same time, it will continue to look for ways to expand how and where it uses the software. The university is planning to host its first virtual graduate fair on March 31. It will have representatives from each of the universitys colleges  business, technology and health  as well as admissions, advising and career services.

To learn more about Davenport Universitys upcoming virtual program fair, visit davenport.edu/gradfair.
With most teaching going remote because of COVID-19, a new grant for the LibreTexts project at the University of California, Davis, will help bring personalized online learning to students around the world.

Launched by UC Davis Professor Delmar Larsen in 2008 as ChemWiki, LibreTexts is a national consortium that creates online resources to replace conventional textbooks and course materials. Students can access the materials for free, and instructors can assemble information tailored to the needs of their class. The world's most popular online textbook platform, LibreTexts saved UC Davis students about $1.5 million in textbook costs in the 2018-19 academic year and had a global impact of 100 million page views in 2019, Larsen said.

The $1 million innovation grant from the state of California's Learning Lab supports LibreTexts' effort to develop, test and widely distribute a new adaptive learning platform that complements LibreTexts' extensive library.

"Adaptive learning is like having a virtual tutor that responds to the performance and needs of individual students," said Larsen, a professor of chemistry in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science. For example, based on the answers a student provides, the adaptive learning system will guide the student toward remediation steps if they get things wrong.

Adaptive learning advances diversity and inclusion in STEM The adaptive learning project aims to foster inclusivity in STEM fields and address equity and achievement gaps in postsecondary STEM education, Larsen said.

"We want to build the system to be responsive to the cultural identity of the students, to increase ownership of the learning, and reduce STEM attrition rates of disadvantaged students," he said. The learning platform will support both in-person and remote teaching.

The award will fund collaborative work between faculty from UC Davis, California State University, San Bernardino, and Mendocino College, as well as additional partners within the California State University Chancellor's Office and the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges.

In addition to UC Davis, the LibreTexts consortium includes the University of Michigan, University of Kansas, DePauw University, University of Minnesota Rochester, College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University, Mendocino College, Monroe Community College and South Tahoe Community College.

###
In 2003, a friend of mine was sent to a centralized quarantining facility near the Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City when the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, was marching through Asia.

He sneaked out and went home. Flying from the U.S. to Vietnam, he had been found running a fever. In the quarantine camp, he said, people were packed close together and there was almost no method applied to prevent transmission of the coronavirus that causes SARS.

He said that since he did not have a fever, he decided to go home because he was afraid he would catch the infection from those in the quarantine camp. He came to my clinic for a health check. Luckily, it turned out that he took the right decision. He was completely healthy.

The fear of getting infected when staying in centralized facilities for quarantine is real, and this can lead to negative reactions that we can guess.

I have just seen some pictures on the internet which are said to be taken by a Vietnamese American who had been quarantined for 14 days following the preventive protocol in Vietnam for the novel coronavirus, which causes the Covid-19 respiratory illness.

That man complained about the quality of the quarantining facility, saying the restroom was dirty and that one quarantine room had up to 16 people, and people lay on bunk beds set close together, heightening the infection threat.

What we are doing now, in quarantining people, is actually separating those who are at risk of carrying the virus from the community, thus preventing the spread of the epidemic, which is truly necessary. Yet, if there is no measure to prevent cross-infection, there would be transmission risk among those kept at centralized quarantine camps.

If anyone is worried about the ability of such a camp to guarantee no cross-infection will take place, we should assess whether such a threat is real. I think this is a reasonable worry.

Deputy Health Minister Nguyen Truong Son had recently demanded that quarantine camps in the south central province of Binh Thuan, where nine Covid-19 patients have been confirmed so far, take steps to ensure no cross-infections occur.

On the other hand, we also have to contend with the psychological trauma of contracting the novel coronavirus, which is something like what happens when you learn you have got cancer or the HIV. This trauma exists even if the novel coronavirus is not as serious as cancer or HIV, because the way we have come up with a series of defensive measures has made many people fear it even more than cancer or AIDS.

A friend of mine narrated this joke recently: A man was coughing and was worried if he was infected with the new coronavirus. After getting a health check, he breathed a sigh of relief and told everybody that he just had lung cancer, not the coronavirus.

Although it is just a joke, which is a bit cruel, it reflects the feeling that many have about the pneumonia illness called Covid-19.

Coming back to the question of quarantining, it can also be said that it is not funny at all to be isolated. I have never stayed in a quarantine camp but I have experienced the feelings of losing my freedom. So when I hear that some have willingly accepted to stay in quarantine, I admire them.

Yet there have been individuals who have not fully and truthfully reported to the authorities where theyd been after they have tested positive. Those people are blameworthy, but why do they hide things? They do so because this virus may expose their private matters, business secrets and tricks to the world. If this happened, the public would jump in, stick their noses into the personal life of those individuals and nitpick everything they can.

At the time of a pandemic, only those who are completely righteous and entirely responsible to the community, or have no secret businesses can feel free to declare everything they have done and everywhere they have been to the authorities.

So what can we do?

In case we are subjected to quarantine, we can try just a little harder to complete that two-week assignment. And in case we dont have to be quarantined, lets have some sympathy for others that do.

Blame game?

Lets look at the patients as those who are experiencing a huge psychological shock and under much pressure. There have been calls for an investigation into the first Covid-19 patient of Binh Thuan, a businesswoman found infected after returning from the U.S., because, the argument goes, she posed a serious threat to the community.

The calls came after this woman was found hiding information that she had stopped by Ho Chi Minh City and met some people there, following her U.S. trip. As a result, she transmitted the virus to two men in the city, who later transmitted it to another woman.

But deep down, we should feel sympathetic for the ones who have tested positive for the virus, as they would probably feel as though everything has fallen apart in just a blink of an eye. Exerting more public pressure on them, treating them like criminals and criticizing their personal life will only create more difficulties in the process of quarantining and treating the Covid-19 disease.

The stress that Covid-19 patients endure comes not just from the illness itself but also from the publics attitude towards them.

With the complicated development of the pandemic, building high-quality quarantine camps is an idea that should be considered. The government can establish quarantine areas that are more private and have better quality, but patients would have to pay a certain fee to stay there. This has already been done and is a move to support.

Though it has been regulated that the state will cover all the expenditure on quarantine for all and the treatment cost for patients who are Vietnamese citizens, if we turn part of this process into a business in which those who can afford it can pay to be quarantined as they want, the state budget would have some burden removed.

The government should continue encouraging operators of resorts that have separate villas and bungalow to use those facilities as quarantine camps for those who want more privacy and comfort. The authorities can make sure that the quarantined person is strictly monitored, while that person pays for accommodation and even the health checks and resort management fees.

What we have been doing, using the tax that the public pays to quarantine those who are not Vietnamese nationals, is not a right move, I feel. That budget is already limited and should be spent properly. It should be regulated that foreigners entering Vietnam must pay a deposit for deportation, and in case they are subjected to quarantine but refuse or they do not have enough money to cover the quarantine cost, they should not be allowed to enter the nation and be deported, losing the deposit as well.

I have also seen many negative reactions towards overseas Vietnamese as well as Vietnamese studying and working abroad who have returned to their home country.

Whether they have come back to Vietnam to work or simply escape from the expanding outbreaks outside Vietnam, they all have their own reasons. And if they are not corrupt officials who have siphoned off funds from the state budget and used it to buy themselves a position abroad, fleeing from pollution and poverty, every overseas Vietnamese deserves to be welcomed back home.

We should remember that overseas Vietnamese have contributed to Vietnam through the remittances they have sent home. No one should be treated as a bad person when they choose to return to their home.

Any criticism must be specific and name only individuals who have been too selfish and demanding.

The entire nation has been fighting the pandemic as its top duty, but we also have to limit its impact on our daily life, on social psychology, and consider what we need to do on that front.

Id like to confirm one thing. This pneumonia illness called Covid-19 is not as dangerous for patients as other some cardiovascular diseases, diabetes or high blood pressure that a majority of Vietnamese people have.

But its pressure on the healthcare system should be taken seriously: If the number of cases stays at several hundred, and dozens become critical, our healthcare system can help them recover. But if infections jump to tens of thousands, and along with that, many patients needs resuscitation or ventilators to help them breathe because they cannot do it on their own, the system will be overloaded.

Covid-19 will become dangerous for the community if it spins out of control and spreads widely, impacting the medical systems ability to tackle it.

Vietnams strategy in fighting and preventing the Covid-19 is now focused on curbing the spread of infection and limiting the number of fresh cases. Identifying outbreak areas, quarantining and social distancing are the best solutions now. Together, we can prevent the new coronavirus from spreading.

What we all need to do, for now, is to enclose ourselves in one place, but keep our hearts wide open.

*Vo Xuan Son is a doctor the EXSON Center for Minimally Invasive Spine and Spinal Cord Care in HCMC. The opinions expressed are his own.
Nguyen Dinh Cung, former director of the Central Institute for Economic Management and member of PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc's economic advisory group, speaks about measures to improve the business environment.

Nguyen Dinh Cung, former director of the Central Institute for Economic Management and member of the Prime Ministers economic advisory group.  Photo vietq.vn

The process of reducing business conditions has slowed in recent years, proven by the return of old business red tape. What do you think about this?

First of all, we must identify what conditional business is and what the business conditions are.

Business conditions, under the State's aspect, are the States management tools for business activities.

However, for businesses, some of them are a barrier to development. Such barriers increase businesses costs and distort the market. They make products cost more, make it more difficult to access business opportunities and make the market less competitive and less efficient. This reduces the growth of the economy.

In the past two decades, improving the business environment and reducing business conditions have been a priority of administrative reforms. Since 2016, administrative reforms have focused on cutting conditional business lines, reducing the number of business conditions and limiting the overlap in issuing business conditions.

In 2017, we proposed completely removing three-quarters of the 4,000 business conditions. The Government later approved cutting or simplifying half of the business conditions.

However, the decision did not state clearly how much we could simplify a business condition. Changing a name or removing something in the condition is considered simplifying work. This has obscured the goals of administrative reforms.

Has there been some success in this work?

In 2018, the situation was better in terms of cutting the number of business conditions. The ministries showed their determination in implementing the Prime Minister's direction with a series of newly issued documents on cutting business conditions. This created trust for businesses and society and promoted domestic investment.

However, the situation hasnt gone well since 2019. The pace of improving the business environment and cutting business conditions has slowed down a lot.

No one can really answer the quality of these reforms. We do not know how to assess them, whether the evaluation should be on the number of conditions cut or on the impact on businesses.

I believe there should be a comprehensive evaluation of the reforms.

In my opinion, the reduction of business conditions in the past several years has had little positive impact on the business environment. We should completely abolish three-fourths of total business conditions.

On what basis do you think that the three-fourth of business conditions should be completely cut?

Many people have asked me that question. Heres my answer. I give a ratio of three-fourths based on four factors.

Firstly, it's based on my research on the scientific basis for laying out conditional business lines. Secondly, it's based on the practical requirements on the abolition of business conditions. Thirdly, it's based on international practices.

Finally, it helps change management thinking by cutting ineffective tools.

Too many business conditions only create a tool for civil servants to abuse their power and profit from enterprises and the State. When this tool is cut off, the State management method will be changed. This is an extremely important task.

We cannot follow the old path. The reduction of business conditions has not changed much and failed to bring effectiveness for both State management and the economy for decades.

Most business conditions must be cut, or they will continue to cause negative impacts on the business environment and the economy.  VNS/Nang Luong Moi

Vietnamese businesses struggle to protect their brands Many Vietnamese famous brands have fallen into foreign hands or disappeared from the market.
Hamza Division leader Abu Hussein Hindawi is believed to have been assassinated in Libya, with suspicion falling on a rival Syrian rebel group reports Al-Masdar.

A Syrian military commander that was deployed in Libya to assist the forces of the Turkish-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) has been assassinated, a new report has revealed.

According to investigative journalist Lindsey Snell, the Hamza Division commander Abu Hussein al-Hindawi was assassinated with five other members of the militant group in Libya a few days ago.

Snell wrote on Twitter, Hamza Division leader Abu Hussein Hindawi was assassinated a couple days ago in Libya along with five others. TFSA says they were recruiting men from Sultan Murad, thus reducing the payouts for Sultan Murad leaders. Guess their infighting isnt limited to Afrin.

As pointed out, the assassination was believed to have been carried out by a rival Turkish-backed militant group.

It appears that the militant infighting is not exclusive to Syria, as these latest reports suggest that the rebel forces have engaged in clashes with one another in Libya as well.

In December, a Bloomberg News report revealed that Turkey was deploying Syrian militants in Libya to help the struggling GNA forces in the northern part of the country.

Since their deployment, however, the Syrian militants have done little to turn the tide of the battle in northern Libya, as the Libyan National Army (LNA) has managed to capture several areas, including the port-city of Sirte.

This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
Stay up to date on the latest coronavirus news with mySA.com:

WASHINGTON (AP)  Hospitals are gearing up to test if a century-old treatment used to fight off flu and measles outbreaks in the days before vaccines, and tried more recently against SARS and Ebola, just might work for COVID-19, too: using blood donated from patients whove recovered.

Doctors in China attempted the first COVID-19 treatments using what the history books call convalescent serum -- today, known as donated plasma -- from survivors of the new virus.

Now a network of U.S. hospitals is waiting on permission from the Food and Drug Administration to begin large studies of the infusions both as a possible treatment for the sick and as vaccine-like temporary protection for people at high risk of infection.

There's no guarantee it will work.

We wont know until we do it, but the historical evidence is encouraging, Dr. Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins Universitys school of public health told The Associated Press.

Casadevall drew on that history in filing the FDA application. The FDA is working expeditiously to facilitate the development and availability of convalescent plasma" a spokesman said.

Here are some questions and answers about this latest quest for a treatment.

WHAT EXACTLY IS THIS POSSIBLE THERAPY?

It may sound like back to the Stone Age, but theres good scientific reason to try using survivors' blood, said Dr. Jeffrey Henderson of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who coauthored the FDA application with Casadevall and another colleague at the Mayo Clinic.

When a person gets infected by a particular germ, the body starts making specially designed proteins called antibodies to fight the infection. After the person recovers, those antibodies float in survivors blood -- specifically plasma, the liquid part of blood  for months, even years.

One of the planned studies would test if giving infusions of survivors' antibody-rich plasma to newly ill COVID-19 patients would boost their own bodys attempts to fight off the virus. To see if it works, researchers would measure if the treatment gave patients a better chance of living or reduced the need for breathing machines.

One caution: While regular plasma transfusions are a mainstay of medicine, very rarely they can cause a lung-damaging side effect.

COULD IT ALSO ACT LIKE A VACCINE?

Sort of, but unlike a vaccine, any protection would only be temporary.

A vaccine trains peoples immune systems to make their own antibodies against a target germ. The plasma infusion approach would give people a temporary shot of someone elses antibodies that are short-lived and require repeated doses.

Still, if FDA agrees, a second study would give antibody-rich plasma infusions to certain people at high risk from repeated exposures to COVID-19, such as hospital workers or first responders, said Dr. Liise-anne Pirofski of New York's Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. That also might include nursing homes when a resident becomes ill, in hopes of giving the other people in the home some protection, she said.

We need both things desperately, Pirofski said. We need to be able to break the cycle of transmission and we also need to be able to help people who are ill.

WHATS THE HISTORY?

These plasma infusions were used most famously during the 1918 flu pandemic, and against numerous other infections, such as measles and bacterial pneumonia, before vaccines and modern medicines came along. Long-ago research is sketchy. But in the Journal of Clinical Investigation earlier this month, Casadevall and Pirofski cited evidence that 1918 flu patients given the infusions were less likely to die. And a 1935 medical report detailed how doctors stopped a measles outbreak from sweeping through a boarding school using serum from prior patients.

The old-fashioned approach still is dusted off every so often to tackle surprise outbreaks such as SARS in 2002, and in 2014 when Ebola survivors plasma was used to treat other patients during the West Africa epidemic. Even during those recent outbreaks, strict studies of the technique were not done, but Casadevall said there were clues that the plasma helped.

Casadevall thinks that when it didn't work, it may have been used too late. "Somebody at the end of their lives, its very hard to affect any disease at that point, he cautioned.

A more modern approach is to brew this type of antibody in the lab, something Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and other companies are working on. Using blood from COVID-19 survivors is a decidedly more labor-intensive approach  but researchers could start banking the plasma as soon as regulators give the OK.

HOW WOULD DOCTORS GET THE PLASMA?

Blood banks take plasma donations much like they take donations of whole blood; regular plasma is used in hospitals and emergency rooms every day. If someones donating only plasma, their blood is drawn through a tube, the plasma is separated and the rest infused back into the donors body. Then that plasma is tested and purified to be sure it doesn't harbor any blood-borne viruses and is safe to use.

For COVID-19 research, the difference would be who does the donating -- people who have recovered from the coronavirus. Scientists would measure how many antibodies are in a unit of donated plasma  tests just now being developed that aren't available to the general public  as they figure out what's a good dose, and how often a survivor could donate.

Researchers arent worried about finding volunteer donors but caution it will take some time to build up a stock.

I get multiple emails a day from people saying, Can I help, can I give my plasma? Pirofski said.

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
ALBANY  Facing billions of dollars in revenue shortfall ahead of the state's April 1 budget deadline, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is pushing for a slimmed-down spending package that his administration would adjust periodically throughout the fiscal year.

With the economic impact of the coronavirus increasingly uncertain, the plan would give the Cuomo administration the power to revisit and trim spending, depending on how deeply the country falls into a recession and how quickly it can recover. In January, Cuomo had proposed a nearly $180 billion budget plan, which had anticipated $88 billion in revenue  but now, the state is estimating a shortfall $10 to $15 billion, according to the state budget division.

"New York state is basically bankrupt,'' Cuomo said in a radio interview Thursday, asserting that there will be education cuts statewide.

The state had already been facing a difficult budget year, looking at a roughly $6 billion budget gap mostly attributable to Medicaid overspending. But things had been looking up: Cuomo charged a team of experts with reorganizing the state's Medicaid program that pinpointed $2.5 billion in savings, and in early March the state identified an estimated $700 million in additional revenue through fiscal year 2021.

Then the novel coronavirus swiftly engulfed the nation, shuttering schools, businesses and other aspects of daily life  rocking the stock market and causing a surge in unemployment. The state's economic health has been crippled.

"We know the revenues are down  we dont know how much," Cuomo told reporters at the Capitol Thursday. "We dont know when the economy comes back, we dont know the rate at which the economy comes back, and we dont know what Washington may do to address this situation in the future, if anything. So, you dont know ... but you have to do a budget with all those unknowns."

The governor's proposal would give the state budget division the authority to re-evaluate spending each quarter, potentially slashing funds earmarked for local governments, schools and other entities as actual revenue numbers are reported.

State Budget Director Robert Mujica's latest calculations put the shortfall up to $15 billion, his office said. State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli had estimated on March 17 that New York would fall $4 billion to more than $7 billion short of the governor's initial revenue projections.

During a typical recession, the state would lose about $8.5 billion in revenue  but "it wouldn't be shocking" for that number to climb higher as the fiscal year begins, said David Friedfel, director of state studies at the Citizens Budget Commission.

The governor's office and the state Legislature have been working toward an expedited budget plan this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, tossing complicated policy issues to the wayside as the state pursues an immediate fiscal response to the crisis. Much of the budget planning was and is dependent upon the federal government's aid to states handling the crisis, most notably in the form of a $2 trillion agreement between the U.S. Senate and the White House.

Cuomo has railed the plan as "terrible," saying that the state government would receive just $5 billion designated only to cover COVID-19 expenses. He asserted on Thursday that federal officials were "irresponsible in addressing the state and the city need." Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, meanwhile, defended the plan, saying New Yorkers would receive more than $115 billion in aid, including $7.5 billion for state and local coronavirus relief and billions for health care centers, public transit, small businesses and other institutions.

In the absence of any significant relief to New York state  the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis  from the federal governments $2 trillion bailout plan, the state will have to reevaluate the entire spending plan for next fiscal year," state budget division spokesman Freeman Klopott said.

The Legislature is unlikely to accept Cuomo's flexible budget proposal at face value, with leaders of both chambers saying on Thursday that they would like to be involved in any adjustments to the budget throughout the year, instead of leaving that to the executive.

"The state is faced with an unprecedented public health and economic crisis that will require leadership and tough decision-making," said Michael Whyland, a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie. "We are exploring ways to give the governor the flexibility he may need without sacrificing transparency and legislative authority."

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, in an interview with the Capitol Pressroom on Thursday, said some low-level budget items have already "been put to bed," while legislative leaders continue to negotiate the "big, big issues." Though the budget is still largely in flux, she would still like the Legislature to give input on any potential cuts or changes in spending.

"We are a co-equal branch of government, and we understand the need to have the nimbleness to react if something has to happen, but I would never be in favor of giving wide latitude [to the executive] without the involvement of the Legislature in most of these decisions," she said.

The state Legislature had planned to convene every business day this week, and Monday through Wednesday next week, in the lead-up to the budget vote, typically the most hotly debated package that lawmakers consider each year. That schedule has been upended as the state heeds social distancing guidelines  and as three Assembly members have tested positive for the infectious disease.

Still, the Legislature will continue its work, Stewart-Cousins said. Both chambers will approve a resolution next week that would allow for remote voting and teleconferencing, she said. Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes has already introduced such a bill, and a reporter spotted new televisions being set up in the Assembly chamber on Thursday.

Many of the policy proposals that lawmakers had intended to include in the budget will now likely be debated later this year through teleconferencing, or perhaps next session, legislators say. For weeks, Cuomo had insisted that an expedited budget bill would not mean a "skinny" budget bill  but on Thursday, he acknowledged that some issues requiring further discussion may be left out of the final package, including provisions for gig workers.

The governor said Wednesday that he would still like to include changes to bail reform and the legalization of recreational marijuana in the budget, though the latter appears increasingly unlikely. State Sen. Liz Krueger, D-Manhattan, a Senate sponsor of the marijuana bill, said on Thursday that "the governor's staff essentially took marijuana off the table weeks ago."

"While it is important that we end marijuana prohibition as soon as possible, it is also important that it be done the right way," she said in an emailed statement. "If that cannot be achieved in the midst of a public health crisis, then we will all be better off waiting. There is no reason we cannot negotiate and pass a nation-leading legalization model when the crisis is over."

Staff writer Amanda Fries contributed reporting.
[LO ULTIMO] Congreso recibe el PL 4895/2020-PE que delega en el Poder Ejecutivo la facultad de legislar en diversas materias para la atencion de la emergencia sanitaria producida por el #COVID?19 pic.twitter.com/uZPKSG5KjV
Hurt by the coronavirus outbreak, airlines have asked for the government's help to pay their employees' salaries, according to a Business Standard report.

Chief executive officers (CEOs) of airlines have asked the government to pay 50 percent of their staff's salaries for three months, sources told the publication.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the story.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has instructed airlines to suspend domestic flights till March 31.

But, domestic carriers have suspended their operations till April 14 amid a 21-day nationwide lockdown.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Coronavirus India LIVE Updates

The Ministry of Labour and Employment has said companies shouldn't lay off employees if they have not been able to work during the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, aka COVID-19.

In the backdrop of such challenging situations, all the employees of public or private establishments are advised to extend their coordination by not terminating their employees  particularly casual or contract workers for their job or reduce their wages, the advisory said.

Executives of airlines told Business Standard that since their margins are slim and they are dependent on cash flows, paying their employees might be difficult.

Even after flights resume on April 15, weak consumer demand may cause airlines to ground some aircraft, the report said.

The period of pain has just started. It is not that as soon as the ban lifts we will see full flights. It will take at least six months for customer confidence to return. There is an urgent need for government intervention, an executive told the publication.
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Linkedin Issam Ahmed (Agence France-Presse) Washington  Thu, March 26, 2020 07:07 658 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d69325 2 Science & Tech rat,Science,beggar,fake-beggars Free

Like people, rats cooperate with one another and give food to those in need, but how can they be sure that other rats are being truthful about how hungry they are?

The answer may lie in smell-based cues that signal a rat's appetite more reliably than its begging gestures and squeaks, a study said Tuesday.

The paper's lead author Karin Schneeberger of the University of Potsdam in Germany told AFP she was interested in learning more about how social animals identify "cheaters" and freeloaders.

She and her colleagues studied Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus), publishing their findings in the journal PLOS Biology.

Previous work has shown the rats share their food reciprocally, with the donation of what they deem high value food items, like bananas, more likely to elicit a gift in return than low value items, like carrots.

But the scientists believed the calls and gestures used by rats to solicit food might not always reflect their actual needs, allowing dishonest rodents to trick givers out of their hard earned gains.

To test out the idea, they took rats that were either hungry from fasting overnight, or well-fed, and placed them in a separate room from the "focal" rat whose generosity they wanted to test.

Air from the rooms of the hungry or well-fed rats was pumped into the chamber of the focal rat.

They found that the focal rats were much quicker to provide help -- by pulling a food tray within reaching distance of another rat -- when the air was pumped from a hungry rat's room.

It took 16 focal rats an average of 29 seconds to provide help for hungry rats, compared to an average of 85 seconds to give help to the well-fed.

The authors then analyzed the air around the rats and found seven different organic compounds that differed significantly in their abundance between hungry and satiated rats.

Read also: Three ways to get rid of rats

Good rat citizens

These might result from recently ingested food sources, the metabolic processes involved in digestion, or possibly even a pheromone that indicates hunger.

Taken together, these signals form a "smell of hunger" for rats that serves as a reliable cue of need, said Schneeberger.

Apart from identifying freeloaders, the rats may be acting to reduce the suffering of others, she added.

"It could be that they do that out of an emotional state -- I don't really want to call it empathy because that's something that is very anthropomorphic," said Schneeberger.

"But having somebody in distress next to yourself can cause stress in yourself too."

Rats could also be investing in a better rodent society that ultimately serves their own interests, just like humans do, she added.

"Maybe when we are old and we need help crossing the street, then we are also very happy to live in a society where it generally is the rule that you help elderly people to cross the street.

"So we try to keep the society as social as possible."
A sex trafficking victim serious health problems was denied a place in a safe house because the accommodation could not comply with coronavirus rules on social distancing, her lawyer has said, raising concerns about vulnerable modern slavery victims being put at risk.

The Zimbabwean woman, who cannot be named to protect her identity, is currently living in shared, mixed-gender asylum accommodation where she has to wash and eat in communal areas, which a clinical psychologist said was leaving her at high risk of being re-trafficked.

After being contacted by The Independent, the Home Office and the Salvation Army have arranged for her to be re-housed in single-sex asylum accommodation.

Modern slavery victims are entitled to safe house accommodation through the National Referral Mechanism (NRM)  the UK's framework for identifying victims  which is run by the Salvation Army under a Home Office contract.

Campaigners have called on the Home Office to urgently establish alternative safe house accommodation for trafficking victims who need it during the coronavirus outbreak, or risk placing this vulnerable group at risk of re-exploitation.

The woman, who has a history of TB and also has serious mental health problems  which led to her attempted suicide three times in the past year, including once as recently as February  had her asylum claim refused at the end of last year, months after she was formally identified as a victim of trafficking in May 2019.

Katy Watts, a solicitor from the Public Law Project who is representing the woman, said she wrote to the Home Office and the Salvation Army on 11 March asking them to urgently move her client to more suitable accommodation.

She said that in response, the Salvation Army said it could not guarantee her safety in a safe house because they could not comply with rules on social distancing, and did not give an alternative option.

When The Independent contacted the Salvation Army, the charity said they raised concerns about the suitability of the accommodation provided by the asylum support service and that the Home Office would now move the woman to single-sex accommodation.

Ms Watts said: "My client needs a lot of support. She is very vulnerable. Shes really concerned about her health. She is more vulnerable than most and it would be impossible to self-isolate where she is now.

She welcomed the fact that her client would be moved, but added: At the moment everyone is really struggling and scrambling around to find suitable provision for lots of different vulnerable groups, but they have a duty to provide support which is tailored to meet the needs to victims of trafficking.

There is a duty on them to come up with something that is better than just saying sorry theres nothing that we can do. There is a risk that without appropriate support trafficking victims are going to end up being re-exploited."

Victoria Marks, director of ATLEU, a charity supporting the woman, said: We recognise that many services are struggling to cope with the rapid escalation of the coronavirus crisis, but a person who has left exploitation is at an incredibly low point. They have chosen to trust in others and our government, believing that help will be available.

That trust cannot be betrayed. To turn someone away, with or without symptoms, with no alternative support in place, is to tell them that they do not matter.

Kate Roberts, UK and Europe manager for Anti-Slavery International, said accepting new victims into safe house accommodation at this time without additional capacity and provisions in place for people to be able to self isolate could be a recipe for disaster, but called on the government to urgently establish alternatives or risk the whole service falling apart.

There needs to be clear guidance and a plan for this pandemic to make sure the NRM is able to accommodate new victims safely and ensure people who are already in support are not moved on without somewhere safe to go to. Now is not a time to be moving people around, she said.

There needs to be some emergency planning  perhaps hotels  and that will need resourcing. The government has shown it is able to put resources into addressing this crisis. They must not forget about the most vulnerable.

Obviously its really challenging but it is a crisis and really urgent action must be taken to ensure the whole service doesnt fall apart and this group that has been so marginalised in the past does not fall through the gaps.

Director of Anti Trafficking and Modern Slavery for The Salvation Army, Major Kathy Betteridge said: At The Salvation Army we do all we can to ensure victims of modern slavery and human trafficking have the best support possible.

We raised concerns about the suitability of the accommodation provided by the National Asylum Support Service for this individual and they have now approved a move to single-sex accommodation. The individual continues to receive regular support from a support worker."

A government spokesperson said: Modern slavery is an abhorrent crime and we are committed to stamping it out. Victims and survivors may feel even more vulnerable during these unsettling times, but existing advice and support remains available.

Were in discussions with providers of accommodation and support services so they can assist victims while keeping them safe from the risks of coronavirus.
- 5 individuals who include a husband and his wife have been arrested for making and selling fake hand sanitizers

- All the suspects were arrested at a suburb of Techiman on March 25, after a tip-off was given to the police

- Apart from the fake sanitizers, the police retrieved other products such as mouth wash, 'saviour water', and sexual healing products among several others

Our Manifesto: This is what YEN.com.gh believes in

A Ghanaian gentleman Opoku Ababio and his wife Dorothy Opoku along with three other accomplices have been arrested for making and selling fake hand sanitizers.

In a video report sighted YEN.com.gh on the official Facebook handle of Joy FM, the illegal hand sanitizer manufacturing unit was at a suburb of Techiman where all the five suspects were arrested.

Ghana as a country is witnessing a shortage in hand sanitizers following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the country which requires constant washing of hands or use of hand sanitizers.

READ ALSO: COVID-19: No entry or exit from Kwahu township till further notice - Chiefs & elders order

Watch the full video report below:

The Techiman Divisional Police Commander Ohene-Boadi Bossman revealed that the suspects were reported to the police and the operation was carried out in the afternoon of Wednesday, March 25, 2020.

It appears that the accomplices have been in the business for a long time as they had a well-designed banner giving the impression that the place was a registered centre branded as Dr Mina Herbal Center.

Apart from the fake sanitizer, the police retrieved other products such as mouth wash, saviour water, sexual healing products among several others.

READ ALSO: Doctors & nurses at Tamale isolate as fresh COVID-19 suspected case dies

It is indicated that the 'factory' and processes that were used in producing the health products are despicable and totally against the standards of the Food and Drugs Authority.

All the suspects are reportedly in the police custody as investigations continue.

In other news, a gentleman from Nigeria who appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties has released a hot video firing Ghanaians for not appreciating the efforts of their president, asking for Nana to come and rule Nigeria.

In the video sighted by , the passionate Nigerian mentions that Ghana's President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is taking highly drastic measures to combat COVID-19 and keeps Ghanaians updated with what's ongoing in the country.

He strongly goes ahead to assert that Muhammadu Buhari, the Nigerian president does not even have adequate knowledge on what's going on regarding COVID-19 around the world.

Enjoy reading our stories? Download YEN's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Ghana news!

Only God can save Ghana from the Coronavirus outbreak - Pastor declares | #Yencomgh

Get interactive via our Facebook page.

Source: YEN.com.gh
Police have released a picture of a man they wish to speak to in relation to an arson attack that reduced a former hairdressers to ashes.

Officers were called to Cheam Common Road, London, at 5.05pm on Saturday, September 7 2019.

Neighbouring buildings had to be evacuated as four fire engines and around 25 firefighters battled the blaze.

Police have released a picture of a man (pictured) they wish to speak to in relation to an arson attack that reduced a former hairdressers to ashes in Worcester Park, London

Officers were called to Cheam Common Road in Worcester Park, London, at 5.05pm on Saturday, September 7 2019. Neighbouring buildings had to be evacuated as four fire engines and around 25 firefighters battled the blaze

The fire, which prompted 23 calls to 999, was eventually brought under control by 7.13pm.

But the empty shop and adjacent flat had largely been destroyed.

Both the London Fire Brigade and the London Ambulance Service attended the scene and were able to prevent anyone being seriously injured.

The Metropolitan Police have now released an image of a man they are keen to speak to in relation to the fire.

The fire, which prompted 23 calls to 999, was eventually brought under control by 7.13pm but the empty shop and adjacent flat had largely been destroyed (aftermath pictured)

Both the London Fire Brigade and the London Ambulance Service attended the scene (pictured) and were able to prevent anyone being seriously injured

The photograph shows a man wearing blue jeans, a black hoodie and trainers while carrying a rucksack on his back.

He was seen in the vicinity of the shops at 4.33pm.

Anyone who recognises him is asked to call police at Bromley police station via 101 or Tweet @MetCC quoting 5323/07SEP.

To remain anonymous, call Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
New Delhi: The East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) on Tuesday issued an order to shut the Ghazipur slaughterhouse  the national Capitals only legal facility to butcher buffaloes, sheep and goats. The slaughter of poultry and fish is permitted elsewhere in the city.

This has been done to restrict close proximity of human involvement in compliance with guidelines to control and contain Covid-19, the order issued by the corporation to the private company that runs the 25-acre facility near NH-24, read. The slaughterhouse delivers over four lakh kilograms of meat daily, under an agreement with the east civic body.

At least 500 butchers and supervisors work here, whose health would have been at risk if the facility continued to run. This is not related to any scare regarding transmission of the Coronavirus infection from humans to animal meat or vice versa, at all. Alongside, the livestock market in the slaughterhouse premises has also been closed for now, spokesperson, EDMC, Arun Kumar, said. The facility will stay closed until further order, he added.

A stakeholder in the private company, however, said the order does not conform with guidelines set out by both the state and central governments.

The Delhi and union government notifications say that selling meat, dairy and poultry is allowed in the city. But where will supply to the shops come from if the Ghazipur slaughterhouse is closed? As far as WHO [World Health Organization] standards on hygiene and sanitation of the staff are concerned, we are already taking care of it, Fauzan Alavi, a director with the company, Frigorifico Allana, said.

Besides, this is a basic food product for a large section of Delhis population. They will obviously not change their food habits overnight for the next 21 days, he said.

EDMC officials said that while the union government order talks about keeping meat shops open, the slaughterhouse is a large space that has a complex web of activities. Between so many people [the staff], it is impossible to maintain a one-metre-distance. We cannot take a chance, Kumar said.

The slaughterhouse produces about two lakh kilogram buffalo meat and 80,000kg of sheep and goat meat for domestic consumption in Delhi in two shifts during the day. Besides, it produces another about one lakh kilogram of buffalo meat and 60,000kg of sheep and goat meat for export, primarily to Gulf countries.

Senior veterinary officers of the corporation said they had other reasons to shut the slaughterhouse as well.

Most of the animals processed here would come from neighbouring States, like sheep and goat from Rajasthan, and buffaloes from Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab. These are unproductive animals, such as infertile or non milk-producing buffaloes. Since inter-state movement has been banned, the feed to the slaughterhouse will reduce from now, said a senior officer with EDMC who did not wish to be named.

Besides, some animals would come to us from the 10 legal dairy farms of Delhi  Kakrola, Goela, Nangli, Jharoda, Bhalaswa, Gharoli, Ghazipur, Shahbad, Madanpur and Masoodpur. These will also thin out as people just cant travel or find commercial transportation to move goods and livestock anymore, he said.
Vancouver Island woman, Claire Patterson is using her experience of living in the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic

A Vancouver Island woman who was living abroad in Igualada, Spain as the COVID-19 outbreak started to take its toll on the country is hoping Canadians will learn from other countries' mistakes.

We have the choice now to make a difference, to self-isolate... to work from home, to flatten the curve, said Claire Patterson in an Instagram video.

Pattersons impassioned plea for people to follow the governments recommendation of physical distancing has been seen by nearly 200,000 people.

After flying back to Canada from Spain and trying to explain to friends that she was going to go into self-isolation, and seeing people making light of the situation, Patterson knew she had to speak up.

I wanted to use a personal story in hopes that it would fill the gaps between news coverage and statistics and foster a sense of empathy, she said. Its like people werent understanding the bigger picture.

Patterson saw photos of Canadians still going to beaches, parties and continuing social life as per the norm, but knew they werent aware of what could happen if the pandemic was taken lightly.

It just felt exactly like where Spain was at a week before the pandemic... seeing how fast things escalated in that one week gave me a lot of fear for Canada, she said.

In her video, Patterson details the two worlds she witnessed and how juxtaposed they were.

The hospital [in Igualada] is devastated and people in Vancouver cant even resist going to a party, she said. Nobody understands whats happening.

Up until early March, Patterson was living with a homestay family while teaching English as part of a culture exchange program through her university in Igualada, a town of nearly 40,000 people living within eight square miles.

According to Patterson, officials in the small town announced they had at least five positive cases of COVID-19, but had no plans to close schools, which she feared may lead to increased spread.

Story continues

It was obvious that the kids were already sick... I vividly remember a 12-year-old coughing so much that tears were streaming down her face, Patterson said in the video.

But, life resumed and classes carried on for at least two more days, until they officially decided to close all schools.

There were rumours starting to go around that there were 20 cases and there was a death already, she said.

Stop making memes, its not a joke...

After consulting with her colleagues, Patterson booked a flight to Amsterdam for later in the week hoping to wait out the pandemic there. But, then U.S. President Donald Trump announced he was going to ban all flights from Europe coming to the United States.

At this point, Patterson felt that when she landed in Amsterdam, she could take a flight home to Canada. Before she could even get on her flight, she received a text the next morning of a rumour indicating public transit in town would be shutting down.

I packed as fast as I could, didnt say goodbye to anyone who supported me from living there, and drove to Barcelona that night, said Patterson.

Shortly after Patterson had hurriedly left Igualada, the regional government placed residents of the town under quarantine.

After being in Barcelona, Patterson booked a flight home and has been in self-isolation since returning.

To date, Spain has been one of the hardest hit countries where a total of 3,647 people have died. Since March 23 the country has reported a daily death total of at least 500 people.

Given the alarming number of COVID-19 related deaths in other countries, Patterson is hoping to see preventative action from fellow Canadians.

Stop making memes, its not a joke, start making choices to protect people you love around you, she said.

In the past two weeks, shes noticed a change in Canadians and believes the constant messaging from the government, and the prime ministers daily speeches have helped ease minds and answer questions.

Im really grateful hes been taking questions everyday and appearing to speak to people, because its shifted the consciousness quite a bit, she said.

Patterson said she intends to stay self-isolated past the recommended 14 days until the government announces Canadians should resume their regular habits.
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The Commerce Protection Platform provider offers merchants free tools and deeply discounted services to keep ecommerce businesses running smoothly during coronavirus disruptions

Signifyd today announced the release of its COVID-19 Business Continuity Package, a discounted set of commerce solutions to help ecommerce businesses prosper in the face of workforce disruptions, unexpected shifts in demand and new and increasing fraud threats.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended all aspects of life and made business continuity particularly challenging for retailers relying on manual order flow and fraud review processes. For example, order review agents may not be equipped to view order data and shoppers' personally identifiable information (PII) from home offices, introducing data-breach risk and compliance exposure.

The Signifyd COVID-19 Business Continuity Package offers new clients free services and an effective, fully scalable and ROI-positive way to manage orders that a merchant would ordinarily send to a manual fraud review team.

"Consumer compassion is at the core of every decision we make," Signifyd CEO and Co-Founder Raj Ramanand said. "We are all finding our way in this unprecedented time. We will all get through this together and we wanted to find a way to make that path easier for retailers."

Specifically, the Business Continuity Package gives new clients free access to Signifyd's Agent Console and Insights Dashboard and includes Signifyd's AI-driven Dynamic Review Capacity. Merchants pay only for orders they would have sent to manual review in normal times.

The Agent Console includes all transaction risk-scoring services, which are best in class due to the massive scale of the Signifyd Commerce Network. The network consists of thousands of merchants processing millions of transactions in more than 100 countries.

The Insights Dashboard includes real-time analytics of ecommerce trends and benchmarking data across Signifyd's global merchant network.

Dynamic Review Capacity uses Signifyd's self-learning systems to keep up with the constant changes in fraud attacks and consumer behavior in these chaotic times. The solution accurately identifies fraudulent orders and sees to it that legitimate orders are shipped promptly. Signifyd will maximize the approval rate on those orders and take liability for any chargebacks that result from its decisions.

The combination of Signifyd's machine learning and the Commerce Network means Dynamic Review adapts to the rapidly evolving commerce environment far faster than a traditional rules-based solution could.

Together the elements of the Business Continuity Package provide the tools merchants need to fight the three-front war brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

With the automated solutions in place, merchants can make up for the loss of productivity and throughput that results from review agents having to work remotely. When order review can't keep up with incoming orders, fraud increases and approval rates, customer experience and revenue all take a hit. Orders will be reviewed while all personally identifiable information (PII) is protected and all compliance issues around privacy and data-breaches are handled. Merchants need not worry about whether remote agents are equipped to view and secure PII from home offices. Signifyd's learning machines can adapt to new and more aggressive fraud attacks launched by criminals seeking to take advantage of the chaos sewn by the coronavirus' spread. Rigid rules are simply not up to the task.

More about how Signifyd's COVID-19 Business Continuity Package can help ecommerce merchants serve their customers in the time of coronavirus can be found on Signifyd's website.

About Signifyd

Signifyd provides an end-to-end Commerce Protection Platform that leverages its Commerce Network to maximize conversion, automate customer experience and eliminate fraud and customer abuse for retailers. Signifyd counts among its customers a number of companies on the Fortune 1000 and Internet Retailer Top 500 lists. Signifyd is headquartered in San Jose, CA., with locations in Denver, New York, Belfast, and London.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005176/en/

Contacts:

Signifyd

Mike Cassidy

mike.cassidy@signifyd.com

+1-650-283-7084
He kneels to pluck a tiny chamomile flower. I dont know what hes thinking, but his sweet face is focused and grave. His darling little fingers go on plucking one, two, three white-and-yellow dots from the jade-green grass. Then, he marches to the somber chalk guardians of the field, those disciplined whitewashed monuments that mark the last halt for so many brave men and places the flowers on the arm of a cross. He stops, and I read the words engraved on the front of the headstone:

Here rests in honored glory

an American soldier

known but to God.

My son doesnt know how to read. Not yet. He doesnt realize he honors an unknown soldier, one of 597 others buried at Oise-Aisne.

In 2012, when we visited the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial in Seringes-et-Nesles, France, my son was just four years old. I stepped among the headstones guided solely by his curiosity and innocent intuition. The graveyard is a shrine to 6,012 American heroes fallen in these pristine fields at a decisive moment during the Second Battle of the Marne and in the Oise-Aisne campaign of the War to End All Wars. The fallen here paid the ultimate price to crush the last German offensive of World War I and to secure the armistice that took place 100 days later.

The burial ground extends across a pristine 36.5-acre landscape that is meticulously manicured.

Walkway through the center of Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France. (American Battle Monuments Commission)

The caretakers are surely military, I remember thinking, for no one else could possibly understand what it takes to serve with hopeless dignity and honor in life and in death.

The cemetery is spotlesseach cross an echo of the other, and all of them a sad, silent, and deafening ballad of courage and woe.

Being here is a paradox: one embraces the unassuming beauty of nature, a cradle that gives these heroes peace far from home; but you also hear their whispers, prayers told by the wind as it gusts through that grass trimmed with such a military precision that no blade is out of place.

Nothing but the grass should grow here to cover the graves of the valiant in gentle green. Theres room for flowers and trees along the pathways connecting the memorial to the gates. And yet, little fingers find wonder in the grassthose tiny white chamomile blossoms are, perhaps, a love poem frozen for eternity on the lips of a young private who still counts the clouds above, so far from home.

Im sorry, my son whispers as he places the small flowers on the cross. Then he wanders elsewhere. As he strolls among the graves, I get this feeling that he hears their distant voices carrying a solemn message of hope and love, and a promise of redemption.

Most of the soldiers buried here were cut down in their prime, mere children by todays standards. They died in a war that crushed nations and shattered humanity to its core. They perished far from home, and many are forgotten. But I like to believe that as long as a child stops to say a prayer in front of their graves their sacrifice was not in vain. If the children remember, surely hope for peace can be redeemed.

The same belief governed the people who built the memorial, a monumental curving colonnade made of rose-colored sandstone and decorated with four bas-reliefs at the top, two representing soldiers, and the other two St. Michael and St. George. The inscription on the facade reads:

These endured all and gave all that honor and justice might prevail and that the world might enjoy freedom and inherit peace.

The memorial at the Oise-Aisne WW1 American Cemetery and Memorial in France. The curving colonnade is built of rose-colored sandstone. (Mattpix/Shutterstock)

The small chapel at the right of the memorial commemorates 241 of the heroes who went missing in World War I, either whose bodies were not found, or who were never identified. A map showing where the soldiers of Oise-Aisne have fallen in the surrounding French territory is preserved in a small room at the left of the memorial. The visitor can grasp the enormity of the conflict while gazing at the map. The gravity of this moment in American and world history sinks in when one realizes that more than 30,000 U.S. combatants were killed or wounded here. The fragment of a message from Captain Jesse Woolridge of the U.S. 42nd Division below reveals a glimpse of the horrors of the war:

Its Gods truth that one Company of American soldiers beat and routed a full regiment of picked shock troops of the German Army  At ten oclock  the Germans were carrying back wounded and dead [from] the river bank and we in our exhaustion let them do itthey carried back all but six hundred which we counted later and fifty-two machine guns  We had started with 251 men and 5 lieutenants  I had left 51 men and 2-second lieutenants

Capt. Jesse Woolridge, 38th Inf., 3rd Division

French flag bearers participate in the 2014 Memorial Day Ceremony at Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France. (American Battle Monuments Commission)

Members of the U.S. Marine Corps participate in the 2017 Memorial Day Ceremony at Oise-Aisne American Cemetery. (American Battle Monuments Commission)

Places to Visit Nearby

The Oise-Aisne American Cemetery is on the scenic route from Paris to Luxembourg, not far from Chateau de Nesles, which is another must-see attraction if you find yourself in Seringes-et-Nesles. Constructed in 1226 for Robert III, Count of Dreux and Braine, the castle is an exceptional example of military architecture from the time of King Philip II of France, or Philip Augustus as he is widely known. The edifice is a replica of Chateau de Dourdan, built by the king in the 1220s. Part of the moats that surrounded Chateau de Nesles survived to this day, and the building remains in excellent condition.

From Chateau de Nesles, after a short ride, no more than 15 minutes, you reach the Cistercian Abbey of Val dIgny in Arcis-le-Ponsart. Founded in 1128, the monastic complex still stands and is now under the care of Trappist nuns.

From the Abbey of Val dIgny, the road leads to Reims, another French gem in the Champagne wine region. This city has several UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the imposing Notre-Dame de Reims Cathedral, the Palace of Tau, and the former Abbey of Saint-Remi, which now hosts Musee Saint-Remi, an archeology and art museum. Adjacent to the museum, you can also visit Basilica of Saint-Remi, a medieval church, which dates from the 11th century.

As beautiful and fascinating as this part of France is, I am perplexed at the course irony emblazoned on the meadows and woods near Oise-Aisne. To be honest, I am at once compelled to embrace many such places in Europe, while at the same time feeling repelled by the ghastly sorrow of war. I am sure many feel this way, but I wrestle as to how to finalize my humble dedication to the fallen. Perhaps the best conclusion comes in the form of a letter from a commanding officer, to the wife of one of these brave heroes.

Mrs. Ackerman,

Your husband, Sergeant Lloyd C. Ackerman, was in my company, and was the best sergeant I ever had. I thought a lot of him, and was greatly grieved when he was killed. He was right at my side when he was killed. We were in a wheat field about five miles northwest of Chateau-Thierry, and your husband is buried right there. Your husband died a hero. He was right in the front line advancing on the Germans, when some machine guns opened up on us and killed many of our men.

Sgt. Ackerman was the best drill sergeant I ever had, and was cool under fire. The company and regiment lost a very valuable man when he was killed, and I personally feel it very deeply. I cannot speak too highly of him.

Captain W.F. Marshall, 318th Inf., 4th Division
Nearly 20,000 people have applied for universal credit in Northern Ireland over the past two weeks as people are hit by the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

The BBC has reported that more than 10,000 claims were made last week, followed by 9,000 so far this week.

The Department for Communities (DfC) normally processes around 1,600 new applications a week.

A number of Northern Ireland businesses had initially announced plans to temporarily lay off staff before the UK Government announced a financial package to pay 80% of workers, while others have lost income due to the strict measures introduced to combat the virus.

A DfC spokesperson told the BBC that staff in its dedicated call centre for dealing with claims had responded to 4,183 calls on Tuesday alone.

The spokesperson said that claims were still being processed in a timely manner, with staff working around the clock, but acknowledged that it was a "difficult and uncertain time for all".

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The UK Government is expected to announce a support package for the self employed on Thursday. Last week Chancellor Rishi Sunak said that self-employed people who had been affected by the coronavirus outbreak could apply for universal credit.

The payment is currently 94.25 a week and the UK Government has been critcised for not providing support for the self-employed sooner.

Speaking on Tuesday Mr Sunak said that providing a support package for the self employed was "incredibly complicated", but promised to deliver measures that were "deliverable and fair".

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which handles universal claims in the rest of the UK, said it had received almost half a million benefit claims in the past week.

Around 477,000 claims have been processed since last Tuesday, with 105,000 being made for Universal Credit on Tuesday this week, said DWP Permanent Secretary Peter Schofield.

The unprecedented pressure and volume of new claims has led to people reporting delays, being unable to get through on the phone and struggling to reach advisers.

It comes as the departments website, Understanding Universal Credit, received approximately 200,000 hits last week.

The Universal Credit benefit was introduced in Northern Ireland in September 2017 for new benefit claimants.

The new system merged six previous benefits into one and has come in for criticism with many recipients complaining of delays in their first payments and cuts to their benefits.
As co-founder and ex-CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates is famous for being one of the world's richest people, but he is also known for his philanthropic activities, specifically funding the work towards eradicating deadly diseases.

As a result, he has become a leading spokesman for disease control and eradication, and has talked before at length about the risks our world faces should there be a new disease outbreak as we are seeing now with Covid-19.

During a digital TED Talk with host Chris Anderson on 25 March, Gates was asked what he would if he were president and tasked with leading country through the worst pandemic the world has seen in over 100 years.

Gates said that his top priority would be to keep people across America indoors to 'flatten the curve' of the coronavirus pandemic; in other words, slowing down the rate at which the virus is spreading.

'The clear message [would be] that we have no choice to maintain this isolation and that's going to keep going for a period of time,' Gates said. 'In the Chinese case, it was like six weeks, so we have to prepare ourselves for that and do it very well.'

'If you're [a country] doing isolation well, within about 20 days you'll see those numbers [of new cases] really change [go down] and that is a sign that you're on your way.'

Gates says that he would emphasize that to do this is not going to be easy, and ensure that such message is loud and clear for everyone to appreciate.

In a previous TED Talk in 2015, Gates had warned of the impact a global pandemic could have on today's globalized society where people can quite freely travel across the globe.

Asked to reflect on this warning and whether he felt it was heeded, he said: 'Basically no. I was hopeful that with Zika, Ebola and SARS and MERS, they all reminded us particularly in a world where people move around so much, you can get huge devastation.

'The talk was to say, "We're not ready for the next pandemic, but there's advances in science that if we put resources against them, we can be ready." Sadly, very little was done,' Gates recalls.

Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and ex-CEO was asked what he would do if he was president to combat the coronavirus pandemic

Bill Gates made his billions as founder and CEO of Microsoft, but has since stepped down from his position to focus his efforts on eradicating infectious diseases

Speaking more generally about the coronavirus, Gates said: 'I think this is a unprecedented, really disconcerting time for everyone with things being shut down, not knowing exactly how long it's going to last, worrying about the health of all the people we care about. It's scary for everyone.'

He said like many people, he is also stuck at home and getting used to working remotely all the time. 'I've gone days without seeing any co-workers!' he said.

The actual US president Donald Trump has advocated reopening businesses by Easter Sunday to help the tanking U.S. economy but several medical experts have cautioned that could be too early to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

On Wednesday he claimed 'fake news' is pushing the need for the lockdown to continue in order for him to perform badly at the upcoming US election in November.

During the daily White House coronavirus briefing, Trump said: 'The media would like to see me do poorly in an election.'

When questioned by a reporter, he snapped back saying: 'I think there are certain people who would like it not to open so quickly and they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls.'

Trump appeared to pull back on his plan to reopen businesses on Wednesday however, and said he would not make any decision without consulting Dr. Tony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Deborah Birx, who is coordinating the day-to-day response on the coronavirus.

US President Donald Trump (L) looks on as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks during a news conference

As world governments struggle to grapple with the rapidly spreading coronavirus, Gates warned years ago that humanity was ill-prepared for a fast-spreading, life-threatening pathogen.

In 2015, Bill Gates predicted a global pandemic would kill many people and grind the world economy to a halt in a 2015 TED Talk.

Gates told a TED Talk that if the wealthiest nations had prepared for a pandemic with the same urgency that they prepared for nuclear war, a global event such as the coronavirus could have been avoided.

This was not the last time Gates made a similar warning. Last year, Gates, who since stepped away from day-to-day work at Microsoft has devoted his energies to helping eradicate disease in the developing world, also warned of a coming pandemic.

In a 2019 Netflix documentary, Gates predicted a killer virus could originate in China's wet markets to rapidly infect the world.



There have been more than 68,000 cases of the coronavirus in the United States and more than 1,000 people have died.
[March 26, 2020] Vype is Focused on Quality and Safety Standards in the Vaping Industry

The E-Cigarette Brand's Commitment to Rigorous Testing and Safety Procedures is a Driving Force Behind its Business LONDON, March 26, 2020 /CNW/ -- Vype, a global e-cigarette brand, has a commitment to the safety of its products and adult vapers globally. Since launching its first e-cigarette in the UK in 2013, Vype has made impressive progress, now offering a range of rigorously tested products like its Vype ePod and Vype ePen3 in more than 40 countries around the world. Its world-class R&D centre in Southampton, UK, acts as the central safety hub, ensuring its batteries, devices and e-liquids are high quality and rigorously tested. To ensure its commitment to quality, consistency and safety, over 100 tests are carried out on its Vype products during development and production  be that on the device itself, eliquids intended for use with the Vype device, or combined testing of the device and e-liquids. This includes the testing of a minimum of 50 compounds in the generated vapour from each device using sample Vype e-liquids. All Vype devices are evaluated and certified* y independent certified body test laboratories.



"With the increasing focus on the safety of vapour products, we want consumers to feel confident in the quality of our products and that robust procedures have been implemented across the entire supply chain," says Elly Criticou, Vype Category Director, British American Tobacco. "From product handling and deep cleaning of facilities to an increase in online direct-to-consumer subscription and purchasing options, the safety of our employees, customers and communities continues to be our top priority.' In addition to Vype's commitment to seek to ensure that its safety standards align with the guidance provided by public health and government organizations. Vype has also won the e-cigarette category at this year's UK Product of the Year awards for the second year running  the UK's largest consumer survey of product innovation - for Vype ePen3 and Vype ePod respectively.

About British American Tobacco: British American Tobacco Group (BAT) is one of the world's leading, multi-category consumer goods organizations, that provides tobacco and nicotine products to millions of consumers around the world. It employs over 55,000 people, with market leadership in over 55 countries and factories in 48. Its Strategic Portfolio is made up of its global cigarette brands and an increasing range of potentially reduced-risk products, comprising vapour and tobacco heating products, as well as traditional and modern oral products. * An internationally recognised conformity assessment scheme for mutual acceptance of test reports and certificates dealing with the safety of electrical and electronic components, equipment and products. Media contact: Natasha Webster, 336-741-2134 Note to editor: More information is available on http://www.govype.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vype-is-focused-on-quality-and-safety-standards-in-the-vaping-industry-301030120.html SOURCE Vype

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Foreign politicians thank China for support amid epidemic

People's Daily Online

(People's Daily Online) 14:22, March 25, 2020

Leaders of many countries and international organizations have publicly thanked China for its assistance in the battle against the novel coronavirus.

The Serbian people will never forget China's help, said Aleksandar Vucic, President of Serbia, adding that they will also support China in times of need.

Peter Pellegrini, Prime Minister of Slovakia, expressed gratitude to China on the social networking platform Instagram as a batch of medical supplies, including 1 million medical masks and 100,000 nucleic acid reagent test kits, arrived at Bratislava Airport on March 19.

"We are grateful for China's support," said Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, as Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang announced that China would provide 2 million surgical masks, 200,000 N95 masks and 50,000 testing kits. Back in January, the European Union also helped China by donating 50 tons of equipment.

Luigi Di Maio, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Italy, thanked the Chinese government, which has donated medical supplies and sent coronavirus specialists to Italy.

In addition, Milos Zeman, President of the Czech Republic, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, President of Zimbabwe, Jean-Yves Le Drian, Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs in France and Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Seyyed Abbas Mousavi have all expressed thanks to China in one way or another for its assistance in combating the pneumonia outbreak.

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FLINT, MI  A 27-year-old man faces multiple charges after law enforcement officials say he used a circular saw to cut up his fathers body, then placed the parts in a dumpster outside a Flint business.

The suspect -- whose isnt being named pending arraigned -- was charged Thursday, March 26 with open murder and disinterment and mutilation of a dead body.

He is expected to be arraigned Friday.

Officers with the Flint Police Department were called out around 8:45 a.m. Tuesday, March 24 to the area of Davison Road between Averill Avenue and Center Road on the citys east side.

It was not an employee (who discovered the body), Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton told MLive-The Flint Journal. It was some neighborhood folks going through the dumpster looking for something that might be of value, also known as dumpster diving.

Leyton said the pair spotted an arm and hand.

Body found in dumpster behind Flint business

They were in different trash bags, he noted. When the police came through in greater detail, Im pretty sure they found the entire corpse.

The Michigan State Police Crime Lab was then called in to the process the scene.

Leyton added two circular saws were also found in the dumpster.

Police went to the 50-year-old victims home off Tiptree Path in Flint and found an instructional manual and packaging matching the same circular saw found in the dumpster, Leyton said.

The suspect and victim lived together.

Leyton said no potential motive has been offered by the suspect.

Leyton said he has seen other cases involving a dismembered body, and that its always bad.

It is grisly and horrific when you do see it, he said.

The suspect is being held in the Genesee County Jail.

He is not expected to be arraigned until Friday, March 27 in Genesee District Court.

Suspect in custody after human remains found inside Flint dumpster
First, you should know that neither group is on the brink of institutional disaster. The Playhouse has $10 million more to raise [out of almost $50 million] before the fall. The ballets project, according to the companys web site, was 94.8 percent funded as of Feb. 25.  Cincinnati Enquirer
The minister explained that these serological tests will complement the molecular ones , which have also been requested in the international market and serve to confirm if someone has COVID-19.

Zamora noted that this purchase comes after an analysis carried out by Minsa and a report conducted by the National Health Institute (INS), the competent authority in this regard, which suggested being "more ambitious" when it comes to samples.

The purchase of rapid tests has been supported by the Committee of Independent Experts, which Minsa constantly consults to know about the technologies that will be progressively used to support the pandemic response.

"We have a committee of talented experts. They have reviewed INS technical recommendations to back the purchase and confirmed that rapid testing is indeed a complementary instrument to molecular testing . It will be a tool for epidemiological surveillance," he explained.
When a Mysterious Shipwreck Popped Up Out of Nowhere: Oregon Coast History

Published 03/23/2020 at 4:44 AM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Rockaway Beach, Oregon)  Ten years ago, a 100-year-old surprise popped up on the north Oregon coast, essentially forgotten by time. At that point, this mysterious shipwreck had not been seen in some 35 years, leaving most people in Tillamook County scratching their heads for awhile. (Historic photos courtesy Don Best)

2010 had been an especially rough winter, with heavy surf scouring out gobs of sand, dropping the beaches some 10  20 feet or more. Many places saw lots of bedrock, but in Rockaway Beach it was the wreck of the Emily G. Reed.

Winter wave action had cut a wedge out of the sandy slope towards the waves as much as four or five feet deep. It was treasure hunters dream of sorts, with around 100 feet of the ribcage-like structure now visible  the most in decades. Since then its popped up every few years during winter.



A baby Don Best is pictured here in the early '40s being held by his mother



The Reed hit the mouth of the Nehalem River in 1908, back when there was no jetty. Apparently, the Reed was looking for the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse to guide its way, and for some reason made a wrong turn and grounded itself.

It snapped in half, said Don Best, a longtime Rockaway Beach resident, historian and photographer. Pieces were scattered all over. Theres still a piece in Nedonna Creek."

The wreck is just below a wave-cut terrace in the sandy slope

This portion is the largest chunk still around, though it had been thoroughly raided pretty quickly, like anything else left of it. Some of the raiders included Bests family, back in the early pioneer days of the area.

The Emily Reed has been a secretive, shy shipwreck, hiding beneath the sand for most of its time on these shores. After this part came to rest here, it was visible most of the time until the 40s and 50s, when its visibility became less and less.

Then it just disappeared, until just before 2010.

That was the first time it was visible in around 35 years, Best said.

The Reed was built in New England by the Reed family, which created a small fleet of ships bearing the name. There was a Mary Reed; there were a bunch of different ships with that name Reed, Best said.

It was bound for Portland, carrying a load of coal from New Castle, South Wales in stormy and foggy weather. It had been at sea 102 days and ran aground on Valentines Day, February 14.

The wreck as it looked decades ago (photo Don Best) The wreck as it looked decades ago (photo Don Best)



From there, accounts vary. Seven or eight crewmembers apparently lost their lives after getting swept out to sea. The captain, his wife and some others clung to a chunk of the wreck and supposedly made it ashore.

Another account has a group of them in a lifeboat that was carried back out to sea, and never making it back until they got to the central Washington coast. One died along the way after drinking sea water.

The shipwreck was raided fairly quickly for materials by locals, including Best's grandfather around 1910.

After this portion of the ship landed, it was Bests grandfather  a homesteader here since 1910  that went out and grabbed chunks of copper siding from the ribs of the ship.

He went and sold that for three cents a pound, or something like that, Best said.

Other chunks of the ships and materials were also taken by Bests grand dad.

One piece was especially interesting to Best as a child, back in the 40s and 50s, which had some copper nails in it that created some wild special effects.

Every Christmas hed put a piece of it in the fire place and it would create these blue and green flames, Best said. We thought it was magic.

Best was born in 1943, and many of his earliest memories were of the wreck, and there are numerous pictures of his family standing by it.

One year when it popped up, Best dug around and found an air pocket.

I scooted under there on my belly and looked inside, and there was this part that nobody had seen since 1908, Best said.





Another portion of the wreck, a set of timbers, was discovered to the south about three years ago, which impressed Best quite a bit.

That was a part I have never seen, he said.

Because its buried under sand most of the time, the wreck is protected from the elements and quick decay. Recent trends towards lower and lower sand levels may change that in the coming years, however.

State authorities are quick to point out any such shipwreck is protected by law. You can take plenty of pictures, but take no part of it with you.

The wreck is located around Second Street in Rockaway, a couple blocks down from the main beach access with the red caboose. It did not appear this year, however.

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The Chairman of Pro Romania party, Victor Ponta, on Thursday urged Prime Minister Ludovic Orban to resign from office, on his Facebook page, maintaining that the solution would be a national union government headed by secretary of state with the Interior Ministry Raed Arafat.

Victor Ponta's reaction comes after the resignation of Health Minister Victor Costache, Thursday morning.Victor Ponta reminded that in February a gov't was needed capable of taking preparation measures for the epidemic, whilst "Ludovic Orban has orchestrated the fall of the gov't to smooth the way for snap elections".Ponta also stressed that the solution is to replace "the Orban Gov't with a national union gov't headed by secretary of state with the Interior Ministry, Dr. Raed Arafat and made up of professional and brave ministers! Now".
The US welcomed the release of former Jammu and Kashmir chief ministers Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah, and urged the Indian government to release all Kashmiri political leaders.

The statement of Acting Assistant US Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Alice G Wells came a day after National Conference vice-president Omar was released after charges under the Public Safety Act (PSA), slapped on him in February, were revoked.

He was among the host of political leaders taken into detention on August 5, when the Centre announced the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir's special status under Article 370 and its bifurcation into the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.

Omar spent 232 days in custody.

The US official also urged the Indian government to fully restore internet services in Jammu and Kashmir.

"We welcome the release of former Jammu and Kashmir chief ministers Omar Abdullah and Dr Farooq Abdullah. We encourage the release of all Kashmiri political leaders and the full restoration of internet services as the coronavirus fight intensifies," Wells said.

Omar's father Farooq was also charged under the PSA and released on March 13 after 221 days in detention.

Abdullah senior, who is also the NC president, expressed happiness over the revocation of his son's PSA detention, but said total redemption would not be possible until all political detainees were released.

India has categorically told the international community that its move to scrap Article 370 was an internal matter. According to officials, internet is being restored in the Valley in a phased manner after reviewing the security situation.




Haiti - Diaspora : Important telephone numbers





After 7 months of interruption of telephone lines to the diaspora (USA, Dominican Republic, Canada, Brazil, Chile...), Louis Gonzague Edner Day, the new Minister of Haitians Living Abroad (MHAVE) has taken steps urgent with members of his Cabinet, to resolve the problem.



After 11 days of active management, the "MHAVE at the Listening" service is operational again, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.



Today Minister Day wants to go beyond his abilities to satisfy the diaspora which has long been in search of attention and understanding.



mportant numbers :



United States: +1 305 735 7265

Dominican Republic: +849 941 0328

Canada: +1 514 447 8161

Brazil: +55 484 042-0852

Chile: +56 229 382 414



Haiti :

+509 4289 8888

+509 3270 8888

+509 6301 9012

+509 6301 9013



Note that apart of the "MHAVE at the Listening" service, Minister Louis Gonzague Edner Day, in person, is ready to communicate with anyone who wishes.



The Minister's direct line is +509 3103 888



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Kevin Kelly, Emerald Packaging's chief executive, on the factory floor. (Russ Mitchell / Los Angeles Times)

When Kevin Kelly woke up March 11, he glanced at his phone, saw a stock market in free fall and gently shook his head. Overreaction, he thought.

I was a skeptic. The idea of a global pandemic seemed unfathomable, said Kelly, chief executive at Emerald Packaging, a manufacturer of plastic wraps and bags for fruits, vegetables and snacks his family owns in Union City, southeast of San Francisco.

Hed change his mind on his 25-mile commute to Emerald's factory. On the radio, disease experts spoke about the seriousness of the pandemic and about the lack of preparation in the United States.

The key to Kelly's attitude shift were the words of Scott Gottlieb, former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner. Kelly pays close attention to the FDA, given the business he's in, and said he's always respected Gottlieb's opinions. When Gottlieb mentioned Northern California as an emerging hot zone, Kelly knew it was time to get serious.

He said we were at a tipping point and if we didnt take mitigation steps we would be facing a very large epidemic, said Kelly, 58. The night before, Trump had given a speech that left me with the sense that we had to take action ourselves because he sounded so helpless.

Kelly sped up the car, reached Emerald, hustled inside and ordered everyone to keep away from the meeting room for their regular 10 a.m. staff meeting. They should stay at their desks and workstations, he said, and pick up their phones, because the meeting would be held by conference call.

We have to start social distancing, because if we dont, people are going to get sick, he told them.

Thus began three days of rapid planning and new, strict rules on cleaning, hygiene and personal interaction to keep the virus at bay.

Emerald would later be labeled as an essential business under government exemption, allowed to stay open while most businesses closed. Its plastic wrap and bags protect food from sneeze droplets, fingertips and other means of transmission. If you see plastic bags filled with salad, or cut fruit or vegetables, there's a good chance they were made by Emerald. The company also makes thicker bags for potato chips and other snacks.

Story continues

(Full disclosure: I worked with Kelly at Businessweek magazine three decades ago.)

The pandemic actually has boosted business for Emerald, which posted revenues of around $85 million last year. Bookings are up three times over a year ago, Kelly said.

But he felt torn. By staying open, he asked himself, am I making everybody sick?

The best approach, Kelly decided, was to make Emeralds office and manufacturing operations as safe as possible for its 250 employees.

Working with Pallavi Joyappa, the company's chief operating officer, and other company leaders, Emerald went into battle mode.

Gatherings of more than five people were banned, and six-foot-minimum physical distancing was required. Larger meetings would be held outdoors.

Lunch and breaks were staggered, no more than five employees at a time. Tables were spread apart.

A two-level sanitizing protocol was announced, one for employees, one for equipment. The print shop is always stocked with isopropyl alcohol, drums of it, Kelly said. It was diluted, put in spray bottles, and handed out for each desktop and factory workstation.

Kelly called a niece, a graduate student in public health, who helped with the hand-washing protocol: arrive at work, wash hands, punch in on the time clock, wash hands. Use alcohol spray to wipe down high-contact workstation areas at the beginning and end of each shift, never mind that someone had just done it.

We figured different people would [tend to] wipe down different parts, Kelly said.

Kelly woke up one night gripped with anxiety about unwiped handrails, lockers, doorknobs. Two cleaners were hired for each shift to do nothing but keep surfaces clean.

Not everyone got the message. Kelly and Joyappa came in the following Sunday for a surprise inspection. In one area, the spray bottles stood empty. Nobody had taken responsibility for refills.

At a staff meeting, Kelly reiterated his insistence that anyone sick must stay home. One guy put his hand up and asked, what if he was the only one who could operate a machine and it went down?

I looked at him and said, Dont  fing  come  in,' and had him repeat it," he said. "Everybody laughed, but they got the message."

The company has added two weeks to its regular 40-hour paid time off policy. "But if someone gets the virus it is totally open-ended. No one will lose their job, raise or seniority" if they're infected, Kelly said.

Emerald sells its products around the world. Employees who had come back from an international trip were told to self-quarantine for 14 days. Office workers in purchasing and customer service departments received instructions to work from home, a culture shock.

Pallavi Joyappa, Emerald's chief operating officer. (Russ Mitchell / Los Angeles Times)

For a factory like us, this whole work-from-home concept is difficult, COO Joyappa said. We have people running back and forth to the factory to see how things are going.

The company suddenly had to look at using Zoom, Webex, Skype or Slack, or some combination of collaboration software. Its two information technology staffers, Irina Anikieva and Steven Kokal, took only eight hours to have a system up and running for the 10 employees working from home.

By March 16, a seven-county Bay Area "shelter in place" had been ordered, with only essential businesses allowed to stay open. The federal governments critical infrastructure list, recommended as a guide by Gov. Gavin Newsom, counts companies such as Emerald as essential, Kelly said.

He had staff type up letters, print them and hand them out to employees to show to police if they were stopped while driving in. Truck drivers delivering goods received similar letters. Truckers were also asked not to step inside the building and to wash their hands before handing over paperwork and unloading cargo. Sinks were set up at the loading dock.

While all this was happening, the factory had to re-gear for a dramatic change in product mix.

"It's shifted radically," Kelly said. "No packaging for food service like restaurants or catering companies and a total switch to retail, with more complicated graphics to appeal to consumers, which takes longer to print. Food service packaging went from 10% of our sales to zero overnight."

Now that Emerald is reaching operational equilibrium, Kelly and Joyappa are planning to make the rounds through their industrial park, introduce themselves to other companies, and offer to talk about ways to share resources.

Emerald is trying to help a favorite local restaurant stay alive  eating choices around the park are limited. The restaurant is dying, so we ordered 270 burritos and chips, Kelly said. Emerald employees will get a free lunch once a week.

Aware that Emeralds products may be in far higher demand than goods from some other essential businesses, Kelly advises others to do everything possible to preserve cash  he believes the pandemic and recession will last far beyond Easter Sunday, and the need to take care of employees and meet fixed expenses will continue even when revenue falls.

Another rule: Dont trust your banker, he said. Banks may seem friendlier amid the crisis, but they will cut off your cash as soon as they find it necessary, he believes. His advice: Keep cash at one bank, loans at another, and transfer cash funds to new accounts as needed.

He also advises against dangling bonuses to those who show up for work, as one business friend told Kelly he'd done. Talk about moral hazard, he said  that only encourages sick people to infect the healthy. Best to take care of sick employees but keep them away, he said.

Kelly believes that bosses who tell people to report to work should show up themselves. He could do much of his work from home, he said. He is married with two kids in college, one in high school. But Im the captain of the ship. Theres a moral obligation to be here.

But he has little patience for those, including President Trump, who have speculated about a rapid relaxation of strict social separation orders.

"It would be foolish to send people back to work without knowing disease spread. We could be bringing people back only to make them sick or kill them," Kelly said.

"Its easy for Trump and [ex-Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd] Blankfein to suggest these things when they're not on the front lines. Theyre like generals in the First World War: send the troops over the top only to get them maimed and killed."
Photo credit: WPA Pool - Getty Images

From ELLE

It's been half a month since Meghan Markle returned to Canada following her final engagements in England as a working royal family member. Her life has starkly changed for the better, a source told Us Weekly in its issue this week. The Duchess of Sussex truly struggled in Englandto the point she allegedly had panic attacksbecause of the constant criticism and smears she received from the UK tabloids and some people there.

An insider told the outlet that Meghans thrilled to have escaped the chaos of London. She feels like a new person.

When Harry and Meghan lived in England at Frogmore Cottage in Windsor, Meghan felt trapped and claustrophobic. She was nervous to step outside her own front door because of all the negative attention she attracted, the source said, adding that the Duchess had suffered from panic attacks because of it.

Life is much better in Canada, where the two live with their son Archie and enjoy a much larger degree of privacy. "Meghan can go out in yoga pants and not be criticized for not following dress code," an insider told Us. "She feels more relaxed and loves walking around fresh-faced with barely any makeup on."

Meghan and Harry have been using their Instagram these past two weeks to provide information during the coronavirus pandemic. They stressed the importance of mental health in a post four days ago. The couple wrote:

With everything going on, its a lot to take in. Many of us may feel confused. Or alone, or anxious or scared...and in isolation, some of us may just feel bored, or that you dont know what to do with yourself without your normal routine. Its perfectly normal to be feeling any of these things.



Our emotional well-being is challenged everyday whether we realize it or not, but our lives are usually filled with distractions. Now with constantly changing COVID coverage, we are all adjusting to this new normal and the feelings that come with it.



But heres the good thing (because right now we need to hear good things, right?): Yes, there is isolation and physical distancing, but there doesnt have to be loneliness.



There are resources that can help us all through this process, and ways that YOU can become one of those resources.

Story continues

A palace source told Harper's Bazaar on March 17 that amid the coronavirus, "[the Sussexes are] taking the appropriate measure of heeding government advice. Like everyone, they are taking government advice, and if and when they are specifically made aware of being in contact with someone who has tested positive, they will act accordingly. We are not commenting or guiding further on private medical details."

This morning, the Palace announced Prince Charles tested positive for COVID-19. According to ITV's Chris Ship, Charles has been in contact with Harry since the diagnosis.

Prince Charles has spoken to both his sons. William in Norfolk and Harry in Canada.  Chris Ship (@chrisshipitv) March 25, 2020

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A French police officer infected with the Covid-19 coronavirus has died, the first death of a member of the security forces, who have been deployed in large numbers to enforce confinement measures to limit the spread of the virus.

The non-commissioned officer in the gendarmerie, the French military police, has been identified in the media as Patrick G., 51.

He had been on sick leave and confined at home for several days in the barracks of the Maisons-Alfort police station, one of the biggest in the Paris region, after he suspected he was ill. The circumstances of his infection are not known.

His conditioned worsened Wednesday, and there was no time to reach the hospital. He died at home. He was married, with three children.

The gendarmerie says the officer had not been in contact with the public, and that they are working on tracking down all the people with whom he had contact in the station.

Police officers are on the front lines of the fight against the spread of the coronavirus, with 100,000 of them deployed to enforce confinement measures.

Death toll continues to rise

France has recorded 1,331 deaths from the coronavirus in hospitals, a five-fold increase in one week. More than 3,000 people are in intensive care.

Officially, 25,000 people have been infected with the virus since the beginning of the epidemic, but because France does not have systematic testing in place, that number is artificially low.

Non-hospital-based family physicians diagnosed at 41,836 new cases of the virus last week, according to Sante Publique France. The number cannot be compared to previous weeks, as this specific data has only been collected since 17 March.

The regions most hit by the epidemic are the Grand-Est, the Paris area, and the Pays de la Loire.
Federal Appeals Court Blocks Withholding of Funds for Sanctuary Jurisdictions

A federal appeals court has struck down a Trump administration policy that withholds millions of dollars in law enforcement grants from so-called sanctuary states as part of a campaign to pressure them to cooperate with immigration law enforcement, which is a federal responsibility.

Getting tough on illegal immigration has been President Donald Trumps signature issue.

In 2017, the administration began to require that U.S. immigration officials be granted access to jails and that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) be provided advance notice before local authorities release an illegal alien wanted by ICE.

Almost immediately, states and cities that harbor illegal aliens began to resist the directive.

In the case at hand, two Rhode Island municipalities, Providence and Central Falls, sued the federal government after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) withheld grants under the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program. The program, created by Congress in 2005, is named after a New York police officer killed in the line of duty in 1988 at the age of 22.

The grants are distributed based on, among other factors, the recipient jurisdictions population and violent crime rates.

The ruling by the Boston-based 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in the case known as City of Providence v. Barr came March 24. Former U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice David Souter participated in the decision, ruling against the Trump administration. Former justices are allowed to sit on federal courts of appeals after leaving the Supreme Court.

In this case, the U.S. district court that first heard the lawsuit sided with the two municipalities, and the DOJ appealed.

The 1st Circuit opinion, written by Judge Bruce Selya, mocked the DOJ for its kitchen-sink-full of clever legal arguments, ruling that the agency lacked the authority to impose the challenged conditions.

When the federal government deals with state and local governments, it must turn square corners. Here, the DOJ took an impermissible shortcut when it attempted to impose the challenged conditions on the Cities FY2017 Byrne JAG grantsconditions that Congress had not vested the DOJ with authority to impose, the court stated.

The court noted that there is now what lawyers call a circuit split because the various circuits of the U.S. Court of Appeals dont agree on how to handle this specific legal issue. Judges in the appeals courts for the 3rd, 7th, and 9th Circuits, have ruled against the Trump administration on this issue. The disagreement could eventually be resolved by the Supreme Court in the nations capital.

When oral arguments were heard, three courts of appeals had refused to enforce some or all of the challenged conditions, but between then and March 24, the 2nd Circuit upheld those challenged conditions, creating a circuit split, Selya wrote.

In the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals unanimous ruling in favor of the administration, Judge Reena Raggi acknowledged that as issues, sanctuary jurisdictions and immigration enforcement have had a polarizing effect on society.

The case implicates several of the most divisive issues confronting our country and, consequently, filling daily news headlines: national immigration policy, the enforcement of immigration laws, the status of illegal aliens in this country, and the ability of States and localities to adopt policies on such matters contrary to, or at odds with, those of the federal government.

At the same time, Raggi rejected the sanctuary states argument that attaching conditions to federal grants unconstitutionally intrude[s] on powers reserved to the States. At that time, a DOJ spokesman praised the decision, saying it rightfully recognizes the lawful authority of the Attorney General to ensure that Department of Justice grant recipients are not at the same time thwarting federal law enforcement priorities.

DOJ declines comment, Alexei Woltornist, a public affairs officer for the department, said via email, in response to a request for comment by The Epoch Times.
There has been a ton of speculation surrounding Meghan, Duchess of Sussexs first big move now that she is no longer a senior working member of the British royal family. Wed know for some time that the duchess has snagged a voice-over role with Disney. Now we know exactly what that role is.

Now that the duchess is no longer beholden to the rules and regulations of royal life, she is free is to explore her passions in a less confining manner. Prior to getting engaged to Prince Harry in 2017, the American-born duchess had a starring role in the long-running USA drama, Suits. She was also extremely passionate about her charity work.

Now, with this new Disney documentary on elephants, it appears that Meghan is combining her passions in a way that we never expected.

Meghan Markle might be interested in returning to Hollywood

Though its doubtful that she will ever return to a show as a series regular, the Duchess of Sussex might be considering a return to Hollywood.

Meghan remains hugely ambitious and is very open-minded to a return to acting which is what she knows, loves and does best, an alleged insider told The Sun. Her preference is to explore the route of a documentary in which she is able to follow up some of the causes she is interested in. This wish has been the focus of some of her most recent meetings and will likely shape the kind of work the agent Meghan goes with seeks to get for her. She is very excited about what the future holds.

Meghan Markle doesnt care what anyone says about her

As she embarks on a new phase of her life, the Duchess of Sussex is more than aware that her choices will be analyzed and scrutinized. However, outside of the glaring spotlight of royal life, she is more than prepared for that.

From the moment that I found a wife that was strong enough to be able to stand up for what we believe in together, has basically scared them so much that theyve now come out incredibly angry, theyve come out fighting, and all they will try and do now is try and destroy our reputation and try and, you know, sink us, Prince Harry explained candidly in a leaked phone call. But what they dont understand is the battle we are fighting against them is far more than just us. Even though they want to make it personal they are scared because we are some of the first two people willing to stand up to their bullying and my wife, we cant stand back. It hasnt been very nice. Its been horrible but we will come out of it stronger people.

Two new movies, two unforgettable journeys. Start streaming Disneynatures Elephant, narrated by Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, and Disneynatures Dolphin Reef, narrated by Natalie Portman, on April 3, only on #DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/N0yW0e7Lv6  Disneynature (@Disneynature) March 26, 2020

Meghan Markle is voicing the Disneynature documentary Elephant

The Duchess of Sussexs latest project will debut sooner than later. Disney just announced that Meghan will narrate Disneynatures Elephant streaming April 3 on Disney+.

The official description for the film reads, Elephant follows African elephant Shani and her spirited son Jomo as their herd make an epic journey hundreds of miles across the vast Kalahari Desert. Led by their great matriarch, Gaia, the family faces brutal heat, dwindling resources and persistent predators, as they follow in their ancestors footsteps on a quest to reach a lush, green paradise.

The Duchess of Sussex has always been passionate about Elephants. In 2017, she along with Prince Harry traveled to Botswana to assist Dr. Mike Chase of Elephants Without Borders. The proceeds from Meghans work on this film will go directly to the charity.

Disneynatures Dolphin Reef, narrated by Natalie Portman will also premiere on the same date.
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Chris is getting out of prison in four months.

Or so he hopes. Now he worries he'll come out in a body bag.

"The last thing I want to do is get infected and die in prison," Chris said over the phone from the Taft Modified Community Correctional Facility, a minimum-security prison about an hour's drive southwest of Bakersfield.

We spoke with four inmates at Taft. They talked about how social distancing is impossible when you have to pack 70 or more men into dorms "the size of a convenience store," as A.J., who lives in the same dorm as Chris, put it.

Inmates' beds are separated by a foot or two, said A.J., who, like Chris, declined to say why he's in prison.

The cafeteria is even more crowded, A.J. said.

"There's 100 men on these tables lined up elbow-to-elbow," A.J. said. "All it would take would be one sneeze, and that sneeze would cover at least six or eight men's food trays."

None of the inmates we spoke with felt comfortable using their full names for fear of retaliation. All of them said they feel helpless in the face of the virus.

It's so crowded, A.J. said they even have bunk beds in the day room where they watch TV.

WE LIVE '24 INCHES FROM EACH OTHER'

"We literally live at all times 24 inches from each other, sleeping, eating, showering, going to the bathroom," he said. "There's just nowhere to hide."

"I don't want to feel like a sitting duck," said Alan, who's serving a 14-year sentence at Taft for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer.

The 36-year-old is up for parole soon -- but now he worries he won't make it out.

"I can't run, I can't hide, I can't keep myself safe from the virus," he said. "I can't do these things that I'm being told to do."

The facility has one nurse and a physician's assistant. The nearest hospital is 45 minutes away. That all heightens inmates' concerns.

"If it comes through here, it's going to roll through like wildfire," said. A.J.

To make matters worse, a broken pipe has left half the prison without hot water, he said, adding, "we've been offered a bucket with disinfectant in it and some rags, and that's it."

TALES OF DISINFECTANT AND SOAP

As of Thursday, 11 state prison staffers and one inmate had tested positive for COVID-19, according to a live tracker maintained by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

One inmate has tested positive in an Orange County jail. No one has yet tested positive in an L.A. County jail.

On Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order that would halt admission of all new inmates into state prisons and juvenile facilities for the next 30 days. Inmates will stay in county custody. Parole hearings will move to video conferences.

Like many county jails, the state prison department has suspended public visitation, programming and religious services.

Each community prison is also required to have a written infection control plan.

The CDCR said it's giving inmates hospital-grade disinfectant to clean their dorms.

The disinfectant provided is Sani-Klean, according to the prison's logs. It needs to stay on surfaces undisturbed for 10 minutes, "but how do you keep a surface clean for 10 minutes when there's 70 guys in there?" A.J. said.

The Corrections Department also told us that it's providing extra soap to those who request it. When we pointed out that the agency's online guidelines did not state that, the guidelines were updated to note that extra soap will be provided "when requested."

The Taft inmates we spoke with said they hadn't been told they could ask for more supplies.

The prisoners normally receive one bar of soap per week. "It's probably no bigger than an inch thick, and three inches wide," Chris said, adding that it doesn't last long.

"If you hadn't told me [about being able to ask for extra soap], I would have laughed at you if you'd asked," A.J said. He said he's been denied extra toilet paper in the past.

In response to our questions about the conditions at Taft, a department spokeswoman said the chief of CDCR's Contract Beds Unit "made personal contact" with the prison's executive leadership to ensure the inmates are getting additional cleaning supplies.

'TRY AND STAY AHEAD OF EVERYTHING'

In New York, the prison on Rikers Island is dealing with a spike in COVID-19 cases. There are over 50 confirmed cases among the inmates.

The Taft prisoners fear their facility could become the next hotspot.

"The only thing I can do is just try and stay ahead of everything," Chris said.

He has experience with illness in prison. He says a couple years ago he got Valley fever.

"It was horrible," he said. "They wouldn't wash my sheets, they wouldn't wash my blankets."

Ironically, Chris feels like he might be safer in a higher security prison -- where each inmate has his own private cell.

Chris' dorm mate Alan says some inmates are holding out hope that Newsom does something to release prisoners -- and soon.

But based on what he sees in the news from the outside world, Alan isn't sure that would help.

"If they don't really have the adequate means on the street to handle this, then what's going to happen to us?" he said.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS:



UPDATES:

March 26, 3:58 p.m.: This article was updated with the latest information on the number of state employees who tested positive for COVID-19.

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Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant



will direct private firms in the coastal state to release full salaries for this month so that their employees can buy essentials during the coronavirus lockdown, a minister said on Thursday.

Speaking to reporters here, Port Minister Michael Lobo said the state government will soon issue orders to private sector companies to release salaries of their staff.

"If we want people to remain indoors, we need to take care of their essentials. People should have money with them," Lobo said.

Sawant will speak to his counterparts in neighbouring states of Maharashtra and Karnataka to ensure that the supply of essential commodities remains uninterrupted, the minister said.

Maharashtra government was intercepting trucks transporting essential commodities to Goa, Lobo claimed, adding that the coastal state's stock of essential commodities will only last for the next eight to 10 days.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
President Uhuru Kenyatta Wednesday announced new measures to combat the Covid-19 pandemic in the country.

One of the big takeaways from the presidents speech was a curfew order requiring Kenyans to stay indoors from 7 pm to 5 am beginning Friday, March 27.

This will be in effect to limit the spread of the virus, Uhuru said. The Head of State, however, exempted providers of critical or essential services from the directive.

These include among others: Medical Professionals & Health Workers, National Security, Administration and Co-ordination Officers, Public Health and Sanitation officers in the County Governments, Licensed Pharmacies and Drug Stores, Licensed Broadcasters and Media Houses, Kenya Power & Lightening Company Limited.

Naturally, the curfew order sparked wild reactions from Kenyans on social media. On Twitter, the hashtag #Curfew took the top spot within hours of Uhurus announcement as KOT reacted with humor to the new development.

We have sampled some memes and tweets below.

Friday if arrested after 7pm sema tu unaenda hosy joto iko juu na uko na fever. police will scatter ??????#Curfew  Hbox (@LugayeAmos) March 25, 2020

Meanwhile Covid 19 has just informed us that it will not infect anybody until its 7pm so the directive by President Uhuru Kenyatta is great!? #Curfew  Ill buy you a bus ticket bitch (@Elianthefour) March 25, 2020

Mtura should be ready by 10Am. #Curfew  Steve Jay (@SteveJumaaa) March 25, 2020

Hii curfew ya Friday italeta shida , tembea na powdered pepper Kama utachelewa just sniff kidogo you will be sneezing and coughing like a goat while walking the police will run instead of you running , ??? #Curfew  Frank Mtetezi ??? (@FrankMtetezi) March 25, 2020

Mutura guys woiye, how will you work without one ingredient#Curfew  Macharia Wangui?????? (@PrinceWangui) March 25, 2020

Kenyans are just creatures on their own level??. Of everything that President Uhuru Kenyatta outlined in combating the novel COVID-19 and its effects, theyve chosen to trend the #Curfew thing ??.  Abuya O. Abuya (@AbuyaOAbuya) March 25, 2020

Thank you president uhuru kenyatta for the #Curfew sasa this is how tunatoka crb???? pic.twitter.com/xvqALaeNVy  MWANGI (@itsmwangih) March 25, 2020

#Curfew

Government: stock something you can eat for 30 days

Me: say no more pic.twitter.com/tpZTgn9mLB  doctari (@Mkenya__) March 25, 2020

President Uhuru wanjohi Kenyatta: we will have a curfew from 7pm to 5am Wasee wa Mutura ????????#Curfew pic.twitter.com/suxOXVa9Yv  PhD in Sanitizer Squeezing (@Bulumacleo) March 25, 2020

One down, I repeat 1 bed down.

Even curfew haijaanza na tukienda lockdown ?????#Curfew pic.twitter.com/RGrqlsfa17  Jazzy J. (@Jayxxd) March 25, 2020

For those who dont know what #Curfew is, this ten seconds vedio will be of help??? pic.twitter.com/CmrhqvZaIQ  Farhan, the Earl of Wajir (@fantasticfave15) March 25, 2020

I feel sorry for the Mutura guys. The #Curfew will hit them badly. I mean, theyll now be forced to sell it during the day? Who will buy mutura day time?  Mercy Nyawera (@NyaweraMercy) March 25, 2020

When its 1855hrs and you remember President Uhuru Kenyatta had set a 1900hrs #Curfew pic.twitter.com/z3kegk7aV4  Zollz (@zollz) March 25, 2020

Ati #curfew 7.00pm thats way too early.

Nimejihami na 50 Bob mkononi I know whats about to happen pic.twitter.com/KhxWn5b7XM  Josiah Mumo (@JosayaMumo) March 25, 2020

Can somebody briefly explain how this virus can manage to walk around at night not in the daylight , cerfew at night 7pm to 5am #Curfew

Meanwhile am quarantined pic.twitter.com/ouu45uBCDY  morarajustine (@morarajustine) March 25, 2020
UN chief Antonio Guterres has condemned the attack on a Gurudwara in Kabul that killed at least 25 people and injured many others, reiterating that attacks against civilians are unacceptable and those who carry out such crimes must be held accountable, his spokesman said.

On Wednesday, at least 25 worshippers were killed and eight others injured when a heavily armed suicide bomber stormed his way into a prominent gurdwara in the heart of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, in one of the deadliest attacks on the minority Sikh community in the strife-torn country.

The Islamic State (IS) terror group, which has targeted Sikhs before in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Secretary-General condemns the attack...in Kabul on a Sikh-Hindu temple in which dozens of civilians were killed and injured. He expresses his deepest sympathies to the families of the victims and wishes a speedy recovery to those injured, Secretary General Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement on Wednesday.

It added that the Secretary-General reiterates that attacks against civilians are unacceptable and those who carry out such crimes must be held accountable.

The United Nations stands in solidarity with the people and the Government of Afghanistan and will continue supporting efforts to bring peace to their country, the statement said.

Also read: Coronavirus: Restaurants to axe 1.5 million jobs; Swiggy, Zomato to continue delivery under curfew
Oswego, N.Y.  The so-called Burberry Bandit" who was convicted of more than a dozen bank robberies in New York City and tied to 10 more, was arrested after police say he robbed an Oswego bank Wednesday afternoon.

Oswego police said Cornell Neilly, 29, was most recently living in Watertown, but hails from New York City, where hes been convicted of committing 14 bank robberies since 2012. His Burberry Bandit moniker comes from surveillance video of a 2012 bank heist that shows Neilly wearing a plaid Burberry shirt, according to the New York Post.

Cornell Neilly, dubbed the "Burberry Bandit" was arrested March 25 in connection to an Oswego bank robbery.Oswego Police

Neilly served nearly five years of a 5-to-10-year prison sentence for the robberies and was released on parole in January 2019, state prison records show. While still on parole supervision, Neilly was accused by NYPD of committing a string of 10 bank robberies in a two-week span this past summer.

Neilly had been jailed and was awaiting trial for those robberies when he was released from custody in December under New Yorks new bail reform law that took effect on Jan. 1, a decision Oswego Mayor Billy Barlow slammed.

Unfortunately, thanks to New York States so-called bail reform laws the constant repeat offender responsible for multiple robberies known as the Burberry Bandit was allowed to walk the streets free and venture to Oswego to commit another robbery, Barlow said in a statement.

Oswego police said Neilly entered the Chase Bank, 204 W. 1st St., around 1:02 p.m. Wednesday and passed a note to a teller demanding money. Before police arrived, Neilly left the bank and entered a vehicle parked on the street. Neilly and two other people in the vehicle left the city and headed north on Interstate 81.

About 40 minutes later, they were stopped by New York State Police near Exit 38, just over the Jefferson-Oswego county line. Troopers recovered proceeds from the robbery on Neillys possession, Oswego police said. All three occupants were initially arrested, but police investigated and determined that Neilly acted alone in the robbery and the other occupants were unwittingly involved and ultimately were not charged.

In a statement, Oswego Police Chief Phil Cady applauded the inter-law-enforcement effort to track down Neilly.

We were able to bring this to a successful conclusion in such a timely manner because of the investigative efforts of our officers and the assistance from the New York State Police and the Oswego County Sheriffs Office, Cady said. The Oswego Police Departments ability to review video footage from the new downtown camera systems; coupled with information sharing throughout Oswego County law enforcement was paramount in getting the suspect vehicle stopped within 40 minutes of this incident and the suspect arrested. This incident was a great example of the interagency cooperation we have here in Oswego County.

Neilly was charged with third-degree grand larceny and third-degree robbery and transported to the Oswego County Jail, where he is being held pending arraignment today in Centralized Arraignment Part Court.

Along with the two charges stemming from the Oswego robbery, Neilly has three outstanding warrants: One from New York State Parole for third-degree robbery and two from the New York Police Department for third-degree robbery and third-degree grand larceny. Neilly is on parole until June 2022.

Other police agencies, including the FBI, have been made aware of the arrest, Oswego Police Lt. Damian Waters said.

Chase Banks appear to be popular targets for Neilly, according to media reports. Along with the Oswego robbery, nine of the 10 banks hes accused of robbing in Manhattan in 2019 were Chase locations.

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Temporary suspension of activities at Bramaderos due to Coronavirus Precautions

OTTAWA, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cornerstone Capital Resources Inc. (Cornerstone or the Company) (TSXV-CGP) (F-GWN) (B-GWN) (OTC-CTNXF) is pleased to provide an update on its Bramaderos gold and copper project in southern Ecuador, which it is exploring together with ASX listed Sunstone Metals Inc. under joint venture agreement (see About Bramaderos, below).



Figures related to this news release can be seen in PDF format by accessing the version of this release on the Companys website ( www.cornerstoneresources.com ) or by clicking on the link below:

http://www.cornerstoneresources.com/i/pdf/NR20-08Figures.pdf .

HIGHLIGHTS:

Detailed technical review leads to a breakthrough in understanding the multiple gold-copper porphyry deposits identified within the Bramaderos concession



The findings stem from a review of drilling results, more detailed magnetic data, and 3-D modeling



The evidence suggests that the porphyry systems exhibit pipe-like geometry similar to many other porphyry deposits, such as Northparkes in Australia, and others globally



Exploration to date had been based on the belief that the porphyries at Bramaderos have broad, widely disseminated geometries, which are common elsewhere such as in Chile

FURTHER INFORMATION:

An in-depth review of all exploration data from Bramaderos has resulted in a breakthrough, that has led to the identification of numerous, compelling drill targets.

The review found that the higher-grade gold-copper porphyries exhibit pipe-like geometry, not broad, disseminated geometry as previously believed.

Some leading porphyries globally display this geometry, while many other porphyries, such as those in Chile and Asia, exhibit broader disseminated geometries (on which the original exploration model for Bramaderos was based).

These geometries for pipe-like or pencil porphyry style porphyry gold-copper systems are not unusual and better-known examples include the Northparkes mine in NSW, the Skouries deposit in Greece, and the Boyongan deposit in the Philippines. These deposits are typically smaller individually but cluster as multiple deposits and deliver higher grades.

Story continues

Cornerstone VP Exploration, Yvan Crepeau, said:

Project operator Sunstones technical review of results to date from Bramaderos has delivered some compelling new interpretations of the gold-copper porphyry systems within the project. Some have been real eye openers such as the detailed ground magnetics and associated 3-D modeling. In isolation this is a standard exploration evolution, but combined with our drilling results to date, and surface sampling we have every reason to be optimistic about discovery. The interpretation of the geometry of these porphyry systems has been improved, and the potential for building significant tonnes, and at higher grades is greatly improved.

Details of the Review

The review considered each of the 6 gold-copper mineralized systems within the Bramaderos project (Figure 1), and the 2 currently defined epithermal gold targets.

All of the gold-copper porphyry systems are mineralized (Figure 2) and the review focused on targeting the higher-grade domains within these systems.

The review has identified that a later higher-grade event can now be defined and is related to pipe like intrusive bodies that are mappable based on the 3-D modeling of the more detailed ground magnetics (Figure 3).

These pipe like bodies cluster within each system, so for example at Brama 5 targets exist and correlate with higher grade where drilled (Figure 4).

At Playas the pipe like magnetic bodies correlate with areas of highest grade gold and copper in surface samples giving us confidence that drilling will extend that mineralization to depth. Playas has never been drilled.

Melonal, Porotillo and Sandia all present similar relationships.

At Porotillo a historical drill hole (CURI-05) intersected 26m at 1.1g/t gold and 0.2% copper demonstrating that significantly higher grades can be delivered from these systems.

Limon Assay Results

Assay results from drill hole LMDD006 at Limon have been received. The drill hole intersected an upper high sulphidation gold interval of 131.3m (true width1 tw 91m) at 0.18g/t gold from surface, with individual samples of up to 1.6m thick grading 1.2g/t. Copper grades were locally anomalous with up to 0.16% copper and 0.4g/t gold over 0.9m widths. This high sulphidation interval is a correlative of that intersected in LMDD004 which returned 59m (tw 41m) at 0.16% copper from 57.8m down hole, including 13.3m (tw 9m) at 0.43% copper and 0.11g/t gold from 57.8m (see Cornerstone news release dated October 15, 2019).

Deeper intervals in LMDD006 intersected intensely phyllic altered intrusive rocks and breccias and only locally gold and copper anomalous intervals. Together with the results from holes LMDD002 and LMDD004 we are now seeing vectors that suggest a target zone to the south.

Suspension of activities at Bramaderos and other Cornerstone Projects due to Coronavirus Precautions and Ecuador State of Emergency

Exploration activities at the Bramaderos Project and other Cornerstone Projects in Ecuador (including Cascabel, the Enami Strategic Exploration Alliance, and Cana Brava) have been suspended in line with the directives of the Ecuadorian government decree declaring a nationwide emergency to manage the risks associated with the corona (Convid-19) virus.

Desktop activities by project operator and JV partner Sunstone Metals are ongoing to interpret data to move target areas towards being drill ready when the suspensions are lifted.

About Bramaderos

Measuring 4,948 hectares, the Bramaderos project is located approximately 130km from the Loja provincial capital in southern Ecuador. The project is easily accessible via the Pan American Highway that crosses the property.

The Bramaderos concession is owned by La Plata Minerales S.A. (PLAMIN), which in turn is owned 87.5% by Sunstone (the project operator) and 12.5% by Cornerstone. Cornerstones 12.5% interest is carried by Sunstone through to the start of commercial production and repayable at Libor plus 2% out of 90% of Cornerstones share of earnings or dividends from the Bramaderos project (see news release 20-01 dated January 7, 2020).

More information about the property can be found at www.cornerstoneresources.com .

Qualified Person:

Yvan Crepeau, MBA, P.Geo., Cornerstones Vice President, Exploration and a qualified person in accordance with National Instrument 43-101, is responsible for supervising the exploration program at the Bramaderos project for Cornerstone and has reviewed and approved the information contained in this news release.

Sampling and assaying

PLAMIN uses a fire assay gold technique for Au assays (FAS-111) and a four acid multi element technique (IMS-230) for a suite of 48 elements. FAS-111 involves Au by Fire Assay on a 30-gram aliquot, fusion and atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS) at trace levels. IMS-20 is considered a near total 4 acid technique using a 20g aliquot followed by multi-element analysis by ICP-AES/MS at ultra-trace levels. This analysis technique is considered suitable for this style of mineralization.

Standards, blanks and duplicates are inserted ~1/28 samples. The values of the standards range from low to high grade and are considered appropriate to monitor performance of values near cut-off and near the mean grade of the deposit. The check sampling results are monitored and performance issues are communicated to the laboratory if necessary.

Sample security was managed through sealed individual samples and sealed bags of multiple samples for secure delivery to the laboratory by permanent staff of the joint venture. MS Analytical is an internationally accredited laboratory that has all its internal procedures heavily scrutinized in order to maintain their accreditation. MS Analytical is accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 2005 Accredited Methods.

PLAMINs sampling techniques and data have been audited multiple times by independent mining consultants during various project assessments. These audits have concluded that the sampling techniques and data management are to industry standards. All historical data has been validated to the best degree possible and migrated into a database.

Rock samples are collected by PLAMINs personnel, placed in plastic bags, labeled and sealed, and stored in a secure place until delivery by PLAMIN employees to the LAC y Asociados ISO 9001-2008 certified sample preparation facility in Cuenca, Ecuador.

Rock samples are prepared crushing to 70% passing 2 mm (10 mesh), splitting 250 g and pulverizing to 85% passing 75 microns (200 mesh) (MSA code PRP-910). Prepared samples are then shipped to MS Analytical Services (MSA), an ISO 9001-2008 laboratory in Langley, BC, Canada, where samples are assayed for a multi-element suite (MSA code IMS-136, 15.0 g split, Aqua Regia digestion, ICP-AES/MS finish) and gold by Fire Assay (MSA code FAS-111, 30 g fusion, AAS finish). Over limit results for Cu (>1%) are systematically re-assayed (MSA code ICF-6Cu, 0.2 g, 4-acid digestion, ICP-AES finish). Gold is assayed using a 30 g split, Fire Assay (FA) and AAS finish (MSA code FAS 111). Over limit results for Au (>10 g/t) are systematically re-assayed (MSA code FAS-415, FA, 30g., gravimetric finish).

Soil samples are dried at low temperature, screened to 80 mesh (MSA code PRP-757); a 15 grams portion is then assayed for a multi-elements suite (MSA code IMS-136, Aqua Regia digestion, ICP-AES/MS finish).

Quality assurance / Quality control (QA/QC)

The MSA Analytical Laboratory is a qualified assayer that performs and makes available internal assaying controls. Duplicates, certified blanks and standards are systematically used (1 control sample every 20-25 samples) as part of PLAMINs QA/QC program. Rejects, a 100 g pulp for each rock sample, are stored for future use and controls.

About Cornerstone

Cornerstone Capital Resources Inc. is a mineral exploration company with a diversified portfolio of projects in Ecuador and Chile, including the Cascabel gold-enriched copper porphyry joint venture in northwest Ecuador. Cornerstone has a 22.2% direct and indirect interest in Cascabel comprised of (i) a direct 15% interest in the project financed through to completion of a feasibility study and repayable at Libor plus 2% out of 90% of its share of the earnings or dividends from an operation at Cascabel, plus (ii) an indirect interest comprised of 8.5% of the shares of joint venture partner and project operator SolGold Plc. Exploraciones Novomining S.A. (ENSA), an Ecuadoran company owned by SolGold and Cornerstone, holds 100% of the Cascabel concession. Subject to the satisfaction of certain conditions, including SolGolds fully funding the project through to feasibility, SolGold Plc will own 85% of the equity of ENSA and Cornerstone will own the remaining 15% of ENSA.

Further information is available on Cornerstones website: www.cornerstoneresources.com and on Twitter. For investor, corporate or media inquiries, please contact:

Investor Relations:

Mario Drolet; Email: Mario@mi3.ca ; Tel. (514) 904-1333

Due to anti-spam laws, many shareholders and others who were previously signed up to receive email updates and who are no longer receiving them may need to re-subscribe at http://www.cornerstoneresources.com/s/InformationRequest.asp

Cautionary Notice:

This news release may contain Forward-Looking Statements that involve risks and uncertainties, such as statements of Cornerstones beliefs, plans, objectives, strategies, intentions and expectations. The words potential, anticipate, forecast, believe, estimate, intend, trends, indicate, expect, may, should, could, project, plan, or the negative or other variations of these words and similar expressions are intended to be among the statements that identify Forward-Looking Statements. Although Cornerstone believes that its expectations reflected in these Forward-Looking Statements are reasonable, such statements may involve unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors disclosed in our regulatory filings, viewed on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com . For us, uncertainties arise from the behaviour of financial and metals markets, predicting natural geological phenomena and from numerous other matters of national, regional, and global scale, including those of an environmental, climatic, natural, political, economic, business, competitive, or regulatory nature. These uncertainties may cause our actual future results to be materially different than those expressed in our Forward-Looking Statements. Although Cornerstone believes the facts and information contained in this news release to be as correct and current as possible, Cornerstone does not warrant or make any representation as to the accuracy, validity or completeness of any facts or information contained herein and these statements should not be relied upon as representing its views after the date of this news release. While Cornerstone anticipates that subsequent events may cause its views to change, it expressly disclaims any obligation to update the Forward-Looking Statements contained herein except where outcomes have varied materially from the original statements.

On Behalf of the Board,

Brooke Macdonald

President and CEO

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

1 True widths are estimated, but cannot be determined accurately at this time from the limited number of holes drilled.
Connecticut added 4,000 jobs in February, while unemployment held steady in the states last month before being struck by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to preliminary data released Thursday by the state Department of Labor.

Februarys numbers built on promising results in the previous month. Januarys originally calculated job increase of 2,600 was revised up to 3,300.

At the same time, Connecticuts unemployment rate ran at 3.8 percent, compared with 3.7 percent in January. The national rate ran at 3.5 percent last month.

This was the sixth month in a row of payroll job growth. Unfortunately, with the impact of the spread of the COVID-19 virus, we can expect payroll jobs to decline as a result of sharply increased layoffs and furloughs, said Andy Condon, director of the Department of Labors office of research, in a written release.

In the past year, total employment (not including agriculture) in the state grew by 13,300 positions, equal to a 0.8 percent gain.

The gains are likely to be wiped out, in the short run at least, by the coronavirus crisis. Since Friday, March 13, well over 100,000 people have filed for unemployment benefits. The department has pushed the expected processing time from three days to more than two weeks, and has not released new figures for unemployment claims.

Its still not clear what the unemployment rate would be based on the more than 100,000 claims, and even what that means  since the assumption is most of those workers are jobless only until the emergency subsides.

In February, just over 40,000 people were receiving jobless benefits.

The gains of the first two months of 2020 could be revised even without the effects of the coronavirus crisis. In 2019, the state initially reported a gain of 6,500 jobs, based on annual averages compared with 2018. That was later revised by the department to a loss of 2,100. State unemployment last year averaged 3.7 percent, in line with the national average.

In the 12 months ending in February, education and health services led all sectors with a 2.2 percent year-over-year job gain. Next came professional and business services with an uptick of 1.3 percent.

Construction, financial activities, government, information, manufacturing and trade, transportation and utilities each recorded year-over-year job increases of less than 1 percent.

Leisure and hospitality and the other services category were the only groups to lose jobs in the past year, as both saw their statewide headcounts drop by less than 1 percent.

pschott@stamfordadvocate.com; Twitter: @paulschott
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday had a telephonic conversation with Qatar Amir Tamim Bin Hamad al Thani and discussed the ongoing developments related to the COVID-19 global pandemic and its social and economic impact. They exchanged notes on the measures taken in their respective countries to contain the spread of the virus.

The Prime Minister also informed him about the recent regional initiatives among the SAARC countries and the Virtual Summit among G20 leaders.

Both the leaders expressed hope that the efforts and the measures being taken to stop the spread of the disease by all affected countries, would yield early and positive results. They emphasised the importance of international solidarity and information-sharing in fighting the pandemic.

The Prime Minister thanked Thani for his personal attention to the welfare of the Indian nationals living and working in Qatar, particularly in the present situation. The Amir assured the Prime Minister about the safety and welfare of all Indian expatriates in Qatar.

Prime Minister Modi and the Amir agreed to maintain regular contact and consultation on the evolving situation.
World-renowned chef Floyd Cardoz has died from the coronavirus at the age of 59.

Kris Connor/Getty Images for NYCWFF

World-renowned chef Floyd Cardoz, 59, died from coronavirus complications at a New Jersey hospital on Wednesday.

The "Top Chef Masters" winner had posted an Instagram photo of himself at the hospital just a week ago.

In the caption, Cardoz said he had flown to New York from Mumbai  where he was the co-owner of two restaurants  on March 8. Cardoz's restaurant group said he tested positive for the disease 10 days later.

The chef, who recently appeared on David Chang's Netflix show "Ugly Delicious," is credited with bringing Indian cuisine to New York's fine-dining scene.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

The NYC dining scene has had a devastating week due to the coronavirus pandemic, and now it has lost one of its own to the disease.

World-renowned chef Floyd Cardoz, who is credited with bringing Indian cuisine to fine dining in New York, died at a New Jersey hospital on Wednesday. He was 59 years old.

Cardoz's family confirmed his death to the Indian English-language news site Scroll.in. He leaves behind his wife Barkha and two sons, Justin and Peter.

Cardoz's restaurant group confirmed last week that he had tested positive for the coronavirus.

David Handschuh/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

Cardoz's restaurant group, Hunger Inc. Hospitality, issued a statement about the chef's death. It stated that Cardoz had tested positive for the coronavirus on March 18 and was being treated at the Mountainside Medical Center in Montclair before his death.

The "Top Chef Masters" winner had posted an Instagram photo from his hospital bed just a week ago.

In the caption, Cardoz said he had flown to New York from Mumbai  where he owned two restaurants  on March 8.

"I was feeling feverish and hence, as a precautionary measure, admitted myself into hospital in New York," he wrote.

Following his Instagram post, Cardoz's restaurant group confirmed that he had tested positive for the coronavirus on March 18.

Story continues

"As a precautionary measure we have informed the Health Department in Mumbai," the statement read. "We are also reaching out personally to people who have interacted with him during his visit to India, so they can take necessary medical advice should they indicate any symptoms."

Cardoz first made a splash in NYC's fine dining scene in the 1990s.

Brian Ach/Getty Images for New York Magazine

Cardoz, who was born in Mumbai, first made a splash in NYC's dining scene in the early 1990s as executive sous-chef at the renowned French restaurant Lespinasse, which held an elusive four-star rating from The New York Times.

But Cardoz really made a name for himself when he opened Tabla with Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group in 1998. The fine-dining Indian restaurant was an instant hit, receiving three stars from the Times.

In her 1999 review of the restaurant, the Times critic Ruth Reichl called it "love at first bite."

"The flavors are so powerful, original, and unexpected that they evoke intense emotions," she wrote. "This is what I have been waiting for. Nothing I have tasted since has changed my mind."

Pete Wells, the Times' current restaurant critic, paid tribute to Cardoz's impact on New York's dining scene in a 2016 review for Paowalla, the chef's second Indian restaurant in New York.

Cardoz's restaurant the Bombay Canteen (pictured) was recently featured on David Chang's Netflix show "Ugly Delicious."

Ugly Delicious/Netflix

"He used the language of Indian cuisine to say things we had never heard before," Wells wrote. "A native of Mumbai, he showed us that the Indian spice cabinet can perform many other tricks besides curry."

"Upstairs at Tabla, he helped end the era in which the fine-dining wing of the restaurant business operated as a club to which cuisines of non-European descent need not apply," Wells added. "At the bottom of the winding staircase, in the little lounge known as Bread Bar, he showed us that a serious chef could pull off a more affordable and accessible menu without pandering."

Cardoz later turned Paowalla into Bombay Bread Bar, a popular restaurant in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood that just closed last year.

He also owned Mumbai restaurants The Bombay Canteen and O Pedro, and had just launched Bombay Sweet Shop.

Cardoz won season three of "Top Chef Masters" in 2011, and appeared in the second season of celebrity chef David Chang's Netflix series "Ugly Delicious," which premiered in February.

Cardoz on the Netflix show "Ugly Delicious."

Ugly Delicious/Netflix

Both Wells and Chang paid tribute to Cardoz after news of his death broke on Wednesday.

Many on Twitter also wrote about the huge impact Cardoz had on Indian cuisine in America.

At least 19,700 people have died due to the coronavirus, which has spread to at least 172 countries and territories around the world.

The US has seen more than 60,000 cases and 800 deaths at the time of writing.

New York has the largest number of coronavirus cases of any US state, with more than 30,000 confirmed cases and 285 deaths as of Wednesday.

Read the original article on Insider
The three-member Expedition 62 crew  Oleg Skripochka, Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan  pose together wearing their mission patch t-shirts at the International Space Station, on Feb. 7, 2020. (Image credit: NASA)

Expedition 62 to the International Space Station (ISS) began on Feb. 6, 2020, with the departure of the Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft. The Expedition currently consists of three crewmembers: Cmdr. Oleg Skripochka of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, as well as two NASA astronauts, Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan.

The ISS will be back up to its usual population of six crewmembers with the arrival of NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and two Russian cosmonauts, Anatoli Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner. On April 16, Skripochka will hand over command of the ISS to Cassidy, marking the end of Expedition 62 and the start of Expedition 63.

See photos of the Expedition 62 crew in action and photos taken by the crew in space in this Space.com gallery.

Related: The International Space Station: inside and out (infographic)

Expedition 62 insignia

(Image credit: NASA)

The official Expedition 62 insignia includes the astronauts' names and an astronaut holding a star alongside another carrying a leaf.



Crew portrait

(Image credit: Robert Markowitz/NASA)

This official crew portrait, taken April 17, 2019, shows (from left): Andrew Morgan of NASA, Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos and Jessica Meir of NASA.



Expedition 62 t-shirts

(Image credit: NASA)

The three-member Expedition 62 crew  Oleg Skripochka, Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan  pose together wearing their mission patch t-shirts at the International Space Station, on Feb. 7, 2020.



Astronaut's view of Earth from space

(Image credit: NASA)

Below the International Space Station, California's San Francisco Bay, the Pacific Ocean and Washington State's Columbia River offer a spectacular view on Feb. 9, 2020.



Playing with water in "zero-g"

(Image credit: NASA)

Water floats in an undulating sphere as NASA's Expedition 62 flight engineer Jessica Meir looks on. This Feb. 9, 2020 photo displays the effects of microgravity on water.



Brain experiments in orbit

(Image credit: Astro_Jessica/Twitter)

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir participates in the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Cerebral Autoregulation experiment aboard the International Space Station on Feb. 10, 2020. The study investigates how microgravity effects how the regulation of blood flow to the brain changes in microgravity. A goal of the study is "applications to future space travelers and patients back on Earth," according to Meir.



Airglow and solar arrays

(Image credit: Astro_Jessica/Twitter)

Sunlight hits the International Space Station's solar arrays with a golden shimmer in this image by Jessica Meir on Feb. 10, 2020.



Noctilucent clouds seen from space

(Image credit: NASA)

The highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere  noctilucent, or "night shining" clouds  glow in this image taken from the ISS on Feb. 12, 2020. Noctilucent clouds occur only when the sun shines on clouds from below Earth's horizon.



Chillin' in the Cupola

(Image credit: Astro_Jessica/Twitter)

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir represents her alma mater, Brown University, while gazing at Earth through the Cupola observatory aboard the International Space Station, on Feb. 13, 2020. When she tweeted this photo, Meir said she tried "to spot the Van Wickle gates from space!"



Fun with "zero-g"

(Image credit: Astro_Jessica/Twitter)

NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan "sit" on the shoulders of Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka as they pose for another "zero-g" group photo on Feb. 14, 2020.



Canadarm2

(Image credit: Astro_Jessica/Twitter)

The last quarter moon looms behind the International Space Station's Canadarm2 robotic arm in this photo by NASA astronaut Jessica Meir. She and her Expedition 62 crewmate Andrew Morgan used Canadarm2 to grapple an arriving Cygnus cargo spacecraft on Feb. 18, 2020.



Key West seen from space

(Image credit: Astro_Jessica/Twitter)

NASA astronauts Jessica Meir captured this vibrant view of Key West, Florida, from 266 miles (428 kilometers) above the Earth, on Feb. 17, 2020. "Many fond memories in idyllic #KeyWest #Florida, including @NASA_Astronauts flight training with landings @NASKeyWest," Meir tweeted.



Astronauts welcome the S.S. Robert H. Lawrence

(Image credit: AstroDrewMorgan/Twitter)

In honor of Black History Month, Northrop Grumman named its 13th Cygnus cargo spacecraft after U.S. Air Force Maj. Robert H. Lawrence, Jr., the first African-American ever selected as an astronaut. The Cygnus NG-13 cargo spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station on Feb. 18, 2020, carrying more than 7,500 lbs. (3,400 kilograms) of science experiments, supplies and other vital gear for the station's three-person Expedition 62 crew.



S.S. Robert H. Lawrence's approach

(Image credit: AstroDrewMorgan/Twitter)

Northrup Grumman's Cygnus NG-13 arrives at the ISS on Feb. 18, 2020. The freighter, full of supplies for the space station, was named after a U.S. Air Force test pilot, Maj. Robert H. Lawrence, Jr., the first African American selected for a national space program.



Astronauts sport protective gear

(Image credit: NASA)

The Expedition 62 astronaut crew is pictured inside a SpaceX Dragon resupply craft, on March 9, 2020. The crew is wearing portable breathing gear while entering to test the spaceship's atmosphere for particles and irritants that could have come loose while launching to space.



St. Patrick's Day in space

NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan tweeted this photo of an Irish flag floating in one of the windows of the Cupola observatory on St. Patrick's Day (March 17).

Full story: Astronauts celebrate St. Patrick's Day 2020 with photos of Ireland from space



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Restrictions of travel from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic, came too late, according to a study which shows that the impact of curbing travel declines as an epidemic grows.

The study, published in the journal Science, noted that regions outside the province of Hubei in China, which acted early to test, track and restrict imported COVID-19 cases fared the best at preventing or containing local outbreaks.

Researchers, including those from the University of Oxford in the UK, assessed mobile geolocation data from Baidu Inc. -- a Chinese multinational technology company -- and combined the information with epidemiological dataset from the Open COVID-19 Data Working Group.

Their analysis showed that local person-to-person transmission happened extensively early on in the coronavirus outbreak, and was mitigated by drastic control measures.

However, since the virus has an average incubation period of 5 days, and up to 14 days in some cases, the scientists said, these mobility restrictions did not begin to positively impact the data on new cases for over a week.

They said the events got worse in the 5-7 days immediately after the lockdown as local transmission was well under way.

Among cases reported outside Hubei, the study said 515 people had a known travel history to Wuhan, and a symptom onset date before 31st January 2020.

On the other hand only 39 people experienced onset of symptoms after 31st January, suggesting the effect of travel restrictions in decreasing the spread to other Chinese provinces.

"Our findings show that early in the coronavirus outbreak travel restrictions were effective in preventing the import of infections from a known source," said Moritz Kraemer, study co-author from the University of Oxford.

"However, once COVID-19 cases begin spreading locally the contribution of new importations was much smaller. This is where a full package of measures including local mobility restrictions, testing, tracing and isolation need to work together to mitigate the epidemic," Kraemer said.

The researchers cautioned that Chinese provinces and other countries that have successfully halted internal transmission of COVID-19 need to carefully consider how they will manage reinstating travel and mobility to avoid the reintroduction and spread of the disease in their populations.

"The political will in many countries is lagging behind the spread of COVID-19. Travel and mobility restrictions are the most useful right at the start, when local transmission has not yet become a factor," said Samuel V. Scarpino, another co-author of the study from Northeastern University in the US.

"After transmission is established, physical distancing and the quarantine of sick individuals will work, but it takes time," Scarpino said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Edison International Donates $1 Million to Support Those Impacted by COVID-19

To help Californians who are facing hardships because of quarantines, taking care of family or school and business closures, Edison International pledged $1 million on March 13 to local nonprofits whose focus is on providing critical services, food and necessities to vulnerable communities in response to COVID-19.

"Edison International appreciates the health care workers, first responders, local communities and others who are on the front lines working to contain this pandemic," said Pedro Pizarro, president and CEO of Edison International, Southern California Edison's (News - Alert) parent company. "As an essential service provider and a member of the community, we remain committed to the health, safety and well-being of customers and employees, and will support those who need it the most during these unprecedented times."

Edison International's charitable donations will go to local nonprofits, including $150,000 to California Community Foundation's COVID-19 LA County Response Fund as previously announced and $100,000 to each of the following organizations that are supporting customers facing food insecurity, a challenge that has only intensified with COVID-19:







In this collective effort, Edison International, SCE and Edison Energy employees are coming together to support the following four local nonprofits and other organizations working with communities greatly impacted by COVID-19:

The company's $1 million pledge to COVID-19 relief efforts will support employee contributions by matching their donations up to $250,000. Remaining funds from the $1 million commitment will be allocated to community organizations that need support.

Edison International charitable causes are funded entirely by Edison International shareholders. SCE customers' utility bill payments do not fund philanthropic donations.

For more information on Edison International's COVID-19 response, visit edison.com/covid19.

About Edison International

Edison International (NYSE: EIX), through its subsidiaries, is a distributor and generator of electric power, as well as a provider of energy services and technologies, including renewable energy. Headquartered in Rosemead, California, Edison International is the parent company of Southern California Edison, one of the nation's largest electric utilities. Edison International is also the parent company of Edison Energy, a portfolio of competitive businesses that provide commercial and industrial customers with energy management and procurement services. Edison Energy is independent from Southern California Edison.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200325005778/en/
WASHINGTON  Money to help BART and other public transit agencies, San Francisco International Airport and homeless people in the Bay Area is included in the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill that the full Congress could pass as early as Thursday. The measure passed unanimously in the Senate late Wednesday night.

Many details of the sprawling package are still unclear, but officials said Wednesday that it includes billions of dollars to help San Francisco and other cities cope with the economic devastation the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to cause.

Among the biggest earmarks for the Bay Area:

 $1.3 billion for transit agencies including BART, which says it is hemorrhaging $39 million per month as ridership has all but evaporated.

 $254 million for SFO, where many domestic and most international flights have been halted.

 $11 million for San Francisco to help homeless people who are especially vulnerable to the pandemic.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said the package is bipartisan legislation (that) takes us a long way down the road in meeting the needs of the American people.

The Bay Areas share of the public transit money accounts for more than a third of the $3.4 billion that will go to transit agencies throughout California whose ridership has fallen sharply since most workers were sent home starting early this month.

Randy Rentschler, legislative director for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, estimated the deal would net Bay Area agencies about three times as much as they receive annually from the federal government in normal times.

This is a very big deal, he said.

BART General Manager Robert Powers said the money will keep the systems trains running, even with ridership having fallen 90%. BART has largely kept service in place during the stay-at-home order put in place in the Bay Area last week, though it now halts trains at 9 p.m.

These emergency funds can be the difference between needing to shut down when our reserves run out and maintaining service to keep the San Francisco Bay Area moving, Powers said.

The bill also includes $10 billion nationally to help airports struggling due to a sharp drop in business as airlines cut flights. Several airlines have grounded nearly all flights into the Bay Area. United Airlines, which has a hub at SFO, has cut more than half of its domestic flights and 90% of its international flights in April.

It was not immediately clear whether there is additional funding for Oakland and Mineta San Jose international airports to go with the $254 million for SFO.

California officials have also stressed they need more money to house homeless people to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. The bill includes up to $237 million for the state and local governments to fund homeless assistance and prevention programs.

Gov. Gavin Newsom warned President Trump in a letter over the weekend that California counties were already working well beyond their capacity to manage the states roughly 150,000 homeless people even before the pandemic hit.

San Francisco is slated to get at least $11 million of the money set aside for homeless assistance grants in the bill, and $1 million to help provide housing for low-income people with HIV/AIDS.

The bill contains several broader victories for Democrats, including expanded unemployment benefits that will cover freelance and gig workers. Still, several Bay Area lawmakers said another stimulus bill is likely to be needed as the economic effects of the pandemic deepen.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Fremont, said he wants the next bill to provide greater cash assistance to people, particularly those in areas with a higher cost of living. The package now before Congress would provide $1,200 for individual adults making up to $75,000 a year but less for those making up to $99,000, after which the money would be eliminated. For couples, the figures are doubled.

Khanna said the caps ignore that many people in high cost-of-living areas such as his Silicon Valley district struggle even on incomes approaching $100,000. He wants larger payments, up to $2,000 for six months, with higher income limits.

Khanna and other Democrats have also called for a national moratorium on coronavirus-related evictions and foreclosures.

Is this the bill we would have written? Absolutely not, Khanna said. Politics is always the art of the possible, and I give the speaker a lot of credit for doing the best that she possibly could in light of whos sitting in the White House.

An earlier version of this story misstated the days BART service ends at 9 p.m. Trains now stop running at that time seven days a week.

Dustin Gardiner and Michael Cabanatuan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: dustin.gardiner@sfchronicle.com, mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dustingardiner, @ctuan
American media personality Kylie Jenner has donated 1 million USD to fight against the COVID-19 outbreak.

Dr Thais Aliabadi shared the same in an Instagram post on Wednesday, "One of my patients, a beautiful Living Angel just donated $1,000,000 to help us buy hundreds of thousands of masks, face shields, and other protective gear which we will have delivered directly to our first responders, as too many masks at hospitals are disappearing before making their way onto the faces of our front line heroes."

According to Page Six, a representative for Jenner confirmed that the 22-year-old star has made the contribution, and said, "I can confirm that she did make the donation."

Now, thanks to Jenner's generosity, Aliabadi will be able to disperse the hundreds of thousands of various necessary essentials needed to combat the dissemination of COVID-19.

The doctor issued huge gratitude and thanks to the Kylie Cosmetics founder and said that she has "never felt more blessed to be a doctor."

Dr Aliabadi was on-hand to deliver Jenner's daughter, Stormi, according to TMZ.

Kylie reciprocated the doctor's kind words by replying to Dr Aliabadi's thank-you post, she wrote, "I love you! and thank YOU for all the love and care you put into everything that you do! You're an angel on earth."

Last Week, Jenner pleaded in an Instagram post, "The coronavirus is a real thing, "I listened to the Surgeon General this morning... he definitely encouraged me to come on here and talk to you guys.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi, March 26 : Public health experts in India are of the view that the 21-day lockdown, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to combat the spread of coronavirus, was timely and would save the lives of millions.

The country is under complete lockdown, which will remain in force till April 14.

"The lockdown was timely and it will surely break the chain of transmission. These three weeks are extremely critical for our country," Dr Naresh Trehan, Chairman of the National Council on Healthcare and founder of Medanta hospital, told IANS.

If surveys found an amplified community transmission, the lockdown should be extended, he added.

Assuaging the fear, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan had recently said the community transmission had not started yet.

Dr Arvind Kumar, Chairman of the Center for Chest Surgery at Delhi's Sir Ganga Ram Hospital (SGRH), said there would be no contact between people during the lockdown period, which would halt the Covd-19's geometric progression.

"21 days are enough. The lockdown will turn the possibility of exponential vertical increase in the number of cases to a slow-rise, which our healthcare facilities can manage," he said.

Kumar, also the director at the Institute of Robotic Surgery, said the median incubation period of the virus was within this period.

"In 14-day, the virus will either die or kill the person infected with it. That's why the 3-week period is given so that the present volume of infected people will get over it," the doctor said.
Altoona-based Sheetz announced today it will pay employees an extra $3 an hour because they are working through the coronavirus pandemic.

The increase is effective through April 23, according a statement from the company. Sheetz has about 17,000 store workers.

Our employees are the heart and soul of Sheetz and their commitment to serve our customers and communities as an essential business during this critical time has been nothing short of extraordinary, said Travis Sheetz, President & COO of Sheetz, Inc. This special compensation is just one way to express our gratitude during this difficult time.

Sheetz also is looking to hire more part-time and full-time employees.

As the COVID-19 health crisis continues, we are making some changes at our store locations in the interest of the health and well-being of our customers and employees. Click the link to read a letter from our President/COO Travis Sheetz. https://t.co/Aqi8pyXBR3 pic.twitter.com/v8xFRPYICY  SHEETZ (@sheetz) March 24, 2020

Sheetz previously suspended self-serve coffee and other beverages and baked goods because of the spread of coronavirus. The company said it also has enhanced routine daily cleaning procedures with a focus on high touch surface areas such as gas pumps, order points, counter tops, checkout lines and door handles as well as reinforcing and re-training all employees on proper hand washing and hygiene. Additionally, to follow social distancing recommendations, Sheetzs full menu is available to order and pay on the Sheetz website and through its app 24/7.

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Weve heard some valid criticisms lobbed at Homeland over the years. For example, in recent seasons, critics have claimed the show is repeating itself. (After 90 episodes, it would be hard not to do this.) But thats not necessarily a negative to fans who have followed the series for a decade.

If we were to criticize Homeland, we might point to its tendency to draw supporting characters with a heavy hand. The shows writers have always done excellent work showing the different sides of characters (i.e., what they might be hiding), but the sketches can skew on the broad side at times.

But in 2020 its still hard to think of any watchable show that gives a better look at the motivations of political leaders  and the officials tasked to carry out their orders. In season 8 (the shows last), viewers have encountered two new characters that have kept Homeland going.

President Hayes, the inexperienced new chief executive played by Sam Trammell, is one of them. John Zabel, the sycophantic adviser played by Hugh Dancy (star Claire Danes husband), counts as another. Zabel seems determined to wreak havoc on a country ready to explode without his help.

Hugh Dancys character seems born to appeal to leaders worst instincts

Hugh Dancy as John Zabel in HOMELAND, In Full Flight | Sifeddine Elamine/SHOWTIME.

Before we even heard the name John Zabel, viewers watched as an easily swayed president fell victim to the alpha posturing of Gulam, the belligerent new president of Afghanistan. Hayes does not know what hes doing and, to make matters worse, seems insecure about that fact.

Enter Zabel, the sort of presidential adviser you typically only hear about on cable news. When chief of staff David Wellington (Linus Roache) enters the Oval Office and meets Zabel, the first words he utters (about Haqqanis bogus death sentence) are full of red flags.

I was just saying to the president, it took 10 years to get Osama Bin Laden but he avenged Ralph Warners murder in, what, three days? In Zabels opening statement, we watch him simultaneously butter up a president in search of compliments while broaching his own dark agenda.

After reassuring Hayes he can take credit for Haqqanis capture  indeed.=, just after remember Haqqani turned himself in  Zabel lets his philosophy fly. Its what that part of the world understands, he says. An eye for an eye, a punch in the f*cking nose.

Saul Berenson reacted with horror at the mere mention of Zabels name

(L-R): John Zabel and Linus Roache as David Wellington in HOMELAND, In Full Flight | Sifeddine Elamine/SHOWTIME.

Before Wellington even entered the Oval, we got an idea of Zabels reputation. Speaking with Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), Wellington described how the situation was slipping out of his control. Guess whos in the Oval Office right now? Wellington tells Saul. John Zabel.

You cant be serious, Saul replies, telling Wellington to do his best to plead his case for peace. Once we get a load of Zabel (and his curiously sideburn-free beard), its easy to understand why Saul doesnt want any of his policy ideas polluting the mind of a naive president.

While Zabel is a corrosive figure in the world of Homeland, his appearance in the final season certainly made life easier for him and Danes. That was such a nice way to end the show, Danes told Porter in early 2020.

I didnt have a single scene with him, but on my days off, I would go to his set. Hes very good. I dont exactly forget that, but we dont talk about acting much, so it was a really nice reminder.

Also see: Spy Wars With Damian Lewis Series Arrives on the Smithsonian Channel
Syracuse, N.Y. -- The Basket Ball Gala, a Syracuse fundraising staple for 20 years, will not be held this year at Turning Stone Resort and Casino.

The Ball, the primary fundraiser for the Jim and Juli Boeheim Foundation, has enabled its organizers to deliver $5.3 million to various charities in Central New York over the years. The Boeheim Foundation generally funds childrens causes and commits to cancer research, but has contributed to more than 200 charities in the region.

The coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of the Ball, but Juli Boeheim said the foundation is in the middle of planning something creative" to collect money and direct it to places that need help.

Our hearts and minds have been racing to determine how to support the most vulnerable in our Central New York community as we respond to COVID-19, a Foundation statement said. While we cannot host our traditional Gala on April 25th at the Turning Stone Resort and Casino, there is extreme urgency to raise money to keep the funnel full for our traditional May and October grant seasons, as well as provide emergency grant funding for COVID-19 relief.

Juli Boeheim said details about a substitute for the gala could be forthcoming in the next few days.

Donna Ditota is a reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard and Syracuse.com. Got a comment or idea for a story? Reach her at dditota@syracuse.com.

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By PTI

MUMBAI: Wadia Group aviation venture GoAir has written to civil aviation ministry and sector watchdog DGCA, offering its grounded aircraft fleet, cockpit and cabin crew, and airport staff for carrying out emergency services and repatriation of citizens.

Regular passenger air services are suspended in the country till April 14 amid the 21-day nationwide lockdown, which is in place from Tuesday mid-night, as part of the larger efforts of the government to contain COVID-19 (coronavirus), which has wreaked havoc in several developed economies.

This has left the entire fleet of over 650 planes with the domestic air operators grounded, along with huge manpower with no work.

Moreover, stringent border control measures by various countries, including India, to deal with the unprecedented situation has left thousands of people stuck in different territories, and governments are operating special flights to evacuate their stranded citizens.

GoAir has reached out to the civil aviation ministry and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and offered its services in the wake of a complete lockdown across the nation, the airline said in a statement to PTI on Thursday.

The budget carrier's proposal came a day after market leader IndiGo made a similar offer to the government.

"Everyone around the world is facing an unprecedented challenge as we try and battle this global pandemic," it said.

The Mumbai-headquartered passenger air carrier has a workforce of around 5,500 personnel to operate its fleet of 56 planes.

"GoAir airline is fully supportive of the initiatives announced by Prime Minister.

In fact, we were the only airline to respond to Prime Minister's call to observe Janata Curfew on March 22 by suspending all our flights on that day.

With our state-of-the-art fleet of Airbus A320 aircraft, GoAir is on stand-by for any flight that the government may want us to fly," GoAir Managing Director Jeh Wadia said.

The airline, in the letter, has proposed that it can help in services such as ship cargo on behalf of the government, essential services such as medicines, food grains, ship manpower who would carry out emergency services: doctors, nurses, para medics, relief workers.

Besides it can also help in repatriation of stranded Indian citizens and expats to each other's countries as well as bring back people stuck in various states within the country to their respective places.
Parents and guardians have been urged to restrict the movement of their children to protect them from contracting the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19).



Mrs Freda Prempeh, the Deputy Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection who gave the advice entreated parents to teach their children proper handwashing with soap, as the government stepped up measures to control the stem of the Disease.



In an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) after a presentation ceremony held in Goaso in the Ahafo Region, Mrs Prempeh who is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Tano North constituency said children were also vulnerable to the COVID-19, though they had strong immune systems.



The Ahafo Regional Coordinating Council (RCC) presented items such as Veronica buckets, washing bowls, medicated soaps, dustbins and sanitizers to the various Municipal and District Assemblies in the region to aid hand washing in their localities.



Mrs Prempeh said it was dangerous to allow minors to hawk and sell on the street, and called on parents to allow their children to engage in that to stop such practice in order not to expose them to avoidable dangers.



She applauded the intensified public education on the COVID-19, and commended President Nana Akufo-Addo for the measures put in place to control the spread of the disease, but added the education ought to be intensified in the rural areas as well.



The Deputy Minister said Persons with Disabilities (PWDs) especially the deaf, blind and dumb should also get full benefit of the public education to protect them against the COVID-19.



Mrs Prempeh said she procured 5000 sanitizers and 100 Veronica buckets and soaps to be distributed to people in her constituency.



Mr Evans Opoku-Bobie, the Ahafo Regional Minister emphasised that the RCC would monitor and warned that Assemblies that failed to use the items for the intended purpose would not be spared.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Minister of State for Health, Senator Olorunnimbe Mamora, says he has tested negative for coronavirus. Mamora said this in a text me...

Mamora said this in a text message sent to newsmen on Thursday.He admitted that he came in contact with at least one person who tested positive for the virus.The minister, however, did not disclose the identity of the person he came in contact with.Mamora said, Following my contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19, I went into self-isolation. Testing was carried out on me yesterday (Wednesday) and the result came back negative this morning (Thursday).It was gathered that many ministers have gone into self-isolation since reports emerged that the Presidents Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, and three of his aides tested positive for coronavirus.Kyari also attended the Federal Executive Council meeting last week as well as meetings with All Progressives Congress governors.
Three Rivers Public Health Department has identified three additional cases of COVID-19, including the first case to be documented in Dodge County late Wednesday evening.

The Dodge County case is a female in her 40s. The Dodge County resident has been self-isolating at home since March 25. Contact investigations were completed and those identified as close contacts were notified. All identified close contacts will self-quarantine and be actively monitored twice daily by public health officials for fever and respiratory symptoms.

Community exposures may have occurred at the following times and locations and are considered low risk: Bakers, 1531 N. Bell St., Fremont, on Sunday, March 22, from 9:30-11:30 a.m.; Dollar General, 1957 E. Military Ave., Fremont, on Sunday, March 22, from 9:30-11:30 a.m.

The second case is in Washington County and is a female in her 60s. The Washington County resident has been self-isolating at home since March 15. Contact investigations were completed and those identified as close contacts were notified. All identified close contacts will self-quarantine and be actively monitored twice daily by public health officials for fever and respiratory symptoms. This is the fifth case in Washington County.

The third case is in Saunders County and is a close contact of the case identified yesterday in Saunders County. The new case is a female in her 50s and she is self-isolating at home. Contact investigations are currently being completed. This is the second case in Saunders County.

Symptoms of the disease include a fever, cough, sore throat, or difficulty breathing. If you have COVID-19 symptoms, or develop symptoms, contact your health care provider and tell them how you are feeling. Please notify them of any potential exposure to a confirmed case of the novel coronavirus. The health department asks that you call ahead before you go to the doctors office or an emergency room.

3RPHD is in communication with state officials in regard to issuing a Directed Health Measure for Dodge and Saunders County.

For more information about COVID-19, visit www.threeriverspublichealth.org or http://dhhs.ne.gov/coronavirus.
Afghanistan's former Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah says the release of Taliban prisoners by the government would be beneficial for both sides and would help move the Afghan peace process forward.



Abdullah's statement came after Afghanistan's National Security Council announced on March 25 that government officials are set to meet with a Taliban delegation in the coming days to discuss an initial release of militant prisoners.



Abdullah told a news conference in Kabul on March 26 that he is ready for talks to resolve Afghanistan's ongoing political crisis which he said was "not in the interest of anyone.



Following a video conference between council members and Taliban representatives, council spokesman Javid Faisal tweeted on March 25, A Taliban team will meet with the government face-to-face in Afghanistan in the coming days to further discuss the release of 100 prisoners by March 31.



The detainees would be freed on humanitarian grounds after guarantees by Taliban and the prisoners that they will not re-enter the fight, Faisal wrote.

U.S. envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, who took part in the video conference, said the sides agreed prisoner releases by both sides will start March 31.



The video conference decided that the release of the prisoners will practically start by the end of March," Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said on Twitter.



President Ashraf Ghani has said the government would initially free 1,500 prisoners, while the Taliban has demanded 5,000 as a precondition for talks with Kabul.



Khalilzad has said a prisoner release has become more urgent because of the spread of coronavirus.



The development could help break a deadlock that has held up negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government under a U.S.-brokered peace process.



The peace process has been further hampered by a feud between Abdullah and Ghani, who have both claimed.Afghanistan's presidency after a contested election in September.



The U.S. State Department announced on March 23 that it was slashing $1 billion in aid to Afghanistan after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo failed to convince Ghani and Abdullah to end the feud and form an inclusive government to advance the peace process.



Abdullah on March 26 said the U.S. aid cut will cause serious trouble for Afghanistan, and it cant be compensated in any way.



An agreement signed in Doha on February 29 by the United States and the Taliban could lead to the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan as part of a peace process aimed at bringing an end to the Afghan conflict.



The United States has said it is committed to reducing the number of its troops in Afghanistan from about 12,000 to 8,600 within 135 days of signing the deal.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, and AIP News


WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  Purdue University President Mitch Daniels on Thursday (March 26) announced that Frank Dooley, senior vice provost for teaching and learning, has been named chancellor of Purdue University Global, effective May 1.

Dooley will replace Betty Vandenbosch, who announced earlier in March her intention to step down to become chief content officer at an education technology company. Vandenbosch will continue to oversee most Purdue Global activity through the month of April.

Frank has been closely connected to Purdue Global since its launch and is ideally qualified to assume the role of chancellor, Daniels said. He is widely respected on our residential campuses and well-suited to building new collaborations across the entire Purdue family of schools. The current crisis is certain to propel an acceleration of online learning across colleges both virtual and traditional. Frank is just the person to lead us in adapting and competing in that new environment.

Dooley was a key leader of the Purdue team that secured the regulatory approvals and helped launch Purdue Global in 2017, extending Purdues land-grant mission to students from across the state and around the nation.

I am honored and humbled by this appointment, and excited to build upon the outstanding work of Chancellor Vandenbosch, her senior leadership team and the Purdue Global faculty, Dooley said. Purdue Global provides a higher education opportunity to thousands of students from coast to coast who otherwise would not be able to pursue their degrees  fulfilling our mission as a land-grant university in the 21st century.

As chancellor of Purdue Global, Dooley will be responsible for overseeing academics for the more than 31,000 students who earn their degrees online, students who are predominantly female, over the age of 30, lower-income and have families.

In his current position, Dooley provides leadership for undergraduate education, academic planning, program evaluation, and general academic policy development and implementation. His responsibilities include fostering program initiatives and providing guidance related to the areas of career success, student success, undergraduate academic affairs and teaching success at Purdue. During his time in the provosts office, Purdues four-year graduation rate has climbed from 46 percent to more than 60 percent. He also reviews academic budgets and serves as the Office of the Provost liaison to the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Educational Policy Committee.

Dooley came to Purdues Department of Agricultural Economics in 1998. He has served as professor of agricultural economics, associate head of the department, Provost Fellow, associate vice provost for undergraduate academic affairs and vice provost for teaching and learning.

Dooley has received numerous awards for teaching, research and service, including the Charles B. Murphy Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2009 and the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher in 2011. He was inducted into Purdues Teaching Academy in 2002 and into the universitys Book of Great Teachers in 2014. His research interests include logistical and supply chain management for food and agribusiness. His publication record includes chapters in six books and over 200 articles or other publications.

Dooley received his bachelors degree from St. Johns University, his Juris Doctor from the University of North Dakota and his doctoral degree from Washington State University.

On May 1, Jenna Rickus, who currently serves as associate vice provost, will assume the role of interim vice provost for teaching and learning for Purdue West Lafayette. Details on a search for the position will be announced at a later date.

About Purdue University Global

Purdue University Global is the extreme personalization online university, providing students the competitive edge to advance in their chosen careers. It offers a hyper-tailored path for students to earn an associate, bachelors, masters or doctoral degree, based on their work experience, desired pace, military service, previous college credits and other considerations  no matter where they are in their life journey. Purdue Global serves more than 31,000 students (as of January 2020) who earn their degree online. It also operates several regional locations nationwide. Purdue Global is a nonprofit, public university accredited by The Higher Learning Commission. It is affiliated with Purdue Universitys flagship institution, a highly ranked public research university located in West Lafayette, Indiana. Purdue University also operates two regional campuses in Fort Wayne and Northwest Indiana, as well as serving close to 6,000 science, engineering and technology students at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) campus. For more information, please visit PurdueGlobal.edu.

Media Contact: Tom Schott, 765-494-9318, tschott@purdue.edu

Sources: Mitch Daniels, president@purdue.edu

Frank Dooley, dooleyf@purdue.edu
The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have claimed a corporate casualty with the loss of over 30 jobs at a construction and plant hire business, the High Court has heard.

Ms Justice Teresa Pilkington this afternoon appointed Chartered Accountant Mr Anthony Fitzpatrick as provisional liquidation to Brandon Plant Hire Ltd, after being told the company was insolvent to the tune of 934,000.

The company, which is currently involved in three projects, is involved the plant hire business and the provision of substructures and groundworks on building sites.

The company's members petitioned the court for the provisional liquidator's appointment, so that its assets will be secured and their proceeds properly distributed to the Trim, Co Meath-based firm's creditors.

At the High Court Ronnie Hudson Bl, instructed by solicitor John Kieran, for the company said the firm had been profitable for many years since it was founded in 1997, and was involved in several major house building projects.

Counsel said that the company had been experiencing cash flow difficulties including issues concerning payments from Cairn Homes, whom it has acted as a subcontractor for on various projects.

It had also encountered difficulties regarding complying with Irish Water's regualtions at a site it had been working on.

Despite these various issues the company had looked to an investor to help it continue to trade.

Counsel said that because of Covid-19 the investor was no longer interested in putting money into the firm rendering the firm insolvent and unable to trade.

Other factors which contributed to the company's difficulties included extra costs involved in having to hire additional workers on projects and the bad weather in late 2019 and early 2020.

Counsel said that the firm's employees are all currently on Covid-19 protection notice.

Counsel said there was urgency to the application as the company was concerned about the dissipation of assets, and that creditors have been calling to its sites and telephoning its premises.

Counsel said that the company's directors had been put under intense pressure and had threatened by creditors involved with work Brandon had been doing at a site in Dundalk, Co Louth.

Some of these creditors had threatened to damage some of the work's in progress counsel said.

Should that occur, Mr Hudson said, the prospects of creditors recovering monies they are owed would be further depleted.

The firm's assets include tools, piping, JCB diggers and dumpers and excavation equipment.

The appointment of a provisional liquidator would ensure that the firm's assets would be secured, and one creditor will not be able to obtain an advantage over another

Ms Justice Pilkington, noting that the Covid-19 pandemic had certainly exasperated the firm's problems, said she was satisfied to appoint Mr Fitzpatrick as the company's provisional liquidator.

The judge after granting Mr Fitzpatrick various powers, including the power to take possession of the firm's assets, adjourned the matter to a date next month.
Railroad operators suspend more routes as coronavirus continues to hit demand

A passenger boards a train in Hanoi in February 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Anh Duy.

Several trains to tourist destinations will be suspended from Thursday due to the dwindling demand as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Hanoi Railway Transport Jsc, the railroad operator in the north, will also suspend SE9 and SE10 trains between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

All three trains every day from Hanoi to tourist hotspot Sa Pa, two to central Vinh Town and one to central Da Nang City will also be suspended.

There will remain two trains each to Vinh, nothern Hai Phong City and two to HCMC in either direction.

The company earlier suspended most daily services between Hanoi and northern localities of Lang Son, Thai Nguyen and Ha Long, retaining only weekend trains.

The Saigon Railway Transport Jsc, the southern operator, has suspended trains from HCMC to Da Nang City, Quy Nhon and Phan Thiet.

A daily return service to central Nha Trang Town is still running.

Vietnam has over 3,000 kilometers of track, none of them high speed. Last year trains carried eight million passengers, down 6.9 percent year-on-year.
This is the heartwarming moment hundreds of people in a Vancouver apartment block stand on their balconies and applaud healthcare workers as part of the 'Clap for our Carers' movement.

In a gesture of gratitude to the frontline healthcare heroes, mass applause and cheering can be heard from a huge apartment complex in the west coast Canadian seaport city on Wednesday evening.

The Clap For Carers campaign, which started online and has since gone global, is being staged because 'during these unprecedented times they need to know we are grateful', the organisers state.

This is the heartwarming moment hundreds of people in a Vancouver apartment block stand on their balconies and applaud healthcare workers (left and right) as part of the 'Clap for our Carers' movement

'Everybody's outside on their balconies, cheering on our healthcare workers,' the woman filming the video can be heard saying.

The tear-jerking moment took place at 7pm on Wednesday evening and saw masses of people congregate on their balconies amid the coronavirus pandemic, in an event which has become somewhat of a ritual to residents in Canadian and North American cities.

Residents in Vancouver have begun clapping and cheering each evening at 7pm as a show of solidarity to those on the frontline.

Residents in Vancouver have begun clapping and cheering each evening at 7pm as a show of solidarity to those on the frontline

Cases of COVID-19 have steadily risen in British Columbia. The region has a total of 659 confirmed cases and 14 deaths as of Wednesday.

Many of those have been recorded in Vancouver - with particular concern now that a cluster of cases has cropped up at one of the city's care homes.

Canada is now testing 10,000 people a day and has tested more than 142,000 people overall. The country has more than 3,336 confirmed cases and at least 35 deaths.

A Spanish family applaud from their balcony after a call on social media to thank Spanish medical staff fighting coronavirus. Locked down locals in Madrid, Milan and Rome pay tribute to their healthcare workers each evening

The 'Clap for our Carers' movement has been seen worldwide, from France, Italy and the UK to India and Dubai.

The scenes echo those from coronavirus-stricken cities in Spain and Italy, where locked down locals in Madrid, Milan and Rome pay tribute to their healthcare workers each evening.

In the UK, everyone across the nation has been invited to join a mass round of applause from their doorsteps, windows and balconies this evening at 8pm.

Feeling pretty emotional stood on the balcony listening to Dubai applaud healthcare workers and trying to digest the magnitude of this whole situation #coronavirus #Wereallinthistogether pic.twitter.com/YPy5qNuPbK  Sophie Prideaux (@sophieprideaux) March 25, 2020

Last Sunday, residents in India from Jammu and Kashmir to Kerala filled the air with the sound of clapping at 5pm to thank those on the front line battling COVID-19.

There were similar scenes in Dubai, UAE, yesterday evening, as residents of the city raised the roof with clapping, whooping and banging on instruments.

Journalist Sophie Prideaux, who was present for the moment, wrote on Twitter: 'Feeling pretty emotional stood on the balcony listening to Dubai applaud healthcare workers and trying to digest the magnitude of this whole situation.'
In early 2020, the Iran-backed Shia rebels of Iran released photos of former Yemen Air Force air-to-air missiles that had been converted, with Iranian assistance, to operate as SAMs (Surface To Air Missiles.) The rebels say they have been using these Russian missiles as SAMs since 2017 and in 2018 they claimed to have used it to shoot down a Saudi F-15S fighter-bomber. That F-15S did not crash but did report it was fired on by some kind of SAM. More recently the rebels claimed to have downed a Saudi Tornado jet fighter the same way. But the Tornado went down because the two-man crew had problems with their oxygen supply plus a fire in the cockpit. The pilots ejected and were later picked up by a Saudi helicopter. Yet the rebels probably really had adapted the Russian missiles for ground use.

The Yemeni Air Force had plenty of Russian R-73 heat-seeking air-to-air missiles and the larger R-77 radar-guided air-to-air missiles. These were captured by the Shia rebels when they overran most of northern Yemen in 2014 and many Yemeni military units sided with the rebels. Converting these two missiles is not difficult but does require engineers and skilled technicians to do it. For example in 1999 the Serbian Air Force did it and used their Russian air-to-air missiles regularly as SAMs. For decades Iran has been adapting American and Russian weapons for new uses and they are apparently behind the conversion of Yemeni Russian heat-seeking and radar-guided air-to-air missiles as SAMs. Adapting the smaller, and shorter ranged heat-seeking air-to-air missiles is pretty straightforward. You have to build a ground launcher, which you can mount in the back of a pickup truck. Then you have to build (or take from an aircraft) the simple electronics used by the pilot to arm (activate the infrared seeker) and fire the missile. The radar-guided R-77 is more complex because it requires a separate radar, which is normally carried in the nose of the aircraft, to track the target and communicate with the R-77 after launch to get the missile close enough to the target so the heat-seeking guidance also found in the R-77 can take over. Russia also sells a shorter range R-77 that just uses the heat-seeker. In other words, the mods are not high-tech but they are techy. Such modifications are nothing new.

In the 1960s the U.S. Army developed a system where vehicles equipped with a Sidewinder heat-seeking air-to-air missile were used as a SAM. This system was called Chaparral and served the U.S. Army from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.

The latest U.S. radar-guided missile, AMRAAM, has its own radar for making its final approach to its target. That led Norway to create its NASAMS anti-aircraft system using AMRAAM as a SAM. This proved very effective and popular. NASAMS has been seen deployed around Washington DC since 2002, as a defense against any terrorist aircraft attempting to attack. Other early users of NASAMS were Spain and Kuwait.

A box launcher is used by NASAMS. The ground-launched AMRAAM can hit targets as high as 4,200 meters (13,000 feet). NASAMS was developed so that it could easily work with different search radars. The AMRAAM SAM costs more (about $600,000 each) compared to the air-to-air version (about $380,000), but is basically the same missile. The four meter (twelve foot) long AMRAAM has a 22.7 kg (fifty pound) warhead, and can take down just about anything that flies, including wide-body commercial transports.
Dozens of former sub-postmasters are to have convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting referred to the Court of Appeal.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission said it had decided to refer for appeal the convictions of 39 people from a total of 61 Post Office applicants, with further work to do on the remaining 22 cases.

The commission announced it will be referring cases on the basis that each prosecution amounted to an 'abuse of process'.

Tracy Felstead was thrown into jail as a teenager, her supposed crime was to steal 11,500 from the post office where she worked in her first job after leaving school. The 36-year-old mother-of-three said earlier this month: 'Id like to think justice will now be swift'

The Post Office settled the High Court case in December 2019 after being lambasted by the judge in a series of excoriating ruling. It had spent years battling its postal veterans and fiercely denying any problem with its IT system [File photo]

The sub-postmasters and postmistresses had been accused of stealing money after the Post Office installed a new computer system.

Helen Pitcher, who chairs the Criminal Cases Review Commission, said: 'This is by some distance the largest number of cases we will ever have referred for appeal at one time.

'Our team has got through a huge amount of work, particularly since the judgment in December, in order to identify the grounds on which we are referring these cases.

'The Covid-19 situation threatened to delay things but we used an IT solution to resolve that and we will continue to do whatever we need to in order to make decisions in the remaining cases as quickly as we reasonably can.'

Tracy Felstead was thrown into jail as a teenager, her supposed crime was to steal 11,500 from the post office where she worked in her first job after leaving school.

Speaking earlier this month, the 36-year-old mother-of-three said: I have had to endure this my entire adult life since aged 19. Id like to think justice will now be swift.'

A Post Office spokesman said: 'The Post Office has been assisting the Criminal Cases Review Commission since applications were first made to them by a number of former postmasters. We have always accepted our serious obligations and responsibilities to the commission's work.

A number of former sub-postmasters are to have convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting referred to the Court of Appeal. [File photo]

'We have not yet received statements of reasons from the commission about the referrals they are making to the Court of Appeal. We will be looking carefully at the commission's decision when we have that information and continue to fulfil all their requirements of us.

'We have also been doing all we can to ensure that, in the light of the findings in the Horizon judgment, further disclosure is provided as appropriate in other cases where Post Office acted as prosecutor, not just those reviewed by the CCRC. The CCRC's reasoning will inform our review of these cases, which is being carried out by an external team of criminal lawyers.

'We won't be commenting on individual cases, because it would be inappropriate to prejudge the outcome of the important work that the CCRC is continuing to do or the Court of Appeal's processes.'
Vitalina Varela plays a fictionalized version of herself in the movie that bears her name. (Grasshopper Film)

Every so often, a shaft of daylight pierces the deep, spectral shadows of Vitalina Varela, the haunting and profoundly haunted new movie from the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Your eyes drift toward every beam of light, every carefully placed pool of illumination in this grimly beautiful nightscape, the latest work by an artist who has found, in darkness, a remarkable new way of seeing. Toward the end of the movie, when all those shadows briefly lift and give way to pale blue skies, its as if Costa had cracked open a window, allowing a burst of warmth  it almost feels like hope  to penetrate this epic of perpetual night.

The hope doesnt last for long, but then not much does. Little known in the U.S. but highly esteemed on the international festival circuit, the 61-year-old Costa is an austere cinematic realist, a poet of entropy and loss. Most of the features hes made over the past few decades are set in Fontainhas, a Lisbon slum that is home to numerous immigrants from the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde. Set at the juncture of fiction and documentary, art cinema and still portraiture, these films delve deep into lives we seldom see in movies and emerge with something bleak, mysterious and quietly monumental.

Costas latest, which is now available for streaming through Grasshopper Film, is a continuation and in some ways a refinement of his method. Vitalina Varela is a Cape Verdean woman in her 50s, here playing a close version of herself (as she did in her brief role in Costas 2014 film, Horse Money). We first see Vitalina descending from a plane in Lisbon, where she has come to bid farewell to Joaquim, the husband who abandoned her years ago without explanation. A woman greets her with condolences but tells her she has arrived three days too late for Joaquims burial. Here in Portugal, there is nothing for you, she says. His house is not yours. Go home.

Home has always been an elusive concept in Costas work, with its unblinking focus on the dispossessed, on lives displaced by poverty, addiction, abandonment and violence. And so it is with Vitalina Varela, a story about the pursuit of a home that never was and never will be. Ignoring the womans warning, Vitalina arrives at Joaquims house and settles in. She never says why she has chosen to stay in Lisbon rather than return to Cape Verde, but her steely resolution provides its own explanation. Wandering these dim, cramped rooms for the first time, she seems to be trying to absorb what remains of her husband's presence while quietly asserting her own.

Story continues

If the narrative details are thin to nonexistent, the weary faces, slow-shuffling bodies and derelict environs are extraordinarily expressive. Varela is a mesmerizing screen presence, with a regal bearing and a reproachful glare that threatens to overpower the cameras own unwavering gaze. (In a nod to her close collaboration with Costa, she won an acting award at last year's Locarno International Film Festival, where "Vitalina Varela" itself won the Golden Leopard for best film.) You can sense her acute resentment of the man who married her 40 years ago and then fled, leaving her with an unfinished house and a lot of broken promises.

You see it especially in the stone-faced hospitality Vitalina extends to some of her husbands friends, among them a homeless couple who drop by for a meal. Costa conveys nearly everything he needs to simply through his arrangement of the actors bodies: The man hungrily wolfs down his food in the foreground, chattering about Joaquims kindness and decency. His wife and Vitalina sit at a slight remove, not eating but quietly listening. Their wordless stares tell a rather different story.

The mononymous Ventura in the movie "Vitalina Varela." (Grasshopper Film)

As far removed as he may be from the commercial mainstream, Costa has cited John Ford as a much-loved influence, and also as a popular American filmmaker whose sturdy classicism sometimes tilted into abstraction. Certainly, in previous films such as Ossos, In Vandas Room and Colossal Youth, Costa has found his own version of Fords Monument Valley, which is to say a physical and cinematic landscape that could be mistaken for no other. The Fontainhas he shows us is a staggering ruin, a world of crumbling interiors, rotting beams and jagged staircases. Spend enough time in these rooms and they start to feel like metaphysical stages, like way stations between this world and the next.

For all his commitment to realism (the French filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet are another influence), Costa also trades in a degree of artifice that verges on the theatrical. This is cinema that pushes beyond the mediums usual representational modes, beyond the observational qualities of neorealism or the interior states of psychological drama. Complex histories and unspoken emotions are distilled into a series of carefully composed tableaus, each one proceeding with slow, ceremonial deliberation. (The rich, painterly digital cinematography is by Leonardo Simoes.) The undeniable intimacy that Costa achieves with his subjects is matched by an equally undeniable distance: Speaking in deliberate, drawn-out cadences and rarely making eye contact, these men and women exist at a remove from the audience and from each other.

Still, a connection of sorts is gradually forged in the second half, when Vitalina visits an empty church and encounters an ailing priest. He is played by Ventura, one of Costas key collaborators, whose lean frame and grave visage will be familiar to those who saw Horse Money and Colossal Youth. Here he becomes a kind of sorrowful companion for Vitalina, a man whose loss of faith and flock mirrors her own sense of abandonment. Their calm, contrapuntal suffering finds an anchor in Vitalinas own Catholic beliefs, as signaled by the crucifix imagery that recurs throughout the movie, particularly a sublime recurring shot of the candles that have been lit in Joaquims memory. It's another hopeful source of illumination, flickering unsteadily in the cold and the darkness.

Vitalina Varela isnt easy, to say the least. See it under the right circumstances, as I did when it screened earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, and its beauty, rigor and unforgettable images  a mournful procession, a bloodstained pillow, a woman's bare feet descending the stairs  cast their own hypnotic spell. Those circumstances have of course temporarily ceased to exist with the nationwide closure of theaters, few of which, even at the best of times, are committed to exhibiting films as defiantly singular as this one. (Costas film was originally scheduled to screen this week at the Lumiere Music Hall in Beverly Hills.)

But while Vitalina Varela may have lost its own ideal venue, it isnt inaccessible or unapproachable. You could call it demanding, I suppose, though mainly in the sense that, like most worthwhile art, it demands the commitment of your undivided attention. Having seen it a second time myself at home, I can attest that not only does the spell still take hold, but also that there is a strange solace, even refuge, to be found in its labyrinth of shadows. Dim the lights, cast your distractions aside and let Costa's dark rooms merge with your own.
By David Shepardson and Tracy Rucinski WASHINGTON/CHICAGO (Reuters) - A compromise $2 trillion economic rescue package set to be voted on by the U.S.

By David Shepardson and Tracy Rucinski

WASHINGTON/CHICAGO (Reuters) - A compromise $2 trillion economic rescue package set to be voted on by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday will include $25 billion for airlines in cash grants, a badly needed lifeline for an industry facing the worst travel downturn in history.

Republican Senator Pat Toomey said passenger airlines will be eligible for $25 billion in grants and $25 billion in loans. Cargo carriers will be eligible for another $8 billion in loans and grants, while airline contractors like caterers will be eligible for up to $3 billion in grants, according to a draft text of the final bill seen by Reuters.

The grants are to be used for payroll costs for airlines and contractors.

Reuters reported Chao worked the phones late into the night talking to air carriers about what they needed to ensure they could maintain payrolls, a person briefed on call on Tuesday that lawmakers were nearing agreement on a deal for cash grants for payroll and other airline employee costs, after airlines made a last-minute effort to convince lawmakers they needed the cash to prevent the layoff of tens of thousands of workers.

The government could receive equity, warrants or other compensation as part of the rescue package, Toomey said.

U.S. airports are set to receive $10 billion in grants under the agreement, the draft text says.

The bill also has restrictions on stock buybacks, dividends and executive compensation. Airlines that accept assistance will not be able to cut pay or lay off workers through Sept. 30, according to the draft bill.

Senate Republicans on Sunday rejected any grants for airlines and instead proposed $58 billion in loans for airlines. Major airlines sounded the alarm and emphasized in recent days that without grants, they had short-term plans to quickly furlough tens of thousands of workers as travel demand collapses amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants said on Twitter it was a "HUGE fight but we WON on this - We got the deal structured around maintaining payroll, no (involuntary) furloughs."

Airlines and airline unions won crucial support from U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who spoke to lawmakers and others in the administration about the crisis.

In a memo Chao had drafted that was seen by Reuters, she noted that airlines employ 750,000 U.S. workers. She was worried about a dramatic decline in the U.S. aviation sector that could reduce competition, and the potential loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, people briefed on the matter said.

"Without grant assistance, U.S. airlines have warned that they may be forced to furlough employees or declare bankruptcy," Chao's memo warned. "Without grants, airlines may be forced to choose bankruptcy over federal loans, if loan conditions are too inflexible."

Chao worked the phones late into the night talking to air carriers about what they needed to ensure they could maintain payrolls, said a person briefed on call.

The government will provide $25 billion in grants for U.S. transit systems and $1 billion for U.S. passenger railroad Amtrak, that have seen ridership fall dramatically as states ordered tens of millions of Americans to stay home and avoid non-essential travel.

Boeing Co could also receive government loans under a $17 billion fund set aside for direct national security-related loans, Toomey said, adding that many companies could qualify.

"It is not meant to be exclusively for Boeing... You should not think of it as a Boeing allocation," Toomey said.

Boeing had sought at least $60 billion in government loan guarantees for itself and the entire aerospace manufacturing sector. Boeing did not immediately comment on Wednesday.

(Reporting by David Shepardson, Tracy Rucinski and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
More than 17,000 New Mexico residents filed initial unemployment claims last week, nearly 2% of the states total labor force.

The U.S. Department of Labor released unemployment claim data Thursday morning between March 15 and March 21.

During that time, 17,187 New Mexicans filed initial claims, compared to 869 during the prior seven-day period. Nationwide, 2.9 million Americans filed unemployment claims. Adjusted for seasonality, the total was 3.3 million, roughly five times the prior record set in 1982, according to the labor department.

While the numbers are stark, Jim Peach, a professor of economics at New Mexico State University, said there is reason to believe worse could be on the horizon for New Mexico.

None of us know where this is headed, Peach said. We all know were not at the peak of this yet.

The spike in unemployment claims comes as New Mexico and other states have ordered bars, restaurants and other businesses to temporarily close to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus.

Earlier this week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham ordered the closure of all non-essential businesses statewide.

The mandated closures prompted business owners ranging from chain clothing stores to local restaurants to lay off employees. Given that the order came after March 21, however, the full impact of the closure wont be known until additional data is available.

Peach said its likely many early job losses are concentrated in the leisure and hospitality sector.

However, as the effects of the partial shutdowns in New Mexico and other states become more apparent, Peach said the virus could cause layoffs in a wide range of industries, including oil and gas, which has already been hammered by a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Id guess, with the next month or two, well lose a third of the oil and gas workers, Peach said. That may be too optimistic.

The New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions is encouraging New Mexico residents who are filing for unemployment to do so online, which should make it easier for the state to respond quickly. Those interested in filing a claim can do so at https://www.dws.state.nm.us/COVID-19-Info

The state workforce department also announced earlier this week it will not be charging employers for benefits paid out to claimants on claims made after March 16, due to the spike in claims and concerns from employers.
India's top gas importer Petronet LNG has issued force majeure notice to Qatargas seeking to delay loading of liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargoes under long-term deals as local gas demand has dropped, two sources familiar with the matter said.

"It seems demand will fall drastically as industrial production is curtailed to a great extent and demand for gas will fall further," said one of the sources, after India imposed a lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Petronet and Qatar Petroleum, the parent of Qatargas, did not immediately respond to Reuters' emails seeking comment.
Nollywood actress Yvonne Jegede has joined millions of others on social media preaching safety first in this coronavirus pandemic era.

The mom of one, took to her IG page to appeal to her fans to be safe first before bringing their faith into the picture.

Read Also: Dont Insult Me Over My Failed Marriage  Yvonne Jegede

Kolodia Drive-Us.

Safety first before you exercise your faith. Please dont self medicate when you feel any symptoms, get medical help.

Protect yourselves. 

#Covid19

#SelfIsolationActivated

This is coming days after so many churches in Nigeria opened for service on Sunday despite the government warning against this.
Elon Musk has said Tesla will reopen its New York factory 'as soon as humanly possible' to help make and distribute ventilators to battle the coronavirus pandemic.

'Giga New York will reopen for ventilator production as soon as humanly possible. We will do anything in our power to help the citizens of New York,' the billionaire said in a Tweet on Wednesday.

Medtronic Chief Executive Officer Omar Ishrak told CNBC earlier in the day that the medical device maker has started working with Tesla, which is fast on track to start production of ventilators at Fremont.

Several other automotive companies, including Ford and General Motors, have offered to use their manufacturing capabilities to ramp up production of ventilators.

Elon Musk has said Tesla will reopen its New York factory 'as soon as humanly possible' to help make and distribute ventilators to battle the coronavirus pandemic

The billionaire made the pledge in a Tweet Wednesday after Medtronic Chief Executive Officer Omar Ishrak told CNBC earlier in the day that the medical device maker had started working with the carmaker, which is fast on track to start production of ventilators at Fremont

The controversial entrepreneur, who has repeatedly downplayed the severity of the global health crisis, delivered over 1,000 ventilators to a California hospital to help with the treatment of patients.

California Governor Gavin Newsom praised Musk's 'heroic effort' during a press conference Monday.

'I told you a few days ago that [Musk] was likely to have 1,000 ventilators this week,' Newsom said. 'They arrived in Los Angeles and Elon Musk is already working with the hospital association and others to get those ventilators out in real time. It's an heroic effort.'

Tesla had bought the ventilators in China and shipped them to the US, Musk said.

He also supplied 50,000 face masks to the Seattle home of a University of Washington physician Sunday.

The outspoken Tesla boss seems to have backpedaled on previous statements were he has dismissed coronavirus as 'dumb' and said children are 'essentially immune'.

Musk's latest pledge came as New York state struggles to bring the spread of the deadly virus under control, with the number of infected individuals topping 20,000 and deaths reaching 385 as of Thursday morning.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly stressed the need for more equipment - specifically ventilators  to be sent to New York state.

The governor said in a live broadcast Thursday morning that he was taking a number of steps to get more life-saving ventilators to hospitals in the state: more ventilators are being shipped to New York, ventilators are being split up for use on two patients at the same time, and anaesthesia ventilators are being converted into respirators.

We are talking to the federal government about more ventilators, were shopping for ventilators ourselves, were splitting ventilators, and were converting anaesthesia ventilators, said Cuomo.

Tesla's Gigafactory 2 in Buffalo where Musk said work will begin on manufacturing the life-saving equipment

So were all over the ventilator issue.

Cuomo said that maximum projections of how the virus will spread in New York means the state needs about 40,000 ventilators.

The state has access to around 12,000, Cuomo said, meaning it is 28,000 short of the amount it may need at the peak of the crisis.

We have maybe about 12,000 in that range of ventilators before talking about splitting and anaesthesia ventilators, he said.

The number of ventilators we need is so astronomical  and its not like theyre sitting in warehouses there is not a stockpile large enough to meet the national need, said Cuomo.

Equipment and PPE is an ongoing issue. Ventilators, ventilators, ventilators  I didnt know what they were as few weeks ago aside from the cursory knowledge, he said, but now he almost knows too much.

The state is still shopping for more ventilators now across the country but we need more, he said.

The state has approved the technology to split ventilators across two patients at a time, Cuomo said, but admitted that it is not ideal but we believe is workable.

New York state Gov Cuomo said he is taking several steps to up its access to the life-saving equipment: more ventilators are being shipped, ventilators are being split up across two patients, and anaesthesia ventilators are being converted to respirators

The state has access to around 12,000 ventilators, and could need 40,000 if the virus continues on its trajectory, Cuomo warned Thursday

Were also converting anaesthesia machines into ventilators, he said.

Cuomo said the need for ventilators is so critical because coronavirus is a respiratory illness for a large number of people.

Some patients are staying on ventilators for a long time for around 11-21 days, the governor explained, which means the supply cannot be passed around as quickly.

Some people are on ventilators for 20 days, 30 days the longer youre on a ventilator the more likely youre not going to come off, he said.

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

New York now has enough PPE for New York hospitals for the time being, Cuomo said, after he had previously urged any businesses that could to ramp up production on face masks.

Cuomo had previously blasted President Trump Tuesday for only sending 400 ventilators to New York from the 20,000-strong federal stockpile when he has said repeatedly that the state  which is by far the worst-hit by the virus in the US - needs 30,000.

'You pick the 26,000 who are going to die because you only sent 400 ventilators,' he said on Tuesday in an angry plea to the government to share more.

He went on to say that Trump and the government have told him they will not release the ventilators 'because companies are coming forward who want to do it.'

Trump boasted about the ventilators on Twitter, saying on Tuesday morning: 'Just got 400 ventilators to NYC!'

Tensions have seemed to lessen between the two but Cuomo continues to urge the president to implement what he called a 'rolling deployment' of resources to the states and cities that need them when they need them, rather than trying to conjure up enough for everyone to battle the virus at the same time.

Cuomo has thanked several other businesses that have donated services and supplies to the state of New York to help it battle the pandemic including JetBlue, Estee Lauder and SoftBank.

Cuomo revealed on Twitter that JetBlue was giving free flights to healthcare workers who need to get to New York to help in its overwhelmed hospitals.

Estee Lauder has donated 10,000 bottles of hand sanitizer and vows to keep giving 10,000 a week to help alleviate the supply shortage in hospitals.

SoftBank has also donated 1.4million N-95 masks to the state. They are crucial to doctors and nurses to be able to treat patients.
By PTI

MUMBAI: Flag carrier Air India will operate a 'relief' flight to Tel Aviv on Thursday to fly stranded Israeli nationals in the country in the wake of visa and travel restrictions on foreign citizens, a source said.

The airline will fly its 342-seater Boeing 777-300ER from New Delhi and will return to the national capital as a 'ferry" flight, the source said.

Besides, a similar 'relief' flight is being planned for Madrid to take back the Spanish nationals stuck in India, he said.

"Air India will fly a relief flight, AI 139, on Thursday afternoon from New Delhi to Tel Aviv to take back Israeli citizens who are stuck here in the country due to the temporary suspension of international air services amid Coronavirus global pandemic," the source privy to information told PTI.

The return flight AI40, however, will not be carrying any passenger and it will come back only as a 'ferry flight', he said.

The national carrier has operated a series of rescue flights including to Wuhan, Japan, Milan and Rome to evacuate Indians stranded at these places.

He said the modalities regarding the relief light to Madrid are still being worked out.
Coronavirus: cases in Morocco surge to 225 Rabat cardinal holds inter-faith 'prayer pandemic'

(ANSAmed) - RABAT, MARCH 26 - The number of known novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, cases in Morocco rose to 225 by Thursday. There had been about 10 new known cases per day last week, rising to 55 new cases in under 24 hours more recently. Six people with COVID-19 have died and six have recovered, according to the health ministry. The largest number testing positive are in Casablanca (59), followed by Fez (50), Rabat (45) and Marrakech (32).



Amid surreal silence in the old cities of the North African country, minarets continue to call out at prayer times but the mosques themselves are closed. Rabat cardinal Cristobal Lopez Roero called for a ''prayer pandemic'' on the evening of March 25, when Christians, Jews, and Muslims chanted 'Our Father', 'Shema', and 'Al Fatiha' while lighting candles in their windows. Isolation in Morocco, which was imposed starting on March 19 and which will remain place until further notice, impacts the 30 days of preparation for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting which is expected to start on April 24. (ANSAmed).




Photo: Jeff Turner/Flickr

Missed the most recent top news in Sacramento? Read on for everything you need to know. Sacramento County sheriff releasing 421 inmates early in response to coronavirus Read the full story on CBS13 CBS Sacramento. PG&E pickup truck driver hurt in crash on I-80 near Sacramento Read the full story on CBS13 CBS Sacramento. Sacramento coronavirus infections jump again: 113 total cases and 5 deaths Read the full story on The Sacramento Bee. Deputies: Man shot while soliciting prostitute in Sacramento Read the full story on CBS13 CBS Sacramento. How long can Sacramento businesses survive a coronavirus shutdown? Heres what they say. Read the full story on The Sacramento Bee. This story was created automatically using data about news stories on social media from CrowdTangle, then reviewed by an editor. Click here for more about what we're doing. Got thoughts? Go here to share your feedback.

The Sacramento County Sheriff's Office announced Wednesday it will release 421 inmates by March 30.

The driver of a marked PG&E pickup truck suffered major injuries in a crash on Interstate 80 near Sacramento on Wednesday.

The number of coronavirus cases in Sacramento County has now hit 113 as of Wednesday morning. Sacramento officials reported a fifth death as well, as the county heads into its fifth week of dealing with the pandemic.

Deputies say a man was shot by a woman he was soliciting for prostitution in South Sacramento Wednesday night.
Antonov An-124 Ruslan, a Ruslan heavyweight airlifter attached to the Russian military, landed at Chinas Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport on the evening of March 24 to transport medical supplies donated by China to Russia.Photo: Haiwainet.cn

By Zhang Qi

Antonov An-124 Ruslan, a Ruslan heavyweight airlifter attached to the Russian military, landed at Chinas Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport on the evening of March 24 to transport medical supplies donated by China to Russia. The poetic lines printed on the packages of the donation are words of famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin: "In a moment, passes sorrow".

The poetic lines printed on the packages of the donation are words of famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin: "In a moment, passes sorrow".Photo: Haiwainet.cn

The Russian Sputnik News reported on March 25 that the medical supplies are donated by Chinas Alibaba Foundation and Jack Ma Foundation to help Russia fight the COVID-19. The military cargo charter flight has arrived in Moscow with the medical supplies including medical masks, COVID-19 detection reagents and protective gears.

Just two days ago, Russia sent another An-124 aircraft to transport 25.5 million medical masks from China and the military cargo transport aircraft had arrived at the Chkalovsky Airport, Moscow Oblast, on the same day. Russian media reported that the masks will be distributed to the elderly and some government agencies through Russian volunteer organizations.

Some Chinese netizens said that the verse "In a moment, passes sorrow" struck a chord in their hearts, because they believe, we are sure to pull through the coronavirus epidemic as long as everyone works hard together.

Quoting the latest data, Sputnik News reported that there are 658 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Russia, increasing by 163 on a daily basis, and 29 people are cured as of March 25.
More than 1000 Australians waiting for a kidney transplant will have to remain on dialysis after an expert taskforce ruled all surgeries must be "suspended" due to the risk of coronavirus to recipients, meaning some donated organs will be thrown away or not retrieved.

Liver, lung and heart transplants will continue only for patients deemed to be "at imminent risk of dying from their organ failure", National Transplantation and Donation Taskforce co-chair Steve Chadban told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Transplant surgeries are being cancelled due to the coronavirus. Credit:AP

Health authorities are being forced into an "unenviable dilemma" over who to prioritise for intensive care beds if the coronavirus pandemic begins to overwhelm the health system. It comes as the federal health department consults with the Royal Australian College of Surgeons on which elective procedures should be prioritised, after Prime Minister Scott Morrison ordered all non-essential elective surgeries be cancelled.

The pandemic has already forced the cancellation of transplant surgeries in the United States and United Kingdom.
With frustration soaring along with layoffs amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Texas Workforce Commission is urging patience and wants Texans to know how the agency is stepping up to help those who find themselves suddenly unemployed.

In a Facebook Live event Wednesday, TWC Executive Director Ed Serna cited the magnitude of the economic impact of the pandemic, its pervasiveness and the number of people impacted.

On a normal day, we take 13,000 to 14,000 calls daily at one of our call centers  we have four around the state, Serna said. On March 22, we took 100,000 calls into one of centers, with the same number of staff members.

He estimated the number of people trying to get into one of the call centers was in excess of 800,000.

A week ago, the commissions Unemployment Insurance director reported to commissioners an increase in the volume of claims from 3,000 to 9,000, he said.

The next day, we hit 25,000 claims and its risen every day since, he said.

We know this is very frustrating, and oftentimes scary, especially for individuals being let go, oftentimes for the first time, Serna said. I assure you, we will help everyone who needs help. I ask you to have a little patience with us.

He said the commission is working as quickly as it can to expand capacity, first by assigning staff from other divisions to the call centers and expanding call center hours. Beginning Saturday, the centers will be staffed from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The commission is also looking to hire 100 temporary workers for the call centers.

Since most claims are taken online, he said the commission is increasing server capacity, the size of the servers and the number of servers to accommodate more online visitors. And he said the company is looking at other, more creative ways to use technology to serve people.

He urged those needing help to continue calling the call centers or accessing the web site at different times.

We are continuing to improve, and by improve, I mean in days, not weeks or months as government sometimes does, and sometimes over the course of just a day, he said.

In other efforts, he said the commission is changing child care requirements, especially for first responders, to ensure their families are cared for while they are at work.

The work search requirement has been waived, as has the one-week waiting period before receiving benefits, Serna said. In addition, he said those who received unemployment benefits in the past and who may have been overpaid, will have that debt deferred, meaning the commission wont take deductions from the current benefits until the debt is paid off.

He also said there is enough funding to support all those impacted by the pandemic, and the commission will seek additional funding from the federal government if necessary.

The rescue package pending in Congress should also help the commission address the needs of independent contractors and the self-employed who were impacted by the pandemic, Serna said.
Goodnight and thank you for following the Herald's live coronavirus coverage. The United States became the new world leader in coronavirus cases and posted its biggest spike in unemployment claims in history, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tested positive for COVID-19, and Australia's number of cases surpassed 3000.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said COVID-19 cases in NSW are still increasing, and authorities are most concerned about community transmission. She reinforced reports that NSW was prepared to go it alone with tougher lockdown measures.

Randwick City Council will close Coogee Beach and eight eastern suburbs ocean pools from tomorrow, while Myer announced tonight it will close stores after this weekend and stand down 10,000 staff for at least four weeks.

Senior economics correspondent Shane Wright writes that Australia faces a deep recession or even a depression unless the Morrison government super-sizes any support package, with economists warning not enough money is being poured into the economy to save jobs.

Summarising developments in Canberra today, Eryk Bagshaw and Jennifer Duke report that schools will be effectively shut down after Easter but the national cabinet has held back on implementing an immediate wider lockdown.

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The military will patrol hotels in Melbourne and Sydney filled with thousands of Australians returning, as the government tries to eliminate the threat of infections from locals coming home to escape the coronavirus crisis overseas.

Chief medical officers told Prime Minister Scott Morrison and state and territory leaders in a four-hour meeting on Friday that Australia was in a "unique position", with the majority of cases coming from returned travellers and limited evidence of significant community transmission.

We'll be continuing our free live coverage of the pandemic, both in Australia and overseas, in a new blog which you can read here. Thanks for joining us.
Parents of students at Akwa Ibom State University, Ikot Akpaden, Mkpat Enin, have accused the authorities of the school of negligence and refusal to close down the school as ordered by the federal government over the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

The parents criticism of the university authorities coincided with the news about the passing on of a student of the university who drowned in a local stream close to the school on Monday.

The victim, identified as Godwin Okade, was a final year student of Marine Biology at the university.

Nsikak Akai, a lawyer in Uyo, on March 24, did a petition to the National Universities Commission (NUC), Abuja, accusing the authorities of Akwa Ibom State University of disobeying the NUCs directive that universities in the country should be shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr Akai said the petition was filed on behalf of the aggrieved parents.

He cited an internal memo of the university dated March 20 in which the university community was informed about the postponement of the first semester examinations because of the coronavirus.

Mr Akai said in the petition that the parents were worried that the university authorities ought to have announced that the school has been closed, instead of merely postponing the examination since their children and wards are still expected to be seen on campus in groups and clusters, thereby exposing them to great risks of contacting the deadly virus.

He asked the NUC to immediately order the vice chancellor to close down the school and get the students to vacate the campus.

Akaninyene Ibanga, the spokesperson of the university, however, told PREMIUM TIMES that the university is not in session as alleged, even though non-teaching staff have been reporting to work.

Mr Ibanga said the school, after the postponement of examinations, later directed the students to vacate the campus. Lecturers cant come (to the school) since the exams have been postponed, except those who may want to come and do something in their office, he said.

He said he has heard about the student who drowned but that it is only the university registrar who could comment on the incident.

A student of the university told PREMIUM TIMES, Thursday afternoon, that she was yet to leave the university town, Ikot Akpaden, because her lecturer was still looking at her final year project topic, therefore confirming that some academic work could be going on, unofficially, in the school.

A lecturer who did not want his name mentioned in the story gave an insight into the situation in the university.

My school has not asked lecturers to leave the campus, they havent complied with the NUC directive, the lecturer told PREMIUM TIMES.

After NUC had sent the information that all schools should close in Nigeria, the first circular that came on Friday merely said the exams have been postponed.

So, a few days ago they insisted (through another circular) that staff should come to school. The only leverage lecturers have is that we dont sign time book. So, it may be difficult for them to evaluate the lecturers but staff, all the staff, are still going to work compulsorily in my school.

In fact, yesterday, a certain dean convened a faculty board meeting, he said he had the vice chancellors instruction to do so, the lecturer said.
Six Flags Discovery Kingdom is holding a community blood donation drive with the Vitalant blood bank on Thursday.

The event will take place at 10 a.m.-3 p.m. at the Vallejo Courtyard Marriott at 1000 Fairgrounds Drive in Vallejo, with Six Flags Discovery Kingdom president Don McCoy among those donating blood.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday said that all the essential services will remain open during Covid-19 lockdown, and assured that people who are involved in delivering these services will be allowed.

He announced this after a press conference with Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal.

Online service providers/e-retailers delivering essential services and goods to be allowed. All essential services shops can remain open 24 hours so that there is no rush of people, Baijal said at the press conference.

Kejriwal said that he held a meeting with Delhi Police officials and told them to allow such services. He also said that Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACPs) have been tasked with ensuring that all the grocery shows and other utility stores remain open.

The factories which make these items, and warehouses where they are stored, will remain open. Those factories which want to function for 24 hours, will be allowed to do so, said Kejriwal.

Those delivering food will be allowed, these executives just have to shows their ID cards to the police, the Delhi Chief Minister said.

He further said that mohalla clinics wont be shut. I know one of our doctors has tested positive. There are reports that mohalla clinics will be shut because of that. I want to tell the people that dont believe in rumours. Mohalla clinics will be closed, said Kejriwal.

His assurance came after chaos on the first day of the lockdown when long queues were seen outside shops and e-commerce and food delivery executives complained of harassment by the police.

People faced trouble reaching stores as policemen refused to let them pass, even beating up some despite the governments assurances of no curbs on the purchase of essential items. Several people who faced harassment said the police did not appear to be aware of the governments advisory. People who did manage to reach local stores said they feared a worsening of the situation as stocks appeared to be depleted.

Online retailers such as Amazon and grocery delivery services such as Big Basket were cancelling previously placed orders and said they did not have new delivery slots available. This pushed people to go out to shop at local stores, where social distancing was a far cry as people jostled to secure fast-disappearing supplies.

The Centre is also in touch with the state governments to ensure there is no shortage of essential commodities.

In five days, the number of Covid-19 cases has jumped from about 200 to 606, and experts say the number could surge if more people are tested. Five fresh cases were reported in the national capital in the last 24 hours till Wednesday.

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The request by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, former President of Chile and erstwhile Head of UN-Women  Michelle Bachelet  to be impleaded in the matter before the Supreme Court challenging the CAA has, understandably, caused much consternation in India.

Nation first

Though the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has a history of such interventions with previous instances of legal petitions to the US and Brazilian Supreme Courts and the European Court of Justice, there is a feeling among many in India that the High Commissioner has impinged upon our sovereignty, reflected partiality in thought and sought to undermine our democracy of which we are justifiably very proud. With international law not taking precedence in India over domestic enactments, the Supreme Court is unlikely to entertain the High Commissioner's locus standi. It is, however, important to try and understand the why and how of the OHCHR action and possible ways of prevention rather than simply express anger, indignation and exclaim how dare? It is also instructive to remember that our past experiences with the human rights set-up at the UN have had several unpleasant moments.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet. (Photo: Reuters)

In 1994, Pakistan brought forth a resolution at the Commission for Human Rights (CHR, which has since been replaced by the Human Rights Council) seeking to censure India on Kashmir. A national effort was mounted against this. The delegation for the CHR session was led by Leader of the Opposition Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and included Farooq Abdullah and Salman Khurshid, then Minister of State for External Affairs and succeeded in stemming Pakistan. In his inimitable style, Vajpayee often mentioned thereafter that the request from Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao to lead the delegation left him with no choice other an accept even though he recognised that failure would mean opprobrium for him while the bouquets of success would go to the PM! He also noted that we had to learn lessons from this episode. The energising of the then recently established National Human Rights Commission followed thereafter along with our even giving the International Committee of the Red Cross access to detainees in Kashmir.

More recently, in 2018, the OHCHR issued a report on Kashmir which was clearly one-sided and needed to be rejected by us. The focus of our ire at that time was the then High Commissioner, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussien from Jordan.

Time to act

The creation of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights by the UN General Assembly in 1994 followed the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. Though an Under-Secretary-General level position, the high-sounding title was designed to give the incumbent personally and human rights, in general, a high international profile. The High Commissioner, though technically elected by the UN General Assembly, is a nominee of the UN Secretary-General with only one name forwarded for endorsement. Without doubt, as for almost all senior UN positions, the views of the P-5 weigh on the Secretary-General in making the choice and cannot be excluded from influencing the thinking of a High Commissioner.

Multilateralism and the UN are participatory but only seemingly "fair" with global power play abilities significant in the way decisions are taken. Given that "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam" is our guiding philosophy, we cannot be thick-skinned about the UN and pronouncements of its instruments.

It is, therefore, imperative that, even while we grow our weight and work for our place on the global high table, we use the instrumentalities available to us for the present and try and influence things in our direction.

Colour of money

A key influencer in this regard is money. In so far as the OHCHR is concerned, the "assessed contributions" of the regular UN budget only cover around 40 per cent of its budget. This makes "voluntary contributions" truly significant. In 2019, these totalled around a huge USD 177 million received from UN Member states, international bodies, INGOs and even corporates! The European Commission is the largest voluntary donor. In 2019, it provided more than USD 20 million while the US voluntarily contributed USD 18 million. Norway and Sweden also provided similar amounts as the US with several other European countries pitching significantly in. China voluntarily contributed USD 800,000 in 2019. For years, India had pegged its voluntary contribution to OHCHR at USD 50,000 per annum. This figure has increased in the past few years and this year we have contributed USD 400,000. This is a welcome development and we should be willing to seriously increase our pay-in.

Co-terminus with financing is the importance of having your people in the set-up, especially in higher policy-making positions. To the best of this writer's knowledge, an Indian diplomat has served on secondment in the UN's human rights setup only once years back and that too at an operational level. We should endeavour to change this. For this, young diplomats need to be groomed for UN assignments and proactive efforts made for induction of our senior and qualified people for policy level placements in the UN's human rights establishment and other areas.

(Courtesy of Mail Today)

Also read: Why National Register of Citizens is likely to turn Assam into a tinderbox
U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Woody Johnson, is pictured after listening to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and David Attenborough during a conference about the UK-hosted COP26 UN Climate Summit, at the Science Museum in London, Britain, on Feb. 4, 2020. (Chris J Ratcliffe/Pool via Reuters)

US Envoy Blames China for Endangering World With Coronavirus

LONDONThe U.S. ambassador to London has said China had endangered the world by suppressing information about the coronavirus outbreak thus allowing it to spread far beyond the Communist regimes borders.

First it tried to suppress the news, Ambassador Woody Johnson wrote in an article for The Times newspaper published on March 26, adding that Beijing had then selectively shared critical information while stonewalling international health authorities.

Had China done the right things at the right time, more of its own population, and the rest of the world, might have been spared the most serious impact of this disease, the ambassador wrote.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said Beijing should have acted faster to warn the world after the outbreak of the disease there.

On Monday, Trump said Asian-Americans were not responsible for spreading the disease and needed to be protected.

When the crisis finally abates we should take stock of the outcome and evaluate the costs of this breakdown in international collaboration, Ambassador Johnson wrote in The Times.

A group of U.S. lawmakers are calling for an international probe into how Beijings initial handling of the virus pandemic may have endangered the United States and the rest of the world.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) introduced a resolution on Tuesday, asking Congress to condemn the Chinese regime for its coverup of the outbreak, which almost certainly heightened the rapid global spread of the coronavirus, they said.

The resolution also calls on the international community to design a mechanism for the Chinese regime to deliver compensation accordingly.

By Guy Faulconbridge and Kate Holton. Epoch Times reporter Eva Fu contributed to this report.
A couple surprised their families with a kitchen wedding ceremony amid the coronavirus outbreak (PA)

A bride and groom left their families in shock when they had a surprise wedding ceremony in their kitchen.

Ashley Wells, 26, and Cody Wells, 35, had originally planned to elope to Las Vegas with their son Sean, seven, but were forced to cancel their nuptials due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The couple, from Illinois in the US, still wanted to stick to their original date for their big day - and so asked Ashleys step-mother Brooke Meritt, an ordained minister, to marry them at home.

They did not tell other self-isolating family members who were invited to video call in under the ruse of attending a virtual pyjama party.

Cody and Ashley Wells had been planning to elope for a Las Vegas nuptials with their young son (PA)

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Speaking to PA news agency, Ashley said: I wanted to still keep the date, since by now I have created an email address with my new last name and the date, and I have ordered items with our wedding name and date on it.

We went to our local courthouse last week and got a marriage licence, so I got to get married in my pyjamas with tacos and champagne.

My dad also got the opportunity to walk me down the hallway.

At first I was very upset and didnt want to get married, but now, I couldnt have been more excited. This was perfect, and totally our style. We made the best of the situation.

They were married by the bride's step-mum, who happened to be an ordained minister (PA)

Read more: Bride and groom donate wedding feast to 400 NHS staff after their reception got cancelled due to coronavirus

The couple were married in front of a small group of family and celebrated with tacos and doughnuts.

Recalling the moment, Brooke said: It was incredibly short and sweet. And now theyre married, thats the main thing. It was perfectly chaotic which is par for the course for our family.

One of Ashleys younger sisters was insistent that she knew something was going on. She was very confident that she was on to a secret plan.

Story continues

When she found out it was a wedding, she said I did not have it figured out at all.

They invited family members to video call in - but told them it was a virtual pyjama party (PA)

They celebrated with tacos and champagne (PA)

Read more: Unlucky bride whose honeymoon and hen do were ruined has now had wedding cancelled by coronavirus

I definitely did not expect to be marrying someone in the family kitchen, but these are difficult times and if anyone can make the best of things its this family.

Ashley added: Everyone so, so very happy and shocked.

One of my sisters thought she had the whole plan figured out  she did not. It wasnt until Brooke said surprise, its a wedding, for everyone to really know what was going on.

In the state of Illinois, as of yesterday, 1,525 people had been diagnosed with the coronavirus.
Queen Elizabeth shares picture of Johnson meeting

UK Royal Family Twitter account posted a picture of Queen Elizabeth and Boris Johnson speaking on the telephone to each other.

Buckingham Palace reaffirmed on Thursdat that Queen Elizabeth is "in good health" following the news that Prince Charles has contracted the novel coronavirus.

Her Majesty The Queen remains in good health, reads today's statement. The Queen last saw The Prince of Wales briefly after the investiture on the morning of 12th March and is following all the appropriate advice with regard to her welfare.

SHE DIDN'T MISS HER WEEKLY MEETING WITH JOHNSON

Prime Minister Boris Johnson wished the prince a speedy recovery and was due to hold his weekly audience with the queen by telephone, Johnsons spokesman said.

"The Queen held her weekly Audience with the Prime Minister today by telephone. Her Majesty - pictured this evening at Windsor Castle - has held a weekly Audience with her Prime Minister throughout her reign." Royal Family tweet said.

Charles, eldest son of Queen Elizabeth, is displaying what Clarence House said were mild symptoms but remains in good health and has been working from his Birkhall residence in Scotland. His wife, Camilla, 72, tested negative.
World War II references are once again being heard daily  because of the coronavirus. Associated Press reports in its article Virus causes surge in WW II references, but is it merited? that the comparison is everywhere in recent days: The world is facing the most serious threat and challenge since the last truly global war. Various leaders have cited World War II in their virus-related remarks. There is pervasive fear that an invisible enemy could cause a severe escalation in deaths, ravage the global economy, hamper food supply and spark social unrest. And theres pushback, too  that the World War II reference is unhelpful and only adds to the fear.

But compare these past frightening few weeks with this roll call of names, places and battles: Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. Auschwitz and Pearl Harbor and Midway and Stalingrad. The siege of Leningrad, the German blitz of London and the Allied firebombing of Dresden. The final, nuclear chapters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And compare the utter destruction of cities to empty streets now. Or the death tolls: 85 million then, over 18,000 now, though that latter figure is expected to multiply. Do the World War II comparisons really hold up, or is it just a convenient metaphor? Heres a look at the connections between the two eras  and the fundamental differences as well.

WORLD LEADERS RALLYING CALLS

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was born the decade after the Nazis defeat and grew up in East Germany feeling the wars direct consequences. Last week, in a rare address to her nation, she stared into the camera with this appeal: Since German unification  no, since the Second World War  there has been no challenge to our nation that has demanded such a degree of common and united action.

U.S. President Donald Trump went from dismissing the virus as a hoax to declaring himself a wartme president as he cited the 70-year-old Defense Production Act to battle shortages in desperately needed medical supplies like masks and ventilators as more and more Americans become stricken. He hasnt actually used the federal law yet in spite of strong calls from, among others, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to do so immediately.

Queen Elizabeth, speaking in recent days, seemed to allude to her own teenage years in World War II when she served as a mechanic and drove military trucks as part of the auxiliary territorial armed services in Britain. At times such as these, I am reminded that our nations history has been forged by people and communities coming together to work as one, she said.

Italy has suffered more deaths than any other nation from the virus so far. Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte went on TV late Saturday, announcing that he was tightening the countrys lockdown and shutting down all production facilities except those providing essential goods and services. He said: We are facing the most serious crisis that the country has experienced since World War II.

DEATH TOLLS AND DEVASTATION

In World War II, 3% of the worlds population died; of an estimated 2.3 billion people, 85 million perished. With a current global populace of some 7.7 billion, a similar death toll from the pandemic would mean 231 million dead. Some experts have warned of tens of millions dying from the virus if lockdown and social-distancing measures are not adhered to.

But there is no endless bombardment from above across vast swaths of the earth, nor a global human tide of misery fleeing those bombs and massacres, nor concentration camps, nor multiple prisoner of war camps with forced labor.

Entire cities and towns were razed in World War II. Oradour-sur-Glane, France  where the Nazis carried out the worst massacre of civilians on French territory in 1944  is a ghost town, preserved today in ruin as Nazis left it. More than 600 people, including nearly 250 children, were slaughtered.

RESCUE PLANS, EMPLOYMENT AND TECHNOLOGY

Governments are showing varying degrees of commitment to keeping critical industries and the working population afloat in the time of COVID-19. Rescue plans projected by several Western countries bear a resemblance to the Marshall Plan, the $15 billion U.S. initiative that aided European recovery after World War II.

In several countries, as many men fought overseas in World War II, women were called upon to bolster the workforce and, in particular, help to produce armaments. Now the key workers across the world are the doctors, nurses, caregivers and cleaners  and those who can are told to work from home to avoid spreading the virus.

That work and the economies it sustains, like much else in the modern world, is dependent on one key connector: internet service. If that cratered, the next phase of crisis could be one triggered not by developments in technology  such as the atomic bomb  but simply by the sudden lack of it.

For human beings who lived through World War II, such a notion would seem unimaginable.
Africa is using digital finance as a means to stem the spread of COVID-19.

Governments and startups on the continent are implementing measures to shift a greater volume of payment transactions toward mobile money and away from cash  which the World Health Organization flagged as a conduit for the spread of the coronavirus.

It's an option facilitated by the boom in fintech that's occurred in Africa over the last decade. By several estimates, the continent is home to the largest share of the worlds unbanked population and has a sizable number of underbanked consumers and SMEs.

But because of that, fintech  and startups focused on financial inclusion  now receive the majority of VC funding annually in Africa, according to recent data.

As COVID-19 cases began to grow in the continent's major economies last week, Africa's leader in digital payment adoption  Kenya  turned to mobile-money as a public-health tool.

The country's largest teleco, Safaricom, implemented a fee-waiver on East Africas leading mobile-money product, M-Pesa, to reduce the physical exchange of currency in response to COVID-19.

Image Credits: Flickr

The company announced that all person-to-person (P2P) transactions under 1,000 Kenyan Schillings ( $10) would be free for three months.

The move came after Safaricom met with the countrys Central Bank and per a directive from Kenyas President Uhuru Kenyatta to explore ways of deepening mobile-money usage to reduce risk of spreading the virus through physical handling of cash, according to a release provided to TechCrunch from Safaricom.

Kenya has one of the highest rates of mobile-money adoption in the world, largely due to the dominance of M-Pesa in the country, which stands as Africa's 6th largest economy. Across Kenya's population of 53 million, M-Pesa has 20.5 million customers and a network of 176,000 agents.

M-PESA Sector Stats 4Q 2019 per Kenya's Communications Authority

Story continues

With all major providers in Kenya there are 32 million subscribers, which means roughly 60% of the country's population has access to mobile-money.

Ghana is also using digital finance as a monetary policy lever to reduce the spread of COVID-19

On March 20, the West African country's central bank directed mobile money providers to waive fees on transactions of GH100 ( $18), with restrictions on transactions to withdraw cash from mobile-wallets.

Ghana's monetary body also eased KYC requirements on mobile-money, allowing citizens to use existing mobile phone registrations to open accounts with the major digital payment providers, according to a March 18 Bank of Ghana release.

The trajectory of the coronavirus in Africa is prompting more countries and tech companies to include mobile finance as part of a broader response. The continent's COVID-19 cases by country were in the single digits until recently, but those numbers spiked last week leading the World Health Organization to sound an alarm.

About 10 days ago we had 5 countries affected, now weve got 30, WHO Regional Director Dr Matshidiso Moeti said at a press conference Thursday. Its has been an extremely rapidevolution.

Source; World Health Organization

By the World Health Organizations stats Monday there were 1321 COVID-19 cases in Sub-Saharan Africa and 34 confirmed deaths related to the virus  up from 463 cases and 10 deaths last Wednesday.

The country with 40% of the region's cases is South Africa, which declared a national disaster last week, banned public gatherings and announced travel restrictions on the U.S.

Unlike Ghana and Kenya, the government in Africa's second largest economy hasn't issued directives toward mobile payments, but the situation with COVID-19 is pushing fintech startups to act, according to Yoco CEO Katlego Maphai.

The Series B stage venture develops and sells digital payment hardware and services for small businesses on a network of 80,000 clients that processes roughly $500 million annually.

Image Credits: Jake Bright

With the growth in coronavirus cases in South Africa, Yoco has issued a directive to clients to encourage customers to use the contactless payment option on its point of sale machines. The startup has also accelerated its development of a remote payment product, that would enable transfers on its client network via a weblink.

"This is an opportunity to start driving contactless adoption," Maphai told TechCrunch on a call from Cape Town.

In Nigeria  home to Africa's largest economy and population of 200 million  the growth of COVID-19 cases has shifted the country toward electronic payments and prompted one of the country's largest digital payments startups to act.

Lagos based venture Paga made fee adjustments, allowing merchants to accept payments from Paga customers for free  a measure "aimed to help slow the spread of the coronavirus by reducing cash handling in Nigeria," according to a company release.

Parts of Lagos  which is connected to Nigeria's largest commercial hub of Lagos State  have begun to require digital payments in response to COVID-19, according to Paga's CEO Tayo Oviosu .

"We're seeing some stores that are saying they are not accepting cash anymore," he told TechCrunch on a call from Lagos.

Cash only Nigeria Paga

Image Credits: Paga

Paga already offers free P2P transfers on its multi-channel network of 24,840 agents and 14 million customers. The startup (that recently expanded to Mexico and partnered with Visa) will also allow free transfers up to roughly 5000 Naira ( $15) from customer accounts to bank accounts, to encourage more digital payments use in Nigeria.

Paga's CEO believes the current COVID-19 crisis will encourage more digital finance adoption in Nigeria, which has shown a cash-is-king reluctance by parts of the population to use mobile payments.

"I think it will help move the needle, but it won't be the final straw that breaks the camel's back," he said.

Time and research will determine if efforts of African governments and tech companies to encourage digital payments over physical currency yield results in halting the spread of COVID-19 on the continent.

It is a unique case-study of mobile finance in Africa being employed to impact human behavior during a public health emergency.
Myanmar military spokesman Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun answers questions from journalists during a press conference at the Defense Services Museum in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw, Aug. 23, 2019.

The rebel Arakan Army fighting the national army in western Myanmars Rakhine state has very little chance of joining the countrys struggling peace process now that the government has designated the 11-year-old force an unlawful, terrorist organization, a military spokesman said Thursday.

The mostly ethnic Rakhine Buddhist force has been engaged in intensified hostilities with Myanmar soldiers in northern Rakhine state since late 2018 and early January 2019, when its troops killed 13 policemen and injured nine others in attacks on four police outposts.

The 15-month conflict has killed dozens of civilians and displaced 140,000 villagers, disrupting life and commerce in a state still reeling from the armys violent expulsion of more than 740,000 Rohingya Muslims into neighboring Bangladesh.

They have shown that they dont want peace, Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun of the militarys information committee told RFAs Myanmar Service. They have repeatedly engaged in terrorist activities although they have been repeatedly warned.

Now that they have been declared a terrorist group, in legal sense, they have very little chance of participating in the peace process, he said.

The military spokesman made the comments in response to statements by AA officials in the wake of the government's designation on Monday of the AA and its political arm as terrorist organizations, saying that the governments decision would hurt any peace process.

Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi has made ending the country's armed conflicts and forging lasting peace the cornerstone of her four-year-old government. But the efforts have been stymied by ongoing fighting between Myanmar forces and rebel armies in outlying ethnic regions.

Only 10 of Myanmars 20-odd ethnic armies have signed a 2015 national cease-fire agreement (NCA) with the government. The AA, which seeks greater autonomy for ethnic Rakhines in Rakhine state, has not signed the pact.

AA officials also have said that the governments designation could worsen the situation of ethnic Rakhines who are accused of having connections to the rebel force and charged under the countrys Counter-Terrorism Law.

But Zaw Min Tun countered that the governments designation will protect civilians who are not involved with the AA.

Now that we have officially designated them under the Counter-Terrorism Law, we can strengthen our actions against them, he said. For those who are innocent, we can give them better protection. But for those who are dishonest and are abetting AA activities, it will be harsher.

Zaw Min Tun said that the Myanmar military has conducted educational campaigns for the local people not to engage with AA members, and warned Arakan soldiers to avoid staging battles near civilian villages or taking cover in them during armed conflicts.

Hypocritical

The AA has accused government forces of continuing to fight amid fears of the spread of the coronavirus epidemic in Myanmar which so far has reported three confirmed cases of the virus.

Zaw Min Tun said the AA is being hypocritical because Arakan troops have continued their attacks in northern Rakhine.

An AA assault on a Myanmar military training school in Rakhines Minbya township on Monday prompted fighting between the two armies in at least three nearby locations with fatalities on both sides. Recent fighting in the township has displaced roughly 1,000 civilians.

The AA has claimed that attacks by Myanmar forces will bode worse for them in a legal case before the International Court of Justice, where the West African country Gambia filed genocide-related charges over the militarys atrocities against Rohingya Muslims during a 2017 crackdown in northern Rakhine state

Zaw Min Tun brushed aside that assessment and suggested that the military can level similar accusations against the AA.

Legally designating the AA as a terrorist group means the government can take a stronger stance on this issue internationally, he said.

The U.S. has designated al-Qaeda as terrorist group though it is located outside its sovereign territory, so that the U.S. can take action against it legally, both in terms of national law and international law, he said. This is the right and the authority of a sovereign state.

Zaw Htay, spokesman for President Win Myints office, declined to comment, saying he does not do interviews by phone.

Reported by RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
A Spanish soldier standing next to beds set up at a temporary hospital for vulnerable people in Barcelona.

PAU BARRENA/AFP via Getty Images

Spain said it found that rapid coronavirus tests bought from China did not consistently identify positive cases and would return them to the manufacturer.

Spain now has over 4,000 coronavirus deaths, the second-most in the world.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais reported that microbiologists found that tests it bought from a Chinese company called Bioeasy could correctly identify virus cases only 30% of the time.

Health authorities have been told that the tests should not be used, and the head of Spain's health-emergency coordination center said they would be returned, El Pais reported.

The Chinese Embassy in Spain said that the Bioeasy tests were not part of China's medical donations and that the firm didn't have a license to sell its products.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Microbiology experts in Spain have said that rapid coronavirus tests that the country bought from China are not consistently detecting positive cases.

The error was discovered as Spain is in the grip of one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world, second only to Italy in the number of reported deaths.

Studies on the tests done in Spain found that they had only 30% sensitivity, meaning they correctly identify people with the virus only 30% of the time, sources told the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Those sources told the newspaper that the tests should have a sensitivity of more than 80%. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says rapid tests for influenza are required to have 80% sensitivity.

Rapid tests can get a result in minutes but are generally less accurate than other tests. Numerous companies around the world are producing them.

The studies prompted the Spanish Society of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology to formally recommend not using these tests, El Pais reported. Health workers are now meant to use other tests that take longer to give a result.

Story continues

Fernando Simon, the director of Spain's health-emergencies coordination center, said on Thursday that Spain checked 9,000 of the tests, found that their results were not consistent enough, and decided to return them.

A doctor on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus in Spain.

Getty

Spain's health ministry confirmed the results of the studies into the tests to El Pais, with a spokesman saying the Carlos III Health Institute, a public-health institute that reports to the government, "detected a sensitivity that does not correspond to what is established in the technical sheet."

The spokesman said that the institute had recalled a shipment of the tests sent to Madrid. New tests approved by the government will be rolled out instead, he said.

The tests were being used in the regions of Andalusia and Galicia, and they were first used in the Madrid region on Wednesday.

Delays from implementing the new test will further harm Spain's efforts to contain the virus, which had killed more than 4,000 people in the country as of early Thursday.

The tests were made by a Chinese biotechnology company called Bioeasy, El Pais reported. Other countries, including Georgia, have bought the company's tests.

The Chinese Embassy in Spain said on Twitter on Thursday that the medical supplies China was donating to other countries did not include Bioeasy products.

It said that the Chinese Ministry of Commerce gave Spain a list of manufacturers and that Bioeasy was not among them, adding that it had not been given a license from China's National Medical Products Administration to sell its products.

People on a balcony in Barcelona on March 15.

David Ramos/Getty Images

On Monday, Spain said it received 640,000 rapid testing kits from China and South Korea; it is unclear how many were manufactured by Bioeasy.

Medical professionals in the Czech Republic have also said that rapid tests from China were not working properly, but it was not clear whether these tests were also made by Bioeasy.

Spain has been ravaged by the virus outbreak that originated in China at the end of 2019. Spain's cases have climbed to more than 56,000, the fourth-highest in the world, behind China, Italy, and the US.

As the outbreak has slowed in China  which has frequently reported no new daily domestic cases  the country has sent medical workers and donated medical equipment such as masks and tests to other countries.

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Linkedin Ganug Nugroho Adi, Suherdjoko and Gemma Holliani Cahya (The Jakarta Post) Wonogiri/Semarang/Jakarta  Fri, March 27 2020

Families residing in Jakarta have started to pack their bags and return to their hometowns despite the governments warning for people not to travel home for Idul Fitri this year so as to prevent the spread of COVID-19.



As of noon on Thursday, the coronavirus had infected at least 790 people across the country and had killed 58 in total.



Hesti Winarni, a 43-year-old meatball vendor in Jakarta, decided to return to Wonogiri, Central Java, since her business had experienced a decline in sales since the outbreak hit the capital city.



The kids are off from school. Wonogiri is also safer than Jakarta, she said.



Hesti was not the only one to return to her hometown, as transportation authorities in Wonogiri have recorded about 14,000 people coming into the regency within the last week. According to data gathered at the Giri Adipura bus terminal in the regency, 876 buses from Greater Jakarta carrying a total of 14,140 passengers had arrived in Wonogiri.



Such an increase in the number of passengers usually only occurs during the Idul Fitri mudik (exodus), said Agus Hasto Purwanto, the head of the bus terminal.



Normally, fewer than 1,000 passengers arrive in Wonogiri every day. However, the number has risen over the past few weeks to 2,000 per day, he said, adding that the number was expected to remain high until the end of the COVID-19 emergency, possibly in late May.



About 7.2 million travelers returned to their hometowns for Idul Fitri in 2019, according to the Transportation Ministry.



Wonogiri Regent Joko Sutopo defended peoples decisions to return to their hometowns, as most of the people who migrated from the regency worked as small-scale vendors and factory workers across Greater Jakarta. They had no option but to go home, he said, as they were earning no money during the work-from-home period.



Joko said the administration could prevent the spread of COVID-19 within the region despite the mass exodus.



Were disseminating information [on COVID-19] to neighborhood units [RTs] and youth groups in communities. We are not worried because everything is going as planned, the regent said.



Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo said he had obtained reports from regents and mayors that an initial homecoming surge from Jakarta had recently entered the province.



In Jepara, 44 buses arrived from Jakarta carrying people returning home. It is indeed happening early, maybe because the offices and companies where they worked have reduced their working hours or have even stopped operating, he said.



While the returnees health has yet to be confirmed, Ganjar hoped they did not cause problems for residents, including students, who had been advised to stay at home.



He appealed to residents who were currently working in Jakarta, the hardest-hit city in Indonesia, not to go home just yet and vice versa.

______



Were disseminating information [on COVID-19] to neighborhood units [RTs] and youth groups in communities. We are not worried because everything is going as planned.

______

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If circulation of deep waters in the Atlantic stops or slows due to climate change, it could cause cooling in northern North America and Europe - a scenario that has occurred during past cold glacial periods.

Now, a Rutgers coauthored study suggests that short-term disruptions of deep ocean circulation occurred during warm interglacial periods in the last 450,000 years, and may happen again.

Ironically, melting of the polar ice sheet in the Arctic region in a warmer world, resulting in more fresh water entering the ocean and altering circulation, might have caused previous coolings. Still, a rapid deep freeze like in the 2004 movie "The Day After Tomorrow" is highly unlikely.

The study, published in the journal Science and led by scientists at the University of Bergen in Norway, follows a 2014 study on the same topic.

"These findings suggest that our climate system, which depends greatly on deep ocean circulation, is critically poised near a tipping point for abrupt disruptions," said co-author Yair Rosenthal, a distinguished professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers-New Brunswick. "Although the disruptions in circulation and possible coolings may be relatively short-lived - lasting maybe a century or more - the consequences might be large."

The warm North Atlantic Current - the northernmost part of the Gulf Stream - flows into the Greenland Sea. It becomes progressively colder and saltier due to heat loss to the air, eventually sinking and forming the North Atlantic Deep Water formation - a mass of deep, cold water that flows southward. Melting of the polar ice sheet in the Arctic region would result in more fresh water entering the ocean and disrupting that circulation pattern, potentially causing cooling in northern areas of Europe and North America.

In their 2014 study, the scientists presented evidence of disruptions in the North Atlantic Deep Water formation during the last interglacial period (the Eemian) about 116,000 to 128,000 years ago. Increased freshwater entering the Arctic region due to melting of the polar ice sheet in a warmer world may have disrupted circulation, which normally brings warmer water to the ocean off northern regions of North America and Europe. Such disruptions seem to last around a century or more.

The latest study covers three other warm interglacial periods within the past 450,000 years. During all of them, regardless of the degree of global warming, the scientists found similar century-long disruptions of the North Atlantic Deep Water formation. And they found that such disruptions are more easily achieved than once believed and took place in climate conditions similar to those we may soon face with global warming.

Next steps include validating the scientists' observations with evidence from other sites near Greenland during other warm intervals.

###

Scientists at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research; Universite Paris-Saclay; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; and University of Cambridge contributed to the study.
By Paul Carsten

ABUJA (Reuters) - The Nigerian Army is preparing to forcibly transfer the sick to hospital and enforce curbs on movement to try to shield the country from coronavirus, and is leasing equipment for "possible mass burial", according to an army memo seen by Reuters.

The memo from Army headquarters also outlines plans to protect government food storage from looters as Africa's most populous nation braces for the illness to spread further in the country.

"Following the rise and continuous spread in cases of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Nigeria, the (Chief of Army Staff) has deemed it necessary for all to take protective measures to ensure the safety of (army) personnel and their families," the memo said.

There are currently 46 confirmed cases in Nigeria, and one death, but the infection has hit the top levels of society, infecting President Muhammadu Buhari's chief of staff.

With a population of 200 million, 20 million of whom are packed into the commercial capital of Lagos, many fear the virus could spread quickly without containment.

The memo said the army was suspending leave passes for all personnel and called for them to be on "maximum security alert and be ready for deployment."

The virus has swept across the world, killing thousands and forcing millions into quarantine. Several nations have activated armed forces to help combat it.

South Africa deployed its army to enforce a 21-day lockdown that begins this week, and U.S. President Donald Trump activated the National Guard in New York, California and Washington.

The U.S., French and Moroccan armies have set up field hospitals, and Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the army to carry out drills to increase readiness to fight coronavirus if necessary.

On Wednesday, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said it would remain open amid the global outbreak.

"The CBN, in line with its mandate of ensuring monetary and price stability, will remain open for business during these trying times," it said in a statement.

Story continues

Also on Wednesday, Nigeria's Rivers state governor said he would close the borders to human movement in or out of the state starting on Thursday to protect it from coronavirus.

The state's capital, Port Harcourt, is the gateway to the oil-rich Delta region, and companies such as Nigeria LNG and Royal Dutch Shell have key offices in the city. Neither company immediately commented on how the closure might affect their operations.

Oil provides more than half of Nigeria's government revenue.

(Additional reporting by Tife Owolabi in Yenagoa, Libby George and Alexis Akwagyiram in Lagos, Writing by Libby George; Editing by William Maclean and Alex Richardson)
A recent paper uses computational tools to explain the mechanism of how streptavidin and biotin binding is affected by streptavidin's tethering

Recent research by Rafael C. Bernardi at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign examines why a common tool in biotechnology -- the binding of streptavidin to biotin -- shows different mechanical resilience in different research labs.

"This interaction has been a key tool in nearly 15,000 published manuscripts," said Bernardi, a research scientist at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. "If you don't do it in a specific way, your results might be inconclusive. It is like creating a building - you can use the same material to make something stable or unstable."

The principle of using the binding of two molecules as a research tool is not limited to streptavidin/biotin systems. "This analysis can also be used in other experiments such as therapeutics and cancer treatments where, depending on the position of the antibody, the stability of a complex is affected," Bernardi said. "The technique is also being used in the work that is being done on the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The technique we are improving is a very common tool used by the labs that are trying to understand the molecular basis of COVID-19."

Bernardi conducted the research in collaboration with Hermann Gaub, a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.The paper "Streptavidin/Biotin: Tethering Geometry Defines Unbinding Mechanics" was published in Science Advances.

Researchers have been using the interaction between streptavidin and biotin for the last 25 years to study, for instance, the folding and unfolding of proteins. In single-molecule folding studies, the protein is usually attached to a surface on one end and to biotin on the other. The streptavidin is then attached to the tip of an atomic force microscope, working as a handle to pull on the protein through the streptavidin/biotin interaction. The researchers measure this effect to understand how the protein folds and unfolds.

"Over the years we have noticed that the numbers associated with the strength of the interaction between streptavidin and biotin varies in different research papers," Bernardi said. "If you're measuring just this interaction, why aren't the numbers always the same? Researchers didn't think about it too much because, for most of them, biotinylation is just a tool."

The researchers used computational analysis to show that the several streptavidin's reactive groups, called reactive amines, can influence how streptavidin and biotin interact under mechanical stress. "Even with the controlled environments we used in our experiments, we got completely different results. You're forcing biotin to take on a different path depending on where the streptavidin attachment takes place," Bernardi said.

The biggest challenge the researchers faced was doing the computational analysis. "We need a lot of computer power to get these results. We were only able to do this because of Blue Waters," Bernardi said, referring to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications' supercomputer on the Illinois campus. To analyze the results, Bernardi employed NAMD, a widely used software for Molecular Dynamics, which was developed by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the Beckman Institute.

###

Editor's note:

The paper "Streptavidin/Biotin: Tethering Geometry Defines Unbinding Mechanics" can be found online at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/13/eaay5999.

For more information, contact Rafael C. Bernardi, 217-244-0177, rbernar@illinois.edu.
The national emergency could not be more stark. This novel coronavirus threatens to overwhelm our health service and those of many other rich countries.

The harrowing images last week of Italian hospitals unable to deal with the deluge of critically ill patients revealed the true scale of the challenge we all face  and why we must not flinch from tackling it.

So far, with only a few exceptions, the country's response has been breathtaking.

On Tuesday night, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock called for an army of volunteers to come to the aid of 1.5 million especially vulnerable people who will be kept isolated indoors by the pandemic for up to three months.

Within a few hours of Mr Hancock's appeal, more than 45,000 had signed up at the website goodsamapp.org/NHS.

Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock leaves 10 Downing Street on Wednesday in London, England

And last night the number rose above 500,000  far more than the 250,000 the Government originally hoped for.

Of course, that is something to be cheered. Yet such is the scale of this epidemic, still more volunteers will be needed to perform critically important tasks such as delivering drugs, medical supplies and food, driving patients to appointments or home after being discharged from hospital, and  just as essentially  being on the end of a phone to offer compassion and understanding to those who will feel lonely, frightened and isolated in these dark times.

That means even those of us who can't leave our homes at all, for one reason or another, can still come to the aid of the NHS at this perilous point in its history.

You could be one of them.

Even before this crisis, the Daily Mail had shown itself to be a pioneer in recruiting NHS volunteers, bringing all its campaigning zeal and experience to launch the Helpforce campaign over the Christmas period in 2018.

Over the course of just a few weeks, an incredible 34,000 readers pledged to donate more than a million hours of their time to do voluntary work for their local hospitals.

As Mr Hancock said this week, that initiative 'inspired an incredible reaction... right now we need that generosity more than ever and I would urge any Mail readers who feel able to do so to sign up as NHS Volunteer Responders as part of the national effort.'

Hospital staff and ambulance staff prepare to take a patient into the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, on Monday when Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said the Government is ready to impose tougher restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus if people do not follow the guidance on social distancing

I loudly echo that call. As the founder of Helpforce, a national movement to improve the lives of NHS staff, patients and communities through volunteering, I have seen with my own eyes the amazing feats that can be achieved by the British people when they pull together in the common interest.

The Helpforce campaign showed that even seemingly small jobs such as fetching coffee, helping to push patients in wheelchairs, making beds and scrubbing mattresses are of invaluable help in stretched and busy wards.

Take lawyer Roy Hammond, who was 52 when he was inspired to get stuck in with Helpforce by the Mail's campaign and by the work his son, a radiotherapist, was doing in the Arden Cancer Research Centre at University Hospital Coventry.

'I volunteer for two half-days a month in the same cancer ward my son works in,' he said. 'When I take off my work jacket and put on my volunteer badge, it is the best feeling.

'I make tea and coffee and talk to the patients who are having treatment. Some are there for up to eight hours a day and they can get lonely.

'I highly recommend volunteering in a hospital. The doctors and nurses stop me when they see my volunteer badge to say thank you, which makes me feel like a valuable part of the team.'

I've heard so many volunteers echo Roy and say how much hospital staff appreciate the tasks that they do. One is A-level student Maisy, who fits her work as a trained dementia support worker around her studies.

She visits patients and chats to them, which can be a challenge when their dementia is advanced, but everyone who knows her at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust says her kindness and patience shine through.

Although volunteering can be challenging, she says, 'having the opportunity to interact with patients on a regular basis and really making a difference to their hospital stay and wellbeing is simply fantastic'.

Hundreds of thousands of people are about to discover the truth in Maisy's words.

The onslaught of volunteers standing up to be counted in this emergency  giving up their precious time and bonding against a common foe speaks to me of the deeply altruistic nature that lies at the beating heart of the British public.

With numbers like these rushing forward in just a matter of hours, who now could call this a selfish society?

So, how do you get involved? To sign up, download the smartphone app from good samapp.org/NHS and switch your online status to 'on duty'.

Then there are three main ways to volunteer. The first is simply talking over the phone to people in the most vulnerable bracket, the 1.5 million men, women and children with underlying health conditions such as cystic fibrosis, cancer and pregnant women with severe heart disease.

These people can be the most vulnerable to complications of Covid-19.

Even to be on the other end of a phone can help people who are living in quarantine to remain cheerful, chipping away at their loneliness.

The second option for volunteers is to drop off prescriptions and food packages. It goes without saying that this will be vital, even lifesaving, in many cases.

The third volunteering option is to act as a driver for people who may need a lift. You might also be asked to transfer equipment, supplies and medication between NHS sites, and to assist pharmacies with deliveries.

Given that so many people are not working at the moment, an unusually large part of the nation's workforce is available and eager to help.

It is an army of kindness  and one that signifies something profound and heartening in our nature.

In moments of crisis, the British public has always come through, in ways both great and small.

Here in the small Suffolk village where I live, everyone seems to be volunteering to help and small businesses are offering all sorts of generous additional services, such as free deliveries.

My instinct tells me the same is happening in every town and village across Britain. This is true 'community in action'.

I especially want to salute the work done by the Royal Voluntary Service (RVS), which is running the Good Sam scheme.

The RVS was founded just before World War II in 1938, to encourage women to sign up as air-raid wardens in the event of bombing.

More than a million women came forward to help.

Today, the RVS is still an amazing organisation helping those most in need.

Over the next few weeks, your help could mean the difference between coping and catastrophe for our beloved NHS.

In good time, this dark cloud will pass. And by volunteering now, we can all become the silver lining.

* To volunteer, visit goodsamapp.org/NHS
With harvesting of wheat crop set to commence in the next few days in Haryana, worried farmers want the state government to make arrangements to help them store the produce before it is procured amid the nationwide lockdown to check the spread of coronavirus.

Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar assured the farmers on Thursday that every single grain will be procured, although there will be some delay but they are apprehensive.

Wheat harvesting will start from April 5 while mustard harvesting has already started. We have no arrangement to store these crops. The government should make arrangement for gunny bags and tarpaulin sheets. In normal times, farmers take their produce straight from the fields to procurement mandis, Bharatiya Kisan Union leader from Haryana, Gurnam Singh told PTI over the phone.

In his televised address to people of the state, Khattar said the farmers don't need to worry as the government has prepared a mechanism to procure every single grain of theirs, although there can be some delay in the process.

With the 21-day nationwide lockdown in place, the chief minister said, As we know that it is not possible to procure till April 14, we have made changes in dates of procurement. From April 15, procurement of mustard will be done while wheat will be procured from April 20. We will begin our procurement on these dates if situation normalises by then.

He also said that as ripened crop of mustard and wheat cannot be left in the fields by then, the farmers have been advised to stock the produce as much as possible in their homes while instructions have been given to state agencies like the Haryana State Agricultural Marketing Board to assist farmers in stocking the produce.

As some delay in crop procurement is expected, Khattar said,We have written to the Centre to prepare a scheme to give incentives to farmers and I am hopeful that the Union government will soon come out with such a scheme. Once such a scheme is announced, the state government will also do its bit to extend help to the farmers".

Haryana Congress president Kumari Selja wrote a letter to CM Khattar on Thursday drawing his attention to the problems likely to be faced by farmers in the wake of delay in procurement of crops.

Selja said the state government should set up a round-the-clock dedicated helpline for farmers where all their concerns should be clarified.

Demanding waiving of crop loans, she also said that the credit limit of Kisan Credit Cards used by farmers should be increased.

As delay is expected in wheat procurement, the government should make arrangement to store the produce of farmers or get it lifted directly from their fields, she said in the letter.

Meanwhile, BKU's Gurnam Singh said the government should not wait till April 20 to procure wheat. By that time, 90 per cent of wheat would have been harvested and procurement mandis are flooded with the crop at one go and will not help the situation. The government should make arrangements to procure it from the fields at its own pace, he added.

Singh also said the government should give advance of Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 per acre to the farmers who have to pay to farm labourers and to meet other expenses related to harvesting and storing of crop.

The government can deduct this amount later from farmers accounts when they procure the produce and make payment to farmers for it, he said.

When asked if there was any shortage of animal feed, Singh said the shops selling fodder remain open for some time enabling farmers to buy as per requirement.

However, farmers are facing some problem in getting fertilisers as shops remain mostly closed, he claimed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Environmental Protection Agency said this week that its reviewing a request from the oil and gas industry to ease enforcement of hazardous air and water pollution and other regulatory issues during the coronavirus pandemic.

The proposal is drawing objections from public health and environmental advocates. A former Obama-era EPA enforcement official, Cynthia Giles, says the request amounts to seeking a nationwide pass for the industry on almost all environmental rules.

The American Petroleum Institute made the request in a letter to President Donald Trump last week and to the EPA on Monday. The oil and gas trade group is citing potential staffing issues during the outbreak, saying worker shortages could make compliance with a range of regulations difficult, such as monitoring, reporting and immediately fixing hazardous air emissions.

Bethany Aronhalt, a spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute, compared the request to businesses asking for flexibility on tax deadlines during the outbreak. In no way would this jeopardize safety, health or the environment, Aronhalt said.

EPA spokesman Corry Schiermeyer said the agency was evaluating the request. The agency understands that the COVID-19 response poses many challenges to our partners and appreciates all they are doing to plan and prepare, Schiermeyer said.

Giles, a former assistant administrator for the EPA enforcement office from 2009 to 2017, said EPA policy explicitly prohibits the agency from promising waiving of enforcement of environmental and public health laws. She called the trade groups request alarming and wildly overbroad.

Trump has sought to soften regulation for the oil, gas and coal industries throughout his administration. He also stresses his desire to ease the impact on businesses from the wide economic shutdown accompanying the coronavirus outbreak, which has millions sheltering in their homes to slow the spread.

The oil and gas groups request also comes as Saudi Arabia and Russia wage a crude-oil price war threatening the market share for U.S. producers, sinking crude prices well below $30 a barrel.

The oil and gas industry already is a major contributor of hazardous pollutants through air and water emissions, especially for Houston and other cities clustered among oil installations on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics COVID-19 Legislation Energy Oil Gas Pollution
A father and son have been refused bail after they were accused of spitting on two gardai on duty in Dublin city centre.

Dublin District Court heard concerns today that the incident occurred at a time of heightened public health fears surrounding the spread of Covid-19.

Judge Miriam Walsh was told a crowd gathered around as a drug search got "out of hand" and the incident was filmed by passers-by. It was posted on social media.

Paul Clarke Snr, 49, and his son James Clarke, 27, of Clonard Road, Crumlin, Dublin, who are both on disability benefits, were charged with assaulting gardai acting in the execution of their duty.

James Clarke had additional charges for obstructing the officers and a breach of the peace. The incident allegedly happened at ODonovan Rossa Bridge, Dublin 8, on Thursday morning.

They were refused bail and remanded in custody to appear at Cloverhill District Court on March 31 next.

Paul Clarke Snr stood wearing a wore a surgical face mask throughout the bail hearing.

Garda Kate Mulligan and Garda Kevin Carthy told the court they were objecting to bail and they cited public fear surrounding Covid-19.

Garda Mulligan told Judge Miriam Walsh a crowd gathered around and recorded the incident which she has since seen on social media.

Efforts were being made to get the footage. She said Paul Clarke Snr was accused of spitting on gardai carrying out their duties.

Opposing bail she cited other factors in relation to this in light of Covid-19, there is already fear in the population.

Defence counsel Sarah Connolly said her client had a kidney transplant three years ago and also suffered from ulcers and gallbladder problems.

Garda Kevin Carthy told the court a drug search was being carried out on a different male and things got out of hand. He said both accused started spitting at him and his colleague.

I was spat at, at least twice, he said.

The barrister said Paul Clarke Snr accepted tensions were heightened but he denied spitting on anyone.

Denying him bail, Judge Walsh said as a result of current matters everybodys lives have totally changed. However, the accused were innocent until proven guilty.

She noted the Prison Service could assist Mr Clarke Snr in relation to his health difficulties.

Objecting to bail in the case of James Clarke, Garda Carthy said in light of Covid-19 it was a very serious offence while gardai were trying to carry out duties.

They were taken to Kilmainham Garda station after they were arrested at about 11.25am on Thursday.

The court heard father and son made no reply when charged.

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Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has made thousands of false, offensive, and damaging claims that could hurt his reelection odds. Democrats plan to use these statements as campaign fodder through the November election. On Wednesday, the Trump campaign adopted a new tactic to neutralize these attacks: It threatened to sue critics of the president in a brazen effort to censor Trumps opponents into silence. Any real legal action is unlikely to hold up against the First Amendment. But Trump doesnt need to succeed in court in order to win.

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This threat came in the form of a cease-and-desist letter sent to television broadcast stations across the country. The letter orders these networks to stop airing an ad created by Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC. That ad, Exponential Threat, juxtaposes Trumps many dismissive comments about the pandemic with a chart tracking the rising number of infections in the United States.* It ends with one line of text: America needs a leader we can trust.

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As political ads go, this one is fairly run-of-the-mill. The ad begins with Trump saying the coronavirus, then cuts to him saying, This is their new hoax. According to the Trump campaign, that edit renders the ad patently false, misleading, and deceptive. Its letter provides the full context of Trumps hoax remarks, made during a rally. Heres the key section:

Coronavirus. Theyre politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs, you say, Hows President Trump doing?, Oh, nothing, nothing.  One of my people came up to me and said, Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didnt work out too well. They couldnt do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, theyve been doing it since he got in. Its all turning, they lost. Its all turning, think of it, think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know we did something thats been pretty amazing. We have 15 people in this massive country and because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that.

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When Joe Biden released an ad implying that Trump called the coronavirus a hoax, the letter points out, fact-checkers accused him of deceiving the public. These fact-checkers accepted Trumps later assertion that the hoax in question wasnt the coronavirus but rather Democrats efforts to pin this on somebody. In context, the true meaning seems more ambiguous; like so many of Trumps wildest declarations, its slippery enough that the president can claim innocence while his supporters can interpret it however they choose.

But it doesnt really matter what Trump meant, because the Priorities USA ad is obviously core political speech, fully protected by the First Amendment. Trumps campaign suggests that it may seek to punish networks that air the ad in two ways: suing for defamation and urging the Federal Communications Commission to revoke their license. Although both approaches are deeply troubling assaults on free expression, and may chill constitutionally protected expression, neither is likely to succeed.

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Start with the FCC route. The agency licenses local stations to broadcast on public airwaves and can theoretically terminate these licensesthough in practice, it almost never does. FCC rules require stations to run ads made by legally qualified candidates for federal office, but not ads by super PACs, which are supposed to be independent. Stations are supposed to act with reasonable care to prevent false or misleading ads. But in reality, it relies on the Federal Trade Commission to penalize untruthful advertisers. And even then, the FTC typically goes after commercial advertisers, not political ones.

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In the past, Trump has floated the idea of challenging the licenses of broadcast stations that air fake news. But the idea was, and remains, a nonstarter, because todays FCC simply does not revoke licenses on the basis of a stations political speech. Allowing federal bureaucrats to censor political expressioneven when it is arguably misleadingraises grave constitutional concerns with which the agency would rather not grapple. The Trump campaign may file complaints against stations that air the Priorities USA ad, but these grievances will cause the stations a minor headache at most, and do not seriously jeopardize their licenses.

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The possibility of a lawsuit is a more substantial menace. Trumps campaign accuses stations of broadcasting false information and reserves its right to pursue all legal remedies available. That translates to a defamation suit. Stations will have to devote significant time, resources, and money to fight off any legal action, but they will probably prevail. The First Amendment was designed to safeguard political speech. It requires public officials to prove that their critics knowingly lied, or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, to win defamation suits. The Supreme Court has even granted constitutional protections to outright lies, holding that an interest in truthful discourse alone is not sufficient to sustain a ban on speech. Following SCOTUSs lead, lower courts have invalidated state laws that penalize knowingly false statements made by political campaigns.

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Put simply, politicians and their allies have a First Amendment right to stretch the truth when smearing their opponents, and this right also shields outlets that carry their smears. If the Trump campaign does sue broadcast stations for airing Priorities USAs ad, it will, in all likelihood, lose. It would lose even if the ad peddled an outright falsehood rather than a tendentious recitation of the facts. But its suit would still compel stations to spend sums of money defending themselves in court.

And therein lies the true danger here: not that stations will actually lose in court, but that they grow so afraid of legal action that they self-censor. Trump is already trying to scare reporters out of covering him accurately; he has threatened to sue several news organizations, including CNN, and his campaign filed a frivolous libel suit against the New York Times. Media outlets are already on alert that Trump might draw them into expensive legal battles. In light of Wednesdays letter, TV stations are also now aware of that risk. They may refuse to run ads that contain factually debatable criticisms of the president for fear of a costly lawsuit. Meanwhile, they will all continue to give airtime to the presidents incessant lies, because they are newsworthy. Trump can use the power of the pulpit to tilt the playing field in his favor. He could successfully monopolize the marketplace of ideas in the midst of his reelection campaign.

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The Trump campaigns cease-and-desist letter closes on a note of unintentional comedy, declaring that we will not stand idly by and allow you to broadcast false, deceptive, and misleading information concerning Presidents Trumps healthcare positions without consequence. In fact, no one lies about Trumps healthcare positions more than Trump himself: The president routinely pretends to support protections for preexisting conditions that his administration is currently fighting to overturn. If TV stations could not broadcast false claims, they would never air a single Trump speech. For better or worse, Trump has a right to manipulate the truth to his political advantage. What he cannot do is gag his opponents when they try to punch back in kind.

For more on the impact of the coronavirus, listen to this weeks What Next: TBD.
And still the virus shrouds Donald Trumps mischief in the Middle East.

First it was his sly retreat from Iraq; now its his cosy military exercises with the United Arab Emirates  famous in song and legend as a former Saudi ally in the bloody Yemen war  and his cut of $1bn in aid to Afghanistan because its presidential feuding may hamper another deal with his newly established chums in the Taliban. And then theres Iran...

So lets look for a moment at the extraordinary mock city built in the Emirates  complete with multi-storey buildings, hotels, apartment complexes, an airport control tower, oil refineries and a central mosque  which Emirati troops and US Marines have been assaulting with much clamour in a joint military exercise. According to the Associated Press reporter who watched this Hollywood-style epic, Emirati soldiers rappelled from helicopters while Marines searched narrow streets on the Persian Gulf for mock-enemy forces.

But who were these forces? Iranian, perhaps? In which case, the mock-mosque was presumably Shia, the oil refineries presumably in southern Iran, and the old streets in one of Irans ancient cities. Surely not Shiraz. Surely not Isfahan.

Brigadier General Thomas Savage of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force didnt seem to think the Iranians might find all this a bit suspicious. The exercise  Operation Native Fury, the name of which seemed to carry its own colonial message  is held every two years. Provocative? asked the aforesaid Savage. I dont know. Were about stability in the region. So if they view it as provocative, well, thats up to them. This is just a normal training exercise for us.

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Im not at all sure that its normal for American armed forces to stage make-believe attacks on scale-model Muslim cities complete with mosque and narrow streets in order to create stability in the region. Surely this particular mock-up was not intended to stand in for Yemeni cities, around which Emirati troops had been fighting for four years against pro-Iranian Houthi fighters before turning against their Saudi allies in the same conflict and doing a quick bunk. The 4,000 US troops had been sent into the Emirates from Diego Garcia and Kuwait, where they might have recently arrived from the three newly abandoned American bases in Iraq. General Savage said none of his men had tested positive for the coronavirus and have had little contact with the outside world since shipping out for the exercise.

In a different context, Trump, who also has little contact with the outside world  the real one, that is  has been back to blackmailing his allies in the region. While much of that world continues to obsess about imminent pestilential death, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has suddenly  and with very little publicity  cut $1bn in aid to Afghanistan and threatened further reductions in cooperation. This is a bitter blow for a nation also facing Covid-19 (we can probably dismiss the handful of declared cases and two deaths there as an absurd underestimation), but America comes first!

Trump and Pompeo, you see, are very, very angry that both Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah are claiming to have been elected president in the recent elections  thus endangering the agreement between Washington and the Taliban to withdraw all US forces in return for the Talibans promise to fight Isis, al-Qaeda and all other jihadis wandering around Afghanistan. The signed understanding between the US and what I suppose we must call Talibanistan also includes a mutual exchange of prisoners (5,000 of the Taliban for 1,000 government troops) to which both of the rival presidents object.

Abdullah and Ghani, who was once described by his old university in Beirut as a global thinker, appear to have forgotten the words of the Persian medieval poet Saadi: that while 10 poor people could sleep on a carpet, two kings could not fit into a single kingdom.

You can see why Pompeo is upset. Not since rival popes  and, I suppose, earlier rival Roman emperors  simultaneously announced their supremacy have we witnessed such a pairing of panjandrums. If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, it is also the font of hubris for its local masters  who, with their palaces, villas, bodyguards and 4x4s will not be affected by the cut in aid. If the two men were to reach a resolution to their dispute, Pompeo has announced, the US sanctions will be revisited  proving that this is indeed a spot of blackmail by Trump.

But US sanctions are clearly not going to be revisited in relation to Iran, which claims  not without some justice  that the ban on imports is hindering its own struggle against Covid-19.

The UN has called for such sanctions to be urgently re-evaluated, pointing out that human-rights reports have already described the malign effect of sanctions on Iran's access to respirators and protective clothes for healthcare workers. The Iranians, with the declared number of cases above 27,000 and more than 2,000 confirmed deaths, may have covered up many more victims  and this, remember, is a regime that couldnt tell the difference between a Ukrainian airliner and an American cruise missile (and lied about it for two days). They clearly need help. American sanctions, however, matter more than the coronavirus in the Middle East.

So, alas, does Iranian amour propre. With truly Trumpian fantasy  for the US president still calls the virus Chinese  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, inspired it seems by a Chinese official's comments, has suggested that Covid-19 was man-made in America and that US medicine is a way to spread the virus more. This sort of claptrap is on a level with former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who claimed that a halo shone over his head at the UN and that his listeners didnt blink for half an hour while he spoke. You [Americans] might send people as doctors and therapists; maybe they would want to come here and see the effect of the poison they have produced in person, announced the 80-year-old divine.

After this nonsense, Imran Khan, the Pakistani prime minister, was perhaps the only regional leader who could still appeal to the US to lift the sanctions on "humanitarian grounds until the virus has receded. Needless to say, he was wasting his time.

And finally, a US Marine Osprey V-22 helicopter took off from the US embassy compound in Beirut last week, carrying aboard Amer Fakhoury, a former member of Israels proxy South Lebanon Army militia. Fakhoury, now a US citizen, had returned to Lebanon last September to visit his family  he was met at Beirut airport by a senior army officer  but was recognised by former prisoners as an ex-warden at Israels notorious Khiam jail. He was immediately accused by the Lebanese authorities of torturing inmates and brought before a military tribunal.

Fakhoury denied, and still denies, all the charges against him. He was subsequently released when a judge said the crimes levelled against him occurred more than 10 years ago. Fakhoury, who entered hospital in Beirut suffering from stage 4 lymphoma, had fled across the border after Israels retreat from Lebanon in 2000. An appeal was lodged against his release by a military judge, but Fakhoury was nonetheless flown out of Lebanon. Weve been working very hard to get him freed, Trump said, which is true: a US embassy official insisted on attending the military court last year when Fakhoury made his first appearance.

Khiam prison was infamous for the torture and mistreatment of Shia Muslim prisoners  both male and female. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch published numerous and detailed reports of torture at the jail, and The Independent also published eyewitness accounts of torture. Fakhourys release prompted an outburst of fury from Lebanese parties who believed that their government had acted under threat of economic sanctions from Washington.

There were even claims that the Hezbollah militia, paid and armed by Iran, had been involved in discussions over Fakhourys release with a representative of the Trump administration. Its leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, in a rare burst of anger, denied such a conspiracy.

Of course, scarcely anyone saw the departure of Lebanons most famous prisoner. For as the American helicopter lifted him to freedom over the Mediterranean, Beiruts inhabitants were hiding in their homes to avoid catching Covid-19.
Weather Alert

...Winter Storm System to Impact the Region this Weekend... A strong winter storm system will push east through the Quad State Saturday into Sunday. Wintry precipitation will spread eastward into southern Illinois and southeast Missouri late Friday night, and then southeast over the remainder of the region Saturday morning. The evolution of the storm for the remainder of the weekend is quite uncertain at this time. The ultimate path and intensity of the storm system, along with the temperature forecast, will determine how impactful it will be across the Quad State. For now you are encouraged to monitor the latest forecasts and follow your winter weather preparedness plans ahead of this potentially impactful winter storm.
Krispy Kreme will give free doughnuts to healthcare workers on Mondays, beginning March 30, and customers beginning March 28.

March 30 is National Doctors Day, according to Krispy Kreme. The promotion will continue on Mondays through National Nurses Week, May 6-12.

Healthcare workers with an employer badge can receive free dozens of Krispy Kremes Original Glazed Doughnuts.

The company also will give everyone a free dozen glazed doughnuts with the purchase of one dozen to customers using the pick-up, drive-thru or delivery options. That begins on March 28. Each of those dozen doughnuts will include a special smiley-face doughnut.

A message to our sweet Community 

More information from Krispy Kreme about COVID-19 can be found here https://t.co/RnOiPjwFDO. pic.twitter.com/inZJpyACSg  Krispy Kreme (@krispykreme) March 19, 2020

The thousands of free dozens on Saturdays will be securely sealed and bagged individually, along with instructions for contactless drop-off, including social distancing and safety guidelines, according to Krispy Kreme.

While weve adjusted hours of operation at shops in some communities to comply with state and/or local government guidelines, most Krispy Kreme shops and drive-thrus in the U.S. are open for pick-up orders. Doughnuts are also available for delivery within 10 miles of participating shops through our website and app ...

MORE CORONAVIRUS NEWS

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Vietnam National Garment and Textile Group (Vinatex) will ask for the Governments permission to export anti-virus products as a measure to overcome difficulties caused by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Face masks produced at a member company of Vinatex.

Those include products like antiviral face masks, antibacterial medical clothing and non-woven disposable clothes.

Vinatex would enhance its search for export orders of anti-virus products.

Le Tien Truong, Vinatexs director said at the groups online conference with 22 of its member companies on Wednesday that the COVID-19 pandemic is weighing heavily on the garment and textile industry.

From the beginning of March, a number of orders were cancelled, Truong said, anticipating that April and May would be a difficult time for many companies, including losing financial liquidity due to high stockpiles or shortages of jobs for workers.

Vinatex said that although many factories in China resumed operation but due to dimmed global consumption demand, the industry would see significant decreases in prices, estimated at more than 20 per cent.

This was creating considerable pressure on local garment and textile producers, Truong said.

Vinatex estimated that if the COVID-19 pandemic was over in May and the economy started to recover from June, the industry would suffer a loss of VND11 trillion (US$474 million).  VNS
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on March 25 gave permission to four more institutes to conduct COVID-19 tests. The four new testing centres  two private and two public facilities  takes the total tally of testing centres in the densely-populated city to 11.

The two new private facilities are Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital Laboratory located in Andheri and InfeXn Laboratories located in Thane. The public institutes granted permission to conduct tests are Sir JJ Hospital in Nagpada and Haffkine Institute in Parel.

The Maximum City, which is currently under complete lockdown, has already reported 62 patients who have tested positive for COVID-19, and the numbers only seem to increase by the day.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has constantly been stressing on the need to carry out more and more tests to ascertain the actual number of patients infected by the novel coronavirus. However, this has mostly remained unachieved, due to the dearth of testing facilities across the country.















Officials believe this will increase the citys testing capacity up to 1,000 samples per day could help map and analyse the spread of the deadly virus in the city far better, Mumbai Mirror reported.



Until now, COVID-19 tests were mostly being conducted at KEM hospital and Kasturba Hospital  where most coronavirus patients are being treated.















Notably, walk-in COVID-19 tests would not be conducted in any private laboratories. These will only test the samples of suspected cases enlisted by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

The samples will be collected by the respective laboratories from the quarantine centres or homes of suspected patients, depending on where they are put up.















Disclaimer: Reliance Industries Ltd is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd















Currently, there are 112 government laboratories across the country where COVID-19 tests are being carried out. Together they can carry out tests for 9,000 samples daily, each of which takes at least three hours to be completed.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 13:10:38|Editor: huaxia

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SUVA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Vanuatu declared on Thursday a state of emergency as part of its efforts to curb COVID-19.

In a national address on Thursday, Vanuatu's caretaker Prime Minister Charlot Salwai said that the declaration was necessary to allow the government to mobilize resources and funding for their coronavirus response.

It was also to enforce restrictions by health authorities and the national disaster management office, which he said were currently being ignored by many, he said, adding that there would be further restrictions on travel, clamping down on the spreading of false information and making sure people are social distancing, hand washing and other good health practices.

He encouraged Vanuatuans to not panic, saying that this will help them know what steps they should take to protect them from this virus.

On Tuesday, Vanuatu's Council of Ministers (COM) had agreed for the government to declare a state of emergency (SOE) due to coronavirus.

Currently, there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the island nation.
H.E. Nana Addo

The Office of the President

Jubilee House

Accra.

Dear Mr. President,

Your Excellency, the tactical approach in handling coved-19 since 12th March, 2020 when Ghana recorded the first two cases of coved-19 needs to be recommended as observed by JOY2020 health and international intelligence monitoring team on Covid-19. After prayers and fasting, the good Lord will not miraculously kill coved-19 but His Spirit will give us wisdom and courage to defeat coved-19 in Ghana.

However, the strategic approach should rather explore local contextual solution based on covid-19 adapted behaviour in our environment, especially the weather conditions for the month of April and May will be crucial.

Ghanaian scientists and medical experts will have to use the secondary precautionary pieces of information from China and other developed nations as a foundation to study the adapted environmental behaviour of coved-19 in Ghana. The JOY2020 Health team will not belabour your team in trying to adopt the same solutions as China and other developed nations.

The JOY2020 team however, would want to suggest the government hastens slowly and rather strategically adopt a solution based on the scientific understanding of the NATURE OF COVID-19, Ghana's economic and socio-cultural endeavour. This approach will enable Ghana to define our own scientific lockdown that will not have adverse ramifications on our authentic existence.

We will therefore suggest the following complementary approach

1. By nature of coved-19, we mean how coved-19 attack the body, the process of invading the host organism and period it takes to hijack the host's genetic instructions. How long coved-19 can remain viable and capable of infection after passing the skin and mucus to enter a suitable cell.

2. What temperature, humidity and aerosol conditions is suitable for coved-19 to incubate and begin to replicate. What factors and interventions that can be made before and during incubation to deactivate and stop coved-19 to serve as precautionary preventive measures.

3. A team of virologists and meteorologists as a matter of urgency to team up to stimulate the next two months weather conditions in Ghana and behavioural pattern of coved-19 to enable Ghana deal with contextual intervention to flatten the growth curve in our socio-cultural settings.

4. Barring coved-19, 38 cases of quarantined importers into Ghana, the 30 cases among the population is lower than the expected exponential growth of covid-19 cases since 12th March, 2020. Covid-19 should have reported 32 cases as at 24th March, 2020. Using the foundation of doubling Covid-19 cases every three days, it is expected that by 27th March, the population cases should rise to 64. If this pattern is not observed, the fear and pressure of lockdown is nonexistent. It will be the second time the growth curve among the population showing signs of flattening.

5. In the case, the growth exceeds the expected, Ghana can have a long weekend of lockdown from Saturday 28th -31st March, which could be family home retreat period and holiday. The team of virologists and scientists should have been ready with pieces of information and attitude to flatten the curve and deactivate the growth of coved-19.

6. Ghana should consider daily inhalation of vapour at temperatures above 50 degree every night before sleep as an intelligence preventive measure before the team of virologists and meteorologists affirm. WHO has cautioned a prevailing temperature and humidity that can aerosolized covid-19 and Ghana needs to search for such conditions. This is to deactivate coved-19 before and during incubation.

7. The retired health workers patronage is a good idea but their lives could be threatened by coved-19. However, government can train and employ the services of unemployed nurses and health workers. We need to reconsider how these health workers could be assigned within geographical radii to assess and attend to patients who are not in critical conditions at their residences to support them.

8. The government should be resolute and courageous in giving factual information about the effects of covid-19 so Ghanaians will adopt appropriate attitude to defeat coved-19. Total lockdown may not be appropriate solution for Ghana.

9. If Ghanaians adopt coved-19 attitude towards all bacterial and virus infections the cost of health will reduce and productivity of the workforce will increase.

10. After prayers and fasting, God will fill us with His Holy Spirit to discover the cure and perpetually prevent and defeat coved-19 with vaccination and medication. The better lesson will be an improved hygienist lifestyle by Ghanaians.

JOY2020 health team would like to thank all those who are risking their lives to save lives and defeat covid-19 and all those who in diverse ways are donating and educating selflessly towards the same purpose.

Thank you H.E NANA Addo for your attention and may God help courageous stakeholders to continue to find contextual local solution for covid-19 and Ghanaians who are more than willing to follow the appropriate instruction.

Yours Sincerely,

Jacob Osei Yeboah (aka JOY2012)

(Independent Presidential Candidate 2012 & 2016)

Cc:

1. COVID-19 COMMITTEE

2. The Media
A bomb blast took place near a Sikh crematorium in the Afghan capital on Thursday, injuring a child and disrupting funeral services for 25 members of the minority community who had been killed by a heavily armed Islamic State suicide bomber a day earlier.

A magnetic bomb went off close to the Sikh cremation in Kabul, Pajhwok Afghan quoted a policeman as saying.

It said a child was injured in the blast, which also disrupted the funeral services for the victims of the Islamic State attack on a prominent gurdwara on Wednesday in the heart of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul.

Thursday's attack was the second assault on the minority community in as many days.

Wednesday's attack was one of the deadliest targeting the Sikh community in the strife-torn country. Eighty people, including women and children, were rescued from the gurdwara.

TOLOnews, quoting sources in the Afghan government blaming the dreaded Haqqani group for the attack. The Pakistan-based Haqqani group, designated by the US as a banned terror outfit, has conducted several deadly attacks inside Afghanistan.

Sikh lawmaker Nardendar Singh Khalsa told reporters that up to 150 people were praying inside the gurdwara when it came under attack.

Khalsa, the only representative of the Sikh community in Afghanistan, said he received a call from a worshipper inside the gurdwara, informing him about the attack.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani condemned the attack on the gurdwara, saying the attack on the religious sites shows the extreme weakness of the enemy, religious sites should not be vulnerable to attacks and violence.

War-torn Afghanistan is currently mired in a political stalemate with two politicians- Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah - both claiming victory in the presidential election.

Sikhs have been target of attacks by Islamist militants before in Afghanistan.

In July 2018, ISIS terrorists bombed a gathering of Sikhs and Hindus in the eastern city of Jalalabad, killing 19 people and injuring 20.

Awtar Singh Khalsa, one of the country's best-known Sikh politicians then, was among those killed in the attack.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Senior US Diplomat Alice Wells on Thursday said that United States is working with public health professionals of all SAARC members to fight COVID-19 in the subcontinent, amid the coronavirus pandemic which has infected over half a million people globally.

"For decades our partnership in the Indo Pacific has strengthened emergency preparedness, response and public health infrastructure. Proud the US is working with science, medicine and public health professionals of all SAARC members to fight COVID19," Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (PDAS) Wells wrote on Twitter.

"SAARC's USD 18.8 million emergency fund to counter COVID19 is an excellent example of South Asian countries coming together to fight a global pandemic. Looking forward to seeing more regional cooperation and collaboration on this shared challenge," she added.

She further lauded the spirits of doctors in India tackling coronavirus situation in the county.

"Wonderful to see resilience and unwavering spirits in the midst of the COVID19 crisis. Inspired by these singing doctors in India, we send our respect and gratitude to healthcare workers around the for their vital work during this time," she said.

On Thursday, Wells had echoed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call to keep fighting spirits high against the coronavirus pandemic, saying that United States will work alongside India to combat the COVID-19 outbreak.

"We stand united with India and echo Narendra Modi's call to keep up our fighting spirits. The US will work shoulder to shoulder with India to combat the COVID-19 outbreak. Together, we can safeguard our citizens and people everywhere," Wells said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Given the extended deadline, the secretary of state is recommending that residents wait until their drivers license or ID card is about to expire before visiting a Driver Services facility to obtain a Real ID. Residents whose current cards expire after the extended Real ID deadline in October 2021 can use a valid U.S. passport to board domestic flights until they must renew their identification, White said.
The presidency has defended the refusal of President Muhammadu Buhari to address Nigerians on the coronavirus pandemic.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how several presidents worldwide including those of African countries like Ghana and South Africa have been addressing their citizens on the pandemic regularly.

Many Nigerians have criticised the president for not addressing them despite the increasing cases of the disease in the country.

Mr Buharis spokesperson, Femi Adesina, while speaking on a Channels Television programme on Thursday, however, said Mr Buharis silence is a style.

Its a matter of style, Mr Adesina said.

If you go back to school you will remember in Stylistic class we were told that is idiosyncratic, which means it differs from person to person. The style that A adopts may not be the one that B adopts. There is no style we can call the style for everybody. Everybody is at liberty to adopt a style that suits him.

The style our president has adopted is to set up a presidential Taskforce committee headed by the SGF which meets regularly. You have the health minister, grant go briefs, the minister of state health who also briefs, the NCDC also briefs, there is no lack of information.

Mr Adesinas explanation comes days after the information minister, Lai Mohammed, said it was not yet the appropriate time for Mr Buhari to address Nigerians on the matter.

On Thursday, Mr Adesina refused to speak on the health status of the Chief of Staff to the President, Abba Kyari, who tested positive for the virus.

READ ALSO:

He, however, said the presidency, like most of Nigeria, was not working at full throttle because of the regulations on the virus.

Office are fairly on a low key in the presidency because the entire country is also on a low key. We cant say we are running at a full blast now, he said.

Nigeria has now confirmed 65 cases of COVID-19 including 14 confirmed Thursday night

Only one person has died from the disease in Nigeria.

Read Mr Adesinas full responses to questions asked on Thursday.

Q: How the presidency is conducting day to day activity

Adesina: Office are fairly on a low key in the Presidency because the entire country is also on a low key. We cant say we are running at a full blast now. Instead of holding meetings where we seat round the table, we can do virtual meetings, consult and contact one another in different ways, we dont have to hold the meeting in the normal way we use to. But things are low key.

Q: On fumigation

Adesina: It is a normal thing it is done from time to time. The villa is under a retainer-ship, people that keep it clean, that fumigate from time to time so there is nothing extraordinary about it.

Q: How is chief of staff doing?

Adesina: Obviously you listened to the minister of health earlier in the day when he briefed, he didnt confirm, he just said an aide to the President. So I wouldnt be mentioning names.

Q: I asked how the presidents chief of staff is doing, I asked you earlier how you were doing and you said you were fine. So I am just asking how the chief of staff is doing if you know?

Adesina: Because I have not seen him for a couple of days so I wouldnt be able to tell you that this is how he is. If you ask me about the President I will tell you the President was still in the office yesterday, I will tell you that Mr. President is doing fine.

Q: Im sure you are aware of the news about the state of health of the Presidents chief of staff. Of course we wish everyone the best at this time but it is important to have some form of clarification on this matter. People are wondering is the presidency keeping mum on this deliberately?

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Adesina: No. But you also need to remember that it is a question of ethics. If the health minister who is a reputed medical doctor came out to brief and he didnt mention names, it tells you it is in the realm of ethics. Anybody passing through a health condition is the one that can authorized that it be revealed, nobody else not even a doctor treating that person dare reveal it. Otherwise you will be bridging the ethics. Prince Charles for instance tested positive, he said reveal it and a statement was issued to that effect, he authorized it.

Our Vice President tested negative and he said disclose it and his media aide disclosed it. So that is the way it is done ethically.

Q: As a matter of closure on this what will you be telling Nigerians?

Adesina: I will be telling Nigerians that we are part of the global Community. The world has an emergency, had a crisis, the world has is battling it with each country trying as much as it could within its capacity, nigeria is part of that global community. The country is doing its best lets stay focused, lets continue to battle this virus which is a common enemy of humanity and lets leave little things aside and face the major thing.

Q: Why are there no daily briefings from presidency like its been done in other nations?

Adesina: Its a matter of style. If you go back to school you will remember in Stylistic class we were told that is idiosyncratic, which means it differs from person to person. The style that A adopts may not be the one that B adopts. There is no style we can call the style for everybody. Everybody is at liberty to adopt a style that suits him. The style our president has adopted is to set up a presidential Taskforce committee headed by the SGF which meets regularly. You have the health minister, grant go briefs, the minister of state health who also briefs, the NCDC also briefs, there is no lack of information.

Q: Nigerians wonder has the love the president shown them in 2019 when he was campaigning been lost?

Adesina: There are two commensurates, this you cannot parallel with campaigns, this is about day to day affair of the country. No, you cannot compare the two. If it becomes imperative for the president himself to speak, he will speak. But the presidents style is that when he gives you an assignment, he leaves you to do it. There are people that he has set up in committees, in Taskforces, in groups and they are doing the work and they keep Nigerians abreast with developments, so we let them do it.
A 22-year old woman and a 27-year old man have both recovered from coronavirus and will be discharged from the Government Institute of Medical Sciences in Uttar Pradeshs Greater Noida by Thursday evening, said officials. The woman is a student from Jharkhand who is pursuing medical studies in Georgia and the man is an engineer from Sector 41 in Noida.

The medical student was found positive for the virus after she returned to Noida from France, where she had gone on a trip before returning to India as her college extended the break amid Covid-19.

I had flown down with my sister and two friends. I had no symptoms at the airport but we were given a toll-free number to inform if we develop any. After reaching home, on March 14, I developed dry cough and blockage of the nose after which I called on the toll-free number who then directed me to GIMS, said the 22-year-old discharged patient.

She was full of praise for the medical staff at the hospital and said she had volunteered to stay at the hospital even when initially presented with the option of home quarantine.

They asked me if I want to go under home quarantine or get admitted and I chose to stay in the hospital. I have been in the isolation ward for 10 days and the medical staff has done everything possible to cure us, added the medical student.

But her experience of the infrastructure at the hospital was not so great.

The doctors and the medical staff have been working really hard but there is a need to improve the infrastructure. I havent taken bath since I was admitted on March 15. There were no separate bathrooms for women and men. The existing bathroom was also not in a running condition as the water pipes were leaking. I was using wet wipes sent by my father to clean myself. People were scared to come close to us, so we had to clean ourselves. Following the lockdown, my father couldnt send wet wipes since yesterday, said the medical student.

The head of department, medicine and the head of the medical team treating Covid-19 patients said that initially few arrangements were missing as the isolation wards were set up on an emergency basis but things have improved now.

We are happy that two more patients are ready to get discharged after two of their reports have come negative for the infection. Initially, there was a problem of the bathroom as the arrangements were made in an emergency. Now we have separate bathrooms for women and men. There was Covid-19 ward set up in the hospital so it took some time to put things in place, said Dr Saurabh Shrivastava, HOD, medicine.

On Wednesday night a 23-year-old patient from sector 78 was discharged from the hospital. Doctors said the only way to avoid Covid-19 infection was to maintain social distancing.

It is important for people to follow the guidelines of the health department to maintain social distancing. There is no fixed treatment for Covid-19 till now but the antimalarial medicines which have been used all over the world have shown results in the case of these three patients, added Shrivastava.

The discharged medical student says that it is important for people to behave responsibly without panicking.

People need to follow the proper protocol of informing officials if they have any symptoms. Once I realized that I have got symptoms, I stayed away from my sister and two friends who were later found negative for the virus, she said.

She added that patients undergoing treatment need to trust the nursing staff and shouldnt question the treatment.

There were many patients who were questioning the medical staff which only makes their job difficult so it is necessary to maintain your calm and to have faith that you will be cured, said the 22-year-old.

Another discharged patient, a 26-year-old resident of Sector 41, had travelled to Indonesia via Malaysia with his wife and returned to India on March 3. He was admitted on March 18 in the isolation ward of GIMS after his reports confirmed him positive for Covid-19.
(Corrects headline to say tens, not ten)

By Stephanie Nebehay and Lucia Mutikani

GENEVA/WASHINGTON, March 26 (Reuters) - Global job losses from the coronavirus crisis could far exceed the 25 million estimated just days ago, U.N. officials said on Thursday, as U.S. jobless claims surged to record levels, starkly showing the scale of the economic disaster.

The International Labour Organization, a U.N. agency, had estimated a week ago that, based on different scenarios for the impact of the pandemic on growth, the global ranks of the jobless would rise by between 5.3 million and 24.7 million.

However Sangheon Lee, director of the ILO's employment policy department, told Reuters in Geneva on Thursday that the scale of temporary unemployment, lay-offs and the number of unemployment benefit claims were far higher than first expected.

"We are trying to factor the temporary massive shock into our estimate modelling. The magnitude of fluctuation is much bigger than expected," he said.

"The projection will be much bigger, far higher than the 25 million we estimated."

By comparison, the 2008/9 global financial crisis increased global unemployment by 22 million.

In the United States, where, as in many parts of the world, measures to contain the pandemic have brought the country to a sudden halt, the number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits surged to more than 3 million last week.

That shattered the previous record of 695,000 set in 1982. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims would rise to 1 million, though estimates were as high as 4 million.

The data added to an alarming scenario spelled out by James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, who warned that up to 46 million people in the country - nearly a third of U.S. workers - could lose their jobs in the short term.

INDIAN LOCKDOWN

Countries across the world are feeling the intense human and economic pain wrought by the coronavirus, which has infected more than 470,000 people, killed more than 21,000, and is expected to trigger a global recession.

In India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown this week to stem the spread of the disease, industry groups warned job losses could run into the tens of millions.

Story continues

Garish Oberoi, treasurer of the Federation of Associations in Indian Tourism & Hospitality, told Reuters that the trade group estimates that about 38 million jobs could be lost in the tourism and hospitality sector alone.

Among those hardest hit will be India's estimated 120 million migrant labourers, for whom the lockdown means wages are disappearing. Many cannot afford rent or food in the cities and, with transport systems shut down, many have now begun to walk hundreds of miles to return to their villages.

In Europe, France is pulling out the stops to persuade companies not to fire their employees, including through a scheme that allows businesses to reduce worker hours without the employee taking a massive pay hit.

The Labour Ministry said nearly 100,000 French companies have asked the government to reimburse them for putting 1.2 million workers on shorter or zero hours since the outbreak, with more than half of requests coming on Monday and Tuesday.

'UNEMPLOYMENT CRISIS'

In Britain, the government said 477,000 people had applied over the past nine days for Universal Credit, a payment to help with living costs for those unemployed or on low incomes. The Resolution Foundation think-tank said that was an increase of more than 500 percent from the same period of 2019.

It said the jump showed that the country was "already in the midst of an unemployment crisis that is building much faster than during the financial crisis".

Ireland's unemployment rate could meanwhile soar to around 18% by the summer from 4.8% last month, the Economic and Social Research Institute think-tank said on Thursday, projecting a recession with output contracting by 7.1% in 2020.

"Unemployment is extremely sensitive and volatile in response to economic activity, that is quite worrisome in our view," said Lee of the International Labour Organization.

"The sentiment among businesses is maybe it will take more time to get back to normal activities," he said. "They are making quick decisions to adjust their workforce rather than keeping workers." (Additional reporting by Dan Burns in New York, Euan Rocha in Mumbai, Graham Fahy in Dublin and Richard Lough in Paris; Writing by Pravin Char; Editing by John Chalmers and Nick Tattersall)
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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Brasilia, Brazil  Thu, March 26, 2020 10:30 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d78050 2 World Brazil,Jair-Bolsonaro,coronavirus,Wuhan-coronavirus,COVID-19,pandemic,health Free

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro drew blistering criticism from the medical community and opponents Wednesday for downplaying the coronavirus pandemic, but renewed his attacks on containment measures to slow its spread.

The far-right leader has repeatedly lashed out at restrictive measures to fight the virus, which he has called a "little flu" that caused an "overblown" reaction.

He triggered new outrage among critics with a national address Tuesday night condemning "scorched-earth" containment measures by local authorities, such as closing businesses and confining people in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's biggest cities.

He said such measures risked wrecking the Brazilian economy, Latin America's largest.

His stance, which flies in the face of World Health Organization recommendations, drew a strongly worded letter of condemnation from a group of eight medical professional associations.

They called Bolsonaro an "enemy of the people's health" whose response to the crisis was "incoherent and criminal."

"He denies the body of scientific evidence guiding the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, disdaining the serious and dedicated work by a national and global network of researchers and health technology professionals," it said.

Politicians of various stripes also attacked Bolsonaro, including center-right Senate president Davi Alcolumbre, who said Brazil "needs a serious, responsible leader who cares about the people's lives and health."

Undeterred, Bolsonaro doubled down.

"Companies aren't producing anything. They can't pay their employees... We are facing chaos," he told journalists outside the presidential residence in Brasilia.

"We could end up with problems like people looting supermarkets... What do we need to do? Get people back to work. Protect the elderly, protect people with health problems, but that's it."

Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has been criticized for praising Brazil's brutal military dictatorship (1964-1985), also warned the fallout of the coronavirus crisis could put democracy at risk.

"What if this derails the 'democratic norm' you all defend so staunchly?" he asked, adding: "It wouldn't come from me, don't worry."

He compared his approach to the pandemic to that of US President Donald Trump, whom he admires.

"We're following a similar line," he said.
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Linkedin Ni Komang Erviani (The Jakarta Post) Denpasar  Thu, March 26, 2020 16:48 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d99056 1 National COVID-19,Bali-tourism,lockdown,Indonesia Free

To contain the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, the Bali administration ordered people to stay at home on Thursday for the normally bustling festival of Ngembak Geni, the day after Nyepi (Hindu Day of Silence), during which Balinese people traditionally throng the islands beaches and public places in celebration.

The resort island has reported at least nine confirmed COVID-19 cases with two deaths, a relatively small number compared to Jakarta, which has more than 500 cases and 40 deaths. Scientists, however, believe the province may have underreported its cases and that thousands of infected people may have gone undetected.

In a first, the police and the pecalang (traditional Balinese security officers) were deployed to enforce the order on Thursday.

The island was uncharacteristically quiet during this years Ngembak Geni. Tourist sites, malls, shops, traditional markets and banks were all closed. Only ambulances and emergency vehicles were seen on the streets. Pecalang periodically stopped people from entering or exiting villages.

We are urging all people not to leave their houses to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Nengah Dira, a pecalang from Sumerta village, said.

The Balinese administration had previously advised people to practice physical distancing, but on Thursday it chose to make the policy mandatory. The strict policy, issued on March 23, however, will apply only on Ngembak Geni, after which residents are merely advised to practice physical distancing.

The fast spread of COVID-19 should be responded to with caution and should be anticipated to prevent more victims. The most effective prevention strategy is to limit outdoor activities and social interaction, Bali Governor Wayan Koster said.

Regents and mayors across Bali also issued similar policies on Thursday. Some of them even closed access to their regions.

Ida Penglingsir Agung Putra Sukahet, who heads the Bali Grand Council of Customary Villages, endorsed the policy to extend the Day of Silence, saying it was needed to stop the spread of the virus.

We hope people will follow it. Its for our safety, he said, adding that family gatherings could now take place on Whatsapp.

While some residents supported the policy, others found it excessive. Kadek Dewi, an employee at a private hospital in Denpasar, had to argue with the pecalang before she could go to work after being told to provide a letter showing that she was, in fact, a hospital employee. I work at a hospital. Patients need food, she said.

The Russian Embassy in Jakarta sent a letter to the Bali governor on Thursday asking him to exempt a number of Russian tourists scheduled for a flight to Moscow that day. Many of our [citizens] cannot go to the airport to board the flight, Russian Ambassador Liudmila Vorobieva said in the letter.

Some tourists were still seen enjoying their holiday on the beaches in front of the hotels where they were staying.

Despite the enforced physical distancing policy, Gilimanuk seaport and Gusti Ngurah Rai airport were still operating.

"Bali airport is operating normally today, with 171 scheduled flights," the airports spokesperson, Arie Ahsanurrohim, said.

Bali declared an alert security status on March 15 in response to the outbreak, asking schools to hold classes online and civil servants to work from home. On March 17, the Indonesian Hindu Religious Council ordered a limitation on religious festivals such as ogoh-ogoh (spirit effigy) processions.

These policies were followed by the administrations decision to close major tourist destinations across the island.
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani says he has sent a letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei seeking his permission to withdraw one billion dollars from the country's foreign currency reserve to spend on the fight against the coronavirus outbreak.

Speaking at a meeting of his administration's economic committee on Thursday March 26, Rouhani said that his Health Ministry needs $1 billion for the next three months to control the outbreak.

He said the sum is to be spent particularly on hospital equipment, public health and hygienic needs.

The foreign currency reserve, officially known as the National Development Fund is a government institution that is meant to safekeep Iran's national wealth and is not supposed to make up for budget deficits. However, it is not clear how much foreign currency has been saved in the fund.

Nevertheless, following a U.S. attack near Baghdad airport which killed the IRGC's Qods Force Commander in January, Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said that Khamenei has allocated 200 million ($220m) out of the fund to the Qods Force.

He had also given several hundreds of millions of dollars to the IRGC and the state-owned TV IRIB in previous years out of the fund originally set up to save for Iran's future generations.

While demanding the hard currency, Rouhani continued his usual bravado about the country's economic potentials. "We are in a better position than many other countries in the world although we have been under pressure by U.S. sanctions," he said.

While many COVID-19 patients are suffering in makeshift beds in hospital corridors and car parks he said on Wednesday there were many empty hospital beds in Iranian hospitals.

Rouhani had said in January that Iran has lost $200 billion during the past three years primarily as a result of the sanctions primarily in lost oil sale and restrictions on international banking operations.

The United States has sanctioned Iran's oil export and says Iran spends its oil revenue to fund international terrorist groups and develop its ballistic missile program as well as its controversial nuclear program.

The coronavirus outbreak in Iran has claimed at least three thousand lives as of March 26 based on an exclusive Radio Farda report which summed up the figures given away by local officials. However, official statistics tend to play down the problem. The latest announcement by the government on Thursday put the number of deaths over 2,200 and the number of patients under 30,000.

The Rouhani administration has so far refused to introduce quarantine regulations to control the outbreak. However, in a belated measure announced on March 25, Iranian officials broke the news about travel restrictions, social distancing and quasi-lockdowns to be started "soon."

The Iranian government has been criticized to allow millions of Iranian to go on Nowruz New Year holidays in various parts of the country. The new directives are being issued while holiday makers are returning to their hometowns and experts believe this may lead to a renewed surge in the number of coronavirus patients.

Ali Rabiei, the spokesman for the Rouhani administration said following a meeting on Wednesday: "Travelers coming back to Tehran should no longer travel from town to town on their way to the capital. They should take direct routes via expressways to avoid multiple inspections. Passengers will be checked at the exits of the cities."

He added that "The Health Ministry and the Red Crescent are prepared to issue health certificates to passengers to facilitate their easy return."

Rabiei said that crowded centers in the cities such as parks and shops that do not provide the people's essential needs will be closed. He called on the people to cooperate with the officials in order to cut short the life cycle of the virus.

Meanwhile, Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said: "Arrivals and departures in all cities will be controlled more seriously. Therefore, we ask the people to cooperate with the officers when this project starts on 26 or 27 March and contribute to the plan's success."
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang speaks during a daily briefing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs office in Beijing on March 18, 2020. American journalists were expelled from China in retaliation for a new limit imposed by the Trump administration on visas for Chinese state-owned media operating in the United States. (Andy Wong/AP Photo)

Have They No Shame? American Communists Exploit CCP Virus to Propagandize for Their Chinese Masters

Commentary

Several of this countrys many communist parties are loyal to the Chinese regime rather than to the United States of America. Consequently, its not surprising that some American communists are closely echoing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda line over the coronavirus pandemic.

The United States main pro-CCP communist partiesFreedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and Liberation Roadare disseminating three major propaganda themes:

Firstly, deflect blame for the pandemic away from the CCP. Promote the lie that the CCP is leading the world in virus containment, even though the disease gained an international foothold precisely because the Chinese regime covered up and lied about the seriousness of the outbreakand is probably still doing so.

Secondly, hew to the line that socialist health care systems and planned economies are far superior at containing epidemics than is heartless capitalism. The rich are profiting off the poor and the middle class, and only socialism can bring justice.

Thirdly, defend the CCP at all costs from any accountability or shame for its negligence (or worse). Paint China as a victim of U.S. aggression and prepare to defend Beijing from Western sanctions or even U.S. military attack. Divert as much blame as possible onto President Donald Trump and the U.S. government.

Even a cursory reading of American communist websites will soon reveal consistent propaganda patterns.

Minneapolis-based FRSO leader Steff Yorek extolled the virtues of Chinese socialism in a March 18 FightBack! News article.

As the number of confirmed cases of the viral illness COVID-19 approaches 200,000 worldwide, we can already see how differently issues of public health and human needs are treated in socialist countries vs. capitalist countries.

COVID-19 was first detected in Wuhan, a major city in the Peoples Republic of China. Local officials took three to four weeks to recognize its significance. Once the threat was clear, the whole of the country and vast resources were mobilized. Everything was shut down to stop the virus in its tracks. People were quarantined at home as new hospitals were constructed, some in as little as ten-days time, to manage the large numbers of sick people.

Because there is a cradle-to-grave social safety net in socialist China, people could be quarantined at home, with neighbors assigned to check on each home, identify needs and find solutions. China shut down the country for eight weeks for the singular purpose of saving lives.

As of today, most of the deaths from COVID-19 are outside China, and the epidemic in China is essentially under control. All those wealthy countries, even those with national health systems, have not been as effective as China in combatting the disease. This shows the superiority of a socialist society, where serving the wealthy is not the first priority of the government.

In a March 17, FightBack! report, an unnamed FRSO cadre wrote from Guangdong, China, on the situation on the ground there. He or she makes some very unflattering and completely untruthful comparisons between the CCP response to the pandemic and that of President Trump and the U.S. government.

There is chaos in America right now surrounding COVID-19. Americans are receiving conflicting information every day about the virus, with no direction from the Trump administration. The Trump administration has decided that the best course of action is to do nothing, with Trump himself declaring I dont take responsibility at all. 

At the same point of the viruss timeline that were now at in the United States, China already had entire cities under quarantine.  Trump has already said that even if a vaccine were to be released, our for-profit system wouldnt guarantee it would be available to everyone. Without access to guaranteed sick leave, working-class people are forced to make the difficult choice between remaining at work and exposing themselves to the virus or staying at home with their families while earning no income. 

The United States messy capitalist system has made it so that there is no such widespread and effective campaign designed to protect working-class people. As such, many are without guidance at the moment. In a return to an almost feudalistic society, states and cities are left to fend for themselves and make up their own public safety policies. 

In China, its socialist system provided a meticulous, centrally planned response that completely suffocated the epidemic and protected its people. Things are finally returning to normal here only because of the carefully organized actions from the government. Meanwhile in the U.S., its capitalist system continues to haphazardly and inefficiently combat the outbreak which is quickly spiraling out of control. The U.S. would be well served in following the shining example from China and developing a universal healthcare system that puts the needs of its people over the profits of wealthy corporations.

C.J. Atkins is the managing editor of the CPUSAs Peoples World website. In a March 18 article, Atkins interviewed Lupin, a young man recently returned to Wuhan from working in Canada:

Trump and his coronavirus point-man, Vice President Mike Pence, parade corporate CEOs at televised press conferences and present the private sector as savior. China has taken the opposite stance. China nationalized this crisis from the beginning and made it the countrys priority above everything else, Lupin asserts. With the solidarity of 1.4 billion people and the entire machinery of the Communist Party of China engaged, we came through the darkest moment. 

Lupin says he has witnessed the extent of efforts the Chinese government and its citizens have made. Looking West, he believes the things the U.S. and Canada are doing so far are nowhere close to it yet. 

A month ago, many countries mocked the situation in China as if it will never become a First World countries issue. Now, these same countries are hoping China will come to their rescuewhich is precisely what is happening in Italy, where teams of Chinese experts have arrived to help.

Ian Goodrum is a CPUSA member working as a writer and digital editor for China Daily in Beijing. He is upset with President Trump for quite rightly pinning the blame for the pandemic on the CCP. Writing in the Peoples World:

Previous presidents were more sophisticated in their efforts against China, pivoting to Asia and drafting trade agreements to box the country out; Trump uses the blunt instrument of tariffs and calls COVID-19 the Chinese virus.

This serves several purposes. First, it creates a distraction from the abysmal U.S. response to the outbreak, which has left tens of thousands of probable cases untested, likely more. The population isnt ready to weather this imminent calamity, despite the time afforded them by the control measures taken by China and other countries months ago. That is criminal negligence. 

Second, it makes the virus someone elses problem. If COVID-19 can be successfully branded a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, then the blame doesnt fall to him. Never mind that the intense focus on China during the early weeks of the epidemic minimized the threat the virus posed to the rest of the world, and made many in other countries complacentshifting responsibility and rescuing whats left of his image is all that matters to an egotist like Trump.

Finally, and most troubling of all, it opens a new front in the ongoing anti-China offensive waged by the U.S. government and media. The rest of the planet is waking up to the fact China has done its best in a difficult moment and come out the other side with valuable experience. Theyre asking for help in handling their own outbreaks after seeing what China has been able to accomplish, and China has been happy to provide it. The U.S. sees this as a loss of ground and is wildly striking wherever it can to win back terrain in an imagined battle for hegemony.

Trump thinks this will help the U.S. back to the top in an influence game only he is playing.

He couldnt be more wrong. If the U.S. wanted to win some global goodwill, it could put aside these petty squabbles and get to work solving a crisisnot a Chinese crisisthat puts the whole world at risk.

Chicago activist Tobita Chow is more closely affiliated with Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), but he wrote a March 18 article for the Liberation Road-linked website Organizing Upgrade. Chow explicitly called on American leftists to protect China from American sanctions or even military action.

The current progressive response to the coronavirus has focused on solutions to the coronavirus like Medicare For All and paid sick leave, and solutions to the recession like a Green New Deal stimulus package. While this is part of what we need, it is not sufficient to counter this emerging rightwing nationalist strategy, and the militarism that it is leading us towards. A race-neutral response focused only on the domestic economy will leave untouched the racism, xenophobia, and nationalism that are coming at us. Antiracism and internationalism must play a much more central role in our counter-narratives than they have so far. 

The antiwar movement must prepare for potential escalation with China, and the rest of the progressive movement infrastructure must get ready to back them up, in a way that we werent when we were on the brink of war with Iran less than three months ago. And we need to pick and escalate our own fights that demonstrate to the whole country where the real battle lines lie, fights that clarify that the greatest threat to us is not any other country, but our own unaccountable elites within the Trump administration and the corporations that seek to profit off of this crisis.

Americas pro-CCP communists are propagandizing for an enemy nation on U.S. soil. They are effectively soldiers in an international information war designed to move U.S. public opinion toward socialism and to disguise and obscure CCP responsibility for this hugely damaging pandemic.

While these groups are clearly acting in line with CCP policy, its unclear whether any of them are registered as Chinese government agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Is the State Department investigating any of these organizations for possible FARA violations? If not why not?

Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics. He is best known for his book Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress and his similarly themed documentary film Enemies Within. His soon-to-be published book is White House Reds: Communists, Socialists & Security Risks Running for U.S. President, 2020.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Brenton Tarrant, the man charged in relation to the Christchurch massacre appear in the dock charged with murder in the Christchurch District Court, New Zealand. AFP Photo

Wellington: The man who committed the worst atrocity in New Zealand's modern history when he slaughtered 51 worshippers at two Christchurch mosques unexpectedly pleaded guilty to all charges Thursday.

The attacks targeting people praying at the mosques a year ago shocked the nation and prompted new laws banning the deadliest types of semi-automatic weapons.

It also prompted global changes to social media protocols after the gunman livestreamed his attack on Facebook, where it was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

The sudden turn in the case took survivors and relatives by surprise, and brought relief to people across New Zealand. Many had feared Australian white supremacist Brenton Harrison Tarrant would try to use his trial as a platform to promote his views.

He'd outlined those views in a 74-page manifesto he published online shortly before the attacks.

Tarrant, 29, pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of terrorism at the Christchurch High Court. He had previously pleaded not guilty to all charges and his trial had been scheduled to start in June.

Tarrant is the first person to be found guilty of terrorism in New Zealand under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S.

The change in plea came less than two weeks after New Zealanders commemorated those who died on the anniversary of the March 15, 2019, attacks.
SPRINGFIELD  As the coronavirus continues to spread, city councilors on Thursday called for further relief to the public including a freeze on rents, mortgages, utility payments and evictions.

Eleven city councilors signed on to a letter emailed to several state and federal officials including Gov. Charlie Baker, local legislators and the U.S. senators from Massachusetts.

We are facing an unprecedented public health crisis, and the steps being taken to contain the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 are 100% necessary, said City Councilor Jesse Lederman, the lead signer, in a statement. At the same time there are very real economic impacts our constituents now face, and we must leverage the state and federal government apparatus to ensure families and businesses do not face undue hardship as a result.

The relief request was sent just hours after the U.S. Senate voted to approve a $2 trillion relief package to confront the coronavirus pandemic. The package, now needing House approval, includes checks to more than 150 million American households, massive loan programs for businesses and billions of dollars into unemployment insurance programs.

The councilors asked for support on the following legislative and administrative actions:

Direct cash payments to Americans to cover costs associated with lost wages and income as a result of COVID-19 and to stimulate the local economy.

Suspension of rent payments, mortgage payments, and utility payments during the State of Emergency for those financially impacted by COVID-19.

Suspension of evictions and foreclosures during the State of Emergency.

Emergency shelter capacity to ensure social distancing among the homeless population.

Conversion of Small Business Administration Emergency Loans into forgivable grants for businesses that sustain their operations and workforce.

Suspension of debt collection activities during the State of Emergency for those financially impacted by COVID-19.

Require all service providers and lenders servicing consumer and small business credit payments, car payments, student loan payments, and other debt and loan payments to offer fair and universal forbearance to those financially impacted by the impact of COVID-19.

A moratorium on all negative credit reporting during the State of Emergency for those financially impacted by COVID-19.

Rent is due Wednesday, said Councilor Adam Gomez. Millions wont be able to pay their rent due to lay offs or illness. Others dont have a home at all, or havent had an affordable and safe place to call home for a long time. The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated clearly the need to create safe, sustainable solutions for all.

Joining Lederman and Gomez in signing the letter were Councilors Tracye Whitfield, Michael Fenton, Melvin Edwards, Malo Brown, Marcus Williams, Victor Davila, Timothy Allen, Orlando Ramos and council President Justin Hurst.

Those sent the request for relief included U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey and U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Hurst said he is proud of my colleagues for their continued commitment to fight for the residents of Springfield in these trying times where all of us have been impacted to our very core by this pandemic.

Hurst said he hopes the government leaders take heed to our recommendations and act with a sense of urgency.

Related Content:
Madrid, March 26 : Spain's Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo has tested positive for the novel coronavirus or COVID-19 that has claimed over 20,000 lives across the world so far, officials said.

Reports citing a Spanish government statement said Calvo tested positive for the COVID-19 in a test performed on Tuesday after previously testing negative. The second test was performed again as the previous one proved inconclusive.

The statement on Wednesday also said Calvo was doing well and getting medical treatment.

Spain has had over 50,000 coronavirus positive cases with more than 3,000 deaths, according to official figures. The country is among the worst-hit nations by the COVID-19 pandemic

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Construction activity across the country has come to a grinding halt and the situation is unlikely to change for the next 3-4 months.

Analysts feel that the construction activities across hubs such as Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Delhi, Pune, and Bengaluru are likely to be stalled or progress at a significantly slower-than-anticipated pace for a major portion of March 2020 which may continue in April as well. As far as the situation is concerned at this point, nothing is moving from point A to point B. Things have come to a standstill and it will take at least 3-4 months for ...
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- A planned five-hour free food giveaway in Grand Rapids was brought to an end after an hour due to an overwhelming demand."

The event, put on by the group Kent County Community Action, was initially slated for 1 to 6 p.m. Thursday, March 26, at the Kent County Health Department building at 121 Franklin St. SE. It was intended to help low-income families struggling during the coronavirus pandemic.

However, the event ended at 2 p.m. Thursday as cars lined up down Franklin Street an estimated mile. Cars were also backed up onto Madison Avenue SE, and even the northbound U.S. 131 exit ramp to Franklin Street was closed by police dealing with the traffic backup.

If you are reading this in your Facebook app, use this link to view the entire gallery of photos.

I would call it a success, said Susan Cervantes, director of KCCA, who estimated that the event provided food to about 1,000 households. We responded to a community need, which is what community action is all about. We had great help from our neighbors with our volunteers.

Unfortunately we couldnt meet everyones needs but we tried.

While Grand Rapids police and Kent County officials said the event was going to end at 2 p.m., Cervantes said cars already in line at the time continued to be served until around 3:30 p.m. when the event ran out of food.

It was a good chaotic, Cervantes said. We had over 30 volunteers and family members and staff. It was a great thing we did.

The food give-away is ending at 2:00 pm due to overwhelming demand. We are asking that no one else come down into in the area. There are significant back-ups in all directions https://t.co/kMxiMUZ5aC  Grand Rapids Police (@GrandRapidsPD) March 26, 2020

Grand Rapids police asked Thursday afternoon that no one else come down into the area, with significant back-ups in all directions." At that time, people waiting in line in their vehicles were encouraged by KCCA to remain in place, but are asked not to get out of their vehicles for any reason.

Thursdays food giveaway was in response to an increasing need for getting food to needy families during the COVID-19 pandemic. The distribution event was advertised for low-income individuals and offered 50 pounds of food per family.

KCCA estimated that it would feed more than 900 households during the five-hour event. The group passed out boxes that included fresh apples, canned vegetables, fresh oranges, noodles, pork, fish and more.

Grand Rapids Police Department Sgt. John Wittkowski said the police department had 12 units at the scene, plus command staff, to help with traffic control.

In hindsight, Wittkowski said there were likely more people than anticipated, the venue was not the right choice for that event, and the traffic control plan could have been better.

Cervantes said KCCA would likely consider another event if they received more food from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The food being supplied to families Thursday was supplemental food from the federal government.

In that case, Wittkowski said a venue like Fifth Third Ballpark might be more appropriate.

Michigan had 129,298 new unemployment claims filed for the week ending March 21 -- a staggering increase from the 5,338 filed the week before.

PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

Read more on MLive:

Coronavirus leads to staggering increases in unemployment claims in Michigan and across U.S.

Another big jump in Michigan coronavirus numbers: Now at 2,295 cases; 43 deaths

Theres such a community feel outdoors despite coronavirus shutdowns in Grand Rapids
A woman who was thrust into the mental health system after employees of a gun shop told police they thought she needed psychiatric intervention cant sue those workers, a state appeals court panel has concluded.

Carolyn Forbes claimed the statements by staffers at King Shooters Supply in Philadelphia amounted to slander and resulted in her involuntary and unjustified mental health commitment.

Philadelphia County Judge Frederica Massiah-Jackson disagreed and the Superior Court panel backed her dismissal of Forbes claims against the gun shop employees in an opinion by President Judge Emeritus Correale F. Stevens.

Stevens cited Forbes claim that she went to the gun shop in January 2017 after she was unable to unload a pistol she had purchased there. It was during that visit that the employees tipped off the cops.

Three police officers arrived at the shop and told Forbes to accompany them to a hospital for evaluation. Forbes said she ended up being held against her will in the Haven Behavioral Hospital for nearly two weeks even though she and acquaintances insisted she was not delusional.

Forbes contended she was never a danger to herself or others and didnt require any psychiatric treatment, Stevens noted. In her suit, Forbes insisted the statements the gun shop workers made to police were defamatory.

Stevens, however, agreed with the Philly judges finding that those statements werent slanderous and that the workers had an absolute privilege to call the police and express their concerns. So, the employees are legally immune from Forbes suit, he found.
Van Hollen (D-Md.) said he doesnt know how the District got lumped in with five U.S. territories  the city is almost always treated like a full-fledged state by the federal government when it comes to grants, highway funding, education dollars and food assistance. He said he would try to ensure the District receives the money it believes it was due retroactively, as well as in a future relief package.
An emergency room staff member at San Francisco General Hospital who had direct contact with patients has tested positive for COVID-19, according to an internal staff memo obtained by The Chronicle on Thursday.

Officials are conducting a thorough contact investigation to determine further steps to ensure safety in the emergency department, according to the memo, sent to employees by hospital CEO Susan Ehrlich on Thursday afternoon.

News of the infected health care worker came after hospital employees filed a complaint with state workplace safety regulators alleging the hospital is doing too little to protect them from the coronavirus and violating state law.

The complaint was filed with the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration last week by a self-described whistle-blower on behalf of hospital employees.

The complaint alleged that the hospital failed to properly isolate patients who may have the illness, failed to properly inform employees of suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients and failed to supply workers with written procedures on how they should avoid exposure to the virus, according to a copy of a letter obtained by The Chronicle and sent to the hospital from Cal/OSHA. In addition, the hospital allegedly failed to properly screen and isolate COVID-19 patients and institute necessary procedures, including proper staffing, to protect workers.

The March 16 letter, written by Denis McComb, district manager for Cal/OSHAs San Francisco office, ordered the city to investigate the allegations and report findings to Cal/OSHA.

San Francisco General responded on Tuesday, with Ehrlich saying the hospital investigated the allegations and determined that its satisfying all regulations designed to protect its workers.

During our investigation, we did not find anything that constituted a violation of (regulations), she wrote. Should you have or obtain additional information with regards to the alleged failure to meet ... requirements, we will be happy to investigate further.

Cal/OSHA is not investigating the hospital over the complaints, and it is not issuing any citations, the letter to the hospital said. If the hospitals inquiry into the investigation or its response is deemed inadequate, an inspection could be conducted, said Frank Polizzi, spokesman for the state Department of Industrial Relations, which includes Cal/OSHA.

While the complaint may be the first against the hospital involving the coronavirus outbreak, the state Department of Public Health and Cal/OSHA are already investigating San Francisco General after complaints that workers have not been protected from assaults.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Nurses have also complained about inadequate staffing and a lack of preparedness for the COVID-19 outbreak. Health care workers at Laguna Honda Hospital, a nursing home also operated by the city, have made similar complaints. That hospital was placed on lockdown Wednesday after five staffers tested positive for the coronavirus.

Brent Andrew, a San Francisco General spokesman, described the Cal/OSHA letter as a routine procedure whenever a complaint is filed with the agency. He declined to respond to the specific allegations, saying they would be included in the hospitals official response.

Andrew defended efforts taken to protect hospital employees from the coronavirus.

Were in almost constant contact with our employees, he said. Training, keeping them up to date on the number of cases, the number of people under investigation, changes in process and procedure  we are literally almost in constant contact with our entire staff. There is nothing more important than keeping our staff safe and healthy.

Michael Cabanatuan and Trisha Thadani are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com, tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan, @TrishaThadani
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The United States now has the most coronavirus cases in the world with more than 86,000 confirmed infections after overtaking both China and Italy as the global pandemic continues to spread.

Italy was set to pass China's more than 81,000 infections later on Friday. The US, Italy and China now account for almost half of the world's 540,000 infections and more than half of the virus deaths.

With 1,200 deaths from the disease, the US is still some way behind hardest-hit Italy where almost 7,000 people have been killed.

Disease experts have warned the American death toll could eventually top 80,000 even if people adhere to social distancing. The World Health Organisation had predicted this week that the US was likely to overtake Europe as the new epicenter of the disease.

Despite the grim figures released on Thursday, President Donald Trump claimed that data being released by China - which has claimed zero new domestic infections in recent days - could not be trusted and that higher rates of testing in the US was behind the surge in cases.

He also accused Andrew Cuomo - the governor of hardest-hit New York - of exaggerating the state's need for ventilators, a key piece of equipment used to keep coronavirus patients in critical condition alive. More than 170 people died in New York City alone between Wednesday and Thursday.

Meanwhile, Dr Anthony Fauci, America's top disease expert, was forced to again pour cold water on Trump's repeated suggestion that the US could be back open for business by April 12.

America has now surpassed China and Italy to report the largest number of coronavirus infections anywhere in the world at more than 86,000, though Italy still has the most deaths with more than 6,000 people killed

Coronavirus infections have been following an exponential growth curve in the US, roughly doubling every three days which is the same as was seen in European nations before they went into full lockdown

The US is now on a worse trajectory than China and Italy, which have both put draconian lockdowns into place, and South Korea which was initially one of the virus hotspots but used aggressive testing and contact tracing measures to bring the infection rate under control

Figures show that a week after the tenth death New York's toll doubled nearly every 1.5 days; the worst-hit region of Italy, Lombardy, saw a doubling every three days. Cases have also accelerated at a faster rate in the US, than in Italy

'I think what the President was trying to do, he was making an aspirational projection to give people some hope,' Facui - who was briefly banished from coronavirus press briefings after contradicting Trump - told CNN. 'But he's listening to us when we say that we've really got to reevaluate it in real time, and any decision we make has to be based on the data.'

It came on a day of fast-moving developments in which:

The US surpassed China and Italy with the most confirmed coronavirus cases in the world

New research showed the outbreak could lead to more than 80,000 US deaths even with social distancing

A 17-year-old from New Orleans became the second child to die as the city sees explosion of cases

New Orleans is experiencing the highest growth in coronavirus cases seen anywhere in the world

State officials warned that hospitals could collapse by April 4 if the daily growth rate remains at 65 percent

New York City officials have said that 177 people died from coronavirus on Thursday, bringing the total number of deaths to 365 as of early Friday morning. City health officials also said late Thursday that there were an additional 1,239 new coronavirus cases, bringing the total across the five boroughs to 23,112.

New York state continues to report the bulk of coronavirus infections that have so far been confirmed in the United States.

Health officials said on Thursday that the statewide tally of infected people reached 39,140.

The state also recorded 457 deaths as of late Thursday.

New York state had reported 100 more deaths in one day, accounting for almost 30 percent of the fatalities nationwide. Gov Cuomo said the number of deaths will increase soon as critically ill patients who have been on ventilators for days succumb.

'That is a situation where people just deteriorate over time,' Cuomo said.

Trump departs after addressing the coronavirus task force daily briefing as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stands by

Cities including New Orleans, Miami and Chicago each have more than 1,500 cases - unlike China where no area outside Hubei ever reached that. A total of 12 states have already surpassed 1,500 cases each

Cruise ship crew with coronavirus symptoms land in Miami More than a dozen crew members from two Costa cruise ships have been brought to shore in Miami, before being rushed to the hospital to be tested for coronavirus. Startling footage filmed Thursday afternoon saw more than a dozen crew from the Costa Favolosa and the Costa Magica jump into lifeboats in order to reach mainland United States. The crew members wore hazmat suits and were inspected by medics once they arrived on dry land, and several ambulances were on standby to escort them to hospital. More than a dozen crew members from two Costa cruise ships have been brought to shore in Miami, before being rushed onward to hospital to be tested for coronavirus A company spokesperson said the Costa Favolosa and the Costa Magica are carrying a combined total of 1,939 crew, and there are at least 30 who have come down with a flu-like illness. The spokesperson said the boats would dock in Miami late Thursday, and that the rest of the crew would be able to disembark. All passengers were able to disembark the boats back in Guadeloupe and nearby Martinique in the Caribbean. It is unclear whether all 1,939 crew members will be tested for COVID-19, or whether they will be placed in quarantine for 14 days. Both ships are based in Guadeloupe, a Caribbean island territory of France, but authorities have not allowed the boats to return there. Advertisement

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced during a Thursday press conference that 200 inmates were being released from jail facilities across the city in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

De Blasio called the news a 'major, major milestone,' adding that an additional 175 inmates would be released be the end of the night.

He touted that the jail population was now below 5,000, marking the first time the number was that low since 1949.

While New York is America's epicenter for the virus, analysts have identified 11 other hotspots for the virus that have the potential for mass-breakouts of the kind not seen in other badly-hit countries.

Washington, California, Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Texas all have more than 1,500 cases of the disease each - far more than any Chinese region other than Hubei province during the outbreak there.

A draconian lockdown by Chinese authorities virtually cut off infected areas from each-other during the outbreak, confining the disease to Hubei. This has not happened in the US, allowing the infection to spread.

Louisiana is now emerging as the possible next epicenter of the US outbreak after infections rose by 30 percent in 24 hours. That state recorded 2,305 infections and 83 deaths by Thursday. Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans has been blamed for the outbreak there.

New Jersey has 6,876 confirmed cases and 81 deaths, while California has 3,899 cases and 81 deaths. Washington state, which was initially the epicenter following an outbreak at a Seattle nursing home, now has 3,207 confirmed cases and 150 deaths.

The White House's coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah Birx, said counties in the Midwest around Chicago and Detroit are seeing a rapid increase in cases.

It comes as new research showed the outbreak could lead to more than 80,000 deaths in the US within the next four months and overwhelm hospital capacity nationally as soon as early April even if social distancing measures are respected.

Forecasters at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington's School of Medicine have predicted that during the epidemic peak - set for some point in April - as many as 2,300 patients could die every day.

This was the case even if the population adhered to strict social distancing measures.

Their predictions came after analyzing the latest COVID-19 data, including hospitalization and mortality rates, as well as patient date in terms of age, gender and pre-existing health problems.

The analysis warned that based on current trends, demand for both ICU beds and ventilators would far exceed capacity for COVID-19 patients as early as the second week of April.

It comes as health care systems in both New York and Europe buckled under the weight of caring for seriously ill victims as officials desperately searched for enough ventilators to keep them alive.

New York City's convention center is now being turned into a temporary hospital and a makeshift morgue was set up outside Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital on Wednesday to cope with a possible surge in victims.

Public health officials in New York hunted down beds and medical equipment and put out a call for more doctors and nurses for fear the number of sick will explode in a matter of weeks, overwhelming hospitals as has happened in Italy and Spain.

In a preview of what might be ahead for the US, Spain has converted hotels into makeshift hospitals and turned an ice rink in Madrid into a temporary morgue. The curve of infections has not slowed in Spain, which now has more than 4,100 deaths, second only to Italy's death toll.

Faced with the exponential spread of the pandemic, the US Senate passed a $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems.

Millions of Americans hoped the measure would give them a lifeline as they lost jobs, income and child care due to the social-distancing rules needed to slow the spread of the virus.

At least 1.5 billion people across the world are now under severe travel restrictions.

But the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, scolded world leaders for wasting precious time in the fight against the virus that has already killed more than 21,000 people, thrown millions out of work and ravaged the world economy.

He called it 'public enemy No. 1.'

Across the US, roughly half of the population have been affected by stay-at-home orders in at least 18 states.

The sweeping orders are aimed at slowing the spread of the pathogen but have upended daily life as schools and businesses shutter indefinitely.
Coronavirus cases continue to grow like wildfire across Canada, with the total number of cases surpassing 3,400 yesterday, almost five times the 727 cases reported just one week before. Deaths have risen from 9 to at least 31.

The rapid spread of the deadly virus has been facilitated by the policies adopted by the federal Liberal government. As cases have surged, Ottawa has focused its energies on funneling hundreds of billions to the banks and big business, rather than mobilizing societys resources, currently monopolized by the capitalist elite, to support the overstretched health care system and working people.

A warning of the catastrophe this threatens to produce was provided by a report drafted last week by the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) and leaked to the Canadian Press Tuesday. Unless urgent action is taken, says the report, Saskatchewans health system will be overwhelmed by the surge in coronavirus cases. This, it estimated, could result in between 9,000 and 15,000 deaths.

That health authorities in Saskatchewan, with a population of just 1.17 million, little more than 3 percent of Canadas total, are warning of thousands of deaths underscores that hundreds of thousands of lives are at risk across Canada.

The internal SHA report says just 90 ventilators are currently available in the provinces hospitals, with another 240 on order. But it said that between 500 and 600 ventilators would be required each day at the peak of the pandemic if the virus was allowed to spread rapidly and infect 30 percent of the population.

The report says that even under the best scenarios, where the curve of transmission is flattened, the provinces health system will be severely taxed in coming weeks and months.

Demand for acute services, it warns, will exceed existing capacity for hospital beds, ICU beds, ventilators, as well as creating a major burden on other acute services, supports, HR [personnel], supplies, and equipment. ..[E]ven under conservative assumptions, COVID-19 will almost certainly overwhelm the health system.

There is growing criticism of the failure of the federal Liberal and various provincial governments to ramp-up testing and provide desperately-needed supplies for medical professionals across the country. Last weekend, doctors at the Royal Columbian Hospital in the Vancouver suburb of New Westminster warned in an open letter that urgent action was required by British Columbias New Democratic Party government to prevent the emergence of a situation like that in Italy, where doctors are forced to ration care due to a lack of supplies and leave patients to die who could otherwise be saved.

Responsibility for this disastrous situation lies with the ruling elite, which did nothing for two months to prepare for COVID-19 despite the news of its deadly impact in China. The Trudeau government has made available a paltry $1 billion in additional health care spending to combat the coronavirus, while trying to enlist manufacturing companies to produce urgently needed medical equipment that should have been stockpiled well in advance. This derisory response is compounded by the fact that Canadas health care system was vastly overstretched even prior to the COVID-19 outbreak due to decades of vicious austerity and privatization overseen by all the establishment parties, from the Liberals and Conservatives, to the NDP, Parti Quebecois and CAQ.

In Ontario, doctors are also raising concerns about the failure of the provincial authorities to publicize the explosive growth of community transmission. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, close to half of all COVID-19 cases in Canada have been passed on through local communities and are not related to travellers returning from abroad. Health officers in Ottawa and Toronto have issued warnings about the risk of community spread, despite resistance from the province. It would be very helpful for senior health leadership in Ontario to acknowledge that there is both travel-related and community-acquired cases of COVID-19, and that now, more than ever, its extremely important to adhere to the physical distancing measures recommended by public-health officials, commented Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease physician at Torontos General Hospital.

As the health situation has deteriorated, the chief focus of the federal government and opposition parties has been to finalize the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks and major corporations. In Parliament yesterday, the Liberal government, supported by the Conservatives, New Democrats, Bloc Quebecois and Greens, unanimously passed a $107 billion COVID-19 Economic Response Plan. The legislation includes $55 billion of tax deferrals, which will overwhelmingly benefit big business and the rich, and just $52 billion of support for lower income Canadians and those who lose their jobs or cannot work because of the pandemic. Laid-off workers will receive just 55 percent of their previous income, while the millions of gig economy and other contract workers who dont qualify for Employment Insurance (EI), and those who contract COVID-19, or have to go into quarantine or look after others impacted by the pandemic, are to be given a $2,000 a month stipend for four months.

These sums are entirely inadequate to help workers and their families survive the economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. Just last week, 929,000 people5 percent of Canadas total labour forceapplied for EI benefits.

Despite the dishonest efforts of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and all the opposition parties, the NDP included, to portray the $107 billion bailout as the main support package, the reality is that the government and Bank of Canada have already funnelled upwards of $500 billion into the banks and major corporations. Through a $50 billion mortgage buy-back scheme, the halving of bank capitalization requirements and other supports, the federal government has demonstrated its determination to guarantee the vast wealth and profits of the super-rich during the pandemic.

Even more is to come, with Finance Minister Bill Morneau indicating Wednesday he will unveil a support package for the oil sector, rumoured to be of the order of at least $15 billion, in a matter of hours or days.

In contrast to the unlimited generosity towards big business, provincial governments across the country are forcing large numbers of workers in non-essential sectors to continue working even as the threat of infection increases. In Ontario and Quebec, where virtual lockdowns have been in place since Tuesday night, the right-wing provincial governments of Doug Ford and Francois Legault have defined essential services so broadly that large sections of manufacturing, construction and industry are continuing to operate, even when they have nothing to do with combatting the health crisis. A World Socialist Web Site reader in Ontario reported that the hot tub manufacturer where he works has been declared an essential service.

In Ontario and British Columbia, the construction sector is largely running at full pace. Protests from workers about unhygienic conditions and a lack of facilities for handwashing have grown. The anger among construction workers is so great that the Carpenters District Council of Ontario, which has over 30,000 members, demanded that the government order the shutdown of construction projects in the province.

A growing number of protest walkouts have also been reported, including 35 miners in Snow Lake, Manitoba, who walked off the job over health and safety fears related to COVID-19.

In Alberta, where a similar lockdown is being prepared, the province is declaring oil and gas workers an essential service. This is in spite of the fact that many thousands of workers in the industry live at close quarters in isolated work camps that create ideal conditions for the rapid spread of COVID-19. Moreover, the camps experience a high rate of turnover, with workers flying in and out every two to three weeks. Summing up the casual indifference to the fate of these workers within ruling circles, a report in the Globe and Mail noted in passing that symptoms of the virus may be mild in the sectors mainly young and physically healthy workforce.

Alberta Energy Minister Sonia Savage summed up the main concern of the financial elite, which is that billions in profits and shareholder payments must be sustained during the pandemic. The oil sands are strategically important to Alberta and Canada, she wrote in an email to the Globe.
A evangelical pastor who runs a Bible Study attended by several members of the Trump administrations cabinet has implied that homosexuality could be one of the causes of the coronavirus epidemic in the US.

In a blog post Is God Judging America Today?, Ralph Drollinger wrote that America is experiencing the consequential wrath of God  that is, the inevitable punishment for violating Biblical precepts on godly behaviour.

A detailed theological argument distinguishing between different types of wrath, the post concludes that those individuals who are rebuked by Gods forsaking wrath are largely responsible for Gods consequential wrath on our nation.

The forsaken include gays and lesbians, given over as they are by God to degrading passions, as well as environmentalists, since clearly indicative of Gods forsaking wrath is when the abandoned serve the creature rather than the creator.

Among the cabinets sponsors of Mr Drollinger and his regular Bible Study are education secretary Betsy DeVos, secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and housing and urban development secretary Ben Carson.

Former energy secretary Rick Perry attended the sessions too; in an interview, he described Mr Drollinger as a brilliant, knowledgeable bible instructor. According to him, the group has previously been hosted by agriculture secretary Sonny Purdue.

In his post on divine judgment, Mr Drollinger appears confident that, thanks in part to his teaching, US political life will soon benefit from the rise of a new evangelical-minded generation who will be able to change the course of the nation.

If my calculations are correct, and I believe they are, there are more believers in Congress and the executive branch now than at any other time in modern American history! And they are beginning to reach a tipping point!

Other Evangelical pastors have drawn criticism for their response to the coronavirus pandemic. One, Rodney Howard-Browne, was shown on TV telling a congregation: I know they dont want us to do this, but just turn around and greet two or three people. Tell them you love em, Jesus loves em, amen.

This has to be the safest place  If you cant be safe in church, you in serious trouble.

Mr Drollinger has forecast the dire consequences of LGBT+ tolerance before. In an earlier blog post, he warned of the certainty that allowing same-sex marriage will incur divine wrath.

All members of the government, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, be ye warned herein by what God says to you today via His Word: OUR NATIONS OBEDIENCE OR DISOBEDIENCE TO GODS LAWS IN TERMS OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE REPRESENTS A TIPPING POINT WITH ENORMOUS, ENORMOUS CONSEQUENCES.

However, while relying heavily on Leviticus to reach his conclusions, Mr Drollinger was also at pains to say he does not advocate executing gay men by stoning: Corporal punishment, or putting to death a man who lies with a male, is not a tenet found recurring in the age in which we live, the Church Age of the Bible; the [New Testament] does not reiterate this practice for this day and age. However, the New Testament most certainly does reiterate and uphold the present prohibition of homosexuality.

Asked by NBC for a comment on Mr Drollingers implications about homosexuality and the coronavirus epidemic, White House spokesman Judd Deere called them disgusting and said they are certainly not something that the president believes.
Pakistan violated the ceasefire agreement yet again on Thursday while the rest of the world is busy battling the deadly coronavirus contagion. Indian troops said they retaliated to Pakistani firing at the Line of Control in north Kashmirs Uri sector on Thursday afternoon.

Locals said the firing went on for a couple of hours in the afternoon and damaged a house which was hit by a shell fired by the Pakistani side, however, no loss of life was reported.

The Indian Army blamed Pakistan for the ceasefire violation and said the Indian forces manning the LoC retaliated to Pakistani firing.

The locals claimed that several mortar shells landed in the villages of Mothal, Silikote, Hatlthanga and Churunda, all located on the zero line.

The latest ceasefire violation spread panic in the villages in Uri, especially those close to the LoC.

Irshad Ahmad, a resident of Uri said the firing continued for two hours. The fresh firing has spread panic in the villages, unfortunately when the world is engulfed in disease Covid -19 and fighting it out to save mankind, here Pakistani soldiers are targeting pickets, said Ahmad.

Since the revocation of article 370, Pakistan has regularly violated the ceasefire agreement with an aim to push militants into the valley, the Indian Army has said on several occasions.

Indian intelligence authorities also suspect the involvement of Pakistans intelligence services in the attack on a Gurdwara in Kabul early Wednesday morning that killed at least 28 people. The involvement of the ISI backed Haqqani network has not been ruled out despite the banned Islamic State (IS) taking the responsibility for the attack.

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President Akufo-Addo says government is not considering a lockdown currently because of the implications it will have on many people.



According to him, although the country is recording more coronavirus cases, government is still monitoring the situation and will implement decisions that are in the best interest of all.



Now people are talking about a lockdown in Ghana and this and that but we should know that the majority of people will be affected. The ordinary Ghanaians are the ones that will be most affected and it is important for us who have to take this decision to take into account, their circumstances and conditions.



If you lockdown Accra, what are the consequences? If we lockdown the country, what are the consequences? A responsible government is required to look at all this before decisions are made and that is the exercise on which we are currently engaged.



I am hopeful that sooner than later, we will come to an agreement within government on the way forward and the Ghanaian people will be informed. But I want to assure you that the matters you have put on the table are matters we are actively deliberating on, President Akufo-Addo said.



Addressing leaders of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) led by General Secretary Dr. Yaw Baah at the Jubilee House, President Akufo-Addo said he was optimistic current measures put in place by government will help curb further spread of the virus.



I have indicated to the country that the main objectives of our policies and responses which includes limiting importation. We are trying to take control of the spread of the virus by making provision to strengthen our capacity to care for those who are sick, limiting as much as possible the impact on our social and economic lives and then also, trying to find a way to use this crisis as an opportunity to strengthen our nation.



We have seen how dependent we are on foreign import for our medicines and that shouldnt be the case. But now we are finding the capacity to produce things for ourselves, he concluded.



Since Ghana recorded 68 Covid-19 cases, there has been pressure on government to announce a lockdown with immediate effect.



The Ghana Medical Association and the Trade Union Congress say such a directive will help contain the spread of the virus and prevent fear and panic.



This has led to a heated debate on social media, with another school of thought arguing that a lockdown will kill more people than the virus since appropriate measures and structures have not been put in place.



But with the country recording 132 cases, the Trade Union Congress is still urging President Akufo-Addo to consider a more aggressive approach to the fight against the coronavirus.

Source: Myjoyonline









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By Express News Service

NAGERCOIL: A 40-year-old male returnee from Kuwait, hospitalised with the symptoms of COVID-19 in Kanyakumari government medical college hospital died on Thursday morning.

On Wednesday evening, a 26-year-old male Qatar returnee and the 40-year-old Kuwait returnee had been admitted to the isolation ward of Kanyakumari government medical college hospital in Nagercoil after they devloped symptoms for coronavirus.

The samples taken from them for swab and blood tests were sent to Tirunelveli government medical college. A senior doctor of the hospital confirmed that the 40-year-old Kuwait returnee died today early morning. The doctor also added that the patient had returned from Kuwait on March 3.

"As he had symptoms for the last five day, he was in his home and admitted to the isolation ward with the history of fever on Wednesday evening. However the results would be out on Thursday evening," the doctor said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 21:53:00|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese defense ministry spokesman on Thursday urged the United States to stop cyber theft and attacks on China and to restore peace, security, openness and cooperation in cyberspace.

Ren Guoqiang made the remarks at a Ministry of National Defense press conference when asked to comment on a Reuters report that findings and analysis of antivirus firm Qihoo 360 revealed the Central Intelligence Agency hackers have engaged in an 11-year-long cyber infiltration and attack program against China's aviation sectors, scientific research organizations, internet companies and government agencies.

The United States, in violation of international law and basic norms governing international relations, has been engaging in large-scale, organized and indiscriminate cyber theft, surveillance and attacks against foreign governments, enterprises and individuals, the spokesman said.

"It is a repeat offender widely known to the international community," Ren added.

From WikiLeaks and the Edward Snowden case to the Switzerland-based Crypto AG case and the Qihoo 360 report findings, facts have shown that the United States is the world's number one secret stealer, the spokesman said.

"Once again we strongly urge the U.S. side to immediately stop cyber theft and attacks on China and to restore peace, security, openness and cooperation in cyberspace," Ren said.
Woody Allen claims that actor Timothee Chalamet denounced him to better his chances of winning an Oscar.

Allen, 84, directed Chalamet, 24, in the film A Rainy Day In New York which was filmed in the latter part of 2017 and before Chalamet's Academy Award nomination in January 2018 for the movie Call Me By Your Name.

'Timothee afterward publicly stated he regretted working with me and was giving the money to charity,' the director wrote in his just published autobiography Apropos Of Nothing.

'But he swore to my sister he needed to do that as he was up for an Oscar for Call Me by Your Name, and he and his agent felt he had a better chance of winning if he denounced me, so he did.'

Woody Allen claims in his new memoir that Timothee Chalamet publicly denounced him after making A Rainy Day In New York in late 2017 to better his chances of winning an Oscar for Call Me By Your Name (the pair are pictured on the location set in NYC in October 2017)

Chalamet has not publicly commented on Allen's claims.

The actor was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for the Luca Guadagnino independent drama in which he starred opposite Armie Hammer.

He lost out to British actor Gary Oldman who won for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.

Chalamet announced in early January 2018 he was donating his salary from the Allen film to charity including Time's Up which had been established by celebrities at the start of that year in response to the allegations against Harvey Weinstein

Chalamet, pictured in February, was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for the 2017 Luca Guadagnino drama in which he starred opposite Armie Hammer. He lost out to British actor Gary Oldman who won for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour

Chalamet announced in early January 2018 he was donating his salary from the Allen film to charity including Time's Up which had been established by celebrities at the start of that year in response to the allegations against Harvey Weinstein.

His Rainy Day co-star Rebecca Hall donated her earnings from the film to Time's Up as well while co-star Selena Gomez also made a sizable donation.

For his part, Allen stated in his book that he did not regret working with Chaalemt but, he quipped, 'I'm not giving any of my money back.'

A Rainy Day In New York was released theatrically in Europe but not in the United States after Amazon Studios severed all ties with Allen in February 2019.

Allen's adopted daughter Dylan continues to allege that he molested her in 1992, a claim Allen has consistently denied.

His memoir was released on Monday after a delay because the original publisher backed out of releasing the book following protests led by Dylan's sibling Ronan Farrow.

Elsewhere in his book, Allen commented further on the stars who refuse to work for him or who donate their pay checks to a cause afterwards.

'This is not as heroic a gesture as it seems, as we can only afford to pay the union minimum, and my guess is if we paid more usual movie money, which often runs quite high, the actors might have righteously declared theyd never work with me but would possibly leave out the part about donating their salary,' he wrote.
Perhaps Americas luck will hold and we will avoid a geopolitical crisis this time. But we have certainly not put ourselves and the world in the best position either to prevent or to manage one. Our relationships with allies are poor. We have picked fights with various potential adversaries that may or may not have been wise or justified, but we have not at the same time effectively deterred them from striking out if they choose. We have waged trade wars against allies and adversaries alike. Overall, we have weakened the fabric of the international order that we created after World War II and that served us and others well through innumerable crises. Lets hope we dont reap the same harvest as our forebears.
More than 100 years ago during the Spanish flu, public health officials didnt have one of the greatest tools needed to understand and defeat this latest pandemic: access to mountains of real-time data and the ability to weaponize it.

Today, as the coronavirus spreads around the world, it leaves a trail of evidence that can be used to understand, predict and model what is happening in real time.

It is a game of numbers that will leave behind winners and losers. Here in New Jersey, an epicenter of the spread, we are still trying to figure out the score.

We do know this: Testing for the virus and tracking the results is the best defense states have to slow its spread. On Wednesday, Gov. Phil Murphy praised the states response to the pandemic, saying New Jersey has been one of the most aggressive states in testing for COVID-19 in the U.S.

We have now the second highest positive tests of any American state, yet we have one-fourth the population of California, he said. Thats a big statement not just about the virus but also about the aggressiveness with which we have attacked the testing regime.

According to data released by state officials, the governor may be taking credit where it isnt due.

An NJ Advance Media analysis of nationwide data shows the state lags dangerously behind in a country that already was slow to start widespread testing. Consider:

New Jersey is No. 2 in the U.S. for confirmed cases, both in the raw number and per capita. Yet it ranks 19th in testing per capita, according to data collected by The COVID Tracking Project . As of Wednesday afternoon, state and private labs had run about 167 tests per 100,000 residents.

Neighboring New York state, which has the most cases in the nation and twice the population of New Jersey, has conducted 532 tests per 100,000 residents.

And the Golden State, which Murphy used for comparison, is also running significantly behind New York and other states where coronavirus cases are fastest growing, though its testing rate jumped significantly Wednesday, with about 169 tests per 100,000 residents  almost identical to New Jerseys rate.

States with lower infection totals are testing at a much higher rate than New Jersey, including Massachusetts (285 tests per 100,000), Washington (449 tests per 100,000) and New Mexico (326 tests per 100,000).

Health experts say New Jersey must ramp up testing because it allows epidemiologists to track the disease more effectively and allows front-line responders to be monitored for infection in its earlier stages.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasnt publicly released testing numbers, so the volunteer-run COVID Tracking Project is filling the gap. But the data isnt perfect, because each state is reporting in different ways. But its the clearest picture we have of testing across the nation. Examining the numbers based on how many tests are conducted per 100,000 people provides a simple way to compare states that have large differences in population.

To date, 4,402 people in New Jersey have tested positive for COVID-19, and 62 have died. But nobody is really quite sure how many people are currently infected with coronavirus in the state, with a continuing testing backlog.

Asked about this at Wednesdays press briefing, Murphy said, if you look at our numbers, were in the top handful from the get-go on testing.

While he said it was possible that New York is in a better place, he stressed that there was pent-up demand in New Jersey that remains hard to service.

At all these sites, there are more people who want to get tested, even symptomatic people, than can be tested, the governor said.

Fewer tests means less information on the spread of the virus and less-informed decision making on policy decisions that affect all aspects of life, including like shuttering workplaces and forcing people to stay inside their homes.

While New Jerseys numbers are rising, far fewer people are being tested than state officials would like, as infection rates  especially in the northern counties  continue to soar.

State Department of Health officials say one of the reasons for the states still-low test numbers is that New Jersey was limited initially by the number of specimen testing kits the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided in the early days of the outbreak. It also continues to be impacted by a national shortage of specimen collection kits. Separately, the commercial labs only began testing in New Jersey the last week of February. Those labs operate nationally on a much larger scale than the state lab.

Other states had cases months before we did, said Assistant State Health Commissioner Christopher Neuwirth, who heads up the office of Public Health Infrastructure, Laboratories and Emergency Preparedness. Washington state had it months before. Massachusetts. New York in New Rochelle. We were just seeing it in March.

Those early cases, he said, served to jump-start their testing programs.

The timeline of the virus, though, suggests those states did not have that much of a head start. The first case of coronavirus in the United States was announced on Jan. 21 in Washington. The first case of COVID-19 in New York was confirmed on March 1.

New Jersey is still losing in its desperate race to catch up.

While the number of test sites here have grown with help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which established two drive-thu testing sites in Bergen and Middlesex counties, the locations have been inundated. Traffic backs up for miles each morning, and the majority are turned away after the facilities hit capacity.

A New Jersey State Trooper guards the entrance of coronavirus drive-thru testing center at PNC Bank Arts Center.Noah K. Murray | NJ Advance Media

Murphy during a radio interview on CBS 880-AM said the state needs even more supplies from the federal government to increase the number of tests it can do in a day.

We have limited amounts of supplies, in particular from the federal side," Murphy said. Im grateful weve gotten some. But our ask is enormous.

A number of county-based testing sites are coming on line, including Union, Passaic and Essex, and more commercial labs are now supplementing the community test locations.

Testing supplies even at commercial labs, though, remain in short supply.

Were literally turning away hundreds of people, complained William Schuler of Immediate Care, which has seven urgent care sites in New Jersey.

Schuler said they have the staff. They have the capacity. They have the process. They just do not have ample supplies.

I dont know where these test kits are. I dont know if the manufacturing sector can kind of dedicate just to manufacture these just in the short term, he said. But people that are out there living day-to-day lives are calling us, theyre showing up at our centers and theyre saying, What do I do? How do I get on your list? Who do I have to talk to?

Meanwhile, New Jerseys strict protocols on who can and cannot be tested because of the shortage of kits has meant that asymptomatic people who fear they may have been exposed are still being largely left out of that picture right now.

In New York, while not just anyone can be checked for COVID-19, the state allows testing when authorized by a health care provider if an individual has come within proximate contact, such as a classroom, office, or gathering, of another person known to be positive; if they have traveled to a country where the CDC has issued a Level 2 or Level 3 Travel Health Notice, and shows symptoms of illness; if they have been quarantined and have shown symptoms of COVID-19 illness; or if they are symptomatic and have not tested positive for any other infection.

New Jersey said individuals seeking testing at community sites must be experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness, including, cough, a fever at or above 99.6F, and shortness of breath.

That has meant that asymptomatic people who fear they may have been exposed are still being largely left out of the picture right now.

Some question if that is the right road to take.

From my point of view as an epidemiologist, Id like to see wide-scale testing to capture population prevalence, which would help us understand the true fatality rate and what proportion of folks have no or mild symptoms, said Henry F. Raymond, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and an epidemiologist. However, from a medical point of view in a crisis, its also important to triage folks so you can identify those who are or will shortly be in need of medical treatment.

Neuwirth said it makes no sense to test everyone, or for that matter anyone who is asymptomatic. He said the viral load in someone is usually not high enough in asymptomatic people not yet shedding virus, and not yet contagious, for them to test positive. Even someone infected and not exhibiting symptoms would test negative in the short term, he said.

With test kits in short supply, testing those without actual symptoms would be a waste of scarce diagnostic resources, he said.

Still, without more widespread testing, it remains difficult for the state to get a full picture of how the virus is spreading. Murphy acknowledges that the more numbers the state has, the better we will be equipped to deal with that data and get out ahead of this.

Indeed, until this week, the state was not even getting all the test data being collected by the commercial labs. And New Jersey as of Wednesday was still waiting on reports from a small number of private labs.

Jared Maples, director of the state Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, ordered the commercial labs serving the state on Monday to report all COVID-19 test results they have performed to date to the Department of Health. State Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said that data will help the state in its predictive modeling in the type of care these individuals require.

Such information can show the spread of the virus, the effectiveness of social distancing, and help investigators identify vectors that transmitted the virus through communities.

For most people, the virus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause far more severe illness, including pneumonia.

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NJ Advance Media staff writer Matthew Stanmyre contributed to this report.

Nick Devlin is a reporter on the data & investigations team. He can be reached at ndevlin@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @nickdevlin.

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The past week has seen widespread panic and mass stockpiling, with doomsday predictions running rampant. South African businesses are nervous. The projected outlook is uncertain, particularly for small enterprises and physical retailers. The advertising fraternity is seeing clients cancel or postpone campaigns due to uncertainty related to Covid-19.

Of course, some cancellations are unavoidable with imposed travel bans kicking-off this week and mass gatherings prohibited. Brands are at the top of the marketing food chain and thus set the general mood. They need to remain calm and carry on with business unusual. Things need to be done differently but whats key is that things are still done. Those who do will find opportunities and grow market share. Those that dont will miss out.Traditionally, marketers use location data and targeting to drive foot traffic. A consumer is close to a store, theyre targeted with an offer, which usually drives them in-store. Now with said consumer being more at home than out and about, marketers need to apply the above-mentioned business unusual thinking.Take Checkers Lonehill, Gauteng, for example: by using past visit data to track if the consumer was in that particular store repeatedly within the last few weeks, we can use location to determine intent. The consumer has intent to shop at that store. Mobile ads, specific to the Lonehill branch, can be served to the same consumer while theyre at home. Using data to take the store to the consumer. And with a delivery or e-commerce call-to-action, brands and marketers can further tailor their communication to the situation.Students or business travelers are a key demographic for many marketers, who under normal circumstances, are easy to communicate with. Buy some campus or airport signage and off you go. Today, its not so simple. Or could it be?The problem presents an opportunity for strategy refinement. By harnessing first party location data you can laser target these demographics based on their past location habits and behaviour. Its about using the data outside of the traditional geofence.The world may be practicing social distancing physically but more than ever were using mobile to remain connected. Look through the panic to see the opportunity.Media is for a limited time, going to be less fragmented than any time in our careers for the foreseeable future. And chances are that competitors are frozen by fear. Embrace the change and adapt quickly for share of voice.
Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala on Thursday said that the Rs 1.75 lakh crore economic package announced by the Centre in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic was inadequate.

The government has announced a package to give relief to vulnerable sections of the society and others, the Congress' chief spokesperson said.

However, may we respectfully and humbly and not in a sense of criticism say - Is it not too little?, a statement quoting him said here.

The Congress leader's comments come after the central government unveiled the relief package involving free food grain and cooking gas to the poor for the next three months, one-time doles to women and poor senior citizens, higher wages to workers and measures to boost liquidity of employees, as it looked to contain the impact of unprecedented nationwide lockdown over the deadly COVID-19.

He further said, 'Kisan' (farmer) has now been offered a sum of Rs 2,000 through 'PM Kisan' accounts on 1st April, 2020, but, he is supposed to be paid a sum of Rs 6,000 under the PM Kisan Yojana..,.

He said Congress chief Sonia Gandhi had suggested a payment of Rs 7,500 over and above the Rs 6,000.

With farmers' wheat crop being at harvesting stage, he said 334 lakh hectare of wheat is now ready to be harvested in India.

Of this, about 130 lakh hectare is in Punjab, 93 lakh hectare in Haryana, 37 lakh hectare in UP, about 68 lakh hectare in Madhya Pradesh and in other states, but, all grain markets are shut.

Food Corporation of India has not come forward with procurement, no gunny bags are currently available for farmers. How should the farmer now harvest and take his crop to the market, for he cannot wait until the April 14 (when 21-day lockdown ends)? he asked.

Surjewala said if a farmer was to delay harvesting up to April 15, he stands to lose 40 per cent of the standing crop.

He said the Centre must look into this and ensure that harvesting and procurement are undertaken even during the lockdown.

Please declare harvesting and procurement operations as part of essential services, he demanded of the Centre.

And what about giving relief to those who have taken land on lease and are cultivating the land? Not a single rupee of relief has been given to them. What about farm labourer, who are poor people, largely SC/STs, who help farmers? They are not being given any relief. So, please consider these aspects, he told the Centre.

Surjewala, former MLA from Kaithal in Haryana, said only Rs 500 per month for 3 months is given in the 'Jan Dhan accounts'.

Sonia Gandhi as also all social scientists have suggested at least Rs 7,500 as a one time measure so that they can take care of themselves and their families. Rs 500 would be an amount, which will give no benefit to these sections for they will not be able to make both ends meet, he said.

He said the ration of Rs 5 kg per person that is being given, is insufficient.

If a person has to eat three meals a day, it would be 500 gms at least. You multiply by 21 days (of lockdown) it becomes 10 or 11 kgs, so at least 11kg of wheat or rice free for these 21 days should be given and then supplement it with additional quantities.., he sought.

He alleged that in the wake of the coronavirus spread, hand sanitisers and masks were being sold in black market and prices of vegetables including potatoes, onions, tomatoes and all essential commodities were surging.

Nothing is available in markets. Please ensure that the black marketeers are punished and these goods are available at decent prices. This will only happen when the government declares mandis to be essential services, he said.

Surjewala also sought a relief for the salaried class and said EMIs of all loans taken by them be deferred upto June 30.

Similarly, government should waive instalment payments and interests on government loans for government employees. Besides, for medium and small enterprises, the small shopkeepers who have all lost their livelihoods, a sector wise package should be given to them, he demanded.

He asked the Centre to reconsider the economic package as also incorporate the suggestions that we are giving to you, not in a bipartisan or political fashion, but, in a spirit of cooperation and unity.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
DETROIT, MI  Ford says it wants to reopen five North American assembly plants in April that were closed due to the threat of coronavirus, but United Auto Workers is not convinced that it is the right idea.

According to the Associated Press, the three Detroit automakers that suspended production at North American factories one week ago under pressure from the UAW had concerns about members working closely at work stations and possibly spreading the virus.

Union spokesman Brian Rothenberg said Thursday that the UAW is reviewing Ford's announcement "with great concern and caution."

The company says it's aiming to reopen its factory in Hermosillo, Mexico, on April 6, followed by its Dearborn truck plant, Kentucky truck plant, the Ohio Assembly Plant and the Transit van line at the Kansas City plant on April 14. The factories were closed earlier this month under union pressure.

The company also wants to reopen parts-making plants to feed the assembly factories on the same day.

The decision comes as the number of people infected by the virus spikes in Michigan. On Wednesday, March 25, the state reported at least 2,294 infections and that the number of deaths nearly doubled from 24 to 43.

Ford has about 56,000 workers represented by the UAW, and some members have been fearful of catching the virus and taking it home to their families, AP reports.
"Since TACA started over 20 years ago, there have been nine autism prevalence numbers announced by the CDC. With each increase, I think this number will provoke more people to care," said Lisa Ackerman, Founder and Executive Director of TACA. "This prevalence rate means even more parents are being told their child has autism. When a family receives an autism diagnosis, there is a huge learning curve when it comes to therapies, medical intervention, educational services, legal issues, financial ramifications, and the need for emotional support. A prevalence rate of 1 in 54 can no longer be ignored. Families are counting on us to act and support them. We cannot continue to overlook this epidemic."

Autism is so prevalent today that almost every U.S. citizen has someone in their direct family who is affected by autism, they know someone with autism, or they know a family who is affected by autism.

Autism Fast Facts:

From the 2020 report, based off of data collected from eleven states in 2016:

1 in 54 eight-year-old children have an autism diagnosis



The 2020 estimate (based off of data collected in 2016), is approximately 175 percent higher than baseline estimates established in 2000



Boys were more than four times as likely to be identified with autism than girls



Five percent of eight-year-old (1 in 20) boys in New Jersey were identified with autism

were identified with autism Over 95 percent of children with autism have co-occurring conditions, the average having 4.9 conditions. Common comorbidities in autism include epilepsy, gastrointestinal issues, sleep disturbances, immune dysfunction, and more.

The U.S. autism annual cost is $238 billion dollars and is projected to rise to $461 billion by 2025.

The Autism Community in Action (TACA) is a national non-profit organization dedicated to educating and supporting families affected by autism. With 1 in 54 children in the United States diagnosed with autism, support for families is needed now more than ever before. TACA's goal is to provide education, support and hope to families living with autism with the goal of independence and/or recovery.

Help families affected by autism by taking action with TACA during April Autism Action Month and beyond  help TACA help families: https://tacanow.org/autism-action-month/.

About The Autism Community in Action (TACA)

The Autism Community in Action (TACA) is a national nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization founded in 2000 with the mission to provide education, support and hope to families living with autism. Headquartered in Irvine, CA with staff and volunteers working across the country serving over 72,000 individuals and adding 600 new families every month. TACA offers: Coffee Talks  free educational meetings, webinars, parent mentor program, an online Hope and Help support group, two annual National Autism Conferences hosted on the west and east coasts and a free 200-page Autism Journey Guide given to new families at events. TACA has a social media presence of over 350,000 on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

Given the Coronavirus crisis facing the world TACA has resources for families living with autism seeking information and support: https://tacanowblog.com/2020/03/13/coronavirus-and-students-with-autism/

For more information visit www.tacanow.org.

Contact:

Lisa Ackerman

949.640.4401

SOURCE The Autism Community in Action (TACA)

Related Links

https://tacanow.org


BIMCO revises 2020 forecast for main shipping markets

The coronavirus pandemic is impacting global shipping demand for 2020 negatively.

The speed of the virus spread makes it difficult to assess the full consequences. Nevertheless, we see a need to update our 2020 forecast to make some of this massive uncertainty tangible. What is going on in addition to the coronavirus pandemic? Geopolitical tensions that made the OPEC+ alliance break down, has subsequently made the crude oil tanker spot freight market erupt. The events that followed the breakdown - and those that are likely to follow, as Saudi Arabia is thoroughly preparing to flood the global oil market - will benefit the crude oil tanker industry specifically while driving fuel costs down more generally, at a time when oil demand generally drops. In massive contrast to the benefits that the crude oil tanker shipping industry enjoys from the brutal geopolitics of the oil market, there are widespread negative impact from the coronavirus pandemic. Moreover, the Phase One agreement, of the US-China trade war, is not delivering on its promises. Even before the effects of the coronavirus, the Phase One agreement between China and the US failed to boost volumes of the implicated goods in January. This opening is likely to set the tone for the full year. The failure itself is no surprise, but the magnitude of it surely is. Global economic activity, which slowed down significantly in 2019 will become even lower in 2020. Some nations may even fall into recession. The trade-to-GDP multiplier does not deliver guidance under such extraordinary circumstance which we currently experience. A call for stimulus It remains of utmost importance that global political leaders, take measures to secure health and safety right now, but also that they prepare for the eventual return to normality  hopefully no later than mid-2021. Traditional fiscal and monetary stimuli will only partly bring normality back, when the virus is contained. What is needed on top of that are economic stimulus packages which aim at securing the purchasing power of consumers and corporates. Public debt will rise as such measures are costly  but you should worry even more about the future if widespread layoffs and bankruptcies results in a severe global recession. The service sector of any economy is surely hit the most in the short term. But manufacturing, which matters the most to the shipping industry is greatly impacted too. Tanker shipping: two different realities Demand is positively impacted on the short term, as the breakdown of the OPEC+ alliance has lifted Saudi Arabian exports dramatically. In the longer term, the corona pandemic has annihilated global oil demand for 2020. BIMCO expects world consumption will fall in 2020, year-on-year. Transportation demand is going down. Most significantly for jet fuel as a single commodity, more generally due to lower economic activity. Supply: new built deliveries from Chinese yards will be slightly lower than previously anticipated. Freight rates for oil product tankers will be negatively affected by the fundamentally lower demand. Still BIMCO expects average freight rates for the year above break-even levels. Freight rates for crude oil carriers are currently super strong, if/when the geopolitical support eases the oversupplied market is likely to deliver freight rates below the levels of last year. Dry bulk shipping: The world excl. China delivers in a supporting role Demand is negatively impacted for the full year, as China  the main buyer of all dry bulk commodities  has limited purchases while the coronavirus outbreak is being contained. Still we expect demand to grow for the full year, picking up from current low-point when China returns to the market for commodities. In the short term, demand from China is still weak. The Capesize sector is feeling the most pain as significant iron ore demand remains to materialise. Other dry bulk sectors fare comparably better. While still experiencing loss-making freight rate levels they are buoyed by demand from outside China. In the medium term, Chinese stimulus may benefit domestically more than externally. Demand from outside China will hit a soft patch as Europe in now the epicentre of the pandemic and North America seems to be up next. In the longer term, a gradual return to normality is expected. No demand boost is expected to come around, as the events have not built up demand, merely destroyed it. Supply: new built deliveries from Chinese yards will be slightly lower than previously anticipated. Freight rates for the dry bulk ships will be negatively affected by the fundamentally lower demand. Prior to the pandemic, BIMCO expected average freight rates for 2020 to come down from last year. They will now become even lower. Container shipping: a negative demand shock replaces a negative supply shock Demand is negatively impacted for the full year, which causes BIMCO to revise the estimate from a low global demand growth to a negative one. Given the nature of this crisis, we do not expect a contraction of demand to proportions similar to that of the 2008 financial crisis, which saw demand slip to +3.4% in 2008 and contract by 9.5% in 2009, from an average demand growth of 9.7% in 1997-2007. The origin of this crisis is not financially and avoiding a huge increase in unemployment is a main objective for many stimulus plans. In the short term, Chinas manufacturing sector is still recovering from the lockdown. Reported productivity sits around 60-75% of capacity, whereas the - equally supply-chain-critical - truck drivers supposedly are fully recovered. In the medium term, Chinese exports of backlogged orders will resume and lift volumes out of Asia. The idle fleet will decline as the number of cancelled sailings are reduced. Only time will tell, if new exports orders will hold up while Europe and North America are in lockdown. In the longer term, the lockdown of Europe and North America keeps consumers at home and lifts unemployment, hopefully just temporarily. As a result, demand will evaporate for the duration of this. BIMCO does not expect a demand boost to appear when daily lives return. We will merely see a gradual recovery to normal freight volumes. For the regular network logistics, BIMCO expects 2020 to be massively disrupted due to these out-of-sync impacts to export centres and import centres across the globe. Supply: new built deliveries from Chinese yards will be slightly lower than previously anticipated. Spot freight rates are currently artificially elevated on the front-hauls out of Asia due to the positive effect of the reduced capacity. Service contract negotiations, which are shortly due on the main trades, are likely to be settled as late as possible, as major retailers as well as carriers have very little solid ground to tread on in terms of upcoming demand. For the full year, BIMCO already expected average freight rates below last years level. But that level is now expected to be loss-making. Due to deteriorating demand-supply fundamentals and higher fuel cost arising from the IMO 2020 sulphur cap implementation, even though the fall in oil prices has lessened some of the negative economic impact. When the dust settles Slowing globalisation may be even more pronounced than what we have seen in terms of slowdown since the financial crisis of 2008. Increasing protectionist measures may also become more widespread as nations seek to fix exposed vulnerability which the health crisis has made abundantly clear. Global and regional supply chains will be up for a review and while some will alter, some of the changes will benefit shipping demand while others wont. This crisis has exposed several unwanted vulnerabilities to supply chains as we know them today. The trade-to-GDP multiplier may yet again provide guidance to the direction of shipping demand stemming from global economic activity. Coming down from an average multiplier of 1 (2002-2008) to an average of 0.85 (2011-2020F), BIMCO expects the multiplier to stay below 1.




People wearing face masks wait for a train at a subway station in Shanghai on March 23, 2020. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)

Chinese Regime Seeks to Use Pandemic to Fulfill Ambitions, Report Says

While many countries around the world still struggle to contain the outbreak of the CCP virus inside their borders, Beijing seeks to take advantage of the global health crisis to advance its economic goals, according to a new report.

Horizon Advisory, a U.S.-based independent consultancy, reviewed recent policies and notices announced by Chinese central government agencies, regional governments, and research institutes. Its report, published March 15, found that Beijing has been formulating strategies since February to fulfill its ambitions while the pathogen was spreading across the country.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

Promote Chinese Manufacturing

Beijing intends to use the global dislocation and downturn to attract foreign investment, to seize strategic market share and resourcesespecially those that force dependence [on China], the report states.

This would include promoting the use of Chinese technologies, such as telecom company Huaweis 5G infrastructure.

This month, several Chinese officials expressed their views on how the pandemic could provide economic opportunities for China.

On March 4, Han Jian, director of the China Industrial Economic Association, which operates under the Ministry of Civil Affairs, wrote on state-run media Xinhua Daily, It is possible to turn the [pandemic] crisis into an opportunityto increase different countries trust and dependence on Made in China.

The next day, the municipal government in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, told a local daily about its economic plan, as it relates to the virus.

Make use of the important window after the epidemic and focus on the strategic opportunities, such as the new technological revolution it will bring about, the Chengdu government stated. It also called for local sectors to be more deeply integrated into the global supply chain, pointing to the importance of developing local sectors such as robotics and biomedicine.

On March 12, a commentary by Song Zhiping, a former representative to Chinas rubber-stamp legislature, the National Peoples Congress, and former chairman of state-owned company China National Building Materials Group, published in state-run newspaper Peoples Daily said China will turn crisis into opportunity.

As global industrial chains face the challenge of reorganization following Chinas epidemic, Chinese firms should enhance their competitiveness, he wrote.

In addition, the State Council, a Cabinet-like agency, has stressed that the following areas be promoted: 5G construction, ultra-high-voltage electricity, urban high-speed rails, new energy vehicles, big data infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and industrial internet, Song wrote.

Grand Plan

These highlighted sectors are the same ones that are considered priorities in Chinas state planning under economic policies such as Made in China 2025 and China Standards 2035.

China rolled out the industrial plan Made in China 2025 in 2015, with the aim of making China a global competitor in 10 tech sectors by 2025. In late 2018, Beijing rolled out China Standards 2035 to accelerate efforts to become leaders in burgeoning tech sectors such as big data, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things (IoT).

In February, before explicit discussions about leveraging the outbreak appeared in state-run media, Beijing announced state support for industries that had to shut down, amid nationwide lockdown measures to prevent the virus from spreading.

Beijing stated that strategic sectors would be prioritized to receive state funding, according to a Feb. 9 announcement by Chinas Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Horizon Advisory also pointed out ways that Beijing planned to secure foreign investment post-epidemic, to pursue its strategic ambition.

For example, a March 9 notice issued by Chinas National Development and Reform Commission asked regional authorities to carry out specific tasks to ensure that foreign companies and local supply chains resume production as soon as possible, such as coordinating and accelerating foreign investment projects that align with government policies.

Ties with Europe

Meanwhile, the Chinese regime plans to make use of the pandemic to court closer relations with European countries.

Beijing intends to reverse recent U.S. efforts to counteract Chinas subversive international presence; at the same time to chip away at U.S.-Europe relations. In other words, Beijing will use COVID-19 to accelerate its long-standing, strategic offensive, Horizon Advisory wrote, pointing to recent remarks by Chinese professor Tian Feilong, a deputy professor at Beihang University.

Tian, in a March 12 article published on an online academic platform called China-US Focus, stated: Europe may fall into an economic downturn under the blow of the epidemic. Unprecedented mutual needs and opportunities in China-EU economic cooperation will emerge and deepen, including in 5G industries.

Tian added that the downturn would prompt European countries, Russia, and China to form a new economic order, cooperating more with each other and less with the United States.
"1917" (out now on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, DVD and Digital) is one of those rare movies whose impact seems to keep coming in waves long after you first see it. Since its release last December, I've thought about it almost every day and had dozens of conversations with people who were truly moved by its depiction of a desperate mission to the front lines during World War I.

If you already own a 4K television, this home video release makes a strong case for upgrading to a 4K Blu-ray player while you're stuck at home for the next few weeks. There's no streaming service that can match the presentation that you'll get from this release, and all of its documentary bonus features are presented on the 4K disc.

"1917" follows British Lance Cpls. Blake and Schofield on a mission to deliver a "do not attack, it's a trap" message to officers commanding troops on the front lines. Director and screenwriter Sam Mendes collaborated with co-screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns, cinematographer Roger Deakins, production designer Dennis Gassner and their crew to create the illusion that the story takes place in real time and with one continuous tracking shot.

That conceit accomplishes two amazing things. Viewers get a strong sense of just how poor communications were during the war and how little information officers had at their disposal when making life-and-death decisions.

More importantly, narrowing the focus makes the movie about the personal connection between two young soldiers and how they depend on each other as they embark on a seemingly impossible mission. The young actors, Dean-Charles Chapman (Blake) and George MacKay (Schofield), give moving performances that make all the technical wizardry actually work.

You can watch the first nine minutes of the movie in the video embedded below.

"1917" is also one of those rare movies with bonus features that deepen a viewer's appreciation and understanding of the film. The planning, rehearsal and use of cutting-edge camera technology is explained in detail, and the shots of how the camera was relayed from one part of the crew to another are almost as impressive as the movie itself.

Even more impressive are two feature-length commentary tracks, one from Mendes and the other from Deakins. Anyone who wants to understand how movies are made and why this film resonates so deeply with the people who made it should spend time with Sam and Roger.

"1917" won a slew of awards this year but came up short in the Oscar Best Picture race. It will probably go down alongside "Saving Private Ryan" as one of the best films to be denied that Oscar. (To be fair, "Parasite" is also a great movie, so the loss will never sting as much as the "Shakespeare in Love" win over "Saving Private Ryan.") The film did earn Deakins his second Oscar for cinematography and won well-deserved technical Oscars for visual effects and sound mixing.

LONDON, ENGLAND - JANUARY 29: (L to R) Dean-Charles Chapman, Dame Pippa Harris and George MacKay, accpeting on behalf of "1917", attend the Newport Beach Film Festival 6th Annual UK Honours at The Langham Hotel on January 29, 2020 in London, England. (Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Visit Newport Beach)

Producer Pippa Harris has worked with Sam Mendes several times, going back to the underrated Marine Corps sniper movie "Jarhead" in 2005. She's also been an executive producer on the TV series "Call the Midwife" and "Penny Dreadful," where she first worked with "1917" screenwriter Wilson-Cairns.

In a conversation with Military.com, Harris explained the motivation behind making the movie and why the U.K. seems to have a deeper connection to the memory of World War I than we do in the United States.

Pippa Harris: My grandfather fought in the First World War, and obviously Sam's grandfather did too. Maybe that war means a lot more to us. We have a lot of memorials to the people who fell in the first world war everywhere around London and the U.K.

That lack of interest in the U.S. certainly wasn't a hindrance in terms of getting the movie set up. Amblin was a studio that we'd worked with before, and they were very keen to work with Sam again. They loved this idea, the idea of having the first World War as the backdrop for this much more intimate, character-driven thriller.

A film crew member, director Sam Mendes and screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns on the set of "1917." (Universal Pictures)

Krysty Wilson-Cairns earned an Oscar nomination for the "1917" screenplay, and the movie's bonus features make it obvious that she was on set and far more involved in the day-to-day production of this movie than most writers are on other productions.

The movie represents a huge breakthrough for a young writer whose previous credits are highlighted by a staff writer gig on "Penny Dreadful." Her career has since taken off, and she has upcoming movies in various stages of production with the gifted directors Edgar Wright ("Shaun of the Dead," "Baby Driver") and Tobias Lindholm ("A War," "A Hijacking").

In an interview, Wilson-Cairns explained her interest in the Great War.

Krysty Wilson-Cairns: I'm really fascinated by the First and Second World Wars. My grandfather never fought. He was born in 1929, so he was too young to fight in either one. He obviously did his military service in Britain and everything like that as well. He wasn't highly educated. He believed in understanding history, how important it was to have a very robust working knowledge of the mistakes civilization has made and the heroism and sacrifice that people went through so we could live the lives we were entitled to live.

My grandfather really believed in learning and reading about those things, and passed on that love to me. There was a graveyard near our house that had an RAF monument from the Second World War with a beautiful poem on it that said, "For your tomorrow, we gave our today." I still remember it years later. My grandfather was the main influence in my life. He took me to see "Saving Private Ryan" in the cinema when it came out, and every Sunday we'd watch a war movie together.

I had always dreamed of writing a war movie and sometimes, when you're a young woman, you're not usually afforded an opportunity to work on one, especially not at this level. When Sam wanted to tell a story based on his grandfather's war experience, I was lucky to be at the right place at the right time.

Military.com: "1917" isn't a movie that's particularly heavy on dialogue. The visual storytelling is remarkably important to how the movie works.

Wilson-Cairns: Screenwriting is a very visual medium. Ideally, when someone reads your script, it should put the movie in their head. Since the movie's story is told in real time, we don't start at the beginning of Blake and Schofield's friendship. We don't learn about Schofield's life because people don't wake up in the morning and say, "Oh, I'm missing my wife and her name is. ..." We couldn't use a lot of dialogue because that wouldn't feel real and it's not how soldiers talk with each other, especially in that war.

Dean Charles Chapman and George MacKay could tell so much of the story through their work that I was actually advocating cutting dialogue a lot of the time, which is very unusual for a writer. We worked with [cinematographer] Roger Deakins, who's arguably the greatest living visual storyteller, and [production designer] Dennis Gassner to tell the story of these two young men trying to deliver a message.

Blake and Schofield rescue a downed German aviator in "1917." (Universal Pictures)

Military.com: There seems to be a more active memory of World War I in the U.K. than we have here in the States.

Wilson-Cairns: In the United Kingdom, millions died and the war touched every village, every town. Almost every young man was involved in the war effort in some way and so were most of the women. There are towns called "Thankful Villages" where all the boys came back from the war, and there's only a few of them in the entire United Kingdom. That's the level of devastation from the war.

Town squares and train stations and department stores from that era have plaques to remember all the young men who fell. In Scotland, there are little villages on the northeast coast that only have a little rocky path for access. Even they have war memorials because they lost men in the war.

Blake and Schofield in the trenches in "1917." (Universal Pictures)

The Second World War is more of a clear-cut war in that the Allies were really fighting evil, because the Nazis were trying to destroy our civilization and our humanity. In the First World War, Brits and Germans were forced to fight each other because Europeans royals who were family members got in a spat a couple of years ago. That's not really an obvious reason to go and die. In the Second World War, you're sacrificing for humanity.

Now, when you read about the First World War, you do it with hindsight. It's very easy to ask, "Why did they send all those men to their deaths? What were they doing in that first year at the Somme? What were they thinking?"

If you try and place yourself in the shoes of the men who had to command that war, I wouldn't wish that unenviable position on my worst enemy. You've got no idea what's happening. You've got no radar. No modern technology. They had soldiers who carried birds in cages on their back and would release the birds when they took a German position, to let command know.

At the same time, there's a massive advancement in the technology used to kill people. You start the war with cavalry and end with tanks, chemical warfare and machine-gun artillery. With mines under the ground, you can wipe out 10,000 people, but you can't communicate with your frontline men 500 yards away other than by messenger, and about half of those messengers are getting blown up.

During this war, everyone doesn't really know quite what's going on. People have different stories and are just trying to keep themselves alive. That was the point of telling "1917" this way. One note scribbled in ink on paper is literally the difference between life and death for thousands of men. That's a profound thing that could've only really happened at that time and during that war.
SAN FRANCISCO  U.S. funeral homes are adapting their businesses to social distancing and the rapidly spreading coronavirus.

Like companies across the United States, funeral homes and mortuaries are limiting contact with customers in order to avoid spreading the highly contagious respiratory illness, in some cases livestreaming memorial services to extended family and friends.

The state of Washington, the early epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, has outright banned funerals, although burials continue. The pandemic appears to be leading to lost sales of funeral homes most profitable services, such as elaborate memorials and luxurious coffins.

Shares of the largest U.S. funeral-related companies have tumbled along with Wall Street in recent weeks as investors struggle with uncertainty around the pandemic.

Service Corporation International, which operates over 1,900 funeral homes and cemeteries, has dropped almost 30% from a March 4 record high, and smaller rival Carriage Services Inc has fallen almost the same amount.

Matthews International Corp and Hillenbrand Inc , which both sell caskets and other memorial products, have each fallen over 30% since Feb. 19, when the S&P 500 ended its 11-year bull market. Both stocks have underperformed the S&P 500.

Carriage Services funeral homes and crematoriums are following local social distancing rules, in some cases video-streaming memorial services. The company is also preparing for a range of potential outcomes related to the spread of the outbreak.

We have a plan for each one of our 219 businesses out there, Carriage Services President Bill Goetz said, citing the companys focus on safety.

Funeral homes in California, one of several states where people have been ordered to stay indoors, have limited the options they offer and are restricting the number of family members who may gather, even at outdoor graveside ceremonies.

We do remain open, but we are only doing cremations and burials. We are not offering memorials or any additional services, said Ruby Joyner, manager of C.P. Bannon Mortuary in Oakland.

Joyner said some of her customers hoped to hold memorial services once the outbreak is contained but that many were likely to hold them at churches instead of funeral homes.

Struggle In Pre-Sell Market

Funerals including memorial services typically cost about $9,000, including a casket, while cremations can cost from $1,000, said Barrington Research analyst Alexander Paris.

As well as taking a hit from offering fewer elaborate ceremonies, funeral homes may also struggle to pre-sell packages, a source of sales that some of them have relied on for growth in recent years.

Such pre-need customers are typically elderly, and the outbreak may make those people reluctant to leave home or receive visitors because they are worried about becoming sick.

Pre-need is kind of the driver of these stocks, said Oppenheimer analyst Scott Schneeberger. Pre-need is also a discretionary spend. Think of the older guy seeing his retirement portfolio take a hit.

In Italy, priests are holding burials without family members amid a backlog of deceased people, while South Korean authorities have urged the families of coronavirus victims to cremate their loved ones first and hold a funeral later.

So far, at least 720 people in the United States have died from the global pandemic, although experts and government officials expect that count to increase dramatically.

A March 16 study by Imperial College in London  published before steps were taken to contain the outbreak, including closing schools and social distancing  predicted that an unmitigated epidemic could lead to 2.2 million deaths in the United States.

While many people eventually will die in the United States from the outbreak, analysts  for now  do not expect the fortunes of funeral homes to significantly improve.

About 2.8 million people died in the United States in 2017, including 56,000 fatalities from influenza and pneumonia, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If it did pick up and significantly increase the death rate in the U.S. in 2020, I think that would help these stocks, but for the short term, its the no-public-gathering rules that are going to affect them, Barringtons Paris said.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Trevali Mining Corporation (Trevali or the Company) (TSX: TV, BVL: TV; OTCQX: TREVF, Frankfurt: 4TI) today announced the temporary suspension of operating activities at its Caribou mine near Bathurst, New Brunswick.



The global zinc market has deteriorated, and this has been exacerbated by the continued challenges presented by COVID-19. These market conditions, combined with high concentrate treatment charges, make mine operations at Caribou uneconomic at this time. The mine will be put on a care and maintenance program immediately to preserve the value of the mineral resource and mine assets. No timeline for a potential restart of operations has been defined. Trevalis operations centre in Bathurst, which serves the Companys global mine portfolio, will continue to operate.

Ricus Grimbeek, Trevalis President and CEO stated, This is a difficult but necessary decision given the market and operating circumstances. We have a capable and engaged team at Caribou, and in the last 12 months we have made incremental improvements to increase production and reduce the cost structure. During the past year we demonstrated that the Caribou mill can achieve higher throughput than nameplate capacity while at the same time increasing metallurgical recoveries leading to higher production, however the significant recent drop in the zinc price limits our ability to generate positive cash flow. This decision is no reflection on the quality of our team or the operating conditions in New Brunswick, and while the operation is paused, we will study a multitude of options in the Bathurst region to maximize value and reduce the overall cost structure of Caribou. This includes the potential to supplement the Caribou mine ore feed from ore deposits within trucking distance of the Caribou mill, metallurgical opportunities which may lead to commercial benefits around copper and gold, and potential for joint ventures with third parties.

Added Mr. Grimbeek: This was not a decision made lightly and we are sensitive to the impact this will have on the community and on our team. We will be providing transition assistance to our workforce in addition to severance. I thank the entire Caribou team for their efforts to enhance the competitive position of the mine.

One-time costs to place the mine on care and maintenance over the course of April and May are estimated to total approximately US$5 million with the ongoing costs expected to be approximately US$0.5 million per month on a cash basis to ensure that the mine, mill, and associated infrastructure are safe and secure, and positioned to restart efficiently when conditions might allow. The Company will be examining the carrying value of Caribou and will provide an update as part of its Q1 2020 financial and operating results.

OUTLOOK UPDATE

Trevali is withdrawing its current 2020 guidance due to the suspension of operations at Caribou as well as the resulting uncertainty caused by COVID-19. Trevali is currently implementing proactive and reactive mitigation measures to minimize any potential impacts COVID-19 may have on our people, communities, operations, supply chain, and finances. This also includes preserving capital and deferring capital programs where appropriate. The Company expects to provide an update on its future outlook in due course.

Aligned with the strategy of preserving capital, Trevali also announced that it has cancelled the Normal Course Issuer Bid ("NCIB") commenced December 2, 2019, as the Company no longer intends to repurchase its common shares. No common shares were purchased by the company under the renewed NCIB, though under the original NCIB in place from November 19, 2018 to November 18, 2019, a total of 28.6 million common shares were repurchased for cancellation.

ABOUT TREVALI

Trevali is a global base-metals mining company, headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. The bulk of Trevalis revenue is generated from base-metals mining at its four operational assets: the 90%-owned Perkoa Mine in Burkina Faso, the 90%-owned Rosh Pinah Mine in Namibia, the wholly-owned Caribou Mine in northern New Brunswick, Canada and the wholly-owned Santander Mine in Peru. In addition, Trevali owns the Halfmile and Stratmat Properties and the Restigouche Deposit in New Brunswick, Canada, and the past-producing Ruttan Mine in northern Manitoba, Canada. Trevali also owns an effective 44%-interest in the Gergarub Project in Namibia, as well as an option to acquire a 100% interest in the Heath Steele deposit located in New Brunswick, Canada.

The shares of Trevali are listed on the TSX (symbol TV), the OTCQX (symbol TREVF), the Lima Stock Exchange (symbol TV), and the Frankfurt Exchange (symbol 4TI). For further details on Trevali, readers are referred to the Companys website (www.trevali.com) and to Canadian regulatory filings on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Investor and Media Relations Contact:

Brendan Creaney  Vice President, Investor Relations

Email: bcreaney@trevali.com

Phone: +1 (778) 655-6070

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information and Statements

This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation and forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (collectively, forward-looking statements). Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, expectations and opinions of management of the Company as of the date the statement are published, and the Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required by law. Forward-looking statements relate to future events or future performance and reflect managements expectations or beliefs regarding future events including, but not limited to, statements with respect to the Companys operations, including the suspension of operations at Caribou and the anticipated costs associated therewith, the impact on the Companys operations of current and future actions taken by governmental authorities, counterparties and others to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Companys growth strategies and planned development activities. By their very nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, risks related to changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; future prices of zinc, lead, silver and other minerals and the anticipated sensitivity of our financial performance to such prices; possible variations in ore reserves, grade or recoveries; dependence on key personnel; potential conflicts of interest involving our directors and officers; labour pool constraints; labour disputes; availability of infrastructure required for the development of mining projects; delays or inability to obtain governmental and regulatory approvals for mining operations or financing or in the completion of development or construction activities; counterparty risks; increased operating and capital costs; foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations; operating in foreign jurisdictions with risk of changes to governmental regulation; compliance with governmental decrees and regulations, including any new or ongoing decrees and regulations issued by a governmental authority in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; compliance with environmental laws and regulations; land reclamation and mine closure obligations; challenges to title or ownership interest of our mineral properties; maintaining ongoing social license to operate; impact of climatic conditions on the Companys mining operations; corruption and bribery; limitations inherent in our insurance coverage; compliance with debt covenants; competition in the mining industry; our ability to integrate new acquisitions into our operations; cybersecurity threats; litigation and other risks and uncertainties that are more fully described in the Companys annual information form, interim and annual audited consolidated financial statements and managements discussion and analysis of those statements, all of which are filed and available for review under the Companys profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com . Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Trevali provides no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events may differ from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Source: Trevali Mining Corporation
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 13:16:46|Editor: ZD

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The world is now in a battle against COVID-19, a disease caused by a previously unknown coronavirus that has spread to over 190 countries and regions.

The following are the updates on the contagious illness.

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WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate on Wednesday night passed a 2-trillion-dollar stimulus package to blunt the economic fallout of COVID-19, after rounds of negotiations between Democrats and Republicans.

The upper chamber passed the bill in a 96-0 vote, well above the 60-vote threshold. The package needs to be approved by the House of Representatives, before being sent to President Donald Trump's desk for signature.

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TOKYO -- Japan's health ministry and local governments said Thursday that six new COVID-19 infections were confirmed in Gifu, Hiroshima and Okinawa prefectures, bringing the total number of people infected in Japan to 1,313 as of 11:00 a.m. local time here.

The death toll in Japan from the pneumonia-causing virus currently stands at a total of 55 people, according to the health ministry, with the figure including those from the virus-hit Diamond Princess cruise ship that was quarantined in Yokohama, close to Tokyo.

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NEW YORK -- The death toll from COVID-19 in the United States surpassed 1,000 as of 10:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on Wednesday (0230 GMT on Thursday), according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

A total of 1,031 people have died from the novel coronavirus in the country, where there are currently 68,572 confirmed cases, the CSSE said.

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MEXICO CITY -- Countries in Latin America on Wednesday stepped up measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic as infection rates continued to climb.

In Cuba, authorities suspended public transportation in the country's 15 provinces, including bus lines, trains and flights, and also grounded private transport services in multiple regions.

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LISBON -- The last group of passengers on board the cruise ship "MSC Fantasia," stranded in Portugal due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were repatriated to Brazil on Wednesday evening, Portuguese authorities said.

The group of people comprised 39 Brazilian passengers and 239 crew members, according to the Portuguese Ministry of Internal Administration (MAI).

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SEOUL -- South Korea's central bank decided Thursday to provide "unlimited" liquidity to financial institutions for the next three months to help minimize the economic fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Bank of Korea (BOK) said in a statement that an open bidding will be held once a week by the end of June to offer liquidity to financial institutions "with no limit" through the repurchase agreement (RP) transactions. The first bid is scheduled for April 2.

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HANOI -- Vietnam's Ministry of Health on Thursday morning confirmed seven new cases of COVID-19 infection, bringing the total in the country to 148.

The seven new cases included a French and a South African travelling to Vietnam recently, four Vietnamese citizens returning home from Britain, the United States and Thailand, and a Vietnamese man travelling to southern Can Tho city by air recently, the ministry said.

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BAMAKO -- Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita declared a state of health emergency in Mali on Wednesday evening and instituted a curfew from March 26.

"In addition to the state of (security) emergency which prevails in our country because of the security situation, the state of health emergency is declared," the Malian president said, adding that a curfew is also ordered which will be strictly applied from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. until further notice, from zero o'clock on March 26.

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HELSINKI -- The Finnish government on Wednesday officially announced the plan to block its Uusimaa region which includes the capital area to prevent the further spread of COVID-19.

The Uusimaa region is currently epidemic centre of COVID-19 in Finland, according to Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). As of Wednesday, 561 of the 880 confirmed cases were in Uusimaa.

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GENEVA -- Calling it "a second window of opportunity", the chief of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday urged countries to use this critical window now to suppress and stop transmission of COVID-19.

This window of opportunity was created by those countries and regions which introduced unprecedented "lockdown" measures to contain COVID-19 pandemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted at a daily briefing, reminding that these measures will not extinguish epidemics on their own.

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LONDON -- A total of 9,529 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed in the UK as of Wednesday morning, an increase of 1,452 over Tuesday's official figure, according to UK's Department of Health and Social Care.

The figure showed that 463 patients who tested positive for the coronavirus have died.

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PARIS -- Declaring a war against "an invisible enemy," President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday announced an army operation "Resilience" to back the fight against the coronavirus pandemic and support the population.

"We are at war and faced with the peak of the epidemic which is before us, I decided to launch the operation Resilience," Macron said on the sidelines of a visit to a military field hospital in Mulhouse, eastern France, the worst-hit region.

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ROME -- The coronavirus pandemic has claimed 7,503 lives in Italy, while the cumulative number of confirmed cases reached 74,386, Italian authorities said on Wednesday.

In detail, active infections grew by 3,491 cases on the daily basis, bringing the total active infections to 57,521 since the epidemic broke out in the northern regions on Feb. 21, according to the Civil Protection Department coordinating the emergency response.

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UNITED NATIONS -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched a 2-billion-U.S.-dollar Humanitarian Response Plan on Wednesday aimed at fighting the coronavirus in the poorest and most vulnerable countries.

"The world faces an unprecedented threat," Guterres said in a tele-news conference. "COVID-19 is menacing the whole of humanity -- and so the whole of humanity must fight back."

- - - -

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper issued an order to stop movements of overseas U.S. forces for up to 60 days to curb the spread of the coronavirus among military, according to media reports.

In a Wednesday interview with Reuters, the Pentagon chief said the order applied to all U.S. forces, civilian personnel, and families, while noting that there would be some exceptions.

- - - -

GENEVA -- A total of 413,467 cases of COVID-19 were reported globally as of 10:00 CET (0900 GMT) Wednesday, according to the situation dashboard by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The global death toll from COVID-19 has climbed to 18,433, as the virus affected 196 countries and regions.

- - - -

NEW YORK -- The number of COVID-19 cases in the United States topped 60,000 as of 3:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on Wednesday (1930 GMT), according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

The fresh figure reached 62,068 with 869 deaths, the CSSE said.
New Delhi, March 26 : An American warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday amid the blame-game between the US and China over the novel coronavirus that has killed over 21,000 people worldwide so far.

The defence ministry of Taiwan in a statement said the ship sailed north through the waterway under an "ordinary mission" and was monitored by Taiwan's armed forces.

A spokesperson for the US Seventh Fleet Anthony Junco, said the ship was the guided-missile destroyer USS McCampbell, which conducted "a routine Taiwan Strait transit on March 25 in accordance with the international law".

"The ship's transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. The US Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows," he said.

China, the unitary one-party socialist republic considers the autonomous and democratic island of Taiwan, its territory which it may bring under its direct control by force if necessary. The narrow strait that separates Taiwan, the island with an area of 35,808 square kilometers and around 24 million people, from China is a frequent source of tension.

Well-known expert on China at JNU, Professor Srikand Kondapalli told IANS that China had sent its aircraft carrier Liaoning twice last year, surrounding the island, besides scrambling bombers and fighters and violating the median line in the cross Straits.

"Traditionally, after the first Taiwan Straits crisis in 1958, the imaginary median line was respected by both sides. As China is rising and its ambitions increasing, it is attempting to overcome the Straits. Secondly, after Xi Jinping took over in 2012, China's policy changed from peaceful development of cross Straits relations to immediate reunification with Taiwan. In 2017, Xi enumerated an extreme policy line of "6 nos" on Taiwan. The change in China's policy led to its more assertiveness and following the US Congress-Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, the US as well has been upgrading its relations with Taiwan and trying to enforce balance in the Straits," he said.

The pandemic has escalated tensions between Beijing and Taipei, with the latter accusing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of covering-up the outbreak of novel coronavirus in the Wuhan city of Hubei province. The US has also blamed the Xi Jinping for the cover-up.

China called the allegations "slander" and also took offense to Taiwan's decision to donate 100,000 face masks per week to the US. Beijing said the Taiwan's agreement with the US was like "confronting the Motherland."
London, March 26 : A UK court has denied bail to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is fighting extradition to the US, after his attorneys expressed concerns that he would be at particular risk if he contracted the novel coronavirus in prison.

On Wednesday, Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Westminster Magistrates Court rejected the lawyers' argument that their client could easily become infected with the virus at London's Belmarsh Prison and that his life would be at risk in the event of contagion due to his poor health after eight years of confinement, reports Efe news.

The request was made after the British government said it planned to temporarily release some inmates in a bid to reduce the spread of the deadly virus in the country's prison system.

In issuing her ruling, the district judge said she had no reason to doubt the effectiveness of the measures Belmarsh has adopted to combat the coronavirus and said the 48-year-old Australian is not the only inmate at risk from the pandemic.

She accepted the argument of Clair Dobbin, the attorney representing US authorities, who said Assange poses a flight risk and will not return and attend his extradition hearing if he was released.

Dobbin also argued that the WikiLeaks founder was not among the demographic group (people 60 years or older) for whom the virus poses a particularly serious risk.

But Assange's attorney, Edward Fitzgerald, said his client suffers from mental health issues and a pulmonary disease that would make him especially vulnerable to the disease, an argument supported by written medical testimony.

Assange is wanted in the US on an 18-count indictment, including violations of the Espionage Act, for "offenses that relate to Assange's alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the US", according to a Department of Justice statement issued in May 2019.

If found guilty on each of the 18 counts, Assange could be sentenced to as much as 180 years behind bars.

Assange had initially been charged in April 2019 with violating cyber security laws in 2009 and 2010 to assist then-US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in gaining access to classified information intended for publication by WikiLeaks.

Conviction on that charge would have entailed a maximum prison sentence of five years.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.  Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been walking a tightrope for weeks during the coronavirus crisis, trying to protect both residents vulnerable to the virus and the cratering economy in a state of 21 million people.

His dilemma is a clear example of the conundrum facing the president of the U.S. and governors nationwide: His state has both an enormous population  a large percentage of which is old and particularly vulnerable to the virus  and a thriving economy whose collapse could result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The success or failure of the Republican governor's decisions could have major consequences for the national economic recovery, not to mention the presidential election. No state is more central to President Donald Trump's reelection.

Critics say DeSantis is relying too heavily on how his actions could reflect on the president  or affect his relationship with Trump.

"I don't think Ron DeSantis makes decisions without consulting with the president, or those close to the president," said State Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando.

Like Trump, DeSantis has been resistant to impose a statewide shutdown as New York, California and Illinois have done. Instead, the governor  in his second year in office  has pushed an incremental approach, suggesting that restrictive measures be put in place only in the hardest-hit counties. To do otherwise, he said, could cost hundreds of thousands of Floridians their jobs. Nearly a third of Florida's counties have had no cases of COVID-19, but most are small and rural.

While DeSantis has taken a cautious approach about shutting down public spaces and private businesses, he did note that his wife, who is due to have a baby soon, hasn't left their house since the beginning of March.

She was sick in January. ... We didnt really know what it was. My kids got a little sick. I was fine. But you know what? It could have been this, he told The Associated Press after a news conference Wednesday.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death. The vast majority of people recover.

DeSantis most controversial decision came this week when he issued an executive order requiring anyone coming into Florida from the greater New York area  which has seen the nations biggest virus spike  to self-isolate for 14 days. Florida officials have said people in the state whove contracted the virus recently traveled elsewhere or had contact with others who had.

The ties between Florida and New York run deep. New Yorkers are the biggest source of new Floridians. In 2018, the most recent year for which numbers are available, more than 63,000 New Yorkers migrated to the Sunshine State, close to double the residents of the next closest state, neighboring Georgia. On Tuesday, the federal government implemented the same order nationwide for those traveling from the greater New York City area.

The governor has taken some statewide measures, closing parks, bars and gyms; restricting visitations to nursing homes; and limiting restaurants to takeout and delivery. He also eventually decided to close beaches in two South Florida counties. Still, he's left many decisions to counties and cities, an approach that has garnered praise, confusion and derision.

"Coronavirus is killing us in Florida, Gov. DeSantis. Act like you give a damn," the Miami Herald declared on its editorial page over the weekend.

The Tampa Bay Times  normally considered one of the states most liberal papers  defended the governor, remarking on Monday that he struck a reasonable balance in efforts to control the virus and stop bleeding in the economy.

The newspaper argued that DeSantis has been unfairly criticized on cable news and social media "for his methodical approach to gradually implementing statewide restrictions" as opposed to the strict stay-at-home orders imposed by other governors.

Eskamani has joined Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried in calling for a statewide shutdown.

"We can't solve the economic health crisis without fixing the public health crisis," Eskamani said.

Business owners are trying to keep track of often-conflicting directives from DeSantis, as he tries to keep the economy as active as possible, and officials in Miami-Dade, Orlando and other counties who ordered all but "essential" businesses to shut down.

"We have to flatten the curve to restore consumer confidence, then get back to business," said Alex Marin, co-owner of the Hungry Pants restaurant in Orlando. "We can't sail a sailboat when there's no wind in the sails, so we're just going to sit in the water until then."

Mike Harting, owner of 3 Daughters Brewing in St. Petersburg, said he thinks DeSantis has done a decent job of prioritizing residents' health and safety, but would like him to help small businesses connect with banks.

"I appreciate his leadership," Harting said. "Are any of these the right calls? I have no idea, and none of us will until this is done. He's taking action."

Harting said Florida's service industry was especially hard hit when DeSantis ordered restaurants and bars to provide pickup or delivery service only  a decision he said he understood but that nonetheless forced him to lay off his 57 employees.

Harting said, "The economic crisis that's going to come behind all of this is just as big, if not more devastating."

Mike Van de Abbeel, owner of Mosaic Hair Studio in Orlando, echoed other business owners' frustration with the patchwork of regulations.

"We can plan for things we know," he said. "We can't plan for things we don't know. What does opening up again look like? When places around the world open, what does that look like? What does the flip side of this look like?"

For now, Van de Abeel has decided to remain open. He has placed a sink and handwashing station at the salons front door and is keeping customers more than 6 feet apart.

"It's my job to stay open and stay employed," Van de Abbeel said. "I'm trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy until I'm told we must close."

DeSantis acknowledged these concerns this week, saying that on Monday, 21,000 Floridians filed for unemployment.

"Clearly we've got to do something about the virus," he said, but "there's no way a nine-month shutdown would possibly be sustainable."

"Let's protect the folks who could be in jeopardy," DeSantis said. "Let's get society functioning."

___

Tamara Lush of The Associated Press wrote this story. AP reporter Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report.

Follow AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak.

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India and the US are working together on combating the deadly coronavirus and collaboration is underway in the areas of diagnostics and therapeutics of the disease, which so far has taken the lives of more than 20,000 people globally, according to the Indian envoy here.

The deadly coronavirus that first emerged in China's Wuhan city has drastically spread around the world, infecting 471,518 people and causing 21,293 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker.

"In the present context of COVID-19 pandemic, close collaboration in the areas of diagnostics and therapeutics of the disease is underway, India's Ambassador to the US, Taranjit Singh Sandhu told PTI.

"India and the United States have had a long-standing productive partnership in the healthcare sector, especially between the research institutions and industries of both countries, he said.

Under the existing bilateral collaboration in healthcare sector- the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease in the US shared the important reagents with the Translational Health Science Technology Institute in Gurgaon.

Such cooperation is expected to play a big role in developing new therapeutics and testing reagents for the COVID-19.

In addition, India-based vendors of American companies are in touch with the Indian Council of Medical Research to engage and enhance the capabilities for COVID-19 test in India.

"The US will work shoulder to shoulder with India to combat the COVID19 outbreak. Together, we can safeguard our citizens and people everywhere," Acting Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Alice G Wells, said in a tweet referring to the cooperation between the two countries.

The United States, she said, stands united with India and echoes Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call to keep up their fighting spirits.

Cooperation and collaboration in the sector of coronavirus was also discussed between the two countries when President Donald Trump met Prime Minister Modi in New Delhi last month.

Trump and Modi also hailed a bilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that seeks to promote access to high quality, safe, effective, and affordable medications for US and Indian consumers.

In 2012, the Center for Disease Control collaborated with National Centre for Disease Control to establish Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Programme.

This post-graduate field-training programme, modelled after the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), has expanded to two additional hubs at the WHO India Country Office and at the India Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Institute of Epidemiology.

According to the CDC, it has helped strengthen national surveillance for detecting and responding to healthcare associated infections and emerging antimicrobial resistance threats in health facilities in 22 states.

A public-private partnership helped increase capacity to diagnose, treat, and care for multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) patients through virtual platforms. In Mumbai, the CDC helped the municipality and local partners, launch an Airborne Infection Control Unit to reduce healthcare-associated transmission of MDR-TB.

The CDC has helped India in implementing a surveillance system in 35 hospitals and 22 states for healthcare associated infections. It has evaluated 346 laboratory facilities across the country to identify needs and trained more than 1,700 laboratorians on quality diagnostic testing/reporting of priority diseases.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
France on Thursday reported that 365 people, including a 16-year-old girl, had died from the coronavirus over the last 24 hours, the country's highest daily toll.

Top French health official Jerome Salomon told reporters that a total of 1,696 people had died in hospital in France from the virus, emphasising that the toll does not include those who died at home or at retirement homes.

He said that 29,155 people had tested positive for the virus so far in France, adding that the real number of cases was likely far higher as testing was reserved for high-risk patients.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hospital employees attend to a patient at a temporary emergency structure set up outside the emergency department at the Brescia Hospital in Lombardy, Italy, on March 13, 2020. (Miguel Medina/ AFP)

Bergamo Doctors: The Catastrophe Unfolding in Wealthy Lombardy Could Happen Anywhere

While still battling the CCP virus, exhausted Italian doctors from Bergamo, the hardest hit city, say there needs to be a change in the approach to healthcare during a pandemic.

In an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst, 13 doctors who work at the Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital are calling for a shift away from patient-centered care as COVID-19 continues to overwhelm the countrys healthcare system.

Solutions for COVID-19 are required for the entire population, not only for hospitals, wrote the doctors. To better handle the next pandemic, community-centered care should be adopted.

Community-centered care involves a network of healthcare, governmental, educational, and community-based organizations working together to look after the health needs of a community.

This differs from the patient-centered model, in which patients are the main decision makers regarding their health care needs and treatment, and physicians are only there to advice, inform, and support.

The current situation in Bergamo is dismal as we operate well below our normal standard of care, wrote the doctors. But the situation in the surrounding area is even worse. Most hospitals are overcrowded, nearing collapse, while medications, mechanical ventilators, oxygen, and personal protective equipment are not available.

Bergamo, a northern Italian city with a population of 122,000, has seen 27,206 cases and 3,456 deaths from the CCP virusabout half of the total deaths in the country as of March 25.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

We are in desperate need of both nurses and physicians, together with ventilators and dispositives for protection, Stefano Faguioli, head of the department at the Papa Giovanni Hospital, said in a youtube video. And if you are a health personnel, you are more than welcome to join us in fighting the coronavirus.

According to the Anaao Assomed union for medical managers, more than 5,000 health workers in Italy have been infected with the CCP virus due in part to a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Walter de Caro, president of the Italian Nurses Association, said in a press release (pdf) that in most cases, nurses and doctors are forced to wear masks which are far past their effective use, and in some hospitals in central and southern Italy, staff have no PPE at all.

The high rate of infections among the health workers in Italy has put an additional strain on the already exhausted and overworked staff. Those who are infected must stay home for 14 days.

The Bergamo doctors write that a community-centered care with outreach services such as home care and mobile clinics would help to avoid unnecessary movements and release pressure from hospitals, as well as delivering pulse oximeters, oxygen therapy, and food to those who are mildly ill or recovering at home. The use of telehealth should also be leveraged.

This outbreak is more than an intensive care phenomenon, rather it is a public health and humanitarian crisis. It requires social scientists, epidemiologists, experts in logistics, psychologists, and social workers. We urgently need humanitarian agencies who recognize the importance of local engagement.

For two days, it looked hopeful that the epidemic was beginning to slow down in Italy as the death toll decreased from 651 deaths on March 22 to 601 the next day. However, the country saw its second-highest death toll of 743 on March 24 since the outbreak became obvious in February.

New York Hospitals Now Feeling the Strain

Doctors test hospital staff with flu-like symptoms for the CCP virus in tents set up to triage possible COVID-19 patients outside before they enter the main emergency department area at St. Barnabas hospital in the Bronx borough of New York City on March 24, 2020. (Misha Friedman/Getty Images)

In the United States, New York has been on lockdown since March 22 after Governor Cuomo made the call for non-essential workers to stay at home. Over 30,000 cases have been confirmed and more than 285 people have died.

New York hospitals are beginning to feel maxed out as COVID-19 cases continue to rise and more people are hospitalized.

Northwell Healths Chief Quality Officer and Deputy Chief Medical Officer Mark Jarrett, MD, told The Epoch Times, All of our policies has been built on the concept of protecting staff in the best way we can, with the available resources that we have.

Any workflow that may expose health workers and waste resources are not going ahead at this time. So, were looking to see how we can streamline workflow at a time when our primary concern is maintaining safety and taking care of our patients, Jarret said.

Like hospitals in other states, Northwell Health facilities are concerned about whether there will be enough medical supplies and PPE in several weeks time.

We havent had an oversupply abundance of masks, but weve had enough masks that met our criteria, Jarret said. However, we get concerned especially on some specific equipment like ventilators. If this doesnt start to tail off or slow down, then were going to be stretched beyond some of our equipment.

Were looking again to see what things we can do that might multiply our supply. It has been done before and were all looking at it now.

There have been reports before of using ventilator for several patients together, he said. There are ways to do it and that way you can expand your supplies.

Jarret said during this stressful time that the employee assistance program in [the] behavioral health unit are offered to support the staff.

To help relieve pressure on hospitals battling the CCP virus, the USNS Comfort has been deployed to New York City. The 1,000-bed hospital ship will focus on treating non-CCP virus patients.

According to 3M Chairman and CEO Mike Roman, the company sent out 500,000 N95 respirators to New York and Seattle on March 22.

People across the nation are volunteering to sew protective masks for hospitals that are in short supply of PPE amid the pandemic. Meanwhile, some distilleries like Old Forester and Lexington Brewing & Distilling are using their alcohol to make free hand sanitizer for those working on the front lines.

Hand sanitizer with at least 60 percent alcohol should only be used when soap and water are not available to prevent transmission of the CCP virus. Soap and water are the most effective at cleaning away any virus particles.
Ben Sasse ultimately offered the amendment to cut unemployment insurance benefits that failed after a Republican revolt against the bills generosity. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Senate leaders congratulated themselves in the wee hours of Wednesday morning for reaching an agreement on a $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package. But they were a bit premature. Late on Wednesday night, as this longest day waned, the upper chamber finally passed the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus after a group of Republican senators pitched a temper tantrum over the bills allegedly over-generous treatment of the unemployed.

This churlish freakout unwound all afternoon as Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott of South Carolina, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Rick Scott of Florida agitated the air over the average bump-up in unemployment insurance payments agreed upon by the bipartisan negotiators. It would, they argued, pay the unemployed more than low-wage workers in their low-wage states. Chief administration negotiator Steven Mnuchin, other Republican senators, and Trump himself expressed disagreement with the four champions of keeping the unemployed in misery. But after Bernie Sanders threatened to demand tougher accountability standards for the major corporate relief the GOP had insisted on, it was agreed that Sasse would be allowed to offer an amendment cutting the UI benefits before the Senate would proceed to approve the package as everyone had originally expected.

Sasses amendment was rejected on a 48-48 vote (60 votes were required for this amendment; its certain failure apparently encouraged maximum Republican support for the uncharitable measure), then the whole bill passed unanimously. The only positive consequence of the delayed action in the Senate is that the House had a full day to figure out how it would proceed on the stimulus legislation. It appears Nancy Pelosi has all but given up on a unanimous consent motion (which would require, as the term suggests, unanimous approval from the entire House, which is unlikely) but may still proceed with a voice vote that would not require members fearful of exposure to COVID-19 to return to Washington. Still, further snags in the process are possible:

The House plans to vote on the stimulus Friday morning - and do so by voice vote. But if any member requests a roll call vote, it could delay the bills passage. Earlier today, AOC didnt rule it out https://t.co/9M6cl7ArZ3  Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 26, 2020

All the more reason its good that the Senate didnt go along with the effort to chop unemployment insurance.
Saudi Arabia's King Salman will chair an emergency virtual summit of G20 leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump, on Thursday to advance the coordinated response to the novel coronavirus pandemic that has claimed nearly 19,000 lives and upended life and businesses across the globe.

Saudi Arabia, which currently holds the G20 presidency, last week called for the "virtual summit" following criticism that the powerful group of major economies had been slow to address the global crisis.

"The Saudi G20 Presidency has set the date of the extraordinary virtual Leaders' Summit for Thursday, March 26. King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud will chair the meeting to advance a coordinated global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its human and economic implications," an official statement said on Wednesday.

Leaders from G20 nations will be joined by representatives from the coronavirus-affected countries like Italy, Spain, Jordan, Singapore, and Switzerland.

Several top international organisations such as the UN, the World Bank, the WHO, the World Trade Organisation, the IMF and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will also participate in the summit titled

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

US President Trump will also participate in the summit.

"President Donald J Trump will participate in a video teleconference with G20 leaders tomorrow as part of the ongoing effort to coordinate an international response to the coronavirus pandemic," White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley said.

'G20 Extraordinary Virtual Leaders' Summit on COVID-19'. Regional organisations will be represented by Vietnam the Chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), South Africa the Chair of the African Union (AU), the United Arab Emirates the Chair of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Rwanda the Chair of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), the statement said.

India is a member nation of the G20 group. The other members include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, France, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UK and the US. Prime Minister Modi will participate in the virtual summit, sources said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will also attend the summit.

The announcement of the summit comes as fears grow that the world economy will plunge into recession due to the coronavirus crisis.

Globally, the death toll from the coronavirus has risen to 18,915 with more than 422,900 cases reported in over 165 countries and territories, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The number of coronavirus cases in Saudi Arabia have gone up to 767 with one COVID-19 death reported so far, according to Worldometer, a website which compiles COVID-19 cases.

The number of coronavirus cases in India stood at 562 on Wednesday with nine COVID-19 deaths reported so far, according to Health Ministry data.

In an attempt to stem the spread of coronavirus in India, Prime Minister Modi on Tuesday announced a nationwide lockdown for three weeks.
Hidayet Musajan, a young Uyghur man living and studying in exile in Turkey, last spoke with his father, a well-known comedian in northwest Chinas Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) named Musajan Ehmet, in September 2017. Musajan later learned through a friend that his father was sentenced to 20 years in prison for having traveled abroad and flouted family planning policies that require rural ethnic minorities have three children or less. Ehmet had visited his son in Egypt once before, after securing permission from authorities to travel abroad. He had also paid a fine in 2016 for Musajans 10-year-old sister, who had been born outside of the family planning policy, so that she could be formally registered with the Chinese state. According to the friend, Ehmet is currently being held in a prison in Kuitun, a county level city in the XUARs Ili Kazakh (Yili Hasake) Autonomous Prefecture.

Ehmet, who was born in Ghulja (Yining) city in 1970, worked at the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefectural Culture Bureau from 1991-1993, and for the cultural division of the Kepekyuzi township government in Ghulja county until his detention. He became popular as a comedian among Uyghurs for his original jokes and wordplay, performing with some of the regions best known comics and releasing several recordings of his work.

Musajan, who is in his third year of studies in graphic design at the Istanbul Media Academy, moved to Egypt in 2014, but relocated to Turkey in 2017 after Cairo forcibly repatriated several Uyghur students to China. He recently discussed how he learned about his fathers imprisonment in an interview with RFAs Uyghur Service and called for the international community to pressure China over his release.

My communication with my father was cut off completely after we last spoke with one another in September 2017. Ever since then, even though Ive suspected that my father had been detained by the Chinese government, I had no chance to get any information directly from the homeland about my father because the Chinese government completely controls communication with people in foreign countries. But two months ago, as a result of doing some digging around with the help of several acquaintances of mine, I heard news that my father, Musajan Ehmet, was detained in September 2017 for having had more than three children and having gone abroad, that he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and that hes currently in a prison in Kuitun.

From my fathers and many other tragic cases, I have come to understand that the fact that Uyghurs are different from Chinese is itself a sufficient crime for the Chinese government. I see the way that they used the fact that my fathera widely known person in our homelandhad more than three children and went abroad, which are within the rights of any average citizen, as crimes upon which to detain and sentence him to a long prison term. Its clear proof that individual lives are the price of the ethnocide that the Chinese are enacting against the Uyghurs.

I call on the U.S. leadership, the United Nations, human rights organizations, as well as all countries and societies that are working in defense of human rights and justice, to do their jobs [in regards to my fathers case].

Reported by Nuriman for RFAs Uyghur Service. Translated by Elise Anderson. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
Schools in Queensland will be pupil-free from next Monday, except for the children that do attend, as fears of a major cluster of coronavirus cases grow on the Sunshine Coast.

Fifty more cases were recorded in Queensland on Thursday, taking the state total to 493.

Queensland Health on Thursday afternoon issued a public health alert for three Sunshine Coast venues, after a patron who was unknowingly infectious visited earlier in March before testing positive for COVID-19.

The person attended the Noosa Beer Companys Land & Sea Brewery in Noosaville between 1pm-3pm on Friday, March 13; Sum Yung Guys restaurant in Sunshine Beach, between 6.45pm-8.45pm on Friday, March 13; and the Sunshine Beach Surf Life Saving Club between 3.45pm-11.30pm on Saturday, March 14 and between 12.30pm-2pm on Sunday, March 15.
A month ago, Daisy Rodriguez had few worries.

The 40-year-old Dover woman spent her days babbling with her 2-year-old daughter and cooking with her mom in the home they comfortably moved to a year ago. She had just gotten word of her tax return, and was calculating her yearly budget with it in her savings.

But now, her biggest worry is approaching: April 1.

Her rent is due just a few days after her life  and just about everybody elses  has been turned upside down as the coronavirus outbreak ravages the world. She doesnt know if she can make the $1,500 payment.

The local temp agency where she was working closed last week. Her mom was laid off from her job at a hotel a week before. She stopped driving for Lyft, which brought in some side money, out of fear of being exposed to the virus.

That was all my income. I dont have the money for savings. Im truly worried. I dont know whats going to happen, she sighed during a phone interview with NJ Advance Media. Im scared.

Shes waiting for her unemployment claim to be processed, and is hoping a stimulus package by the federal government will offer some rent relief, though any such help is weeks away at best.

At least for the time being, Rodriguez knows she cant be locked out of her home for up to 60 days after the state of emergency is lifted, after Gov. Phil Murphy placed a moratorium on evictions of rental tenants and homeowners amid foreclosure proceedings in New Jersey during and up to two months after a crisis.

But that hasnt stopped her landlord from reminding her rent is due in less than a week.

Rodriguez believes she could scrape up enough to pay for rent on the first. But the question remains -- how does she pay her car payment on the 10th? Or the insurance bill thats due the 12th? And the next rent payment on May 1? She hasnt been able to find many answers.

I dont have money to sustain me. Do I pay rent or do I save money to feed my family?"

Paying the rent is a problem facing tenants and landlords across New Jersey, the Murphy administration acknowledges.

Assistance for renters and landlords after the moratorium is lifted is being discussed, a spokeswoman for the Murphy administration said.

Governor Murphy knows that many New Jerseyans are facing difficult financial realities due to COVID-19," spokeswoman Alyana Alfaro said in a statement to NJ Advance Media.

The Murphy administration is currently assessing how to best ensure that residents feel secure during these uncertain times and paths forward to mitigate the impacts of ongoing financial hardships,

Derek Reed, a representative of the state Property Owners Association, which represents thousands of New Jersey landlords, urged renters to try to pay their landlords, who he says are one of the most crucial parts of the society by providing housing."

Its critical now more than ever for landlords to get the rent, he said. These are really trying times but theres more stress on these buildings.

He noted that renters should communicate any issues they foresee with their landlord, who should be reasonable during this crisis.

It cant just be that tenants stop paying rent. There are options landlords can work with residents on, Reed said. They have to look at this at a day by day basis and with this (federal stimulus) package, itll help folks with essential expenses and putting food on the table and other daily expenses, hopefully that includes paying their rent.

The New Jersey Tenants Organization did not respond to requests for comment.

For Sandy Rojas of Mine Hill Township, help cant come soon enough. Just after Murphy declared all non-essential businesses close and restaurants cease dine-in service, she lost her job at a neighborhood bar.

In the two weeks since her boss broke the news that the restaurant would shutter, Rojas, who has three children, has been trying to find any job to be able to pay her bills. Shes willing to do anything  painting, babysitting, baking, cleaning  but none of these jobs are viable right now.

Today I got a bunch of bills and I said, Oh my God, what do I do? she said. If I have for one thing, I dont have for another. Its like having your hands tied.

Her landlord has been understanding with the rent, but Rojas is worried about how long that compassion will last. After all, who knows when the outbreak will be over, and how long she can defer rent payments for?

Rojas and Rodriguez said they were blindsided by the arrival of COVID-19, which originated in Wuhan, China in December. As of Wednesday evening, the virus has infected over 467,000 people globally, including 21,000 deaths, and infected more than 4,000 in the state, including 62 deaths.

Rojas says shes worried about getting sick, but not so much from the coronavirus.

Its the stress thats going to kill me, she said, laughing to mask the dark joke. I cant rest peacefully because all Im thinking about is where Im going to get money. Everyday Im wondering how Im going to pay for the next thing.

She tries to distract herself by playing with her kids now that theyre home, and acting as her 11-year-old sons teacher. But then she turns on the TV and shes reminded of reality.

Unsettling thoughts lurk in Rodriguezs mind too, no matter how much she tries to entertain her daughter, a happy baby who has no idea whats going on in the world.

I look at my little girl and I think, How am I going to go to the supermarket? I try to do things with her, but its a lot of work to keep my baby happy while my mind is on finances, she said.

Its effecting everything, and even my daughter is going to notice soon.

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Lamar Elementary School principal Erin Honeycutt sets up a "Zoom" class for first through fifth graders in Meridian, Miss. With millions of people now turning to Zoom and other video-conferencing platforms to stay connected while physically apart, "Zoom-bombing" has also piled on to the many stresses overwhelming schools. (Paula Merritt/Associated Press)

Jordan Scott, a high school student in Conejo Valley, logged on to the Zoom video-conferencing platform Tuesday evening hoping for some sense of normalcy after all the overwhelming changes brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

Her school district was about to hold its first public meeting online, and Scott, the student board trustee, was just catching her breath after a week of helping classmates grapple with school closures, canceled events and the switch to stay-at-home learning.

Familiar faces popped up on the screen  fellow board members and district staff. But minutes before the meeting was about to start, a number of unrecognized users jumped into the group meeting and began chanting the N-word repeatedly. Close-up pornographic images suddenly took over the center screen.

The horrifying images and voices continued as the ugliest corners of the internet crashed this public online gathering. At least one unknown user cackled. School board members were sexually harassed and threatened. One voice said if someone could hack into a Zoom meeting, home addresses could be discovered as well.

I immediately closed my laptop, said Scott, a senior and AP-Honors student at Westlake High School in Thousand Oaks. She then paused her comments, collected her thoughts and recalled the experience:

I was uncomfortable  being a female, and 17 years old, and African American, hearing the N-word, watching sexual intercourse knowing that my male colleagues were watching the same thing that I was looking at, hearing sexual harassment directed at my female colleagues  I felt like it would be best to just remove myself from the meeting."

With millions of people now turning to Zoom and other video-conferencing platforms to stay connected while physically apart, Zoom-bombing has also piled on to the many stresses overwhelming schools, companies and community groups transitioning to online lessons and meetings.

A Zoom spokesperson said in a statement that we take the security of Zoom meetings seriously and we are deeply upset to hear about the incidents involving this type of attack. The company urged users to report misuse.

Story continues

A relatively new frontier of internet trolling, Zoom-bombing has taken over video conferences and work from home happy hours with hateful images and vulgar screen-shares.

Local groups just trying to provide a virtual hangout for their communities have had to terminate online events. Last week, Chipotle tried to host a public Zoom event with the popular musician Lauv  but had to shut down after someone started broadcasting hardcore porn to the hundreds of people tuning in.

As more and more colleges and school districts scramble to set up Zoom classrooms as a stand-in for canceled in-person classes, these internet bullies have found another vulnerable space.

Some grade-school teachers have already shied away from teaching their youngest students on this platform. Teachers in at least one Los Angeles public school stopped using the platform at the end of last week. Districtwide, Los Angeles Unified officials said that Zoom was one of several approved platforms that teachers could utilize, but they acknowledged that the potential security problem has been flagged.

"We are encouraging people to use what they need to get up and running with distance learning. But regardless of whether that's Zoom or other online resources, folks still have to take the appropriate security precautions," said LAUSD board member Nick Melvoin. "That's also why the training component for teachers and families is so important."

At USC, top administrators on Tuesday apologized to the school community after some virtual lectures fell prey to people crashing in with racist and vile language.

We are deeply saddened that our students and faculty have had to witness such despicable acts, USC President Carol L. Folt and Provost Charles Zukoski wrote in a universitywide letter. You have all worked tirelessly to make the transition from in-class learning to remote learning and have done so quickly to maintain our academic progress and continuity.

Officials at USC and other universities across the nation are working quickly to implement safeguards and new protocols. Memos by information security offices like the ones at USC and UC Berkeley have been circulating this week to students and faculty. Many warned about Zoom-bombing and laid out steps to manage screen-sharing and turning off public settings.

There is a default setting on Zoom that permits any meeting participant to share their screen. Meeting hosts should be aware that anyone who has the link to a public meeting can jump in. These links are often shared on social media and easy to dig up on public event pages.

Platforms like Zoom were built mainly to serve as a business tool  not a social tool used by the millions of people suddenly stuck at home. Moderating user behavior (and online trolls) at such a large scale was not necessarily as well-established at Zoom as companies such as Facebook and Twitter.

In a post titled How to Keep the Party Crashers from Crashing Your Zoom Event, Zoom representatives offered detailed tips on how to adjust security settings. Meeting hosts, for example, can change the platforms default administrative settings and make sure the screen-sharing option is disabled for everyone but the host.

Meeting hosts can also mute participants, and those hosting private meetings or virtual classrooms can set up password protections that prevent uninvited users from joining.

For Conejo Valley school officials, the agenda and log-in information for Tuesdays meeting had been posted days earlier. When the Zoom crashers took over, officials quickly ended the session and notified the community of technical difficulties. They called the police, who are now investigating the matter.

In a letter to the community, school officials said the District is doing all it can to determine who was responsible, and to prevent something like this from occurring again. They assured parents and students that there are clear differences as to how these Zoom teacher hosted meetings will be set up for children, and a set number of invited participants, versus how the Board of Education Meeting was established for the public, and an unlimited number of participants.

Balancing the need to keep their meetings open to the public, while also protecting the community that they serve, clearly will be an ongoing priority and challenge, officials said. In preparation for Tuesdays meeting, the district had done several mock meetings and went through what they thought was due diligence in training and tutorials.

When public officials gather to conduct official business, there is a trust that it is a safe place to meet, respectfully share concerns, and work together for the best interest of the community, the letter said. This trust was breached by a person or people intentionally trying to cause great harm at a time when our entire community is trying to cope with a global health crisis.
A Covid-19 patient who was recently discharged from Cleveland Clinic left behind a message thanking the intensive care unit staff that tended to him. The patient wrote on the glass door separating the isolation room where healthcare workers often communicated with him. Cleveland Clinic shared the message on their Instagram.

This window has been the most impactful window in my life. On days when I watched you work hard to keep me and others alive, unable to thank you for the time that you poured into me  and although I will probably never get the chance to pour that same love and support into you, I want you to know that I think you all are rockstars," the note said.

"I watched some of you have good nights and some bad nights but what was consistent every night was that you care for people," he continued.

To finish, he added: "Today I leave this ICU a changed person, hopefully for the better, not only because of your medical healing and Gods direction and guidance, but with the fact of knowing that there are such wonderful people dedicated to the care and concern of others. God bless each of you.

As of Thursday, there are 704 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ohio and 184 hospitalizations, according to the Ohio Department of Health. There have been 75 patients admitted to the intensive care unit.

On Tuesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the infection rate in New York was increasing, and that the state could be two weeks away from a health crisis of 40,000 people in intensive care.

Doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other healthcare staff are on the frontlines of the pandemic. Many healthcare workers have started taking extreme measures to prevent infecting their families. Last week, Heather Tubbs Cooley, a paediatric nurse in Ohio, told the Washington Post that her husband, a physician, removes his clothes in their garage, changes, and heads to the shower before interacting with his children.

Doctors have contracted Covid-19, sometimes fatally. Peng Yinhua, a 29-year-old Chinese doctor postponed his wedding to attend to patients in Wuhan as the virus spread in February. Dr Yinhua died from the virus on February 21.

Li Wenliang, 34, who first sounded the alarm on the seriousness of Covid-19, died on February 7. He left behind his pregnant wife and son.

Jean-Jacques Razafindranazy, a 67-year-old retired doctor, returned to practice at the emergency ward in Compiegne hospital, France. He died on March 21.

Cleveland Clinic's Instagram post of the Covid-19 patient's note shares a caption: "To our caregivers, you uplift and inspire us all."
Model and activist Adwoa Aboah has launched an initiative to encourage creativity during the lockdown.

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, Boris Johnson has told the public they should now only leave the house for several key reasons.

These include travelling to work as a key worker, shopping for food or medicine and taking one form of exercise per day. Meanwhile, those with underlying health conditions should be self-isolating at home for a period of 12 weeks.

In a bid to inspire millions of house-bound Britons, Aboah has created #CopingTogether.

For the initiative, the 27-year-old is inviting her 862,000 followers to submit creative work, which can be anything from art, videos, photographs, essays or journal entries.

Then, Aboah will share the submissions on Instagram via her Gurls Talk account, which is an online platform she launched to inspire young women to speak openly about mental health, body image and other issues in a safe environment.

Aboah announced the initiative on her own Instagram page via a video, in which she explained that she hopes creativity will help curb peoples anxieties during the lockdown.

These are uncertain times and I know that like me, a lot of you out there are feeling anxious and looking for ways to cope, she said.

Aboah explained that she hopes #CopingTogether will help people to stay connected during the lockdown.

I cant wait to see all your work! she added. Mad love and stay safe!

Those wishing to submit their work to Coping Together should send it via email to info@gurlstalk.com.
Webinar Review

Please download Dr. Peng Zhiyong's slides here.

Please download Dr. Vernon Lee's slides here.

Please see key points made by the speakers, and Dr Peng's answers to all related questions.

Covid-19 continues to spread globally and countries are gearing up to fight the virus. China and Singapore, although different in many ways, have tackled the challenge since January and are ahead of most countries in their fight. This Caixin Global webinar brings leading doctors from Wuhan and Singapore together to share valuable lessons from the frontlines.

Time & Date: Thursday March 26, 20:00-21:15, Beijing time

Speakers:

Dr. Peng Zhiyong, director of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University; adjunct faculty, Department of Critical Care Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Dr. Peng has been fighting Covid-19 in Wuhan since early January, leading ICU teams at Zhongnan Hospital and the newly built Leishenshan Hospital. ICUs under his leadership have had among the lowest rates of Covid-19 fatalities and hospital transmissions.

Dr. Vernon Lee, director of communicable diseases, Singapore Ministry of Health; adjunct associate professor, Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at National University of Singapore; senior consultant, Singapore Armed Forces.

Associate professor Vernon Lee is a dedicated public health physician with expertise in health policy and management, infectious diseases epidemiology, preparedness and research.

Webinar topics:

- What are the important medical findings about Covid-19?

- What kind of strategies should countries adopt to minimize infections and casualties?

- What treatments are most effective in ICUs? What are the best ways to handle equipment shortages?

- What regular patterns did you see in severe and critical cases over the course of outbreak, and how did you prepare for patients crashing in the second week?

- What are the best ways to protect health care workers from being infected?

- What advice would you give to colleagues and public health officials in countries whose outbreaks are just beginning?

About Caixin Global Webinar - Coronavirus Series: Caixin Global Webinars invite experts to share insights from their respective fields. The Coronavirus Series explores medical, social and economic impacts and implications of the outbreak helping stakeholders including policy makers, businesses and researchers better understand and combat the virus.

Visit here to learn more about Caixin events. Want to join future Caixin Roundtable Live or other Caixin events, please contact: danliu@caixin.com

To enjoy a smoother reading experience, receive breaking news alerts, download Caixin app here.
COLUMBUS, OhioA sweeping emergency coronavirus relief bill is on its way to Gov. Mike DeWine after state lawmakers unanimously passed it Wednesday.

Cleveland.com politics reporter Jeremy Pelzer discussed whats in the legislation with Spectrum News 1s Curtis Jackson in a segment previewing the Thursday edition of Capitol Letter -- our weekday newsletter on Ohio government news and politics.

In the segment, Pelzer talks about extending Ohios primary to April 28 (as well as whos against the idea), waiving testing requirements and allowing high-school seniors to graduate, addressing a pressing school-voucher problem, and expanding unemployment benefits, among others.

You can watch the segment below, and dont forget to subscribe to Capitol Letter here.
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
The Northern Command of the Army has asked its troops returning from leave or outstation duties to report directly to the screening centres established at various transit camps in Jammu and Kashmir as part of its efforts to check the spread of coronavirus, an official said on Thursday.

He said after the medical screening the troops are being quarantined for 14 days in isolation rooms established in the units.

The Indian Army's efforts in the fight against COVID-19 have gained momentum in the Union Territories of J&K and Ladakh, PRO of northern command Lt Col Abhinav Navneet said.

A number of measures are being taken by the Army to prevent the epidemic amongst its personnel so that they are available to do their primary task and to support people in the fight against coronavirus, he said.

"Troops returning from leave or out station duties directly report to the screening centres established at various transit camps," the PRO said.

To maintain social distancing, distance between beds in the barracks has been increased, to avoid crowding in dining halls meals are served at staggered timings and adequate hand washing points are in place, he said.

The PRO added that at the unit level, a dynamic and judicious approach has been adopted by all ranks of the Indian Army to contribute to the efforts being made against coronavirus under its new mission 'Corona Mukt Awam' or coronavirus-free population.

The slogan "I will neither get infected nor will I infect others" is being "aggressively followed" by Army personnel, he said.

"Surveillance and control measures have been put in place and a number of innovative awareness programmes are being run by the field formations and units for the benefit of the populace, particularly in rural areas. Advisories by medical specialists on identification of and precautions against fomites has been issued to all in text and audio visual formats," Lt Col Navneet said.

He said Army personnel are being motivated to share the information with their families, friends and civilians in the areas of their deployment.

A total of 17 helplines in the two UTs of Ladakh & J&K for the public have been established by the troops of Northern Command.

The Mobile Vehicle Check Posts that are usually deployed for Counter Terrorist operations are innovatively educating the populace on COVID-19 by way of audio broadcasts through loudspeakers and hailers, he said.

Multiple advisories on social media including Audio Video Content have been posted using the Twitter handle of Northern Command and the same can be accessed by the public.

"The Army as an organization is proactively taking all measures. Drills have been set in. Should there be a situation to extend facilities to the civil administration, medical personnel and units are building their capacities, non-medical personnel are being taught to actively contribute to the care of patients and effort is on to enhance equipment holdings," the personnel said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Press Release

26 March 2020

CHICAGO - Oxford Hotels & Resorts, LLC, an Oxford Capital Group, LLC affiliate, is supplying the City of Chicago with up to 1,100 rooms at some of its hotel properties throughout Chicagoland to support efforts against the spread of coronavirus. In addition to housing asymptomatic guests and those requiring isolation, the rooms will also provide sanctuary for first responders who are involved in the war against COVID-19.

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"As COVID-19 continues to spread throughout our community, we wanted to do our part to provide a sanctuary for those who need it during this difficult time," says John W. Rutledge, founder, president, and CEO of Oxford Capital Group, LLC and Oxford Hotels & Resorts, LLC. "We're proud to help the city combat this crisis and allow our brave medical professionals to focus on their most critical patients in their hospitals."

The hotels will also provide three meals a day. As hotels have been deemed essential businesses to house travelers, including medical personnel, Oxford maintains strict protocols across the country around sanitation procedures that help combat the spread of viruses between guests and employees. This includes frequent sanitation of high-contact points, such as elevator buttons, door handles, reception counters, and bathrooms.

"Chicago is the first city to adopt this hotel plan, and we are gratified to be able to assist the city during this difficult time," says George Jordan, President, Oxford Hotels & Resorts, LLC. "In addition to helping the city, this arrangement allows Oxford to retain a number of its employees who are interested in contributing to the relief effort. It's inspiring to see our hospitality teams come together, even when they've had to weather the storm themselves."

In building this partnership, Oxford Capital Group, LLC worked with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot's office, organized labor including UNITE-HERE Local 1 and the Operating Engineers Local 399, and other parties, to bring an end to an 18-month strike at Hotel 166. As part of this resolution, Oxford helped craft an amended collective bargaining agreement and is simultaneously taking over management of Hotel 166, demonstrating that business, labor, and the private equity investment community can productively work together in Chicago. In addition to Hotel 166, the partnership includes Hotel Cass, Hotel Essex, Hotel Felix, and Hotel Julian. Oxford's hotels LondonHouse Chicago, The Godfrey Hotel Chicago, and Hotel Versey are not currently part of the agreement.

Oxford's partners in this initiative include: Fillmore Capital Partners at Hotel 166, The Bricton Group and The Gettys Group at Hotel Felix and Hotel Cass.

About Oxford Capital Group, LLC

Oxford Capital Group, LLC is an award-winning international real estate investment, development, and management firm. Oxford, its affiliates, and principals have been involved in over $3 billion of real estate and private equity investments, with a primary focus on hospitality (13,000+ hotel rooms) and hospitality anchored mixed use projects including multifamily (approximately 1,000 units), senior housing (approximately 3,000+ units), retail, parking, multi-family residential, and other operationally intensive forms of real estate.
A Cork woman charged with the murder of her brother has been refused High Court bail after her other brother told the court he was afraid she would come after me next.

Helen Jones (52), of Cahergal Avenue, Mayfield, in Cork, is charged with aggravated burglary and the murder of her brother Paul Jones (55) at his home on Bandon Road, in Cork, on September 4 last.

She was refused bail by the High Court today on foot of objections by gardai.

Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Emmet Nolan BL, said Ms Jones other brother, Liam Jones, had travelled to the High Court in Dublin from Cork notwithstanding his ill health.

Im recovering from cancer and every time she sees me she calls me cancer balls, Mr Jones said of his sister during the bail hearing.

He said he was afraid of his sister, that she would "come after me next" and petrol bomb his girlfriend's house - which she denied.

Swore to have no contact with brother, if bailed

Giving evidence to the High Court via video link from Limerick Prison today, Ms Jones said she had not seen her brother Liam in three and a half years, and she swore she would have no contact with him if she was granted bail.

Ms Jones told her barrister, Aoife OLeary BL, that she suffered from emphysema and chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, which were of great concern to her during the current Covid-19 crisis.

Ms Justice Mary Rose Gearty said it was a difficult matter and the judge said she had every sympathy with Ms Jones medical conditions. But the evidence was such that no condition of bail could assure the judge to release her.

Ms Justice Gearty said there may be a time quite soon when Ms Jones could make a renewed bail application.

Paul Jones found by young teenage son

Detective Sergeant Joe Young told the court that the body of Paul Jones was discovered in the hallway of his bungalow by his 15-year-old son on September 7, 2019, and a post mortem examination indicated that he had been deceased for two days.

Det Sgt Young said the deceased died following a violent struggle and suffered 25 stab wounds including a 16cm wound to the crown of his head.

He said Ms Jones and another man were arrested on April 10. They are both charged with the murder of Paul Jones on September 4 last.
Homes in Leeds amid warnings of a downturn in the UK property market from Zoopla. (PA)

Zoopla has warned the coronavirus will paralyse the UK property market, sending house sales into freefall over the next few months.

The leading property website predicted sales will sink by 60% over the next three months compared with a year earlier, and keep falling in the summer.

The companys figures suggest the pandemic has knocked the market sideways, with buyer demand last week 40% lower than a week earlier.

The data reflects the state of the market before the UK government ordered the public to stay at home for all but essential journeys on Monday.

Read more: How coronavirus fears threaten to upset the property market

Buyers appeared to be holding back amid heightened concerns over the growing crisis even before the current lockdown. Separate figures show UK workers fears for their jobs are at an eight-year high, while fears about infections during viewings and the future of the market had already taken a toll on activity.

Richard Donnell, director of research and insight at Zoopla, said economic shocks like the current situation dent confidence and put a brake on the number of people looking to move home.

He called COVID-19 a major new challenge, undermining the fragile recovery in confidence and activity seen since prime minister Boris Johnsons December election victory.

But Donnell did not predict any immediate impact on prices, saying it largely depended on how far the government could insulate firms and households from the economic fallout of the virus.

Read more: Rightmove warns of sharp slowdown in UK property market

Zooplas latest report sent to journalists on Thursday 26 March said times of economic stress typically would send prices spiralling downwards, with higher borrowing costs and rising unemployment forcing homeowners to sell fast.

But it said the governments proposed mortgage holiday for those struggling because of the outbreak could limit the number of forced sales, allowing homeowners to stay put and maintaining prices.

Story continues

Donnell also declined to predict when activity could return, noting: The timing of any rebound in housing market activity depends upon when new restrictions are lifted, and the extent to which households and businesses are able to return to a normal way of life.

It comes after Zooplas rival Rightmove (RMV.L) also warned property sales had started to fall through and the market faced a sharp slowdown in activity last week.

Rightmove announced it had slashed fees by 75% for estate agents and housebuilders putting properties on its platform, in a sign of the severity of the downturn for estate agents.

Yahoo Finance UK reported on a rise in cancelled viewings earlier this month amid fears over face-to-face contact, as well as wider economic uncertainty deterring transactions and residential building work.
A 66-year-old man has become the second UK prisoner to die of coronavirus after the infection killed a paedophile, 84, on Sunday.

The inmate at HMP Manchester, who had an underlying health condition, died in hospital today, according to reports.

Edwin Hillier, 84, who was jailed for sex attacks on young girls in the 1970s, was the first UK prisoner to die of coronavirus when he passed away in hospital on Sunday.

Edwin Hillier (left), 84, from Hertfordshire, was one of the country's oldest inmates at HMP Prison Littlehey (right) in Cambridgeshire. He was the first UK prisoner to die of coronavirus

The convict was rushed to hospital with suspected sepsis last Friday but post-mortem results showed he had also contracted coronavirus, which likely caused his death, according to reports.

A source told The Sun last night: 'The real concern is how he picked it up, who else he's come into contact with and how he died.'

A Prison Service spokesman said: 'A 84-year-old prisoner at HMP Littlehey died in hospital on March 22.

'Our thoughts are with his family at this time. As with all deaths in custody, there will be an independent investigation by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman.'

Hillier, from Hertfordshire, was was serving an 8 and a half year sentence for abusing girls in the 1970s.

He was sentenced in February 2016 at St Albans crown court by Judge Stephen Warner, who told him that he had subjected the victims to 'repeated and systematic abuse' for his own 'sexual gratification.'

Hillier, who had received a suspended jail sentence for a sexual offence against a girl in the 1970s, told one of his victims: 'Nobody believes a 10 year old when she speaks.'

Prosecutor Beverly Cripps told St Albans Crown Court that the offences were first reported to the police in 2002 by the boyfriend of one of the victims. She did not want to proceed at that time, but she eventually made a statement in 2014.

Hillier, a former school caretaker, of Saturn Way, Hemel Hempstead pleaded guilty to attempted rape and indecent assault on one victim who was aged between 10 and 15. He also admitted two charges of a serious sexual offence (buggery), attempted rape and indecent assault on a girl when she was aged between 7 and 14.

Edmund Vickers, defending, told the judge: 'He seeks to apologise to his two victims for his appalling behaviour all those years ago. He was in tears in a very difficult police interview. He has done his best to make amends by pleading guilty at the earliest opportunity.

'He said he was a fully grown man and he should have known better. He said it was his 'filthy brain.''

After his arrest in November 2014, he said Hillier had tried to take his own life.

On Tuesday the Ministry of Justice confirmed that visitors would no longer be allowed to enter the establishments in an effort to keep staff, inmates and families safe

Mr Vickers went on: 'He is now over 80 and in considerable ill health. His health is bad and deteriorating and he is registered blind. If he does not end his days in prison, there will not be much of his natural life left if he is released.'

Jailing him, Judge Warner told Hillier: 'Your victims were young, confused and vulnerable and unable to speak for many years. What you did has had a life-long effect on them.'

It follows the Ministry of Justice confirming yesterday that 19 inmates across 10 UK prisons have tested positive for coronavirus.

Earlier this week it was announced prisons across England and Wales would be shutting down jail visits in an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

A number of prisons have already confirmed cases of the virus as figures soared across the UK and Boris Johnson ordered Britons to stay inside.

But anxiety inside jails over coronavirus continues to grow due to the close proximity of prisoners and fears staff will go off sick with the disease.

On Tuesday the Ministry of Justice confirmed visitors would no longer be allowed to enter the establishments in an effort to keep staff, inmates and families safe and protect the NHS's ability to cope with the surge in coronavirus cases.

HMP Oakwood , HMP Manchester and HMP High Down have all confirmed cases of coronavirus.

On Monday, police were called to Addiewell Prison in West Lothian, Scotland, after rioting prisoners carrying metal bars were said to have 'smashed up' part of the jail and stabbed a prison officer who had been taken hostage.

A Scottish Prison Service spokeswoman said the incident had been dealt with.

She said: 'An incident took place yesterday in HMP Addiewell where a small number of individuals were involved in a disturbance in one section of the establishment.

'The incident was brought to a safe conclusion and the prison was secured on Monday night. The individuals involved have been reported to Police Scotland.'
TANZANIA, Tanzania - Eight countries under unilateral sanctions, mainly from the United States and European Union, urged U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday to request the immediate and complete lifting of those measures to enable the nations to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

In a joint letter obtained by The Associated Press, the ambassadors from China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria and Venezuela urged the U.N. chief to reject the politicization of such a pandemic.

The ambassadors, who said they were under instructions from their foreign ministers, did not name any countries responsible for what they called illegal, coercive measures of economic pressure. But the United States has imposed sanctions on all of the nations except China and the European Union has imposed sanctions on all but Cuba.

In a speech to the Group of 20 major industrialized nations on Thursday, Secretary-General Guterres appealed for the waiving of sanctions that can undermine countries capacity to respond to the pandemic.

The ambassadors said their governments have the political and moral will to gear up to fight the pandemic, but they said this is a hard  if not impossible  deed for countries facing sanctions.

The eight countries said efforts to combat COVID-19 are hindered by the destructive impact of sanctions nationally, plus their extraterritorial implications, together with the phenomena of over-compliance and the fear for `secondary sanctions, which impede governments from regularly accessing the international financial system or trading freely to procure medical equipment and supplies including testing kits for the virus.

The ambassadors noted that U.N. independent experts have concluded that unilateral sanctions affect over a third of the worlds population.

Iran is one of the countries hardest-hit by the new virus, representing eight of 10 cases of the virus in the Mideast, and those leaving the Islamic Republic have carried the virus to other countries. U.S. sanctions have made it more difficult for Iran to access the global market and international firms remain leery of deals with Tehran, even those for humanitarian purposes.

On Sunday, Irans supreme leader refused U.S. assistance to fight the new coronavirus, citing an unfounded conspiracy theory claiming the virus could be man-made by America.
Before you even begin to read this post, remember what Hillary Clinton, the voice of the left in 2015, said about sexual assault allegations: "Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported." With that fixed in your mind, it's time to talk about Joe Biden.

The #MeToo movement in America reached the top of its crescendo in 2017. The diminuendo phase happened soon after, when it seemed as if every Democrat man in America, especially in Hollywood and the media, had been playing fast and loose with women, even while pandering to feminists.

Up until spring 2019, when he began his presidential run, Joe Biden seemed immune. That was when Lucy Flores, a Bernie Sanderssupporter, claimed that, in 2014, when he was still vice president, Joe Biden touched her inappropriately and kissed her head at a campaign rally. In other words, she claimed that he did to her what he did to the women and girls in this video:

Biden denied the accusation. And because Biden seemed like the best hope to beat President Trump, he got a pass. (Recall that back in 1998, feminist reporter Nina Burleigh said of Clinton, "I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal." Politics before principles...)

Tara Reade, however, believed Flores's claims. To support Flores, she went public with her own story about the time that Biden had "put his hand on my shoulder and run his finger up my neck." However, because Reade was threatening the man who would save America from Trump, the Democrats threw at her the worst insult they could think of, calling her a Putin puppet. Reade retreated.

As the Democrat Party began to consolidate around Biden, Reade decided that, for her daughter's sake, it was time to tell the whole story about Joe. She reached out to Time's Up, a post-#MeToo organization that was established to help survivors of sexual assault and harassment tell their stories. Because Reade supported Sanders, Time's Up bowed out of helping her. The organization was afraid that doing supporting her would look like a political act and threaten its non-profit standing. Additionally, Reade had written nice things about Putin, which gave credence to the charge that she was a Russian operative.

Eventually, Reade found her way to Katie Halper, a podcaster and journalist who often works with Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi (one of the last honest left-leaning journalists). On Wednesday, Katie Halper released a short excerpt of a more extended interview with Reade. In the excerpt, Reade gives graphic details about what Biden allegedly did to her in 1993.

According to Reade, she was working in Joe Biden's office in 1993. Her supervisor asked that she deliver a gym bag to Biden. Reade reached Biden just as he was finishing a conversation with someone, after which they were alone.

Suddenly, Biden pushed Reade up against a wall, slithered his hand down the outside of her skirt and up the inside, and then thrust his fingers, not just into her underwear, but into her. At the same time, he started kissing her and asking her if she wanted to go somewhere else.

Reade's body language must have alerted Biden to the fact that, no, she didn't want to go somewhere else, for Biden pulled away. He then said either, "Come on, man. I heard you liked me" or, perhaps, "Come on, man. I thought you liked me."

Reade was shattered. Up until then, she'd admired Biden, whom she considered a father figure, for he was the same age as her father. More than that, "[h]e was, like, this champion of women's rights in my eyes, and I couldn't believe it was happening. It seemed surreal."

Even worse than the assault, said Reade, was what Biden did when it was over. "He took his finger. He just, like, pointed at me and said, 'You're nothing to me.'" And at that moment, Reade truly felt like nothing. While she told her brother and a close friend what happened immediately after the event, she remained silent until Flores's words, and the treatment meted out to Flores, caused her to act.

Keeping in mind Hillary Clinton's words, which were the mantra of the Democrat Party until too many Democrat men got hit by them, Reade must be believed. And frankly, listening to her, she sounds believable, not least because it's so easy to envision gropey, arrogant, hair-sniffing Biden being gropey and arrogant with Reade  and then calling her "man," as he does everyone else.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Senate late Wednesday passed an unparalleled $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems engulfed by the coronavirus pandemic.The unanimous vote came despite misgivings on both sides about whether it goes too far or not far enough and capped days of difficult negotiations as Washington confronted a national challenge unlike it has ever faced.

The 880-page measure is the largest economic relief bill in U.S. history. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., appeared somber and exhausted as he announced the vote  and he released senators from Washington until April 20, though he promised to recall them if needed.

"The legislation now before us now is historic because it is meant to match a historic crisis,"said Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. "Our health care system is not prepared to care for the sick. Our workers are without work. Our businesses cannot do business. Our factories lie idle. The gears of the American economy have ground to a halt."

The package is intended as relief for an economy spiraling into recession or worse and a nation facing a grim toll from an infection that's killed nearly 20,000 people worldwide. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, asked how long the aid would keep the economy afloat, said: "We've anticipated three months. Hopefully, we won't need this for three months."

Underscoring the effort's sheer magnitude, the bill finances a response with a price tag that equals half the size of the entire $4 trillion annual federal budget.

+2 Wednesday's coronavirus updates | 4 new cases in Champaign County The four include two men in their 70s, a man in his 50s and a woman in her 80s, CUPHD Administrator Julie Pryde told The News-Gazette.

Insistently optimistic, President Donald Trump said of the greatest public-health emergency in anyone's lifetime, "I don't think its going to end up being such a rough patch" and anticipated the economy soaring "like a rocket ship" when it's over.

The drive by leaders to speed the bill through the Senate was slowed as four conservative Republican senators from states who economies are dominated by low-wage jobs demanded changes, saying the legislation as written might give workers like store clerks incentives to stay on unemployment instead of returning return to their jobs since they may earn more money if they're laid off than if they're working. They settled for a failed vote to modify the provision.

Other objections floated in from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has become a prominent Democrat on the national scene as the country battles the pandemic. Cuomo, whose state has seen more deaths from the pandemic than any other, said, "I'm telling you, these numbers don't work."

Ardent liberals like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were restless as well, but top Washington Democrats assured them that a additional coronavirus legislation will follow this spring and signaled that delaying the pending measure would be foolish.

The sprawling measure is the third coronavirus response bill produced by Congress and by far the largest. It builds on efforts focused on vaccines and emergency response, sick and family medical leave for workers, and food aid.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., swung behind the bipartisan agreement, saying it "takes us a long way down the road in meeting the needs of the American people."

Senate passage delivered the legislation to the Democratic-controlled House, which will most likely pass it Friday. House members are scattered around the country and the timetable for votes in that chamber was unclear.

House Democratic and Republican leaders have hoped to clear the measure for Trump's signature by a voice vote without having to call lawmakers back to Washington.

The package would give direct payments to most Americans, expand unemployment benefits and provide a $367 billion program for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home.

It includes a controversial, heavily negotiated $500 billion program for guaranteed, subsidized loans to larger industries, including airlines. Hospitals would get significant help as well.

Six days of arduous talks produced the bill, creating tensions among Congress' top leaders, who each took care to tend to party politics as they maneuvered and battled over crafting the legislation. But failure is not an option, nor is starting over, which permitted both sides to include their priorities.

"That Washington drama does not matter any more," McConnell said. "The Senate is going to stand together, act together, and pass this historic relief package today."

The bill would provide one-time direct payments to Americans of $1,200 per adult making up to $75,000 a year, and $2,400 to a married couple making up to $150,000, with $500 payments per child.

A huge cash infusion for hospitals expecting a flood of COVID-19 patients grew during the talks to an estimated $130 billion. Another $45 billion would fund additional relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency for local response efforts and community services.

Democrats said the package would help replace the salaries of furloughed workers for four months, rather than the three months first proposed. Furloughed workers would get whatever amount a state usually provides for unemployment, plus a $600 per week add-on, with gig workers like Uber drivers covered for the first time.

Businesses controlled by members of Congress and top administration officials  including Trump and his immediate family members  would be ineligible for the bill's business assistance.

Schumer boasted of negotiating wins for transit systems, hospitals and cash-hungry state governments that were cemented after Democrats blocked the measure in votes held Sunday and Monday.

But Cuomo said the Senate package would send less than $4 billion to New York, far short of his estimate that the crisis will cost his state up to $15 billion over the next year. More than 280 New Yorkers have died from the virus, a death toll more than double that of any other state.

Still, Pelosi said the need for more money for New York is "no reason to stop the step we are taking."

Pelosi was a force behind $400 million in grants to states to expand voting by mail and other steps that Democrats billed as making voting safer but Republican critics called political opportunism. The package also contains $15.5 billion more for a surge in demand for food stamps as part of a massive $330 billion title for agency operations.

Republicans won inclusion of an "employee retention" tax credit that's estimated to provide $50 billion to companies that retain employees on payroll and cover 50% of workers' paycheck up to $10,000. Companies would also be able to defer payment of the 6.2% Social Security payroll tax.

A companion appropriations package ballooned as well, growing from a $46 billion White House proposal to $330 billion, which dwarfs earlier disasters  including Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy combined.

Europe is enacting its own economic recovery packages, with huge amounts of credit guarantees, government spending and other support.

Germany, Europe's biggest economy, has agreed to commit over 1 trillion euros ($1.1 trillion) in fiscal stimulus and support  roughly 30% of that nation's entire annual output. France, Spain and Italy have launched similar programs.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death.

In the United States, more than 55,000 people have been sickened and more than 1,000 have died.
Toronto, March 25, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- With the emergence of an unprecedented global pandemic crisis, the provincial government has taken urgent and desperately needed steps to keep Ontarios seniors and those who care for them safe.

The $3.3 billion in new funding for health care announced in the budget statement, titled Ontarios Action Plan: Responding to COVID-19, includes critically needed funds for long-term care homes and home and community care providers to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are so impressed and thankful for how quickly this government has mobilized to look after Ontarians, especially seniors and other vulnerable populations who need our support now more than ever, said Lisa Levin, CEO of AdvantAge Ontario.

The COVID-19 funding announced today for the long-term care sector includes $243 million for surge capacity in homes, as well as funding for 24/7 screening, supplies and equipment, and more staffing to support infection control.

This added support is vital to our members efforts to safeguard residents from exposure to this virus. The nature of our sector is that staff are continually in close contact with residents and providing hands-on, personal care, so it is vital that we keep everyone safe. Funding for active screening, personal protective equipment, and added staff to help with care are our top priorities, so these investments are going right where we need them, added Levin.

The government has also committed approximately $80 million to enhancing the quality of care and overall resident experience in long-term care homes, along with $23 million for a minor capital program for upgrades and repairs.

Our long-term care homes need this added funding to maintain care levels and ensure that the buildings that residents call home remain in good condition, said Levin.

Also in todays announcement is $120 million to increase home and community care capacity.

"The more we can bring care and services into peoples homes and keep them out of hospital, the better. This keeps seniors in familiar surroundings and frees up resources and space in hospitals to care for complex COVID-19 patients.



We will continue to work closely with the Ministry of Long-Term Care, the Ministry of Health, and our sector partners to tackle this pandemic. We know that the dedicated staff in our member homes are working their hardest to safeguard residents during this incredibly difficult time, added Levin.



AdvantAge Ontario is the trusted voice for senior care. We are community-based, not-for-profit organizations dedicated to supporting the best possible aging experience.


A conversation circulating on Chinese social media platforms recently said China is selling donated aid supplies to the US.

China donated hundreds of thousands of rapid COVID-19 test kits to the Czech republic. But Czech authorities said the kits werent donated and had an 80% error rate.

A Chinese doctor recounts witnessing a patient killed inside the ICU. He said the patients death was caused by the Chinese healthcare system.

G7 countries are meeting by teleconference on Wednesday. The top of the agenda included combating the CCP virus (coronavirus) and the Chinese regimes disinformation campaign.

NTD refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

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The new coronavirus pandemic is upending life as we know it.

More than one-quarter of the worlds 7.8 billion people are now largely confined to their homes, as governments step up curbs on movement and social contact in a bid to contain the virus.

In many parts of the world, borders are closed, airports, hotels and businesses shut, and school cancelled. These unprecedented measures are tearing at the social fabric of some societies and disrupting many economies, resulting in mass job losses and raising the spectre of widespread hunger.

Much remains uncertain, but analysts say the pandemic and the measures we are taking to save ourselves could permanently change the ways in which we live, work, worship and play in the future. Envisioning that post-pandemic world is key in ensuring we change for the better, not the worse.

So what does the future look like?





Al Jazeera asked experts in various fields, including medicine, psychology, economics and technology, to weigh in:

As the analog world descends into crisis, tech firms will become even more powerful

Andrew Keen is a commentator on the digital revolution and author of five books, including How to Fix the Future. He is based in Berkeley, US.

The physical analog world is being decimated, with traditional analog businesses including hotels, restaurants and airplanes in crisis. The digital world, however, is thriving. We are surviving through this pandemic because of technology.

Everyone is sitting at home, and their window to the world is through their smartphone.

In the post-pandemic world, technology will be as ubiquitous as it is now, if not more, and tech companies will become even more powerful and dominant. That includes smaller firms like Zoom, and the big players such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Paypal. And not just Americans firms, but also Chinese. Prior to this, we saw a period in which people were increasingly more cynical and critical of technology. But, as the pandemic increases our dependence on technology, people will forget that hostility towards Silicon Valley, at least in the short term.

We could also see more government use of surveillance. It is a useful weapon to fight the virus  for instance, countries like Israel are using smartphones to figure out whos been where in order to track clusters of the virus  but at the same time, such moves threaten to undermine individual freedom and privacy. This is nothing new, it only compounds and accelerates forces that have been at play for many years. Moving forward, this will affect not just our ability to hide from the camera, but also determine our socio-political rights.

Separately, China will benefit greatly from this crisis as it was the first country to experience the epidemic and to get out of it. The technocratic authoritarian model in Beijing and East Asia, such as in Singapore and to some extent South Korea  countries that are dealing more effectively with the virus  now appears more viable than the Western democratic one. And for people who care about freedom, privacy and individual rights, the world after the coronavirus looks much more worrying.





Less international cooperation; chaos and anarchy in fragile states

Andreas Krieg is an assistant professor at School of Security Studies at Kings College London, UK.

COVID-19 will fast-forward the fourth industrial revolution and digitalization of all services, including public services. The relationship between the community and the state will become ever more remote, whereby states are now expanding their remote control over civil society and private life. Amid COVID-19, the individual will be sufficiently pressed to surrender basic civil liberties in return for security, which alters the social contract in the liberal world.

By promising security, especially authoritarians will exploit COVID-19 as a pretext to further contract the public space and consume more powers to intervene into private lives. Digital technology makes it possible to create subtle police states whereby state control is not as obvious as it might have been as citizens might voluntarily offer private data in hope the state can provide security.

On the international level, there will be less cooperation. The trend of nationalism and self-reliance will continue, especially as the fear of the external and foreign can be exploited by populists. Most states are challenged in their resilience economically, socially and in terms of public health.

The public health crisis compounds existing domestic economic crises amid a global economic depression following the end of the COVID-19 crisis. Fragile states will be pushed into chaos and anarchy, and there is a realistic chance that some regimes will not survive COVID-19 as mass dissidence towards the end of mass mortality will bring 100,000s to the street to overthrow regimes whose legitimacy will be undermined by their inability to manage the crisis.





Lasting changes in our habits and values

Pete Lunn heads the Behavioural Research Unit at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland.

I suspect many people will look back and see this as a time when things changed in their lives.

A lot of our lives are habitual, and habits are highly effective in helping us work, look after our families and pursue our goals. What a shock to the system does is change those habits. People work and travel in a different way, their daily routines and the very rhythm of their lives change, including when they eat and how they communicate with their families. And when you are forced to do things differently, new habits begin to form. This doesnt have to take long  it could be as short as a few weeks or a month.

More than that, what we know about shocks like this and system change is that they can have lasting effects on peoples values. We know societies that go through war generate stronger ties. This pandemic is far from a war, but it requires pulling together. And when people realise what collective action can achieve, it could change how they relate to others, resulting in a greater sense of community.

There are bound to be downsides. We dont know what they are yet, but this has to be a difficult time for people with poor-quality relationships, such as abusive partners, or those struggling with behaviours such as alcoholism and gambling. Similarly, people who have mental illnesses, such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders and paranoia, may find shocks like this hard to deal with.





A revolution in the delivery of primary healthcare

Vin Gupta is an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, US.

We havent faced a public health emergency of this scale in a century. It is exacting a massive psychological toll on the worlds population, and there are bound to be calls for action. People across the globe will use COVID-19 as a strong justification to demand universal healthcare. But the ability to respond to a pandemic depends more on principled and transparent leadership. And so there will be calls to elevate health security to the same priority level as other threats such as nuclear disarmament and terrorism.

We could also see governments boost their ability to deploy ICU-level assets, build up stockpiles of protective gear and ventilators, scale up hospital infrastructure of emergency nature and rely more heavily on the military to fight disease.

In the US, we are in for a reckoning. A lot has not gone well here, and that lag has mainly been regulatory. This will be a factor in the 2020 election.

We are also in for a revolution in the delivery of primary healthcare. Digital technologies will become even more prominent, and we are likely to see a rise in the use of telemedicine as well as home testing. A third of the US population already use telemedicine, and now, people currently have no other choice but to rely on it. The more they use it, the more they will learn to trust the method, allowing for the delivery of faster and cheaper healthcare. We will also see a movement towards people utilising home tests, for illnesses such as the flu or for high cholesterol. In that sense, pandemics are equalisers, allowing us to pinpoint whats not working and also serving as a starting point to scale and innovate.





The very essence of religion is in danger

Mohd Faizal Musa is a research fellow at the Institute of the Malay World and Civilization (ATMA), National University of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

One aspect of life that has been badly affected by the outbreak is culture, to be specific  religion. In some countries such as South Korea, Iran, and Malaysia, the surge of COVID-19 cases were attributed to religious gatherings and pilgrimage sites. Never before in modern history have holy sites in both the Sunni and Shia Muslim world been closed for worshippers, to be sanitised or for security reasons.

In a month, Muslims will be entering Ramadan, and no doubt the axiology (values) of religion that lies in rituals will be greatly lessened and disrupted. This is something technology cannot help to substitute. Of course, we can still appreciate sermons online, but without the human touch and the sacred ambience offered by rituals and holy sites, the very meaning of religion is in danger. This is so important since rituals often symbolize the essence of religion.

Even after the outbreak, the Hajj for Sunni Muslims, congregational prayers for Christians, gatherings such as Thaipusam for Hindus and the Arbaeen for the Shias will be conducted with great prudence, perhaps with restrictions on number of participants and new rules on sanitation and social contact. These group rituals give believers spiritual experiences, and without proper engagement, that experience could be undermined. In other words, religion  one of the biggest source of culture for the human being, the epistemology of society  will never again be the same.





Stronger global trade and reduced inequality

Shanta Devarajan is a professor of the Practice of International Development at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University in Washington, DC, US.

The COVID-19 pandemic is showing us the huge economic cost when global trade, including transport, slows down. It also demonstrates how dependent we are on the global supply chain, including for medical equipment such as masks and testing materials. When this pandemic is over, my sense is that global trade will resume and become even more stronger, and any disruption to the supply chain will be temporary.

At the national level, this pandemic is forcing many countries to reconsider their social policies, especially social protection and healthcare. In addition, there is an effort to help workers in the informal sector. If these policies, or some variant of them, persist after the outbreak, this will help reduce inequality.

We are also seeing governments providing assistance to banks and companies to cushion the effects of both the virus and the lockdowns. This is mainly to keep the economy from collapsing even further. There might be a shift in the policies towards these companies after the pandemic, but it should be carefully balanced against providing subsidies or tax breaks when they dont need them.
Irish people are being advised to be prepared for potential country lock downs and to make visa inquiries as Covid-19 uncertainty mounts.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Irish visa experts suggest that any Irish person on a short-term visa which is less than 1 year return home to Ireland, rather than risk overstaying as more countries close their borders. Some countries will grant citizens to extend their visas due to force majeure, due to the current pandemic.

Irish company Visa First say they are fielding a large volume of calls from Irish people both at home and abroad who are concerned over the implications of COVID-19 on the working holiday or business visa.

The Visa First experts say they are advising people daily as to the changes and restrictions being implemented by countries all around the world, which have meant that certain visas currently in processes are now being granted, but with suspensions, while others have been put on hold altogether.

Kellsie Larkin, Account Manager with Visa First explained that as it stands, the situation is constantly changing worldwide, and it is very important for Irish citizens to follow and adhere to the travel guidelines from the Department of Foreign Affairs and from their closest Irish Embassy/Consulate. Each day more and more countries are closing their borders, the most recent countries to do so being Australia, New Zealand and Canada." Whereas, Working Holiday Visa holders in Australia remains unclear.

In relation to Australian second year holiday working visas, "many Irish backpackers travel to nearby countries such as Thailand. This may not now be possible under the current circumstances. Whether the Australian Government will waive this application requirement in the near future has not yet been clarified according to Larkin.

Visa First report that while Irish Work Permit applications are still coming in from overseas employers, it is possible that companies may temporarily suspend recruitment of non-EEA nationals until the COVID-19 crisis has passed.

Larkin commented on the situation as it is unfolding outlining that some visa applications in processing are still being approved, but many with suspensions due to travel restrictions in countries like India, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia. So, your visa might be granted but it is essentially invalid until a certain date, which will most likely keep changing, depending on how things pan out over the next couple of weeks."

The company urge Irish people to be prepared and to "err on the side of caution. Several countries could potentially go into lockdown and with very little notice."
HANGZHOU, March 25 (Xinhua) -- A China-Europe freight train left Yiwu, east China's Zhejiang Province Tuesday, carrying 84 TEUs of containers and bound for Minsk, capital of Belarus.

The train, the 10th of the kind for the year so far, is expected to arrive in Minsk 11 days later. The cargo service has expedited Yiwu's pace of recovery from disruption caused by the outbreak of COVID-19.

As of Tuesday, the Yiwu railway station has seen departures of 67 China-Europe freight trains carrying 5,474 TEUs since the start of the year, up 40.8 percent year on year in terms of the total cargo volume.

The China-Europe train service has expanded rapidly since it was launched in the city of Yiwu, well-known for its trade of small commodities, in 2014. The service now has 11 routes linking Yiwu with 37 countries and regions across Eurasia, according an official of the Yiwu railway station.

Amid Zhejiang Province's bid to continue boosting trade with countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative, Yiwu is hoping that the number of trains departing from it will reach 1,000 in 2020.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 05:32:11|Editor: huaxia

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by William M. Reilly

UNITED NATIONS, March 25 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched a 2-billion-U.S.-dollar Humanitarian Response Plan on Wednesday aimed at fighting the coronavirus in the poorest and most vulnerable countries.

"The world faces an unprecedented threat," Guterres said in a tele-news conference. "COVID-19 is menacing the whole of humanity - and so the whole of humanity must fight back."

"The world is only as strong as our weakest health system," said the UN chief. With proper funding, the plan will save many lives and arm humanitarian agencies and non-governmental organizations with laboratory supplies for testing and with medical equipment to treat the sick while protecting health care workers.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general; Henrietta Fore, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) executive director; and Mark Lowcock, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, joined Guterres in the virtual conference.

Earlier this week, Guterres appealed for a world-wide halt in hostilities amid the fight against COVID-19. Now he is pinpointing conflicts.

"The secretary-general calls today (Wednesday) on those fighting in Yemen to immediately cease hostilities, focus on reaching a negotiated political settlement and do everything possible to counter a potential outbreak of COVID-19," said his spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, in a statement.

"More than five years of conflict have devastated the lives of tens of millions of Yemenis," the statement said.

The UN chief also recalled the need to concentrate on fighting the coronavirus when he sent his condolences to Chad following a Boko Haram attack on an army post in Boma in Lac Province which resulted in "a significant number of deaths."

He appealed for "an immediate and global ceasefire in all corners of the world - including in the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel - at this very moment when humanity is confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic," Dujarric told reporters in his daily briefing.

Likewise, Mankeur Ndiaye, the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic, urged all signatories to the peace agreement to abide by their commitment to immediately cease violence and therefore, contribute to efforts to protect the country from COVID-19 and its harmful consequences.

In the struggle to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the impacts are hitting women hardest, said UN Women's Deputy Executive Director Anita Bhatia.

"While the economic and social impacts on all are severe, they are more so for women," she said. "Many of the industries in the formal economy directly affected by quarantines and lockdowns -- travel, tourism, restaurants, food production -- have very high female labor force participation."

Women also constitute a large percentage of the informal economy in informal markets and agriculture around the world, Bhatia said. "In both developed and developing economies, many informal sector jobs - domestic workers, caregivers - are mostly done by women who typically lack health insurance and have no social safety net to fall back on."

She added that women typically shoulder a greater burden of care, on average doing three times as much unpaid care work as men at home before COVID-19.

Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) called on all governments to keep maritime trade moving by allowing commercial ships continued access to ports worldwide as the world addresses the COVID-19 pandemic, Dujarric said.

"Amidst the current COVID-19 outbreak, seafarers have come under increased checks and scrutiny in various ports," the spokesman said. Restrictions on trade and cross-border transport may interrupt essential aid and technical support, as well as disrupting businesses and having negative social and economic impacts in affected countries.

UNCTAD statistics show that around 80 percent of global trade is facilitated by commercial shipping, which carries the world's food, energy and raw materials, as well as manufactured goods and components, Dujarric said.

WHO said the COVID-19 pandemic is testing the resilience of robust health systems around the world, stressing the critical importance of sustaining efforts to prevent, detect and treat malaria, which exacts a heavy toll on vulnerable people in sub-Saharan Africa.

"As COVID-19 continues its rapid spread, WHO would like to send a clear message to malaria-affected countries in Africa," said Pedro Alonso, director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme. "Do not scale back your planned malaria prevention, diagnostic and treatment activities. If someone living in a place with malaria develops a fever, he or she should seek diagnosis and care as soon as possible."

Any interventions must consider the importance of both lowering malaria-related mortality and ensuring the safety of communities and health workers, he said. WHO will guide countries to safely maintain essential health services during the COVID-19 crisis.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, has called on governments to take urgent action to protect the health and safety of people in detention and other closed facilities, as part of overall efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, the spokesman said.

She warned that "COVID-19 has begun to strike prisons, jails and immigration detention centers, as well as residential care homes and psychiatric hospitals, and risks rampaging through such institutions' extremely vulnerable populations."

Bachelet urged governments to not forget those behind bars and to reduce the number of people in detention, examining ways to release those particularly vulnerable to COVID-19.

The UN Human Rights Office and WHO are due this week to issue an interim guidance paper - COVID 19: Focus on persons deprived of their liberty - which will contain key messages and actions, Dujarric said.
NEW YORK  In several hours on Tuesday, Dr. Ashley Bray performed chest compressions at Elmhurst Hospital Center on a woman in her 80s, a man in his 60s and a 38-year-old who reminded the doctor of her fiance. All had tested positive for the coronavirus and had gone into cardiac arrest. All eventually died.

Elmhurst, a 545-bed public hospital in Queens, has begun transferring patients not suffering from coronavirus to other facilities as it moves toward becoming a facility dedicated entirely to the outbreak. Doctors and nurses have struggled to make do with a few dozen ventilators. Calls over a loudspeaker of Team 700, the code for when a patient is on the verge of death, come several times a shift. Some have died inside the emergency room while waiting for a bed.

A refrigerated truck has been stationed outside to hold the bodies of the dead. Over the past 24 hours, New York Citys public hospital system said in a statement, 13 people at Elmhurst had died.

Its apocalyptic, said Bray, a general medicine resident at the hospital.

Across the city, which has become the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, hospitals are beginning to confront the kind of harrowing surge in cases that has overwhelmed health care systems in China, Italy and other countries. On Wednesday morning, New York City reported 16,788 confirmed cases and 199 deaths.

More than 2,800 coronavirus patients have been hospitalized in the city. Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday offered a glimmer of hope that social-distancing measures were starting to slow the growth in hospitalizations. Still, hospitals are preparing for a major influx.

Working with state and federal officials, hospitals have repeatedly expanded the portions of their facilities equipped to handle patients who had stayed home until worsening fevers and difficulty breathing forced them into emergency rooms.

Dr. Mitchell Katz, the head of the Health and Hospitals Corp., which operates New York Citys public hospitals, said plans were underway to transform many areas of the Elmhurst hospital into intensive care units for extremely sick patients.

But New Yorks hospitals may be about to lose their leeway for creativity in finding spaces.

All of the more than 1,800 intensive care units in New York City are expected to be full by Friday, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency leadership briefing obtained by The New York Times. Patients could stay for weeks, limiting space for newly sickened residents. Cuomo said on Wednesday that he had not seen the briefing; he said officials could quickly add intensive care beds if they received more ventilators, the machines that help the most sick coronavirus patients breathe.

The federal government is sending a 1,000-bed hospital ship to New York, although it is not scheduled to arrive until mid-April. Officials have begun erecting four 250-bed hospitals at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Midtown Manhattan, which could be ready in a week. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday on Twitter that construction was ahead of schedule.

Officials have also discussed converting hotels and arenas into temporary medical facilities.

At least two city hospitals have filled up their morgues, and city officials anticipated that the rest would reach capacity by the end of this week, according to the leadership briefing. The city requested 85 refrigerated trailers from FEMA for mortuary services, along with staff, the briefing said.

That is inaccurate, said a spokeswoman for the citys office of the chief medical examiner. We have significant morgue capacity in our five citywide sites, and the ability to expand.

In interviews, doctors and nurses at hospitals across the city gave accounts of how they were being stretched toward a breaking point.

Workers at several hospitals, including the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, said employees such as obstetrician-gynecologists and radiologists have been called to work in emergency wards.

At a branch of the Montefiore Medical Center, also in the Bronx, there have been one or two deaths a day, or more, said Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, a nurse. There are not always enough gurneys, so some patients sit in chairs. One patient on Sunday had been without a bed for 36 hours, she said.

Confirmed coronavirus patients are sometimes paired with those who have not yet received test results, added Sheridan-Gonzalez, the president of the New York State Nurses Association.

At the Mount Sinai Health System, one of the most prestigious health systems in the country, some hospital workers in Manhattan have posted photos on social media showing nurses using trash bags as protective gear. A system spokesman said she was not aware of nurses using trash bags.

Since ventilators are in short supply, both Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian, two of the citys largest systems, are exploring using one machine to help multiple patients, an unusual move, according to employees at both networks and to staff emails.

But officials have called Elmhurst among the hardest-hit hospitals in the city.

Definitely Elmhurst Hospital in Queens has had an extraordinary amount of activity, Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a radio interview earlier this week. Its been very tough for Elmhurst.

Elmhurst Hospital Center opened in 1832 and moved to its current Queens location in 1957, making it one of the oldest hospitals in New York City. In the neighborhood it serves, Elmhurst, more than two-thirds of residents were born outside of the United States, the highest such rate in the city. It is a safety-net hospital, serving mainly low-income patients, including many who lack primary care doctors.

Medical workers said they saw the first signs of the virus in early March  an increase in patients coming in with flulike symptoms before the alarm had been fully raised in the city and the country. Tests results were taking longer then, but they eventually confirmed that many of these patients had coronavirus.

In the weeks after, the emergency room began filling up, with more than 200 people at times. Every chair in the waiting room was usually taken. Patients came in faster than the hospital could add beds; earlier this week, 60 coronavirus patients had been admitted but were still in the emergency room. One man waited almost 60 hours for a bed last week, a doctor said.

The patients coming in now are sicker than before because they were advised to try to recover at home, doctors said.

Elmhurst is at the center of this crisis, and its the number one priority of our public hospital system right now, the citys public hospital systems statement said. The front line staff are going above and beyond in this crisis, and we continue surging supplies and personnel to this critical facility to keep pace with the crisis.

Cuomo said that on Sunday, the states projections showed hospitalizations doubling every two days, while Tuesdays estimates showed them doubling every 4.7 days. That is almost too good to be true, the governor said, but the theory is, given the density that were dealing with, it spreads very quickly. But if you reduce the density, you can reduce the spread very quickly.

But the crowds outside of Elmhurst have not thinned out.

The line of people waiting outside of Elmhurst to be tested forms as early as 6 a.m., and some stay there until 5 p.m. Many are told to go home without being tested.

Julio Jimenez, 35, spent six hours in line on Sunday night after running a fever while at work in a New Jersey warehouse. He returned on Monday morning in the pouring rain. On Tuesday, still coughing, eyes puffy, he stood in line for nearly seven hours and went home, untested, again.

I dont know if I have the virus, Jimenez said. Its so hard. Its not just me. Its for many people. Its crazy.

Rikki Lane, a doctor who has worked at Elmhurst for more than 20 years, said the hospital had handled the first wave of this tsunami. She compared the scene in the emergency department with an overcrowded parking garage where physicians must move patients in and out of spots to access other patients blocked by stretchers.

Family members are not permitted inside, she said.

Lane recalled recently treating a man in his 30s whose breathing deteriorated quickly and had to be put on a ventilator. He was in distress and panicked, I could see the terror in his eyes, she said. He was alone.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
tech2 News Staff

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day lockdown in India due to coronavirus pandemic, several companies had to suspend or limit their services, whereas some had to close their production facilities, and Apple is one of them. iPhone suppliers Wistron and Foxconn have suspended their production in India.

As reported by Bloomberg, Foxconn also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry has halted its operations for now. It will resume its India facility based on further government announcements.

(Also read: Coronavirus Outbreak: How Flipkart, Amazon, Uber, Ola and other companies are tackling the 21-day lockdown)

iPhone XR (Review) is in production in the Foxconn facility since October. It is expected that the company might begin the manufacturing of the iPhone 11 (Review) in its Chennai plant soon. As per a report by Counterpoint research, iPhone XR is one of the top-selling iPhone of 2019 worldwide.

Wistron has also reportedly shut down its plant in India till 14 April. It did not comment on the fact how this sudden 21-day lockdown would affect the production of the iPhones.

According to a report by Times of India, to stop the spread of coronavirus, Samsung has also shut down its biggest manufacturing factory in India, that is situated in Noida.


Israel's ex-military chief Benny Gantz called for an emergency unity government after being elected parliament speaker Thursday, likely leading to an alliance with his rival Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to tackle coronavirus.

"These are unusual times and they call for unusual decisions," Gantz told the Knesset, Israel's parliament, after his speakership election.

"That is why I intend to explore the formation of an emergency unity government," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
TICKERS: DFLY; DFLYF

Source: Streetwise Reports (3/26/20)

Draganfly and its partners aim to rapidly deploy the groundbreaking technology so it can help combat COVID-19.



In a news release, Draganfly Inc. (DFLY:CSE; DFLYF:OTCQB), which specializes in unmanned vehicle technology, announced it was chosen as the exclusive integration partner on a project aimed at combating COVID-19 and future health crises.

The Vital Intelligence Project combines a health and respiratory monitoring platform with new and existing camera networks and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and remotely piloted aircraft. The automated equipment monitors people's health and vital signs, including temperature, heart rate and respiratory rate, and detects respiratory and infectious conditions.

The monitoring devices are ideal for use among crowds, workforces and at-risk groups, such as seniors, at care facilities for example, and high-traffic places, including airports, convention centers, cruise ships, border crossings and critical infrastructure facilities. Also, the data they collect can help in understanding certain health trends.

Draganfly's role is to use its engineering, integration and distribution expertise and secure supply chain to commercialize and deploy the technology right away. Accordingly, the Canadian company signed a binding agreement, which affords an initial $1.5 million-plus budget.

The other partner in the project is Vital Intelligence Inc., a healthcare data services and deep learning company associated with the University of South Australia, which developed the technology with help from the Australian Department of Defense's Defense Science and Technology Group.

"With fighting epidemics rising as a global priority, new versatile technologies, such as humanitarian mission UAVs, are immediately needed to detect and track outbreaks so that critical interventions can be deployed sooner and with greater effectiveness," Dr. Jack Chow, adviser to the Vital Intelligence Project and the former first assistant director-general of the World Health Organization, said in the release.

"Draganfly has been selected because of its proven leadership in an industry so important to public safety at such a critical time. We look forward to working with global agencies and industry to rapidly deploy this important technology," said Cameron Chell, CEO of Draganfly.

"Draganfly is honored to work on such an important project given the current pandemic facing the world with COVID-19. Health and respiratory monitoring will be vital for not only detection, but also utilizing the data to understand health trends. As we move forward, drones and autonomous technology doing detection will be an important part of ensuring public safety," said Andy Card, Director of Draganfly and former Secretary of Transportation and White House Chief of Staff.

[NLINSERT]

Disclosure:

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ATLANTA, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- With concerns about germ transmission at an all-time high and businesses increasingly concerned about public health, pest control leader Rollins, Inc. (NYSE: ROL), announced today that its subsidiary, Orkin, LLC, has a new service that will help businesses quickly and thoroughly suppress a wide variety of serious pathogens.

In dense places where people congregate, if high-touch surfaces such as countertops, fixtures and public seating are not disinfected, harmful viruses such as the novel coronavirus can spread rapidly. Just like frequent, careful handwashing is a basic measure for humans to stave off virus transmission, large-scale sanitization is imperative to keeping establishments where people shop, eat and work as sterile as possible. Orkin VitalClean is an effective option for reducing risk and helping restore a safer and healthier business environment.

Currently, no service or product has received approval from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for killing the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) because it's too new. However, Orkin's VitalClean service uses an EPA-registered disinfectant labeled for use against a wide variety of pathogens, including other known coronaviruses (specifically feline coronavirus and canine coronavirus) and the influenza strains that caused two other global outbreaks  swine flu and avian flu. When applied at full strength in accordance with the product label by trained Orkin technicians, this powerful disinfectant will kill 100 percent of bacteria and viruses on hard, non-porous surfaces.

"The disinfectant product we use is incredibly effective against other coronaviruses, has almost no toxicity and has been approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for fast-track review by the EPA for specific use against the SARS-CoV-2 virus," said Judy Black, Vice President of Quality Assurance and Technical Services, Rollins, Inc.

Beyond its sanitizing and disinfecting strength, the disinfectant Orkin uses for VitalClean treatments is rated by the EPA as Toxicity Category IV, their lowest toxicity rating, defined as "practically non-toxic and not an irritant," contains no ozone-harming volatile organic compounds and is mild on skin, hard surfaces and fabrics.

"We have been using this product for years to sanitize commercial facilities after pest cleanouts," said Black. "Now we are pleased that it can serve a broader public health purpose as well."

"Orkin's longstanding priority is to help protect and ensure the safety of our customers and co-workers," said Freeman Elliott, President, Orkin, LLC. "During this unpredictable and stressful time, for businesses especially, we want to do our part to help. There's no silver bullet for stopping COVID-19 yet, but this powerful cleaning treatment should prove to be a very important step in helping to remove pathogens from facilities."

For more information, visit vitalclean.orkin.com.

About Rollins

Rollins, Inc. is a premier global consumer and commercial services company. Through its family of leading brands, Orkin, HomeTeam Pest Defense, Clark Pest Control, Orkin Canada, Western Pest Services, Northwest Exterminating, Critter Control, The Industrial Fumigant Company, Trutech, Orkin Australia, Waltham Services, OPC Pest Services, PermaTreat, Rollins UK, Aardwolf Pestkare, and Crane Pest Control, the Company provides essential pest control services and protection against termite damage, rodents and insects to more than two million customers in the United States, Canada, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, Mexico, and Australia from more than 700 locations. You can learn more about Rollins and its subsidiaries by visiting our web sites at www.orkin.com , www.pestdefense.com , www.clarkpest.com, www.orkincanada.ca , www.westernpest.com , www.callnorthwest.com, www.crittercontrol.com , www.indfumco.com , www.trutechinc.com , www.orkinau.com , www.walthamservices.com , www.opcpest.com , www.permatreat.com , www.safeguardpestcontrol.co.uk , www.aardwolfpestkare.com, www.cranepestcontrol.com and www.rollins.com . You can also find this and other news releases at www.rollins.com by accessing the news releases button.

CAUTION CONCERNING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This release contains statements that constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements include the Company's claims that Orkin VitalClean will help businesses quickly and thoroughly suppress a wide variety of serious pathogens; provide an effective option for reducing risk and helping restore a safer and healthier business environment; will kill 100 percent of bacteria and viruses on hard, non-porous surfaces; can serve a broader public health purpose than its current commercial use; and should prove to be a very important step in helping to remove pathogens from facilities. The actual results of the Company could differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements because of various risks and uncertainties, including without limitation, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the potential impact on global economic conditions and on capital and financial markets, changes in consumer behavior and demand, the potential unavailability of personnel or key facilities, modifications to the Company's operations, and the potential implementation of regulatory actions; economic and competitive conditions which may adversely affect the Company's business; the degree of success of the Company's pest and termite process, and pest control selling and treatment methods; the Company's ability to identify and integrate potential acquisitions; climate and weather trends; competitive factors and pricing practices; the Company's ability to attract and retain skilled workers, and potential increases in labor costs; uncertainties of litigation; changes in various government laws and regulations, including environmental regulations; and the impact of the U. S. Government shutdown. All of the foregoing risks and uncertainties are beyond the ability of the Company to control, and in many cases the Company cannot predict the risks and uncertainties that could cause its actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements. A more detailed discussion of potential risks facing the Company can be found in the Company's Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the year ended December 31, 2019

ROL-IR

For Further Information Contact

Eddie Northen (404) 888-2242

SOURCE Rollins, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.rollins.com


Strikes and protests by workers demanding protection from the deadly coronavirus have occurred with increasing frequency over the last several days. Job actions in the United States and other countries are taking place even as the Trump administration and other capitalist governments around the world rush to restart production and the flow of corporate profit, knowing full well that this will accelerate the spread of COVID-19 and increase the death toll.

Thats crazy, Tonya, a worker at Fiat Chryslers Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit, said of Trumps comments about ending the lockdowns and getting the economy roaring back by Easter. There shouldnt be any rush back to work. There isnt a cure, and this is fast spreading and deadly. If we go back to work, well be with co-workers who are sick but dont have any symptoms. They would be sending us to be hurt, if not killed.

Pittsburgh sanitation workers refused to take out their trucks (Source: Facebook)

On Wednesday, sanitation workers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania carried out a wildcat strike over concerns that fellow workers had contracted the virus and that they had no protective gear. In a video posted on Facebook, sanitation worker Fitzroy Moss said the city had falsely claimed that sanitation workers were evaluated for coronavirus when, in fact, they dont care about our health. The mayor says the trash is going to get picked up no matter what, he continued, but weve only been given a pack of four wet-wipes and no masks, no gloves, nothing!

Workers shouted down and chased off a Teamsters union bureaucrat who tried to force them back to work. The union official said, Keep your social distance and do your six-foot thing, and told the workers that the city did not have facilities to test workers.

We are risking our lives, a worker told a local reporter, if one of us gets infected, all of us get infected.

On Tuesday, more than two-thirds of shipbuilders at Bath Iron Works (BIW) in Maine refused to show up to work, the day after the first worker at the shipyard tested positive. In a memo last Tuesday, General Dynamics said the US Navy had confirmed that the Bath shipyard was deemed critical infrastructure under a White House guidance that directed defense contractors to continue to operate normally in the interests of national security.

The wife of one BIW worker posted, Dont forget what keeps companies running... employees! Too bad they arent being valued as people right now... just numbers, employee numbers who are deemed replaceable because BIW doesnt care about their health or well-being during a NATIONAL PANDEMIC!

On Monday, public transit workers in Birmingham, Alabama refused to take their busses out due to COVID-19 concerns. The Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority responded by restricting busses to 15 to 19 passengers, blocking off seats to allow social distancing for passengers and drivers, and asking passengers to use the rear door when entering and exiting busses.

The Detroit Department of Transportation was forced to halt bus operations last week after sickouts by drivers.

Also, on Monday, over 40 poultry workers at a Perdue chicken and pork processing plant in Kathleen, Georgia walked off the job to demand sanitary working conditions, hazard pay and time off after multiple workers reported being exposed to COVID-19 at the factory.

These actions follow the strike by Amazon workers in Queens, New York, the refusal of Brooklyn postal workers to work in an infected facility and the wave of wildcat strikes at Fiat Chrysler plants in Michigan and Ohio last week, and an earlier job action at the companys minivan plant in Windsor, Canada. The actions initiated in opposition to the United Auto Workers and Unifor unions, which insisted that workers stay on the job, forced the shutdown of the auto industry in the US and Canada, but not Mexico.

At least three Fiat Chrysler workers have died from COVID-19, including Jeff Bagby, a mechanical quality engineer at the Kokomo Transmission Plant in Indiana, and a still unnamed worker at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in suburban Detroit. On Wednesday, Fiat Chrysler confirmed that Lorenzo Seldon, a 50-year-old worker and UAW steward at the Warren Truck plant, had also died of the disease.

The walkouts in the US are part of an international trend, which includes a walkout by Manitoba silver miners, Amazon workers in Italy, more than 1,000 meatpacking workers in Northern Ireland, public hospital doctors and nurses in Zimbabwe, and a series of wildcat strikes by autoworkers in Italy, which has the highest number of COVID-19 fatalities in the world. Italian metal workers and bank workers are scheduled to strike next Wednesday in Lombardy, the countrys hardest hit region.

Workers in every industry and all over the world have to stand together, Tonya, the Detroit Fiat Chrysler worker, said. In Italy, there is a lockdown, but they are still forcing workers to work. Its horrible.

All that the companies care about are production and profits. [UAW President Rory] Gamble said he was demanding a two-week shutdown, but they came back and said well rearrange a few things to make it safer. All they did was give us degreasers, not even disinfectants, for workers to clean their own areas. The UAW doesnt give a damn about us. If we didnt walk out, wed still be in the plants.

She also expressed outrage over the shortage of masks, ventilators and other lifesaving medical equipment. We should use all of the plants to produce what is needed, Tonya said. In one shift we knock out 600 Jeeps and that takes way more parts and manpower than medical equipment. We would have the capacity to produce tens of thousands of masks and other equipment every day. We have the capacity but were not using it.

FCA and other carmakers say they are going to produce ventilators and masks. But the president and the companies are only concerned with profit. If workers were in control, we would be making sure humanity is not suffering and people are not dying from a lack of equipment that can be produced.

Laura, a teacher from Florida, said, I'm furious that people expect us to give up our lives for work that does not pay us enough to even live the lives we're given. This is a horrible abuse of power and in some ways just sentencing people to die.

Clearly, the working class is replaceablethat has never been clearer. If this were a computer virus that could wipe out their fortunes, theyd care. But this virus, which spreads among those who have not been granted the privilege of leaving work and still being paid, does not worry them.

The ruling class has access to tests and safety measures and money to survive that the rest of the world doesnt. What does this say about the society we live in? That this truly is dying capitalism and it is clawing and kicking to stay relevant. The only fatality I am happy to see from this virus is that of a capitalist structure.

Capitalism is showing its true face, Barry, a retired General Motors worker from the Lansing Delta Township plant in Michigan, said. This is socially sanctioned euthanasia, just like the WSWS said.

We know from the lessons of Korea and China we can flatten the curve if you isolate and test people. We need to be tested every week, every day, not just when you get symptoms, and we need a quick test to get results right away.

This is culling the herd. They must be laughing all the way to the bank. I told my wife, They would love us to die, we are collecting Social Security. They have been trying to slash that for years. Its just another way to do that. Its ruthless and inhumane.

A worker from Fords Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, where a worker tested positive, said, I used to think capitalism was OK. But when you get these extremes of wealth and povertythese huge dividesit cant keep going.

Most people, workers that is, want to do whats right for the public good. But everything is run by the capitalists, the people with money. Were approaching an eruption of class war.
People walk in an almost empty Via del Corso, as Italy tightens measures to try and contain the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Rome

By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and five other telecoms providers have agreed to share mobile phone location data with the European Commission to track the spread of the coronavirus, lobbying group GSMA said on Wednesday.

The companies, including Telefonica, Telecom Italia , Telenor, Telia and A1 Telekom Austria met with EU industry chief Thierry Breton on Monday.

Worries about governments' use of technology to monitor those in quarantine and track infections have intensified in recent weeks over possible privacy violations, with some raising the spectre of state surveillance.

The Commission will use anonymised data to protect privacy and aggregate mobile phone location data to coordinate measures tracking the spread of the virus, an EU official said.

To further assuage privacy concerns, the data will be deleted once the crisis is over, the official said, adding that the EU plan is not about centralising mobile data nor about policing people.

While anonymised data falls outside the scope of EU data protection laws, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) said the project does not breach privacy rules as long as there are safeguards.

"The Commission should clearly define the dataset it wants to obtain and ensure transparency towards the public, to avoid any possible misunderstandings," the EU's data watchdog said in a letter to the EU executive seen by Reuters.

"It would also be preferable to limit access to the data to authorised experts in spatial epidemiology, data protection and data science," EDPS head Wojciech Wiewiorowski said.

However he also warned about the possibility of such measures becoming permanent.

"The EDPS often stresses that such developments usually do not contain the possibility to step back when the emergency is gone. I would like to stress that such solution should be still recognised as extraordinary," Wiewiorowski said.

Countries from Singapore to Taiwan and Israel are using various methods such as contact-tracing smartphone apps, a mobile phone-based "electronic fence", satellite-based phone tracking and location-tracking wristbands to fight the spread of the virus.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)
An emergency alert warning 'stay home' in Washington DC has confused some residents who mistakenly believed a shelter-in-place order was in effect due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The alert was sent to cell phones in the DC area on Wednesday evening, reading: 'Stay Home. You have a critical role to play in stopping the spread of COVID-19 in DC.'

Less than an hour after the alert went out, the DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency clarified in a statement: 'We understand there may be some misinformation in the National Capital Region. The Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) that went out this evening is NOT a shelter in place order for DC.'

'Residents are encouraged to be good neighbors and social distance; stay home,' the agency said.

The alert was sent to cell phones in the DC area on Wednesday evening, reading: 'Stay Home. You have a critical role to play in stopping the spread of COVID-19 in DC'

Residents in DC saw this alert on their phones shortly after 8pm, sparking confusion

So far, DC has recorded 231 confirmed cases of coronavirus and three deaths.

On Wednesday night at 10pm, an order went into effect shutting down all non-essential businesses until April 24 and limiting gatherings to 10 people or fewer.

'The intent of the Order is to temporarily cease all non-essential business activities, including tour guides and touring services; gyms, health clubs, spas, and massage establishments; theaters, auditoriums, and other places of large gatherings; nightclubs; hair, nail, and tanning salons and barbershops; tattoo parlors; sales not involved in essential services; retail clothing stores; and professional services not devoted to assisting essential business operations,' said a statement from the office of Mayor Muriel Brown.

Even after the clarification, some were still confused over the order.

'What's the difference between a 'shelter in place' mandate vs being told all nonessential biz will close and to stay home?' tweeted HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery.

Officials in DC are urging the public to avoid the city's famous cherry blossoms and are taking steps of closing down public streets to traffic in order to keep visitors away

Pennsylvania avenue, one of the largest avenues of the US Capital, is almost deserted by traffic during the 6pm usual rush hour in Washington on Wednesday

DC city council member Charles Allen clarified in the statement that residents were not required to stay at home, but urged them to do so.

'There may not be a formal Stay-At-Home Order in place, and I may not be able to order you to do so, but please, in the strongest terms I can possibly ask, please stay home as much as you can,' he said.

There has already been confusion over the term 'shelter in place,' which is what San Francisco originally called its order telling residents to remain in their homes aside from essential trips.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo blasted the term, pointing out that it typically refers to nuclear war and more recently active shooters.

In those contexts, an order to 'shelter in place' typically means that people should immediately barricade themselves in the most secure room available and wait for an all-clear signal.

Cuomo called his own order closing all non-essential businesses a 'pause'.
Tourists in Tasmania have been bluntly ordered to go home, with travellers told to leave all accommodation and return interstate by midnight on Sunday.

Premier Peter Gutwein delivered the message to non-Tasmanians on Thursday, while announcing extra coronavirus stimulus measures totalling $1 billion.

'I'm sorry to say that, but go home,' he said on Thursday.

Tourists in Tasmania have been bluntly ordered to go home, with travellers told to leave all accommodation and return interstate by midnight on Sunday. Passengers are seen arriving at Hobart airport

'Unfortunately there will be some dislocation for people but I make no apologies for working hard to keep Tasmanians safe.'

People staying in hotels, hostels, bed and breakfasts, campsites and boarding houses must leave their accommodation by 11.59pm on Sunday.

Mr Gutwein also implored non-essential visitors to stay away, noting a mandatory 14-day quarantine for anyone not considered an essential traveller.

'We're built on tourism so it hurts me to say that but do not come and put Tasmanians at risk,' he said.

'We're an island and we are unique in that regard. We have used our island state as an advantage.'

Those with campervans have been given until Wednesday to leave, with extra Spirit of Tasmania services put on next week to deal with increased demand.

The strict directive came on the same day Tasmania more than doubled its economic stimulus package after an initial $420 million last week.

Public school levies will be waived or refunded, water prices frozen and electricity prices capped, while power provider Aurora Energy won't disconnect any homes or businesses during the state-declared emergency.

There are a swathe of tax concessions for small business, as well as $50 million extra for interest-free loans.

'It is unprecedented. Never before has the state had to take steps of this magnitude,' Mr Gutwein said of the second wave of spending.

The state's parliament passed laws placing a freeze on rental evictions to help those struggling to make ends meet.

Tasmania recorded five new virus cases on Thursday night, taking the state's total to 47, but there remains no evidence of community transmission.

Two are children, the others aged in their 30s and 70s.

All were passengers aboard the Ovation of the Sea cruise ship which docked in Sydney last week.

Public Health Director Mark Veitch said 240 people linked to cruise ships are in self-isolation and being monitored.

Another 80 people, who are close contacts of cases, are also in self-isolation.

State parliament sittings have been suspended until August, with MPs to work from their offices or homes.

All national parks have been closed from Thursday night to discourage unnecessary travel.
Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has pardoned a death row soldier convicted of killing eight people, including a child in the country's Tamil-dominated Northern province in 2000 during the civil war.

Staff Sergeant Sunil Ratnayake was convicted in June 2015 by the High Court here and his appeal was dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2019.

Ratnayake was charged of killing 8 civilians including a child when he was serving in the military in the north in 2000 where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the military were fighting.

Ratnayake and 13 other armymen were charged by the then government when Tamil politicians and human rights groups pressed for justice.

Nine of them were later released without charge. While Ratnayake was convicted of 15 counts, four of his colleagues were acquitted as there was no evidence against them.

President Rajapaksa in his election campaign leading to his victory in November last year had pledged to release military men convicted during his predecessor Maithripala Sirisena's government.

The Sirisena government had commenced trials against some military men for alleged rights abuses.

The LTTE ran a military campaign for a separate Tamil homeland in the northern and eastern provinces of the island nation for nearly 30 years before its collapse in 2009 after the Sri Lankan Army killed its supreme leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Some hardliners want to use the virus as a weapon to kill minorities, as others spread further hate and conspiracy.

The new coronavirus has already infected hundreds of thousands of people, taken more than 20,000 lives and caused a level of economic, social and political disruption not seen in decades.

But for many far-right hardliners, its a crisis to be welcomed.

The hardest-core accelerationists  violent neo-Nazis who want civilisation to crumble, hope that COVID-19 will turn out to be their secret weapon.

The situation is ripe for exploitation by the far right, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, American University sociologist and expert on the far-right, told Al Jazeera.

Aside from feeding into accelerationist and apocalytic ideas, Miller-Idriss said the uncertainty the pandemic creates creates fertile ground for claims about the need for change or the solutions the far right purports to offer.

A leader of the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), a neo-Nazi movement based in northern Europe, said that he welcomed the pandemic as a necessary step to help create the world that his group wants to see.

[COVID-19] might be precisely what we need in order to bring about a real national uprising and a strengthening of revolutionary political forces, Simon Lindberg, the leader of NRMs Swedish branch, wrote on the movements website.

We cannot build a society lasting thousands of years into the future on the rotten foundations of today, Lindberg added, [but] instead we must build it upon the ruins of their creation.

NRM, described as a neo-Nazi cult by one former member, has temporarily been banned by Finnish courts pending a final ruling on the movements legality.

According to Norwegian police, the 22-year-old perpetrator of an August 2019 attack on a mosque had been in contact with NRM.

Other far-right groups see the pandemic as an opportunity to further push xenophobic, racist messages.

In Germany, members of the neo-Nazi group Die Rechte (The Right) claimed that German borders should have been sealed off weeks ago to all non-Europeans.

Another German neo-Nazi group, Der Dritte Weg (The Third Way), said that the virus was being exploited by German leaders as a diversionary tactic to distract from an apparent oncoming flood of refugees and migrants from the Middle East.

In Ukraine, a figure in the countrys far-right Azov movement took to messaging app Telegram to claim that the spread of COVID-19 generally isnt the fault of white people and stated that ethnic minorities in Italy should alone be blamed for the spread of the virus there  where now more than 8,000 have died.

And it was on Telegram, the online messaging application that has been the target of much criticism for allowing openly violent content on its platform, where the most ardent far-right fans of COVID-19 can be found.

Neo-Nazi accelerationist Telegram channels have increased their calls for destabilisation and violence related to COVID-19, Joshua Fisher-Birch, a researcher from the United States-based Counter Extremism Project, which monitors international extremist movements, told Al Jazeera.

These channels are treating the current situation  as an opportunity to try to increase tension and advocate for violence.

Much of this content is available to anyone online, even those without a Telegram user account.

One popular neo-Nazi channel urged its members to cough on doorknobs at synagogues. Another urged followers infected with COVID-19 to spray their saliva on police officers.

And a further channel praised a man arrested in New Jersey in the US for coughing on a grocery store employee and claiming he had COVID-19.

Exalted to sainthood, the channel wrote in a now-deleted comment on a news story about the incident.

The term saint or sainthood is common praise for perpetrators of violence on neo-Nazi Telegram channels.

A great deal of this content is shared as an attempt at humour or trolling, but it's possible that a member of the target audience will decide to take action and commit an act of violence. Joshua Fisher-Birch, researcher from the US-based Counter Extremism Project

But the calls for spreading COVID-19 go beyond Telegram.

In recently leaked chat logs on Discord, an online chat application, members of Feuerkrieg Division discussed deliberately infecting Jews and others if one of the members caught the virus.

Feuerkrieg Division is a small neo-Nazi group with a presence in the US and Europe whose members have planned to carry out attacks. Several members of the group, including teenagers, have already been arrested in recent months for their activities.

Law enforcement has taken notice of what the far right has to say about COVID-19.

In a memo this week to US law enforcement agencies, US Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen wrote that anyone in the US who intentionally spreads COVID-19 could be charged under anti-terrorism legislation, given that the virus appears to meet the statutory definition of a biological agent'.

Rosen reportedly would not say whether such actions had yet to take place or whether his warning was merely a precaution.

Far-right fantasies

Some far-right fantasies about COVID-19 have already spilled over into the real world.

Well-known far-right figure Timothy Wilson, 36, died on Tuesday after a shootout with FBI agents in Missouri in the US. Wilson had been planning to attack a hospital caring for patients suffering from COVID-19.

According to reports, Wilson was an administrator of a neo-Nazi Telegram channel known for encouraging violence.

Wilson promoted attacks and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 outbreak on the channel, claiming that the pandemic was an excuse to destroy our people.

Fisher-Birch from the Counter Extremism Project warns that although it is difficult to gauge the level of danger from the far-rights rhetoric, it still needs to be taken seriously.

A great deal of this content is shared as an attempt at humour or trolling, Fisher-Birch told Al Jazeera, but its possible that a member of the target audience will decide to take action and commit an act of violence.
Job creation in India is expected to slow down further after growing at the slowest pace in three months in January as the Covid-19 pandemic forces businesses to temporarily close their operations.

At least 750,441 people joined the formal workforce in January, the government payroll data released on Wednesday showed. It was the lowest monthly addition in this financial year so far except in October when the payroll additions were fewer than January as recorded by the government through its retirement fund body Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO). A total of 715,590 people joined the workforce in October.

Sluggish economic growth is affecting the jobs scenario. This will likely worsen in the coming months, especially in February and March with India in a lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid-19, impacting businesses and employees across sectors.

In December, a total of 843,263 people joined the workforce; in November, it was 956,887 people.

According to the EPFO database, of the total payroll additions, around 396,541 are in the 18-25 age group, which is almost 54,000 less than the December additions for this group of job seekers. The 18-25 age group is significant as it is considered to involve fresh job seekers. In January, while 214,491 were in the 26-35 age group, 134,040 were above 35. The remaining 5,369 people were below the age of 18.

To be sure, payroll data of most recent months may be slightly revised due to data collection and tabulation delays in some sectors. A slowing economy has hampered job creation in recent months. Both private and government surveys have emphasised the slowing down of employment generation.

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On Tuesday evening, a tornado ripped through the northeastern part of Mississippi damaging several buildings and leaving a a huge amount of debris behind.

A dollar store in Tishomingo was even levelled by the tornado. It passed the store ar the Alabama and Tennessee state lines, about 242 milies northeast of Jackson, a video posted on social media showed how what used to be a store become a pile of rubble.

Aside from damage to properties, the tornado also caused several minor injuries, according to authorities as the severe storm system crossed into other parts of the south.

According to the National Weather Service office in Memphis reported that after storm moved through the town of Tishomingo at around 5:30 in the afternoon, the damage was reported throughout the small town which is home to fewer that 350 people.

After passing Tishomingo, the twister crossed into northern Alabama which prompted the issuance of another tornado emergency by the NWS.

The weather service also indicated that there were preliminary reports of incidents where falling debris were sen in the area.

Read also: Nine Doctors Fall Amid the COVID-19 Battle in the Philippines

A meteorologist for NWS in Huntsville, Robert Boyd, stated that severe weather warninngs have been issued for northwest Alabama by Tuesday evening, as the thunderstorms made their way into areas of Tennessee.

Tishomingo rebuilding after Tuesday tornado

On Wednesday, officials of Tishomingo County spent the whole day cleaning up the aftermath of the tornado that passed through their town.

After the tornado passed, there were more than three dozens of home and businesses that were either damaged of destroyed. The storm system, ripped off roofs, blew over and uprooted trees. Leaving behind piles of debris of what used to be stores and businesses.

According to Payton Berklite, director of Tishomingo County Emegency Management, the tornado hit the town for a while before it picked up. Further adding that after a short while, it dropped back down which brought and caused even more damage in the county.

Moreover, Berklite stated that there are about 30-40 houses and business that sustained damage during the hit of the tornado. Furthermore, he added that the town mostly received the damage and butbehind the path of the torando which moved east along Highway 30 was a trail of trees, buildings that were blown away and roof damage.

Berklite was also relieved that there were only minor injuries but no fatalities that were reported during the hit. Also adding that the county exprienced power outtage but the power company was able to restore about hald of the supply by Wednesday afternoon.

On top of this, he said that their whole crew is now working to clear roads, and restore power. The town of Ecru also sent a crew to check on gas and water leaks.

On the other hand, Mississippi Emergency Management Agency director Greg Micheal flew in to the town Wednesday to asses the damages, along with crew from NWS Memphis and Huntsville who also surveyed for information in the area.

NWS officials said that the tornado is likely to be classified as an EF1 or EF2.

Related article: Islamic State Claims Responsibility for Sikh Complex Seige That Took 25 Lives

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ePlane, described as a B2B sourcing and business intelligence platform for the aerospace parts and repair market, has raised $9 million in funding. The round is led by Japanese trading and investing company Marubeni Corporation, along with a number of previous investors.

Founded in 2016 and launched fully in 2018, ePlane has built to let users trade aircraft parts, locate repair services, and improve supply chain bottlenecks and reduce costs. The idea is that by throwing tech at the problem, including an online marketplace -- covering buying, selling, repairing, loaning, and exchanging aircraft parts -- many inefficiencies within the aerospace parts and repair market can be eradicated.

For example, the platforms "Autopilot" feature claims to use an AI algorithm to match buyers and sellers based on needs, available inventory, past transactions, and required timeframe. It then automatically sends requests for quotes (RFQs) to appropriate sellers, therefore eliminating the need to send each request manually.

More broadly, ePlane's platform digitizes the procurement process, "syncing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and custom inventories, to ensure that inventories are most up to date in real time".

The aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) market is said to be large, too, totalling $80 billion globally. ePlane says the market is expected to grow to $116 billion by 2029, and therefore is prime for its B2B sourcing platform.

To that end, I'm told the aviation industry is already embracing Cyprus-headquartered ePlane. The startup is now receiving over $50 million in monthly demand from over 4,000 major companies in the aerospace industry.
Highlights India is presently under nation-wide lockdown for 21 days Authorities, including PM Modi, are urging people to stay home PM Modi appealed to his bal sena to make this lockdown a success

Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a complete nation-wide lockdown during an address to citizens on Tuesday. He said that the lockdown will be in place for 21 days and has advised everyone to follow it in order to fight coronavirus. In a tweet posted recently, PM Modi has appealed to his bal sena to ensure that this lockdown is successful.

In a tweet posted in Hindi, PM Modi wrote, I have full faith in my Bal Sena. They will ensure that people stay in their homes, so that India can fight against COVID-19 effectively.

The tweet is also accompanied with a video showing a young girl stopping her father from stepping out of their home.

The video, since being posted 14 hours ago, has collected over 74,000 likes and more than 15,000 retweets and counting.

On March 24, PM Modi announced the 21 day lockdown in India.

Today, I am going to announce a very important measure in our fight against Covid-19. The entire country will be under lockdown from today. The complete lockdown will come into effect from midnight tonight, PM Modi said in his address to the nation.

In his speech, PM Modi also praised people who were sharing innovative messages about social distancing. He also showed one such creative banner that breaks down the syllables of corona to say koi road par na nikle.
Photo: The Canadian Press

Canada's agriculture sector is warning of higher prices and potential food shortages if it it isn't designated an essential service and allowed to do business as usual during the COVID-19 crisis.

Already people worried about food staples have emptied some grocery store shelves, although governments have all said supplies are secure.

"We're in unknown territory. We have concerns about potential problems," said Todd Hames, president of the Alberta Wheat Commission. "That's why we need to have governments recognize that farming is an essential service supplying food for the world."

Hames, who has a grain farm near Marwayne in east-central Alberta, said railways, the Port of Vancouver and companies that supply fuel and farm implements also need to remain open with spring seeding only weeks away.

It's especially important since there have been delays in getting grain to market due to strikes and rail blockades, he said.

"Just when prices were starting to see our seasonal rallies in the spring, coronavirus hit. It's just all gone to hell in a handbasket," Hames said. "Who knows what we're in for this year?"

Canada's cattle industry saw a sharp drop in prices when the coronavirus pandemic was declared, although they have stabilized in recent days.

In 2018, Canada exported $3.7 billion in beef and live animals to 56 countries, but three-quarters was shipped to the United States. The Canadian Cattlemen's Association wants to make sure that market isn't affected and is relieved that borders are still open to beef as an essential good.

But first and foremost, said executive vice-president Dennis Laycraft, there must be recognition of efforts to keep an adequate supply of food available to Canadians.

Laycraft said the industry has been working with Agriculture Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to ensure meat-packing plants remain open.

"We've had good assurance that we're going to be able to keep the plants up and operating at capacity," he said.

The federal government is exempting temporary foreign workers, including migrant farm workers, from some COVID-19 travel restrictions.

About 60,000  mostly from Mexico, Jamaica and Guatemala come to Canada annually, including 20,000 to Ontario alone.

Bill George, chair of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association, said workable safety rules need to be developed for those workers.

"We have to have some protocols that make sense. We view it as an essential service, but sometimes it would be very hard to maintain the six feet minimum separation that they want," George said.

"We have to find a way around this or potentially look at relying on other countries to supply our (produce), and you're not going to be getting a lot out of Spain this year or the United States."

George said each day of delay increases the risk of crops not being planted in time  something that Canadians could see reflected at the grocery store.

"That would be my concern. There'll be shortages and the prices will be higher if it is available. There'll be a more limited selection, for sure."
Supporters of Assembly Bill 5 rally at the state Capitol in Sacramento last year, before the passage of the law that restricts how companies can classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

Kathrin Kana juggles a few jobs: She's a voice-over actor, a yoga instructor and a home organizer. But after the coronavirus outbreak and the stay-at-home order implemented to contain it made gigs around Los Angeles hard to come by, Kana watched her bank account balance dwindle to $36 last Friday. Seeing few options that wouldn't involve jeopardizing her health, she tried to sign up to transcribe audio clips for Rev.com from the comfort of her home.

She got turned down  because of where she lives. Rev is among a handful of companies that stopped using workers in California after the state Legislature passed a law last fall that makes it harder to treat them as contractors rather than employees.

"I was like, 'We are in a crisis, so can we get a workaround so we can at least make some money?'" Kana said. "This [Rev customer support] person said it doesn't work that way."

Workers and companies have feverishly debated the merits of AB 5, as the law is known, since Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) introduced it in 2019. Some workers who want to retain the independence that comes with being a contractor argue AB 5 limits their ability to work for whomever they want, whenever they want. Others say being classified as contractors by companies such as Uber, Lyft and Postmates wrongly deprives them of employee benefits such as workers' compensation and a minimum wage.

The coronavirus outbreak, and the economic devastation it has wrought, has heaped fuel on this debate, providing fresh arguments to both sides. Pro-AB 5 voices say workers can't wait any longer for healthcare coverage, paid sick leave and other protections in the face of a fast-moving pandemic. Those who oppose the law point to the economists already declaring the U.S. in recession and say any regulation that takes opportunities for workers off the table will do more harm than good.

Kana and others like her have published or signed petitions calling on state regulators to repeal AB 5, or at least suspend it for the duration of the crisis. "You're trying to protect us, but you're killing independent contractors who now have zero income," Kana said.

Story continues

Lauren Sakiyama, a freelance writer who can no longer write for the company she was contracting with because she hit the 35-article-a-year cap for non-employees imposed by AB 5, has also had trouble finding online work she can do at home. "We can talk about reforming the rules around independent contractors when this is all over," she said.

Companies of all sizes have steered clear of working with California contractors. Smaller companies such as Enotes, a 25-person Seattle-based company, are particularly wary of the risk of potentially violating the law. Enotes co-founder Alex Bloomingdale said company lawyers advised it was too much of a liability to continue contracting with workers in the state.

"We hope the law will be changed so we can continue to provide opportunities for talented educators in the state," Bloomingdale said.

On the other hand, workers such as Nicole Moore, a driver for ride-hailing services and an organizer of Los Angeles' Rideshare Drivers United labor group, have held marches demanding that the Legislature enforce AB 5 and grant gig workers the employee protections they argue they're entitled to. (Drivers at a rally in L.A., held just before the county's stay-at-home rule took effect, were careful to maintain six feet of separation from one another, she said.) "If this pandemic is not the biggest example of why the majority of workers need this kind of backup [and benefits], I don't know what is," Moore said.

As The Times previously reported, ride-hail drivers began seeing a drop in demand as early as February, leaving many struggling to replace the income.



Pressure is mounting for cities and the state to begin enforcing AB 5. San Francisco's Board of Supervisors introduced a resolution Tuesday calling on City Atty. Dennis Herrera and California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra, among others, to ensure employee protections for gig workers and to file injunctions against the gig companies, preventing them from misclassifying workers. The resolution is expected to win approval next week.

Nationally, gig workers may be receiving some new albeit temporary protections in a form that sidesteps the question of worker classification. The Senate and the White House came to an agreement on a coronavirus relief bill Wednesday that expands federal and state unemployment insurance to cover independent contractors for as long as four months. The bill will effectively give California workers on both sides of AB 5 some of the benefits they claim the state law has made difficult to access while leaving the question of employee status unresolved.

The federal bill also does little to close the gaps around sick leave policies that threaten to force workers to choose between driving or delivering when ill and losing out on income.

In response to pressure from lawmakers including Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), Uber, Lyft, Postmates, DoorDash and other companies agreed to offer workers as many as 14 days of paid sick leave if they are diagnosed with the coronavirus or directed to self-isolate by a physician. But for those experiencing symptoms with no diagnosis, filing for unemployment benefits will be the only remedy.

"This has really exposed the underbelly of this whole part of the workforce," Warner said in an interview. "Things are going fine until they're not and they've got nothing to fall back on.

"My hope is that during this time period we could actually work on more permanent policies," Warner added. One possible long-term solution he's looking at: a hybrid classification that blends the flexibility of contract work with some of the protections of employee status.

Such a model is precisely what the gig companies have asked for in the face of increasing pressure to turn their contractors into employees. In a letter to President Trump on Monday, Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi asked lawmakers to find a "third way" that would "remove the false choice between flexibility and protection for millions of American workers." It's the same proposal Uber, Lyft, Postmates and DoorDash are making in a ballot measure the companies are spending $110 million to push as an alternative to AB 5.

Gonzalez sees Khosrowshahi's plea and the ballot measure as an attempt to get out of paying into social benefit funds such as unemployment insurance or covering sick leave for workers. "That goes for any company that has been misclassifying their workers, making a profit off of them and never paying into the system," she said. "That's wrong. And it hurts all of us because when the unemployment insurance fund goes dry, and it will, the people who have been paying into it are going to have to continue to pay in. And Uber and Lyft should be let off the hook?"

Gonzalez conceded that there's still work to be done to ensure AB 5 is suitable for all workers but said the outbreak has forced a pause to the legislative process. "We are still working on ensuring that AB 5 works for as many people as possible and that we can have different gradations of what a freelance job may look like," she said. "We released language on freelance writers. We're going to release language on musicians that we have."

However, she maintains the ongoing pandemic validates the importance of worker protections. "The overall idea [of AB 5] is correct," she said. Gonazlez said there are numerous workers who have been reclassified because of the law and now have access to workers' compensation and unemployment insurance when they need it the most.

Jorge Perez, for example, works part time for an arm of the same-day shipment company Deliv. The company, which works with contractors around the country, started a California subsidiary in 2019 in order to hire employees in anticipation of AB 5.

As a result, Perez said, he now has access to workers' compensation and paid time off. (Because Perez is a part-time driver, Deliv in California does not contribute to his health insurance.) "They give us employees complete flexibility in working when we want, and we can take off time for as long as we want and still be W-2 employees," he said.

But for every worker with a happy story about AB 5s effects, there's another such as Kana, who blames it for the difficulty she's having finding work at a particularly unsettling time.

Kana has continued to email and call Gov. Gavin Newsom's office asking to repeal the law while she hustles to find a job. But her options remain bleak. "Whether I am an independent contractor or an employee is completely irrelevant because there is no employment situation available," Kana said.
[March 26, 2020] Apple FCU Provides Consumer Tips on Banking During the Coronavirus With social distancing and business shut downs becoming the new normal during the Coronavirus pandemic, Apple Federal Credit Union (FCU), which has 21 branches throughout Northern Virginia, is offering solutions on how consumers can safely conduct banking business without fear of contracting the disease. "Our goal is to keep our members and our staff safe during the spread of the Coronavirus, as we continue to conduct business on behalf of our members," says Jeffery Long, CPA, Chief Lending Officer at Apple (News - Alert) Federal Credit Union. "We want to make consumers aware of the many options available to them that do not require going into a credit union or bank lobby and being around people." Consumers should consider these options when conducting their bank business: Digital Banking: Credit union and bank mobile apps and online banking are great options for many transactions, such as inquiring about balances, transferring money and paying bills. With secure technology, consumers can even deposit checks using their mobile banking app via their cell phones. Digital banking can be conducted without leaving your home. Drive Thru Services: With many credit union and bank lobbies closed during this pandemic, consumers should consider using drive thrus to conduct business. Consumers can deposit and cash checks, make loan and credit card payments, and withdraw cash. Inaddition, some institutions, such as Apple, offer members in need of debit cards an instant-issued card. Mobile Payment Apps: Consumers should consider using mobile payment apps like Apple Pay, Square Cash, Venmo and PayPal (News - Alert), as well as debit cards and credit cards for purchases. And many big retailers and smaller merchants are not only accepting these forms of payment; they are actively encouraging their use. This is expected to continue, especially since there are reports about how physical forms of money could be contaminated by the coronavirus. Call Center: For consumers who want or need to talk to a live person, they can do so via their credit union or bank call center. Specialists are standing by and are able to help with any kind of banking business consumers may need. Consumers can find support from a call center similar to what they can find in the branch lobby. Waiving ATM fees: Ask your credit union or bank if they are waiving ATM fees. At Apple, for instance, they are being waived through the end of May. Members can use any of the 53,000 ATMs nationwide fee free. Emergency Loan Relief: Consumers should check to see what emergency relief their credit union or bank is offering. Look for special emergency relief loans, skipping payment options and penalty-fee waivers for those who may be late on a loan payment. Do Not Withdraw Large Amounts of Money: Consumers do not need to carry or store large amounts of cash. Banks and credit unions are federally insured up to $250,000 (IRAs are an additional $250,000) by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the National Credit Union Administration, respectively. Clean Your Cards and Hands: After swiping a credit or debit card at a store, make sure to wipe the card with a disinfectant wipe. Also wash your hands after handling them. To learn more, visit www.AppleFCU.org. About Apple Federal Credit Union Established in 1956, Apple FCU is ranked as a top 100 credit union nationwide, serving nearly 220,000 members with $3 billion in assets. As a not-for-profit, member-owned financial cooperative, Apple FCU serves a diverse community of local education systems and anyone who lives or works in Fairfax, Frederick (VA) and Prince William counties. Members enjoy competitive rates, as well as fair and honest products and services, within a trusted environment. The Credit Union is fully committed to making a positive impact within the region, not only in financial services, but also in community involvement, financial literacy and charitable giving. AppleFCU.org. Federally insured by NCUA. Equal Opportunity Lender. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005183/en/

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The Bombay High Court on Thursday



directed an NGO to file representation before the collectors of Sangli and Satara Maharashtra seeking arrangements to be made to provide antiretroviral therapy (ART) drugs to HIV positive patients in these two districts.

The HC direction came after it was informed that HIV-infected persons from these two districts were unable to travel to Mumbai for treatment in view of the coronavirus- induced lockdown in the state.

The Sangli-based NGO, Veshya AIDS Muquabla Parishad, works for HIV positive persons.

A bench of Justice K K Tated was hearing an application filed by the NGO seeking providing antiretroviral treatment drugs to HIV positive persons in Sangli and Satara in view of inter-city travel restrictions imposed as part of the lockdown enforced to contain COVID-19 spread.

As per the plea, HIV infected persons are entitled to ART treatment.

HIV positive persons from Sangli and Satara travel once a month to Mumbai to collect their dosage of ART medication, the plea said.

However, this is no longer possible due to the stoppage of inter-city transport facilities, it added.

The plea sought for arrangements to be made so that the medications are made available to HIV positive persons in their own districts.

Justice Tated directed the NGO to file representation before the collectors of the two districts and asked them to decide on the request expeditiously.

ART is the only known treatment that inhibits HIV.

The drug slows down the replication of HIV and immune deterioration is delayed leading to an improvement in survival and quality of life in patients.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Detention of four ex-policemen involved in Golunov case extended until early June

 RAPSI, Natalia Vaneyeva

16:15 26/03/2020

MOSCOW, March 26 (RAPSI)  Moscows Basmanny District Court on Thursday extended detetion of four former police officers charged in a case over planting drugs on journalist Ivan Golunov for a little over 2 months, Golunovs. lawyer Sergey Badamshin told RAPSI.

Igor Lyakhovets, Maxim Umetbayev, Akbar Sergaliyev and Roman Feofanov will stay in detention until June 7.

In late February, Alexey Kovrizhkin, the lawyer for Lyakhovets, told RAPSI that another defendant Denis Konovalov had testified against his client, saying it was him who had ordered to plant drugs on Golunovs bag and apartment. Investigators believe Lyakhovets, who does not admit guilt, is the organizer of the crime.

The defendants are charged with abuse of power, evidence tampering and illegal drug trafficking. Only Konovalov pleaded guilty. He was later released from detention and put under house arrest.

Investigators believe that they planted drugs on Golunov. Thus, they falsified the results of operative search activity that later became inculpatory evidence against Golunov in a drug dealing case; however, the drugs had been earlier illegally bought and kept by the police officers, according the Investigative Committee.

In late December 2019, investigators opened the case over arrest of Golunov. The journalist was recognized as an injured party. All five defendants in the case have been dismissed from police.

Golunov was arrested in Moscow on June 6, 2019. On June 8, the Nikulinsky District Court of Moscow placed him under house arrest for 2 months. According to the Interior Ministrys official statement, police seized nearly 4 grams of methylmethedrone from Golunov.

The journalist pleaded not guilty, insisted that the drugs were planted on him during the arrest and claimed that his prosecution is related to his journalistic investigations.

According to his defense, an examination showed no drugs in his biomaterial.

On June 11, charges against Golunov were dropped because of a lack of evidence that he participated in the crime, and the journalist was released.

On June 13, Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed two generals of police on the back of the arrest of Golunov.




Korea's fat cats are increasingly minded to lay off workers as the coronavirus epidemic exacerbates the sluggish economy.

Refiner S-Oil, one of the most sought-after employers due to its high salaries and perks, is considering its first major layoffs since 1976. The average annual salary at S-Oil is a staggering W137 million, with an average duration of employment of 16 years, even more than Samsung Electronics' W119 million and 11.6 years (US$1=W1,232).

But the petroleum company has been hit hard by declining margins and inventory valuation losses as oil and petroleum product prices have plummeted due to the pandemic.

Hyundai Oilbank, another Korean refiner, recently went into crisis mode with management accepting a 20-percent pay cut. And SK Innovation, which is expected to suffer more than a W200 billion loss in the first quarter of this year, slashed the operating rate of its factories by 15 percent this month due to declining demand.

In the airline industry, there are already more than 10,000 workers on unpaid leave.

Korea's top conglomerates all complain that they are suffering. Samsung Heavy Industries has started taking applications for voluntary retirement. Hyundai Steel and Hyundai Rotem, which makes railway cars, are doing the same, as is LG Display.

Lotte, which announced plans to close down 200 money-losing stores, is expected to lay off at least 10,000 workers.
Celebrities have not been shy about sharing their thoughts on the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. From helping fans stay positive with cooking demos to admitting they were refusing to practice social distancing because they value freedom over their own life, high profile figures are flocking to social media with public statements. Now the Sarah, Duchess of York is weighing in with her opinion  and her timing couldnt be worse.

Fergie headed to Twitter to express her deep thoughts on the underlying cause of coronavirus. The only problem? Her statements coincide with the current heir apparent, Prince Charles, making his diagnosis public.

Sarah, Duchess of York | STEVE PARSONS/AFP via Getty Images

Sarah Ferguson says coronavirus is mans punishment for mistreatment

The royal family has always been interested in conservation and promoting remedies for climate change, so the duchesss comments dont come as a huge surprise. On March 24, Prince Andrews ex-wife expressed her feelings via tweet.

Mother Nature has sent us to our rooms.. like the spoilt children we are, she wrote alongside a photo of a tree in bloom. She gave us time and she gave us warnings. She was so patient with us. She gave us fire and floods, she tried to warn us but in the end she took back control.

Mother Nature has sent us to our rooms.. like the spoilt children we are. She gave us time and she gave us warnings. She was so patient with us. She gave us fire and floods, she tried to warn us but in the end she took back control. pic.twitter.com/vOg1dZvj8E  Sarah Ferguson (@SarahTheDuchess) March 24, 2020

And that wasnt all. A second tweet beside a flowering bush expanded the sentiment, saying, She has sent us to our rooms and when she is finished clearing up our mess. She will let us out to play again. How will we use this time? xxxx

Prince Charles was diagnosed with coronavirus this week, too

Fergies followers had mixed reactions to her tweets, with some voicing support and others claiming she was completely wrong. But either way, the timing of her statements was terrible.

On March 25, Buckingham Palace confirmed that the Prince of Wales had tested positive for coronavirus. They said he was experiencing mild symptoms but otherwise remained in good health. He is reportedly self-isolating at home in Scotland for the duration.

Charles had already canceled his upcoming engagements as confirmed cases of the virus skyrocketed in the United Kingdom.

People are sick of hearing from celebrities about coronavirus

While most people wouldnt wish for Prince Charles or any royal family members to get sick, they are getting tired of the philosophical ramblings about how nature is cleaning house or we should all be grateful for time spent at home.

Unlike millionaires like Charles and Fergie, many people are struggling to provide basic necessities for their families as they contend with a loss of income for an extended period of time.

She has sent us to our rooms and when she is finished clearing up our mess. She will let us out to play again. How will we use this time? xxxx pic.twitter.com/gbFFPsIyn0  Sarah Ferguson (@SarahTheDuchess) March 24, 2020

Have you been in contact with Charles in the last 14 days? one follower asked on Twitter. Pull your head out of the clouds.

Are you completely nuts? another agreed. Now this is knocking on your door, still feel we are all spoiled children?

The Duchess of York, plus plenty of other celebs, are being called tone deaf for making these types of statements. And its not helping anyone feel sympathy for Prince Charles, who theyre saying shouldnt have been given a test if he only had mild symptoms.
Why didnt Saturn eat Titan, its biggest moon?

In classical mythology, the titan Cronus, who was reinterpreted by the Romans as Saturn, devoured his newborn children to prevent a prophesied coup. (He did not succeed, and Zeus became the king of the gods.)

In planetary science, a similar scenario emerges when scientists recreate the evolution of large planets like Saturn, which has a satellite system dominated by one massive moon, Titan. Typically those simulated planets either eat their orbital retinue, or multiple sizeable moons survive into adulthood, like the four Galilean moons of Jupiter.

How, then, did Saturn end up with massive Titan and a multitude of tinier moons? Using a set of simulations detailed in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, a team of planetary scientists identified an explanation for how a moon like Titan could have avoided straying too close to its murderous parent.

Recommended From space lettuce to ancient plant networks

Titan is one of the largest moons in our solar system, says Yuri Fujii of Nagoya University and lead author of the new study. I would like to reveal its origin.

She and a colleague attempted a detailed simulation of moon formation for a planet at Saturns distance from the sun. Instead of considering a large world surrounded by a simplified, gassy disk, she modelled an environment with more intricate, fine-scaled temperatures and densities. Then, she tweaked the amount of turbulence in the gas itself. They then simulated more than 100,000 years of moon evolution, adding in the gravitational jostling caused by migrating satellites and accounting for the disks dissipation over time.

She found that a swath of space emerges within the disk that acts like a safety zone. That zone is a dusty expanse with a steep temperature change between its warmer inner edge, closer to the planet, and the colder outer edge, nearer to the void. Warm gas inside that band, which fluctuates between 20 and 100 planetary radii from the infant planet, prevents farther-flung moons such as Titan from moving inward and becoming snacks for the young planet. But moons that already live on the interior of the safety zone are out of luck.

The simulation, Fujii says, reproduces a satellite system with a single, large moon around a Saturn-like planet  although that outcome largely depends on how long it takes the gas in the disk to vanish, and how far from the planet the large moons initially form.

Kangaroos have two separate uteruses (iStock)

This Mom is still pregnant. But shes already having another baby

Kangaroos and wallabies dont reproduce the way most of their fellow mammals do  they keep their pregnancies short and to the point, with their young crawling out of the womb and up to their mothers pouch after just a months gestation. Once there, the tiny joeys spend about nine months nursing and growing before theyre ready to climb out of the pouch into the world.

Almost all kangaroos and wallabies have two separate uteruses, and they usually contrive to have extra, undeveloped embryos waiting in the wings  or rather, in whichever uterus was unused in their most recent pregnancy.

But researchers report in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the swamp wallaby has an even more peculiar way of doing things. It gets pregnant again before the first pregnancy is even over, suggesting that female swamp wallabies may be pregnant continuously for their entire reproductive lives.

Swamp wallabies are delicate, skittish creatures, says Brandon Menzies, one of the papers authors. While researchers had suspected for decades that they were doing something unusual, answers were not forthcoming until he and his co-authors, Thomas Hildebrandt of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany and Marilyn Renfree of the University of Melbourne, managed to use ultrasound scanners on pregnant females.

The researchers monitored 10 pregnancies in the University of Melbournes captive wallaby colony. They gently sedated some creatures and scanned their pouches and uteruses, while they looked into others pouches regularly for new young, and they swabbed the females for sperm to pinpoint when mating had occurred.

Based on traces of sperm found in the days before the birth of the first joey, the researchers found that the wallabies estrus, or mating period, began before the pregnancy was over. Whats more, in the case of two females who lost their young in the final day or so of gestation, an ultrasound 10 days later showed they had already grown a 12-day embryo in the other uterus. That implied that fertilisation had occurred two days before the losses.

Potentially, these animals are always pregnant, says Menzies, with not even a day or two between pregnancies.

The heavily muscled species were once able to Hulk-smash their way through South America (Getty)

They knew saber-toothed tigers were big. Then they found this skull

When the curator mentioned a huge saber-toothed tiger skull stored behind the scenes of the National Museum of Natural History in Montevideo, Uruguay, Aldo Manzuetti had to see for himself.

The skull belonged to Smilodon populator. Extinct for about 10,000 years, the heavily muscled species once Hulk-smashed its way through South American fauna in the Pleistocene. To picture a normal individual, start with an African lion. Then double its size and add giant fangs.

But this one wasnt normal. The skull was 16in long, making previous large specimens from the species look small. I thought I was doing something wrong, says Manzuetti, a doctoral student in palaeontology at Uruguays University of the Republic. He was using the head to infer the likely size of the animals body. I checked the results a lot of times, and only after doing that I realised I hadnt made any mistakes.

His analysis showed the skull sat atop a beast that likely tipped the scales at around 960 pounds. The specimens existence, he and colleagues reported earlier this month in the journal Alcheringa, suggests that the largest saber-toothed tigers might have been able to take down giant plant-eaters, heavy as pickup trucks, that researchers had thought were untouchable.

Science news in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Science news in pictures Science news in pictures Pluto has 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen Pluto has a 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen that is doing strange things to its surface, Nasa has found. The mysterious core seems to be the cause of features on its surface that have fascinated scientists since they were spotted by Nasa's New Horizons mission. "Before New Horizons, everyone thought Pluto was going to be a netball - completely flat, almost no diversity," said Tanguy Bertrand, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and the lead author on the new study. "But it's completely different. It has a lot of different landscapes and we are trying to understand what's going on there." Getty Science news in pictures Over 400 species discovered this year by Natural History Museum The ancient invertabrate worm-like species rhenopyrgus viviani (pictured) is one of over 400 species previously unknown to science that were discovered by experts at the Natural History Museum this year PA Science news in pictures Jackdaws can identify 'dangerous' humans Jackdaws can identify dangerous humans from listening to each others warning calls, scientists say. The highly social birds will also remember that person if they come near their nests again, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. In the study, a person unknown to the wild jackdaws approached their nest. At the same time scientists played a recording of a warning call (threatening) or contact calls (non-threatening). The next time jackdaws saw this same person, the birds that had previously heard the warning call were defensive and returned to their nests more than twice as quickly on average. Getty Science news in pictures Turtle embryos influence sex by shaking The sex of the turtle is determined by the temperatures at which they are incubated. Warm temperatures favour females. But by wiggling around the egg, embryos can find the Goldilocks Zone which means they are able to shield themselves against extreme thermal conditions and produce a balanced sex ratio, according to the new study published in Current Biology journal Ye et al/Current Biology Science news in pictures Elephant poaching rates drop in Africa African elephant poaching rates have dropped by 60 per cent in six years, an international study has found. It is thought the decline could be associated with the ivory trade ban introduced in China in 2017. Reuters Science news in pictures Ancient four-legged whale discovered in Peru Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planets oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago A. Gennari Science news in pictures Animal with transient anus discovered A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a transient anus that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste Steven G Johnson Science news in pictures Giant bee spotted Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. An international team of conservationists spotted the bee, that is four times the size of a typical honeybee, on an expedition to a group of Indonesian Islands Clay Bolt Science news in pictures New mammal species found inside crocodile Fossilised bones digested by crocodiles have revealed the existence of three new mammal species that roamed the Cayman Islands 300 years ago. The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal New Mexico Museum of Natural History Science news in pictures Fabric that changes according to temperature created Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold Faye Levine, University of Maryland Science news in pictures Baby mice tears could be used in pest control A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males Getty Science news in pictures Final warning to limit "climate catastrophe" The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase Getty Science news in pictures Nobel prize for evolution chemists The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies Getty/AFP Science news in pictures Nobel prize for laser physicists The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers Reuters/AP Science news in pictures Discovery of a new species of dinosaur The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn" Viktor Radermacher / SWNS Science news in pictures Birth of a planet Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star. ESO/A. Muller et al Science news in pictures New human organ discovered that was previously missed by scientists Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the interstitium. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins Getty Science news in pictures Previously unknown society lived in Amazon rainforest before Europeans arrived, say archaeologists Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs Jose Iriarte Science news in pictures One in 10 people have traces of cocaine or heroin on fingerprints, study finds More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test. Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly. Getty Science news in pictures Nasa releases stunning images of Jupiter's great red spot The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary

Ricardo Praderi, an amateur collector, first dug up the prehistoric predators skull in September 1989 in southern Uruguay. The site had otherwise yielded only the fossils of herbivores. He then donated it to the archives of the national museum, Manzuetti says.

Scientists knew South America was haunted by the ghosts of vanished Pleistocene carnivores. But the top tier of possible prey  armoured armadillos comparable to Volkswagens, lumbering mastodons, the 12ft-tall ground sloth Megatherium  would have challenged even the fiercest hunter.

Weve always wondered: Who could take down a giant ground sloth? says Kevin Seymour, a palaeontologist at Torontos Royal Ontario Museum who reviewed the research.

The new skull suggests an answer. If Smilodon is getting this big, theres a potential for it to be taking down these giant adult herbivores, Seymour says.

The tiny creatures prefer to roll their way out of trouble (Antweb)

These ants have a revolutionary escape strategy

Ants are bristling with defence weaponry. Different species might sting their enemies, bite them with powerful jaws or shoot them with jets of formic acid. Some even explode.

But Myrmecina graminicola  an ant about the size of a sesame seed  doesnt want to get into all that. According to research published last week in Scientific Reports, if one of these ants encounters danger while its on a slope, it makes a practical choice: it tucks itself into a little ball and rolls away.

It is the only ant known to move in this way, and one of few rollers in the animal kingdom overall, says Donato Grasso, the papers lead author and an ant ethologist at the University of Parma in Italy.

Grasso and his colleagues first spotted this unique behaviour while scanning the forest floor during a trip to one of their field sites in Fornoli, Italy. (Many entomology discoveries are made this way: When you are a biologist interested in insects, it is impossible not to look at the ground, Grasso says.)

The team found a few colonies of M graminicola, which are so small and elusive they often go unnoticed. When the insects were menaced by spiders and other ants, they curled their bodies and disappeared into the leaf litter, Grasso says. They rolled away.

In the lab, the researchers use slow motion video to tease out the ants choreography. Roughly: A ready-to-roll ant tucks in its head and pulls its abdomen forward to form a ball. It then lifts its legs up and tips itself forward to rest on its mandibles and antennae, which balance it like arms, Grasso says. A final push with the hind legs, and its off.

On smoother surfaces like stones and leaves, the ants travelled at about 15in per second  about 80 times faster than their average walking speed. They could move themselves about 6in, or about 50 body lengths.

Such a distance is pretty impressive, and shows that the ants rolling form must be very efficient, says Nicholas Gravish, an engineer who studies ant locomotion at the University of California and was not involved in the new research.

Researchers still dont know the purpose of the bony site (PA)

This mysterious ancient structure was made of mammoth bones

Ice Age hunter-gatherers, foraging the bone-chilling, unforgiving steppes of what today is Russia, somehow completed a remarkable construction project: a 40ft-wide, circular structure made from the skulls, skeletons and tusks of more than 60 woolly mammoths. The reason remains a mystery to archaeologists.

The sheer number of bones that our Paleolithic ancestors had sourced from somewhere and brought to this particular location to build this monument is really quite staggering, says Alexander Pryor, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter. It does boggle my mind.

Alexander Dudin, a researcher from the Kostenki Museum-Preserve, and a team of scientists began excavating the 25,000-year-old mammoth-bone circle in 2014 at a site called Kostenki 11, which is 300 miles south of Moscow. It is the third structure uncovered at the site. The discovery was published Monday in the journal Antiquity.

Archaeologists have unearthed about 70 mammoth bone structures across Eastern Europe. But this one is the oldest on the Russian plain thought to be made by modern humans. Most of the previously identified structures were small, leading researchers to conclude they were most likely used as winter dwellings on a nearly treeless landscape.

Pryor arrived at Kostenki 11 in 2015. The ring, which also included ribs, jaws and leg bones, had probably been piled 20in high before collapsing thousands of years ago, he says. The team collected sediment samples from inside the bone circle and from three large pits located outside.

Through further processing, they identified more than 400 charcoal pieces, evidence of wood-burning. The charcoal came from conifers such as spruce, larch and pine, suggesting that trees still grew in the harsh, frozen environment. They also radiocarbon-dated the charcoal, which further supported that the site was about 25,000 years old.

They also found burnt mammoth bones, which indicated that the Paleolithic people were probably starting fires with wood and then using the beasts greasy bones to feed the flames. Bone-fueled fires burn brighter than wood fires, but spread less warmth.

The team acknowledge that they did not fully solve the mystery of how the mammoth-bone circle was used. They still do not know whether the hunter-gatherers killed or scavenged the beasts, how long the location was used or if it held any ritualistic importance.

 The New York Times
We've all seen the documentaries that feature scenes of mass migrations on land. Those videos are pretty impressive showing all sorts of animals - birds, mammals and other creatures - on the move. What wasn't known was to what extent this was taking place in the deepest parts of our oceans.

That was until now.

Scientists have, for the first time, documented seasonal migrations of fish across the seafloor in deep-sea fish, revealing an important insight that will further scientific understanding of the nature of our planet.

"We are extremely excited about our findings, which demonstrate a previously unobserved level of dynamism in fishes living on the deep sea floor, potentially mirroring the great migrations which are so well characterised in animal systems on land," said Rosanna Milligan, Assistant Professor at Nova Southeastern University, who started the work at the University of Glasgow.

The study - published today in the Journal of Animal Ecology and led by Nova Southeastern University (NSU) and the University of Glasgow - analysed more than seven years of deep-sea photographic data from West Africa, linking seasonal patterns in surface-ocean productivity with observed behavioural patterns of fishes at 1,500 metres.

The deep sea - greater than 200-meters water depth - covers most of the world's surface. Recent advances in technology and computational power have hugely improved our ability to access and study deep sea ecosystems, but there are still many basic questions that we simply don't have answers to.

This study now provides evidence of cycles of movement across the seafloor in deep-sea fish, with the study authors believing these movements could be happening in other locations across the world's sea floor too.

This work was only possible because of an international collaboration between industry, academia and government, involving more than 10 organisations across Angola, UK and US. It was done using the Deep-ocean Environmental Long-term Observatory System (DELOS).

The DELOS observatories are permanently left in place on the seafloor (1,400 m depth) and house separate instrumentation "modules" containing oceanographic sensors, cameras and more. The modules are periodically recovered for data download and servicing using a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV).

You can learn more about the DELOS project ONLINE.

"The work really adds to our understanding of movement patterns in deep-sea fishes and suggests reasons for their behaviours, Milligan said. "Because we were able to link the abundances of fish observed at the seafloor to satellite-derived estimates of primary productivity, our results suggest that even top-level predators and scavengers in the deep oceans could be affected by changes filtering down from the surface of the ocean."

Dr. David Bailey, Senior Lecturer in Marine Biology at the University of Glasgow's Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, said: "Animal migrations are really important in nature, because when animals move from place to place, they transport energy, carbon and nutrients. We were only able to discover this behaviour because of the collective expertise and decade-long commitment of the Universities and industry partners. These kinds of long-term projects and the datasets they generate are vital to understanding ongoing change in the oceans and how they may be impacted in the future."

###

About Nova Southeastern University (NSU): At NSU, students don't just get an education, they get the competitive edge they need for real careers, real contributions and real life. A dynamic, private research university, NSU is providing high-quality educational and research programs at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree levels. Established in 1964, the university includes 16 colleges, the 215,000-square-foot Center for Collaborative Research, a private JK-12 grade school, the Mailman Segal Center (early childhood education) with specialists in Autism, the world-class NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, and the Alvin Sherman Library, Research and Information Technology Center, one of Florida's largest public libraries. NSU students learn at our campuses in Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, Miami, Miramar, Orlando, Palm Beach, and Tampa, Florida, as well as San Juan, Puerto Rico, and online globally. Classified as having "high research activity" by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, NSU is one of only 50 universities nationwide to also be awarded Carnegie's Community Engagement Classification, and is also the largest private institution in the United States that meets the U.S. Department of Education's criteria as a Hispanic-serving Institution. Please visit http://www.nova.edu for more information.
As front-line officers express daily safety concerns amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Toronto police union is calling for the force to immediately halt all unnecessary contact between officers, including the practice of two officers per car and stop parades  the regular platoon meetings of over a dozen officers.

Theres a lot of concern in the field, and a lot of uncertainty, said Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack, who said he is hearing each day from officers worried about access to personal protective equipment, including masks, and unnecessary gatherings between colleagues.

Its a daily battle. Shortage of masks, disinfectant  every day we are dealing with a borderline crisis, McCormack said, adding he is hopeful that will change with a recent restocking of equipment, including N95 masks, gloves and nearly 500 protective suits, should they be required.

Staffing is stretched, too, McCormack said, with approximately 400 officers currently in self-isolation, many due to March break travel.

A frequent concern from officers is over parades, the gathering of a platoon at the start of its shift, when about 15 cops share the same space. If one of the officers gets COVID-19, it could spread to others and take out an entire shift.

Those gatherings, McCormack said, shouldnt be happening.

Meaghan Gray, spokesperson for the Toronto police, said the force is encouraging police to minimize the length of parades. That recommendation is among other efforts to socially distance, including staggering lunch hours, and adjusting shifts to limit the number of officers overlapping at one time.

Stressing that the health and safety of TPS members is paramount, Gray said the service will have enough masks and maintains a stockpile of all personal protective equipment.

The service is also screening all members reporting for duty, providing daily information updates about self-monitoring and personal hygiene, and has launched a hotline phone number for officers and civilian staff to call and get answers about COVID-19, Gray said.

In an internal communique sent March 19, officers were asked to save and submit their empty hand sanitizer bottles so they can be reused when bulk supplies of hand sanitizer could be replenished.

Another communication will be out when there is more hand sanitizer to distribute, reads the internal message.

Although Toronto police has closed all of its divisions to the public and sent members home to work, front-line officers must continue their work in the community, including attending medical complaints, calls to shelters and other public emergencies  all of which require contact with members of the public.

In a video message sent internally to TPA members Monday, McCormack calls COVID-19 the most significant health crisis to face the organization.

For many of you, your job cannot be done from home, you cannot work remotely  you are on the front-lines of this global crisis, said McCormack.

We know that you are worried, not only about your health, and the health of your families but also about the well-being of the community, adding the service and the union are holding daily meetings to discuss any shortages and equipment, and are in regular contact with city and provincial leaders.

The union is also asking the service to suspend, wherever possible, the practice of having two officers within one cruiser in an effort to encourage social distancing.

Gray said unit commanders have been directed to consider deploying the least number of two-officer patrol cars as possible, with consideration given to officer safety, operational demands and the Uniform Collective Agreement, which has requirements for when two officers should be in one vehicle.

On Thursday, the Toronto police board held a brief special meeting by phone amid what executive director Ryan Teschner called an unprecedented public health emergency.

Perhaps even moreso at times like these, the board must ensure it remains continually engaged in discharging its legislative mandate to ensure the adequate and effective policing in Toronto, Teschner said during the meeting, whose attendees included board chair Jim Hart, vice-chair Marie Moliner, and Toronto police chief Mark Saunders.

At the meeting, the board approved changes that will allow just the chair and vice-chair to make decisions as requested by Saunders, in an effort to move swiftly and be immediately responsive to rapidly evolving and urgent circumstances, the board said in a statement after the meeting.

The board also formalized information-sharing between the police service and the board, requiring the ongoing exchange of information relevant to Board decision-making during critical events.
The country's forty-four prisons will be hard hit, should prisoners and wardens contract the dreaded COVID-19. More worrying will be the increase in positive cases among the population stemming from contacts between prison wardens and the public.

As most prisons around the world begin to release more and more prisoners and modify sentences to avoid further spread of the disease among prison populations, it has become even more expedient in the case of Ghana for the President to pardon more first time offenders with lower sentences, as well as the sick and the aged, most of whom do not pose a risk to society.

It is against this backdrop that we at Crime Check Foundation CCF believe that the eight hundred and eight prisoners granted Amnesty by the President is woefully inadequate looking at the dangers the COVID-19 pandemic present to incarcerated populations, and the fact that for the past three years the number of prisoners granted Amnesty by the President has been minimal.

We at CCF believe the need to pardon more sick and aged prisoners at this crucial period has become even more necessary because of the way the pandemic has largely killed the aged and others with low immunity in many parts of the world.

With the shared knowledge of the non-nutritious nature of foods in the country's prisons from a meager one cedi eighty pesewas per prisoner per day, sick prisoners and the aged will have no chance of surviving the COVID-19 pandemic.

With rates of Tuberculosis infections among prison populations a hundred times higher than outside individuals, the need for our President to pardon more inmates with pre-existing health conditions cannot be over-emphasized, especially with the possibility of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic lurking around our prisons.

The massive congestion in our prisons, CCF thinks, further legitimizes our case on the need for the president to act with dispatch to address our concerns, because should there be an infection, most prisoners will be swept away by the pandemic.

Though the Justice for All programme has reduced the prison remand population, there are still many prisoners on remand with missing dockets as well as others whose fate are yet to be determined either through lack of evidence or their prosecutors may have been transferred. Such infractions of the law and the abuse of the rights of such individuals dilute Ghana's designation as the beacon of democracy and the champion of Human Rights in Africa.

We hope the President will act swiftly to dispatch more remanders home to significantly reduce the remand population in the country's prisons to make social distancing for those in custody less challenging. Much as we appreciate the President's efforts, the release of eight hundred and eight prisoners as against the more than fifteen thousand inmates whose lives are currently in danger of the disease represents a drop in the ocean.

We call on government to as a matter of urgency provide sanitizers, veronica buckets, infra-red thermometers and other protective gadgets to the Prison service to enable them cope with the pressure associated with the pandemic.

The Eight hundred and six confirmed COVID-19 infections in five prisons in China, the release of seventy thousand prisoners in Iran and the urgency with which other countries are pardoning more prisoners across the world should serve as a clarion call on government to quadruple the numbers.

We urge philanthropists, individuals and well-meaning Ghanaians to also support the Prison Service with protective gadgets at this crucial period

.Thank you.

Ibrahim Oppong Kwarteng

Ambassador Extraordinaire of Ghana Prisons

Executive Director, CCF
A teacher practices giving an online lecture at Seoul Girls' High School in Mapo-gu, Seoul, Thursday, after the education ministry announced it was considering introducing online classes if the spread of COVID-19 shows few signs of slowing down by April 6, the rescheduled start date for the spring semester. /Yonhap



By Bahk Eun-ji



Many parents are expressing concerns over the government's move to introduce online classes for elementary, middle and high school students starting April 6 as the spread of COVID-19 shows little sign of abating.



Education authorities have delayed the spring semester by five weeks amid the spread of the highly-contagious virus and schools are set to begin their academic year on April 6.



With continuing concerns over possible mass infections in classrooms, the Ministry of Education (MOE) said it is considering opening online classes so that students can take classes on computers at home rather than come to schools. The ministry came up with the plan to help schools meet the statutory required number of school days this year.



However, many parents are skeptical about the online courses and wonder if the ministry is sufficiently prepared for the implementation of online schooling.



Eileen Kim, an office worker and mother of a nine-year-old daughter, said working parents will still be struggling if their children are required to take their classes at home.



"Under the situation over the virus epidemic in the country, I fully understand about the MOE's decision to delay the opening of the spring semester. However, working parents still have to find someone to take care of their children at home while they are taking online classes," Kim said.



Lee Jae-yun, a homemaker and mother of three primary school students, said the online classes do not sound like a realistic solution for her family.



"I have three kids and all of them have to attend online classes while we have only one desktop computer at home. How can we manage the situation?" Lee said.



According to the Enforcement Decree of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, heads of schools can remotely operate classes using information and communication media. However, many schools are not equipped to operate online curriculum.


[March 26, 2020] 16 Local Nonprofits Awarded Nearly $370,000 in First Round of Grants from the COVID-19 Regional Response Fund

Just 12 days after its creation, grants from the COVID-19 Regional Response Fund totaling nearly $370,000 were directed to 16 nonprofit organizations serving St. Louisans affected by the coronavirus, St. Louis Community Foundation officials announced today. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005486/en/ Help nonprofits assist St. Louis' vulnerable citizens who are affected by coronavirus disruptions. Visit Stlgives.org/Covid19 for more details. (Graphic: Business Wire) The COVID-19 Regional Response Fund was created and funded by a coalition of area foundations, businesses, and individual donors brought together by the St. Louis Community Foundation. An Advisory Council comprised of public health experts, foundation partners, and corporate and community representatives guided the initial grantmaking process and awarded funds to the following organizations: Aging Aging Ahead: elder services and food delivery

Cardinal Ritter Senior Services: basic needs, mental health, and isolation

St. Louis Area Agency on Aging: nutrition, transportation and other services Basic Needs Catholic Charities: coordinate agencies providing unmet and emerging needs

Community Action Agency of St. Louis County: rent, mortgage, utility, and food assistance

Connections to Success: access to technology, food, transportation, occurring because of a job loss

Metro Trans Umbrella Group: food and toiletries, and address social isolation for transgendered

Salvation Army: food, supplies, shelter

St. Francis Community Services: therapy, legal aid and case management

rban League of Metropolitan St. Louis: nutrition and isolation and low-income rent and utilities



Child Care United for Children: nutrition and childcare for emergency and essential personnel; Disabilities Services

Paraquad: emotional support and communication for families and caregivers Food Insecurity Operation Food Search: food for children and families

St. Louis Area Food Bank: provide food given network disruptions Mental and Behavioral Health Alive & Well Communities: basic services, mental health, and isolation

Behavioral Health Network: uninsured adults, homeless without phones About the Advisory Council Those serving on the Advisory Council are: Jama Dodson, St. Louis Mental Health Board; Jane Donahue, St. Louis Public Schools Foundation; Regina Greer, United Way of Greater St. Louis; LadyAshley Gregory, Forward Through Ferguson; Jacki Langum, ArchCity Defenders; Sal Martinez, Employment Connection; Rich McClure, UniGroup - retired; Jamie Opsal, St. Louis Seniors Fund; Jason Purnell, Washington University; Michael Renner, Missouri Foundation For Health; Pat Sly, Emerson (News - Alert) - retired; Pat White, St. Louis Labor Council; Elizabeth George, St. Louis Community Foundation. "With this initial round of grantmaking, we really wanted to support a broad array of organizations that are already working with affected people in the designated populations," said Elizabeth George, director of Community Investment, for the St. Louis Community Foundation. "Given the magnitude of the events unfolding and their impacts, we knew we had to act fast." As funds continue to be raised and received, the Advisory Council will evaluate the impact of the grants already extended and make additional grant recommendations as contributions to the funds allow. "We are continuing to work with our coalition members to broaden support and raise funds for the Regional Response Fund," said Amelia Bond, president and CEO of the St. Louis Community Foundation. "The need in our community is great - and will likely grow larger - and we intend to help as many organizations as possible deliver services to those who need help." Regional Response Fund coalition members include: United Way of Greater St. Louis, Boniface Foundation, Catholic Charities, Clark-Fox Foundation, Episcopal Presbyterian Health Trust, Incarnate World Foundation, Gateway (News - Alert) Center for Giving, Jewish Federation of St. Louis, Lutheran Foundation of St. Louis, Marillac Mission Fund, Missouri Foundation for Health, Regional Business Council and its affiliate Social Venture Partners, Saigh Foundation, St. Louis City Seniors Fund, St. Louis Mental Health Board, St. Louis Regional Chamber, City of St. Louis, St. Louis County, Trio Foundation of St. Louis, Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, Washington University, Wells Fargo (News - Alert) Advisors, and WestPort One. Please Give! Here's How Individual, corporate and foundations contributions are being accepted and encouraged for both the COVID-19 Regional Response Fund and the Gateway Resilience Fund, which will assist employees and owners of restaurants, bars, shops and other venues affected by the coronavirus disruption. Visit stlgives.org/COVID19 for details. Together, both funds have raised $1.4 million to date. Grants from each will be guided by advisory committees unique to the mission of each fund. For additional information about Covid-19 relief efforts hosted at the St. Louis Community Foundation visit stlgives.org/Covid19. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005486/en/

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The Prince of Wales has become the highest profile coronavirus case in the country, after Clarence House said he had tested positive for the virus.

Charles (71) is displaying "mild symptoms" of the Covid-19 illness but is in good health and spirits as he self-isolates at Birkhall in Scotland, a spokesman said.

A source added "medical advice is that it is unlikely to escalate into a more serious case".

The Duchess of Cornwall (72), who is also at Birkhall, in Aberdeenshire, has tested negative for the virus, so is separating herself from the prince.

The couple were tested by the NHS in Aberdeenshire on Monday, but SNP politician Joan McAlpine, a Member of the Scottish Parliament, raised questions about procedures, citing a relative with an underlying health condition who was refused a test.

Charles' office Clarence House said the prince and duchess were tested on the NHS as "they met the criteria required for testing".

Charles fell ill over the weekend and a source said his doctor's most conservative estimate was that he was contagious on March 13. Charles last saw the Queen the day before this date, at a private meeting at Buckingham Palace which was not attended by the Duke of Edinburgh, who at the time was thought to be at Sandringham.

Buckingham Palace said the Queen (93), who is staying at Windsor Castle with Philip (98), remains in good health and is following all appropriate advice.

The royal family's official Twitter account released an image of the Queen in her Berkshire royal residence yesterday evening holding her weekly audience with Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the telephone. The monarch was pictured using an old fashioned phone in a sitting room, adorned with ornaments including a china corgi.

Later, the official royal family Twitter account posted a tribute to all the volunteers helping to combat coronavirus.

"Volunteers always have a huge role to play in society, but never more so than in difficult times - and for that we salute you," it said.

It is not known when Charles was last in contact with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis.

Clarence House said: "The Prince of Wales has tested positive for coronavirus. He has been displaying mild symptoms but otherwise remains in good health and has been working from home throughout the last few days as usual. In accordance with Government and medical advice, the prince and the duchess are now self-isolating at home in Scotland. The tests were carried out by the NHS in Aberdeenshire where they met the criteria required for testing."

Charles and Camilla are both over 70, the age group told to take social distancing particularly seriously.

Prince Albert of Monaco, who tested positive for the virus last week, sat opposite Charles for more than half an hour during a event held by the charity WaterAid on March 10 in London.
YouTube CPAC

UPDATE 8:42 a.m.

The federal government is asking banks and credit-card companies to lower interest rates on Canadians struggling financially because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the government is also looking at extending lower-interest credit directly to consumers.

The Bank of Canada has slashed its trend-setting interest rate to try to cushion the blow to business from a slowing economy, but credit-card interest rates, the ones that matter most directly to most consumers, remain high.

Speaking at his Ottawa residence this morning, Trudeau says Finance Minister Bill Morneau is in talks with major banks about doing things to narrow the gap.

We recognizes they are a significant challenge for many Canadians at this point, Trudeau said.

We are looking at making credit more available and less expensive for Canadians to make it for the next few months.

He says the government is spending billions on programs to help individuals pay their bills over the next few months as the novel coronavirus forces people out of work due to illnesses and enforced closures.

He says lowering the costs Canadians have to pay as they rely on borrowing to cover their expenses is another part of the effort.

UPDATE 8:21 a.m.

A 14 day quarantine for those returning to Canada is now mandatory and the 'Quarantine Act' is now in place and those who violate the protocols will face fines and the possibility of jail of time.

The global co-ordination on the COVID-19 pandemic response is on the agenda today when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes part in a video conference call with other leaders of the G20.

On the call with international leaders, Trudeau is set to discuss further global co-ordination in both the health and economic response to a rapidly spreading virus that, as several federal officials have stated: knows no borders.

Trudeau also indicates that all efforts are being made to shift production to key medical and essential supplies.

Trudeau also says it's vital to protect our supply chains to keep essential products like food flowing.

ORIGINAL 7:53 a.m.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to address the nation this morning at 8:15 a.m. Pacific time in what has become a daily occurrence from Ottawa.

The Prime Minister, announced Thursday morning that Kirsten Hillman has been appointed as Canadas Ambassador to the United States.

Today, we are announcing Kirsten Hillman as our countrys next Ambassador to the United States. When we worked together to negotiate the new NAFTA, I saw Ms. Hillmans ability to stand up for Canadians and fight for their interests. She combines exceptional knowledge and skills, and is a gifted diplomat. Ms. Hillman will remain a trusted advisor, friend, and counsellor in Washington and is our point person with Congress and the U.S. administration. I know that Canadians will be well represented by her.
The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic began in China in late November and early December 2019. Now many accuse the Chinese authorities of negligence and the fact that they did not take sufficient measures to prevent the spread of the virus, thereby contributing to the infection of the inhabitants of all countries on the planet. However, the Chinese Communists had a completely different task.

In order to understand the logic of the Chinese authorities, you need to know what China is. In modern China, there is not a traditional nation-state, but a party-state. They have no separation of powers as in Western countries. Nevertheless, there is still a particular division of power in China.

Power in China is divided among several opposing communist groups.

The most famous are the Communist Youth League (CYL) faction and the Shanghai faction. The CYL faction was significantly weakened in 2016 by the secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping. Former CCP secretary-general Hu Jintao and current prime minister Li Keqiang belong to the CYL faction. Another former secretary-general of the CCP, Jiang Zemin, belongs to the Shanghai faction.

Xi Jinping came to power in November 2012 entirely unexpectedly. The Hu Jintao faction insisted on one candidate, while the Jiang Zemin faction supported the other. Xi Jinping skillfully played the role of a compromise candidate. He looked like a suitable candidate for all the main warring factions, because, although he was one of the "communist princes" (his father was a close associate of Mao Zedong), he gave the impression of a somewhat "weak" leader. Xi Jinping belongs to the faction long forgotten in China, which at one time was aligned with the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin.

Hopes for easy manipulation of the new party boss did not materialize. Secretary-General Xi Jinping toughened the persecution of those who do not support the party's official line. In 2013, shortly after coming to power, Xi Jinping even banned the teaching of freedom of the press, civil rights, and the rule of law.

The massive party inquisition and the purge of the party apparatus, which began in China in 2013, led to the fact that many supporters of the previous leader of the country, Hu Jintao, appeared on the dock. Xi Jinping not only established effective internet censorship in China, but also achieved almost a lifetime post.

The Chinese communists have been fighting for many years with all kinds of "deviations" from their own dogmatic interpretation of Marxism. On this front, they clashed with the Soviet communists, the Marxist Dalai Lama, the Fourth (Trotskyist) Communist International, and numerous internal factions.

The congress of the CCP, which meets every five years, is the supreme arbiter of all covert battles. But between congresses, the establishment of political influence materializes in the manipulation of cadres  each faction seeks to place as many of its people into leading posts as possible.

Recently, a faction of Wang Qishan, an associate of Xi Jinping in mass party purges, has begun to gain strength in China. Wang Qishan is a representative of the "power bloc" in the government and is a peculiar Chinese analog of Torquemada. Wang's faction is relatively new, but he still managed to put his people in key positions. For example, in 2016, Chen Wenqing became the head of the "Chinese KGB," and American-educated banker Jiang Chaolyan became the party boss of Hubei Province.

Hubei Province, with its capital in Wuhan, has always been "problematic" for the Chinese communists. The relationship between Beijing and Wuhan is somewhat reminiscent of the relationship between Washington and New York, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Madrid and Barcelona. The parallels here are unambiguous  this is not just a conflict between the current and previous capital of the country (Wuhan was the capital under Chiang Kai-shek). Wuhan has always been a rebellious city that triggered the events that led to the tragedy in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

When the epidemic of the new coronavirus started, Beijing faced the challenge  to ensure that the party authorities of the rebellious and freethinking Wuhan made mistakes, and to deal with them under this pretext.

Now many say that if the Chinese authorities acted three weeks earlier, the number of diseases could have decreased by 95%, and its spread would be significantly limited. This could happen only if the main objective were human health. But in fact, the main task of the Chinese communists was to win the intraspecific struggle.

All these warring factions of China at the most critical time of the outbreak of the epidemic were engaged in what they always did: to protect and strengthen their political positions and interests, and not to fight the spread of the virus.

For China, such an epidemic is a typical phenomenon. Influenza outbreaks occur in China, as in all countries, every year, but generally, in 2019, China was ready for the flu season, and no panic was expected. Xi Jinping needed a crisis to settle accounts with dissent in the party ranks.

Without a doubt, the Chinese left operates on the same principles as the American left: these people "never let a serious crisis to go waste."

There is a widespread belief that Beijing was silent about the scale of the epidemic in Wuhan. Initially, that was the case, but only until January 7, 2020. On this day, Xi Jinping intervened and changed the essence of events  from medical, they became political. From that moment, it was Beijing that methodically and purposefully stepped up the situation around the epidemic.

What the Chinese leaders did not take into account was the fact that their ensuing panic would be picked up by the world's mass disinformation media. The surrealistic footage of the Apocalypse from China, created by skillful Chinese propagandists, was very photogenic and was instantly circulated by the world press.

The crisis inflated by the Beijing elite was the result of an ideological confrontation among the Chinese factions, which clashed over some of the nuances of Marxist dogma.

Xi Jinping's ruling group has skillfully used the epidemic to blame the party leadership of Hubei and the leadership of Wuhan. As a result, the political goal was achieved. The party boss of Hubei province, Jiang Chaoliang (from the Wang Qishan faction), and the party boss of Wuhan city, Ma Guoqiang (from the Shanghai faction), "paid for the epidemic" and were removed from their posts on February 13, 2020. Only after this reprisal did Beijing embark on a full-scale suppression of the true extent of the epidemic, which continues to this day.

The connection with the coronavirus is indicative of the fate of Wang Xiaodong, the governor of Hubei province since 2016. As a man of Xi Jinping, Wang Xiaodong remained at his post, even though he is the governor of the province most affected by the coronavirus of China.

From this point of view, the undercover political operation of the Chinese communists was successful. But the panic they created turned out to be more contagious than the coronavirus itself.

As soon as the political reprisal in Hubei was over, Beijing instantly switched from internal to external efforts and began openly accusing the United States of creating and spreading the coronavirus. The Chinese communists simply had to do this because they had lost control of the situation  the panic they created, and then the coronavirus itself, spread throughout the world.

What was initially conceived as a local and time-limited episode of reprisals against party comrades unexpectedly gained a global status. The genie jumped out of the bottle: the situation in China took the form of a comprehensive economic crisis and spread throughout the whole world.

On the surface, the current situation looks as if microorganisms are capable of reformatting the world macroeconomics. However, the difference between the current pandemic and all previous ones is that in 2020, the Information Coronavirus won a convincing economic victory over the real one.

Gary Gindler, Ph.D. is a conservative columnist at Gary Gindler Chronicles and the founder of a new science: politiphysics. Follow him on Twitter and Quodverum.
The Mooresville Graded School District Board of Education met Monday morning and approved a resolution granting emergency powers to Superintendent Stephen Mauney to allow him greater flexibility in responding to school district matters during the COVID-19 crisis.

The board granted the resolution in a unanimous vote during an emergency virtual meeting held in response to the N.C. Department of Health and Human Servicess recommendation that groups of 50 or more people should suspend meeting in person.

The resolution grants Mauney the authority to temporarily waive board policies as he sees necessary to comply with guidance from appropriate health or governmental authorities and to take any lawful actions necessary to ensure the continuation of public education.

The resolution also grants him the authority to enter into contracts without board approval for any dollar amount necessary for the purchase of materials or services for sanitation, cleaning, technology or other needs directly related to the COVID-19 emergency.
These mucus and saliva droplets are ejected from the mouth or the nose as we cough, sneeze, laugh, sing, breathe and talk. If they dont hit something along the way, they typically land on the floor or the ground. When the virus becomes suspended in droplets smaller than five micrometers  known as aerosols  it can stay suspended for about a half-hour, research suggests.

To gain access to your cells, the viral droplets must enter through the eyes, the nose or the mouth. Some experts believe that sneezing and coughing are most likely the primary forms of transmission. Professor Kwok said talking face-to-face or sharing a meal with someone could pose a risk.

Julian Tang, a virologist and a professor at the University of Leicester in England who is researching the coronavirus with Professor Kwok, agreed.

If you can smell what someone had for lunch  garlic, curry, etc.  you are inhaling what they are breathing out, including any virus in their breath, he said.

The virus does not linger in the air at high enough levels to be a risk to most people. But the techniques health care workers use to care for sick people can generate high levels of aerosols. This is part of why its so important that they have proper protective equipment.

How close is too close?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends keeping a distance of six feet from other people to minimize the possibility of infection. (A useful way to think about six feet is that its roughly twice the length of the average persons extended arm.)

Three feet is the distance the W.H.O. emphasizes as particularly risky when standing near a person who is coughing or sneezing.
Over time, however, doubts have arisen and pulled HAR down to VND 2,000 per share, and given the current business volatility, it seems impossible that the stock will ever rise back to face value again.

Doubts of stock price manipulation

HAR was officially listed on HOSE in the trading session on 17 January 2013, at a listing price of VND 12,000 per share. This stock traded sideways in the first few weeks, then suddenly pulled up dramatically on the trading session on 20 March to touch VND 32,600 per share, an increase of 250% in just two months of trading. After reaching this peak, HAR again moved sideways for several sessions, then unexpectedly exceeded the threshold of VND 40,000 per share in the trading session on 22 April. However, after surpassing this peak, HAR was pulled down sharply to just VND 20,000 per share in the session on 4 June 2013.

In another surprise move, HAR stock suddenly shot up to VND 35,500 per share in the session on 21 June, much to the amazement of investors. Like previous waves, after reaching the expected threshold, this code again pulled down sharply and fell to VND 20,000 per share. Although the cause of the waves is unclear, but with this increase and decrease cycle in HAR stock, many investors began to pay attention to when this stock would reach bottom, or wait for the next wave. Typically, there were two trading sessions on 10 June and 12 June, with around 2.2 million shares transferred, double that from previous sessions. The fact that HAR continually created waves and anchored at a high price compared to the intrinsic value of the business, while there was no outstanding information before and after each increase or decrease, made many people doubt HAR stock.

Shareholders disillusioned

The real reason investors questioned HAR uptrend in 2013 is because the business situation of this enterprise was nothing outstanding, but rather weak compared to other enterprises in the same field. According to the 2012 audited financial statements, the net profit from operations was only at VND 1.2 bn, a sharp decrease of 77% compared to the same period in 2011. However, from profits of more than VND 11 bn from liquidation of land use rights, HAR achieved about 50% of its annual target.

Although profitability fell sharply in 2012 due to decline in efficiency of the main business, the cost of corporate management accounted for a large portion and profits were mainly offset by transfer of liquidation of land use rights. Right at the time of listing, HAR profits for the first quarter of 2013 came mainly from liquidation of land use rights, as this contributed around VND 2.1 bn to revenue, compared to net profit of only VND 231 mn.

Therefore, HAR had total revenue of around VND 215 bn in 2013, a 6.5 times increase compared to 2012, of which main operating revenue was VND 135 bn and VND 80 bn came from mining activities. The expected profit before tax from these two segments was VND 33.3 bn and VND 25 bn, respectively. Despite nurturing ambitious plans, when answering questions of shareholders at the 2013 annual shareholders meeting, the Board of Directors of HAR declined to outline any strategic business plan of their mining activity, and only promised to notify shareholders in the near future.

Such ambiguity on the part of the Board of Directors of HAR was also a reason that many investors felt disillusioned and pushed for selling, causing HAR to plunge further. On 28 August, for the first time HAR fell below face value of VND 10,000 per share. From 2013 up to now, HAR has only traded at a very low price, sometimes even near VND 2,000 per share. HAR stock plunge not only caused small shareholders heavy losses, but even large organizations like VinaCapital suffered substantial losses.

No focus on business strategy

HAR was established as a JSC in 2007, with charter capital of VND 32 bn. The initial goal was to become a professional real estate development enterprise, a leader in the field of real estate services, leasing and management. With this ambition in mind, HAR attempted to increase capital to acquire land. In 2010, HAR increased its charter capital to VND 100 bn and then to a further VND 350 bn in 2012. After listing on the stock market, HAR continued to issue a large number of shares to increase charter capital. At present, HAR has charter capital amounting to VND 1,013 bn.

Despite this large charter capital amount, HAR has a business strategy that worries shareholders, especially its move to enter into new business arenas. For example, the decision to retain all profits in 2017 to focus resources to revive the Co Ba Soap brand. HAR spent more than VND 214 bn acquiring nearly 31% of the capital of Orient Manufacture and Trading Joint Stock Company, the enterprise that manages this soap brand. However, up to now, the return date of the Co Ba Soap brand is still unclear. It is worth mentioning that HAR's outward investment activities have also disappointed shareholders. For example, in 2016, HAR invested in G Homes JSC and Glenwood Horeca JSC to the tune of about VND 90 bn. However, both businesses are running quite inefficiently.

Learning from past mistakes, HAR shareholders will now probably not have high expectations or believe in the ambitions of its business leaders. In fact, HAR's corporate governance has many fundamental errors. In October 2019, HOSE sent a letter to HAR reminding the company to comply with regulations of corporate governance. Previously also, HAR had been forced to pay around VND 2 bn to the Tax Department in District 1 in Ho Chi Minh City for defaulting on tax payment by more than 90 days.

Translated by Francis

Kim Giang
A streetcar driver wears a mask amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in New Orleans, Louisiana on March 25, 2020. (Jonathan Bachman/Reuters)

Louisiana Reports Jump in Virus Cases to Second Per Capita in US

Louisiana recorded 510 new COVID-19 cases overnight, a 28 percent increase, taking the state to number two in cases per capita in the United States, officials said.

The state now has 2,305 cases. Eighteen new deaths, including a 17-year-old from New Orleans, takes the death toll to 83.

If we dont flatten the curve and do it soon, we could be out of ventilators in region 1, the New Orleans area, by as early as April 2, Gov. John Bel Edwards said at a press conference on Thursday.

And we would potentially be out of bed space for individuals by about April 7. Theres simply not enough health care resources to care for all those who will need care if we continue to develop cases at our current pace.

The dire projections arent conjecture or a flimsy theory but simply whats going to happen, Edwards warned.

EMS personnel bring a patient into the emergency center at Ochsner Baptist Medical Center amid the outbreak of the CCP virus in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 25, 2020. (Jonathan Bachman/Reuters)

State officials said 676 patients are hospitalized, 239 of which are on ventilators.

New York reported a surge of nearly 6,500 COVID-19 cases earlier Thursday, along with 100 new deaths. New Jersey, which has a similar per capita rate as Louisiana, reported 2,492 new cases, taking the state to 6,876 cases.

The high case count in Louisiana was blamed by some on large gatherings just last week in New Orleans, similar to how groups gathered for parades in New York City last month. Some churches have continued holding gatherings, including one in Baton Rouge that welcomed over 1,800 people on Sunday.

COVID-19 is caused by a new coronavirus that The Epoch Times refers to as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

The pandemic is affecting nearly the entirety of Louisiana, Edwards said, chiding those who think it isnt a problem for them.

For those people who think that this is really just a problem for urban Louisiana, New Orleans, Jefferson Parish, for example, we now have positive cases in 53 of our 64 parishes. So nobody, nobody should look at this situation and think, oh, this doesnt involve me. This doesnt involve my town. This doesnt involve my parish, he said.

I am encouraging everyone, no matter who you are or where you live to understand that this coronavirus is in your neighborhood. It is spreading throughout the state of Louisiana. There is no place where it isnt.

Louisiana has a stay at home order in effect that requires residents to limit trips to those acquiring essentials like food or medicine, caring for children or the elderly, or going to a job at an essential company or agency.

Medical personnel talks to a person at a drive-thru Coronavirus COVID-19 testing station at West Jefferson Medical Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 17, 2020. (Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

The epicenter of the virus in the state is New Orleans, a coastal city that has nearly 400,000 residents. With the new cases overnight, the city was up to 997 cases and 46 deaths.

Clusters of cases have been linked to six nursing homes, including the Lambeth House in New Orleans, St. James Place home in Baton Rouge, and the Vista Shores Assisted Living and Memory Care facility in New Orleans.

Preventing COVID-19

The new illness causes more severe and deadly cases in older individuals or people with underlying health conditions, though younger people can still get the virus and suffer serious symptoms or death.

COVID-19 spreads primarily from person-to-person between people who are in close contact with one another (within about 6 feet) through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These droplets can land in the mouths or noses of people who are nearby or possibly be inhaled into the lungs, it says on its website.

Its possible that touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching ones nose, eyes, or mouth, is a source of infections.

Experts recommend preventative steps including frequently washing hands, avoiding close contact with sick people, and regularly cleaning surfaces and objects.
A pastor who was left fighting for his life after contracting Covid-19 has said his main concern now is for the health of others, including his wife, who may herself be infected.

Mark McClurg admitted that he fears he may have transmitted the potentially lethal virus to several people.

Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph from his bed in the coronavirus ward of the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald, Mr McClurg said he has no idea when he will be discharged, having spent the last week in intensive care.

The 40-year-old, who is still on oxygen but out of immediate danger, said his near-death experience has brought home the importance of self isolation and social distancing.

"If we can all just be a bit kinder, more sensible, smarter, stop being selfish, and stay indoors, we can get through this," said Pastor McClurg, who is being kept in isolation.

"I'm so thankful for the hard work of the ICU team in the Ulster over the past week.

"They've been working day and night to save my life."

In an interview with this newspaper, the pastor's wife Claire (42) revealed on Tuesday that the father of their three children - Liliana (5) and twin boys Josiah and Judah (2) - has a long road to recovery ahead of him.

Read More

But last night, her husband - who was hitherto fit and healthy with no underlying health conditions - said that leaving intensive care was definitely "a step in the right direction".

"The problem with coronavirus is that it sucks the life out of your lungs," he said.

"Somehow I also got pneumonia, so I'm struggling on two fronts.

"Breathing is hard and because I've spent a week just fighting to breathe, my energy is low.

"Coronavirus is still in my body. In the days ahead it will begin to get better but recovery is going to take a long time."

I still have Coronavirus in body. I wanted to share another personal video. Can you help me by retweeting this out. Can you show your love and appreciation for our amazing NHS staff today. #coronavirus #Covid19 pic.twitter.com/oknXADH70M  Mark McClurg (@Mark_McClurg) March 26, 2020

The evangelical pastor of Newtownards Elim Church recalled one particularly harrowing moment when he called his wife to say goodbye.

"I phoned Claire before I went into ICU, I really thought 'this is it'," he said.

"I told her I believed I was going to die. I said I needed her to come, so she rushed to be with me in hospital and I prayed for my life.

"I said 'Lord, I'm ready for Heaven but I'm not ready to say goodbye to my family, they need me'. I was trying to fight for them."

Her frantic dash to Dundonald came prior to his positive Covid-19 diagnosis, however, and Mark expressed his fears about others who visited him that same day. "A few people who saw me back then, including Claire, may well have the virus now," he said.

Mark, who is a healthy and strongly built man, is not a typical coronavirus patient and he did not display any of the symptoms typical of the disease before falling ill.

"I don't drink or smoke, and I've no underlying conditions, but I got it," the Glengormley native said, adding that he believes coronavirus poses a risk to all of humanity.

"If somebody you love, your family or friends, has to come into ICU with coronavirus they're going to struggle to breathe and they're going to be in danger," he said.

"I have strength because I'm fit and I was able to keep on pushing but this is deadly. This coronavirus is out to kill us all.

"It doesn't matter if you're a Protestant or a Catholic, coronavirus doesn't care.

"This idea that it's for over 70s or over 80s is misplaced.

"I'm 40, fit and healthy and this has been the toughest week of my life."

He said his survival was down to our excellent healthcare workers.

"You have to remember the doctors have been doing all they can to keep me alive," he said, describing what it feels like to battle the virus.

"It's like trying to breathe under water... we all know that's impossible.

"Your whole energy is just consumed with trying to take one breath."

Pastor McClurg said his church family helped him get through the long, dark, sleepless nights.

"You want to sleep but you can't because you've got this full oxygen mask on to force oxygen into your lungs even though you're not breathing," he said.

"What really helped me was our church prayer WhatsApp group.

"I could see that someone was praying for me from night until morning.

"I couldn't respond because I'd no energy but I could watch what they were doing and it was so amazing."

Although Mark knows he will not be discharged any time soon, he said that it is a small price to pay for his recovery.

"It's going to take a while for me to get off the oxygen and the physiotherapists will then have to get my strength back up," he said.

"I've been out of bed a couple of times and I shuffled like a 90-year-old man.

"But when you're thinking you're going to die, you're thinking you're leaving behind a wife and a widow and three small children... it's hard."

He added: "The only thing I kept on thinking was that I have to stay alive for them."

Pastor McClurg's main concern now is for the medical professionals who are keeping Covid-19 patients alive.

"The amazing staff in our NHS know they are going to get coronavirus at some stage," he said.

"I've seen their faces. I've spoken to them. They all know that.

"The scary thing is they've all seen me and they're all young and healthy and they don't know if they'll be like me.

"We've been asked by the government to stay at home whereas their job is to go into coronavirus wards... I do know what that is like for them and their families so we must stop going out unnecessarily.

"This is dangerous. If we don't stay six feet apart we're going to end up six feet under."

He added: "The heart and soul of Northern Ireland now is our NHS staff.

"There are only so many beds... it will get to a stage when the beds run out and they're going to have to pick and choose who lives and who dies."
Christian Michel James, an alleged middleman arrested in connection with the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper scam cases by the CBI and ED, moved the Delhi High Court on Thursday seeking interim bail citing risk of contracting coronavirus in the Tihar Jail.

Michel, 59, claimed that his health condition was critical and incompatible with the current prison status, especially to cope with the risk of contracting the COVID-19 infection which could have a lethal effect on him as he is already suffering from serious pathologies.

The agedness and a pre-existing ill state of health will make the applicant's (Michel) body more susceptible to the said infection than any other ordinary prisoner with a normal health condition," the plea said.

"Further, the presence within prisons of subjects who are tested positive for Covid19 pose a threat to the applicant considering his existing health condition and age, added the plea, filed through advocates Sriram Parakkat, Vishnu Shankar and Aljo K Joseph.

It also referred to the Supreme Court's March 16 order directing all the states and union territories (UTs) to constitute high-level committees to consider releasing on parole or interim bail prisoners and undertrials, for offences entailing up to 7-year jail term, to decongest jails in the wake of coronavirus pandemic.

The plea further cited the Prime Minister's speech declaring a nation wide 21-day lockdown on March 24 to avoid the spread of the virus.

It said Michel's health condition needs to be monitored and treated and he requires home-like environment where the risk of contagion is less and social distancing can be effectively practiced.

The regular bail plea of Michel, who was arrested in 2018 and is in judicial custody since January 5, 2019, is also pending before the high court where the CBI and the ED have contended that he should not be granted the relief as he has a nexus with influential people and can influence witnesses.

He has been denied bail in both the matters by the trial court. He has approached the high court against the lower court's decision.

The special CBI court had denied him the relief, saying there was no sufficient ground to grant bail.

Michel, extradited from Dubai, was arrested by the ED on December 22, 2018.

On January 5 last year, he was sent to judicial custody in the ED case. He is also lodged in judicial custody in another case registered by the CBI in connection with the scam.

Michel is among the three alleged middlemen being probed in the cases filed by the ED and the CBI. The other two are Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
PARMA, Ohio -- Two Parma Fire Department firefighters are currently in self-quarantine after being exposed on Sunday (March 22) to COVID-19 while transporting a Sprague Road nursing home patient to Southwest General Health Center.

The run changed during the course of the event, where the guys got exposed to the patient because they didnt have all of the proper gear on, Fire Chief Michael Lasky said. The person tested positive for the virus.

Because our guys were wearing just surgical masks instead of full-face pieces, theyre in self-isolation, checking their temperatures twice a day at home for a three-day period. Thats what the CDC recommends. With no symptoms and not taking any medicine for fever, theyll be back to work on next shift, which is Saturday (March 28).

Due to the shortage of masks, Lasky said the firefighters cant wear gear on every run; however, due to the incident, the fire chief has instituted new protocol regarding nursing home visits. This includes wearing full gear -- N95 face masks, gloves, gowns and eye protection.

In addition, Parma first responders wont be providing aerosol treatments, such as albuterol, due to COVID-19 possibly being transmitted through the air.

Lasky noted that Southwest General Health Center did contact the Parma Fire Department about the exposure less than eight hours after the run.

What happened is unfortunate, but sometimes you learn something from a mistake and it makes us even better, Lasky said. Also, were asking people to give as much information as possible. What were finding out is sometimes theyre not giving us everything right off the bat, and then youre already into the call.

Im asking residents to tell dispatchers about everything thats going on -- a cough, fever, flu symptoms. Thats telling the guys to get themselves ready, because theyre probably going to be wearing full gear.

Read more news from the Parma Sun Post.
Dr. Andrea Halliday tours a new triage trailer set up for suspected COVID-19 cases at a hospital in Springfield, Ore. Halts to non-urgent procedures threaten the finances of smaller hospitals. (Chris Pietsch / Eugene Register-Guard)

Rural hospitals across the Pacific Northwest that were already struggling financially have seen steep declines in business this month, shunned by patients who fear exposure to the coronavirus as it spreads from urban areas.

Emergency rooms have been eerily quiet. Many operating rooms went dark last week after the governors of Washington and Oregon halted most elective surgeries to conserve precious masks, gowns and other protective equipment.

But instead of enabling them to prepare for an expected surge in COVID-19 patients, the hospitals say, the lull threatens to bankrupt them.

In Washington, at least 13 rural hospitals have less than 45 days of cash on hand and five of them face imminent closure, according to Cassie Sauer, chief executive of the Washington State Hospital Assn.

The health care delivery system in Washington state is at a crisis point as result of the COVID-19 outbreak, association leaders wrote Friday in a letter to Gov. Jay Inslee requesting at least $40 million in grants for hospitals in "extreme financial distress."

We expect certain hospitals to close if funding is not provided," the letter said.

Cash shortages have also prevented the hospitals from stocking up on the badly needed protective equipment, which is expensive and difficult to find even for better-financed urban hospitals.

The non-urgent procedures that the governors canceled pay the bills for many facilities, which often have fewer than two dozen beds. Some hospitals are now planning layoffs.

Rural hospitals across the United States were in trouble long before the coronavirus, partly because people in the countryside tend to be sicker, older and poorer than Americans as a whole  hence more expensive to treat. Nearly 100 have closed since 2010, victims of rural flight, workforce shortages and government payments that reimburse less than private insurers.

Now many rural hospitals appear woefully unprepared to deal with a pandemic that few parts of the United States are expected to escape.

Story continues

"You're very quickly starting to see rural counties light up on the map, and it's probably a misconception that rural America is going to be spared," said Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Assn., in Washington, D.C.

The virus was first detected in the United States on Jan. 20, when a 35-year-old man tested positive in Everett, Wash., after returning from Wuhan, China.

The Seattle area became the early U.S. epicenter with a nursing home outbreak that killed 35, and more cases have popped up in ever more remote Washington counties. The death toll in Washington and Oregon has climbed to at least 135  out of 926 nationwide.

In Gold Beach, a community of 2,300 on the southern Oregon coast, Ginny Williams, CEO of Curry Health Network, said this week that she was worried by the prospect of a rural surge.

But she had more immediate concerns. She said revenues at the health system and its crown jewel, the 18-bed Curry General Hospital, had dropped about 50% since elective procedures were halted.

"We will have to do some significant workforce reductions, she said.

EvergreenHealth Medical Center staff members work in the hospital's emergency department, where a sliding metal wall partitions COVID-19 patients and those who may have the disease from others being treated. (Karen Ducey / For The Times)

In Goldendale, a south central Washington community of 3,500, the Klickitat Valley Health public hospital district has seen revenues drop by half since elective procedures were halted last week, even as spending has increased to screen for the coronavirus and prepare for a COVID-19 surge.

"We need an infusion of cash," said Leslie Hiebert, the district's CEO.

She said the organization, which operates the 17-bed Klickitat Valley Hospital, would drain its coffers in less than a month without outside assistance.

The hospital has no intensive care unit and normally transfers patients needing ventilators to larger regional medical centers.

But in preparation for a surge in COVID-19 cases, managers have plans to temporarily add 23 standard beds and three ICU beds by reconfiguring existing space.

They would still need extra staff for those new rooms. In the meantime, they are checking to see how many nurses have ICU experience.

By Tuesday, testing at the hospital had turned up four cases of COVID-19 and 34 negative results.

Now test kits are running low. Heibert said a commercial lab that supplies them requested 50,000 from a manufacturer, received 10,000 and was able to send the hospital only five.

Greek Orthodox nuns in Goldendale and other volunteers are crafting homemade masks to donate to Klickitat Valley Hospital.

Away from the hospitals, rural doctors' offices have also seen revenues plunge since non-urgent procedures were halted.

"Many physicians' offices are on the brink of not being able to cover their payroll, rent or lease," said Jennifer Hanscom, CEO of the Washington State Medical Assn.

Like the hospital association, the medical organization is seeking state legislation to see members through the crisis.

Hospitals everywhere are conserving equipment by reusing masks and other gear, as permitted by newly relaxed federal recommendations. Many are accepting donations of homemade face shields and masks used by construction companies.

On the Oregon coast, Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital in Newport and Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital in Lincoln City have partnerships with urban medical centers that should provide them with more protective equipment, according to Dr. Lesley Ogden, the CEO for both.

"But my compatriots who run independent rural hospitals are at a huge disadvantage because they do not have the supply network or the connections to go out there and play with the big boys," she said.

Dr. Jeff Tomlin, EvergreenHealth chief executive, looks through doors of the section of the hospital that accepts COVID-19 patients. (Karen Ducey / For The Times)

For now, big urban hospitals face the greatest immediate need. EvergreenHealth Medical Center, a 318-bed facility in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland, has cared for 177 COVID-19 patients, including 35 who died.

But as the caseload continues to surge, the hospital may need to transfer some patients to rural hospitals, said Dr. Ettore Palazzo, the hospital's chief medical officer.

"The bottom line is, we're all in this together," he said.
Atlanta

There is no 12th Democratic presidential debate on the horizon now that the nominating process is in a holding pattern because of the coronavirus pandemic.

One of the Democratic National Committee's lead debate organizers, Xochitl Hinojosa, said the party has not set a date or secured a television broadcasting partner for what would be the final encounter of the dozen that DNC Chairman Tom Perez promised at the campaign's outset.

There's no evidence that either Joe Biden, the prospective nominee, or Bernie Sanders, Biden's last remaining rival, is clamoring for a debate, and there's doubt among the candidates' advisers that one will occur.

"We are taking things day by day," Hinojosa said.

The uncertainty reflects both the political realities of Biden's lead and the public health realities of the virus, which could make another debate logistically difficult because of the social distancing orders from public officials.

Biden made clear Wednesday that he'd be fine if debates were finished. "Our focus is just dealing with this crisis right now," he said during a video news conference from his Delaware home. "I think we've had enough debates. I think we should get on with this."

The first 10 Democratic debates were held in public venues before audiences of party officials and candidates' supporters. CNN and the DNC moved the March 15 debate, the first after U.S. officials publicly urged a massive coronavirus response, from Phoenix to the network's Washington studios. There was no live audience, and the candidates stood 6 feet apart, recognizing the public health recommendations.

Since then, Mayor Muriel Bowser of the District of Columbia has issued a stay-at-home order urging only nonessential workers to move about the nation's capital. New York, where national television networks are based, now has among the most serious coronavirus outbreaks of any U.S. city.

The next debate was expected to be in an East Coast location before the April 28 primary anchored by New York. That primary remains scheduled for now, but several states, including Maryland, Rhode Island and Connecticut, have pushed their primaries back to join New Jersey on June 2.

The 11th debate, the relocated one, was the first between just Biden and Sanders and came after the rest of the field had either dropped out or failed to meet debate qualifications. Biden had established a clear delegate lead over Super Tuesday and March 10 primaries. Sanders' aides said at the time that the Vermont senator wanted to use the forum to trumpet his progressive agenda as a democratic socialist against the former vice president's more establishment approach.

Sanders' team is making no such noise now. "If there is a debate in April, he plans to be there," Sanders spokesman Mike Casca said. It was a notably muted tone for a campaign and candidate often critical of the DNC and the "establishment media" for alleged unfair treatment.
Were really grateful that our delegation and others were able to get a bill package together that I would describe as short-term relief, said Gregory Russ, the chairman of the New York City Housing Authority. But, he added, we are under no illusions that there will not be a need for more.

The economic crisis precipitated by the coronavirus has hit hard in high-cost urban areas where many residents were already struggling to afford homes. About 11 million of the nations roughly 44 million renters were paying half their incomes in rent before the pandemic, said Mary Cunningham, the vice president for metropolitan housing at the Urban Institute. With 3.3 million people filing for unemployment compensation last week, many of them have no income at all.

The funding in the package is considerable. But administering it will be a challenge. Doug Guthrie, the president of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, said the agencys employees, like many others still at work, were struggling with school closings and underlying health issues and advanced ages that put them at risk of infection.

We are trying to get as many as possible set up for telecommuting, but there are great gaps in the services we can provide, Mr. Guthrie said.

Likewise, homeless shelters, which were overcrowded before the pandemic, are scrambling to increase the space between beds to comply with quarantine guidelines put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Air India pilots'unions, IPG an ICPA, have said their members will support the government and will operate any special flight irrespective of the extent of the coronavirus pandemic

Mumbai: Air India pilots'unions, IPG an ICPA, have said their members will support the government and will operate any special flight irrespective of the extent of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a joint letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Indian Pilots Guild (IPG) and Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA) said, Air India pilots note with "admiration" the proactive way in which the government has been working round the clock to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

On Tuesday, Modi announced that the entire country would be going under a 21-day lockdown. He said this lockdown is very important for India to fight against novel coronavirus and control its spread.

"Air India as the national carrier has always been proud to fulfill a myriad of diverse and challenging missions, whenever required by the government to fulfill this obligation," the two pilot unions said a joint letter on Wednesday.

The IPG represents Boeing fleet pilots while the ICPA has its members from the Airbus fleet in the flag carrier.

The national carrier has operated a series of rescue flights including to Wuhan in China, Japan, Milan and Rome in Italy to evacuate Indians stranded at these places.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

Besides, Air India operated a relief flight to Tel Aviv to take the Israeli nationals back to their country due to coronavirus outbreak.

Of late, budget carrier SpiceJet announced operating a flight from Delhi to fly 142 Indians to Jodhpur, who were evacuated from Iran following the COVID-19 outbreak there.

Similarly, another no-frills airline, IndiGo has on its part offered the government its aircraft and crew to facilitate transportation of medical equipment within the country.

These announcements came only after the grounding of their entire fleet in the wake of temporary suspension of all commercial flights.

Air India pilots have remained loyal to the company despite all the mismanagement and hardships that are "plaguing" it, the letter said adding "our pilots are ready and willing to go above and beyond to support you in this monumental endeavour".
North Korea has reportedly reached out for international help during the coronavirus pandemic  despite publicly claiming the country has zero infections.

Officials have privately been asking contacts around the world to help boost their capacity for testing, according to the Financial Times.

The government has testing kits for Covid-19 and they know how to use them, but [the number of kits are] not sufficient, one person familiar with the situation told the newspaper.

They claimed officials are asking organisations for help.

Premier Kim Jong-un has taken strict measures against the virus, despite there being no officially confirmed coronavirus cases in the country to date.

Foreign experts have been sceptical of this claim, given North Korea borders China, where the virus originated, and South Korea, which has been home to many cases.

The country has banned foreign tourists, intensified screening at entry points and mobilised health workers to monitor residents and isolate those with symptoms.

Thousands have been ordered to quarantine, and traffic flow has been heavily restricted across its border with China.

Mr Kim has also ordered a new hospital to be built in the shortest period amid the pandemic.

An outbreak in North Korea could have dire consequences due to the countrys poor health system and shortage of medical supplies, experts have warned.

The US State Department has expressed concerns about the countrys vulnerability to a potential outbreak, saying it was ready to support efforts by aid organisations to contain the spread of the illness.

Donald Trump, the US president, has also sent a letter to Mr Kim offering to help the country battle coronavirus, North Korea has claimed.

John Linton, head of International Health Care Centre at Severance Hospital in Seoul, said earlier this month North Korea had made indirect requests to South Korean aid groups for supplies including masks.

More than 470,000 people have tested positive for Covid-19 internationally.

The death toll stood at around 21,200 as of Thursday.

Additional reporting by agencies
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has ordered a halt of signing new rice-exporting contracts, the Government Office said in a latest document concerning this matter.

Packages of rice for export

The Ministry of Industry and Trade is tasked with coordinating with relevant agencies, localities and rice exporters to review the supply, exports and reserves of the food.

It will have to report to the PM by March 28 for consideration of adjustments to rice-exporting activities.

PM Phuc also tasked the ministry, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) and the Ministry of Finance with ensuring rice supply for the people amid climate change and the COVID-19 outbreak.

On March 18, PM Phuc presided over a meeting, during which he stressed the food security must be ensured in a really firm way under any circumstance.

Rice is the main food for the Vietnamese people, and also the countrys major hard currency earner.

Vietnam is currently the third largest rice exporter in the world after India and Thailand. In 2019, the country exported 6.37 million tonnes of rice with a total revenue of 2.81 billion USD.

A report of the MARD showed that Vietnam earned 410 million USD from exporting 895,000 tonnes of rice in the first two months of 2020, up 32.6 percent in value and 27 percent in volume compared to the same period last year./.
France has launched a military operation to support public services strained by the Covid-19 coronavirus epidemic. President Emmanuel Macron announced the launch of operation Resilience as France decided to withdraw its contingent of troops from Iraq.

The military operation in France will focus on "aiding and supporting the population, as well as helping public services face the epidemic in mainland France and overseas", Macron said on Wednesday, on a visit to a field hospital set up by the military in Mulhouse, in the east of France, the region hardest-hit by the coronavirus epidemic so far.

France plans to deploy helicopter carriers in its overseas territories, and has transported the sick on military planes and an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean.

Resilience is separate from the anti-terrorism Sentinelle operation, which has about 7,000 troops throughout France.

France out of Iraq

While the military focuses at home, abroad, troops are pulling back abroad, to minimise their exposure in Iraq, which on Sunday imposed strict measures to contain the virus.

The army chief of staff announced in a statement Wednesday that France will provisionally suspend training activities in Iraq.

France has about 200 military personnel in Iraq, mostly trainers to local armed forces, based at the headquarters of coalition forces in Baghdad helping the Iraqi military fight the remnants of the Islamic State armed group

The Iraqi army said last week that it was suspending training operations, and that the coalition forces would be temporarily withdrawing their support staff in coming days.

The chief of staff said that while the troops in Iraq would be repatriated, France will continue fighting the Islamic State, with troops stationed at coalition headquarters in Kuweit and Qatar, French maritime operations will continue in waters around Syria, and air support will continue from bases in Jordan and Qatar, said the chief of staff.

Story continues

The 15,000 French troops stationed in the Sahel, as part of the anti-jihadist Barkhane operation, will remaining place, even as the first cases of the virus have appeared in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

Further cuts to services in France

France had recorded almost 26,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection as of Wednesday, with 1,300 deaths in hospital.

The country is already under a nationwide lockdown, with police enforcing a ban on non-essential movement, and schools and restaurants closed.

Officials in Paris said Wednesday that metro and train services will be reduced to a minimum, just enough to allow health workers and other employees to get to work.

Paris airports operator ADP said it would temporarily shut Orly airport, the main domestic hub, to commercial flights because of the "significant and sudden" drop-off in passenger traffic because of coronavirus travel restrictions.
ORMOND BEACH, Fla. - Florida police officers responding to a disturbance fatally shot a man and woman Thursday afternoon, authorities said.

The shooting occurred near the Halifax River in Ormond Beach, police spokesman Keith Walker said in an email. Investigators werent immediately releasing details about what led to the shooting.

Five officers fired their weapons, police said. None were injured. Theyve been placed on administrative leave.

State law enforcement officials will investigate the shooting.

Ormond Beach is located just north of Daytona Beach.
The Kaduna State Government on Thursday announced additional measures to contain the novel Coronavirus ravaging the world.

In a broadcast Thursday, Deputy Governor Hadiza Balarabe announced a total lockdown of the state, saying all residents are to be quarantined.

Mrs Balarabe said, In exercise of the powers vested in the Governor by Section 45 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, (as amended), Sections 2 and 8 of the Quarantine Act 1926, now known as CAP Q2, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004 and the Public Health Law of 1917:

Kaduna State has been declared a public health area,

Coronavirus, otherwise known as Covid-19, is hereby declared as a dangerous, infectious disease within the meaning of the Quarantine Act;

Further to these declarations, and in accordance with the law, the following shall take effect in Kaduna State:

From midnight of Thursday, 26th March 2020, all residents of Kaduna State are quarantined and must stay at home.

No office, event centre, market, shop or business of any sort or place of worship is allowed to open;

The only category of persons exempted are workers in essential services such as health workers, the fire service and security personnel. Tankers conveying fuel to petrol stations are also permitted to move;

We recognise that Kaduna State is a transport hub. Therefore, transit through Kaduna will be allowed, provided that such vehicles ply only the Western bye-pass.

We are grateful that the federal authorities have responded to our persistent requests by suspending the Abuja-Kaduna train service. We expect that this service will not resume until the Covid-19 pandemic is declared over;

We recognise that this quarantine will have consequences for everyone, but more so for the vulnerable persons in our communities. As indicated in previous statements, the government is procuring food and other supplies, funded from its contingency budget, to mitigate the challenges of a lockdown for such persons.

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These items will be distributed in community clusters across identified parts of some urban local government areas in the state. This will be a grassroots exercise, as it is people drawn from the the target community that will constitute the committee to manage the distribution.

READ FULL TEXT OF BROADCAST BELOW

Text of State Broadcast by Dr. Hadiza Sabuwa Balarabe, Deputy Governor of Kaduna State, invoking extraordinary emergency provisions against Covid-19, Thursday, 26th March 2020

My dear people of Kaduna State,

My dear people of Kaduna State, The State Standing Committee on Covid-19 prevention met today to review global and national developments relating to the coronavirus pandemic. The meeting noted with great concern the rising number of Covid-19 infections being reported daily in Nigeria, including in nearby Abuja. The Committee also considered reports of unsatisfactory compliance levels with the preventive measures that have been outlined by the government in repeated announcements, and with increasing severity, over the past seven days. While compliance levels with school closures is now total, the sad fact is that there is no consistent and significant adherence to the ban on large gatherings and the closure of shops and markets. There were also reports of certain persons not obeying the ban announced on motorcycle taxis and Keke-Napep tricycles. Amidst this unfortunate indication that many people are yet to absorb the enormity of the danger that Covid-19 poses to lives, the government pays tribute to all the residents of our state who have complied with public health advice and stayed home. We thank the religious and community leaders, school proprietors, business owners and other citizens who have contributed to our efforts to protect our people from a deadly virus that would easily overwhelm the health facilities and personnel in our state. I would like to put on record our gratitude to persons who have reported individuals because of their travel history or otherwise whom they suspect may have Covid-19 infection in their communities or alerted our agencies to violations of the preventive measures. This is the third broadcast this week, and the second I will be making. Our resolve to use all preventive measures at our disposal remains strong. We are committed to pragmatic and rational means to increase the chances that all our people stay safe, stay home and stay alive. In previous broadcasts, the government made clear that it would not hesitate to impose a curfew if circumstances dictate. With every sense of responsibility, I am compelled to inform you that we are at such a moment. Therefore, the State Standing Committee on Covid-19 has recommended, and the Kaduna State Government has accepted, the implementation of the additional emergency measures to enhance the protection of the health and lives of the people of Kaduna State. In exercise of the powers vested in the Governor by Section 45 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, (as amended), Sections 2 and 8 of the Quarantine Act 1926, now known as CAP Q2, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004 and the Public Health Law of 1917: Kaduna State has been declared a public health area, Coronavirus, otherwise known as Covid-19, is hereby declared as a dangerous, infectious disease within the meaning of the Quarantine Act; Further to these declarations, and in accordance with the law, the following shall take effect in Kaduna State: From midnight of Thursday, 26th March 2020, all residents of Kaduna State are quarantined and must stay at home. No office, event centre, market, shop or business of any sort or place of worship is allowed to open; The only category of persons exempted are workers in essential services such as health workers, the fire service and security personnel. Tankers conveying fuel to petrol stations are also permitted to move; We recognise that Kaduna State is a transport hub. Therefore, transit through Kaduna will be allowed, provided that such vehicles ply only the Western bye-pass. We are grateful that the federal authorities have responded to our persistent requests by suspending the Abuja-Kaduna train service. We expect that this service will not resume until the Covid-19 pandemic is declared over; We recognise that this quarantine will have consequences for everyone, but more so for the vulnerable persons in our communities. As indicated in previous statements, the government is procuring food and other supplies, funded from its contingency budget, to mitigate the challenges of a lockdown for such persons. These items will be distributed in community clusters across identified parts of some urban local government areas in the state. This will be a grassroots exercise, as it is people drawn from the the target community that will constitute the committee to manage the distribution. Fellow citizens, let me reiterate that we do not have the human resources and the health facilities to cope with this pandemic should it spread through the towns and villages of our state. The struggles of countries with much better health systems should offer a sobering lesson to anyone who seeks to minimise or trivialise the clear and present danger that we face from coronavirus. This is not scaremongering. We are only observing our solemn obligation to let our people know the full facts, however unpleasant. It is much easier and cheaper to prevent this pandemic than to manage its spread and the attendant suffering and deaths it could inflict on our citizens. Therefore, these emergency measures will be strictly enforced by the security agencies. They have clear directives for the immediate arrest, detention and prosecution of any person that violates these measures. Churches and mosques will be shut, there will be no congregational prayers or services of worship either within these places of worship or in their immediate outdoors. The circumstances of the moment dictate that the worship of God must be conducted in the privacy of our homes, for now. Wedding events and all social gatherings are strictly prohibited while these emergency measures remain in place. Let it be clear that any place of worship, event centre or building that hosts social gatherings will be in violation of its term of grant and therefore risks forfeiting its title to the land and having the site of the offence removed in the public interest. This is a dangerous moment, and we cannot risk the lives of the many to indulge the delusions of a few. Thank you for listening. Please stay safe, stay home, save lives!!! May God bless and protect us all.
M/T Andronikos released from arrest in Singapore

Capital Ship Management Corp. announced that the M/T Andronikos (ex Anbar) was promptly released from arrest in Singapore after the Owners P&I Club posted security and has resumed trading.

As previously disclosed, the M/T Andronikos, together with an additional five vessels, were redelivered after Al-Iraqia Shipping Services & Oil Trading (AISSOT or Charterers) gave notice of termination of the bareboat charters for those vessels on 22 February 2020 in what were then dire spot market conditions. At the time AISSOT terminated the charter, the M/T Andronikos had approximately another six years duration remaining under that bareboat charterparty. At the time of the termination, the charter rates published by established shipbrokers for a five year time charter, adjusted for bareboat business by excluding OPEX, were below the rate under the relevant charter party, demonstrating that at the time of redelivery AISSOT had suffered no damages, and they were instead hoping to make a gain by redelivering the vessels. However, in its evidence before the Singapore court, AISSOT presented rates which it described as a Fearnleys Bareboat Charter Assessment, which were not only misleading, but also transpired to be just informal email correspondence between an AISSOT executive and a Fearnleys AS shipbroker, and which were used in court proceedings without Fearnleys AS prior knowledge or authority. The Owners of M/T ANDRONIKOS wish to advise that, having promptly obtained the release of the vessel, they shall now pursue appropriate sanctions against AISSOT and its relevant executives. Owners choose to once again publicly inform the market of the above in order for market players to have a better understanding of the situation and leave it to the market to assess AISSOTs performance and tactics.




Restaurants and bars are closed, per county order. More than 150,000 Texans filed for unemployment last week, according to state officials. Harris County residents have been instructed not to leave their homes, except for essential errands.

But The Rustic, a Houston restaurant, bar and live music venue, is looking to hire.

Kyle Noonan, co-owner of restaurant operator FreeRange Concepts, is readying to open the second location of The Rustic  an endeavor that entails hiring 250 servers, bartenders, hosts, bussers, bar-backs, dishwashers, cooks and other workers. And hes optimistic that by the time the new location in Uptown Park is ready to open, restaurants and bars will be cleared to reopen.

This gives us an opportunity to attract the best of the best right now, Noonan said. Our hope is that were able to attract some really dynamic talent.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: Stay informed with accurate reporting you can trust

Grocery stores, delivery services, pizza chains and home improvement stores have been hiring to accommodate increased demand for food and products that can be used around the house. But The Rustics hires are predicated on future, not current demand.

If you apply today today doesnt mean you start today, Noonan said. Until the shelter-in-place order is lifted, well conduct phone interviews. And once we can all come out of our houses, well conduct in-person interviews. And hopefully get people much-needed work.

While restaurants that are currently operating were surprised by the sudden disappearance of revenue, Noonan said, those that have not opened yet budget for pre-opening expenses. That means the new location of The Rustic has yet to feel the squeeze faced by established restaurants across the city.

The 27,000-square-foot restaurant plans to feature live music seven days a week, locally source prime steaks and the largest tequila selection in the city.

CORONAVIRUS IN HOUSTON: All of the latest news, numbers and analysis to keep you up-to-date, only on HoustonChronicle.com

Those plans  and hires  hinge upon when, exactly, restaurants will be allowed to reopen. The Uptown Park Rustic will not open as a takeout only-establishment.

We were shooting for May 1, Noonan said. It will probably be pushed back a little bit, but were thinking it will be pushed back a few weeks  not a few months.

rebecca.schuetz@chron.com

twitter.com/raschuetz
The shareholders of ABB have approved all the proposals by the companys Board of Directors at its 2020 Annual General Meeting held in Dubendorf, Switzerland. The event took place under extraordinary conditions, and in line with the COVID-19 Ordinance 2 of the Swiss Federal Council shareholders were not allowed to attend in person. On March 9, 2020, ABB had already recommended shareholders to give voting instructions to the independent proxy in order to protect themselves and others. The independent proxy represented 80.05 percent of the share capital with a right to vote.

The shareholders supported the proposed distribution of a dividend of CHF 0.80 per share with 99.81 percent of the votes. The dividend payment in Switzerland is planned for April 1, 2020. The shareholders also approved the management report, the consolidated financial statements and the annual financial statements for 2019.

Peter Voser was confirmed as Chairman of the companys Board of Directors with 97.60 percent of the votes. In addition, all other existing members of the Board were re-elected for another term with more than 92 percent of the votes: Jacob Wallenberg (Deputy Chairman), Matti Alahuhta, Gunnar Brock, David Constable, Frederico Fleury Curado, Lars Forberg, Jennifer Xin-Zhe Li, Geraldine Matchett, David Meline and Satish Pai.

ABB gave a resilient performance in 2019 in the face of challenging market conditions and a significant transformation. Our revenues and operating margin both improved slightly, and we made significant progress in transforming our company during the year, said Peter Voser, Chairman of ABBs Board. During these uncertain times when the coronavirus crisis is changing how we all live and work, we are responding quickly in order to protect our employees, customers and partners and ensure business continuity.

Furthermore, shareholders approved in a binding vote with 98.88 percent the maximum aggregate compensation of the Board of Directors for the 20202021 term of office and of the Executive Committee for the 2021 financial year with 93.59 percent. In addition, in a non-binding vote the shareholders voted in favor of the compensation report for 2019 with 84.63 percent of the votes.

The final results of the Annual General Meeting are available on www.abb.com. ABB will be reporting first quarter results on April 28, 2020.

ABB (ABBN: SIX Swiss Ex) is a technology leader that is driving the digital transformation of industries. With a history of innovation spanning more than 130 years, ABB has four, customer-focused, globally leading businesses: Electrification, Industrial Automation, Motion, and Robotics & Discrete Automation, supported by the ABB Ability digital platform. ABBs Power Grids business will be divested to Hitachi in 2020. ABB operates in more than 100 countries with about 144,000 employees. www.abb.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005251/en/
On Wednesday, two major Detroit-area hospitalsHenry Ford Health System and Beaumont Healthreported that facilities within their system had reached their capacity for treating coronavirus patients, as the number of confirmed cases in Michigans most populated metropolitan area continued to escalate. The total number of confirmed cases in Detroit proper reached 702 on Wednesday, contributing to a statewide total of 2,294 infections.

Michigan currently has the fifth highest number of cases in the United States behind New York, New Jersey, California and Washington.

Henry Ford Health System reached the patient limit at its Detroit and West Bloomfield hospitals and began creating additional bed space by moving patients and creating COVID-19 units at several of its other facilities in the area. The Detroit News reported that Chief Operating Officer Bob Riney said that the number of inpatients with confirmed COVID-19 increased from 282 Wednesday morning to 304 as of 1:00 p.m. Wednesday.

Henry Ford Hospital

Riney also said Henry Ford hospitals have 107 patients with pending test results for a total of 411 patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 infection. The health care network has a total of five hospitals in the state and there are coronavirus patients being treated at all of them.

In addition to converting clinics at other Detroit-area facilities, Riney said they were moving other non-infected patients around to keep them from being exposed to the coronavirus.

Like every other hospital network in the US hit by the pandemic, Henry Ford Health is facing staffing issues and a shortage of personal protective equipment and mechanical ventilators and asking people in the community to help by donating supplies like face shields, face masks and disposable gowns.

Dr. Betty Chu, associate chief clinical officer, told the Detroit News, Because of the lack of testing in the population ... its hard to anticipate the total numbers were going to have. We would certainly look to other health systems to take care of those patients as well, making sure we can create as much ICU capacity in our own facilities.

Beaumont Health, Michigans largest hospital system, had over 500 confirmed coronavirus patients across eight hospitals as of Wednesday, with more than 200 more awaiting test results. Beaumont CEO John Fox told a Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce teleconference that approximately 100 patients were being added daily and measures were being taken to increase capacity, including converting operating rooms into COVID-19 intensive care units.

The vast majority of those infected in Michigan1,946 or 85 percentare from Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties in the Detroit metropolitan area. Of the 43 who have died from the virus in the statean increase of 19 in one day88 percent are also from the tri-county area. Meanwhile, the epicenter of the crisis in Michigan continues to be in the city of Detroit, with a total of 702 confirmed cases and twelve dead.

The skyrocketing numbers of patients in Detroit correlate directly to the desperate social conditions in the city. Contrary to corporate media hype about the comeback of Detroit due to downtown real estate investment and development by billionaire Dan Gilbert, living conditions for the working class throughout the city have continued to deteriorate, a process which began with the decline of the US auto industry in the 1970s.

Thousands of families in Detroit have no running water due to the extreme poverty and an aggressive shutoff policy enforced by the citys Democratic Party administration of Mayor Mike Duggan. The state of emergency and temporary suspension of inessential business activity by the Democratic Party Governor Gretchen Whitmer has also hit city residents the hardest.

The closure of the Detroit public schools combined with an increasing number of workers contracting COVID-19 has made the distribution of food to the citys children nearly impossible. For thousands of children in the city, their school breakfast and lunch are the only regular meals they receive each day.

The working class in Detroit is not going to sit by and allow the public health crisis to spread without taking matters into their own hands. Detroit bus drivers shut down the citys transportation system on March 17 when they staged a sick-out in defiance of both the city government and their union to demand better health and safety protections on their routes.

Auto workers in several Detroit-area assembly and stamping facilities also walked off the job forcing the auto companies to shut down production at Ford, GM and FCA facilities across the country. Two auto workers have since died after contracting COVID-19 when they were on the job before the walkouts.

Health care workers on the front lines of dealing with the life and death impact of the pandemic are also taking independent measures to provide the materials needed to care for the sick and protect themselves from the spreading disease. Click-On Detroit reported on Wednesday that nurses are using their off hours to fan out in the community and make passionate appeals for donations of needed supplies.

A nurse at a hospital in Southeast Michigan highlighted the utter lack of preparation and foresight by the healthcare administrators, including Ascension Providence and Beaumont Health. Theyre not being honest with us about how this disease is being transmitted. There have been preliminary studies by the NIH with Princeton University, I believe, that indicate that the COVID-19 virus can stay three hours in the air.

She reported that a nurse at a Detroit-area hospital was told by management to remove her personal N95 mask, which she wore to work as extra protection. The hospital management initially threatened to call security but relented in the face of her steadfastness.

The Nurse Anesthetist (NA), which means she intubates people getting ready for surgery, after she intubates a patient, she goes into a common room with several other NAs and regular Anesthesiologists. They all just sit around and wait for their next case.

Typically, she would only wear the mask while intubating. But with everyone in the room, she did not feel comfortable sitting there unmasked with everyone else, as they are all intubating patients. Im not sure why, but she is rotating three masks she has at home. I suspect there is a shortage of masks at the hospital.

This nurse also reported that at another hospital in the Detroit-area, hospital workers in the postpartum unit only started wearing masks two days ago. The reason given by management was that they didnt want to spread panic among expectant mothers.

At my hospital, a co-worker of mine reported that a pregnant mother was admitted, and on day four she exhibited symptoms of COVID-19, she continued. None of the workers were wearing masks. A few days later, this person was on a ventilator. Theyre still not wearing masks. A lot of us feel like sacrificial lambs.

The nurse confirmed that despite promises from Governor Gretchen Whitmer and others that the desperately needed protective equipment would arrive, the situation remains dire: They should have been rallying to supply us five years ago.

Another nurse who works at a hospital in Detroit told the World Socialist Web Site, The virus in Detroit is spreading the fastest in areas of the city where you have the most concentrated poverty, a lack of running water and lack of soap. Whole swathes of Detroit have no grocery stores or places where residents can get decent or nutritious food.

People are coming into the hospital in terrible condition They have a cough, fever and chest pains and we cannot really do anything for them except help them with breathing or intubate them.

The virus is now morphing in Detroit and I hate to say this but things in this country could become like Italy in terms of mortality rates. A woman came into the hospital today after getting worse and worse at home for the past six days where she was told to shelter in place.

The danger for Detroit residents is that many are in bad shape already and have underlying conditions. The body needs all its organs to fight the virus. If you have heart disease, diabetes or other problems, there is less of a chance that you can fight it off.
An attorney who represented victims of the Las Vegas shooting massacre has filed a federal lawsuit against Chinas government over the new coronavirus, saying that officials hid information about the outbreak and that U.S. small businesses should receive billions of dollars in damages. The case seeks class-action status for 32 million businesses for lost income and profits.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of five Law Vegas businesses, claims that Chinas government should have shared more information about the virus but intimidated doctors, scientists, journalists and lawyers while allowing the COVID-19 respiratory illness to spread, attorney Robert Eglet told reporters.

They engaged in falsehoods, misinformation, cover-ups and destruction of evidence, the attorney said.

Eglet represented about 2,500 people last year in an $800 million settlement with Mandalay Bay casino-hotel owner MGM Resorts International stemming from the deadliest mass killing in modern American history  the October 2017 shooting that left 58 people dead and more than 850 injured at an open-air concert on the Las Vegas Strip.

Eglet also won hundreds of millions of dollars in verdicts and settlements against pharmaceutical firms and healthcare companies after a Las Vegas hepatitis C outbreak and is handling Nevadas largest lawsuits against drug manufacturers accused of fueling the nations opioid addiction crisis.

His plaintiffs in the coronavirus case filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Nevada are owners of a restaurant, a flower seller, two real estate businesses and a CPR training firm. Eglet said the five are representative of tens of millions of other businesses that could become plaintiffs because they have also suffered economically whose damages could end up in the trillions of dollars.

Chinas government was reckless and negligent as the virus spread, the attorney said.

If they had been transparent with the world this could have been stopped in Wuhan, Eglet said, referring to the Chinese city identified as the original epicenter of the outbreak. The world could have come together and gotten the right scientists to Wuhan and stopped it right there.

Chinese Embassy officials in the U.S. did not immediately respond to email messages seeking comment. Court records did not say whether the lawsuit has been served to Chinese officials or their representatives and no defense attorney was identified.

But in comments Tuesday before Eglet announced the lawsuit, Chinas Foreign Ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, said there is great anger and strong opposition from the Chinese people on use of the terms Chinese virus and Wuhan virus to describe the coronavirus. President Donald Trump is among those who have called it the Chinese virus and defended that term.

I want to point out that it was the U.S. side that started this argument, the foreign ministry spokesman said. I wish certain people in the U.S. could heed the reasonable voice at home and from the international community and stop making wrongful remarks that stigmatize China.

More than 400,000 people worldwide have been diagnosed with COVID-19, including more than 51,000 in the U.S. More than 18,000 people have died, including more than 600 Americans. In Nevada, 278 people have tested positive for the virus. Four have died, all in the Las Vegas area.

Health officials have said most patients exhibit mild or moderate fever and cough. The vast majority recover. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, severe symptoms including pneumonia can occur.

The lawsuit points to trillions of dollars in trade between the U.S. and China, and says small U.S. businesses deserve compensation from China, its ministries including health and emergency affairs and Hubei provincial and Wuhan city authorities for negligence, creating a public nuisance and liability for conducting ultrahazardous activity.

Eglet said he knew of two other lawsuits filed in Florida and Texas against China stemming from the outbreak. He said he believed those cases are overly broad in classes of plaintiffs and will be unwieldy. The Las Vegas case focuses on businesses with 500 or less employees, he said.

This class-action is just laser-focused on small businesses, he said. This lawsuit is not directed at the people of China. No one is blaming the people of China and no one is blaming Chinese-Americans. They are as much a victim of the Chinese governments actions and inactions as the rest of the world.

Eglet said the case is based on the U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act of 1976 and U.S. federal law for acts outside the territory of the U.S. that have a direct effect on the United States. It could take years to resolve, he said.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits COVID-19 USA Profit Loss China Nevada
While the open spaces and trails remain open at many of the sites administered across Pennsylvania by the National Park Service, restrooms, offices and other facilities are closed in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Heres a site-by-site rundown, excluding NPS units like national heritage corridors and scenic rivers that cover large regions.

Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site, Gallitzin, is entirely closed. The site marks the finishing piece of the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal, the first railroad to circumvent the Allegheny Mountains, opening in 1834 the first direct route between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Its not practical to attempt to close the Appalachian Trail, but the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which manages the trail, has asked everybody to stay away from the trail.

Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, which includes areas in six states, including Pennsylvania, has closed its offices and many partners in the trail has closed.

In the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, which includes parts of six states, including Pennsylvania, the National Park Service Chesapeake Bay Office has been closed, as have huge numbers of sites and businesses within the watershed.

The 70,000-acre Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, headquartered in Bushkill, has closed all bathrooms and other facilities. Except for those that were closed for repairs, park trails and parking areas are open.

Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia is closed. The home was occupied by the famous writer for six of his most productive years.

Eisenhower National Historic Site at Gettysburg is closed. Adjacent to the Gettysburg Battlefield, the site is the home and farm of General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was his weekend retreat and a meeting place for world leaders.

The Flight 93 National Memorial at Shanksvile in entirely closed. The site marks the site where the flight crashed as 40 passengers and crew fought terrorists for control of the plane, part of the 9-11 terrorist attack on America that killed nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001.

Fort Necessity National Battlefield at Farmington, which marks the battle in the summer of 1754 that was the opening action of the French and Indian War, is entirely closed.

Friendship Hill National Historic Site at Point Marion is closed entirely. The restored country estate of Albert Gallatin, who was U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the Jefferson and Madison administrations. In that time he reduced the national debt, purchased the Louisiana Territory and funded the Lewis and Clark expedition.

At Gettysburg National Military Park, which is the site of the Battle of Gettysburg, a turning point in the Civil War, the museum, visitor center, all observation towers, Pennsylvania Memorial stairs and all comfort stations are closed. The battlefield, roads and trails are open.

Gloria Dei Church National Historic Site in Philadelphia is closed.

Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site at Elverson, which showcases an early American industrial landscape, is closed.

Independence National Historic Park in Philadelphia is closed. The Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were both debated and signed inside Independence Hall. Nearby sits the Liberty Bell, an international symbol of liberty.

The Johnstown Flood National Memorial at South Fork, which marks the location of the South Fork dam that failed on May 31, 1889 and unleashed 20 million tons of water that devastated Johnstown and killed 2,209 people, is closed.

For the North Country National Scenic Trail, which runs from New York to North Dakota and includes some trail in Pennsylvania, the North Country Trail Alliance advised, Hiking in general is safe but we suggest keeping it local, hiking with only immediate family and avoiding popular spots. If the parking lot is full, consider moving to the next one. Several states have issued orders to shelter in place, which would prohibit even venturing out to hike on your own.

National Park Service facilities along the Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail are closed.

Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton is closed.

Valley Forge National Historical Park is closed, including all park road, parking lots, trails and open spaces.

Full coronavirus coverage: https://www.pennlive.com/coronavirus/

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Contact Marcus Schneck at mschneck@pennlive.com.




By Kim Bo-eun







Kim Sung-joon, the head of peer-to-peer lending platform Lendit, is set to play a role in government innovation efforts, as a member of a presidential committee.







Kim was appointed to the Fourth Industrial Revolution Committee, which was created to lead in incorporating key technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and hyper-connected networks in various sectors.







Led by Seoul National University professor Yoon Sung-roh, the committee is comprised of six government officials and 20 non-governmental experts. The members of the government include the ministers of ICT, industry, labor, SMEs, and infrastructure. The committee held its first meeting, Thursday  a video conference, as social distancing is being practiced amid the coronavirus outbreak.







The committee will review and touch up the government's execution plan on national AI strategies unveiled in December. The government has pledged to set up a leading ecosystem for AI, to best utilize the technology. The committee is set to look into setting up appropriate regulations.







Members of the committee appointed this year will serve until March of next year.







Kim founded Lendit in 2015, and saw loans on the platform grow to an accumulated 200 billion won ($162.55 million) in its first five years of business.







Kim also took part as a member of the private sector in establishing regulations on peer-to-peer lending, which were set up in October.







"After taking part in the legislation process for regulations on the P2P finance industry, I realized how much influence policies and regulations can have on our daily lives," Kim told The Korea Times.







"By participating on the Fourth Industrial Revolution Committee, I hope to contribute to new positive developments. I also hope, as an entrepreneur, to deliver the voice of those in the industry so that policies that assist the development of new industries can be set up."


As governments worldwide impose harsh measures to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus pandemic, sex workers remain one of least discussed but most affected groups, when it comes to the drastic economic impact of the social restrictions. In the United States, Nevadas legal brothels have been ordered to close, as AVN.com reported, while in Berlin, Germany, where sex work has been legal for two decades, business is reportedly down by 50 percent.

In the already impoverished South American country of Bolivia, sex workers are protesting that countrys measures, which include a 5 p.m. curfew, and a two-week lockdown that forced businessesincluding dozens of legal brothelsto shut down, according to a Reuters report.

Sex work is legal but heavily regulated in Bolivia, with brothels required to have government licenses to operate. Most sex workers are represented by a trade union, but struggle just to make a living, according to the Reuters report.

"We are also part of Bolivian society. We are sex workers, women, aunts and grandmothers that also have to worry about our work hours, union rep Lily Cortes told Reuters, adding that if the brothels are closed "unfortunately the sex workers will go out to work the streets and the result will be worse."

Bolivia, a country of about 11 million people, had confirmed 32 coronavirus cases as of late Wednesday, without any deaths so far.

But sex workers are also suffering due the coronavirus containment measures in Bangladesh, another largely poor countrybut one with a population of more than 160 million.

Sex work is also legal but regulated in Bangladesh, where there are 12 government sanctioned brothels, according to Reuters.

The largest of those brothels, Daulatdialocated just outside of the countrys capital city of Dhakaemploys about 1,500 sex workers who were all put out of work on Friday when the Bangladesh government banned customers from patronizing brothels as part of the coronavirus containment measures.

The government has promised to compensate the laid-off sex workers with a one-time payment equivalent to $25, along with a 65-pound bag of rice. But the sex workers there say that wont be enough.

"If we were informed beforehand, we could have tried to save up as much as possible. Now many of us have to take loans to not stay hungry," said one 30-year-old sex worker at the century-old brothel. Right now, we need the government aid as soon as possible.

The average worker's wage in Bangladesh is slightly over $60 per month.

The country has reported 39 cases of coronavirusbut five of those patients have died.

Photo by Teomancimit / Wikimedia Commons
The Morningstar International Fund Awards are set to recognize the China 2020 winners on March 26

BEIJING, CHINA / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / The Morningstar International Fund Awards are set to recognize the China 2020 winners on March 26. The China Southern Selected Growth Balanced Fund (202023) from China Southern Asset Management Co., Ltd. won the annual Balanced Fund Award, as the only fund in the Chinese market to win this award.

According to Morningstar's evaluation criteria, China Southern Selected Growth Balanced Fund has a five-star rating for the past three and five years of hybrid growth. In accordance with the data of Galaxy Securities Fund Research Center, by the end of 2019, the cumulative net growth rate of the fund since its establishment had reached 205.7%, its net growth rates for the past three and five years were 57.17% and 126.95% respectively; a similar ranking is 9.16% and 3.45% respectively. With a long-term balanced and steady performance, this China Southern Selected Growth Balanced Fund, managed by Luo Shuai, stood out from the 290 selected funds of the same category and won the Morningstar Annual Balanced Fund Award.

China Southern Selected Growth Balanced Fund has also won many honorary awards: in 2018, it was awarded the five-year Open Hybrid Sustainable Winning Golden Bull Fund. In 2018 and 2019, it won the Balanced Star Fund with Five-year Sustainable Return Balance. (Source of Awards: China Securities Journal, Securities Times, March 2018, March 2019) (The past performance of the fund does not predict its future performance, and the performance of other funds managed by the fund manager does not guarantee the performance of the fund.)

Company Overview

On March 6th, 1998, China Southern Asset Management Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Southern Asset Management") was officially established as one of the first domestic asset management companies approved and regulated by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (hereinafter referred to as "CSRC"), which symbolizes the start of our nation's "New Golden Era for Funds".

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On January 4th, 2018, Southern Asset Management restructured for the Limited. On July 24th, 2019, following approval of the CSRC, Southern Asset Management realized its employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). Through employee shareholding and shareholder capital increase, the registered capital was increased to CNY 361.72 million. Currently, with its headquarters in Shenzhen, Southern Asset Management has 6 branches and 2 subsidiaries.

Southern Asset Management has stood the tests of time throughout periodic shifts between bull and bear market in Chinese capital market. By showing stable and sustainable performances and providing improved and professional services, Southern Asset Management managed to continuously build the trust and recognition of a wide range of investors, including mutual fund investors, the National Council for Social Security Fund, corporate annuity clients and high-net-worth clients.

Southern Asset Management has grown into one of the industry leaders that boasts diverse range of products, comprehensive type of business activities, exceptional investment performance and a large scale of assets under management. As of December 31th, 2019, Southern Asset Management and its subsidiaries have a scale of combined assets under management (AUM) that totaled USD 153.9 billion.

Contact Info:

Name: Si Chen

Email: Send Email

Organization: Southern Asset Management

Website: https://southernfund.com

SOURCE: Southern Asset Management





View source version on accesswire.com:

https://www.accesswire.com/582663/China-Southern-Selected-Growth-Balanced-Fund-Wins-Morningstar-Balanced-Fund-Award




Margaret Breihan relies on the nursing assistants who visit six mornings a week to help her shower, dress and tidy up her Silver Spring, Maryland, apartment.

Breihan, 31, who has cerebral palsy, is mostly self-reliant and does everything from shop to cook from her electric wheelchair but she has limited mobility and struggles with daily tasks like pulling clothes out of a dryer or showering.

Sheltering in her apartment for the past two weeks amid the coronavirus outbreak, she lives in daily dread of one day finding out the help can no longer visit. One of her helpers lives with a daughter who is a nurse at a local hospital, deepening her concern for infection.

"I keep waiting every morning for the phone call that the agency is withdrawing its assistance," said Breihan, who is pursing a master's degree in social work at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. "It hasn't happened, thank God. But it's a scary prospect, I won't lie."

Coronavirus live updates: Thurday's news on the stimulus bill, US cases

A shopper navigates an isle at Northgate Gonzalez Market on Tuesday, March 17, 2020, in Santa Ana, California. In light of coronavirus concerns, the Northgate market chain opened the store one hour early for seniors 65-years and older and disabled.

People with disabilities and chronic health conditions are some of the most vulnerable groups during the coronavirus crisis, though often overlooked in the national debate, according to advocates. The virus has infected more than 69,000 Americans and led to nearly more than 1,000 U.S. deaths, according to a site run by Johns Hopkins University.

On Wednesday, 27 U.S. representatives and five senators sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr, urging them to issue guidance to state agencies to protect people with disabilities from being discriminated against during the outbreak. U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-NJ, led the effort.

A $2 trillion relief bill passed by the Senate earmarks some relief for those with disabilities, such as $85 million for centers for independent living, but has a long way to go to protect the most vulnerable, U.S. Bob Casey, D-PA, said.

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"If you have a disability, your daily life is often a series of struggles to begin with," said Casey, who has advocated for more assistance for the elderly and people with disabilities during the outbreak. "Those challenges that they face are now that much greater. We have to try to be responsive to that."

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One of the concerns is whether people with disabilities will be sidelined for healthcare as medical equipment such as ventilators and hospital beds become increasingly scarce, said Ari Ne'eman, visiting scholar at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

A number of states, including Utah, Tennessee and Alabama, have emergency contingency plans that direct hospitals not to provide medical equipment, such as ventilators, to people with certain intellectual and cognitive disabilities, should that equipment become scarce, he said.

On Tuesday, several groups, including the Center for Public Representation and the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program, filed a complaint with HHS's Office of Civil Rights, alleging the Alabama Department of Public Healths Emergency Operations Plan violates federal disability rights law, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), according to the complaint.

"There are very severe concerns that disabled people are going to be sent to the back of the line when accessing healthcare equipment such as ventilators," Ne'eman said.

Signed into law 30 years ago this July by former president George H.W. Bush, the ADA is the signature civil rights law for people of disabilities, prohibiting discrimination in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools and transportation.

As hospitals and the federal government reach crisis levels because of the pandemic, advocates are closely watching to see whether the ADA is adhered to, Ne'eman said.

"What were really going to see determined here is whether this country really meant it when they passed the ADA 30 years ago, that they passed it as a civil right and not as an act of charity," he said. "You can do away with charity when times are tough. You cannot do away with civil rights."

The National Disability Institute hosted two webinars this week to explain developments and field questions regarding disabilities and the coronavirus. The online sessions drew more than 1,500 attendees.

One of the voiced concerns was that health care providers were not going to be able to continue making home visits as the outbreak deepened, said Michael Morris, the institute's founder and senior strategic adviser. With no home care, states could turn to grouping those with severe disabilities in state-run facilities -- a trend advocates have worked hard to reverse over the past three decades, he said.

There's also fear that hospitals will classify people with disabilities and chronic illnesses as a lower priority for healthcare -- a fear Morris said he's experienced firsthand. As a person battling cancer, Morris had been going to a Washington-area hospital once a month for chemotherapy and had investigative surgery every three months, he said. The hospital recently told him they're suspending his treatment to redirect doctors and space to coronavirus victims.

"This story is playing out by the thousands across the country," Morris said. "People with disabilities and chronic health conditions are incredibly afraid of the rationing of healthcare."

Margaret Breihan, 31, of Silver Springs, Maryland, has cerebral palsy and relies on two nursing assistants who visit her six days a week. She said she fears what will happen if they stop coming due to coronavirus concerns.

As the pandemic took hold in the U.S., Breihan began prepping. Her classes at Catholic University went online so she was able to continue with those. Her mother brought her cash and friends volunteered to deliver groceries. In case her helpers stop coming, she bought a "reacher-grabber" through Amazon.com that allows her to pull laundry out of the dryer. She plans to struggle through sponge baths.

Breihan's greater concern is what happens if she gets infected. Drive-through testing sites won't help her or thousands like her, she said, since she doesn't drive. If some day she needs emergency healthcare, she hopes she doesn't wind up low on the list of priorities.

"I do my best to contribute to our society," Breihan said. "Just because I live a life that might be different from yours, doesnt mean my life isn't valuable and worth saving and worth protecting."

Jervis is an Austin-based correspondent for USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter at: @MrRJervis.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Coronavirus crisis threatens those with disabilities, chronic illness
Rome, March 26 : The coronavirus pandemic has claimed 7,503 lives in Italy, while the cumulative number of confirmed cases have reached 74,386, Italian authorities said.

Active infections grew by 3,491 cases on the daily basis, bringing the total active infections to 57,521 since the epidemic broke out in the northern regions on February 21, the Civil Protection Department coordinating the emergency response said on Wednesday, Xinhua reported.

The cumulative number of confirmed cases grew by 5,210 cases, while 683 new fatalities were registered compared to Tuesday.

Among the people positive to the coronavirus, some 30,920, asymptomatic or with slight symptoms, are currently under home confinement, and 3,489 are in intensive care, while the rest 23,112 are hospitalized in normal wards, the Civil Protection Department added.

With a daily increase by 1,036 in the number of people cured, the total recoveries was 9,362, the latest data showed.

In terms of geographical spreading of the contagion, northern regions remained the most affected. Lombardy registered 20,591 active infections up to Wednesday, followed by Emilia Romagna (8,256), Veneto (5,745) and Piedmont (5,556).

In the daily press conference to update the situation, Civil Protection officials said epidemic trends seemed to meet expectations, and strongly appealed again to people to respect all rules and restrictions imposed by a nationwide lockdown that is going to be effective until April 3.

"We are in a phase of apparent stabilization, and we believe the number of infected people, or new cases, is consistent with the trend that the virus spreading has had in the country," Agostino Miozzo, coordinator of the Civil Protection's scientific-technical committee, told the press conference.

"This makes us to think it is absolutely crucial to keep respecting the measures of social distancing, if we want to see the curve stabilize and then decrease," he stressed.

In this regards, the World Health Organization (WHO) Assistant Director-General Ranieri Guerra on Wednesday told local media that Italy's epidemic might reach its peak this week.

"The slowing down in the pace of (contagion) growth is a positive factor, and in some (Italian) regions I believe we are getting close to the drop-off point of the curve," Guerra told private radio broadcast Radio Capital.

"I believe this week and the first days of the next will be crucial, since these will be the moments in which the government's measures passed 15-20 days ago should find an effect, an impact," Guerra said.

Still on the emergency response to the epidemic, Civil Protection officials said that over 9,600 volunteers have been deployed across the country to assist police forces, army, and health system engaged against the epidemic.

A wide response in terms of solidarity was also arriving from citizens, who donated over 44 million euros ($47.8 million) to a special bank account opened by the Civil Protection Department, and devoted specifically to the emergency.

"So far, we have also put up some 720 tents for pre-triage outside hospitals' emergency rooms, which are very useful to detect and contain possible new cases," Luigi D'Angelo, Operative Director of the Civil Protection Department told reporters.

"Another 151 tents for pre-triage were set up inside prisons to monitor the situation among inmates," he added.

Meanwhile, Italy's health professionals were paying a high price in this emergency. Fatalities linked to the COVID-19 included 31 doctors, of which at least five were family doctors who died in the last 24 hours, the Italian federation of general medicine physicians said on Wednesday.

Late on Wednesday, updating the parliament on all the emergency measures approved by the cabinet, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also addressed this aspect of the emergency.

"New doctors will be dispatched to the most affected hospitals in the next few days, and, as far as I know, a first group should have arrived already in the past hours," Conte told lawmakers. "We will also transfer some 500 nurses in the areas with the highest number of COVID-19 patients." The prime minister further explained beds in intensive care have been increased from 5,343 to 8,370, and beds in sub-intensive care have also been added to 26,169 from 6,525.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Over the time Ive been here, New York has become the center of the pandemic and America has become more and more on lockdown. I have learned to live with the restrictions and have even drawn some lessons from it.

First, as a writer, I normally work from home. I need the isolation for concentration. I find it quite hard to write around others. But now, multitudes, including my children and many of my friends, are also working from home. It occurs to me, and to many of them, that much of what they were doing in the offices was unnecessary, that emails could have easily substituted for many of the meetings, that they could be just as productive from their couches as from any conference room.

Second, news doesnt always need to be followed hour to hour. This may seem an odd statement coming from a newspaper person and a cable news commentator, but I have found over the last couple of weeks that a little bit less is a whole lot more. I now check the news once in the morning and once at night. And I skip Donald Trumps horrid, propagandistic news conferences and their misinformation. I am convinced that the only people who need to watch those are the reporters who cover them and the fact checkers who correct them. Those events have become as much a threat to public health as the virus itself.

Third, it has been revelatory for me just how unprepared we were, not just in terms of emergency readiness, but also psychologically. I will fully admit that I had a hard time letting the true magnitude of this set it. For a long time, I simply couldnt get my head around how dangerous this virus was and how completely it had changed the world as I knew it. Up until three days before I was to travel to Spain, I was still foolishly contemplating continuing with my plans.

Fourth, people around the world, and particularly here in the United States, have a rebellious spirit that is on full display during this crisis. Even if the 80 or 90 percent of people who are able to do so comply with instructions to stay home and stay safe, 10 to 20 percent wont. Complete compliance is simply impossible. Some people just dont want to feel controlled. They dont want to feel afraid. They have been worn thin by disaster warnings. Yes, some, many even, are just foolish, selfish and reckless, but there is also a cowboy component.
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has refused to blame anyone over the coronavirus-stricken Ruby Princess cruise ship debacle.

The finger pointing between New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, Australian Border Force and NSW Health officials continues over who was responsible for allowing the ship to dock without everyone being tested when the vessel arrived in Sydney last week.

Most of the 2,647 passengers were given the green light to disembark from the ship without being tested for coronavirus, despite reports of flu-like symptoms on board.

At least 133 have since been diagnosed with the virus while a 78-year-old female passenger died in a Sydney hospital on Tuesday.

Mr Dutton spoke to 2GB morning show host Ray Hadley from his Brisbane home on Thursday after he was recently struck down with the virus.

He said ABF and NSW Health staff working on the frontline during the crisis are facing incredible pressure and stress.

The finger pointing blame game continues after thousands of passengers disembarked from the Ruby Princess cruise ship (pictured) without being tested for coronavirus

He believes the mistake will not be repeated.

'I have not been critical of NSW Health or the Premier. I actually think it's a time, regardless of people's politics that people pull together and I think that's in the national interest,' Mr Dutton told the program.

'Clearly, the wrong call has been made. Somebody has made an error in relation to this matter, it's a serious mistake but I honestly believe hanging somebody out to dry in the current circumstance is not the way to do it.'

'This people are under enormous pressure and I want to make sure we've supporting them, not chastising them.'

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton (pictured) has refused to hold anyone responsible after a Ruby Princess passenger later died

The radio broadcaster disagreed and argued someone needs to be held responsible after passengers were allowed to disembark in the phase of or with the deadly virus.

'That woman's death has been caused by the stupidity of a conglomerate of people,' Mr Hadley said.

'Someone died because of a decision taken and that person needs to be held to account for that death.'

Mr Dutton replied; 'And that person will live with that mistake. We are all working to clean up after that mistake. No doubt that officer within NSW Health and many others are making decisions today that will save lives.'

'That's the situation they're dealing with at the moment. There is no perfect solution here.'

Cruise ship passengers have since been banned from disembarking in Sydney. Pictured is the Ruby Princess docked in Sydney last week

Cruise ship passengers have since been banned from disembarking in Sydney until new protocols are signed.

'I don't want a single person coming off a ship in Sydney until various signing of protocols between the federal and state governments,' Premier Berejiklian announced on Thursday.

'The position we land on we will mean that the state and federal authorities will be in complete lockstep.'

'We are going to take a very hardline approach in NSW ... but we need to really make sure there is no amount of daylight between where the states and federal authorise lie.'

Mr Dutton said governments are facing a difficult situation regarding cruise ships which he believes will get tougher.

'You've got some cruise ships who are lying about the state of their passengers,' the minister said.

'We've also got Australian citizens are being held in ships off other countries around the world.'
The Nepal authorities have rescued 115 trekkers, mostly foreigners, stuck in various trekking routes in Mustang district in northern Nepal after the government imposed a week-long nationwide lockdown to control the spread of the novel coronavirus.

According to the district administration, 50 trekkers and eight mountain guides were rescued on Wednesday, and nine Nepali and 48 foreigners were rescued on Thursday.

"We rescued them in coordination with Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Foreign Affairs," an official said.

The rescued trekkers have been sent to Kathmandu via two passenger buses.

The official said that still many trekkers are on trek to various parts of Mustang including Kagbeni, Lete and Muktinath.

"Some of them are willing to continue their trek owing to the suspension of public transport facilities and air services," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 18:02:54|Editor: mingmei

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CAIRO, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Thursday ratified a loan of 200 million U.S. dollars from the World Bank to create more job opportunities for Egyptian youths and women.

The loan, or the Catalyzing Entrepreneurship for Job Creation Project, "will focus on expanding the credit amount and access for small and medium enterprises that have proved a major source of growth and job creation," the Egyptian government said on its website.

The World Bank project is designed to address the major obstacles to starting new businesses for young people and women in Egypt.

The World Bank currently has a portfolio of 16 projects in Egypt with a total commitment of 6.69 billion dollars.
Not even the coronavirus pandemic, it seems, is enough to stop some of the citys best-known stock floggers spruiking investment opportunities to anyone who will listen.

Even this week  a day after Prime Minister Scott Morrison had ordered all pubs, restaurants and even churches to be shuttered to stop the spread of the virus  punters were gathering at the Radisson Blu to hear about stock opportunities.

And there in person to present to retail shareholders and brokers? Shaw & Partners chief investment officer Martin Crabb. Lunch provided for no cost.

Shaw, of course, earns fees every time someone uses it to purchase shares. And its been pushing some of the companies at the event for years. It has recommended punters buy into stem-cell outfit Cynata, which has in the past paid Shaw to act in a "corporate capacity", since May 2017.
Zoos Victoria has launched a live streaming service so animal lovers can stay connected with some of their favourite creatures from home, work or anywhere else they want.

Several live streams at Melbourne Zoo and Werribee Open Range Zoo are live, offering people who can't visit the zoo at the moment the chance to check out some of the animal action.
Did Prince Harry and Meghan Markle prove that they are royal copycats after they stole this important thing from Prince William and Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge?

Prince William reportedly snubbed Prince Harry and Meghan that he only offered his brother "cold and perfunctory greeting" during the Sussexes' last royal engagement at the Commonwealth Day Service at Westminster Abbey on March 9.

However, reports emerged that Harry shrugged his brother off first by naming their son "Archie" despite it being the nickname of Prince George, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridges' eldest son.

Royal Copycat?

Before Meghan gave birth to Archie, itw as reported in January 2019 that Prince George revealed to a passer-by that his name was "Archie."

"I was asked by a police minder not to take a photo of the children, which I didn't, but George started stroking my dog," the passerby narrated.

The said bystander added that although he knew what George's name was, he still asked the royal what his name was and received "Archie" as an answer.

"I don't know why he calls himself Archie, but kids often play with their names, and I think it's lovely," he went on.

So when the Sussexes' son was born, it surprised the people when they christened him Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor.

During that time, it was reported that Prince Harry and Meghan wanted to give their son a name with no royal connections.

However, the future king of England used "Archie" as his nickname, so it somehow has a royal connection, too.

For Archie's other name -- Harrison -- the managing editor of Majesty magazine Joe Little told BBC shortly after the birth of the Sussexes' son that no one expected that they would use Archie and Harrison as their son's name.

However, Little believed that the couple's selection of "Harrison" might originally mean "the son of Harry."

"It may well be that it's a name that Meghan is familiar with, and that's why they are using it," Joe explained. "They have wanted to do something a little bit different, and they have done."

Too Much Love For Nicknames?

Although Prince George's full name is George Alexander Louis of Cambridge, it is surprising to know that Archie was just one of the countless nicknames everyone has given to Prince George.

When Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, found out that she was pregnant, she and Prince William decided to call their eldest son "our little grape."

In addition, it reported in 2013, the same year he was born, that friends of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge started calling Prince George "PG" for short.

Prince George is also known as "PG Tips" or "Tips" (a British brand of tea) at school, and "Georgie" to the members of the royal family, most especially to his grandfather, Prince Charles.

Despite all these nicknames he has, he is not the only member of the royal family who has multiple weird tags. For instance, his mother can be called "Squeak," Prince William is "Steve," and Queen Elizabeth II is "Cabbage."
Sailors who train Navy recruits at boot camp will no longer be allowed to go back to their own homes at night as the service hit hardest by the coronavirus continues rolling out new policies to try to stop the spread.

Starting Thursday night, Navy recruit division commanders and other boot camp staff will spend 90-day cycles at Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Illinois. Command Master Chief David Twiford announced the new rules in an email to the command, telling them "No one will be allowed to leave the installation," Navy Times reported on Wednesday.

The unusual decision is based on the effect the highly contagious coronavirus has had on the force, Lt. Cmdr. Frederick Martin, a spokesman for Recruit Training command, told Military.com. The boot camp lockdown will "minimize the chance of the virus infecting this vital accessions pipeline for the Navy and ensure our ability to man the Fleet."

The Navy on Tuesday had 57 cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, in the ranks. On Wednesday, the service announced that 12 more sailors tested positive for the disease.

Related: Coronavirus Will Delay Promotions for Nearly 160,000 Sailors

Martin said the command recognizes the new 90-day tours would place extra burdens on its sailors "who are already performing an arduous mission during their shore duty, and together with their families, trying to navigate this national crisis."

"We understand and greatly appreciate the sacrifice these sailors and their families are making, but given the extraordinary circumstances we are in, this action must be taken to ensure the ability to protect our recruits and staff while creating basically trained sailors," Martin said.

Case-by-case exceptions for staff with family issues or other considerations are being evaluated, he added. But Twiford told the command families would "have to be able to for the most part function without us for a bit, just like when we deploy," according to Navy Times.

The move at Great Lakes is one of several aggressive policies Navy leaders have enacted amid the global pandemic. The service has 14-day required quarantines between port calls at sea and also postponed selection boards, advancement exams and fitness tests to help prevent personnel from having to congregate.

It also announced the relaxing of some grooming standards to keep its personnel from having to make routine trips to the barbershop or salon, where they wouldn't be able remain six feet away from other people.

New recruits showing up to boot camp are screened for coronavirus symptoms before they're allowed to start training.

-- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins.

Related: Navy Eases Up on Grooming Standards to Limit Virus Exposure
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 16:58 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d9aafd 1 National COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,National-Police,Komnas-HAM,Polri,law-enforcement Free

The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) has called on the National Police not to detain people who insist on holding mass gatherings after being warned against doing so during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Komnas HAM commissioner Choirul Anam said the commission initially supported the polices move on maintaining public order during the pandemic, adding that banning mass gatherings for the sake of public health was also stipulated in the Siracusa principles on the limitation of human rights.

However, he said placing wrongdoers in jail was not the right decision.

Placing violators in jail will not improve public health. Thus, I suggest the police make them perform community service related to public health improvement instead, so the public will also benefit from the sanctions, Choirul told The Jakarta Post on Thursday. For example, the police could ask the violators to spray disinfectant in public facilities, while still paying attention to [the violators'] health and safety."

His comment comes in the wake of the National Police's announcement that police would press charges against people who continued to hold mass gatherings after being warned against doing so.

National Police spokesperson Insp. Gen. M. Iqbal said people who continued to gather in large numbers could be imprisoned for up to 16 months or fined up to Rp 900,000 (US$56). Those charges, he said, were stipulated in articles 212, 216 and 218 of the Criminal Code.



Choirul also said imprisoning violators would cram more people into jails and detention facilities, which would accelerate the spread of the disease, and that fining violators was a better option than detaining them.

Other countries have also imposed fines on those who hold gatherings during the pandemic, so I think the police should implement that, Choirul said.

Previously, a coalition of 11 civil society groups, including Amnesty International Indonesia, the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute and Transparency International Indonesia, questioned the polices move to press criminal charges against people who still conducted mass gatherings even though the government has yet to formally declare a lockdown in the country.

The central government rejected calls for a lockdown, but the call for people to stay at home has become coercive. This is evident from the use of police force to disband gatherings and the announcement that those who break the [gathering] prohibition could be prosecuted, it said in a statement.

As of Thursday, Indonesia had reported 893 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 78 deaths. (glh)
Although locked in the midst of Italy's tragic coronavirus situation, Ferrari may also be ruing the latest goings on in the world of Formula 1.

Earlier, it emerged that only one team - Ferrari - was initially undecided about joining the otherwise unanimous vote to keep the 2020 cars next year rather than press on with the sweeping 2021 rules.

Christian Danner, a former F1 driver, might have figured out the reason why.

"A car that did not look very fast after the winter tests will also be quite weak in 2021 if the regulations remain the same," he told Bild am Sonntag.

"That gives little hope that much can change for Ferrari next year either," Danner added.

(GMM)
Two employees of electric car manufacturer Tesla tested positive for the coronavirus, according to an email obtained by The Chronicle.

It was not immediately clear if the employees worked at the companys Fremont factory, which remained open until Monday despite being ordered to close along with other nonessential businesses by Alameda County last week. Teslas headquarters is in Palo Alto, though the factory has the bulk of its Bay Area workers.

The employees had already been working from home for roughly two weeks but are now quarantined at home, as are their direct co-workers, according to the email from Laurie Shelby, Teslas vice president of environmental, health and safety performance.

Given the long incubation period of the virus, many people may show no symptoms and spread the virus to others. It is not clear when or how the workers became infected.

Tesla did not immediately respond to an email asking for comment. The development was first reported by Business Insider.

The company continued to operate its plant in Fremont last week after the imposition of shelter-in-place orders by Alameda County on Monday, which took effect in the early morning of March 17. CEO Elon Musk told workers in an email that employees who wanted to or felt sick could go home, but that he would be coming in to work.

A later email from management also obtained by The Chronicle told employees who could not work from home to use paid time off or borrow it against future accruals if they did not have enough accrued time.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

The Chronicle previously reported on difficult working conditions at the plant. Some employees said they were working harder and more chaotically than usual as they tried to fill production gaps while some stayed home for fear of contracting the virus.

The company relented last week and shut down the plant Monday, except for some essential functions  nearly a week after it was supposed to close.

Chase DiFeliciantonio is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: chase.difeliciantonio@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChaseDiFelice
B Anbuselvan By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: From Friday onwards, both private and Aavin milk distributors will be sold in select retail shops only between 3.30 am and 9 am across the state, according to milk distributors.

The decision said to be taken by Tamil Nadu Milk Dealers Welfare Association on Thursday, on the second day of statewide lockdown after the police allegedly asked them to restrict the sale of milk owing to the increasing gathering of people at retail shops.

With this, private milk sachets and Aavin will be sold only in over 10,000 retail shops owned by milk dealers in the city, said S A Ponnusamy, State president, Tamil Nadu Milk Dealers Welfare Association.

From Friday we will not distribute milk to about 50,000 small retail shops across City and the milk will only be sold at retail bunks owned by dealers, added Ponnusamy.

Ponnusamy said the consumers should buy the milk at one go before 9 am so as to reduce their movement.

The Chennai citys per day milk demand is 27 lakh litre of which 14 to 15 lakh litre being catered by private milk companies  mostly for hotels and tea shops. The Aavin supplies about 12 lakh litre a day.

Since all the hotels and tea shops are closed since Tuesday, the private companies reduced their milk supply. However, Aavin milk is being sold at retail shops throughout the day.

Police sources told The New Indian Express that the unrestrained sale of milk has defeated the purpose of the lockdown in many places.

A large number of youths who violated the curfew order claimed that they came out for buying the milk, said an Assistant Commissioner of Police in North Chennai.

Many small retail shops sell cigarettes and other junk items opened under guise of selling milk. As a result, the action is being taken against the retail shoppers, added the police officer.

On Wednesday, a retailer at Korukkupet was taken to R K Nagar police station and released later for allowing too many people in his store.

Since the milk will not be distributed to over 50,000 retail outlets, shops which dont sell any essential food items will have to be closed thereby curtailing the peoples movement, added the industrial sources.

When contacted Aavin officials said, Aavin milk will be sold during working hours of Aavin parlours and authorized dealers across the City.
Passengers wearing masks wait at Jaiprakash Narayan Airport in Patna on Tuesday after it was announced that domestic airline services would be suspended from midnight Wednesday, March 25 onwards for 21 days. (Photo | PTI)

Patna: One person has tested positive for the coronavirus COVID-19 in Patna, taking the number of confirmed cases in the state to four.

The person has been admitted to Nalanda Medical College and Hospital (NMCH), Patna.

Initial reports suggest that he had been unwell since he returned from Gujarat a week ago. He was referred to NMCH after his condition deteriorated on Tuesday.

His test results arrived on Wednesday morning, which confirmed that he was infected with the virus.

He has been kept in the isolation ward at NMCH, nodal officer for COVID-19 Dr Ragini Mishra told this newspaper. We are taking all kind of preventive measures and are now trying to track all those whom he has been in touch with after he returned to Patna from Gujarat.

Earlier on Sunday, a person with a travel history to Qatar had died at AIIMS, Patna. The state administration has been worried about the growing threat due to the huge migrant population returning home from other states.

According to health department officials here, measures are being taken to prevent the surge in coronavirus cases. Railway and bus stations in Bihar have been shut down and thermal screening is being done at Patna and Gaya airports

State health department reports said that 194 samples have been tested for the novel coronavirus, out of which 174 were found negative while results for 14 samples are still awaited.
The total number of COVID-19



cases in Maharashtra has gone up to 124 as two more persons tested coronavirus positive on Thursday, health officials said.

"Both are from Mumbai city. We are finding out if they have any travel history," an official said.

Till Tuesday, 2,988 people were admitted to isolation wards of hospitals since January 18, while 932 persons were in hospital quarantine for suspected exposure to the virus.

As many as 14,502 people were put under home quarantine, officials said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Amid strong protests by locals, the Pakistan Army has started to move COVID-19 positive patients from Punjab province to Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) and Gilgit Baltistan - the two most marginalised areas under Pakistani occupation.

Sources in POK reveal that special quarantine centres have been set-up in Mirpur and other major cities in the occupied regions to cleanse the Punjab province of COVID-19 patients as Army top brass has ordered that no positive patient should be anywhere near where Army facilities and Army family housing is there.

Consequently, large numbers of patients are being moved in locked transport carriers to Mirpur city and other parts of PoK and Gilgit Baltistan.

The local residents have carried out protests against setting up of quarantine centres for COVID-19 patients from Pakistan as the region already lacks infrastructure and trained medical staff.

They fear the pandemic will grip the entire region and lives of indigenous Kashmiri people are in danger. However, the Pakistan Army top brass is not concerned about this as the POK and Gilgit Baltistan have no political significance in Pakistan especially when compared to the Punjab province.

Residents in Muzaffarabad are terrified that their region is going to be hit by the pandemic and more so because the area simply has no health care facilities to deal with even minor ailments.

They say that the Pakistan Army only thinks about Punjab and nothing else. Jaffar Ismail, a trader in Muzaffarabad's busy downtown area said: "We have been seeing the movement of coronavirus patients from all over Punjab to hospitals in Muzaffarabad and we are very scared at this latest betrayal of the Kashmiri people by the Pakistan army ".

He added: "The Pakistan Army only thinks about Punjab and they want to keep Punjab free of this Coronavirus. They are treating Kashmir and Gilgit as the dustbin of Pakistan."

Dr. Amjad Ayub Mirza, a political activist from PoK said, "On one side we are giving emphasis on social distancing and other side Pakistan government is forcing people to gather and demonstrate against the setting up of quarantine centres."

"There is a lack of governance in Pakistan that's why they have handed over the entire country to the Army. The Army is making all arrangements to suit its interests, "said the activist.

The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Pakistan surged to 1,000. More than 400 COVID-19 cases were reported from Sindh, the worst-hit region in the country.

The Punjab province recorded nearly 300 Coronavirus cases, whereas the northeastern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa confirmed 78 COVID-19 cases.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A new study has revealed that most legal marijuana products supplied to medical dispensaries are significantly higher in strength than recommended levels for the treatment of chronic pain.

Image Credits: HQuality / Shutterstock.com

THC levels in medical marijuana should be no more than 5%

In a study published this week in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the Wake Forest School of Medicine announced that over 90% of legal marijuana products are far more potent than clinical tests recommended they should be.

An estimated three and a half million people in the US take medical marijuana for various reasons. Chronic pain relief is a major reason for being prescribed this kind of product, however, it is also used to treat nausea caused by chemotherapy, muscle stiffness and spasms that are characteristic of multiple sclerosis (MS), and severe forms of epilepsy.

With such a vast number of people taking the substance for a wide range of conditions, it is essential that medical marijuana meets guidelines that have been laid out by scientific research in order to protect users from negative side effects.

Higher potency products carry greater risks of inducing substance-use disorders, therefore, it is important that strengths of medically available marijuana products lie within the levels deemed both effective and safe by clinical studies. High-exposure to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive substance in cannabis, can have negative impacts on a persons health, which is then counterintuitive to using these products therapeutically.

Previously, multiple studies have revealed that for a marijuana product to be effective at alleviating chronic pain with minimal adverse effects it should contain no more than 5% THC. Researchers at the Wake Forest School of Medicine set out to determine whether these levels are being maintained in marijuana products that are being supplied to medical dispensaries.

Most medical marijuana products contain more than 10% THC

The team of researchers in Wisconsin took samples from 653 dispensaries across the states of California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. In total, 8,505 cannabis products were analyzed.

Researchers measured and recorded the levels of THC in the products, as well as concentrations of cannabidiol (CBD), the other major substance in cannabis, however, unlike THC it is non-psychoactive. All the samples taken were from products supplied by legal dispensary websites.

The results showed that most products sampled that were available in medical dispensaries had greater than 10% concentrations of THC, with a significant amount containing 15% of the substance, much higher than the recommended 5%, reaching the same levels as products available at dispensaries supplying recreational marijuana.

Most people using medical marijuana are using it to treat chronic pain (roughly 60-80% of users). Given that concentrations of THC are higher than they are expected to be in products supplied by medical dispensaries, these people are being put at risk of developing dependency issues, as well as tolerance, leading to them requiring higher and higher concentrations to feel the same level of pain relief as time goes on.

Better regulation of medical marijuana products needed

The results highlight the urgent need for better regulation of medical marijuana products. Concentrations of THC in these products must be monitored and kept to the recommended levels to protect those using them. In a similar way to how over-the-counter pain medications are regulated by the FDA, medical marijuana products should also be strictly monitored.

The study acts as a warning to policymakers that patients using medical marijuana are at risk of severe side effects if the products continue to not be regulated. Hopefully, this research will encourage systems to be put in place to ensure levels of THC are kept to no more than 5%.
[March 26, 2020] Notice Regarding Effects of Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) on Renesas Business

Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the effects on Renesas Group's production sites from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic as of March 26, 2020. 1. Renesas Group's production sites in Malaysia

Due to the Movement Control Order announced by the Malaysian government, Renesas Group's three production sites located in Malaysia temporarily halted productions from March 18, 2020. The status of each of the sites are listed below: Renesas Semiconductor (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd.

Partially resumed operation from March 21, 2020, and following the Malaysian governments' instructions, as of March 26, the site is running at a limited capacity.

Partially resumed operation from March 21, 2020, and following the Malaysian governments' instructions, as of March 26, the site is running at a limited capacity. Renesas Semiconductor KL Sdn. Bhd.

Partially resumed operation from March 26, 2020, and following the Malaysian governments' instructions, the site is running at a limited capacity.

Partially resumed operation from March 26, 2020, and following the Malaysian governments' instructions, the site is running at a limited capacity. Integrated Device Technology (News - Alert) Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. (Note)

Partially resumed operation from March 19, 2020, and following the Malaysian governments' instructions, as of March 26, 2020, the site is running at a limited capacity.



(Note) As of April 1, 2020, Integrated Device Technology Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. Will change its name to Renesas Electronics (Penang) Sdn. Bhd 2. Renesas Group's production sites in China

Although the below Renesas Group's two production sites in China temporarily halted operations, production partially resumed from February 10, 2020, and as of March 26, 2020, are under normal operation. Renesas Semiconductor (Beijing) Co., Ltd.

Renesas Semiconductor (Suzhou) Co., Ltd. Although impacts from the production halt from the above mentioned Renesas' Malaysian production sites will be additionally incorporated into Renesas Group's consolidated forecasts for the three months ending March 31, 2020 announced on February 12, 2020, there are no revisions at this current time. In closing, we would like to express best wishes for a speedy recovery to those who have been impacted by the COVID-19. /p>



About Renesas Electronics Corporation Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723) delivers trusted embedded design innovation with complete semiconductor solutions that enable billions of connected, intelligent devices to enhance the way people work and live. A global leader in microcontrollers, analog, power, and SoC products, Renesas provides comprehensive solutions for a broad range of automotive, industrial, home electronics, office automation, and information communication technology applications that help shape a limitless future. Learn more at renesas.com.

(FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS) The statements in this press release with respect to the plans, strategies and financial outlook of Renesas and its consolidated subsidiaries (collectively "we") are forward-looking statements involving risks and uncertainties. Such forward-looking statements do not represent any guarantee by management of future performance. In many cases, but not all, we use such words as "aim," "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "endeavor," "estimate," "expect," "initiative," "intend," "may," "plan," "potential," "probability," "project," "risk," "seek," "should," "strive," "target," "will" and similar expressions to identify forward-looking statements. You can also identify forward-looking statements by discussions of strategy, plans or intentions. These statements discuss future expectations, identify strategies, contain projections of our results of operations or financial condition, or state other forward-looking information based on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections about our business and industry, our future business strategies and the environment in which we will operate in the future. Known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors could cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those contained or implied in any forward-looking statement, including, but not limited to, general economic conditions in our markets, which are primarily Japan, North America, Asia, and Europe; demand for, and competitive pricing pressure on, products and services in the marketplace; ability to continue to win acceptance of products and services in these highly competitive markets; and fluctuations in currency exchange rates, particularly between the yen and the U.S. dollar. Among other factors, downturn of the world economy; deteriorating financial conditions in world markets, or deterioration in domestic and overseas stock markets, may cause actual results to differ from the projected results forecast. This press release is based on the economic, regulatory, market and other conditions as in effect on the date hereof. It should be understood that subsequent developments may affect the information contained in this presentation, which neither we nor our advisors or representatives are under an obligation to update, revise or affirm. (Remarks) All registered trademarks or trademarks are the property of their respective owners. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005299/en/

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Italy's coronavirus crisis has now killed 37 doctors while more than 6,000 medical workers have been infected, it emerged today.

Three more doctors died of coronavirus yesterday, in Bergamo, Foggia and Naples, the Italian Federation of Medical Professionals said, bringing the total to 37.

The head of an Italian research institute said today that 6,205 health workers had caught the disease - 8.3 per cent of Italy's 74,376 total infections.

'What we face every day is a real war bulletin. Doctors and their families mourn their dead,' said Filippo Anelli, president of the doctors' federation.

Two doctors wearing masks and white protective suits treat a patient in an intensive care unit at the Istituto Clinico Casalpalocco in Rome today

Medical professionals work on a coronavirus ward at a hospital in Rome today, as a doctors' federation revealed that 37 medics had died of the disease

The doctors' federation has warned that the true death toll may be higher because 'many doctors die suddenly, even if the cause of death is not directly attributable to the virus, because the swab is not carried out.'

On top of that, at least one nurse is believed to have killed herself after being infected with coronavirus and fearing she had spread the disease to others.

Daniela Trezzi, 34, had been working on the front line of the coronavirus crisis at a hospital in Lombardy, the worst-affected region of Italy.

The National Federation of Nurses of Italy confirmed her death and expressed its 'pain and dismay' in a statement earlier this week.

The nursing group also revealed that 'a similar episode had happened a week ago in Venice, with the same underlying reasons'.

'Each of us has chosen this profession for good and, unfortunately, also for bad: we are nurses,' the federation said.

'The condition and stress to which our professionals are subjected is under the eyes of all.'

Many Italian hospitals have been overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis and are facing shortages of ventilators and other medical supplies.

Thousands of medics falling sick has taken them away from the front line when they are desperately needed.

Nino Cartabellotta, the head of the Gimbe foundation which is gathering data on the number of infected medics, urged that this 'phenomemon' must be 'curbed to safeguard those who take care of us'.

As well as hospital doctors and general practitioners, the dead include dentists, psychiatrists and an ophthalmologist.

An Italian soldier holds his weapon while wearing gloves and a face mask as police and the army guard access to the town of Nerola today

A man wearing protective gear sprays disinfectant over an army truck near the cemetery in Bergamo, which has been unable to cope with the number of deaths

Doctors stand over the bed of a coronavirus patient in Rome, in a country where hospitals have been facing medical shortages because of the crisis

There has been similarly grave news in the church, where priests who comfort the sick and preside over funerals are exposing themselves to the virus.

'A priest is always close to the people. For good or bad, it's his raison d'etre,' said Monsignor Giulio Dellavite, secretary-general of the diocese of Bergamo.

More than 7,000 people have been infected by Covid-19 in the city and province of Bergamo, and priests have not been spared.

Of the 67 Italian priests who have died of the virus, more than 20 have come from Bergamo, including a bishop, according to the Catholic newspaper Avvenire.

But Giuseppe Locatelli, the priest of the parish in Albino, also in the province of Bergamo, says he has no plans to renounce his ministry.

'Priests are on the second line. Doctors and nurses are on the front line with the risks they take every day. We take fewer risks,' Locatelli said.

He recently blessed a man on his death bed, he said, 'because it was a special circumstance,' with only the ailing man's wife and handicapped son at home.

'They were alone,' Locatelli said.

The youngest priest known to have died from the virus is Alessandro Brignone, from the diocese of Salerno, south of Naples. He was 45.

Doctors treat coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit in Rome today. More than 6,200 medics have been infected with the flu-like illness

An armed Italian soldier looks on as a woman walks towards a vehicle in the town of Nerola today. The town, around 30 miles north of Rome, has been designated as a 'red zone'

The latest national figures for Italy showed 7,503 deaths and 74,376 deaths as of Wednesday evening.

There have been some signs that the rate of increase is slowing, but prime minister Giuseppe Conte's national lockdown is expected to last well into April.

'History will judge us,' the Italian leader told parliament on Wednesday.

'We must all contribute to the common good,' Conte said. 'The government has acted with the utmost determination and speed.'

The World Health Organization's deputy director Ranieri Guerra sounded positive notes about the most recent figures.

'The slowdown in the growth rate is extremely positive,' Guerra told Italy's Capitale radio.

'I think the measures taken are absolutely correct - perhaps with a certain delay at the start, but that is understandable.'

The government-run National Research Council said 57 out of Italy's 107 provinces have already hit their peak of the virus spread.

The numbers are improving 'and the containment measures are delivering the desired effect, even if we are in the initial phase of the slowdown,' the research council said.
Over 50 administrators and staff members at a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City have been quarantined after attending a funeral where family members of a novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patient were present.

A source close to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper confirmed on Wednesday that 53 administrators and staff members of Binh Chanh District Hospital had been sent to a quarantine camp in Hoc Mon District after having attended a funeral held for the father of a senior doctor at the infirmary on Monday.

The doctors nephew, 26-year-old H.T.H., had returned to Vietnam from the United States on March 10 and tested positive for COVID-19 on March 24.

Although he was not present at the funeral, the patient had been in close contact with his family members, including the senior doctor.

The Peoples Committee in Binh Chanh District is cooperating with the citys Center for Disease Control in tracking all of the funerals attendees.

A probe by Tuoi Tre found that H. had visited several locations and been in contact with many people since his arrival in Vietnam, though he claims he wore a face mask during every interaction.

The novel coronavirus, which first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, has infected over 468,300 and killed more than 21,100 globally as of Thursday morning, according to Ministry of Health statistics.

Vietnam has confirmed 148 COVID-19 cases, with 17 having already been discharged from the hospital. No deaths related to the disease have been recorded in the country.

The Southeast Asian country had quarantined 44,955 people who either had close contact with confirmed patients or arrived from epidemic-hit areas as of Thursday morning, according to the Ministry of Health.

Over 26,000 of those in quarantine are being kept at home.

Health workers in Vietnam have carried out 30,548 COVID-19 tests to date, with 30,400 returning negative results.

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Jails in New York, California, and several other states have begun releasing some inmates from prison to prevent outbreaks of COVID-19 in the confined spaces.

Thousands are being released.

And just this week, New York City started releasing hundreds of inmates convicted of low-level and non-violent offenses who have less than one year of their sentence left.

Theres over 500 inmates in that category, said Mayor Bill de Blasio in a press conference on March 24. There is a substantial group that because of very specific legal issues Im not able to immediately release.

The mayor added that approximately 300 inmates would be released immediately. In total, hes looking at the eventual release over 1,000 inmates to reduce the chance of transmission of the CCP virus in jails.

NTD News refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China before it was transmitted worldwide.

As of Monday, 50 inmates at Rikers Island had tested positive for the virus, according to data obtained by the Wall Street Journal.

Not Ready to Release Some

There will be restrictions, however.

There are some who have domestic violence charges or sexual offenses charges who I have determined we are not prepared to release at this time, although we will continue to look at cases individually; Im not comfortable releasing these individuals at this point, he said.

But not everyone is happy with the idea of releasing inmatesfor obvious reasonslike the Correction Officers Benevolent Association (COBA), which expressed its disappointment with the decision.

You dont solve a public health crisis by creating a public safety crisis, the union wrote on Twitter last week.

The founder of Blue Lives Matter NYC said the plans not bullet proof, in an interview with NTD News.

Despite the nonviolent nature of their crimes, Joseph Imperatrice said inmates could still commit potentially deadly nonviolent crimes, like drunken driving.

Keeping Virus Out of Jails

But he said more efforts to prevent the virus from getting into jails would be a good idea.

Theres a lot if people who come in and out of the jail system everyday, said Imperatrice. So theres a good chance that it may not have been a visitor or a worker, it could have been an individual that was brought into jail today that wasnt there yesterday and started infecting people.

COBA and over half of the NYC Council is asking the mayor to set up a testing facility in Rikers Island. This way workers and officers can be promptly tested if they have symptoms.

In addition, we are also requesting that every person who enters the campus each day be thoroughly screened for symptoms of COVID-19 before they are allowed to proceed, says the letter (pdf).

With both of these measures in place, the city will be able to determine the full extent of the virus on Rikers and take the appropriate steps to remove individuals from the island to either a hospital or at-home quarantine, and keep everyone safe.

We asked the Department of Correction if it would honor the councils request, but it did not immediately reply.
Diverting capital's flights 'key to deter second outbreak'

Global Times

By Xu Keyue and Wan Lin Source:Global Times Published: 2020/3/25 23:53:40

Diverting international flights bound for Beijing to 12 other airports to guard the capital city against imported COVID-19 cases is a reasonable move and key part of the national virus prevention strategy, which is essential to avoid a second outbreak, experts say.

Such arrangement would not place much pressure on other parts of the country as long as timely quarantine and testing measures are in place, experts said, in response to recent netizens' concerns aroused by reports that imported COVID-19 cases were detected in other cities after consecutive days of local zero growth.

Starting Monday, all international flights to Beijing were rerouted to one of 12 cities, prior to landing in the capital, China's Civil Aviation Administration said on Sunday.

Among the 12 cities, those in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in North China reported two imported confirmed infections on Tuesday.

A further 19 imported infections were found in Shanghai on Tuesday, while only five were found in Beijing.

"Sharing the pressure, united as one to prevent and control the epidemic, is the only approach to win the battle," Zhu Wei, a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Zhu noted if the epidemic spreads in Beijing, which is the political and cultural center with a large immigrant population, the second wave of the outbreak in the whole country would be inevitable.

Wang Peiyu, deputy head of Peking University's school of public health, said that the move can effectively share the burden, accelerate customs clearance, reduce possible cross-infections and avoid cluster infections

"Why does Beijing share its incoming passengers from abroad out? That's not fair," said a netizen, among similar concerned voices online, worrying that the less-developed public health system in regions outside of Beijing could not defend themselves well enough.

Commenting on such concerns, Wang explained that the diversion of incoming passengers to the 12 entry points would not cause heavy pressure on the local medical resources as each point would at most share very few confirmed imported cases.

"All the 12 cities should conduct full quarantine inspection and tests for all passengers from abroad, which could avoid an imported epidemic from spreading."

A staff member, who is responsible for accepting and arranging people from abroad coming to Beijing and works in the new China International Exhibition Center in the suburb of Beijing, a temporary transit point for overseas travelers, told the Global Times that before the move, they received an average of 6,000 to 7,000 inbound passengers a day, which was overly stressful.

He said now the passengers have decreased more than half.

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The COVID-19 virus is wreaking havoc on schools, stores, businesses -- and events. As concerts, talks and big gatherings get cancelled and people spend more time at home, LAist is temporarily switching our events column to a "nonevents" column to help us through this time of social distancing.

Until it's safe to go out again, please consider contributing to your local arts organizations, or to individual artists during this difficult time.

Now that most trails and recreation facilities throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties are closed to the public (this is why we can't have nice things), Southern Californians are jonesing to get close to nature. Until the coronavirus pandemic wanes, people will have to explore the outdoors vicariously -- through these live camera feeds.





Beach & City Cams

The Venice Beach Cam

This livecam has been capturing scenes from the Venice Beach Cafe since 1996. Viewers can control the camera in 30-second shifts, checking out the graffiti pit, skate park, beach and the surfers.





Huntington Beach Pier

Travel further down the coast with the click of your mouse to check out the eastern and western views from the pier, as well as cameras that face the beaches on either side. The cameras on this site are in HD, which makes for great viewing on a sunny day.

Watch the clouds roll over the Ojai Valley (and resort) in this peaceful nature cam. (Screenshot from the Ojai Valley Cam)





Ojai Valley Cam

For mountain lovers, the camera that overlooks the Ojai Valley Inn offers stunning views. Watch it at sunrise and sunset for immediate serenity.





Hollywood Cameras

For those who miss being out and about in Hollywood, this camera provides a view of Hollywood Boulevard facing the Dolby Theatre. Another rotating camera in HD provides a birds-eye view of Hollywood and Vine.

Animal Cams

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of animal livecams around the world, but we picked some of our favorites from zoos, aquariums, rescue organizations and nature preserves. Be forewarned: These animal cams are highly addictive.

The moon jellyfish has a dedicated camera at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and their motion and movement is mesmerizing. (Screengrab from Monterey Bay Aquarium Moon Jelly Cam)





Jellyfish: Monterey Bay Aquarium

The aquarium's hypnotic "Jelly Cam" is turned on from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. It lets you watch jellyfish as the undulat past the camera while a new agey soundtrack plays on a loop. The "Moon Jelly Cam," which runs until 7 p.m., is even more calming. The aquarium's other live cameras focus on sea otters, penguins and sharks.



Seabirds, Seals and Sea Lions: Farallon Islands

The California Academy of Sciences webcam of the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge is located about 30 miles off the San Francisco Coast. Guests can control its camera for two minutes at a time, checking out views of the islands, ocean and all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. We spotted about 10 seals chilling on the rocks as seagulls flew overhead.





Sharks and Penguins: Aquarium of the Pacific

View the Long Beach Aquarium's largest sharks as they swim in the big tank of the Shark Lagoon. It's serene to see the fishes swimming with the sharks but it's something else when the sharks come straight for the camera. Penguins are constantly moving and migratory, so capturing them on camera in the wild is spotty at best (except for this memorable video). Many zoos and aquariums have cameras trained on their penguins, including the Long Beach aquarium, because they're highly entertaining.

This koala was chillaxing in front of the web cam at the San Diego Zoo. (Screenshot of Koala Cam/San Diego Zoo)





Koalas: San Diego Zoo

The zoo has 10 cameras on trained on owls, giraffes, elephants, tigers and other creatures but the koalas are the most mesmerizing. We watched the koala, above, just chilling and thinking about life. (Or maybe s/he was just napping? We couldn't tell.) The camera is HD so viewers can see the texture of the koala's fur.





Giant Pandas: CCRCGP Dujiangyan Base, China

This center is part of the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda (CCRCGP). Located in the Wolong Nature Reserve (Sichuan Province) in western China, the center has several cameras in different parts of the preserve. The best time to watch these pandas, however, is at night (in L.A.) because of the time difference.

This camera, located in South Africa, is fixed on an elephant watering hole. (Screenshot from Tembe Elephant Park webcam)





Elephants: Tembe Elephant Park, South Africa

This camera is trained on the elephants' watering hole and we've caught at least one pachyderm every time we've looked. This park is located in Emangusi, South Africa, near the border of Mozambique. The camera is in HD and, best of all, the sound is live, too.



Naked Mole-rat: Smithsonian National Zoo

These mole-rats live in highly social organized structures, with a colony supporting a breeding female. They're not pretty, but their story is fascinating. The zoo offers two cameras trained on them: One is fixed on a food supply and the other is focused on a series of tunnels. The zoo also offers lion, panda and elephant cams, but the mole-rats win this race, hands down.

We captured this bald eagle sitting in his or her nest in Hanover, Penn., during a freezing rainstorm. (Screenshot: Hanover Bald Eagle Cam)



Bald Eagle Nest: Hanover, Penn.

Although the Big Bear Valley Bald Eagle Cam is still online, Jackie and Shadow (the eagles) lost their eggs recently to a few ravens, and haven't returned to their nest. However, we found a great camera from Hanover, Penn., with an eagle sitting in the nest every time we visited. (We're not sure if the one sitting in the freezing rain in the above screengrab is Liberty or Freedom.)





Puppies: Puppy Playroom at Warrior Canine Connection in Brookeville, Maryland

The Warrior Canine Connection teaches vets to train puppies -- mostly Golden and Labrador Retrievers -- to become service dogs for wounded soldiers. The puppies can be found in the playroom or whelping room. It doesn't matter which camera you pick, they all provide maximum cuteness.





Kittens: Kitten Rescue Sanctuary



Last but not least, it's time to watch kittens. The no-kill cat sanctuary in Atwater Village has a camera fixed on kitties taking catnaps and playing while they wait to be adopted.
London: The outbreak of Corona, which is getting increased suddenly, has been taking the form of an epidemic for the whole world.There have been more than 19000 deaths so far. But still this death game has not stopped. This virus has rocked the whole world today. According to information received, it has been learned that 48-year-old Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks, was refused bail despite the risk of Coronavirus infection.

He has been asked to remain in Belmarsh jail in London. Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison by a UK court in May last year for violating bail conditions in Britain. Earlier in April 2019, he was arrested from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Assange was arrested for the withdrawal of political refugee status by Ecuador.

It is also being said that he had been in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 where he had taken refuge in Sweden to escape the sexual harassment case. Let us tell you that in February, there was a possibility that Assange could seek asylum in France. His lawyer Eric Dupond-Moretti gave this information. According to information from sources, Moretti said that the French asylum request will be made on humanitarian and health grounds. Assange is to be extradited in 18 states in the United States for espionage and computer hacking. Assange's legal team is in contact with French President Emmanuel Macron to seek asylum in France. Assange has also said that the mother of his youngest child is also French.

Also Read:

Britain getting ready to battle Corona, making adequate arrangements for ventilators

Corona outbreak in Zimbabwe, electoral activities suspended

Death did not end in Egypt even after lockdown

New York Governor's big statement, 'Coronavirus is slowing down due to 'social distancing'
Nurses across Pennsylvania are concerned about having adequate supplies on hand in the midst of a growing COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report card compiled and issued by the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals Wednesday.

We are the frontline caregivers, said union president Maureen May during a press teleconference Wednesday morning. We have been told this is a war and we are the boots on the ground. We need to take care of our caregivers and we need to have resources.

The report indicates union members at 21 of 23 surveyed hospitals or health care facilities reported concerns about having enough N95 surgical masks or other personal protective equipment. Nurses at the other two  Wills Eye in Philadelphia and St. Marys in Bucks County  reported they are already not being given masks and also worry about dwindling supplies.

We have been exposed, said Celeste Bevans, a radiology technician at Temple University Hospital. The front line has been exposed. And I dont know what its going to look like next week, what is going to be the number of the front-liners that have now been infected due to the lack of PPEs.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health reported an additional 276 COVID-19 cases Wednesday, bringing the statewide total to 1,127 in 44 counties. The department also reported four new deaths, bringing the state death total to 11.

PASNAP, representing approximately 8,500 nurses and healthcare workers across the state, found most of the hospitals surveyed have set up a tent or outdoor triage to receive COVID-19 patients, but several still do not have a separate unit to deal with those patients specifically.

Among those that have both is Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic system member Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital. Crozer Chester Medical Center, Delaware County Memorial Hospital and Springfield Hospital, all in the Crozer Keystone Health System, have reportedly prepared separate coronavirus units. Of those, only Springfield does not have an outdoor triage or tent set up to receive patients, the report said.

Crozer-Keystone spokesman Rich Leonowitz said the health system is consulting with local, state and federal agencies for guidance and best practices to safely and effectively identify, isolate and treat any COVID-19 patients who present at those facilities.

Our most important priority is ensuring the safety and security of our patients, staff and physicians, he said. We have contingency plans in place to help address any surge in patient volume that occurs. These plans include creating specific units for COVID-19 patients throughout the system, which will be opened at the appropriate time.

Leonowitz said Crozer facilities also have the necessary staffing, supplies and equipment on hand to help keep patients, employees and physicians safe, and communicates with employees about actions the system is taking daily.

Our responses are consistent with well-established emergency management strategies and are being managed by qualified and talented leaders and physicians at Crozer-Keystone, Leonowitz said.

Nurses on the call Wednesday expressed frustration with typically strict hospital attendance policies in the face of the pandemic, indicating they have to use their own paid time off or face punitive measures if they call out.

The four Delco hospitals surveyed all offer paid administrative leave for employees who have to quarantine themselves due to COVID-19 exposure and the county offers paid leave for Fair Acres employees, according to the report.

County spokesperson Adrienne Marofsky said Fair Acres does have a separate unit for COVID-19 patients, a category erroneously listed as N/A on the report, and is following the countys policy regarding sick time. Though PASNAP indicated the facility is not properly staffed, Marofsky said Fair Acres has never staffed below the state minimum and is currently recruiting new staff.

But none of the five facilities have a specific COVID-19 absence policy in place, the survey found. Union members argue this is an important distinction, as it would not only help stop the spread of the virus but also give employees the ability to make the best judgment about their own health and safety, as well as that of patients.

When we call off sick because were ill, we risk being disciplined, said Tammy May, a nurse at Butler Memorial Hospital. If we have symptoms, were using our PTO or sick time. Theres no policy to ensure we wont be disciplined.

Nurses and hospital workers need to know that theyre going to be fully paid and suffer no type of loss for any type of accrued time if theyre going to quarantine due to any type of symptoms or exposure to a positively identified COVID-19 patient, said Bevans. I feel that we need to encourage our workers to come forward when theyre concerned about their symptoms or their exposure, encourage them that they need to stay home.

Ann DAntonio, vice president of marketing and communications for Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic, said in an emailed statement that the absence policy has been relaxed during the pandemic.

These changes enable our team members to stay home, if they are not feeling well, without the worry of the typical consequences related to missing work, she said. This has been put in place to ease the stresses on colleagues as well to help fight the potential spread of this virus.
Enemy troops used proscribed 120mm and 82mm mortars.

Russia-led forces mounted nine attacks on Ukrainian positions in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, on Wednesday, March 25.

"The enemy fired at our positions, using 120mm and 82mm mortars, which are prohibited under the Minsk agreements, as well as grenade launchers of various systems, large-caliber machine guns, and rifles," the press center of the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) Headquarters said in a morning update on Facebook on March 26.

Read alsoRussia-led forces mount eight attacks on Ukraine army in Donbas on March 24

Hot spots were the towns of Avdiyivka (two attacks) and Krasnohorivka, the villages of Vodiane, Pisky, Novoluhanske (two attacks), Orikhove, and Krymske.

From 00:00 to 07:00 Kyiv time on March 26, the enemy mounted one attack on Ukrainian positions near the village of Pavlopil, having lobbed fifteen 82mm mortar shells there.

No Ukrainian army casualties have been reported.
A body of accredited journalists has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to include mediapersons in a special insurance scheme announced by the government in the wake of coronavirus outbreak.

In a letter written to the Prime Minister's Office, the Press Association said journalists have also been contributing in the fight against the pandemic.

The government has announced that any health professional, who while treating COVID-19 patients, meets with some accident, will be compensated with an amount of Rs 50 lakh under the insurance scheme. All government health centres, wellness centres and hospitals of Centre as well as states will be covered under this scheme.

"As you know mediapersons are also working during this unprecedented lockdown period fighting the epidemic. We are also thankful to you for taking note and appreciating contributions of mediapersons who are helping to spread vital information at pan India level,"it said in the letter.

The association said journalists all over the country have been exempted by the government from this lockdown and have been contributing their might to fight the epidemic along with health professionals.

"Hence, we request you to include mediapersons on duty also in this scheme," the letter said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a complete lockdown across the country for 21 days from Tuesday midnight, asserting that social distancing is the only way out for the country in its decisive battle against the coronavirus.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Tibetan government-in-exile has appealed to the community to strictly comply with the nationwide lockdown imposed to fight coronavirus.

The appeal comes after the death this week of a member of the community in McLeodganj, where the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) is headquartered.

This was the first death due to coranavirus in Himachal Pradesh.

On Thursday, the Dalai Lama praised the tough measures being taken to contain the virus.

The Tibetan spiritual leader also wrote to Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur, expressing support.

In its appeal to Tibetans in the state and elsewhere in the country, the CTA urged strict compliance to instructions issued by any state government.

The CTA itself has reduced the presence of staff at its headquarters, encouraging employees to work from home, an official said.

The man who died of coronavirus had recently returned from the US.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Expectations of an economic relief package in the wake of Covid-19 were really high. And these sky-high expectations were perhaps largely responsible for the disappointment that greeted the announcement of the Rs 1.7-trillion economic relief package by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday.

In itself, the announcement is welcome and a much-needed first step that should help ameliorate the economic hardships being faced by millions of poor Indians after the country was locked down from Wednesday to prevent the spread of the flu. But there is no denying that more needs to be ...
By Trend

Volunteers of the leading New Azerbaijan Party (NAP), having joined the initiative of President Ilham Aliyev in the fight against coronavirus, are participating in the campaign, Ali Ahmadov, Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Chairman  Executive Secretary of the NAP told reporters, Trend reports.

Ahmadov said that the party is contributing to the effectiveness of measures taken in the country to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Deputy Prime Minister emphasized that everyone should show solidarity in the fight against coronavirus.

"With joint efforts, we will provide our support so that Azerbaijan can defeat coronavirus with minimal losses, which has become a global problem for the whole world," Ahmadov said.

In connection with the quarantine regime, President Ilham Aliyev noted the importance of the active work of volunteers in providing assistance to citizens in need. NAP volunteers helped 2,500 lonely people in need of support, said the deputy prime minister.

Ahmadov added that in connection with the quarantine regime, NAP volunteers, together with employees of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of Population, launched a campaign to support elderly and lonely people.

Over 200 volunteers in Baku and over 550 throughout Azerbaijan were mobilized as part of this campaign, Ahmadov said.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Doctors dont need any shouting from the windows. We need whats behind your windows, in your living room, hoarded for an apocalypse that will occur only if we do not have the resources needed to fight this pandemic. If you are isolating yourself, then you do not need an arsenal of defenses. Basic social distancing and hand hygiene are sufficient. Those who dont have the luxury of isolating, the people you will rely on if you get sick, require that arsenal. Not all of it. But for our good, though really for yours, please contribute your hoarded supplies.

You cant possibly go through that big bottle of hand sanitizer, but keep it anyway. That second and third bottle, though  please put them to better use. I have not seen a single bottle on my floor at the hospital, and some scavengers have been observed coming to the hospital to fill their home bottles from our supplies. Bring us your extra masks. The critical shortage requires us to use a single mask for multiple patients until it is contaminated or damaged. You do not need five of them to go for a walk. Many of our own stockpiles have grown legs and walked away.

About those boxes of toilet paper: Do you really need that much? How many years of hand soap do you need in your bathroom? Will you go through that many bags of zinc lozenges while sitting unexposed on your couch? The amount of acetaminophen you have hoarded would be toxic if you took half of it.
Dr. Chuwanga John Ndengue Facebook

Dr. Chuwanga John Ndengue, former South West Regional Delegate for Public Health and onetime Director of the Regional Hospital Annex Buea is no more. The acclaimed Surgeon died Wednesday, March 25, 2020 in Buea.

Born on December 27, 1956 in Tiko, Dr. Chuwanga grew up in Malende in Muyuka Subdivision of Cameroons South West Region. He attended Catholic Primary School Malende from where he moved on to St. Joseph College Sasse in 1968 to acquire secondary education.

It was at the Cameroon College of Arts & Science, CCAS Kumba that Dr. Chuwanga acquired high school education from 1974 to 1976 before jetting off to Nigeria where he did undergraduate studies in medicine at the University of Calabar from 1979 to 1985 and obtained an MBBCl.

He returned to Cameroon in 1987 and joined the public service. He began working at the Nkongsamba District Hospital. After a work stint, he decided to go in for specialisation at the University of Nairobi in Kenya where from 1995 to 1999 he obtained a masters degree in general surgery.

Upon his return to Cameroon, he continued working in the public service and occupied several positions over time. Dr. Chuwanga served at the Sub-Divisional Hospital in Batcham-Bamboutous from 1990 to 1993 and at the District Hospital in Wum from 1999 to 2001 while serving as District Medical Officer for Menchum.

He left Wum to Yaounde where he served as Chief of Service  Surgical Emergency Central Hospital Yaounde from 2001 to 2004 and was later transferred to the Regional Hospital Annex Buea as Director from 2004 to 2008.

Later in 2008, Dr. Chuwanga was appointed South West Regional Delegate for Public Health where he served until his retirement in 2012. Until his death Wednesday, March 25, 2020, the celebrated surgeon was practising in the private sector within which time he worked at the Mount Mary Hospital Buea.

He was married and a father of three children.

Dr. Chuwanga is remembered for saying that: Let my colleagues, nurses, para-medics, technicians, auxiliary staff know that it is an honour working somewhere in charge of the life of people. An intelligent action on your part can save a life and a careless action can take the life of somebody away.

Make a name for yourself by doing the best you can, doing what you are supposed to do, endeavour to be accessible, cooperative, tolerant, patient and all humanly possible. Let your patient see you and be happy with you. Those thank yous from patients constitute blessings in our lives. Let money come second. Let your act, your patient be the first in your mind.
Each morning at a crowded bus station east of Nairobi, Kenyans load their bags on to minibuses emblazoned with the faces of pop stars and Jesus, heading to their villages in the hope of escaping the coronavirus.

"I am going back home because of corona," said Amina Barasa, her yellow headscarf standing out in the dark bus. The electronics shop where she worked had shut, she said, and she was going to stay with her family away from the city crowds.

"There you just stay in your compound where your movements are very limited. Here in the city you brush shoulders with so many people," she said.

Travelers in other African cities - from Nairobi to Kampala, Johannesburg and Rabat - are also heading to the countryside, worrying officials who say this helped spread diseases like Ebola in other outbreaks.

Traveling makes it harder to trace contacts a sick person has had and risks increasing transmission through overcrowding, said James Ayodele, spokesman for the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

George Natembeya, the commissioner of Kenya's Rift Valley Region, had a blunt message for travelers.

"You are going to kill your grandmother," he told a news conference this week. "You are transporting disease, and if people die, you will carry that cross for the rest of your life."

Kenya has 28 coronavirus cases. The government has severely restricted international flights, begun a dusk-til-dawn curfew, and informed buses and the public minibuses known as matatus that they can only fill half the seats to prevent overcrowding.

Simon Kimutai, chairman of the Matatu Owners Association, said trips out of Nairobi had more than doubled the week after the first coronavirus case was announced.

"It was all one-way," he said. Now, trips within Nairobi were down by 75%, he said.

CLAMPDOWNS BEGIN

For some, the countryside is a refuge both from disease and the city's high prices.

When Moroccan authorities closed the restaurant in the capital Rabat where Ahmed Agram worked as a waiter, he went home to the mountains of Taroudant, about 600 km south.

"The countryside is full of people who found themselves unemployed due to coronavirus," Agram said. "In the countryside life is cheap and people help each other."

Agram's city neighbours won't be able to follow him. Morocco, which now has 170 cases, halted inter-city travel earlier this week.

South Africa, which has Africa's highest number of cases with 554 coronavirus patients, is going further.

A 21-day lockdown will begin at midnight on Thursday that will suspend all commuter and long-distance passenger rail services, international and domestic flights and cruise ships.

Minibus taxis will still be allowed to carry a third of their capacity to transport essential services workers and those permitted to move during the lockdown. The minibuses must be sanitized after every trip.

Student Keitumetsi Kelodi escaped Johannesburg before the lockdown began.

"I am leaving because our school decided to shut down the residences and I don't have a choice," she said, as she waited for her minibus taxi to depart for Brits, her small steel-mining hometown. "It's better to leave now. I'm going back home to Brits because the virus has not reached there yet."

Investment banker Sebastian Pieterse planned to commute between Johannesburg and the countryside after driving his pregnant wife and two small children to her parent's farm in Limpopo, South Africa's northernmost province, on Sunday.

But when the new restrictions were announced, he joined them rather than risk being trapped in the city.

"With her being pregnant we don't want to risk it," he said. "We are fortunate enough that we can do it. Many families don't have that option."

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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how Italian Christians pray and live their faith, amid a nation reeling from more than 10,000 deathsthe highest tally in the worldamong 92,400 confirmed cases, second only to the United States [as of March 28].

During lockdown, we can no longer gather on Sundays or in home groups. Social gatherings, travel, and weddings are suspended, as are most businesses. If someone is caught outside their home without a valid reason, there can be a heavy fine.

But this season of exile has helped us discover three facets of prayer we often neglect in times of abundance.

1) Prayers of Lament

Psalms of lament often felt hyperbolic a month ago. For example, Asaphs complaint that God has made his people drink tears by the bowlful could seem overdramatic; Davids cry to God of How long will you hide your face from me? was a distant feeling.

But as humanity struggles to contain a fear- and anxiety-provoking pandemic, lament feels newly relevant to all of us. In March 2020, Psalm 44 sounds pitch perfect:

Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep?

Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever.

Why do you hide your face

and forget our misery and oppression? We are brought down to the dust;

our bodies cling to the ground.

Rise up and help us;

rescue us because of your unfailing love.

Few Western Christians have experienced poverty, injustice, or persecution. Consequently, our worship usually reflects the moods of resourceful individuals in times of prosperity and peace: composed and mainstream. We do suffer individually; however, seldom is our corporate worship fueled by protest and mourning before God.

Lament is suffering turned into prayer. Its the worship of people who feel out of balance and out of place. Historically, it has been the prayer of minorities, the poor, and the persecutedof Chinese pastors in prison cells and of black slaves singing of justice and Christs coming.

If lament felt foreign to most Italians a month ago, pastors have found eerie echoes of biblical stories in what is currently taking place in the country. To see wives who cant perform rites or bid farewell to their dying husbands reminds me of how Jesus was hastily buried and women returned to the tomb to anoint his body, Gaetano di Francia, director of the Union of Christian Biblical Churches in Italy, told me. Their lack of closure will produce a deeper grief.

The language of lament may prove to be one of the bittersweet lessons Christians learn from this crisis. It can help believers unlearn a spirituality of the center and learn a spirituality of the margins (as pastor Abraham Cho reminds us).

2) Prayers of Intercession

Never have I spent so much of my time in prayer interceding for others. Im ashamed to confess that, in the past, Ive often told people, Ill pray for you, but then forgot to do it.

But now that the virus ravages Italy, I have been moved by images of overworked doctors and people lying in makeshift hospitals. A member of our church fell gravely sick, but the emergency room turned him away because it is fielding so many cases of the new coronavirus.

I cant meet or lay hands on him due to the current national lockdown, but I have been praying for his recovery. As a church, we have prayed for doctors, created a common fund to help those in economic need, and fasted for our country.

The coronavirus crisis has united Italian evangelicals, who observed a National Day of Prayer this past Sunday [March 22]. Pentecostals, Reformed, Wesleyans, Baptists, Congregationalists, and others met at the feet of the Lord, united by the Holy Spirit, Giacomo Ciccone, president of the Italian Evangelical Alliance, told me.

Article continues below

It is as if God prepared leaders and denominations around the country to come together in prayer for the nation and for the church, Leonardo de Chirico, the alliances vice president, told me. It was the easiest event to organize. Nobody needed convincing; all were already on fire for it.

Mila Palozzi, a pastor at my congregation, Hopera Church in Rome, agrees that evangelicals desire to come together.

In the Promised Land, Israel understood itself as a collection of tribes but in exile as one nation, she told me. So does Italy: this crisis is bringing churches and tribes together to pray as one body for our country.

Its a foretaste of the spirit of unity and intercession spreading around the world. For example, this coming Sunday [March 29] the World Evangelical Alliance will convene a Global Day of Fasting and Prayer.

3) Prayers of Silence

However, the news is so bleak and the suffering so global these days that we can feel overwhelmed in prayer. How can my prayers possibly meet this moment? Our honest response may be, Lord, Im dumbfounded. I dont know what to say.

When I watched army trucks driving corpses to be cremated because there is no longer space in cemeteries in parts of Italy, I was speechless.

But to wait upon the Lord is valid. To put our wordless trust in him is a legitimate prayer. When Paul writes about our present weakness and suffering, he adds:

We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for Gods people in accordance with the will of God. (Rom. 8:26-27, NIV)

When words fail us, we can be still and know that God is God.

As a family, we have chosen to fill our silences full of doubts with the secure promises of God, Stefano Picciani, a preacher at Stadera Church in Milan, told me. Asaphs statement of trust in Psalm 73Yet I am always with youprovides words for our prayers.

We rightly long to return to normalcy and corporate worship. Imagine the victory parties, and the joining of hands!

When this pandemic will be defeated, many will resonance with the sense of relief of Psalm 126 (Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.) and the joy of Psalm 150 (Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.).

But alongside celebrations, we will be wise to remember the prayers we uttered in this time of sickness. May this pandemic humble our hearts and teach us the prayers of the weak, the concerned, and the speechless.

Rene Breuel is founding pastor of Hopera, a church in Rome, Italy, and author of The Paradox of Happiness.

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Date: April 2, 2020 4:00 PM EDT Location: Zoom Tickets: Free

Join Director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at ASU Ed Finn and editor of Future Tense Torie Bosch as they discuss how crises can unleash our imaginations.

Follow the conversation online using #SocialDistancingSocials and following @FutureTenseNow.

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Researchers at the University of South Australia are working to develop a drone that can spot people with potential respiratory infections, remotely. A wall-mounted AI device that listens for coughing and sneezing to predict and monitor pandemics was recently reported in Medgadget, but this latest monitoring device is mobile. The developers say the drone technology could be useful in monitoring and controlling the spread of pandemics, such as the current COVID-19 emergency.

To create the device, the Australian team will work with DraganFly, a US-based drone developer. The research group has previously created drone technology that can measure heart and breathing rates from within 5-10 meters, using image processing algorithms, and also measure activities associated with illnesses, such as coughing and sneezing.

This latest device will take things further, as the research team intends to fit a drone with sensors that can also record someones temperature  a potential indicator of COVID-19 infection. During the current pandemic, the drone could patrol locations where it is likely to encounter people, such as public spaces, airports, and streets, where it can monitor people to see if they show signs of disease.

Monitoring crowds of people could be particularly useful. It might not detect all cases, but it could be a reliable tool to detect the presence of the disease in a place or in a group of people, said Javaan Chahl, a researcher involved in the work.

Originally conceived for applications such as search and rescue in disaster zones, the researchers have realized that with the current pandemic, the drone may be useful for remote monitoring in a wide array of spaces. Now, shockingly, we see a need for its use immediately, to help save lives in the biggest health catastrophe the world has experienced in the past 100 years, said Chahl.

We are honoured to work on such an important project given the current pandemic facing the world with COVID-19, said Draganfly CEO Cameron Chell. Health and respiratory monitoring will be vital not only for detection but also to understand health trends.

Via: University of South Australia
You are here: China

Commercial flights will partly resume operations in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, starting on April 8, according to local authorities.

The flights to resume services exclude international flights and flights between Wuhan and Beijing, Wang Benju, with the provincial department of transportation, told a press conference on Wednesday.

"We are now applying to the Civil Aviation Administration of China to resume commercial passenger flights in non-Wuhan airports in Hubei as soon as possible," Wang said. "The flights do not include international flights and those between Hubei and Beijing."

Hubei is also preparing to resume operations of domestic and international cargo flights, Wang added.

Meanwhile, inbound trains will start arriving in Wuhan's 17 train stations starting Saturday, while departing businesses will resume in Wuhan on April 8.
As the Covid-19 pandemic sweeps across the globe, the government led by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has not admitted there are any cases in Syria even though it has announced the shutdown of the country.



Despite its denials, the threat of the new coronavirus has impacted military and political operations in Syria, suspending all fighting and political activities.



One week ago, the war was still raging in northern Syria, killing dozens and displacing thousands every day. Russian-Turkish relations and Turkish-US relations were tense, an agreed ceasefire between Russia and Turkey earlier this month had failed, and the killing continued.



The Covid-19 outbreak then emerged and shut things down: the fighting stopped; the battlefronts were frozen; the fighters mostly returned to their barracks; and the Russians all but suspended their air strikes.



The political track also ground to a halt, and the Constitutional Committee charged with drafting a new constitution and meetings between Russia and Turkey on northern Syria were cancelled. The deadly virus thus succeeded in pausing the war.



Turkey had been trying to maintain the ceasefire in Idlib after months of bombardment by the Syrian regime and its supporters, which had killed hundreds and displaced thousands of Syrians to the border with Turkey in deplorable humanitarian conditions.



However, Ankara failed in its negotiations with Moscow.



Since Syria has become the home of Iran-backed militias, the likelihood of a Covid-19 outbreak is high. However, the regime continues to deny the presence of any cases and has said it has started to test for the virus across the country.



So far, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has received a report of only one new coronavirus infection in Syria even though there is an outbreak in all the countries surrounding it. There is also video footage of quarantine areas in Syria, most likely housing coronavirus patients.



Rick Brennan, the WHO regional director, said his organisation would this week begin testing for Covid-19 in northwest Syria, which is under the control of the Syrian opposition. Brennan said he was very concerned about the virus infecting an area where the war destroyed the healthcare system a long time ago.



Northern Syria, where the new coronavirus has brought a forced truce, has not reported any cases because it is almost entirely isolated. There is no passage to areas under regime control, and the roads connecting it to Turkey are closed. There is no transportation to the outside world, making it by default a quarantine zone, something that could be a blessing for the millions living there.



The Syrian government claims that the results of the tests carried out by government health labs have been negative. Syria has stamped out all the terrorists and germs in Syria, the minister of health commented, in a reference to the armed opposition groups and Covid-19.



However, early on Russian commanders in Syria issued orders banning Russian officers and soldiers from meeting their Syrian or Iranian counterparts until further notice.



A central emergency taskforce has been formed to monitor any outbreak and the readiness of health institutions in Syria, prepare quarantines for suspected cases, and provide trained medical staff.



It is establishing Covid-19 testing labs at government health facilities, training staff on diagnosis, supplying border checkpoints with electronic temperature devices to test travellers, and providing travellers with forms that ask for their personal and contact information.



The Syrian opposition, however, says that none of this will work because the countrys financial, medical and logistical capabilities are weak, and the government cannot do a fraction of what it has proclaimed.



If there is an outbreak in areas under opposition control, it will be catastrophic because they are home to some three million refugees who live in tents. These areas are not equipped to withstand an outbreak since the healthcare system is decimated and there is no staff or funding.



In recent weeks, many Iranians have travelled to and from Syria to visit holy sites, as well as Iranian forces deployed there along with their families. Although Iran has reported thousands of Covid-19 cases and thousands of deaths, it was the last country that Syria suspended flights to.



The Syrian regime has not stopped thousands of Iranians coming to Syria, with the opposition charging that this is because Iran pulls the strings in Syria.



Between the governments secrecy and the peoples ignorance of what is occurring around them in this war-torn country, there are conflicting reports of Covid-19 cases in Syria that could mean disaster because of the countrys tattered healthcare sector.



There are also conflicting reports as to whether the regime and Russia will uphold the truce, or whether they will continue fighting to force the opposition, and in turn Turkey, to surrender the idea of controlling the international highways in northwest Syria.



On social media, the Syrian people have been speaking of their suffering as they watch loved ones die. Some one million people have been killed, according to unofficial figures, leaving two million orphaned children, according to the UN.



Many Syrian people say Covid-19 will not be as cruel as the regime, but will be just another way to take the lives of Syrians who are already dying every day.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Company's Corona, Modelo, Kim Crawford, Meiomi, The Prisoner and High West Whiskey brands join forces to help industry partners and communities most in need

Contributes $1 million to National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation, $500K to U.S. Bartenders' Guild, and $250K to support first responders

Establishes company COVID-19 Relief Fund and will match employee contributions 2:1

Launches employee effort to support local restaurants via take-out and delivery orders

VICTOR, N.Y., March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Constellation Brands, Inc. (NYSE: STZ and STZ.B), a leading beverage alcohol company, in partnership with a number of its iconic beer, wine, and spirits brands, announced today a collective commitment of more than $2.5 million to COVID-19 relief efforts.

"Our hearts go out to the many individuals and businesses impacted by this terrible virus," said Bill Newlands, president and chief executive officer, Constellations Brands. "Many of our retailer partners, particularly local restaurants and bars and their employees, have been significantly impacted by this situation. These businesses are essential to the fabric of our communities. It's important that we all come together to help those most in need in this critical time. We are focusing our support on efforts that directly benefit those impacted today while also helping the larger industry on its path to recovery."

Constellation, along with a number of its flagship brands such as Corona Extra, Meiomi, Kim Crawford, The Prisoner, and High West Whiskey, contributed $1 million to the upcoming launch of the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation's (NRAEF) Restaurant Employee Relief Fund.

"We are thrilled and inspired by Constellation Brands' commitment to help restaurant employees throughout the industry and across the country impacted by the COVID-19 crisis," said Rob Gifford, president of the NRAEF. "Thanks to their substantial donation we will have the ability to help thousands of people who are out of work and facing financial hardship."

The NRAEF has an extensive history of supporting the restaurant, bar and hospitality community and has the national infrastructure to meet industry needs now and over the long-term. For more information on the NRAEF's upcoming launch of the Fund, follow the NRAEF on Facebook, Twitterand LinkedIn.

Constellation Brands, in partnership with Modelo Especial, also pledged $500,000 to the U.S. Bartenders' Guild, a non-profit professional society of bartenders and other hospitality professionals currently offering relief for impacted bartenders and support staff across all 50 states. And, true to its Fighting Spirit positioning, Modelo has contributed an additional $250,000 to support first responders as they continue to support those in need in communities across the U.S.

"Our brands and company have a long history of giving back to the communities where we live and work," said Jim Sabia, chief marketing officer, Constellation Brands. "We are committed, especially in this unprecedented time, to supporting our impacted retailer partners and their employees, as well as the first responder community that continues to work selflessly to serve the needs of communities across the country."

Furthering its commitment, the company established the Constellation Brands COVID-19 Crisis Relief Fund, through which Constellation will match contributions from its several thousand employees across the country 2:1 to benefit non-profit organizations supporting communities impacted by this crisis. The company is also mobilizing employees across the nation to actively contribute to the effort by providing resources to help them support local restaurants in their communities by placing take-out orders and food deliveries in an effort to help sustain these local businesses and the jobs they create as they work toward recovery.

Additional efforts made by the company include a $250,000 contribution to support relief efforts in Italy, home to the company's Ruffino brand. Specifically, these funds will be used to support the strained healthcare system in the Veneto region.

ABOUT CONSTELLATION BRANDS

At Constellation Brands (NYSE: STZ and STZ.B), our mission is to build brands that people love because we believe sharing a toast, unwinding after a day, celebrating milestones, and helping people connect, are Worth Reaching For. It's worth our dedication, hard work, and the bold calculated risks we take to deliver more for our consumers, trade partners, shareholders, and communities in which we live and work. It's what has made us one of the fastest-growing large CPG companies in the U.S. at retail, and it drives our pursuit to deliver what's next.



Today, we are a leading international producer and marketer of beer, wine, and spirits with operations in the U.S., Mexico, New Zealand, and Italy. Every day, people reach for our high-end, iconic imported beer brands such as Corona Extra, Corona Light, Corona Premier, Modelo Especial, Modelo Negra, and Pacifico, and our high-quality premium wine and spirits brands, including the Robert Mondavi brand family, Kim Crawford, Meiomi, The Prisoner brand family, SVEDKA Vodka, Casa Noble Tequila, and High West Whiskey.

But we won't stop here. Our visionary leadership team and passionate employees from barrel room to boardroom are reaching for the next level, to explore the boundaries of the beverage alcohol industry and beyond. Join us in discovering what's Worth Reaching For.

To learn more, follow us on Twitter @cbrands and visit www.cbrands.com .

MEDIA CONTACTS INVESTOR RELATIONS CONTACTS Mike McGrew 773-251-4934 / michael.mcgrew@cbrands.com (mailto:michael.mcgrew@cbrands.com)

Amy Martin 585-678-7141 / amy.martin@cbrands.com (mailto:amy.martin@cbrands.com) Patty Yahn-Urlaub 585-678-7483 / patty.yahn-urlaub@cbrands.com (mailto:patty.yahn-urlaub@cbrands.com)

Bob Czudak 585-678-7170 / bob.czudak@cbrands.com (mailto:bob.czudak@cbrands.com)

A downloadable PDF copy of this news release enhanced with multimedia links can be found here: http://ml.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/e318c317-ebf9-475d-88a7-54fa78ba468d
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Linkedin Riza Roidila Mufti and Ivany Atina Arbi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 13:00 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d8229e 1 Business COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,Hotel,doctor,nurse,patients,collaboration,cooperation Free

The Tourism and Creative Economy Ministry is working on a plan to collaborate with business players in the hotel industry to help curb the spread of COVID-29

The partnership would have hotel chains across Indonesia provide rooms for medical personnel treating COVID-19 patients, Minister Wishnutama Kusubandio said at an online press conference on Monday.

Medical workers will have a proper place to rest somewhere close to their hospital.

Wishnutama added that he had discussed the plan with the representatives of several hotels and the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB).

The ministry is also in talks with transportation providers for another possible collaboration that would transport medical workers to and from hotels and hospitals.

Wishnutama called on businesses operating in tourism and the creative economy to actively participate in Indonesias fight against COVID-19, including by postponing events that involve mass gatherings during the ongoing emergency period.

Tourism and the creative economy have been hit the hardest by the pandemic. According to the Indonesia Hotel and Restaurant Association (PHRI), the countrys overall occupancy rate has fallen below the low season average of 50 to 60 percent to 30 to 40 percent since the outbreak of the new coronavirus in China in late December.

The occupancy rate in Bali has dropped to 20 percent, especially in areas visited by solo travelers such as Kuta, Sanur, Legian, Ubud and Jimbaran.

The drop in tourist visits has also affected workers at the grassroots level who rely on tourism for their daily income, such as tour guides, tour drivers and daily hotel staff.

The events industry has also taken a significant hit, with projected financial losses incurred as a result of massive cancellations at postponements amounting to between Rp 898.2 billion and Rp 2.65 trillion, according to the Indonesia Event Industry Council (Ivendo).

Some 1,200 companies are engaged in the event-organizing business.

Meanwhile, the State-Owned Enterprises (SOE) Ministry plans to transform existing buildings into hospitals for treating COVID-19 patients, like what was done with the Wisma Atlet Kemayoran athletes village in Jakarta

"What we did in Jakarta is going to be duplicated in some other provinces," Arya Sinulingga, an aide to SOE Minister Erick Thohir, said on Tuesday.

He added that among the regions were Bandung in West Java, Semarang in Central Java and Surabaya in East Java.

The ministry also plans to cooperate with the Religious Affairs Ministry to transform haj dormitories into COVID-19 hospitals, he said.

The SOE Ministry, with the help of the Public Works and Housing Ministry, converted four apartment towers at Wisma Atlet Kemayoran into a hospital to meet the potentially increasing demand for isolation and treatment wards in the coming days.

The facility, previously used to house athletes during the 2018 Asian Games, will be able to accommodate up to 22,000 COVID-19 patients.

Scientists have warned that Indonesia could have tens of thousands of cases by April if authorities fail to take drastic measures to slow down the spread of the new coronavirus. Based on their calculations, Indonesia could be grappling with up to 71,000 COVID-19 cases by the end of April.

The number of COVID-19 cases in Indonesia tripled within a week, jumping from 172 positive diagnoses on March 17 to 686 on Tuesday. The number of deaths stood at 55, with the disease spreading to at least 22 of the country's 34 provinces.
New Delhi: As the Indian economy eagerly awaits a financial package to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic from causing major harm, a new report said on Wednesday that the 21-day nationwide lockdown will result in a direct output loss of nearly 4.5 per cent, with further indirect effects.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said that the government is currently addressing the compliance related issues and an economic package covering issues of concern to the industry would be announced separately later.

According to Tokyo-based financial services group Nomura, nearly 75 per cent of the economy will be shutdown, resulting in a direct output loss of approximately 4.5 per cent.

"Additionally, there will be indirect effects such as the persistence of public fear factor (even after the lockdown ends) -- a high risk that the livelihoods of the predominantly unorganised workforce will be hit and a sharp increase in corporate and banking sector stress, which are likely to further weigh on growth is beyond Q2 in H2 2020," the report warned.

While the states have been largely leading the fiscal charge against COVID-19 so far, the report said it expects the Central government to soon announce a stimulus package of around 0.7-1.1 per cent of the GDP.

"Along with the growth hit and poor tax collections, we expect the fiscal deficit for FY21 (year ending March 2021) to balloon by over 1 per cent of GDP from the 3.5 per cent target set in the budget (more than the escape clause leeway of 0.5 per cent of GDP)."

Monetary policy proactiveness has been missing so far, it said.

However, "we expect at least 50bp of policy easing on or before the April 3 policy meeting, accompanied by a host of liquidity injections and unconventional policy measures to reduce financial sector tightness, including large scale open market operations."

The government's concern is that India is reaching the exponential part of the epidemic curve, with the number of COVID-19 cases currently tracking 562 (512 are active, and 11 deaths so far), which is now an average daily growth rate of around 23 per cent.

In the top 2 infected states of Maharashtra and Kerala, the number of cases have breached 100, while most states are seeing their numbers increase.

"Experience from other countries show that this could be the inflection point for a sharp jump in cases from here on," the findings showed.

Given India's large population, limited testing and contact tracing facility and relative scarcity of quality healthcare, it is understandable that the government is attempting to contain the spread rather than move to the mitigation stage, the report mentioned.

Media reports on Wednesday claimed the government may announce a financial stimulus worth $20 billion (Rs 1.5 lakh crore) to help revive the economy.

The Indian economy that had already slowed down before the outbreak of novel coronavirus, is in for a more difficult period in the coming months with businesses almost coming to a standstill.

The Finance Ministry and the RBI have taken several steps to ensure that liquidity in the system remains intact. But the industry has called for more stimulus measures to fight depression like conditions setting in the economy.

The report said that the lockdown is essential to slow COVID-19 transmission, "but this will come at a very heavy economic cost in the short term with potential medium-term spillover effects".
Pompeo: G7 Nations Deeply Aware of China's 'Disinformation Campaign' on Coronavirus

Sputnik News

15:48 GMT 25.03.2020(updated 17:40 GMT 25.03.2020)

The US Secretary of State previously slammed China for providing 'imperfect coronavirus data' and expressed his frustration about the difficulty of obtaining from Beijing the information necessary to develop vaccines.

All the G7 nations are "deeply aware of the disinformation campaign" that China is leading in regard to the coronavirus epidemic, the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday. The top US official stated that the world still needs accurate information from Beijing about the deadly virus.

G7 Foreign Ministers held a video call earlier today during which they committed to continue cooperation in the fight against the coronavirus. This is the second meeting to be held by video link to avoid the threat of coronavirus spread.

Mike Pompeo previously lambasted Beijing for putting the US "behind the curve" by not sharing adequate information with the United States on the coronavirus disease. Pompeo also accused actors in China, Russia and Iran of spreading fake news related to the coronavirus outbreak.

In his turn, US Defence Secretary Mark Esper earlier this week announced that the Pentagon would set up "a myth-busting website" to counter coronavirus (COVID-19) disinformation "disseminated partially by foreign actors".

Beijing dismissed Washington's claims about China, Russia and Iran as careless and laughable.

China's Foreign Ministry underlined that the PRC had shared information on the epidemic with the World Health Organisation and other countries, including the United States, in a timely manner.

Global COVID-19 Pandemic

The outbreak of the new coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, was first reported in China in late December. It later spread to 195 countries and was declared a pandemic. As of now, there are 375,498 confirmed cases of the virus globally.

China still has the most confirmed cases, but in recent weeks the spread of the virus appears to have been brought under control in China as Europe has become the new epicenter of the disease.

 Sputnik

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Dr. James Pruden was the first. But he will hardly be the last.

The director of emergency preparedness at St. Josephs University Medical Center in Paterson was hospitalized March 6 with upper respiratory and cold-like symptoms and tested positive a week later for the coronavirus.

Pruden, 70, remains in critical but stable condition, hospital spokeswoman Pam Garretson said Wednesday.

Pruden was the first known doctor in New Jersey hospitalized with COVID-19, but hes not alone, interviews with health care physicians revealed. Two members of the New Jersey Doctor-Patient Alliance told NJ Advance Media there are other doctors and nurses in the state who have either tested positive for the coronavirus or have been sent home to quarantine after experiencing symptoms.

Nobody cares about the doctors or the nurses right now," said Dr. Stavros Christoudias, chair of the NJDPA, an advocacy group whose mission is to create affordable health care in the state. You look at what happened to the doctor at St. Josephs  if that happens just 50 more times, Im afraid to even think about whats going to happen.

I had a pulmonologist who was in the ICU taking care of these coronavirus patients at Pascack Valley (Medical Center), and this guy turned to me and said: When this thing is over, you might be the last general surgeon left in Bergen County. I turned to him and said, Thats a horrifying thought.

LATEST CORONAVIRUS UPDATES FROM NJ.COM

A more horrifying thought for Christoudias is whats known about COVID-19 and whats known about the states medical workforce. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported adults 65 years and older are at higher risk for severe illness and death, 36.6% of active physicians in New Jersey are over the age of 60, according to a recent Association of American Medical Colleges report. New Jersey ranks third nationally with more than one-third of its doctors being 60 or older, a figure well above the national median of 30.3%.

There are 500 surgeons like me in New Jersey, and one of the most scary things about the New Jersey doctors workforce is were one of the oldest in the country, Christoudias said. So our doctors are the most vulnerable.

Dr. Lawrence Stankovits, a pediatric orthopedist who serves emergency rooms at four hospitals in Monmouth and Middlesex counties, called New Jerseys aging physicians workforce a huge concern." Those doctors are battling a pandemic that has resulted in 4,402 cases and 62 deaths in New Jersey, according to figures announced Wednesday by state officials.

We have enough data to show that as you age, youre more susceptible to this virus and your risk of both hospitalized critical care or even death goes up," Stankovits said. So if you have people who are over 60 on the front lines with direct contact to these patients, you have to do everything you can to protect them. We have a very limited physicians supply in this state. You cant just replace them out of nowhere with their experience."

While its not known how many doctors and nurses have been hospitalized nationwide, health care professionals compared conditions inside some New Jersey hospitals to a war zone."

I get called into ERs all the time, and what Im seeing is stunning," Stankovits said. Whats most concerning is when you walk into a hospital, you dont know what youre going to get.

You dont know if theyre going to hand you a gown and a mask and check your temperature so you feel like theyre really looking out for the doctors, or you feel like youre in a Twilight Zone video because no one is wearing a mask, nobody is checking your temperature and its almost business as usual.

Some medical experts fear the U.S. health care system could collapse as a nationwide shortage of personal protective equipment could leave doctors and nurses exposed to the contagious virus. The desperate state of Italys system, where nearly 5,000 health workers have been infected and 23 have died as a result of the coronavirus, illustrates the threat.

The disease is going to show up predominantly in the older population, and unfortunately, the Italians and other countries have shown us that the older doctors are the ones that are getting sick," Stankovits said. Some younger doctors have gotten sick and died from it as well, which is just as frightening. But I think the countries that are a few weeks ahead of us have shown us what can happen to these physicians."

The novel coronavirus is a respiratory illness that attacks the lungs and can result in multiple organ failure in the most severe cases, medical experts say. Patients have reported mild to severe respiratory illness with symptoms of fever, cough and shortness of breath.

Who is taking care of these patients? Once they get past the emergency room doctors, its critical care physicians. Its pulmonologists. And its cardiologists, Stankovits said.

The AAMCs 2019 State Physician Workforce Data Report shows alarming numbers when it comes to those lung and heart specialists. Of the 226 doctors statewide who specialize in pulmonary disease, 72.4% are over 60 years old. The report notes 53.7% of the 943 cardiologists are also over 60.

Were talking about more than half of our doctors who are critical to caring for these patients are our most vulnerable," Stankovits said.

Even before the coronavirus outbreak emerged late last year in Wuhan, China, there were growing fears of a pending shortage of physicians in New Jersey," the New Jersey Hospital Association warned in a strategic report. It pointed to the AAMC statistics and noted only 13% of active New Jersey physicians are under 40, the fifth lowest percentage nationally at the time.

New Jersey has an aging population, and thats reflected in the average age in professions including physicians and nurses," said Kerry McKean Kelly, vice president of communications for the NJHA. Long before the COVID-19 outbreak, weve been focused on the health care workforce to bring more people into these important professions and be assured we will have the clinicians and caregivers we need in the future.

The times were in now underscore how truly valuable our healthcare professionals are.

So whats the solution? The simple answer could boil down to giving the doctors on the front lines the sufficient protective equipment they need to provide critical care, health care experts said.

Why is it that, for the most part, the doctors and nurses are coming in wearing flimsy gowns, an 3M N95 mask  which they may be told to re-use  and a bouffant hat when they should be in a space suit?" Stankovits said. They should be in something that takes 15 minutes to put on, not 15 seconds. But I havent seen a picture of anyone taking care of a patient in New Jersey wearing a space suit other than the people at the testing centers.

So the solution is to basically have an all-out war effort to get maximum protection for as many health-care providers as possible."

Space suits and N95 respirators are cheap compared to the cost of losing experienced doctors and nurses on the front lines of a pandemic, Stankovits said.

The hospitals that are saying, You get one surgical mask a day to wear around the hospital, he said, and thats a completely inadequate response given the overwhelmingly high probability that at some point youre going to come in contact with this virus in the hospital.

If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share.

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Keith Sargeant may be reached at ksargeant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @KSargeantNJ.
Tilman Fertitta, the sole owner of the Rockets, wont consider minority partners as a matter of pride, tweets ESPNs Tim MacMahon.

MacMahons note on the Rockets owner comes at a time when Fertittas companies have furloughed approximately 70% of their employees, according to Davide Scigliuzzo of Bloomberg. Fertitta, who owns a series of casinos, hotels, and restaurants, said he has had to temporarily lay off approximately 40,000 employees as a result of coronavirus-related shutdowns.

Indicating that he wants to hire every employee back, Fertitta expressed confidence that his businesses will survive and even talked about possibly buying back some of the Golden Nuggets debts when things turn around, per Bloombergs report.

Fertitta, who is hoping that restaurants and casinos will soon be permitted to operate at least at partial capacity, said he has been talking to banks about raising as much as $200MM in additional liquidity as a little bit of insurance, Scigliuzzo writes.

Selling off part of the Rockets to one or more minority stakeholders at any time since he assumed control of the team in 2017 would have helped provide Fertitta with additional liquidity, but he has long been averse to the idea. In October 2017, shortly after he took the reins in Houston, he indicated he might make an exception for pop star Beyonce, who had previously considered an investment in the franchise. Otherwise though, he said, I prefer to own 100 percent.

Fertitta, who has appeared reluctant to pay the luxury tax since taking over as the Rockets owner, figures to be hit particularly hard by the NBAs loss of revenue this season. Houston was believed to be the team with the most partnerships in China prior to Daryl Moreys tweet in support of protestors in Hong Kong, which reportedly cost the team many of those business ties.
BJP MLA Thounaojam Shyamkumar resigned from the Manipur Assembly on Thursday, eight days after the Supreme Court removed him from the state cabinet, invoking its plenary powers.

Shyamkumar, who joined the BJP after winning the 2017 election from Andro constituency on a Congress ticket, submitted his resignation letter to Speaker Y Khemchand Singh, Assembly secretariat sources said.

The plea of his disqualification is pending with the Speaker since 2017 and he is scheduled to pronounce his judgement on the matter on Saturday.

In a rare move, the Supreme Court on March 18 invoked its plenary powers and ordered forthwith removal of Th Shyamkumar who was the states forest minister.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The weekly has also temporarily changed its periodicity.

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The Trend economic weekly will lose about one-quarter of its editorial staff, including all political reporters. The reason is the drop in advertising incomes due to the coronavirus pandemic resulting in an effort to cut expenses by 25 percent, the Omediach.com website reported.

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The weeklys publisher, News and Media Holding controlled by the Penta financial group, will dismiss eight of its 35 reporters. This includes current deputy editor-in-chief Eva Mihockova, as well as journalists Marian Biel, Peter Kapitan, Tomas Nejedly, Martin Polas, Jan Meluch, Jarmila Horvathova, and visual department manager Mariana Krupkova, Omediach.com wrote.
More than three billion people around the world are living under lockdown as governments stepped up their efforts against the coronavirus pandemic which has left more than 21,000 people dead. As the number of confirmed cases worldwide soared past 450,000, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that only a concerted global effort could stop the spread of the virus.

China

Till now, China has reported 81,285 coronavirus cases and the death toll stands at 3,287, according to worldometres. China has begun to relax its own draconian restrictions on free movement in the province of Hubei - where the outbreak began in December - after the country reported no new cases. Crowds jammed trains and buses in the province as people took their first opportunity to travel.

Italy

Considered to be the second epicenter of the deadly disease after China, the death count in Italy jumped in 24 hours by 683 to 7,503 - by far the highest of any country. Italy has reported total confirmed cases of 69,176 while 8,326 patients have been recovered so far. More than 60 per cent of the latest deaths reportedly occurred in the northern region of Lombardy, where the hospitals are flooded with patients that have left intensive care beds hard to find and respirators in dire supply.

US

Stock markets rebounded after the US Congress moved closer to passing a $2.2 trillion relief package to prop up a teetering US economy. Secretary Guterres said that COVID-19 is threatening the whole of humanity -- and the whole of humanity must fight back, during launching an appeal for $2 billion to help the world's poor. He also added that global action and solidarity are crucial. Individual country responses are not going to be enough to fight this deadly disease. In Washington, President Donald Trump said New York, the epicenter of the US outbreak with over 30,000 cases, likely has a few "tough weeks" ahead but he would decide soon whether unaffected parts of the country can get back to work.

Spain

Spain is the latest in a string of countries to be badly hit by the deadly coronavirus. The disease was first detected in Catalonia but has since spread to regions throughout the country, including the Canary Islands. In Spain, the number of deaths surge to more than 3,400 after 738 people died in the past 24 hours and the government announced a 432-million-euro ($467 million) deal to buy medical supplies from Beijing, making it the hardest-hit nation after Italy.

Read: Coronavirus: Spain Overtakes China's Death Toll With 3,434 Fatalities

Read: MP Reports First Coronavirus Death; Elderly Woman Succumbs

Germany

Currently, the coronavirus pandemic has infected 37,323 people in Germany, and 206 deaths. Following the disease, German police are tenaciously trying to trace nearly six million faces maks which went missing at an airport in Kenya, international media reported. Though it was unclear why the masks were in Kenya, authorities have said that they were actively searching for it.

Iran

Iran is currently the sixth-worst virus hit the nation with 27,017 reported cases of infection and 2,077 deaths. According to reports, a multitude of citizens travelled during the Iranian new year holidays. Iranian President warned that his government was poised to introduce tough new measures against the coronavirus on March 25 as the death toll from one of the world's deadliest outbreaks topped 2,000.

Read: Second Covid-19 Death In Gujarat

Read: COVID-19: Iran To Ban Intercity Travel As Coronavirus Death Toll Crosses 2,000
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines)  The world is now caught up in battling a pandemic  and fighting for the environment. With this being said, there is now an even greater need for awareness on the importance of nature and a healthy planet, and for long-term solutions to the current environmental crisis.

The annual Earth Hour will be celebrated on March 28 in an effort to bring together millions of people around the world in a show of commitment for the planet. And the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)-Philippines encourages Filipinos to help #ChangeTheEnding of the current environmental crisis.

WWF-Philippines Earth Hour Pilipinas National Director Atty. Angela Ibay describes the evolution of Earth Hour throughout the years. Photograph  Alo Lantin / WWFPhilippines

We want to be able to use Earth Hour to galvanize people, to bring our messages forward - that our own actions have an effect on our planet, and that our own actions are also the solution that will be able to provide for us and for our shared home, said WWF-Philippines Earth Hour Pilipinas National Director Atty. Angela Ibay.

Since the first lights out event was held in Sydney in 2007, the movement has continued to bring together individuals, businesses, and governments alike in joint acts of commitment toward a future of environmental integrity and where man lives in harmony with nature.

Climate Change Commission Policy Research and Development Division Chief Jerome Ilagan expresses the governments commitment to combating the countrys environmental issues. Photograph  Alo Lantin / WWF-Philippines

Climate Change Commission Policy Research and Development Division Chief Jerome Ilagan also said the Philippine government is ready to make things possible to make sure that Filipinos survive and thrive in this era of climate change.

Public support and the translation and mainstreaming of conservation science across all levels of Philippine government are crucial in addressing the countrys environmental issues, Ilagan added.

From left to right: WWF-Philippines Advocate Enzo Pineda, WWF-Philippines Executive Director Joel Palma, WWF-Philippines Child Advocate Xia Rigor, WWF-Philippines Earth Hour Pilipinas National Director Atty. Angela Ibay, WWF-Philippines Earth Hour Ambassador Mikee Cojuangco-Jaworski, and WWF-Philippines National Ambassadors Rovilson Fernandez and Marc Nelson pose with WWF-Philippines Mascot Chi Chi the Panda. Photograph  Alo Lantin / WWFPhilippines

WWF-Philippines is inviting the general public to participate in the local Earth Hour 2020 activities, to be held across the country on the 28th of March. Earth Hour 2020 Philippines will largely be a digital effort, and WWF-Philippines will be supporting the events of government agencies, local government units, and private businesses.

More importantly, WWF-Philippines is encouraging individuals to take part in Earth Hour 2020 from their own homes, through actions as simple as closing and leaving off non-essential lights for the night.

WWF-Philippines Earth Hour Ambassador Mikee Cojuangco-Jaworski introduces the #ChangeTheEnding campaign. The campaign aims to stress the urgency of our environmental issues while emphasizing the need to act now in order to change the ending on the current crisis. Photograph  Alo Lantin / WWF-Philippines

This year, we decided to invest in a campaign that will reach beyond Earth Hour," said WWF-Philippines Earth Hour Ambassador Mikee Cojuangco-Jaworski. "This campaign will hopefully send a message that will show how everything that we've allowed to happen is affecting the generations after us. It's us right now, however, who are in a position to make a change.
Romania will buy, on behalf on the European Union, protective medical equipment and ventilators for setting up a strategic reserve on the territory of our county within the limit of 10 million euro, President Klaus Iohannis has stated on Thursday.

"At European level, it has been decided, based on a project approved during our Presidency at the Council of the European Union, the setting up of a strategic medical equipment reserve, within the European Civil Protection Mechanism, a European mechanism designed so that the European Union can prevent, prepare and respond to various crises and disasters, such as the epidemic we are confronted with. It is very important, Romania is the first European Union member state that received the accept of the European Commission to start the necessary acquisition procedures to establish this reserve of the European Union on our country's territory. In a first stage, the acquisition carried out by Romania, on behalf of the European Union, within the limit of 10 million euro, is aimed at protective medical equipment - masks and individual protection suits - and ventilators. This procedure is carried out independently from the purchases made directly by the Commission, but when these materials will are available, we too, in Romania, will be able to request a part of this strategic reserve," Iohannis explained at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace.He showed that he will present within the videoconference with European Council members, to be held on Thursday, Romania's efforts within this project, announcing that the discussions with the suppliers have already begun."I will ask a more consistent funding on this programme and I will show Romania's availability to also get involved more in other areas of this mechanism. On a different note, I will convey to our partners in the Union that we need functional chains of supply in order to ensure the appropriate access of our citizens to the essential goods, and for this, the barriers in the supply chains should be eliminated and other blockages prevented," the head of state said.He underscored that it is important that the joint acquisition procedures of equipment and medical devices necessary to manage the epidemic be completed as soon as possible, so that the interested member states be able to quickly take possession of these products.
Cook County Chief Financial Officer Ammar Rizki said the measures will temporarily free up at least $30 million in cash flow for businesses during the public health crisis. Business owners can use money that they otherwise would have owed in home rule taxes to cover payroll, rent, or just to keep the lights on.
Texas abortion providers sued the state Wednesday to challenge an executive order that prohibited a list of procedures considered not medically necessary, including abortion, to preserve the states health-care capacity in the wake of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

Sealy Massingill, the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas, accused Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton of playing politics over the directive.

I find it extremely distressing . . . that we are trying to respond to a purely political fight that [Gov. Greg Abbott] started. Patients who need abortions are on a time-sensitive deadline, Massingill said in a Wednesday press conference.

We cannot sit idly by while the state is forcing Texans to be pregnant against their will, Amy Hagstrom Miller, president and CEO of abortion provider Whole Womens Health, added.

Paxton issued the ban on Monday, saying that it extended until April 21 and that violators could be fined $1,000 or face up to 180 days in jail.

No one is exempt from the governors executive order on medically unnecessary surgeries and procedures, including abortion providers. Those who violate the governors order will be met with the full force of the law, a statement from Paxtons office reads. The attorney general added that an abortion could be performed if the mothers life is in danger.

Paxton slammed the lawsuit on Twitter Wednesday, calling it unconscionable that abortion providers are fighting against the health of Texans and withholding desperately needed supplies and personal protective equipment in favor of a procedure that they refer to as a choice.

It is unconscionable that abortion providers are fighting against the health of Texans and withholding desperately needed supplies and

personal protective equipment in favor of a procedure that they refer to as a choice.  Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) March 26, 2020

Ohio is also locked in a battle over abortion amid coronavirus, as attorney general Dave Yost has issued multiple cease and desist orders to abortion clinics across the state that had defied an order from the Department of Health (ODH) to stop.

More from National Review
Amid nationwide lockdown, the Delhi Police officials on Thursday distributed food to the needy people in several parts of the city including Najafgarh and Majnu Ka Tila.

A total of 649 confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been reported in India, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare informed on Thursday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Viralym-M recently received EMA PRIME and U.S. FDA RMAT designations

Phase 3 pivotal and Phase 2 proof-of-concept studies to be initiated for Viralym-M in 2020 targeting six devastating and life-threatening viral pathogens in immunocompromised patients

AlloVir, a late-clinical stage allogeneic T-cell immunotherapy company, today announced it has been granted Orphan Drug Designation from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for Viralym-M (ALVR105) as a potential treatment of viral diseases and infections in patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). Viralym-M is the company's lead allogeneic, off-the-shelf, multi-virus specific T-cell therapy, being developed for the treatment and prevention of serious viral diseases caused by six commonly occurring, devastating viral pathogens in immunocompromised individuals: BK virus, cytomegalovirus, human herpes virus-6, Epstein Barr virus, adenovirus, and JC virus. Viral diseases are a primary reason for poor outcomes in transplant patients, resulting in potentially devastating and life-threatening consequences.

In addition to Orphan Drug Designation, Viralym-M has been granted PRIority MEdicines (PRIME) designation from the EMA and Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Viralym-M is one of only seven investigational therapies, to date, to receive both PRIME and RMAT designations from the EMA and FDA, respectively. AlloVir plans to initiate Phase 3 pivotal and Phase 2 proof-of-concept studies with Viralym-M in 2020 targeting six commonly occurring, devastating and life-threatening viral pathogens.

"At AlloVir, we are committed to advancing allogeneic, off-the-shelf novel T-cell therapies with the potential to improve the way we treat and prevent devastating viral diseases," said Agustin Melian, MD, Chief Medical Officer and Head of Global Medical Sciences of AlloVir. "The Orphan Drug Designation by the EMA acknowledges the critical need for new treatment options for patients who have undergone stem cell transplant and are at risk of the serious consequences of viral diseases. Also, leveraging PRIME and RMAT designations, we are working to quickly advance Viralym-M through late-stage clinical development to bring, what we believe to be a transformative new therapy, to patients in the U.S., European Union and eventually around the world."

The EMA grants Orphan Drug Designation status for products intended for the treatment, prevention or diagnosis of life-threatening or chronically debilitating conditions that affect no more than five in 10,000 people in the European Union, and where the product represents a significant benefit over existing treatments. Orphan Drug Designation provides companies with certain benefits and incentives in the EU, including a 10-year period of market exclusivity after product approval, reduced regulatory fees and protocol assistance.

About Opportunistic Viral Diseases

In healthy individuals, virus-specific T-cells from the body's natural defense system provide protection against numerous disease-causing viruses. However, in patients with a weakened immune system these viruses may be uncontrolled. Viral diseases are common, with potentially devastating and life-threatening consequences in immunocompromised patients. For example, up to 90% of patients will reactivate at least one virus following an allogeneic HSCT and two-thirds of these patients reactivate more than one virus, resulting in significant and prolonged morbidity, hospitalization and premature death. Typically, when viruses infect immunocompromised patients, standard antiviral treatment does not address the underlying problem of a weakened immune system and therefore, many patients suffer with life-threatening outcomes such as multi-organ damage and failure, and even death.

About Viralym-M (ALVR105)

AlloVir's lead product Viralym-M (ALVR105) is in late-stage clinical development as an allogeneic, off-the-shelf, multi-virus specific T-cell therapy targeting six common viral pathogens in immunocompromised individuals: BK virus, cytomegalovirus, adenovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, human herpesvirus 6, and JC virus. In a positive Phase 2 proof-of-concept study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (Tzannou, JCO, 2017), greater than 90% of patients who failed conventional treatment and received Viralym-M, demonstrated a predefined criteria for a complete or partial clinical response, most with complete elimination of detectable virus in the blood and resolution of major clinical symptoms. The company plans to initiate pivotal and proof-of-concept studies with Viralym-M in 2020 for treatment and prevention of severe and life-threatening viral diseases.

Viralym-M has received Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and PRIority MEdicines (PRIME) designation from European Medicines Agency (EMA).

About AlloVir

AlloVir, formerly ViraCyte, is an ElevateBio portfolio company that was founded in 2013 and is the leader in the development of novel cell therapies with a focus on restoring natural immunity against life-threatening viral diseases in patients with severely weakened immune systems. The company's technology platforms deliver commercially scalable solutions by leveraging off-the-shelf, allogeneic, multi-virus specific T cells targeting devastating viral pathogens for immunocompromised patients under viral attack. AlloVir's technology and manufacturing process enables the potential for the treatment and prevention of a spectrum of devastating viruses with each single allogeneic cell therapy. The company is advancing multiple mid- and late-stage clinical trials across its product portfolio.

AlloVir's investors include Fidelity Research and Management Company, Gilead Sciences, F2 Ventures, The Invus Group, Redmile Group, EcoR1, Samsara Biocapital, and Leerink Partners Co-investment Fund, LLC.

AlloVir is an ElevateBio portfolio company. More information can be found at www.allovir.com.

About ElevateBio

ElevateBio, LLC, is a Cambridge-based creator and operator of a portfolio of innovative cell and gene therapy companies. It begins with an environment where scientific inventors can transform their visions for cell and gene therapies into reality for patients with devastating diseases. Working with leading academic researchers, medical centers, and corporate partners, ElevateBio's team of scientists, drug developers, and company builders are creating a portfolio of therapeutics companies that are changing the face of cell and gene therapy and regenerative medicine. Core to ElevateBio's vision is BaseCamp, a centralized state-of-the-art innovation and manufacturing center, providing fully integrated capabilities, including basic and transitional research, process development, clinical development, cGMP manufacturing, and regulatory affairs across multiple cell and gene therapy and regenerative medicine technology platforms. ElevateBio portfolio companies, as well as select strategic partners are supported by ElevateBio BaseCamp in the advancement of novel cell and gene therapies.

ElevateBio's investors include F2 Ventures, MPM Capital, EcoR1 Capital, Redmile Group, Samsara BioCapital, Emerson Collective, The Invus Group, Surveyor Capital (A Citadel company), EDBI, and Vertex Ventures.

ElevateBio is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass, with ElevateBio BaseCamp located in Waltham, Mass. For more information, please visit www.elevate.bio.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005129/en/

Contacts:

Courtney Heath

ScientPR

AlloVirPR@scientpr.com

+1 617-872-2462
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 11:08:26|Editor: huaxia

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HANOI, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam's Ministry of Health on Thursday morning confirmed seven new cases of COVID-19 infection, bringing the total in the country to 148.

The seven new cases included a French and a South African travelling to Vietnam recently, four Vietnamese citizens returning home from Britain, the United States and Thailand, and a Vietnamese man travelling to southern Can Tho city by air recently, the ministry said.

Vietnam has recorded a total of 148 COVID-19 patients, of them, 17 had been discharged from hospital after recovery with no deaths recorded so far in the country.

The country has 1,643 suspected cases with some 45,000 others still under medical observation and quarantine as of Thursday, according to the health ministry.
Central Regional Minister, Kwamena Duncan, has accused former President John Mahama of deliberate selectivity on national discourse.



To him, it is the height of hypocrisy for the ex-president to keep mum on the infamous Airbus saga while loudly sharing his thoughts on other issues.



The Central Regional Minister thus believed the COVID-19 response team formed by the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) is an indictment on other groups fighting the coronavirus pandemic.



He also sought to know if by the setting up of a COVID-19 team, the NDC flagbearer sides with assertions by the party's General Secretary, Johnson Asiedu Mketiah, that the current administration intends to rig the 2020 elections by using the pandemic as a ruse.



Speaking at a church service to end a three-day prayer and fasting organised by the NDC, former President John Mahama announced the formation of a technical team to assist the government in the fight against the pandemic.



I have also already announced that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) is committed to assisting government in this fight by availing all technical and logistical resources at our disposal. As evidence of our seriousness in that respect, we have assembled a technical team to guide our efforts and to lead the NDCs response to the evolving situation. The team is an assembly of experts from the many fields that will be required to implement a national action plan on COVID-19, Mahama reportedly said.



But contributing to a panel discussion on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo' Wednesday, Kwamena Duncan wondered why the former President till date, has not commented on the Airbus scandal but has found his voice on other issues in the country.



You did not find your voice on the airbus scandal but hes heard all over making remarks on other issues; so with your flagbearership position, you choose and pick? (issues). The response team is an indictment on the Ghana Health Service and other groups . . . it is pathetic. What is sad is that the General Secretary of the NDC claims the ban on public gatherings is intended to rig the 2020 elections. So, you ask yourself is this response team going to support government or to help government rig the 2020 elections, he stated.



Press conference



The COVID-19 response team of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was outdoored on Tuesday.



Speaking on the conference, Kwamena Duncan said apart from Zanetor Rawlings who highlighted some important issues, the rest meddled in propaganda.







A statement signed by the Communications Officer of the NDC, Mr Sammy Gyamfi, gave the names of members of the team as Mr Alex Segbefia, former Minister for Health; Professor Margaret Kweku, Public Health Expert & former Dean of School of Public Health, University of Health and Allied Sciences; Dr Grace Ayensu-Danquah, Specialist in Disaster Management and Infectious Disease Control and Humanitarian Assistance & Professor of Global Surgery, Ensign School of Public Health; Dr Vida Yarkong, Interdisciplinary Medicine Expert and Dr Jehu Appiah, Senior, Medical Consultant and former General Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association.The rest are Mr Prosper Bani, former Minister for the Interior and former Head of UNDPs Crisis Prevention and Recovery Team for Africa; Mr Cassiel Ato Forson, Ranking Member, Parliamentary Committee on Finance and MP for Ajumako-Enyan-Esiam; Mr Kwabena Mintah Akando, Ranking Member, Parliamentary Committee on Health and MP for Juaboso; Dr Ezanetor Rawlings, Medical Doctor and Member of Parliament for Klottey-Korle; Mrs Mawuena Trebarh, Communications Specialist; Dr Jonas Asamoah; Public Health Expert, Hawa Memorial Hospital, Osiem; Dr Prosper Akanbong, Physician Consultant and former CEO, Tamale Teaching Hospital and Nana Kofi Quakyi, Specialist in Health Economics and Assistant Professor in Public Health.

Source: Rebecca Addo Tetteh/Peacefmonline.com/[email protected]









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Detroit

Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Honda and Toyota took steps Thursday to restart North American factories that have been closed to protect workers from the coronavirus.

The plants would reopen in early or mid-April, restoring the largest source of cash for automakers that generally book revenue when they ship vehicles to dealerships.

Auto companies, like other businesses, are trying to manage their way through the coronavirus crisis, which has forced factories to close amid employee concerns that they could catch the virus while working close to others at factory work stations.

Ford said it wants to reopen five North American assembly plants, starting with one in Mexico April 6 and continuing with four in the U.S. on April 14. The move was immediately met with skepticism by the United Auto Workers union, which represents 56,000 Ford factory workers.

"The UAW continues to review with great caution and concern decisions being made about restarting workplaces, especially at advanced dates," union President Rory Gamble said in a statement.

Honda wants to reopen U.S. and Canadian factories on April 7, a week later than originally planned, while Toyota plans to restart North American plants on April 20. Fiat Chrysler intends to reopen U.S. and Canadian factories April 14 depending on state restrictions and plant readiness. General Motors says it hasn't decided yet when factories would restart. Most automakers said they would monitor the virus and adjust decisions if needed.

The factory decisions contrast with Italy, which on Thursday expanded a nationwide lockdown to include most heavy industry. Auto plants in Italy, which leads the world in virus deaths, already had been closed voluntarily.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

The automakers' moves in the U.S. come as new auto sales are expected to fall dramatically for the month of March. Edmunds.com expects March sales to fall nearly 36 percent from a year earlier.

Ford, in a release before the markets opened Thursday, said it's aiming to reopen its factory in Hermosillo, Mexico, followed by its Dearborn, Mich., truck plant, Kentucky truck plant in Louisville, the Ohio Assembly Plant near Cleveland, and the Transit van line at the Kansas City plant. The company also wants to reopen some parts-making plants on the same day, including four in Michigan, which is among the states hardest hit by the virus.

The Dearborn, Mich., automaker says it will introduce additional safety measures to protect workers, but said it would give details later. Ford wants to reopen five North American assembly plants in April that were closed due to the threat of coronavirus.

All three Detroit automakers suspended production at U.S. factories a week ago under pressure from the United Auto Workers union, which had concerns about worker safety.
PORTLAND, Ore.  On Wednesday, Governor Kate Brown followed up her "Stay Home, Save Lives" executive order with a potential method of enforcement for some of the mandates it contained  a way to report businesses that fail to follow social distancing guidelines.

The Governor's order allows many businesses to stay open, but they are supposed to be adhering to strict social distancing policies. Businesses that aren't outright banned by the order are directed to work toward allowing employees to work from home as much as possible, appoint an officer to oversee proper precautions are being taken, and enforce 6 feet of distance between employees that are still in the same building together.

However, if anecdotal evidence is any guide, at least some employers in Oregon are flouting both the spirit and the letter of the order in an effort to keep in business.

"If your employer is staying open and not enforcing 6 feet of social distancing, you can report them to Oregons Occupational Safety and Health division," Governor Brown said in a brief Facebook post.

The executive order does allow for a (very limited) number of businesses to operate without such strict guidelines  grocery stores, healthcare facilities, and medical or pharmacy services are only "encouraged" to strive for these same social distancing rules.

Oregon's stay-at-home order does not hinge on what businesses are considered essential or non-essential, unlike some other states. Only the short list of resources just listed are exempt from the social distancing rules, everyone else who stays open is directed to follow social distancing  or risk being shut down.

Brown linked to Oregon's OSHA portal for reporting workplace hazards, which can be reached here.
The number of coronavirus infections is set to hit half a million today, with Italy and the US each expected to surpass the number of cases recorded in China within days.

According to Beijing's numbers the deadly virus has abated in China, where it originated in Wuhan, with the number infected at 81,000, with just 67 new cases on Wednesday.

In Italy, more than 74,300 have been infected, while in the US more than 69,000 have the disease. Italy posted another 3,491 cases on Wednesday, while the US reported another 3,342 cases.

The global figure infected currently stands at 487,648, while the death toll has soared to more than 22,000.

In Italy, more than 74,300 have been infected, while in the US more than 69,000 have the disease. Italy posted another 3,491 cases on Wednesday, while the US reported another 3,342 cases (pictured: coffins are lined up on the floor in the San Giuseppe church in Seriate, one of the areas worst hit by coronavirus, near Bergamo)

A person walks through a nearly empty Times Square in New York. The global figure infected currently stands at 487,648, while the death toll has soared to more than 22,000.

Italy, which recorded its first coronavirus death in February, has to date declared 7,503 fatalities, Spain has declared 4,089, both have more than China which has recorded 3,287 deaths.

The other worst-hit countries are Iran with 2,234 fatalities and 29,406 cases, and France with 1,331 deaths and 25,233 cases.

Faced with the spread of the pandemic, the U.S. Senate has passed a $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care facilities.

Millions of Americans hoped the measure, which is expected to be voted on in the House on Friday, would give them a lifeline as they lost jobs, income and child care due to lockdowns, travel restrictions and business closures.

At least 2.8 billion people are under severe travel restrictions. But the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, scolded world leaders for wasting precious time in the fight against the virus that has thrown millions out of work and ravaged the world economy.

Soldiers of the Italian Army, along with police and Carabinieri officers, guard the road access to the town of Nerola, Italy

The small town of Nerola, located some 50 kilometers (30 miles) to the north of Rome, has been designated as a coronavirus 'red zone' following the detection of dozens of cases of the COVID-19 disease

'The time to act was actually more than a month ago or two months ago,' he said Wednesday. 'We squandered the first window of opportunity. ... This is a second opportunity, which we should not squander and do everything to suppress and control this virus.'

In the United States, where virus deaths passed 1,000, a political battle raged between those demanding urgent action for a long siege against the pandemic, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and President Donald Trump.

Trump has expressed hope churches could return to normal by Easter on April 12, and grumbled that 'our country wasn't built to be shut down' - apparently concerned that the outbreak's devastating effects on financial markets and employment will harm his re-election chances. Democrats say Trump is prioritizing the economy over the health and safety of Americans.

'I'd like to say, let's get back to work next Friday,' said Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. 'That'd be wonderful. But it can't be arbitrary.'

Spain's death toll from coronavirus has topped 4,000 - with 655 new fatalities registered overnight bringing the total to 4,089

A Spanish soldier walks next to beds set up at a temporary hospital for vulnerable and homeless people in Barcelona

Video taken at Albacete hospital, 85 miles west of Valencia, showed patients lining corridors after they ran out of beds and people laying on the floor from exhaustion

In Brazil, the country's governors are defying President Jair Bolsonaro over his call to reopen schools and businesses, dismissing his argument that the 'cure' of widespread shutdowns to contain the spread of the coronavirus is worse than the disease.

Brazil's Supreme Court upheld virus mitigation plans that had been challenged by Bolsonaro. As of Thursday, the country had more than 2,550 cases and 59 deaths.

New York has emerged as a global virus hotspot and Cuomo says infections are doubling nearly every few days. The city's convention center is being turned into a temporary hospital and the state has hit 280 deaths, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University.

Spain has become the country in Europe where the outbreak is spreading the fastest. On Thursday, the Health Ministry reported reported 8,578 new infections and 655 deaths, bringing the total cases to 56,188 and more than 4,000 fatalities - second only to Italy's death toll of 7,503.

'We are collapsing,' said Lidia Perera, a nurse at Madrid's Hospital de la Paz. 'We need more workers.'

Watching patients die alone is 'killing all of us inside,' she said.

A plainclothes police officer strikes a man over the legs for breaking a strict 21-day curfew imposed across India as the country attempts to slow the spread of coronavirus in Kolkata

While the lockdown is intended to prevent the spread of coronavirus, there were fears that it could inadvertently spread it to the countryside as migrant workers fled cities on packed buses

Men caught violating rules about public gatherings in India are forced to crouch inside chalk circles drawn on the ground to show them what mandatory minimum distances looks like amid the country's lockdown

'Physically this is extremely complicated, but psychologically it is appalling,' said colleague Patricia Nunez, a nurse who is recovering from being infected herself.

In Italy, doctors and nurses begged the government to provide more masks, gloves and goggles and urged the public to understand how important onerous social distancing measures really are. Scientists say stopping just one person from getting the virus means scores of others will not become infected down the road.

'Please don't leave us alone. Help us help you,' Dr. Francesca De Gennaro, who heads a small medical clinic in Italy's hard-hit Bergamo region, wrote in an open letter.

European Union leaders were holding their third summit in three weeks on the virus to manage the havoc it is wreaking on their 27 economies. As the number of deaths in Europe soared past 12,000, Spain prolonged a state of emergency that will allow it to impose broader lockdowns while French President Emmanuel Macron launched 'Operation Resilience,' a military-backed response to combat the pandemic.

France began evacuating infected citizens from the northeastern hotspot of Alsace using a special high-speed train that its health minister called a 'first in Europe.' About 20 patients were being taken from Strasbourg to hospitals in the Pays-de-la-Loire and other regions.

Britain ordered 10,000 ventilators to grapple with the COVID-19 crisis, working with engineers from Dyson. The government wants to increase its supply of the breathing machines from 8,000 to 30,000.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.

So far, more than 115,000 people have recovered from the virus, and health care experts say the key to fighting it is to 'flatten the curve' - slow the spread of the outbreak so that hospitals aren't overwhelmed with seriously ill patients all at once. Slowing the rate of infections will also cut the eventual death rate.

China's cases have slowed, with only 67 new cases reported, all recent arrivals.

The leaders of the Group of 20 largest economies were holding a special video conference to better coordinate a response to the pandemic, amid criticism that the world's wealthiest countries have not taken cohesive action. The conference was being chaired by Saudi Arabia's King Salman.

A view of the construction site of a new infectious diseases hospital for patients with a suspected COVID-19 coronavirus infection in the village of Golokhvastovo, Russia

Russia has 840 cases of coronavirus, but that increased by a record 182 on Thursday amid fears the disease is starting to spike as it has in other badly-hit countries

As the virus spreads into new territory, many countries took drastic measures.

India on Thursday began enforcing the world's largest coronavirus lockdown, trying to keep its 1.3 billion people indoors. In neighboring Pakistan, a caseload of nearly 1,100 infections propelled government efforts to persuade the country's more than 200 million people to stay home.

As cases start to rise in Russia, President Vladimir Putin ordered the military in to help. The government announced it would halt all international flights starting Friday and will have troops build 16 medical centers to treat virus victims by mid-May. Russia says it has 658 cases, but experts say those figures underreport the crisis there and may be due to the lack of testing.

Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House's coronavirus task force, urged people to understand just how important each one of them is to stopping the pandemic.

'To every American out there, where you are protecting yourself, you are protecting others,' Birx said.
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(Photo : Pixabay) The tough decision is being considered due to lack of personal protective equipment.

With the rising number of coronavirus patients but the dwindling protective gears of medical staff, hospitals and doctors are debating whether they should order a do-not-resuscitate policy for COVID-19 patients--a harrowing choice to help save healthcare frontliners against the virus.

Doctors are Given a Hard Choice

According to the Washington Post, the Northwestern Memorial Hospital located in Chicago is already discussing that doctors and medical staff may stop resuscitating coronavirus patients when their hearts and breathing stop, regardless of the family's wishes.

This is after realizing the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE), including face masks, gowns, and gloves, medical staff is more at risk of catching the virus.

During resuscitation, medical staff at the frontlines are in close contact with the patient, so the risk of getting infected is higher.

Based on a report by the Daily Mail, one of Northwestern's intensive-care medical directors, Richard Wunderink, said that the hospital administrators would be talking to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker to clarify whether the law permits such change in hospital policies.

Wunderink believes that it's a significant concern for everyone, and added: "This is something about which we have had lots of communication with families, and I think they are very aware of the grave circumstances."

Read Also: 3.5M Coronavirus Antibody Kits Should be Available 'Within Days' According to PHE Official

More Hospitals Consider a Do-Not-Resuscitate Order

Besides Northwestern Memorial Hospital, doctors at the George Washington University Hospital are also considering the do-not-resuscitate orders.

However, they will continue to resuscitate coronavirus victims for now but will prepare special measures such as creating a barrier and putting a plastic sheet over the victim before they follow with the CPR.

Meanwhile, healthcare staff at the University of Washington Medical Center located in Seattle is handling the situation by limiting the responders of a cardiac or respiratory arrest patient if they are positive for COVID-19.

Several other larger hospital systems, including the regional Kaiser Permanente networks and the Atrium Health in the Carolinas, are also looking at guidelines that could potentially allow doctors to override the wishes of a coronavirus patient's family on a case-to-case basis.

Again, this is due to the shortage of protective gear.

However, they would stop short of enforcing a do-not-resuscitate policy on all coronavirus patients.

Tough but Logical

Bioethicist Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin - Madison believes that the choice is a logical one, saying that it will not help us if doctors and nurses get infected by the virus and would be unable to help us.

Likewise, a bioethicist from the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Halpern, said that if healthcare staff risk their life for one patient, they detract themselves from caring for future patients, which is "unfair."

Healthcare Workers are Exhausted

Around the world, thousands of healthcare workers are already isolating themselves at home after being in contact with a patient and showing symptoms.

Healthcare staff has also died, including one Italian nurse who committed suicide after testing positive of COVID-19 in fear that she would infect other people, as per the New York Post.

Additionally, medical frontliners are getting more mentally and physically exhausted, according to Time, with the ongoing battle against the coronavirus pandemic, especially when they have to go to work knowing they are risking their lives.

Read Also: 24 Bodies a Day: Fleet of Military Trucks Bring the Dead Out of an Overwhelmed Italian City Due to Coronavirus-Related Deaths

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The Centre has directed states to use the Rs 31,000-crore fund to aid 3.5 crore construction workers during the coronavirus pandemic. Real estate developers have welcomed the announcement saying that it is the step in the right direction and that the Government must consider providing similar relief to the unregistered construction workers.

States are required to use the Workers Welfare Fund to provide economic relief to construction workers facing economic disruption, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on March 26.

Rs 31,000 crore is available in the Building and other Construction Workers Fund (BOCW). These can be used for 3.5 crore construction workers. The government has suggested state governments to utilise this for the welfare of these workers, Sambit Patra tweeted.

Niranjan Hiranandani, president  NAREDCO, welcomed the relief. The widely covered unorganized sectors including agrarian and construction laborers, these moves aim at resolving primary problems of the poor.

One hopes that other segments of society, who are also looking forward to measures such as EMI waivers as also extension of loan scheme tenures, among others economic package shall be on wait and watch mode, he said.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

With state governments across India announcing a lockdown to contain the spread of novel coronavirus or COVID-19, work at ongoing construction sites has come to a grinding halt, real estate developers told Moneycontrol.

The Governments announcement to primarily protect the livelihood of the citizens currently at an economic disadvantage is a step in the right direction. We particularly laud the utilization of the existing Rs 31,000 crore welfare fund for over 3.5 crore construction workers across India, said Nayan Shah, President, CREDAI MCHI.

However, there is an urgent need for the Government to follow a similar approach to combat the adverse implications of Covid  19 on the Indian Real Estate industry, he said.

We thank the Government for taking cognizance of our recommendation and advising the states to use BOCW cess funds collected by the labour welfare boards in providing the immediate relief to the construction workers. Concurrently, the Government must consider providing similar relief to the unregistered construction workers, said Satish Magar, president, Credai, National.

We are also ensuring that our construction workers are provided with basic amenities to be able to cope up with the ongoing situation. With this positive step, the industry eagerly awaits the economic stimulus required for our revival. We stand in solidarity with the government as a socially responsible organization, he said.

Construction at all sites came to a halt last week. Daily wage construction workers are suffering because of the lockdown. Besides those from MMR who have returned home, about 50,000 construction workers from the around 3 lakh labourers in Delhi-NCR have returned to their hometown.

All developers are required to pay one percent as cess to the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Fund.

Pradeep Aggarwal, founder and chairman, Signature Global and Chairman, National Council on Affordable Housing, ASSOCHAM said that workers are vital for the construction industry and thus, we welcome the governments decision to extend a helping hand to them through effective use of the Building & other construction welfare fund.

The Building and Other Construction Worker Welfare Fund has a corpus of about Rs 31,000 crore. It is important that the proceeds are effectively utulised to help this vulnerable segment, said Ashish Bhutani, MD Bhutani Infra.

The Delhi government has decided to give Rs 5,000 to construction workers as their livelihood has been affected due to coronavirus outbreak, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced on Tuesday.

Subhash Bhatnagar, National Campaign Committee for Central Legislation on Construction Labour (NCC-CL), too had written to the Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal requesting for a transfer of one-month minimum wage into the bank accounts of construction workers registered with the Delhi Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board (BOCW).

This letter was in response to the March 22 order notifying a lockdown in the NCT (National Capital Territory) of Delhi until March 31.

There are over 10 lakh construction workers in Delhi. Of which, 5.4 lakh are registered with the Delhi BOCW. Because labour officials of the Delhi BOCW suddenly stopped carrying out their responsibilities from May 2018 onwards, most construction workers do not have a live registration. Even the digital upgradation of membership, which was started on November 16, 2018, has been very slow. In 16 months, it has been able to update only 50,000-60,000 construction workers as live registrations of the over five lakh registered beneficiaries, the letter had said.

States like Kerala, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Jharkhand have announced emergency relief as other benefits under their respective state BOCW boards in light of the current health crisis.

The Supreme Court last week categorised over two crore registered construction workers as consumers making it possible for them to move consumer forums if any government denied them benefits promised under the welfare schemes implemented with funds collected as cess from real estate builders.
Prasanta Mazumdar By

Express News Service

GUWAHATI: Village republics are back in vogue in parts of the Northeast.

Village after village in the region has resorted to the age-old mechanism of putting up barricades to fence themselves from novel coronavirus carriers from outside. In the process, people are staying at home and protecting themselves and others.

The barricades have been put up across villages in Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh. So far, the Northeast has recorded two positive cases, one each in Manipur and Mizoram, but the panic is widespread.

Hatkhola village in Assam's Baksa district

It (barricade) reminds me of our ancestors who would wait and guard the village in their traditional fort vigil of enemies during the head-hunting era, Sanen Pongen, who is the chairman of Chuchuyimlang Village Council in Nagalands Mokokchung district, told The New Indian Express.

He said the villagers were keeping vigil to ensure that no outsider, including our own citizens settled in various towns and cities or abroad, enter our village with the deadly virus. He said the barricading would continue till the threat from the virus was completely over.

Traders in Chuchuyimlang town bring essential commodities from Assam. I learnt yesterday (Wednesday) that trucks were not allowed to load the items in Jorhat (in Assam). The stocks in our market will exhaust in 15 days. We are worried, he said.

In Arunachals East Siang district, the locals locked down several villages by erecting the barricades to prevent the entry of outsiders. Nobody is being allowed to enter or leave the villages. This customary self-restriction is called motor or pator system in the Adi (tribe) dialect.

Phungyar block headquarters in Manipur

As the villagers imposed self-restrictions, normal activities came to a grinding halt in the villages. The village authorities passed instructions on the locals to keep their houses and surroundings clean.

Matung in Tamenglong district is one of Manipurs many villages where the villagers put up road barricades. The locals on Wednesday did not allow a team of health officials to pass through the village despite prior information about their visit by the district magistrate.

In the states Kamjong district, almost all villages have put up the barricades.

As we dont have access to proper healthcare facilities, only we have to take care of ourselves. If one person gets infected, the whole village will be finished, said Yarmatai, who is the president of Raizan Students Union, a local students body.

Similarly, the locals kept Hatkhola village in Assams Baksa district out of bounds for outsiders.

We have closed all roads leading up to Hatkhola to prevent the entry of COVID-19-infected people into the village. We appeal to people to cooperate with the government during the lockdown period, Dhrubajyoti Das, a villager, said.
Yesteryear actress Nimmi passed away after a prolonged illness on Wednesday. The star from the 50s and 60s had featured in Aan, Barsaat and Deedar. The actor was brought to a suburban Juhu hospital after she complained of breathlessness. She died in the evening, family sources told PTI.

"She was admitted to the hospital on Wednesday afternoon after she complained of breathlessness. She passed away this evening. She had been unwell for quite sometime. She had been in and out of hospital this year," the source added.







Bollywood stars and her fans have paid heartfelt tribute to the star. Take a look.





Saddened to hear that yesteryear actress Nimmi ji has passed away. She leaves behind a legacy of classic work and will always be remembered for the versatility, beauty and talent she brought to the Indian screen. Rest in a Peace.  #Nimmi pic.twitter.com/gNTeYXppw3  Manav Agrawal (@coolagrawal1999) March 25, 2020

RIP. Thank you Nimmi aunty for all the blessings and love for Bobby on its premiere release. You were part of the RK family. Barsaat was your first film. Allha aapko Jannat naseeb kare. Ameen. pic.twitter.com/nsTGhpCpac  Rishi Kapoor (@chintskap) March 25, 2020





 jiya beqaraar hai,

chaayi bahaar hai,

aaja more baalama,

tera intezaar hai .. #RIP actress NIMMI passes away



born as Nawab Bano in Agra; she celebrated her 88th birthday only a month ago. She debuted in film Barsaat and featured in 50+ films. pic.twitter.com/r35xJgjNiL  Film History Pics (@FilmHistoryPic) March 25, 2020

Dads Rakhi sister is no more. Om Shanti Nimmi ji. pic.twitter.com/YBMYyH3KFa  sunil sikand  (@ttunni) March 25, 2020





Veteran actress Nimmi is no more.

RIP pic.twitter.com/7zbbo3bYZl  Nitin Godbole  (@nitingodbole) March 25, 2020

The image of Nimmi in a Kashmiri blossom thicket, donning blooms of full maturation; her shy chirps and fleeting eye-flutters toward the lens affirm her contrasting juvenescencethe unripe rosebud of vintage cinema. pic.twitter.com/toZsk8C463  L A I L A  (@lailaofgenovia) March 25, 2020





 You may win your hearts desire, but in the end you are cheated of it by death. Goodbye Nimmiji  . Yesteryears dove-eyed actress Nimmi passes away at 88 https://t.co/fRoQWlbuKI  Mahesh Bhatt (@MaheshNBhatt) March 25, 2020





The actress will be buried at a cemetery in Mumbai.


Kolkata, March 26 : A 66-year-old man, admitted to a private hospital, here, has tested positive for coronavirus, taking the total number of positive cases in West Bengal to 10.

According to hospital sources, the patient is in ICCU and being treated with hydroxy-chloroquine and other medicines prescribed for HIV treatment.

The man had gone to Digha, the East Midnapore district's popular tourist resort, where he felt unwell, said his family on Thursday.

Prior to Digha visit, the man had stayed for a few days at a relative's place in East Midnapore district's Egra. There he also attended a marriage ceremony in which a few of the invitees had come from abroad.

The latest Covid-19 patient, a resident of Nayabad near the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, here, was admitted to the Peerless Hospital on Monday with fever, cough and respiratory problems. He was kept in the isolation ward.

On Tuesday, his swab sample was sent to the virology laboratory at the state-run SSKM Hospital, where it tested positive. A second confirmatory test also gave the same result, officials said.

While one afflicted person died on Monday, others are under treatment.

On the Egra visit, his brother-in-law said, "He came to my place on March 12, and left on March 23. In between he went to Digha. There he fell unwell, and came back. He had fever, which got worse. We sent him to Kolkata, where he was hospitalised." Asked whether he and other family members were taking precautionary measures prescribed for those coming in close contact with Covid-19 affected, he said they were living in home isolation.

"We are living under lock and key. Neither are we allowing anyone to come to our house, nor are we going out," he said.

In Kolkata, the patient's immediate family members have also been kept in home isolation. The police have been posted outside their residence.
With their reservations canceled, the trip had come to an end, said Ms. Lauster, 68, a retired school librarian. They watched as friends packed their belongings within hours and hit the road the following day. Then they started planning their own drive home.

It took them about three days to get to upstate New York. Hours into their drive, one of the campers wheels came off, which forced them to stop in Virginia for a Band-Aid fix, Ms. Lauster said. The following day, after driving for about 11 hours, they made it to Clyde a little after midnight. They plan to remain under self-quarantine for two weeks.

It was a relief to be home, Ms. Lauster said. Theres no longer the pressure of what happens if they close roads, if they close gas stations?

In Texas, another popular state for snowbirds (though they are called winter Texans there), private campgrounds remain open and largely full, said Brian Schaeffer, the executive director and chief executive of the Texas Association of Campground Owners. His 400 members, made up of private campgrounds and R.V. parks, have only seen about a five percent decline in reservations and will continue to operate as essential businesses. The majority of the parks visitors usually stay for an entire season.

Mr. Schaeffer said he thought it was better for visitors to shelter in place in South Texas. Better to do that than risk traveling through multiple states to get back home. Once things settle down, then you can go back.
President Trump takes questions during a White House briefing about the coronavirus crisis. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

Confronted with criticism about the lagging federal response to the coronavirus crisis, President Trump often boasts about his Jan. 31 decision to restrict travel from China, where the outbreak began, claiming he saved thousands of American lives.

But Trump has repeatedly overstated the effect of his decision, and the supposed opposition to it, even as he has misrepresented federal efforts to develop a vaccine and supply protective masks, ventilators and other critically needed gear.

"Nobody wanted that to happen," he said Wednesday about the China travel ban. "Everybody thought it was just unnecessary to do it. And if we didn't do that, thousands and thousands of people would have died, more than what's happened."

Speaking at a White House coronavirus briefing, Trump gave himself and his administration unabashed praise. "It's hard not to be happy with the job we're doing, that I can tell you," he said.

With more than 68,000 confirmed cases and more than 1,000 U.S. deaths as of Thursday, Trump's decision two months ago to restrict all foreign travelers from China, and to quarantine Americans returning from China for two weeks, had a short-lived impact at best, experts say.

"To the degree that it bought us time, we did not take advantage of that time," said Jeffrey Levi, a public health expert at George Washington University, who said the coronavirus had already spread to other countries when Trump imposed the ban.

Levi said the administration should have begun widespread testing, improved medical surveillance systems, begun preparing hospitals and ordered emergency production of masks and ventilators "so we wouldn't be in the difficult position we're in today."

Chris Beyrer, a professor of epidemiology and international health at Johns Hopkins University, said Trump issued his order too late to make a difference because coronavirus infections were already reported in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Toronto, as well as 26 other countries.

Story continues

Any gains from the travel ban were lost in "the crucial early days and weeks of spread by our lack of testing, limited contact tracing, and failure to impose rapid travel and movement restrictions where cases were identified to limit clusters," he said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the public face of the administration's public health response, has praised Trump's decision on China but said it wasn't enough to halt "the tsunami" of infections.

With its caseload fast rising, the United States will soon be the epicenter of the global pandemic, according to Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

"We squandered weeks," Jha said Thursday. The travel restrictions "created a sense of complacency because it felt like we did something meaningful."

Asked Thursday about the fast spread of U.S. infections, Trump acted as if it were a point of pride, calling the soaring figures "a tribute to our testing" while casting doubt on the accuracy of China's numbers.

"I'm sure you're not able to tell what China's testing and not testing," he said.

China, which appears to have gotten its own outbreak under control, tightened its own travel restrictions Thursday. Beijing announced that it would temporarily block foreign nationals with valid visas and residence permits from entering the country.

Trump said he planned to speak by phone with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday night.

As the crisis has worsened, Trump has repeatedly blamed what he calls "the Chinese virus," although this week he briefly stopped amid reports of racist attacks on Asian Americans. He revived the term Thursday, however.

"I talk about the 'Chinese virus' and I mean it  that's where it came from," he said at the White House briefing, before praising Asian Americans. "I'm very close to them, as you know," Trump said.

The president and some of his supporters continue to suggest China was responsible for the pandemic, which began in Wuhan, and some members of the administration have called it the "Wuhan virus."

A video meeting of the Group of Seven nations ended Wednesday without a customary joint statement because other foreign ministers wouldnt agree with a demand by Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, who chaired the meeting, to cite the Wuhan virus, not the coronavirus.

Tim O'Brien, a Trump biographer, said the president is "trying to self-preserve by shifting blame for the problem to China and he's trying to portray himself as a man of action by focusing on this one thing he did," referring to the travel ban.

"He's much more concerned about self-preservation and self-aggrandizement than he is about doing the right thing as a leader in a time of crisis," said O'Brien, who worked as an advisor to Michael R. Bloomberg's now-shuttered campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Trump repeatedly minimized the danger of the pandemic until March 13, when he declared a national emergency  "two very big words"  to free up $50 billion in federal resources to deal with the crisis even as he denied any responsibility for the slow response.

He has falsely claimed that testing, a key to identifying and containing the spreading virus, was widely available when it was not, shifting only this week to boasts about tests having finally ramped up.

He has also touted unproven remedies and falsely suggested a vaccine is imminent.

Trump has also overstated Democrats' response to the travel ban, accusing Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Joe Biden, the putative Democratic presidential nominee, of opposing it. Neither one did so, although Biden blasted Trump more broadly for what he called a record of "xenophobia and hysteria."

Washington is justified in criticizing Beijing for covering up the early stages of the outbreak by concealing reports of the virus and detaining doctors who sounded early alarms, according to China experts. But the mounting propaganda battle threatens to hamper cooperation at a critical moment.

"We should be cooperating at a time when China has learned a lot about this virus, and instead we're engaging in this name-calling," said Stephen A. Orlins, president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a nongovernmental group.

"The nationalism it's stoked in China is terrible," he added. "There are people in China who want to send masks and equipment to the rest of the world, but they'd rather send it to the [European Union] than the U.S. at this point."

"Every effort that the administration should be making today should be focused on saving American lives. That the administration is seeking to talk about blame at this point is a political calculus that is incredibly irresponsible and inappropriate to the moment."
On Friday, a Silicon Valley technologist named Aaron Ginn self-published an article on Medium called Evidence Over hysteriaCOVID-19 that garnered millions of views. Touting his marketing expertise in understanding virality, Ginn gathered publicly available epidemiological data to make the case that the coronavirus threat to the U.S. doesnt merit the dramatic response called for by public health officials: Shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses.

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Ginns analysis certainly had a seductive contrarian appealafter all, who wouldnt want to hear that the pandemic wont be as bad as we were told? But a closer look by scientists revealed his number-crunching to be riddled with inconsistencies and entry-level errors. Over the weekend, Medium took down the post.

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Ginn is far from the only quantitative type posting superficially convincing but flawed epidemiological analyses of the ongoing global pandemic. Across social media, Silicon Valley data wonks, as well as people with Ph.D.s in fields tangentially related to epidemiology, are analyzing public datasets, posting graphs, and making sweeping predictions about the pandemic. Some, like Ginn, draw conclusions that contradict accepted public health advice. Other casual assessments of the numbers are being used to make uselessly terrifying cases for containing the viruss spread. Wherever you look, people have become suspiciously comfortable with concepts like R 0 and CFRs, which they use to argue in favor of or against widespread social distancing. At least one epidemiologist has called the phenomenon a crisis in its own rightan epidemic of armchair epidemiology.

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One reason back-of-the-envelope hot takes are thriving is that the science of ongoing epidemics is inherently uncertain. And in the U.S., the testing fiasco has only amplified that uncertainty. How many people have the new coronavirus? How many people will become infected and never know? How likely are they to spread it? What role do children play? What is the actual death rate? These are crucial data, and we simply dont have reliable estimates right now. In addition, how societies behave feeds back into the epidemics severity, adding another layer of uncertainty. The way the virus behaves in China or Italy will be different from how it behaves here, depending on what we do. The only thing we know for sure is that things continue to change rapidly, which also means that in these circumstances, anyone claiming certainty is suspect.

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I used to be an experimental neuroscientist, so while Im not a math whiz, Im comfortable with numbers. I only bring up my background because I understand the temptation to play around with public data. As we all watch an unpredictable crisis unfold in real time, numbers offer refuge in the hell pit of media noise and genuine political turmoil. Perhaps by crunching the numbers myself, Ill find clarity, or provide helpful information, or find something that challenges accepted wisdom, in a useful way. Plus, playing with numbers is just kind of fun. But should science-minded nonepidemiologist like myself give in to the impulse to post off-the-cuff analyses? Does this add to the discussion, or just provide another source of misinformation with a potentially dangerous veneer of authority?

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One reason back-of-the-envelope hot takes are thriving is that the science of ongoing epidemics is inherently uncertain.

When Medium took down Ginns post (its since been posted here), the Wall Street Journals editorial board framed its removal as an attempt to stamp out free debate and require conformity with the judgment of expert institutions. The board has a point: We shouldnt always blindly trust expertise. Consensus is not always coterminous with truth. And in some cases, outsider viewpoints provide valuable insights that evade insider experts. But this wave of nouveau epidemiologists parsing publicly available data about the new coronavirus does not appear to be one of those cases. Epidemiological amateurs make faulty assumptions, get basic principles wrong, or just pull numbers out of thin air. Slipshod data-crunching doesnt challenge the consensus in any meaningful way. Opining with numbers just because you use numbers in your day job isnt formulating a rigorous dissent; its overestimating your abilities while lacking self-awareness of your own incompetencethe Dunning-Kruger effect. In my experience, the Dunning-Kruger effect seems particularly strong in people who think real expertise in one area automatically confers expertise in another.

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Im quite experienced at understanding virality, how things grow, and data, Ginn writes, in a hall-of-mirrors move that seems to elide the fact that marketing virality is a bastardized metaphor cribbed from  epidemiology. In my vocation, Im most known for popularizing the growth hacking movement in Silicon Valley that specializes in driving rapid and viral adoption of technology products. Data is data. Our focus here isnt treatments but numbers. You dont need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesnt say. Numbers are universal. That has a nice ring to it. Its also not true.

Data isnt just data. It cant exist without context. Rather than diving into Ginns analysis, which is lengthy and complicated and has already been refuted in some detail by more qualified critics, let me offer a simple example of how a lack of expertise can make analyses go awry. Last week, I came across a Medium post by another data scientist named Abe Stanway. Stanway wanted to figure out how to track the outbreak in New York City when testing was almost nonexistenta laudable goal. So he ran some numbers using New York Citys publicly available data on influenzalike illness, which tallies emergency room visits where the chief complaint mentions flu, fever, and sore throat. Stanway reasoned unusual upticks in visits by patients complaining of these symptoms might reflect unknown COVID-19 cases. One of his most surprising conclusions was that the epicenter of the New York City outbreak was a Queens neighborhood called, believe it or not, Corona. Stanway tweeted his discovery (You just cant make this shit up). I noticed this tweet and his analysis concerned me because my child care provider, who is nearly 60 years old, lives near that neighborhood. I thought it might be worth giving her a heads up to be extra careful.

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I also thought Id check over Stanways work before potentially panicking our child care provider. And, Ill admit, I was eager to peruse the data. So I went to the NYC Health Data site, got to work, and immediately found a likely flaw in Stanways method. Stanway was correct that, at the time of his analysis at least, the Corona neighborhood had the highest number of reported cases in NYC. But by comparing this years data with previous years data, I noticed the Corona neighborhood has the highest number of flu cases every year. That suggests this years high rate reflects baseline characteristics of the neighborhoodsuch as a population more likely to go to the emergency room for health carerather than indicating that its the epicenter of this particular outbreak. Sure, it may be possible that Corona has special characteristics and its the center of the current coronavirus outbreak. I dont know. But the point is that neither does Abe Stanway. It takes knowledge to know what other variables might be thwarting your analysis. But Stanway didnt take any steps to control for confounding variables. I asked an epidemiologist at NYU to check over my reasoning, and he confirmed that one of the first things youd want to do is compare this year with previous years, to understand the baseline for the area. In other words, Stanways omission is a mistake few expertswho would understand the problem of likely confounderswould make.

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This isnt to pick on Stanway (although, like many others, he should take down his misleading post), but to point out a larger problem with coronavirus data vigilantes: They dont know what they dont know. They are oddly comfortable marshalling irrelevant credentials to make sweeping predictions that muddy the waters at a profoundly critical time. As one Twitter user quipped, Coronavirus can cause a hacking cough. As a software engineer, I know a thing or two about hacking. In this Medium post I will be.

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Stanway, it seems, was just having fun with the numbers, and perhaps thought his conclusions would be helpful to someone. But Ginnwhose Medium post gained far more attentionhad a clearer purpose: to persuade. This is a crucial distinction. Ginn is making two types of arguments: a scientific one (what is happening with the pandemic?) and a political one (what should we do about it?). These questions are of course interrelated. But the political question, in particular, urgently needs to be addressed, even though its often something public health officials like to evade.

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By presenting his argument as fundamentally scientific, Ginn comes off as an objective, just-the-facts guy, someone with expertise that readers searching for answers can trust. But this coy stance is a rhetorical one that helps advance a political argument. At the end of his post, when Ginn debates the trade-offs of various political responses, I dont actually disagree with many of the points he raises. The economic consequences of mitigating the pandemic are huge. The powers gained by the state in this situation are troubling. The government authorities making these decisions should absolutely be questioned and subjected to intense scrutiny. Ginn is right to push back, but the problem is how he does it. His bizarre credentialing flex and subsequent numerical legerdemainwhich at first glance seem to boost his credibilityultimately make his pushback seem less reliable.

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These posts may be coming in response to an epidemic, but they reflect the alternative facts problem endemic to American political psychologyjust now with a pernicious quantitative twist. As public opinion about the appropriate response to the pandemic becomespredictably and depressinglyhyperpolarized, people are falling in line. Theres a growing movement in conservative circles to end the shelter-in-place directives and a growing insistence in liberal circles to keep them in place. Earlier this week, trending on Twitter were #ReopenAmerica (among conservatives) and #NotDyingForWallStreet (among liberals). With the help of the president, were watching the conversation devolve into a false dichotomy between saving the economy and preserving public health. In this escalating din, I hear the familiar refrains of the culture wars. Posts like Ginns entrench each side further, because now each side gets to claim its own set of settled facts. In reality, a rapidly developing pandemic requires we tolerate some amount of uncertainty.

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That said, the facts on the ground make it clear that many things are far less uncertain than the raft of Medium posts might lead the casual reader to believe. Countries that have failed to take preventive measures get hit harder. Health care systems in New York City are already becoming overwhelmed before the pandemic has peaked. Its necessary and important to debate the political response to the pandemic. But as a few researchers penned in their own cheeky Medium post, we need to flatten the curve of armchair epidemiology (If take appears hot/feverish, seek expert help). When the stakes are this high, the decision to use your authority (and yes, having a Ph.D. or a fancy job title is a form of authority) is an ethical one: Just because you can analyze data doesnt mean you should.

For more on the impact of the coronavirus, listen to the latest episode of What Next.
A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now killed more than 21,000 people around the world, including at least 1,000 in the United States.

Spains death toll has eclipsed that of China where the new respiratory virus, known officially as COVID-19, was first detected back in December. Spains count of over 3,600 deaths is now second only to that of Italy, where more than 7,500 people have died from the virus, according to data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Worldwide, there are more than 472,000 diagnosed cases of COVID-19, spanning every continent except Antarctica. With more than 69,000 cases, the United States has the third-highest national total behind Italy and China. The virus has rapidly spread across every U.S. state as well as Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. At least 114,000 people around the world have recovered from COVID-19. (ABC News)

Featured stories

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky gives a thumbs up as he leaves the Senate chamber Wednesday on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Andrew Harnik, Associated Press)AP

U.S. Senate approves $2 trillion coronavirus package that includes relief checks (cleveland.com)

13 deaths in a day: An apocalyptic coronavirus surge at a New York City hospital (New York Times)

Soldiers around the world get a new mission: Enforcing coronavirus lockdowns (Washington Post)

The U.S. is asking other countries for everything from hand sanitizer to ventilators to help fight the coronavirus (CNN)

Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent who vanished in 2007, died in Iranian custody, his family says (Washington Post)

National news

Nyla Clark, 3, accompanied by her mother, Chavonne Clark, sits in a baby stroller Wednesday at a corner in New Orleans, hoping to get a few dollars from an occasional passerby. Clark was a phlebotomist with a local company until she lost her job because of the coronavirus pandemic. (David Grunfeld, The Advocate via AP)

Quite ominous: Unemployment claims for last week could reach several million due to COVID-19 layoffs (USA Today)

All 94 residents of New Jersey nursing home presumed positive for coronavirus (USA Today)

Uninsured on the front lines: Americas working poor face a pandemic without any aid (NBC News)

Abortion-rights groups sue Texas over abortion ban amid coronavirus outbreak (CBS News)

Idaho governor issues stay-at-home order for 21 days amid coronavirus spread (The Hill)

Americans coping with coronavirus are clogging toilets with wipes and T-shirts (NBC News)

Man licked deodorant in a Walmart for coronavirus prank video, authorities say (CBS News)

Tornado rips across Mississippi and Alabama, causing injuries and damage (USA Today)

World news

A commuter wears face mask to protect himself from the coronavirus Thursday at a skytrain in Bangkok, Thailand. (Sakchai Lalit, Associated Press)

Christchurch shootings: Brenton Tarrant pleads guilty to 51 murders (BBC)

U.S. envoy blames China for endangering world with coronavirus (Reuters)

Pentagon halts overseas travel of U.S. troops for 60 days to mitigate spread of coronavirus (ABC News)

Canada doubles value of coronavirus stimulus package, promises cash, loan delays (Reuters)

50,000 U.S. citizens still stuck overseas because of coronavirus (NBC News)

Coronavirus delays Russian vote on Putin staying in power (BBC)

Coronavirus: Bolsonaro downplays threat of pandemic to Brazil (BBC)

Kosovo government falls in vote of no confidence (The Guardian)
A ctor Mark Blum has died at the age of 69 due to complication from coronavirus, his representative confirmed.

New York theatre company Playwrights Horizons first announced news of Blums death in a tweet shared on Thursday, in which they hailed the You and Crocodile Dundee star as a dear longtime friend and a consummate artist.

With love and heavy hearts, Playwrights Horizons pays tribute to Mark Blum, a dear longtime friend and a consummate artist who passed this week, they wrote.

Thank you, Mark, for all you brought to our theatre, and to theatres and audiences across the world. We will miss you.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1950, Blum began his career on the stage in the 70s before moving into the film industry in the 80s.

He appeared in movies including Lovesick, Desperately Seeking Susan and Crocodile Dundee throughout that decade and also had television roles in series including Frasier and NYPD Blue.

More recently, he appeared in The Good Wife, Amazon Prime drama Mozart in the Jungle, Succession and Netflixs You.

Im sad about this. He was really very kind, was always supportive and funny, a gentle man and a great actor who loved the work, his Desperately Seeking Susan co-star Patricia Arquette told TheWrap.

Im so sad for his family and all the people who love him. This is a tragedy on so many levels.

Rest in peace and power Mark Blum.

Playwright Jack Canfora wrote on Twitter: Found out a terrific actor and man whom I was lucky enough to be in one of my plays died this morning of #coronavirus.
The Delhi government on Thursday urged people to not hoard essential goods and asked them to report to authorities if they are overcharged for any item in the wake of the 21-day lockdown due to the novel coronavirus.

The government issued phone numbers of zonal officers on which people can report if any shopkeeper charges them more than the MRP.

Food and Civil Supplies Minister Imran Hussain tweeted the phone numbers for each zone: 9213894305 (West); 9818592867 (Central); 8700424211 (South); 9540167842 (South West); 9999409284 (North West); 9654001602 (North); 9810667050 (North East); 9971913232 (East); 9891945229 (New Delhi).

Hussain also reviewed arrangements for supply of ration to beneficiaries with senior officers.

The Delhi government has announced it would provide 7.5 kg food grains instead of the existing monthly entitlement of 5kg to each beneficiary under the PDS scheme for April.

Fair price shops will distribute the food grains to the beneficiaries on all seven days of a week, it said.

"In case of queue, one metre distance between beneficiaries should be maintained. The beneficiaries should be encouraged to wear masks and use hand sanitisers," it said in a statement.

One civil defence volunteer will be deployed at each fair price shop for crowd management.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Connecticut could absorb a nearly $15 billion contraction in economic activity this spring as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study analyzing projections by Wall Street investment banks.

The forecast factors in any benefits of the $2 trillion stimulus bill the U.S. Senate approved on Wednesday, according to a StratoDem Analytics, a Boston firm that provides economic analysis to real estate investors.

U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy appeared Thursday in Hartford alongside Gov. Ned Lamont to describe the bill in greater detail. Blumenthal noted a planned infusion of $350 billion in federal loans to small businesses will be converted to outright grants for any that do not cut jobs, with Murphy saying the provision was included at Lamonts urging.

The objective here is to put cash in the hands of those workers (and) small businesses that are the backbone of our economy, Blumenthal said. We also need to look ahead at whats going to be happening in six months.

Between April and June, Fairfield County could see a $5.3 billion reduction in gross domestic product  including service activities that are the backbone of the economy  an 24 percent decline from last years GDP as calculated by StratoDem.

New London County is poised for the steepest drop at 28 percent. Hartford County fares best with a projected 18 percent dip that, nevertheless, will cost the capital region close to $4 billion in activity. New Haven County could see a 21 percent lull, with Litchfield County faring slightly better.

StratoDem projects an overall decline of 18.1 percent in national GDP, which if proving true would be the single largest freefall in U.S. history.

In general, counties driven by tourism or cyclical manufacturing are taking the deepest hit, said StratoDem partner James Chung, expanding on the firms study results.

Heading into the 2019 holiday season, the Connecticut economy was on pace for GDP of roughly $290 billion for the full year, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated in January.

Job gains in the first two months of 2020 suggested the state was sustaining that momentum on the eve of the March collapse, triggered by the outbreak of the COVID-19 strain of coronavirus. If that indeed was the case, the StratoDem calculations would work out to the Connecticut economy absorbing a 5 percent hit to the annualized GDP that might otherwise have been generated.

But any number of unknowns loom, most significantly whether Lamonts restrictions on business operations will extend into June or beyond, and whether consumers and businesses will keep their wallets locked into the autumn against the possibility of any return of coronavirus.

On Wednesday during his daily update on coronavirus response, Lamont cited four months as the window he currently sees impacting businesses, which would extend into the start of the third quarter. On Thursday, the governor asked people to limit social gatherings to fewer than five people, and reiterated his opposition to President Donald Trumps suggestion that businesses resume normal activities in April.

Youre never going to get this economy going again until we get this public health crisis behind us, Lamont said Thursday. I think its wrong to say we can rush people back to work and set artificial dates. ... Its going to get a little bit worse before it gets better.

On short notice, the state Department of Economic and Community Development bas cobbled together a $25 million program to provide no-interest loans to businesses with up to 100 people, as well as nonprofits, as a bridge to the $350 billion expected to be funneled to small businesses from the federal government.

Loans are being capped at $75,000 for any single entity, allowing the program to assist hundreds of entities this spring. Information is available online at portal.ct.gov/decd. Businesses are automatically disqualified if they cannot show a recent history of profits, with several sectors disqualified including real estate entities.

Were going to size (these loans) at three months of operating expenses for these businesses, said David Lehman, commissioner of DECD, on Wednesday. We want to make sure businesses can have enough cash to meet their payroll, to meet their rent, to meet their insurance and other costs for this three-month period as we battle the virus.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
NEW DELHI: Congress Member of Parliament Rahul Gandhi on Thursday (March 26, 2020) lauded the Narendra Modi government for announcing the Rs 1.7 lakh crore financial package to protect the weaker sections of the society from the economic fallout of deadly coronavirus COVID-19, which has claimed the lives of over 21,000 people across the globe.

The Congress MP took to Twitter and said that says Centre's announcement on financial package is the first step in right direction.

The Govt announcement today of a financial assistance package, is the first step in the right direction. India owes a debt to its farmers, daily wage earners, labourers, women & the elderly who are bearing the brunt of the ongoing lockdown, he tweeted.

The Govt announcement today of a financial assistance package, is the first step in the right direction. India owes a debt to its farmers, daily wage earners, labourers, women & the elderly who are bearing the brunt of the ongoing lockdown.#Corona  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 26, 2020

The remarks from the Gandhi came shortly after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the massive economic stimulus to help poor tide over the crisis triggered by the deadly coronavirus pandemic.

Rahul's party has been demanding an economic package in view of the coronavirus spread and the subsequent lockdown. On Thursday, party interim president Sonia Gandhi wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi demanding the implementation of its proposed Nyay scheme and aid for the health workers.

Announcing the relief package, FM Nirmala Sitharaman said, ''A package is ready for the poor who need immediate help like migrant workers and urban and rural poor. No one will go hungry. The package is worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore.''

The Rs 1,70,000-crore scheme, dubbed the "Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan scheme" will "address the concerns of poor, migrant workers and those who need help", she said.

The FM also announced Rs 50 lakh per person insurance cover for doctors, paramedic and healthcare workers dealing with coronavirus outbreak. The PM Garib Kalyan Yojana will benefit migrant workers and rural poor and the women. The FM said the scheme will work via direct cash transfer, as one set of measures, while another set will include food security-related measures.

"We do not want anyone to remain hungry, so we will be giving enough to take care of their foodgrain requirement, protein requirement in terms of pulses," the FM said as she announced the Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief. "On the other hand, they should also not remain without money in hand. So several measures through DBT are being taken so that money reaches them so that they can have money in their hands."

Sitharaman also announced that doctors, paramedics, nurses, `Asha` workers, cleaning workers involved in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic and treating affected patients would be extended a medical insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh each.

Addressing the media here, Sitharaman said that the scheme will help 20 lakh health professionals and workers across the country, in case they want to avail of it.
Airlines, hotels, cruise lines, coal-mining companies and others strangled by the coronavirus are lining up to receive slices of a $2 trillion aid package funded by taxpayers. Read more

When airline executives realized a few years ago that they could charge passengers extra fees for just about anything - meals, checking bags, even choosing seats - their businesses seemed bulletproof.

"I don't think we're ever going to lose money again," American Airlines chief executive Doug Parker told giddy investors in 2017. As such companies continued to thrive, they also undertook share buybacks, boosting investor value. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans sweetened the outlook for big businesses further when they passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut that slashed the corporate rate beginning in 2018.

That seems so long ago. Now airlines, as well as hotels, cruise lines, coal-mining companies and others strangled by the coronavirus shutdowns, are lining up to receive slices of a $2 trillion aid package funded by taxpayers.

Yet many of these companies behaved in ways before the current economic crisis that are making a bailout tough to swallow, labor advocates and some economists say.

The hotel giant Hilton, for instance, announced a $2 billion stock buyback on March 3, weeks after coronavirus cases began affecting the industry. Cruise lines for years have avoided taxes and U.S. safety regulations by registering their headquarters abroad. Coal companies put some of their workers in harms way and are now asking to get out of tax that generates money to compensate former miners who have black lung disease.

As Congress debated the details of the bailout this week, lawmakers wrestled with how far Congress should go to help another set of American corporate titans two years after tax reform and less than a dozen years after the bank and auto industry bailouts of the Great Recession.

The choice is between two options unsavory to many: bail out some of the country's largest corporations or watch as they put more people out of work.

Among those seeking assistance from a pot of at least $500 billion in the rescue package are companies employing hundreds of thousands of servers, flight attendants, housekeepers, janitors, security guards and other workers. With unemployment already expected to reach as high as 20 percent this year, no one wants to see so many people lose their jobs.

"You don't want to reward companies for doing shortsighted, short-term things the past 11 years. You don't want to reward them for stock buybacks and excessive CEO compensation," said Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, an advocacy groups that tracks corporate subsidies. "The trouble is a lot of the companies that are in trouble right now are the ones that have been doing that."

Indeed writing checks to some of the companies in need of help may require some Americans to swallow hard and look away.

Airlines and hotel chains have in recent years dramatically increased spending on stock buybacks (which can pump up a share price without building anything or hiring anyone) and sometimes generous dividends (payments to shareholders).

Trump addressed such concerns Monday.

"I don't want to give a bailout to a company and then have somebody go out and use that money to buy back stock in the company and raise the price and then get a bonus," Trump said. "So I may be Republican, but I don't like that. I want them to use the money for the workers."

Cruise lines are also facing potential cash shortages, but they are domiciled in Liberia, Panama and elsewhere to avoid nearly all U.S. taxes and safety regulations. Some health officials say some cruise operators should have done more to stem transmission of the virus among passengers and crew members aboard their ships.

Coal-mining companies also have asked for help, including a request that the government rescind a $220 million tax increase to support 25,700 disabled coal miners and their dependents, many of whom have suffered from black lung disease. The industry employs about 51,000 miners in surface and underground mines, federal data shows.

"You've probably heard the critics by now. How dare the coal industry ask for relief to weather the covid-19 crisis?" the National Mining Association said Monday. "It's the kind of absurd question or assertion we've come to expect from people who simply don't value coal jobs like others and who remain completely out of touch with the essential role that coal plays in keeping the lights on, homes warm and industry churning."

Even Boeing, the aerospace manufacturer that is accused of misleading pilots and federal safety inspectors about lapses that led to two of its 737 Max jets to crash (killing 346 people), is poised to receive a portion of a $17 billion loan program designated for businesses deemed "critical to maintaining national security."

With its 737 Max jets still grounded and the novel coronavirus spreading among some of its own workers, Boeing may have to declare bankruptcy if it does not receive a bailout, some analysts said. Critics of the company noted that even if it goes in to bankruptcy, the company could continue operating and paying employees, as airlines have done in the past.

But Boeing and its subsidiaries employ 160,000 people worldwide. "We have to protect Boeing," Trump said last week.

It was not so long ago that Americans were asked to bail out a different set of companies that appeared too big to fail. In 2008, the government propped up big banks, the same institutions that had driven the country into recession, with the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Months later the government began spending tens of billions of dollars to help General Motors and Chrysler stave off liquidation.

There are important differences between those packages and the current one, which is much larger and moving through Congress more quickly. Some economists say the aid is likely to benefit workers only if it is closely tailored to ensure the money won't end up bailing out just companies' stock prices.

Trump's declaring "I will be the oversight" for the payouts, as he did Monday, didn't make these experts feel any better.

"Industry rescues are only worth doing if they're a rescue of payroll and wages," said Josh Bivens, research director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. He said he hoped money could be provided directly to workers to preserve jobs until the "all clear" is sounded. "Then they can make sense," he said.

Top corporations vowed to do better after the last crisis. Last year, 181 top American chief executives pledged to redefine the purpose of corporations beyond profit by signing a pact for "An Economy That Serves All Americans." The pact includes promises to support employees and communities.

Perhaps no one could have predicted the depth of the economic devastation wrought by the novel coronavirus. But some companies - at the urging of Wall Street  often put shareholders and executives first, sometimes to the detriment of preparing for another downturn, labor advocates and some economists said. Now they are in line for cash to pay their staffs as business has ground to a halt.

A year ago Arne Sorenson, chief executive of Marriott, the world's largest hotel chain, announced the company would return $11 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends by 2021. Its share price jumped 3 percent on the announcement.

Now the company has begun furloughing tens of thousands of employees, effectively laying them off but allowing them to maintain health benefits. Sorenson was among executives to meet with Trump, seeking a reported $150 million of direct aid to hotels. The company has since suspended dividend payments, stopped share buybacks and cut Sorenson's salary for the remainder of the year.

Marriott spokeswoman Connie Kim said the coronavirus closures have created "significant drops in demand at properties globally with an uncertain duration." Marriott's last dividend payment will be one announced Feb. 14, she said, "until conditions improve." MGM Resorts, Delta Air Lines and other companies have stopped dividend payments or buybacks as well.

Hilton Worldwide has purchased roughly 55 million shares since 2017 for $4.3 billion, including the stock buyback announced March 3.

Hilton has 60,000 employees and 200,000 more work at Hilton-branded hotels. Tens of thousands of those have been furloughed. The company issued a statement to The Washington Post saying it is not seeking "direct financial support" but is working "to secure emergency relief for hotel workers that are employed by thousands of small businesses that own hotels across the country."

Of all the industries, airlines are considered most likely to get money because of their fundamental role in the travel economy and the quality of their mostly unionized jobs. The airlines are bracing for an estimated $113 billion of losses, according to the International Air Transport Association, because many are able to operate only half or fewer of their usual routes. As of Tuesday night, the Senate bill called for up to $50 billion in aid specifically for the airline industry.

But airlines have employed many of the same practices to boost their stocks. American Airlines, which has 130,000 employees, spent $13 billion on buybacks in the past decade. United, which employs 100,000, has approved $5 billion of buybacks since 2016.

Parker and United chief executive Oscar Munoz joined nine other airline executives in writing to Congress on Saturday saying that "time is running out" for the industry. "Unless worker payroll protection grants are passed immediately, many of us will be forced to take draconian measures such as furloughs," they wrote.

Aside from the money provided to shareholders, American has also invested aggressively, spending more than $30 billion on capital improvements, $23 billion on planes and $20 billion on increased wages and benefits for employees. In 2017, it gave pilots and flight attendants a mid-contract pay raise, angering some Wall Street banks.

"We wish we didn't need help to weather this crisis, but we are fighting for a lifeline to help protect our 130,000 team members and their jobs, and the vital role aviation plays in the global economy," American spokeswoman Shannon Gilson said.

United suspended its share buyback program last month and says it has invested $30 billion in recent years in new planes and technology, plus $3 billion in wages, benefits and profit-sharing with workers. The company says it cannot continue to pay its employees without assistance if business continues to crater.

"Demand continues to drop, and we've cut our schedules accordingly," spokesman Steven Restivo said. "We're looking at a 60 percent schedule reduction in April - 42 percent domestic and 90 percent international. We expect similar reductions in May."

Some cruise line executives say they are not seeking a "bailout."

"We don't need a bailout in terms of giving us money. Getting a loan guarantee would be helpful," Carnival chief executive Arnold Donald said recently on HBO.

Carnival spokesman Roger Frizzell said the company has not made jobs cuts as result of the virus and is not seeking a financial bailout because the company has "created a strong balance sheet in the process that is helping us the weather the storm today." Norwegian did not respond to requests for comment, and Royal Caribbean declined to comment.

Trump has pledged assistance anyway, saying Sunday: "We can't let the cruise lines go out of business."

The Washington Posts Will Englund contributed to this article.
Photo: The Canadian Press Peter MacKay addresses the crowd at a federal Conservative leadership forum during the annual general meeting of the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative party in Halifax on Saturday, February 8, 2020. The 2020 Conservative Party of Canada leadership election will be held on June 27, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

The Conservative party is gearing up for the next phase of its leadership race, a contest taking place in unprecedented times.

Wednesday was the deadline for candidates to get on the ballot by getting 3,000 signatures, raising $300,000 and having their applications approved by party officials.

Four candidates crossed that threshold: Toronto lawyer Leslyn Lewis, former cabinet minister and current MP Erin O'Toole, former cabinet minister and longtime MP Peter MacKay and current MP Derek Sloan.

Three others who had been trying to get into the race, however, found their efforts hamstrung by the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada.

Marilyn Gladu, Rudy Husny and Rick Peterson all called multiple times for the party to extend the deadlines or postpone the contest, saying it was inappropriate for them to be campaigning at a time of crisis.

Peterson subsequently dropped out, while Gladu and Husny had been waiting to see if the party made any changes ahead of the Wednesday deadline.

They didn't, and Gladu and Husny's names were removed Wednesday from the list of candidates.

Husny said the leadership organizing committee was the only organization in the world refusing to recognize the extent to which the COVID-19 crisis has upended the way of life.

"While I am disappointed, I know that I made the right decision," Husny said in a statement.

"I can look Canadians and our members in the eye and say I stayed true to my values and put my country and my fellow citizens ahead of my political party and personal ambition."

The organizing committee must now decide how to roll out the rest of the race while the country is virtually on lockdown.

Social distancing measures mandated by public health officials have ruled out the possibility of a live studio audience for debates that had been scheduled for April. But now even getting the candidates together in a single room for a livestreamed event may no longer be possible.

The deadline to sign up new members is also mid-April, and as a nod to the fact candidates can no longer host large public events to recruit them, the party did create an online portal.

Only members can vote in the June 27 election, and the focus for candidates between now and the April cutoff is to sign up as many supporters as possible.

So far, the organizing committee is sticking to that June 27 date, despite pressure to change it  not only from the candidates, but senior party members including former interim leader Rona Ambrose.

Concerns being raised include the fact that members want to see and meet the candidates in person, not just interact on telephone town halls or watch events on social media, and that no one wants to be fielding polling calls or fundraising requests at present.

Some senior Tories have also complained it makes the party look disconnected from the reality of many Canadians.

The four candidates on the ballot have continued to campaign throughout, albeit in different ways.

MacKay has been holding town halls nearly every night, fielding calls from particular regions of the country. He has advocated for the leadership vote to be moved up, arguing the party needs a leader sooner rather than later.

O'Toole and Sloan have both called for delays. O'Toole continues to reach out to supporters via emails and phone calls, though both he and MacKay appear to have paused their fundraising. Both are directing people to donate to community causes instead.

Sloan, meanwhile, has suggested some of the fees be refunded to candidates to offset the need to fundraise.

Lewis has said the rules, as they are, should remain and she continues to solicit both funds and supporters.

The party rules say members must be able to use a mail-in ballot to choose a new leader if they can't attend a convention. The party has said that is one reason they could continue as planned with the June 27 election.

But what they're watching for now is whether Canada Post and the company that handles the technical elements of the balloting can provide what's needed to ensure the entire vote could be conducted that way, since it's possible a convention won't be able to be held.

Canada Post has already said to expect delays in its service overall as it adjusts to the ongoing spread of the pandemic.
LONDONTwo days after Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed a lockdown on Britain to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the government has recruited an army of more than 400,000 volunteers to help elderly people quarantined in their homes, as well as the beleaguered public health system.

The recruiting drive, which drew nearly twice its goal in less than 24 hours, was one of several rays of hope in a country that has been girding itself for an onslaught of infections. Officials also expressed guarded optimism that the National Health Service could cope with the flood of patients now that Britain has adopted the sweeping social distancing measures of other European countries.

This is going to be a close-run thing, Chris Whitty, the countrys chief medical officer, said at a Downing Street news conference with Johnson. This gap will probably be manageable by the NHS, but we cant guarantee that.

The statement was a striking turnaround from last week, when officials and outside experts warned that Britain was on a course to be the next Italy, with a growing number of cases that would hopelessly swamp hospitals. It was also evidence that Britain, which only grudgingly accepted the isolation measures of Italy, France and Spain, was pulling together to meet a national challenge.

The government moved to fix one of its weaknesses  widespread testing  by announcing plans to buy 3.5 million test kits that would allow people to test themselves at home. The tests, which officials said would be available on Amazon or at Boots drugstores, would allow doctors and nurses to work more safely.

None of these developments will spare Britain a harrowing few weeks, as the trajectory of cases rises steeply.

The country was rattled by news Wednesday that Prince Charles, eldest son of the Queen and heir to the throne, had tested positive for the virus and was suffering mild symptoms. Charles, 71, last met with the Queen on March 12, only a day before medical experts said it was possible that he had become infectious with the virus. Buckingham Palace said the Queen, 93, was healthy.

The British diplomatic service was shaken by the death of one of its rising stars, Steven Dick, 37, from the virus. Dick was serving as deputy chief of the British Embassy in Budapest, Hungary.

We will cope, and we are coping under the most challenging circumstances, Johnson said. He marvelled at the recruiting campaign, which he said had attracted in one day, as many as the population of Coventry  a mid-size city known for its medieval cathedral left in ruins by Nazi bombs during the Second World War.

The 405,000 volunteers, he said, would deliver food and medicine to roughly 1.5 million elderly and vulnerable people, whom the government has asked to stay at home for 12 weeks. Thousands of retired doctors and nurses have agreed to go back to work to reinforce the ranks of the health service.

That, plus the lockdown that Britain has adopted, has buoyed hope among experts that hospitals will be able to cope. Among them is a prominent scientist who warned last week that Britain could face as many as 250,000 deaths if it did not take steps to suppress the contagion.

The scientist, Neil Ferguson, who heads a team of epidemiologists at Imperial College London, told a parliamentary committee that the measures would prevent the National Health Service from being overwhelmed in the next few weeks.

There will be areas of the country which are extremely stressed, but we are reasonably confident  which is all we can be at the current time  that, at the national level, we will be in capacity, Ferguson told Parliaments science and technology committee.

Other experts were more guarded, noting that Britain still fell short of countries like South Korea in testing. Imperial College, they noted, had shifted its view before: it had advised the government on its now-discarded strategy of building up a herd immunity in the population by allowing the virus to spread.

Then, two weeks ago, it issued a new report, based on statistics from Italy, that took a more alarmist view. Britain, it said, could not afford to allow the virus to spread unchecked, and an effective campaign to suppress the virus would need to last for months.

Ferguson, who later reported suffering symptoms of the coronavirus himself, shared the findings with the White House, where officials said they played a role in temporarily shifting the tone of U.S. President Donald Trump.

It is hard to judge the accuracy of his statements in the absence of seeing the underlying data and evidence, said Devi Sridhar, director of the global health governance program at Edinburgh University.
Probation officers will have doorstep interviews with serious offenders to keep them amid the coronavirus lockdown.

Officers will be expected to adhere to the 'two metre rule' as they conduct interviews at the homes of released murderers, paedophiles and other criminals.

Staff at probation offices, where interviews typically take place, are key workers but are still being encouraged to work from home, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Officers will be able to use their phones - provided the offender remains visible - if they cannot be heard due to the location, meaning some interviews could take place through a window.

Face-to-face interviews will still take place with terrorists, those without phones and for initial appointments.

Offenders considered lower risk will have more frequent supervision - over the phone or through video messaging services.

A probation service spokesman said: 'The public rightly expects us to have plans to continue keeping them safe whatever the impact of Covid-19  and that's exactly what we are doing.

Face-to-face interviews will still take place with terrorists, those without phones and for initial appointments (file image: HMP Winchester)

More than 9,500 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in the UK with 465 deaths

'Probation officers will continue supervising in person those who pose the highest risk ensuring the monitoring of high-risk offenders remains as tough as it always is. If staff believe it is the right thing to do, offenders can always be recalled to prison.

'At the same time, we will use technology more to supervise lower-risk offenders to reduce the spread of the virus. These measures will be regularly reviewed.'

Calls between probation divisions, local authority social services and police forces will be scheduled to maintain the flow of intelligence and review police callouts.

The latest figures, which the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said was accurate as of 1pm on Wednesday, show that some 19 inmates have now tested positive for coronavirus in 10 different British prisons.

The number of cases has jumped up by six in 24 hours.

Jails in England and Wales were put on immediate lockdown on Tuesday with all visits cancelled as it emerged thousands of staff were in self-isolation.

Jo Farrar, chief executive of the Prison and Probation Service, told the Commons Justice Committee around 4,300 prison and probation staff overall were self-isolating at present.

Some 3,500 were prison staff - representing about 10% of the workforce - and four have tested positive for Covid-19, each in separate jails.

There have been three prisoner escort and custody services staff and eight probation staff who have also tested positive.

Around 50,000 protective masks have been delivered for staff to use and a ban on bringing hand sanitiser into the prison had been lifted.

Justice Secretary Robert Buckland has hinted he may have to consider some forms of early release for prisoners in a bid to ease pressure on jails during the crisis.

Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: 'The risks of infection for people who live and work in prisons are acute, as the Justice Secretary has said.

'So while it is obviously right that the way of life in prisons should change dramatically, just as it has in the wider community, Robert Buckland is right to be considering forms of early release.

'In a chronically overcrowded system, this will help keep people safe by reducing the pressure on both space and staff resources.

'For this to work, there will need to be support to organisations, many of them charities, that help prisoners on release.

'And it's vital that while creating some headroom through releases, the flow of people into prisons is also drastically reduced.

'That means not sending anyone to prison for all but the most serious alleged or proved offending, and not recalling people to prison in all but the most dangerous of circumstances.'
Indrajeet Prasad, an NRI living in Prague has proven himself to be an ingenious personage. He has taken a humanitarian step to aid the young students to pursue their education abroad.

Mr. Indrajeet Prasad, born in a middle-class family, always possessed the whim of pursuing education abroad. After finishing an engineering degree in India, he was presented with an opportunity in 2011 to travel to Poland to study and pursue his dream. Today, he works as a Junior Scientist on a European Commission HORIZON 2020 research project entitled AVA: Accelerators Validating Antimatter Physics. This research consortium contains 11 of the most prestigious and best research institutions in the world including CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, the University of Liverpool in the UK and GSI in Germany, amongst others.

Indrajeet Prasad has been awarded the most prestigious research fellowship (European commission's Marie Curie ITN grant) award twice in the last 5 years. He was also selected by MIT, the USA for a short Educational program in 2016 where he realizes that a good student can reach greatness if given a good opportunity.

He started providing mentorships to Indian and Czech students utilizing his social media platforms, he has served so many students with minuscule details by resolving their myths and issues on the subject of studying abroad. Using social media as a proliferating platform, he serves his experience to other deserving students, connects them to multitudinous scholarship opportunities, and explains them the ground reality to clears the haze for them. He wants them to have clear facts rather than a clouded picture.

He is all psyched up to serve his experience to the students and help them out by making their dreams come true.
Greek authorities have quarantined a cluster of Muslim majority towns and villages in the country's northeast after several cases and a death from the new coronavirus in the area.

The area in Xanthi prefecture was placed in lockdown as of Wednesday evening as nine people in the region overall have tested positive for the virus over the past six days, civil protection deputy minister Nikos Hardalias told reporters.

"All residents have been temporarily confined at home. No exceptions are allowed," Hardalias said.

The centre of the outbreak appears to be the small Pomak town of Ehinos, a community of about 2,500.

"Ehinos residents will be provided with food and medicine," Hardalias said.

Police were deployed Thursday on a bridge leading into town to enforce the lockdown, television footage showed.

One 72-year-old Ehinos man has died from the virus, local mayor Ridvan Deli Huseyin told Antenna television.

"It's better to take some measures now than to cry about this later," said Huseyin, the mayor of the local administrative centre of Miki.

The Pomaks are a Muslim group of Slavic origin who live mainly in neighbouring Bulgaria.

They make up part of Greece's roughly 110,000-strong Muslim minority in the country's northeast bordering Turkey.

Many of them work as migrant industrial workers in other European countries.

According to state TV ERT, several hundred Pomak workers have recently returned from shipyards and construction work in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

"I estimate that around 1,000 workers returned from central Europe, Germany, the Netherlands and France. Many were in Turkey for work or study," Xanthi mayor Manolis Tsepelis told Ethnos portal.

"Many of them were carrying the virus without knowing," Tsepelis said.

"These are tightly-knit societies with large families," he said.

There are 22 deaths and 821 officially announced infections from the coronavirus in Greece, which has a population of 11 million.

Two mountain villages in northern Kozani prefecture had also been placed under quarantine last week after several confirmed cases in the area.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Kaiser Permanente contributes $1 million to 10 leading public health organizations, and is collaborating with the CDC Foundation to support COVID-19 response

Support for effective outbreak response will help share best practices based on evidence and data

Kaiser Permanente is contributing $1 million to 10 leading public health organizations and is collaborating with the CDC Foundation to strengthen the United States public health infrastructure and response systems to stop the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

The organizations that will receive this funding include, but are not limited to: American Public Health Association; Association of State and Territorial Health Officials; Big Cities Health Coalition; Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists; County Health Executives Association of California; Health Officers Association of California; National Association of County and City Health Officials; National Health Law Program; the Network for Public Health Law; and Trust for Americas Health.

These organizations work closely with state and local health officers and play an important role to support them in responding to public health threats. This contribution will help them focus on rapidly sharing emerging evidence and data, aligning on effective protocols and policies, and cascading accurate information as it becomes available  as well as quickly debunking misinformation.

Public-private collaboration and intergovernmental coordination are critically important in creating effective outbreak response, said Dr. Bechara Choucair, chief health officer at Kaiser Permanente. These groups have immense breadth and depth of experience addressing public health issues and can ensure alignment with the health care ecosystem.

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Government support is essential in combatting health threats, such as COVID-19, said Judy Monroe, president and chief executive officer of the CDC Foundation. But, philanthropic and private sector donations  such as this generous gift from Kaiser Permanente  can be used alongside government funds to extend response efforts and meet rapidly emerging needs, including those with organizations supporting state, local, county and territorial health officials.

The CDC Foundation is an independent nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help extend the lifesaving work of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC Foundation activated its Emergency Response Fund for the COVID-19 response in late January.

A key part of Kaiser Permanentes mission as the nations largest nonprofit, integrated health system is to improve the health of its 12.2 million members, as well as that of the 68 million people who live in the communities it serves.

As a leading health care provider with a deep commitment to community health, Kaiser Permanente is proud to support these organizations to safeguard health and mitigate the impact of the virus in our communities, said Cynthia Telles, Community Health Committee chair for the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals Boards of Directors.
We are not sufficiently afraid and it may be our undoing. Nigerians still believe that less than 60 people have the virus and are therefore not observing social distancing guidelines. If we dont act quickly and decisively, we may all get the virus. But a holistic response will be expensive. With oil revenue at record lows, our government is stretched and would soon need to start dealing with the economic fallout, this is why we are calling on Nigerias billionaires to step up fast.

African leaders are celebrating Jack Mas donation of 1.1 million testing kits, 6 million masks and 60,000 protective suits. This amounts to 20,000 test kits, 100,000 masks and 1,000 medical use protective suits and face shields for each of Africas 54 countries. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged to give $100 million. Giorgio Armani and 19 other Italian billionaires recently donated $44 million to the fight against coronavirus in Italy. These should challenge Nigerias wealthy to do more. If they dont, there would be no one to buy their cement, use their banks or campaign for them when election season comes around.

There are little glimmers of hope however: from the Anap Foundation, initiated by the banker, Atedo Peterside, a pledge has come for a major civil society attempt to mobilise the Nigerian public good will for such an endeavour. Then the modest but salutary gesture of Guaranty Trust Bank to build a 100 bed hospital in Lagos as response to this pandemic also shows that some thinking is going on in little corners. It is time, however, for a show of massive national leadership and push.

In the last 24 hours, three members of our team have attempted to call Nigerias COVID 19 emergency contact numbers 080097000010 and 0800 026 7662 claiming to have symptoms and asking to be tested for the COVID 19 virus. The former line was perpetually busy, but thankfully the second line  the Lagos State COVID 19 Helpline  was set up as a call centre, with negligible wait time to speak to an agent. But thats where the good news ends. The good natured and polite call centre agent struggled to provide a coherent response to the simple question: I may have been exposed, I have symptoms, how can I get tested? His answer was basically, Lagos State has no testing centres (false information).

At the time of publishing this Editorial, Nigeria has 51 confirmed cases from less than 200 tests, according to NCDC (South Africa has done more than 15,500). Authorities are using the modeling rule of thumb in putting a figure to cases; the actual number of cases could be about 51 times 50, and thats 2,550 suspected cases.

But if no one cant get tested, even when they show symptoms, then administrators intending to save face can continue to assume that the number of confirmed cases is in the tens, when if there is really prompt access to testing, the number of new confirmed cases could become overwhelming in one fell swoop.

Administrators, in the bid to not show up the weakness of the countrys health care system, rather than raise the alert levels, are artificially lowering the prevalence numbers. This is myopic. Because, delays in raising alert levels only give people false confidence  which prevents them from appropriately practicing social distancing.

Assuming we believe the 2,550 number, then If we dont stop the virus from spreading, in 30 days we will have at least two to the 10th power more cases of infected people, because the infection count doubles every three days (the virus doubles every three days and there are 10, three-day periods in 30 days). That is 1,024 times as many cases as we have today That is at least 2.6 million cases. Of these 2.6 million, about 15 per cent will need hospitalisation (392,000 beds) and about 5 per cent will need intensive care including ventilators (130,000 ventilators). This is a catastrophe!

The country is in dire need of help  from testing kits, to health care workers, to hospitals fitted with the right equipment including ventilators, to protective gear for our healthcare professionals, to cash transfers to our most vulnerable populations. Jack Mas 20,000 test kits would barely be enough for a day if we are to really tackle this scourge headlong. Our aspiration ought to be to follow the example of the Italian city that tested all its 3,000 residents, and then developed a clear roadmap to care for the sick and stop the spread. South Korea, which is now experiencing a decline in new infections, had more than 66,650 people tested within a week of its first case of community transmission and raised its testing capacity to 10,000 tests per day.

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While testing everyone would be impossible for a city like Lagos, with its 20 million inhabitants, increasing access to testing to at least 10,000 per day, including drive by and mail in testing options, and having designated testing centres would go a long way in curbing the spread and caring for the sick.

Building testing centres and hospitals overnight would cost a lot, however Nigeria has a church or a mosque in virtually every street of the country. If Churches and Mosques donate the real estate, what would be left is furnishing the centres with test and treatment equipment. Testing can be open air, using large church parking lots. Five to ten lanes can be created, and drivers should stay in their cars to reduce the exposure of the testing volunteers.

Telecoms companies and banks can volunteer their call centre facilities to receive COVID calls to ensure that no call is dropped and adequate information is given to every call centre to be effective.

Such an endeavour would require a lot of coordination and cost, but we are up to the task. Most importantly, governments at all levels need to quickly set up and enable accountable and transparent structures and agencies that people can approach to make their urgent donations and contributions.
COVID-19 Updates from LAUSD Board Member George J. McKenna III

The Los Angeles Unified School District is working to support the continued learning, health, and safety of our students during the COVID-19 global pandemic. District schools are closed in order to comply with the Safer at Home orders issued by state, local and public health leaders. Minimizing contact with others will help to flatten he curve on community spread of COVID-19. School campuses and facilities are currently closed for this purpose.

Schools are widely considered to be centers of communities. While our physical doors are closed, know that the hearts of our teachers, administrators and District staff remain committed to supporting teaching and learning for our students, even if we are using alternate methods and mediums and modalities to do so.

My staff and I are doing our part to practice social distancing by continuing to work remotely to share vital information and updates with our District 1 community. We learned recently that the Superintendent has directed schools to remain closed until May 1 at this time. Information and directives remain fluid and are changing quickly in this current environment, but we are committed to keeping you informed as we receive updates.

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Here are some tools and resources on items like learning tools, food services, and family resources that may be helpful to you while schools remain closed:

At-Home Learning Resources from PBS SoCal/KCET and KLCS Television Stations

LAUSD has established a partnership with PBS to provide educational and online learning programming on its television stations, PBS SoCal, KCET and KLCS.

Grade level content is available on the following channels for viewing: Pre-K3rd grade programs on PBS SoCal, Channel 50.1 from 5am to 5pm; Pre-K12th grade programs on KLCS, Channel 58.1 Grades PreK-3 from 6am  8am Grades 4-8 from 8am -2pm Grades 9-12 from 2am  6pm; 9th12th grade programs on KCET, Channel 28.1.

The resources are free and designed to be used by public schools in LAUSD and beyond to help students continue learning at home.

Grab & Go Food Services for Students

Approximately 64 School Sites are now providing non-perishable meals to students Monday-Friday from 7am  11am.

The following District 1 School Sites are available for meal service: Audubon Middle School (4120 11 th , Los Angeles, 90008) Cochran Middle School (4066 W. Johnnie Cochran Vista, Los Angeles 90019) Dorsey Senior High School (3537 Farmdale Ave., Los Angeles 90016) Bret Harte Preparatory Middle School (9301 S. Hoover St., Los Angeles 90044) John Muir Middle School (5929 S. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles 90044) Barack Obama Preparation Academy (1700 W. 46th St., Los Angeles 90062) Palms Middle School (10860 Woodbine St., Los Angeles 90034) Washington Preparatory Senior High School (10860 S. Denker Ave., Los Angeles 90047)



School-Based Wellness Centers Open

Campus wellness centers operated by the LA Trust for Childrens Health in partnership with local community clinics are open.

District 1 Wellness Centers that remain open include: Crenshaw High School Washington Prep High School Manual Arts High School

The County of Los Angeles advises anyone with flu-like symptoms to call their doctor or 2-1-1 to see if they need testing  they should not visit any healthcare facility without checking that it is safe for them to do so.

Visit the LA Trust website thelatrust.org for more information on available health centers and specific services offered.

Internet and Device Resources

We recognize that families do not have equal access to computers, tablets, internet or wireless data at home, which can make it difficult for all students to utilize the distance learning tools and resources available.

The District has requested an emergency $100 million appropriation from the state legislature to assist with purchasing devices for all LAUSD students who dont have their own device or internet at home.

The District has also announced a partnership with Verizon to provide free internet connectivity to all LAUSD students who are currently without access at home to help more than 100,000 students continue to learn while schools are closed.

Spectrum cable services is also providing two months of free internet access to qualifying households with PreK-College students who are currently lacking connectivity at home. Call 1-855-243-8892 for more information about this offer.

Your health and safety are our first priority. In addition to social distancing, we remind you to wash your hands often with soap and hot water for at least 20 seconds, avoid touching your face and wipe down surfaces frequently. Learning continuity may be a bit challenging right now, but we have talented and creative educators who are working to stay connected and share information with our students. I am grateful for their commitment and dedication.

I will host the first in a series of McKenna Mondays virtual town hall meetings starting on Monday, March 30, at 6:00pm. I will share any news and updates from the District and provide you with a forum to ask questions or share information with me. You may connect to the town hall via Zoom Videoconferencing by clicking https://lausd.zoom.us/j/971850362 Meeting ID: 971 850 362 or use the phone access feature by dialing 1.408.638.0968 and entering the Access Code: 971850362#.

For the latest updates, please continue to call the LAUSD Hotline at (213) 443-1300, email [email protected], visit www.lausd.net and/or follow me @DrGeorgeMcKenna on social media.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Thursday expressed deep concern on reports of blasts near the cremation site of those killed in an attack on gurudwara in Kabul by Islamic State.

"Deeply concerned at the blasts reported near the cremation site of those killed during the attack on Gurudwara Sahib in Kabul," the minister said in a tweet.

He said the government is working to bring back the mortal remains of Tian Singh, who was killed during the attack.

"Medical opinion against moving injured at this stage. Embassy is working on the return of mortal remains of Tian Singh. Will keep you updated," he said.

The minister said in tweets that the Indian embassy is in touch with families of those killed and injured and also security authorities in Kabul.

" Understandable grief and anger at the cowardly terrorist attack on Gurudwara in Kabul. Our Embassy is in continuous touch with the families of those killed and injured," he said.

"Our Embassy has been in touch with Kabul security authorities. Have asked them to ensure adequate security on site as well as safe return of families to their homes thereafter," he added.

The terror attack took place on Wednesday leaving at least 27 dead and eight others injured.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Odisha is set to become the first state to set up hospitals to treat only coronavirus patients. The Odisha government has said that it will be readying two hospitals with a combined capacity of 1,000 beds soon.

The funding for the coronavirus hospital will be provided by Odisha Mining Corporation (OMC) and Mahanadi Coalfields Limited as CSR funding.

Odisha government, on Thursday, signed two tripartite agreements with SUM and Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences (KIIMS) at Lok Seva Bhawan to set up hospital for COVID-19 patients.

According to Odisha's chief minister's office, the two hospitals will be functional within a fortnight.

Also read: Coronavirus Live Updates: 42 new COVID-19 cases, 4 deaths in last 24 hours

Yesterday, OMC contributed Rs 500 crore to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund (CMRF) to support the state government in dealing with the coronavirus outbreak.

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik felicitated OMC and MCL for working in synergy amid the epidemic.

Recently, Patnaik donated his three months' salary to the CMRF. He has appealed to others to donate generously for the cause. Besides, Patnaik has also announced four months' advance salary for doctors, nurses, and other paramedical staff.

In India, a total of 649 people has been found positive for coronavirus. Out of 649 cases, 42 fresh cases were reported on March 26 as of 4:00 pm, according to Lav Aggrawal, Joint Secretary, Health Ministry. Besides, four COVID-19 infected people have died in the last 24 hours.

Also read: Coronavirus: Doctors, nurses, healthcare workers receive Rs 50 lakh insurance cover per person

Also read: AIIMS sets up task force to develop COVID-19 management protocol
Turkeys prosecutors Wednesday sought aggravated life sentences for 18 accused in the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in the city of Istanbul, Turkish news agency Anadolu reports.

The Istanbul Chief Prosecutor Office, the agency said, has identified a total of 20 people in the assassination. The office also said two others were charged for incitement to first degree murder.

The journalist, who had fled the kingdom and established a residence in Washington, was butchered and cut into pieces by a Saudi hit-man squad sent from Riyadh.

Khashoggi entered the consulate compound on October 02 and never came out.

Turkish security authorities released a set of tapes in which the operatives could be heard interacting with the prominent journalist before his murder and how they killed him.

Saudi Arabia first denied the killing arguing that Khashoggi was killed in a brawl but later confessed and sentenced five people to death and three more to jail.
One of the researchers in China's top universities had invented a robot that can help save thousands of lives and participate in the frontline during the coronavirus outbreak.

The robot consists of a robotic arm with wheels that can execute ultrasounds, take mouth swabs and analyze sounds made by a patient's organs which is usually with a stethoscope.

Medical tasks are typically done by doctors personally but with this robot, that has cameras installed, the medical staff doesn't need to be in the same place while taking medical tasks for the patient.

Zheng Gangtie, a professor at Tsinghua University, and the chief designer of the robot said that all doctors are brave but the coronavirus is too endemic that it spreads too fast that's why he invented a robot to help and perform dangerous tasks instead of putting the doctors in the field which has a higher risk of having them infected too.

Wuhan had the first case of the coronavirus and just had been put on lockdown and the number of infected people and deaths was increasing fast every day. Zheng came into the idea of building a robot around the turn of the Lunar New Year.

Read Also: Coronavirus Outbreak in Space? What Happens When Astronauts Get Sick

Zheng, as an engineer wanted to contribute something to help the doctors to reduce the risk of getting infected by the coronavirus. On the first day of the Lunar New Year, while talking to his friend, the executive president at Beijing's Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, Dong Jiahong told Zheng that the biggest problem of the frontline workers is getting infected, that when Zheng came to an idea of making a robot.

Zheng gathered a team to work on converting two mechanized robotic arms with the same automation used in space stations and lunar explorers. Zheng said that the robots are fully computer automated and can disinfect themselves after operating actions associating contact.

The evaluation from the doctors was that it would be better for them to be there to have less automation, and as a doctor, they can calm and comfort the patient directly, Zheng said.

The two robots were put into tests by the doctors at hospitals in Beijing. One robot is still at the university, at the team's lab. While the other one is at Wuhan Union Hospital where the doctors started to train on how to use the robot on Thursday.

Zheng said if all goes according to plan, the two robots might be used on the coronavirus patients on duty in Wuhan from Sunday. The robots will join the ward rounds accompanying nurses and other medical staff members.

The university would like to build more of the robots but the funding of the university has run out, Zheng said. The robot would cost around RMB 500,000 or $72,000 per piece. He doesn't have a plan on making the robot profitable but he hopes that a company comes along to take that on.

China has sent thousands of medical frontliners out to the epicenter of the outbreak which is in Hubei province, the state media said. More than 3,000 medical frontliners had been infected by the coronavirus last month, including the whistleblower, Li Wenliang, whose death in early February sparked a momentary outpouring of mourning and anger on Chinese social media.'

Related Article: Coronavirus Test for Apparent COVID-19 Cases Will Give Results in Thirty Minutes

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New Delhi: In a bid to contain the outbreak of coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, the central government on Thursday (March 26) assigned the task to different ministers to deal with different states. Under this assignment, a letter from the PMO has been sent to all ministers, asking them to play an active and effective role in defeating the deadly virus.

The concerned ministers will take daily updates from district magistrates of the assigned state, as they have been asked to ensure that poor and underprivileged get food, and the PDS shops in their area do not run out of ration.

The ministers will remain in constant touch with the local administration and keep themselves updated on the status of COVID-19 in their respective constituencies as well.

The ministers who have been given charge are Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, who will look after Jharkhand, whereas Maharashtra has been given to Nitin Gadkari and Prakash Javadekar. Similarly, UP will be looked after by Rajnath Singh, Mahendra Nath Pandey, Sanjeev Balyan, Krishna Pal Gurjar.

The responsibility of Bihar has been given to Ravi Shankar Prasad and Ram Vilas Paswan, while Gajendra Singh Shekhawat will look after Rajasthan and Punjab.

Notably, the move assumes significance as Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to ensure that there is no community outbreak of the disease. The elected representatives have also been asked to ensure the community kitchens do not face problems in serving the poor.

The ministers have also been asked to create awareness regarding the disease.
Beach towns along Victoria's Great Ocean Road are trying to stop visitors heading there for the usually busy Easter holiday period, to limit the spread of coronavirus.

The surf club in Lorne has stopped beach patrols, while the region's biggest real estate rental agency is blocking all new bookings of holiday houses until the end of April.

The beach at Lorne on Thursday. Credit:Jason South

Tourist hubs along the world-famous holiday trail have already suffered a plunge in visitor numbers following the federal government's ban on overseas visitors to Australia.

Lifesaver Samuel Ord said regular rostered patrols at the Lorne Surf Life Saving Club had stopped and the club house had been shut down.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  The Cleveland Clinic needs the communitys help to fight off coronavirus and is asking the public to donate supplies like hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes.

Its also seeking money to help support medical workers, buying them things like gifts cards for meals at local restaurants. The public can also write a check to the Clinic to help support COVID-19 research and treatment.

The call for aid, part of the Clinics new COVID-19 community response campaign, aims to direct the publics generosity and resources into channels that benefit healthcare workers and patients.

During challenging times like these, we see the good in people shine through, Clinic CEO and President Dr. Tom Mihaljevic said in a news release. We are exceedingly grateful that people throughout the community have asked how they can help. The Community Response Campaign is Cleveland Clinics effort to direct peoples generosity, time and resources to provide meaningful impact for our patients and caregivers in a variety of ways.

Ohio currently has 704 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 206 cases in Cuyahoga County.

Heres a rundown of ways you can help the Cleveland Clinic doctors, nurses and medical professionals:

Donate supplies and make masks

The Clinic needs medical and cleaning supplies in anticipation of a surge of patients in the coming weeks. The supplies, which must be in their unused and in their unopened, original packaging, include:

- N-95 masks

- surgical masks

- isolation gowns

- eye protection

- face shields

- gloves

- hand sanitizer

- disinfecting wipes

The Clinic is also asking the public to make masks. These masks wont be used by healthcare workers providing care, but will be distributed to the community to help people remember to cover their cough. Instructions on how to make approved masks can be found here.

The supplies and masks can be dropped off at the following locations starting Monday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on weekdays, through April 30.

-Akron General Health and Wellness Center, 4125 Medina Road, Akron, Ohio 44333

-Independence Family Health Center, Crown Center II, 5001 Rockside Rd, Independence, OH 44131

-Cleveland Clinic Family Health and Surgery Center Beachwood, 26900 Cedar Road, Beachwood, OH 44122

Cleveland Clinic Richard E. Jacobs Family Health Center, 33100 Cleveland Clinic Blvd, Avon, Ohio 44011

Masks can also be mailed into the Cleveland Clinic, at 8937 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44195. You should not come donate supplies if you are experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.

Donate to support Cleveland Clinic healthcare workers

You can give to support the needs of healthcare workers on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic, caring for members of our community here. These donations will go toward gift cards for meals at restaurants.

Donate to support coronavirus treatment and research

You can give to support the Clinics research and treatment surrounding coronavirus, like projects that use predictive analytics to create risk models individual patients.

Give blood

The Clinic is asking health people to give blood, as many blood drives have been canceled due to coronavirus concerns. You can find a Red Cross Blood drive near you here.
Michael White was released from an Iranian prison last week on a medical furlough

A Navy veteran released from an Iranian prison last week on a medical furlough says he is sick with symptoms of the coronavirus and is requesting a humanitarian evacuation to the United States for medical treatment.

Michael White was hospitalized Wednesday in a ward for coronavirus patients in Iran and has experienced fever, fatigue, a cough and shortness of breath since his furlough last week, according to a statement from Jon Franks, a family spokesman said.

White, of Imperial Beach, California, 'is an immunocompromised cancer patient and his situation is urgent,' Franks said.

He has been tested for the coronavirus but the results have not come back. According to the Twitter account Free Michael White, he was prescribed anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine.

White was detained in July 2018 while visiting a girlfriend in Iran and was later convicted of insulting Iran's supreme leader and posting private information.

He is among tens of thousands of prisoners granted medical furloughs by Iran as the country tries to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

On Wednesday evening, former New Mexico Gov Bill Richardson reached out to Iran on the family's behalf to ask for an immediate humanitarian medical evacuation.

White (pictured on March 19) was hospitalized Wednesday in a ward for coronavirus patients in Iran and has experienced fever, fatigue, a cough and shortness of breath since his furlough last week, according to a statement from Jon Franks, a family spokesman said

White was detained in July 2018 while visiting a girlfriend (left and right) in Iran and was later convicted of insulting Iran's supreme leader and posting private information

'Not only will this allow Michael to receive additional treatment here in the United States, but it will help protect Iranian citizens from further exposure and free up their own medical personnel to treat their own citizens,' the statement said.

White would likely be returning to California, where he's from, if he's evacuated.

California currently has 3,158 confirmed coronavirus cases and 67 deaths

In Iran, the country has reported 2,234 deaths and 29,406 infections so far.

Health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said that the spread of the new coronavirus and its rate of infection was 'growing steadily' in Iran.

The Islamic republic imposed strict new containment measures Thursday, after weeks of public appeals largely failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of Iranians taking to the roads to visit family for the Persian New Year holidays.

In Iran, the country has reported 2,234 deaths and 29,406 infections so far. Firefighters wear protective face masks, amid fear of coronavirus disease as they disinfect the streets, in Tehran

Health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said that the spread of the new coronavirus and its rate of infection was 'growing steadily'. Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is seen disinfecting vehicles in Tehran

'Those who were planning to travel, cancel it right from this moment,' said Hossein Zolfaghari, a senior official at Iran's anti-coronavirus committee.

'Those who are out traveling should return home quickly,' he added in a televised announcement while announcing details of the new measures.

Zolfaghari said non-residents will not be allowed into cities based on their car plates and drivers' IDs, and violators will be fined and their cars impounded.

'All official and non-official gatherings... are also banned,' the official said, without elaborating further.

President Hassan Rouhani said in a cabinet meeting he hoped the 'more strict measures' would help to curb the virus.

He added the government was going to ask Iran's supreme leader for permission to draw $1billion from its national development fund to address 'the coronavirus' complexities and issues, especially the medical sector's needs'.

The country will also provide businesses which have not laid off workers during the outbreak with low-interest loans, Rouhani said.
priMED a proven leader in performance, culture and community giving for third consecutive year

EDMONTON, AB / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / For the third year in a row, Edmonton-based priMED Medical Products has been named one of "Canada's Best Managed Companies" by professional services network Deloitte. Founded in 1995, priMED is known for its high-quality personal protective equipment products, including single-use medical face masks, exam gloves, isolation gowns, head covers and shoe covers. priMED employs more than 50 professionals locally and nearly one thousand globally.

With the massive surge in global demand for medical products due to the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic, priMED's employees are rising to the challenge. It is now; more than ever, they are being called to fulfill their mission to protect people from harmful substances and infectious disease.

"We're proud to be recognized by Deloitte for our engaged employees and high-performance culture," said priMED President and CEO, David Welsh. "This award speaks volumes about our team who bring their best every day. Our role in healthcare is one we take very seriously, and we are committed to doing everything in our power to keep our customers and the global community protected as we navigate the unknown of COVID-19 together."

This shared sense of purpose has helped to evolve the company from its small startup roots 25 years ago to being one of the top medical product manufacturers on the planet. Currently, millions of clinicians are being protected with priMED's self-manufactured apparel as the company manufacturers for some of the world's largest health care distributors in addition to supplying its own branded products to virtually every hospital and healthcare facility across Canada.

In addition to its global and national presence, priMED also plays a big role in the local community. Through its "100 Days of Giving" initiative, priMED offers each Canadian employee two full days of paid time off to volunteer at their charity or non-profit organization of choice. In 2019, priMED staff provided more than 900 volunteer hours to support charitable organizations such as the Edmonton Food Bank, Habitat for Humanity, the Stollery Children's Hospital, the Edmonton Humane Society and Canadian Blood Services.

For more information:

To learn more about what makes priMED one of Canada's Best Managed Companies, go to priMED.ca/careers.

HR Contact:

Mark Kwan, HR Manager

Mark.Kwan@priMED.ca

Media Contact:

Craig Blackburn, Senior Manager, Brand and Engagement

Craig.Blackburn@priMED.ca

priMED Medical Products

#200, 2003-91 Street SW

Edmonton, Alberta T6X 0W8

Phone: 780 497 7600

Web: priMED.ca

About priMED Medical Products:

priMED Medical Products Inc. is a dynamic, global medical product manufacturer specializing in high-quality personal protective apparel. On a mission to protect people from harmful substances and infectious disease, priMED is a leading Canadian provider to hospitals, clinics, labs and long-term care facilities. priMED offers branded, co-branded and private label products and services to its customers and international partners.

About Deloitte Canada's Best Managed Companies:

Established in 1993, Canada's Best Managed Companies is one of the country's leading business awards programs; recognizing excellence in Canadian owned and managed companies with revenues over $15 million.



priMED staff at annual corporate team building event in 2019.

SOURCE: priMED Medical Products

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/582700/priMED-Medical-Products-Recognized-as-one-of-Canadas-Best-Managed-Companies-by-Deloitte
Three more people, including two



24-year old overseas returnees, tested positive for coronavirus in Tamil Nadu on Thursday, taking the total number of COVID-19 cases in the state to 31, the Health department said.

The new cases are a man with a history of visiting Dubai, another who returned from London and his contact, a 65-year old woman, it said.

Health Minister C Vijaya Baskar in his social media account said "one new COVID19 positive case reported from Trichy. 24 year male, Dubai return at Trichy GH (government hospital). The patient is in isolation and stable," he said.

According to health department statement, the other two cases are from Chennai and both had been admitted to a hospital here.

Of the 31 positive cases, one person has already been discharged after treatment while a 54-year old man who was suffering from prolonged illness and had turned positive for coronavirus had died in Madurai, becoming the first COVID-19 fatality in the state.

Meanwhile, a 20-year old man hailing from Uttar Pradesh and tested positive after travelling here by a train has recovered at the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital and was expected to be discharged soon, officials said.

Vijaya Baskar said he participated in a video-conference held by Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan to discuss on the preparedness and measures to contain the spread of coronavirus.

According to health department, 2,09,284 passengers had been screened in the state as on date and 15,788 passengers were under home quarantine for 28 days.

Nearly 109 asymptomatic passengers from highly affected countries were being quarantined in facilities near airport and 284 under hospital isolation, it said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Duncan Miriri and Nigel Hunt

NAIROBI/LONDON (Reuters) - Fresh fruit and vegetables will become increasingly scarce in Europe, suppliers warn, as the coronavirus pandemic hampers the global movement of produce and of the people needed to gather crops.

Governments are looking at ways to ease any shortage, including "green lanes" to allow fresh produce to move quickly across EU borders, recruiting a "shadow army" of harvesters and loosening travel rules for migrant workers.

While Europe's supermarkets say they are still getting most produce, supply pressures are building at source, including in Africa, a key provider of fresh goods, and within Europe.

Stores that are already dealing with hoarding by customers may struggle to keep shelves stocked.

In Kenya, a major supplier of green beans and peas to Europe, half of the workers in the sector have been sent home on mandatory leave because of the industry's inability to ship orders, even as demand from European retailers surge.

"Their (European) stocks are being depleted by the day," said Okisegere Ojepat, chief executive of the Fresh Produce Consortium of Kenya which groups over 200 growers and exporters.

Shipments from another key supplier, South Africa, are becoming more challenging with the country set to begin a 21-day lockdown this week.

"We were in reasonably good shape until earlier this week but now things are becoming very difficult," said Hans Muylaert-Gelein, Managing Director at Fruits Unlimited, a South Africa-based company that exports fruits and vegetables to the UK.

"More and more flights are being grounded so I expect there are going to be big disruptions."

Those planes that are flying are charging more. Operators have tripled the price per kilo of produce to $3 in the past two weeks, said Hosea Machuki, head of the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya representing 117 growers and exporters.

Western supply chains are buckling as problems ranging from a shortage of truck drivers to restrictions on seafarers hit the smooth flow of goods, freight logistics operators say.

Story continues

Even longer-lasting produce like citrus fruit, which is normally transported by sea, could be stranded because of the shortage of containers linked to China's shutdown, said Muylaert-Gelein.

"Oranges and lemons, the old ambassadors of Vitamin C, are in high demand. Also roots, carrots, cabbages, anything that has health properties people have stocked up on," he told Reuters.

NOT ENOUGH WORKERS

A shortage of migrant workers also threatens to disrupt production in several top European suppliers including Spain, the biggest exporter of fruit and vegetables in the EU.

Some 16,000 Moroccan seasonal workers, mostly women, were expected to arrive in the Huelva region in Spain to pick strawberries and red fruits under an agreement between the two countries.

Less than half had made it by March 12, as Morocco closed its borders to passenger traffic, said Abdelmounaim Madani, head of the Moroccan job promotion agency ANAPEC. The country's lockdown is due to last until April 20.

Farmers and unions in Spain said the production, processing and export of fruit and vegetables was still going smoothly, although the state of emergency is restricting people's access to farms and packing areas.

Absentee rates were as high as 50% in recent days, said agricultural worker union representative Monica Vega.

Philippe Binard, General Delegate of Freshfel Europe, which represents Europe's fresh produce industry, said the main problem was the lack of seasonal workers, especially for labor-intensive crops like strawberries and asparagus.

The challenges included moving workers from accommodation to farms while maintaining social distancing, he said.

"Before they were collected in a minivan of eight or nine people and then worked the day and then moved back. Now these collective transports are no longer possible."

Binard said supermarkets may move towards selling produce which could be more easily mechanized in the supply chain.

Heinz Schibli runs a farm growing strawberries, raspberries and blackberries in the rolling countryside just south of the Rhine River near Winterthur, Switzerland. All of his crops are destined for the Swiss market.

Typically, he would now have about 30 workers from Slovakia, Romania and Poland working in his fields and greenhouse, either preparing the first strawberries of the season for harvest next month, or getting ready for the new round of planting.

By May, he'll need 70 as harvest season begins in earnest.

So far, only 12 harvest workers have arrived, as those due to come this week have been blocked either by restrictions in their own countries or on transiting Germany and Austria to get to Switzerland.

Given the uncertainty, Schibli is talking with local authorities about enlisting local unemployed people or asylum seekers waiting for their cases to be resolved.

"The worst-case scenario is that we won't be able to plant all the berries that we normally would after the first round is harvested, or that we wouldn't even be able to do the actual harvest," Schibli told Reuters.

The Swiss government on Wednesday announced 20 billion Swiss francs ($20.6 billion) in no- or low-interest loans to help small businesses like Schibli's make it through the coronavirus crisis should their income dry up.

'SHADOW ARMY'

In Germany, whose food sector relies on some 286,000 seasonal workers every year, the agriculture minister has talked with carrier Lufthansa to see if they could be flown in, if they can prove they are not infected.

Other ideas include temporarily easing the time limit for seasonal workers beyond the current 70 days.

France, where farmers forecast a shortage of around 200,000 laborers during the harvest period, has also appealed to newly laid-off workers to help pick fruit and vegetables.

Agriculture Minister Didier Guillaume issued a rallying cry to what he called France's "shadow army".

Border restrictions introduced to stem the spread of the virus also disrupt the movement of produce within the EU, with traffic jams of up to 18 hours at some border points.

The European Commission has urged the 27 EU countries to adopt measures to ensure the free flow of freight along "green lanes" with border crossings lasting no more than 15 minutes.

Norbert Lins, chair of the agriculture committee of the European Parliament, said "green lanes" also had to apply to essential inputs such as feed, fertilisers and plant protection products.

He also called on the EU's executive and member states to find ways to allow some sort of cross-border movement for seasonal workers during the harvest season, even if travel restrictions are still in place.

European food retailers are keeping a close eye on the situation.

A spokesman for the Aldi Nord discount supermarket chain said that in Germany, fruit and vegetable supplies were secure and supply chains were functioning.

"Despite this we are watching the current developments and making a new assessment of the situation from day to day."

A spokeswoman for UK-based food retailer Tesco said she could not comment specifically on fruit and vegetables but in general there had been a surge in demand and there had been some empty shelves as a result.

"We would ask our customers to buy only what they need so that there is enough for everyone," she said in a statement.

($1 = 0.9719 Swiss francs)

(Reporting by Nigel Hunt and Jonathan Saul in London, Duncan Miriri in Nairobi, Ahmed El Jechtimi in Rabat, Sonya Dowsett in Madrid, Phil Blenkinsop in Brussels, Michael Hogan in Hamburg, John Miller and Arnd Wiegmann in Zurich and Gus Trompiz and Sybille de La Hamaide in Paris; Editing by Veronica Brown and Mike Collett-White)
Photo credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Cory J. Daut

From Popular Mechanics

The toilets on Americas two newest carriers clog frequently, causing problems throughout the ship.

The ships use a scaled-up version of airliner toilets, using vacuum power to evacuate human waste.

As a result, the system must regularly be cleaned with an expensive acid solution that costs $400,000 per use.

The toilets on Americas two newest aircraft carriers, USS Bush and USS Ford are experiencing clogging problems, and the only way to keep the pipes draining is to use a special, extremely expensive acid solution. The two carriers toilet plumbing system, modeled on the plumbing system installed on airliners, clog frequently requiring the Navy to regularly service them with an acid that costs $400,000 per use.

The problem, first reported by Bloomberg , is mentioned in a General Accountability Office (GAO) report on sustainment costs for Navy ships. The GAO report states that the Navy used a brand new toilet and sewage system for the USS George H.W. Bush and USS Gerald R. Ford, the last two aircraft carriers to roll off the production lines. The system is similar to what is on commercial aircraft, but increased in scale for a crew of over 4,000 people. GAO:

To address unexpected and frequent clogging of the system, the Navy has determined that it needs to acid flush the CVN 77 and 78s sewage system on a regular basis, which is an unplanned maintenance action for the entire service life of the ship.

Each acid flush costs $400,000. The Navy, the GAO states, cannot predict how often this expensive procedure is necessary, making it difficult to predict how often it will need to repeat the procedure over the 50-year lifespans of each carrier.

Photo credit: Jack Taylor - Getty Images

The clogging problems with the new toilet system were well known even before USS Ford finished construction. In 2011, the Navy Times reported on toilet issues with the USS Bush, the first carrier to feature the toilet vacuum system, writing that during the ships maiden deployment in 2009, the ship averaged 25 calls a week to fix the commodes and all 432 commodes on the ship went down twice. The problem was reportedly so widespread sailors were peeing in bottles and emptying them overboard and experiencing health problems.

Story continues

In response, the Navy claimed Bush had a 94 percent toilet availability, and that most problems were fixed in a few minutes. The Navy blamed the sailors flushing inappropriate materials down the toilets, including feminine hygiene products, food, and clothing. But the Navy also acknowledged that the system differed from the old system in that outages in one toilet affected a wider grouping of toilets than before.

The U.S. Navy plans to build up to 11 Ford-class carriers, gradually replacing existing Nimitz-class ships over the coming decades. The next ships in class are the USS John F. Kennedy, USS Enterprise, and USS Doris Miller. USS Ford cost a whopping $13 billion, more than twice as much as the USS Bush. USS Ford has experienced a number of technical issues, including getting the electromagnetic aircraft launch system working, the advanced arresting gear, a new radar system, and electromagnetically powered weapon elevators.

Photo credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Cory J. Daut

The GAO report also mentions a bigger problem with USS Ford than faulty toilets: the ship, designed to be less expensive to sail than previous classes, was projected to cost $77.3 billion over 50 years to operate, or $1.54 billion annually. Instead, the GAO projects the ship will cost $123 billion over the same period, or $2.46 billion a year. If the Navy builds all eleven ships the service will see a combined cost increase of $10 billion a year the equivalent of four new destroyers with toilets that flush.

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Appeal against sentence of escaped Moscow 2012 riot case defendant set for April

 Lyudmila Klenko, RAPSI

17:44 26/03/2020

MOSCOW, March 26 (RAPSI)  The Moscow City Cout is set to hear on April 21 an appeal against a 2.5-year prison sentence given in absentia to Dmitry Buchenkov for participation in the riots on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow on May 6, 2012, according to the courts press service.

On December 24, Buchenkov was convicted and sentenced in absentia. Moscows Zamoskvoretsky District Cour also included the term spent in detention and under house arrest in the sentence, considered the term served and closed the search case. On December 18, a prosecutor demanded an 8-year term in penal colony for Buchenkov.

In February 2018, the Moscow City Court upheld suspension of proceedings against Buchenkov because of his disappearance. In November 2019, the trial was resumed. As reported earlier, the defendant, who was under house arrest, once failed to appear at the Bolotnaya case hearing. He was put on the international wanted list, and his house arrest was replaced with detention. The case was suspended. Prosecutors believed that Buchenkov fled to Europe.

In October 2016, final charges were brought against the defendant. He stands accused of participating in mass riots and attacking persons in a position of authority. There are 6 charge counts and 7 victims in the case against him, his lawyer Svetlana Sidorkina told RAPSI earlier.

Buchenkov pleaded not guilty. His attorneys insisted that he was out of Moscow on the day of riots. According to defense lawyers, Buchenkov has an alibi.

Initially, Buchenkov was put in jail. In March, the Moscow City Court replaced his detention with the house arrest.

Over 400 people were arrested, and scores were injured in the authorized Bolotnaya Square protest that turned violent in May 2012. Dozens were later charged with inciting mass riots and battery against law enforcement officers.

Riot organizers Leonid Razvozzhayev and Sergey Udaltsov were sentenced to 4.5 years in prison each. Other defendants in the case received prison terms ranging from suspended sentences to four years. Several defendants were pardoned; two activists were sent to compulsory mental treatment.

The convicts supporters believe that the riots were provoked by police.




Canada is making unprecedented use of the federal Quarantine Act in a bid to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The order, which went into effect early Wednesday, hours before it was announced, means all travellers returning to Canada are now legally required to go into self-isolation for 14 days rather than simply urged to do so. Here's a closer look at the legislation:

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Minister of Health Patty Hajdu listens during a press conference on COVID-19 in West Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Friday, March 20, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

Canada is making unprecedented use of the federal Quarantine Act in a bid to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The order, which went into effect early Wednesday, hours before it was announced, means all travellers returning to Canada are now legally required to go into self-isolation for 14 days rather than simply urged to do so. Here's a closer look at the legislation:

Has Canada always had a Quarantine Act?

According to the federal government, a piece of legislation bearing the same name went into effect shortly after confederation in 1872, but was left largely unchanged for more than a century. After the deadly SARS outbreak of 2003, however, the government acted on a recommendation to beef up the legislation.

The act as we know it today received royal ascent in 2005.

What's allowed under act?

The legislation gives the federal health minister sweeping powers to stop the spread of communicable diseases either in or out of Canada. Those measures include everything from routine screenings conducted by quarantine officers at airports to the sort of mandatory isolation orders issued on Wednesday.

"The Quarantine Act is always active. It's being used all the time," says Steven Hoffman, director of the Global Strategy Lab and a global health law professor at York University. "It's just not always used in a very public way."

The Act was invoked earlier this year when travellers returning to Canada from Wuhan, China and other global hotspots for the novel coronavirus were detained for two weeks at an eastern-Ontario military base. But Hoffman says the latest orders, issued by Health Minister Patty Hajdu, take the government into uncharted territory.

"We've never, ever seen a quarantine order this broad or affecting so many people at once in Canada," he said. "

Why is the government taking this step?

Hajdu said the measure was necessary to send a message about the importance of limiting the spread of COVID-19,, which has sickened more than 3,000 Canadians and killed at least 30. The order comes after women in Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador were arrested for violating provincial orders requiring to stay at home after travel abroad.

"People are not understanding that this 14 days is absolutely essential to protect the health of their fellow Canadians," she said. "... So there is perfect clarity around the need to isolate when Canadians come back from abroad whether it's from the USA or other international destinations we are implementing the Quarantine Act so there is no confusion about the need to do so whether you are symptomatic or not."

Does the government have any obligations under the act?

The legislation gives the government a fair bit of latitude to do whatever they feel is necessary to stop the spread of a disease that could pose a public health risk, Hoffman says.

"They're not in prison," he says of the people under quarantine. "The government, under the act, is supposed to take steps to make it as least intrusive as possible, but what exactly that means, there is some discretion.''

Hajdu says returning travellers will be barred from taking public transit or placing vulnerable people at risk, but says the government will assist with transportation and accommodation arrangements as needed.

How will the new orders be enforced?

That's the big question for Hoffman, who says the new edict will need to be implemented consistently across the country in order to ensure it does not run afoul of the Constitution. Hoffman says that while quarantine officers at the border have enforcement powers, local public health and law enforcement officials may be enlisted as the order takes effect. Health Canada did not immediately respond to request for comment, but Hajdu has said details about enforcement will be released before the order kicks in.

What happens if someone violates the Quarantine Act?

Hoffman says the legislation contains a wide range of penalties for those flouting the law. Hajdu's office issued further clarification late Wednesday: maximum penalties include a fine of up to $750,000 and six months in jail.

Is the government within its rights to take this step?

Hoffman anticipates the new use of the Act will be challenged in court eventually, but says Ottawa is likely on solid legal ground.

He said the Act requires Hajdu to follow a "reasonableness requirement" and be able to demonstrate that the affected travellers pose a genuine risk to the public. The overtaxed health-care system and rapidly growing number of cases, he said, may well meet that threshold.

Additionally, Hoffman said the new measures likely fall within the bounds of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by containing a fixed, relatively short time limit and playing out against the backdrop of an unprecedented global crisis.

"It's in a context of a constrained public health system that really needs everyone to comply," he said. "Maybe it would pass that legal test. We're going to find out."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 25, 2020.

Source: Government of Canada, The Canadian Press

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version said the order would go into effect Thursday at midnight.
(Newser)  US prosecutors have indicted Venezuela's president and other senior government officials on charges of drug trafficking, claiming a "narco-terrorism conspiracy." The unusual move against Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan government, intelligence officials, and members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia stems from a federal investigation in Washington, New York, and Florida, reports the New York Times. Maduro and aides are accused of working to "flood the United States with cocaine" an indictment reads, per NBC New York. They "prioritized using cocaine as a weapon against America," the indictment continues, claiming Maduro "helped manage and ultimately lead" a criminal group dubbed the Cartel of the Suns.

story continues below

Sitting foreign leaders normally enjoy immunity from prosecution under US law and international norms, per the AP. But the US is among 60 countries that no longer consider Maduro a head of state even if he does hold de facto power. They instead recognize Juan Guaido, the head of congress, as Venezuelas rightful leader following the socialists re-election in a 2018 race marred by allegations of fraud and an opposition boycott. As the indictments were unsealed, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the State Department would offer cash rewards of up to $55 million for information leading to the arrests or convictions of Maduro and his associates. It offered rewards up to $15 million for Maduro and up to $10 million each for the others. (Read more Nicolas Maduro stories.)
Millions of undocumented immigrants in the US face elevated health and financial risks from coronavirus.

Since coming to the United States from Bolivia 20 years ago, Ingrid has eked out a living cleaning houses in the Washington, DC area to support herself and her son and to send money to her mother back home.

The 57-year-old usually earns around $1,500 per month. Nearly half of it goes to her share of the monthly rent on an apartment she shares with her 27-year-old son in Virginia.

Even in a good month, Ingrid has very little money to spend on food, utilities and remittances to her family. So when she suffers a health setback, the blow is both physical and financial.

Once she paid $280 out of pocket for an ambulance after a bad fall, she told Al Jazeera.

But that hit could pale in comparison to the risks the coronavirus outbreak poses to her health and economic wellbeing.

We, more than anything, fear this because we dont have health insurance, we dont have paid sick days as domestic workers, Ingrid, who asked to use only her first name because she is undocumented, told Al Jazeera in Spanish. Like any human being, we count on having our pay to survive.

Wall of worry

More than 800 people in the US have died from COVID-19 to date, while the number of confirmed cases has surpassed 55,000, according to Johns Hopkins University.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization warned that the US could become the new epicentre of the pandemic, citing the very large acceleration of cases.

The crisis has led many governors in the US to declare a state of emergency, including in the state of Virginia, where Ingrid lives.

In response, Ingrid said eight of her 12 regular clients have cancelled her cleaning services for the month of March without paying her. Nor did they say if they will hire her back in April.

This week, she has just three cleanings scheduled, for which shell earn about $300 in total, less than half of her $700 portion of the rent is due on April 5.

A lot of the people we work for dont understand that we have budgets, we need money to pay our rent, our food and our debts, Ingrid said. Its very difficult for us.

Ingrid is not scaling that wall of worry alone.

Some 95 percent of the undocumented immigrants or relatives of undocumented immigrants surveyed by the California-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights this week said they were worried about paying their bills, while 73 percent said they were worried about contracting the virus itself.

Some 10 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants are believed to live in the US. Many earn their living as domestic workers, or in the restaurant, service or construction industries  sectors of the economy that have ground to a halt as mandatory stay-at-home orders have taken effect.

Ingrid said her clients dont seem to realise that when they text her to cancel her services, they are derailing her financially.

Immigrants who are undocumented are really scared, and rightfully so. Julie Kashen, senior policy adviser, National Domestic Workers Alliance

Little relief, but plenty of fear

It is unclear what, if any, government support tax-paying undocumented immigrants might receive to help them cope with the fallout from coronavirus.

Congress is moving closer to passing a massive $2 trillion economic stimulus plan that could see some US families receive a one-off cash handout of up to $3,000.

But it is not yet clear whether that measure would exclude people who pay taxes using individual taxpayer-identification numbers  a common practice for immigrants without Social Security numbers, according to immigrants rights group Make the Road New Jersey.

While the federal government has waived testing costs for coronavirus, treatment is not universally free.

For undocumented people like Ingrid, that means contracting coronavirus could be financially ruinous.

Because we dont have health insurance, we take care of ourselves at home with the medicines we can buy in the pharmacy without a prescription, she said. Or we have to go to medical centres that charge us a lot.

Where she lives, that means shelling out about $70  plus any testing or drug costs, Ingrid said.

Activists also warn that the anti-immigrant rhetoric and climate of fear created by the administration of US President Donald Trump could make undocumented people less likely to seek testing or treatment for fear of being arrested or deported, potentially accelerating the viruss spread.

Immigrants who are undocumented are really scared, and rightfully so, Julie Kashen, senior policy adviser for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told Al Jazeera. That means that they are less likely to seek healthcare when they need it, and it means that they are less likely to be able to do what they would need to care for themselves and their family.

Even if there are provisions in place to make sure that theyre not supposed to be legally retaliated against or that ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] isnt supposed to be called, theres no reason for them to trust that in this moment, when theres been such an unfair and unsafe situation, she added.

ICE, the government agency tasked with arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants in the US, said it does not conduct operations at medical facilities, except under extraordinary circumstances.

In response to the pandemic, ICE announced it will allow discretion over whether an arrest or deportation operation can be delayed, with a focus on public safety risks and individuals subject to mandatory detention based on criminal grounds.

But even as residents are urged to stay inside, ICE agents are still making arrests.

Agents brought masks for an operation in California after the states governor put people there on lockdown last week, the Los Angeles Times reported.

And not all undocumented immigrants who are mandated to check in at ICE field offices have had their appointments rescheduled, despite social distancing guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Concerns are also growing about the health and safety of people being held in immigration detention facilities.

On Tuesday, ICE said a 31-year-old Mexican national being held in Bergen County Jail in Hackensack, New Jersey had tested positive for COVID-19.

ICE also said that one of its employees in a detention facility and 18 not assigned to detention facilities had tested positive for the disease.

On Tuesday, The Nation magazine reported that it had obtained an internal US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report dated March 19 that said nine undocumented immigrants held in ICE facilities had been isolated for medical reasons and that two dozen more were being monitored in 10 more facilities, adding that the title of the memo suggested it was in response to COVID-19.

An ICE spokesperson told Al Jazeera she was unable to corroborate the information sourced in the article that was allegedly leaked to the reporter, and that ICE cohorts individuals for a variety of infectious disease.

On Friday, two whistle-blower physicians contracted by DHSs Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties wrote a letter to Congress warning of a tinder-box scenario if the virus is allowed to spread through detention facilities, CNN reported.

There were 37,311 detainees in ICE and Customs and Border Protection facilities as of March 14.

Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First have urged government authorities to release immigrants and asylum seekers held in administrative detention by ICE due to the documented inadequacies of medical care and basic hygiene in immigration detention facilities.

The groups also warned that infections in facilities could easily spread beyond them.

The coronavirus is really hitting home the ways that were all so interconnected and living in such a community, no matter who we are  whether were somebody who moved to the United States with papers or without, said Kashen. Public health requires that we all care about each other to save lives.

Ingrid agrees.

I wish people would have a little more consideration for us, because we are the people, in reality, who help them with their children, with their older people, with their homes, she said. We are the people who help them live their lives.
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Introduction:

Passion fruit is a tropical fruit and is found in countries such as Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Columbia. Passion fruit addresses consumer interest in healthy and exotic beverages. Passion fruit juice is sold to juice manufacturers and other processors as single strength aseptic juice (14-16 brix) or frozen concentrate (50 brix). Passion fruit puree is mostly used for preparation of passion fruit and mixed fruit beverages, baby food and is also growing popular in the dairy industry, with introduction of fruit yogurts and ice-creams. Tremendous growth has been observed in the demand for fruit purees including passion fruit puree in Western Europe. Demand for puree has been augmented with the rise in demand for fruit flavors and healthy food consumption. As the demand is set to increase, end-product manufacturers are willing to introduce new products with application in field of cosmetics as well.

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Passion Fruit Puree Market Segmentation

Brazil is worlds largest producer and consumer of both fresh and processed passion fruit, Brazil alone accounts for over 50% of the total world production. Domestic consumption of passion fruit-based puree and the use of puree in drinks has grown significantly in the last five years. Although Brazil is the largest producer, in terms of trade Brazils export is very limited. Major passion fruit puree exports are concentrated in Ecuador, Columbia and Peru. With limited supply and even reduced supply of passion fruit puree, imports have reduced in countries with high demand such as the U.S., but this has only pushed more demand for the fruit at even higher prices. Europe also faced the same supply intervention but the demand has continued to grow.

Passion fruit puree is segmented on the basis of source and end use. Based on the source passion fruit puree is segmented as organic passion fruit puree and conventional passion fruit puree. Organic trends have widely picked up and has been on an exponential growth with more and more consumers demanding organic fruits and use of organic fruit by manufacturers of beverage and baby food. A positive market growth for organic fruit puree is highly likely.

On the basis of end use, passion fruit puree is segmented as; infant food, beverages, bakery & snacks, ice-cream & yoghurt, dressings and sauces and others.

Passion Fruit Puree market Global Market Trends and Market Drivers:

Measures and aid have been put forward by various government and non-government entities to tackle global hunger and food security in countries such as Kenya. This has helped horticulture, grain and dairy farmers increase their productivity and adopt sustainable methods of farming. With these initiatives the productivity has certainly increased and the exports from these regions have also picked up. Demand for passion fruit puree has witnessed significant increase but the supply of puree in not easily full-filled. With the major dependence on countries such as Ecuador and Columbia, facing crop destruction, severe droughts, torrential rainfalls and situations of less yield. Prices of puree have also witnessed fluctuation. A higher price at the beginning of year 2016 to even higher prices in the middle of year 2016. This supply shortage is considered to boot the demand of this fruit puree and more significantly increase the market value of the same.

Demand from puree is often backed by the rise in consumption of fruit purees from fast food chains. A smoothie boom in the U.S. and the Europe caused major influx in demand from companies such as McDonalds and Starbucks.

The market in U.S. and Canada is being more accustomed to the Latin American customs and trends. Food and beverages from countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru has been the major driving force for the increase in demand. With more trade coming towards these countries, more and more food (including fruits and vegetables) processing companies have invested in these region.

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Passion Fruit Puree Market Key Players:

Small and medium scale manufacturers are mostly predominant in the Latin American region and constitute a large fraction of the market. Some of the key manufacturers of passion fruit puree include; Agrana Group, SVZ Industrial, Kiril Mischeff Group, Passina Products B.V., Quicornac S.A.
DETROIT  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been scouting possible alternate care sites for coronavirus patients in Michigan.

State and health officials have been planning for alternative care plans as hospitals in Metro Detroit near capacity. Patients may be moved to hospitals across the state, but the state is also exploring other options.

The Army Corps District Detroit says its has performed seven assessments on locations nominated by the State of Michigan as possible alternate care facilities, including a 725,000 square-foot TCF Center, the Detroit Pistons Performance Center and two dormitories at Wayne State University.

Oakland University and Grand Valley State University have also offered up dorm rooms as a possible alternative.

Under this planning mission assignment from FEMA, USACE team leaders across the nation are providing planning and assessments for the possible conversion of existing buildings into alternate care facilities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a post on Facebook reads.

USACE personnel are assisting the state and FEMAs efforts with initial site assessments as well as in-depth alternate care facility site assessments. This effort is helping to shape future anticipated mission assignments for alternate care facility support to individual states.

The news comes the same day Chief Medical Executive Dr. Joneigh Khaldun said Michigan is beginning implementation of a load balancing plan for hospitals in which hospitals outside Southeast Michigan will be asked to take on patients.

Beaumont Health, which operates eight hospitals in Wayne and Oakland counties are approaching capacity while caring for hundreds of confirmed or possible COVID-19 cases.

Michigan had 2,856 cases of COVID-19, as well as 60 deaths as of Thursday.
As the country goes into lockdown and all non-essential shops and salons close, people are turning to the scissors and razors to give themselves home makeovers.

And with Boris Johnson declaring all hairdressers shut in a bid to slow the spread of coronavirus, many are attempting to do their own hair at home, often with disastrous results.

From malfunctioning mohawks to funky fringes, many fuelled by the boredom of isolation are discovering it's not as easy as they think to cut their own hair.

Here, Femail looks at the biggest hair do fails from skin fades gone wrong to uneven ends.

Daniel Rundle, from Durham, said he was glad he was self-isolating after his girlfriend Sophie gave him a skin fade, which went very wrong

Matty MacGregor, shared a photo of his home cut mohawk, saying he'd joined the trend at home

West Ham fan Tom Williams said his hair was 'real good' after attempting a skin fade at home haircut

Gala Stancev, from Yarm in North Yorkshire, shared a series of crying emojis over her disastrous 'do

Martin Stevenson from Dundee shared a photo of his buzzcut gone wrong to Twitter

Jar shard others sentiments saying he 'knows the feeling' of a bad haircut showing his half-done fade

Lara, 22 made an unfortunate error in cutting her fringe. In what was undoubtedly an attempt to make the hair more workable by wetting it, she's inadvertently cut a massive triangle into her hair

Tommy, 22, looks as if he may have racing stripes cut into his hair, as it comes down into a bizarre point at the end

Ollie, 22, seems to have some kind of mullet growing, with his hair varying lengths throughout

Matt, 20, also attempted to do a skin fade before releasing it's an acquired and practised skill

In an attempt to get the lockdown look, Harry, 23, tried to give himself a bowl cut but ended up with a lid-like hair style

Jim, 20, appears to have a shortened version of a bowl cut, with a very short fade on his head

An unnamed lady took to Instagram and wrote: 'Good morning faux hawk?! #bedhead #quarantinehair'

Elsewhere Fardid admitted he was in need of a barber, writing: 'Quarantine day 3: Tried to cut my hair with immediate regret'
The U.S. military has decided it will stop providing some of the more granular data about coronavirus infections within its ranks out of concern that the information might be used by adversaries as the virus spreads.

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper outlined the plan in an interview with Reuters, saying that he wanted the military to keep providing broader data about infections in the armed forces, which boasts well over one million active service members.

He also banned all troop movement overseas for 60 days to curb the spread of the coronavirus as cases among U.S. service members rose by 30 percent to 280 cases on Thursday, a jump of 53.

A further 81 civilian employees, 67 dependents and 40 contractors have tested positive.

The freeze will affect 90,000 service members including those who were set to leave Afghanistan as part of a peace deal with the Taliban.

The U.S. military has decided it will stop providing some of the more granular data about coronavirus infections within its ranks, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper revealed

The US Defense Department has issued a 60-day freeze to troop deployments to aid in further prevention of the spread of the coronavirus as cases jump by 30 percent on Wednesday

U.S. Sailors man the bridge of USS Boxer, just one of the U.S. warships hit by the coronavirus

The largest increase in military cases has been seen in the United States but there are thousands more U.S. military personnel in quarantine or in self-isolation in Europe and the Middle East due to exposure to a person with the coronavirus or recent travel to a high-risk area.

Esper, a former Army secretary, said he wanted some of the more mission-specific information to be withheld to prevent compromising operational security.

'What we want to do is give you aggregated numbers. But we're not going to disaggregate numbers because it could reveal information about where we may be affected at a higher rate than maybe some other places,' Esper said, without disclosing precisely what information would be withheld or when the plan would be implemented.

The military has a small number infections compared to its one million plus forces but until now the locations of individual cases have been provided, including the first case in a U.S. soldier in South Korea in February.

'I'm not going to get into a habit where we start providing numbers across all the commands and we come to a point six, seven weeks from now where we have some concerns in some locations and reveal information that could put people at risk,' Esper said.

'The rate of infection and its impact is not hitting us at the levels that we have any concerns about right now,' he added but noted that releasing information about troops overseas was dangerous for the safety of those in the fight against al-Shabaab in East Africa as well as Islamic State militants in Syria or Afghanistan.

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper says the military will now only provide case numbers on coronavirus cases and no further information will be given on where the cases are based

Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Ernesto Santa Ana, right, and Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Maria F. Potts-Szoke, work in Naval Medical Research Center's mobile laboratory aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt where 23 cases of the coronavirus was confirmed Thursday

Sailors prepare surgical equipment to be sterilized aboard the Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Mercy which is on its way to Los Angeles to aid with the coronavirus

On Tuesday, the Navy revealed they had changed their policy to no longer supply information on which ship positive sailors serve on after over a dozen cases were discovered on various warships based in San Diego.

The policy said it would will now 'only release the number of positive cases and the geographic location of those sailors'.

The largest increase in troops has been seen within the U.S. with 85 percent of cases in the Air Force based at home.

Ninety percent of 104 cases in the Navy at now based at home while the Army declined to reveal their figures, according to Yahoo! News.

Esper did not confirm that the threat of the coronavirus was greater for troops based at home than overseas but commented on it being easier to control the actions of troops and their families who are stationed outside of America.

'You have far, far, far greater control of your servicemembers when you're deployed abroad, even when you're stationed abroad, than you do back in the United States,' he said.

The number of those in quarantine and self-isolation has also not been revealed amid claims that it is not something the military want 'to advertise'.

'If advertised, numbers can be used by adversaries to their advantage,' said Air Force Colonel Christopher Karns, a spokesman at the U.S. Africa Command.

U.S. Navy sailors lower a larne target from the fantail of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt on Saturday before four sailors were airlifted from the ship with the coronavirus

U.S. Navy sailors participate hang targets during a small arms qualification aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. All 5,000 personnel aboard will be tested for the coronavirus

On Wednesday, Esper also all troop movement overseas for 60 days in attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus in the military.

The order applies all U.S. forces, civilian personnel and families, including those scheduled to return stateside and those scheduled to deploy.

'This measure is taken to aid in further prevention of the spread of [COVID-19], to protect U.S. personnel and preserve the operational readiness of our global force,' according to the DOD statement.

The order will be hardest felt in Afghanistan where U.S. troops were scheduled to leave in accordance with a peace agreement with the Taliban but 90,000 service member will be affected in total.

The U.S. headquarters overseeing operations in Afghanistan reported Tuesday that four service members who recently arrived in the country had tested positive for the virus and were placed into a separate quarantine.

Exceptions will be granted to those needing medical treatment and Navy ship deployments if they will be in transit for 14 days.

'The purpose is to make sure that we're not bringing the virus back home, infecting others, that we're not spreading it around the military,' Esper told Reuters.

The Pentagon froze domestic travel for service members, civilian employees and their family members until May 11 earlier this month.

The news also comes as a total of 23 cases were confirmed aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, currently underway in the Pacific, after three people were airlifted from the ship on Tuesday.

Four patients in total have now been airlifted out for treatment at a medical facility in Guam as the number of cases on the ship rose by 20 in a day.

Aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt where 23 cases on the coronavirus have been found as the ship is now forced to dock in order to test all 5,000 personnel onboard

Two Kenya Port Authority boats can be seen in front of the Wasp class amphibious assault ship USS Boxer. Now based in San Diego, coronavirus cases have been confirmed on the ship

The warship is now forced to dock to test all 5,000 on board despite the Navy previously banning all ships from going into port to prevent any further infections.

There are only 800 tests on board and limited testing ability.

'We found several more cases on board the ship. We are in the process now of testing 100 percent of the crew of that ship to ensure that we're able to contain whatever spread might have occurred there,' Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said from the Pengaton Thursday.

However, Admiral Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, is adamant that the carrier will continue with its operations.

The ship is currently pulling into Guam where all sailors on board will be tested.

However, once at port the crew will not be permitted to leave the carrier.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt was deployed from San Diego in January to the western Pacific.

On March 5, it made a port call in Da Nang, Vietnam, a country where there were known coronavirus cases. At that time, the number of cases in the country was low and all were in the northern part of the country away from the port.

'At that time, there were only 16 positive cases in Vietnam, and those are well to the north all isolated in Hanoi,' said Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday.

'So this was a very risk-informed decision by the (Indo-Pacific) commander, Adm. Davidson, on whether or not we proceed with that port visit.

'We took great precautions when the crew came back from that shore visit, and did enhanced medical screenings of the crew.'

U.S. Marines walk down a removable Trident Pier leading to an American ship docked near an Emirati military base home to a Military Operations and Urban Terrain facility in al-Hamra, United Arab Emirates on Monday despite the global new coronavirus pandemic

Colorado National Guard medical personnel prepare to perform coronavirus test on a motorist at a drive-thru testing site outside the Denver Coliseum Saturday, March 14, in Denver

Gilday added that it is not certain the sailors contracted the virus in Vietnam as other personnel regularly fly on and off the carrier while at sea.

Extra precautions had also been taken to protect the crew in Vietnam such as limiting self-service in the ship's chow hall and screening sailors coming back on board for illness.

Sailors live within close conditions on the ship in staterooms and berthing spaces.

The number of cases in the US has rocketed over the last two weeks

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

People are asked to leave six feet between themselves and other people to prevent the spread of the virus which would be next to impossible in the crowded quarters.

'They are beefing up their cleaning stations,' Cmdr. Myers Vasquez, a spokesman for the Pacific Fleet, told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

'Across the fleet, (ship commanders) have been looking at best practices and implementing them. Everyone's following what (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) guidance is and putting those into effect.'

Port visits across the Pacific fleet have been called off and ships have been ordered to stay at sea for 14 days to isolate sailors.

'We canceled, I think, every port visit, with the exception of ships that need to pull in for maintenance or resupply. In those cases, when you pull in, (sailors) are limited to the pier,' Gilday said.

On March 13, the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer, currently in port in San Diego, reported one of its personnel had tested 'presumptive positive' for the virus. A second cases on board was confirmed a few days later.

And a sailor aboard the Littoral Combat Ship USS Coronado, also in San Diego, tested positive before the Navy changed their policy and are now no longer confirming which ship positive sailors serve on.

They will now 'only release the number of positive cases and the geographic location of those sailors', according the Military.com.

The virus has spread to at least a dozen serving on U.S. warships in San Diego.

Testing is also being conducted on the amphibious assault ship USS America and the 7th Fleet flagship USS Blue Ridge, both based in the Pacific.

Ships can be difficult to protect during an outbreak as seen with the Diamond Princess and Grand Princess cruise ships which became coronavirus outbreak centers earlier this year.

In 2019, a mumps outbreak aboard the USS Fort McHenry infected 28 people despite efforts to quarantine the infected and disinfect the ship from the vaccine-preventable disease.

There is no current vaccine for the coronavirus.

The U.S. military is already on the front lines of the fight against the coronabvirus in the U.S. as Navy hospital ships are deployed to New York and California.

'The Department of Defense has been at the forefront of the fight against coronavirus since the early days of our nation's response effort,' wrote Esper in an op-ed for Fox.

'In January, we provided housing at March Air Reserve Base in California to assist the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in caring for hundreds of State Department employees, dependents and U.S. citizens who were evacuated from Wuhan, China.

'Our contributions and efforts to the interagency's response has only grown since then, as we simultaneously took major steps to ensure the safety of our military personnel and their families.'

Esper has been criticized, however, for not doing more earlier on to prepare the Defense Department to protect its own forces and to assist in the federal response.

On Wednesday, he cautioned that the U.S. military is not positioned to deploy nearly enough medical resources to address the scale of the coronavirus outbreak

The USNS Mercy, a Navy hospital ship is seen docked at Naval Base San Diego in San Diego, California. To help combat an expected shortage of hospital beds as the virus spreads, the U.S. Naval hospital ship Mercy departed San Diego on Monday, March 23, bound for Los Angeles

U.S. National Guard members stand beside crates of medical supplies at the Jacob Javits Center on Monday in New York. New York City hospitals are just 10 days from running out of 'really basic supplies,' Mayor Bill de Blasio said late Sunday of the coronavirus crisis

The coronavirus is taking a growing toll on the U.S. military, and commanders and senior officials are bracing for worse. From nuclear missile fields at home to war zones abroad, from flight lines to ships at sea, the Pentagon is striving to shield vital missions even as it faces urgent calls for help on the civilian front.

Training exercises big and small, including one of the largest in Europe since the end of the Cold War, have been curtailed. Army recruiting stations have closed. Troops around the globe are hunkering down to confront an enemy unlike anything the world's most lethal armed forces have encountered before.

'It's unprecedented in my lifetime,' Defense Secretary Mark Esper said, adding that he believes that 'in a period of months' the worst will be over and the force will once again be 'fully mission capable.'

Until then, the ramifications of COVID-19 for the military are likely to expand. There are worries, for example, about the defense industry being weakened and key weapons development slowed.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that in a worse-case scenario, the military will lose some of its preparedness for combat and other missions. But the impact is likely to be 'moderate to minor to low in terms of its risk' to national defense, he told reporters on Monday.

'I'm just not in a place right now where I can give you an accurate description of what that's going to look like,' he said.

The Pentagon budget also is taking a hit, although a coronavirus relief bill working its way through Congress would provide billions for the growing list of new expenses, including loans to industry that would enable accelerated production of medical equipment like ventilators and respiratory masks for civilian needs.

Many of America's closest allies are waging their own COVID-19 battles, including Britain, Germany, Italy, France and other NATO partners, as well as South Korea, which hosts about 28,500 U.S. troops. At least temporarily, the pandemic has taken the edge off conflict in some of the globe's major flashpoints, such as Iran, as governments focus on fighting the disease inside their own borders.
: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy on Thursday appealed to people to "stay where you are" till April 14 as it was the only way to contain the spread of novel coronavirus, which he said happens once in a century.

"We can win (over coronavirus) only through self- discipline. If we are negligent, we will be paying a heavy price," he said in a televised address to the people.

His appeal came in the backdrop of the incidents on the AP-Telangana borders since Wednesday evening, where hundreds of people, who set off from neighbouring Telangana capital Hyderabad to their native districts in Andhra pradesh are stranded in view of the sealing of the borders.

People could not be allowed to cross the borders in view of the lockdown. "It's a nation-wide rule," he pointed out.

"Our people are trying to come into our state but the situation is such that we can't invite them with a smile. Diseases like corona happen may be once in 100 yearswhich we can't hope to see even once in a generation. So, we need to take some tough decisions," the Chief Minister noted.

He said the incidents (on the borders) since last evening were "heart-wrenching". "But, if we do not take tough decisions at the right time, it will be too late. If we don't confine to our houses, we can't contain the disease."



'Contact tracing' could prove extremely difficult if people were allowed to cross the borders and go home.

"If you are allowed, you could be a danger to your own family. It is inevitable that they have to be kept in quarantine for 14 days," he said.

The Chief Minister said about 150 people were permitted into the state at Markapuram, Addanki and Kandukuru (all in Prakasam district) as they returned from Hyderabad.

Another 44 were taken in at Garikapadu and shifted to a quarantine facility.

"I spoke to (Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao) KCR garu and he responded positively. He assured to take care of food and shelter of all people (from AP) in Hyderabad," Jagan added.

He requested people not to undertake inter-state or intra-state travel and "stay where you are" and not to resort to panic buying or hoarding of stocks as essential commodities were available across the state in adequate quantities.

Stating that 10 positive cases of coronavirus had been registered in AP so far, the Chief Minister said only through self-discipline could it be ensured that the cases did not rise.

"If we leave it, don't know where we go. So, self- discipline is the key. The government is taking all steps to tackle the situation," he said.

All the 27,819 persons who returned to AP from various countries in recent days were traced through a survey and kept under surveillance.

Four critical care hospitals have been opened in Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Nellore and Tirupati with 2,500 beds and 475 ICU beds with ventilators.

For 'stable patients', 200-bedded hospitals have been readied in each district while another 100-bedded hospital facility was readied in each Assembly constituency for quarantine.

The Chief Minister said 213 additional ventilators were also kept ready in government hospitals.

A central helpline 1902 has been opened to address people's concerns related to non-medical needs (supply of essential items, etc.) during the lockdown period.

Principal Secretary M T Krishna Babu would head the state control room to redress people's grievances.

Control rooms were also opened in each district and the respective ministers would coordinate with the Collectors to address people's problems.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Complaints from some Republicans that the unemployment provisions were too generous held up a Senate vote on the stimulus package.

Closed schools in the U.S. are talking about not reopening until the fall.

France says it has issued 100,000 fines to people who broke social-distancing edicts.

Get the latest updates here, plus maps and full coverage

Whats in the $2 trillion stimulus package

The deal hammered out overnight in Washington for about $2 trillion in federal aid to help the U.S. ride out the pandemic is expected to pass quickly in both houses of Congress  though there was some last-minute squabbling on Wednesday  and get President Trumps signature soon after that.

Our colleague Catie Edmondson in Washington has been reporting on whats included in the package. A few big things stand out:

Direct payments to taxpayers: If you make less than $75,000 a year ($150,000 for couples), youll get $1,200  faster if the I.R.S. has your direct-deposit information, later if they mail you a check. Theres an extra $500 for each dependent child. People who make more get less; over $100,000 a year ($200,000 for couples), and youll get nothing.

Expanded unemployment benefits: Larger checks for four months; an extra 13 weeks of eligibility; and assistance for freelancers, gig workers (like Uber drivers) and furloughed workers.

Emergency loans for small businesses: Employers who pledge not to lay anyone off can get government loans to help make payroll  and if they keep that promise for the duration of the crisis, they wont have to repay the loan.
Britain's Prince Charles has coronavirus after he travelled to Scotland where he was tested on the NHS for "mild symptoms".

The prince (71) tested positive after qualifying to be checked for Covid-19 in Scotland on account of his age and medical history. He is now self-isolating at his home in Birkhall, Aberdeenshire, separately from his wife Camilla who tested negative.

Doctors said he had been contagious from March 13 at the earliest.

He last saw his mother Queen Elizabeth, who at 93 is in voluntary isolation in Windsor, on the morning of March 12.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon sent her best wishes to the prince but warned that the Highlands must not be seen as somewhere people can go to "outrun the virus".

The prince arrived in Scotland on Sunday night after experiencing "mild symptoms", which were not sufficient to raise alarm bells about his pre-planned travel, it is understood. He was tested at home on Monday on the advice of a doctor, learning the results on Tuesday.

The Scottish NHS website states that "Generally, you'll only be tested for Covid-19 if you have a serious illness that requires admission to hospital", while some surveillance testing is permitted by local GPs. A spokesman for NHS Grampian said: "All clinical decisions are on a case-by-case basis supported by national guidance."

The news is likely to cause deep concern for those who have met the prince in recent days, after he held a succession of private meetings at his Highgrove home. All those he has been in contact with have been traced and informed.

Buckingham Palace confirmed the queen remains in "good health" and is following "all appropriate advice" while at Windsor Castle. She is understood to remain in her private apartments with Prince Philip and a vastly reduced staff.

The prince is said to be in good spirits and has not been bedridden with the illness.

A spokesman said: "It is not possible to ascertain from whom the prince caught the virus owing to the high number of engagements he carried out in his public role during recent weeks."

On March 10, Prince Charles was photographed sitting opposite Prince Albert of Monaco at a London conference about water and climate change. Nine days later, Prince Albert announced he had contracted the virus. ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Visit our Covid-19 vaccine dashboard for updates on the roll out of the vaccination program and the rate of Coronavirus cases Ireland

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
Prince William and Kate Middleton have a 'considerable responsibility' to boost morale among the British people during the coronavirus crisis, a royal expert has claimed.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who have relocated with their children to their home in Norfolk, recently visited NHS 111 to thank staff for their help.

Prince William was also the first member of The Firm to speak to the nation during the crisis in a video released last week.

Yesterday it emerged Prince Charles, 71, has tested positive for Covid-19 and is self-isolating at Balmoral, while the Queen, 93, and Prince Philip, 98, are currently in isolation in Windsor.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who have relocated with their children to their home in Norfolk, recently visited NHS 111 to thank staff for their help (pictured)

Royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams said a 'very considerable responsibility rests on the Cambridges at this difficult time.

He told Express.co.uk: 'Their movements are obviously followed avidly by the press and social media and they are certain to rise to the challenge of boosting morale, whilst complying with the behaviour recommended by the Government.'

Mr Fitzwilliams added that the couple will 'undoubtedly' send messages which will reach a huge audience through their eleven million followers on Instagram and get thoughts and ideas across during the unprecedented emergency that we all face.

He said the Cambridges' visit to NHS staff was 'undoubtedly a morale booster' and the unseen photos of Prince George and Princess Charlotte that they shared on Mother's Day were 'enchanting'.

Mr Fitzwilliams claimed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who are currently in isolation together in Canada with their son Archie, will 'undoubtedly' continue to contribute on Instagram.

However, he added: 'During this crisis... as they have chosen to be abroad, they are likely to be sidelined.'

Earlier this week an expert claimed Prince William is set to 'step up into statesman role' during the coronavirus crisis and will lead the Royal Family's efforts to support the nation.

Mr Fitzwilliams claimed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who are currently in isolation together in Canada with their son Archie, will ' undoubtedly' continue to contribute on Instagram but are likely to be 'sidelined' as a result of their decision to be abroad

Speaking to Australian website 9Honey, Katie Nicholl said the move was 'significant', adding that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were the 'best placed' members of the royal family to be 'pillars of support' for the nation at the moment.

She revealed: 'We're seeing William step up in that statesman role. It strikes me as interesting that the first member of the royal family to address the nation has been William.'

Katie said the decision would have been 'cleared by Buckingham Palace' before Prince William's video was released.

The expert explained that the Queen, 93, 'needs' to be 'pretty much in quarantine' in Windsor due to her age.

Yesterday it emerged Prince Charles, 71, has tested positive for Covid-19 and is self-isolating at Balmoral, while the Queen, 93, and Prince Philip, 98, are currently in isolation in Windsor. Pictured: Her Majesty and the Prince of Wales leaving after the Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey on March 9

Buckingham Palace has insisted the Queen is in 'good health', after her eldest son and heir was diagnosed with coronavirus.

It is understood the Prince of Wales met his mother at Buckingham Palace on March 12  less than two weeks ago. The virus has an estimated incubation period of one to 14 days.

Charles's doctor is convinced that he would have been contagious from March 13 at the very earliest, based on when the prince first started to develop symptoms at the weekend.

Yesterday the Palace released a picture of the Queen undertaking her weekly audience with the Prime Minister by telephone from Windsor Castle

The Duchess of Cornwall has tested negative but is now isolated from her husband at Birkhall, their Scottish retreat where both are staying.

Yesterday the Palace released a picture of the Queen undertaking her weekly audience with the Prime Minister by telephone from Windsor Castle.

It shows her wearing a blue blouse and cardigan, surrounded by china corgis and racing trophies, and speaking on a 1970s-style white telephone.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced yesterday that it is coordinating with the Ministry of Health and diplomatic missions abroad to evacuate Bahraini citizens who are still in Iran, Iraq, Syria and in other GCC countries, including Bahraini students studying abroad.

This came during a video conference initiated by Foreign Affairs Minister Dr. Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani at the Ministrys headquarters.

It included Council of Representatives First Deputy Speaker Abdul Nabi Salman; a number of MPs including Falah Hashim, Mamdouh Al Saleh, and Ahmed Al Dimistani; and Foreign Affairs Ministry undersecretary Dr. Shaikha Rana bint Issa Al Khalifa.

The Ministry gave its directives to the Kingdom's embassies to communicate with Bahraini citizens residing abroad to meet their needs and look after them, in addition to allocating a 24-hour operation room to receive calls from citizens to answer any queries.

The ministry also issued guidelines and published them on all conventional and social media, urging citizens to register their data at the Kingdom's embassies abroad. The ministry coordinated with diplomatic missions overseas to facilitate the shipment of medicines and medical devices from the exporting countries.
N95 respirator masks are among the personal protective equipment healthcare workers need. (Ana B. Ibarra / California Healthline)

On Sunday night, Chad Loder traversed Southern California in the pouring rain.

He drove from his South Bay home to Palms to pick up N95 masks from a UCLA student. He then dropped off masks and hazmat suits to a grateful doctor in Culver City.

And finally, at the end of the night, he drove more than two hours to a Rancho Mirage hospital to drop off even more supplies.

As hospitals run short of personal protective equipment and the number of COVID-19 patients surges, residents across the country are scouring their belongings for any gear that can be used to help the doctors and nurses on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.

"Literally, hours matter right now," said Loder, who lives in the South Bay and co-founded an organization called Masks for Docs, where donated supplies are delivered to hospitals. "We have to just do everything we can."

On Wednesday, officials from the Los Angeles County Public Health Department said COVID-19 infections are rapidly rising and doctors and nurses were advised to conserve supplies by reusing face masks and wearing expired gowns. Doctors and nurses have told Loder that they're using trash bags as protective coverings and bandannas as face masks.

Although private companies have been producing face shields and other paraphernalia, and a healthcare workers union has located 39 million N95 masks, community volunteers often work at a speed unhindered by bureaucracy, with the process as simple as putting out a call for equipment and someone either picking it up or dropping it off at a healthcare facility.

I just completed another @MasksForDocs pickup run of N95 masks. One more pickup, then a 3-hospital dropoff run.



I love you, Los Angeles. 



I love you, USA. 



I love you, world.  pic.twitter.com/Wh6g3bxCMy  Chad Loder (@chadloder) March 23, 2020

Over the last week, Loder helped build the group's website as volunteers began picking up donations and delivering gear to hospitals around the world. In New York City, he said, there's a group of motorcycle riders delivering supplies to doctors in alleys.

Story continues

Masks for Docs has more than 1,000 volunteers. People have been checking their garages, closets and earthquake kits for supplies.

"We're just on fire about getting them stuff right away," Loder said.

Others, like Deyu Kong, an engineer from Santa Clara, have created their own databases, where people can add local hospitals for donation drops.

Kong said that after watching news about the growing pandemic, he wanted to help. He teamed up with UC San Francisco Medical School students and a Los Angeles doctor to build a database and website called DonatePPE.org. Within days, more than 100 hospitals were on the list.

Karen Tsai, an L.A. internist working with the DonatePPE.org effort, was inspired to help after she learned what medical colleagues in New York were facing. Friends told her they were sterilizing used masks and hospitals have resorted to using plastic trash bags as protective gowns. Others are using paper bags to store their masks because they are alllowed only one per shift.

"You go into work," she said. "You expect to get the protection you need. And sometimes you go in, and theres nothing left.

Patty Ahn felt "terrified" after hearing about equipment shortages at the Los Angeles hospital where a relative works.

So Ahn and partner Ro Haber tapped into their combined social networks to put out a call for medical provisions. Haber, a director and writer, has a wide network in Hollywood, and word traveled fast. Messages started pouring into their inboxes. Film Director Lulu Wang further publicized the drive.

Continuing the URGENT CALL for donations of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for frontline healthcare workers in LA. See drop-off locations below. Please share widely and DM @pattyahn with any questions. https://t.co/KsNStTkY4Q pic.twitter.com/1tPk9RPSCl  Lulu Wang (@thumbelulu) March 23, 2020

Ahn and Haber drove from place to place last week, picking up donations  while practicing social distancing, they said. Their biggest donation came from Lucid Studios, a costume rental service, which provided 200 face masks.

People were pulling them out of their own emergency kits or had them left over from the fires," Ahn said.

Over the weekend, Joseph Kidane, a third-year medical student at UC San Francisco, and other classmates taped a cardboard sign to chairs in the city's Mission District asking for donations.

The first day, the group collected 235 items. Then, people went back home and grabbed masks from the 2018 Camp fire. Others raided their unused earthquake kits. The next day, donations skyrocketed to 5,000.

Days later, Kidane joined forces with Tsai and Kong.

We know theres a lot more PPE to be donated in the upcoming weeks and months, Kidane said.

Tsai said her medical colleagues, who once took for granted the readily accessible protective equipment provided to them, have been overjoyed by the donations.

Youll never see an N95 mask the same way," she said.

Times staff writers Jen Yamato and Alex Wigglesworth contributed to this report.
Minister of Finance Mohamed Maait urged taxpayers to submit their tax returns before the announced due dates for individuals and legal persons.

In a statement issued on Thursday, Maait called for positive synergy with taxpayers in the Egyptian Tax Authority (ETA) and its offices, especially the individuals, and to respond to their inquiries instantly through hotline 16395 or email [email protected] to encourage them to submit their returns electronically.

Maait instructed the ETA to finalise the national digital transformation project of the taxing system to help simplify the procedures in line with the state's efforts to attract more investors and ease the business-doing climate.

Through the electronic tax system, 101 electronic return is dedicated to individual taxpayers, including those who have commercial, industrial, vocational activities, real-estate revenues and payrolls, and those who do not have regular accounts, according to the minister.

He added that 103 tax return is for vehicle and taxi owners, while 105 tax return is for individual taxpayers who have documented regular accounts.

The ETA announced on Monday that it has extended the due date, for the second time, for individual taxpayers to submit their tax returns to 16 April, in line with the precautionary procedures adopted to contain COVID-19 outbreak impacts.

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Archived Results for Thursday, March 26th, 2020

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Cheers could be heard from 35 locations throughout town when Friendswood High School thespians held a virtual watch party for the announcement of this years Tommy Tune Award nominations.

It was so good to see the kids, said Kathy Powdrell, who directed Matilda the Musical, which scored 13 nominations, including best musical.

Four seniors were nominated for acting honors.

They included leading actress Taylor Greny in the title role as a 5-year-old prodigy who discovers she can move objects with her mind; Eric Jensen as her principal, evil Miss Agatha Trunchbull; and Thomas Massey and Taylor Campbell as Matildas parents, the Wormwoods.

The show also won nominations for best ensemble, direction, lighting design, scenic design, stage crew execution, orchestra, musical direction and choreography.

We are thrilled to be applauding our students. They worked so hard, said Powdrell.

Two years ago, the 50th annual FHS musical, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, set a record by winning 10 categories at the 16th annual Tommy Tunes, which honor excellence in musical theater at Houston-area high schools.

Hunchback also set a record for most nominations, with 15.

This year, FHS tied for the most nominations with Klein Cain Highs production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and Stratford Highs The Drowsy Chaperone.

The awards, which traditionally have been handed out in a Tony Awards-style ceremony at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts in Houston, will be announced this year on Facebook.

A special online awards show will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 28, said Israel Jimenez, the director of community engagement for Theatre Under the Stars, which sponsors the competition.

In addition to trophies in 15 categories, the Tommy Tune program awards scholarships to graduating seniors who plan to pursue a career in the arts.

Powdrell said that, due to the pandemic, she isnt counting on the Matilda cast and crew being together on April 28.

If we are able to get together, we will; but if we cant, then we cant. she said.

The biggest takeaway from the nominations is that it was something to celebrate, she added. We miss our students and we worry about them, especially the seniors, who had so much to look forward to, such as graduation and prom.

In my minds eye, I can see a production before it ever goes onstage; then Im always just a little bit surprised by how my students rise up to meet the standards and the play and their characters. I am sure they will rise up to meet the coronavirus, too.

See the full list of Tommy Tune nominations.

Don Maines is a freelance writer who can be contacted at donmaines@att.net
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Physicians are, without a doubt, some of the most educated professionals around. You spend endless hours studying, taking tests, and jumping through academic hoops in the name of good grades and patient care. But is the education you are receiving truly preparing you for the practice of medicine today?

Health care is now considered almost exclusively a business term. And yet there is a lack of business taught in medical school. Learning the language of the health care industry is a crucial skill for the physicians of today and tomorrow.

The elephant in the exam room

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, financial literacy is the ability to understand the basic principles of business and finance.

This definition seems simple enough. Yet grasping the nuances of the business of medicine is as challenging as learning the intricacies of a rare disease. Despite numerous scholarly articles and professional organizations acknowledging this, while medical schools teach the essentials of doctoring, the elephant of financial literacy is still standing in the middle of the room.

This often leaves residents overwhelmed when facing financial decisions post-graduation. Its like asking an intern to perform a comprehensive visit on a complex patient in 15 minutes on July 1st  not only is it near impossible, its just plain cruel. But there is hope: accrediting bodies are now requiring non-clinical skills be taught, including those focusing on finances.

Getting some guidance

In response to these stressors, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has incorporated recommendations for educating residents on the business of medicine. The Common Program Requirements, which every residency program must follow, require programs to incorporate basic business topics into training. But is this enough? While learning the basics of health care finance is absolutely vital, many residents are starting behind the proverbial eight ball when it comes to a baseline knowledge of personal finances.

Ignorance is not bliss

As noted above, the majority of residents in training have a startlingly low level of personal financial literacy.

Many residents have been shown to have low financial literacy and investment-risk tolerance, high debt, and deficits in their financial preparedness.

So how did we wind up here? According to Christie Ton, DO, an American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) Emerging Leaders Institute Project Winner, there is an unmet educational need for teaching medical students and residents the basics of financial literacy.

While medical schools now recognize the importance of good communication skills paired intelligence in their applicants, the elephant stomping through the room is the profound lack of basic financial education in medical students. Add this to years of being isolated from the real world by grueling hours of studying with peers having the same insulating experience, and youve created a major driver of the physician burnout.

Getting educated

Just like the first day of medical school, developing a savviness for the ins and outs of finances in medicine, both professional and personal, can seem overwhelming. There are a multitude of new terms, concepts, and acronyms (yes, theyre in this field too) that look like a jumbled mess. However, you already have the tools you need to tackle this. By taking a moment to step back and use your analytical skills, youll soon see that this can be mastered. Take these tips you likely already use and apply them to your financial education:

1. Know the lingo. Remember trying to figure out what the heck EC ASA stood for? How about ORIF? Or CABG? All the acronyms and slang were overwhelming. Feeling under-versed can take an already anxiety-provoking subject (money) and make it overwhelming. So, familiarize yourself with the terms used in business, both at home and in the office.

2. Know your resources. Nothing strikes fear into the heart of a physician than an encounter that starts with I Googled my symptoms Search engines are powerful tools, however, without defined parameters, they can take a seemingly innocent question and provide results that strike fear into the heart of the most reasonable person. Organizations such as the American Medical Association, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and Harvard Business Review provide reliable, vetted information on finances. You wouldnt devise a complex treatment plan based on an unreliable source . why do the same with your finances?

3. Get an insiders perspective. As noted above, you are likely insulated from the real world with peers who are experiencing the same struggles as you are. However, you and your colleagues are not the first medical trainees who have faced this challenge. As the old saying goes, there are no stupid questions, only the ones that go unasked. Ask your peers what they are doing to educate themselves. Look to those who have not only survived but thrived through this storm. Resources such as White Coat Investor and Dr. Piggy Bank are not only informative, they are tangible evidence that physicians can educate themselves on the intricacies of finance.

Why it matters

I was lucky enough to be Dr. Tons advisor in her ELI project; we spent quite a bit of time discussing how and why to conduct this project. She very simply and powerfully stated that basic financial literacy is not a requirement to be a competent physician.

But we are shooting ourselves in the foot by missing the proverbial forest through the trees: by hyper-focusing all our attention on science and the details of medicine, we lose sight of the financial sacrifice weve made and the impact it has on our financial and emotional health.

Lack of professional and personal financial literacy is a primary driver of burnout, which we all are very well acquainted with.

By taking the time to be informed, ask uncomfortable questions, and broaden our education beyond the traditional art of medicine, you are giving yourself a much-needed booster of professional and personal financial literacy to help prevent the onset of burnout.

Meagan Vermeulen is director of content strategies, Physician Career Planning and associate program director, Rowan University SOM Family Medicine Residency Program.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A San Francisco party promoter accused by City Attorney Dennis Herrera of organizing an illegal event amid the city's shelter-in-place order said Wednesday he canceled the event days ago and called the situation a misunderstanding.

Herrera initially accused event promotor Set San Francisco of selling nonrefundable tickets for a party called "Lehar (Afterlife, Multinotes, Diynamic) at 251 Cocktail Club at 251 Rhode Island St. for this Friday, with tickets ranging from $5 to $780.

Herrera claimed the organizers were "attempting to profit off the coronavirus," and ordered the promoter to remove the party's listing on Eventbrite.com and notify everyone who bought tickets that the event has been canceled and refund them their money.

However, according to Christian Pineiro, owner of Set San Francisco, he moved to cancel the event more than a week ago. Since then, however, he's been bed-ridden after testing positive for COVID-19.

"No one is trying to do any type of events right now," he said. "This has been blown out of proportion."

According to Pineiro, he had previously agreed to cancel the event, along with the owners of 251 Cocktail Club. Following the decision to cancel, the owners then moved to delete a Facebook event page made for the party.

Pineiro said after that, a glitch on Eventbrite.com wouldn't allow him to access the party's event page and cancel it. Although he remains ill, he said he's already contacted Eventbrite to remove the listing and to refund eventgoers' money.

While the Eventbrite listing was available as of Wednesday morning, the page has since been deleted.

In a statement posted to Twitter, Eventbrite said, "We have removed this event from our platform. The health and safety of our community is our focus and we advise everyone to follow all government-issued practices."

Rick Haynes, owner of 251 Cocktail Club, said he moved to close his space since the shelter-in-place order took effect last week.

Additionally, a statement on the venue's website said, "Like most other bars in California, we are currently closed and waiting out the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope to re-open as soon as we are given the okay by state and local authorities."

Haynes seemed dumbfounded as to why Herrera admonished his club and Set San Francisco Wednesday, when Haynes said he spent a considerable amount of time on Tuesday speaking with a San Francisco police officer, assuring them that event was not taking place.

"This is not good for our business," Haynes said. "They're making us look really bad."

Copyright  2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
NEW YORK, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Fairstead, a fully-integrated real estate firm committed to the preservation of high quality affordable housing, today announced the $33.25 million acquisition of Festival Field Apartments, a 204-unit Section 8 family apartment property located in Newport, Rhode Island. The acquisition was financed through the issuance of low-income housing tax credits and tax-exempt bonds issued through RIHousing.

The property is comprised of six three-story walkup buildings, as well as two accessory buildings that house a management office. As part of the acquisition, Fairstead is planning an extensive property-wide rehabilitation in excess of $17 million, which will include the renovation of all roofs, sidings, windows, and boilers. In addition, 100% of units will receive new kitchens, flooring, cabinets and bathrooms. Fairstead will also be developing new ADA-accessible units and a state-of-the art community center.

"We're excited to acquire and begin a much needed renovation of Festival Fields Apartments. Our acquisition and complete renovation of the Festival Field Apartments property supports Fairstead's mission to provide people with a great place to live regardless of income," said Will Blodgett, Co-Founder and Partner of Fairstead. "Right away, we will commence an $85,000 per unit renovation that will bring quality, affordable housing to this community. Fairstead believes it's more important than ever to preserve and enrich communities such as Festival Field Apartments as we continue our commitment to developing and preserving exceptional affordable housing nationwide."

"The need and demand for affordable rental housing is strong in Newport, where 60% of the city's residents are renters," said Carol Ventura, Executive Director of RIHousing. "The rehabilitation of Festival Field Apartments ensures these rental homes remain affordable, safe and healthy for residents for years to come and helps strengthen previous investments made in the North End of Newport."

About Fairstead

Fairstead is a vertically integrated real estate investor, developer, owner and operator specializing in affordable, mixed-income and market-rate housing. Since 2013, Fairstead has acquired, preserved and/or developed more than $4 Billion of multifamily property across the country, and today owns a portfolio of 11,500 apartments in 14 states. The company's comprehensive platform provides hands-on expertise across all multifamily disciplines, including acquisitions, development, design and construction, energy and sustainability, property management and social services. For more information, visit www.fairstead.com.

CONTACT: For Fairstead:

GREAT INK  212-741-2977 (Eric Gerard/Tom Nolan)

[email protected]

SOURCE Fairstead

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 17:26:24|Editor: huaxia

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Palestinian policemen work at a checkpoint at the entrance of the West Bank city of Bethlehem on March 26, 2020. A senior Palestinian official announced on Thursday that 15 new COVID-19 cases were recorded in Palestine, raising the total number to 86. (Photo by Luay Sababa/Xinhua)

RAMALLAH/GAZA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- A senior Palestinian official announced on Thursday that 15 new COVID-19 cases were recorded in Palestine, raising the total number to 86.

Ibrahim Melhem, spokesman of the Palestinian government, told a news briefing in Ramallah that the 15 new cases were from the village of Beddo to the northwest of Jerusalem.

They were infected "after mixing with the Palestinian woman who was declared dead (from coronavirus) on Wednesday," said Melhem, adding more precautionary measures will be taken in the village.

The number of the Palestinians infected with the coronavirus has reached 86, with nine in the Gaza Strip and 77 in the West Bank.
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Furious commuters and key workers vented their anger at Sadiq Khan again today as the London Underground was packed with passengers including NHS staff on day three of Britain's historic coronavirus lockdown.

The Mayor of London, who has sparked fury and defied the Prime Minister by cutting Tube services while blaming staff sickness at Transport for London, is being accused of 'risking lives' because of the conditions on the trains.

And he angered commuters today by tweeting: 'One in three TfL staff are off sick or self-isolating: we cannot run more services. Employers: staff must work from home wherever possible to help protect our key workers who need to travel. If you have to go to work, please don't travel at rush hour.'

Social media users criticised what they described as a 'no can do' attitude and accused Mr Khan of 'purposely trying to undermine the Government in the UK's hour of need', while others said: 'Step aside if you can't cope.'

More shocking pictures of packed carriages and platforms emerged again today due to there being an insufficient number of trains to carry people with no choice but to go to work, including medics on the frontline saving lives.

Denise Bennett tweeted this morning: 'Message from daughter, going to work as a nurse in London - 'Tube station is rammed'. How can she stay safe, keep her patients safe when she has to travel to work like this, Sadiq Khan?'

Debz Lipsphil was on the Tube today and tweeted: 'Sadiq Khan, why have you reduced the Tube service? Key workers are forced to be squashed together! Nuts! Thanks for that stupid unsafe idea!' Meanwhile Richard Heath said: 'No wonder the country (is) not taking this serious when the London Tube (is) still like f***ing sardines'.

And Patricia Pereira posted: 'Jubilee line service packed, Waterloo station escalators out of use forcing people to use the ones that are working and be extremely near. Three TfL staff by gate line talking, no one manage the crowd (or) helping on social distancing! I am a key worker, I don't want to get ill!'

MailOnline's Piers Morgan tweeted: 'Ridiculous. Come on Mayor Sadiq Khan - you must run enough trains for people to maintain 2m distancing or they will infect each other and be unable to provide essential work. Sort it'.

Mr Khan has axed the Tube's Night service, and drivers on that shift could be drafted in to ease pressure during the day - with workers saying staff are 'dropping like flies' with about a third off sick or going into self-isolation.

However early-morning Tube use today was down 13 per cent on the previous day, while bus use was down 8 per cent. Passenger numbers yesterday morning were down 92 per cent compared with the same day last year.

The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has tweeted about reduced Tube usage today and urged people to only travel if essential

Critics including MailOnline's Piers Morgan have urged Sadiq Khan to put on more Tube trains to avoid spreading coronavirus

A Central Line train on the London Underground is pictured at 5.45am today, showing carriages are full even before rush hour

Commuters pack onto a Central line train into London this morning as people continue to travel into the capital

The escalator at London Waterloo station this morning where social distancing for key workers was impossible again

Commuters face a 14-minute wait for a District line train at Ealing Common station in West London this morning

This Twitter user was unimpressed by the 14-minute wait at Ealing Common station in West London this morning

Some passengers stated that their Tube journeys were quieter than normal today. Twitter user @mortimusprime-x posted two pictures showing carriages with empty seats, and wrote: 'My normally packed #tubes this morning on the way to work... thank you to all those staying at home #keyworker keepsafe #stayathome.'

One in three of TfL staff are ill or in self-isolation - including large numbers of drivers and customer-facing workers - with the sickness figures appearing to be disproportionately higher than among frontline workers in the NHS, police and fire services.

Some have blamed the strength of the Tube unions and their threat to pull away members for the high level of staff absence.

But one Tube driver told BBC London: 'We are attacked no matter what we do. Most of us have families and because people who should be in quarantine or practising social distancing aren't following guidelines we are being exposed to the virus even more. We are dropping like flies.'

Another driver told the broadcaster: 'We have 30/80 drivers off and half the managers. We are trying our best. We want to do more but we don't decide the service levels.'

MailOnline can reveal that during rush hour today some Underground lines are currently only running one train every 20 minutes, when it should be one every three to five minutes, causing more crammed conditions in 'death trap' carriages and on heaving platforms.

Commuters hold onto bars as they pack onto a Central line Underground train into the capital this morning

Commuters wait for a Central line train at Stratford station on the London Underground this morning

Passengers sit on a London Underground Circle line train this morning as the UK continues to be on lockdown

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said: 'My own view is that we should be able to run a better Tube system at the moment, we should be able to get more Tubes on the line.'

** Are you travelling in London today? Send your stories and pictures to martin.robinson@mailonline.co.uk or tips@dailymail.com ** Advertisement

He claimed 'I do not wish in any way to cast aspersions on what is going on at TfL', and pledged to give the mayor 'every support' to get through 'what seems to me to be his present logistical difficulties'.

As deaths in the capital doubled, the Mayor of London is facing mounting fury and pressure to restore services to normal levels with some NHS workers claiming they are now more worried about travelling to work than treating coronavirus patients in hospital.

But in a statement Mayor Khan revealed more train services will go and said: 'Nearly a third of TfL's staff are now off sick or self-isolating - including train drivers and crucial control centre staff.

Commuters at Canning Town Station in East London this morning wait to board a Jubilee line Underground service

A police officer stands guard at Canning Town station in East London today as people continue to travel by Tube

London Underground passengers wait to board a Tube train at Canning Town station in East London this morning

Underground commuters board and alight from a train at Canning Town station in East London this morning

'Many of them have years of safety-critical training in order to run specific lines - so it is simply not possible to replace them with others.

Police patrols stop train passengers for spot checks to enforce the coronavirus lockdown Police patrols have been stopping train passengers for spot checks in a bid to enforce the coronavirus lockdown. Officers have been seen patrolling train stations in Swansea to check passengers should only be making 'essential' journeys. Passengers at Swansea train station were asked for proof of their travel plans - and urged to take a single journey to their destination and home again. Police are being given powers to issue 30 on-the-spot fines to those breaking the lockdown - and court appearances for non-payment. South Wales Police declined to comment on the specifics of what officers were doing at Swansea station. The force's chief constable, Matt Jukes, has previously said: 'South Wales Police has a track record of maintaining public order and safety in huge events and at times of emergency. We have always done so positively, with pride and professionalism. 'So, we will continue to do what we do best - engage with people. We will ask them to support their communities and stick to these important restrictions. 'As the public would expect, we will also enforce the existing law when this is necessary and new legal powers, as they come into effect.' Advertisement

'TfL will do everything possible to continue safely running a basic service for key workers, including our amazing NHS staff, but if the number of TfL staff off sick or self-isolating continues to rise - as we sadly expect it will - we will have no choice but to reduce services further.'.

There were grim scenes on the Tube again today where commuters with no choice but to go to work were faced to stand nose-to-nose with strangers on teeming trains.

Key worker Tony Drew tweeted: 'No-one is listening to you and don't need to reduce the service as much as you have. You need to get more trains on and stop putting the lives of key workers like me at risk'.

Kate Mat wrote: 'I have zero respect for Sadiq & TFL! Are they really blind or just heartless??! They are putting key workers life in danger!!!! Nurses, doctors and other key workers can't practice social distancing on cramped tubes!'

A senior nurse named Danny posted on Twitter: 'Another busy tube. Can we not stagger people's start times so we aren't all squashed on the same tube! This is unsafe and not fair!'

And Barry Trimble, whose work involves ensuring cancer patients receive chemotherapy, posted: 'The Tube is packed, with social distancing impossible. We need more people to stay at home and more trains running in morning and evening peak.'

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said there is 'no good reason' Tube services have been slashed and Mr Johnson also questioned why up to three quarters of services had been axed in a call with Mr Khan yesterday.

** Are you travelling in London today? Send your stories and pictures to martin.robinson@mailonline.co.uk or tips@dailymail.com **
English Norwegian

The Annual General Meeting of Orkla ASA will be held at Orkla House, Drammensveien 149, Oslo, on Thursday, 16 April 2020 at 09:00 a.m. Please note that the time and

venue has changed from what was communicated on the 11th of March.

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, a number of measures are being implemented to prevent the spread of infection.

Shareholders are requested to avail themselves of the possibilities of casting advance votes or voting by proxy, as described in the notice of the meeting, and as far as possible to refrain from attending in person. Arrangements are being made to enable shareholders to watch the Annual General Meeting (AGM) via a webcast at www.orkla.com, and the AGM will be simultaneously translated into English.

The AGM will be conducted as briefly as possible, and representation of Orklas Board of Directors and administration will be kept to a minimum. No refreshments will be served in connection with the AGM. Necessary infection prevention measures will be taken for shareholders attending in person.

Notice of attendance, casting of advance votes and submission of proxies must be received no later than 3 p.m. (Norwegian time) on 14 April 2020 as further set out in the notice. Attached you will find the notice to the General Meeting, including appendices.

The Notice is posted electronically or by mail to all shareholders. To order a printed version of the appendices to the Notice, see www.orkla.com.

Notice of the Annual General Meeting and other documents relating to items of business, including supplementary information to agenda item 3, as well as further information concerning the rights of shareholders, may be found at https://www.orkla.com/investor-relations/annual-general-meeting/annual-general-meeting-2020/ .

Registration will open at 08:30 p.m. on the date of the General Meeting.



Orkla ASA

Oslo, 26 March 2020



Ref.:



Group Director Corporate Communications & Corporate Affairs

Hakon Mageli

Tel.: +47 928 45 828

Email: hakon.mageli@orkla.no



VP Investor Relations

Elise A. Heidenreich

Tel: +47 951 41 147

Email: elise.andersen.heidenreich@orkla.no



For questions concerning the nomination committee recommendations, please contact:

Anders Christian Stray Ryssdal

Tel.: + 47 907 84 794

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to Section 5-12 the Norwegian Securities Trading Act

Attachments
Immigration looks to cut crowding, wants 90-day report to be made online

THAILAND: The Immigration Bureau (IB) wants foreign residents not to come to its offices to make their 90-day place of residence report after overcrowding put paid to its attempts at one-metre social distancing against COVID-19.

CoronavirusCOVID-19immigration

By Bangkok Post

Thursday 26 March 2020, 11:07AM

Foreigners report to the Immigration Bureau on Chaeng Watthana Road in Laksi district of Bangkok on Tuesday (Mar 24). Photo: Varuth Hirunyatheb

Foreigners living in Thailand are being asked to process their 90-day reports at home via an online platform or, more traditionally, by post, IB deputy spokesman Phakkhaphong Saiubon said yesterday (Mar 25).

Applicants are usually required to report in person to immigration officers to complete the procedure.

But at Immigration Bureaus Division 1 on Chaeng Watthana Road yesterday, the office was so overcrowded that people were forced to wait in a nearby compound that once housed a now-shut down market, officials said.

The office serves foreigners who want to renew their visas as well as migrant workers who are required to process some paperwork.

Up to 1,000 chairs were brought into the IB building and the compound and placed at a safe distance, Pol Col Phakkhaphong said, referring to the social distancing measure. The bureau will now start working at 7am, earlier than before. However, officers admitted it was difficult to manage such large numbers of people with COVID-19 spreading.

The numbers yesterday were greater than those on Tuesday, following the governments announcement of the emergency decree which made many rush to report to the authorities.

The slow processing of visa renewal applications caused by social distancing on Tuesday forced some people to return to the immigration office yesterday.

Why doesnt the government offer an extension application with a payment portal online? one US citizen named only Ashok asked in a letter of complaint sent to the Bangkok Post before the IB announcement.

His 30-day tourist visa is valid until April 3 and he said he needed to get a 30-day extension.

Other foreigners also want to stay in Thailand as a result of flight cancellations and lockdowns in many countries.

His bureau has also decided to temporarily close three One Stop Service centres for migrant workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia in order to better manage their numbers.

They can currently contact officers at a car park at Imperial World shopping mall in Bangkok which has more space or at Chaeng Watthana, according to Pol Col Phakkhaphong.
The Delhi government ordered the district magistrates on Thursday to set up 'hunger relief centres' to serve food to the needy people in the wake of the countrywide lockdown over the novel coronavirus pandemic.

An official said the Delhi Disaster Management Authority has issued an order asking the DMs to set up two centres in every municipal ward.

The official said the district magistrates would appoint a nodal officer for every 'hunger relief centre', where lunch and dinner would be offered to the homeless and deprived people.

Protocols related to social distancing will be strictly followed while serving free meal, the official said.

The deputy commissioners of police have also been asked to ensure proper security arrangements at these centres.

At present, the Delhi government has been serving lunch and dinner at more than 230 night shelters amid the 21-day lockdown to contain the spread of the deadly COVID-19.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 19:07:15|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday said he appreciates World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus' efforts to advance the global battle against the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a reply letter to Ghebreyesus, Xi said China will continue to provide support for the international community in combating the coronavirus disease.

Under Ghebreyesus' leadership, the WHO has been actively advancing global cooperation against the contagious illness and gained wide recognition from the international community, Xi noted.

China, he added, will continue to firmly support Ghebreyesus and the WHO playing an active and leading role in the global fight.

China has always supported the global COVID-19 containment efforts with concrete actions, and has offered assistance to international organizations, including the WHO, as well as more than 80 countries, Xi said.

He added that China will continue to provide as much assistance as its capacity allows for the international struggle against the pandemic.
The Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) is with immediate effect going all out to enforce the ban on the sale of second-hand clothing, including brassieres and panties, the Director-General of the authority, Professor Alex Dodoo, has said.



In 1994, Ghana passed the Legislative Instrument (LI) 1586, which outlawed the importation, clearance and sale of used undergarments because they were found to be unhygienic and presented a health hazard.



However, the implementation of the law was never carried out and the second-hand clothing continued to flood the markets.



But with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the regulator - GSA - believes the time to act is now.



The regulation



The LI states: No person shall import for commercial purpose or in commercial quantities any of the following goods which are second-hand or which have been used  handkerchiefs; men, women and childrens underpants; mattresses and sanitary ware.



A person who imports any goods contrary to the regulation above commits an offence and is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding GH500,000 or imprisonment for a term not exceeding one year or to both, and the goods in respect of which the offence was committed shall be liable to be seized and forfeited to the State.



In an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra last Tuesday, March 24, Prof. Dodoo said the enforcement, which would start in due course, would be done at the various entry points of the country.



Enforcement



That would help ensure that used clothing classified as banned were not allowed into the country, especially at this moment when the world was battling the spread of the COVID-19, he said.



He stated that the authority would also begin market surveillance across the country to rid the market of banned second-hand items such as brassieres, panties and handkerchiefs.



We are triggering all the measures at the entry points to ensure that some of these items do not get to the open market because anything unhygienic is a threat to public health at this moment, Prof. Dodoo said.



He explained that not all used clothing had been banned under the Legislative Instruments (L.I. 1586) of 1994 and (L.I. 1693) of 2001 which placed a ban on the importation of some used merchandise.



As a result, he said some clothing were acceptable under the laws of the country to be imported through the recognised organisations that had been certified to indulge in the second-hand clothing business.



Those organisations, Prof. Dodoo said, were expected to disinfect the goods before bagging and exporting them to ensure that they did not pose a health risk to persons who patronised them.



As for the clothes, they are expected to be disinfected by the organisations that ship them into the country, so we will ensure that the right things are done; but we will get onto the market to ensure that banned items are not sold on the open market, he said.



Health risk



Prof. Dodoo said the health risks posed to persons who patronised such items, especially during this period of crisis, were enormous.



He said the public could help curb the spread of the virus through cleanliness.

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Source: Daily Graphic









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There is an acute shortage of seasonal labour to harvest crops on French farms. The agriculture sector is calling on people in France, under lockdown and currently not working, to go work in the fields.

The French agriculture sector needs 200,000 people in the coming three months to palliate the absence of foreign workers. They cannot come to France because the countrys borders have been shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic whose epicentre is now Europe.

The foreign workers are mainly from north African countries like Tunisia and Morocco as well as eastern European countries. Undocumented workers  who also take up such jobs  currently living in France are hesitant to travel across the country because of reinforced police patrols monitoring the lockdown.

Didier Guillaume, the French Agriculture minister, said there is a need for more solidarity so that we may all eat. The minister is urging the people in France to "manger francais!", eat French produce and support the local economy.

I am calling on the men and women who are not working and locked indoors to join the great army of French agriculture, he declared.

He said he was thinking about waiters, hairdressers, hotel receptionists and all the people who are unable to carry out their usual professional activities.

Guillaume said they will be paid by the farmers and that the modalities for this initiative will be laid out in coordination with Muriel Penicaud's Labour ministry, Bruno Lemaire's Economy ministry and his ministry of Agriculture.

The ministry of Labour will deliver "practical guide", by the end of the week, for potential employers in the farming sector establishing how to ensure the safety of newly recruited workers while France is still under lockdown.

I cant see why a hairdresser will not be able to pick strawberries or bottle yogurts, he added.

His declarations met with some degree of mockery on social media given that his government recently applied tougher sanctions and restrictions on public movements for an extended lockdown.

Story continues

Matching farmers and workers

The FNSEA, the French National Federation of Farmers Union, said that measures will be put in place ensuring the safety of potential new seasonal workers, including social distancing.

French asparagus farmers said that, with the lockdown, their sales went down by half. So, they reduced production accordingly and are leaving crops to rot in the fields.

The FNSEA launched an online platform, des bras pour ton assiette, to liaise potential workers with farmers.

Its sort of Meetic [a dating app] and Blablacar [car sharing app] for agricultural jobs, explained Christiane Lambert, chairperson of FNSEA.

Lambert called on students and unemployed to reach out.

According to the farmers' union, the regions most in need of seasonal labour are the Pyrenees-Orientales the Gard and Herault in the south as well as the south-western Dordogne, Lot et Garonne and Tarn et Garonne.

The online platform is set up with Pole Emploi, the French national employment agency.

The FNSEA requested a special exception for weekly working hours which, in France, are set at a maximum of 48 hours. The union is also asking that overtime not be taxed.

The government as well intends to launch a platform with Pole Emploi to facilitate recruitment by "those sectors currently in need of more labour".
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  The Alaska Senate approved a budget provision Monday that would give residents a $1,000 payment as a way to blunt economic impacts from the coronavirus.

The provision, an amendment to a larger state spending package, passed 12-7 after the Senate rejected a proposed $1,300 stimulus payment. The underlying budget passed 17-1 later in the day, with Republican Sen. Lora Reinbold voting in opposition.

The House will have to decide whether to agree to what passed the Senate. If theHouse does not agree, differences typically are hashed out in a conference committee.

The sti...
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney and union leaders representing health care workers on Thursday called on the city to come up with a comprehensive plan to help protect hospital staff from contracting the novel coronavirus.

In light of at least five cases of health care workers contracting COVID-19 at Laguna Honda Memorial Hospital recently, the employees say their working conditions have become increasingly unsafe as they continue to combat a shortage of personal protective equipment, according to Haney.

"Every single day I've heard from frontline workers," Haney said. "They don't feel safe. They're not receiving the protective equipment they need. There isn't a comprehensive plan to ensure their safety at work, and on top of all that far too often they aren't being listened to."

"We cannot forget about our in-home support workers," he added. "Many members of our community who are sick, who are disabled, are being taken care of at home and we expect that that's only going to increase as the virus spreads."

On Tuesday, Haney introduced legislation, along with Supervisor Shamann Walton, urging both the Department of Public Health and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital to create a plan to protect workers.

The plan would include personal protective equipment for all health care workers; testing and treatment for all frontline workers as well as those receiving homecare and nursing facility residents; a minimum of two weeks of pay before workers must use paid leave; compensation for long-term care providers for work in addition to regular hours; and to stop issuing violations for in-home service providers who exceed their weekly work limits.

"This resolution is really about protecting our frontline workers and making sure they're not penalized for the great work that they do," Walton said.

According to Deanna Chan, president of the Rehabilitation Professionals Chapter, IFPTE Local 21, which represents workers in the city's hospitals, clinics, behavioral health facilities and homeless shelters, the workers are finding it increasingly hard to do their job without protection like PPE, which is in short supply in hospitals nationwide amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The lack of PPE is of grave concern to all of us. Right now, there is no way for us to protect our patients when we are doing direct care with them," she said. "We're in very close contact, if not direct contact, for more than 15 minutes, 30 minutes, even an hour at a time."

Other challenges nurses are currently facing include a lack of safe practices, like notifying co-workers of a health care professional who has tested positive for the virus, according to Chan.

"Something that has been happening, is that we might not find out until days later that somebody we had seen two, three days ago is now a person under investigation (for COVID-19) or an active COVID-19 client. It's just days too late of, again, not being able to protect ourselves, our families, or the people who we work with," she said.

Jennifer Esteen, a nurse and vice president of organizing for SEIU Local 1021, said despite hundreds of thousands of masks reportedly being provided by the state and private companies, health care workers are still seeing shortages.

"We are week two of sheltering-in-place and our frontline staff throughout all of the department of public health continues to come to work with little to no protection. Staff are even being instructed to reuse masks, which are designed only for single use -- and that's if they have it at all, she said.

Esteen also warned of a potential shortage of health care workers at such a critical time, if the city doesn't step up to protect them.

"If our health care workforce falls ill en masse, we will have a severe and crippling shortage and this pandemic will immediately worsen," she said.

On Wednesday, city Department of Public Health officials confirmed the five COVID-19 cases of Laguna Honda health care workers. In response, the hospital has placed a total of 120 people under a two-week protective quarantine at two of the hospital's units, where four of the staff who tested positive work.

Additionally, DPH officials said all staff at the hospital are being screened for symptoms each time they start their shift.

Dr. Grant Colfax, San Francisco's Health Director, also announced that to further support the health care workers, DPH has recently hired 80 new nurses.

The full Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on Haney's resolution in the coming weeks.

Copyright  2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
Small business owners worry about cash flow as Nigeria prepares to go into lockdown later on Thursday.

Nigerians are bracing for a partial lockdown from Thursday as authorities try to contain the spread of coronavirus cases in the country of about 200 million people.

Markets, religious centres, schools, offices and leisure spots have already been shut in some states since last week.

We are determined to be more aggressive in enforcing the measures aimed at containing the spread of the virus, information minister Lai Mohammed said in the capital Abuja on Thursday.

Time is running out. We have a short window within which to stop this pandemic or face an explosion in terms of the cases. We cannot afford to be complacent.

The country has 51 confirmed cases of coronavirus and has recorded one death.

On Tuesday, Lagos, the nations commercial capital with an estimated population of 20 million, advised residents to stay at home and only permitted shops selling essential items like groceries, medicine and life-saving products to remain open.

I urge that all travel to and from Lagos, whether by air or by road, be avoided at this time, Lagos governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu said on Tuesday.

Many residents resorted to panic buying on Wednesday as they rushed to stock up on food and other essentials in the face of Thursday morning deadline.

In Abuja the government has implemented a similar directive that will come into effect on Thursday.

I am happy with the directive by government. It enables me to spend time with my family and avoid contact with people who visit my office, said a worker in Abuja who did not want to be named.

I work at the front desk and I have to attend to a lot of people daily. I was already worried at the level of exposure to suspected cases of coronavirus.

Nyesom Wike, governor of the countrys oil capital, Rivers State, said he would close the states borders to people crossing from Thursday evening. The states capital, Port Harcourt, is home to the offices of some oil majors such as Nigeria LNG and Royal Dutch Shell.

Some top government officials, including the chief of staff to President Muhammadu Buhari, and a state governor have tested positive for coronavirus, according to local newspaper The Cable.

Some government officials have taken to social media to reveal they are in self-isolation after coming in contact with confirmed cases.

Military deployment?

The Nigerian army is reportedly preparing to deploy for a coronavirus lockdown, according to sources close to the military.

Reuters news agency reported that the soldiers are expected to forcibly transfer the sick to hospitals across the country and enforce curbs on movement to try.

According to an army memo seen by Reuters, the military also plans to protect government food storage from looters.

The Nigerian army has not confirmed the plans.

With millions asked to stay at home, concerns have been raised about fiscal stimulus to cushion the effects on the informal sector which constitutes a bulk of the countrys population.

Michael Babajide runs a business centre in Abuja and has three staff working for him.

I earn daily income. Closing my shop is going to affect me greatly. I know its for my health and the health of others but how do I pay my bills? I have workers salary to pay too, he said. If this thing lasts for much longer and we cant open our shop, I may be forced to sack my workers. I wont be able to pay them with no work to generate money, he told Al Jazeera.

The government is yet to announce measures in place to address the concerns of private businesses.

The group under the poverty line, those that live by the day, how do you tell them to stay at home without providing for them? The government needs to intervene, Abuja resident Rita Egbujovbo told Al Jazeera.
Niamey, Niger (PANA) - Niger's technical and financial partners announced on Thursday commitments of 127,655,000,000 CFA francs to fund Niger's health management plan in combating the coronavirus pandemic
Its not just toilet paper and hand sanitizer people have been stocking up on during the COVID-19 crisis.

Inventory levels at adult use cannabis stores in the U.S. showed a quick decline after the COVID-19 crisis began, as what was once an illicit drug seems to have not only become mainstream, it is now being declared an essential business by a number of state governments.

In California, for example, the pre-COVID crisis average inventory carry levels were roughly 4.7 weeks (meaning the average retailer had about 4.7 weeks of inventory on hand), according to Seattle, Wash-based research firm Headset.

By last week, this had decreased to only about 3.3 weeks supply, according to the research firm.

In Canada inventory levels also rapidly declined, with average inventory coverage at about 5.8 weeks pre-crisis and 3.1 last week, according to the research firm.

This week, however, the stock-up behaviors cooled off in places like California and Nevada, where Headset reported dramatic sales declines.

Research from the Brightfield Group, a CBD and cannabis-focused market research firm, shows 31% of cannabis consumers plan to use cannabis more frequently as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. The data is from a survey of 941 cannabis users in the U.S. from March 16 to 19.

Despite California being under lockdown, cannabis dispensaries can continue to offer delivery and pick-up service. California Gov. Gavin Newsom deemed cannabis an essential medicine and stated it serves as a pharmacy to many people.

Similar actions were taken in several other states, while regulations in a number of states were changed to enable delivery of cannabis products. Cannabis has been given an essential designation in 21 states including Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington.

Even before the virus struck, poll after poll has showed that a majority of Americans support federal legalization of marijuana.

The upshot of the virus impact on the cannabis industry, and those who work to insure cannabis businesses, may be the broad recognition that cannabis is a legitimate as well as essential business, and importantly, it may be worth the risk of insuring.

Now we have state governments going so far as to include medical cannabis as essential, said Michael Sampson, a partner in the insurance recovery group and co-vice chair of the cannabis law team for in the Pittsburgh, Penn., office of ReedSmith. Its a whole other thing in a time of crisis to see state after state declaring medical cannabis as essential.

The recognition of cannabis operations as essential could change the insurance landscape for the industry, according to Rocco Petrilli, chairman of the National Cannabis Risk Management Association.

That brought a lot of prominence to the fact, particularly on the medical side, that this is not simply a recreational drug or a placebo, that people are very much reliant on it, Petrilli said.

One of the goals of the NCRMA has been to open up additional capacity in the insurance industry, which Petrilli said has largely still shunned the cannabis.

The capacity is very limited, so were in a supply and demand situation and demand has overwhelmed supply, said Petrilli, who believes this is the one silver lining in the COVID crisis.

Chris Boden, cannabis and life sciences practice group team leader with wholesaler Crouse & Associates, who has been arguing for years that insurers should consider cannabis a legitimate opportunity, has seen progressively more carriers step into the space.

Boden believes this crisis and the treatment of cannabis dispensaries by state governments as an essential business may be the push thats needed to get more insurers off the fence and into the cannabis insurance game.

A lot more carriers are starting to see this as a legitimate and viable business opportunity, Boden said. This definitely will shine more of a positive light on it.

Not all lights being shined on the cannabis industry during the crisis are positive.

A persistent problem with the industry has been that the drug is all-too-often marketed as a panacea. Its been touted as everything from a sexual enhancer to a cure for cancer.

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws on Monday sent out a press release hoping to make people aware of online misinformation surrounding the use of either whole-plant cannabis or CBD as a potential remedy for the COVID-19 virus.

NORML in its announcement noted that some predatory marketers are seeking to profit by selling a host of products under a variety of false or unsubstantiated claims, some of whom are explicitly targeting cannabis consumers.

NORML used as an examples:

One recent CBD provider recently received warning letters from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission for improperly marketing the agent as a key component of its COVID-19 prevention package.

In Oregon, the Attorney General ordered a Portland CBD retailers to remove misleading advertising claiming that the compound may boost ones natural immunity to the virus.

In Vancouver, Canada, an unlicensed CBD distributor has come under fire for opining that their products can help your body defend against COVID-19.

If something sounds too good to be true, it likely is, NORML Executive Director Erik Altieri said in a statement. During these difficult times, we encourage people to be skeptical of any unsubstantiated claims, particularly those circulating online, surrounding the use of cannabis or any other uncorroborated treatment for COVID-19.

Petrilli sees another upside to the COVID crisis for the cannabis industry. He said NCRMA staff has lately been field more calls from members with questions about implementing more risk management practices.

Thats what were hearing from our members. They now have needs. They now have significant needs, Petrilli said. This event is making them realize those needs. I think what it does for cannabis, if not all American businesses, is it highlights the need for risk preparedness.

Related:

Topics California USA Cannabis Drugs
Taiwan anger over China military drills during virus outbreak

WORLD: Anger is rising in Taiwan over China continuing to buzz the island with fighter jets and warships even as they both fight the global coronavirus pandemic.

militarypoliticslandCOVID-19CoronavirusChinese

By AFP

Thursday 26 March 2020, 08:30AM

Taiwan is angered that China has continued to agitate by displaying its military might despite the catastrophic coronavirus pandemic that the world is struggling to combat. Photo: AFP

The self-ruled democratic island has had to scramble its own fighter jets in response to recent Chinese manoeuvres, designed to show that Beijings military might remains unbowed by the health crisis.

But the tactic is winning few friends among the Taiwanese.

As the world grapples with the severity of the COVID19 pandemic, Chinas military manoeuvres around Taiwan have continued unabated, President Tsai Ing-wen said in a tweet late on Tuesday (Mar 24) accompanied by pictures of her visiting troops.

Whether its national defence or preventing the spread of disease, our armed forces remain as vigilant as ever, she added.

Beijing has ramped up drills around the island since Tsai was first elected in 2016 because she refuses to acknowledge its concept that Taiwan is part of one China.

There has been little let up during the devastating coronavirus outbreak that began in China.

Taipeis defence ministry said four targeted drills have been conducted by China near its borders this year, which it said was concrete evidence of provocations and threats.

Taiwan ran an exercise with its own F16 fighter jets on Tuesday in response.

China continues the drills to show to the world, as well as to assure its people, that it has maintained military strength and defence abilities in the midst of an epidemic, Lin Ying-yu, a military analyst at National Chung Cheng University, told AFP.

The incursions have sparked anger on Taiwanese social media with some even calling for Chinese jets to be shot down.

I firmly support to government to contain the outbreak of the China/Wuhan pneumonia and resist the harassment of the communists military, read one message left on Tsais Facebook page.

A Chinese military jet briefly crossed the median line separating the two sides in February, less than a month after Tsai was re-elected in a landslide.

The coronavirus has killed more than 3,000 people in China. But despite its close proximity, Taiwan has just 235 cases and two deaths.

The island has been held up as a model for how to respond to the pandemic, even though Beijing ensures it is frozen out of global bodies such as the World Health Organization.

Taiwan is recognised internationally for its epidemic prevention that shows democratic Taiwan is beating authoritarian China and this is unacceptable for China, said Wang Ting-yu, a lawmaker in Tsais ruling party.

China has lashed out at Taiwan for using the outbreak to promote independence because Taipei has signed bilateral agreements with countries, including the US, on epidemic prevention and also sought to join the WHO.

Beijing still claims the self-ruling island as part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary, even though the two sides have been ruled separately for more than seven decades.
Portlands Shanghai Tunnels were, according to legend, a series of underground passageways in Old Town Chinatown that served as a secret way to transport goods, conduct illegal activities and shanghai sailors in the 19th century. Some historians believe, as The Oregonian/OregonLive has reported, that the tunnels werent actually used to shanghai -- that is, abduct men and force them to join a ships crew. But the Shanghai Tunnels are getting more TV time, on the Travel Channel series, Portals to Hell.

Portals to Hell features Jack Osbourne, producer and TV personality (and son of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne), and Katrina Weidman, described as a paranormal researcher and investigator on the shows website. The show sends Osbourne and Weidman to, as the website says, especially sinister places purported to be doorways to the spirit underworld.

(How to stream Portals to Hell: Watch the show on Hulu; and fuboTV)

The team of Osbourne and Weidman are, according to the show description, in search of irrefutable evidence that a spirit world exists, and death is not the end. In each episode, Osbourne and Weidman dive headfirst into a different historical site, examining unusual incidents while utilizing specialized technology and a network of experts to help document and uncover the truth.

According to the logline for the Portals of Hell episode in Portland, Katrina Weidman and Jack Osbourne gain unprecedented access to the infamous Shanghai Tunnels of Portland, Oregon. Theyve been called on to determine if two newly restored tunnels are safe for public tours after a recent spike in violent paranormal activity.

Other sites featured in Season 2 of Portals to Hell included Fort William Henry, in Lake George, New York; Croke-Patterson Mansion, in Denver Colorado; Ohio State Reformatory, in Mansfield, Ohio; Thomas House Hotel, in Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee; Iron Island Museum, in Buffalo, New York; and Haunted Hill House, in Mineral Wells, Texas.

The Portals to Hell Shanghai Tunnels episode premieres at 10 p.m. Friday, March 27 on Travel Channel.

-- Kristi Turnquist

kturnquist@oregonian.com 503-221-8227 @Kristiturnquist

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Health insurers have said it is too early to say if people with cover will be refunded premiums due to the State taking over the private hospitals.

The Government has said the private hospitals will become part of the public system for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. This will effectively render private health insurance useless.

Asked if this would mean the two million people with health cover will get refunds, Vhi said it was seeking more detail on the takeover of the 19 private hospitals and clinics.

"This has just been announced, so clearly it is too early for us to understand the implications and we will be engaging with Government over the next couple of days to see how this will be implemented," a spokeswoman said.

Health insurance expert Dermot Goode, of TotalHealthCover.ie, said it was unclear at the moment whether the State would continue to collect the levy on private health cover, which amounts to 445 per adult for cover in public and private hospitals.

If the State continues to collect this levy it will make it difficult for insurers to refund members.

It was also unclear if some procedures, such as cancer treatment, for those with health insurance would continue to be carried out in private hospitals after the State takeover, Mr Goode added.

He also said insurers were seeking to find out if the State would treat private hospitals as being part of the public system, and charge 800 a night as happens when someone with health cover is treated privately in a public hospital.

Mr Goode warned that people who cancel a policy mid-term will be hit with cancellation fees.

He advised people to not make any changes to their health insurance policies.

Once the pandemic has gone there will be a huge backlog due to the number of non-essential procedures and surgeries that have been postponed.

"At the end of all this, people getting non-essential surgery and diagnostics done will be using private health insurance to get it done quickly. I would not be making any changes to my cover for now," Mr Goode said.

The takeover of the private hospitals will mean 2,000 beds, nine laboratories and 8,000 staff being drafted into the public system.

Health Minister Simon Harris said on Tuesday "there can be no room for public versus private" when responding to the Covid-19 crisis.

"We must of course have equality of treatment, patients with this virus will be treated for free, and they'll be treated as part of a single, national hospital service," he said.

"For the duration of this crisis the State will take control of all private hospital facilities and manage all of the resources for the common benefit of all of our people. There can be no room for public versus private when it comes to pandemic."

Gerry Hassett, of Insurance Ireland, speaking on behalf of Vhi, Laya and Irish Life Health, said health insurers will work with the Government and the private hospitals to play a constructive role in supporting the public system during the crisis.

He said insurers are due to discuss how the private hospital takeover will work with the Department of Health and the Health Insurance Authority.

The deal is likely to see the cancellation or postponement of a large number of non-essential elective surgeries in private hospitals.
Antonio Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, has appealed for a cease-fire in all of the world's war zones, so countries can focus on fighting the coronavirus pandemic. Civilian populations in conflict-ravaged areas face the "highest risk of suffering devastating losses" from the virus, he said. Refugees and internally displaced people are "doubly vulnerable."

Guterres is right, of course: It is terrifying to think of the disease sweeping across, say, Syria, where years of fighting have devastated medical facilities - hospitals are a favorite target of the forces of the dictator Bashar Assad, and his Russian and Iranian patrons - and left millions displaced.

Sadly, however, Guterres' appeal may not have much if any impact on that case, or for that matter, in many others. But keep your eyes on Yemen, where his intervention could open a window for a settlement of its so far intractable conflict.

Worldwide, relief agencies are bracing for an outbreak in refugee camps, and Guterres is seeking $2 billion for an international humanitarian response. The U.N. refugee agency estimates that the number of people fleeing conflict exceeds 70 million, the highest level since World War II.

Alas, that number is no more likely to go down now than it was before the epidemic. If anything, some belligerents will use the coronavirus crisis to try and seize the advantage over others. To stick with the example of the Syrian conflict, the Assad regime, having acknowledged the country's first coronavirus case, could well push still more waves of refugees into Turkey, where the virus has already begun to take a toll.

But if Guterres were to concentrate on Yemen, he might have better luck. There, the belligerents might - just might - be sufficiently exhausted from years of fighting, to the point where he could bring enough pressure on the warring parties and their sponsors to halt the hostilities long enough for a humanitarian intervention to work.

It is now five years since a coalition of Arab countries launched a bombing campaign in Yemen, the opening salvo in a war that has turned one of the world's poorest nations into a humanitarian catastrophe. The coalition is led by Saudi Arabia, and its target is a rebel group, known as the Houthis, backed by money, training and arms from Iran.

According to the UNCHR's latest report on Yemen, 24 million people, or 80% of the population, are "in need," and more than 3.65 million are displaced. Unlike displaced Syrians, only a small proportion of Yemeni refugees have been able to leave the country; it is hemmed in by the sea on two sides, and its longest land border is with Saudi Arabia.

Yemen's heath system was poor before the war began; now, it is barely functional. Add to that widespread malnutrition and water scarcity in much of the country, and you have the perfect setting for an epidemic. Indeed, the country has already endured one - the world's largest cholera outbreak, in 2018, affected more than a million people, 25% of them children. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control says nearly 3,800 Yemenis have died from the disease.

As yet, Yemen has no "official" cases of coronavirus, but that means very little. The country is too poorly administered - whether by the Houthis from Sanaa or the internationally-recognized government in the south - for any reliable estimates. Ominously, the Houthis are preemptively blaming their enemies, and especially the United Arab Emirates. Worse yet, Houthi media outlets are parroting the line of their Iranian patrons that the coronavirus is an American biological weapon. On the other hand, the rebel government has taken the precaution of suspending schools and international flights.

Even so, relief agencies working in the country reckon that the spread of the epidemic is only a matter of time. Given their experience in dealing with the cholera crisis, they know the challenges coronavirus will bring. Gutteres himself has said he has "great confidence in our ability to adapt," but that sounds very much like whistling past the graveyard.

The secretary-general would better serve his relief staff, and Yemenis, if he spent the next few days pressing the protagonists of the war to put down their weapons and instead prepare for the crisis to come. This would require trips to Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Tehran.

To expect the Iranians, Saudis and Emiratis to do the right thing out of sympathy for the Yemenis would be too much. After all, they were not greatly moved by the cholera outbreak. But Guterres will likely find the leadership of the Arab coalition sympathetic for other reasons. Over the past year, the Saudis and Emiratis have shown a growing desire to exit their expensive, embarrassing Yemeni quagmire. The rebels, too, may welcome a break: Last fall, the Houthis and Saudis both signaled interest in a cease-fire. The UAE began to draw down its troop presence.

The Iranian position is more complicated. Compared with, say, its sponsorship of the Syrian civil war, keeping the Houthis and Saudis at each other's throats costs the regime in Tehran very little. But given the scale of the epidemic in Iran, where the death toll has already crossed 2,000, the Islamic Republic might consider a pause in its more malign activities abroad; in propaganda terms, the regime could spin this as evidence of good faith and responsible membership of the international community.

Admittedly, this is asking for quite a lot. But it is a more achievable goal than a global cease-fire.

- - -

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners. Bobby Ghosh is a columnist and member of the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board. He writes on foreign affairs, with a special focus on the Middle East and the wider Islamic world.
Saudi Arabia's King Salman on Thursday urged G20 leaders to take "effective and coordinated" action to combat the global crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, amid forecasts of a deep economic recession.

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin joined the emergency videoconference chaired by King Salman, who is also under pressure to end an oil price war with Moscow that has roiled energy markets.

The talks come amid criticism the group has been slow to address the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left a global death toll of more than 21,000 and triggered financial shockwaves as more than three billion people around the world are locked down in their homes.

"This human crisis requires a global response. The world counts on us to come together and cooperate in order to face this challenge," the Saudi king said in his opening remarks as the summit began.

"We must have an effective and coordinated response to this pandemic and restore confidence in the global economy." As concerns mount for poorer countries without access to capital markets and adequate health facilities, the king also called on the world leaders to extend a "helping hand" to developing nations.

The world's 20 most industrialised countries are scrambling to defend their virus-wracked economies amid forecasts they will likely plunge into a recession.

On Wednesday, the financial ratings agency Moody's estimated the G20's overall gross domestic product would contract by 0.5 percent this year, with the US economy shrinking by 2.0 percent and the eurozone by 2.2 percent.

"The G20 economies will experience an unprecedented shock in the first half of this year and will contract in 2020 as a whole," Moody's said.

While wealthy nations including the US have unveiled mammoth stimulus packages, there has so far been no collective action plan from the G20.

The IMF and World Bank on Wednesday urged G20 leaders to support its call for governments to put debt payments from the world's poorest nations on hold.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also urged G20 nations to offer support to "low and middle income countries", including those from Sub-Saharan Africa.

This week, French President Emmanuel Macron and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping pushed for an emergency G20 summit to limit the impact of the pandemic.

French presidential sources said the virtual meeting would focus on "coordination on the health level" as well as sending a "strong signal" to financial markets over efforts to stabilise the global economy.

But with world leaders divided, the meeting stands in contrast to the G20 summits following the 2008 financial crisis, when the group swung into action to mobilise assistance for vulnerable countries.

"The G20 is missing in action today, unlike 2008," said Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the Eurasia Group risk consultancy firm. Talk of global coordination has yet to resonate under Trump's isolationist presidency.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took aim at China, saying the top diplomats of the Group of Seven agreed with him that Beijing was waging a "disinformation" campaign about the pandemic.

At the G7 talks, a day before the G20 summit, Pompeo alleged Beijing was engaged in a social media campaign that included conspiracy theories that the US was behind the virus, first detected in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan.

"If G20 leaders can put politics aside and reach a collective G20 agreement, countries have a better chance of success or of delivering more stimulus than on their own," Markus Engels, from the Global Solutions Initiative, a network of think tanks, told AFP.

"Coordination among the G20 sends a strong message of unity and confidence, both of which are urgently needed now." Crude oil prices -- hammered by the outbreak's impact on demand as well as by a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia -- were also expected to be at the centre of the discussions.

Riyadh faces pressure from Washington to row back on its decision to hike production and offer the biggest price cuts in two decades, in retaliation for Russia's refusal to tighten supply as the virus saps demand. On Wednesday, Pompeo urged Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to "rise to the occasion" and "reassure global energy and financial markets".

However, the Kremlin said "the oil topic" will not be discussed. The G20 members will be joined by leaders from other affected countries including Spain, Jordan, Singapore and Switzerland, Riyadh said.

Leaders from international organisations such as the United Nations, World Bank, the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization will also participate.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Defense Department expects to get novel coronavirus tests out to deployed environments in the coming weeks and months as it begins to ramp up production efforts that are essential for test kits, according to a top medical officer.

Air Force Brig. Gen. (Dr.) Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, said Wednesday that, as soon as the Food and Drug Administration approves emergency use authorities for test elements, such as coronavirus-specific cartridges and canisters, officials will be able to get troops in deployed environments tested faster.

"We're hearing that potentially we can begin seeing these tests for these specific machines coming out in weeks to months," Friedrichs said during a press briefing at the Pentagon. "I think industry is doing an excellent job of stepping forward with solutions and, as they're coming out, we're purchasing them and providing them to our units."

Friedrichs acknowledged that testing efforts across Defense Department facilities have not been without problems.

Related: As 4 Troops in Afghanistan Test Positive, General Asks for Reduction in Violence

"Have I heard the anecdotes of, 'Well, I went to Fort So and So, and something happened, and I didn't get my test results for two days'? That breaks my heart when I hear that because that's not the norm that we're aspiring to," he said.

"I'm not going to pretend that there are not episodes now where someone is not able to get [tested] as quickly as they would like, but I think we have very aggressively moved forward in opening up our labs and our testing capability," Friedrichs said. "If someone is aware within the DoD population where that's not happening, please let us know, because we do have the capacity to perform the testing on our population."

The Pentagon has 16 laboratories certified to process thousands of test kits per day. Last week, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he had authorized the labs to begin processing tests for non-DoD personnel and civilians. On Wednesday, Friedrichs said that the capacity to test the general population in these labs is available pending a request for assistance from the Department of Health and Human Services.

"We have not received a [request for assistance] from HHS that I'm aware of," he said. "[But] we continue to partner with the [Centers for Disease Control], HHS and [Federal Emergency Management Agency] to support the whole-of-government effort as we're going forward."

As of Wednesday, 227 service members had tested positive for the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, an increase of 53 from the day prior; twelve remain hospitalized, according to the Pentagon.

While the military has already canceled or scaled back multiple exercises, troops overseas as well as those on board deployed Navy vessels have seen an increase in cases. Stars and Stripes reported Wednesday that 72 members of the military community within U.S. European Command are infected with the virus; the Navy on Tuesday announced its first positive novel coronavirus cases on a deployed aircraft carrier.

Operation Resolute Support officials on Tuesday said there were four confirmed cases of coronavirus among coalition troops in Afghanistan, the first for the estimated 12,000 U.S. and 16,000 troops from coalition nations in Afghanistan. Another 38 personnel who have flu-like symptoms have also been placed in isolation and are receiving medical care.

But the coalition lacks labs in Afghanistan to analyze tests. As a result, tests must be flown to Landstuhl, Germany, for analysis. Earlier this month, one lawmaker requested answers from the Pentagon about whether coronavirus tests were being sent to austere military base locations.

"If anyone is putting their life on the line for us overseas in the military, we really should be providing the health care that they deserve," Rep. Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat, told Military.com on March 13. Pocan raised concerns that troops had not yet been tested for COVID-19 after one of the service members' families contacted his office.

Friedrichs said the Pentagon will not have a full grasp on the situation for at least a few weeks.

"Everybody keeps asking what's going to happen in two weeks, what's going to happen in three weeks -- we don't know." he said. The Pentagon is balancing risk assessments in real time, much like the rest of the country, he added.

Based on the influx of data from the CDC and other agencies, the department is unable to create a forecast model of how the virus will spread over the next three weeks and how it can affect troops within the ranks.

"We think we're going to continue to see this, to no surprise, continue to grow," Friedrichs said, adding there's "no value" in speculating on particular end dates.

"If we stop doing the right thing today because we think something is going to happen in four weeks, we will make things worse," he said. "It is a worrisome narrative ... when we try to say there's some reason that we should question the guidance that's being given out.

"I think in a few weeks, we'll have better fidelity on that data," he said.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.

-- Richard Sisk and Gina Harkins contributed to this report.

Read more: The Latest on the Military's COVID-19 Response
EL PASO, TEXASSome believe clues to the future can be found by studying the lines on your palm, but Miss Eva wasnt about to tempt fate.

Outside her small studio on a busy stretch of road not far from the U.S.-Mexico border, where her business was marked by a giant sign featuring an outstretched hand, the fortune teller shook her head when asked if she was doing palm readings.

In broken English, she explained she was scared of catching the virus, as she called COVID-19, the deadly, fast-spreading disease that has upended the lives of tens of millions of Americans across the country with no end in sight.

But like many businesses that have scrambled to find ways of staying open in this rapidly changing environment, she had come up with an alternative.

Cards? she asked, referring to tarot, a fortune that could be told from a comfortable distance.

In El Paso, there have been nine confirmed cases of coronavirus, and local officials have warned that many more are likely to come. Last week, city officials began sending emergency alerts to all cellphones in the area asking recipients to, among other things, wash their hands often and stay six feet apart.

Stay home as much as you can, another alert read.

In recent days, much of this border city has gone into lockdown  with many businesses closed and most restaurants limited to takeout only. But some establishments stubbornly remained open, including the citys famed L&J Cafe and Chuys, the Texas-based Tex-Mex chain where employees had moved tables six feet apart to accommodate a handful of diners this past Friday evening. It was allowed under a rule passed by El Paso city council that cut restaurant occupancy by half and enacted tough sanitary rules in exchange for letting dining rooms stay open.

Im thankful, a Chuy's employee said. If we close, we all lose our jobs.

But some wonder about longer disruptions to a way of life in El Paso that has already been marked by tensions over U.S. President Donald Trumps immigration policy. On Saturday, new restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus went into effect, barring non-essential travel over the U.S.-Mexico border, a move that is likely to have huge cultural and economic implications in El Paso and its sister city, Ciudad Juarez.

Thousands of people  both Americans and Mexicans  cross back and forth between the cities daily for work and play, including to visit family members. This past Friday afternoon, the usually packed streets leading to the Stanton Street border bridge were almost empty, with many businesses already closed.

But not far away, a local Walmart was packed, its parking lot full of cars with Chihuahua, Mexico, licence plates, as shoppers from across the border stocked up on supplies to last them for an undetermined amount of time.

At one point, near the back of the store, employees wheeled out a cart of what have become Holy Grail items during this sweeping pandemic: yellow plastic containers of Clorox wipes and bright pink cans of Lysol disinfectant spray.

Some shoppers froze, as if they werent quite sure whether what they were seeing was real or a mirage. They quietly lined up, as if determined not to create a commotion, as two store employees began unwrapping the products and handing them over.

Each person could receive one of each. And as a woman took her allotted share, she smiled gratefully. Gracias, she said.
(Adds detail)

March 26 (Reuters) - Glencore PLC on Thursday halted a number of smaller mines due to government restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus but added its larger operations were not materially impacted.

The London-listed company said it would shutter its oil operations in Chad, some coal and ferroalloys operations in South Africa and Colombia, as well as nickel and zinc mines in Canada.

"To date, our larger operations have not been materially impacted, however a number of our smaller assets have had to restrict or stop operations," the miner said in a statement.

Glencore joins peers such as Anglo American , Antofagasta , Codelco and Teck Resources in temporarily closing or slowing some operations, hitting global supply of commodities.

To slow the spread of the virus, South Africa and Colombia installed nation-wide quarantines this week that will run until mid-April, while Quebec province in Canada ordered non-essential businesses to close.

(Reporting by Aby Jose Koilparambil in Bengaluru and Zandi Shabalala in London)
Bloomberg photo by Andrey Rudakov.

With the extent of Russia's coronavirus epidemic distorted by a lack of testing, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin ordered restaurants and most stores in Europe's biggest city to shut down for a week.

Restaurants, parks and stores except for pharmacies and food shops in the city of 12.7 million will shut down from Saturday for eight days, Sobyanin wrote on his website Thursday. Confirmed infections in Moscow jumped by a third to 546 over the last day and make up 65% of the country's total.
A thug who spat at a police officer after threatening to infect her with coronavirus has been jailed for 26 weeks.

David Mott, 40, also coughed at police sergeant Linda Haywood after telling him off for breaking new social distance rules.

Drunken Mott lost his temper when the sergeant told him to back away when he came towards her on Tuesday in Blackburn, Lancs.

David Mott, 40, also coughed at police sergeant Linda Haywood after telling him off for breaking new social distance rules in Blackburn on Tuesday

Sgt Haywood said: "The utter contempt he showed toward me both as a police officer and a fellow human being disgusts me."

She added: "We as police officers are here to protect the public and should not be exposed to unnecessary risks in doing so by mindless acts such as Mr Mott displayed."

Mott was with two other people when he was challenged by police.

He admitted using threatening behaviour, possessing an offensive weapon and possession of cannabis at Blackburn Magistrates Court.

Cops stopped a taxi that Mott was travelling in with two others.

He then would not back away when challenged by Sgt Haywood.

Prosecutor Peter Bardsley said: 'He said he wasn't moving away and if she tried to do anythaing he would just cough and spit at her.

Blackburn Magistrates Court heard PS Haywood was forced to pepper spray Mott as he continued to move toward her, coughing and spitting in her direction

'He then proceeded to do just that and she was forced to pepper-spray him. She then pushed him away.

'He was clearly aware that Covid-19 was transmitted by coughing and spitting and put the officer in fear for her personal safety.'

The Crown Prosecution Service has warned that it would prosecute anyone who coughs on emergency services in the current crisis and face up to a year in jail.

Darren Rafferty, 45, has admitted deliberately coughing on police in Dagenham, east London and faces sentencing next month.

He appeared at Barkingside Mags on Wednesday.
The Tamil Nadu police has booked



over 1,200 people for violations relating to the Section 144 Cr.Pc order in the state, in force to implement an eight-day lockdown ordered by the state government as part of its fight against the spread of coronavirus.

Police personnel continued to patrol roads and kept an eye on violators to persuade them to confine themselves to their homes, and continued to adopt novel ways to create public awareness as well as punish violators.

According to police, 1,252 people have been booked for violating Section 144.Cr.Pc order, while cases have been filed against 16 people for spreading rumours in the last two days.

The 144.Cr PC order prohibits assembly of more than five persons.

Further, six others who violated quarantine protocols have also been booked, police said on Thursday, two days after the lockdown came into effect.

The Chennai Police said it has set up 156 checkposts in the city to effectively implement the order, with its personnel undertaking regular patrolling.

Besides, drunken driving and helmet violation was also being strictly dealt with.

In Sivaganga, police made violators carry awareness banners for a while, even as they were made to stand apart form one another, in an obvious effort to implement social distancing to prevent any spread of the contagion.

At Gudiyatham in Vellore district, police administered a pledge to those who were wandering about in public defying prohibitory orders, to abide by the law.

Where people were allowed to buy essentials like groceries, vegetables and medicines, social distancing was strictly implemented, with customers allowed only in batches to purchase items and medicines of their choice.

Most roads were virtually deserted.

In places like Chennai and Nagapattinam, government buses were operated only to ferry health professionals and essential government department employees to discharge their duties.

Police have already warned of action against those violating the prohibitory orders, in force from 6 pm on March 24, following an announcement by Chief Minister K Palaniswami.

Meanwhile, Palaniswami chaired a meeting of various departments and district collectors through video conferencing form here to discuss the measures being taken to tackle the spread of COVID19.

The chief minister, his deputy O Panneerselvam and officials including Chief Secretary K Shanmugam and state police chief JK Tripathy were seen wearing masks, in the picture released by the state government.

The state has reported a total of 28 positive cases of coronavirus, including a 45 year-old man who has been discharged after treatment.

Meanwhile, the Greater Chennai Coproration said there was a ban on home delivery of cooked food by well-known players like Zomato and Swiggy.

"Dry rations, vegetables and groceries from local super market and e-commerce are allowed to home deliver in Chennai City. Only the cooked food supply from Zomato/Swiggy etc. are NOT ALLOWED," the civic body said on its official Twitter handle.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Channel Nine bosses are putting Love Island Australia on the back burner in response the escalating coronavirus pandemic.

The dating show, hosted by Sophie Monk, is unlikely to return for season three due to restrictions put in place to limit the spread of COVID-19, including travel bans and social distancing.

Nine's programming director Hamish Turner told TV Tonight the network is in discussions with ITV over the future of Love Island Australia in light of the 'current circumstances'.

On hold: Channel Nine bosses are putting Love Island Australia on the back burner in response the escalating coronavirus pandemic. Pictured: Sophie Monk

'Last time we were discussing what the future of that held and where we were going to shoot. That conversation has obviously shifted again with the current circumstances that we're in,' he added.

'We're still working with ITV if there is a show this year how you can get that to air.

'We're obviously in extraordinary times and there are certain things out of our control that have put a bit of a spanner in the works. We're working through those at the moment.'

End of the road? The dating show is unlikely to return for season three due to restrictions put in place to limit the spread of COVID-19, including travel bans and social distancing

It comes after former Love Island stars Josh Moss and Amelia Plummer slammed beachgoers who visited Bondi Beach last Friday.

Hundreds of locals and tourists disregarded social distancing measures to stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

The pair, who recently returned from a holiday in New Zealand, spoke exclusively to Daily Mail Australia from self-isolation on Sunday.

'We were really frustrated' It comes after former Love Island stars Josh Moss and Amelia Plummer slammed beachgoers who visited Bondi Beach last Friday

'We were really frustrated, because there's so many people doing the right thing and taking it serious, and then on the other side so many people, even people we know and are friends with, were taking the p**s out of the whole situation,' Amelia said.

She added that her followers from Spain and Italy warned her that their friends were doing the same thing last week - and now everyone has been forced into lockdown.

As of late Thursday morning, there are 2,675 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia, including 11 deaths.
The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine might not be effective in treating patients with Covid-19, a new study finds.

The report published by the Journal of Zhejiang University in China tested if coronavirus patients who received the medication were more likely to recover than those who didnt, and it found that was not the case.

This limited study only looked at 30 patients and contrasted the study from France, which looked at 40 patients. In France, its study found the virus decreased in patients when used with the combination of an antibiotic.

Frances study encouraged President Donald Trump to advertise the potential benefits with the US to help treat the novel virus. Last week, he called the drug combination a game-changer even though the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned it might not work and has yet to approve it for Covid-19.

But the FDA approved drug trials in New York state with more severe Covid-19 patients to see if the combination of hydroxychloroquine and an antibiotic would help. These trials started on Tuesday, and Governor Andrew Cuomo said he was optimistic about the results.

Nevadas governor, Steve Sisolak, banned the use of hydroxchloroquine and chloroquine to treat coronavirus patients after the contradictory reports on if the drugs actually worked against the virus.

Mr Sisolak said there was no consensus among experts or Nevada doctors that the drug combination would be beneficial to patients.

His executive order also limited prescription orders to only allow a 30-day supply. This limitation was to ensure the drug was used for legitimate medical purposes, such as lupus patients or people with malaria.

An interest in the drug has caused problems across the US, including people wrongly using the medication to treat Covid-19 symptoms.

An Arizona man died after he self-medicated with an additive used to clean fish tanks, which included chloroquine phosphate. His wife also took the mixture and is now in the ICU battling the drug effects of the solution.

When speaking to NBC News, the woman said the couple decided to try to mixture after hearing about the drugs potential benefits during the presidents press conferences. They were afraid of getting sick from the virus.

Drug shortages for chloroquine and hydroxchloroquine have also escalated across the country, with pharmacists reporting that doctors are misusing their positions by prescribing the drugs for themselves and family members.

States including Nevada, Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas have noticed doctors hoarding the prescriptions and released recommendations to deter any abuse by prescribers.

Pharmacists are now encouraged to report any misbehaviour if they believe a prescriber is prescribing hydroxchloroquine or chloroquine to patients who do not need them.
Leaders of both political parties in Washington yesterday put aside their differences and acted decisively to help American families and businesses weather this crisis.

Thats not a sarcastic joke, or a dream sequence, and things could still fall apart. But on Wednesday the Senate announced a deal on a $2 trillion stimulus plan, the largest single spending bill in American history, one more than twice the size of the 2009 stimulus.

Even that $2 trillion might not be enough in the end. Because when a $22 trillion economy stops short, it takes a great heave to get it moving again, or even to soften the blow to the millions of businesses and families bearing the brunt of it. Unlike in 2009, when Republicans pressed the Obama administration to scale back its stimulus, both parties agreed this time on the need to go big.

So, for now, compromise is back in style. The prospect of 2 million Americans losing their lives in this pandemic, and many more losing their jobs, has had a sobering effect in Washington that one can only hope survives the moment.

The final deal also vindicates Democrats like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, who fended off enormous pressure to yield to the urgency of the moment and forced Republicans to rewrite big portions of the bill.

Some of the changes they held out for were intended to fatten benefits for common people, like expanding eligibility for unemployment payments, and bolstering payments for four months so that they will actually replace earnings for most Americans. The bill would also provide emergency credit for small firms and forgive those loans if they agree to keep employees on the payroll through this crisis.

After both parties rejected a White House plan for a cut in the payroll tax, which would do nothing for those who have lost jobs in this crisis, both parties agreed instead to make $1,200 in direct payments to American adults, which would taper off as income rises, ending for those earning more than $100,000 a year, or $200,000 for a couple.

Perhaps the most memorable move Democrats made was to block the most shameless gambit by Republicans, the attempt to give Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin his own slush fund to play with, one he could use to directly subsidize President Trumps personal businesses. That was the main sticking point in the final stages of negotiation.

The GOP bill set aside $500 billion to aid stressed industries, and even individual companies. The bulk would help the Federal Reserve to leverage loans for distressed companies, but $75 billion would be under Mnuchins control to bolster specific industries and companies, as he sees fit, without virtually no oversight, and no restrictions on providing help to Trumps family business. Mnuchin wouldnt even have to reveal the names of companies receiving help for six months.

It was Trumpism in its most raw form, and Schumer was right to make it a deal-breaker. Under the final agreement, Treasury will get the $500 billion, but spending will be overseen by an inspectors general and an oversight board. All transactions will be made public, and Trumps personal business is disqualified, as are any personal businesses owned by members of Congress.

The agreement is more than 1,000 pages long, and packed full of painful compromises. No doubt, given the urgency, it contains mistakes that will have to be corrected in coming days and weeks. It calls for $100 billion in aid to hospitals, and no one on earth knows if that will be enough. It includes $150 billion for state and local governments, which New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo criticized as a fraction of whats needed, and Gov. Phil Murphy described as almost certainly not enough.

This is not a final step, and America is still miles away from an effective public health response to this pandemic when measured against places like China and South Korea. Also, by Wednesday evening, bickering had broken out in the Senate as the parties tried to digest this massive bill.

But an agreement is close, if not certain. And this measure, flaws and all, is at least ambitious enough to meet the moment. Heres hoping its not derailed by any last-minute snags.

More: Tom Moran columns

Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
On March 23, two Arab Joint List lawmakers were appointed to head Knesset committees: Knesset member Mansour Abbas, the head of the Islamic Raam party, will serve as the chair of a special committee to tackle crime in Arab communities, and Knesset member Aida Touma-Suleiman will chair the Labor, Welfare and Health Committee.

Touma-Suleimans appointment generated racist reactions not only on the part of right-wing Knesset members, but also from organizations advocating for disabled Israelis and bereaved families, inculcated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his friends with the message that Arab lawmakers are terror supporters. Minister of Social Equality Gila Gamliel went so far as to say in a television interview, An Arab woman from the Joint List cannot head the Welfare and Labor Committee. Does the minister of social equality not realize the irony?

To Gamliels credit, in 2017 she was instrumental in pushing through an unprecedented 15 billion shekel ($4.3 billion) five-year plan for the economic development of the Arab population, an initiative on which she cooperated with Joint List Knesset members Ayman Odeh and Ahmad Tibi. Why, then, does she now recoil at the appointment of an Arab colleague to chair a Knesset committee? Her reaction may be an expression of the constitutional crisis in which Israel is mired, as reflected in Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein's decision this week to violate a Supreme Court order to convene the plenary to choose his successor. Gamliels behavior also reflects the political rights persistent delegitimization of the Joint List, made all the more intense by its electoral successes in the recent election cycles. On March 2, the Joint List won 15 Knesset seats, making it instrumental in blocking the formation of a Netanyahu-led right-wing/ultra-Orthodox government coalition. In its frustration over the loss of its Knesset majority, the right is taking up the ugly weapon of racism.

Gamliels remark testifies to Netanyahus success in imbuing his followers with the message that members of the Arab Joint List do not count as part of the center-left Knesset majority, which garnered 61 seats in the 120-member legislature in the March 2 elections. As Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz explained, the democratically elected representatives of Israels 21% Arab minority are nothing but terrorists in suits.

Opponents of Touma-Suleimans appointment point to the fact that her committee is tasked with such matters as the welfare of bereaved families, victims of terrorism and disabled army vets. Meir Indor, the chair of Almagor, an advocacy group for victims of terrorism, called her appointment a dark day for the victims of terrorism. Indor said the fact that families who have lost loved ones to Palestinian terrorism will have to plead their case for benefits before Arab Knesset members who have expressed sympathy for murderers is a terrible thing. The Disabled Veterans Organization urged Knesset member Benny Gantz, leader of the center-left bloc and a former chief of the Israel Defense Forces, to void the appointment. We implore you as disabled IDF vets, do not take another step in that direction!! the organization wrote. How will you be able to look us in the eye, we who have sacrificed body and soul for the state while you cooperate with those striving to destroy our state?

Netanyahu, by the way, shared the letter on his Twitter feed, writing, Shame. This is the same Netanyahu who whitewashed the racist Kahanist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish power) party ahead of the 2019 and 2020 elections, offering several tempting jobs to its chair Itamar Ben-Gvir, including an ambassadorial appointment, so that he would drop out of the race and throw his support behind the Likud. Only recently did Ben-Gvir take off his living room walls the portrait of his hero, Baruch Goldstein, who massacred Muslims praying in the Hebron Cave of the Patriarch, killing 29 of them in 1994.

Netanyahu and his ilk are inciting to hatred of Touma-Suleiman simply because she is an Arab. Her detractors refuse to credit her diligent performance in public life over the years and in the legislature over the past five years. For example, she established the first shelter for abused women in the Arab sector, she fought against the pervasive marriages of underage girls and she demanded equal membership for women in the top body representing Israels Arab communities.

She won praise for her leadership of the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women and Gender Equality (2015-2019), not only in advocating for Arab women but for women in general, Jewish, Muslim and Christian. She also helped women trafficked to Israel for prostitution, and dealt with issues related to ritual baths serving religious and ultra-Orthodox Jewish women.

My appointment to head the important committee is certainly due to the impressive achievement by members of the Joint List, she told Al-Monitor. But it is also a political statement. Enough with the incitement. We are legitimate representatives elected in democratic elections and we deserve the right to make good on our achievement.

The Joint List, she said, represents a broad swath of disadvantaged Israelis and it is therefore only natural that she heads a committee tasked with caring for the weak and improving their lot, Arabs and Jews alike. When I headed the Advancement of Women Committee, I had a clear agenda of serving as the voice for the disadvantaged in Israeli society, she said. All the organizations attacking me now are using slogans coined by Netanyahu and his people. They are actually a political tool Netanyahu is using in light of his situation and political loss.

Members of Netanyahus right-wing/ultra-Orthodox bloc of parties are boycotting the newly empaneled Knesset committees. They [the new Knesset members from the ultra-Orthodox and right-wing parties] were elected by a certain public that has problems, which should be brought to the committees attention in order to find solutions and answers, she said. So, rather than accepting the decision of the voters and presenting their voters distress to the [welfare] committee, they choose to be paid to do nothing and boycott the committees. They will have to account for this to their voters, I think. Anyone who wants to join me is welcome, and anyone who wants to boycott  I promise to deal fairly with the public they are supposed to represent.

The Knesset committees were only formed March 23 after the Supreme Court intervened to block the speakers undemocratic suspension of the legislature and ordered him to allow the newly sworn-in lawmakers to get to work. Edelsteins defiance of the court was particularly severe in light of the war being waged against the COVID-19 epidemic and the surging unemployment that has affected some 20% of the workforce. This is exactly the time for the Knessets Welfare and Labor Committee to address the distress of small businesses, families and the unemployed worried about making a living.

Touma-Suleiman has already scheduled a committee meeting next week to discuss benefits for the unemployed with the National Insurance Institute. I can deal with all these issues and I do not need to even justify myself, she said. I have already proven that I take care of everyone and I will represent everyone fairly and faithfully. I have always concerned myself with the disadvantaged in society and I will not let anyone down. And perhaps, one day, all this incitement will disappear in light of our activity and the trust we earn. This will certainly change the political map.

As we neared the end of the interview, I could not help ask Touma-Suleiman how she feels about being tainted along with her colleagues as terrorists in suits. She laughed and answered, I am actually wearing a dress now.
The then-actress Meghan Markle wrote in her blog before becoming the Duchess of Sussex that her favorite country is Mexico.

Recently, many issues are circulating in different media outlets about the royal family involving Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. It all started when they announced in the middle days of January that they are planning to step down and leave their senior royal duties.

MEXICO, THE FAVORITE COUNTRY OF MEGHAN MARKLE

Starting April 1, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will no longer function their senior royal duties and are not obliged anymore to attend any official royal duties. However, this does not mean that Prince Harry completely abandoned U.K. because he and Meghan will divide their time both for the U.K. and Canada.

The decision of the couple also means that they will have more time to travel. Meghan Markle once wrote on her now-defunct blog The Tig, "I am often asked about my favorite places in the world, and nary a conversation occurs where I don't mention my beloved Mexico. The culture and food, the people and varied landscapes make it a favored destination of mine year after year,"

Meghan Markle grew up in Los Angeles and traveling to Mexico is not uncommon to her anymore. The country is just so close to the place where she lived before. She also recounted her visits to Oaxaca together with her mother for the Day of the Dead in 2014.

Meghan Markle also wrote that she and her mother used to travel in Oaxaca to witness the celebration of the Day of the Dead. She also shared that she would dig for the buried treasures in the beaches of Puerto Vallarta and even catch fish in Yelapa.

TULUM MIGHT BE MEGHAN'S FAVORITE PLACE IN THE WORLD

In 2018, a news outlet listed Meghan's favorite vacation spots. The list includes Iceland, Dublin, Malta, and Tulum. According to the news outlet, Tulum was included in the list because Meghan, who is a skincare fanatic, could go in the place and have Mayan clay treatments.

Meghan Markle even wrote in her blog, "For years Tulum had been shrouded in this cool kid mystery to me - musings of yogis and movie stars finding solace in the slow pace and beautiful setting. So it was with great excitement that I took a trip to the Mayan Riviera to dip my toes in the much talked about Tulum."

"Go explore the town either on bike or foot, and take a yoga class at Yoga Shala, a hippie-dippie paradise. It's the mecca for yoga in the beach stretch of Tulum, where classes are taught throughout the day in a jungle setting so you can get your zen on," Meghan wrote in her blog.

This time that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will have more time to travel together with their son Archie. It is also expected that they will spend some days in Mexico most especially in Tulum.

Moreover, according to the recently published article, the father of Meghan Markle, an ex-pat, now lives in Rosario, Mexico. He spent his retirement days in an exclusive San Antonio del Mar Subdivision.

However, there is no record or report that Meghan Markle visited her father in Mexico. But, the affection and love of Meghan Markle for Mexico could influence Prince Harry to visit the country or have the country as part of their holiday destinations.

Read related articles:
/ -- Dare2Compete, one of India's largest student communities, has put all stakeholders of the B-School ecosystem under a single umbrella, with Dare2Compete Awards, where efforts of all- Students, B-Schools and Companies, are acknowledged and celebrated.

Today, through its social media handles and website, Dare2Compete revealed the rankings for D2C Competitive B-Schools 2020 amid COVID-19. The rankings were decided on the basis of students' meritorious performance in corporate campus engagements through student competitions. The true mark of a B-School's success can be gauged by how well its students fare when put up against their peers from across the nation.

IIM Bangalore topped the D2C Competitive B-Schools 2020 ranking, outshining everyone. IIM Kozhikode, known for its lush campus and its enterprising students, was ranked a close 2nd. Having lifted the trophy last year, IIM Kozhikode had to make room for IIM Bangalore this year. Shots have been fired and things are bound to heat up in the coming academic year.

Not far behind is the Indian School of Business (ISB), which secured the third rank with the next highest number of students who won laurels to the institute. In the fourth and fifth place are MDI Gurgaon and NMIMS Mumbai, respectively. Other prestigious B-Schools that managed to rank in Top 10 D2C Competitive B-Schools 2020 are IIM Ahmedabad, SIBM Pune, XLRI Jamshedpur, NITIE Mumbai, IMT Ghaziabad and IIM Shillong, in their respective order.

Rankings drastically changed from last year, with many new entrants like NITIE and IIM Shillong going in for the kill.

Students from IIM Bangalore are the proud owners of a whooping 15 National/International Winner trophies, along with an impressive 5 First Runners Up and 4 Second Runners Up titles. This goes to show that IIM Bangalore not only dominates the word by word every management book there is, but also pushes its students to think outside the box and question the status quo.

Rankings for D2C Competitive Leaders 2020 were also simultaneously released and to no surprise the top 4 rank holders are from IIM Bangalore. Ameer Iqubal, Vishwajith G Bhat, Kundan Thakan, and Pratiksha Patil respectively sit atop with 5 to 13 competitions under their belt. Ashwini Kumar Shrivas from FMS Delhi was next after performing well in 5 competitions closely followed by Bijayeta Pati from IMT Ghaziabad with 9 competitions under her.

An impressive 8 students from IIM Bangalore have been ranked as top 30 D2C Competitive Leaders 2020. No other B-School comes in close to such a stellar performance. IIM Shillong and NITIE Mumbai have 4 and 3 students each, respectively.

In another category, Dare2Compete recognised companies that do such student engagements through D2C Prestigious B-School Competitions 2020 basis 13,800+ B-School student votes. Dare2Compete does this under 2 segments - Top 20 from votes across All B-Schools and Top 20 from votes across popular 10 B-Schools.

HUL LIME Season 11 grabbed the limelight there with the first place for second year consecutively in both segments. Under All B-Schools segment, Reliance TUP 5.0 held the second place while Google Case Challenge 2019, ICICI Bank Beat the Curve 2019 and Flipkart Wired 2019 Campus Case Challenge 3.0 were placed 3rd, 4th and 5th respectively.

In the Popular 10 B-Schools segment, Aditya Birla Group's Stratos retained its second position followed by InvicTAS from TATA Group, ITC Interrobang?! Season 9 and Flipkart Wired 2019 Campus Case Challenge 3.0 in that order.

Visit www.dare2compete.com/awards to know more about Dare2Compete Awards 2020 and to view all categories under it.

About Dare2Compete



Dare2Compete is one of the largest student communities across domains. It engages with the students of B-Schools, Engineering Colleges and other colleges with 1 million+ active registrations from across 10,000+ colleges. It is a one-stop-shop to meet the needs of students during their academic journey.

Dare2Compete also enables leading brands to engage with the students' community in the most interactive way to discover, measure and hire the best talent and conceptualizes unique engagements to enhance the company's brand visibility, brand engagement and brand equity across campuses in India.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1137536/D2C_B_Schools.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The presidency has outlined measures President Muhammadu Buhari has taken to help Nigeria check the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19).

Mr Buharis spokesperson, Garba Shehu, said the president had approved funds for the Lagos State Government and the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).

The president also approved the release of a presidential jet to the NCDC for emergency operations, he said.

Read Mr Shehus full statement below.

With developing news around the world and in Nigeria on the Coronavirus pandemic, President Buhari issues the following statement:

I advise all Nigerians to follow to the letter the health guidelines issued by the Federal Ministry of Health and our State Governments.

Wash your hands thoroughly many times throughout the day. Observe social distancing of a minimum of two metres. Do not make unnecessary journeys outside of your homes. Do not attend public meetings or public gatherings  including religious events  which is where, through social contact, the virus can easily be transmitted.

The Federal Ministry of Health will continue to issue daily updates on all developments. Please refer to public announcements by the Ministry on radio, television, www.health.gov.ng and @Fmohnigeria.

With regard to the request by the government of Lagos State for financial support to combat and contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus in Lagos and Nigeria, the President has already approved the sum of N10 billion which release was effected within two days of the request.

The President has also approved and ensured the prompt release of N5 billion special intervention requested by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) to equip and expand their facilities and laboratories.

In the same vein, the President has given approval to NCDCs request for an aircraft from the Presidential Air Fleet for emergency situations. He has furthermore authorized the evacuation of three critical members of the NCDC team who are stuck in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo where they went for a training organsied by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

These measures are in addition to the ones approved and announced by the Presidential Task Force, PTF including the closure of land borders to human traffic for four weeks; the conversion of all Hajj transit camps to be utilized as COVID-19 isolation centers; the directive that all non-essential government employees to work from home and for a daily briefing of the nation through the PTF.

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Other approved measures already put into place include the ban of flights from and into the country, suspension of the Federal Executive Council and National Council of State meetings and a directive for engagements, at the highest levels between the Federal Government and the state governments.

President Buhari has also directed for the escalation of the nations capacity for testing and detection with the acquisition of testing kits and establishment of additional test centers; acquisition of Personnel Protection Equipment and the mobilization of experts and trained staff serving and recall of some of those retired.

The closure of schools and tertiary institutions and the suspension of religious and other gatherings above the fifty prescribed number are also parts of the measures approved and are in place.

The President is keeping a close eye on international developments on the spread of COVID-19 and will intensify or introduce new measures if they become necessary to protect Nigerians.

Garba Shehu

Senior Special Assistant to the President

(Media & Publicity)

March 26, 2020
The story of air travels shutdown can be told in numbers.

Helane Becker, managing director and senior airline analyst at Cowen, an investment bank, estimates between 40 and 60 percent of United States domestic flights have been canceled. Cancellations of international flights are even higher, about 85 percent, she said.

But photographs will do just as well.

Very few people are flying right now. But among those who are, many have found themselves on almost empty planes  and have captured that emptiness in photographs. Almost uniformly, they capture rows of vacant seats, a few heads poking above them, and vast acreage of overhead storage free for the taking. Many such photos have been posted to Instagram and Twitter in recent days. Others were shared directly with The New York Timess Travel desk.

Lindsey Ferrentino, who flew home from Newark to Orlando, Fla., on Saturday, bought three tickets for herself  one with points, and two for $17.40 each  to ensure shed have some space around her on the flight. When she boarded the plane, an Airbus A320 (capacity: about 150), it was almost entirely empty.
Derek Charles Johnson has released a brand new album. Seeing For The First Time is an original 7-song offering that features an upbeat, pop-infused style with lyrical hooks finding their basis in Biblical truths; all challenging the listener to take a deeper look at their own faith and dependence upon God.

Often ranging in comparison to Mac Powell (Third Day), Jeremy Camp, or Bebo Norman, Derek's vocals are soothing yet commanding all at once. Each song takes the listener on a journey and is unique in its own right, featuring diversity from track to track and in one theme to the next. Still, the overall message of the project is that of dependence and reliance upon God despite the highs and lows of life.

Whether it's the honest declaration of "Pray" ("I have prayed full of faith but somedays you don't answer like I think you should"), the absolute trust in the Psalm-like "Watch Over Me," or the call to follow after Jesus despite not knowing all the answers ("The Jesus Dare"), each song makes a statement that stands on its own. More overt worship-themes are found on tracks "God of All" and "My Hope Is In The Cross," each lending themselves to corporate offerings. Rounding out the album, title track "Seeing For The First Time" and "Doing Something New" both incorporate synth and pop sounds while featuring uncompromising lyrics and truths.



These new songs have been the result of a collaboration with producer Jay Speight (Bottle Rockit Productions) and feature co-writes with Jay, Ross King, Cooper Bascom, Brian Yak as well as songs written by Kenna Turner West and Aaron Cox. "I know every artist says this, but I believe these new songs are the best work I've done and I've asked God to bring about His perfect will throughout this process. I cannot wait to release these songs and am excited about the doors God is opening."

Raised in Northern Minnesota, Derek was a kid who grew up in hey-day of modern Contemporary Christian Music. As a youth group teen in the 90s and onto his college years in the early 2000s, he soaked up any and every "youth pastor-approved" CD he could grab. A quick playlist at the time would have included such artists and bands as Michael W. Smith, Matt Redman, Petra, Delirious and of course, DC Talk.

It was those influences and many more that led him to develop a deep love for Christian music. That love, coupled with a passion for worship ministry, led Derek to pursue a degree in worship leading. This came later in life, several years after finishing school to become a pharmacist.

"After working in healthcare for many years, I realized God had placed a call on my life that was to go back and be in ministry. I wrestled with it for quite some time but couldn't shake this desire which I believe was God-given."

As a worship pastor, he spent 7 years on staff in a local church in South Dakota. He was blessed to be part of a thriving ministry that grew by leaps and bounds all due to God's blessing. During this time, he recorded his first full-length project titled Carry On with producer Tommee Proffitt (Capitol CMG). Carry On helped to open many doors including several concert billings and worship leading opportunities. Having been a part of line-ups featuring such artists as Casting Crowns, Newsboys, and MercyMe, Derek has come full-circle in seeing his early love for CCM and worship become more than a hobby; it is now a calling upon his life.

Tags : Derek Charles Johnson Releases New Album "Seeing For The First Time" Derek Charles Johnson Derek Charles Johnson new album
R ishi Sunak will today unveil a rescue package aimed at helping the self-employed get through the coronavirus crisis as the Government continues to face pressure to throw them a lifeline.

The Chancellors move will come after Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Parliament he wanted to achieve "parity of support" so self-employed workers could have similar levels of protection to waged workers amid the epidemic.

Mr Sunak will outline his emergency measures later, on the same day the number of people who have tested positive for Covid-19 is likely to pass 10,000 after cases increased by almost 1,500 on Wednesday.

Those recently diagnosed include the Prince of Wales, who is self-isolating in Scotland with what Clarence House described as "mild symptoms".

Coronavirus in numbers: UK deaths rise to 463

Also on Wednesday, the Foreign Office announced that Steven Dick, 37, the deputy head of mission at the British Embassy in Budapest, had died after contracting coronavirus.

Meanwhile, more than 400,000 people volunteered to help the health service during the crisis in just 24 hours after the PM appealed for 250,000 to help out.

As the Commons shut down early for Easter due to the escalating crisis, Mr Johnson told MPs: "There are particular difficulties with those who are not on PAYE schemes as ... I think the whole House understands.

"We are bringing forward a package to ensure that everybody gets the support that they need."

Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures 1 /81 Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures A deserted Westminster Bridge PA A man wearing a face mask or covering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, walks past customers sat outside a restaurant AFP via Getty Images Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the Coronavirus lockdown Andrew Parsons Runners pass cardboard cutouts of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William during the London Marathon in London AP An empty escalator at Charing Coss London Underground tube station Jeremy Selwyn Electronic bilboards displays a message warning people to stay home in Sheffield PA A sign is displayed in the window of a student accommodation building following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Mancheste Reuters People take part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions, in Londo AP People sing and dance in Leicester Square on the eve on the 10PM curfew Reuters Hearts painted by a team of artists from Upfest are seen in the grass at Queen Square, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Bristol Reuters Graffiti reads 'good luck and stay safe', as the number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases grow around the world, under a bridge in London Reuters A sign is pictured in Soho, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London Reuters Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures, during a coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, London AP A person runs past posters with a message of hope, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Manchester REUTERS Riot police face protesters who took part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions in London AP An image of The Queen eith quotes from her broadcast to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the Coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images Durdle Door in Dorset Reuters Captain Tom Moore via Reuters Mia, aged 8, and Jack, aged 5, take part in "PE with Joe" a daily live workout with Joe Wicks on Youtube to help kids stay fit who have to stay indoors due to the Coronavirus outbreak PA An NHS worker reacts at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital during the Clap for our Carers campaign in support of the NHS Reuters Goats which have taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno @AndrewStuart via PA Tobias Weller PA Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed London Landscapes: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, central London. Matt Writtle A newspaper vendor in Manchester city centre giving away free toilet rolls with every paper bought as shops run low on supplies due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus PA Theo Clay looks out of his window next to his hand-drawn picture of a rainbow in Liverpool, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continue Reuters A young man cuts another man's hair on top of a closed hairdresser in Oxford Reuters General view of the new NHS Nightingale Hospital, built to fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London via Reuters Jason Baird is seen dressed as Spiderman during his daily exercise to cheer up local children in Stockport, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters A woman wearing a face mask walks past Buckingham Palace Getty Images A man holds mobile phone displaying a text message alert sent by the government warning that new rules are in force across the UK and people must stay at home PA Medical staff on the Covid-19 ward at the Neath Port Talbot Hospital, in Wales, as the health services continue their response to the coronavirus outbreak. PA Prime Minister Boris Johnson taking part in a virtual Cabinet meeting with his top team of ministers PA A shopper walks past empty shelves in a Lidl store on in Wallington. After spates of "panic buying" cleared supermarket shelves of items like toilet paper and cleaning products, stores across the UK have introduced limits on purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have also created special time slots for the elderly and other shoppers vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Getty Images People on a busy tube train in London at rush hour PA Mia, aged 8 and her brother Jack, aged 5 from Essex, continue their school work at home, after being sent home due to the coronavirus PA Children are painting 'Chase the rainbows' artwork and springing up in windows across the country Reuters Social distancing in Primrose Hill Jeremy Selwyn A general view of a locked gate at Anfield, Liverpool as The Premier League has been suspended PA Homeless people in London AFP via Getty Images A piece of art by the artist, known as the Rebel Bear has appeared on a wall on Bank Street in Glasgow. The new addition to Glasgow's street art is capturing the global Coronavirus crisis. The piece features a woman and a man pulling back to give each other a kiss PA The Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, London, for Windsor Castle to socially distance herself amid the coronavirus pandemic PA A general view on Grey street, Newcastle as coronavirus cases grow around the world Reuters Matt Raw, a British national who returned from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China, leaves quaratine at Arrowe Park Hospital on Merseyside PA Britain's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news conference inside 10 Downing Street Reuters The ticket-validation terminals at the tram stop on Edinburgh's Princes Street are cleaned following the coronavirus outbreak. PA Locked school gates at Rockcliffe First School in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear PA A sign at a Sainsbury's supermarket informs customers that limits have been set on a small number of products as the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases grow around the world Reuters Jawad Javed delivers coronavirus protection kits that he and his wife have put together to the vulnerable people of their community of Stenhousemuir, between Glasgow and Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" Getty Images A man who appears to be homeless sleeping wearing a mask today in Victoria Jeremy Selwyn A pedestrian walks past graffiti that reads "Diseases are in the City" in Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images Staff from The Lyric Theatre, London inform patrons, as it shuts its doors PA A quiet looking George IV Bridge in Edinburgh PA A quieter than usual British Museum Getty Images A racegoer attends Cheltenham in a fashionable face mask SplashNews.com A commuter wears a face mask at London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn A empty restaurant in the Bull Ring Shopping Centre Getty Images A deserted Trafalgar Square in London PA Passengers determined to avoid the coronavirus before leaving the UK arrive at Gatwick Airport Getty Images

He added: "I cannot, in all candour, promise the House that we will be able to get through this crisis without any kind of hardship at all.

"We will do whatever we can to support the self-employed, just as we are putting our arms around every single employed person in this country."

Ahead of the Chancellor's announcement, The Daily Telegraph reported one in three self-employed workers were set to ask the Government to support their wages.

The move comes after Mr Sunak set out plans for 80 per cent wage subsidies for PAYE employees last week.

It should affect 1.7 million of the five million self-employed, according to the same newspaper.

The Government is also under pressure to provide more protective equipment for doctors and nurses, with the number of positive UK tests rising to 9,529 at 9am on Wednesday, up from 8,077 at the same point on Tuesday.

A total of 97,019 people had been tested with 87,490 negative results, while the number of deaths of UK patients who tested positive for Covid-19 increased from 422 to 463.

Timelapse: London on Lockdown

The British Medical Association (BMA) warned doctors and patients would die without adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) across the NHS.

It said said there was "growing evidence that thousands of GPs and hospital staff are still not being provided with the kit they need to properly protect themselves and their patients", despite Government assurances.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said millions of items of PPE had been sent out in recent days, with a hotline set up so staff could report shortages.

BMA council chairman Dr Chaand Nagpaul said: "A construction worker wouldn't be allowed to work without a hard hat and proper boots.

"Even a bee-keeper wouldn't inspect a hive without proper protective clothing.

"And yet this Government expects NHS staff to put themselves at risk of serious illness, or even death, by treating highly infectious Covid-19 patients without wearing proper protection. This is totally unacceptable."

Asked about the latest death toll figures, business minister Nadhim Zahawi told BBC2's Newsnight: "Well, at this stage I wouldn't interpret anything into the figures.

"I think the Prime Minister is right to say that the message is very clear - stay at home, make sure we protect the NHS and save lives."

Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick told ITV's Peston: "We need to get more PPE out to people working on the frontline, that's in hospitals, it's in social care, it's in pharmacies and GPs' surgeries.

"We are doing that, we are ramping up efforts very significantly, we're taking very large stocks now, over 10 million masks for example in the last few days.

"Every social care provider in the country will get deliveries this week. We now have a PPE hotline so that those people on the front line can ring up, get the order that they desperately need."

The economic impact of the outbreak has also brought a large spike in the number of people applying for Universal Credit.

Ministers are being urged to step-up testing for coronavirus, especially among health workers.

But the UK's chief medical officer dismissed suggestions a coronavirus antibody test will be ready to buy online next week.

Professor Chris Whitty said the accuracy of the tests needed to be properly tested before they were made available, and he stressed that frontline NHS workers would need them first so they could get back to work if they have already had the virus.

A national salute is set to take place to honour the hardworking NHS staff who are trying to battle coronavirus.
Islamabad, March 26 (IANS) China has asked Pakistan to open the border between the two countries for one day on Friday so that medical supplies to combat the novel coronavirus could be transported, a media report said.

The Khunjerab Pass is usually opened on April 1 which marks the end of winter in that part, but due to the global pandemic, the border between Pakistan and China has been closed for an indefinite period, the Dawn news report said.

Under a border protocol agreement of 1985, the Khunjerab border crossing remains closed from the end of November to April. Trade and travel activities between the two countries take place through Khunjerab Pass, also known as Sust Dry Port  the only land route between China and Pakistan.

A letter, written by the Chinese Embassy in Islamabad to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with copies to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), the government of Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) and the Ministry of National Health Services, states that the governor of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China would like to donate a batch of medical materials to GB.

According to the letter, the governor has donated 200,000 ordinary face masks, 2,000 N-95 masks, five ventilators, 2,000 testing kits and 2,000 medical protective clothes mainly used by doctors and paramedics.

The donation is in response to a request made by GB Chief Minister Hafeezur Rehman to the governor of Xinjiang region to combat coronavirus in the province.

"The materials are ready to be delivered to GB through Khunjerab Pass at 9 a.m. on March 27. Therefore, it is requested to temporarily open (border) the same date," the Dawn news report quoted the letter as saying.

"In this regard, it is also highly recommended that Pakistani side should agree and make due preparation before the date so that all materials could enter Pakistan smoothly," it added.

Gilgit-Baltistan, which has a high percentage of coronavirus cases in the country compared to its population, has a negligible number of operational ventilators and remoteness leading to a severe shortage of medical equipments.

The federal government is yet to take a decision regarding this development.

As of Thursday, Pakistan has reported 1,098 confirmed coronavirus cases with eight deaths.

--IANS

ksk/
QUETTA, Pakistan - Gunmen gunmen opened fire on Pakistani security forces patrolling a remote border region near Iran on Thursday, killing two troops, a provincial minister said.

Four other troops were also wounded in the attack in the town of Turbat in impoverished Baluchistan province, said provincial interior minister Ziaullah Longove.

The troops were patrolling the region where smugglers have a strong presence. Pakistan has also stepped up security along the Iran border in recent weeks to check on movement of people in order to contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. Such attacks have been blamed on militants and small separatist groups. Baluchistan has long been the scene of a low-level insurgency by armed groups demanding more autonomy for the region and a greater share in the gas and mineral resources there.

The government claims it has quelled the insurgency but violence has continued.
Italy's coronavirus death toll has today soared by 712 to 8,215 with more than 6,100 new cases recorded, taking the global total past half a million.

The nation's total number of confirmed cases has risen to 80,539, almost as many as China, where COVID-19 was first detected in December.

The nation's Civil Protection Agency reported 712 deaths in Italy today, bringing the country's death toll to 8,215 - by far the highest in the world.

There are 510,108 coronavirus cases confirmed worldwide, with 22,993 deaths reported as a result of the virus.

Pictured: Pallbearers bring a coffin to be stored in the church of San Giuseppe in Seriate, near Bergamo, Lombardy, today amid the country's coronavirus lockdown

Italy's death toll had jumped by 683 to 7,503 on Wednesday, a decline in the daily tally of fatalities following a spike in deaths a day earlier.

On Tuesday 743 people died, following 602 deaths on Monday, 650 on Sunday and a record of 793 on Saturday - the highest daily figure since the deadly bug emerged in the country on February 21.

Of those originally infected nationwide, it was today reported 10,361 had fully recovered compared to 9,362 the day before.

There were also said to be 3,612 people in intensive care against a previous 3,489.

The hardest-hit northern region of Lombardy reported a steep rise in fatalities compared with the day before and remains in a critical situation, with a total of 4,861 deaths and 34,889 cases.

This compares with 4,474 deaths and 32,346 cases reported up to Wednesday.

A coffin is carried to be aligned with others on the floor in the San Giuseppe church in Seriate, one of the areas worst hit by coronavirus, near Bergamo, Italy today

The World Health Organisation said there were 'encouraging signs' after Italy's latest numbers were released, but warned it was 'still too early to say whether the pandemic is peaking'.

But today's numbers mean Italy has almost surpassed China as the nation with the most confirmed cases of the deadly virus.

There are 81,782 reported cases of COVID-19 in China, where some 61,201 people have recovered from the pandemic in the Wuhan province alone.

The Italian jump in cases comes as the Vatican today announced it is testing dozens of priests who live in the same residence as Pope Francis for coronavirus.

Contingency plans are also in place to move those who are diagnosed with the disease elsewhere, an insider added.

A priest who lives in the Santa Marta residence and works in the Secretariat of State had recently tested positive for the virus and was hospitalised in Italy.

A convoy of military vehicles arrives at the Monumental Cemetery in Bergamo today

Doctors treat COVID-19 patients in an intensive care unit at the third Covid 3 Hospital (Istituto clinico CasalPalocco) during the coronavirus emergency in Rome

The Vatican source was one of several officials who expressed concern about a possible flare-up in the residence where the pope has lived since 2013.

The modern residence, which has 130 rooms and suites and a staff of about 30 people, is also home to dozens of priests who continue to work in key Vatican departments.

'Santa Marta may be a bomb waiting to explode,' said one of the officials, who was not identified.

Pope Francis has tested negative for coronavirus twice in recent weeks, according to Italian media reports.

There are currently around 50 permanent residents in Santa Marta, which is run like a hotel and stopped accepting bookings for temporary visitors earlier this month.

Coffins of coronavirus victims are stored in a warehouse in Ponte San Pietro, near Bergamo in Lombardy

A man wears a face mask as he waits outside the San Guiseppe church, where coffins of the deceased have been stored in Italy

Half of the residents were tested on Wednesday and the other half were being tested on Thursday, a source said, adding that the plan is to move those who test positive to a Church-run hotel for pilgrims in Rome.

Senior Vatican officials who live elsewhere inside the city-state are also being tested, another insider added.

'I consider it a potentially serious public health issue,' said one official.

Until recently, Pope Francis took his meals in a common dining room but he has recently been eating in his suite, it was reported.

The Pope is 83 and part of one of his lungs was removed following an illness when he was a young man.

The jump in cases comes as the Vatican today announced it is testing dozens of priests who live in the same residence as Pope Francis (pictured today) for coronavirus

One source who enters the residence regularly said precautions have been taken such as encouraging social distancing and making hand sanitisers available.

Since March 6, the Vatican has issued at least five notices or decrees that mirror steps taken in Italy, by far the hardest hit country in Europe.

They include recommendations to communicate by phone even with people in the same office, alternating shifts and encouraging as much work from home as possible.

'The Church will continue without the Roman Curia working for a few weeks,' one official said.

'This policy to keep all the offices open is worrying. My department can be closed for months without any damage,' another added.

The Pope has cancelled public appearances since the outbreak of coronavirus across Italy and is conducting his general audiences via television and the internet.
Not for distribution to U.S. newswire services or for dissemination in the United States

OAKVILLE, Ontario, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Giyani Metals Corp. March 26, 2020 (TSXV:EMM) (FRANKFURT:KT9) (WKN:A2DUU8) (Giyani or the Company) is pleased to announce that The Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) in Botswana has granted the Company final approval for the Environmental Management Plan (EMP) of its Lobatse manganese prospect.



This final approval was granted after the customary one-month public review process during which the Company was required to advertise the details of the EMP in the government gazette and local newspapers. The public review process commenced on February 14, 2020 and concluded on March 13, 2020. There were no concerns raised by any stakeholders during that period and, as a result, the DEA issued an official acceptance letter on March 20, 2020.

Robin Birchall, CEO of Giyani commented:

We are extremely pleased with the final Lobatse EMP approval and grateful to the DEA in Botswana for the speed and dedication in which they have completed their review. This is another great example of Botswanas dedication to supporting its mining industry, especially as the country has introduced its own in-country restrictions following the COVID-19 global pandemic; measures we are both supporting in country and applaud.

This has been a detailed process with multiple reviews and updates which commenced in early 2019. The environmental framework required to proceed with exploration activities at Lobatse is now in place in order for Giyani to realize its full potential including our efforts to expand the companys manganese resource base in Botswana. This approval is the last of the three that we have received across K.Hill, Lobatse & Otse project sites.

About Giyani

Giyani Metals Corp. is a Canadian explorer and developer focused on the development of its K.Hill, Lobatse & Otse manganese projects in the Kanye Basin, Botswana, Africa. The companys flagship K.Hill project is a near-surface manganese oxide deposit currently going through a feasibility study to produce high-purity electrolytic manganese metal (HPEMM), a key product needed for batteries in the expanding electric vehicle (EV) market. Additional information and corporate documents may be found on www.sedar.com and on Giyani Metals Corp. Website: https://giyanimetals.com/.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of Giyani Metals Corp.

Robin Birchall, CEO

Contact:

Giyani Metals Corporation

Robin Birchall

CEO, Director

+447711313019

rbirchall@giyanimetals.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.



The securities described herein have not been registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the U.S. Securities Act), or any state securities laws, and accordingly, may not be offered or sold to, or for the account or benefit of, persons in the United States or U.S. persons, as such term is defined in Regulation S promulgated under the U.S. Securities Act (U.S. Persons), except in compliance with the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities requirements or pursuant to exemptions therefrom. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the Companys securities to, or for the account of benefit of, persons in the United States or U.S. Persons.

Forward Looking Information

This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements in this news release, other than statements of historical fact, that address events or developments that Giyani expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words expects, does not expect, plans, anticipates, does not anticipate, believes, intends, estimates, projects, potential, scheduled, forecast, budget and similar expressions, or that events or conditions will, would, may, could, should or might occur.

All such forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of the relevant management as of the date such statements are made and are subject to certain assumptions, important risk factors and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Giyanis ability to control or predict. Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which could cause actual events or results to differ from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking information, including, without limitation: inherent exploration hazards and risks; risks related to exploration and development of natural resource properties; uncertainty in Giyanis ability to obtain funding; commodity price fluctuations; recent market events and conditions; risks related to the uncertainty of mineral resource calculations and the inclusion of inferred mineral resources in economic estimation; risks related to governmental regulations; risks related to obtaining necessary licenses and permits; risks related to their business being subject to environmental laws and regulations; risks related to their mineral properties being subject to prior unregistered agreements, transfers, or claims and other defects in title; risks relating to competition from larger companies with greater financial and technical resources; risks relating to the inability to meet financial obligations under agreements to which they are a party; ability to recruit and retain qualified personnel; and risks related to their directors and officers becoming associated with other natural resource companies which may give rise to conflicts of interests. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect Giyanis forward-looking information. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in the forward-looking information or statements.

Giyanis forward-looking information is based on the reasonable beliefs, expectations and opinions of their respective management on the date the statements are made, and Giyani does not assume any obligation to update forward looking information if circumstances or managements beliefs, expectations or opinions change, except as required by law. For the reasons set forth above, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. For a complete discussion with respect to Giyani and risks associated with forward-looking information and forward-looking statements, please refer to Giyanis financial statements and related MD&A, all of which are filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

GIYANI METALS CORP.

1155 North Service Road West, Unit 11

Oakville, Ontario L6M 3E3

T: 289-291-4032

www.giyanimetals.com TSX.v-EMM
As much as one in five Canadians would find the entirety of their budgets worn out in just a month if their work stops amid the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new survey by DART & maru/Blue.

The study, which polled 1,514 randomly selected Canadian adults online last March 19 and 20, also found that only 33% of Canadians are confident that they can endure a no-job situation for a year.

The immediate future would be bleak for at least one tenth (10%) of Canadians who indicate they have no financial reserves or wherewithal to tap into to pay for the basic necessities of life, the pollsters said, as quoted by the Financial Post.
Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar on Thursday said that police and medical professionals are doing their duty to combat the menace of coronavirus and added that strict action will be taken against those heckling or attacking them.

"Doctors and police are doing their duty in the fight against coronavirus. We will not tolerate attacks on doctors and police personnel. Those who are found heckling or attacking doctors and Police personnel will be dealt with strict actions under the law," Pawar said in the statement.

He also urged people to avoid unnecessary crowding in public places.

"Don't let the time come for us to use the military. During the lockdown, America used its Army. It is our responsibility that we ensure that the time doesn't come when we have to take the help of the Army," Pawar said.

"A lockdown is implemented but we are still continuing the essential services like milk, groceries, vegetables, gas, medicine, and fruits, etc. The public and police must co-operate with each other during this time," he added.

With 124 confirmed coronavirus cases and three deaths, the state of Maharashtra has the largest number of COVID-19 cases in the country.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country effective from midnight to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly.

According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the total number of confirmed positive COVID-19 cases soared to 649 across the country on Thursday (including 593 active cases, 42 cured/discharged people) and 13 deaths.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As the coronavirus cuts through NYC, a makeshift morgue is set up to house those who have died from the ill-effects of the virus in the Big Apple.

The current count of the cases is 15,597 and with 192, taken by the reaper and these stats were made available by the Johns Hopkins University. NYC Gov Andrew Cuomo told the public on Tuesday that cases are doubled every three days and the forecasters are comparing it to the bullet train.

Assembled near the Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital is the morgue to house the corpses of the COVID-19 fatalities on Tuesday. Made up of several white tents, two refrigerated trailers, an RV with 'Mobile Command Center - Medical Examiner' on the outside, reported the New York Post.

Sources that are connected to the setup told the newspaper several more refrigerated trailers are coming in, to add to what they have now and these tents and trailers are planned for other local hospitals in NYC.

The source added that this setup will be city-wide to cope with the coming wave of patients.

On 9/11, the Bellevue Hospital was the site where the dead was housed about two decades ago told the New York Post.

According to Bryan Llenas, the number of COVID-19 is hitting the roof.

Such grim updates in the New York outbreak was reported by Dr Deborah Birx, a top response coordinator for the White House's coronavirus task force.

To add, Vice President Mike Pence said that anyone coming from the New York City metropolitan area, should self-isolate for 14-days to be sure that they are not infected, and transmit the disease in their communities.

These makeshift morgues in NYC are part of greater preparation too.

Also related: President Donald Trump Invokes the Defense Production Act as COVID-19 Worsens in USA

Dr. Deborah Birx also stressed according to sources, that strict quarantining for all those who have been to NYC for 14-days, to keep the contagion from spreading. She echoed the message of Vice President Mike Pence, she also noted than 60% of new cases in the United States has come from NYC.

The US VP Mike Pence mentioned that New York is now a major hotspot and high risk as well, with more support coming to help NYC weather the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pence mentioned that public health officials are recording one case per 1000 people density, which is greater than Washington state which is where coronavirus took its first death, spread since them.

NYC is ready to process more dead as the COVID-19 gets more virulent

In preparation for more deaths to come, NYC is now adding 45 refrigerated truck trailers that can hold approximately 45 bodies in its hold, should the worst outcome of more deaths that might stress the capacity of city morgues and hospitals.

There is an expectation that with more refrigerated tents, about 3,600 bodies can be held which adds to the capacity of NYC to process more fatalities anticipated.

In lower Manhattan, workers have put up a large tent near the central morgue, confirmed by Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokeswoman for the Office of Chief Medical Examiner. This adds to 800 to 900 bodies capacity with 5 city morgues.

She added that this is a precaution for the worst-case scenario, and stress it will not be needed.

Sources cite Michael Lanotte, executive director of the New York State Funeral Directors Association, saying these units are for the humane treatment of the victims before sent to funeral parlours.

Officials stress the need for these makeshift morgues in NYC, but hopefully, they will not be needed.

Related article: U.S. Can Be the Next Center of Coronavirus Outbreak, WHO Warns

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
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Chennai-based Ashok Leyland, Indias third largest commercial vehicle maker, is using the slowdown to go aggressively after cost cutting. It is also recalibrating its capital expenditure for FY21.

The maker of heavy duty trucks has already managed to reduce capital expenditure for the present financial year by 40 percent. This will help it to close the year with a capital expenditure of Rs 1,200 crore, as against the earlier Rs 2,000 crore announced at the start of the fiscal.

For the coming financial years, Ashok Leyland is going back to cost structures that were in place three years ago. And, not just that, the company plans to further reduce expenditure from those levels, a top company official recently told analysts.

This is relevant as the auto industry, which had a dismal 2019, is facing further challenges due to the COVID-19 breakout. Manufacturing at all of Ashok Leyland plants, like every automaker, has been on a standstill since the start of the week following the call for a nation-wide shutdown by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Coronavirus India LIVE Updates

Gopal Mahadevan - the chief financial officer and whole-time director - Ashok Leyland, said, So what I told the management was, let us go back to when we were Rs 18,000 crore last, let us look at what were the resources we are deploying and let us take a 20 percent cut on that. So that has set the organization thinking completely differently, why not we resize the organization to the level it was, say, possibly 3 years ago.

In FY20, the company recorded a revenue of nearly Rs 30,000 crore.

Mahadevan's address to analysts took place just before the outbreak of COVID-19.

Relook at capex

Going forward, the company will set aside a much smaller capex which will be mostly on the light commercial vehicle business. This capex will not exceed the given band of Rs 400 to Rs 500 crore for each of the next four to five years, the official informed.

We have been really looking at how to get capex down over the last few months that we have been able to achieve that. We have just finished our strategic planning process now. We have said that we need to get this business into high ROC. Next year the second quarter is not going to be really great, but we are going to use this opportunity even to scale down the operations of the company even further, Mahadevan added.

FY20 has seen Ashok Leylands domestic sales cripple by 30 percent to 1.14 lakh units till February. The fall was much higher than the industry which recorded a drop of 22 percent during the same 11 month period, as per data shared by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM).

With exports taking a hit in the present financial year, the company has moved the senior team focusing on exports, moved back to Chennai and reduced its level of activity in Dubai, which has been a hub for the company for past several years.

The coming on board of a new chief executive officer and two chief operating officers has expedited the revival process under Chairman Dheeraj Hinduja. While Vipin Sondhi is the CEO and MD, Anuj Kathuria and Nitin Seth are the new COOs.

We are making the company very asset-light. We are looking at our entire manufacturing strategy. Again, we possibly will shift some manufacturing and rebalance the whole manufacturing. That has been happening ever since Dheeraj started. So his focus was on long-term sustainability, and we are looking at that, and we hope to achieve that over the next couple of years, added Mahadevan.

He added that the company also wanted to reduce the break-even period for new projects, but did not provide additional details.

The area which will continue to attract attention for Ashok Leyland is the light commercial vehicle business. Despite the challenging environment, the LCV business of Ashok Leyland did better than the industry and recorded a fall of 8 percent to 44,623 units till February compared to the same period in 2019.

Industry volumes in the LCv segment were down by 12 percent during the same year at 5.51 lakh units, as per SIAM data.

Our plan for next year is going to be extremely aggressive, even though it is not easy to achieve. Some of these goals are so aggressive that we do not know, it requires a Rambo to deliver them, but I am sure that we will get there. We have said that we want to be in the global top 10 in commercial vehicles over the next few years, maybe 6 years, 7 years, depending on how the economy pans out. If that has to happen, believe me 50 percent of our volumes will have to come from LCV, which means we need to have LCV volumes clocking somewhere around 150000 to 180000 or 200000 units. So LCV investments will happen, said Mahadevan.
President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on March 21, 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

White House Working on Guidelines for States on Social Distancing Measures

The White House is working to soon publish guidelines to help state and local officials make decisions on either relaxing, maintaining, or increasing social distancing and other mitigation measures designed to stop the spread of the CCP virus pandemic.

President Donald Trump announced the development in a letter sent to governors on March 26. The guidelines will be based on local testing for the CCP virus. Levels of spread on county-by-county basis can then be used to make decisions on containment measures.

The guidelines are in line with Trumps plan to begin to open up the United States by Easter on April 12. Widespread stay-at-home and other state and local orders have smothered the U.S. economy. On the morning prior to the release of Trumps letter, the Department of Labor reported a record-breaking number of jobless claims.

There is still a long battle ahead, but our efforts are already paying dividends. As we enhance protections against the virus, Americans across the country are hoping the day will soon arrive when they can resume their normal, economic, social, and religious lives, Trump wrote.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mishandling allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

The administration will use the data collected from widespread testing to determine whether counties are high risk, medium risk, or low risk. The guidelines will likely stem from the risk classifications.

As testing gives us more information about who has been infected, we are tracking the virus and isolating it to prevent further spread, Trump wrote. This new information will drive the next phase in our war against this invisible enemy.

The number of deaths in the United States from the CCP virus surpassed 1,000 on March 26. New York is the epicenter of the U.S. contagion with more than 37,000 confirmed cases and 385 deaths. Trump noted that the virus has inflicted a heavy toll on the country, but he remained optimistic.

A number of our fellow citizens have tragically succumbed to its ravages, while many more are fighting for their lives, Trump wrote. In their honor, we pledge to marshal every resource and power we have to overcome and vanquish this threat.

Through it all, I am deeply inspired by the unflinching dedication of Americans in every state who are rallying together to defeat the virus. I look forward to witnessing that same boundless spirit drive our recovery and quickly return us to the path of exceptional health, safety and prosperity for all.
In a Wednesday night Facebook Live update, Conroe ISD Superintendent Curtis Null reiterated his message to families and addressed some of the problems the district has been handling as everyone adjusts to remote learning.

This is real, Null started, addressing the release from the county announcing the count of positive COVID-19 tests was now at 31. We hope that youll take this serious.

He urged families to practice social distancing.

If we cant handle this ourselves then Im afraid our county judge will be forced to do more, and well have more restrictions and they could last longer, Null said. But if we all work together we can get through this much quicker.

But along with his warnings, Null reassured parents that they are doing great and the district only expects them to do what they can at this time. He encouraged parents to communicate with their campus if they are feeling overwhelmed or are having issues with technology or supplies.

Weve had a few of these little bumps along the way, folks that have contacted us, we knew that would happen, Null said. Ive yet to see any situation that we havent been able to solve.

More Information Other highlights: The district will continue to distribute meals on Tuesday and Thursday from 10 different schools. So far, CISD has distributed over 80,000 meals since school closed. The district has created a nurses hot-line to talk to the district nurses, who are all registered nurses. It is not meant to be a substitute for 911 but is a resource for any generic or general questions you may have during this time. The hot-line will be open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday, and the number is 936-709-7791. The district has created a hot-line for future CISD students looking to register, allowing staff to help them while still comlying with social isolation. The number is 932-709-7895. The district is going to create videos about skills that aren't typically taught in school but are helpful in daily life, like changing a tire or cooking. Anyone with an idea for a video can share them in the comments of the video. See More Collapse

Online boost

One of the bright spots that Null sees in this situation is that CISD will be much better at online education and instruction than it was before. But the move has necessitated some technology updates. The district has increased its bandwidth from 6G to 10G and added more redundancy to prevent outages.

What the district cant control, Null explained, was the speed of the services the district uses, like Canvas, Dreambox, or Zoom.

Just know that the whole world, all of a sudden, is using these applications and theyre doing the best they can, Null said.

For students without internet or internet-accessing devices at home, Null said the district is working to solve this issue as best it can by distributing devices to students who need them. He reiterated again the need for people to contact their counselor if they are in need of technology.

Graduation and prom

Null brought in Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Schools, Gregg Colschen, to talk about the issues the districts seniors are dealing with. The district has over 4,500 seniors this year.

The class of 2020 was assured that as of right now the plan is that they will walk across the stage for graduation on the scheduled dates. But, the spread of COVID-19 has been a rapid one and plans could change in the future.

Both Sam Houston State and the Cynthia Woods Mitchel Pavilion are willing to host the graduation ceremonies assuming there are no restrictions, Colschen said. If there are restrictions, he said the what if plans are being explored. Nothing is off the table: moving the graduation date or holding smaller ceremonies have been discussed. But the districts first choice is to hold graduations on the scheduled date.

Prom is more concerning, Colschen said. The district is anticipating returning to school April 13 but that too might change. The earliest prom in the district is scheduled for April 24. In order to host the event, the county will need to lift the crowd restrictions currently in place.

The district has been in touch with both the Lone Star Convention Center and the Marriott and as long as they are up and running and the event can comply with size restrictions, proms will go on as planned.

AP testing

The College Board, the governing body for AP classes and tests, has reconsidered their stance on redesigned testing for this spring and will be using a 45-minute, online, free-response test. The district wont know more about the timing of these tests until April 3. Only the first 75 percent of the course will be covered in the exam.

Both the ACT and SAT have canceled all tests through the end of the school year, but Colschen said they feel confident they will be able to offer testing times in June.

Null said the district is looking for guidance from the Texas Education Agency regarding grades.

For the most part, I think if we did not get back to school, you could just assume the third nine weeks was the end of the school year. What would your standing be advancing to the next grade based on the end of the third nine weeks, Null said. I think thats the simplest way to look at it today.

For students who may have been struggling before school closed, he urged students and parents to have those conversations with their school administration and counselors.

jamie.swinnerton@chron.com
Angry locals at a Dorset coastal beauty spot have joined a growing list of Britons hitting out at tourists and second home owners flocking to their area amid the coronavirus crisis.

Residents in Lulworth, Dorset - which was packed with visitors last weekend - have erected a sign telling visitors to 'go home'.

Towns and villages across the country have lashed out at those in cities fleeing the spread of coronavirus - which has now infected more than 9,500 people and killed 465.

Signs saying hostile messages like 'Go home, rats', 'Tourists please go home' and 'locals only' have sprung up across Britain.

The Lulworth Estate, which owns the land, has announced it would be closing its car parks at Lulworth and Durdle Door following public criticism.

Residents in Lulworth, Dorset - which was packed with visitors last weekend - have erected a sign telling visitors to 'go home'

The car park a Lulworth Cove in Dorset was nearly full over weekend. Signs saying hostile messages like 'Go home, rats', 'Tourists please go home' and 'locals only' have sprung up across Britain

One resident, who did not want to be named, said: 'I've seen a picture of the sign and completely agree with what it says.

'People coming down here to self-isolate and potentially bring the virus with them are as selfish as it comes.

'We're all on lockdown and they're coming down here for a jolly-up.

'I don't think it's right and I hope they listen to the sign and go home.'

Vikki Slade, leader of nearby Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council said: 'We obviously welcome the decision to close the car parks to keep people safe.

The Lulworth Estate, which owns the land, has announced it would be closing its car parks at Lulworth and Durdle Door following public criticism

The car park at the tourist hotspot at Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door have been closed to prevent people from visiting during the coronavirus lockdown

'People coming down here to second homes is creating a huge strain on our public services and I completely understand people's frustrations.

'I would say that people who can go home should do so and people thinking about coming down should stay away.

'The advice is for one piece of exercise a day but you shouldn't be going to your parks or beaches unless they are local and you have no other choice.

'This is for people's safety - it is not a bank holiday.'

People living in big cities all over the UK have been flocking to the seaside to escape the virus, drawing the ire of locals.

Angry locals in St Ives in Cornwall scrawl messages on the beach as second home owners continue to flee London and other big cities

This sign, put up by local residents, has appeared in Bala, north Wales, and it reads 'Go home rats'

Though second homers are remaining defiant, local anger towards the mass exodus is clear

Residents in St Ives, Cornwall have scrawled messages on the beach demanding second home owners leave.

An even more furious sign has appeared in Bala, north Wales, which says 'Go home rats'.

The Government has urged people not to head to the countryside or to holiday homes, with fears that they could be spreading the virus throughout the nation.

But despite their pleas - and the Prime Minister imposing a UK-wide lockdown - second homers have been defiantly continuing to flock to the countryside in their droves.

Residents of St Ives in Cornwall scrawled a series of messages into the sand on the beach demanding that tourists go home.

Two messages read 'Locals only', while another said 'Tourists please go home'.

A frustrated farmer in Pendle, Lancashire took lockdown into his own hands and 'closed the countryside' by plastering his land with placards ordering 'non-locals go home', after 'thousands' flocked to the area amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Reid Nutter, 53, whose family own a farm in Roughlee spent the weekend erecting placards as tourists flouted social distancing rules.

The government have urged people not to head to the countryside, with fears that they could be spreading the virus throughout the nation

Farmer Reid Nutter, 53, from Roughlee, Lancashire, built a sign reading 'countryside is closed' after 'thousands' of visitors flocked to his village and flouted social distancing rules

Reid (right) with daughters Kelsie (centre), 24, and Brooke (left). The father proudly showed off his handy-work to Brooke, who chuckled at his 'extreme' action

After Boris Johnson announced parks would close, Reid decided to 'close the countryside' to the public too.

By the time the Prime Minister announced lock down, the farmer was already working on six more signs in a bid to halt the spread of the virus and protect elderly locals.

The father-of-three proudly showed off his handy-work to daughter Brooke Nutter, 21, who chuckled at his 'extreme' action, but shared the pictures online to spread his message.

In Bala, second home owners were compared to rats in one sign while another message, scrawled on the side of a car, read 'Go home idiots'.

Signs also appeared on a roundabout in Porthcawl, south Wales asking people to turn around.

Meanwhile, a roadside sign in Pembrokeshire also urged non-locals to go home, while a sign in north Wales said: 'Snowdonia is closed. F*** off home!'

However, second home owners are remaining defiant in the face of intense criticism.

One of those is Alice Townsend, 52, a physiotherapist who moved to her second home in Northumberland from south London with her husband and three children.

A car with a warning scrawled across its side has been dragged across the entrance to a car park at Bala, Wales

This angry sign in north Wales reads: 'Snowdonia is closed. F*** off home!', as locals hit out at tourists

Countryside dwellers are blasting city residents who are fleeing places like London for idyllic retreats (pictured, one person erected a sign on a roadside near Pembrokeshire)

She told the Times: 'We are in the middle of nowhere here. We thought with three children and two dogs it made sense. We can be outside and not infect anyone else.

'I get that some people might see that as selfish but we thought it was practical.'

A second homeowner, from west London, decided to move to her Suffolk cottage with her husband as soon as rumours of a lockdown first started.

She insisted that her and her husband haven't heard any backclash, despite the fury on social media.

The woman, who wanted to remain anonymous, added: 'We weekenders are quietly having our own backlash. Like the rest of the country, we are tired of being fed ambiguous advice that changes day by day, and most of all we resent being told we should not go to our own homes, where we pay our council tax, like every other resident.'
A climate scientist is appealing for volunteers to help rescue 65,000 pages of old UK rainfall records while housebound during the coronavirus lockdown.

The majority of the countrys records from before 1960 exist only in Met Office scans of their original paper form, dating back as far as 1820.

The Rainfall Rescue Project wants to digitise the records, which cover four million measurements from weather stations in every part of the UK.

With the majority of Britons confined to their homes, Professor Ed Hawkins hopes to find volunteers to help transcribe these old records, which could help scientists to better prepare for future droughts and flooding.

I think given the present circumstances we might well find more volunteers who are looking for distractions and are able to help, said Prof Hawkins, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the University of Reading.

I certainly feel a little bit overwhelmed at the moment and want to have a distraction, something useful to do and this would be very useful to help climate scientists better understand the wonderful British weather.

You can either sit and binge-watch Netflix, and thats very necessary, but it would also be great if people could help us out with projects like this.

Volunteers can help by visiting the projects website and copying over the amounts of rainfall and locations from the scanned handwritten records.

If you do just a couple of minutes every now and then  thats great, Prof Hawkins told the BBC. If you want to spend an hour doing 30 or 40 columns  then thatll be amazing. But any amount of time, it will all add up and be a tremendous help.

In keeping with the British tradition of talking about the weather, there were at least 3,000 rain gauges across the UK from 1900 onwards, and several hundred as far back as the 1840s.

But currently only a fraction of the 65,000 pages of measurements taken over the last 200 years are currently available for manageable analysis by scientists.

This project could help them to prepare for droughts and establish worst case flood scenarios, so that defences can be built at the correct height.

The wettest month on record in the UK is thought to be October 1903, but scientists currently only have a fairly broad picture of how this extreme weather event affected the UK as a whole.

This data will help us clarify where exactly it was very wet and why, said Prof Hawkins.

If October 1903 happened again today we would get floods larger than weve seen recently, and so understanding how much rain we could get in a particular month nowadays is extremely valuable for those planning flood defences, for example.

What were trying to do here is to fill gaps in our understanding. We know that in the past weve had some very wet periods and some very dry periods in the UK, and these have significant impacts on society.

Its likely well get very wet periods and very dry periods again in the future, so we want to try to understand the causes of very wet and very dry periods so we can plan better to deal with extreme floods or extreme droughts.

To help transcribe the rainfall data, visit the Rainfall Rescue Project website.

Additional reporting by PA
HOUSTON - (March 26, 2020) - There is no longer a need to guess what ocean temperatures were like in the remote tropical Pacific hundreds of years ago. The ancient coral that lived there know all.

A study in Science led by Rice University and Georgia Tech researchers parses the record archived by ancient tropical Pacific coral over the past millennium. That record could help scientists refine their models of how changing conditions in the Pacific, particularly from volcanic eruptions, influence the occurrence of El Nino events, which are major drivers of global climate.

They found the ratio of oxygen isotopes sequestered in coral, an accurate measure of historic ocean temperatures, shows no correlation between estimates of sulfate particles ejected into the atmosphere by tropical volcanic eruptions and El Nino events.

That result could be of particular interest to scientists who suggest seeding the atmosphere with sun-blocking particles may help reverse global warming.

According to Rice climate scientist and primary author Sylvia Dee, previous climate model studies often tie volcanic eruptions, which increase sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere, to increased chances for an El Nino event. But the ability to analyze climate conditions based on oxygen isotopes trapped in fossil corals extends the climatological record in this key region across more than 20 ancient eruptions. Dee said this allows for a more rigorous test of the connection.

"A lot of climate modeling studies show a dynamical connection where volcanic eruptions can initiate El Nino events," Dee said. "We can run climate models many centuries into the past, simulating volcanic eruptions for the last millennium.

"But the models are just that -- models -- and the coral record captures reality."

Coral data that Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb and her team arduously collected on trips to the Pacific show little connection between known volcanoes and El Nino events over that time. Like tree rings, these paleoclimate archives hold chemical indicators, the oxygen isotopes, of oceanic conditions at the time they formed.

The coral data yields a high-fidelity record with a resolution of less than a month, tracking the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the heart of the central tropical Pacific.

The eight time-overlapped corals Cobb and her colleagues recently studied held an unambiguous record of conditions over 319 years, from 1146-1465. This and data from other corals spans more than 500 years of the last millennium and, they wrote, "presents a window into the effects of large volcanic eruptions on tropical Pacific climate."

That span of time includes the 1257 eruption of Mt. Samalas, the largest and most sulfurous of the last millennium.

Cobb said her lab has been developing techniques and expanding the coral record for years. "My first expedition to the islands was in 1997, and it has been my sole focus pretty much since then to extract the best records that we can from these regions," she said, noting the lab has issued many papers on the topic, including a groundbreaking 2003 study on ENSO in Nature.

Cobb said dating the ancient coral samples depends on precise uranium-thorium dating, followed by thousands of mass spectrometric analyses of coral oxygen isotopes from powders drilled every 1 millimeter across the coral's growth axis. "That speaks to the temperature reconstruction," she said. "We're borrowing on 70 years of work with this particular chemistry to establish a robust temperature proxy in corals."

The oxygen-16 to oxygen-18 isotopes revealed by spectrometry show the temperature of the water at the time the coral formed, Cobb said. "The ratio of those two isotopes in carbonates is a function of the temperature," she said. "That's the magic: It's based on pure thermodynamics."

"This beautiful coral record is highly sensitive to El Nino and La Nina events based on its location," Dee added. "My collaborators worked to extend this coral record to span a period where we know there were a lot of explosive volcanic eruptions, especially in the first half of the millennium.

"Scientists have reconstructed the timing of those volcanic eruptions from ice-core records," she said. "We compared the timing of the largest eruptions to the coral record to see if volcanic cooling events had any impact on tropical Pacific climate."

Only some volcanoes launch particulate matter -- particularly sulfate particles, leading to a phenomenon called sulfate aerosol forcing -- into the stratosphere, where the particles reflect incoming sunlight and cool the planet over the short term, Dee said. "But that cooling's impact on the tropical Pacific is uncertain, and might be regionally heterogeneous," she said.

"Our study suggests that linkage (between volcanoes and ENSO) doesn't exist or, if it does, it is obscured by the large natural variability in the climate system," Dee said. "In general, El Nino is a natural oscillator in the climate system. It's a product of chaos, like a Slinky going back and forth. It is so strong that the system might be immune to big climate perturbations like short-term volcanic cooling.

"Incidentally, our scientific community uses the same climate models that we evaluated to estimate the climate's response to geoengineering and solar radiation management schemes that employ sulfate aerosols," Dee said. Cobb and Dee characterized the study as a cautionary tale for those who study geoengineering. "There is no doubt whatsoever that if we inject stratospheric aerosols, we will cool the planet," Cobb said. "That's been shown and modelled. What we're trying to ask is, what else happens? And how well can we predict that? Our work really motivates further study to flesh out the full scope of climate impacts from sulfate aerosols."

###

Co-authors of the paper are Julien Emile-Geay, an associate professor of Earth sciences at the University of Southern California; Toby Ault, an associate professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University; Lawrence Edwards, the Regents & Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota; research scientist Hai Cheng of Minnesota and Xi'an Jiaotong University, China; and Christopher Charles, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Brown University and the University of Texas at Austin.

Read the abstract at https://science.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aax2000

This news release can be found online at https://news.rice.edu/2020/03/26/coral-tells-own-tale-about-el-ninos-past/

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews. Related materials:

Ice-age climate clues unearthed: http://news.rice.edu/2018/10/24/ice-age-climate-clues-unearthed-2/

El Nino/Southern Oscillation and tropical Pacific climate during the last millennium: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01779

Highly variable El Nino-Southern Oscillation throughout the Holocene: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6115/67

The (Paleo) Climate Group at Rice (Dee lab): https://sylviadeeclimate.org

Kim Cobb Lab: http://shadow.eas.gatech.edu/~kcobb/people/people.html

Rice Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences: https://earthscience.rice.edu

Wiess School of Natural Sciences: https://naturalsciences.rice.edu

Images for download:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/03/0330_EL-NINO-4-web.jpg Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb samples an ancient coral for radiometric dating. She is part of a team of Rice University and Georgia Tech scientists using data from coral fossils to build a record of temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean over the last millennium. (Credit: Cobb Lab)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/03/0330_EL-NINO-3-RN.jpg CAPTION: Sylvia Dee. (Credit: Rice University)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/03/0330_EL-NINO-5-web.jpg CAPTION: Kim Cobb. (Credit: Cobb Lab)

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,962 undergraduates and 3,027 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 4 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance.

RICE CONTACTS:

Jeff Falk

713-348-6775

jfalk@rice.edu

Mike Williams

713-348-6728

mikewilliams@rice.edu

GEORGIA TECH CONTACT:

Ben Brumfield

404-385-1933

ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu
Even those of us who have devoted tens of thousands of hours to watching films have blind spots  important pathways of cinema history that weve never ventured down, or, perhaps even more embarrassingly, major movies whose greatness weve never quite grasped. But being shut in is the perfect time to open doors. So here is a new column, focusing on gateway movies. If youre unfamiliar with an essential director, I will recommend the ideal place to start. If youve always felt a particular type of movie was not for you, the goal is to change that.

Lets start with wide-open spaces and a genre that has repeatedly been written off for dead: the western, which undoubtedly lives on in revisionist variations (Unforgiven, Deadwood) and the most enduring of all parodies, Blazing Saddles. When people say they hate westerns, I always think theyre imagining something like Bonanza or a movie like Shane. Without too much disrespect to Shane, the best westerns are rarely so clear-cut in their delineations of right and wrong. They deal in moral gray areas; they take place when society is still establishing basic laws and codes of honor.

The cycle of westerns that the director Budd Boetticher made with the actor Randolph Scott from 1956 to 1960 are a great entry point.
The projections of Austrian scientists have been confirmed: Avoiding social contact helps prevent the spread of Covid-19.

What the model calculations of the TU Vienna and the TU Vienna spin-off dwh predicted a week ago (elektroniknet.de reported) is now coming true: The prescribed reduction of social contacts slows down the spread of disease.

In Austria, most people have followed the recommendations and reduced the number of interpersonal contacts. Thus, exactly what we calculated for this case a week ago has happened: The number of Covid-19 cases is still rising, but the daily percentage increase has decreased. We are on a good path, says Niki Popper, CSO and co-founder of dwh.

When the virus started to spread in Austria, the number of confirmed cases doubled every two or 2.5 days. In the last few days, the daily increase has become smaller, now a doubling in the range of four to six days can be expected. This is exactly what the calculation models showed a week ago (see also the report of 19.03.2020 on elektroniknet.de).

Now calculations are still carried out to evaluate the individual measures implemented so far - and also to estimate how and when it will be possible to withdraw the measures. For this purpose, the team of the TU Vienna has now joined forces with colleagues from the Medical University and Gesundheit Osterreich. How quickly this can be done depends on the successes in the near future. The important thing is to test as many people as possible for the virus - what counts in the end are measured figures, not forecasts, says Popper.

The great unknown: the estimated number of undetected cases

As always, when you simulate such complicated processes on the computer, there are still some unanswered questions. One of them is: How many people are infected with Sars-CoV-2 without knowing it? How high is the dark figure?

There is, of course, an estimated number of unreported cases. Some research teams have also already tried to estimate this unrecorded figure - which is good, but of course very difficult, says Niki Popper. The first promising considerations are currently being made by IHS, with which TU Vienna is also cooperating.

However, if significantly more people were infected without symptoms, that might not be bad news. The number of serious cases that have to be treated in hospital is known. A high number of unreported cases would therefore mean that the proportion of serious cases is lower than previously thought. In addition, a high number of unreported cases would mean that the goal of herd immunity would be closer: it might not be so long before a sufficient number of people would be immune to the virus.
Militants launched an attack on a Sikh temple in Kabul that left at least 25 people dead before security forces killed the attackers and freed dozens of hostages.

Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian did not say how many attackers were involved in the March 25 assault on the temple, though all were killed.

The Islamic State militant group has claimed responsibility for the attack via the Amaq news agency, which it uses to distribute statements.

The Interior Ministry said that in addition to the 25 dead, eight people were wounded and 80 being held in the compound were rescued.

The AP news agency reported one of the dead was a child, whose body was brought to a Kabul hospital.

A Taliban spokesman had earlier denied responsibility for the attack via a statement on the group's Amaq News agency.

Member of parliament Narender Singh Khalsa, who represents Afghanistan's tiny Sikh community, told RFE/RL that at one point, more than 150 people were trapped inside the compound during the early morning attack.

Khalsa said that the majority of the hostages were women and children who were gathering for the morning praying session.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul and rights group Amnesty International condemned the attack.

Peace will only come when people resolve their differences through words, not guns, the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.

Amnesty said on Twitter that it was shocked and disheartened by the attack. https://twitter.com/amnestysasia

Sikhs, a small religious minority in Afghanistan which numbers fewer than 300 families, have been targeted by Islamist militants before.

A suicide bombing targeting the Sikh community and claimed by the Islamic State (IS) militant group killed more than a dozen people in 2018 in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

The United States last month struck a deal with the Taliban on the withdrawal of U.S.-led international troops but the agreement does not include IS militants.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, dpa, and tolonews.com
While most domestic and international airlines are cutting thousands of flights from their schedules due to the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, Qatar Airways is taking another route. The airline is actually stepping up some of its flying again, after also announcing some cuts in the last few days, by adding 10,000 extra seats back to its network.

It's doing so by adding extra flights to Paris, Perth and Dublin from its hub in Doha, and by using its A380 fleet for flights to Frankfurt, London Heathrow and Perth. In addition, it's adding charter service to Europe from the U.S. and Asia.

Unlike other airlines, Qatar still serves 75 destinations, including to the U.S., though the airline acknowledges that this could quickly change as some countries adopt tighter restrictions.

In many ways, Qatar's decision seems counterintuitive, especially given that even its local competitors like Emirates have cut most of their schedules and many U.S. airlines now only serve a handful of international destinations. But Qatar argues that its mission right now is to "reunite stranded passengers with their loved ones." The company's data backs this up, with planes to the U.K., France and Germany leaving with about 80% of their seats sold, but outbound flights only being 36% full. The airline says it flew about 100,000 passengers in the last seven days.

The demand here clearly is from passengers trying to get home. That likely won't last and Qatar, too, will end up shutting down more of its routes. But for the time being, it's one of the few airlines still offering flights on many of these routes, something it can do because its hub in Doha also remains open for transit passengers. Emirates and Etihad, for example, would likely keep some of its flights going, too, but their hub airports are now closed and other major hubs like Singapore and Hong Kong have banned all transit passengers.
Except for the transportation of food items, Akwa Ibom State government has announced the closure of its borders with other states as one of its preventive measures against the spread of the novel coronavirus.

There is no suspected or confirmed case of the virus in the state.

The state government has also directed its workers to stay at home for a week from March 30.

The new directive is contained in an update issued on Thursday morning by the Secretary to the State Government, Emmanuel Ekuwem.

The stay-at-home order for the government workers would be strongly enforced, Mr Ekuwem said in the statement.

The statement said the state-owned airline, Ibom Air, would suspend all its flight operations from Sunday, March 29.

Mr Ekuwem, who said markets in the state would remain open for sales of foodstuffs and essential commodities, urged churches in the state to fast and pray for Gods mercy on Sunday, March 29.

Residents and citizens are strongly advised to apply all the preventive measures earlier announced.

While the one-week stay-at-home order subsists, Akwa Ibom State Government will continue to monitor and provide regular updates on any development in the COVID-19 situation in our state.

Although there is no confirmed COVID-19 case in Akwa Ibom State, we abide by the ancient adage that prevention is better than cure.

The Governor, also enjoins all residents and citizens; including professional bodies, to desist from creating unnecessary panic within the state by propagating unverified news, whipping up selfish and myopic sentiments and fanning the embers of discord for pecuniary / or political gains, the statement said.

So far, Nigeria has a total of 51 confirmed cases and one death.

Lagos State has the highest number of confirmed cases in the country with 32 cases, followed by Abuja with 10 cases, Ogun State three, and Ekiti, Oyo Edo, Bauchi Osun and Rivers have one case each.

Most of the cases reported are travellers who have just returned to the country. Other cases are people who have come in contact with infected people.

Some senior government officials like Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, and the Chief of Staff to the President, Abba Kyari have tested positive while others have self-isolated.

Meanwhile, most state governments have directed that some of its workers stay at home and not report to work.
New Delhi: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday (March 26) wrote a letter to Chief Ministers of 18 states asking them to provide food, shelter and medical facilities to all the semi-skilled and unskilled workers of Bengal who are stuck in some other state.

Mamata's letter is addressed to 18 Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Telangana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Delhi, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Bihar, Goa, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, requesting them to provide shelter, food, medical support to workers from Bengal stranded in their states due to lockdown.

The West Bengal Chief Minister said, "we are taking care of stranded workers from other states in Bengal."

The letter reads, "We have received information that many such workers who are ordinarily residents of Bengal are stuck in your state too. We are getting SOS calls from them. They are generally in groups of 50-100 and can be easily identified by the local administration."

West Bengal CM wrote, "Since, it is not possible for us to reach any help to them, I take the opportunity to request you to kindly ask your administration to provide them with basic shelter, food and medical support during this period of crisis."

In a letter written to Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, she wrote that her Chief Secretary will pass on the details of such people to CM Thackeray`s Chief Secretary to hasten up this entire process of humanitarian support in this hour of crisis. "May I request you to kindly see for appropriate action," added the West Bengal Chief Minister.
Federal prosecutors in New York announced drug charges Thursday against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and other government officials.

The charges include narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy and weapons possession conspiracy. Prosecutors allege that Maduro and 14 current or former officials ran a vast criminal enterprise for the last 20 years, using state resources to fuel the international drug trade, including in the U.S.

"Maduro and the other defendants expressly intended to flood the United States with cocaine in order to undermine the health and well-being of our nation. Maduro very deliberatively used cocaine as a weapon," Geoffrey Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said as he unveiled the charges alongside Attorney General William Barr.

MORE: Stalemate in Venezuela has US vowing to increase pressure on Maduro in 2020

The State Department is now offering up to $15 million for information leading to Maduro's arrest and up to $10 million for the arrest of four other senior officials, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also announced Thursday.

It's a remarkable set of steps to take against a head of state, but the Trump administration has made it clear that it no longer views Maduro as Venezuela's leader.

Barr said U.S. officials expect to "eventually" gain custody of Maduro and the other officials and are currently "exploring all options" to do so.

Maduro responded on Twitter Thursday, calling it a conspiracy by the U.S. and Colombia to "fill Venezuela with violence."

MORE: US sanctions Venezuelan lawmakers for backing Maduro effort to seize legislature

Prosecutors also allege that Maduro and the other Venezuelan officials, including Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino and Chief Supreme Court Justice Maikel Moreno, "participated in a corrupt and violent narco-terrorism conspiracy" as leaders of the Venezuelan "Cartel of The Suns." Enriching themselves, they also worked in partnership with Colombia's Revolutionary Armed Forces group FARC, the violent guerrilla movement designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization.

Story continues

PHOTO: U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman of the Southern District of New York announced drug charges against Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro and other Venezuelan government officials, in New York, March 26, 2020. (U.S. Attorney's Office)

As leaders of the cartel, they worked to "facilitate the importation of tons of cocaine in into the United States" since 1999 through the "corrupted" use of Venezuela's "legitimate institutions" -- the military, intelligence service, legislature, and judiciary, according to the indictment.

Maduro, who became president of Venezuela in 2013 after Hugo Chavez's death, is described as the cartel's head and allegedly "prioritized using cocaine as a weapon against America and importing as much cocaine as possible into the United States," according to the indictment.

He is also alleged to have coordinated with FARC in the training of an "unsanctioned militia group" that acted as a de facto armed forces for the Venezuelan cartel and to have provided the terror group military-grade weapons. FARC leaders Luciano Marin Arango, aka Ivan Marquez, and Seuxis Hernandez, aka Jesus Santrich, who have previously been indicted by U.S. federal prosecutors, moved some operations to Venezuela, where they transited cocaine through to the Caribbean and Central America and on to the U.S.

This is the latest effort by the Trump administration to push Maduro from power and highlight his corruption. Thursday's indictment describes Maduro as "a Venezuelan citizen" who was "previously the president of Venezuela" and is "now the de facto ruler of the country."

Instead, the U.S. has recognized Juan Guaido, the president of Venezuela's opposition-controlled National Assembly, as Venezuela's legitimate leader since January 2019, eventually winning the support of nearly 60 other countries.

Despite the international pressure, including from Venezuela's closest neighbors and through tighter U.S. sanctions, Maduro has remained defiant and in control of the country's military and security state, largely thanks to unwavering support from Russia. Senior U.S. officials like Special Representative for Venezuela Eliot Abrams have vowed to increase the pressure on Maduro to leave power in 2020 and push for free and fair elections, which the country hasn't had since 2015.

The indictment calls for all of the defendants, including Maduro, to forfeit any and all property derived from the alleged offenses.

In addition to the $15 million reward for Maduro, the State Department is offering up to $10 million for information leading to the arrest of some of his key allies: former military intelligence chief Hugo Cavajal, retired general Cliver Alcala, former vice president Tareck El Aissami and Diosdado Cabello, head of the Constituent Assembly, which Maduro created with his supporters to undermine the legitimate parliament, the National Assembly.

All four men have already been designated by the U.S. Treasury for corruption or narcotrafficking, with El Aissami even being designated as a drug "kingpin."

Federal prosecutors announce drug charges against Venezuelas Nicolas Maduro originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Nurses in the intensive care unit of MedStar St. Mary's Hospital, in Leonardtown Maryland, March 24.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Medical workers at the Cleveland Clinic, in Cleveland, Ohio, discovered a touching note from a patient written on a hospital room window.

"Today I leave this ICU a changed person," the patient wrote. "I watched some of you have good nights and some bad nights but what was consistent every night was that you care for people."

The hospital staff "were brought to tears" by the message, according to Gretchen Sacha, a pharmacist at the Cleveland Clinic.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The coronavirus crisis has already put enormous stress on the United States, with hospital workers begging for more protective equipment and Americans looking toward their first federally mandated aid in the next several weeks.

In the midst of it all, a patient at the Cleveland Clinic, in Ohio, left a note for hospital employees that gave them a message of deep appreciation, according to a pharmacist working there.

"Today I leave this ICU a changed person," the anonymous patient wrote on their hospital room window. "This window has been the most impactful window in my life. On days when I watched you work hard to keep me and others alive unable to thank you for the time that you poured into me."

The medical workers who discovered the note, written in neat, black marker, "were brought to tears," Gretchen Sacha, a critical-care pharmacist at the Cleveland Clinic, wrote on Twitter.

"Although I will probably never get the chance to pour that same love and support into you," the message continued, "I want you to know that I think you all are rockstars. I watched some of you have good nights and some bad nights but what was consistent every night was that you care for people."

Story continues

Sacha posted the note on Twitter, where it was retweeted by hundreds of people.

"These are trying times," she said. "But we will recover. We will get through this. Together."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Former Love Island Australia star Justin Lacko has come out as bisexual, or sexually fluid.

The 29-year-old model, who is expecting his first child with ex-girlfriend Anita Barone-Scott, made the admission in a series of now-deleted Instagram posts obtained by The Kyle and Jackie O Show.

'Love who you want to!' he wrote. 'Doesn't matter the sex.'

'I won't lie anymore': Former Love Island Australia star Justin Lacko came out as bisexual, or sexually fluid, on Thursday

Justin added: 'I won't lie anymore within myself. I want freedom to be free. I respect myself to say this. I love me and always will.'

He then clarified that 'this isn't me coming out at all about being gay. This is me coming out today that I fall in love with a person, not a sex. I love women and man [sic], that's it.'

He concluded: 'Gay, bi, straight, just be who you are. I don't care and neither should anyone else.'

'Love who you want to!' he wrote in an now-deleted Instagram post. 'Doesn't matter the sex'

'I want freedom to be free. I respect myself to say this. I love me and always will,' he added

He concluded: 'Gay, bi, straight, just be who you are. I don't care and neither should anyone else'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Justin Lacko for comment.

Justin rose to fame on Love Island Australia in 2018. He went on to appear as a contestant on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!

While on I'm a Celebrity, he admitted he had stopped speaking to his grandmother because she questioned his sexuality.

Revealed: Justin's confession was revealed by The Kyle and Jackie O Show, which obtained his Instagram posts before he deleted them from his page

'I have held onto a grudge with my grandma. I say "hi" to her when I see her at Christmas time, I acknowledge her, but that's it,' he said.

'She said something like, "I think it's time we admitted that Justin is gay and in the closet. He never brings girls home."'

Justin said he was hurt and disappointed by his grandmother's words, even though his other family members supported him.

'I have held onto a grudge with my grandma': Justin admitted on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! last year that he stopped speaking to his grandma after she questioned his sexuality

'Someone's sexuality is none of your business. I don't feel like it's anyone's business unless I choose to say it myself,' he said.

When his campmates Angie Kent and Richard Reid suggested the grudge was unfair - with Richard pointing out many people assume Justin is gay - he became angry.

'I don't feel like I'm going to be sitting here and then I'm going to have two people just disagreeing with me!' he snapped, shutting down the conversation.

'Someone's sexuality is none of your business. I don't feel like it's anyone's business unless I choose to say it myself,' he said on I'm a Celebrity

Justin's sexuality came into question when he was starring on Love Island in 2018.

He complained on the show that he wasn't 'masculine' enough to find love with any of the female islanders.

'Maybe I was not masculine enough, not blokey enough, not crude enough,' he told the Herald Sun at the time.

He later told Daily Mail Australia he was 'questioning' some of the other guys in the house.

'Maybe I was not masculine enough': Justin's sexuality also became a hot topic during his stint on Love Island Australia

'I could say the same thing [being gay] about some of the boys who have like a massive bromance, and some of the guys shower naked together,' he said.

Justin is currently expecting his first child with ex-girlfriend Anita Scott-Barone.

Even though the couple split last year, they still have a close relationship and have vowed to co-parent together.
By PTI

PANAJI: The condition of three coronavirus patients in Goa is stable and the state government is making all efforts to contain the spread of the deadly viral infection, officials said on Thursday.

Three persons, all with foreign travel history, tested positive for coronavirus in Goa on Wednesday, as the tourist haven joined the states which have reported COVID-19 cases.

"All the three are men, aged 25, 29 and 55. They returned to Goa from Spain, Australia and USA. They are undergoing treatment at the state-run Goa Medical College and Hospital and their condition is stable," a senior health department official said.

Chief Minister Pramod Sawant told reporters late Wednesday night that all those who came in contact with the three patients would be quarantined.

Their contacts are being traced and the authorities have begun to quarantine them.

State Health Minister Vishwajit Rane said the government is taking all precautions and following guidelines laid by the Centre.

Union AYUSH Minister Shripad Naik, who is the Lok Sabha member from North Goa, has urged people to stay indoors.

Naik is currently at his private residence in Ribandar village near Panaji along with his family.

"In view of the three positive #coronavirus cases in the state of Goa, I appeal to all to be more cautious, responsible and follow guidelines of the central and state governments," Naik said in a tweet.

"Goa govt.with the support of central govt and its medical and paramedical teams is doing its best to make sure to contain the spread of virus in the state of Goa.

There is no need to panic but follow the directives, he tweeted.
China Sends Ships, Planes over Disputed Seas to Show Strength after COVID-19 Outbreak

By Ralph Jennings March 25, 2020

China is asserting itself in disputed waters around Asia this month to look strong after containing the world's first coronavirus outbreak as the rest of the world grapples with the disease now.

The Communist leadership seeks an image boost among its own population that's beleaguered by shutdowns and lockdowns -- measures to stop the spread of COVID-19. The deadly respiratory disease virus was discovered in central China in December and led to about 81,000 cases there.

Chinese officials hope to appear strong too around the world against growing resentment that China spawned the coronavirus that's now hurting economic activity in India, Western Europe, the United States and parts of Southeast Asia, scholars say. China is making up as well for any military exercises they may have put on hold to fight the virus, some believe.

"Priority for China is to protect their national interests, so to step up or to implement military exercises is inevitable," said Andrew Yang, secretary-general of the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies think tank in Taiwan.

South China Sea and Taiwan

Chinese military aircraft carried out an anti-submarine drill this month in the contested South China Sea, apparently in response to patrols by U.S. warships, media in China report.

The U.S. guided-missile destroyer USS McCampbell passed through part of the sea March 10 in the U.S. Navy's second mission this year to advocate that the waterway remains open internationally rather than coming under Chinese control.

In a less expected move, China held joint exercises March 15 with Cambodia despite risk of offending Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries that resent China's military presence in the region.

A Chinese fishing boat "militia" that has pestered the Philippines in the sea's disputed Spratly Islands never went home in response to the coronavirus outbreak, said Carl Thayer, Southeast Asia-specialized emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Beijing calls about 90% of the South China Sea its own despite competing claims by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. China has reclaimed land to build up the resource-rich sea's tiny islets for military use. Its coast guard vessels periodically pass through the claims of other countries, all of which are militarily weaker.

China has time from now until the late-year typhoon season to do even more in the South China Sea, Thayer said.

In another show of strength, three Chinese military planes have flown near Taiwanese airspace since February, the defense ministry in Taipei says. China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan and has not renounced use of force, as needed, to reach its goal of unification.

"Training for war preparedness will not be stopped even in the middle of the COVID-19 epidemic," Chinese state-controlled news website Global Times said March 25 following an aircraft carrier-based exercise in Chinese territorial waters.

Responses to provocation

Chinese authorities said they had all but stopped the spread of the coronavirus spread this month. But some overseas, including U.S. President Donald Trump, have pointed at China as the source of the virus that has triggered economically destructive city lockdowns around the world. COVID-19 has killed about 18,900 people including 3,281 in China.

The U.S. Navy's passages through the South China Sea year to date got China all the more fired up, analysts say. But the U.S. government, in the thick of its own COVID-19 response this month, isn't helping other Asian countries resist China longer term as it has in the past, they add. Annual events where national leaders often discuss China's maritime activity have been spiked this year.

For China, "it will be business as usual if not intensify," Thayer said. "China is slapping back (at Washington), and the U.S. is showing no leadership, so it's a vacuum for China to step in."

China is likely to increase offshore military activity beyond normal levels only with a "pretext" such as more provocation from the United States, said Oh Ei Sun, senior fellow with the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. Otherwise, he said, China's Asian neighbors would get angry.

"As long as this COVID thing is still running around over the next few months, I don't think they will go to the extent of resuming reclamation (or) being too proactive in sending their coast guard," Oh said. "Many countries would sort of at the back of their minds think this virus actually came from China."

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Taipei, March 26 : Amid the global coronavirus pandemic, a US Navy ship sailed through the Taiwan Strait, marking the third such passage this year, a media report said on Thursday.

The USS McCampbell (DDG 85), a guided-missile destroyer, passed through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday, the Taiwan News report quoted the US Pacific Fleet as saying in a tweet.

"Sailors stand watch aboard USS McCampbell (DDG 85) as the forward-deployed US 7th Fleet guided-missile destroyer transits the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday," the post said.

The US Navy has carried out freedom of navigation operations across the region over the years, and this is the third such trip this year.

In response to the incident, Taiwan's Ministry of National Defence said on Thursday that the military had closely monitored the situation and did not detect any anomaly.

The US ship sailed northward from waters in the southwest of Taiwan, it added.

Military activities in the region have not slowed down even as countries across the world have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic for the last two months, said the Taiwan News report.

A USS Barry destroyer (DDG-52) launched a missile during a live-fire exercise in the Philippine Sea on March 19.

This came three days after several Chinese aircraft conducted an exercise off the southwest coast of Taiwan, according to the report.

On Wednesday, a US Navy EP-3E signals intelligence aircraft reportedly carried out an operation off the southwest coast of Taiwan.

Taiwan has also carried out a number of military exercises across the island in the past week.

Speaking at an army base in Tainan on Tuesday, President Tsai Ing-wen called on the military to maintain its state of combat readiness while carrying out coronavirus prevention tasks.

There are currently 235 confirmed coronavirus cases in tAIWAN WITH TWO FATALITIES.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi interacts with the citizens of Varanasi via Video Conferencing, in New Delhi on March 25, 2020. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS

March 26 : With the 21-day nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus outbreak underway, the Narendra Modi-led government has got cracking on what it finds as a serious challenge -- feeding the poor, impoverished and marginalised.

What's also a matter of concern for the government are the videos of panicky migrant workers walking back to their homes at far-off places, often without food.

Meanwhile, the PMO has asked for daily reports from select ministers who will oversee the overall coronavirus spread and the containment situation in the states they have been made responsible for.

The government has asked all its ministers to take charge of the states they come from in overseeing that the poor don't go hungry during the lockdown period. For instance, Babul Supriyo and Debasree Chaudhuri will be overseeing the situation in West Bengal, while Ravi Shankar Prasad and Ram Vilas Paswan will take charge of Bihar. Likewise, all other ministers will do the same.

The BJP has already started a campaign called 'Lets feed the poor'.

Meanwhile, all BJP MPs have been asked to ensure that no one goes hungry in the present situation. How will they do it? They need to ensure that PDaS shops don't go out of ration or shops selling essentials like groceries or medicines don't shut shop or run out of stock.

This comes hours after BJP President J.P. Nadda held a video conferencing with the presidents of the party's state units, telling them to ensure that everyone gets food.

This move comes a day after a man from Narendra Modi's constituency in Varanasi asked the Prime Minister through video conferencing about the fate of the poor during this 21-day nationwide lockdown. The Prime Minister then urged Indians, who have economic means, to feed nine poor families for 21 days.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has also directed select ministers to inform the PMO on the status of the spread of coronavirus in different states on a daily basis.

Gajendra Shekhawat has been made in-charge of Punjab and Rajasthan, while Gen (Retd) V.K. Singh has been given the charge of Assam in this context.

Since Uttar Pradesh is a big state, four senior leaders have been asked to share the responsibility -- Rajnath Singh, Sanjeev Balyan, Mahendra Nath Pandey and Krishnapal Gurjar.

Similarly, Dharmendra Pradhan will oversee Assam, Arjun Munda Chhattisgarh, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi Jhharkhand while Nitin Gadkari and Prakash Javadekar will oversee the situation in Maharashtra.

Paswan and Prasad will also be responsible for giving daily report to the PMO on the status of coronavirus spread in Bihar.

As the country braces for a long lockdown, Modi in his televised interaction with the people from Varanasi on Wednesday said that India will have to win this war against the deadly virus in 21 days.

Latest updates on Howdy Modi Houston
Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday that China is ready to work with all other parties to step up coordination against COVID-19 and shore up confidence in the international community.

Xi made the remarks during a telephone conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of an extraordinary virtual summit of the Group of 20 (G20) leaders on a coordinated response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Chinese president noted that Merkel has expressed to the Chinese side sympathies and support, and the German government and various sectors in the country have extended their helping hand in the early days of the outbreak in China, saying that the Chinese people will remember that in their hearts.

Germany is now facing a serious challenge from the epidemic, and the Chinese people feel the same way, said Xi, adding that China firmly supports Germany in its fight against the epidemic and is willing to continue to provide assistance within its capacity.

He also said that the Chinese and German experts have already had video exchanges, and German experts have also travelled to China with the World Health Organization expert team, adding that China is willing to share prevention, control and treatment experience with Germany, strengthen cooperation in vaccine and drug research and development, and contribute to the health and wellbeing of both peoples and global public health security.

"May you lead the German people to overcome the epidemic as soon as possible," Xi said.

Viruses know no borders and are a common challenge faced by humanity, Xi said, adding that no country can stay out of or be immune from the epidemic.

In the battle against the outbreak, China and Germany, as well as China and the European Union (EU) have demonstrated the strength of solidarity and cooperation, and displayed positive energy, Xi said.

Noting that the extraordinary G20 summit is about to be held, Xi said that the Chinese side is ready to work with all sides, including Germany, to step up coordination and speak with one voice to advocate the spirit of sharing the same boat and jointly fight the COVID-19 epidemic, so as to shore up confidence in the international community.

He also proposed that all sides should give consideration to both the present and the long term, coordinate domestic effect and global impact, strengthen macroeconomic policy coordination, stabilize markets, ensure growth, promote employment and people's livelihood, and at the same time push for market opening to ensure openness, stability and safety of the global supply chains.

Xi stressed that the two sides should continue to conduct key political agenda planning, further advance communication and collaboration in various fields, guarantee the stability of China-Germany, China-EU production chains and supply chains, and explore the potential for cooperation in emerging industries, so as to mitigate shocks caused by COVID-19.

For her part, Merkel said as Europe is facing a grim epidemic situation, Germany has been taking decisive measures to contain the outbreak, adding that the German side is grateful for the timely and precious help China has offered, and hopes to cooperate with China in the research and development of vaccines and medicines, so as to set an example of fighting against COVID-19 with solidarity.

The German side advocates that the international community should respect facts, uphold an objective and fair stance, and overcome the outbreak through cooperation, she said.

Merkel called on the G20 members to strengthen coordination and cooperation, support each other, and play a leading role in overcoming the current crisis and stabilizing the global economy.

The German side looks forward to further enhancing Germany-China, EU-China exchanges and cooperation after the pandemic, she said.
In preparation for a March 17 base transfer ceremony with the Iraqi Security Forces, US Army soldiers burned materials and packed up equipment in Al-Qaim, Iraq, video taken on March 7 shows.

According to the US-led Coalition operating in Iraq, the Armys presence in Al-Qaim was drawn down after the successful joint campaign with Iraqi Security Forces to dislodge Islamic State fighters in the country.

Brig Gen Vincent Barker said in a March 17 statement, Today marks a historic moment for the Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve and our Iraqi Security Partners. Al Qaim served as a critical location in the fight against Daesh. First, as the Iraqi Security Forces liberated the Al Qaim region from an evil presence, and later as a valuable base during the Battle for Baghouz, the last physical territory held by ISIS. Todays transfer is possible thanks to the efforts and successes of our ISF partners.

In the statement, the Coalition said it will relocate and consolidate personnel and equipment from several Iraqi bases throughout 2020. Credit: US Army via Storyful
" " People gathered outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. to protest the Muslim travel ban in April, 2018. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for MoveOn.org

In no period of American history  not in its founding or at the height of its most soaring successes, during none of its many wars or in the oft-spasmodic years in between  has xenophobia not been a problem. It is as much a part of this nation as its immigrant roots, as Abe Lincoln's stovepipe hat and Donald Trump's hair.

It's not always blatant. Xenophobia even appears, at times to be on the decline  say, after the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But often, too, it seems to spurt, with fury and venom, unapologetically from the mouths of common citizens and presidents alike.

It's a fact of American life, never easy to face, and never, ever pretty.

"To me, when I see it throughout history, I see it as changing, morphing, adapting, but not necessarily going away," says Erika Lee, a history professor and the director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. "It's very common to be swept up in some of these moments. But when you look at it more carefully, especially in the long sea of history, we see more adaptation and shapeshifting, rather than we see sort of demise."

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What Is Xenophobia, Exactly?

Lee, the author of "America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States," defines xenophobia by the book.

"An irrational fear and hatred of immigrants," she says.

The concept of xenophobia often is muddied with "-isms" like racism (Merriam-Webster: "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race") and nativism ("a policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants"). And, to be sure, xenophobia goes hand in hand with both. It's sometimes hard to tell them apart.

But it's probably best to keep the idea simple: Xenophobia is the fear and hatred, held by some people in a country, of those who are not from that country. It's a fear of immigrants, or just of people from other countries. Of foreigners. That fear could be because of skin color or culture or religion. It could be because of all of that. Or it could be something else.

Mainly, the hatred and fear are because those people are not from here.

That, of course, raises all sorts of questions, perhaps the biggest being, "Who exactly is from this country?" It's a riddle that's especially pertinent in the U.S., which bills itself as a nation of immigrants and is, supposedly  if not always factually  welcoming of them.

It's important to point out that xenophobia is alive and thriving in many parts of the globe. And it has been forever.

But because of America's reputation as a haven for immigrants the country has some answering to do when it comes to its deeply embedded history of xenophobia.

" " During World War II, the United States sent its own Japanese citizens to internment camps, like Manzanar Relocation Center in California seen here, purely out of fear. Ansel Adams/Library of Congress

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The History of Xenophobia in the U.S.

From the very beginning of the country, many who were there  even if they'd immigrated only recently  cast a squirrely eye on newcomers. From Lee's book:

Americans have been wary of almost every group of foreigners that has come to the United States: German immigrants in the eighteenth century; Irish and Chinese in the nineteenth century; Italians, Jews, Japanese, and Mexicans in the twentieth century; and Muslims today.

Historical accounts prove that every group that has immigrated to America has battled hatred, discrimination and worse from some already in the country. German and Irish Catholics in the mid-1800s were shunned  and even killed. During the Great Depression, 20 percent of the Mexican and Mexican American population was deported. (And more than half of them were American citizens by birth.) Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. Muslim Americans battle xenophobia today.

"We see this in the campaigns against Irish Catholics in the 19th century; 'Their drunkenness, they don't make good citizens because they're only going to vote the way of their Catholic priests,'" Lee says. "We see it in campaigns against Chinese immigrants ... 'They're cheap laborers, they take away jobs from deserving white Americans.'

"We could go on. 'Italians are also criminals. Mexicans are illegals and bandits. Muslims are terrorists.'"

Many of those groups, even long after they've carved out a place in American society, after generations, still grapple with xenophobia. It's at the crux of a uniquely American dichotomy, Lee says.

" " Amnesty International activists in London, England, hold signs as they protest against U.S. President Donald Trump's travel ban in March 2017. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

No country has allowed more immigrants to settle and more refugees a safe haven than America. Yet no country has deported more: Some 57 million since the late 1800s, according to Lee.

"It points to a contradiction that is as old as the United States," Lee says. "We have these very conflicting notions about who an American could be. There were very romantic proclamations that an American is someone who chooses to be an American. As long as you had it in your heart to accept the ideals and the values of the United States, then we  unlike countries that were based on a monarchy or hereditary citizenship  we had this much more inclusive definition of American citizenship. And in many ways that was true. But in many other ways, it was very narrow."

The first naturalization law, for an example, was passed in 1790. And it was relatively open, mainly because the country was starting from scratch. It said that "any alien, being a free white person," could apply for citizenship as long they lived in the United States for at least two years. But that law did, of course, excluded African slaves, Native Americans and others.

Even when the U.S. seemingly has taken steps that would seem anti-xenophobic, it falls back. The Immigration Act of 1965 overturned immigration quotas that were based on national origins, originally designed to favor immigrants from European countries. The law paved the way for millions of legal and illegal immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere. And that spurred some xenophobic reaction. From a 2015 piece by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute:

The law's proponents see it as a historic success and assert that the estimated 59 million immigrants who have come to the United States since its passage [2015 numbers] have made the country younger, infused it with diversity and talent, and generated prosperity and economic growth. Critics contend that high admission levels of diverse groups of immigrants have created more competition for low-skilled U.S. workers, and shattered the country's cultural homogeneity.

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The Dangers of Xenophobia

"The connection with racism is really powerful," Lee says. "So what's wrong with racism? It treats people unequally. It demonizes entire groups as dangerous and threatening, either because they're racially different, or they practice a different faith, or that they're just thought of as inherently dangerous. And we treat them as a group ... rather than treating them as individuals."

Worse yet is when the government codifies that way of thinking into law. "The United States, time and time again, acted on those beliefs and made policy," Lee says, "that justified unequal treatment."

It's hardly the "self-evident" truth etched forever into the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." But it's undeniable at this point: America  again, like many other countries  has a xenophobia problem. It's deep-rooted and insidious.

And it won't be cured any time soon.

Now That's Scary There are numerous current examples of xenophobia in the U.S. A literal wall is being built on the Southern border because of the unfounded fear that immigrants bring crime and disease and they'll take our jobs. President Donald Trump has banned people from predominantly Muslim countries for fear of terrorism, a policy that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2019. Trump also calls the deadly coronavirus a "foreign" virus or the "Chinese virus," prompting fear of Chinese people. Of note: About 90 million people in America are immigrants or U.S.-born children of immigrants. That's about 28 percent of the total population.
Ofelia Rousseva thought she just had the flu before she died of COVID-19 on March 19, becoming the second person in Allegheny County to die of the disease.

Even though the flu conditions were enough that Rousseva, 78, slept for most of two days before she died in her sons home in Greenfield  she had been visiting from her home in Bulgaria since November  she told her son she did not want to go to the hospital.

She didnt have insurance. She thought she might not be able to pay the bills, her son, Ludmil Velev, said Wednesday from his hospital bed at UPMC Presbyterian, where he has been treated for COVID-19 since Monday. And being a foreigner, she was worried even more.

Velev said he told his mother  a famed womens choir director in her hometown in Sofia, Bulgaria  that she should go to the hospital.

She was refusing to go, said Velev, 43, a Lyft and Uber driver who has difficulty breathing now. She thought it was regular flu and that it would get better by itself.

That was partly because Velevs daughter, Isabella, 4, got sick first about two weeks ago but she went through it fast and was fine in a couple days. Then his wife, Carmen Blanco, got sick just briefly and was fine in a day.

Both he and his mother started getting sick at about the same time, around March 12. That was about the time that Velev said he stopped taking rides.

By March 16, his mother was really bad. He thinks now that his mother misled him  that she was worse off than she was telling him, when she said she just needed to rest and shed be better.

Velev said he never suspected his mother or anyone in the family had COVID-19 because my daughter got better so fast.

The mild impact of COVID-19 on many children has been one of the distinctive traits of the disease that researchers continue to try to understand. But the disease also has been notoriously severe on people over 60.

By March 19, Rousseva woke up feeling worse and asked for help getting downstairs. Velev said his wife helped her downstairs and his mother became unresponsive. He said he called 911, but his mothers heart had stopped by the time an ambulance arrived.

Velev said he started doing CPR on her until the medics arrived dressed in hazmat suits. They did everything they could for 40 minutes, he said. But she was gone.

Velev said he did not know that his mother had COVID-19 until she was tested after she died. He was told this past weekend. The official cause of death was acute respiratory distress syndrome due to COVID-19 virus infection.

A family friend in Pittsburgh set up a Go Fund Me online page to raise money to help the family.

By Sean D. Hamill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (TNS)

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Passengers arriving at Sydney international airport on at least two flights on Sunday were allegedly given out-of-date safety information about coronavirus and told to disregard self-isolation.

The information handouts were more than a week old and distributed to people disembarking from at least two Air New Zealand flights on Sunday afternoon, according to The Guardian.

It is understood that among the information on the pamphlets was advice that it was fine to immediately return to workplaces.

The federal government last week ordered that any Australians returning from overseas must self-isolate for 14 days.

Passengers arriving at Sydney international airport on Sunday were reportedly advised they could return to work (file image)

Authorities were criticised after letting passengers disembark from the Ruby Princess (pictured) in Sydney on March 19 without proper checks

Suriya Black, who was on a flight from Auckland to Sydney, said airline staff told passengers over the loudspeaker that the factsheets were out-of-date and they would need to self-isolate but still gave them out.

The forms reportedly state that passengers 'can attend work unless you work in a setting with vulnerable people'.

It is not clear if the information handouts were the responsibility of airline staff or Australian authorities.

Ms Black said once she arrived at the airport she had to sign a form committing to self-isolate for 14 days but was not given information about what that required.

'The only check was a man in scrubs and a mask yelling at us from a distance asking if we felt sick. They seemed more concerned about my boots and hiking gear,' Ms Black told The Guardian.

Border Force and NSW Health have already been criticised after letting passengers on a cruise ship disembark in Sydney without proper checks.

ABF Commissioner Michael Outram said his officers were responsible for checking visas and making sure no contraband is brought into the country

The Ruby Princess docked in Sydney on March 19 and let 2,647 passengers off the ship.

More than 133 passengers have since tested positive for coronavirus with one woman in her 70s passing away.

Australian Border Force Commissioner Michael Outram said that NSW Health gave the ship the all clear for passengers to disembark.

Commissioner Outram said his officers are responsible for checking passengers' visas and also making sure no contraband enters Australia.

Mr Outram said NSW Health decided, after consulting with the ship's doctor, that the vessel did not require an on-board inspection.

This was despite the fact that 13 passengers had flu-like symptoms and had tested negative for viral flu while on the ship.

'New South Wales Health stated to the Ruby Princess, 'You are free to disembark tomorrow',' Mr Outram said.

The NSW Premier had reportedly previously said the ABF was responsible for letting the passengers off the ship.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Air New Zealand, Australian Border Force, and the Department of Health for comment.
Indian healthcare major Apollo Hospitals on Thursday launched 'Project Kavach' to fight the spread of Covid-19. Translated as 'project shield', the plan encompasses information sharing, screening and assessment, testing and readying the infrastructure for quarantine and treatment.

The healthcare major is setting aside 250 beds out of its total network of around 8,000 beds though the founder and chairman Dr Prathap C Reddy feels the country will need to have at least 50,000 beds and dedicated facilities because of the highly infectious nature of the virus.

"We are telling the government that they need to set aside 500-bed hospitals which we will help manage. We are already doing that in Nellore in Andhra and in Bhubaneswar, where we have also taken up management of certain number of beds within large government hospitals," says Sangita Reddy, his youngest daughter and the Joint Managing Director, Apollo Hospitals.

Detailing the response plan that included hospital beds allotted, testing of patients, stocking of its pharmacy chain, setting up fever clinics and isolation centres, Preetha Reddy, Vice Chairperson, Apollo Hospitals Group and the eldest daughter of the founder, said, "While we hope that community transmission does not take place on a large scale, we need to be prepared for the eventuality. This stage will see a constant requirement of highly specialised treatment for the critically ill. Apollo Hospitals with its network of 70 hospitals also has the largest number of isolation and ICU facilities in the private sector. There will be over 250 beds which can be enhanced to 500 beds, created only to treat the critically ill at any given time. We expect to give advanced care to over 2,000 patients a month."

The company says it has 1,000 ventilators that could be put into service as and when required. In addition, the group will be launching isolation facilities near its hospitals from March 28.

Apollo Hospitals has been training its health personnel on the latest treatment protocols. Adequate personnel has been pressed into service with provision for quarantine quarters to house them separately. Meanwhile, medicines, consumables, hospital supplies, negative pressure rooms, ventilator and additional medical equipment have been procured or reserved with vendors to meet any increase in demand. "We have also ensured stocking of PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) for all our staff," says Preetha Reddy.

Dr Prathap C. Reddy said, "We are closely following the Singapore model where not a single healthcare worker died. We reiterate the importance of governments creating large separate hospitals for handling Covid-19. We believe that the lockdown is going to help significantly in flattening the curve but we feel that we still need to have at least 50,000 beds across the country in dedicated facilities because of the highly infectious nature of the virus. We are already working in Bhubaneswar and Andhra Pradesh and have committed our assistance in managing certain beds. We have set up protocol for managing EICU that are manned by our specialist, expert pulmonologists and intensivists 24/7."

In addition, 17 fever clinics and sample collection centres, which will essentially be OP clinics that will look at the symptoms and not the final testing. The picture is still unclear on the pricing of the facilities (in the critical care or at the fever clinics) though for the testing there is a price cap of Rs 4,500.

Shobana Kamineni , Executive Vice Chairperson, Apollo Hospitals Group, who leads the pharmacy business at the group, said, "The 3,800 Apollo pharmacies across 18 states will be pressed into action with all the medication, consumables and supplements. Stocks have been doubled, prices will be strictly monitored and controlled, and home delivery capability has been enhanced. It is estimated that the capacity can be ramped up from the 500,000 people served on a daily basis to 1 million if required."

She also referred to "Apollo Hospitals designed AI-based Coronavirus Risk Assessment scan for screening and initial assessment, which is available in the form of an app and on the following website: https://covid.apollo247.com/. The Risk assessment scan, which is available in six regional languages, will guide individuals about the potential risk of having the virus through simple interactive questions. Based on the risk level, people are guided to contact the certified help center."

Sangita Reddy talked about the testing and isolation facilities and said four molecular testing centres equipped with all the RNA isolation, RT-PCR equipment and the kits are operational and there are 17 fever clinics and sample collection centres. "Most Apollo centers have been cleared for COVID-19 testing, the full infrastructure is expected to be in place and full scale testing is to start by the end of March. There will be provision for home collection of samples as well as Drive Through Testing. In-hospital testing will be discouraged except for inpatients. Dedicated, fever clinics are being setup to screen people. People who qualify under the criteria for tests would enter via the drive through, make the payment as per the government recommended charges and then be tested."

She further said that the company will be launching "Project Stay I", an innovative strategy to create medical rooms in hotels/hostels with light medical supervision for quarantine and creating a barrier before people come into the hospitals. "This would address the situation where over 50 per cent of the cases need only isolation and paracetamol. These medical rooms will be rolled out in Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bangalore and Delhi, starting with approximately 50 in each city, going up by 50 rooms every three days, to reach an eventual target of 5000 rooms across the country. These will be calibrated as per the need." These would typically be near the Apollo hospitals.

With 'Project Stay-I' Apollo expects to help over 10,000-15,000 patients in a month and prevent over 50 lakh infections. "We are working with the government and will be able to share more details by Saturday as we launch the Stage 1 of 'Project Stay -I," says Sangita Reddy.

ALSO READ: Coronavirus update: Odisha first state to set up 2 hospitals for COVID-19 patients

ALSO READ: Coronavirus Live Updates: Essentials, medicines to be available 24X7 in Delhi, Maharashtra
: The Kerala government on Thursday



rejected a British media report which alleged that six UK nationals, infected with COVID-19, were being treated in filthy hospital isolation units at a hospital in Ernakulam.

The state authorities said two coronavirus infected 76- year-old UK nationals, a man and a woman, have already recovered due to the proper care provided to them by doctors and nursing staff at the Government Medical College Hospital,



Ernakulam District Collector S Suhas said all COVID-19 patients admitted in the Ernakulam Government Medical College were given utmost care and facilities by the district administration.

Two days after the allegations raised by relatives of one of the patients through the UK media came to the notice of the state authorities, the Collector, in a Facebook post, said the patients are accommodated in single rooms with attached washrooms.

He, however, did not specifically refer to the allegations which appeared on the British newspaper in his post.

"They are provided with wet wipes and tissue papers by the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation.

They are given special continental items of their choice for breakfast, lunch and dinner and provided dry fruits as well as fresh fruits and fruit juices," said the Collector in his post.

The Ernakulam district administration officially released the content of his Facebook post to the media.

"They are provided non A/C rooms as the norms stipulate room with good ventilation and sunlight. The isolation rooms are cleaned six times a day", the Collector said.

"The patients are being given round the clock medical care by six teams of doctors and paramedical staff taking four hours duty shifts.

All the doctors are experienced and qualified with MD degrees in internal medicine. They are also being given counselling by the psychiatry team daily. All these are done free of cost", the Collector said.

A prominent British newspaper had carried the allegations levelled by the daughter of the British nationals.

She had reportedly said her parents were among the six tourists being held in filthy hospital isolation units infested with rat droppings and were without bedding, toilet paper, soap, towels and only had very basic food rations.

Theyre living in terrible conditions. We're just worried the conditions theyre living in are going to make them so ill.

Theyre finding it really, really difficult. Its going to have a massive impact on their mental health I think, she was quoted as saying in the UK media report.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Kathmandu, March 26

The government is preparing to airlift hundreds of foreign tourists who have been stranded in different parts of the country to Kathmandu and to send them back home.

Due to the recently announced lockdown, around 300 trekkers, most of whom are foreigners, are stranded in the Everest region. Likewise, six foreigners are waiting to be rescued in the Manaslu region. Simbir Ghale, the media coordinator of the Trekking Agencies Association of Nepal, says there are other tourists also who are stranded in different parts of the country.

The high-level coordination committee formed for coronavirus control on Wednesday decided to facilitate their rescue and safe return to their own countries. The government has told concerned embassies to take care of their citizens and take them home.

Of late, a few embassies in Kathmandu have expressed concerns over the status of their citizens in Nepal. South Korea has taken its citizens back by chartering a flight whereas its second flight request is yet to be approved by the government. France has also taken initiatives to evacuate its citizens.

The government has decided that the tourists should stay in quarantine before being airlifted to their country. The tourists themselves will be responsible for the costs involved in the quarantine.

Dhananjaya Regmi, the chief executive officer of Nepal Tourism Board, says around 10,000 foreigners are living in Nepal currently. Around 8,000 of them have come for tourism purposes, according to him. Most of them are currently in Kathmandu, Pokhara, and Chitwan.

Meanwhile, around 3,000 foreigners have recently got their visas extended due to travel restrictions.
Priests line up outside for the procession into the installation Mass of Archbishop Nelson Perez at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2020. Philadelphia-area Catholics are grappling with ways to celebrate Holy Week when there won't be in-person services. Read more

The Rev. Chris Walsh spent Wednesday morning videoconferencing with St. Raymond of Penafort Church staff members about how to make Holy Week and Easter feel normal during a season of Lent that has been anything but.

Can they pass out palms in the parking lot? How can the livestreaming experience be enhanced? Is there a safe way to get Easter water to the faithful?

Were in a time in which weve never had a playbook, said Walsh, a pastor at the Northwest Philadelphia church. Certainly not in my lifetime was Holy Week canceled, or not able to be public. Were looking for ways to really make it powerful.

In a directive to priests Tuesday, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia called off all public Masses and services for Holy Week and Easter. The decision, which landed the same day President Donald Trump said he hoped Easter would bring packed churches all over our country, came after orders last week suspending public Masses indefinitely at the archdioceses more than 250 parishes, as the coronavirus spread in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

Though the directive will keep the regions 1.3 million Catholics away on the holiest day of their religion, churches remain open for the faithful to pray, under new restrictions on social distancing. The archdiocese is still encouraging parishioners to participate from home in livestreamed celebrations.

Dioceses in New York, Wisconsin, Maine, and elsewhere have also canceled in-person Holy Week services, as have some Protestant and Orthodox denominations grappling with how to practice social distancing during their holiest season.

 READ MORE: Coronavirus will complicate, but not stop, Passover for Philly area Jewish families

The Catholic parish changes are in line with direction from the Vatican, which Wednesday stated bishops and priests in affected countries may celebrate Holy Week without the presence of the people and in a suitable place." The Archdiocese of Philadelphia will also continue to stream an 11 a.m. Mass live from the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul every Sunday.

The Rev. Ken Brabazon at St. Isidore Church in Quakertown said it was only by Gods grace that his Bucks County parish had set up its capability to livestream weeks before the coronavirus crisis hit  an idea he had floated last year when staffers were installing a new video security system.

Thanks to the technology, he has still said 7:30 a.m. daily Masses, two weekend Masses in English and Spanish, and nightly prayers  many featuring his 63-year-old mother, who drove up from South Philadelphia to shelter in place with him, and whom livestream watchers now affectionately refer to as Mrs. B.

It helps that I have someone with me, he said. It makes it a little more natural.

Though most services occur in front of empty pews or from the churchs chapel, Brabazon said he hopes to have a cantor, a musician, and a deacon with him for Easter so it will feel a bit more like a normal celebration.

Its not the same as being in the same location and being united by being at the altar, he said. But its good to still be connected, if only in this way.

Some Catholic faithful in the region say that instead of livestreaming, they are planning tiny services in their homes. Mia Holman, a nurse practitioner who spent several days working in a COVID-19 testing tent in Radnor, plans to gather with relatives the night before Easter for a makeshift vigil.

Shell miss the communal experience of Mass at her home parish, St. Thomas of Villanova, but said there could ultimately be a silver lining.

God uses every situation to bring out good, said Holman, 55, of Bryn Mawr. And I think that this will allow Catholics who never even considered doing things any differently to come back to our roots of the home church.

The Rev. Dennis Gill, who runs the archdioceses Office for Divine Worship, has outlined additional guidelines, beyond livestreaming, for how priests should stage Holy Week and Easter celebrations in the age of stay-at-home orders and social distancing.

For example, priests are encouraged not to cancel their orders of palm fronds, a staple of Palm Sunday services, which recount the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem. According to the memo, the fronds will be refrigerated and preserved for distribution at a future date.

The traditional feet-washing has been banned for Holy Thursday celebrations, the evening Mass to celebrate the Last Supper, as have gestures such as touching or kissing the cross.

Still, Gill wrote, efforts must be made to help those participating from afar to feel engaged. He encouraged priests to continue ringing church bells, decorating their churches as they normally would, and prompting online viewers with the normal calls for standing, kneeling, and singing during Mass.

Sean McElwee, campus minister for liturgical music at Villanova University, said such signs and symbols of Lent are in many ways unique to Catholicism and allow for a sensory experience. He said they really do end up contributing to our understanding of the faith.

McElwee, 32, of West Chester, plans to stream Easter Mass and hopes others find ways to prayerfully follow along, even if that means sitting, standing, and kneeling when theyre watching Mass in their living room in their pajamas.

Were going to have to work a little harder to keep our faith and our sense of hope during this time, he said, but Easter will help with that.
Students enter the Taipei American School in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 18, 2020. Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong have had more success in battling the COVID-19 pandemic that other jurisdictions can learn from. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore: Success Stories in Fight Against COVID-19

Commentary

Like the Titanic striking a massive iceberg in 1912, a deadly novel coronavirus, later named COVID-19, struck the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. First revealed by local doctors in early December, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus spread like a global tidal wave and has now infected people in 152 of the 193 U.N. member-countries.

Amid the gloom and doom scenarios painted by some mediaboth traditional and socialthe worlds policy makers, as well as individual citizens, must pay close attention to what some governments did to restrain the pandemic, and to examine why in others it took such a heavy toll.

Perhaps we can learn lessons from the first group of countries and prevent the global shipthat so many of us thought was unsinkablefrom hitting more rocks.

Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singaporeall in southeast Asia with strong language, economic, and cultural ties to China and situated in close proximity to it, have managed to date to keep their deaths to single digits.

They did this primarily by vigorous testing and tracing of infected persons.

Taiwan is effectively barred from both the United Nations and the World Health Organization by the Beijing party-state through continuous leveraging of its permanent membership on the Security Council. Despite this, it has proven to be the most effective (along with Hong Kong and Singapore) in protecting its nearly 24 million citizens from the disease.

Although both Italy and Taiwan confirmed their first cases of the CCP virus in almost the same week, as of March 24 Italy tragically had about 47,000 active cases and 4,032 deaths, while Taiwan had about 215 confirmed cases and only two fatalities.

Almost 100 initiatives implemented by Taiwans national government include screening flights from Wuhan as early as Dec. 31; banning Wuhan residents on Jan. 23; suspending tourist visits to Hubei province on Jan. 25; and barring all Chinese arrivals on Feb. 6.

The government in Taipei merged citizens recent international travel records with their digital health-insurance files and allowed doctors and pharmacists access to the information. Stiff fines were applied to quarantine violators.

Singapore took a similar serious approach, deploying police to track down the contacts of infected residents and using government-issued cellphones to keep tabs on those in quarantine. Three local doctors said recently in a journal paper that relative normalcy of day-to-day life has been maintained.

The general approach in all three jurisdictions was a range of aggressive measures based on the view that COVID-19 would spread fast and widely. This meant testing for infection quickly. Today, testing capacity for COVID-19 in Taiwan has reached 3,400 samples daily.

Violators of home isolation regulations were fined up to US$5,000. The price of surgical masks was brought down to US$.20 and production greatly increased

By contrast, most other countries opted for delayed containment strategies, hoping the emerging international calamity would prove no worse than SARS in 2002-2004 and Ebola in 2014-2016. Unfortunately, reality proved otherwise. According to Johns Hopkins University, as of March 23 there were more than 350,536 confirmed cases and 15,328 deaths worldwide.

Another major need from all governments is transparency, early warnings, and clear, honest, and effective communications with the public.

According to the South China Morning Post, government data in China indicates that the first COVID-19 case was identified in November 2019. A University of Southampton (U.K.) study has concluded that if Beijing had revealed the facts and acted three weeks earlier than it did, the number of cases would have been reduced by 95 percent.

David Matas, a member of the Canadian delegation to the U.N. conference on the establishment of an International Criminal Court, notes that China is subject as a state party to the Biological Weapons Convention:

In my view, non-reporting is a form of retention in violation of the Convention. The United States is also a state party to the treaty. If the U.S. found China acted in breach of its obligations deriving from the provisions of the Convention by its delay in reporting the coronavirus, the U.S. could lodge a complaint with the Security Council.

While the party-state of China is probably in violation of the Convention, individual Chinese, whether residents of China or in diasporas around the world, are in no way to blame for the catastrophic effects of the state-partys mishandling of the situation. Many of them have been heroic in their conduct and care for others.

In Canada and elsewhere, medical professionals, first responders, caregivers, and populations as a whole are struggling with a new health catastrophe, often with inadequate knowledge and equipment. The lessons from the three Asian leaders on the present health crisis are invaluable.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

David Kilgour, a lawyer by profession, served in Canadas House of Commons for almost 27 years. In Jean Chretiens Cabinet, he was secretary of state (Africa and Latin America) and secretary of state (Asia-Pacific). He is the author of several books and co-author with David Matas of Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for Their Organs.

Susan Korah is a freelance journalist based in Ottawa. She has a Master of Journalism degree from Carleton University and writes on Canadian and international politics as well as travel and lifestyle.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
26.03.2020 LISTEN

Ethiopia has granted 4,011 prisoners a presidential amnesty as part of measures to curb the spread of the Coronavirus in the country.

Those released are said to be people who were charged with minor crimes and serving sentences up to 3 years of imprisonment.

The President of Ethiopia Her Excellency Sahle Work Zewde said that would help ease overcrowding in the country's prisons.

Article 71 Clause 7 of the Ethiopian Constitution grants the president the power to pardon convicted individuals an amnesty.

The President wrote in a twit "I have in accordance with Article 71 Clause of our Constitution, granted pardon to 4,011 prisoners convicted of minor crimes serving a sentence up to 3 years and to those about to released".

But some citizens of the country have urged the government to release other prisoners convicted of political crimes to help Ethiopia battle the global pandemic Coronavirus.

One netizen twitted "How about over 30,000 political prisoners who still haven't been charged with anything and are suffering in overcrowded prisons all over the country?".

Some political pundits in Ethiopia are believed to be held in the country's prisons due to the political unrest last year which claimed 67 lives.
Rapper Bugzy Malone has reportedly been hospitalised with serious injuries after an accident on a quad bike in Manchester.

Footage circulating on social media appeared to show the 29-year-old British rapper riding a quad bike with friends cheering him on. A second clip shows the same man lying on the ground following an apparent crash.

On Twitter, a number of rappers identified the man as Bugzy, and wished for his safety.

Chip tweeted: Prayers out to @TheBugzyMalone from the most sincere place in my heart and soul. Hope he pulls through.

Lethal Bizzle tweeted: Hope Bugzy is ok along with a prayer emoji.

Others also criticised those who filmed the incident on their phones before uploading the footage to their social media channels.

How you going to record @TheBugzyMalone on the floor in agony after his crash, tweeted entrepreneur Aleem Iqbal. What world do we live in? Praying for his recovery.

Brothers Waqas Mahmood and Shahbaz Arif Mahmood, who rushed to assist the injured following the accident, told The Sun that the driver of the quad bike identified himself as Aaron Davies  Bugzys real name.

He had an orange jacket on, Waqas said. We rang the ambulance and carried on talking to him until the ambulance service and police came. The car and the quad had an accident, the car was smoking. It was parked in the middle of the road.

Its a residential road that leads onto the motorway. We saw the driver. He was out of the car and on his phone to the police.

A spokesperson for Greater Manchester Police confirmed the specifics of the incident.

Shortly before 9.20pm last night (25 March) ... police were called to Rochdale Road, Bury to reports of a collision involving an Audi car and a quad bike.

Emergency services attended and the driver of the quad bike  a 29-year-old man  was seriously injured and taken to hospital for treatment. His injuries are not believed to be life-threatening.

No arrests have been made and enquiries are ongoing.

The Independent has reached out to Bugzy Malones representative for further statement.
South Dakota's chief justice seeks $5 million for courthouse security

In Chief Justice Jensen's State of the Judiciary Address, he mentioned courthouse security, sexual harassment training and a lack of court reporters.
Elton John is set to host 'The iHeart Living Room Concert for America,' a music event to raise money for groups fighting to stop the spread of coronavirus in the United States.

This Sunday's virtual concert will feature performances by Alicia Keys, the Backstreet Boys, Billie Eilish, Billie Joe Armstrong, Mariah Carey, Tim McGraw and more, from their own homes, filmed with their personal cell phones, cameras and audio equipment, to ensure the health and safety of all involved.

The hour-long, commercial-free concert that will tribute to the front line health professionals and first responders on the front lines of fighting the ongoing pandemic, will air on Fox as well as on iHeartMedia radio stations nationwide and the iHeartRadio app.

The iHeartRadio Music Awards were scheduled for March 29 in Los Angeles, but have been postponed to an undetermined date.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
March 26, 2020



POCATELLO  Southeastern Idaho Public Health (SIPH), with assistance from the Idaho State University Kasiska Division of Health Sciences and the Medical Reserve Corp of Idaho, has a COVID-19 hotline, 208-234-5875, that the public can call to get answers about the COVID-19 virus.

The SIPH hotline is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday. People leaving messages outside of these hours will receive a call back during open hours. It is designed for use by Bannock, Bear Lake, Bingham, Butte, Caribou, Franklin, Oneida and Power County residents. Residents can call with questions about the virus, staying safe, or anything related to the local or national response.

In a time when it can be challenging to get accurate information, this hotline serves as a reliable resource for people in our community, Maggie Mann, Southeastern Idaho Public Health District director.

People calling the hotline can get general information about COVID-19. If after an initial screening they appear to have possible symptoms of COVID-19, callers can be transferred to talk with health care providers, including SIPH staff, ISU nursing students being supervised by ISU nursing faculty, other ISU health professions faculty and students, members of the Medical Reserve Corp of Idaho and other medical professionals.

ISUs participation was encouraged and shaped by Christopher Owens, PharmD, MPH, associate vice president for health sciences, who sought to align health professions students to use their expertise in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic emergency.

"The faculty and students in ISU health sciences understand that serving our community is just part of what we do, Owens said. This is a community-wide response and Idaho State is an important part of our community."

Owens attends the daily meetings of the SIPH Emergency Operations Center, a group made up of public health officials, local fire chiefs, law enforcement, long-term care and other health providers, tribal officials, representatives from the business community and public-school officials. Owens was able to see first-hand the needs of these various entities and worked with the groups to identify ways that ISU students who are already trained and qualified could respond to assist.

Additionally, ISU Kasiska Division of Health Sciences has had a Memorandum of Understanding in place since 2019 with Southeastern Idaho Public Health to provide health professions students and faculty members to assist in such an emergency.

A crisis like COVID-19 can have the effect of bringing out the best in people --and I am so proud of our health sciences students and faculty who are working alongside Southeastern Idaho Public Health to serve our community during this time of need, Owens said.

Working together with SIPH officials, Owens and Dr. Ron Solbrig, ISU Health Center director, created a flowchart that students could use to answer questions and help guide conversations, including potential treatment action plans that would direct a caller for further testing and medical evaluation if needed. A virus symptom self-checker (https://www.cdc.gov/ coronavirus/2019-ncov/ symptoms-testing/testing.html ) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was added to their toolkit this week.

Cara Esplin, director of undergraduate studies/clinical assistant professor for the College of Nursing, believes the participation of ISU nursing students with the SIPH hotline is valuable.

Rather than sending all of the nursing students home, they are able to help manage the pandemic to some degree by volunteering at Southeastern Idaho Public Health to answer phone calls and questions regarding COVID-19, Esplin said. There were four students volunteering at SIPH every day last week.. This week there are two students and a nursing faculty member volunteering there each day as well.

Esplin said the students have reported that most of the callers have had general COVID-19 questions, while others have been referred to a health care provider for screening and in rare cases, testing for the virus. Esplin says they have in some cases helped calm callers who were initially very concerned and upset.

More information on the coronavirus is also available on the SIPHs website, https://www.siphidaho.org/ coronavirus.php ..

Bottom photo information: ISU nursing student Taylor Monk, front right, from Grace, and Josie Haslam from Preston, were also assisting at the Southeastern Idaho Public Health COVID-19 hotline.
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Famed mochi shop Fugetsu-Do has weathered every crisis to hit Little Tokyo over the last 100 years  from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, the 1992 riots to the waves of redevelopment.

World War II was the toughest. The owners were incarcerated along with other Japanese Americans and had to close the shop the years they were in camp.

Fugetsu Do, the First Street confectionary owned by the Kito family, has been making sweets since 1903. (Courtesy of Little Tokyo Service Center Small Business Assistance)

Now COVID-19 is here. And it feels like the biggest test yet to Brian Kito, the shop's third-generation owner.

"Because of the physical threat, it's got to be the worst," Kito said.

Small businesses are in trouble now that the whole state is under a stay-at-home order to slow the pandemic. But there's special worry in an ethnic enclave like Little Tokyo where boutiques, bars and eateries are critical to its identity, and the reason why its five city blocks have long hummed late into the night even as much of L.A. sleeps.

The thought of iconic shops like Fugetsu-Do faltering has Little Tokyo boosters like Mariko Lochridge racing to help them drum up new customers. A business adviser for the Little Tokyo Service Center, Lochridge said mom 'n pops make the neighborhood feel homey, even to those who don't live there.

Fugetsu-Do is trying to stay open and sell specialty mochi and other sweets. (Courtesy of Little Tokyo Service Center Small Business Assistance)

"My concern right now in this triage moment is making sure there's a Little Tokyo for people to go back home to," Lochridge said. "Even if everything else in their life is not going very well."



A Roll Of Toilet Paper With Your Curry

Working with leaders of Go Little Tokyo and the Little Tokyo Community Council, Lochridge has created a running list of still-open restaurants that she's sharing widely through social media.

Hi all, thanks so much for amplifying this message. I have a request. We worked around the clock to make this for those needing takeout from Little Tokyo. It's a digital takeout menu highlighting small businesses still open plus a link to the complete list. Plz RT #loveLT pic.twitter.com/0StPSHSBu4  Mariko   (@MarikoLochridge) March 25, 2020

Having active Facebook and Instagram pages are great avenues to luring new customers, according to Lochridge. But it's not the only way to pivot in the coronavirus era.

She cites the example of the popular Shabu Shabu House in the Japanese Village Plaza, across the street from Fugetsu-Do.

Before stay-at-home orders went into place, Shabu Shabu was usually packed, with lines out the door. (Courtesy of Little Tokyo Business Little Tokyo Service Center Small Business Assistance)

Japanese hot pot is a dine-in experience, so things seemed ominous when Mayor Eric Garcetti last week restricted restaurants to take-out and delivery. But Shabu Shabu House adapted to the new rules by assembling home cooking kits containing paper-thin meats and bottles of house-made ponzu and sesame sauces.

"I believe the other night they sold out," Lochridge said.

Shabu Shabu House has embraced take-out options since dining out was barred starting last week. (Courtesy of Little Tokyo Service Center Small Business Assistance)

Across the way on First Street at Suehiro Cafe, Kenji Suzuki is on a self-admittedly steep learning curve.

Suzuki said when he took over about 20 years ago, the business was on cruise control.

His mother opened the cafe with her sister nearly fifty years ago. The pair built a menu of 200 items  sushi, curries, ramens  and a huge customer base.

Kenji Suzuki's mother Junko (middle) passed the Suehiro Cafe and its 200-item menu to him. (Courtesy of Kenji Suzuki)

"Everything was already done for me," Suzuki said. "I just had to make sure I didn't burn the place down."

But Suzuki can't rely anymore on regulars or the steady stream of walk-ins. So last week, with Lochridge's help, he got his restaurant on ChowNow and Facebook. He made two of his servers into delivery people. He cut down menu offerings by 75 percent, and even came up with a special deal.

"For any order over $25, ask for the toilet paper deal," Suzuki said, with a laugh. "We've been giving (a roll) to everybody even if they didn't know about it."

Suzuki said he can't consult his mother about the restaurant these days. She's 83 and has dementia. But he's vowed to keep the business afloat, even through the coronavirus crisis.

"There's an old Japanese saying that businesses are usually run into the ground by the second generation," Suzuki said. "I want to make sure that doesn't happen on my watch."

A new takeout menu outside Shabu Shabu House. (Courtesy of Little Tokyo Service Center Small Business Assistance)

Over at Fugetsu-Do, Brian Kito is also wading into the unknown waters of social media.

He's enlisted his 19-year-old son, now at home taking college classes remotely because of the pandemic, to revive the shop's dormant pages on Facebook and Instagram. A volunteer is in the middle of updating the shop's website.

Meanwhile, Kito has scaled down his production of sweets by 60%. He's kept his 10 employees by shifting all of them to part-time shifts but he wonders how much longer before he has to close temporarily.

Maybe, he said, the best thing he can do now is to patronize other Little Tokyo businesses.

Cafe Dulce now prominently displays its menus on an outdoor table. (Courtesy of Little Tokyo Service Center Small Business Assistance)

Every night his family orders take-out from a neighborhood restaurant. It creates a special feeling that he said is best described by the Japanese word kimochi.

"It's not charity but it's support," Kito said. "You know, that's the old Little Tokyo way."
(Natural News) If you thought coronavirus was only hitting elderly people hard, think again. More and more young people who are otherwise healthy are experiencing symptoms strong enough to require hospitalization, and one 26-year-old writer recently shared her experience with the New York Times.

Fiona Lowenstein recounted how quickly things went from okay to downright terrifying. As a young, healthy, non-smoker who works out six times a week and teaches yoga, you might think she had little to worry about. However, she says that on the same day she decided to start social distancing out of concern for others, Friday March 13, she came down with a fever and headache. She had a cough the next morning but felt a bit better on Sunday. Her fever was gone, and she was relieved.

However, that night, she woke up with shortness of breath, vomiting and chills. On Monday, talking left her gasping for air and even walking to the bathroom took everything out of her. She couldnt even eat because she found it impossible to get enough oxygen while she did.

Lowenstein was afraid of going to the hospital, particularly in light of requests that people with coronavirus symptoms stay at home. She didnt want to spread the virus, nor did she want to use the limited hospital resources that she felt vulnerable populations might need more than her. Another consideration was the fact that if she was not suffering from coronavirus, going to the hospital might just expose her to it.

Unfortunately, she did end up having to go to the hospital after her worried partner called and a doctor insisted she go. The oxygen tube they gave her brought about slight but quick relief, and she feels lucky for the attentive care she was given.

Young people being hit hard by coronavirus in the U.S.

Although she was surprised that this happened to her, the doctors and nurses at the hospital were not. In fact, they told her that an otherwise healthy 30-year-old was in the next room with serious breathing trouble, and they were seeing a lot of patients her age in the ER.

Now, shes trying to warn Millennials that this illness is something they need to take seriously. Instead of defying warnings and continuing to meet up in groups, they should be doing everything they can to protect vulnerable populations  and themselves.

She said the idea that young people are invulnerable to the illness is a myth. In fact, nearly 40 percent of the people hospitalized with coronavirus in the U.S. are younger than 54, according to the New York Times, while a CDC report showed that as much as a fifth of those hospitalized in the U.S. with coronavirus were aged between 20 and 44. She also pointed out that when doctors are forced to decide to whom they should offer the limited treatment available, its often given to younger people first, which means theyre taking away needed care from other people. The idea that some people continue to ignore social distancing advice and create so much risk is mind-boggling.

Speaking on Today, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said that the demographics of the disease appear to be quite different in the U.S. than other countries where it hit earlier, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that 53 percent of cases in his state had been in people aged 18 to 49.

Lowensteins warning comes as it emerges that at least one person who attended a coronavirus party among young adults in Kentucky has now tested positive for the virus. At the party, young adults got together believing they were invincible and in defiance of state guidance to use social distancing.

The governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, spoke for many of us when he said, This is one that makes me mad, and it should make you mad. Now is a time when everyone should be sensible to protect not only their health but that of the world at large.

Sources for this article include:

NYTimes.com

DNYUZ.com

Edition.CNN.com
Over 500 German citizens stranded in India amid the nationwide lockdown were flown back to their homeland on Wednesday night, German Ambassador to India Walter J Lindner informed on Thursday.

"Today's update on our repatriation efforts. First evacuation flight (A380) with 500+ people left last night. Second one to be airborne tonight. Thanks also to the Indian authorities for the great cooperation!" Lindner tweeted.

Countries like Russia, Japan, Germany, and Ukraine have been carrying out special operations to evacuate their citizens stranded in India following the announcement of a nationwide 21-day lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Russia on Wednesday had evacuated 464 of its nationals from India.

It may be noted that the Central government has banned the operations of international commercial passenger flights to India from March 22 to March 29.

India has reported 649 cases of the novel coronavirus, of which 593 are active cases, according to the Union Health Ministry update on Thursday morning.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Married At First Sight's Michael Goonan told Stacey Hampton he would 'let her drive' during their final date on Tuesday's episode.

But Daily Mail Australia can reveal there was a specific reason why the 29-year-old company director couldn't get behind the wheel.

According to court documents, he had his driver's licence suspended for 10 months after pleading guilty to drink driving on July 24, 2019.

In trouble: Married At First Sight's Michael Goonan (left) could not drive on his final date with Stacey Hampton (right) because his licence had been suspended

Married At First Sight began production two months later, in September.

Police alleged Michael had recorded a blood alcohol concentration of 0.192 - which is well above the South Australian legal limit of 0.05.

After Michael pleaded guilty and was convicted, he was fined a total of $2,091.50 by the court and had to pay another $1,097.70 for police impounding costs.

Legal matter: According to court documents, Michael had his driver's licence suspended for 10 months after pleading guilty to drink driving on July 24, 2019

The case: Police alleged Michael had recorded a blood alcohol concentration of 0.192 - which is well above the South Australian legal limit of 0.05

Schedule: Michael and Stacey's final date, which aired on Tuesday, was filmed on November 25, meaning he was not legally allowed to drive at the time. Stacey drove instead

His licence was also suspended for 10 months, which means he won't be able to drive again until May 24, 2020.

Michael and Stacey's final date, which aired on Tuesday, was filmed on November 25. He was not legally allowed to drive at the time.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Michael Goonan for comment.

What a joker! During the episode, Michael pranked Stacey by giving her a set of fake Lamborghini keys that actually opened a beat-up old car

During the episode, Michael pranked Stacey by giving her a set of fake Lamborghini keys that actually opened a beat-up old car.

He did not disclose on the show why he wasn't driving.

Thinking they had rented a Lamborghini, Stacey excitedly asked: 'Are you driving?' Her husband replied: 'No, well, I was going to let you drive!'






Ford officially declared dates for when it plans to get some of its plants back in business. The No. 2. U.S. automaker said it was bringing key plants back online, while introducing additional safety measures to protect returning workers from the coronavirus pandemic.

The Hermosillo Assembly Plant in Mexico is expected to return April 6. Ford currently produces the Fusion and Lincoln MKZ at the Hermosillo plant. April 14 is a much bigger date for Ford, though, as it intends to reopen multiple plants in the U.S. on that date.

The following locations are tentatively scheduled for an April 14 reopening: Dearborn Truck Plant, Kentucky Truck Plant, Kansas City Assembly Plant's Transit Line, and the Ohio Assembly Plant. In order to support these plants, Ford intends to open more facilities including the Dearborn Stamping Plant, Dearborn Diversified Manufacturing Plant, Integrated Stamping Plants within Kansas City and Kentucky Truck Plants, Sharonville Transmission Plant, and portions of Van Dyke Transmission, Lima Engine and Rawsonville Component plants.

Earlier this week, Reuters had reported, citing sources that Ford did not plan to restart production until at least April 6, warning it could be further delayed into April. Michigan is currently subject to a "stay at home" order that is in effect through April 13.

Detroits Big Three shut plants and curtailed production to limit the number of workers on the job to prevent the spread of coronavirus among roughly 150,000 factory employees. Neither GM nor FCA have provided hard dates for the reopening of its manufacturing facilities in the U.S. yet.

"We will continue to assess public health conditions as well as supplier readiness and will adjust plans if necessary," Kumar Galhotra, Ford's president of North America, said in a statement.

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We are failing our girls.

Thats pretty much the message of Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, airing at 9 p.m. March 26 on WFYI. I was able to get an advanced look at the documentary, and its heartbreaking.

It opens with various scenes of adults abusing Black girls. In one scene it looks like a teacher is pulling a girl by her braid. A 5-year-old sits in handcuffs in another.

Although the documentary focuses on the role of school, I say we are failing our students because we allow this to happen. We are complicit in the abuse our girls face because we often view our girls through the same negative lens. You probably dont view your daughter this way, but you view so-and-sos daughter this way. Not my daughter but that other girl. Its OK when that girl gets into trouble. She deserved it.

We dont take the time to actually understand whats going on with that girl and find out why shes behaving as she does. Could it be trauma she masks with certain behaviors? Or, maybe her behavior is misinterpreted. If we dont take the time to look at our girls differently, how can those tasked with the job of educating them  especially when they come from a different cultural background  do so?

According to Pushout, there are four million teachers in the United States, and only 7% are African American. Black girls comprise 16% of the public school students. This disparity leads to a variety of problems between middle class white and often female teachers and Black girls. Consider these statistics about high school:

 Black female students are four times more likely to be arrested than their white female counterparts.

 Black girls are three times more likely to be referred to law enforcement than white girls.

 Black girls are the only group over-represented in all disciplinary categories  expulsions, suspensions, arrests, corporal punishment, referrals to law enforcement and restraint.

Also consider, the suicide rate for African American girls and boys under age 13 is about twice as high compared to white children of the same age.

We spend a lot of time focusing on the school to prison pipeline for Black boys, and rightfully so, but how much attention are we giving to our girls? It doesnt have to be an either or mindset. We need to let our boys and girls know they are equally important and quit perpetuating this belief that males are more valuable than girls simply because of genitalia. We could stop this silly battle of the sexes before it even starts.

The lack of attention to the plight of our girls shows how invisible our girls are. Oh, theyre visible when it comes to punishment, but not so much when it comes to showing them compassion, affection and empathy.

The documentary shares the story of Samaya, who after being disciplined by a teacher was left in the hallway. Seven years old at the time, she left school for two hours and walked along streets and highways. Samaya walked into a Walmart and was told she had to stay outside since she wasnt with an adult. She then went to a restaurant to ask for a cup of water and only then was someone concerned enough to call the police. The police asked her age, and the caller said she was 12  a full five years older than she was. (Black girls are often viewed and treated as older than they are. Its a weird dynamic that confuses girls and removes the blame of their maltreatment from the adults.) The police dispatcher said since she didnt seem upset it was OK for her to be alone.

The teacher bullied Samaya continuously. As she walked along a highway, Samaya contemplated suicide, thinking heaven would be better since no one wanted her. Up until this point, Samayas parents, trying to be good ones, trusted the teacher and took her side.

How many Samayas are out there? If she hadnt gone missing for two hours, would her parents have ever caught the downward spiral in her behavior and made the connection, or would they have blamed Samaya and sealed her fate as a discipline problem?

Its a critical time for our girls. We cant let someone else decide the fate of our daughters. They dont have all of the information or understand our historical and present-day trauma. Labels such as a sassy, loud, ghetto, smart aleck and ratchet reinforce negative gender and racist stereotypes. We dont need patronizing professional development that reinforces the idea of the great white hope, either. We are failing our daughters if we continue to let culturally uneducated, racially insensitive teachers teach our girls.

Samayas story ends well. So do the stories of other girls in the documentary.

We can change this. We can mend the broken heart.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 21:39:40|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The world is now in a battle against COVID-19, a disease caused by a previously unknown coronavirus that has spread to over 190 countries and regions.

The following are the updates on the contagious illness.

BEIJING -- Chinese President Xi Jinping said Thursday that it is imperative for the international community to strengthen confidence, act with unity and work together in a collective response against COVID-19.

Xi made the remarks in Beijing while attending the G20 Extraordinary Leaders' Summit on COVID-19 via video link.

- - - -

MOSCOW -- Russia will ban nearly all international flights from midnight Friday and recommend new restrictions, as the number of COVID-19 cases in the country rose to 840 on Thursday.

Russia will stop all regular and charter flights from domestic airports to and from foreign countries, except flights associated with Russians returning home from abroad as well as flights carried out by the Russian government, according to an order by Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin published Thursday.

- - - -

SEOUL -- South Korea has unveiled 100 trillion won (about 80 billion U.S. dollars) worth of fiscal stimulus package and unprecedented monetary policy steps to help stabilize volatile financial markets and minimize the economic fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak across the globe.

The country's central bank on Thursday added an "unlimited" liquidity supply to its emergency moves. According to the Bank of Korea (BOK), an open bidding will be held once a week by the end of June to provide liquidity "with no limit" to financial institutions.

- - - -

NEW DELHI -- India's federal finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced a relief package of 2.26 billion U.S. dollars for the poor through cash transfer and food subsidy amid lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.

"We have come with a package for migrant workers, urban and rural poor, women and disadvantaged, which is expected to reach a total of 1.7 lakh crore rupees (2.26 billion U.S. dollars)," during a press conference.

- - - -

WUHAN -- Wuhan, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus epidemic in central China's Hubei Province, will suspend group Tomb-sweeping Day activities to prevent mass gatherings and reduce cross-infection of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

All funeral homes, cemeteries and columbaria across the city will not allow gathering activities such as collective public offerings, vigil and tomb-sweeping activities earlier than April 30, according to a circular issued by the city's COVID-19 control headquarters Thursday.

- - - -

KUALA LUMPUR -- Malaysian King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah and his wife Azizah Aminah Maimunah Iskandariah will undergo a 14-day quarantine after several palace employees were infected with COVID-19, the national palace said Thursday.

Abdullah and Azizah had themselves tested negative for the virus, Comptroller of the Royal Household Ahmad Fadil Shamsuddin said in a statement.

- - - -

DAKAR -- Senegalese Ministry of Health and Social Action confirmed on Thursday the country's total COVID-19 cases have surpassed 100, with six new confirmed cases reported, bringing the total number to 105.

During the daily press conference on COVID-19, Dr. Alyose Waly Diouf, spokesperson of the health ministry said among 130 tests done by Institute Pasteur in Dakar, 6 came back positive, including 5 imported cases and one close contact of earlier confirmed patients.

Among the 105 confirmed cases, 51 are imported ones.

- - - -

JAKARTA -- The death toll of the COVID-19 in Indonesia climbed to 78 by noon local time on Thursday, according to the Indonesian government.

At a press conference, the government's spokesperson for the all coronavirus-related matters Achmad Yurianto said that 893 cases had been confirmed in the archipelagic country and 35 patients had recovered from the disease.

- - - -

ROME -- The number of new COVID-19 cases reported daily in Italy is dropping steadily while the daily death toll is still fluctuating.

Based on the mixed picture, local experts forecast a trend of slower growth of COVID-19 infections in the country in the coming weeks.

A total of 3,491 new cases were reported on Wednesday, representing a downward trend from the past few days when the figure stood at 3,612 Tuesday, 3,780 Monday and 3,956 Sunday respectively.

- - - -

VIENTIANE -- Laos has been preparing medical teams and more control measures to prevent the widespread outbreak of COVID-19.

Local media on Thursday quoted the deputy head of the National Taskforce Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control, Phouthone Muongpak, as saying that health officials were strengthening measures for coronavirus response and ensuring that the public can access healthcare.

- - - -

ULAN BATOR -- Mongolia's National Center for Communicable Disease (NCCD) said Thursday that one more Mongolian citizen tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the total number of the confirmed cases in the country to 11.

"One of more than 200 Mongolian citizens who arrived in Mongolia on (a) chartered flight in route of Istanbul-Ulan Bator on last Wednesday night tested positive for the novel coronavirus," Dulmaa Nyamkhuu, head of the NCCD, told a press conference.

- - - -

CANBERRA -- Australia's COVID-19 death toll has increased from eight to 12 in a single day.

Victoria has recorded its first three deaths related to COVID-19 over the past day. All three deaths in the state were men in their 70s who were being treated in hospital and the other one in Queensland is a 68-year-old man who became infected on a cruise ship.

- - - -

NEW DELHI -- The death toll due to COVID-19 in India on Thursday morning rose to 13, the federal health ministry said, with 649 confirmed cases reported so far.

"Death toll related to novel coronavirus has reached 13," said the ministry at 10:15 a.m. local time.

"The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases across India is 649," the ministry said. "Of these, 602 cases are Indian nationals and 47 foreign nationals.

- - - -

SUVA -- Vanuatu declared on Thursday a state of emergency as part of its efforts to curb COVID-19.

In a national address on Thursday, Vanuatu's caretaker Prime Minister Charlot Salwai said that the declaration was necessary to allow the government to mobilize resources and funding for their coronavirus response.
Minister of Health Paulette Lenert was joined by panel of doctors to provide more information on the ways in which Luxembourg's healthcare sector is responding to the coronavirus crisis.

The pandemic is tightening its stranglehold on Luxembourg and on our lives but the country's healthcare sector is fighting to respond to the ongoing crisis as efficiently as possible.

Minister of Health Paulette Lenert and a panel of experts presented a number of new measures at a press briefing this Thursday morning.

Health officials have coordinated efforts with the CNS to bring to life a centralised platform for tele-consultations. The new eConsult platform can be accessed here. The platform allows patients to get in touch with doctors via video conference.

Elderly patients who may struggle with the internet can of course still contact GPs and other doctors via phone but all other individuals are encouraged to use the online platform. "It is extremely important that patients use the platform in order to guarantee the safety of these tele-consultations," CNS director Christian Oberle explained. The medical fees and reimbursement procedures for tele-consultations will be the same as for regular consultations. Prescriptions will automatically be sent to pharmacies.

There are three new health centres ("centres de soins avances") in Kirchberg, in Esch, and in Ettelbruck. Dr Pierre Hertz explained that these centres are open to patients who present symptoms associated with coronavirus but also for all other patients. Strict safety measures are in place and patients will be split into groups. 219 people have been treated at these new centres as of Wednesday evening. An additional 75 patients headed to the centres on Thursday morning.

Dr Romain Nati explained that Luxembourg is also participating in the international "Discovery Project." The main goal of the large-scale project is to test existing medication and pharmaceutical drugs in order to determine if they can be used to treat patients suffering from coronavirus. Around 1,000 people will participate in this unprecedented study. It remains unclear how many Luxembourgish patients will take part. Four different kinds of drugs will be tested.

Dr Carlo Ahlborn explained that regular dentists are closed in Luxembourg. Patients can, however, still call their dentists as is currently the case with GPs. There are three dental emergency centres that remain open seven days a week: one in the north, one in the centre, and one in the south. Dr Ahlborn added that the number of dental emergency centres may be increased depending on demand.
The Ministry of Health has urged people to stay at home and only leave their homes for a handful of special reasons.

An elderly man works as a transporter in Ha Noi during the COVID-19 pandemic. People, especially those over 60, are advised to stay at home for their safety.  Photo baophatluat.vn

The announcement was made on Thursday morning when seven people, including five Vietnamese, one French man, and one South African woman, tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the countrys total number of cases to 148.

In the past 24 hours, 14 new cases were reported. Of that, ten cases were immediately quarantined after entering the country and one case was a doctor who was infected while treating people in hospital.

The three remaining cases were reported to have contacted other members of the community.

The ministry said people needed to stay indoors. Those who were over 60 years old needed to stay at home all the time as they were the most vulnerable to the virus.

People needed to notify local authorities and police about people entering Viet Nam, including both Vietnamese and foreign citizens, from March 8 who have not been quarantined.

All unnecessary services in Ha Noi have been ordered to shut down to help curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr Truong Huu Khanh, head of the Infection and Neurology Department at HCM Citys Children No1 Hospital, told online newspaper Zing that the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection was high in crowded places.

The amount of virus spread from the infected person depended on different stages. For those who start coughing, the virus would spread more.

Therefore, people should limit travelling and gathering in crowded places.

"A person who feels like he or she may be infected with Covid-19 needs to know how to quarantine themselves. This will limit the spread of the disease," he said.

Khanh said when people raised their awareness, the disease would spread slowly and be brought under control. Doctors would have enough time to care for patients, especially in severe cases.

When too many people got sick at the same time, the hospital would be overloaded, making treatment more difficult, he said.

Dr Pham Ba Hien, deputy head of the steering committee for the prevention of COVID-19 of ong a General Hospital, shared the same view, saying karaoke bars, pagodas, or churches were places where people had very close contact with each other and had high risk of infection.

If infected people were not detected and quarantined, the risk of infection would increase to the community and make it difficult to control the epidemic.

Ministry asks for review of infection prevention at hospitals

The Ministry of Health has asked health departments of localities nationwide to review infection prevention measures at hospitals to prevent cross infection.

The move was made after the first doctor in Viet Nam was infected with the novel coronavirus while treating COVID-19 patients.

The 29-year-old doctor works at the emergency department of the Central Tropical Diseases Hospital branch in ong Anh District.

He has taken part in work for COVID-19 epidemic prevention at the hospital since January 31. The man screened and treated suspected COVID-19 patients, as well as participated in emergency care for patients in severe conditions. During his work, he was provided with full personal protective equipment. After work, he stayed in the isolation area for medical staff in the hospital.

He showed symptoms of coughing, muscle aches and fever on March 20.

On March 21, he started his self-isolation in the emergency department's buffer zone. His sample then tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.

Deputy Minister of Health Nguyen Truong Son said medical workers need to strictly follow infection prevention rules at hospitals.

He suggested medical workers proactively prevent infection while caring for and treating COVID-19 patients.

He proposed the Central Tropical Diseases Hospital to enhance infection prevention work and pay more attention to health checks for medical workers in direct contact with patients, particularly those in critical condition.

The ministry plans to buy an additional 30 million face masks for medical workers.

Deputy Minister of Health Son had a working session with the hospital on Tuesday to look into the treatment for COVID-19 cases, especially serious ones.

The hospital is treating 46 COVID-19 patients, including 34 Vietnamese and 12 foreigners.

Notably, its intensive care department is tending to three serious cases, comprising a 64-year-old Vietnamese woman, a 50-year-old Vietnamese man and a 69-year-old British man.

Luong Ngoc Khue, Director of the Health Ministrys Department of Medical Examination and Treatment Management, said as the hospital handles serious cases, it needs to review its operating procedures and equipment and report the situation to the ministry to seek solutions if necessary.

Deputy Minister Son highly valued efforts by all the staff of the hospital and asked the hospital to better care for its staff so that they wont be overloaded. Besides, it needs to build more response plans in case the number of patients surges.

Severe cases will receive treatment at higher-level hospitals, including the Central Tropical Diseases Hospital, while mild ones will be moved to others.
The State Department is tracking 50,000 Americans who might seek assistance returning to the US due to the coronavirus pandemic, the head of the repatriation task force said Wednesday -- a dramatic increase from the department's estimate from days ago.

'At the moment we are keeping a running tally of the number of US citizens we estimate will seek our help in returning to the United States. This number changes daily, hourly,' Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Consular Affairs Ian Brownlee said on a call with reporters.

'At the moment we're tracking approximately 50,000 we think might seek to return to the United States,' he said.

The number is more than triple the figure the State Department was tracking just two days ago. On Monday, a senior State Department official said they were looking at approximately 13,500 Americans abroad who were seeking US assistance after flight restrictions and border closures mean to combat the spread of coronavirus left them stranded.

Brownlee, who heads the department's repatriation task force, said Wednesday that they had repatriated 'over 9,000 people from some 28 countries.'

'We're planning on another 66 flights over the next nine days or so,' he said. 'We have some 9,000 people scheduled -- identified for those flights and we hope to move those numbers up.'

Many of the citizens and their families stuck abroad have previously told CNN they are still struggling to get clear answers from the agency tasked with protecting their health and well-being overseas.

Asked by CNN what message they want to send frightened Americans overseas trying to get home, State officials essentially say, 'get out while you can' -- a foregone option for many stuck in countries where borders suddenly closed and flights were canceled.

'If you are a US citizen, and you are abroad at the moment, take a look at your circumstances, determine whether this is a place where you'd be willing to hunker down for an indeterminate period of time, as airspace and borders, etc., close down,' the senior official said.

'If you are somewhere where you think, 'No, this is not where I would want to be over the long haul,' take advantage of existing commercial opportunities and get out now.'

The official said they were 'hesitant to give a guarantee' that they would be able to move every single person, noting 'we're hearing about people who are in very remote locations in very remote parts of the world.'

This story has been updated with additional information Wednesday.
The $2 trillion stimulus package making its way through Congress includes more than $1 billion for New Jersey Transit, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker said Wednesday.

In fact, the bill likely will include the full $1.25 billion the transit system requested to make up for the drop in farebox revenue and its extra expenses due to the coronavirus, said Booker, D-N.J.

The coronavirus pandemic has touched nearly every aspect of New Jerseyans lives, from our health care system to our economy to the ways we move around," Booker said. Even NJ Transit, a vital means of transportation for countless New Jerseyans and an economic driver for our state, is feeling significant impacts from this crisis.

Kevin Corbett, president and chief executive of NJ Transit, has said the system could lose as much as $1.25 billion by the end of fiscal year 2021. The state has ordered most New Jerseyans to stay at home and closed non-essential businesses.

The money will come from the $25 billion in the stimulus bill earmarked for public transit grants. Booker said the allocations are based on existing formulas and therefore would provide more than $1 billion and probably the entire amount that NJ Transit asked for.

The Federal Transit Administration will determine the final total.

We are extremely grateful for the steadfast support of the entire New Jersey Congressional delegation and their tireless advocacy in fighting on behalf of NJ Transits interests in Washington DC, said Nancy Snyder, an agency spokeswoman.

New York states Metropolitan Transit Authority will get $3.8 billion, according to U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Booker said the transit systems should see the funding within a week after the legislation is signed into law.

NJ Transit is running fewer trains as fewer passengers are going to work and changed its bus boarding rules to practice social distancing. Ridership declines have hit the 90% mark, said Gov. Phil Murphy. Revenue from fares make up about 39% of the agencys operating budget,

In addition, costs are up as NJ Transit disinfects and cleans its trains, buses and stations to try to prevent the virus from spreading.

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It is early morning and Harpreet Singh is busy preparing a list of people and places he and his community of volunteers called Brothers For all have to visit during the day to deliver food kits containing flour, rice, pulses oil, salt, etc. He has already delivered about 150 such kits in the past two days to the poor reeling under the ongoing coronavirus lockdown. Besides, since Wednesday, he has opened two kitchens to prepare 1,000 meals every day and deliver them to various locations across the city.

These are difficult times for the poor. Thousands of them are going hungry. I am getting so many calls pointing me to people who are either unable to go out or do not have the money to buy essential commodities. We are in the midst of a gigantic crisis and we all need to chip in and act fast, says 34- year old Singh, a resident of Tilak Nagar in Delhi, who runs a Knowledge Processing Outsourcing firm.

Singh is among people in Delhi and other cities who are self-organising a fightback against Corona, trying to create a collective, sustainable social response to the pandemic by mobilising volunteers, raising funds online and coordinating the delivery of food and medicines to the needy, especially the elderly and daily wagers.

Though we get calls for help from all over Delhi and NCR, we are currently focusing on west Delhi. I am trying to mobilise citizens groups in different parts across Delhi to coordinate aid in their localities. Today, I got a call from a person, requesting us to urgently deliver food kits to people in a jhuggi cluster in Matiala, west Delhi. says Singh. Thankfully, the police are cooperating with us and letting us move around in our cars. We take all precautions to ensure social distancing so that we do not put our volunteers as well as those we are trying to help at risk.

Similarly, the Delhi Youth Welfare Association, a community organisation in the Walled City on Monday launched Covid- 19 Community Support Fund, to help daily wage workers across the city by providing them cash assistance of Rs 3,000 a month. We thought that in the current lockdown, it would be best to extend cash support to people. We are collecting funds through 40- odd members of our organisation and also running an online crowdfunding campaign,  says Mohammad Naeem, president, the Delhi Youth Welfare Association (DYWA).

We have created a Google form, on which the people can give the details of the needy, and tell why and where they need support. We have already disbursed Rs 3000 each to about 100 daily wage workers in Delhi who include darners, out- of- job taxi drivers, roadside vendors. We have raised about Rs 13 lakh in three days on a crowdfunding platform,and wish to raise a total of Rs 20 lakh in next few days, says Abu Sufiyan, 28, a Walled City blogger, who is raising funds for the campaign.  We intend to help about 200 families over the next two months and, if need be, we will extend this help further.

Gurgaonbased Venkat Iyer, who runs an HR consultancy firm, says he realised early on that the corona crisis would be prolonged and hit people in the unorganised sector the most such as daily wagers, maids, house helps, construction site workers, plumbers and electricians.

We are tying up with cloud kitchens to provide meals and with NGOs for last-mile distribution in vulnerable areas in Delhi such as Bara Tooti, Usmanpur, JJ Colony, Madanpur Khadar, Sangam Vihar, Govindpuri Cluster, Chandni Chowk labour market, says Iyer, who will start food distribution this Friday from Sangam Vihar.

Iyer, who has already raised over Rs 28 lakh in the past five days on a crowdfunding platform, plans to raise about Rs 1 crore. We will be following all safety protocols and social distancing rules; our volunteers will wear gloves, safety suits and carry all necessary equipment. While distributing food, we will coordinate with authorities and also be checking the temperature of these daily wage workers for infection.

In the past few days, many corona-related fund-raising campaigns Coronavirus Support Initiative for Food & Medical Aid to Daily Wagers, Support The Victims Of Coronavirus; Together WE Can, among othershave been initiated on online platforms such as Milaap , Ketto , Our Democracy. The stated objectives of these campaigns include providing food to the daily wagers, create awareness about the virus and the disease, give free masks, soaps, and sanitisers to the poor to help prevent the spread of the virus, and support the Covid 19 patients who need financial help.

Most of crowdfunding platforms have waived off the campaign fee for corona-related fund-raisers.  Currently, we have over 50 Corona - related fundraisers on our platform; in fact, we have created a dedicated microsite on our platform for this purpose. Unlike other fundraisers, which get support from people in certain locations, corona related fundraisers, which are being run by both common people and organisations, are getting widespread support, both from commoners and celebrities,  says Varun Seth , co-founder Ketto.

Harpreet Singh of Brothers For all believes that the community response to the pandemic will help form bonds that will outlast the current crisis. It will help build relationships in communities, which will have the potential for a long- term change, he says.

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Boko Haram militants kill at least 92 Chadian soldiers

Iran Press TV

Wednesday, 25 March 2020 5:36 AM

Takfiri Boko Haram militants from Nigeria have killed at least 92 Chadian soldiers in an attack on an army base on the border with Chad.

The deadly attack took place in Boma, in western Lac Province, early on Monday, and lasted around seven hours.

"We lost 92 of our soldiers, non-commissioned officers and officers," Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno said on Tuesday, after visiting the site of the attack.

"It's the first time we have lost so many men," he said.

An unnamed soldier said the Boko Haram militants destroyed 24 military vehicles, including armored vehicles, and carried off captured weapons in speedboats.

"The enemy has hit at our defenses hard in this zone," a senior officer said.

Boko Haram militants hailing from northeast Nigeria have been stepping up their attacks on the Lake Chad region in recent months.

In 2015, countries in the region formed the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) to fight the militants. The MNJTF is a joint force consisting of soldiers from Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Chad, and Benin. It is tasked with ending the Boko Haram militancy in the Lake Chad region.

Boko Haram started its campaign of militancy in Nigeria in 2009 with the aim of toppling the central government.

In 2016, Boko Haram pledged allegiance to Daesh.

Boko Haram's campaign of militancy in Nigeria has killed more than 30,000 people and displaced about 2.5 million since 2009.

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Beijing officials have proposed new law to enforce citizens to wear face masks in public amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Local lawmakers have submitted a draft of the 'Beijing Promotional Regulations of Civilised Manners' today for its second review in a committee meeting.

Anti-coronavirus regulations were added to the newly-proposed law, ordering residents with flu symptoms to wear face masks in public and cover their faces when they cough or sneeze even after the crisis passes.

It came as Beijing has recorded a total of 150 imported cases, sparking fears of a second wave of the outbreak hitting the nation.

Beijing officials have proposed new law to enforce citizens to wear face masks in public amid the coronavirus pandemic. A Chinese air passenger is seen wearing a face mask in Shanghai

Anti-coronavirus regulations were added to the newly-proposed law, ordering residents with flu symptoms to wear face masks in public and cover their faces when they cough or sneeze. Travellers wearing face masks are spotted at the Beijing Railway Station yesterday

The proposal was initially issued in late October last year, but officials decided to re-draft the bill in March in response to the virus outbreak.

Other new requirements included using public spoons and chopsticks when sharing a meal, as well as forbidding illegal trade of wild animals.

Citizens who breach the regulations would face 'serious financial punishment', but it is unclear how much they would be fined, according to the press.

Chinese officials have ordered people to regularly wear face masks as a precaution against catching the coronavirus during the outbreak. Residents are also required to keep a minimum distance of 1.5 metres (4.92 feet) away from one another in public.

However, one medical expert told MailOnline that masks 'cannot' protect against the virus and that wearing them may even make it worse.

Meanwhile Public Health England has warned that there is 'very little evidence' that masks are effective 'outside of clinical settings' such as hospitals.

Citizens who breach the regulations would face 'serious financial punishment', but it is unclear how much they would be fined, according to the press. A woman wearing a face mask looks through the window of a train at the Hongqiao Railway Station in Shanghai

Chinese officials have ordered people to regularly wear face masks as a precaution against catching the coronavirus during the outbreak. The picture shows a woman wearing a face mask as a precautionary measure walks past a street mural in Hong Kong

Restaurants and canteens around China also launched a one person per table policy to prevent the spread of the coronavirus after citizens started to leave their homes and resume their lives back to normal.

It came as millions of Chinese residents were allowed to leave Hubei yesterday after officials lifted a two-month lockdown on the former coronavirus epicentre.

Some of China's most popular tourist sites also resumed their business after staying closed for nearly two months to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Some of China 's most popular tourist sites also resumed their business after staying closed for nearly two months to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus. Two Chinese kids wear protective masks as they visit the Badaling Great Wall in Beijing on March 24

But one of China's top coronavirus experts has warned that the nation is facing a second outbreak due to the increasing number of infections detected among new arrivals from abroad.

Professor Li Lanjuan, a member of Beijing's expert team on the virus, said she was 'very worried that imported cases could trigger another large-scale epidemic in our country'.

Meanwhile, Spains death toll from the coronavirus has surpassed the official figure from China today, becoming the second highest in the world.

Globally there are 460,000 confirmed cases and more than 20,000 deaths and more than 110,000 people having recovered, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Those who watched the Socialist Equality Party online election launch in Sri Lanka last Sunday sent enthusiastic comments to the WSWS.

Ruchira Madhawa

Ruchira Madhawa, a contract teacher from Colombo, said: Nothing can be solved on the basis of private property. Thats what this coronavirus pandemic has proven. In this devastating situation, the capitalist class has put all of its efforts into protecting the profit system.

Why is the capitalist world unable to save the lives of the public even though it possesses such technology and more than sufficient wealth for that? It is because everything is decided according to the profit interests of the capitalist class. The WSWS has provided many articles explaining this. I joined the SEP election meeting today because I agree with its perspective.

The media, which is aligned with the police-military crackdown, is pointing fingers at the people, but theres no word about the difficulties that people are really facing. Instead of the masses being locked-up and confined, we must find a way to mount an effective struggle by building up the solidarity of the working class.

Dineth Jayakody, a University of Colombo graduate, said: This pandemic has proven that the nation-state system is not rational anymore. Separate national policies collide with globalisation and the money spent by all the countries in the world, under the pretext of national security, is more than enough to solve the problems of the people. This becomes very clear to us when we read the WSWS.

To cope with this epidemic we have to work in a scientific way and it has to be global. The problem is that every country is now trying to develop a failed national effort. Instead, according to the perspectives of the International Committee of the Fourth International, what is necessary is a World United Socialist Federation, which would serve for the betterment of the working class.

Sameera Samarakoon

Sameera Samarakoon, a quantity surveyor, commented: Capitalist countries can boast about making enormous developments, but the coronavirus disaster shows that workers and the oppressed masses do not enjoy these developments.

The government has called for the removal of the curfew from time to time so people can buy essential commodities, but how many families in the country dont have enough money to buy food for even two days? All you need to do is give the people everything they need and conduct an island-wide test to identify infected people. The capitalist system, however, cannot even think of such a thing.

Food, medicine, and all other essential goods are made by workers, who really should own them. But the capitalists, when they are in trouble, are not ready to give anything for free. Thats the irrationality of capitalism.

Prasanthi, a housewife from Kandy, said: I watched the SEP meeting because theres no other movement that accurately describes the destruction that has taken place. The capitalist rulers are trying to get out of this viral crisis by sacrificing the lives of workers and the oppressed.

The lives of the people are saved by the sacrifices made by doctors and other workers in health and other essential services. But what they dont have is the power to use the wealth accumulated in the hands of the capitalists for the sake of social need. The working class must fight for that.

Commenting on Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse leaders summit on March 24, she said: In this situation, every section of the bourgeois ruling class is afraid of the mounting opposition of the masses. As a result, the parties have come together to save the capitalist system.

Sohan Tissera

Sohan Tissera, a young worker who moved to Italy from Sri Lanka, is currently confined with five other workers in his apartment in Lombardy and faces serious dangers. He commented that he has experienced firsthand the enmity of the entire nation-state system to the working class.

Switzerland, where the United Nations Human Rights Council is located, is the first country that closed its border. No help has been given to Italy from any country in the region. Neither the European Union, nor any other organisation in this area, has shown any interest in Italy. Workers are very angry about the situation and there are plans for big protests. There will be a lot of revolutionary upheavals in the future.

S. Santhirapalan

S. Santhirapalan, from Vavuniya in northern Sri Lanka, wrote: The speech by Wije Dias focused on the spread of the coronavirus. No other political party has put forward such a perspective. He explained that capitalism is waging war on society.

World capitalism is spending large sums of money to fight war and strengthen the military, but it is not willing to allocate the necessary funds for health care. The result is the inability to control disasters such as the coronavirus. The bourgeois states are now attempting to exploit the situation. People are dying, but all the capitalists care about is profits.
Craving a little adventure or cultural enrichment? In a creative answer to the sudden closure of everything from beaches to national parks to landmarks, monuments, and museums, establishments around the globe are offering virtual visits to allow people to continue to tour, now from the comfort of their couch.

Wander the world and embark upon these virtual voyages to satisfy your wanderlust without leaving home.

National Gallery of Art, Washington



Theres never been a better time to expand your American history education.

Wander the National Gallery of Art in Washington, via two online exhibits that will transport you to another time and place: the first exhibit, called Fashioning a Nation, examines American fashion from colonial times through the Industrial Revolution (1740 to 1895), with a look at how the typical vesture of the time reflected the social, political, and technological climate of the day.

Dress, Melita Hofmann, 1935/1942, From the collection of: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. (National Gallery of Art)

The second exhibit, Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, explores scenes of daily life from the Dutch Golden Age.

To visit virtually, you can scroll online or install the Google Arts & Culture app on your phone, which actually gives you closer access to the art than youd get in person: you can zoom in on your favorite pieces, take a selfie to find art that resembles you, utilize augmented reality (AR) technology to envision the pieces hanging in your own home, and take a curated virtual tourthe next-best thing to actually being there.

Palace of Versailles, Paris



Marie Antoinette and Her Children by Louise Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (1787). (Public domain)

Visit the virtual exhibitions of the typically overcrowded Palace of Versailles in France for a taste of courtly history. Curated tours developed especially for online use explore topics ranging from Louis XIV to the gastronomic heritage of the royal table to 1780s French fashion to the history of the Palace itself. From frescoes to sculptures and beyond, a virtual trip to Versailles promises mental enrichment sans crowds.

Monterey Bay Aquarium, Monterey, California

A leopard shark swimming in the Kelp Forest exhibit. (Copyright Monterey Bay Aquarium)

No matter what your favorite sea creature may be, you have a good chance of spotting it through the Monterey Bay Aquariums 10 live webcams. Whether you want a soothing session with the Kelp Forest Cam or glowing Moon Jelly Cam or a peek into the adorable antics happening daily on the Penguin Cam and Sea Otter Cam (tune in for the thrice-daily feedings!), the aquarium is sure to keep you entertained even while youre stuck at home.

Flagler Museum, Palm Beach, Florida

The Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Florida. (Sean Pavone/Shutterstock)

Take a virtual tour through Gilded-Age glamour at Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Florida, a mansion built by Henry Flagler in 1902 as a wedding present for his third wife.

The estate is now a National Historic Landmark and one of the top tourist attractions in Palm Beach, providing a thorough examination of one of the most fascinating periods of American history. Guided tours, period exhibits, and special programs are usually on the in-person docket, but for now, visitors from around the globe can turn to the museums online presence or free app to soak in all the history and opulence of the era.

Niagara Falls, New York



Niagara Falls, N.Y. (TRphotos/Shutterstock)

If Niagara Falls has long been on your bucket list, theres no time like the present to visit the world-class waterfalls. Head to YouTubebest experienced through a virtual reality (VR) headsetand you can explore outdoors through an immersive 360-degree video experience that sends you above the falls in a helicopter, then on a high-speed jaunt through Class-V rapids. Its among the most thrilling two minutes you can spend in self-quarantine, and likely a more up-close (and adrenaline-fueled) encounter than you wouldve gotten on your standard summer vacation.

Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

Perseus Freeing Andromeda by Piero di Cosimo, in an online exhibit by the Uffizi. (Public domain).

Travel through time and space to take in the ancient sculptures, art, and artifacts housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Its not quite the same as being there, but you can still wander the storied halls of the 1560s-built gallery. Thanks to the Google Arts & Culture platform, you can visit the Uffizi Gallery even during lockdown by exploring online exhibits and art collections, plus enjoy 360-degree inside access to many of the gallerys permanent displays and halls.

George Washingtons Mount Vernon Estate, Virginia

Mount Vernon, Virginia. (Bob Pool/Shutterstock)

Touring historic Mount Vernon may be the closest you get to an invitation to visit the private home of an American president, so accept your digital opportunity to do just that and explore the plantation of Martha and George Washington, the first president and first lady of the United States.

Located on the Potomac River, the Mount Vernon mansion is open for a virtual visit through an immersive online experience that truly feels as if youre there. Interactive buttons allow you to click certain elements and features to learn more about what youre seeing, and narrated video guides walk you through the estate as if youd paid admission and booked a trip.

Looking for something less mentally stimulatingsomething just plain cute? Head to Mount Vernons YouTube channel for a live-streamed Lamb Cam, starring the estates newborn residents.

Glacier National Park, Montana

View of the Continental Divide from the Apgar Lookout Webcam in Glacier National Park. (NPS)

Take a deep breath and spend some time watching the glaciers, lakes, peaks, and beyond on the Glacier National Park live webcamsyoull feel way better than you do after spending the same amount of time watching the news. The national park has 15-plus webcams posted around its 1500 square miles of land, with views of everything from Apgar Mountain to Lake McDonald to Flathead River. Other highly esteemed national parks, including Yellowstone and Yosemite, also have live webcams on offer, so take your pick and get packing for the parks.

Enriching Travels for the Kids at Home

At-home field trip, anyone? If youre a parent of a school-aged child, chances are that youre well aware that the kids are wishing they could be out and about, too.

Send them on educational odysseys online via the following institutions:

Loggerhead Marinelife Center: Sea Turtles and Ocean Conservation

Located in Juno Beach on the southeast coast of Floridaone of the loggerhead sea turtle nesting capitals of the worldLoggerhead Marinelife Center is a nonprofit sea turtle research, rehabilitation, and educational institution that promotes ocean conservation. Theyre offering learn-at-home opportunities in Virtual Coastal Classroom sessions, which are streamed via Facebook Live from the Outdoor Sea Turtle Hospital. Each day, theyre broadcasting STEM-infused programming and short lessons, plus nightly trivia and social media giveaways.

Craft and Create: Plains Art Museum

Looking for a creative outlet for the kiddos? Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota, is offering kid-friendly Facebook Live sessions with artists every weekday at 10 a.m. local time. Gather the listed supplies for each project, then get to crafting.

Science Experiments: EdVenture Childrens Museum

Join Todays Play with EdVenture Childrens Museum for educational content, experiments, and daily activities kids can try at home. Videos on the website walk parents and kids through the fun and mentally engaging activities.

Head Underwater: Aquarium of the Pacific

The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California, is offering online educational programs for students from kindergarten through 12th grade. At-home learning tools include Aquarium Webcam Resource Kits, with materials that complement the aquariums live webcams; Career Connections, which introduce students to STEM professionals and careers; and Sustainability Series, a collection of videos and digital materials on sustainability.

Skye Sherman is a freelance travel writer based in West Palm Beach, Fla. She covers news, transit, and international destinations for a variety of outlets. You can follow her adventures on Instagram and Twitter @skyesherman.




Daniela Trezzi

A 34-year-old Italian nurse has committed suicide after testing positive for coronavirus.

It was gathered that she took her own life after fearing she had infected others.

Daniela Trezzi was working on the front line of the coronavirus crisis at the San Gerardo hospital in Lombardy, the worst-affected region of Italy.

The nurse had been suffering heavy stress before she was quarantined after showing coronavirus symptoms.

After she tested positive for the disease, she reportedly took her life with her colleagues disclosing that she talked about her fears as she could have infected others with the disease.

The National Federation of Nurses of Italy confirmed her death with a statement expressing

all the pain and concern of the nurses over the death of their young colleague who lost her life, and of all 450,000 Italian healthcare professionals who are fighting united around their families, friends, and colleagues.

Her death comes just a week after another nurse in Venezia killed herself. It is an analogous event with the same motivation and although we wish it the opposite, this may not be the last case, the federation report said.
Several countries have employed robots inorder to decrease its medical staffers' exposure to virus. (AFP)

Jaipur: A government hospital here is putting a robot through its paces to see if it can help in the fight against coronavirus, delivering food and medicines to patients admitted there.

If the trial works out, the humanoid robot could make its way to assigned patients with a tray carrying food and medicines.

Potentially, this would reduce the chances of the hospital staff contracting the infection.

Nurses now need to approach such patients wearing protective gear like masks and gloves.

SMS Hospital superintendent Dr D S Meena said that a private firm had approached them, offering a robot which could carry food and medicines to patients, a job normally done by the nursing staff.

We are conducting a trial and a committee has been formed to see its efficiency, he said. The committee will submit a report.

The robot at SMS Hospital uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) to do its job. It doesn't need to follow lines on the floor and can navigate its own way, according to developer Bhuvnesh Mishra.

It can supposedly use the lift and reach a particular bed in a specific ward. When it starts running out of power, it heads towards the charging point, the manufacturers claim.

Dr Meena called it a good step. Doctors and the nurses have higher chances of getting infected with the virus, he reminded. According to him, the nursing staff likes the idea.
Elnur Sidiq, a Uyghur mother of four who lives in exile in Turkey, last heard from her husband Muhemmet Imin Abdulla in March of 2017 before he disappeared back home in northwest Chinas Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). She learned from sources in the region the following year that Abdulla, the head of traditional medicine wholesaler Xinjiang Tangnuri Co., was detained in an internment camp beginning in October 2017 and sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2018. While Sidiq is certain her husband is being held in a jail in the XUAR capital Urumqi, she doesnt know which one, and has no information about his legal status or well-being.

Sidiq recently told RFAs Uyghur Service that she believes Abdulla was targeted for maintaining financial ties abroadincluding sending money to his family in Turkeyand for traveling overseas to countries Chinese authorities have blacklisted Uyghurs from visiting, citing a fear of Islamic radicalization. She noted that four of Abdullas uncles and two of his younger brothers have also been detained in their hometown of Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian).

RFA spoke with Sidiq, as well as her 10-year-old daughter Fatime, about how they learned of Abdullas imprisonment and the hardships they endure, wondering if they will ever see him again.

Sidiq: The last time he came [to Turkey] was in 2016. He wasnt able to come back after that. He traveled through Dubai, he always traveled through Dubai. He returned to our homeland and told me hed made it safely. After that I messaged him several different times but never got a response.

In the fall of 2016, he left [Turkey], and in March 2017 he disappeared. I have a close friend, someone who knows my family really well. When I checked with her, she said, Hes gone to study [a euphemism for someone who has been detained in an internment camp], over the telephone. She said hed gone to study in March or April of 2017. I asked her to pass on a few things to him. Later, my friends husband passed away during an interrogation at the airport. And thus, we lost contact.

In 2018, I think it was at the end of the year, close to the start of 2019, I had an acquaintance, a close acquaintance, in Ankara, who knew a policeman who worked for national security [in China]. My acquaintance looked into [my husbands case] through this connection. After [my acquaintance] sent [my husbands] passport and identification numbers, the policeman sent messages saying that [my husband] was in a prison in Urumqi and that he was going to be studying for 15 years. I have proof of these messages. Hes in a prison in Urumqi.

RFA: Did they not say which prison hes in?

Sidiq: They didnt say which prison hes in, but they said hes in an Urumqi prison and sent a picture of the prison from the outside. Later, when word started getting out about [the authorities] transferring middle-aged people to prisons in the interior [of China], we looked into [my husbands case] again. [The policeman] said he was still there and hadnt been moved, and he sent a photo of the prison. So, it was clear that he hadnt been transferred. We asked again in March and April of 2019. At that time, the policeman sent a message asking that we stop seeking his help. We havent been in touch with the policeman since.

Medicine wholesaler

RFA: What line of business was your husband involved in Urumqi?

Sidiq: He went to Urumqi [from Hotan] in the 1990s to do business, wholesaling traditional medicines. He started a company called Xinjiang Tangnuri in 2006  Basically, we dealt in saffron, cardamom, other spices and medicines used in Uyghur medicine. We sourced the medicines from private individuals, from farmers, and then we sold them wholesale. We sold the medicines wholesale to the large hospitals practicing traditional Uyghur medicine in [the cities of] Hotan, Korla (Kuerle), Kashgar (Kashi), and Urumqi  For a while we imported medicines from Pakistan.

RFA: What has been the fate of the company?

Sidiq: I dont know. I dont know about anything [that has happened] since [my husband] went to prison, since he went to a camp  He has four uncles in Hotan. We got news that they locked up all four of his uncles in the period when they were taking a lot of people into camps. He also has two younger brothers. We got news that they took his brothers in as well. Later we heard that they gave 10-year sentences to each of his uncles. Recently we heard the news that they let one of his uncles out early because his health is bad.

I believe its been more than five years now since we came to Turkey. I lost contact with both of my older sisters right about a year after I left. They were in Ghulja (Yining) city. My father and two older sisters, up to now weve had no contact with each other.

RFA: So, as for his health and how hes doing in prison, do you really have absolutely no news?

Sidiq: I went looking for help from a cousin of mine in Urumqi to see if they could go to the prison to check on him, take him money, and the like. They said that they didnt want me to ask for help though, after which I didnt seek them out again. But as for how long hes been in prison, how long he was in a camp, I havent been able to get any news at all about this. His health was always really good before, but I dont know what its like now. I have absolutely no news. We had a number for the company and tried to call that, but it didnt go through.

Very difficult for me

Fatime: I miss my dad with all of my heart, but I cant see him.

RFA: When was the last time you spoke with your father on the phone?

Fatime: I dont remember. He left while I was sleeping one night, crying as he said goodbye. But I woke up the next morning and at first, I wasnt scared because I thought he was going to come [to Turkey] again. But later I got really sad. Now, everything is in lockdown and theres [the coronavirus], and Im about to give up hope. His telephone is cut off and everything is erased from it, theres nothing on it anymore. We cant even talk to our family when we want to, because theyve been rounded up now. Its very difficult for me to be without my father.

RFA: Do you remember your fathers face?

Fatime: I can remember his face, but I cant remember his voice, because hes not here with me  We dont know what is fated for us. He was one of my most favorite people I had around me, my friend, my dad, my parent. He kept me close.

Reported by Jilil Kashgary for RFAs Uyghur Service. Translated by Elise Anderson. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
Doctors across fire-ravaged southern NSW say theyre facing equipment shortages amid the COVID-19 health crisis and pleading for people to stay away from regional areas unable to cope with an inundation of critical patients.

As coronavirus cases in Australia reached 2000, clinics in regional centres are struggling to source enough personal protective wear for their staff, while dozens of large towns are without a single ventilator.

GP Doctor Andrew Gibson at Batemans Bay Medical Centre. Credit:Louise Kennerley

Dr Andrew Gibson, a GP in Batemans Bay, said both the Commonwealth and state governments had been behind the game and "missed the boat" with planning for the pandemic, which could have dire consequences.

"The fact is we've got no gowns, no masks, we cant get a swab done, there's confusion, Dr Gibson said, adding that he hadn't been able to get a test for himself after developing a sore throat.
T he Co-op has introduced new measures to enforce social distancing in its stores, in a bid to protect customers and staff from the coronavirus outbreak.

The retail giant has introduced a range of measures across its 2,600 stores, including floor markers which will define a one-metre distance throughout the store and two-metre spacing for customer queues.

A limited number of customers will be allowed into stores at any one time and there will be a reduction in the number of tills that will be open to allow a greater distance between shoppers.

Chris Whitfield, the Co-ops chief operating officer, said the new measures will be reviewed on a daily basis.

PA

The safety and wellbeing of our colleagues is our priority and we fully support the need for social distancing," said Mr Whitfield.

We are immensely proud of our frontline colleagues and the work they are doing at this unprecedented time to serve our customers, members and local communities but we urge our customers to follow the Government advice to only shop for essential items and to be considerate of others when they are shopping.

PA

As panic buyers flocked to stores to buy items such as pasta and toilet toll, supermarkets have had to come up with creative ways to ensure the shelves are stocked and staff are safe from the virus.

Morrisons, Iceland, Sainsbury's and Aldi have introduced similar safety measures by installing perspex screens at checkouts to protect staff.

PA

In order to encourage the message of staying at home, Co-op stores will be opening with reduced hours which will also give staff time to re-stock shelves.
For the past 24 hours, Russia-backed militants have violated the ceasefire in Donbas nine times, using mortars that are prohibited by the Minsk agreements. This was reported by the press service of Ukraines Defense Ministry.

Thus, the invaders attacked Ukrainian positions with 120-mm and 82-mm mortars, grenade/rocket launchers, large-caliber machine guns and small arms.

Five shellings were carried out in the Donetsk region; next to Vodiane, Krasnogorivka, Avdiivka and Piskiv. The Luhansk region was attacked four times.

As a result of the shelling, no casualties have been reported among Ukrainian soldiers.

As we reported earlier, the European Union stated about the importance of the unhindered access of the OSCE SMM to areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions that are uncontrolled by Ukraine.

It is crucial that Russia and the armed formations that it backs allow the OSCE SMM, UN agencies, non-governmental organizations and the ICRC freedom of movement across the contact line, the message said.
By AFP

SAUDI ARABIA: World leaders on Thursday promised $5 trillion to stave off global economic collapse from the coronavirus pandemic that has killed 21,000 people and shut down huge swathes of the globe.

From New York to Paris to New Delhi life has ground to standstill with some three billion people confined to their homes as governments scramble to halt the disease's deadly march across the world.

The death toll spiralled upward again in Europe, as fatalities in the United Stated shot past 1,000 and cases in Africa continued to multiply, and already-stretched healthcare systems readied for the worst.

Fears are mounting the virus could cause an even greater shock than the Great Depression, with the latest unemployment figures out of the US breaking records as businesses across the world's biggest economy are pinched by the pandemic.

Leaders from the G20 most industrialised nations held crisis talks by video link Thursday, pledging a "united front" to fight the outbreak -- along with an enormous financial injection to prop up the economy.

"The virus respects no borders," the leaders said in a statement.

"We are injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy, as part of targeted fiscal policy, economic measures, and guarantee schemes to counteract the social, economic and financial impacts of the pandemic."

They also pledged "robust" support for developing nations, where it is feared coronavirus could next take hold after ravaging China and then Europe.

But the unity pledged by the G20 has been in short supply with China and the United States trading barbs over their handling of the coronavirus crisis.

The outbreak first emerged in China late last year but has spread relentlessly.

Globally, infections are nearing half a million worldwide.

Europe is now the hardest hit continent, clocking over 250,000 infections and more than 15,000 deaths.

- Five patients, one bed -

Hard-hit Italy and Spain are living through nightmarish scenarios feared around the globe: health services buckling under the strain of mounting caseloads.

Medical workers are now facing painstaking choices.

"If I've got five patients and only one bed, I have to choose who gets it," Sara Chinchilla, a pediatrician at a hospital near Madrid, told AFP.

"People are dying who could be saved but there's no space in intensive care."

More than 4,000 have died in Spain and over 56,000 are infected.

Health care facilities in Britain could face a similar strain.

The National Health Service said London's hospitals are facing a "continuous tsunami" of seriously ill COVID-19 patients, despite a lockdown imposed this week.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said the country could be just a few weeks behind Italy's curve.

Countries are now facing the twin challenge of stemming infections and dealing with the sick while trying to tend to a global economy facing the most devastating recession in living memory.

In a sign of the economic impact, some 3.3 million people in the US filed unemployment claims last week -- the highest number ever recorded.

Bars, shops, hotels and schools have shut across the country -- in line with measures already rolled out across Europe -- and around half the US population is under lockdown.

President Donald Trump, who is seeking reelection in November, said he would decide soon whether unaffected parts of the country can get back to work.

"I'm not going to do anything rash or hastily," he said, adding that he hoped for a recommendation by Easter.

- Priests at risk -

The global lockdown -- which also hemmed in India's huge population this week -- tightened further on Thursday as Russia announced it was grounding all international flights, while Moscow's mayor ordered the closure of cafes, shops and parks.

Tokyo's millions of citizens have been told to stay home too, just days after the city was forced to postpone the 2020 Olympic Games for a year.

China meanwhile said it was barring entry to most foreigners, fearing that imported cases were undermining the successes it has claimed in bringing domestic transmissions way down.

And South Africa braced for a nationwide lockdown Thursday as its cases climbed to more than 900 -- about a third of Africa's 2,975 cases.

The impact of the virus has stretched well beyond frontline health workers, with billions trapped in their homes and facing what experts say could be lasting psychological harm.

In virus-stricken Italy, clergy members have been among the worst affected. Out of Italy's more than 7,500 deaths, 67 have been priests.

"A priest is always close to the people. For good or bad, it's his raison d'etre," said Monsignor Giulio Dellavite, secretary-general of the diocese of Bergamo, the hardest hit area in Italy's north.

- 'Encouraging signs' -

But offering a glimmer of hope, both Italy and Spain have seen lower daily rates of new infections this week.

The World Health Organization said there were "encouraging signs" after Italy's latest numbers were released, but warned it was "still too early to say whether the pandemic is peaking".

Even in China, there were signs of cautious optimism.

A two-month old lockdown has started to ease up in Hubei province, coronavirus ground zero.

But life was still far from normal: banners warn that playing cards together is "suicide" and guards yelled at crowds of people to separate.

The disease has also reached high profile figures, including Britain's heir to the throne Prince Charles who tested positive.

And Pope Francis reportedly tested negative for coronavirus after a person in his residence was said to have contracted it.
Gunmen Kill 25 At Kabul Sikh Temple; Islamic State Claims Responsibility

By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan March 25, 2020

Militants launched an attack on a Sikh temple in Kabul that left at least 25 people dead before security forces killed the attackers and freed dozens of hostages.

Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian did not say how many attackers were involved in the March 25 assault on the temple, though he said all were killed.

The Islamic State militant group has claimed responsibility for the attack via the online Amaq news agency, which it uses to distribute statements.

Afghanistan's Interior Ministry said that in addition to the 25 dead, eight people were wounded and 80 being held in the compound were rescued.

The AP news agency reported that one of the dead was a child, whose body was brought to a Kabul hospital.

Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian told RFE/RL that Afghan security forces had cordoned off the area and efforts were under way to clear the building of the assailants.

Arian said at least four attackers were exchanging fire with Afghan special forces. He added that some people were rescued by Afghan security forces and that the operation is proceeding cautiously to avoid harming the people inside the compound.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul and rights group Amnesty International condemned the attack.

"Peace will only come when people resolve their differences through words, not guns," the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.

Amnesty said on Twitter that it was "shocked and disheartened" by the attack.

Sikhs, a small religious minority in Afghanistan that numbers fewer than 300 families, have been targeted by Islamist militants before.

A suicide bombing targeting the Sikh community and claimed by Islamic State killed more than a dozen people in 2018 in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

The United States last month struck a deal with the Taliban on the withdrawal of U.S.-led international troops but the agreement does not include IS militants.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, dpa, and TOLOnews.com

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/gunmen-suicide- bombers-attack-sikh-temple-in- afghan-capital/30508020.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Australia ordered two cruise ships to leave its waters on March 26, after a liner that docked in Sydney Harbour last week became the primary source of infection in the countrys CCP virus outbreak.

NTD refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

The government of West Australia state said nobody would be permitted to disembark from the German-operated MV Artania after seven of 800 foreign passengers on board tested positive for the CCP virus, unless there was a life threatening emergency.

This ship needs to leave immediately, Premier Mark McGowan said. Our position is clear, we are not going to have a Sydney Harbour fiasco on our watch.

Germanys Phoenix Reisen, owner of the Artania, was not immediately available for comment.

McGowan said a second cruise ship, the MSC Magnifica, which was refused permission to dock in Perth this week, was headed out of Australian waters. MSC Cruises, which has said it had no ill passengers, declined to comment on its destination.

Cruise ships have become a flashpoint after 147 of the 2,700 passengers allowed to disembark from Carnival Corps Ruby Princess later tested positive for the CCP virus, a blunder that underlined official tensions in handling the crisis.

State and federal authorities have clashed over who was at fault, amid conflicting public advice over matters such as CCP virus testing and school closures.

The discrepancies echo similar tensions elsewhere. In Brazil, state governors have defied President Jair Bolsonaros call to ease strict curbs. Bolsonaro, who has called the virus a little flu, wanted schools and businesses reopened.

Western Australia is preparing Rottnest island, a former prison island, to quarantine some of the 800 Australians aboard a third cruise ship, the British-operated Vasco de Gama. More than 100 other passengers, from Britain and New Zealand, will be quarantined on the ship when it docks on Monday.

Shipowner Britains Cruise & Maritime Voyages said it was carrying no unwell passengers or staff.

More than 3,000 Australians are scattered on about 30 cruise ships around the world, Foreign Minister Marise Payne said.

In so many portsI couldnt begin to countbut literally from South America, to Europe, to the United States, and further afield, she said. We want to make sure that those Australians are able to return.

Two British tourists found themselves stranded in South Australia last week after getting off the Celebrity Solstice cruise liner in Sydney, and traveling to the city of Adelaide where they were told to quarantine themselves, they told media.

Steve and Tina Dixon, an asthmatic diagnosed with the CCP virus, had to rely on a good Samaritan for food after arriving in the city where they had no friends or family, and were unable to register for a home delivery account at a local supermarket.

Tougher Social Curbs

Some state leaders have also flagged that they are willing to push for tougher curbs on social activities if Prime Minister Scott Morrisons government does not move fast enough.

Stricter measures likely in the next few days are expected to affect retail and public transport.

Police will patrol beaches on what is set to be a sunny weekend, after crowds at Sydneys Bondi last weekend frustrated officials and set off a round of tighter curbs.

Because of the lack of consistent messaging, because people had been flouting the earlier advice regarding social distancing measures, we need to move further and quickly to ensure that what were seeing around the world doesnt mimic and occur on front doors, Australian Medical Association President Tony Bartone told reporters.

With infections rising quickly, Australia has ordered curbs, such as the forced closure of pubs, restaurants, and cinemas.

Long queues snaked around welfare offices, while more than a quarter of a million Australians registered for financial help on Wednesday, the government said.

Further job losses are expected, with some economists expecting Australian unemployment to double this year to more than 11 percent.

Flight Centre on Thursday said a third of its workforce of 20,000 faced temporary or permanent redundancy, while retail tycoon Solomon Lews Premier Investments Ltd temporarily closed all stores in Australia.

By Kate Lamb and Swati Pandey

NTD News staff contributed to this report.
The US Department of Justice is digging into how hedge funds tap into research and set up their bets.
Mexico has opened its doors to accept immigrants,migrants, and asylum-seekers who were deported by the United States due to the threat of COVID-19 according to a recently published article.

SENSE OF HEROISM

Mexico was once seen and described as one of the most dangerous countries in the world because of the negative reports associated with the country. Some of these include drug cartels, violence, killings, domestic violence, and more. These are the prime reasons why many Mexicans decide to leave the country.

However, this image that puts fear to anyone around the world will now start to change. The Mexican government decided that they will receive immigrants, migrants, and asylum-seekers who were deported by the United States. They are mainly composed of people from Central America, Asia, and as well from Mexico.

Amid the threat of COVID-19 where other countries are closing their doors for foreign individuals and decided to have a nationwide lockdown, it is the opposite thing that Mexico is doing. Instead of closing their doors and borders, they opened it to make sure that these people are safe and have shelter for the meantime.

This a sense of heroism for the Mexican government as they show the value of family that is deeply rooted in their culture. It has been there since then and in this time of global health crisis, they once again show to the world their love and compassion towards family.

ACCEPTING DEPORTED IMMIGRANTS, MIGRANTS, AND ASYLUM SEEKERS

It was confirmed by the Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard that Mexico will receive migrants and asylum-seekers whose American-asylum applications were rejected by the United States due to the threat of COVID-19 pandemic. It also includes immigrants who were deported as well.

The decision to reject their asylum application means to return to their home of origin. Many of these are Mexicans. However, the Mexican government is still willing to accept them even though they tried to leave their country of origin.

Ebrard clarified why the U.S. denied the entry of migrants and asylum seekers. He said: "They are going to make this decision based on their health emergency legislation. (...) And consequently, they will not admit people who are arriving every day in an undocumented manner."

There are around more than 1,250 migrants who arrived every day in the borders of the United States and Mexico. The majority of these are Mexicans and people from Central America while few are coming from other regions.

Ebrard asserted that Mexicans migrants who returned immediately before they could spend several days in the detention centers will be treated as being from its country itself.

The same attention and care will also be given to people who came from Central America like Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador who have been staying in the northern border of the country for months already while waiting for the approval of their U.S. asylum application or while waiting for them to be heard in the court.

In line with his pronouncement to admit migrants rejected by the U.S. due to the global health concern, he said: "And if people who are not Mexicans or Central Americans return to us, Mexico would not accept it, that the United States takes care of this."

Meanwhile, Guatamelan officials say that will stop receiving deported Hodurans and Salvadorans from the United States according to a recently published article.

In this time of global health crisis, each one should help one another. It is understood why the U.S. temporarily closed its doors to migrants because of health concerns. They do not want migrants to get infected by the virus because of the swelling cases in their country, the same as they do not also want their country to have additional cases of COVID-19 coming from the migrants.

Read related article:
Attorney General William Barr has directed federal prison authorities to begin identifying more elderly and medically compromised inmates for home confinement to avoid a larger outbreak of the coronavirus inside the agency's 122 institutions.

Barr's directive comes as lawmakers and civil rights advocates have urged the Justice Department in recent days to reduce the number of vulnerable prisoners who would be most at risk of infection inside the nation's largest detention system.

As of Thursday, officials reported that six inmates and four staffers have been infected with the virus. Barr said that one of the inmates, a prisoner in Louisiana, was in critical condition.

Barr acknowledged that there were rising "concerns" for the plight of the 170,000 federal prisoners and the 36,000 staffers who are in regular and close contact with the inmates everyday.

While the attorney expressed confidence in the agency's capacity shield prisoners from disease, he said "there are some at-risk inmates who are non-violent and pose minimal likelihood of recidivism and who might be safer serving their sentences in home confinement rather than in BOP facilities."

This photo taken on February 13, 2019 shows a view of the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, also known as the ADX or "Supermax", in Florence, Colorado.

Describing the risk of a prison outbreak to "a fire in a dry barn," some conservative groups, including the American Conservative Union, had called on the president to intervene. The groups urged the president to issue an executive order, allowing the elderly and non-violent offenders who have served two-thirds of their sentences to complete their terms at home.

President Donald Trump said Sunday that the administration had been considering such a move. Barr's directive the first indication that the government had put a plan in motion.

We commend the Department of Justice and federal Bureau of Prisons for heeding the call of public health experts and working to reduce the federal prison population," Kanya Bennett, senior legislative counsel for the ACLU. "Everyone agrees that the very nature of the criminal legal system puts vulnerable populations at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19.

Story continues

Jessica Jackson, chief advocacy officer for the REFORM Alliance which supports prison reduction efforts, said the attorney general's directive could "save lives.

Protecting vulnerable incarcerated people from exposure to COVID-19 is not just good for their safety, but also for others behind bars and correctional staff who are at risk of spreading the disease back into their communities," Jackson said.

The attorney general said there were about 10,000 prisoners 60 or older. But decisions on release could be complicated as about 40% of those are serving terms for violent crimes and sex offenses and who would not be eligible for release under terms of Thursday's directive.

In a letter earlier this week to Barr and Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal, a group of senators led by Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Richard Durbin, D-Ill., urged the government to begin moving the elderly and terminally ill from custody.

More: Full text of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill released

"Conditions of confinement do not afford individuals the opportunity to take proactive steps to protect themselves, and prisons often create the ideal environment for the transmission of contagious disease," the senators wrote. "For these reasons, it is important that consistent with the law and taking into account public safety and health concerns, that the most vulnerable inmates are released or transferred to home confinement, if possible."

Federal prison officials, who earlier this month halted all visitation, said Tuesday that they will now quarantine all new prisoners for 14 days in a further effort to limit the virus' spread.

While the federal government was just launching its effort to reduce the prison population, local and state governments have been releasing waves of prisoners from its jails and prisons to reduce the risk of infection and create additional space to quarantine infected prisoners.

The largest such effort was underway in New Jersey where hundreds of prisoners were expected to exit county jails this week under an order issued by Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner.

The ACLU estimated that the New Jersey releases could reach 1,000.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Feds to expand home confinement for elderly inmates
The Court of Appeal has dismissed two professional landlords' appeal against orders restraining them from interfering with Cork properties they owned that had been put into receivership.

The appeal was brought by Paddy McKeown and Adelaide McCarthy against orders including injunctions, restraining them from interfering with four properties all located in Cork.

The were put in place by the High Court in 2017 pending the full hearing of the dispute, secured by Mr Ned Murphy.

Mr McKeown and Ms McCarthy, who are husband and wife and reside at The Poplars, Villa Nova, Douglas Road, in Cork, opposed the action and had appealed those orders made against them in respect of the properties to the Court of Appeal.

In a detailed written judgement the three-judge Court of Appeal comprised of Ms Justice Marie BaKer, Ms Justice Una Ni Raifeartaigh and Mr Justice Brian Murray dismissed the appeal and upheld the High Court's order.

Giving the COA's decision Mr Justice Murray said the defendants failed to establish any basis which there could be a conclusion that the High Court fell into error in granting the orders sought by the receiver.

The judge noted that in early 2017 Mr Murphy was appointed receiver by AIB over four properties in Cork, two owned by Mr McKeown, one owned by Ms McCarthy and a fourth which was jointly owned by the couple.

The couple he said are professional landlords who own and operate a mixed portfolio of buy-to-let commercial properties.

AIB appointed Mr Murphy after the defendants allegedly defaulted on loan agreements taken out by them where the properties had been put up as security.

AIB claims that in May 2017 it obtained judgments in sums of just over 1.4m against both of the defendants,

Later that year Mr Murphy went to the High Court and secured various orders against the couple from Mr Justice Paul Gilligan including ones restraining them from trespassing at or interfering with the receivership of the four properties.

The court also dismissed the couple's cross applications for injunctions restraining receiver from disposing of the properties.

The couple appealed that decision on 12 grounds, including issues over the identity of the corporate entity that purports to have appointed the receiver, and over the conduct of the judge that heard the case in the High Court.

It was also alleged that the High Court disregarded evidence that the appointment of the receiver was an attempt by the bank to to asset-strip the couple by using unlawful, false instruments and contracts presented to the court.

A further ground raised was that the receiver had sued using an alias, which impaired both his appointment as receiver and the proceedings he had brought against them.

They claimed that he should have brought the action under the name Edmund Murphy and that Ned Murphy was an alias.

Lawyers for the receiver opposed the appeal.

In his judgment Mr Justice Murray said that it was clear to him that the appeal should be dismissed.

The defendant he said had raised only one remotely arguable ground of claim, which relates to the validity of the appointment of the receiver having regard to the identity of the appointing bank, he said.

That argument he said would have to be dealt with at the full trial of the action.

The Judge noted that judgment in very significant sums had been obtained by the bank against the couple.

The judge said that the couple's claims that the High Court judge had been biased or unfair to the defendants was unsustainable.

"I would reject outright any claim that the proceedings were conducted in a manner that was other than scrupulously fair," he said.

The judge added that the argument raised in relation to the use of the alias was "utterly without merit", Mr Justice Murray added.
By Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The fast-spreading coronavirus has forced the U.S. military to restrict the movement of thousands of personnel in the regions overseas most exposed to the virus: Asia, Europe and the Middle East, U.S

By Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The fast-spreading coronavirus has forced the U.S. military to restrict the movement of thousands of personnel in the regions overseas most exposed to the virus: Asia, Europe and the Middle East, U.S. military commands tell Reuters.

Reuters has learned that there are more American troops under special restrictions -- including quarantine -- elsewhere. But the military commands that operate in Latin America and Africa declined to disclose their data.

Almost 10,000 personnel in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are under restrictions, illustrating the challenges facing the Pentagon as it seeks to prevent an erosion of military readiness even as big chunks of the force are locked in place. The forces are either in isolation, quarantine or under some other restriction of movement.

The number is still a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel in Asia, Europe and Middle East.

U.S. Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon virtual town hall that he expected there could be a low or even moderate impact on U.S military readiness for a conflict or crisis, "based on the numbers so far."

"This could change. We'll have to assess it, and we are assessing it frequently," Milley said.

Each time a U.S. Marine, sailor, soldier or any other servicemember is identified with the virus -- and 227 have as of Wednesday morning -- the U.S. military seeks to isolate that person and anyone who has had contact with him or her.

The Pentagon has canceled military exercises and put in place several restrictions on personnel, whether they have the virus or not. They are not allowed to travel through or from high-risk countries around the world and all domestic U.S. travel has been halted. The U.S. military has also restricted access to the Pentagon building, including barring anyone who has traveled internationally in the past 14 days.

More than 420,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported across 196 countries, according to a Reuters tally on Tuesday. About 19,000 deaths are linked to the virus, which causes a flu-like respiratory illness.

As of last week, the U.S. military had restricted the movement of nearly 5,500 personnel in the Pacific region, a U.S. official told Reuters.

Lieutenant Commander Nicole Schwegman, a spokeswoman for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said those affected were not suspected of having the virus but had traveled from high-risk countries.

Schwegman said that the 5,500 included a little over 1,700 personnel from U.S. Forces in Korea and Japan as of March 19.

The military's Central Command, which oversees activities across the Middle East, said more than 1,500 service members in its areas overseas were quarantined "in accordance with World Health Organization's (WHO) guidelines and pre-deployment screening protocols."

Navy Captain Bill Urban, a command spokesman, said that in addition to those service members, approximately 30 service members were in isolation, "due to travel through at-risk locations and showing symptoms consistent with COVID-19."

In addition, more than 100 personnel at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, were in self-quarantine "due to either travel through at-risk locations or possible contact with someone confirmed to have COVID-19."

The numbers for Asia and the Middle East have not been previously reported.

The U.S. military said last week that some 2,600 U.S. military personnel in Europe, including civilians, were in self-isolation after being identified as people of concern during the coronavirus outbreak.

The U.S. military is allowing local commanders some flexibility in dealing with the virus, with some servicemembers reporting meetings and activities that would otherwise appear to violate social distancing norms.

U.S. military commands are also deciding for themselves what they want to communicate -- or not communicate -- about the impact caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

At the Germany-based Africa Command, spokesman Air Force Colonel Christopher Karns said broadcasting quarantine numbers could "be used by adversaries to their advantage" and unnecessarily increase anxiety among U.S. forces.

A spokesman for U.S. Southern Command said it prefers not to provide specific numbers on restricted travel, quarantine and self-isolation "because the numbers continue to change from day to day as a person's status changes."

During the townhall, one of the personnel from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina asked what the message was for troops and families affected by quarantine restrictions and stop movement orders.

"What we're trying to do, again, is limit movement. We're trying to make sure we curtail the spread of the virus by folks going abroad or coming back home from overseas," Esper said.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart; Editing by Alistair Bell)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Moscow is using a state-of-the-art system of face-recognition cameras to track people who should be self-isolating after returning from countries with serious outbreaks of the coronavirus. In the United States, members of Congress have written to President Donald Trump to voice concerns over potential measures to track people's movements via their mobile phones. Around the world, many are concerned that such powerful technologies could be abused in the future by governments and corporations. The debate over security versus privacy is being seen in a new light through the prism of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The dairy industry has issued a stark warning that it may be unable to process all of the nations daily milk supply when coronavirus cases are expected to peak.

The approach peak production is occupying the minds of the industry as it battles the implications of Covid 19 while keeping milk processed.

With expansion, the processing capacity in Ireland is extremely tight and the loss of any plant due to loss of key staff from Covid or mechanical failure has the potential to be catastrophic for farmers and the cooperative system alike.

Commenting on the challenge Dairy Industry Ireland (DII) Director Conor Mulvihill said this is a national Issue  not confined to any one coop.

"There has been massive industry collaboration across processors, government and farmers as we fight to keep milk collected and processed. The spread of COVID-19 has resulted in enormous logistical efforts to safely collect milk even prior to the peak period.

The industry has seen huge commitment from everyone that they will do everything possible to help one another and their farmer suppliers.

We have engaged in critical contingency planning across the companies to deal with this challenge, modelling different scenarios.

We estimate that spare Irish processing capacity could be as low as 1% to 2% at May peak.

There is a huge danger if anything goes wrong- not to mind the Covid challenge. Our production managers are estimating that 2020 peak supply could be as high as an unprecedented 250 million litres per week. Put simply, if one processor goes down  the knock-on consequences would be unimaginable for the entire industry.

As this crisis develops and deepens, our concern is escalating because of potential employee Covid-19 positive cases in processing sites may cause a production line or even a full factory to go down. This is something that we cannot afford and would have serious consequences for farmers and companies alike.

We have seen processing difficulties reported with our colleagues in Italy, Croatia and France.

We are actively working with our regulatory authorities to guide us on what we can do in the event that we cannot collect or process milk."

ICMSA President Pat McCormack said it is important that people remain calm, plan for every eventuality and, in the event of an issue arising, he stressed how essential it is for the processors to be ready to co-operate in every way possible, including processing milk for each other, sharing milk collection routes or sharing skilled staff if required.

He said that the regulatory authorities must also assist this level of co-operation by not placing any unnecessary barriers to co-operation and he was confident that what he said was the founding principle of our Co-op processing would assert itself in any crisis of this nature.

We are in an uncertain period and it is important that everyone remains calm and does not create an unnecessary sense of panic. The Irish dairy sector is based on the co-operative model  thats its heritage and founding principle - and that pooled strength and original drive must and will come to the fore in a time of crisis."
MBABANE  EswatiniBank and the Construction Industry Council (CIC) are celebrating a landmark partnership.



The reputable financial institution and the construction industry regulator have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU). This transpired at the banks offices in Mbabane yesterday. Managing Director Zakhele Lukhele represented the bank while CIC was represented by its CEO Nhlanhla Dlamini.

Dlamini stressed that it was challenging times for the economy following the coronavirus outbreak, highlighting that it adversely impacted the industry in many ways.



This has necessitated the Council to engage actively with stakeholders to provide solutions that will stimulate activity and hence ensure doing business sustainably in the long term.



Signing of this MoU will provide an opportunity for industry players to have preferential access to financing options, notwithstanding the need for the Bank to consider the risk factors involved, he said.



capacitated



In his address, Dlamini said that the cooperation between the organisations would provide a platform for industry to be capacitated on issues bordering on financial literacy, among other things.



Areas of partnership include strategically engaging to facilitate Eswatini firms and companies access to resources for development of operations as well as regulating the behaviour and promoting minimum standards and best practice for contractors, among others.



sustainable



The objectives and values of this MoU are aligned to His Majestys vision for sustainable economic development, social justice and political stability, he said.

Lukhele also celebrated the partnership, highlighting that the contractors would now know what to expect when approaching the bank for finance.

The MoU will assist in ensuring the bank provides proper service to the construction industry. The bank will provide working capital and other banking services to contractors.



approach



We commit to CIC that we will educate their stakeholders/contractors if they approach us and we will provide the required service that they need. We looking forward to this relationship with CIC and hope it will play a significant role in growing the construction industry as well as the countrys economy, he said.

Meanwhile, CIC recently signed another MoU with the Ezulwini Town Council.
President Trump speaks during his Feb. 26 White House news conference on the coronavirus pandemic. (Getty Images)

To the editor: I read that one of President Trump's advisors likened the coronavirus pandemic to an "asteroid" hitting the campaign.

There are many professional and amateur astronomers who track countless asteroids in our solar system and beyond. We are never surprised by an asteroid that could threaten our survival.

The emergence of COVID-19 in China was first reported last December. In February, the president called the Democrats' criticism of his lack of preparation for the pandemic a "hoax." He and his supporters in conservative media dismissed the seriousness of the virus as it ravaged China, Italy and Iran.

The only surprise was how unprepared this administration was. In any war, a general who similarly failed to prepare for battle would be relieved of his command. Now, the president says he knew all along how serious this problem really was.

I don't know what it takes for Americans to see how stunningly unprepared this president is to lead this country. Sadly, with better preparation and containment, the stock market might not have been in freefall now.

Richard Wulfsberg, Studio City

..

To the editor: A few hours before the March 15 debate between Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden, I received an unsolicited email from Trump's reelection campaign,previewing the debate as "snoozefest" between "Crazy Bernie" and "Sleepy Joe."

How presidential! Amid a national health and economic crisis, Trump directed snarky schoolyard taunts at the opposing party's candidates.

It's time to saddle him with a nickname most apt for these trying times, what with store shelves emptying, gun sales booming, and hospital triage tents rising. "Dystopian Don" seems a perfect fit.

Sandra Perez, Santa Maria
Most Michiganders believe the worst is yet to come as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases rises daily, but a new poll found growing trust in Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and President Donald Trump as they navigate the pandemic.

Baldwin Wallace Universitys Community Research Institute partnered with Ohio Northern University and Michigans Oakland University to poll Midwest voters in the midst of the coronavirus emergency. The poll found severe anxiety about how the global crisis will affect the U.S. economy and personal finances of Michigan residents but also revealed a majority of respondents approve of Whitmers decision to close down schools and restaurants and other actions to slow the spread of COVID-19.

More than 80% of Michigan respondents support limiting public gatherings and closing schools and daycare centers, while 78% support closing restaurants and bars. Whitmer ordered those measures days after the states first COVID-19 case was discovered on March 10, followed by a broader stay home" order requiring most businesses to send their employees home from March 24 to April 13.

Whitmers actions to handle the coronavirus outbreak garnered approval from 69% of Michigan respondents. That includes 61% of self-identified Republicans and 60% of independents.

Michiganders are saying we strongly approve of how our governor is handling this crisis, said Terri Towner, professor of political science at Oakland University. When we see our state officials garnering higher approval, especially in the middle of the pandemic, its really interesting. We were surprised that those findings.

Michigan voters gave Whitmers COVID-19 response higher approval ratings than Trump (51%) Congress (44%). Trump is experiencing a boost in approval as well.

Trumps approval rating increased from a January Baldwin Wallace poll, though a slim majority of Michigan voters still report disapproval with how Trump is handling the presidency. Survey respondents were closely split, with 46% approving of Trumps performance and 49% disapproving, within the polls margin of error.

Were calling this a rally around the flag effect, which is unusual, Towner said. Normally, we see this when were talking about conflict -- 9/11, the Iraq war and the Vietnam war -- but the president is dubbing the coronavirus as a war and a war were going to win. Thats clever. Its important messaging to the American people that this is a war that were going to fight.

Trump opened a Wednesday evening press conference by saying America continues to gain ground in the war against the virus, and previously said he views himself as a wartime president.

Whitmer said in multiple interviews the federal government has been slow to provide states with vital medical equipment and coronavirus tests.

A partisan divide still remains when voters were asked about Trumps COVID-19 response. Only 26% of Democrats approve of his performance, compared to 85% of Republicans and 47% of independents.

Meanwhile, 73% of Democrats and 53% of independents say they cant trust what Trump says about the coronavirus pandemic.

A supermajority of voters say the coronavirus is a real threat, but Republicans are more likely to say that the pandemic has been blown out of proportion. The president has faced criticism, including from Whitmer, for downplaying the impact COVID-19 earlier in the year.

As the pandemic unfolded, there was a tendency for conservative media outlets to call the virus a hoax and that the virus spread was over-exaggerated, Towner said. Its clear that this media coverage has left a lasting impression on some voters.

Michigan residents across the board are worried about how the pandemic will affect their wallets.

The poll was released on the same day new unemployment figures were reported from the U.S. Department of Labor. Michigan had 129,298 new unemployment claims filed for the week ending on March 21, a massive increase from the 5,338 filed the week before.

Nationally, almost 3.3 million Americans filed new unemployment claims, setting a new record for seasonally adjusted claims. The previous record of 695,000 is nearly five times smaller.

Nine out of 10 Michigan voters are concerned about how COVID-19 will impact the economy, with 61% of people reporting that they are very concerned.

Fifty-one percent of respondents expect the economy to get worse during the next year, and 78% are worried about the impact on their personal finances.

Health care issues remain the top factor for Michigan voters in the presidential election, followed by the economy. Women were more inclined to list health care as their top issue.

The poll found 38% of voters in Michigan reported they would vote for Trump if the election were held today, the lowest among the four states, while would 47% vote for either of the Democratic Partys candidates. Independent voters were more likely to support a Democrat by 7 percentage points, but a third of independents remain undecided.

Democratic front-runner Joe Biden easily won Michigans March primary and has a strong lead in the delegate count, though U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. has not announced any plans to drop out. Michigan voters who said they may vote against Trump depending on who becomes the nominee preferred Biden by a 20 point margin.

The survey polled 997 self-identified registered voters from March 17 to March 25 using Qualtrics, an online sample aggregator. Sampled individuals were emailed by Qualtrics and responded using a personalized link to the survey.

The results were weighted by gender, education, race and the annual household income to represent each states population. Michigans results have a 3.7% margin of error.

CORONAVIRUS PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

Complete coverage of coronavirus in Michigan

More on MLive

Read all of MLives coverage on the coronavirus at mlive.com/coronavirus.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.
The Berejiklian government will spend $750 million on keeping businesses afloat, creating new jobs and retraining employees as part of a second, small-scale, stimulus package.

As the state faces dire economic conditions amid the worsening coronavirus crisis, NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet said the latest instalment took spending on jobs to $1 billion.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Treasurer Dominic Perrottet, who says the latest spending measures were designed for maximum impact. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

Last week the government announced it would spend $2.3 billion on the crisis, including boosting intensive care units, buying critical equipment such as ventilators and setting up respiratory clinics. This first round of stimulus measures included an extra $700 million in health and $1.6 billion in tax relief for small businesses.

The second stage of the package does not include funding to help commercial and business tenants affected by the crisis. Those measures are being considered by the national cabinet.
Gun sales have exploded in the United States in the last two weeks as the Covid-19 coronavirus crisis has worsened. People are stocking up on weapons and ammunition, fearing that the pandemic may lead to social unrest. Even in Europe, which has tighter weapons regulations, arms sales are on the rise as well.

Since California, New York and 14 other US states issued Shelter-in-place orders, instructing people to stay in their homes to limit the spread of the coronavirus, gun sales all over the US have shot up.

"We have had about an 800 per cent increase in sales," said David Stone, owner of a gun store in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "I'm getting close to running out."

Fear driving sales

Stone told the French news agency AFP that the majority of the customers rushing to stock up on firearms and ammunition are first-time buyers grabbing anything available.

"It's fear over coronavirus," he said. "I don't understand it myself and I think it's unreasonable."

Several other store owners across the US said they have also seen a surge in sales as people fear social order will unravel if the health and economic crisis caused by Covid-19 escalates.

The Northwest Herald, a local newspaper in Chrystal Lake, Illinois, described a long line of customers waiting outside the Marengo gun shop, its website carrying an ad proclaiming March 1-31 the "month of madness," offering "25 per cent off all used guns". State police said that requests for firearm transfers have increased considerably.

Gun stores managed to stay open

The Illinois lockdown prohibits all public gatherings of any number of people outside a single household or a living unit, closes places of amusement, forbids all but essential travel and establishes social distancing requirements.

Like the French lockdown, the order also closes non-essential services. But firearm and ammunition suppliers and retailers are exempt from the provisions for purposes of safety and security.

Story continues

According to a statement by the Illinois State Police, the Firearm Services Bureau received a high volume of submissions since Friday, 13 March, according to spokesperson Jacqueline Cepeda, Through 18 March, the FSB had received 18,980 inquiries. The FSB is working to process these requests as efficiently as possible to ensure a timely response.

Stricter controls

In the US, where the right to own a gun is enshrined in the Constitutions Second Amendment, increased gun sales in times of crisis are not unusual. According to the Small Arms Survey, individuals in the US possess over 393 million firearms, of which the vast majority are not registered. The average is 120 weapons for every 100 inhabitants.

In Europe, where gun legislation is much stricter than in the US, the corresponding figure is 5 guns per 100 inhabitants. But, even in Europe, weapons sales are on the rise as the coronavirus crisis deepens.

According to the Reuters news agency, gun shops in Hungary have been selling between five and ten times more weapons this month than usual. The agency quotes the Czech arms manufacturers association as saying that shop owners have reported rising demand and a double-digit increase in sales.
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Linkedin Arya Dipa (The Jakarta Post) Bandung  Thu, March 26, 2020 12:26 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d7fe65 1 National novel-coronavirus,West-Java,Bandung-West-Java,Hasan-Sadikin-Hospital,COVID-19,COVID-19-Indonesian-patients,coronavirus Free

Hasan Sadikin Hospital in Bandung, West Java, has planned to add more isolation rooms to accommodate a surge of COVID-19 patients.



The hospital's director of the Medical, Nursing and Support Department, Nucki Nursjamsi, said the additional rooms could take in up to 200 patients.



"It's part of our second scenario to open inpatient care for up to 200 COVID-19 patients in the hospital," Nucki told The Jakarta Post via video message on Wednesday.



However, Nucki said the isolation rooms were not ready yet as the hospital was still waiting for ventilator machines.



Previously, Hasan Sadikin Hospital president director Nina Susana Dewi said she would turn the hospital's tuberculosis isolation rooms into COVID-19 isolation rooms.



"We already have five special isolation rooms. [If we] add the 24 tuberculosis isolation rooms we would have 29 rooms in total [for COVID-19 patients]," Nina said.



Nina said the hospital would cooperate with other hospitals and the local health agency to transfer the tuberculosis patients so that they could be treated in other hospitals.

If all beds in the 29 isolation rooms were occupied, Nina said, the hospital would use other rooms in the same building to accommodate more COVID-19 patients. The hospital would then have a total of 252 beds.

The hospital's director of operational and general affairs, Muhammad Kamaruzzaman, said the protective gear for the medical personnel taking care of COVID-19 patients would last the next 10 days.



"As long as we don't have a sudden surge in COVID-19 patients, the protective gear could last the next 10 days," he told the Post on Tuesday.



Kamaruzzaman said the hospital was currently treating 24 COVID-19 patients and suspected patients, an increase of 11 people from the previous day.



"Of the 24 patients, 11 tested positive for COVID-19, increasing by five from yesterday," he said.



The confirmed COVID-19 patients, he said, comprised six men and five women aged 24 to 61 years old.

Indonesia has 790 COVID-19 cases and 58 deaths. West Java is the province with the second-most cases after Jakarta with 73 confirmed cases and 10 deaths. (nal)
Senate Republicans and Democrats have reached a deal on the largest stimulus package in American history, passing the bill in a 96-0 vote late last night. Four quarantined senators were not present for the vote.

Designed to stave off economic downturn spurred by the coronavirus, the legislation injects $2 trillion into businesses, states and households. For comparison, the Troubled Asset Relief Bailout in 2008 was $700 billion and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was $831 billion. The bill will now need to clear the House, but leaders from both parties have signaled that it will pass, possibly by a voice vote, Friday morning.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin negotiated many of the latest changes with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and President Donald Trump has said he will quickly sign the final version into law. After a week of heated debate, the final deal includes direct one-time payments of $1,200 to most Americans, expanded unemployment insurance for people out of work, and $500 billion in federal loans for major corporations and municipalities hit by the COVID-19-spurred economic downturn.

Washington, DC, is generally plagued with gridlock so this bill actually came together pretty quickly -- though it may have felt like an eternity for newly out-of-work Alabamians. The agreement was reached, in part, by both sides getting much of what they want.

So whats in the bill?

Stimulus checks

One of the most high-profile pieces of the bill is the checks individual households will receive. Its been a hotly debated topic over the last week as the bill went through several rounds of revisions. Heres what we know about the stimulus checks right now.

Who gets a check: Under the Senate bill, single American taxpayers would receive a one-time check of $1,200. Married couples filing jointly would get $2,400. Parents in qualifying households would also get $500 for each child under age 17. If youve already filed your 2019 taxes, your income will be based on that. Otherwise, it will be based on your 2018 tax returns.

But: Payments would be less for individuals with adjusted gross incomes of more than $75,000, or couples with more than $150,000 -- decreasing at a rate of $5 for every additional $100 of income.

Individuals making more than $99,000 -- or couples with no children who make more than $198,000 -- will not receive checks.

Earlier versions of the bill would not have included checks for lower-income individuals who did not have taxable income, but the current version of the bill should include most Americans under the $75,000 threshold.

When will you get your check: Thats unclear at this point but were likely still three weeks away, even after it is signed into law by President Trump. In 2001, it took taxpayers six weeks to receive rebate checks, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has indicated he hopes to have this done in three weeks, with at least some checks being distributed by April 6. More people have filed online than ever before and so some may receive their payments as a direct deposit.

Unemployment insurance

Unemployment insurance will be increased by $600 per week up to for four months. That money will supplement what states pay as a base unemployment salary; in Alabama thats just $250 per week. Of note, the bill also creates a new Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that will help furloughed workers, gig economy workers and freelancers.

This became an unexpected hurdle in the final completion of the bill. Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Ben Sasse (Neb.) and Rick Scott (Fla.), argued that the benefits were too generous and could incentivize some workers to take unemployment rather than work. Graham cited nurses as an example of people who may drop out of the workforce. Mnuchin countered that it would be too difficult to assign benefits on a case by case basis. The four senators offered an amendment to the stimulus bill that was rejected, but all four senators ultimately voted for the final bill.

Unemployment claims are spiking in Alabama, with 31,000 new claims filed since Sunday -- already three times more than the 9,000 claims filed last week. Nationwide, a record 3.28 million people filed for unemployment last week.

Corporate loans

Republicans secured a $500 billion loan program for corporations and Democrats were able to put in some safeguards and accountability including oversight panels, and a requirement that companies owned by the president, vice president, members of Congress or Cabinet cannot receive the funds. That also applies to children and spouses of government officials. Additionally, Schumer offered a last minute amendment that guarantees the terms of all loans must be made public within seven days.

However, a Washington Post analysis points out that several of the businesses carved out for funding, such as airlines, were also bailed out 12 years ago and used the funds for stock buybacks. Language to prevent such buybacks was not included in the final bill, but its possible it would fall under the purview of the oversight committees.

Small business and local funds

Theres also $367 billion in loans available for small businesses, designed to enable businesses to retain employees they would have otherwise had to lay off.

The bill also includes $130 billion for hospitals, health worker protections and equipment, and another $150 billion for state and local emergency aid. Its unclear at this point how much Alabama and its cities will receive.

What else?

Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said in a press release that the bill contains the following provisions, among others," that will impact Alabama (note - some of these funds are included in the analysis above):

$150 billion for State and Local Governments;

$45 billion for the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund;

$1.5 billion for State and Local Preparedness Grants;

$3.5 billion for Child Care Development Block Grants;

$250 million for Hospital Preparedness;

$100 billion for Reimbursements for Health Care Providers;

$30.75 billion for the Education Stabilization Fund;

$400 million for First Responder Grants;

$10 billion for Airport Improvements Grants;

$1.5 billion for Economic Development Administration Grants;

$450 million for the Emergency Food Assistance Program;

$350 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program;

$349 billion for Small Business Administration Loan Guarantees;

$425 million for Mental and Behavioral Health Services;

$265 million for Small Business Grants for Counseling, Training, and Related Assistance;

$300 million for Fishery Disaster Assistance;

$850 million for Byrne JAG Grants; and

$23.5 billion for Support for Agricultural Producers.

Tonight, the Senate came together to pass a much stronger, bipartisan bill that will get more money to working folks, small businesses, and our health care workers on the front linesbut this won't be our last step.



In the meantime, take care of yourselves & each other, folks. pic.twitter.com/uEvtdtP4hE  Doug Jones (@SenDougJones) March 26, 2020

Edited at 10:15 a.m. on March 26 to include the cost of the 2009 stimulus package.
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is scheduled to address a press conference here at 1 pm today.

The conference will be held at the Media Centre.

The government is soon also likely to unveil an economic stimulus package as the country battles the coronavirus, a source from Finance Ministry had told ANI on Wednesday.

The package will be focused on micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and daily wage workers besides injecting liquidity in the market, added the source.

The total number of COVID-19 cases in India has risen to 649, including 593 active cases and 42 people who have been cured or discharged from hospitals, the Ministry of Health said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The spin-off series has been a huge hit in the US since its release on Disney+ in November and UK fans are suitably overjoyed at being able to watch the show.

However, the whole series hasn't arrived just yet and only the first two episodes of The Mandalorian are available.

The more traditional episodic release structure mirrors the American release, but due to the delay British fans were hoping to get the entire series in one go.

Disney unvelis first footage of The Mandalorian

We may earn commission from some of the links in this article, but we never allow this to influence our content.

When is The Mandalorian episode 3 out on Disney+?

You haven't go long to wait and there's just one day to go until episode three is available to watch. Get yourself a Disney+ account here to tune in as soon as it's released.

It will be out on Friday, March 27.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian 1 /24 Star Wars: The Mandalorian The Mandalorian is one of the most-anticipated shows from Disney's new streaming service AP  2019 Lucasfilm Ltd. & . All Riights Reserved. The Child (Baby Yoda) Lucasfilm Ltd Disney Disney Disney / YouTube Disney Disney via REUTERS Disney / YouTube Disney (c) 2019 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved. Disney Disney / YouTube Disney / Lucasfilm Star Wars The Mandalorian/ Disney The Mandalorian is one of the most-anticipated shows from Disney's new streaming service Lucasfilm Ltd

In the US, the episodes were released at 8am and it is expected UK releases will be the same - but it could change, so keep an eye on that schedule.

Disney is offering fans a free 7-day trial of Disney+. Standard pricing is 5.99 a month or 59.99 for an annual subscription. Sign up here.

What is The Mandalorian release schedule?

According to Games Radar, the episodes are set to be released on the following dates:
SINGAPORE  The Philippine Embassy reminds all Filipino nationals in Singapore who wish to return to the Philippines to leave as soon as possible following the city states order to close its borders to curb the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

As of Wednesday (March 25), only one flight is available to cater returning Filipinos to the Philippines from Singapore while all other commercial flights are already suspended.

Singapore Airlines (SIA) flight 910 is the only available flight back to Manila until Saturday (March 28), the Embassy said.

SIA 910 departs Singapore at 9:15am and arrives in Manila at 12:50pm of the same day, the Embassy added.

The Embassy reiterates its call to all Filipino tourists or workers with completed contracts in Singapore to return home to the Philippines at the earliest time while the SIA flight is still available.

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The post Last flight to PH until March 28 as Singapore shuts borders due to COVID-19 appeared first on UNTV News.
K A Badarinath By

A comprehensive economic response to the coronavirus pandemic is perhaps the most unenviable task any finance minister would have ever faced. Even for the best number-crunching economists, estimating the impact of the deadly virus poses an indomitable challenge. Given its all-pervasive nature, the Chinese virus may result in a complete wipeout of the projected 4-5% GDP growth estimated for 2020-21. A spillover would definitely be felt in the following year too. After the overwhelming support for the janata curfew, the Modi government will have to come up with a people-centric janata economic rescue package. The Covid-19 Economic Response Task Force headed by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman rolled out a slew of measures such as extending the deadline for payment of taxes by individuals and companies to June 30. The waiver of charges on ATM transactions and the reduction or no late fees on delayed tax payment would have very limited utility but were necessary.

Getting the economic response right is far more important than the measures announced till now by the finance minister. For that, understanding the deep impact of the virus spread would be necessary. Just as the lockdown will protect people by containing the community spread of the coronavirus, the governments economic package should have people, not industry, at the fulcrum. Over five crore people may have lost work opportunities either temporarily or in the medium-term in both the formal and informal sectors. This includes daily wagers to temporary employees and factory workers. Providing them with livelihood support apart from whatever their employers did should be the priority. Responding to industry calls for financial support, as has been the case with the electronics industry, or economists pushing for difficult reforms hitherto stuck cannot be the centrepiece of the response to the economic distress inflicted by the virus on daily-wage earners. For ideas, theres no harm in analysing responses of other countries. Canada has promised $900 every fortnight to those without paid sick leave or access to employment insurance sickness benefits. Similarly, the Donald Trump administration in the US has plans to give out $1,000 to every adult citizen as immediate relief.

Back home, states such as Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Kerala, Andhra and Tamil Nadu have responded with relief programmes that include cash support for the poor. Further, from subsidised ration, the governments have moved to free rice and wheat supply to support poor families that have lost their meagre earnings. The initial response shows that governments need to provide direct succour to the poor. Cash and food support should be delivered through direct benefit transfers that minimise the transaction costs. The Union finance minister has unfortunately prioritised postponing tax collection or waiving ATM charges rather than immediately responding to job losses and the impending food crisis that will seriously affect those below the poverty line.

Can this virus-induced near collapse of growth be revived through a universal basic income support scheme? The then finance minister Arun Jaitley had put the proposal for such a scheme mooted by then chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian in cold storage citing funds shortage. With modifications and amends, Sitharaman may consider a universal basic income support scheme for 660 million people who do not earn even $1.25 per day as wages. This could be dovetailed into the `6,000 annual income support provided to every farmers family through the Prime Ministers Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana. This amount could be doub- led as a one-time dole this financial year.More money with the urban poor and rural small farmers has the potential to revive consumption demand that is at the lowest ebb and will provide indirect stimulus to industrial manufacturing, which has seriously been faltering, especially after the spread of the virus. More money with farmers would also mean that it would boost farm growth that has the potential to cross 4%. The Aadhaar-linked Jan Dhan Yojanas no-frills 356 million bank accounts opened in the last few years should be the easiest and fastest way to reach immediate liquid funds to people.

Broadly sticking to the path of economic prudence while allowing for some deviation, the finance minister should utilise the over Rs 2,00,000 crore savings from the fall of crude prices to just over $20 per barrel to fund the janata economic package. In this crisis situation, the around Rs 3 per litre increase in diesel and petrol prices through duty hikes last fortnight may have to be withdrawn forthwith. For the middle class, rescheduling repayments on housing and personal loans should be an option that the government can consider in consultation with banks. Interest and penalty waivers, and providing larger income tax exemptions along with late payments on taxes announced should be considered by the finance minister

Parallelly, the Centre should think of providing an economic rehabilitation package to the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that have taken a direct hit in the last few weeks. American experience in this regard should serve as a reminder while designing the package. Airlines in the US had used an earlier monetary support to fund buybacks and dabble in stock markets rather than use the money for acquisitions and expansion of capacities in infrastructure. Back home, the huge cut in corporate taxes by 25% last September to boost economic growth did not yield much in terms of new brown field projects or expansions. Instead, most industry players have utilised the lower tax liabilities to park funds abroad, undertake stock market operations and initiate buybacks apart from retiring high cost debt. Hence, the finance minister has to tread very cautiously and get the economic response package right. Frittering away meagre resources may have serious consequences for the Indian economy.

K A Badarinath

The writer is a New Delhi-based senior journalist and an economic analyst

Email: badarinath61@gmail.com
New York Approves Hospitals Using One Ventilator to Treat Two Patients

Hospitals in New York can use one ventilator to treat two COVID-19 patients, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced on Thursday.

The state projects a need for 30,000 ventilators and only has 15,000 on hand, officials said earlier in the week.

The New York State Department of Health approved a protocol developed by New York-Presbyterian Hospital that enables a ventilator to treat multiple patients. Its done by adding a second set of tubes to a ventilator so it can serve two patients.

Cuomo called the technique not ideal, but workable.

At a press conference earlier this week, the governor said the procedure splitting the ventilators was experimental.

We use one ventilator for two patients. Its difficult to perform, its experimental, but at this point we have no alternatives, he said.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, left, discusses the arrival of a shipment of 400 ventilators with Dr. Steven Pulitzer, the Chief Medical Officer of NYC Health and Hospitals, at the citys Emergency Management Warehouse in New York City on March 24, 2020. (Mark Lennihan/AP Photo)

New York had 4,000 ventilators in its system and bought another 7,000. The federal government was sending 4,000, some of which had already arrived. The state is still shopping for additional ventilators and is also converting several thousand anesthesia machines to ventilators. In normal times, the machines cost around $30,000 each.

Patients with COVID-19 in intensive care units in hospitals are essentially in regular hospital beds with a ventilator, state officials have said. As of Thursday, 660 patients are in ICUs across the state.

Officials are seeing patients with the new illness, which is caused by the CCP virus from China, remain on ventilators much longer than patients with other illnesses.

The average time on a ventilator for a non-COVID-19 patient is three to four days. Patients with COVID-19 are on ventilators for, on average, 11 to 21 days. Some patients are on them for up to 30 days.

You dont have the same turnaround for the number of ventilators, Cuomo said.

Ventilators are machines that help lungs work. Theyre typically used during recovery from some surgeries, for people suffering from serious conditions like a brain injury or lung disease, and for babies with premature lung development. The machines pump oxygen into a persons body while removing carbon dioxide. Most require electricity while some can function on battery power.

The tubes of a ventilator, center, at a hospital in Germany on March 25, 2020. (Axel Heimken/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Modifying Ventilators

A study exploring increasing ventilator capacity first came in the 2000s when two researchers successfully modified a ventilator to stimulate care for four adults at the same time, though they noted it was only for a limited time.

Later in 2017, Dr. Kevin Menes later remembered that study while treating victims of the mass shooting in Las Vegas and was able to use single ventilators to treat multiple patients.

Dr. Craig Smith, chief surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, said in a note to staff this week that the hospitals have been carefully manag[ing] two patients on one ventilator.

Dr. Charlene Irvin Babcock, who co-authored the study looking at increasing capacity, said in a recent video that the study just looked at simple equipment available in the emergency department and a way to modify the ventilator to ventilate four patients.

The six-minute clip shows Babcock, now an emergency medicine physician at St. John Hospital and Medical Center in Detroit, illustrating how to modify ventilators.

Other efforts are underway around the nation to boost existing ventilator capacity or find alternative solutions to the dearth of the machines.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego said on Thursday that theyre developing simple, ready-to-use ventilators built with premade and 3D-printed parts. The team hopes to have functional prototypes by next week.

Our aim is to have functional devices as soon as possible, Dr. Lonnie Petersen, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, said in a statement. Once weve got the bare bones system up and running, we can start adding layers of sophistication and automation. Those additional layers will include advanced regulation of air pressure and flow to allow for a more disease-specific and patient-tailored respiratory support.

A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, meanwhile, is working to create a simple, inexpensive alternative to a ventilator using a hand-operated plastic pouch called a bag-valve resuscitator, or Ambu bag, which hospitals already have on hand in large quantities.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 11:27:39|Editor: huaxia

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CANBERRA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The Australian Army is preparing to deploy reservists to assist with the Australian Defence Force's response to coronavirus.

The Guardian Australia on Thursday published an email sent by Carmen Sieger, the acting director of the directorate of contingent workforce management army, earlier in March in which Sieger called on reservists for help if they had the willingness and capacity for work "likely to result from our current environment."

It would be the second time in 2020 if reservists will be deployed in response to the crisis.

The other time that such action has been taken was at the height of Australia's bushfire crisis in January when about 3,000 reservists were deployed to help with recovery.

In the email Sieger asked reservists to provide their skill set as well as the type of work they would be willing to do.

"This is normal practice for Defence - to plan and prepare for support to Commonwealth, state and territory authorities in times of need," a spokesperson for the defence department told the Guardian.

"We are focused on ensuring the continuity of our essential tasks and functions to enable us to respond to, and sustain, current and potential commitments."

Minister for Defence Linda Reynolds, who previously served as the Army Adjutant General, on Monday announced an escalation of the ADF's role in Australia's response to the virus.

ADF personnel have begun helping overwhelmed health authorities trace transmission of the virus in Australia as well as providing reconnaissance, planning and logistical support.
The disconcerting thing about this pandemic is behavior that we cant control. Moron behavior.

You could be sitting at home right now, playing it safe, taking this seriously, and doing your part in helping society get through a difficult time. Then you get jabronies who come in and ruin it for everybody else, because theyre selfish and immature.

Via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Police in Luzerne County are looking to pursue charges against a woman who intentionally coughed on $35,000 worth of food at Gerritys Supermarket on Wednesday. The eastern Pennsylvania grocery store chain announced the incident on its Facebook page and said it was forced to throw out thousands of dollars worth of produce, meat, bakery items and groceries after a woman known to be a chronic problem in the community came in and purposely coughed all over the food. Joe Fasula, co-owner of Gerritys Supermarket, called it a twisted prank  presumably to scare shoppers during the coronavirus outbreak  and said that local police were contacted immediately after associates removed the woman from the store. Mr. Fasula said the store had not yet quantified the total loss, but estimated the value of the tossed food to be well over $35,000.

Heres another tidbit from Fasula, via the Facebook post:

Our incredible team did the best they could to get the woman out of the store as fast as possible. The police were contacted immediately and the case has been escalated to the District Attorneys Office. They have assured me that they will be aggressively pursuing numerous charges. In addition, while we do not believe the woman is truly infected, they will make every effort to see that she is tested.

What is appropriate punishment for this woman? Jail? 100,000 hours of community service? Should she be forced to rewatch the 2015 Phillies season in its entirety?

Heres a suggestion via Ron on Facebook:

I present the motion of having each member of the community cough on her

Good idea. Its an eye for an eye, a cough for a cough. King Hammurabi would approve.

Here are some more photos that Fasula posted online:

What a waste.
Mumbai, March 26 : Actor Anil Kapoor says his 1990 release "Kishen Kanhaiya" has a special place in his heart.

The actor reminisced about the Rakesh Roshan directorial as it turned 30. The actor said that he is constantly "reminded of all the love and appreciation that the movie has received over the years".

"Madhuri Dixit and I have worked in a lot of films together and every film has a set of memories which cannot be forgotten," Anil said.

"'Kishen Kanhaiya' was, and continues to be one of my favorite films. My double role in the film gave me an opportunity to explore two very different personalities - one strong and macho and the other soft and vulnerable. On the occasion of its 30 year milestone, I'm reminded of all the love and appreciation that the movie has received over the years," he added.

The film is about twin brothers, Kishen and Kanhaiya, who are separated at birth. One is raised in a mansion and the other in a poor family. They reunite in a bid to fight evil.

The film will air on Zee Bollywood on March 28.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Zoroastrians In India Send Second Relief Shipment To Iran

03/26/20

Source: Radio Farda

The New Delhi Parsi Association has sent its second relief cargo, including medicine and medical equipment, to coronavirus-hit Iran, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC)-linked Fars news agency reported.

Tweet by Sepanta Niknam, a leader of Iran's Zoroastrian community in Iran

       #     #_          .#                  :#         pic.twitter.com/a0gGZwFivg    (@NiknamSepanta) March 25, 2020

Followers of the Iranian monotheist prophet, Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, (c. 1500 BC - 1000 BC) in India are called Parsis, or Parsees. The Parsis moved from Iran to India during the 7th century AD to flee persecution from Muslim Arabs who had conquered the Persian Empire.



As a dwindling community that struggles to survive, they live chiefly in Mumbai, but also in Karachi (Pakistan) and Bengaluru (Karnataka, India). The number of Parsis in New Delhi, today, 700.



In the official census of 2001, the Parsis numbered 69,601, representing about 0.006% of the total population of India.



Parsis are renowned for being the most successful religious minority in the whole subcontinent.



In Iran itself, Zoroastrians are the oldest religious community. Before the Muslim conquest of Persia, Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion in the Persian Empire.



According to the Islamic Republic's official census, there were 25,271 Zoroastrians in the country as of 2011.



According to Fars News Agency (Fars News Agency), the second cargo sent by the New Delhi Parsis was carried to Iran by the IRGC-controlled Mahan Airlines on Wednesday, March 25. In the meantime, 137 citizens of Iran returned from India on the same Mahan Airline flight.



In an emergency flight, Mahan Airline plane left India at a time that all local and international flights were suspended.



Based on the FNA report, the consignment sent by the Parsis consisted of products urgently needed by the Iranian health sector to fight the novel coronavirus and its related disease, Covid-19.



Based on the latest data, there are 1,200 Indians living in Iran who are mainly pilgrims and students. Three hundred eighty-nine citizens of India have so far returned to their homeland.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 01:54:09|Editor: yan

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RABAT, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Morocco received a U.S. grant of 670,000 U.S. dollars from the United States to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19 as confirmed cases soared to 275 in the North African country.

"With longstanding partners like Morocco, we are working together to improve global capacity to contain outbreaks at their source and minimize their impact," U.S. Ambassador in Rabat Davis Fischer said in a tweet on Thursday.

These investments and the U.S.-Morocco partnership are critical to rapidly and effectively prepare for emerging threats, including the current COVID-19 outbreak, he added.

The grant was offered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)'s Emergency Reserve Fund for Contagious Infections and Diseases.

Moroccan Ministry of Health confirmed on Thursday 50 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the total number to 275.
Sydney, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Poly Centre Sydneys Air Village design recently received international acclaim, winning the MIPIM Architectural Reviews Future Project Award for office and office led development. The awards celebrate global excellence in unbuilt projects.

The development at 210 George Street was judged on how it enhances the immediate surroundings, as well as how the design creates an environment in which workplace productivity can flourish.

Poly New South Wales Design Manager Jack Qian said the company is thrilled the design, created by global architecture firm Grimshaw, has been internationally recognised.

We have worked collaboratively with Grimshaw to achieve an enlightened Air Village concept, focusing on daylight, connectivity and vibrant public realms, with prestigious finishes and creative architectural integrations to deliver a working environment never seen before in the Sydney business district.

We are honoured that global real estate market leaders MIPIM and The Architectural Review considers Poly Centre Sydney as a world-class upcoming office development, he said.

Poly Centre Sydneys evolutionary Air Village design was sculpted with the intention to present an aspirational, free-flowing workplace destination within Sydneys business district. The dual floor design acts to provide a new level of open plan working, inducing an increased energy, connectivity and productivity for businesses.

Grimshaw Managing Partner Andrew Cortese said the optimisation of natural light, air and open spaces was pivotal in encapsulating the essence of the development.

"The design intends to recover the ability of life within the workplace to animate the life of the street and make architecture where work can be enjoyed.

The building is conceived as a series of double-height tenancies with a sculptural spatial volume, material character and amenity brought about by the twin floor plate coupling. Expressive and sculptural in form, the tripartite composition of elements resolve vertically through counterpoised arched volumes.

The west facing podium facade is formed with vaulting, cantilevered arches enclosing a continuous double height workplace extending out to the external terraces. The vertical blades that shift in orientation enable a civic scale to the street while giving enabling transparency, shade and shadow to the western sun, Mr Cortese said.

The 27-storey tower is scheduled for completion at the end of 2021. The development is targeting a PCA A Grade, 5 Star Green Star and 5 Star NABERS Energy rating.

Commercial tenant queries for Poly Centre Sydney can be taken through co-agents Robert Gishen, Tom Buxton and Jock Gilchrist from Colliers International and Alex Wong and Linda Ko from JLL. Retail enquiries can be directed to Alex Alamsyah of Knight Frank.

For more information on Poly Global vist www.polyglobal.cohttps://polyglobal.com/

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How Books and Buckets program in Long Beach aims to keep kids away from gang violence
In a video that has now gone viral on social media, doctors at a hospital in Bhilwara, Rajasthan who have been working tirelessly to tend to patients diagnosed with coronavirus can be seen singing a popular song, 'Chhodon Kal Ki Baatein' to cheer themselves up.

While the whole nation is figuring out how to survive a lockdown where only essential services are still available, medical practitioners and healthcare providers are working around the clock to ensure that patients receive the best possible treatment.

Bhilwara in Rajasthan is one of the worst hit places in India where at least half of the state's positive coronavirus cases have been confirmed.

The video, which has been shared by Twitter user Rohit Kumar Singh, shows six doctors singing the song while still dressed in protective gear.

At the epicentre of COVID 19 in Rajasthan Government Hospital in Bhilwara - Drs Mushtaq, Gaur & Prajapat, paramedics Mukesh, Sain, Gyan, Urwashi, Sarfaraz and Jalam are working 24*7 to beat Coronavirus. Take a bow, you are our true heroes!This is the spirit of new India  pic.twitter.com/97ziZUrXOS Rohit Kumar Singh (@rohitksingh) March 25, 2020

This is how people reacted:

Sir, We are very proud of you, in your able leadership team of medical staff is doing great job in this COVID19 crisis. Shakti Singh Rathore (@ShaktiRathore17) March 25, 2020

Superb Mukesh Kejariwal (@Mukesh_k) March 26, 2020

You are the saviours. Thank you. Sanghamitra Malik (@Ilovehyderabad) March 25, 2020
More than 500,000 volunteers have signed up to support the NHS in helping vulnerable people who have been told not to leave their homes during the coronavirus crisis, as the UK death toll hit 465. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said while addressing the issue in a press conference that the UK government is coping very well indeed under the most challenging possible circumstances and that they are massively ramping up testing.

Volunteering in Government Scheme

Nearly five people per second enlisted in the governments new volunteering scheme in the hours after the health secretary, Matt Hancock, launched a call on March 24 for 250,000 people in England to help bolster the NHS response to the Covid-19 pandemic. About 11,000 former medics have also agreed to return to the health service and more than 24,000 final year student nurses and medics will join them.

Read:Govt Looks For Volunteer Doctors To Fight COVID-19 Outbreak

Read:5,000 Volunteers Sign Up For Coronavirus Vaccine Trial In Wuhan

Overnight the number of volunteers who had pledged support topped 170,000, and as the day went on the target was smashed. Johnson opened up about the same in a press conference and said that the stats are already, in one day and as many people as the population of Coventry are joining hands to save the country. The figure now stands at 504,303. The overwhelming response has prompted the NHS to extend its target to recruit 750,000 volunteers in total. Those volunteers who have already signed up will start next week.

As the coronavirus death toll in the UK rose to 422 people as of 10 am on March 25, the government called on fit and healthy adults to deliver vital supplies such as food and medicines to up to 1.5 million vulnerable people, drive them home after being discharged from hospital and make regular phone calls to those in self-isolation.

Meanwhile, the Prince of Wales tested positive for Covid-19. Clarence House announced that Prince Charles, 71, is self-isolating at home in Scotland with his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, 72, who does not have the virus. As per the reports, a statement issued from the Clarence House read that it is not possible to know who he had caught it from due to a high number of engagements in recent weeks.

Figures released from NHS England show there were 28 deaths over the latest recorded 24-hour period, bringing the death toll in England to 414. There have also been 22 deaths so far in Scotland, 22 in Wales and seven in Northern Ireland, according to the latest available figures. The government scheme to recruit 250,000 helpers - who must be over 18 and in good health - went live on March 24.

Read:Virtual Volunteers Offer Help To Strangers Amid Virus Stress

Read:New Hampshire Seeks Volunteers, Stay-at-home Order Resisted
Cutting-edge technology in trendsetting Auroral Blue and Midnight Black colours up for grabs on OPPO's Official Website and E-commerce partners' Noon and Amazon

DUBAI, UAE, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- OPPO's latest Reno3 Series is now available for the UAE consumers on OPPO's Official Website and E-commerce partners' Noon and Amazon. Equipped with 44MP+2MP Dual Punch-Hole camera and powered by the all-new ColorOS7, the OPPO Reno3 Series is a powerhouse of design and smartphone innovation.

Inspired by the natural skylights, Reno3 Series comes in two stunning back colours, Auroral Blue and Midnight Black, echoing the beauty of nature. The OPPO Reno3 Pro with 8GB RAM and 256GB ROM, 64MP Zoom Quadcam, 44MP Dual Front Camera with Ultra Night Selfie Mode, and Super AMOLED Display, is priced at AED 1,899, while the OPPO Reno3 with 8GB RAM and 128GB ROM, 48MP Zoom Quadcam, 44MP Front Camera is priced at AED 1,399.

Ethan Xue, President, OPPO Middle East and Africa, said, "Since our entry into the global market in 2009, OPPO has stayed true to its core belief of being a global brand with local insight. The revolutionary camera capabilities of the Reno3 Series are set to impress UAE's tech-savvy consumers. We keep consumer-centric innovation at the heart of our product strategy and will to continue to bring products and services that are meaningful to our regional consumers."

The OPPO Reno series continues to be admired by technology fans around the world with its exemplary cameras ever since the launch of the first Reno Series last year. Featuring OPPO's latest ColorOS 7, Reno3 Series is set to take users on a vibrant journey of colourful and clear photos in every shot.

Experience the All-time Clarity with Reno3 Pro

Reno3 Pro is packed with 64MP Zoom Quadcam which includes 64MP Ultra-clear Main Camera, 13MP Telephoto Lens, 8MP Ultra Wide-angle Lens and 2MP Mono Lens. The super high pixel and ultra-clear primary camera perceives the light more keenly, and captures finer details, making the photos more clear and vivid.

Additionally, OPPO's signature Ultra Steady Video has evolved into Ultra Steady Video 2.0 on Reno3 Pro. Together with Video Bokeh, Video Zoom and AI Beauty Mode, Reno3 Pro stimulates the imagination of users by rendering movie-like videos efficiently. Soloop, the Smart Video Editor comes in handy for beginners who can confidently start recording life stories via videos.

Well-Recognized Performances by Third Parties

Reno3 Series' outstanding performance is winning praises from global users and is also well recognized by internationally renowned institutions. Reno3 Pro has obtained the Full Care Display Certification of TUV Rheinland, which demands the highest standard of display quality and eye protection technology. This certification confirms OPPO's leading position in the display field and the company's constant efforts in enhancing the consumer experience. While OPPO's latest VOOC Flash Charge 4.0 on Reno3 Pro received the TUV Rheinland Safe Fast-Charge System Certification for its fast charging speed and also passed the 50% charge in 20min test by TUV Rheinland. Furthermore, the Dolby Certified audio and video capabilities of Reno3 Series allows users to immerse themselves in the world-class video and audio experience.

About OPPO

OPPO is a leading global technology brand, dedicated to providing products infused with art and innovative technology. Based on the brand elements of leading, young and beautiful, OPPO dedicates to the mission of letting the extraordinary users enjoy the beauty of technology.

For the last 10 years, OPPO has focused on manufacturing camera phones, while innovating mobile photography technology breakthroughs. Today, OPPO brings the aesthetics of technology to global consumers through smart devices, ColorOS, and Internet services like OPPO Cloud and OPPO+.

OPPO's business covers 40 countries and regions, and with 6 research institutes and 4 R&D centres around the world, as well as an International Design Center in London, providing an excellent smartphone photography experience to more and more young people around the world.

About OPPO MEA

In 2015, OPPO entered the Egyptian market. In 2016, OPPO set up its Middle East & Africa Sales Center in Cairo. The markets OPPO has entered in the Middle East and Africa including Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Kenya, Nigeria, and the Levant.

OPPO set up its factory in Algeria in 2017, which made OPPO the first Chinese brand setting up a factory in North Africa. Based on the insights of local consumers in each country, OPPO MEA has started the progress of localization. And the localization includes all the perspectives towards each market - product localization, to further meet the core needs of users; marketing localization, to better communicate with local young customers; and team localization, to know our local consumers also and provide better service to the consumers.

Within the last year, OPPO has started to adjust its product line in the Middle East region precisely. This has included the launch of its flagship OPPO Find X smartphone and the introduction of the OPPO Reno Series. OPPO will continue to evolve its local product line to offer more premium series to consumers in the region.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1138002/OPPO_Reno3.jpg

For more information, please contact:

Judy Zhu

Regional PR Manager

OPPO

Email: zhudi@oppo.com
The fun reason, she said, was to enjoy the countrys beautiful backpacking and hiking trails. Her mother, Patricia, who lives in Lincoln, is from El Salvador and Sack also wanted to work on her Spanish.

But there was a serious reason, too.

I have a strong passion for global public health, Sack said. I knew in Peru there were a lot of different avenues to help. Lima has really strong multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. That caught my attention from a policy standpoint.

About two weeks after arriving, in mid-March, the borders were closed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. A few people she knows made it out before the deadline. But Sack is staying with two fellow Americans in the town of Arequipa, with no way to get to Lima or Cusco even if flights were available.

Shes heard reports of Americans in Cusco being harassed by local police and feels lucky to be in a safe place. So far.
The person credited with saving the most lives ever is Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox vaccine. The disease had a much higher mortality rate than the novel coronavirus that is confining many people to their homes right now; about 80% of children and 60% of adults who contracted smallpox died of it. In the 20th century alone, it killed more than 300 million people before the vaccine eradicated it worldwide in 1979.

The polio vaccine is estimated to have saved 10 million people from paralysis just since 1988, and prevented 500,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. A global vaccination campaign for measles that began in 2000 prevented an estimated 23 million deaths by 2018, the organization reported.

But despite these extraordinary victories of science over disease, too many people have forgotten or are unaware of the havoc that certain diseases visited on the world before vaccines became available to fight them. This collective amnesia has allowed for the rise of the anti-vaccine movement, whose irresponsible adherents believe vaccines exist to line the pockets of Big Pharma. They ignore the fact that the smallpox vaccine was so overwhelmingly successful at eradicating the disease that it no longer is routinely given. Then there are the wild claims that autism is linked to vaccines, based on a fraudulent study that was long ago debunked.

Are anti-vaxxers ready to start believing in vaccines again?

As social distancing and other efforts to rein in the spread of COVID-19 are ramped up, people are understandably hoping for an Edward Jenner-like miracle in the form of a vaccine that would protect against the virus. When a scourge is upon us, immunization starts looking pretty good.

Theres encouraging news on this score, and discouraging news as well. This week, people have seen what seems like a bright promise in the darkness: a volunteer in Seattle receiving the first dose of an experimental vaccine against the novel coronavirus. It was developed by a Massachusetts company called Moderna, one of dozens of companies searching for a vaccine across the world. Israeli officials recently announced that a group of research scientists there were on the verge of offering a new vaccine candidate, as well. A San Diego biotech company is also working on the problem.

The speed of development has been made possible in part through the help of Chinese scientists who worked on sequencing the genetic material of the virus that causes COVID-19. But as fast as all this sounds, dont expect a coronavirus vaccine clinic to be opening near you anytime soon. Despite the claims of the anti-vaccine crowd that vaccines arent tested thoroughly enough before coming to market, they actually go through a longer and tougher process than most other drugs. Without fast-tracking, it usually takes 10 to 15 years for them to gain final approval in the United States.

In urgent situations, vaccines can be fast-tracked, but fast is a relative term. Public health officials have warned that even if these first vaccines continue to look good, a fast-tracked vaccine wont be available for 18 months, perhaps a little bit sooner. And the vaccine approach used by Moderna, using genetic material called messenger RNA, has not in the past resulted in any vaccine being brought to market, although that doesnt mean it couldnt work.

Even in dire situations, testing is critical. An ineffective vaccine could do more harm than good by giving people the false impression that theyre protected. But the United States and governments around the world should be supporting these vaccine-development efforts in every way possible, and fast-tracking those that appear safe and effective.

COVID-19 is upending our lives and our economy; of course we want a vaccine to stop it in its tracks as soon as possible. But come the time when  may it only happen  vaccines have rendered COVID-19 just a memory, its frightening to think that future generations who did not live through it may think of the vaccine as more problematic than the disease.

 Los Angles Times
TV broadcaster Gifty Anti has tested negative for COVID-19.She is among 1,000 persons who have been compulsorily quarantined and being tested after entering the country from coronavirus-hit countries.



Oheneyere, as she is referred to, in a statement, said she lost five kilos in five minutes while waiting to hear the test results.



Between hello I am Dr to the end of the 5-minute conversation, I lost 5 kilos!! Sharp. Chai!!, she stated.



The award-winning broadcast journalist said she is writing a book on her quarantine experience and urged Ghanaians to stay safe while obeying the protocols outlined to prevent the spread of the virus.



Ghana has recorded sixty-eight COVID-19 cases with two deaths.



Meanwhile, the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) has called on the government to lock down the country with immediate effect to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.



The GMA says only essential services such as food, water and medicine businesses should be allowed to operate.



The lockdown, though not a comfortable decision for leadership and citizens alike is a proven option backed by science and along with the other measures will ultimately be in our best interest.



We call on all Ghanaians to support such a move in the national interest to save our nation from the devastating effects of this pandemic, the GMA said in a press statement released Wednesday.









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Jenna Dewan's eldest is certainly excited about being a big sister.

The 39-year-old actress revealed that her six-year-old daughter with ex Channing Tatum, Everly, has been so 'excited' about newborn baby brother Callum.

Jenna told People magazine on Thursday that the two have been thick as thieves since their first encounter as she said: 'I was so excited for her to meet her little brother.

Sweet: Jenna Dewan revealed that her six-year-old daughter with ex Channing Tatum, Everly, has been so 'excited' about newborn baby brother Callum, as the mother and daughter are seen in Studio City, California in January

'She came to the hospital and it was adorable. She nuzzled him, she cuddled with him. She kept talking in a little baby voice and she was showing him pictures.'

It has even gotten to the point where Everly is lobbying for she and her new sibling to share a living space together.

Jenna said: 'She keeps asking me when she can share a room with him.'

The mother-of-two said that she did not want to be forceful in creating a relationship between the two but the eldest child has been exuberant in bonding with the youngster.

'Another day another cuddle' It has even gotten to the point where Everly is lobbying for she and her new sibling (pictured with Jenna) to share a room together

Former flame: Jenna shares Everly with ex-husband Channing Tatum (the former couple are seen together in London in September 29017) as their divorce was finalized November 20

The actress and host said: 'She always wants to hold Callum. I dont push him on her, but shes been so excited and very loving towards him and open and cuddly.'

The lovefest hasn't stopped there as the Step Up actress revealed that Everly has tried to help in the caring for her brother in any way she can.

Jenna explained: 'She knows to get the wipes [for diaper changes]. I encourage her to help.

'Good day': Jenna looked stunning as she cuddled with 18-day-old son Callum in a sweet snap posted onto her Instagram Story on Tuesday

'I let her pick out what hes going to wear during the day and his outfits for bedtime. She also has a lullaby that she likes to sing to him.'

Things seem to be going harmoniously in their household as Jenna has been enamored in observing 44-year-old fiance Steve Kazee become a dad for the first time.

Jenna gushed to People magazine on Wednesday: 'It was incredible to watch the awe in his eyes of experiencing birth for the very first time, and the first time he laid eyes on our son.

'It was beautiful': Though she definitely seems to be enjoying the experience of being a mother for a second time, Jenna has been most enamored in observing 44-year-old fiance Steve Kazee become a dad for the first time

'He was crying the whole time and he cut the umbilical cord. Seeing his transformation of becoming a dad was one of the best things Ive ever witnessed. It was beautiful. Birth is such a bonding experience, youre transformed at the end of it.'

As she also has Everly, Jenna felt very prepared before welcoming Callum.

She explained: 'Id heard this from a lot of people, that theres something that happens with the second baby, that theres a little bit more calm and peace in knowing whats happening.

'You are able to be a little more present': As she also has a six-year-old daughter, Everly, with ex-husband Channing Tatum, Jenna felt very prepared before welcoming Callum

'Knowing whats coming down the line, you are able to be a little more present and enjoy all of it and its so true.'

The Flirty Dancing host would play 20-minute Sanskrit prayer, The Devi Prayer, to aid in her relaxation including in the background while welcoming her second child via cesarean section.

She said: 'Its a very peaceful song. It always puts me at ease. I put that on our playlist and I said to Steve, "If I ever start to look like Im getting anxious or if I was having a rough time, just please play that." He was actually born to that song.'

Just a day prior looked stunning as she cuddled with 18-day-old son Callum in a sweet snap posted onto her Instagram Story on Tuesday.

Sweet: Jenna recently shared a cute video of Steve kissing his baby boy

Jenna has made a conscious effort to document the familys time in quarantine on Instagram - from cuddles with Callum to bonding time with dog Cosmo.

By engaging in a self-imposed quarantine, the couple are forced to limit all visitors, including family members.

A source close to the family told People: 'They are limiting visitors to try and keep everyone healthy. The pandemic is obviously extra worrisome with a newborn.'

Meanwhile, Dewan and ex-husband Channing Tatum's daughter Everly, six, is home for two weeks amid school closures.

Dewan and Kazee welcomed Callum into the world on March 6; Jenna shared this picture of herself and baby Callum to her Instagram on March 10

The insider continued: 'They all plan on just staying home She is trying to focus on her happiness and stay calm so she can be the best mom to her baby and Everly.

Steve has been great. He is changing diapers and carrying the baby around, said the insider of the first time father.

Dewan and Kazee welcomed Callum into the world on March 6, less than one month after they announced their engagement to the world via Instagram.

She posted a black-and-white selfie from the delivery room of the newborn sleeping on her shoulder, announcing the baby news.

Less than a month prior to Callums birth, Kazee proposed to Dewan during the couples babyshower; Jenna shared this portrait of herself and her fiance on January 6

The caption read: 'And just like that, our hearts exploded into all of eternity and beyond. Welcome to the world you little angel! Callum Michael Rebel Kazee 3/6/20.'

Kazee proposed to Dewan during her crystal-laden baby shower in February.

Dewan first met Kazee in 2012 while backstage at Manhattan's Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre where the Tony-winning thespian was performing his hit Broadway musical, Once.

I do! Kazee proposed to Dewan during her crystal-laden baby shower in February

They didn't begin dating until March 2018, seven months before the former back-up dancer filed for divorce from her ex-husband Channing Tatum, which was finalized November 20.

Tatum has moved on from Jenna with pop-star Jessie J.

The 39-year-old actor and the Price Tag songstress ended their 13-month relationship back in December, but got back together in January.
Steve Kazee has shared a portrait of new son Callum to social media.

The actor posted a close up shot of the little boy that he welcomed with fiancee Jenna Dewan on March 6. And in his captioned Steve hinted that the little one has had past lives.

'This kid already has it all figured out. This is definitely not his first go round the cosmic wheel,' began the theater vet.

New shot: Steve Kazee has shared a portrait of new son Callum to social media. The actor posted a close up shot of the little boy that he welcomed with fiancee Jenna Dewan on March 6. And in his captioned Steve hinted that the little one has had past lives

The happy parents: Steve and Jenna seen side by side in October in LA

Kazee added to the Wednesday post: 'Say hello to the world Callum Kazee! You certainly know how to make an entrance pal!'

The child was in a white onesie as a knitted white blanket lay over him.

Things seem to be going harmoniously in their household as Jenna has been enamored in observing 44-year-old fiance Kazee become a dad for the first time.

Jenna gushed to People magazine on Wednesday: 'It was incredible to watch the awe in his eyes of experiencing birth for the very first time, and the first time he laid eyes on our son.

'It was beautiful': Though she definitely seems to be enjoying the experience of being a mother for a second time, Jenna has been most enamored in observing Kazee become a dad for the first time

'Good day': Jenna looked stunning as she cuddled with 18-day-old son Callum in a sweet snap posted onto her Instagram Story on Tuesday

'He was crying the whole time and he cut the umbilical cord. Seeing his transformation of becoming a dad was one of the best things Ive ever witnessed. It was beautiful. Birth is such a bonding experience, youre transformed at the end of it.'

As she also has Everly, Jenna felt very prepared before welcoming Callum.

She explained: 'Id heard this from a lot of people, that theres something that happens with the second baby, that theres a little bit more calm and peace in knowing whats happening.

'Another day another cuddle' It has even gotten to the point where Everly is lobbying for she and her new sibling (pictured with Jenna) to share a room together

'You are able to be a little more present': As she also has a six-year-old daughter, Everly, with ex-husband Channing Tatum, Jenna felt very prepared before welcoming Callum

'Knowing whats coming down the line, you are able to be a little more present and enjoy all of it and its so true.'

The Flirty Dancing host would play 20-minute Sanskrit prayer, The Devi Prayer, to aid in her relaxation including in the background while welcoming her second child via cesarean section.

She said: 'Its a very peaceful song. It always puts me at ease. I put that on our playlist and I said to Steve, "If I ever start to look like Im getting anxious or if I was having a rough time, just please play that." He was actually born to that song.'

Just a day prior looked stunning as she cuddled with 18-day-old son Callum in a sweet snap posted onto her Instagram Story on Tuesday.

Sweet: Jenna recently shared a cute video of Steve kissing his baby boy

Jenna has made a conscious effort to document the familys time in quarantine on Instagram - from cuddles with Callum to bonding time with dog Cosmo.

By engaging in a self-imposed quarantine, the couple are forced to limit all visitors, including family members.

A source close to the family told People: 'They are limiting visitors to try and keep everyone healthy. The pandemic is obviously extra worrisome with a newborn.'

Meanwhile, Dewan and ex-husband Channing Tatum's daughter Everly, six, is home for two weeks amid school closures.

Dewan and Kazee welcomed Callum into the world on March 6; Jenna shared this picture of herself and baby Callum to her Instagram on March 10

The insider continued: 'They all plan on just staying home She is trying to focus on her happiness and stay calm so she can be the best mom to her baby and Everly.

Steve has been great. He is changing diapers and carrying the baby around, said the insider of the first time father.

Dewan and Kazee welcomed Callum into the world on March 6, less than one month after they announced their engagement to the world via Instagram.

She posted a black-and-white selfie from the delivery room of the newborn sleeping on her shoulder, announcing the baby news.

The caption read: 'And just like that, our hearts exploded into all of eternity and beyond. Welcome to the world you little angel! Callum Michael Rebel Kazee 3/6/20.'

Kazee proposed to Dewan during her crystal-laden baby shower in February.

Dewan first met Kazee in 2012 while backstage at Manhattan's Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre where the Tony-winning thespian was performing his hit Broadway musical, Once.

They didn't begin dating until March 2018, seven months before the former back-up dancer filed for divorce from her ex-husband Channing Tatum, which was finalized November 20.

Tatum has moved on from Jenna with pop-star Jessie J.

The 39-year-old actor and the Price Tag songstress ended their 13-month relationship back in December, but got back together in January.
Prime Minister Ludovic Orban on Thursday criticized the "door-to-door" testing method for coronavirus infection, pointing out the importance of following the procedures recommended by the National Institute of Public Health (INSP).

"We strictly adhere to the procedure adopted by the INSP, which is, in fact, a recommendation of the European Commission, based on the recommendations of the scientific support forum of the European Commission, namely: symptomatic patients with an international travel history, contacts beginning to show symptoms, medical professionals - starting with the symptomatic ones, but we will have to, with the increase in the capacity, to be able to test more medical professionals, even if they do not present symptoms, so as to make sure that the experience in Suceava is not repeated; symptomatic institutionalized persons. That is there is an order of priorities in testing, which cannot be violated and which we will strictly apply. The stories that we go from door to door to do tests are not serious and I would like to emphasize this. So we clearly apply the procedures that are validated and based on technical and scientific testing arguments," the prime minister said at the beginning of the Government meeting.He added that Real Time PCR devices provide 100pct accuracy, which is not achieved by other types of testing."We have seen a lot of stories circulating on the market. At present, in Romania, there is a test procedure, in which the test priorities are established, the order of priorities in which the testing is done. Testing at the present time can be done only with these Real Time PCR devices, because only this test mode ensures 100pct accuracy. Other types of testing do not ensure 100pct accuracy and there is a risk that, from people who are declared negative, a part may actually be positive. Not to mention that they are extremely hard to find and are also at quite high costs," he said.Former Health Minister Victor Costache said on Wednesday that he wanted to implement an "innovative" testing program of the kind of the one in South Korea for the new coronavirus through which all citizens of Bucharest would be tested by the door-to-door method."Today we signed a protocol together with Mr. Streinu-Cercel, which will be validated, and we want to implement an innovative program like the one in South Korea, we want to test all citizens of Bucharest with mobile door-to-door testing teams", said the official at Adevarul Live.He said that not all the people in quarantine have been tested yet."There are different testing phases. A test can be done when exiting quarantine. This test is done depending on the capacities of the centers and the symptomatic ones are prioritized, as it is done in other countries," Costache said
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 22:02:25|Editor: huaxia

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CAIRO, March 26 (Xinhua) -- An Egyptian court on Thursday sentenced five people to death over vandalizing oil pipelines in Beheira province, northern of the capital Cairo.

In November 2019, ten defendants attempted to steal gas from the pipeline, causing a gas leakage and big fire that killed nine people and wounded other dozens.

Other five people were sentenced to 25 years in jail over the same charges.

The death appealable verdict was sent to the grand Mufti, Egypt's top Muslim religious authority, for his non-binding opinion.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Get to know Cleveland Indians prospect Angel Martinez, an infielder from the Dominican Republic who is ranked the No. 16 prospect in the Tribes farm system.

Name: Angel Martinez.

Pos: INF.

Age: 18.

Height/weight: 6-0, 165.

Bats/throws: S/R.

Acquired: International free agent signed July, 2018.

Indians IF Angel Martinez swinging from the left side. The switch hitter slashed .324/.405/.436 as a LHH in 179 PA in the DSL. Martinez is one of the many Cleveland teenage prospects to watch next year; most likely stateside in the AZL. pic.twitter.com/KGvKzRMBaL  tyler j. spicer (@tylerjspicer) January 7, 2020

2019: Martinez played short, second and third during his first pro season in the Dominican Summer League where he hit .306 with an .830 OPS and 27 RBI in 56 games.

Outlook: The Indians signed Martinez for $500K as part of their 2018 international class. The switch-hitting Martinez has plenty of professional experience in his family as his father, Sandy, was an eight-year catcher in the majors and his brother, Sandy Jr., catches in the Diamondbacks farm system. He shows good instincts in the field and at the plate with an advanced approach to hitting.

Ranks: Martinez ranks as the Indians 16th overall prospect according to MLB Pipeline.

2020: Expect Martinez to play in the Arizona Rookie League once players return from the coronavirus shutdown.

More Tribe top prospects:

No. 2 Tyler Freeman, SS

No. 5 Daniel Espino, RHP

No. 6 Brayan Rocchio, SS

No. 7 Aaron Bracho, INF

No. 8 Ethan Hankins, RHP

No. 9 Triston McKenzie

No. 10 Gabriel Rodriguez, SS

No. 11 Logan Allen, LHP

No. 15 Emmanuel Clase, RHP

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Do the Cleveland Indians deserve credit for dominating a weak division? Hey, Hoynsie!

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What to expect from Jose Ramirez with the Cleveland Indians in 2020

Ramirez rediscovered how to hit changeups midway through 2019; can he continue in 2020?

What will the Cleveland Indians schedule look like when games start? Hey, Hoynsie!
Update:

A Border Patrol agent with 21 years of service was shot to death by his 47-year-old wife in a San Antonio hotel early Tuesday, authorities said.

Jon Travis Marburger, also 47, was found with multiple gunshot wounds about 8:30 a.m. Tuesday in a La Quinta hotel room at 1017 North Loop 1604, San Antonio police said.

Police performed life-saving measures on Marburger before he was transported to University Hospital, where he died.

BORDER LOCKDOWN: U.S., Mexico to curb border travel at Texas border to control coronavirus

Sherry Lee Marburger was later arrested and charged with murder, according to records. Jon Marburger was assigned to the Border Patrol's Del Rio Station.

Update:

A 47-year-old man has died after a shooting at a Stone Oak hotel on Tuesday.

The Medical Examiner's Office identified the victim as Jon Travis Marburger.

Original:

A man was taken to the hospital in critical condition after a shooting at a North Side hotel on Tuesday, according to the San Antonio Police Department.

Officers responded to a shooting in progress reported at 8:22 a.m. by a person in a La Quinta hotel room in the 1000 block of North Loop 1604. When officers arrived in the room, they found a man in his late 40s with multiple gunshot wounds.

HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Border agent's death leaves many questions

Police performed life-saving measures while EMS was en route. The victim was then transported to University Hospital with critical injuries.

A woman in her late 40s, believed to be the mans partner, was detained and taken in for questioning. The couple were not from San Antonio, according to SAPD spokesperson Alisia Pruneda.

Animal Care Services will take care of a small pet found in the hotel room until a permanent home can be found. Police said the investigation will continue.
New Zealand law allows abortion on demand up to 20 weeks into pregnancy

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New Zealand's Parliament has passed a law decriminalizing abortion and allowing women to obtain an abortion for any reason through the fifth month of pregnancy. Some lawmakers have warned that the law also opens the door to sex-selective abortions and abortion up to the moment of birth.

Parliament voted 68-51 last week to pass the bill that lifts restrictions on abortion up to 20 weeks gestation. Women seeking an abortion past 20 weeks can get the procedure so long as they obtain approval from a medical professional.

The new law overturns a previous measure from 1977 that banned abortion unless the procedure was approved by two doctors appointed by the state known as certifying consultants.

The New York Times reported that despite existing restrictions on abortion, "... about 13,000 abortions a year are performed legally" in New Zealand. These circumstances include "when a womans physical or mental health is endangered."

"Critics claim that has made it common for women to feign mental illness to obtain abortions, and for doctors to play along," the NY Times added.

Justice Minister Andrew Little praised the bill's passage, claiming that for more than four decades abortion has been the only medical procedure considered a crime in New Zealand.

The previous law required a women seeking an abortion to go through many hoops. That resulted in delays to access a procedure, and that was less safe, said Little, according to The Guardian. The changes agreed to by parliament will better ensure women get advice and treatment in a more timely way.

Agnes Loheni, a National Party member of Parliament who opposed the bill, warned in her speech in the House that "it will allow abortions up to the moment of birth," Radio New Zealand reported.

Similarly, the NY Times noted that Simeon Brown, another National Party lawmaker, voiced concerns that the new law would allow sex-selective abortions and the killing of preborn babies who are developed enough to survive outside the womb.

Im opposed to this bill not because of the tenets of any religion but because of scientific, philosophical and ethical principles, Brown said.

Terry Bellamak, the director of the pro-abortion group Alranz Abortion Rights Aotearoa, supported the new abortion bill.

Finally after 44 years, New Zealand parliament has recognized that women have bodily autonomy  and that is huge. Being able to control ones fertility is key to ones life  it is hard to see how we could achieve equality without that, said Bellamak, as quoted by the Guardian.

Voice for Life, a national pro-life organization founded in 1970, posted a statement on its Facebook page earlier this week denouncing the bill that expands abortion in the country.

The most troubling thing for the pro-life community is not only that our lobbying efforts did not prevent the bill from passing as law, but it's more so the horrific implications of the many innocent lives that will be barbarically terminated as a result, the pro-life group said.

Many pro-abortion lobbyists have taken the opportunity to relentlessly attack us with vulgar and demeaning language, hoping that their efforts will cause us to retreat indefinitely. The unmasked pro-abortion movement is certainly not a pleasant sight to behold, so we appreciate your thoughts and support at this time.

Voice for Life also vowed to launch a better, stronger, online forum/platform, knowing that more people will be online than ever before, who we can reach with the pro-life message.

 many kiwis who have not yet given adequate consideration to the issues of abortion and euthanasia, may now have time to wrestle with these subjects via social media over the next month, they continued.

Unlike the pro-abortion movement, be sure to graciously present logical, scientific, and ethical arguments, while giving people space to contemplate what you have shared.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Romanian Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu have agreed to ensure the protection of citizens of the two countries during temporary transport restrictions.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry reported this following a phone conversation of the two ministers on Wednesday evening.

Im calling on you to fully support the Ukrainian citizens in Romania when the transport connection has been actually terminated, and I confirm that you can count on our relevant attitude towards the Romanian citizens in Ukraine during this difficult period," said Kuleba.

The Ukrainian foreign minister also thanked the Romanian counterpart for the Romanian side's readiness to ensure uninterrupted transit of Ukrainian cargo between Ukraine and the EU through the territory of Romania.
LSCPA representatives met with representatives from Christus Health of Southeast Michigan including for a ceremonial handing off of medical supplies outside the St. Elizabeth Hospital Wednesday. Boxes of supplies, which would have been used in nursing school training labs, which are now going unused, were taken to a Christus warehouse for staff to use amid a growing need of supplies to handle COVID-19.

Among the items donated were sterile and non-sterile gloves and gowns, and N-95 masks. The college's nursing program wanted to aid area health workers as they prepare for a potential increase in COVID-19 cases and patient care.
COVID-19 UPDATES

Holcomb announces new COVID-19 plans

Gov. Eric Holcomb announced additional efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 on March 25. The new initiatives focus on child care and local companies working to donate goods needed in the health care industry.

There is a critical need for child care for those workers who are taking care of others and helping Hoosiers keep food and supplies in their homes, Holcomb said in a press release. We appreciate all of the efforts Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Jennifer McCormack and FSSA Secretary Dr. Jen Sullivan and their staffs have worked on jointly to create more child care options for parents.

The Indiana State Department of Education and Family Social Services Administration are working to encourage school corporations throughout the state to open schools on a limited basis to provide child care services for children of essential workers during the pandemic. Schools must follow certain guidelines to keep the school safe for children, including allowing for extra time for deep cleaning, prohibiting staff who are in high-risk categories for the virus and they must keep groups of students in separate areas of the building.

Further, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation is working with more than 1,000 businesses and economic development agencies over the past week to continue to support the states economy. More than 135 local companies have been vetted to help make shields, masks and other Personal Protective Equipment for pandemic response workers. Several restaurants and companies have donated thousands of pairs of gloves.

The Office of Community and Rural Affairs announced funds from the Community Development Block Grant may be redirected to assist with COVID-19 needs based on guidelines set by the United States Housing and Urban Development. Money from these grants can help fund mobile testing areas and economic assistance packages for small businesses.

Organizations get COVID-19 relief money

The Central Indiana COVID-19 Community Economic Relief Fund (C-CERF) doled out $7,305,000 in unrestricted grants to 46 organizations throughout Central Indiana.

Those organizations  which include Horizon House, Meals on Wheels and YMCA of Greater Indianapolis  will use the money to help individuals and families who have been hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is the first phase of funding for C-CERF, which is administered by United Way of Central Indiana (UWCI) and has about $17.8 million now.

Our coalition of funders has been in daily communication with community leaders across Central Indiana to assess emerging needs and direct service providers to better understand their most pressing challenges, said Ann Murtlow, president & CEO of UWCI.

Indy Arts & Culture launch emergency relief fund

After launching last week, the Indy Arts & Culture COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund has helped more than 130 local artists and culture workers file applications for relief grants from the Fund, with the first round of grant payments set to go out later this week.

The Fund now has $250,000 in leadership commitments thanks to investments by the Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation Inc., Central Indiana Community Foundation, Christel DeHaan Family Foundation, Efroymson Family Fund and the Herbert Simon Family Foundation. With the public Go Fund Me campaign, the Relief Fund is expected to exceed $325,000.

Artists and cultural workers can apply for a grant at IndyKeepsCreating.org.

Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site hosting virtual egg roll

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site still wants families to take part in the annual Presidential Egg Roll in honor of Easter. This year, however, families can participate in the event from home and share their photos and videos on social media.

On April 4, the Presidential Site is inviting families to have the Egg Roll in their backyards. All you need is one egg, one spoon, a participant and at least 25 feet of yard or driveway to roll the egg. The Presidential Site will be awarding prizes in three categories; best dressed egg rollers (for ages 12 and under), best decorated egg and best egg course. The Presidential Site reminds everyone to practice social distancing and keep the Egg Roll to your immediate family members in order to contain the spread of COVID-19.

You can watch a Presidential Egg Roll tutorial at the Presidential Sites Facebook and Instagram page, and share your videos on either platform with the hashtag, #2020PresidentialEggRoll.

IN OTHER NEWS

On My Way Pre-K applications open

Indianas Office of Early Childhood and Out-of-School Learning is accepting applications for grants from families to take advantage of the states On My Way Pre-K program for the 2020-21 school year.

The program, which has been statewide since 2019, is for 4-year-old children from low-income families so that they may have access to a high-quality pre-K program the year before they begin kindergarten. Families who receive a grant may use the grant at any approved On My Way Pre-K program throughout the state.

Information about the program, including how to apply, is online.

A child is eligible for an On My Way Pre-K voucher if they live in any Indiana county, will be 4 years old by Aug. 1, 2020, and plan to start kindergarten in the 2021-22 school year.

An eligible child must live in a household with income below 127% of the federal poverty level, and have parents or guardians who are working, going to school or attending job training.

HUD adds more funding to homeless programs

Indianapolis will receive an additional $760,000 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for homeless assistance initiatives.

The funds will provide support to 20 local programs, including Coburn Place, Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention and Julian Center.

This additional grant funding will empower Indianapolis organizations with the needed tools to help individuals and families experiencing homelessness, Mayor Joe Hogsett said.

News In Brief
By West Kentucky Star Staff Mar. 26, 2020 | 01:42 PM | WESTERN KENTUCKY





West Kentucky Community and Technical College recently made a donation of personal protective equipment to local health care providers to aid in the COVID-19 pandemic.







WKCTC made the donation to local emergency management groups and will be distributed to hospitals in our region. The donations were collected from the college's allied health and nursing programs, and included over 400 N95 face masks, 1,300 regular masks, more than 11,000 gloves, 75 sterile gloves, and over 250 sterile and non-sterile gowns.







WKCTC's Paducah School of Art and Design also made a donation, providing 200 N95 masks.







"We want to work with others in the community to provide needed supplies to our caregivers so they can safely care for those in need," said Dr. Renea Akin, WKCTC interim vice president of academic affairs.







Anyone that has masks available to donate is asked to contact Paducah School or Art and Design Director Paul Aho at paul.aho@kctcs.edu.

A local college is donating protective equipment to area health care providers.
On Wednesday, the White House and the Senate agreed on a $2 trillion stimulus package to help stabilize the economy of the US during the COVID-19 pandemic. $300 billion of the package are designated to help small businesses, says an article.

The bill will be used to give loans to small businesses and provide payroll-tax deferment. Also, the bill includes direct payments to US citizens, an increase in unemployment insurance, and a stimulus for the airline sector.

There are a lot of provisions that may help small businesses that are struggling to survive the challenges from the COVID-19 crisis in the country. Also, this will help businesses keep their workers amid the country-wide business closures and social-distancing orders.

Payroll Tax Relief

Those who are eligible for this relief are businesses that are continuously employing workers amid the COVID-19 crisis in the country.

Through the stimulus bill, businesses will receive tax credits. Also, they will be allowed to defer payroll taxes. This will help them to continuously pay their employees.

The vice president of policy promotion and the National Taxpayers Union Foundation's economist, Nicole Kaeding, said that employers are allowed to delay the payment of payroll taxes for the year. Then, they can pay half of the amount due in 2021 and the other half in 2022.

According to Kaeding, it is important because small businesses are offered with particular cash flexibility. She cleared that the tax is not forgiven. However, they are not required right not to pay them to the federal government.

Check these out:

The employers, including those who were given the order to close, are eligible to make use of the new payroll-tax credits. However, they need to keep their workers while the COVID-19 crisis is still on-going to avail of the credits. Also, those who applied for small-business loans will not be permitted to avail of the credits.

Interruption Loans for Small Businesses

Those who are eligible for this are businesses with 500 or below employees that are still employing those employees and giving their pay despite the COVID-19 crisis in the country.

The government will be giving out loans to small and midsize businesses. The purpose of the loan is to prevent these businesses to layoff employees. Individual loans may be enough to pay six weeks of the payroll of their employees capped at $1,540 every week, per employee, says a report from last week.

According to a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, Garett Watson revealed that the maximum loan amount may be less than $10 million or a business' average total monthly payroll expense. The payroll cost should be calculated based on the business' payroll from January 1 to February 29.

Senator Pat Toomey sais that the funding for businesses will not be grant money but loans. The repayment of the loans will be the responsibility of the businesses that applied for one.
Robert Olshansky, emeritus professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sees a paradox in the term social distancing. The paradox is that we are being very collaborative and social by mutually agreeing to stay six feet away from each other, he said. The term social distancing implies that we have to become a more separate and individual society, but there is no way we are going to survive this problem and emotionally support ourselves through this if that is what we do.
UNODC engages with UNHCR and relevant stakeholders in Coxs Bazar to address human trafficking and migrant smuggling

Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh 27 March 2020 - UNODC, under the Global Action against Trafficking in Persons and the Smuggling of Migrants - Bangladesh ( GLO.ACT-Bangladesh) held consultations with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and relevant government stakeholders in Coxs Bazar from 24 to 25 February 2020. The objective of the consultations included identifying joint ventures in relation to addressing Trafficking in Persons (TIP) and Smuggling of Migrants (SOM) under the framework of GLO.ACT-Bangladesh.

Coxs Bazar is considered as one of the hotspots for human trafficking in Bangladesh, and the Bay of Bengal is a major trafficking route by sea. According to a report1 of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), human trafficking is on the rise in the sprawling 6,000-acre refugee camp with more than 350 cases identified in 2019, approximately 15% of which involved children. Therefore, GLO.ACT-Bangladesh has identified Coxs Bazar as one of its pilot regions outside of Dhaka as part of the projects implementation strategy.

During the 3rd national GLO.ACT consultation held in Bangladesh in January 2020, UNODC met with the UNHCR Protection Team in Dhaka. One of the major discussion points was to explore the scope of a potential partnership with UNHCR and the possibility of designing a joint initiative to provide capacitybuilding to the criminal justice actors in the Coxs Bazar district. To further the discussion, UNHCR proposed a mission to Coxs Bazar to coordinate with their Coxs Bazar-based legal protection team. UNODC held further meetings with the UNHCR Coxs Bazar Team, the UNDP Research and Survey Analysis team, and the Additional Refugee, Relief and Repatriation Commissioner. During the meetings, GLO.ACT provided an overview of UNODCs mandates and explained the GLO.ACT-Bangladesh project and emphasized the work to be undertaken as part of capacity-building for criminal justice actors. UNHCR outlined their existing protection response in Coxs Bazar including on TIP. In addition to possible collaboration with GLO.ACT-Bangladesh in the context of its capacity-building component, UNHCR also proposed to engage under the projects policy and strategy component.

UNHCR also facilitated a visit to a refugee camp for the GLO.ACT-Bangladesh team to show the increased vulnerability of refugees to becoming victims of human trafficking and migrant smuggling. The visit highlighted the risks faced by the refugees and emphasized the critical need to raise awareness and strengthen the capacities of law enforcement in Coxs Bazar to address TIP and SOM in order to protect the victims and those who are most at risk. The consultation led to the following action points being agreed: The identification of concrete activities, including assigning roles and responsibilities to work jointly to address TIP and SOM in Coxs Bazar under the framework of GLO.ACT-Bangladesh;

To provide joint UNHCR-UNODC capacity-building to criminal justice actors, including prosecutors, judges, investigators, police, Border Guard Bangladesh, Coast Guard, Ansar-VDP, Special Branch, and Detective Branch of Bangladesh Police working in Coxs Bazar and refugee camps;

To provide a Training of Trainers to the UNHCR pool of trainers, who will share the learnings with relevant actors including camp protection focal points, lawyers of NGOs, and officials of the relevant humanitarian agencies;

To include UNODC as member of the inter-agency Technical Working Group on CounterTrafficking based in Coxs Bazar which is co-chaired by UNHCR and IOM;

To discuss with UNDP Coxs Bazar team future collaboration with UNODC on conducting research in the region on issues relating to transnational organized crime, including TIP and SOM; and

To familiarize with specific risks faced by the refugees in the camps related to human trafficking and migrant smuggling and to properly ascertain the capacity-building needs for the law enforcement agencies. It is expected that this collaboration between UN agencies (UNODC, UNHCR and UNDP) and other relevant stakeholders in Coxs Bazar will enhance the capacity and understanding of criminal justice practitioners to successfully combat TIP and SOM. Furthermore, it will enable them to better assist and protect victims of trafficking and vulnerable migrants. The Global Action against Trafficking in Persons and the Smuggling of Migrants - Bangladesh (GLO.ACT - Bangladesh) is a joint initiative by the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) being implemented in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM). GLO.ACT-Bangladesh builds on a global community of practice set in motion in GLO.ACT 2015-2019 in 13 partner countries across Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

Through targeted, innovative and demand-driven interventions, the GLO.ACT aims to support the Government of Bangladesh and civil society organizations to more effectively fight the crimes of human trafficking and migrant smuggling across the country. The project works on developing evidence-based information on trafficking and smuggling patterns and trends, legislative review and harmonization, capability development of criminal justice actors, and international cooperation. The project also provides direct assistance to victims of human trafficking and migrants in vulnerable situations through the strengthening of identification, referral, and protection mechanisms.

The project is funded by the European Union

For more information, please contact:

Mahdy Hassan muhammad.hassan@un.org

unodc-glo.act@un.org
The worlds net capacity additions of coal-fired power generation rose in 2019 for the first time since 2015, due to a surge in the Chinese coal fleet, a new report from environmental organizations shows.

Worldwide, a total of 68.3 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power were commissioned last year, with 34.2 GW retired. This shift resulted in a net increase in the global coal fleet of 34.1 GW, according to findings from Global Energy Monitor (GEM), Sierra Club, Greenpeace International, and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

This was the first such increase since 2015, as commissioning increased from 2018 levels and retirements flattened, the report says.

As much as 64 percent of the newly-commissioned coal capacity was in China, another 12 percent came from India, and the remaining 24 percent was mainly in Asian countries, including Malaysia, Indonesia, and Pakistan.

Almost half of the retired coal power capacity in 2019 was in the United States, the second-highest on record, the report showed.

Under Trump, US coal plant retirements have increased 67% compared to Obama. Retirements averaged 8.2 GW a year during Obamas tenure (20092016), and 13.7 GW a year during Trumps tenure (20172019), the authors of the report wrote.



Related: Building The Sustainable City Of The Future

Despite the increase in global coal capacity in 2019, the amount of power generated globally from coal fell by 3 percent year-on-year, with global coal plants operating at an average 51 percent of their available operating hours, a record low, according to the report.

Though coal is still advancing in some Asian countries, the rest of the world is clearly seeing an overall decline in the coal fleet. This is an international trend that is only going to continue, Gyorgy Dallos, Global Strategist for Greenpeace International, said, commenting on the report.

A study from Global Energy Monitor showed in November 2019 that between January 2018 and June 2019, the world minus China saw their total coal power capacity decline by 8.1 GW. At the same time, China increased its coal-fired power plant fleet by 42.9 GW, resulting in the global coal fleet growing by 34.9 GW between January 2018 and June 2019.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
CNN  When Brandon Waltman went to visit his newborn baby girl in the neonatal intensive care unit of an Alabama hospital Monday night, he was told she had been placed in isolation.

His daughter Emmarie Grace Waltman has been in the NICU of the University of South Alabama Women's Hospital for the past month. After a nurse recently tested positive for Covid-19, Waltman said, he was told that as a precaution Emmarie was taken to another room and put in isolation.

After watching the news about the spread of the virus over the last few weeks, Waltman says he wasn't surprised.

"I felt like it was inevitable," he told CNN.

Gary Mans, an associate vice president for Marketing and Communications at USA Health, said in a statement that a staff member within the health system had tested positive, but declined to say in which department.

"A USA Health employee has tested positive for Covid-19. USA Health continues to implement all state and national guidelines to ensure we protect our patients, providers and staff," said Mans.

Older adults and those with chronic conditions are most vulnerable to the virus, but young adults are catching and spreading it as well. Fortunately, children are not developing severe symptoms, said Dr. Arthur Reingold, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Berkeley.

Emmarie was born February 20 and was in the NICU for issues associated with feeding, her father said. With the number of people caring for her and running tests, Waltman and his wife talked about the likelihood of exposure.

Now the parents can only visit Emmarie one at a time in a low-pressure room in order to prevent any potential spread of Covid-19.

"It's rough. But today is about pushing so some of this doesn't happen again to her or God forbid anybody else."

Waltman says that in the weeks his daughter has been in the NICU, he's seen some doctors and nurses consistently wearing masks and gloves, while others are only wearing them some of the time.

As the number of coronavirus cases grow, top healthcare officials have said the US does not have enough protective equipment stockpiled to meet the anticipated need of the healthcare system. Doctors and nurses have been scrambling to get what they need to keep themselves and their patients safe.

According to the hospital's website, all visitors are screened for symptoms and possible exposure and the visitor policy was recently changed to limit one visitor per patient at a time for all patients.

Waltman is anxious to get his daughter home to Mississippi to quarantine together as a family, but he isn't sure when Emmarie will be released. The family's home is about an hour away from the hospital.

"With the times being like they are, we feel like we're better left at home where we know who's coming in contact with her."

For now, he says his daughter isn't showing any symptoms of Covid-19, and he hopes it'll stay that way.

"I don't think she's going to test positive," he says. "She's one of the, probably the biggest and the healthiest babies in the NICU."

This story was first published on CNN.com
Looks like Bigg Boss Malayalam 2 is not ready to retire from the controversies any time soon. Recently, a promo of Rajith Kumar announcing the re-telecast of the Malayalam reality show was released by the makers. In the promo, the professor is seen watching the show on television and adding that he was eagerly waiting for the re-telecast to see how he had performed inside the house.

Well, the promo has not gone well with the fans, with them calling it a mere tactic of the channel to use Rajith's fame for its TRP. The old episodes will be telecasted in the wake of the 21-day nationwide lockdown due to the Coronavirus outbreak.Interestingly, the viewers, as well as the participants, who were inside the house, will get to see the show to check on how they performed. Well, recently one of the participants had opened up that the show was highly edited and only a desired angle was telecasted. It will be interesting to see how, if any, participants react after the telecast of the show.

Also, as per the recent rumours the third season of the show will kick off from December 2020 and might telecast on a competitor channel of the existing telecasting one. This comes in the wake of the controversies around the channel of being biased towards a particular contestant of the show. But neither the producers, Endemol India, nor the channel has confirmed the news about the same.

Bigg Boss Malayalam: Fans Urge Endemol India To Shift From The Existing Telecasting Channel
Our lives often consist of battles, battles which take place over the entire length of ones life and shape us into who we are and who we can potentially become. The Christian life on the other hand consists of battles which will shape us for serving in eternity, and these are often fights that define how we perceive God. In our ignorance, we focus on the battles that have not yet taken place, and we often face our present circumstances vastly unequipped and with our focus on things that have not yet happened.

Defining battles

In every waking and non-waking moment, we are facing various kinds of circumstances, and it is in these circumstances that our character is defined. Take for example the Jews who spent 40 years wandering the wilderness, they were afraid to fight and stand against all that was in the way of them claiming the promise land and as a result an entire generation had to die off in order to proceed. The choice they made in that moment, that particular battle, cost them an entire generation and 40 long years.

Each obstacle, every action and re action in the countless fights we face as believers is a defining moment. It is a moment that is filled with some form of victory or one that forces the battle to prolong further until we are defined in the right way, Gods way. The sooner we come to the realisation that every battle, every choice we make, every small victory defines a piece of who we are, that is the moment we begin to live truly for God.

Perceiving God

There are times when we are often faced with such an horrific defeat, it is usually in those moments we begin to see God in a negative light. My life has been one constant defeat and I have faced many harsh defeats and circumstances, it is a result of not partnering with God and allowing Him to fight on our behalf. In every challenge, trail and toil we often choose to take control and as a result we are utterly defeated or barely survive, yet if we were to partner with God and see Him win the victory He has promised to win, it is only then we will experience true success.

It is how we perceive God that heavily determines how we approach the fights of life. If we view Him in as negative or distant we will enter every fight and either lose or barely make it through. If we see Him as He is, we will prepare properly and partner with Him and as a result even though we may suffer, itll be a victory we reap in eternity.

One at a Time

As I mentioned before, we as humans have this innate ability to go against 100 different things at once and writing from experience it often results in a miserable defeat and an unnecessary amount of stress. We can learn from the example of the Israelites again, they conquered the promise land one battle at a time, one victory after the other partnered with God.

It is essential in learning from that example and applying it in the sense that we can only ever proceed successfully one step, one victory after the other.

We are not capable of dealing with multiple assaults, but we are capable of facing one at a time. David had to overcome countless obstacles to become king, and once he was king more it didnt stop. The point is the fighting never stops, but with God and taking it one separate battle at a time, victory is assured, because in plain terms God is good.
The Delhi district administration on Thursday introduced a colour-coding mechanism to streamline the process of issuing electronic passes (e-passes) for those working to provide essential services in the national capital.

On Wednesday, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal announced issuing e-passes to ensure the smooth movement of people providing essential services in the wake of the a 21-day nationwide lockdown (announced on Tuesday) to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) epidemic.

Last [Wednesday] night it was decided that colour-coded passes will be issued based on the category of essential services an individual is catering to. The colour-coding system is being introduced to ensure proper monitoring and record keeping. It will also be convenient for enforcement agencies such as the police, as they will be able to identify such persons and vehicles easily, said Tanvi Garg, district magistrate, New Delhi.

As per the new system, those involved in manufacturing, storage, and transportation of essential items such as masks, sanitisers and milk, etc. will be issued blue-colour passes. Delivery persons and related services will get orange passes, while those engaged in groceries will be given green passes. Yellow is for retailers, pink for doctors, nurses and other health workers, red for chemists and pharmacists and purple is for miscellaneous categories such as the media.

Revenue officials said the main objective behind the introduction of the e-passes was to observe social distancing. On the first day of the lockdown, all the DCP offices had reported a mad scramble for curfew e-passes. The new system will ensure that there is no need to physically visit any government office. Every pass also has a unique ID, which will help us and the police in conducting random checks to ensure that there is no misuse, a senior revenue official said.

CM Kejriwal has released a dedicated helpline number 1031 for those who require the e-pass. Later, the Delhi government also released a WhatsApp number, 9873743727, for the same purpose. A total of 525 e-pass applications were received, out of which 299 were cleared till Wednesday.

Kejriwal had said the e-pass system was being introduced for those who are providing essential services but do not have a formal ID card to back their claims. Only those engaged with such services without an ID should apply for such passes. Others should refrain from calling on the helpline, he said.

He also clarified that people do not need e-passes to buy from grocery shops located in their neighbourhood.

It is our responsibility to ensure that all shops selling essential items remain open. We assure you that the supplies of commodities of your daily needs will not dry up. Do not resort to panic buying, as it will defeat the purpose of the lockdown, Kejriwal appealed as five fresh Covid-19 positive cases were reported in Delhi between Tuesday and Wednesday, with the total cases reaching 35 in the national capital.

For anyone in the national Capital facing harassment by the police or other enforcement officers during the lockdown period, Kejriwal also announced another helpline number 011-23469526, which he said is the control room being monitored directly by the Delhi Police commissioner, SN Shrivastava.

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Kerry Smith was at the same Vancouver conference hall as multiple people who later tested positive for COVID-19 and a B.C. dentist who died this week.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Kerry Smith was at the same Vancouver conference hall as multiple people who later tested positive for COVID-19 and a B.C. dentist who died this week.

That thought has been weighing heavily on her mind since she became ill after returning home to Manitoba and began experiencing a significant shortness of breath. However, repeated efforts to get tested for the novel coronavirus resulted only in frustration  leaving her worried many more Manitobans may unknowingly be infected.

SUPPLIED Kerry Smith exhibited symptoms of COVID-19 the province would not test her because she had not travelled internationally. She has voiced concern that Manitobas numbers arent reflecting the amount of spread within the community.

"To say that we have 35 people infected? Thats ridiculous, we have way more than that," Smith said Wednesday.

Smith, who works for the Manitoba Metis Federation, attended an event in the same facility as the Pacific Dental Conference March 5-7. By March 16, her symptoms had worsened. She called Health Links provincial telephone info service several times, but couldn't get through. She contacted a private nurse, who told her she should be tested for COVID-19.

At the Winnipeg testing site, Smith said she was turned away because she had not travelled internationally. Fearing she might have COVID-19, Smith took extra precautions, pulled her children out of school and her husband stayed home from work to self-isolate.

"I could very easily have taken the attitude: if the province isn't worried then why am I? And I assure you there are people who did," she said.

By March 20, her symptoms had persisted, and she was tested at the Selkirk screening site. Smith is still waiting for the results.

Dr. Joel Kettner, who oversaw Manitobas response to large outbreaks as the provinces public health chief from 1999 to 2012, said what public health officials want from testing numbers and what the public want from numbers are two different things. click to read more Dr. Joel Kettner, who oversaw Manitobas response to large outbreaks as the provinces public health chief from 1999 to 2012, said what public health officials want from testing numbers and what the public want from numbers are two different things. Kettner said the reasons someone would be tested would have to fall into three categories. First, does a positive result mean that a patient would experience different treatment from health professionals? In all COVID-19 cases, the answer is 'no,' because there is no current treatment for the novel coronavirus. Second, he said theres an argument for testing to decide if a person should be isolated or not. As everyone is advised to stay home, this is less important right now. But this is a reason to test health-care professionals who need to get back to work but may be exhibiting symptoms. Surveillance is the third reason to test people, which results in more information about the epidemic. Theres lots of things we want to know about this epidemic, of which community spread is one of them. But some people might make the argument that it is not the most important thing, Kettner said, adding what is likely more important is understanding the characteristics of those who are being hospitalized, those who need intensive care, and those who die. I dont care that much about asymptomatic people and people with mild (symptoms), other than the potential of them spreading it to others. Im not worried about those people themselves. I am worried about the people who are sick enough to go to hospital or the ICU, Kettner said. Outside of hospitals, Kettner said if the province was adequately testing those who had travelled and those who had contact with those who travelled, it would give public health authorities a sufficient amount of information about spread. If you want to know better what is the amount of community spread  in other words, how many people are sick that were not testing, because they dont fit these categories  the place to test those people is in the hospital (when they present) with acute respiratory illness, Kettner said. Theyre the ones I want to know where theyre getting it. A recent survey conducted by polling firm Leger underlined how difficult widespread testing would be. Of 1,508 respondents to the survey, 18 per cent of people answered they exhibited at least one of the symptoms related to COVID-19, but likely unconnected.  Sarah Lawrynuik Close

"I don't know what it costs to test people. But I'm more worried about what it costs to not test people."

On March 16, the 15,000 people who had attended the dental conference  in the same location where Smith had been  were told to self-isolate by B.C.s public health officer, who confirmed several cases of COVID-19 had been traced to the event. Vancouver dentist Denis Vincent, who was in his 60s, died on the weekend.

Dr. Alan Katz, director of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, said while there are reasons testing is limited, more screening is vital to track and keep a lid on the pandemic.

"What is the true community-based prevalence of infection?" Katz said. "The only way to do that is through a mass, broad-testing approach... That's key information to make much more informed policy decisions."

Manitoba has limited testing to the most at-risk groups; it has also been hamstrung by a backlog at the Cadham Provincial Laboratory.

The messaging of who should be tested isn't consistent and getting to everyone, Katz said. He pointed to examples of people being referred for COVID-19 testing by one public health worker at Health Links only to be turned away at the testing site by another public health worker.

Dr. Alan Katz, director of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, said more screening is vital to track and keep a lid on the pandemic. (Tessa Vanderhart / Free Press files)

"It depends on where you go," he said. "You might get a test. You might be turned away."

In Saskatchewan, more than 5,700 people were tested as of Tuesday, with at least 72 presumptive and confirmed cases of COVID-19. However, it's difficult to compare why the province next door  with a similar population and geographic size  has twice as many cases as Manitoba, partly because the testing has been inconsistent, Katz said.

"When we look at what's happening across the country, we know very little," said Katz. "If in Manitoba, we're not consistently applying standards for testing, you can imagine across Canada.

"This results in the actual number of positive tests not being comparable across the country. We don't know where we are in the curve compared to other provinces and places."

Health Min. Cameron Friesen said Wednesday that First Nations are prioritized for testing. (Ruth Bonneville / Free Press files)

When testing began in February, all returning international travellers to Manitoba who developed cold- or flu-like symptoms within 14 days were told to self-isolate and contact Health Links to see if they should be tested. Now, Manitoba is prioritizing the most at-risk groups for testing.

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Only those Manitobans with respiratory symptoms who have travelled out of province in the past 14 days or who have had direct contact with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases at large events (conferences, cruises, flights) need to be tested at this time, the province said.

Health Minister Cameron Friesen said Wednesday First Nations  hit hard by the 2009 H1N1 epidemic  are also prioritized for testing.

Katz said Manitoba learned from the H1N1 outbreak, when the rate of hospitalization for First Nations was seven times higher than the rest of the province.

"We learned lessons, not in terms of testing, but in terms of how it can affect needs in different parts of the province."

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sarah.lawrynuik@freepress.mb.ca
His campaign says he is still actively running for president, and there is other concrete evidence he is. On Tuesday, his team confirmed that he planned to participate in an April debate with Mr. Biden if there is one. The Bern app, a proprietary smartphone app that the campaign uses to organize volunteers, still includes an option for supporters to send their networks a text message encouraging them to mail in ballots, according to an aide. Under phone bank event listings on his campaign website, volunteers are urged to join campaign staff as we outreach our communities.

But his campaign is not actively advertising on Facebook and has not made any significant television ad buys since March 12. He has not actively fund-raised for his campaign in over a week, though his campaign has used its extensive email list to raise money for charities to help people during the virus crisis. On Wednesday, his campaign sent an email to supporters asking them to sign a petition to help Amazon workers.

Some Democratic supporters of his have said its time to end his campaign, including Robert Reich, the former labor secretary. Other Democrats say that if he stays in, he should make clear his motivation and his goal.

Ive never seen Bernie as someone who is selfish, Ive always thought of him as being an advocate for his cause, Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, said in an interview. If he stays in the race for no reason, that would be selfish.

In conversations with aides and allies since March 17  when stinging losses in three states left him with no realistic chance at winning the Democratic nomination  many said he viewed this as an extraordinary moment that not only demands the kind of political revolution he has championed since he was the mayor of Burlington, Vt., but also underscores why the country would have been better off if his liberal policy agenda was already in place.
Bangladesh on Thursday deployed its army to enforce a nationwide lockdown, asking people to stay at home to stunt the spread of the new coronavirus.

On Wednesday, Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina announced that the government will provide free food and cash for the poor for the next six months.

Hasina also declared an incentive package for the country's export-oriented garment industry to help pay millions of workers.

Bangladesh's garment industry is the world's second largest after China, and the South Asian nation annually earns about $30 billion from exports of garment products, mainly to the United States and Europe.

The sector has employed about four million workers, mainly women from rural Bangladesh.

The manufacturing companies said many big orders had already been cancelled by the western buyers because of the impact of the deadly virus globally.

Streets in the capital city were mostly empty on Thursday, shops and shopping malls were closed while only vegetable markets and medicine stores were allowed to operate.

Experts say Bangladesh, a nation of 160 million people, is at the high risk of spreading COVID-19 as hundreds of thousands of people have returned to the country in recent weeks from Italy and other affected countries.

So far Bangladeshi authorities have confirmed five deaths and 44 cases of COVID-19.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks.

For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.




Thai Union donates US$30,411 worth of seafood products to COVID-19 frontliners



The Thai Union Group PCL has donated 1 million baht (US$30,411) worth of SEALECT and FISHO products to support the Thai government's medical teams who are in the frontline battling the global spread of coronavirus.

The leading seafood company delivered more than 25,000 cans of tuna, sardines and mackerel and 8,000 packs of FISHO snacks to the Ministry of Public Health. These were to be distributed to hospitals and related support units dealing with the coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19.





Meanwhile, Thai Union has become the first food producer and Thailand-listed company to join EP100, a Climate Group global initiative on smarter energy use.

As part of the company's strategy to tackle climate change and its impact on the world's oceans, Thai Union is aiming to double its energy productivity by 2041, from a 2016 baseline.

Last year, Thai Union was ranked No. 1 on the inaugural Seafood Stewardship Index (SSI), which assessed the contribution of the world's 30 largest seafood companies to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Airlines are refusing to give cash refunds to passengers despite the Foreign Office travel ban amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Thousands of travellers are desperate to cancel their upcoming holidays following the Government's warning against all but essential travel to anywhere in the world.

However, an investigation by consumer champions Which? found that carriers including British Airways, Ryanair and easyJet are refusing to let them cancel and claim a refund on flights which are still scheduled to run.

British Airways planes parked up at London City Airport today as the UK lockdown continues

Grounded easyJet aircraft are parked up at London Luton Airport due to the virus, on Tuesday

This is despite the fact any travel would be against government advice and invalidate travel insurance.

Some flights are even running to countries which have banned UK residents.

NHS frontline nurse hits out at easyJet after airline only allows her to rebook cancelled flight to Amsterdam An NHS frontline nurse hit out at easyJet today after it only offered her the chance to rebook a flight to Amsterdam which was cancelled. Jeanette Turner said a 'stressful time is being added to' by the airline, with her trying to talk to customer services 'numerous times' without success. Jeanette Turner, pictured, hit out at easyJet after it only offered her the chance to rebook a cancelled flight She was due to fly to Amsterdam today, but this was cancelled by easyJet along with the return flight on March 29. Ms Turner told MailOnline: 'They are only offering to rebook. I do not want to do this. I have tried numerous times via phone, on line chat, email and form submission to no avail. 'My friends' flight to Florence was cancelled recently and they automatically got the option of a refund, as did my son whose flight to Zurich was cancelled. 'I am a NHS frontline nurse and what us obviously a stressful time is being added to by easyJet.' She said she was due to travelling with her husband Peter for her birthday, adding: 'I do not want to rebook as no idea when this pandemic will be over. 'Plus I do not want this added stress again of trying for a refund if we rebook and still cannot fly.' Advertisement

In normal circumstances, airlines are only legally obliged to offer a cash refund if they cancel a flight.

Instead, passengers who no longer want to travel are being told to rebook or accept a voucher for the face value of the flight.

Many are reluctant to accept these offers as they are unable to predict when the pandemic will end, and whether their airlines will survive the crisis.

This has left many passengers hundreds of pounds out of pocket as they face no choice but to cancel and attempt to recoup their losses through their travel insurance.

Which? cited an example of a BA passenger called Lynette who lost 550 when she cancelled her flight to Thailand following the Foreign Office travel ban.

Ryanair and EasyJet are also refusing to offer cash refunds for flights that do operator.

Worse, some Ryanair passengers who tried to rebook their flights found that the 'change fares' are more expensive than a new ticket on the same flight.

Scores of passengers have also been unable to make the refund system work.

Last week, some Ryanair passengers were told their flight was back on after previously being told it was cancelled.

Some were left with as little as two hours' notice to get to a refund and were unable to claim a refund when they didn't make the flight.

In the worst example found by Which?, Hungarian airline Wizz Air is still charging 30-40 (27-37) per passenger, per flight, to rebook - or 60 (55) to cancel. These fees apply even to countries that have closed their borders.

Rory Boland, Editor of Which? Travel, said: 'Despite travel restrictions being in place around the globe, passengers who booked flights before this outbreak began that have not yet been cancelled are now left trapped between a rock and a hard place - unable to fly while also being denied a refund.

A Ryanair jet is seen on the Tarmac at Dublin Airport next to an Aer Lingus plane on Monday

Nine passenger planes of the Hungarian airline WizzAir parked at Debrecen Airport on Sunday

'We would urge anyone with a flight that is still scheduled to depart to rebook before the departure date, on the chance that the new flight will be cancelled.

EasyJet passenger loses 190 after being due to fly to Geneva Harvey Mozer, 63 An easyJet passenger has lost 190 having been due to fly to Geneva on Friday next week with the airline. Harvey Mozer told MailOnline he was aware of Swiss and French travel restrictions, and easyJet offered him a 'free' chance to move his flight to January next year. However, Mr Mozer, 63, of North London, added: 'The downside of this was my original flight was 250-ish return and the replacement flight was only 60 return. 'I decided to take what was offered in case I missed the flight next week, due to a possible last minute website crash etc, and I would lose 250. 'They would not offer a refund even though they were probably going to cancel the flight. They state on their website that they will not offer refunds due to extraordinary circumstances!' Mr Mozer added that he was a 'bit put out as I have now lost 190'. Advertisement

'To allow this, any airlines that have not already done so must urgently waive their flight change fee to ensure passengers who have no choice but to rebook are not penalised for doing so.'

An easyJet spokesman said: 'Customers on cancelled flights can transfer to an alternative flight free of charge or receive a voucher for the value of their booking online or claim a refund through our contact centre.

'We are experiencing higher than average wait times so we would thank customers for their patience and assure them that these entitlements will be available long after their cancelled flight has flown.

'For customers whose flights are not cancelled but would like to move to a later date they can amend their flight online with no change fee and we have brought forward our winter schedule on-sale so customers have more choice to move their flights, up to February 28, 2021.'

A spokesman for BA said customers who no longer wish to travel can move their flight or receive a voucher.

The Daily Mail has also contacted Ryanair for comment today.

Yesterday, London City Airport announced it will close its runway to commercial and private flights until the end of April, amid a collapse in demand caused by coronavirus.

London City is the UK's 12th busiest airport, handling 5.1 million passengers last year. Its location close to the capital's financial district makes it particularly popular with business travellers.

The airport is used for British Airways' business-class only flights to and from New York.

Images posted on social media appeared to show a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft landing at London City on Tuesday.

The runway could be used by the military in the coming weeks as it is near the ExCeL centre, which is being converted into a makeshift field hospital to deal with coronavirus patients.

Airlines such as British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair have suspended the majority of their flights due to demand plummeting and countries around the world introducing travel restrictions in a bid to slow the spread of the virus.

'They simply said we don't do refunds': What other passengers have told MailOnline today Jo Emes: 'EasyJet cancelled my flight on March 16 and gave me the option of rebooking or a refund. I opted for a refund. Still waiting for the money to be credited back to my card ten days later.' Sean Owen: 'I am one of the passengers that has a flight back from Germany that's not going to happen, but is scheduled on March 30 because Ryanair had cancelled the flight outbound. I have sent emails to easyJet but they have not even acknowledged my emails. I don't think it's going to happenm but as it happens Ryanair have promised me a refund via a phonecall with them.' Jon Murray: 'I have a flight booked to Girona, Spain for April 24 to take part in a Gran Fondo bike ride that has been cancelled. Ryanair refuse to cancel or refund.' Peter Hainsworth: 'My flight is to Tenerife on April 13. They simply said we don't do refunds.' Advertisement

The impact of the coronavirus on the aviation industry is being highlighted by dozens of planes being flown to airports across the UK for storage.

Airports in Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow and Norwich are among those being used by airlines to park their aircraft amid the drop in demand.

British Airways planes parked at Glasgow Airport have been fitted with engine covers to prevent damage.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has decided against creating a specific support package for the UK's aviation industry.

In a letter to airports and airlines, he said the Government was prepared to enter into negotiations with individual companies once they had 'exhausted other options' such as raising cash from existing investors.

Karen Dee, chief executive of trade body the Airport Operators Association, said the aviation industry was 'surprised' by Mr Sunak's decision and would have to 'fight on its own to protect its workforce and its future'.

Ryanair, which has grounded more than 90 per cent of its aircraft, has announced the significantly reduced schedule it will operate for the next week.

It mainly involves flights between Dublin and airports in Britain.
By Trend

The Operational Headquarters established at Azerbaijans State Committee on Work with the Diaspora continues to provide comprehensive support to Azerbaijani citizens living abroad and if necessary, ensures their evacuation amid coronavirus, Trend reports.

Azerbaijani citizens were evacuated from Warsaw, Poland on March 26, with the support of the State Committee and on the initiative of the chairman of the Council of Azerbaijani Youth in Poland, Farid Jafarli.



These citizens, living in various cities of Poland, have applied to the Council of Azerbaijanis in Poland for immediate return to Azerbaijan due to family and personal problems. For several days, these citizens were placed in the House of Azerbaijan in Warsaw. Taking into account the closure of borders, an alternative decision was made in connection with the return of fellow citizens to their homeland. Thus, they were transported from Warsaw to Minsk (Belarus) by bus, and from there by plane to Azerbaijan.

Farid Jafarli held talks with the Embassy of Azerbaijan in Poland, as well as with the border services of Poland and Belarus on this issue. Embassies issued documents confirming the Azerbaijani citizenship of compatriots. Most of them were provided with plane tickets, after which they were sent to Azerbaijan from the Minsk National Airport.

Currently, 19 Azerbaijani citizens evacuated from Poland have been placed in the Relax Hotel in the countrys Lerik district in accordance with the rules of the quarantine regime.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
UPDATE March 27 4:18 p.m.: Evelyn has been found safe, click here for more coverage.

Original story: Lee County authorities are searching for a 4-year-old girl who disappeared Wednesday afternoon and was last seen walking her dog.

UPDATE: Helicopters, drones deployed in search for Alabama girl who vanished while walking her dog

Evelyn Vadie Sides was last seen around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday in the 5000 block of Lee County Road 66 in Auburn, where she was walking her red dog, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said.

Evelyn was described as 3-feet tall and weighing 40 pounds. She has red hair and green eyes with a red mark on her nose. The child was wearing a short-sleeve floral dress when she disappeared.

Anyone with information on the girls whereabouts was asked to call the Lee County Sheriffs Office at 334-737-7131 or 911.
Kaduna State Government has announced curfew throughout the state, following the non-compliance to certain measures that were earlier put in place to stop the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19).

The Deputy Governor, Hadiza Balarabe, who made this known on Thursday, said the decision is in line with the 1999 constitution.

According to her, the decision is in exercise of the powers vested in the Governor by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria1999, (as amended), Sections 2 and 8 of the Quarantine Act 1926 and the Kaduna State Public Health Law of 1917.

Mrs Balarabe said Kaduna State has therefore been declared a public health area. Coronavirus, otherwise known as Covid-19, is hereby declared as a dangerous, infectious disease within the meaning of the Quarantine Act.

The official said that state standing committee on Covid-19 prevention met on Thursday to review global and national developments relating to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Committee also considered reports of unsatisfactory compliance levels with the preventive measures that have been outlined by the government in repeated announcements, and with increasing severity, over the past seven days.

She said apart from flouting the directive against large gatherings, there were also reports of certain persons not obeying the ban announced on motorcycle taxis and tricycles.

She warned that from midnight of Thursday, 26th March 2020, all residents of Kaduna State must stay at home. No offices, businesses of any sort or places of worship are allowed to open.

The only category of persons exempted are workers in essential services such as health workers, the fire service and security personnel, she said.

She warned that the curfew will be strictly enforced by the security agencies, adding that they have clear directives for the immediate arrest and prosecution of any person that violates these measures. 

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Churches and mosques will be shut, there will no congregational prayers or services either within these places of worship or outdoors.

Wedding events and all social gatherings are strictly prohibited while these emergency measures remain in place, she warned.

Mrs Balarabe said that any place of worship, event centre or place that hosts social gatherings will be in violation of its term of grant and therefore risks forfeiting its title and having the site of the offense removed.

We recognise that Kaduna State is a transport hub. Therefore, transit through Kaduna will be allowed, provided that such vehicles ply only the Western bye-pass, she said.

Palliatives

According to her, the government recognises that this lockdown will consequences for everyone, but more so for the vulnerable persons in our communities.

As indicated in previous statements, the government is procuring food and other supplies, funded from its contingency budget, to mitigate the challenges of a lockdown for such persons.

These items will be distributed in community clusters across urban local government areas in the state. This will be a grassroots exercise, as it is people drawn from the the target community that will constitute the committee to manage the distribution, she explained.
The Progressive Conservative government is hoping an unprecedented injection of funding will help Ontarios COVID-19-ravaged health-care system.

With the province in a state of emergency for a week and all non-essential businesses asked to close, Finance Minister Rod Phillips will table a fiscal update Wednesday designed to tackle the pandemic.

This is first phase, Premier Doug Ford told reporters in a teleconference from Queens Park on Tuesday.

Ford emphasized that we dont want to duplicate measures in Ottawas $82-billion rescue package.

The fiscal capacity of the province is not the same as the fiscal capacity of the federal government, the premier said, noting he had an encouraging call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other provincial leaders on Monday night.

I was pushing hard to make sure we increase the funds that would be going to individuals. That was one of my questions along with the other premiers to the prime minister, he said.

The prime ministers doing a great job working around the clock along with the deputy prime minister (Chrystia Freeland). I want to thank them.

Phillips said his fiscal update will ensure the health-care system has the resources it needs to cope with a pandemic that has crippled the global economy and killed more than 18,000 people around the world.

The province of Ontario is first and foremost responsible for health care so there will obviously be a significant focus on the response to COVID-19 and the health-care components of that, he said.

But this will be the first steps in our plan to respond overall, so there will also be supports for businesses (but) we are concerned that we are delivering the health-care resources.

The finance minister noted Wednesdays fiscal update is replacing the spring budget he had hoped to table.

Three weeks ago we were planning to present a budget (that was) very different because the economy was very different, said Phillips.

But we made the decision that we needed to update our information and we needed to provide the most accurate information that we could and thats what well do in our economic statement, he said.

This will be the first step and an important signal. We have to make sure that our partners: hospitals, municipalities, school boards know the money thats going to be transferred every year.

A full budget will be tabled by the middle of November, and should contain revenue and expenditure forecasts that wont be in Wednesdays statement.

Because no full provincial budget will be delivered by March 31, both Ford and Phillips will face cash fines thanks to a new law passed last year. It will cost Ford $9,200 and Phillips $4,900  or 10 per cent of their cabinet top-up pay.

What we wont be doing tomorrow is providing any multi-year projections. And of course thats because that would be impossible to do so at this time, the finance minister said.

Well do that when hopefully the dust is cleared and we have a better sense of things.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath is calling for immediate $2,000 payments to households facing economic hardship due to the pandemic.

Horwaths proposed payouts, which would cost the treasury as much as $6 billion, are designed to help people bridge the gap while they wait for federal Employment Insurance cheques.

Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca is urging the Tories to consider matching the federal 10 per cent wage subsidy to double the benefit that this provides to both workers and their employers.

Del Duca has also asked the government to impose a six-month suspension of provincial payroll charges like WSIB and employer health tax premiums for businesses with up to 300 employees retroactive to Jan. 1.

On Tuesday, Ontario government followed his advice by suspending time-of-use electricity pricing, although only for 45 days. He had recommended a six-month reprieve.

The Liberal leader also wants the Tories to allow licensed establishments providing takeout and delivery services to temporarily sell alcohol as a way of helping the restaurant industry.

After Wednesdays 4 p.m. statement, which will be delivered before just 28 MPPs in the 124-member house due to the need for social distancing, the legislature will break until April 14.

Robert Benzie is the Stars Queens Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie

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Our heart goes out to the families, Love said. It doesnt help them go through the grieving process any easier."

This week, hes watched a daughter dealing with the death of her mother with two sisters in far-away states with high rates of COVID-19 who cant return.

Her father has dementia and lives in a nursing home, Love said, and its unclear whether he will be able to attend his wifes graveside service.

It might just be the daughter and her son.

At Colonial Chapel, families have also been very understanding of the situation, said funeral director Christian Biester.

On Tuesday, they extended a visitation to seven hours.

So people could flow in and out while keeping the 10-person limit.

Colonial Chapel is also offering livestream funerals through YouTube with a link on its website.

We are saying you can be at the funeral at home, just like churches are doing for Sunday services, Biester said.
Former Israeli Elite Cyber-Intelligence Officer Joins as Partner

MENLO PARK, Calif. and TEL AVIV, Israel , March 25, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NetworkWire  Fort Ross Ventures , a venture-capital firm focused on startups in the U.S., Israel, and Eastern Europe, today announced that it closed an oversubscribed $235 million Fund II, raising an additional $35 million beyond its target. Additionally, the company announced that Ms. Sharin Fisher, former officer of Israels elite cyber-intelligence agency, Unit 8200, has joined the firm as a partner to help identify cybersecurity, SaaS, big data, artificial intelligence, and fintech startups. Fisher will join the Israel office based in Tel Aviv.



Demand for Fund II was fueled by the firms recent exits, including Dynamic Yield (acquired by McDonalds for $327M), CoverWallet (acquired by Aon), and the IPOs of Uber (UBER) and Tufin (TUFN). Fort Rosss two funds combined have a total of $345 million assets under management (AUM).

In these volatile financial times, were pleased that our second fund has garnered so much attention. This allows us to continue to bridge the U.S. and Israeli startup ecosystems with Eastern European markets, said Victor Orlovski, Founder and Managing Partner at Fort Ross Ventures.

New partner Sharin Fisher brings 14 years of technology-focused experience from serving nine years at Unit 8200s Cyber-Intelligence Agency and leading the 8200 EISP, a top Israeli accelerator. She will maintain a board position at 8200 EISP and at the 8200 alumni association.

In getting to know the team at Fort Ross, I was impressed by their deep breadth of expertise as well as their ability to expand their portfolio companies growth globally, said Fisher. Im happy to join Fort Ross, which is not only unique in its geographical focus, but also by being operator-led with a team of industry pioneers from complementary backgrounds.

Fort Rosss Fund II focuses on startups specializing in cloud, fintech, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and marketplaces. It recently participated in Roofstocks Series D, Fetch Robotics Series C and FireFlys Series A2.

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About Fort Ross Ventures

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Good Morning, welcome to Information Nigerias Newspaper headlines for today, 26th March 2020.

Here are the major headlines.

Coronavirus: Gov Diri Speaks On Being In Contact With Bala

Bayelsa state governor Doye Diri has reacted to the reports that say he had contact with the duo of Bauchi state governor, Bala Mohammed and Abba Kyari who have both tested positive for coronavirus.

Coronavirus: Aso Rock On Partial Lockdown

Femi Adesina, President Muhammadu Buharis special adviser on media and publicity, says the presidential villa in Abuja is on a partial lockdown. The presidential aide said this on Wednesday during an interactive session with state house correspondents.

Atiku Donates N50m For Coronavirus Relief Package For Nigerians

Atiku Abubakar, former vice-president, has donated N50 million as relief fund to support the fight against coronavirus. Atiku made the announcement in a statement personally signed by him on Wednesday.

Coronavirus: Kaduna Bans Motocycle, Tricycle Operations

Hadiza Balarabe, Deputy Governor of Kaduna State says the State Government has banned the operations of motorcycles and tricycles in order to maintain social distancing precaution.

COVID-19: Wike Shuts Down All Rivers Air, Land, Sea Borders

Rivers state governor, Nyeson Wike has announced the total lockdown of the state following move by a coronavirus infected person to sneak into the state.

Edo State Governor Goes Into Self-Isolation

Governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki has reportedly gone into self-isolation as a preventive measure against spreading Coronavirus.

Governor Fayemi Goes Into Self-Isolation

Governor of Ekiti State, Kayode Fayemi has said that he has gone into self-isolation after he came in contact with two persons infected with Coronavirus.

Edo State Assembly Speaker Test Positive To Coronavirus

The Speaker of the Edo state House of Assembly, Frank Okiye, has tested positive for Coronavirus.

Governor Bello Lockdown All Entry Point In Kogi State

Governor of Kogi State, Yahaya Bello has ordered closure of all entry points (land and water) into the state in order to prevent Coronavirus from entering into the state.

Boko Haram Kills 47 Troops In Borno State

The Nigerian army on Tuesday lost no fewer than 47 troop members to the deadly Boko Haram sect in Gorogi area of Borno state after they were ambushed by the extremists.
Amaravati: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy has appealed to people to stay put wherever they are to help to fight the coronavirus and assured that all measures are being taken from government side besides seeking cooperation from the people by staying back at home.

Speaking after a high-level review meeting here on Thursday, he said if people keep moving it will be difficult to track the contact points and situation would turn more challenging.

The chief minister issued a warning, especially after hundreds of Andhra Pradesh origin people residing in Hyderabad, wanted to get back to their respective homes in Andhra Pradesh.

"Those who managed to cross the border yesterday have been sent for isolation for 14 days. They will not be able to go homes so what's the point of coming here," reasoned Jagan.

Till today evening hundreds are still gathered at Andhra-Telangana border.

"People should stay home and helpline numbers 104 for medical emergencies and 1902 for other emergencies are active round the clock for the public," the cm reminded.

"If people observe home isolation it will be easy to track the needy and their contact point. We were never before in such an emergency," he said.

There are ten positive cases so far and the officials have tracked 27, 819 foreign returnees in Andhra Pradesh- Tirupati, Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Nellore. The government has put in place isolation wards and dedicated medicare with critical care at four places. The facilities at the hospitals, isolation wards are well equipped to meet the requirements but the three-week self-isolation would be a great contribution, he said.

Ten Departments are integrated to look into the non-medical emergencies and we have lifted a ban on goods vehicles, the chief minister informed.
- Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko has spoken about the calls from Ghanaian for a total lockdown in the country to help fight the deadly coronavirus

- He said currently a total lockdown will hurt the poor badly because a lot of people survive on 'hand to mouth'

- Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko was quick to add that every society can design its own lockdown with the ultimate goal of stopping the spread of the deadly coronavirus

Our Manifesto: This is what YEN.com.gh believes in

NPP activist and cousin to President Nana Akufo-Addo has stated that the calls by most Ghanaians for a lockdown in this country to help stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus will hurt the poor.

Since the number of cases started going up several people in the country have been calling on President Akufo-Addo and his government to totally lockdown the country in order to control the spread of the deadly virus.

READ ALSO: Man undertaking fumigation exercise has collapsed at Amasaman

But a Facebook post sighted by YEN.com.gh Gabby disclosed that every society can design its own lockdown with the ultimate goal of stopping the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

READ ALSO: Pastor Brian Amoateng apologises for hand sanitiser comment

The debate for and against a temporary lockdown in Ghana is sincere.

But, lets remember that a lockdown is not necessarily one size fits all; every society can design its own lockdown to fit its peculiar dynamics; except the goal is one: to stop the spread. Those against a lockdown make the point that Ghana is not like Europe.

A lot of people here survive on hand-to-mouth, live in compounds houses, etc. Our markets are mainly not like Walmart or Sainsburys. Online sales are not common. A lockdown would hurt the poor badly.

All very true. But, how else can we protect the masses from a virus that does not discriminate in its deadly wide spread? How do we protect the poor if things get very bad? he quizzed

READ ALSO: Pastor Brian Amoateng apologises for hand sanitiser comment

READ ALSO: Doctor weds handsome fiance with only 3 witnesses, no reception

Perhaps the government is working on developing a strategic way to lockdown the country without the poor suffering its effects.

YEN.com.gh earlier reported one of the people responsible for the fumigation exercise at the Amasaman market collapsed while discharging his duties

It is currently unclear what caused him to collapse while going through the fumigation exercise

Information available to YEN.com.gh indicates that he is currently receiving treatment at the hospital.

Only God can save Ghana from the Coronavirus outbreak - Pastor declares | #Yencomgh

Know someone who is extremely talented and needs recognition? Your stories and photos are always welcome. Get interactive via our Facebook page.

Enjoyed reading our story? Download YEN's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Ghana news!

Source: YEN.com.gh
Nirmala Sitharaman to hold pre-Budget consultations with state finance ministers on Thursday

GST on textiles will not be increased from 5 to 12 per cent: FM Sitharaman

It is not BJP money: Nirmala Sitharaman on IT raids on 'Samajwadi perfume' trader

Rs 1.76 lakh crore package for poor: Highlights of the Nirmala Sitharaman presser

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Mar 26: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a Rs 1.76 lakh crore relief package for the poor today.

An insurance scheme for the health workers was also announced by the Finance Minister. Let us take a look at all the announcements made by the Finance Minister today.

Insurance scheme for health workers fighting COVID-19 in Government Hospitals and Health Care Centres:

Safai karamcharis, ward-boys, nurses, paramedics, technicians, doctors and specialists and other health would be covered by a Special insurance Scheme.

Any health professional who while treating Covid-19 patients or meets with some accident, then he/she would be compensated with an amount of Rs 50 lakh under the scheme.

All government health centres, wellness centres and hospitals of Centre as well as States would be covered under this scheme and approximately 22 lakh health workers would be provided insurance cover to fight this pandemic.

Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan yojana

Each farmer would be given Rs 2000 during the month of April 2020.

It would cover 8.7 crore farmers and Rs 16000 crores would be distributed to them.

Cash transfers Under PM Garib Kalyan Yojana:

A total of Rs 20.40 crores PMJDY women account-holders would be given an ex-gratia of Rs.500 per month for next three months.

For this purpose, the Government of India will spend Rs 31,000 crore.

Gas cylinders

Under PM Garib Kalyan yojana, gas cylinders, free of cost, would be provided to 8 crore poor families for the next three months.

Three gas cylinders would be provided during this period.

Rs.13,000 crores would be provided for this purpose.

Low wage earners in organised sectors:

Wage-earners below Rs.15,000 per month in businesses having less than 100 workers are at risk of losing their employment.

Under this package, government proposes to pay 24 per cent of their monthly wages into their PF accounts for next three months.

This would prevent disruption in their employment.

Rs 5,000 crores is being provided for this purpose.

Support for senior citizens (above 60 years), widows and Divyang:

There are around 3 crore aged widows and people under the Divyang category who are vulnerable due to economic disruption caused by COVID-19.

Government will give them Rs 1,000 to tide over difficulties during next three months.

Rs 3,000 crores has been provided for this purpose under the PM Garib Kalyan Package.

PM Garib Kalyan Ann Yojana

Government of India would not allow anybody, especially any poor family, to suffer on account of non-availability of food grains due to disruption in the next three months.

80 crore individuals, i.e, roughly two-thirds of India's population would be covered under this scheme.

Each one of them would be provided double of their current entitlement over next three months.

This would be free of cost.

GOI will bear entire expenditure of Rs 40,000 crores spent for this purpose.

Pulses:

To ensure adequate availability of protein to all the above mentioned individuals, one kg per family, of pulse like moong, toor, chana, urad would be provided for next three months.

These pulses would be provided free of cost by the government of India.

GOI will be spending Rs.5,000 crores for this purpose.

MNREGA:

Under PM Garib Kalyan Yojana, MNREGA wages would be increased by Rs 20 with effect from 1 April, 2020.

This will benefit approximately 13.62 crore families.

Approximately, Rs 5,600 Crores will be spent for this purpose.

Organised sector :

Employees' Provident Fund Regulations will be amended to include pandemic as the reason to allow non-recoverable advance of 75 percent of the amount or three months of the wages, whichever is lower, from their accounts.

Families of four crore workers registered under EPF can take benefit of this window.

Self-Help groups :

Women organised through 63 lakhs Self Help Groups(SHGs) support 6.85 crore households.

Limit of collateral free lending would be increased from Rs 10 to Rs 20 lakhs.

This will help them by additional credit availability.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Thursday, March 26, 2020, 14:50 [IST]
Because of the lockdown Americans stock up on weapons, Germans buy a lot of pasta, and Russians try to make reserves of pickles

Now, during the coronavirus epidemic, masks and antiseptics are being sold all over the world. Finns discuss mass buying of toilet paper. They even found an explanation for this phenomenon.

However, Finland is not the only country in which demand for certain goods increased. Helsingin Sanomat gathered information on the most popular purchases in different countries at the moment.

Sweden



Purchases there have their own special national features.

The head of the Central Bank of Sweden, Stefan Ingves, said a week ago that in the current exceptional conditions, the Swedes are buying primarily the following three products: rice, pasta and snuff.

Sweden is the only EU country in which snuff is sold legally. About a million Swedes use snuff more or less regularly. It contains a lot of nicotine and is highly addictive.

Petya Pelli, a Helsingin Sanomat correspondent in Stockholm, noted that the rest of the Swedes are buying the same as the Finns: they purchase antiseptics in pharmacies and make empty shelves with toilet paper in stores. In some stores, sales have quadrupled.

In the homeland of meatballs, they buy not only pasta, but also minced meat.

Also people witness increased sales in the state network of alcoholic beverages stores. The Systembolaget Swedish state wine monopoly reported a record level of sales. Norwegians come to the western and northern regions of Sweden for alcohol.

This is a rather controversial phenomenon, because the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called on the citizens to refrain from all trips abroad. In addition, on March 16, the border with Norway became partially closed: Norway closed its airports and seaports to foreigners.

In Sweden, alcohol costs a little cheaper than in Norway.

Estonia

Estonians are buying potatoes, Andres Soots, head of the South Estonian grocery chain sales department, reports to Postimees newspaper. This grocery network delivers products from local farmers to shops throughout Estonia.

Grocery stores in Tallinn and Tartu order three times more potatoes than usual, Soots said.

The second most popular product in Estonia is garlic. Kolleste Garlic takes a record number of orders. Although garlic is an important component of Estonian cuisine, one of the current reasons for purchasing garlic is the general belief that garlic has a positive effect on health. The local online newspaper Delfi has published an article about the myths of coronavirus, among which is the opinion that coronavirus can be defeated by garlic.

Garlic is a healthy product that helps the body fight germs. However, there is no evidence that eating garlic can protect against a new coronavirus, Delfi quoted the World Health Organization.

Photos of empty shelves in alcohol stores appeared in social networks. Estonians buy a lot of 80 percent alcohol to use as an antiseptic.

Toilet paper is also popular in Estonia. The Estonians who remained at home, like the Finns, joke a lot about this. Facebook group "Black Exchange for the sale of toilet paper" in less than a week was joined by 16 000 people.

Germany, Netherlands, Austria

If a German goes to the store, he buys a lot. There is even a separate word for this phenomenon - hamsterkauf. The first signs of hamsterkauf were seen in late February, writes Der Spiegel. Then the Lidl retail chain reported an increase in sales of products with a long shelf life - canned goods and pasta. Sales of toilet paper and antiseptics also increased.

In mid-March, pasta ended even in online stores of some cities in Germany. On March 16, Germany decided to tighten measures to combat the spread of the virus, but store hours were not limited.

In Austria, the massive purchase of groceries in stores has acquired comic features: the local Kurier published a video showing a customer driving on a scooter inside the store. The scooter was loaded mostly with toilet paper. The purchases were so heavy that the buyer could not move the scooter without assistance. His original trip to the store was still unsuccessful.

The Dutch government, in turn, on March 15 announced the closure of all cafes that offer cannabis - for three weeks. According to AFP, just a few minutes after the press conference in many cities long lines appeared near cafes. If the day before, the Dutch grabbed toilet paper and pasta in stores, then on March 15 their minds were already completely different.

USA



Americans stock up on weapons for a rainy day. For example, the ammo.com online weapons store announced 70% sales growth in late February - early March. This year, more weapons permits were issued in America than usual. According to the FBI, between January and February, 5.5 million documents were issued for the purchase of weapons.

The Los Angeles Times writes that many Americans bought their first weapon this year.

"I want to buy a gun. Maybe Glock, but I'm not very sure," said the doctor who introduced himself as Ray.

I have a family that needs to be protected in case of danger, Ray said and expressed concern that public services would stop working.

Americans also buy antiseptics and wipes. Everclear liquor shelves are empty in Culver City stores. Its ales, according to the Los Angeles Times, have risen due to reports that 60 percent alcohol is a good disinfectant.

Russia

In Russia, sales of canned meat and fish increased, RBC reports. Russians buy pickled cucumbers and pasta - especially in such large cities as Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. RBC writes that in early March, sales of canned goods with vinegar and salt - for example, pickles and sauerkraut - increased in large cities by 79%.

Of the cereals, buckwheat is especially actively sold. It is a product popular in Russia. In Moscow stores, demand for sugar and salt also increased.

Major retailers also reported an increase in the supply of necessary goods such as cleaning products, baby food and pet food. According to RIA Novosti, Russian President Vladimir Putin asked the citizens of the country not to buy food in reserve, because this is not necessary.
I spent much of Friday a week ago - or day one, as it's now being referred to - in a blind rage. It kicked off that morning, when an acquaintance texted into a WhatsApp group I am in, one with about 30 members.

It was one of those messages we were all plagued by for the first few days of this thing, before people (mostly) copped themselves on.

This one was from an anonymous doctor (provenance unknown), urging people to take various measures. Most of it was about children. The vectors.

Towards the end it got to the grandparents and how they could not be expected to babysit. There followed some discussion in the group over how important this was.

Hence my rage. I am a self-employed single mother, supporting my child, and a home, I ranted to the various friends I rang to talk me out of texting into the group itself, something I knew I would ultimately regret.

My parents do not babysit. What they do is so much more. They are helping us to rear our daughter.

They mind her to an extent that allows me to earn a living. If I was paying an actual childminder, working probably wouldn't be worth my while financially.

More than that, though: while her father and I co-parent amicably, co-parenting is entirely different to having a spouse. You don't sit on the couch after bedtime with a co-parent and confide your small anxieties over your child's welfare. Neither do you go to Ikea or the DIY store together of a Saturday because your child needs a new bed or something in your house needs fixing.

I do these things with my parents - my daughter's grandparents.

I'm lucky. I'm so supported that sometimes I feel like a fraud calling myself a single parent. In any given week, my parents will be involved in school drop-offs and collections, in bringing my five-year-old to after-school activities hosting playdates, cooking meals, tracking down suddenly needed new sizes of clothing, and doing bedtime. They live five minutes away; my daughter sees them almost every day.

Three years ago, my parents got me through my separation, and made it okay to be a single parent, because I never really felt like one, so supported was I.

What going through a divorce taught me was that you can lose the person you had built a life with, without whom life seemed unimaginable, but that there are still some people in your life who are givens.

What the last week has so shockingly revealed is that sometimes the decision to be there, in your life supporting you, might be out of their hands. Suddenly, we were facing into weeks, maybe months, of isolation from them.

My father has asthma, so I knew immediately, before the WhatsApp groups cranked into action, that we would need to isolate from them. I was raging, because I was so scared.

Everyone going through this has their own particular challenges. I work from home already, so that hasn't been too much of an adjustment. So far, unlike many of my fellow freelance friends who have, terrifyingly, seen months of work disappear overnight, I'm busy.

But it's a strange kind of isolation to face into this as the only adult in your house.

And the worries we are all facing can feel that bit more intense: finance, isolation, working from home when the children are there. Some single parents will face isolation from their children, for who knows how long.

The first few days were fine. I realised quite quickly that I had to be strict with myself. Monitor exactly what I was consuming. In ways, it was freeing: muting WhatsApp groups which threw up links to doom and gloom; not getting back to anything but the absolutely essential stuff.

When my marriage ended I learned that for a time, when you're in the midst of huge change and lots of grief, you need to make your world really small.

You go off social media at times when you are mentally vulnerable; you take things day by day, hour by hour if you need. Having a child to focus on gives you a purpose, takes you out of your own mind and the potential vortex of anxiety that awaits there, threatening to pull you under.

As the days went on in this past week, I noticed mental buoyancy becoming harder. I didn't suffer the vicious anxiety I saw paralysing a lot of my friends.

More a heavy sadness, like the waves of grief. We've had to isolate from my daughter's father; we don't know when he'll next see her.

The sight of her one night putting her little arms around the phone during their video call and saying "cuddle?" nearly broke me.

Like lots of us, she's having vivid dreams each night, which she recounts to me every morning. "I dreamt granddad collected me for school," she says, and I have to hide my face in the press, pretending to be looking for something so she won't see the tears in my eyes.

"I miss granddad," she says a few days in and gets upset. As kids do, five minutes later she appears to have moved on entirely. But I begin to notice an increase in mentions of physical complaints, a regular sore tummy.

I find that the time I'm most bothered by the social isolation is when I least want to talk to other people.

Friends call and I ignore them, or text saying "bad day, won't risk crying in front of her, speak tomorrow". We video-call my parents and I stay just out of sight of the camera so they can't see me welling up.

When my daughter sees my father she howls "grrrraandaaaaad", and I can barely hold it together. The panic comes in waves: when my mother texts late at night to check in; when my daughter goes silent and stares into the middle distance. "Alright Beanie?" I ask her. "I miss Daddy, and everyone," she replies.

I tell myself, you know how to do this - you've been through this before. When your marriage ends, all sense of the future you had imagined disappears and for a time instead the future becomes a scary place. Who knows what it will bring?

But I know what that is. Future thinking. Worrying about things yet to come, which may never happen, things you cannot control.

By worrying about the future, you risk overwhelming yourself in the present.

Stay right here in this moment, I tell myself strictly. Tidy a room. Paint with your daughter. Give her a bath.

It's not all bad, though. As with everything, there is a flip-side. Obviously, adult conversation would be good.

But there is something to be said for the company of a joyful five-year-old who isn't consumed with anxiety. It can be helpful that the face you spend all day looking at isn't tinged with panic.

But then when you get consumed by fear, for her, for yourself, for your family, your work, there's no one to bounce it off.

"Not having someone to carry the fear I have and being the only one to carry it for my son" another single mother confides. "The nights are the worst."

Throughout this first week, I've been making regular trips to the kitchen to cry, before heading back in to pretend all is fine.

People are lovely. We have a WhatsApp dinner party with my best friend and her family, where the children eat pasta and shout at each other.

My cousin and my aunt drop off book parcels for my daughter. I contact the Department of Health to enquire as to the safety of two single parents joining forces.

"It's really a case of individuals now weighing up all the pros and cons of doing something like this against the public health advice of good hand hygiene, respiratory etiquette, social distancing, keeping surfaces clean etc.

"Is everyone currently well? Does anybody have underlying conditions? Has anyone been in contact with a suspected or confirmed case? Is there sufficient space in the house? Answers to these types of questions will help people judge whether the advantages outweigh the risk."

It sounds like a yes. Frolo, the networking app for single parents, is facilitating virtual meet-ups, group messaging for members, and providing financial advice.

The WhatsApping calms down, but I find I need to still be careful. All that posting of routines online. It's helpful, I suppose, but difficult if your reality is trying to maintain a full-time career, with no one to take the parenting shift while you work.

"Do they think all mothers are at home, not working through this?" asks one single mother with three children who have been sent home with huge amounts of school work.

Mine is five, and I have made an executive decision that she will be fine, whatever amount we do or do not get done. But it's difficult for single parents with older children.

The TV goes on far more regularly than I would like, but I decide to quell the guilt. One morning, on deadline, I look up to realise that she is on her second viewing of her favourite movie that day.

She's figured out the remote.

"I'm practising an extreme form of 'whatever works' parenting," I tell a friend.

"Suspend your normal rules and rituals around screen time, because you've got to do what you've got to do. These are not normal times. The normal rules and routines do not apply," Joanna Fortune, psychotherapist and author of 15 Minute Parenting, tells me.

"I think single parents are actually better equipped than most to deal with this," one single mother tells me.

"I for one am used to being trapped indoors when the milk runs out; three kids under nine means I can't leave the house. I am used to online shopping, managing alone. We are better at multi-tasking, better at handling considerable anxiety due to personal struggles. Better at doing everything with kids in tow. I don't allow my brain to go to what-if places."

I know what she means. Sometimes, as I'm in the kitchen making yet another snack, a flash of the mind-bogglingly daunting nature of what lies ahead sweeps over me. It might be just the two of us, for months. It was my network that got me through the difficulty of the last few years, when my marriage fell apart and now we are cut off from them.

But even though this feels incredibly difficult, and draining, I also know for a fact that there is no way I will go under.

I'm exhausted, and frazzled, and crying on and off (like most of the friends I speak to), but I know also that I am in no danger of succumbing to anxiety over this. I don't worry (not much anyway) about what I cannot control. In short, I can manage my mind.

That is because my friend is right. Single parents have developed a mental hardiness that at a time like now stands to us. A resilience.

Another mother confides that she has been sick for the past week, she thinks it is the coronavirus, and she is solo parenting.

Are you okay? I ask.

She replies that she has parented alone through vomiting flu, so she can handle anything.

If you have survived a long relationship falling apart, you've had to get on, in the face of it all going to pieces. You've had to get up every morning and make it all okay for your children. You've coped with work and children overlapping.

And even with all the family and friends in the world, you've also had to do it by yourself to some extent.

You've woken up at four in the morning worried over something and comforted yourself back to equanimity.

You've watched your life as you knew it fall apart and you've picked up the pieces and put it all back together.

You've seen the life you wanted for your children crumble, and had to cope with that, and make it alright for them.

It's different, and much scarier, right now, but in ways it is the same. If you are a single parent, chances are you have already proved to yourself you can cope. You have shown your children that you can.

It's incredibly hard right now, and the future is daunting. But you are so much stronger than you might think.

Liadan Hynes's first book, How to Fall Apart, about putting your life back together after the end of a marriage, is published on May 7. Pre-order now from Easons to be in with a chance to win a weekend spa break for two at Cliff at Lyons Hotel & Country Retreat in Kildare. www.easons.com
Around the world, communities are taking drastic measures to curtail the spread of coronavirus. For many colleges and universities, that means canceling events, closing dorms and dramatically disrupting the lives of students and faculty. To date, at least 1,102 colleges and universities in the U.S. have closed their campuses due to coronavirus, choosing to move classes online. Georgetown professor Bryan Alexander estimates that college closures have impacted over 14 million students. "At least," he stresses. While students, professors, administrators and public health officials agree that school closures will play an important role in limiting the transmission of coronavirus, this bold move is causing a ripple effect throughout the higher education community. CNBC Make It spoke with over a dozen college students to hear how coronavirus is impacting them.

College closures

On March 7, The University of Washington became the first large university in the U.S. to close its doors because of coronavirus. The school canceled in-person classes for its nearly 50,000 students and is having students take their exams remotely. Soon after, schools across the country followed suit. While each school has confronted coronavirus differently, many of the students Make It spoke with mentioned a typical pattern: rumors, followed by emails from administrators, followed by panic  despite the school administrators' best efforts. "It all escalated really quickly," Isabella Borshoff, a graduate student from Australia earning a master's degree in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, tells CNBC Make It, "I think the Kennedy School was one of the first Harvard schools to announce that it was planning to pilot online courses," she says. "And they'd framed it as 'Just in case we need to go online after spring break, we're going to test our capacity to deliver our courses online via Zoom.'" About a week later, on March 10, Harvard announced the entire university would be going online and gave students five days to evacuate their dorms. "It kind of went from 'We're just testing' to, 'Okay, this is the real deal' pretty quickly," says Borshoff. Michael Robertson, a senior at Davidson College, learned from a professor that the school was closing. "I was sitting in my professor's office hours trying to work on a math problem when a different professor came out and shouted, 'That's it, it's over! [You're] going home! Classes are remote,'" Robertson says. "I think I spent about 10 more minutes trying to solve the problem I was working on before the gravity of the situation started to sink in." "It sort of created an end of the world feeling," he says.

Harvard Student Will Rowley carries moving boxes to pack up his things in Cambridge, MA on March 10, 2020. All Harvard University courses will move to remote instruction beginning March 23 as a result of a growing global coronavirus outbreak, University President Lawrence S. Bacow announced in an email Tuesday morning. The University will also ask students not to return from spring break. Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Logistical difficulties

As students were forced to leave campus, many faced logistical difficulties as they suddenly had to scramble to pack their things and find a new place to live if they couldn't just return home. Aaron Vanek, a junior studying at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, left New York with the understanding classes would resume on April 19. Instead of going home to Minnesota, where a family member was being tested for coronavirus, he decided to go to his roommate's home in Maryland. Travel considerations also played a part in his decision  his roommate's father agreed to make the five-hour drive from Maryland to pick them up, but Vanek had no way to get home to Minnesota. Later, NYU informed students they would need to clear all of their belongings from their dorms, which meant Vanek had to travel back to New York, find a place to store his belongings and find a way to get home. Some schools, like Davidson, have provided additional support to students during this rocky transition, offering free shuttle rides to the airport and refunding students for the remaining cost of their room and board. Brandon Harris, a Davidson sophomore, says the Dean's Office is helping cover the transportation costs of students in need and the school's student government purchased two large storage lockers for the student body to use free of charge. Davidson alumni created a Google Doc listing the air miles they have collected so that students in need can use them to buy airplane tickets home. Other schools have made exceptions for students who cannot easily travel. At Stanford, "the only undergrads that were allowed to stay on campus were international students, students who have suppressed immune systems and other students who are homeless or who don't have a home to go back to," Robin Fierberg, a senior at Stanford University, tells CNBC Make It.

Matthew Adams of Midland, Michigan moves belongings into a storage unit after leaving the dorm at the University of Michigan on March 17, 2020 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. College students across America are being told to leave campus and continue classes online after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Coronavirus (COVID-19) a pandemic. Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

Exacerbating inequalities

Indeed, for students who are housing or food insecure, school closures have made these issues even worse, as they struggle to find alternative living situations. "The long-term effects are kind of hard to know, but in general, when you have vulnerable populations and emergency hits them, it tends to make their life situation worse. Just as a sort of general statement. And so I think overall, that's what we're going to see," Eddy Conroy, associate director of research communications for the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice tells CNBC Make It. Conroy fears that students who were struggling to stay in college before the pandemic will drop out completely. "If colleges don't figure out how to support those students, they might lose them permanently," he says.

An entirely new educational experience

Perhaps the biggest change to the lives of college students has been to their educational experiences. "I can already tell from just the three or four Zoom classes that I've had that they're not going to be the same quality of education that I'm used to and that I came to school for," says one college student who wishes to remain anonymous due to concern about losing an on-campus job. "If you're in a 200 person lecture and one person forgets to mute themselves, then that's just like chaos." Trey Rogers, a senior at Harvard, says he is skeptical of how his virtual classes using Zoom video conferencing services will compare to the small discussion-based classes he is accustomed to. "It's really hard to think that this is not the end of our academic year because this Zoom thing feels a little bit like a last-minute fix for a problem that is not that easily fixed," he says. And because the nature of their education has changed, many students are asking for their money back, including close to 10,000 students at NYU who have signed a petition calling for partial tuition refunds. "I think it's fair to ask for at least a partial refund on classes, just considering the huge drop in quality," Olivia Bornstein, a junior at Boston University, tells CNBC Make It. Indeed, students like Bornstein are still paying big prices for an online education product that typically costs less, that researchers believe is less effective and that students and professors find less valuable.

The senior class of 2020

School closures have had a significant emotional impact on students  especially those set to graduate this year. "It sucks a lot, I think, for people who are seniors," says Fierberg of his fellow graduating classmates. "I had to say goodbye to a lot of my friends much quicker than I thought I would have to, and under much different circumstances. It's unclear whether there will be a commencement ceremony." "I find solace in the idea that this is something that probably every college senior in the U.S. is going through in one way or another," he adds. "I realize that it's probably the right thing for [Harvard] to do and to be especially safe," Rogers says. "But it's devastating as a senior to know that I have to abort my college experience on this really sad note."

Job prospects

College students, and seniors in particular, are focused on their professional lives after college and are now preparing to enter the workforce during a recession. "A lot of people are talking about what it's gonna be like graduating into a recession, which is what it's looking like," says Borshoff. Cheryn Shin, a senior at Wellesley College majoring in English and creative writing, says she has spent the past few months looking for a full-time job to start after graduation. But because of the pandemic, her job search has become even harder. "It feels like even fewer companies are looking to hire," she says. "I was told that [majoring in] the humanities was all about luck and timing, so it felt like a slap in the face because it feels like I have neither of those."

Overall optimism
One logjam appears to have been broken in Peru, where some 5,000 Americans have been stuck since the government suspended both international and domestic flights. More than 1,000 Americans have been repatriated in recent days. Two U.S.-bound flights left Wednesday, one from Lima and one from Cusco. Brownlee said U.S. officials are working with their Peruvian counterparts to arrange more flights this week.
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Many moons ago, in the 1970s era, when no imposition from physically brutal on-call schedules to laudable scut to demeaning attendings was outside the boundaries of the house staff training curriculum, our leaders informed us that we were being introduced to the worst-case medical environment. That familiarity with setting aside our own creature comforts would enable us to save patient lives when the circumstances demanded our resilience.

Not quite two years into retirement, I still dont know if my elders were right, though the stress of coronavirus on the current medical teams may be taking another eras medical leadership theory to the laboratory. By being on call one night in three, with no day off for two weeks if one of those days fell on Sunday, we only missed just over half the available experience, perhaps a little more if we nodded off the afternoon following our call night. By the end of internship, we could make critical decisions with our midbrains, spear a non-palpable radial artery for ABGs by finding the flexor carpi radialis tendon, knew what tubes to put on the vacutainers, and picked up enough skill with snide retorts to hold our own at morning report.

For mostly good reasons, medical training and practice no longer resembles a fraternity hazing. Thinking has acquired some semblance of parity with responding. The phlebotomist has a crib sheet to color-match tube tops with computer-generated test requisitions. Even our order sheets are no longer a blank page to be mentally sorted by nursing tasks, diagnostics, therapeutics, and help me please consultations in that order.

Unless there was a communal disaster like a plane crash or train derailment, practiced in mock drills, for most American physicians, that worst-case never materialized, but we more than proved ourselves ready to pitch in the few times it did. People of my era had our challenges, to be sure. Malpractice insurance premium escalations occurred, though unavailability never materialized. Our clinical insights expanded through the research of others, or sometimes our own, but our accountability shifted to the less satisfying metrics imposed upon us, usually without input from the clinicians. Our appointment schedules eventually filled with little regard to our capacity, evoking no end of negative transference reactions to the off-site clerks instructed to do this. Overwhelmed, burned out, irritated, devalued became the terms exchanged most frequently over donuts in the doctors lounge.

Being retired forces me to watch from afar as my still active colleagues cope with the professional stresses of a COVID-19 pandemic that left them little time to plan. Professional voyeurism may not be the optimal preference for a healthy 60-something clinical retiree. People of my age usually do not have young dependents. Were we to acquire lethal COVID-19, there would be sorrow among our relatives but not the sense of tragedy that we read about when young physicians or those in their prime have succumbed in Italy or China while stabilizing their populations. We get a meager taste of this concern for our younger colleagues every Christmas when the on-call schedule defaults to the Jewish, Hindu, and Islamic physicians. For the groups that have none, many in my community, some give call that holiday to the associate with least seniority, but more often, it is the senior empty nester partner that makes rounds so that the physicians with young children can share the family joys. No matter how gruff an imprint was left by our mentors a generation ago, they had a soft spot for us as we developed, and we return that concern to the younger physicians as they rise to prominence.

Perhaps more importantly for physicians recently departed from decades amid the grand health care pageant, as non-participants in the current crisis, or any lesser previous crisis, we might wonder if the intensity of our training really succeeded in enabling us to demonstrate top form and prolonged stamina in the way own teachers had anticipated. FOMO, the acronym for fear of missing out, is usually directed to younguns whose iPhone screens remain visible at all hours to avoid missing the most trivial text message. But physicians have this in a different form.

As I read about my active colleagues drawing upon their reserves, our managers shifting their focus from beating on them to enabling them, my not being there to offer my own skill reinforces a sense of being in exile. I could kvetch about the EHR with the best of them, but COVID-19 has changed the formal and informal discussions for the better. Gone from physician social media are the snipes about how poorly we are treated or devalued by the public. Anyone who watches TV wants somebody to hit the gong when the president takes the podium and let the learned medical officer take over. Physicians have recaptured the respect that drives so many of us to excel in the most trying of circumstances. We rise to the occasion, much as those trained in another era were forced to do. I wish I could rejoin my active colleagues amid the medical fray, but the best I can do right now may be to join the rest of the public in offering admiration for the physicians and numerous others who have their importance returned to the public psyche. Our value has been restored. For many of us, our self-worth along with it.

Richard Plotzker is an endocrinologist who blogs at Consult Maven.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
The COVID-19 pandemic has exceeded expectations with regards to its spread and severity, leading the World Health Organization to declare it a global health emergency. As businesses and other sectors experience massive disruption, organizations must consider the risks posed by a breakdown in communications, which could cause further confusion or spark panic among employees, customers, and other stakeholders.

W7Worldwide, a communications consultancy based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, released a report containing a list of seven important steps organizations must consider during these times of crisis.

These challenging times are taking their toll on the society on several fronts including the health and the business front, said Abdulrahman Inayat (pictured), director and co-founder of W7Worldwide, told Corporate Risk and Insurance. There are numerous reports about businesses closing down, people losing their jobs, and quarantines. These businesses facing a crisis must do all they can to protect their reputation.

There is a glaring need to develop solid corporate communications to protect the corporate reputation and weather the crisis before it is too late  which is why we developed a seven-step guide to navigating through communications crises during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Establish a guiding task force of decision makers

According to W7Worldwide, the team should be ideally led by the CEO and include leaders from the communications, HR, IT, legal, and risk teams. Rapid decision making is critical as each day brings new information to light that may impact an organisations business practices and operations. Formulate a crisis management plan and assign responsibilities, so every member of the COVID-19 response team knows who is doing what. The communications team will be responsible for developing and delivering the organisations messages internally and externally.

Create an internal communications plan

The organisation should pre-empt and provide answers to questions its employees will have. These will relate to changes in working conditions, travel restrictions, job security, health, safety, welfare, and business continuity. Define a two-way process for reaching employees through emails, intranet, company meetings, FAQs, or a website situation room.

Create an external communications plan

This needs to reach external stakeholders, customers, the media, shareholders, suppliers and the local community. Use all communications channels available in order to engage, including social media, press conferences, shareholder meetings, website, web conferences, and email. Messages must be tailored to the audiences to maintain trust and avoid the spread of misinformation.

Prepare for a media crisis

If the organization is named in the news by being directly linked to the spread of the virus, it should have a dedicated company spokesperson in place who can address any concerns and provide reassurance to the media. Have a targeted media list ready to reach out to with company information.

Create a central information hub

This will serve as the organizations reliable source of truth where the workforce and stakeholders can find all the information they need. Always support the efforts of respective governments and the World Health Organization (WHO), referencing only their guidance, healthcare advice, and rules. Employees need to know they are protected and understand the reasons for any safety precautions and internal actions the company is taking.

Be realistic and ready

Organizations should be prepared to address the risks they may face as the world prepares for an increase in COVID-19 cases. The crisis management plan needs to address questions such as how the organization will continue to deliver if the crisis escalates, how it will handle employee illness, whether the supply chain be disrupted, and how will the business be affected by local government directives and policies.

Demonstrate corporate social responsibility

Once the organization has secured its employees and facilities, they must consider how they can support local or global COVID-19 response efforts with services, equipment or expertise and seek out opportunities to be part of the solution to the crisis.

The report also shared several best practices adopted by major companies during the COVID-19 crisis. It said that Apple committed donations of at least US$15 million to the global COVID-19 response  both to help treat those who are sick and to help lessen the economic and community impacts of the pandemic. The company also announced that it will be matching employee donations two-to-one to support COVID-19 response efforts locally, nationally and internationally.

Emirates Airlines and other airlines have been hit hard by the outbreak, with canceled flights affecting their passengers and operating crew. Emirates, the report said, adopted a proactive approach that puts people at the center of its strategy. The company activated a crisis management center and has made regular corporate announcements of the operational steps taken to provide customers and employees with peace of mind. These include waiver policies on tickets, special flights for stranded travelers, enhanced disinfection on all aircraft, and thermal screening on US-bound flights.

Meanwhile, the report cited Silicon Valley firm Avaya Technologies as one of the forerunners in corporate social responsibility. Since January, the companys teams and partners in China have been on the frontline in Wuhan, where they have donated audio and video equipment to help medical personnel perform remote consultations and video diagnostics. The company also decided to provide its Avaya Spaces collaboration software for free, to all educational institutions, including colleges and universities, along with non-profit organizations worldwide. The company also established a customer crisis team to work with public- and private-sector customers in the Middle East and has been working to enable work-from-home readiness. These efforts seek to ensure that vital citizen and business support services remain unaffected during the effort to contain the spread of COVID-19.
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Linkedin Matt Spetalnick and Sarah N. Lynch (Reuters) Washington, United States  Fri, March 27, 2020 09:02 656 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206db26fc 2 World venezuela,Nicolas-Maduro,president,narcotics,US,convicted,DrugOffenses Free

The US government on Thursday indicted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and more than a dozen other top Venezuelan officials on charges of "narco-terrorism," the latest escalation of the Trump administration's pressure campaign aimed at ousting the socialist leader.

The State Department offered a reward of up to $15 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Maduro, whose country has been convulsed by years of a deep economic crisis and political upheaval.

The indictment, a rare US action against a sitting foreign head of state, marks a serious new phase against Maduro by Washington at a time when some US officials have privately said President Donald Trump is increasingly frustrated with the results of his Venezuela policy.

Attorney General William Barr, announcing charges that also included corruption and drug trafficking, accused Maduro and his associates of conspiring with a dissident faction of the leftist Colombian guerrilla group FARC "to flood the United States with cocaine. "While the Venezuelan people suffer, this cabal lines their pockets with drug money and the proceeds of their corruption," Barr said of Maduro and the more than a dozen others who were indicted.

Venezuela's information ministry did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment. The US government has previously lodged criminal indictments against members of Maduro's family and inner circle.

He and his allies have dismissed such allegations as a smear campaign, and argue the United States is responsible for drug trafficking given its role as a leading consumer.

Maduro is already under US sanctions and has been the target of a US effort aimed at pushing him from power. He took office in 2013 after the death of his mentor President Hugo Chavez, a staunch US foe.

Other Venezuelan officials whose indictments were announced on Thursday include Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, senior socialist leader Diosdado Cabello and the chief justice of the country's supreme court, Maikel Jose Moreno Perez, 54, who was charged with money laundering. The US government is offering $10 million for information leading to Cabello's arrest.

The United States and dozens of other countries have recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country's legitimate president. But Maduro has remained in power, backed by the country's military and by Russia, China and Cuba.

US officials have long accused Maduro and his associates or running a "narco-state," saying they have used drug trafficking proceeds to make up for lost revenue from a Venezuelan oil sector heavily sanctioned by the United States.

'Deployed cocaine as a weapon'

The indictments were unsealed in New York, Florida and Washington.

Maduro and his top lieutenants ran a "narco-terrorism partnership with the FARC for the past 20 years, stated Geoffrey Berman, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who said the Venezuelan president "very deliberately deployed cocaine as a weapon.".

"The scope and magnitude of the drug trafficking alleged was made possible only because Maduro and others corrupted the institutions of Venezuela and provided political and military protection for the rampant narco-terrorism crimes described in our charges," he added.

Berman accused Maduro and his co-defendants of "using their political and military power to promote narco-terrorism for their personal gain." He said the case took many years to build.

The US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Ariana Fajardo Orshan said she sees signs of Venezuelan officials' dirty laundered money throughout her area every day, from fancy yachts to million-dollar condos.

"This party is coming to an end," she said.

Asked whether the US government wants to capture Maduro dead or alive, Barr said: We want him captured so he can face justice in US court.

Barr said the administration does "expect eventually to gain custody of these defendants" and would explore all options. But he offered no indication of how US authorities believe they might get their hands on Maduro, who has endured more than a year of heavy international pressure and on-again, off-again street protests as the OPEC members economy has continued to unravel.

Maduro's international travel could be restricted, given that Washington would be able to request that he be handed over if he visits a country that has an extradition treaty with the United States. US authorities can also freeze any assets he has in the United States, though such holdings are considered unlikely.

The Justice Department said that since at least 1999, Maduro, along with Cabello and others, "acted as leaders and managers of the Cartel of the Suns. The name, it said, refers to the sun insignias affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials.

An indictment accused Padrino, who holds the rank of general, of using his control of the Venezuelan military to facilitate cocaine flights to the United States.

Venezuelan Vice President Tareck el-Aissami was charged with evading US sanctions. In 2017, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions against him for alleged drug trafficking and other related crimes. Two nephews of Maduro's wife were convicted in US federal court that year for drug smuggling.
By Naveen Thukral and Maha El Dahan

SINGAPORE/DUBAI (Reuters) - Global food security concerns are mounting as some governments contemplate restricting the flow of staple foods with around a fifth of the world's population under lockdown to fight the widening coronavirus pandemic.

Panic buying of household items and store cupboard staples such as rice and flour has occurred in nearly every country hit by the virus, which has infected over 470,000 people across 200 countries. Empty shelves in supermarkets have been common.

The erratic nature of consumer buying is stoking concern that some governments are moving to stem the flow of food staples to ensure their own populations have enough while supply chains are disrupted by the pandemic.

"If major exporters start keeping grains at home, it will have the buyers really worried," said Phin Ziebell, agribusiness economist at National Australia Bank. "It is panicking and not rational, as fundamentally the world is well supplied with food."

Vietnam, the third largest rice exporter, has already restricted sales amid concerns over domestic availability.

"If Vietnam maintains the export ban we will suddenly have about 10-15% less available supply in the world market in the near term," one European rice trader said. "Africa especially could face disruption from this."

India, the top global rice exporter, has just entered a three-week lockdown that has brought several logistics channels to a halt.

Elsewhere, Russia's vegetable oil union has called for a restriction in sunflower seed exports, and palm oil output has slowed in the number two producer Malaysia.

WHEAT MARKET ON EDGE

Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan have so far been able to maintain wheat exports after decent 2019 harvests, but Russia-focused grain traders are nervous.

"I am absolutely sure there will not be a harsh scenario - like Russia leaving the market. But I think there is going to be some soft scenario," a trader said on Thursday, referring to wheat and other types of grain.

Story continues

At the same time, some importers are trying to boost strategic supplies while others are finding glitches in supply chains.

In Egypt, the worlds largest wheat buyer, there have been delays in offloading Black Sea grain supplies from ships, with paperwork slowed by office closures due to the virus.

"There are at least four cargoes, corn and wheat, for the private market that I know have been delayed at the ports," Hesham Soliman, a private grain trader, said.

The cargos are all for the private sector and Egypts government has said it is well stocked with strategic supplies for four months ahead.

Iraq has said it needs to import 1 million tonnes of wheat and 250,000 tonnes of rice after a "crisis committee" advised building up strategic food stocks, while Qatar is also signing agreements to increase its reserves.

However, most wheat buyers in Asia, led by the world's second largest importer Indonesia, are covered for supplies until June, traders said.

"As of now we have not seen any wheat importer rushing to cover supplies more than the usual needs," said one trader in Singapore at an international trading company which sells Black Sea and U.S. wheat in Asia.

NO SHORTAGE

Combined global production of rice and wheat - the most widely-traded food crops - is projected to be a record 1.26 billion tonnes this year, according to the United States Department of Agriculture data.

That output tonnage should easily surpass total combined consumption of those crops, and lead to a build in year-end inventories to a record 469.4 million tonnes, USDA data shows.

However, those projections assume normal crop flows.

Prices for rice are already rising due to expectations of a further squeeze on exports.

"It is a logistics issue. Vietnam has stopped exports, India is in a lockdown and Thailand could declare similar measures," said a senior Singapore-based trader at one of world's top rice traders.

Benchmark rice prices in Thailand have risen more than 11% since the end of February to their highest since August 2013 at $492.5 a tonne.

The market topped $1,000 a tonne during the food crisis of 2008, when export restrictions and panic buying buoyed prices.

"We are unlikely to see a repeat of 2008," the Singapore rice trader said. "One thing is that the world has enough supplies, especially in India where inventories are very large."

Global rice stocks are estimated to surpass 180 million tonnes for the first time this year, up 28% since the 2015-16 season.

But those inventories are not distributed evenly, with more than 153 million tonnes in China and India alone.

That means big rice buyers such as the Philippines, the top importer, and others in Asia and Africa could be vulnerable if crop movements are curtailed for long.

"Our rice inventory is good for 65 days. We have enough rice for the next two months," said the Philippines Agriculture Secretary William Dar, adding that with additional supply coming from the dry season harvest, there would be enough for the next four months.

(Additional reporting by Enrico Dela Cruz in Manila, Michael Hogan in Hamburg, Polina Devitt in Moscow and Nigel Hunt in London; Editing by Gavin Maguire & Simon Cameron-Moore, Kirsten Donovan)
Hundreds of people across the country were booked and penalised for violating restrictions on the second day of the national lockdown on Thursday and drones were deployed to send out a warning, as authorities ramped up measures to ensure there was no supply disruption of essential commodities.

The unprecedented 21-day lockdown also had a tragic fallout when a 28-year-old man allegedly killed his younger brother for stepping out of their home in Mumbai's western suburb of Kandivali.

Police said Rajesh Laxmi Thakur killed his younger brother Durgesh after the latter stepped out of the house despite repeated warnings about the lockdown on Wednesday night, an official from Samta Nagar police station said. The official said Rajesh has been arrested.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made a fervent appeal to the countrymen on Tuesday night not to cross the 'lakshman rekha' of their homes in the next three weeks to make the lockdown a success in a bid to halt the spread of coronavirus.

According to the Union Health ministry data, 16 people have died of COVID-19 and the number of new cases rose by 80 taking the total to 694.

The Union Ministry of Home Affairs came out with a Standard Operating Procedure(SOP) on Thursday night for maintaining supply and availability of essential commodities during the lockdown period



Suppliers of essential goods, including restaurants providing home delivery of cooked food items were exempted from the lockdown, it said.

The SOP also said that facilities for storage of essential goods like warehouse, godown, transporters, drivers and loaders have also been given exemption.

Roads wore a deserted look as police personnel kept a tight vigil but violations relating to prohibitory orders continued.

A ruling Congress MLA in Puducherry was booked for allegedly violating lockdown rules and distributing dole in the form of vegetables in bags to about 200 people outside his home, Lt Governor Kiran Bedi said.

In a WhatsApp message to mediapersons, she said an FIR had been registered against A John Kumar and also the people who had assembled ouside his home in Nellithope village on Wednesday. The Orleanpet police also confirmed the filing of the cases.

Police vehicles fitted with public address systems went around the residential areas in several places to announce that restrictions under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) that prohibits assembly of more than five persons are in force and advised people to stay indoors.

In Srinagar, police were also using drones to announce the restrictions on the movement of people, an official said.

Loiterers defying the lockdown were severely penalized in Bihar, where close to 40 people ended up in jails, over 1,300 vehicles were impounded and violators ended up coughing up nearly Rs 24 lakh in fines, a top police officer said in Patna.

In Tamil Nadu, police booked over 1,200 people for violating the Section 144 CrPc order.

Police personnel also adopted novel ways to create public awareness as well as punish violators.

In Sivaganga, police made violators carry awareness banners for a while, even as they were made to stand apart from one another, in an obvious effort to implement social distancing to prevent any spread of the virus.

At Gudiyatham in Vellore district, police administered a pledge to those who were loitering in public defying prohibitory orders, to abide by the law.

In Uttar Pradesh, police have registered 2,802 FIRs and booked 8,649 persons persons for violating the orders in the last three days.

Reports of people being booked for violating prohibitory orders as well as home quarantine conditions also came from other parts of the country.

People were allowed to buy essentials like groceries, vegetables and medicines keeping social distancing in mind with customers allowed only in batches to purchase items and medicines.

Amid reports that trucks and food delivery personnel were being stopped by police in several cities, authorities were taking steps to sensitise the police and asking them not to intimidate anyone while enforcing the lockdown.

In the national capital, the Delhi Police directed all its personnel to allow persons and vehicles engaged in essential services to remain operational in the national capital.

All traffic, picket and beat staff have been briefed to allow identified retailers, operators and online delivery services to operate.

This comes a day after the Delhi Police held a meeting with representatives of e-commerce websites and assured them help in ensuring smooth movement of essential services.

A Delhi Police constable was also suspended for allegedly damaging vegetable carts during the lockdown period, officials said.

The constable, who was identified as Rajbir, was posted at Anand Parbat Police Station, they said.

The order came a day after a video of the incident went viral on social media.

In the short clip, the constable can be seen overturning three vegetables carts one by one.

The Delhi government also decided to allow shops selling essential items to operate round the clock so that there is no rush of people, Lt Governor Anil Baijal told reporters.

Also, the SDMs and ACPs hconcerned ave been directed to ensure shops selling groceries, vegetables and milk remain open and essential items are adequately stocked in their respective areas, Baijal said.

In Chandigarh, buses operated by the Chandigarh Transport Undertaking were deployed for delivery of essential items to people.

With people across the country confined to their homes, the National Book Trust (NBT) provided its select and best-selling titles for free download to encourage reading during the period.

"The PDFs are for reading only and any unauthorised or commercial use is not allowed," an official said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Description

GIS - 26 March, 2020: A mobile application on Covid-19, beSafeMoris, was launched, today, by the Minister of Information Technology, Communication and Innovation, Mr Deepak Balgobin. The objective is to create awareness for a safer Mauritius through real-time information approved by the Ministry of Health and Wellness.

Developed by Mauritius Telecom in collaboration with the Ministry of Information Technology, Communications and Innovation, and the Ministry of Health and Wellness, the beSafeMoris mobile application allow users to get real time information from the Ministry of Health and Wellness regarding topics about public health and safety measures that can be taken to stay healthy in Mauritius.

The application which can be downloaded free from IOS and Play Store has the following features:

News and Communiques: Users are kept informed on news and communiques from the Ministry in the app. Health tips videos: Users are able to view videos approved by the Ministry regarding measures that can be taken to stay in good health. Map and directory of health centres: Users will be able to find a list of health centres and their contact details on a map or a directory. Quick access to hotline numbers: A list of hotline numbers in case someone is unhealthy or need information regarding precautionary measures. Push notifications: News and vital information with regards to health of people in Mauritius from the Ministry of Health and Wellness. FAQ: A list of commonly asked questions regarding public health.

Minister Balgobin appealed to the population to consult the application for official news and communiques and not to listen to fake news.
The hundreds of journalists we employ have worked around the clock (often remotely from across the country) to deliver independent news, sharp analysis, comprehensive explainers and vivid on-the-ground reporting in a timely and responsible manner. We know we have an important job to do and we take that job very seriously. We also know our readers detest political agendas, particularly in the midst of a crisis, which is why we stick to expert sources and keep commentary and news separate.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have been reporting the news without fear or favour for a combined 355 years. The mastheads have endured wars, recessions and other global shocks and we are confident we will make it through this extraordinary crisis. However, these are anxious times for newsrooms - ours included. So Id like to explain to you how we will tackle the important challenge of keeping you fully informed throughout this pandemic.

The challenge we face today is as unexpected as it is immense. And it is possible the terrible impact of the virus gets worse before it gets better. Uncertainty about what happens next is part of our daily lives and I know many loyal readers are doing it tough. The temporary shutdown of our vibrant society is deeply unsettling.

Since we first reported on the outbreak of a new virus in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January, COVID-19 has spread across the world infecting hundreds of thousands of people, locking down countries, closing down core institutions and changing how we live and work.

Misinformation can spread as quickly as the virus itself. Our newsrooms are committed to reporting the facts about COVID-19 while calmly explaining what the spread of the virus means for our health, the economy, schools and universities, the sporting and cultural realms as well as our homes and families. We will hold federal and state governments to account without straying into sensationalism or negativity. It is imperative that our community is properly prepared and informed as we face this challenge together.

With the newsrooms all-but empty, Herald, Age, Brisbane Times and WAtoday journalists face many familiar challenges. We work from home worrying about the health of friends and family, like many of you. We juggle homeschooling, video conferencing and the other aspects of our newly-confined lives, like many of you. We are anxious about the future, like many of you. Given all this I am incredibly proud of the way our journalists have gone about their work, putting in long hours to provide you with the information you need.

Of course, quality journalism costs money. Our efforts are only possible with the support of our subscribers - now more than ever. We do not take your contribution lightly. It underpins everything we do and gives us confidence we will come through a period when advertising revenue has fallen dramatically.

We also recognise how important access to reliable coverage is for all Australians. In an attempt to strike a balance between financially supporting the newsrooms and making important public information freely available, we made the decision early to remove the paywall from our daily live coverage of the pandemic. Our live blogs are hosted in a prominent position on our homepage. They contain all the key news events, updated as often as they need to be to keep you informed.

If youre not in a position to subscribe, we recommend visiting our homepage each day and looking for the articles labelled live. These articles are free for all registered readers. Were publishing a Coronavirus Update newsletter for all readers that provides a summary of the weeks most important stories. You can sign up to have it delivered to your inbox each week. And you can listen to our daily Please Explain podcast covering all angles of the COVID-19 response.
Danish English

According to the announced financial calendar, Tivoli A/S should have held the Annual General Meeting Thursday the 23rd of April 2020, at 1:30 pm in the Tivoli Concert Hall. At an extraordinary Supervisory Board meeting the 26th of March 2020, the Supervisory Board of Tivoli A/S decided to postpone the Annual General Meeting due to the COVID-19 situation.

About the postponement, Chairman Tom Knutzen says:

Tivoli has a long tradition for its shareholders to attend the Annual General Meeting. Because of the new legislation implemented during the Corona crisis, we now have the opportunity to hold an Annual General Meeting as we usually do. Here we can meet our shareholders and review the results for 2019, but also look at what the future brings for Tivoli.

At the same time, the Supervisory Board decided to recommend to the General Assembly that no dividend is distributed for 2019 as a result of the Corona crisis.

About the decision not to distribute a dividend, Tom Knutzen says:

Although it is not more than 2 weeks since the Supervisory Board adopted a dividend distribution as in 2018, the development and scenarios for the Corona crisis have shown day by day that Tivoli should strengthen its equity as much as possible to withstand the potential consequences of the crisis. Therefore, the Supervisory Board will now recommend to the General Assembly that no dividend is paid on the result for 2019.

When the ban on larger assemblies, etc. has been repealed, the Supervisory Board of Tivoli A/S will set a new date for the Annual General Meeting as soon as possible and issue a revised financial calendar. Tivoli's shareholders will then receive an invitation to the Annual General Meeting in accordance with the deadlines set out in the company's articles of association.

Questions regarding the Annual General Meeting can be sent in writing to Head of Communications Finn Trngren Srensen at: fits@tivoli.dk





With best regards





Tom Knutzen Lars Liebst

Chairman CEO









Contact person: Head of Communications, Finn Trngren Srensen: fits@tivoli.dk

Attachment
TriggerPhoto/iStock(WASHINGTON) -- President Donald Trump's continued resistance to use his emergency powers to compel companies to produce medical supplies needed in the fight against the novel coronavirus has drawn a bipartisan chorus of criticism.



Experts say it could jumpstart domestic production, though global constraints may limit how quickly it could make an impact.



Trump has yet to put the Korean War-era Defense Production Act (DPA) into practice, instead leaving private companies to volunteer their production lines and states to compete for contracts of masks, ventilators, gowns and other essential supplies to treat patients suffering from COVID-19.



But as hard-hit states and hospitals have said they are not getting the supplies they need from the federal government or private companies' donation, experts say that elevating the federal response by compelling certain aspects of production could better coordinate the relatively ad-hoc production shifts and donations thus far.



"The private sector is responding with some action here, but it couldn't hurt to have the federal government trying to light a fire under the process," Ethan Harris, head of global economics research for Bank of America, told ABC News.



Tune into ABC at 1 p.m. ET and ABC News Live at 4 p.m. ET every weekday for special coverage of the novel coronavirus with the full ABC News team, including the latest news, context and analysis.



The DPA provides the president with the power to direct civilian businesses to help meet orders for products necessary for the national defense. Congress passed it in 1950 and has since gradually expanded its scope to include homeland security and domestic emergency management.



The act gives the Trump administration the ability to force companies to sign contracts and impose wage and price controls, among other stipulations. In the case of the coronavirus, Trump could compel companies to produce a certain number of ventilators, respirators or other needed medical supplies.



Trump has repeatedly claimed he has "invoked" the act, but in practice, it does not appear his administration has actually used it.



On Tuesday morning, Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Peter Gaynor said the government planned to use the act for the first time to "get our hands on" 60,000 COVID-19 testing kits. Lizzie Kitzow, an agency spokesperson, then said the government was in the end "able to procure the test kits from the private market" without using the DPA.



Gaynor said it would also be used Tuesday to insert language into a contract for masks. FEMA did not respond to ABC News' question about whether that actually happened.



The Defense Department, meanwhile, has worked with FEMA and the Department of Health and Human Services to determine how it might carry out the DPA if desired by the White House. So far, there have been no formal requests, according to Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisitions and sustainment.



Trump on Tuesday argued that "the threat" of him using the act provides leverage over companies that so far, in his view, have stepped up to the task.



"It's called leverage," Trump said. "You don't have to use it from the standpoint of actually, it's been activated, but you don't have to use it."



He added, "But the threat of it being there is great leverage and companies are doing as we ask and companies are actually even better than that."



Governors and members of Congress have called on Trump to use the law, saying not doing so is hampering the nation's ability to meet the demand for medical supplies.



Sixteen attorneys general this week also sent a letter to the president, calling on him to immediately and "fully utilize" the DPA "to prioritize the production of masks, respirators, and other critical items."



The vast majority of the medical supplies -- and raw materials for those supplies -- come from China and other low-wage countries that the U.S. has now found itself relying on. At the same time, many countries around the world are desperately seeking out the same equipment, drastically driving up prices as demand surges.



Unlike the United States, China has seized the opportunity, using its centralized, command-and-control economy to rapidly reset supply chains and churn out ventilators and personal protective equipment, according to Nick Vyas, the executive director of the Center for Global Supply Chain Management at the University of Southern California.



"We are missing the opportunity to take the leadership," Vyas told ABC News. "We are missing the opportunity to prepare our public health response."



The Trump administration is in the unique position to play a critical role at a time of national crisis, and the DPA would "absolutely" help, he said.



"We can certainly create internal capacity for the oncoming demand we anticipate," Vyas said. "I think the federal government needs to insert itself in two ways: infusing the capital and creating an incentive."



Trump has explained that he does not like "the concept of nationalizing our business" by employing the act -- although the law's levers give him ways to get involved in much less intrusive ways.



"Call a person over in Venezuela," Trump told reporters at the White House Sunday. "Ask them how did nationalization of their businesses work out. Not too well."



New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, though, said that he spoke to businesses that "would welcome it."



"Its actually a pro-business mentality, not an anti-business mentality," Cuomo told reporters on Tuesday.



But having the federal government insert itself into the intricate details of companies' business affairs could slow down production if created more bureaucracy and red tape, said Steve Ganyard, an ABC News contributor and former deputy assistant secretary of state.



"You have to be careful what you ask for when you get the federal government involved in something like this," Ganyard said. "The best thing to do is to just write a check."



Whether the DPA is employed now may not necessarily have an immediate impact anyway, since it takes time to repurpose factories and shift companies to producing medical gear, according to Kaitlin Wowak, an assistant professor at the Mendoza College of Business, who specializes in supply chains.



"If we responded a little bit faster about trying to increase production or pivot supply chains, then we could have avoided a lag," Wowak told ABC News.



Still, it's not too late, experts say, as the U.S. seeks to ramp up its supply of ventilators and other key equipment as the spread of COVID-19 creates more hotspots across the country -- and threatens more waves of infection.



"It is a good idea to be using the act to try and direct production," Bank of America's Harris said. "But I think we have to be realistic about how quickly you can achieve the goals."



Copyright  2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
 Close Governor blasts Trump for months of delay and withholding equipment: 'He does not understand the word federal'

Donald Trump has said he hopes the US is starting to see light at the end of the tunnel while New York, the epicentre of the countrys coronavirus outbreak, reported a potential "plateau" of cases, as a grim streak of hundreds of deaths appears to have levelled rather than continue to spike.

On Monday, the number of Covid-19-related deaths in the US eclipsed 10,500, including the nation's youngest victim, a one-day-old newborn in Louisiana.



The president optimistic comments came in stark contrast to those of US surgeon general Jerome Adams, who warned Americans to brace for levels of tragedy similar to the September 11 attacks and the bombing of Pearl Harbour in the week ahead, as states continue mitigation efforts and prepare for several more weeks of quarantine and stay-at-home measures.

In a press conference attacking his predecessor Barack Obama, Democrats, reporters and a US Navy captain who alerted officials to a potential coronavirus outbreak on his ship before he was fired for doing so, the president dismissed an inspector general report that outlined the shortages of critically needed medical supplies in US hospitals.

The president also said he has considered "getting involved" with Captain Brett Crozier's case, and said that the captain's emailed letter "shows weakness."

The president said: "We don't want to have letter-writing campaigns where the fake news finds a letter [and] gets a leak. We don't want that."

Mr Trump continued to push for a controversial malaria drug that officials in his own administration have warned is not clinically proven to safely combat the virus. Despite warnings from Dr Anthony Fauci and the federal Food and Drug Administration, the president and his chief trade adviser Peter Navarro have insisted on administering the drug.

Mr Navarro has reportedly clashed with Dr Fauci about the drug's efficacy, though he told CNN he's qualified to measure the drug's effectiveness, despite not having a medical background.

On Monday, Dr Fauci was hesitant to say that mitigation efforts are showing signs of working across the US, but early results in hard-hit areas like New York are starting to show decreasing numbers of hospitalisations requiring ventilator support. He said: "You never want to think about declaring victory prematurely."

He said that health officials may be "overshooting" the models using initial data that showed as many as 200,000 deaths.

Meanwhile, a Democratic primary election in Wisconsin scheduled for 7 April cannot be postponed despite pleas from lawmakers and a last-minute push from the state's governor, which was overruled by the state's Supreme Court. The decision sends the election into chaos, with a drastic shortage of poll workers and an electorate that has been ordered to stay home under threat of the virus.

Ballots include thousands of local races in addition to a crucial race between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders for the party's nomination to face the president in November.

Follow live updates
A 38-year-old Walker County man is behind bars, accused in the blunt force trauma death of his girlfriend.

Walker County Sheriff Nick Smith on Thursday identified the victim as Stacey Hogan, 50. She also went by the name Stacey Campbell.

Her boyfriend, Michael Gene Bolin is being held pending a formal murder charge.

The investigation began Wednesday afternoon when authorities say Bolin called 911 to report a burglary at his girlfriends mobile home in the 4000 block of Highway 269 in Walker Countys Parrish area. Bolin told dispatchers Hogan was unresponsive.

Sheriffs Investigator Carl Carpenter said deputies responded to the home at 2:45 p.m. and found Hogan dead. There were discrepancies in Bolins initial statements to lawmen. We found out that they had gotten into a physical altercation the night before, Carpenter said. When he returned, he found her deceased.

Hogans body has been sent to Huntsville for an autopsy, but Carpenter said they expect the exam to show she died from blunt force trauma.

The couple, he said, has an extensive history of domestic violence. He said while law enforcement officials believe incidents of domestic violence will rise during COVID-19 restrictions, he does not believe that played a role in this crime. Both parties stayed at home anyway, he said. There was a history of domestic violence and substance abuse.

Walker County District Attorney Bill Adair said the murder warrant against Bolin will be obtained by the end of the day. He said investigators also have carried out two search warrants in connection with the ongoing investigation.

I want to stress to everybody in a domestic violence situation, he said, there are a lot of places you can go to seek help, he said.
The Congregation for Divine Worship issued a decree with "general indications" for Holy Week celebrations. Services will be held without people. Means of live (not recorded) telematic broadcasts can be of help.

Vatican City (AsiaNews)  The Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments has issued a decree with general indications to be followed during the celebrations held between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.

This years Easter will be different. There will be no Way of the Cross (Via Crucis) at the Colosseum. Pope Francis will not wash feet, nor hold any celebrations with the faithful. The decree became necessary as a result of the rapidly evolving pandemic, taking into account observations which have come from Episcopal Conferences.

Noting that the date of Easter cannot be transferred in the countries which have been struck by the disease and where restrictions around the assembly and movement of people have been imposed, Bishops and priests may celebrate the rites of Holy Week without the presence of the people and in a suitable place, avoiding concelebration and omitting the sign of peace.

Nevertheless, The faithful should be informed of the beginning times of the celebrations so that they can prayerfully unite themselves in their homes. Means of live (not recorded) telematic broadcasts can be of help. In any event it remains important to dedicate an adequate time to prayer, giving importance above all to the Liturgia Horarum.

These general guidelines are followed by those relating to Holy Week celebrations. Here, individual Bishops Conferences and dioceses are invited to provide resources to support family and personal prayer.

Palm Sunday celebrations must be celebrated within sacred buildings, and cathedral churches are required to adopt "the second form given in the Roman Missal, whereas in parish churches and in other places the third form is to be used.

As for the Chrism Mass, episcopates may, depending on the situation in each country, pick another date.

As for the Paschal Triduum, the washing of the feet, already optional, shall be omitted during the Coena Domini Mass on Holy Thursday.

On this day the faculty to celebrate Mass in a suitable place, without the presence of the people, is exceptionally granted to all priests.

On Good Friday, during the universal prayer, bishops will arrange to have a special intention prepared for those who find themselves in distress, the sick, the dead.

The adoration of the Cross by kissing will also be changed, limited solely to the celebrant.

The Easter Vigil will be celebrated only in cathedrals and parish churches. For the Baptismal liturgy only the Renewal of Baptismal Promises is maintained.

The decree invites seminaries, priestly colleges, monasteries and religious communities to follow the aforementioned indications.

Diocesan bishops can decide to transfer the Expressions of popular piety and processions which enrich the days of Holy Week and the Paschal Triduum to other days, like 14 and 15 September

The Congregation for the Eastern Churches issued similar indications. Celebrations are strictly to be kept on the days foreseen by the liturgical calendar, broadcasting or streaming those celebrations that are possible, so that they can be followed by the faithful in their homes.

The faithful should be reminded of the value of personal and family prayer.

Some Churches celebrate the consecration of the Holy Myron in the morning liturgy of Holy Thursday; however, this celebration is not linked in the East to this day and thus can be moved to another date.

On Good Friday, people should be encouraged, individually or in the family, to use the precious texts that the oriental traditions present on this day for prayer around the Cross and the tomb of Christ.

On Easter night, families should be invited, where possible through the festive sound of the bells, to gather to read the Gospel of the Resurrection, lighting a lamp and singing some troparion or songs typical of their tradition that the faithful often know by memory. (FP)
Putin Postpones Vote On Constitutional Changes Due To Coronavirus

By RFE/RL's Russian Service March 25, 2020

MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin has postponed an April 22 vote on sweeping constitutional changes that could allow him to remain in power until 2036 because of concerns over the coronavirus outbreak.

Speaking in a live television broadcast on March 25, Putin said a new date for balloting will be determined based on the recommendations of health experts.

Russians were scheduled to vote on the package of amendments to the constitution, the most substantive changes to the document since its adoption 27 years ago.

Weeks after the plan to amend the constitution was announced in January, Putin signaled support for another change -- one that would allow him to seek reelection in 2024 and potentially remain president until 2036.

Putin said that the government didn't want Russians except those working in essential sectors, to come to work next week, though stores, pharmacies, and banks will stay open.

"The health, life, and safety of the people is an absolute priority for us," Putin said.

Putin's comments came after the government reported 658 infections, up from 495 a day before, a rise Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova said was almost three times higher than the previous average of confirmed cases.

"There are currently 658 cases in 55 regions of Russia. Twenty-nine people have recovered. A total of 112,000 people are being monitored in self-isolation," Golikova told a meeting of the country's federal coronavirus operative response group that is coordinating the fight against the coronavirus.

The same number appeared on the government's official website dedicated to the coronavirus outbreak in Russia.

Earlier in the day Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin ordered provincial governors to move at a quicker pace to provide hospital beds for coronavirus patients.

Unlike other countries, Russia has not yet ordered citizens to remain at home as much possible.

In his address, Putin also urged Russians to help each other and follow instructions given by medics and the authorities.

"All measures that are being taken and will be taken will work, will have results if we show unity and understanding of the difficulty of the current situation," he said.

"The strength of society consists of this solidarity," Putin said.

Until the virus outbreak, many Russians had been focusing on the sweeping constitutional changes that under current law, Putin wouldn't be able to run for president again in 2024 because of term limits.

A new measure would reset his term count, allowing him to run for two more six-year terms if he chooses.

Other constitutional changes further strengthen the presidency and emphasize the priority of Russian law over international norms.

With reporting by Reuters and Interfax

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-postpones-vote -on-constitutional-changes-due- to-coronavirus/30508893.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Stars are doing all they can to pass their time in quarantine.

And when Mark Wright decided to entertain his followers with an Instagram Live video, the former TOWIE star's wife Michelle Keegan was less than pleased when she risked baring a little too much while wearing her dressing gown.

When the Our Girl star, 32, came into shot she was facing the camera and as she crossed her legs she exclaimed: 'Hello! Legs open!' shortly before Mark continued his Instagram session with pal Olly Murs.

Mark! Mark Wright decided to entertain his followers with an Instagram Live video, the former TOWIE star's wife Michelle Keegan was less than pleased when she risked baring a little too much while wearing her dressing gown

Michelle appeared totally astounded by Mark's filming however he seemed incredibly tickled by the turn of events.

It is not the first quarantine mishap the couple have suffered after Michelle was awkwardly interrupted by her barking dogs during a live This Morning interview filmed from her bedroom on Tuesday.

The 32-year-old could not go to the studio as the nation is currently on lockdown amid the COVID:19 pandemic but still wanted to promote the new series of BBC show Our Girl

Calling Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby from home, Michelle, who plays Georgie Lane in the show, joked; 'Good job Ive cleaned, my house has never looked so clean!'

Ahem! When the Our Girl star, 32, came into shot she was facing the camera and as she crossed her legs she exclaimed: 'Hello! Legs open!'

Oops! The couple were having a relaxed morning together

Then talking about Our Girl, she said: 'So Georgie is back and training a new batch of medics. Theres an underlying sense of grief for Elvis that we'll see earlier in the series

'Last season ended on a cliff-hanger and the thing is you dont know who survives, its down the line, she's got a promotion...'

Then her dogs start barking. Michelle said: 'See its all gone wrong already. Im shutting my door. sorry about that they get back to afghan and she's conflicted about whether to go or not.'

Cheeky! Mark found the situation hilarious as he laughed with his followers

Having a giggle: Mark had been chatting to his friend Olly Murs

Michelle said that there won't be any sign of romance with Captain James in the new series.

She said: 'No, unfortunately hes not back this season. I think with Georgie she's married to her job in a sense she puts her job first. Shes trying to get over the death of Elvis and she needs closure with that.'

Michelle also spoke about how she's finding being in self-isolation.

She said: 'Dont get me wrong Im keeping busy. Ive been doing jigsaws non-stop, Ive been exercising, taking the dogs for a walk, and cleaning.

It's all gone wrong!' It is not the first quarantine mishap the couple have suffered after Michelle was awkwardly interrupted by her barking dogs during a live This Morning interview filmed from her bedroom on Tuesday

'Im enjoying being home with my dogs and Mark, and I want to say hi to my family and friends I've not seen in a while.'

Michelle has now left Our Girl and said she's looking forward to pastures new.

She said: 'Ive done it for four years now and for me, having other opportunities and youre away from home a lot of the time...

'It was a hard decision because I had a great time its one of those bittersweet things really, but I also got to travel around the world.'

Role: She was on the show to promote her final series of starring as Georgie Lane in BBC show Our Girl (BBC still)
ELITE. Its a word that conjures images of success beyond the norm, of standing out above the rest of the pack. Indeed, not just anyone can be an Elite Broker. To be marked out as elite is an impressive badge of honour. For the last eight years, Insurance Business has been scouring the industry to pinpoint the brokers who truly are elite. For 2020, this resulted in an impressive crop of talent. On the following pages, youll see a mix of returning and fresh faces, from those who are expanding their influence on the future of the industry to those who are making their mark for the first time. Remember their names: these are the brokers to watch and learn from in the coming years. They have marked themselves out as elite this year  and possibly for many to come.

Methodology

The Insurance Business Elite Brokers ranking system is an objective means of ranking the best-performing insurance brokers in the country  not just those with the biggest portfolios or the largest clients. Each broker was required to supply their own details to be eligible, along with details of a contact who could verify those figures. The criteria included:

Number of policies written

Total revenue

Revenue per policy

Number of clients

New clients

New client revenue

Client retention

Each broker was ranked in each of these measurements, and the sum of their rankings was calculated to determine their final placement on the list.
Rishi Sunak last night hinted that future taxes will have to rise to pay for the unprecedented economic bailouts for business, workers and the self-employed.

Unveiling a huge rescue package for Britain's army of self-employed workers, the Chancellor said he had set aside economic orthodoxy to deal with the national emergency, but warned that would come at a cost as the public finances are plunged deep into the red.

The latest scheme  which will allow almost four million people to claim back 80 per cent of lost profits  follows huge bailouts last week for business and those in employment.

Speaking at a press conference in No10, Mr Sunak issued a direct warning that the price of the package would include the future loss of their tax and national insurance perks, saying: 'If you all want to benefit equally from state support you must all pay in equally in the future.'

Chancellor Rishi Sunak holding a digital press conference about the coronavirus outbreak

With the overall cost of economic support now running to hundreds of millions of pounds, and tax revenues collapsing, the Chancellor also hinted at wider tax hikes in future, saying that everybody would be 'chipping in'.

The Treasury said that tax changes would be set at future Budgets. But a Government source said it was right to 'level with people' that the extraordinary bailout packages would eventually have to be paid for.

Last week the Government announced a 350billion package of support for business, and pledged to pay 80 per cent of the wages of employees whose jobs would otherwise disappear because of the crisis.

And in yesterday's announcement Mr Sunak said the self-employed would ultimately benefit from 'tens of billions of pounds' in state help.

Grants will be worth 80 per cent of a person's average monthly profit over the last three years, up to a maximum of 2,500.

To claim the cash, people will simply have to show that their profits fell as a result of the epidemic.

The scheme is expected to cost 3billion a month for three months but could be extended if the epidemic continues.

Some 3.8 million self-employed people will be eligible to claim, with payments expected to average 940 a month each.

Payments will not be available until June, leading to questions about how people will survive financially until then.

Matt Dowling, head of the Freelancer Club, said thousands would be forced out of business as they waited for payment, the Daily Telegraph reported. And Peter Kyle, a Labour MP, told the newspaper 'five million people' risked being left 'high and dry'.

'Were talking days or a couple of weeks for some before theyre out of business,' he said.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak outside 10 Downing Street, London, joining in with a national applause for the NHS to show appreciation for all NHS workers who are helping to fight the Coronavirus

People will be contacted directly by HMRC about their eligibility and will receive three months' money backdated.

The scheme will not be available to those whose profits average more than 50,000 a year, who account for roughly five per cent of the total.

They will also not be available to 1.7 million people who are registered as self-employed but get most of their income from a regular job.

New businesses that did not file a tax return in 2018/9 will not be eligible, with the Treasury saying it would be impossible to fairly estimate their income.

SIMON WALTERS: Mr Moneybags Rishi Sunak has made it abundantly clear about coronavirus aid packages... he wants it all back

During his six weeks as Chancellor, the sight of Rishi Sunak standing at the Downing Street lectern giving away billions has become so familiar you would expect less cash if a magic money tree appeared in his place.

But Sunak was not just Mr Moneybags yesterday: He made it crystal clear that he wants it all back.

In doing so he passed the first test of any politician who wants to be taken seriously  he showed he had the ability and courage to announce bad news as well as good.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak holding a digital press conference about the coronavirus outbreak

Chancellor Rishi Sunak outside 10 Downing Street, London, joining in with a national applause for the NHS to show appreciation for all NHS workers who are helping to fight the Coronavirus

He told the self-employed that in return for the help he gave them, they will no longer be able to pay less tax than others.

If we all want to benefit, he said in explicit terms, we must all pay in equally.

But the self-employed won't be the only ones who pay more. Everyone will have to 'chip in to right the ship', said Sunak.

'We'll have to choose - food or bills': Self-employed people react to Chancellor Rishi Sunak's bail-out Rishi Sunak's multi-billion-pound coronavirus bailout has left hundreds of thousands of self-employed workers 'close to a cliff edge'. The Chancellor unveiled a scheme handing out cash grants worth up to 2,500 a month, in a boost for taxi drivers, musicians, gig economy workers and freelancers. Many welcomed the move but some have reacted negatively, with roofers, directors, driving instructors and fitness coaches saying it will not help them. Roofer Ken Price, 50, from London, said he was concerned people were being made to wait until June for the rescue payment. Driving instructor Rob Cooling echoed Price's concerns, saying that many self-employed people will struggle if they have to wait until June for their money. His firm, Apple Driving School, provides lessons to pupils with special needs. Mr Cooling, 40, from Nottingham, normally earns around 20,000 a year after tax. But on Monday he was forced to postpone all of his lessons by at least a month after the Prime Minister announced a lockdown. Hannah Murphy is not sure if she will qualify for government help. The mother of three runs Globe Fit, which provides dance and fitness classes to schools. Her income after tax is more than 50,000, but this includes dividends from her husband's company. Advertisement

An apt metaphor from a man who grew up in the port of Southampton.

It could mean tax rises for all of us, public spending cuts, maybe both. Sunak didn't say when or how. It won't be before Covid-19 is defeated but he wanted everyone to know: His day of reckoning will come.

Sunak, a former banker, will be aware of the growing number of experts warning of the danger that the cost of the coronavirus cure may be worse than disease itself. That the scale of the damage to Britain's and the wider global economy could be such that it causes huge hits not just to jobs and public finances but to our economic health too, claiming more lives than Covid-19.

Nor is it just Donald Trump who is making this argument. It is a view shared by some ministers  though not surprisingly, none has been bold enough to utter it in public.

The moment he delivered his Budget less than a month after taking office with such precocious confidence, I thought Sunak had the makings of a future prime minister.

It clearly wasn't a fluke. His two successive performances have been every bit as assured. For all his qualities, Boris Johnson's critics say one of the reasons he has at times appeared uncertain responding to coronavirus is because his cheery temperament is not suited to breaking bad news. Sunak showed no such hesitation yesterday. Instead of leaving it to aides to do his dirty work with anonymous briefings of future tax rises, like so many cowardly ministers, Sunak announced it from No 10 with half the nation watching live on TV

It could not have been more plain if he had held up a placard stating: Taxpayers, you have been warned.

Sunak learned the basics of good housekeeping as a teenager, doing the accounts for his mum's pharmacy. Margaret Thatcher learned the same timeless Conservative principles from her shopkeeper dad.

They were values that enabled her to prevent the UK going bust after Labour's overspending  and served her well in No 10. The same values will help Sunak in No 11 as he battles to prevent the UK going bust as a result of the unavoidably huge amount he is spending on fighting coronavirus.



'Oh s***!' Robert Peston makes hilarious gaffe when he doesn't realise he is being broadcast to the nation during Rishi Sunak's coronavirus press conference

By Joe Middleton for MailOnline

ITV journalist Robert Peston appeared to swear this afternoon when he didn't realise he was being broadcast to the nation during Rishi Sunak's press conference.

The Chancellor had just outlined his package of support for the self-employed when he asked for questions from journalists, alongside Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer.

Mr Sunak said 'Could I turn next to Robert Peston from ITV.' But Mr Peston appeared to be having trouble with his home video link and doesn't realise the Chancellor and Dr Harries could hear him when he says 'oh sh**'...hello.'

An unflustered Mr Sunak responded 'good afternoon Robert', and Mr Peston blamed the poor connection at his home for the confusion, saying it 'isn't terribly stable'.

Social media users found the gaffe by the veteran journalist - best known for his work during the 2008 financial crisis - hilarious.

On Twitter Professor Mark Wetherell said: ''oh sh**' Peston experiencing the same issues as everyone else trying to join virtual meetings.'

A user called Ryan Love declared that Peston 'wins the daily press briefing!'

And Katie McNulty declared 'We are all Peston.'

At the press conference Mr Sunak revealed that self-employed workers will be able to claim support worth 80% of their average monthly profits in an 'unprecedented' move to cover the impact of coronavirus.

The Chancellor said the move - worth up to a maximum of 2,500 a month - would cover 95% of self-employed workers.

The package comes after the Government came under sustained pressure as its initial package of financial support only covered employees.

Mr Sunak said: 'To support those who work for themselves, today I am announcing a new self-employed income support scheme.

'The Government will pay self-employed people who have been adversely affected by the coronavirus a taxable grant worth 80% of their average monthly profits over the last three years, up to 2,500 a month.'
The White House will begin making direct payments to Americans within three weeks of a $2.2trn coronavirus economic aid measure becoming law, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced.

As that bill awaits Senate and House action, Donald Trump said he hopes the bill will tide the US economy over "for a long time." If it doesn't and the pandemic outbreak worsens, the president said he will "go back" to Congress for more federal monies.

The economic aid bill is awaiting Senate action, with several GOP members objecting to language they say would allow workers to make more via unemployment benefits that would be increased temporarily if the bill becomes law. But those four senators appear to lack the votes to do more than hold up the legislation, meaning it will pass the Senate this week.

"Our expectation is this bill passes tonight," Mr Mnuchin said of the Senate's plans.
Ventilators, part of a shipment of 400, in New York City's emergency management warehouse. (Mark Lennihan / Associated Press)

It's a choice most doctors never thought they would have to make: Who lives and who dies.

But in coming weeks, if COVID-19 continues to surge, such decisions will be inevitable.

The coronavirus will attack so many peoples lungs that thousands could show up at hospitals gasping for air and will need to be hooked up to machines that breathe for them. But there wont be enough ventilators for everyone, forcing doctors to make impossible calls about which lives to save.

You have an 80-year-old and a 20-year-old and both need a vent and you only have one. What do you do? said Dr. Christopher Colwell, the chief of emergency medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.

Across the U.S., there could be as many as 31 patients requiring ventilation for every machine available, according to an article published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The shortage could be just as severe in California.

Statewide, there are about 9,500 ventilators, a total that includes recent additions made by state leaders and others in anticipation of increased numbers of COVID-19 patients. The federal governments national stockpile, which states can tap when their local supplies run low, has an additional 16,000.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has not said how many ventilators he thinks California will ultimately require, but studies in China found that between 2% and 6% of people with COVID-19 needed to be on ventilators.

If half of Californians fall sick with COVID-19 and 2% need ventilators, the state would need 390,000 over the course of the outbreak. Even if those cases were spread out over the next year, the state could still require 20,000 ventilators at once.

It could be catastrophic, said Dr. Robert Winters, an infectious disease doctor in Los Angeles.

Doctors will have to resort to a wartime-like triage to determine whom to put on the ventilators and whom to turn away. In Italy, hospitals have been forced to deny potentially live-saving treatment to older, frailer people due to a shortage of machines.

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These are difficult decisions anywhere, but particularly in America, where families often push for extreme measures to keep people alive even when they are very sick, experts say. And they arent choices that medical workers, who trained for years to save lives, want to make.

Colwell, the San Francisco doctor, said he is already considering what to do in such a situation. The citys hospitals have about 750 ventilators and officials are trying to obtain others from reserve supplies, he said.

How do I distribute them in an equitable manner that tries to honor the approach of the good of the many versus the good of the few? Colwell said. Does it mean lives saved, years of life saved or quality of life?

Theres not a black and white answer, he said.

In the New England Journal of Medicine article, a trio of Harvard Medical School experts called decisions about who gets ventilators "the toughest triage."

"Although rationing is not unprecedented, never before has the American public been faced with the prospect of having to ration medical goods and services on this scale," they wrote. "Of all the medical care that will have to be rationed, the most problematic will be mechanical ventilation."

Ventilators supply oxygen to people who cant get enough and also physically push air in and out of the lungs. Infections can debilitate patients and weaken their muscles so they cannot contract and expand on their own.

Rationing such care has been the subject of ongoing discussions at Sutter Health Network, where one of those weighing in said she believes the best model is to allow a panel of doctors, instead of individual physicians, to decide who receives the care, said Dr. Janice Manjuck, a critical care specialist at an Oakland hospital.

One particular physician does not have the birds eye view of what is out there, she said, adding that as a doctor caring for a patient, you are probably not the best to make that decision because you always advocate for the patient.

Ventilators, she said, can be the difference between life and death.

With COVID-19, it remains unclear how often that is the case. One small study published in the medical journal the Lancet found that of 37 patients in Wuhan who were ventilated, only seven survived.

Dr. Lewis Rubinson, a New Jersey intensivist who wrote a guide for physicians caring for critically ill patients with COVID-19 that was published by the Society for Critical Care Medicine, said that based on the literature and information sharing in the intensivist community, about half of patients who get ventilated for COVID-19 survive, with chances of survival dropping with age.

In recent weeks, he has had first-hand experience in ICU treatment of these patients in his post as chief medical officer of Morristown Medical Center. He said his advice to places that havent been hit as badly as the New York metro area is: Dont squander time. This is when to get ready.

New York, now the national epicenter of the outbreak, recently procured 7,000 ventilators in addition to the roughly 4,000 that were already available in the state, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo. But at least 30,000 more will be needed to cope with the ongoing outbreak, he said in a press briefing Tuesday.

What happens to New York is going to wind up happening to California and Washington state and Illinois  its just a matter of time. Were just getting there first, he said.

Cuomo said that doctors may try an experimental technique of putting as many as four people on a single ventilator. Shortages in other states may eventually prompt similar measures born of desperation, experts say.

You cant let somebody die in the parking lot because you cant ventilate them, said Winters, the L.A. doctor. Ive never seen two people on one ventilator in my entire life but it beats the alternative of dying of respiratory failure.

In extreme situations, a lack of ventilators could also mean that staff use a hand-held pump to push air in and out of patients lungs, said Dr. Wally Ghurabi, ER medical director at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica.

In Los Angeles County, there were 833 ventilators available across the countys 70 public and private hospitals this week, according to a survey by the countys Emergency Services Agency. The county department that runs the four local public hospitals is working to acquire an additional 313, according to a statement.

If there arent enough ventilators, one hospital with extras could theoretically lend some to another facility that is running short, said Cathy Chidester, head of the countys EMS agency. She said she thinks L.A. County wont be inundated at once, because of how spread out the region is.

A hospital over here that isnt seeing that influx of patients. ... They could move the ventilators over if push came to shove, Chidester said. The beauty of L.A. County is its broad. Its 4,000 square miles  its not like New York, its not like China.

Other places already severely impacted by COVID-19 have offered horror stories that have put U.S. providers on edge. In one hospital in Lombardy, a hard-hit region in northern Italy, doctors reported patients in the hospital sleeping on mattresses on the floor. There, 70% of the ICU beds are reserved for COVID-19 patients with a reasonable chance to survive, the doctors wrote in a recent paper.

The situation here is dismal, they wrote. Older patients are not being resuscitated and die alone without appropriate palliative care, while the family is notified over the phone, often by a well-intentioned, exhausted, and emotionally depleted physician with no prior contact.

Experts say these end-of-life decisions will be particularly tough for people to accept in America, where much more money is typically spent to keep very sick people alive than in the rest of the world.

California and particularly L.A. County have some of the highest rates of spending in the last six months of peoples lives, according to the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, a Dartmouth University-led project documenting how medical resources are distributed in the U.S.

As it stands in the U.S., if your family member is adamant that you would want everything done and you're 90 years old, wearing a diaper, severely demented, you would get put on a ventilator, said Dr. James Keany, ER physician at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo. Most countries consider that malpractice because what are you saving that person for?

Many Americans believe life needs to be protected at all costs, he said, but we may not have that luxury if this disease explodes.

Dr. Arthur Jey, an emergency room doctor who works at a Sutter Medical hospital in downtown Sacramento, said there are ongoing discussions about how to ration care at his facility, but if there is a shortage, he plans to also ask patients if they want to be ventilated.

He said he has often been surprised by older patients who tell him firmly that they dont want any additional medical measures.

We think a lot of people want to live no matter what, but over the years, I have been taken aback by so many people who have said, No, Im OK.'" he said. There are people who would say, You know what, save somebody else.

He said the fundamental question medical providers will ask themselves in these tough situations is: Do I think I can pull them through?

If the answer is no, the ventilator might go to someone else, he said.

Its terrifying.
YEREVAN, MARCH 26, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE's Armed Forces, discussed the measures taken by the two countries to tackle coronavirus (COVID-19) during a telephone conversation, WAM official news agency of the UAE reports.

The sides exchanged views on the latest regional and global developments and issues of mutual concern as well as measures taken by the two countries to combat coronavirus, COVID-19, and mitigate its impact on countries of the world.

The Armenian President and the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi also discussed the cooperation prospects in economic and investment spheres which will serve the bilateral interests and progress.

His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed affirmed the UAEs readiness to provide all forms of support to Armenia and its friendly people in their efforts to contain the virus and limit its repercussions.

In turn the Armenian President thanked Sheikh Mohamed for his sustained support for the growing bilateral ties.
Paty mask covers in production "We all see the sacrifice and selflessness of the clinicians and support staff; we consider it a privilege to partner with other businesses, to serve the community, and show our support however we can"

Houston apparel manufacturer, Paty, Inc., is retooling their facility to meet the increasing demand for medical supplies amidst the COVID-19 outbreak. This week, they began producing face mask covers to donate to front line medical staff and have also made them available for sale online to support their employees while the economy slows to a crawl. They have received support, from not only their customers, but also from other businesses graciously offering their products and services to assist where ever possible. Paty, Inc., President, Derrick Veillon states "We all see the sacrifice and selflessness of the clinicians and support staff; we consider it a privilege to partner with other businesses, to serve the community, and show our support however we can."
CHICAGO, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- It's no secret that social distancing during the COVID-19 outbreak can bring stress with it. The weight of a national epidemic and being cooped up at home can take a toll on one's mental health. As the anxiety mounts and the ability to leave the house is limited, one can easily turn to food for comfort.

While we may joke and post memes online about eating all day when being forced to stay inside, emotional eating can negatively affect your health - both physically and mentally.

With a 24-hour news cycle that can be easily overwhelm a person, trying to limit your snacking habits and curb overeating can be extremely difficult. This is especially true when you are working from home and in close quarters with your pantry.

While it may be hard to avoid snacking just to snack or looking to junk food to cope with COVID-19 fears, it can be done.

Joyce A. Corsica, PhD, director of outpatient psychotherapy and director of bariatric psychology at Rush and Mackenzie Kelly, PhD, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Rush, shared six tips to avoid emotional eating during social distancing.

Tip 1: Structure your day

One of the main reasons people end up overeating when at home is the lack of structure in one's day. Social distancing will more than likely throw your day to day routine out wack.

Having a set schedule and sticking to it will help you avoid aimlessly wandering into the kitchen for an unneeded snack or meal.

"Include chunks of time for work, relaxation/exercise, eating, and communication with others," Corsica suggests. "If you have an outline planned, you are less likely to feel like the day is a big empty space which can make you feel rudderless and may lead to overeating."

Tip 2: Keep it healthy and prep your meals

Both Kelly and Corsica said meal prepping was a great way to curb unwanted snacking.

"Plan out your meals and snacks at the beginning of the day," Kelly said. "If you wait until you're hungry to decide what you're going to eat, you may end up eating more or choosing something higher in calories than if you had planned your meal and snacks in advance."

Corsica added that you can even add snacks to your meal plan. Knowing that you have a healthy snack in the lineup can stop you from eating too much in between meals.

Along with prepping your meals, making sure you are still eating healthy is also important. While it may be convenient to buy processed foods, these types of foods make it easier for one to overeat. Do your best to buy healthy options when you have the chance.

"If you have access to processed foods, they can cause you to lose control over what and how much you eat, consider removing them from the house," Corsica said. "At the very least, make them harder to access."

Tip 3: Avoid boredom cravings

When one is bored, the easiest thing to do is fill that time with food. When you are stuck in the house with no intentions of leaving for a while, the boredom can really ramp up. When this boredom ramps up, your desire to continually eat can rise as well.

The best way to stay away from boredom cravings? Keep yourself busy!

"If you feel stuck, bored, lost, or frustrated, try to understand and label the feeling and then decide what you can do about it," Corsica suggests. "That might be finding a smaller task to work on, changing tasks entirely, taking a break, or checking in with a colleague."

To keep yourself busy, try switching things up. Don't just binge watch Netflix for 12 hours straight, but rather watch TV for a while then work on a puzzle or read book, maybe put your knowledge to the test with a few brain games. If you're working from home, make sure to take breaks!

Tip 4: Keep your em' separate

In other words, your bedroom should not act as your dining room. Having a separate space to eat and drawing the line saying food should not be in your sleeping quarters is a great way to curb late snacking and overeating.

"Designate one place in your home as the place where you will eat and try to keep your work and relaxation spaces in your home separate from where you eat," Kelly suggests.

The ideal living situation is limiting all eating to your kitchen area. This can prove difficult for people who are now working from home and may be using their kitchen table as a desk. If you are working at the kitchen table, consider moving to another chair when it's time to eat.

Other techniques to put into place include avoiding eating and working at the same time. When it comes to TV on the couch and decide you want something to eat: you should get up, eat in the kitchen, and then return to the couch when you are done.

Tip 5: Look for other ways to manage your stress

If you have the news on or are frequently checking your phone for updates or social media posts, this may be contributing to your stress. Try changing the channel, turning off the TV, or putting your phone down. You can always check in later to learn of any updates.

If you are feeling stressed or anxious, look for other ways to address your emotions. Try calling a friend or family members, clean out a closet or drawer, streaming a free at-home exercise class, or any other healthy strategy you may have used to help reduce stress in the past.

Tip 6: Stay connected

This last tip is one that's is imperative for both haulting stress eating and improving your mental health overall. Make sure to stay connected! It can be easy to isolate yourself from others when social distancing. While you may not be able to go see your friends and family in person, you can use the technology available to keep in touch with loved ones. Host a virtual Netflix watch party, Facetime loved ones frequently, and don't be afraid to pick up the phone and give them a call.

As we continue to protect ourselves and others from the spread of COVID-19, social distancing is going to be a major player in that game plan. Social distancing can and more than likely will lead to stress and anxiety. It is easy to turn to food for comfort but there are steps to curb the urge and stay healthy.

Don't be afraid to reach out and lean on loved ones around you. Stay positive and stay safe. Just because you are distancing yourself form physical contact doesn't mean you need to isolate yourself completely.

This news release was issued on behalf of Newswise(TM). For more information, visit http://www.newswise.com.

SOURCE Rush University Medical Center

Related Links

http://www.rush.edu


The South African government has been promptly responsive in formulating ways in which to maintain business viability so as to minimise the undoubtedly crippling effects of Covid-19 and to ensure swift and effective healthcare service in the country.

Certain grocery items are protected from price gouging under Covid-19 regulations

The Covid-19 Block Exemption for the Healthcare Sector Regulations (Exemption for the Healthcare Sector Regulations), effective as of 19 March 2020;

The Consumer and Customer Protection and National Disaster Management Regulations and Directions (Consumer/Customer Protection and National Disaster Regulations), effective as of 19 March 2020;

The Covid-19 Block Exemption for the Banking Sector, 2020 Regulations (Exemption for the Banking Sector Regulations), which are effective as of 23 March 2020; and

The Covid-19 Block Exemption for the Retail Property Sector, 2020 Regulations (Exemption for the Retail Property Sector Regulations), which are effective as of 24 March 2020.

Exemption for the Healthcare Sector Regulations

Consumer /Customer Protection and National Disaster Regulations

the increase does not correspond to, or is not equivalent to, the increase in the cost of providing that good or service; or

the increase inflates the net margin or mark-up on that good or service above the average margin or mark-up of that good or service in the three-month period prior to 1 March 2020.

Toilet paper

Hand sanitiser

Facial masks

Disinfectants cleaners

Surgical gloves

Surgical masks

Disinfectant wipes

Antiseptic liquids

All-purpose cleaners

Baby formula

Disposable nappies

Bleach

Cooking oils

Wheat flour

Rice

Maize meal

Pasta

Sugar

Long-life milk

Canned and frozen vegetables

Canned, frozen and fresh meat, chicken or fish

Bottled water; and

Private medical services relating to the testing, prevention and treatment of the Covid-19 and its associated diseases.

Exemption for the Banking Sector Regulations

promote concerted conduct to prevent an escalation of the national disaster and to alleviate, contain and minimise the effects of the national disaster; enable the banking sector to minimise the negative impact on the ability of customers, including both business and private individuals, to manage their finances during the national disaster, and be in a position to continue normal operations beyond the national disaster; and enable the banking sector to manage the banking infrastructure, including the payment infrastructure, ATMs and branches.

Payments system: the agreements or practices covered are limited to the development of industry monitoring, operational policies and contingency plans in respect of: (i) the continued availability of bank notes to ATMs, branches and businesses; (ii) the continued provision of essential ATM, branch and corporate banking services; and (iii) the continued provision of electronic payments systems.

Debtor and credit management: the agreements or practices covered are limited to the development of industry policies and monitoring in respect of: (i) payment holidays and debt relief for business and individual debtors subject to financial stress; (ii) limitations set on asset repossessions of business and individual debtors subject to financial stress; and (iii) the extension of credit lines to individuals and businesses subject to financial stress.

Exemption for the Retail Property Sector Regulations

Payment holidays and/or rental discounts for tenants; Limitations on the eviction of tenants; and The suspension or adjustment to lease agreement clauses that restrict the designated retail tenants from undertaking reasonable measures required to protect viability during the national disaster.

To qualify for exemption, such agreements must extend to all South African retail tenants in the designated retail lines, including small and independent retailers.

The designated retail tenants covered by this block exemption are identifiable by the designated trading lines, namely:

Clothing, footwear and home textile retailers; Personal care services (i.e. hairdressers, health and beauty salons); and Restaurants.



To this end, the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition in South Africa has issued various regulations in response to the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic as a national disaster by the South African government and to strengthen its programmes designed to fight the virus. These regulations, which will remain effective until the national disaster status is rescinded, are:These regulations are dealt with briefly below.These regulations have been promulgated to enable healthcare players to cooperate on ensuring that there is adequate capacity and stocks at healthcare facilities throughout the country in order to respond to the Covid-19 national disaster.The regulations are aimed at exempting a category of agreements or practices in the healthcare sector from the application of section 4 (which prohibits restrictive horizontal practices, including cartel conduct between competitors) and section 5 (which prohibits restrictive vertical practices, including minimum resale price maintenance) of the South African Competition Act. It is envisaged that the exemption will assist in ensuring that private and public healthcare service providers cooperate and provide the necessary care to citizens without fear of falling foul of the Competition Act. The cooperation envisaged between competitors in the healthcare sector should not extend to communication and agreements in respect of prices charged to the public (i.e. price-fixing), and cooperation will take place at the request of and in coordination with the Department of Health.The healthcare players covered by this exemption include those between hospitals or healthcare facilities, medical suppliers, medical specialist or radiologists, pathologists or laboratories, pharmacies and healthcare funders. Healthcare companies who participate in any agreements or practices falling with this the scope of this block exemption should keep minutes of meetings held and written records of such agreements or practices.How the exemption will apply in practice is not yet clear. However, what is noteworthy is that it appears that the Department of Health will be central to the cooperation between the various healthcare players, in that it will issue a request for such cooperation where, presumably, specific areas of coordination are identified (on the basis of limited capacity, lack of stock, etc.) and will also coordinate with the relevant healthcare players.Whilst these regulations have come into force, the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition has allowed for representations to be made no later than 14 days from the date of publication (icalculated from 19 March 2020).There have been a growing wave of concerns by the government and consumers that companies may seek to charge higher prices for goods given the tight supply-demand balance caused by Covid-19. The minister promulgated these regulations to address this concern. Accordingly, these regulations relate to, amongst other things, "excessive pricing" by dominant firms during the Covid-19 outbreak. Under the Competition Act, a dominant firm may not charge an excessive price to the detriment of consumers or customers. The regulations suggest that there will be scrutiny of material increases in price for certain goods or services, particularly where:The goods and services in question are as follows:The commission has engaged with retailers, amongst other stakeholders, in the healthcare sector and agreed that the commision would be advised of "unusual increases of prices" by suppliers. A dominant firm that contravenes or fails to comply with the regulations may be investigated by the Commission on charges of excessive pricing and if found to have contravened the regulations, may be liable to an administrative penalty.Dominant firms should guard against inflating prices beyond acceptable standards (raising prices to a level where there is no reasonable relation between the price charged by a firm and the firm's input costs) during the Covid-19 period to minimise any risks of competition law investigations based on excessive pricing.Whilst these regulations have come into force, the Department of Trade and Industry has allowed for representations to be made no later than 14 days from the date of publication (icalculated from 19 March 2020).The president indicated that commercial banks have been exempted from provisions of the Competition Act to enable them to develop common approaches to debt relief and other necessary measures during the Covid-19 crisis.Accordingly, these regulations have been enacted for the purpose of exempting a category of agreements or practices between banks, the Banking Association of South Africa and/or Payments Association of South Africa from the application of sections 4 and 5 of the Competition Act at the request of and in coordination with the minister of finance. The exemption is underpinned by the imperative to:The cooperation envisaged between the banking sector players should not extend to communication and agreements in respect of prices (price-fixing).The block exemption covers payments system and debtor and credit management:Whilst these regulations have come into force, the Department of Trade and Industry has allowed for representations to be made no later than 14 days from the date of publication (icalculated from 23 March 2020).Practically, it appears that the trade minister and finance minister will jointly play a key and central role in the implementation of this block exemption.Ensuring business survival and continuity, particularly for designated retail tenants, including small and independent retailers informed the promulgation of these regulations.These regulations are aimed at exempting a category of agreements or concerted practices between designated retail tenants and retail property landlords from the application of sections 4 and 5 of the Competition Act at the request of and in coordination with the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition. The exemption promotes concerted conduct in the retail sector to prevent an escalation of the national disaster and to alleviate, contain and minimise the economic and social effects of the national disaster and enables the retail property sector to minimise the negative impact on the ability of designated retail tenants, including small independent retailers, to manage their finances during the national disaster and be in a position to continue normal operations beyond the national disaster.Important to note is that the envisaged concerted conduct should not extend to communication and agreements in respect of prices unless specifically authorised by the Department of Trade.The block exemption applies only to agreements or concerted practices in respect of:The above list of agreements may be augmented by the Minister. It is also noteworthy thatPractically, it appears that the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition will be the main driver of the implementation of this block exemption.Retail property landlords and designated retain tenants who participate in any agreements or practices falling with this the scope of this block exemption should keep minutes of meetings held and written records of such agreements or practices.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Mota Ventures Corp. (MOTA.CN)(FSE:1WZ:GR)(PEMTF) (the "Company" or "Mota") is pleased to announce that further to its January 10, 2020 news release, it has now acquired the intellectual property and trade names of Sativida from Sativida OU (Estonia). The Company will license both back to Sativida OU's subsidiary, VIDA BCN LABS S.L. (collectively with Sativida OU, "Sativida") in exchange for a royalty associated with the gross revenues generated by Sativida.

Sativida is an arms'-length producer and online retailer of cannabidiol ("CBD") and branded CBD products in various jurisdictions in Europe, including Spain, Portugal, Austria, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Sativida currently develops and retails a vast range of organic CBD oils and cosmetics across Europe and is in the process of expanding its distribution network internationally to include the United States. Sativida has become the number one search-ranked online retailer of CBD products in Spain and Mexico, and intends to continue its expansion into other countries in Europe and Latin America.

Through Mota, Sativida has an agreement with Unified Funding, LLC ("Unified") for the expansion of the brand into the United States. Unified will provide assistance to Sativida with product sourcing, packaging, shipping, payment infrastructure and marketing in the United States. Unified Funding is an e-Commerce and technology company focused on serving U.S.-based and international consumers in the CBD and natural health products market. Powered by its proprietary technology platform, Unified has created an e-Commerce ecosystem to scale its brands through data analysis, strategic customer acquisition and supply chain management. Since June 2015, Unified has generated a database of over 4.5 million consumers and has facilitated over US$200 million in consumer transactions from more than one million paying customers.

"I am very excited to announce the acquisition of the Sativida brand. This gives Mota immediate entry into the European market and will be a building block for our planned European expansion. Mota's U.S. operation, First Class CBD, is set to enter the European market and we expect the acquisition of the Sativida brand to expedite this expansion. Furthermore, our partnership with Unified Funding, LLC, the e-Commerce platform behind the success of First Class CBD, will allow us to bring the Sativida brand to the U.S. market as well," stated Ryan Hoggan, CEO of the Company.

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Noah Laith, founder of Sativida, commented, "Joining Mota is a major step for Sativida that will provide access to the capital, connections and infrastructure necessary to grow our business in Europe and internationally."

Pursuant to the previously announced binding agreement with Sativida dated January 9, 2020 (the "Transaction Agreement"), the Company was granted the right to acquire Sativida in stages (the "Transaction"), at the discretion of the Company, as certain corporate and intellectual property registrations were completed. To accomplish this, the Company set up a wholly-owned Spanish subsidiary ("Spanish Subco") and coordinated the registration of various intellectual property and trade names associated with business operations of Sativida.

The Company, through Spanish Subco, has now completed the acquisition of the intellectual property and trade names of Sativida in Spain, and will license both back to Sativida in exchange for a royalty associated with the gross revenues generated by Sativida. Pursuant to the Transaction Agreement, the Company also holds the right to acquire, through Spanish Subco, all of the outstanding share capital of Sativida at any time for no additional consideration.

Consideration for the Transaction is made up of an initial component of 2,000,001 (the "Consideration") and an earn-out component made up of three milestone payments based upon the revenue of Sativida (each, a "Milestone Payment"). The Consideration was paid in 5,496,221 common shares of the Company (the "Consideration Shares") at a deemed price of $0.5689 per share. Each Milestone Payment will be based on a 400% multiple of Sativida's revenue until the aggregate of the Initial Consideration and Milestone Payments reaches 4,000,000, at which point the multiple will be reduced to 100%. In no event will the combined Milestone Payments and the value of the Initial Consideration exceed 15,000,000. Payment of the Milestone Payments will be satisfied by the Company issuing common shares ("Milestone Shares") to Sativida. The total number of Milestone Shares issuable to Sativida will be determined by dividing the amount due by the volume weighted average closing price of the Company's common shares on the Canadian Securities Exchange in the ten trading days prior to the day that the Milestone Payment is due.

The Consideration Shares and the Milestone Shares will each be subject to a 36-month pooling arrangement such that 10% of the Consideration Shares, or the Milestone Shares, as applicable, will be released from escrow on upon their issuance, with an additional 15% being released every six-months thereafter until all Consideration Shares or all Milestone Shares, as applicable, are released.

As part of the Transaction, Mota Ventures will enter into employment contracts with certain employees of Sativida and will provide an option pool that may be divided among the employees of Sativida equal to 60,000 in stock options of Mota Ventures for every 1,000,000 in revenue that Sativida earns, subject to certain conditions. Additionally, Mota Ventures has paid a 10% finder's fee based on the total value of the Consideration Shares (528,072 common shares) to certain finders that assisted in introducing the Transaction to the parties as well as a 2% administrative success fee based on the total value of the Consideration Shares (105,614 common shares) to a consultant who assisted in the administration of the transaction.

The Company and Sativida are at arms'-length. The Transaction is not expected to result in a "reverse-takeover" or "fundamental change" for the Company under the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange, or result in the creation of any new insider or control person of the Company. No changes to the board of directors, or management, of the Company are contemplated in connection with the Transaction.

About Mota Ventures Corp.

Mota is seeking to become a vertically integrated global CBD brand. Its plan is to cultivate and extract CBD into high-quality value-added products from its Latin American operations and distribute it both domestically and internationally. Its existing operations in Colombia consist of a 2.5-hectare site that has optimal year-round growing conditions and access to all necessary infrastructure. Mota is looking to establish sales channels and a distribution network internationally through the acquisition of the Sativida and First Class CBD brands. Low cost production, coupled with international, direct to customer sales channels will provide the foundation for the success of Mota.

About Sativida

Sativida is a producer and online retailer of CBD and branded CBD products in various jurisdictions in Europe, including Spain and the United Kingdom. Sativida currently develops and retails a vast range of organic CBD oils and cosmetics across Europe and is currently expanding its distribution network internationally. For more information on Sativida, readers are encouraged to review their website at www.sativida.es.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

MOTA VENTURES CORP.

Ryan Hoggan

Chief Executive Officer

For further information, readers are encouraged to contact the President of the Company, Joel Shacker, at +604.423.4733 or by email at IR@motaventuresco.com or www.motaventuresco.com

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release, which has been prepared by management.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statement

All statements in this press release, other than statements of historical fact, are "forward-looking information" with respect to the Company within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including with respect to the expansion of Sativida's business and entrance into the U.S. market, the expansion of First Class CBD's business and entrance into the European market, its plans to become a vertically integrated global CBD brand, its plans to cultivate and extract cannabis to produce CBD and high-quality value added CBD products in Latin America for distribution domestically and internationally. The Company provides forward-looking statements for the purpose of conveying information about current expectations and plans relating to the future and readers are cautioned that such statements may not be appropriate for other purposes. By its nature, this information is subject to inherent risks and uncertainties that may be general or specific and which give rise to the possibility that expectations, forecasts, predictions, projections or conclusions will not prove to be accurate, that assumptions may not be correct and that objectives, strategic goals and priorities will not be achieved. These risks and uncertainties include but are not limited those identified and reported in the Company's public filings under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise unless required by law.

SOURCE: Mota Ventures Corp.





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https://www.accesswire.com/582610/Mota-Ventures-Moves-Forward-with-Its-Acquisition-of-Spanish-CBD-Company-Sativida




Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 20:28:17|Editor: Liu

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BANGKOK, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Chief of Defence Forces of the Royal Thai Armed Forces Gen. Pornpipat Benyasri on Thursday issued a stern warning to all Thai people, appealing to them to stay home and observe strict social distancing or risk facing a full lockdown of the country.

The warning came as Thailand entered into the first day of the state of emergency imposed by Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha.

Meanwhile, an estimated 357 check-points have been set up throughout Thailand to discourage people from non-essential travel.

Pornpipat, who had been assigned by Prayut to be in charge of law enforcement and security under the emergency decree, warned that authorities are serious in imposing fines on violators.

"I am appealing to all government agencies and business establishments to introduce more online communicating to minimize the number of personnel and employees having to commute to work," said Pornpipat.

"The next few days will be very crucial in the fight against the COVID-19," said the commander. "And only strict compliance with the directives to stay at home and to avoid non-essential travel can help stop the spread of this virus."

"We don't need the curfew or a national lockdown at this stage, but if the emergency decree imposed is not effective, then everyone in the country will have to suffer the consequences of a curfew or lockdown," Pornpipat warned.

On Thursday, Thailand reported another 111 cases of COVID-19 infection, bringing the total number in the country to 1,045.
With the coronavirus outbreak, vaccine researcher Peter Hotezs gift for explaining science to the general public has made him a familiar bow-tied presence on the national news.

His lab is developing a COVID-19 vaccine . An M.D. and Ph.D., hes a professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, and co-director of the Texas Childrens Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.

Since early March  before community spread was discovered in Houston  hes talked with us about the virus, the effect it could have on the U.S. and Houston, and about his own life in these strange times.

This week, from his home office, he discussed what COVID-19s explosive growth in New Orleans might mean for Houston; his own highs and lows; and his labs continuing struggle to pay for research on a coronavirus vaccine.

Youve been worried about New Orleans. Judging from the numbers we're seeing coming out of Louisiana, its possible that their hospital system could melt down. What are you thinking?

I'm thinking that things have not gone well in New York. We're seeing hospital systems being overrun. We're hearing stories of 500 or more coded patients coming into Columbia, Presbyterian, New York Hospital, the big flagship teaching hospitals, daily. And we're hearing Gov. Andrew Cuomo telling us that they just cannot manage the surge. There are too many ICU patients for them to manage. This is the nightmare scenario that we all worried about.

Then you have the healthcare workers getting sick, so they're getting taken off the workforce. Many of them are my former medical students, so I'm very upset and very worried about what's going on in New York.

Now the question is, is New York a one-off thing, or do we now expect this to pop up in other cities? This week, we started seeing a big sharp uptick in Louisiana, and when I look at the map, most of the cases are in New Orleans or New Orleans and their suburbs. So I'm concerned that New Orleans may be one of the next dominoes to fall.

We also heard from the mayor of Atlanta that their ICUs are filling up. So I'm wondering if the epidemic is taking a Southern twist or a Southern turn.

Are there other problems with cities like New Orleans that could make things worse  like poverty?

Ive spent my life working on interventions  vaccines  for poverty-related diseases. There is a depth and breadth of poverty on the Gulf Coast that I'd never seen before I moved from Connecticut to Houston. The people are wonderful, but it is heartbreaking to see the severity of poverty here.

The question is, is that the population that's getting affected by COVID-19? Now, why would I think that? One of the reasons New York is getting hit so hard is because of extreme population density. And what you see among the poor, in places like New Orleans and Atlanta, is they also live in areas of extreme population density, so practicing social distancing is problematic.

I'm worried that that in the South, COVID-19 is taking a different turn or twist, that it's predominantly affecting underrepresented minorities, especially African-Americans living in extreme poverty.

Do I have evidence for that? No, I mean, all I have to go on are the observations I've just been making, together with some of the news reports I'm seeing. But I think this is something that we need to get our arms around very quickly.

How do you do that? Well, it would be nice if we could get the locations of COVID-19 cases by ZIP code, because we have detailed demographics of the economic levels by ZIP code.

We've heard that COVID-19 is more deadly when it's combined with underlying conditions. Is that a lot more likely with people who are living in poverty?

Absolutely. And especially African Americans living in poverty. We know that they suffer from higher rates of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes  all the known risk factors for COVID-19. So I worry this is a toxic mix. I think this is going to be an important new dimension to look at.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Coronavirus spread in Houston could burn out by mid-May under stay-at-home order

What sorts of effects do you think an outbreak in New Orleans would have on Houston?

Since Katrina hit in New Orleans, the cities have been linked to the hip. We root for each other: If the Texans aren't advancing to the Super Bowl, I'm rooting for the Saints. If you've ever taken that Megabus between New Orleans and Houston, you know that everybody's got family in the other place.

That affection and love between the two cities is great, but it also means that if you have all those individuals leaving New Orleans coming to Houston, there's the potential to spread COVID-19 into our community. Thats one reason why we've implemented pretty severe social distancing measures. That may help us a lot.

We've been hearing a lot about the shortage of equipment such as ventilators. If there are outbreaks simultaneously in multiple cities, does that mean that we can't move those ventilators around?

Until these last few weeks, I never even gave thought to the fact that ventilators could move around. This is a new idea. Its being discussed with New York City right now: The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo says he needs 30,000 ventilators, and he's only getting 400. So would other cities be willing to share? We may have look at some type of rationing.

The other thing that I'm worried about is, if it's building up in New Orleans and building up in Atlanta, is Houston the next shoe to drop or the next domino to fall? I don't know. I think there's a real possibility.

We're blessed with the greatest medical center in the world: Texas Medical Center, where I work. The leaders of the TMC have been meeting on a regular basis, having those discussions daily.

But I'm not seeing any data or information on what the plan is in terms of surge capacity, or at what point do we have to build new infrastructure, building a tent city or some type or something along those lines, or bringing in the Army Corps of Engineers?

Hopefully, we'll never get to that point. We dont know.

But we've been pretty aggressive with social distancing. Is that having an impact? That's question one.

Question two: We know coronaviruses and other respiratory viruses often have a seasonal nature to them. So now the weather's warmed up. It's more humid. Might we get a reprieve? Maybe we dodge that bullet because of the warmer weather. We dont know that for certain, but it will be interesting to see in the coming weeks what happens.

We've been hearing a lot about the difficulties of density in New York. Houston and Atlanta are both more sprawling cities. Can we expect lower rates of spread?

Yeah, that's a huge question. I think it's not a coincidence that this disease is in New York and San Francisco and Seattle. These are very dense cities, and in Houston, we don't have that. Maybe that's going to work to our advantage.

You mentioned that you know people on the front lines in New York. What sorts of stories are you hearing?

I'm getting emails and texts from colleagues and friends. They're worried.

I've been going on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC and debunking this narrative that COVID-19 is only a disease of the old and infirm. That's not the case. The CDC has come out with important data in their morbidity and mortality weekly reports finding that about a third of the hospitalized patients are under the age of 44. That means young people are getting severely affected.

Young physicians, especially residents, who are often in their late 20s or early 30s, are at risk for this infection. And the fact that they don't have adequate protection means that a number of them are going to get sick.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Coronavirus or not, these new doctors are matched and ready to work

We know some of them are going to get seriously ill. Ive been getting quite emotional about this point because I love to mentor medical students at Baylor College of Medicine. I remember match day last year -- getting hugs because someone is going to Bellevue or New York Hospital or Columbia or Mount Sinai and was really excited.

Now, Im upset about what they're facing.

We've talked before about what recommendations you would give everyday Houstonians at this point in the outbreak, so what are you thinking now? What should we be doing? How should we be living our lives?

I was strongly advocating for shutting down the rodeo and, and doing the social distancing measures. I think these are good decisions made by our city leaders. I think they did the right thing, and they did it in with sufficient time, so I think so it'll make a big impact.

But quality of life is not at its best now for all of us. Its been especially hard for my special-needs daughter, Rachel, who works at Goodwill for two hours a day. She builds her whole life around that. She gets there an hour early, she talks to people, then she walks home. She's befriended all of the merchants in Montrose. She talks to the person at the frozen yogurt place and the person in the Subway. Now that whole world, her whole social network, has been taken away from from her.

Are you talking from your home right now?

Yes. Im not going into the lab as much because we're trying to restrict people going in and out.

Our scientists are working on the on the COVID-19 vaccine. They are at it day and night. So we have a team that's there, with special permission because of the unique nature of the project.

Normally I travel a lot. I do a lot of public engagement, getting people to care about neglected diseases, and that's all stopped. It's good to be spending more time with Ann and Rachel. That's actually been a bit of a silver lining.

But there's a lot of emotional stress because my lab is trying to get this vaccine out. So Im on teleconferences nonstop to move this forward  not only for the science and all of the regulatory hurdles and manufacturing and things like that, but also we don't have the money to do this.

I have highs and lows. Our group is making a vaccine that's urgently needed  that's incredibly satisfying. And I've been blessed to have the opportunity and privilege to talk to the country. I've been on almost every day on Fox News, MSNBC or CNN, and some days on all three networks. Not many people can do that because everything is so politically charged. So being able to speak to the country about science has been incredibly satisfying.

Feeling that responsibility both to talk to the nation and to make vaccines has been draining. My wife is seeing the strain on my face. And I'm seeing it in how I'm conducting my teleconferences. I'm far more emotional than I usually am. I have a reputation for being calming and even-handed, and I've seen flashes of anger that I didn't think I had in me. This epidemic has taught me that I have a limbic system.

Could we back up a bit? With all the federal money flowing into fighting COVID-19, you still dont have the money your lab needs to work on its vaccine?

We've gotten some. We've got some bridge funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases. And we've been invited to submit proposals to the other agencies, so we're doing that, but those wheels are not turning quickly.

Fortunately, one of the great things about being in Texas is that he philanthropic environment here is extraordinary. You know Texans. There's an attitude in Texas that we shouldn't rely on the federal government, that we're going to take care of it ourselves  and that's actually true. We were on our own during Ebola in 2014, and with Zika in 2016.

And unfortunately, we're pretty much on our own again, I think. But maybe well get through it because we're Texans.

lisa.gray@chron.com

@LisaGray_HouTX
The release of at least 500 inmates from jails across the state -- an unprecedented move that the Attorney General says will help stem the spread of the coronavirus -- has irked some county officials who say the move will bring more harm than good.

The fact that our Governor and Attorney General consented to this risky and poorly thought out plan is deeply disturbing, Freeholder Director Joe Derella said in a statement released on behalf of the Cumberland County Freeholder Board Tuesday. This action is unprecedented in the United States for good reason. It is foolish.

Derella, a Democrat, said he shares concerns that Governor Phil Murphy, Attorney General Gurbir Grewal have expressed about the health of the corrections officers and staff. But, Derella argued, releasing inmates does little to protect anyone.

They have been convicted of crimes and have proven to be a danger to the community, Derella said. In fact, their release could cause the very community spread the Governor and the Attorney General wish to avoid. Instead of treating inmates who may ultimately test positive in a controlled setting, as a practical matter, they will be free to travel and interact with the public with no greater restriction than anyone else.

Citing the profound risk posed to people in correctional facilities arising from the spread of COVID-19, the state Supreme Court issued an emergency order late Sunday directing the release of inmates serving jail time as a result of probation sentences or municipal court convictions.

It applies to certain inmates serving jail sentences of a year or less for low-level crimes. The offenders either violated probation or were convicted of municipal court violations like driving while intoxicated or disorderly persons charges. The inmates who qualify to be released will all be out by noon Thursday.

Other local officials have voiced opposition to the order, as well. Monmouth County Sheriff Shaun Golden disagreed with the emergency order, calling it unacceptable.

It is absurd that this court order to release inmates includes cases such as - failure to register as a sex offender, child endangerment, resisting arrest/assault on our Law Enforcement officers with no regard for the victims, Golden wrote in a Facebook post. Is this really about preventing an outbreak in our jail? No (coronavirus) cases in Monmouth Correctional facility to date.

The State Supreme Court declined to comment. Requests for comment to the Attorney Generals office and the Cumberland County Jails warden were not immediately returned. Last week, Grewal said it could be safer to let some of the inmates go home instead of keeping them in the county facilities.

Were in the middle of a public health emergency, and we recognize that for some lower-level, non-violent offenders, it may be safer to temporarily release these individuals to their homes than to keep them detained in a county jail, said Grewal.

About 800 inmates were eligible for release, but county prosecutors objected to letting out about 300 of them. Those cases will now be heard by a judge to determine whether or not they are released.

Judges will decide at the end of the emergency coronavirus declaration whether to return people who have been released to jail or sentence them to time served.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share.

If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

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Alex Napoliello, Blake Nelson, and S.P. Sullivan contributed to this report.

Chris Franklin can be reached at cfranklin@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @cfranklinnews or on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips.
A joint security patrol team compromising officers and men of the Nigerian Army, Nigeria Police Force and Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps exchanged heavy gunfire with armed bandits around Galkogo Forest in Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State last weekend.

PRNigeria learnt that while the bandits suffered heavy casualties, at least 20 security personnel were killed during the bloody gun duel.

The bodies of security operatives and volunteers killed during the encounter were immediately evacuated and conveyed to the Minna General Hospital.

Efforts of PRNigeria to get responses from the spokespersons of both the Nigerian Army and Niger State Police command proved abortive as their mobile lines could not be reached at the time of filing this report.
Former presidential candidate, Kingsley Moghalu has advocated for a total shutdown of the country, as efforts are in place to battle the spread of coronavirus.

Moghalu, the countrys health system lacks the capacity to handle large numbers, if theres ever a cases if community transmission.

Speaking on Thursday via his Twitter handle, he broke down how a total lockdown for one month can be achieved.

Read statement below

Apart from the Nigerian health systems weakness to handle large numbers of COVID-19 patients, poverty is a problem. This means congested masses of crowds of urban poor in Lagos, Kano, Onitsha, Aba etc. in their daily struggle for subsistence. @NigeriaGov must shutdown Nigeria completely. For a period of one month. To reduce community spread and give time for more contact tracing and to deal with medical emergency of treatments while it can still be handled.

Read Also: Covid-19: Dont Let Overzealous Religion Hamper Public Safety, Moghalu Tells Nigerians

The army should enforce this across the country. Even in several advanced countries compliance with shut-downs is problematic, not to speak of a country in which education and literacy levels are not what they should be. There has to be stronger communication in local languages about the coronavirus. Then, what to do about the loss of livelihood for the many already-poor?

This is where the countrys extremely weak economy and empty financial coffers becomes really painful. The budgets of the federal and state governments must now be COMPLETELY reprogrammed to focus on Covid-19 in 2020. Pretty much little else except security should matter now.

The @cenbank fund for small businesses and families wont be enough. The Bank as a monetary authority cant do everything, including things the fiscal authorities should be doing. Therefore, the federal and state governments must plan for subsistence funding of EVERY poor family in Nigeria for a 3-6 month period with reprogrammed budgets. We have to be innovative in this crisis.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has ordered the release of thousands of prisoners to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Farid Hamidi, Afghanistans attorney general, says the authorities could release up to 10,000 inmates from prisons in the capital, Kabul, and across the countrys 34 provinces after Ghani issued a decree ordering the move on March 26.

"Today, we are going to witness the release of a number of prisoners to prevent the spread of coronavirus, he told journalists in Kabul. This step is being taken in accordance with the constitution and laws of the country.

While Afghanistan has so far reported only 82 coronavirus cases, these figures do not reflect the true picture of the spread of the pandemic because of low testing. Afghan officials have attributed three deaths to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus infection. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of Afghans have returned to all parts of Afghanistan from neighboring Iran, where the pandemic has killed more than 2,000 people.

Hamidi says the government has formed a specialized committee to look into the issue and prepared the lists of those to be released within a week. Those expected to be released include women, children, elderly, sick, and convicts expected to serve less than five years of imprisonment or those imprisoned for minor crimes.

The move is separate from the release of some 5,000 Taliban prisoners.

Earlier this month, Ghani released a separate decree to allow and outline the phased release of Taliban inmates. Following several rounds of discussions over the Internet, Afghan officials are set to meet with Taliban representatives to begin the process by releasing 100 militants on March 31.

On March 26, Afghan authorities extended the lockdown to more cities and provinces.

Authorities will now lock down the southern province of Kandahar, Kabul, and the rural province of Logar to its southeast. A day earlier, Afghan authorities locked down the western province of Herat and the provincial capitals of neighboring Farah and Nimroz provinces.

With reporting by Radio Free Afghanistan and the BBC Pashto Service.
Former IRS officials warn it may not be possible for the US government to send cheques to all Americans by April 6.

President Donald Trump wants to send cash payments to households in less than two weeks, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday, but former IRS officials warn that deadline could be hard to meet.

The payments are one of the central provisions of the $2 trillion stimulus package awaiting a Senate vote.

Schumer said in a CNN interview that Trump wanted the money to start going out April 6 to get checks or direct deposit payments into peoples hands as soon as possible. A family of four could receive as much as $3,400, according to the Senate bill.

Big help, quick help is on the way, Schumer said.

Politicians and economists think thats a great idea. With businesses already laying off workers and economic activity grinding to a halt, many people are wondering how they are going to pay bills due in April. But former IRS officials warn it may not be possible for the agency to act so quickly.

Im confident theyre going to do better than anybody would expect with all of the limitations they face, but it wont be easy, former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said.

The IRS declined to comment on how fast the agency could issue the payments. The Treasury Department did not respond to a request to comment. The White House didnt immediately respond to a request for comment on the April 6 deadline.

Processing these stimulus payments will likely take much longer than two weeks because there isnt a centralized, up-to-date list of every household, the number of children, income and address or direct deposit bank information, the former officials said. When the IRS sent checks to large swaths of households most recently  in 2008 and 2009  it took more than two months to get the money in the mail.

It will be easy for the IRS to send money to some taxpayers, such as Social Security recipients and those who get benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs, because the federal government already sends funds to those individuals regularly.

The IRS may be able to handle payments that quickly for a smaller number of payments, but for that many millions it will require special handling, said Mark Everson, IRS commissioner from 2003 to 2007.

The IRS should be able to send about half of the payments via direct deposit, according to a Senate Finance Committee aide who helped draft the bill. Those payments directly to bank accounts go out within a matter of weeks after the law is signed, but paper checks could take more than a month, the aide said. The government is also considering ways  such as pre-loaded debit cards  to get payments to people without bank accounts.

Tax Filing Delay

As part of the Senates massive stimulus package announced early Wednesday, the government will send payments of $1,200 to many adults and $500 to children. The payments are subject to an income cap that starts to phase out at $75,000 for an individual or $150,000 for a married couple.

The payments will be based on tax returns filed in 2020, but for people who have yet to submit their tax returns, theyll be based on information filed in previous years. Even more taxpayers could put off filing their taxes this year, since Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin pushed back the filing and payment deadline to July 15 to help people make ends meet during the economic crisis.

The IRS has taxpayers addresses and bank accounts for those who received a refund via direct deposit, but it might not be current or accurate, particularly for those who havent yet filed yet this year.

The birth of children, divorces and marriages could also affect how big the check should be, meaning that many people could receive more or less than theyre supposed to get. The agency may also have gaps in the data from individuals who arent required to file tax returns because they dont make enough money.

These are all obstacles that could slow the IRS down as it tries to send the payments, said Mark Mazur, a former IRS and Treasury Department official.

You have to accept that there is going to be a bunch of errors, said Mazur, now the director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. To do this instantaneously is an aspirational goal.

Taxpayers who receive incorrect amounts or dont get a check at all can resolve those differences on their tax return next spring, but that means they wont have access to the money immediately.

The bottom line is youve got to make sure the best isnt the enemy of the good, Koskinen said. And the fact that you wont necessarily reach 100% of everybody qualified doesnt mean you shouldnt send it to the 80% or 90% you can reach out to and find.

The IRS is also operating at less than full capacity at one of its busiest times of the year. The agency has been forced to close many offices or reduce operations in facilities across the country, including those performing mission-critical tasks.

Commissioner Charles Rettig said in an email to employees last week that even if a facility isnt closed, its workforce will be cut in half to comply with social distancing orders.

Offices Closed

Eddie Walker, an IRS employee and president of the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 247 in Austin, said employees have been told theyll be needed to process checks, but they havent been briefed on who will be responsible for that work or how its going to be done.

Walker said he is concerned about the safety of IRS workers and is worried agency leadership may force people to come back prematurely to process the checks.

The IRSs technology department will be particularly strained because it will need to go back through the filing database to find the information needed to issue checks or make wire transfers, Koskinen said.

Despite these reductions the agency says that its core functions and duties wont be jeopardized.

The IRS is the best-situated federal agency to process these payments, even if it doesnt have perfect data, Alan Viard, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, said. It has more taxpayer information than any other part of the government, he said.

The main argument is that you want to get the money out as quickly as possible, Viard said. The whole purpose is not to sort out who does and who doesnt need it. Its to get it out fast.
Gujarat: Disruptions in labour and trading  fishing industry comes to a halt

March 26,2020 | Source: The Indian Express

The multi-billion fishing industry, which employs around 3.5 lakh people in the state of Gujarat, has come to a grinding halt as traders and processors are facing labour shortage and transportation issues, following restrictions imposed due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Gujarat has the longest coastline in the country at 1650 kilometre. Fishing is also an important contributor to the states GDP and Rs 7,000 crore worth of seafood is annually exported.



Fish has been included in the list of daily essentials whose movement and sale has been exempted from restrictions. It has to be treated at par with vegetables but somehow, a message has spread or people have assumed that the movement of fish is also prohibited. Therefore, traders and processors have stopped buying from fishermen and seafood processing units are suspending their operations, President of Akhil Bharatiya Fishermen Association, Velji Masani told The Indian Express on Wednesday. The last fishing trawler arrived on shore at Jakhau in Kutch on Tuesday, but there has been no business on account of the lockdown. Masani said that Veraval Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC), the hub of seafood processing industry in Gujarat, is deserted with hardly any vehicles plying and labourers not leaving their homes, either.



There are no takers for fish being unloaded on fishing harbours. Police are intensively checking all trucks transporting goods, therefore traders are not taking any risks. On Tuesday, 22 fishing trawlers landed at Jakhau fishing harbour with their catch. But effectively, there was no auction as only two traders turned up to buy the fish, said Usmangani Sherasiya, Secretary of National Fishworkers Forum (NFF), a national forum of Indian fishermen organisations.



Masani, who is also a member of the NFF, said that there are 35,000 active fishing boats in the state. Each boat supports the employment of around a 100 persons. Around 3.5 lakh fishermen and their families depend on this industryThe government must do something soon to ensure that the industry continues to functionOtherwise, all boats would come to shore and the huge number of fishermen who are confined to their boats in fishing harbours would swell, Masani further said.



People from states like Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka and Assam are known to come to Gujarat to work as crew on fishing boats, fish-handling or processing firms along the coast. Sherasiya said that hundreds of such fishermen were stuck up in Jakhau, Okha, Mangrol, Porbandar and Veraval as public transport is not available and the movement of people has been restricted by the government.



Kanji Baraiya, who runs a fish trading firm called RK Enterprise in Jakhau, said that he stopped trading on Tuesday. Seafood processing firms of Veraval stopped loading fish from Jakhau citing transportation issues. So, after getting a letter of permission from fisheries, I dispatched the last consignment of around 20 tonne fish in six trucks on Tuesday. Now, there is a curfew in Jakhau, said Baraiya. He added that as road transport was highly restricted, traders were unable to supply fish to Karnataka and other states in the northern and northeastern part of the country.



Processors and exporters said that the restrictions announced by the government forced them to suspend operations. Labourers are not turning up for work and are instead preferring to stay indoors. Police presence on roads is also dissuading them to step outClearing and forwarding agents at ports are also not working. Therefore, shipment of fish for export has by and large halted. Therefore, we have no option but to shut down, said Karshan Salet, Vice-President of the Gujarat chapter of Seafood Exporters Association.



The disruption in trading, transport and processing has meant fishermen are either stranded in harbours and forced to return if they are at sea. Police and Fisheries department had been asking us to dispose of our catch for a week. Therefore, we stopped fishing operations, Abdullasha Pirjada, President of Jakhau Bandar Machhimar ane Boat Association, an organisation of fishermen and boat owners in Jakhau. Pirjada said that 1,231 fishing boats had returned to the harbour, but a few of them could not sell their catch due to the lockdown.



President of Porbandar Machhimar Boat Association, Jadavaji Posteria said that anchoring space in Porbandar is also an issue. Since there are no takers for fish, fishing boats are returning from sea but there is issue of anchoring space in Porbandar harbour. Around 1,200 boats have already arrived. Another 400 are at sea and waiting for their turn to enter the harbour, said Posteria. However, Masani said that the government has instructed fishermen to not beach their boats. Instead, they should either anchor their craft in harbours or the anchorage. Usually, fishermen do not have homes in the port they operate from and there is fear that a large number of fishermen will congregate at harbours, he said.



Gujarat Fisheries Minister Jawahar Chavda said that he is aware of the issue. We issued a circular to all district collectors on Wednesday morning, asking them to ensure that movement of fish, processed seafood and fish feed is not affected. These instructions will be followed and the supply of fish will not be allowed to be affected, said the Minister. Meanwhile, 104 fishermen from returned to Navsari district in south Gujarat from Bhavcha Dhakka in Mumbai via the sea route. They were medically screened and later advised by health officers to quarantine themselves at their homes for 14 days. These fishermen from Navsari and Valsad had landed at Bhavcha Dhakka in Mumbai for selling their catch, but returned to Dholai port at Billimora in Navsari district on Wednesday.
BERGEN COUNTY, N.J.  Kashif Chaudhry and Naila Shereen wed in a private ceremony at a mosque in Hawthorne, New Jersey, last Friday without guests or fanfare.

It was a far cry from the lavish multi-day Pakistani-style wedding theyd planned. They were to host 400-plus people in London, followed by a reception in a bucolic English village and a honeymoon in Dubai and the Maldives.

Instead, after a Saturday dinner and a second ceremony at her parents home, with relatives joining in online, they said their goodbyes and went to work at their respective hospitals  1,000 miles apart. They are medical doctors, and their life as newlyweds would have to wait amid the raging pandemic, they both agreed.

We are ready to do our part to save as many lives as we can. The worst isnt even here yet, said Chaudhry, a former Englewood resident who practices in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Crikey! It's a wedding: Australia enacts strict gathering policy; Bindi Irwin sneaks in 'small, private' wedding amid coronavirus

Shereen returned to her job as a chief internal medicine resident at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in central Brooklyn, an epicenter of the global coronavirus outbreak. Chaudhry went back to Iowa, where he specializes in heart rhythm disorders at a hospital.

They did not want to postpone their marriage until after the pandemic subsided, fearing it could last weeks or months.

Theres a saying, When you know, you know. We felt like we know and were going to get married, so why wait? We know we were meant for each other, Chaudhry said.

The virus has turned hospitals into war zones, pushing doctors to their limits. Iowa recorded its first death just this week, but New York City now has 20,000 cases  almost a third of all infections in the U.S.  and more than 285 deaths as of Wednesday night.

'We just wanted to get married': Couple get married on the streets of New York amid coronavirus pandemic

Kashif Chaudhry and Naila Shereen celebrate their marriage at her parents' home in New Windsor, NY. Amid a coronavirus outbreak, the doctors canceled a large wedding and honeymoon and went back to work.

Shereen said the scenario was alarming, with her colleagues upset and worried about the escalating crisis. But she's not worried for her own safety, as younger, healthier people seem to be at less risk. Far away, Chaudhry said he worries about his wife  but marvels at her determination.

Story continues

That neither hesitated to part and return to work is hardly surprising. They are dedicated doctors and humanitarians who bonded over a mutual passion to help others.

Chaudhry knew his wife professionally for several years. They were both involved in charitable doctors groups that traveled to other countries to deliver medical aid. He implanted pacemakers for patients in Bolivia, while she volunteered at a clinic in Guatemala.

He asked to meet her while visiting New York City last fall, and they immediately hit it off. She was smart, selfless and calming, he said.

Just all those things make me love her, he added. Shes a very beautiful person.

Shereen said that they shared common beliefs and values, and it was a natural attraction.

They were set to marry March 29 in London, where his parents and brothers live. Her family reserved a banquet hall in the city for a ceremony and reception. His family arranged for an event at a village about 70 miles outside London, where the wedding would continue in the countryside.

The couple had planned to go to Dubai, where his sister lives, before heading to the picturesque islands of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.

Should I cancel my wedding due to coronavirus?: What about my honeymoon? Yes, experts say

A few weeks ago, they called it all off as it became clear amid the pandemic that they could not travel and might be needed at home as medical professionals.

They asked an imam at the Ahmadiyya Muslim Center in Hawthorne, where her family worships, to perform a Muslim marriage ceremony called the Nikah. Shereens mother and siblings waited outside, holding sweets and red roses and cheering as they emerged.

The next night, the newlyweds donned the clothing they planned to wear in England. Chaudhry wore a sharp navy tuxedo, while Shereen was draped in an embroidered red gown. They went to her parents home in New Windsor, New York, for the second part of the wedding.

Family members read wedding prayers from the Quran via video conferencing. They listened to music and had a lavish feast including chicken biryani, lamb korma and buttered chicken. They cut a store-bought cannoli cake. The couple, her parents and her three siblings sat far apart from one another, at times wearing protective masks.

After the dinner, Shereen drove her new husband to the airport and he returned to Iowa. She went back to Brooklyn. I wish we could be together, but its my professional and ethical duty to be here, she said.

As chief internal medicine resident, Shereen handles administration, dealing with staffing issues and scheduling. She also sees her own patients and while none have tested positive for COVID-19, others in the hospital system have.

Medical residents at the hospital are concerned as they see the numbers of patients increase and health care facilities become overwhelmed, she said. They fear they won't be able to deliver the level of care that they are used to giving, but they are "willing" and "stepping up."

While she feels safe, she worries about other, more vulnerable family members.

"Of course I'm worried because New York is an epicenter," Chaudhry said by telephone. "There are tons of people with coronavirus, and tons of health care workers have already tested positive."

But above all, he said, he is proud.

Ordinarily I would have been, but Im even more proud that she didnt think twice, he said. She put public health before our personal life.

Chaudhry came to the U.S. from Pakistan in 2008 and was granted asylum as a member of the persecuted Ahmadi community. He lived and worked in Englewood before moving to Boston and then to Iowa, where he is a cardiac electrophysiologist at Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids. Iowa has had its own outbreak, with 145 reported cases as of Wednesday, according to the state's Department of Public Health.

Love in the time of coronavirus: New York couple get engaged amid pandemic

Chaudhry, 37, has long been active in interfaith and peace efforts as well as advocacy for the rights of the Ahmadi Muslim minority community. He was awarded the Presidential Service Award by former President Barack Obama in 2011.

He frequently writes for the Huffington Post and other websites about human rights and has posted extensively on social media about coronavirus, urging people to take precautions against its spread. He hopes that, by telling his story, he can remind the public to be vigilant.

To the public, Id say you have it easy, just stay home, he said Thats all you need to do. Dont socialize, dont form groups. Just take it easy and practice social distancing and good hygiene and just back off.

Follow on Hannah Adely Twitter: @adelyreporter

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Wedding during coronavirus outbreak, doctors delay honeymoon to save lives
There is a high possibility of the Covid-19 virus being transmitted sexually, the minister of Health, Osagie Ehanire, has said.

Mr Ehanire, addressing an emergency press briefing in Abuja on Thursday, said he believed that if a person is positive, the virus can be transmitted sexually.

This is, however, subject to scientific testing as the Covid-19 is a new disease and a lot of research is ongoing on the pattern of transmission of the disease.

However, some scientists have claimed that the virus cannot be transmitted through sexual intercourse except via oral sex.

A scientist, Jessica Justman, who spoke with The Guardian UK, said they are not seeing patterns that indicate sexual transmission.

She, however, advised that when a partner is a Covid-19 case, it is better to steer clear of each other as much as possible.

Transmission

It has, however, been proven that Covid-19 can be transmitted from person to person and primarily spread through respiratory droplets. Touching contaminated surfaces is thought to be the secondary mode of transmission.

This is one of the reasons why the World Health Organisation and health experts have been campaigning that people should always wash their hands with soap and water as much as possible and when that is not possible, the use of sanitizer is advised.

The UN health agency advised frequent handwashing with soap under running water or using an alcohol-based sanitiser.

It also said that people should avoid crowds, large gatherings and needless physical contact and to always clean surfaces frequently with disinfectants

Face mask

Also, Mr Ehanire said it is not everyone that has to wear a face mask. He said this action will affect supplies for medical personnel.

Since the onset of the outbreak in Nigeria, many Nigerians have been wearing face masks in an attempt to prevent contracting the virus.

However, Mr Ehanire said if the face masks were for everyone, Jack Ma will have had to donate 200 million masks.
Walmart Inc. has taken on 25,000 new employees and given offers to thousands more in the first week of a hiring push, as the biggest private employer in the U.S. scrambles to keep its shelves stocked and checkouts staffed during the coronavirus pandemic.

The retailer has compressed a hiring process that can often take two weeks into as little as three hours by eliminating formal interviews and written job offers, giving store managers authority to make verbal offers right away, according to Dan Bartlett, executive-vice president of corporate affairs. The applicants include high school and college students along with those let go from jobs at restaurants and hotels.

Walmart last week pledged to hire 150,000 hourly workers, increasing its U.S. workforce by 10 per cent, amid a rapid economic shift due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits surged to a record 3.28 million last week. While service industries are laying off huge numbers of workers in response to plummeting demand, retailers like Walmart and Amazon.com Inc. are adding staff to keep up with a burst in traffic. Target Corp. said this week that comparable sales of everyday essentials, food and beverages have risen more than 50 per cent in March so far.

Were seeing a surge in applications, Bartlett said in an interview. The stores are able to engage directly at the ground level, bypassing regional hiring managers to speed the process.

That expedited process worked for Jabren Thompson, a 16-year-old in Boise, Idaho, who got a job unloading trucks for $11 an hour. Thompson, who previously was digging trenches and feeding livestock on a farm for $10 an hour, said he felt very welcomed by his new co-workers.

Not all Walmart employees are rolling out the welcome mat for Thompson and his fellow greenhorns. Stacy Rowback, an associate at the Walmart in Gloversville, N.Y., and a member of United for Respect, a labour advocacy group that has targeted Walmart and Amazon, said the new hires are there to do our jobs for us. Instead of hiring more workers, Walmart should give more hours to its part-time associates, she said.

Bartlett said thats happening, however, and the retailer is giving priority to existing employees to add hours before new hires come on board.

Walmart shares rose 0.8 per cent at 9:37 a.m. in New York trading Thursday.

Employees have aired other grievances on online message boards, particularly concerning safety measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in crowded stores. Some grocers, like Kroger Co., have installed Plexiglas partitions at checkout counters, while most have put measures in place to maintain social distancing among shoppers.

Its time to limit the stores to 10 customers at a time, one commenter said on a Reddit group frequented by Walmart workers, adding that without the measure, Walmart is a cesspool for coronavirus.

Earlier this week, the retailer said its installing Plexiglas sneeze guards at its pharmacy lanes and plans to do the same for regular cash registers over the next two to three weeks. It will also put decals on the floor in checkout lanes to indicate the right distance shoppers should keep from each other. Workers are also using a new spraying tool to more rapidly sanitize shopping carts.

Thompson, the new hire in Idaho, said he was satisfied with the safety measures that Walmart has taken. The high school junior, whose school is closed due to the coronavirus, said he wouldnt mind getting hired into a permanent role one day. Walmart has said many of the temporary roles will convert to permanent ones over time.

Bartlett said Walmart is making faster decisions about operations in addition to an expedited hiring process. The company has seen its supply chain rebalance a bit as it copes with the surge of demand for food, toilet paper and other everyday essentials.

Its like wartime footing, he said.

Read more about:
Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch was supposed to celebrate his 89th birthday on March 11 with a lavish party at his California estate. But on March 8, with the COVID-19 coronavirus spreading, "the Murdoch family called off a planned party out of concern for the patriarch's health," Ben Smith reports at The New York Times. Lachlan Murdoch, the 48-year-old son nominally in charge of Fox News, "knew the virus was coming" by January, because "he'd been getting regular updates from the family's political allies and journalists in his father's native Australia," Smith reported.

But "if you were watching some of the commentators on Fox News and Fox Business in the first 10 days of March, you wouldn't have been too worried about the coronavirus," Smith notes: "It would be no worse than the flu, and the real story was the 'coronavirus impeachment scam.'" Two things changed the network's prime-time downplaying of the pandemic  Fox Business host Trish Regan took things too far, and President Trump started warning about the coronavirus publicly on March 11. The Washington Post rounded up some before-and-after commentary:

Smith described a "glaring" gap between how seriously "the elite, globally minded family owners of Fox" took the COVID-19 pandemic and the big shrugs from "many of their nominal stars." But Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott also responded quickly and decisively inside the network's Manhattan headquarters starting in late February, as the apostate Republican Lincoln Project highlighted in its own rebuke of the conservative pro-Trump media's coronavirus coverage.

On Tuesday, with a sixth Fox News staffer testing positive for COVID-19, Scott noted in an internal memo that "the vast majority of our workforce is now telecommuting" and ordered a halt to all in-studio bookings and contributor appearances. Smith asked Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Public Health Institute, if he believed people will die because of Fox's coverage in those critical two weeks, and he said yes, this "very specific type of misinformation" has been "very harmful." A Fox News spokeswoman accused the Times of "politicizing this serious threat" by "cherry-picking" clips from "our opinion programs."

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Days ago, the Hong Kong authorities confirmed the death of the first dog who got inflicted by the coronavirus after it was treated with the disease. Several days following its death, the authorities have once again announced another dog that was tested positive of it.



The second dog that got inflicted is a German shepherd from Pok Fu Lam area and was living with a family, which has also been tested positive for the coronavirus. According to the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD), the dog is now sent to quarantine along with other mixed-breed dog living from the same residence.



Though the German shepherd has tested positive, the other canine showed a negative result. As of the writing, authorities say the canines are still not showing any symptoms of the virus and are presently under strict observation. They are also planning to monitor both these canines and conduct several tests unto them.



Despite the second case of coronavirus infliction among dogs, the government organization is urging families not to abandon their pets during the outbreak out of fear of getting ill because of them. As of the gathered data, the confirmed case is more likely a human-to-animal transmission, and there is no need to worry about getting inflicted with the coronavirus through them, as reported by Daily Mail.



The department also emphasized the need for fur parents to stop kissing their companions in times like this. They should also have to observe proper hygiene in handling their fur babies to limit the contamination of the virus to their household.



The best thing to do to protect your pets from the coronavirus is by washing or sanitizing your hands before holding your fur babies. It is also better to wear a face mask and isolate yourself once you are not feeling okay.



Furthermore, you strengthen your pet's immune system by giving them vitamins and healthy foods such as vegetables and fruits so they can have stronger protection against any disease. Some of these foods you can give to your pooches are rosemary, coconut oil, yogurt, peppermint, and pumpkin.



If you have extra money to boost their immunity, providing them supplements is also a good idea. You can give them fish oil, vitamin c, vitamin e, glucosamine, probiotics, milk thistle, lysine, and also multivitamins, according to Science Based Medicine.



Just make sure that as you take care of your fur babies' health, you are also securing yours. Keep your body healthier and well-protected too.



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Indians have been warned they could be shot if they defy the coronavirus lockdown with thousands queuing for food today despite social distancing advice.

Three more people died overnight as the health ministry said the number of cases had risen to 649, including 13 dead.

But despite the populace of 1.3billion being told to stay indoors by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, thousands were seen lining up close behind each other to get into bustling markets in Delhi, Kolkota and Mumbai on Thursday.

Yesterday there were chaotic scenes across the nation with police beating violators of the lockdown with rattan canes and forcing others to crouch down in chalk circles to teach them about social distancing.

In the southern state of Telangana the chief minister, Kalvakuntla Chandrashekhar, made the most ruthless threat to anyone who continues to flout the rules.

'Please don't let it come to this,' he said. 'The administration cannot stop everyone and I will have to call in the army or issue 'shoot at sight' orders. Please stay at home.'

Scroll down for video.

Hundreds line up for food at the D-mart mall in Mira Road, Mumbai, on Thursday after Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a three week lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus

People buy vegetables in a market where food is seen strewn across the floor during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in the old quarters of Delhi, India

People queue to buy groceries at a D-mart mall in Mira Road in suburban Mumbai, India, on Thursday. Maharashtra state has been put under lock down till 31 March in an effort to contain the spread of COVID-19 and coronavirus

In the southern state of Telangana the chief minister, Kalvakuntla Chandrashekhar, made the most ruthless threat to anyone who continues to flout the rules. 'Please don't let it come to this,' he said. 'The administration cannot stop everyone and I will have to call in the army or issue 'shoot at sight' orders. Please stay at home.' (pictured: a guard at a checkpoint in New Delhi today)

People look on as they stand in circles drawn to maintain safe distance while waiting to buy medicine during a 21-day nationwide lockdown in Kolkata on Thursday

A police officer wields his baton against a man as a punishment for breaking the lockdown rules after India ordered a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Nagaon District of Assam

A police officer wields his baton against a man as a punishment for breaking the lockdown rules after India ordered a 21-day nationwide lockdown

A police officer wields his baton against a man as a punishment for breaking the lockdown rules after India ordered a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of coronavirus disease

India has so far reported a relatively small number of cases compared to European nations that are reporting figures well into the tens of thousands, but there are fears that generally cramped living conditions, poverty, poor hygiene and a creaking healthcare system could quickly cause it to run out of control.

Experts warn that up to 500million Indians could contract coronavirus within the next year, which would mean more than 1million deaths in the next 12 months.

Announcing the lockdown Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that only essential services such as water, electricity, health services, fire services, groceries and municipal services will be allowed to operate.

All shops, commercial establishments, factories, workshops, offices, markets and places of worship will be closed and interstate buses and metros will be suspended. Construction activity will also be halted.

'According to health experts, a minimum of 21 days is most crucial to break the cycle of infection. If we are not able to manage this pandemic in the next 21 days, the country and your family will be setback by 21 years. If we are not able to manage the next 21 days, then many families will be destroyed forever,' Modi said.

A police officer wields his baton against a man as a punishment for breaking the lockdown rules after India in Nagaon District of Assam

Indian shopkeepers and customers haggle over the prices of fruits and vegetables in a crowded Mandi (market place), as nationwide lockdown continues over highly contagious novel coronavirus

Indians covering their faces with masks and clothes walk in a crowded market place in New Delhi on Thursday after the lockdown came into force

In videos which have emerged online, officers are seen punishing members of the public caught roaming on the streets in Patiala, Bathinda and Chandigarh in the North Indian state of Punjab. Violators are made to do sit-ups and body rolls while police beat them with cane sticks.

A policeman removes air from the tyre of a labourer carrying vegetables to dissuade people from crowding outside a market during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in the old quarters of Delhi, India

People queue standing in circles drawn to maintain safe distance as they wait to buy grocery items during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Kolkata, India

A plainclothes police officer strikes a man over the legs for breaking a strict 21-day curfew imposed across India as the country attempts to slow the spread of coronavirus in Kolkata yesterday

India's 1.3billion people woke Wednesday to find themselves under the world's most extensive coronavirus lockdown - with police using rattan canes to beat people into compliance in New Delhi yesterday

Rwandan cops shoot dead two men for defying lockdown order Rwanadan police yesterday shot and killed two men who defied the government lockdown order to stop the spread of coronavirus. The pair in their twenties, 'attempted to tussle with officers,' Rwanda National Police spokesman John Bosco Kabera told Bloomberg. The two-week shutdown started on March 22, putting in place travel restrictions and urging people to stay inside. They are some of the most stringent measures on the continent. Rwanda has recorded 40 cases of the deadly infection. Advertisement

The lockdown means that roughly a third of the world's population - or 2.6billion people - are now living under some kind of restriction imposed because of coronavirus, half of them in India.

While police were strict at enforcing the lockdown in the country's metropolises, there were fears that the lockdown could inadvertently cause the disease to spread to the countryside as migrant workers packed on to buses to avoid being locked down away from their families.

Meanwhile India's colossal passenger railway system has come to a halt as officials take emergency measures to keep the coronavirus pandemic from spreading in the country of 1.3 billion.

The railway system is often described as India's lifeline, transporting 23 million people across the vast subcontinent each day, some 8.4 billion passengers each year.

On Thursday, streets were silent across cities and towns on the second day of a three-week, 24 hour shutdown. Lines of people, wearing masks and some with gloves, could be seen outside small neighbourhood shops in Delhi and Mumbai, among other cities.

Indian shopkeepers and customers are seen in a crowded market place in the nation's capital on Thursday

A bustling market place in New Delhi today where shoppers and traders appeared relaxed after the government imposed a lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus

Homeless and impoverished Indian receive food at a government shelter in New Delhi on Thursday. Some of India's legions of poor and people suddenly thrown out of work by a nationwide stay-at-home order began receiving aid distribution Thursday, as both the public and private sector work to blunt the impact of efforts to curb the coronavirus pandemic.

Homeless and impoverished Indians receive food at a government shelter in New Delhi as the widespread effects of the virus begin to bite in the country of 1.3billion

Security personnel stand guard at a checkpoint during a government-imposed nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus in New Delhi today

People queue to buy groceries at a D-mart mall in Mira Road, Mumbai, today after the lockdown went into effect yesterday

People queue to buy groceries at a D-mart mall in Mira Road, India, 26 March 2020. Maharashtra state has been put under lock down till 31 March in an effort to contain the spread of COVID-19 and coronavirus.

People stand on designated areas to maintain social distancing as they queue outside a medical store during a government-imposed nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus in Srinagar

Trucks were stranded at state borders and public transport was withdrawn. Police have strictly enforced the lockdown even though Modi said essential services would be maintained. Ram Prakash, a shopkeeper in Delhi's Nizamuddin area, said supplies of some essential goods had improved although bottled water was still a problem.

'We are still facing supply issues with a few things, but slowly things are getting better,' he said.

Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO's top emergencies expert, told a Geneva news conference that with the lockdown in place, India had a window of opportunity to expand testing, surveillance and quarantine facilities and said its success with eliminating polio was an example.

'India got rid of polio by breaking it by breaking it down to the village level. All the way through the system, it broke down the problem, it went after the polio virus district by district by district by district. And India won. If India does the same thing, breaks down the problem, puts in place the measures that are needed, then there is a way out.'

Members of a municipal fire brigade spray disinfectant in a street ofthe Mira Road residential area of Mumbai today in an effort to combat the spread of the virus

A man wearing a protective face mask walks in front of members of a municipal fire brigade as they spray disinfectant in a street ofthe Mira Road residential area during an official lockdown of the city in an effort to combat the widespread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus which causes the Covid-19 disease, in Mumbai, India, 26 March 2020

Men caught violating rules about public gatherings in India are forced to crouch inside chalk circles drawn on the ground to show them what mandatory minimum distances looks like amid the country's lockdown

Customers watch municipal workers painting white marks on the floor to help maintain recommended social distancing as they queue outside a departmental store during a government-imposed nationwide lockdown in Mumbai

While the lockdown is intended to prevent the spread of coronavirus, there were fears that it could inadvertently spread it to the countryside as migrant workers fled cities on packed buses

Members of a municipal fire brigade spray disinfectant in a street ofthe Mira Road residential area of Mumbai on Thursday, day two of the government lockdown

India has tested 24,254 people as of Wednesday, according to the government run Indian Council of Medical Research, a small number compared to the population.

Only recently has the government authorised the private sector and some nongovernmental research laboratories to run the tests for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

Today the leaders of the world's most powerful economies, including India's Modi, will convene for a virtual meeting to coordinate a response to the fast-spreading coronavirus.

The meeting for the Group of 20 nations (G20) will be chaired by Saudi Arabia's King Salman.

The kingdom, which is presiding over the G20 this year, said it organised the extraordinary meeting to advance global efforts to tackle the pandemic and its economic implications as people lose their incomes amid closures, curfews and lockdowns.

New Delhi train station, one of the busiest in the world, was all-but deserted Wednesday morning as India entered the first full day of a nationwide lockdown to slow the spread of coronavirus

A deserted view of the Delhi - Meerut Expressway which is typically packed with cars was all-but deserted Wednesday morning as India adjusted to life under quarantine

The meeting comes amid criticism that the world's wealthiest countries have not taken cohesive action to combat the virus or its economic impact on people around the world.

The global death toll from the new coronavirus, which causes an illness called Covid-19, has climbed past 21,000 with the number of infections surpassing 472,000, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

The number of dead in the US rose to 1,041 as of late Wednesday, with nearly 70,000 infections.

Spain's death toll has risen past 3,400, eclipsing that of China, where the virus was first detected in December.
The US Department of Justice announced Thursday that it has indicted Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro and several key aides on charges of narcoterrorism.

Attorney General William Barr announced the charges against Maduro, who already faces US sanctions and has been the target of a US effort aimed at pushing him from power.

The State Department offered a reward of up to $15million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Maduro, who has been in power since 2013.

Barr accused Maduro and his associates of conspiring with a dissident faction of the leftist Colombian guerrilla group FARC 'to flood the United States with cocaine'.

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The US Department of Justice announced Thursday that it has indicted Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro and several key aides on charges of narcoterrorism

Attorney General William Barr (pictured) announced the charges against Maduro, who already faces US sanctions. The State Department offered a reward of up to $15million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Maduro

'We estimate that somewhere between 200 and 250 metric tons of cocaine are shipped out of Venezuela by these routes. Those 250 metric tons equates to 30 million lethal doses,' the indictment says.

Maduro responded to the charges on Twitter, saying: 'There's a conspiracy from the United States and Colombia and they've given the order of filling Venezuela with violence.

'As head of state I'm obliged to defend peace and stability for all the motherland, under any circumstances.'

The indictment of a functioning head of state is highly unusual and is bound to ratchet up tensions between Washington and Caracas as the spread of the coronavirus threatens to collapse a health system and oil-dependent economy driven deep into the ground by years of corruption and US sanctions.

Analysts said the action could boost Trump's re-election chances in the key swing state of Florida, which he won by a narrow margin in 2016 and where Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans fleeing authoritarian regimes have political muscle.

But its unclear how it brings Venezuela any closer to ending a 15-month standoff between Maduro, who has the support of Russia and China, and the US-backed opposition leader Juan Guaido.

It also could fragment the US-led coalition against Maduro if European and Latin American allies think the Trump administration is overreaching.

The US is also offering a $10million reward leading to the arrest of four of Maduro's aides (bottom left)

'This kind of action does nothing to help a negotiated solutionsomething that's already really difficult,' said Roberta Jacobson, who served as the State Department's top diplomat for Latin America until 2018.

Maduro, a 57-year-old former bus driver, portrays himself as an everyman icon of the Latin American left.

He's long accused the US 'empire' of looking for any excuse to take control of the world's largest oil reserves, likening its plotting to the 1989 invasion of Panama and the removal of Gen Manuel Noriega to face drug trafficking charges in Florida.

Barr and Elliott Abrams, the State Department's special envoy on Venezuela, are driving the hawkish US stance toward Maduro much as they pushed for Noriega's ouster in the late 1980s  Barr as a senior Justice Department official and Abrams as assistant secretary of state for Latin America.

US officials see other parallels as well. Noriega transformed Panama into a playground for violent, international drug cartels while the Trump administration has accused Maduro and his military henchmen of harboring drug traffickers, guerrillas from Colombia and even Hezbollah, a designated terrorist group.

They also have accused government officials together with well-connected businessmen of stealing hundreds of billions of dollars from the state coffers, much of it from state oil giant PDVSA, which has seen its production plunge to a seven-decade low.

Still, charging Maduro was no easy task. Sitting foreign leaders normally enjoy immunity from prosecution under US law and international norms.

But the US is among 60 countries that no longer consider Maduro a head of state even if he does hold de facto power.

Maduro (pictured on March 22), 57, has long accused the US 'empire' of looking for any excuse to take control of the world's largest oil reserves

They instead recognize Guaido, the head of congress, as Venezuela's rightful leader following the socialist's re-election in a 2018 race marred by allegations of fraud and an opposition boycott.

The evidence against Maduro was collected over several years by investigators in Miami, New York, Houston and Washington who have brought drug trafficking, foreign bribery and money-laundering charges against several senior Venezuelan officials, members of the military and government-connected businessmen.

Much of those probes have focused on PDVSA, which is the source of practically all of Venezuela's export revenue.

Last year, the US sanctioned PDVSA, barring Americans from doing business with the oil giant.

But to the surprise of many, Hugo Chavez's hand-picked heir has stubbornly clung to power, withstanding months of street protests last year and even a US-backed military revolt all the while millions of Venezuelan migrants flee hyperinflation and widespread food shortages.

With support on the streets for Guaido fading, the Trump administration raised the ante last fall, withdrawing support for a Norway-sponsored mediation effort and extending sanctions so that even foreign companies faced retaliation for extending Maduro a lifeline.

Separately, Barr, echoing calls from Florida Republican Sen Marco Rubio, prioritized investigations into Maduro's inner circle, according to two people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal Justice Department deliberations.

The pressure to deliver, the people said, went into overdrive around the time when Guaido visited Washington in February and Trump praised him as his guest at the State of the Union address as 'a very brave man, who carries with him the hopes, dreams and aspirations of all Venezuelans'.

But the spread of the coronavirus pandemic delayed the announcement, which was originally scheduled for March 16, according to the people.

The virus is likely to further distract Washington's attention and threatens to splinter the opposition, some of whom have expressed a willingness to work with Maduro to stem the burgeoning medial crisis.

It could also give new life to Maduro's call for the US to ease sanctions, an idea that several European Union allies have also warmed to.

Frank Mora, a former Pentagon official, said the US is right to condemn Maduro and others for repressing his people, stealing from state coffers and turning Venezuela into a criminal state.

But he worries the indictments play more into the emotion of Latino voters in Florida than help address the country's grinding crisis.

'We're not going to go in and capture him,' said Mora, who now heads the Latin America studies institute at Florida International University.

'This isn't about regime change or restoring democracy to Venezuela. It's about electoral politics.'
The weekly series will focus on how PR professionals are managing COVID-19 communications

CHICAGO, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Cision announced it will host a new webinar series, Best Practices For Brand Communications In Times Of Uncertainty, in response to the changing landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each week, Cision will partner with a variety of communications experts for a live discussion and Q&A. Speakers and themes will vary week to week, but the overall subject will remain constant: what are the latest changes impacting PR and comms professionals and how should communications professionals shift their strategy to navigate the uncertainty effectively? Each webinar will offer new insights as the situation evolves.

The idea for a weekly series came after Cision hosted a webinar last week and saw an overwhelming demand for additional COVID-19 communications support and resources.

"With rapidly shifting news cycles and growing concerns about COVID-19, it's important to Cision that the PR and communications industry knows we are here for them and aim to provide them with valuable and relevant guidance as this crisis evolves," said Lucie Vietti-Curtis, Manager of Content Marketing Operations at Cision.

"We believe that a weekly series, with expert advice and a live Q&A for attendees, is the best way to address the wide range of communications concerns right now."

The webinar series will cover topics like:

The current media landscape surrounding COVID-19

How your brand should communicate during a crisis

Re-evaluating your content strategy

Preparing for future crises

Speakers will be announced weekly and have already included leaders at Edelman, Ketchum, Visit Raleigh and Brinker International.

Best Practices For Brand Communications In Times Of Uncertainty is available to everyone. The series is free of charge and will take place every Thursday at 1pm CT until further notice.

To register for today's webinar click here.

For complimentary COVID-19 PR resources, and webinar updates, visit www.cision.com/us/covid-19-resources/

Most importantly, Cision's heart goes out to anyone who's been impacted by this global pandemic. For those who are sick, or know someone who is sick, we wish a speedy recovery.

About Cision

Cision Ltd. is a leading global provider of earned media software and services to public relations and marketing communications professionals. Cision's software allows users to identify key influencers, craft and distribute strategic content, and measure meaningful impact. Cision has over 4,800 employees with offices in 24 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. For more information about its award-winning products and services, including the Cision Communications Cloud, visit www.cision.com and follow Cision on Twitter @Cision.

Media Contact:

Rebecca Dersh

PR Manager

cisionpr@cision.com

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Linkedin Winda Liviya Ng (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 15:42 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d9416b 3 Opinion COVID-19-lockdown,COVID-19,Jokowi,fake-news,hoax,pandemic Free

Dear Mr. President,

I hope this letter finds you well, or at the very least, healthy. This is a trying time for the country and for the world at large. Given my unique background of epidemiology, science and business, I feel obligated to voice my opinions on the COVID-19 pandemic.

In summary, Mr. President, here are a few things I would do, were I in your shoes.

On hoaxes:

1. Create a government-managed fact check website, much like the United States FactCheck.Org. On that website, allow citizens to report potential hoaxes.

2. Show extensively through the media what happens to hoax instigators caught by law enforcement.

3. Make the penalty for hoax-spreading heavier on the financial retribution than prison time. The fines collected, however small, can be used to fund efforts to control the virus. Instead of prison time, consider sending hoaxers to work at a mask factory as a form of community service.

On general news:

1. Request news outlets to soften their approach in delivering news. Spread alertness and awareness, not panic. The very least they can do is to change the background music to something less intimidating. Anxiety and stress reduce the immune system, which is not helpful to anyone.

2. Request that news outlets not only report on the outbreak but educate even more, though several are already doing this. Education is key to winning this war and to helping the public see the big picture.

On the trading of fake and illegal goods:

1. Detain and fine people who abuse desperate needs as an opportunity to sell goods or services with false claims, for example, those who sell 1-ply masks as 3-ply masks, and those who sell vitamins claiming to prevent or cure the COVID-19 infection. Use the funds gathered to help check the pandemic.

2. Educate people on identifying fake news; this can be done together with the fact-checking website. Also, encourage surgical mask users to cut their mask in half before disposal. This is to prevent sales of used masks in the market.

On medical treatment:

1. The current death rate is too high, which is one primary reason why our stock market crashed and why there is widespread panic. We need external medical consultation. This is not the time to be proud. Call back home Indonesian citizens who went to study medicine abroad, and give them a license to practice medicine in Indonesia with relaxed requirements.

2. Enlist much more help from prominent private hospitals, especially in Jakarta, which has seen most of the cases so far.

3. Gather a team of prominent epidemiologists and public health officials to help contain the viral. Make projections, anticipate needs and losses.

Mr. President, I wish you the best of luck, and I will be happy to assist if and when needed. This is World War 3, but with all countries on the same side, fighting against a common enemy, COVID-19. There needs to be a worldwide call to arms. Spare no expense; take swift action. He who hesitates is lost.

Mr. President, when all this is over, lets take a walk and talk about our education system.

Godspeed,

Winda

Independent Scholar

General manager of cosmetics firm PT. Winida Ayu Lestari

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) CEO Jim Hackett says the Blue Oval needs to cut costs quickly -- but it's not planning to cut any jobs.

In a letter to employees on Thursday, Hackett outlined a cost-reduction plan that includes a hiring freeze and pay cuts for executives, but -- at least for the moment -- no job cuts.

Separately, Ford also said it's going to try to reopen a few of its factories in the U.S and Mexico in April.

Here's what we know.

What Hackett said about cost cuts

Hackett told Ford employees that he wants the company to have "a shared understanding of the principles" that will guide Ford's cost-cutting plans over the next several days:

Sacrifice starts at the top. Ford's top 300 senior executives will defer 20% to 50% of their salaries for at least five months, starting on May 1. Bill Ford, the company's executive chairman, will defer all of his salary for that period.

Ford's top 300 senior executives will defer 20% to 50% of their salaries for at least five months, starting on May 1. Bill Ford, the company's executive chairman, will defer all of his salary for that period. No job cuts for now. Hackett said that Ford's goal is to get through the crisis without eliminating jobs -- in part because things are tough enough right now, and in part because he wants Ford's full team in place for the post-crisis recovery. But, he noted, if things go on longer than he now expects, or get more severe, some cuts may be necessary.

Hackett said that Ford's goal is to get through the crisis without eliminating jobs -- in part because things are tough enough right now, and in part because he wants Ford's full team in place for the post-crisis recovery. But, he noted, if things go on longer than he now expects, or get more severe, some cuts may be necessary. These are short-term actions. Merit-based salary increases and salaried overtime will be deferred for now, and Ford is freezing almost all hiring.

Merit-based salary increases and salaried overtime will be deferred for now, and Ford is freezing almost all hiring. Health and wellbeing is most important. Ford will be flexible about work schedules, will continue to provide health insurance for employees who choose to take sabbaticals, and will provide 14 days of time off for self-quarantine for anyone who is exposed to the COVID-19 virus.

Long story short: Ford's employees should expect some big cuts -- to spending and to ongoing programs -- in the next few days. But at least for now, nobody's job is in danger.

What Ford said about reopening plants

In a separate announcement on Tuesday morning, Ford said it is "aiming" to restart production at several of its factories in North America.

On April 6:

Hermosillo Assembly, in Mexico, will reopen on one shift. That factory makes the Ford Fusion and Lincoln MKZ sedans.

On April 14, Ford will resume production at:

Dearborn, Michigan, Truck Plant (F-150 pickups)

Kentucky Truck Plant (Super Duty pickups)

Kansas City, Missouri, Assembly Plant's Transit line (Transit commercial vans. The factory also makes pickups on a second assembly line; that line won't reopen on April 14.)

Ohio Assembly Plant (medium-duty trucks and some commercial versions of the Super Duty pickups)

Ford will also reopen several parts-manufacturing factories that support those plants, it said.

The company noted that all of this depends on public-health conditions and its suppliers' ability to be ready on time, and said that it will adjust plans if necessary.

The announcement appears to have been a surprise to the United Auto Workers labor union (UAW). In a brief statement, the UAW said that it is reviewing Ford's announcement "with great concern and caution" and that the health and safety of its members (and the American public) remains its priority.

What does this mean for Ford investors?

First, we can think of Hackett's letter as a preview of cost cuts to come over the next several days. The reassurances about job cuts (that there won't be any right now) and salary deferments for senior executives were strong moves, showing good leadership at a tough moment. But we'll have to wait to see the details before we try to figure out the implications of the cuts that Ford plans to make.

Second, the moves to reopen factories seem premature to me. Have Ford's dealers actually been selling enough trucks (and sedans) over the last couple of weeks to justify restarting production? And why was the UAW apparently caught by surprise, given that Ford's relationship with the union is generally quite strong?

Long story short: There's nothing here that hurts the investment case for Ford's stock right now, but there are some puzzles and unanswered questions. We await more information.
GoMarketing-Richard-Uzelac-Restaurant-COVID-19-Survival-Guide "Our hope is to offer at least one new idea for each Restaurant Owner or Manager to help them through the COVID-19 virus pandemic." -Richard Uzelac, CEO of GoMarketing Inc.

I write this press release here in Thousand Oaks California. We are all on lockdown due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. My first thoughts today were for any restaurant owners across the USA who was told they must shut down their dining rooms to stem the spread of the Corona virus. We are offering this free webinar to help them maybe a little bit," said Richard Uzelac, CEO of GoMarketing Inc.

Weve decided to offer a FREE Webinar to help Restaurant Owners on Tuesday March 31st at 10am PST

To sign up, go to: Webinar Signup Here.

In the meantime, you can stay open to conduct your business:



Delivery: You can take phone orders and deliver food to your customers. You can fulfill orders from Uber Eats, or Door Dash. Or use your own employees to deliver and offer Free Delivery to all your customers.

Pickup/Carryout: You can allow patrons to come into your restaurant, and pickup their phone orders.

Drive -Through: If you are lucky to have a drive-through for your restaurant which can stay open.

Adjust Staffing:



You will be able to keep some of your staff on payroll to handle the above options for conducting your restaurant business. Some owners have laid off most of their staff but kept thirty percent or so to conduct business.

Your situation will dictate how many people stay on staff. Or how many you switch to part-time.

Getting Customers to Your Restaurant:

You can be all set to offer Deliver and Takeout, but if nobody knows you are open, what good is it? Do these things:

Marketing:

Website: Update your Website home page to reflect that you understand the COVID-19 restrictions, but you are OPEN! Dont make people guess.

Examples:

YES! We are OPEN for Delivery and Takeout!

Let us cook a great Dinner for you tonight!

CALL NOW! to Place Your Takeout or Delivery Order!

Call 222-555-1234 to order Pickup or Delivery! Or fill out this form:

More on Website: Consider adding a home page banner or section that explains what your restaurant is doing to comply with the COVID-19 restrictions and health measures you are taking.



Add a COVID-19 Statement on your website. Client Brents Deli, has updated their home page to reflect this.

We added a message of precautionary steps they are taking to mitigate the spread of the Corona virus.

They also state right at the top of the home page that they are Open for Takeout and Delivery.

If possible, expand your Delivery and Pickup Menu to include more food options during this time.

Delivery: If you are using your employees to deliver the food, tell them on your website! Tell them you offer contactless delivery and you deliver in sealed containers with tamper-evident packages [like taping or stapling the order bags closed]. Offer Free Delivery with the money you will save by using your employees and not using UBER or Door Dash.

Seal the order bags so Customers feel better about picking up their orders at your restaurant. Cashiers should offer a squirt of hand sanitizer to those that want them. Consider having the cashier wear rubber gloves and apply the hand sanitizer on them while working with the public.

Emphasize Gift Card Sales at a discount to generate more cash flow during this restricted business situation.

Social Media:



Update your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media accounts.

Let your contacts know what you are doing to be safe and that you have great food available to them.

People are already tired of cooking at home for every single meal. Take the offensive: Tell them you will cook it and deliver it safely to their home or for pickup.

Update your restaurant days and hours if these have changed on all social media.

Google Business Page: Update your content to show you are open for Takeout and Delivery. Update your hours here as well if they changed.

Advertising:



Run targeted Google Adwords and Facebook ads to let everyone know that customers can still get your great food and you are open to help them.

Advertising can get you on the first page of Google as well, and in front of people looking for an open restaurant.

Yelp Management: We can offer management and you get you an extra 10% bonus in displayed ads from your current costs. And we optimize your Yelp presence as well.

Signs:



Get a sign that says Were OPEN! and put it in front of your restaurant.

Paint a message on your storefront if appropriate. Takeout and Delivery!

Have an employee hold a sign up on the main street to attract passersby to park their cars and order.

Financial Helpers

$2 Trillion Stimulus Plan:

Nothing here is been implemented, but it will be. Stay alert for what you need to do to get your fair share. This could be a huge benefit for your business to keep it afloat until you can go back to normal

Rent Holiday:

Ask for Three months Rent Free: Things are going to be tough for a while. Property owners know that. If you go out of business, it will be hard to re-rent that restaurant space. Landlords know that too. So, ask for a break, it doesnt hurt to ask. Some Landlords will offer concessions or even free rent. Others wont agree, but at least you tried.

Another Issue: Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Website Compliance Law: This has nothing to do with COVID-19, but it is worth mentioning.

This is a Law that prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in many areas of public life. ADA has been interpreted as pertaining to website accessibility for visitors with vision, hearing, and speech disabilities. Restaurant websites need to be ADA compliant now. We can discuss how to be compliant in the Webinar, time allowing. Learn more about restaurant ADA compliance.

SIGN UP FOR OUR FREE RESTAURANT WEBINAR!

When: Tuesday March 31st at 10am Pacific Standard Time.

Where: Go to [link here] to sign up.

Then what? You will be sent a login and password and website address to go to participate in the webinar. We want participation. If you have questions, ask them, if you have answers that are working, share them all of us. Lets help each other out.

A Message from GoMarketing.com:

You can implement any of these changes yourself if you would like to. Of course, if you want us to help you with implementing these ideas, we can! We can do it all for you, and for less than you might think. We are all in this together and we will work with you. Please call us at 805-413-7893 today!

About GoMarketing

Based out of Thousand Oaks, California, GoMarketing uses the following mission statement to deliver digital marketing results to their clients: Understand. Engage. Succeed. Grow. Acting as digital marketing professionals within a wide range of industry sectors, the GoMarketing team specializes in many Services, including; SEO, content strategy, website design and development, and more. GoMarketing provides a full suite of marketing solutions that generate online leads and sales for businesses throughout the country. For more information about their custom marketing plans, contact GoMarketing directly at 805.413.7893 or visit GoMarketing.

About Richard Uzelac, CEO of GoMarketing

Founder of GoMarketing and RealtyTech Inc., Richard Uzelac is an Emmy award-winning graphics producer, former Director of Realtor.com, and sits on several boards of directors. Richard Uzelacs GoMarketing works with Corporations and Small Businesses to generate exposure, sales and improve online reputation. Mr. Richard Uzelac is also available as a Technology Speaker, Seminar Provider and Business Consultant. For more information, contact Richard Uzelac at 805.413.7893.
An information exchange between a Spanish judge and a Swiss prosecutor has shed new light on an ongoing investigation into alleged financial irregularities involving emeritus king Juan Carlos I, the father of Spains reigning monarch Felipe VI.

Spains High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, has been waiting for the Swiss justice system to relay information about an alleged bank account that was opened at the Swiss bank Mirabaud and the $100 million (88 million) that was reportedly deposited in it as a payment from Saudi Arabia.

Swiss prosecutors are already investigating this account, opened in the name of Lucum Foundation, whose first beneficiary was Juan Carlos I, on suspicion of kickback payments for the contract to build the AVE high-speed rail link to Mecca, which was awarded to a Spanish consortium, as EL PAIS recently revealed.

King Felipe VI recently announced he is relinquishing any inheritance from his father, after news emerged that he himself was a beneficiary of Lucum and another foundation named in the investigation.

The $65 million gift

In 2012, around $65 million (57 million) was allegedly transferred from this account to Corinna Larsen, a Monaco-based businesswoman described as a close friend of Juan Carlos. Larsen has told investigators that the money was a donation from the former Spanish monarch, whom Swiss prosecutors name as the first beneficiary of the Mirabaud bank account. In Spain, High Court Judge Manuel Garcia Castellon and anti-corruption prosecutors are investigating these alleged payments.

Of the $65 million that Juan Carlos allegedly donated to Corinna Larsen, 39 million was later transferred by the latter to one of her personal accounts at a US bank in late 2016 and 2017. This money ended up at Fieldpoint Private Bank, according to a request for judicial assistance sent by Swiss prosecutor Yves Bertossa to Judge Castellon, to which EL PAIS has had access.

Part of the money, according to this document, was used by Larsen to purchase and refurbish two apartments at the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Villars-sur-Ollon, and to acquire a mansion in north London worth 5 million (5.4 million).

The request for judicial cooperation sent by the Geneva prosecutor on August 16 describes the main findings of the Swiss investigation following a raid on the offices of the lawyer Dante Canonica and the fund manager Arturo Fasana, who were the administrators of the Lucum Foundation, whose first beneficiary was Juan Carlos I. The Mirabaud bank account was in the name of this foundation. On August 8, 2008 a deposit was made worth $100 million, as a donation from the Saudi royal house.

Part of the money was allegedly used by Larsen to purchase and refurbish two apartments at the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Villars-sur-Ollon

Bertossa is investigating alleged money laundering and kickback payments for the contract to build the AVE high-speed rail link to Mecca, a project that was awarded to a Spanish consortium headed by the construction giant OHL. According to the prosecutor, the winning companies had included in their offer a 30% discount. In his judicial request, Bertossa ties this project to the deposit that was made in the Lucum account, and to the later transfer of the money to an account held by Corinna Larsen in the Bahamas.

Robin Rathmell, Larsens lawyer, says that the money was an unsolicited gift and denies any commission payments. This legal representative says the timeline clearly shows that the money was received before the railway contract was awarded, and notes that kickbacks are paid by the winning companies, not by the country where the project takes place.

A file photo of King Felipe and his father, Juan Carlos. Paolo Blocco (WireImage)

Loans

Judicial sources say that the request for information focuses on the discovery of the Lucum Foundation, whose beneficiary is the retired king, and on the money transfers that this foundation made to an entity called Siam Partner, held by Corinna Larsen. The transfers were described as loans, and Siam Partner was allegedly created by Larsen, according to the Swiss prosecutors document, in order to secure the loans from Juan Carlos I with the aim of purchasing two apartments at the Villar-sur-Ollon ski resort.

The first loan was made on May 28, 2009. The Lucum Foundation transferred 1,242,356 to an account held by Siam Partner at Switzerlands Mirabaud bank, via an intermediary account that is also mentioned in the document. On October 15 of that same year, Larsen received a further 324,000 from Lucum at her HSBC account in Monaco. And on November 3 she received another transfer worth 150,000. Bertossa writes that these payments were tied to refurbishments made in both apartments.

Larsen described herself to investigators as as a person who puts people in touch who want to create companies in the Middle East

The document also notes that, under questioning as part of the Swiss investigation, Larsen described herself as as a person who puts people in touch who want to create companies in the Middle East. She also explained that she returned the loans in 2010 because she had received a $5 million (4.6 million) payment from the State of Kuwait for services rendered. Bertossa notes that this money was paid a few days after Juan Carlos I visited the emir of Kuwait.

The Swiss prosecutor further notes that between October 27, 2011 and January 24 and 25, 2012, the Lucum Foundations Geneva-based account transferred a total of 1,596,000 (1,732,587) to another account in the name of Riverhouse Partner, benefiting Larsen. Riverhouse Partner is a real estate company, and Bertossa writes that Larsen claimed Juan Carlos I had donated this amount so she could purchase an apartment in Eaton Square worth 5 million (5,426,121).

Account closed

The prosecutors document notes that Juan Carlos Is Swiss bank account was closed in June 2012 due to new Swiss fiscal legislation and that the monarch, who was still on the throne at the time, signed an order to transfer the remainder of the money to Corinna Larsen at her account held in the name of the company Solare Investors Corporation at Gonet & Cie bank in Nassau (Bahamas). Among the transfers received by the Lucum account while it remained open, Bertossa mentions $1,895,250 (1.7 million) by the sultan of Bahrein.

Bertossa writes that according to the individuals under investigation  Larsen, Canonica and Fasana  the $64.8 million transfer to Larsen was an irrevocable donation by the former king of Spain to his close friend. Larsen told investigators that the money paid for the refurbishment work at the Eaton Square apartment. These refurbishments cost around 4 million pounds (4,340,055).

Larsen created a company named Mountain Lion Inc. with the alleged goal of receiving an unbuilt plot of land from the king of Morocco

The Swiss prosecutor also writes that in 2015 Larsen bought a mansion in the north of London worth 6 million (6.4 million) thanks to a loan from Solare Investors in favor of a trust named Honeybird Group Corporation. In late 2016 and 2017, according to the Swiss investigation, Larsen transferred $42 million (39.33 million) to her personal account at the US lender Fieldpoint Private Bank.

Bertossa also indicates in the request for information that Larsen created a company named Mountain Lion Inc., of which she was the beneficiary, with the purpose of receiving an unbuilt plot of land in Marrakesh from the king of Morocco. This property was worth 18 million dirhams (1,712,865).

Bertossas document also mentions the Zagatka Foundation, and its beneficiary Alvaro de Orleans, a distant cousin of Juan Carlos I. The prosecutor notes that this foundations funds paid for many of the retired monarchs private trips for a total of 3 million. Regarding the origin of these funds, Alvaro de Orleans told investigators that it was part of his fathers inheritance. The Zagatka Foundations Swiss account transferred 150,000 to Larsens HSBC account in Monaco on July 6, 2010.

Bertossas request for information also describes how the Lucum Foundations account was opened. According to this document, the lawyer Dante Canonica and the Geneva-based fund manager Arturo Fasana were contacted by Juan Carlos I in order to create a structure to receive a donation. The document states that Fasana met with the Saudi ambassador in Washington, and that the latter said the sum was a simple, free donation from the king of Saudi Arabia. In 2008 the king was Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, who passed away in 2015.

On May 27, 2019 Juan Carlos dropped all official activities and retired from public life. He abdicated the throne in 2014, in the wake of waning popularity fueled in part by a corruption scandal involving his son-in-law and by a hunting trip during which his relationship with Corinna Larsen emerged.

Juan Carlos, who served on the throne for 39 years and is widely credited with helping stop the February 23, 1981 coup attempt in Spain, has hired a former anti-corruption prosecutor, Javier Sanchez-Junco Mans, to represent him if he ultimately faces a judicial investigation.

English version by Susana Urra.
Islamabad, March 26 : Pakistan President Arif Alvi has urged religious scholars to take urgent action to halt congregational prayers in the country as a preventive measure againt the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The President made the request on Wednesday after Grand Imam Shaikh of Jamia Al Azhar and Supreme Council in Egypt issued a fatwa regarding the matter, The express Tribune said in a report.

"Countries that have stopped congregational prayers: UAE, Saudia, Iran, Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan, Kuwait, Palestine, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt," said President Alvi.

The "government of a country can impose a ban on congregational prayers, including regular and Friday prayers, and halt gatherings across the country", read the fatwa.

It urged elderly people to stay indoors and not partake in prayers as in the light of available evidence, these gatherings are a reason for the spread of the virus.

"The coronavirus is more dangerous than rain, therefore a ban can be placed on congregational prayers," it added.

Pakistan has been facing a rise in coronavirus cases. It currently has 1,078 confirmed cases with seven fatalities.

Sindh, where the provincial government is taking stern steps to curb the spread of COVID-19, remains the worst affected with 413 confirmed cases.
While plenty of tech stocks have seen their market caps dive in the past month, Groupon has taken a harder hit than most. The company's share price has dropped more than 70% in the past five weeks.

The reckoning came for Groupon's leadership today with both CEO Rich Williams and COO Steve Krenzer ousted. In an announcement, Groupon shared that both execs would be pushed out of their roles and that Groupon's President of North America Aaron Cooper would serve as interim CEO.

While the impact of COVID-19 on retail across the country will certainly further negatively affect Groupon moving forward, the company was in dire trouble weeks before the crisis fully took root stateside. Groupon took a beating on its Q4 earnings report, where it widely missed expectations and showcased seriously declining revenues.

The company's board will be leading the search for a full-time chief executive. For the time being, Cooper will be tasked with the company through an undoubtedly rough period as many of its current and potential customers close up shop.

The disruption created by the global pandemic, however, is significant, and our immediate goal is to help millions of Groupon merchants, customers and employees navigate the massive challenges they face," interim CEO Aaron Cooper said in a statement.

Groupon's stock was down a hair on the news, though it has seen some upward movement from its recent all-time low even as the rest of the market has tanked. One wonders whether investors believe that the entire market enduring a crisis could give the company an opportunity to take stock of its future or if they simply think they found the share price's bottom.
State media lauds China as global leader in fight against disease in bid to defuse criticism it allowed virus to spread.

Chengdu, China  On March 18, China marked a milestone in its peoples war against the new coronavirus. For the first time in three months, there were no new local infections in the central province of Hubei, where more than 60 million people remain confined to their homes as part of a nationwide effort to control the deadly outbreak.

The respiratory illness caused by the new pathogen, first detected in late December in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, has spread rapidly across the world, infecting more than 465,000 people and killing more than 21,000 as of March 26.

Europe has become the new epicentre of the disease, also known as COVID-19, with the death toll in Italy and Spain higher than China and the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Tuesday that the United States might be next.

But in China, the outbreak appears to be under control, with less than 5,000 patients still undergoing treatment and new cases confirmed only among people returning from overseas.

Authorities in Beijing, who were widely criticised for initially covering up the outbreak, are now hailing their success, highlighting the unparalleled measures that helped quell the outbreak within the country and positioning China as a global leading power in the fight against the coronavirus  all while engaging in an acrimonious war of words with the US.

Prior to the slowing of local transmissions in China, the countrys highly controlled state media was almost exclusively pushing one narrative: the supremacy of the so-called system with Chinese characteristics in fighting the outbreak.





News anchors and online reporters praised the central leadership for utilising measures unthinkable in other countries in their bid to contain the virus, including a nationwide quarantine, the use of mass surveillance to track infections bringing the worlds second-largest economy to a near-halt.

With utmost determination to curb the outbreak growth, China has bought enough time for the world to prepare itself for this pandemic, Geng Shuang, the spokesman for Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told reporters on March 19, suggesting that Chinas draconian measures had slowed down the transmission of the disease worldwide.

Global leader against coronavirus

As the domestic pressure to contain the outbreak eased, state media shifted their focus to featuring Chinas recent effort to deploy medics and resources to areas most hard-hit by the virus, particularly Italy and Iran, labelling itself as a global leader in the battle against the virus.

China has sent planeloads of medical equipment, including the much sought-after masks, ventilators, and other personal protective equipment to the worst-hit countries in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere.

CCTV, the official state broadcaster, continuously plays videos of Chinese medics arriving in Bergamo in northern Italy and Irans capital, Tehran.





CGTN, the international wing of CCTV, and Global Times, a state-owned English language tabloid, are two of the many state media outlets praising Chinas generosity and leadership during the pandemic.

Positive feedback from global leaders, such as Serbias President Aleksandar Vucic, and officials from Venezuela and the Philippines  mostly comments applauding Chinas support and leadership  have also been prominently featured in the state media coverage.

Meanwhile, the social media accounts of government-backed media institutions are at the front line of the propaganda push, including on Twitter and Facebook, which are both banned in China.

Shifting domestic anger

By doing so, Beijing is trying to shift domestic and international attention away from the pent-up anger in the country towards the central government for an initial cover-up of the outbreak that many say paved the way for the rapid spread of the virus.



By pushing for this narrative, China is avoiding the blame and successfully dodging culpability for its role in spreading the coronavirus, said Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.





In suppressing information about the virus and allowing it to spread unchecked in the crucial early days and weeks, the regime imperilled the more than 100 nations now facing their own potentially devastating outbreaks.

Some analysts say what triggered the propaganda machine in China is the deterioration in relations between Beijing and Washington, which are also locked in a bitter trade dispute.

Last week, tensions escalated after China expelled more than a dozen American journalists working for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post newspapers, in a tactic seen as retaliation for the US designating Chinas state media as diplomatic missions.

Blame game

Now officials in the two countries are blaming each other for the current pandemic.

Since early March, Chinese officials and state media have been pushing the idea that the new coronavirus could have originated somewhere else  notably the US.

Lijian Zhao, a spokesman for Chinas foreign ministry, has been particularly vocal in questioning the USs role in the viral outbreak.

Some stations and bus services resumed in Chinas Hubei Province on Wednesday, March 25 and people who passed a health check were finally allowed to travel for the first time since the coronavirus outbreak surged in January [Mark Schiefelbein/AP]

On March 12, Zhao posted a tweet saying: It might be the US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. And despite widespread criticism over the unsubstantiated claim, Zhao continues to blame Washington.

Articles with titles along the lines of The virus didnt come from China: the US brought the virus to China as a bioweapon are widely shared across Chinas tightly-controlled internet.

Some of these pieces filled with conspiracy theories say the US army brought the virus to China during the Military World Games held in Wuhan in October last year. State media is also calling for an inquiry into the USs role in the emergence of this outbreak, publishing articles that question Washington based on an unfounded assumption that the US was behind the spread of the virus.

Aggressive foreign policy

The WHO and leading medical experts say the virus jumped from an animal host to humans, stressing that the suggestion that the pathogen did not have a natural origin are dangerous to the effort to contain the pandemic.

But Chinese academics are also supporting the narrative of US involvement.

Chen Xuyan, a scientist based in Beijing, appeared on CCTV on March 18 and suggested that the fast speed of research on COVID-19 vaccines in the US could be attributed to the possibility that Washington had already obtained the virus long before, by extension implying the US might have sent the virus to China.





The Xi government is following a very aggressive foreign policy now, engaging in what Mao Zedong called a tongue war  the propaganda war, said Anne-Marie Brady, a professor at the University of Canterbury who specialises in Chinese politics.

The resentment in China has been exacerbated by US President Donald Trumps decision to use terms like foreign virus and more frequently, Chinese virus, to refer to the new pathogen.

Images posted online show that during a recent news conference, Trump crossed out the word corona and wrote CHINESE in front of the word virus in the script of his speech.

The Chinese foreign ministry has called the moves irresponsible and racist.

Instead of sweeping Trumps comments under the rug, which is usually what the state media does for comments that go against the Communist Party line, the government is using Trumps remarks as a tactic to incite public anger towards the US leader and as an extension, the US as a whole.

With the US facing its own credibility issues in recent years, Chinas false narrative threatens to spread as quickly as the coronavirus, wrote Matthew Karnitschnig, the chief Europe correspondent of Politico.
In an implicit challenge to American policy against other adversaries, two top United Nations officials, Secretary General Antonio Guterres and Michelle Bachelet, the high commissioner for human rights, called this week for the easing of financial sanctions against economically strapped countries so that they could confront the spreading virus. Ms. Bachelet said the economic penalties could impede medical treatment in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and Zimbabwe  all of which are penalized by the United States.

Speaking to reporters on March 22, Mr. Trump cast himself as providing relief to at least two of those nations. On North Korea, Iran and others, we are open for helping other countries. It is a very serious time, Mr. Trump said, adding that he had offered a glad hand" to many other countries.

The United States thus far has committed $274 million to 64 countries and the United Nations refugee agency. Bonnie Glick, deputy administrator at the United States Agency for International Development, challenged other nations on Thursday to give no-strings-attached contributions to help the world combat the pandemic.

In the battle against the coronavirus, we are saving lives, not saving face, Ms. Glick said.

With Irans health care system swamped by one of the worlds worst outbreaks of the coronavirus, the State Department said last month that it was prepared to assist the Iranian people in their response efforts, a message conveyed through the Swiss government, which acts as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran.

The State Department could not clarify precisely what sort of assistance the Trump administration offered. But the gesture was a shift for an administration that has worked to undermine Irans government in every way it can, and which imposed new economic sanctions on Tehran as recently as last week.

Despite a swiftly mounting death toll, which has surpassed 2,000, Iran quickly rejected the American offer, making clear that what it really wants is broader relief from the sanctions Mr. Trump has imposed since he withdrew two years ago from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Even before the virus struck, Iran appealed to international opinion by arguing that the American sanctions were causing innocent people to suffer.

In an open letter to the American people last week, Irans president, Hassan Rouhani, said the United States was aiding the spread of this virus with its sanctions, which he said have drastically undermined the ability of the Iranian people to fight the coronavirus and some among them are losing their lives as a result.
Dear Mr. President,

Do you wish to be the president who, by lifting restrictions necessary to slow the spread of COVID19 too soon, caused thousands upon thousands of unnecessary deaths? Do you wish to be the president who also left even more thousands with seriously impaired lung function by the same action? That will be your legacy if you carry out your threat to call industries back to production after April 7, 2020. Such a decision will fly in the face of all the expert advice of your COVID-19 Task Force. The consequences will be catastrophic.

Two-year-old children think they know everything. They dont. Neither do you. Two-year-old children think they can do anything they want because they are all-powerful. They arent. Neither are you.

Please take the advice of your Task Force. Please heed the desperate pleading of governors all over the United States. Use your authority under the Defense Production Act to make available all existing resources to those who are working as hard as they can to control the spread of this disease and to treat those who are suffering with it.

As President and leader of the Executive Branch of our government, your first duty is to assure the safety of the population. Among our rights, the first is pursuit of life. That should be your highest priority. Instead, you appear to value business and the performance of the stock market over health. Without healthy people, there is no industry; there is no stock market. They depend on citizens working at every level. That is why our Constitution places pursuit of life first; you should too.

Please release our stockpiles of ventilators. Please do everything you can to produce additional badly needed respirators as well as N19 masks and other personal protection equipment. Please do everything you can to distribute test kits for COVID-19 Please do everything you can to distribute those items where the number of COVID-19 patients is highest. And most of all, please heed the advice of the experts you have assembled as the COVID-19 Task Force. Then you can be the president who managed the COVID-19 pandemic as well as possible and thereby saved thousands upon thousands of lives and, ultimately, businesses and the stock market.

Sincerely,

Nancy U. Cairns






In April 2011, Ethiopia announced its intention to proceed with the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile in the Benishangul-Gumuz region of the country about 30km from Ethiopias border with Sudan. The main purpose of the dam is to generate electricity, with an expected capacity of 6,000 MW.

Egypt and Ethiopia have yet to reach an agreement on the specifications of the dam, the rules for filling its reservoir, the rates at which the stored water will be used for energy production or irrigation, and how to manage the operations of the dam and the amounts of water it releases in coordination with downriver dams. Nevertheless, Ethiopia has announced that the dam will go into operation at full capacity in 2022, making it the largest energy producer in Africa.

Egypt, with available water resources of 610 m3 per capita as of 2019, is among the countries that fall below the water poverty line that the UN has estimated at 1,000 m3 per capita. Egypt also suffers from a large food-production deficiency, forcing it to import about 55 per cent of its current food needs. This figure is expected to climb to 75 per cent after the GERD is complete because of the huge quantity of water held back during the filling of the reservoir, which has an estimated capacity of 74 billion m3 of water.

Ethiopia has said that it plans to fill the dam in only three years. That would cut 25 to 33 billion m3 from Egypts annual quota of Nile water which, in turn, would yield a five to six billion acre loss in cultivable land given Egypts climatic conditions and the current average of 5,000 m3 of water that the Ministry of Agriculture allots per acre of agricultural land. Even if the filling period of the dam were doubled to six years, that would result in a 12 to 17 billion m3 reduction in the amount of water that reaches Egypt. That too would be difficult for Egypt to sustain, as it would put about 1.5 acres of land out of cultivation.

Egypt is expected to fall even further below the UN water poverty line due to population growth on top of the reduction in the flow of Nile water to the country after the construction of the GERD. By 2022, the per capita quota will decline to 409 m3, bringing Egypt to the point of water paucity. If Egypt is to lose quantities of water equivalent to the GERDs reservoir capacity due to the filling of the dam, which could come to 67 billion m3 at full capacity, then it needs to know about both the quantity and the timing in advance so that it can take the appropriate precautions in order to avert a severe water crisis when the dam first goes into operation.

Hydrology experts are also worried by the mere size of the GERDs reservoir, which is situated in an earthquake zone. They warn of catastrophic damage to Sudan and Egypt in the event of seismic movement and the effect of the enormous weight of water and silt behind the dam.

Egypt wants the initial filling period of the reservoir to be spread out over ten years with allowances made for years of drought. Addis Ababa had initially insisted on three years, and Egypt then proposed to increase these to five. However, more recently, a new impasse reared its head when Ethiopia refused to sign a draft agreement prepared by the US acting as an intermediary in the negotiations on the dam.

Some analysts believe that a dam with such a huge reservoir capacity is not in Ethiopias interests and that its purpose is primarily political and serves the interests of outside powers. They say a series of smaller dams would better serve Ethiopias energy and agricultural needs. Smaller dams would cover a wider area more efficiently and cost-effectively, make it possible to optimise the use of the high levels of rainfall on the Ethiopian Plateau, and increase the quantities of stored water. The experts also believe that mega-dams are not suited to the geological circumstances of the GERD due to tremors, the nature of the subterranean bedrock, and other environmental factors.

It is hoped Nile Basin countries will realise before it is too late that regional cooperation is a safer, more cost-effective, and more peaceful way to realise their sustainable development goals than unilaterally pursuing mega-projects that threaten their neighbours welfare.

The writer is an associate professor of economics at Cairo University.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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The remains of Paige Johnson were found on Sunday morning near Williamsburg Township in Clermont County, approximately 45 minutes away from her parent's home in Florence, Kentucky

Ohio authorities have found the remains of a 17-year-old mother in a wooded area less than an hour from her family's Kentucky home, 10 years after she went missing.

Paige Johnson were found on Sunday morning near Williamsburg Township in Clermont County, approximately 45 minutes away from her parent's home in Florence, Kentucky.

A woman alerted authorities to the scene, informing them that her husband had found a burned human skull just off the highway while he had been hunting for deer, the Daily Beast reports.

The Clermont County Sheriff's Office, Covington police and the Clermont County coroner all responded to the scene. There, they found additional items that are believed to be associated with the body.

The teen's remains were identified on Wednesday using dental records.

Johnson was reported missing by her older sister - Brittany Haywood - on September 23, 2010, after attending a party with friends the night before.

'We all wanted to find Paige alive,' Covington Police Chief Rob Nader said at a Wednesday press conference. 'Today, I'm sad to say that hope evaporated entirely.'

The Clermont County Sheriff's Office, Covington police and the Clermont County coroner all responded to the scene

At the scene, police found additional items that are believed to be associated with the body

The police chief shared that Johnson's mother was notified of the discovery just moments before the conference.

'A lot of ways, you feel relief but you still have a lot of questions about why she disappeared in the first place,' Nader continued. 'So after you had that moment of relief where you could tell her mom, you went right back to work to find out why she disappeared in the first place.'

Alicen Franks, an older cousin to the teen, expressed 'relief that after nine and a half years  we found her.'

Franks said that when she was informed of the news by authorities, she was jumping between 'happy and angry screams.' She expressed gratitude at finally getting to bury her cousin.

Johnson was reported missing by her older sister - Brittany Haywood - on September 23, 2010, after attending a party with friends the night before

'I do feel like this huge burden has lifted a little bit, to know that we're not crazy and that something bad had actually happened to her,' Franks said. 'Now, we just want to bury her and give her the send-off she deserves.'

The teen's remains were identified on Wednesday using dental records. She is seen here in an age progression image

Frank added that Donna Johnson, Paige's mother, was also grateful for the discovery but 'upset because she wants to bury her daughter's whole body.'

'It's been hell on earth for her these last several years,' Franks added.

Authorities did not reveal Johnson's cause of death on Wednesday but are hoping the discovery of her body will help open doors in her case.

At the time of Johnson's disappearance in 2010, authorities questioned Jacob Bumpass.

The at-the-time 22-year-old had picked Johnson up from her mother's home to take her to the party, and he later told police he dropped the teen at an Covington intersection 15 minutes from her home.

'It was hard for authorities to find out any information from people who were at the party,' Franks said. 'Everyone there was partyingdrinking and some even doing drugsso they all had slightly different stories and it was pretty unclear what exactly happened that night.'

Phone records, however, indicated that Bumpass was actually in Florence at the time he said he dropped Johnson off. Bumpass also made a call that night from East Fork State Park in Clermont County at about 4.28am.

The location pinged was roughly one-and-a-half mile away from where authorities discovered Johnson's body.

At the time of Johnson's disappearance in 2010, authorities questioned Jacob Bumpass. The at-the-time 22-year-old had picked Johnson up from her mother's home to take her to the party, and he later told police he dropped the teen at an Covington intersection 15 minutes from her home

Bumpass was never named a suspect in the case nor was he arrested.
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A $2 trillion financial aid package for Americans hurt by the coronavirus pandemic appears to be finally on its way.

The legislation, passed by the Senate late Wednesday, goes to the House on Friday for expected approval. President Donald Trump says he would sign the bill immediately.

Known as the CARES Act (for Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security), the 880-page bill contains several key measures (PDF) to provide financial help to families, including direct cash payments of up to $1,200 to many individuals, enhanced unemployment benefits, suspension of student loan payments, and relaxed rules for tapping retirement savings.

This is a good downpayment on helping individuals stay afloat for the next several weeks, says Nicole Kaeding, vice president of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C.

Still, given the severity of the economic downturnunemployment claims hit a record 3.3 million (PDF) last weekits highly likely that that Congress will end up passing additional stimulus measures, Kaeding says.

Here's a look at the provisions that will help consumers.

Direct Payments

The bill gives one-time direct payments (PDF) of up to $1,200 for individuals ($2,400 for couples) and $500 for each child under the age of 17. The maximum a family can receive is $7,500.

Eligibility will depend on income. Single people whose adjusted annual gross income is $75,000 or less will get the full $1,200. Those with adjusted gross incomes above $75,000 will get smaller amounts, with no payment to anyone making $99,000 or above.

For married couples, the $2,400 benefit begins to phase out after $150,000 in combined annual income, with no payments to any couple making $198,000 or more.

The IRS will determine your eligibility based on your 2019 or 2018 tax return. If you havent filed in those years, the income will be based on your Social Security statement.

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How quickly will you see that money? Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has said the first checks will arrive within three weeks. That timetable assumes that the IRS already has your bank account information, which must be provided for the direct deposit of any refund or payment. Nearly 60 percent of filers received a refund via direct deposit last year, says Kaeding.

For those who have not provided the IRS with bank information, you will probably have to wait for a check. According to a study by the nonprofit Tax Foundation examining past federal payments during downturns, the lag between the programs enactment and distribution of payments ranged from six weeks to more than two months.

The IRS still has not yet posted details about the direct payment program, but it has set up a page on its website that will soon be updated.



Unemployment Benefits

Under the bill, the federal government will increase your state unemployment benefits by $600 a week for four months. Benefits will also be extended by an additional 13 weeks. Gig workers and freelancers, who previously were not able to claim unemployment, will also be covered (PDF).

Many states have already enhanced their jobless benefits. For example, 19 states (including New York, Washington, and California) have dropped the standard one-week waiting period before collecting benefits, according to research by the nonprofit National Employment Law Project.

To find out about the unemployment benefits in your state, including new policies related to Covid-19, you can go to CareerOneStep.org, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Be aware that getting through to your local unemployment office can be challenging right now. But many states are adding hours and hiring additional staff. So be persistent.

Student Loans

The White House has previously announced help for many federal student loan borrowers. Under the CARES Act, that aid will be codified into law, says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of SavingforCollege.com.

Under the new law, borrowers will not have to make any payments for six months (through Sept. 30, 2020) on federal student loans, though that money will have to be paid later. Interest during the six-month period will be waived entirely.

Only certain federal student loans are eligiblethose owned by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), which include direct loans and loans made under the Federal Family Education Loans Program (FFELP) that were transferred to the DOE. Perkins Loans, FFELP loans held by a bank or other financial institution, and private student loans are not eligible.

Involuntary collection of defaulted student loans, including wage garnishment and claiming of tax refunds, will also be suspended. You can find more information and assistance on student loans at the The Institute for Student Loan Advisors, a nonprofit group.

Retirement Plans

The bill loosens the limits on taking money out of your retirement plan in an emergency, similar to previous disaster relief bills.

For those affected by the coronavirus crisis, such as testing positive or financial hardship due to the pandemic, you can take out up to $100,000 in retirement savings, without paying the 10 percent penalty if you're under age 59 1/2.

The provision applies only to savings in a qualified retirement plan, such as a 401(k) or IRA. You will still owe tax on the money you pull out. The increased limit also applies to 401(k) loans.

Still, just because you can tap more of your savings, doesn't mean you should. "You really should view pulling money out of your retirement plan as a last resort," says Ed Slott, a CPA and IRA expert in Rockville Centre, N.Y.





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Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization that works side by side with consumers to create a fairer, safer, and healthier world. CR does not endorse products or services, and does not accept advertising. Copyright  2020, Consumer Reports, Inc.
P iers Morgan has demanded that the free parking rolled out for NHS workers fighting coronavirus be made permanent after the pandemic ends.

The Government announced on Thursday that free parking will be offered to NHS workers and social care staff on the front line of the fight against Covid-19.

It faced pressure this week to waive parking charges for NHS staff  who normally pay between 50 and 200 to park their cars at hospitals.

Before the announcement on Thursday, a petition calling for the Government to scrap parking charges for healthcare workers during the pandemic gained more than 415,000 signatures.

And, after Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced the free parking on Thursday, the Good Morning Britain co-host tweeted saying he wanted the pledge to go further.

Sharing Mr Hancocks announcement on Twitter, Morgan urged the Health Secretary to "make it permanent".

He wrote: "It would be outrageous to go back to charging NHS workers for parking at hospitals after this.

Cars outside the Royal Free in north London / AFP/Getty Images

It came after NHS staff told of parking fines they had received outside hospitals during long shifts battling the virus.

Morgan said on Wednesday that he would pay any fines given to NHS staff outside hospitals during the outbreak.

The journalist tweeted: "I will say now, to any health worker during the future of this crisis, however long it lasts, if any of you get a parking ticket, at a hospital where youre working, I will pay it for you.
Photo: Norwegian Cruise Line

The cruise ship industry wants travellers to know it expects to soon be back in business, with some scheduling cruises as soon as April.

To soothe any concerns guests might have regarding the coronavirus pandemic, many are offering guarantees that include either full cancellation refunds or adding extra perks if they rebook.

On March 13, Transport Canada issued a formal health advisory, recommending that Canadians avoid going on cruise ships at this time due to COVID-19 and the health risk it poses, particularly in such close quarters.

The federal government also deferred the start of the cruise ship season in Canada, from April 2 to July 1, at the earliest, for ships capable of carrying more than 500 passengers and crew.

But now the cruise ship industry wants to rebuild. Heres a quick look last what some of the cruise lines are offering.

American Cruise Line: river cruises

Voluntarily suspended operations until April 30

The new plan includes assurance from American that it will protect Travel Advisor (agents) commissions for bookings impacted by COVID-19. Earlier this month, American proactively rolled out flexible new options for guests and has now bundled them into one simple Travel Advisor Assurance Plan for agents.

This new option offers flexibility to guests for all new and existing bookings on cruises departing through Aug. 31, 2020. Guests opting for this offer have the ability to cancel for any reason up to 24-hours prior to the start of their cruise package and to receive cruise vouchers equal to 100 per cent of the amounts paid.

Guests booked on any cruises that have been suspended by American have the option to receive a full money-back refund or cruise vouchers equal to 125 per cent of all amounts paid for their package.

Globus: Globus, Cosmos, Monograms and Avalon Waterways

Voluntarily suspended operations until April 30

Its new plan provides travellers booked to depart from now through April 30, 2020 the freedom to reschedule their vacation in 2020, 2021 or 2022 to any destination, with any of the Globus family of brands, without incurring cancellation fees.

The plan also offers travellers an additional credit of $50 to $200 CDN per person (depending on which brand they originally booked with) when they reschedule their plans.

Norwegian Cruise Line

Voluntarily suspended operations until April 11

Guests who were booked on suspended cruises with embarkation dates from March 13 through April 11 will automatically receive a 125 per cent or 150 per cent refund (depending on the original cruise date) of their cruise fare in the form of a future cruise credit, which can be applied towards any Norwegian Cruise Line voyage through Dec. 31, 2022. Future cruise credits will be applied to their account by April 1, 2020.

For all cruises through Sept. 30, guests can cancel up to 48 hours prior to their vacation start date and receive a future cruise credit for sailings through December 2022.

For all cruises Oct. 1 and beyond, guests can cancel for a full refund up to 120 days before their cruise.

Other changes include: rigorous pre-embarkation screenings, no-touch temperature checks for all guests and crew, disinfection and sanitization protocols on all ships

Royal Caribbean

Voluntarily suspended operations until May 12

Royal Caribbean will now let guests cancel any cruise that sets sail from now through July 31, 2020. Whether its a booking you already have or one you make right now, youre covered.

As long as guests cancel at least 48 hours before they set sail, theyll receive a future cruise credit, which can be used toward any cruise that sets sail through Dec. 31, 2021.

Carnival Cruises

Voluntarily suspended operations until April 10

Carnival is also offering full refunds on certain cruises and extra credits up to $600 for guests who reschedule their cruise.

Staring this year, Carnival will be denying boarding to guests 70 years of age or older unless they have a letter from their physician confirming they are fit to sail. Additionally, all guests will be asked if they have been hospitalized in the past two months or if they have a history of chronic or severe medical conditions.

Chronic conditions are defined as an illness persisting for a long time or constantly recurring, such as diabetes, heart, kidney or lung disease. Additional severe medical conditions include: suppressed immunity (active cancer, taking steroids) or if the person requires oxygen for any reason. Guests with chronic or severe medical conditions will not be allowed to sail.

Holland America

Voluntarily suspended operations until April 15

For cruises departing on or before July 31, 2020, guests can cancel their cruise no less than 48 hours before departure and a future cruise credit will be automatically applied to their mariner number in approximately two weeks  no further action is required.

For bookings made between March 1 and April 30, 2020 on cruises departing Aug. 1 to Oct. 15, 2020, guests must complete a form to receive a future cruise credit.

Canadians who are planning to travel abroad are reminded to consult the Government of Canadas Travel Advice and Advisories and register with the Registration of Canadians Abroad service.
Production Adjustment at Mazda due to Spread of Novel Coronavirus







TOKYO, Mar 24, 2020 - Mazda Motor Corporation would like to express our deepest sympathy and concern for all of those who have been suffering from the novel coronavirus outbreak and extend our sincere condolences to the families of the deceased.

In response to the global spread of the novel coronavirus, many countries have been quickly and extensively reinforcing their infection prevention measures including implementing curfews, retail business suspensions and restrictions on corporate activities. Mazda has decided to adjust production at our production facilities globally in consideration of difficulties in parts procurement, the plummeting sales in overseas markets, and the uncertainty of future markets.

Mazda plans to suspend production for 13 days and operate day-time shifts only for eight days at Hiroshima Plant and Hofu Plant during the period commencing March 28 through to April 30. Mazda intends to transfer part of the production originally scheduled for this period to the second quarter of the fiscal year ending March 2021 or later while monitoring how the situation develops. During this period, administrative operations will be undertaken as usual.

For overseas plants, Mazda de Mexico Vehicle Operation, our production site in Mexico, will shut down for about 10 days starting from March 25, and AutoAlliance (Thailand) Co., Ltd., our production site in Thailand, will suspend production for about 10 days starting from March 30.

We will continue sales operations in certain countries including Japan and China. For other regions, we will take appropriate responses respective to each country's policies aimed at preventing the spread of the virus and give our utmost effort to minimize the impact on sales and service operations for customers. In addition, we will work on minimizing the impact on local business partners who have always showed their support.

Mazda places the highest priority on health and safety of local residents, customers and employees and will continue to take infection prevention measures such as teleworking and sterilization at Mazda offices and dealerships.

About Mazda

Mazda Motor Corporation started manufacturing tools in 1929 and soon branched out into production of trucks for commercial use. In the early 1960s, Mazda launched its first passenger car models and began developing rotary engines. Still headquartered in Hiroshima in western Japan, Mazda today ranks as one of Japan's leading automakers, and exports cars to the United States and Europe for over 30 years. For more information, please visit www.mazda.com
Grading Japans Global Publicity Efforts

Japan should follow the lead of countries like Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia in designing a unified multilingual information portal as a "tool of diplomacy," argues former Foreign Ministry analyst Sato Masaru.

How can Japan improve its use of global public communication as a tool of foreign relations? One way may be to learn from governments that of necessity rely heavily on that diplomatic tool. Internationally isolated countries like Iran and North Korea place particularly strong emphasis on state-sponsored public communications and invest considerable resources in providing multilingual information aligned with specific strategic goals. Their purpose is quite simply to convey their views to the rest of the world and make official information easily accessible to decision makers and opinion leaders overseas, including government officials, influential politicians, and journalists.

In Praise of State-Controlled News Sites

Pars Today is a news and commentary website operated by state-controlled Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, or IRIB. It has sister sites in more than 20 languages, providing information in English, Chinese, Hindi, and Japanese, as well as Persian. The content includes not only domestic news but also detailed coverage of the Middle East as a whole, as well as significant developments in key countries like the United States and Israel. It also provides an overview of world news in the form of excerpts from Western media outlets.

North Korea has an information portal called Naenara (Korean for "my country") offering content in nine languages, including Chinese, English, and Japanese as well as Korean. As with Iran's Pars Today, this impressive multilingualism attests to the infusion of government resources.

One important point to note about Naenara is that the various multilingual editions are not identical in content. From the wide-ranging news and commentary carried on the Korean site, the editors select and prioritize items of interest or relevance to the hypothetical readership of each foreign language edition. Thus, the Japanese site prominently features items pertaining to Tokyo-Pyongyang relations and ongoing controversies surrounding past Japanese aggression, whereas the Russian site naturally focuses on relations between North Korea and Russia. A certain political calculus unquestionably goes into this editing.

From the Top Down

Another important function of both sites is to publish the full text of statements by the countries' political leaders. Naenara, for example, carries the complete text of all of Kim Jong-un's major speeches as well as his remarks during summit conferences and similar events. While the average reader can dispense with such detailed information, it is extremely useful to diplomats, foreign-policy officials, and other experts seeking to understand North Korea's intentions.

One might note that when Prime Minister Abe Shinzo visited Iran and conferred with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in June 2019, Pars Today reported the results of the talks in extensive detail and published the information before the Japanese media did. The driving force in this case was clearly the political aim of ensuring that governments around the world received Khamenei's political message exactly as intended.

Of course, in Iran's case, there is also the religious component to consider; some departments of Pars Today are clearly concerned with propagating Islamic doctrine. But when it comes to political news, the content seems strongly geared to policy makers and opinion leaders in the target countries.

In this sense, the Iranian and North Korean news sites differ in intent from traditional mass-propaganda instruments like the former Soviet Union's Radio Moscow, which was aimed primarily at influencing public opinion around the world. Iran and North Korea appear to be using their news websites as a tool of foreign policy, targeting their message to a fairly select group of decision makers and opinion leaders. It is doubtless because their official diplomatic channels are severely limited that they place such emphasis on strategic public communication.

English is Not Enough

It might be argued that an English-language sister site should be sufficient if the information is oriented to the cognoscenti. I disagree. The fact is that information provided in English is not universally accessible to opinion leaders and policy makers in non-English-speaking countries. "Internationalists" may pride themselves on their English ability, but there are many domestically powerful leaders in countries around the worldJapan being but one examplewho read nothing that is not in their native language. This applies to journalists as well; if one wishes to reach reporters and commentators covering domestic politics (not just journalists in the international and foreign-language sections) there is much to be said for publishing information in the target country's native language. More fundamentally, information in one's native language is simply easier and faster to absorb, regardless of one's level of education or expertise. This, I believe, is the reason North Korea and Iran go to the trouble of translating their news websites into so many different languages.

Of course, Japan is not an internationally isolated country like North Korea or Iran. But that does not mean it can afford to neglect public communication as a tool of foreign relations. To the contrary, I see an urgent need for Japan to enhance its capacity to communicate clearly and coherently with the world in order to advance its strategic interests amid the harsh realities of international affairs.

The Japanese government's current approach to global public communication is lacking in unity and strategic purpose. Instead of a single portal, the government has separate official websites for the prime minister and his cabinet, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, and so forth. Most of these agencies also have English-language pages that translate a portion of the information from the Japanese website, but there is no central government coordination or oversight. When it comes to communication with the international community, a consistent and unified message is of the essence.

The governments of Iran and North Korea use Pars Today and Naenara to convey their official positions. Similarly, it is usually possible to glean the government stance on various issues from China's People.cn and Russia's Sputnik. It seems to me that Japan would also benefit from an Internet portal that hews to the government's position while providing multifaceted information on a wide range of topics. Needless to say, public funds would be needed to support multilingual translation, editing, and website administration.

I believe that global public communications targeting opinion leaders in the government and the media will play an increasingly important role in international politics in the coming years. The Japanese government needs to make better use of today's digital technology to unify, clarify, and amplify the messages it wants to send to the rest of the world.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: Screen shots of the top pages of Pars Today (left) and Naenara.)
T wo men have been found dead after a house fire in Ireland.

Emergency services rushed to the burning house in Kells, Co Meath, at around 3am on Thursday morning.

The two men, aged in their 40s and 50s, were pronounced dead at the scene.

The two other people in the house, a man and a woman, escaped the blaze without injury.

The house has been sealed off for a technical examination. Gardai are investigating the incident.

A spokesperson said: "On Thursday 26th March 2020 at approximately 3am, Gardai and Emergency Services were called to the scene of a fire at a house in Kells, County Meath.

"Two men (aged in their 40s and 50s) were pronounced dead at the scene. Two other occupants of the house (a male and female) were uninjured.

"Gardai are investigating all circumstances of this incident.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 26



By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Turkmenistan increased cement imports from Turkey in January through February 2020, the Ministry of Trade of Turkey told Trend.

During this period, Turkmenistan imported cement from Turkey in the amount of $4.7 million, which is 4.78 times more than in the same period of 2019.



Turkmenistan imported cement from Turkey in the amount of $3.5 million in February 2020, which is 9.6 times more compared to the same period in 2019.

The export of cement from Turkey to world markets increased by 15.3 percent in January through February 2020, compared to the same period last year, amounting to $597.8 million.



Cement exports from Turkey account for two percent of the country's total exports in January through February.



Turkey exported $309.7 million worth of cement to world markets in February 2020,which is 16.3 percent more than in the same month of 2019.



Cement exports from Turkey in February 2020 accounted for 1.2 percent of the country's total exports.



Over the past 12 months (February 2019-February 2020), Turkey exported cement worth $3.5 billion.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
There has been no solid evidence of community transmission of COVID-19 in India as yet and the infection appears to be relatively stabilising considering the rate at which it is increasing, the health ministry said on Thursday.

At the same, it said the latest figure does not establish a clear trend and in no way the government is relaxed about anything at this point.

The number of coronavirus cases climbed to 649 in India on Thursday and the death rose to 13, with one fatality reported each from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh, according to the Health Ministry.

Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretary in the ministry of health, said at a press conference that 43 new confirmed COVID-19 cases and four deaths were reported since Wednesday.

"While the numbers of COVID-19 cases are increasing, there appears to be relatively a stable trend or even little bit reduction in the rate at which they are increasing," he said.

"This however does not establish a clear trend and in no way are we relaxed about anything at this point," he added.

Agarwal said the ministry is hopeful of containing the spread of the coronavirus by social distancing policy, conducting a proper contact tracing of positive cases and by ensuring that all people at home quarantine are monitored.

While adding a note of caution, Agarwal said the community transmission phase of the disease will begin if the community and the government do not work collectively and follow the set guidelines of social distancing, home quarantine and treatment.

He urged people to support the lockdown announced by the prime minister saying social distancing can be an effective intervention to break the chain of transmission and all the efforts will go into waste even if one person does not follow the policy for containment of the disease.

Commenting over the cases reported in Hyderabad and Bhilwada, Raman R Gangakhedkar, head of the Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases at ICMR said, "Going by one or two cases we cannot say there has been community transmission. Also why should we hide if there has been a community transmission."



"There is still no solid evidence to say there has been community transmission of coronavirus in India," he asserted.

Agarwal further said that 17 states have started work on earmarking hospitals for dedicated treatment of COVID-19 patients on their request.

He also denied that the virus spreads through mosquitoes.

Assuring the general public, Agarwal said India is geared up for COVID-19 challenge.

A home ministry official said a discussion on travel restrictions has been conducted during a meeting of the Group of Ministers and it will be conveyed to the public soon.

Prime Minister Modi announced a nationwide lockdown for 21 days from Tuesday midnight.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Kabul, Afghanistan

A lone Islamic State gunman rampaged through a Sikh house of worship in the heart of the Afghan capital Wednesday, killing 25 worshippers and wounding eight, Afghanistan's Interior Ministry said.

The gunman held many worshippers hostage for several hours while Afghan special forces, helped by international troops, tried to clear the building. At least one of the dead was a child.

Within hours, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Afghan special forces rescued at least 80 worshippers who had been trapped inside the Sikh house of worship, known as a Gurdwara, as the gunman lobbed grenades and fired his automatic rifle into the crowd, the ministry said.

Earlier, Afghan lawmaker Narindra Singh Khalsa said he rushed over to help after receiving a call from a person inside the Gurdwara telling him of the attack. There were about 150 people inside at the time, he said.

The SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks militant postings and groups, said IS claimed responsibility for the attack on the group's Aamaq media arm. The communique identified the gunman as Indian national Abu Khalid al-Hindi, who carried out the attack to avenge the plight of Muslims living under severe restrictions in Indian-ruled Kashmir, Hindu India's only Muslim dominated state.

At a Kabul hospital, Mohan Singh, who was in the Gurdwara when the attack began, said he first heard the sound of gunshots and ducked for cover under a table. Later he heard explosions, adding that he believes they were hand grenades. He was wounded when parts of the ceiling fell on him.

In photographs shared by the Interior Ministry, about a dozen children were seen being rushed out of the Gurdwara by Afghan special forces, many of them barefoot and crying.

As news of the attack first broke, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed tweeted that the Taliban were not involved. Earlier this month, Afghanistan's IS affiliate struck a gathering of minority Shiite Muslims in Kabul, killing 32 people.

Afghanistan's National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib condemned the attack in a tweet. Pakistan and India issued statements of condemnation.

"Such despicable acts have no political, religious or moral justification and must be rejected outright," the Pakistani Foreign Ministry statement said.

India said the attack was particularly egregious coming as Afghanistan sought to deal with the growing coronavirus pandemic.

"Such cowardly attacks on the places of religious worship of the minority community," India said, reflect the "diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers."

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the attack, reiterating that "attacks against civilians are unacceptable and those who carry out such crimes must be held accountable," U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan called for a "reduction of violence leading to a cease-fire" by all combatants in Afghanistan.
Dhaka, March 26 : The Bangladesh government has conditionally released former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and suspended her sentence for six months, as the country goes all out in its efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic, it was reported on Thursday.

After serving 25 months for corruption cases, she was released through executive orders from the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University on Wednesday evening, reports bdnews24.

The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) supremo was driven to her residence in the captial city's Gulshan area, as scores of supporters crowded her path and shouted slogans.

Earlier on Thursday, the Home ministry had ent an order for Khaleda's release to the prison authorities, after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina gave the go-ahead.

Khaleda, who is ailing, had been receiving treatment in prison said the bdnews24 report.

Expressing concerns over Khaleda's health amid "risks of coronavirus infection", BNP lawyers demanded her release the day before.

Meanwhile, BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir said they wanted to keep Khaleda in "quarantine" and party leaders were discussing ways to keep her supporters away for some days.

Khaleda has been in prison since February 2018 after she was sentenced to a total of 17 years in two graft cases involving Zia Orphanage Trust and Zia Charitable Trust.

She was initially kept at Old Dhaka's abandoned central prison, but on April 1, 2019 she was moved to Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University for treatment.

In the past two years, Khaleda's legal team had appealed several times for her bail but it was not granted.

It was reported in the media that her family appealed to the Home Ministry for her temporary release earlier this month.
3D Printing

Colleges Pitch in to 3D Print Medical Gear

Colleges all over the country are helping out COVID-19 response efforts by producing health equipment with their 3D printers, including face shields and respirator masks.

Tennessee's Governor, Bill Lee, enlisted colleges and universities in his state to use their 3D printing capacity to create face shields. The facilities will produce a combined 1,500 to 2,000 shields, which will be collected and distributed at Austin Peay State University. A student at Austin Peay came up with the prototype, which was reviewed and approved by health professionals. From there, the design "was sent all over the state to various universities to start printing," said Mike Wilson, director of the university's GIS Center.

The face shields have three parts: a 3D-printed shield frame, an acetate face shield and an elastic band. Ten universities and technical colleges across the state are printing the frames and sending them to Austin Peay, where the GIS Center will pair them with the acetate shields and elastic bands for packaging. The packages will include 20 acetate shields for each unit, to allow medical workers to replace their shields after each patient.

Wilson said he hopes to be able to ship a thousand face shields with 20,000 replaceable acetate shields this week. Each shield frame takes about two hours to print, and each acetate shield takes a minute or two to cut.

The same center is also trying to figure out a way to build filtering face masks. The hold-up there is that it hasn't found a "viable filter material" that's safe enough for medical work. "We're trying to come up with a mask that acts like an N95 (respirator) mask," said Wilson.

A version of the N95 respirator mask prototypes being printed at Concordia University Wisconsin. Source: Concordia University Wisconsin

"They Need the Masks Now"

That isn't stopping Concordia University Wisconsin, where the campus makerspace is printing N95 respirator masks 24 hours a day on its 30 machines. These are being classified as "prototypes" at this point, since what the makerspace has come up with isn't certified by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. That's no deterrent.

"We're hearing from the medical community that they need the masks, and they need them now," said Dan Sem, dean of Concordia's Batterman School of Business, said in an article about the project. "Our goal is to get these N95 prototypes produced and delivered as quickly as possible to keep the medical professionals using them as safe as possible. The internal experts at the health care institutions are aware of the certification limitation and are doing their own assessments, but they need the masks now."

The university has also enlisted local companies and community members with their own 3D printing resources to join in the effort by registering their printing capacity.

Once the printing is done, the Milwaukee Police Department will rally their officers to volunteer to deliver the products to Children's Hospital and other health organizations in the area.

Cobbling Together Supplies

At New York's Stony Brook University, the school's makerspace and incubator, iCreate, is making face shields, which have been reviewed by the university hospital's personnel for medical compliance. The design includes replaceable parts so that workers can change them out, allowing for a more sanitized product, according to the institution.

iCreate Director David Ecker holds a face shield produced at the makerspace. Source: Stony Brook University

Startup wasn't easy, according to David Ecker, director of iCreate. "We didn't have all of the materials that we needed so we went to Home Depot and found some door insulation material," he explained in a university article. "That's what we're using for the forehead cushion. The plastic shield on the facemask is what you would typically use if you bound a folder for a presentation. It's clear plastic. We had to go to Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft store to get the elastic. We found other things we needed at Staples. So we're improvising here, but in the end, it's going to be an excellent, viable product for our medical professionals."

With the current supplies on hand, iCreate expects to be able to produce about 800 face shields, and the hopes to procure enough materials to produce another 5,000.

The university estimated that one 3D printer can produce one face shield in about four hours. Stony Brook has 20 machines that can be applied to this project at any given time, which means it can make 40 face shields a day.

"We are doing something positive to protect the health of the medical professionals that are helping the community," said Stony Brook's Charlie McMahon, interim senior vice president and enterprise CIO. "Being able to be a part of keeping our medical professionals safer is a really good feeling."
Empty telephone boxes are seen in a near-deserted central London on March 25 after the government ordered a lockdown to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. AFP



By Jean-Baptiste Andrieux



Korean students in Britain say they have been disappointed and upset at the country's poor handling of COVID-19.



Repeated policy changes of the U.K. government in the face of the global pandemic is at the heart of their concerns.



"Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to put the country on lockdown but changed his mind after a few days," said Kim Min-jeong, a resident of Oxford. "Countries like Italy, Spain and France reacted more quickly."



Johnson announced his decision to put the U.K. on lockdown on the evening of March 23, two weeks after Italy and nine days after Spain  two other badly hit countries in Europe.



"I was quite surprised when I heard that there was no systematic testing," Park Ji-hun, who left London before the shutdown, said. "Also, I felt that preventive measures such as shortening the opening times of public establishments and social distancing were implemented too late."



The "disbelief" among Koreans there reached its peak after the government's chief scientific officer, Patrick Vallance, said the U.K. would adopt a "herd immunity" strategy.



This approach aims to give enough of the population COVID-19 so they can develop immunity against it. At high enough levels, this would make it difficult for the virus to spread, as these people would not be able to contract it, and so could not spread the infection to healthy individuals. However, some patients have been found to get re-infected after recovery, leading to this strategy being abandoned



"This idea was absolutely ridiculous and irresponsible," said Hyun-jin from Coventry. "Viruses can mutate very quickly. Many of my friends went back home because of this."





Travellers wear face masks as they wait at Heathrow Airport in London on Wednesday, March 18. AP
(CNN)  Amazon warehouses are facing a growing tide of coronavirus cases with at least 10 facilities hit so far, according to Amazon and local media reports.

One person who works in Amazon's Staten Island, New York, fulfillment center tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the online retail giant told CNN Business late Tuesday. The person, who was last at work physically on March 11, is in quarantine and recovering, Amazon said.

That case marks the second to affect Amazon warehouses in New York. It comes a week after the first reported case at any US Amazon facility, in Queens, NY. The company also confirmed a case at a facility in Joliet, Illinois, on Wednesday afternoon. Other positive cases have been reported at Amazon facilities in Moreno Valley, California; Jacksonville, Fla.; Shepherdsville, Ky.; Brownstown, Mich.; Oklahoma City, Okla.; Katy, Texas; and Wallingford, Conn.

Amazon has temporarily closed some sites, such as the Queens location, but has largely refrained from mass closures. The company told CNN that it is taking "extreme measures to ensure the safety of employees at our site[s]."

That includes regularly sanitizing door handles, elevator buttons, lockers and touch screens, Amazon said, as well as staggering shifts and spreading out chairs in break rooms.

The spread of the virus within Amazon's massive logistics operation may only add to the anxiety among workers who previously told CNN Business they felt Amazon should be doing more to protect the hundreds of thousands in its warehouse facilities across the US.

The additional cases also threaten to disrupt shipments and delay deliveries even as millions of Americans are becoming more reliant on the service as they are told to leave their homes as little as possible. The company is already warning visitors to its website of longer delivery times, and encouraging customers to select no-rush shipping if their needs are not urgent.

A CNN Business review of Amazon's website Wednesday morning showed delivery dates in mid-April for Amazon's white-label toilet paper. Digital thermometers, the site said, could be delivered by early May.

Amazon is witnessing spikes in demand that are comparable to the surge surrounding peak holiday periods such as Black Friday, Jay Carney, Amazon's senior vice president of global corporate affairs, told CNN's Poppy Harlow in an interview last week. In response, the company is ramping up hiring.

"We're boosting employment by 100,000 in the way that we do for seasonal periods like the holiday, when we need extra workers," Carney said.

Before the dramatic rise in confirmed cases across the United States, Amazon represented a whopping 39 percent of the e-commerce industry, according to research firm eMarketer. Now that figure could rise even higher as Americans stop visiting brick-and-mortar stores.

That's put increasing strain on Amazon workers themselves, some of whom have accused the company of "recklessly endangering" employees by not granting them paid time off. Earlier this week, Chicago-area warehouse workers said they successfully petitioned for paid time off, in a policy update affecting part-time and seasonal Amazon workers nationwide, but are still fighting to have that leave count separately from sick leave.

One worker at the Staten Island facility told CNN Business Wednesday morning that despite confirming the positive case to the media, Amazon had not notified workers at the site through email, text message, call or update in the company's employee app  pointing to a lack of internal transparency.

"I realize we're all in uncharted territory but yes, I would have appreciated learning about the infected person from Amazon's HR Dept. and not from Reddit or Vice," the worker said.

An Amazon spokesperson told CNN Business, "We communicated to the employees verbally in socially distanced small group meetings." The spokesperson has not yet responded to a follow-up question about how the company had communicated with employees who'd yet to come in for their next shift.

Workers previously told CNN Business that Amazon's social distancing policies are unrealistic in warehouses, where tight conditions in locker areas force employees to "walk sideways" to pass one another.

Rina Cummings, a worker at the Staten Island facility, told CNN Business she felt a lack of control about the situation, saying few are washing their hands and that "nobody is really coming around to ask people if they're OK, if they're feeling sick. I feel like they're not as proactive as they should be."

This month, Amazon said all employees placed in quarantine would receive two weeks' pay, and that Amazon contractors who tested positive for the virus could apply for up to two weeks' pay from a $25 million relief fund the company has established.

In an internal memo posted to Amazon's corporate blog dated Saturday, CEO Jeff Bezos said the company has placed orders for "millions of face masks" meant for employees and contractors.

"Masks remain in short supply globally and are at this point being directed by governments to the highest-need facilities like hospitals and clinics," he said. "When our turn for masks comes, our first priority will be getting them in the hands of our employees and partners working to get essential products to people."

For now that means Amazon warehouse workers and delivery people remain some of the most exposed, working on the front lines of the crisis in hopes of earning a paycheck and ensuring households can continue to get soap and paper towels delivered to their door.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Amazon warehouses are getting hit with coronavirus cases."
The government wants Egyptians to practise social distancing and stay home. Al-Ahram Weekly looks at how the two are working

Egypt has imposed a series of measures to rein in the spread of the coronavirus, including suspending air traffic, closing schools and universities and shutting malls and cafes starting from 7pm. It has also banned gatherings for prayers in mosques and churches.

By Monday, Egypts death toll from the coronavirus was 19 and 366 infected.

Many Egyptians, overwhelmed by fear of the virus, are willing to go to the next level, including social distancing, a term that has become world famous. But some cannot afford to stay at home too long.

Heba Al-Beheiri, a 30-year-old engineer, is religiously following social distancing and hygiene tips.

My family and I have not left home for 10 days except to buy groceries. We wash our hands every 10 minutes, alcohol has become our new best friend, and disinfecting the house and food has become a daily pastime, Al-Beheiri told Al-Ahram Weekly.

Trying to see the bright side, the mother of two always highlights the positives of staying at home with her 10-year-old daughter and six-year-old son.

At least I know that Im now freely practising my truly ultimate passion: constant eating, Al-Beheiri giggled. But the truth is, Im exhausted and emotionally drained just like millions of others. I stopped going to my parents even though we live in the same building. I dont know what else I can do to save my life and my childrens.

The civil engineer was among those who decided to stay at home following a decision by Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli to give mothers of school-aged children fully paid leave after schools were suspended for two weeks.

Despite the efforts to slow the spread of the virus, Al-Beheiri believes that her effort is going in vain, as thousands of others are not following the governments instructions.

I feel like we are all paying for the mistakes of others and no matter how much we try to raise the awareness of the circle surrounding us, it is like talking to ourselves, Al-Beheiri angrily commented.

But not everybody who is not abiding by the new rules does so out of carelessness. Many find home quarantine a luxury they cannot afford. Sixty-two-year-old Hanem Mohamed is one.

Working as a cleaning lady, Mohamed, 57, does not have a fixed source of income every month, leaving her constantly at risk of having no money to pay the rent or buy food essentials. As the bread winner of her family, she finds herself with no option but to keep following her normal life routine.

However, for the past two weeks the families who she works for have not been calling her for fear she might transfer the virus to them since she goes to work on crowded public transportation.

Mohamed says that some of her customers were generous enough to offer to send her money, despite not working. Thank God, I am in better shape than many of my friends who are now jobless and have no source of income.

Many charities are adopting initiatives to compensate those who lost their jobs or a huge part of their income due to the coronavirus. Meanwhile, the government has yet to reveal its plan to help those most affected.

Mohamed says she tries to follow hygiene instructions as much as possible, but there is no available masks in any of the pharmacies surrounding poor neighbourhoods in Giza, and the alcohol is just too expensive for us to get. A small bottle is now LE30.

Despite Madboulis decision to grant more authority to the Consumer Protection Agency to monitor markets and limit price gouging, Mohamed said this was not the case where she lives, with thousands of others who work in hand-to-mouth jobs.

People are running out of money, and stores are increasing the price of commodities massively. The cost of all regular flu medicines almost doubled because of the virus, she added.

Amr Al-Deeb, 27, believes that the virus does not pose such a huge threat to peoples lives the way the media are portraying it.

Away from the tragedy that every death brings on the screen, if you analytically look at the number of deaths and the total number of patients, youd logically see it is just a normal flu, Al-Deeb said calmly.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) stated at the beginning of March that the coronavirus mortality rate was 3.4 per cent, a number that Al-Deeb finds not alarmingly high. Compare it to something like the Spanish Flu that killed almost 500 million people. That was a quarter of the worlds population at the time. Covid-19 is not that menacing, he added.

Following the same path is Ahmed Radwan, 26, who lives in Italy, the country where the virus has killed the most people.

Radwan believes that the coronavirus is nothing more than a flu virus, however, due to worldwide panic, it has attracted more attention than it should have.

I live in one of the most affected cities near Milan. The number of infections increases on a daily basis but we never hear about those who have recovered or any of their stories, he said.

Radwan asks that if the recovery rate reaches 87 per cent how come we never see any of these thousands of people globally?

He said that from research, scientists suggest the virus itself is not so deadly and that pre-existing health conditions contribute more to the deaths.

When you put the sentence that way, the virus does not seem as scary as it is portrayed in media outlets. However, we never see that version of the story.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Kim Kardashian had some harsh words for her sisters.

The 39-year-old mother-of-four was seen accusing her sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner as well as Kourtney of not having the same work ethic as she and Khloe in a new explosive trailer for Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

This is the conversation that took place before Kourtney and Kim famously got into a physical fight which has been seen in previous trailers.

Angry Kim: Kim Kardashian had some harsh words for her sisters. The 39-year-old was seen accusing her sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner as well as Kourtney of not having the same work ethic as she and Khloe in a new explosive trailer for Keeping Up With The Kardashians

I do it all! Kim is seen sitting on a rug while Kendall is on a bed as they chat over work ethic

On Thursday evening, the show sees its premiere of season 18.

Kim is seen sitting on the floor of a bedroom with Kendall Jenner on a white bed and Khloe next to Kourtney in front of her.

Mrs Kanye West starts talking about how she works no matter what to make mother Kris Jenner happy.

She adds that sometimes her sisters don't step up, like when Kylie Jenner did not walk in a fashion show due to an illness in 2019.

Kylie recently revealed she did not walk the Balmain show because of a severe strep and staph infection.

Not fair: Mrs Kanye West starts talking about how she works no matter what to make mother Kris Jenner happy. She adds that sometimes her sisters don't step up, like when Kylie Jenner did not walk in a fashion show due to an illness in 2019

Mad now: The supermodel then tells Kim that is not right and says she will 'come at you right now'

'If I were on my death bed, I would still show up,' Kim, who was in a black top and slacks, stated.

She added that their mother constantly leans on her and Khloe to make appearances to help the brand.

But this ruffles the feathers of Kourtney and Kendall.

Kim then says she knows that Kendall suffers from anxiety so that holds her back, bu the Vogue supermodel argues that she still works hard.

Mean words: Kim then looks at Kourtney and brushes her off by saying she just doesn't 'care about stuff' which gets Kourtney - who is in jeans and a T-shirt and eating a nutrition bar - very upset

NOT happy: 'You act like I don't do s**t! You have this narrative in your mindI will literally f**k you up if you mention it again,' the mother-of-three says. 'But, honestly, change the narrative in your mind. I work my f**king a** off'

The supermodel then tells Kim that is not right and says she will 'come at you right now.'

'I was just expressing that, Kylie not going to Paris and how my mom's freaking out and crying and begging us, she's so used to me and Khloe showing up, especially Khloe,' Kim added.

'Like, we would've gone no matter how sick we are, that's just who we are.'

Kendall says she has been 'been sick as f**k,' and has had to endure 'major panic attacks' but that she has shown up.

Trouble at home: Khloe, who is in a shirt and shorts, rolls her eyes as she cannot believe what she is hearing

She stays out of it: But Khloe does not engage and instead looks at her phone

There is goes: Kourtney gets up and throws something at her sister Kim who is shocked

Kim then looks at Kourtney and brushes her off by saying she just doesn't 'care about stuff' which gets Kourtney - who is in jeans and a T-shirt and eating a nutrition bar - very upset.

'You act like I don't do s**t! You have this narrative in your mindI will literally f**k you up if you mention it again,' the mother-of-three says.

'But, honestly, change the narrative in your mind. I work my f**king a** off.'

'But also, if I didn't want to work my ass off and I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, that's f**king fine!' Kourtney shoots at Kim.

Not taking it: In a confessional, Kourtney says she is frustrated with the accusation that she does not work when she does

Khloe, who is in a shirt and shorts, rolls her eyes as she cannot believe what she is hearing.

This is when Kourtney gets up and throws something at Kim, which starts the physical fight that has been seen in other previews.

In a confessional, Kourtney says she is frustrated with the accusation that she does not work when she does.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 14:04:17|Editor: huaxia

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The deserted New Delhi Railway Station is seen during a lockdown in New Delhi, India, March 26, 2020. The death toll due to COVID-19 in India on Thursday morning rose to 13, the federal health ministry said, with 649 confirmed cases reported so far. (Xinhua/Partha Sarkar)

NEW DELHI, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The death toll due to COVID-19 in India on Thursday morning rose to 13, the federal health ministry said, with 649 confirmed cases reported so far.

"Death toll related to novel coronavirus has reached 13," said the ministry at 10:15 a.m. (local time).

"The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases across India is 649," the ministry said. "Of these, 602 cases are Indian nationals and 47 foreign nationals."

According to ministry, 43 people have been discharged from hospitals after showing improvement and the number of active cases in the country right now is 593.

Maharashtra state has the highest number of cases, followed by Kerala, with 124 and 118 cases reported respectively.

Maharashtra state has so far recorded three deaths (highest in India) related to COVID-19.

The Indian government on Wednesday began a 21-day lockdown across the country in a bid to contain the spread of novel coronavirus. Authorities have imposed strict curfew-like restrictions to prevent the movement of people.

All road, rail and air services have been suspended in wake of the lockdown, except essential services that have been exempted.
Oregons U.S. senators hailed Wednesdays passage of a $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package, even as they hunkered down in their offices to ride out the outbreak.

This is really a right hook, left punch situation in which people are hit both on the health anxiety, which is certainly well placed given the potential lethality, and on the economic side, U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley said Wednesday.

Since he sent all of his staff home, Merkley moved a toaster onto his desk along with the stacks of memos to brief him for endless calls and meetings about coronavirus response.

Alone all day, he is surviving on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

His fellow U.S. senator from Oregon, Ron Wyden, is also in Washington. My hands feel like sandpaper because youre washing your hands all the time, Wyden said.

The two Democrats are living the crisis even as Congress makes a down payment on digging the country out from the catastrophe. Last week, 3.3 million people across the country filed for unemployment claims -- quadruple the prior record -- as businesses across the country closed and people huddled in their homes to avoid spreading the virus.

Gov. Kate Brown said Wednesday she expects the federal rescue package, which awaits passage in the House and President Donald Trumps signature, will bring at least $1.2 billion to Oregonians and to the state. The bill is designed as a lifeline for businesses and laid-off workers facing weeks or months of hardship before the outbreak passes and they can return to work.

The bills highlights include:

Up to $600 more per week in unemployment benefits, plus expanding unemployment insurance to part-time and self-employed workers who arent usually covered by the program.

One-time checks of $1,200 per adult , and $500 per kid for individuals earning less than $75,000 annually. People earning more than that will receive less -- and those with incomes about $99,000 for an individual or $198,000 for couples wont receive payments.

$150 billion for state social services.

$350 billion in loans to small businesses, which can turn into outright grants.

$425 billion in loans for large, distressed industries.

This horrendous disease that has just been punishing Oregon families and every nook and cranny in the state has also hit the Oregon economy like a wrecking ball, Wyden said Wednesday. If working Oregonians cant pay their bills, he said that will have ripple effects throughout the state.

When theyre not able to pay that makes it hard for businesses to keep their doors open, Wyden said. Demand drives the Oregon economy.

Merkley pushed hard for a $40 billion housing assistance package and is disappointed that only $7 billion survived. He also wanted a nationwide ban on evictions, which hasnt come through.

Instead, state and local jurisdictions, including Oregon and Portland, have implemented their own moratoriums on evictions, which vary in who is protected and for how long.

Merkley is concerned about unemployment skyrocketing at the same time many people are saddled with too-high rents to start with.

We were already looking at such a challenging housing situation across the country, Merkley said. We should absolutely be doing a lot more.

Some of the $7 billion will be used to try to prevent the outbreak from disproportionately impacting homeless people. It will be disbursed to states and counties based on how many people are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Merkley is confident Oregon will get a large chunk of it.

Among other things, it will be used to temporarily house people living outside in shelters like the ones the city-county Joint Office of Homeless Services have opened in Multnomah County.

Tribal governments would also be eligible for stabilization funds -- a growing concern in Indian Country, where unemployment is high in regular economic times and the few health resources normally available have already been stretched to the breaking point.

Despite the record-breaking size of this weeks rescue package, there is broad agreement among economists and by many in Congress that it is only a first step in the recovery process. Wyden predicted additional legislation will focus on the crisis implications for medical care.

Im staying at my post and am convinced that this is not going to be the end, Wyden said. Weve got a whole host of issues with respect to health care where we very much need the additional services.

-- Molly Harbarger

mharbarger@oregonian.com | 503-294-5923 | @MollyHarbarger

-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
The army has built a tent hospital in a single day in the courtyard of Budapests St. Laszlo Hospital, Ferenc Korom, the commander of the Hungarian Armed Forces, said in an interview to public television.

The state-of-the-art tent system has been set up to flexibly adapt to the task at hand, according to the armys website honvedelem.hu.



In the current epidemic phase, the tent will be used to pre-screen patients so that patients can be assigned to the best possible care within the shortest possible time.



The tent system can withstand winds of up to 100kms per hour and it contains a rapid cooling and heating system, the website said.
Although the USDA envisioned operators providing meals directly to children, Kline wrote, the agency recognizes that in this public health emergency, continuing to require children to come to the meal site to pick up meals may not be practical and in keeping with the goal of providing meals while also taking appropriate safety measures.
My thoughts and prayers are with you.

How often do we hear these words, particularly in current times of drama and disaster?

Thoughts and prayers  easy to say. But do we mean it?

Its flip and quickly said. Like offering a tissue or a bandaid for a cut or graze. One that you had in your pocket, along with your mints and loose change. Close at hand. Easy to feel good afterwards. It may or may not comfort the wounded but you have done your bit to help.

Moving on 

Is it real? Is it sincere? Who needs it most? The pray-er or the pray-ee?

Prayer should be a Christians natural response to another persons need, whether that person believes or not. Praying for someone or a situation is, frankly, a labour of love and requires much, much more that a flip couple of words applied like a magic spell or a bandaid.

Praying for someone can be hard work. It is also a big responsibility. And it is an honour to be asked to pray for someone, an honour to God.

Theres been a couple of times when I have been asked by friends to pray with them even though they are not believers of any faith. You know I dont go along with that Christian stuff but you do. And it would mean a lot if you would pray for us.

Wow! No pressure.

Thats a big responsibility that takes more than a flippant reply. I reckon theres a few things worth considering when we offer, or when we are asked, to pray.

Prepare. One choir director I know would say prepare when he meant breathe. We need to take a breath, to focus, to still the mind.

Research. Ask and listen. What is the need, what is hurting or lost?

Remove distractions. Be fully present, both with the person and with God. Be silent if necessary.

Give thanks for Gods goodness and give thanks for permission to pray.

Ask God for guidance on what to pray for, rather than what you think is the solution.

Use a liturgical prayer. Or speak spontaneously. Or sit in silence.

Be gentle and patient, waiting on the Spirit.

Remember how blessed we are that we can pray in our country. There are many places in the world where even meeting with another Christian, in public or in private, is punishable by death. We need to remember that.

Give thanks. Again.

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray he gave them what we know and love as the Lords Prayer. (See James 1:19) As a pattern it is hard to go wrong with this one. It gives us the perfect template: Respect, scripture, thanks, asking for guidance and forgiveness, praying for others, and Amen  Let it be.

So forget the bandaids. Get out the full thoughts and prayers first aid kit.
Region CEO Lori Elam is not as certain.

The county attorneys from the counties have provided feedback and from my understanding  and nothing has been decided yet, it has to be voted on by the governing board  that when Muscatine County submitted their letter to leave there was formal action taken from Muscatine County and formal action taken by the governing board, Elam said. In the attorneys eyes, that had created a binding agreement, a contract is the term the attorneys have used. The only way to end that contract is for another motion by the governing board.

Elam commented that she did not know how it would be accepted. She said she had only been asked to put the issue on the agenda. If the board approves accepting the new letter, she does not believe Muscatine County would have to reapply for membership in the region. She also said Muscatine County would have a vote on the agenda item.

With formal action already having been taken, Elam said if the board chooses to do nothing, Muscatine County would be out on July 1.

The letter asking to leave the region was submitted in October 2019, with Muscatine County citing financial mismanagement as a reason for leaving the region.
On Tuesday, Albany City Manager Peter Troedsson and Mayor Sharon Konopa sat in City Council chambers in front of the dais in two chairs facing a camera, a table in between and potted plant off to the side.

It wasn't a satirical take on Late Night shows or an effort to pay homage to Johnny Carson. It was the latest in a string of ongoing attempts by the city to keep residents informed about the changes and challenges caused by the continued spread of COVID-19.

The illness, which mirrors flu-like symptoms but can cause serious complications, has been confirmed in the mid-valley with more than a dozen cases and at least one death at the Edward C. Allworth Veterans' Home in Lebanon. Benton County has also reported cases.

Statewide, the number has climbed closer to 200 and at least 10 people have died prompting Gov. Kate Brown to institute strict social distancing measures in line with California and Washington. Non-essential businesses have closed, restaurants must offer curb-side takeout or delivery exclusively and schools throughout the state have been closed until April 28.

Currently, city hall is open for business via phone only but the city's website also has options for information. Both public libraries are closed as well as the community pool. The fire station is closed for tours and community meeting rooms and the police station's lobby is closed. The senior center is also closed.

On Tuesday, Konopa and Troedsson addressed the ongoing closure and the city's efforts to help stem the spread while taking a few questions from Facebook and soliciting additional questions to be answered at a later time.

"We know this has been an unsettling time," Konopa said. "We're all faced with it right now."

The pair detailed Gov. Brown's orders that stressed social distancing by staying inside unless absolutely necessary.

"The city is following the Governor's orders," Konopa said. "Do not go out unless you are in need of an essential service. If we don't all follow the rules, this is going to go on longer."

Troedsson assured residents that if they are unable to pay their utility bill, they will not be shut off, citing water as an essential service in stopping the spread of the illness. Both Troedsson and Konopa asked that if residents are able to pay their bill, that they do so noting that the services are paid, in large part, by the fees charged to residents.

"We'll continue to have these videos," Troedsson said, adding that in subsequent live feeds, residents may hear from the fire and police chief as well.

For those without internet access or a computer, Troedsson said calls are being fielded at city hall.

For more information on COVID-19 from the city's perspective or for information on current city services, visit cityofalbany.net/coronavirus.

"We are doing the best we can," Troedsson said, "under the circumstances to provide a continuity of services."
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  Presidential Peace Adviser Carlito Galvez, Jr. was named by President Rodrigo Duterte as the chief implementer of the government's national response against the coronavirus disease.

The country is currently under a state of public health emergency and calamity amid the COVID-19 outbreak that has infected more than 700 people. As of Thursday, the death toll has risen to 45.

Galvez, a former chief-of-staff of the Armed Forces, is expected to "ensure the strict compliance and adherence of everyone to the guidelines and protocols issued by the IATF (Interagency Task Force)."

"He was further tasked to protect and promote the safety and welfare of the public at all times, and ensure the efficient and expeditious distribution of government assistance to the public," read the memorandum signed by Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea dated March 24.

Duterte placed the entire Luzon under enhanced community quarantine to restrict the movement of people and avoid further spread of the virus. The quarantine will end on April 13.

The President also approved a bill granting him additional powers to address the COVID-19 crisis in the country, including reshuffling funds in this years budget to provide assistance to the poor.
New Delhi: Bhojpuri stunner Aamrapali Dubey held an interesting chat session on Instagram today and revealed several things about her. She sought suggestions from her Instafam on how to keep herself busy during the quarantine break due to coronavirus scare and soon, she was flooded with answers. Some fans asked her to utilise the time in household chores while some requested her to start a blog. Another fan suggested Aamrapali to watch a movie and that too her own film Nirahua Hindustani, which also marked her debut in the Bhojpuri industry. The actress replied back saying its her favourite film.

Nirahua Hindustani, starring Dinesh Lal Yadav aka Nirahua and Amrapali Dubey released in 2014 to a blockbuster status.

Ever since then, Nirahua and Aamrapali have co-starred in several hit films together. They have mostly worked together in the Nirahua series. Their latest film is 'Nirahua Hindustani 3', directed by Manjul Thakur and produced by Pravesh Lal Yadav. Apart from the duo, the film also features Shubhi Sharma, Sanjay Pandey, Kiran Yadav, Samarth Chaturvedi and Ashish Shendre among others.

Nirahua and Aamrapali's on-screen pairing is adored by several of their fans who throng cinema halls in large numbers to catch a glimpse of their favourite jodi.
US Charges Venezuelas Nicolas Maduro With Narco-Terrorism, Drug-Trafficking

The United States has indicted Venezuelas socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro and other top regime officials in a narco-terrorism and drug trafficking conspiracy that aimed to flood the United States with cocaine, the Justice Department announced.

The department unsealed a criminal indictment against Maduro, accusing him of facilitating efforts in conjunction with a violent terrorist organizationthe Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC)to smuggle cocaine into the United States. The socialist leader has been charged with participating in narco-terrorism conspiracywhich carries a 20-year minimum sentence, conspiring to import cocaine into the United States, and related criminal offenses to support the drug smuggling effort.

Attorney General William Barr announced the charges during a press conference on Thursday, adding that the conspiracy involved many current and former top Venezuelan regime officials who allegedly profited from the corruption. The DOJ also indicted more than a dozen of these high ranking officials for their involvement in the conspiracy including the head of Venezuelas National Constituent Assembly, intelligence officials, and military members. Moreover, two FARC leaders have also been charged.

Justice Department officials alleged that Venezuela dictator Nicolas Maduro and other regime officials ran a cartel aimed to flood the United States with cocaine. The United States estimates that 250 metric tons of cocaine is trafficked from Venezuela each year. (Department of Justice)

The Venezuelan regime, once led by Nicolas Maduro Moros, remains plagued by criminality and corruption, Barr said. For more than 20 years, Maduro and a number of high-ranking colleagues allegedly conspired with the FARC, causing tons of cocaine to enter and devastate American communities.

Todays announcement is focused on rooting out the extensive corruption within the Venezuelan governmenta system constructed and controlled to enrich those at the highest levels of the government. The United States will not allow these corrupt Venezuelan officials to use the U.S. banking system to move their illicit proceeds from South America nor further their criminal schemes, he added.

The DOJ highlighted that although Maduro is currently in Venezuela, the socialist leader may travel outside of the country and that it was offering a $15 million reward for information that would lead to his capture and conviction.

We do expect eventually to gain custody of these defendants and were going to explore all options for getting custody, Barr said during the press conference.

The Justice Department is offering a $15 million reward for information that would lead to the arrest or conviction of Venezuelas socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro. (Department of Justice)

Responding in a Twitter post, Maduro condemned the charges, accusing the United States and Columbia of conspiring to fill Venezuela with violence.

The indictment accuses Maduro and his co-defendants of acting as leaders and managers of a drug trafficking organization called the Cartel of the Suns, since 1999. The cartel sought to not only allow its members to profit but also flood the United States with cocaine and inflict the drugs harmful and addictive effects on users in the United States, the court filings alleged.

The indictment said that Maduro, who was a leader of the cartel, negotiated multi-ton shipments of cocaine produced by FARC, directed that the cartel provide military-grade weapons to the FARC, and coordinated foreign affairs with Honduras and other countries to facilitate large-scale drug trafficking. He was also accused of soliciting assistance from FARC leadership in training an unsanctioned militia group that is functioning, in essence, as an armed forces unit of the cartel.

Barr said the United States estimates that about 250 metric tons of cocaine were dispatched out of Venezuela using air and maritime routes. The attorney general said that amount of cocaine equates to 30 million lethal doses.

It comes months after President Donald Trump placed pressure on Maduro to leave office after Venezuelas duly elected National Assembly declared Maduros presidency illegitimate. The United States refuses to recognize him as the Venezuelan leader because of a fraudulent election, instead officially recognizing his opponent, Juan Guaido, as the interim president.

The standoff between the two has become a global referendum on socialism, with more than 100 free-world nations including the United States, the UK, and Australia siding with Guaido. Despite this Maduro has refused to give up control, causing Venezuela to spiral into political chaos exacerbated by its ruined economy.

The United States has long accused Maduro and his socialist regime of human rights abuses, corruption, and for being responsible for the countrys collapsed economy.

Maduro is an illegitimate ruler, a tyrant who brutalizes his people, Trump said during his State of the Union speech in February. But Maduros grip on tyranny will be smashed and broken.
By IANS

KABUL: At least 25 members of the Sikh community, including children were killed in a terror attack on a Gurudwara in central Kabul on Wednesday.

"Unfortunately 25 civilians were killed and eight wounded in today's attack," interior ministry spokesman Tariq Arian said in a statement.

Sources said Afghan security forces were engaged in a gun battle with terrorists who stormed Gurudwara in the Shorbazar area Wednesday morning. Around 150 people were worshipping in the Gurudwara at the time of the attack.

READ| India condemns terror attack on Kabul Gurdwara, offers 'all possible assistance'

However, the security forces, sources said, rescued some worshippers from the Gurudwara. The Sikhs constitute a minuscule minority in Afghanistan.

The Ashraf Ghani government has blamed the Pakistan-backed Haqqani network for the terror attack.

However, the Taliban, has denied involvement in the attack on the Sikh shrine. Though the US and Taliban have signed a peace deal, violence in Afghanistan remains unabated.

Reacting to the terror attack, India's Housing and Urban Minister and a former diplomat Hardeep Singh Puri on Wednesday tweeted, "Suicide attack on a Gurudwara Sahib in Kabul needs to be strongly condemned. These killings are a grim reminder of atrocities that continue to be inflicted upon religious minorities in some countries and the urgency with which their lives and religious freedom have to be safeguarded."
Oil resumed its decline after the head of the International Energy Agency warned global demand was in free fall as coronavirus lockdowns wreak havoc on consumption while major producers pump more.

Futures in New York tumbled 7.7% in New York, dropping for the first time this week, after IEA executive director Fatih Birol said demand could drop as much as 20 million barrels a day. WTI crude decreased 5.1% to $23.23 a barrel. The gloomy outlook exacerbated investor pessimism driven by a U.S. decision to rescind a crude-buying offer after failing to win funding from Congress.

Market gauges have been signaling weakness, with key swaps in the North Sea plummeting, and U.S. traders and consultant IHS Markit raising alarms about storage space running out. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. also warned of a massive contraction in demand that not even a supply freeze or cut from OPEC could rectify.

Weve never seen something like this before, said Mike Hiley, president of OTC Futures. Oil is going to continue to be stuck in this rut given the simultaneous supply and demand shocks. Stimulus doesnt really help these issues. Just because people have more money in their pockets, doesnt mean theyre getting in their cars.

PREVIOUSLY: Market shows fear U.S. is running out of storage space

Falling crude prices were undeterred by the U.S. Senate approving a $2 trillion stimulus plan after days of intense negotiations. The House is under pressure to pass the bill quickly and send it to President Donald Trump for his signature as signs of weakness in the economy mount with American jobless claims surging to a record 3.28 million last week.

The White House is urging Saudi Arabia to dial back its plan to flood the crude market. Still, any agreement to curtail supply among producers will be too little and too late in the face of an unprecedented shock for the worlds oil refining system, Goldman said.

Refineries in India -- the worlds third-largest crude importer -- are preparing to slash processing rates by as much as half, according to estimates from one of the countrys biggest Middle Eastern suppliers.

We expect crude demand to now start declining, following products demand on its downwards path, and this is what will fundamentally drive prices lower, said Per Magnus Nysveen, head of analysis at Rystad Energy AS.

Producers are already showing signs of strain with Brazils Petrobras cutting output through the end of March, while some operators in Canada are shutting production altogether.

The glut extends far beyond the U.S. The Brent Dated-to-frontline swap, which helps traders to cover the gap between the futures and physical market in the North Sea was at the weakest level in at least a decade on Thursday. Similarly, Russian Urals crude traded at a nine-year low, and the country plans to boost its eastern exports to a record in May.

2020 Bloomberg L.P.
Authorities arrested UFCs Jon Bones Jones on Thursday morning, multiple outlets report.

In New Mexico, an Albuquerque Police officer responded to the sound of a gunshot at about 1 a.m. local time, according to a criminal complaint obtained by ESPN.

The officer identified 32-year-old Jones as sitting in the drivers seat, with an open container of alcohol behind the passenger seat.

Following a sobriety test, the light heavyweight champ was charged with alleged aggravated DWI, possession of an open container and failure to provide proof of insurance, according to Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center records.

A search turned up a handgun underneath the drivers seat, resulting in Jones also being charged with alleged negligent use of a firearm, according to KOAT.

RELATED: Second Suspect Arrested on Kidnapping Charges in Case of UFC Fighters Missing Stepdaughter

Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center records show Jones was later released on Thursday. He is scheduled to appear in court on April 9, TMZ reported.

Jones rep declined to comment to PEOPLE.

The Albuquerque Police Department did not immediately respond to PEOPLEs request for comment.

Never miss a story  sign up for PEOPLEs free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories

As part of the investigation into this incident, our Gun Violence Reduction Unit will test the firearm and bullet casing to determine whether the gun has been used in any crimes, a spokesperson for the police department told ESPN. Reducing gun violence in Albuquerque is our top priority.

The outlet also reported that the UFC is in contact with Jones management team and is currently gathering additional information.
Romanian Health Minister Victor Costache has resigned and will be replaced by his deputy Nelu Tataru, the prime minister said on Thursday without elaborating.

The European Union member state, which has recorded 906 coronavirus infections and 13 deaths, declared a state of emergency on March 16. Hospital across the country have complained about a lack of protective gear for personnel.

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COVID-19: 5 Tips to Face Your Anxiety is a free digital guide designed to help those that feel anxiety from the recent outbreak. Our goal is to give practical information on how to think through, calm yourself, and manage during this COVID-19 pandemic. This guide gives practical steps for how to keep your calm during a time of uncertainty.- Dr. Anne Marie Albano

AllenComm partnered with the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry to create a free online guide, to combat feelings of anxiety and the resulting uncertainty from the recent outbreak of COVID-19.

COVID-19: 5 Tips to Face Your Anxiety is a free digital guide designed by AllenComm and written by Dr. Anne Marie Albano, author, and Founder of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders. This is a free resource designed to help those that feel anxiety and panic from the resulting uncertainty caused by the outbreak.

Anxiety can run wild during times of uncertainty and crisis, says Dr. Anne Marie Albano. Our goal is to give practical information on how to think through, calm yourself, and manage during this COVID-19 pandemic. This guide gives practical steps for how to keep your calm during a time of uncertainty.

COVID-19: 5 Tips to Face Your Anxiety can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection on their mobile device or computer. The guide addresses common concerns in five modules that identify helpful or harmful thoughts, how to take control of the stories we tell ourselves, putting things into perspective, educating on what to focus on, and occupying the mind and body with the right thoughts and actions.

This outbreak affects more than our L&D industry. We feel its our responsibility to relieve some of the anxiety our community might be feeling right now and to help them find their footing as we navigate our way through these turbulent times, said Ron Zamir, AllenComm CEO. Its important to help each other stay calm and unified until this situation passes.

About AllenComm

For over 35 years, AllenComm has partnered with Fortune 100 companies to create and scale unique, innovative learning solutions. Extensive instructional design experience, innovative learning technologies, and agency-level creative teams enable AllenComm to stand out in the learning landscape. Considered one of the top ten firms of its kind in the country, AllenComm wins over 40 awards year after year for their tailored learning solutions. With internal workforce and experience, AllenComm is uniquely positioned in the learning space to meet multiple needs from small to very large change management projects. Partnering with AllenComm to supplement and support human capital management needs has helped customers reduce expenses, shorten onboarding periods, and raise the impact of sales and compliance efforts.

About Columbia University Department of Psychiatry

The Columbia University Department of Psychiatry is one of the largest in the country in terms of faculty size as well as state, federal, and foundation research support. They are currently among the top-ranked in the nation for Psychiatry in the US News & World Report Best Hospital rankings, as well as in psychiatric research funding from the National Institutes of Health. They have extraordinary clinical, educational, and research resources. Their faculty includes over 400 psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, and neurobehavioral scientists. Clinical facilities and laboratories of the Psychiatry Department are located in a large number of institutions and healthcare systems. These include New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, the New York State Psychiatric Institute, the New York State Office of Mental Health, and the Washington Heights Community Mental Health Center. The Department of Psychiatry also houses the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, the Mind/Brain Institute, a Howard Hughes Research Institute and the Stanley Center for Applied Neuroscience of Bipolar Disorders.
Peter Navarro, director of the White House National Trade Council, at the CPAC convention in National Harbor, Md., on March 1, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Big Pharma and Its Well-Heeled Swamp Creatures Should Stop Being Divisive, Navarro Says

WASHINGTON White House trade adviser Peter Navarro slammed Big Pharmas attempts to send a letter to President Donald Trump opposing a potential Buy American executive order.

Trumps proposed executive orderwhich aims to reduce dependence on Chinawill encourage companies to relocate the production of essential medicines, medical equipment, and supplies to the United States.

In response to the push by the lobby groups against the executive order, Navarro told The Epoch Times in an email, America is more than up to that task, and Big Pharma and its well-heeled Swamp Creatures need to stop being such a divisive element in American politics.

The Association for Accessible Medicines, a trade group for major pharmaceutical manufacturers such as 3M, drafted a letter dated March 24 to Trump, opposing the plans of reshoring medical supply chains. The draft letter, which was leaked by Spectator USA Magazine, stated that such measures could undermine the complex arrangements between firms that allow for efficient delivery of medicines to patients.

The letter, signed by 40 organizations, including PhRMA, a Big Pharma lobbying organization, warned that the proposed plan could harm efforts to supply necessary equipment and medicines to fight the growing pandemic.

None of the Buy American provisions in the proposed Executive Order would apply during the current COVID-19 crisis, Navarro responded.

Thats a Big Pharma red herring designed to preserve its offshore oligopoly at the expense of American citizens.

Navarro has been working for weeks on the executive order, which may be released within days. The hope is that increasing government demand for U.S.-made products will help create a market for manufacturers to invest and to produce in the United States.

If this crisis teaches us anything at all, it is that we cannot rely on Big Pharma, which is renown already for its price gouging, to provide America with the medicines and medical supplies we urgently need from its offshored production during the China virus crisis, Navarro said.

He noted that other countries where the supply chains and plants are located are already imposing export restrictions for critically needed items. So its becoming harder for big pharmaceuticals to bring products to the United States.

Ten of the top 20 countries exporting medicines to the U.S., including four of the top five, have already imposed some form of restrictions, he said.

The executive order would ensure that government agencies, including the departments of Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Defense, buy American products.

National Security Threat

The CCP virus, commonly referred to as the novel coronavirus, has disrupted the U.S. pharmaceutical industrys global supply chain that is largely dependent on China, calling attention to a dangerous level of dependence by the United States on this global competitor.

China is the dominant supplier of thousands of medicines found in U.S. homes and hospitals, from antibiotics to chemotherapies, from HIV/AIDS drugs to antidepressants and painkillers.

Thats made the United States vulnerable to supply chain disruptions arising from the pandemic, which has alarmed Congress and the White House.

The increasing dominance of Beijing in the manufacturing of medicine poses a national security threat to the United States, Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) told The Epoch Times.

We are totally dependent on Chinacertainly the American military is, the American public equally so, he said.

The Chinese regime is the major producer of generic drugs (copies of prescription drugs that are allowed for sale after patent protections on the original drugs expire), which account for nearly 90 percent of pharmaceuticals.

China is also the dominant supplier of personal protective equipment, such as masks, respirators, surgical gowns, and gloves, which are currently in high demand.

The Chinese state-run media Global Times published an article on March 11 stating that Beijing could ban the export of face masks and other medical gear to America which are in acute shortage, over recent actions by the United States to restrict market access to Chinese telecommunications company Huawei.

The United States is dramatically dependent on China for medical supplies, according to Rosemary Gibson, a senior adviser at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, and the co-author of China Rx: Exposing the Risks of Americas Dependence on China for Medicine.

Our dependence is a risk to our national security, she told The Epoch Times.

For prescription drugs, 90 percent of the core ingredients, the chemicals, and other ingredients depend on China, she said.

Bowen Xiao contributed to this report.
L.A. County COVID-19 Update: Los Angeles Department of Mental Health discusses the psychological effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Tuesday, March 24. The director of Los Angeles Department of Mental Health, Dr. Jonathan E. Sherin reviewed the psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we practice social distancing, new mental challenges have surfaced. Dr. Sherin disclosed the resources available for all L.A. County residents, as well as the available aid throughout the region. The Public Health department also shared updates on the L.A. COVID-19 cases and over all status of the outbreak. In addition to that, on Monday, March 23. Los Angeles public officials provided updates on plans for public safety, they ensured protocols for around the clock medical services.

Dr. Sherin examined the mental strain due to the radical change in daily habits, as we respond to COVID-19. He stated, In particular with change, comes the unknown The mental health director continued by highlighting the anxiety level rising in children and those facing disability. He addressed that the impact of the Corona Virus is affecting everyone in all levels. That increase in mental strain, has triggered the countys efforts to assist in mental needs. Dr. Jonathan Sherin expressed the importance of having a sense of daily operation and sticking with a healthy routine. He shared to stay away from unhealthy practices such as excess alcohol consumption to numb your anxiety. Dr. Sherin stated with precaution, For those in need of immediate help, it is very important that you reach out and share your feelings with someone you trust He protested to stay connected, social distancing does not mean isolation. The contact information to speak to a mental health professional is 800.854.7771, they are available to accept calls and provide information around the clock.

The L.A. County city officials announced on Monday, March 23. That there are new contracts with private and public labs that will significantly increase the amount of testing available for COVID-19. During the first phase, Emergency responders and those at high risk will be tested for the severe respiratory syndrome, in addition to the first round of public patients hospitalized. Soon, the medical centers will have the capacity to test 500 patients each day. L.A. county officials are finding private and public labs that can produce more COVID-19 tests. Unfortunately, testing is still priority based. One will only be tested if they have severe symptoms or they have been around someone who has already tested positive.

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The 33rd Sheriff of Los Angeles, Alex Villanueva shared updates about his department. He disclosed how the law enforcement team will be active in the community during the outbreak of COVID-19. He ensured that the L.A. County Sheriff department is prepared. Sheriff Villanueva is the director of emergency operations for the county of Los Angeles. He is working collaboratively with other public officials in wake of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The L.A. Sheriff has activated public safety protocols to manage the Corona Virus outbreak. These protocols are aligned with The National Incident Management System (NIMS) and the California Standardized Emergency Management System. The Incident Command System Structure, known as the I.C.S. has also been activated. The Sheriff of Los Angeles reported that the LASD has dropped off a quarter of a million N-95 masks to the medical supply hub for distribution to all hospitals. Villanueva concluded that if needed, the National Guard will be assisting in Humanitarian roles, such as helping at food banks and transportation.

Director of Public Health, Barbara Ferrer shared the latest updates surrounding the COVID-19 virus. As of Monday, March 23. Over 5,700 people have been tested for the Corona Virus, and 10% tested positive for carrying COVID-19. New levels of increase revealed on Tuesday March 24. Ferrer shared that there were four additional deaths, including one that was reported by the Long beach health department Monday. This brings the total COVID-19 related deaths in the L.A. County to 11. One of the deaths being under the age of 18. Barbara disclosed that as of March 24. there are 128 new cases, bringing the total amount of cases in the L.A. County to 662. Over the last 48 hours, there has been 256 new reports. These incidents are made of 21 cases reported in Long Beach and 6 cases coming from Pasadena. The public health director shared COVID-19 data, reporting that 42% of positive carriers are between the ages of 18-40, 39% of positive cases are between the ages of 41-65, and 18% of the positive cases have been hospitalized at some point. You can check an updated status report of LA County cases every afternoon on the public health website, www.publichealth.lacounty.gov.
Marion, North Carolina--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - Greene Concepts Inc. (OTC PINK: INKW) is pleased to announce it has signed an agreement with Sunflower Consulting Group (SCG) for the purchase and sale of up to 2 million cases of the company's bottled water production during the 2020 calendar year.

As one of the two food and beverage executives who visited the company's Marion, NC bottling plant this past February, the founder and CEO of SCG, Harold Wingert, noticed substantial revenue opportunities and nationwide consumer appeal offered with Greene Concepts products and strategic plans (described in a recent company press release (here). Through a signed sales and purchase agreement, SCG has agreed to the purchase and sell to retailers up to 2 million cases of bottled water at a target price of $7.00 per case through the end of the year valued at $14 million. This equates to 25% of the company's current total production capacity of 8 million cases.

Mr. Wingert expresses, "The reception for Greene Concepts' product lines has been excellent and we wanted to lock up capacity and get this under contract as quickly as possible. I went to the bottling plant, received a tour, made an agreement, locked it in, and am ready for these inventories to fly out the door into the hands of customers. The company's products, beginning with BE WATERTM, have garnered much interest from distributors, retail chains, and end-users and Sunflower Consulting Group wants to be a part of this extraordinary endeavor. I can see all 2 million cases going really fast in the current marketplace."

Lenny Greene, CEO of Greene Concepts Inc. states, "It is wonderful to have a partner in Sunflower Consulting Group that is so invested in helping us reach the masses with our products. By locking down a sales agreement with SCG along with the current demand on bottled water nationwide, Greene Concepts is primed for tremendous success and revenues of $14 million from this venture alone. Stay tuned for more fantastic coming announcements."

About Sunflower Consulting Group:

Sunflower Consulting Group (SCG), founded by Harold Wingert, specializes in all aspects of convenience store operations: consulting, store design, operational set up and ramp up, controls, inventory, and vendor contracts. Since 1985, when Mr. Wingert bought his first store, he has been engaged in the industry in some fashion, including operations, consulting, construction, and design. Over the last 34 years he has owned and operated 8 stores, successfully sold them, and has been consulting for the past decade. SCG has the team in place to provide the level of support you desire, from concept design, through opening the store, and establishing policy and procedures. SCG will work with vendors to achieve optimal sales and manage vendor contracts to take advantage of rebates or other incentives, which will result in more profits for ownership. SCG will assist ownership in hiring and training employees, continuing education, benefits package for management, and will assist in developing an employee manual. Sunflower Consulting Group looks forward to working with you to bring your concept to reality.

https://sunflowerconsultinggroup.com/

About Greene Concepts, Inc. and Mammoth Ventures Inc.:

Greene Concepts, Inc. (http://www.greeneconcepts.com) is a publicly traded company. Through its recently acquired wholly owned subsidiary, Mammoth Ventures Inc., the Company has entered the specialty beverage and bottling business and is an emerging leader in the global scientifically formulated beverage industry.

Safe Harbor: This Press Release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements are based on the current plans and expectations of management and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks that could significantly affect the company's current plans and expectations, as well as future results of operations and financial condition. A more extensive listing of risks and factors that may affect the company's business prospects and cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements can be found in the reports and other documents filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission and OTC Markets, Inc. OTC Disclosure and News Service. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

CONTACT:

Greene Concepts, Inc.

Investor Relations

info@inkwayusa.com

Lenny Greene

lenny@greeneconcepts.com

559-434-1000

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/53833
"We Need To Return To Georgia"-Georgian Citizen in Spain about COVID-19 Outbreak - GeorgianJournal
A New York hospital system has begun treating two patients instead of one on some ventilators, a desperate measure that could help alleviate a shortage of the critical breathing machines and help hospitals around the country respond to the surge of coronavirus patients expected in the coming weeks.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, began ventilator sharing this week, said Dr. Laureen Hill, chief operating officer at the Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center system. Doctors have developed protocols for the maneuver and now are rapidly scaling it up while also sharing their methods with the federal and state governments and other hospitals.

Ventilator sharing has been explored in a few scientific studies and has been used twice in crisis situations  the immediate aftermath of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting and, as of several days ago, by an emergency physician, Dr. Marco Garrone, for coronavirus patients in Italy. This is believed to be the first time that it has been put forth as a longer-term strategy in the United States.
Day three of Gov. Tom Wolfs order shows that 13 new warnings were issued to non-life-sustaining businesses, where owners didnt close their physical location.

Enforcement of Wolfs order began on Monday. He said its necessary for specific businesses to temporarily shut down during the coronavirus pandemic as a means to slow the spread of it.

The latest numbers reported by Pennsylvania State Police are from Wednesday. Only two central Pennsylvania businesses were issued warnings, according to state police figures. And, a total of nine businesses overall in central Pennsylvania have been warned since Monday.

There have been a total of 57 warnings issued statewide, but no citations have yet to be given, police said.
A Chinese commerce official said Thursday that the country will encourage local authorities to to roll out measures to help stimulate auto sales.

To cushion the short-term impact the coronavirus outbreak has caused on auto sales, a pillar of China's consumption, local authorities could encourage purchases of new energy vehicles and unveil auto replacement policies, Ministry of Commerce official Xian Guoyi said during an online news briefing.

Auto sales in the country fell 42 percent year on year during the first two months of the year, including a 79.1-percent plunge in February, as the epidemic disrupted business activities and kept buyers at home.

Xian said as of Tuesday, 94.7 percent of the country's 4S shops had resumed operation, with 61.7 percent of buyers coming back to market, according to a survey of 8,569 4S shops by the China Automobile Dealers Association.

The epidemic will not change the long-term sound growth of China's consumer market, which Xian said would be revived as business and life gradually recovered from the epidemic shock, while the effects of the country's consumption-encouraging policies filtered through.
Miami

Florida has a message for New Yorkers: Please don't visit. And if you do, prepare to sit in quarantine or risk jail.

Hawaii, another state that thrives on tourism, is asking tourists to stay away for a month.

And Alaska is requiring a 14-day quarantine for anyone entering that state from, as Alaskans put it, "outside."

It is a rare circumstance in the United States, a country where travel between states is generally welcome and often only noticed in counts of tourism visits, that states are suddenly looking for ways to discourage residents of other states from coming into theirs.

Governors, who also now find themselves competing with one another for urgently needed medical resources like ventilators, say they are placing restrictions on visitors to save their own people, trying to prevent the contagious virus from spreading further into their states. They are on particular alert for travelers from New York City, which has far more cases than any other area in the country.

And in a spiraling health crisis that has largely been managed by individual governors rather than a cohesive federal government, there has been little to stop them from making their own rules.

On Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, signed an executive order requiring a 14-day quarantine of anyone who had arrived from the New York region over the past three weeks. All new arrivals will have to report names of people they have contact with to public health officials so they can trace those people as well, he said.

"Maybe they haven't even shown symptoms, but they could be infected," DeSantis said. "After all the hard work, we don't want it to now get seeded as people flee the hot zone."

Last week, Gov. David Ige of Hawaii, a Democrat, did the unthinkable in a state that lives on entertaining visitors by asking travelers to postpone trips for 30 days.

"The actions I'm announcing today may seem extreme to some of you, and we know that it will have negative effects to our economy. But we are confident that taking aggressive actions now will allow us to have a quicker recovery when this crisis is over," Ige said.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska, a Republican, enacted one of the strictest measures Monday when he ordered almost everyone arriving in Alaska, whether they live there or are visiting, to self-quarantine for 14 days and monitor themselves for symptoms of the virus. The state has 42 diagnosed cases  a smaller number of confirmed infections than in all but four other states  as of Wednesday morning.

"If you are a resident, your designated quarantine location is your residence," the order said. "If you are a visitor or worker, your designated quarantine location is your hotel room or rented lodging."

The aggressive quarantine measures in Florida were met with skepticism by many residents who fault the governor for taking steps aimed at arriving New Yorkers instead of adopting stricter restrictions throughout the state.

DeSantis has resisted calling on Floridians to stay in their own homes, unlike in New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, issued a statewide call for residents only to leave their homes if necessary.

Mayor Dan Gelber of Miami Beach, a Democrat whose city was the first in the state to formally issue a stay-at-home order Monday, applauded the governor's quarantine order of New Yorkers. At least 117 of Florida's more than 1,600 coronavirus cases have been linked to travel to New York, New Jersey or Connecticut, including about 11 percent of known cases in Palm Beach County.

"They're coming from an area where it seems much more rampant than here," Gelber said. "I worry that people coming here from New York are coming because they don't like the stay-at-home order and they're just looking to ride it out anywhere else. We cannot be the resort you go to right now."

A Florida Department of Health form that passengers must fill out requires passengers to list family members traveling with them and to sign a page acknowledging that violating the 14-day quarantine can be punishable with up to 60 days of prison and a $500 fine.

DeSantis said last week that he had urged President Donald Trump, who is himself a legal resident of Florida, to restrict domestic travel between New York and Florida. More than 190 daily direct flights were arriving in Florida from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, according to the governor. When no restrictions came, DeSantis said he ordered quarantines.

Historians said it was difficult to recall a time in modern U.S. history when states imposed quarantine restrictions on residents of certain other states.

David Oshinsky, a medical historian whose book "Polio: An American Story" won the Pulitzer Prize, said he was not familiar with individual states taking such measures to quarantine residents of other states. But during several polio epidemics in the 20th century, local officials forbade "outsiders" from entering their jurisdictions.

"In 1916, when newspapers blamed Italian immigrants in New York City for starting a serious polio outbreak, several surrounding municipalities used heavily armed policemen to patrol the roads and rail stations in search of fleeing New Yorkers and their children," he said.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat who has been a frequent critic of the Trump administration, said this week that he has found himself in the extraordinary position of competing against other states and federal agencies for medical supplies.

"I was on the phone yesterday talking to companies, and here's what I ran into: In one case we're competing for ventilators with FEMA and the federal government," Pritzker said. "So Illinois is bidding for ventilators against the federal government. In another case, we were bidding against foreign countries and other states."
The United States Senate, after days of discussions with the White House, on Wednesday passed an unprecedented emergency bill that would send some $2 trillion in aid to businesses, workers, state and local governments and a healthcare system overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic.

If approved by the US House of Representatives as written, it would represent the largest economic stimulus package in US history. The sprawling, 900-page measure is the third coronavirus response bill produced by Congress and by far the largest, building on earlier efforts focused on vaccines and emergency response, sick and family medical leave for workers, and food aid.

The bill now goes to the Democrat-controlled lower house for approval. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday that the House would move quickly on Friday to pass the bill and get it to President Donald Trumps desk for his signature.

Here is a breakdown of who gets what from the massive aid package.

Families and workers

The package would provide one-time direct payments of $1,200 to every American adult making less than $75,000 a year, and $2,400 to couples with household incomes below $150,000, with $500 payments for each child under the age of 17. The payments phase out for those with adjusted gross incomes over $75,000 ($150,000 for couples), and are eliminated entirely for those earning more than $99,000 for singles and $198,000 for couples.

Rules on unemployment compensation are tweaked to give workers an additional $600 per week on top of state benefits that range between $200 and $550 a week depending on the state. The federal government will add 13 weeks to the amount of time unemployed workers will be able to collect benefits. Currently, workers are allowed to collect benefits for between 12 and 28 weeks, depending on the state. Additionally, those who wouldnt normally be eligible for benefits  independent contractors, the self-employed and gig workers such as Uber drivers and delivery personnel  will be eligible.

The US Department of Education is allowing holders of federal student loans to defer payments until September 30 with no penalties, and people with 401K or retirement savings accounts would be able to withdraw funds from those accounts without paying the 10 percent penalty for early withdrawals.

The bill also bans lenders from foreclosing on federally backed mortgages through mid-May and imposes a four-month ban on evictions by landlords who rely on federal housing programmes.

The package includes nearly $25bn in food assistance, including $16bn for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, also known as food stamps, and $9bn for child nutrition programmes. Additionally, the bill provides $450m for the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which supplies food banks, $350m of which would go toward additional food and $100m of which would be channeled to distribution efforts. An additional $200m is provided for food assistance in Puerto Rico and other US territories, as well as $100m food distribution on Native American reservations.

Industries and corporations

The US Treasury Department will be authorised to provide up to $500bn in loans, loan guarantees and investments to companies both large and small. The money comes with catches, however. Businesses that receive the money may not issue dividends for up to a year beyond the date the loans are repaid, and must retain 90 percent of the employees on their payroll as of March 24 to the extent practicable through September 30. The loans must be repaid within five years. There are also limits on executive compensation at companies accepting the aid, and prohibitions on using the money for stock buy-backs.

Some of the money is directed at specific industries. Airlines, for example, will get $29bn in grants and $29bn in loans and loan guarantees, as well as a reprieve on excise and fuel taxes. Half of the money is devoted explicitly to employees wages, salaries and benefits. Strings on the assistance include limits on executive compensation and stock buy-backs.

Up to $17bn of the money is directed at companies involved in national security, which is being widely interpreted as intended for planemaker Boeing.

Farmers will get up to $14bn in aid via the Commodity Credit Corporation to offset losses in that sector. Additionally, the US Department of Agriculture will receive $9.5bn to provide emergency aid for cattle ranchers, fresh fruit and vegetable growers, and others in the agricultural sector.

One business that will not be benefitting from the package is the chain of hotels and resorts owned by Trump. Legislators inserted language into the bill that precludes companies majority-owned or controlled by any prominent figure in either the executive or legislative branches of government, including cabinet members and members of Congress, from tapping into the government loans or investments.

Small businesses

A total of $377bn has been allocated to offer loans and grants to small businesses with 500 or fewer employees. To encourage the distribution of these loans, banks would earn a 5 percent fee for making the loans. Payments can be deferred up to a year, and the loans could be partially forgiven if the money is used to pay employee salaries, rent, mortgage interest or utilities.

The bill also allocated $17bn to defer existing payments on Small Business Administration loans and $10bn in emergency grants to small businesses.

Health of the nation

The bill includes $100bn in grants for hospitals and other healthcare providers to help them cope with the crisis and to make up for revenue they lost by delaying other procedures. They will also receive a 20 percent increase in Medicare payments for treating patients with the virus.

As much as $45bn is directed at the US Federal Emergency Management Agencys Disaster Relief Fund for state and local efforts to combat the virus, including for protective equipment.

State and local governments

State and local governments will get $150bn to cover costs associated with the virus, to be distributed based on each states proportion of the total US population. No state shall receive less than $1.25bn, and local governments that serve populations of more than 500,000 will be eligible.

State and local governments will also receive $400m in grants to cover the costs of shifting elections away from polling centres to remote methods such as voting by mail.

Some $30bn in aid is directed toward the education sector, including colleges and universities and local school districts.
EDITORS NOTE: This story is part of a trio of stories in the Intelligencer examining the impact of COVID-19 on the music business in Madison County.

EDWARDSVILLE  For local music-related businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a major blow to musicians, employees and customers alike.

Like many other retailers across the state, Swing City Music in Edwardsville and Collinsville temporarily closed its doors at 5 p.m. Saturday as a non-essential business in order to comply with Gov. J.B. Pritzkers stay-at-home order for Illinois residents.

We have a lot of customers who are musicians and many of them came in today and said they lost jobs for live shows not only for this week and last week but for the next few months, said Swing City general manager Art Risavy, who is an Edwardsville alderman.

So many places that hire musicians have just shut down, and it affects not only the people who work at restaurants and bars, but the people who play music at those places have basically lost all of their income.

While Swing City will maintain its online presence, the business will still pay a heavy price due to the pandemic.

The two stores combined will have to lay off 15 full-time employees, but Risavy said they should be eligible for unemployment benefits and any other emergency benefits that may be offered by the state and federal governments.

Its unfortunate, but its the only thing we can do at this point, said Risavy, who hopes to rehire those employees when the stores are allowed to reopen.

Swing City also has 20 music teachers, but they are employed on a per-lesson basis.

More Information RESOURCES The administration has worked to expand unemployment insurance to cover individuals who are unable to work due to COVID-19. For more information on unemployment insurance, go to the Illinois Department of Employment Security website. Here is a list of some other small business resources to help with coronavirus impacts:  U.S. Chamber of Commerce - https:// www.uschamber.com/coronavirus  National Restuarant Association - https:// restaurant.org/Covid19  U.S. Small Business Administration Economic Injury Disaster Loans - https://www.sba.gov/disaster-assistance/coronavirus-covid-19 See More Collapse

Were definitely concerned not only about us but all of the other small businesses in the area, Risavy said. The fact that we are going to be shut down, even if it is for the safety of our citizens, is obviously going to affect a lot of employees.

At Mojos Music in downtown Edwardsville, owner Tom Pullen faced a similar dilemma as his store also closed its doors at 5 p.m. Sunday.

While Mojos has shut down its retail operations, Pullen has to make sure that the stores vast inventory will be kept safe for when the doors open again.

The retail space cant be opened, but I need to come down and keep the humidification up and things like that to make sure the guitars are OK, Pullen said. Proper maintenance is going to be the key during these times. I cant just lock it up and come back two weeks later.

Pullen, who has only two employees, is not expecting any layoffs at this point.

Im giving them paid leave for the first two weeks and I think were pretty well set to weather the storm, Pullen said. We dont have a ton of salary to cover at the moment and we do a good bit of online business. If this goes long term, well obviously have to reassess the situation, but for now, were alright.

Risavy, in addition to his own business at Swing City Music, is worried about what the future holds for many of his customers.

For many of these people, music is their livelihood, Risavy said. My dad was a musician for so many years and he kept in touch with those musicians, and a lot of those people still come into the store. They are devastated by what has happened and I tell them to keep their heads up and hunker down and try to make it through.

But so many of them are not sure what is going to happen when things come back (after the quarantine). There are so many concerns about businesses not even opening back up after they get through this.

As Mojos Music prepared to close its doors on Saturday, business was brisk.

And it wasnt just professional musicians buying new instruments to practice while staying at home.

Weve had quite a few last-minute stockpilers and weve sold quite a few ukuleles, Pullen said. People who are figuring if they are going to be stuck on the couch for two or three weeks, they may as well learn to play an instrument.

Some veteran musicians who are not gigging right now are doing some maintenance. Ive had several guitars come in to have us do some work on them.

To keep as much of its business operating as possible, Swing City is increasing the amount of online music lessons it offers.

Tara Wright, our lessons coordinator in Collinsville, and Carrie Henrichs-Albaugh, our lessons coordinator in Edwardsville, are transitioning our students to online lessons so they can take them from their house, Risavy said. Its something fun for kids or adults to do while things are shut down and everybody is at home.

Pullen is following a similar business plan at Mojos Music.

All of our teachers have taken their lesson programs online and they are now doing them on FaceTime so people can continue to learn during the crisis, Pullen said.

In the age of Amazon, online sales were already important for local music retailers such as Swing City Music and Mojos Music.

But with customers not having the option of the stores in person, attracting potential buyers to the store websites is more important than ever.

Our online presence is going to stay up and running and Im offering free shipping on anything that is $100 or more, Pullen said. Im going to keep Facebook posts going and keep the online community side of things going just so people dont have to focus solely on the virus.

At Bird Cloud Recording, located above Mojos Music at 144A N. Main St. in Edwardsville, it has pretty much been business as usual.

For a while, at least, Bird Cloud owner Ryan Wasoba expects that to continue.

My personal music income comes from two places  the studio, which is the main source, and my band, which does weddings and private events and things like that, Wasoba said. Those gigs are out for the unforeseeable future, but I havent been freaking out as much as a lot of my friends and peers because the studio, as of now, hasnt been affected by this.

For me, a big session with a lot of people is like five people, which is still within the realm of what is allowed. But as the income of my client base disappears, Im anticipating that Im going to see fewer bookings.

Wasoba is more concerned about the fate of his fellow local musicians and the venues they play at.

For the music venues, it has been like being kicked over and over again, Wasoba said. At first, everyone started canceling their tours, so the venues were trying to do different things to respond to that.

Its not an easy life in the first place (operating a music venue), but theyre getting kicked a little harder than usual.
Victoria's Secret's newest catch Helena Christensen cheered herself up by collecting a bunch of fresh flowers on Thursday morning while New York is in the grip of a coronavirus outbreak.

The 51-year-old Danish native, who has been staying with her son Mingus, 20, and friend Camilla Staerk, appeared to be taking a break from her 'mountain isolation spot.'

After leaving Upstate New York for a trip to the city, Christensen appeared relaxed in a pair of light-wash overalls, Golden Goose Slide trainers and no makeup on her Thursday stroll.

Big Apple: Danish supermodel Helena Christensen was seen carrying some fresh flowers in New York City, after leaving her 'mountain isolation spot' on Thursday amid the coronavirus pandemic

While the brunette bombshell flaunted her phenomenal figure in a skimpy black swimsuit earlier this week, she hid her body under an over-sized knit black sweater and a massive scarf.

In a reserved move, she kept her signature brown tresses slicked into a ponytail and carried some freshly cut flowers in a vase.

Her outing comes after posting a few sexy snaps on Instagram from her Catskills home in upstate New York, which showed her love for nature.

Trendy: After leaving Upstate New York for a trip to the city, Christensen appeared relaxed in a pair of light-wash overalls, Golden Goose Slide trainers and no makeup for a Thursday stroll

New VS pinup: Earlier this month, she was featured in a more inclusive Victoria's Secret campaign and even served as a photographer on the shoot

More inclusive: Helena is seen second from left. Also in the lineup is plus size model Candice Huffine and the more natural looking Solange van Doorn. The brand also featured the stunning Valentina Sampaio (second from right), who is transgender

In a series of striking images, Helena was clad in plunging one-piece, with a thong cut, as she posed up a storm whilst paddling in a riverbed.

The mother-of-one also gave her followers a look at her breathtaking surroundings in a series of stunning images, as she revealed snow had begun to fall on the mountainside.

Helena fled to the mountainside with her son and pal amid advice to practise self-distancing and social isolation to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Staying safe: Helena fled to the mountainside with her son and pal amid advice to practise self-distancing and social isolation to slow the spread of COVID-19

The former Victoria's Secret Angel revealed she would be using the time to work on her designs, as she runs a clothing line with friend Camilla.

In a post on their business page, the pals penned: 'Dear Friends.. Sending love and thoughts to you from our mountain isolation spot in Upstate NY.

'Navigating this surreal time is challenging for us all, but at least we are in this together. Wanted to share how grateful we are for family, friendships and our incredible team and partners.

Working remotely: The former Victoria's Secret Angel revealed she would be using the time to work on her designs, as she runs a clothing line with friend Camilla

'Being in nature always makes us feel creative and we have been thinking about how to keep the wheels moving and help our fellow NYers...'

Helena has also been spending some quality time with son Mingus, who she shares with ex Norman Reedus.

Mingus, who is with the Unsigned Group modelling agency, has made a name for himself after walking in several high profile runway shows.

Bonding: Helena has also been spending some quality time with son Mingus, who she shares with ex Norman Reedus

Earlier this month, she was featured in a more inclusive Victoria's Secret campaign and even served as a photographer on the shoot.

The lineup includes plus size model Candice Huffine and the more natural looking Solange van Doorn. The brand also featured the stunning Valentina Sampaio, who is transgender.

The company has been trying to become more diverse after Rihanna's more body accepting brand Savage x Fenty took off. Also nipping at their heals is Kim Kardashian's SKIMS brand which comes in sizes up to 4X.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.-- With the number of people in the city testing positive for coronavirus (COVID-19) growing by the day -- 84 members of the FDNY have tested positive for the virus, according to an FDNY spokesman.

The number of FDNY employees who have tested positive has almost doubled since yesterday, when FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro stated during an interview on Fox News that 46 members had tested positive for coronavirus.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***

According to a spokesman for the FDNY, the department has taken several countermeasures to ensure that the virus isnt transmitted.

Firefighters in each firehouse are broken up into four shifts. Each shift will work a 24-hour tour and each firefighter will only work with those people who are on their shift in order to avoid transmission of the virus. By having firefighters constantly work with the same people, the Fire Department says the risk of transmission is much lower.

If a firefighter on a shift tests positive for coronavirus, it then falls on the firefighters who were working with the infected firefighter to self-monitor and self-report daily data about whether they are feeling sick or showing any symptoms of the coronavirus.

A firefighter who spoke with the Advance/SILive.com said the department has set unrealistic standards and guidelines when it comes to preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

Theres some concern in the firehouse because certain equipment isnt really our own equipment, its equipment on the truck that we all share and some of the equipment has to do with the breathing apparatus," said a firefighter, who requested not to be named. We can easily get the virus. Were sort of left for dead, at this point. Its kind of like theyre telling us if we get it, we have to deal with it.

When the Advance/SILive.com reached out to the FDNY about its cleaning policy, we were told that the department is following CDC guidelines and is monitoring each case independently to curb the spread of the virus. Firefighters are told to wipe down commonly used surfaces with a bleach or alcohol solution regularly.

Firefighters are also told to regularly decontaminate protective equipment after its used on a job.

We were also told that FDNY officials are looking into contracting out cleaning of their firehouses to professionals in order to ensure firefighter safety and minimize possible contact with the virus.

On Tuesday, the NYPD announced that more than 200 employees have tested positive for coronavirus.

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The Pune police have decided to



issue passes to delivery boys of e-commerce companies to facilitate easy movement of essential goods and medicines ordered by customers during the ongoing lockdown.

E-commerce companies which are into home delivery of essential goods, groceries, vegetables, meat, food and medicines will get the passes, officials said on Thursday.

The decision has been taken to ensure people don't have to step out of their houses during the coronavirus- enforced lockdown and the objective of social distancing is achieved, they said.

"In our prohibitory orders, we had given exemption to e-commerce sites which are into home delivery of essential items.

"But as police force on the ground did not have information about some home delivery sites, some issues had cropped and representatives of all these firms were in touch with us," said Joint Commissioner of Police Ravindra Shisave.

He said to bring some co-ordination, a meeting was called where representatives of several firms which are into home delivery such as Big Basket, Grofers, Dunzo, Swiggy and Zomato, among others, were invited.

"We have decided to issue passes to their delivery boys so that they don't face any problem while delivering goods and essential items.

"Instructions have been issued to all these companies to ensure their delivery boys maintain hygiene by using sanitisers, masks and other measures of social distancing so they don't become targets of (virus) transmission," he said.

Police stations and nakabandi (check) points in the city have been informed about the decision, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The basics of a "shelter-in-place" order during the coronavirus pandemic are fairly clear: Stay at home.

But as cities, states and the federal government take increasingly aggressive moves to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, the precise details of a "shelter-in-place" order and its many exceptions for "essential activities" may soon become familiar to millions of Americans across the country.

Already, nearly 7 million people living in a wide swath of Northern California are under a "shelter-in-place" order, which began Monday night.

And Tuesday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio urged New Yorkers to prepare for the possibility that there could be a shelter-in-place order within the next two days. Whether that actually happens remains unclear, though. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose approval would be required for such a move, has repeatedly downplayed such a move.

A growing number of countries have also imposed lockdowns that effectively shut down public life, but the details of such lockdowns vary dramatically. For example, Italy banned all public gatherings and set a 6 p.m. curfew but allowed travel for work or health reasons, while in China, millions of residents are restricted from even going to shop for groceries.

What exactly is "essential?"

The "shelter-in-place" order that San Francisco adopted has fairly large exemptions for health, work, food and even exercise.

There, city officials ordered residents to remain in place at their homes except for essential activities, essential business, and essential government functions, including:

Tasks essential to maintain health and safety, such as obtaining medicine or seeing a doctor.

Getting necessary services or supplies for themselves or their family or household members, such as getting food and supplies, pet food and supplies necessary for staying at home.

Engaging in outdoor activity, such as walking, hiking or running provided that they maintain at least 6 feet of social distancing.

Caring for a family member in another household.

Caring for elderly, minors, dependents, people with disabilities or other vulnerable persons.

The shelter-in-place order also does not apply to those going to work in an essential business or essential government function. That includes:

Health care operations, including home health workers.

Essential Infrastructure, including construction of housing and operation of public transportation and utilities.

Grocery stores, farmers' markets, food banks, convenience stores.

Businesses that provide necessities of life for economically disadvantaged individuals and shelter facilities.

Pharmacies, health care supply stores and health care facilities.

Gas stations and auto repair facilities.

Banks.

Garbage collection.

Hardware stores, plumbers, electricians and other service providers necessary to maintain the safety, sanitation and essential operation of residences and other essential businesses.

Educational institutions, for the purposes of facilitating distance learning.

Laundromats, dry cleaners and laundry service providers.

Businesses that ship or deliver groceries, food and goods directly to residences.

Child care facilities providing services that enable essential employees to go to work.

Roles required for any essential business to "maintain basic operations," which include security, payroll and similar activities.

The Northern California shelter-in-place order applied to San Francisco and Berkeley as well as residents in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Marin, Alameda, and Contra Costa counties, per the order from health officers of those jurisdictions.

"We must move aggressively and immediately," San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said at a news conference announcing the order. "The time for half measures is over. History will not forgive us for waiting an hour more."
Pollution has declined in some European cities as many countries have ground to a halt in efforts to battle the coronavirus outbreak.

Satellite images show nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations from 10 March to 22 March, compared to the same period last year.

NO2, represented by the colour density on the maps, is shown to be in lower concentrations this month across Europe. The maps show noticeable differences in Essen, Germany; Granada, Spain and Russias capital, Moscow.

According to United Nations data as of Wednesday, Spain has 39,673 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 2,696 deaths while Germany has 31,554 confirmed cases and 149 deaths. The Russian Federation has 658 confirmed cases and no deaths.

The analyses of NO2 emissions were provided to The Independent by Descartes Labs, a geospatial analysis group. The images, using the European Space Agencys Sentinel-5P satellite data, represent weighted mean NO2 concentrations.

Marshall Burke, a professor at the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford University, who reviewed the data for The Independent said: I think they show pretty clearly that air pollution has declined as a result of the epidemic.

In an article he wrote earlier this month, Mr Burke noted that air pollution in China caused by economic disruption likely saved twenty times more lives in China than have currently been lost directly due to infection with the virus in that country.

But he made clear that [N]one of my calculations support any idea that pandemics are good for health.

Europe has been hit hard by the Covid-19 outbreak as thousands more cases are reported daily. Some countries like Italy, the country with the highest death toll, along with France, Spain and Germany imposed lock-down measures earlier this month to try to limit the spread of the virus. The British government ordered a lock-down on March 23.

Satellite images show nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations from 10 March to 22 March, 2019 in Essen (Descartes Labs)

Satellite images show nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations from 10 March to 22 March, 2019 in Essen (Descartes Labs)

Satellite images show nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations from 10 March to 22 March, 2020 in Essen (Descartes Labs)

Russian president Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that the country had managed to restrain the spread of the virus while Moscows mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, warned that the number of sick was larger than official figures, ordering the citys residents over 65 to stay home from Thursday, the New York Times reported. 

Similar analyses were also provided to The Independent of NO2 emissions for US cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Nitrogen dioxide levels in the atmosphere in part come from cars, trucks, buses and power plants, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The air pollutant forms when fossil fuels like coal, oil, gas or diesel are burned at high temperatures. Along with other nitrogen oxides, NO2 contributes to particle pollution in the air.

It can cause a range of health issues, according to the American Lung Association, including increased inflammation of airways; cough and wheezing and reduced lung function. The group also points to new research which warns NO2 to be the likely cause of asthma in children.

Satellite images show nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations from 10 March to 22 March, 2020 in Moscow (Descartes Labs)
MIDDLETOWN  After serving residents of the 33rd District for nearly 28 years, state Rep. Joseph Serra, D-Middletown, announced Wednesday hes not running for reelection.

Theres a time when you know its time  and it was time, said Serra, who has worked with every Connecticut governor since Lowell Weicker. He was very close with Gov. William A. ONeill, and developed relationships with others, such as Ella Grasso, John Dempsey, and M. Jodi Rell while she was a state representative from Brookfield.

Serra, 79, who grew up on High Street with his late brother, former common councilman Thomas Serra, who died of cancer in February 2019, has been toying with the idea of retirement during the entire past legislative term: On and off, on and off.

Between January and June, you really cant go anywhere. In the short session, its February to May, and then theres always special sessions, Serra said, acknowledging how hard his hours have been on his family over the past three decades.

He is a lifelong resident of Middletown, and has served on the citys Democratic Town Committee since 1984, with a long career in public service prior to running for the 33rd District seat in 1992.

Serra is House chairman of the Aging Committee, and member of both the Transportation Committee and Public Safety and Security Committee. The legislator served the Middletown Department of Public Works for 37 years, starting in 1959. He was appointed deputy director in 1979, and held that position until he retired in August 1996.

Starting off his career working for the city, Serra never imagined hed eventually spend nearly 30 years in public office. Whether you like politics or not, youre affected by it. I was very interested while young, he said.

His curiosity began when he enrolled in the mayor for a day program through Middletown High School. I got my first taste of that, Serra said.

When he graduated, Serra immediately went to work. He was assigned to an engineering survey crew in Middletown, which afforded him connections with the likes of business people, architects, lawyers and others in the field.

He went back to school at Middlesex Community College then graduated from the University of Hartford with a bachelors degree in business and public administration.

Serra is most proud of several accomplishments, including the formation of Middletowns first enterprise zone, which affected the North End by way of the former Remington Rand building. They got a benefit in funding.

Hes long worked on issues affecting seniors, and is credited with bringing free television to nursing homes years back. Prior to the legislation, convalescent homes in Connecticut would charge for the service. The courtesy has since been extended to hospitals.

Serra also was instrumental in getting a law passed that allows health insurance companies to approve eyedrop prescriptions for those with macular degeneration and other issues before a months time: if you run out before the 30 days, because half of it goes down your cheek. Even if you run out at 24, 25 days, [pharmacies] have to refill it.

Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Serra was working to increase the personal needs allowance for seniors in convalescent homes, now capped at $60 a month. Thats for toiletries, snacks, haircuts. It allows more purchasing power for bare necessities, said Serra, who worked with Sen. Kevin Kelly, R-Stratford, on the legislation.

Theyre hoping to raise the amount to $72.

The first thing the governors people would say to us is, where are you going to cut to make that up? Thats worth between $800,000 and $1 million. In the grand scheme of a $20 billion budget, thats really nothing. But we had a way of being able to leverage federal funds to pay for this, said Serra, who is hopeful the bill eventually will pass.

Serra was instrumental in having turn lanes added to the intersection of Boston and Old Mill roads, and Washington Street/Route 66 in Middletown: a very busy area. There were always rear-end crashes there, he explained.

Mayor Ben Florsheim said he knew Serra was contemplating the move, but didnt know he had made a final decision not to run again.

Hes certainly an institution in Middletown politics for as long as Ive been involved, and a great deal longer. He and his brother, and his family have an incredible legacy of public service. It doesnt come as a huge surprise, but its a surprise, nevertheless, the mayor said.

I know hell continue to be involved and available. We wish him the absolute best. Its well-deserved after such a long distinguished career in the legislature. He has big shoes to fill, Florsheim said.

Portland First Selectwoman Susan Bransfield was sad to learn the news, saying she and the entire town will miss Serra.

Rep. Serras long tenure in the legislature is marked by an unwavering commitment to serving his beloved hometown of Middletown, and a dedication to helping all of his constituents any way he could, Speaker of the House Joe Aresimowicz, D-Berlin, said in a statement. Though we will miss our colleague, Joe Serra set an example for all of us on what public service is all about.

Representative Joe Serra and the entire Serra family are dedicated to the people and places of Middletown. Joes commitment to his constituents is legendary. He is truly part of the fabric of Middletown, House Majority Leader Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said in the release.

I always say, I was born and raised here and Im not leaving. Ill be around, Serra said.

Serra is looking forward to spending more time with his wife, Marie, children and seven grandchildren. Hes certain his late brother would support the decision.

He would be happy for me. We would have spent a little more time together, too. Thats my only brother. Ill never get over that, the lawmaker said. My brother and I went out of our way to make sure Middletown was protected.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 09:13:59|Editor: Yurou

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Photo taken on March 26, 2020 shows an empty street in Wellington, New Zealand. New Zealand recorded 78 new confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, the first day of the national lockdown, bringing the total number of confirmed and probable cases to 283. (Xinhua/Guo Lei)

WELLINGTON, March 26 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand recorded 78 new confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, the first day of the national lockdown, bringing the total number of confirmed and probable cases to 283.

Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield told a press conference that 27 people have recovered.

Among the newly discovered cases, seven people are hospitalized, but none of them are in intensive care units.

Bloomfield said some of the new cases are related to overseas travel and previous mass gatherings, such as the World Hereford Conference in Queenstown, a wedding in Wellington, and a group trip to the United States.

Police Commissioner Mike Bush said those returning to New Zealand from overseas on Thursday without a plan for isolation have been sent to self-isolation locations by customs and police officers.

New Zealand declared a state of emergency on Wednesday before entering a national lockdown on Thursday.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  Rep. Henry Villarica of Bulacan's 4th District tested positive for COVID-19 Thursday, according to House Secretary General Jose Luis Montales.

Villarica last reported for work on March 4, and was admitted to the hospital on March 12 for pneumonia, according to Montales. He also said the legislator is now in stable condition.

It was reported that Villarica attended an event hosted by Baliuag Mayor Ferdie Estrella, who was tested positive on March 8.

Members of Villarica's staff have not exhibited any symptoms, Montales noted.

Seven more people have died from the coronavirus disease in the country, bringing the death toll to 45, the Department of Health said on Thursday.

Eight in ten, or around 80 percent, of infected patients experience "mild illness" and eventually recover from COVID-19, according to the World Health Organization. Some 15 percent experience severe illness while five percent become critically ill, the WHO added.

To prevent the spread of the virus, authorities are urging people to practice regular hand washing, cover their mouth and nose when coughing and sneezing, and avoid close contact with those who exhibit virus symptoms.
American media persoanlity Kourteney Kardashian has explained why she deleted her son Mason Disick's Instagram account.

On Tuesday, Mason appeared to join the social media platform, and even started an Instagram Live and answered rumors about Kylie Jenner's relationship with Travis Scott. But the account mysteriously vanished soon afterwards, reported People magazine.

During a Poosh Instagram Live session with her friend Sarah Howard on Wednesday, Kourtney shared that 10-year-old Mason whom she shares with ex Scott Disick along with daughter Penelope and son Reign didn't ask his parents for permission before creating an account on the social media platform.

"He started an Instagram yesterday and didn't ask us. I did delete it because Scott and I just felt like... He's 10. I think there's an age limit with Instagram. I think it's... 13," Kourtney shared.

Pointing out the negative effects of social media the Poosh founder added: "I think on Instagram, the thing that really worries me with kids is just comments. People can be so mean. It's really easy to get consumed with it. I just feel it's not the time."

"I made it private and then Mason turned it back to public without me knowing... so I just deleted it. It's gone, it's deleted," Kardashian said.

Previously Kourtney has mentioned that she wouldn't call herself a 'strict' mom, but that "I love to communicate with my kids, and I constantly check in and try to talk things through instead.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Residents and visitors decided to make their way to Ocean City beaches and the boardwalk Thursday, even after warnings from officials telling them to stay away to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.

The boardwalk and beaches were shut down Wednesday after Ocean City Mayor Jay Gillian utilized a state administrative order allowing Shore towns to place restrictions on those locations.

Despite the decree to stay away from the area, several people were still out on the boardwalk, biking, jogging, and strolling along during the sun-drenched Thursday afternoon. People were also on the beach, including one family with children playing in the sand.

At 2:18 p.m., a message came across the loudspeakers asking everyone to leave.

The beach and the boardwalk are closed to the public until further notice, the voice spoke through the speakers. Please exit at the nearest ramp. Thank you for your understanding during this public health crisis.

A bicyclist rides up the ramp to the Ocean City Boardwalk, past a vacant police car, the day after the city announced it was closed due to the coronavirus scare, Thursday, March 26, 2020.Tim Hawk | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Some refused to comply.

Ocean City resident Ed Steinberg told NJ Advance Media that someone had told him that the boardwalk was closed, but the city was not enforcing the measure. Steinberg said he takes the virus very seriously, and if a patrolman came and told him to get off the boardwalk, he would.

If they told me to get off, I would get off, Steinberg said while shrugging his shoulders. It is a beautiful day. If they are going to close the boardwalk, then let them close Acme, Shop Rite, and every other thing.

Fellow Ocean City resident Victoria Kesen said she did not know about the boardwalk closure. While walking with her dog Sky, Kesen questioned the measure.

I pay taxes, so I want to walk the boardwalk, Kesen said. Where do my taxes go?

Visiting from nearby Somers Point, Lee lapetina was walking off the beach. An Ocean City beach regular, Iapetina said the boardwalk and other open-air places should not be closed because of the fresh air.

Nobody is coming here in droves, Iapetina said. Lots of people were on the Ninth Street Bridge today, and they were not six-feet apart.

A woman walks past the Fudge Kitchen, which is closed, on the Ocean City Boardwalk the day after the city announced it was closed due to the coronavirus scare, Thursday, March 26, 2020.Tim Hawk | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Officials have reiterated that the closures are meant to curb the spread of the coronavirus, which as of Thursday in New Jersey had infected 6,876 people, resulting in 81 fatalities.

Ocean City spokesman Doug Bergen said city officials are discussing ways to discourage people from heading to the beach and how to enforce the ban, especially with warmer weather potentially bringing bigger crowds to Shore towns.

The key message is that, during this public health crisis, Ocean City will not be open for business as usual, said Bergen.

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More than a staggering 500,000 people have been infected by the coronavirus across the world while at least 22,000 have died as the Covid-19 pandemic continued to batter Europe and the US.

On the European continent, Italy and Spain reported 662 and 498 single-day deaths respectively on Thursday, while across the Atlantic, the US saw its death toll shoot past 1,000. More than 15,000 new infections were confirmed in the US over a 24-hour period.

China, Italy, the US, Spain and Germany are now the five worst-hit nations in terms of confirmed cases. Spain reported 498 new fatalities on Thursday as its death toll climbed to 4,145, while the Netherlands confirmed more than 1,000 new cases -and 78 single-day deaths.

In the UK, the streets are empty but hospitals are filling up to the extent that health officials describe the registration of new cases as a continuous tsunami. Deaths in the UK rose to 477 and close to 10,000 cases have been reported.

Britain brought in tough measures on Thursday to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The new powers allow police to issue instant fines to those who leave their homes without good reason or gather in groups of more than two people.

As the US continued to witness an exponential increase in the number of cases, White House experts warned of a second wave that could come later in the year as demonstrated by previous pandemics of this magnitude.

Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, at a daily briefing, spoke of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that had killed 50 million people worldwide. That epidemic had come in three waves.

Anthony Fauci, another member of the task force, said the coronavirus could become a seasonal cyclic thing.

These warnings came as the US continued to deal with a ballooning crisis that caused 1,080 deaths until Thursday and infected over 70,000 people.

New York City continued to be the hardest hit with at least 280 reported dead. The spiralling cases are severely straining medical supplies such as ventilators and masks and hospital beds, despite government support.

New York state has had the highest number of confirmed cases with more than 33,000, which was nearly half of the nationwide cases, with nearly 400 deaths. The adjoining state of New Jersey is next with over 4,400 cases, followed by California with more than 3,100 cases and Washington with 2,600 cases.

New Orleans, where large crowds celebrated Mardi Gras a month ago, was on track to become the next US epicentre, as Louisianas Gulf Coast metropolis recorded the worlds highest growth rate in cases.

In new restrictions ordered to slow down and stop the spread of the coronavirus, the Pentagon on Wednesday barred all overseas travel for its troops for the next 60 days. The purpose is to make sure that were not bringing the virus back home, infecting others, that were not spreading it around the military, US defence secretary Mark Esper said. He added that an exception would be made for the drawdown under way in Afghanistan.
Gold and silver have become the new toilet paper in Australia as investors pile into coins and bullion as a safe haven during the coronavirus panic.

'Everyone is going bananas for gold and silver and we've seen a lot of excitement around rare coins, too,' said Numismatist Matthew Thompson of Downies Coins and Collectables in Melbourne.

Demand has surged with a 200 percent increase in inquiries for both bullion and rare coins, he said.

Buyers have cleared out most of the shop's stock of gold and silver coins and bullion.

Numismatist Matthew Thompson (pictured) of Downies Coins and Collectables in Melbourne with a display case that is normally full of gold coins. Demand is surging from investors who want to put their wealth into tangible assets to protect against a falling Australian dollar

'I have literally no bulk silver and only a handful of gold coins in the shop right now,' Mr Thompson said.

'Normally these display cases are full,' he said, holding up a large black display case with just three coins.

'It's crazy at the moment, many dealers are completely cleaned out of physical stock.

Retail investors are turning to precious metals seeking a store of value as the Australian dollar drops below US60c.

Because bullion is in short supply- with silver almost unobtainable by some dealers - retail customers are turning to collectibles instead.

Gold bullion is in great demand right now and so is silver bullion, and silver is harder to get A disconnect has opened between retail demand and paper gold trading in the futures and ETF markets where hedge funds have sold down positions to pay those who are cashing out

Mr Thompson said there was a lot of excitement around high-end rarities like the 1930 penny, with the shop having one specimen for sale at $27,500.

'A lot of our clients are also diving into the rare coins, as many people like the idea of having a diversified portfolio,' Mr Thompson said.

The surge in demand for physical gold and silver around the world has taken off with safe haven buying resulting in precious metals being sold out and world gold markets stressed.

Goldman Sachs told investors on Tuesday it was now time to buy gold as the currency of last resort, Marketwatch.com reported.

'We have long argued that gold is the currency of last resort, acting as a hedge against currency debasement when policy makers act to accommodate shocks such as the one being experienced now,' said Goldman Sachs analysts led by Jeffrey Currie.

Retail investors across Europe and the US have rushed to buy up bars and coins to protect their money from fiat currency devaluation and stock market plunges caused by the economic impacts of the coronavirus.

The Financial Times reported a growing global shortage of gold bars as Europe's largest gold refineries in the Swiss region of Ticino near the Italian border have been caught up in the pandemic shutdown.

The gold price hit a seven-year high on March 9 of more than US$1700 a troy ounce.

Sanitizers at the Swiss-Italian border checkpoint in Chiasso, Switzerland. Coronavirus has disrupted production at Europe's largest refineries in Ticino, near the Italian border

At the same time that retail demand has surged, hedge funds have been selling down the metal in order to pay off redemptions as investors cash out.

Much of the selling has been seen in the paper gold markets - the futures and exchanged traded funds - instead of the physical metal.

This has led to a disconnect between gold futures and the spot price of the physical metal with the gap between futures on the Comex exchange in New York and the London spot price widening to almost $80 an ounce - or four percent - on Tuesday.

This rare 1930 penny is selling for $27,500. Downies Coins and Collectables numismatist Matthew Thompson said high-end coins such as this are now in high demand as customers want to protect their wealth during uncertain times

Retail dealers round the world have reported delays of up to 15 days on shipments.

Rob Halliday-Stein, founder of UK online bullion dealer BullionbyPost, told the Financial Times the demand was like the toilet paper craze.

'Basically we're selling as soon as we get stock on location in secure vaults  but we're restricted to what we can get hold of. It's a bit like toilet roll,'

In Australian dollars, the gold price was at $2708.95 early on Thursday morning, Kitco.com reported.

The Australian dollar was sitting at US59.6c on xe.com as of 9am Australian Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday.
The UN Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, called for a total ceasefire in Syria to combat the potentially deadly coronavirus writes Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.

The United Nations on Tuesday called for a total ceasefire in Syria and for the release of tens thousands of detainees and abductees, as coronavirus threatens to wreak catastrophe on the war-torn country.

The UN Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, called on all sides to launch an all-out effort to combat the potentially deadly virus, after Damascus recorded its first case of coronavirus on Sunday.

He also called for the large-scale releases of detainees and abductees who are particularly vulnerable to the disease, living in cramped and crowded prisons, often starved and in poor health.

Medical experts fear Syria could be one of the countries worst-hit by COVID-19, due to war and instability, a breakdown in healthcare, and millions living in crowded refugee camps.

Syrians are acutely vulnerable to COVID-19. Healthcare facilities have been destroyed or are degraded. There is a shortage of key medical equipment and health professionals, he said in a statement.

To confront this danger, the long-suffering Syrian people desperately need a sustained period of calm throughout the country respected by all parties.

After weeks of denials of a coronavirus outbreak in Syria, Damascus recorded its first case on Sunday.

It comes after weeks of reports of army officers from Iran  which has seen tens thousands of cases  and Tehran-linked militia fighters in Syria had contracted the disease.

There have also been reports of coronavirus among civilians and officials in regime areas, where governance is poor and hospitals are starved of funds.

The 100-bed Al-Zabadani Hospital in the Damascus suburbs  with an eight bed ICU unit and four ventilators  has been designated as the key isolation and treatment centre for the more than 10 million people living in regime areas.

Most concerning for medical experts are the some 100,000 detainees in regime jails, where torture is rampant, rations are at starvation levels, and prisoners are packed like sardines.

Detainees immune systems are already broken due to torture, starvation and a variety of sicknesses caused by the conditions in their cells, he told The New Arab.

Also of concern are the more than 1 million recently displaced Syrians in opposition Idlib province, where camps are overrun and medical facilities unable to cope with a pandemic.

Hospitals and clinics in the opposition province have also been destroyed in a systematic campaign of air strikes by Russia and the Syrian regime.

The World Health Organisation is sending testing kits to northwestern Syria, which is home to around 4 million Syrians, as the International Rescue Committee warns that an outbreak in Idlib could be the worst the world has seen.

Despite the calls for calm, Syrian regime forces launched a barrage of rockets on Idlib villages this week, threatening an already shaky ceasefire.

More than 500,000 people have died in Syrias war, which has seen around half the population displaced and whole towns and cities completely destroyed  mostly due to regime bombing and shelling.

The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
Panic gripped Kashmir late on Wednesday night after there were untimely 'azaans from mosques at several places across the valley amid the lockdown imposed to check the spread of coronavirus.

Some people reached their nearby mosques while many prayed at their homes after the 'azaans' at 10 pm on Wednesday, officials said.

A religious organisation in Pakistan had reportedly asked Muslims across the world to come out of their houses and offer prayers at around 10 pm.

The people who had reached the mosques stayed there for some time and later returned to their homes, officials said.

Meanwhile, in view of the coronavirus scare and gatherings at mosques on Wednesday night, the authorities appealed to the people not to gather at religious places and stay home.

"Prayers are equally effective from home as they would be from a religious place. Don't call people out when everyone in world is #StayingHomeNow," district magistrate Srinagar Shahid Choudhary said on Twitter.

He said closing of religious places, which attract gatherings, is an important step to save a whole population.

"Let's stay indoors, stay safe to be able to worship again," he said.

Later, Choudhary said managements of various religious places had cooperated with the administration and closed the places.

"Closure of all religious places in #Srinagar is under way. With active cooperation of Managenent committees. Revered shrines Hazratbal, Naqshband Saheb show the way. #StayAtHome," he said in another tweet.

"Dastgeer Saheb, Gurudwara Saheb Chhati Padshahi and others. Mosques follow. Thankful to officials on ground and all management committees. #StayAtHome," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Background

What is the Nansen Refugee Award?

The Nansen Refugee Award is presented every year to an individual or organization that has dedicated their time to help people forcibly displaced from their homes. The Laureate receives USD 150,000 generously donated by the governments of Norway and Switzerland. Four regional winners are also recognized.

The Award is named after Fridtjof Nansen, Norwegian explorer and humanitarian. Through its recipients, the Nansen Refugee Award aims to showcase Nansens values of perseverance and commitment in the face of adversity.

Who was Fridtjof Nansen?

Fridtjof Nansen was a Norwegian explorer, scientist, diplomat, humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who served as the first High Commissioner for Refugees at the League of Nations. The legacy of his work for the aid and protection of displaced persons is still present in the UN system today.

When was the Nansen Refugee Award instituted?

The first Nansen Refugee Award Ceremony took place in 1954, honouring Eleanor Roosevelt as the recipient.

Nominations

Who can be nominated for the award?

Any individual, group of people or organization that has displayed extraordinary humanitarian work on behalf of refugees, displaced or stateless peoples is eligible to be nominated. Former and current UNHCR staff, including United Nations Volunteers (UNVs) working for UNHCR offices, are ineligible.

Can I nominate myself?

Self-nominations are strongly discouraged. This includes individuals and organizations nominating themselves.

What criteria will be considered to determine the Laureate?

Nominees are considered in the following light:

The deed for which the person/ entity is nominated should take place outside the framework of normal professional duties and go beyond the call of duty;

It should demonstrate courage;

It should raise awareness for displaced people; and

It should reflect the values of UNHCR.

Who selects the Laureate?

The Nansen Refugee Award Selection Committee comprises:

A member designated by the Norwegian Government;

A member designated by the Swiss Government;

The Secretary-General of the Council of Europe;

Executive Director of the International Council of Voluntary Agencies;

The Chairperson of Executive Committee; and

A guest member.

Is the selection process confidential?

Yes, the selection of the Laureate and regional winners is completely confidential.

When is the deadline for nominations?

The deadline to submit nominations is midnight CET, 20 February 2022.

How do I obtain a nomination form?

Please find the nomination form here.

How do I submit a nomination? How can I be sure it has been received?

All nominations must be submitted online. Once the nominations are closed, you will receive a response from the Nansen Secretariat to confirm we have received the nomination.

Must the nomination be in English?

No. Nominations can be submitted in any of the official languages of the United Nations (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese).

What do I need to provide to supplement my nomination?

Nominations consist of a description of the nominees work and how they fulfil the selection criteria. This includes details of why the nominee should be considered, evidence that they have positively impacted the lives of the forcibly displaced and links to articles and publications as evidence. Additional information supporting the nomination, including websites, news articles, social media posts and other awards bestowed on the nominee, is welcome.

Do I need to provide references?

Nominations will not be considered if three references are not included. These referees should be diversely selected and have the ability to verify the nominees work with or for refugees, displaced people, stateless people, asylum seekers and resettled refugees and why their work has made a significant impact on their lives.

How many winners are honoured with the Nansen Refugee Award annually?

As a general rule, one recipient is chosen each year. In exceptional circumstances, more than one winner has been awarded.

Are Regional Winners recognised?

Since 2017, four regional winners are selected each year from different geographical locations around the world. They receive a certificate and regional recognition for their work helping displaced people.

The Laureate

How is the Laureate honoured?

In 2021, the laureate was honoured for the second time ever through a virtual global ceremony. However, most years the winner is honoured at a ceremony in Geneva in front of an audience from across the globe.

The laureate receives a USD 150,000 cash prize which is used to further their work through a specific project designed with the support of UNHCR.

When will the Laureate be announced?

Each year the laureate is announced during the month of September, ahead of the ceremony in October.

Regional winners

Are other nominees recognised?

Yes. Four regional winners from each global region outside of the laureates region will be recognized for their humanitarian work in 2022.

The Ceremony

Where and when does the Ceremony take place?

UNHCRs Nansen Refugee Award Ceremony was once again held virtually in 2021. However when possible, the official Ceremony presided over by the High Commissioner for Refugees is held annually in Geneva, Switzerland. The Ceremony takes place on the first day of the UNHCR Executive Committee, at the start of October.

Can I attend the Nansen Refugee Award Ceremony?

Unfortunately, the event is not open to the general public. However, public broadcasts of the Ceremony take place in tandem.

Media

Are members of the media allowed to attend the Ceremony?

Yes, media are welcome to attend the event. Journalists should contact the Nansen Refugee Award Secretariat beforehand to gain entry and will be accredited upon arrival at the venue. Please note that possible restrictions, including on recording, photography and copyright, may apply.

I am working on a feature article/broadcast story. How do I obtain an interview with the appropriate person?

Please contact the Nansen Refugee Award Secretariat at [email protected] for further information.

Is there a media package?

Yes. Please contact the Nansen Refugee Award Secretariat at [email protected] for further information.

Contact us

Our address:

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United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

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Email: [email protected]

Connect with us:

Use the hashtag #NansenRefugeeAward to share stories, videos and articles and keep up to date with the latest news.

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How can I partner with the Nansen Refugee Award?

Thank you for your interest in supporting the Nansen Refugee Award program. Please contact the Nansen Refugee Award Secretariat at [email protected] for further information.

Our current partners:
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 14:04:06|Editor: huaxia

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CANBERRA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The South Australian Government has announced a jobs rescue package in response to "unprecedented economic emergency" caused by COVID-19.

Premier Steven Marshall unveiled the 650-million-Australian-dollar (383.5-million-U.S.-dollar) package on Thursday, saying it was aimed at supporting key industries and preventing job losses amid "the greatest economic emergency of our generation."

It brings the state government's economic response to the virus to one billion Australian dollars (590.1 million U.S. dollars) having previously announced a 350 million Australian dollars (206.5 million U.S. dollars) infrastructure package.

Marshall said that his government's economic response to the crisis has been "the highest per capita" out of any of the eight state and territory governments.

"The crucial thing about this package is to provide some structural support so that we can get this state moving," he told reporters on Thursday.

"When we come out the other side, we know that we're going to get through this disaster."

"We've seen tens of thousands of people laid off -- there are devastating scenes in South Australia and that's why we need to be doing literally everything we can at this time," he said.

"There's no point in waiting for six or 12 months. People are hurting now they need their government support."

Federal Parliament on Monday passed legislation for the federal government's 83.6 billion Australian dollars (49.3 billion U.S. dollars) economic stimulus measures.

Since that legislation was passed Centrelink, Australia's welfare agency, has been overwhelmed by applications, including 280,000 on Wednesday alone.

In response to the unprecedented number of applications the government on Wednesday announced changes to make accessing welfare easier.
Travel ban in Hubei, Wuhan eased to restore normal life

Global Times

By GT staff reporters Source:Global Times Published: 2020/3/25 1:28:40

Despite easing restrictions, Hubei locals struggle to return to workplaces

After two months of complete isolation of Central China's Hubei Province, especially its capital Wuhan, authorities announced on Tuesday to lift outbound travel restrictions on cities excluding Wuhan beginning Wednesday and to end the lockdown of one of the most virus-stricken cities on April 8, signaling that the domestic battle against the deadly coronavirus will score victory.

However, this battle has not come to an end, as more people from Hubei will return to megacities like Beijing and Shanghai, bringing mounting pressure on cities that have been already facing growing imported cases of infections. It's time for shifting the focus of the prevention and control work toward relapses of domestic cases and increases of imported ones, officials and analysts warned.

It has been over two months since Wuhan, a city with about 11 million people, hit hardest by the virus, was completely locked down as part of China's decisive and aggressive measures that gained a window of opportunity not only for the country but also for the entire world.

The outbreak has changed everyone's life, as people in Hubei have been following strict quarantine measures while hundreds of thousands of restaurants, shops and public venues have been shut down, such stringent measures are also believed to be the only effective way of cutting transmission routes of this highly contagious disease, about which the public has very limited knowledge.

Lifting lockdowns and easing travel restrictions appeared to be an exciting and inspiring gesture for millions of locally born residents who sacrificed their freedom of movement for important public interests, especially those who work in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province and Guangzhou in Guangdong Province.

Hubei railway authorities announced on Tuesday night to resume services inside railway stations within Hubei Province from Wednesday, except for Wuhan. Rail services in Wuhan will resume on April 8.

As one of the major labor exporting regions in the country, about 6 million Hubei residents now work outside their home province and 70 percent of them had returned to their hometowns for the Spring Festival holidays in January and have been stranded ever since.

For some of those trapped at home, the prolonged holidays have become much more stressful rather than relaxing as they might have faced losing their jobs due to a delayed return, or being kicked out by landlords following discrimination against people from the region where the earliest infection cases were reported in the country.

But now, some of them are struggling in new dilemma: Does lifting travel restrictions mean everyone stranded in the province can go back immediately? Who goes first and who has to wait for further instructions? Does it mean the COVID-19 battle comes to an end and Hubei is a safe place now?

Given growing concerns over increasing numbers of imported cases of COVID-19 from abroad, a high proportion of covert coronavirus cases, in addition to loopholes in screening processes at custom and inadequate quarantine measures, the risks of a second wave of outbreaks in China looms, raising concerns among medical experts and observers over whether other cities outside Hubei are well prepared to receive the influx of new arrivals from the province.

Steps to follow

The National Health Commission said no new confirmed cases have been reported in Hubei from Wednesday to Sunday, and the World Health Organization said Wuhan's recovery from the COVID-19 outbreak gives the rest of the world hope as the highly contagious disease has spread to 169 countries and regions as of Tuesday, data from Johns Hopkins University of Medicine shows.

Ying Yong, Hubei provincial Party chief, said on Tuesday that the spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan's main battlefield has been contained, and the province has made significant progress in preventing the spread in the province and exporting infection cases to other parts of the country. Gradually lifting restrictions marked restoration of the economic and social order, he said.

Keeping track of recovered patients is paramount after lifting the lockdown, said Zheng Shuqian, a Wuhan doctor, explaining that uncertainties still remain as we don't know if the virus is completely out of recovered patients' systems. Is it possible for those patients to re-transmit the virus, Zheng asked.

Sporadic infections can be brought under control, but possible "invisible transmission" from asymptomatic patients or those recovered patients are the focus of future viral prevention work, said Zheng. "We still face an arduous long journey of pursuing follow-up viral prevention work," he remarked.

A local resident with online name Silvia who has been staying in her hometown Yichang, a city about 400 kilometers away from Wuhan, said she has been working from home since the lockdown. She told the Global Times on Tuesday that she has registered on an app called Jingxin Xiangzhu to provide her personal information, a must-do step before getting further notification about whether she is qualified to leave Hubei and return to Beijing, where her employer is..

"Until now, I haven't received any further instructions, and some circulating information said we could not go back even if local governments ease the travel ban," she said, noting that instead some should follow the instructions issued by the Beijing authorities on February 27 by not returning to Beijing for the moment.

Chen Bei, Beijing municipal government's deputy secretary general, told a press conference on February 27 that residents in Hubei can't return to Beijing and people from other regions coming to Beijing should undergo a 14-day mandatory quarantine.

Still, some local residents in Shiyan and Xiangyang - two Hubei cities - are prepared to leave by train on Wednesday, heading to Beijing, with the first group of returnees potentially surpassing 1,000 people, as several WeChat group chats showed.

An official surnamed Zhou in a Beijing community confirmed to the Global Times that they had received a notice from superiors one day before to begin accepting people stranded in Hubei to return to Beijing.

The returning workers are expected to arrive in the nation's capital city at the Beijing West Railway Station starting Wednesday, Zhou said, noting that they are required to undertake 14-day quarantine at home after their arrival.

Another worker in a community in the Chaoyang district told the Global Times on Tuesday under the condition of anonymity that they had not received any notices about such arrangements of receiving people from Hubei. In response to safety concerns, he said that there is no need to worry as those people have been quarantined in Hubei for two months but showed no symptoms so they should be healthy.

Remaining on high alert

Though lifting the lockdown is also seen as a major sign that the country has scored a victory in the COVID-19 battle, China still faces growing uncertainties in the next phase of prevention and control work, given growing numbers of imported infections from overseas as well as accelerating resumption of work.

Yang Zhanqiu, a virologist at Wuhan University, said that lifting the travel ban in Wuhan also signals China's viral prevention battlefield is shifting to metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, where imported infection cases have been surging in recent days.

The Chinese central government's leading group for steering COVID-19 prevention warned on Tuesday that domestic COVID-19 transmission has been stopped in China, but risks of sporadic and regional clusters of infection still exist.

Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an online broadcasting interview on Tuesday that it's not the time to discuss whether COVID-19 comes to an end but to share prevention experiences and enhance control work. "If the coronavirus still exists in one country, then the virus still exists, we can't declare an end [to this war]," Zeng said.

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Moscow, March 27 : Russia may be able to defeat the COVID-19 epidemic in less than two or three months, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

"A colleague expects that we will do away with the coronavirus in two or three months. This is a good forecast," Putin said at a meeting with business people, Xinhua news agency reported.

"But as far as the date when we really get out of this situation is concerned, and we will do that for sure, I hope it will happen even earlier," he added, according to a video footage provided by the NTV channel.

The situation with the spread of COVID-19 in Russia will undoubtedly change for the better, while the only question is the timing and effectiveness of work to stop it, said Putin.

According to the latest official data, the total number of people infected with coronavirus in Russia reached 840, including 546 in Moscow, and 38 people have recovered and two died.
Well Foundation today announced the launch of a Covid-19 Action Fund to support Waitemata District Health Board in its local level response to Covid-19 across North Shore, West Auckland and Rodney.

The fund will be used to support the rapid establishment of remote patient monitoring for people with underlying health conditions including respiratory conditions, diabetes, heart conditions, and patients with compromised immune systems.

This initiative, led by Waitemata DHBs Institute for Innovation and Improvement, will allow specialist hospital staff to monitor and care for the most vulnerable in the community within their own homes, keeping them out of the hospital environment unless absolutely necessary.

The generous support of The Perpetual Guardian Foundation and Liz and Paul Blackwell  Albany Pakn Save, has provided the initial funding needed to kick-start these efforts.

Further funding is needed to provide more remote monitoring systems.

To find out more about the Well Foundation Covid-19 Action Fund, or to donate, visit covid19.wellfoundation.org.nz

Waitemata DHB is the largest District Health Board in New Zealand with a population of 630,000. About 70,000 of those people are over the age of 70. In addition to operating North Shore and Waitakere hospitals, the DHB is responsible for primary healthcare and other community services that run across more than 30 sites throughout the region.

A DHB spokesperson says local health services are facing the reality that new models of care, outside of hospitals, are needed and critical care needs to be delivered safely in patients homes during the Covid-19 pandemic. Remote patient monitoring has been identified as part of the solution.

Patients will be taught to use remote monitoring devices that record heart rate, temperature, blood oxygen level, and breathing rate. The data can then be monitored remotely by specialist hospital staff and patients given advice and support on how to stay safe and well in their homes.
TUSCOLA The Douglas County man who was identified Wednesday as having contracted coronavirus, had recently traveled to neighboring counties, a health official said.

Amanda Minor, the administrator of the Douglas County Health Department, said that immediately after being notified Wednesday morning of the diagnosis of a man in his 50s, members of her staff immediately went to work tracing the persons steps and alerting people and businesses he may come into contact with. During those conversations, department staffers reiterated the importance and proper procedures for sanitizing and keeping social distance.

Minor said some of those on the list are in neighboring counties, but didnt identify which ones. Douglas county is surrounded by Champaign, Piatt, Vermilion, Edgar, Coles and Moultrie counties.

Everyone needs to know that it is everywhere, Minor said of virus. State health officials announced 330 new cases of COVID-19 statewide in the daily press briefing Wednesday. Currently, the state is reporting a total of 1,865 cases in 35 of its 102 counties. There have been 19 deaths.

I think this should be a wake-up call to everyone, she said and hopefully entice people to take precautions and adhere to the recommendations to stay home and avoid contact.

As of Wednesday, the Douglas County Health Department was aware of 21 people in the county having been tested for coronavirus. In addition to the one positive test, there have been eight negative tests. There are 12 pending tests, and those individuals are self-quarantined, Minor said.

The county board adopted a seven-day disaster declaration March 18, which was extended another 45 days Wednesday, she said.

Minor said an emergency committee has been meeting for the past three weeks, and that she feels very confident in the agencies and the plan they have in place to address the challenges associated with the local battle against coronavirus.

Douglas County Health Department, Douglas County (Emergency Management Agency), and all community partners are working tirelessly on our community-level response to COVID-19. Your adherence to public health guidance is imperative to keeping you, your family and our healthcare providers, first responders and other essential staff safe, Minor said.

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This blog covers software patent news and issues with a particular focus on wireless, mobile devices (smartphones, tablet computers, connected cars) as well as select antitrust matters surrounding those devices.
The 4,000-plus military medical professionals that have rushed to aid the battle against the novel coronavirus in central China's city of Wuhan are sticking to their positions until "a full victory is achieved."

Ren Guoqiang, a Defense Ministry spokesman, made the remarks at a press conference Thursday.

The military medics who came to help Wuhan will remain committed to supporting local authorities in fighting coronavirus, treating patients and carrying out scientific research, Ren said.

China's military medical experts have wasted no time stepping up drug and vaccine research as well as virus source tracing to aid the country's anti-virus battle, the spokesman said.

On March 16, a recombinant novel coronavirus vaccine developed by a research team led by Chen Wei, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a researcher at the institute of military medicine under the Academy of Military Sciences, passed a review by authorities and was greenlighted for clinical trials, he said.
A worker sells goods behind a makeshift plastic barricade during the outbreak of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in the Manhattan borough of New York City

By Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House plans to expand "Buy America" mandates to the medical equipment and pharmaceutical sectors could worsen shortages of urgently needed medicines and delay discovery of a vaccine for the new coronavirus, over 80 business groups warned.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and dozens of other business and trade groups urged U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow and other top U.S. officials to drop plans for the order, arguing it would also damage U.S. trading relationship for years to come.

"Preventing federal agencies from sourcing medical equipment and pharmaceutical ingredients from abroad ... would only exacerbate the supply shortages racking the United States," said a letter from the groups, which was also addressed to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a long-time trade hawk who is crafting the order, told Fox News late on Wednesday evening that he expected movement on the issue shortly.

"The president's gonna get that done soon," Navarro told Fox News' "Hannity" program, without giving an exact date.

The push has sparked concern in China and elsewhere, rekindling tensions with Beijing at a moment when global leaders are calling for a coordinated response to the outbreak.

Trump will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders of the world's 20 largest economies in an extraordinary video conference meeting on Thursday to map out a plan to combat the health and economic impacts of the pandemic.

Navarro said the executive order would provide long-term incentives to U.S. companies to produce equipment in the United States through Buy America provisions, deregulation and incentives for 3D printing and other advanced technologies.

In their letter, the groups, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said U.S. industry would "do whatever it takes" to respond to the pandemic, which has infected over 53,000 in the United States and killed 730.

But they said the order could worsen shortages of drugs and medical products and undermine prospects for economic recovery since U.S. companies needed access to international supply chains to produce needed goods.

Story continues

"The United States cannot shut itself off from the rest of the world," the groups wrote. "Turning our backs on trading partners during a crisis could damage our relationships long after this pandemic ends," they wrote.

U.S. trading partners could also retaliate and limit U.S. imports if Washington imposed local content requirements, they said.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal, Additional reporting by Eric Beech and Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Thursday condemned the attack on a Gurudwara in Kabul that killed at least 25 people and injured many others. Taking to Twitter, Jaishankar termed the attack as cowardly and assured that the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan is in continuous touch with the families of those killed and injured

Understandable grief and anger at the cowardly terrorist attack on Gurudwara in #Kabul. Our Embassy @IndianEmbKabul is in continuous touch with the families of those killed and injured.  Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) March 26, 2020

Medical opinion against moving injured at this stage. Embassy @IndianEmbKabul is working on the return of mortal remains of Shri Tian Singh. Will keep you updated.@HardeepSPuri @HarsimratBadal_ @capt_amarinder  Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) March 26, 2020

READ | Kabul Gurudwara Attack: One Indian Killed, Family Writes To Prime Minister Modi

Family writes to PM Modi

In their letter, they have also appealed to the prime minister to facilitate transportation of Tian Singh's mortal remains to Delhi where they wish to perform his last rites. The letter mentions that other children of the slain Indian are in the US and UK, and are unable to travel to India due to the on-going lockdown in the country in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.

READ | Here's UN Chief Antonio Guterres' Statement On The Shocking Kabul Gurudwara Attack

Terror Attack on Gurudwara

As many as 11 people have been killed, and several injured, in the Gurdwara attack in Kabul, Afghanistan after unknown gunmen and suicide bombers stormed the religious place. Later, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, reported an intelligence group. The gunmen and suicide bombers stormed the gurdwara in Shor Bazar area at around 07:45 (local time) when 150 worshippers were inside the Sikh religious premise.

Afghanistans Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian has reportedly said that the defence forces have cordoned off the area and trying to counter-attack. The Taliban denied its involvement and its spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid tweeted that they have no relation with the attack in Shor Bazar.

READ | Amarinder, Harsimrat Badal Condemn Attack At Gurudwara In Kabul

READ | Attack On Sikh Gurdwara In Kabul 'extremely Reprehensible': Rajnath Singh
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  Though restrictions remain to slow the spread of the coronavirus on Staten Island and beyond, the Staten Island Council of Jewish Organizations (COJO-SI) hosted its Annual Passover food drive and distribution Wednesday at Young Israel of Staten Island  even if it meant bringing the event outdoors.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***

Some 800 Staten Island families will now be able to enjoy Passover with traditional foods necessary for a festive Seder and continue traditional holiday customs.

This year marks the 45th year of COJO helping to ensure that all members of the Staten Island community celebrate Passover in accordance with Jewish law.

Mendy Mirocznik, president of COJO, thanked Rev. Terry Troia, president of Project Hospitality and her team of 25 volunteers, who together with COJO did a great job in organizing the Passover food drive and distribution.

Scott Maurer, CEO & executive vice-president, COJO; and Mendy Mirocznik, president, COJO practicing social distancing at the annual Passover Food Drive. (Courtesy/Mendy Mirocznik)

Mirocznik stated, COJO has been collaborating with Project Hospitality for some time now. Todays distribution is historic where both COJO and Project Hospitality teamed up on a Passover venture and this project will be the building block for future collaborative efforts to further benefit all the residents of Staten Island.

He added: The positive spirit demonstrated today helped alleviate the down feeling that we are experiencing due to the Covid19, Coronavirus crises. It is love and fellowship that will get us through this crisis. It is only when good people partner up and work together, we get the strength, wisdom and fortitude to preserver through the challenges we face.

Mirocznik thanked the generous COJO Food Pantry partners who made the Passover food drive and distribution possible, as well as Assemblyman Michael Cusick for his support and advocacy.

He acknowledged the Met Council on Poverty that donated Passover food items, arranged the delivery and coordinated with the Food Bank for New York City and City Harvest. He shouted praises for Rabbi Yaakov Lehrfield and President Robert Rosenberg of the Young Israel of Staten Island for once again hosting the Annual Pre-Passover Food Distribution.

Mirocznik concluded, The COJO Passover Food Relief is just one component of our pantry that services all people of Staten Island. Our goal is to make sure that no person goes hungry on Staten Island.

Scott Maurer, CEO of COJO agreed. My dream is that no one should experience poverty and hunger and the pantry should go out of business due to a lack of clients in need," he said. "However, until we reach that day, we here at COJO are in the business of combating hunger. In this time of uncertainty, we implore everyone to stay inside, if you must leave please maintain social distance and have a healthy Passover.

It was a privilege to be part of the Passover call to invite all who are hungry to come and eat," said Troia. "Project Hospitality is an interfaith effort practicing the hospitality modeled by Abraham who prepared a feast for people he didnt know and carrying out the mandate of Isaiah 58:7: Share your bread with the poor and welcome the homeless Poor into your home. I am privileged to work side by side the Jewish community to feed people.

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John Murray, MD.

An influential doctor who spent decades studying and treating lung conditions has died of acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, caused by COVID-19,University of California, San Francisco doctors say.

John F. Murray, a UCSF Emeritus Professor of Medicine, died at the age of 93 in Paris on March 24, according to an emailed announcement to department of medicine staff.

Murray was a key figure in defining, understanding and treating ARDS. "Sadly and ironically," he died of respiratory failure caused by that condition, the email signed by seven doctors says.

ARDS is a common killer among critically ill patients hospitalized with COVID-19. The new virus often targets the lungs and can cause respiratory problems including bronchitis and pneumonia. In a small number of severe cases, ARDS develops.

What does the coronavirus do to your body? Everything to know about the infection process

Murray was instrumental in redefining the medical community's approach to the treatment of lung diseases and helped lead a surge of new doctors to the field, Philip Hopewell told USA TODAY.

Hopewell, former chief of the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital Pulmonary Division, said when Murray entered pulmonary medicine, the field was mostly focused on a single disease: tuberculosis.

Murray's work broadening the field and training others helped pave the way for the modern ICU, multiple colleagues told USA TODAY. His work is proving integral to the treatment of the current pandemic, Hopewell said.

What is ARDS? Some severe cases of coronavirus could result in brain damage, inability to walk

He had a hand in almost every part of our field, Courtney Broaddus told USA TODAY. Broaddus is editor-in-chief of a respiratory medicine textbook that bears Murray's name.

In addition to writing the influential book, "The Normal Lung," Murray was chief of pulmonary for more than two decades at San Francisco General Hospital. He was also a former president of The American Thoracic Society.

Story continues

Murray was beloved for his bedside manner and respect for other health care professionals including nurses, Broaddus said. He was known for wearing a bow tie, partly out of consideration for patients  he didn't want his tie to drag over them as he attended.

Murray was a sophisticated, worldly human being who was living in an apartment in Paris with his wife, novelist Diane Johnson, at the time of his death, according to Morris Schambelan, who knew Murray for more than 50 years.

Among other accomplishments, Johnson is known for co-writing the screenplay for the classic Stanley Kubrick film "The Shining."

In addition to his wife, Murray is survived by two children, four stepchildren and 14 grandchildren.

Murray's age was among the factors that made him a high-risk patient for COVID-19, according to Hopewell.

Coronavirus was new to him, just as it was to all of us, Broaddus said.

Contributing: Adrianna Rodriguez, USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Coronavirus death: John F. Murray, leading lung expert, dies of ARDS
Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007, died in Iranian custody, according to a statement from his family.

The statement said Levinsons family received the news from US officials but did not know how or when he died, only that his death preceded the coronavirus outbreak that has ravaged Iran.

It is impossible to describe our pain, the statement said. If not for the cruel, heartless actions of the Iranian regime, Robert Levinson would be alive and home with us today. It has been 13 years waiting for answers.

The family added they did not know if or when his body would be returned.

This is the very definition of cruelty, the statement said.

Levinson disappeared 13 years ago on Irans Kish island. The US initially claimed he was there on his own initiative, but in 2013, the Associated Press revealed he had been sent on a mission there by CIA analysts who had no authority to run espionage operations. Levinson was a specialist on Russian organised crime and had not had much previous involvement in Iran.

Tehran denied knowledge of Levinsons whereabouts until November last year when it acknowledged that there was an ongoing case involving him before its revolutionary court.

Levinson, who suffered from diabetes, was last seen in a hostage video sent anonymously to the family in 2010, and then in still photographs three years later in which he was wearing an orange jumpsuit, of the kind used in the US detention camp on Guantanamo Bay. The images did not make clear who was detaining him.

Levinsons family thanked Donald Trump and his administration for doing all they could to make our family whole again but they blamed other, unnamed US officials for their lack of action.

Those who are responsible for what happened to Bob Levinson, including those in the US government who for many years repeatedly left him behind, will ultimately receive justice for what they have done, their statement said.

We will spend the rest of our lives making sure of this, and the Iranian regime must know we will not be going away. We expect American officials, as well as officials around the world, to continue to press Iran to seek Bobs return, and to ensure those Iranian officials involved are held accountable.
On Feb. 13, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent out an email with what the author described as an 'URGENT' call for help.

The agency was struggling with one of its most important duties: keeping track of Americans suspected of having the novel coronavirus.

It had 'an ongoing issue' with organizing  and sometimes flat-out losing  forms sent by local agencies about people thought to be infected. The email listed job postings for people who could track or retrieve this paperwork.

'Help needed urgently,' the CDC wrote.

This email is among hundreds of pages of correspondence between federal and state public health officials obtained by ProPublica through a records request in Nevada.

Leader: Robert Redfield is the director of the CDC. Internal emails uncovered by ProPublic reveal how the agency reacted with confusion and chaos to the threat of coronavirus

Complacency: The CDC's director Robert Redfield told staff there was 'low' risk to the American public and the virus was 'not spreading.' But an analysis suggests it was already spreading then

During the period in which the correspondence was written, from January to early March, health officials were trying to stay ahead of the coronavirus outbreak underway in China.

By mid-February, when the CDC job postings email went out, the virus had a toehold in the United States, where there were already 15 confirmed cases.

In another two weeks, the first case of community transmission would be reported in California, followed shortly by cases in Washington.

The documents  mostly emails  provide a behind-the-scenes peek into the messy early stages of the U.S. response to the coronavirus, revealing an antiquated public health system trying to adapt on the fly.

What comes through clearly is confusion, as the CDC underestimated the threat from the virus and stumbled in communicating to local public health officials what should be done.

The same week the CDC sent out the email about the job openings, the agency sent Nevada officials alerts about 80 potential coronavirus patients to monitor, documents show. Four were not Nevada residents.

A state epidemiologist, in each instance, corrected the agency, informing the CDC that the person was from New York, not Nevada. (The CDC then redirected each report to New York, the documents show.)

The confusion sometimes went both ways. On March 4, a program manager in the Nevada Health Department reached out to the CDC to ask about congressional funding for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

'There seems to be a communications blackout on this end,' the program manager wrote, wondering if funds would be distributed based on the number of cases in each state or by population.

'Unfortunately, there is no clear answer to your questions,' responded a CDC staffer, apologizing for the lack of information. 'We are hearing all of the rumor mills as well.'

'Thank you,' the Nevada program manager replied. 'It's good to be confused together.'

CHAOTIC COORDINATION

For much of February, the CDC kept a tight grip on who should be tested for the coronavirus, a strategy that has been criticized by epidemiologists for limiting the ability to track the spread of the disease.

In a Feb. 19 presentation to state health officials, the CDC described the definition of a person who ought to be tested: You had to have had close contact with someone confirmed to have COVID-19, or to have traveled from China and then had respiratory symptoms and a fever at the same time.

Unfortunate phrase: A Nevada state official asked the CDC for guidance about funding and was told they 'are hearing rumor mills' - prompting this response

However, the CDC's own guidance from a month prior, distributed to the states on Jan. 17, had a footnote that said that 'fever may not be present in some patients,' such as people who had taken fever-lowering medications, according to one of the documents obtained by ProPublica.

That caveat was not on the slides presented to the states in mid-February.

In a statement to ProPublica, the CDC said clinicians could always use their judgment to decide who received a test.

'CDC never declined a request for testing that came from a state or local health department,' the agency said.

In mid to late February, the CDC was trying to move responsibility for coronavirus testing from itself to state health departments  a critical step, since the CDC does not have the capacity to be the nation's testing lab.

Slides from the Feb. 19 presentation describe the process for transitioning from 'Phase 1,' in which the CDC determined who was a potential COVID-19 patient and conducted all the testing, to 'Phase 2,' in which local health departments would do that work and report data back to the CDC.

Testing fiasco: Because of delays with test kits, Phase 2 had to be 'redesigned,' a presentation said, so the CDC would continue to test specimens and return results

Because of delays with test kits, Phase 2 had to be 'redesigned,' the presentation said, so the CDC would continue to test specimens and return results.

The CDC told ProPublica that all states have now transitioned to the original Phase 2 plan, where they can run their own tests.

The CDC presentation also directed the states to use a web platform called DCIPHER, which the agency was already using for food-related outbreaks, to report potential COVID-19 patients and confirmed cases.

But it wasn't until the week of Feb. 24  the same week that the U.S. would discover its first case of community-acquired COVID-19  that the CDC scheduled a training for states on how to use the platform, according to the documents.

On March 1, the CDC emailed Nevada's Health Department, requesting that it send a list of users and email addresses to connect to the DCIPHER system, to 'ensure that we can onboard your jurisdiction.'

'We sent a spread sheet a couple weeks ago which I thought covered this,' a state epidemiologist responded.

Four days later, Nevada announced its first confirmed case of the coronavirus. It's unclear when the state managed to successfully get on the DCIPHER system. Officials from Nevada declined to comment.

'MAYBE JUST KIDDING'

A key part of the CDC's strategy during the early days of the outbreak was identifying infected travelers returning from China.

The process for screening passengers arriving at Los Angeles International Airport did not go smoothly, the correspondence obtained by ProPublica indicates.

On Feb. 16, a CDC staff member sent a message to colleagues about a buggy electronic traveler screening questionnaire that wouldn't save correctly, among other issues.

Also, the tool's drop down field auto-populated with 'United Kingdom' instead of 'United States,' forcing users to type 'United States of America.'

The CDC staffer also said the agency was struggling to interview non-English speakers in a timely manner and needed additional interpreters.

'Hello Team,' another CDC staff member responded, offering a solution: 'The Google translate App has a real-time voice translation option.'

The screening protocol also wasn't always clear. On Feb. 29, a CDC officer at LAX sent an email to her colleagues, saying: 'In case this comes up again, we are not screening private flights.

'These would be flights that land at LAX but don't arrive into the regular terminal  mainly for rich people.'

Just over two hours later, the officer emailed again. 'And, maybe just kidding,' she wrote. Information from headquarters seemed to contradict what she had said about private flights, she said.

The CDC told ProPublica that it scaled up the screening almost overnight, so it focused on vetting the largest segment possible of high-risk passengers coming from places like Wuhan, China.

The agency trained staff and dealt as best it could with limited staffing and translation services, it said.

The CDC's initial response to COVID-19, particularly its failure to initiate swift, widespread testing, has drawn intense criticism.

'PROTECTING AMERICANS IS WHAT WE DO'

Nonetheless, the correspondence ProPublica obtained shows that the CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, exuded confidence in communications with others at the agency.

On Jan. 28, when the CDC had confirmed five cases of the coronavirus, all in travelers who arrived from outside the country, he emailed colleagues to acknowledge it posed 'a very serious public health threat,' but he assured them 'the virus is not spreading in the U.S. at this time.'

That actually may not have been the case. The CDC confirmed the first case of COVID-19 in Washington on Jan 20.

Trevor Bedford, a computational epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, has said he believes that the virus could have begun circulating in the state immediately after the traveler arrived in mid-January, based on his analysis of genetic data from the initial Washington cases.

Missing information: The CDC asked for help and warned about how they had lost track of potentially infected people

The CDC said in its statement that Redfield's comments were based on the data available at the time.

'At no time, did he underestimate the potential for COVID-19 becoming a global pandemic,' the agency's statement said.

'He stated consistently that more cases, including person to person spread, were likely.'

On March 3, Redfield wrote to his staff again, stressing the agency's readiness, despite the growing evidence that it wasn't.

'We anticipated and prepared for the possible spread of COVID-19 in communities across the United States,' he said in an email.

The CDC said in its statement that Redfield was telling staffers that the agency would continue to be engaged in a sustained response to COVID-19. Redfield's email was not characterizing the state of the outbreak, the CDC said.

By that point, it was clear that the coronavirus was gaining ground within the country, even if the inability to test for it was obscuring the true numbers.

Physicians and public health experts begged for more tests while warning that thousands of cases would soon emerge.

Still, Redfield's March 3 email struck a reassuring note.

'Confronting global outbreaks and protecting Americans is what we do,' Redfield wrote in the message.

'More and more, people are turning to us for guidance, and we respond consistently with evidence-based information and professionalism.'
Google is updating its Maps in light of the coronavirus crisis, and the latest change allows businesses to declare themselves temporarily closed.

Google is giving the option through its My Business portal. To declare itself closed, a business should go to Google My Business. Then, the business should select Info on the left menu. Next, select Close this business on Google. Finally, Mark as temporarily closed will appear. Select it. Once a business declares itself closed during the COVID-19 outbreak, the new results will appear in Google Maps and on Googles search engine.

Google marshals Maps in coronavirus crisis

Tech giants are at the forefront of educating the public during this global epidemic. Among them is Google, who is using its Maps service to alert customers as to changes in business hours, closings, and, of course, the new temporary closing label. Some days ago, Google gave businesses the option to declare a change in operation hours. Now, in light of worsening conditions, some businesses need to close indefinitely for the time being.

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Google just added a COVID-19 warning for Maps users some days ago. When a user searches for a hospital, med clinic, or blood bank, the service tells users to call a doctor first before visiting a hospital. The worst thing one can do in the coronavirus crisis is go to a hospital. In hospitals where multiple people are already sick, its too easy to contract the disease.

The new temporary closing declaration comes as the coronavirus pandemic continues its stretch across the globe. The virus, originally from an animal market in Wuhan, China, has now spread to the US. Over 65,000 people have been infected. Over 600 have died from COVID-19. The disease is spreading in Amazon factories in the US. Washington State has seen a nursing home facility at the center of its disease spread. Schools and some businesses have closed indefinitely.

Temporarily closing business: Best Buy

In the US, favorite retailer Best Buy, originally reducing its hours from 10am-6pm, has now closed its stores. Washington-based Microsoft has closed its retail stores. Samsung has closed its Best Buy experience stores. Outside of these well-known examples, other businesses and companies have closed their stores to prevent the spread of the disease. Some say that the United States Postal Service (USPS) could see its business close in three months if COVID-19 and the social distancing mandate remain in place that long. A new door-shutting policy is now in effect for nail salons, cosmetology salons, and even sweepstakes parlors.

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Further temporary closings, shutdowns, and stay-at-home orders

US President Donald Trump says that gatherings should be no greater than ten people. He also says that everyone should wash their hands, practice good social distancing, and work from home as much as possible. Some counties and states in the US are announcing stay-at-home orders that go into effect as early as today and will remain indefinitely.
More than 50 pilots and cabin crew of IndiGo are now stuck in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow, and Mumbai as the government has withheld permission to ferry flights to bring them back to their bases. AirAsia India has two pilots from its Bengaluru base stranded in Kolkata, while SpiceJet and Vistara said all their crew members returned to their bases on Tuesday after the suspension of all domestic operations on Tuesday midnight.

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"I found that once I made the decision to close, it was easier," Paul Williams, owner of Canteen Food in Limerick, says.

His city centre cafe opens seven days a week: Monday to Friday for breakfast and lunch, and Saturday and Sunday it serves all-day brunch.

Williams employs 15 full and part-time staff.

He made the decision to shut his doors last Monday, just ahead of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar's St Patrick's Day speech.

"There is so much you are worrying about [by staying open]; the staff, health and safety, the customers, who's going to infect you, if one of the staff gets it, are all of the staff going to have to isolate? You are worrying about everyone else," he says.

Staff were "very stressed" as customers came through the door.

"It was hard to know what to do, but I just felt it was better to close in the end," Williams says. "Now all I have to do is worry about the bills."

Williams had warned his staff on the Friday beforehand that closure was a real risk. He feels most knew it was coming.

"Some of their friends had been working in Pharmacia, a nearby pub that closed, so I felt they knew it was coming. Also, you could see on social media other restaurants were closing or talking about closing," he says.

To help staff as much as he could, Williams printed off all the relevant social welfare forms and explained what people should do when the time came to shut.

The next step was to inform suppliers. Between 20-25 people supply various products to the business during the year.

Around 10-15 of these suppliers provide goods daily or weekly. Like the staff, most of them saw it coming.

"I think it is easier to say to your suppliers, 'we are closed and we are going to pause, and when we open we will continue business'," he says.

Expand Close Shuttered: Paul Williams was forced to close his Canteen Food cafe in Limerick last week / Facebook

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Whatsapp Shuttered: Paul Williams was forced to close his Canteen Food cafe in Limerick last week

"Rather than me trying to stay on for a month and them ringing you for money and you saying, 'well, I'm not busy enough', to which they might say, 'well, you are still open'."

With so many high-profile businesses closing temporarily, including fast-food giant McDonald's, "you feel like we are all in it together", he says.

Having spoken to staff and suppliers, and shut his doors, the next stage for Williams was to speak to the bank.

He called it the day after the Taoiseach's March 17 address to the nation.

"After Leo Varadkar's speech, I felt the country was going to shut down, so I got on to my business agent in the bank. I have not got on to Revenue yet, I'm sure they are inundated, but anyone I have dealt with has been very good. The bank now says they will give you a three-month window [on loans]."

In addition, local authorities are allowing a break on the payment of rates.

"I think it has dawned on everyone that [the economic impact] is going to be a country-wide thing," Williams says.

"I don't think the banks have a choice but to be understanding; there is no point me pretending that I might have money in a week if they call me back," he adds.

Like all business owners up and down the country, Williams has many questions he wants answers to.

He appreciates no one knows when this period of uncertainty brought on by the spread of the coronavirus will end.

"Last Monday week, people felt it was going to be for two weeks, so it felt it was only going to be a short time.

"Now it's unknown; I don't know if the Government knows or if anybody knows. I don't know. How is life going to go back to normal? I just don't know," he says.

If and when things go back to normal, it will take "a couple of years" for Canteen to be able to employ 15 staff again.

In the meantime, Williams wants more information on what support will be put in place to help small and medium businesses stay afloat.

"The Government has talked a lot about supports for employees and social welfare payments but they have not yet talked about supports that are going to be in place for businesses, like in Germany, in the US, in Italy, [where] they have said the SME sector will be supported," he continues.

"The Government have said a few things, but nothing concrete is set in place."

Williams' fear is that were he to open in two or three weeks, business could still be down 50-60pc.

Interest-free or Government-backed loans would help deal with the fallout from being closed.

"They have announced stuff through the enterprise board and government agencies but with some of the application forms, it can be a month or two before you get to talk to someone and apply," Williams says.

If the Government were to fund loans through lenders such as Linked Finance, it would speed up the process of providing cash to SMEs, he believes.

"If the Government says the curve has flattened next week, it might enable me to go in and get an overdraft of, say, 15,000," he says.

"I could say to some of my staff, 'let's try to do takeaways only', but until those supports are there, I can't say to my staff, 'I'll take one of you on'. I have a big premises, I have 35 seats; I can't just run it with one person," Williams adds.

The other thing Williams would like to see from the Government is a roadmap for the economy to reopen.

"I know they can't say how long this is going to last, but in China they seem to be getting back to work," he highlights.

In the meantime, Williams has asked his accountant to work out what it takes week-to-week to cover the costs that are still being incurred by his business, which include things like electricity and heating.

He's repainting the empty cafe and getting through other jobs he'd put on the long finger.

He concludes: "When we open seven days, there are always jobs that get left behind.

"This week, I will do a lot of them; after that, I don't know."
On Wednesday, Gen. Robert B. Abrams, commander of U.S. troops in South Korea, declared a public health emergency on his bases, which gives him wide-ranging authority to help combat the spread of the coronavirus among his forces.

General Abrams is one of the first U.S. commanders to issue such an order. In North Carolina, Maj. Gen. Julian D. Alford, the Marine officer in charge of Camp Lejeune, circulated a draft order that would also declare a public health emergency if authorized.

Any person who refuses to obey or otherwise violates an order during this declared public health emergency may be detained, says one section of the draft, which was obtained by The New York Times.

For the military, the challenge now is striking a balance between readiness and health, but preserving the force is quickly taking priority.

The mantra of todays American military, but particularly of Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is readiness. The phrase preserving the force is military parlance for keeping a military that is fit, well-rehearsed and ready to deploy. But that means training and rehearsals, such as fighter pilots practicing how to refuel at 25,000 feet and Marines dragging each other through the dirt.

Those run counter to the social distancing that medical professionals say is required to beat the novel coronavirus.

As part of the new restrictions, the Army chief of staff, Gen. James C. McConville, said that he was putting a select group of service members, the Armys contingency response forces, into the highest state of isolation  HPCON Delta. These troops are on call to rapidly deploy in emergencies. Under HPCON Delta, they now are expected to remain at home for extended periods of time, the Army said, and may even be quarantined.
Lviv Armor Vehicle factory has transferred six T-64 tanks for the needs of the Ukrainian army, according to the press service of Ukrobornprom.

"Lviv Armor Vehicle factory, which is part of the State Concern Ukroboronprom, has transferred another batch of six T-64 tanks to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine," the statement says.

According to the enterprises director, Viktor Androshchuk, the repair and modernization of armored vehicles are carried out under the public contract for 2019, since it is transitional and should be fully completed at the end of the second quarter of 2020.

According to the contract, the enterprise has already transferred more than 50 repaired and upgraded armored vehicles, including T-64 and T-72 tanks, BREM-1 armored repair and recovery vehicles, and GPM-54 armored tracked fire engines.

Androshchuk also said that the enterprise sews its own medical face masks so that employees comply with quarantine requirements.

ish
THE government has hired 307 healthcare professionals as it seeks to strengthen health system service delivery and reinforce the fight against the COVID-19 outbreak in the country.

The Minister for Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, Ms Ummy Mwalimu said here yesterday the new health workers are supposed to report to their duty stations before the tomorrows deadline.

The new batch of healthcare workers, whose recruitment has been made possible in collaboration with the Benjamin Mkapa Foundation, include laboratory technicians, who will oversee rapid tests for coronavirus to diagnose any new cases.

Ms Mwalimu said the 307 health personnel will be deployed in eleven regions which are in dire need of the staff, thanking the Global Fund for HIV, TB and Malaria for their support through the Benjamin Mkapa Foundation.

Ms Mwalimu said the new workforce include nurses, clinical officers, and the laboratory technicians among others.

They will serve in the following regions; Mwanza, Shinyanga, Mara, Simiyu, Geita, Kagera, Katavi, Tabora, Dodoma, Arusha and Kigoma.

The minister said, in collaboration with the Benjamin Mkapa Foundation, they are finalizing employment logistics for additional 80 health workers who will be deployed in 28 regional, zonal and referral hospitals countrywide.

She used the occasion to advise non-governmental organisations to supplement governments healthcare initiatives, and work in line with its priorities.

Ms Mwalimu urged NGO to divert their attention from capacity building workshops and seminars and pay special focus to the ongoing fight against coronavirus outbreak and other priority areas.

Meanwhile, the minister said the government, through the public service has announced employment opportunities for 1000 medical doctors.

This follows a recent promise made by President John Magufuli during his meeting with medical doctors February, this year.

Earlier, Benjamin Mkapa Foundation (BMF) Chief Executive Officer, Dr Ellen Senkoro said their collaboration with the government has brought a positive impact in health services delivery.

It is now 14 years since we started our services, during that time we have employed more than 2,181 medical practitioners, who are serving in public and religious health facilities countrywide, she stated.

She prayed for the government's close working relationship with civil society organisations in order to bring the much expected socio-economic development among communities.
Its always a great idea to celebrate puppies but this year, this month, its even more crucial.

National Puppy Day arrived on Mar. 23 during an increasingly bleaker and bleaker news cycle, and it could not have come sooner.

Diane Pol and Dr. Jan Pol of The Incredible Dr. Pol | The Walt Disney Company/Image Group LA via Getty Images

Dr. Jan Pol of The Incredible Dr. Pol celebrated the wee canines this week on social media. Enjoy the puppy love!

Dr. Pols favorite dog breed

While the family, from what viewers have seen on the NatGeo WILD reality show, loves all dog breeds and has owned several, they seem to favor one more than others: the Great Dane.

Dr. Pol said on his show, We like big dogs. When Diane and I got married, we went for the Danes, and we have had Danes ever since. They are an even-tempered and easygoing breed.

And of course, the Netherlands-born animal doctor made a point that he feels is worth repeating because of its importance.

I think a kid that grows up with dogs probably will make better adults, because the dog will teach the children empathy, compassion, he said. You just have to teach them that they can trust you and you can trust them. Theres a breed for everybody! I cannot imagine life without a dog.

Dr. Pols puppy food line

The Pols recently introduced Dr. Pol Dog and Cat Food and theres even a High Energy Active Dog and Growing Puppy formula.

Dr. Pol said on his Facebook page in December 2019, Were proud to introduce the first line of Dr. Pols Veterinarian Inspired Recipes. We hope your dogs love it as much as ours do!

Dr. Pol said in his statement at the release of his pet food line, Im excited to incorporate the insights Ive learned in my many years of veterinary experience, collaborating with great companies to develop an affordable and practical line of animal products that are unique to the marketplace.

It was National Puppy Day this week and Dr. Pol had a Twitter party

National Puppy Day was founded in 2006 by pet lifestyle expert, animal behaviorist, and author, Colleen Paige. Paige is also the founder of National Dog Day and National Cat Day.

According to the National Day Calendar website, Observed each year on March 23rd, National Puppy Day celebrates the unconditional love and affection puppies bring to our lives. Their cuddles and wiggles make us smile and without a doubt, there are squeals of delight when there are puppies around!

Happy #NationalPuppyDay! Raise your hand if you have a celebration planned for your pup whether small or grown up We love them all! #DrPol pic.twitter.com/lNAIHT5SaB  Dr. Pol (@DrPol) March 24, 2020

The veterinarians Twitter account announced Puppy Day by tweeting, Happy #NationalPuppyDay! Raise your hand if you have a celebration planned for your pup whether small or grown up. We love them all.

Another fan said, I dont have a puppy but Ill celebrate for everyone who does!!! Woof Woof ARROOOOoooo!!!

Lets celebrate and enjoy every moment of the day with our puppies, they deserve our care, attention and true love, said another tweeter.

Read more: The Incredible Dr. Pol: Is Dr. Emily Married?
A local event intended to gather some essential food and hygiene items for the elderly in a short period of time went better than expected Wednesday despite the limited planning time.

READ MORE: Funny memes and tweets to make you feel less stressed during the quarantine

Although the organizers tried to get some attention via social media and traditional media for the event, the event was organized in just a little over two days. Despite the limited window of time, a local business and church leader, a radio station and American Legion Post 59 got together and hosted the drive to help the elderly of the community.

The goods will be used to help over 100 families and elderly people that go visit their new service area on Friday to get the items they seek.

It was a blessing, said Rafael Garcia, the owner of Fishers of Men Foods Inc. and the organizer of the food and hygiene event. We filled the trailer and my back truck completely.

He further stated that he could not have hosted the event with much success without help from the partners that helped such as the radio station and American Legion. The local radio station La Raza 90.9 FM and its chief DJ at the event Beto Martinez El Morenazo were also excited about the turnout.

According to them, they were able to get plenty of the essential items they were seeking for the public.

The food and hygiene drive for the elderly in our community was a great turnout as we received water, toilet paper, napkins, canned foods and much more, Martinez said.

Martinez said he was enthusiastic about the turnout as he knew the majority of the people in the city were afraid of the virus and either sheltering at home or storing materials for their own benefit rather than donating them.

Laredo is scared of the virus but still came out to help out, Martinez said. Like they say, Today for them, tomorrow for us.

Although many people continue to be afraid of becoming sick as the number of cases related to the novel coronavirus continue to climb in the city and elsewhere, many people say they are proud of having events like this one contribute their own part to the betterment of the community during their difficult times.

I think events like these are what the city needs right now as many people seem to be getting the idea that social distancing is something that separates us when in reality it should be something that unites us in other ways as this passes, Veronica Martinez said.

Martinez said she believes events like these are essential to help show hope to the community in a time when people are too pessimistic about what is happening and feel that everyone is alone in times of isolation and quarantine.

Just like Martinez, Garcia is extremely happy about the event and what it means for the families they will help.

I want to say thank you Laredo, Texas for all the donations that God is going to bless them back 100 percent for this immense help, Garcia said. We are so happy for the outcome. We love the way Laredo responded.

The local radio station is also content not just at the people but also all the partners that got together in such a short time in efforts to conduct the event.

We at La Raza 90.9 FM want to thank our partners Fisher of Men Foods Inc., the American Legion Post 59 and our community for a great event. Thats why were La Raza as we always try to help la raza.

Although the event is already over, there is still time for people to donate as American Legion Post 59 continues to accept items at their offices at 809 Zaragoza St.

Garcia invites all elderly people above 65 or those who may be in their 50s but have a condition that makes them highly dependent on others to come on Friday to the parking lot behind Mall del Norte next to Main Even to get their goods.

At the same time, people wanting to pray will be offered an area with Garcia and people of his congregation where they will allow people to pray from their cars. Also, people wanting to buy items and help support his business will also be able to do so as he will have his business open close to the area selling several packets of meats.

READ MORE: See the latest numbers on our interactive coronavirus tracker

People can call Rafael Garcia at (956) 645-5331 or visit the Fishers of Men Foods Inc. Facebook page to find out more information about Fridays event.
Acting to curb hoarding of essential items amid rising COVID-19 cases in Mumbai, police raided a godown in the city and seized four lakh masks, valued at Rs one crore, an official said on Wednesday.

Mumbai: Acting to curb hoarding of essential items amid rising COVID-19 cases in Mumbai, police raided a godown in the city and seized four lakh masks, valued at Rs one crore, an official said on Wednesday.

The raid was conducted at the Shah Warehousing and Transport Godown in suburban Mumbai, the official said.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on Coronavirus Outbreak

The Vile Parle Police received information on Tuesday night that a large quantity of face masks was stored in the warehouse. Police reached the spot and found 200 boxes of face masks valued at around Rs one crore, the official said.

Police registered an FIR against five people including the owner of the godown, agent and supplier at the Sahar police station but no arrest have been made, the official said.

Deputy Commissioner of Police Manjunath Singhe said legal action is being taken against the five. Hoarding of essential items like face masks and sanitizers is an offense, he added.

On Monday evening, the Mumbai crime branch Unit 9 had seized 25 lakh high-quality masks worth Rs 15 crore.
The Taoiseach has appealed for the public to continue in its support of the national objective to suppress the Covid-19 virus and flatten the curve.

Leo Varadkar was speaking in a major Dail debate which will pass further emergency legislation to deal with the coronavirus.

The proposals, detailed in the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Bill, will prevent evictions and implement a rent freeze throughout the health crisis.

The emergency measures are part of a major effort by government to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 and the economic consequences of the virus.

The Dail also agreed to pause business at 8pm to applaud health workers following a request from the Health Service Executive (HSE).

The Taoiseach went on to say the emergency legislation is a response to an unprecedented emergency.

Speaking in the Dail, Mr Varadkar said: Unfortunately, we cannot stop this virus, but working together we can slow it in its tracks, push it back and put it back in its box.

Our national objective is to suppress the virus and flatten the curve.

We can succeed if everyone takes sustained action  nothing less will do.

He added: As a doctor, and also as a politician, I know the value of repetition; give advice, the best advice, give it again and keep repeating until it becomes second nature and engraved.

So I want to advise everyone in the public to follow the public health advice, and to keep following these five basic steps, simple steps to protect all of us from the virus.

Regular hand washing; coughing etiquette; not touching your face; maintaining physical distance and staying at home if you feel unwell.

Mr Varadkar said there was a positive side to the amount of time spent on planning for Brexit.

He said that the thousands of hours spent on preparing for Brexit leaves Ireland in a better position to deal with major issues.

For the past three-and-a-half years, so much of our political time and energy was taken up by the issue of Brexit, he said.

Who would have thought quite a different crisis would bring our country to a standstill?

But in one sense, this was valuable time, and in other circumstances might be directed at other pressing national issues.

Todays legislation, to last for the duration of the emergency, will freeze rents, prevent evictions and make it easier for healthcare professionals to re-register and return to work and also enable former members of the Defence Forces to rejoin at the ranks they left.

The truth is, these are extraordinary times.

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said the people of Ireland continue to face real fear and uncertainty.

Speaking in the Dail, he added: To an extent never seen before, people are subject to major personal restrictions which limit their ability to mix with others, look after family members and go to work.

The measures which we adopted last week and those which we are adopting today are not ones that we would even discuss in normal circumstances.

But clearly, this unprecedented situation has justified, and will continue to justify, an unprecedented response.

Mr Martin also said that Ireland needs a government which can discuss and implement an urgent recovery plan.

He called for an introduction of some form of social partnership model.

He added: In Ireland we will need to develop our own national recovery plan to be implemented immediately when social and economic restrictions are significantly lifted.

No-one can be in any doubt that in order to have the funds to pay for social supports, public services and rebuilding jobs, tough decisions will have to be made even with a significantly higher deficit.

We already know about the massive increase in spending which must be implemented.

I believe we need a government which can discuss and implement an urgent recovery plan. In doing this, we should certainly look at the introduction of some form of social partnership model.

This should involve key stakeholders so that there can be real engagement and a true societal response to what will be a plan for our national recovery post-Covid-19.

Green Party leader Eamon Ryan told the Dail that the chief executive of the HSE, Paul Reid, told him during a meeting that they did more in a week to move towards Slaintecare than they would normally do within a year.

Mr Ryan said the resources being pumped into healthcare was an opportunity to invest in the system in every aspect.

He added: At a time of this radical and rapid change, its a chance for us to invest in a health system to bring it in the direction we want, and that will require investment.

Similarly, if we have tens of thousands of workers and hundred of thousands who will be unemployed, we should be looking to really ramping up our public housing programme straight away, as a stimulus to come out of unemployment that may come with this economic downturn.

People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett has called for a rent, mortgage payment and utility bill holiday or amnesty.

Speaking in the Dail, he said: We think that a rent, mortgage payment and utility bill holiday or amnesty for people is a must.

People who cannot work and have lost or will lose income because of this crisis, need the stress of bills, mortgage payments and rents, which in many cases are extortionate, and the potential for arrears, to be removed.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar's speech in full

Ceann Comhairle,

We are meeting today to take unprecedented actions to respond to an unprecedented emergency. I am grateful to you, and to all our public representatives for facilitating this vital work.

I also want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the staff in Leinster House for going about their business with such efficiency, while following the recommended guidelines on physical distancing. Our laws derive their legitimacy, in the first place, from being passed by a democratically elected Oireachtas. Your work enables our democratic life to continue in the most trying of circumstances, and it is precisely at times like this that we need to see it in action the most.

I also wish to put on the record the constructive role played by Opposition parties and independents to date. The Government is grateful to you for your understanding, goodwill and co-operation and it has been an example of politics at its best. It shows that when faced by a common foe we can put aside our differences and work together for the good of our country, to protect livelihoods and to save lives.

Following my speech, Minister Donohoe will provide an economic overview of the Bill and give a detailed outline of what is proposed. Later, after the contributions of each party and grouping in this Chamber, Minister Humphreys will conclude by looking at the Bill more broadly and how it will affect business. In the Committee and Remaining Stages we will have Government contributions from Ministers Harris, Donohoe, English, Kehoe and Humphreys to ensure that as many of your questions and concerns can be answered.

Unfortunately we cannot stop this virus but working together we can slow it in its tracks and push it back. Our national objective must be to flatten the curve. We can succeed if everyone takes sustained action. Nothing less will do.

As a doctor and a Politician I know the value of repetition. Give the best advice and then give it again, and keep repeating it until it becomes second nature.

So I would like to advise everyone to follow the public health advice and to keep following the five key steps. Simple steps that are vital to protect us all: regular hand washing, coughing etiquette, not touching your face, physical distance, and staying at home if feeling unwell.

For the past three-and-a-half years so much of our political time and energy was taken up by the issue of Brexit. Time expended preparing for the impact of a possible No Deal Brexit. More time spent ensuring we avoided that outcome and did not see the return of a hard border on the island of Ireland.

In one sense, this was valuable time that in other circumstances might have been directed at other pressing national issues.

However there has been one positive side effect. Because of the thousands of hours devoted by our civil servants and officials to prepare for all possible eventualities  because of the work our Ministers did to ensure that we would be able to withstand the worst effects of a No deal Brexit  we are now in a better position than if we were starting to think about some of these issues for the first time.

The work spent thinking about supply lines, about the impact of a shock to the economy, the money we set aside through prudent management of our finances  all of this is now being deployed against a different kind of national threat.

We did not expect or predict a pandemic of this kind, but we were prepared for an economic crisis, and we are in a much stronger position today as a result.

So I want to reassure the public that although the challenges will be great, we are ready to face them. And although the cost of these measures will be high, we are prepared to pay the price.

We can bear it and we will be able to pay it back as a nation. We do so willingly because it is the right thing to do and because we owe it to our fellow citizens.

By maintaining the link between employees and employers and companies, it will be easier for us to bounce back when this is all over. These actions will keep our economic infrastructure intact. It will also give businesses the best chance of making it through this crisis.

We are also making sure the self-employed are covered. I know the sacrifices so many of our self-employed have made to build up their businesses and practices and I know how worried they are now.

We will do everything we can to help sustain you and bring you through this Emergency.

Today we are asking the Oireachtas to pass emergency legislation to respond to the COVID-19 emergency. Emergency actions that will mitigate the impact of the virus and enable us to provide public services.

Todays legislation  to last for the duration of the Emergency - will freeze rents, prevent evictions, make it easier for health care professionals to re-register and return to work, and enable former members of our Defence Forces to rejoin at the rank they left.

We know that the financial impact of mass redundancies over a short period of time would have a serious impact on the ability for a business to recover, so we are extending the time-periods under which a person who has been laid off or kept on short-time due to Covid-19 can claim a redundancy payment from their employer.

So much work is taking place to help save and protect lives. For example, we have also approved a framework agreement with the private hospitals, so that they can operate effectively as public hospitals under Section 38 of the Health Act for the duration of the Emergency. This will add over 2,000 beds, 9 laboratories, critical care capacity and thousands of staff to our health service.

Some might ask why these things were not done before now  and why we have previously objected to measures such as rent freezes, a moratorium on evictions, and the co-opting of private healthcare.

The truth is that these are extraordinary times.

For example, property rights are always subject to the common good in our Constitution. I dont think anyone would argue that this is an extraordinary situation where the common good applies.

In normal circumstances, a freeze in rents would actually make things worse, it would reduce the supply of new housing, for example. So, therefore less rental properties becoming available. But this is a temporary policy, its only for a few weeks hopefully, for twelve weeks.

However, that is not to say that some emergency policy changes might not make long-term policy changes.

One area is sick pay. Workers in low paid sectors should not have to be out of work for six days to qualify for income support. Six days is too long and is bad policy both in terms of social justice and public health.

Desperate times do not call for desperate measures. They call for composure and they call for radical responses, that will provide hope and bring maximum benefit to those who need them most.

This legislation is designed to do just that.

We will be remembered for what happened after this emergency visited our shores, and when we faced our greatest challenge. It will be the story of a great national effort to withstand the worst of it, and how every person played their part.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that this emergency has already cost lives and cost jobs, and is going to get worse before it gets better. People are afraid and are looking for reassurance. Politicians dont always have a good reputation, sometimes deservedly so, but we do have an opportunity to shine. Not as individuals, but as a group. We can show that the ideals that first motivated us to enter politics can sustain us when our country needs hope the most.

Go raith mile maith agaibh.

- Additional reporting by Press Association
The death toll shot up in Spain by more than 700 for a total of over 3,400, eclipsing the number of fatalities in China, where the outbreak began. Spain is now second only to Italy in the number of dead.

The countrys hospitals are groaning under the weight of the pandemic: Video and photos from two hospitals in the Spanish capital showed patients, many hooked up to oxygen tanks, crowding corridors and emergency rooms. At the 12 de Octubre University Hospital, patients could be seen on the floor as they waited for a bed. The hospital says the patients have since been accommodated elsewhere.

On Wednesday, the number of medical personnel infected was nearly 6,500 nationally, health authorities said, representing 13.6% of the countrys 47,600 total cases and about 1% of the health systems workforce. At least three health-care workers have died.

Spanish media reported that 23 residents of a Madrid retirement home died from COVID-19 or symptoms related to the virus. The homes management said it had been pleading for more staff and supplies, including virus tests, after 55 of its workers had been forced to take medical leave.

britain

Prince Charles

tests positive

Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, has tested positive for the new coronavirus, royal officials confirmed Wednesday  touching off debate about whether his wealth and status gave him priority in receiving a test.

The 71-year-old is showing mild symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and is self-isolating at a royal estate in Scotland, the princes Clarence House office said. His wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, has tested negative.

Meanwhile, Britains deputy ambassador to Hungary has died after contracting the new coronavirus.

The Foreign Office says Steven Dick, 37, died Tuesday in Hungary, where he had been based since last year.

Dicks parents said he had long dreamed of becoming a diplomat and was very happy representing our country overseas. We are devastated by his loss.

russia

Putin postpones

key national vote

Citing the coronavirus, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday postponed a nationwide vote on proposed constitutional amendments that include a change potentially allowing him to stay in office until 2036.

Putin didnt set a new date for the plebiscite, which was originally scheduled for April 22, saying that it would depend on how the pandemic develops in Russia. The country reported its first two deaths from the virus on Wednesday.

He also announced during a televised address to the nation that the government doesnt want Russians to go to work next week, except for those in essential sectors. Stores, pharmacies and banks will stay open, he said.

zimbabwe

Medical workers

strike in protest

Zimbabwes public hospital doctors and nurses went on strike Wednesday over a lack of protective gear as the coronavirus begins to spread in a country whose health system has almost collapsed. Its the latest blow to a nation where some patients families are asked to provide such basics as gloves and clean water.

Zimbabwe has three cases of COVID-19 and recorded its first death this week.

Neighboring South Africas coronavirus cases jumped to 709, its health minister said, as the country with Africas most cases prepared to go into lockdown Friday.

Cases across Africa are now well above 2,400. Forty-six of the continents 54 countries have the virus with Mali, Libya and Guinea-Bissau the latest to confirm their first.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

italy

U.S. Army aids

hard-hit region

The U.S. Army Europe says it has delivered medical supplies and equipment to help fight the new coronavirus in Italys hard-hit region of Lombardy.

The move, part of the Defense Security Cooperation Agencys humanitarian assistance program, saw the 405th Army Field Support Brigade deliver hospital beds, mattresses, adjustable IV poles and other supplies.

china

Lockdown eased

at epicenter

Trains carrying factory employees back to work after two months in locked-down cities rolled out of Hubei province, the center of Chinas virus outbreak, as the government on Wednesday began lifting the last of the controls that confined tens of millions of people to their homes.

Chronicle News Services
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Following the suit of the major banks last week, second-tier lenders have steadily been announcing significant COVID-19 support packages of their own to provide for small business and home loan customers financially struggling as a result of the pandemic.

ING

ING Australia has encouraged customers facing difficulties to reach out for assistance with their home, personal or commercial loans.

Customers may be eligible for:

Repayment deferrals of up to 6 months on commercial loans for small business customers

A 3- to 6-month pause on home loans and personal loan repayments

A 3- to 6-month payment pause on credit cards

Record low fixed rates for home loan borrowers

Higher term deposit rates for savers

A cut of 0.35% to rates for existing commercial variable loans (under $3m), effective from 9 April

New fixed home loan rates, including a record low 2.09% p.a. two-year owner occupied will also be effective from today, 26 March 2020.

AMP

AMP Banks support package also includes a pause on home loan repayments for clients experiencing financial pressure, for three months with the option to extend for a further three months.

It also includes:

A range of new fixed rates for existing owner occupied and investment clients, including a 2.39% p.a. fixed rate for the 2-year Professional Package owner occupier P&I product

Fee waivers for home loan clients in financial hardship

A waiver of the monthly account keeping fee for everyday and savings account holders, from 30 March 2020 until 1 October 2020

Access to a 1.80% p.a. term deposit rate across all available terms from 6 to 18 months

MyState

MyState Bank will reduce lending rates for fixed rate home loans from 31 March 2020 by up to 0.80%. The fixed rate home loan for 1-, 2-, and 3-year loan terms with an LVR of less than 80% will drop to 2.39%.

These rates will also be available for eligible borrowers under the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme.

MyStates support package includes:
The Army has a message for its retirees: Uncle Sam wants you to help fight the novel coronavirus.

A message sent by Defense Finance and Accounting Services, which processes and dispenses retiree pay, asked troops who had previously served in specific health care specialties to consider "re-joining the team" to address the current pandemic crisis. It's signed by Lt. Gen. Thomas Seamands, deputy chief of staff for U.S. Army Personnel, G-1.

"We need to hear from you STAT!" reads the message, obtained by Military.com.

The Army, it states, is gauging the interest of retired officers, noncommissioned officers and more junior enlisted soldiers in assisting service efforts to treat the sometimes-deadly disease. The message does not specify whether retired troops would be returned to active status or serve in some other capacity.

Related: Massive Relief Bill Would Triple Mlitary Hospital Beds, Fund Guard Deployments

"These extraordinary challenges require equally extraordinary solutions and that's why we're turning to you -- trusted professionals capable of operating under constantly changing conditions," the message states. "When the Nation called -- you answered, and now, that call may come again."

The call was addressed to retirees from the following health care-specific military occupational specialties:

60F: Critical Care Officer

60N: Anesthesiologist

66F: Nurse Anesthetist

66S: Critical Care Nurse

66P: Nurse Practitioner

66T: ER Nurse

68V: Respiratory Specialist

68W: Medic

The message came with a caveat: retired personnel now working in a civilian capacity in a hospital or other medical facility should make that known. Army officials said they did not want to pull personnel from service they were "providing to the Nation" in that role. They added that former soldiers from a different specialty who were interested in supporting Army efforts should also reach out to communicate that interest.

The call-out directed interested retirees to contact Human Resources Command, Reserve Personnel Management Directorate at Fort Knox, Kentucky, providing contact info and MOS.

As of Wednesday, the Pentagon reported 227 cases of Coronavirus among U.S. troops and 435 total among Defense Department-connected personnel. U.S. cases on Wednesday passed 64,000.

This week, the Pentagon announced that military medical and dental treatment facilities would postpone the majority of elective surgeries, dental procedures and invasive procedures for 60 days as it shifts most resources to fighting the pandemic. A massive relief package moving quickly through Congress Wednesday would triple the number of hospital beds available at these facilities and give the DoD $1.5 billion to open expeditionary military hospitals.

The call to retirees also comes on the heels of a recommendation from the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service for the creation of a "critical skills Individual Ready Reserve" that would serve essentially as a roster of qualified individuals in high-demand fields, likely including health care, on standby to support the Defense Department in times of national emergency. It's one of 164 recommendations that will be considered by Congress in coming months.

The U.S. Selective Service System also owns a yet-to-be activated standby plan known as the Health Care Personnel Delivery System, colloquially known as the "doctor draft," that would "provide a fair and equitable draft of doctors, nurses, medical technicians and those with certain other health care skills if, in some future emergency, the military's existing medical capability proved insufficient and there is a shortage of volunteers."

That proposed mechanism, however, is designed for use only in wartime and in connection with a broader national mobilization effort, with the approval of Congress and the president.

In a briefing at the Pentagon Wednesday, Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, Joint Staff surgeon, said he felt generally comfortable that the U.S. military had the resources it needed to continue to fight the virus.

"I'm very comfortable that we've analyzed the communities where we have military bases. We've looked at what we think their medical requirements would be when an outbreak occurs or if an outbreak occurs in that community," he said. "Do we have enough health care resources there? Is it the right mix of health care resources? That's then allowed us to identify what medical capabilities from the military we can offer to help support the whole of government, or to support combatant commands in other parts of the world."

Interested retirees can contact Human Resources Command, Reserve Personnel Management Directorate, at usarmy.knox.hrc.mbx.g3-retiree-recall@mail.mil or call 502-613-4911.

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.

Read More: Thousands of Troops Will Be Stuck Overseas Under Sweeping New Travel Ban
From time to time, most of us have sat outside and dug into a good book.

It's an opportunity to get some fresh air and enjoy the sunshine as the turn of each page draws us deeper into the story.

Jacquelyn Tiger-Williams has taken the concept to a different level. In fact, the fourth grade teacher at Hurffville Elementary School in Washington Township has taken her educational approach to new heights in an attempt to keep students active and engaged.

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With schools in the state closed due to the coronavirus crisis, online teaching has become the new normal. And while she misses the daily face-to-face connection with her students, Tiger-Williams is taking steps to help ensure learning remains fun.

"I'm trying to maintain a relationship with them, be a part of their daily life," she said.

"The best part of the day is spending time with the kids. Now you do, but you don't. I kinda lost the best part of my job."

A teacher who deals in subject matter from math, reading and writing to spelling and health, Tiger-Williams has leaned on video technology to help make the online experience fresh and lively.

Jacquelyn Tiger-Williams, a fourth grade teacher at Hurffville Elementary School in Washington Township, recently gave a math lesson via video from her laundry room with family dog Olive.

It started with a math lesson in front of the washer and dryer - Live from the Laundry Pile! She's read aloud from various places in her house - in front of the tank that's home to Eugene the Bearded Dragon; with Olive, the family dog; in front of Frozen fatheads in her daughter's room.

"I just Googled things like magnetics and white board," Tigers-Williams said. "When I knew we were closing it was, 'OK, washing machine.' That's where math started."

She's even gone to higher elevations - the rooftop.

"I read a book on the roof at sunset because I knew (Thursday) would be rainy and I wanted a video with sunshine," she passionately noted. "I'm doing anything to keep their attention. It's like 'I wonder where she is today?'

"You can find videos online, but you're not in them. I want them to see me and in a specific way. For me, it's about keeping them connected to us. I go to different parts of the house so the kids don't get bored. I feel all teachers are doing make-it-work things."

A fourth grade teacher in Washington Township, Jacquelyn Tiger-Williams made a stand out of Legos to hold her phone while making daily videos as part of her online teaching method.

She even made a stand for her phone while shooting videos - out of Legos.

"We're all MacGyvering our way through this," she said referring to the original TV series of the mid to late 1980s.

A Pitman resident, Tiger-Williams has spent 14 of her 20 years in teaching at Hurffville. This year certainly ranks among the most challenging.

"It's slowly getting easier as kids and teachers are getting used to the tech platforms," she said. "Our district has training sessions available every day; we call colleagues and ask how they've done something.

"The village mindset is making it gradually easier."

Jeff Pollock has been in education for 38 years, the last eight as Hurffville's principal after a 12-year run at neighboring Thomas Jefferson Elementary. He said Tiger-Williams has always had a creative teaching style.

"They are all trying so hard to provide instruction in different ways, using different programs that they're not used to using," Pollack said. "They are trying to make connections with the kids and Jacki is doing that in a very creative way. It's pretty cool that she's trying to make it fun for the kids.

"Jacki is going above and beyond, but that's just the type of teacher she is."

Sitting in from of the tank with Eugene the Bearded Dragon, fourth grade teacher Jacquelyn Tiger-Williams reads a story via video to her students at Hurffville Elementary School.

Tiger-Williams said parents have got a kick out of her approach.

"I'm a mom, too, and it's really stressful trying to teach from home," she said. "I'm taking a little off the parents' plate even though I'm not there."

Not every math lesson is from the laundry room, although Tiger-Williams was planning to return on Friday. She won't read from the roof every day or include Olive in each video.

But there's a method behind her madness, one she hopes will bring a smile to her students' faces in what is arguably a time of loaded with anxiety and plenty of unknown hurdles.

"Every teacher I know is doing something fantastic," Tiger-Williams said. "We're all doing really cool stuff. I don't think I'm unusual."

As for that washer ...

"There's a slight blue tint to it now," Tiger-Williams said.

You have to make sure your house is clean, too, she laughed, and youve got to change your clothes. Im ready to order some new sweatpants.

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New Delhi, March 26 : Making an aggressive bid, the country's largest power producer NTPC on Thursday announced acquisition of the government's entire stake in two hydropower producing companies - THDC India and North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Ltd (NEEPCO) - for a total consideration of Rs 11,500 crore.

The company informed the exchanges that it signed share purchase agreement on Wednesday to buy central government's entire 74.496 per cent stake of THDC for an aggregate consideration of Rs 7,500 crore. Similarly, NTPC has also acquired entire 100 per cent government stake in NEEPCO for Rs 4,000 crore.

The transaction was earlier cleared by the competition regulator after the Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs (CCEA) had given its nod last year. SEBI has treated acquisition as a related party transaction and this exempted the deal from its open offer provisions.

The Centre held entire 100 per cent stake in NEEPCO that operates close to 1,500 MW of power plants in the northeastern region, and has 75 per cent holding in THDC. The Uttar Pradesh government holds the balance 25 per cent stake in THDC India.

NTPC paid Rs 11.08 per share of NEEPCO and Rs 2,746.31 per share of THDC. Both companies are not listed on exchanges.

The stake sale would be only disinvestment proposal this year where a state-owned entity would pick up government equity in another public sector undertaking (PSU).

"NEEPCO and THDC fits into the scheme of things for NTPC that has grown its coal-fired capacity but is yet to get into the big league on renewables. The takeover of the two hydropower generating companies would give a foothold to NPTC in the northeastern region while also allow synergies with several of its plants in the north of the country," said an official source.

Earlier, NTPC was looking at buying the Centre's stake in Sutlej Jal Vidyut Nigam Ltd (SJVNL). But despite its interest, the deal could not go through as the Himachal Pradesh government, which also had a minority stake in the hydro company, refused to part with its shares.

The government has identified NTPC for this strategic sale of its equity as it would add value to country's largest shareholder and help the Centre by way of higher dividend payouts. Moreover, NTPC has a stable operational record and decent cash reserve, that could make these buys easy.
Bowser slammed Congress for not sending enough economic aid to the nations capital in a $2 trillion federal stimulus package, which passed the Senate and is set to be voted on by the House. The bill treats the District as if it were a U.S. territory and would steer about $500 million to local relief efforts  about $750 million less than what each state is guaranteed. Normally, the city is treated like a state in terms of federal funding.
(Newser)  Louisiana had already banned gatherings of more than 50 people before Gov. John Bel Edwards announced a statewide order against groups of more than 10 on Sunday. But the first order didn't stop a pastor from herding a claimed 1,000 people into his church week after week, and it's not clear that the second will result in any change. Rev. Tony Spell of Central City's Life Tabernacle Church says roughly 1,000 congregants, bused in from five different parishes, have been gathering each Sunday in defiance of state and federal recommendations, while a few hundred more enjoy additional services each Tuesday. "If they close every door in this city, then I will close my doors," Spell told CNN shortly before hosting congregrants on Tuesday. "But you can't say the retailers are essential but the church is not. That is a persecution of the faith."

story continues below

Spell previously claimed the COVID-19 pandemic was "politically motivated" while "the church is a hospital for the sick," per CNN. He also said a police officer had threatened to send in the National Guard to break up services, which he has no intention of stopping until forced. Chief Roger Corcoran of the Central Police Department, however, says "that was never told to the pastor by my officer." He adds the "matter is under investigation." There appeared to be far fewer than 1,000 congregants at Sunday's outdoor service, which was livestreamed hours before Edwards' latest order was to take effect, though Spell tells CNN the congregants were scattered across in different areas. "We're doing our best to keep everyone safe," Spell said at one point, noting social distancing guidelines. Later scenes, though, showed those in attendance were clearly breaking those guidelines, per USA Today. (Read more Louisiana stories.)
Vatican daily paper stops printing paper edition for only third time since 1861.

The Vatican daily newspaper L'Osservatore Romano has suspended printing due to the ongoing Coronavirus emergency, reports Reuters news agency.

The temporary stop is only the third time in its almost 160-year history that the newspaper has ceased printing, with the evening edition on 25 March the last for the time being.

The paper will continue publishing online, and most of its 60 employees, including 20 journalists, will work from home, editor Andrea Monda told Reuters.

Despite a print run of 5,000, the newspaper is influential in reflecting Vatican opinion in international affairs and Church matters, and is read by many ambassadors in Rome.

Monda told Reuters that the newspaper will attempt to boost its online readership until it is able to print again.

However in the meantime the paper will continue to print 10 copies, destined for Pope Francis, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, several for top Vatican officials and the rest for the historic archive purposes.

"We had to stop primarily because both the printers and the distributors could not guarantee their services in safe conditions because of the lockdown in Italy and the Vatican," Monda told Reuters.

When did L'Osservatore Romano stop printing before?

Founded in 1861, the newspaper continued to print during the Nazi occupation of Rome during world war two.

The first time it ceased printing, according to Reuters, was on 20 September 1870 when troops fighting for Italian unification conquered Rome and brought an end to the Papal States.

The other occasion was a period in 1919 due to labour unrest and other difficulties in Italy after world war one, Monda told Reuters.

What newspapers does Pope Francis read?

Pope Francis told reporters last year that he reads only two newspapers: L'Osservatore Romano - which he jokingly referred to as the "party paper" - and Rome's daily newspaper Il Messaggero.

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Amid the coronavirus outbreak, budget carrier SpiceJet has returned five of the aircraft it wet leased from Turkish carrier Corendon Airlines.

Sources told the paper the planes were returned due to a cash crunch, but a SpiceJet spokesperson said some aircraft have been returned due to reduced operations.

The coronavirus, or COVID-19, pandemic has hurt Indian airlines since the government has suspended international and domestic flights.

With a 21-day nationwide lockdown, air travel is expected to resume only on April 15.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the story.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

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Some aircraft have been returned due to weaker demand and closure of international operations, a SpiceJet spokesperson told The Indian Express.

The suspension of international operations and the weakening of domestic demand due to COVID-19 outbreak earlier this month provided an opportunity to SpiceJet to cut high-cost expenses and focus our resources on running a lean and profitable operation. As part of the cost cutting exercise, wide-ranging measures have been taken including returning some wet lease aircraft, the spokesperson said.

Airports, too, will face the impact of the plunge in demand, and will see a drop in passenger traffic.

Given the fall in airline operations, airports are likely to operate at less than 20 percent capacity for the month of April and less than 50 percent till June. A decline of anywhere between 8 percent to 15 percent is expected for passengers handled (domestic and international) by airports, CARE Ratings said in a report.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Renaissance Gold Inc. (REN.V)(RNSGF) ("RenGold" or the "Company") reports that in order to protect its employees, contractors and do our part for the safety of our communities, it has implemented a work from home strategy at both its Reno, Nevada and White Rock, B.C. offices until further notice.

Robert Felder, President & CEO states, "The COVID-19 threat has created a challenging situation around the world and we are fortunate to live at a time when our technical capabilities allow us to continue with our business remotely, with only minimal disruption. We are in good financial shape to carefully steer the Company through this uncertain time, and our generative activities are continuing and discussions with potential new partners remain ongoing."

Cash Position: The Company reported C$2.85M in cash as of December 31, 2019. A US$2.40M (C$3.48M) payment is due in June, 2020 from AngloGold Ashanti ("Anglo") should they choose to complete their option to acquire the Silicon Project in Nye County, Nevada. If Anglo completes their option, the Company will retain a 1% NSR on the project (See NR dated January 6, 2020).

Funded projects: The Company currently has 6 of its projects in option or earn-in agreements. Given the current uncertainty due to the COVID-19 threat and the highly volatile financial markets, drilling plans are uncertain at this time, but will be reported when plans materialize later in the year.

About Renaissance Gold Inc.

Renaissance Gold Inc. is a western US focused prospect generator utilizing a joint venture business model. RenGold applies the extensive exploration experience and high-end technical skills of its founders and team members to search for and acquire high quality precious metal exploration projects that are then offered for joint venture to industry partners who provide exploration funding. RenGold maintains a large portfolio of gold and silver exploration properties and has entered into over 70 exploration agreements over the past 16 years including those of its predecessor, AuEx Ventures Inc., and those from Kinetic Gold. RenGold's objective is to place its projects into exploration agreements, testing as many drill targets as possible and providing maximum exposure to success through discovery.

Story continues

By: Robert Felder, President & CEO

For further information, contact:

Robert Felder 775-337-1545 or bfelder@rengold.com

Ronald Parratt 775-337-1545 or rparratt@rengold.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release contains certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking" statements. Forward looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. Although Renaissance Gold Inc. believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in forward looking statements. Forward looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates and opinions of Renaissance Gold Inc's management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by law, Renaissance Gold Inc. undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change.

SOURCE: Renaissance Gold Inc.





View source version on accesswire.com:

https://www.accesswire.com/582593/Renaissance-Gold-Implements-Safe-Practices-to-Minimize-COVID-19-Risk




WELLINGTON, New ZealandThe man who committed the worst atrocity in New Zealands modern history when he killed 51 worshippers at two Christchurch mosques unexpectedly changed his plea to guilty for all charges on Thursday.

The attacks targeting people praying at the mosques a year ago shocked the nation and prompted the Ardern Labor government to bring in new laws banning the deadliest types of semi-automatic weapons. It also prompted global changes to social media protocols after the gunman livestreamed his attack on Facebook, where it was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

The sudden turn in the case took survivors and relatives by surprise, and brought relief to people across New Zealand. Many had feared the Australian eco-fascist Brenton Harrison Tarrant would try to use his trial as a platform to promote his views. Hed outlined those views in a 74-page manifesto he published online shortly before the attacks.

Tarrant, 29, pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder, and one count of terrorism at the Christchurch High Court. He had previously pleaded not guilty to all charges and his trial had been scheduled to start in June.

Tarrant is the first person to be found guilty of terrorism in New Zealand under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S.

The change in plea came less than two weeks after New Zealanders commemorated those who died during the attacks on March 15, 2019.

Honestly, Im still trying to process what just happened, said Aya Al-Umari, whose brother Hussein was killed in the attack on the Al Noor mosque. I feel conflicted.

She said that on the one hand, she had wanted to find out more details about what happened at the trial but on the other hand was feeling relieved about not having to face the trauma of sitting through it.

Temel Atacocugu, who survived being shot nine times during the attack at Al Noor, said he was surprised by the turn of events and hoped the judge would set an example at the sentencing by imposing the harshest punishment in the countrys history and helping ensure nothing like it would happen again.

Im happy that he has accepted that he is guilty, Atacocugu said.

Judge Cameron Mander has not yet set a sentencing date. Tarrant faces life imprisonment, with the judge having some discretion in deciding the minimum number of years Tarrant must serve before becoming eligible for parole.

The change in plea came at a hastily arranged court hearing at a time that New Zealand was beginning a four-week lockdown to try and combat the new coronavirus. The lockdown meant Tarrant appeared in the court via video link from his jail cell in Auckland and only a handful of people were allowed inside the courtroom.

By Nick Perry. Epoch Times staff contributed to this report.
The program to support unbudgeted spending covering emergency outlays and medical supplies and equipment

Washington: The IMF on Wednesday approved a $1.3 billion aid plan for Jordan, made all the more necessary by the global coronavirus pandemic.

The program was initially announced at the end of January before the novel virus rocked the world's economy.

"Changes were made to the program to support unbudgeted spending covering emergency outlays and medical supplies and equipment," the IMF said in a statement.

"If the impact of the outbreak is deep enough to put at risk program objectives, the program will be adapted further to the changed circumstances, upon reaching understandings with the authorities," the statement added.

Jordan will immediately receive a first tranche of about $140 million. The rest will be dispensed over the rest of the program, subject to eight program reviews.

In addition to funds for combatting the pandemic, the program also provides for structural reforms including lowering the price of electricity for businesses and facilitating youth employment.

Jordan, whose stability is considered central to that of the entire region, is one of the most important countries that receives foreign aid, including from the United States.

The Middle Eastern nation has also long benefitted from IMF aid programs in exchange for reforms.
[March 26, 2020] Wolters Kluwer Arms Coronavirus Efforts with New Global Interactive Map using UpToDate

Wolters Kluwer, Health is supporting clinicians on the front lines fighting the COVID-19 pandemic with additional evidence-based resources in UpToDate and a new interactive COVID-19 search intensity map. The map helps clinicians and public health agencies track the virus and may support clinicians in gaining predictive insights on reported cases based on clinical search activity from 1.9 million clinicians at the point of care. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005441/en/ Wolters Kluwer's Interactive COVID-19 Search Intensity Map highlights areas of high clinical search intensity in UpToDate, helping to anticipate regional increases of reported COVID-19 cases. (Photo: Business Wire) "With a legacy of nearly 30 years, UpToDate has been there to support and promote the best patient care around the world; we will never waver in that commitment. In these most difficult times, we want to support clinicians in any way we can," said Denise Basow, MD, CEO, Clinical Effectiveness at Wolters Kluwer, Health. "That's why we have provided open access to our COVID-19 clinical and patient topics in UpToDate." Continuously Updated COVID-19 Resources Since February 1st, UpToDate's clinical COVID-19 topics have been viewed over two million times. These topics, and easy-to-read patient education resources, are updated continuously. In addition, the UpToDate editorial team has expanded free access to topics in Infectious Diseases, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, providing information related to diagnosis and management of COVID-19 and its complications. To support clinicians with patients heading home after hospitalization for COVID-19, discharge instructions and patient-facing information is now available for free. The downloadable PDF includes information about recomended care at home, follow-up care, medications, what physical activity will be limited and more.



Interactive COVID-19 Search Intensity Map To help epidemiologists and public health agencies turn the tide on the coronavirus pandemic, Wolters Kluwer has developed a global interactive bubble map that highlights areas of high clinical search intensity in UpToDate, which may support clinicians in gaining helpful insight to anticipate regional increases of reported COVID-19 cases.

Cross-disciplinary teams at Wolters Kluwer developed the interactive map by analyzing how often specific questions related to COVID-19 are searched by doctors, nurses and other clinicians globally. This leverages global search activity in UpToDate, a trusted resource used by more than 1.9 million clinicians for clinical decision support in direct patient care. Data scientists calculated and displayed what is called "search intensity" and also factored into this bubble map cases of COVID-19 reported by Johns Hopkins University. In previous studies (looking at MERS and influenza),1,2 an increase in search intensity correlated with documented outbreaks. The map illustrates how search intensity increases over time in regions around the world and where it is diminishing. It currently includes country-level data around the world as well as state-level data in the U.S. View the live map now: https://covid19map.uptodate.com?utm_source=press-release&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=interactive-map-pr Read more Wolters Kluwer will continue to make resources available for clinicians battling COVID-19 around the world. For more, please bookmark and visit the Wolters Kluwer COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Resources & Tools page at http://healthclarity.wolterskluwer.com/coronavirus-resources.html?utm_source=press-release&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=interactive-map-pr Read this story on our website. Thorner AR, Cao B, Jiang T, Warner AJ, Bonis PA. Correlation between UpToDate searches and reported cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome during outbreaks in Saudi Arabia. Open Forum Infectious Diseases 2016; 3(1): ofw043. Santillana M, Nsoesie EO, Mekaru SR, Scales D, Brownstein JS. Using clinicians' search query data to monitor influenza epidemics. Clinical Infectious Diseases 2014; 59(10): 1446. About Wolters Kluwer Wolters Kluwer (WKL) is a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the clinicians, nurses, accountants, lawyers, and tax, finance, audit, risk, compliance, and regulatory sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with advanced technology and services. Wolters Kluwer reported 2019 annual revenues of 4.6 billion. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,000 people worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands. Wolters Kluwer provides trusted clinical technology and evidence-based solutions that engage clinicians, patients, researchers and students with advanced clinical decision support, learning and research and clinical intelligence. For more information about our solutions, visit http://healthclarity.wolterskluwer.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter (News - Alert) @WKHealth. For more information, visit www.wolterskluwer.com, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005441/en/

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Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that four of the nations five largest banks have agreed to suspend mortgage payments for 90 days for California homeowners affected by the coronavirus.

Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and U.S. Bank, along with about 200 state-chartered banks and credit unions, agreed to the 90-day grace period, he said.

Congress, meanwhile, was struggling to pass a stimulus bill that would provide most Americans with direct payments of $1,200 for each adult and $500 for each child younger than 17. The bill also would provide expanded unemployment benefits, even to those who are not eligible for regular state unemployment benefits because they are self-employed, havent worked long enough or ran out of benefits.

Some banks agreed to temporarily suspend mortgage payments for customers nationwide after federal regulators announced last week they are halting all foreclosures and evictions of homeowners for at least 60 days on mortgages backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration. They also urged all homeowners facing financial difficulty to contact their loan servicer and ask for a forbearance for up to 12 months. During this time, they could make no or reduced payments without incurring late fees or a hit to their credit rating. That policy applies to government-backed loans on homes and condos with one to four units, including rental properties. It did not apply to jumbo or other loans that do not have a government guarantee.

Chase said it is offering a 90-day payment forbearance for mortgage customers nationwide who have been impacted by the coronavirus. Wells Fargo said it will grant an immediate 90-day payment suspension for any home lending customer who asks for assistance. Although the waiver is available on all loans including jumbos, at the end of the 90-day payment suspension, the borrower could be offered other options including a continued suspension or longer-term loan modification, depending on the loan investor and other factors, Wells Fargo spokesman Ruben Pulido said in an email.

Newsom said that Bank of America had agreed to only a 30-day payment waiver. However, bank spokesman Bill Halldin said in an email, Bank of America is deferring mortgage payments on a monthly basis until the crisis is over. At this point, until the crisis is over could be up to 90 days or longer. On loans owned by the bank, deferred payments would be added to the end of the mortgage.

Consistent with federal guidelines, Newsom said the banks agreeing to the 90-day payment grace period will not charge late fees or report late payments to credit reporting agencies, nor will they initiate foreclosure sales or evictions for at least 60 days. California homeowners wont be charged interest while their loan payments are suspended, said Nathan Click, a spokesman for the governor.

Newsom also said Wednesday that the state has received 1 million unemployment claims since March 13, and praised Congress for working to provide additional benefits to the unemployed.

Under the latest version of the bill, nearly all unemployed workers would get $600 per week, plus their state benefit if they get one, for up to four months. In California, where the maximum weekly benefit is $450 for 26 weeks, some people could get up to $1,050 for four months. In addition, people who ran out of regular state benefits after 26 weeks could get an additional 13 weeks of federally funded benefits.

The stimulus payments provided in the bill would go to all U.S. residents with adjusted gross income up to $75,000 ($150,000 married), who are not a dependent of another taxpayer and have a work eligible social security number, according to a Senate finance committee summary.

They would be eligible for the full $1,200 per adult or $2,400 for a married couple filing jointly. In addition, they would get $500 per child.

Above those income limits, the payment would be gradually reduced and would reach zero at $99,000 in income for singles, $146,500 for head of household filers with one child and $198,000 for joint filers with no children. The top of the phaseout range would be higher the more children a family has.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

Only children younger than 17 would qualify for the $500 payment, according to Mark Luscombe, principal analyst at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting.

For the vast majority of Americans, no action on their part will be required in order to receive a rebate check as IRS will use a taxpayers 2019 tax return if filed, or in the alternative their 2018 return, the summary said. Those who exceeded the limit on their latest tax return would not get the payment.

People with no income, as well as those whose income comes entirely from means-tested benefit programs, would also be eligible. However, to get the payment, people would need to file a tax return so the IRS can confirm their eligibility.

People will receive a payment via direct deposit, perhaps within a matter of weeks after the bill is approved, if the IRS has their bank information. If not, they will have to wait for a check, which could take four or five weeks, according to the committee.

These details could change before a bill is passed.

Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: kpender@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kathpender
Rubber-glove producers in Malaysia urged the government Wednesday to exempt them from an extended nationwide lockdown, warning of a chronic shortage of the product as they struggle with reduced manpower amid surging worldwide demand from hospitals battling the coronavirus.

The Malaysian Rubber Gloves Manufacturers Association (MARGMA)  the worlds largest maker of medical gloves  made the appeal as Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin announced that his government was extending the coronavirus lockdown until mid-April.

It is the demand from the rest of the world that is going to be very challenging as there is the MCO, whereby rubber glove manufacturers are allowed to operate with just 50% of its original work force, the group said, using the acronym for the Movement Control Order, which had an initial cutoff point on March 31, but was extended until April 14.

This will mean only half of the normal quantity of gloves to be produced and it could really cause a chronic shortage to the world, the association said.

Malaysias rubber gloves makers had previously complained that the pandemic had also led to shutdowns of manufacturers of carton boxes, which made it difficult for MARGMA members to ship their products.

Earlier in the day, the nations health authorities had confirmed 172 new cases of COVID-19 infections, bringing the Malaysian total to 1,796, with 17 deaths. The Muslim-majority nation remained the country with the third-highest caseload in Asia, behind China and South Korea.

The urgent need for more disposable gloves was underscored Tuesday when the United States lifted an order it imposed in September 2019 on Malaysian gloves maker WRP Asia Pacific Sdn. Berhad, which had faced allegations that its production involved forced-labor conditions.

Customs authorities blocked those products at the same time that clothes produced by an apparel manufacturer in Chinas Xinjiang region were suppressed from reaching the U.S. market.

To halt the COVID-19 transmission by preventing direct human contact, Prime Minister Muhyiddin said in a live televised address that he would prolong the nations lockdown until April 14.

The trend of new positive COVID-19 cases is still happening, and the trend is expected to continue for some time until it starts to decline, he said. I was briefed by the National Security Council that we can see a higher number of new cases if we dont act quickly.

The impact of the initial lockdown imposed a week ago has quickly rippled through businesses, including the gloves manufacturers. MARGMA said its members employees had been working overtime during the lockdown to produce gloves but with half of the normal workforce.

Malaysia is using about 120 million pieces per year and this can be easily fulfilled and we have given assurance to the [minister of health] that there will be no shortage, the groups statement said. It said the manufacturers were continuing talks with the government to stave off the virus by allowing them to make gloves with full staff.

Malaysia is expected to deliver 225 billion pieces of medical gloves this year, which is about 65 percent of the total world requirement of 330 billion pieces, the statement said.

Denis Low, the associations president, said the lockdown could jeopardize the global effort to contain the coronavirus outbreak.

We trust our government to be compassionate and that our prime minister and our ministers will want to assist to fight off this COVID-19 coronavirus that is affecting the world, he said in the statement, emphasizing that the overtime work as a result of reduced manpower would increase production costs by up to 30 percent.

No longer under forced labor

Meanwhile, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced on Tuesday that it had lifted its order blocking the entry of rubber gloves imported by WRP Asia Pacific over allegations that the Malaysian manufacturer had engaged in forced-labor conditions.

Under U.S. law, it is illegal to import goods made with forced labor, including the use of convicts and children. Customs authorities block the entry of such merchandise by using a Withhold Release Order (WRO).

The WRO, which was initially levied against the company in September 2019, was revoked based on recent information obtained by CBP showing the company is no longer producing the rubber gloves under forced labor conditions, Brenda Smith, CBPs executive assistant commissioner, said in a statement.

We are very pleased that this effort successfully mitigated a significant supply chain risk, she said.

When WRP Asia Pacifics products were blocked, customs officials also announced the use of WROs against garments produced by Hetian Taida Apparel Company in Xinjiang, saying its products were produced with prison or forced labor.

Xinjiang is Chinas restive region where U.N. experts and activists say at least 1 million ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslims are held in detention centers where they are forced to work in horrific forced-labor conditions.

CBP, in its statement, underscored that it usually receives allegations of forced labor from a variety of sources, including from the general public. Importers have the opportunity to either re-export the detained shipments at any time or to submit documents to challenge the CBP decision, it said.

In January 2019, Malaysias Human Resources Ministry announced that the government would sue WRP Asia Pacific over allegations that the gloves company had withheld the salaries of its workers from Bangladesh and Nepal, which triggered a strike by about 2,000 employees.
Police officers wearing masks patrol an empty St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, Wednesday, March 11, 2020.

Associated Press

Fr. Don Giuseppe Berardelli, the parish priest of Casnigo, Italy, died after he was infected with COVID-19.

Initial reports indicated that Berardelli declined to use a ventilator that was donated to him and instead gave it to a younger patient he didn't know.

After the story was covered by several outlets, Catholic News Agency reported Tuesday that wasn't true.

Beradelli is among at least 60 priests who have died amid the novel coronavirus outbreak in Italy, which is home to the overall highest death toll of any country thus far.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Don Giuseppe Berardelli, a priest in Casnigo, Italy, died last week after being infected with COVID-19.

The story of Berardelli's death was widely shared after Italian media site Araberara reported that parishioners donated a ventilator to Berardelli, but he declined to use the breathing apparatus and instead gave it to a younger patient at the same hospital.

The story was aggregated by a variety of regional and global news sites, including Insider.

However, that story turned out to be false.

While those who knew Berardelli remembered him as a selfless man, some told Catholic News Agency that the tale of the donated respirator was not an example of his kindness.

"There was not a donated respirator. There have not been any respirators coming from outside of the hospital," Fr. Giulio Dellavite, secretary general of Berardelli's diocese, told CNA Tuesday.

Related Video: What COVID-19 Symptoms Look Like, Day by Day

Dellevite, a friend of Fr. Berardelli for over 20 years, told CNA he believes that Berardelli would have given up a potential spot in the intensive care unit up for another younger patient, if he could have.

"But we do not have certainty," the priest said.

Story continues

Beradelli is among at least 60 Italian priests who have died from the coronavirus, according to the Catholic News Agency. The youngest priest to die was Fr. Paolo Camminati, who died in the hospital on March 21 at age 53, the outlet reported.

Italy has emerged as the European epicenter of the pandemic and remains in a nationwide lockdown in an effort to stem the spread of COVID-19.

There are nearly 64,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Italy and more than 6,000 residents have died  the highest death toll of any country thus far. On Saturday, Italy broke its own record death toll for a single day, with 793 COVID-19 deaths over 24 hours.

Read the original article on Insider
The United States on Thursday granted Iraq a 30-day waiver to keep importing Iranian gas despite American sanctions, two Iraqi officials told AFP, the shortest extension yet.

The US slapped tough sanctions on the Iranian energy sector in late 2018 and has granted Iraq a series of waivers, usually for 45, 90 or 120 days. Baghdad relies on gas and electricity imports from its neighbour Tehran to supply about a third of its power grid, crippled by years of conflict and poor maintenance.

"This is the final extension," one source at the Iraqi president's office told AFP.

The source said Washington had been frustrated that Iran was meddling in the government formation process in Iraq.

Adnan Zurfi, who has had close ties with US officials since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, was nominated on March 17 and has a month to pull together his cabinet.

"The US did not want to put Zurfi in a difficult position by not renewing the waiver," a second senior Iraqi official told AFP, confirming the 30-day extension.

The official said Baghdad had prepared a checklist at the beginning of the last 45-day waiver period of ways the country could decrease its reliance on Iranian oil.

"But we haven't been able to accomplish any of them because of the circumstances," the source said.

Iraq has been hit by a cocktail of crises in recent weeks, including the government formation stalemate, collapsing oil prices and the novel coronavirus pandemic.

OPEC's second-biggest producer relies on crude exports to fund more than 90 percent of its state budget, but the crash to a price of under $30 per barrel puts it in jeopardy.

The COVID-19 virus has also spread across the country, with nearly 350 confirmed cases and 29 deaths announced by the health ministry.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Here are the latest updates on the coronavirus crisis in India and other parts of the world on Thursday.

2:52 p.m.

There is no restriction on hawkers, online home-delivery services amid lockdown, says Gautam Buddh Nagar administration.

2:36 p.m.

Coronavirus deaths in Australia increases to 12 with the number of infected nearly 2,800.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

2:32 p.m.

Delhi Metro services closure period extended till April 14, DMRC says.

2:30 p.m.

A man in Mumbai kills his brother for stepping out despite COVID-19 lockdown.

2:17 p.m.

A Delhi Police constable is suspended for damaging vegetable carts during lockdown.

2:11 p.m.

Mahindra & Mahindra hopes to be ready with ventilator prototype in 3 days to assist combating the COVID-19 pandemic.

2:09 p.m.

Steps being taken under PM Modi's firm leadership will be effective in combating virus, Dalai Lama says.

2:08 p.m. The Delhi Police distributes food packets to slum-dwellers amid lockdown.

2:01 p.m.

The government will provide 5 kg grains and 1 kg pulses for free over next 3 months, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman says.

1:50 p.m.

Suspected coronavirus patient left Srinagar hospital for home after stray dogs entered the ward, her family says.

1:39 p.m.

Inquiry is ordered into a COVID-19 suspect being allowed to leave hospital in Srinagar.

1:34 p.m.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announces Rs 50 lakh insurance cover for doctors, paramedic, and healthcare workers.

1:26 p.m.

Scientists identify nearly 70 drugs that may be effective against COVID-19.

1:25 p.m.

Three more people test positive for coronavirus in Noida.

1:18 p.m.

Buses are deployed for vegetable-fruit delivery in Chandigarh as people remain indoors to combat coronavirus spread.

1:13 p.m.

The Ranchi administration asks people to give leave to domestic helps without pay cut.

1:09 p.m.

The government has enough foodgrain reserves to feed the poor amid the nationwide lockdown, Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan says.

1:01 p.m.

Shops selling essentials will remain open round the clock, says Delhi Lt Governor Anil Baijal.

12:43 p.m.

Britannia urges government to issue necessary permits to people in food processing supply chain.

12:40 p.m.

Coronavirus will impact India's economic growth "severely", with disruption across multiple sectors, including manufacturing, oil, financial, among others, says a report.

12:34 p.m.

A total of 36 cases of coronavirus have been reported in Delhi so far, CM Arvind Kejriwal says.

12:24 p.m.

Steel companies are considering to cut production amid coronavirus lockdown, sources say.

12:17 p.m.

Shortage of thermal scanners in two inter-state check gates of Nagaland, official says

12:16 p.m.

Warm, humid climate linked to slower COVID-19 transmission, MIT study says.

12:01 p.m.

Forty eight people who came in contact with COVID-19 patient in Srinagar are put in quarantine.

11:56 a.m.

Housing sales fell by 42 per cent during January-March period at 45,200 units across seven major cities over spread of coronavirus, brokerage firm Anarock says.

11:52 a.m.

China's ruling Communist Party poses a "substantial threat" to Americans' health and their way of life, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says.

11: 44 a.m.

US President Donald Trump says that the WHO has "very much" sided with China on coronavirus crisis.

11:43 a.m.

Mobile maker Lava pays 20 per cent advance salary to factory workers to support their expenses during the lockdown period.

11:26 a.m.

Five more people test positive for coronavirus in Indore, taking total cases in the city rise to 10.

11:20 a.m.

The number of coronavirus cases in India rises to 649, with a death toll of 13, Health Ministry says.

11:07 a.m.

SpiceJet says its special flight will take 142 Iran-returned Indians to quarantine facility in Jodhpur.

11:05 a.m.

ICMR invites quotations from manufacturers for supply of COVID-19 test kits.

11:04 a.m.

Extending closures in Wuhan may prevent second wave of COVID-19, study says.

10:35 a.m.

Restrictions intensified in Kashmir following the detention of 4 more COVID-19 cases with the total number in the valley rising to 11.

10:23 a.m.

The National Book Trust offers free download of books to encourage reading during coronavirus lockdown.

9:49 a.m.

Indian-American hoteliers offer free accommodation to stranded Indian students in the US.

9:46 a.m.

A 65-year-old man from Hyderpora area of Srinagar dies, becoming the first fatality in Jammu and Kashmir due to coronavirus.

9:38 a.m.

China reports no new local coronavirus infections for the second consecutive day, but the number of imported COVID-19 cases sharply rose to 67.

9:30 a.m.

Fifty people are booked for lockdown violation in UP's Muzaffarnagar.

9:00 a.m.

Madhya Pradesh's COVID-19 tally rises to 20 as five more people test positive.

8:58 a.m.

Coronavirus cases in the US cross 65,000 with more than 1,000 fatalities.

1:15 a.m.

Three more people test positive for coronavirus in Goa, health department officials say.
Cross said he foresees many other problems, including the uncertainty of summer sessions and other operations on campuses. The system has about 40,000 employees, he said, and is the largest employer in Wisconsin. He worries about how fast he can cut expenses if revenue tanks. We need support from the state, from the federal government, just to stabilize our institutions, he said.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Headquarters in Washington on July 11, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Man Planning to Blow up Missouri Hospital Dead in Shootout: FBI

A Missouri man who was plotting to bomb a hospital was killed in a shooting this week, according to the FBI in a statement on Wednesday.

Timothy Wilson, 36, was killed in a shootout with FBI agents near Kansas City after agents in the joint terrorism task force tried to arrest him. Wilson was the subject of a domestic terrorism investigation, officials said in a statement.

FBI officials said he was a potentially violent extremist, wanted to commit an act of terrorism, and considered several targets including a school, a synagogue, and a mosque. He was motivated by racial, religious, and anti-government animus, the FBI said.

As the CCP virus pandemic escalated, FBI officials said Wilson sought to accelerate his plans to carry out a bombing.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China before it was transmitted worldwide.

With the current health crisis, Wilson decided to accelerate his plan to use a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device in an attempt to cause severe harm and mass casualties, the FBI said in a statement.

Wilson settled on an area hospital, which was not identified. But the FBI noted that the facility is currently providing critical medical care in todays environment, most likely referring to the viral pandemic.

Federal law enforcement authorities said Wilson had taken the necessary steps to acquire the materials needed to build a bomb. The vehicle that Wilson was slated to pick up had no actual bomb, according to the FBI, which had undercover agents in contact with him the entire time.

Officials then attempted to arrest him, leading to the shootout. Wilson was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
(Newser)  A New Jersey nursing home was evacuated Wednesday after its entire resident population apparently contracted the coronavirus, NBC News reports. So far 24 of 94 patients at St. Joseph's Senior Home in Woodbridge have tested positive, but authorities say the other 70 likely have it too. "This is the presumption," said John Hagerty, a rep for the city of Woodbridge. "That all have been exposed and would be positive." So all the residents and patients were moved to a CareOne facility about 30 miles away, in Whippany, NJ, forcing people there to disperse to three other care facilities and a hospital. State officials coordinated the move, USA Today reports.

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The coronavirus has also infected caregivers at St. Joseph's, which prompted another crisis: "The sisters told us on Friday that 12 of their employees were home, feeling ill with respiratory symptoms," says New Jersey Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli. "The sisters were working around the clock to take care of almost 90 residents. I don't know how many were there, but when they called us, I can tell you that it was an extreme situation." So the state found other care facilities in the region to relieve St. Joseph's staff over the weekend. "I can tell you the collaboration was extraordinary," says Persichilli. (Meanwhile, one insurer won't charge patients for coronavirus stays.)
By Alexander Cornwell and Fathin Ungku

DUBAI/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Global airlines urged the world's major economies to act quickly to prevent irreversible damage to an industry that has seen demand decimated almost overnight by the coronavirus crisis.

Several states have already stepped in to help airlines hammered by the travel slump, with the United States offering $58 billion in aid, Singapore announcing support for aviation and Australia easing competition rules.

As leaders from the Group of 20 nations met for a video summit, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) asked governments to provide or facilitate financial support for the major carriers it represents.

"The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic around the globe and the resulting government-mandated border closings and travel restrictions have led to the destruction of air travel demand," IATA Chief Executive Alexandre de Juniac said in an open letter.

Underlining the industry's plight, AirAsia, the region's biggest budget carrier, became the latest to announce sweeping schedule cuts and said some of its businesses would halt flights altogether for a period.

Singapore Airlines said it would tap existing investors for up to S$15 billion ($10.5 billion) through the sale of shares and convertible bonds to offset the shock to its business from the coronavirus outbreak.

It also arranged a S$4 billion bridge loan.

"Many airlines have been paying out more in refunds than they have received in new booking revenues," de Juniac, a former head of Air France-KLM, said.

"The average two-month cash reserves held by airlines are rapidly being exhausted," de Juniac added, calling for direct financial support, loans or tax relief.

LOADING CARGO

In a desperate bid to preserve some revenues and keep global supply chains operating, U.S. Delta Air Lines, Air New Zealand and Abu Dhabi's Etihad Airways joined a list of carriers that have offered to charter passenger planes as freight transporters, using their spacious cargo holds.

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About half of the world's air cargo normally travels in the bellies of passenger planes, so the cancellation of passenger flights has led to a sharp reduction in capacity, with knock-on effects on food, industry and other trade.

U.S. airlines, like others around the globe, have been reeling from the slide in passenger numbers and on Wednesday the U.S. Senate passed a $58 billion rescue package, half in the form of grants to cover some 750,000 airline staff wages.

Those receiving funds cannot lay off employees before Sept. 30 or change collective bargaining pacts. [L1N2BI0XW]

The bill has restrictions on stock buybacks, dividends and executive pay, and allows the government to take equity, warrants or other compensation as part of the package.

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to back the move on Friday. President Donald Trump has promised to sign it.

A HEAVY PRICE

IATA, which estimates the pandemic will cost the global industry $252 billion in lost revenues this year, said earlier it had written to 18 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Japan and South Korea for emergency support.

Australia and New Zealand have joined other governments in announcing some financial relief. But this has not stopped carriers from putting staff on leave and grounding planes.

Virgin Australia plans to permanently cut more than 1,000 jobs among the 8,000 staff that have already been stood down. Australia's Flight Centre Travel Group said it would cut 6,000 travel agent roles globally.

In a move unthinkable under normal conditions, Australia's competition regulator said it would allow Virgin, Qantas Airways and Regional Express to temporarily coordinate schedules and share revenue on 10 regional routes.

(Reporting by Alexander Cornwell in Dubai, Jamie Freed in Sydney, Fathin Ungku and Anshuman Daga in Singapore, Tracy Rucinski in Chicago, David Shepardson in Washington, Tim Hepher in Paris; Writing by Edmund Blair and Keith Weir; Editing by Susan Fenton and Alexander Smith)
Australia could run out of ICU beds in just a week as hospitals are overwhelmed by the surging number of coronavirus infections, university researchers say.

The number of cases nationally surged to 3,050 on Friday morning as a Western Australian man in his 70s became the country's 13th COVID-19 fatality.

Modelling by Macquarie University researchers has indicated Australia could reach ICU capacity as early as April 5 when the national number of cases is predicted to hit 22,000.

Australia has just 2,229 intensive care unit beds, according to a 2018 report from the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society.

The new study published by the Medical Journal of Australia compared real data of the infection in Italy to forecast how many Australians will need an intensive care unit bed in the coming weeks.

South Australia Hospital staff pictured simulating a drive-thru testing facility. Experts have warned Australia could run out of ICU beds in just a week as the infection count nationally continues to rise

'ICU capacity will be exceeded at around 22,000 COVID-19 cases sometime around April 5 if public health measures fail to curb the rate of growth,' the study concludes.

Australia has around 2200 ICU beds currently, the MJA study says.

'Over the coming months it's going to take courage, brains and a concerted unified effort to manage the infection,' Professor Nick Talley said.

'While the results reported may represent a worst-case scenario and may not come to pass, we must better prepare, now,' he wrote.

About 5 per cent of people with coronavirus become so seriously ill they need intensive care unit treatment to survive.

Dr Norman Swan had warned on Q&A on Monday night New South Wales could run out of beds by April 10.

Hospital staff waiting to screen people outside the Royal Melbourne Hospital on March 11. The number of available ICU beds could be insufficient by April 5

Doctors and infectious disease experts are leading growing calls for Australia to be put into complete lockdown for up to six weeks to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Despite the country's total number of COVID-19 cases jumping to 2,810 on Thursday night, with 13 dead, the Federal Government has so far stood firm on its refusal to close schools, confine people to their homes and close all non-essential businesses.

Infectious disease expert Professor Brendan Crabb said keeping only 'essential services' open was a drastic, but necessary step.

Pedestrians walk through Sydney in masks on Thursday. Doctors and infectious disease experts are calling for the prime minister to put in place a full lockdown including closing schools

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the government had received no medical advice to close schools, despite one member of the expert panel guiding the government on the crisis campaigning for a full and immediate lockdown.

Mr Morrison has taken a staged approach to restrictions, including closing the borders to all but essential travel, but Professor Crabb, from Melbourne's Burnet Institute, said the measures were too easily misinterpreted and called for a blanket lockdown for two to six weeks.

'This is war, this is an actual war being fought. A lockdown-type mentality sends an unambiguous message that just cannot be misconstrued,' Professor Crabb told The Age.

'Everyday matters now... I would want to see very strong reasoning for why they (the government) would not go as hard as they can early.'

Full lockdown would prevent Australians from leaving their homes other than for essential reasons like shopping for groceries.

Infectious disease expert Professor Brendan Crabb has called for keeping only 'essential services' to reduce the infection rate

A nurse takes a sample from a driver at a new COVID-19 drive-thru testing facility at in Adelaide on Tuesday

Australia has reached 3,050 cares of coronavirus and 13 deaths on Friday morning

University of NSW professor Mary-Louise McLaws said supermarkets, banks and pharmacies would have to stay open.

'Lockdown would have to be very severe for about three weeks,' she told news.com.au.

'During this time cases would recover and people would stop being infectious.'

A 'response tracker' set up by the University of Oxford gives Australia a ranking of just 40 out of 100 for the stringency of its lockdown.

University of Oxford's response tracker gives Australia a ranking of just 40 out of 100 for the level of its lockdown

The US and much of Europe and South America have an index of between 60 and 100.

UNSW's Raina MacIntrye, who is part of the expert panel advising the government on its COVID-19 response, said schools should be closed as part of the new lockdown.

Prof MacIntrye said the majority of the panel agree an immediate, short-term lockdown was needed, but the advice was being ignored.

'I was hoping we'd see a more comprehensive lockdown for a short period of time, but that is not the approach we're taking. It's more a trickle sort of approach, a little bit by bit, which won't be as effective at stopping the transmission in the community,' she told the ABC.

Leading infectious disease expert Raina MacIntrye (pictured) believes the federal government's trickle down approach won't be enough to stop the transmission of COVID-19 across the country

'The more you slam on the brakes, the more control you'll get of the epidemic, the more the cases will go down. The other alternative is to wait until things really get out of control and your health system starts to get infected.'

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

Professor MacIntrye said the economic hit to the country would be far greater in the long term if hardline action wasn't taken now.

'If you don't control the disease, your economic losses are going to be far greater and the recovery time is going to be a lot longer,' she said.

Advice was put together by a panel of academics from Australia's Group of Eight Universities and handed to Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt on Monday.

The government was urged to introduce 'strong immediate and co-ordinated social distancing measures' including shutting down schools and ramping up testing measures.

But the government's current scope and scale of physical distancing measures is concerning the university panel.

The panellists are confident it will lead to a spike in cases and a higher numbers of deaths.

Professor MacIntyre believes it's not too late to stabilise the projected death toll, but it can only be done if 70-80 per cent of people stop contacting each other.

The panel is one of a number to have been established to guide the federal government through the current health crisis.
U.S. President Donald Trump during a news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on March 25, 2020.

President Donald Trump faces a critical test to assert America's leadership in the global fight against the coronavirus at the emergency Group of 20 meeting on Thursday.

As the White House scrambles to shore up support for its coronavirus strategy at home amid a spike in new cases, criticism has been mounting overseas about the administration's approach.

"For a nation that has typically been viewed as a leading international body and generous collaborative partner  the U.S. is viewed as a day late and dollar short," Frank Lavin, a former U.S. ambassador to Singapore and CEO of Export Now in Singapore, told CNBC. Lavin was a White House aide to President Ronald Reagan.

Days of partisan bickering in Washington to pass a $2 trillion stimulus package while the death toll soared above 1,000 hasn't helped global perceptions of the U.S. response to the crisis. As of Thursday morning, the number of deaths in the U.S. had reached 1,046, according to Johns Hopkins University.

"In the U.S. it looks chaotic, disorganized, almost insane," James Crabtree, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, told CNBC. "The fact that the president and (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi can't even speak to each other shows you how dysfunctional it has become. America will come out of this much diminished in the eyes of the world."

Thursday's meeting could be an opportunity to put critics to rest. Saudi Arabia, which holds the rotating G-20 presidency this year, will host an emergency virtual meeting aimed at a coordinated global response to the pandemic.

Ahead of the meeting, Saudi King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud said on Twitter: "we convene this extraordinary G20 summit to unite efforts towards a global response."

Salman tweet: As the world confronts the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges to healthcare systems and the global economy, we convene this extraordinary G20 summit to unite efforts towards a global response. May God spare humanity from all harm.

With members bracing for a global recession, the attention will turn to the leader of the world's largest economy to right the ship.

"Coordinated fiscal measures in the manner of the 2008 financial crisis to stop the pandemic crisis from turning into a worse economic crisis than it needs to be should be a top priority," Crabtree said.
Assemblyman Dan Stec, R-Queensbury, called on the state and federal government to waive taxes on thousands of unemployment checks and open up benefits to freelance workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Were in the middle of an unprecedented crisis right now. New York state is bearing the brunt of this pandemic and our residents are experiencing some of the toughest financial times we have seen in decades, Stec said in a news release. A significant portion of New Yorkers are currently laid off or unemployed as we attempt to slow, and hopefully, prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Unemployment checks are charged 10 percent in federal taxes and 2.5 percent from New York state.

The Department of Labor has seen a record number of new filings in New York and across the country. According to figures released Thursday, 80,334 people applied for benefits in New York last week.

Stec is also calling for freelancers to be made eligible for benefits from state and federal assistance programs.

I strongly urge the governor to use his executive powers to lift this tax and make more hardworking New Yorkers eligible for unemployment benefits during this uncertain time. In addition, I am reaching out to our state congressional delegation to push for lifting the federal tax on unemployment as well. As New Yorkers and Americans, we have an obligation to look out for one another and do what we can to help each other out during this time of need. This is one small, but important, way to do so, Stec concluded.

Nearly 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits across the nation  more than quadruple the previous record set in 1982.

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For more coverage, visit our complete coronavirus section here.

Calling all available doctors - Washington needs you.

Right now the state is working to get volunteer health practitioners ready to help in the battle against coronavirus.

The Washington Department of Health DOH activated the volunteer drive after Governor Jay Inslee declared a statewide state of emergency.

The volunteers will help answer the call for the anticipated surge on health care facilities statewide.

But as of right now, the Washington State Medical Commission says it needs more volunteers - in particular doctors and surgeons.

So far Commission Spokesperson Stephanie Mason said this afternoon that the state had processed 600 people have worked their way through the volunteer application and validation process, but less than five dozen of those volunteers are doctors.

Mason knows it's only a matter of time and that the surge is coming.

Signs of surge response were visible today as tents went up outside Harborview Medical Center - a part of the center's 'implementation of surge plans' UW Medicine says the tents are designed to separate 'low acuity ambulatory patients with respiratory illness symptoms from other patients who arrive their UW hospitals' emergency departments. After a brief evaluation, UW Medicine in a new release said, patients will be treated and discharged or directed to the most appropriate care setting the hospital or alternative sites of care'.

"We are really putting out a cry, Washington needs your help and we'll need your help in the coming days," said Mason.

As the cases of COVID-19 climb, as of this writing there are 2,580 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 132 deaths in our state, so too does the demand for volunteer health practitioners.

Mason said out of 600 volunteers in the pipeline the majority are nurses.

"Nurses were in the 300's and doctors we only have 57," said Mason.

She said Washingtons COVID-19 state of emergency and a 2018 law give the DOH authority to fast-track validation and certification for practitioners who don't have a license to practice in our state, but are in good standing. More specifics including additional ways to help and who's eligible is on the DOH website.

Mason underscored that it's a simple process to apply.

DOH's website explains the program, the state's authority and offers a FAQ section in addition to a link to the online application to volunteer.

"Our licensing staff is working to get people validated as quickly as possible so when we see a surge of healthcare practitioners overrun in the hospital we will be able to send support to them," said Mason.

Dr. Tona McGuire has been there done that.

The retired pediatric psychologist is a disaster response veteran.

McGuire co-developed a Disaster behavioral health curriculum and trained community volunteers at a field clinic in Haiti following the devastating 2010 earthquake.

She also offered trauma training in Jordan to help Syrian refugees.

"It's really good work you can make a difference in someone's life over and over again that part is really rewarding," said McGuire.

She said working the frontlines of disaster response taught her she could things she never thought she could do and the most rewarding part is being able to help the helpers.

"The ones in our area are under an incredible amount of stress and I think there is a huge emotional toll...health care workers who are being overwhelmed by people who are very ill, ICU's that are full...it's very hard on them and I'm deeply concerned about impact on them."

McGuire said if she could 'clone herself' she'd volunteer as a pediatric psychologist to help children and their families struggling in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, but at the moment she has a seat at the table serving on the Washington Department of Health Strike Team.

For example the strike team works on guidance for behavioral health issues related to quarantine - she said their efforts are designed to help the state with its disaster preparedness and response of the health care system.

"We dont' know yet how many people we will need so it's an open call at this point everyone is welcome from every field," said Mason.

Late today some encouraging news - the Department of Health just updated their volunteer application numbers and learned that 4,500 applications are in the pipeline right now.

Mason said most volunteers are typically paid - and they are not deployed until facilities request help.

Some volunteers could work at a facilities while others may be assigned to telemedicine, it all depends on the need.

Learn more HERE.

This article first appeared on KOMO News.

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ANN ARBOR, MI  Ann Arbor Public Schools teachers will see some step pay increases and additions in the coming years under a tentative contract agreement approved by its the school board Thursday.

The Ann Arbor School Board approved the contract, which runs through Dec. 31, 2022, during an electronic meeting March 25. The agreement gives Ann Arbor Education Association members an immediate 2.25% off-schedule, non-reoccurring bonus.

The bonus equates to $1,532 for all full-time employees active as of Dec. 31, 2019. The value of the bonus is based on 2.25% of total payroll of the AAEA. Ann Arbor Public Schools Chief Financial Officer Marios Demetriou said he anticipates the bonuses being paid out by the first week in April.

Employees with less than a full-time workload will be paid a prorated percentage of the bonus total based on their full-time equivalent. A breakdown of the tentative agreement can be found on the districts website.

In 2020-21, all teachers will receive a half-step advancement in pay, while Step 2 was eliminated from the salary schedule, increasing the entry-level hiring salaries for teachers to $43,900 for those who have earned a bachelors degree and $50,195 for teachers who have earned a masters degree. Those teachers move to Step 3 and will receive an additional half-step salary advancement.

Both of those starting entrance salaries at this time will be (among) the top in southeast Michigan and will help us to remain competitive, Ann Arbor Public Schools Superintendent Jeanice Swift said.

An additional step was added between steps 9 and 10 for 2020-21, so there was not as big of a jump between salaries moving forward, while a 2% increase in salary was added to the new Step 11. Steps L1 and L2, for teachers, which is achieved after 11 and 14 years in the district, respectively, will receive 1% and 2% salary increases from the new Step 11.

Under the agreement, there is a 1.7% increase to the districts premium share amount toward the health insurance cap for 2020-21. In 2021-22, the district will increase what it pays toward faculty premiums by 1.5%.

Ann Arbor Education Association President Fred Klein said he was pleased that teachers will have nearly three years of stability under the new contract, particularly in light of the financial uncertainty facing the state with the looming economic impact of coronavirus. Klein said members of the AAEA ratified the tentative agreement with 95% approval.

We couldnt have foreseen how important (this contract) would be with all this weird COVID-19 stuff going on, Klein said. This, to me, feels like really good security for our teachers. I think the stability it provides in these uncertain times is amazing.

The district also will reward teachers who achieve or have achieved National Board Certification with a $1,000 bonus for both 2020-21 and 2021-22.

Teachers will receive another half-step advancement in 2021-22, while a 2% increase was added to Step 11. Similar step increases were approved for teachers with longevity.

After a rocky start to negotiations in December 2019, board member Rebecca Lazarus said she was happy to be able to reward teachers for all of their hard work.

This was the first year Ive gone through this process. In the beginning I thought, Oh no, this doesnt look good for us, Lazarus said. Its amazing that youve come out with this agreement that I think is very fair. Everybodys going out on a limb. Weve got a lot of work ahead of us.

District teachers have seen their wages frozen five out of six years between 2009-10 and 2014-15 after receiving salary schedule increases in each of the previous three years.

Board member Jeff Gaynor said he was pleased to see teachers receive step pay increases for all the hard work they put in with students, speaking to their adjustment with online learning as an example of how quickly they adapt to new challenges.

The salary increase is, given all the cuts and freezes over the last years, not as much as we would like or they would like, but Im glad we did come through with a raise for this year and for the next two years, Gaynor said.

Since 2014-15, teachers have bargained for 1% increases in pay for certain steps, and one salary increase of 1% in 2016-17. In 2018-19, wages and step advancement pay were again frozen for the majority of teachers.

The teachers union ratified a tentative agreement on a two-and-a-half-year contract in June 2019, but financial aspects of their compensation, like salary, step-pay increases and benefits are bargained each year, Ann Arbor Education Association President Fred Klein said.

Under a previous contract ratified by the teachers union and several other district bargaining units in 2017, it was estimated pay raises would total $8.5 million.

As the district now shifts its attention to its 2020-21 budget, board member Glenn Nelson acknowledged the risks the new teachers contract could carry with it, given the implied economic strain the coronavirus might have on state revenues, reminding members to be psychologically ready for a rough ride ahead.

Our teachers and our staff are so important, but I do want to acknowledge the risks, Nelson said. This tentative agreement was put together before the coronavirus hit our nation so hard and we found out we were not well-prepared.

I agree this is what we want to do and should do for our teachers and staff that are absolutely key to the education of our children.

READ MORE:

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Bhopal/Indore, March 27 : A 47-year-old man admitted to a hospital in Madhya Pradesh's Indore after being suspected of coronavirus has died, an official said, adding the the man has no travel history and his test reports are awaited COVID-19 cases continued to rise in Madhya Pradesh with six more patients -- five in Indore and one in Shivpuri -- testing positive on Thursday and taking the number to 21, the Health Department confirmed.

There have been two deaths so far. Both victims were from Ujjain who succumbed to the infection during treatment in Indore.

While a 47-year old patient suspected of corona admitted to an Indore hospital died in the early hours of Thursday, a 65-year-old woman who had no travel history for over a month had died on Wednesday in Indore government hospital.

Shivpuri Chief Medical and Health Officer (CMHO) A.L. Sharma said a 26-year-old youth from Khaniyadhana, about 80-km from the district headquarters, tested positive for the infection on Thursday. This was Shivpuri's second case. The man had gone to Hyderabad on March 13 and returned to Shivpuri two days later, he said Among the five new cases in Indore, two are women, a government medical college spokesman said.

Sharma said family members of the coronavirus positive man have been told to quarantine themselves at home and they will be monitored by health workers. The residents of victim's locality have been told to self-quarantine under medical supervision. The patient sought medical help through a video on social media.

Sharma also informed that the mother and father of a 30-year man, the first coronavirus positive case in Shivpuri, tested negative in the medical reports received on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, five more patients admitted in Indore hospitals tested coronavirus positive, health officials said on Thursday.

So far, 10 coronavirus cases have been reported in Indore (including deceased woman of Ujjain), six in Jabalpur, two each in Bhopal and Shivpuri and one in Gwalior, they said.

No positive case has been found so far in Chhatarpur but the COVID-19 patient from Gwalior had travelled to Khajuraho in Chhatarpur, they said.

As a result, curfew was clamped in Rajnagar and Khajuraho towns of Chhatarpur district, officials said.

Government MGM Medical College Dean said the patient's test report was not received till noon. He was referred from Ujjain civil hospital on Wednesday with breathing problem, fever and coughing, the dean said.

The first death in the state due to the virus occurred when a 65-year-old woman from Ujjain who was admitted to the government MY hospital died early on Wednesday. At present, 19 are admitted in different hospitals of the state.

Among the latest five new cases found positive in Indore, two are women and three men from different localities of the city, a spokesman of Government Medical College said.

Curfew has been in force in Indore and Ujjain since the cases were reported on Wednesday.

Earlier, six positive corona virus persons in Jabalpur, two in Bhopal including a journalist and his daughter and one each in Gwalior and Shivpuri were found in the state, official sources said.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Asian markets mostly rose or clawed back early losses Thursday as investors breathed a sigh of relief that US senators have finally passed a gargantuan stimulus package for the world's top economy after being delayed by wrangling over details.

The unprecedented USD 2 trillion plan - described by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a "wartime level of investment" - helped spur a surge across global equities as panicked traders worried about the impact of the coronavirus sweeping the planet.

But another advance on Wall Street was blunted Wednesday as it emerged that four Republican senators have baulked at the generous provisions agreed to in the bipartisan deal with the White House.

However, the bill eventually cleared the Senate by an overwhelming majority and will now head to the House of Representatives before going to President Donald Trump for his signature.

The monster deal thrashed out between Republicans, Democrats and the White House includes cash payments to American taxpayers and several hundred billion dollars in grants and loans to small businesses and core industries. It also buttresses hospitals desperately in need of medical equipment and expands unemployment benefits.

The plan, together with a huge bond-buying programme by the Federal Reserve that effectively prints cash, is part of an unprecedented global response to the outbreak, which has even seen Germany put together a list of measures worth more than USD 1 trillion.

The emergence of uncertainty, however, weighed on Asian investors at the start of the day, while profit-taking following the recent rally also played a part.

Still, traders reacted positively to the latest developments.

Hong Kong was marginally higher after spending most of the morning down, Sydney climbed three percent, Mumbai climbed 2.6 percent and Seoul put on 0.9 per cent.

Jakarta soared more than nine percent, Manila more than five percent and Wellington four percent. Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Taipei also posted strong gains.

But Tokyo, which soared by almost a fifth in three days, was down 3.2 per cent, while Shanghai was also slightly down.

Singapore also bounced back slightly after losing more than two percent earlier.

The early losses came after data showed the city-state's economy suffered its worst quarterly contraction since the financial crisis more than a decade ago, giving global investors an early insight into the economic effects of the pandemic.

Singapore is considered a bellwether for trade-reliant Asian countries.

While the US bill provides much-needed support, observers continue to err towards caution with most now expecting the global economy to plunge into recession as countries go into lockdown, turning off the growth taps.

"While this is good .. it's impossible to gauge the ultimate economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic for weeks, possibly months, and until that point, the sustainability of any rally in oil or equity markets is questionable and suggests the current high level of volatility will likely extend," said AxiCorp's Stephen Innes. "All the stimulus chatter will fade if the COVID-19 headcount curve goes vertical.

The reality is the 'Big Bazooka' sway is impossible to sustain, and not to mention the surprise effects greatly diminish. Ultimately, policy is harder to maintain the more protracted virus outbreaks continue." Investors are now nervously awaiting the release later Thursday of US jobless claims data, which is expected to show a massive rise.

"The high-frequency data will confirm we're in a horrible vortex of the fastest and most substantial rise in the US unemployment in modern financial history," Innes added.

Also Thursday, G20 leaders will be holding a summit by teleconference, with hopes they can provide a united front in the face of the pandemic after the group of leading economies faced criticism that it has been slow to address the crisis.

French presidential sources said the virtual meeting would focus on "coordination on the health level" as well as sending a "strong signal" to financial markets over efforts to stabilise the global economy.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau has announced new financial measures to help Canadians affected by the coronavirus pandemic.



Workers who lost their income as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, people who are quarantined, caring for someone with COVID-19 and parents who have to stay home to take care of their kids will be given $2,000 a month for up to four months through the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).



The new system replaces the Emergency Care Benefit and the Emergency Support Benefit to streamline benefits for those whose qualify for Employment Insurance (EI) and those who dont, after over a million people applied for the old program last week.



Trudeau said during a news conference; Families are worried about when theyll get help. It can be hard to get through on the line, and that is frustrating.



Public servants are working around the clock, while dealing with unprecedented demand and all of the same personal stress everyone else is facing. They will get to your application.



Americans will also receive a $1,200 check in about three weeks as part of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus relief bill, White House officials said on Wednesday as the unprecedented package hit a snag in Congress.



Americans earning less than $75,000 a year would receive a check for $1,200, or couples earning less than $150,000 would receive a check for $2,400. Families would receive $500 per child.



Checks will be reduced by $5 for every $100 exceeding those thresholds. It completely phases out at $99,000 in income for individuals, $146,500 for head of household filers with one child and $198,000 for joint filers with no children.



Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said; We couldnt be more pleased with the unprecedented response from the Senate to protect American workers and American business in this situation. This is going to be an enormous help for the American workers and the American economy."









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Americans who intentionally expose and infect others with coronavirus could face criminal charges under federal terrorism laws, according to a new memo sent out by the Justice Department.

The document, signed Wednesday by Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and sent to all US states Attorney Generals, declared that any coronavirus carrier now caught purposely exposing himself with the intent to infect others will now be treated as a terrorist by law enforcement agencies.

The third-degree terrorism charge carries a sentence of three to five years in state prison

READ ALSO  Coronavirus: Tokyo 2020 Olympics Postponed To 2021

The new order comes as the coronavirus pandemic continues to savage the US, with almost 60,000 Americans testing positive to COVID-19 as of Wednesday afternoon with more than 800 people reportedly dead.
With 112 persons testing positive in Kerala for COVID-19, the state has been under complete shutdown since Monday, a day before the Central government announced a lockdown across the country.

With 112 persons testing positive in Kerala for COVID-19, the state has been under complete shutdown since Monday, a day before the Central government announced a lockdown across the country.

The southernmost state, which was the first in the country to report positive a COVID-19 case at the end of January, has put various measures into place to tackle the outbreak.

Roads are deserted, while those that venture out are being sent home by the police. Public transport has been shuttered. Shops selling essential items are open from 7 am to 5 pm. Public gatherings, including functions and prayer meetings, have been disallowed.

The government has promised that essential services such as water, electricity, medicine, telecom, food, newspapers, will continue.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

More than 72,000 are under observation, with 400 in hospitals and others at home. Kasargod, the state's northernmost district, has the highest number of cases, with 44 testing positive. Strict measures have been imposed in the district with shops open only from 11 am to 5 pm. Cases will be filed against those who go outside their homes, police said.

The state, struggling to recover from the blows to its economy by the 2018 and 2019 floods, announced a special revival package of Rs 20,000 crore, including Rs 500 crore for the health department, Rs 2,000 crore as loans through the Kudumbasree project, Rs 1,320 crore as pension for March and April, Rs 100 crore for food grain for those above and below the poverty line, and one month relief for electricity and water bills.

Strict regulations are in place to avoid community spread of the coronavirus, with physical distancing, social unity being the new motto. The health department earlier successfully initiated two campaigns which were taken up by the people: break the chain and route map.

As of now, no community spread has been reported in the state, with all of those infected having come from abroad and their first contacts.

Politicos lead way

KK Shailaja, the minister of health and family welfare, is leading the fight to tackle the coronavirus. The former school teacher hailing from Kannur, popularly known as Shailaja Teacher, earlier led the state in the fight against the 2018 Nipah virus outbreak, which killed 17 of 18 affected, including a nurse.

Keralites had been observing the spread of the virus in Wuhan in January with much worry, given that many students from the state were in the Chinese city. Shailaja called a high-level meeting on 25 January on the matter. A rapid response team headed by the minister was set up to deal with the situation.

The Disha Helpline was activated in the state (1056) and district levels (several numbers), to which calls could be made anytime to clear doubts or to get information. Arrangements were made for home quarantine and counselling services, utilising health care facilities with the cooperation of the local bodies.

Volunteers and counsellors are calling up those in quarantine twice a day to help them deal with stress and trauma.

The first student to return from Wuhan reached Kerala on 30 January was tested immediately and isolated, along with her family, and then sent to hospital.

After two more students returning from Wuhan tested positive and were hospitalised, Kerala declared a state calamity on 3 February. It was then lifted on 7 February as no new cases were reported. All three students were cured and returned home, no one else was infected. Kerala announced that the first stage was successfully overcome by 14 February.

All passengers coming from COVID-19 affected countries were asked to undergo screening at airports. Those who had symptoms were moved to hospitals, while others were asked to stay in isolation for 28 days (which was later changed to 14 days) at their homes.

All suspected cases were screened and samples sent to the National Virology Institute in Pune to test initially, later a testing lab was opened by the NVI in Alappuzha.

The health ministry chalked out plans A and B in the initial stage. Eighteen committees were formed, including an infrastructure committee and a private hospitals coordination committee.

Plan A was implemented when the first positive case was reported. A total of 974 isolation beds were arranged in 52 hospitals (50 government and two private) across the state, and an extra 242 were kept ready for use in case of emergency.

Plan B included 1,408 isolation beds in 71 government and 55 private hospitals, with 17 more isolation beds kept ready. The state went with the Plan A till the first week of March, as no more cases were reported after the initial three students were cured.

Things took a sudden turn on 8 March, when a family that had returned from Italy on 29 February tested positive. The family of three did not undergo airport screening and visited friends and family.

Despite their reluctance to be isolated, authorities stood firm. But in the meantime, two of their contacts became infected. The government then prepared a map of the places they'd visited since leaving the airport and asked all those at these spots as well as the fellow passengers in the airplane and at the airport to contact health authorities. Many were placed in home isolation.

Plan C was chalked out after this incident. The plan includes 3,028 isolation beds in 81 government and 41 private hospitals. Areas not deeemed essential at hospitals would be evacuated to make space for new COVID-19 patients. A total of 208 ICU beds were also arranged in the Plans B and C. More private hospitals could be included in the Plan C if needed.

A total of 147 corona care centres have been opened all over the state to facilitate quarantine for those coming from COVID-19 affected countries or other states but have no options.

However, only very few people have been kept in these facilities. These centres, which could accommodate 21,866 people at a time, have been arranged as part of Plan C.

The government has decided to appoint 276 new doctors from those in the rank list of the state Public Service Commission. The selected candidates have been reportedly provided advice memo, and would be appointed after counselling via video conference.

Other paramedical staff also would be appointed similarly. The state would need more staff including nurses, more medicine, precautionary equipment, ventilators. On 22 March, the health minister gave a call for health practitioners to volunteer at the isolation facilities in hospitals/ houses, patient management in wards, screening at airports, seaports, railway stations and bus stations. The message asked interested health practitioners to submit this form.

Food and essential supplies

The Department of Industries would provide bed sheets, towels and other items for hospitals that are burning items used by coronavirus patients. It will also provide medical masks and gloves, hand sanitizer and oxygen cylinders. Masks have also been provided by certain Kudumbasree units and prisons.

Hotels and restaurants have been ordered to only accept orders online and allow takeaway. The Food Safety Department has increased inspections, with 200 of 700 outlets being issued notices instructing them to improve hygiene.

Meanwhile, the cooperation minister informed that pension would reach those eligible by 31 March. Consumer authorities will also provide essential items to those under quarantine via Neethi stores.

Law and order

The police are on the streets to ensure that the lockdown is observed properly, closing down shops after the allowed timings and preventing people from being outside for no serious reason. Strict measures will be taken against hoarders and price gougers and the with the Civil Supplies Department has already begun inspections. Those under quarantine will be arrested if they venture outside, police said.

The passports of two people infected with the virus, who disregarded directions of authorities, were confiscated. Three have been arrested in Ernakulam for keeping their shops open past allotted hours. The police have also registered cases against those spreading fake news and superstition.

Help and information

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has been giving the public daily updates, except the day of the Janta curfew, since 10 March. Shailaja has also been in constant contact with the media.

Schools and other educational institutions, including anganwadis, have been shut since 8 March and all exams till Class 7, including classes 10 and 12 and university exams cancelled. The Kerala PSC has cancelled all its exams till April 30.

Community intervention

Many have heeded the call of the government and health officials, with several organisations and volunteers stepping forward to serve in this time of need. Many have delivered those finding it hard to get food and essentials. Others provided hand sanitizers to those travelling in buses.

Volunteers have become an essential part of the fight against COVID-19, with many under the auspices of the government like the Kerala Voluntary Youth Action Force. Volunteers have been at the forefront of helping disinfect public places such as schools (which could be used as isolation wards), bus stations and roads.

Kerala, thanks to the coordination between the people and government, is fighting hard to ward off COVID-19.
Craven politics are a long, bipartisan tradition in Texas, and no one has lost an election boosting business and the economy. But our shamelessness is coming back to haunt us.

Around the Capitol, Gov. Greg Abbott is known for holding his finger to the wind and waiting for others to act first. His desire to avoid controversy has made him one of the most timid governors in Texas history.

Abbotts waffling is perhaps most vivid when it comes to local control. When governments want to ban plastic bags, limit tree-clearing or establish employment standards, he declares only he and the Texas Legislature have the wisdom for such things.

When it comes to shutting down businesses with decisive action to deal with a public health emergency, well, thats not his job.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: Stay informed with accurate reporting you can trust

What may be right for places like the large urban areas may not be right at this particular point in time for the more than 200 counties that have zero cases of COVID-19, Abbott said, declining to declare a statewide stay-at-home order.

Doublespeak! How many people have been tested in those counties? How many people will leave shelter-in-place counties and go to others? Like every expert, he knows the virus is spreading and will soon reveal itself in every county.

Abbott fears that voters and politicians who have not seen COVID-19 up close might get angry. Hed rather wait until cases emerge and let someone else deal with it.

Supporters will see a perverse consistency. The governor is unabashedly pro-business, and he will do anything to keep the Texas economy going. But now hes threading a political needle.

Say what you will about Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, but he puts himself out there, even becoming a national embarrassment. Patricks Fox News martyrdom video in support of the economy riffed on William Barrett Travis letter from the Alamo. I can imagine the rewrite:

The enemy (recession) is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand (layoffs) in four or five days. If this call (to restart the economy) is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a (pro-business) soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country(Economic) Victory or Death.

Tomlinsons Take: Homeowners along Texas coast want us to pay for their risky choices

Doesnt quite have the same ring, which is why Abbott sits idly by. His silence is a fait accompli.

County and city authorities must decide whether to allow a pandemic to overwhelm their hospitals and clinics or shut down the economy, triggering tens of thousands of layoffs and potentially bankrupting thousands of small and medium-sized businesses.

Passing the buck hurts Abbotts biggest enemies. Texass most populous metropolitan areas are run by Democrats, many of whom will run for higher office in 2022.

County judges and mayors have no choice but to prioritize public health and emergency services. They must sacrifice commercial activity to save lives. Abbott can claim later he had nothing to do with those decisions and blame Democrats for the coming statewide recession.

Abbott also avoids criticism from those he fears most: his partys rightwing. If Abbott declared a statewide shelter-in-place, folks like State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, would be criticizing him instead of Democrats.

Bettencourt and his ilk want half-measures that would keep businesses open, but epidemiologists say that could sacrifice the elderly and medical professionals. To be fair, these folks are willing to shut everything down if bodies start piling up, but they want to smell the death first.

Tomlinsons Take: Bigot bills would damage Texas economy

Tellingly, these are the same people who suspect humans are not causing global warming, and therefore want to wait until its too late to do anything about it, lest the economy suffers. Protect the present, forget the future is their motto.

Since taking control of the state in 1998, the Texas GOPs mantra has always been, Texas is Wide Open for Business. Sadly, they think this requires keeping wages low, failing to fund health care for the working poor, and prioritizing profits over public health.

The COVID-19 pandemic reveals the false choice. The Texas uninsured rate is 17.3 percent, compared to the 8.9 percent national average. Thousands of people without health coverage are going to flood our emergency rooms.

Texas has a 13.7 percent poverty rate, compared to the national average of 11.8 percent. Texans will suffer the recession more than most.

Business leaders, they do this in your name.

Abbott and the Republican Party are more than happy to pander to business, but they run away when the consequences of their policies become evident. In that way, they are genuinely traditional Texas politicians.

Tomlinson writes commentary about business, economics and policy.

twitter.com/cltomlinson

chris.tomlinson@chron.com
Its a moment of absolute relief. After a very long week, knocking around South Asia, we were finally on our final descent, the big pontoon plane gliding down through humid thermals toward an endless expanse of aquamarine. Below us, a little coral island grows larger and larger out the window, one of 1,200 here, spots of green, fringed with white, often encircling blue lagoons, here in the Arabian Sea.

Touching down. (Tim Johnson)

The hot streets of Delhi, Male, and Negomboall from the past weekfade into memory as we splash down, right at the northernmost end of the country, this island being part of one of the remotest atolls here. Taxiing to a long dock, Im given a warm welcome and a cold towel. All three people waiting for me beam big smiles, and one extends a drink. Theyre strangers, but soon these staff members will become like friends. Soon, even if for just a few days, it will feel like home, on the far side of the world.

Signage showing various distances from the Maldives. (Tim Johnson)

Im in the Maldives, a series of 26 atolls just east of India. My trip here is unexpected. A week earlier I had been sitting poolside in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, April 21, when news came through that a series of churches and hotels across the country had been targeted in a string of bombings, killing hundreds. After riding out a strict curfew, the next day I hired a tuk-tuk driver and visited St. Sebastians, which suffered the greatest losses of all the sites.

Covering the event as a reporter, I saw things, close-up, that I will never forgetthe devastation was both broad, and very personal, smashed windows and physical destruction and blood, yes. But burned into my memory are the little piles of personal items, now separated from their departed owners, perhaps eternallyan umbrella here, a cloth shopping bag, over there, and, most evocatively, just a single slipper, now swept aside. I can only imagine what happened to its owner.

Leaving the country the next day, I wandered north to New Delhi, then back south to Kochi, finally landing here in the Maldives. I was ready for rest. And maybe a little restoration, too.

Over-water villa at Fairmont Maldives Sirru Fen Fushi. (Courtesy of Fairmont)

Rest and relaxation at the Fairmont Maldives Sirru Fen Fushi. (Courtesy of Fairmont)

And here, at the Fairmont Maldives Sirru Fen Fushi, both begin in the sea. The resort, brand-new less than two years ago, feels like a place for castaways, albeit a fancy one. The only resort on Shaviyani Atoll (an atoll is a chain of islands formed from coral), the property is bisected by a pool that runs the entire width of the island. Villas with private pools string the beach, and a number have also been built over-water, the latter built on stilts, hovering over the waves.

After a full day of relaxation, time to reflect and enjoy and soak up the suna massage, a little shopping at an on-site workshop for local artisans, who create, and teach guests, plus plenty of time poolside in a loungerI meet Charlie Shearn, the hotels resident marine biologist.

Soon after he arrives, holding flippers and a mask for me, he explains why this string of atolls is so special.

This is one of very few places on the globe with shallow seas, where the currents bring up so much interesting sea life, including whale sharks and manta rays, he says, noting that, before he came here, he only saw one manta ray over the course of more than 140 dives. Here, he saw six within the first two months.

Originally from England, Shearn has been in the Maldives for months researching coral reefs. He explains how all these islands came to bethat they were all deep-sea volcanoes, millions of years ago, which collapsed on themselves.

I love being able to just walk out, and theres the reef, he says, as we walk over the beach and into the blue sea, paddling out to the house reef, just offshore.

While we snorkel our way across the flourishing ecosystem, we dont spot any manta rays, or whale sharks, but what I do see refreshes my soulunicorn and trigger and parrot fish, flashing all around us. At one point, a hawksbill turtle appears, out of the blue, and we follow her, out to sea, swimming until we reach the edge of the reef, the ocean floor dropping off sharply, just an endless infinity of deep blue ahead.

She disappears into it, and we turn back.

Thats Kibashes a 30-year-old female, he says, explaining that they have a registry of dozens of these turtles, who are distinguished, like a fingerprint, by their facial markings.

She had disappeared for about 20 monthsmaybe she found a reef on a nearby island, or rode out on the current, anywhere.

And the next day, I go fishing. Rolling out on a traditional wooden dhoni boat, two guides, Salley and Ali, tell me they were raised on the water, growing up right near this atoll. As kids, they would use hand lines for smaller fish, but have caught huge ones, too.

Sailfish, theyre big, and tasty, too, Ali smiles. I dont catch much, a couple of tiny ones, but both guides bring in nice catches quicklyand often. Taking a little pity on me, Salley is kind enough to donate his biggest one for my dinner that night, cooked up, fresh, in the resort kitchen.

The crew members show off their catch. (Tim Johnson)

I hop around a bit on these islands, spending time at the fabulous Conrad Maldives Rangali Island, sipping champagne in Ithaa, their underwater restaurant while sharks swim over my headall the walls, and the ceiling, just water, behind glass.

The beach at Conrad Rangali Island. (Tim Johnson)

Later, I roll out on a big motorboat under late-afternoon rays, spotting dolphins frolicking under the sun, on the waves. And, finding drama of a different sort, in Male, the Maldivian capital, I lose myself in the crush of the city, letting myself be carried along on the tide of humanity in one of the worlds most densely populated places.

Searching for dolphins. (Tim Johnson)

And back at the Fairmont, after my snorkel, I head to my over-water villa. Showering off the salt, I enjoy a sunset dinner, then walk the beach, marveling at my place, here, under the southern stars, in the breeze, working through the thrills of the afternoon, and everything Ive seen.

The sun will rise again, tomorrow, and, as always, the waves will continue to crash. And, just like Kiba, swimming off into the deepest blue Ive ever seen, I dont understand, exactly, what the future holds. But I know that everything will be all right.

When You Go

Stay at the Fairmont Sirru Fen Fushi, where you can swim the longest pool in the Maldives, a total of 656 feet split into four linear sections, then dip into the house reef, which runs a total of six miles.

The pool at Fairmont Sirru Fen Fushi. (Tim Johnson)

An aerial view of the Fairmont Sirru Fen Fushi. (Courtesy of Fairmont)

For a change of pace, stay at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island, where rooms and restaurants are spread between two islands, connected by a wooden bridge. If you cant afford the undersea suite (which comes with a private buggy, jet boat, and butler), sign up for champagne at Ithaa.

For more info on the Maldives, see VisitMaldives.com/en
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

So, with a $25 billion rescue package in the works, the airlines will stay in business, fit for purpose when there are once again passengers to fill the seats.

When might that be?

Analysts at the International Air Transport Association represent the industrys best guess at how fast the airlines will recover. They assume a gradual lifting of travel bans after the first wave of infections recedes.

As an encouragement, they cite some signs of a turning point in the Chinese domestic market already.

In North America they see a recovery to 75 percent of the normal number of flights in the third quarter of this year and predict that traffic will be back to 90 percent of pre-virus levels by the end of this year.

IATA says the stimulus package will help to lead to a strong recovery in 2021.

The good news for American travelers is that, whatever the worldwide picture, our airline industry has been recognized for what it really is, an essential public utility that had to be saved.

Does this mean that you should already be looking for bargain fares?

Its too early to make a judgment on international flights. The ability of airlines in other countries to recover will vary greatly, and our own airlines with international routes wont be able to resume flying with any certainty of the traffic volume on most routes for a while.

One permanent casualty could be the disappearance of the largest transoceanic jets, the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 747. They were the first to be pulled from long haul routes as the passengers disappeared and are just not viable unless high passenger loads return.

The largest twin-engine jets, the Boeing 777 and the Airbus A350, can carry slightly fewer passengers far more efficiently and, as a result, they will be replacing the jumbos.

As for domestic flights, as always, looking at the fine print is vital.

For the moment fees for cancellations and changes are waived as there was no alternative in an emergency. Its not clear when those fees will reappear, so if you are booking far ahead that needs to be a concern.

Story continues

Theres little to lose with Southwest, which has no cancellation or change fees (although if a changed flight involves a higher fare you have to pay the difference), is running a flash sale right now with most fares below $200 and a minimum fare of $39.

And its good that the airline rescue package ensures airline staff will themselves be ready to return to full service as needed. Under the deal, the airlines are obliged to keep their staffing levels, wages, salaries, and benefits to at least 90 percent of where they were from April to September last year.

Sara Nelson, the president of the flight attendants union, who has emerged as a powerful influence on legislators, said, This is an unprecedented win for frontline aviation workers this bill will save hundreds of thousands of jobs and will keep working people connected to health care many will need. This is not a corporate bailout, its a rescue package for workers.

Nonetheless, this deal is a massive injection of public funds to keep the airlines whole. Without it, they could only have survived by filing for bankruptcy protectionas American Airlines, Delta and United have done in past crises caused by the aftershocks of the 9/11 terror attacks and the 2007 financial crash.

By taking that course they were able to cut many thousands of jobs, slash benefits, and relieve themselves of the burden of legacy pension plans. But this time it was different. They were not facing insolvency because of burdensome labor contracts, but because of the coronavirus.

So the unions and legislators came together to tell the airlines that, in return for being rescued, it would no longer be business as usual.

Under the terms of the bailout, the loans are conditional on the airlines not doing what they have been doing for more than a decade of fat profitsusing the free cash like an ATM machine to buy back their own shares and push up the stock price instead of building reserves for a rainy day. Nor can they pay dividends. They must avoid layoffs to the extent practicable.

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Iran on Thursday announced 157 new deaths from coronavirus, raising the official number of fatalities to 2,234, as it slapped a ban on intercity travel to try to curb the spread.

Health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour also said that 2,389 new cases have been confirmed in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of declared infections in one of the world's wost-hit countries to 29,406.

"Fortunately, until today 10,457 of those infected have recovered and been discharged from hospitals," he told a conference.

Jahanpour said that the spread of the new coronavirus and its rate of infection was "growing steadily" in Iran.

The Islamic republic imposed strict new containment measures Thursday, after weeks of public appeals largely failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of



Iranians taking to the roads to visit family for the Persian New Year holidays. "Those who were planning to travel, cancel it right from this moment," said Hossein Zolfaghari, a senior official at Iran's anti-coronavirus committee.

"Those who are out travelling should return home quickly," he added in a televised announcement while announcing details of the new measures.

Zolfaghari said non-residents will not be allowed into cities based on their car plates and drivers' IDs, and violators will be fined and their cars impounded.

"All official and non-official gatherings... are also banned," the official said, without elaborating further.

President Hassan Rouhani said in a cabinet meeting he hoped the "more strict measures" would help to curb the virus.

He added the government was going to ask Iran's supreme leader for permission to draw USD 1 billion from its national development fund to address "the coronavirus' complexities and issues, especially the medical sector's needs".

The country will also provide businesses which have not laid off workers during the outbreak with low-interest loans, Rouhani said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Omar Nabi, whose father, Haji Daoud Nabi, died in the attacks, said he felt relief on hearing the news but added that to be there, to see it unfold would have been a lot better than finding out through the media. Still, he understood that this would not have been possible because of the lockdown in place amid the coronavirus pandemic. He said he plans to attend the sentencing.
Israel's parliament speaker has resigned abruptly, dealing a blow to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The move also deepened the country's political turmoil as the Israeli leader tries to cling to power amid coronavirus and a looming corruption trial.

The resignation of Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein clears the way for the opposition to move forward with efforts in parliament to topple Mr Netanyahu. But by resigning, Mr Edelstein, a member of Mr Netanyahu's Likud party, also defied a Supreme Court order to hold a vote for his successor.

The move drew an angry reaction from the opposition Blue and White Party, which now has the backing from a slim parliamentary majority.

"The Israeli parliament belongs to Israel's citizens, and their elected representatives will follow the laws of the state of Israel and the rulings of its courts. No one is above the law," Blue and White leader Benny Gantz tweeted.

Mr Edelstein suspended parliamentary activities last week, citing restrictions due to the spread of the coronavirus. But opponents accused him of blocking the vote on his replacement to shield Mr Netanyahu from legislation that would limit his lengthy rule.

Mr Netanyahu was recently indicted on various corruption charges and faces a trial.

The Supreme Court had ordered him to hold a new vote by yesterday. While some members of Likud urged him to defy the order, he said he would "not agree to an ultimatum" and resigned instead.

"The Supreme Court decision marks a harsh and arrogant intervention of the judicial branch in the affairs of the elected legislative branch," Mr Edelstein said.
Prior to this, our budgets were very stable, our financial condition healthy, Mr. Mujica said in an interview this week. This seriously destabilizes our overall picture and, at this point, its too early to tell what the total fallout is and what the next steps are.

In New York City, officials are similarly bracing for dire consequences, as the tourism and hospitality industry effectively shuts down.

The city could face revenue shortfalls of between $4.8 billion and $6 billion over the next 15 months, according to the city comptroller, an estimate predicated on the theory that recovery efforts will begin to take hold between late May or end of June.

The Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit group, was less optimistic; Maria Doulis, vice president of the group, said the city could lose $20 billion in revenues over the next three fiscal years.

The city could bleed 750,000 jobs in the cultural, restaurant, retail, airline and other sectors, eliminating between $1.5 billion to $2 billion in wages per month, according to James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

Mr. de Blasio has ordered city agencies to identify $1.3 billion in budget cuts, but warned that he may ask for more as the city continues to lose revenue and see massive new expenses because of this crisis.
Manchester rapper Bugzy Malone is in a 'stable condition' after he was seriously injured in a crash while riding a quad bike.

Malone, 29, real name Aaron Davis, came off the vehicle in a collision in Bury, Greater Manchester, on Wednesday night.

His injuries are not believed to be life-threatening and police inquiries are ongoing.

His management team said he was being monitored in hospital as he recovers from his injuries which have not been confirmed.

The Bugzy Malone Team tweeted: 'I can now confirm that @TheBugzyMalone is in a stable condition. He remains in hospital whilst being monitored and assessed.

'He would love privacy for him and his family while recovering so let us leave him at peace until stable enough to make a comeback on social media.'

Malone's Can-Am three wheeler motorcycle was badly damaged in the smash on Wednesday evening. The rider, Aaron Davis, who goes by the name of Bugzy Malone is a British rapper and actor from Manchester

Bugzy Malone is treated by a paramedic after he crashed his three wheeler motorbike last night in Bury, Manchester

It is unclear if the driver of the Audi (pictured), which was left with smashed bodywork and windows, was injured in the collision

Debris and clothing was left on the road following the shocking collision last night. The smash took place in Bury, Greater Manchester close to Openshaw Park

Bugzy Malone was apparently injured on Wednesday evening after smashing into an Audi on this Can-Am three wheeler motorcycle moments after being seen on social media doing burnouts and racing a Mercedes car

The star's condition was unclear after the crash, however he was talking to onlookers before emergency services arrived

They later added: 'It's been a very craaazy last 24hrs which was not obviously intended & shows how quick life can turn.

'I just wanted to say to everyone who has wished and prayed for bugzy & anyone in general, stay safe and keep healthy, keep your loved ones close and live your life! Thank You.'

CCTV showed the moment his motorbike smashing into a car in a crash that left him lying bloodied in a pile of wreckage.

The musician, 29, had been seen riding what appeared to be a motorised trike in the moments before the crash despite the UK being locked down due to coronavirus.

An Audi pulls out of a T-junction giving the grime star no time to react before he ploughed into driver's door.

Malone's bike then falls onto its side and he is sent spinning down the road in a spray of sparks in front of shocked onlookers who raced to his aid.

The songwriter, famed for his album King Of The North, was left dazed and lying on his back on the kerbside with blood pouring from facial injuries. One bystander said it appeared his nose was 'hanging off'.

Witness Lewis McMullen shared a clip of the performer clearly dazed and surrounded by shattered glass in the aftermath of the collision.

It is unclear if the driver of the Audi, which was left with smashed bodywork and windows, was injured in the collision.

The social media user wrote above the video: 'Bugzy Malone wrapped up big time in Bury.'

His jacket is shredded in the footage as the disoriented rider writhes on the ground clearly in pain.

Footage also surfaced on Malone just before the crash, showing him riding his bike around the town.

A recovery vehicle was used to tow the smashed motorcycle away from the scene of the crash

Malone could be seen lying in the road close to the pavement with blood coming from his face after being flung from the three wheeler bike (pictured, his bike is towed away)

A police car is pictured at the scene of the smash in which Malone's three wheeler motorcycle was badly damaged

The road in Bury was left strewn with debris after the crash, which happened last night

The Audi that the star crashed into was left with extensive damage to the driver's door

This footage shows Malone just before the crash which was caught on CCTV in Bury, Greater Manchester

Malone is pictured lying on the floor in Bury, Greater Manchester, following the accident

Police and paramedics raced to the scene after the crash, with Malone being treated where he lay before being taken to hospital, witnesses said.

A spokeswoman for Greater Manchester Police said: 'Shortly before 9.20pm last night police were called to Rochdale Road, Bury, to reports of a collision involving an Audi car and a quad bike.

'Emergency services attended and the driver of the quad bike - a 29-year-old man - was seriously injured and taken to hospital for treatment.

'His injuries are not believed to be life-threatening.

'No arrests have been made and inquiries are ongoing.

'Anyone with information should contact 101, quoting incident number 2677 of 25/03/20. Reports can also be made anonymously to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.'

The King Of The North songwriter had previously posed on Instagram with motorbikes

Messages of goodwill came from fellow rappers on social media.

Chip tweeted: 'Prayers out to @TheBugzyMalone from the most sincere place in my heart and soul. Hope he pulls through', while Wiley posted: 'Praying for all people involved in the @TheBugzyMalone Crash.'

Manchester City FC tweeted: 'Everyone at Manchester City sends their love and thoughts to Bugzy Malone. Wishing you a quick recovery.'

However not everyone had sympathy for the star for crashing during the lockdown.

Niamh on Twitter wrote: 'He was ... trying to show off when we're on lockdown. The nurses are trying to treat people for the virus not an injury caused by reckless driving.'

Rapper Bugzy Malone, who was injured in a motorbike crash last night, preforming at Wireless Festival in 2019
The coronavirus-enforced lockdown



has triggered a mass exodus of migrant workers hailing from Madhya Pradesh from adjoining Gujarat as they headed towards their native villages on foot.

The 21-day nationwide lockdown has rendered lakhs of labourers across the country jobless, as several construction works and projects have come to a standstill.

Thousands of daily wagers, including women, who had gone to Gujarat's Surat, Ahmedabad, Rajkot and Navsari districts to eke out a living, gradually headed towards their homes in poverty-stricken districts of Jhabua, Alirajpur, Barwani, Ratlam, Bhind and Morena.

Some of these labourers either walked hundreds of kilometres or were dropped at border districts of Madhya Pradesh in vehicles.

Speaking to PTI at Jhabua's Pitol area checkpost, an official, who did not wish to be identified, said at least 3,300 migrant workers had returned to the state through the checkpost.

Workers, who crossed over, underwent thermal screening for coronavirus at the checkpost, he added.

Daily wagers started walking back home on Tuesday midnight when the lockdown came into force, and some good Samaritans provided food and other essentials along the way, one of the workers said.

Vijay Ahirwar (28), a resident of Morena, said there was no point staying behind in Gujarat.

"I am a daily wager and now with the shut down in Surat, there was no point in staying there without any money to survive," Ahirwar said.

Some migrant labourers entered the state via Chandpur and Chaktala check posts in Alirajpur district.

Around 400 to 500 people, who were mostly on foot, enetered the state from checkposts in his district, Alirajpur police superintendent Vipul Shrivastava said.

At least 10 buses carrying workers from Gujarat's Navsari district are likely to reach Alirajpur by Thursday midnight, he added.

However, the Gujarat government doesn't want these workers to leave and has been arranging to provide them food and lodging, the SP said.

While those who are travelling on foot and are half way across are being let off, others who have still not left Gujarat are being persuaded to stay back, he said.

Jhabua Sub Divisional Magistrate Abhay Kharari could not be contacted despite repeated attempts to know the actual figure of workers crossing over from Jhabua district.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
SALEM, Ore.  Oregon Health Authority announced 50 new coronavirus cases Thursday.

Another person has died, as well. OHA said it was a 69-year-old Washington County woman who tested positive March 15 and died March 25 at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center. They said she had underlying medical conditions.

The new cases include 14 in Marion County, 12 in Multnomah County, eight in Washington County, five in Deschutes County, three in Polk County, two each in Josephine and Lane County, and one each in Clatsop, Linn, Tillamook and Wasco counties.

KEZI 9 News reported the two new Lane County cases on Wednesday. And Douglas County announced another case on Thursday that has not yet been included in the state count.

Including the latest Douglas County case, the state total is now 317. Eleven people have died.
Occidental Petroleum OXY has decided to lower its 2020 expenditure again to preserve liquidity amid the economic crisis created by the breakout of novel coronavirus. Reduction in demand impacted prices of crude oil that have dropped 60.5% year to date, with hardly any indication of prices becoming steady anytime soon, which is forcing oil and gas companies to take remedial measures.



Earlier this month, Occidental cut dividend and capital expenditure to ensure enough liquidity to service its debts. It is evident that the earlier reduction was not enough to face the current challenges.



Taking into consideration the choppy commodity price scenario, the company is lowering 2020 production expectation to 1,275,000-1,305,000 barrels of oil equivalents per day (BOEPD), down 6% from the prior guidance in the range of 1,360,000-1,390,000 BOEPD.



Additional Cut in Expenditure



Occidental will now invest in the range of $2.7-$2.9 billion, down from the prior expenditure plan of $3.5-$3.7 billion. Initially, the company had plans to invest in the range of $5.2-$5.4 billion in 2020.



The company now aims at reducing 2020 operating and corporate costs by at least $600 million compared with the original 2020 plan, including salary reductions for executive leadership. These cost reductions are in addition to the previously announced operating and overhead synergies of $1.1 billion that are expected to be fully realized in 2020.



The above planned reduction of expenses will provide assistance to the company to face the challenges posed by the low commodity price environment.



Whats Impacting Oil Prices?



The breakout of COVID-19 is adversely impacting demand for crude oil. The U.S. Energy Information Administration release also indicates the same, and predicts global petroleum and liquid fuels consumption to average 99.1 million barrels per day in first-quarter 2020, indicating a decline of 0.9 million from the same period in 2019. Governments globally are issuing directives related to travel, asking people to stay at homes and avoid mass gatherings, as well as carrying out temporary closure of schools, factories and offices, which are adversely impacting the demand for crude.



Saudi Arabia  the worlds top oil exporter  has plans to increase crude oil production to 12.3 million barrels per day in April, after the collapse of its OPEC supply cut agreement with Russia. The decision of Russia and Saudi Arabia to produce more crude volumes could further lower the price of the commodity from the current level due to supply glut.



The factors mentioned above factors are having a negative impact on crude oil prices. International crude oil prices are trading below $30 per barrel for the past nine days. The sustained low cost of commodities will make it very difficult for oil and gas companies to sustain their normal level of operation without taking any corrective measures.



Other companies belonging to the oil and gas sector such as Devon Energy DVN, WPX Energy WPX and Murphy Oil Corporation MUR are also cutting down on capital expenditures to preserve liquidity and slow down expansion plans amid the falling oil prices.



The $2-trillion U.S. stimulus package can boost crude oil prices. However, this will only happen if the OPEC countries restrain from pumping out more crude oil.



Zacks Rank



Currently, Occidental carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).



You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.



Price Performance



Occidentals shares have underperformed the industry in the past 12 months.

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Nominations for UW Women in STEM Own It! Awards Accepted

Nominations are still being accepted for the fifth annual Own It! Awards for women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) at the University of Wyoming. The deadline is Monday, March 30.

The Own It! in-person celebration is canceled, but that wont stop us from honoring the outstanding women on campus and around Wyoming who are doing amazing work in STEM, says Lisa Abeyta, UW coordinator of Student Research Programs. The program is located with Wyoming NSF EPSCoR (National Science Foundation Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research).

Winners names will be posted on the Wyoming EPSCoR website.

Abeyta says the awards help increase the visibility of an often-overlooked group in STEM, which can be fundamental in encouraging women to participate in science.

Researchers are nominated for their outstanding scientific and scholarly achievements. Many will receive awards in categories for undergraduate and graduate students, STEM professionals, pre-tenured and tenured faculty members, and community members.

Wyoming EPSCoR and its partners develop award nomination criteria. Nominations are for women who exemplify the following:

-- A woman student, STEM professional, faculty or community member who has made significant contributions to her field of research.

-- A woman who demonstrates service, leadership and mentoring among her peer group.

-- A woman who inspires teaching and learning among her community.

-- And, a woman who is deserving of celebration.

Other sponsors are the Wyoming IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) program; the Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium; the College of Engineering and Applied Science; Women in Math, Science and Engineering (WiMSE); and the Learning Actively Mentoring Program (LAMP).

For more information and updates, visit the Wyoming EPSCoR website at www.uwyo.edu/epscor/events/own-it-2020.html.
Today

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low around 35F. Winds ESE at 10 to 20 mph.

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low around 35F. Winds ESE at 10 to 20 mph.

Tomorrow

Partly cloudy skies during the morning hours will become overcast in the afternoon. Temps nearly steady in the mid to upper 30s. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph.
Inc. magazine today revealed that AdaptiBar is No. 211 on its inaugural Inc. 5000 Series: Midwest list, the most prestigious ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Born of the annual Inc. 5000 franchise, this regional list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the Midwest economys most dynamic segmentits independent small businesses.

AdaptiBar was also honored on the national Inc. 5000 list in August of 2019, ranking No. 2253 in addition to receiving honors for being No. 40 in Top Education companies. This marked the third consecutive year appearing on the list.

On the release of the Inc. 5000 Series: Midwest list, AdaptiBar Founder and CEO Tarek Fadel said, AdaptiBar is honored to be included in the 2020 list of fastest-growing private companies in the Midwest. We are dedicated to providing the best technology and customer service in the industry. Due to our hard-working team, we can truly say that AdaptiBar is the most effective bar preparation tool on the market.

As an Inc. 5000 series honoree, AdaptiBar shares a pedigree with Intuit, Zappos, UnderArmour, Microsoft, Jamba Juice, Timberland, Clif Bar, Pandora, Patagonia, Oracle, and many other notable alumni.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000 Series: Midwest, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, metro area, and other criteria, can be found at inc.com/inc5000-series-midwest-2020 starting March 25, 2020.

The companies on this list demonstrate just how much the small-business sector impacts the economies of each Midwest state, says Inc. editor in chief Scott Omelianuk. Across every single industry, these businesses have posted revenue and growth rates that are beyond impressive, further proving the tenacity of their founders and CEOs.

More about AdaptiBar

Established in 2003, AdaptiBar was created by a team of lawyers and technology experts committed to developing a superior Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) preparation program. The AdaptiBar mission is and has always been to utilize advanced, adaptive and superior technology to develop revolutionary ways to prepare for the MBE. The result is AdaptiBar, the most powerful diagnostic tool for MBE preparation.

CONTACT:

AdaptiBar

Jacob Rooney

312-239-6062

Jrooney@adaptigroup.com
T he Government is facing an angry backlash over its new financial support package for the self-employed which may not be available until June.

Rishi Sunak announced a major support package on Thursday to help self-employed people during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Speaking at the daily press conference in Downing Street, the Chancellor said the support package for self-employed people would cover 80 per cent of average earnings over the past three years.

He said the scheme would pay up to 2,500 a month and would be available "no later" than the beginning of June.

Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures 1 /81 Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures A deserted Westminster Bridge PA A man wearing a face mask or covering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, walks past customers sat outside a restaurant AFP via Getty Images Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the Coronavirus lockdown Andrew Parsons Runners pass cardboard cutouts of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William during the London Marathon in London AP An empty escalator at Charing Coss London Underground tube station Jeremy Selwyn Electronic bilboards displays a message warning people to stay home in Sheffield PA A sign is displayed in the window of a student accommodation building following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Mancheste Reuters People take part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions, in Londo AP People sing and dance in Leicester Square on the eve on the 10PM curfew Reuters Hearts painted by a team of artists from Upfest are seen in the grass at Queen Square, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Bristol Reuters Graffiti reads 'good luck and stay safe', as the number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases grow around the world, under a bridge in London Reuters A sign is pictured in Soho, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London Reuters Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures, during a coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, London AP A person runs past posters with a message of hope, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Manchester REUTERS Riot police face protesters who took part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions in London AP An image of The Queen eith quotes from her broadcast to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the Coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images Durdle Door in Dorset Reuters Captain Tom Moore via Reuters Mia, aged 8, and Jack, aged 5, take part in "PE with Joe" a daily live workout with Joe Wicks on Youtube to help kids stay fit who have to stay indoors due to the Coronavirus outbreak PA An NHS worker reacts at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital during the Clap for our Carers campaign in support of the NHS Reuters Goats which have taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno @AndrewStuart via PA Tobias Weller PA Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed London Landscapes: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, central London. Matt Writtle A newspaper vendor in Manchester city centre giving away free toilet rolls with every paper bought as shops run low on supplies due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus PA Theo Clay looks out of his window next to his hand-drawn picture of a rainbow in Liverpool, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continue Reuters A young man cuts another man's hair on top of a closed hairdresser in Oxford Reuters General view of the new NHS Nightingale Hospital, built to fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London via Reuters Jason Baird is seen dressed as Spiderman during his daily exercise to cheer up local children in Stockport, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters A woman wearing a face mask walks past Buckingham Palace Getty Images A man holds mobile phone displaying a text message alert sent by the government warning that new rules are in force across the UK and people must stay at home PA Medical staff on the Covid-19 ward at the Neath Port Talbot Hospital, in Wales, as the health services continue their response to the coronavirus outbreak. PA Prime Minister Boris Johnson taking part in a virtual Cabinet meeting with his top team of ministers PA A shopper walks past empty shelves in a Lidl store on in Wallington. After spates of "panic buying" cleared supermarket shelves of items like toilet paper and cleaning products, stores across the UK have introduced limits on purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have also created special time slots for the elderly and other shoppers vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Getty Images People on a busy tube train in London at rush hour PA Mia, aged 8 and her brother Jack, aged 5 from Essex, continue their school work at home, after being sent home due to the coronavirus PA Children are painting 'Chase the rainbows' artwork and springing up in windows across the country Reuters Social distancing in Primrose Hill Jeremy Selwyn A general view of a locked gate at Anfield, Liverpool as The Premier League has been suspended PA Homeless people in London AFP via Getty Images A piece of art by the artist, known as the Rebel Bear has appeared on a wall on Bank Street in Glasgow. The new addition to Glasgow's street art is capturing the global Coronavirus crisis. The piece features a woman and a man pulling back to give each other a kiss PA The Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, London, for Windsor Castle to socially distance herself amid the coronavirus pandemic PA A general view on Grey street, Newcastle as coronavirus cases grow around the world Reuters Matt Raw, a British national who returned from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China, leaves quaratine at Arrowe Park Hospital on Merseyside PA Britain's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news conference inside 10 Downing Street Reuters The ticket-validation terminals at the tram stop on Edinburgh's Princes Street are cleaned following the coronavirus outbreak. PA Locked school gates at Rockcliffe First School in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear PA A sign at a Sainsbury's supermarket informs customers that limits have been set on a small number of products as the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases grow around the world Reuters Jawad Javed delivers coronavirus protection kits that he and his wife have put together to the vulnerable people of their community of Stenhousemuir, between Glasgow and Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" Getty Images A man who appears to be homeless sleeping wearing a mask today in Victoria Jeremy Selwyn A pedestrian walks past graffiti that reads "Diseases are in the City" in Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images Staff from The Lyric Theatre, London inform patrons, as it shuts its doors PA A quiet looking George IV Bridge in Edinburgh PA A quieter than usual British Museum Getty Images A racegoer attends Cheltenham in a fashionable face mask SplashNews.com A commuter wears a face mask at London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn A empty restaurant in the Bull Ring Shopping Centre Getty Images A deserted Trafalgar Square in London PA Passengers determined to avoid the coronavirus before leaving the UK arrive at Gatwick Airport Getty Images

Those who have only recently gone into self-employment will not be eligible for fraud reasons, Mr Sunak said.

Several opposition MPs expressed dismay that self-employed workers could have to wait until the summer to claim.

Meanwhile, many Brits took to social media to express their anger at the delay in available funds while many recently self-employed people commented on their lack of options.

Self-employed offered support worth 80% of average monthly profits

Labour MP David Lammy tweeted: Leaving the five million self-employed Brits without any support until June is a slap in the face.

"Many will be bankrupt by then. And why is there an eligibility cap for the self-employed but not the employed? This is not what I call fair.

SNP MP Stephen Flynn tweeted: I did hear June. What on earth are they doing. My constituents simply cannot wait until June.

"They need help, now. No wonder he didnt announce it in Parliament yesterday.

Liberal Democrat MP and leadership candidate Layla Moran posted: 80% grant for the self-employed is welcome.

"But waiting until June does not give self-employed parity with those in employment.

She added that it was a huge missed opportunity to implement a universal basic income.

Other social media users complained about not being eligible for the funds.

One said: "I dont know how well pay out rent - weve only been self-employed since September."

Another said: "No @RishiSunak June is to far away, you've just put thousands of self employed people out of work, they will not have there [sic] tools of trade left by then..."

Manchester mayor Andy Burnham tweeted: Once again, the Chancellor has shown his ability to listen. This move is welcome & will help millions. But initial feedback says June will be a stretch.

Case for an up-front blanket 1k payment in April to tide people over? Just an idea. Could be deducted from the final figure.

However, many people welcomed the move, with one saying: "Very good news for the self-employed from Rishi Sunak."

Another tweeted: "Well done! This is great help. People should not be whinging and whinging. The government is doing their best to support everyone."

Meanwhile, the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM) also praised the Government for rolling out the new package.



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Joe Exotic Maldonado-Passage, the man at the centre of Netflixs hugely popular new documentary Tiger King, is suing from prison.

Tiger King, which has been called absolutely bonkers by quarantined viewers, tells the story of a feud between tiger breeder Exotic and animal activist Carole Baskin.

Exotic is currently serving a 22-year sentence for plotting to kill Baskin and other wildlife violations.

He has now filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Interior and the US Federal Wildlife Service for nearly $79 million while serving time at Grady County Jail in Oklahoma.

In the suit, according to TMZ, Exotic claims he was a victim of malicious prosecution and discrimination. He says the aforementioned agencies were allegedly responsible for stealing my property and promoting an animal rights agenda when they tried to put him out of his business - namely by placing the generic tiger on the endangered species list.

Exotic argues that he was discriminated against because he is the only person charged with this statute because [he] is an openly gay male with the largest collection of generic tigers and crossbreeds.

He is seeking $78,840,000 to cover his personal property loss and 18 years worth of his work with tigers.

Exotic is also demanding another $15m for being falsely arrested and imprisoned over an attempted murder plot on Baskin, in addition to violating the Endangered Species Act for killing five tigers.

He is currently serving his sentence after he was found guilty in October 2017.

Exotic also alleges his former business partner Jeff Lowe lied to authorities and planted evidence to implicate him, while claiming that another colleagues role as an informant contributed to the death of his mother.

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Since the seven-episode series first launched on Netflix, Baskin has slammed the show in a blog post, calling it salacious and sensational.

Tiger King is being adapted into a drama, with Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon set to play Baskin.
Made in Vietnam cell phones, lounge chairs and clothing have become more popular with Americans than ever before. U.S. imports from the Southeast Asian nation have increased to record levels, showing the two sides increasingly interlinked, despite U.S. President Donald Trumps taking a tougher line on commerce with Vietnam.



The United States increased its imports from Vietnam by 36% last year for a total value of $67 billion, which is the highest increase in a single year since 2003, according to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.



The increase shows Vietnam is making a massive reorientation in trade toward the U.S., according to Michael Ryan, the economics director at IHS Markit Economics, an investment research firm.



Businesses have moved to Vietnam in order to depend less on neighboring China, where it has become more expensive or harder to do business because of multiple reasons: the trade war with the U.S., the coronavirus pandemic, and the higher costs.



The United States has become far and away the most important driver of Vietnams export engine, accounting for two-thirds of Vietnams total export growth in 2019, Ryan said.



Vietnam is a key source of electronics, furniture, clothing, footwear, and fish for Americans. It also is a key global exporter of coffee, rice, and other food.



After the U.S. government asked it to buy more American goods, Vietnam announced this month it would buy $3 billion worth of farm goods, from soy animal feed to barley, in addition to previous announcements of buying U.S. airplanes.

Trump has threatened tariffs, saying in June that Vietnam abuses the trade system but not explaining how. He said he wants to decrease the gap in what the U.S. exports to Vietnam, versus the larger number of what it imports from Vietnam.



Instead, that gap has increased every year from 2008 to 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. While economists say the trade balance is not a key way to measure trade success, Vietnam is exporting more because of the China-U.S. trade war.



Assistant professor Jing Wu says President Trumps trade war did not get companies to move to the U.S., but instead shifted them to other nations like Vietnam.



Contrary to the hypothesis that firms move production back home as it is more safe, we find [that] an increase in U.S. trade policy uncertainty tilts the production process of American firms overseas, Wu said.



He and colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School studied the relationship between trade uncertainty and the movement of firms, finding that firms tended to diversify source countries amid the trade war. They cited as examples Apple, Chevron, and Victoria's Secret owner L Brands, which all have moved more business to Vietnam.



Their study predates COVID-19, which has upended supply chains and exports around the world. Businesses still expect to be active in Vietnam after the crisis, though, and continue to invest. For instance, the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council went through with plans to send a business delegation to Vietnam this month amid the crisis.



The record number of companies on our health delegation this year, especially during this critical time, speaks volumes to the value the business community places on working with the Vietnamese government to make health care more accessible, Son Pham, chief executive officer of GE Vietnam, which includes GE Healthcare, said.


Face. Accept. Float. Let time pass. Thats the recipe that Dr. Claire Weekes, the Australian clinician and relatively underrecognized pioneer of modern anxiety treatment, established in a series of books (including Hope and Help for Your Nerves, her first) published from 1962 to 1989, the year before she died. This advice, when you encounter it in the midst of a cycle of breath-shortening attacks, may sound cruel.

First, Weekes says, you must decide to truly experience the panic, to let it burst out into your fingers, your gut, your skull. Then, sink into it like a warm pool. Finally, rather than mentally kicking your legs to keep your nose out of the water, flip onto your back. Stop holding tensely onto yourself, she writes, trying to control your fear, trying to do something about it while subjecting yourself to constant self-analysis. Just float through it, observing that its happening and recognizing that it will end.

Weekes promises that every unwelcome sensation can be banished, and you can regain peace of mind and body. Thats a guarantee that, even in our cure-all-saturated world (Sex dust for orgasms! Crystals for  everything!), is hard to square. But her advice, hard-earned through her own lifelong anxiety, which would wake her out of sleep to torment her, is so simple that Hope and Help essentially turns into a soothing repetition of two points. First, that what were mostly afraid of is fear. And second, that by your own anxiety you are producing the very feelings you dislike so much. Page after page offers the reassuring reminder that you can best fight your panic by refusing to fight the panic.

And in short: It works.

Weekess tactics have trickled out in drabs to influence much of cognitive behavioral therapys approach to panic. She was no lightweight  first an evolutionary biologist, then a general practitioner and made a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 1973. Psychiatrists poo-pooed her theories in her day  her biographer Judith Hoare writes that as the guest speaker at a prominent psychotherapy conference in 1977, fellow doctors belittled her lack of formal training and looked at their watches and talked among themselves  but her work was propelled by word of mouth (Hope and Help had sold more than 400,000 copies by 1978), and a cultish devotion to her simple and direct advice means that today the book is prized by the readers, including me, whom it has guided out of emotional suffocation. A scroll through its Amazon reviews turns up one gushing convert after another.

The language of self-help, especially of the mental health variety, often emphasizes resilience and grit, like were mixed martial artists who ought to stand firm after every wallop. (Badass Ways to End Anxiety & Stop Panic Attacks!, exclamation point included, is one of the sponsored books Amazon shows above Weekess books.) But Hope and Help for Your Nerves, which walks us through every possible physical symptom of panic  from giddinesss to sore scalp  sounds practically Victorian to our modern ears, in both its lingo and its prescription. Weekes refers to panic as nervous illness, and illustrates it with images like the shaking hands of a vicars wife as she struggles with cups of tea rattling in their saucers.
Over 500 German citizens stranded in India amid the nationwide lockdown were flown back to their homeland on Wednesday

New Delhi: Over 500 German citizens stranded in India amid the nationwide lockdown were flown back to their homeland on Wednesday night, German Ambassador to India Walter J Lindner informed on Thursday.

"Today's update on our repatriation efforts. First evacuation flight (A380) with over 500 people left last night. Second one to be airborne tonight. Thanks also to the Indian authorities for the great cooperation!" Lindner tweeted.

Countries like Russia, Japan, Germany, and Ukraine have been carrying out special operations to evacuate their citizens stranded in India following the announcement of a nationwide 21-day lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Russia on Wednesday had evacuated 464 of its nationals from India.

It may be noted that the Central government has banned the operations of international commercial passenger flights to India from 22 March to 29 March.

India has reported 649 cases of the novel coronavirus, of which 593 are active cases, according to the Union Health Ministry update on Thursday morning.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak
Ireland's coronavirus death toll has more than doubled in the last 24 hours with an additional 10 deaths being reported by the Department of Health this evening.

Three females and seven males have sadly passed away from the Covid-19 virus, with nine of these patients based in the east and one in the south.

The median age of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 who have died is 79 years, 68% are male and 32% are female.

The Health Protection Surveillance Centre has been informed of 255 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ireland, as at 1pm, Thursda 26 March.

There are now 1,819 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ireland.

The HSE is now working to identify any contacts the patients may have had to provide them with information and advice to prevent further spread.

Todays data from HPSC, as of midnight, Tuesday 24th March (1,383 cases), reveals:

55% are male and 45% are female, with 66 clusters involving 295 cases

the median age of confirmed cases is 46 years

40 cases (25%) have been hospitalised

of those hospitalised, 47 cases have been admitted to ICU

321 cases (23%) are associated with healthcare workers

Dublin has the highest number of cases at 774, (56% of all cases) followed by Cork with 154 cases (11%)

Of those for whom transmission status is known; community transmission accounts for 51%, close contact accounts for 22%, travel abroad accounts for 27%

Research conducted on behalf of the Department of Health shows that while 35% of people are worried about their personal health, 77% of people are worried about the health of their family and friends.

Read also: Work on readying Longford's Connolly Barracks as 'drive-thru' Covid-19 test centre gets underway

The nationally representative online survey of 1,270 adults conducted today, which is conducted twice weekly, reveals:

66% of people say they are coughing into their elbow

81% say they are physical distancing when they are in a queue

65% of people are worried about the economy

32% of people are worried about their employment status

Dr. Tony Holohan, Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health, said; We are only at the beginning of the curve. We need every citizen to heed the advice and measures put in place to protect all of us.

Dr. Ronan Glynn, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health, said; We are aware COVID-19 is impacting and reshaping daily life for everyone. We can see from the data that people are most concerned about their family and friends. If you look after yourself, restrict movement and follow advice, you will ultimately protect them.

Dr. Breda Smyth, HSE Director of Public Health, said; Protection from COVID-19 is literally in our hands. It is important that we continue to wash our hands and practice cough and sneeze hygiene constantly.

Dr Colm Henry, HSE Chief Clinical Officer, said; While the HSE is engaged in extensive preparations for COVID-19, the more we as individuals take personal responsibility to interrupt the spread of the virus, the greater impact we can have on protecting our vulnerable people and saving lives.

Read also: Public asked to walk in a clockwise direction at the Mall and other Longford walkways

The latest statistics are also available on the COVID-19 Dashboard.

Social distancing still remains the most important factor in slowing the spread of the virus.

"Italy were very well provisioned - twice as well provisioned as we were," said Dr Catherine Motherway, President of the Intensive Care Society of Ireland in an interview with RTE earlier this evening.

We've had a warning; we've managed to create extra space, she added, but the emphasis now is on "controlling the surge" to ensure that there are enough beds and resources.

"If we can control the surge, we may have enough, but we can only do that if the population in its entirety takes into the spirit of this - the washing of the hands, the coughing etiquette, the keeping away from other people, and the staying at home. That is the primary way we will beat this problem and if people do that, they will give us the time and the space to treat sick people as they come in," said Dr Motherway.

"If we have a wave, I think we will be able to rise to meet that. But if we have a tsunami, if we don't control the surge, then we will have a difficulty. There is no doubt about it."

Worldwide, the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus has reached over half a million, with 510,686 cases reported across 198 countries, and 23,079 deaths in total.

The number of confirmed cases in Italy has been increasing rapidly over the past number of weeks with 80,539 confirmed cases and 8,215 deaths. China is still the country that has had the most reported infections with a total of 81,285 cases in total reported to date, including just 67 new cases in the last 24 hours.

Italy has been reporting thousands of new cases and hundreds of new deaths daily for some time now, with 6,153 newly diagnosed cases reported in the last 24 hours alone and 712 deaths. At 80,539 confirmed cases in total, Italy is less than 750 cases away from surpassing China as the country with the most confirmed cases in the world.

Read also: People found deliberately spitting or coughing on anyone should face immediate six month jail term, says Longford councillor
1. Call the hair helpline

HARI's salon / HARI's

Want to look hot for your next HouseParty date? Or totally pulled together and not like youve just changed out of your pyjamas for your 2pm Zoom conference? Haris is on hand to help.

With its four west London salons closed, the pro team of stylists and colourists are just a WhatsApp video call away thanks to its new virtual consultation service.

Book in for a 15-minute appointment for expert at-home tutorials at your fingertips, whether you want to perfect an in-salon blow-dry, disguise outgrown roots or master that braid you spotted on Instagram.

25, redeemable against future salon appointments. To book, email emma@harissalon.com

2. Join a house party

Bleach London / Bleach London

Dalstons brightest beauty disruptors Bleach London is launching its Hair Party series which will see some of the best colourists in the world guide rainbow-haired stay-at-homers through self-dye-solation.

Kicking off this weekend, the first hair party, hosted by co-founder Alex Brownsell, will invite quarantiners to DIY dye along at home with the help of step-by-step advice, while special guests Georgia May Jagger, Pixie Geldof, Nick Grimshaw and Mesh Henry provide some much-needed LOLs.

Shopping from the brands product range is your ticket to gaining access with different product bundles granting entry to the party best suited to your hairs needs and colour choices  the secret time, date and virtual location of which will be revealed in advance.

Whats more, theres free delivery on products this week and the brand will also be making a donation to the NHS Charities Together fund as part of the campaign.

3. Colour by numbers

Josh Wood / Josh Wood

The capitals king of colour Josh Wood has seen a surge of customers stocking up on his at-home hair dye range  and an equal amount of questions from those scratching their heads about where to begin.

In a bid to answer, Wood has doubled his customer service team using colourists from the salon, who will be fielding questions and dishing out expert advice from their homes to yours through video sessions.

Finding your right shade and how to cover roots without ruining highlights are among the most frequently asked questions. His top tip? I personally recommend using the dotting method  parting hair into four sections like a hot cross bun and dotting dye in a line along the partings, paying particular attention to the hairline, before massaging in for maximum coverage.

Crucially, theyre also on hand to tell you when to step away from the sink. We are here to help with shade matching and pro application tips, but well also be honest with parts of hair colour that are best left to the professionals when the salon reopens.
By Beth Berg, Kai Liekefett and Derek Zaba of Sidley Austin LLP

Things havent been this interesting in a generation.1 While most of Corporate America is struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic, some dont see a humanitarian and economic crisis of epic proportions  they see an opportunity.

In addition to putting almost unprecedented stress on our healthcare system, the COVID-19 crisis presents the most severe challenge of Corporate America since World War II. It has caused one of the worst crashes in the stock markets since the Great Depression, and management teams and boards are desperately working to protect the lives of employees, customers and business associates and save their businesses from demise.

As explained in our previous Sidley Update ( Will the Coronavirus Become a Poison Pill for Proxy Contests This Season? ), one of the few silver linings is that most activists are abandoning their campaigns for the 2020 proxy season. Many activist funds are struggling to survive after suffering millions or billions of losses and facing imminent redemptions as a result of the virus-driven market rout.

In the midst of this mayhem, however, some see the most exciting opportunity in a generation. Take, for example, Carl Icahn: In the past two weeks alone, he nearly quadrupled his stake in Occidental Petroleum and rapidly acquired almost 15 percent in Delek US Holdings. From his perspective, the market crash has created a target-rich environment of undervalued companies with distracted leadership teams. Reportedly, several other well-capitalized activist funds are similarly poised to exploit current market conditions. The same applies to resilient companies with strong balance sheets that finally, after the dramatic end of an 11-year bull market, see an opportunity to acquire competitors and other complementary businesses on the cheap. As a consequence, we expect to see a rise in unsolicited approaches and hostile takeover bids in the near future.

Story continues

We typically advise public companies to refrain from adopting a shareholder rights plan or poison pill, which creates a cap on maximum share ownership (typically 10 percent or 15 percent), unless and until an insurgent (or group) approaches or crosses a 10 percent ownership threshold, a public unsolicited takeover bid is made or a company has substantial net operating losses (NOLs) to protect. After all, ISS, Glass Lewis and many institutional investors generally oppose, and ISS and Glass Lewis may recommend votes against directors who have adopted, poison pills without such a justification. Consequently, most public companies instead keep a poison pill on the shelf (i.e., fully drafted and ready for adoption, with the board having been properly briefed).

In the current environment, boards of public companies should, at a minimum, make sure they have an up-to-date poison pill on the shelf and consider whether to adopt one. At least in Delaware, the standard of review of the boards decision to adopt depends on the companys particular circumstances at the time of adoption. In Delaware, if a poison pill is adopted on a clear day (i.e., where the company is not facing a hostile takeover bid or other specific threat), the business judgment rule applies (Moran)2, whereas adoption of a poison pill as a defensive measure in response to a specific threat is subject to enhanced scrutiny (Unocal)3. Notably, even if a poison pill is adopted on a clear day, the decision whether to redeem the poison pill in the face of a hostile bid remains subject to enhanced scrutiny.

In these extraordinary times, a board may, in the exercise of its reasonable business judgment, conclude that it is in the best interests of the company and its shareholders to adopt a poison pill even in the absence of a specific threat. High trading volumes make it easier for activists and hostile bidders to scoop up large stakes within a few days. The current high level of market volatility and use of derivatives by activists make it extremely difficult for stock watch services to detect rapid stock accumulations. Management teams are distracted by the severe challenges of the crisis and may not have the bandwidth to pay attention to these threats. As a consequence, companies may wake up to a Schedule 13D of a new insurgent reporting ownership of 15 percent, 20 percent or even more of the shares. These share ownership levels approach what Delaware courts have referred to as de facto or negative control  meaning that as practical matter, most boards and management teams cannot ignore the wishes of a shareholder with a stake of that size (e.g., the Sothebys case).4 In other contexts, Delaware courts have suggested that directors may be liable for breach of fiduciary duty if they do not prevent a change of control without the payment of a control premium (e.g., the Landrys case).5 It is no accident that at least nine companies have adopted poison pills since the beginning of March 2020, either as a preventive measure (e.g., Williams Cos and Global Eagle Entertainment) or in response to a specific threat (e.g., Occidental Petroleum and Delek US).6

However, that does not mean that every public company should adopt a poison pill in these times. Whether a public company should adopt a poison pill depends on the circumstances, and boards that adopt a poison pill should be prepared for the corporate governance consequences. There is no assurance that institutional investors or proxy advisory firms will change their general opposition to poison pills even in these unprecedented circumstances. Also, adopting a poison pill could draw poisonpill-related shareholder proposals. In determining whether to adopt a poison pill, a board should also consider factors including the following:

 Industry: While most of Corporate America has experienced stock price declines, some industries have been hit harder and are therefore most vulnerable (e.g., energy, retail, restaurant, entertainment and travel). Moreover, smaller players in industries that have been consolidating are more vulnerable.

 Market Capitalization: Mega- and large-cap companies are less at risk than small- and midcap companies because few insurgents have the financial wherewithal and risk appetite to spend billions of dollars on a single position.

 Trading Volume: High trading volumes make a company more vulnerable to a surprise attack. Thinly traded companies are less at risk.

 Relative Value: If a companys trading multiple (or other indicia of value) is lower than those of its peers, it may be perceived as a particular bargain and may, therefore, be more at risk, as are companies whose stock prices have declined significantly more than competitors.

 Shareholder Base: If a company already has an existing controlling shareholder, it is more or less immune from an activist campaign or hostile takeover. In addition, significant insider ownership reduces the risk of a hostile approach. By contrast, having significant free float makes a company more vulnerable to a surprise attack.

 Existence of a Potential Hostile Bidder or Known Activist: If a company has already been approached by a potential hostile bidder, or a known activist already owns stock, there is a greater risk of attack, particularly if the insurgents cash position remains strong.

 Debt Change of Control Triggers: Most public companies have credit facilities and/or bonds with provisions that trigger a default or put right in the event of a change of control. The trigger thresholds generally vary from as low as 25 percent to as high as more than 50 percent. The lower the threshold, the higher the risk for a company to have to refinance its debt as a result of a rapid stock accumulation.

 NOLs: Companies with significant NOLs should consider the adoption of a poison pill because the related tax benefits will be impaired in the event of an ownership change pursuant to Section 382 of the Internal Revenue Code. That definition is extremely broad and includes an ownership increase by 5 percent of shareholders by more than 50 percentage points within a rolling three-year period. A poison pill with a 4.9 percent trigger threshold can protect a company against such an ownership change and has been upheld by the Delaware courts.7

If a board decides to adopt a poison pill, it should tailor its terms to the companys circumstances and be mindful of the standard of judicial review that is likely to apply to the decision to adopt. If a poison pill is adopted in the absence of a cognizable threat of a potential hostile bidder, known activist or NOLs to protect, consider a limited duration of six to 12 months. In any event, it is critical to communicate clearly to all constituencies the rationale for adoption.

1 Reported quote from a well-known activist

2 Moran v. Household Intl, Inc., 500 A.2d 1346 (Del. 1985).

3 Unocal Corp. v. Mesa Petroleum Co., 493 A.2d 946 (Del. 1985).

4 Third Point LLC v. Ruprecht, C.A. No. 9469-VCP (Del. Ch. May 2, 2014).

5 Louisiana Municipal Police Employees Retirement Sys v. Fertitta, C.A. No. 4338-VCL (Del. Ch. July 28, 2009).

6 See Corporate Americas Medicine Against Coronavirus, Deal Point Data, March 20, 2020.

7 Selectica, Inc. v. Versata Enters., Inc., C.A. No. 4241-VCN (Del. Ch. Feb. 26, 2010).

Kai Liekefett, Partner +1 212 839 8744, kliekefett@sidley.com

Derek Zaba, Partner +1 650 565 7131, dzaba@sidley.com

Beth Berg, Partner +1 312 853 9763, bberg@sidley.com

Sidley Austin LLP provides this information as a service to clients and other friends for educational purposes only. It should not be construed or relied on as legal advice or to create a lawyer-client relationship. Readers should not act on this information without seeking advice from professional advisers. In addition, this information was not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, by any person for the purpose of avoiding any U.S. federal, state or local tax penalties that may be imposed on such person.

CorpGov Contact:

www.CorpGov.com

Editor@CorpGov.com

Twitter: @CorpGovernor
Starting from March 28 Kazakhstan will impose new restrictions in Almaty, Nur-Sultan and Shymkent cities, Kazakh Information and Social Development Minister Dauren Abayev told a briefing, Kazinform reports.

The Minister stressed that new restrictions are not a curfew urging all to adhere to all requirements of the state of emergency. Earlier the Minister confirmed the first coronavirus death.
This week, we heard that a man in Arizona had died from taking the drug chloroquine after President Donald Trump claimed it had been approved for use in treating coronavirus.

Were going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately, Trump proclaimed at a news conference on March 19.

Two days later, he tweeted to his 75 million followers (a population the size of Turkey) that chloroquine had a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.

Unfortunately, this was not entirely true. The United States Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), which is in charge of licensing drugs, clarified the situation, saying it has not approved chloroquine or, indeed, any drugs at all to fight COVID-19.

Sadly, it was too late for the man in Arizona and his wife, who remains critically ill in hospital after taking chloroquine phosphate  usually used to clean fish tanks  in a desperate bid to avoid contracting the virus.

So, where has this information about chloroquine come from and is it true?

The race is on to find a drug that effectively and safely treats patients who have contracted COVID-19. Rather than come up with new drugs from scratch, scientists are looking at existing drugs that have been used to treat similar viruses in the past such as middle eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

Chloroquine

Chloroquine, which has long been used to treat malaria, is one of the drugs currently being studied.

However, it has been around so long that the parasite which causes the majority of malaria cases has now become resistant to it and it is no longer recommended for use in most countries. It is also used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

Chloroquine has been shown in laboratory tests, involving viruses in test tubes only, to help reduce the spread and reproduction of other types of coronaviruses, however, tests on animals have so far proved unsuccessful.

A Chinese study, published this month in Nature, one of the worlds leading scientific journals, suggested that when tested on more than 100 patients, chloroquine had superior results when compared with a control drug (a drug known to have no effects on the virus, used for comparison purposes) in inhibiting the exacerbation of pneumonia, improving lung imaging findings, promoting a virus negative conversion, and shortening the disease course.

This would be the first successful use of chloroquine in humans for the treatment of an acute viral disease, albeit not specifically COVID-19, which is good news if true.

However the authors of the study have not yet provided their raw data for peer review and this should be considered carefully before any announcements are made, especially by the US president.

It is also worth noting that this drug can have some serious side effects, including depression, hair loss, stomach upset and headaches to name a few. Therefore, it must be taken under the supervision of a doctor.









Remdesivir

Another drug being looked into is Remdesivir, which was used during the Ebola epidemic without much success. This drug is designed to slow down the infection of healthy cells by blocking viral replication.

However, a study by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, showed in test tube and animal studies that the drug can inhibit the coronaviruses that cause SARS and MERS.

Furthermore, a case report published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed how the first patient with COVID-19 in the US  a young man  showed significant improvement in his symptoms within hours of taking the drug, as did a severely ill patient in California.

However, these are single cases, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has urged caution until more trial data is available.

Although promising, it is worth noting that this drug needs to be given intravenously  via injection into a vein  and is relatively expensive.

HIV drugs

As well as these drugs, the WHO is fast-tracking research into some HIV drugs  Ritonavir and Lopinavir  which have not shown promising results so far in smaller studies. These drugs work by blocking enzymes inside the virus and reducing its capacity to invade human cells and replicate.

The bottom line is that more research is needed before we can draw any definite conclusions about effective treatments or even a cure for COVID-19.

Therefore, people should not take any of these drugs  in whatever form they come in  unless instructed to do so by a qualified doctor.

We are relying on the worlds scientists to not only come up with treatment but also a vaccine. This will take time. In the meantime, we must stick to the rules about hygiene, self-isolation and social distancing.
Since Monday, March 23, the number of Michigan prison inmates confirmed to have the coronavirus has increased from one to seven, the Michigan Department of Corrections says.

An eighth case was identified at the Detroit Detention Center, which the MDOC also operates. That detainee is no longer in custody.

There are four cases confirmed at Parnall Correctional Facility in Blackman Township near Jackson and a case each identified at Newberry Correctional Facility in the Upper Peninsulas Newberry, Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater and Duane L. Waters Hospital in Jackson.

The case discovered at Duane L. Waters Hospital involves a prisoner who had recently been hospitalized after being lodged at the Kinross Correctional Facility in the Upper Peninsulas Kincheloe. While hospitalized, the man was on a floor with patients who showed symptoms of COVID-19, MDOC spokesman Chris Gautz said.

Its unclear how many other inmates may be suspected of having the coronavirus.

Gautz said the number of inmates under supervision after displaying coronavirus symptoms is not a figure the agency had readily available. Confirmed case data will be updated on the MDOC website as they are confirmed and after making the proper notifications, Gautz said.

MDOC suspended all prisoner visitations beginning March 13 as fears over spread of the coronavirus heightened.

At that time, 10 prisons were already under lockdown for influenza outbreaks. While multiple prisoners in each of those facilities had tested positive for influenza, they hadnt been tested for COVID-19, according to Gautz.

If a prisoner has symptoms and meets the criteria for testing, the MDOC will seek permission from the local health department in the county the prison is in to conduct a test utilizing a test kit, the MDOC said. A limited number of test kits have been distributed to all MDOC facilities, but can only be used with the permission of local community health officials."

The agency has increased frequency and thoroughness of facility cleaning; provided more soap to inmates; posted Centers for Disease Control proper-hygiene notices, which have also been recreated digitally to play on facility TV screens; and began screening staff or other authorized visitors for COVID-19 symptoms. The screening process involves taking the temperature of staff who are not allowed in facilities if they register over 100.4 degrees.

Sorry, but your browser does not support frames.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday reported six cases of confirmed conronavirus among patients and staff in state-run psychiatric hospitals.

The total number of people diagnosed with the coronavirus COVID-19 in Michigan reached 2,295 on Wednesday, March 25, including 43 deaths.

On Monday, March 23, Whitmer issued a stay-at-home order, requiring Michigan residents to stay at home except for essential business.

There have been nearly 55,000 cases of the coronavirus and 400 deaths in the United States, according to the Center for Disease Control.

CORONAVIRUS PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

Read all of MLives coverage on the coronavirus at mlive.com/coronavirus.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

More on MLive

Coronavirus developments, March 25

2,295 cases, 43 deaths; latest coronavirus case data

Michigan unemployment system overwhelmed

Congress reaches $2 Trillion coronavirus aid deal

Local law enforcement to handle non-essential business complaints

How to report non-essential businesses
TDT | Manama

The second batch of Bahraini citizens evacuated from the Islamic Republic of Iran due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak arrived late last night, on a day that Bahrain announced its fourth death related to the pandemic.

The Ministry of Health announced on social media that the chartered flight carrying the repatriated Bahrainis touched down in the Kingdom after being delayed for nearly two nights. It was originally scheduled to reach Bahrain late on Monday night but its departure was put off due to logistical reasons. It is understood that a total of 61 evacuees were on the plane.

Following their arrival, the ministry administered tests under the supervision of a specialised medical team. Based on these results, they will be transferred either to a precautionary quarantine centre or to isolation and treatment centres, according to the guidelines and standards approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The Health Ministrys evacuation procedures are in full accordance with medical and internationally approved measures, and are a part of the ministrys plans in order to safeguard the well-being of its arriving citizens and their families. Earlier this month, the first group of repatriated Bahrainis numbering 165 in all returned to the Kingdom.

From that group, a total of 77 tested positive for the coronavirus. The ministry is continuing its efforts towards intensifying all precautionary and preventive measures to contain and prevent the further spread of COVID-19. Meanwhile, the ministry announced yesterday the death of a 78-year-old Bahraini national who was a registered active case of the coronavirus.

The deceased male was suffering from underlying and chronic health problems. He had contracted the virus after being in contact with another active COVID-19 case, after which he was placed in isolation and received extensive 24-hour treatment from a specialised medical team. The Health Ministry expressed its heartfelt condolences to the individuals family at this difficult time.

The ministry also highlighted that, except for one case, all other 224 active COVID-19 cases remain stable and all patients continue to receive aroundthe-clock treatment from a specialised medical team following guidelines provided by the WHO.
THE government and agriculture stakeholders have been urged to work as a team in order to wipe out child labour in the industry.

Representatives from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Association of Tanzania Employers (ATE), Government and Trade Union Congress of Tanzania (TUCTA) called for concerted efforts especially in tobacco chain production that employs a number of children.

Speaking at a three-day strategic workshop to address decent work deficit in the agriculture sector attended by more than 50 participants from within and outside the country recently, TUCTA Senior Official, Ms Siham Ahmed, said they must make sure children are removed from the labour market and rehabilitated.

Explaining, Ms Ahmed called upon the government to re-establish Child Labour Unit and strengthen National Steering Committee that organises regular meetings to get reports, discuss and make decisions for the implementations.

Equally, she appealed to the State to strengthen the monitoring system, adding: It is not only focusing on tobacco or agriculture, other mechanisms and systems should be put in place for sustainable reports to be submitted to relevant authorities from time to time.

"It is important to have the Child Labour Unit and this is for the government to decide and take action onlet us strengthen the steering committees and monitoring systems, including naming and shaming employers, who recruit children as their workers.

ATE Representative, Mr Vitus Lugakingira said the association fully supported the idea, and will get involved in its programs and projects, which are geared towards ending child labour, adding: We shall also raise awareness among our members on the need to adhere to the law of the land.

ILO is working closely with the Prime Minister's Office (Labour, Youth, Employment and People with Disability), ATE and TUCTA on a project that would address the challenge, mostly in the agricultural sector in the country.

Other crops in the focus include cashew nuts, coffee, tea, cloves, cotton and sisal, where a data analysis undertaken by ILO in 2018 shows that Tanzania's tobacco production in 2017 stood at 104.5 thousand tonnes in 118,763 hectare of land.

Whereas in September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals that resolved that between then and 2030 ending poverty and hunger, there should be sustained economic growth, shared prosperity and decent work for all.

ILO has signaled its intention in this period of global transition to promote the goal by securing decent work for all everywhere.

Decent work is a global demand today and ILO has translated it into four interrelated pillars of fundamental principles, rights at workplace, employment, social protection and social dialogue.
WASHINGTON  After Secretary of State Mike Pompeo concluded a "virtual" summit on Wednesday with top diplomats from six other countries, he struck a note of solidarity with U.S. allies as the world faces down a common enemy: the coronavirus pandemic.

"I made it clear to our G7 partners  especially to our friends in Italy and the rest of Europe  that the United States remains committed to assisting them in all ways possible," Pompeo told reporters at the State Department after his private video conference with foreign ministers from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

But the Trump administration has not championed an international response to the global disease threat  nor have other world leaders, experts say.

"Its been very chaotic, said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of global health studies at Seton Hall University's School of Diplomacy and International Relations.

Indeed, after the G7 meeting ended, a German news outlet reported that the seven foreign ministers could not agree on a joint statement because Pompeo insisted on using "Wuhan virus" to describe the pandemic, a move seen as deliberately provocative toward China. Pompeo essentially confirmed that report Thursday.

Different countries take different approaches," Pompeo told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt Thursday when asked about that report. "My theory is we should always be accurate with respect to how we identify something. This virus began in Wuhan; Ive referred to it as the Wuhan virus.

During other international crises  such as the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and the global economic meltdown in 2008  world leaders joined forces to confront the threat of disease and economic collapse. But the reaction to COVID-19 has been very "state-centric," Huang said, with most afflicted countries turning inward.

Story continues

Across the globe, individual governments are competing to secure scarce medical supplies from a strained global supply chain, closing borders with little to no notice to their neighbors, and lobbing verbal broadsides that threaten to deepen the discord.

"The world today thats impacted by this is terribly fractured, terribly fragmented," said Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Affairs, a Washington think tank. "We dont see much on the horizon in terms of promising diplomatic initiatives to bring the major powers and others together to address both the pandemic virus crisis, as well as the economic dislocations that its brought forward."

One reason: The coronavirus is unprecedented in the force and speed with which it has spread from one country to the next. First reported by Chinese officials in late December, it has now infected at least 415,000 people across more than 150 countries, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker.

"Typically on an international level, the World Health Organization goes into full throttle," in response to disease outbreaks, as does the United Nations, said Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

But the world was "caught off guard" by coronavirus, he said. "And once it began hitting the United States, its been a little bit of a catch-up game."

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a press conference at the State Department in Washington, DC, on March 25, 2020.

Morrison and others say the virus struck also at a particularly problematic time, when international institutions have been weakened and a nationalistic fervor has swept many governments.

In those countries best positioned to rally an international response, several leaders greeted the outbreak "with a particular level of skepticism" and "were somewhat dismissive of the notion that there needed to be high-level coordinated action," Morrison said. "Certainly that was true in Washington, in London, in Rome, and elsewhere."

In Washington, the Trump administration has, among other steps, shut down travel from Europe without consultation, scorched Iran for its handling of the epidemic, tried to buy up scarce medical equipment from U.S. allies that are themselves under siege with coronavirus cases, and accused China of a virus cover-up.

"China was very secretive, okay?" President Donald Trump said during a March 21 briefing on the U.S. coronavirus response. "Very, very secretive. And that's unfortunate."

There were also reports that the Trump administration offered a large sum of money to a Germany company working to develop a coronavirus vaccine, sparking fears the U.S. was trying gain exclusive rights to inoculate Americans first. Both the German firm and the White House denied the report, but it highlighted the sense that this was an every-man-for-himself battle and demonstrated that traditional allies were eyeing each other with new suspicions.

Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at CSIS, said it's not only the U.S. that has responded to the pandemic with a unilateralist bent.

"There is just an absolute scarcity of coordination and collaboration in Europe," she said.

"This is going to be a soul-searching moment for the European Union," because its created the potential for solidarity, coordination and collaboration across the EU, Conley said. Instead, "what weve seen is that this pandemic has completely laid bare that ... those institutions are not going to be used for this great challenge."

Pompeo has echoed Trump in criticizing China. At Wednesday's news conference, the secretary of state pivoted from touting America's global generosity to attacking China for what he has labeled a "cover-up" of the initial outbreak.

The Chinese Communist Party poses a substantial threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus outbreak clearly has demonstrated," Pompeo said, refusing to use the official medical name  COVID-19  despite objections from Chinese officials and public health experts who say it could lead to stigmatization and attacks on Asians.

Pompeo noted that China was the first to resist international help. Officials suppressed reports about the outbreak and sought to punish doctors who raised alarms. Xi Jinpings government refused to allow U.S. medical experts to go to Wuhan, the initial epicenter, and brushed off the Trump administrations offer of financial assistance.

"We tried ... from the opening days to get our scientists, our experts on the ground there so that we could begin to assist in the global response to what began there in China, but we werent able to do that," Pompeo said Wednesday.

Chinese officials have since been more transparent, sharing the virus' genome sequence and other vital data. And some experts fear that picking a fight with China now is counterproductive, particularly because the country dominates the global supply chain for in-demand medical products.

"We should be cooperating with China. This is not a good time for us or for China to say 'Lets have a spitting match'," said Gayle Smith, who served on the National Security Council and other top positions in the Obama administration. The fact that were interconnected and dependent, it isnt a political position. Its a statement of fact."

Smith worked at the White House when President Barack Obama grappled with the Ebola outbreak, and she said he badgered other world leaders to cobble together a campaign against the disease.

"He called pretty much every leader on the planet to say Heres what were doing. weve got this many doctors, this much money'," Smith recalled. Then he would say: "'What are you going to do? How much money can you put in? How many health care workers? He really pressed everybody."

As the coronavirus continues its steady march, Smith noted, scientists, epidemiologists and other experts are sharing their research and other information about the virus across borders.

But, she added, "at the level of global political leadership, theres a real stark absence of the kind of international collaboration that's needed."

Even if the scientists keep cooperating as they race to develop a vaccine, Huang said he doesnt foresee that happening on the political front.

He fears if and when a vaccine becomes available, those countries that have the capacity to manufacture it will first satisfy the needs of their people and those countries that do not have the capacity will have to wait. This will probably cause more death and more suffering.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Coronavirus: Global response falters as virus spreads, Trump lashes out
According to Tamil Nadu Health Minister C. Vijayabaskar, a 24-year-old man from Trichy, who had returned from Dubai, has tested positive for coronavirus.

Chennai: With one more person testing positive for coronavius on Thursday, the total number of infected persons in Tamil Nadu rose to 27.

The patient is in the isolation ward of the government hospital in Trichy and his condition is stable, Vijayabaskar said.

Out of these 27 persons who have tested positive, one person has been cured while one patient died on Wednesday.

Vijayabaskar said one person is expected to be discharged soon as he has tested negative after treatment.
G20 nations pledged a "united front" Thursday in the fight against coronavirus, saying they were injecting $5 trillion into the global economy to counter the pandemic amid forecasts of a deep recession.

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin joined the emergency videoconference chaired by Saudi Arabia's King Salman, who called for coordinated action while facing pressure to end an oil price war between Riyadh and Moscow that has roiled energy markets.

The talks come amid criticism that the G20 has been slow to address the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left more than 21,000 dead worldwide according to official data, and triggered financial shock waves as more than three billion people are locked down.

"We are strongly committed to presenting a united front against this common threat," the leaders said in a joint statement after the summit.

"We are injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy, as part of targeted fiscal policy, economic measures, and guarantee schemes to counteract the social, economic and financial impacts of the pandemic."

As concerns mount for poorer countries without access to capital markets or adequate health facilities, G20 leaders also pledged to work with bodies such as the International Monetary Fund to deploy a "robust" financial package to support developing nations.

"It is our responsibility to extend a helping hand to developing countries and (the) least developed countries to enable them to build their capacities and improve their infrastructure to overcome this crisis and its repercussions," King Salman said.

The world's 20 most industrialised countries are scrambling to defend their virus-wracked economies amid forecasts they will likely plunge into a recession.

On Wednesday, the financial ratings agency Moody's estimated the G20's overall gross domestic product would contract by 0.5 percent this year, with the US economy shrinking by 2.0 percent and the eurozone by 2.2 percent.

- 'Missing in action' -

This week, French President Emmanuel Macron and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping pushed for an emergency G20 summit to limit the impact of the pandemic.

The lack of immediate action stood in contrast to the 2008 financial crisis, when the group quickly swung into action to mobilise assistance for vulnerable countries.

Talk of global coordination has yet to resonate under Trump's isolationist presidency.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took aim at China, saying the top diplomats of the Group of Seven agreed with him that Beijing was waging a "disinformation" campaign about the pandemic.

At the G7 talks, a day before the G20 summit, Pompeo alleged Beijing was engaged in a social media campaign that included conspiracy theories that the US was behind the virus, which was first detected in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan.

"If G20 leaders can put politics aside and reach a collective G20 agreement, countries have a better chance of success or of delivering more stimulus than on their own," Markus Engels, from the Global Solutions Initiative, a network of think tanks, told AFP.

"Coordination among the G20 sends a strong message of unity and confidence, both of which are urgently needed now."

Crude oil prices -- hammered by the outbreak's impact on demand as well as by a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia -- were also expected to be at the centre of the discussions.

Riyadh faces pressure from Washington to row back on its decision to hike production and offer the biggest price cuts in two decades, in retaliation for Russia's refusal to tighten supply as the virus sapped demand.

On Wednesday, Pompeo urged Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to "rise to the occasion" and "reassure global energy and financial markets".

However, the Kremlin said "the oil topic" was off the table.

The G20 members were joined by leaders from other affected countries including Spain, Jordan, Singapore and Switzerland as well as international organisations such as the United Nations and the World Bank.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  Five of the nations largest banks agreed to temporarily suspend residential mortgage payments for people affected by the coronavirus, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.

The announcement came as Newsom provided yet another grim statistic about the economic devastation from the virus: 1 million Californians have filed for unemployment benefits since March 13 as businesses shut down or dramatically scaled back because of a statewide stay-at-home order to prevent the spread of the virus.

Meantime, Newsom said California is rapidly expanding its supply of equipment for health care workers and hospital beds in anticipation of the expected surge in patients that will come as more people are infected. Testing for the virus is accelerating quickly as the state adds locations for the public to get checked.

We are leaning in to meet this moment, Newsom said.

Wells Fargo, US Bank, Citi and JP Morgan Chase will defer mortgage payments for three months. State-chartered banks and credit unions will offer similar deferrals. Newsom said everyone is eligible, regardless of how much money they make. He said homeowners must submit some form of documentation, but did not give details.

I thought the Great Recession was overwhelming, and we really had to react. This one is much bigger, said Diana Dykstra, CEO of the California-Nevada Credit Union League. Peoples health is on the line, its deeper and broader than that crisis was. It was a housing crisis. This is a crisis for everyone.

Newsom criticized Bank of America for only agreeing to waive mortgage payments for one month. But Bank of American spokesman Bill Halldin said the company isnt capping its offer at 30 days. It will consider delaying payments on a monthly basis that could extend beyond 90 days depending on the length of the crisis.

The news comes after Congress reached an agreement with the Trump administration on a $2 trillion economic stimulus package to keep the economy afloat during the crisis. The plan would increase weekly unemployment benefits by $600 more than what states are already providing.

For California, that means the unemployed would be eligible for up to $1,000 per week. Thats on top of the $1,200 many adults will get as a one-time payment under the stimulus package.

More help could be on the way for Californians. Assemblyman Phil Ting, a Democrat from San Francisco, said Tuesday state lawmakers could consider a state stimulus package to supplement whatever Congress approves.

Coronavirus cases in California are increasing as more testing is done. A tally by Johns Hopkins University counted nearly 3,000 infections and at least 65 deaths. Confirmed cases in the state are doubling every three to four days, according to California Health and Human Agency Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly.

California hospitals are preparing for a surge of patients, with state officials projecting the state will need an additional 50,000 hospital beds. Last week, Newsom announced the state had leased Seton Medical Center in Daly City, a hospital that was slated to close after its parent company filed for bankruptcy. On Wednesday, Newsom said the 357-bed facility is operational.

A significant milestone, he said.

The governors office also announced it is emptying the states special fund for economic uncertainties and using the $1.3 billion to buy protective equipment for health care workers and medical supplies and to help hospitals increase their capacity.

When the crisis began, California had a stockpile of 21 million masks for health care workers but was down to 2.5 million on Monday. The state has now acquired 100 million masks and is looking for more, Newsom said. The state also has authorized the procurement of 1 billion gloves.

The state has conducted 66,800 virus tests so far, Newsom said. Thats nearly 40,000 more tests than he had previously been announced. The quick increase comes because more labs are now reporting their testing numbers, he said.

Tens of thousands of people tested are still awaiting results, Newsom said.
China has asked Pakistan to open the border between the two countries for one day on Friday so that medical supplies to fight coronavirus pandemic could be transported into the country, according to a media report.

The Khunjerab Pass is usually opened on April 1 which marks the end of winter in that part, but due to the global outbreak of COVID-19, the border between Pakistan and China has been closed for an indefinite period.

The Chinese embassy in a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the governor of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China would like to donate a batch of medical materials to Gilgit-Baltistan, the Dawn reported.

According to the letter, the governor has donated 200,000 ordinary face masks, 2,000 N-95 face masks, five ventilators, 2,000 testing kits and 2,000 medical protective clothes mainly used by doctors and paramedics to fight with virus, which originated in China late last year.

The donation is in response to a request made by GB Chief Minister Hafeezur Rehman to the governor of Xinjiang region to combat coronavirus in the province.

Gilgit-Baltistan has high percentage of coronavirus cases in the country compared to its population, but the underdeveloped region has a negligible number of operational ventilators and remoteness has led to a severe shortage of medical equipment.

The province has reported 84 positive cases so far while the national tally has reached to 1,102 and the death toll to eight.

Earlier, National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) Chairman Lt Gen Mohammad Afzal had said said Pakistan had sought to purchase medical equipment, including ventilators, but these were in short supply around the world and only China had assured that it would provide such items to Pakistan.

Under a border protocol agreement of 1985, the Khunjerab border crossing remains closed from the end of November to April. Trade and travel activities between the two countries take place through Khunjerab Pass, also known as Sust Dry Port the only land route between China and Pakistan.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The report reflects a continued increase in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the United States. Importantly, for the first time the CDC found no difference in the prevalence rates between black and white children, indicating that gaps in access to screening and diagnosis may be closing.

"The world of autism has changed considerably since we were founded in 2005, when the estimated prevalence was 1 in 166," said Autism Speaks President and Chief Executive Officer Angela Geiger. "Core to our mission since our founding has been to increase screening and lowering the age of diagnosis, especially in minority populations. This news could not be more rewarding to the thousands of Autism Speaks advocates, volunteers and community partners, as well as campaign partners Ad Council and BBDO whose award-winning work made this possible. It shows that when non-profits make an issue a priority, change happens."

Key findings include:

One in 54 children had a diagnosis of ASD by age 8 in 2016, a nearly 10 percent increase over 2014 when the estimate was 1 in 59.

While the CDC found no difference in prevalence rates between black and white children, a gap remains in prevalence among Hispanic children, indicating a need to expand screening and intervention among this group. Further, black and Hispanic children identified with autism received evaluations at older ages than similar white children, again indicating that more needs to be done in this area.

The number of children who had a developmental screening by age 3 increased from 74 percent to 84 percent, a sign of potential progress toward earlier and more consistent screening by healthcare providers.

Boys are four times as likely to be diagnosed as girls, holding steady from previous reports. This indicates the need for more research to understand the gap in prevalence and ensure girls on the spectrum are receiving the care they need.

Significant differences remain in the frequency of autism diagnosis between the CDC's monitoring sites. These range from a low of 1 in 76 in Colorado to a high of 1 in 32 in New Jersey . This may be due to how autism is diagnosed and documented in different communities.

to a high of 1 in 32 in . This may be due to how autism is diagnosed and documented in different communities. For a detailed summary of Autism Speaks interpretation of the new findings, please visit autismspeaks.org.

"We have worked tirelessly to fuel research that would allow earlier diagnosis and intervention; advocacy with and for the autism community to ensure access to care; and programs and services that allow our constituents to reach their full potential," Geiger added. "Despite the progress made, we know that more is needed. We will continue to champion the importance of early screening and intervention for all children, as we know this leads to better outcomes and increases the opportunity for people with autism to thrive."

Autism Speaks calls on legislators, public health agencies and the National Institutes of Health to advance research to better understand the continued increase in prevalence and the co-occurring medical conditions that may accompany autism. In doing so, the organization urges policy makers to double the federal funding of autism research, in accordance with the guidance of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), and to advance policies that better provide services and supports for early intervention, education, transition to adulthood, employment and community living.

The CDC report was released in advance of April's World Autism Month and World Autism Awareness Day (April 2), which Autism Speaks dedicates to increasing global understanding and acceptance of people with autism. To engage in this effort to create a kinder, more inclusive world, visit www.autismspeaks.org/kindness.

To join the conversation, find @autismspeaks on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. For personalized support and questions, contact the Autism Response Team at 1-888-AUTISM2, en Espanol at 1-888-772-9050 or by email at [email protected].

About Autism

Autism, or autism spectrum disorder, refers to a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech and nonverbal communication. We know that there is not one autism but many subtypes, and each person with autism can have unique strengths and challenges. A combination of genetic and environmental factors influences the development of autism, and autism often is accompanied by medical issues such as GI disorders, seizures and sleep disturbances. Autism affects an estimated 1 in 54 children.

About Autism Speaks

Autism Speaks is dedicated to promoting solutions, across the spectrum and throughout the life span, for the needs of individuals with autism and their families. We do this through advocacy and support; increasing understanding and acceptance of people with autism spectrum disorder; and advancing research into causes and better interventions for autism spectrum disorder and related conditions. To find resources, join an event or make a donation, go to www.autismspeaks.org . Learn more by following @autismspeaks on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and LinkedIn .

SOURCE Autism Speaks

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NEW YORK, March 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Fairway Market, together with its debtor affiliates in their Chapter 11 cases in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York (Case No. 20-10161) has announced winning bids for 6 Fairway stores on a going concern basis (five New York stores to Village Supermarket, Inc., a Wakefern member, and one store to Seven Seas Georgetowne, LLC, a Key Food member) and the sale of two real estate leases to Amazon Retail LLC.

Village's winning bid includes four of Fairway's Manhattan stores as well as Fairway's production and distribution center for a purchase price of approximately $76 million. Seven Seas' winning bid is for the Georgetowne store in Brooklyn for a purchase price of approximately $5 million. Amazon's winning bid is for the leases in Paramus and Woodland Park in New Jersey for a purchase price of $1.5 million.

Fairway Market continues to serve its communities by operating all of its stores, including stores not sold during the Court-supervised auction, and intends to do so for the foreseeable future to accommodate the current public need for our products.

"We are pleased with the outcome of the auction and are grateful for our dedicated and hard-working employees, suppliers and distributors during this process which has taken place in these unprecedented times," said Abel Porter, Chief Executive Officer at Fairway Market. "Serving our community has always been our top priority and we remain committed to providing quality items and a safe shopping environment for our customers and our employees during this global health crisis."

Fairway Market is a unique food retailer offering customers a differentiated one-stop shopping experience as "The Place To Go Fooding." Fairway has established itself as a leading food retail destination in the greater New York City metropolitan area. Fairway offers an extensive selection of fresh, natural and organic products, prepared foods and hard-to-find specialty and gourmet offerings, along with a full assortment of conventional groceries.

Fairway Market's legal counsel is Weil, Gotshal & Manges, LLP, its M&A investment banker is PJ Solomon and its financial advisor is Mackinac Partners.

The Ad Hoc Group of senior lenders is represented by King & Spalding, LLP.

For more information about Fairway Market's Court-supervised sale process, please visit: www.omniagentsolutions.com/fairway

SOURCE Fairway Market
Guntur : , March 27 (IANS) A few Andhra Pradesh policemen were among the injured in a stone-pelting incident that took place at Pondugula checkpost in the Andhra Pradesh-Telangana border on Thursday evening.

A large number of people had turned up on the Telangana side of the interstate border to proceed to their homes in Andhra Pradesh. When the policemen pushed them back towards Telangana, on account of the COVID-19 lockdown, the irate group of people, comprising mostly students from Hyderabad, began pelting stones.

The incident has come a few hours after Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Reddy requested all those living in other states, particularly Telangana, to remain there until the lockdown is removed.

Andhra Pradesh DGP Gautam Sawang condemned the incident and said that suitable action would be initiated against those who violated lockdown protocols.

In a statement issued on Thursday night, he said: "As per discussions between the two governments, Telangana government will provide all facilities to people from Andhra Pradesh living in Hyderabad." A large number of people, mostly students and IT professionals, belonging to Andhra Pradesh reside in hostels and paying guest facilities in Hyderabad.

With the 21-day lockdown announced on March 24, a number of people are trying to return to their home state.

Meanwhile, security has been increased at various checkposts on the interstate border between Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
Bay Area political events that are happening online during the coronavirus pandemic:

SATURDAY

David Plouffe: Barack Obamas 2008 presidential campaign manager on political leadership in a time of crisis. Hosted by Mannys. 5 p.m. Join here.

SUNDAY

Electing more women: Andrea Dew Steele, founder of Emerge America, on why more women need to be elected to office and ways to make that happen. Hosted by Mannys. 5 p.m. Join here.

MONDAY

Supporting women running for office: A conversation with Stacy Mason, co-founder of WomenCount, on how to support women running for office while sheltering in place. Hosted by Mannys. 3 p.m. Join here.

MARCH 31

Heather Knight: Chronicle columnist talks about covering San Francisco politics during a pandemic. Hosted by Mannys. 1 p.m. Register here for a Zoom link.

APRIL 1

Armed forces role? Is there a roll for the U.S. military to play in the pandemic response? A conversation with Seth Moulton, who served in the Marines and is now a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. Hosted by Mannys. 3 p.m. Join here.

To list an event, please email Chronicle politics editor Trapper Byrne at tbyrne@sfchronicle.com
Standardbred horseman Dean Arnold Stevens, 71, passed away at Victoria Hospital in London, Ont. with his family by his side on Saturday, March 21, 2020.

Dean was the youngest son of the late Louise (McDonald) and Ronald Stevens of Dawn Township. Loving and devoted husband of Darlene (McFadden) Stevens for over 47 happy years.

Cherished and adored by his children, Amy Stevens, Kim (Laurie Minten) Stevens. Loved dearly by his partner and pal for life, his grandson and namesake Cohen Dean. Sadly missed by brother- and sister-in-laws, Bryon and MaryBeth McFadden; Kevin and Brenda Regnier; nieces and nephews. Brother, and sister-in-law, Jerry and Betty Stevens, and nieces and family. Fondly remembered by beloved aunts and uncles and many cousins. Predeceased by his father-in-law and mother-in-law, the late Grant Forsyth and Kathryn (McKerrall) Forsyth.

Deans enduring love of horses, first inspired by his fathers passion for Standardbred racing, fuelled a successful breeding, training and racing career under the name Trefoil Farms. Deans joy in life was working side by side with his mentor and father Ron, a leading driver and horseman of his time. Horses and the business of racing remained a great love of Deans throughout his life. His other great love was his family, to whom he was their rock and best friend and the glue that held everything together. Neighbours and friends knew Dean as an honourable, kind, and generous man who you could always turn to for advice, help and encouragement  no questions asked. A gentleman in the truest sense of the word, Dean was a one-of-a-kind man, son, husband, father and friend, not to be forgotten.

Due to the COVID-19 precautions a private funeral service will be held. A celebration worthy of Deans life will be held at a later date. (Please check the Badder Funeral Home website for further information). Donations to the Canadian Cancer Society or Dawn Valley United Church would be appreciated. Online donations and condolences may be left at www.badderfuneralhome.com

A celebration of Deans life will be held at a later date (please check back with the website for further details).

Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Dean Stevens.
As part of measures to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus, Sunda Ghana, a subsidiary of the Sunda International Group, is intensifying its safety and personal hygiene efforts.



Visitors, staff and customers arriving at its three manufacturing plants are being made to strictly comply with safety measures such as temperature check, hand sanitizing, hand washing, among others.



Persons who visit the three plants namely Sunda Ghana Baby Diaper Factory, Sunda Ghana Investment Company Limited and HomePro Company Limited - with a body temperature above 37.8 are being barred from entering their premises.



Trucks and other vehicles arriving at the factories, especially those from neighbouring countries are vigorously sprayed or disinfected before being allowed in.



Safety Local Manager for Sunda Ghana, Bright Bokor, told journalists in an interview at the factory on Wednesday, March 25, 2020, that the company was strictly complying with President Nana Akufo Addo and the World Health Organizations directives on the prevention of coronavirus.



He said details of drivers and everyone entering the factories are being taken daily.



According to him, the company has been donating some of its detergents, medicated soaps, among others, to individuals and institutions to aid the fight against coronavirus.



Mr Bright Bokor further reiterated that Sunda is fully committed to investing in products and services to guarantee the health and safety of Ghanaians.



Managing Director of Sunda Ghana, Victor Zhang, said "when coronavirus hit some European countries, we knew it could hit Africa too, because of the strong bond existing between the two continents, that is why we decided to reinforce our safety mechanisms within our premises to protect workers and visitors by preparing some safety materials such as facemasks, hand sanitizers, detergents, among others to be used by their employees."



Mr. Zhang said employees have been sensitized to understand and abide by all the health protocols such as regular hand-washing and the use of sanitizers which is intended to prevent the spread of the virus.



Ghana has recorded some 132 cases of coronavirus and three deaths related to the virus.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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India is expected to push for a coordinated and forward-looking approach at the extraordinary G20 virtual leaders summit to be held on Thursday evening against the backdrop of a divide in the G7 over US efforts to label Covid-19 as the Wuhan virus, people familiar with developments said.

Members of the G20, which includes 19 of the worlds largest economies and the European Union, are engaged in hectic negotiations to finalise a joint communique to be issued after Thursdays meeting, the people cited above said on condition of anonymity.

The members will also outline their individual positions in separate statements during the video conference that has been convened by G20 president Saudi Arabia to discuss a joint response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Indias approach will be to have a positive and forward-looking outcome. This is a global challenge and requires a coordinated global response, a person who declined to be named said.

The people said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his statement, is expected to refer to Indias role in forging a coordinated response through the video conference of leaders of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) on March 15 and how this could be replicated by other countries.

On Wednesday, other members of the G7 spurned the US state departments push to include the phrase Wuhan virus in a joint statement that was to be issued after a video conference of the groupings foreign ministers. The members issued separate statements that reflected the divisions within the G7.

The person cited above said: India doesnt want to get into a blame game. The priority for us is to tackle the Coronavirus and to forge a coordinated global response to it.

What the US state department has suggested is a red line, an unnamed European diplomat was quoted as saying by CNN. You cannot agree with this branding of this virus and trying to communicate this.

The proposed draft statement by the US also blamed China for the pandemics spread, the diplomat told CNN. The US was responsible for framing the draft statement as it is the current president of the G7, which includes the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada.

The division within the G7 was reflected in a statement issued by French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, which said he had underscored the need to combat any attempt to exploit the crisis for political purposes and expressed the view that the unity of all to effectively combat the pandemic must now take precedence over any other considerations.

The US leadership, including President Donald Trump, has repeatedly referred to Covid-19, which was first reported in the Wuhan region of China last December, as the Chinese virus or Wuhan virus.

Asked by journalists about a media report that the draft statement of the G7 had contained a reference to Wuhan virus, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo did not deny it. There was a lot of discussion today amongst the G7 about the intentional disinformation campaign that China has been and continues to be engaged in, he said.

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Voter ballots in the documentary "Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections." (HBO)

Though the November 2020 election has probably never felt farther away, it doesnt mean we shouldnt be thinking about how were going to protect its integrity and ensure that this vital aspect of democracy runs smoothly.

Then again, considering what weve learned about Russian interference in 2016 and beyond, and how routinely voting issues crop up every cycle, what if America is already behind the eight ball on that front as well? Thats the scary scenario rolled out over 90 minutes in the HBO documentary Kill Chain: The Cyber War on Americas Elections from filmmakers Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels and Sarah Teale, which says that electronic voting is still woefully unsafe from bad actors, be they nations or loners. Distraction viewing, this admittedly isnt.

The trio behind Kill Chain have tackled this story before, in the 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy, which centered on vulnerabilities in the Diebold e-voting machines that had risen to prominence in the 2000 and 2004 elections. In that film, Finnish computer security expert Harri Hursti demonstrated how easy it was to get into a Diebold system to change votes. Diebold is no more  it was bought by another company, which was then subsumed by a bigger voting machine outfit  but Hursti is still around, his knowledge of election security problems even greater, so its not surprising that the filmmakers have made him their tour guide for the 2.0 version of their techno-cautious crusade.

At the core of the movies warning is that an electronic voting machine is always penetrable  something most readily proved in a scene at the annual hacker convention Def Con, in which Hursti instructs assembled participants to try to sabotage the voting machines provided, which they then do. That the main companies behind these products are tight-lipped about their security, and breaches around the country are sometimes kept from the public, doesnt inspire confidence.

But also, as Hursti and interviews with cyber analysts, security gurus, journalists and concerned politicians make clear, the threat doesnt have to be some blanket attack or even about switching or erasing votes in ballot machines. It only takes altering address numbers in the voter roll electronic files of one targeted county to cause enough confusion and delay on election day to be considered a wholly successful hack.

Story continues

Though voting machines arent supposed to be accessible to the public, Hursti finds someone selling old AccuVote TSX machines (a model still in use) on EBay. The film also wades into the irregularities and hinkiness surrounding Georgias 2018 elections, and the close gubernatorial race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was allowed to oversee an election rife with problems, and who after taking office hired a lobbyist from an e-voting business as his chief of staff.

The title Kill Chain comes from a military term for how an enemy clarifies its attack steps. Though clearly meant to inject paranoid gravity to an already persuasive argument about the perils inherent in electronic voting systems, the movie is more helpful when giving voice to what experts say is the only true solution: the simple physical record of a paper ballot. UC Berkeley statistics professor Philip Stark makes a convincing case for his risk-limiting auditing methodology, which when applied to the 2018 Georgia contest revealed that one Democratic districts suddenly going Republican was a one in a million possibility.

Swift and blunt, Kill Chain is designed to strike fear and leave you viewing any voting machine as a disenfranchisement tool. The irony, of course, is that one of the movies big takeaways is that, more than the literal scrubbing of anyones touchscreen vote, the overarching goal of any election hacker is merely souring our trust in democratic processes. In this time of widespread concern for the health of our institutions  and what voting in the year of coronavirus is even going to look like  Kill Chain, as well-intentioned as it is, kinda sorta does that too.
Beep  baap

The U.S. District Court is now in session, the courtroom deputy announced shortly after 1:30 p.m. Wednesday. The Honorable John V. Acosta is presiding.

Mr. Dominguez, the judge started, can you hear me?

Jose Benito Claros Dominguez, 41, was one of six defendants appearing that afternoon before Acosta via videoconference in whats become the new daily virtual hearing to avoid the spread of the new coronavirus.

Beep  baap signaled every time people joined or left the remote hearing. It became a familiar sound.

At times, people talked over one another. Other times, words were hard to hear as a new person entered the conversation.

Do you want me to call the case, your Honor? Assistant U.S. Attorney Quinn Harrington asked, his voice popping in on another line.

Yes, the judge told Harrington, adding, Its just like being here in court ...

Except it is nothing like being in court.

Defendants appear by video either from the U.S. Marshals Service lockup in the federal courthouse in downtown Portland or from Columbia County Jail, which has a contract to house federal defendants.

The judge, a court reporter and his courtroom deputy appeared by video from his courtroom, running through a docket of defendants making their first appearances following an arrest or new indictment.

Defense lawyers tuned in by video from their home or offices. Language interpreters, U.S. pretrial officers joined by video or phone. Prosecutors used the phone.

The setup isnt ideal but its happening at federal courthouses across the country as jurisdictions try to keep the work going as cities and states follow stay-home rules to try to flatten the curve of burgeoning known cases of the infection. COVID-19 has so far sickened more than 300 in Oregon and killed 11. Nationwide, the cases climbed to above 80,000 with more than 1,000 deaths.

In Portland, with defense lawyers unable to speak privately to their clients during the hearings, they often had to say out loud for all to hear what they typically would whisper in a defendants ear.

Mr. Dominguez, this is Gerry Needham. Can you see me? OK, very good, said Needham, his defense lawyer. Just listen closely, the judge may address you at some point at the end.

At another point, defense lawyer Per C. Olson, appearing by video, began by telling the judge, I just want to wave so the client knows who I am, and then added, "Im your lawyer, sir,'' to the defendant, appearing by video from another location.

Another defense attorney had to loudly counsel his client, appearing on video from the U.S. Marshals Service office, not to address the judge.

Since Im not sitting next to you, its my strong recommendation that you not talk about the allegations here today, defense lawyer Bryan Francesconi interrupted his client as the man was about to talk about details of his case.

Most of the defendants in virtual court Wednesday afternoon claimed they were in the high-risk category for the new coronavirus because of their age, health problems or both and asked through their lawyers to be released before their trials.

Harrington, the prosecutor, objected to the release of Dominguez, 41, accused of stealing another persons identity and using it to obtain a fraudulent U.S. passport.

Theres a risk Dominguez will flee, given his continued use of aliases, Harrington argued.

Needham, though, said Dominguez had no prior criminal record, has local ties and didnt flee when he knew he was under investigation.

The judge agreed to release Dominguez, but not due to the coronavirus concerns.

Im aware that the issue, if you will, the recent COVID-19 virus, has caused concern among those in recent custody, Acosta said. But that would be a reason to release everyone who is currently in custody. You need something more than the possibility of exposure to the virus.

A short time later, defendant Kenneth Earl Brink, 52, a convicted bank robber, made a video appearance, accused of violating his supervised release.

Im scared about this coronavirus. I dont want to die in jail. Thats what Im afraid of, Brink said. He told the judge that he has high blood pressure and needs medication to control it.

Promising to return to court if released, he added, If you want me to, Ill sleep on the steps of the courthouse.

Acosta told Brink he couldnt overlook his past record. He violated his release in October, November and December, then failed to report to his probation officer for a month and a half.

I cant be confident youre going to comply with anything I would tell you to do, the judge said.

As new defendants were called to appear, their lawyers said on the record that their clients agreed to appear by video. Under federal rules and law, a criminal defendant can consent to appear by video rather than being brought into a courtroom for most proceedings.

Because of the risk of infection from being transported or kept in close contact with others, most of our clients are consenting to use of a video, Oregon Federal Public Defender Lisa Hay said. This is a temporary solution that became necessary because of the pandemic.

Oregons Chief U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez said he and others moved as quickly as they could to try to limit the number of people coming to the courthouse to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, and moved initially to address how defendants first appearances could be held remotely. "I think everyone is working really, really hard doing their very best to try to live up to our duties as lawyers and judges,'' Hernandez said.

In federal courts in Seattle and Tacoma, first-appearance court hearings are largely being done by phone, but the district is working to use by the end of this week a WebEx-based video conferencing for participants and phone-in capability for others, according to William M. McCool, clerk of the U.S. District of Western Washington.

Were all trying to get through this begging, borrowing and learning from others, McCool said. Things are changing so rapidly.

Back at the virtual Portland hearing, Maria Gallegos-Mendoza, 45, appeared on allegations she was selling methamphetamine, using her 16-year-old son and 19-year-old daughter to drive her to make the sales. According to the FBI, federal agents seized 31 pounds of meth from her Salem home.

In 12 years on the bench, I dont recall anyone coming before me on possession of 31 pounds of anything, the judge said.

Release denied.

She presents a danger to her community, Acosta said, and her children in using them to participate in her illegal behavior.

After another defendants appearance, the hearing appeared to end. No other defendants were named. The judge could be heard talking softly to a courtroom deputy or clerk. No one pronounced court adjourned.

There was only the sound of participants disconnecting their phone lines.

Beep  baap. Beep ... baap.

During the COVID-19 outbreak, the Court is scheduling hearings by video teleconference and teleconference. Members of the public who would like to attend a proceeding by telephone may call the District Clerks office for information about how to dial in.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.

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As social distancing and self-quarantining to prevent the spread of the coronavirus continue, shopping becomes more complicated - and potentially riskier. Most retailers are closed, but there remains a chance to spread the disease from person to person through interaction at stores.

Even before the pandemic began, shopping online was extremely popular. And now, even more people are turning to shipping items through the United States Postal Service as well as private parcel deliveries like Amazon and UPS, rather than going out to buy things they need.

But concerns of spreading infection via the mail or private shipping can still remain. How high is the risk of catching the coronavirus through packages or other shipped items?

According to the evidence so far, the risk is not terribly high. The Center for Disease Control has stated on their website that at the moment, there is no evidence to support transmission of COVID-19 associated with imported goods and there have not been any cases of COVID-19 in the United States associated with imported goods," so the concern for anything shipped from overseas is low thus far.

But even with goods shipped from in the United States, the CDC website says that the coronavirus can remain viable for hours to days on surfaces from a variety of materials.

According to the Coronavirus Resource Center on the Harvard Health Publishing website, a recent study found that the coronavirus can survive up to 24 hours on cardboard - longer than the two to three hours that it can survive on droplets in the air, but significantly less than the two to three days it can survive on plastic or stainless steel.

To that end, according to this story from Today.com, experts suggest leaving packages outside for a day, if possible, just to be safe.

As for the people doing the delivery themselves: mail and parcel delivery services have all announced their own updated sanitation and health guidelines in response to the coronavirus.

In their public statement, the United States Postal Service announced they were instituting the CDCs guidelines on sanitation strategies, and shared that the World Health Organization has similarly determined there is a low risk of contracting the disease from a package that has been shipped. Click here for the full USPS statement.

Similar statements can be found at the Amazon website, UPS website and the FedEx website, with all three companies stressing the increased cleaning protocols at their facilities and that employees are to stay home if they are feeling any symptoms.

However, confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection have been reported from employees of at least eight Amazon warehouses, according to NPR.

An open statement from Amazon employees published on March 17 is demanding more consideration be taken by the company for its workforce, which is currently looking to fill an additional 100,000 positions to keep up with demand. The petition also states that employees are concerned about the companys current lack of protective measures.

Since then, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has announced several new policies for Amazon employees, including paid sick leave for those diagnosed or quarantined with COVID-19 and a relief fund for contractors and drivers.

And regardless, Amazon has been so overloaded with orders that wait times for shipping for some items has gone up to as much as a month, even for Prime members. So if you do decide to place orders with Amazon, you may be waiting a bit longer than usual anyway.

More coronavirus coverage:

Did Gov. Tom Wolfs mandatory shutdown list close your business over coronavirus? Check it again. It has changed.

Texas Roadhouse owner provides hot meals for teachers, first responders: coronavirus hero

Pa. unemployment claims skyrocket to 540,000 since statewide coronavirus shutdown, shattering records

How to volunteer, donate in central Pa. during coronavirus pandemic
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Linkedin Adrian Wail Akhlas (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 16:35 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d97e02 1 Business Indonesia,bank-indonesia,liquidity,financial-system,capital-outflows,COVID-19,bonds,equity-market Free

Bank Indonesia (BI) is ensuring the liquidity in the countrys financial system would be sufficient to meet the peoples needs in the coming months as massive capital outflows seen in the past several days have begun to decline.

BI Governor Perry Warjiyo said in Jakarta on Thursday that there is at least Rp 450 trillion (US$27.77 billion) in cash stored in banks and ATMs in Indonesia, which would be sufficient for the next six months.

We have been working closely with banks in the last two weeks to boost their liquidity, Perry told reporters on Thursday during an increased requirement for cash in the past several days to finance efforts to curb the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. We want to assure the public that we have sufficient stocks of cash.

Perry also said the central bank saw signs of easing capital outflows, driven by the announcement of a $2 trillion fiscal stimulus by the United States and to-be-announced stimulus by the European Union.

The stimulus package has reduced pressure on a global scale and resulted in better sentiments for Indonesias financial markets, Perry said, adding the central bank has since recorded a lessening capital outflow.

The rupiah appreciated as much as 1.8 percent against the US dollar to Rp 16,205 on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. The Jakarta Composite Index (JCI), meanwhile, jumped the most since 1999 by as much as 11 percent on Thursdays trading, the best performer in the region, despite other Asian indices recording declines during the day.

The COVID-19 crisis is much different than Asias crisis in 1998 and the global financial crisis in 2008 as banks remain in a healthy condition despite weakening business activities and volatile financial markets, Perry said.

We want to make sure that the situation is different than the crisis in 1998 and in 2008 as the banking industry remains healthy with low levels of non-performing loans and good financial market conditions, he added.

Because of the pandemic, the central bank also plans to implement shorter trading hours and a shorter settlement period for transactions starting next week.

As of Tuesday, BI had injected liquidity of up to Rp 300 trillion into the financial markets and banks to help support the countrys crashing currency as foreign investors sold off Indonesian assets.

The central bank recorded a Rp 125.2 trillion capital outflow from government bonds, the stock market and BI certificates so far this year. Foreign investors sold Rp 112 trillion worth of government bonds and Rp 9.2 trillion worth of Indonesian shares, with most of the sell-offs recorded this month.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 02:56:08|Editor: huaxia

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RIYADH, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The Group of 20 (G20) major economies on Thursday pledged full support for the World Health Organization (WHO) in coordinating global efforts against the COVID-19 epidemic.

"We fully support and commit to further strengthen the WHO's mandate in coordinating the international fight against the pandemic," G20 leaders said in a joint statement released after an extraordinary summit convened by Saudi Arabia.

The leaders who attended a virtual conference sought to ensure adequate financing to contain the pandemic and committed to provide immediate resources to the WHO, according to the statement.

"We will share timely and transparent information; exchange epidemiological and clinical data; share materials necessary for research and development; and strengthen health systems globally, including through supporting the full implementation of the WHO International Health Regulations (IHR 2005)," the statement said.

"We task our Health Ministers to meet as needed to share national best practices and develop a set of G20 urgent actions on jointly combatting the pandemic by their ministerial meeting in April," the statement added.
The CRPF on Thursday launched a WhatsApp-based helpline that will provide medicines and other essential items to the needy in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.

The assistance has been launched under the umbrella of its Kashmir-based 'Madadgaar' helpline that operates with the primary number of 14411 and Twitter handle @CRPFmadadgaar.

The force on Thursday issued a message on its social media platforms publicising the new WhatsApp number- 7082814411.

It said the helpline can be specifically used by Kashmiri people living in the Jammu-Kashmir Union Territory and also by those living in the northern part of the country, that is the area of responsibility of its J&K zone.

Officials added that people calling from other parts of the country will also be helped as the force has a nation-wide presence.

"The WhatsApp number can be called by people seeking assistance. The helpline will help them in case of general information sought and in case of specific medical query, experts will be consulted."



"The helpline will also cater to CRPF personnel and their families who face any issue regarding coronavirus. Many of the troops are away from home and hence all help will be extended to their families also," a senior officer said.

The helpline will provide a one stop solution to our extended family, CRPF's J-K zone chief commander Zulfiquar Hasan said in a message.

The helpline can be called in cases of assistance for medicines or other essential items, information for prevention and control of the coronavirus and details of ICMR and CRPF isolation facilities.

The paramilitary force is country's primary combat armed unit under the Union Home ministry for internal security, anti-Naxal operations and counter-terrorist operations in the Kashmir valley.

It has deployed over 70 battalions (about 1,000 personnel in each) in the J-K UT.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Global beverage giant weathers outbreak setback

From:ChinaDaily | 2020-03-26 10:59

The resumption of operations at the Coca-Cola bottling factory in Hubei province on March 21 signified the return of nearly all production for the bottling factories of the beverage giant in China, two months after the temporary closure of its production lines.

Starting with the initial resumption of a bottled water production line on March 15, the Coca-Cola facilities in the province, epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak, have restarted manufacturing of Coca-Cola products in the following five days from the middle of March.

Hu Qianming, general manager of Hubei Swire Coca-Cola Beverages Ltd, said daily production capacity has reached 40 percent of the previous level, with nearly 50 percent of the production line personnel back at work and the staffing level reaching 90 percent rate in sales and logistics.

The company formed a crisis management team to provide face masks and hand sanitizers, installed temperature screening in offices, and mapped out sanitizing procedures for the factory. The team had been responsible for building and restoring confidence among employees during the period.

Using WeChat, employees have reported their health status on a daily basis. Coca-Cola China has set up health monitoring mechanisms across the Coca-Cola system in the country as part of its precautionary measures to protect the health and safety of its employees.

Hu said: "The meanings of the word weiji in Chinese are twofoldcrisis and opportunities. Every factory has encountered the same crisis. What matters now is who is the first to grab the opportunities."

The plan to resume production in Hubei Swire Coca-Cola has focused on its employees, clients and consumers.

The company has offered online training and extra motivation measures to raise the morale of employees. Clients were offered multiple marketing plans to stimulate consumption.

For consumers, the company has boosted online sales to complement its distribution of products in April and May.

Coca-Cola China has currently resumed work on its production lines of water, soda and juice.

The company has praised the policies and measures from governments in various regions for production restarts. For the Swire Shenmei factory in Shanghai, the city government has eliminated its water and electricity bills between Feb and June which are worth 750,000 yuan ($106,058).
As Britain battles coronavirus, newspapers across the nation, both local and national, have been dominated with reports and analysis about the worldwide pandemic. Meanwhile, 24-hour television news channels provide a constant flow of reports, expert analysis and statistics.

There are also many personal stories of great selflessness and, sadly, some others of incredible selfishness.

However, on Tuesday morning, newspapers in one part of the United Kingdom devoted most of their front pages to another story.

That part was Scotland and the story was the acquittal of Alex Salmond in a high-profile court case.

In August 2018, Mr Salmond resigned from the SNP after allegations of sexual misconduct and, in January 2019, he was charged with 14 offences, including attempted rape and sexual assault.

The 10 women who made the allegations against Mr Salmond included an SNP politician, a party worker and several current and former civil servants and officials.

One charge was dropped, but on Monday, after an 11-day trial, Mr Salmond was acquitted of the other 13 charges by majority verdicts.

He must have been relieved, but the trial must have been embarrassing. Even his defence lawyer admitted that he had acted "inappropriately" in relation to a number of women.

Mr Salmond was acquitted of the criminal charges, but the fallout from the trial will pour petrol on a smouldering fire in the ranks of the SNP.

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon is a confident performer in the Scottish Parliament and in the media, but all is not well in the party and, for some time, there has been talk, albeit muted talk, of the need for a new leader.

There has been division and animosity within the SNP for some time and, back in February, Angus MacNeil, the SNP MP for the Western Isles, launched a scathing attack on Nicola Sturgeon's government, accusing it of "dithering" over independence.

After Mr Salmond's trial ended on Monday, SNP MP Kenny MacAskill, a former Scottish justice secretary, tweeted: "Some resignations now required."

Meanwhile, SNP MSP Alex Neil has demanded a judge-led inquiry into claims of an SNP government "conspiracy" against Mr Salmond.

Joanna Cherry QC, a prominent SNP MP and a close ally of Mr Salmond, said: "Some of the evidence which has come to light raises very serious questions over the process that was employed within the Scottish Government to investigate the alleged complaints."

On top of the questions about what did, or did not happen, in private in Bute House, which was then Mr Salmond's official residence, there are the questions about whether or not there was a conspiracy within the SNP and Scottish government against him.

The second issue is potentially complicated by the fact that the chief executive officer of the SNP, Peter Murrell, is the husband of Nicola Sturgeon.

The coronavirus crisis will delay developments, but there will be further investigations and, later this year, there will be a Holyrood inquiry into a botched internal investigation of complaints against Mr Salmond.

Such inquiries will keep the unsavoury story in the news and before the electorate and they also have the potential to go in unexpected directions.

Mr Salmond seems determined to bring into the public domain evidence that, he believes, will demonstrate that there was an internal SNP conspiracy against him and the inquiry could provide the vehicle for that.

Before the trial, his lawyer presented in closed court details of text messages between senior figures in the Scottish Government and SNP, which, Mr Salmond argues, proves there was orchestration against him.

Then, outside the court on Monday, Mr Salmond said: "There was certain evidence we weren't able to (present to the court). At some point, that information will see the light of day."

The next elections to the Scottish Parliament are set for May 2021 and the Salmond affair could influence the outcome of that election.

The SNP is already tarnished by the whole affair, with its stories of poor behaviour by Mr Salmond and allegations of a conspiracy against him.

The party also faces the prospect of a nasty internal battle and there is ample evidence that voters do not like a divided party.

This could afford an opportunity for other parties to make advances and eat into the SNP vote and that will be important, because the SNP will want to turn the election into a referendum on independence.
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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Montevideo, Uruguay  Thu, March 26, 2020 11:30 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d7bbfb 2 World Latin-America,lockdown,coronavirus,novel-coronavirus,COVID-19,pandemic,health,SARS-CoV-2,infectious-diseases,infection Free

Countries across Latin America tightened measures on Wednesday to halt the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus, with more lockdowns, border closings and school closures as well as increased aid to the region's poorest.

As cases of COVID-19 cases continue to rise -- more than 7,400 and 123 deaths up to now -- Bolivia and Colombia became the latest countries to impose a total lockdown, while Chile extended its schools closures until the end of April.

Here are the latest measures taken in several Latin American countries:

Bolivia

Bolivia is closing its borders and ordering a strict lockdown until April 15 starting at midnight Wednesday, President Jeanine Anez said, as she declared a state of "sanitary emergency."

The measures are designed to add teeth to a lockdown that was ordered on Sunday but has largely been ignored.

More police and soldiers have been deployed to enforce the measures, Anez said.

There are narrow exceptions to who can cross the border and times at which people can be outside, Anez said.

Colombia

A three-week total lockdown began just after midnight Tuesday.

"Stay at home, prevent the virus from spreading and save lives," said President Ivan Duque.

Colombia, population 48 million, will be locked up until April 12.

Nearly 500 cases of the deadly virus have been reported in Colombia.

The capital city Bogota had already been on lockdown on orders from the mayor since Sunday.

Chile

Some 1.3 million residents of Santiago -- including those of the Chilean capital's most affluent neighborhoods -- will be on lockdown for least a week starting at 0100 GMT Thursday, officials said.

This followed orders extending school closures until May. Classes were suspended on March 16, just under two weeks after the first novel coronavirus case was recorded.

The lockdown areas "concentrate the greatest number of cases, and the movement of people can generate more contagions," said Health Minister Jaime Manalich.

"This means that people will have to stay at home," he emphasized.

Chile has more than 1,100 recorded infections and three deaths from the virus.

Panama

Panama will allow the cruise ship Zaandam -- operated by the Holland America cruise line -- to sail through its canal even though there are 42 people aboard the ship with flu-like symptoms, Health Minister Rosario Turner said Wednesday.

The ship, with 1,800 passengers aboard, set sail on March 7 from Buenos Aires, with the destination of San Antonio, on the central coast of Chile.

But the ship had to alter its plans when ports along the way stopped it from docking due to the coronavirus crisis.

Every ship that reaches Panama must present a list of sick people, "and if we suspect there are people with respiratory problems, they cannot land," Turner said.

The Zaandam is set to cross the 80-kilometer inter-oceanic canal on Thursday and meet up on the Caribbean side with another cruise ship, the Rotterdam, which is to deliver supplies and kits to test for the COVID-19 virus.

Its aim is to reach Fort Lauderdale, Florida on March 30, the cruise line said.

There have been 558 cases of the new coronavirus in Panama, including eight deaths.

Honduras

Soldiers have begun distributing food to locked-down residents of the poorest neighborhoods of the capital Tegucigalpa.

President Juan Orlando Hernandez said 800,000 poor families -- 3.2 million people -- would receive food to ensure they stayed indoors.

Honduras has recorded 36 COVID-19 cases so far.

Brazil

President Jair Bolsonaro has warned of possible "chaos" and the "looting" of supermarkets if state shutdowns ordered by the governors of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro aren't ended.

Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly scoffed at the severity of the deadly pandemic, had previously criticized the closing of schools and businesses in Sao Paulo and Rio states, two of the country's most populous states.

"Companies aren't producing anything. They can't pay their employees. And if the economy collapses, there won't be any way to pay public officials. We are facing chaos," Bolsonaro said.

If that happened and supermarkets were looted, he said, "we'll have chaos plus the virus."

Mexico

BBVA, the largest bank in Mexico, has predicted that the coronavirus outbreak will cause the economy to contract by 4.5 percent in 2020.

The Spanish bank said Mexican exports would be hard hit by a reduction in demand from the United States, its largest trading partner, if virus containment measures continue.

BBVA also said remittances sent to family members in Mexico could be hit by rising unemployment in the United States.

Other banks, such as Barclays and Credit Suisse, predicted the economy would shrink by 2-4 percent.

Uruguay

Dueling demos: labor activists and their supporters banged of pots and pans from balconies late Wednesday demanding measures that would protect workers during the coronavirus crisis -- only to be met by government supporters singing the national anthem at the exact same time.

There are 217 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Uruguay.
The CEO of Texas Roadhouse is donating his salary until January of next year to pay front-line employees during the coronavirus outbreak, according to reports.

W. Kent Taylor is forgoing his salary and bonus from March 18 through Jan. 7, 2021, MarketWatch reported.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) are calling for an international probe into how Beijings initial handling of the CCP virus pandemic may have endangered the United States and the rest of the world.

In a resolution introduced in both chambers on March 24, the lawmakers asked Congress to condemn the Chinese regime for its coverup of the outbreak, which almost certainly heightened the rapid global spread of the CCP virus, they said.

Congress should also quantify the damage of such acts on the health and economic being of afflicted nations, the resolution states.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mishandling allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

The resolutionone of three legislative proposals introduced that day that focuses on the Beijing regimealso calls on the international community to design a mechanism for the CCP to deliver compensation accordingly.

It is time for an international investigation into the role their coverup played in the spread of this devastating pandemic, Hawley said, in a joint press release with Stefanik. The CCP must be held to account for what the world is now suffering.

Media reports have detailed how Chinese authorities censored critical information when the virus first emerged in the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.

On Jan. 1, Hubei health officials ordered a genomics testing company to stop virus testing, destroy all virus samples, and to keep their findings a secret, according to reporting by Chinese media Caixin.

Police tracked down multiple doctors who voiced concerns about the virus on social media, accusing them of spreading rumors and inciting public fear. Critics of Chinese authorities outbreak response were summoned and punished, and several outspoken citizen journalists disappeared after they tried to share firsthand videos from Wuhan.

On Jan. 13, Thailand confirmed the first infection outside of China, a day before the World Health Organization, citing Chinese investigations, announced that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.

A University of Southampton study, currently in preprint and not yet peer-reviewed, found that China could have stopped up to 95 percent of the viruss geographical spread had it enacted containment measures earlier.

There is no doubt that Chinas unconscionable decision to orchestrate an elaborate coverup of the wide-ranging and deadly implications of coronavirus led to the death of thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans and climbing, Stefanik said.

The resolution also took note of how senior Chinese officials have tried to push the conspiracy theory that the virus originated in the United States.

Since day one, the Chinese Communist Party intentionally lied to the world about the origin of this pandemic, Hawley said.

Also on March 24, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) introduced a bipartisan resolution to condemn the CCP for the outbreak coverup and disinformation.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), meanwhile, introduced legislation called No Chinese Handouts in National Assistance Act, to prevent any virus-related relief funds from flowing into China.

Allowing American taxpayers money to go to companies owned by the Communist Chinese government is antithetical to our America First agenda, he said in a statement.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) on March 24 called the CCPs handling of the outbreak one of the worst coverups in human history.

This is a systematic whitewash of what the Communist Party has done in China, he told Fox News. He added that the virus is now wreaking havoc all across the world, costing not only the lives of people but economic chaos.

For the harm, loss, and destruction their arrogance brought upon the rest of the world, China will need to pay, Stefanik said.

Simply putChina must, and will, be held accountable, she said.

From The Epoch Times
SUNNYVALE, Calif., and TAIPEI, Taiwan  March 26, 2020  Intrinsic ID, the worlds leading PUF company for security in IoT, Banking and Government, and IKV, a leading company in embedded security in Taiwan, today announced IKV has launched its software-based security solution equalling hardware level for IoT security. IKV used Intrinsic IDs BroadKey, a secure root key generation and management software solution for IoT security that enables device manufacturers to secure their products with an internally generated, unique identity without the need for adding a costly, security-dedicated silicon.

We had great trust in using BroadKey for this project because Intrinsic IDs SRAM PUF technology for security has proven so reliable and highly secure based on our experience with its implementation on FPGAs, said Albert Cheng, chief executive officer of IKV. Collaborating with Intrinsic ID, we believe there is greater flexibility to use PUF in any platform and for a wide range of applications.



IKVs KVSoftKey enables cryptographic system deployment, intellectual property protection, IoT device management and identification, and digital copyright management. It eliminates chip integration and production processes, and offers seamless integration with MCUs from STMicroelectronics, delivering better cost control, streamlined manufacturing and improved research and development processes. For systems already embedded with secure elements, the root of trust generated by KVSoftKey serves as the access key to the secure element, optimizing security with the root key residing not in memory and generated on a need-basis only. It is also used to establish secure channels bridging secure elements, which mitigates the risk of data breach in transit among MCU and secure elements.



We know how concerned IKV customers are when it comes to security certifications, so its a great testament to our teams focus on delivering robust, reliable security that IKV chose BroadKey for this project, said Pim Tuyls, chief executive officer of Intrinsic ID. With IKV expertise, which enables eclectic applications and security by design, we expect BroadKey to satisfy security requirements in a wider range of contexts.



Intrinsic IDs patented SRAM PUF (Physical Unclonable Function) technology is the basis for deriving unclonable identities for products connected to the IoT. The companys secure root key generation and management software solutions for IoT security enable device manufacturers to secure their products with an unclonable identity such as a unique secret root key without the need for adding a costly, standalone, security-dedicated silicon. It has been deployed in a wide variety of devices such as FPGAs, microcontrollers, sensors and server chips.



BroadKey enables IoT device manufacturers to securely anchor their connected products with a unique secret key or identity without having to add security-dedicated silicon. BroadKey, a recipient of IoT Security Product of the Year recognition in the IoT Breakthrough Awards, does not have to be loaded at silicon production but can be installed later in the supply chain, or even retrofitted on deployed devices via brownfield update.



IKV and Intrinsic IDs collaboration marks a key milestone in SRAM PUF technology, Cheng said. IKV believes this technology still has great potential to be unleashed and infinite possibilities to be uncovered.

About Intrinsic ID

Intrinsic ID is the worlds leading digital authentication company, providing the Internet of Things with hardware-based root-of-trust security via unclonable identities for any IoT-connected device. Based on Intrinsic IDs patented SRAM PUF technology, the companys security solutions can be implemented in hardware or software. Intrinsic ID security, which can be deployed at any stage of a products lifecycle, is used to validate payment systems, secure connectivity, authenticate sensors, and protect sensitive government and military systems. Intrinsic ID technology has been deployed in more than 170 million devices. Award recognition includes the Cyber Defense Magazine InfoSec Award, the IoT Breakthrough Award, the IoT Security Excellence Award, the Frost & Sullivan Technology Leadership Award and the EU Innovation Radar Prize. Intrinsic ID security has been proven in millions of devices certified by Common Criteria, EMVCo, Visa and multiple governments. Intrinsic IDs mission: Authenticate EverythingTM. Visit Intrinsic ID online at www.Intrinsic-ID.com.



BroadKey, Intrinsic ID and the Intrinsic ID logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intrinsic ID, B.V., and are protected by trademark laws of the United States and other jurisdictions. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.



About IKV

InfoKeyVault Technology (IKV) is the leading service company in embedded security in Taiwan, also an independent design house for security solutions from global security chip vendors, such as Infineon and Microsemi. IKV provides seven platforms for tailor-made security solutions, which are (1) silicon IP of cryptographic algorithms (2) KVSoftKey using Intrinsic IDs SRAM PUF (3) S10 security chip for authentication and anti-counterfeiting (4) iBadge device identity management for IoT (5) SLE97 security chip for military-grade security (6) Fusion FPGA security modules (7) cryptocurrency hardware wallets. Based on these platforms, IKV complies with ESAA (Embedded Security Adaptation Approach), analyzing customers potential threats and design solutions meeting corresponding security requirements. Now IKV is paving the way for twenty years ahead, researching and developing post-quantum cryptography in case of attack by quantum computers. Visit IKV online at www.ikv-tech.com.






TORONTO - The Parole Board of Canada says a man convicted of manslaughter in a deadly public shootout at an east Toronto block party lacks the community support to be released on full parole.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO - The Parole Board of Canada says a man convicted of manslaughter in a deadly public shootout at an east Toronto block party lacks the community support to be released on full parole.

But the two board members who heard Nahom Tsegazab's case earlier this month say he has shown enough personal growth and maturity while incarcerated to be granted day parole.

In a decision released today, the panel gave Tsegazab six months of day parole with several conditions, including that he not contact any of the victims or their relatives, and avoid anyone involved in criminal activity.

Tsegazab, 26, is serving a sentence of more than 11 years after being convicted of two counts of manslaughter and six of aggravated assault in connection with the July 2012 shooting.

The incident, which took place at a crowded barbecue at a social housing complex, claimed the lives of 14-year-old Shyanne Charles and 23-year-old Joshua Yasay, and sent 23 people to hospital.

It remains unclear who fired the fatal shots but Tsegazab was one of several gunmen involved.

The board members said in their ruling that Tsegazab showed significant insight into his crime and its impact on the community at the March 11 hearing.

"You were able to understand the mistakes you made as a young man and took accountability. You demonstrated remorse for your actions," they said.

Tsegazab knew the deceased and their families and acknowledged he could never undo the harm he caused, the board members said, adding they believed his empathy and regret to be sincere.

They also noted Tsegazab was incarcerated young and gained some maturity behind bars. "One sign of maturity is your ability to admit your former association with a gang, as you had previously denied that you were a gang member," they said.

His time in prison has not been without incident, however, the board members said  a fact that influenced their decision not to grant him full parole.

The panel noted Tsegazab was found to have two kitchen knives in his unit in March of last year, which he said was because he didn't know they had to be returned to the common kitchen.

The board members also mentioned an incident in May of last year, in which two phone cards were found during a routine search of Tsegazab's cell, including one that wasn't his.

Two days later, it was discovered that a cellphone seized earlier from another inmate had videos of Tsegazab, some of which were "intimate in nature." The board said Tsegazab claimed he was using the phone to contact two female friends and to use SnapChat.

As a result, he was transferred back to a medium-security facility, though he is now recommended to return to a minimum-security one, the board said.

"Clearly, your institutional behaviour is an area of concern to the board, as it appeared that you had regressed," it said, stressing the need for compliance with rules and expectations.

The board noted the Correctional Service of Canada recommended denying Tsegazab both day and full parole. It also said the parole office in his chosen area opposed his release, "citing public safety concerns and gang associations as well as the severity and violence of your index offences."

Tsegazab requires a "structured and gradual" release into the community, meaning he must complete a period of day parole before he can be considered for full parole, the board said.

His plan for day parole is to work full time and continue his education through evening or online classes, the decision said.

One of the conditions of his day parole is that he remain employed or seeking employment. Others include that he only own one telecommunications device and disclose his financial situation with his parole supervisor.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on March 25, 2020.
It was during the Mumbai floods of July 26, 2005, that I first discovered how a city can be brought to its knees. Buses, trains, autos, taxis and all transportation that we take for granted, came to a grinding halt, as we waded through water for several kilometres to reach home. Between staying where we were and reaching home, the choice for most was easy  try and get home because you dont know how much higher the water levels will rise up to.

The official 21-day lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) in India has, and will, trigger similar reactions for many migrant city dwellers. Except that they will be walking many more kilometres, in fear of an invisible virus and visible anti-migrant hostility, and without the solidarity of people on the streets to cheer them on. As news reports filter in, many are walking home, outside the city. Orders to stay home have mixed connotations for over 100-million circular migrant workers in India because home is usually the native place and getting there will be of utmost priority. With lack of clarity on income support, the figurative water levels are rising, and migrants will scramble to reach home as we did during the Mumbai floods.

As luck would have it, many millions, in northern India, would have gone home before the lockdown itself in the weeks surrounding Holi, as per the annual ritual. As authorities have clamped down on international travel, we can also rule out mass return migration from abroad. This is important since Punjab sends over 200,000 migrants to Italy, a country badly affected by Covid-19. The Indian governments stellar efforts at rescuing stranded Indian travellers abroad should also be appreciated. And yet, the routine double-standards in treating international migrants better than internal migrants, is now on full display, as millions of migrant workers are stuck, given only a few hours of notice.

What can be done for our migrant workers, especially those with low incomes? First, state governments and district administrations need to show as much resolve as the national government in bringing back migrants should they want to do so. The Uttarakhand government appears to have taken the lead in this and other states, especially Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and West Bengal must emulate this. Civil society organisations which are tracking this issue in real-time such as the Aaajevika Bureau, with decades of experience in dealing with migrant workers in source and destination regions, should be roped in.

Second, for those who cannot go back, welfare support measures need to be put in place immediately. This will ideally require an official call on cancellation of housing rent payments for one month and access to rations for non-domiciled people.

Third, for those migrants who have already gone home, social distancing has to be strictly enforced by district-level administrations. Since Maharashtra and Kerala have registered a number of Covid-19 cases so far, it would mean that the source-region districts of migrants to those places should be on high alert. Districts such as Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, Ganjam in Odisha, East and West Midnapore in West Bengal and a cluster of districts in the Bhojpuri-speaking belt should be prepared with more testing facilities.

A few decades ago, AIDS spread from Surat to Ganjam through migrant workers. A century ago, during the plague of 1896-98 or influenza of 1918, cities were emptied out as migrant workers fled. That perhaps contributed to a larger spread of the epidemic, though at times, the choice was between escaping the city or facing a famine in the countryside. This time around, there is no famine but with greater information, home may also not be as welcoming as Konkan migrants from Mumbai are finding out.

Trapped migrant workers need our empathy and support. The cruel irony is that when the lockdown is over, migrant workers will be expected to return as soon as possible, where they will work and live in congested sites and pick up all sorts of infections.

That is a public health issue that demands as much of our attention as Covid-19, after this pandemic has subsided.

Chinmay Tumbe is a faculty member at IIM-Ahmedabad, and author of India Moving: A History of Migration

The views expressed are personal
White House officials are discussing the possible deployment of troops to the Canadian border.

The potential move is driven by US fears about the integrity of the border during the coronavirus pandemic and fears that people carrying the virus may enter the country illegally.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed that he is aware of the discussions during his daily briefing.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters that Canadian ministers and diplomats have made it clear that this is not a plan Canada supports.

Canada is strongly opposed to this US proposal and weve made that very clear to our US counterparts, she said. Ms Freeland confirmed that Canadian officials learned of the proposal a few days ago.

In his press conference, Mr Trudeau said Canada and the US have the longest unmilitarised border in the world, and it is very much in both of our interests for it to remain that way.

The possibility of troops being stationed along the US side of the border was first reported by Canada's Global News, which cited sources as saying that they would be based approximately 15-20 miles from the border and would rely on remote sensors to pick up on border crossings.

Information would then be shared with Customs and Border Patrol agents who would take appropriate action. It is thought there would be no more than 1,000 troops involved.

The border between the US and Canada has been closed to all but essential traffic since midnight on 21 March.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 07:12:36|Editor: Liu

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HELSINKI, March. 25 (Xinhua) -- The Finnish government on Wednesday officially announced the plan to block its Uusimaa region which includes the capital area to prevent the further spread of COVID-19.

The Uusimaa region is currently epidemic centre of COVID-19 in Finland, according to Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). As of Wednesday, 561 of the 880 confirmed cases were in Uusimaa.

Prime Minister Sanna Marin gave details of the planned blockade at a press conference late Wednesday night. She said that the blockade could start earliest on March 27, but depends on the parliamentary process. The cabinet has already submitted the respective decrees on Wednesday.

Commuting to jobs will be allowed, as well as necessary travel for family affairs, but others like leisure travel in and out of Uusimaa region will not be permitted. Interior Minister Maria Ohisalo said at the press conference that the police would supervise.

Krista Kiuru, Minister of Family affairs and Social Services, said the epidemic has been fast in Uusimaa, and that with the restrictions, the same rate of spread will not be repeated in the rest of the country.

Marin on Wednesday also appealed to the restaurant industry in Finland to close voluntarily as the legislation to enforce the closing was delayed. Parliamentary committees on Wednesday asked the cabinet to submit further details making a mandatory closing from this Saturday possible. Marin has earlier described the Finnish legislative process as stiff.

THL said on Wednesday that the number of confirmed novel coronavirus cases in Finland had risen to 880. As of Wednesday, Finland had carried out around 13,000 tests. Two people have died in Finland from the virus in the last 24 hours, according to THL.
The B.C. Conservation Officer Service has issued a plea for the public's help to find out who illegally shot and killed a California Bighorn sheep ram along Westside Rd. near Shelter Cove.

Conservation officer Sgt. Ken Owens tells Castanet the ram was killed unlawfully along Westside Road on Friday March 20.

Conservation officers in the North Okanagan area are investigating the illegal killing which took place in the Shelter Cove area.

"At 5 p.m. a motorist observed an injured ram adjacent to the road. Conservation officers attended the location, conducting a necropsy on the animal confirming the ram had been shot illegally," said Owens.

The Westside road sheep herd consists of approximately 75 animals and the population has been supplemented with additional animals that were brought in from other locations to help maintain viable numbers. Owens says, "there is no licenced harvest of Bighorn Sheep in this area."

Bighorn sheep are considered a blue list species in British Columbia which means they are a species of concern because of limited habitat options that keep their population low.

Illegal kills of sheep have serious consequences for legal harvest, game viewing, and genetic quality of herds in the area.

Conservation officers need your help in finding those responsible and are asking anyone with information related to this matter or any other wildlife crime to call the Report All Poachers and Polluters (RAPP) hotline at 1-877-952-7277.
Spain's death-toll from coronavirus has risen to more than 4,000 people while new infections have also increased by almost a fifth.

The country announced that 655 people died from the virus between Wednesday and Thursday, taking the total number from 3,434 to 4,089.

The number of new infections also rose from 47,610 on Wednesday to 56,188 - an increase of 8,578, or around 20 per cent.

Meanwhile harrowing images from a hospital in Albacete, 85 miles west of Valencia, showed patients lining the corridors of a hospital waiting to be treated.

One nurse at a Madrid hospital said health provision was 'collapsing' with nearly 6,500 medical workers infected themselves.

Spain's death toll from coronavirus has topped 4,000 - with 655 new fatalities registered overnight bringing the total to 4,089

Video taken at Albacete hospital, 85 miles west of Valencia, showed patients lining corridors after they ran out of beds and people laying on the floor from exhaustion

The video was taken by a medic who can be heard urging the government to provide more beds and protective equipment for staff

Spain is now the second worst-affected country with coronavirus, having surpassed China's death toll Wednesday and now lags only behind Italy.

Thursday's death figure is dramatic but significantly better than this time yesterday, when the country posted a record-breaking 738 deaths in 24 hours - on par with Italy's worst days.

Spain confirmed 7,937 new cases of coronavirus Wednesday - an increase of 20 per cent - meaning Thursday's figures are roughly in line with expectations.

The clip was recorded in the Hospital of Albacete in the central Spanish region of Castilla La Mancha where 88 patients were hospitalised on Tuesday.

In the video, patients in gurneys can be seen lining the corridors of the hospital, with others sitting on chairs.

The woman recording can be heard saying 'people are lying on the ground because they said they were exhausted'.

A Spanish soldier walks next to beds set up at a temporary hospital for vulnerable and homeless people in Barcelona

Ambulance workers in full protective gear arrive with a patient at the Severo Ochoa Hospital during Spain's coronavirus outbreak

Health workers are being sent into Spanish nursing homes to disinfect them, after the military said it found some residents had been abandoned by staff

Members of the military suit up as the prepare to disinfect a nursing home of coronavirus

She says that she was sharing the images as a call for the authorities to react to the situation as the patients cannot make their voice heard.

She says the hospital is a bottleneck for the local health centres, adding that more beds are needed for the huge number of patients being admitted.

Man stabs flatmate who tried to break curfew By GERARD COUZENS Spanish police chiefs are urging the public to report coronavirus lockdown flouters after a man was stabbed as he tried to leave home with a cough. Jose Angel Gonzalez, the Spanish National Police's number two nationwide, encouraged people to ring the country's equivalent of 999 if they witnessed or heard about wrongdoing. Referring to the stabbing, in the town of Mislata near Valencia in which a 31-year-old knifed his 29-year-old flatmate during a row sparked by the younger man's attempt to break curfew, he said: 'The best thing people can do is call the emergency number and report what they have seen, what they've heard or found out about. 'Have no doubt that we will mobilise a patrol car to check the information out and act accordingly.' Advertisement

The health worker complains that there is not enough protective equipment 'so we keep putting our health and our loved ones at risk'.

The Integrate Attention Management of Albacete, which belongs to the Health Service of the regional government of Castilla La Mancha said the increase in the number of patients in the hospital had put a lot of pressure on the emergency services.

Reports state new measures were implemented on Tuesday after the video was shared with one floor of the hospital previously dedicated to other patients now being used for those coming from the emergency room.

Another ward from the nearby Perpetuo Socorro Hospital is also available for use.

Local media report that health centres in Albacete are changing and adapting their facilities in order to attend to coronavirus patients.

On Wednesday, the number of medical personnel infected was nearly 6,500 nationally, health authorities said, representing 13.6 per cent of the country's total cases and about one per cent of the health system's workforce. At least three health care workers have died.

'We are collapsing. We need more workers,' said Lidia Perera, a nurse who works at Madrid's Hospital de la Paz, which has 1,000 beds.

Patricia Nunez, a 32-year-old nurse at the same hospital, is among those who have been infected.

'The worst thing is that you need to stay at home, worried about infecting relatives, while knowing that you are dearly needed at work,' she said.

Despite a national lockdown imposed on March 14, which parliament on Thursday agreed to extend until April 11, both deaths and infections have continued to mount, with officials warning this week would be particularly bad.

Spain also confirmed 8,578 new infections between Wednesday and Thursday, bringing the total from 47,610 to 56,188 (pictured, a policeman is tested for the virus in Madrid)

Spain is now the second-worst affected country in the world with coronavirus behind only Italy, after overtaking China's death toll on Wednesday

Medical wokers hug eachother outside the emergency rooms at Severo Ochoa Hospital

Health authorities are hoping it will soon become clear whether the lockdown is having the desired effect.

The Madrid region has suffered the brunt of the epidemic with 17,166 infections - just under a third of the total - and 2,090 deaths, or 51 percent of the national figure.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, whose wife is infected with the virus, has said this is the country's most difficult moment since its 1936-39 civil war.

'Only the oldest, who knew the hardships of the civil war and its aftermath, can remember collective situations that were harsher than the current one.

'The other generations in Spain have never, ever had to face as a collective something so hard,' he said when he imposed the state of emergency on March 14.

Spain's demographics partly explain why it has been one of the worst-affected nations.

The country has one of the longest life expectancies in Europe and the pandemic has taken a high toll on its large elderly population, who are especially vulnerable to the disease.

Spain's Queen Letizia has been self-isolating and only taking visits from a nurse despite testing negative for coronavirus after meeting an infected politician

King Felipe VI of Spain giving a speech during his visit to a field hospital in Madrid, which has seen the bulk of Spain's cases

King Felipe listens to health workers as he visits a hospital in Madrid for coronavirus patients

Even Queen Letizia has been forced to go into lockdown after coming into contact with a minister who has since tested positive for coronavirus.

Royal chronicler Pilar Eyre wrote in her blog for the magazine 'Lecturas' that, despite testing negative for the virus, Letizia has been separated from the rest of the royal household and is only receiving visits from nurses

The move is a precaution after she met Equality Minister Irene Montero on March 6.

'Doctor Manuel Martinez Perez forced Letizia to go into lockdown and wear a mask and glove, eating from a tray and only receiving visits from a nurse,' Eyre wrote.

Eyre also revealed that the queen had put pressure on King Felipe VI as she thought he should address citizens to show sympathy.

King Felipe VI addressed Spanish citizens in a public speech on 18th March.

Pensioners on coronavirus evacuation buses are pelted with ROCKS in Spain after locals ambush them to stop them arriving from area affected by the virus

Elderly coronavirus patients came under attack from angry youths who threw stones at a fleet of ambulances moving them to a new home in Spain.

The Civil Guard convoy was ambushed when it arrived in the town of La Linea de la Concepcion near Gibraltar, bringing 28 patients to a new care home.

Angry locals obstructed the convoy and stoned the vehicles before throwing Molotov cocktails at police who were guarding the home.

A gang of people, many of them wearing masks and hoods, assembled in the town of La Linea de la Concepcion to confront an ambulance convoy bringing elderly residents to their town

The hostile reception was in stark contrast to the cheers and applause which had greeted the convoy when it evacuated the sick patients from the town of Alcala del Valle, after a virus outbreak at their previous care home.

Two men were arrested in La Linea de la Concepcion after parking a car across the road in a bid to stop the pensioners moving in, the Spanish government said.

Around 50 youths then surrounded their new residence, which is called Tiempo Libre or Free Time.

The locals also appeared to be breaching coronavirus lockdown rules which ban people from leaving their homes unnecessarily.

The Civil Guard convoy was ambushed when it arrived in the town of La Linea de la Concepcion near Gibraltar, bringing 28 patients to a new care home

Local reports said the men involved had been sharing WhatsApp messages before the attacks in which they had threatened to set up barricades with burning tyres.

A National Police spokesman said: 'Several youths gathered at the entrance to the town and threw stones at the ambulances as well as leaving a vehicle across the road to try to prevent it reaching its destination.

'Officers arrested the two occupants of the vehicle, two men aged 32 and 35.

'Once the elderly people were taken into the home, police had to establish a security cordon around the residence as around 50 people outside threatened to cause problems.
The number of known modern slavery offences in England and Wales has rocketed by more than 50 per cent in one year, figures have revealed.

There were 5,144 modern slavery offences recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019, data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows.

This is a 51 per cent rise from the previous 12 months, when 3,412 offences were recorded.

Meanwhile, 6,985 potential victims were referred through the UK National Referral Mechanism (NRM) in the year ending December 2018 - a rise of 36 per cent in a year.

This coincided with a 68 per cent increase in calls and submissions to the Modern Slavery Helpline over the same time period.

There were 5,144 modern slavery offences recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019, data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows. Pictured: An example of the squalid conditions lived in by victims of a modern slavery gang in the Midlands

Experts have previously warned there could be as many as 136,000 modern slavery victims in the UK, while the ONS has admitted that quantifying the number of victims is 'challenging' as many victims do not self-identify.

The figures come less than six months after a former soldier revealed how he was robbed, beaten, starved and humiliated at the hands of Britain's biggest modern slavery ring.

Mariusz Rykaczewski was among 400 people held captive by the gang in the West Midlands, who made their victims work, eat from skips and wash in canals.

The gang who held Mr Rykaczewski captive, described as Britain's largest-ever UK modern slavery ring, were jailed for a total of more than 50 years.

The release of the figures comes after the ONS analysed figures from the police, Crown Prosecution Service, Modern Slavery Helpline, UK National Referral Mechanism, the Salvation Army and others.

Helen Ross, from the ONS Centre for Crime and Justice, said: 'This is the ONS's first attempt to bring data sources together on modern slavery to help us better understand both the nature of this terrible crime and the potential demand on support services.

'While there is no one source or method available which accurately quantifies the number of victims in the UK, evidence suggests there have been improvements in identification since the introduction of the modern slavery acts in 2015. Yet this is only part of the story, as many cases remain hidden and unreported.'

Almost a quarter 23 per cent of the potential victims referred through the NRM in the year ending December 2018 were UK nationals.

Of the 2,251 potential victims supported by the Salvation Army in England and Wales in the year ending June 2019, 48 per cent had experienced labour exploitation and 39 per cent had experienced sexual exploitation.

Experts have previously warned there could be as many as 136,000 modern slavery victims in the UK. Pictured: An example of the squalid conditions lived in by victims of a modern slavery gang in the Midlands

Sir Bernard Silverman, Professor of modern slavery statistics at the University of Nottingham, said: 'Modern slavery takes many forms, usually but not always involving trafficking of people across and within countries.

'Victims may be coerced into prostitution or otherwise sexually abused; they may become forced labourers in both legitimate and illegal areas of the economy; they may be in domestic servitude or involved in drug dealing or other illegal activities; they may be enslaved or exploited in many other ways, even as horrendous as organ harvesting.

'If we are to fight slavery effectively, an evidence-based approach is crucial.'

A Home Office spokeswoman said: 'The government is committed to targeting perpetrators and safeguarding victims of modern slavery.

'The Modern Slavery Act has given law enforcement agencies the tools to tackle this horrific crime and we are helping victims rebuild their lives through the National Referral Mechanism.

'Today the government published the world's first government Modern Slavery Statement to show how we tackle potential slavery in our supply chains.'
While the coronavirus (covid19) has paralyzed Pakistan, much larger India is finding the virus confined to a few areas and more controllable. India has banned travel between areas with virus cases and those without. Kashmir is one exception because it has been a war zone for decades. There are still instances of Pakistani troops firing machine-guns and mortars across the border but these are not as frequent and are causing fewer military and civilian casualties.

Across the border, in Pakistan, the Islamic terrorist camps that have been sending more men across the border have different priorities now and for the next months as they stay put to curb the spread of the coronavirus. India has had about 11 cases in Kashmir so far and has blocked movement throughout the state to hinder further spread. So far India has had only ten virus deaths. The national health system is not that efficient and covid19 deaths may be mistaken for the common flu or something similar. Pakistan, with one-sixth the population of India, has suffered twice the number of virus infections but only ten deaths. Pakistan was more vulnerable to infection because of many people coming in from Iran, China and Arabia. Most of those with the virus in Pakistan had recently traveled to Iran, usually on a religious pilgrimage.

India quickly shut down travel from China and other nations with a lot of virus activity. This means China, where it all started and Iran where the clergy initially insisted Allah would protect Iranians from the disease. China is pressuring India to ban media from calling the coronavirus the China or Wuhan virus. India refused because of press freedom in India. Few people in China or India doubt that the virus came from China. In all countries suffering from the virus, the military has been mobilized to help deal with it. As a result the usually military activities, including aggressive ones towards neighbors, have been deferred until the virus threat subsides. That may take a few months or more. No one is certain yet how long the virus threat will last. It is something of a viral ceasefire.

Pakistan And Afghanistan

Despite covid19 disruptions, Pakistan is still deeply involved with what happens inside neighboring Afghanistan. In part because the current efforts by the Afghan Taliban to negotiate a peace deal with the U.S. are apparently inching closer to success. Attitudes inside Afghanistan are different. Most Afghans see the Taliban offer to negotiate as a scam because the Afghan Taliban are doing whatever Pakistan wants. The Pakistani Taliban, who have no Pakistani support are basically at war with the Pakistan government and much smaller than their Afghan counterparts. The Afghan Taliban has always enjoyed a sanctuary in Pakistan, across the border from Helmand province where Afghans produce most of the world's heroin supply. Pakistan, or at least the Pakistani military, support the Afghan drug gangs as well by allowing, for a large fee, raw materials for turning opium plan sap into heroin to go from Pakistan to drug gang processing plants in Afghanistan, and for most of the heroin to be smuggled through Pakistan to the port of Karachi where the illegal drug can be smuggled to markets worldwide. The Afghan drug gangs pay the Afghan Taliban to protect their drug operations from foreign or Afghan interference.

This is how most Afghans see the situation, which includes millions of Afghan addicts made possible by the availability of so much opium and heroin. While most of this stuff is exported, some of it is sold locally, at a much lower price than in foreign markets. There are equally large numbers of addicts in Pakistan and Iran and the people in all those countries agree that the drug problem exists because of unofficial Pakistani support. That Pakistani effort is justified by the obsession with controlling Afghanistan even if it means supporting an Islamic form of government that would not be tolerated in Pakistan and the heroin production that is condemned by the people and governments of Afghanistan and all its neighbors.

Despite this, the Americans are determined to go through the motions of obtaining a peace deal with the Afghan Taliban, who also have internal problems. The Afghan Taliban, at least those in Afghanistan, consist of many factions, usually based on geography and or tribal affiliation. These factions never agreed completely with each other and those differences have grown since the 1990s.

Like everything else in Afghanistan, the Taliban began because of important tribal links. The original Taliban were Pushtuns from tribes in Helmand and Kandahar provinces. The original Taliban combat force was recruited in the mid-1990s from among Pushtun Afghan refugees from war-torn Afghanistan who were still in Pakistan. Even though the Russians were gone by 1988, and the pro-Russian government that was left behind survived until 1991 because the Soviet Union that created it had dissolved and the economic and military aid that kept that Afghan government going, in only a small part of Afghanistan. The aid stopped in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved and by 1992 the Najibullah government the Russians had left behind also disappeared. A vicious tribal and warlord civil war followed.

The Pakistan backed Taliban entered Afghanistan in 1994. The Taliban were largely Afghans who had been studying in Pakistan-based, Saudi-financed religious schools. They portrayed themselves as pure and not partisan like the other factions in the civil war. The Taliban took control of Kabul and most of southern (Pushtun majority) Afghanistan. By the late 1990s, the victorious Taliban were still fighting the non-Pushtun northerners in an effort to control the entire country.

At this point, even a lot of Pushtuns could see that the Taliban were just another Pakistani effort to control Afghanistan or at least parts of it. There were reasons for that. Pakistan has twice as many Pushtuns as Afghanistan, although with a much larger population the Pakistani Pushtun are a small minority in Pakistan versus a major (40 percent) minority in Afghanistan. That is one reason why Pakistan is so keen on having a large degree of control over Afghanistan, that makes it more difficult for the Pushtun in both countries to unite. For thousands of years that has never happened but the potential was always there and late in the 20th century the idea of a separate Pushtunstan was gaining more supporters among Pushtun in both countries.

The interference in Afghanistan has been going on since Pakistan was created in 1948, is illegal according to international law and opposed by every other nation in the region. Yet this interference has ancient origins. For over a thousand years, before the ancient silk road from China to India and the Middle East was replaced by more effective European cargo ships in the 16th century, the empires in what is now Iran and greater India (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) controlled portions of the silk road that went through Afghanistan. In effect, there is ancient Iranian influence in western Afghanistan while the influence in the east is Indian.

The factionalism that has developed in the Afghan Taliban since 2001 is largely the result of more and more Taliban rejecting Pakistani influence. That is something Pakistan has violently sought to suppress, while Iran supports because the anti-Pakistan Taliban groups endanger the Pakistan-backed Afghan drug trade. A final complication is that in Pakistan it is the largely autonomous (from government control) military and the ISI intelligence branch that need the Afghan Taliban to justify their power and autonomy in Pakistan. This has caused a major rift in Pakistan where most Pakistanis back the elected government that, as the constitution stipulates, controls the military and not the other way around.

The American attitude is that it will trust the Afghan Taliban and their Pakistani patrons only so far as the terms of any deal are observed. The Pakistani generals think they can play all this to their advantage. That would change if there were a change of government in Iran. The religious dictatorship there is losing control because of decades of misrule, corruption and bad behavior towards its own people. A new Iran government would probably be less anti-American and more willing to work with the Americans and Indians to reduce or eliminate Pakistani influence in Afghanistan along with the Afghan drug production. That would be very bad news for the Pakistani generals.

The U.S. believes that the Islamic terrorist threat to Pakistan would encourage Pakistan to prevent the Afghan Taliban from again, as they did in the late 1990s, providing sanctuary for international Islamic terrorists. The Pakistani government has always supported some of those inside Pakistan, but only as long as these groups only attacked targets that Pakistan military approved of. These usually included India and Afghan government forces and their foreign allies.

March 19, 2020: In India the defense procurement bureaucracy finally, after years of pressure from the army, signed the contract for purchasing 16,000 7.62mm machine-guns from Israel.

March 18, 2020: In northwest Pakistan (North Waziristan), troops clashed with seven Islamic terrorists who had established a hideout near the Afghan border (Khost province). All seven of Islamic terrorists were killed and found to be Pakistanis. Four soldiers were also killed. Much equipment and documents were seized. The seven men were planning attacks in Pakistan.

March 15, 2020: In Pakistan, along the Afghan border about half the 2,500 kilometer long border fence has been completed and work continues. Many Afghans dispute where Pakistan draws the border and the need for a border fence itself. Gunfire from the Afghanistan side of the border regularly kills or wounds soldiers and workers building the fence. Construction has been underway since 2017 and the attacks from the Afghan side have become particularly intense (about ten a week) at times. So far Pakistan has had over a hundred soldiers and workers killed or wounded. Most of the Afghan-Pakistani border is still called the Durand Line. This was an impromptu, pre-independence (1893) invention of British colonial authorities and was always considered temporary, or at least negotiable, by locals. The need for renegotiation was mainly about how the line often went right through Pushtun tribal territories. However, the Afghans are more inclined to demand adjustments to the Durand Line and fight to obtain what they want. Thus recent Pakistani efforts to build more fences and other structures on their side of the border was an attempt to make the Durand line permanent and no longer negotiable.

March 14, 2020: In eastern India (Chhattisgarh State) the bodies of 17 local police were found in a jungle area where a large scale search for Maoist rebels had been going on for several days. The policemen had been killed the day before after being ambushed by over a hundred Maoist gunmen. The ambush firepower was so massive that many of the police were captured before reinforcements could be called in much less arrive. Most of the dead policemen were those executed after they surrendered. The police were searching for a training camp for new recruits. Heavy losses like this happen when the police get sloppy and underestimate the rebels. The local police received a tip about Maoists assembling in the jungle and went with policemen who knew the area well but were not armed and trained to deal with a large group of Maoists. That is the job of the paramilitary police battalions who have been at work in the area for over a decade.

March 12, 2020: In Pakistan police arrested Shakilur Rahman, the head of the largest media group in the country and the founder of Geo, the largest TV network in the country. Rahman is accused of participating in an illegal 1986 land deal. That accusation is suspicious because the military have been trying to shut down Geo and most of the other media outlets Rahman. These days anyone accused of corruption in Pakistan usually has active criminal activities or very recent ones. Going back 34 years sounds like desperation and fabrication. The military has failed to get Rahman to cooperate by defending military corruption and current efforts to control the elected government without another coup. Rahman kept publishing details of what the military was really up to.

Two years ago Geo, the largest TV network in the country, was allowed back on the air after being shut down by the military several weeks for criticizing the military and the Supreme Court. Apparently Geo management agreed to cooperate with military censorship as the cost of getting back on the air. This is not the first time the military and ISI (military intelligence) have clashed with Geo over press freedom. Back in November 2014 Rahman, as the head of Geo was sentenced to 26 years in prison. He had been convicted of blasphemy for allowing the broadcast of a video the court considered anti-Islamic. Most Pakistanis saw this as another example of the army and ISI using their control of some courts to use the blasphemy laws as a form of censorship against those who criticize the army or ISI. Pakistan still has severe blasphemy laws that are mostly used by Moslems against innocent Christians or other non-Moslems. Efforts to repeal these laws, or at least limit their misuse, are violently resisted by Islamic political parties. The Pakistani blasphemy laws are usually only used by Moslems against non-Moslems and when they are used against Moslems it is usually for revenge or political reasons. The laws are unpopular with the majority of Pakistanis. But the minority who do support the laws, are willing to use lethal force to keep the laws on the books. These blasphemy laws were enacted in the 1970s at the behest of the military. The opposition to repealing these laws is violent and fearless. In 2011 the Punjab province governor Salman Taseer was shot dead by one of his own bodyguards because Taseer had openly opposed the blasphemy laws. While no one had ever been executed because of these laws, many are accused and jailed each year, and often condemned to death (and later reprieved). But over 30 of those accused have been murdered by Islamic fanatics, who are a large, and violent, minority of the population.

Eventually, Geo agreed to be more sensitive to military complaints about unwarranted criticism. But the military got worse, especially when it formed a partnership with the Supreme Court and Geo felt it essential to report what was going on with this. That, Geo learned, was not allowed.

March 10, 2020: In northeast Pakistan, across the Afghan border in Nangarhar Province, an Afghan army raid near the main crossing from Pakistan found and seized a recently arrived (from Pakistan) truck that was carrying ten tons of explosives. The two men on the truck said they were paid to deliver half the load to someone in Nangarhar and the rest to someone in Kabul. Meanwhile, Pakistan has closed most of its Afghan border crossings to prevent the spread of the Chinese covid19 virus. The crossings are expected to remain closed for at least another week.

March 6, 2020: In northwest Syria, the last concentration of Islamic terrorists is making a last stand in Idlib province. The Syrian Army, with Russian support, has been slowly clearing the province of Islamic terrorists, despite resistance by the Islamic terrorists and Turkish forces. Suddenly there are a lot more dead terrorists and efforts are made to identify them or see if families or countries want the bodies back. So far about fifty of the dead Islamic terrorists have been identified as Pakistani. But Pakistan refuses to comment or take any action to deal with the situation.

March 2, 2020: In Pakistan, an air force F-16 crashed near the capital while participating in a rehearsal for a major military parade in the capital on the 23rd. Apparently the fighter experienced an equipment failure while the pilots was performing an acrobatic maneuver. Pakistan has a reputation for poor maintenance of military and commercial aircraft. Higher accident rates are the proof and there is no solution in sight.

February 29, 2020: In Qatar, the U.S. and Taliban signed a peace deal which, if the Taliban can abide by the ceasefire and other conditions, will lead to the withdrawal of American forces within 14 months. Many believed this agreement was doomed to fail and it promptly did. Within days Taliban forces were violating the ceasefire with multiple attacks. The agreement had a lot of flaws. For example, it called for the Afghan government to release 5,000 imprisoned Taliban within three days. That was a problem because the Afghan government was not involved in the negotiations because the Taliban refused to allow it. The Afghans pointed out that the logistics of identifying the 5.000 prisoners and releasing them would take longer than three days. That amounts to about half the Taliban held in government prisons. Another issue that has been ignored is that many of those Taliban prisoners are jailed because they have killed civilians or security force personnel who surrendered. The kin of these victims want revenge. In Afghanistan that is the way. The number of Afghans who want revenge against Taliban violence is very long and the Taliban want that to just disappear. These blood debts go back to the late 1990s when the Taliban ran most of Afghanistan and were still fighting the Northern Alliance. While the Northern Alliance got some help from Russia and the Americans it was faced with a Taliban that had the enthusiastic backing of Pakistan and many wealthy Sunni Arabs, especially in the Persian Gulf oil countries. Those backers still exist although the number of Arab donors has diminished. Pakistan created the Taliban in the mid-1990s and wants the Taliban to run Afghanistan because that gives Pakistan enormous influence over that goes on in Afghanistan.

February 28, 2020: The leaders of Burma and India concluded two days of meetings by signing ten new cooperation agreements. One of these had each country pledge to not allow any group on its territory to do harm to the other country. This is mainly about various terrorists, rebel or criminal groups operating bases in one country in order to cross the border and commit illegal acts. The other nine agreements had to do with trade and regularly exchanging certain kinds of information.

February 25, 2020: In India, the American president completed a two-day visit. The U.S. and Indian leaders signed several agreements, one of them was for $3 billion worth of American weapons for India. India long disdained buying American but with the continued decline in quality and service of its many Russian systems, India began buying more military gear from Western suppliers. First Europeans, then Israeli and, since 2007 the Americans. So far India has ordered $17 billion worth from the United States and the Indian wants more. Unlike Russian gear the American (and Western in general) gear works as advertised and any problems that arise are quickly addressed by the manufacturer.

Russia is still the largest supplier of military equipment to India. At the same time, India is the second largest importer of weapons in the world (Saudi Arabia is first) and the largest customer for Russian military exports. Yet Russian imports have been declining for over a decade. In 2020 Russia supplied 72 percent of Indian weapons imports. Now that is 56 percent and continuing to decline. Neighboring Pakistan is the largest customer for Chinese military exports and, with a much smaller (about one-eighth the size) defense budget is 11th on the list of arms importers.

February 22, 2020: In the last year the U.S. surpassed China as Indias largest trading partner. Currently, the value of annual trade between the United States and India is $87 billion. Given the proximity of India and China, it was something of a surprise that the Americans should replace China. Within India, it was no surprise. China is considered Indias most dangerous military threat and the Chinese are not trusted. The U.S. has long sought closer diplomatic, military and military ties with India but until the 1990s that was not possible. After independence in 1947, India adopted socialism, which proved to be a major economic disaster. India also declared itself neutral in the Cold War despite buying most of its weapons from Russia and having a large and active local Communist Party. Then the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, after all the communist governments in East Europe had already done so. At that point, anti-communist sentiment led India to ditch socialism (in theory, anyway) and seek new allies and arms suppliers. The United States and Israel have proved to be the most useful and American firms were eager to do business with India. Millions of Indians who had migrated to the U.S. and become economically successful, and often quite rich, helped encourage Indian firms to check out American suppliers.

Indian emphasis on economic growth since the 1990s has paid off because that growth has been spectacular lately, with GDP nearly doubling in the last decade from $1.7 trillion to the current $2.9 trillion. This made India the fifth largest economy, recently surpassing Britain and France. The rest of the top five are the U.S., China, Germany and Japan.

Chinese GDP growth is slowing although in the last decade it more than doubled from $6.1 trillion to $14 trillion. But for once the annual Indian GDP growth has been faster than in China, where GDP growth rates have been declining over the last five years.

February 21, 2020: The FATF (Financial Action Task Force) told Pakistan that it made enough progress in reducing support for Islamic terrorism since October 2019 to avoid being blacklisted. Back in October Pakistan had achieved only four of the 27 tasks the FATF set to get Pakistan out of trouble. Pakistan should have gone onto the blacklist for that but pressure from China get Pakistan another last chance. Since 2019 Pakistan has raised the number of goals achieved to 14. All 27 reform goals must be met by the next FATF review in July 2020. For over a year now it appeared that Pakistan was not making enough effort to block Pakistan-based terrorist groups from using the international banking system to finance their violence. Pakistan keeps making just enough progress to keep them off the FATF blacklist. Pakistan was put back on the grey list in June 2019. Pakistan had been warned in early 2018 that unless they reduced the illegal financing activity coming out of Pakistan the FATF would put Pakistan back on the gray list and this time it would be more likely to make it to the blacklist and that would mean Pakistan would have some financial problems because of international banking restriction. FATF pointed out that in 2018 there were 8,707 STRs (Suspicious Transaction Reports) generated by Pakistan versus 5,548 in 2017. For 2019 Pakistan appears to be generating even more STRs. Pakistan had been on the gray list from 2012 to 2015 and that was bad for businesses that import or export or need to get loans or sell bonds. After 2015 Pakistan was still on the FATF list but not designated as dangerous. Being on the gray portion of the list makes it more expensive to do business and is very bad for the reputation of Pakistan and Pakistanis. China played a major role in keeping Pakistan off the gray list in early 2018 but the odds were against Pakistan staying off the list because it has long been an open secret that Pakistani support for its own pet Islamic terrorists included making it easier for Islamic terrorists, in general, to do business in Pakistan. The United States has been gathering evidence to justify the FATF to put Pakistan back on the gray list (along with Ethiopia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, Vanuatu and Tunisia). FATF meets every three months to consider new evidence to get nations on, or off, the list. Next review is in February 2020 and the Americans continue gathering evidence. The U.S. now considers Pakistan a problem in the war against terrorism and not a reliable partner. India and Afghanistan share that view as do a growing number of UN members.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka launched its campaign for the 2020 general election with a live online meeting on its Facebook page last Sunday. The SEP is fielding a total of 43 candidates in three districtsColombo, Jaffna and Nuwara Eliya. Its election manifesto, Fight for an international socialist program against war, social devastation and dictatorship was published by the World Socialist Web Site on March 21.

SEP General Secretary Wije Diass address to the meeting was delivered in Sinhala and translated into Tamil. Over 100 people from Sri Lanka and internationally participated in the March 22 event, which was held amid a three-day COVID-19 national curfew. More than 2,000 have since viewed the video.

Most of those who initially watched the meeting have shared it on their Facebook feeds. Many added greetings or commented during the event, including making requests for more comprehensive online educational sessions. Some of those attending have emailed their observations about the SEPs policies (see: Sri Lankan workers and young people endorse SEPs election program).

Wije Dias

Reviewing the current situation in Sri Lanka, Dias told the meeting: Although its legitimate to restrict peoples movements to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the curfew is now being used illegally by the government, different heads of the armed forces and state bureaucrats to impose their authority over the people.

What currently exists is a police curfew. This is because President Rajapakse is constitutionally restricted from declaring a state of emergency. For it to be legally valid the dissolved parliament must be recalled to approve it within 10 days. The government has decided to avoid this procedure because it did not have a majority in the now dissolved parliament. Instead, Rajapakse has used the curfew to autocratically lock down the island and put the military in charge.

Dias said that the army and police, under the pretext of tracking down those who may be infected with coronavirus, were conducting search operations across the country. Police-military road blocks, reminiscent of the 30-year anti-Tamil war, have been established.

The speaker said that although the election commission chairman had suddenly, without any constitutional basis, requested a stop to all political activities in the country in order to concentrate energies on virus eradication the SEP was asserting its democratic rights and proceeding with its online meeting.

Dias drew attention to the recent police shooting of protesting inmates in one of Sri Lankas intolerably overcrowded prisons. A few days ago the government limited the number of visitors to a prisoner to one person per week, he explained.

This provocative order heightened tensions among prisoners and led to a prisoners protest at Anuradhapura jail. The police opened fire and killed two prisoners, while injuring several others.

The last time police shot and killed protestors in Sri Lanka was in 2013 during the administration of President Mahinda Rajapakse, the older brother of the current president.

The SEP general secretary noted that the first coronavirus infection was reported in China last December. Given global economic, commercial and social activities, it should not have been difficult to realise that this virus could rapidly spread all around the world. No ruling class in any country, however, paid any attention to the danger for several weeks.

The eyes of the Sri Lankan ruling class were opened when a female Chinese tourist to the country was diagnosed as a COVID-19 patient on January 7 at the airport as she was about to return home. She fully recovered from the infection, in Sri Lanka, and returned home on January 21.

The Sri Lankan government, however, took no precautionary measures over the next 50 days. It did not even issue a public warning about the virus threat, until a tourist guide was found to be infected on March 12, Dias stated.

The callous and indifferent response of the Sri Lankan government to the dangers posed by this contagious virus was not unique but similar to the reaction of capitalist governments internationally. The sole concern of capitalism everywhere is the production of profit, not the well-being of the producers.

The SEP general secretary noted the comments of Indian Council of Medical Research chief Balaam Bargava, who rejected immediate mass testing for COVID-19, claiming community transmission had not begun in that country.

How many lives have to be sacrificed to convince the rulers about the need of mass testing? Dias asked. He referred to the warnings of the former Indian Medical Council chief that tens of thousands could be killed by COVID-19.

One of the most drastic examples of the barbaric nature of capitalism is revealed in US President Donald Trumps attitude towards the masses of Iran, Dias said. He explained that US sanctions on that country mean thousands are dying from COVID-19 in Iran.

This tragic situation raises the very pertinent question: What is the response of the ruling elites of the Arab world to this barbaric act of imperialism?

None of the bourgeois regimes is ready to come forward to rescue the Iranian masses from the clutches of imperialism. This is a vivid confirmation of the Trotskyist theory of Permanent Revolutionthat no national bourgeoisie of any subjugated or semi-subjugated nation is capable of representing the interests of the masses of their own country against imperialism. The defence of fundamental rights, democratic and social, can be achieved only through the establishment of working-class power, supported by the multi-million rural poor.

Under conditions of war and other disasters, Dias continued, The political and social consciousness of the working people and youth becomes receptive to alternative political programs to counter capitalist barbarism.

This situation requires the intervention of the revolutionary party, armed with the program of socialist internationalism that is decisive for the development of political consciousness among workers, the rural poor and youth of all communities and the struggle to overthrow capitalist rule.

Dias explained that the Rajapakse administration faced growing popular opposition and noted the three-day national strike by 200,000 teachers; walkouts by plantation workers over the nonpayment of a promised wage increase and ongoing protests outside the Presidential Secretariat by sacked temporary and contract workers. The Rajapakse regime, he added, also confronted a deep-going financial crisis that had been intensified by the coronavirus pandemic.

While those hardest-hit were daily wage workers and those employed in informal sectors, the government, Dias said, had no plans to ameliorate the worsening conditions of ordinary people.

As part of its election campaign, the SEP was demanding the immediate launch of mass-testing for coronavirus, for all foreign debt payments to be stopped immediately and for a massive building program to be initiated to establish new, well-equipped hospitals. Vast sums must be allocated for free health services. All working people and the poor should be guaranteed the income necessary for decent living conditions.

None of these demands, Dias emphasised, could be fulfilled under the profit system. Capitalism must be overthrown and replaced by a workers and farmers government to implement a socialist program.

The foundation of the SEPs perspective, he concluded, was for a republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam, as part of a federation of socialist republics of South Asia and internationally. Dias urged workers, young people and intellectuals to study its policies and to join and build the SEP as a mass revolutionary party.
 Flash

Two Austrian Airlines planes from Xiamen, a coastal city in southeastern China, arrived in Vienna carrying more than 130 tons of medical equipment on March 23. Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen posted a tweet thanking China for its support in his country's fight against COVID-19.

"Austria gave precious support to China at a critical moment in its own fight against COVID-19," Chinese Ambassador to Austria Li Xiaosi said in an exclusive interview with China.org.cn on the same day.

"As the number of cases in Austria increases rapidly, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi sent a letter to Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg saying China would like to share information and experience on medical treatment as well as prevention and control of the epidemic, and offer possible assistance to Austria," he said.

"It fully reflects the traditional friendship between the Chinese and Austrian people," Li added.

The number of confirmed cases of coronavirus infection in Austria exceeded 5,000 on Tuesday with 28 deaths reported, according to local health authorities. The government has imposed border restrictions all over the country as part of a series of drastic measures to contain the outbreak.

"Austria has extended controls from its borders with Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Liechtenstein to Hungary and Slovenia from last Friday, " Li said.

"As the virus continues to spread in Austria, we care about the safety and health of overseas compatriots, students and Chinese-funded enterprises. For them, the motherland is always a strong supporter. The Chinese embassy in Austria will always be with them through the hard times," he added.

Recently, some elements in the U.S. have been deliberately blaming the epidemic on China and trying to stigmatize China's efforts in an attempt to shirk responsibility.

They have ignored the huge sacrifices the Chinese people made in safeguarding the health and safety of all humanity, and vilified China's significant contributions to global public health security.

"Their moves run counter to the WHO's professional advice and the expectations and efforts of the international community to fight the pandemic together. The U.S. should immediately stop politicizing the pandemic, stigmatizing China and denigrating other countries. It should focus on putting its own house in order and play a constructive role in the global combat against the pandemic and safeguarding global public health security," Li said.

"The virus knows no borders. It is a common challenge for humanity," Li said, "Only through unity, mutual assistance and joint efforts can we win the fight against this pandemic."

"With the vision of a community with a shared future for all humanity, countries should strengthen communications and cooperation and jointly address the challenges with all-out efforts to safeguard global public health security," the ambassador concluded.
Stores that are already dealing with hoarding by customers may struggle to keep shelves stocked.

Fresh fruit and vegetables will become increasingly scarce in Europe, suppliers warn, as the coronavirus pandemic hampers the global movement of produce and of the people needed to gather crops.

Governments are looking at ways to ease any shortage, including "green lanes" to allow fresh produce to move quickly across EU borders, recruiting a "shadow army" of harvesters and loosening travel rules for migrant workers, Reuters said.

While Europe's supermarkets say they are still getting most produce, supply pressures are building at source, including in Africa, a key provider of fresh goods, and within Europe.

Stores that are already dealing with hoarding by customers may struggle to keep shelves stocked.

Read alsoExpert names sectors to be most affected by coronavirus crisis in Ukraine

In Kenya, a major supplier of green beans and peas to Europe, half of the workers in the sector have been sent home on mandatory leave because of the industry's inability to ship orders, even as demand from European retailers surge.

"Their (European) stocks are being depleted by the day," said Okisegere Ojepat, chief executive of the Fresh Produce Consortium of Kenya which groups over 200 growers and exporters.

Shipments from another key supplier, South Africa, are becoming more challenging with the country set to begin a 21-day lockdown this week.

"We were in reasonably good shape until earlier this week but now things are becoming very difficult," said Hans Muylaert-Gelein, Managing Director at Fruits Unlimited, a South Africa-based company that exports fruits and vegetables to the UK.

"More and more flights are being grounded so I expect there are going to be big disruptions."

Read alsoUkraine's antitrust agency records rise in retail prices of food amid coronavirus quarantine

Those planes that are flying are charging more. Operators have tripled the price per kilo of produce to US$3 in the past two weeks, said Hosea Machuki, head of the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya representing 117 growers and exporters.

Western supply chains are buckling as problems ranging from a shortage of truck drivers to restrictions on seafarers hit the smooth flow of goods, freight logistics operators say.

Even longer-lasting produce like citrus fruit, which is normally transported by sea, could be stranded because of the shortage of containers linked to China's shutdown, said Muylaert-Gelein.

"Oranges and lemons, the old ambassadors of Vitamin C, are in high demand. Also roots, carrots, cabbages, anything that has health properties people have stocked up on," he told Reuters.
For more coverage, visit our complete coronavirus section here.

Theres good news and bad news in the United States efforts to test the public for the COVID-19 virus. Testing has gone up dramatically in recent days, but there is still catching up to do  and states arent doing it equally.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. had tested 433,545 people for the coronavirus, according to the unofficial COVID Tracking Project, which aggregates available state data. Thats up from only 103,000 people tested six days ago, when much of the country was already sheltering in place.

COVID-19 SPREAD: Coronavirus spread in Houston could burn out by mid-May under stay-at home order

However, nearly one-quarter of those tests were conducted in one state: New York. By contrast California, with double New Yorks population, had reported tested only 27,000 people until Wednesday, when Gov. Gavin Newsom announced 66,800 total had been tested. It was unclear how many of those new tests were still pending.

California largely attributed the spike in testing to "commercial, provider and academic labs that have increased testing capacity and are now reporting that data to the state." The most recent numbers included 2,535 positive cases and 53 deaths.

As recently as Tuesday, President Trump and others had called New York the epicenter of U.S. infections  its nearly 31,000 cases make up almost half of the nations positive tests. But with many states lagging far behind it in per capita testing, health experts can only guess what the virus national impact really is.

We have no systematic strategy to do the kind of surveillance necessary to understand the chain of transmission, Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale School of Medicine, told the Washington Post this week. Were basically flying blind because we have so little idea about its penetration into our society and the number of people affected.

Up to now, coronavirus has been mostly equated with urban, coastal states. But Louisiana is an example of a more rural state that may be facing far more infections as testing ramps up. It reported 1,800 positive cases Wednesday, 400 more than a day earlier.

STAY-AT-HOME ORDER: Some hunkered down, some lost their livelihoods during stay-at-home order in Harris County

Sixty-five Louisianans, out of 11,000 tested, have died just two weeks after the states first positive test. By contrast, California had reported 40 deaths after almost 28,000 tests before Wednesday.

Reasons why the U.S. fell far behind nations such as South Korea in testing for the virus include faulty tests initially sent by the Centers for Disease Control, and private companies not being tasked with developing their own tests.

Reporting state-by-state testing data is imperfect because each state reports it differently and not all report negative test results. But what follows are the states that have tested the most and least for coronavirus on a total and per-million basis, as March 25 in the afternoon, using the COVID Tracking Projects data.

New York: 103,479 tests (5,322 per 1M)

California: 66,800 tests (1,672 per 1M)

Washington: 34,181 tests (4,383 per 1M)

Florida: 18,289 tests (831 per 1M)

Ohio: 14,764 tests (1,256 per 1M)

Massachusetts: 13,749 tests (1,970 per 1M)

Texas: 13,494 tests (457 per 1M)

Pennsylvania: 12,320 tests (961 per 1M)

New Jersey: 12,045 tests (1,347 per 1M)

Illinois: 11,485 (907 per 1M)

Minnesota: 11,475 tests (2,012 per 1M)

Louisiana: 11,451 tests (2,465 per 1M)

Tennessee: 11,184 tests (1,621 per 1M)

North Carolina: 10,489 tests (988 per 1M)

Wisconsin: 8,694 tests (1,485 per 1M)

Colorado: 7,701 tests (1,317 per 1M)

New Mexico: 6,842 (3,263 per 1M)

Georgia: 6,179 tests (575 per 1M)

Utah: 5,823 tests (1,774 per 1M)

Virginia: 5,370 tests (622 per 1M)

Connecticut: 5,300 tests (1,487 per 1M)

Nevada: 4,572 tests (1,456 per 1M)

Oregon: 4,559 tests (1,059 per 1M)

Michigan: 3,860 tests (384 per 1M)

Hawaii: 3,666 tests (2,595 per 1M)

Indiana: 3,356 tests (497 per 1M)

Maine: 3,326 tests (2,471 per 1M)

Kentucky: 3,022 tests (671 per 1M)

Alabama: 2,812 tests (572 per 1M)

Iowa: 2,723 tests (856 per 1M)

New Hampshire: 2,530 tests (1,845 per 1M)

South Carolina: 2,470 tests (474 per 1M)

Kansas: 2,184 tests (750 tests per 1M)

Montana: 2,001 tests (1,841 per 1M)

Idaho: 1,960 tests (1,073 per 1M)

Mississippi: 1,943 tests (649 per 1M)

North Dakota: 1,773 tests (2,327 per 1M)

Alaska: 1,733 tests (2,361 per 1M)

Vermont: 1,712 tests (2,725 per 1M)

District of Columbia: 1,609 tests (2,232 per 1M)

Rhode Island: 1,463 tests (1,385 per 1M)

Nebraska: 1,365 tests (699 per 1M)

Arkansas: 1,286 tests (423 per 1M)

South Dakota: 1,128 tests (1,249 per 1M)

Oklahoma: 969 tests (245 per 1M)

Wyoming: 930 tests (1,640 per 1M)

West Virginia: 804 tests (452 per 1M)

Arizona: 736 tests (99.7 per 1M)

Missouri: 624 tests (101 per 1M)

Maryland: 517 tests (84.9 per 1M)

Delaware: 151 tests (153 per 1M)

Greg Keraghosian is an SFGATE homepage editor. Email: greg.keraghosian@sfgate.com
Since last Thursday, March 19, thousands of workers have been mobilized in a series of wildcat strikes and protests at call centers in cities from the north to the south of Brazil. They have stood up against unsafe working conditions in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. This movement is part of a global wave of wildcat strikes, including at automobile factories in Italy, Spain and the United States and in other industries elsewhere.

Among the first protests to erupt was one that challenged the Italian-based transnational AlmaViva, which has call centers in 11 Brazilian cities and employs 37,000 workers across the country.

Three days before the protests began at AlmaViva in Brazil, the Italian newspaper Agenzia Italia had reported that the companys 2,800 workers in Palermo were organizing a mass strike, demanding the closure of the call center there after a confirmed case of COVID-19 among the operators. The next day, the Palermo headquarters was shut down and home office service was implemented.

Call center strike in Recife, Pernambuco.

AlmaViva workers in the city of Sao Paulo, where a protest and work stoppage took place last Friday, reported to the WSWS that they learned that the center in Italy had been closed due to the pandemic. One of them, Ingra, said: It was very strange for a multinational like AlmaViva. They should have absorbed the experience of what had happened in Italy, but they really didnt have any reaction.

AlmaVivas attitude was the same taken by absolutely every telemarketing company in Brazil. They ignored World Health Organization warnings and guidelines, as well as the disastrous results they have already seen in other countries, and forced the continuation of regular operations, even after the coronavirus had already infected thousands of people in Brazil and there were cases within the companies themselves.

Brazilian workers, however, quickly assimilated the international experiences and realized that, like workers in other countries, they were being forced to work under extremely dangerous conditions

At the beginning of last week a lot of buzz was going on, because obviously the images we are getting from the rest of the world are shocking. Like it or not, globalization brings this kind of problem; people know whats going on, 24-year-old operator Elias, also from AlmaViva in Brazil, told the WSWS.

The coronavirus crisis vastly exacerbates what are already inhuman working conditions in these centers, turning them into death traps. Its a call center, that old story, a lot of cubicles all close to each other, an environment with about 100 people, totally closed, without windows because of the noise, said Elias.

Another AlmaViva operator, Cris, 28, reported to the WSWS that one of her colleagues is hospitalized with a suspected case of COVID-19. I do believe there is some case [at the company], it just hasnt been discovered yet, she said. Because we who work in the call centers go to work with colds, with migraines, with pain, because if we miss one day, we already feel it in our pockets.

Elias reported that the only measure taken last week by AlmaViva was from Tuesday, or Wednesday, they put out an all-purpose cleaner and a rag, and at shift change they let us clean ourselves and our cubicles and then pass the same cloth and the same cleaner to the others. The supervisors had no information. We wanted to know if there would be a shutdown, and they said nothing.

Some at-risk workers, like Ian, who suffers from respiratory diseases, stopped going to work. I was the first on my team not to go in and then find a way to justify this absence, he said. Its really a feeling that either we fight alone for our health and suffer retaliation from the company, or we die in our cubicles.

On Thursday, AlmaViva operators in Sao Paulo began to organize a strike through a WhatsApp group. Elias said that in the middle of Thursday, they added me to a strike group, and during the last break of the day they distributed several leaflets. By the end of the day, this group had gathered over 250 people.

The company tried to suppress the movement. Elias reported that he and his colleagues met on Thursday afternoon when the sector coordinator stated that basically, what matters to the company, above all, is their profit. They couldnt just stop operations and keep us at home getting paid. So if operations were suspended, we wouldnt be paid anything. The coordinator also said that they would implement home office measures, but that of the operation we are part of, which has about 100 people, only 10 would do it.

I was revolted, said Elias. Obviously I wasnt silent and I asked, Okay, all youre talking about is what your employer told you to say, but what do you think? With this cleaner, or this hand sanitizer youre bringing, well be safe? Do you really believe that? And then the guy said if he suspended us, wed be out of pay. Then another coordinator called me to a corner to say I didnt even know what a pandemic was, for me to be agitating people. Its so unfair.

Despite the company's attempt to terrorize the workers, they joined massively in the next days work stoppage. Over the weekend, they continued to discuss on social media how to continue the movement in the coming days.

As Cris stated, Its not just Sao Paulo; in several cities in several states they have stopped work. It is necessary to take care of the employees health. Today the company sees us as a number... So the strike is not only to make a fuss, or not to work. We are claiming our rights and to not have any problems in the future with our health and that of our loved ones.

The stoppages that broke out across the country occurred in multiple centers of the same companies, several of them belonging to transnational corporations like AlmaViva. There are some even larger ones, such as Atento, which in Brazil alone employs more than 80,000 workers and has over 70,000 more employees in 12 different countries. The centers of these companies usually gather together thousands of workers, mostly young, who are then divided into the so-called operations. They receive the lowest possible wages, which are regularly discounted and are below the minimum stipulated by Brazilian law of R$ 1,039 (around $250 dollars) a month. One worker, for example, reported receiving about R$700.

At an AlmaViva center in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, which serves Banco Itau, a company representative declared to workers protesting on Friday: AlmaViva, the leadership, top management, plus Itau and the government are involved and concerned about the coronavirus scenario. He was interrupted by booing from the angry workers, who know that this is a lie. In addition to the centers in Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte, between Thursday and Friday protests and strikes broke out at AlmaViva in Teresina, Piaui in Brazils Northeast, as well as in Guarulhos, also in the state of Sao Paulo.

In Goiania, the capital of Goias in the center west of the country, thousands of workers walked off the job on Thursday and took over 136 Avenue, where large telemarketing companies like Atento and BTCC are based. They then blockaded the nearby federal BR 153 highway. Other wildcat strikes and protests were registered in Recife, Pernambuco; in Salvador and Feira de Santana, Bahia, both in the Northeast; in Curitiba, Parana in the south; and other cities in the state of Sao Paulo, such as the municipality of Poa and Bauru.

These protests and strikes were organized independently of the corporatist unions. After the mobilization of the workers, the National Federation of Workers in Telecommunication Companies and Switchboard Operators (Fenattel), linked to the CUT, the union confederation led by the Workers Party (PT), stated that it had contacted the companies to ensure that care was taken about the transmission of the coronavirus. They have, in fact, only established measures--such as making hand sanitizer available and advising employees to wash their hands--to allow the companies to continue operating.

Asked about the union, Elias said, I dont think its fair for me to take a stand on [their] work because I dont know what theyre doing. But I havent had contact with anyone from the union, nor have I heard about them. You said they stated they were in contact with the company... with the company, not with the workers.

Roma, an operator of Tel Telematica, from Feira de Santana, in the interior of Bahia, reported to the WSWS that there were demonstrations between Thursday and Friday in front of the company, asking that the activities stop. He reported that the union went there only once last week.

To tell you the truth, I dont even know who they are, he said. They only go there at elections and I really dont know what they do... Oh, they receive the dues from our wages. Asked if the union comes as soon as there is an uprising in order to calm down the workers, he answered: No doubt about it... and then they disappear.

In another center run by the company where Roma works, in Salvador, the capital of Bahia, workers went on a wildcat strike on Thursday and Friday. Bypassing the union, they formed a rank-and-file committee. We, from the employees committee, are representing more than 2,000 people, one member said. The union came later and said it would negotiate safer conditions with the company, so that the work could continue.

Operators in Salvador have also created a page of denunciations on Instagram, called senzala80, where they use the slogan: What right have you had stolen from you by the call center companies? We dont have ties to the union, we dont believe in them, we are proletarians like you. The page tried to pressure the governor of Bahia, Rui Costa of the Workers Party (PT), to close all call centers in the state. However, all their comments were deleted by the governor and they were blocked.

The page replied to the governor in a post: Your quarantine is selective. We have to die because we are poor, we have to stay in that company in Boa Viagem (neighborhood) and bring disease to our families. There are already infected people inside. This is going to be a tragedy foretold.

The response of Rui Costas government, together with the CUT unions, shows the degree to which the Workers Party is committed to guaranteeing capitalist profit interests. Their actions complement those of the countrys fascist President Jair Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro responded to the wave of protests by revising the decree defining what services were essential during the coronavirus epidemic to include call centers. This legislation allows for the determination of compulsory realization of this activity, suspending workers right to strike and including the threat of force to make workers go back into the centers.

This repressive measure has been questioned by operators. The workers understand that there are some specific call centers that make sense to continue in a period of necessity, such as the one that serves health plans, because they would be essential, as Elias said. But this is absolutely not the content of the decree. The government has set precedents for a company like AlmaViva to decide that I will continue, during a pandemic, to sell plans for [the telecom company] Vivo.

Cris also contested: Are you telling me that the telemarketing of private companies such as AlmaViva, TMKT, Saitel, Tivit, Atento, among others, is an essential service? It is not. Ian added: Without active offering (sales service), Brazil doesnt stop, only the big companies stop profiting. The world may be disintegrating and they still want to make us beat our goals.

The profit interests of transnational corporations are in direct conflict with the social interests of the vast majority of the global population. The Brazilian working class will be able to defend its health and living conditions through the coronavirus crisis only if this struggle is fought internationally.

After finding the WSWS, a Brazilian call center operator called upon his colleagues: Lets collaborate. Lets show our reality there. The site is worldwide. We strongly endorse this advice.
Portlanders, along with most of the rest of the world, are learning how to live smaller lives in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Gov. Kate Brown has ordered Oregonians to stay home except for essential activities, which means families are suddenly together a lot more than they may be used to. When people do leave their homes, they are staying six feet apart, social distancing in hopes of flattening the COVID-19 curve.

Portland photographer Natalie Gildersleeve, 40, is capturing the surreal moment in time by taking photos of families from a distance.

My friend Rachel and I were talking, Gildersleeve said Wednesday, and she said, You should come take social distancing photos of us!

Immediately, I thought -- yes! she said. You and lots of others!

Social distancing photos (Natalie Gildersleeve)

This project was a way for me to capture some of the mood I think a lot of us are experiencing during this unprecedented time, Gildersleeve said. The isolation, beauty, hope, maybe loneliness -- and most of all our shared humanity.

Social distancing photos (Natalie Gildersleeve)

Gildersleeve reached out to her school and yoga community looking for subjects.

Everyone I asked was interested, she said.

Social distancing photos (Natalie Gildersleeve)

And after posting images to Facebook, she said, more people reached out to her who wanted to be part of the project.

To take the photos, she said she spends about five to ten minutes at each location, shooting with my long lens and keeping plenty of distance while she communicates with the subjects over the phone.

Social distancing photos (Natalie Gildersleeve)

There are so many waves of emotion for everyone right now and people are suffering and dying, she said. And yet there is so much goodness happening.

Social distancing photos (Natalie Gildersleeve)

Gildersleeve said the most-surprising aspect of the project has been the response by the subjects.

The images are all meant to be strong alone, but there is something really powerful when you see them together, she said. It is a collective story of this time and something we can all relate to.

Social distancing photos (Natalie Gildersleeve)

-- Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052, lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyacker

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Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 26, 2020) - Hinterland Metals Inc. ("Hinterland" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has entered into a mining property acquisition agreement (the "Agreement") with Mistango River Resources Inc. (the "Purchaser"), an arm's length party, to sell its non-core asset, the Teck Property, located in the Kirkland Lake Gold Camp of the Province of Ontario (the "Teck Property"). The Teck Property has been inactive for a number of years, with the Company having written of all costs related to the Teck Property in prior years.

Pursuant to the Agreement, the Company has agreed to transfer to the Purchaser 47 mining claims, 22 mining patents, and 2 mining licenses of occupation, all situated in Eby, Teck and Grenfell Townships, in the Province of Ontario, together with all exploration data and technical information associated with the foregoing in the possession of the Company. Pursuant to the Agreement, and subject to applicable laws, the total consideration payable to the Company by the Purchaser will consist of a cash payment of CAD $15,000 as well as 1,500,000 common shares in the capital of the Purchaser (the "Consideration Shares").

The Consideration Shares to be issued under the Agreement will be subject to a statutory hold period that extends four months and one day from the closing date. Completion of the transaction is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions (including, without limitation, the receipt of all necessary approvals). Pursuant to the terms of the Agreement, it is anticipated that the transaction will close on or around April 3, 2020 or such later date as agreed upon by the Company and the Purchaser.

Cautionary Statements

This press release may contain certain forward-looking information and statements ("forward-looking information") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation, that are not based on historical fact, including without limitation, statements containing the words "believes", "anticipates", "plans", "intends", "will", "should", "expects", "continue", "estimate", "forecasts" and other similar expressions. Readers are cautioned to not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties, its securities, or financial or operating results (as applicable). Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in forward-looking information in this press release are reasonable, such forward-looking information has been based on expectations, factors and assumptions concerning future events which may prove to be inaccurate and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond the Company's control. The forward-looking information contained in this press release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement and are made as of the date hereof. The Company disclaims any intention and has no obligation or responsibility, except as required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

This press release is intended for distribution in Canada only and is not intended for distribution to United States newswire services or dissemination in the United States. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities in any jurisdiction.

Further Information

For further information, please contact:

Hinterland Metals Inc.

1 Adelaide Street East, Suite 801

Toronto, Ontario M5C 2V9

Attention: Binyomin Posen, Director and Chief Executive Officer

Email: bposen@plazacapital.ca

Not for distribution to U.S. Newswire Services or for dissemination in the United States. Any failure to comply with this restriction may constitute a violation of U.S. securities laws.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/53824
Informed by his 27 years in prison, the political organizer, lawyer and late president of South Africa Nelson Mandela is known to have said: No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.

I considered Mandelas words on Sunday, March 21, International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, as I wrote this column from COVID-19 self-isolation. I can see how this nation has leapt to action to protect many of its citizens from harm. I am safer from being able to listen to the advice of our health officials. But what of the so-called lowest among us?

A growing number of tenacious and caring lawyers, advocates, allies and family members of incarcerated loved ones are calling for provincial and territorial governments, as well as the federal government, to extend compassion and common sense to Canadas incarcerated civilians, a disproportionate number of whom are Indigenous, Black or otherwise racialized, as part of their COVID-19 response.

I have joined this campaign for both humanitarian and personal reasons: my younger brother is currently incarcerated at a federal medium-security correctional institution in Ontario. Admittedly, his well-being is driving my advocacy on this issue as much as my commitment, as a human rights lawyer, to de-policing and decarceration as a method of abolition. But we all need to realize that if my brother is safe, we will all be much safer too.

Like no other previous event, the COVID-19 outbreak is exposing the human rights crisis that is the contemporary prison. By its very nature, structure and function, the institution as we know it invalidates the supposed universality and ostensible inalienability of human rights as articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, along with all other quasi-constitutional federal and provincial human rights legislation.

Incarceration results in the loss and/or severe limitation of basic human rights (to free movement, expression, assembly and association, to privacy, etc.) It also dramatically restricts social, economic and political opportunities and deprives people of human and humane contact, due to overly risk-averse and stigmatizing policies and social practices reserved specifically for those who have been incarcerated. Theres a reason the American sociologist Joshua Price describes incarceration as a kind of social death.

The full weight of that idea hit me in a recent conversation with my friend, the award-winning writer NourbeSe Phillip, who casually referred to these Covidian times. To quote my brother, prisons are simply not equipped for a crisis like this. Inmates are confined two to a small cell, or up to 12 at a time in modest living pods. How does anyone in that situation heed the advice of the worlds leading health care professionals to practice social distancing. Its simple: you cannot.

Inmates must be escorted at all times, at close distance, by a correctional officer who is leaving and re-entering the prison. Guards must keep no more than two steps from the inmates as they bring them to see visitors or take them into different parts of the prison, to access such things as programming, the kitchen, jobs, health care and even showers.

Inmates are required to live, exercise, wash themselves and eat in social settings and gatherings that are now banned, or would result in a fine, in many countries under pandemic states of emergency. As you might expect, there are no compulsory facemasks in jail, even for inmates showing symptoms of COVID-19.

If we take seriously the analogy of COVID-19 as a war, then our prisons are powder kegs being carried and cared for by chain-smoking soldiers. Tens of thousands of lives are at risk, and the fight against this pandemic critically undermined, if we dont move more aggressively to apply COVID-19 emergency containment measures to Canadas federal and provincial prisons.

That means making sure bail court judges are only denying bail to the most extremely and demonstrably high-risk accused. It means allowing offenders serving intermittent sentences to serve the rest of their time in the community. It means quickly releasing low-risk accused and offenders.

And it means providing cellphones (if without data) to inmates to avoid the few available pay phones becoming COVID-19 transmission points  and so inmates can better keep in touch with their lawyers and the family members and loved ones who often play a pivotal role in their rehabilitation.

Though some of these measures have been adopted or are being explored in Ontario, theyre not being pursued nearly as fast the virus is spreading.

The urgency is not theoretical: Toronto recently confirmed that a provincial correctional officernotably at an institution with considerable overrepresentation of Black and Indigenous inmateshad contracted the infection. This accentuates the point that COVID-19 is not a colour-blind crisis, but a litmus test of Canadians commitment to racial equity as a national norm.

In sum, if immediate and dramatic action to safely depopulate Canadas prisons isnt taken up as part of our governments containment measures, our efforts to address the outbreak wont be judged by who is left, but by who was left behind.
W ith more than 9,500 cases of coronavirus in the UK, Britons have been instructed to stay at home unless they need to buy food or medicine, help vulnerable people or go to work if "absolutely necessary".

It can be difficult to know what advice to follow, but Dr Hilary Jones, health editor for ITVs Good Morning Britain and Lorraine, has answered important questions about symptoms, self-isolation and how long it takes for signs of the virus to show.

Here, we take a closer look at the symptoms and when the signs begin to present themselves.

Dr Hilary explained when coronavirus symptoms begin to present themselves / ITV

What are the symptoms of coronavirus?

The main symptoms of coronavirus are having a cough, high temperature or shortness of breath.

People with the virus will typically show flu-like symptoms, including a fever and a cough, that can progress to severe pneumonia. This can then cause breathing difficulties.

Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures 1 /44 Before and during Coronavirus lockdown - In pictures AP Buckingham Palace AP Piccadilly Line tube AP Big Ben AP Millennium bridge AP Wembley Stadium AP St Pancras International train station AP Downing Street AP Victoria Station AP Regent Street AP The Mall leading to Buckingham Palace AP London's National Gallery in Trafalgar Square PA Edinburgh's Royal Mile PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bath PA Bath PA London's Waterloo station PA London Bridge PA London's Canary Wharf Jubilee Line platform PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA London's Buckingham Palace PA London's Tower Bridge PA London's Leicester Square PA London's Millennium Bridge with St Paul's Cathedral PA London's Criterion Theatre PA London's Palace Theatre PA London's Phoenix Theatre PA London's Canary Wharf Station PA Bournemouth beach PA Bath PA Bath PA Barry Island, South Wales PA Bournemouth beach PA

Some people with mild symptoms of the virus have reported a loss of smell and taste, but Dr Hilary said this is not a reason to self-isolate as it could be down to a cold or an allergy.

"Hayfever is coming in now, people are getting a bunged up nose, and that isn't often a symptom of coronavirus, so if you haven't the two cardinal symptoms - a cough, which is new, and a fever - you carry on as normal," he said.

How long does it take for the signs to show?

Dr Hilary said the incubation period is between five to six days in most cases, so symptoms would show from then after exposure to the virus.

Many people can have the virus without knowing and only show mild symptoms, Dr Hilary said, and it is possible for people to have had it without knowing.

Dr Hilary explained how the new coronavirus antibody test works on ITV's Good Morning Britain, which identifies whether you have had the virus and are now immune or whether you are still at risk.

Describing the test as a "game-changer", Dr Hilary said: "It determines whether you have had the virus and are now immune.

"It works by putting a drop of blood in and a couple of drops of a buffer solution and then the liquid is drawn up through the filter...it's basically measuring chemicals which are within the virus itself.

"And it tells you whether you have been exposed or you haven't, so this will be really useful for people who need to know whether they can go back to work safely."

The test can also be used to see how long immunity against the virus lasts, which will be key, according to Dr Hilary.

Dr Hilary Demonstrates How The New Coronavirus Antibody Test Works

How to self-isolate if you are showing symptoms

If you live alone, the seven-day self-isolation period begins on the day your symptoms start, Dr Hilary said.

Anyone who is self-isolating after showing symptoms such as a continuous cough or fever should use their own bedding, pillows, towels and toiletries if they live with other people.

People should also use their own cutlery and crockery and they should visit the bathroom last and clean hard surfaces with a household bleach product.

If after seven days, your symptoms have gone and you are well, you can carry on as normal, even if you still have a cough. But if you still feel unwell, you have to stay at home until you feel better.

A pedestrian wearing a protective face mask walks across Westminster Bridge on Wednesday / AFP via Getty Images

When to call 111

If someone is showing symptoms such as a fever or a new continuous cough, do not go to your local GP surgery, pharmacy or hospital.
President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya has announced that he is taking an 80% salary cut alongside Vice President William Ruto, to fund the fight against coronavirus in the country.



Uhuru also disclosed that members of the federal cabinet would have their salaries slashed by 30 percent, while salaries of chief administrative secretaries and principal secretaries would be reduced by 30 percent and 20 percent respectively.



The Kenyan President who made the announcement at a press conference on Wednesday March 25, said the salary cut was voluntarily agreed upon by him and the officials to fund the fight against coronavirus in the East African country which has 28 confirmed cases.



With an 80% salary cut, Uhuru who according to a Salaries and Remuneration Commission gazette notice of July 2017 currently earns Ksh.1.44 million per month, will only get Ksh.288,000 as salary.



Vice President William Ruto who currently takes home a pay of Ksh.1.22 million monthly, will get Ksh.245,000.



Cabinet Secretaries and Chief Administrative Secretaries who currently earn Ksh.924,000 per month, will now get Ksh.646,000.



Senate Speaker Ken Lusaka and his National Assembly colleague Justin Muturi have agreed to take a 30 % pay cut for three months due to COVID-19 situation in Kenya. Speaking at the Parliament building on Thursday March 26, the two Speakers disclosed that MPs from both Houses are still consulting whether or not to take pay cut.



President Uhuru had also announced a 100 percent tax relief for all Kenyans earning below Ksh24,000 to cushion the effect of the coronavirus pandemic. There is a 25 percent tax relief for other workers, as well as a reduction of the Pay as You Earn (PAYE) tax rate from 30 percent to 25 percent.













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Uttar Pradesh Police has arrested AIMIM District President Mansoor Alam for spreading misinformation on social media about deaths caused due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The accused is a resident of Gajia in Jahagirabad area of Naini.

According to the police, Masood on social media shared that "the government is hiding facts. While the government figures show over 500 till now, 50,000 people have already died in the country due to Covid-19."The police took action against Masood after the post shared by him went viral on social media.

An FIR has been registered against the accused and action is being taken accordingly.

According to Health Ministry, there are 606 cases of COVID-19 in the country, including 553 actives cases and 42 cured ones.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Unions and employers are both arguing for the federal government to provide direct wage subsidies for workers hit by the coronavirus lockdown, with one retail executive saying other forms of stimulus are pointless until the worst is over.

The calls come as unions and employer groups struck another deal which will change conditions and pay rules for more than a million administrative workers, allowing about 10 per cent of the entire Australian workforce to drop their working hours to keep their jobs and help businesses stay afloat.

Retail Apparel Group chief Gary Novis. Credit:Jessica Hromas

After days of high-stakes negotiations, the national chamber of commerce, ACTU, services union and Australian Industry Group agreed to the deal on Thursday in the latest example of collaboration between unions and industry groups.

Meanwhile, Gary Novis, the chief executive of Retail Apparel Group (RAG) which operates brands such as Tarocash and YD, called for wage subsidies to be paid to businesses to prevent workers from having to "queue up at Centrelink".
MBABANE - The Republic of China (Taiwan) has donated E10 million to the country towards the fight against the coronavirus.

The donation was made by the Ambassador, Jeremy Liang, at the Cabinet Offices yesterday. When presenting the donation to the deputy prime minister, the ambassador stated that they knew what it was like to fight a pandemic as they had a similar experience before.

Epidemic

He highlighted that they were attacked by an epidemic called SARS which is an acronym for severe acute respiratory syndrome. Having recognised the magnitude of COVID-19, His Majesty King Mswati III made a very timely decision to cancel his birthday celebration and prioritise the lives of emaSwati in the process, he said. The ambassador mentioned that in their country, they were able to control the virus and would share their expertise and experience to help the country to fight the virus. He said their country stood shoulder to shoulder with the country in fighting the virus. Receiving the donation, the Deputy Prime Minister, Themba Masuku, said they were aware that the assistance would be additional to the provision of testing kits, protective clothing, masks and other equipment related to the nations concerted effort in combating the virus.

Consistent

He mentioned that Taiwan remained the countrys long standing, committed and consistent co-operation partner, working hand-in-hand with the people of Eswatini throughout the 52-year bilateral and diplomatic partnership to realise the nations socio-economic ambitions in the areas of agriculture, education, health care, financial inclusion, energy and infrastructure.

I wish to acknowledge with unreserved gratitude the commitment of Taiwan to the principle of people centred, development responsive, priority driven interventions, such as this one and implore the continued engagement by our two countries in other far reaching and mutually reinforcing areas of co-operation, he said.

Leadership

Masuku stated that the Government of the Republic of China (Taiwan) had shown meticulous leadership and commendable resilience to contain and control the spread of the coronavirus outbreak since it gained prominence in December 2019. The entire world has a leaf to take out of the book of best practice from Taiwan in dealing with public health emergencies and we hope that this experience will be the much needed catalyst that will see Taiwan included in a meaningful way in international organisation such as the World Health Organisation, where collective responsibility is the global standard, remarked Masuku. After the presentation, the DPM handed the cheque over to the Chairperson of the Resource Mobilisation Team, Dr Phil Mnisi.
Hong Kong police Thursday arrested an opposition politician under a colonial-era sedition law for allegedly sharing the identity of an officer who fired a baton round that blinded a journalist during protests last year.

Police said they arrested 60-year-old Cheng Lai-king on suspicion of "action with seditious intention".

"Someone posted speech that advocates violence and incites hatred," spokesman Superintendent Swalikh Mohammed said, adding that personal information on an officer and his family members was "illegally distributed".

Democratic Party district councillor Cheng, 60, shared a Facebook post which gave details of a policeman suspected to have fired the baton round that blinded a journalist during the anti-government demonstrations.

"If the police officer has a conscience, please turn yourself in. An eye for an eye," Cheng wrote in her repost.

Indonesian journalist Veby Indah suffered permanent blindness in one eye after being hit by a police plastic baton round when she was covering the protests. She has asked the court to order the police to name the officer so she can lodge a private prosecution.

The police had refused to disclose his name, sparking a search for the officer's identity on social media.

Civic Party lawmaker Dennis Kwok said the "outdated" and "draconian" colonial law was in contravention of freedom of expression and human rights.

"Unfortunately, the government of today decided that they would use this colonial law to silence political discontent," Kwok said, calling it an act of "political revenge".

The sedition law has rarely been used since it was first enacted in 1938 under the British colonial government.

Hong Kong last year saw seven straight months of political unrest sparked by a now-abandoned bill to allow extraditions to China.

The protests have since morphed into a larger revolt against Beijing's tightened control over the semi-automonous city, and greater demands for fully free elections and an inquiry into police misconduct.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Myanmar Army raided the headquarters of an offshoot of the rebel Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in northern Shan state on Thursday, seizing illegal drugs, interrogating leaders, and confiscating about 1,000 weapons, an officer in the militia told RFAs Myanmar Service.

When soldiers from Myanmars 99th Light Infantry Battalion invaded the Kaungkha militia headquarters in Lwekham village, they ordered the militiamen to surrender their guns, he said.

The registered armed group has 850 soldiers and more than 2,000 reservists not registered with the Myanmar government, as well as liaison offices in five townships in northern Shan state.

They have taken control of the Kaungkha headquarters and restricted peoples entry, said the militia officer, who declined to give his name for fear of retribution.

They confiscated all the weapons and detained some of the leaders, he said.

Though government soldiers are holding some of the leaders of the militias 10 groups in the town of Lashio, they have released others, he added.

Some were summoned by name, while others were asked to attend a meeting on March 24, and then were detained, he said. Some groups may have been related to the drug cases in the area.

The Kaungkha militia, also known as the Kachin Defense Army (KDA), signed a cease-fire with government army in 1991. The militia has been known for its involvement in drug trafficking and the production of methamphetamine tablets.

Leaders and members of the militia who hail from Yeinmaw and Hophyat villages and a leader from Lwelkham village, where large amounts of illegal drugs were found, have now been accused of being involving in drug manufacturing and failing to inform authorities about illegal drug activities.

The Myanmar Army discovered illegal narcotics and other materials and equipment valued at 267 billion kyats (US$187 million) during an 11-day period in late February and early March in Lwekham and Kaungkha villages, which were under the control of the Kaungkha militia, the online journal The Irrawaddy reported.

The officer also said that KDA vice chairman Zaw Ten is still at the militias headquarters, but secretary Dee Khun, and other leaders, including Zhum Khon, are being interrogated at the Myanmar militarys North Eastern Command headquarters in Lashio.

The weapons confiscated from the militia are used for the groups own protection and not for an insurgency against the state, he said, adding that Myanmar forces should rightly take action against illegal drug activity in the region, but not to go so far as to disarm the entire militia.

Related to drug cases

Myanmar military spokesman Brigadier Gen Zaw Min Tun told RFA that he was not aware of a raid on the Kaungkha militia headquarters or the interrogation of its leaders, but that government soldiers are taking action against armed groups that have failed to inform authorities about drug-trafficking activities.

I havent heard about it, he said about the raid. They must have somehow related it to the drug cases in the region because drug traffickers cannot do their jobs without going through local armed groups.

Drug manufacturers, users, and those who fail to notify authorities about illegal drug activities can be prosecuted under Myanmars Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Law, he said.

So they could be found guilty under the law, Zaw Min Tun said. As for us, we will act according to the law.

The Myanmar Army did not confirm whether the militia is under its control, as are other such groups that operate in Myanmar.

Kutkai township residents said Myanmar soldiers have blocked roads in and out of Kaungkha village and are monitoring vehicles.

Villagers said the troops are now stationed on a prayer hill, a sacred place for local ethnic Kachin Christians.

They are staying there temporarily for now, said a resident who requested anonymity out of fear for his safety. They havent built any permanent structures.

But many local civilians visit the site for religious services, he said. They [soldiers] claimed that they are taking care of security, but we dont trust them since everyone is afraid of the solders.

Northern Shan state, which borders China, is a hotbed for flagrant drug activity, with the narcotics of choice being heroin and methamphetamine, an extremely addictive stimulant in the form of a white, bitter-tasting crystalline powder commonly sold as yaba tablets.

The rebel Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and the Kokang ethnic armed group are active in the area controlled by Kaungkha militia, though they have not engaged in clashes with the militia.

Residents predict that armed conflict between the Myanmar military and the two ethnic armies could flare up if local militias, which help keep the peace, are eliminated.



Reported by Kan Thar for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
A unique community partnership in Creggan is proving to be a vital lifeline to vulnerable people currently isolated due to the government-imposed lockdown.

Following British Prime Minister Boris Johnsons shutdown announcement on Monday, the publics movements have been restricted which has dramatically changed the outlook in the Creggan area and beyond.

People have lost jobs, been forced to self-isolate and cut themselves off from wider society.

A home delivery service run from Rath Mor Centre has become very popular. Coupled with the distribution of food parcels, it has proven to be a lifeline for people experiencing financial hardship.

The Rath Mor Centre, run by Creggan Enterprises, is a multi-purpose community facility comprising of retail services, a business centre and community services

Popular businesses including the hair salon, cafe and florists have been forced to close their doors resulting in the temporary, and potentially permanent, loss of 200-300 jobs.

The loss of jobs will have a major impact on the Creggan, Brandywell and Bogside area, Rath Mor Chief Executive Conal McFeely said.

What remains at the centre is the supermarket, taxi company, pharmacy, post office and newly opened health centre to provide key services for the community.

A unique partnership between Creggan Enterprises, Creggan Neighbourhood Partnership (CNP) Eurospar and Glassagh Taxis has allowed them to run an effective delivery service across the city.

Those in need fall into two categories: people who can afford to pay for it and a sizeable section of the community who are struggling to survive.

Forced isolation of already vulnerable individuals means that some are struggling to manage mental health difficulties and are feeling suicidal. Phoning for food delivery and meeting the driver may be their only form of contact all day.

At this point in time we have a social enterprise delivering a service to not only Creggan, the Bogside and Brandywell but to Galliagh, Strathfoyle and so forth. And what were actually showing is the people of Creggan care about the people in this city.

This is a great example of how a community responds in a time of crisis to meet the common good.

It shows how the Creggan community comes to the fore at times of adversity to meet the needs of local people and show that were all in this together.

This is about saving lives and giving people hope at the other end of it.

Below: Mark McCleary (Glassagh Taxis) awaiting his next round of deliveries  kitted in full Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).

EARTH ANGELS

Community workers, Shauna Deery and Tony ODoherty, of CNP are well placed to identify those most in need.

James McClean and his wife Erin have donated thousands of pounds worth of goods and other figures from the community have made additional contributions. Yesterday, local bakeries which had to shut gifted a large supply of eggs.

These acts of generosity have allowed CNP to make up parcels filled with essentials for volunteers to distribute accordingly.

Ms Derry explained: We were offered a huge amount of food from James McClean and following on from that we were able to identify older vulnerable people living within the Creggan are in particular, but also throughout the town to send these packages to.

Over 200 parcels have been sent out. We would go up to their front door, knock, leave the package on their doorstep and stand outside their fence to have a wee chat with them.

Because a huge part of the problem is social isolation for people who dont have a family. Theyre not seeing a being bar us coming to their door. Were primarily delivering necessities like cereal, cleaning stuff, pasta, beans, peas and tinned foods.

We had a huge amount of baby stuff go out because people were struggling to access baby formula, nappies, wipes and so on.

Volunteers have answered the phone to people weeping. One family had a week old baby and were sent home from hospital, their sister had cancer and mother who is also very vulnerable was looking after the both of them.

CNP was happy to be able to support this family which was isolated and in desperate need.

Other people have been visibly upset when parcels arrived at the door, thankful that someone had thought about them. Ms Deery said community workers were taken aback after receiving messages hailing them as earth angels - which shows the depth of gratitude for their efforts.

She envisages that demand for such services will increase as time goes by but more people have been coming forward with donations.
Stay up to date on the latest coronavirus news with mySA.com:

Most Americans will be receiving checks from the federal government after President Donald Trump and Congress agreed to a $2 trillion coronavirus relief deal Wednesday.

The stimulus is unprecedented in size, and politicians hope it will prevent the country from descending into a recession if a protracted fight against COVID-19 grinds the economy to a halt.

So what does it mean for you? Although the final legislative language is still being hammered out, here is what was proposed and passed in regards to stimulus checks:

 Individual taxpayers with incomes up to $75,000 will receive a one-time $1,200 direct payment. If you make more than $99,000, you will get nothing. If you make between that range, you'll get less than $1,200, but the exact number has not been confirmed yet. An earlier version of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act stipulated $5 would be subtracted from the $1,200 for every additional $100 in income.

 For couples, everything doubles. Combined incomes of up to $150,000 will receive $2,400; the cap is a combined income of $198,000.

 Families that qualified for the one-time payment will also receive an additional $500 per child.

 Annual income is based on your 2018 tax returns. If you did not file a tax return in 2018, you must file the 2019 return before qualifying for the stimulus check.

 If you're on unemployment, the bill increased unemployment insurance by $600 per week for four months (this is on top of what individual states pay out for unemployment). It has also been expanded to include freelance and gig economy workers.

 Although Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin spoke of a desire to send checks regularly throughout the coronavirus pandemic, this ultimately didn't make it into the final bill. If Congress wants to send more than one stimulus check, it will have to separately authorize another payout.

As to when checks will arrive, that's still very much up in the air. The last time Americans got stimulus checks  in 2008 under George W. Bush  it took about three months for checks to arrive. Theoretically, Americans should get them faster this time, provided they're signed up with the IRS for direct deposit into their bank accounts (like how you get tax refunds).

Nonetheless, it seems like the earliest estimates for seeing that cash is around mid-April.

Katie Dowd is a senior digital editor with SFGATE. Email her: katie.dowd@sfgate.com
Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili.

The global electron microscope market size is expected to reach USD 5.7 billion by 2025, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. It is anticipated to expand at a CAGR of 7.4% over the forecast period. Rising investment in research and increasing use of electron microscopes in industries such as semiconductors, life sciences, and materials research Industries is anticipated to boost the market growth. Developing countries offer new investment avenues to the global market giants. The developing infrastructure and increasing research investments are driving the demand for advanced medical devices in these countries.

Microscopes are used extensively in the field of semiconductors. In the field of life sciences, they can be used in clinical trials, toxicology, pathology, diagnosis of diseases, and various other sub disciplines. Microscopy can also be used for characterization of materials, to study their internal structures, and various other applications. They are used in forensics, food industry, healthcare, and chemical among other industries.

Few of the key players in the electron microscopes market are Nikon Metrology Inc.; Thermo Fisher Scientific.; ZEISS, International; JEOL Ltd.; Angstrom Advanced Inc.; Hirox Europe Ltd.; and Hitachi High-Technologies Europe GmbH. Regional and service portfolio expansions and mergers and acquisitions are the key strategic undertakings adopted by these players. For instance, in June 2018, Thermo Fischer Scientific acquired electron microscope software console from Roper technologies.

Further key findings from the study suggest:

The global electron microscopes market was valued at USD 3.2 billion in 2017 and is expected to grow lucratively over the forecast period

Scanning electron microscope segment is anticipated to expand at the fastest CAGR over the forecast period

Life sciences segment captured the largest market share in 2017

Nanotechnology is expected to witness the fastest CAGR during the forecast period owing to increasing investments

Asia Pacific is expected to exhibit high growth over the forecast period owing to rising investments from global market players.

Request a Sample Copy of the Global Electron Microscope Market Research Report @

www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/electron-microscopes-market/request/rs1

Grand View Research has segmented the global electron microscopes market on the basis of type, application, and region:

Electron Microscope Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025)

Scanning

Transmission

Electron Microscope Application Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025)

Material Sciences

Nanotechnology

Lifesciences

Semiconductors

Others

Electron Microscope Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025)

North America U.S. Canada

Europe Germany U.K.

Asia Pacific Japan China

Latin America Brazil Mexico

Middle East and Africa (MEA) South Africa Saudi Arabia



Access full research report on global electron microscope market:

www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/electron-microscopes-market
TEHRAN, Iran, March 26

Trend:

The Head of Iran Central Bank Abdolnasser Hemmati has announced that thanks to efforts of the foreign ministry and the CBA as well, some of Iran's frozen foreign assets are likely to be released, Trend reports via IRNA.

Speaking on the sidelines of a cabinet meeting, Hemmati said that these assets had been frozen under pressure of the US government in other countries.

Based on the reports we have, these resources will probably be released, said Hemmati.

"We hope we can use these released resources to provide essential goods, medicines and medical equipment for the people," he said.

"The supply of basic commodities for the country is being seriously pursued, he said.

Hemmati went on to say that last Iranian year (ended on March, 20), $15 billion worth of medicine and essential commodities were imported into the country.

Hemmati also expressed hope that as soon as the coronavirus outbreak ends, Iran's economic situation will improve.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

Iran is one of the countries heavily affected by the rapidly-spreading coronavirus. According to recent reports from the Iranian officials, over 24,800 people have been infected, 1,934 people have already died. Meanwhile, over 8,900 have reportedly recovered from the disease.

The country continues to apply strict measures to contain the further spread. Reportedly, the disease was brought to Iran by a businessman from Iran's Qom city, who went on a business trip to China, despite official warnings. The man died later from the disease.

The Islamic Republic only announced its first infections and deaths from the coronavirus on Feb. 19.
[March 26, 2020]

Invitation to SCA's Q1 2020 Press Conference April 24, 10.00 CET

STOCKHOLM, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The press conference held in connection with the publication of SCA's interim report for the first quarter of 2020, will be available via webcast or by phone.

The interim report will be published on April 24, 2020, at approximately 08:00 CET. The subsequent web cast press conference will be held at 10:00 CET.

At the press conference, President and CEO Ulf Larsson and CFO Toby Lawton will present and answer questions regarding the report.

The press conference will be webcast live at www.sca.com. It is possible to participate in the press conference by telephone:









Sweden: +46-(0)-8-5069-2180 United Kingdom: +44-(0)-2071-928000 USA: +1-631-510-7495



Call in good time before the conference starts. Provide the code "SCA" or the conference ID 6461139.

The core of SCA's business is the forest, Europe's largest private forest holding. Around this unique resource, we have built a well-developed value chain based on renewable raw material from our own and others' forests. We offer paper for packaging and print, pulp, wood products, renewable energy, services for forest owners and efficient transport solutions.

In 2019, the forest products company SCA had approximately 4,000 employees and sales amounted to approximately SEK 19.6 bn (EUR 1.9 bn). SCA was founded in 1929 and has its headquarters in Sundsvall, Sweden. For more information, visit www.sca.com

Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget SCA



Skepparplatsen 1

SE-851 88 Sundsvall

Tel: +46-60-19-30-00

www.sca.com



For further information, please contact:



Bjorn Lyngfelt

SVP Communications

tel. +46-70-626-82-23

Andreas Ewertz

Investor Relations Director

tel + 46-72-211-57-97



This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/sca/r/invitation-to-sca-s-q1-2020-press-conference-april-24--10-00-cet,c3069254

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SOURCE SCA
The term anarchy was ubiquitous this past week in Israels political discourse, unrelated to criticism of the governments handling of the coronavirus crisis. Senior representatives of the executive branch talked about anarchy. For example, Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said that even though his Likud party disagrees with the Supreme Courts ruling ordering Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein to urgently convene the plenary to elect a new speaker, we will not reach a state of anarchy. Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan and Agriculture Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, both of the Likud, expressed similar viewpoints. Blue and White leader Benny Gantz urged Interim Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to tell the people of Israel in no uncertain terms that Supreme Court rulings must be obeyed and that there will be no anarchy in Israel.

On the other hand, Tourism Minister Yariv Levin of the Likud accused the justices of leading Israel to anarchy. Levin, a lawyer, added, "If Chief Justice [Esther] Hayut wants to put herself above the Knesset, she is invited to arrive to the building with her guards and open the session herself. Levin also claimed that a handful of judges who elect each other behind closed doors have declared a political coup. In other words, Levin is arguing that a group of regime opponents are plotting within the nations top court to unseat the prime minister and to do so, this cabal is willing to smash one of the foundation stones of Israeli democracy  the separation of powers between the judicial and legislative branches of government.

Levin is obviously aware of the fact that the Judicial Appointments Committee consists of nine members, including four politicians, two Bar Association members and three judges. Appointment of a Supreme Court justice requires approval by a majority of seven panel members, and thus the politicians actually have control over the makeup of the court. It is also worth remembering that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been in power for the past decade and that the previous justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, a representative of the radical right, boasts of the many appointments of conservative judges during her tenure.

Unlike the impression that the conservative right is seeking to convey on Edelsteins back that the Supreme Court enjoys limitless power, the executive branch often displays contempt for the top courts rulings. Only rarely does the parliamentary opposition weigh in to forestall arbitrary decisions by the Knesset majority. In 2009, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel documented no fewer than eight instances in which the state displayed contempt or was still displaying contempt for Supreme Court decisions since 2006. Among other cases, it found two decisions regarding the fortification against rockets of schools in Gaza border communities, three rulings ordering the state to build 100 classrooms in East Jerusalem and a decision regarding the violation of the rights of migrant workers. In a 2009 ruling on a petition against the route of the wall between Israel and the West Bank, then-Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch was harshly critical of the state for ignoring a previous court ruling for years. She found it appropriate to remind the government of what should have been obvious  that the rulings of this court are not by way of being recommendations.

A 2019 position paper by the Israel Democracy Institute underscores the fact that Israel is the only state in the world where only one institution, the Supreme Court, has oversight over the political executive and legislative branches, which are under the control of the governing coalition. Many states have two parliamentary chambers that balance each other, while in other states the balance stems from a division into electoral districts. The states of Europe are under the purview of the European Court of Human Rights. Not only that, but contrary to the impression disseminated by its critics, to date the Supreme Court has overridden only 18 laws in its 72-year history.

In his resignation speech on the morning of March 25, Edelstein accused the High Court, which had essentially forced him to step down, of destroying the work of the Knesset and undermining the foundations of Israeli democracy. However, the institution responsible for maintaining the foundations of Israeli democracy  i.e., the Knesset  is that same legislature that he has led for the past seven years. One of the reasons for this instability is a flawed infrastructure  in other words, lack of a constitution. The official Knesset website notes that unlike many states in the world, "Israel has no written constitution."

Over the years, numerous initiatives by lawmakers and human rights groups to rectify the flaw were torpedoed. The Knesset website states that supporters of a constitution hailed the educational and cultural values of a constitution, and noted that a constitution was a type of state calling card vis-a-vis the world. Arguments were also raised regarding a constitutions value in promoting the melting pot of Israels disparate population groups and its value as an expression of the revolution in the life of the Jewish nation.

Opponents have argued that the 1948 Declaration of Independence includes the foundations of every progressive constitution. They rely, inter alia, on two quasi-constitutional Basic Laws adopted by the Knesset in 1992 and 1994  Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty and Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation. The article laying out the principles of the Basic Law on human rights states, The basic human rights in Israel are based on the recognition of the value of the human being, the sanctity of his life, and his being a free person, and they shall be upheld in the spirit of the principles set forth in the Proclamation of the Establishment of the State of Israel. However, in June 2018, the Knesset adopted the Basic Law: Israel - the Nation State of the Jewish People, known as the Nationality Law. Unlike the Declaration of Independence and the constitutions of other nation-states, the Israeli law ignores the principle of equality, recognizing only that of nationality.

The crisis over the election of a new Knesset speaker and over the forming of the new parliamentary committees have exposed the shame of Israeli democracy. Every democracy needs checks and balances, even more so a young democracy devoid of borders (in every sense of the word) and a society made up of a fragile national-ethnic fabric in which the term anarchy is becoming increasingly pervasive in public discourse.
Shawn Harris, one of a only a few passengers, waits to board a Metrolink train to San Bernardino as other Metrolink trains stand idle at Union Station. (Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)

As rail ridership plunges amid the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, Metrolink has significantly scaled back its train schedule, reducing service by 30%, officials said.

The new schedule, effective Thursday and until further notice, maintains peak-time routes and as many connections as possible for riders, said Stephanie Wiggins, chief executive of the regional commuter rail network.

As of last Friday, Wiggins wrote in a public message, ridership was down roughly 80% across the system  which includes routes connecting Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura counties.

This week, the drop-off had plunged to 85%, Metrolink spokesman Paul Gonzales said, with daily boardings falling from an average of 43,000 to 6,292.

Metrolink trains idle at Union Station as ridership plunges amid the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. (Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)

The decrease can largely be attributed to the spread of the coronavirus, which has prompted local and state leaders to order most Californians to stay at home and to maintain at least a six-foot buffer zone around themselves when they do go outside  something that can be hard, if not impossible, to do on a crowded train or bus.

"This lack of demand means a temporary reduction of our service levels can occur without the danger of creating crowding situations on our trains," Wiggins said.

Although no routes are being entirely eliminated, Metrolink will operate only 115 trains on weekdays compared with its normal 167. Weekend service will not be affected, Gonzales said.

Metrolink also is making hand sanitizer available on its trains and is cleaning the cars more frequently, he said.

"We take seriously our role as a lifeline transportation service for our community," Wiggins said. "We also take seriously the need to keep both our riders and employees safe during this global pandemic. So we will continue to do all we can to maintain the cleanliness and social distancing thats required to minimize the spread of this virus while still providing a vital service."

As fewer riders are taking the train, we are making temporary schedule changes, working with other transportation agencies to service our communities for essential travel. #OurMetrolink #StayHealthy



Learn More: https://t.co/l3QAbBvZUA pic.twitter.com/73LHOmDbYT  Metrolink (@Metrolink) March 24, 2020

Metrolink isn't alone in its struggles. Statewide, transit agencies have been walloped by tanking ridership during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Story continues

The L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority reported last week that trips on its six light rail lines were down nearly two-thirds compared with a typical day, and bus ridership was down by about 53%.

In response, the agency is reducing bus service 15% to 20% and running trains less frequently.

On Tuesday, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system's ridership was down 92% compared with a typical Tuesday last month, according to the agency. BART service, which normally ends at midnight, now shuts down at 9 p.m.

In addition, San Francisco's Muni Metro light rail system will be replaced by buses starting Monday. Service already has been suspended on the citys famed cable car and historic streetcar system.

Metrolink has significantly scaled back its schedule, effectively reducing its service by 30%. (Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority suspended its light rail service Wednesday night after an operator trainee tested positive for the coronavirus, the agency said. Ridership on the system has dropped by 82% since stay-at-home orders were issued, and the agency will now focus on bus service, "which is more nimble and can adapt to the various needs of our community, it said.

Some officials have said they hope the federal government's roughly $2-trillion coronavirus economic relief package  which the Senate approved Wednesday  will provide a much-needed lifeline, as it includes $25 billion for transit providers.

"There is more work to do, and this is only one step toward keeping the trains running, but it is a significant down payment for the essential workers in the region and commuters when they return," BART General Manager Bob Powers said in a statement.

It's not yet clear how much of the transit assistance would flow to California, however.

MTA staff estimated that the agency may get from $710 million to $810 million, spokesman Rick Jager said, with specific terms on how these funds can be spent on matters directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
By PTI

KOLKATA: Chinese-origin people in the city, some living here since birth, have become targets of racial discrimination and slurs, amid the growing panic over the Covid-19 pandemic, which began in China.

Francis Yee Lepcha (41), whose grandfather had migrated from China decades ago, said he had been encountering glares and cold stares since the outbreak of the disease.

A musician by profession, Lepcha took to Facebook to post a picture wearing a tee-shirt which said he was from Kolkata and had never been to China.

"During my recent trip to Puri, I could hear people taunting me and addressing me as 'corona'. It was then I decided I should do something about it."

"I posted my picture on social media wearing a white tee-shirt which said that I was from the city and have not been to China. The picture went viral on the Internet and many have since expressed regret over the incident," he said.

A city-based businesswoman said one of her acquaintances had a similar experience recently at a grocery shop in Tangra area, also known as Kolkata's Chinatown.

"Her father is of Chinese origin and mother a Nepalese. A grocery shop owner called her 'corona' when she visited his shop to buy essentials."

The girl immediately protested, following which the grocer apologised, she said.

Another school teacher in the city, also of Chinese origin, said any person with mongoloid features are being targeted, including those from the northeast.

"Hopefully things will fall in place and misconceptions will be cleared once the crisis is over," she added.
While this is due to a desire to focus on her kids and her career, phony rumors are circulating about Angelina Jolie's supposed 'struggle' to find love after her separation from Brad Pitt.

Jolie has reportedly not publicly or privately dated anyone since the actress declared her split from Pitt in 2016.

Last June, a story was written that the "Maleficent" actress allegedly drunk-dialed Pitt on her birthday because she was lonely. The tabloid contended that after "a few wines," Jolie gave her former husband a call. However, the story did not prove to be true as the actress had been busy on her birthday on the set of her upcoming film, "Those Who Wish Me Dead."

A tabloid has also claimed that the dubbed unlucky-in-love mother is on the path to find a perfect match for her better future.

Jolie has never appeared to indulge in a new relationship as she keeps herself busy with her children and often goes on outings with them.

On her resentment towards Pitt, a source said in 2019, "Angie is not trying to make things hard on Brad, she just wants to be fair for her and the kids. She is struggling to let go of any lingering resentment and wants to move to a place of healing, love, and forgiveness about her relationship and failed marriage with Brad."

Also Read: Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston Relationship Timeline: Rumored Marriage in 2019, Debunked

She apparently felt that she had to not prioritize her career so that Pitt could take projects that he was passionate about.

When Pitt landed lead roles, "she feels largely responsible for much of his success and acquired wealth while they were together," one source said. Jolie reportedly felt responsible for much of his success and acquired wealth.

It has been long difficult to draw a line from fact to rumor when it comes to Pitt and Jolie. The two Hollywood A-listers have been the subject of tabloid rumors since the time before their relationship went public.

The pair has openly admitted that they became attracted to each other while filming their 2005 movie "Mr. & Mrs. Smith." This was while Pitt was still married to Jennifer Aniston. The sneaky couple then managed to hide their secret feelings for each other even from their bodyguard.

Other reports said that Jolie is looking to leave Los Angeles and set up a new home with her children.

Another tabloid wrote up a story with the headline, "Angie Moans She Can't Get A Guy!" earlier this March. The 'snitch' said Jolie felt that men have considered her toxic since her separation from Pitt. According to "Gossip Cop" that checked in with a source close to Jolie, the story was false.

Jolie filed for divorce in 2016, opting to split from the "Once Upon A Time In Hollywood" actor citing irreconcilable differences. Pitt had six children with his former wife: Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Vivienne, and Knox.

Related Article: Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie Feud Continues Following SAG Reunion with Ex-Wife Jennifer Aniston

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VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Mota Ventures Corp. (CSE:MOTA)(FSE:1WZ:GR)(OTCPINK:PEMTF) (the "Company" or "Mota") is pleased to announce that further to its January 10, 2020 news release, it has now acquired the intellectual property and trade names of Sativida from Sativida OU (Estonia). The Company will license both back to Sativida OU's subsidiary, VIDA BCN LABS S.L. (collectively with Sativida OU, "Sativida") in exchange for a royalty associated with the gross revenues generated by Sativida.Sativida is an arms'-length producer and online retailer of cannabidiol ("CBD") and branded CBD products in various jurisdictions in Europe, including Spain, Portugal, Austria, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Sativida currently develops and retails a vast range of organic CBD oils and cosmetics across Europe and is in the process of expanding its distribution network internationally to include the United States. Sativida has become the number one search-ranked online retailer of CBD products in Spain and Mexico, and intends to continue its expansion into other countries in Europe and Latin America.Through Mota, Sativida has an agreement with Unified Funding, LLC ("Unified") for the expansion of the brand into the United States. Unified will provide assistance to Sativida with product sourcing, packaging, shipping, payment infrastructure and marketing in the United States. Unified Funding is an e-Commerce and technology company focused on serving U.S.-based and international consumers in the CBD and natural health products market. Powered by its proprietary technology platform, Unified has created an e-Commerce ecosystem to scale its brands through data analysis, strategic customer acquisition and supply chain management. Since June 2015, Unified has generated a database of over 4.5 million consumers and has facilitated over US$200 million in consumer transactions from more than one million paying customers."I am very excited to announce the acquisition of the Sativida brand. This gives Mota immediate entry into the European market and will be a building block for our planned European expansion. Mota's U.S. operation, First Class CBD, is set to enter the European market and we expect the acquisition of the Sativida brand to expedite this expansion. Furthermore, our partnership with Unified Funding, LLC, the e-Commerce platform behind the success of First Class CBD, will allow us to bring the Sativida brand to the U.S. market as well," stated Ryan Hoggan, CEO of the Company.Noah Laith, founder of Sativida, commented, "Joining Mota is a major step for Sativida that will provide access to the capital, connections and infrastructure necessary to grow our business in Europe and internationally." Pursuant to the previously announced binding agreement with Sativida dated January 9, 2020 (the "Transaction Agreement"), the Company was granted the right to acquire Sativida in stages (the "Transaction"), at the discretion of the Company, as certain corporate and intellectual property registrations were completed. To accomplish this, the Company set up a wholly-owned Spanish subsidiary ("Spanish Subco") and coordinated the registration of various intellectual property and trade names associated with business operations of Sativida.The Company, through Spanish Subco, has now completed the acquisition of the intellectual property and trade names of Sativida in Spain, and will license both back to Sativida in exchange for a royalty associated with the gross revenues generated by Sativida. Pursuant to the Transaction Agreement, the Company also holds the right to acquire, through Spanish Subco, all of the outstanding share capital of Sativida at any time for no additional consideration.Consideration for the Transaction is made up of an initial component of 2,000,001 (the "Consideration") and an earn-out component made up of three milestone payments based upon the revenue of Sativida (each, a "Milestone Payment"). The Consideration was paid in 5,496,221 common shares of the Company (the "Consideration Shares") at a deemed price of $0.5689 per share. Each Milestone Payment will be based on a 400% multiple of Sativida's revenue until the aggregate of the Initial Consideration and Milestone Payments reaches 4,000,000, at which point the multiple will be reduced to 100%. In no event will the combined Milestone Payments and the value of the Initial Consideration exceed 15,000,000. Payment of the Milestone Payments will be satisfied by the Company issuing common shares ("Milestone Shares") to Sativida. The total number of Milestone Shares issuable to Sativida will be determined by dividing the amount due by the volume weighted average closing price of the Company's common shares on the Canadian Securities Exchange in the ten trading days prior to the day that the Milestone Payment is due.The Consideration Shares and the Milestone Shares will each be subject to a 36-month pooling arrangement such that 10% of the Consideration Shares, or the Milestone Shares, as applicable, will be released from escrow on upon their issuance, with an additional 15% being released every six-months thereafter until all Consideration Shares or all Milestone Shares, as applicable, are released.As part of the Transaction, Mota Ventures will enter into employment contracts with certain employees of Sativida and will provide an option pool that may be divided among the employees of Sativida equal to 60,000 in stock options of Mota Ventures for every 1,000,000 in revenue that Sativida earns, subject to certain conditions. Additionally, Mota Ventures has paid a 10% finder's fee based on the total value of the Consideration Shares (528,072 common shares) to certain finders that assisted in introducing the Transaction to the parties as well as a 2% administrative success fee based on the total value of the Consideration Shares (105,614 common shares) to a consultant who assisted in the administration of the transaction.The Company and Sativida are at arms'-length. The Transaction is not expected to result in a "reverse-takeover" or "fundamental change" for the Company under the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange, or result in the creation of any new insider or control person of the Company. No changes to the board of directors, or management, of the Company are contemplated in connection with the Transaction.About Mota Ventures Corp.Mota is seeking to become a vertically integrated global CBD brand.
ST. JOHNS, N.L.Police say a woman in Newfoundland has been arrested for a second time for allegedly refusing to stay inside after arriving from outside the province, contravening public health measures put in place to combat COVID-19.

The 53-year-old was arrested in the Curling area of Corner Brook, N.L., Thursday morning  one day after she was released from custody for contravening special orders under Newfoundland and Labradors Public Health Protection and Promotion Act.

She is currently back in custody, awaiting a court appearance.

The woman has been charged with failing to abide by the special-measures order and two counts of breaching a release order. Contravening orders under the public health emergency measures could lead to a fine between $500 and $2,500 or a jail sentence of up to six months.

Const. James Cadigan with the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary said only one person has been arrested for offences related to the provinces emergency orders as of Thursday morning.
Kasautii Zindagii Kay: Parth Samthaan, who plays Anurag Basu in Kasautii Zindagii Kay, has revealed that he plans to spend his next 21 days playing playstation. The actor has also shared a photo of himself playing playstation.

Kasautii Zindagii Kay: In the challenging times of COVID-19, Kasautii Zindagii Kays Anurag Basu aka Parth Samthaan has found a perfect way to keep himself busy. Amidst the 21-day-long countrywide lockdown, Parth has decided to spend majority of time indoors while playing playstation. Sharing his plans to stay busy during home quarantine, Parth Samthaan treated his fans with an adorable photo on Instagram, which is making many of his female fans go gaga over him.

In the photo shared by Parth Samthaan on social media, he can be seen playing a game on his beloved playstation. He also asked his playstation to become his best friend for the next 21 days. Earlier, Parth had also shared a photo with his grandmother. While sharing the photo, the actor wrote in the caption that it is very important to be with our loved ones in the midst of coronavirus. He further urged everyone to stay isolated.

In the wake of novel coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak in India, the shooting of all television shows, web series and films along with their production work has been brought to a halt. Of now, there are a total of 649 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in India, including 593 active cases, 42 cured and 13 deaths.

Also Read: Ex Bigg Boss contestant Shehnaaz Gill says she was upset to see Asim Riaz with Sidharth Shukla in the grand finale

Speaking about Kasautii Zindagii Kay, the current track is following Prerna Sharmas return to Kolkata after Anurag Basus betrayal. As Prerna gears up to seek revenge, it is also revealed that her and Anurags daughter Sneha is alive.

Also Read: Mujhse Shaadi Karoge: After Indeep Bakshi, Balraj Syal wants Shehnaaz Gill, Sidharth Shukla to come together

Also Read: Katrina Kaif shares a funny video of her sweeping the floor,Arjun Kapoor calls her Kantaben 2.0

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Pappu Qureshi, a good samaritan in Mumbai, helps feed more than 15 migrant families, mostly daily wagers and their children, since Mumbai went into a lockdown, but with the 21-day national lockdown looming large, time is running out.

Can you help?

IMAGE: Some of the daily wagers from Uttarakhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh huddle together inside the home of one of the immigrants as an uncertain future lies ahead. Photograph: Kind courtesy Pappu Qureshi

A good samaritan, who was actively involved in helping the Mumbai riot victims of 1992-1993, the flood-affected people of the 2005 Mumbai deluge, and more recently helping those whose homes and livelihoods were washed away by a tsunami-like wave when a huge wall gave way because of the heavy downpour in July 2019 in north Mumbai, Musa 'Pappu' Qureshi has once again emerged as the epicentre of all the efforts that are underway to help feed and look after scores of migrant families ever since Mumbai began witnessing a partial lockdown last week.

With Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi announcing a complete national lockdown from March 25 for the next 21 days, these 15 families comprising 46 people, and 200 more who have been shifted to different locations in Malad East's Pathanwadi, north west Mumbai, neighbourhood by various non-profit organisations, Qureshi is pleading for any help, from any quarter to help feed them "till India wins this war over the Covid-19 pandemic."

"I don't think this lockdown will end after 21 days. Even if it does it will take months more for people to get back to their normal, earning lives," Qureshi tells Prasanna D Zore/Rediff.com over the telephone, a few hours after he had helped feed these families their lunch, brought by people from nearby residential buildings, on the first day of the national lockdown.

SEE: The helpless labourers describe their condition. Video: Kind courtesy Pappu Qureshi

"They are my tenants. I have told them I will not be charging them any rent for the next two-three months. Most of them are from Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh," he says about these families emphasising the melting pot, which the city has become, and which manifests itself mainly after either tragedies or pandemics like this one.

But while the rent part has been taken care of, even for a month or two, Qureshi and many like him are looking out for helping hands who could help these non-profits and individuals take care of food necessities of 300-odd people.

"Jamaat-e-Ilsami and other local NGOs have taken as many as 200 people from my place to another location in Pathanwadi so that people can follow some semblance of social distancing," Qureshi says, explaining the need for people to stay away from each other lest they get infected by coronavirus in these scary times.

"We are looking for people who can provide us with food items, cereals, pulses, vegetables, fruits, whatever for the next month or so for these many people," he says when asked about his biggest challenge.

"People donating money will not help as much as those providing food items in our case," he adds.

"While groceries remain open and vegetable vendors sell their wares every morning, most of these places are so crowded that venturing out in crowds come with coronavirus risks," Qureshi explains. "While donations are also welcome, now you get why money won't help much."

"Money can be distributed among these people, and will be needed, once this pandemic gets over so that these daily wagers can sustain for some time till they get back their livelihoods and earning capacity" he says.
New Orleans residents are starting to get the cold shoulder from officials in neighboring states due to the city's surge in known cases of the coronavirus.

On Thursday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said that people traveling from New Orleans to Texas by air are now ordered to self-quarantine once they arrive in the state. The executive order will require travelers to fill out paperwork detailing their stay in Texas and quarantine for 14 days after arriving.

Louisianians 'escaping' to Gulf Coast amid coronavirus pandemic has Mississippi leaders worried

Texas already has nearly 1,500 confirmed cases of the coronavirus across all of its major cities. Abbott said that the quarantine was designed to help slow the spread.

"This is intended simply to achieve the goals that have been articulated by the CDC and the White House organization focused on reducing the spread of the coronavirus in the United States," Abbott said during a news conference at the Texas Capitol in Austin, according to The Texas Tribune.

The order comes as some Mississippi officials have also started to worry about an influx of New Orleans residents traveling to Bay St. Louis and other areas along the Mississippi Gulf Coast  cities and towns where many Louisianians have vacation homes or condos. The Biloxi Sun-Herald on Wednesday reported Bay St. Louis Mayor Mike Favre was concerned that New Orleans residents could bring the coronavirus with them.

We have major concerns because they have the fastest growing number of cases of this virus and we are the closest to them, Favre told the Sun-Herald.

Mississippi had at least 485 confirmed cases of the coronavirus as of Wednesday evening.

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In Texas, Abbott reportedly said in the news conference that Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the White House's coronavirus task force, was one person who suggested the quarantine requirements.

Anthony Fauci: Coronavirus shutdown in Louisiana likely needed to come 'a bit sooner' Louisiana and the rapid growth of coronavirus cases across the state was a focus of Chris Cuomo's Prime Time show on CNN when he invited guest

The Texas Department of Public Safety is handling the enforcement of the order, which also applies to travelers from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards responded to Abbott's decision at a news conference Thursday.

"I cannot say that's not inappropriate," Edwards said.

The move by Gov. Abbott comes after Florida issued a similar order requiring New Yorkers traveling to the state by air to quarantine. Both Florida and Texas are believed to already have significant community spread of COVID-19.

Known coronavirus cases in New Orleans are increasing faster than in nearly any other county-level jurisdiction outside of New York.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
PREVENTION and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) in Dodoma region has dragged to court a former Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) Dodoma District Chairman for allegedly forging, conspiring and using phony documents.

The thirty-nine year old Robert Mwinje was charged yesterday along with his office attendant, Nyemo Malenda (20) at the Residence Magistrates Court in Dodomas Central Business District.

According to PCCB Regional Commander, Sosthenes Kibwengo, the two committed the offence between October 18 and 20, 2019 contrary to Penal Code no 16 and its amendments of 2018.

At the court, Kibwengo pointed out that during the dates, Mr Mwinje, being the chairman and Malenda being the Office Attendant, forged an appointment letter for aspiring new party leaders.

He said the forged letter printed by the partys district management was submitted to a party stalwart as an authority and decision for the post, yet knowingly it was a flop.

Meanwhile, Tanzania Teachers Commission acting Secretary in Bahi District, Mr Adam Richard (49) has been taken to Bahi District Court for soliciting a bribe of 1.5m/-, but received only 553,000/- down payment to promote four teachers at their places of work.

Richard now faces four counts for breaching section 15(1) of the PCCB act number 329 of 2018. We were tipped that the civil servant has been soliciting bribes, yet promoting teachers is part and parcel of his work.

We embarked on our investigations and found that between April and June 2019 he demanded and received money from the teachers, who needed promotion.

Equally, we received a lot of more terrifying information, but were still working on them and we expect to charge him afterwards, said the PCCB Regional Commander.
A Chinese man reportedly working as a university professor in Japan has confessed to spying and was in custody in his home country, China's foreign ministry said on Thursday.

Yuan Keqin was investigated on suspicion of espionage and had "confessed to the facts of the crime", ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a regular press briefing.

He was responding to a question from Japanese media about a professor at the Hokkaido University of Education who disappeared after travelling to China last June.

Yuan had returned for a family funeral and had been out of contact since, Japanese agency Kyodo reported in December.

Geng did not confirm any details about Yuan's background but said there was "unambiguous evidence" of his guilt, adding that his case had been transferred to authorities for review and prosecution.

A group of Japanese researchers have issued an emergency appeal for the scholar, who specialises in East Asian political history, according to Kyodo.

A Japanese man detained by Beijing -- reportedly also on suspicion of espionage -- was released and returned to the country, government officials in Tokyo said last November.

Japanese media identified him as a professor from Hokkaido University.

Beijing said the man, identified as Nobu Iwatani, had confessed to collecting classified information from China.

China also detained six Japanese citizens for alleged "illegal activities" in 2017.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Delhi to ease restrictions, if Covid cases come down in next 2-3 days: Health Minister

Lata Mangeshkar health update: Doctor says,'She in ICU with Covid-19 and pneumonia, will be under observation'

Karnataka man kills self over Coronavirus fear, advises family to get tested in suicide note

India

oi-Deepika S

Bengaluru, Mar 26: A 56-year-old man in Udupi, Karnataka, allegedly committed suicide out of fear that he was infected with the dreaded Coronavirus or (COVID-19), which has killed more than 20,000 people across the globe.

The victim was found hanging near a tree outside his house and has left a note to his family in which he said he had contracted coronavirus. In the letter, he has advised his family members to get tested for the virus.

The deceased has been identified as Gopalakrishna Madivala, a resident of Narnadu in Uppoor village of Udupi taluk. He was working as driver with KSRTC for several years and was recently posted as a trainer of new drivers.

The man had no specific symptoms of the virus infection. He was awake till 2 am in the night, speaking to his family members. He was found hanging from a tree near the house when others in the house woke up at 5 am on Wednesday.

However, police said that he was not in the list of people who had been asked to remain in home quarantine. He also did not display any symptoms, police added.

The fear of the disease might have driven him to take the extreme step, police said.

The man is survived by his wife and two children.
Pompeo said in a statement that the failure of Afghanistans leaders harmed U.S.-Afghan relations and, sadly, dishonors those Afghan, Americans, and Coalition partners who have sacrificed their lives and treasure in the struggle to build a new future for this country. He added that the United States is prepared to reduce by another $1 billion in 2021.
A grief-stricken son has today described the 'pure torture' of watching his 83-year-old mother 'suffocate to death' because of coronavirus and now he has to self-isolate from his three children.

Michael Hardy, 47, watched his 83-year-old mother Rachael pass away at Northwich Park Hospital, Harrow, after the killer virus ravaged her lungs and left her gasping for breath.

Mrs Hardy, a former NHS nurse with chronic asthma, had bravely battled coronavirus since March 10- but her condition worsened violently last week and she died last Friday - one of the 465 who have passed away in the UK.

Only days earlier she was filmed smiling as she did an 'elbow bump' with one of her children in her hospital bed.

Her son Michael was with her when she died and told Sun Online: 'It was like suffocating to death - gasping - you're not able to breathe. It just happened so quick, she was deteriorating in front of us'.

His brother Angelo, 56, added: 'It was pure torture. Mum was trying to tell us lots of things but she couldn't get it out, she was struggling. I think she was aware of what was happening.'

Racheal Hardy's tragic death has been repeated hundreds of times in the past month as coronavirus sweeps through the country - but many are dying without loved-ones beside them.

Michael Hardy (pictured), 47, was allowed into his 83-year-old mother Rachael's room at Northwich Park Hospital, Harrow, just hours before she died in her sleep

Rachael, who lived alone in Eastcote, north east London, first suffered from a cough and fever on March 10 - and after ringing 111 went into hospital

Earlier, Michael had filmed a jovial conversation with his mother, who was in 'high spirits', while she lay in her hospital bed just hours before her illness rapidly worsened.

Rachael, who lived alone in Eastcote, north east London, first suffered from a cough and fever on March 10 - and after ringing 111 went into hospital.

But the next day she was sent home with antibiotics.

Just four days later she fell onto the floor and couldn't get up, leading to her son finding her next to her bed 72 hours later.

She was severely dehydrated and taken back into hospital where, on Thursday, March 19, she was diagnosed with coronavirus. She died the next day.

Her son Michael, who runs a telephone company, thought his mother would be okay right until the end. And described her death as a 'shock'.

He said Rachael, who had chronic asthma as well as mobility issues, was housebound and never went anywhere so he couldn't understand where she might have picked up the highly contagious illness.

Michael managed to persuade hospital staff to allow him to don full protective equipment - which he described as a 'space suit' - to visit his mother's ward.

Michael filmed a jovial conversation with his mother, who was in 'high spirits', while she lay in her hospital bed just hours before her illness rapidly worsened

He explained his surprise the moment he was confronted by dozens of patients, some gasping for breath, as they battled the deadly virus.

Michael thought that because his 'happy and loving' mother had survived a difficult upbringing, heavy bombing during WW2 and a run-in with Cypriot terrorists, she would be okay.

Rachael, who was born in Hull, was given up by her 'unwell' mother and raised by an adoptive family who treated her as a slave.

She left for London at the age of 18 and worked as a nurse, but later left to join The Navy, Army and Airforce Institutes in Cyprus.

There she fell in love with Paul's father, a high-ranking police officer who worked for a secret force, but had to leave when he was viciously beaten up by EOKA terrorists.

Last week, when the hospital called with bad news Michael and Angelo raced to the isolation ward to put their brother Paul, 59, and Michael's kids on the phone to speak to her.

Before the pair left the ward, their mum told them: 'I'm tired now, I'm going to go to sleep.' She later passed away.

The brothers are now self-isolating together in Harmondsworth, Hillingdon.
SOUDERTON, PA / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Ensuring a regular and quality blood supply is a constant challenge for healthcare systems worldwide. In the US, according to data from the American Red Cross, a mere 3% of citizens normally donate blood even though 38% of the population are eligible to donate; Every two seconds, someone requires a transfusion; And a single donation could save as many as three lives. The current US blood supplies can barely meet the needs of patients, many of whom rely on transfusions to survive, either because of severe trauma, life-threatening medical conditions, or surgical complications. In times of national emergencies, such as pandemics or major natural disasters, the lack of sufficient supplies can lead to unnecessary loss of life, exacerbating already tragic situations. Hence, the strong advocacy from the medical and scientific communities for the development and use of blood substitutes, such as the oxygen-carrying solution Hemopure, manufactured by Hemoglobin Oxygen Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech company headquartered in Souderton, PA.

While clinicians have been able to use evidence-based medical and surgical concepts to optimize hemostasis and minimize blood loss in an effort to improve patient outcomes, the number of donors over the past few years has dropped significantly, more than negating any savings. An additional risk, this time to the safety of US blood supply, is that despite what officials describe as near-Herculean efforts to screen donated blood for the emerging viruses, the nation's blood supply is not immune from contaminations as was the case a few years ago when the CDC announced that several cases of West Nile illness were attributed to blood transfusions that contained tainted blood.

The push to develop alternatives to traditional blood transfusions has intensified in the 21st century amidst the global population growth and aging, the emergence of new infectious agents, and the seemingly rising number of natural disasters due to climate change. Not only is the number of donors insufficient to meet demand, but the nature of blood is such that it cannot be readily stockpiled, as refrigerated blood has a shelf-life of only 42 days. With multiple positive medical journal articles already published on Hemopure, its characteristics - including no blood typing or cross matching as well as three-year stability without the need for refrigeration - are ideal for out-of-hospital applications and stockpiling for national emergencies. It is no surprise then that the US Department of Defense is funding a large prehospital clinical trial to evaluate use of Hemopure as a resuscitation fluid in conjunction with freeze-dried plasma.

Currently, Hemopure is stocked and used at several hospitals as an investigational product, under FDA's authorized expanded access protocols, for the treatment of severe anemia when blood transfusions are not an option. Interestingly, regulatory authorities in South Africa and Russia have already granted market approval for Hemopure for the treatment of perioperative anemia. "While blood transfusion will always be the gold standard of treatment, there is also an obvious need for alternative products, such as Hemopure, in our healthcare system and emergency preparedness," experts at BloodSupplySolution.com assert. "Stakeholders in government, academic medicine and industry should find a way to work together to make this happen proactively rather than reactively."

Blood Supply Solution - Oxygen-Carrying Blood Substitutes: http://bloodsupplysolution.com

Hemoglobin Oxygen Therapeutics LLC - https://hbo2therapeutics.com/

Expanded Access Protocol Using HBOC-201 - ClinicalTrials.gov: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02684474

Contact Information:

Gail Weiss

BloodSupplySolution.com

267-871-9577

gweiss@bloodsupplysolution.com

http://bloodsupplysolution.com

SOURCE: Hemopure

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/582693/Hemopure-Addresses-the-Serious-Threat-Posed-to-US-Blood-Supplies-by-the-Emerging-Infectious-Diseases
As the entire country is making every effort to combat the deadly coronavirus outbreak, the Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) of North West Vijayanta Arya and her team, as a humanitarian gesture, have taken the initiative to adopt a refugee camp in Majlis Park area.

The Delhi Police officials have decided to adopt about 250 Pakistani refugee families from the camp for 21-day nationwide lockdown.

"There are about 250 families of refugees in Majlis Park of Adarsh Nagar who migrated from Pakistan and are resettled here. They were making their ends meet by doing daily wage labour. Since the lockdown, the families have been resourceless. So, we decided to pitch in resources by making efforts from our end and have decided to take care of food and essentials requirement for this 21 day period," DCP Arya said while speaking with ANI.

READ | PM Modi Leads The COVID-19 Fight At G20 Virtual Summit, Statement Accessed

"This is the time when we all should stand together and fight this deadly virus. We will offer all possible help to campers here. Not just food, but also medical facilities if required. I appeal to other citizens also, the ones bestowed with sufficient resources, to help our fellows in this hardship. Its time when we stand united," she added.

READ | MASSIVE: FM Sitharaman Announces Rs 1.7 Lakh Cr Coronavirus Relief Package; Details Here

India fights Coronavirus

As there is no vaccine or specific antiviral medicine to treat COVID-19, countries have been grappling with all possible mechanisms to contain its scope. As of now, the only possible measure to arrest the spread of the virus is by way of social distancing and maintaining personal hygiene.

Keeping in mind the looming threat of the virus, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day lockdown in the country, shutting down all the services and operations while allowing only essential services like healthcare facilities, water, food and energy supplies and banking facilities to remain operational during the lockdown. PM Modi stressed on maintaining social distancing and urged the citizens to avoid stepping out of their homes.

To bring some relief to the poor who live hand to mouth, the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced a COVID-19 relief package worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore with an exhaustive list of benefits for the poor and women to provide some relief from the impact of the pandemic

(Representative Image, source - PTI).

READ | 'Thank You For Reaching Out To The Poor': Kamal Haasan Hails FM Sitharaman's Relief Plan

READ | COVID-19 Lockdown: Cong Backs FM Nirmala Sitharaman's Rs 1.7 Lakh Cr Relief Plan For Poor
Many figures on the right have expressed concern about the toll on the economy from prolonged social distancing and from the closing of businesses. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter, a timeline that top health professionals said was far too soon.
Jerusalem: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was set to hold onto power after his chief rival, Benny Gantz, reversed himself on Thursday and signalled he would be open to serving in a Netanyahu-led government.

Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist Blue and White party: "It all sounds like political pressure." Credit:AP

Gantz, a former Israeli army chief who had vowed to bring Netanyahu's long rule to an end and fought him to a draw in three elections, said he was changing course to help bring the country together to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

"These are unusual times, and they call for unusual decisions," Gantz said in a speech to parliament early Thursday evening.

"This is not the time for infighting and mudslinging," he said. "This is not the time for controversy and divisions. This is the time for responsible, committed, patriotic leadership. Let's join hands and get Israel out of this crisis."
Selected Pick n Pay stores are offering a drive-thru service where shoppers do not have to leave their vehicle to buy groceries.

This forms part of Pick n Pays strategy to better serve their clients during the 21-day coronavirus lockdown in South Africa.

Pick n Pay informed customers that their stores will remain open throughout the shutdown, and there is no need to stockpile.

There is enough food in the supply chain, and we ask customers to support us by not stocking up beyond what they need, the company said.

Our stores will remain open, safe, and well-stocked for our customers during this time so that they can continue to get what they want and need, said Pick n Pays Marketing Head John Bradshaw.

Our staff are working really hard to keep our stores clean and our shelves stocked. We are giving them every support, and ask all our customers to do the same.

Pick n Pay drive-thru service

For those who would prefer to avoid as much physical interaction as possible with other shoppers and staff, Pick n Pay is offering a drive-thru service.

Here is how the Pick n Pay drive-thru service works:

You email your order to your local Pick n Pay store with a drive-thru service.

You receive a two-our notice about your order.

You park your car in a designated spot in the Pick n Pay shops parking lot.

A Pick n Pay staff member delivers the groceries and load them into your car.

You pay from within your car through a sanitized credit card machine.

Pick n Pay highlighted that it has limited purchases on specific products per customer in store and online to help serve all customers.

It should be noted that only a few franchise Pick n Pay stores will offer the drive-thru service to their clients. It will therefore not be available at all stores.

Pick n Pay drive-thru flyer
Authorities in Revere said seven cases of coronavirus have been linked to a senior housing facility in the city.

Revere Mayor Brian Arrigo said as of Thursday the citys Board of Health was notified by state health officials that there were 33 positive cases of COVID-19 in Revere.

Of these positive cases, seven have been identified as residents of Jack Satter House on Revere Beach Boulevard, the mayor said in a statement. Five of these individuals are hospitalized and one is deceased, though the cause of death for this individual has not been confirmed.

The Jack Satter House is run by Hebrew SeniorLife, which has set several measures in place earlier in the months.

My heart goes out to the family that has lost their loved one, and to the others who continue to fight the virus, Arrigo said. As part of our continued effort to slow the spread of COVID-19 and protect our most vulnerable residents, we are directing further restrictions at Jack Satter House and issuing additional guidance to senior housing facilities across the city. COVID-19 is a highly contagious virus. It is imperative that everyone take measures to stem the spread within our community by staying at home.

As of Thursday, the Jack Satter House ordered all residents not to leave their apartment after receiving directives from the citys Board of Health.

Residents must quarantine in their apartments and not enter common areas of the building or leave the building, according to a statement posted by Hebrew SeniorLife on Thursday.

The facility closed the dining rooms and is having food delivered to residents. Groceries and other items are also being delivered. All deliveries are being made to the front desk only.

The Revere Board of Health issued directives to the Jack Satter House management to immediately implement several protocols to safeguard the health of residents and staff along with first responders, health care providers and the broader community.

It is the intention of this directive to enhance the efforts of the Jack Satter House and the policies already in place and give further authority for them to enforce these critical protocols, Arrigo wrote. The Board of Health is also issuing an additional advisory to all other senior housing facilities in the city.

Arrigo declared a state of emergency in the city on March 19.

A total of 1,838 cases in Massachusetts and 15 deaths due to the virus have been reported as of Wednesday, according to the state Department of Public Health.

Sign up for free text messages about important updates on coronavirus in Massachusetts
Norway announced Thursday that it had extradited a fundamentalist Islamic preacher to Italy, despite the ongoing coronavirus epidemic, where he has been sentenced to jail for leading a jihadist network.

"Krekar is no longer in Norway. Krekar has today been extradited to Italy," Norwegian Justice Minister Monica Maeland told a press conference.

The 63-year-old Iraqi Kurd -- known as Mullah Krekar, but named Najumuddin Faraj Ahmad -- was arrested in July 2019 after he was convicted in his absence by an Italian court and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

The Italian court found him guilty of having led a now dismantled jihadist network, Rawti Shax, a Kurdish movement with alleged links to the Islamic State group and which is suspected of planning attacks in the West.

Krekar arrived in Norway in 1991 as a refugee. Norway's Supreme Court authorised the extradition in early February, ending Krekar's legal attempts to avoid deportation.

Considered a threat to national security in Norway, Mullah Krekar had been the subject of deportation proceedings since 2003, when Norway first decided to deport him to Iraq.

However, the decision was never implemented, due to concerns that he might suffer torture and face the death penalty there.

The deportation to Italy comes at a time when that country is the hardest hit in the world by the new coronavirus pandemic, with more than 7,500 deaths.

"We have been given assurances that he will receive the help he should have and needs," Maeland told the press conference when asked whether Krekar risked contracting the potentially deadly COVID-19.

Krekar's lawyer, Brynjar Meling, told AFP the extradition marked "a day of shame" for the Norwegian authorities and constituted a "denial of justice".

According to Meling, Krekar is particularly at risk because he suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure.

Krekar, who founded the radical Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, is designated a terrorist by the UN and the US and has spent several years in Norwegian prisons for issuing threats and calling for murder.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 00:33:22|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the G20 Extraordinary Virtual Leaders' Summit on COVID-19 via video link in Beijing, capital of China, March 26, 2020. (Xinhua/Li Xueren)

BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping Thursday called for a resolute all-out global war against the COVID-19 outbreak as leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) convened an extraordinary summit to coordinate multilateral response to the pandemic.

"It is imperative for the international community to strengthen confidence, act with unity and work together in a collective response," Xi addressed the summit via video link in Beijing.

Calling major infectious disease the enemy of all, Xi said the international community must comprehensively step up international cooperation and foster greater synergy so that humanity as one could win the battle against the COVID-19.

The summit came as the global death toll from the COVID-19, an illness caused by novel coronavirus, has climbed over 21,000 and the number of infections has surpassed 480,000 as of Thursday, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University.

This is the first time for the leaders of the world's 20 major economies to hold a summit online since the mechanism, which used to only gather finance ministers and central bankers, was elevated to be the world's premier platform for international economic cooperation in 2008.

Stressing the outbreak is spreading worldwide and the situation is disturbing and unsettling, Xi called on countries to move swiftly to stem the spread of the virus.

He proposed that a G20 health ministers' meeting be convened as quick as possible to improve information sharing, strengthen cooperation on drugs, vaccines and epidemic control, and cut off cross-border infections.

Xi also proposed a G20 COVID-19 assistance initiative for better information sharing and policy and action coordination with the support of the World Health Organization (WHO).

Guided by the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind, China will be more than ready to share its good practices and provide assistance in its capacity to countries hit by the growing outbreak, he said.

Xi called on countries to make a collective response for control and treatment at the international level.

China has set up its online COVID-19 knowledge center that is open to all countries, said Xi.

He said it is imperative that countries pool their strengths and speed up research and development of drugs, vaccines and testing capabilities in the hope to achieve early breakthrough to the benefit of all.

The summit was chaired by Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. The kingdom, which holds the presidency of the G20 this year, said it organized the extraordinary meeting to advance global efforts to tackle the pandemic and its economic implications.

The leaders of G20 members were joined by their counterparts from some invited countries, including Spain, Jordan, Singapore and Switzerland, as well as the United Nations, the World Bank and other international organizations, and the chairing states of some regional organizations.

Comprising 19 countries plus the European Union, the G20 members account for about two thirds of the entire human population and some 86 percent of the gross world product.
While much of the Dan River Region adapts and all but shuts down in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19, local farmers  though concerned about and already seeing some of the negative effects of the global pandemic  must continue operating business as usual.

These producers essentially have to, for the time being, pretend that theres no downstream effect thats going to be taking place months from now, said Stephen Barts, a Pittsylvania County extension agent.

Even though there are a wide range of disruptions  including spikes and declines in demand, spiraling prices, labor shortages and broken supply chains  farmers have to continue with their regular preparations and operations.

The agriculture community has not missed a beat during this whole crisis.  We are an essential industry that cannot miss a beat during any time of crisis, said Robert Mills, a Pittsylvania County farmer who serves on multiple boards with the Virginia Farm Bureau.

The American Farm Bureau Federation laid out three primary concerns in a news release Wednesday: Labor shortages because of restrictions of the H-2A program  a federal program that allows farmers to hire foreign workers on a temporary basis  issues with the supply chain at processors and packing plants, and market manipulation of prices.

For labor, many area farmers use the H-2A program. In 2017, 479 farm workers came to Pittsylvania County through the H-2A program, the second most of any Virginia locality, according to Virginia Employment Commission estimates.

Several countries have suspended routine immigrant visa services indefinitely, which will affect the H-2A workers who are scheduled to arrive in the next few months. While the United States Department of Agriculture and Department of Labor have found some ways around this, including the hiring of H-2A workers who are already in the country who cant return because of travel restrictions.

If additional restrictions are placed on the H-2A program, the labor issue could play out in two different scenarios depending on the timing, Barts said. If producers havent put their seeds in the ground, then they no longer need a larger workforce. On the other hand, if a farmer already has planted the crops, they will have to locate additional workers through other means.

Part of the problem is we dont really know what disruptions are going to place, we dont know how severe those disruptions are going to be, Barts said. Were in a position where its kind of a daily change in the circumstances.

In terms of supply chains, the American Farm Bureau is concerned the processors and packing plants that help get the food from the producers to the consumers will be slowed down because of social distancing policies.

Nathan Hammock, a dairy farmer based in Museville, said he is having no problems getting his product out, but he is concerned there will be problems getting the supplies he needs, such as medicine, fertilizer and seed.

The thing that concerns me the most is the supply chain coming to me, he said. Hopefully that wont stop somewhere in a warehouse.

Robert Pollok, who runs a certified seed business in Pittsylvania County, said he already is seeing shortages in masks and gloves he and his employees use to fight off dust and chemicals during their work. Despite his concerns about long-term demand and a lack of supply, he must continue planting as normal.

Its too far forward into the spring to be changing what were going to do, he said.

Both stock prices and commodity prices have fallen drastically in recent weeks amid international concern over COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. But as the stock markets have declined, prices for corn, soybeans and wheat  three popular commodities in Virginia  have spiraled as well, said Tony Banks, a commodity marketing specialist with the Virginia Farm Bureau.

With the drop in stocks, and youve got the issue with the low oil prices, this is all adding uncertainty, so its depressing prices, he said.

But the numbers havent only declined; theyve fluctuated in recent days, with a few days of gains Tuesday and Wednesday being followed by further declines Thursday.

Its a pendulum thats swinging back and forth, so with that kind of volatility its hard to make a marketing decision, Mills said.

The prices for most livestock also are taking a nosedive, said Cole Staudt, media relations specialist with the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Its a bloodbath, Mills said of the price drops, particularly with cattle. It is terrible. We are below break-even.

To be honest with you, we dont know what to worry about, added Bob Harris, a Pittsylvania County cattle and chicken farmer. Everybodys got a wait and see approach.

Even as prices for many products are dropping, Hammock said demand has skyrocketed in recent weeks as milk flies off the shelves and the processors are screaming for milk.

Were still putting it out the door as hard as we can, he said of his operation, which puts out more than 30 tons of milk per day.

Overall, however, demand for agricultural products has declined as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Retailers have seen a major uptick in sales as people seek to stock their shelves during a period of social distancing, but large-scale buyers  such as schools, universities and sit-down restaurants  have closed their doors for the time being.

Thats going to address some of the lost demand from institutional buyers  its not going to cover it all, but it is going to help some, Banks said of the increase in retail demand.

Many farming markets are being forced to adjust their approach with the rules about social distancing. For instance, the Lynchburg Livestock Market, which hosts weekly cattle auctions, has reverted to streaming the auctions online and allowing buyers to bid virtually.

The online thing could actually turn out to be a positive  once everything comes back to a sense of normality, that could open up another avenue of marketing, said Chris Haskins, a Pittsylvania cattle farmer who usually sells his cattle through the Lynchburg program during April and May.

All of the market changes and disruptions just add another layer of uncertainty to a sector that already is dependent on many variables and has experienced increasing costs while commodity and product costs have stagnated or even declined, Staudt said.

I think this is an unprecedented level of uncertainty for all sectors of the economy right now, he wrote in an email. Agriculture has just been hit with unprecedented levels of uncertainty for the last few years, and this is the latest hit to the industry.

Due to environmental timelines and weather concerns, farmers cant just delay planting crops for a few weeks or stop taking care of their animals. That could jeopardize the countrys entire food supply.

We cant stop working. We cant shut our production down, Pollok said.

Added Mills: The next 60 days sets the stage for the next nine months.

Ayers reports for the Register & Bee. Reach him at (434) 791-7981.

Ayers reports for the Register & Bee. Reach him at (434) 791-7981.

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[March 26, 2020] Hunters.AI Now Available in CrowdStrike Store, Offering Users 'XDR' Capabilities and Extending Threat Detection Beyond the Endpoint

LEXINGTON, Mass. and TEL AVIV, Israel, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hunters , an Israeli cybersecurity pioneer in autonomous threat hunting, announced CrowdStrike , a leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection, has made Hunters.AI threat hunting solution available through the CrowdStrike Store. Hunters innovative approach extends threat detection beyond the endpoint and enables threat hunting at scale.

Hunters.AI autonomous threat hunting detects cyberattacks that bypass existing controls in every environment. Using the rich endpoint telemetry and open APIs provided by the Falcon platform, it interconnects with a wide array of data sources and IT environments like cloud and networks, and enriches its threat signals with unique TTP-based attack intelligence as well as Falcon threat intelligence feeds. Hunters.AI extends threat detection and response across every IT environment  a capability increasingly known as " XDR ." Hunters.AI has been recognized in the March 2020 Gartner  Innovation Insight for Extended Detection and Response  report (Gartner subscription required). According to the report, Extended detection and response describes a unified security incident detection and response platform that automatically collects and correlates data from multiple proprietary security components.



We believe the rich APIs of CrowdStrike Falcon power a thriving partner ecosystem, enabling strategic technology integrations with cloud leaders like Hunters, said Andy Horwitz, vice president of Store Business at CrowdStrike. Our partnership with Hunters delivers an innovative and encompassing solution to todays IT organizations seeking holistic cybersecurity. We are proud to partner with leaders like Hunters to support the global battle against burgeoning threats and breaches. Our collaboration lets CrowdStrike users take their cybersecurity fight beyond the endpoint, using advanced AI to detect threats across every attack surface, noted Uri May, Hunters co-founder and CEO. CrowdStrike Security Cloud is an ideal platform enabling Hunters to build its effective XDR. The combination provides a compelling and comprehensive detection and response capability to the modern enterprise.

Learn more about Hunters.AIs XDR threat detection for CrowdStrike Falcon online or visit the CrowdStrike Store to extend your protection beyond the endpoint. About Hunters: Hunters launched its innovative autonomous threat hunting solution in May 2019. Combining unique attack intelligence and AI, Hunters.AI scales threat hunting techniques and detects cyberattacks that bypass existing security solutions. By seamlessly connecting to raw organizational data, Hunters.AI extracts threat leads based upon TTP (tactics, techniques and procedures). Hunters.AI performs autonomous investigation and intelligently correlates threat leads across all attack surfaces, equipping security operation teams with bottom-line attack stories for rapid identification, comprehension, and response to newly exposed cyberthreats, starting the moment its installed. Learn more at: Hunters.AI . CONTACT:

Deb Montner, Montner Tech PR

(203) 226-9290

[email protected]

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
When Californias governor ordered his state shut down to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic this month, semiconductor equipment manufacturer Lam Research shut down its Silicon Valley factories and complied.

In Oregon, though, Lam has kept its massive Tualatin plant running and ordered employees to keep reporting for work. The decision confounds Lam technician Michael Borek, who said theres no way he and his colleagues can do their jobs and remain six feet apart, as Oregon Gov. Kate Brown mandated in Mondays stay-home order.

Technicians work in teams around hazardous chemicals and electricity, he said, a basic safety measure to prevent a potentially serious accident. By continuing to work in close quarters, though, Borek said he fears efforts to contain the coronavirus will come to naught  and that it could spread widely throughout the factory, and the community.

Lam said it has been four weeks since Borek has been on site and that the company has made significant changes in that time designed to ensure the six-foot separation and has added protective equipment and gear in situations where its not possible to keep workers that far apart.

Lam said its products represent critical infrastructure. The company said it has taken additional steps to keep workers safe by sanitizing their work areas, keeping people apart in the cafeteria and monitoring their temperatures when they come in for work.

My concern is theyre not going to catch something, its going to spread to a lot of people, lots of people are going to get sick, said Borek, 29. I just dont feel safe.

Several dozen workers across a variety of industries reported similar concerns to The Oregonian/OregonLive in the time since Brown issued her Monday order. They complain its inherently impossible to do their jobs and maintain the six-foot buffer from their colleagues that health authorities recommend.

Unlike governors in other states, Brown gave Oregon businesses enormous latitude to decide for themselves whether to close during her indefinite stay-home order. She said some businesses, among them shopping malls, theaters, spas and barbers, must close because their are inherently unable to operate without putting people at risk of spreading the virus.

Many other businesses could remain open but Brown called on those employers to take personal responsibility in ensuring worker safety by keeping employees at least six feet apart.

If they cannot, Brown said, Then those businesses should shut down.

The governor has no firm enforcement mechanism to make sure they are complying, though, or to make businesses close if they dont follow her orders. At various times this past week Brown has designated three different state agencies as responsible for taking complaints about workplace violations.

The confused message concerns workers who fear exposing themselves to the virus, or worry crowded workplaces will thwart efforts to contain the outbreak. The state, meanwhile, says it is fielding many hundreds of complaints daily about alleged social distancing violations. (Oregon is taking complaints here but has yet to conduct any inspections or issue any citations.)

Workers in factories, grocery stores, warehouses, delivery services, restaurants, a flight-training school  even the states own Employment Department call center  all have said they feel uncomfortable continuing to work during the outbreak. But the employees said they cant afford to quit or take vacation time without knowing how long the outbreak will last.

Most of my coworkers currently believe that we have to choose between showing up or not getting paid unless we have accrued sick time or vacation time, said one Precision Castparts employee, who asked not to be named discussing his employer. There are also fears of retaliation if we do choose to take a leave of absence in order to self-quarantine.

Photos shot at job sites this week and shared with The Oregonian/OregonLive show many apparent violations:

Construction workers at Intels Ronler Acres site in Hillsboro, walking close together this week en route to their posts.

J.E. Dunn Construction workers, building a Hillsboro data center, standing shoulder-to-shoulder while aloft in a construction lift.

Employees personal gear packed tightly together at a Precision Castparts factory in Milwaukie.

Intel and Precision Castparts couldnt be immediately reached for comment Thursday. Both companies have acknowledged positive coronavirus tests at their Oregon sites in the past week, and both companies have said they are taking steps to ensure their workers remain safe.

Construction has been allowed to proceed in the state of Oregon, as it supports so many other essential businesses such as healthcare and public services, J.E. Dunn vice president Emily Gallagher wrote in an email Thursday. She said Oregons order allows the company to support its contractors and employees with jobs that support their families.

However, we know that there will inevitably be a period of transition as individual behavior is modified and jobsite culture and methods are adjusted, Gallagher wrote. Workers have been doing things a certain way for decades, and changing behavior, although critical, will take some effort.

J.E. Dunn has assigned two people at each jobsite to enforce social distancing, she said, and taken other steps to ensure workers remain safe.

We are committed to being as proactive as we can based on a new normal  one that changes daily, Gallagher said.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee issued a stay-at-home order Monday, shortly after Brown issued hers in Oregon. He followed up Wednesday with a new, more specific directive that Commercial and residential construction is not authorized under the proclamation because construction is not considered to be an essential activity.

Manufacturing and construction are two of Oregons most vital industries and shutting them down would be a severe blow to the states economy, which is already staggering during the coronavirus outbreak. Economists say Oregon faces a severe recession.

While Brown specifically exempted construction and manufacturing from her stay-home order, she said such employers must still take steps to protect their workers. On Tuesday, before Inslee acted, Brown said she didnt see a need to shut down Oregon construction.

The six feet of distancing, telecommuting, that probably doesnt work on a construction site, Brown said. But they also have equipment, from masks and helmets, that should provide a layer of protective gear.

Violators of Browns stay-home order are subject to a misdemeanor citation that could include a $1,250 fine, 30 days in jail or both. But the governor has said repeatedly she doesnt want to use law enforcement to enforce her rules.

I cant have police in every single law office or every single business office around the state of Oregon, Brown said this week. I am asking people to take personal responsibility and act with consideration for your employees and for your customers.

Big Oregon employers that continue requiring workers to report to the job include all the states major grocery chains, many restaurant kitchens that offer takeout or delivery service, construction contractors, and manufacturers large and small  among them Intel, Precision Castparts and Boeing.

Boeing shut down its Washington factories on Monday. Like Lam Research, though, it kept its Oregon factories operating.

Lam, which has had as many as 3,000 people working at its Tualatin campus in recent years, said Thursday that The health and safety of our employees remains our highest priority.

To protect our workforce, we have implemented robust workplace protections including enhanced and frequent disinfecting, social distancing controls, and active temperature monitoring, Lam said. We continue to monitor the situation closely to ensure we have the highest health and safety protocols.

A memo that Lam issued to workers late Wednesday, obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive, appeared to acknowledge the hazards  and the need for a fix.

We have too many people in the cleanroom and not enough controls for keeping physical distance between employees, the memo read. The note from a supervisor instructed employees to take the day off while supervisors and managers work on social distancing control.

Lam declined to discuss the memo. The company reiterated it has already taken steps to provide safety equipment and spacing within its factory.

The coronavirus has already arrived at many of Oregons largest workplaces. Precision Castparts acknowledged an infected worker last week and Intel said this week a contractor helping build its multibillion-dollar factory expansion in Hillsboro has been infected.

RVP Construction in Ontario shut down Monday after Brown issued her order. The small kitchen remodeler said it learned the next day that one of its employees had tested positive for the coronavirus  and now has had seven employees and the family member of one worker become sick.

RVP didnt say whether any of those others have been tested for the virus, but did say in a statement Thursday that All are recovering at home and seem to be over the worst of it.

While highly contagious, the coronavirus presents little risk for most people  the vast majority of those infected recover, and many have mild or no symptoms.

The potential consequences of infection, though, are high. Estimates vary widely about the fatality rate but scientists believe COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, to be significantly more deadly than the flu. It appears especially dangerous for older people and those with underlying health conditions.

Thats why Oregon and many other states have instructed people to stay home during the outbreak. Government officials hope that if they can slow the spread of the virus that will reduce the strain on hospitals and give testing and treatment regimens a chance to catch up.

Oregon has had 317 people test positive for the virus and 11 deaths attributed to COVID-19. The outbreak is much more severe elsewhere, with cases overwhelming hospitals in New York City, Italy and Spain.

Pressed this week for details about how Oregons stay-home order applies, Brown insisted repeatedly she has been very clear that people should stay home and businesses should not operate if they cannot ensure workers safety.

The governors message has been muddled, though, on how workers should respond if they see workplace violations. Her office initially directed workplace complaints to Oregons Occupational Safety & Health division (OSHA), but on Tuesday the governor said concerns should go to the Oregon Employment Department. On Wednesday, the governor said workers should direct concerns to the states Bureau of Labor & Industries.

On Thursday, shortly after this article posted, the governors office said complaints and coronavirus safety violations should go only to Oregon OSHA, not to the other state agencies.

OSHA said it is taking hundreds of complaints per day, but said it has yet to perform any inspections or write any citations.

The governor ordered restaurants and bars to close last week, but allowed them to continue offering delivery and takeout meals. Andy Ricker, owner of Portlands renowned chain of Pok Pok restaurants, opted Wednesday to close his businesses altogether. His decision followed the death of a fellow chef, Floyd Cardoz, and Ricker said he wished he had acted sooner.

Keeping our kitchens open is a microcosm of the tension between the economy and public health that is playing out on the world stage. The fact is, we all need to stay at home to stop the spread of Covid-19, all of us, now, Ricker wrote in a letter to employees.

Pok Pok is a restaurant, not a hospital, not a fire station, not a police station, not a vital food delivery service, He wrote. Though it is nice to have a familiar food available during this time of isolation people do not need fish sauce wings to survive.

This article has been updated with additional comment from Lam Research.

-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway |

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WASHINGTON  When it comes to large corporations that dont provide paid sick leave for workers, Sen. Kamala Harris is ready to resort to public shaming.

Harris, D-Calif., sent a letter Thursday to the CEOs of 36 large corporations  including McDonalds, Walmart, Kroger and Burger King  demanding they put public health ahead of profits and provide two weeks of paid sick leave and 10 weeks of family and medical leave for all workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary leadership, Harris wrote in the letter, which was co-signed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. We implore you to use your unique position as a leader in the business community to protect our workers and protect our nation.

Harris singled out corporations with more than 500 employees, which are exempt from new legislation requiring companies to provide paid sick leave to people affected by the pandemic. President Trump signed the bill March 18. Democrats tried unsuccessfully to extend the mandate to the largest companies.

Harris also took to Twitter to call the companies out by name, saying its unacceptable they aren't providing adequate paid leave for all their workers right now.

Kroger said it has begun granting two weeks paid leave to coronavirus-affected employees at its stores, which include Ralphs and Food 4 Less.

Walmart says it also has a new emergency leave policy, providing at least two weeks of paid leave for employees who contract the virus or are quarantined.

McDonalds and Burger King did not respond to requests for comment.

About a quarter of U.S. workers dont receive paid sick days, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Harris said that poses a public-safety issue during a pandemic because many workers without sick days are low-wage earners, such as waiters, cooks and housekeepers, who interact with many people on the job.

This is not only a pay equity issue, Harris told The Chronicle. It is not only about workers rights, it is literally about the fact that if you want to be safe, then advocate for paid sick leave for all workers.

The exemption for large businesses means the bill doesnt cover about 53% of workers, census data indicate.

In addition to McDonalds, Burger King, Walmart and Kroger, Harris and Gillibrand sent their letter to Subway, Pizza Hut, Target, Marriott, Wendys, Taco Bell, Dollar General, Applebees, Dunkin Donuts, Sonic, Publix, Chick-fil-A, Holiday Inn, Dominos, Walgreens, Cracker Barrel, CVS, KFC, JC Penny, IHOP, Panera, Meijer, Dollar Tree, Lowes, Wegmans, Jimmy Johns, Old Navy, Kmart, UPS, Gap, Sams Club and the Cheesecake Factory.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said Thursday that Democrats would seek to expand eligibility for paid family and medical leave in another relief bill after Congress approves a $2 trillion package that is nearing final passage.

Chronicle staff writer J.D. Morris contributed to this report.

Dustin Gardiner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dustin.gardiner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dustingardiner
IN 1986 as a member of the PNM then, many of us stood to rebuild the PNM by supporting the charisma and grit of Patrick Manning. What made us successful in the 1991 elections was Mannings ability to be honest with the country and show up the untruths of the NAR government. In 2010 I must admit although he faced numerous allegations, I opted to vote for Mr Manning because of one feature, his ability to always talk for the country as opposed for political gain.
New Delhi: With long queues at police stations for curfew pass, the Delhi government on Wednesday announced it would issue e-passes to those delivering essential services within and outside city limits. It also announced a helpline for those who have been harassed by state enforcement agencies, including police, to register their complaint.

The announcement came as reports emerged of delivery agents and workers being unable to reach their destination amid the stringent lockdown traffic restrictions enforced to curb the spread of Covid-19.

Those who are providing essential services, but do not have a formal ID card to back their claim will be issued an e-pass, Kejriwal said in a digital press conference. Workers at grocery and provisional stores, milk plants and others can avail this. Only those engaged with such services without an ID should call on the helpline. Others should refrain from calling on it... Those working in factories producing masks, sanitisers, milk, etc. will not face any problem once they get the e-passes. They should get the same for their drivers too so that transportation of such items are not affected

The government released a helpline number 1031 for the purpose. The CM said the facility to apply for the pass online will be provided as well.

Previously, everyone, including providers of essential services had to get curfew passes by approaching and applying with the offices of deputy commissioners of police and district magistrates. The e-pass initiative, government officials said, is likely to reduce the burden on these offices. Around 2,400 curfew passes were issued till Wednesday 11 am, the police said.

In case of harassment by police or other enforcement officers during the lockdown period, Kejriwal announced another helpline number 011-23469526, which will monitored directly by the Delhi Police commissioner.

Kejriwal urged people not to crowd grocery and medical stores, saying that doing so would defeat the purpose of the 21-day nationwide lockdown.The chief minister also said people didnt need curfew passes to buy from grocery shops located in their neighbourhood.

We assure you that supplies of commodities of your daily needs will not dry up. Do not resort to panic buying, Kejriwal said .

ACTION AGAINST LANDLORDS

The Delhi government empowered district magistrates and zonal officers in the city to take strict penal action against landlords who have been forcing their tenant health care personnel, engaged in treating Covid-19 patients, to vacate.

Such behaviour amounts to obstructing public servants in discharging their duties, read the order which HT has reviewed. The order came a day after the Delhi chief minister said how he was hurt by such news surfacing from across the city.

On Wednesday, Kejriwal again talked about the issue.

It can not be tolerated. Strict action will be taken, Kejriwal said.

Invoking the Delhi Epidemics Diseases, Covid-19 Regulations, the order said the district magistrates, zonal deputy commissioners of municipal corporations and the deputy commissioner of police are directed to take strict penal action against such landlords and house owners under the relevant provisions of law.

These officials have also been asked to submit their Action Taken Report on a daily basis to the office of the Additional chief secretary of the Delhi governments home department.

Resident doctors of Indias premier hospital AIIMS on Tuesday had sought the governments intervention saying their colleagues were facing eviction from their homes by their landlords, who fear the medical professionals at the forefront of the fight against the novel coronavirus could be infected.

In a letter to Home Minister Amit Shah, the Resident Doctors Association said many staffers were stranded on roads with all their luggage, and urged him to immediately release an order, prohibiting landlords from evicting the health care professionals working tirelessly against the virus from their rented houses.

Shah has spoken to the Delhi police chief and asked him to take immediate action to ensure the security of doctors facing harassment.
Lincoln police say a man they caught in January within seven minutes of him stealing a car left running at a gas station has been at it again.

Officer Erin Spilker said on Tuesday night around 9:30 police noticed a blue 2004 Ford F-150 that matched the description of one reported stolen in Lincoln three days earlier driving into downtown Lincoln on Interstate 180.

They followed and stopped Elliott Rohrs, 22, near 33rd and F streets.

Spilker said while processing the stolen pickup, police found a plastic bag of methamphetamine in the cup holder.

They arrested Rohrs, who was charged Wednesday with possession of a controlled substance and theft by receiving stolen property.

Spilker said Rohrs also was arrested on suspicion of two burglaries Tuesday morning, one at Finke Gardens, 500 N. 66th St., where computers and computer equipment were taken, and the other at Ace Hardware, 934 N. 70th St., where a gate was cut and several lawn mowers and lawn equipment were stolen. He hasn't yet been charged on those allegations.

Spilker said items stolen in both burglaries were inside the pickup Rohrs had been driving.
Study suggests extending school and workplace closures in Wuhan until April, rather than March, would likely delay a second wave of cases until later in the year, relieving pressure on health services

Study suggests extending school and workplace closures in Wuhan until April, rather than March, would likely delay a second wave of cases until later in the year, relieving pressure on health services

New modelling research, published in The Lancet Public Health journal, suggests that school and workplace closures in Wuhan, China have reduced the number of COVID-19 cases and substantially delayed the epidemic peak--giving the health system the time and opportunity to expand and respond.

Using mathematical modelling to simulate the impact of either extending or relaxing current school and workplace closures, researchers estimate that by lifting these control measures in March, a second wave of cases may occur in late August, whereas maintaining these restrictions until April, would likely delay a second peak until October--relieving pressure on the health services in the intervening months.

However, the authors caution that given the large uncertainties around estimates of the reproduction number (how many people an individual with the virus is likely to infect), and how long a person is infected on average, the true impact of relaxing physical distancing measures on the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic cannot be precisely predicted.

"The unprecedented measures the city of Wuhan has put in place to reduce social contacts in school and the workplace have helped to control the outbreak", says Dr Kiesha Prem from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK, who led the research. "However, the city now needs to be really careful to avoid prematurely lifting physical distancing measures, because that could lead to an earlier secondary peak in cases. But if they relax the restrictions gradually, this is likely to both delay and flatten the peak."

In December 2019, a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in Wuhan, China. In mid-January 2020, schools and workplace were closed as part of the Lunar New Year holidays. These closures were then extended to reduce person-to-person contact and prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

In the study, researchers developed a transmission model to quantify the impact of school and workplace closures using information about how often people of different ages mix with each other in different locations, and to assess their effects on bringing the outbreak under control.

Using the latest data on the spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan and from the rest of China on the number of contacts per day by age group at school and work, they compared the effect of three scenarios: no interventions and no holidays (a hypothetical scenario); no physical distancing measures but school winter school break and Lunar New Year holidays as normal; and intense control measures with school closed and only about 10% of the workforce--eg, health-care personnel, police, and other essential government staff--working during the control measures (as started in Wuhan in mid-January). They also modelled the impact of lifting control measures in a staggered way, and during different stages of the outbreak (in March and April).

The analyses suggest that the normal school winter break and Lunar New Year holidays would have had little impact on the progression of the outbreak had schools and workplaces opened as usual (figure 3). However, putting extreme measures in place to reduce contacts at school and workplaces, could reduce case numbers and the size of the epidemic peak, whilst also delaying the peak (figure 4). The effects of these distancing measures seem to vary by age, with the greatest reductions in new cases among school children and the elderly, and lowest among working-aged adults (figures 4 and 5). However, once these interventions are relaxed, case numbers are expected to rise.

Further analysis suggests that physical distancing measures are likely to be most effective if the staggered return to work commences at the beginning of April--potentially reducing the median number of new infections by 24% up to the end of 2020, and delaying a second peak until October.

"Our results won't look exactly the same in another country, because the population structure and the way people mix will be different. But we think one thing probably applies everywhere: physical distancing measures are very useful, and we need to carefully adjust their lifting to avoid subsequent waves of infection when workers and school children return to their normal routine. If those waves come too quickly, that could overwhelm health systems", says co-author Dr Yang Liu from London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. [1]

Despite these important findings, the study has some limitations, including that it assumed no difference in susceptibility between children, and that the extreme distancing measures used in Wuhan may have increased the transmission within households. Finally, the model did not capture individual-level differences in contact rates, which could be important in super-spreading events, particularly early on in an epidemic.

Writing in a linked Comment, Dr Tim Colbourn from University College London, UK (who was not involved in the study) says: "The study by Kiesha Prem and colleagues in The Lancet Public Health is crucial for policy makers everywhere, as it indicates the effects of extending or relaxing physical distancing control measures on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in Wuhan, China."

He continues: "Given many countries with mounting epidemics now potentially face the first phase of lockdown, safe ways out of the situation must be identified... New COVID-19 country-specific models should incorporate testing, contract tracing, and localised quarantine of suspected cases as the main alternative intervention strategy to distancing lockdown measures, either at the start of the epidemic, if it is very small, or after the relaxation of lockdown conditions, if lockdown had to be imposed, to prevent health-care system overload in an already mounting epidemic."

###

NOTES TO EDITORS

The study was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, National Institute for Health Research, Wellcome Trust, and Health Data Research UK. It was conducted by researchers from London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK.

The labels have been added to this press release as part of a project run by the Academy of Medical Sciences seeking to improve the communication of evidence. For more information, please see: http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/AMS-press-release-labelling-system-GUIDANCE.pdf if you have any questions or feedback, please contact The Lancet press office pressoffice@lancet.com

[1] Quotes direct from authors and cannot be found in the text of the Article.

Peer-reviewed / Modelling study / People
Central trade unions on Thursday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to announce a financial package of Rs 5-7 lakh crore for the worst-affected segments of the working population, saying their survival is in jeopardy due to coronavirus-forced lockdown in the country

New Delhi: Central trade unions on Thursday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to announce a financial package of Rs 5-7 lakh crore for the worst-affected segments of the working population, saying their survival is in jeopardy due to coronavirus-forced lockdown in the country.

"We demand that the government immediately announce not less than Rs 5 to 7 lakh crore package both to meet the urgent need of combating Covid-19 as well as for the protection of means of survival for the working people who are worst affected by the unavoidable lockdown situation," 10 trade unions said in a joint letter to the Prime Minister.

They stressed in the letter that saving the people's living and livelihood must be considered integral to the Covid-19 combat strategy.

The ten unions are INTUC, AITUC, HMS, CITU, AIUTUC, TUCC, SEWA, AICCTU, LPF and UTUC.

They also demanded the announcement of concessions and debt moratorium for the MSMEs, small retail traders, street vendors, self-employed, who are the worst affected by the 21-day lockdown imposed by the government in view of the rapid spread of the coronavirus outbreak.

The unions noted that daily wagers, casual labourers, migrant workers, agriculture workers, self-employed as hawkers and vendors, rickshaw pullers, e-rickshaw /auto/taxi drivers are facing livelihood crisis. Others like truck drivers and helpers, coolies/porters/loaders unloaders, construction and beedi workers, domestic workers and waste pickers etc are losing their livelihood in the lockdown/curfew situation.

Their very human survival has been put in total jeopardy as they lost their only means of their income and sustenance due to lockdown situation, the letter said.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

The trade unions also wrote that the door-to-door delivery of essentials like medicines, hygiene materials, vegetables/fruits and other food items must be allowed and facilitated.

They suggested that the government should immediately check the black marketing and hoarding of essential commodities.

Workers need immediate income support/financial relief, free ration and free fuel to cook food.

The supply of essential grains and necessities from the public distribution system (PDS) should be made with immediate effect from the existing stocks and not to wait till April.

They also demanded that the registered workers under various welfare boards be provided Rs 5,000 as urgent measure.

The unions said that they were aghast that the government''s Economic Taskforce headed by Finance Minister was only busy in announcing extension in deadlines for filing IT returns, GST, about TDS or the cases under Bankruptcy Act etc, benefitting mainly the defaulters among the big businesses but there was no announcement made for the 40 crore out of about 54 crore of working people whose survival is put at stake.

They demanded immediate announcement of strong statutory enforceable measures to arrest and put a ban on the ongoing spree of retrenchments, wage cut, forced unpaid leave etc being perpetrated by the employers on the workers, particularly contract/casual/temporary/fixed-term workers in various establishments, particularly in the private sector throughout the country to be enforced both by central and state governments.

Mere appeal by the government or advisory by the Labour Ministry is not at all working to prevent loss of employment and earnings in the process of lockdown, they added.
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Police were drafted in to guard shops yesterday as queues again formed at stores around the country.

The measures were thought to be aimed at countering panic buying and making sure shoppers kept the right distance from each other.

Officers kept watch outside Lidl and Sainsburys stores at a shopping centre in Stratford, east London.

They were also present at a Tesco in nearby Mile End as only one entrance was open to control who entered the store.

The move came as supermarkets began to recruit pub bouncers and limit the number of shoppers allowed in. The measures are among a raft of initiatives they hope will put an end to ugly battles in the aisles.

Panic buyers have been pushing and shoving as they battle to fill trolleys with items such as hand sanitiser, toilet roll and pasta. Tesco has recruited bouncers who lost their jobs as a result of the pubs shutdown.

The supermarket giant yesterday joined other outlets in announcing measures to protect shoppers and staff, while maintaining access to groceries.

Officers kept watch outside Lidl and Sainsburys stores at a shopping centre in Stratford, east London

Shoppers at Sainsbury's superstore wearing face masks and gloves, at the store in Greenwich , south-east London on Wednesday

The measures include limits on the number of shoppers, marshals on the doors to police queues and floor markings in stores to aid social distancing at checkouts.

Shoppers were pictured squeezing together at supermarkets up and down the country on Wednesday morning, ignoring social distancing rules from the government which say people are supposed to stay 6ft apart while stocking up on essentials and fanning fears that they could pass on the virus through touching and contaminating food.

And Jeff Howes, 58, from Coventry, has now revealed that his mother caught the virus and died after shopping at her local Asda.

Jean Howes, 87, only left her home for an hour a week to pick up groceries from Asda but while she was on one of her brief supermarket trips, the great-grandmother contracted the deadly bug and she died on Monday.

Her grieving son Jeff posted a poignant message on Facebook begging people to stay indoors in order to save lives.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday ordered Brits to stay at home to halt the spread of the virus, imposing curbs on everyday life without precedent in peacetime.

However, people are still allowed to leave their homes to shop for basic necessities, leading to supermarkets being flooded with customers and fears that they will become hotbeds of the virus.

Several major chains are now introducing new measures to try and enforce social distancing and protect staff, including a large quantity of hand sanitizer, gloves for workers and protective screens.

In other coronavirus developments in the UK:

London and Madrid are facing worse coronavirus outbreaks than Lombardy in Italy with deaths doubling every two days

Parliament is set to go into recess tonight a week early after pushing through a series of emergency coronavirus laws - with no return date;

Sadiq Khan revealed it is inevitable he will have to cut Tube services even further because one in three staff are now off sick - despite mass overcrowding on the Underground;

NHS medics working across the UK fighting the coronavirus pandemic threatened to 'quit the profession' over a lack of personal protection;

Prisons could release some offenders to ease the pressure caused by coronavirus after jails in England and Wales were put on immediate lockdown last night;

The UK's coronavirus death toll jumped to 422 in the biggest daily rise yet, while people still cram on the tubes and mingle in parks.

Shoppers in an East London Asda ignore social distancing rules as they stock up on essentials this morning

Despite having to stay 6ft apart, the shoppers crowded close together as they waited to get into the supermarket in Mile End

Great grandmother Jean Howes, 87, who only went out once a week to do her shopping at Asda, has died after contracting coronavirus, according to a social media post by her son Jeff

People queuing at Tesco on Bow Road by the Mile End flyover in London this morning, failing to heed social distancing rules

Heartbroken Jeff said: 'It is just madness that people are still going out in groups or having barbecues and carrying on with normal life.

'We were probably the same as everybody else thinking, this is a horrible thing but it won't affect us.

'If you are thinking like that, it can happen to you and when it does, it hits hard. I think there needs to be more of a clampdown and do what other countries have done them.

'I don't know how they would police it. It's difficult but it just needs to be stricter.'

The lorry driver and father-of-two started noticing his mum was suffering from cold-like symptoms last weekend.

He said: 'She would go out literally once a week for about an hour. She knew she was in the higher risk category so she was careful.

'I'd take her shopping just to the local Asda. She was independent but she stayed indoors as much as she could.

'I would drop her there, I wouldn't go around with her, she would do her shopping and I would do my shopping and meet her at the tills to take her home again.

'Mum was a good age, but she still had her independence until the end. The last time I took her shopping was a week last Sunday.

'She had a little bit of a cold. I said, 'do you want me to do your shopping for you?' But she wanted to go herself.

'Unfortunately, as the week went on, the symptoms got worse. It progressed quite slowly to start with, more or less just a cold. I was checking up on her obviously.

'She didn't seem to have the typical issues associated with the virus. She wasn't coughing, she thought her temperature was okay.

Police officers monitor the queues outside Tesco in Mile End, London this morning, as people cram together and ignore social distancing

Shoppers at the Asda Greenhithe store queue up in the car park - with most appearing to be adhering to social distancing guidelines

'It got a little bit worse during the week. You expect a cold to start off slow and then get a little bit worse but it didn't seem to be getting better.

'It wasn't until last Friday that things took a turn for the worst and Jean's symptoms escalated so much that she couldn't get out of bed.

'I went round at about 1.30 pm and all the curtains were shut. Obviously, that was a worrying sign. I could see that she was not very well.

'I called an ambulance, but even then, as far as I can see, she still wasn't showing the symptoms of the virus.

'She got that she started coughing a bit more, which rang alarm bells with me.

'Once they arrived they found she had a raging temperature, but even the crew thought it may have been a chest infection which would have given a high temperature anyway.

'Unfortunately, it turned out that she did have the virus. They took her into Coventry University Hospital.

'She then very quickly went downhill and died on Monday afternoon.'

Strict quarantine guidelines meant Jeff was not able to comfort his mother in hospital, often having to phone the ward she was on for regular updates.

He said: 'We were told we couldn't go and see her which is obviously the worst thing when a loved one is taken into hospital, that you can't go with them.

'I was just pacing up and down all day, wondering what's going on.

'You don't want to keep phoning them because, especially at certain times, as it's so busy there at the moment.

'At the end we were allowed to see her if we wore full protective suits which we did. It was heartbreaking.

'I wouldn't want anyone to go through what we have gone through and that's why I'm begging people to stay at home and obey the rules on social distancing.'

Just hours after Jeff posted a poignant picture of his late mum on Facebook along with a warning to people to respect the rules it went viral.

So far more than 40,000 people have liked and shared his story from around the world.

He said: 'I can't believe how mad it's gone, it is just crazy. It's all over the world. I just hope the message gets through before more people die like my mum did.

'Hopefully, even if it saves one person, then that little bit of effort was worth it.

'My mum was a kind, loving, generous lady that thought the world of her family. She had a mischievous sense of humour and was stubbornly independent. She will be sorely missed.'

Supermarkets have now introduced a range of measures to try and enforce social distancing.

Morrisons, Lidl, Aldi, Iceland and Sainsbury's have brought in protective screens for staff, and Waitrose - which is introducing 'two-metre marshalls' who will manage queues outside shops - has ordered screens and visors for its workers.

Waitrose calls its policies 'a set of strong, new measures' to help its customers shop safely.

The company said the number of customers allowed in at any one time will be limited so that social distancing can be observed, and a 'one in, one out' policy will be operated when it is judged that the shop is at capacity.

Customers coming to Waitrose will see marshals who will help to manage queues outside shops and if necessary remind people to respect the two-metre social distancing rule.

Waitrose will also dedicate the first opening hour to elderly and vulnerable customers and those caring for them, while NHS staff will continue to be given priority checkout service.

There will also be 'safe distance' floor signage, protective screens at checkouts, and additional security.

Morrisons, which has already put up perspex screens, is introducing signage in stores to support social distancing, including floor stickers, posters and banners which will ask customers to keep one trolley distance apart, as well as giving guidance on where to wait and where to queue.

People, young and old, cram into the Asda in east London to buy groceries, while flouting social distancing rules

Taped-off areas for customers to distance themselves from each other are seen at the checkout area of a local Tesco store in London

The taped off areas are one of several safety measures introduced by supermarkets to protect staff and workers amid the coronavirus pandemic

Long queues with people closely stood together were spotted in the London Asda this morning

Asda has also announced similar measures, saying it will introduce floor markers and directional barriers to help customers keep their distance, and will install perspex screens at its checkouts.

Hand sanitiser will be available for customers to use when entering and departing.

A number of self-service machine will also be shut in order to enforce the two-metre rule, a spokesperson told MailOnline.

Sainsbury's said it is 'working through the detail' but expects to restrict the number of people allowed in stores at any one time, and will also be introducing barriers outside to ensure people queue at a safe distance when waiting to get in.

The supermarket said it will also have reminders to keep two metres apart displayed throughout stores, screens at manned checkouts, and will close every other payment point to help keep people apart.

On Tuesday afternoon, Marks & Spencer said its 31 outlet stores selling only clothing and homeware will be temporarily closed.

M&S said when customers arrive at its food stores, they will see a 'greeter' who will ensure the number of customers in the store at any one time is managed.

Workers redeployed from the clothing and home departments will help support limiting customer numbers entering the store.

M&S said trolleys, baskets, screens and all touch points will be cleaned every hour and deep cleaned every night.

The stores will have floor markings in queuing areas to remind customers about social distancing and 'sneeze guards' will be in place.

Customers will be asked not to scan their Sparks card and cash payments are discouraged.

Nationwide Building Society has reduced its branch opening hours in response to the crisis, with most branches now opening from 10am until 2pm from Monday to Friday, and 9am until 12pm on Saturday.

Nationwide said there will be a two-metre distance rule between staff and customers at all times, while numbers of people in branches will be restricted to ensure rules around space can be controlled as much as possible.

Where possible, customers are being asked to use online or mobile banking services, particularly those at higher risk.

Santander said its branches will remain open where possible, but a number of its more vulnerable workers are currently being advised to stay at home while others are self-isolating.

Due to this, the bank has been unable to open a number of its branches.

Meanwhile, Unison said shopping centres, pubs, gyms and other businesses are being urged to provide free parking to NHS and care staff.

The union, which represents NHS, school, police, care and other essential key public service workers, is calling on local businesses closed because of the lockdown to help key workers drive to work and avoid public transport.
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New York, March 26, 2020  Authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan should conduct a swift and thorough investigation into the torture and robbery of journalist Adnan Rashidi and hold those responsible to account, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

In the evening of March 11, between three and five unidentified people wearing masks stormed into Rashidis home in the eastern Iraqi Kurdistan city of Penjwen, and beat him while holding his wife and daughter hostage, according to Rashidi, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

Rashidi is an Iranian Kurdish freelance journalist based in Iraq, who contributes to local outlets and is the editor of the Kurdistan Human Rights Association, an advocacy organization and news website based in Iraqi Kurdistan that documents human rights abuses in the Kurdish regions of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, he told CPJ.

The assailants, who claimed to be working for the Kurdish Asayish security forces, punched and hit Rashidi with sticks, handcuffed his arms and legs, and broke his hands while demanding he hand over his electronic devices and hard drives containing the identities of activists in Iran, he told CPJ and his employer reported.

Rashidi told CPJ that he gave over the information after realizing that the attackers were also holding his wife and daughter, and had forced his wife to strip and filmed her naked. The attackers fled the scene after he gave them his electronic devices, he said.

On March 17, police in the northeastern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah released a statement saying that two suspects in the attack, who were identified by the initials K.M.S. and J.H.A., had been arrested.

The brutal assault of Adnan Rashidi and attack against his family should not go unpunished, said CPJs Middle East and North Africa Representative Ignacio Miguel Delgado. Iraqi Kurdish authorities must leave no stone unturned in pursuing his assailants. The best way to ensure that such attacks do not happen again is to bring all the perpetrators to justice.

Pictures posted by the Kurdistan Human Rights Association show that Rashidi sustained a skull fracture, bruises, and a broken arm and hands as a result of the assault. Rashidi told CPJ that he has been unable see a doctor because of the ongoing lockdown in the region in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and said that the local hospital in Penjwen does not have the appropriate equipment to x-ray his skull.

I was jailed in Iran for 8 years because of my work. I was tortured really badly. But even Irans intelligence service did not do what was done to me this time here, Rashidi told CPJ.

Rashidi said that he has been under threat from Iranian security and intelligence services for years, which has led him to lock himself inside his home multiple times. He told CPJ that a man claiming to work for Iranian intelligence had recently threatened to kill him if he didnt stop reporting on human rights abuses in Iran.

He said all the people I was reporting on were terrorists and offered me a new life in Europe in exchange for quitting my job. When I refused, he threatened to kill me, Rashidi said.

He told CPJ that the attackers threatened to publish the video of his naked wife if he ever revealed what was done to him and his family. Rashidi said he recognized the voice of one of the assailants, an Iranian Kurd who had worked as Rashidis driver during his reporting assignments in the past.
Ryane Panasewicz, of Rancho Santa Margarita, is a nursing student set to graduate from West Coast University nursing school in Anaheim in June. Because of coronavirus, nursing students, faculty and administrators across the state are calling on the California Board of Registered Nursing to modify its requirements so students can complete more of their clinical education through simulations. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

Amid a frantic scramble to open hospitals and increase the number of healthcare workers, California nursing schools are warning state officials that an estimated 10,000 nursing students are in jeopardy of not graduating, meaning they will be unable help evaluate and treat patients amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Under state rules, nursing students must spend a substantial part of their clinical education in hospitals, but they are barred from doing so now because of hospital lockdown orders. Unless the state loosens its rules, students set to graduate in coming months will find it impossible to become a licensed nurse.

As a result, public and private nursing schools are pleading with Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state's Board of Registered Nursing to allow greater flexibility in how students meet their clinical education requirement after many hospitals discontinued training placements because of safety concerns and to focus on the tidal wave of COVID-19 patients.

I went through 19 months of training and the end is near and everything is coming to a screeching halt, said Ryane Panasewicz, 27, who attends nursing school at West Coast Universitys campus in Anaheim. Keeping graduating nursing students out of the healthcare system at this time will make problems worse.

Ryane Panasewicz is a nursing student set to graduate from West Coast University nursing school in Anaheim in June. (Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)

California has been bracing for an onslaught of COVID-19 patients, with Newsom saying this week that the state will need 50,000 additional beds and many additional healthcare workers. With the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases rising daily, nursing schools say the backdrop of their urgent request is clear.

On Wednesday, a Kaiser executive vice president and infectious disease expert said about half of Kaiser Permanentes San Jose hospital has been filled with patients confirmed or suspected to have the new coronavirus, prompting a need to boost staffing. Meanwhile, California has begun leasing medical facilities, with one in Daly City beginning to accept up to 220 COVID-19 patients this week, which will also require more healthcare workers.

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On Monday, Newsom said the state is exploring ways to get nursing students licensed earlier, but no additional details were provided by his administration Wednesday.

The Board of Registered Nursing, an appointed body that enforces laws on nursing education and licensure, has not indicated publicly what changes, if any, it is seeking. Michael Deangelo Jackson, president of the board, and Loretta Melby, the board's acting executive officer, referred questions to a spokeswoman, who declined to comment, saying she expected "more up-to-date information in the coming days."

"We could use these 10,000 nurses right now," said Joanne Spetz, an associate director of research at Healthforce Center at UC San Francisco, which produces supply and demand forecasts on registered nurses in the state. "Getting them out the door and practicing is incredibly important."

The Idaho Board of Nursing last week announced an apprentice program to move nursing students into hospitals and a temporary emergency license for students who are nearing graduation. This month, in response to the pandemic, the Texas Board of Nursing relaxed its rules on how many hours nursing students must work in hospital training rotations.

Critics say California's slow response is rooted in a lack of urgency on behalf of the state's nursing board.

Nursing students and instructors await a shift change in the intensive care unit at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica in 2014. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times)

So far, our governor and the California Board of Registered Nursing hasnt taken any action and we just arent getting anywhere, said Scott Casanover, senior vice president of governmental affairs for West Coast University and American Career College, which operate nursing schools in Anaheim, Los Angeles and Ontario.

We started appealing to the board three weeks ago saying this will be a huge problem if we cant graduate nurses," Casanover said. "There are no more nurses going into the pipeline until we solve this.

The University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges, which each operate nursing programs on various campuses, sent letters urging the governor and state nursing board to increase temporarily the number of clinical hours nursing students may complete through simulations.

Currently, the state requires 75% of a nursing student's clinical education to be in a hospital, with the remaining 25% allowed to be simulation. Students must also pass board exams after graduating.

Nursing schools are asking the state to reduce the required amount of in-hospital hours to 50% of a student's clinical education, thus allowing the schools to do more computer simulation with coursework that has already been moved online because of campus closures from the coronavirus outbreak.

Alison Wrynn, associate vice chancellor for academic programs, innovations and faculty development at California State University, said the vast majority of students expected to graduate this spring have had their clinical placement sites closed, largely because of the lack of available personal protective equipment.

The California State University system, one of the largest issuers of nursing degrees in the state, graduates about 4,000 nursing students every year.

Wrynn said allowing for more simulation education is a necessity, with only a small number of Cal State nursing students continuing with clinical placements in hospitals.

Other states have initiated a 50% simulation and their graduates are successful, Wrynn said. We have high-quality simulation software from respected vendors. Our faculty monitor these experiences and evaluate the students. Weve been doing this and weve been doing it well. This is not going to impact the quality of our nursing education.

Fresno City College President Carole Goldsmith said the state nursing board would be "incredibly shortsighted" if it did not ease the graduation requirements. Fresno City College produces about 200 nursing graduates each year and it's unclear, Goldsmith said, how many students could still graduate in May without the change.

Goldsmith closed the school's campus, but in-person elements for programs that train workers in essential services, like police work, firefighting and nursing, are continuing, per guidance from the state chancellors office and requests from local public health and safety officials.

Goldsmith said her college works with close to a dozen local sites to offer clinical placements for nursing students; only one of those, St. Agnes Medical Center, is still taking students.

Our capacity  has been greatly diminished, Goldsmith said.

With a limited number of healthcare workers, and many of those in a high-risk group for COVID-19, there are so many things our students could be doing, Goldsmith said, such as initial screenings, vitals and triage.

She said temporarily relaxing the state's rules on how much time a nurse must spend in a hospital rotation to graduate will not come at a cost to patients. She pointed to a comprehensive 2014 study by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing that showed there was no significant difference in learning or clinical performance between students who did 25% of their clinical education in simulations and those who did 50%.

And that was in 2014, Goldsmith said. Technology has improved in that time.

For now, nursing student Brea Ortiz of Whittier said, its a waiting game. Shes watching every news conference given by Newsom in hopes of hearing there will be some changes so she can graduate.

There is a need for us and we can be helpful, said Ortiz, 24, who is supposed to start a hospital rotation April 10 or her August graduation will be pushed back. The hospital rotation in a critical care unit is currently suspended.

All these new beds are going to need staffing, Ortiz said. Those on the front lines are going to experience burnout or exposure and the need for us is there. We just need help so we can get in there.
North Sea, Denmark - French carrier strike group and its flagship, the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, trained with the Standing NATO Maritime Group One (SNMG1) for four days last week.

North Sea, Denmark - French carrier strike group and its flagship, the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, trained with the Standing NATO Maritime Group One (SNMG1) for four days last week.

The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle sails with Standing NATO Maritime Group One (SNMG1) warships off the east coast of Denmark on 22 March 2020 (Picture source: French Navy)

Their combined exercises ran between 19-22 March bringing together warships from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom on the east coast of Denmark.

Naval exercises involving a large number of ships from various countries are complex and challenging. Regular training and exercises among NATO-forces and Allied nations are therefore important to enhance Alliances ability of naval warfighting and to maintain high readiness.

The ability to train and develop our procedures, communication and interaction is ultimately what tie us together as allied forces

The interaction with the French carrier strike group provides valuable opportunities for both the carrier strike group and us. The ability to train and develop our procedures, communication and interaction is ultimately what tie us together as allied forces. It enhances our readiness and our ability to fight war. Obviously it also enhances the cohesion within the Alliance. Together NATO allies constitute a powerful naval force," said Commodore Yngve Skoglund, Commander of SNMG1.

The aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and its strike group left France in January for operations in the Mediterranean Sea. The group has now deployed to the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 22:08:54|Editor: huaxia

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Li Zhanshu, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, speaks at a symposium on strengthening and improving legislation and revision of existing laws in public health, which was held by the NPC Standing Committee, in Beijing, capital of China, March 26, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Ye)

BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislator Li Zhanshu has called for efforts to strengthen and improve legislation and revision of existing laws in public health.

Li, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, made the remarks at a symposium held by the NPC Standing Committee.

Li underlined the importance and the urgency of improving public health legislation and law revisions to guard against major public health risks in light of the weak links exposed in the coronavirus outbreak.

Stressing the centralized and unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee and a people-centered approach, Li called for enhancing law-based governance capacity in public health.

Li said a coordinated mechanism for legislation and law revision and a special task group should be set up to review the implementation of relevant laws to push for scientific and effective legislation and revisions.

Advice and suggestions put forward to address the problems revealed in epidemic response, in particular, should be taken into consideration, he added.
Madison Township is carrying out a plan to continue holding government meetings while at the same time protecting the health of people who attend those gatherings during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The meetings of township trustees and the communitys other government boards have been relocated to the Bill Stanton Community Park banquet hall, at 5585 Chapel Road, from their traditional location in the township Administration Building at 2065 Hubbard Road.

READ MORE COVERAGE OF THE CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK

The trustees have chosen to move all township board meetings to the large banquet hall at Bill Stanton Park because it is larger than our meeting room at the township Administration Building, Trustee Kenneth Gauntner Jr. said in a Facebook post. This will allow us to create some distance in seating for the board members, and any public that might attend.

Along with trustees, other township panels that will assemble for meetings at the banquet hall are the Zoning Commission and Zoning Board of Appeals.

At the trustees meeting held there on March 24, all three trustees, as well township Administrator Tim Brown and Police Chief Matthew Byers, were sitting about 6 feet apart from one another at rectangular tables that had been positioned together at one end of the room.

A large number of chairs had been set in the hall for a meeting audience, but only two spectators  a news reporter and one resident  attended and sat about 12 feet from each other.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWines stay-at-home order, issued March 22, directs everyone in the state going outside their home and into shared spaces to maintain social distancing of at least 6 feet from any other person.

Another benefit of shifting the meetings to Stanton Parks banquet hall is reducing the number of people entering the Administration Building, which houses the Police Department and administrative staff.

Trustee Max Anderson Jr., during the March 24 meeting, said he thinks that holding meetings in the banquet hall is a good move.

Because if we had (government meetings) at (the township Administration Building), weve got to worry about the administrative side, and weve got to worry about the police side, he said. Coming in here (to the banquet hall) its just one open room. This can be cleaned quicker and easier than it would be over there.

In addition, the location of Madison Fire District board meetings has been switched, until further notice, to the banquet hall from Fire Station 3 on River Street in Madison Village. The Fire Board consists of all three Madison Township trustees and three members of Madison Village Council.

Meanwhile, township trustees approved a separate motion on March 24 related to how theyll conduct future meetings in light of state government orders issued in response to COVID-19.

Trustees unanimously agreed that they will hold only one regularly scheduled meeting each month instead of the usual two.

Anderson said the decision by trustees to only meet once a month would help comply with terms and conditions stipulated in Ohios declaration of emergency and the other two statewide orders.

Trustees next meeting will take place at 7 p.m., April 14, at the banquet hall. Until further notice, they will continue to meet at 7 p.m. only on the second Tuesday of each month. Work sessions will not be held prior to those meetings, Anderson said.

Normally, trustees also meet at 7 p.m. on the fourth Tuesday of each month.

When considering the threats posed by COVID-19, Anderson believes that trustees have made wise choices in revising how meetings will be conducted.

Were concerned about our employees, families, friends and ourselves, Anderson said. We didnt want to see anybody get sick, so I think this is the best idea.
Earlier this month, "Lost" actress Evangeline Lilly came under fire as she refused to go on self-quarantine amid the call of the government due to the coronavirus pandemic. She has two young children, but the actress wrote on her Instagram page that she, unlike a lot of people, values her freedom more than her life.

Caring For The Vulnerable

Maggie Grace fired back at her "Lost" co-star Evangeline Lilly for her stance amid the coronavirus scare. The actress honestly called out on Lilly for blatantly disregarding the mandate of health officials to practice social distancing.

In the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, the 36-year old actress could not help but worry for her and her unborn child's safety. After Lilly posted on her Instagram account that it was "business as usual" for her, despite being immunocompromised, Maggie Grace left a comment to hopefully put some sense to what is truly going on.

"There is no need to panic, but at the same time this is all about us-- the vulnerable, the immunocompromised, older folks," Maggie wrote. She further emphasized that although she believes that America is a free country, she encouraged everyone who chooses to exercise their freedom to always have compassion.

"Trust the extensive science here and not overwhelm the health system," Maggie added.

She went on to write, "No doctor should have to choose which patients get life-saving care and which patients get sent home to die -- the sort of triage that is tragic happening in Italy right now. Think about how these small decisions affect (sic) your dad and those in your community as ventilators run out."

Maggie also encouraged Evangeline to talk to their former co-star in "Lost" Daniel Dae Kim who recently came forward to admit that he tested positive for the coronavirus. His intent was to warn everyone he has come in contact with to get tested as well.

"PS Daniel said he is doing a lot better now btw. I don't know. Maybe you guys want to chat?"

Lilly is not the only celebrity who has a different take on the growing coronavirus scare. However, health officials continue to advise everyone not to take the coronavirus scare lightly. After all, it may not kill everyone, but it can definitely put a lot of members of the community in a more vulnerable situation.

Making Our Own Choice

Evangeline took it to social media to let everyone know what she thought about going on self-quarantine with her two children. Although it was a relatively unpopular opinion, especially at this time of the global health scare, the actress bluntly told everyone to back off.

"Some people value their lives over their freedom, some value their freedom over their lives. We all make our choices," Lilly wrote after posting a picture of herself dropping her children off at their gymnastics class.

Maggie was not the only person who called out on Evangeline for her opinion on the coronavirus scare. Others have encouraged her to think beyond herself so that she could see what the more vulnerable members of the community could suffer from.
(Natural News) The worst of the coronavirus pandemic is set to hit the State of New York like a bullet train, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a press conference, Tuesday.

We are not slowing it, and it is accelerating on its own, Cuomo said. Were now looking at a bullet train because the numbers are going up that quickly. He added that the state is in dire need of ventilators and hospital beds.

Speaking at the Javits Convention Center at New York Citys Eleventh Avenue, which is being retrofitted as a 1,000-bed hospital for non-COVID-19 patients, Cuomo asked the federal government to provide its 20,000 reserve ventilators to New York, as well as invoke the Defense Production Act that would direct manufacturers to build the much-needed machines and provide them the necessary financial support to do so.

I do not for the life of me understand the reluctance to use the Federal Defense Production Act, Cuomo said. We need the federal help and we need the federal help now.

According to Cuomo, the state needs at least 30,000 ventilators and at least 50,000 hospital beds at the minimum in order to accommodate the expected explosion in the states number of COVID-19 patients. The states hospitals only have a combined number of 11,000 ventilators  of which 7,000 were newly acquired  and 53,000 hospital beds.

Cuomo earlier issued an executive order requiring all hospitals operating within the state to boost their capacity by up to 50 percent in order to meet the expected influx of coronavirus patients.

The inescapable conclusion is that the rate of infection is going up, Cuomo said, explaining that the coronavirus rate of infection is now doubling every three days.

It is spiking. The apex is higher than we thought, and the apex is sooner than we thought. That is a bad combination of facts.

Cuomo further said that the apex, or the worst of the outbreak, could arrive in 14 to 21 days, and is expected to put huge pressure on the states health services,

We havent flattened the curve, and the curve is actually increasing, Cuomo said.

In an earlier briefing with reporters this week, Cuomo said New Yorkers should brace themselves in case the coronavirus spread lasts for up to nine months.

It is going to be four months, six months, nine months, the governor said, warning that there could be a chance that a major chunk of the population would contract the virus.

The timelinenobody can tell you, it depends on how we handle itbut 40 percent up to 80 percent of the population will wind up getting this virus, Cuomo said. All were trying to do is slow the spread. But it will spreadit is that contagious.

As of this writing, 25,665 COVID-19 cases and 210 deaths have been confirmed in the state of New York, of which 14,776 cases and 131 fatalities are concentrated in New York City.

Cuomos pronouncement echoes a statement made by the World Health Organization (WHO) that said the United States could emerge as the new epicenter of the lethal COVID-19 pandemic after it overtook Spain in terms of the number of infected and deceased individuals.

The United States currently has 61,081 confirmed cases and 841 deaths.

Cuomo pushes back against Trumps planned easing of restrictions

At the same conference, Cuomo also pushed back against what appeared to be plans by the federal government to ease restrictions to boost the countrys economy.

This could be in reference to President Donald Trumps statement on Monday, saying he was thinking about ways on how to restart the countrys economy once the 15-day shutdown ends next week.

I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter, Trump said in an interview with Fox News Channel, noting that the currently imposed restrictions could themselves lead to suicides or other fatalities.

Youre going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression. Youre going to lose people. Youre going to have suicides by the thousands, he said. (Related: Coronavirus HOTSPOT? New York cases now exceed 8,000.)

Trump, however, did not cite any evidence to support the assertion.

Trumps statements came a day after James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said that the governments shutdowns to combat the spread of the coronavirus could lead to the U.S. unemployment rate hitting 30 percent in the second quarter, in addition to an unprecedented 50 percent drop in gross domestic product.

Cuomo, in response to Trumps statements, said that he understood that shutting down the economy is unsustainable in itself, but that being too hasty to ease the limits on travel, socializing and working would also cost the lives of Americans.

If you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then its no contest, Cuomo said. No American is going to say, accelerate the economy at the cost of human life because no American is going to say how much a life is worth.

Cuomo plans to develop a refined public health strategy thats also an economic strategy instead of just prioritizing one over the other.

As of this writing, 455,000 have been confirmed to be infected by COVID-19 globally, while 20,543 have been confirmed dead. The virus death rate is currently pegged at 12 percent.

Sources include:

News.Trust.org

NBCNews.com

TheGuardian.com

NPR.org

BusinessInsider.com

TheHill.com

Bloomberg.com

Coronavirus.JHU.edu
Or are you going to listen to our gut-feeling-having president, who said Wednesday during a coronavirus press briefing: I think there are certain people who would like it to not open so quickly. I think there are certain people that would like it to do financially poorly because they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls.  They would love to see me, for whatever reason, because weve done one hell of a job  nobodys done the job that weve done, and its lucky that you have this group here right now for this problem or you wouldnt even have a country left.
New Delhi, March : Union Home Minister Amit Shah here on Thursday lauded the first Rs 170,000 crore Covid-19 relief package announced to protect the weaker sections of society, saying it reflected the Narendra Modi government's sensitivity.

Shah's remark came after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the relief package declaring the PM Garib Kalyan Yojana would benefit migrant workers and the rural poor and women.

"Today, the decisions taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for every section of the poor, farmers, labourers, elderly, women and Divyangs, affected by the coronavirus epidemic, reflected the sensitivity of the government. I thank the Prime Minister for this," Shah said in a series of tweets.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) welcomed the Rs 50 lakh health insurance to all the Covid-19 warriors.

Referring to the decision to supply 5 kg wheat and 5 kg rice per person in addition to 1 kg pulse for the next three months to 80 crore poor under the 'Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana', Shah said, "With this decision, no poor in the country will go without food." Shah said the Modi government had decided to deposit the first instalment of Rs 2,000 to farmers' account in the first week of April to extend relief to poor farmers during the Covid-19 pandemic. "More than 8 crore farmers will be benefited by this," he said.

Covid-19 has claimed 15 lives and infected over 600 people across the country.

On the decision to pay Rs 500 to 20 crore women Jan Dhan account holders and free gas to 8.3 crore Ujjwala scheme beneficiaries for three months, Shah said the move displayed how the Modi government had taken the burden of feeding the poor.

He also praised the step to increase loan from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 20 lakh to 63 lakh Self-Help Groups (SHGs) under the National Livelihood Mission.

"The government has decided to give an additional Rs 1,000 to the elderly, widows and disabled. This money will go directly to their bank accounts through direct benefit transfer. It will benefit around 3 crore people," he said.

The relief package was announced two days after the Prime Minister announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown till April 14 to break the spread chain of Covid-19 that has killed over 20,000 and infected 3.80 lakh across the globe.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Gunmen gunmen opened fire on Pakistani security forces patrolling a remote border region near Iran on Thursday, killing two troops, a provincial minister said.

Four other troops were also wounded in the attack in the town of Turbat in impoverished Baluchistan province, said provincial interior minister Ziaullah Longove.

The troops were patrolling the region where smugglers have a strong presence. Pakistan has also stepped up security along the Iran border in recent weeks to check on movement of people in order to contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. Such attacks have been blamed on militants and small separatist groups. Baluchistan has long been the scene of a low-level insurgency by armed groups demanding more autonomy for the region and a greater share in the gas and mineral resources there.

The government claims it has quelled the insurgency but violence has continued.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Infosys on Thursday said it is deeply concerned with an "inappropriate post" on social media related to the coronavirus outbreak being attributed to a company employee, and vowed to take necessary action based on its investigation.

The company also said it would assist any independent investigation into the matter.

The IT major's comments came after an individual, who claims to be an employee of Infosys, posted an inappropriate content that triggered an outrage on microblogging site Twitter.

"Let's join hands, go out and sneeze with open mouth in public. Spread the virus," the individual said in a social media post. A screenshot of the post made its way to Twitter.

In a tweet from its official handle, Infosys said, "We are deeply concerned with an inappropriate post being attributed to an Infosys employee. We strongly reaffirm our commitment to responsible social-sharing".

Further, the company said itspreliminary enquiry, and discussions with its employee "suggest that this could be a case of a mistaken identity".

"However, given the seriousness with which we take such matters, we are investigating this further and will also assist with any independent investigation. The company would take appropriate action based on its investigation," it noted.

The deadly coronavirus infection, which started in China and has spread to many parts of the world, including Europe and the US, has infected more than 650 people in India. So far, it has claimed 13 lives in India.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The long-term closure of schools during the coronavirus outbreak has teachers scrambling to adapt as they shift to a remote model of learning that many districts are unprepared to put in place.

Years ago, wealthier public and private schools entered the digital age as students began logging in from laptops using high-speed internet access at home. But many public schools were left behind.

At this point, nearly a million students across the Bay Area wont be back in a classroom until early May, officials announced Wednesday. If the closures are extended again, schools could be shuttered until the fall.

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing Bay Area districts to play catch-up so kids can keep learning. In many cities, thousands of students still dont have access to computers or the internet at home, officials say. In districts that are further along, the transition to remote teaching and learning is uneven at best, leaving many parents and students frustrated.

Parent Dee Deshpande created an online petition to urge Fremont Unified officials to adopt live video instruction so students will keep learning during the closure.

While some teachers quickly ramped up videoconferencing or online lesson plans, others simply emailed random activities that kids could do, said Deshpande, who has a second-grader and a seventh-grader in the district.

The teachers are doing what they can do individually and their best, but theres no consistency, he said. I want the school board to start thinking about what to do next, to start thinking creatively, out of the box.

District officials said they were working with the teachers union to come to an agreement on what is expected of educators during the closure. In the meantime, teachers independently are deciding how to interact with students.

Santa Clara Unified is at the other end of the spectrum, launching digital instruction for middle and high school students Wednesday, including a class schedule requiring students to log in and teachers to take attendance.

Elementary schools will start to attend online classes on Monday.

Superintendent Stella Kemp said she sat in on a couple of morning sessions Wednesday, including a U.S. history class studying Cold War propaganda.

She could see all the students, some at desks and others in bed with pillows behind their backs.

This is a different way of teaching and learning, she said, adding they were smiling and happy to see each other and back to a schedule. They are engaged in the curriculum.

Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle

The district tested the system Tuesday, asking students to log in for each class, where they learned about online etiquette and how to adapt to a videoconferencing classroom.

About 7,000 middle and high school students attended their classes, more than 90% of students in those grades, Kemp said.

Officials also handed out Chromebooks to students who needed them prior to the start of classes, but they are still monitoring who needs access.

We can see after today which students have not yet engaged with the teaching and learning, the superintendent said. From there we can reach out individually to those families to find out what they need and how to help them.

Across the Bay Area, other districts were at various stages of getting that kind of digital learning up and running.

San Francisco school officials, for example, are anxiously tracking the shipment of 8,000 Chromebooks ordered in recent days to loan out to students across the city who lack a home computer. In the meantime, they are loaning out devices they have on hand, with 900 distributed so far.

Officials said they expect to begin teacher-led coursework online on April 13, but that an estimated 15% of the districts 62,000 students didnt have access to computers or the internet prior to the closure. They are working on addressing that now.

Brian Gonzalez, 15, who lives with his three siblings and parents in the citys Sunnydale projects, said he picked up one of those Chromebooks on Wednesday, but his family still doesnt have Wi-Fi access.

Its kind of difficult not having Wi-Fi. Without it we cant really do much, the June Jordan freshman said. We have to use a hot spot to do work, but that sometimes disappears.

Still, Brian said he was looking forward to getting back to lessons and homework, even if it meant attending school via a screen.

Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle

Since Ive been out of school, I couldnt really do anything at home because of the Wi-Fi, but I care about my work, Gonzalez said, adding that a Chromebook was an inferior substitute for school. I prefer learning in class.

Other districts are also scheduling drive-through access to computers while companies like Verizon and Comcast are offering free digital home access for at least the next two months.

Hayward Unified also handed out Chromebooks to elementary school students on Wednesday morning, including a distribution site at Burbank Elementary, where staff have already scheduled a digital spirit week with activities, including Make a TikTok Video Tuesday and Stay in Your Pajamas Friday.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Across Hayward, the schools are transitioning to more online learning, although no student will be penalized if work is not done due to access issues, said spokeswoman Dionicia Ramos Ledesma.

In general, each district will be required to determine how to continue teaching during school closures and how or whether to grade student work. Its a local decision, state officials said.

But teachers should still be taking attendance somehow to comply with compulsory education laws, according to state guidelines.

Many if not most districts have yet to track attendance since work has been optional and often sent by email or in paper packets home.

Some districts, like San Francisco, also have a significant population of homeless and recent immigrant students, as well as foster youth, who do not have stable homes or reliable contact information to set up digital learning, said Melissa Dodd, chief technology officer.

Internet access is a challenge for us in SFUSD and cities at large, she said.

Many district leaders and state officials say that on the other side of this crisis, schools will emerge better prepared than ever for the digital age, perhaps a bright spot amid the doom and gloom.

Santa Clara County teacher Carl Erickson was already adapting his eighth-grade science classes to an online format, teaching via video chat with his students, some huddled under covers to escape siblings during class.

Theyre in good spirits, he said. Its fun to see them.

But Erikson, who teaches at Buchser Middle School, wasnt sold on distance learning.

Its not the real thing, but it will do for now, he said. I miss my job. This is not why I started teaching, to stare at a computer all day.

Chronicle writer Shwanika Narayan contributed to this story.

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker
This spring, American residents throughout the fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands partake in the critical decennial tradition of completing a Census questionnaire. The Census is the only statistical undertaking conducted by the government that maps every resident into a geographic location. The results of this nationwide count influence the U.S. government and economy for the following decade, from the apportionment of Congressional representatives to federal funding for schools and infrastructure repairs. As author Teresa A. Sullivan articulates succinctly in Census 2020: Understanding the Issues, "everybody counts"--including adults, children, incarcerated people, homeless and migratory people, and noncitizens.

Because the data collected in this statistical undertaking is so critical to the appropriation of federal resources, it is a legal requirement. However, in the 21st Century, when the United States is more heavily populated than ever before, people's housing circumstances vary widely, and there exists a pervasive fear of data misuse, it can be difficult to get an accurate and complete count. Dr. Sullivan skillfully explores the undercounted and underreported in her book, discusses the multitude of challenges involved, and outlines how the Census Bureau confronts them. She investigates the political controversies surrounding a citizenship question--not currently included on the Census questionnaire. This volume illuminates some important questions about the future of the Census, including how the United States will reconcile data protection and adequate representation.

This book will be of particular interest to non-specialist readers interested in social demography, political statistics, U.S. government processes, machine learning, and the representation of marginalized communities in the United States. Nevertheless, it is also an excellent resource for American residents curious to learn more about the ongoing Census in the United States.

###

About the author

Teresa A. Sullivan is president emerita and university professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and the interim provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Michigan State University. Renowned for her scholarly contributions in social demography, she is the author or co-author of multiple publications, including The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (2000, with Elizabeth Warren and Jay Lawrence Westbrook), The Social Organization of Work (2011, with Randy Hodson), and As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America (1999, with Elizabeth Warren and Jay Lawrence Westbrook).

Teresa A. Sullivan

Census 2020: Understanding the Issues

2020, XI, 113p., 1 b/w illus., 3 illus. in colour

Softcover $27.99 | 19.99 | 23,91 

ISBN 978-3-030-40577-9

eISBN 978-3-030-40578-6
UPTON, NY--You know how you leave space in a water bottle before you pop it in the freezer--to accommodate the fact that water expands as it freezes? Most metal parts in airplanes face the more common opposite problem. At high altitudes (low temperatures) they shrink. To keep such shrinkage from causing major disasters, engineers make airplanes out of composites or alloys, mixing materials that have opposite expansion properties to balance one another out.

New research conducted in part at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory may bring a whole new class of chemical elements into this materials science balancing act.

As described in a paper just published in the journal Physical Review Letters, scientists used x-rays at Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)--a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility--and two other synchrotron light sources to explore an unusual metal that expands dramatically at low temperature. The experiments on samarium sulfide doped with some impurities revealed details about the material's atomic-level structure and the electron-based origins of its "negative thermal expansion."

This work opens avenues for designing new materials where the degree of expansion can be precisely tuned by tweaking the chemical recipe. It also suggests a few related materials that could be explored for metal-mixing applications.

"In practical applications, whether an airplane or an electronic device, you want to make alloys of materials with these opposite properties--things that expand on one side and shrink on the other when they cool down, so in total it stays the same," explained Daniel Mazzone, the paper's lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at NSLS-II and Brookhaven Lab's Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department.

But materials that mimic water's expansion when chilled are few and far between. And while the expansion of freezing water is well understood, the dramatic expansion of samarium sulfide had never been explained.

Like other materials Mazzone has studied, this samarium-based compound (specifically samarium sulfide with some yttrium atoms taking the place of a few samarium atoms) is characterized by competing electronic phases (somewhat analogous to the solid, liquid, and gaseous phases of water). Depending on external conditions such as temperature and pressure, electrons in the material can do different things. In some cases, the material is a gold-colored metal through which electrons can move freely--a conductor. In other conditions, it's a black-colored semiconductor, allowing only some electrons to flow.

The golden metallic state is the one that expands dramatically when chilled, making it an extremely unusual metal. Mazzone and his colleagues turned to x-rays and theoretical descriptions of the electrons' behavior to figure out why.

At NSLS-II's Pair Distribution Function (PDF) beamline, the scientists conducted diffraction experiments. The PDF beamline is optimized for studies of strongly correlated materials under a variety of external conditions such as low temperatures and magnetic fields. For this experiment, the team placed samples of their samarium metal inside a liquid-helium-cooled cryostat in the beam of NSLS-II's x-rays and measured how the x-rays bounced off atoms making up the material's crystal structure at different temperatures.

"We track how the x-rays bounce off the sample to identify the locations of atoms and the distances between them," said Milinda Abeykoon, the lead scientist of the PDF beamline. "Our results show that, as the temperature drops, the atoms of this material move farther apart, causing the entire material to expand up to three percent in volume."

The team also used x-rays at the SOLEIL synchrotron in France and SPring-8 synchrotron in Japan to take a detailed look at what electrons were doing in the material at different stages of the temperature-induced transition.

"These 'x-ray absorption spectroscopy' experiments can track whether electrons are moving into or out of the outermost 'shell' of electrons around the samarium atoms," explained co-corresponding author Ignace Jarrige, a physicist at NSLS-II.

If you think back to one of the basics of chemistry, you might remember that atoms with unfilled outer shells tend to be the most reactive. Samarium's outer shell is just under half full.

"All the physics is essentially contained in this last shell, which is not full or not empty," Mazzone said.

The electron-tracking x-ray experiments revealed that electrons flowing through the samarium-sulfide metal were moving into that outer shell around each samarium atom. As each atom's electron cloud grew to accommodate the extra electrons, the entire material expanded.

But the scientists still had to explain the behavior based on physics theories. With the help of calculations performed by Maxim Dzero, a theoretical physicist from Kent State University, they were able to explain this phenomenon with the so-called Kondo effect, named after physicist Jun Kondo.

The basic idea behind the Kondo effect is that electrons will interact with magnetic impurities in a material, aligning their own spins in the opposite direction of the larger magnetic particle to "screen out," or cancel, its magnetism.

In the samarium-sulfide material, Dzero explained, the almost-half-full outer shell of each samarium atom acts as a tiny magnetic impurity pointing in a certain direction. "And because you have a metal, you also find free electrons that can approach and cancel out these little magnetic moments," Dzero said.

Not all elements subject to the Kondo effect have electrons fill the outermost shell, as it can also go the other way--causing electrons to leave the shell. The direction is determined by a delicate energy balance dictated by the rules of quantum mechanics.

"For some elements, because of the way the outer shell fills up, it is more energetically favorable for electrons to move out of the shell. But for a couple of these materials, the electrons can move in, which leads to expansion," Jarrige said. In addition to samarium, the other two elements are thulium and ytterbium.

It would be worth exploring compounds containing these other elements as additional possible ingredients for creating materials that expand upon cooling, Jarrige said.

Finally, the scientists noted that the extent of the negative thermal expansion in samarium sulfide can be tuned by varying the concentration of impurities.

"This tunability makes this material very valuable for engineering expansion-balanced alloys," Mazzone said.

"The application of highly developed many-body theory modeling was an important part of the work to identify the connection between the magnetic state of this material and its volume expansion," said Jason Hancock, a collaborator at the University of Connecticut (UConn). "This collaboration between Kent State, UConn, Brookhaven Lab, partner synchrotrons, and synthesis groups in Japan could potentially guide new materials discovery efforts that make use of the unusual properties of these rare-earth materials."

###

Brookhaven Lab's role in this work was funded by the DOE Office of Science. Daniel Mazzone's fellowship was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Kent State University and UConn researchers were funded by the DOE Office of Science and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://www.energy.gov/science/

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit applied science and technology organization.

Follow @brookhavenlab on Twitter and Facebook

Related Links

Online version of this news release with related graphics

Scientific paper: "Kondo-induced giant isotropic negative thermal expansion"

Media contacts: Karen McNulty Walsh [kmcnulty@bnl.gov], (631) 344-8350, or Peter Genzer, (631) 344-3174
Romania's Health Minister Victor Costache resigned on Thursday following criticism of the government over its handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Costache did not give a reason for his resignation while Prime Minister Ludovic Orban said it was for "personal and professional reasons." Orban added: "I regret his resignation, I understand it and I want to thank him for the good collaboration."



The government has come under fire as Romania's hospitals struggle to cope with an increasing number of coronavirus patients.

On Wednesday Costache told a TV channel that all of Bucharest's population would be tested for COVID-19, a plan widely panned as not feasible and misguided when medical staff do not have access to widespread testing.

Many Romanian doctors and nurses have also taken to social media to criticise the lack of protective medical equipment such as masks and gloves. A number of medical professionals have also contracted the virus.

Romania has confirmed 1,029 cases of the new coronavirus so far, with almost 16,000 tests carried out.

Seventeen people have been killed by the virus, eight of them at a hospital in the northeastern city of Suceava, a facility that has become the centre of the country's coronavirus outbreak.

Romania declared a state of emergency last week and on Wednesday went into a full lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus, with the army deployed to help enforce it.

Costache is expected to be replaced by Nelu Tataru, a state secretary in the health ministry who has been one of the main faces of the government's response to the crisis.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Amtrak is suspending all service to Vermont at the request of Gov. Phil Scott, who said the decision was part of an effort to stop the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. Both the Ethan Allen Express, which operates to and from Rutland, and the Vermonter, which operates to and from St. Albans, were to suspend service Thursday.

The move, coupled with the closing of the Canadian border last week, effectively leaves Saratoga Springs and other communities north of Albany temporarily without passenger rail service. Both the Adirondack, which usually serves Montreal, and the Ethan Allen Express will now end their northbound trips at Albany.
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Photo: The Canadian Press The Netflix logo is shown on an iPhone in Philadelphia on Monday, July 17, 2017. Netflix is lowering video quality for its subscribers in Canada as the streaming giant attempts to reduce soaring demands on internet bandwidth. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Matt Rourke

Netflix is lowering video quality for its subscribers in Canada as it attempts to reduce soaring demands on internet bandwidth.

The streaming giant says it will introduce changes today that are designed to slash its data traffic by 25 per cent as internet service providers deal with a surge in user activity in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The lower bandwidth streams of Netflix programs should still deliver the usual quality of each plan, the company said, whether it's ultra-high definition 4K, high-definition or standard definition.

In a blog post last week, the company's vice president of content delivery explained that Netflix has many different levels of streaming quality for each title within each resolution tier. With the changes, Ken Florance said Netflix is simply removing the highest bandwidth streams from the platter of options.

The move comes as telecom companies see a rise in data usage while Canadians self-isolate at home and use streaming services more frequently than usual.

Netflix has already introduced bandwidth measures in other parts of the world over the past two weeks. Similar reductions in video quality were made in Europe, India, Australia, New Zealand and some Latin American countries.

The company says it plans to maintain the lower bandwidth measures in Canada for 30 days.
Lyft is offering free, 30-day bike-share passes to critical workers in New York City, Chicago and Boston. This should help people who still have to get to work during the coronavirus pandemic, and to keep them safe, Lyft says it is ramping up its cleaning efforts.

In New York City, Lyft will provide hospital workers, first responders and transit workers with a free, one-month Citi Bike membership. Those passes can be obtained through employers, who can email HeroBikes@Lyft.com to enroll their staff. The offer applies to anyone working in these fields who recently purchased a membership or has an upcoming membership renewal, too. After this initial trial, Lyft and its partners will determine ridership needs and reevaluate.

"Having seen higher demand for Citi Bikes near our critical hospitals, Lyft has arrived at a generous and creative plan that will help get first responders where they need to go," said NYC DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg.

At certain high-traffic Citi Bike stations -- like those outside of hospitals -- Lyft valets will dock and disinfect bikes. Lyft will expand its cleaning operations and continue to disinfect bikes every time they enter the depot or are repaired in the field.

Healthcare workers in Boston and Chicago will also have access to discounts, The Verge reports. In Boston, Lyft's Bluebikes is offering hospital workers a free 30-day membership, and in Chicago, healthcare workers have access to free rides on the city's Divvy bikes through April 30th.

Lyft tends to be the more altruistic of the major ride-share players. Previously, Lyft has offered free rides to voters and people traveling to job interviews. This latest move will help workers who still have to head outside during the pandemic.
An e-commerce regulator is likely to be set up in India to tighten control over the e-commerce. The regulator will have the power to seek any kind of information from the companies.

Penalties will be imposed on the companies those who fail to cooperate with the regulator.

The government has consulted stakeholders and e-commerce firms regarding the new policy.

The new policy is going to be the latest effort taken by government to maintain e-commerce firms and make sure that the companies follow all the legal laws and regulations in regards to running business.

The policy will be implied on social media platforms too. Whose revenue is linked to advertising and other means of monetisation of users data.

According to the new policy any kind of information asked by the regulator to the e-commerce company should be given within 72 hours.

India one of the worlds fastest growing e-commerce markets this year is expected to reach $120 billion, triple its size in 2017.

In order to regulate data storage by technology companies government had been working hard on many policies. The new appointed regulator will tell the e-commerce company on what kind of data to be stored within India.

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal had informed the Lok Sabha that since e-commerce is a new issue, no date has been fixed for the release of the national e-commerce policy.
The general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), Phil Ni Sheaghdha has said the HSE needs to change its mentality and the way it operates.

It needs to act a lot faster she told RTE radios Morning Ireland.
The report says that since 1970, large areas of land have been urbanized, and this strains quality of life in every region

As cities physically expanded worldwide between 1970 and 2010, the population in those cities became less dense, according to a study led by a Texas A&M university professor.

Researchers found the trend was driven by small- and medium-sized cities, particularly in India, China, North America and Europe. Burak Guneralp, assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M, Billy Hales, a doctoral student in the same department, and colleagues from Yale University and Arizona State University examined these changes in a study published in Environmental Research Letters.

More than 60 percent of the reported urban expansion was formerly agricultural land, the researchers estimated.

"If urban population densities had remained unchanged since 1970, more than 48,000 square miles (roughly the size of North Carolina) would have been saved from conversion to urban and instead could have remained in cultivation or as natural vegetation," Guneralp said.

He said decreases in urban population densities present several problems. Loss of fertile lands at the outskirts of growing cities caused by decreasing urban population densities is of serious concern in China, India and Nigeria, Guneralp said.

"These three countries are expected to account for more than a third of the projected increase in the world's urban population by 2050," he said. "They also still have many millions of small farmers earning their livelihoods working fertile lands on the outskirts of cities. Thus, any loss of these high-quality lands to urban expansion has huge implications for the livelihoods of these farmers."

This is "especially disconcerting" for India, he said, with about half of its land classified as "degraded" while the country had the steepest decreases in urban land-use efficiency from 1970 to 2010. India has the world's largest rural population.

"Our findings suggest that decreasing urban population densities in India and Nigeria since 1970 caused 85 percent and 30 percent more land, respectively, to be converted to urban," Guneralp said.

A decrease in density as cities grow outward also puts pressure on local and regional governments to provide adequate infrastructure such as water, transportation and housing to formerly rural areas, he said.

The researchers found that these trends are the strongest in small- and medium-sized urban centers, defined in the study as those with fewer than 2 million people.

"Furthermore, small-medium cities in India, China, Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe are following in the footsteps of the United States in declines in urban population densities," he said. "These findings are important because, globally, it is these small-medium sized cities with limited institutional and financial capacity that are growing the fastest."

The U.S. had the lowest urban population densities across all four decades the researchers looked at, which led to many of the same problems seen in other countries.

"Such low density development whether in the U.S. or anywhere else generally means inefficient use of resources," Guneralp said.

Guneralp said the findings are relevant to one of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations', SDG11, which was established specifically to measure progress around the world toward making cities and communities more sustainable.

"It is important for urban areas to attain densities that would both improve living conditions in urban landscapes and promote efficient use of resources including land," he said.

###
The Trump administration is preparing yet another major blow to Huawei amidst everything else going on. Insiders quoted by Reuters claim the White House is moving to effectively seize control of Huaweis global supply chain.

The plan is to have every foreign company dealing with the U.S. stop supplying Huawei unless Washington allows that. More specifically, the Republican administration is looking to issue licenses for such activities moving forward.

It remains unclear how difficult procuring those licenses would actually be. However, the development comes on the tail of numerous hostilities between the U.S. and Huawei. Due to that, the reported change is unlikely to be anything but bad news for the Chinese company.

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As for the licenses themselves, it appears the legislative endeavor would primarily target chipset technologies. Thats because virtually every major semiconductor firm on the planet uses American patents to some degree. In other words, Washington is more than able to deal this blow to Huaweis global supply chain all on its own.

Yet another Trump blow to Huawei  or is it?

While the government is moving forward with the initiative, its not a given President Trump himself supports it. While he previously got personally involved in turning on the pressure on Huawei, he toned down on that rhetoric since the turn of the year.

He most recently did so last month, yet at the same time, he doubled down on blaming China for the ongoing current crisis. Like other prominent critics of Beijing, the President is adamant to refer to the new viral strain as a Chinese menace.

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So, with or without Trumps personal support, the U.S. governments new anti-Huawei effort should become official in a matter of weeks. The moves just the latest episode in over two decades worth of clashes between Washington and the Chinese conglomerate.

As for the legal framework behind the effort, the Trump administration is reportedly looking to pressure Huaweis suppliers with the Foreign Direct Product Rule. The Commerce Departments rulebook already allowed stateside authorities to dictate certain export policies to foreign companies. With the upcoming change, that power is expected to reach unprecedented heights.

In the meantime, Huawei leadership claims the company already weathered the worst of the crisis. The effects of everything happening should become clearer once Huawei publishes its quarterly financials next month. By that time, Trumps latest blow to Huaweis chip suppliers is likely to become official as well.
'Don't be under the illusion that we are in a lockdown for 21 days and then we are free.'

IMAGE: A closed market in New Delhi. Photograph: Yawar Nazir/Getty Images

On Tuesday, March 24, Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi called for a 21-day lockdown of the country in an attempt to curb the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Will this lockdown help in the battle against the virus is a question that many are asking.

"From a science perspective a 28-day lockdown was good, but, of course, the government has other things to worry about, like the economy and logistics," Dr Shahid Jameel, virologist and chief executive officer at the Wellcome Trust/India-DBT Alliance, a research funding agency supported by the United Kingdom and the Indian government, tells Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff.com.

Can India win the war against the coronavirus after 21 days?

We should not look at it in that way -- that India will win the war against coronavirus in 21 days.

The whole point is that we are fairly early on the curve of infection. If we do not control the spread of coronavirus now and the more we delay, the harder it gets to control. That's the point.

Could you please explain why this 21-day lockdown is a must so that the virus doesn't spread?

Twenty-one days is important from various perspectives. We have, at present, 500 plus confirmed infections and most of the infections is due to people who have travelled overseas.

As of now, we don't have good evidence of community transmission within India, but I believe that is a false hope because we have not tested enough in the community. And that is a separate story.

We are early in the curve and now we have the lockdown, therefore the virus does not get a chance to transmit from person to person.

One infected person on an average infects three other people. And we don't know who that infected person is because when you show symptoms of coronavirus it is already too late.

Therefore, it is important to isolate that person, but we don't know who that one person is. Therefore, the lockdown has to happen for everyone.

But...

(Interrupts) The virus has an incubation period. It means from the day you catch the virus till the day you show symptoms, that is varied from about 1 week to 3 weeks.

Let us assume that I get infected today I will not know whether I got infected because I will not show any symptoms of coronavirus. I will show symptoms only after one to three weeks; therefore I have to be in isolation for three weeks.

Therefore, it is important to have a 21-day lockdown.

Honestly, purely from a science perspective a 28-day lockdown was good, but, of course, the government has other things to worry about, like the economy and logistics.

Still, I think it is a good decision of a 21-day lockdown. It is a good balance and we should be able to take care of this problem if we all follow this lockdown religiously.

The important thing is that we have to follow and not do what we did on Tuesday night -- rushing to stores to buy things. All social distancing norms were thrown down the drain on Tuesday night.

The common man has an impression that the virus will be extinguished in 21 days.

Coronavirus will not get extinguished in 21 days, but the number of cases will be reduced. The virus has already started picking up in India and the number of cases has started doubling every five days.

Let us say if community transmission takes place, then the number of cases will start doubling every three days and then we will have a high number of cases which our healthcare system will not be able to cope with.

Our experience from China shows that if 100 people catch coronavirus, then 20 of them would require hospitalisation and another five of them would require ventilators in ICU.

The only way to reduce the number of people on ventilators in ICU is to reduce the total number of cases. Simple logic.

All these things (lockdown) are being done to ensure that we don't pile up with more cases. Cases will continue to happen.

Don't be under the illusion that we are in a lockdown for 21 days and then we are free. We are not free.

Simple idea is that the number of cases at any point should not exceed the healthcare capacity of our country. That is important for people to understand and each one of us has to contribute to this.

At what point will we know that the virus is now in a community-transmission phase?

There is no figure and you have to keep your eyes and ears open. You have to see the number of cases that is happening daily and the rate at which it is picking up.

All flights from abroad are now shut down and now if there are people who have contracted coronavirus without any travel history or that person has no contact with any person who has travelled overseas, then it means community transmission is taking place.

A case such as that has happened in Kolkata.

It will happen.

I am of the firm belief that community transmission is happening at this time. And the whole point of this lockdown is to slow it down further.

Therefore, each one of us has to consider ourselves as a potential source of infection. We should not be considering ourselves as somebody who can get infected.

Each one of us should show the behaviour that we are infected and we have to protect the community.

IMAGE: People practise social distancing as they queue up outside a supermarket to buy essential items in Faridabad. Photograph: PTI Photo

Is social distancing the only way to prevent it?

That is really the only way. Because there is no vaccine for coronavirus.

There is no confirmed therapy to treat coronavirus. Although people are talking of chloroquine and other medicines, but chloroquine again is in experimental mode. It has not proved anything in a large scale random trial. It has only been tried in France and it could be used as an experimental drug only on those people who are in a hospital setting.

Chloroquine is not a preventive medicine for coronavirus and you cannot start taking chloroquine hoping that you will not get the virus. Chloroquine is not preventive.

There are higher chances you will damage your kidneys and liver if you do that. It is associated with some neurological disease as well. You will mess up your system.

Chloroquine can only be given to people who are sick and under the supervision of a doctor. So please, no self-medication just because chloroquine is a cheap drug and readily available.

But those who tested positive for coronavirus have also turned negative, like this couple in Maharashtra. What medication do they take?

They don't take any medicines. The body's immune response takes care of it in 80 per cent of the people.

If you have the virus and tested positive, you will get fever for a few days and let us say you don't have trouble in breathing, then you don't need hospitalisation. Your immune system is perfectly capable of taking care of it.

Therefore, if you analyse those who died of coronavirus, it targets the elderly who have other health problems like heart disease, high blood pressure or diabetes.

If you are below 50 or 55 years and reasonably healthy, you don't need to worry.

Even if you get the virus there is an 80 per cent chance that you will not suffer from any serious ailment. It will be mild and you can be quarantined at home and just take fever reducing medicines like paracetamol. That is all.

Now say four people stay in one home and one person among them is infected. What are the chances that the other three may also get infected?

Chances are high for the others to get it too.

The person who gets infected must try and protect others as much as possible. They must isolate in a separate room. Any waste the patient generates in terms of clothing or tissue papers has to be properly sanitised.

They need to wear a mask and if there are people in the house, they too need to wear a mask. Regular hand washing and all other precautions need to be taken which doctors suggest.

I have read reports that people first test negative for coronavirus and then suddenly they turn positive. How does that happen?

It depends on when you are tested.

In the matter of any viral infection, it takes time for it to settle in your body and multiply. Only when its concentration reaches beyond a threshold the tests are able to detect it.

Let us say you were tested on day 1, you did not have enough of the virus in your body and you are tested negative but when you were tested on day 15 or day 20, the virus has multiplied and then you will test positive.

It depends on the concentration of the virus in your body.

When will we know that India has won the battle against coronavirus? What will be the indication?

I don't think anybody is in that position to say for sure. Let us go through this exercise of lockdown and see where we are (on April 14). And be ready for further restrictions if needed.

It's very hard to answer this question.

It's hard to answer because viral outbreaks are extremely unpredictive and they are unpredictive because the spread of virus depends on human behaviour. And human behaviour is the most unpredictable that we know.

How I will behave, you will behave and the third person will behave is very different.

Therefore, it is very important to follow guidelines and advice (by the government on social distancing).
On the market: The four retail units are located in Quartiere Bloom on Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin

Four Dublin retail units developed by MEP Mick Wallace's family company have been relaunched on the market this week, and online agent BidX1 has increased its guide price by 21pc.

Last December, the auctioneer guided 700,000 for those outlets at the landmark Quartiere Bloom, Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin 1. That was a huge reduction on the 1m guided for them in a 2018 auction catalogue. However, the properties were withdrawn before auction in order to finalise some paperwork.

Now, BidX1 has increased the guide price to 850,000 following the departure of tenants from two of the units, thus making it easier for a new owner to attain market rents for the vacated sites at 2 and 7 Bloom Lane.

The units are among several lots that BidX1 is offering for sale online but because of the current market situation, it has not set a date for their auction.

Instead, it is inviting offers for all of these properties and if the offers are acceptable to the vendors, the properties will be sold before auction.

BidX1 director Jonathan Fenn explained that otherwise, they will remain available for sale until an auction date is set.

Mr Wallace developed Quartiere Bloom as part of an imaginative urban regeneration project on Dublin's then-decaying north quays. Originally known as the Italian Quarter, Quartiere Bloom was built on both sides of a pedestrian walkway which links Temple Bar with the Luas red line station at Jervis St.

The four premises now for sale have floor areas totalling 2,156 sq ft. They also include units 4 and 5 Bloom Lane which are occupied by a hairdressing salon and coffee shop. The latter is let to an individual trading as Amir's Delight.

Together, they generate combined rents of 30,134.88 per annum, including VAT. The two now-vacant units had been rented at 32,424, including VAT, and were occupied by fashion boutiques.

Gillian Earley of BidX1 estimates that the vacant units could rent for about 50 per sq ft.

They are being sold by the receiver of some of the assets of M & J Wallace Ltd.

Coincidentally, an apartment almost directly across on the south side of the River Liffey, which was also developed by Mr Wallace during the boom, is being sold by an investor who bought it at a BidX1 auction in 2016.

Apartment 1, 43 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, is a two-bedroom unit on the second floor over the Communist Party-owned Connolly Books shop. In BidX1's February 2020 auction catalogue, the auctioneer had guided 495,000 for it. Now, the guide has been reduced to 395,000.

The current vendor bought it in 2016 for 410,000 and undertook a substantial revamp of the 69 sq m unit.

Also among the latest BidX1 lots are three Applegreen-branded service station investments in Foxford, Co Mayo; Tulsk, Co Roscommon; and Collon, Co Louth, with guide prices ranging from 350,000 and yields ranging from 11.1pc to 14.35pc.

The most valuable of them is the Applegreen service station in Foxford, which has a 650,000 guide price.

It is let to Petrogas Group Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Applegreen plc, at a current annual rent of 80,000, rising this August to 84,000 per annum for years six to 10.

It includes a two-storey building extending to 4,725 sq ft with a retail unit on a 0.6-acre site.
France has launched a military operation to support public services strained by the Covid-19 coronavirus epidemic. President Emmanuel Macron announced the launch of operation 'Resilience' as France decided to withdraw its contingent of troops from Iraq.

The military operation in France will focus on "aiding and supporting the population, as well as helping public services face the epidemic in mainland France and overseas", Macron said on Wednesday, on a visit to a field hospital set up by the military in Mulhouse, in the east of France, the region hardest-hit by the coronavirus epidemic so far.

France plans to deploy helicopter carriers in its overseas territories, and has transported the sick on military planes and an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean.

Resilience is separate from the anti-terrorism Sentinelle operation, which has about 7,000 troops throughout France.

France out of Iraq

While the military focuses at home, abroad, troops are pulling back abroad, to minimise their exposure in Iraq, which on Sunday imposed strict measures to contain the virus.

The army chief of staff announced in a statement Wednesday that France will provisionally suspend training activities in Iraq.

France has about 200 military personnel in Iraq, mostly trainers to local armed forces, based at the headquarters of coalition forces in Baghdad helping the Iraqi military fight the remnants of the Islamic State armed group

The Iraqi army said last week that it was suspending training operations, and that the coalition forces would be temporarily withdrawing their support staff in coming days.

The chief of staff said that while the troops in Iraq would be repatriated, France will continue fighting the Islamic State, with troops stationed at coalition headquarters in Kuweit and Qatar, French maritime operations will continue in waters around Syria, and air support will continue from bases in Jordan and Qatar, said the chief of staff.

The 15,000 French troops stationed in the Sahel, as part of the anti-jihadist Barkhane operation, will remaining place, even as the first cases of the virus have appeared in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

Further cuts to services in France

France had recorded almost 26,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection as of Wednesday, with 1,300 deaths in hospital.

The country is already under a nationwide lockdown, with police enforcing a ban on non-essential movement, and schools and restaurants closed.

Officials in Paris said Wednesday that metro and train services will be reduced to a minimum, just enough to allow health workers and other employees to get to work.

Paris airports operator ADP said it would temporarily shut Orly airport, the main domestic hub, to commercial flights because of the "significant and sudden" drop-off in passenger traffic because of coronavirus travel restrictions.
The Ministry of Health has called on units to import or look for sponsorship and donation of internationally-made medical equipment and SARS-CoV-2 testing kits.

Doctors conduct SARS-CoV-2 tests at the General Hospital of Phu Yen Province.

The domestic units have also been encouraged to locally manufacture more medical devices and testing kits to meet Viet Nams increasing testing demand.

The ministry will verify quality of the imported or donated testing kits to soon put them into use.

According to the Vietnamese Law on Foreign Trade Management, the imported products must have Certificate of Free Sale (CFS) showing the products are approved for sale.

However, the Vietnamese health ministry said most of the virus testing kits have certificates of use in the manufacturing country in emergency cases only, but do not have sale certificates in that country.

Companies are allowed to import samples of medical device and testing kits which have CFS in other countries.

After they are tested by the health ministry, the ministry will issue the legal import documents and allow imports in large quantity.

Kits manufactured by domestic companies will also be tested by the health ministry.  VNS

Hanoi plans large-scale testing to prevent COVID-19 Authorities in Hanoi have proposed buying an additional 200,000 COVID-19 test kits to conduct large-scale testing.
The Jaipur Police has tied up with five mega marts and 15 grocery shops for home delivery of essential commodities such as vegetables, fruits, edible oil and grains during the lockdown. They have prepared 50 hawkers to supply these at peoples residences.

Deputy Commissioner of Police, East, Rahul Jain said they held a meeting with representatives of Big Bazaar, D-Mart, Kirana King, Reliance Fresh, Grofers and 15 small grocery shops and motivated them to help people during the lockdown. Owners and managers accepted our proposal without any hesitation, the DCP said.

He said because of this initiative, long queues outside stores have reduced and chances of the spread of Sars-Cov-2 also lessened.

The officer said that in order to popularize this move of home delivery through websites, the mega marts and grocery shops are sending messages to people, announcements are being made on FM channels at regular intervals and the police are spreading the message through community liaison groups (CLG) WhatsApp groups.

The facility of home delivery has been started across Bajaj Nagar police station area, Adarsh Nagar area, Jawahar Circle area, Sanganer area and Jawahar Nagar area. We are trying to connect to more and more stores for this, Jain said.

The city police in the last 36 hours have also convinced around 50 vegetable vendors to go to different colonies to supply vegetables at the doorsteps of people so that people do not venture out to vegetable markets.

Those delivering necessary items at home are been given special permits so that they are not stopped. They are also taking necessary precautions like wearing masks and sanitizing their hands on regular intervals.

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Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.

When the International Olympic Committee decided to make the right call and postpone the Tokyo Olympics, I was disappointed. I was writing a story about Panasonic's robotic exosuits that were going to be assisting Tokyo visitors and Paralympic athletes this summer. I had hoped to report on all the major tech showcases that Japan had planned, too. (Like a broken record, yes, I used to live there and, sure, wanted to visit again.)

Whether it was self-driving transport, robotics or 8K broadcast, it was going to be a quintessentially tech Olympics. It still will be, I'm sure, just in 2021.

-- Mat

It's not just Netflix and YouTube.Xbox and PlayStation networks adjusted due to surging demand

In a statement sent to Engadget, Xbox product services corporate vice president Dave McCarthy said the company is "actively monitoring usage and making temporary adjustments as needed to ensure the smoothest possible experience for our gamers."

Meanwhile, in a blog post, Sony CEO Jim Ryan said that PlayStation was doing its bit to "address internet stability concerns," noting that players in Europe "may experience somewhat slower or delayed game downloads but will still enjoy robust gameplay."

And it's available to more users on Android.Google Assistant's redesigned Snapshot feed is rolling out on iOS

You can check out the new experience by launching Assistant and tapping on the inbox icon (marked Update on Android) near the bottom left of the interface. You'll see the redesigned feed, which organizes information using chronological cards.

Take a peek inside.iFixit's MacBook Air teardown confirms 0.5mm thicker keyboard

Now that a new MacBook Air is here, it was just a matter of time before the repair-minded folks at iFixit took one apart. They focused on the upgraded keyboard -- to quote our Editor in Chief Dana Wollman: "I love this keyboard" -- and found that Apple was able to replace the butterfly mechanism of its recent laptops for a more satisfying scissor switch while only adding an extra half millimeter in thickness.

Now there are answers to questions like "Did anyone try to build more androids like Data?"'Picard' finally shows us how 'Star Trek's' technology evolves

There's one new episode left in the first season of Star Trek: Picard, and Kris Naudus is looking back at one big way this series stands apart from other shows. "It's because we finally get to see what happens next in the Star Trek universe."

It will help consumers find open businesses on Search and Maps.Google lets businesses mark locations as temporarily closed

When Sundar Pichai revealed Google's initial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, he promised to give business owners a quick way to mark themselves as temporarily closed. Google My Business users can now do exactly that. Head to "Close this business on Google" in the menu to find the new feature, with three options: "Mark as temporarily closed," "Mark as permanently closed" and "Remove Listing." Prior to launching the capability, Google only relied on information from governments and other authoritative sources.

Of course, this all still depends on whether businesses take the time to update their status. Google previously said, however, that it's using AI tech to seek out businesses to confirm and update their operating hours.

But wait, there's more...

The Morning After is a new daily newsletter from Engadget designed to help you fight off FOMO. Who knows what you'll miss if you don't Subscribe.

Craving even more? Like us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter.

Have a suggestion on how we can improve The Morning After? Send us a note.
Veteran actor Shabana Azmi on Thursday condemned the terror attack on a Gurudwara in Afghanistan's Kabul city which claimed at least 27 lives and injured eight people.

The 69-year-old actor took to Twitter and expressed her condolences to the families of those killed in the attack.

"Strongly condemn the terrorist attack on the gurudwara in Kabul. My heartfelt condolences to the families of the innocent Sikhs who lost their lives," she tweeted.

"Speedy action against the perpetrators is the need of the hour," the tweet further read.

At least 27 civilians were killed and eight others were wounded in a terror attack on a Gurudwara in Kabul, Afghanistan on Wednesday. All 4 terrorists have been killed by Afghan security forces.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The number of people diagnosed with the coronavirus COVID-19 in Michigan took another big jump, reaching 2,856 on Thursday, March 26, up from 2,295 the day before.

That includes almost 1,400 cases in Wayne County.

The number of Michigan coronavirus cases has more than doubled in the past three days, although health officials say thats partly due to a significant increase in testing.

Sixty people have died, according to the states daily update on coronavirus numbers. Thats up from 43 on Wednesday.

What Michigans coronavirus numbers tell us, and what we still dont know

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services reported 564 new cases on its daily update, setting another record for a one-day increase.

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The numbers have spiked since last week, when the state began to significantly increase the number of people tested for the coronavirus.

Originally, you only had the state Bureau of Laboratories doing the testing, said Linda Vail, Ingham Countys health officer. Last week, some hospitals and private laboratories began performing tests, and a lot of these test results are now getting dumped into the system.

Fifty-two of Michigans 83 counties are home to a resident who contracted coronavirus.

About 84% of the COVID-19 cases are in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties.

The disproportionate number of cases in metro Detroit is a result of several factors, including the areas large population, more aggressive testing in those counties and community spread of coronavirus, said Lynn Sutfin, spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

About 39% of Michigan residents live in Wayne, Oakland or Macomb counties.

There are 851 patients who are Detroit residents; 538 who live elsewhere in Wayne County; 668 who live in Oakland County and 347 in Macomb County.

Of the 60 patients who died, 15 were residents of Detroit, 11 in Wayne County outside of Detroit, 15 in Oakland County, 11 in Macomb, three in Washtenaw and one each in Kent, Livingston, Genesee, Mecosta and Tuscola counties.

Sorry, but your browser does not support frames.

As of Wednesday, there were 9,109 completed coronavirus tests on Michigan residents and 2,453 -- or 27% -- were positive, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human and Services.

Its unclear how many tests are pending.

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Whitmer declared a state of emergency on March 10 after the first cases were identified. She has since closed schools, bars, restaurants and other establishments to prevent COVID-19 from spreading further

On Monday, March 23, Whitmer issued a stay-at-home order, requiring Michigan residents to stay at home except for essential business.

There have been almost 70,000 cases of the coronavirus and more than 1,000 deaths in the United States.

Every state in the country has reported a COVID-19 case. States with the highest number of cases include Washington, New York, California, New Jersey and Louisiana.

[12:35 PM] Scott W. Levin Sorry, but your browser does not support frames.

Coronavirus symptoms include fever, cough and shortness of breath. Many infected people exhibit mild symptoms and dont necessarily need to be tested or treated in-person, as theres currently no known vaccine or cure for the disease.

Read all of MLives coverage on the coronavirus at mlive.com/coronavirus.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

CORONAVIRUS PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.
Berlin-based company sets standards for commitment

Autodoc, Europe's largest online retailer of car spare parts, is donating EUR 50,000 to the Stiftung Universitatsmedizin Essen foundation to support the fight against COVID-19. The researchers are studying the biology of the virus together with Chinese colleagues in a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The aim is to develop therapeutic options and preventive measures. As an internationally active company, Autodoc would like to become involved at a global level in the fight against the current pandemic.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005597/en/

Autodoc donates 50,000 euros to the University Medical Foundation Essen for research into the coronavirus. Researchers in the joint research laboratory of the Institute of Virology and the Clinic for Infectiology and the Chinese Clinic for Infectious Diseases of the Union Hospital in Wuhan are looking for vaccines and treatment options for the virus. (Image: FILEOPEN CREATION/Shutterstock.com image for use only in connection with this release)

Autodoc GmbH, based in Berlin, is an international company with online shops in 26 European countries. The employees come from all over the world. The current crisis also affects Autodoc employees, customers and suppliers to a high degree. Autodoc would like to take its responsibility as a company and actively participate in the fight against COVID-19. To this end, Autodoc is supporting researchers at the Universitatsmedizin Essen medical center and the Union Hospital in Wuhan in their search for special treatments against the virus.

According to Alexej Erdle, managing partner of Autodoc GmbH, "The corona crisis is a global pandemic that affects us all. We are an international company. That is why we feel a clear responsibility here to contribute to solving this crisis. Every day we see what can be achieved when people from different countries work together, just as the researchers from Essen and Wuhan are doing. Supporting their work is now the best way for us to do something that helps people all over the world, i.e. to fight this pandemic. With this donation, we want to set an example so that every individual as well as every company can think about how to get involved within the scope of their respective possibilities so that we can succeed in overcoming this challenge together.

Researchers against a global pandemic

Since the end of December 2019, the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has been spreading at high speed. It is the trigger of the COVID-19 disease. The Institute of Virology and the Clinic for Infectiology at the Universitatsmedizin Essen medical center and the Clinic for Infectious Diseases at the Union Hospital in Wuhan have been working closely together for many years. In 2017, a joint research laboratory was founded in Wuhan. Numerous data and samples have been collected and recorded there since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the number of cases in China, this results in a much larger database than is currently the case in Germany, for example. The laboratory is already in operation and well equipped, but money is still urgently needed to cover the running costs for material and personnel. Autodoc is now supporting the researchers' work with a sum of EUR 50,000.

Jorit Ness, Managing Director of the University Medical Foundation, is very grateful for the support: "In the current situation, rapid help which is at the same time sustainable is essential. Thanks to the research cooperation between Essen and Wuhan, which has been in place for years, professional and established structures are now in place and can be used immediately. It is now important to make additional funds available for the evaluation of the extraordinarily large amounts of data and samples of disease cases. With the donation from Autodoc GmbH we have come a big step closer to our goal".

Social commitment

Since its foundation in 2008, Autodoc has seen itself as an active part of society and is committed both ideologically and financially to helping disadvantaged social groups. Autodoc therefore regularly supports local initiatives in various European countries.

If you would like to support the research work in Essen and Wuhan, please visit https://www.universitaetsmedizin.de/forschung/corona/ and make a donation online. Or donate directly to:

Stiftung Universitatsmedizin Essen

Hufelandstrae 55

45147 Essen, Germany

E-mail: info@universitaetsmedizin.de

Internet: https://www.universitaetsmedizin.de/

Donation account:

IBAN: DE 0937 0205 0005 0005 0005

BIC: BFSWDE33

Reference: corona research

Autodoc GmbH a brief profile

Autodoc GmbH is Europe's leading online dealer for automotive spare parts. As the fastest-growing company in this sector with a 63% growth in turnover in the 2018 financial year to around EUR 415 million (2017: EUR 254 million), Autodoc is aiming to further expand its position. Thanks to its successful expansion, Autodoc is now represented in 25 other European countries in addition to Germany. Autodoc pursues a strong customer focus through social media activities, technical support in the respective national language and demand-oriented product range composition with currently almost 2.5 million products from 545 brand manufacturers for 128 car brands. The online retailer offers a wide range of products from brake systems, body parts, shock absorbers and springs, exhaust systems, interior elements, steering systems and clutches to air conditioning systems, heaters, repair kits and engine oil. In June 2018, the company celebrated its tenth anniversary. Autodoc GmbH is based in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg and is fully owner-managed. In May 2019, the company opened a representative office on Kurfurstendamm in addition to its headquarters.

The original source-language text of this announcement is the official, authoritative version. Translations are provided as an accommodation only, and should be cross-referenced with the source-language text, which is the only version of the text intended to have legal effect.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005597/en/

Contacts:

Thomas Casper

Head of Press and Public Relations Communication

Tel.: +49 30 2084 78 237

E-mail: t.casper@autodoc.eu

www.autodoc.de

cometis AG

Matthias Kunz

Tel.: +49 611 20 585 5-64

E-mail: kunz@cometis.de

www.cometis.de
Buzzi Unicem sees 12% rise in sales, stable net profit in 2019

ICR Newsroom By 26 March 2020

Italy-based Buzzi Unicem reported a 12.1 per cent rise in net sales in 2019 to EUR3.221bn in 2019, up from EUR2.874bn. The company posted a 4.3 per cent YoY rise in cement sales to 29.122Mt in 2019 while ready-mix sales remained stable at 12.1Mm3 over the same period. EBITDA surged to 26.1 per cent to EUR728.1m in 2019 while recurring EBITDA saw a 23.9 per cent jump to EUR704.4 when compared with the previous year. Net profit advanced by 0.8 per cent to EUR385.9m and consolidated net profit edged up by 0.9 per cent to EUR385.7m in 2019. Overall, the progress achieved in all the markets where the group operates, in particular in the United States of America, also favoured by the positive exchange rate effect, and in Italy, contributed to the strengthening of operating results, said the company in a statement.



Amortisations and depreciations amounted to EUR259.9m, compared to EUR225.4m in 2018. Net finance costs and income went from EUR24.7m income to EUR58.6m costs, mainly due to the volatility of non-cash items, such as the valuation of derivative instruments, despite a reduction in interest expense referred to net debt. Losses on sale of investments recorded a negative contribution of EUR1.5m, while equity in earnings of associates, among which its joint venture operating in Mexico stands out, decreased from EUR87.9m to EUR73.8m. The tax charge for the year was EUR96m, compared to EUR82.5m in 2018.



Consolidated net debt as at 31 December 2019 stood at EUR567.8m, down EUR322.7m from EUR890.5m at year-end 2018. In 2019 the group distributed dividends of EUR26.6m and paid total capital expenditures of EUR339.3m, EUR42.9m thereof allocated to capacity expansion or special projects. In particular the block purchase of second-hand machinery and equipment for the Korkino plant in Russia (EUR23.6m), the modernisation and expansion of the Maryneal plant in Texas (EUR9.1m), acquisition of new batching plants in Germany, Italy and Poland (EUR8.5m), expansion of the shipping department of the Nikolaev plant in Ukraine (EUR0.9m) were all factors. Additional investments attributable to strategic development projects amounted to EUR82.2m, mostly relating to the execution of the contract with HeidelbergCement regarding the purchase of a full-cycle cement plant in Tuscany and two grinding plants in the northwest of Italy. As at 31 December 2019, total equity, inclusive of non-controlling interests, stood at EUR3690.8m versus EUR3143.6m at 2018 year-end. Consequently the debt/equity ratio decreased to 0.15 from 0.28 in the previous year. In 2019 the parent company Buzzi Unicem SpA reported a net profit of EUR87.2m (EUR97.9m in 2018) and a cash flow of EUR126m.



Italy

In Italy mild weather at the start of the year supported sales, a trend maintained by a change in scope attributable to the Testi cement plant and two grinding units in Piedmont, despite a lower export contribution. Average prices improved on the back of a more stable market. Output stabilised and prices recovered in the ready-mix sector. As a result, total net sales advanced 9.8 per cent (7.5 per cent like-for-like) YoY to EUR504.7m in 2019.



Central Europe

In Germany cement deliveries were robust in the 1H19 as mild weather and the additional contribution of the Seibel & Sohne plant supported sales. A more regular pace was observed in the 2H19 to close the year up 3.2 per cent YoY. Average selling prices were also reported to have improved. Ready-mix concrete output confirmed the levels reached at year-end 2018 (-0.2 per cent), while average selling prices increased. Overall net sales increased from EUR632.5m to EUR679.6m (+7.5 per cent) and EBITDA from EUR82.5m to EUR102.3m (+24 per cent). Net of non-recurring items, EBITDA improved by EUR12.7m on the previous year (+14.7 per cent).



In Luxembourg and The Netherlands cement and clinker sales slipped 0.9 per cent YoY in 2019 and the ready-mix concrete sector reported an eight per cent decline in sales volumes, mainly as a key infrastructure project in The Netherlands slowed down. Net sales fell 2.4 per cent YoY to EUR192.5m although prices recovered. EBITDA stood at EUR22.7m against EUR23.2m in 2018.



Eastern Europe

After a sound start to the year, cement volumes in Poland took on a more regular shape in the second half of 2019, closing 1.6 per cent down when compared to year-end 2018. However, there was a marked improvement in average selling prices in local currency. The ready-mix concrete saw results fall by 6.6 per cent although average local currency prices rose. Net sales were up 11.1 per cent to EUR111.4m in 2019 while EBITDA improved from EUR32.1m to EUR31.9m, up 0.9 per cent YoY.



In the Czech Republic, cement sales confirmed a 1.5 per cent drop but average selling prices improved. The ready-mix concrete sector, which also includes Slovakia, posted weaker production levels, offset by rising prices. Consolidated net sales increased 2.2 per cent to EUR168.2m. EBITDA advanced 6.3 per cent to EUR46.3m.



Ukrainian cement sales improved, supported by reduced imports from Russia, Belarus and Moldova following anti-dumping measures. Ready-mix concrete output confirmed a weak trend but average prices improved. Net sales reached EUR131.9m, jumping by 49.3 per cent YoY. EBITDA trebled to EUR21m.



In Russia cement shipments were up five per cent YoY. Net revenues increased 15.6 per cent YoY to EUR214.5m and EBITDA rose 15 per cent YoY to EUR57.7m.



USA

In the US cement sales improved by six per cent in 2019 compared to 2018 while ready-mix concrete output jumped by 16.5 per cent, supported by moderate price growth. Total net sales advanced 16.2 per cent to EUR1069.6m while EBITDA was up 18 per cent YoY to EUR402.7m in 2019.



Latin America

In Mexico the sales of associate Corporacion Moctezuma began to stabilise after a clear drop in the 1H19 but closed the year down with prices in local currency declining. Ready-mix concrete showed an even more marked decrease YoY but prices improved. Net sales and EBITDA in local currency declined by 9.8 and 17.1 per cent, respectively. The appreciation of the Mexican peso favoured the translation of the results into euros. With reference to 100 per cent of the associate, net sales stood at EUR593.2m (-5 per cent) and EBITSA at EUR252.2m (-12.7 per cent).



Buzzi Unicem shipments in Brazil, which were carried out by the new joint venture maintained a positive development, mainly due to the contribution of the northeast region. Average selling prices in local currency showed a marginal improvement. Net sales and recurring EBITDA, in local currency, posted an increase of 3.8 per cent and a decrease of 24.8 per cent, respectively. The depreciation of the Brazilian real negatively affected the translation of the results into euros. With reference to 100 per cent of the associate, net sales stood at EUR134.7m (+1.3 per cent) and EBITDA at EUR23.4m (-26.6 per cent).



Outlook

The assumptions and objectives developed during the budget process outlined for the current financial year a substantial confirmation of the particularly positive results achieved in 2019, through further progress expected both in Italy and in Central Europe and basically neutral changes in Eastern Europe and the United States of America, all this assuming a fairly stable dollar and ruble exchange rate. The sales performance and the turnover so far during the first quarter of 2020, at least until a week ago, have been in line with the forecast of the original budget, said the company.



However, the recent developments concerning new Coronavirus (COVID-19) infection outbreaks in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the United States of America have obviously changed the companys view according to which the health emergency would be short-lived and limited to China. Almost all the countries involved are responding with very severe measures regarding the mobility of

people and the carrying out of production and commercial activities. The economy is constrained and is rapidly moving towards a phase of global recession. The collapse of the stock markets was joined by that of the oil price and by the rapid devaluation of some currencies which are relevant to its financial statements, such as the Russian ruble, the Mexican peso and the Brazilian real.



From the new scenario that is emerging we expect impacts that could be significantly adverse on our business, such as: a marked drop in the demand for cement and ready-mix concrete, especially in markets where there are more infection cases and more severe restrictions, a favourable change in the fuel and electric power cost, partly offset by interruptions and difficulties in transportation and supply chains.



At the moment we are not able to reliably estimate the unfavourable effects of the ongoing pandemic on the group's results, which will mainly depend on its duration and the intensity of the infection in the various geographical areas of business. We will provide the market with more precise information when the visibility on short-term expectations improves. Once the crisis is over, the rebound should be guided by the important support measures that governments have already approved or will approve in the next days (expansionary monetary policy, infrastructure projects, support to work and employment), said Buzzi Unicem.

Published under
(CNN)  As the spread of the novel coronavirus accelerates around the world, sub-Saharan Africa has largely been spared  until now.

Recent days saw more African countries reporting cases and deaths from the virus, including in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. And the head of the World Health Organization has issued a stark warning: "Africa should wake up."

The rise of Covid-19 comes as an outbreak of another deadly virus, Ebola, appears to be ending in Central Africa's Democratic Republic of Congo. Those of us who have been responding to Ebola are now turning our attention, resources and expertise to Covid-19.

Our experience dealing with multiple outbreaks of Ebola offers some lessons that could be helpful in addressing Covid-19. Some of these are more specific to the African context, but most apply anywhere.

Protect health care workers. This is emerging as a major priority, as the coronavirus begins to overwhelm the health care system in the United States. Unfortunately, we saw too many cases of heroic doctors, nurses and others become infected with Ebola from the patients whose lives they were trying to save. Health care workers were 21 to 32 times more likely to contract Ebola than the general population during the West Africa Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

With this novel coronavirus, health care workers will face similar risks at work, and will likely be required in many cases to continue treating patients even without the most rudimentary protective measures. Many sub-Saharan African health systems are already severely constrained because there are not enough doctors and nurses to meet basic health care needs of the population.

We must protect this workforce in order to keep health systems from collapse. Health care facilities need to be equipped and supplied, and the health workers must be trained in how to prevent the spread of infection within facilities, both from patient to patient and from patient to health care worker.

Aggressively push back against rumor and disinformation with frequent, fact-based communication. In responding to Ebola, bad information spread quickly and was a major hindrance to getting communities to cooperate with efforts to detect and slow the spread of the disease. For example, in the DRC outbreak, rumors led to violence against health care workers and attacks that destroyed clinics.

Home care will be an important part of this response and providing good information to families and communities on how to care for the sick  and when to seek care  will be an important component of this response. We need to quickly disseminate as much information as possible to the public about the nature of the virus and the response.

Engage the local community. Some of our best and most effective outreach during the Ebola outbreak in the DRC was done through trusted members of the community. By training and equipping them to keep their neighbors informed and reassured, community cooperation will increase and will facilitate efforts to detect the virus and encourage individual and family responses that will slow its spread.

Use faith-based networks. Faith leaders are often among the most trusted members of a community and enlisting them in providing accurate information and encouraging cooperation among members of their congregations is extremely effective. In chronically under-resourced African nations, faith-based institutions provide services, including health care, where governments sometimes can't reach.

For example, the organizations I represent, Lutheran World Relief and IMA World Health, are working in partnership with Christian health associations in several countries to provide information on the virus, technical assistance and equipment and supplies to implement infection prevention and control in health facilities.

In the recent Ebola outbreak in the DRC, we worked with church networks to provide technical assistance, equipment and supplies to help prevent the spread of infections, as well as to help the global health community track where cases of the virus were spreading.

Test, test, test. As we are finding in the United States, you can't treat it if you can't see it. When Covid-19 was first detected outside of Asia, only two laboratories in all of sub-Saharan Africa were equipped to process tests. That capacity has since ramped up considerably, but it is still short of the mark, as shortages of testing kits and laboratory supplies are common. We must expand the capacity to test to every national and regional reference lab on the continent as soon as possible and provide the supplies needed to test in accordance with WHO guidelines.

Covid-19 poses a particularly dire threat to sub-Saharan Africa, given its generally weak health systems -- and too many people already suffering the effects of living in extreme poverty. And in urban slums in cities like Lagos, Nigeria, where people are crowded into cramped housing and pack into minibus taxis to travel to work they can't afford to miss, social distancing is all but impossible.

But the African continent can draw from significant experience dealing with epidemics. The continent is currently waging battles against epidemics of measles and cholera, just to name a few. And the lessons learned in controlling and containing viruses such as Ebola can inform the fight against this novel coronavirus.

This story was first published on CNN.com 'What Africa can teach the world about beating the coronavirus'
Singapore on Thursday unveiled a "landmark" package of SGD 48.4 billion (USD 33.17 billion) to support its workers and businesses as the country stepped up measures to deal with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The stimulus is in addition to the SGD 6.4 billion (USD 4.4 billion) announced in its Budget last month to tide through the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The two support packages amount to 11 per cent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).

"This is a landmark package and necessary response to a unique situation," Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat told Parliament while unveiling the stimulus.

To fund this supplementary budget, the government will draw up to SGD 17 billion (USD 1,18,15,442) from Singapore's reserves, Heng said.

President Halimah Yacob has given her in-principle approval for drawing the reserves.

Heng said the coronavirus pandemic is a public health crisis, an economic shock and a social test -- all rolled into one.

"It is an unprecedented crisis of a highly complex nature. The global shocks from coronavirus will deeply impact Singapore's open economy, which could see its worst economic contraction since independence," he said.

According to preliminary official data, the Singapore economy is shrinking 2.2 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter.

"This extraordinary situation calls for extraordinary measures," Heng said, adding that more than one-third of the "resilience budget" is dedicated to saving jobs and supporting workers.

Singapore has so far reported 631 COVID-19 cases, including two deaths.

The global death toll from COVID-19 soared to over 21,000 and over three billion people were locked down in their homes, triggering a massive financial shock worldwide.

On Wednesday, financial ratings agency Moody's estimated the US economy shrinking by 2.0 per cent and the eurozone by 2.2 per cent.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Odisha government is planning to set up a Covid-19 testing laboratory at a hospital here to ease the burden on the states only other facility at Bhubaneswar.

The state government is working out the modalities of setting up a Biosafety Levels 2 (BSL 2) laboratory at Veer Surendra Sai Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (VIMSAR), a senior official said here on Thursday.

Jayashree Dora, the superintendent of VIMSAR, said the institute has sent a feasibility report to the government in this regard and a decision will be taken shortly.

The laboratory is likely to come up in the microbiology department of the hospital, she said.

"Once the lab is operational, we can conduct the Recombinant Technology Polymerase Chain Reaction (rt PCR) test here for suspected cases of Covid-19," she said.

Currently, the premier health care institute sends swab samples of suspected coronavirus patients to the Regional Medical Research Center (RMRC) in Bhubaneswar.

The Junior Doctors Association (JDA) at VIMSAR had requested the state government to set up two more Covid-19 laboratories - one at the institute and the other at MKCG Medical College and Hospital, Berhampur, following which the health department sought a feasibility report.

"The hospital here caters to hundreds of patients in western Odisha. The region will benefit from the BSL2 laboratory," Dora added.

Odisha has reported two Covid-19 cases so far.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The pandemic that has idled scores of commercial flights is having a little-noticed consequence for meteorologists, whose forecasts rely in part on data collected from planes. That means a crucial eye in the sky has weakened just as spring flood waters rise across North America and Europe, and farmers are preparing to plant wheat, corn and soybeans.

In terms of importance, aircraft data are usually in the top five, said Chris Davis, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

With flights all but halted in many nations, meteorologists have seen a steep decline in more than 700,000 daily weather observations from aircraft. There could be a resulting dip in weather-forecasting accuracy, meteorologists warn, but fortunately there are possible workarounds to augment the remaining flights.

Forecasters have faced this challenge before. After the Sept. 11th terror attacks in the U.S., the grounding of global air traffic caused a deterioration of computer weather models. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts found between a 4% to 5% loss in its modeling abilities, Davis said.

The decrease in flights as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic hasnt been that severe so far. About 17% of all trips worldwide have been cancelled, according to FlightAware, an airline tracking service, and 34% of U.S. flights have been grounded.

That has led the European Centre to see 45% drop-off in incoming reports from airplanes since March 1. One difference is that the pandemic and its economic fallout could last longer. The loss of airplane data could continue into the summer, the European Centre said.

Airplanes have been gathering weather data since WWI. The U.S. Weather Bureau first paid pilots in 1919 to carry instruments attached to wing struts to a height of 13,500 feet (4,100 meters). The flyers who got higher were paid a bonus.

The modern data-collection network took shape in 1998 when the World Meteorological Organization created the Aircraft Meteorology Data Relay Panel, which led to a fully automated system for gathering weather data from commercial, private and military aircraft. The flight information is radioed to ground stations and relayed to meteorologists. That data is combined in forecasting models with satellite observations and readings from weather balloons, ground stations and even buoys at sea.

The heaviest concentration of daily aircraft weather reporting comes from the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. In the U.S. alone there are about 250 million observations per year, said Susan Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the National Weather Service. Jets from American and Delta as well as cargo haulers FedEx and UPS contribute weather data, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Total loss of airplane data can have an impact. The European Centre, whose Euro weather models are touted as the gold-standard among many forecasters, ran a simulation last year that eliminated all airliner reports and found short-range forecast skill for temperature and wind fell by about 15%, with a smaller loss in prediction of high- and low-pressure patterns.

The U.S. government, which runs weather models of its own, doesnt anticipate a great loss of accuracy. Even though a decrease in critical data will likely negatively impact forecast model skill, it does not necessarily translate into a reduction in forecast accuracy, said Buchanan. She cited billions of Earth observations from other sources that feed into our models.

There are reasons to be optimistic. The heavy cancellations havent reduced flights by military and cargo haulers or private aircraft. Unlike 9/11, there still are a lot of planes flying, so the impact is muted right now, said Todd Crawford, chief meteorologist at the Weather Company, an IBM business.

In addition, the forecast models themselves are better than in 2001. There is some redundancy in observations, enough that some compensation can occur if one type is lost, said Davis of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The system can be tuned such that other observations take up some of the slack. Not perfect, but fairly resilient.

Some of the data could also be made up by additional weather balloon launches, an undertaking that is often used in anticipation of weather emergencies such as a hurricane bearing down on a coastline. Balloons are currently launched twice a day at 850 weather stations worldwide, climbing to heights up to 115,000 feet while radioing back information every second.

Above all is the fleet of satellites keeping an eye on weather down below. Crawford said these provide the most important observations.

There are also flights that almost never stop. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Air Force Reserve have a cadre of pilots dedicated to flying weather missions. The Hurricane Hunters, as theyre called, are currently flying into the Pacific gathering information on atmospheric rivers. In June, these pilots will transfer back to their summer jobs: searching for hurricanes in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific.

With assistance from Alan Levin and Mary Schlangenstein.

Photograph: Southwest Airlines Co. aircraft sit parked at a field in Victorville, Calif., on Monday, March 23, 2020. Southwest, which carries the most passengers in domestic markets, said it will cut 1,000 daily flights starting Sunday, ahead of a previously planned 20% capacity reduction, because of a rapid drop in near-term demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics COVID-19 Trends USA Commercial Lines Europe Aviation
There is growing concern within the Morrison government about how to handle foreign takeovers of Australian businesses which have ended up in financial strife as a result of the outbreak of the coronavirus.

The Foreign Investment Review Board is bracing for attempts by foreign companies, particularly from China, to take over distressed Australian businesses and assets.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has been fielding concerns about takeovers of Australian assets. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The concern has sparked calls from Liberal MPs to revisit the criteria for FIRB approval of foreign acquisitions, including putting a greater emphasis on company links with foreign governments.

While no such cases are before the FIRB, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has privately expressed concern about Australian assets ending up in the hands of opportunistic foreign interests over the coming months when more companies are expected to fold.
The city of Asaba is the capital of the oil-rich Delta State in the south-south region of Nigeria. It lies on the western bank of the Niger river. It is not well known beyond Nigeria, but still has powerful resonances for Nigerians because of events in its environs in the first year of the countrys civil war in October 1967. Federal government troops pursuing the Biafran army entered the town and, over three days, massacred at least a thousand people. The town was left in ruins and the survivors traumatised.

The events of that terrible time remain close to peoples hearts. When Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999 after decades of military governance, a body called the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission  popularly known as the Oputa Panel  received some 10,000 petitions about abuses that had taken place between 1966 and 1999. They included the Asaba massacre. But few cases were examined in any depth. The result was that deep dissatisfaction remained.

The massacre is still little acknowledged and a highly sensitive issue. According to historians Elizabeth Bird and Frazer Ottanelli, the massacre is not well known because it was covered up at the time. They argue that this was done with the connivance of Nigerias allies and backers, such as the British Labour government of Harold Wilson. The fact that the military commander whose soldiers committed the atrocities, Muritala Muhammed, became Nigerias head of state in 1975 ensured that the suppression of the truth continued.

The Nigerian civil war broke out in July 1967 when the Igbos of several eastern states, who were mainly Christian, formed a breakaway republic of Biafra in response to massacres carried out by troops of the Northern (Hausa) dominated government. Its estimated that more than a million people died during the three-year conflict, many of malnutrition as a result of an economic blockade. The fighting ended in January 1970 but there continue to be tensions between Christian and Muslim populations in regions of Nigeria.

The Asaba massacre was the single worst atrocity of the civil war. It is part of local folk memory. But, as with many of the events of the civil war, it is not taught in Nigerian schools.

Several years ago, the former leader of the federal government during the civil war, General Gowon, tendered an apology for the atrocities during a private visit to Asaba. But no further action followed.

Campaigners believe it is time that the massacre was officially memorialised. They argue that the obvious location for a permanent memorialisation is Asabas historic Mungo Park House.

The memorial

Mungo Park House is a pre-fabricated wooden structure dating from 1886. It is thought to be the last existing building once owned by the Royal Niger Company. Responsibility for the building was assumed by Nigerias National Commission on Museums and Monuments in 1997 but without government funding the Commission has been unable to renovate it or develop the project.

For some, building a memorial would be beneficial for people living in the area. As Bird and Ottanelli point out, countries elsewhere in West Africa are discovering the value of cultural heritage. For example, Ghanas active promotion of its world heritage sites has boosted national prestige and brought considerable tourist income.

In contrast, Nigeria lags behind.

Reconciliation is only possible when it is closed by a consciousness of remorse and compensation, no matter how symbolic.

In 2017, there was a 50th anniversary remembrance event in Asaba, attended by the Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, who observed that reconciliation is only possible when it is closed by a consciousness of remorse and compensation, no matter how symbolic.

The state governor was there, but there was no representative from the federal administration, indicative of the government stance that the war with Biafra is best forgotten in the interests of national unity.

Given this, the struggle to secure a memorial is likely to continue for some time.

Jon Silverman, Research Professor Media and Criminal Justice, University of Bedfordshire.

This article, slightly modified by Justice Info with the agreement of the author, is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A 52-year-old man who is being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Essex County Correctional Facility has tested positive for coronavirus, the jail announced.

The man was transported to University Hospital for a non-coronavirus (COVID-19) health issue, according to a statement released by the jail, and started experiencing symptoms of the disease while at the hospital.

The hospital eventually tested him, and he was positive, the jail said.

He currently remains under care at University Hospital in isolation, the statement said. All appropriate procedures are being followed for detainees and staff who may have been in contact with the individual.

The man is the second ICE detainee in New Jersey to to test positive for coronavirus. The other detainee to test positive was being held at the Bergen County jail.

ICE has contracts with the Bergen County and Essex County jails, as well as the Hudson County Correctional Facility, to detain immigrations who are awaiting immigration proceedings.

Dozens of advocacy groups and immigration attorneys across the country have been calling on ICE to release all detainees they are holding as the coronavirus outbreak continues to grow.

NJ Advance Media reported Wednesday that ICE was beginning to release detainees at the Essex County Correctional Facility and the privately-run Elizabeth detention center who have health conditions that put them at high-risk of the disease.

It is unclear how many detainees have been or will be released or what the timeframe for release is.

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By Jung Min-ho







A woman, 19, was confirmed to have been infected with COVID-19 after traveling around Jeju Island for five days, authorities said Wednesday.





According to the Jeju government, the woman and three other people, including her mother, arrived on Jeju March 20 and  despite her coronavirus symptoms  traveled around the island before being confirmed to have the disease at a Seoul health center on March 24.





As a result, 38 people, who had been in close contact with her, are now under quarantine in their homes. Most of them are residents of Jeju, an island with a population of 670,000.





Their movement information, which is available on the Jeju government website, shows they stayed at Hanwha Resort Jeju for the first two nights and at Haevichi Hotel and Resort Jeju for the other two. All places they visited have been disinfected.





The patient, a college student in the United States, returned to Korea on March 15 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.





She told health officials that she started showing symptoms such as a cough and phlegm on the first day she arrived on Jeju.





As of Thursday morning, seven people were confirmed to have been infected with the virus on Jeju.


Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 11:10:18|Editor: huaxia

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CAIRO, March 26 (Xinhua) -- At least 16 people were killed and 15 others injured late Wednesday in a multi-car crash in the Egyptian capital Cairo, local media reported.

The collision took place a few hours after Egypt implemented a nighttime curfew from 7 p.m. local time (1700 GMT) to contain the COVID-19 spread in the country, according to a report of state-run Al-Gomhuria daily.

The injured have been rushed to hospital. And an investigation is underway to determine the cause of the incident.
Just as the movement to pay teachers more money was gaining political steam, the economic fallout from the coronavirus is jeopardizing most of this years statewide initiatives to increase salaries, according to an Education Week analysis.

State lawmakers predict that the spread of the coronavirus and the extraordinary efforts to bring it to heel will send sales and income tax revenue into a tailspin next fiscal year. And theyre doing all they can now to brace for the coming storm.

In recent weeks, lawmakers in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee, many citing a potential recession, have significantly reduced the pay bumps that teachers were expecting to get. In Kentucky, a much-anticipated $2,000 raise might get scrapped altogether. And in at least five states, proposals for teacher salary increases are in limbo as legislatures have either suspended their sessions or are retooling state budgets to account for the economic crisis.

In the midst of a pandemic, you try not to put too much focus on that, but educators are very concerned about this decision, said Tikeila Rucker, the president of the United Education Association, which represents teachers in Memphis, Tenn., of the governor cutting the proposed bump in the states contribution to teacher salaries from 4 percent to 2 percent. It feels like a disservice to the people.  Were already underappreciated, overworked, underpaid, and undervalued, and when theres a need to make a cut, it feels like were dispensable.

Over the past two years, teachers across the country have called attention to their stagnant paychecks, staging multi- or single-day walkouts and protests in at least 10 states. Rallies for higher wages and more school funding were planned at state capitols across the country for this spring, until the coronavirus pandemic squashed gatherings.

To maintain social distancing, Tennessee teachers canceled their March 16 protest in Nashville, while South Carolina teachers canceled their second-annual statehouse rally, which was scheduled for March 24 and expected to shut down some schools. In Kentucky, teachers have resorted to driving around the state capitol building in Frankfort in their cars, honking in protest of lawmakers proposed changes to their pensions.

Teachers Asked to Do More

The freeze on pay proposals comes just as teachers must radically change how they worktransition their lessons to a remote-learning platform , soothe students fears about the pandemic from afar, and bring a sense of normalcy to the disrupted school year.

Parents, now tasked with supervising their childrens learning, have exclaimed in memes, social media posts , and notes to district staff that its past time for teachers to get a pay raise. Teachers deserve to make a billion dollars a year. Or a week, tweeted television producer Shonda Rhimes on her first day of homeschooling her children.

Having parents at home who struggle to complete the work that their children are supposed to do will fuel a little more respect for the everyday lives of teachers, said Thomas Easterling, an English teacher at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science. Hes hoping that the state legislature, which has suspended its session, doesnt forget about the $1,000 teacher pay raise proposal that is still pending.

But in state capitols, lawmakers worry theyll see a significant dip in revenue next year when they reconvene to craft the 2021 fiscal year budget. Many of their fiscal analysts have advised them to spend conservatively this year in order to avoid more drastic budget cuts next year.

District school finance analysts, meanwhile, are encouraging district superintendents to save any extra dollars they have to spend rather than bump their teachers pay during negotiations this year. The costs of salary increases this year will compound during a recession as more and more teachers qualify for step-ladder raises and fewer employees leave their jobs, said Marguerite Roza, a Georgetown University school finance professor.

It doesnt take much to destabilize district finances during a recession, Roza said during a webinar for district administrators and school funding advocates earlier this week.

Of the 13 governors who proposed teacher pay raises in their State of the State speeches, only the governors in Arizona, Idaho, and New Mexico have so far been successful in getting their entire proposals across the finish line. Even so, New Mexico lawmakers are expected to head back into a special session to adjust the budget, which includes a 4 percent teacher pay raise, to reflect the new economic reality.

In Arizona, which saw a statewide strike over teacher pay in 2018, the legislature included in a streamlined budget earlier this month a 10 percent bump in pay this year. But Anabel Aportela, a K-12 fiscal analyst for the states school board association and school budget officers association, is concerned about future cuts in the state, which is heavily reliant on sales tax revenue.

Its a fluid situation, Aportela said. Im really concerned about what this is going to do to the economy.

Many teacher-pay initiatives now hang in limbo as state legislatures have promised to reevaluate next years budget after reviewing sales and income tax receipts this month and next to see the impact of so many people being laid off their jobs and locked up in their homes for weeks at a time.

In Georgia, the House of Representatives, citing the threat of a looming recession, cut in half a proposal to provide teachers with a $2,000 pay raise earlier this month before going into a temporary recess. While its yet to be determined what the state Senate decides, Joe Fleming, a lobbyist for the Georgia Association of Educators, a group that represents teachers, said it has put his members on edge.

There are two ways to look at it, Fleming said. Yes, state revenue could be down substantially this time next year but, at the same time, I think our teachers are doing amazing work.  You can make an equally strong argument that its more deserved now than ever before.

A Tough Spot

In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, had made raising teacher pay a hallmark of his campaign last year and has credited teachers with his election. He had proposed a $2,000 pay raise for teacherstheir first in years.

In early March, the state House had passed a budget that gave teachers a 1 percent pay raise each year of the biennium. That was slightly less than Beshears proposal, but it also spread the pay raise to school support staff, too.

But the state Senates proposed budget cuts teacher pay raises entirely, though it includes a 1 percent raise for support staff. The legislature will reconvene on March 26 and April 1 to hammer out the details and finalize the budget. If Beshear vetoes all or parts of the budget, legislators have until April 15 to consider any veto overrides.

But Kentucky lawmakers are bracing for a financial crisis. According to the Courier Journal , state Sen. Tom Buford said that instead of a projected surplus through the end of the fiscal year, we could be down $1 billion in revenuesand I think thats a conservative estimate. Were really in a tough spot.

Even so, teachers are urging state legislators not to forget about them.

Yes, we are in an unprecedented crisisno one has ever imagined living through this kind of pandemic that shuts down states and nations, said Tennessee Education Association President Beth Brown.

Still, she added, we have to acknowledge Tennessee does have a very large cash surplus. So, while were disappointed that this proposal for teacher [raises] has been reduced, its a step back, but its not the end of our fight. . As we recover, lets not forget the problems that were already there before COVID-19 hit us.
Police forces across the UK have set up checkpoints to stop vehicles and ask drivers if their journey is essential during the coronavirus lockdown.

On Monday, Boris Johnson, the prime minister, imposed a nationwide three-week lockdown to combat the spread of Covid-19, telling Britons to stay at home and giving police powers to enforce the instructions with fines.

Officers have been asking motorists where they are going and why they are going there.

They have also been reminding them of the governments message to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives.

Roadblocks have been set up in North Yorkshire, Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall.

Assistant Chief Constable Mike Walker, of North Yorkshire Police, said: The new and significant restrictions announced by the prime minister on Monday evening spell out very clearly what each and every one of us must do to save lives.

The message is clear and the warning stark. Stay at home, save lives.

These are the lives of the people we know and love. Our partners, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, grandparents.

You may never be in such a position again where your simple actions will lead directly to saving lives.

Plymouth D Section Response tweeted a picture of their road-block, adding: We are continuing our work again this morning with road calming measures and enquiries ref essential travel, consider this now the norm.

Officers have also deployed to various supermarkets to assist with queueing flows and social distancing.

Officers in Cornwall had checked over 150 vehicles in Penzance, Hayle and St Ives, they said on Thursday.

They wrote on the Penzance Police Facebook page: Essential journey? Driving to exercise at another location is NOT an essential journey!

Yesterday we stopped and checked over 150 vehicles in the Penzance, Hayle and St Ives area.

Drivers were asked if their journey was essential. We will continue to carry out these checks because, like you, we want to keep Cornwall safe.

Please share and lets keep travel to an absolute minimum.

Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Show all 15 1 /15 Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A rose is delivered by drone to a woman on Mother's Day in Jounieh, Lebanon AFP/Getty Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Women dance on their balcony as a radio station plays music for a flash mob to raise spirits in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A skeleton stands on a balcony in Frankfurt, Germany AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies The film Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna is projected on a building in Rome AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman uses a basket tied to a rope to pull a delivery of groceries up to her balcony in Naples, Italy EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Francesco Cellini plays for his neighbours from the rooftop terrace of his flat block in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman gestures from her balcony in Barcelona EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Cellist Karina Nunez performs for her neighbours at the balcony of her flat in Panama City Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Nash Petrovic live streams a set from his roof in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies People applaud medical workers from their balconies in Modiin, Israel Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A Brooklyn resident relaxes in a hammock hung on their balcony Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Residents toast during a "safe distance" aperitif time between neighbours in Anderlecht, Belgium Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Musician Adam Moser plays for neighbours from his balcony in Budapest, Hungary Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man and his son on their balcony in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man sits alone on a roof terrace in Rome Reuters

Derbyshire Police said people continue to drive to the Peak District for walks despite the forces warnings to stay at home.

In a series of tweets, which included drone footage of people enjoying walks, the force said: Despite posts yesterday highlighting issues of people still visiting the #PeakDistrict despite government guidance, the message is still not getting through.

Cars were parked in both the car park and on the hill up to it. A bag of stones that was at the entrance as a roadblock had been pulled to the side to allow cars to enter. Plenty of people were walking, many of which had parked up in cars before heading out for their walk.

Some number plates were coming back to keepers in #Sheffield, so we know that people are travelling to visit these areas. Daily exercise should be taken locally to your home. Under government guidance, all travel is limited to essential travel only.

The Metropolitan Police and West Yorkshire Police said they had no checkpoints in place.

It comes as police in England were given the power to arrest or fine people up to 960 for breaking the lockdown rules.

The government said the unprecedented measures were necessary to reduce the spread of coronavirus, protect the NHS and save lives.
The much-touted anti-malarial drug seen as a possible treatment for coronavirus has been used successfully in Bahrain, a top health official said Tuesday.

Bahrain, according to the state-run Bahrain News Agency, is one of the first countries to use the decades-old malaria drug known as hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus patients. The agency quotes Lt. Gen. Dr. Shaikh Mohammed bin Abdullah Al Khalifa, the head of the Bahrains coronavirus task force, who said hydroxychloroquine had been effective in alleviating the symptoms of the virus and reducing its complications.

Doctors in Bahrain first used hydroxychloroquine, which is also a treatment for lupus and acute or chronic rheumatoid arthritis, on Feb. 26, Khalifa said.

The jury is still out on whether the experimental drug is an effective treatment for coronavirus. In France, the anti-malarial was used in combination with azithromycin, an antibiotic typically prescribed for bacterial pneumonia, to treat some two dozen patients in Marseille.

But in China, where the virus emerged, a small clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine found no significant differences between those who took the medication and those who didnt.

US President Donald Trump has called the related drug chloroquine a potential game changer. Early trials have shown promise, with one group of French researchers running small tests of the drug on COVID-19 patients concluding that "If clinical data confirm the biological results  the disease will have become one of the simplest and cheapest to treat and prevent among infectious respiratory diseases. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, however, have not been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for use on coronavirus patients.

Reports of the drugs potential have led to both a rush on and unsupervised use of the drug, as well as hoarding. In Arizona, a man died and his wife was hospitalized after they both ingested chloroquine in an attempt to treat themselves for suspected coronavirus. (The couple appears to have taken a non-pharmaceutical version of the drug sold to clean fish tanks.) In Nigeria, health officials say three people in Lagos overdosed on the drug following Trumps comments.

The health ministry in Bahrain has reported 419 confirmed cases of the coronavirus with a death toll of four. The country is among several participating in the World Health Organizations solidarity trial, which will compare treatment efforts around the world.
The total number of infected patients in the capital increased to 47.

Seven more cases of Covid-19 coronavirus were confirmed in Kyiv on March 26, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko wrote on Facebook.

This brings the total number of infected patients in the country's capital to 47.

Klitschko says four women aged 22 to 39 tested positive, as well as two men aged 48 and 62, and a boy, 10.

"Two patients were admitted to the Oleksandrivska Hospital in Kyiv. Five remain in self-isolation, being treated at home under doctors' supervision," Klitschko added.

Read alsoMayor Klitschko: Kyiv may see US$35.6 mln in loss over coronavirus

The mayor once again urged Kyiv residents and all Ukrainians to observe quarantine measures.

UNIAN memo. According to the Public Health Center with the Ministry of Health, as of the morning of March 26, a total of 156 lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 were registered in Ukraine, including five lethal cases and one recovery.
Washington

Pressure was mounting on the Trump administration Wednesday to release people from immigration detention facilities where at least one detainee has tested positive for COVID-19 and advocates fear tight quarters and overall conditions could cause rapid spread of the virus.

The U.S. holds around 37,000 people in immigration detention. Detainees and advocates say many are vulnerable because of age and pre-existing medical conditions, and because they are often held in open rooms, beds 3-feet apart, and without adequate supplies of masks or other protections.

"It's impossible to stay calm," said Marco Battistotti, an Italian who is among 170 people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Bristol County jail in Massachusetts. "People are panicking. People are in fear."

The 54-year-old Battistotti was among about 100 detainees at the county jail near Cape Cod who signed a letter released by a local immigration lawyer detailing conditions inside. They asked to be released to await decisions on their immigration cases.

"I don't want to die in an ICE jail," he said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. "Why can't I fight my case on the outside?"

The agency, which reported the positive test of a 31-year-old man from Mexico held in Bergen County, New Jersey, on Tuesday, has announced steps to protect detained migrants and staff from the virus, but hasn't said whether it plans to review cases for possible release because of the outbreak. It did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the complaints about conditions from the detainees and their advocates.

The administration has tried to balance its overall hard line on immigration, a signature policy of President Donald Trump, and its response to the outbreak, with ICE announcing previously that it would "temporarily adjust" operations to focus on apprehending people who pose a risk to public safety or are subject to mandatory detention because of a criminal record.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Immigrant advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union, filed lawsuits in California, Maryland, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, seeking court orders for the immediate release of people in immigration detention, especially those at risk because of their age or medical conditions.

Advocates have also asked a court in Los Angeles to order the Office of Refugee Resettlement to release to eligible sponsors around 1,200 migrant children who were apprehended without parents or legal guardians and have been held in government-contracted shelters for more than 30 days. They said two staff members at two such facilities in New York have tested positive for COVID-19.

Eunice Cho, an ACLU lawyer, warned that if the virus spreads through a facility the number of sick people who would require advanced care could overwhelm nearby hospitals. Many ICE jails are in rural areas with smaller hospitals.

"This is closely related to the public health of our entire community," Cho said.
A n 84-year-old inmate who had been infected with coronavirus has died.

The prisoner, who had been held at HMP Littlehey in Cambridgeshire, had been transferred to hospital, where he died on Sunday.

He is the first British prisoner to die after contracting coronavirus.

A Prison Service spokesman told the Standard: An 84-year-old prisoner at HMP Littlehey died in hospital on 22 March.

"Our thoughts are with his family at this time.

They added that the death will be subject to an investigation by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman.

Details of when the man was diagnosed with the virus and details as to how he caught it remain unclear.

Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures 1 /81 Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures A deserted Westminster Bridge PA A man wearing a face mask or covering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, walks past customers sat outside a restaurant AFP via Getty Images Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the Coronavirus lockdown Andrew Parsons Runners pass cardboard cutouts of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William during the London Marathon in London AP An empty escalator at Charing Coss London Underground tube station Jeremy Selwyn Electronic bilboards displays a message warning people to stay home in Sheffield PA A sign is displayed in the window of a student accommodation building following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Mancheste Reuters People take part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions, in Londo AP People sing and dance in Leicester Square on the eve on the 10PM curfew Reuters Hearts painted by a team of artists from Upfest are seen in the grass at Queen Square, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Bristol Reuters Graffiti reads 'good luck and stay safe', as the number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases grow around the world, under a bridge in London Reuters A sign is pictured in Soho, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London Reuters Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures, during a coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, London AP A person runs past posters with a message of hope, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Manchester REUTERS Riot police face protesters who took part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions in London AP An image of The Queen eith quotes from her broadcast to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the Coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images Durdle Door in Dorset Reuters Captain Tom Moore via Reuters Mia, aged 8, and Jack, aged 5, take part in "PE with Joe" a daily live workout with Joe Wicks on Youtube to help kids stay fit who have to stay indoors due to the Coronavirus outbreak PA An NHS worker reacts at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital during the Clap for our Carers campaign in support of the NHS Reuters Goats which have taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno @AndrewStuart via PA Tobias Weller PA Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed London Landscapes: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, central London. Matt Writtle A newspaper vendor in Manchester city centre giving away free toilet rolls with every paper bought as shops run low on supplies due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus PA Theo Clay looks out of his window next to his hand-drawn picture of a rainbow in Liverpool, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continue Reuters A young man cuts another man's hair on top of a closed hairdresser in Oxford Reuters General view of the new NHS Nightingale Hospital, built to fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London via Reuters Jason Baird is seen dressed as Spiderman during his daily exercise to cheer up local children in Stockport, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters A woman wearing a face mask walks past Buckingham Palace Getty Images A man holds mobile phone displaying a text message alert sent by the government warning that new rules are in force across the UK and people must stay at home PA Medical staff on the Covid-19 ward at the Neath Port Talbot Hospital, in Wales, as the health services continue their response to the coronavirus outbreak. PA Prime Minister Boris Johnson taking part in a virtual Cabinet meeting with his top team of ministers PA A shopper walks past empty shelves in a Lidl store on in Wallington. After spates of "panic buying" cleared supermarket shelves of items like toilet paper and cleaning products, stores across the UK have introduced limits on purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have also created special time slots for the elderly and other shoppers vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Getty Images People on a busy tube train in London at rush hour PA Mia, aged 8 and her brother Jack, aged 5 from Essex, continue their school work at home, after being sent home due to the coronavirus PA Children are painting 'Chase the rainbows' artwork and springing up in windows across the country Reuters Social distancing in Primrose Hill Jeremy Selwyn A general view of a locked gate at Anfield, Liverpool as The Premier League has been suspended PA Homeless people in London AFP via Getty Images A piece of art by the artist, known as the Rebel Bear has appeared on a wall on Bank Street in Glasgow. The new addition to Glasgow's street art is capturing the global Coronavirus crisis. The piece features a woman and a man pulling back to give each other a kiss PA The Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, London, for Windsor Castle to socially distance herself amid the coronavirus pandemic PA A general view on Grey street, Newcastle as coronavirus cases grow around the world Reuters Matt Raw, a British national who returned from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China, leaves quaratine at Arrowe Park Hospital on Merseyside PA Britain's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news conference inside 10 Downing Street Reuters The ticket-validation terminals at the tram stop on Edinburgh's Princes Street are cleaned following the coronavirus outbreak. PA Locked school gates at Rockcliffe First School in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear PA A sign at a Sainsbury's supermarket informs customers that limits have been set on a small number of products as the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases grow around the world Reuters Jawad Javed delivers coronavirus protection kits that he and his wife have put together to the vulnerable people of their community of Stenhousemuir, between Glasgow and Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" Getty Images A man who appears to be homeless sleeping wearing a mask today in Victoria Jeremy Selwyn A pedestrian walks past graffiti that reads "Diseases are in the City" in Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images Staff from The Lyric Theatre, London inform patrons, as it shuts its doors PA A quiet looking George IV Bridge in Edinburgh PA A quieter than usual British Museum Getty Images A racegoer attends Cheltenham in a fashionable face mask SplashNews.com A commuter wears a face mask at London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn A empty restaurant in the Bull Ring Shopping Centre Getty Images A deserted Trafalgar Square in London PA Passengers determined to avoid the coronavirus before leaving the UK arrive at Gatwick Airport Getty Images

HMP Littlehey is a Category C prison for male sex offenders.

The death comes as the Ministry of Justice confirmed 19 inmates have been infected with coronavirus since the beginning of the outbreak across 10 different prisons.

Four prison staff from four different facilities have also been diagnosed, while three prisoner escorts also have tested positive.

Concerns have been raised previously over the potential for the new coronavirus to spread in prisons - with suggestions some offenders, likely lower level convicts, could be released amid the outbreak.

Previously, the general secretary of the Prison Officers Association said releasing prisoners to prevent the spread of coronavirus may come in the future.

Union general secretary Steve Gillan described the coronavirus situation in Iran is one nation to already take the step of releasing thousands of inmates in order to stem the spread of the virus in prisons there.

Andrea Albutt, president of the Prison Governors Association, said conditions inside jails could enable the spread of the virus, while the demographic of populations inside could also make for a serious impact.

We have approximately 85,000 people in our prisons and prisons are overcrowded, so when you have a lot of people in a small area, transmission of disease will obviously be easier, she previously told BBC Radio 4.
TOKYO, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Japan's health ministry and local governments said Thursday that six new COVID-19 infections were confirmed in Gifu, Hiroshima and Okinawa prefectures, bringing the total number of people infected in Japan to 1,313 as of 11:00 a.m. local time here.

The death toll in Japan from the pneumonia-causing virus currently stands at a total of 55 people, according to the health ministry, with the figure including those from the virus-hit Diamond Princess cruise ship that was quarantined in Yokohama, close to Tokyo.

Of the 1,313 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Japan, the majority are still in Japan's capital city of Tokyo, which has confirmed 212 cases.

A day earlier, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike requested that people in Tokyo stay at home this weekend due to a spike in the number of infections recorded in the capital recently.

There were 41 new cases recorded the day before in the capital, which was more than double its previous daily record of 17.

On Tuesday, Tokyo overtook Hokkaido as the prefecture with the most cases of COVID-19 infections in the country.

"Tokyo is facing an important phase in preventing an explosive rise in the number of infections," Koike told a press conference on the matter, also calling on those in Tokyo to work at home and as much as possible to avoid going out in the evenings.

Meanwhile, according to the latest data, Japan's northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido has 167 COVID-19 cases, Aichi Prefecture has 154 cases, while Osaka Prefecture has confirmed 149 COVID-19 infections, health ministry and local authorities said Tuesday.

The health ministry also said there are currently a total of 66 patients considered severely ill and are on ventilators to receive respiratory assistance or have been admitted to intensive care units for medical treatment.

The ministry added that a total of 907 people have been discharged from hospitals after their symptoms improved.
Former vice president Joe Biden on Wednesday suggested passing climate-change legislation as part of economic aid packages amid the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

Were going to have an opportunity, I believe, in the next round [of economic aid] here to usemy Green Deal to be able to generate both economic growth as consistent with the kind of infusion of monies we need into the system to keep it going, Biden said in a live-streamed briefing on the coronavirus crisis.

Biden then advocated for investment in infrastructure-related jobs to offset the economic impact of the pandemic.

Were going to need new infrastructure going down the road here, and its a way to generate economic growth. Thats going to be, I think, the next round we have to be looking at.

Biden in January released a climate-change plan based in part on the Green New Deal floated in 2019 by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass.).

Democrats have already attempted to add environmental legislation to the massive $2 trillion economic stimulus meant to offset the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The legislation included measures requiring airlines receiving assistance to fully offset carbon emissions by 2025, as well as requiring airlines to report greenhouse gas emissions in order to display the results in a public database.

On Monday, President Trump criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats for the attempt to add the legislation.

Nancy Pelosi came and put a lot of things in the deal that had nothing to do with workers  that had to do with an agenda that they have been trying to get passed for 10 years, Trump said during a Fox News virtual town hall. [The Democrats said] We want green energy, lets stop drilling oil  they had things in there that were terribleWindmills all over the place and all sorts of credits for windmills  they kill the birds and ruin the real estate. A lot of problems.

More from National Review
ESCHBORN, Germany, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Innoplexus AG announced some first results in its artificial intelligence enabled search for a COVID-19 antiviral treatment.

Innoplexus began by scanning data on previously approved drugs for off-label potential in treating COVID-19, using its proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and big data platform to generate actionable insights from hundreds of terabytes of structured and unstructured public data, drawing from sources ranging from private research databases to social media.

Innoplexus processed hundreds of studies covering thousands of patients. Its AI-platform was used to analyze data coming from expression data, molecular pathways, drug binding affinities, and clinical trials published.

One of the most prominently upcoming drugs identified was Hydroxychloroquine, for which more than 200 reports were found. Hydroxychloroquine is a derivative of Chloroquine that has both antimalarial and anti-inflammatory activities. While some smaller studies with Hydroxychloroquine alone showed mixed results in fighting COVID-19 , Innoplexus' proprietary trial prediction engine suggests overall more limited response rates (response being defined as a shorter and less severe disease trajectory than would be seen in the absence of the drug) for ongoing and upcoming clinical trials for Hydroxychloroquine alone.

However, Hydroxychloroquine is a potential and immediately available treatment cost-effective option, although it could have major side effects for specific patient groups. The long-approved drug has been widely used as a prophylaxis for Malaria and as treatment for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. It is on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines and has been prescribed five million times in the US in 2017 alone. Given that Hydroxychloroquine is out of patent and easy to produce, it is among the most promising stand-alone treatment options especially in emerging markets, where cost of treatment is expected to be a significant factor.

In an effort to improve the efficacy of treatments, Innoplexus used its AI platform to analyze drug pathways and interactions in their vast self-learning Knowledge Graphs  built over the entire universe of available biological data  to identify targets for human and virus proteins. Additionally, Innoplexus' AI evaluated the clinical potential of medications approved for other diseases to identify promising drug combinations that work synergistically to interrupt disease mechanisms.

These findings suggest that a combination of Hydroxychloroquine  or Chloroquine  with several previously approved drugs might yield better results than any drug administered alone. This hypothesis needs to be further evaluated in in-vitro and in -vivo research.

According to the AI-based analysis, a combination of Chloroquine and Tocilizumab, a drug approved to treat severe rheumatoid arthritis respectively. Tocilizumab is thought to interrupt the process of 'cytokine release syndrome' (CRS), a form of serious inflammatory response that can occur as a complication of COVID-19.

This first algorithm-based AI analysis of the data ocean also suggested that Chloroquine combined with Remdesivir, an antiviral drug developed by Gilead to treat Ebola, might also be effective. However, Remdesivir has not been approved yet for any indication and some first study results of Remdesivir alone showed limited efficacy. Our analysis suggests higher efficacy for a combination.

Finally, Hydroxychloroquine combined with Clarithromycin or Plerixafor, a semisynthetic macrolide antibiotic derived from erythromycin and an antiretroviral for HIV respectively, could be an option to be evaluated further. Plerixafor appears to act as an immunostimulant, while Clarithromycin seems to be able to block internalization of the virus into host cells during the early phase of infection. Despite safety concerns regarding Plerixafor it might have a positive effect in certain clinical settings.

Innoplexus is in the process of validating all of these combinations in vitro and in vivo studies.

"Our analysis has shown a good basis for allowing these combinations of previously approved drugs in off-label-use with further evaluation," said Dr. Gunjan Bhardwaj, Founder and CEO of Innoplexus. "As such, we recommend that governments and regulators take bold action and remove hurdles in order to substantially lower the incidence of critical and lethal cases of COVID-19. Confirmatory clinical studies should be done in parallel."

To further facilitate and expedite research, Innoplexus is offering its AI-based Clinical Trial Designer and Launch support solutions free of charge to any biotech or pharma company working on solutions to COVID-19.

Finally, Innoplexus has also generated potential candidates for novel molecules using its deep generative models powered by NVIDIA's DGX-1 supercomputers.

"This is crucial in order to be prepared for future viral strains," added Dr. Bhardwaj.

The two novel molecules target a specific virus protein and stop the growth of the virus. Initial results from in silico ADMET predictions and docking simulations showed improved efficacy compared to existing drugs. Additional tests are in progress.

Innoplexus AG

Innoplexus is a leading global AI-based platform for drug discovery and development with over 250 employees and 120+ patent filings including 14 grants in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain technologies. Innoplexus' solutions can generate real-time insights from hundreds of terabytes of structured and unstructured private and public data, thereby facilitating continuous, informed decision-making for its customer base at an unprecedented speed. Founded in 2015, Innoplexus AG is headquartered in Eschborn, Germany, with offices in Pune, India, as well as Hoboken, and San Francisco, United States.

CONTACT: Dr. Gunjan Bhardwaj, CEO, [email protected], +49 (6196) 9677311

SOURCE Innoplexus
Billionaire retailer Solomon Lew has taken the law into his own hands in his fight with large retail landlords. He is refusing to pay rent on the 1250 retail stores owned by his Premier Investments for at least a month, as it shutters all shops from Thursday.

Lew is neither waiting for the government to close down all non-essential retail nor holding his breath for landlords to offer rent concessions but pursuing a scorched earth approach instead, with 9000 staff to be stood down.

Solomon Lew's battle with landlords escalates to outright war. Credit:Paul Jeffers

In doing so Lew has removed two of his businesses largest fixed costs: staff and rent. It will clearly limit the losses and slow the cash burn the group will experience as revenue shrinks to a trickle.

It's the showdown with landlords that Lew has for years been itching for in response to the migration of customers to online retail.
Government presses Welsh ministers to set up a parallel scheme

One of the features of devolution is that our National Health Service is not terribly national. Each of the devolved legislatures is responsible for healthcare in its territoriy  often with less than spectacular results.

With the nation trying to pull together to combat the spread of Covid-19, Conservative MPs are deeply frustrated that even as hundreds of thousands of English people sign up to the Governments NHS volunteer scheme, there is no such programme in Wales.

This anger is not confined to the devosceptic usual suspects, either. At Prime Ministers Questions yesterday Craig Williams, the new MP for Montgomeryshire who formerly sat for Cardiff North, asked Boris Johnson:

I welcome the Prime Ministers approach to devolution. Wales has two Governments, and his mature approach, and that of the Welsh Government, has meant that we have delivered fast legislation and efficient help, but any divergence on policy or communication causes anxiety for my constituents. The Secretary State for Health and Social Care has made an announcement on volunteering. Sadly, Welsh volunteers cannot take part in that schemewe are cross-borderso will the Prime Minister get on the phone to the Welsh Government and say, Lets work together?

Meanwhile Simon Hart, the Welsh Secretary, has written to Mark Drakeford to ask that he make the establishment of such a scheme an urgent priority  and to explain why the proposals are likely to be different to the UK Government version. Stephen Crabb has also said that Wales should be part of the main scheme from the get go.

Nor is this the only place where devoscepticism seems to be taking root. A suitably-outraged report in the separatist National newspaper tells us that Chris Elmore, who was standing in for the Shadow Scottish Secretary, asked the following of Alister Jack:

The coronavirus has shown that local services have been decimated by the Scottish Government. Theyve passed on four times the austerity to local councils that they have received themselves. Would you agree with me that any additional budget resourcing should be passed to Scottish local councils to help bolster already under pressure local services?

He makes an excellent point  under devolution the SNP have pursued an aggressive policy of centralisation, undermining the financial autonomy of Scottish local government. A policy wherein HM Government set aside the idea of Holyrood as a gatekeeper and liaised directly with councils would be most welcome.

Alas, were not there yet and Jack merely said that, under the devolution settlement, it was a matter for the Scottish Government.

Salmond gathers his forces as SNP civil war looms

This column didnt get into the details of Alex Salmonds trial  there was plenty on it in the press. But as I noted on Tuesday, his shock acquittal on all charges made a civil war within the Scottish National Party more likely than not.

Well, were two days on and they havent wasted any time. Senior Nationalists are already calling for an inquiry into whether or not there was a conspiracy against the former First Minister at the top of the Party. Jim Sillars, another figure on the fundamentalist wing of the separatist movement  of which Salmond is effectively figurehead  has also claimed that he had been set up by his former party.

For his own part, the Times reports that the ex-SNP leader intends to publish a revelatory book covering the period of the scandal which will take aim at SNP figures he believes conspired against him. He reportedly claims it will include certain evidence which, for some reason or other, he hadnt been able to use in his trial.

However he may not be out of the woods yet  four women in London have reportedly made complaints to Scottish detectives about the former MPs behaviour whilst in the capital.

On the other side of the field, allies of Nicola Sturgeon apparently fear that Salmonds re-admission to the SNP will be automatic, as he resigned his membership before they had an opportunity to suspend it over the allegations against him. The First Minister herself risks seeing her reputation severely damaged as furious Salmondites press her on what she knew, and when.

As Alex Bell points out in a scathing Courier column, the coming battle can only damage the SNP. The row could open a rift between a substantial portion of the separatist movement, where Salmond remains a giant, and the current Nationalist leadership plus just about every female MSP.
26.03.2020 LISTEN

Minister of Trade and Industry, Ebrahim Patel has reiterated that companies that are essential to the production and transportation of food, basic goods, and medical supplies will remain open during the 21-day lockdown.

He indicated that essential personnel required for the continued functioning of these companies during the lockdown will be exempted from the stay-home provisions.

He said this at a media briefing on Tuesday, 24th March 2020.

All essential items  food and beverages, medical suppliers, personal products, hygiene products, cleaning products  will remain available through the lockdown and the period of the national disaster. This means that all businesses essential for the production and distribution of these essential items will be allowed to remain in operation during the lockdown. He stated.

Pharmacies will remain open during the lockdown. Healthcare professionals providing essential services to the public will be open as well.

Businesses which remain in operation during the lockdown will be required to do so with all the staff required to ensure that the service or production is uninterrupted. He added.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced a nationwide lockdown for 21 days from midnight on Thursday, March 26 in a bid to halt the spread of the Covid-19 virus and save the lives of hundreds of thousands of our people.

Ramaphosa said that although the decision would negatively affect the economy, the human cost of delaying this decision would be far greater.

Briefing the media, Ebrahim Patel called on the people of South Africa to limit the trips to shopping centers for the purpose of shopping for food and basic goods only and not to gather in shopping malls.

He, therefore, urged Businesses to take necessary protocols to ensure adequate hygiene and social distancing.

...ThePressradio.com/Anokye Elvis
London, March 26 : UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has called for the country's borders to be closed in order to stop people arriving from coronavirus hotspots in an effort to halt the pandemic from further spreading, a media report said on Thursday.

Patel was seeking support for her plans to stop passengers being able to fly in to the UK from countries with high levels of infections such as Iran, the US and Chin, the Daily Mail quoted a report by The Telegraph newspaper as saying.

Patel believes flights from virus hotspots should not be allowed when the country was on lockdown to prevent its spread.

The lack of a travel ban in the UK was in stark contrast to policies in the European Union (EU) and the US, which have closed their borders to travellers from foreign countries.

Flights headed to the UK from New York, Tehran, Rome and Beijing all took off on Wednesday, reports the Daily Mail.

An estimated 100,000 passengers were still arriving through UK airports each day - around one fifth of the number before the pandemic.

Many of these are Britons returning from abroad, but government scientific advisers have warned that around 500 coronavirus cases may be linked to foreign nationals coming in to the UK.

"We are most concerned about the daily flights from the US and Iran which are coming in on a daily basis," the Daily Mail quoted a source as saying to The Telegraph.

"We want to stop non-EEA nationals from flying into the UK. The EU is not a problem for the most part because their domestic lockdowns are so severe." This development came as the UK reported 9,640 confirmed coronavirus cases with 46 deaths.
President Moon Jae-in speaks with representatives of Korean COVID-19 detection kit makers, including SolGent's co-CEO You Jae-hyung, left, at Seegen's office in southern Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap



By Jung Min-ho



SolGent, a subsidiary of Korean genome sequencing company EDGC, will export its COVID-19 detection kits to the United States, where cases have been soaring over the past few weeks.



SolGent told The Korea Times Thursday that it has signed a letter of intent (LOI) with several U.S. states, including New York, California and Nevada, to sell its kits (DiaPlexQ) for 1 million tests.



This comes two days after U.S. President Donald Trump asked Korean President Moon Jae-in during a phone conversation for supplies to help combat the disease. Trump then said he would help expedite the process of receiving approval from the Food and Drug Administration for supply providers.



The next day, Moon met representatives of five detection kit makers, including SolGent's co-CEO You Jae-hyung, to thank them for their R&D efforts, saying he was "grateful and proud" of them.





SolGent's coronavirus detection kit DiaPlexQ / Courtesy of EDGC
By The Associated Press Mar. 25, 2020 | 11:24 PM | WASHINGTON





The unanimous vote came despite misgivings on both sides about whether it goes too far or not far enough and capped days of difficult negotiations as Washington confronted a national challenge unlike it has ever faced.







The 880-page measure is the largest economic relief bill in U.S. history. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., appeared somber and exhausted as he announced the vote  and he released senators from Washington until April 20, though he promised to recall them if needed.





The legislation now before us now is historic because it is meant to match a historic crisis,"said Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Our health care system is not prepared to care for the sick. Our workers are without work. Our businesses cannot do business. Our factories lie idle. The gears of the American economy have ground to a halt."





The package is intended as relief for an economy spiraling into recession or worse and a nation facing a grim toll from an infection that's killed nearly 20,000 people worldwide. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, asked how long the aid would keep the economy afloat, said: Weve anticipated three months. Hopefully, we wont need this for three months."





Underscoring the effort's sheer magnitude, the bill finances a response with a price tag that equals half the size of the entire $4 trillion annual federal budget.







Insistently optimistic, President Donald Trump said of the greatest public-health emergency in anyone's lifetime, "I dont think its going to end up being such a rough patch" and anticipated the economy soaring like a rocket ship when it's over.







The drive by leaders to speed the bill through the Senate was slowed as four conservative Republican senators from states who economies are dominated by low-wage jobs demanded changes, saying the legislation as written might give workers like store clerks incentives to stay on unemployment instead of returning return to their jobs since they may earn more money if they're laid off than if they're working. They settled for a failed vote to modify the provision.





Other objections floated in from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has become a prominent Democrat on the national scene as the country battles the pandemic. Cuomo, whose state has seen more deaths from the pandemic than any other, said, I'm telling you, these numbers don't work."







Ardent liberals like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were restless as well, but top Washington Democrats assured them that a additional coronavirus legislation will follow this spring and signaled that delaying the pending measure would be foolish.





The sprawling measure is the third coronavirus response bill produced by Congress and by far the largest. It builds on efforts focused on vaccines and emergency response, sick and family medical leave for workers, and food aid.







House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., swung behind the bipartisan agreement, saying it takes us a long way down the road in meeting the needs of the American people."







Senate passage delivered the legislation to the Democratic-controlled House, which will most likely pass it Friday. House members are scattered around the country and the timetable for votes in that chamber was unclear.





House Democratic and Republican leaders have hoped to clear the measure for Trump's signature by a voice vote without having to call lawmakers back to Washington.





The package would give direct payments to most Americans, expand unemployment benefits and provide a $367 billion program for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home.





It includes a controversial, heavily negotiated $500 billion program for guaranteed, subsidized loans to larger industries, including airlines. Hospitals would get significant help as well.







Six days of arduous talks produced the bill, creating tensions among Congress' top leaders, who each took care to tend to party politics as they maneuvered and battled over crafting the legislation. But failure is not an option, nor is starting over, which permitted both sides to include their priorities.







That Washington drama does not matter any more, McConnell said. The Senate is going to stand together, act together, and pass this historic relief package today.







The bill would provide one-time direct payments to Americans of $1,200 per adult making up to $75,000 a year, and $2,400 to a married couple making up to $150,000, with $500 payments per child.





A huge cash infusion for hospitals expecting a flood of COVID-19 patients grew during the talks to an estimated $130 billion. Another $45 billion would fund additional relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency for local response efforts and community services.







Democrats said the package would help replace the salaries of furloughed workers for four months, rather than the three months first proposed. Furloughed workers would get whatever amount a state usually provides for unemployment, plus a $600 per week add-on, with gig workers like Uber drivers covered for the first time.





Businesses controlled by members of Congress and top administration officials  including Trump and his immediate family members  would be ineligible for the bill's business assistance.







Schumer boasted of negotiating wins for transit systems, hospitals and cash-hungry state governments that were cemented after Democrats blocked the measure in votes held Sunday and Monday.





But Cuomo said the Senate package would send less than $4 billion to New York, far short of his estimate that the crisis will cost his state up to $15 billion over the next year. More than 280 New Yorkers have died from the virus, a death toll more than double that of any other state.







Still, Pelosi said the need for more money for New York is no reason to stop the step we are taking.





Pelosi was a force behind $400 million in grants to states to expand voting by mail and other steps that Democrats billed as making voting safer but Republican critics called political opportunism. The package also contains $15.5 billion more for a surge in demand for food stamps as part of a massive $330 billion title for agency operations.







Republicans won inclusion of an employee retention tax credit that's estimated to provide $50 billion to companies that retain employees on payroll and cover 50% of workers' paycheck up to $10,000. Companies would also be able to defer payment of the 6.2% Social Security payroll tax.





A companion appropriations package ballooned as well, growing from a $46 billion White House proposal to $330 billion, which dwarfs earlier disasters  including Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy combined.







Europe is enacting its own economic recovery packages, with huge amounts of credit guarantees, government spending and other support.







Germany, Europe's biggest economy, has agreed to commit over 1 trillion euros ($1.1 trillion) in fiscal stimulus and support  roughly 30% of that nation's entire annual output. France, Spain and Italy have launched similar programs.







For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, or death.







In the United States, more than 55,000 people have been sickened and more than 1,000 have died.

The Senate late Wednesday passed an unparalleled $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems engulfed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Avengers star Jeremy Renner's ex-wife has clapped back after he asked a judge to reduce his child support payments because of coronavirus.

In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Sonni Pacheco slammed her ex for 'yet another attempt to reduce funds I rely on to provide for our child.'

Renner filed papers in court Tuesday asking a Los Angeles judge to reduce his child support payments to Pacheco for their seven-year-old daughter, Ava.

The Academy Award-nominated actor earned $20m for Avengers: Endgame alone. his net worth is an estimated $50million after bumper checks from his roles in blockbuster franchise Avengers, Mission Impossible, Captain America and The Bourne Legacy.

But Renner wrote in his legal filing that he was expecting a drop in income due to Hollywood projects being canceled in the coronavirus shutdown, asking the judge to slash his monthly child support payments for his daughter from $30,000 to $11,000.

Jeremy Renner and his ex-wife Sonni Pacheco are in a legal battle over child support payment for their seven-year-old daughter Ava

Renner filed papers in court Tuesday asking a Los Angeles judge to reduce his child support payments to Pacheco due to the coronavirus

In the documents, he accused Pacheco of using the child support payments as a 'slush fund' for a high-end lifestyle and expensive court battle against him.

In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Pacheco slammed her ex for 'yet another attempt to reduce funds I rely on to provide for our child'

Speaking to DailyMail.com, Pacheco hit back at her ex's 'lies' and said she was only trying to protect her daughter after 'seven years of hell' in a relationship with Renner.

'It is very disheartening that in a time of global crisis there is yet another attempt to reduce funds I rely on to provide for our child,' the model and actress said, adding that Renner had 'greatly exaggerated' the amount of income he paid Pacheco.

'I think it's time after seven years of hell, I start addressing the lies myself,' she said. 'First, I do not receive $30,000 in monthly child support. Second, all of my savings and Ava's savings have been drained due to lawyer fees, as my concerns for Ava's safety have been an ongoing battle for years now.

'I have, and will always choose to protect Ava when I find out about disturbing behavior exhibited by her father at his homes that put her in danger.

'Last but not least, I am choosing love and to continue to wish him the best and a healthy safe life.'

During the bitter custody battle over the former couple's daughter, Renner's ex, Ava's former nanny and his friends have accused him of regularly taking drugs while he was meant to be looking after his daughter, firing a gun in the house and threatening to kill himself while she slept, and having a 'revolving door' of young women visiting and partying at the six-year-old's part-time home.

He accused Pacheco of using the child support payments as a 'slush fund' for a high-end lifestyle and expensive court battle against him

Pacheco said after 'seven years of hell' with Renner, she wants to call out his 'lies' that she's using the payments to live a lavish life

Using texts and doctors notes as evidence, Pacheco claimed Renner even bit their daughter, and said he had been referred to the Department of Child and Family Services.

Renner has denied the allegations and has claimed that Pacheco persuaded his ex-girlfriend to lie about shooting his gun in his home.

Affidavits from friends and a former employee say Renner left cocaine lying around the house in the way of his young daughter, and got drunk in his jacuzzi then had a threesome while his daughter wandered around the house at a party.

Two ex-girlfriends submitted copies of text messages and wrote affidavits claiming Renner constantly sent them 'd**k pics' and nude photos using a Snapchat account named after his daughter's initials and birth date, and even dressed one of them in a gown embroidered with his six-year-old's name.

Pecheco has written in previous court filings that she is 'terrified' for her daughter's safety while she spends time with her father.

Renner met Pacheco in Vancouver on the set of Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol. They welcomed Ava in March of 2013 and tied the knot 10 months later, in January of 2014.

Pacheco filed for divorce in December of 2014.
Newsfrom Japan

Narita, Chiba Pref., March 25 (Jiji Press)--Narita International Airport was crowded by Japanese citizens returning from the United States on Wednesday, one day before Japan extends measures to limit entry into the country to people coming across the Pacific.

A 46-year-old Tokyo corporate worker who had been stationed in New York returned to Japan two days earlier than initially planned.

"I think they are necessary measures (to prevent the further spread of the novel coronavirus), although they should have been implemented a bit earlier," he said.

A 45-year-old man working at a company in Ishikawa Prefecture, central Japan, said he wrapped up his business in Philadelphia one week earlier than scheduled so he could unconditionally go home after arriving at the airport near Tokyo.

Similarly, a business owner in Yokohama, 62, finished staying at his vacation house in Hawaii with his family members ahead of schedule.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]
The day after the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned that Indias swiftness in dealing with COVID-19 was vital to prevent the global spread of the disease, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared a nation-wide three week lockdown starting from midnight on March 24.

Referring to Indias large population, WHO emergencies program director Mike Ryan stated on March 23: The future of this pandemic will be determined by what happens to densely-populated countries. Its important that India takes aggressive action at the public health level, and at the level of society to control and suppress this disease.

Modis imposition of the lockdown came almost two precious months after India reported its first positive case of COVID-19. While the official figures of positive cases currently stands at 606, with 12 deaths, it is not clear how many of the countrys 1.3 billion people are infected, because barely 20,000 tests have been carried out.

Along with WHO, a series of medical experts warned of a looming incoming disaster. Modi and Indian authorities, however, repeatedly declared their intention not to panic, on the basis of claims that no communal transmission had taken place. Modis rush now to enforce a total national lockdown only indicates how potentially severe the situation has become.

Indias Economic Times reported on March 23 how the Indian government did not pay heed to the WHOs demand in February for industry and governments to increase production of healthcare equipment by 40 percent, in preparation for an exponential rise in global demand. But the government failed to make any forecast, the Times commented, adding that the resultant last minute rush by the government is inadequate, feel industry experts.

Sanjiiv Relhan, chairman of the Preventive Wear Manufacturer Association of India, stated: Despite us reaching out to the ministry and requesting for anti-profiteering measures to be imposed, as early as February 7, the Indian government did not do that. The price of components used to make the three-ply face masks have gone from 250 per kilogram to 3,000 per kilogram. Elastics are not available at any price. We are now facing a crisis which is of our own making. We also repeatedly raised the need for creating stockpiles of protective gear, which were ignored.

Modi, in his address, repeatedly asserted that social distancing was essential to stem the spread of infection. He declared that it was the only way before us and that there is no other method or way to escape the coronavirus.

While social distancing is an important part of preventing the spread of coronavirus, it is not, as Modi asserted, the only step. International experience has proven the essential role of large-scale testing to identify all positive cases combined with systematic tracing to identify and rapidly isolate and test those with whom an infected person has been in close contact. No less essential is sufficient protective clothing for workers who cannot isolate, especially in the health sector.

While declaring the Indian population must not step outside our home, Modi did not outline a comprehensive program to deal with enormous difficulties that millions of workers and the oppressed will face under the lockdown, including accessing the most basic food necessities.

A BBC report on March 25 noted: At least 90 percent of Indias workforce is employed in the informal sector, according to the International Labour Organisation, working in roles like security guards, cleaners, rickshaw pullers, streets vendors, garbage collectors and domestic help.

This vast section of the population, some 520 million workers in 2019, stand to lose their wages for the whole three-week lockdown period, as they are not guaranteed any salary.

Ramesh Kumar, a construction worker from Banda district in Utter Pradesh, told the BBC: There wont be anybody to hire us, but we still took our chances  I earn 600 rupees ($US8) every day and I have five people to feed. We will run out food in a few days. I know the risk of coronavirus, but I cant see my children hungry.

Mohammed Sabir, a street vendor, aptly summed up to the BBC the social disaster that faces millions: I feel so helpless. I fear that hunger may kill many like us before coronavirus.

Reports suggest that a third of all restaurants could be shut down, shedding more than two million jobs over the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the entire automotive sector is mothballing its factories, putting at risk the incomes of a million people employed in this area.

Modi loudly announced a provision of 150 billion rupees ($US1.9 billion) for treating the coronavirus patients and strengthening the medical infrastructure of the country. Given the dimensions of the incoming disaster, this is a drop in the ocean and reflects the negligence and indifference for human lives of the ruling class.

Just weeks ago, the Modi government allocated $66 billion to the defence budgetmore than 30 times the outlay on combating the virus. The amount is less than what Modi agreed to spend to buy American-made military helicopters during US President Donald Trumps visit on February 24-25.

One coronavirus test kit costs the government about 5,000 rupees ($67). If the entire $1.9 billion was spent on testing alone, it would pay for only 29 million tests within a population of 1.3 billion.

However, Modis $1.9 grant is not merely for testing, but as he boasted, to improve the severely deficient health infrastructure in country, which has just 2.3 intensive care unit (ICU) beds per 100,000 people. When this figure is compared with Iran, which has 4.6 ICU beds per 100,000 and has been overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases, it brings into stark focus the dire situation that is developing in India over the coming weeks.

As of 2016, the Indian Medical Association reported a shortage of tens of thousands of critical-care specialists. Meanwhile, the majority of doctors and hospital beds are in the private healthcare, which is not affordable for the vast majority of the population, the working class and the rural poor.
Politicians who consider sacrificing the old for the sake of the economy face a backlash: Don Pittis

Those who say the value of human life cannot be measured may not know one of the dark secrets of economics.

As we hear about the monstrous death rates from COVID-19 in Italy and Spain, we must face the fact that whenever there is a cost to keeping people from dying  whether in traffic accidents or from rare diseases  there is always a trade-off.

According to the calculations of economists, human life does, indeed, have a price.

And after Texas Lt.-Gov. Dan Patrick suggested it may be time for grandma and grandpa to risk sacrificing themselves for the economy, it is inevitable that those of us approaching the cut-off date may be getting a little nervous.

"As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that's the exchange, I'm all in," said Patrick, 70, this week in a much-quoted and much-shared clip from Fox News.

It brings to mind Christopher Buckley's satiric novel Boomsday, in which baby boomers are paid cash up front to commit to being bumped off when they reach age 75 in order to save money for younger taxpayers.

A character in the 2007 book remarks it's "the fate of many propositions to begin as heresies and end as truths."

If Patrick is to be taken at his word, suddenly, that economic heresy may be coming to life.

The human life calculator

Of course, reports show the new coronavirus does not just kill old people.

But with death rates for those who catch it rising with age to as high as one in five after age 80, there's been a backlash.

Essentially, critics say similar statements by U.S. President Donald Trump  to the effect that the country needs to go back to work soon to restart the economy  will likely lead to hundreds of thousands of additional deaths.

"We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself," Trump tweeted in capital letters.

Story continues

As Chris Fievoli from the Canadian Institute of Actuaries said Wednesday, there is no question in the insurance industry that lives have measurable value. He recalls working in the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was killing young people, and each young life lost cost the industry more than if they had been able to grow old.

The insurance industry has this handy widget called the Human Life Value Calculator intended to show how much life insurance you need, but which also shows a decline in value in senior years.

COVID-19 crisis has brought out the ageists

Similarly, various government agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, have estimates for how much should be spent to protect people from hazards. According to the New York Times, the EPA's estimate is $9.5 million US per life saved.

In the 1990s, the agency tried to include a provision that the lives of people over 70 were only worth two-thirds of those of younger people before being scared off by AARP, the U.S. lobby group for older people.

Here in Canada, Marissa Lennox, chief policy officer for CARP, AARP's northern sister organization, is outraged by what she sees as an increase in bias against older people caused by the new pandemic.

"I think COVID-19 has brought the ageists out in force," said Lennox. She deplores the use of the phrase "boomer remover" that she says has swept social media.

WATCH | U.S. President Donald Trump is anxious to get the economy running again:

Even worse, she says, some medical authorities around the world are discussing putting an age limit on who gets treatment, which she sees as an implication that seniors are expendable.

Comments like Trump's and Patrick's, she warns, may be a slippery slope.

"Any rhetoric around sacrificing the 'old' for the sake of the economy is purely ageist, and it is dangerous," said Lennox.

Caring for the elderly has a cost

As Buckley's satire Boomsday laid out clearly, caring for the old has a public cost, especially in the U.S. where pensions remain an unfunded government liability. Here in Canada, most pensions come out of a fund based on your lifetime contributions.

But sacrificing the weak and old has a cost, too, leaving each of us wondering which group will be next.

"The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members," Indian civil rights leader Mahatma Gandhi reportedly said, an idea that clearly represents a different kind of economic calculus.

Rather than being based on dollars and cents, it is a social contract in which the more active and wealthy work to support the more vulnerable. After all, as Lennox points out, most of us will eventually need the help of a caring society.

"One of the things we love about CARP members is how much they love their children and their grandchildren," said Lennox. "And I would hope those children and grandchildren feel the same."

But even if politicians don't care about the idea of a social contract, they may be inclined to listen, because repeated studies show that old people vote and the young don't.

Follow Don on Twitter @don_pittis
GRAND RAPIDS, MI  Inside Steelcases global headquarters in Grand Rapids, employees were hard at work over the past week designing, prototyping and building new products.

But these werent the sleek desks, chairs and couches the renowned office furniture manufacturer is known for. Instead, Steelcases workers were hustling to create isolation masks, face shields and other products hospitals across Michigan need to treat patients amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Its new territory for Steelcase, but these are unprecedented times, said James Ludwig, the companys vice president of global design and engineering.

The sprit of the innovator is to solve problems, he said. Right now, honestly, theres now bigger problem, no better problem to solve than health and safety.

As the global health emergency deepens, supply chains for personal protective equipment have dried up, leaving hospitals critically short of the materials healthcare workers need to safely treat the growing number of coronavirus patients.

Now, businesses from across the region are stepping up to meet that demand.

Amway has manufactured thousands of free containers of hand sanitizer for West Michigan hospitals. Addix, a sportswear manufacturer based in Lowell, has begun sewing facemasks. And Altus, a Walker-based company that specializes in mobile healthcare workstations, is now producing carts used to transport ventilators for patients that cannot breathe on their own.

Its an emotional roller coaster, but its a great testament to our team, our employees and our supply vendor base here in West Michigan, said Eric Kahkonen, chief revenue officer at Altus.

He said his company has produced about 350 ventilator carts over the past two days, the majority of which have been purchased by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Despite such successes, some hospitals are still running low on equipment. Henry Ford Health System, for example, has 400 ventilators but recently placed an order for 74 more. Officials with the Detroit-based health care provider said its expected to take eight weeks to receive them.

In West Michigan, as demand began to grow for items ranging from hospital gowns to hand sanitizer and gloves, regional economic development group The Right Place has worked to provide guidance for businesses looking to assist in the effort.

Such conversations have resulted in new and, until now, unexpected partnerships.

One example: Eric Icard, a senior business development manager at The Right Place, said he recently sent design plans for a medical face shield to Jim Medsker, president of the Kalamazoo-based medical device manufacturer Keystone Solution Group.

I said this looks like something Keystone could do with the right partnership, and Jim being Jim  and being a very collaborative guy  he reached out to Kent Manufacturing, which is based in Grand Rapids, Icard said.

It looks like theyre prototyping something right now.

In addition to face shields, Keystone Solutions Group is also examining whether it can produce coronavirus test sample collections kits, Medsker said. He said his company expects to soon finalize whether it can manufacture the face shields and test kids.

Lord willing, we are going to get through this pandemic, and that high-demand is going to shrink, Medsker said. But what I see long term is that were all realizing the importance of sourcing locally and sourcing in the United States.

The first cases of coronavirus were reported in China late last year, but the virus has quickly spread to the rest of the world. There were 2,294 Michiganders diagnosed with coronavirus (COVID-19) and 43 deaths as of Wednesday, March 25. Thirty-six of the infected individuals are in Kent County.

Michigans first two cases were reported on March 10.

Companies big and small are examining how they can help meet the health care systems needs.

Last week, Lowell sportswear manufacturer Addix said it had begun, at the suggestion of one customer, making face masks. The masks are not N95 respirators, which can block 95 percent of small airborne particles, but Addix CEO Steve Dean previously told the Grand Rapids Press/MLive.com that he believed the masks could help people during the pandemic.

Dean said about one-quarter of the companys 48-person workforce were recently laid off due to the downturn in apparel orders.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Stryker, a global medical device and equipment manufacturer based in Portage, is reviewing option to make personal protective gear such as masks.

However, company spokesperson Jenny Braga said, It will take time to get products approved and scale up production.

We are working with our trade association, AdvaMed, and FDA to accelerate the regulatory pathways for essential personal protection equipment, she said.

At Steelcase, employees over the past week were designing and developing prototypes for facemasks and face shields.

The company has never manufactured the products before but had access to some of the expertise and materials needed to make the products, said Ludwig, the companys vice president of global design and engineering.

He recalled how one employee texted him over the weekend asking if there was anything he could do to help. After Ludwig spoke with the employee about the face shields, he received a text the next day with designs for three different face shields, as well as the cost of the product and potential suppliers for some of the necessary materials.

These are the kind of people that are in our community, Ludwig said, in reference to his employees. Theres an incredible amount of ingenuity, inventiveness and desire, and if you can tap into that, I think we can do amazing things together.

Looking forward, Ludwig projected that Steelcase would be able to begin producing the masks and face shields, in multiples of the thousands, by the end of the week.

Following Gov. Gretchen Whitmers stay-at-home order, the company has laid off nearly all its hourly manufacturing and distribution employees. However, Steelcase says it can continue operations related to the health care sector.

The company plans to donate the first and most urgent wave of masks and face shields to its community partners. Future decisions about how to cover costs and continue to acquire materials will be decided as this situation evolves, the company said in a statement.

Did I imagine it this way  probably not, Ludwig said, when asked about the role his company is now playing amid the coronavirus pandemic. Did I imagine trying to do something meaningful with our work  its something weve always dreamed of.

PREVENTION TIPS

Read more

Another big jump in Michigan coronavirus numbers: Now at 2,295 cases; 43 deaths

70K pieces of medical and protection equipment donated by GRCC

Navigating Mental Health During Quarantine podcast launching from West Michigan group
Typhoid Mary was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid in the early 1900s who didn't believe she was infected. She also failed to practice what would now be considered basic hygiene (e.g., hand-washing) and worked as a cook. She moved from job to job every few months, spreading her disease along the way. At the time (according to the linked article), typhoid killed roughly 10% of its victims. Mary wound up quarantined for the last 23 years of her life.

Various governors and other political officials are currently instituting quarantines and "shelter in place" orders for the entire population of a city, county, etc. Hefty fines often accompany the orders, justified on the grounds that each of us may be an asymptomatic carrier of Wuhan Coronavirus and thus a danger to others. At least in Mary's case, a doctor tested her first and found that she was a carrier before she was quarantined for the rest of her life. We are presumed guilty without proof of harboring dangerous viruses, and we are expected to obey the orders even if we have a recent test showing we are not infected.

I am not worried for my own health, and I have no issues with people being able to choose whether or not to risk getting sick and (probability estimates vary) potentially dying. People practice many risky behaviors, including extreme sports, without the government stepping in and confining them to their residences. Adrenaline junkies tend to endanger only themselves, which could be why the government doesn't arrest them all. On the other hand, drunk driving is also dangerous and is illegal, at least in part due to its endangerment of others.

It is illegal to knowingly expose others to a dangerous disease. If you don't know you are infected, then (at least for STDs) you cannot be convicted of endangering others. Laws do vary, and this may not be true everywhere. However, it seems inconsistent to assume we all are a lethal threat by virtue of breathing because we might possibly have active coronavirus in our systems.

Those concerned about catching the disease and unwilling to accept the risk should definitely be allowed to stay home. Those of us who are willing to accept the responsibility of making our own choices and the consequences thereof should be allowed to do as we please regarding moving about and participating in generally legal behavior. Life isn't lived in a bubble. We cannot be protected from everything, certainly not by government. Home is intended as a refuge, not a cage.

There is much about disease we don't know, like who will get it and how bad his infection and symptoms will be. Being swaddled in undeserved quarantines only allows government to claim it's "doing something." Let's get back to being treated like adults.
More than 3.28 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, more than four times the previous record set in 1982, reflecting the huge economic impact of the coronavirus and the steps being taken to curb its spread. In Ohio, more than 187,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits in the first week Gov. Mike DeWine began closing businesses  quadrupling the prior record for weekly unemployment claims since records began to be kept in 1987.

The U.S. Senate unanimously voted to approve a landmark $2 trillion coronavirus relief package, the largest in the nations history, which includes $1,200 financial-assistance checks to middle-class and lower-income Americans, as well as expanded and increased unemployment benefits. The House will vote on the bill Friday morning, according to U.S. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.

Ohio lawmakers on Thursday passed sweeping legislation to address a long list of coronavirus-related issues, including extending mail-in voting from the postponed March 17 primary until April 28, allowing high-school seniors to graduate, freezing school-voucher eligibility, and banning water utilities from disconnecting service.

Efforts for the United Nations Security Council to pass a coronavirus resolution have stalled because of U.S. insistence that it explicitly state that the outbreak started in Wuhan, China. Chinese diplomats accused the U.S. of "irresponsible practices over the resolution, one version of which calls for a "general and immediate cessation of hostilities in all countries for 30 days to allow coronavirus-related supplies to flow.

By the numbers

World cases and deaths: 491,623 confirmed cases, 22,169 deaths

U.S. cases and deaths: 69,210 confirmed cases, 1,046 deaths

Ohio cases and deaths: 704 confirmed cases, 10 deaths, 182 hospitalizations

General information

Coronavirus timeline: How the coronavirus spread from cases in China to Ohio in less than three months

Coronavirus in Ohio: Department of Health opens call center to field questions, open 7 days a week

Ohio is under a state of emergency because of the coronavirus. What does that mean?

Coronavirus patients can take a turn for the worse two weeks into the illness, experts say

Kids and coronavirus: Children have come down with COVID-19, but usually with milder symptoms

Coping with coronavirus: Guide aims to ease fear of pandemic disease

MetroHealth Dr. Amy Ray offers helpful coronavirus advice in video

Can you have coronavirus without knowing it? Absolutely.

Loss of smell may be early symptom of coronavirus

Risk/mitigation factors

Hypertension could be a leading factor in coronavirus deaths: Heres what to know

How will coronavirus affect allergy sufferers?

Heres why mitigating the pandemic curve matters

What you might not know about using face masks to protect against coronavirus

Will the shingles vaccine help me fight coronavirus? No. Heres why

Coronavirus update: Virus could live up to 24 hours on cardboard, 3 days on plastic and steel, study says

Coronavirus and lungs: How do smoking, vaping, air pollution affect respiratory illnesses?

How humidity could help fight coronavirus

ACE2: How researchers think coronavirus attacks cells, and how it could be stopped

Coronavirus and the lungs: Does COVID-19 cause more severe pneumonia or ARDS than other viruses?

Hygiene/etiquette

Washing your hands: Best public restroom etiquette in the age of coronavirus

How to protect yourself from coronavirus: An infocomic goes viral

Ohio health department chief regularly cites school study on hand-washing. What does it say?

Coping at home

Compiling a COVID-19 coronavirus quarantine prep kit: What you should have on hand at home

Should I take elderberry supplements to ward off flu, coronavirus?

Homemade hand sanitizer to battle coronavirus? Dont use denatured alcohol -- or vodka

10 essential tips to working from home during the coronavirus outbreak

Working from home? These 10 must-have items will make the transition easier

Comfort TV options you can stream if things get too quiet while working from home

Have a back-up plan for pets in case you get sick with coronavirus, Cleveland APL says

Coronavirus and food: 5 things to know for novice chefs at home

Worried about coronavirus on your food? 165 degrees is universal safe cooking temperature, but not often necessary

How to avoid a census worker coming to your door during coronavirus crisis

FAQ: Everything you need to know about getting Ohio unemployment amid coronavirus outbreak

What to read during coronavirus isolation: Cleveland authors, literary leaders offer book recommendations

40 podcasts to enjoy during coronavirus isolation

Travel

Could Ohio shut down travel for coronavirus quarantine?

Travel in the age of coronavirus: Some Clevelanders cancel trips, others wait and see

Closings/cancellations

Coronavirus closings and restrictions in Ohio for Thursday, March 26, 2020
Coronavirus, which first emerged in China's Wuhan city, has now spread across the globe. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the Coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic. Recently, PM Narendra Modi took a major decision on March 24 and announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19. India's economy is severely hit as shops, offices and many businesses are shut down. The daily wage workers are having a tough time handling the situation. While our government is trying their best to handle the crisis, a few celebrities have come forward to extend their help. One such actor is Kapil Sharma, who has contributed Rs 50 lakh to PM relief fund for fighting Coronavirus.

The actor-comedian took to social media to announce the same. He tweeted, "It's time to stand together with the ones who need us. Contributing Rs.50 lakhs to the PM relief fund towards the #fightagainstcorona. Request everyone to #stayhome #staysafe #jaihind #PMrelieffund @narendramodi  ." - (sic)



Kapil also batted for the daily wage earners and promised to help the needy and the worst-affected by COVID-19 outbreak. The actor wrote, "i whole heartily support this noble initiative. Happy to contribute for this humanitarian cause. While staying safe at home i urge every one else also to contribute online -www.iahv.org/in-en/donate/ #iStandWithHumanity #ArtOfLiving #BMC." - (sic)

A couple of days ago, the actor-comedian also urged people to stay at home and save lives by sharing a video of hens and asked people to learn from them. In the video, hens are seen walking outside but at the noise of a horn at once, they all run into their houses. Kapil captioned the video as, "      #StayHomeSaveLives #coronavirus #INDIAfightsCorona ." - (sic)

Also Read: Sidharth Shukla on Bhula Dunga Trending At 1 On YouTube & His Chemistry With Shehnaz Gill
An expert on South Korean politics who became a global superstar after his serious interview on the BBC was gatecrashed by his curious children and stressed-out wife has appeared on the news again today - to reveal that his son and daughter are 'climbing the walls' during their coronavirus isolation.

Professor Robert Kelly's appearance on BBC News via a video link in March 2017 became an instant sensation after his daughter Marion, then four, burst into her father's office for the world to see, with her baby brother James hot on her heels in his walker.

Their unflappable father, who was offering his expert insights on South Korean politics to BBC News, managed to ignore the chaos behind him as his wife Jung-a Kim rushed into the room to remove their excitable children - but not before the pair became a hit with the public.

Now Professor Kelly, 47, has appeared on the BBC World News again - this time with his wife and children invited to sit by his side - as he reveals what life is like in Busan, South Korea during coronavirus lockdown.

Professor Kelly has appeared on the BBC World News again - this time with his wife and children invited to sit by his side (pictured children Marion and James and wife Jung-a Kim) - as he reveals what life is like in Busan, South Korea during coronavirus lockdown

Talking about working from home with his young children, Professor Kelly said: 'It's tough for us. As you can see, it's very difficult.

'Employers who have employees with kids this age; they're fighting all the time, they've got nothing to do, they're climbing the walls, it's just really really tough.

'That's why I'm glad they're softening the rules a little bit so at least we can take them outside so they can use a little bit of energy  but three weeks ago it was very difficult because we couldn't go anywhere.

'There are only so many games you can play and puzzles you can do before they start running around.'

Professor Kelly's struggles with the children are visible during today's interview as Marion and James fidget as their parents answer questions on life in South Korea as coronavirus spreads across the country.

But the parents keep calm as they field questions on life under lockdown with their children.

Professor Kelly's wife Jung-a Kim said: 'It's very difficult to stay in the house for a very long time.

'We try to go out and see the flowers and the trees and they can shout and scream.'

Professor Robert Kelly's appearance on BBC News via a video link in March 2017 became an instant sensation after his daughter Marion, then four, burst into her father's office for the world to see, with her baby brother James hot on her heels in his walker

Professor's Kelly's rise to fame in 2017 came after he was questioned about South Korea's president, Park Geun-hye, being ousted from power was eclipsed by Marion, aged four, who performed a comical dance in the background

South Korea has pushed for testing of its citizens during the outbreak and has also been using mobile phone data that people can use to determine if they have come into contact with someone who has been infected with the novel coronavirus

The country has been viewed as something of a success story in its efforts to beat back the spread of the virus.

Professor Kelly said: 'I think South Koreans have actually dealt with it really well. I think self-compliance has been pretty high. You don't see the kind of thing you see in the US with crowded beaches and people refusing to stay off the subways and things like that.

'The South Koreans have responded really well and that's why the curve has flattened.'

As the interview concluded the BBC news anchor told Professor Kelly he was glad that 'Marion and James haven't lost any of their naughtiness'.

Professor's Kelly's rise to fame in 2017 came after he was questioned about South Korea's president, Park Geun-hye, being ousted from power was eclipsed by Marion, aged four, who performed a comical dance in the background.

She was followed by little brother James, aged just nine months, who swept in to the study in a fast-moving baby walker. Moments later a stressed-out Jung-a skidded into the room and grappled the children out of shot.

Speaking to BBC News soon after the blunder - sitting alongside his wife and two children - with Marion sucking a lolly and James munching on a rusk, Proffessor Kelly was keen to defend his wife against mean-spirited comments

He revealed he was so anxious after the 'disaster' that he had apologised to the BBC and thought his career as an interviewer was over.

Speaking to BBC News soon after the blunder - sitting alongside his wife and two children - with Marion sucking a lolly and James munching on a rusk, Proffessor Kelly was keen to defend his wife against mean-spirited comments.

He said:'It is quite apparent in the video that she is frantically trying to salvage the professionalism of the interview.

'When Marian our daughter speaks in the clip she says in Korean 'Why mum' because she was responding surprise because we do not usually treat out children the way you saw in the clip.'

Prof Kelly admitted he was mortified at the time but in hindsight he could see the funny side.

He said his feelings about the incident had gone from 'surprise and embarrassment' to 'amusement' and finally 'love and affection'.

'It was terribly cute. I saw the video like everybody else and it's really funny,' said Prof Kelly.

He said the reaction on social media had been astonishing - and mostly positive - and he had been forced to switch off Twitter and Facebook alerts and put his phone on airplane mode.

Speaking on Twitter in 2018, a year after the clip went viral, Professor Kelly told his followers that he doesn't like to talk about the video too often out of fear of 'overexposing' the children, but wanted to mark the one year anniversary of the interview.

He revealed that achieving worldwide fame because of his children had made them all closer as a family.

Professor Kelly said: 'It made us happier. We laugh about it. It helps me empathise with parents more. We love our children very much, but I suppose it made our bond with them tighter.'
The Anthropologie store in Center City. The store is closed during the coronavirus pandemic, but employees have voiced growing concerns about those who still must report for work to perform other jobs. Read more

The package appeared at the Urban Outfitters warehouse on March 17. It was the standard zip-up case for customers receiving and returning brand-name clothes rented by the month through the companys Nuuly subscription service.

A note was attached.

Id typically take to store, but we have come in contact with virus and are taking zero risks of spreading, said the note, a copy of which was seen by The Inquirer. Thank you. Stay well.

Whoever wrote it underlined thank you three times.

A young man who processes returns at the warehouse in Bristol Township was concerned about handling this one, employees said. He was instructed to process it anyway.

This week, a different kind of note arrived at the inboxes of employees at Urban Outfitters headquarters in Philadelphia, where some employees have had to report to work during the coronavirus pandemic. Unfortunately, we have had our first confirmed case of COVID-19 in an employee from the Navy Yard campus, the email said.

Urban Outfitters Inc.  which also encompasses such brands as Anthropologie, Free People, BHLDN, and Terrain  rang up almost $4 billion in sales in the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2019, its most recent annual report. The company was one of the first retailers to close its stores to the public as social distancing measures took hold, and has now pinned its hopes on e-commerce.

That means dozens of employees have continued producing photo shoots and running food and beverage service at its Navy Yard campus, even as other businesses have shuttered. Hundreds more have kept operations running at warehouses in Bristol Township and in Gap, Pa.

 READ MORE: What the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill could mean for Pa. and N.J.

The company says its in compliance with city orders to close nonessential businesses and state orders to close business that arent life-sustaining, noting there are exceptions to those orders. We are carefully reviewing and following state and local executive orders across the country on an hourly basis, a spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

But current and former employees are voicing growing concerns about the in-person work requirements amid the global pandemic that has put a halt to huge amounts of economic activity in the United States and around the world. This article is based on audio of internal meetings, company emails, and interviews with multiple employees who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.

Some employees have circulated a phone script encouraging friends and family to call Gov. Tom Wolfs office to report that Urban is endangering peoples livelihoods, mental health, and physical well-being ... to sell clothes and home furnishing items.

As one worker at the Nuuly warehouse put it: There is nothing life-sustaining about it. We are literally renting out clothes to slightly privileged people.

In a statement emailed Wednesday in response to questions from The Inquirer, Urban did not address specific questions about the incident at the Nuuly warehouse or other claims by employees. The company said employees are not required to come to work if they dont feel comfortable" and can use sick, vacation, and unpaid days off to do so.

We take our employees health and well-being most seriously, Urban said in its statement. The company said that while it has closed stores, certain jobs cannot be performed remotely. Urban said it has reduced staff at its headquarters from 2,100 to typically less than 100 per day. A spokesperson also said the company has increased cleaning regimens, and encourages employees to share concerns.

If our safety protocols are not being carried out in a given location or by a particular manager, we want to know so we can immediately rectify the situation, the company said. We understand how, on the surface, some might consider online fashion retailing to be nonessential, but the reality is that COVID-19 is a serious threat not only to our health but also to our economy.

After Mayor Jim Kenney ordered the closure of nonessential businesses last week, the company said it did not believe it had to completely close. Days later, after Wolf ordered businesses that are not life-sustaining to close, the company told employees its operations were exempt, and could stay open under such categories as electronic shopping and mail order houses, and warehousing and storage," according to an email to staffers.

 READ MORE: The Philly restaurant group behind Zahav and Federal Donuts will pay sick leave to 400 laid-off workers

Its extremely essential that we get the [digital] sales to offset some of the major losses were going to have, Denise Albright, chief operating officer for Anthropologie North America, told employees on a March 18 call.

On a Friday call to discuss Wolfs latest order, Urban chief development officer David Ziel said he handles a majority of the companys lobbying in Harrisburg. Were very close with the Wolf administration, he said. Im very close with Mayor Kenney.

Ziel also said he and Urbans general counsel had just gotten off a call with Philadelphia Managing Director Brian Abernathy. "Once we got through the conversation with him, he was very relieved we have less than 100 people at any given time this week on campus, Ziel said.

City spokesperson Lauren Cox said Wednesday that Abernathy confirms that is a fair characterization of the call.

During the discussion with Abernathy, Cox said, the firm stated that they only have employees at the site that are necessary to support their electronic shopping enterprise  which is considered an essential business under both the state and our order, and is separate from their storefront operation. They also outlined a number of precautions they were taking, including social distancing. Based on that, the city is comfortable that the firm is currently complying with the mayors order.

A statement from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development did not specifically address Urban.

On the Friday call, employees expressed worries about how to practice social distancing while being in direct contact with models  having to dress them, doing their makeup  as well as interacting with freelancers from New York, where the pandemic in the U.S. is most severe.

On the same call, Ziel urged employees to educate themselves about what is considered a low-risk work environment instead of listening to the hype and everything going on.

Even somebody who confirms that they have COVID-19 in your studio that day  thats low risk, its very low risk, he said.

In an email to employees Wednesday, before this article was published, the company said the decision of a small number of employees to leak internal documents and surreptitious recordings of management to the press was selfish and shortsighted.

At the Nuuly warehouse in Bucks County, some workers said they felt the company was hiding information from them after the package arrived with the note about the "virus.

Day shift workers were not informed about the incident, three people said, and only learned of it from co-workers. "It was never addressed, one person said. At that point, I got the feeling of, What else are you hiding from us?

Employees also said they were concerned about work conditions at the distribution center in Bristol Township. The less glamorous side of the apparel rental businesses is that the clothes come back dirty, employees said: Sometimes they are stained with urine, feces, blood, and vomit. Workers process the packages, and sort the clothes into bins to be laundered on site.

These clothes are coming from New York, Vegas, Minnesota, all over, one employee said. Were still in the beginning of this pandemic, and we dont know if these clothes have been exposed to the virus.

By Monday, large monitors in the warehouse displayed a letter from the company saying the facility was exempt from closing down: We ask each of you to also practice social distancing in your private lives.
As knowledge about the newest coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to grow, so does the list of potential symptoms. While the major and most common symptoms are still fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath, a recent plea from ear, nose, and throat specialists points to a sudden loss of smell and taste as another symptomsomething which, just last week, I started experiencing.

Let me back up: Six days ago on vacation, I sat in a Costa Rican cabin eating two eggs Id fried for breakfast before a long day of hiking in the rainforest. At first, I thought maybe eggs just werent so eggy in Costa Rica. But then I ate some of the reddest, most beautiful strawberries and they tasted like nothing. The fish tacos I had for dinner that night were also tasteless, and so was the next days breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

But it wasnt just my taste that had gone MIA; I also couldnt smell anything (your senses of taste and smell are extremely linked, FYI). Coffee, mango, and the damp earth and plants I was hiking through all had absolutely no odor. Even the bubbling hot springs my girlfriend and I visited, which famously reek of sulphur, smelled like nothing to me.

Maybe I should have thought more deeply about my suddenly missing senses amid this global pandemic, but at the time loss of smell and taste were not symptoms we were told to look out for. (Believe me, I Googled it obsessivelyeven while on vacation.)

Then, days after I got back to the states, I started learning of others reporting a loss of smell and tasteand experts have begun connecting those symptoms to coronavirus.

In a new joint statement on behalf of ENT UK, a professional membership body of ear, nose, and throat surgeons and specialists in the United Kingdom, experts warn of evidence that suggests loss of smell may be a symptom of coronavirus. Going a step further, co-authors of the statement, Clare Hopkins, president of the British Rhinological Society, and Nirmal Kimar, president of the British Association of Otorhinolaryngology, urged anyone who has lost their ability to smell or taste to self-isolate for seven days. I think these patients may be some of the hitherto hidden carriers that have facilitated the rapid spread of COVID-19, the doctors wrote. Unfortunately, these patients do not meet current criteria for testing or self-isolation.

Story continues

During a news briefing Monday, Maria Van Kerkhove, coronavirus technical director for the World Health Organization, also shared that the loss of these sensations may be an indicator of a coronavirus infection. Weve seen quite a few reports now about people in the early stages of disease may lose the sense of smell, may lose the sense of taste, she said, adding that this is something the WHO is currently looking into.

According to the co-authored statement, anecdotal cases of anosmiacommonly known as smell blindness, or the inability to detect one more smellrelated to the current coronavirus pandemic are rising. Hopkins and Kumar wrote that anosmia is reported in two out of three confirmed cases of coronavirus in Germany and 30 percent of the confirmed cases in South Korea.

Loss of smell and taste seem particularly noticeable in mild cases of coronavirus, when patients have few or no other symptoms. There have been a rapidly growing number of reports of a significant increase in the number of patients presenting with anosmia in the absence of other symptomsthis has been widely shared on medical discussion boards by surgeons from all regions managing a high incidence of cases, the authors wrote. Because people have no other symptoms, they may be unknowingly spreading the virus. While we all should be practicing social distancing, the doctors say its especially important for anyone who suddenly cannot smell or taste to stay home.

In general, viruses often cause anosmia or hyposmia (a partial loss of smell), which can lead to dysgeusia (a distorted sense of taste).

Alfred Iloreta, MD, an otolaryngologist at The Mount Sinai Hospital says that post-viral anosmia is a leading cause of loss of smell in adults. Almost 40 percent of patients who have complete loss of smell have some kind of respiratory infection or virus, he says.

Although experts dont know for sure whats causing coronavirus to affect some patients ability to smell and taste, some viruses can affect the olfactory sensory neurons themselves, says Donald Wilson, PhD, a neurologist and physiologist at New York University Langone School of Medicine. These are the cells that sit up in the back of your nose, and when an odor molecule binds to receptors on their surface, the olfactory sensory neuron (OSN) sends a signal to the brain, says Wilson. That is, essentially, how we typically sense smells.

Those sensory neurons dont tend to live very long because they exist in a harsh environmentall the things that go up your nose impact them)so each cell dies and gets replaced by a new one every couple of months. But, importantly, the cells dont all die at the same time, so you never notice when a few are shed.

Some viruses, however, cause OSNs to die more quickly. If OSNs die then odor signals cant get to the brain and we lose our sense of smell, says Wilson. Since our perception of flavor is mostly olfaction, many people will also complain of loss of taste. That loss of taste is actually more loss of flavor, however. Since we still have taste buds, we can still distinguish whether something tastes sweet, bitter, sour, salty, or savory. We just lose the variety of vanilla, coffee, Merlot, etc that is due to olfaction, says Wilson.

Its also possible, however, that the virus is merely dulling our senses of smell and taste in the same way that a common cold or flu does, through simple decrease of airflow through the nose.

Cold-like symptoms that cause inflammation or excess mucus in our nostrils limit the ability for odor molecules to reach these receptors, and therefore make it more difficult to smell something and sense variation in flavors, says Wilson.

The slightly less concerning news? Patients who lose their senses of smell and/or taste should get those senses backwhether its related to coronavirus or another ailment. But something to keep in mind amid the coronavirus outbreak: If you suddenly become unable to smell your coffee in the morning, its likely best to call your doctor, start self-isolating, and keep an eye out for any other symptoms that arise.

As for me, I self-quarantined with my girlfriend as soon as we returned from our Costa Rican trip, so I havent been in contact with anyone other than her since our return home. Upon learning that a lost sense of smell and taste could be indicators of coronavirus, I immediately contacted my health insurance provider to put me in contact with a doctor for evaluation to see if I am eligible for a coronavirus test. Though Ive yet to hear from a doctor, I am still under self-quarantine, and I have regained my sense of taste and smell.

As information about the coronavirus pandemic rapidly changes, HelloGiggles is committed to providing accurate and helpful coverage to our readers. As such, some of the information in this story may have changed after publication. For the latest on COVID-19, we encourage you to use online resources from CDC, WHO, and local public health departments, and visit our coronavirus hub.

This story originally appeared on Health.com by Kasandra Brabaw.
Longford's Connolly Barracks is to be used as a 'drive-thru' test centre for the coronavirus if, as expected, the number of cases in the county continues to rise, the Leader has learned.

Work on preparing the site got underway this morning ahead of a likely opening next week.

The Leader has attempted to contact both the HSE and Longford County Council over the plans, but has yet to receive an official response from either organisation.

Cllr Paraic Brady, who sits on the HSE's Dublin Mid Leinster HSE Health Forum, however, confirmed attempts were being made to avail of the barracks as a site for testing to be carried out.

"There is a centre in Mullingar for testing and we have one in St Joseph's and we have looked at a number of possibilities where a drive in centre could be set up.

At present, there are four confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Longford and Cllr Brady said the move to open up Connolly Barracks is a way of ensuring the county is able to keep a handle on the spiralling pandemic.

"If the numbers in increase, we need to have a facility in place to help the people of Longford/Westmeath and the northern area," he said.

Cllr Brady, nonetheless, urged people not to turn up at either St Joseph's or Connolly Barracks unless they have been advised to do so by their GP.

"The next two weeks are very, very critical for the whole of Ireland," he said, while urging people and especially youngsters to shy away from congregating in large groups.

He also heaped praise on Longford County Council chief executive Paddy Mahon and the local authority for its efforts in working with the HSE over the Connolly Barracks issue.

The Fine Gael representative said should those plans and the more stringent social measures imposed by government jave the desired effect, towns like Longford could start returning to some semblance of normality by the end of April.

He also reserved a special mention for doctors, nurses and frontline staff who, he said, were going above and beyond the call of duty to keep Irish citizens safe and well.

"I just hope people will remember all the nurses and doctors and our healthcare workers for all they have done and continue to do," he said.
Responding to strong criticism from journalists and media watchdogs, Armenias government has significantly eased its controversial restrictions on the spread of information about the coronavirus pandemic.

Immediately after declaring a state of emergency last week, the government obligated Armenian media outlets and social media users to disseminate only coronavirus-related news that are released by official sources. It said this is necessary for preventing false rumors and panic-mongering in the country.

The Armenian police have since accused more than two dozen news services of flouting these restrictions and ordered them to remove news stories from their websites.They have also controversially forced some Facebook users to delete posts critical of the governments handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Journalists, press freedom groups and opposition politicians have denounced the de facto censorship imposed by the authorities. They believe that the curbs on freedom of speech are unnecessary and counterproductive.

The OSCEs representative on freedom of the media, Harlem Desir, also voiced concern at the restrictions in a statement issued on Tuesday. Desir said that while he understands the Armenian authorities desire to prevent panic independent news reporting is essential for countering fake news on the pandemic.

The government decided to allow such reporting on Wednesday. It said the Armenian media will only be required to fully reflect information coming from official sources and to swiftly publish retractions or clarifications demanded by government bodies enforcing the state of emergency. Local journalists will also be free to cite or reprint relevant reports by foreign media.

Ashot Melikian of the Yerevan-based Committee to Protect Freedom of Speech welcomed on Thursday the new rules for media coverage of the pandemic.

Now that  media outlets can again operate in an unrestricted manner I believe that they will be able to collect information important to the public from their own sources as well, Melikian told RFE/RLs Armenian service. He urged them to double-check facts and avoid reporting fake news.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-25 23:34:35|Editor: yan

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BUDAPEST, March 25 (Xinhua) -- Hungarian low-cost carrier Wizz Air has grounded about 85 percent of its fleet due to travel restrictions introduced by different countries in their efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus, Hungarian news agency MTI reported on Wednesday.

"The company continues to operate 15 percent of its capacity and remains operational in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, but the grounding of the entire fleet remains a distinct possibility over the next period, as potential additional travel restrictions and social distancing policies issued by authorities may make international flying for commercial purposes either untenable or impossible," MTI quoted a statement from the airline.

Additional cost-cutting measures such as overhead spending, discretionary spending and non-essential capital expenditure were also introduced, according to Wizz Air.

The Hungarian airline also said: "Given the significant balance sheet strength and liquidity, as well as the company's ultra-low cost business model, Wizz Air is confident in its ability to survive even a potential prolonged grounding substantially beyond the current estimates for the impact of COVID-19 in Europe."

Also, Wizz Air introduced measures aimed at securing the airline's cash flow.

"The situation is posing a significant threat to the aviation industry and we call on governments to take non-discriminatory steps which will benefit all airlines," Wizz Air CEO Jozsef Varadi said.
T here's a high chance that quarantine and our collective lockdown is impacting your fortnightly mani-pedi appointment.

And if there's one thing more annoying than not being able to leave our homes, it's outgrown gel nails.

So we spoke to creative manicurist genius, Imarni Ashman, the founder of cult London nail salon, IMARNI Nails, to get the lowdown on how we can remove the hefty polish from our nails in the comfort of our own homes.

Below is Imarni's seven-step DIY gel nail removal technique, which also works for acrylics too (it might just take longer to buff and soak them off.) All thats needed for a simple Imarni-approved gel removal is a bottle of 100 per cent acetone (7, shop it here), cotton wool balls, tin foil, and something uber hydrating for once the process is complete. Imarni suggests opting for cuticle oil (9.50, shop it here) to re-hydrate post-removal, but marula oil also does the trick.

So, get your DIY mani station ready and clear, and get ready to nail it.

Trim your nails

Cut your nails to your desired length.

File, file away

Use a file to break the first layer of topcoat by buffing lightly until the surface looks rough. The more you manage to file off, the less youll have to soak off later in the process.

Give them soak

Soak some cotton balls in acetone and place them over the nails before wrapping each of them in small sheets of foil. The tighter the foil, the better the result. To speed up the process, it can sometimes help to place a warm towel over the tin foil, to help hurry the acetone up.

Be patient

Leave your nails to soak for 30 minutes. If youre out of cotton wool, then simply pour the acetone into a bowl and pop your nails in it for the same amount of time. While your fingers are submerged, use your other nails to begin scratching the polish off, but make sure not to force anything! Its better to wait than to damage your nails.

Scrape it off

Remove the foil one nail at a time and your gel manicure should have lifted. You can help it along by gently scraping off with an orange wood stick (2 for a pack of 100, buy them here.) If your gels still arent showing any sign of lifting, then pop the cotton wool and foil back on for another round. Patience is key here.

Buff n shape

Once youve removed the gel polish, use a soft file to gently buff your nails to remove any fine layers of gel base coat still attached to your nail plate. You can also shape your natural nail here, too.

Hydration station
STEPANAKERT, MARCH 26, ARMENPRESS. President of Artsakh Bako Sahakyan held a meeting today with representatives of the Artsakh Parliaments political parties supporting the authorities, the Presidential Office told Armenpress.

State elections to be held on March 31 of the current year were touched upon during the meeting.

Within this context the Head of the State underscored once again the necessity of implementing all preventive and organizational activities and maintaining sanitary and hygienic rules in the pre-election period to avoid the spread of the novel coronavirus in the republic.

The meeting also addressed the ways of solving tasks on taking possible additional measures in case of the occurrence of new circumstances in the fight against the coronavirus.

Minister of State Grigory Martirosyan took part in the meeting.
ONeills is helping in the fight against coronavirus by manufacturing medical scrubs at its Strabane factory

O'Neills has swapped sports shirts for scrubs, as it gets back to work by tackling coronavirus.

The sportswear business confirmed that around 150 staff are now back at work as the first sets of medical scrubs rolled off the production line.

The Strabane-based firm - which had suspended all operations last Thursday due to loss of trade amid the coronavirus outbreak - secured an order for 55,000 maroon scrubs on Monday.

Now the first sets, which will go to NHS staff across Northern Ireland, have been produced at the firm's factory.

O'Neills said it could not comment on the volume of orders at this stage as it is "changing daily".

The company said fabric used in the scrubs was dyed and coated with anti-viral properties at its Walkingstown site in Dublin.

When Kieran Kennedy, managing director of O'Neills, announced the deal he said he hoped to be able to produce 10,000 sets of scrubs per week.

Meanwhile, a Belfast-based medical 3D printing firm is to put its facilities and expertise behind the efforts to tackle the Covid-19 crisis.

Axial3D said it is currently evaluating and prototyping 3D printed devices, parts and equipment that could be used in the fight against the virus. This includes prototyping and 3D printing parts for Covid-19 test kits, swabs, masks and ventilators.

The company said it hopes that by prioritizing its 3D print facilities in the UK and USA, it can quickly supply much needed parts to hospitals and medical device manufacturers.
Concerned neighbours claim calls to police about a Perth family of eight failing to self-isolate after returning from Iraq last week have gone unactioned.

The case has sparked confusion over whether police are enforcing the 14-day mandatory quarantine period issued to anyone returning from overseas from March 16, with the authority refusing to comment on specific cases.

Neighbours claim a quarantined WA family had been seen out and about. Credit:Michele Mossop

A community member, who did not want to be identified, said the Stratton family returned to Australia about a week ago and had since been seen at the local shopping centre, and out on the street.

On Monday he had a fencing contractor, I think it was a father and son, come out to look at his fence - so hes invited people unknowingly into his property and those people have now gone out into the community, she said.
Germany has boosted its coronavirus test rate to 500,000 a week, with the early detection helping in part to keep the country's death toll relatively low, a virologist said Thursday.

"The reason why Germany has so few deaths compared to the number of infected people can be explained by the fact that we carry out an extremely large number of laboratory diagnostic tests," said Christian Drosten, who heads the Institute of Virology at Berlin's Charite University Hospital.

"Estimates from the last days show that we are carrying out half a million tests a week," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
[March 26, 2020] State of Texas and Senator Bryan Hughes Secure a Donation of Hydroxychloroquine Sulfate from Amneal Pharmaceuticals for Texas Patients

Amneal Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NYSE: AMRX) ("Amneal" or the "Company"), one of the largest U.S.-based generics manufacturers, and the State of Texas today announced that they are responding to the national COVID-19 health emergency. Amneal has donated 1,000,000 hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets to the Texas State Pharmacy, which will be directly distributed to hospitals for potential use in treating COVID-19 patients. "On behalf of the people of Texas, I thank Amneal for this generous donation," said Senator Hughes (News - Alert), who chairs the Senate's Committee on State Affairs. "In trying times like these, Americans come together and put others ahead of themselves. Amneal's donation is a shining example, and it reminds us of how blessed we are to be Americans." Senator Hughes added, "I also want to thank the leadership of the Texas Department of Emergency Management, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, and many professionals at Franklin Scott Conway LLP, who were instrumental in securing this donation." "This is a crucial time in the global fight against COVID-19," said Chirag and Chintu Patel, Co-Chief Executive Officers of Amneal. "With an existing supply of hydroxychloroquine sulfate and our ability to quickly accelerate production, we are humbled to be able to assist the hardest hit states and hospitals around the country to benefit as many patients as possible." Amneal noted that it has donated 2,000,000 tablets of 200mg hydroxychloroquine sulfate to New York, and will provide more as needed. The Company is also donating and providing products directly to hospitals across the country. Hydroxychloroquine sulfate was first synthesized in 1946 and is in a class of medications historically used to treat and prevent malaria. Today, Amneal's hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat malaria, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, childhood arthritis and other autoimmune diseases. Hydroxychloroquine is not FDA-approved for the treatment of COVID-19; but it has been identified as a possible treatment for COVID-19,1 and the U.S. government has requested its immediate availability. About Amneal Amneal Pharmacuticals, Inc. (NYSE: AMRX) headquartered in Bridgewater, NJ, is a fully-integrated pharmaceutical company focused on the development, manufacturing and distribution of generic and specialty drug products. The Company has manufacturing operations in North America, Asia, and Europe, working together to bring high-quality medicines to patients primarily within the United States.



Amneal has an extensive portfolio of more than 225 marketed commercial products and is expanding its portfolio to include complex dosage forms, including biosimilars, in a broad range of therapeutic areas. The Company also markets a portfolio of branded pharmaceutical products through its Specialty segment focused principally on central nervous system and endocrine disorders. For more information, visit https://www.amneal.com. Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained herein, regarding matters that are not historical facts, may be forward-looking statements (as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended). Such forward-looking statements include statements regarding management's intentions, plans, beliefs, expectations or forecasts for the future, including, among other things, future operating results and financial performance, product development and launches, integration strategies and resulting cost reduction, market position and business strategy. Words such as "may," "will," "could," "expect," "plan," "anticipate," "intend," "believe," "estimate," "assume," "continue," and similar words are intended to identify estimates and forward-looking statements. The reader is cautioned not to rely on these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations of future events. If the underlying assumptions prove inaccurate or known or unknown risks or uncertainties materialize, actual results could vary materially from the expectations and projections of Amneal. A list and descriptions of these risks, uncertainties and other factors can be found in the Company's most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019, as supplemented by any subsequently filed Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Copies of these filings are available online at www.sec.gov, www.amneal.com or on request from the Company. Forward-looking statements included herein speak only as of the date hereof and we undertake no obligation to revise or update such statements to reflect the occurrence of events or circumstances after the date hereof, except as otherwise required by United States securities laws. 1 https://www.who.int/blueprint/priority-diseases/key-action/Table_of_therapeutics_Appendix_17022020.pdf?ua=1 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005739/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
I first met Judy Persichilli in 2000 while reporting on a local spat between the City of Trenton and two hospitals.

Met is a loose word. Wed talked on the phone a few times, and we shook hands in person once. I remember that, and its likely in the forefront of my brain because shaking hands is likely to be a thing of the past.

I remember today my dealings with her 20 years ago because the 71-year-old is now one of the public faces of New Jerseys coronavirus response as the states health commissioner. And I definitely recall her leadership.

The in-person meeting took place at a city council meeting, and she arrived to defend, and save, the Trenton EMS ambulance service, which was caught in a political-corporate tug-of-war. At the time, Judy was the CEO of St. Francis Medical Center, in the city.

She carried a leather portfolio, a big one, the size that could hold a full-size pad of paper and a stack of paperwork. She had a big smile that belied her purpose at the session.

St. Francis had a seat on the board of the nonprofit ambulance agency, known as TEMS, which was close to being taken over by a larger hospital chain, which also had a seat on the board. The allegations were that the bigger company saw dollar signs with all the patients they could quite literally hand deliver to their ER doors if they controlled the first-line ambulance response in the capital city.

Anyway, the city of Trenton, which also had a board seat, wanted to save TEMS too, and their rep was the fire director, Dennis Keenan, and by default, the mayor, Doug Palmer.

With all the players were assembled, I recall clearly how Judy commanded the room and peoples attention. Firm, fair, but unyielding in her arguments and advocacy. I recall thinking at the time, I would not mess with Judy Persichilli.

Judy Persichilli, as CEO of St. Francis Medical Center, in September 2003.Michael Mancuso | Times of Trenton

Palmer and Keenan were happy to have her in the citys corner, they would tell me later.

A decade before lean in was a buzzword synonymous with women in the workplace, Persichilli was a practitioner. (I am not even going to get into what Persichilli did in her eight years as St. Francis CEO, but the word save was in the news story several times when she moved on with a promotion.)

We talked on the phone several times during my reporting on the matter, and I never had to re-read back a quote, or duel on any of the other behind-the-scenes things people in power sometimes try with reporters. She was clear when she always returned my calls, on my direct line.

Heres an example. When the larger hospital started hiring away EMTs from TEMS, which was seen as poaching at the time, Persichilli wasnt having it. We're astonished that [they] don't see the conflict of voting against hiring employees, because they were hiring them! What they are doing is putting another roadblock in our way of going forward to keeping TEMS alive, and we plan to pursue it.

She later said she would push the board to get the remaining TEMS employees to pull together and do whatever needs to be done to save the agency.

It worked. Several EMT supervisors did band together, and the larger company backed off.

TEMS crews are out there right now, responding to calls, and theyve likely had some coronavirus patients in the backs of their ambulances.

Persichilli eventually went on to greater leadership roles in healthcare, and while I spoke to her a few more times later, during the anthrax crisis in 2002 and 2003, we had no more dealings. (And I was out of this business from 2009 to 2014).

When I heard her name several weeks ago as she sat next to the governor and talked COVID-19, she looked different, but she was still Judy. Calm, clear.

And when I read my colleague Kelly Heyboers excellent profile of Persichilli on Sunday, my gut wrenched with that line about virus: Im definitely going to get it. We all are Im just waiting, she said.

Wow.

I hope not.

Judy, stay healthy, we need you in this fight.

New Jersey needs you. My family needs you.

Someone I do not know needs you.

Kevin Shea has been covering the Trenton and Mercer County areas for the Times of Trenton and NJ.com off and on for over 20 years. He may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @kevintshea
Indian ambassador to Afghanistan Vinay Kumar on Thursday visited the Sikh shrine that was attacked by terrorists in Kabul yesterday and left at least 27 dead.

"Amb Vinay Kumar visited the gurudwara and met community leaders, elders and families of the victims of terrorist attack. He shared their grief and offered condolences. He was told that the injured are receiving satisfactory treatment," the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan wrote on Twitter.

India also expressed condolences to the Sikh community in Afghanistan following the massacre.

"We convey our sincerest condolences to the immediate family members of the deceased and wish a speedy recovery to the injured. India stands ready to extend all possible assistance to the affected families of the Hindu and Sikh community of Afghanistan," the Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement.

"Such cowardly attacks on the places of religious worship of the minority community, especially at this time of COVID 19 pandemic, is reflective of the diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers," it read.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also expressed condolences to those killed in the ghastly incident.

"I am saddened by the terror attack at the Gurudwara in Kabul. I express my condolences to the families of all the deceased," the Prime Minister said during his interaction with people of his Lok Sabha constituency, Varanasi, via video conferencing on the same day.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Salt Lake City, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Inception Mining Inc. is pleased to announce that its subsidiary, Minera Cerros del Sur, has teamed up with the local government of El Corpus, Honduras to provide humanitarian relief to the communities surrounding Inceptions Clavo Rico mine, including donating much-needed supplies, various staple food items, and toiletries to the surrounding area. Due to the threat of COVID-19, Honduras has been in a countrywide lock-down with orders to remain at home. The people of El Corpus, especially the poorer and at-risk community members, have not been able to go to town to purchase basic supplies. Inception Mining understands gravity of the situation, and graciously donated enough supplies to feed over 350 at-risk families in El Corpus and the surrounding villages. Inception's policy of producing sustainable and profitable operations is not just related to mining; community is what drives forward momentum. Without community, there is no profitability.



About Inception Mining, Inc.:

Inception Mining Inc., a Nevada corporation, is engaged in the acquisition, exploration, and development of gold projects in Central and North America. Inceptions core asset is the Clavo Rico gold project in Honduras, which features a heap leach facility and on-site ADR plant.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This news release includes certain forward-looking statements or information. All statements other than statements of historical fact included in this release are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements in this news release include statements with respect to the potential mineralization and geological merits of the Company properties. There can be no assurance statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from anticipated in such statements.

Inception Mining Inc. disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events except as required by applicable securities legislation.

Story continues

SOURCE: Inception Mining Inc.

(OTC QB: IMII )

5330 South 900 East, Suite 280

Salt Lake City, Utah 84117

Trent D Ambrosio CEO

(801) 312-8113 Ext. 101

info@inceptionmining.com




SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

Police on Thursday announced they've arrested three suspects connected to a shooting that killed a 26-year-old man last week in San Francisco's Mission District.

The shooting occurred on March 16 in the 3000 block of 16th Street, near the 16th Street BART station, according to police.

The victim, identified by the medical examiner's office as Demondre Perkins, had been shot multiple times and died at the scene.

Though an investigation, detectives were able to identify three suspects involved in the shooting. Officers arrested the trio after serving multiple search warrants in both San Francisco and Alameda on Monday and Tuesday, police said.

They've been identified as 19-year-old Oscar Ticas of Alameda, and Rodrigo Tellez and Bryan Moreno, both 20 years old and from San Francisco.

Ticas has been booked on suspicion of homicide, conspiracy, carrying a loaded firearm, negligent discharge of a firearm and participating in a gang.

Police booked Tellez on suspicion of homicide, conspiracy, being a felon in possession of firearm, and committing a felony while out on bail and participating in a gang.

Moreno has been booked on suspicion of homicide, conspiracy, and participating in a gang.

All three men are being held without bail, according to jail records.

Police haven't released a motive in the shooting and said the case remains under investigation.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the San Francisco police anonymous 24-hour tip line at (415) 575-4444 or to text a tip to TIP411 with SFPD at the beginning of the message.

Copyright  2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
After the success of Netflixs Tiger King documentary, Universal Content Productions are working on a drama adaptation that would focus on the character of Carole Baskin.

The Saturday Night Live actress Kate McKinnon is set to play Baskin, the animal activist head of Big Cat Rescue who becomes the rival of flamboyant tiger owner Joe Exotic.

A seven-part series based on a podcast, Tiger King follows the prolific war which erupts between Exotic and Baskin.

Where Exotic once ran a 16-acre private zoo, Baskin would accuse Exotic of animal abuses, and specifically breeding tigers for the purposes of being photographed as cubs with excited visitors.

The series elaborately spirals from there, with directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin investigating the feud over the course of five years. Along the way, the pair encountered a wild industry of private big cat ownership in the USA, at least one murder-for-hire, a cult revolving around exotic animals, and allegations of a millionaire being fed to tigers.

Carole Baskin appears in Netflixs new true crime docuseries Tiger King (Netflix ) (Netflix)

The true crime docuseries  which counts Kim Kardashian among its fans - has shocked viewers, with many dubbing it the perfect binge-watch for quarantine.

While there is currently no network or streamer attached to the McKinnon-fronted show, which has been scripted by EP, the release of Tiger King is likely to raise its profile.
NEW YORK, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The global Brand Safety Summit Series , produced by The 614 Group , announced today that it will add a virtual dimension to its 2020 lineup of events , with live, in-person activations to follow in Singapore, London, and New York City, in an appropriate time frame later this year when the present health crisis permits. This new addition of Live Virtual Summits will enable the global community of brand safety leaders to continue learning, interacting, and educating from home with an eye toward more in-person events in the future.

"The present pandemic demands that we adapt how we meet -- but it doesn't diminish why we meet," said Rob Rasko, CEO of The 614 Group and President of the Brand Safety Series. "This new strategy allows the ever-growing, ever-more global community of digital executives committed to brand safety solutions to come together. I am truly humbled by the support and trust we have been given. It emphasizes the community's attention to driving awareness and sharing solutions around them, which remain as important as ever, for brands, publishers, tech companies, and consumers."

Each event in the Brand Safety Series serves as a platform for discussions on the implications of brand safety in local markets that then ladder up to the concerns and solutions of the global community that the Series draws together.

"The safety of our community is a top priority," said Amanda Forgione, VP, Marketing, The 614 Group. "All of our event partners agreed that it made sense to shift our annual lineup of Brand Safety Series events to a virtual format for the time being. We look forward to working with our partners to bring our community together in this new, virtual format as a way to learn and stay connected."

"It's more important than ever that we continue to ensure clients are safely investing in online advertising. Digital brand safety is a universal mission and our partnership with the Brand Safety Summit Series gives us the platform to educate our clients and teams about the most cutting-edge brand safety best practices. The Series' addition of this virtual element means we now have additional opportunities to lead important industry discussions around brand safety, especially at this unprecedented time."

John Montgomery, Global Head of Brand Safety, GroupM

"The Brand Safety Summit Series brings decision makers and leaders from across the digital ecosystem together in a unique way to tackle key challenges facing our industry. Despite the difficult environment we are all faced with right now in our personal and professional lives, it is crucial that we find alternative paths forward and continue to collaborate and share best practices. The new virtual format supports these discussions and allows us to continue to align on definitions and tools to move the industry forward."

David Murnick EVP Digital Operations & Brand Safety, Dentsu Aegis Network US

"We're operating in a completely different way as a result of the current health crisis. We'll continue to work with the industry to discuss top of mind concerns for advertisers and ways to better address them, including 614 Group's virtual Brand Safety Summit Series."

Erik Geisler, Director of North American Agency Partnerships, Facebook

Other event partners who have voiced their support of these efforts include:

Jennifer Chase , VP, Digital Sales & Solutions, Commercial Group, MediaCorp

, VP, Digital Sales & Solutions, Commercial Group, MediaCorp Michael Zacharski , CEO, EMX

, CEO, EMX Mike Zaneis , CEO, TAG and Co-Founder, Brand Safety Institute

, CEO, TAG and Co-Founder, Brand Safety Institute Jed Hartman , Chief Commercial Officer, Channel Factory

, Chief Commercial Officer, Channel Factory Dan Hughes , Chief Data Officer, APAC, Middle East , and Africa , Publicis Groupe

, Chief Data Officer, APAC, , and , Publicis Groupe Yale Cohen, EVP, Digital Investment and Standards, Publicis Media Exchange (PMX)

To read the full version of the press release, please click here: https://brandsafetysummit.com/news/

For more information on what a Live Virtual Brand Safety Summit is, please click here: https://brandsafetysummit.com/virtual-summit-faq/

Contact

Amanda Forgione

[email protected]

(973) 902-2805

SOURCE The 614 Group

Related Links

http://614group.com


Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro has said that a coronavirus lockdown would 'destroy' the country, aligning himself with US President Donald Trump in prioritising the economy.

Yesterday Bolsonaro condemned as criminals the governors and mayors of the largest states and cities for ordering people to remain indoors to stop the outbreak. Meanwhile the death toll rose to 57 from 46 while confirmed cases rose to 2,433 from 2,201 the day before.

State governors have defied the president's calls to reopen schools and businesses, dismissing his argument that the 'cure' of widespread shutdowns to contain the coronavirus is worse than the disease.

Bolsonaro has aligned himself with Trump in prioritising the economy over the shutdowns favoured by public health experts - including his own health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta - who have warned the outbreak in Brazil could trigger a collapse of the healthcare system next month.

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro is pictured at a press briefing in Brasilia, Brazil last Friday

A man wearing a protective mask walks in a nearly empty Saara region of Rio de Janeiro, a large shopping area in the center the city, during a lockdown aimed at stopping the spread of the (COVID-19) coronavirus pandemic

'Other viruses have killed many more than this one and there wasn't all this commotion,' Bolsonaro told journalists. 'What a few mayors and governors are doing is a crime. They're destroying Brazil.'

Bolsonaro contends the clampdown already ordered by many governors will deeply wound the already beleaguered economy and spark social unrest.

In a nationally televised address on Tuesday night, he urged governors to limit isolation only to high-risk people and to lift the strict anti-virus measures they have imposed in their regions.

'What needs to be done? Put the people to work. Preserve the elderly, preserve those who have health problems. But nothing more than that,' said Bolsonaro, who in the past has sparked anger by calling the virus a 'little flu'.

Senate President Davi Alcolumbre denounced his speech and called for 'leadership that is serious, responsible and committed to the life and health of its people.'

Bolsonaro has aligned himself with Trump in prioritising the economy over the shutdowns favoured by public health experts - including his own health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta - who have warned the outbreak in Brazil could trigger a collapse of the healthcare system next month.

Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria took Bolsonaro to task for not setting an example for Brazilians and appealed for him to 'lead the nation, not divide it' at a time of crisis.

Two sources told Reuters that Bolsonaro's prepared 5-minute speech had been drafted without consulting health minister Mandetta.

The two have been at odds since Bolsonaro flouted guidelines and physically greeted supporters on March 15.

The country's top medical associations issued statements in support of Mandetta's approach to dealing with the epidemic, amid fears that the minister might resign from the job.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Mandetta, who denied that he was quitting, stressed the gravity of the epidemic and the need to keep up the drive to isolate the population from the virus.

The country's governors protested that Bolsonaro's instructions ran counter to health experts' recommendations and endangered Latin America's largest population.

They said they would continue with their strict measures. The rebellion even included traditional allies of Brazil's far-right president.

An aerial view of a nearly empty Presidente Vargas Avenue and Central do Brasil Station in the center of Rio

n aerial view of a nearly empty Presidente Vargas Avenue and Central do Brasil Station in the center of the city during a lockdown aimed at stopping the spread of the (COVID-19) in Rio

Governor Carlos Moises of Santa Catarina state, which gave almost 80% of its votes to Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential election, complained he was 'blown away' by the president's instructions.

Moises said he would insist that all residents stay home during the pandemic despite the president's stand.

In a video conference earlier in the day between Bolsonaro and governors from Brazil's southeast region, Sao Paulo governor Joao Doria threatened to sue the federal government if it tried to interfere with his efforts to combat the virus, according to video of their private meeting reviewed by The Associated Press.

Presidente Vargas Avenue and Central do Brasil Station in the center of Rio during the coronavirus lockdown

A nearly empty Saara region, a large shopping area in the center of the city, with all stores closed during a lockdown aimed at stopping the spread of the (COVID-19) coronavirus pandemic on March 24, 2020 in Rio de Janeiro

'We are here, the four governors of the southeast region, in respect for Brazil and Brazilians and in respect for dialogue and understanding,' said Doria, who supported Bolsonaro's 2018 presidential bid. 'But you are the president and you have to set the example. You have to be the representative to command, guide and lead this country, not divide it.'

Bolsonaro responded by accusing Doria of riding his coattails to the governorship, then turning his back.

'If you don't get in the way, Brazil will take off and emerge from the crisis. Stop campaigning,' the president said.

The governors weren't the only defiant ones. Virus plans challenged by Bolsonaro were upheld by the Supreme Court. The heads of both congressional houses criticised his televised speech. Companies donated supplies to state anti-virus efforts.

Bolsonaro has found some support among his base  #BolsonaroIsRight trended atop Brazilian Twitter on Wednesday  though that backing has been countered by a week of nightly protests from many Brazilians respecting the self-isolation rules, who lean from their windows to bang pots and pans.

There is particular concern the virus' potential damage in the ultra-dense, low-income neighborhoods known as favelas.

Bolsonaro's administration has also faced criticism from economists, including Arminio Fraga, a former central bank governor, and Claudio Ferraz, a professor at Rio de Janeiro's Pontifical Catholic University.

A shopping district in Rio with all stores closed during a lockdown aimed at stopping the spread of the (COVID-19)

'Brazil is seeing something unique, an insurrection of governors,' Ferraz wrote on Twitter.

'This will become a new topic in political science: checks and balances by governors in a Federal System.'

Demand for electricity, a strong indicator of economic activity, fell sharply at the start of the week in Brazil, according to the National Electricity System Operator.

The agricultural sector, a powerhouse of the Brazilian economy, also said it was suffering due to the coronavirus, with farm lobby CNA warning that grain, coffee and sugarcane growers were facing operational hurdles.

Still, the Economy Ministry said it will not sacrifice long-term debt targets in order to rescue the economy. An official said there was no capacity for huge fiscal packages to fight the coronavirus crisis.

Economic Policy Secretary Adolfo Sachsida said any additional measures would only apply for this year, but warned that fiscal stability in coming years cannot be put at risk by overspending in 2020.

The government is struggling to transport medical equipment due to widespread flight cancellations, health minister Mandetta said, forcing authorities to rely on ground transportation.

Mandetta said the ministry would allow doctors to use the anti-malarial drug chloroquine to treat coronavirus.

The drug, described by Trump as a potential 'game changer,' has not yet been proven effective against the new coronavirus. A lead doctor on clinical trials in Brazil for the related drug hydroxychloroquine told Reuters that initial results would only be available in two weeks.
Seoul, March 26 : South Korea on Thursday declared a no-tolerance stance toward those who violate self-isolation rules due to the coronavirus pandemic, warning that violators will face legal punishment or deportation.

The government issued the strong warning as some arrivals from Europe and the US have not abided by the two-week self-isolation guidelines, sparking concerns about the spread of COVID-19, reports the Yonhap News Agency.

The Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters announced that any foreigner leaving his or her self-isolation venue without permission will be expelled from the country.

Local violators will not receive a leave subsidy totaling 1.23 million won (U$1,000) in the case of a four-member household.

Police will maintain their highest alert status and be ready to make an emergency response to any breach of the rules, the agency said, noting violators could be fined up to 10 million won or imprisoned for up to a year under the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act.

The government has also decided to deny entry to inbound travellers at the airport who are ordered to self-isolate but fail to install the self-quarantine safety protection app intended to keep track of their locations in the country.

The installation rate of the self-quarantine app installation among those asked to self-isolate here for 14 days reached 60.9 per cent on Wednesday evening, and 11 people were reported to have left self-isolation without authorization from March 13-24, the agency said.

The government will also encourage ordinary citizens to report any self-isolation violations to the local authorities, said the Yonhap News Agency report.

South Korea has required all arrivals from Europe and the US.to undergo stricter quarantine procedures and to remain in 14-day self-isolation due to spikes in imported cases.

The total number of infections from abroad jumped by 34 to 101 on Tuesday, the biggest single-day rise so far. The country has reported a total caseload of 9,137 since the first case on January 20.

There has been a total of 131 deaths.
SHANGHAI, March 25 (Xinhua) -- The Shanghai-based Fosun Foundation, in cooperation with companies at home and abroad, further donated a batch of medical supplies to Italy this week.

The medical supplies including protective suits, medical goggles, gloves and over 20,000 N95 respirators arrived in Milan on Monday and were delivered directly to eight hospitals in cities hard hit by the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) such as Bergamo and Parma, according to the foundation.

Lyrics from a famous Italian song such as "La vita mia legata a te" (my life is linked to you) were printed on the packing boxes of the supplies, representing best regards to people in Italy, the foundation said.

This is the third batch of medical supplies Fosun has sent to Italy. Earlier in March, Fosun donated over 50,000 pieces of medical supplies to aid Italy's fight against COVID-19.

As of Monday, the Fosun Foundation, in cooperation with other companies, had coordinated the supply of nine batches of medical supplies to countries including Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea and Britain.
NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell has promised "no student will be without a learning plan" as public schools make a quick transition to remote learning with varying levels of preparedness and up to 89 per cent of children stay home this week due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Principals are encouraging patience while staff rapidly adapt to new teaching styles, re-assuring parents that they don't need to take full responsibility for their child's academic development after the state government encouraged students to stay home where possible.

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell. Credit:AAP

"This year of schooling is not going to look the same as a normal school year. It is going to be a challenge for everyone," Ms Mitchell said in a recorded statement on Thursday. "Schools will communicate directly with you on what learning options are available for your children using normal communications message such as the school website and email."

Schools are using a combination of department lesson plans and their own digital tools while they figure out online teaching.
Netiquette

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Die Kommentarspalten sind artikelbezogen, die thematische Ausrichtung ist damit vorgegeben. Wir bitten Sie deshalb auf Beitrage zu verzichten, die nichts mit dem Inhalt des Artikels zu tun haben.

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Kommerzieller Natur sind

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einzelne Personen oder Gruppen aufgrund von Rasse, Ethnie oder Religion herabsetzen

in Rechtschreibung und Interpunktion mangelhaft sind

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Nur einen Link enthalten ohne beschreibenden Kontext dazu

Als Medium, das der freien Meinungsausserung verpflichtet ist, handhabt die Weltwoche Verlags AG die Veroffentlichung von Kommentaren liberal. Die Online-Redaktion behalt sich jedoch vor, Kommentare nach eigenem Gutdunken und ohne Angabe von Grunden nicht freizugeben. Es besteht grundsatzlich kein Recht darauf, dass ein Kommentar veroffentlich wird. Weiter behalt sich die Redaktion das Recht vor, Kurzungen vorzunehmen.




Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 18:24:30|Editor: mingmei

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KABUL, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) on Thursday welcomed and supported an appeal from the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres for immediate global ceasefire to fight the COVID-19 outbreak.

All sides of war should give up war and focus on fight against the epidemic and protect the life of the entire Afghan citizens, the AIHRC office tweeted.

On Monday, the UN chief appealed for an "immediate global ceasefire" aiming at protecting the vulnerable civilians in the conflict zones from the ravages of the pandemic.

"The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war," Guterres said in a briefing at the UN headquarters in New York. However, he did not mention any country by name but added "that is why today, I am calling for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world."

Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani frequently called on the Taliban to agree on a ceasefire to facilitate peace talks and most importantly the fight against the COVID-19 but the outfit refused and persisted on continuation of war in the conflict-ravaged nation.

In the latest clashes, five Afghan police officers and 10 Taliban militants were killed and several people wounded after Taliban attacked security forces positions in northern Kunduz and western Ghor provinces on Wednesday night.
- Senator Koko Pimentel has been receiving criticism online because of the incident at a hospital in Makati

- He allegedly violated the protocols with regards to the enhanced community quarantine in Luzon

- As soon as the issue broke out on social media, many netizens turned to Angel Locsin who campaigned for the said politician

- The name of the actress immediately became trending because of her reply to those who were asking

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Angel Locsin immediately became the talk of the town online because of her response to a netizen who asked her about Senator Koko Pimentel.

KAMI learned that the said lawmaker is currently in hot water for allegedly violating the protocols with regards to the enhanced community quarantine in mainland Luzon.

The politician received heavy criticism because of his decision to go to the Makati Medical Center despite being on a quarantine for experiencing symptoms of COVID-19.

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A brave netizen uploaded a photo of Angel that was taken when she was still campaigning for the said Senator.

The actress immediately replied Eww to show that she is disgusted of the fact that she rooted for the lawmaker several years ago.

Another social media user also asked the gorgeous celebrity if she regrets campaigning for Senator Pimentel after knowing about what happened at the Makati Medical Center.

Do you regret that you campaigned for him then in a tv ad? Voted for him because of you, the netizen wrote.

Yes. Super. Mortal sin. Patawarin nyo po ako bilang ex-husband po sya ng pinsan ko, Angel replied.

In a previous article by , Angel kindheartedly set up airconditioned sleeping tents for health workers who are battling COVID-19.

Angel Locsin is a veteran actress and commercial endorser in the Philippines. She is known for her willingness to help other people especially the least fortunate.

POPULAR: Read more news about Angel Locsin!

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TikTok dance challenges are taking over social media. We are always on point in asking passers-by to dance to famous songs together with our host Andre!  Dont forget to subscribe to HumanMeter!

Source: KAMI.com.gh
As a Victorian County Court Judge for 17 years, Elizabeth Gaynor sees the worst of what human beings can do.

But she believes it is important young people realise that we can all fail, yet still find a worthwhile career.

I never imagined I would end up on the bench, says Elizabeth Gaynor.

I was not a particularly good student; I failed a year and took an extra year," she says of her University of Melbourne law/arts degree.

Its important to put that stuff in (the story). People look at a judge and they think, 'I could never do that'.
HOW New York will weather the pandemic that is Covid-19 will be down, in large part, to the work of West Limerick man, Michael Dowling from Knockaderry.

Michael was asked by New York state governor, Andrew Cuomo, to galvanise the hospital sector in readiness for Covid-19 patients.

New York is the epicentre of the problem right now, and has more cases than anywhere else. It is growing every single day, said Michael speaking from his office in Long Island, New York.

 I have known him (Governor Cuomo) a long time. He taps into me every so often to help him out, Michael said, explaining how he came to be in the frontline of New Yorks fight against Covid-19. When all of this happened, he asked me and another guy to co-ordinate the hospitals in New York and to try and figure out how we can increase the number of beds. We need a lot more beds.

It is no small ask.

At the start of this week, New York had at least 23,000 confirmed cases, accounting for 5% of cases worldwide. One in every 1,000 people is being infected, five times higher than in other parts of the US.

But Michael, who heads up Northwell Health, a non-profit health provider employing 70,000 people and the largest health provider in New York state, believes firmly it can be done.

The target, he said, is to get every one of some 150 hospitals in New York to increase capacity by 50%.

We are making available 15-20,000 beds, he explained. They are also, he said, looking at places other than hospitals to put patients If and when the volume increases beyond hospital capacity.

But, Michael pointed out, increasing capacity to meet emergencies is not something new. We do this on an ongoinig basis when we have a big spike. We are able to adapt very quickly.

Putting beds together is easy, he continued.

I know I can make an extra 2,000 beds available relatively easily. The issue is to make sure you have the right staff.

He is pleased with the response to the call-out for retired medical and healthcare workers or those who have switched to other sectors to come and help. But he acknowledged there has been a problem with supplies such as masks, ventilators and protective clothing.

It has been a challenge because a lot of the stuff was made in China and all of that got disrupted. But we are resolving that. We are going to other places in the world to find more, Michael explained, and he is confident they will be able to accommodate everyone.

He is unequivocal that social distancing and closing down businesses - shops, schools, universities, pubs, restaurants, gyms, salons - was the correct decision.

I think it is one of the best things you can do to prevent the spread of the virus, he said. Having people working from home is important.

He is not fazed by rumours that policy may change when the 15-day nationwide state of emergency ends. I know the White Houses gives conflicting messages. I dont spend an awful lot of time worrying about it or listening to you know who, Michael declared. I listen to the Public Health People, I focus on the facts.

But he admitted the lockdown has had its consequences. New York has been pretty much shook. You dont see anybody moving much. It is a whole different place.

Do people like it? No. They dont like it. People are frustrated with the inconvenience, Michael continued.

But the overall mood is pretty positive, he said, and the attitude is this is something we have to do if we are to survive.

You get pockets of complaints but that is normal.

The big question is, will the systems in New York be ready for the big surge?

We are ready, Michael declared. We are in pretty good shape. It is around the clock. It will put lot a lot of strain, a lot of pressure on the system. We have a pretty good record. People adapt. People are creative.

Michael acknowledged too that Covid-19 is having, and will have, a big economic effect. Every budget, every hospital budget is going to be affected. But that is what you have to do, he continued.

Michael also believes the pandemic will have a profound effect on the future.

I believe every business will change the way it operates. I have 40,000 people working from home. When this is over, I will probably have more people working at home than I ever thought possible. It changes the way you think about things, he said.

Michael is in regular contact with his family in Limerick and other parts of the country. Ireland is making the right decisions, doing all the things that should be done, he commented.

The world has changed, he continued. This is a new reality now. We know now we live in a very interconnected world. We have had Sars, Ebola, we have had Swine fever. It would be foolish to think we wont be hit again. It may not be Covid-19 but he said: We live in a very interconnected world. You cant disconnect.

You do what you have to do. Keep calm.

Michael Dowling is chief executive of Northwell Health, which has 23 hospitals, over 750 outpatient facilities and 70,000 staff. He previously worked as health secretary for the State of New York. He is a graduate of UCC, is on the board of Smurfit School of Business in UCS and is also involved with UL. In 2017, he was Grand Marshal in the New York St Patricks Day Parade and has been named as one of the top 25 health professionals in the US.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi celebrated her 80th birthday Thursday getting ready to shepherd the biggest economic bill in history through the U.S. House she leads. The Senate version of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill turned out to be 880 pages long, presumably a coincidence and not a tribute.

Reporters greeted her with a chorus of "happy birthdays" when she arrived for a briefing in the Capitol. "I'm not celebrating, though, until I can hug my grandbabies," she replied with a smile. "Waiting for that day."

Eighty years ago, news of her birth, the daughter of a first-term Baltimore congressman, also made headlines in the local press. It was a time, though, that any thoughts of a political dynasty focused on her five older brothers, not on the only girl in the family.

Now, of course, she's the one who is running the House.

Its a Girl for the DAlesandros, The Baltimore News-Post headline declared over a four-column photo at the top of the front page that showed the swaddled newborn only hours after she was born at the citys St. Joseph Hospital.

The Baltimore Sun took a more political tilt: Tommy DAlesandro Announces Another Sure Vote -- Its a Girl.

The Baltimore Guide offered a prediction that in retrospect seems practically prescient. DAlesandro Will Find New Boss in First Daughter, it said, adding, We predict that this little lady will soon be a Queen in her own right.

In Baltimore during those days, just about everybody knew the D'Alesandros. Tommy DAlesandro Jr. was an up-and-coming pol, dapper and charismatic. At 36, he had already served two terms in the state legislature and a stint on the Baltimore City Council, then been elected to Congress. He represented Marylands Third District, which included Little Italy and other ethnic enclaves across the city.

He won the U.S. House seat by ousting a six-term incumbent, Vincent Palmisano, in the Democratic primary. Years earlier, Palmisano, a political leader who lived around the corner, had taken an instant dislike to the younger man when he wanted to run for Maryland House of Delegates. Later, it would be DAlesandro who ended Palmisanos career.

Story continues

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., updates reporters as lawmakers worked on a coronavirus aid package in Washington on Thursday.

That would provide one of the political lessons that Nancy DAlesandro Pelosi never forgot. Powers not anything that anybody gives away, she would declare. You have to fight for it. It was a precept that her father had followed in challenging Palmisano. It was advice she regularly gave Democrats contemplating tough contests. And it was the approach she would apply in a career that would make her the most powerful woman in the history of American politics.

Deal-making in a crisis: How Congress united on a $2 trillion coronavirus package

She would have the sort of deep understanding of politics, bred in her bones, that is particular to those for whom public office is the family business.

What I learned from my father was everything, she said. I didnt learn like you learn lessons. I learned by osmosis. I breathed it in. You cant articulate it. Politics is every minute of every day. It is part of you.

A week before she was born, her father had announced his candidacy for a second term in the House of Representatives, warning of perilous times for the nation ahead as war clouds gathered. A year later, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would catapult the United States into World War II.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Nancy Pelosi celebrates 80th birthday amid coronavirus crisis
Hostel boarders line up at the Raidurg police station in Hyderabad to receives permits to travel to their native places in neighbouring states on March 25. (DC Photo: R. Pavan)

Hyderabad: The Telangana government took the flak Wednesday from opposition parties for allowing students and young professionals to be evicted from hostels, thereby forcing them to return to their native places in Andhra Pradesh. It led to people making a dash to the AP-Telangana state border, where they were stopped by the police of that state.

Most political leaders were scathing in their criticism of the developments, with leaders of different parties saying the governments handling of the situation was incompetent.

Telangana state BJP president Bandi Sanjay Kumar called it a hasty act, which reflects the mindset of CM K Chandrashekar Rao. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi has appealed to people to stay wherever they were for 21 days, the CM allows people to be forced out of their rooms, gives them permits to leave for their native places, further increasing the risk of spreading the coronavirus.

He said that if at all the Telangana government should have consulted the AP government first and coordinated it properly. People should have been given a medical examination before being allowed to travel.

Telangana Congress president N Uttam Kumar Reddy said that the problem of youngsters stranded at the border was a humanitarian problem that should be resolved by both state governments. He said that since the lockdown is going to be long, both governments should coordinate better so that people do not suffer.

Malkajgiri MP A Revanth Reddy said the state government has been immature in its handling of the Covid-19 situation in Telangana.

Why did the state government allow students to go to their native places in AP without prior consultations with the government there? he asked.

Kishen Reddy, Union minister of state for home affairs, strongly condemned the TRS government. What chief minister Chandrashekar Rao has done is deplorable. Creating panic and tension at the state border is not what was expected. We have already issued a strong message to the state home secretary as well as the DGP. Unless the crisis is resolved quickly, it will lead to greater human suffering, Kishen Reddy said.

He warned saying that the Centre would discuss this entire fiasco at its next review meeting. How can they violate all medical warnings?
Having deactivated all of the network equipment that it operated outside of Kiev, Ukrtelecoms mobile unit TriMob is now auctioning its disused infrastructure.

TriMob is currently running just 49 base stations in Kiev after taking the decision to wind down the majority of its sites across Ukraine at the end of last year. Prior to this, the operator had 1700 active 3G base stations in the country.

Following its decision, TriMob returned almost all of its national 3G UMTS mobile frequencies to Ukraines regulator. On 28th December 2019, the operator received a spectrum licence set to expire on the same date as its nationwide frequency-agnostic mobile service permit (14th December 2020).

The majority of TriMobs operation is now based on national 2G/3G roaming through Vodafone Ukraines network. It also hosts the MVNO Lycamobile Ukraine on its network.
Who Decides What Is Essential?

But Are You Really That Necessary?

What Should Employees Do If Theyre Concerned About Working?

Ensuring Safety At Work Sites

Extra Pay, Protections

Uncharted Territory

(TNS)  So youre an essential worker. That means you can go to work while the rest of Illinois abides by a mandate to stay home in hopes of minimizing the spread of the coronavirus.Some people are grateful for the continued paycheck. Others worry their own safety concerns arent being considered, and dispute how indispensable they really are.There are certainly going to be instances where employees who are deemed essential will be concerned about going to work, said Lauren Novak, a partner in the labor and employment practice at Chicago-based Schiff Hardin. Employers will need to be flexible but also be very clear that they have to show up. It is going to be very difficult for employers in essential industries to strike that balance.Gov. J.B. Pritzkers order, in effect from last Saturday through April 7, lists dozens of business categories considered essential, from gas stations, hardware stores and banks to food production and accounting services. Such companies are encouraged to remain open while other businesses were told to cease operations unless their employees can work from home.Its up to employers to determine if their business falls under an essential category and to inform their employees. Businesses that arent sure where they fit are advised to contact the states Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity for help. But the state doesnt bestow essential status, nor police it.Differing interpretations of essential have caused some friction between employers who wish to keep operating and employees who believe the risk of exposure to the coronavirus outweighs their indispensability.Video game retailer GameStop came under fire from employees when it initially declared itself an essential business because it also sells items people use to work from home, such as keyboards and mice, and kept stores open in some states with lockdown orders. On Sunday it switched gears and now customers can buy merchandise online and pick up in stores.In Illinois, some candy factory workers have contacted their union to question the necessity of keeping confectionary lines running, said Donald Woods, president of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 1, which represents about 3,500 people in the Midwest who work at companies including Mondelez International, Ferrara Candy and Tootsie Roll.Woods said he consulted a local congressman for an opinion and was told candy is part of the critical food supply chain, in part because people holed up at home might be craving sweets.Theyve got to show up, Woods said of his members. The only thing we can make sure of is that employers follow the CDC guidelines. Employers are doing that.Chicago-based Ferrara Candy, maker of Lemonheads and Trolli, cited state and federal guidelines as reasons for continuing production. Late last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Securitys Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued advisory guidance defining which workers are essential to continued critical infrastructure viability during the coronavirus emergency, a list that includes employees of food manufacturers.Ferrara, along with other food and snack manufacturers, continues to produce products to meet the needs of our consumers and retail partners, spokeswoman Sarah Kittel said in a statement. We are doing it with the highest standard of care possible to ensure the health and safety of our team, and we see it as a responsibility and privilege to keep our team employed through these challenging times.Businesses weighing whether or not they are essential  and therefore whether or not they should temporarily shutter  are grappling with employee concerns about safety as well as paychecks.Ikea, which has closed all of its U.S. retail stores and many abroad, is keeping its distribution centers open to handle e-commerce. Though one could argue that buying a new sofa isnt essential at this moment, Illinois stay-at-home order lists distribution centers as essential infrastructure and has a provision for businesses that sell or manufacture supplies to work from home. But the furniture-maker said the decision to keep selling online had more to do with keeping employees paid.It is important for each and every one of us to understand that the decision to continue to operate our ecommerce business as long as we can is not about making a profit, the Swedish company said in an open letter to employees Monday. It is about protecting our people and their livelihoods in this time of uncertainty. In these times, ecommerce is critical for the longevity of our business, and we need to protect the business, so that we can continue protecting our co-workers.Aviva Grumet-Morris, a Chicago-based partner in the labor and employment group at Winston & Strawn, said employers are taking pains to make an honest assessment of whether they are essential, a classification Illinois order says should be construed broadly to ensure necessary goods and services continue to be available. Companies that supply essential businesses are also considered, essential, so the order encompasses more than the obvious.Employees who dispute the essentialness of their business should raise concerns with their manager to get an understanding of the companys thinking, Grumet-Morris said. If a person feels uncomfortable going into work, its possible that the employer could accommodate the worker as it tries to make the workplace compliant with evolving safety guidelines.It may be that the solution here is one that is great for everyone, Grumet-Morris said. If you have a business and it needs to reduce the number of people that are on the floor at a particular time, or they want to move people to a different shift, it could be to the workers benefit.Employees who are particularly vulnerable to becoming ill with COVID-19, such as if they have an underlying condition, could seek a reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act that could allow them to work from home or take a leave, Grumet-Morris said.Though Illinois is an at-will state, meaning employees can be fired without cause, many employers are accommodating workers who dont want to show up to a work site because they are worried about virus exposure, attorneys say. Concerned employees can inquire about taking paid time off if they have it or unpaid leave if they dont. Some companies are waiving their usual penalties for absences.Im advising my clients not to take punitive action if an employee truly has a good faith belief that theyre truly scared, said Brian Alcala, a Chicago-based attorney with Nixon Peabody who represents management in employment cases.At Chicago-based Conagra, which makes Duncan Hines and Wishbone products at two Illinois plants, if an employee chooses not to work their shift then they will still have a job when they return, spokesman Michael Cummins said.The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1546, which represents some 25,000 regional grocery store cashiers as well as meatpacking and other food production workers, said employers have been accommodating employees individual situations.They are allowing them to take time off with or without pay, depending on the employer, said Bob OToole, president of the local.Employers that continue to operate are being advised by the state to institute additional safety measures, such as staggering work schedules to minimize the number of employees present at the same time and using tape or signage to impose 6-foot social distancing rules. Some may close break rooms to prevent too many people from congregating, per CDC guidelines to avoid gatherings of more than 10 people.Anyone who can work from home should be encouraged to do so  and if they are working they must be paid, not forced to take paid time off, attorneys say.Employees who feel their workplace is unsafe should contact the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Illinois Department of Labor said in a fact sheet addressing employees COVID-19 concerns.Some companies requiring employees to show up during the pandemic are sweetening the deal by offering extra pay and leave protections, often as they seek to hire thousands more workers to meet rising demand for certain services.Jewel-Osco, which is hiring 3,000 workers across the grocery chain, on Monday announced a $2 per hour pay raise for associates, and the installation of plastic sneeze guards at registers.Mondelez International, the Deerfield-based food giant that makes Oreos and Triscuits, also announced a $2 hourly raise for front-line workers, two more weeks of paid leave and $150 bonus for sales representatives as it seeks to hire 1,000 more employees.PepsiCo, which plans to hire 6,000 more workers, is increasing pay by $100 a week for 90,000 employees and has offered full pay for 12 weeks if a plant must close.The federal emergency leave law approved last week also offers some additional worker protections, though it does not apply to employers with more than 500 workers and those with fewer than 50 can seek exemptions. It also doesnt apply to independent contractors.Under the act, which goes into effect April 2 through the end of the year, full-time employees get 80 hours fully paid sick time if they are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 or are under a quarantine order, and part-timers get a proportionate amount. They get at least two-thirds of their regular pay if they are caring for someone with a coronavirus-related illness or must stay home with a child whose school or day care is closed.The law also expands on the Family and Medical Leave Act by allowing people to take up to 12 weeks off at two-thirds pay, up to $200 daily, to care for a child subject to a public health-related school closure.The unprecedented nature of the pandemic response is raising more questions than answers about the obligations essential businesses have to protect their employees, said Karen Munoz, a partner with the boutique Chicago law firm Dolan Law, which represents plaintiffs in personal injury, victims rights and employment cases. She anticipates there will be plenty of people taking to the courts to challenge how they were treated by their employers during this time.We are going to be seeing litigation from this for years, Munoz said. That includes possible negligence claims if businesses dont implement the recommended safety measures and employees end up getting sick.But Munoz urges employees to talk with their managers about they concerns and to see if they can agree to an arrangement that makes them feel safe.Everyone needs to be a bit more humane during these times, she said.
New Delhi, March 26 : The Indian Railways has geared up production units to supply sanitisers to help the country fight Covid-19.

According to Railway Ministry officials, the railways diesel shed at Asansol in West Bengal and the diesel locomotive shed at Jodhpur in Rajasthan have produced over 700 liters of sanitisers in the past few days.

The diesel locomotive shed at Andal in Asansol has prepared 500 litres of sanitisers and has been packed in bottles of different sizes for supply. The diesel locomotive shed at Bhagat ki Kothi in Jodhpur prepared 215 litres of sanitisers, which was distributed to 13 railways units of the Jodhpur division.

The Southern Railways has also produced sanitisers, masks and aprons for the medical usage. The electric loco sheds at Erode and Arakkonam and the diesel loco shed at Ernakulam, Perambur loco works, Golden rock workshop and Perambur Carriage and Wagon work workshops were preparing masks, sanitisers and aprons, said a Southern Railway spokesperson.

Hand sanitisers at the Perambur Loco Works were being produced for use at the railway offices and hospitals, he said and added, the materials used into making it were isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, glycerol and distilled water.

"Initially, 5 litres have been prepared. Similarly, Golden Rock Workshop at Tiruchirappalli has produced 10 litres of hand sanitisers. The average cost is Rs 570 a litre, which is a lot cheaper than what's sold in the market," the Southern Railway official said.

The Golden Rock workshop has also handed over ingredients to the medical department for producing hand sanitisers in its lab. It will soon be making 60 medical cots, as required by the medical branch.

The Perambur Carriage works had taken the initiative of making 250 masks, he said. Of this, 100 masks have been provided to the Chennai Division for use by goods trains running staff and 150 masks handed over to the railway hospital in Perambur.

These masks have been made of white cotton cloth and is of single layer with elastic ear band, which can be reused after thorough washing.

"It has also produced 45 aprons and handed them over to the railway hospital in Perambur," he said and added, it would produce 50 medical cots in 10 days, using the material available at the workshop.

The Southern Railways official said the electric locoshed at Erode had produced 200 litres of hand sanitisers for use in offices and hospitals in the jurisdiction of the Salem Division.

Even electric loco shed at Arakkonam, diesel loco shed at Ernakulam and the medical branch of the Trivandrum division have contributed hand sanitisers for internal use.

Following the suspension of passenger services from March 23 to March 21, the railways has shut production units and has taken up the task of preparing hospital beds, IV stands and other medical equipment required by hospitals.

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a three-week countrywide lockdown, the railways has suspended passenger trains till April 14 and has stopped booking on IRCTC, its online platform.

However, the goods trains have been pressed into services to ensure adequate supply of essential goods across the country.
MAINTAL (dpa-AFX) - 1&1 Drillisch AG (DRHKF.PK, UDIRF.PK), a German telecommunication service provider, reported that its earnings before interest and taxes or EBIT for fiscal year 2019 fell by 6.8% to 528.5 million euros from last year's 567.2 million euros, reflecting higher costs for Advance Services. Profit per share was 2.12 euros, compared to 2.30 euros in the previous year. The number of customer contracts increased by 790,000 to 14.33 million contracts in fiscal year 2019 from the prior year. Annual revenue grew by 1.1 percent to 3.67 billion euros from last year. The company will propose an unchanged dividend of 0.05 euros per voting share to the Annual General Meeting. The company expects revenue and earnings for fiscal year 2020 to be roughly on a par with the level of the previous year. The company noted that complete annual report will be available on Thursday. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
CP Premiere: Matt Redman wants world to know Jesus is the same in every season, even in a pandemic

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Two-time Grammy Award-winner Matt Redman released his 14th album, Let There Be Wonder, at the top of the year that includes the new single, The Same Jesus, and said he now wants the world to hold on to that phrase more than ever.

"In a moment when theres so much uncertainty and anxiety swirling all around us, its so important to sing unchanging truth, Redman told The Christian Post on Wednesday.

Amid concerns surrounding the global coronavirus pandemic, the popular U.K. worship leader said he wants people to stay focused on who Jesus is.

When we worship Jesus, we encounter the One who is the same yesterday, today and forevermore. He is the ultimate unchanging truth  the same Jesus through every season, every problem, and indeed, every pandemic, he said.

The video for The Same Jesus was recorded live at Heart of God Church Singapore before many churches stopped holding large gatherings to slow down the spread of COVID-19. The Heart of God Church Singapore, an independent youth church founded by pastors Tan Seow How and Cecilia Chan, welcomed Redman and his band with open arms as they all worshiped together.

View the video premiere here:

The lyrics to The Same Jesus are inspiring and a reminder that God is in control.

This Jesus / Who carried our shame / This Jesus / Who rose from the grave / The same Jesus / We worship today, we worship today

He came to us / In grace and in truth / He's still with us / And still on the move / The same Jesus / He is making us new X2

I know that my Redeemer lives X2 / He's still keeping all His promises / The same Jesus X2

He's commanding / The wind and the waves / His kingdom / Forever shall reign / And we know that / He is coming again X2

The Same Jesus was a collaboration between Redman and producers Jacob Sooter and Joshua Silverberg. Let There Be Wonder is now available.
Houthi rebels have tightened their grip on northern Yemen in recent months, pushing deeper into Marib province.

Five years since a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states launched a military intervention against Houthi rebels in Yemen, the movement continues to make advances in the countrys north.

In recent weeks the group has taken control of territory in Jawf province including its main city of Hazm, which lies northeast of the capital, Sanaa, while it has also pushed into parts of the resource-rich Marib province, the last stronghold of Yemens internationally recognised government in the north.

The Houthi advances against forces loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and their regional allies have come despite the financial power of the Saudi-led coalition and the continuing international and domestic isolation of the rebel movement.

Buoyed by his groups military progress in recent months, Houthi leader Abdelmalek al-Houthi has urged the coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to halt attacks.

Impact of intervention

Before the coalition started air raids on March 26, 2015, the Houthis had forced President Hadi to flee to the southern city of Aden after holding him temporarily under house arrest.

They had also taken over the majority of Yemens populous northern and central highlands. Houthi control of the countrys air force meant that they were able to bomb pro-government forces in Aden, and almost took full control of the city. Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia the day before Riyadh launched its aerial intervention.

Within months, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their allies on the ground pushed the Houthis out of southern Yemen towards their northern heartland.

The most important success of the war has been preventing the Houthis from controlling all of Yemen, or the majority of it, especially the oil and gas-rich areas, said Abdulnaser Almuwadea, a Yemeni political researcher.

The Houthis have been unable to get international recognition, which would have been a possibility if the Houthis had taken control of Yemen and not faced any local resistance.

But the intervention and the protracted conflict has caused what the UN describes as the worlds worst humanitarian crisis in the poorest country in the Middle East.

More than 100,000 people have been killed in the war, according to ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), including 12,000 civilians. According to the World Food Programme, 24 million Yemenis are in need of humanitarian assistance, while 20 million are food insecure.

Air strikes hitting civilian areas and infrastructure have led to fewer Yemenis supporting the war, and the Houthis have been able to take real advantage and grow their base, Almuwadea said.

The weakness of the Yemeni government and the absence of its real presence on the ground in many areas  has strengthened the Houthis and made their control of the north more deep-rooted.

Houthi rebel chant slogans as they hold their weapons during a gathering aimed at mobilising more fighters [Hani Mohammed/The Associated Press]

Splits in coalition

The Houthi grip on Sanaa and the northern highlands appears fairly secure but the group has few domestic allies, having fought against most of the other major factions in Yemen, including Hadi loyalists, southern separatists, pro-Islah party militias, and loyalists of the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Saleh helped the Houthis take control of Sanaa in 2014 but was killed in December 2017 by Houthi fighters, who suspected that he was preparing to ally with the Saudi-led coalition.

His death marked the end of a brief period of fighting between the Houthis and forces loyal to the former leader, and perhaps the last real opportunity for the Saudi-led coalition to defeat the Houthis in their northern stronghold.

While Salehs death led to some coalescence of non-Houthi forces around the coalition Hadis government, the anti-Houthi alliance was weak and has since fractured.

When the coalition advanced on the Houthi-held port city of Hodeidah in the second half of 2018, it seemed likely to result in a military victory for the alliance, but international fears that the fighting would cause a humanitarian catastrophe allowed diplomatic pressure stopped the advance.

Since then, anti-Houthi forces have turned their guns on each other, as divisions between officially allied groups played out in.

The secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC), a UAE-backed group that has widespread support across southern Yemen, forced government forces out of its temporary capital of Aden in August 2019.

This led to the worst fighting between anti-Houthi forces since the beginning of the war, as clashes spread across southern Yemen. It also led to increasingly apparent divisions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who supported the government and the STC, respectively.

A Saudi-brokered agreement in November 2019 was supposed to bring the two sides back together, but has yet to be implemented fully.

The anti-Houthi alliance on the ground has deep ideological differences that may not be easy to overcome, said Fatima Abo Alasrar, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute.

Hadis government will have to quickly incentivise other factions to unite their efforts under one banner, but this might be too ambitious to expect at this stage of Yemens conflict.

The STC itself is still adamant that it will not back away from pushing for southern secession.

The STC is the political representative of the Southern people, and will negotiate to end the crisis in Yemen in a way that ensures a just solution to the Southern issue, Nasr Alesayi, a member of the STC, told Al Jazeera.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 15:51:55|Editor: huaxia

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A Chinese team of health experts sent to provide assistance to contain the COVID-19 outbreak in Iraq pose for a group photo outside the new PCR laboratory in Baghdad, Iraq, March 25, 2020. (Xinhua/Khalil Dawood)

China's anti-virus external assistance is the most intensive and wide-ranging emergency humanitarian operation since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- China has provided assistance to 89 countries and four international organizations to fight against the novel coronavirus, the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA) said Thursday.

A new round of aid implementation programs is currently being prepared, Deng Boqing, deputy head of the CIDCA, said at a press conference held in Beijing.

"China's anti-virus external assistance is the most intensive and wide-ranging emergency humanitarian operation since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949," Deng said.

Chinese medical workers and supplies have been sent to 28 Asian countries, 16 European countries, 26 African countries, nine countries in the Americas and 10 countries in the South Pacific, he noted. 




"Our recommendation is to prolong the confinement because we have reason to affirm this from a health point of view," he said in remarks to America TV news show.





The government official stated that the Government is doing every effort to prepare the Health Ministry and the health system in general.





"We have summoned former health ministers, ex-deputy ministers, as well as experts from different fields, such as epidemiology, infectiology, sociology, and anthropology," Zamora noted.









"We have put a high complexity health center such as the Ate Hospital into operation, exclusively for the treatment of coronavirus patients, and we are about to launch a specially adapted hospital at the Pan American Village towers," he expressed.





Additionally, the cabinet member affirmed that the Government is struggling to get the tests that Peruvian people need





"Our mission at this moment is to take care of our caretakers. We greatly appreciate your work and we are going to redouble our efforts so that you can work under conditions of safety. Thank you very much," he concluded.





(END) LIT/RMB/MVB

The Ministry of Health (Minsa) recommends that the Government extend the social confinement during the state of national emergency in order to contain the risk of contagion of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Peru , the sector head Victor Zamora affirmed on Thursday.Published: 3/26/2020
During World War II, Germany converted the recently formed Volkswagen into a company that made vehicles for the military at its factories. In times of similar exigency, Indian automobile majors Maruti Suzuki and Mahindra and Mahindra are gearing up to produce ventilators to help the government fight against the Coronavirus pandemic in India.

Mahindra and Mahindra is first off the block. Pawan Goenka, the managing director of the company's automotive division on Thursday tweeted that the company has embarked on a two pronged strategy to produce ventilators at its factories. "At one end, we along with two large PSUs are working with an existing manufacturer of high spec ventilators to help them to simplify design and scale up capacity. Our engineering team is right now with them working on it," his tweet read.

"At other end we are working on an automated version of the Bag Valve Mask ventilator (commonly known as Ambu bag). We hope to have a Proto ready in 3 days for approval. Once proven this design will be made available to all for manufacturing." This follows group patriarch Anand Mahindra's tweets on March 22 itself offering help in the fight against Coronavirus.

"Going by various reports from epidemiologists, it is highly likely that India is already in Stage 3 of transmission. Cases could rise exponentially with millions of casualties, putting a huge strain on medical infrastructure. A lockdown over the next few weeks will help flatten the curve & moderate the peak pressure on medical care. However, we need to create scores of temporary hospitals & we have a scarcity of ventilators," he had tweeted. "To help in the response to this unprecedented threat, we at the Mahindra Group will immediately begin work on how our manufacturing facilities can make ventilators."

The government has also reached out to other companies including market leader Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors and Hyundai to look at ways to manufacture ventilators expeditiously. A ventilator is a mechanical breathing device that can blow air and oxygen into the lungs and are critical in the treatment of of people with lung failure, a complication suffered by patients with severe COVID-19. It costs anywhere between Rs 5-12 lakh. Currently India imports around 80-85 percent of all medical devices for intensive care, including ventilators.

"The govt anticipates a need for a much larger number of ventilators. They have approached us about the possibility of making ventilators in house," said R C Bhargava, chairman, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd to a TV channel on Wednesday. "A number of our teams are looking at the possibility. We will come up with an answer in a day or two. We have very limited time."

Though the number of Covid 19 infected cases in India are relatively low compared to other parts of the world, the risk of it spreading here remains high. This could put a strain on the medical infrastructure of the country and the shortage of ventilators in the country could get woefully exposed. According to a Brookings report, if the number of cases spiral in India, it may need as many as 110,000-220,000 ventilators as early as mid May. It estimated the number of ventilators today in the country at a maximum 57,000.

"An estimated 5-10% of total patients will require critical care in form of ventilator support. In a worst-case scenario, according to one estimate at least, we may end up with 2.2 million cases in India by May 15, which implies that we will need 110,000 to 220,000 ventilators. We have no official figures on the number of ventilators available in the public sector, however ,we arrive at an estimated figure using the number of hospital beds available - 7,13,986 total government beds, out of which 5-8 percent are ICU beds (35,699 to 57,119 ICU beds).

Assuming that 50 percent of these ICU beds have ventilators, we arrive at an estimate of 17,850 to 25,556 ventilators in the country. Even in the best-case scenario where all ICU beds are equipped with ventilators, we have a maximum of 57k ventilators to cater to a growing number of COVID-19 patients. Clearly, the growing demand for ventilators is going to outstrip the limited supply really soon," it said.

Also read: Coronavirus: Auto dealers stuck with Rs 6,000 crore inventory; many fear permanent closure

Also read: Coronavirus impact: Factory shutdowns to cost auto makers Rs 2,300 crore per day
[March 26, 2020] Robotic Process Automation Market Growth Predicted at 20% Till 2024: Global Market Insights, Inc.

SELBYVILLE, Del., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the latest report "RPA Market by Tools (Model-Based Application Tools, Process-Based Application Tools), Operation (Rules-Based, Knowledge-Based), Service (Training, Professional), Solution (Automated, Decision & Management Support, Interaction), Organization Size (Large Enterprises, SMBs), Application (BFSI, Healthcare, Retail, IT & Telecom, Manufacturing, Transportation), Regional Outlook, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast 2024", by Global Market Insights, Inc., the market valuation of robotic process automation (RPA) will cross $5 billion by 2024. The robotic process automation market is anticipated to witness ascending growth across various regions, with Europe contributing predominantly towards the business expansion. The presence of manufacturing and logistics companies across the region is predicted to impel the European RPA industry. RPA technology helps in streamlining logistic operations, with the intent of obtaining an overwhelming advancement in cycle time and improving the consumer experience. Request a sample of this research report at https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/2035 The Asia-Pacific robotic process automation (RPA) market is estimated to grow at a rapid pace over the forecast period. Automation, which includes artificial intelligence and machine learning, are the frontiers for growth in the region. Increasing sophisticated manufacturing practices in countries including China, Japan, and Taiwan, also offer growth opportunities for the implementation of RPA processes. The expanding industrial sector has forced organizations to automate their business processes, which on a large scale is supporting the growth map of the global RPA market. These automated solutions are likely to help companies to structure their business operations and lay their key focus on the core competencies. Likewise, the automation of tedious tasks eradicates the workload on the production team, eventually resulting in enhanced productivity and upgraded competitiveness. The IT and telecom sector of the robotic process automation market share is likely to accrue noteworthy gains during the span of seven years, owing to its proficiency of bridging a gap between highly supported transformation projects through the automation processes. BFSI, on the other hand, is projected to observe massive traction across the market globally. This growth is ascribed to accuracy and the effectiveness offered by the automated systems to immediately address the regulatory comliance issues. It has been apprehended that the RPA systems in the BFSI sector bridge the connection between the BPM and ERP systems, thereby proliferating the growth statistics.



Process-based tools have gained significant attention in the robotic process automation market due to a surge in demand for non-voice processes. It helps organizations to seamlessly manage the various interlinked processes, increasing efficiency, and gain operational benefits. The automation process enables organizations to improve business processes by analyzing the performance at every step and offering strategic support. Knowledge-based RPA tools and cognitive artificial intelligence solutions have been gaining traction in the market. As RPA has become more common, the majority of companies that are currently focused on rules-based solutions are beginning to implement knowledge-based automation. An example of a knowledge-based solution would be searching for information across customer service functions systems and answering customer emails.

Make an Inquiry for purchasing this report at https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/2035 Table of Contents (ToC) of the report: Chapter 3 RPA Market Insights 3.1 Industry segmentation 3.2 Industry landscape, 2013 - 2024 3.3 Industry ecosystem analysis 3.3.1 Vendor matrix 3.4 Technological & innovation landscape 3.4.1 RPA roadmap 3.4.2 Impact of artificial intelligence 3.4.3 U.S. 3.4.4 EU 3.4.5 China 3.5 Industry impact forces 3.5.1 Growth drivers 3.5.2 Industry pitfalls & challenges 3.6 Growth potential analysis 3.6.1 Business model 3.7 Porter's analysis 3.7.1 Threat of new entrants 3.7.2 Buyer's power 3.7.3 Threat of substitutes 3.7.4 Threat of suppliers 3.7.5 Industry rivalry 3.8 Competitive landscape, 2016 3.8.1 Strategy dashboard 3.8.2 Investment landscape 3.9 PESTEL analysis Browse Complete Table of Contents (ToC) at https://www.gminsights.com/toc/detail/robotic-process-automation-market About Global Market Insights, Inc. Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider. Offering syndicated and custom research reports, growth consulting and business intelligence services, Global Market Insights, Inc. aims to help clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data that aid in strategic decision making. GMIPulse, our business analytics platform, offers an online, interactive option of exploring our proprietary industry research data in an easy-to-use and dynamic manner. Clients get to explore market intelligence across 11 top-level categories and hundreds of industry segments within them, covering regional, company-level and cross-sectional statistics that make our offering a stand-out for decision-makers. https://www.gminsights.com/gmipulse Contact Us: Arun Hegde

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Global RPA Market to register 20% gains to cross $5B by 2024: GMI

Process-based tools have gained significant attention in the robotic process automation market due to surge in demand for non-voice processes. It helps organizations to seamlessly manage the various interlinked processes, increasing efficiency and gain operational benefits. Related Links Smart Factory Market Trends Research Report on Sustainable and Smart Technologies View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/robotic-process-automation-market-growth-predicted-at-20-till-2024-global-market-insights-inc-301029720.html SOURCE Global Market Insights, Inc.

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KAMPALA (Reuters) - Uganda said on Wednesday it had closed its borders to all new refugee arrivals as part of efforts to contain the new coronavirus in a country which has long kept its doors open to those fleeing conflict and other troubles in the region. The east African country hosts roughly 1.4 million refugees mainly from neighbours where conflict and civil war have uprooted tens of thousands from their homes.

KAMPALA (Reuters) - Uganda said on Wednesday it had closed its borders to all new refugee arrivals as part of efforts to contain the new coronavirus in a country which has long kept its doors open to those fleeing conflict and other troubles in the region.

The east African country hosts roughly 1.4 million refugees mainly from neighbours where conflict and civil war have uprooted tens of thousands from their homes.

Most of the refugees in Uganda come from South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi.

"Whereas Uganda has an open door policy for refugees and asylum seekers, Uganda has suspended receiving of new arrivals with immediate effect," a government statement said.

"Refugees who are already in the country will continue to receive the support."

According to the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR about 13,500 refugees have arrived in Uganda so far this year.

Uganda over the years has won international plaudits for its liberal refugee policy that maintains open borders and allocates land plots to individual refugee families.

Kampala also grants refugees free movement and employment, as well as some public services such as free education and healthcare.

Some refugee camps are very crowded, however, and coronavirus containment measures such as social distancing could potentially prove hard to enforce and a possible outbreak difficult to control. Uganda has reported 14 cases so far.

(Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; editing by Omar Mohammed and Grant McCool)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Pelosi Says Free Virus Testing, Treatment Could Be in Next Bill

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that free testing for the CCP virus could be in the next bill that Congress takes up, in addition to treatment for those who test positive for the new illness from China.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

The Senate passed a package late Wednesday and includes billions for small business loans and a payout of $1,200 for many Americans.

Some of the components were inserted by Democrats but others are still on the table for future pieces of legislation, Pelosi told reporters in Washington.

There are so many things we didnt get in any of these bills yet in a way that we need to, she said.

The pandemic forced Congress to quickly take action, including passing an initial bill that provided $8.3 billion for research and testing and another bill that provided money for masks and other items. The third bill is focused on mitigating the economic loss.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) leaves the Senate floor at the US Capitol in Washington on March 25, 2020. (Alex Edelman/AFP via Getty Images)

Lawmakers will next turn to economic recovery, including creating jobs to help people recover from the situation, according to the Democratic House leader.

Pelosi also wants to better define who qualifies for family and medical leave, bolster Occupational Safety and Health Administration for workers, a 15 percent increase in food stamps, and more money sent to state and local governments, including treating the District of Columbia as a state in terms of the distribution of funds.

Theres also the matter of a proposal on pensions that Pelosi claimed is supported by Republican President Donald Trump but was blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who said the proposal could be in the next bill.

Democrats will also insist on free testing, according to Pelosi.

We said free testing, free testing, free testing, but with free testing is the visit to the doctors office, the treatment that goes with it, and that has to be free as well, she said.

Pelosi ripped Republicans, who she alleged made a version of the bill focused on corporations that was transformed by Democrats to a bubble-up, worker-first, family-first legislation. Later in the press conference, she called for working together in the most bipartisan way possible to get the job done as soon as possible.
The United Bank For Africa(UBA) has released a statement stating that it has donated over N5b ($14 million) to Nigeria and other 19 nations over the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the chief executive officer of the financial institution, Tony Elumelu, it is important that all wealthy individual and corporate organisation come together so as to defeat the deadly disease.

He said:

This is a time when we must all play our part. This global epidemic must bring citizens, governments and business leaders together  and quickly.

Read Also: Governor Obaseki Tests Negative For Coronavirus

As we see a rapidly increasing number of cases of the coronavirus in Nigeria and Africa, the private sector has to work hand in hand with various Governments, in stemming the spread of the global pandemic.

We commend the efforts of governments and we are keen to partner and contribute our resources to the collective effort that will ensure the response to the pandemic is swift and effective.
- A Ghanaian who tested positive for coronavirus has advised the public to stay home to avoid catching the disease

- The man, who is now in isolation said people should take the virus serious becauses it is real

- He disclosed that he got the disease during his visit to France in an interview on the Executive Breakfast Show (EBS) on Class91.3FM

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The number of infected persons for COVID-19 in Ghana is surging and some of these sufferers are sharing their distressing experience with the public.

Recently, a Ghanaian who tested positive for coronavirus and is now in isolation has advised the public to stay home to avoid catching the disease.

He strongly recommended that people should comply with the president's directive including avoiding social gatherings.

In an interview on the Executive Breakfast Show (EBS) on Class91.3FM on Thursday, March 26, 2020, Nii said people should take the virus serious because it is real.

Nii got infected with the dreaded disease while in Paris, where he had travelled for training after he was promoted at his workplace and had to acquire a new skill for the role.

READ ALSO: Please pray for me - Lady who tested positive for COVID-19 'cries' for help

On March 14, 2020, he arrived in Ghana with a cough unaware that he was infected.

Nii notes that when he was coming back to Ghana, the symptoms were not strong because he was having a mere cough which started in France.

According to him he thought he was only reacting to a chemical that was spread in the atmosphere because he was allergic to it.

On 15 March, Nii reported himself to the health authorities and went in for a voluntary test.

He received the test results on March 17, 2020, which confirmed his positive status for the virus and was isolated.

Speaking to host Benjamin Akakpo, Nii said: ''Initially, when I tested positive, it wasnt easy for me because I came into contact with my family.''

Although he feared for his family, they tested negative for the disease.

According to him, he gave the list of all those he had come into contact with to officials of the Ghana Health Service.

He remarked that:''Isolation is not a good thing and I dont wish it for any Ghanaian.''

He, however, applauded the health professionals at the front line of the fight for their professionalism.

Meanwhile, the Ghana Health Service has said as on the morning of March 26, 2020, that a total of 54 COVID-19 cases including three deaths have been confirmed from the regular surveillance systems.

This brings the total number of cases to 132.

In a similar development, YEN.com.gh previously reported that a lady identified as Precious Williams has also shared a heart-wrenching experience about how she is struggling to cope after testing positive for the coronavirus.

Precious Williams disclosed in a message on social media that she tested positive for the COVID-19 and she asked her friends to remember her in their prayers so as to speed up her recovery.

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Global risk and reinsurance specialist Guy Carpenter & Company, a business of Marsh & McLennan Companies, has announced the appointment of George Williams as managing director, global head of client support services. In his new role, Williams will be responsible for setting the strategy for Guy Carpenters global client-service organisation.

Williams has more than 20 years of experience in operations, product management and client service in the insurance and banking industries. Prior to joining Guy Carpenter, he served as chief operating officer of North American General Insurance at AIG. He has also served in several global and regional roles for AIG, including as general manager for its business in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Prior to joining AIG, Williams held a number of roles in the banking sector.
A test conducted on the Governor of Ondo State, Rotimi Akeredolu on his coronavirus status has indicated negative.

The governor personally made the result public in his Twitter handle @RotimiAkeredolu, on Thursday.

Mr Akeredolu had refused to embark on self-isolation even though he was said to have met with persons who had tested positive to the virus.

On Wednesday, he denied reports that he had gone into isolation, when he appeared in public with the Commissioner of Police, Undie Adie, to brief journalists on the measures to enforce the stay-at-home order in the state.

He, however, accepted to subject himself to a test, to ascertain whether he had the virus.

Having received news that one of the persons at a meeting I attended tested +ve for #COVID19, I have willingly volunteered to get tested for #Covid19 in spite of the fact that many others at the said meeting tested negative, to make assurance doubly sure, he tweeted on Wednesday.

I am well & asymptomatic.

The Commissioner for Information, Donald Ojogo, also announced on Thursday that the result of the test was negative.

READ MORE:

This is to officially announce to all residents of the state and indeed, the world that the result of the test carried out on the Governor of Ondo State, Arakunrin Oluwarotimi Odunayo Akeredolu, SAN is out. Its negative, he said.

Recall that Mr Governor willingly offered to be tested on Wednesday morning after one of his earlier contacts had been confirmed to be positive.

Mr. Governor encourages all to continue to be vigilant and adhere strictly to all regulations put in place to tackle this debilitating pandemic.

We are taking measures that the disease does not enter our state; that is why we are calling on the public to follow the various directives of the state government on preventing the disease.
One of Australias largest and most influential unions is calling for both a jobs guarantee to keep people in work and a universal income of $740 a week to be paid to most other people.

The push by the 156,000-member United Workers Union highlighted the escalating demands by the labour movement in response to the pandemic crisis and the significant rise in unemployment in recent weeks.

Tim Kennedy is pushing for a jobs guarantee and universal income Credit:Arsineh Houspian

UWU national secretary Tim Kennedy, in a position paper, said there was an urgent need for the federal government to intervene and play an active role in guaranteeing and providing social and economic security during this time.

Mr Kennedy is pushing for a jobs guarantee that would mean no workers could be dismissed or retrenched during the pandemic crisis, with the government guaranteeing the wages of affected workers.
Ankara, March 26 : A tradition in Turkey is to offer visitors cologne water to refresh their hands. Now the habit has become an unexpected strategy in te country's fight against the coronavirus pandemic and also an alternative to expensive and scarce hand sanitizers.

"I always carry a bottle of cologne in my car," an emergency health worker at Ankara's May 19 Hospital, told Efe news on the phone.

"Alcohol is a good sanitizer for hands, the most dangerous part of the body because it can spread the virus," says the doctor.

What is now medical advice was already widely spread in the Eurasian country.

Cologne is offered as a sign of hospitality in homes, restaurants and cafes, and is sold in supermarkets and grocery stores.

The services sector, especially gastronomy, has renewed its use in recent years of offering scented wet wipes Every meal in an Istanbul restaurant ends, without exception, with the waiter offering one of these cloths to customers.

The towels have previously been immersed in a perfumed solution that usually contains a concentration of 80 percent alcohol.

Since the country first announced is coronavirus case on March 10, queues have formed at shops and chemists to buy cologne at a standard price of around seven euros ($7.5) a litre.

Hand sanitizers, like in many other countries, have vanished from store shelves across Turkey.

According to a study by the Ipsos social research institute on how Turks cope with the pandemic, 88 per cent said they use cologne to fight the virus.

Turkish media and experts have recommended its use to avoid spreading the virus in situations where it is difficult to wash your hands with soap.

The government has even announced it will distribute free cologne water and face masks to over 65s, the most vulnerable social group.

Engin Tuncer, president of Eyup Sabri Tuncer, a company that produces various types of cologne, told NTV radio that the lotion's sales have increased five-fold and daily shipments are necessary to replenish store stocks.

It is now common to find sold-out signs in supermarkets and pharmacies.

The most popular brands have also exhausted their online sales although they have issued statements to say stocks will be updated soon.

"We do not have masks, gloves, or cologne. These are the phrases that I have repeated the most in the last days," an Istanbul pharmacist told Efe news.

Given the rapid spread of the COVID-19, the Turkish government has suspended the use of ethanol in other sectors, such as gasoline production, to increase cologne production.

Turkey has so far reported 2,433 confirmed cases with 59 deaths.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Nigerias mechanism for the protection of human rights, has accused the police in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) of shooting live bullets into its premises, damaging properties worth millions of naira.

In a statement issued during the week and signed by its executive secretary, Tony Ojukwu, NHRC said the Monday attack on its headquarters was the second between 2018 and 2020.

NHRC added that its officials investigating cases of human rights abuse by the police are also constantly harassed by police officers, apparently to intimidate and force them to hand off the cases.

Amnesty International Nigeria has demanded a thorough, effective and impartial investigation into the alleged attack, describing the development as reckless and horrific.

According to NHRC, police officers after members of the outlawed Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) protesting against the continued detention of their leader, Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, had descended on the premises of the commission and deliberately targeted the compound.

The statement reads in part; Having assessed the situation, we are of the view that the premises of the Commission was deliberately attacked by the police with not only tear gas canisters but with live bullets. The side door glass of one of the staff vehicles parked in the compound was shattered by bullets with bullet holes while the drivers door frame had a live bullet presently lodged inside it.

The window glass of one of the offices, department of education and promotion as well as the security gate house was also pierced by bullet holes.

Now, this is not the first time the commission was attacked directly by officers of the Nigerian Police Force. Several officers of the Commission investigating complaints of human rights violations have in the past been assaulted and intimidated by officers of the Nigerian police.

National Human Rights Commission (NHRC)

The commission said the harassment had continued because its earlier complaints to the appropriate authorities, including the office of the inspector-general of police, swept the matter under the carpet.

The premises of the Commission just like the courts should be one of such places where every Nigerian should feel free, where human rights must be respected and staff should be able to carry out their constitutional mandate without fear of intimidation, the statement added.

Amnesty International demands probe

Reacting to the development, the director, Amnesty International Nigeria, Osai Ojigho, said the attack must not only be investigated but that culprits must be made to face the wrath of the law.

The human rights organisation, in a statement shared with PREMIUM TIMES, said the frequent resort to lethal force to quell peaceful protests must be condemned by everyone.

This reckless and horrific incident which happened while supporters of Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) were holding their usual protest by the headquarters of NHRC, once again, shows Nigerian polices total disregard for human life and brutal violation of freedom of assembly.

Amnesty International

We condemn this violation of human rights and frequent resort to lethal force by the police whenever they are handling peaceful protests. Live bullets fired by the police put lives at risk, damaged some parts of the building and some staff vehicles parked in the office premises of the commission. Our findings show that this is not the first time police are targeting the offices of NHRC with live bullets and tear gas. On many occasions, some staff of the commission investigating human rights violations were threatened and intimidated by the police.

Police keep mum

Meanwhile, the police frustrated all efforts to get them to react to the development.

When called on the phone, the police public relations officer, Frank Mba, said whatever happens within the FCT metropolis is handled by the FCT police command and not the national headquarters of the force.

You know, the Nigeria police headquarters does not micromanage its affairs. Just like any other state of the federation, whatever happens within the FCT is handled by the FCT police command. They have their own police commissioner and the command has its own spokesman.

Police Spokesperson, Frank Mba

It is only a matter of national interest that the headquarters responds to. So on this, you may have to speak with the command for adequate response.

However, the spokesperson for the command, Anjuguri Mansah, neither picked calls made to his phone nor replied a message sent to him.
I felt no worse than I've ever felt when returning from a trip. It was on Saturday night when I was eating dinner that I realised it didn't taste like much. It was the next day and I was reading an article and someone mentioned they had really mild symptoms of coronavirus but one of the things they noticed was they had a reduced sense of taste and smell. Jess said the lack of taste persisted on Sunday and Monday, so she decided to get tested. On Wednesday she got the call to say she had tested positive.

Jess began taking notes of her symptoms on the plane on March 20. Credit:Jess/Supplies Life with COVID-19 Fortunately for Jess, her symptoms are mild, with only the lack of taste and breathlessness separating it from a common cold. Speaking to WAtoday over the phone, there was a slight croakiness to Jess' voice that sounded like the tail end of a sickness. Im ok but Im definitely feeling more breathless, she said. Breathlessness is a symptom of people being stressed and I had to rush to fly home and I knew I was flying with a whole lot of sick people so I assumed that's part of it. In all honesty, this feels like the type of cold that people wouldn't think anything of.

While she counts herself lucky, Jess is acutely aware of the risk the virus could have to others. I am in my 20s, Im quite healthy and literally the weekend before last I had climbed a volcano and I am noticing the breathlessness ... so I can only imagine what it would be like for someone who is older and has some kind of condition, she said. Plane stupid The most frustrating part of Jess ordeal was seeing a number of people ignore directions from airport staff to notify them if they had any COVID-19 symptoms on her flight back to Perth. It held me up by an hour and a half but Id still do it again and it didn't change anything because they're making everyone isolate anyway," she said.

Jess has been receiving these text messages from the WA Health Department. Credit:Jess/Supplied [My symptoms were] so mild but I still have it, so for all those people who were literally hacking up a lung on the plane, they might not have it, but they have something. People should just be honest. I just think that is really negligent on their behalf and really disappointing. Alone time Jess new daily routine is catching up with friends digitally and responding to a Department of Health text message asking whether she still had symptoms.

She said the advice provided to her was that she could come out of isolation when her symptoms disappeared for three days or at the end of her quarantine  whichever comes last. With her symptoms diary, that will be something much easier to determine. She said it was disappointing health authorities werent testing patients for the virus to confirm they had beaten it. I think it is really difficult that they dont test you to make sure you're negative before you're allowed back out because obviously some people are completely asymptomatic, she said. My dad is over 65 and my mum is in her 60s as well. They're healthy but at the same time it is not a risk I want to take.
The COVID-19 had spread globally. It had infected more than 462,000 individuals. The deadly novel coronavirus had taken the lives of at least 20,000 people, says an article.

Statistics of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The statistics of the total number of recovered novel coronavirus cases globally may serve as a light of hope to many nations who are putting their best resources and efforts to use in their attempt to prevent the further spread of the dangerous novel coronavirus.

Based on three sources that track the coronavirus globally, there at least 113,000 individuals who have recovered from the COVID-19.

In China, the country where the novel coronavirus had originated had reported more than 81,000 cases. The country has the most total number of cases in the world. It has more than 73,000 recoveries, says Bing, a Microsoft tracking tool. The country has the most number of global recoveries.

In some countries in Europe such as Spain and Italy, there are higher death tolls compared to China.

Italy has 69,000 COVID-19 cases. It has the second largest number of COVID-19 patients in the world. It has a total of 9,300 recoveries. It was reported at least 7,500 Italians lost their lives after getting the infection.

Check these out:

The following are a summary of countries and their COVID-19 total cases, active cases, patient recoveries, and deaths. The information is as of March 25.

China

In China, there are a total of 81, 218 confirmed cases. The active cases are 4,287. 73, 650 people had already recovered from the disease while 3,281 died.

Italy

There are 74,386 confirmed cases in Italy with 57,521 active cases. The total number of patients in the country who survived the disease is 9,362. 7,503 Italians lost their battle with the illness.

United States of America

In the United States of America, there is a total of 64,107 cases of COVID-19 with 62,821 active cases. It was reported that there are already 393 people who recovered from the illness. 893 lost their fight with the disease.

Spain

There is a total of 47,611 COVID-19 confirmed cases in Spain and 38,799 are active cases. 5,367 patients recovered from the disease while 3,445 lost their battle with the novel coronavirus.

Germany

Germany has a total of 37,323 confirmed cases of the COVID-19 and 33,570 are active cases. There are already 3,547 patients who recovered from the illness while 206 individuals lost their lives from the disease.

South Korea

There is a total of 9,137 COVID-19 confirmed cases of South Korea and 5,281 are active cases of the illness. 3,730 individuals recovered from the disease while 126 lost the fight.

For those who had mild symptoms of the illness, they felt fine after the disease passed while those with severe cases of the disease had long-term lung damage. The effects of the COVID-19 depends on the patient's age and the presence of any pre-existing health condition.
Kartik Aaryan, Meghna Gulzar, Yami Gautam has joined the growing list of celebrities, who have pledged their support to the new initiative aimed at supporting the daily wage-earners who have been severely affected by the lockdown imposed to prevent the coronavirus spread.

The initiative, 'I Stand With Humanity', has been started by the Art of Living Foundation and the Indian film and television industry, which will provide support to families of daily wage workers with essential food supplies.

"If we won't be there for each other, then who will? Show your Support and Donate," actor Kartik Aaryan posted on Twitter.

'Chhapakk' director Meghna Gulzar also shown in her support for the donation and said that it is the time to help those who are less fortunate.

"Trying times. Time to be grateful for what we have. Time to keep in mind, those less fortunate, who we can help. Every bit counts," the 46-year-old director wrote.

Taking it to her Instagram platform, actor Yami Gautam also expressed her wholehearted willingness to contribute to this 'noble initiative'.

"I whole heartily support this noble initiative. Happy to be a part of this humanitarian cause. While staying safe at home I urge everyone else also to contribute, whatever you can in your capacity," the 31-year-old star wrote.

Meanwhile, actor Kriti Kharbanda too shared her take to say 'yes to humanity.'

"#coronaseladona #changewithin #istandwithhumanityNow is our chance to say yes to humanity! Let's do this for us. For our brothers and sisters. For the world. For our future," the 'Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aana' star wrote on Instagram.

The latest of all-stars to join the initiative is Boman Irani.

The 60-year-old star took to his Twitter handle and requested everybody to do their bit by supporting the cause.

"I request you all to support the daily wage earners. It's time to do your bit," he tweeted.

Earlier the day, Bollywood filmmakers and actors including Karan Johar, Rajkumar Hirani, Taapsee Pannu, Ayushmann Khurrana, Lara, Dutta, Sanjay Dutt, Jackie Shroff, Kiara Advani, Rakul Preet Singh and Bhumi Pednekar had pledged their support to the said initiative.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
People with second homes in the Catskills region of New York are being warned to stay away in venom-laced Facebook posts and blunt messages from county officials.

Boardwalks and beaches in some Jersey Shore towns are barricaded, and residents are urging the closure of coastal access bridges to outsiders.

In the Hamptons, the famous playground for the rich on the East End of Long Island, locals are angry that an onslaught of visitors has emptied out grocery store shelves.

A backlash has grown on the outskirts of the New York region as wealthy people flee to summer homes to avoid the densely packed city, which has become the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis.

This clash between year-round residents and those with the means to retreat to vacation homes intensified Tuesday as White House officials advised those who had passed through or fled New York City to place themselves in a 14-day quarantine.

Theyre pumping gas. Theyre stopping at grocery stores, said Kim Langdon, 48, of Ashland, New York. If theyre infected and they dont know it, theyre putting everyone at risk.

The expletive-filled commentary on a Catskills Facebook page was less subtle.

The only cases in Greene County were brought here from downstate people so stay down there, one man wrote. Just because you have a second home up here doesnt mean you have the right to put us at risk.

Mayors, town supervisors and the governors of at least two states have warned part-time residents of tourist destinations to stay away.

We dont want your bugs, said Linda Michel, 71, of Surf City, on Long Beach Island in New Jersey, about 100 miles south of Manhattan. Michel, who wore blue plastic gloves into a grocery store, said the bridge that connects Long Beach Island to the mainland should be closed to all except year-round residents who hold disaster re-entry passes.

The problem with the island is you do not have the resources, she said.

Across the country, similar tensions between locals and seasonal visitors are bubbling to the surface as efforts to confront the pandemic have led the nation to navigate uncharted territory.

The governor of Florida has ordered anyone who traveled from the New York region in the last three weeks to remain under quarantine for 14 days. Officials in vacation hubs on North Carolinas Outer Banks have barred nonresidents as cases of the highly contagious virus creep south along the East Coast.

Short-term rentals have been curtailed in Truckee, California, about 30 miles southwest of Reno, Nevada. Nantucket and Marthas Vineyard have been deemed no-go zones in Massachusetts, where Gov. Charlie Baker urged people to stay on the mainland.

In New Jersey, Gov. Philip Murphy made an unequivocal plea for those with shore houses to stay away.

We all love the summer people, said Joseph Mancini, the mayor of Long Beach Township, New Jersey. They drive our economy. But when they come down here now, the services here arent geared up for them.

He estimated that his township had tripled in size to 15,000 as part-time residents arrived, lured by last weekends warm, sunny weather and the relative safety of the beach.

The cancellation of schools in most states and work-from-home edicts have left many families unfettered by offices or primary residences, free to work wherever they can find Wi-Fi.

The influx has drained local supermarkets and fueled fear that a continued onslaught could cripple towns with tiny police forces and few hospitals.

Just try to get chicken, said Pete Byron, the mayor of Wildwood, New Jersey. You cant get chicken.

At Red Horse Market, a gourmet food shop in East Hampton, part of Long Islands East End, some customers are phoning in to ask for personal shoppers or for delivery to their cars, so they dont have to walk through the store, said Jeff Lange, one of the owners.

At the moment, he said his 30-person staff is too busy to accommodate such requests.

We had people showing up to buy a lot of meat, Lange said, and there were moments where we had to step in and say, Thats too much. Theres no hard line on the meat, for example, but if it seems like more than what is fair, we say so.

A liquor store in Sag Harbor, another Hamptons town, is selling cases of wine and spirits through a half-opened door.

Its like the Fourth of July out here, said Robin Farnam, a clerk at the store.

The number of known coronavirus cases in the United States continues to grow quickly.

As of Wednesday afternoon, there have been at least 59,502 cases of coronavirus confirmed by lab tests and 804 deaths, according to a New York Times database. More than half are in New York state and most of these are from New York City  an easy drive to some of the wealthiest enclaves in the nation.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said that with cases doubling every three days in New York City alone, as many as 140,000 people might need urgent care in the next few weeks.

Greene County, about two hours north of the city in the heart of the Catskills, warned on its website that travel from any area at this time is inadvisable and is highly discouraged.

Greene County is a large rural county with NO hospital! the message reads.

On Long Island, private plane and jet traffic increased at East Hampton Airport, with everything from single-engine Cessnas and Piper Cubs to Gulfstreams and Falcon jets landing.

Weve had helicopters, seaplanes, corporate planes, said Jim Brundige, the airport director. A little bit of everything.

Stores there have also been stripped. Some people are even buying extra freezers, residents said.

They want to make sure they have enough for a year, said Jonathan Amaral, the house manager and chef at a gated estate on Southamptons Main Street. The shelves were bare. For us locals and middle class people, that hurts.

Long before the virus struck, many full-time residents of towns that flood with seasonal visitors already had a healthy distrust of their part-time neighbors and the crowds that follow in their wake.

Some people have bitter feelings toward weekenders, said Honora Trimbell, of Bovina, New York, in the Catskills. Theyre just taking this opportunity to elaborate.

A popular bumper on cars in southern New Jersey, where day-trippers are disparaged as bennies, reads, Welcome to the shore. Now go home.

Still, the rapid swell of visitors remains worrisome to elected leaders.

Officials on Fishers Island, a quaint oasis in the Long Island Sound not far from the Connecticut coastline, with an offseason population of 230, have issued new urgent protocols pleading with people to stay away for at least a month.

Jay Schneiderman, the supervisor of Southampton, an area comprising more than a dozen hamlets and villages on eastern Long Island, said the population had soared in the last two weeks to nearly 100,000, up from 60,000.

I would prefer that if you are coming from New York City, a hot spot, you stay there, said Schneiderman, chairman of the East End Supervisors and Mayors Association. I cant stop you, but wed love people to heed the advice of the CDC and stay home.

Bob Sankosh, 56, splits his time between a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, where his office is, and a home in Beach Haven, New Jersey. He and his wife and his two adult children are now living at the beach as they all work or study from home.

I get both sides, Sankosh said. It would be easy to overrun things.

He said he believed the warnings from Murphy and others to stay away had been effective, noting that recently, beaches felt emptier.

Some New Yorkers, however, still seem undaunted by the warnings.

Last weekend, on Middle Lane in East Hampton, contractors bustled around a house under construction.

The home is at least two months away from completion, but the owner wants to move out of the city and into the home as soon as possible, said Michael Maycol, a carpenter and painter.

Hes pushing us to finish the home, Maycol said, before something worse happens.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic which has infected over 600 people in India, the Union finance ministry has asked the Reserve Bank of India to consider ensuring a string of emergency measures to help borrowers cope with the damage caused by the outbreak.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic which has infected over 600 people in India, the Union finance ministry has asked the Reserve Bank of India to consider ensuring a string of emergency measures to help borrowers cope with the damage caused by the outbreak.

According to a report in the Economic Times, the department of financial services secretary Debashish Panda wrote to RBI suggesting a moratorium of a few months on the payment of EMIs, interest and loan repayments and a relaxation in the classification of nonperforming assets (NPAs).

The letter stressed on the need for relief measures for businesses and individuals facing losses arising from the coronavirus outbreak, the report added.

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day lockdown period from 25 March to help slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

The period will only see essential services being allowed to function, while businesses and individuals may not be able to pay loans due to the lockdown.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced that the threshold for insolvency is being raised to Rs 1 crore from Rs 1 lakh.

On Thursday, the finance minister announced a Rs 1,70,000-crore scheme to provide food security to the economically weaker sections of the society.
New Delhi, March 26 : Indian authorities on Thursday allowed a special flight of Lufthansa airlines to fly to Delhi and later evacuate German citizens stuck in the wake of countrywide lockdown.

Under special circumstances, a Lufthansa A380 aircraft from Frankfurt landed in Delhi around midnight. The return flight departed from Delhi at 130 am. The number of foreigners evacuated could not be immediately known.

The airline said the aircraft evacuated German citizens at a time when no international flights were operating to and from India and most air traffic worldwide had come to a halt.

On Wednesday, a special flight of Japan Airlines was allowed to operate to Delhi for evacuating Japanese citizens.

At present, no foreign or domestic passenger flight operations are allowed to operate in India though cargo operations are still underway.
Red Bull will not simply abandon its push to get to the bottom of the secret agreement reached between the FIA and Ferrari.

Before the coronavirus pandemic took over Formula 1 and the entire world, the hottest topic was a big group of teams threatening legal action over the way F1's governing body handled the questionable legality of Ferrari's 2019 engine.

"Unfortunately at the moment we are dealing with other things," Marko told f1-insider.com.

"But that does not mean that we will give up on the FIA and Ferrari business if things go back to normal," Red Bull's top Austrian official said.

"The corona crisis took over but we still think the agreement was scandalous."

Marko also referred to the fact that Toto Wolff and Mercedes suddenly withdrew their opposition to the FIA-Ferrari agreement.

"We don't want to harm Ferrari or the FIA in any way, but we continue to demand complete clarification of how the strange private agreement came about," he said. "Even without Mercedes, who strangely jumped off the train even though they were the train driver from the beginning."

(GMM)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-10 22:03:42|Editor: xuxin

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ULAN BATOR, March 10 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia's State Emergency Commission on Tuesday decided to suspend all scheduled flights to and from Russia, Turkey and Kazakhstan from Friday through March 28.

The move came after a French national in Mongolia tested positive for the novel coronavirus on Tuesday, becoming the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the country.

The 57-year-old French national, who arrived in the capital city of Ulan Bator on March 2, developed a fever on Saturday and afterward tested positive for the virus.

Prior to reporting the first COVID-19 case, the country had already halted all flights to and from China, Japan and South Korea for a certain period as part of precautionary measures against the spread of the virus.
by Vladimir Rozanskij

Kazakhstan announces 49 cases; Kyrgyzstan 42; Uzbekistan 55. Quarantine, military control and economic aid. Nur-Sultan promises 300 billion tenge (about 700 million dollars) to create 200 thousand new jobs. In Almaty car processions with the relic of the Cross and of saints Nicholas and Luka Vojno-Jasenetskij.

Moscow (AsiaNews)  The coronavirus has now also reached Kazakhstan. 49 cases have been ascertained since mid-March: 22 in Almaty, 25 in the capital Nur-Sultan and 2 in Karaganda, the country's third largest city.

President Kasym-Zhomart Tokaev has proclaimed a state of emergency, calling on everyone to observe strict measures in the fight against the pandemic and promising economic support for country's health system and internal market. In particular, 300 billion tenge (about 700 million dollars) will go towards creating 200 thousand new jobs of social interest.

The arrival of the coronavirus was expected in Kazakhstan as early as March 10, when the head of the health service Zhandarbek Bekshin, based on mathematical analyzes, stated that according to specialists, the new disease would "finally" manifest itself in the country between March 11th and 16th. Because of his explicit and "brutal" statements, Bekshin was later downgraded to vice-president of the service, whose guidance passed to Dr. Ajzhan Esmagambetov.

The source of the national contagion seem to have been two Kazakh citizens who returned from Germany on 13 March, and two other women who returned from Milan via Moscow on the same day. Two days later the first containment and closure measures were introduced, especially in the capital Nur-Sultan.

The minister of commerce said that special prices will be imposed for most industrial products, even if this "violates the rules of the market economy".

Since March 23, the Minister for Social Development, Dauren Abaev, has been holding regular press conferences with journalists to inform the population of the evolution of the crisis. Foreigners residing in Kazakhstan for work have had their residence visa extended for 30 days. The sale of food products was rationed (for example, you cannot buy more than 5 liters of oil and 5 kilos of refined products such as sugar, flour and cereals).

Hospitals have introduced quarantine for all patients, with a ban on visiting the sick for anyone other than a doctor or paramedic; photographs and videos are also prohibited in hospitals and treatment centers. Faced with the probable spread of the virus, the next level of safety measures includes curfew for everyone and the transformation of hotels into hospitals; the burial modalities of the deceased will be decided by the state and local administrative bodies. The government of Kazakhstan has also decided to block the import of gasoline and other fuels from Russia for three months, due to the decrease in their use.

The Russian Orthodox metropolitan of Almaty, Aleksandr (Mogilev), the country's highest Orthodox ecclesiastical authority, began a regular procession by car around the city on Tuesday, reciting a special moleben for release from the epidemic and sprinkling the territory with water holy.

Sacred objects such as the cross with the relic of the Holy Cross of Christ, the casket with a fragment of the belt of the Virgin and others with the relics of St. Nicholas and other saints, such as the famous doctor and Saint Luka (Vojno -Jasenetsky), apostle of Central Asia during the period of the Stalinist purges.

Even Kyrgyzstan, in the midst of a "spring revolution" against the ruling regime, has strengthened the control measures that were already in place due to the street demonstrations in recent weeks. The government has deployed special army divisions around major cities (Biskek, Osh, Jalal-abad and the provinces of Nookat, Kara-Suysk and Suzak). A curfew was imposed in all these areas from 8.00 pm to 7.00 am, with a total ban on going out on the street without special permission. 42 cases of Covid-19 have been reported in the country.

In Uzbekistan, a special verification system has been developed for the presence of coronavirus in people, as reported by the local health ministry. Previously it took a month to process tests, now they have developed a procedure that takes 5-6 hours.

In fact, this is not a rapid test, but a complete verification that can only be carried out in specific laboratories. 55 cases of coronavirus have occurred in the country, as the main Kazakhstan epidemiologist Nurmat Otabekov reported, 4 of whom are in intensive care. One of the infected, a 20-year-old young woman, did not travel outside in the country, nor did she come into contact with people who came from abroad.
No one knows exactly when the state budget will pass, and state lawmakers say that they have no concrete date yet for voting on the budget ahead of the April 1 budget deadline, whether that involves coming to Albany or not. We are all waiting, Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte said Thursday morning.

The state budget shortfall is growing by the day, and lawmakers are running out of time to make their case for a wide range of fiscal and policy priorities like taxes, health care, public schools and criminal justice reforms. And the more legislative leaders wait to call their conferences back to the state Capitol, the more leverage the governor gets in ongoing negotiations.

For now, Gov. Andrew Cuomo says that the state might have to peg funding for local governments, school districts and others based on how revenues perform moving forward. In other words if the state is only get 95 cents for every dollar that is received, then state funding will have to be adjusted accordingly, Cuomo said at a Thursday morning press conference at the state Capitol.

In addition to his other formidable budget powers, the governor will have to issue a message of necessity if lawmakers want to circumvent the three-day waiting period required by the state Constitution for new legislation, including spending measures. The governor used such tactics to full effect last year, and considering the governors ongoing insistence on passing the full range of his budget proposals, it is likely that he will push lawmakers hard again.

While Cuomo has argued that new federal legislation will make it impossible for him (because of a provision that constrains him on limiting Medicaid spending) to balance a budget deficit that could now be in excess of $10 billion. Cuomo has said the level of aid in the bill is a drop in the bucket for the state.

However, the passage of a $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill will provide the governor and state officials with some clarity on the extent to which the federal government will bail New York out of its dire fiscal straits. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a Thursday morning press conference that the bill will likely pass her chamber on Friday.

While the deficit would give the governer an excuse to reject budget proposals he does not like  a form of political leverage he has arguably enjoyed for months  the ballooning deficit heightens the pressure from lawmakers to raise taxes on the wealthy. Cuomo has said in recent days that will not happen, but he did back proposals like taxing pied-a-terre apartments and stock transfers last year when state revenues were in a relatively strong position.

While some of the political dynamics in Albany remain the same, the coronavirus has reoriented others, according to Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. This is an opportunity to have some substantive discussions that have been on the docket for quite some time, but are now being presented in a very different and distinct light, she said.

That is one reason criminal justice activists are reframing their opposition to amending bail reform as a matter of public health, given the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic that is now spreading in the penal system. Pharmacists have spoken about how they could better mobilize during the pandemic, if only state leaders would help them limit the power of pharmacy benefit managers. Lawmakers have only met a few times this month to pass any bills, but the list of coronavirus-related legislation is growing by the day.

Assuming the governor and the lawmakers hit their deadline, we will all find out in the coming days who is getting what they want in the time of coronavirus  and who ultimately did not play their budget cards effectively.
The novel coronavirus pandemic that has forced billions of people across the globe to stay home is making parents skip routine immunisations for their kids, the United Nations children's agency UNICEF warned Thursday. The phenomenon is being aggravated by overburdened health services where medical workers are being diverted from giving vaccines to focus on the COVID-19 response. Some governments might even have to postpone mass immunisation campaigns as a way of slowing the disease's spread, UNICEF said. The agency's executive director Henrietta Fore said the requirement for people to stay home and observe social distancing was leading parents to "make the difficult decision to defer routine immunisation". Of particular concern are impoverished and war-torn countries battling measles, cholera or polio outbreaks, such as Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, the Philippines, Syria and South Sudan. "At a time like this, these countries can ill-afford to face additional outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases," Fore said in a statement. "Medical goods are in short supply and supply chains are under historic strain due to transport disruptions. Flight cancellations and trade restrictions by countries have severely constrained access to essential medicines, including vaccines." Governments may in future need to postpone preventive mass vaccination campaigns -- where people group together to receive inoculations -- to ensure these do not contribute to the spread of COVID-19, Fore said. UNICEF recommended governments begin rigorous planning now to boost immunisation campaigns once the coronavirus is under control. Ann Lindstrand, who heads the World Health Organization's expanded programme on immunisation, agreed with UNICEF's warnings and said measles was a particular concern. "This will be a particular challenge where vaccination coverage is already low," she told AFP. "There is a risk that more people will die due to the indirect impact of COVID-19, because vaccination will go down. There will surely be more measles deaths." - 'Two global outbreaks - Vaccine alliance GAVI, which is making funding available for lower-income countries to respond to the coronavirus crisis, also called for routine immunisations to continue. "We cannot have two global outbreaks on our hands," GAVI chair Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said in a statement. Afghanistan is one of only three countries, along with Pakistan and Nigeria, where polio remains endemic. Even before the coronavirus crisis, Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan were struggling to vaccinate kids as local populations viewed inoculation teams with suspicion. Opposition grew after the CIA organised a fake vaccination drive to help track down Al-Qaeda's former leader Osama Bin Laden in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. The Taliban last week pledged to cooperate with healthcare workers in combatting the coronavirus. UNICEF says the coronavirus pandemic is forcing parents to skip children's vaccinations, especially in war-torn and impoverished countries like Afghanistan
[March 26, 2020] Tegra118 Wins Family Wealth Report Award for Outstanding Contribution to Wealth Management Thought Leadership

Tegra118, formerly Fiserv Investment Services, a leading provider of wealth and asset management technology solutions and a Motive Partners Company, announced that it received a Family Wealth Report Award on Wednesday, March 18th for Outstanding Contribution to Wealth Management Thought Leadership among technology companies. "Tegra118 is deeply appreciative of Family Wealth Report's recognition of our thought leadership contributions," said Cheryl Nash, Chief Executive Officer, Tegra118. "Our daily engagement with clients, the industry and other influencers connects our Tegra118 team to the trends, challenges and social and environmental causes that inspire us to think, write and talk about important topics and issues where we believe consideration-and action-should be taken." "We are excited to build on the thought leadership accomplishments of the Tegra188 team," said Alvi Abuaf (News - Alert), Industry Partner, Motive Partners. "As we continue to prioritize close collaboration with our clients, we will provide the essential investment to drive innovation and deepen our thought leadership presence." Now in its seventh year, the Family Wealth Report Awards showcase 'best of breed' providers in the global private banking, wealth management and trusted advisor communities. The awards were deigned to recognize companies, teams and individuals that a prestigious panel of judges deemed to have 'demonstrated innovation and excellence during 2019'.



"The firms who triumphed in these awards are all worthy winners, and I would like to extend my heartiest congratulations. These awards were judged solely on the basis of entrants' submissions and their response to a number of specific questions, which had to be answered focusing on the client experience, not quantitative performance metrics," said Stephen Harris, of ClearView Financial Media and Publisher of Family Wealth Report. "That is a unique, and I believe, compelling feature. These awards recognize the very best operators in the private client industry, with 'independence', 'integrity' and 'genuine insight' the watchwords of the judging process - such that the awards truly reflect excellence in wealth management." Tegra118 is a market leader in providing innovative wealth management technology solutions. Together with our clients, we are building the future of wealth management technology. Learn more at www.tegra118.com.

About Tegra118 Tegra118 is an industry leading provider of software solutions to the wealth and asset management industry with a vast network of broker-dealers, asset managers, and custodians and trading interfaces. Its Unified Wealth Platform is one of few scaled wealth technology platforms providing portfolio management, trading, accounting, rebalancing and reporting for managed accounts. Tegra118 also provides modular, goals-based financial planning and fee billing software for financial advisors using modern API-based open technology. Tegra118 is committed to delivering powerful solutions that set a new standard for how people interact with, manage, and grow their wealth. Tegra118 is a portfolio company of Motive Partners, a next-generation investment firm focused on technology enabled companies that power the financial services industry. For more information, please visit www.tegra118.com. About ClearView Financial Media ClearView Financial Media was founded by Chief Executive, Stephen Harris in 2004, to provide high quality 'need to know' information for the discerning private client community. London-based, but with a truly global focus, ClearView publishes the Family Wealth Report group of newswires, along with research reports and newsletters, while also running a pan-global thought-leadership events programme. For more information about ClearView Financial Media, please visit https://clearviewpublishing.com/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005396/en/

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ARUSHA Region has been successful in initiating 387 industrial parks since the inception of the fifth phase government.

Putting in place the industries is in line with one of the biggest agendas of President John Magufuli, who has since sparked off the industrialisation drive, calling on every regional authority to adopt and implement it effectively.

Of the 387, eight are major industries while medium-sized industries are 20 and 359 small ones.

The Arusha Regional Consultative Committee (RCC) was informed in Arusha that all the industries meet the required standards and have commenced operations.

Presenting the status of the industrial drive and strategies put in the region to the RCC, Arusha Regional Planning Officer, Mr Melchiory Temu said the industries have so far offered employment to 3,335 people.

He noted that reducing unemployment, especially to the ordinary people, was one of the strategies behind establishing industries, while another is to have huge production of goods to saturate the market and engage in exports to get foreign exchange.

He said most businesspersons complain of high price of raw materials, especially imported ones, high production costs and limited purchasing power.

He said there is a challenge in getting capital for their business, things that regional authorities should look into and take action.

He said one of the solutions is for businesspersons to engage more in production of packaging materials. The Integrated Industrial Development Strategy 2025 identifies and provides the direction of policy instruments available to steer the process of industrialisation in the desired direction.

Major instruments include the accumulation and concentration of industrial firms through cluster development, supported by Special Economic Zones (SEZ).

Three waterfront SEZs are planned, including for Dar es Salaam which is linked with the Central Railway Line to constitute the Logistics Corridor and TAZARA to constitute the Agricultural Corridor.

The other one, Mtwara SEZ, is being developed as the Minerals Corridor, while the Tanga corridor is set to serve the northern and north-western areas of Tanzania up to and including Rwanda.

At the regional and district level, these corridors will link Regional SEZs and Micro Industrial Parks at the district level with the domestic and regional markets.

On business licenses issuance in the region, Mr Temu said currently the number is 93,764 for the established industries and other businesses, and revealed that traders are faced with several challenges, including shortage of packaging materials as only a few industries produce them.
Developed: Following Kirklands revamp last autumn of the former Bank of Scotland building on Henry Street, Limerick, now known as Carlton House, it has attracted a number of tenants

WP Engine, the WordPress digital experience platform (DXP), is to occupy the 12,000 sq ft prime office building at 12 Henry Street in Limerick city centre, a premises in the portfolio of local property firm Kirkland.

The US firm plans to relocate the company's existing 75-member team to the premises, which will also provide space for future expansion. It is understood that the rent will be more than 25 per sq ft.

This letting will see WP move from the coincidentally named The Engine building, where Limerick County Council provides space for start-up firms and overseas firms when they first set down in Ireland. WP's Innovation and Technical Support Centre operated there since 2016 but has outgrown its space.

Rudi Butler, head of Kirkland Investment, welcomed WP Engine's move to 12 Henry Street, describing it "as testament to the skilled workforce and the attractiveness of the city as a place of both business and lifestyle".

The letting represents the last available office unit within Kirkland's Limerick office portfolio of Grade A accommodation. Following its revamp last autumn of the former Bank of Scotland building on Henry Street, now known as Carlton House, it has also attracted a number of tenants to this 12,000 sq ft property with lettings at around 25 per sq ft.

Focus Consulting has recently reserved space there to join Amesto Global, KMPM and Tribeca Holdings.

"These recent lettings further highlight the limited availability of Grade A office accommodation in Limerick city centre with overall office vacancy now at its lowest level since 2007," said John Buckley of letting agents Cushman & Wakefield.

Kirkland is now advancing the next phase of development which will provide over 85,000 sq ft of LEED Gold Grade A office accommodation on the waterfront along the city's Bishops Quay. It is due to commence construction later this month and will also include a residential element comprising 34 apartments overlooking the River Shannon.

Paul Ryan, senior director of technical support at WP Engine, said that the new office "in the heart of Limerick's artistic and cultural scene, will amplify our ability to give back to the community and bring more employment at all levels, to the region".

Denis O'Donoghue, of CBRE, who acted on behalf of WP Engine, commented that the acquisition is hugely positive for Limerick and cements its reputation as one of Europe's most attractive FDI locations.

Other firms which expanded in Limerick in recent years include Uber.
The primetime special, billed as Homefest: James Cordens Late Late Show Special, will be broadcast at 10 p.m. Monday, March 30, on CBS. It will showcase music, comedy and interviews with some of the most popular celebrities from all over the world.

And while James Corden wont be chatting and singing along with guests in his car as he is known to do in Carpool Karaoke (definitely wouldnt meet the 6-feet away criteria), he will be chatting with entertainers from his garage in England. The special boasts the theme Bringing people together to keep people apart.

WATCH CBS: Hulu Live TV, fuboTV (free trial)

The show will include musical performances by Billie Eilish and Finneas, and John Legend from Los Angeles; BTS from South Korea; Dua Lipa from London; Andrea Bocelli from Tuscany, Italy, plus appearances by David Blaine, Will Ferrell and others  all in the safety of their homes.

According to a press release from CBS, Corden and the entertainers featured in this special will encourage viewers to follow the recommended guidelines from the CDC and government officials to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 and reduce the strain on the medical community.

Information will be provided on how viewers can donate money to the CDC Foundation and Feed the Children.

Read about other celebrities raising funds for coronavirus relief:

According to The Late Late Show executive producers Ben Winston and Rob Crabbe, since they had to stop filming the show due to the coronavirus crisis, they had been trying to think up a different way to put on a show.

Winston and Crabbe went on to say, With the help of some wonderful guests, we are going to try to put on the best show we can, to entertain, raise awareness, raise money and hopefully lift spirits.

PennLive wants to shine a spotlight on people whose acts of kindness provide some good news in these dark times. If you know a coronavirus hero  someone who has inspired you with their generosity or a selfless act  please tell us about them by emailing newstips@pennlive.com

Read more:
A fashion 'influencer' from Spain, who returned to her former role as a nurse to help combat Covid-19, has revealed she has contracted the killer virus in a tearful video.

Angela Rozas Saiz, AKA Madame de Rosa, 38, decided to return to work as a nurse at the Hospital Universitario La Paz in Madrid - a region of Spain that has been especially hard-hit by the virus.

But within days of swapping her fashionable clothes for her scrubs, the social media star learned she too had contracted coronavirus.

There is also a possibility, she says, that she has passed the virus to her son.

The social media star cannot keep it together as she explains her diagnosis to all her fans

Happy and smiley - Madame de Rosa gestures a peace sign to her fans at the hospital

Madame de Rosa sitting in a flowing spotted dress. She has 637,000 followers on Instagram

Her emotional video on Instagram has received more than 1,000,000 views to date.

She said the whole episode has made her feel 'psychologically down'.

The fashion influencer posted a photo of herself gesturing a peace sign and wearing medical clothing in a hospital corridor soon after going back to work.

But after complaining of a headache, fever, and respiratory problems she tested positive for the deadly virus some days later.

'Hello everybody. I am doing this video as I have just visited the hospital,' she said.

'I tested positive for Covid-19. I have got coronavirus.

'I am fine. I have a little fever, I find it a bit hard to breathe, and I have a little headache.

'I feel psychologically down because I can't help but feel guilty because I have the feeling I have done something stupid.

'Forgive me (for crying),' she said.

The 38-year-old went on to say she will not be able to return to work at the La Paz Hospital in Madrid, where it is believed she was stationed.

'Forgive me,' she repeats.

Angela Rozas Saiz, AKA Madame de Rosa, in a bathing suit and hat by a body of water

Relaxing by the sea - Angela Rozas Saiz, AKA Madame de Rosa, poses for a photo shoot

She also said her son Romeo is showing signs that he may have contracted the virus.

'I am well, but I also feel guilty for Romeo as he has got symptoms as well,' she said.

Saiz has since taken to social media in attempts to calm her worried fan base.

She said she is 'fine', aside from her mild symptoms.

The influencer had also shared personal accounts with her 637,000 followers of her experience working at the hospital.

In one instance she described how she tried to console a patient who was feeling isolated.

She said working in the hospital was very hard due to a shortage of materials, and from seeing sick people removed from their families due to coronavirus.

'The only thing I want is to get better soon to go back to the hospital and help them,' she said.

'I love you' she added.

Hats off for Madame de Rosa in this one - a floral-patterned woolen cardigan and designer hat

Angela Rozas Saiz sitting with a coffee in a busy cafe, long before the terrible news struck
Journalists practice social distancing during a news conference with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on March 24, 2020 at the Jacob Javits Center, which will house a temporary hospital in response to the COVID-19 outbreak in New York. Read more

Even the late great Charles Dickens, who churned out copy for 19th-century daily London rags like the Morning Chronicle before he went super long-form, would have struggled to keep up with the best of times and worst of times hitting Americas (and the worlds) newsrooms in the earth-shattering year of 2020.

On the upside, the publics craving for accurate, real-time information about the coronavirus  whats open or closed, how to stay safe, or how quickly is the global pandemic spreading  has sent internet traffic to news websites skyrocketing to once unthinkable levels. After several years when the New York Times was becoming Home Depot with its digital subscriptions while local papers were becoming your dying Main Street hardware store, people now desperately need news about their home town. Many local sites say online readership has more than doubled. What could go wrong?

A lot. Even as most newsrooms push for a new business model around digital subscriptions, the old model  heavily dependent on advertising  had helped keep U.S. journalism barely afloat...until now. With nearly half the nation on near-total lockdown and the rest reeling, most of the businesses that buy ads in local papers, especially in smaller towns or for youth-oriented alt-weeklies  like restaurants, nightclubs or boutiques  are closed and have nothing to advertise. Scores of layoffs are already happening.

Consider New Orleans. Ive written in the past about the struggle of journalism to survive near the mouth of the Mighty Mississippi, where a perfect storm of lots of news (from climate change in our lowest-lying state and a swatch of chemical plants called Cancer Alley to a tradition of crooked government) and poverty  with fewer folks than average having digital access  had roiled the market. But with the city, on a per capita basis, now rivaling New York as a coronavirus epicenter, things have really hit the fan.

This week, the Advocate, the news org that survived to cover much of southern Louisiana, said that, with ad revenue vanishing rapidly, it would furlough a tenth of its workforce and the rest would work just four days a week. Thats happening as Louisianas hospitals and, increasingly, its morgues are overwhelmed with new cases. This is a story that is moving and changing and if you take a three-day break, youre going to miss a bunch, an anonymous Advocate staffer complained to the Washington Posts Erik Wemple of the shortened workweek.

Yet some journalists might envy the New Orleans scribes  having lost their jobs entirely or, in a couple cases, seen their publications shut down. Some venerable alt-weeklies like St Louis award-winning Riverfront Times are already shells of their recent selves. The virus is proving an insidious weapon against any business model for modern newsrooms.

 READ MORE: Saving journalisms soul in the Age of Trump | Will Bunch

Even the huge increase in web traffic has been somewhat negated by some advertisers demanding their digital ads not run next to stories about coronavirus, even though theres little other news. Most newsrooms have seen upticks in digital subscribers  even after many news orgs moved coronavirus stories in front of the paywall thats meant to drive subscriptions  but so far its not enough to offset the ad-loss tsunami.

This has all been a plot twist in the wider war for the future of journalism that escalated when President Trump was elected on a media-bashing platform in 2016. But even as the 45th POTUS attacked fake news and called journalists enemies of the people," while news orgs like the Post argued back that democracy dies in darkness, to many everyday readers this was often an abstract kind of cold war. Not anymore. The coronavirus has made it clear that access to accurate information can be a matter of life and death.

Thats particularly true because Trump has increasingly tried to dominate the flow of information about the coronavirus, through lengthy, televised briefings every afternoon, as well as added events like Tuesdays town hall on Fox News and the presidents pesky Twitter feed. But sometimes Trumps facts are flat-out wrong, and much of the rest can be self-serving propaganda. Rigorous independent journalists are the only real fact check.

Yet already our deeply divided nation cant agree on a common set of facts about the coronavirus and how to prevent it. A CBS News/YouGov poll released this week revealed among Democrats, a healthy 72% trust the national media for information on the coronavirus  not far behind the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the respondents governor  while Trump rated just 14%. Yet among Republicans, a whopping 90% trust Trump and only 13% believed the national media.

 READ MORE: GOP, Fox News have waged war on science. With coronavirus, will their aging fans pay the price? | Will Bunch

In a time of creeping authoritarianism, the economic collapse of much of the news media will make this problem worse. And many of the smaller towns where Trumpism is already entrenched will lose any reality-based counter-balance. Thats on top of the general erosion of civic life and connectedness these communities will feel without local media.

What is to be done? The formula that many news orgs have been refining to stay afloat in the 2020s  in part because of ad dollars that were already disappearing before the pandemic  will struggle to keep up. The uptick in digital subscriptions  the core of that survival strategy  could become a downtick if the recession lingers. Sponsored events, another new tool, cant take place in cities that are on lockdown. Big time philanthropy  which has been the saving grace for the Inquirer after its 2016 donation to the non-profit Lenfest Institute  may be similar challenged, or at least distracted, by the challenge of coronavirus.

That brings us to the bailer-outer of last resort: Washington. The idea of government support for journalism has long been a non-starter for folks in the business, myself included, for an obvious reason: the fear that any taxpayer dollars, doled out through the good graces of politicians, might  even subconsciously  cause journalists to pull their punches when writing about those pols. And that was a concern long before the bill-signer at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was a thin-skinned shouter of fake news.

But the bizarre dichotomy of the current crisis  journalism thats vital to cover a virus thats eating away what little is left of the business model  has, at least in my opinion, dramatically changed the moral calculus. This week, Craig Aaron, CEO of the media advocacy group Free Press, wrote a much-discussed piece in Columbia Journalism Review arguing that Journalism needs a stimulus via Congress, to the tune of $5 billion.

 READ MORE: Disaster socialism: Will coronavirus crisis finally change how Americans see the safety net? | Will Bunch

Aaron argued in the piece that the money  a fraction of the more than $2.5 trillion the feds have pumped into coronavirus relief packages so far  could increase funding for public radio and TV in underserved areas, support local newsroom jobs for the duration of the health crisis and related slowdown, and support innovative news-gathering projects. This agenda could be supported going forward by a small tax on the kind of targeted digital ads that made Google and Facebook wealthy while decimating local news.

The last weeks have driven home how important it is to have local reporters telling whats going on, Aaron told me by phone Wednesday. People are desperate for trustworthy information. He acknowledged that the idea of government relief funds for journalism may have been unthinkable before the crisis  but so was the $2-trillion-plus package now in the pipeline. (Aaron notes the final bill has $75 million for public media and small-business support that could go to private newsrooms, but he said any grand journalism stimulus would have to come in the next package, which seems certain as the crisis persists.)

Aaron also argued that the success of investigative journalism by the public-funded PBS Frontline or efforts in other countries (most notably the BBC) should quell ethical worries, especially if journalism stimulus grants were administered by an independent board, as removed as possible from politicians control. Its a convincing argument. This longtime skeptic is on board, if it can be done in this right fashion.

Until then, Id urge those who are still collecting a paycheck, and loading up on news about where to buy milk or whether a loved one needs a COVID-19 test, to consider subscribing to your local hometown newspaper and not just the two or three national brands. (If you live in greater Philly, the Inquirer link is here.)

But well likely need even more. The coronavirus crisis has revealed Americas badly frayed safety net, from underfunded rural hospitals to underpaid workers in the food supply chain. Journalists providing accurate, real-time information are a critical part of that web. America shouldnt try to find out if we can live without it.
In the 4 weeks since Italy detected the first signs of the outbreak, the country has lost more than 8,000 people to the virus. The rate of spread has appeared to slow, with cases growing day-on-day this week at about 8 percent, compared with 20 percent two weeks ago. But the daily toll remains staggering. The Italian government on Thursday reported that 662 people had died in the previous 24 hours. The Reuters news agency suggested that the government had omitted 50 deaths in one region and that the count should be higher.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the Trump administrations coronavirus task force, said Thursday that Italy has been impacted particularly badly by the coronavirus pandemic because the country hosted a high number of Chinese tourists in recent months.

When you look at the different patterns of what happened in different countries, China versus South Korea versus what were seeing in northern Italy, it really gives you some interesting insight into certain things, not only in the explosive nature in certain places versus others, but as you get to your peak, how do you know when youre turning the corner, Fauci said on CNN.

Its when the new infections each day start to level off to be the same and then start going down, then you see the curve go down, Fauci said, adding that Italy is not there yet.

Italy has reported declining numbers of new infections but still added more than 3,400 new cases on Tuesday. More than 57,500 people are currently infected with the coronavirus in Italy, and the countrys death toll passed 7,500 on Wednesday.

Italy got hit very badly because they had a large number of importations from China by Chinese tourists, Fauci said.

Before they even knew what was going on, there was enough baseline people spreading that it essentially got out of hand, and it became difficult for them, as good as they are, and theyre very good, to be able to contain it in a way that is contact-tracing. It was more mitigation, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases continued.

Fauci also noted that the outbreak of the virus in Washington state differs from the outbreak in New York City, which is getting hit terribly hard.

Were a big country, and there are different patterns, he explained.

Washington states outbreak involved the coronavirus spreading in several elder care homes, while New York City is a travel hub that experiences an influx of travelers, Fauci said.

Story continues

New York City reported 100 new deaths from the coronavirus on Thursday, bringing the death toll to 385 as the number of infections topped 37,200.

More from National Review
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 23:15:53|Editor: yan

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VIENTIANE, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese side has been delivering epidemic prevention materials to Laos to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese embassy in Laos said on Thursday.

The Communist Party of China and the Chinese government have paid high attention to strengthening the cooperation with Laos on the COVID-19 prevention and control, while 2,016 sets of testing kits provided by China have been delivered to the Lao side, an embassy official told Xinhua.

Meanwhile, 5,000 sets of protective clothing, 5,000 N95 masks, 400,000 disposable medical masks, as well as 20,000 sets of testing kits provided by the Jack Ma Foundation have been shipped to Laos.

In the coming days, the Chinese government will also offer further assistance to Laos according to the epidemic prevention and control needs in Laos, the embassy official said.

Local governments of Yunnan, Hunan, Chongqing, Shandong and Shanghai in China, institutions and enterprises such as the China-Asia Economic Development Association, the China and Foreign Entrepreneurs Alliance, and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) Vientiane Branch, and overseas Chinese communities in Laos are also extending their assistance.

Some equipments and materials they prepared have been delivered to Laos.

On March 18, a shipment of COVID-19 testing kits provided by the Chinese government arrived in Vientiane, and on the same day Chinese Ambassador Jiang Zaidong exchanged views on enhancing epidemic prevention and control cooperation with Lao Health Minister Bounkong Syhavong.

Laos detected three more COVID-19 cases on Thursday, bringing its total number to six.
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Market Research Future Published a Half-Cooked Research Report on Global Silica Gel Market Research Report- Forecast to 2023

Competitive Analysis:

Some of the Prominent Players Operating in the Global Silica Gel Market Trends are are Evonik Industries (Germany), Clariant (Switzerland), Solvay (Belgium), Merck Group (Germany), China National Bluestar Company Limited (China), Fuji Silysia Chemical (China), Nissan Chemical Industries (Japan), DowDuPont (U.S.), Qingdao Haiyang Chemical (China) and Millennium Chemicals (U.S.). among others.

Segmentation:

Global Silica Gel Market is segmented into Type, Application and End-Use.

On the basis of Type, the market is segregated into Type A, Type B, Type C, silica-alumina gel, and others.

The market by Application is sub-divided into desiccant, chromatography, food additives, water filtration, and others.

Based on the End User, it is further categorized into oil and gas, pharmaceutical, chemical, cosmetic and healthcare, and others.

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Regional Analysis:

Silica Gel is used in a wide variety of applications due to their capability of offering a superior and cheap source of desiccant to various end-use industries such as packaging of pharmaceuticals, paints and coatings and water filtration plants among others. The allochroic Silica Gel has the ability to change its color when absorbed moisture from the environment. Therefore, it is suitable for the extensive use of the power systems and transformers.

The Global Silica Gel Market is spanned across five regions of the world namely Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa. Among these, North America holds the major share of the global market and is projected to continue leading owing to the increasing consumption of Silica Gel in the developed pharmaceutical sector. Moreover, the shale boom, especially in the U.S., has augmented the demand for the Silica Gel owing to its use in refining and processing of natural gas and petrochemicals.

Moreover, it is an important part of the dehumidification process of instruments in the petroleum and petrochemical plants. The U.S and Canada are the major countries driving the demand for silica gel in the region. Additionally, the approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the usage of Silica Gel in medicines and containers is further expected to significantly boost the market growth.

The Asia Pacific market is expected to grow at a higher CAGR. The burgeoning growth in the packaging industry of the developing economies of the region is the major factor attributing to the market growth. Moreover, to cater the growing consumer base, the medium and large players are constantly investing in logistics. Therefore, it is propelling the packaging sector and is adding fuel to the market growth. Furthermore, to counter the adverse effect of moisture and to increase the shelf life of the products, the pharmaceutical and food and beverage industries are increasing the use of silica gel in the packaging of products. India, China, and Japan are the major countries accounted for the growth of the market.

Browse Key Industry Insights spread across 135 pages with 48 market data tables & 13 figures & charts from the report, Silica Gel Market Information: By Product (Type A, Type B, Type C, Silica-Alumina Gel, Others), Applications (Desiccant, Chromatography, Food Additives, Water Filtration) End-Use Industry (Oil and Gas, Pharmaceutical, Petrochemical) and Region  Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast 2023 in detail along with the table of contents: https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/silica-gel-market-5151

Europe is another major region in the Global Silica Gel Market and is expected to show a considerable growth over the forecast period. The presence of the major cosmetic and personal care manufacturers in the region is driving the market growth. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are some of the major countries contributing extensively to the market growth.

A considerable development is expected in the Middle East and Africa over the coming years. The developing oil and gas and petrochemical industries are adding fuel to the market growth. Moreover, increasing government participation for the production of crude oil in large quantity is further expected to increase the market growth. Furthermore, the growing demand for personal care and cosmetics, especially in Saudi Arabia, is expected to amplify the demand of the product.

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New Delhi, March 26 : The Rs 1,70,000 crore package, aimed at providing food security to the poor and money in their hands to fight the Covid-19 pandemic issues, may not be the last set of economic relief from the government.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, here on Thursday, indicated that concerns of India Inc, small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) segments and other segments hit by the lockdown might be looked at and the government could announce a plan later.

"Our first priority is to provide food to the poor and money in their hands. We will think about other things later," Sitharaman said.

On relief to the travel and aviation sectors that are bearing the brunt of the lockdown, the Finance Minister said, "We will come back when something is ready." Today's package follows announcements by the Finance Minister on Tuesday where she dealt with several compliance-related issues during the lockdown.

India Inc has been waiting for a package to resolve immediate problems and provide relief to lockdown-hit sectors. The India Inc's suggestions include withdrawal of LTCG temporarily, removal of buyback tax and deferment of payment of corporate tax.

The industry has also suggested that time-lines for qualifying delays in loan repayment as NPAs should be extended.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 14:08:32|Editor: ZD

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Photo taken on March 25, 2020 shows the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C., the United States. The U.S. Senate on Wednesday night passed a 2-trillion-dollar stimulus package to blunt the economic fallout of COVID-19, after rounds of negotiations between Democrats and Republicans. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)

WASHINGTON, March 25 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Senate on Wednesday night passed a 2-trillion-dollar stimulus package to blunt the economic fallout of COVID-19, after rounds of negotiations between Democrats and Republicans.

The upper chamber passed the bill in a 96-0 vote, well above the 60-vote threshold. The package needs to be approved by the House of Representatives, before being sent to President Donald Trump's desk for signature.

The bill, aimed at cushioning the economy from COVID-19 ravages, will provide small businesses emergency loans, business tax breaks, expanded unemployment benefits, 1,000-dollar-plus direct payments for working Americans, government aid for industries such as airlines and hotels, as well as more support for hospitals and state and local governments.

Calling it an "emergency relief," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said at the Senate floor earlier in the day that the package will "help the people of this country weather this storm."

The Senate approval of the bill came a few hours after the White House and Senate leaders reached a deal early Wednesday morning on the stimulus plan, which was considered the largest rescue package in American history.

Government bailout for hard-hit companies and industries was one of the sticking points in the negotiation. Democrats insisted oversight provision should be put in place, recipients be immediately disclosed, and companies that benefit from the loans could not engage in stock buybacks for a certain period of time.

Some Republican Senators, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, voiced their disagreement with the expansion of unemployment insurance benefits, arguing that this could discourage people from returning to work. They requested capping bolstered unemployment benefits at 100 percent of workers' salaries, but a related amendment failed to pass.

Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, a major accounting firm, wrote in a blog Wednesday that the bill is designed to temporarily help individuals, firms of all sizes, hospitals and states "traverse COVID-tainted waters."

Swonk, however, said these measures "will not stop a recession from occurring." The goal is to blunt the blow to the economy "so that we have a foundation from which to recover," she said.

The White House had originally proposed an around 1-trillion-dollar stimulus package, but several rounds of negotiations among lawmakers ballooned the cost of the package to roughly 2 trillion dollars, far above the 700-billion-dollar Wall Street rescue in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
The real hero of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker may have been someone you never suspected.

Those who have seen JJ Abrams film know that it sees the return of an old foe who is defeated following a shift in allegiance courtesy of the films primary villain

*Spoilers follow*

Following huge expectation from fans, the 2019 blockbuster shows the villainous Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) turn to the good side to help Rey (Daisy Ridley) defeat Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) in the climactic battle.

While much of the journey that steers Kylo  the son of Han Solo and General Leia  from evil to good was left on the cutting room floor, leaving it to the films tie-in novel to fill in the gaps, its now been revealed that the inspiration behind his redemption was actually Chewbacca.

After Chewbacca is taken prisoner by the Knights of Ren on the planet Pasana, Kylo probes his mind to try and find out where Rey and the other Resistance fighters are located.

What he finds in the beloved Wookies mind are memories of experiences he shared with Kylos father, as well as thoughts of Kylo as a young boy before he turned to the dark side.

Rae Carlsons novel reads: He saw flashes of the Wookiee laughing with a much younger Han Solo than he himself remembers. Felt Chewbaccas joy when his best friend married the woman hed come to love like a sister. Saw the Wookiee cuddling a human toddler, teaching an older boy to fly a speeder, target practice with a young man, their blasters set on stun against a haphazard dummy made of rocks.

Kylo seeing these memories in Chewbaccas mind would have been proof that he could come back to the good side despite killing his father in The Force Awakens.

Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Show all 14 1 /14 Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Jodie Comer The Emmy Award-winning star of Killing Eve shows up very briefly in flashback as Reys mother. Getty Images Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker John Williams JJ Abrams rewards the composers hard work on the franchise with a cameo. Williams plays the composer on the planet Kijimi, seen shaking his head at the group of main characters as they storm into the droid shop. Getty Images for Turner Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker JJ Abrams Remember the shaky droid who keeps uttering No, thank you whenever anyone goes to touch him? Thats the voice of the films director himself. Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Lin-Manuel Miranda Chances are you didnt spot the Hamilton superstar, but we did  towards the end of the film, hes one of the Resistance Fighters in the background as Rey reunites with a tearful Finn and Poe. Getty Images Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Harrison Ford Yes, you read that correctly. Harrison Ford returns as a spiritual adviser-of-sorts to his son, Ben (Driver), whose days as Kylo Ren come to an end after a nice little pep talk from the father he killed. Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Mark Hamill Mark Hamill's appearance may not be a surprise considering everybody and their aunt assumed Luke Skywalker would return as Force Ghost, but its still great to see him for one last time on the big screen. (Photo by Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images) Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Hayden Christensen In the climactic showdown between Rey and Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), a host of Jedi voices will her to defeat the Sith once and for all. Among those that can be heard include Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker. Getty Images Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Samuel L Jackson In the climactic showdown between Rey and Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), a host of Jedi voices will her to defeat the Sith once and for all. Among those that can be heard include Samuel L Jackson's Mace Windu. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Liam Neeson In the climactic showdown between Rey and Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), a host of Jedi voices will her to defeat the Sith once and for all. Among those that can be heard include Liam Neeson's Qui-Gon Jin. Getty Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Frank Oz In the climactic showdown between Rey and Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), a host of Jedi voices will her to defeat the Sith once and for all. Among those that can be heard include Yoda himself, Frank Oz. Getty Images Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Freddie Prinze Jr In the climactic showdown between Rey and Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), a host of Jedi voices will her to defeat the Sith once and for all. Among those that can be heard include Star Wars: Rebels character, Kanan, who is voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr. Getty Images for NBC Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Billy Dee Williams Billy Dee Williams  the original Lando Calrissian (sorry, Donald Glover)  shows up a few times, much to the happiness of Chewbacca. Getty Images Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Wedges Antilles It might have previously been announced by Lawsons family, but the original Star Wars actor shows up extremely briefly as fighter pilot Wedge Antilles. His appearance elicited huge cheers from the crowd we saw it with. Lucasfilm Every cameo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Dominic Monaghan Not so much a cameo, considering he has a decent amount of lines, but the Lord of the Rings and Lost star shows up as Resistance mechanic Beaumont Kin. He shares the majority of his scenes with Kelly Marie Tran, who returns as Rose Tico. Getty Images

It's no stretch to assume that if he had not of seen this, he would not have returned to assist Rey in defeating Palpatine in the films climax.
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Linkedin Markus Makur (The Jakarta Post) West Manggarai, East Nusa Tenggara  Thu, March 26, 2020 15:43 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d9443d 1 National COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,West-Manggarai,Indonesia,labuan-bajo Free

The West Manggarai Regency administration is planning to temporarily close Komodo Airport and Labuan Bajo Port in East Nusa Tenggara to slow the spread of COVID-19.

West Manggarai Deputy Regent Maria Geong said that people would not be able to enter or leave the regency from March 28 to April 5.

This is not a lockdown as airlines can still pick up supplies in West Manggarai regency. So starting Saturday, no people will be coming home via the Labuan Bajo entry point, Maria told The Jakarta Post by phone on Thursday.

"In an emergency, sick people requiring hospitalization due to COVID-19 outside [of the regency] will be prioritized."

The contagious respiratory illness that has killed thousands globally has confirmed cases in 25 of Indonesias 34 provinces.

Indonesia confirmed Wednesday 105 new cases, raising the total number of confirmed cases to 790. Of the total, 31 people have recovered and 58 have died. A total of 186 people in the province were under general monitoring for COVID-19 as of Wednesday.

The regency administration previously sent a letter to the Transportation Ministry requesting that authorities start closing the airport and seaport as a preventive measure against the pandemic.

The West Manggarai administration had requested the ministry to temporarily restrict access for passenger vessels. Cargo vessels are still allowed to unload their supplies through the seaport and airport at West Manggarai, Maria explained, adding that medical workers in the area were in urgent need of protective gear.

As the closure has yet to go in effect, those wanting to return to the regency can do so and tourists currently in Labuan Bajo can still leave. (dpk/dfr)
(Bloomberg) -- Masayoshi Son has been among the most fervent believers in the sharing economy, investing billions in startups that help people split the use of cars, rooms and offices. But as the coronavirus curtails unnecessary human interaction, its hammering such businesses and rattling the foundations of Sons SoftBank Group Corp.

In New York City, the co-working space of SoftBank-backed WeWork stands practically empty as tenants stay home for fear of infection. In Shanghai, drivers for the ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing have seen their pay plummet as customers avoid shared automobiles. In San Francisco, Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc., another SoftBank investment, said I wouldnt put my kids in an Uber.

Investors are increasingly spooked about the stability of Sons empire and its $100 billion Vision Fund amid the pandemic. Before this week, SoftBank shares had tumbled about 50% in a single month, including their worst one-day decline since the Japanese billionaire listed his company in 1994. In response, the SoftBank impresario launched one of the most audacious deals of his career: sell part of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and other assets to raise $41 billion to buy back shares and slash debt.

While that envisioned deal put a floor under the share price, it hasnt changed the fundamental vulnerability of an edifice built on sharing-economy standouts thatve been walloped since sheltering in place became the norm. SoftBank gained about 40% since Son revealed that blueprint, which is said to include unloading $14 billion of Alibaba stock for starters. But it remains down about 30% from a February peak. In fact, Moodys Corp. questioned the wisdom of selling prized assets into a market downturn and pushed SoftBanks debt deeper into junk territory. SoftBank fired back by accusing Moodys of bias, but its stock fell 9.4% on Thursday.

Right now, investments sensitive to sharing and the economy are not where you want to be, with the pandemic encouraging a stay-at-home mentality, said Pelham Smithers, whose London-based firm offers research on Asian technology companies, in a note to clients. Companies such as WeWork, Uber and the hotel-booking Oyo werent profitable when times were (relatively) good, begging the question, what will their economics look like in 2020?

Story continues

Read more: Masa Son Unveils a $41 Billion Asset Sale to Silence His Critics

Despite the stock bounce, SoftBanks credit default swaps -- the cost of insuring debt against default -- are still near their highest levels in a decade. The concern isnt so much that the Japanese giant wont be able to pay its own debts -- its cash will cover money due for at least the next two years. Rather, investors fret that Sons 80-plus portfolio companies will struggle in the current environment, triggering negative headlines and massive writedowns.

With the prospect of more good money being sunk into firms like WeWork and Oyo, investors would not have reacted as positively as they did this week, Amir Anvarzadeh, a market strategist at Asymmetric Advisors Pte. in Singapore, said in a note to clients.

Most worrisome for investors, Son -- who saw $70 billion wiped from his net worth in the dot-com crash -- may feel compelled to step in to support some of his startups rather than see them fail. The litany of woes surrounding SoftBanks highest-profile startups threatens to tarnish Sons reputation as a tech investor -- one built largely on an early bet on Alibaba before it came to dominate Chinese e-commerce, which hes struggled to replicate.

Last year, after WeWorks effort to go public fell apart, SoftBank stepped in to organize a $9.5 billion bailout. Son had to choose between financial aid or bankruptcy, at a time when risk aversion is straining global tech investment.

SoftBank frustrated investors already with its assistance to WeWork last year, said Makoto Kikuchi, chief investment officer at Myojo Asset Management Co. in Tokyo. SoftBank owns many investments such as tech companies that get hit particularly in this situation.

SoftBank and Vision Fund representatives declined to comment for the story.

Read more: SoftBank Blasts Moodys for Biased Ratings Downgrade

Son did vow he wouldnt step in to rescue any more portfolio companies after WeWork and called for more financial discipline. Among SoftBank startups, Brandless Inc. said in February it would close down while satellite operator OneWeb is mulling a possible bankruptcy filing.

Its unlikely that SoftBank portfolio companies will see any of that money, because the announcement was pretty clear on the purpose of the asset sale, said Justin Tang at United First Partners. In fact, it would be an opportune time for SoftBank to get rid of its weaker portfolio companies and stick with the leaders.

On Wednesday, Moodys said it will watch SoftBank and the extent to which tumbling valuations will hurt its tech-heavy portfolio. Sons biggest bet to date has been on ride-hailing, with stakes in Uber and the leading companies in China, India and Southeast Asia. The latest to exhibit signs of trouble was European player Getaround, which is now said to be dangerously short of cash and actively seeking a buyer.

Beijing-based Didi Chuxing is another prime example of how the virus is walloping these operations. The startup, once tagged at $56 billion, had struggled to justify its valuation even before the latest crisis because of a government crackdown on its services. Ridership tumbled during the outbreak in China and Didi cut driver subsidies.

Sheng Gang, a 34-year-old Shanghai resident, said he used to earn a 36 yuan ($5) bonus for every four rides during the morning rush hour; now thats been lowered to just 6 yuan for every three. He expects his income to drop by about half this month to around 10,000 yuan.

I dont have a Plan B since I just bought a new car, Sheng said.

Wen Peng, a 35-year-old Hebei native, earned around 6,000 yuan a month as a part-time driver. But when the coronavirus hit, most people chose to stay inside and he couldnt sustain himself. He quit in February.

People didnt leave their homes, almost no one wanted rides, he said. Many others quit for similar reasons.

A Didi spokeswoman said ridership has rebounded significantly in recent weeks as people went back to work.

Read more: WeWorks New Crisis: Workplaces Will Never Be the Same

WeWork is another question mark: SoftBank has told WeWork shareholders that it could withdraw from the agreement to buy $3 billion of its stock that was part of a bailout deal. WeWork has kept its offices open despite the virus, even while other co-working operators have closed them. That may be because revenue would disappear otherwise, just as SoftBank is trying to engineer a turnaround. WeWork said Thursday it doesnt expect to hit its 2020 financial targets as it grapples with the outbreak.

One executive who usually uses a WeWork office on Park Avenue in New York said hardly anyone shows up anymore. His WeWork representative has stopped coming to the site and works remotely. He figures customers may be canceling their leases or simply not paying, which would leave WeWork on the hook for rent owed to the landlord, Tishman Speyer. None of us are going to the office, he said. But weve decided for now to just kick any decisions down the road for six months.

Then theres Oyo, which is in a particularly tricky spot. The Indian company has been expanding rapidly by guaranteeing a certain amount of revenue to hotels if they sign on as franchisees. But with few travelers anywhere, Oyo has to pay hotels even when their rooms are mostly empty.

At the Kawasaki Hotel Park in Japan, more than 400 reservations were canceled for February to April. The result was a drop in revenue of about 25 million yen ($226,000), according to Sanho Miyamoto, the owner.

Overseas customers disappeared and Japanese businessmen halted business trips. I had to ask our employees to take a vacation for a while, Miyamoto said. I am worried whether Oyo can manage because it guarantees the revenue fall for its members.

He wouldnt comment on arrangements with Oyo. But if the startup paid the entire shortfall, it would lose about $240,000 on a single hotel.

Read more: Masayoshi Sons Other Big Real Estate Bet Has Some Real Problem

Theres opportunity in the downturn too. SoftBank-backed Slack Technologies Inc., a popular work communications tool among home workers, has surged following lockdowns from New York to California. And after a difficult first year in Japan, Oyo has turned to promising cash for hotels that join its platform as bookings plunged. While the company didnt say how much it was prepared to spend, that kind of opportunism can only shorten its runway of available cash.

Investors fear that companies like Oyo have become too big to fail for SoftBank, Atul Goyal, senior analyst at Jefferies Group, wrote in a report. The WeWork rescue showed that zero is not a floor for any SoftBank investment and that Son is willing to throw more good money after bad, he wrote.

SoftBank may soon prove Goyal right. The company is seeking to raise an additional $10 billion so its first Vision Fund can support portfolio companies, according to people with knowledge of the matter. And the list of SoftBank portfolio firms that may soon need help also includes gym company Gympass, Getaround and travel startups Klook and GetYourGuide.

These startups are geared for high growth and high cash burn, Goyal said. As revenues fall, they will need further infusions of capital to keep the lights on.

Read more: SoftBank Seeks $10 Billion to Support Vision Fund Companies

(An earlier version of the story corrected the name of GetYourGuide.)

(Updates with WeWorks warning in the 21st paragraph)

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Five specials flights from Delhis IGI airport will fly back over 1200 foreign nationals between March 26 and March 27, news agency ANI quoted an airport official as saying late Thursday.

Amid the coronavirus outbreak that has led to suspension of flights and a three-week countrywide lockdown, 1,245 foreign nationals from Austria, UAE, Israel, Germany, and Italy will be evacuated via five special flights, according to ANI. The details of the flights were not shared.

Earlier in the day, aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil aviation (DGCA) extended the ban on international commercial passenger flights to India till April 14, 2020 as part of the efforts to check the spread of coronavirus in the country.
Louisiana is taking drastic steps to surge its medical capacity to prepare for what officials fear could be an overwhelming tide of coronavirus patients in the coming days, with the state planning to put more than 1,100 beds in the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center to ease the strain on New Orleans area hospitals.

The move, which will see 120 beds in the convention center by the end of this weekend, is the linchpin of a plan to boost the number of hospital beds, health care workers, ventilators, protective equipment and other resources available in Louisiana.

That plan now includes 60 new health staffers and two new 250-bed field hospitals to be provided by the federal government  half of the 1,000 beds Gov. John Bel Edwards requested  along with nearly 400 ICU beds that hospitals across the state are adding in the coming days and weeks.

But Edwards on Thursday warned that none of it will be enough if the number of cases doesnt start to wane soon. For the second straight day, Louisiana confirmed a record-high number of new cases and saw an alarming spike in deaths, as testing continues to expand considerably. Of the 2,305 positive cases, 83 had died, 676 were being hospitalized and 239 were on ventilators, vital machines that are in short supply.

Those numbers kept New Orleans on a trajectory to run out of ventilators by the first week in April, and to run out of hospital beds for patients by April 8th-10th, Edwards said.

This isnt conjecture, Edwards said. This isnt some flimsy theory. This isnt a scare tactic. This is whats going to happen.

The governor delivered his most forceful message to date to Louisianas 4.6 million residents, urging them to heed his stay-at-home order and take social distancing seriously. The change in tone was prompted by another staggering rise in cases, Edwards said, and because we havent seen the curve flatten.

The governors rhetoric surrounding the pandemic has started to diverge from that of the president, who in recent days has said he wants to get the country back open for business. In a letter to governors Thursday, Trump said the CDC was developing new guidelines for social distancing and restrictions and would classify counties as high-, medium-, or low-risk.

Edwards said he would review the guidelines but until the number of positive cases stop climbing at a steep rate causing the curve to level out more, we are not going to do anything that is less restrictive.

The governor also said he requested 5,000 ventilators from the federal stockpile, but the state has received zero. Meanwhile, he got 92 of a 100-ventilator request and hoped to land another 100 in the coming days.

Those numbers are not the kind of numbers that we need, he said. We need several thousand ventilators.

The move into the convention center, a mammoth structure spanning a full kilometer near the New Orleans riverfront, represents the most significant effort to date by officials to surge the states medical capacity.

With more than 3 million square feet of halls and meeting rooms, the building is more than twice the size of all the healthcare facilities at University Medical Center.

The exhibition halls alone have enough room for nearly 5,000 booths. If each of those spots were converted to a space for a patient, the Convention Center's capacity would be more than 10 times that at UMC.

Even as Louisiana gets more beds, though, officials need to find workers to staff them. The staffing issue is becoming so acute that the governors administration set up a website to solicit volunteers, like retired doctors and nurses, to be dispatched to the front lines. Some medical schools across the state are likewise trying to get newly-matched residents to hospitals immediately, instead of waiting several months until they would normally start.

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All of that together isnt enough if we dont get off of this curve, Edwards said. We can move more of these wings, 120-bed wings, into the convention center. And we will if we have to. But staffing those beds becomes very very problematic.

By converting the Convention Center to a field hospital, Louisiana is following in the footsteps of New York. Facing predictions that New York could need up to 110,000 beds as the virus spreads  more than twice the current capacity of its hospitals  FEMA began converting the Javits Convention Center in New York City to a 2,000 bed hospital over the weekend.

The state will use a similar set of plans developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to convert the Convention Center in New Orleans, said Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne.

Dardenne said the state hoped to sign a contract late Thursday or Friday with Dynamic Construction Group LLC, a Baton Rouge construction firm, to build out the facility with pod-like structures to house individual patients. Another contract will staff the facility with medical workers, though it was not clear Thursday how much the state would spend on the deals.

New York and Louisiana have been linked throughout the coronavirus crisis as two of the hotspots for infections in the United States. Though Louisiana identified its first case eight days later than the Empire State, it has been identifying new infections more quickly and now has more than five times as many confirmed cases as New York did this far into its crisis.

Turning to the Convention Center as a sanctuary during a disaster may open old wounds for New Orleanians who remember the chaotic scene as tens of thousands of their neighbors turned it into a makeshift shelter after the levees breached during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The Convention Center became a beacon for those seeking to escape their flooded homes and neighborhoods but, because it was not an official shelter like the Superdome, there was practically no food and little authority on the ground.

Days later, as false rumors swirled of violence around the site, Lt. General Russell Honore  after issuing his now-famous instructions to National Guard troops to keep their weapons lowered  arrived at the site to cheers and quickly began setting up food distribution and other resources.

A field hospital would eventually be set up in the Convention Center to make up for the trauma centers throughout the city that flooded and closed. Honore said Thursday the sprawling complex provided a near-perfect solution in the current crisis since it is large, clean, centralized and has food service and other equipment.

Were going to need places to put people who have been identified as infected to isolate them and you can isolate their ass in them rooms, Honore said in typically blunt fashion.

The Convention Center has been discussed as a potential shelter during other hurricanes that have threatened New Orleans but Honore said those discussions never went anywhere because of opposition from its board, a quasi-independent body. In the current crisis he said he believed the governor likely had to forge ahead over the board's opposition.

Convention Center officials and board members have declined repeated requests for comment about the possibility of using the facility as a field hospital.

Theres an attitude with this convention center board that we will not use the convention center to save our own people and they can go to hell, Honore said.

Staff writer Brooks Kubena contributed to this report
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast / Photo Saul Loeb/Getty

Days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, then-Senator Joe Biden had been advised that he should make an address to a frightened nation before the National Press Club. Instead, he phoned Oprah.

Biden, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, decided that The Oprah Winfrey Show, the highest-rated daytime television show in the country at the time, was the best way for his message to reach the biggest audience of frightened Americans.

They do not have the capacity to take this nation down, Biden told the studio audience six days after the attacks, reassuring Americans that President Geore W. Bush has his eye on the ball and had built a coalition of global partners to keep the nation safe. Bidens address to the nation on Oprah was seen as a major moment for the future vice president: a call for calm during a time of national crisis, with an audience numbering in the tens of millions, many of them stuck in their homes.

Nearly two decades later, as the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc on Americas economy, government and collective sanity, Biden has been slow to establish a similar platform at another time of national crisis. Sequestered in his home in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden has lost the national spotlight just as the Democratic primary appeared to be drawing to a closeand just as President Donald Trump has, through no genius of his own, been able to frame himself as the chief architect of the governments response to the pandemic.

Although the general election will likely turn more on Trumps handlingor mishandlingof the coronavirus crisis than on the former vice presidents ability to get airtime, some longtime Biden backers are worried that he has ceded too much territory to the president at a time when his humanity-driven brand of politics could be at its most effective.

The vice president has disappeared from cable news coverage in the first days of the crisis, one bundler told The Daily Beast. People Im talking to are wondering whys he not out there, every day, calming the nation, especially at a time like this? Why is he letting Trump run the show?

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Biden has, in fact, done numerous television appearances in recent days. In broadcasts beamed in from the rec room of his home this week, the former vice president has outlined his plan to combat the pandemic, appeared on The View to decry Trumps apparent proposal to re-open the nations businesses despite the risk to public health, and did two cable news hits on Tuesday afternoon emphasizing the importance of national unity in combating the novel coronavirus.

Biden, like much of America, has been in social isolation to ensure that he wont get sick, and basements in Wilmington arent easily convertible to high-definition television studios, which was abundantly clear the night of Bidens address after sweeping the Arizona, Illinois, and Florida primariesthe low audio and visual quality of the address made it look as if Biden had won the trio of primaries in 1988 rather than 2020.

The Trump campaign exploited the technical lag, tweeting that Biden was in hiding and doesnt have the capacity to stand in front of a camera and answer questions for an hour every day like President Trump!

Trumps poll numbers, meanwhile, have surged nationally in recent weeks, as daily press briefings on the public health emergency have given him a platform to alternately calm and frighten the nation: the most recent Gallup national poll shows his approval ratings rising five points, to a record 49 percent.

That the rise in approval, similarly enjoyed by other national leaders around the world during the pandemic, has come despite a stock market freefall and an unprecedented disruption in American daily life adds credence to the concern by some Biden backers that the battle for airtimethough cheap in a time of national emergencyisnt one to ignore.

I do think it does provide him a great opportunity to fill the void, to step up and be the very strong alternative to Donald Trump, said Lis Smith, who served as Pete Buttigiegs communications director but is currently unaffiliated with any campaign. Joe Biden is a very empathetic person, Donald Trump isnt, and I think people are looking for some humanity and some empathy at this moment.

Part of the problem may lie in the fact that the stars of the pandemic, to use Trumps terminology, are those in charge of the direct response: governors, senators and senior public health officials. As a former senator and vice president who has functionally, though not formally, attained the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden is not in a position to call any shots.

He doesnt have that sort of natural perch, Smith said. These are really trying times and you know it doesnt make sense to go out there with some sort of half-baked idea or half-baked strategy Andrew Cuomo doesnt have that luxury.

That lack of an official platform might not be a bad thing, however.

What he should not be doing is what McCain did in the fall of 08 and try to kind of overstate his ability to have influence in this, said Tim Miller, a Republican communications advisor who ran Jeb Bushs comms operation in 2016, referring to the decision by Sen. John McCain, then the Republican nominee for president, to suspend his campaign to head to the nations capital to focus on addressing the financial crisis.

That spur-of-the-moment decision largely backfired on the Arizona senatorMcCain was not a leading figure in addressing the nations economic collapse, and he still lost the White House.

Instead of trying to out-commander-in-chief the president, Miller suggested, Biden should take a page from his own post-9/11 book and focus on the human aspect of the ongoing crisis.

Have conversations with people who are struggling from this, provide moral and emotional supportthat something that Biden is great at doing, and something that the president is utterly incapable of doing, Miller said. Its an important contrast for him.

In one of his increasingly common appearances on Tuesday, Biden appeared to be doing just that.

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things for their community, Biden told MSNBCs Nicole Wallace on Tuesday. The American people have been through some really tough times, they have never ever, ever, ever failed their country.

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A few weeks ago, it would have been hard to imagine that a debate would take place in leading German newspapers over how many workers lives should be sacrificed for the interests of big business. The recollections of the Nazis, who literally worked millions of forced labourers to death in Germanys large industrial factories, would have appeared too deeply rooted. But with the outbreak of the coronavirus, the representatives of capital are giving free reign to their fascistic conceptions.

The financial daily Handelsblatt published an interview on Monday with investor Alexander Dibelius, who headed the German and Eastern European operations of Goldman Sachs for 11 years, and now manages the Germany portfolio for private equity firm CVC Capital Partners. The investor bluntly stated that the death of millions would be preferable to an economic collapse that would endanger the wealth of his customers.

Dibelius opposes the measures designed to delay the spread of the virus. He justifies this by saying that the acute collapse of the world economy with all of its consequences is the much larger and more dangerous stress test than Sars-CoV-2. He is more worried about the collective shutdown of the economy and social life, implemented with virtually no discussion and with a raised moral finger than this viral infection.

Is it right, he asks, that 10 percent of the populationthe really high-risk groupis protected while 90 percent and the entire economy are massively crippled, with the potentially dramatic consequence that the basis for our general wellbeing will be massively and permanently eroded?

Better the flu than a broken economy, is how he sums up his position.

Dibelius, who studied medicine before entering the financial world, knows full well that COVID-19 is not the flu. He is speaking for a financial oligarchy that has achieved unheard-of riches through decades of social spending cuts and austerity. Now, it is prepared to trample over corpses and sacrifice 10 percent of the populationthe really high-risk group to defend its wealth. As with the financial crisis of 2008-2009, they view the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to press ahead with attacks on social spending and public services so as to further enrich themselves.

It will only be a matter of days before Dibelius and his ilk will demand that workers who refuse to risk their health by going back to work should be forcibly made to do so. His anti-social tirades in Handelsblatt are a subjective expression of the objective fact that the capitalist system is so rotten and class tensions so sharp that the ruling elite can only stay in power by resorting to fascist forms of rule, as it did during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Dibelius and his family have no cause for concern during the coronavirus pandemic. His wealth, measured in the hundreds of millions of euros, guarantees him access to the best doctors. And if they are forced into quarantine, they will have no shortage of choices: from a 3,500-square-metre, 40-room villa in Berlin-Dahlem, to several second homes, such as a 10 million villa in St. Tropez, a 16 million villa near Kitzbuhel and a property in the wealthy London district of Belgravia.

Dibeliuss opinion is not that of an individual. Handelsblatt conducted an interview with Germanys most controversial investment banker with the deliberate intention of triggering a debate and helping his fascistic views win a hearing. The Handelsblatt editorial board is conscious of the fact that the discussion initiated by Alexander Dibelius is painful and controversial in light of the close to 15,000 deaths from the coronavirus, states the Handelsblatt Morning Briefing. However, we believe that this debate should be conducted responsibly.

Dibelius is among the most well-connected figures in German business and politics. He advises Chancellor Merkel and is a member of the German-American elite networking group Atlantic Bridge, which is currently led by former Social Democratic Party leader and former Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel.

He maintains close ties to leading figures in German big business. He has close personal and business relations with Eckhard Cordes, who served consecutively as a board member at Daimler-Benz, chief executive at investment holding firm Franz Haniel, and chief executive at the Metro corporation, and is now a partner of the hedge fund Evian and chairman of the supervisory board for industrial services company Bilfinger.

At Goldman Sachs, where Dibelius headed the mergers and acquisitions department from 1998 until he took over operations in Germany, Eastern Europe, and Russia, he oversaw a number of mergers that cost tens of thousands of jobsincluding the subsequently reversed merger of Daimler-Benz with Chrysler, the takeover of Mannesmann by Vodafone, the sale of Karstadts property to Goldman Sachs, and the sale of Siemenss subsidiary VDO to Continental.

Dibeliuss Handelsblatt interview shows in unvarnished form the ideas upon which the policies being pursued by the federal government and all parties represented in parliament are based. They are showering large corporations with 600 billion while placing small businesses and workers on rations. They are doing virtually nothing to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Although the World Health Organisation has issued urgent recommendations to increase testing, no comprehensive programme of tests is taking place. Even people with serious symptoms find it extremely difficult to get tested. The hospitals are also not prepared for a surge in cases.

The struggle against the coronavirus pandemic must be based on the principle that the health of working people has absolute and unconditional priority over private profit and wealth. The matter is not what the ruling elite claims it can afford, but what the masses of humanity require. This is what the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) fights for within the framework of an international socialist programme.
Its been just over three weeks since Premier Daniel Andrews and Australian Grand Prix Corporation chair Paul Little decided to pull crowds from the annual Albert Park petrol fest. Less than an hour later, Formula One officials followed suit by shelving the entire event.

Since then, Albert Park has sat largely untouched, with the bulk of Grand Prix infrastructure in place and waiting to be removed. Its a puzzling sight for residents nearby, who can see the empty grandstand, a deserted pit lane and makeshift offices and tents dotting the park.

But the Formula One ghost town could come into use soon, potentially.

Sources close to the Grand Prix organisers have revealed that officials are weighing up whether the Pit Exit building and other sites inside the Grand Prix precinct could be used as makeshift hospital space, or even an intensive care unit, for patients affected by COVID-19.

No final decision has been made, but its understood the board considered the site and the buildings as part of a discussion on how it could support the broader COVID-19 response effort. The AGPC is separate but is answerable to the Victorian Government, which chips in around $70 million a year to fund the Formula One Grand Prix and the Motorcycle GP at Phillip Island.
New Delhi, March 26 : Amid the increase in coronavirus cases across the country, doctors and other healthcare experts reckon that the 21-day lockdown is not enough to wipe Covid-19 out. The government should use the period as an opportunity for strengthening the healthcare infrastructure, banning foreigners' entry to India at least for a month, and ensuring protection for healthcare workers fighting coronavirus.

World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had said the lockdown, enforced in India and many other countries to contain coronavirus, was not enough. The countries that had gone for lockdown should use this as a second window of opportunity, Ghebreyesus said.

Dr Dodul Mondal, a senior Delhi-based oncologist, told IANS, "The 21-day lockdown will be nothing without forward looking measures. The government should focus on expanding quarantine facilities and identify at-risk groups, which included slums.

"During lockdown, the government should increase immediate testing facilities, ensure protective gear for doctors and other medical staff to protect them against the infection, and increase the number of ventilators." "We need to strictly quarantine people who are coming from abroad," said Dr Mondal.

The administration, he said should also focus on training people during this period, which would be an add-on to contain the coronavirus spread.

Dr Mehvash Haider, Assistant Professor at Hamdard Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, said public health measures, like physical or social distancing, was important to flatten the curve of sharp increase in spread of infection, but they were not enough. "This lockdown is a golden period. This has to be used for strengthening the testing facilities and hospital response capacity," he said.

According to health experts, the sharp rise in Covid-19 cases came after three months in Italy and China, the coronavirus hotspots, as the infected people usually show symptoms after close to 14 days.

Dr Shyam Mohan Nayak, medical officer with the Labour Ministry, said the country was witnessing a sharp rise in coronavirus cases. "This 21-day lockdown will lead to isolation, where the disease will eventually collapse or the viral infection cease to exist. China and Italy experienced extremely sharp rise in cases and that crippled their healthcare system.

"We should suspend the entry of foreigners at least till the end of April. It will help in focusing the fight against Covid-19 domestically," he said.

He stressed protecting people from the second wave of coronavirus, spread through healthy carriers who don't show symptoms. "Isolation will serve the purpose in the absence of anti-viral drugs. Through isolation, the incubation period of coronavirus can be brought under control," said Dr Nayak.

An incubation period is the time between exposure to virus and appearance of symptoms.

According to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the incubation period for coronavirus is between 2 to 14 days after exposure.

According to reports, more than 97 per cent people who contracted SARS-CoV-2 started showing symptoms within 11.5 days of exposure, and the average incubation period was 5 days.

For many people, Covid-19 symptoms start in mild form only to get worse over the next few days.

(Sumit Saxena can be contacted at sumit.s@ians.in)

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Update for 4:53 pm ET: The United Launch Alliance successfully launched an Atlas V rocket carrying the AEHF-6 military communications satellite for the U.S. Space Force at 4:18 p.m. EDT (2018 GMT). Read our full story here.

A next-generation military communications satellite will launch today (March 26) on the first national security mission for the United States Space Force , and you can watch the liftoff live.

The sixth and final Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite, or AEHF-6, is scheduled to lift off atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Thursday during a two-hour window that opens at 2:57 p.m. EDT (1857 GMT). You can watch the action live here at Space.com courtesy of ULA, or directly via the company .

AEHF satellites circle Earth in geostationary orbit, about 22,200 miles (37,730 kilometers) above the planet.

Related: Military space  the latest launches, tech and videos

The six-satellite system "provides vastly improved global, survivable, protected communications capabilities for strategic command and tactical warfighters operating on ground, sea and air platforms," representatives of aerospace company Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for AEHF, wrote in a mission description . "The jam-resistant system also serves international partners including Canada, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom."

The first five AEHF craft are already up, having launched in August 2010, May 2012, September 2013, October 2018 and August 2019 , all atop Atlas V rockets. The system has been operational since 2015, and the satellites have a 14-year design lifetime.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket topped with the AEHF-6 military communications satellite stands at the launch pad ahead of a planned March 26, 2020 liftoff. (Image credit: United Launch Alliance)

AEHF-6 will be the first National Security Space mission for the U.S. Space Force, which was officially established in December 2019.

"In the current dynamic environment, national security is of utmost importance," Gary Wentz, ULA vice president of government and commercial programs, said in a statement . "We are proud to launch the first National Security Space mission for the U.S. Space Force and look forward to delivering the final AEHF asset to support our nations national defense and the warfighter community."

Mike Wall is the author of " Out There " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate ), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall . Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook .
The U.S. military has decided it will stop providing some of the more granular data about coronavirus infections within its ranks out of concern that the information might be used by adversaries as the virus spreads, Reuters reports.

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper outlined the plan in an interview with Reuters, saying that he wanted the military to keep providing broader data about infections in the armed forces, which rose by 30 percent to 227 cases on Wednesday.

But Esper, a former Army secretary, said he wanted some of the more mission-specific information to be withheld to prevent compromising operational security.

What we want to do is give you aggregated numbers. But were not going to disaggregate numbers because it could reveal information about where we may be affected at a higher rate than maybe some other places, Esper said, without disclosing precisely what information would be withheld or when the plan would be implemented.

Such a decision could upend expectations about the kind of disclosure about coronavirus fallout the public can expect from the military, which has a small number of infections relative to an overall forces of well over 1 million active duty troops.

Beyond daily updates on infections across the armed forces, the U.S. military has been telling the public for weeks about the locations of individual cases, from on a warship to inside the Pentagon, and at overseas commands throughout the world.

Esper noted that it was one thing to disclose the case of the first U.S. soldier infected with coronavirus, which U.S. forces in South Korea did last month. But he wanted to guard against creating the expectation of regular updates everywhere.

Im not going to get into a habit where we start providing numbers across all the commands and we come to a point six, seven weeks from now where we have some concerns in some locations and reveal information that could put people at risk, he said.

Esper said operational security was particularly important in places overseas where the United States is combating adversaries, noting the fight against al-Shabaab in East Africa as well as Islamic State militants in Syria or Afghanistan.
With the arrival of spring, naturally it's time to clean your beauty collection and treat yourself to some new products.

From a slew of swoonworthy NARS Blushes to Charlotte Tilbury's Eye Colour Magic Collection, here are the new beauty launches we're snapping up this week.

Legendary British makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury has released a new collection aptly named Eye Colour Magic Collection; a range of eyeshadow palettes and coordinating liners that enhance eye colour using age-old colour theory.

Each palette and double-ended eyeliner has been created to enhance either blue, hazel, green or brown eyes using a set of complementary colours (as set out by the colour wheel).

For those with blue eyes, Charlotte designed the Copper Charge Luxury Palette and Eye Color Magic Liner Duo. The palette houses a quad of sultry russet shades to make blue eyes pop.

Buy now on Charlotte Tilbury and John Lewis (32)

The makeup brand who arguably created the most famous blush of all time has released a handful of new hues to their core range.

Our top pick Tempted is a flattering warm-toned peach with a gorgeous luminous finish. It's just the right shade to warm up any complexion and highlight your cheekbones, and it's ideal for those not keen on pink shades. The formula blends seamlessly onto the skin, can be easily built up or toned down, and delivers glowing colour every time.

Buy now on Cult Beauty

If you want a pigmented, long-lasting lip colour, Kevyn Aucoin is worth a look as the brand just dropped a new line of Unforgettable Lipsticks in 18 swoon-worthy shades.

The new range is broken up into three formulas - cream, shine and matte - and each hue is housed in a long, sleek modern tube inspired by Kevyn's on-set and on-the-go mentality for effortless yet precise application. The formula is blended with antioxidants and hyaluronic acid for a comfortable, hydrated finish.

Buy now on Space NK

Erborian's new BB Crayon With Ginseng is perfect for those wanting to even out skin tone, or conceal spots on-the-go without the risk of spillage.

With its creamy texture and adjustable light to medium coverage, this multi-purpose stick will leave your skin looking incredibly natural and feeling nourished thanks to its blend of hydrating sunflower oil and vegetable squalene.

There are four shades available. Caramel which is the darkest shade, is also great as a contour for lighter complexions.

Buy now on Space NK

Now with a new and improved formula, the luxurious and lightly scented Murad Retinol Youth Renewal Night Cream melts into skin for a supple, vibrant complexion, visibly minimising lines and wrinkles whilst improving firmness and elasticity.

Powered by Retinol Tri-Active technology, it uses three types of retinol; fast-acting retinoid, time-released retinol and a retinol booster that visibly minimises wrinkles and smooths texture. This combination will help reduce dryness and irritation  making it suitable for even the most sensitive of skin.

Buy now on Lookfantastic

A helping hand from Pai Skincare Acton Spirit Hand Sanitizer: For every tube sold, Pai will give one away to a school, nursery or beauty bank charity The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a global shortage of much-need hand sanitiser. In response, many beauty brands are working hard behind the scenes to make antibacterial liquids and gels, including London-born brand Pai Skincare. 'There is a global shortage of hand sanitising gel,' explained Sarah Brown, founder of Pai Skincare. 'Two weeks ago we decided to create one. I am so proud of how the team rallied together to launch a brand new product in two weeks (rather than the 18 months they are used to spending perfecting a product!)' The product costs 9 and is named 'Acton Spirit' because it 'it summed up the amazing resilience and community spirit'. Instead of putting them on sale, Pai gave away the first batch for free to neighbouring schools, nurseries and incredible charities such as The Beauty Banks. Now on sale to customers, Sarah said that 'with all sales of Acton Spirit we commit to a buy-one-give-one approach, donating a Hand Sanitiser to the most vulnerable in our communities. 'The packaging may be a little makeshift initially - we're over-labelling existing tubes for speed. But I figured you'd be forgiving provided it worked!' Advertisement

MailOnline may earn commission on sales from the links on this page (excluding Pai Skincare).
The Charleston metro area exceeded 800,000 residents in the summer of 2019, a benchmark the tri-county area was once predicted to reach in far off 2030, new Census Bureau estimates confirmed.

Charleston is now the 74th-largest metropolitan area out of 384 in the nation, up from 80th when the 2010 census was conducted.

Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester counties will hit a combined population of 1 million in the early 2030s at current growth rates.

Now that we have Boeing, Mercedes and Volvo, we are on the map and that will never change," said Randy Bates, managing partner of Randolph Development.

With multiple city-sized subdivisions underway, Berkeley County has become the Charleston metro's growth leader. Among S.C. counties with at least 100,000 residents, Berkeley had the state's most rapid annual growth last year, a 3 percent increase that raised the county's population to 227,907.

I think a lot of the single-family homes are going out there because thats where the jobs are going," Bates said. "Volvo has certainly increased the rate of growth out there exponentially."

Charleston and Dorchester counties have seen some of South Carolina's most rapid growth this decade, but in 2019 didn't make the top 10 fastest-growing counties in the state. That's partly because growth has increased rapidly along the Charlotte-Greenville-Atlanta corridor, with large population gains in Greenville, Spartanburg and York counties.

South Carolina's population hit nearly 5.15 million residents on July 1 after gaining 64,558, according to the new census estimates. More than half that growth came in just four counties: Horry, Greenville, York and Berkeley.

The Palmetto State's growth has long been driven by people moving from other parts of the United States. That's sent coastal populations soaring, along with the Greenville/Spartanburg area and York County, which has become a bedroom community for Charlotte.

Metro areas lead

Across the nation, metropolitan areas have mostly been gaining population while the reverse has been true for rural areas. That's also been the case in South Carolina, where 18 of 46 counties lost population last year even as the state grew.

One interesting trend we have seen this decade is widespread population decline among smaller counties, while larger counties tended to have population growth, said Dr. Christine Hartley, a demographer in the Census Bureaus Population Division.

Some South Carolina counties have fewer residents than the largest planned communities now under development in Berkeley County will have when all the forecast construction is complete.

Cane Bay Plantation and Cainhoy Plantation could each have about 25,000 residents when completed. Ten S.C. counties have fewer residents than that, and most of those counties saw their populations decline last year.

"This kind of growth creates lots of challenges, and opportunities," said Berkeley County Supervisor Johnny Cribb.

He said many residents have a better quality of life because of the companies that have brought jobs, such as Volvo, but the county is also spending $375 million to improve roads in order to deal with the resulting traffic.

The challenge, said Cribb, is to grow, but not so fast that it's overwhelming. Counties that are losing population will be struggling to pay for services, he said, when the 2020 census leads to a redistribution of government funding.

"We're trying to grow at a manageable rate," Cribb said.

Metropolitan areas typically include multiple counties, and can cross state lines. The Myrtle Beach metro area includes part of North Carolina, for example, and the Charlotte metro area includes counties in South Carolina.

Among metropolitan areas in the U.S., Myrtle Beach has consistently been among the most rapidly-growing, driven by elderly retirees, and 2019 was no exception. Horry County has a negative birth rate  recording more deaths than births  and yet its population soared, gaining 9,976 people just last year.

Warm weather, low taxes

Nationally, the Myrtle Beach metro area was the second-fastest-growing in 2019 behind St. George, Utah, which sits on the Arizona border. The Myrtle Beach-Conway-North Myrtle Beach, SC-NC Metro Area, as it's officially known, is now the 111th largest in the nation, up from 139th in 2010.

Most of the fastest-growing metropolitan places in the nation were in the South and West.

Illustrating the trend, the Phoenix metro area last year replaced the Boston metro area as the 10th largest in the United States. The Dallas metro area has gained 1.2 million residents since 2010.

Domestic migration  U.S. residents moving from one place to another  accounts for many of the changes. The nation's aging population has sent waves of retirees from states with long winters and high property taxes to states where snow is rare and taxes are low.

In the Southeastern states, after Myrtle Beach, Florida was home to most of the region's fast-growing metro areas in 2019. The Raleigh-Cary, N.C., and Hilton Head-Bluffton metro areas were also in the top 10 for the region and top 30 nationally out of 384 metro areas in the country.

South Carolina's Florence metro area is the only one in the state that hasn't been growing. The population in 2019  204,911  was several hundred fewer than in 2010, when the last national census was conducted.

The 2020 census is now under way. The results will recalculate political representation and government spending, and rural counties in particular will be working hard to make sure everyone is counted.

Nationally, the largest 53 metro areas all have at least 1 million residents, and the largest, the New York metro area that includes portions of three states, has 19.2 million.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the metro area rankings, which had mistakenly included metro divisions.
AXIS Capital Holdings Limited (NYSE:AXS) stock is about to trade ex-dividend in 3 days time. You can purchase shares before the 30th of March in order to receive the dividend, which the company will pay on the 15th of April.

AXIS Capital Holdings's next dividend payment will be US$0.41 per share. Last year, in total, the company distributed US$1.64 to shareholders. Calculating the last year's worth of payments shows that AXIS Capital Holdings has a trailing yield of 4.4% on the current share price of $37.64. Dividends are a major contributor to investment returns for long term holders, but only if the dividend continues to be paid. As a result, readers should always check whether AXIS Capital Holdings has been able to grow its dividends, or if the dividend might be cut.

See our latest analysis for AXIS Capital Holdings

Dividends are typically paid out of company income, so if a company pays out more than it earned, its dividend is usually at a higher risk of being cut. Fortunately AXIS Capital Holdings's payout ratio is modest, at just 48% of profit.

Companies that pay out less in dividends than they earn in profits generally have more sustainable dividends. The lower the payout ratio, the more wiggle room the business has before it could be forced to cut the dividend.

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

NYSE:AXS Historical Dividend Yield March 26th 2020

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Businesses with shrinking earnings are tricky from a dividend perspective. If business enters a downturn and the dividend is cut, the company could see its value fall precipitously. Readers will understand then, why we're concerned to see AXIS Capital Holdings's earnings per share have dropped 15% a year over the past five years. When earnings per share fall, the maximum amount of dividends that can be paid also falls.

The main way most investors will assess a company's dividend prospects is by checking the historical rate of dividend growth. AXIS Capital Holdings has delivered 7.4% dividend growth per year on average over the past ten years.

Story continues

Final Takeaway

Should investors buy AXIS Capital Holdings for the upcoming dividend? Earnings per share have shrunk noticeably in recent years, although we like that the company has a low payout ratio. This could suggest a cut to the dividend may not be a major risk in the near future. At best we would put it on a watch-list to see if business conditions improve, as it doesn't look like a clear opportunity right now.

However if you're still interested in AXIS Capital Holdings as a potential investment, you should definitely consider some of the risks involved with AXIS Capital Holdings. Every company has risks, and we've spotted 1 warning sign for AXIS Capital Holdings you should know about.

A common investment mistake is buying the first interesting stock you see. Here you can find a list of promising dividend stocks with a greater than 2% yield and an upcoming dividend.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
Opinion Article

26 March 2020

The impact of COVID-19 is devastating. Now, it is not a question of whether the coronavirus pandemic will cause a global economic downturn. The damage has made. It is about how much the economy will shrink.

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The numbers are depressing

The Dow's closed at 19,173 points last Friday, the lowest since December 2, 2016. A few weeks ago, in mid-February, the Dow's was still at its highest level, reaching close to 30,000 points.

There seems no hope for a quick rebound. More states are joining California to pause non-essential businesses and urge/order residents to stay home, adding more shutdowns and layoffs. Hotels, restaurants, airlines, and retailers, for example, warned they might have to lay off millions of workers unless they received hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency funds.

On Sunday, the highly-anticipated emergency economic rescue plan failed to move forward in a 47-to-47 vote in the Senate. In response, the Asian markets and the U.S. stock futures plunged on Monday.

By estimations, the U.S. economy might see the worst slowdown on record in upcoming months:

Oxford Economics predicts the U.S. economy will shrink at an annual rate of 12% in the second quarter of 2020.

JPMorgan expects a contraction of 14% in the second quarter.

Goldman Sachs warms a stunning 24% drop.

Restaurant delivery gets a boost

Residents may go to grocery stores, convenience stores, gas stations, and pharmacies.

Restaurants are closed for dine-in services but can deliver food to homes.

Residents may pick up take-out orders from restaurants.

Mail services, including USPS and FedEx, will continue operations.

While states might take different measures as they order a "lockdown," residents are generally expected to follow the social distancing order to avoid close contact with others. Even though people are expected to work from home except for essential personnel, in most cases,

Even before lockdown, the restaurant delivery business has already been doing well. Usually, restaurants partner with one or more of the four dominant food delivery companies, namely UberEats, Grubhub, Postmates, and DoorDash, for food delivery.

McDonald's, for example, added DoorDash as a new partner for food delivery in July last year. Before that, McDonald's had an exclusive partnership with UberEats, which serves about 64% of McDonald's U.S. stores. Delivery makes up about 2-3% of the chain's business, totally about $3 billion.

When restaurants are not allowed to offer dine-in services, they are making extra efforts to promote their take-out or delivery service. To many restaurateurs, that is really the only way to prevent them from closing down.

Meanwhile, not every resident is a good cook at home. Or they may simply want to try a variety of restaurant food during a lockdown. The restaurant delivery business gets a boost.

Grocery delivery too is doing better

Grocery stores are categorized as an essential business and will remain open during the pandemic lockdown. When everyone shops at the grocery stores, they become a dangerous place for the vulnerable. To cope with the coronavirus outbreak, many grocery stores have already cut store hours while adding designated hours for the seniors

Today, some high-end grocery stores have already offered restaurant service to shoppers. People may find it easier to purchase restaurant-quality food at grocery stores now than before. To avoid human contact in a public place like grocery stores or restaurants, some residents may choose to have their groceries delivered to their homes.

Grocery stores have been making long-term efforts to encourage shoppers to place delivery orders. Amazon, for example, is making ways to provide fresh-food delivery service in its Whole Foods Market. Amazon Prime Pantry, which offers Prime members nonperishable grocery items and household essentials, shut down last week due to a sudden surge of the online orders.

Drome delivery has a bright future

While there are still concerns about drone delivery , the advantage of drone or robot delivery is that it minimizes human contact . Some people believe drones or robots can be used in fighting the coronavirus outbreak. In China, the agricultural drone markers see a rise in demand during the coronavirus outbreak because more drones are needed for delivery.

The future of delivery business

The coronavirus will probably change how people shop, travel, and work for years . People may likely rely more on delivery service. Such demand will help boost the delivery business even when everybody is having a tough time fighting the pandemic.

What do you think about the outlook of the delivery business? Are there other businesses that will have a positive outlook?
Our health and our destinies are inextricably tied. Nothing demonstrates that like the current COVID-19 pandemic. As with most catastrophes, the coronavirus will have a disproportionate impact on the poor and homeless. But unlike events bound by geography, this pandemic crosses the borders of race, gender, class and status.

With approximately one-quarter of the nations homeless population residing in California, homelessness was already at crisis proportions. And now, our homeless communities  living in close proximity, in unsanitary conditions and frequently with underlying health conditions  are more likely to contract, transmit and die from coronavirus.

We simply cannot afford to allow the homeless to be further marginalized in this crisis. The only way to ensure that each of us is protected is to ensure that all of us are protected. To do this, we urgently need a more expansive and comprehensive plan, led by the city, that harnesses collective resources and action to prevent, screen, test and contain the spread of the coronavirus, as well as provide rigorous and humane care for the inevitable onslaught of cases in homeless communities. We know we cannot rely on the federal government for this leadership. San Francisco must lead the way.

Glide has been on the front lines of poverty and injustice for more than 50 years. Every day, thousands of people walk through our doors seeking help for addiction, trauma, mental illness, hopelessness and hunger. Even before this new threat emerged, the lines were growing for our meals service, family resource center and shelter reservations. We were stepping up in new and bigger ways to meet the rapidly increasing demand for our services.

As the coronavirus spreads, the lines are increasing at an alarming rate and more families with children arrive every day. Our homeless population is also trending older.

People who are obviously ill wait in these lines, but there is no immediate or safe way to have them screened or tested for coronavirus. Among our community, there is a lack of information about the virus, alongside a growing fear that residents will not receive care. And because the people who come through our door face such a complex intersection of longstanding problems and lack basic information about the virus, they are often not able to take steps to prevent or protect against it.

We are currently having to turn away our clients seeking shelter because, this week, the city canceled new shelter reservations.

Our state and local leaders have announced emergency funding for bringing the homeless indoors and increasing sanitation services, but these proposals currently fall short of what is needed. And the federal government is just beginning to realize the unique needs of the homeless in the relief package debate.

Glide and other service providers are working hard to maintain essential services for the homeless population in an effort to protect all San Franciscans. But we will have greater impact working under a coordinated and comprehensive plan. While there have been some incremental first steps, we need to move swiftly, collectively and with determination to provide:

Information and outreach: We must find a way to get timely and accurate information into the homeless communities, where they are. Most are not getting information from the TV, radio or newspaper.

Sanitation and hygiene: We must distribute large amounts of readily available sanitation services  masks, hand-washing stations, showers and portable toilets.

Screening and testing: We must give top priority to proactively screening and testing our homeless populations, given the likely high rate of contraction and transmission. We need a plan for triaging them into quarantine locations. The city has announced some initial first steps, but we should also leverage service providers who are in a position of trust to achieve wide-scale testing.

Quarantine locations with essential services: For those who test positive, we must get them to quarantine locations with minimal exposure to others. The city is exploring hotel spaces and other locations, and we know this urgent work continues. But the homeless cannot quarantine when they have symptoms if they have no place to go. Once in quarantine, they will need continued service delivery.

Shelter for those who are not sick: These facilities need to provide space for people day and night, with enough room to keep a safe distance. These populations also need a plan for comprehensive service delivery. Our homeless population cannot rely on family members or friends for support like many other groups in our community.

Utilizing a social innovation framework and collective thinking, we can go beyond mitigation of the coronavirus and design sustainable solutions toward ending homelessness. For example, if we can utilize RVs and secure government-owned buildings to shelter people at risk now, as proposed by the governor, and if we can effectively devise and deploy wraparound service delivery to these new locations, then we have already begun to create a foundation for longer-term solutions. While the complexity and scale are daunting, we can meet this moment. Neither service providers nor governments are alone. We are all in this together.

Karen J. Hanrahan is president and CEO of Glide Foundation and was the former deputy assistant secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the Obama administration.
Before the coronavirus pandemic turned the world upside down, it seemed that New York was on track to follow California in granting gig economy workers  like delivery cyclists and on-demand task do-ers  labor protections that they dont currently have as independent contractors.

Sure, New York faced a challenge in being pressured to find a solution more palatable to both sides of the debate than Californias AB5  a new law classifying most gig workers as employees, which has prompted challenges from gig economy giants Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, while garnering intense criticism from freelancers, who want to maintain their status as independent contractors. Even so, state lawmakers had suggested they were up to that challenge. Several bills had been introduced in the Legislature that would either reclassify gig workers as employees or create a new employment classification that would grant them more labor protections like overtime pay and unemployment insurance. Then in January, Gov. Andrew Cuomo included in his budget proposal a state task force that would bring together workers and representatives from organized labor and business to come up with recommendations on how gig workers should be classified and other issues like wages and benefits for gig workers. If that task force didnt come up with recommendations by May 1, the state Department of Labor would then be able to introduce regulations on its own.

But now, with the coronavirus occupying most, if not all, of lawmakers time, it looks like the effort to secure gig workers more labor protections will be put on the back burner. The world has changed a million ways since January. Things that we thought we were going to be able to negotiate and get passed into law by April 1, don't appear to be likely anymore, state Sen. Diane Savino told City & State on Wednesday. And part of that is going to be how we define the sharing economy, and what protections we can provide for workers, because we just don't have the ability to get it done right now.

In one sense, its not all that surprising that a task force charged with deciding the complicated question of how gig workers should be classified is poised to fall by the wayside as the state focuses on addressing the unprecedented health and financial challenges posed by the coronavirus. But considering the fact that gig workers like food delivery cyclists are working on the front lines of the pandemic, meeting increased demand for home-delivered meals, some groups are saying this moment is making very clear the urgent need to provide those workers with labor protections. The need to provide app-based workers with the same rights as all other hardworking New Yorkers has never been more clear than during this pandemic, Mario Cilento, president of the New York State AFL-CIO, said in an emailed statement. We are committed to working with the governor and Legislature and will not rest until this inequity is addressed once and for all.

Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, noted she was happy to see the task force pushed out of the budget, as she'd rather the state take more dramatic action by classifying gig workers as employees. Still, she said she hopes the state Legislature prioritizes the gig worker debate this session. If anything, I hope the pandemic has made more clear the urgent need for workers across the economy  including gig workers  to have full, permanent protections, like unemployment, minimum wage and overtime, paid sick leave and family leave, she said.

But while Savino suggested that the issue is taking a back seat, she said she wasnt blind to the idea that some gig workers are acting like first responders in the crisis. The irony is, as everybody else is forced home and businesses are shutting down, it's those very workers who are out there that are making sure that deliveries are made and people can get food and restaurants are able to operate to a certain extent, Savino said. So you see how integral they really are to the economy.

Assemblyman Clyde Vanel, who chairs the Assembly Subcommittee on Internet and New Technology, said on Tuesday that he didnt want the governors gig economy task force proposal included in the final budget. I didnt think that was the right way to go, Vanel said, referring to the fact that the governors proposal would have allowed the Department of Labor to set its own policy if the task force didnt come up with its own recommendations.

Even though it looks like the debate over how gig workers should be treated will be pushed off in New York for the time being, many of those workers could benefit from federal action. Cuomo asked the federal government to release Disaster Unemployment Assistance funds to the state, which allow workers not traditionally covered by state unemployment benefits  essentially, people who arent classified as employees  to still receive assistance tied to the coronavirus crisis. Congress took an important step in that direction this week, as the deal struck in the Senate on Wednesday would extend unemployment benefits to gig workers and other kinds of independent contractors, like freelancers and the self-employed. The House of Representatives will still have to pass the bill, however.

Representatives for Cuomo did not directly respond to the possibility of the gig worker task force being left out of the budget, but suggested that the governors focus for now is on securing unemployment assistance for gig workers from the federal government. It is clear the coronavirus epidemic will have a real impact on working New Yorkers, and they deserve protections now, Jack Sterne, a spokesman for Cuomo, said in a statement. The federal government must provide Disaster Unemployment Assistance to New York, which will allow independent contractors, self-employed New Yorkers, farmers, and others to receive unemployment insurance tied to the COVID-19 crisis."

In the meantime, unemployment assistance from the federal government would be an important way to address the immediate needs of many gig workers, Savino said. The federal action, thank God, at least provides some assistance and relief for those people until we figure out the bigger issue of what it means to be a gig worker in our economy, she said.

To say that gig workers have no labor protections in New York isnt exactly true, as the landscape is not so black and white. In 2018, a state labor review board ruled that three Uber drivers and others similarly situated were employees for the purposes of unemployment insurance, which Desai said means those ride-hail drivers can and should be applying for state unemployment insurance. Other gig workers and independent contractors, however, may not be eligible for state unemployment benefits. Ride-hail drivers for the large companies  Uber, Lyft and Via  in New York City also have minimum pay protections and some paid sick leave.

And then there are all the efforts that gig economy companies have made in recent weeks in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Uber has said it will provide paid sick leave for drivers affected by coronavirus. Other companies, like Lyft and Instacart, have said they will introduce similar measures.

For now, gig workers in New York will have to rely on those kinds of benefits being doled out on an app-by-app basis. Still, that doesnt mean Cuomo couldnt convene a task force to continue to look at the gig worker issue, Savino said. Governors generally like task forces, it gives them a little bit more flexibility, Savino said, noting that the governor doesnt need legislation to convene a task force, and could still bring all the relevant industry and labor voices in a room to study the issue. I think they were actually moving towards that. And then shit hit the fan, so to speak.

Correction: Jack Sterne's description has been updated to reflect a recent title change.
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In this file photo, a "Good Vibrations" dorm room curated by Dormify is shown. A Bay Area college has ordered students to return and clean out their dorm rooms by April 14, amid a pandemic. (Dan Whipps / Dormify)

As colleges across California shuttered their campuses and sent most students home last week, one campus in the Bay Area is requiring its students to return  amid a pandemic  and clean out their dorm rooms.

On March 18, Evette Castillo Clark, St. Mary's College dean of students, emailed parents and students that the Moraga campus was closing and students needed return and get their dorm rooms cleaned out by April 14.

The day before, six Bay Area counties, including Contra Costa, where the college is located, announced a shelter-in-place order in response to the growing threat of the coronavirus. Health officials want people to maintain distance from everyone but their immediate families.

We realize that most students are away from campus now and are concerned about the shelter-in-place order established for Contra Costa County and surrounding Bay Area counties, wrote the dean. We want to clarify that the order explicitly allows essential travel to or from educational institutions for purposes of receiving materials for distance learning.

Please plan to move out at your earliest opportunity, she wrote.

Some parents are livid.

This is so reckless, said Karen Lane, who lives in Littleton, Colo. Her daughter, Madison, returned home the day the six counties announced the shelter-in-place. She's reluctant to send her daughter back to campus.

The whole point [of the order] is to keep us from being mobile. Does anybody really need their comforter or coffee mug that badly? she said.

St. Marys College, a mission-style campus nestled in the rolling hills of the East Bay, follows a Lasallian Catholic educational philosophy. Roughly 3,600 students attend the liberal arts school, which claims notable alumni such as the actor Brian Doyle-Murray and Carolina Marquez, host of Cali Mornings, Cali 93.9 Los Angeles.

Incredulous and concerned about the college's order, Lane wrote to Clark expressing her alarm at the idea of sending her daughter to the Bay Area on an airplane while there's a growing global pandemic.

Story continues

On March 24, the school's medical director, Rachel Snowden, responded to Lane by email. She explained that the college was not only "in constant communication" with county health officials about their plans, but that other Bay Area colleges, such as Stanford University and Santa Clara University, were following similar procedures.

She suggested Lane connect with local students or families to assist with moving items out of Madison's dorm room, if Lane wasn't comfortable sending her daughter back to clean.

"This might be a helpful option for your family to consider," wrote Snowden.

A county health spokesman told the Los Angeles Times he hadn't heard about the situation until he was contacted by the newspaper, on Tuesday. Officials from Stanford and Santa Clara University said their universities were not requiring students to return to campus to clean their rooms in the near-term.

"We have told undergraduate students they should not return to campus at this time due to the ongoing shelter-in-place order," said Ernest Miranda, a spokesman for Stanford.

Robin Reynolds, the associate vice president for auxiliary services at Santa Clara University, said her university has told students to return between May 1 and May 8 to clean out their dorm rooms.

However, "we know the situation is fluid, so that may change," she said.

A spokesman for St. Mary's said the request was in line with two travel exemptions in Contra Costa County's shelter-in-place: one that allows for essential travel and another for distance learning.

"Saint Mary's College of California is acting to prevent and slow the spread of COVID-19, and working hard to adapt to changing circumstances in response to the impacts of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic," wrote Michael McAlpin, the college's director of media relations, in an email.

Asked if St Mary's request violated the order, Fischer, the Contra Costa County spokesman, declined to provide an opinion.

"We can't be in a position to adjudicate best practices, whether or not, in a particular case, it is good for certain students to follow, or not follow, the instructions," he said.

As to what will happen to Madison's belongings if she doesn't return, St. Mary's spokesman declined to comment.

But for Lane, it's pretty clear: "What's a thousand dollars worth of items when the choice comes down to my daughter's health, and that of others?"
The United States says it has imposed sanctions against 20 companies based in Iran and Iraq, along with officials and other individuals there who are accused of supporting terrorist groups.

The U.S. Treasury Department said on March 26 that the targeted front companies, senior officials, and business associatesprovide support to or act for or on behalf of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its branch for elite operations abroad, the Quds Force.

The individuals and entities are also accused of transferring lethal aid to Iranian-backed terrorist militias in Iraq such as Kataib Hizballah (KH) and Asaib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), the Treasury Department said.

Among other activities, the companies and individuals were said to be involved in smuggling weapons to Yemen, selling U.S.-blacklisted Iranian oil to the Syrian government, promoting propaganda efforts in Iraq, and intimidating Iraqi politicians.

The sanctions freeze any U.S.-held assets of those designated and bar Americans from doing business with them.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Iran employs a web of front companies to fund terrorist groups across the region, siphoning resources away from the Iranian people and prioritizing terrorist proxies over the basic needs of its people.

The targeted entities and individuals include the Reconstruction Organization of the Holy Shrines in Iraq, which the U.S. Treasury Department described as an organization based in Iran and Iraq that is controlled by the Quds Force.

Also targeted by the sanctions is that organization's executive chairman, Mohammad Jalal Maab.

Maab, an Iranian citizen from the town of Kerman, was appointed to the post in 2019 by Qasem Soleimani, the IRGC's Quds Force commander who was killed by a U.S. air strike in Baghdad in early January.

With reporting by Reuters
New York has been testing a lot of people. Are the big numbers just a product of that?

We looked into it. New York has conducted more tests than any other state. Even after you account for that, however, the number of cases in New York is much higher.

If you just compare the percentage of tests that have come back positive, its about 25 percent in New York, and in California its about 5 percent. That doesnt necessarily mean that five times as many people in New York have it, but it is a sign that the virus is probably more widespread in our community than in California.

What would explain the difference?

What the experts think is that this virus was circulating in the city for much longer than we thought, and it spread before we put in place these social-distancing measures. We are starting to see the ramifications of that now, days and weeks after the virus spread, because it takes time for symptoms to show up.

Does New Yorks experience offer any lesson?

I think the most important lesson for the general public is to take this seriously, because the number of cases can escalate extremely quickly, and it will catch you off guard.

Thats it for this briefing. See you next time.  Mike

Thank you

To Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford for the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

P.S.

 Were listening to The Daily. Our latest episode is about President Trumps response to the coronavirus pandemic.

 Heres todays Mini Crossword puzzle, and a clue: Passing fancy (three letters). You can find all our puzzles here.

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Saudi Arabias King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud on Thursday urged G20 leaders to take effective and coordinated action to fight the global health crisis set off by the coronavirus pandemic. He urged leaders attending the summit to do their best to assist all developing nations.

Leaders of the G20 convened the Extraordinary Virtual Summit on Thursday evening even as wealthy countries including the United States unveiled huge economic stimulus packages.

Till date, there has been no collective action plan from the G20, and the group has been criticised for its slow response.

In his opening remarks as G20 leaders began an emergency online summit in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the king detailed the destruction and damage the disease had caused on the global economy, financial markets, trade as well as global supply chains.

We must have an effective and coordinated response to this pandemic and restore confidence in the global economy, the Saudi King said.

India is expected to push for a coordinated and forward-looking approach at the extraordinary G20 virtual leaders summit. The summit is being held against the backdrop of a divide in the G7 over US efforts to label Covid-19 as the Wuhan virus.

Members of the G20, which includes 19 of the worlds largest economies and the European Union, are engaged in hectic negotiations to finalise a joint communique to be issued after the meeting.

This human crisis requires a global response. The world counts on us to come together and cooperate in order to face this challenge, the Saudi King said. As concerns mount for poorer countries without access to capital markets and adequate health facilities, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have urged G20 leaders to support its call for governments to put debt payments on hold.

The members are also expected to outline their individual positions in separate statements during the video conference that has been convened by G20 president Saudi Arabia to discuss a joint response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his statement, is expected to refer to Indias role in forging a coordinated response through the video conference of leaders of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) on March 15 and how this could be replicated by other countries.

On Wednesday, other members of the G7 had spurned the US state departments push to include the phrase Wuhan virus in a joint statement that was to be issued after a video conference of the groupings foreign ministers. The members issued separate statements that reflected the divisions within the G7.

The US was responsible for framing the draft statement as it is the current president of the G7, which includes the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada.

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A 'Draft Andrew Cuomo' for president movement popped up this week as the New York governor has become President Trump's favorite foil amid the coronavirus crisis.

Two Draft Cuomo Twitter accounts were launched since Monday, while praise of Cuomo has lit up the left-leaning Twittersphere every time he briefs the press.

At the same time, likely Democratic nominee Joe Biden just got his Wilmington, Delaware house wired for home broadcasting, so he's able to spend more time in the limelight, something that kept him sidelined until Monday.

'Draft Cuomo' Twitter accounts popped up this week after the Democratic New York governor took control of his state's coronavirus crisis

On Tuesday, the account @DraftCuomo2020 appeared, which was created by a man named Jay out of New Jersey, who likes the governor as a back-up Democratic candidate for president

The @DraftCuomo2020 account started with this tweet on Tuesday. The founder said he planned to amass followers on social media to start, with no plans to raise funds for a potential Cuomo run through a political action committee

Jay, a Democrat from New Jersey, who declined to have his last name used for the story, launched @DraftCuomo2020 on Twitter on Tuesday. Another @DraftCuomo account was created Monday, but has fewer followers thus far.

'I think what this moment shows the electorate, more than anything, is the importance of things we might not have considered initially, most especially - executive experience,' Jay told DailyMail.com on Wednesday. 'If you look at our field back when it started with 20-25 some odd candidates, there were a few governors in there and maybe in hindsight we should have given them a better look.'

But the coronavirus outbreak put those leadership skills front and center, and prompted Jay to act.

While the Twitter account still has under 200 followers, Jay called the initial response 'overwhelmingly positive.'

'I've been getting messages from folks around the country saying how can I help, what can I do to get this done?' Jay said. 'The enthusiasm is definitely there - and I think it's in large part due to reconsideration of our priorities given the circumstances.'

Jay envisioned Cuomo as a back-up candidate, pointing to the advanced ages of both Biden and Bernie Sanders, who remains in the Democratic 2020 race.

Biden is 77-years-old, while Sanders is 78-years-old.

'So given these circumstances and given where 2020 has already led us, we have to be prepared in the case that one or both of our nominees can't serve and they fail - whether that's because of their health or for other reasons,' he said.

'And in that case, I think Gov. Cuomo would be a great pick,' he added.

He also argued that while Biden promised to pick a female running mate, the former vice president might want to rethink that choice and select Cuomo instead.

Jay said he has no plans for @DraftCuomo2020 besides a social media presense so far, explaining that people's focus should be on the coronavirus pandemic. He also has no plans to look up convention rules or raise funds for Cuomo as part of a political action committee.

'There needs to be a critical mass so to speak for this to even be a discussable topic,' Jay said.

Other Democrats DailyMail.com interviewed understood why there was an interest in Cuomo.

Lindsey Boylan, a former Cuomo aide who's running for Congress in the New York Democratic primary against Rep. Jerry Nadler, said the governor has 'stepped forward and taken responsibility in a time when we have a real vacuum of leadership at the federal level.'

'He's making things happen, period end of story,' Boylan said. 'People are responding to his straight talk and bottom line kind of leadership in a moment like this.

'The American people need leaders with the courage to tell the truth and thats what Andrew Cuomo is doing,' she added.

As a Congressional candidate, Boylan hasn't made an official endorsement for president, but has said she'll support the Democratic nominee.

She has, however, noticed Biden's absence.

'As I watch [President Trump] bungle the most basic humane support on stage and be a total jerk, I think of the leadership we need. If [Joe Biden] expects to be our nominee, I would expect him to be very present and vocal right now,' she tweeted Sunday. 'I don't get it at all.'

On Monday Biden started to remedy that, by broadcasting from his home.

Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist who worked for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, suggested members of his party were still shopping for a candidate over jitters from what happened four years ago.

'I think it's just reflexive of a nervous, insecure Democratic Party,' he told DailyMail.com. 'Donald Trump rocked the party's confidence and now we're hopping from savior to savior.'

'Also reflects how much the COVID outbreak has sidelined Biden,' Payne added.
A MAN has been accused of burgling a Navy vessel that had just begun operating as part of a Covid-19 testing centre.

Patrick Hynes (34) allegedly got into the ship docked on Dublins quays, took a uniform jacket and car keys and tried to find the vehicle to steal more property from it.

He was granted bail after his defence lawyer told a court the allegation was the accused had chanced his arm in an opportunistic crime.

Judge Miriam Walsh adjourned the case for the directions of the DPP to be given.

Mr Hynes, with an address at Baylough, Athlone, Co Westmeath, is charged with burglary at the LE George Bernard Shaw on Dublins quays in the early hours of yesterday morning.

Dublin District Court heard he was charged at 3.24pm yesterday at Pearse Street garda station and made no reply after caution.

He was handed a copy of the charge sheet, Garda Fran Kennedy told Judge Walsh.Objecting to bail, Gda Kennedy said the vessel was docked at Sir John Rogersons Quay where a Covid-19 testing centre was in operation.

Gardai got a call that at 1.40am a man trespassed on the boat for the offence of theft and had stolen a number of items.

While searching the area, the accused was stopped close to the scene.

He matched the description been given out by Navy personnel.

Mr Hynes was questioned and searched and gardai found a set of car keys on him.

He admitted the keys were taken from the ship and said he had been returning them, the garda said.

He admitted taking a uniform jacket with the keys and a beret belonging to the Naval Service and pointed out the ship to gardai.

The accused told officers he had been walking around with the keys, pressing buttons to try to find the car and steal items from it, Gda Kennedy continued.

He alleged Mr Hynes was caught red-handed and told gardai he had been living homeless at Sir John Rogersons Quay since August last year, close to where the ship is docked and will be for the foreseeable future.

Defence solicitor Michael Kelleher said the accused, who was down on his luck, admitted to gardai he got into the boat and took the jacket with the keys, but he had no luck with them, and he was on the way back with them when he was stopped.

I was looking for food as well, I thought they were giving out food, Mr Hynes interjected.

Gda Kennedy said while it was a serious alleged offence, the accused did co-operate.

Judge Walsh granted bail to Mr Hynes.

The accused has not yet entered a plea to the charge.
Mr Herbert Mensah, businessman and President of Ghana Rugby, has launched a passionate appeal to businesses in Ghana to stand up and be counted in the fight against the novel Coronavirus, COVID-19.



Mensah, in conjunction with Sunda International, made a substantial contribution to the Legon Hospital with products such as detergents and soaps that are manufactured locally in Ghana.



Mr Isaac Hu, Sunda Internationals Manager for Africa, has been supporting Mensah with various ventures such as Ghana Rugby, May 9th Remembered and other charitable products that Mensah has been involved in over the years.



In the appeal, Mensah referred to many cases of businesses and business people who stood up to be counted and who made substantial contributions.



Alibaba founder Jack Ma pledged to donate medical equipment, including 1.5 million laboratory kits for the novel coronavirus, to member states of the African Union.



In South Africa billionaires Johann Rupert and Nicky Oppenheimer are each giving away R1 billion (US$ 57million) to help South African small businesses and their workers cope with the economic carnage wrought by Covid-19 and the impending lockdown.



Mensah also initiated a COVID-19 information service for the Ghana Rugby Family in which his message is, Everything will be fine if we all play our part!



The appeal from Mensah is also aimed at all the people who may have an influence on businesses in Ghana.



Stop sitting around and just rely on the government to make big decisions. They are already making big decisions. Now the question is, 'Where do we go?'



Mensah continued to say that we already have guidelines and regulations on how to protect ourselves and others against the spread of Covid-19 but that there are many less-fortunate people who find it difficult to ride out this storm.



We have many Regions in Ghana and every Region must have one or a few wealthy people who can afford to help others. This is the time to stop thinking about yourself, but to rather think about Ghana Mensah said.



Mensah ended his appeal with, All Im saying is that Im appealing to you, middle classes. Come together, go to the people you benefit from and put pressure on them to support the cause.







Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
Release of Arbitrarily Detained Civilians and U.S. Citizens in Syria to Avert COVID-19 Spread

Press Statement

Morgan Ortagus, Department Spokesperson

March 25, 2020



In light of threats posed by COVID-19, the United States reiterates its calls for the Assad regime to take concrete steps to protect the fate of thousands of civilians, including U.S. citizens, being held arbitrarily in overcrowded and inhumane conditions in regime detention centers. These conditions are prime for the quick spread of the virus which would have devastating impacts on vulnerable detainees who are already in poor health after months or even years of torture, malnutrition, and lack of access to medical care. We demand the immediate release of all civilians arbitrarily detained  including women, children, and the elderly. Additionally, the regime must also immediately grant impartial and independent entities, including medical and health organizations, access to regime detention facilities.

If the Assad regime maintains its current campaign against the Syrian people, it risks exacerbating the spread of the COVID-19 virus to epic proportions, endangering the lives of Syrians throughout the country. The regime must cease all hostilities and allow the unabated flow of humanitarian assistance to IDP camps within Syria, in addition to releasing tens of thousands of civilians arbitrarily detained in regime detention centers in order to mitigate the disastrous spread of the virus. The regime should take immediate measures to protect the Syrian people, as well as U.S. citizens in Syria, from the devastating impacts of this pandemic.

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With a grant of just over DKK 5 million, Professor and DMSc Ulf Simonsen from Aarhus University is immediately beginning a research project with the aim of treating patients with the corona virus and reducing the need for ventilators

Professor, DMSc, Ulf Simonsen from Aarhus University, Denmark, knew that he and his research group had made an important discovery a few years ago, when they discovered that it was possible to inhibit the development of severe acute respiratory syndrome and damage to the lungs by blocking a potassium channel in the lungs with the drug Senicapoc. So important that he and his research colleagues together with Aarhus University patented the discovery. But at the time, he had no idea that the discovery could be of crucial importance to people infected with the corona virus, as the first pandemic of modern times spread around the world.

"We've discovered that by using Senicapoc, we can block the ion channel that sits in the cells between the lung's alveoli cavities and the blood - what we call the pulmonary barrier. By doing this, we don't treat the viral infection, but we prevent or slow the development of the disease that in turn leads to severe damage to the lungs," explains Ulf Simonsen.

In the research project for which Ulf Simonsen has now received funding, he and his colleagues will investigate whether the treatment with Senicapoc is able to reduce the amount of time spent on a ventilator during the course of the COVID infection. In other words, whether treatment with the drug can prevent the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome and lung damage in a way that reduces the need for a patient to be on a ventilator.

When a person is infected with COVID19, the worst case scenario is that they will suffer severe lung disease. Water in the lungs is a critical sign of this, and many patients die due to this condition, because their level of oxygen saturation falls and they suffer difficulty breathing.

"This is the situation where the need for treatment with a ventilator occurs, and it's also here that we hope the Senicapoc treatment can make a difference - if only so that the patients require a shorter period on a ventilator," says Ulf Simonsen.

The effect can be assessed within the next two months

The treatment will already begin within a few weeks at Aarhus University Hospital, Odense University Hospital and Hvidovre Hospital, where selected patients admitted with COVID-19 will be offered the chance to participate in the research project and receive treatment with Senicapoc.

Treatment with the new drug begins in connection with the patients' transfer from one of the infectious diseases departments to intensive care. Ulf Simonsen believes that the project group will be able to assess whether the new treatment has reduced the number of days on the ventilator relatively quickly.

"The results still depend on how quickly we can obtain and analyse data. We won't have a complete picture immediately, but I expect that we'll be able to say whether the medicinal treatment reduces the need for ventilators within the next two months," says Ulf Simonsen.

"Everything is a little chaotic right now. We need to get all the practical aspects in place so we can already begin in April, when the disease is expected to peak in Denmark. We had planned a similar project, but now everything has to move really fast, and that demands everyone involved makes an extra effort - not least my clinical colleagues who are already busy at the hospitals," he says.

Ulf Simonsen receives a total of DKK 5.3 million for the treatment and prevention of severe pulmonary manifestations - as the professionals call it - by COVID-19 with Senicapoc (COVIPOC).

His research project is one of a total of nine research projects sharing the DKK 50 million that the Danish government has earmarked for corona-related research. The projects intend to quickly obtain new knowledge and new solutions in the fight against COVID-19, and they are being launched immediately, so that the results can benefit the public, the healthcare sector and society in general as quickly as possible.

###

The press release is partly based on information from the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science.
Some coronavirus tests could return false-positive results for 47 percent of samples, a study abstract from China suggests.

'In the close contacts of COVID-19 patients, nearly half or even more of the 'asymptomatic infected individuals' reported in the active nucleic acid test screening might be false positives, wrote the authors from Jiaotong University in Xi'an, China.

The abstract offers little detail about how this testing was done, but Chinese health authorities were traveling to the homes of infected people and collecting samples to test from other members of their households at the height of the outbreak there.

A US expert says that the high false positive result could be due to contaminations from poor collection - and cautions that similar rates would be possible if Americans tried to test themselves at home.

It comes after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned that companies could not sell at-home test kits direct to consumers - although some start-ups across the US had already started shipping them.

Even drive-thru testing may raise the risks that a sample for coronavirus testing gets contaminated, and at-home testing risks would be higher and could lead to false positives, a Columbia University scientist warned after Chinese research suggested that up to 47% of close contact tests there returned false positives

The Chinese research team predicted that about 20 percent of close contacts of people infected with coronavirus might develop the disease.

But they found that more than 47 percent of the tests returned false positive.

Only a study abstract was posted to that National Institutes of Health's (NIH) PubMed repository, so it's difficult to how many tests this translated to or how the study was conducted.

Still, Dr Susan Whittier, director of microbiology services at Columbia University and New York Presbyterian Hospital said it underlines just how sensitive and misleading tests for the COVID-19 can be if they're not done in tightly controlled conditions.

'When we think about false-positives, there are really only two steps where this happens,' she told DailyMail.com: during collection or when the specimens are being analzyed in the lab.

In the case of the Chinese tests with alarmingly high false-positive rates: 'Maybe they went to the homes of the infected people and tested the people around them.

'That environment is contaminated and specimen collection has to be really carefully done.

'As they're collecting samples, they could be introducing environmental virus, and those samples would test positive, but it would be because of how they were collected.'

COVID-19 in particular sits at unusually high levels in the body, and thus likely in the environment, compared to other viruses.

Dr Susan Whittier cautions that samples may test falsely positive for coronavirus 'because of how they were collected.' Pictured: health care workers collect samples at a drive-thru site

The Us has scrambled to ramp up testing, and its led to daily case increases as well as the hasty release of at-home tests before the FDA warned against them

Dr Whittier said that her lab, which is running between 450 has to amplify the levels of the virus by 20- or 30-fold to detect it.

With coronavirus, they only have to amplify it by 15-fold, 'so there's more virus there,' she said.

It's also possible that that samples get contaminated at labs where they're analyzed.

Labs certified to the levels that Dr Whittier's are run a relatively low risk of this happening because they have to have strict protocols in place.

Although states can now approve their own tests, including those for which samples are taken at drive-thru sites, the specimens still have to be analyzed at these rigorous CLIA labs.

False positives 'are certainly possible...if people are using test kits that haven't gone through a rigorous validation process,' Dr Whittier said.

'Any time you're using a kit from a non-certified lab or without FDA approval, I wouldn't trust any of the results.'

Despite the need for better access to testing, this was among the concerns with at-home test kits like Nurx's, Everlywell's.

Dr Susan Whittier warned that 'environmental virus' in spaces occupied by infected people could lead to false-positives among their close contacts. This certainly applies to household members and could carry over to vehicles where drive-thru samples are collected

'They come with good intentions in trying to make testing available to more people, but it's 180 degrees away from what goes on in a CLIA lab,' said Dr Whittier.

'Making a bad test available is doing more harm than good.'

What's more, even if the labs analyzing these results, it's highly unlikely that lay people can take collect samples from themselves appropriately, despite the FDA's announcement that such self-swabbing will be allowed if it takes place in health care settings.

Until that announcement, only nasopharyngeal swabs were acceptable, requiring a long Q-tip-like implement to be stuck far into the nostril.

'If you do it properly, it's so uncomfortable it feels like you're going for a brain biopsy,' Dr Whittier said.

'As soon as it's uncomfortable, you're going to stop, and it should be uncomfortable and should

'My concern would be that having somebody sitting in a car putting their head back

Now, new research from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UnitedHealth, Quest Diagnostics and University of Washington has found that self-swabbing led to results equally accurate to those from tests on swabs taken by clinicians.

The study participants swabbed the lower, less difficult part of the nose to reach, a methodology Dr Whittier called 'promising.'

But she still worries that swabs are taken outside of relatively sterile clinic environments, they could easily be contaminated.

'If there are hundreds of cars in the line I'm afraid they're not going to get a great specimen,' Dr Whittier said.

Nearly 60,000 Americans have coronavirus and more than 800 have died of the infection

'Are they changing their gloves? I've seen videos where, after collecting [the sample, the workers] didn't get it into the tube and it went down the side onto their hands.

'There's a lot of potential for contamination, but I haven't been to one personally.'

Some labs found that even the CDC's original test, which was supposed to be the 'gold standard,' returned false-positive results.

Drive-thru testing hasn't been going on long enough for there to be solid data on false-positives from the kits, but Dr Deborah Birx Wednesday announced that Americans will now be permitted to swab themselves in their cars and hand their samples to health care workers in biosafe bags.

It's meant to limit the use of PPE and exposure for health care workers but raises still more questions about how pure these samples will be and how accurate tests run on them will be.
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Linkedin Sausan Atika (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 18:33 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206da1f21 1 National #COVID19,COVID-19,#coronavirus,coronavirus,COVID-19-Jakarta,COVID-19-death-toll,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,burial Free

The increasing number of deaths from COVID-19 has profoundly altered the daily pace for those who work to provide mortuary services.

Employees at Palang Hitam (Black Cross), which provides services in the capital to transport the bodies of the deceased from hospitals to cemeteries, said they had grown busier over recent weeks.

Home to around 10 million people, Jakarta has emerged as the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in Indonesia, with 472 confirmed cases and 899 patients under surveillance (PDP) at the time of publishing, according to its dedicated website.

The death toll in the capital has now reached 46 according to the nation's COVID-19 accelerated management task force, or 59 percent of 78 deaths attributed to the disease in the country.

Data on deaths among suspected cases is unavailable.

During the first days of the COVID-19 outbreak, we received [just] one call per day to pick up the body [of someone who had died of COVID-19], but now it is around 10 a day, said Nur Syamsuryah of Palang Hitam.

He added that he and other Palang Hitam workers treated most of the bodies with extreme caution, as if they were unconfirmed cases pending post-mortem test results.

Before the outbreak, Palang Hitam primarily collected and transported the bodies of victims of traffic accidents and homicides, as well as unidentified or unclaimed bodies from hospitals. They also helped transport the bodies of nursing home residents who had died far from their families, as well as those of beggars and the homeless at shelters.

Syam said that Palang Hitam typically provided its services from one or two bodies up to a dozen bodies each day before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Now, it is like we are always going back and forth transporting bodies from hospitals to cemeteries, said Syam, recalling that his team had transported 25 bodies on Sunday.

Out of these, 15 were the bodies of people who had either tested positive for the virus or were suspected of having contracted the disease.

Syam and his fellow colleagues, however, declined to supply the cumulative number of the bodies of COVID-19 patients that they had transported to date.

Palang Hitam has 48 employees that are responsible for providing a variety of mortuary services, from washing and preparing the body to driving the hearse.

However, only 25 employees  all under 50 years old  are permitted to handle COVID-19 cases. The staff at hospital morgues help out by preparing the bodies for collection and transportation by Palang Hitam.

With half the team focused on managing COVID-19 cases, Palang Hitam's workers are now worried about how the team will perform, assuming that the outbreak has yet to peak.

We are overwhelmed, but its not like we cannot accept more work. I'd say we could cope well even if we were to handle 20 [cases] now, but we cannot predict what will happen later, Syam said.

I'd guess we haven't yet peaked, his colleague Wahyudi added, referring to the team's capacity.

Wahyudi said that the virus was unlikely to be transmissible after death, as long as the staff at hospital morgues and Palang Hitam followed the proper procedures as set by the Jakarta Health Agency.

The health agencys procedures require that a body be wrapped in multiple layers of linen and then in plastic sheeting before it is placed inside a coffin. The outside of the coffin should be sprayed with disinfectant before the coffin is enclosed in plastic, and the agency prohibits anyone from removing the coffin from its external wrapping.

Palang Hitam employees must wear disposable masks and gloves at the very least for personal protection. After they have finished work, they are also sprayed with disinfectant. Meanwhile, the used masks and gloves are burned at a cemetery and the hearse is also disinfected.

In addition, Palang Hitam workers must finish collecting and transporting COVID-19 cases within four hours.

We are not worried about [the risk of transmission] from the bodies," said Wahyudi. He noted that the team was more concerned about the risk of risk was transmission from the deceased's family members and relatives, "since they are the ones who have been monitoring the patient closely". "They might have been [exposed to the virus], said Wahyudi.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease is transmitted mainly by respiratory droplets that are expelled when an infected person sneezes or coughs. It is unclear how long the virus stays active after death, and the risk of infection is as yet unknown from handling the body of a person who died of COVID-19 or related complications.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has stated in its interim guidelines that there is no evidence of persons having become infected from exposure to the bodies of persons who died from COVID-19. The WHO guidelines recommend that all workers involved with preparing a body properly use personal protective equipment like disposable gloves, masks and impermeable gowns.

The Jakarta administration has allocated Pondok Ranggon cemetery in East Jakarta and Tegal Alur cemetery in West Jakarta for burying the bodies of people who have died of COVID-19.

The Indonesian Red Cross (PMI) is also available to provide mortuary transportation services for burial at other cemeteries, as long as the family of the deceased arrange the required paperwork and adhered to precautionary measures.

Wahyudi said that collecting the bodies of people who had died of COVID-19 was sometimes uncomfortable, as Palang Hitam staff might need to convince the surviving family members to release the bodies to their care.

Some families insist on taking the bodies of the deceased home [for the wake] or to a funeral home themselves, without proper [procedures]. There is a chance that they could open the coffin, he said.

Jakarta has temporarily closed public facilities to prevent mass gatherings as part of its physical distancing policy, and this includes cemeteries as well as restricting attendance at funerals.

Ricky Putra, the head of the Jakarta Park and Forest Agency's data and information center, said that cemeteries were only permitted to open for burial services attended by only a small number of direct relatives. Cemeteries were closed to ziarah (grave visiting) from March 14 to 30.
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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  Senator Aquilino Koko Pimentel III may face a string of charges and even a Senate probe for accompanying his expectant wife to the Makati Medical Center, effectively breaching quarantine protocols.

Senate Ethics Committee chairman Manny Pacquiao told CNN Philippines' News Night he can call for a hearing to tackle any complaint that may be filed against Pimentel.

Siguro kung may complaint na, iimbestigahan namin sa Ethics Committee kung may pagkukulang siya, kung may pagkasala siya, Pacquiao said. Pero sa tingin ko, as a husband, maganda yung intention niya na samahan yung asawa niya sa hospital.

[Translation: If there is a complaint, we can investigate in the Ethics Committee if he had any lapses or mistakes. But I think, as a husband, he had a good intention in accompanying his wife to the hospital.]

Pacquiao, who is from Partido Demokratiko Pilipino  Lakas ng Bayan which Pimentel heads, said his colleague may have just overlooked the risk that he may infect other people at the hospital out of his concern for his wife.

Former University of Makati law dean Rico Quicho said he, his associates and law students are drafting a complaint against Pimentel, looking into possible criminal, civil and administrative charges against the senator who tested positive for COVID-19.

Quicho said there is no definite date yet when to file their complaint against Pimentel, adding that they want to be thorough about it, making sure to include factual allegations against the senator.

He, however, said he is not in contact with Makati Medical Center and would not represent it. But he hopes that the hospital would eventually press charges against Pimentel.

Former Supreme Court spokesperson Theodore Te said it is clear that Pimentel violated quarantine protocols.

He and University of the Philippines law professor John Molo said Pimentel may have violated Section 9(e) of Republic Act 11332 or the Mandatory Reporting of Notifiable Diseases and Health Events of Public Health Concern Act.

That law punishes the failure to disclose notifiable diseases, like COVID-19, with a fine of 20,000 to 50,000 fine or a jail term of one to six months.

For violating the enhanced community quarantine, Molo said Pimentel can be fined between 10,000 and 50,000 or jailed for up to a year.

Molo added that Pimentel could also be sued for criminal negligence, disobedience to agents of a person in authority, graft and corruption and for damages.

He also said that Pimentel may be disbarred, and suspended or expelled from the Senate for what he did.

Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said they will temper the rigor of the law with human compassion as people are prone to commit violations during abnormal times like these.

But this is not to say that the DOJ (Department of Justice) will not act upon the filing of a proper complaint by any interested party, Guevarra said.

But Te said it is unfortunate that Guevarra came out with such a tone deaf statement that appeared to clear Pimentel.

Where is the compassion when authorities arrest curfew violators because they dont have a place to go? Te said.
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"We know there is a real need for students who are scrambling to find a place to stay and may be far away from their hometown and family with nowhere to go," says Marina MacDonald, CMO at Red Roof. "Red Roof has many locations near colleges and universities, and we have created the Student Support Program to provide secure and safe accommodations to give students some stability and peace of mind."

Students must show valid college identification to receive the 30% discount and weekly stay incentive. Rooms include Fast. Free. Verified. WiFi* that will allow students to be connected and engaged with virtual learning and e-classes during their stays. Pets can travel with students and always stay free. Students looking for accommodations close to campuses can book through May 15 and can stay through May 31, 2020 using VP code 627535.

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Artists in the war-torn city of Idlib in northern Syria have painted a mural celebrating the good health of Germanys chancellor Angela Merkel, after the leader tested negative for coronavirus on Monday.

The German chancellor went into quarantine at home last Sunday amid fears that she may have contracted Covid-19.

Angela Merkel welcomed Syrians and refugees from all over the world. She is a good person and we wish her well, Aziz Asmar, the artist who painted the mural with Anis Hamdoun, told The Independent.
Photo/Xinhua

Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty. Chen Wenling, chief economist of China Center for International Economic Exchange, cited the popular saying during a talk with Chinese youth to comment on the international communitys fight against the coronavirus.

It is regretful that the rest of the world did not take the window of opportunity seriously, which the Chinese people and government had won through a hard-fought battle. They wasted the opportunity with ignorance and bias, Chen said in a video conference held on Wednesday about Chinas and the worlds role in pandemic control.

On Thursday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom called on countries to use the second window of opportunity to suppress and stop the transmission of Covid-19 as many countries and regions introduced unprecedented lockdown measures.

With fewer and fewer cases, China has passed its darkest time since the first reports emerged of an outbreak in central Wuhan, China, two months ago.

The WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic in early March and the organization has reported over 460,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in 196 countries as of Mar. 25.

The Western world lambasted China for the quarantine measures it implemented in the early days of the outbreak, criticizing the Chinese government for violating human rights. However, China was the only country that responded to the request for help by Italy and Serbia a month later.

The cultural difference between the East and the West drags down the response to the global crisis. The discontent of a rising China in the international community, the malicious distortion of Chinese concepts, and bias toward Chinese culture are the reasons for the impasse, Chen pointed out.

In Europe for example, before it became the epicenter of the coronavirus on Mar. 13, the Covid-19 was treated like the flu , that is, until it became an uncontrollable disaster.

The EU is standing at a crossroad. It should rethink its relationship with the US, China, and Russia, among which China and Russia provided medical assistance to the hardest-hit member, Italy, as the number of confirmed cases surged on the other side of the Atlantic, said Cui Hongjian, director of the Department of European Studies at the China Institute of International Studies.

International cooperation has never been more in need than now. China is not taking advantage of your vulnerability; we want to help. Pursuing international leadership at this critical time is not a part of Eastern wisdom. Conspiracy will do no good for EU-China cooperation, Cui added.

Besides the current support in terms of medical supplies and experience sharing, China is seeking broader cooperation in the international public health mechanism, such as in some African regions, due to their below-average public health systems and the possibility of Africa becoming the next place of the pandemic outbreak following Europe.

This global crisis also exposed questions in the basic theories and values that dominate the Western world about what are human rights where the border between governance and individual freedom lies.

It will be difficult for China to change the stigma that emerged from the epidemic, because we are stronger before and have more responsibility to fulfill as the worlds second largest economy and the key link in the global supply chain, said Ding Yifan, former deputy director of the State Councils World Development Institute at Development Research Center. (by Miao)
PBS

In a technical sense, the scope of East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story, a PBS documentary which debuted Tuesday night, is extremely specific. Filmmaker-spouses Sarah Burns and David McMahon follow a 30-year period from 1970, when the Atlanta Housing Authority opened a public housing project called East Lake Meadows, until 2000, when, after decades of near-criminal negligence, the city destroyed and rebuilt it from scratch. But the film also attempts to tell a larger storyabout the fraught history of Americas relationship to public housingand a timely one, as the coronavirus pandemic forces the country to confront how the government serves its most vulnerable citizens.

Executive produced by Ken Burns, the film traces the origins of East Lake Meadows back to 1934, when Atlanta officials began construction on the first public housing project in the nation: Techwood Homes. We think of public housing as a place where low-income and mostly minority families live, author Richard Rothstein says in the documentary. Thats not how public housing began in this country. Instead, Techwood was built in the shadow of the Great Depression, when millions of familiesincluding middle- and upper-class familieslost their homes at once. The Roosevelt administration pitched public housing as a safety net for white middle-class Americans who had fallen on hard times, a stop-gap to help them ascend back to stability. Low-income or minority families were not the target demographics; their neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for public housing.

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Burns and McMahon sketch the trajectory of public housing through interviews with public officials, historians and journalists. After a while, white residents were able to use New Deal reforms to transition into homeownership, while black citizens were redlined out, given no means to accumulate wealth. For a time, the system was working as intended, Sarah Burns said. It was working as a temporary place for people to get their lives together and climb out of poverty. But as it became a place where it served lower and lower income people. White people are getting all these ladders out and the people who are left behind are non-white peoplein many cities, theyre African-Americanand theyre low-income, the lowest incomes. Thats when we start stigmatizing it more and funding it less.

Story continues

When East Lake Meadows was built in 1970, federal and local governments had already begun to gut public housing. The earliest residents discovered quickly that the place had been constructed so shoddily it bordered on criminal negligence, as one attorney puts it. Sewage flooded kitchen floors; roaches and mice infested the walls; trash went uncollected for days. Through dozens of interviews with former residents, Burns and McMahon paint the picture of a place all but abandoned by local officials, left to decay around the families living inside it. During the Reagan years, most of the attention paid to housing projects like East Lake Meadows came from flagrantly racist stereotypes of welfare recipients. Archival footage flips through years of dog whistles about superpredators and sensationalist media coverage of gang activity and the crack epidemic.

The documentary counters those portrayals with intimate stories about the families that lived at East Lake: a mother who saved 5 dollars each week and bought her own home, a boy who watched his friend die, a resident who became the complexs unofficial mayor. The strongest scenes come from a trove of archival footage from an old class project, when a local AV teacher sent off her grade-school students with cameras to film their home. Wherere you gonna go, one boy sings, as workers demolish nearby buildings, when they tear East Lake down?

But by the mid-90s, the conditions at East Lake had gotten so dire nearly everyone, including residents, wanted it demolished. With a woman named Renee Glover at the helm, the Atlanta Housing Authority moved to rebuild the place as a mixed income community, putting most units on the private market while reserving a few for public housing. Glover consulted with East Lake residents; she even brought it a vote. The community voted overwhelming in favor of redevelopment. But as Atlanta constructed the new complex, the people it was meant to serve slipped from view.

By the time Glover unveiled The Villages at East Lake, most of the former residents had moved away with Section 8 vouchers or relocated to other units. Of the few that remained, only some met the income standards the new development mandated. In one of the archival school videos, some kids tour one of the new homes. It looks Levittown-ish, like someones baking cookies off-screen. A real estate agent asks if any of them will be moving in. She is met with silence: No?

As a portrait of life at East Lake Meadows, the documentary is unsparing, affectionate, and thorough, if at times sentimental. But as an interrogation of how America has failed public housing, it falls short. Burns and McMahon zero in on individuals who lived in public housing, but shy away from the people who corrupted it. They imply, for example, that Glovers mixed income solution recreated the institutions racist original sin: privileging the middle class over those most in need. And their criticism is hedged. They never confront her about it, nor do they examine the ways it might have been improved. Odder still, they overlook how housing policy has gained steam on the national stagein Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders Green New Deal for Public Housing, in Rep. Ilhan Omars Homes for All Act, in the growing popularity of the Homes Guarantee. But in the end, their public housing mission echoes what East Lake Meadows does best: put the people who live there at the fore.

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced an $82 billion support package  equal to 3 per cent of Canadas GDP  to support the economy and Canadians finances during the coronavirus outbreak.

Individuals and businesses get $27 billion and $55 billion is earmarked to meet liquidity needs of Canadian businesses and households through tax deferrals to help stabilize the economy.

The crisis package outlined by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today will help to cushion the blow from the disruption caused by the coronavirus outbreak, said Stephen Brown, senior Canada economist, at Capital Economics, in a note.

That said, while the package reduces the chance that weakness in the coming months will morph into a prolonged slump, we still think the government needs to do more to secure a strong recovery further down the line.

The Prime Minister says hes ready to take further action as needed.

After waiving the one-week waiting period to receive employment insurance (EI) payments in the last package, Ottawa is offering aid for affected workers who arent covered by EI. They will get up to $900 every 2 weeks for 14 weeks, at an amount comparable to EI.

No Canadian should have to worry about paying their rent or buying groceries during this difficult time, said Trudeau.

That is why we are taking the strong action needed to stabilize our economy and help those impacted by the COVID-19 virus. Together, we will get through this difficult time.

The deadline for individuals to file their taxes is pushed back to June 1, 2020 and people who owe money will not have to pay until August 31, 2020.

Low and modest-income families will get a top up on their GST credits. Individuals get $400 and couples get $600.

The Canada Childcare Benefit is also being increased by $300 per child.

Students also get relief in the form of a 6 month moratorium on student loan payments.

The measures seem better targeted than a US plan under discussion that would send a cheque to all, given that income disruptions arent evenly spread, said Avery Shenfeld, chief economist at CIBC Capital Markets.

Story continues

Some are designed to help insure against a wave of household and business defaults, including extending benefits to those losing jobs who wouldnt currently qualify for employment insurance payments, such as part-timers, those in quarantine not able to report to work, those looking after someone who is ill, and the self-employed.

Small businesses get a 10 per cent wage subsidy for the next 90 days, up to a maximum of $1,375 per employee and $25,000 per employer.

In a joint news news conference with Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz following the Prime Ministerss announcement, Finance Minister Bill Morneau says hes prepared to do whatever it takes to keep the economy strong and stable.

We have the fiscal fire power to respond.

When asked about why the Bank of Canada hasnt matched the U.S Feds latest rate cut to basically zero, Poloz said he was waiting to see what Ottawa would announce today and cautioned that Canada has its own monetary policy.

Poloz hasnt ruled out further cuts or quantitative easing.

Jessy Bains is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance Canada. Follow him on Twitter @jessysbains.

Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android.
The NHS critical care nurse who went viral with her emotional video plea urging shoppers to stop panic buying has revealed she might have contracted COVID-19.

Dawn Bilbrough, 51, from York, touched hearts across the nation last week when she shared a tearful video explaining she had gone to the supermarket at the end of an exhausting hospital shift only to discover there was hardly any food on the shelves.

Speaking on Good Morning Britain today, Dawn told how she is now in self-isolation after developing symptoms of coronavirus, including shortness of breath, chest discomfort and ongoing nausea.

She also urged viewers to stay at home, saying: 'You need to protect the NHS, you need to save lives.'

The critical care nurse who urged shoppers to stop stripping supermarket shelves amid the coronavirus pandemic revealed she may have contracted COVID-19. Dawn Bilbrough, 51, from York, appeared on Good Morning Britain via video link today (pictured)

The nurse touched hearts across the nation last week when she shared a tearful video explaining she had gone to the supermarket at the end of an exhausting hospital shift only to discover there was hardly any food on the shelves. Pictured, a screengrab from Dawn's video

Speaking via video link, Dawn said: 'I do believe I have Covid but obviously I haven't been tested so it's hard to confirm.

She continued: 'Ive been sleeping lots, I've been discussing going back to work on Monday - but that will depend on my symptoms.'

The NHS nurse admitted it was 'lonely' in self-isolation. It is not clear why she has been unable to be tested for COVID-19.

Speaking on her experience caring for hospital patients, Dawn said: 'People I've spoken to, the cases are getting more and more each day - but my friends, we're all worried people in the UK are taking this seriously.

'People are going to die, you need to stay indoors. You need to protect the NHS, you need to save lives.'

Dawn appeared on Good Morning Britain via video link, pictured, and urged viewers to take the Government advice seriously

Last week, after discovering there were no fruit and vegetables for her to sustain a healthy living amid the COVID-19 outbreak, the healthcare worker made a tearful plea to the public urging them to 'just stop it'.

In her original video the nurse took to Facebook from the seat of her car to tell the nation: 'So I've just come out the supermarket. There's no fruit and veg and I had a little cry in there.'

'I'm a critical care nurse and I've just finished 48 hours of work and I just wanted to get some stuff in for the next 48 hours. There's no fruit, there's no vegetables and I just don't know how I'm supposed to stay healthy.

The NHS worker asked the public to 'just stop it' after she was unable to buy basic items for herself

'Those people who are just stripping the shelves have basic foods you just need to stop it because it's people like me that are going to be looking after you when you are at your lowest and just stop it please!'

After sharing the emotional video, Ms Bilbrough was flooded with messages of support from concerned friends and loved ones, with some offering her some of their very own food items.

Speaking about it today, she said: 'I wasnt expecting it, I just wanted to go home and cook some nice food and to find everything had been stripped from the shelves, while i'm living in the United Kingdom, I just felt very, very sad.'
Married At First Sight's Mishel Karen has revealed thieves broke into her $500,000 home in Brisbane while she was away filming the show and stole her sex toys.

The 49-year-old police worker told the Not Here to Make Friends podcast that the burglars took the intimate gadgets and other 'personal stuff'.

She described the attack as 'random', adding that the criminals also snatched her bras, underpants and shoes.

How bizarre! Married At First Sight's Mishel Karen has revealed thieves broke into her $500,000 home in Brisbane while she was away filming the show and stole her sex toys

Mishel didn't hear about the robbery until later because she was recording a commitment ceremony in Sydney at the time.

'My daughter [Eva] was calling me for four hours and producers wouldn't let me speak to her because I was filming a commitment ceremony,' Mishel said.

Recalling her phone call with Eva, Mishel said: 'I said to her, "Go check in the drawer." They stole our vibrators and they took [Eva's] as well!'

Crime: The 49-year-old police worker didn't hear about the robbery until later because she was recording a commitment ceremony in Sydney at the time. Pictured: Mishel's Brisbane home

Mishel added that police later arrested a suspect.

The single mother-of-two took viewers inside her Brisbane home during homestay week on Married At First Sight.

She purchased the three-bedroom property for $490,000 in 2015, and it's now believed to be worth more than half a million dollars.

Mishel lives there with her two children: Sam, 20, and Eva, 18.

Issues: On Wednesday's episode of MAFS, Mishel's relationship with Steve Burley (left) went downhill when she watched his months-old audition tape

On Wednesday's episode of MAFS, Mishel's relationship with Steve Burley went downhill when she watched his months-old audition tape.

Steve, 52, had told producers he wanted a partner in her 'mid- to late-30s', which upset Mishel because she is 49.

Despite staying together at the last commitment ceremony, on-set photos published earlier this week prove they split before the final vows.

Married At First Sight continues Sunday at 7pm on Channel Nine
(Photo : Image by Prawny from Pixabay ) Rare Apple Sneakers Sold! Guess How Much This 90s Shoes Cost-- Expensive as Air Jordan! (Photo : Heritage Auctions ) Rare Apple Sneakers Sold! Guess How Much This 90s Shoes Cost Now (Photo : Heritage Auctions ) Rare Apple Sneakers Sold! Guess How Much This 90s Shoes Cost Now

While people patiently wait for the release of the iPhone 12 in the market, other fans of Apple shifted their interest in buying the rarest Apple Sneakers. Yup, you've heard it right! There is an available Apple Sneakers that was made back in the 90s. Unfortunately, you no longer able to make bidding out of this item, as Apple Sneakers is now sold for a huge amount of money! Here's how much these sneakers cost, and they're as expensive as a pair of Air Jordan V.

Don't look for iPhone 12, buy Apple Sneakers first!

Have you ever imagined buying a pair of Apple Sneakers? Unexpectedly, they released a bunch of pairs of these "Apple Computer Sneakers" back in the year 90s, and the limited edition items were now sold for exactly $9, 687. If you compared it to today's market, you could already purchase one of the most expensive shoes in the world, Air Jordan V, for that price.

So why is it expensive, and why would Apple create sneakers without us knowing?

Apple Sneakers or Apple-branded trainer shoes is one of the best Apple collectibles that was exclusively created for Apple employees in the early '90s. It was now sold for a generous price when a famous bidding company, Heritage Auctions, made a bidding event for the item.

These pair of sneakers has a shoe size of 9 1/2, featured the classic Apple rainbow logo embroidered on the side, and we're already pre-worn and featured some minor issues like discoloration to the edges and mild surface soiling, according to Heritage Auctions.

Heritage Auctions listed Apple Sneakers as part of the "Urban Art Signature Auction"-- that are usually filled up with memorabilia and other iconic items released from the past by famous companies but now are totally sold out.

After the item went to 20 biddings, the item was finally sold for over $9,000 to an unidentified person. So, that's a sad thing for people out there that aims to have these iconic shoes.

Other items auctioned in Heritage Auctions

Online auctioning is now becoming more in demand-- even more due to the Coronavirus. Since everyone is now in their homes, you need something to get you to mind out of all the chaos that is happening in the world.

Heritage Auctions is just one of the most famous and renowned auctioning houses in the world. The company has already sold a lot of other iconic items from different famous brands, including the latest of them all, the rare Nintendo Play Station Prototype-- and that also cost a lot!

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Toss, dont flush, that wipe.

Thats the advice of Bethlehem Water and Sewer Resources as it seeks to head off sewer backups during the unfolding coronavirus pandemic.

The virus has led to shortages of toilet paper on store shelves, potentially prompting consumers to find an alternative in the bathroom. Plus, among the advice of medical professionals in the coronavirus fight is to regularly sanitize frequently touched surfaces -- maybe with disinfectant wipes, maybe with paper towels and spray products.

Don't flush down the toilet anything that's not human waste or toilet paper, Bethlehem's sewer operators stress.

According to a news release Thursday from the city:

"All sanitizing wipes, paper towels, rags, diapers, baby wipes and anything advertised as 'flushable' should not be flushed down the toilet.

"These materials are not biodegradable and can cause blockages in your home plumbing system as well as the citys sewage collection system which can result in back-ups, overflows, flooded basements, and damage to sewage handling equipment.

"The citys sewer department is keenly aware of this situation and has stepped up maintenance efforts for sewer main flushing and cleaning to prevent overflows and back-ups."

Unlike the novel coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 illness, the debate over flushable wipes is not new.

In its blog, lentheplumber.com states: Wet wipes are marketed as flushable and septic-safe, so there should be no problem with flushing them down the toilet, right? Wrong! Even though these wipes do eventually break down, they take a longer amount of time to do so compared to toilet paper. Since the breakdown of wet wipes arent as rapid, clogged pipes and blockages occur more frequently. Putting your homes plumbing at risk for serious clogs translates to hefty plumbing bills for you.

Manufacturer Cottonelle, on the other hand, touted a 2019 endorsement from the wastewater collection and treatment agency in Jackson, Florida, claiming that flushable wipes  specifically Cottonelle flushable wipes  are a solution to the problems related to non-flushable wipes in their sewers.

Bethlehem officials are making no such distinctions, however, and ask citizens to do their part and adhere to their basic guidelines.

For more information on the coronavirus, consult your state health department at health.pa.gov or covid19.nj.gov and the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover or a personal story you want to share.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. If theres anything about this story that needs attention, please email him. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
T hose with the fewest resources are finding their daily struggles multiplied amid the pandemic, but this is magnified for people with migrant backgrounds.

Charities such as Praxis continue to support people in crisis, but the Home Office needs to recognise the link between public health and immigration administration. Many people are still required to attend Home Office meetings in person. Imagine being torn between travelling on public transport, against government advice, to visit an immigration office, or risking the wrath of that same government for not showing up.

The priority should be limiting social interactions, not worrying about renewing visas, or paying Home Office fees, or becoming overstayers if they are unable to meet requirements.

The Government must issue clear guidance and reassure individuals and their legal advisers that they will not be penalised. Sally Daghlian OBE, CEO, Praxis Community Projects

Editor's reply

Dear Sally

The last thing the country needs is to have people on the streets or travelling unnecessarily, so I agree that its right to show flexibility, in this case over immigration matters.

Like many of the problems that have been thrown up by this crisis, its understandable to an extent that the Government doesnt have instant solutions to every issue that arises, but there are at least signs of progress over visas. Here the Home Office has said that any expiring before May 31 can be extended until that date, although those affected must apply for this right. To do this they can either email the Coronavirus Immigration Help Centre at CIH@homeoffice.gov.uk (in English) or call free on 0800 678 1767 from Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. The details required are the applicants full name, date of birth, nationality, previous visa reference number, and the reason why they cant return home.

Its a sensible response, and lets hope other helpful changes follow. Martin Bentham, Home Affairs Editor

Dont let school pupils go hungry

Luz Estrada, left, hands lunch to a student at Rockwood Elementary School in Oklahoma City, as the city public school district holds their first day of providing free meals to students / AP

Schools are the first line of defence against hunger for so many children. We cannot allow coronavirus to breach it.

Feeding Britain is bringing together school kitchens and caterers with local authorities and voluntary sector organisations to shore up that defence. Between a mixture of collection points and home deliveries, and with generous support from businesses, we are helping to build up the food supplies and logistical support required to ensure no child goes hungry.

If you wish to contribute, please email info@feedingbritain.org Andrew Forsey, Director, Feeding Britain

Standard delivers to readers in need

Im obeying the directives by not venturing out of my house, but I was concerned about not being able to pick up my Standard each day. I love the Sudoku and crosswords  a vital part of a routine which has otherwise gone to pot. So thank you for the delivery. Please continue to inform and entertain us in our solitude! Jill Lee

Thank you for home-delivering my Standard. Im trapped for the next three months and reading your newspaper made me feel normal and connected. Please keep it up. Sarah Whitehead

The Evening Standard / REUTERS

Fight fuel poverty amid virus crisis

As the UK locks down, more and more people are struggling to meet the costs of electricity and heating. We are all footing the bill for internet access, light and heating normally provided by workplaces, schools and community centres. Some are losing their income. Some pensions wont stretch any further. One Southwark mother caring for a disabled daughter told us: Im using all my food money on the prepayment meter, spending more as Im worried the top-up shops might be closed.

A welcome deal has been reached to support those most in need, but it wont be a reality without publicity, clarity (will bills be reduced or just deferred?) and instant relief. Fuel Poverty Action launched a Change.org petition (Covid-19: Guarantee peoples heat and power) calling for government and suppliers to offer:

Immediate free credit to prepayment meter users.

A reduction of unaffordable bills.

Moratorium on debt repayments.

Prominent publicity of the support available.
ATLANTA, GA / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Findit, Inc. (OTC PINK:FDIT) owner of Findit.com, a full service social networking management platform which provides online marketing services, is featuring Findit member Chavez for Charity who sells charity bracelets online that help benefit various humanitarian efforts, charities and foundations that are fighting to support some of the most important causes that our world faces today.

Through their Colors for Causes Campaign, Chavez for Charity currently benefits eight different foundations and charities. Each charity is matched to a specific color of charity bracelet. For every sale of their charity bracelets, Chavez for Charity donates 25% of net profits to the charity that the colored charity bracelet corresponds to. For the Month of March, Chavez for Charity is featuring the Malala Fund, which empowers young girls through 12 years of education.

Chavez for Charity has a beautiful collection of color matched charity bracelets that they sell online. Each bracelet is color matched to a specific charity - purple charity bracelets help support the Malala Fund, pink charity bracelets help support the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation for Breast Cancer, green charity bracelets support the Sierra Club Foundation and so on. Every charitable bracelet sold helps spread the word for Chavez for Charity's mission as well as the mission of the charity you choose to support with your charity bracelet purchase and it helps each charity continue their mission because of your donation.

Findit has provided marketing services to Chavez for Charity since September of 2019. The services that Findit provides Chavez for Charity includes content creation and social network marketing to increase the overall online presence of Chavez for Charity in search engines and on social networking sites. The content is created within Chavez for Charity's Findit sites that they claimed utilizing Findit's Claim your Name Tool. To date, Chavez for Charity has claimed 13 Findit Names under the Claim Your Name Feature on Findit. Each of the names represents a specific charitable organization that Chavez for Charity benefits through donations from the sales of their charity bracelets or keywords or phrases that Chavez for Charity is looking to index under in search engines . The purpose of these Findit Sites is to improve overall online exposure and increase the number of search results in search engines for Chavez for Charity under those keywords or phrases. The Claim Your Name Feature on Findit lets you reserve as many names or phrases that you would like and each name or phrase only exists once on Findit.

Clark St. Amant of Findit stated "Chavez for Charity is doing a great thing by helping support these important foundations and humanitarian efforts. We wanted to highlight Chavez for Charity right now while many people may be at home and shopping online. Chavez for Charity is helping others and many people are looking for ways to give back during this time and Chavez for Charity charity bracelets make beautiful gifts for friends and family while also giving back to different important foundations and causes."

Visit Chavez for Charity on Findit under their Findit Names

findit.com/malala-fund-chavez-for-charity

findit.com/matthew-shepard-foundation-chavez-for-charity

findit.com/best-friends-animal-society-chavez-for-charity

findit.com/water-chavez-for-charity

Chavez for Charity has a beautiful selection of charity bracelets that make amazing gifts for friends, family, coworkers and for yourself. They help support worthy foundations, spread the word about Chavez for Charity's mission as well as the mission of the charity you elect to support with your purchase.

Chavez for Charity Colors for Causes Campaign Supports:

Malala Fund - Purple Charitable Bracelets

Water.org - Blue Charitable Bracelets

Best Friends Animal Society - Brown Charitable Bracelets

The Hunger Project - Black Charitable Bracelets

TAPS - Gold Charitable Bracelets

Sierra Club Foundation - Green Charitable Bracelets

Matthew Shepard Foundation - Multi Colored Charitable Bracelets

Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation - Pink Charitable Bracelets

Chavez for Charity's Featured Charity Bracelets That Benefit The Malala Fund

The Power Of Women Bracelets

Shades of Spring Bracelets

Besties Bracelets Set

To learn more about Chavez for Charity and their Colors for Causes Campaign, visit Chavez for Charity Colors for Causes.

Findit focuses on reaching the target demographics for Chavez for Charity that may or may not be aware of them in an effort to heighten brand awareness of their services and in some cases, their extensive product lines.

About Chavez for Charity

When Julie Chavez founded Chavez for Charity in 2013, she had an ambitious vision. She wanted to create a line of colorful bracelets that would contribute, in a significant way, to some of the most important humanitarian issues facing our world today. Leveraging her background as the Founder and Designer of the small, yet highly coveted jewelry line Marie Chavez, whose fans included a-list celebrities like Julia Roberts, Jennifer Garner, Rosario Dawson, and Anne Hathaway, Julie carefully crafted a brand that is unique in its mission and has a purpose much greater than profits. Supporting their trademark phrase "Colors for Causes', each of the 10 colors in the collection represents a distinct cause. For every product sold, Chavez for Charity donates 25% of their profit to each color's corresponding cause.

To date, Chavez for Charity has provided over 6,000 people in rural and impoverished communities with clean water; funded over 500 micro-loans for women entrepreneurs world wide, covered 1,400 hours of critical pediatric cancer research, impacted 724 students in Ghana for a lifetime with Teacher Support Programming - and the list goes on. With over 3,000 stores across the U.S. and Canada carrying their iconic bracelets, in 2018 Chavez for Charity will proudly celebrate 1.6 million dollars in donations. While this is a major milestone for the company, it is just the beginning of what they aspire to accomplish.

About Findit, Inc.

Findit.com which is a Social Media Content Management Platform that provides an interactive search engine for all content posted in Findit to appear in Findit search. The site is an open platform that provides access to Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines access to its content posted to Findit so it can be indexed in these search engines as well. Findit provides Members the ability to post, share and manage their content. Once they have posted in Findit, we ensure the content gets indexed in Findit Search results. Findit provides an option for anyone to submit URLs that they want indexed in Findit search result, along with posting status updates through Findit Right Now. Status Updates posted in Findit can be crawled by outside search engines which can result in additional organic indexing. All posts on Findit can be shared to other social and bookmarking sites by members and non-members. Findit provides Real Estate Agents the ability to create their own Findit Site where they can pull in their listing and others through their IDX account. Findit, Inc., is focused on the development of monetized Internet-based web products that can provide an increase in brand awareness of our members. Findit, Inc., trades under the stock symbol FDIT on the OTCPinksheets."

Safe Harbor:

This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the "Exchange Act"), including statements regarding potential sales, the success of the company's business, as well as statements that include the word believe or similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Findit, Inc. to differ materially from those implied or expressed.

CONTACT:

Clark St. Amant

404-443-3224

SOURCE: Findit, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/582685/Findit-Featured-Member-Chavez-for-Charity-Sells-Charity-Bracelets-Online-That-Benefit-Various-Humanitarian-Efforts-and-Foundations
Savoy bartenders launch seminar series for bar staff in coronavirus lockdown

With bars forced to shut their doors amid the current coronavirus pandemic and bar staff urged to stay at home, the time could be ripe for some professional development.

In a bid to fill this educational gap, two revered bartenders from The Savoy in London have launched an online training series for bar staff to help them hone their skills from home.

Entitled The Booze Brain, the live-stream platform will provide viewers with seminars about alcoholic products and techniques, updates from the industry and more, with brand ambassadors and representatives called in to host some sessions.

It has been devised by Maxim Schulte, head bartender at American Bar at The Savoy - which was named hotel bar of the year in Gin Magazine's Icons of Gin Awards in February - and Jo Last, senior bartender at the Beaufort Bar.

Details of upcoming seminars in The Booze Brain series can be found on Facebook and Instagram.

26 March 2020 - Bethany Whymark
More Houston-area residents younger than 60 are testing positive for the novel coronavirus than are older persons considered most at risk of developing serious complications from the illness.

Middle-age adults  those in their 40s and 50s  account for the lions share of cases where there have been positive tests, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis.

A review of 164 cases from March 4 through Monday in counties with confirmed diagnoses  Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, Galveston, Liberty and Chambers  show about 49 percent of COVID-19 cases in the Houston region are adults in their 40s and 50s. When including all those under 60 who have tested positive, the number jumps to 78 percent.

People older than 60, who federal health authorities say are more likely to require hospital care if infected, make up about 21 percent of those who have tested positive.

The data does not include Fort Bend County from March 22 onward as officials there have since stopped publishing individual case data, such as age and gender.

The review also does not include people who tested negative for the virus because most counties have not provided that information.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Houston Democrat, last week noted a similar trend among seniors at United Memorial Medical Center, a private hospital in Acres Home. She said that fewer seniors were showing up to be tested. The municipal health jurisdictions consider data from third-party testing sites, such as the hospital, to be unconfirmed until they have reviewed it.

About 40 adults in their 20s and 30s tested positive for the illness during the nearly three-week period, as local governments increased their calls for social distancing, according to the analysis.

Even a handful of children in the Houston region tested positive for the coronavirus.

Dr. Umair Shah, executive director of Harris County Public Health, said he was aware of the trend of younger people contracting the coronavirus.

People like me, who feel like they can go out and do everything  we, too, can test positive, Shah said Tuesday morning at a news conference, where officials also announced a stay-at-home order for Harris County.

All of us have the potential of transmitting that to others, he added.

Harris Countys stay-at-home order was issued as an attempt to drastically reduce the number of new COVID-19 cases before the virus overwhelms the local healthcare system.

Already, the Houston areas rate of hospitalization has been higher than what was recorded in the Chinese city of Wuhan  where COVID-19 originated  and in New York, where authorities have watched more than 25,000 cases unfold. Health officials have attributed the increased hospitalization rate to the initial inability to test as the pandemic first crept into the community.

Both age groups  those under 60 and those older  have had nearly the same number of hospitalizations, data shows.

The majority of the initial cases for the Houston region were from patients in their 60s, most of whom were vacationers on board a Nile River cruise in Egypt.

While it is nearly impossible to compare local numbers to the national trend because of the lack of consistency among local health authorities on how to disclose the age of those testing positive, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week that 29 percent of U.S. cases  of 4,226 people  were among those 20 to 44.

Persons age 65 to 84 accounted for 25 percent of the case total.

Data from the initial outbreak in China has indicated that older adults, especially those with underlying health issues, are at a higher risk of complications  even death  than younger people, according to the CDC study.

nicole.hensley@chron.com
Cases of the coronavirus increased by 2,492 new positive test results Thursday, bringing the states total to 6,876 people infected with at least 81 known deaths from the virus. The latest numbers marked the single-day increase in the state since the expanding outbreak began.

Speaking at his daily press briefing, Gov. Phil Murphy also announced 19 new deaths from coronavirus, including four in Essex County, three in Bergen, three in Middlesex, two in Burlington, two in Monmouth, two in Morris and one each in Ocean, Passaic and Somerset. Three of the deaths were from longterm care facilities.

Sadly the number of lost lives is going up, Murphy told reporters. "Thats partly due to some community spread.

Heres a roundup of coronavirus news:

N.J. reports 1st health care worker to die from coronavirus: A health care worker has died from the coronavirus, officials said Thursday. State Health Commissioner Judy Persichilli said the person was a part-time worker in the northern part of the state. Officials did not identify where the person worked.

Rutgers offers refunds for room and board after coronavirus cut semester short: Rutgers University announced Thursday it will issue refunds toward some of what students spent on room and board for the spring 2020 semester that has been cut short by the coronavirus outbreak. Colleges around the state moved to online courses while many have postponed graduation or moved the ceremonies online as the pandemic spread.

Layoffs possible after coronavirus cuts deeply into Jersey City budget: Mayor Steve Fulop said that some municipal employees may be laid off or furloughed as the city grapples with a $70 million budget shortfall caused by the coronavirus, according to the Jersey Journal.

Ocean County to open testing center for residents starting Monday: Officials on Thursday said a testing site for county residents would open Monday at the county college in Toms River. Residents are required to register ahead of time on the Ocean County Health Department web page, www.ochd.org, or by calling 732-341-9700, ext.7411. They must also present proof of residency and a prescription for the test from a doctor.

Another 2,492 positive tests as New Jersey sees huge single-day increase in cases: New Jerseys total known cases of the coronavirus increased to at least 6,876, including at least 81 known deaths, as officials announced another 2,492 new positive test results Thursday, marking the largest single-day increase of the states outbreak.

N.J. may give homeowners mortgage relief during coronavirus outbreak, Murphy says: Gov. Phil Murphy said hes hopeful that the states homeowners who have taken a financial hit during the coronavirus outbreak could get some relief on their mortgages. An exact plan wasnt clear yet, but the governor said hes very much looking into it.

Coronavirus cases in the United States: There were 80,021 cases reported in the country as of Wednesday afternoon, according to information from the the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The center logged 1,136 deaths nationwide. The United States now has the most confirmed cases in the world, according to data from the New York Times.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share. If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

Sign up for text message alerts from NJ.com on coronavirus in New Jersey:





NJ Advance Media staff writers Matt Arco, Amanda Hoover, Brent Johnson, Jeff Goldman, Steve Strunsky and the Jersey Journal contributed to this report.

Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
1. Yes. The downtown area needs a good draw. Some quality taverns would be a plus.

2. Yes. Too many storefronts are vacant. Bars could help to bring in needed revenue.

3. No. Putting a number of bars downtown is just asking for trouble. Dont change things.

4.No. Several churches have located downtown. Putting bars close by would be a bad fit.

5. Unsure. It would depend on how the law is written and what standards are enacted.

Vote

View Results




By Kim Hyun-bin







Kakao is scheduled to implement artificial intelligence technology to provide a diverse range of services at Everland through its Kakao Talk application.







Samsung C&T, which operates Everland, has signed an agreement Thursday with Kakao Enterprise, the AI sector subsidiary of the operator of the country's largest mobile messenger.







"By combining the unique experience of Everland and Kakao's future technology IT platform we will be able to deliver new value to customers," Samsung C&T CEO Chung Keum-yong said. "Through digital innovation we will work to create an IT park in cooperation with Kakao Enterprise."







An agreement between Everland and Kakao Mobility, a cloud based parking system will be implemented in April.







Kakao Mobility runs Kakao T the cab-hailing application as well as Kakao Navi.







When customers use Kakao Navi to reach Everland the app will guide the customer to the nearest vacant parking spot.







Since March last year, Everland, Kakao Mobility and Seoul National University's GSES Transportation Studies department have been tasked with 10 projects related to enhancing vehicle traffic flow around the amusement park.







"Through Kakao Enterprise's superior AI, big data technology platform we plan to enhance customer value at Everland," Baek Sang-yeop, CEO of Kakao Enterprise said. "We will work closely with Samsung C&T to provide more convenient and innovative services."






A cruise director quarantined on a ship off the coast of Australia is sharing her isolation diary online after dropping off passengers in Sydney on March 17.

Chloe Loddo, who is the Cruise director on the Carnival Splendor and hosts all the main events on board for more than 3,000 guests, is currently anchored off the Wollongong coast with 1,100 crew and no passengers to entertain.

The popular director and her team aren't allowed to enter New South Wales as part of premier Gladys Berejiklian new cruise line restrictions, after 133 passengers from the Ruby Princess ship that docked on March 19 tested positive to COVID-19.

They've been there since March 18 after the Federal Government placed a 30-day ban on cruise ships docking in Australia unless they had special permission - only returning to Circular Quay in Sydney to pick up provisions for crew on board.

Chloe has been documenting her quarantine on Facebook, not knowing when she will be allowed to return to her native Gibraltar to see friends and family.

'Today on St Paddy's Day we are sailing into the sunset back into Sydney to disembark our guests two days early,' she wrote on March 17.

'We will be sailing back out again with no guests tonight. Everyone is happy, healthy and in good spirits. We will be back soon! Thank you to the incredible team on the Splendor and to all the Aussie guests for your love and support.'

Scroll down for video

Chloe Loddo (pictured), who is the Cruise director on the Carnival Splendor and hosts all the main events on board, is currently anchored off the Wollongong coast with 1,100 crew and no passengers to entertain

'We will be sailing back out again with no guests tonight. Everyone is happy, healthy and in good spirits. We will be back soon,' she said (the Carnival Splendor near Port Kembla, NSW)

'Today on St Paddy's Day we are sailing into the sunset back into Sydney to disembark our guests two days early,' she wrote on March 17 (pictured)

But isolation isn't a holiday for Chloe and her crew, who are keeping productive with 'some office and locker cleaning' despite the eerily, quiet decks.

On the second day of their quarantine a group of Chloe's friends finished jigsaw puzzles in the 'coffee shop' after a day spent disinfecting their surroundings.

By day three they were conducting a rehearsal of Dr Seuss - a show they normally put on for guests - and Chloe headed to the gym for a quick workout.

She has been livestreaming some of their shows to her 6,000 fans, with musical numbers and comedy skits providing a welcome distraction to cruise fans tuning in.

DAY ONE: Chloe's crew members dropped off their passengers in Sydney before turning around to head out to sea

DAY TWO: Everyone spent ample time cleaning out their lockers and disinfecting the ship

DAY THREE: They were conducting a rehearsal of Dr Seuss - a show they normally put on for guests

'It's a bit weird with no guests on board. We are safe and we're staying positive. We're getting the crew to rest and doing lots of cleaning,' she said in one live video.

'We're keeping the 1,100 crew entertained with fun live music. We're all staying on board being very well looked after.'

She noted that the lights had been dimmed to conserve energy on the ship but little else had been affected.

On day four Chloe curated some workshops that would help those who usually conduct the 'Welcome Aboard' show for travellers, and visited the gym again.

DAY THREE: Chloe headed to the gym for a quick workout while on board

DAY FOUR: Chloe curated some workshops that would help those who usually conduct the 'Welcome Aboard' show for travellers

DAY FIVE: 'We are back in Sydney on day five of quarantine so we can pick up some more provisions and sail back out again,' Chloe announced the following day

'We are back in Sydney on day five of quarantine so we can pick up some more provisions and sail back out again,' Chloe announced the following day.

'I took some time to relax today. Thank you Julie Andrews for keeping me company,' she said, sharing a photo of a book she was reading.

Day six was 'inventory day' where they counted how many charity 'Wiggle for Westmead' shirts they have and bingo boxes.

Things looked similar on day seven with more inventory and cleaning, with the crew testing their 'towel animal' skills by folding tiny animals that would usually be placed on a freshly made bed.

DAY SIX: Day six was 'inventory day' where they counted how many charity 'Wiggle for Westmead' shirts they have and bingo boxes

DAY SEVEN: The crew tested their 'towel animal' skills by folding tiny animals that would usually be placed on a freshly made bed

Chloe reported that day eight was a teaching time for staff and involved a few relaxing card games like Uno.

With 'unlimited wifi' on board Chloe will be continuing to update her followers while in isolation, with details about where they are heading next to come.

New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian announced on Thursday passengers won't be allowed off cruise ships in Sydney until new protocols are signed.

DAY EIGHT: Chloe reported that day eight was a teaching time for staff and involved a few relaxing card games like Uno

'I don't want a single person coming off a ship in Sydney until various signing of protocols between the federal and state governments,' Ms Berejiklian said.

'And that's what we are negotiating with the federal government.'

The decision came after 2,647 passengers from the Ruby Princess were allowed to disembark in Sydney on March 19 despite reports of flu-like symptoms on board.

Since then, 133 passengers have been diagnosed with coronavirus from the ship and a 78-year-old female passenger became the eighth person to die from the virus in Australia.
An intensive care nurse who spent 15 hours treating coronavirus patients was left devastated after she finished her shift to find her bike had been stolen.

Kathy Miranda finished a long shift in the Intensive Care Unit at Wellington Hospital in New Zealand at 2am on Wednesday.

But when she went to collect her electronic e-bike, worth $1,820, the exhausted nurse realised a thief had cut through the lock and stolen it.

Ms Miranda posted on Twitter and Facebook asking users if she could borrow a bike to get to work and keep helping victims of COVID-19.

Kathy Miranda finished a long shift in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Wellington Hospital in New Zealand at 2am on Wednesday

When Kathy Miranda she went to collect her electronic e-bike, worth $1,820, the exhausted nurse realised a thief had cut through the lock and stolen it

'Feeling empty,' she wrote.

'The last thing I needed was for someone to steal my e-bike from the hospital.

'I'm not sure what to say but any good vibes anyone has to spare, I could really use about now?'

Her friend and colleague Lara Conyers shared the post and said she was 'disgusted'.

'[Kathy] is an ICU nurse and an integral member of our covid response team,' Ms Conyers wrote.

'She has been working 12-15 hour days in preparation for this pandemic, serving our community and keeping us safe. Today a member of that same community stole from her, and robbed her of her means to commute to work.'

Ms Miranda was inundated with responses from people who wanted to donate money for a new one or who had bikes to spare. Pictured: the bike that was stolen

She urged community members to keep an eye out for e-bikes on sale in case it belongs to her friend.

Ms Miranda was inundated with responses from people who wanted to donate money for a new one or who had bikes to spare.

Others slammed the thief as a 'scumbag', 'b***tard' and 'rodent'.

Local MP Nicola Willis wrote: 'This makes me so cross. Please know the rest of us are so grateful to you for the work you are doing and will do for us during this crisis. You deserve much much better than this.'

Another colleague set up a Go Fund Me page which has raised more than $1,200.

A police spokesperson told New Zealand Herald the incident had been reported and police were making enquiries.

People wearing face masks leave a supermarket after buying supplies one day before the country goes on lockdown to stop any progress of the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Wellington

Authorities in New Zealand fear cases could soar into the thousands, flooding the healthcare system.

A state of emergency was declared by the New Zealand Minister for Civil Defence Peeni Henare on Wednesday afternoon as the number of infections soared to 205 overnight - a rise of almost 50 per cent.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern issued a dire warning to the country as it prepared to go into a month-long lockdown at midnight on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media at a press conference on March 25 in Wellington

Roads were closed and police began moving around the country with the authority to question people found outside their homes.

Ardern said the measures were tough but necessary.

'Modelling suggests we could have several thousand cases before we see the measures we're taking today having an impact,' she said in a press conference.

'Breaking the rules could kill someone close to you.

'Every move you make could be a risk to someone else.'

Director of Civil Defence Emergency Management Sarah Stuart-Black said the emergency was declared due to the 'unprecedented nature of this global pandemic'.

'[It will] ensure the government has all the powers it needs to slow the spread of Covid-19 and reduce its impact,' she said.
A father-of-three arrested for transporting four shotguns and a revolver in a car in west Dublin has been further remanded in custody pending the possibility of more serious charges.

Security man Eugene Farrell, 40, was refused bail last week after he was charged over the weapons seizure on St Patrick's Day.

Mr Farrell, of Moorefield Avenue, Clondalkin, Dublin, is accused of three counts of possession of stolen property, but the court heard more serious charges are likely to be brought.

He faced his second hearing when he appeared via video-link before Judge Victor Blake at Cloverhill District Court today.

Judge Blake noted directions from the Director of Public Prosecutions were required. Garda Sergeant Stephen Nalty, court presenter, told Judge Blake that it was a recent matter and there will be a comprehensive file.

Further more serious charges were contemplated, he added.

Judge Blake remanded Mr Farrell in continuing custody to appear again on April 9 next.

The accused spoke briefly to greet Judge Blake and to say thanks when his case was adjourned.

At his first hearing on March 20, he was denied bail following objections by Garda Michael Brislane who alleged the three shotguns were stolen in house burglaries.

He said they included a Harrington taken in Maynooth, Co Kildare on October 4, 2018; a Beretta in Swords, Co Dublin on September 19, 2018; and a Mossberg shotgun taken at Dunboyne, Co Meath on September 6, 2019.

During a bail hearing, Garda Brislane alleged he was on patrol in the Ardmore Estate in Tallaght at 9.45pm on March 17 when he noticed a grey Peugeot 407 acting suspiciously.

After it was pursued he saw two men running from the vehicle, he said.

Garda Brislane ran to the door and arrested the accused, the driver. He said a gearbag in the boot contained four shotguns and a revolver.

The handgun was loaded with six rounds of ammunition and there were four shotgun rounds in the bag.

The garda alleged the accused was caught red-handed.

Defence solicitor Matthew Kenny had said his clients son was in prison and faced threats of assault over a drug debt. His client had made an error out of misplaced loyalty to his son and thought he was transporting drugs, not guns, the solicitor said.

Mr Kenny had also said his client had not named names but co-operated as much as he could and made admissions.

Cloverhill District Court has amended its practices to cope with the Covid-19 emergency and two judges divided the list of cases which were dealt with in separate courtrooms.

A statement from the Courts Service said it was organising scale back and distance to promote health, yet maintain rights.

The district court in Cloverhill was working with the Irish Prison Service to organise the running order of the video-link cases based on security and prison requirements and, to operate the list in groups of five, also allowing the prison to manage the throughput of prisoners needed in court more easily".

These measures, cumulatively, should significantly reduce the pressure on managing prisoners in the Cloverhill video-link area , given the security and social distancing needs.

"Added to these measures we are actively promoting the use of video-link for professional visits for solicitors and barristers in order to allow social distancing be maintained."
By Express News Service

MADURAI: A day after a 54-year-old Anna Nagar resident died after contracting COVID-19, the health department officials traced the eight Thai nationals with whom the man came in contact with. All eight were quarantined in Madurai. Speaking to The New Indian Express, Collector TG Vinay said the eight preachers from Thailand visited Madurai as part of a religious tour on March 12. They were received at the Madurai airport by the man. With the assistance of two persons from Madurai, the eight visited several mosques in the city for the next two weeks.

All the eight preachers, along with the locals, were found near Malaipatti in Alanganallur by a team of officials on Monday. They were quarantined at the Government Hospital for Thoracic Medicine (GHTM) at Thoppur near Tirumangalam the same day, the collector said, adding that two of the Thai nationals developed symptoms of COVID-19 on Wednesday. Samples for swab test were taken and sent to the testing lab at the government medical college and hospital here. The results will be out on Thursday morning, he said. According to the collector, the group did not have any connection with the two Thai nationals in Erode.

Meanwhile, following the mans death on Wednesday, the driver of a hearse service was initially hesitant to take the body for burial. However, health officials convinced him saying that there would be no risk of infection and provided him personal protection equipment (PPE), hospital sources said. The Madurai Collector said the body was wrapped in a three-layer package and disinfected with hypochlorite solution.

As per the guidelines, the health workers and the driver were provided PPE. Ten of the deceaseds family members were present at the burial as they were insistent. But, they too were provided protective equipment, he said. Also, the residential area of the deceased at Anna Nagar has been cordoned off. All entry points were sealed by police and the residents were being monitored by health officials.

Deceased visited hotel

The Madurai Collector earlier told reporters that the patient had attended a wedding reception on March 9 at a city hotel, which also accommodated tourists from Thailand and Indonesia. On March 13, the patient organised a religious meeting with preachers from Thailand at an Anna Nagar mosque, to which he was regular visitor.

The patient, an employee of a construction company, was not a regular visitor to the construction site. However, he did go to the office. The places of his regular visits, including the mosque, private hotel and the office, have been disinfected by the corporation workers he said.
Our live coverage is wrapping up so these are the key developments today.

There have been 555 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Queensland - an increase of 62 overnight.

Queensland's Chief Health Officer insists it is "perfectly safe" to vote at polling booths tomorrow if people follow a few rules: stay home if you are sick (as everyone should be doing); go in with your choice already made; have a pen and your voter information card ready; keep a 1.5 metre distance from others; and mark your votes, lodge them and leave.

Almost 7000 motorists have been stopped at Queensland's borders since the crackdown on interstate travel.

New rules on international travel will take effect from 11.59pm tomorrow. All travellers entering Australia will be required to self-isolate for a fortnight at designated facilities such as hotels.

Thank you for joining us and check the main site for updates overnight.

We leave you with the singing surgeon who has made lives a little brighter at a Brisbane hospital.
Border agents have found a partially built cross-border tunnel in Arizona, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced Wednesday.

A unit of CBP officers assigned to the Yuma Border Sector and Homeland Security Investigations agents confirmed the discovery after they were tipped off by contractors working on a border wall project west of the San Luis Port of Entry.

The workers became suspicious when they came upon a collection of plywood and boards that had been left behind as they were removing soil from the area.

CBP said the unfinished tunnel measured at least eight to 12 feet, and went under the border fence into Mexico.

Border Agents in Yuma, Arizona, discovered an underground partially-built tunnel connecting the U.S. border city with Sonora, Mexico, on Monday. The hole was approximately eight to 12 feet

CBP said the tunnel was the sixth discovered in the Yuma Sector

It is the sixth tunnel discovered in the Yuma Sector area of responsibility.

CBP said agents from the Yuma Sector Border Patrol and HSI reached out to their counterparts in Mexico, who discovered the original location of where the smugglers had started the tunnel shoring operation.

The hole on the Mexican side of the border was located about 10 to 12 feet away from the original sinkhole.

The Mexican military reported it found a ladder inside the tunnel entrance in San Luis Rio Colorado, a city in the state of Sonora.

'Law enforcement on both sides of the fence will continue to monitor and inspect the tunnel,' CBP said.

In January, U.S. Border Patrol San Diego Sector discovered the longest tunnel ever built by drug smugglers that connected Tijuana, Mexico, with San Diego.

The tunnel originated in an industrial area, approximately one half mile west of the Otay Mesa Port of Entry.

It extended north into the United States, CBP said, 'bending slightly west and extending an astonishing 4,068 feet from the border, with a total length of 4,309 feet.'

The tunnel was about five and a half feet tall and two feet wide, and was approximately 70 feet from the surface.

The construction workers set up 'a rail/cart system, 'forced air ventilation, high voltage electrical cables and panels, an elevator at the tunnel entrance, and a complex drainage system.'
Three recent events have recently drawn the attention of the public, experts and official circles in Central Asia: U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeos visits to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and his meetings with the presidents of these states on 1-4 February 2020; the C5+1 meeting in Tashkent; and the announcement of a new U.S. Strategy for Central Asia 2019-2025. In Central Asian capitals as well as in Moscow and Beijing, these three events served to alter the existing geopolitical calculus: Washington effectively reminded Central Asians and U.S. rivals Russia and China of itself and its interests. It thus seems that the old Great Game continues.

BACKGROUND: It is obvious that since the collapse of the Soviet superpower in 1991, Central Asia has been an area subjected to the geopolitical manipulations of great powers  mostly within the triangle U.S., Russia and China. While Russias and Chinas presence in the region has frequently been considered as a neighbors right, the U.S. presence has had a dual effect: on the one hand, regional states viewed it as friendly and hoped it would translate into political and economic assistance. On the other hand, Russia and China have become increasingly concerned over the presence of their geopolitical rival in their backyard.

It is not by accident that the U.S. from the beginning promoted a regional vision, supporting the independence of these countries and their democratic development. Some U.S. experts even proposed the concept of Central Asia as a great-power-free-zone. In the course of U.S.-Central Asia interactions, Washingtons strategy has evolved from general principles and visions to more strongly articulated concepts. The C5+1 format, established in 2015, was a major step forward.

At the same time, C5+1 came into being in a controversial context, as international politics show signs of a return from the ad-hoc post-cold war world order to a neo-cold war type of relationship between the U.S. and Russia (see CACI Analyst 15/11/13). The latest meeting within this format took place in Tashkent where Pompeo, aside from participating in the meeting, had a talk with President Mirziyoev. Soon after Pompeos Central Asia tour, the United States Strategy for Central Asia 2019-2025: Advancing Sovereignty and Economic Prosperity was published.

On one hand, the text of the Strategy contains concrete, not abstract, messages on what constitutes the U.S. interests in the region in a number of areas: Central Asia is a geostrategic region important to United States national security interests, regardless of the level of United States involvement in Afghanistan. This is one of the most important messages, since it recognizes the value of the region consisting of five countries in its own right, and does not include Afghanistan as part of Central Asia as some scholars have recently been inclined to do.

Of crucial importance is the U.S. intention to support and strengthen the sovereignty and independence of the Central Asian states, individually and as a region. This item demonstrates and articulates that the U.S. recognizes and emphasizes the significance of regional unity in this part of the world. It resolutely states that the U.S. will support efforts to bridge differences that have divided the region. No other great power pays so much attention to the existence of the region per se or expresses clear-cut support of regionalism in Central Asia.

On the other hand, geopolitical intentions are hidden in the Strategy text, which for instance stresses that close relations and cooperation with all five countries will promote U.S. values and provide a counterbalance to the influence of regional neighbors. This is undoubtedly a message addressed to the permanent geopolitical rivals Russia and China.

IMPLICATIONS: The so-called triangle geopolitics emerged in this region already in the 1990s. It is presently only taking on a new shape and new dynamics. Russia is eager to consolidate the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) created in 2015. China intends to realize the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) of its global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) first advanced in 2013. The 2020 version of the new U.S. Silk Road is a response to this. Thus, the old geopolitical game now seems to take on a new specific combination of EEU, SREB and U.S. Silk Road, which actually reflects a strongly organized, subtly articulated and ambitiously scaled process of competition in and around Central Asia.

Notably, Russian and Chinese media and pundits did not leave the U.S. top officials visit and the subsequent announcement of the U.S. Strategy without reactions. In particular, they noted that Pompeos Central Asian tour was preceded by a trip to Ukraine and Belarus, suggesting that the tour had a broader and more sophisticated agenda. Moreover, while in Kazakhstan, Pompeo raised the issue of Uighurs of Xinjiang, prompting top Chinese diplomats to rebuke this demarche against China. In response to Pompeos meeting with Mirziyoev, in turn, Russian experts discerned Washingtons temptation to prevent Uzbekistan from joining the EEU.

Meanwhile, having recognized and valued the regional unity of the five Central Asian states, the U.S. Strategy, unfortunately, does not specifically mention the recently revitalized Consultative meetings of the leaders of these countries as a major step towards regional integration. Two such meetings were held since 2018  one in Astana, one in Tashkent. The third is scheduled for this year in Bishkek. However, these meetings have not so far given rise to a more institutionalized mechanism for cooperation. One of the reasons is that the leaders of these states are apprehensive of possible counter-reactions from Moscow, which would perceive this as an obstacle to its own scheme for regional integration via the EEU.

Overall, the region is facing an ambiguous trend where great powers bring policies with competing geopolitical visions, while Central Asian states seek to escape geopolitical challenges. The longer the regional states remain independent and gain broader experience in the international system, the more obvious it becomes that their only option for escaping the geopolitical trap is to concentrate on stronger institutionalization of their own regional cooperation, moving beyond the modest Consultative Meetings format.

Indeed, neither SREB nor EEU are concerned with normative issues and each is designed and promoted on the basis of salient geopolitical and utilitarian attitudes to Central Asia. The U.S. Strategy, by contrast, consistently highlights the elements of protecting human rights, supporting the rule of law, improving human capital and strengthening civil society.

CONCLUSIONS: The new U.S. strategy on Central Asia reinvigorated the perspective of international politics in the region as a geopolitical game. The five regional states are once again concerned of finding themselves as hostages in the competition of great powers with uncertain implications, recalling Thucydides old maxim Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Indeed, to what extent can Central Asian states exercise true independence from great powers in terms of possessing the freedom of choice and ability to escape the geopolitical trap?

Hopefully, the triangular geopolitics will not blur Central Asian regional unity. Consultative meetings will ultimately be the Litmus Test in this regard. The C5+1 meeting in Tashkent, Pompeos discussions with the Presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and the publication of the U.S. Central Asia Strategy, all taking place within several days in February, revealed once again the existing gap between the Western versus the non-Western approach to this region.

The U.S. Strategy points out the U.S. intention to consult with like-minded partners in its engagements with C5+1 countries. This is a relatively new element of the Strategy since it suggests a correlated and coherent Western approach to Central Asia, which can in turn help keep the normative agenda become more salient. After all, this normative agenda will play a decisive role in the tug of war within the geopolitical triangle.

From this perspective, instead of expressing suspicions (relevant or irrelevant) about Washingtons plot against Moscow and Beijing, Russian and Chinese media, analysts and official circles could also indicate their position as to whether they share the main ideas and goals of the U.S. Strategy on Central Asia.

AUTHOR'S BIO:

Dr. Farkhod Tolipov holds a PhD in Political Science and is Director of the Research Institution Knowledge Caravan, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

Image Source: U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan accessed on 3/26/20
To the Times:

How should we talk about the pandemic that is washing over the U.S.? As a lack of leadership, not a black swan event.

A black swan event is defined as: an unpredictable event with extreme consequences.

The U.S. government should have predicted this pandemic. Weve had many previous instances of diseases spreading rapidly: Ebola, SARS, and H1N1. Quick action by competent governments stopped them.

Reagan said that government is not the solution, but the problem. And for 40 years it has become fashionable to vilify those who work in government. I disagree.

As a high school government teacher, I began my course by asking students to identify the 10 greatest accomplishments of the U.S. government. They included:

* Rebuilding Europe after World War II

* Social Security

* Winning World War II

Our government solved big problems in the past and it can again.

We need competent leadership at every level of government so that we can meet the challenges of the 21st century: climate change, pandemics, and more.

I believe that we will overcome this crisis because we Americans are resilient and resourceful.

But when this crisis is over  when the dust has settled and we look back at what has happened  we must clearly identify a lack of leadership as the source of this disaster, and we must act accordingly.

We must elect strong leaders.

I am ready.
Tim and Deb Crawshaw the Founders of Tasmanian The Bay of Fires Walk For Spiritual Seekers and Christian leaders speaking God's word into the Covid 19 scenario world wide pandemic, have written to Australian CEOs.

The Letter

If you werent aware, you can pray for personal protection and for the world using the name of Jesus Christ who has spiritual authority to destroy, heal and eradicate coronavirus. The prayers we speak of are contained in the article enclosed we wrote for Christian Today Australia along with other scriptures that can supernaturally protect you against all harm.

We recommend you pray the prayers out loud with family, staff etc in sets of three throughout the day and evening - especially when feeling overwhelmed instead of worrying.

If you are concerned that God isnt going to answer your prayers we recommend first of all saying sorry to God for all the things that youve done that you know of and that you dont know of by asking for forgiveness. God is giving you an opportunity right now to receive his son, Jesus Christ (who is the physical manifestation of the invisible God) who died on the cross and took all your sins, past present and future with him if you allow him.

When you do accept Jesus in faith you will receive whats known as salvation which means you belong in Gods spiritual kingdom and family and receive eternal life with him amongst other amazing things!

We are talking real supernatural spirituality here - not religion. Christian religion and Christian spirituality are not the same. We are hoping you choose to enter and seek an authentic relationship with God who can save you and help you supernaturally with so much of your life. Its nothing to be afraid of - God is love and spirit and you can expect miracles and supernatural help in your life as promised by Jesus if you believe.

If you need anymore information to get started have a look at the free online pre-walk reading that we offer here at www.bayoffireswalkforspiritualseekers.com

There are 2 articles currently available, How to Avoid Spiritual Bankruptcy in a Success Driven Age. Jesus Without Religion and Lose Your Ego - Jesus Style.

If we can help any further with your spiritual development or if you would like to book in for a walk with us when everything settles down please contact us.

In service to you through Jesus Christ,

Tim and Deb Crawshaw

Covid-19  unprecedented expansion of God's Kingdom

What we are seeing with Covid 19 is a manifestation of spiritual attack and resistance from the enemy on a world scale. Coronavirus is being used as a weapon to try and prevent the next big move of God's kingdom on earth through Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit which will inevitably happen on an unprecedented massive scale and quickly.

The coronavirus and its manifestations are the exact spiritual opposite of the Godly revival that is to follow all over the world.

Amid all this chaos is God re-ordering everything behind the scenes. He is re-establishing his Kingdom and things will be new on the other side when this is over.

God has emphasised these two scriptures (Isaiah chapter 43 verses 18-19). amidst all the coronavirus mayhem to us:

Forget the former things;

do not dwell on the past.

See, I am doing a new thing!

Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

I am making a way in the wilderness

and streams in the wasteland.

As I looked at a photo of US vice-president Mike Pence praying in the White House with the coronavirus task force, God gave me this scripture (2 Chronicles. 7-14). very clearly.

"If my people, who are called by my name,

will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways,

then I will hear from heaven,

and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. "

We here at The Bay of FIres Walk For Spiritual Seekers in Tasmania have begun sending out letters to large Australian company CEO's, government and organisations with information for them about how they can pray for eradication and protection against coronavirus with their staff with the spiritual authority of Jesus Christ.

https://www.bayoffireswalkforspiritualseekers.com/

"A Jesus Response to Coronavirus" contains prayer suggestions and info suitable for Christians and non-Christians that you can use with these tips https://christiantoday.com.au/news/a-jesus-response-to-coronavirus.html).
China's ruling Communist Party poses a substantial threat to Americans' health and their way of life, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday, blasting Beijing for the intentional "disinformation campaign" and trying to deflect from its handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Pompeo, a known critic of China, said China's delay in sharing information about the virus had created risks to people worldwide.

"The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses a substantial threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus outbreak clearly has demonstrated," Pompeo told reporters at a State Department after video conference with his counterparts from G7 countries.

"The CCP also threatens to undermine the free and open order that has underpinned our mutual prosperity and safety in the G7 countries," he said.

Pompeo said, during the meeting, the US urged every country to work together to protect the UN and other organisations from China's malign influence and authoritarianism.

"We G7 countries must promote our shared values of freedom, sovereignty, good governance, transparency, and accountability, and push the UN to uphold these principles as well," he said.

There was a discussion among the G7 countries about the intentional disinformation campaign that China has been and continues to be engaged in, he said.

"You see it. You see it in the social media. You see it in remarks from senior people inside the Chinese Communist Party talking about whether this was a US brought to China. This is crazy talk," he said.

"Every member of the G7 today saw this disinformation campaign. China now making small sales of product around the world and claiming that they are now the white hat in what has taken place here. This isn't a time for blame; this is a time to solve this global problem. We are focused on that today," Pompeo said.

Every nation that was at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place here, he alleged, amidst the brewing of an anti-China sentiment in the US on the latter's handling of coronavirus.

There are talks in Congress to hold China responsible for the coronavirus outbreak because it hid information. Some of the lawmakers are also calling on China to pay damages to the US and the world.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik introduced a Resolution in the House of Representatives and Senator Josh Hawley in the Senate calling for an international investigation into the Chinese Communist Party's cover-up of the early spread of the coronavirus outbreak.

The Resolution calls on China to pay back all nations impacted due to its intentional, early coverup of the deadly virus.

"The Communist government of China knowingly withheld critical information needed to combat the spread of the Chinese-born COVID-19 and to this day continues to spread lies and disinformation on the origin of the deadly virus," Stefanik said.

"There is no doubt that China's unconscionable decision to orchestrate an elaborate coverup of the wide-ranging and deadly implications of coronavirus led to the death of thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans and climbing. This Resolution calls for China to provide compensation for the harm, loss, and destruction their arrogance brought upon the rest of the world. Simply put China must, and will, be held accountable," she said.

"Since day one, the Chinese Communist Party intentionally lied to the world about the origin of this pandemic. The CCP was aware of the reality of the virus as early as December but ordered laboratories to destroy samples and forced doctors to keep silent," said Hawley.

"It is time for an international investigation into the role their cover-up played in the spread of this devastating pandemic. The CCP must be held to account for what the world is now suffering," he said.

Congressman Matt Gaetz introduced legislation to prevent any funds appropriated by the US Congress, including coronavirus relief funds, from being distributed to businesses owned by the Chinese government.

"'No CHINA Act' prevents appropriated money, including coronavirus relief funds, from being disbursed to businesses owned by the Chinese government. Chinese corporations operating in America must not be eligible for the upcoming trillion-dollar bailout, now or ever," he said.

Senator John Barrasso said that China had been exposed.

"We cannot allow ourselves ever again to be in any way dependent on China for medicines, for materials, or for minerals," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
BASE RESOURCES LIMITED - Notice of change of Significant Shareholder

AIM and Media Release

26 March 2020

BASE RESOURCES LIMITED

Notice of change of Significant Shareholder

Base Resources Limited (ASX & AIM: BSE) (Base Resources) advises that it has today received notification from Bank of America Corporation that, on 23 March 2020, it and its related bodies corporate (Bank of America) had reduced their voting power in Base Resources by 14,990,718 ordinary shares.

Base Resources understands that, as at 23 March 2020, Bank of America had a relevant interest in 54,280,792 ordinary shares, representing 4.63% of the total Base Resources ordinary shares on issue and constituting a significant shareholding for the purposes of the AIM Rules for Companies on that date.

The decrease in Bank of America's relevant interest was the result of the return of ordinary shares pursuant to prime brokerage agreements since 14 March 2020. During the period from (and including) 14 March 2020 until (and including) 23 March 2020, Bank of America did not otherwise dispose of or acquire a relevant interest in any Base Resources ordinary shares.

A copy of the notice referred to in this release is available from the company's website: www.baseresources.com.au.

ENDS.

For further information contact:

James Fuller, Manager Communications and Investor Relations UK Media Relations Base Resources Tavistock Communications Tel: +61 (8) 9413 7426 Jos Simson and Barnaby Hayward Mobile: +61 (0) 488 093 763 Tel: +44 (0) 207 920 3150 Email: jfuller@baseresources.com.au

About Base Resources

Base Resources is an Australian based, African focused, mineral sands producer and developer with a track record of project delivery and operational performance. The company operates the established Kwale Operations in Kenya and is developing the Toliara Project in Madagascar. Base Resources is an ASX and AIM listed company. Further details about Base Resources are available at www.baseresources.com.au

PRINCIPAL & REGISTERED OFFICE

Level 1, 50 Kings Park Road

West Perth, Western Australia, 6005

Email: info@baseresources.com.au

Phone: +61 (0)8 9413 7400

Fax: +61 (0)8 9322 8912

NOMINATED ADVISOR

RFC Ambrian Limited

Stephen Allen

Phone: +61 (0)8 9480 2500

JOINT BROKER

Berenberg

Matthew Armitt / Detlir Elezi

Phone: +44 20 3207 7800

JOINT BROKER

Numis Securities Limited

John Prior / James Black / Paul Gillam

Phone: +44 20 7260 1000
Police officers captured an armed robber on the spot as he robbed a French couple of their cellphone in downtown Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday.

At the police station, the robber was identified as T.Q.T., 16, who lives in District 1.

The French couple was walking on the sidewalk of Le Lai Street in Pham Ngu Lao Ward, District 1 at around 2:00 pm on Wednesday when the robber snatched the wifes phone from her hands and ran away.

The husband quickly chased after the robber, at which point T. suddenly pulled out a knife he carried with him and threatened the Frenchman.

At the time of the robbery, a police task force of District 1 was patrolling Le Lai Street and witnessed the incident.

The police officers immediately pinned the robber down and brought him to Pham Ngu Lao Wards police station.

T. has been detained for robbery.

A police officer pins down T.Q.T. as another shows the phone he snatched from a French couple in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, March 25, 2020. Photo: Tuoi Tre

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BUSINESS community in Songea District, Ruvuma Region have asked the government to improve infrastructure in the area so that they could be able to engage in economic activities with their counterparts in neighbouring countries.

They said Tanzanian traders have good relationship and trade-link with their fellows from neighbouring country of Mozambique.

The traders said Ruvuma Region needs reliable link with Mozambique so that they easily can engage in economic activities. The region borders with Mozambique and Malawi on Mkenda and Mbababay borders.

One of the maize traders in Songea District, Mr Saimon Swedi said the 124 kilometres road that connect Songea municipal council with Mozambique is impassable during rainy seasons and that the situation affect business operations.

Mr Swedi was speaking during a meeting that was organised by the Tanzania Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture (TCCIA) in the region on Monday.

The businessman further revealed that the 240 kilometers road that connects Congress and Lichinga towns on Mozambique side was also inaccessible, hence hampered businesses between the two countries.

"I appeal to the government to consult with its counterparts in Mozambique and make sure the damaged roads are rehabilitated as soon as possible. The road is potential for Ruvuma and the nation at large, said Mr Swedi.

According to government statistics, Ruvuma has a total of 4,007,746 hectare of land suitable for cereal crops cultivation.

The statistics further show that during 2018/19 agricultural season, the region produced a total of 1, 255,134 tonnes of crops. At least 644,934 tonnes of the produced crops were maize.

For his part, TCCIA's president Paul Koyi called upon the Tanzania National Roads Agency (TANROADS) and other relevant authorities to rehabilitate the road.

He said the improvement of infrastructure would boost business activities between Tanzania and Mozambique.

"We will take this matter into further consideration by consulting the top government leaders in the Ministry of Works, Transport and communication and ensure they act accordingly to address this challenge, said Mr Koyi.

Referring to the business environment in Ruvuma, Assistant Regional Administrative Secretary (Economics and Production sector) for Ruvuma Mr Deogratius Sibula admitted that the road was affecting business activities between the two countries.

"It is true, we have been receiving complaints from the business community in the region about the poor condition of the road. I would like to assure the public that the government is working on the matter, said Mr Sibula.

TANROAD's Regional Manager for Ruvuma, Mr Lazeki Alinanuswe assured the public that plans were on pipeline to rehabilitate the damaged road.
A welfare society for Afghan Sikhs urged the Central government on Thursday to bring to India those injured in the gurdwara attack in Kabul and also facilitate the homecoming of the Sikhs living there as they were undergoing trauma.

At least 25 worshippers were killed and eight others injured when a heavily armed suicide bomber on Wednesday stormed his way into a prominent gurdwara in the heart of Afghanistan's capital, in one of the deadliest attacks on the minority Sikh community in the strife-torn country.

Khajinder Khurana, president of the Afghan Hindu-Sikh Welfare Society, said the attack was against humanity.

"It is very tragic. Nothing could have more cruel than this. We urge the government to bring back those who were injured. Those willing to return home should be helped and the government should ensure that those staying there be provided security," he told PTI here.

The government earlier said it was facilitating bringing back the bodies of those killed in the attack.

Khurana said Sikhs in Kabul were in a state of trauma and want to come to India.

The Islamic State (IS) terror group, which has targeted Sikhs before in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack in Kabul's Shor Bazar area.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
CHIANG MAI, Thailand  Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai  and many other camps in Thailand  have closed their doors due to the current Coronavirus situation, which apart from resulting in unspeakable hardship for the elephants, could seriously hurt Thailands tourism industry in the future if no support is forthcoming soon.

This is the opinion of Saengduean Lek Chailert, owner of Elephant Nature Park and founder of Save Elephant Foundation, who believes many of the closures will be permanent. I have been to visit many of the camps and the situation is very serious, she says.

The elephants have been chained up since the tourists stopped coming. They are very stressed and upset. Some have started to attack each other from being chained up all day and several have bite wounds as they are fighting over food. The pregnant elephants are also stressed and not doing well at all.

What does that mean for the future?

If there is no support forthcoming to keep them safe, the elephants will either starve to death or may be put onto the streets to beg. Alternatively, some may be sold to zoos and some may be returned to the logging business (which officially banned the use of elephants in 1989 due to its cruel nature). Its a very bleak outlook unless some financial help is received immediately, says Lek.

At Elephant Nature Park, which houses more than 3000 animals, many disabled or emotionally unstable, a frantic fund-raising effort is underway for food and medical needs. Some of the elephants need intensive, regular veterinary care.

On her Facebook post today, Lek thanks donors, saying: I have been in touch with more than 30 elephant camp owners to help them find a way out. My ability to help these animals is an extension of your generosity, I cannot do it without your help. There is no amount too big or too small to impact the lives of these animals. 100% of each donation is tax deductible and goes directly to Elephant Nature Park. I will share these donations with elephants in other camps as appropriate.

HOW TO DONATE

TRUNKS UP (https://jointrunksup.org) is a certified supporting organization which is currently MATCHING all donations, dollar for dollar, up to US$45,000. Donations can be made via the site.

Where the money will go:

US$30 will feed an elephant for a day

US$20 will feed a dog or cat for one week

US$10 will feed a pig, cow or buffalo for one week

US$8 will feed a monkey for one week

US$5 will feed a rabbit for one week
The COVID-19 crisis is mostly over for Huawei, its Chief Executive Officer had claimed. CEO and founder Ren Zhengfei recently went on record to reveal the situation at the companys home country is finally stabilizing.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Ren also revealed Huaweis intent to double down on key investments for the remainder of 2020. The most notable boost will target its research and development division whose annual budget will surpass $20 billion for the first time ever. The figure represents an increase of nearly $6 billion year-on-year.

The R&D budget increase is both a sustainability strategy and a showing of strength. Huawei remains in dire need of such publicity following a troubled period of clashes with the United States government thats still far from over.

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Is Huawei acting prematurely or truly stabilizing?

Huaweis CFO and Rens daughter, Meng Wanzhou, remains under house arrest in Canada. Shes been fighting a stateside extradition request since late 2018. The coronavirus outbreak slowed down those proceedings in recent weeks. Regardless, shes still facing a realistic risk of being extradited to the U.S. in the second half of the year.

Among other things, Meng is facing charges of conspiracy, fraud and violations of American trade sanctions on Iran. Both the CFO and her father repeatedly called the litigation an unfair hoax with purely political motivations.

Given that state of affairs, its dubious to what extent is Huawei currently truly stabilizing. Even Ren himself admitted the company has yet to see the worst effects of the COVID-19 crisis. Naturally, that was in reference to the tech giants upcoming financials.

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Whats more, some industry watchers remain troubled by the fact most of the companys staffers are now returning to work; while the situation in Wuhan, the origin point of the virus, is stabilizing, thats not the case globally. Its worth reminding theres still no vaccine for the newest coronavirus strain either. In other words, a second outbreak wave in China isnt off the table.

Yet Huawei can hardly afford to wait after enduring heavy blows from the West in recent times. Especially given how many of its production lines were closed since the turn of the year in order to combat the spread of the virus.

Thousands of its employees are now working overtime in order to mitigate the effect of COVID-19. In a recent interview with Chinese media, Ren estimated some 20,000 staffers are presently doing everything they can to help resume normal R&D operations at Huawei.
Bexar Countys population has crossed the 2 million mark for the first time, new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate.

The countys population surged by almost 289,000 people since 2010, the latest numbers show. As of July 1, its total number of inhabitants stood at 2,003,554, the census information released late Wednesday shows.

Bexar County ranked sixth nationally among U.S. counties recording the largest raw numeric growth since 2010. Local experts cited a healthy economy and affordable housing as reasons why people want to move here.

Harris County, which includes Houston, ranked second nationally with a gain of 620,149 residents since 2010. Tarrant County, where Fort Worth is located, placed fifth, with its population jumping by 291,851 people during that nine-year period.

In Texas as a whole, the population jumped to almost 29 million. Thats an increase of nearly 4 million people since 2010.

More than half of Bexar Countys population surge  about 54 percent  was attributed to people moving here.

The rest was driven by births outnumbering deaths by a more than 2-1 margin.

Census numbers show an estimated 156,283 people moved to Bexar County between 2010 and 2019. Most of them  113,583  came from elsewhere in Texas or the nation. But 42,700 of them moved here from international locations.

David Marquez, the top official at Bexar County Economic and Community Development, wasnt surprised by the significant population gain. He pointed to the strong performance of the local housing market, construction trades and the manufacturing and hospitality industries before the coronavirus arrived.

On ExpressNews.com: City, county census effort counting on self-responders to submit answers for the 2020 Census

Every sector was roaring, Marquez said Wednesday. It was just such a broad-based, healthy growth in our economy over the last decade.

Economic development has really turned into a battle for talent. The fact that we can get that many folks moving here bodes well. So its a good place to be.

Marquez noted that Bexar County has been very focused on advanced manufacturing opportunities, such as Navistar, a truck maker building an assembly plant on San Antonios South Side, and Aisin AW Co., an automatic transmissions producer building a plant in Cibolo in Guadalupe County very close to the Bexar County line.

He doesnt expect that focus to change as the county weathers and recovers from the coronavirus crisis.

I think people want to come here, he said.

Kim Bragman, a local Realtor and the San Antonio Board of Realtors chair of the board, also wasnt surprised by the surge. A boost in single-family housing sales in recent years was a strong indicator of that growth, she said.

The number of single-family residences sold in SABORs nine-county service area rose 7 percent in 2019 compared to the year before, Bragman said. The vast majority of those home sales occurred in Bexar County.

Sales of single-family homes also rose nearly 5 percent in 2018 compared to the year before.

The price points of our homes are lower, Bragman said. The fact that theyre more affordable makes it attractive to folks.

On ExpressNews.com: From an Alaskan village to San Antonios West Side, 2020 Census getting native attention

Bragman also believes Bexar County is receiving some overflow from Austin. Other factors driving the population growth, she believes, are the areas numerous universities and colleges, the growing culinary scene, the areas green spaces, the mild weather and the friendly people.

State Demographer Lloyd Potter, interim dean of the University of Texas at San Antonios College of Public Policy, said the local economy was continuing to grow through last week. But as the coronavirus started to spread across the nation, some people began losing their jobs and many businesses closed temporarily.

Texas also has seen an influx of residents coming from California, New York, Illinois, Michigan and some international locations, he said.

We have been creating a lot of jobs, Potter said. And then we have a lot of people here who are creating families. The combination of those two things together has really made it so that Bexar County has continued to grow.

Joachim Singelmann, a UTSA demography professor, points out other factors that he said contributes to the population growth in Bexar County and Texas as a whole.

We are a low tax state, Singelmann said. Its a right-to-work state, so its very little unionization. What sets San Antonio apart from the other places  the cost of living is fairly low here, the housing prices are much lower.

Comal County, which includes New Braunfels, ranked fourth nationally among U.S. counties recording the largest percentage growth. Its population jumped 44 percent since 2010, soaring to 156,209 as of July 1. Thats an increase of almost 48,000 people.

Almost all of that was attributed to people moving there, as opposed to births outnumbering deaths.

Kendall County, where Boerne is located, ranked fifth nationally for largest percentage growth. Its population surged 42 percent since 2010, reaching 47,431 as of July 1. Thats a boost of more than 14,000 people. The vast majority of that was due to people moving to the area.

Peggy OHare reports on the census, demographics and occasionally crime and general assignments in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pohare@express-news.net | Twitter: @Peggy_OHare
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 05:00:30|Editor: huaxia

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A man wearing a face mask rides a bike in Rome, Italy, March 22, 2020. (Photo by Elisa Lingria/Xinhua)

Data from countries showed more men died of COVID-19 than women. Experts believe hormonal influences on the immune response may play a key role.

by Xinhua writer Tan Jingjing

WASHINGTON, March 25 (Xinhua) -- Existing data show the novel coronavirus has caused higher mortality in men than women. Besides general poor health and habits like smoking and drinking for men that may cause damage to lungs, leading experts told Xinhua hormonal influences on the immune response may also play a key role in this phenomenon.

While addressing a White House daily briefing, Dr. Deborah Birx, White House COVID-19 task force director, said a report from Italy shows that men in nearly every age bracket were dying at higher rates than women. She called it a "concerning trend."

According to Italian health authorities, men accounted for 58 percent of all 13,882 COVID-19 cases in Italy between Feb. 21 and Mar. 12, and 72 percent of the 803 deaths.

Hospitalized men with COVID-19 were 75 percent more likely to die than were hospitalized women.

People walk on the street around the Seomun Market in Daegu, South Korea, March 17, 2020. (Photo by Lee Sang-ho/Xinhua)

Data from other countries also showed more men are dying of COVID-19 than women. A report of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that the mortality among men with confirmed coronavirus infections was roughly 65 percent higher than it was among women.

Unhealthy habits such as smoking and drinking alcohol occur in more men than women, which may damage lungs and prime for inflammation when battling an infection, experts said.

Men tend to have more underlying health conditions such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease and chronic lung disease, according to Global Health 50/50, a research institute examining gender inequality in global health.

"While other factors, that may promote severe infection such as history of smoking and heart disease, also differ between men and women, the immune system is known to function differently between the sexes," said Susan Kovats, an immunologist and microbiologist at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, in an interview with Xinhua.

A man wearing mask walks on a street in downtown Tehran, Iran, March 12, 2020. (Photo by Ahmad Halabisaz/Xinhua)

Gender differences in the incidence and severity of respiratory virus infection are well documented in humans and mouse models and correlate with differences in immune cell activity, she said.

Immune cells are capable of responding to estrogen and testosterone, suggesting the disparate levels of these hormones in men and women may play a role in their differential immune responses, Kovats explained.

In response to some viruses, compared to male cells, female cells produce higher levels of proteins termed "interferons" that are a crucial part of the early innate immune response. Interferons trigger a cascade of proteins that are directly anti-viral and act to attenuate viral spread, according to Kovats.

"Indeed, evidence shows that production of interferons is promoted by estrogens. During a respiratory virus infection, a greater capacity for interferon production may help to reduce viral spread and lung damage in females," she said.

Indian private company workers fly a drone to spray disinfectant in Bangalore, India, March 24, 2020. (Str/Xinhua)

Dr. Stanley Perlman, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa, has studied infected male and female mice with the coronaviruses that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

He found male mice were more susceptible to infection than females at every age.

"Our experiments in mice suggest that this is in part hormonal. If we removed estrogen from mice, they were now as sensitive as males to SARS-CoV," Perlman told Xinhua.

The immune response between males and females could be hormonally-related, but remain poorly understood, Kent Pinkerton, professor of the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, told Xinhua.

If scientists can uncover how that works, they could identify better strategies for fighting coronavirus infections in general, experts said. 
The news media are glued to the coronavirus every minute, day and night, and rightly so. But meanwhile, the world spins just as it did in the before time; other crises continue to churn their own disasters, and the Trump administration is handling them with its customary blend of indifference, clumsiness, and malice.

Lets begin with another apocalyptic scenario in the catalog of nightmaresnuclear war, or, in its milder variant, the renewal of a nuclear arms race. New START, the U.S.-Russian strategic arms-reduction treaty, signed by then Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, expires in February 2021, and Trump has neither taken steps nor expressed a desire to extend it.*

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In fact, he has done the opposite: He has appointed a man named Marshall Billingslea as his chief negotiator in nuclear arms talks that may take place during the U.N. General Assembly in September. Billingslea, currently the undersecretary of treasury for monitoring terrorist financing, is a former adviser to Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, Capitol Hills most fervent opponent of arms control during the last decades of the Cold War. Billingslea has said that any renewal of New START should include Chinaa position that is nothing but an obstructionist ruse, for three reasons.

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First, Chinas nuclear arsenal is about one-fifth the size of Americas or Russias, so it makes no sense to include it in talks between equals. If anything, doing so might galvanize Beijing to speed up its program. Second, China has no interest in joining the talks. Third, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said several times that hes ready to sign an extension of New START today. Its true that Russia has been building more short-range nuclear weapons, but not the types of arms limited by New STARTintercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Even critics who have accused the Russians of cheating on other arms treaties acknowledge that they are in strict compliance with New START.

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No U.S. military officer has expressed a need or desire for a large nuclear arsenal. But without New START, the reins will be loosened. And without the treatys verification provisions, which allow intrusive inspections and forums for resolving ambiguities, fear and uncertainty could mount on both sides, leading one side or the other to build more, in case the other side is building more, which could spawn a self-fulfilling prophecyand off we go, into a new phase of the nuclear arms race, which has been halted for the past quarter-century and slowed down for the quarter-century before then.

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Meanwhile, this week in North Korea, Kim Jong-un test-launched two more short-range ballistic missiles, in rapid succession. Also satellite imagery from late February revealed that rail cars parked at the countrys Yongbyon nuclear facility have departed, suggesting that they might be transporting material used in nuclear fuel production.

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Trump seems unmoved by these developments. The missile tests violate U.N. Security Council resolutions and pose a threat to Japan and South Korea, but he has waved away such matters in the past, saying he would be concerned only if Kim tested long-range missiles, capable of hitting the United States, or if he actually set off a nuclear device. Trump is so unconcerned that he sent Kim a letter, offering to help North Korea resist the coronaviruswhich is more than hes personally offered New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Perhaps Trump made the gesture, hoping that Kim would reciprocate by not testing any more missiles; if so, he is still deluded about his preposterous friends true intentions.

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Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan seems primed for a fatally disastrous turn. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Kabul this week to mediate between Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, who each claim to be the countrys president following the recent disputed election. After hours of discussion, Pompeo threw up his hands, flew home, and announced he would cut U.S. aid to Afghanistan by $1 billion. However, he stressed that he would not cut assistance to the Afghan military, as that part of the mission is still vital.

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This makes no sense. First, the nonmilitary portion of U.S. aid to Afghanistan amounts to well under $1 billion, so its not clear just what Pompeo proposes to cut. (He provided no details in his announcement.) Second, its unclear what Pompeo is after: It would be one thing if hed said there was no point throwing more money to prop up a government that couldnt declare a president; but since he pledged to continue security assistance, utter abandonment doesnt seem to be his goal.

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Still, that may be what happens. Barnett Rubin, director of the Afghanistan Regional Project at New York University, notes that the countrys Soviet-backed regime collapsed, back in 1992, not because the USSR withdrew its troops but rather because it stopped sending money.

Maybe Pompeo thinks that, by threatening to whisk away money, Ghani and Abdullah will come to their senses, form a unified government, and beg him to return. If so, it wouldnt be the first time U.S. emissaries have tried to exert leverage, to no avail. What do we want in Afghanistan? Thats still a question unanswered, and the place is unraveling amid the confusion.

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Meanwhile  there is much going on meanwhile, but the coronavirus is smothering developments in all corners of the globe. Its spreading to Syria and Gaza and Somalia, where thousands of refugees, bereft of medical care and unable to self-quarantine, are certain to die. Its spreading to Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the crisis of the moment. There is no global arrangement, and no global leader, to meet it head-on. Since the end of World War II, the American president has been the one to assume that role. Trumps abstentionand the absence of anyone else capable of stepping up in his placeonly highlights how desperately a new leader, here or elsewhere, is needed.
The USS Ronald Reagan, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered super carrier, is followed by the USS Somerset as it departs for Yokosuka, Japan from Naval Station North Island in San Diego, Calif., on Aug. 31, 2015. (Mike Blake/File Photo/Reuters)

Exclusive: As CCP Virus Spreads, US Military to Withhold Some Infection Data

The U.S. military has decided it will stop providing some of the more granular data about CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus infections within its ranks out of concern that the information might be used by adversaries as the CCP virus spreads.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper outlined the plan in an interview with Reuters, saying that he wanted the military to keep providing broader data about infections in the armed forces, which rose by 30 percent to 227 cases on March 25.

But Esper, a former Army secretary, said he wanted some of the more mission-specific information to be withheld to prevent compromising operational security.

What we want to do is give you aggregated numbers. But were not going to disaggregate numbers because it could reveal information about where we may be affected at a higher rate than maybe some other places, Esper said, without disclosing precisely what information would be withheld or when the plan would be implemented.

Such a decision could upend expectations about the kind of disclosure about CCP virus fallout the public can expect from the military, which has a small number of infections relative to an overall force of well over 1 million active-duty troops.

Beyond daily updates on infections across the armed forces, the U.S. military has been telling the public for weeks about the locations of individual cases, from on a warship to inside the Pentagon, and at overseas commands throughout the world.

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, on March 2, 2020. (Susan Walsh/AP Photo)

Esper noted that it was one thing to disclose the case of the first U.S. soldier infected with CCP virus, which U.S. forces in South Korea did last month. But he wanted to guard against creating the expectation of regular updates everywhere.

Im not going to get into a habit where we start providing numbers across all the commands and we come to a point six, seven weeks from now where we have some concerns in some locations and reveal information that could put people at risk, he said.

Esper said operational security was particularly important in places overseas where the United States is combating adversaries, noting the fight against al-Shabaab in East Africa as well as ISIS militants in Syria or Afghanistan.

Still, he did not expect those missions to be disrupted by the CCP virus, saying we have more than enough capability.

The rate of infection and its impact is not hitting us at the levels that we have any concerns about right now, he said.

U.S. Infections Outstrip Ones Overseas

But Espers remarks appear to underscore U.S. military concerns about the potential trajectory of the CCP virus over the coming monthsboth at home and abroad.

There has been a sharp increase in CCP virus cases among troops inside the United States, which officials tell Reuters have overtaken the number of cases among forces overseas in key branches of the military.

U.S. soldiers gather as U.S. Vice President Mike Pence arrives for meetings at Al Asad Air Base, Iraq, on Nov. 23, 2019. (Jonathan Ernst/File Photo/Reuters)

The Air Force told Reuters that the United States was home to about 85 percent of its confirmed coronavirus cases among its personnel as of Wednesday. The Navy said roughly 90 percent of its cases were in the United States.

The Army declined to say how many of its personnel who tested positive were at home or overseas.

Esper did not confirm whether the number of cases was higher in the United States or abroad but noted that commanders overseas have greater ability to impose restrictions on troops and their families.

You have far, far, far greater control of your servicemembers when youre deployed abroad, even when youre stationed abroad, than you do back in the United States, he said.

Reuters has reported that thousands of U.S. military personnel are in quarantine or in self-isolation in Europe and the Middle East due to either exposure to someone infected or recent travel to high-risk locations.

But the precise number worldwide has not been disclosed and some commands have declined to offer figures, including the U.S. militarys Southern Command.

A spokesman at the U.S. Africa Command, Air Force Colonel Christopher Karns, said his command would publicly report confirmed cases of infection but was not looking to advertise the number of people under quarantine.

If advertised, numbers can be used by adversaries to their advantage, Karns said in a statement.

By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali

Epoch Times staff contributed to this report.
FOR the second week in a row the caretaker government is asking TDs to back an unprecedented emergency law to deal with the coronavirus crisis.

Meeting in reduced numbers, the Dail will thrash out the details of the legislation today.

Q: Whats first up on the Dail agenda?

A: A: The day will begin with a motion being tabled to remove planning barriers to building temporary medical facilities as part of the Covid-19 response. Other proposed changes will mean restaurants can switch to providing takeaways without requiring planning consent.

This comes after the Government said restaurants that wish to stay open should switch to takeaway. The main work of the day will be debating the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid) Bill 2020.

Q: So whats in this new law?

A: It provides strong new powers to temporarily ban evictions and freeze rents. But the wide-ranging Bill also allows for the Governments planned wage subsidies and includes measures to make it easier for health care professionals to re-register and return to work. Another section of the law deals with mental health tribunals. The law also allows former soldiers to rejoin the Defence Forces at the same rank at which they left.

Read More

Q: So what will it mean for renters?

A: Landlords wont be able to serve notices of termination during what the law describes as the emergency period. This is defined as three months in the Bill. Rent increases are also prohibited for three months. This period can be extended by the Government depending on the threat posed by the coronavirus but any extensions must later be put to the Houses of the Oireachtas for approval.

Q: What about wages for at-risk employees?

A: With hundreds of thousands of jobs threatened the Government has pledged to pay 70pc of an employees wages up to 410-a-week for businesses willing to meet the remainder of their staffs weekly payment. The employer must be adversely affected by the virus crisis and have suffered at least a 25pc reduction in turnover or customer orders. The proposed law allows for the wages subsidies to be paid.

Q: And what about former health staff?

A: More than 60,000 people have responded to the HSEs Be on Call for Ireland initiative. The legislation amends laws relating to doctors, nurses and pharmacist re-registering to make it easier to bring back former medical professionals. It includes a provision that no fee would be charged for re-registering.

Q: Will the legislation pass?

A: In all likelihood yes. Opposition parties will table amendments to the Bill - for instance Sinn Fein want protections for renters who have verbal agreements to rent rooms - but ultimately it will get over the line due to the need to protect renters and provide wage subsidy payments.

Theres also a deadline which will focus minds. There have been warnings that, in the absence of a new government being formed, new laws must be passed before the new Seanad is elected next week.

Q: What changes are the Opposition seeking to the legislation?

A: Opposition parties have tabled a string of amendments to the emergency law. Proposed changes to the Bill are to be debated later this evening.

Among the suggestions put forward are:

Fianna Fail want the government to publish regulation for payment break criteria for all mortgages including the Rebuilding Ireland Home Loan Scheme.

Sinn Fein put forward an amendment to ban evictions or rent increases in instances where the tenant is renting under licence or in an informal rent-a-room arrangement for the duration of the emergency.

Independent TDs Michael Fitzmaurice, Marian Harkin and Michael McNamara want an option to extend the proposed three month rent freeze for a further five months.

Solidarity TD Mick Barry is seeking the publication of a report within two weeks on legislative changes required to ensure tenants in student accommodation are able to leave contracts early without having to pay rent for the remainder of the year.

Solidarity-People Before Profit want a line included "for the avoidance of any doubt" that all Travellers who are currently resident in any location should not be evicted during the crisis. Exceptions to this would be "where movement is required to ameliorate hardship and provide protection" but it would be "subject to consultation with the Travellers involved".

Fianna Fail health spokesman Stephen Donnelly has suggested that nurses or midwives living here who qualified or practiced in the UK be able to register to work in Ireland.

Immigrants that are trained doctors, nurses and pharmacists would be allowed to register to practice in Ireland under amendments tabled by Solidarity-People Before Profit.

Those seeking abortions should be able to do so by "tele-medicine consultations with doctors" with medication or prescriptions sent through the post according to an amendment tabled by Solidarity TD Mick Barry.

Sinn Fein wants the government's 350 Covid Payment for those that lose their jobs set at 100pc of the applicant's former net pay up to a maximum of 525-per-week.

Independent TDs Denis Naughten and Cathal Berry want new regulations for Mental Health Tribunals surrounding a patients to continue in operation for no more than 30 days without further approval from the Dail or party and group leaders.
Readers hoping to buy Laurentian Bank of Canada (TSE:LB) for its dividend will need to make their move shortly, as the stock is about to trade ex-dividend. Ex-dividend means that investors that purchase the stock on or after the 31st of March will not receive this dividend, which will be paid on the 1st of May.

Laurentian Bank of Canada's upcoming dividend is CA$0.67 a share, following on from the last 12 months, when the company distributed a total of CA$2.68 per share to shareholders. Based on the last year's worth of payments, Laurentian Bank of Canada has a trailing yield of 8.5% on the current stock price of CA$31.5. If you buy this business for its dividend, you should have an idea of whether Laurentian Bank of Canada's dividend is reliable and sustainable. As a result, readers should always check whether Laurentian Bank of Canada has been able to grow its dividends, or if the dividend might be cut.

View our latest analysis for Laurentian Bank of Canada

Dividends are typically paid from company earnings. If a company pays more in dividends than it earned in profit, then the dividend could be unsustainable. Laurentian Bank of Canada paid out more than half (74%) of its earnings last year, which is a regular payout ratio for most companies.

Companies that pay out less in dividends than they earn in profits generally have more sustainable dividends. The lower the payout ratio, the more wiggle room the business has before it could be forced to cut the dividend.

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

TSX:LB Historical Dividend Yield March 26th 2020

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Companies with falling earnings are riskier for dividend shareholders. If earnings decline and the company is forced to cut its dividend, investors could watch the value of their investment go up in smoke. That's why it's not ideal to see Laurentian Bank of Canada's earnings per share have been shrinking at 4.5% a year over the previous five years.

Story continues

The main way most investors will assess a company's dividend prospects is by checking the historical rate of dividend growth. In the past ten years, Laurentian Bank of Canada has increased its dividend at approximately 7.0% a year on average. That's interesting, but the combination of a growing dividend despite declining earnings can typically only be achieved by paying out more of the company's profits. This can be valuable for shareholders, but it can't go on forever.

To Sum It Up

Should investors buy Laurentian Bank of Canada for the upcoming dividend? Earnings per share have been declining and the company is paying out more than half its profits to shareholders; not an enticing combination. These characteristics don't generally lead to outstanding dividend performance, and investors may not be happy with the results of owning this stock for its dividend.

So if you're still interested in Laurentian Bank of Canada despite it's poor dividend qualities, you should be well informed on some of the risks facing this stock. Case in point: We've spotted 1 warning sign for Laurentian Bank of Canada you should be aware of.

If you're in the market for dividend stocks, we recommend checking our list of top dividend stocks with a greater than 2% yield and an upcoming dividend.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
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San Francisco, 26 March 2020: The Report IT Professional Services Market Size, Share, & Trends Analysis Report By Type, By Deployment (On-premise, Cloud), By End Use, By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2019  2025

The global IT professional services market size is expected to reach USD 1.07 trillion by 2025 with a CAGR of 8.4%, according to a new study conducted by Grand View Research, Inc. Growth in demand for knowledge-based services and preference for flexible and customizable professional services are driving the global market.

Enterprises across various end-use industries are under mounting pressures to reduce capital expenditures and increase operational efficiencies. The adoption of IT professional services has been growing as these services can help reduce the overall IT costs, and in turn, the capital expenditure. Benefits associated with these services, such as ease of deployment, lesser risk, and higher security, have also been aiding the market growth.

Incumbents of the BFSI, retail, telecommunication, and IT industries prefer cloud-based services. As the number of enterprises opting for digital transformation continues to increase, vendors are finding it more convenient to deliver IT services through the cloud technology. It also allows providers to expand their geographic reach and offer scalable services, as well as on-demand support.

Tech companies, marketing firms, and consulting companies are the largest users of IT professional services. Digitization, big data analytics, and Business Intelligence (BI) are some of the key functionalities being outsourced to reduce the administrative costs and overheads. However, concerns over data security and protection of privacy and confidentiality are some of the factors that may hinder the market growth.

Access Research Report of IT Professional Services Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/it-professional-services-market

Further key findings from the study suggest:

The market is significantly diverse and fragmented but led by a few well-established companies, including Accenture PLC, Capgemini SA, IBM Corp., and Microsoft Corporation

The ability of the vendors to provide cloud-based, tailored, and secured solutions would influence the customers buying decisions

The cloud segment is expected to witness the fastest CAGR over the forecast period

Technology and consulting companies have emerged as the largest adopters of IT professional services and would continue the trend in the years to come

The North America regional market led the global IT professional service market in 2017 and is expected to register a CAGR of 7.5% over the forecast period.

However, Asia Pacific is anticipated to be the fastest-growing regional market with a CAGR of 9.6% during the forecast period

Browse more reports of this category by Grand View Research at: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry/emerging-and-next-generation-technologies

Grand View Research has segmented the global IT professional services market on the basis of type, deployment, end use, and region:

IT Professional Services Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2014 - 2025)

Project-oriented Services

ITO Services

IT Support & Training Services

Enterprise-Cloud Computing Services

IT Professional Services Deployment Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2014 - 2025)

On-premise

Cloud

IT Professional Services End-use Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2014 - 2025)

Technology Companies

Consulting Companies

Marketing & Communication Companies

Others

IT Professional Services Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2014 - 2025)

North America

Europe

Asia Pacific

Latin America

Middle East & Africa

Access Press Release of IT Professional Services Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-it-professional-services-market

About Grand View Research

Grand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.

For More Information: www.grandviewresearch.com
New Delhi: Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Harsh Vardhan accompanied by Union MoS Health and Family Welfare Ashwini Kumar Chaubey and Union MoS Social Justice and Empowerment Rattan Lal Kataria, addresses at the signing of an MoU between the Image Source: IANS News

New Delhi, March 26 : The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Thursday said that there was a reduction in the rate of increment of novel coronavirus cases in India. The reduction has been noticed during the lockdown which was implemented in the country on Wednesday.

"Although we are seeing a larger number of cases being reported and deaths recorded, the rate at which the cases are increasing appears to be relatively stabilizing," Joint Health Secretary Lav Agarwal told media at a press conference.

"However, this is only the initial trend," Agarwal cautioned.

He said if the measures taken by the government are strictly followed, then there will be a time when no case will be reported.

Agarwal also stressed continuing with measures to contain the dreaded disease from transmitting in the country.

"I want the same level of alertness to continue. If we collectively ensure that lockdown measures are implemented, we will be able to tackle the challenge posed by this disease," he said, while requesting the foreign-returnees to follow the quarantine directions.

"It will not only benefit you but your family too. Therefore, I request all the people to cooperate with us. The challenge is big and it is our collective responsibility to overcome it," he said.

According to the Health Ministry, 43 new confirmed cases and 4 new deaths due to coronavirus were reported on Thursday, which is the highest number of casualties reported so far in India.

Busting a myth if housefly could be a host for novel coronavirus transmission, Agarwal said there was no such possibility.

Dr Raman Gangakhedkar of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), who was also present at the conference, said that there was still no proof of community transmission.

"We are still at the stage of local transmission. If we follow the measures such as social distancing and isolation, we may safely be stable. One or two cases cannot be considered as beginning of community transmission," he said about an infected person in Hyderabad who neither had a history of foreign travel nor did he meet any infected person.

"Why would we hide anything about community transmission?" he said.

At least 17 states have started building dedicated COVID hospitals, the joint secretary told the media.

Agarwal said the government is working to ensure that essential things reach the people easily during the lockdown.

"The Cabinet Secretary had discussed with all chief secretaries the lockdown measures and preparedness of states in terms of hospitals and logistic arrangements. He had also called for making an arrangement for essential commodities to reach the people. Seventeen states have started working towards building a dedicated COVID hospital," Agarwal said.

He said arrangements are also being made to facilitate uniformity of treatment and introducing the orientation of protocol by training doctors online in association with AIIMS Delhi.

"The training consists of epidemiology, infection control practices and case management. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is involved by the government for conducting behavioural module training." "As many as 64,411 people have been brought into surveillance. Out of these, 8,300 people are quarantined at government facilities and the rest are home-quarantined. Before the travel restrictions, a lot of people came into the country. States are now monitoring those people," Agarwal said.

As on Wednesday there are at least 593 active COVID 2019 cases in India, of this, 42 have been cured, 13 have died and one migrated, according to the data put out by the Health Ministry at 10.15 a.m. on Thursday.
Former Bacalar deputy shot to death at ranch

Bacalar, Q.R.  A former deputy with the municipality of Bacalar was found shot to death on his ranch Wednesday evening.

Neighbors called emergency services reporting the shooting. Police went to the scene where they reported finding the deceased body of ex-legislator Roman Guzman Gonzalez. Witnesses said that two hooded individuals arrived at the ranch and shot him, fleeing in a truck and leaving Guzman Gonzalez for dead.

Staff from the Forensic Medical Service arrived to remove the body. The State Attorney General has begun an investigation.

Guzman Gonzalez was a deputy for the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), president of the Ejidal Commissariat and candidate of the Social Encounter Party.
DENVER  Well get this done by the end of summer.

That was what Dan Haegerts neighbor Bob told him one summer afternoon in 1976 in Lansing, Mich., when Mr. Haegert decided it was time to restore his fathers 1931 Ford Model A to its original luster.

The summer of 76 would prove an optimistic deadline. Thirty years later, the work was finally done.

And neighbor Bob, well, he dropped off the project before summers end, said Dr. Stan Haegert, Dans son. Dr. Haegert, a family physician, inherited the vehicle from his father, now 87, in the early 2000s. They were reminiscing recently at the assisted-living home in Colorado where Mr. Haegert resides, about a 20-minute drive from his sons home.

In 1968, Dan Haegert bought the Model A from his father for $1. Dad brought it up to Michigan, Dr. Haegert said. Shined it up a little bit, and then you drove it as is.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned at the outset of COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions that some Canadians would be stranded abroad. That warning looks like prophecy now for a number of people for whom travel options are becoming increasingly scarce.

Canada issued a blanket non-essential travel advisory on Friday, March 13, telling would-be travellers not to leave the country  that they would risk getting stuck abroad during the pandemic.

The next day, Foreign Affairs Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne encouraged all Canadians in the U.S. and overseas to come home  a call that prompted caravans of snowbirds to make the trip home from sunny destinations like Arizona and Florida.

But travellers in other countries  including those who left well before the advisory was issued  haven't been able to make it home due to severe border restrictions in some countries that have halted the movement of foreigners and locals alike.

After the initial flood of media reports on Canadians stranded in countries where borders were shut with little notice, the federal government has been working with companies like Air Canada and Air Transat to send planes to destinations in Morocco, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru, among others, to repatriate Canadians. Thousands have already headed home.

But demand for transportation back to Canada has exceeded the capacity of even the largest of jumbo jets, while emergency tickets are being snatched up in an instant or snarled by internet connectivity problems in remote locales.

Vancouver-based lawyer Peter Swanson has been stuck in Cusco, Peru, for days. He's been largely confined to his room, with little access to life's necessities beyond the walls of his hotel.

He said he's heard many "horror stories" of people securing tickets on rescue flights only to be told their booking wasn't valid because of a glitch. So far, the rescue flights have been departing the country only from the capital, Lima  but there are several hundred Canadians in Cusco, the city used as a staging ground for hikers climbing Machu Picchu.

Story continues

The long, winding drive over the Andes to Lima takes 19 hours in normal conditions, but it's impossible in a country where martial law is now in place and domestic travel is nonexistent.

Swanson said he hopes he can catch a Lima-bound flight Friday and a connecting rescue flight to Toronto in the evening.

"I am pretty much never leaving my phone or iPad so I can get online right away," Swanson told CBC News. "It has been a bit of a roller coaster, with a lot of rumour and misinformation on possible efforts to get Canadians from Cusco.

"Sadly, I think there are going to be a number of Canadians stuck here for a while longer."

The Americans already have airlifted stranded travellers from Cusco to Miami. The Israelis also brought their countrymen home days ago on a rented El Al jet.

Submitted by Peter Swanson

Canadians are waiting anxiously for further instructions from officials who have been swamped with requests for help. In the last two days alone, Global Affairs Canada has fielded 8,907 calls and 25,441 emails at the Emergency Response and Watch Centre in Ottawa from Canadians all over the world.

Emergency response centre swamped

The emergency response centre is more accustomed to helping Canadians with lost passports, or people whose loved ones have died abroad. It's not experienced in organizing a large-scale evacuation of tens of thousands of people trying to outrun a global pandemic.

Given the sheer volume of correspondence, much of the government's communication with Canadians like Swanson has been through social media. Champagne has urged all travellers to register with the Canadians Abroad service so the government knows who's abroad and where they are, and who's ready to go.

"Fellow Canadians in Peru: We continue to work to organize the upcoming flights of Thursday and Friday. Our goal is for the Friday flight to have as many people from Cusco as possible," Ralph Jansen, Canada's ambassador in Peru, tweeted Wednesday.

CBC News

Air Canada has been sending special promotional codes to registered email addresses when flights become available. Those codes can be used on their website to book rescue flights. The cost of a one-way ticket home from Peru is about $1,400.

One of the Canadians who will be stuck in Peru for the foreseeable future is Greg Bestavros. He's been in a hostel near Cusco for 11 days and, while conditions have been grim, he said he's hoping to get out soon on a rescue flight.

Now he's been told that won't happen because someone else in the hostel has tested positive for COVID-19  and the Peruvian government doesn't want anyone entering or leaving the building for the next month or more.

"We're locked down here for a duration of one to three months. This hostel is in a military quarantine," Bestavros said. He faces jail time of up to five years if he tries to leave. He's tried to contact Global Affairs Canada, to no avail.

"There's obviously a very high volume of calls. We've been reaching out to the various numbers that have been provided. At this point we haven't heard back from anyone."

"I wish that [government] action had come swifter, because now we're in a situation where we don't know if we'll be able to make it home," Bestavros said. "We've checked emails, we filled out forms, we've waited for something to happen and our worst fear has come to light now."

'Dog's breakfast'

Global Affairs Canada said it's doing all it can to bring people like Bestavros home but with 419,400 people registered in nearly every country on earth, some inevitably will be left behind.

"We are working to help as many Canadians as possible return home, but some may remain outside of the country for an indeterminate amount of time," the department said in a statement.

The Canadian government has really not got their act together. - Oliver Hartleben

"Canadians that are already outside of Canada or unable to return to Canada should monitor local media and follow local public health advice [on] lockdown or shelter-in-place guidance."

Kurt Egloff, a retired civil servant from Ottawa, has been travelling throughout South America with his wife for months over the winter.

The couple arrived in Lima on the very day the Peruvian president closed the border, ending all commercial flight traffic to points abroad. That lockdown has been extended until April 15. He hasn't been able to get a ticket on any of the three flights that have left the country so far. He only received an Air Canada offer code once.

"The whole process is very tricky, very frustrating," Egloff told CBC News. "They keep saying, 'We can't promise to get everybody back home.' That concerns us."

Egloff said he and his wife are worried about their supply of prescription medications as the days tick by.

Submitted by Peter Swanson

The government had said it would prioritize certain passengers for rescue flights, especially those more susceptible to COVID-19-related complications. Egloff said he was disappointed to see pictures of the first Lima evacuations involving planes full of young people destined for Canada while some of the more vulnerable were left behind.

Egloff said the booking process for repatriation flights has been a "dog's breakfast," one that privileges the web-savvy. The cost of a ticket home is steep and applying for the government's emergency loan program is cumbersome.

"It's not been very stellar, let's put it that way. Other countries have had a much more efficient, prompt process in place and they were able to bring their people back for free," Egloff said.

Janis Legg is worried about her son, Tyler, who's also in a Cusco hostel with "little social distancing, police on every street corner and very poor communication from the Peruvian and Canadian governments."

Legg said Tyler and other travellers are "frustrated and scared," worried that if they get sick they won't have a way home given Canadian restrictions on symptomatic passengers travelling by plane. Canadians who are sick will be denied boarding and told to seek medical attention in the countries where they are.

Legg said she just wants to know if her son will be safe. "The communication breakdown is catastrophic, given all that today's technology can provide for," she said.

Submitted by Kurt Egloff

Some Canadians in other countries, like Guatemala, have given up waiting for the federal government to come to their aid.

Oliver Hartleben had been trying to get his family out of the country for days, with Canadian embassy officials offering bus services to the Mexican border to help travellers find flights home from a country with fewer travel restrictions.

His family made it out of Guatemala on Monday  but only because his daughter is also an American, and they could hitch a ride on an evacuation flight organized by the American embassy on Monday. "The Canadian government has really not got their act together. We heard that the bus they organized to go via land to Mexico never showed up," he said.
VectorStory | Getty Images

Thousands, if not millions, of businesses across America have already been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Thats why GoFundMe created its Coronavirus Small Business Relief Initiative, which the company claims is intended to support our friends and neighbors at local businesses facing financial loss from the COVID-19 pandemic. Make a difference today by donating or starting a small business fundraiser.

So, if you own a business, it might be time to set up a GoFundMe that can help. If you love a local company thats struggling right now, you can check the website to see whether you can donate or whether you might be able to start a GoFundMe for that business. If youre simply in a giving mood, here are three businesses asking for donations right now.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has written to 18 chief ministers of the country, asking them to provide aid to the workers from the state who are stranded in different regions due to the lockdown over the novel coronavirus pandemic.

"Bengal has many workers - semi skilled and unskilled, working in different parts of the country. Due to complete lockdown in the country for COVID- 19 pandemic, many Bengal workers could not travel back and are stuck at different places," Banerjee said in the letter.

The chief ministers of Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Delhi, Odisha, Karnataka and Punjab were among those who received the letter.

"We have received information that many such workers who are ordinarily resident of Bengal are stuck in your state too," Banerjee said. "We are getting SOS calls from them."



They are generally in groups of 50-100 and can be easily identified by the local administration, the chief minister said.

"Since, it is not possible for us to reach any help to them, I take the opportunity to request you to kindly ask your administration to provide them with basic shelter, food and medical support during this period of crisis," she said.

"We, in Bengal, are taking care of such stuck people in our State," Banerjee said in the letter.

She stated that the chief secretary would pass on the details of such people to the respective state chief secretaries to speed up this entire process of humanitarian support in this hour of crisis.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The government on Thursday said the mega bank consolidation plan is very much on track and will take effect from April 1 despite the onslaught of coronavirus pandemic throwing the country out of gear

New Delhi: The government on Thursday said the mega bank consolidation plan is very much on track and will take effect from 1 April despite the onslaught of coronavirus pandemic throwing the country out of gear.

The Union Cabinet earlier this month approved amalgamation of 10 public sector banks into four global size lenders, beginning next financial year.

Asked if the government is considering extending the deadline for the merger of public sector banks, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said "at the moment there is nothing on that".

Banking Secretary Debasish Panda said the merger process is very much on track and expressed hope that the banking sector would be able to meet the challenges thrown by the pandemic.

"That is very much on the track. It''s parallel activity going on. As far as fund transfers etc are concerned, necessary arrangements will be made," Panda said.

The statement assumes significance as there has been demand from some quarters for deferring the deadline due to coronavirus outbreak.

All India Bank Officers'' Confederation (AIBOC) on Wednesday requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to defer mega-merger exercise of banks in view of coronavirus outbreak.

Banking services across the country are impacted due to COVID-19 as the lockdown is being observed across the country.

Following the consolidation, there will be seven large public sector banks (PSBs), and five smaller ones. There were as many as 27 PSBs in 2017.

As per the mega consolidation plan, Oriental Bank of Commerce and United Bank of India will merge into Punjab National Bank; Syndicate Bank into Canara Bank; Andhra Bank and Corporation Bank into Union Bank of India; and Allahabad Bank into Indian Bank.

The merger will result in the creation of seven large PSBs with scale and national reach, with each amalgamated entity having a business of over Rs 8 lakh crore and it would help create banks with a scale comparable to global banks and capable of competing effectively in India and globally.

In addition, consolidation would also provide impetus to amalgamated entities by increasing their ability to support larger ticket-size lending and have competitive operations by virtue of greater financial capacity.

Last year, Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank were merged with Bank of Baroda. Prior to this, the government had merged five associate banks of SBI and Bharatiya Mahila Bank with the PSB.
An elderly man tested positive for COVID-19 in West Bengal, taking the total number of cases in the state to 10, a senior health official said on Thursday.

The 66-year-old from Nayabad in Kolkata had no history of travelling abroad or outside the state, he said.

He is undergoing treatment at a private hospital's intensive coronary care unit, especially set up for novel coronavirus patients, the official said.

His family members have been placed under home quarantine, he said, adding that police have been posted outside their residence.

The man recently attended a wedding ceremony at Egra in East Midnapore district, where he might have come in contact with an infected person, sources in the health department said.

"After coming home from the wedding ceremony, he complained of fever and breathing problems, following which he was admitted to a private hospital on March 23," one of the sources said.

His samples were tested twice and the result turned out to be the same, a doctor at the private hospital said.

The sexagenarian has been given oxygen support and necessary medicines, the doctors added.

Meanwhile, a woman who was sneezing and coughing in a bus, which was on its way to Kolkata from Paschim Burdwan, was told by the driver and his helper to get herself tested but she refused.

The driver, on reaching Esplanade area in the city, informed police about the matter, following which he was told to take the bus to Beliaghata ID hospital.

The woman, however, refused to alight from the bus despite repeated requests by doctors at the hospital.

"We tried convincing her to get down so that we can conduct a test, but she was reluctant," a senior doctor of Beliaghata ID hospital said.

A team of police officers also reached the hospital to convince her but she again refused, the doctor said.

The woman was finally taken to MR Bangur hospital in south Kolkata, where she agreed to get her tests done, a senior police officer said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
File photo of health staff carrying out a door-to-door campaign in Khanyar locality of Srinagar. The first patient to test positive for the coronavirus was from this locality. On Thursday a person who had flown on the same flight as the first positive also tested positive for coronavirus. (DC Photo by H U Naqash)

Srinagar: The Jammu & Kashmir authorities on Thursday decided to shut all places of worship in the Valley after it recorded the first death due to the novel coronavirus, COVID-19.

The number of patients infected by the deadly virus rose to 13 after three more cases tested positive today. Thirteen more such patients are being treated in the union territory (UT) of Ladakh.

Among the three new positives are two siblings aged 8 months and years whose grandfather returned from the Umrah pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia on March 16 and tested positive on March 24.

The man, a resident of the Natipora area in Srinagar, had shared the same flight in which the Kashmir Valleys first COVID-19 patient, a 67-year-old woman from the Khayam, Khanyar locality in Srinagar, flew back home.

The third person to test positive on Thursday is a resident of the frontier district of Rajouri. He had been in close contact with the person who died of the virus earlier in the day.

The 65-year-old man who died in the government-run Chest Disease (CD) Hospital in Srinagar had a medical history of diabetes, hypertension and obesity. A noted businessman and originally a resident of Sopore town, the man had contracted the deadly virus while attending a public outreach programme of Tablighi Jamaat in various parts of the country.

The patient had returned to Kashmir after visiting New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu recently after participating in a Tablighi Jamaat programme in which people from Indonesia and Malaysia were present, an official said.

The J&K government has ordered an inquiry into the alleged mishandling of the patient after he tested positive for COVID-19 at CD Hospital.

An official who wished not to be named said that the hospital administration, even after knowing the travel history of the patient and observing the symptoms of COVID-19 in him, did not put him in quarantine or bring the matter to the notice of authorities when he left the hospital without getting admitted.

Official sources said while on the loose, he spread the virus by intermingling with the public and relatives.

On Wednesday, there were chaotic scenes at hospitals and various other medical facilities in Baramulla and Bandipore districts with panic-stricken residents who had met this person rushing there to offer themselves for COVID-19 testing.

A report from Sopore said about two dozen mourners attended the funeral of the Covid-19 victim on Thursday afternoon. While the pallbearers and grave-diggers wore protective gear -- masks, overalls and eye gear - provided by the authorities, others hid their faces with surgical or locally made masks.

In order to prevent the spread of the virus, the authorities have decided to shut places of worship across the Valley. Srinagars DC Shahid Iqbal Choudhary claimed that major Muslim shrines and Sikh gurdwaras supported this decision. He tweeted, Closure of all religious places in #Srinagar is under way..with active cooperation of management committees. Revered shrines Hazratbal, Naqshband Saheb show the way. #StayAtHome".

Despite repeated requests by government authorities and advisories issued by some religious organizations and prominent clerics, joint prayers and congregations continue to be held in many mosques and hospices in the Valley.

At midnight Wednesday, people recited adhan or azaan from the balconies, rooftops and lawns of their houses, apparently in the belief this would invoke god's mercy and ward off COVID-19. A Pakistani cleric had earlier asked Muslims to say azaan from wherever they would be on Wednesday night. His video message was telecast by a Pakistani TV channel.

Though his call was supported by several other clerics, many prominent religious leaders in South Asia and beyond have claimed that such an exercise is not permissible in Islam as there is no evidence or record to suggest that this was ever done during Prophet Muhammad's time or by his sahaba or companions.

Kashmir's Grand Mufti, Nasir-ul-Islam, on Thursday announced that no weekly congregational prayers would be held in Valley mosques on Friday.
HullWiper  hull underwater cleaning by robot

Hull robot underwater cleaning company HullWiper Ltd reports a big growth in use of its technology, as an alternative to underwater divers, to remove marine biofouling from ship hulls.

HullWiper, a company providing underwater robots for cleaning ship hulls of fouling reports a big growth in take-up of the technology, which provides a lower cost alternative to human divers. HullWiper is currently rolling the service out in ports around the world. Looking only at the cost per square metre of hull cleaning, the technology appears initially more expensive than traditional hull cleaning methods such as divers with brushes, which the company roughly estimates to be around $3/m2 compared to $1/ m2 with a diver, this includes attendance by two scuba divers with a wire hand brush so is subjective. But HullWipers cleaning method, with high pressure seawater jets, is less likely to damage the hull than divers using brushes, and so extends periods between cleaning and it works out cheaper overall, the company says. No harsh chemicals, scrubbing or abrasive materials are used. For a vessel with a typical five-year paint plan, hull cleaning with divers/brushes shortens the life of the coating by eight months (or 80u roughness) per clean, says Simon Doran, managing director of HullWiper. This paint damage increases the roughness on the ship hull and therefore the drag, but also increases the regrowth of the algae due to better foothold. HullWiper catches, filters and compresses the fouling, which is captured onboard the ROVs unique filter system. The fouling is removed from the robot when it is brought onshore, and disposed of by an approved environmental waste disposal company. The fouling does not fall into the water risking the spread of harmful invasive species. It is concerns about pollution from fouling removed from hulls which has led many ports to ban cleaning by human divers while a vessel is in port. This means that the vessel cannot be cleaned and loaded/unloaded at the same time. So a vessel must usually be taken off hire while it is being cleaned by divers. With HullWiper you can clean in the port. Also with HullWiper, you can clean the hull at night time, something which cant be done with divers. And of course it does not need any breaks or rest periods after it has entered the water. The robot device is known as a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), similar to the devices used in oil and gas subsea (seabed) projects. The ROV is "driven" from an operator on a barge or offshore support vessel. This gives more flexibility than operations from a jetty. If it was operated from a jetty, the work would need to be planned around the vessel's berthing schedule and cargo operations. Testimonials Stephan Martinussen, Maersk Lines head of global vessel performance centre, said in a written testimonial on the HullWiper website, we place a high degree of focus to ensure world class bunker efficiency and thereby reduce our fleets carbon footprint. Hull performance plays a key role in that objective. It uses technology that is both eco-friendly and facilitates diver free hull cleaning of our vessels. Jesper D Rasmussen, a former managing director of Maestro Technical Shipmanagement, provided a written testimonial saying it was a very good initiative, and aligned with the way environmental legislation as well as bunkering are going. Hull cleaning is clearly going to be one of the ways of saving a dollar on fuel consumption. Online calculator Having a clean hull improves a vessels speed, or enables it to operate at the same speed with less fuel consumption (and so less CO2). There is an online calculator on the HullWiper website, which will tell you how much it thinks a HullWiper clean will save on your next voyage, taking into account the type of vessel, vessel size, engine type and power, voyage information, chartering rate and fuel type (and so fuel cost). It will calculate the hull area, how much HullWiper will cost, how much conventional cleaning will cost with divers, and additional costs from divers, including from having the vessel off hire while the work is being done, and paint damage HullWiper thinks diver cleaning will cause. It can also estimate how much extra costs you will incur from having a fouled hull, including from extra fuel costs (which worked out at about 4% more, on an example Tanker Operator tried). It will estimate additional chartering cost from this speed reduction, calculated by the extra time a fouled ship will take compared to a clean ship (which worked out at about 6% of the fuel cost, on an example Tanker Operator tried). Where it is available The service was first launched in 2013 in Dubai and has since expanded to include key locations in the Middle East(Port Khalid  Sharjah, Port Rashid - UAE, Fujairah  UAE, Jebel Ali  UAE) as well as ports in Australia (Brisbane, Bundaberg, Gladstone and Townsville), Egypt (Suez Canal), Mauritius (Port Louis), Panama (Balboa), Singapore and Spain (Algeciras). There is a Gothenburg base covering a wide area of Scandinavia - the Sound, Great Belt and Skaw areas; Copenhagen, Malmoe, Kalundborg and Frederica Havn. The service in Gibraltar is provided by ship fuel conservation and underwater services provider SCAMP. It plans to have a second unit in operation in the first quarter of 2020, following the first unit doing around 60 hull cleans over 2018-2019. HullWiper will offer the service in Ras Laffan, Qatar, from early 2020, in a partnership with GAC Qatar, which has a license from the countrys Environment Ministry. Plans are in the pipeline for new locations including Sri Lanka, Korea, South Africa, Chile and Bahamas. It is approved to work with coatings from Chugoku Marine Paints, Hempel, International Paints, Jotun, PPG Protective and Marine Coatings, SeaCoat Technology. These coating manufacturers approve of our ROV methodology and cleaning process, Mr Doran says. The company has a leasing program to provide the technology to service providers, where HullWiper does not have its own base, interested in offering it to their clients. Simon Doran HullWipers Managing Director Simon Doran is a former diver with the Royal Navy, who has also served with the UK army in the Falklands, Northern Ireland and Operation Desert Storm. As a former diver, Mr Doran says he appreciates how dangerous diving can be. "I am a diver at heart, and I know that what we do reduces the risk to divers. Hull cleaning can be labour intensive and arduous for a diver at the best of times, and you can imagine the unnecessary risks and even shortcuts that can be taken when a dive team is cleaning a VLCC by night, at anchorage." "Whilst there are a number of first class diving companies who work to the highest standards with correct equipment, there are still Mickey Mouse outfits that choose to ignore what it means to be a professional commercial diver."




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Linkedin Suherdjoko (The Jakarta Post) Semarang  Thu, March 26, 2020 10:17 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d76277 1 National COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,mudik,exodus,Central-Java,West-Java,virus-corona Free

Though the government has yet to decide whether to ban this years Idul Fitri mudik (exodus), many Jakarta workers have reportedly returned to their hometowns across Java despite warnings against traveling and public gatherings.

Some consider it an opportunity to mudik earlier as business has slowed down or their offices have closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak  even though Idul Fitri is not expected to fall until late May.

Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo said he had obtained reports from regents and mayors saying the initial homecoming flow from Jakarta had recently entered the province.

In Jepara, 44 buses arrived from Jakarta carrying homecomers. It indeed happening early maybe because the offices and companies where they worked had reduced their working hours or even stopped operating, Ganjar said.

While the homecomers health has yet to be confirmed, Ganjar hoped they did not cause problems for residents, including students, who had been advised to stay at home.

Read also: Forget 'mudik' this year, govt tells people as Idul Fitri moves closer

Ganjar appealed to residents who were currently working in the hardest-hit Jakarta not to go home just yet.

Meanwhile, those in Central Java, dont go see your relatives in Jakarta, he said. If it is necessary, there should be a record of each travelers health at the border into Central Java.

West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil said the number of people under monitoring for COVID-19 had jumped dramatically because many residents who worked in Jakarta had chosen to return home during the crisis.

The number of people in monitoring for COVID-19 in Sumedang surged to 1,807, the majority of whom are workers who had just returned from Jakarta. The regency only had one positive case announced on Sunday.

The outbreak is centered in Jakarta. If you go home before the rapid test is carried out, you could be put under monitoring coming from a highly exposed area, Ridwan told kompas.com on Tuesday.

Sumedang Regent Dony Ahmad Munir said he had imposed two-week local isolation that prevailed in the six districts where the number of people under monitoring significantly increased.

The West Sumatra administration has officially issued a circular calling on all residents living outside of the province not to return home. The circular was signed by West Sumatra Regional Development and Cooperation Bureau head Luhur Budianda on Monday.

We have issued a letter of appeal to temporarily delay plans to return home, Luhur said, adding that the appeal was also addressed to all heads of Minang community organizations outside of West Sumatra.

The Transportation Ministry is currently mulling over a ban of this years Idul Fitri mudik and has yet to reach a final decision. The ministrys spokesperson, Adita Irawati, said there might be some uncommon policy.

Read also: Scientists call for lockdown to contain COVID-19 ahead of Ramadan, 'mudik'

Both the Jakarta Transportation Agency and the Transportation Ministrys Land Transportation Directorate General have canceled their annual free Idul Fitri mudik programs this year, which normally receives thousands of participants.

It has been decided that the program will be canceled this year. Originally, we planned to hold this free mudik program with state-owned enterprises and other private companies, said the ministrys land transportation director general, Budi Setiyadi.

Such a measure was taken on the ground of the extended emergency disaster status for COVID-19 declared by the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB), which would last 91 days starting from Feb. 29 to May 29, he added. (syk)




By Jung Min-ho







Korea reported more deaths than births for the third consecutive month in January.





According to Statistics Korea Wednesday, 28,471 people died last month, up 4 percent from a year earlier. Meanwhile, the number of newborns decreased 11.6 percent to 26,818.





The trend of more deaths than births started in November, with the government running out of policy ideas and  now with the COVID-19 pandemic  resources to boost the falling birth rate.





Korea's total fertility rate  the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime  hit a record low of 0.92 in 2019, a further drop from 0.98 a year before. The level is the lowest among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and far below the replacement level of 2.1, which the country needs to keep its population stable at 51 million.





The trend is only expected to accelerate, with fewer couples tying the knot. Data shows that 239,200 couples married in 2019, down 7.1 percent from a year earlier.





The agency said the number of deaths is expected to exceed that of births for all of this year, although the total population may still increase with an influx of workers from overseas.


Pactum's artificial intelligence-based system renegotiates long-tail vendor contracts to yield better outcomes for both sides.

Pactum, an AI-based platform that enables global companies to automate personalized commercial negotiations on a massive scale, today announced that Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT) has engaged Pactum to automate negotiations with part of its global supplier network. Pactum's augmented artificial intelligence system enables partners to negotiate more valuable contracts for all parties while reducing costs for customers.

Pactum's deal with Walmart is set for a pilot project with some of the company's long tail vendors. Revisiting those partnerships is key for large companies like Walmart, who may have so many contracts with various suppliers that it is hard for individual people to reach out and renegotiate, should circumstances change.

"We're thrilled to be working with Walmart," said Martin Rand, Pactum CEO. "It's encouraging that, as a leader in cutting edge technological innovation for efficiencies across its enterprise workflows, they see the value in what Pactum offers."

Inefficient contracting has been estimated to cause firms to lose between 17% to 40% of the value on a given deal, depending on circumstances, according to research by KPMG. Increasing the efficiency of millions of longtail supplier contracts represents a $200-500 billion opportunity for Fortune Global 500 companies jointly, according to Pactum's calculations.

"The underlying principle of efficient negotiations is that it's not a zero-sum game," said Rand. "The fact that one party wins with Pactum means the other party will win as well. Pactum removes the inefficiencies from low value, high volume deals."

In addition to retail, Pactum is also negotiating deals in real estate, online marketplaces, and online advertising. Pactum first showed early success with a daily deals company where it helped to increase vendor commission by 27% and 82% of those vendors said they would prefer to negotiate with that same bot again.

Pactum's team of analysts begins each project by mapping what they call the "value function" in a given set of negotiations. This is combined by Pactum's negotiation chatbot which is capable of autonomously conducting best practice negotiations prepared by Pactum's negotiation scientists. Once a negotiation is complete, all information is updated automatically in relevant systems such as ERP and CRM.

About Pactum:

Pactum is an AI-based system that helps global companies to autonomously offer personalized, commercial negotiations on a massive scale. The system adds value and saves time for both the Pactum client and their negotiation partner by aligning their values to determine win-win agreements via an easy-to-use chat interface that implements best-practice negotiation strategies. The web-based tool's applications range from supplier negotiations for online marketplaces to enterprise and retail procurement negotiations. The company is based in Mountain View with engineering and operations in Estonia. Pactum is backed by founders of Skype and TransferWise and built by luminaries from Skype, Starship Technologies and the Government of Estonia's e-Residency program. All are agreed on Pactum's vision of artificial intelligence improving business relationships while safeguarding humanity with ethical AI. Learn more at www.pactum.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005015/en/

Contacts:

Media contacts:

Robert van Gool (US) Elena Davidson (UK)

Liberty Communications for Pactum

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A dozen people who were supposed to be in self-isolation after touching down in Australia weren't at home during police spot checks.

Victoria Police ramped up quarantine spot checks on Thursday to ensure people aren't flouting coronavirus isolation rules.

The patrols and Facetime checks come as officers prepare to increase their presence in public places including using drones to keep an eye on beachgoers ahead of hot weather at the weekend.

Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton AM flagged the potential to bring in the military to support enforcement activities if laws are further tightened in Victoria.

Police conducted 88 spot checks in Victoria since Saturday, March 31 with about 380 police officers knocking on doors around the state over 24 hours.

They also used Facetime to check up on people self-isolating in a new measure to protect officers from coming into contact with potential positive cases.

Of the 88 checks conducted 12 people weren't home and several had provided the wrong address to Border Patrol officials on arrival back in Australia.

But Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton AM said it seems the Victorian Premier's hardline directives are getting through to the general public.

'People seem to be complying much better. They seem to be heeding the Premier's strong words on this,' he said.

Law enforcement conducted 90 spot checks in Victoria on Thursday, with about 380 police officers knocking on doors around the state over 24 hours

But Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton AM said it seems the Victorian Premier's hardline directives are getting through to the general public

Victoria Police Officers will continue to monitor the general public's behaviour to ensure community members aren't flouting advice to stay at home.

Commissioner Ashton said they'll be out in force at the weekend to make sure residents continue to stay at home despite the forecast of hot weather.

'We'll be patrolling beaches. We'll also be doing aerial patrols around beaches both with our air wing but also we'll be endeavoring to use some drone technology at beaches to try and make sure that we're monitoring group activity there,' he said.

'We do not want to see what happened last weekend in New South Wales. We do not want to see large groups of people sitting cheek-to-jowl on the beach on their mats, blowing up their blow up things. That's ridiculous. Going to the beach is a nice thing to do on a hot day. We're not in that situation right now, we're in a state of emergency.'

Victoria Police will conduct strict patrols at beaches this weekend to prevent community members flocking in droves like they did at Bondi Beach in Sydney (pictured)

Mr Ashton also indicated they're ready to engage additional forces if tensions escalate further in Victoria.

'Through emergency management Victoria we have access to additional workforce. If we had to we could talk to Australian Defence Force. We haven't had to do that yet but that would be an end game if we needed to do that. So we'll just keep ramping up we'll be continuing to increase as we need to,' he said.

Individuals face fines of up to $25,000 and businesses face $100,000 fines for breaching isolation restrictions.

Victoria Police ramped up patrols on Thursday for those in quarantine to ensure people aren't flouting the laws which are primarily based on an honour system

Members of the public had been calling police to report large gatherings and people who are not self-isolating when they should be.

'[We've also received calls] about businesses they think are open when they shouldn't be as well,' he said.

'We have had a few calls in relation to gatherings of people that people are concerned about so we've been sort of looking to respond to all of those calls.

'Lives will depend on everyone doing the right thing and particularly at the moment it's an important time when we live in such a world where the individual comes first, at the moment community must come first.'

Mr Ashton said police are yet to issue fines to anyone as people who haven't complied didn't understand the rules.

Individuals face fines of up to $25,000 and businesses face $100,000 fines for breaching isolation restrictions

A sign at Sydney International Airport instructing people to keep a 1.5m distance from each other. All people who have landed must isolate for 14 days at home

'They have been deeply apologetic and they're doing the right thing now. We've applied the common sense principle to that,' he said.

He said if police catch people who are deliberately and knowingly breaking the rules, they will be fined.

'We'll go down that track if we find someone is absolutely flouting it,' he said.

Meanwhile 400 police officers are in self-isolation and two have tested positive for COVID-19 in Victoria.
Ontario, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/26/2020 -- Bauxite is a rock with high aluminium content. It is the primary ore from which aluminium is extracted. Bauxite is one of the most abundant elements on earth. It contains nearly 25 - 30% of alumina. Bauxite is generally found in the belt around the equator. It occurs mostly in tropical and subtropical regions, in horizontal layers beneath a few meters of the overburden. Bauxite is a mixture of aluminium hydroxides, clay minerals, hydrous aluminium oxides and insoluble materials, such as hematite, magnetite, quartz, goethite and siderite. Aluminium minerals in Bauxite include gibbsite Al(OH)3, diaspore, AlO(OH) and boehmite AlO(OH).



The global bauxite mining market is estimated to have been valued at US$12.4238 billion in 2018 and is projected to grow at a value compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.4% by the end of 2025.



Furthermore, in the global Bauxite Mining Market, some of the top Bauxite Mining countries are Australia, China, Guinea, Brazil & India. These countries are the top 5 Bauxite Mining countries and held 86.2% share in the total production of Bauxite globally in 2017. Similarly, the top 5 Bauxite consuming countries are China, Brazil, Australia, India and Russia. These countries held 81% share in total Bauxite consumption in 2017.



The global primary aluminium production increased by 5.8% in 2017. The outlook for the aluminium industry continues to be positive in spite of the ongoing political uncertainty due to various political stances, such as import tariffs by the US on aluminium, Brexit and concerns that China, as the world's leading producer of aluminium and its semi-finished products, might increase its exports to the European markets.



Request Exclusive Free Sample PDF Of This Report At  https://dataintelo.com/request-sample/?reportId=75872



Segment by Key players:

- Aluminum Corporation of China Limited

- Access Industries

- Tata Steel Europe

- Halco Mining

- Tajik Aluminium Company

- Mitsubishi Aluminum

- Queensland Alumina

- Nippon Light Metal Company

- Australian Bauxite

- Iranian Aluminium



Segment by Type:

- CA-50

- CA-70

- CA-80

- Other



Segment by Application:

- Alumina for Metallurgical Purposes

- Abrasives

- Refractory

- Cement

- Others



Segment by Regions:

- North America

- Europe

- Asia Pacific

- Latin America

- Middle East & Africa



Avail Discount On This Report  https://dataintelo.com/ask-for-discount/?reportId=75872



Table of Content:



1. Executive Summary



2. Assumptions and Acronyms Used



3. Research Methodology



4. Bauxite Mining Market Overview

4.1. Introduction

4.1.1. Market Taxonomy

4.1.2. Market Definition

4.2. Macro-Economic Factors

4.2.1. Industry Outlook

4.3. Bauxite Mining Market Dynamics

4.3.1. Market Drivers

4.3.2. Market Restraints

4.3.3. Opportunity

4.3.4. Market Trends

4.4. Bauxite Mining Market - Supply Chain

4.5. Global Bauxite Mining Market Forecast

4.5.1. Bauxite Mining Market Size (US$ Mn) and Y-o-Y Growth

4.5.2. Bauxite Mining Market Size (000' Units) and Y-o-Y Growth

4.5.3. Bauxite Mining Market Absolute $ Opportunity



5. Global Bauxite Mining Market Analysis and Forecast by Type

5.1. Market Trends

5.2. Introduction

5.2.1. Basis Point Share (BPS) Analysis by Type

5.2.2. Y-o-Y Growth Projections by Type

5.3. Bauxite Mining Market Size and Volume Forecast by Type

5.3.1. Fabricated Frame

5.3.2. Tube and Coupler

5.3.3. Mobile

5.3.4. Pole

5.4. Absolute $ Opportunity Assessment by Type

5.5. Market Attractiveness/Growth Potential Analysis by Type



6. Global Bauxite Mining Market Analysis and Forecast by Application

6.1. Market Trends

6.2. Introduction

6.2.1. Basis Point Share (BPS) Analysis by Application

6.2.2. Y-o-Y Growth Projections by Application

6.3. Bauxite Mining Market Size and Volume Forecast by Application

6.3.1. Personal Decoration

6.3.2. Commercial Decoration

6.4. Absolute $ Opportunity Assessment by Application

6.5. Market Attractiveness/Growth Potential Analysis by Application



7. Global Bauxite Mining Market Analysis and Forecast by Sales Channel

7.1. Market Trends

7.2. Introduction

7.2.1. Basis Point Share (BPS) Analysis by Sales Channel

7.2.2. Y-o-Y Growth Projections by Sales Channel

7.3. Bauxite Mining Market Size and Volume Forecast by Sales Channel

7.3.1. Manufacturer/Distributor/Service Provider

7.3.2. Aftermarket

7.4. Absolute $ Opportunity Assessment by Sales Channel

7.5. Market Attractiveness/Growth Potential Analysis by Sales Channel



8. Global Bauxite Mining Market Analysis and Forecast by Region

8.1. Market Trends

8.2. Introduction

8.2.1. Basis Point Share (BPS) Analysis by Region

8.2.2. Y-o-Y Growth Projections by Region

8.3. Bauxite Mining Market Size and Volume Forecast by Region

8.3.1. North America

8.3.2. Latin America

8.3.3. Europe

8.3.4. Asia Pacific

8.3.5. Middle East and Africa (MEA)

8.4. Absolute $ Opportunity Assessment by Region

8.5. Market Attractiveness/Growth Potential Analysis by Region

8.6. Global Bauxite Mining Demand Share Forecast, 2019-2029



Continued



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According to a TOI report, the Super 30 actor has pledged Rs. 20 Lakh for municipal workers and care-takers to ensure they have all safety aids in place for themselves.

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Producer, and Telugu actor Pawan Kalyan has donated Rs 50 lakh to both the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana Chief Minister Relief funds to fight against the coronavirus pandemic.



Joining the bandwagon is Dil Dhadakne Do actor Shefali Shah. Shefali Shah wore a plastic bag over her face to demonstrate the effect of coronavirus on the lungs. She took to Instagram and Twitter to share the video in which she wore a plastic bag over her face.



Agencies

In a tweet, Haasan said with the help of doctors in his party Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) he is willing to convert the building that was once his residence into a temporary hospital to treat the coronavirus patients.



"One idea to be sent to all the government authorities. All train services are at standstill. The train wagons are idle. Each has 20 rooms which can be used. 3000 trains easily, all over India. Means 60,000 beds. Can be used in isolation in some cases. But in any case better than no hospitals," the Instagram user wrote as shared by Amitabh Bachchan.


New Delhi, March 26 : Union Minister for Human Resource Development Ramesh Pokhriyal 'Nishank' here on Thursday donated his one month salary to the Prime Minister Relief Fund to help battle the coronavirus crisis.

"In these times of crisis and to battle coronavirus outbreak, I am donating one month's salary to provide economic relief to the people. Not only this, if the need be, I will personally do whatever I can to help the people," Nishank said.

Keeping in mind the epidemic, the government has also announced a 170,000 crore relief package on Thursday, he added.

The Union Minister has urged students and teachers to make more and more people aware of this epidemic through various mediums and encourage them to follow the lockdown.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 06:41:35|Editor: yan

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HOUSTON, March 26 (Xinhua) -- U.S. state of Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday issued a 14-day self-quarantine order for anyone traveling to Texas through an airport from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut or New Orleans.

During a news conference, Abbott said the executive order will be enforced by Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). Travelers from those areas will have to report their quarantine location to DPS, said the governor. The individuals will not be allowed to go out in public, and will only be allowed visits from doctors.

Those travelers will also receive visits from DPS to ensure they are complying with the order. Those who do not follow the order will be subject to a 1,000-U.S. dollars fine or 180 days in jail.

As of Thursday, there are about 1,420 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state of Texas and 18 people have died from the disease. According to Abbott, more than 21,000 COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the state.
The Oregon Health Authority is putting out a call for medical volunteers amid the coronavirus outbreak.

The agency encouraged health professionals to volunteer their time by registering with the State Emergency Registry of Volunteers in Oregon. Volunteers can offer their services locally or make themselves available for statewide deployments.

Volunteers duties depend on immediate needs.

They may be asked, for example, to staff the Oregon Medical Station in Salem, work an information hotline or facilitate the mass distribution of medications.

CORONAVIRUS IN OREGON: THE LATEST NEWS

Other ways to help are available if youre not a licensed medical professional.

Multnomah County is looking for temporary shelter employees. Volunteers can sign up, too.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, medical centers, public health agencies and fire departments have sent out pleas for donations of supplies like masks, gloves and other protective equipment. And Salem Health is soliciting help making masks for nurses and other care providers.

-- Jim Ryan; jryan@oregonian.com; 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015

Subscribe to our Oregon coronavirus newsletter:
Hood River, a Columbia River Gorge travel hub, has ordered an immediate halt to discretionary overnight stays, citing the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

The measure temporarily bans stays at motels, hotels, short-term vacation rentals, hosted home shares, bed and breakfasts, RV parks and campgrounds, according to the city.

Essential personnel who need lodging so they can do local work are exempt. So are current guests staying at least 30 consecutive days.

People deemed vulnerable by the Hood River County Health Department, potentially including those who are homeless or under quarantine, are also exempt.

CORONAVIRUS IN OREGON: THE LATEST NEWS

The order comes after Gov. Kate Brown on Monday instructed people to stay home except when traveling for essential work, buying food and similar critical supplies or returning to their own homes.

Its similar to measures taken on the Oregon coast, which saw heavy crowds last weekend, prompting some areas to ask visitors to leave.

The gorge also saw plenty of traffic. Many popular hiking trails, as well as viewing areas at Multnomah Falls, are now closed.

In the past week, despite statewide restrictions on public gatherings, many visitors have flocked to the Columbia Gorge, gathered in large groups and failed to observe state-mandated six-foot social distancing requirements, thus creating a threat and danger to others, the city of Hood River said Thursday in a statement announcing the order.

The citys overnight stay order lasts until April 14, unless its extended.

-- Jim Ryan; jryan@oregonian.com; 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015

Subscribe to our Oregon coronavirus newsletter:
The Ladakh Heart Foundation started by a monk named Lama Thupstan Chogyal over a decade ago to address medical, especially heart-related problems, of Ladakhis is now battling the deadly coronavirus.

Ladakh's health department asked the foundations help in setting up an isolation ward. We have a facility and it was needed for people of Ladakh. The government wanted to run it on its own and we readily acquiesced, says Chogyal.

The LHF usually has four doctors, mostly volunteers who treat around 500 to 700 people every month; teams of doctors would also travel to reach patients in different villages across the region.

Speaking to The Better India Chogyal said, We agreed to cooperate with whatever the administration required of us. A couple of days after I was first notified of this requirement for our hospital and facilities, I received a call about a patient they were bringing in. Since this is a free hospital with volunteer doctors and nurses, we requested the local administration to deploy some of their medical staff with us as well to monitor suspected cases here."

Despite the lack of single rooms, Chogyals hospital is helping the administration quarantine suspected cases as much as they can.



Talking about how the hospital is dealing with crisis Chogyal says. "We are helping our doctors, nurses, cleaners and ambulance drivers in whatever capacity so that they can perform their duties without fear. I am at the hospital 24/7 to help the local administration in whatever capacity."

Its the presence of children in the isolation ward that brings tears to the eyes of Lama Thupstan Chogyal, 49, president of the Ladakh Heart Foundation. These children should be playing and enjoying life in the open, under the open sky. And here they are. Their cries are heart-wrenching, says Chogyal.

Three childrenaged two to two-and-a-half yearsbelong to a family of eight who have been quarantined in the LHF after two members tested positive for coronavirus, especially a 68-year-old-man from Chuchot village, around 20 km from Leh, who had returned from Iran on February 26 and developed symptoms of COVID-19.

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At this present moment, however, we have suspended all outreach programs because of COVID-19. We have also shut down our OPD because a lot of our patients are pregnant women," Chogyal told The Better India .



Chogyal expressed his gratitude for the people who are fighting the pandemic on the frontline saying, "I would also like to issue my gratitude to those battling on the frontlines of this epidemicdoctors, nurses, hospital cleaners, ambulance drivers, police personnel and airport/airline staff as well."

For now, Chogyal strongly believes that the pandemic is a test for everyone at the hospital, from the equipment required, isolating and treating patients and constantly disinfecting the rooms, he says it's a learning lesson to be well prepared for unexpected scenarios.
Washington, March 26 : Former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared in Iran 13 years ago, has died in custody there, a media report quoted a statement from his family as saying.

Levinson, the longest-held hostage in US history, disappeared in 2007 on the Iranian island of Kish, the BBC report said on Wednesday.

According to his family, he was working on behalf of an unauthorised CIA mission.

He retired from the FBI in 1998, but had been working in Kish as a private investigator, looking at cigarette counterfeiting in the region, according to Levinson's wife.

US officials suspected he was kidnapped by Iranian intelligence forces to be used as a bargaining chip in dealings with Washington, the BBC report further said.

In the statement issued on Wednesday, the Coral Springs, Florida-based family said they had recently received information from US officials that had led them to conclude Levinson had died in Iranian custody.

"If not for the cruel, heartless actions of the Iranian regime, Robert Levinson would be alive and home with us today," the BBC quoted the statement as saying.

The family said they received proof-of-life photos and a video in 2010 and 2011, though his whereabouts were unknown.

Photographs emerged of him bearded and wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, similar to those worn by US detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

Around his neck hung signs, one of which said, "why you cannot help me", they were quoted as saying.

In response to the development, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday at the White House: "I've been very much involved in that and he was a great gentleman and a great family.

"But Robert Levinson, who was outstanding, has been sick for a long time. He had some rough problems prior to his detainment or capture.

"It's not looking great, but I won't accept that he's dead. They haven't told us he's dead." Last November, Trump tweeted calling for Iran to turn over Levinson.
Asos has been accused of playing Russian roulette with workers health at one of its UK warehouses during the coronavirus outbreak.

The GMB union alleges that Asos has failed to properly implement social distancing measures or to provide workers at its site in Grimethorpe, South Yorkshire, with protective masks and hand sanitiser  allegations the online fashion retailer strongly denies.

GMB said workers have reported no social distancing measures are in place and a complicated clocking-in system means large numbers of people gather in a small area. Hundreds of workers are said to break for lunch at the same time, potentially adding to the difficulty of remaining at a safe distance from colleagues.

Some staff at the warehouse believe government guidelines on preventing the spread of Covid-19 are being completely ignored, GMB alleges.

One worker told the union: Itll be like a domino effect, if one gets it, well all get it. Another added: Im currently in isolation as I live with someone who is high risk. However, because I have been told I am not sick myself I will not be entitled to sick pay. So Im currently off work unpaid.

A Facebook group set up to support workers has attracted dozens of posts critical of how Asos treats staff at the warehouse.

Stephanie Peacock, MP for Barnsley East, said: I have spoken to a number of concerned workers employed at the Asos warehouse in Grimethorpe.

It is imperative that we all do our bit to stop the spread of coronavirus, saving future lives.

Asos employs more than 4,000 workers in the UK. They shouldnt have to put theirs and their familys wellbeing on the line for a pay check.

Deanne Ferguson, GMB organiser, said workers were scared by the situation, with many fearing they could catch the coronavirus at work and pass it on to vulnerable relatives.

Asos needs to put people before profits and make sure workers are the required distance apart and paid properly if they need to take time off. Anything else is putting unnecessary lives at risk, Ms Ferguson said.

Asos hit back at GMBs claims, which it described as false and part of a continuing campaign against us and the recognised union onsite, Community.

A spokesperson said: It is simply not true to say we dont have social distancing protocols in place and it is not true to say that we have thousands of employees working under one roof.

The reality is we typically have around 500 colleagues working in our 680,000 square feet facility at any one time and we have strict social distancing protocols in place but, it must be said, it is also our colleagues responsibility to adhere to them.

As directed by the government, we, along with other online retailers, are ensuring we are striking the right balance between keeping our warehouse operational, for the good of our employees and the wider economy, and maintaining the health and safety of staff, which is always our number one priority.

Employers are under increasing pressure to ensure staff are safe after MPs on the Commons business committee received more than 1,000 emails and tweets from employees about going into risky workplaces during the coronavirus epidemic.

The testimonies revealed staff being ordered to work closely together in small rooms, sometimes with no hand sanitiser or with no extra cleaning even after colleagues fall ill with the virus.

Rachel Reeves, chair of the committee, said: Its clear that many businesses are still not doing the right thing. This must change now. This is a health emergency  it cannot be business as usual.
The General Secretary of the opposition national Democratic Congress (NDC) Johnson Asiedu Nketia has hit hard at President Akufo Addo urging him to stop been obsessed with power at the expense of health and lives of Ghanaians.



According to him the President main priority should be the safety of every Ghanaian and not about the next election.



In a statement copied to Peacefmonline, Mr. Nketia stated that: Your Excellency please be true to your conscience. Ghana is facing a serious national emergency and you must let that be your priority, your one and only concern until this darkness fades away. Not GhanaCard, Not compiling a new voters register nor the December elections is worth any Ghanaian live.



Our passionate appeal to President Akufo Addo is that, there is a time for elections and there is time to save human lives, the lives of the very people who voted him into power and whose votes he may need again. Mr. President the time to save our lives, Ghanaian lives is NOW, not later, portion of the statement read.



Read full statement below;



A few days ago, Ghanaians were left bewildered about news that the Attorney Generals Office had filed an appeal at the High Court seeking to quash an earlier ruling restraining the National Identification Authority from continuing its mass registration of the GhanaCard in the Eastern Region, an act which was found by the court to be in breach of the Presidential directives relating to measures to prevent the spread of the deadly corona virus.



We note that in its appeal the AG argues that the GhanaCard will be needed in the upcoming voter registration exercise and for that matter, a halt of the exercise will result in an irremediable harm to the NIA. Ghanaians await the ruling of the courts on the appeal with bated breadth.



Suffice to say that, the NDC is deeply disappointed with the duplicity of President Akufo Addo. His stance as evidenced by the AGs appeal is a betrayal of public trust, because the NIA, being a public institution that reports directly to President, should not be encouraged to act with such levels of impunity in flagrant disregard of the Presidents own lawfully instituted public health directive to deal with a National Emergency of this magnitude.



The reasons for seeking a review of the court ruling as stated by Deputy AG, Hon. Godfrey Odame, have let the cat out of the bag. It is now abundantly clear that President Akufo Addos mind is actually preoccupied more with manipulating the electoral process in the hope of winning the 2020 elections than in dealing frontally with the clear and present danger posed by the global pandemic.



Our passionate appeal to President Akufo Addo is that, there is a time for elections and there is time to save human lives, the lives of the very people who voted him into power and whose votes he may need again. Mr. President the time to save our lives, Ghanaian lives is NOW, not later.



President Akufo Addo owes the country a responsibility to rally together all our people to face the pandemic. We expect him to demand full compliance of all directives he has given so as to send a clear and unambiguous message to all public institutions and individuals that he means what he says. The President must also restrain his overzealous Electoral Commissioner who seems totally oblivious to the escalated health crisis posed by the pandemic and which requires marshaling all available resources and undivided attention. That is how serious governments have approached this pandemic.



We wish to reiterate what the President probably knows already. We are a nation in crisis. The number of reported cases is on the increase. The number of casualties is slowly inching up. The situation will be dire, if the incidence of infection begins to rise beyond the capacity of our health care system and infrastructure.



We urge President Akufo Addo to do the right thing and bring all state institutions in line with his clarion call for Ghanaians to face COVID 19 enemy collectively. We hope he will not deny knowledge of the AGs appeal just as we are told he did with the Clergy when they asked about the GhanaCard registration then going on in the ER, during the Jubilee House Prayer session.



Your Excellency, please be true to your conscience. Ghana is facing a serious national emergency and you must let that be your priority, your one and only concern until this darkness fades away. Not GhanaCard, Not compiling a new voters register nor the December elections is worth any Ghanaian live. Let it the peoples health, the peoples safety and the lives of the elderly, our mothers, fathers and children be above all else.



--Signed--



Hon Johnson Asiedu Nketiah



General Secretary









Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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One of the most wrenching questions in medicine has been playing out to garish effect in White House press conferences.

The question is this: In an emergency, like the exploding pandemic of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, how much data should doctors require before they use a medicine? President Donald Trump has made clear that he thinks two old malaria drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, should be deployed quickly against the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. But his own lieutenants, the heads of the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have been hesitant.

There's no question the need for effective treatments is urgent. Cases of COVID-19 are exploding, with more than 24,000 reported nationally and more than 10,000 in New York State alone. Actual numbers may be far higher. Reports say that New York hospitals are full with patients on ventilators who need treatment now.

Hope has emerged around two anti-malaria drugs: chloroquine, discovered in 1934, and a derivative of it called hydroxychloroquine that is thought to have less severe side effects. Both have shown promise in preventing SARS-CoV-2 from infecting cells in the laboratory. And a small and preliminary clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine in France circulated widely and stirred excitement on social media (including from the president)  though its findings were hardly definitive about whether the drug would benefit coronavirus patients. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Sunday that a study of the drug will start Tuesday.

The fact that these drugs have already been cleared by the FDA for use against other diseases  they're prescribed by doctors not just for malaria but also rheumatoid arthritis and lupus  has added momentum to the argument they should be quickly made available for COVID-19; their side effects, which include heart and nerve damage and suicidal thoughts, are well-understood and, given the current circumstances, manageable, supporters argue. Doctors can already prescribe them off-label.

At a Thursday news briefing, Trump trumpeted that chloroquine had shown "very, very encouraging early results" and said "we're going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately." Minutes later, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, an oncologist, clarified that the drug would be available "in the setting of a clinical trial  a large, pragmatic clinical trial  to actually gather that information and answer the question that needs to be answered and  asked and answered."

On Friday, the president said, "It may work, it may not work. I feel good about it. That's all it is. Just a feeling." At the same press conference, Anthony Fauci, a physician who heads the NIAID and a veteran of outbreaks going back to HIV, emphasized the need for a methodical clinical trial.

"We're trying to strike a balance," Fauci said, "between making something with a potential of an effect to the American people available, at the same time that we do it under the auspices of a protocol that would give us information to determine if it's truly safe and truly effective."

On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted: "HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine," referencing a scientific journal article about the small clinical trial of 36 patients in France. Several other small studies of other antiviral drugs have also shown glimmers of hope. So what should doctors do?

How likely is it that the possible benefits shown in a small study will turn out to be a mirage? One way of understanding this is to look at what happens with medicines in clinical trials. Experimental drugs are usually studied in three stages of progressively larger studies. The first, called Phase 1 trials, are small studies used to get an early read on efficacy and rule out obvious safety issues. These are then refined in larger "Phase 2" studies and then in the large "Phase 3" studies used by the FDA to decide whether to approve a drug.

The study referenced by Trump, and other studies done so far of potential treatments for COVID-19, are small and hastily designed even by the standards of Phase 1 studies. So how often do infectious-disease drugs that enter Phase 2 studies reach the market? An analysis by the Biotechnology Industry Organization says they worked out only 27.5% of the time between 2009 and 2015. That means that three-quarters of the time, medicines against infectious disease that looked promising in small studies either were ineffective or had side effects that made them unusable. Even for medicines that reached Phase 3 trials, just 63% succeeded.

But the issues with these studies go beyond their small size or the fact that early promises, in research, often don't pan out. It goes to one of the big truths about how doctors, eager to see a new drug succeed, can subconsciously lie to themselves with clinical studies: To be trustworthy, these studies often need to be randomized. This means that not only are some patients assigned to a control group that doesn't get the promising medicine, but that who gets what treatment is decided, essentially, by a coin flip. (The most rigorous of these randomized trials are also "blinded," meaning the doctors running the studies don't know which patients are in which group.)

The use of randomization as the standard way to design a medical study goes back to another deadly infectious disease: tuberculosis. In the early part of the 20th century, it was a scourge, and many doctors turned to gold-based treatments, to try and control it. They turned out to be toxic and ineffective. In 1946, researchers in the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council decided to conduct a randomized trial of another treatment, the antibiotic streptomycin, in 107 patients. The results were clear: 7% of those who received streptomycin died, compared to 27% of those in the control group.

That study, published in the British Medical Journal in 1948, became the basis for most modern medical research. The sacrifice made by the 52 people in the control group meant that there was no doubt the streptomycin worked _ and that a situation like gold treatment, where many patients get a therapy that harms, instead of helping, wouldn't repeat itself.

The study Trump and others have touted was anything but randomized. Instead, COVID-19 patients were treated with either hydroxychloroquine or the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, an antibiotic also known as Zithromax, at a hospital in Marseille, France. They were compared to coronavirus patients at hospitals in Marseille, Nice, Avignon, and Briancon who didn't receive these drugs.

The study doesn't show that patients lived longer or were more likely to recover, but instead shows that the amount of virus in the blood was reduced much faster in the patients who took hydroxychloroquine and even faster in the six patients who took the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.

That result is encouraging, but for patients who are not gravely ill, it doesn't tell how to weigh the side effects of hydroxychloroquine against the potential benefits. That's the reason for a clinical study like the one starting in New York.

But for doctors on the front lines, particularly in New York City, where hospitals are becoming overwhelmed and where there are many patients on ventilators, the drugs could be an immediate option. As Cuomo put it in a press conference Friday, "where a person is in dire circumstance, [you] try what you can."

Reports about the potential of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for COVID-19 have been circulating among New York City emergency physicians for more than a week, and some patients are reportedly getting the hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin combination. (Perhaps as a result, there are shortages cropping up for patients with lupus and other diseases who need the drug.) The University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Washington both recommend hydroxycholoroquine for very sick COVID-19 patients.

The qualms about the French study extend to two other studies of antiviral drugs as potential COVID-19 treatments. A study of 80 patients given the Japanese flu drug favipriavir, which is not approved in the U.S., was not randomized; it found a shorter clearance time for the drug. A small randomized trial of HIV medicines, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found no overall benefit, but hints that it helped some subgroups of coronavirus patients.

Taken together, some stock analysts have forecast that these results could improve the odds that another antiviral drug, Gilead's remdesivir, could prove effective in two Phase 3 studies in China that are expected to read out in April.

For drug development, getting results so soon is blindingly fast. For doctors on the ground and patients who are struggling to breathe, it is agonizingly slow.
On May 1, 2010, at 4:51am - 911 operators received a distressed phone call from 24-year-old Shannan Gilbert, an escort from Jersey City, New Jersey who was visiting a john in the remote, upscale Long Island gated community of Oak Beach.

'They're trying to kill me,' she screamed amidst panic, confusion and voices in the background trying to calm her down. Emergency dispatchers struggled to determine Shannan's exact location over the 23-minute-long phone call that suddenly cut out.

Shannan Gilbert was working as an escort when she disappeared in the early morning hours of May 1, 2010. Investigation into her case led to the discovery of as many as 16 different bodies buried on Gilgo Beach, all are assumed to be the work of the unsolved Long Island Serial Killer

Shannan took off running down the road, shrieking for help. Two different neighbors called in to report a civil disturbance but operators had not yet drawn a connection to Shannan's panicked 911 phone call. By the time police arrived on the scene at 6:10am, Shannan Gilbert had vanished into the night and was never seen again.

It was her disappearance that would inevitably crack open a much larger, serial murder mystery. One that, ten years later, still has more questions than answers; with as many as 16 victims, no arrests, no suspects and no persons of interest, the Long Island Serial Killer is still at large to this very day.

Lost Girls, directed by Liz Garbus, is a new Netflix feature adapted from Robert Kolker's 2013 investigative book with the same title. The film focuses on Shannan's mother, Mari Gilbert as a tireless champion for her missing daughter against resistance from the Suffolk County Police Department who was all too ready to dismiss cases involving sex workers.

Tragically, four years after Shannan's remains were finally uncovered in 2012 - Mari Gilbert was brutally murdered by her other daughter, Sarra Gilbert during a psychotic breakdown. She was stabbed 227 times, nearly decapitated and beat with a fire extinguisher before having it sprayed into her mouth in an attempt to drown her.

New Netflix film focuses on Shannan Gilbert's mother Mari (above) who struggled to get justice for her daughter in a police department that quickly dismissed cases involving sex workers. The author of Lost Girls wrote, 'As far as the authorities are concerned, their profession still seals their fate'

Shannan Gilbert was the eldest of four daughters. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at a young age and Mari Gilbert was forced to place her in foster care as she struggled to care for her illness as a single mother with three other children. Gilbert graduated high school by the age of 16 and immediately entered the work force but turned to escorting to help pay for online college courses

Mari Gilbert (seated) sits with her attorney and three daughters (Stevie, Sarra and Sherre) during a press conference in 2016, this photo was taken months before her daughter Sarra (center, back) murdered her in a violent rage

Lost Girls is a movie about a mother's journey to find justice for her daughter while fighting against systematic victim-blaming of the women who were killed while working as escorts. 'As far as the authorities are concerned, their profession still seals their fate,' wrote Kolker in New York Magazine.

Life as a struggling single mother to four daughters in small-town New York was not easy for Mari Gilbert. Shannan, Sherre, Sarra and Stevie had difficult childhoods, marred by poverty and sexual abuse.

The eldest daughter, Shannan Gilbert was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at a young age and Mari was forced to place her in foster care. While Shannan was away, the two middle sisters, Sherre and Sarra were molested by Mari Gilbert's boyfriend.

Shannan Gilbert was intelligent, she graduated high-school early and by the age of 16, she was working various jobs trying to make ends meet before she began escorting to pay for online college classes. She moved to Jersey City, New Jersey where she was close to her clientele that was mostly based in Manhattan.

In the early hours of May 1, 2010 - Shannan headed out to Long Island for an escort call to Joseph Brewer's house in the sleepy seaside community of Oak Beach and was never seen alive again.

Much of what transpired that night still remains a perplexing mystery, but the most thorough account of what happened that evening came from Shannan's driver, Michael Pak who also doubled as her security.

Shortly after 2am, Shannan arrived at the two-story wood-frame house owned by Joseph Brewer, a 46-year-old unemployed financial adviser that was going through a divorce. As per the usual protocol, Pak would wait outside in the SUV while Shannan conducted her business inside.

Not long after entering the house, Shannan left with Brewer for a quick errand before returning back 15-minutes later; it's assumed that they went to buy drugs, but that was never confirmed.

'Shannan liked to partymostly pot, coke, and prescription drugs,' explained Kolker. 'But if she managed to make it through the night without burning through too much of what she earned, she could get home after five calls with $600 or more in her pocket.'

Michael Pak passed time by playing poker on his phone for two and a half hours when suddenly Brewer banged on his car window asking for his help. He told Pak that Shannan was 'freaking out' inside the house and that he wanted her to leave but she refused. Inside, Pak found Shannan cowering behind a couch, clutching onto her phone in a frenzied panic, telling 911 dispatchers: 'They're trying to kill me!'

On December 10, 2010, a K9 Police Officer and his cadaver dog found the remains of a missing sex worker in a weedy section of Ocean Parkway in Gilgo Beach while searching for Shannan Gilbert. Her body was one of ten found dumped in the area. Seven other women, a toddler and an adult male were discovered over the course of the following year. The remains of six women have been identified, the others have not. Many of the victims were sex workers who offered their services on Craigslist

Mari Gilbert speaks to reporters at the funeral of her daughter, Shannan Gilbett on Thursday, March 12, 2015 in Amityville, New York. 'Mari was good at harnessing the energy of others to achieve her goals, even if that sometimes meant pitting her new friends against one anotheror vilifying the media that was giving her the attention she needed,' said Kolker in New York Magazine

Shannan Gilbert (far right) poses in an undated photo with her younger sisters, Stevie, Sarra and Sherre (left to right). Shannan liked to lavish her sisters, nieces and nephews with the money she got while working as an escort. Mari, her mother who struggled to make ends meet while working at Wal-Mart, said she knew where Shannan's money came from but Shannan refused to stop. According to Kolker, she would say: 'Mom, I hardly have to do nothing, and I get thousands of dollars'

She kept 911 operators on the phone for 23 minutes but they were unable to locate her whereabouts and like almost everything else in Shannan's case, whomever 'they' are remains an enigma.

The 911 tape has never been publicly released but according to former Suffolk County Chief of Detectives, Dominick Varrone - Shannan sounded, 'not very coherent, not very rational.' He told 48 Hours in 2013: 'It almost seems like she's in some type of psychotic state or in some type of drug-induced stupor.'

Whatever terrified Shannan in that house remains one of her case's most enduring conundrums. Joseph Brewer insisted that a sexual encounter never occurred nor did he pay Shannan for her time. He later told The Star Ledger that he questioned if Shannan was a man after she 'asked him an odd question about transvestites' and that she began acting erratically when he asked her to leave.

'He got this girl probably so blown out of her mind, because thats how they are. Theyve got the drugs and theyve got the money, and youre there for the hour,' explained Kimberly Overstreet whose sister, Amber Lynn Costello was also murdered by the Long Island Serial Killer. Overstreet, an escort herself, introduced her younger sister to the sex trade. 'Then, for whatever reason, he did something to spook this girl.'

Sarra Gilbert killed her mother Mari Gilbert during a psychotic break in 2016, six years after her sister, Shannan was murdered by the Long Island Serial Killer

Shannan refused to leave and Pak eventually got frustrated and went back outside to wait in the car; he figured that she might have been suffering a bad reaction to drugs but that she would eventually come down.

A few minutes later, Shannan fled the house and took off running down the road screaming for help. She banged on the front door of 75-year-old neighbor, Gustav Coletti who immediately phoned the police at 5:22am. Later he gave conflicting accounts as to whether he made Shannan wait at the front door, or allowed her into his home.

Shannan took off again upon learning that Coletti called the police and ran out to the middle of the road. But when she saw Pak's SUV creeping down the street, she turned back around and hid under a boat parked in Coletti's driveway.

As Pak slowly drove passed, he asked Coletti if he had seen Shannan but before he could answer, Shannan bolted out from behind the boat and disappeared even deeper into the neighborhood. Neither Gus, nor Pak could catch up to her.

Pak later told police that he spent an hour driving around the small gated community searching for Shannan before he gave up and headed back to the city.

Shannan Gilbert (left) poses for a photo with her sister Sarra Gilbert. Sarra was the third in birth order and Mari Gilbert always considered her to be 'the reliable one.' After Shannan died, Sarra was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and began to have dangerous delusions that her family was possessed by demons

Suffolk County Police found Shannan Gilbert's remains on December 13, 2011. The medical examiner ruled her death inconclusive and police theorized that she had accidentally drowned after stumbling into a pool of brackish water while high on drugs. An independent autopsy revealed that she had been strangled and showed no evidence of drug use

Barbara Brennan, another Oak Beach resident, reported a frantic woman ringing her doorbell but by the time authorities finally arrived at 6:10am - Shannan Gilbert had completely vanished, leaving behind a single set of footprints in the sand of Gilgo Beach as her only trace. (Though accounts of the footprints vary).

Two days later, Mari Gilbert didn't even know her daughter was missing yet when she received a phone call from a man who identified himself as Dr. Peter Hackett. He explained that he ran a 'home for wayward girls' and wanted to see if Shannan made it home safely. He also explained that he administered her a drug to help calm her down the night she went missing.

At first Mari Gilbert didn't think much about the call, but began to worry when she couldn't get a hold of her daughter. Shannan was officially reported as missing on May, 3 2010.

Hackett was Barbara Brennen's next door neighbor. He had a reputation as a serial exaggerator who often made up stories in his personal and professional life as a way to insert himself into the conversation.

The retired surgeon first denied calling Mari Gilbert on May 3, but phone records determined that he did in fact call her twice. Even more suspect is that cell-phone towers show that he made the phone calls in New Jersey near Shannan's home. Police eventually decided that this was just a mere coincidence and cleared him of suspicion though how he got Mari Gilbert's number is an unanswered question that still looms large in the investigation.

Police search the beaches and thick brush on Oak Beach in April 2011, after they uncovered 10 sets of remains nearby while looking for Shannan Gilbert. Eventually they uncovered 16 different people, including an adult Asian male and a toddler, many of whom have still yet to be identified

Michael Pak and Joseph Brewer were polygraphed and also cleared in the investigation. The case went cold for seven months when a cadaver dog uncovered human remains just 50 feet off the road in the thick and thorny bramble on Gilgo Beach. They identified the victims as, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello.

All four women shared a startlingly similar profile to Shannan's: they were petite in stature, (only one stood taller than five feet). They were all escorts in their 20s who advertised for $200-an-hour on Craigslist. Each of them were discovered wrapped in burlap all within 500 feet apart from each other. Six more sets of human remains were uncovered in March and April 2011 - some have still yet to be identified.

On December 13, 2011, Suffolk County Police announced that the remains of Shannan Gilbert were found in a marsh about half a mile from where she was last seen. The medical examiner ruled her death inconclusive.

Mari Gilbert refused to accept the police's theory that Shannan had accidentally drowned after stumbling into a pool of brackish water. It doesn't explain why her belongings and clothing were scattered throughout the vicinity nearby.

An independent autopsy paid for by Mari Gilbert revealed signs consistent with strangulation and concluded that there was no evidence of drugs or drowning that lead to the death of her daughter.

Mari Gilbert never stopped advocating for Shannan even at the time of her brutal death in 2016 at the hands of her other daughter, Sarra Gilbert. Of Mari's four children, Sarra was always considered the reliable one. According to Robert Kolker, author of Lost Girls, 'She was the rock, the unfussy one, the child who parented the other children when Mari wasnt around.'

In addition to her sister's murder, Sarra suffered through various traumas throughout her life. She was sexually abused as a child by Mari's boyfriend. She had an abortion at the age of 14 and dropped out of school when she was 16 to move in with her 22-year-old drug dealing boyfriend named Manny.

The two had a son in 2009 which tested the already fraught relationship and Sarra ended up in a shelter for victims of domestic violence on more than one occasion.

Mari Gilbert along with the families of four other victims discovered in the Gilgo Beach bramble held a vigil on June 11, 2011 to bring attention to the case which they felt was being ignored by the local police department

Suffolk County Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart revealed previously undisclosed evidence in the on-going investigation in January 2020. It was a black belt embossed with the initials WH or HM was discovered at the crime scene during the early stages of the investigation. It is believed to be worn by the perpetrator who hunted sex workers and dumped their bodies on Gilgo Beach

The first four bodies discovered in December 2010 were that of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello. All four women were found wrapped in burlap, just 50 feet off the road in the thick and thorny bramble on Gilgo Beach

Several months after the independent examination of Shannan's remains, Sarra had her first intense mental breakdown. She became delusional and believed that her family was possessed by demons. 'She told people she was a god, and her job was to defeat all evil gods, and that quite often the evil gods took the form of her sisters and mother,' wrote Kolker in New York Magazine.

Lost Girls, directed by Liz Garbus, is a new Netflix feature adapted from Robert Kolker's 2013 investigative book with the same title. The film focuses on Shannan's mother, Mari Gilbert as a tireless champion for her missing daughter

In 2014, Sarra was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent much of that year in and out of mental institutions. She refused to take her anti-psychotic medication and her illness was often exacerbated by drug use.

In February 2016, Mari was given custody of Sarra's son after she drowned the family dog in a bathtub because she believed that it was possessed by the devil. Without her son, Sarra stopped receiving government checks that helped pay her bills and she resented her mother even more.

She was hospitalized in July for overdosing on ecstasy or LSD. 'Once awake, Sarra was so delirious and combative that the staff induced a coma to prevent her from harming herself,' explained Kolker. By the time she was released from the hospital, she had missed her monthly dose of medicine and 'there was nothing to keep her now from becoming actively psychotic.'

On the morning of July 23, 2016 , Sarra texted her sister and mother to tell them that she was hearing voices. It was later that day, when Mari stopped by Sarra's apartment to check on her, that she unleashed a frenzied attack on her mother - stabbing her 227 times.

Sarra Gilbert's lawyer tried desperately to mount an insanity plea in her trial; explaining that she was delusional and had no concept of right and wrong. He begged the jury to see that she was 'a true psychotic,' that was let down by the mental-health system. The jury did not agree and found Sarra Gilbert guilty of premeditated matricide and sentenced her to 25 years in federal prison.

The Long Island Serial Killer has become one of the most confounding mysteries in contemporary America. The case remains open and unsolved, but Shannan's memory lives on 'as a symbol of a system that lets down those who are vulnerable,' writers Kolker. 'For that, there are many people to thank, but chief among them is Mari Gilbert.'
[March 26, 2020] Crackdown wins 2020 Canadian Hillman Prize

ONFR+/TFO's Les Accents receives Honourable Mention BC Civil Liberties Association awarded Hillman Canada Prize for Democracy and Social Justice TORONTO, March 26, 2020 The Sidney Hillman Foundation announced today it has awarded the 10th annual Canadian Hillman Prize to Crackdown, a community-led documentary radio show and podcast that covers the overdose crisis and failed war on drugs. Crackdown is produced by a coalition of leading drug activists from Vancouver, including executive producer Garth Mullins, a longtime community organizer and former injection heroin user. In revelatory episodes, such as "Change Intolerance" ( Parts 1 and 2), Crackdown sheds light on pivotal public health incidents including "The Switch," a catastrophic attempt by British Columbia to push 15,000 methadone patients onto a new and unfamiliar treatment overnight. When the provincial government refused to heed warnings from users, Crackdown reveals how patients were forced to turn to the black market, with many relapsing  all on the eve of the devastating fentanyl crisis. Judges Bonnie Brown, Tony Burman and Garvia Bailey called Crackdown a pioneering example of collaborative journalism, marshalled in the service of telling urgent and humane stories from the front lines of a community fighting for its life. "Crackdown is an astonishing and profoundly moving example of the podcast format at its most emotionally acute," said judge Garvia Bailey. "The podcast is an effective amalgamation of 'on the ground' reportage, intimate first-person accounts, and investigative teacity coupled with a deep dive into drug policy. By enlisting drug users to tell these frontline stories, the raw urgency and tragedy of this ongoing crisis has never been rendered more starkly."



The Hillman judges also recognized ONFR+/TFO's Les Accents (Accents) for honourable mention. Les Accents is a beautifully produced and impactful web series that exposes linguistic discrimination against Franco-Ontarian and other French speakers in the province, discouraging their participation in post-secondary education and barring them from employment opportunities. "This year, the winner and the honourable mention used audio and video to reach online audiences to excellent effect," said judge Bonnie Brown. "While very different, each is an important piece of journalism that captures the lived experience of individuals whose challenges are often misunderstood to create lasting and meaningful societal change."

Hillman Canada Prize for Democracy and Social Justice The Sidney Hillman Foundation is also proudly announcing that the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) will receive the Hillman Canada Prize for Democracy and Social Justice  a special award given by the foundation's officers to mark the 10th anniversary of the Hillman Prize in Canada. The BCCLA, established in 1962, is the oldest and most active civil liberties group in Canada. Under the leadership of Josh Paterson, and now Harsha Walia, the BCCLA has repeatedly proven its commitment to just causes and, through its efforts, has instigated substantive change in the areas of human rights, privacy, police accountability, national security, free expression and workers' rights  each of which is central to the Sidney Hillman Foundation. Hillman's judging committee was deeply impressed by the breadth of work of the BCCLA over the last decade on some of Canada's most important issues and cases, including winning the right to medically-assisted death, striking down Canada's cruel solitary confinement laws, defeating the second-class citizenship bill and challenging discriminatory police street checks. "The BCCLA has had enormous influence and success overturning unjust laws, and bringing a progressive, humane perspective to many of this country's most contentious social issues," said judge Tony Burman. "The BCCLA has had a particular commitment to preserving the rights and freedoms of those who are most vulnerable to abusive government regulation and has repeatedly fought to protect the free expression of journalists and others." Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been forced to postpone the 2020 Canadian Hillman Prize Ceremony in Toronto. So, we are acknowledging our honourees online today, March 26, and we invite all of our readers to join us in sharing congratulations on social media. Please follow us on twitter @SidneyHillman to join our virtual celebration of outstanding Canadian journalism. The Sidney Hillman Foundation honours excellence in journalism in service of the common good. The U.S Hillman Prizes have been awarded annually since 1950 and the Canadian Hillman Prize since 2011. SOURCE The Sidney Hillman Foundation

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New Delhi, March 26 : After the central government announced financial assistance package to the poor in the wake of a nationwide lockdown due to coronavirus outbreak, former Mumbai Congress President Milind Deora on Thursday praised it but demanded more concessions for certain segments of socity.

Even as Congress Rahul Gandhi termed the package as the "first step in the right direction", Deora tweeted: "Government's decision to deposit money in the accounts of farmers, daily wage earners and India's most vulnerable is a good beginning." But he demanded concessions also for students and relief in payments of EMIs. "@FinMinIndia & @RBI must also permit deferment of EMIs on student, housing & small business loans. Salaried class & MSMEs also need immediate relief." Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced an economic relief package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore for the poor and migrant workers under the Prime Minister Gareeb Kalyan Yojana.

She also announced that doctors, paramedics, nurses, 'Asha' workers, cleaning workers involved in the fight against coronavirus pandemic and treating affected patients would be extended medical insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh each.
Iran tightens protective measures, introduces travel bans to rein in virus spread

Iran Press TV

Wednesday, 25 March 2020 10:43 AM

Stepping up its fight against the new coronavirus outbreak, Iran has begun banning people from leaving their cities and requiring those who are already on Persian New Year trips to return to their hometowns at the earliest opportunity.

Spokesman for the Iranian administration Ali Rabiei made the remarks in a Twitter thread on Wednesday following a cabinet session that was chaired by President Hassan Rouhani in Tehran earlier.

"In light of the fact that the country has brought the first wave [of the outbreak] under control and in order to prevent a new wave, the president announced a ban on all new inter-city trips," Rabiei wrote. "Those violating this directive will be subjected to legal action."

A pending amendment to the directive would, however, specify individuals and cases that are exempt from the measure, the official told reporters on the sidelines of the meeting.

The country would also enforce the closure of all parks as well as any sites that might draw large clusters of people, he said.

Those who have tested positive for the disease should observe the Health Ministry's relevant directives, including staying in isolation for 15 consecutive days, and are banned from traveling around freely against the precautions, the official noted.

Public offices and businesses are all ordered closed, except for stores supplying groceries and basic supplies, until April 3, the official added.

The Judiciary is set to announce the legal implications of violating the measures, and the Law Enforcement Force is required to act upon the announcement, Rabiei said.

The policies should attain the status of a social agreement among all members of the nation, he said, adding that popular contribution to the measures would reduce the virus' lifespan and the human cost that it could inflict, the spokesman tweeted.

"We need to stand by each other to pass through this difficult stage and trust the health apparatus and the government's decisions," Rabiei added.

He, meanwhile, expressed satisfaction that the country faced no shortage of staples for the months to come.

According to the World Health Organization, since emerging in central China late last year, the respiratory disease has claimed more than 18,900 lives and infected more than 425,000 others.

Earlier, Rouhani also told the cabinet meeting that later on Wednesday, the country would begin enforcing a plan featuring "stricter" countrywide measures aimed at preventing further spread of the new coronavirus.

The plan, he said, had been discussed in detail during a session of the National Headquarters for Managing and Fighting the Coronavirus on Tuesday. During that session, the Health Ministry tabled a measure aimed at enforcing "social distancing" that had to be employed more rigorously in certain places, Rouhani noted.

The new measures were to be employed "because we could begin facing a new wave of the disease over the upcoming days that we should likewise bring under control," he said.

The chief executive said the tough measures have to be enacted because "people's lives are very important to us."

"People should know that these harsh decisions are aimed at protecting their lives," Rouhani said. "What matters is that people suffer minimum losses, have no problem procuring their requirements, and that the period spent fighting the virus is cut to a minimum," the president asserted.

He, meanwhile, expressed delight that most cities and provinces were not facing any shortages as far as medical services and hospital facilities were concerned.

He cited the case of hospitals in the northeastern holy city of Mashhad, where general and intensive care wards had respectively reported 60 and 30 percent of their beds to be still available.

Draft resolution on US sanctions

Separately, Rouhani pointed to the United States' illegal sanctions against Iran that Washington was keeping in place amid the Islamic Republic's battle against the virus despite a global outcry.

He said a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council  that he did not identify by name  was to present the Council with a draft resolution protesting the bans.

"What is being talked about at the Security Council now is that a resolution should be ratified to enable the lifting of the sanctions amid the virus outbreak," Rouhani said.

Efforts are underway to unlock Iran's frozen assets overseas, he said. "Good steps are being taken to that end," the president stated without specifying.

Ministry updates number of confirmed cases, deaths

Presenting its daily COVID-19 update on Wednesday, the Iranian Health Ministry said the number of deaths had increased by 143 to 2,077 since Tuesday.

The ministry's spokesperson Kianoush Jahanpour also said the total number of confirmed infections had risen by 2,206 cases to reach 27,017 during the past 24 hours.

Jahanpour further noted that 9,625 COVID-19 patients had already recovered and been discharged from hospital around the country.

More than 47.5 million people have so far been screened for the viral infection through online and telephone monitoring programs, he said.

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March 25, 2020  Reuters, the worlds largest multimedia news provider, announced today it is mobilizing and expanding its fact-checking unit to fight misinformation on social media by expanding its partnership with Facebooks Third-Party Fact-Checking Program in the United Kingdom. The expansion comes at a critical time for audiences around the world, as misinformation about coronavirus is spreading widely on social media.

Reuters will now offer its media verification expertise in reviewing false or misleading content from U.K. users posted on Facebook and Instagram for its U.K.-based audience.

Hazel Baker, Head of UGC Newsgathering, Reuters said, As the world faces up to the severity of the coronavirus outbreak, the need to stem the flow of misinformation has never been more critical. The Reuters Fact Check team is examining social media content closely in order to track viral claims made by users in the U.S. and now also in the U.K. By verifying or debunking these claims, we hope to play our role, aimed at the publics interest, in reducing the rate at which inaccurate and potentially harmful posts are being shared at this time.

Guido Buelow, Facebook Strategic Partner Development Manager, EMEA said, Were committed to fighting the spread of misinformation online and building on our existing fact-checking programme in the UK through this additional partnership with Reuters. Our goal is to reduce the distribution of misinformation on our platforms, showing warning labels to people who come across fact-checked content and notifications before they try to share it.

Last month, Reuters joined Facebooks Fact-Checking Program to detect misleading user-generated photos, videos, headlines on social media for Facebooks U.S. audience in English and Spanish. Reuters has documented its findings in a specially created blog, and in the last 6 weeks, its fact-checking unit has analysed over 40 pieces of viral content related to COVID-19 on Facebook. Content fact-checked in the United Kingdom will also be recorded on the blog.

Reuters

Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the worlds largest multimedia news provider. Founded in 1851, it is committed to the Trust Principles of independence, integrity and freedom from bias. With unmatched coverage in over 16 languages, and reaching billions of people worldwide every day, Reuters provides trusted intelligence that powers humans and machines to make smart decisions. It supplies business, financial, national and international news to professionals via desktop terminals, the world's media organizations, industry events and directly to consumers. Reuters: The Real World in Real Time.

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Reuters

Deepal.Patadia@thomsonreuters.com
World leaders are to hold online crisis talks Thursday on the coronavirus pandemic that has forced three billion people into lockdown and claimed more than 21,000 lives.

With the disease tearing around the globe at a terrifying pace, warnings are multiplying over its economic consequences, and experts say it could cause more damage than the Great Depression.

Amid squabbling between the leaders of China and the US over who is to blame, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for the world to act together to halt the menace.

"COVID-19 is threatening the whole of humanity," he said. "Global action and solidarity are crucial. Individual country responses are not going to be enough."



The global lockdown -- which also took in India's huge population this week -- tightened further Thursday as Russia announced it was grounding all international flights, while Moscow's mayor ordered the closure of cafes, shops and parks.

Tokyo's millions of citizens have been told to stay home and tourism-dependent Thailand has shuttered its borders. Economists say the restrictions imposed around the world could cause the most violent recession in recent history.

"The G20 economies will experience an unprecedented shock in the first half of this year and will contract in 2020 as a whole," ratings agency Moody's said.

Unemployment rates are expected to soar -- as much as 30 percent in the US -- according to James Bullard, president of the St Louis Federal Reserve.

Leaders of the G20 major economies will hold a virtual huddle later Thursday in the shadow of such dire predictions.

"As the world confronts the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges to healthcare systems and the global economy, we convene this extraordinary G20 summit to unite efforts towards a global response," tweeted the king of Saudi Arabia. Saudi currently holds the rotating G20 presidency.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said richer nations needed to offer support to low and middle income countries.

The devastating effect on poorer nations was laid bare Thursday when the Philippines announced that nine frontline doctors had died after contracting COVID-19.

Three large Manila hospitals said this week they had reached capacity and would no longer accept new coronavirus cases. Hundreds of medical staff are undergoing 14-day self-quarantines after suspected exposure, the hospitals said.

The death toll from the virus, which emerged in China late last year, continued to grow, with the US becoming the sixth country to hit four figures.

Almost 1,050 people are now known to have died in the United States, with nearly 70,000 confirmed infections, a tally by Johns Hopkins University showed. Globally the number of infections is closing in on half a million.

The rocketing infection rate in the US has sparked a rush to buy weapons, gun store owners told AFP, with customers panicking about societal breakdown.

"A lot of people are buying shotguns, handguns, AR-15 (semi-automatic rifles), everything," said Tiffany Teasdale, who sells guns in Washington state.

"A lot of people are scared that someone is going to break into their home... to steal cash, their toilet paper, their bottled water, their food." Around half of the US population is under lockdown, but President Donald Trump said he would decide soon whether unaffected parts of the country can get back to work.

"We want to get our country going again," Trump said. "I'm not going to do anything rash or hastily.

"By Easter we'll have a recommendation and maybe before Easter," he added.

The White House, which has been criticised for its lacklustre response to the mushrooming crisis, has repeatedly lashed out at Beijing over the disease.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Group of Seven powers were united against China's "disinformation" campaign.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman infuriated Washington by suggesting on Twitter that US troops brought the virus to Wuhan, the metropolis where it first emerged late last year.

Scientists say the new coronavirus was first detected at a market that sold wild animals. "Every one of the nations that were at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place," Pompeo told reporters.

But any notion of unity after the videoconference among the G7, which also includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, was dashed by the lack of a joint statement -- often a formality at such gatherings.

Reports suggested the statement was scuttled by Pompeo's insistence that it use the term "Wuhan virus" -- a phrase frowned upon by medical professionals who say it is stigmatising.

The origins of the virus notwithstanding, its human cost continued to rise, as did the volume of the alarm bells being rung all over the world.

Iran's death toll surpassed 2,200 Thursday and Spain's topped 4,000. Meanwhile health experts cautioned that the sewage-soaked alleyways and bamboo shacks that are home to one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh provide fertile ground for the spread of the disease.

Britain's National Health Service said London's hospitals faced a "continuous tsunami" of seriously ill COVID-19 patients.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Egypt will extend a suspension of all court proceedings until mid-April as part of national efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus, a judicial source told Ahram Online.



Egypts justice ministry announced a two-week suspension on 15 March, which it said was intended to reduce crowding at court buildings.



The Supreme Constitutional Court, Egypts highest court, will halt its monthly sessions scheduled for early April until the second week of May, it said in a statement Thursday.



The court will notify parties in cases that will be postponed about the new dates, it added.



Egypt has ramped up measures aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus, imposing a nighttime curfew, suspending flights and halting classes at schools and universities until mid-April.



The country has registered 456 coronavirus cases and 21 fatalities.

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California's streets are empty, schools across the state have shuttered and businesses have closed their doors. The drastic measures being taken to contain the COVID-19 outbreak in California are creating a new dimension to the disaster: The pandemic  which has already claimed 68 lives and infected a confirmed 3,243 people in the state as of Thursday morning  will exact a heavy economic toll.

Anticipating a coming surge in cases of the fast-spreading virus, Gov. Gavin Newsom has quickly mobilized resources and expanded his order for roughly 40 million Californians to continue sheltering in place in the coming weeks. The sharp shift in economic output could hit California hardest among all states.

This is really going to be a recession unlike anything we have ever seen before, said Dr. Mark Duggan, a Stanford University economist and director at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Usually with recessions, he explained, its somewhat gradual. This will be just an instantaneous change in the economy.

Already, nationwide unemployment claims have exploded past previous records. New data from the U.S. Labor Department shows a historic 3.28 million new initial applications filed last week  a twelvefold increase from the week before. The last record, set in 1982, was 695,000.

Some officials have raised concerns that unemployment could surpass the 2008 Great Recession  or worse, the Great Depression. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin cautioned lawmakers last week that if drastic actions arent taken, the nation could see 20% unemployment.

But Newsom insists the nation's most populous state  with the fifth-largest economy in the world  is well-positioned to weather the storm. Armed with $21 billion in reserves and a strong safety net already in place, the governor remains confident that the state is ready for the recession.

The road to recovery, however, could be rocky.

Californias underfunded unemployment insurance program has been a problem for decades and only regained solvency in 2018.

Story continues

The state's economic resilience also will come down to revenue.

California's budget relies on taxes from stock market investment wins more than most. While the market rallied on Thursday in anticipation of the historic stimulus bill that is expected to pass Congress, the coming recession could just as quickly send stocks spiraling again. Now that the markets are taking investors for a ride, a sizable chunk of Californias revenue is also on the rollercoaster.

Compared to other states, California may need more help from the federal government for both response to, and recovery from, the disaster and is already expected to be among the first to begin borrowing, especially to help cover unemployment benefits.

Newsom, who waived the one-week waiting period in place before the crisis, said this week that California's unemployment insurance claims have already passed the 1 million mark.The U.S. Labor Department report shows the state had the largest increases in initial claims with rates rising faster than the country at large, and the numbers are more than 13 times higher than they were two weeks ago.

Before the crisis, the state averaged 2,500 claims a week  but for the week ending March 21, more than 186,800 new claims were filed.

The UCLA Anderson Forecast, which revised its quarterly estimates for the first time in its 68-year history last week, projected that California's reliance on tourism would make it particularly vulnerable in the coming recession. Economists predict that more than 280,000 payroll jobs will be lost as a result, more than a third from the leisure, hospitality, transportation and warehousing sectors.

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, paints an even bleaker picture, projecting 604,741 jobs will be lost in California by this summer.

The states underfunded unemployment insurance system will not be able to sustain the need for long, at least not on its own.

The unemployment insurance program in California is in the worst state of any, in respect to its reserves, Duggan says. For decades, analysts have cautioned that California needs to shape up its beleaguered unemployment insurance fund. U.S. Labor Department reports from the past two years deemed California's fund was the least solvent state in the nation.

An EDD report issued October 2019 shows the fund ended a nine-year insolvency in 2018, with $2.3 billion left over at the end of the year, and was projected to end 2019 with $3 billion. That's a narrow margin for a fund that pays out roughly $5 billion in good years. The report states that, "the current financing system does not allow for sufficient fund reserves to be built up during better economic conditions."

More: Unemployment funds were in trouble before coronavirus. Now claims are sky high.

California has long struggled with underfunding unemployment insurance

Last month, U.S. Department of Labor listed California as one of six states that would not be able to handle unemployment increases on its own. Duggan said California likely wont make it to the end of this year on its own coffers.

[California] made some questionable choices for how [they] finance unemployment insurance, he said. We will be the first state going to the federal government and asking for money for our unemployment insurance.

The system is designed so that taxes collected from employers during a strong economy can sustain the surges in unemployment when things take a turn. But in the late '90s, California got stuck in a political standoff between businesses and labor unions and opted to increase its benefit rates without raising the taxes needed to pay for the increase. The state still levies unemployment taxes on only the first $7,000 of each employees annual wages  the minimum allowed by the federal government.

Unemployment claims are soaring in California.

It is extremely insufficient," economist Ken Jacobs, chair of UC Berkeleys Labor Center, said. "That was clear after the Great Recession," he explained, adding that the state quickly went into the red and had to borrow from the federal government. "Changes werent made then. They need to be made now."

When the economy recovered, California continued paying interest on its $10 billion federal loan out of the general fund, but the principal was paid back by employers with higher taxes. That created an increasingly difficult environment to make long-term changes to the system.

[Employers] have been willing to do the payback afterward, rather than being willing to raise the rates," Jacobs added.

The state Employment Development Department has conceded that it is ill-equipped to handle a recession. In the last report, issued at the end of 2019, the EDD wrote that it weathered nine years of insolvency until 2018.

In good times, the fund pays out roughly $5 billion a year. This year, it will need to pay significantly more. To put it into context, before the pandemic hit, the EDD projected roughly 836,000 applications in 2020. In just the first two and a half months of the year, Californians had already submitted more than 1 million claims.

Its not just financing that is posing a problem. The rapid change caused by this crisis left little time for the EDD to bolster its staffing. Already, the agency is struggling to keep up and quickly process all the claims.

While the EDD is rushing to staff up, California Labor Secretary Julie Su has directed the department to streamline the process, and is bolstering the agency's workforce with staff from other departments and enlisting the help from recent retirees while the office continues to work around the clock.

In the short term, Californians can still expect to get their benefits and the states system will be shored up by the federal government. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, signed into law on March 18, could funnel roughly $120 million to the state for unemployment insurance. It also adds an extra 13 weeks to federally funded benefits. A separate stimulus bill, which passed the U.S. Senate on Wednesday night, could also add $600 to state benefits for up to four months, which otherwise fall between $40 and $450 a week.

Even with the added help, California's program is likely to fall into the red.

We will be borrowing from the federal government and the federal government will be borrowing a lot, too, Duggan said. The federal government doesnt have to run a balanced budget like the states do so the federal government can throw more weaponry than California can. I think the two working together will be really important.

California could lose revenue on capital gains

Even well-funded unemployment systems are not intended as a long-term solution, and typically provide only a fraction of pay a person would otherwise have gotten from their normal job.

The real resilience test will come down to revenue, and the state's ability to get the economy back on track.

In a report published last week by the nonpartisan California Legislative Analysts Office, analyst Gabriel Petek emphasized that its too early to know for sure how badly the budget will fare, but that the pandemic  and the economic uncertainty it causes  will significantly affect Californias near-term fiscal outlook.

One issue is the states close financial ties to the stock market.

California taxes capital gains, or the positive amounts investors earn, as regular income. That means when investors take a hit, so does state revenue.

In the governors $222.2 billion budget proposal, released in January, officials projected the price level for the S&P 500 stock index  which measures the market performance of 500 listed companies in the United States to gauge the overall health of the stock exchanges  would stay pretty flat. But after a slight upward swing late last year and into January, the markets plummeted this month.

Petek said, by the offices preliminary analysis, that means several billion dollars less will flow into state coffers than what was initially projected in the Newsom's budget. That revenue crunch is further complicated by the suddenness of the pullback in activity across wide swaths of the economy," Petek wrote.

The timing is tricky, as the emergency response falls just weeks ahead of the deadline for the governors May budget revise. Along with a two-month extension given to taxpayers who can now file through July 15, that will further complicate the task of developing revised revenue estimates, the government will have to significantly change legislative priorities, presenting new logistical challenges Petek wrote.

The constitutional deadline to pass the budget is June 15, and amid so much uncertainty, righting the ship wont be easy  especially with an extended need for emergency spending.

Its not all bad news out of the analyst's office, though.

Analysts have left room for the possibility of a V-shaped recovery where financial activity spikes back to normal levels just as rapidly as it sank, with the help of state and federal stimulus. California was, after all, on good footing going into the crisis. In recent years, the state prioritized paying down its debt and stashed surplus cash in its rainy day fund.

We were in a good place in a number of areas, said Jacobs. There are resources to be able to respond and thats central to being able to keep things going  being able to keep safety net programs going and respond to the emergencies, he said. That is very big.

Newsom echoed this point during a March 15 news conference, assuring the public that he is confident in the states position despite the uncertainty that lies ahead.

Weve never been in a better position to weather a recession, Newsom said, explaining that his team has projected a three-year $70 billion reduction in revenue and a $40 billion reduction in the general fund.

We are better position, I think, than the vast majority of states in the country, he added, saying that he expects federal support and the states ability to quickly change spending priorities to play a big role.

California has had to maneuver around recessions in the past  and even rewrote its budget three times during the 2008 financial collapse. The ability to bounce back will likely hinge on just how long it takes to contain the virus. Economic systems can sustain short periods of shock, and as Christopher Thornberg, founder of Beacon Economics told Politico, regions tend to recover quickly from natural disasters.

Its spending delayed, not spending canceled, Thornberg said, likening four weeks of coronavirus shut down to a hurricane. But to be clear, if this goes 40 weeks, California is not in a good position, he added. Our revenue system in the state is so hypersensitive to shifts in capital gains that if the stock market really did stay down where it is right now, were going to take a massive hit.

Emergency managers are finding, however, that this disaster poses new problems.

We are in response mode right now and we are going to be in response mode for many months, said Samantha Montano, an expert in emergency management whose debut book Disasterology is forthcoming. She noted that the coronavirus emergency is unusual compared to other disasters because it's not geographically isolated and that it is expected to stretch over a longer period of time.

Usually you are looking at a response that lasts a couple of days  or a couple of weeks at most, she adds. To have this really long period of response, which looks a lot different than moving into a period of recovery, to be activated to that extent is really unprecedented.

The feds will need to play a big role

As in most disasters, California will look to the federal government for help. Newsom has already requested $1 billion from Trump to help finance his response efforts.

The president has also made two declarations and both will provide much-needed resources for the state to take on this crisis. First, on March 13, he declared a national state of emergency. He also granted Newsoms request to declare a major disaster for California on March 22. New York and Washington also have been granted declarations.

California and other states and territories that receive the declarations can bill some of their emergency expenses to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. Typically, the state is expected to cover 25% of the expenses with the remaining 75% covered by the federal government. FEMA staff are also deployed to disaster areas, and affected businesses can qualify for low-interest loans from the federal Small Business Administration.

But it is still unclear just how much money California will get.

In recent years, the federal government has sought to limit the burden it shoulders, especially facing increasingly expensive disasters. FEMA has floated a policy that would require states to have disaster deductibles to curb federal expenses.

Sometimes, though, FEMA reimburses states for more. The process is murky and complicated  and adds even more uncertainty to an already financially precarious situation. Jacobs said the extent that the federal government decides to support California will determine just how economically devastating this disaster will be.

If the federal government doesnt step in in a very big way right now  not just with general stimulus but with targeted support for workers and small businesses that are directly affected we could see a very changed economy coming out on the other side, he said, adding that he thinks the Newsom administrations response has been impressive so far. There are clearly things the state can and should be doing, but we really will need the federal government to step up in a big way.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-California, is pictured delivering a statement ahead of early Saturday's coronavirus aid package deal.

On Wednesday, the Senate passed a historic $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill, hoping to curb the expected economic contraction caused by the outbreak. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., likened the spending to "a wartime level of investment for our nation." The House is scheduled to vote on Friday, and is expected to quickly send it on to the president to sign.

If the bill passes, Americans could soon will be getting direct payments from the federal government. Most individuals making under $75,000 will receive $1,200, with an additional $500 per child. Married couples earning $150,000 or less would receive $2,400. Those in higher income brackets will receive less, with a hard-stop for anyone earning above $99,000 or married couples with combined salaries above $198,000.

The bill also provides about $350 billion in new aid to small businesses, $500 billion for corporations, $100 billion in direct assistance to hospitals, and roughly $150 billion for state stimulus.

On Wednesday, Newsom announced that California would receive $10 billion from Congress in state block grants. About $5.5 billion of that would go toward statewide efforts, with the remainder going directly to cities and counties.

This bill will be very helpful and is very timely," Newsom said, as the state prepares to allocate billions to secure the safety of the people of California.

Trump has wavered on his approach to the crisis vacillating between assuring the public that the outbreak will quickly be contained and cautioning Americans that the country may have to undergo long-term distancing to stop the spread.

This week, he called for the country to reopen by Easter  April 12 oft repeating that he doesn't want the "cure" to be worse than the disease.

Public health officials warn that prematurely lifting social distancing orders could raise the death toll considerably, and will do little to stave off recession as the economic effects will magnify if outbreak explodes.

Newsom has chosen a different path for the state of California, telling residents that the next 8-12 weeks will be crucial to containing the virus. His stringent orders to remain at home, he stressed, will limit the most devastating consequences that could come from this outbreak.

"This is a dynamic situation," he said during a livestreamed press conference, conceding that he and Trump "are moving in a different direction." But, he emphasized, that in conversations and with the "significant support and resources" promised by the president, suggest "an understanding of the unique situation the state is in."

Gabrielle Canon is a California Reporter for the USA Today Network. You can reach her at gcanon@gannett.com or on Twitter @GabrielleCanon.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How financially prepared is California for the coronavirus recession?
For months, it seemed much of the nation could focus on nothing else.

Who, from a Democratic field that once numbered more than two dozen, was best suited equipped to take on and defeat Donald Trump.

Over the course of a few days at the beginning of March, the field was whittled down to two men aged in their late 70s, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, representing different political ideologies, and each claiming they had what it took.

And then, rapidly, another huge story took over, dominating the energies and attentions of not just the nation, but the world, and making the Democratic primary process and its $1bn price tag suddenly feel inconsequential and undeserving of our time. The last debate, involving just Biden and Sanders and held under coronavirus safety protocols, underscored how business-as-usual had been upended.

And yet the race goes on, or rather it sits as it did after the two men, along with Trump, were obliged to give up live campaigning. As the coronavirus crisis has raged, the contest race into which was poured huge sums of money, passion and labour, appears as if set in aspic.

On Wednesday, conscious of how the fight against Covid-19 has robbed him of the airtime he had anticipated and reduced both him and his opponent to delivering livestreams from their respective headquarters in Vermont and Delaware, Biden sought to kickstart the process.

In a video news briefing in which he took aim at Trumps response to the crisis, the former vice president suggested he would not take part in the partys 12th debate, due to he held some time next month and in which Sanders had suggested he will participate.

My focus is just dealing with this crisis right now, he said. I havent thought about any more debates. I think weve had enough debates. I think we should get on with this.

Observers say the frustration expressed by the 77-year-old Biden points to the unprecedented landscape in which the 2020 race will play out.

Several states have postponed their primaries amid safety concerns, and despite Trumps stated wish for social distancing and others measures currently being followed to be done with by Easter, it is unclear if this will happen. This is especially so, if state authorities insist on keeping the measures in place.

Even after 9/11, when New York had to briefly move its primary, the people who were physically affected  I dont mean mentally or emotionally  when we had to move some polling stations, were only in lower Manhattan, says Christina Greer, professor of politics at Fordham College in New York.

If you lived in one of the other five boroughs, you went to your usual polling station. And that was New York. Now we have all 50 states affected  large cities, small town, rich people, poor people. college students.

It is not even clear if either the Republicans or Democrats will be in a position to hold their traditional conventions.

Democrats are due to hold theirs in the middle of July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of several battleground states. Republicans are scheduled to hold theirs at the end of August in Charlotte, North Carolina.

It is possible the GOP will be able to proceed with its once-every-four-years event. But Democrats are anxiously examining possible alternatives, including delay or else a virtual forum.

As we navigate the unprecedented challenge of responding to the coronavirus, were exploring a range of contingency options to ensure we can deliver a successful convention without unnecessary risk to public health, Katie Peters, a convention spokeswoman, told the New York Times. This is a very fluid situation  and the convention is still more than three months away.

 Joe Biden criticises Donald Trump for considering an end to coronavirus shutdown

As things currently stand, after a landslide win in South Carolina and a strong performances on Super Tuesday and the two other days of voting since, Biden has managed to amass 1,215 delegates.

By contrast, Sanders, who won in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, only to see his momentum halted by a resurgent Biden and a Democratic establishment lightening fast to rally around him, has 910. He needs to win 60 per cent of the remaining delegates available if he is going to seize the nomination from Biden, something most think unlikely.

With up to a dozen states having postponed their primaries, the next date in the calendar to watch will be June 2, when ten states along with Washington DC will vote for a nominee.

The largest prizes on offer, in terms of delegate count, will be Ohio and New Jersey and if Sanders is to make a dramatic comeback it would have to happen then.

Many believe the Vermont senator sees little prospect of defeating Biden and remains in the race in order to put pressure on him.

This could be to try and force Biden to agree to adopt more progressive policies for the party platform, or agree to a running mate Sanders approves of, perhaps somebody such as Stacey Abrams, of Georgia.

Barring some cataclysmic change, its over  and Biden is the nominee, says Michael Fraioli, a DC-based political strategist, who has advised numerous Democrats.

But Sanders has to be all in. Biden needs his supporters to defeat Trump. Sanders has not dropped out. And so hes still a real candidate. And Bidens being respectful of them. Im sure every day they hope hed drop out and endorse him.

Given neither Biden or Sanders is able to engage in actual on-the-ground campaigning, the former vice president, at least, is stepping up his spending on advertising.

This week it was reported that Priorities USA, one of the major Democratic super PACs, spent $6m attacking Trumps response to Covid-19 in adverts aired in Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Each of the four states was narrowly won by Trump in 2016 and are at the top of the Democrats wish-list to flip.

That will not be easy. Both Fraioli and Greer acknowledge the coronavirus crisis has provided Trump with another weapon  a daily briefing in which he gets to appear before the cameras and seek to shape the narrative.

Both say Trump risks losing his reelection bid if he messes up the federal response to the virus, either in terms of ending the social distancing measures before medical officials say it is safe, or failing to inject enough money to prop up the economy and minimise unemployment.

So far, most Americans seem to think the president is doing a good job. A poll by Gallup published this week suggested 60 per cent of Americans approve of the job he is doing to combat the coronavirus crisis, pushing his approval rating to 49 per cent, the highest of his presidency.

All of which helps accounts for the frustration felt by Biden and this supporters.

On Wednesday, he claimed he was trying new ways to break into the news cycle.

Im learning a lot more about how to get the message out, in terms of beyond what were doing, he said Theres still plenty of opportunity to communicate with the American people.
The novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), whose epicentre was Wuhan in China, has forced the most powerful countries to bend their knees and face the pandemic. The contagious virus has already infected more than 4,71,000 people and claimed over 21,000 lives. In India, we have over 600 confirmed cases and the government is trying its best to curb in its initial stages before things go out of their hands.

 (Representive Image, Google - Labeled For Reuse)

With increasing cases of Coronavirus infected patients in India, the doctors are working round the clock and they are the real heroes who are exposed to it and are risking their lives to make sure that others stay safe. Currently, with no vaccine available, people are restricted to stay at homes and every household is in a state of panic. Lack of sleep and ruthless hours mean the medical staff seldom gets time to eat, sleep or even breath in peace. A video is currently going viral on the internet which has a team of doctors from Rajasthan, who are treading COVID 19 patients, singing Chhodo Kal Ki Baatein to cheer themselves up. Well, this video is a perfect dose of positivity this morning. Heres the video:



In the video, you cannot see their faces as they are seen wearing the gear meant for doctors and nurses who are treating the infected patients. This heart warming video by the doctors can encourage anyone whos battling from this disease and the people who are feeling the anxiety pile up as they sit at home.

To control the spread of the virus, PM Narendra Modi has announced a 21-day lockdown and all the preventive measures are being taken by the government to ensure that we battle this disease in a very efficient manner.

PM Modi has requested everyone to stay home and practice social distancing for a while as theres no other way to fight this disease. While staying home is turning out to be tough for many of us, we need to understand that this is the only way we can contribute in helping the country fight this pandemic.
A NHS nurse stranded in Cambodia who begged Boris Johnson to bring her home is finally back in the UK.

Respiratory nurse Cheryl Baxter and her husband Ivon were on holiday when Britain went on lockdown and were due to fly home on March 22.

But they were stopped from boarding their second flight in Bangkok after officials demanded a medical certificate.

They spent the whole day obtaining the paperwork and were re-booked onto another flight - only to be told they to undergo coronavirus testing before they could travel.

Friends set up a crowdfunding campaign as the couple, of East Sussex, 'neared meltdown' and almost ran out of money.

After an agonizing 72-hour wait for their results and a direct plea to the Prime Minister, the couple came back negative and were able to board their flight with 1,000 raised by wellwishers via their Go Fund Me page.

Respiratory nurse Cheryl Baxter and her husband Ivon (pictured together) were on holiday in Cambodia when Britain went on lockdown and they found themselves unable to get home

An update today read: 'It is with great pleasure to update you with some positive news. Cheryl and Ivon have now returned home safely.

'We can not thank everybody enough with the support shown through a very tough 48 hours for Cheryl and Ivon, who had to face the fear and distress which was caused.'

The post continued: 'We reached our target which we are extremely grateful for.

'Cheryl and Ivon will now do what they do best and return to work as frontline/Keyworker's for our country.

'No more donations are required, this campaign has had a positive effect and we are hoping that by what we have managed to do many other stranded Will get home safely too. Again thank you for your kindness, thoughts and prayers.

Ms Baxter is a ward matron at Conquest Hospital in Hastings and her husband Ivon is also a key worker, she said in her online video.

Before they got the green light to go home, she uploaded the heartbreaking clip begging the Prime Minister to intervene so she could go back to work.

After an agonizing 72-hour wait for their results and a direct plea to the Prime Minister, the couple were able to board their flight with 1,000 raised by wellwishers via their Go Fund Me page

Breaking down into tears, she said: 'I've now run out of my medications needed and money is dwindling fast, so please UK Government and the Foreign Commonwealth (Office) help us back to our own country like you say we should.

'I'm a frontline NHS nurse - come on Boris Johnson, help me get back to where I'm needed.'

The Go Fund Me page had a target of 1,000 to help the couple with the cost of new flights, extended accommodation and food.

Their original online message read: 'We were told on the first cancellation on Sunday we did not have the medical certificates required to enter Bangkok, explaining we did not have the Covid-19 virus.

'The medical certificate cost is 80 dollars and now it's not worth the paper it's written on. Apparently now we need a swab and negative lab results proving we do not have this Covid-19 virus.

Before they got the green light to go home, Cheryl Baxter (pictured) uploaded the heartbreaking video message begging the Prime Minister to intervene so she could go back to work

'We also run the risk of Bangkok airport closing and also, the longer we're here, of us contracting this virus in a foreign country.

'We really are trying, believe you me, but with the language barrier and lack of communication this seems to be a relentless task.

'We are near a meltdown and unable to cope with this uncertainty so I'm begging you all, please post and share this to assist me and my husband and also the other people trying to return home and get the help we so desperately need.'

While Mrs Baxter and her husband are safely home, dozens of British families are still stuck abroad due to coronavirus restrictions.

Britons are increasingly turning to online fundraising to get back to the UK.

Crowdfunding page GoFundMe said a keyword search on its website shows a 54 per cent increase in campaigns in the last week mentioning being stuck abroad, and a 33 per cent increase in campaigns mentioning being stranded overseas.

Elizabeth Hazlewood, from Shrewsbury in Shropshire, created a crowdfunding page after being left stranded in Tunisia.

Elizabeth Hazlewood, 52, (pictured) from Shrewsbury in Shropshire, created a crowdfunding page after being left stranded in Tunisia

The 52-year-old support worker travelled to the country on Friday March 6 and was scheduled to fly back on Wednesday.

But her flight home was cancelled after the country suspended commercial air travel to stop the spread of Covid-19.

Ms Hazlewood said she is staying in a hotel in the capital Tunis and is waiting further instructions from the British embassy.

'I am running out of money rapidly,' she added. 'I really am stressed because of the situation and feel totally lost and alone.'

Another crowdfunding page was created for a family of four from Leswalt, south-west Scotland, who are stuck in Florida.

George McMillan, 43, his wife Kim, 42, and their children Finlay, 13 and Ruby, five, travelled to the popular holiday destination on March 5.

George McMillan, 43 (far right), with his wife Kim, 42 (far left), and their children Finlay, 13 and Ruby, 5, from Leswalt, Scotland, as they are stuck in Florida after their flights were cancelled due to coronavirus, after dozens of families stuck abroad due to coronavirus restrictions are trying to crowdfund their way home as a last resort

But their holiday plans were scuppered after Disney World Florida announced it would close due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Mr McMillan, who suffers from Crohn's disease, said their flights to the UK were cancelled and they were soon to be kicked out of their hotel.

'It's been very stressful, more so these last few days as in two days time that's us out of the hotel,' he said.

'I have enough medication to see me through to about Saturday.'

While flights have been arranged for their return, Mr McMillan said they were not guaranteed.

'There is (so) much conflicting information, we are effectively in the dark,' he added.

Meanwhile, Adam Smith, 32, from Nazeing in Essex, and his girlfriend were two months into their travels across central America when they found themselves stuck in El Salvador.

Mr Smith said the country has enforced curfews and travel restrictions, with only one person per household allowed to go out to visit a supermarket, bank or pharmacy.

He has been speaking to the British embassy to arrange flights home but has not been told when this could happen.

He described the response from the UK Government as 'responsive but so far lacking any detailed plan of action'.

Describing the atmosphere in El Salvador since the lockdown, he said: 'Orderly - everyone we've spoken to has been 100 per cent behind the president's response.'

Elsewhere, Jenny and Rosie Addison are stuck at Dubai Airport on the way home from a holiday in the Philippines after their connecting British Airways flight to London was cancelled.

Jenny (left) and Rosie (right) Addison are stuck at Dubai Airport on the way home from a holiday in the Philippines after their connecting British Airways flight to London was cancelled

The police officer, 28, and A&E nurse, 25, have nothing left to eat or drink after all retailers in the airport closed and have been trying to get home since March 14.

They are both 'key workers', but are terrified of being stranded in the UAE, which is also on lockdown, after airport staff warned it would close tomorrow.

The UAE warned foreign tourists that all flights would be grounded by midnight tomorrow.

But after a number of new COVID-19 cases, this was brought forward to 12am on Tuesday.

The Addison sisters, who are originally from Kendal, Cumbria, were due to begin their journey home from the Philippines on March 14.

They were forced to wait for 10 days until they could get on a plane, managing to get the last flight from Cebu on Tuesday, March 24.

But when they arrived in Dubai, they were devastated to find their BA flight to London had been cancelled as the UAE's flight restrictions had been brought forward.

Jenny told MailOnline: 'There are no shops or restaurants open in Dubai airport to buy food or drink. We are being little information staff at the airport.

'We feel really worried and scared as we do not know what is going to happen or whether we are just going to be stuck in the airport which is apparently closing down tomorrow.'

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is advising Britons stuck in the UAE to get in contact with them. But the Addison sisters claim they have had no help.

The UK travel advice for Dubai reads: 'Inbound and outbound flights will stop as of midnight on 24 March.

'If you're a remaining British traveller in the UAE, you should continue to contact your airline or tour operator regarding any possible return flights. Contact the British Embassy if you are in difficulty.'

A spokesman for Dubai Airport said it was assisting passengers by referring them to their airlines and native embassies.

A spokesman from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said: 'We recognise British tourists abroad are finding it difficult to return to the UK because of the unprecedented international travel and domestic restrictions that are being introduced around the world - often with very little or no notice.

'The Government is seeking to keep key transit routes open as long as possible and is in touch with international partners and the airline industry to make this happen.'
CLEVELAND, Ohio  The company overseeing construction at the Lumen apartment tower in downtown Cleveland sent out the sort of message Saturday that nobody wants to write  or read.

A worker on the theater-district project had tested positive for COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus.

Gilbane Building Co. shut down the project for two days. The general contractor hired a cleaning specialist to sanitize areas where the worker, who was last on site March 14, had been. Construction resumed Tuesday, the first day of Ohios broad stay-at-home order  and the first day that the industry operated under an exemption from that order, as an essential business.

Across the country, construction crews are wrestling with what it means to be essential during a public health crisis. Like Ohio, many states in shutdown mode have carved out building as a key business, one thats necessary to keep the economy moving, to provide Americans with shelter and to ensure that structures including hospitals can be maintained and expanded.

New York and Illinois, for example, deemed construction essential. Pennsylvania shut it down, with some exceptions. The mayor of Boston ordered laborers off work sites, as did the neighboring city of Cambridge. In many states, construction companies are trying to figure out where their projects stand while parsing broad stay-home orders and lists of critical businesses.

You can basically make the argument under the order that anything is either essential or is an exemption, said Allison Taller Reich, a construction attorney and partner at the Frantz Ward law firm in downtown Cleveland. You can basically make an argument that everything is allowed to move forward. And then theres a question of should it.

Even essential businesses must take safety precautions  or face penalties and closure  under Gov. Mike DeWines order. Those measures include keeping a 6-foot distance between people, when possible; frequent cleaning of equipment, particularly anything thats touched often or by multiple people; and offering hand sanitizer or facilities for handwashing.

Major contractors in the region said theyve implemented measures to keep workers safe. Gilbane, which has projects across the country, has stepped up disinfecting of corridors at the Lumen, added handwashing stations and split workers into small, spaced-out groups for morning pre-construction stretching routines, said Wes Cotter, a spokesman.

The company also has largely barred workers from riding in the construction hoist with materials  a social-distancing move that means laborers now must climb the stairs at the 34-story tower. Were super-focused on keeping everybody healthy, Cotter said. We are not taking this lightly at all. No one should think that.

One worker, who asked not to be identified by name, questioned whether construction of luxury apartments is necessary during a pandemic. I want to keep working, but I think they should have closed because its not essential. You need to go on a job-by-job basis, said the worker, who also worried that stepped-up sanitation measures at the Lumen are insufficient.

Gilbane Building Co. temporary shut down work at the Lumen apartment tower this week, after a laborer tested positive for COVID-19. Work resumed Tuesday at the 34-story building, which is scheduled to open soon.Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer

Some owners and developers have quietly halted construction and sent workers home. Others are struggling with staffing, as workers call off sick or walk off sites. Several contractors said theyre having a particularly difficult time finding and keeping workers who handle interior jobs, like drywall or electrical work.

Most of these guys have a lot of ego. Theyre big, tough guys. They dont want to see the doctor.  Maybe 12 to 15% of people are really just afraid to come in, said Trevor Cost, the owner of Warren Roofing & Insulating Co., based in Walton Hills. The rest of them, I think we have to put maybe a little bit more fear into them.

At the Church and State apartment project in Clevelands Ohio City neighborhood, Cost is splitting up groups of workers to give everyone more space. He added handwashing stations and ordered portable toilets specifically for his crew so that they dont have to share bathrooms with other subcontractors. In some cases, hes hand-delivering hand sanitizer to sites.

Its not highly productive, he said of this new way of working, but well be moving the project forward. People will continue to get paychecks, and the owner wont sue me.

Construction is a dirty, high-risk business. Its also a major employer in Ohio, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 229,400 construction jobs in January, based on seasonally adjusted figures.

Last week, trade groups for the commercial construction and homebuilding businesses were advocating for Ohio to categorize the industry as critical. This week, theyve been digesting the governors order and navigating a landscape that seems to change daily.

We know that theres a lot of people who are nervous, said Don Taylor, president and chief executive officer of Fairlawn-based Welty Building Co. Tradespeople are very nervous. Nobody signed up for a death sentence to be in construction. Its dangerous enough.

Welty, whose current projects include government-affiliated work, hospital construction and housing, hasnt seen any jobs canceled, though some are delayed. Taylor said one electrical subcontractor decided to shut down because the company couldnt figure out how to get work done under social-distancing requirements. We think thats an extreme, he said.

On Tuesday, Welty asked laborers to change their clothes and shower after work, rather than sitting at the dinner table or on the couch in grubby gear. Workers are being asked to wipe down shared tools before and after using them. The company ordered thermometers for on-site temperature checks and is asking subcontractors and vendors to follow suit.

Were working through these things, Taylor said. Im not going to say were perfect.

Construction continued Monday at apartment projects in Cleveland's Ohio City neighborhood. Contractors are grappling with rising absenteeism as workers call in sick or choose to stay home out of fear of catching, or spreading, the coronavirus.Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer

Absenteeism spiked this week at local sites managed by construction company Turner, whose projects include the Church and State apartments and the new hospital at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland. At sites, Turner has added handwashing stations, including ones that use hot water where possible, and has managed to keep hand sanitizer in stock, said Jason Jones, the companys vice president and general manager in Cleveland.

While grappling with on-site challenges, the company also is monitoring supply-chain issues related to the coronavirus crisis. A structural-steel vendor and other suppliers are idled in Pennsylvania. Anticipating problems getting materials from Canada, Turner pre-purchased all of the spray-on fireproofing required for the MetroHealth project from a Canadian vendor, rather than waiting to buy the material when its needed.

Reich, the construction attorney, said some construction companies are worried about keeping enough personal protective equipment, such as masks, on site. Contractors are trying to balance their own needs against requests from hospitals seeking more protective gear.

The lack of PPE is a huge concern, and people are really wary of running afoul of the order and being forced to default on their contracts, she said, adding that nobody should be working on a construction site without proper protective equipment.

Even with Northeast Ohioans largely confined to their homes, new housing construction continues. Builder Bo Knez said hes still receiving calls from buyers interested in his projects  to his surprise. Like commercial builders, hes seeing fewer tradesmen on his sites. One of his contractors voluntarily shut down for two weeks after a worker was exposed to COVID-19. Other laborers are staying home because theyre nervous or they no longer have childcare.

Were probably running at 60 to 65% of where we were 10 days ago, said Knez, who has roughly 100 homes under construction across the region and another 150 planned.

Residential construction hasn't stopped at projects including the Avenue townhomes in downtown Cleveland. Builder Bo Knez said he's still receiving sales calls - to his surprise.Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer

Reich said shes working on furlough and layoff plans for companies that anticipate work slowdowns or stops. On one hand, having a state order to read, and interpret, is providing more clarity for clients who feared a complete halt to construction. On the other hand, the industrys status as essential puts a burden back on employers  and workers  to decide whats safe, and reasonable, when the stakes seem incredibly high and the future is far from certain.

People need to use their judgement and talk to their people, Reich said. Labor is so short, as it is. Do you want that person not coming to work now and maybe not coming to work for you again, ever?

Are you working in construction - or staying home due to layoffs, family obligations or health concerns? Were interested in hearing your stories. Call business reporter Michelle Jarboe at 216-316-7024 or reach her by email at mjarboe@plaind.com.

More coverage:

These Northeast Ohio companies reported mass layoffs due to the coronavirus

Manufacturing workers concerned about safety, but proud to battle coronavirus pandemic

Cuyahoga County public health efforts aim to stave off COVID-19 in long-term care and assisted living facilities

MetroHealth board member Bernie Morenos coronavirus comments on Twitter spark outrage

Coronavirus hits assisted-living, skilled-nursing facilities in NE Ohio
The Syrian regime surrounded two families in the western Damascus countryside, arrested them and transferred them to a branch of the Air Force Intelligence writes Syria 24.

Regime forces and security agencies raided the town of Moadamyeh in the western Damascus countryside and arrested a number of civilians for unknown reasons.

Local sources said that forces from the Fourth Division and a number of security patrols surrounded two displaced families from the town of Kanakar in Moadamyeh.

They said that the regime forces arrested the two families, including women and children.

The prisoners were taken to the Air Force Intelligence branch in Damascus near the al-Mezzeh airport, where the intelligence released the women and children after about six hours, and kept the men.

The villages and towns of the Damascus countryside have seen repeated arrests and raids, most of them affecting young men with the aim of putting them into compulsory and reserve service.

This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
When they were in 6th grade beginning band, a classmate told Mickey Smith Jr. to be sure to call him when he won a GRAMMY. This year, he got the call.

I was like, Hey dude, were going to the GRAMMYs, Smith Jr. says.

A band director at Maplewood Middle School in Sulphur, Louisiana, Smith Jr. received the 2020 Music Educator Award presented by the Recording Academy and GRAMMY Museum. Alicia Keys honored him during the award show.

The Recording Academy chose Smith Jr. from more than 3,300 nominees. The first in his family to go to college, he took Maplewoods band program from 28 kids to about half the student body. He received a $10,000 honorarium.

Smith Jr. says that he wants to use the recognition to champion for teachers. A year before his nomination, he wrote a letter of resignation because he couldnt see his impact. Three letters from appreciative students arrived that day and changed his mind.

I want to use my music and my message to show teachers that theyre loved and theyre valued, says Smith Jr., who is a saxophonist.

In 2017, he created Sound180, a company that supports teachers with strategies on effective teaching. Hes also an author and illustrator. He wrote a childrens book called The Adventures of Little Mickey: Keep on Going about his own experience making amazingly terrible sounds to motivate students to persevere.

Smith Jr. had previously been nominated for the competition twice and had been a finalist in 2019.

Smith Jr. says his students and the small community in Sulphur, Louisiana, are feeling the effects of the award too. When you can touch a childs heart, then you can reach their mind, Smith Jr. says, This award shows our kids that anythings possible.

You can read about a previous GRAMMY Music Educator Award recipient here.

Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Medwick.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 14:10:14|Editor: huaxia

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RIO DE JANEIRO, March 25 (Xinhua) -- Brazilian state governors on Wednesday called on the federal government to adopt minimum income for citizens amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

Several states have established quarantine and isolation measures. Many people who have informal jobs are unable to work from home and thus lost all their incomes.

The governors, who held a nationwide meeting on Wednesday, called for a 2005 law establishing minimum income for all citizens to take effect.

The law, signed by then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, stipulates that citizens should receive a minimum income to cover their basic expenses on food, education and healthcare.

In addition, the governors called for a 12-month suspension of the payment of state debts, as well as credit lines at the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) to finance improvement of the public healthcare system.
On Thursday, Chinas National Health Commission reported that there were zero new domestic cases of the coronavirus in the country, including Wuhan  the epicenter of the outbreak in China, a monumental shift from months ago when new cases were adding up in thousands. The claim was a bold one to make, and not surprisingly attracted a great deal of skepticism from observers who refused to take it seriously.

However, whilst of course this does not mean the potential end of the COVID-19 in China or a total declaration of victory given how random and fast cases can spring up nevertheless there is substantial evidence to argue that the country has made serious and undeniable progress against the virus, prevented a national pandemic and it is simply not reasonable to keep dismissing this even if one chooses to be cautious in the fight that remains.

First of all, Chinas quarantine and lockdown methods were successful. These stipulations, of which were strictly enforced, rapidly reduced the scope of the viruss spread and had extremely effective results outside Hubei. The travel ban on this area worked. From January to March, the vast majority of new cases remained in the epicenter and cases throughout the rest of the country were declared on a straight trajectory almost every single day.

Whilst pockets of cases did emerge in certain areas with notable problems faced in Guandong and Zhejiang provinces, the travel ban ensured these initial numbers were small, local lockdowns further buttressed this and medical authorities were able to contain and stifle their spread. The outbreak as a whole was kept in one regional location which allowed more sufficient management elsewhere. The lockdown within Hubei itself also, in the long run, stifled its spread by eventually cutting off human-to-human transmission as testing and relief eventually caught up.

In addition to this, China pursued an all-society mobilization against the virus. The countrys hierarchical mode of governance allowed every level to pour all priorities and resources in a unified effort towards combating the outbreak. This ensured a comprehensive strategy. As noted above, quarantine and lockdown measures were observed properly, thus ensuring social distancing worked.

A customer has her body temperature checked before entering a hotpot restaurant in Jiangbei District, southwest Chinas Chongqing Municipality, March 14, 2020. /Xinhua

The containment of the virus outside the epicenter allowed surplus resources and personnel to administer to Hubei and speed up the relief efforts. Hospitals were built very quickly and testing was also pursued on a rapid scale. China sits second in the world in testing per capita only behind South Korea (and that is not considering the huge difference in population between the two), with Guangdong alone having 300,000 COVID-19 tests done.

In addition, Chinas technological advances also helped stifle the spread, technology was utilized to the maximum. Train stations, metro stations and other hubs were equipped with infra-red scanning technology to identify temperatures, artificial intelligence allowed rapid contact identification and mapping out where individuals had been, smartphone apps kept individuals informed about infected areas and establishments.



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Furthermore, the Chinese people themselves were also vigilant. They wore masks, they exercised appropriate social distancing, they followed the direction of the authorities and all appropriate advice, which some in Europe have struggled to do.

When all of this is taken into account, is it really that unrealistic to say there are zero new cases in China? Of course people are going to continue to be skeptical regardless and not least because of the nature of this virus. This does not mean the virus is gone for good as the incubation period of the COVID-19 easily means that more could yet spring up and it is true to say there will be more cases here and there with imported cases becoming the biggest threat.

Either way, it is not reasonable to observe that tremendous progress has been made and quite clearly the country has got back on its feet. Thus, if one continues to be skeptical, one should also be fair and acknowledge the progress that has been made because in either way, the evidence does suggest that cases in China have been drastically reduced and if you look at what has been done, it is not difficult to see why.

Tom Fowdy is a British political and international relations analyst and a graduate of Durham and Oxford universities. He writes on topics pertaining to China, the DPRK, Britain, and the U.S. The article reflects the authors opinions.
As the world struggles to fight the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak that has practically brought the majority of global businesses to a halt, the airlines industry is the worst affected. Commercial plane makers are also experiencing the wrath of this pandemic almost in equal terms, if not more.

Notably, the Aerospace sector that houses the major jet manufacturers has declined 44.5%, year to date, while the S&P 500 Index has slumped 30.2%.

COVID-19 Impact on Commercial Jet Market

Panic among travelers along with travel curbs imposed by different nations to contain the spread of the coronavirus has prompted increased flight cancellations in the recent times. Globally the number of scheduled flights last week was down more than 12% from a year ago, per a data published by flight data provider OAG.

Thanks to such cancellations, airlines are experiencing mounting costs and as a cost cutting measure, delaying deliveries of jets from plane makers. Now, planemakers make most of their money when they deliver jets but airlines are doing everything possible to preserve cash and thus deferring deliveries.

This is hurting plane makers as brand-new aircraft are stationed outside factories and in facilities, which is pushing up costs for these manufacturers.

There also remains another roadblock. It usually takes several airline officials to review the paperwork, conduct last-minute quality checks and make financial arrangements to transfer the ownership of jets and approve delivery. However, amid the outbreak, as social distancing remains the need of the hour, such reviews are difficult, even if the carriers are ready to take deliveries.

In this regard, it is imperative to mention that rating agency Moodys has recently downgraded its outlook for the aerospace and defense industry to negative from stable, based on expectations that airlines will continue to delay deliveries of commercial aircraft to lessen the strain on their balance sheets, even after the market starts recovering.

Story continues

Stocks in Focus

In light of the aforementioned facts, here we discuss some commercial aircraft manufacturers who will be keenly watched by investors. These are:

Boeing BA, the largest plane maker in the United States, faces the shutdown of key assembly lines for the second time in a year after being forced to halt production of its grounded 737 MAX aircraft in January. Per a report by Reuters, production of long-haul jets such as the 787 and 777 in Washington is set to be stalled for 14 days from Mar 25, which will cause the world's largest industrial building, Boeing's wide-body plant in Everett, north of Seattle, to stop functioning for the first time.

Adding to Boeings woes, the global health crisis threatens the smooth return to service of its 737 MAX that has been a drag on its commercial business unit for almost a year now. The company requested at least $60 billion in financial support for U.S. aerospace companies from the government last week.

European jet major and Boeings rival, Airbus EADSY deliveries have been hit by the impact of coronavirus on airline operations, especially in China. On Mar 24, the company announced new steps to bolster its financial position, including the signing of a credit facility for approximately $16 billion.

Airbus added that it is withdrawing its 2020 financial guidance, dropping a proposed 2019 dividend that had a cash value of $1.5 billion and suspending funding to boost staff pension schemes.

Other companies like Embraer and Textron have been impacted by the pandemic, but not to the extent that Boeing and Airbus have, so far.

Embraer ERJ has put on furlough all non-essential workers in Brazil, where it makes regional jets, until Mar 31. The planemaker also said that it will take a decision shortly on whether to implement similar measures in other countries it operates in, considering the rapid rate at which the virus is spreading. Moreover, completion of its pending joint venture with Boeing is now uncertain.

Textrons TXT unit, Textron Aviation announced a four-week furlough for most of its U.S.-based workforce on concerns over depressed demand due to the coronavirus crisis.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 08:24:37|Editor: Yurou

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Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina delivers a televised speech to the nation on COVID-19 measures from her office in Dhaka, Bangladesh on March 25, 2020. Bangladesh has announced a stimulus package of 50 billion taka to help export-oriented industries relieve economic impact of COVID-19 in home and abroad. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina made the announcement in a televised speech to the nation on Wednesday night on the eve of the country's Independence Day, programs to celebrate the day have already been cancelled. (PID/Handout via Xinhua)

DHAKA, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh has announced a stimulus package of 50 billion taka to help export-oriented industries relieve economic impact of COVID-19 in home and abroad.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina made the announcement in a televised speech to the nation on Wednesday night on the eve of the country's Independence Day, programs to celebrate the day have already been cancelled.

She said this fund can be used for paying wages and allowances to the readymade garment workers and employees.

"Our exports can suffer a blow due to COVID-19 outbreak. So we've taken some emergency measures to support the export-oriented industries," said Hasina.

Apart from this, she said the central bank of Bangladesh would take business-friendly initiatives so that no one is considered a loan defaulter till June.

In her speech, Hasina also laid out several other measures to tackle the COVID-19's spread in the country.

Bangladesh on Wednesday announced the country's fifth death related to COVID-19.

The victim was one of the 39 cases reported in the county to date.
With the year 2020 panning out like some sort of an Apocalypse film, no thanks to Covid-19 and locust invasion, a section of Kenyan clergy has been using these disasters to warn believers that they have attracted the wrath of God and are being punished.

This has seemingly prompted Kenyan actress Nyce Wanjeri to make an impassioned plea to men and women of the cloth to change the narrative for the sake of humanity.

Humanity is going thru so much already, its time they hear the message of hope, faith, salvation, the message of Grace and mercy, of love, peace, redemption. Its so saddening to hear those who are meant to preach this message are doing the opposite, wrote Wanjeri on Wednesday.

The former Auntie Boss star further lectured church ministers for straying away from their true calling.

How can you call yourself Gods mouthpiece yet you are instilling fear, crushing hope, taking away the light of the true gospel By preaching disaster, punishment, judgement..causing the same people whom God loved and died for, even in their sins..? Those called, are called to bring hope, light in a dark world, turn things right side up, reveal what Christ has done and turn many from the confusion the devil had trapped them in stated Nyce.

She said now is the time to preach the goodness of God instead of causing panic.

Its time to reveal the goodness of God so that many may come to repentance according to Gods word in Romans 2:4not to cause panic and fear which is not of God ..its time to boldly declare to the world that God has not rejected anyone and that He is more willing to see an end of everything affecting His creation Its time to disapprove and trash the negative fallacies about our good God which have confused many and darkened their thinking by showing them the true Father in the scriptures Our God isnt complicated neither is He a mystery anymore she concluded.
Dhaka, March 26 (IANS) Bangladesh has announced a stimulus package of 50 billion taka ($5.9 million) to help export-oriented industries to counter the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic ar home and abroad.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina made the announcement in a televised address to the nation on Wednesday night on the eve of the country's Independence Day, programs to celebrate the day have already been cancelled, reports Xinhua news agency reported.

She said this fund can be used for paying wages and allowances to the readymade garment workers and employees.

"Our exports can suffer a blow due to COVID-19 outbreak. So we've taken some emergency measures to support the export-oriented industries," said Hasina.

Apart from this, she said the central bank of Bangladesh would take business-friendly initiatives so that no one is considered a loan defaulter till June.

In her speech, Hasina also laid out several other measures to tackle the COVID-19's spread in the country.

Bangladesh on Wednesday announced the country's fifth death related to COVID-19.

The victim was one of the 39 cases reported in the country till date.

The Bangladeshi government has also declared a public holiday starting from Thursday to April 4 except for entities providing essential services.

--IANS

ksk/
Whitney Melvin, left, Emmanuella Mensah and Octavious Johnson pick out shirt sizes at East Carolina University. | Photo: Cliff Hollis

With the cancellation of the in-person Pirates Aboard Admitted Student Days, future students and their parents now have an online resource to provide information about East Carolina University and the admissions process.Originally scheduled for March 21 and 28, the university was expecting a record number of admitted students to attend this year's Pirates Aboard. The annual event features sessions on financial aid, housing, dining and student life, to go along with campus tours and information on individual colleges and majors.Now a new Pirates Aboard website has been established for future students and their parents to explore and have their questions answered.The website features virtual campus tours, housing and dining information, a financial aid presentation, online explorations of ECU colleges, and recorded presentations from various departments and programs. It also includes scheduled interactive presentations and panels through Facebook Live or other streaming technologies.said Stephanie Whaley, assistant vice chancellor and director of ECU undergraduate admissions.Whaley said the entire admissions office shares the disappointment of students and parents over the cancellation of Pirates Aboard. She suggests that students considering ECU and their parents go to the website, explore it and take the virtual tours. She encourages those with questions to reach out to the admissions office.Whaley said.Students can contact their personal admissions counselor by using the " Find Your Counselor " feature online, calling 252-328-6640 or emailing admissions@ecu.edu Whaley said that the enrollment deposit deadline has been extended to June 1 to give students more time to make their commitments. Still, the earlier students submit their housing deposit and contract, the more likely they are to get their preferred housing choice.New content and features will be added to the website over the coming days and weeks, including a link where families can schedule an online appointment with a financial aid counselor.Whaley said.
Houston ISD officials indefinitely suspended the distribution of food at the districts campuses Wednesday evening after an individual at one site went under self-quarantine due to potential exposure to the novel coronavirus.

HISD officials said the individual under self-quarantine earlier Wednesday attended a distribution location. All volunteers and staff at the location, which district officials did not disclose, have been notified and asked to self-quarantine for 14 days.

HISD and districts across the Houston area have been providing food and meals to families for the past two weeks, serving tens of thousands of people during widespread school closures tied to COVID-19. In the first five days of distributing food at HISD schools, districts officials reported serving 22,862 households with about 685,860 pounds of food.

This is a difficult decision to make, but the safety of the community, staff and volunteers is our top priority, Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan said in a statement. We are proud that in the past two weeks we have provided meals for thousands of Houston families.

HISD officials said they plan to re-evaluate their process for safely delivering food. Many districts throughout the Houston area continue to provide breakfast and lunch meals through curbside pickup on school days.

HISD partnered with the Houston Food Bank to provide about 30 pounds of food to each family at 10 rotating sites Monday through Friday. By contrast, other Houston-area districts are providing single meals to children only, which must be picked up from a set list of campuses during the breakfast and lunch hours.

HISD officials directed parents to visit one of the city of Houstons 47 locations offering curbside meals for children. The city is offering lunch and a snack from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at each site.

In announcing the food distribution plan, city officials said they would serve up to 200 meals at each location. It is not immediately clear whether the city plans to increase its limit on meals.

District leaders also suggested families could visit HoustonFoodBank.org to find a nearby food pantry.

jacob.carpenter@chron.com
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Linkedin Agence France-Presse (Washington)  Thu, March 26, 2020 09:52 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d72c2d 2 Business IMF,World-Bank,debt-payment,poor-nations,G20,COVID-19,coronavirus Free

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank on Wednesday called for governments to put a hold on debt payments from the world's poorest nations so they can battle the coronavirus pandemic.

"The World Bank Group and the IMF believe it is imperative at this moment to provide a global sense of relief for developing countries as well as a strong signal to financial markets," the Washington-based development lenders said in a joint statement.

The move aims to help countries that are home to two-thirds of the world's population living in extreme poverty -- largely in sub-Saharan Africa -- and qualify for the most generous, low-cost loans from the International Development Association (IDA) financed by wealthier nations.

"The coronavirus outbreak is likely to have severe economic and social consequences for IDA countries" which will face "immediate liquidity needs to tackle challenges posed by the coronavirus outbreak," the organization said.

Read also: Jokowi relaxes loan settlements to help small businesses cope with COVID-19 effects

The IMF and World Bank called on the Group of 20 nations to support the initiative for "all official bilateral creditors to suspend debt payments from IDA countries that request forbearance."

In addition, the institutions called for an analysis of the financing needs these countries will face, and whether their total debt load is sustainable.

Part of the World Bank, the IDA is one of the largest sources of assistance for the world's 76 poorest countries, providing zero or low interest loans spread over 30 years or more, and grants to some distressed nations.

In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2019, IDA commitments totaled US$22 billion, of which 36 percent was provided on grant terms, according to the World Bank.
The coronavirus continuously proves that it is one of the most dangerous viruses in the world, so much so that even a medical expert failed to run from it.

The medical consultant of the award-winning pandemic thriller film "Contagion," Dr. Ian Lipkin, revealed that he has tested positive for the coronavirus.

On Tuesday, the Columbia University's director of the Center for Infection and Immunity appeared on Fox's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" from his home to discuss the ongoing and worsening coronavirus pandemic.

However, after he let out a dry cough, he suddenly opened up on the national TV and admitted that he has contracted the virus.

"I would like to say on this show tonight, this has become very personal to me, too," Lipkin said in the remote segment. "Because I have COVID as of yesterday. It's miserable."

He took the chance to warn everyone that since the virus hit his system despite being one of the most renowned virologists in the world, it can ultimately hit anyone else, too.

When asked where he caught the disease, Dr. Ian said that it is not important anymore since it already became widespread all over the United States, making it possible to get it anywhere.

#KAG2020 #Dobbs pic.twitter.com/IxTpJ54sFn Fighting the Coronavirus: Dr. Ian Lipkin reveals his own personal battle with the coronavirus and says if it can hit him, it can hit anybody. #AmericaFirst  Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) March 24, 2020

Dr. Ian previously worked with "Contagion" screenwriters Scott Z. Burns and Steven Soderbergh.

In 2011, he told Columbia University's newsletter that he joined forces with the film's team so that they could accurately and effectively represent the science behind the viruses by making a movie that would entertain and educate its viewers.

To recall, they included some of the doctor's personal experiences in the movie, including the time when he jetted to Beijing to offer assistance to the World Health Organization and the Chinese Health Ministry during the SARS outbreak in 2003.

After he participated in the mission, he fell ill and got quarantined when he came back to the U.S.

The Expert's Advice

In the same interview, Dr. Ian revealed that there is an ongoing research at medical schools, including Columbia and John Hopkins, where they use and study the blood of the patients who fortunately recovered from the COVID-19.

"But we will be able to use lessons learned to developed other sort of pharmacological treatments based on what we've found," he said.

As they wait for the result, the virologist went on to push and promote the themes in the current coronavirus crisis as no one knows when they will be able to get the cases under control.

He also pointed out how restrictions across the country can significantly help them in lessening the number of cases.

"We have porous borders between states and cities, and unless we're consistent, we're not gonna get ahead of this thing," he said. "The best tool we have is isolation and confinement."

In addition to his live appearance, Dr. Ian stressed his points again through an e-mail he sent to USA TODAY, where he advised the government to enforce national "shelter-in-place" as soon as possible. He knows that this move will surely flatten the curve and stop further transmission of the deadly disease.
The man who committed the worst atrocity in New Zealand's modern history when he slaughtered 51 worshippers at two Christchurch mosques unexpectedly pleaded guilty to all charges

Wellington: The man who committed the worst atrocity in New Zealand's modern history when he slaughtered 51 worshippers at two Christchurch mosques unexpectedly pleaded guilty to all charges Thursday.

The attacks targeting people praying at the mosques a year ago shocked the nation and prompted new laws banning the deadliest types of semi-automatic weapons. It also prompted global changes to social media protocols after the gunman livestreamed his attack on Facebook, where it was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

The sudden turn in the case took survivors and relatives by surprise, and brought relief to people across New Zealand. Many had feared Australian white supremacist Brenton Harrison Tarrant would try to use his trial as a platform to promote his views. He'd outlined those views in a 74-page manifesto he published online shortly before the attacks.

Tarrant, 29, pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of terrorism at the Christchurch High Court. He had previously pleaded not guilty to all charges and his trial had been scheduled to start in June.

Tarrant is the first person to be found guilty of terrorism in New Zealand under laws passed after the 11 September, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US. The change in plea came less than two weeks after New Zealanders commemorated those who died during the attacks on 15 March, 2019.

Honestly, I'm still trying to process what just happened, said Aya Al-Umari, whose brother Hussein was killed in the attack on the Al Noor mosque. I feel conflicted."

She said that on the one hand, she had wanted to find out more details about what happened at the trial but on the other hand was feeling relieved about not having to face the trauma of sitting through it.

Temel Atacocugu, who survived being shot nine times during the attack at Al Noor, said he was surprised by the turn of events and hoped the judge would set an example at the sentencing by imposing the harshest punishment in the country's history and helping ensure nothing like it would happen again.

I'm happy that he has accepted that he is guilty, Atacocugu said.

,Judge Cameron Mander has not yet set a sentencing date. Tarrant faces life imprisonment, with the judge having some discretion in deciding the minimum number of years Tarrant must serve before becoming eligible for parole.

The change in plea came at a hastily arranged court hearing at a time that New Zealand was beginning a four-week lockdown to try and combat the new coronavirus. The lockdown meant Tarrant appeared in the court via video link from his jail cell in Auckland and only a handful of people were allowed inside the courtroom.
March 26 : From the house of ZEE5, here comes another star-studded and content-driven saga about the real-life incident, web series 'State of Siege: 26/11' starring Arjan Bajwa, Arjun Bijlani, Vivek Dahiya, and Mukul Dev among others is based on the horrifying terror attacks of 26th November 2008, in Mumbai.

Inspired by Sandeel Unnithan's book, 'Black Tornado: The Three Sieges of Mumbai 26/11', directed by Hollywood director, Matthew Leutwyler.

Ten fully armed and highly trained misguided youth caused havoc in the financial capital of India, Mumbai. Entering the city via Arabian Sea, these terrorists randomly gunned down innocent people down in the name of Jihad.

These Pakistani Mujahideen terrorists, hailed from the city of Lahore. Their sole aim was to terrorise people and kill a number of expats in lieu of annexing Kashmir into Pakistan. This real-life saga is told from the NSG point of view. The much-awaited State of Siege is now streaming on the platform since the 20th of March 2020.

Actor Arjan Bajwa plays the part of Col. Suneel Sheron, a no-nonsense officer nicknamed as bullet thatcher. Leads the operations at the Taj, where the terrorist took their last stand. He is part of the 51 special Action group.

Dapper Vivek Dhaiya as Rohit Bagga, a young officer stationed at Chabad House (Nariman House). Actor Arjun Bijlani plays the role of Nikhil Manikrishnan.

The background score is remarkable. The editing was clean and takes the viewers through all the sieges with zero ambiguity. The production did display some eminent flaws. They havent paid attention to detail.

Overall the series is remarkable and address the real life situation with finesse and precision. Though there are flaws but then again one need to understand its a reconstruction of a real-life situation, which is a difficult task and the makers have done a great job doing so.

Some of the noteworthy back-stories pertaining the siege have been artfully woven into the series. The names have been fictionalized, but every Mumbaikar, who can recollect the minute-by minute account as it was being portrayed by the media, will relate to every incident and brave sole connected to the instances shown.
A cruise ship stricken by a coronavirus outbreak was told Thursday to leave Australian waters, days after local infection numbers spiked when passengers on another vessel were allowed to disembark and roam freely around Sydney.

Seven passengers have tested positive for COVID-19 aboard the Artania, which had been due to travel onward to South Africa but is now anchored near the port of Fremantle.

Its operators say they are planning to fly the vessel's mostly German passengers home from Australia on a chartered plane by Saturday.

Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan said he would ask the national government to call in the navy if the ship refused to move on from Australian waters.

"This ship needs to leave immediately," he told reporters.

"No one will be disembarking at Fremantle unless a passenger is in a life-threatening emergency," he said.

Two other cruise ships are in nearby waters.

The Magnifica, carrying around 1,700 passengers, departed Fremantle on Tuesday after being allowed to refuel but was forced to turn back when told it could not dock in Dubai.

Neither the Magnifica nor the Artania are carrying Australian travellers.

But authorities are planning to allow around 800 Australian passengers aboard the Vasco de Gama to leave the vessel.

McGowan said those from Western Australia would be quarantined for 14 days on Rottnest Island, a former Aboriginal prison site and modern-day holiday destination, while other Australians would be flown to their home states.

The remaining passengers would need to wait on board until they could be flown home by their governments, he added.

More than 130 coronavirus cases have been detected among cruise ship passengers in Sydney last week, including one death.

Authorities had deemed the New Zealand-bound Ruby Princess "low risk" and let passengers spill into the centre of the country's most populous city.

Australia has recorded nearly 3,000 confirmed COVID-19 infections and 13 deaths since the pandemic began.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
On Wednesday, for instance, a day before the Labor Department announced that a record 3.3 million Americans had applied for unemployment benefits, Trump said he does not believe the economic impact of the coronavirus is going to end up being such a rough patch. And amid a global pandemic that so far has sickened more than 82,000 Americans and left more than 1,000 dead, he also spoke about certain states right now that have virtually no problem and boasted that he and his team have done one hell of a job.
Spanish police found six people allegedly having an orgy at a brothel in Madrid during the coronavirus lockdown.

Police in the Spanish capital confirmed they found six people in a flat - suspected of being a brothel - taking part in a sex party.

According to local media, several neighbours in the building called the police to complain about people going in and out of a flat and playing loud music.

Reports said the police went into the flat on Saturday and found four women and two men naked in a corridor with three bedrooms.

Police broke up a sex party at a suspected brothel in Madrid during the coronavirus lockdown. Pictured are police vehicles in Madrid (file image)

The local authorities also found alcoholic drinks and cigarette butts all over the flat, local media reported.

The police reportedly suspect the house was functioning as a brothel as only one of the women was registered as a tenant in the house.

Officers broke up the orgy in the Tetuan area of the city and have filed reports against them.

Reports claim that local authorities filed a complaint against the tenant for breaking the regulations against noise pollution.

The other five guests were also reported for breaking the quarantine declared by the national government to stop the spread of COVID-19.

No arrests have been reported.
Nearly a fifth of court cases have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, Hong Kongs chief justice revealed on Wednesday, adding that the judiciary was considering expanding the use of technology to resume some proceedings.

In a statement issued on Wednesday night, Geoffrey Ma Tao-li said judges and judicial officers had been exploring ways to increase court services, after some 18 per cent of the annual caseload at all court levels had been affected since January 29 because of the Covid-19 crisis.

Hong Kong courts and specialised tribunals handled a caseload of 551,276 last year, with the bulk, 332,746, by magistrates.

Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma says the judiciary will consider allowing certain types of proceedings to resume soon. Photo: Sam Tsang

Defendants on average waited 41 to 51 days from entering a plea to standing trial before a magistrate, while those appearing before a jury in the High Court had to wait 167 days from the date of indictment.

Courts have been closed intermittently since late January, in line with the governments work-from-home arrangements to tackle the coronavirus outbreak.

The judiciary had reopened court registries and offices over the past two weeks with a view to resuming normal court operations on Monday, but on Sunday it announced the plan would be pushed back by another fortnight in light of a surge in Covid-19 infections in the city.

Although most civil and criminal cases have been postponed, the High Court has remained open on most working days to manage urgent and essential matters. The lower magistrates courts were also open four days a week to handle fresh remand cases and bail applications.

On Wednesday, Ma said the judiciary would consider allowing certain types of proceedings to resume soon, while court activities would remain limited.

He accepted that courts could conduct hearings with the help of telephones, videoconferencing and other visual aids, subject to feasibility and security.

The greater use of technology has been urged on the judiciary and generally I agree with this approach, Ma said.

Story continues

The only qualification  is that the use of such means to facilitate hearings must not only be logistically feasible, but also legal in terms of being permitted by applicable court rules and procedures. Additionally, information technology security issues must be addressed.

In an unprecedented move last month, the High Court held a hearing with parties involved in a civil case via telephonic conferencing, the first such example since the virus outbreak.

The High Court has remained open on most days to manage urgent and essential matters. Photo: Roy Issa

Mr Justice Russell Coleman, who presided over the hearing, later explained in a written ruling that it was the obvious solution to the current unfortunate and frustrating circumstances, where face-to-face proceedings were not viable. He also called for the legal profession to reassess how to best manage cases in times of public health concerns.

In a review in 2009, the Civil Justice Reform, comprised of a panel of judges and legal experts, explored the possibility of permitting telephonic hearings in civil proceedings in the High Court and District Court. But it was not recommended because of doubts about how much cost could be saved and whether lawyers were interested in using telephones. At present, it is only adopted in direction hearings in commercial arbitration.

Melissa Kaye Pang, president of the Hong Kong Law Society, echoed Mas view.

This outbreak has given us an opportunity to make that quantum leap in embracing technology, she said. It is certainly a positive direction.

She said judges should consider managing more cases in writing subject to parties consent, while noting that aspiring lawyers had been unable to practice because the courts had not admitted newcomers since the adjournment.

Pang said the society was prepared to provide technological support and assist smaller firms in securing grants to upgrade their systems, but she hoped the government could provide more funding to subsidise their needs.

Legal sector lawmaker Dennis Kwok Wing-hang said many other jurisdictions including Britain and Singapore were already embracing such conferencing technologies  and Hong Kong should follow.

The barrister also drew attention to the HK$682 million funding approved in 2013 for the courts to implement technological reform.

Time to put these resources into action, Kwok said.

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This article Coronavirus: Hong Kong courts consider tech options as fifth of caseload affected by health crisis, top judge reveals first appeared on South China Morning Post

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ChangeUp, an independent retail brand experience agency, today announced it has been named to the inaugural Inc. 5000 Series: Midwest list, the most prestigious ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the 12 Midwest states. With two-year revenue growth of 121%, ChangeUp placed 175th in the Midwest, 15th among the retail industry, and 2nd for the retail industry in Ohio.

Its an honor to be recognized by the Inc. 5000 list and ranked alongside so many remarkably innovative businesses, said Lee Carpenter, CEO and co-founder of ChangeUp. Our business is changing the future of retail experiences across a wide variety of industries nationally, and our growth is a testament to our amazing team that has adapted as our business has transformed into where we are today.

Born of the annual Inc. 5000 franchise, this regional list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the Midwest economys most dynamic segmentits independent small businesses.

The companies on this list demonstrate just how much the small-business sector impacts the economies of each Midwest state, says Inc. editor in chief Scott Omelianuk. Across every single industry, these businesses have posted revenue and growth rates that are beyond impressive, further proving the tenacity of their founders and CEOs.

Its rewarding to be on the leading-edge of change, said Lynn Gonsior, COO and co-founder of ChangeUp. The last year has been full of disruption in our industry. From the threat of a literal retail apocalypse to COVID-19, weve helped clients grow and adapt their brand strategy, customer experience, and architectural design.

The companies on this list show stunning rates of growth across all industries in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Between 2016 and 2018, these 250 private companies had an average growth rate of 360 percent and, in 2018 alone, they employed more than 27,000 people and added $13 billion to the Midwests economy. Companies based in the Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati areas brought in the highest revenue overall.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000 Series: Midwest, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, metro area, and other criteria, can be found at inc.com/inc5000-series-midwest-2020.html.

About ChangeUp:

ChangeUp is an independent retail brand experience agency thats connected customers with unforgettable brands for over 40 years. Our team has the expertise of a global agency and agility of a boutique, providing clients with the best of both worlds. Our model integrates meaningful brand strategy, memorable experience design, and measurable architecture & validation, providing clients like Buffalo Wild Wings, Macys, Best Buy, Stop & Shop, Corona and Cadillac with capabilities across the customer experience. From start-ups to established companies, we drive change for fast-moving brands. We believe change is not a risk; its the answer. Learn more at http://www.ChangeUpInc.com.

More about Inc. and the Inc. 5000 Regional Series

Methodology

The 2020 Inc. 5000 Regional Series is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2016 and 2018. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2016. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independentnot subsidiaries or divisions of other companiesas of December 31, 2018. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2016 is $100,000; the minimum for 2018 is $1 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons.

About Inc. Media

The worlds most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit http://www.inc.com.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced that Ujjwala beneficiaries will get free cooking gas for three months. The FM said that the move would benefit 8.3 crore families in the country.

In order to support the poor amid coronavirus outbreak, Sitharaman announced a Rs 1.7 lakh crore Garib Kalyan Yojana. The package includes cash transfers for farmers, MGNREGA workers, widow/pensioners, apart from benefits under Jan Dhan Yojana, Ujjwala scheme and EPFO.

"A package is ready for the poor who need immediate help like migrant workers and urban and rural poor. No one will go hungry. The package is worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore," Sitharaman said.

Also read: Coronavirus Live Updates: FM announces Rs 1.7 lakh crore package to deal with COVID-19 impact

The relief package also includes Rs 50 lakh medical insurance cover for each frontline Asha workers, sanitation workers, and medical staff involved in managing coronavirus outbreak.

Also, for the next three months, Rs 500 per month will be distributed to 20.5 crore women Jan Dhan Account holders. The government also hiked the daily wage under MNREGA to Rs 202 a day from Rs 182.

Also read: Nirmala Sitharaman LIVE updates: Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief package announced; cash to be transferred directly to poor

For farmers, the FM said that the government would release the first instalment of Rs 2,000 in the first week of April under the existing PM Kisan Yojana. Total 8.69 crore farmers will be benefited from this moved, the FM claimed.

For poor senior citizens, widow and disabled, the FM announced ex-gratia of Rs 1,000.

For women self-help group (SHGs), Sitharaman declared collateral-free loan up to Rs 20 lakh, which will help 63 lakh self help groups.

Lastly, the FM said that government will pay employee provident fund (EPF) contribution for both employer and employee (12 per cent) each for the next three months The package is for companies that have upto 100 employees and are earning less than Rs 15,000 per month.

Also read: Relief for employers! Govt to bear EPFO contribution

Also read: Coronavirus: Doctors, nurses, healthcare workers receive Rs 50 lakh insurance cover per person


People returning from Western countries are bringing a new wave of coronavirus cases to parts of Asia such as Hong Kong and Taiwan.

This is happening as health officials in the area were getting their outbreaks under control.

The development, which health officials describe as imported cases, threatens disease control work and economic recoveries.

Once theyre overseas, situations easily develop, Taiwan health and welfare Minister Chen Shih-chung said this week. However, (returnees) have the right to live here, so if they have any symptoms, we do our best to intercept them at the airports.

Flights to East Asia being watched

Chen said people arriving from heavily infected places such as Western Europe and the United States brought many new cases last week. The Taiwan Centers for Disease Control said most of the new cases reported earlier this week had come to the island from other countries.

The total number of cases in Taiwan has grown nearly five times since early March.

Late last week, Hong Kong recorded 48 cases in one day resulting in warnings there about arrivals from overseas.

Singapore had contained its outbreak, one of the worlds earliest. However, people returning from overseas have pushed the total caseload higher. Singapores Ministry of Health said many of the new cases were imported local media reported.

People are returning to Taiwan from overseas for several reasons, including school cancellations, Taiwanese health minister Chen said. Those returns will continue for another two weeks, he predicted, before everyone gets back. The daily number of people entering Taiwan is decreasing and totaled about 4,600 early this week.

Bans on foreign visitors

Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam have all banned most foreign visitors. Taiwan took the extra step Sunday of barring transit passengers. Quarantine rules have been strengthened on arrivals with any kind of passport. People arriving in Hong Kong from anywhere in the world are ordered to quarantine. Taiwan asks airplane passengers to report travel histories and any clear symptoms.

Most airplane passengers are returning home as few people are starting trips, said Brendan Sobie. He started the Singapore-based advising company Sobie Aviation.

What will happen in Singapore and Taiwan and Hong Kong will depend on the cases that came from abroad, said Rajiv Biswas, Asia-Pacific chief economist at the information services company, IHS Markit. If it can be kept under control for the next couple of weeks, then hopefully things should get better, he said.

Economic recovery could be affected

In China, where the virus spread began, citizens have slowly returned to work this month. People have started going out to eat again and to visit stores. In Taiwan, children are still attending school, workplaces remain open and restaurants are filled on weekends.

But experts warn that bans on foreign travel into Asian countries will reduce how much people spend there, especially in the case of foreign travelers. For example, Vietnam's normally active tourism industry is almost completely quiet. The country reported a few imported coronavirus cases this month. There are more than 230 confirmed cases there.

Adam McCarty is chief economist with advisory company Mekong Economics. He said travel bans mean little economic improvement can be made.

If people cant travel from one country to another, then demand will not pick up no matter how much money you throw at the problem, so its really different (from) just a normal downturn, McCarty said.

Mario Ritter Jr. adapted the VOANEWS report for VOA Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

outbreak n. a sudden increase or spread of something like disease or fighting

trend n. the general direction of how a situation is changing

symptom n. a sign of a disease or infection

intercept v. to stop someone from going from one place to another

epicenter n. the place where an event like an earthquake or disease outbreak starts

tourismn. the practice of traveling for recreation

transit adj. in the process of going to a place

quarantine n. to be kept separate from other to prevent the spread of disease
What if I told you depending on your size right now, I will not consider you a part of my community? Oh, if you had any physical problems, you will not be allowed to be around me? Lets not stop there. Ill think about whether you are wanted before you can join us for a meal.

I bet that I would be receiving complaints and have a label plastered on my forehead that shouts Discriminating! But that is exactly what some have been doing recently here in New Zealand.

Debates on the proposed amendments for abortion up to birth in New Zealand has been happening. How sad is it that we even need to debate about murdering a baby because he or she has Down Syndrome? How outrageous it is that if a child is born alive from the result of an abortion, no care would be given. The craziness goes on and on. What is evil is now being made into what is okay and normal. Nevertheless, it is far from being right and holy.

The difference

In March last year, New Zealand faced the horror of watching mass shootings occur in Christchurch. The terrorist attacks killed 51 people and injured 49. The reaction from Kiwis was a tsunami of compassion and love. Age didnt matter. The colour of ones skin was not a question. Your birth place were only words on a piece of paper. Humanity was at its best in opening their hearts to their neighbour.

They are us.

The infamous words spoken by Prime Minister Jacinda Arden following the shootings made headlines all over the world. Words of comfort that warmed the hearts of everyone. It felt good to be assured you belonged - whether you were born here or a migrant. It created a great sense of camaraderie among Kiwis.

Ironically, one year later, New Zealand is in a similar situation. Decisions are being made about mass killings of unborn babies. Yet, suddenly some people (all that have been given a chance to live!) have chosen to classify a group of humans as not one of us.

You are not one of us even when we can hear your heart beating in your mothers womb.

You are not one of us even when we can see you move and play during ultrasounds.

You are not one of us even if you are born alive and bravely take your first breath after a failed abortion.

No apologies to the so called clump of cells that do not feel any pain. You are simply not one us.

Dont give up this fight

It almost seems useless to fight a system that time and time again has proven that what is ungodly is what people want. By human standards, the prolife groups seems to be in a losing battle with laws being passed all over the world in favour of abortion.

But we know this is spiritual warfare. Ephesians chapter 6, verse 12 reminds us, For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. We continue this fight for the life of unborn babies knowing that God, the Creator of life, is on our side.

No one can stop us from sharing our testimonies of redemption. Acts chapter 18, verse 9 tells us that One night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision: Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. Similarly, I believe God is calling His followers today to be courageous.

Share your stories if you have gone through abortions. Let the women considering abortions know of the pain and shame that follows, not to condemn but to ensure that they dont have to face that same consequences. If you have survived an abortion, dont shy away from telling others your wonderful testimony to open blind eyes. Shout out the truth, and let the truth set people free (John chapter 8, verse 32).

Rise up

Heres an encouragement in the midst of this gloominess  God is still in control. He is still Lord of Lords. He is still King of Kings. Nothing escapes His watchful eyes.

Armour yourself with the Word of God. Soak yourself in prayer. Rise up and defend one of us.
Editors note: This article previously gave the incorrect amount of time that coronavirus can live on cardboard. The virus can live on cardboard for one day.

Whether its groceries or a take-out meal, food and its packaging should be handled with care and disinfected before its put away in your home while the world grapples with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

Jeffrey VanWingen, a doctor at Family Medicine Specialists in Grand Rapids, Michigan, created a 13-minute video to show everyone how to bring food into their homes as safely as possible.

Imagine that your groceries are covered in glitter, and your goal at the end of this is to not have any glitter in your house, on your hands or, especially, on your face, VanWingen said. Imagine that disinfectants and soap have the power to dissolve that glitter.

The National Institute of Health reports that coronavirus can live in air for three hours, on cardboard for one day, and on plastic and metal surfaces for three days.

The best way to keep the glitter out of your home is to leave groceries outside (on the back porch or in the garage) for three days if possible, VanWingen said. If thats not possible, he adapted a surgical sterilization technique for use on groceries.

HOW TO DISINFECT GROCERIES

Sanitize a table before bringing groceries inside

Establish a dirty side of the table to place groceries that are coming into the house, and a clean side to place items after theyre sanitized

Use a household disinfectant spray or wipe

Disinfect plastic, glass and metal packaging

Trash unnecessary and external packaging like cardboard boxes that have plastic bags inside (the plastic bags inside boxes should be OK without additional disinfecting)

Some items, such as bread or chips can be dumped directly into clean plastic containers without touching them - or just disinfect the packaging

Clean fruit and vegetables that are not bought in plastic bags by dumping them into soapy water, and then washing/scrubbing each piece for at least 20 seconds

Reusable grocery bags should be considered dirty after use; plastic bags should be thrown out

This all seems a bit time consuming, but, in truth, these days people do have a bit more time on their hands," VanWingen said. Lets be methodical and be safe, and not take any chances.

TAKE-OUT SAFETY

Sanitize a table before bringing in take-out food

Establish a dirty side of the table to place the take-out bags that are coming into the house, and a clean side to place items onto plates

Dump food from inside their packages onto plates without allowing the item to touch your hands or the outside of the package

Microwave hot food before eating

The food isnt the main concern since coronavirus doesnt live long in hot food, VanWingen said. However, the packaging could be contaminated. Choosing hot foods from restaurants is safer than cold foods at this time, he added.

Also note that coronavirus can live in frozen foods for long periods of time, he said. The freezer should not be considered a safe zone. Frozen food packaging should be disinfected like everything else.

Go out there, use this knowledge and do the best that you can, VanWingen said.

Since March 10, COVID-19 cases in Michigan went from 2 to 1,791 on March 24, which was the day that Gov. Gretchen Whitmers Shelter-in-place order went into effect. There have been 24 deaths. Forty-one of Michigans 83 counties are home to a resident who contracted coronavirus. About 85% of the COVID-19 cases -- 1,561 of 1,791 -- are in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties.

PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus. Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

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Toronto Mayor John Tory emerged from two weeks of self-isolation on Thursday into a radically changed city.

Its eerily quiet, he said, after arriving at his office early in the afternoon.

In the 15 days since he decided, on the advice of health officials, to isolate himself from others after returning from a business trip to London, the number of COVID-19 cases in the city he governs has jumped from 19 to 339 and all but essential businesses and services in the city have been closed.

Popular spots like the Toronto Eaton Centre, which attracts close to 50 million tourists and shoppers a year, are deserted. The citys main streets, typically choked with traffic at all hours of the day, are hushed.

For two weeks Tory conducted city business via e-mail and video and conference call, speaking to councillors, to mayors in other cities; answering questions from residents via remote media appearances and keeping in frequent touch with the Emergency Operations Centre, set up to co-ordinate the citys response to the pandemic.

He signed Mondays state-of-emergency declaration  the first in the citys history  from his condo while his chief-of-staff Luke Robertson stood close by  but not too close.

Robertson arrived bearing a file with the documents. Tory wore gloves to sign the documents and used Lysol disinfectant wipes to wipe down the documents and the file folder before handing everything back, to protect Robertson and anyone else who might next handle the file.

Of course I was paranoid, as I wiped it, that the ink of the pen I signed it in would start to run and then it would look terrible and there were only two copies of it, said Tory, speaking on the evening of his last full day in isolation.

Overall, Tory said, working in isolation proved productive, although he pointed out that unlike many people who must now work from home, he had the benefit of a spacious condo and staff, friends and family, dropping off binders of work and bags of groceries.

A neighbour dropped off a Starbucks coffee at his door every morning at 7 a.m., until Starbucks closed. Then he switched to Tim Hortons.

Tory said he didnt have time to be bored, and he had more time to think  in particular about whether he needed to invoke emergency measures for the first time in the citys history, a decision announced Monday, after Premier Doug Ford ordered all non-essential workplaces in the province to close for 14 days.

I could think about it more clearly because I was here by myself  there was nobody wandering in or out; there was just nothing going on, said Tory.

He told himself that as soon as his isolation period ended, he would go straight downstairs and walk outside, but two weeks later, that didnt seem like a good idea anymore.

Even walking on the sidewalk is fraught for someone as recognizable as the mayor of Toronto, who is often approached in public, something he says he generally welcomes, but would be problematic with social-distancing rules in place that recommend people keep a two-metre distance from one another.

Tory, whose schedule is usually packed with social events in the evenings and often on weekends, emerged into a world where social interactions are discouraged, even between family members who dont live together, and there are few places left to meet even if they could meet.

While I might have said, gosh, Id love to go out for dinner, there is no dinner to go out for in a restaurant, said Tory.

His wife Barb arrived at their condo for a visit Wednesday night after his quarantine ended, but will stay with their children while he continues to stay at their condo, to ensure he doesnt pass the virus on to her if he becomes infected.

The first thing she did, he said, was to tidy the jerry-rigged television studio he had set up for himself for his remote media appearances  an iPad perched atop 11 books and family photo albums and a lamp nearby, to illuminate his face. He plans to work mostly from home as much as possible.

Even going to the office, I think Ill be limited in the time I can spend there, because were asking people to do that, and I want to set an example the best I can, Tory said.

Toronto Fire Chief Matthew Pegg, who is leading the citys emergency response to the pandemic, praised Tory for remaining in isolation from the moment he returned home from London until the same time 14 days later, and for working throughout.

He has been absolutely the model of self-isolation.

Read more about:
WALTHAM (dpa-AFX) - Raytheon Co.'s (RTN) Missile Systems business has reached a $1 billion, five-year strategic agreement to purchase propulsion systems from Aerojet Rocketdyne for Standard Missile products. Aerojet Rocketdyne provides propulsion systems spanning Raytheon's Standard Missile family. For the SM-2 missile, SM-3 interceptor and SM-6 missile, Aerojet Rocketdyne supplies the majority of the solid rocket motors for these systems. Also, for SM-3, the company produces the Divert and Attitude Control System, a high-precision, quick-reaction propulsion system that positions the interceptor to defeat incoming ballistic missiles. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
An explosive device went off a short distance from the site where the cremation of the Sikhs killed in yesterdays terror attack was underway in Kabul on Thursday, according to media reports. There were no casualties.

The device exploded in a house in Qalacha area, not far from the spot where members of the Sikh minority were cremating those killed in the attack on a Sikh place of worship at Shor Bazar on Wednesday. A second explosive device was defused by Afghan security forces in the same area, the media reports said.

People familiar with developments confirmed on Thursday that an Indian national named Tian Singh, a resident of New Delhi, was among the 25 people killed in the attack. Singhs wife, in a letter sent to the prime minister, requested the repatriation of his body.

Click here to read the Hindustan Times epaper

External affairs minister S Jaishankar tweeted: Deeply concerned at the blasts reported near the cremation site of those killed during the attack on Gurudwara Sahib in Kabul. He added the Indian embassy was in touch with Afghan authorities to ensure adequate security onsite as well as safe return of families to their homes.

Jaishankar also said the Indian embassy was working to repatriate the body of Tian Singh. Though Singhs wife, in her letter, had also called for those wounded in Wednesdays attack to be shifted to New Delhi, Jaishankar said medical opinion was against moving [the] injured at this stage.

The external affairs minister said there was understandable grief and anger over the terror attack and the Indian embassy was in touch with the families of those killed and injured.

Indian ambassador Vinay Kumar visited the Sikh place of worship and met community leaders and families of the victims on Thursday. He was told the injured were receiving satisfactory treatment.

The Islamic State claimed the attack, though Afghan officials said the Pakistan-based Haqqani Network was behind it. In a statement issued late on Wednesday, the Islamic State claimed the attack was revenge for developments in Kashmir and that it was carried out by an attacker using the kunya or assumed name of Abu Khalid al Hindi, suggesting that he was of Indian origin.

The Islamic State provided no other information about the attacker or his origin. Afghan officials have said four suicide attackers were involved in the incident.
President Trump said Wednesday he had no problem with the Senate stimulus bill including $25 million in funding for the Kennedy Center, the large arts venue located in Washington, D.C.

'Well, I approved that,' he answered when a reporter asked him about the sum, pointing out that the original number Democrats pitched was $35 million. 'But the Kennedy Center has suffered greatly because nobody can go there, it's essentially closed.'

On the right, the Kennedy Center example was used as a talking point by Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits as they criticized Democrats for packing the legislation with goodies, and stalling on getting valuable need to the American people.

President Trump said Wednesday he was perfectly find with Congress giving $25 million to help the Kennedy Center, which is closed due to the coronavirus outbreak

The Kennedy Center is in Washington, D.C. and is adjacent to the Potomac River. It hosts performances including opera, ballet, theater and large-scale events

Before President Trump defended the funding conservatives like Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk were using it to blast Democrats for wasteful spending in the stimulus package

Even Donald Trump Jr. got into the action retweeting this message from Todd Starnes, a conservative radio show host and columnist

'Democrats believe #coronavirus can be cured by providing $35 million in funding to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,' tweeted Todd Starnes, a conservative columnist and radio host, highlighting the appropriate section of the legislation.

His quip was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr.

Charlie Kirk, another conservative talking head who runs the youth group Turning Point USA also fumed about the Kennedy Center funding calling it 'government at its worst.'

'How many ventilators could that money buy? How many masks could that buy? How many lives could that save?' he tweeted.

Trump, however, threw water on that political attack, by telling reporters in the press briefing room that he loved the place.

'I'm a fan of that,' he said of the arts center, located adjacent to the Potomac River. 'Although we haven't spent time there because I'm far too busy, I'd love to go there evenings, but I'm too busy doing things, because that's more important to me than going there.'

He did note that the Kennedy Center funding 'was a Democrat request.'

'That was not my request,' he said. 'But you've got to give them something, it's something that they wanted, you know it works that way,' he said, speaking of how bills are cobbled together in the House and Senate.

Trump also told the press that he believed the Democrats treated the White House and Republicans 'fairly.'

'I really believe we've had a really good back and forth,' he said, praising Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, by name.

Trump indicated he was also aware that he was ruining conservatives' fun.

Prseident Trump told reporters in the briefing room Wednesday that he loved the Kennedy Center and wouldn't mind going to see a production of Romeo and Juliet there

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Trump ally, said the funding for the Kennedy Center was legitimate, but was mad that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi listed it among other 'political' items in the stimulus bill

'That's a lousy soundbite, that's not a good soundvite, but that's the way life works,' he said after praising Congressional Democrats.

Trump had the backing of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the father of his ex-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had tweeted in defense of the Kennedy Center funding.

'Unlike absurd stuff in her list, [Kennedy Center] closure is covid related federal issue,' the former governor tweeted.

Huckabee was still enraged with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, for grouping the Kennedy Center with those other items on her 'political' wishlist.

The president also praised David Rubenstein, a D.C.-based billionaire who has thrown money at large-scale projects like the Kennedy Center and fixing the Washington Monument.

'The Kennedy Center they do a beautiful job, an incredible job, David Rubenstein does a fantastic job,' he said. 'But they've essentially closed.'

'If I wanted to go there tonight to look at Romeo and Juliet, I'd love to see Romeo and Juliet tonight - you know what would happen? They'd say sorry 250 people or 50 people, or whatever it might be down to,' the president said, trailing off.

To which a reporter pointed out that Trump's coronavirus guidance said it's gatherings fewer than 10.
Gov. Tom Wolf is asking the federal government to ease up restrictions on food assistance programs for the state.

The governor on Thursday asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to waive eligibility requirements for a number of programs, including the Emergency Food Assistance Program, amid an uptick in cases of coronavirus.

In a letter to USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue, Wolf also asked that Washington reconsider Pennsylvanias request for temporary waivers to allow more food to be distributed at school feeding sites and food banks; and to be flexible and change its interpretation of recent changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

In addition to ensuring that our most vulnerable citizens continue to have access to affordable, life-sustaining food, we now also have hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians filing for unemployment compensation as a result of necessary COVID-19 mitigation efforts in the commonwealth, Wolf said.

It is inhumane to consider that Pennsylvanians who are doing the responsible thing by staying home to stop the spread of COVID-19 in our communities would go hungry because of USDAs limiting interpretations and refusal to cut bureaucratic red tape during a national crisis.

Wolf said waivers would remove the burden of extra time spent on paperwork and the delay in access to food.

Read the full letter.

Pennsylvania has seen an unprecedented number of initial claims for unemployment compensation, Wolf noted. Charitable food systems are struggling to meet the increased demands of Pennsylvanians who are temporarily out of work.

According to the state Department of Labor and Industry in the last week, roughly 650,000 state residents have filed for unemployment. Pennsylvania is among states with the fastest-rising unemployment.

Pa. businesses are challenging Gov. Tom Wolfs emergency powers. So far, Wolfs winning.

Pennsylvania submitted its application for disaster nutritional assistance on March 20.

Worf urged the USDA to review and approve the application as soon as possible.

Wolf urged Perdue to waive eligibility requirements for the emergency food assistance program and to reconsider his request for temporary waivers.

Those who are seeking assistance from our food banks are the newly unemployed and those critically in need of food, and it is unconscionable to delay access to them because of the need to complete cumbersome paperwork requirements to prove that they are eligible for the food which they so desperately need, Wolf wrote.

Senators Toomey and Casey break down the stimulus bill

The temporary waivers would allow use and replacement of on-hand supplies of USDA foods at schools and in state warehouses to provide food to those in need as a result of this crisis.

Pennsylvania has confirmed 560 new coronavirus cases, raising the statewide total to 1,687.

The state Department of Health said 16 people in Pennsylvania have died due to the virus. The department released new numbers Thursday. Cases have now been confirmed in 48 of Pennsylvanias 67 counties.

The confirmation of 560 new cases marks the biggest one-day jump by far. Before today, the largest one-day jump came Wednesday, with 276 new cases.

Text PennLive to 717-745-7532 to sign up to have breaking news and essential updates about the coronavirus delivered right to your mobile device. Data and messaging rates may apply.
An Italian professor has said that he is 'certain' the novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan first after Chinese state media outlets linked the origin of the pandemic to Italy, which has been ravaged by the bug.

Professor Giuseppe Remuzzi claimed that, based on genetic studies, there was 'no doubt that the virus arrived in Italy from China' before Beijing informed the world about the outbreak.

In an email to MailOnline, he said that studies showed the bug was brought to Italy through a German person who had been in contact with a Chinese individual.

Professor Remuzzi (pictured) said there was 'no doubt that the virus arrived in Italy from China' after Chinese media used his comments to suggest Italy as the birthplace of the pandemic

Professor Remuzzi is the Director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan.

The Bergamo-born expert added: 'One has to consider the possibility that, rather understandably, the emergence of this unfortunate event in China probably occurred long before health authorities realised it, considering the number of asymptomatic carriers.'

An asymptomatic carrier is someone who is infected with the disease but shows no symptoms.

The Bergamo-born professor said studies showed the bug was brought to Italy through a German person who had been in contact with a Chinese individual. Pictured, an Italian coronavirus patient arrives at the Helios hospital in Leipzig, Germany, on March 25

His comments come after Beijing's state-run news organisations flocked to report that the deadly disease could have emerged in Italy before China, using his quotes from a previous interview.

Professor Remuzzi said in an interview last week that local doctors 'remember having seen very strange pneumonias [sic], very severe, particularly in old people, in December and even in November.'

He told American news organisation NPR: 'It means that the virus was circulating at least in Lombardy before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China.'

His comments were quickly seized by China's tightly controlled press, which used them to prove that the global health crisis did not start in China.

State newspaper Global Times reported that 'virus might already be spreading in Italy before the epidemic erupted in China'.

While state broadcaster CCTV cited another interview of professor Remuzzi to stressed that 'unknown pneumonia appeared in Italy as early as October last year'.

Red Cross staff wearing a protective containment suit return to the Red Cross headquarters after transporting a COVID-19 patient to a hospital in Turin on March 25

Professor Remuzzi stressed that the comments he gave to NPR were based on the information given to him by other doctors and that he had 'no scientific evidence' to prove the allegations.

He said: 'These are rumours of a small number of people and impressions of a few doctors who however did not confirm to me that they had seen bilateral pneumonia before January.'

He underlined that there was no evidence to show these patients had COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

A man carries a dog at a park in Wuhan, in China's central Hubei province on March 26

Interestingly, Chinese media's attention on professor Remuzzi's remarks seems to contradict with their reports about the first coronavirus patients in Italy.

Cover News, an outlet under state-run Sichuan Daily Group, reported that the very first confirmed sufferers of COVID-19 in Italy were a couple from Wuhan.

The article, released on Monday, said the couple arrived in Italy on January 23 and were treated in Rome.

Beijing is now rejecting the widely held assessment that the city of Wuhan is the birthplace of the global outbreak after the number of daily infections there dropped to zero but soared in Europe.

Epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan, 83, said at a press conference yesterday that no evidence suggested the virus originated in Wuhan. 'The epidemic of the novel coronavirus pneumonia indeed took place in China, in Wuhan but it does not mean its source is in Wuhan,' he said

Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said in January that the coronavirus had been passed onto humans by wildlife sold as food in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

However, Dr Zhong Nanshan, the leader of a team of experts appointed by China to tackle the health crisis, last week denied that the bug originated in Wuhan and slammed such claim as 'irresponsible'.

'The epidemic of the novel coronavirus pneumonia indeed took place in China, in Wuhan but it does not mean its source is in Wuhan,' said Dr Zhong at a press conference.

The pandemic has so far killed more than 22,000 people and infected over 486,000 worldwide.

Italy has become the country with the most coronavirus fatalities in the world, recording more than 7,500 deaths.

It is followed by Spain, which has reported at least 4,080 deaths, and then China, where more than 3,280 people have died.
Oregon officials have started disclosing key metrics about confirmed coronavirus cases, as well as more information about their own preparedness efforts. The move followed calls for greater transparency by media outlets statewide. Among the new details: more detailed age ranges for the 268 people in Oregon who have so far tested positive for COVID-19.

The new figures show that for every five Oregonians who tested positive, three are 50 or older, one is in their 40s and one is 39 or younger. Forty-somethings are actually more likely to have tested positive than people in their 50s and nearly just as likely to have tested positive as people in their 60s. Only five Oregonians younger than 20 have confirmed coronavirus diagnoses.

While the new figures offer a better lens into the disease, the data doesnt count sickened Oregonians who have not been tested.

Here are more key developments to know Thursday:

CASES: State officials also disclosed two more deaths in Oregon from the coronavirus. An 80-year-old woman from Clackamas County and a 73-year-old woman from Marion County were the latest patients to die from the illness, according to state health officials. Both had preexisting medical conditions.

TAXES: Oregonians now have some extra breathing room to file their taxes. State officials delayed the deadline until July 15, matching the new federal deadline. In Portland, city leaders also pushed back the arts tax now deadline.

CARE: Hospital administrators around Oregon had hoped the states stockpile of personal safety equipment would give them significant additional time to find more of their own. But the mountainous piles of respirators, masks, gowns and face masks are just about gone. Gov. Kate Brown blamed the federal government for the shortage of protective equipment.

JOBS: Daimler Trucks and Deschutes Brewery joined the ranks of Oregon businesses cutting back amid the coronavirus outbreaks. Daimlers decision to pause production, at least until early April, made it the first major Oregon manufacturer to close.

LIFE TODAY: The Oregon Humane Society and animal shelters across the Northwest are preparing for a potential influx of animals due to the economic upheaval linked to the continued spread of the novel coronavirus. A Newberg shelter said it will focus on working with families to keep animals in homes whenever possible.

YOUR STORIES: Have you or a family member tested positive for the coronavirus? Are you battling the illness at home or in the hospital? Have you since recovered? Wed like to hear from you.

-- The Oregonian/OregonLive

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
A Chinese man reportedly working as a university professor in Japan has confessed to spying and was in custody in his home country, China's foreign ministry said Thursday.

Yuan Keqin was investigated on suspicion of espionage and had "confessed to the facts of the crime", ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a regular press briefing.

He was responding to a question from Japanese media about a professor at the Hokkaido University of Education who disappeared after travelling to China last June.

Yuan had returned for a family funeral and had been out of contact since, Japanese news agency Kyodo reported in December.

Geng did not confirm any details about Yuan's background but said there was "unambiguous evidence" of his guilt, adding that his case had been transferred to authorities for review and prosecution.

A group of Japanese researchers have issued an emergency appeal for the scholar, who specialises in East Asian political history, according to Kyodo.

A Japanese man detained by Beijing -- reportedly also on suspicion of espionage -- was released and returned to the country, government officials in Tokyo said last November.

Japanese media identified him as a professor from Hokkaido University.

Beijing said the man, identified as Nobu Iwatani, had confessed to collecting classified information from China.

China also detained six Japanese citizens for alleged "illegal activities" in 2017.

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  The Department of Health has disapproved the Marikina COVID-19 testing center, saying it did not pass space and biosafety standards.

DOH Secretary Francisco Duque III said in a press briefing on Thursday that the proposed testing center, which is on the sixth floor of the City Health Office, should be set up in a different location to comply with guidelines on biosafety.

Nasa sixth floor ang laboratoryo, kaya iminungkahi ng DOH na gamitin ang laboratoryo ng Amang Rodriguez Memorial Medical Center o mag-set up sa ibang lokasyon, Duque said.

[Translation: The laboratory is on the sixth floor, so the DOH suggested that they use instead the laboratory at Amang Rodriguez Memorial Medical Center or set up one at a different location.]

The Health Department wrote the Marikina city government, telling them that this recommendation is made to "minimize cross-infection," and to observe less foot traffic for the protection of staff and Marikina citizens.

Marikina City Mayor Marcy Teodoro lamented this decision, saying that the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine  an approved COVID-19 testing facility  is also a co-shared facility.

Nagtataka kami kung bakit ang RITM ay isang co-shared facility na nandun ang admin office at may ospital pa samantalang kami ay hindi kami pinayagang mag-operate ng aming testing laboratory, he said.

[Translation: We don't understand why the RITM is a co-shared facility that has its administrative offices alongside a hospital, but our testing laboratory is not allowed to operate.]

He said the city government dedicated the entire sixth floor to the testing facility and that all offices on the said floor have been relocated to ensure biohazard safety.

Yung City Health Office ay nagbigay tayo ng isang exclusive elevator doon, isang buong palapag ay nakalaan sa laboratoryo natin sa Marikina City COVID testing center, he said.

[Translation: The City Health Office has an elevator for its exclusive use there, one entire floor is alloted for our Marikina City laboratory as a COVID-19 testing center.]

The local government called the DOH decision a denial to the Filipino people access for COVID-19 testing especially those in the marginalized sector, especially to the poor people.

Given the condition of the health crisis in the country, the DOH should set different protocol for the establishment of COVID-19 centers, it said in a press statement.

Teodoro, however, said that they will comply with the DOH recommendation if that is the way for Filipino people to be given additional access to COVID-19 tests.

Meanwhile, the RITM in a press release called on LGUs and other private laboratories intending to establish their own COVID-19 testing centers to exercise the utmost diligence in complying with all laboratory standards.

It said it welcomes all parties that are providing the public with greater access to COVID-19 testing. But it is important that practices and protocols recommended by the World Health Organization are observed, the RITM said.

Not all laboratories can be COVID-19 testing centers, RITM Director Celia Carlos said.

Laboratories handling COVID-19 samples must be capable of performing molecular diagnostics in terms of infrastructure, personnel, apparatus, and quality assurance, the research institute wrote.

It added that inadequacy in any of these prerequisites might lead to inaccurate results, possible infection of laboratory personnel, and the contamination of collected samples and the immediate testing environment.

According to DOH, the RITM will assist the city government in setting up a facility that adheres to biosafety guidelines.

We will work with them and help them until they can attain the standards, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire also said.
Former political aide Alastair Campbell has shared his techniques for coping with pandemic anxiety and insomnia - and they include playing the bagpipes and a healthy dose of David Attenborough.

The Bradford-born journalist, 62, who has struggled with bouts of depression, penned a blog for British GQ outlining 20 tips for staying upbeat during lockdown.

He admitted his suggestions won't be relevant to everyone, but hoped some will resonate and be 'useful' to people.

Mr Campbell's first tip is to look after your loved ones, especially those you are in isolation with.

Former political aide Alastair Campbell has shared his techniques for coping with pandemic anxiety and insomnia

He added that he is 'luckier than most' to be with the person he would wish to be on lockdown with - his wife Fiona Millar - and he is trying to do something each day that he wouldn't normally do to show how much he cares, which this week was unloading the dishwasher.

Mr Campbell also urged readers to stay active and exercise, resisting the temptation to do nothing and slob out on the sofa.

He suggested turning your home into a gym, doing exercises such as squats, star jumps and running up and down the stairs, and joining an online workout class.

The father-of-three also advised ditching junk food and eating as healthily as possible, stocking up on fruit and vegetables - and keeping an eye on your alcohol intake.

Mr Campbell (pictured in 2004 on Parkinson) also suggested 'making music', adding: 'I play the bagpipes. What is more, before the jokes start, two of my neighbours have said to me in the past 24 hours that they want me to play more. So I will'

'"This is like Christmas without the fun!" someone tweeted the other day,' he wrote.

'We know the temptation to drink more at Christmas or when on holiday. This is not Christmas; it is not a holiday. Best to resist.'

He suggested keeping a food diary - as well as a regular one for noting down your thoughts and feelings - and sharing what you eat with others to 'swap ideas'.

Despite being an insomniac himself, Mr Campbell hailed the benefits of getting enough sleep.

Alastair Campbell, pictured with wife Fiona Millar, said he is trying to do something each day that he wouldn't normally do to show how much he cares, which this week was unloading the dishwasher

'Bed and fast asleep before the ten o'clock news means a good night so far as I am concerned,' he wrote.

He also recommended reading books, fiction or non-fiction, for escapism, cutting down on social media and listening to music regularly.

Alastair Campbell's 20 tips to deal with pandemic anxiety and insomnia 1. Really look after the people closest to you. 2. Try to stay active. 3. Exercise. 4. Watch your diet. 5. Watch the booze. 6. Sleep a lot. 7. Read books not newspapers. 8. Cut down on social media. 9. Listen to music regularly. 10. Make music! 11. Think in ink. 12. Keep in touch. 13. Get in touch. 14. Do something good. 15. Try easy things. 16. Stay curious. 17. Enjoy nature. 18. Remember that the crisis will end. 19. Keep things in perspective. 20. Get good out of bad. Advertisement

Mr Campbell also suggested 'making music', adding: 'I play the bagpipes. What is more, before the jokes start, two of my neighbours have said to me in the past 24 hours that they want me to play more. So I will.'

Keeping in touch with people you aren't seeing face-to-face is also important during this time of isolation, and Mr Campbell also recommended taking the opportunity to re-connect with someone you've lost contact with.

For fellow depression sufferers, Mr Campbell urges them to 'try easy things' if you are finding it hard to do difficult tasks.

He wrote: 'When I am depressed and I know my mood and energy are going to be low, I make a big deal in my mind of little things. Brush my teeth. Shave. Turn on the radio. It is another of my mottos: "If I can turn the radio on, I can turn my mind on."'

The former Labour spin doctor also urged people to do something good for someone else every day - whether it's your next-door neighbour, an NHS worker or helping a local charity or food bank.

Mr Campbell urged readers to enjoy nature, whether it's inside or out, admitting he watched the 'wonderful' Blue Planet for the first time at the weekend and has been indulging in Gordon Buchanan's wildlife films.

'If you follow me on social media you will know I have been posting Tree Of The Day photos for some time, since before the crisis,' he said.

'I cannot tell you how much pleasure Fiona and I have got on our morning walk with the dog deciding which tree to pick. It is especially wonderful right now as the birds are starting to sing more and the absence of aircraft in the sky (though a downside in other ways) means the birdsong is more noticeable and appears to be louder.'

He concluded by reminding people the crisis will end, and to keep things in perspective and make the most of a bad situation.
TORONTO - The CBC says it's gradually restoring the local supper-hour TV news it recently shelved.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 25/3/2020 (658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CBC journalist Andrew Chang is seen on a television in an upper floor condo, giving a report about the coronavirus, in Vancouver, on March 23, 2020. The CBC says it's gradually restoring the local supper-hour TV news it recently shelved.Last week the public broadcaster drew criticism when it announced it was temporarily scrapping its local TV newscasts, except for CBC North, in order to pool resources at CBC News Network amid the COVID-19 crisis. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

TORONTO - The CBC says it's gradually restoring the local supper-hour TV news it recently shelved.

Last week, the public broadcaster drew criticism when it announced it was temporarily scrapping its local TV newscasts, except for CBC North, in order to pool resources at CBC News Network amid the COVID-19 crisis.

Prince Edward Island Premier Dennis King called for the move to be reversed to keep remote and vulnerable communities informed during the pandemic.

The public broadcaster now says that as of Wednesday it will air a 30-minute local news segment during suppertime on CBC News Network (at 5 p.m. ET and 6 p.m. ET).

It also said in a statement that over the course of this week and next, the CBC "will make every effort to have all of the dedicated local shows back up on the main network."

Chuck Thompson, head of public affairs at CBC English Services, told The Canadian Press that the CBC will start restoring supper-hour local TV newscasts starting in Newfoundland/Labrador on Wednesday evening.

He said on Thursday, viewers in P.E.I. will see the return of its local news program "Compass," while audiences in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick "can watch a combined regional show."

"We are taking it one day at a time, carefully adding in other markets on a gradual basis to ensure nothing jeopardizes the essential services or the health and well-being of our journalists," Thompson said in an email Wednesday.

Thompson said the CBC's "Power & Politics" program will also return to its regular schedule in the coming days. It, too, was temporarily suspended last week so the Ottawa production team could be redeployed to CBC News Network.

Last week, the public broadcaster said CBC News Network would be the "core live breaking-news service" and temporarily replace all local newscasts across the country, except for CBC North, as the public broadcaster dealt with the crush of pandemic coverage.

A memo to CBC staff on March 18 noted these "unprecedented times" have led to "much stricter newsgathering protocols," and that there are far fewer staff in CBC's Toronto broadcast centre.

At the time, Prince Edward Island Premier Dennis King said he was "incredibly disappointed" in the move, and planned to speak with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and formally ask Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault to intervene and reverse the decision.

"The reach of 'CBC News: Compass' into the living rooms of Island households, community and long-term care homes and seniors' residences is essential now, more than ever," King said.

"Our chief public health officer and government are working together to share important information, recommendations and directions for Islanders as we navigate the current state of public health emergency in our province and 'CBC News: Compass' is a critical partner in helping us do this."

At the time, King said he also spoke with Catherine Tait, president and CEO of CBC, to express his disappointment. He said she told him the changes would not be reconsidered.

Local news teams have continued to work throughout, providing content for CBC News Network and coverage on radio, digital and social media.

The CBC announced the reversal in a statement Tuesday when it chalked up last week's decision to "operational reasons due to the surge in COVID-19 related live news stories across the country."

"To be clear, this was a temporary measure to ensure stability in our news service to Canadians," it said.

"We understand the frustration this has caused our viewers and thank them for their continued support and patience as we restore service."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 25, 2020.
People working on the frontline with some of the most vulnerable in Derry during the coronavirus pandemic have raised concerns about their personal protection.

Frontline workers on the Supporting People programme help people who have been homeless or a rough sleeper, those with a physical or sensory disability, people at risk of domestic violence, individuals with alcohol and drug problems, people with learning difficulties, teenage parents, elderly people and many more.

It enables vulnerable people to live independently in the community, in all types of accommodation and tenure.

However, the Department for Communities (DfC) which oversees the Supporting People programme has said that protective gear will not be provided based on advice from the Public Health Agency (PHA).

The issue of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) has become much-talked about in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic with health workers in most need of gear which is in short supply.

There is a belief that all frontline workers should be adequately protected, including voluntary and community workers and shop staff.

Health and Safety Executive UK guidelines state that: Every employer shall ensure that suitable personal protective equipment is provided to his employees who may be exposed to a risk to their health or safety while at work except where and to the extent that such risk has been adequately controlled by other means which are equally or more effective.

Derry Trades Union Council (DTUC) believes the DfC position on PPE is unacceptable as these workers provide personal caring duties such as showering and washing clothes.

Support services include Damien House, Womens Aid, House on the Wells, Simon Community, Ramona House, Jefferson Court and Shepherds View Young Persons Project.

Speaking to the Derry News, one frontline worker said: Two of my work colleagues are now self isolating.

I have just finished a 12 hour shift and we still do not have everything we need to protect ourselves from this virus.

I have to return to work tomorrow, we are all worried and no one seems to know what is going on.

Derry Trades Union Council says it has been contacted by a growing number of workers employed in the Community and Voluntary Sector who have raised concerns around the lack of or unfit for purpose Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) being made available to them by their employers.

These workers, many of whom are on very low pay, do not have the luxury of working from home which leaves them further exposed to the current public health emergency, COVID-19.

The Supporting People Programme is funded by the DfC and it is administered by the Housing Executive on the Departments behalf.

A spokesperson said: The PHA does not currently recommend the use of PPE for support workers providing Supporting People services.

The PHA recommends that workers follow good hand hygiene practices, and that there is regular and thorough cleaning of the accommodation.

This position is however being kept under constant review by the PHA due to the rapidly evolving situation.

CHALLENGES

Meanwhile, the NIHE said each organisation funded through the Supporting People programme is responsible for their contingency planning and staffing.

In order to support this, it has shared Public Health and Central Government Guidance and identified money from the Supporting People 2019/20 budget to distribute to Supporting People provider organisations who receive a single source of public funds.

This will support the implementation of Covid-19 contingency plans in the short term and will be available to support voids for isolation, personal protection equipment, extra cleaning costs and staff cost pressures.

The Housing Executive also continues to engage with our sponsor Department, the Department for Communities, on a bid for additional funding, which would be made available to Supporting People provider organisations in respect of increased staffing costs in 2020/21, a spokesperson added.

PROTECTION

However, DTUC Chair Niall McCarroll believes the health, safety and welfare of all workers should be risk assessed.

A proactive forward planned approach should be in place - but this isn't the case with too many employers. Health and safety in the workplace and the welfare of workers should be the number one priority for all employers.

Fortunately, workers who are organised, in a trade union and were their employer has a partnership agreement with their union are best placed to deal with this pandemic. DTUC want to put on record our appreciation to those employers who are addressing this current crisis whilst working with their trade unions colleagues.

DTUC are not surprised to find that those community sector based organisations that have always been anti trade union are also the same organisations that are inadequately prepared to protect their workers at this time.

He added: The approach taken by some employers towards the health, safety and welfare of their workers has been exposed by COVID-19.

Frontline workers employed through the Supporting People Programme are one such group of workers who are particularly at risk. Due to the vulnerable and at risk people they support these workers must continue to present for work.

The work they carry out every day changes lives, enhances life opportunities and reduces significant risks for a growing number of people.

These workers are largely unseen, they are the frontline against the root causes of homelessness and support those in our society who already find themselves socially isolated.

The Health and Safety Executive state that, employers should, therefore, provide appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) and training in its usage to their employees wherever there is a risk to health and safety that cannot be adequately controlled by other means.
COVID-19 fears and restrictions are hitting all Torontonians, but few can match the challenges faced by Tam-thanh Doan.

The 77-year-old Toronto Community Housing tenant in North York has physical limitations including two prosthetic legs, no fingers on her right hand and missing parts of fingers on her left.

She gets help from family, including a primary caregiver son, and neighbours. But her daughter, Hilda Doan, said they worry about the global pandemics impact on a woman who has overcome so much  arriving from Vietnam a single mother, tireless work, illness and amputation, and mental health challenges.

Social distancing is especially tough for somebody who is remarkably resourceful but relies heavily on others, Hilda said. She worries her brothers security guard work could expose him to the virus, which would further isolate Tam-thanh.

TCH is also densely packed housing, where it may become an extra level of risk as community members stop in to check on or help my mother when my brother isnt home, she said, adding her mom luckily stocked up on nonperishable items.

Although her situation can benefit from more support, we are thankful that TCH, in combination with social assistance (that has now turned into her pension) has allowed housing to be affordable and makes for one less thing to worry about.

For many of the other 100,000-plus TCH tenants paying rent, April 1 will be a concern since COVID-19 restrictions have shuttered many businesses, reducing incomes for some of the lowest-paid people in the city.

The city agency, Canadas biggest landlord, has committed to immediately adjust the rents of people who lost income due to the virus, part of the efforts to help them through this crisis, said TCH spokesperson Bruce Malloch.

The 90 per cent of TCH tenants who have rent set in accordance with their income will be eligible for an immediate rent reduction if they lost income because of COVID-19, Malloch said.

Those paying market rates who suffered economically can opt for three-month rent reductions  three-quarters, half or one-third of the usual amount  and repay the reduced amount, with no interest, over a period of six to eight months.

If (tenants) have lost their job or lost income due to COVID-19, were working to make sure their housing unit is secure. The only category for which you could be evicted (from TCH at the moment) is illegal acts, Malloch said.

As of Thursday afternoon, TCH had not heard of any residents testing postive for the coronavirus. About 1,800 employees  90 per cent of TCH staff  remained on the job, with roughly 500 working from home. Some 230 were not working for various reasons and 39 were self-isolating.

Many are busy calling all seniors and other tenants deemed vulnerable to check up on them, Malloch said  a task made tougher by con artists also busy calling people.

They are claiming to be volunteers who are going to deliver groceries to their homes and say they need (tenants) banking information, Malloch said. Its slowing us down a bit because some tenants are hanging up thinking our person is a scammer.

Posters are going up about the scammers and the rent adjustments, along with the calls and mailouts.

Susan Gapka, a Toronto transgender rights activist and longtime TCH tenant, said the agency seems to be trying to help residents cope with COVID-19  but its a big job given there are almost 60,000 units across Toronto.

I see signage in elevators and hand sanitizer put out but on the best of days TCH has a hard time meeting the needs of tenants, Gapka said, saying the agency, which has weathered multiple leadership changes, is years overdue in introducing a new engagement system for tenants, many of whom have multiple challenges.

This is why social housing is so incredibly important  they provide a social component, said Gapka. Theyre more than a landlord.
Growing up in Singapore, Justine Chan always looked forward to buying real estate. It was imbued in me by my parents that real estate was a wealth-management tool, she said. We dont see it as just a place to live. We see it as asset-building.

Ms. Chan, now 31, came to New York to study at New York University and later earned a business degree from Yale. Her first home purchase, when she was 25, was a small studio near Gramercy Park. She later sold it to someone like her  a young woman buying a starter home.

She was exactly at the life stage I was in when I bought it, Ms. Chan said. I felt I was passing it on.

She traded up to a bigger studio on West 34th Street. I wanted it to be not just a primary residence but a buy-and-hold, she said. So last year she prepared to rent the studio and move again.

[Did you recently buy or rent a home in the New York metro area? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com]

Her price range was $350,000 to $500,000, although her ideal top price was more like $400,000. When I was hunting this time around, I realized my debt-to-income ratio was getting high, and I was capped as to what I could find, she said.

Nearby public transportation was important. Ms. Chan, a strategy consultant for small-business startups, eliminated some Brooklyn neighborhoods that were tethered to one subway line or had lengthy rides to her usual destinations: Union Square, where she travels for work, and Chinatown, where she shops for groceries.

She preferred a condominium or a co-op with a liberal sublet policy, so she could rent her home, if need be. And she was open to a place big enough to accommodate a roommate who could offset some of the costs, allowing her to take advantage of being an owner and an investor, she said.

Having my housing situation be low-cost is incredibly comforting, she explained. Owning real estate was one of the ways that made me feel more stable moving into self-employment.

Parts of the South Bronx were appealing for the prices, the proximity to Manhattan and the convenience to the 2 and 5 trains.

Among her choices:
Seoul, March 26 (IANS) Officials of two key departments at North Korea's ruling Workers' Party visited a western military unit to congratulate soldiers after they won a recent artillery fire competition overseen by leader Kim Jong-un, state media reported on Thursday.

The rarw group visit to the artillery battalion of the 3rd Corps of the Korean People's Army was seen as unusual as it came amid intensified efforts to prevent the coronavirus pandemic in the country since the North declared a national emergency system in late January, reports the Seoul-based Yonhap News Agency.

"On March 24, officials of the Organizational Leadership Department and the Information and Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) paid a congratulatory visit to the artillery battalion," Pyongyang's state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in a report.

The officials "warmly congratulated the service personnel who were honored with the battalion of master gunners under the blessings of the illustrious commander of Mt Paektu" ,the report said, referring to the country's sacred Mount Paekdu.

The KCNA said the unit was given a certificate bearing the congratulatory autograph of leader Kim, reports Yonhap News Agency.

"The officials of the Party Central Committee read the officers and soldiers the encouraging letters and listened to the merits the artillerymen performed in the service days, deepening the blood feelings," it added.

The North has not reported any confirmed coronavirus infections.

--IANS

ksk/
Asian markets mostly rose though major indexes struggled after posting hefty gains this week.

Hong Kong: Asian markets mostly rose Thursday as investors breathed a sigh of relief that US senators have finally passed a gargantuan stimulus package for the world's top economy after being delayed by wrangling over details.

The unprecedented $2 trillion plan -- described by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a "wartime level of investment" -- helped spur a surge across global equities as panicked traders worried about the impact of the coronavirus sweeping the planet.

But another advance on Wall Street was blunted Wednesday as it emerged that four Republican senators have baulked at the generous provisions agreed to in the bipartisan deal with the White House.

The bill eventually cleared the Senate by an overwhelming majority and will now head to the House of Representatives before going to President Donald Trump for his signature.

The monster deal thrashed out between Republicans, Democrats and the White House includes cash payments to American taxpayers and several hundred billion dollars in grants and loans to small businesses and core industries. It also buttresses hospitals desperately in need of medical equipment and expands unemployment benefits.

The plan, together with a huge bond-buying programme by the Federal Reserve that effectively prints cash, is part of an unprecedented global response to the outbreak, which has even seen Germany put together a list of measures worth more than $1 trillion.

Asian markets mostly rose though major indexes struggled after posting hefty gains this week.

Tokyo ended down 4.5 percent after surging almost a fifth over the previous three days, while Hong Kong shed 0.7 percent and Shanghai eased 0.6 percent. Seoul fell more than one percent.

But Sydney jumped more than two percent, Wellington and Mumbai climbed four percent, while Manila rallied nearly eight percent. Jakarta soared more than 10 percent as dealers there played catch-up with the rest of Asia having been closed Wednesday for a holiday.

There were also healthy gains in Taipei and Bangkok.

Singapore lost more than one percent after data showed the city-state's economy suffered its worst quarterly contraction since the financial crisis more than a decade ago, giving global investors an early insight into the economic effects of the pandemic.

The government on Thursday unveiled a US$33 billion stimulus package.

Singapore is considered a bellwether for trade-reliant Asian countries.

In early trade, London sank almost three percent, while Paris and Frankfurt lost more than two percent.

While the US bill provides much-needed support, observers continue to err towards caution with most now expecting the global economy to plunge into recession as countries go into lockdown, turning off the growth taps.

"While this is good news... it's impossible to gauge the ultimate economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic for weeks, possibly months, and until that point, the sustainability of any rally in oil or equity markets is questionable and suggests the current high level of volatility will likely extend," said AxiCorp's Stephen Innes.

"All the stimulus chatter will fade if the COVID-19 headcount curve goes vertical. The reality is the 'Big Bazooka' sway is impossible to sustain, and not to mention the surprise effects greatly diminish. Ultimately, policy is harder to maintain the more protracted virus outbreaks continue." Investors are now nervously awaiting the release later Thursday of US jobless claims data, which is expected to show a massive rise.

"The high-frequency data will confirm we're in a horrible vortex of the fastest and most substantial rise in the US unemployment in modern financial history," Innes added.

And CMC Markets analyst Michael Hewson said the figures "could well be extremely ugly" and warned some estimates had put them at around the four million mark.

Also Thursday, G20 leaders will be holding a summit by teleconference, with hopes they can provide a united front in the face of the pandemic after the group of leading economies faced criticism that it had been slow to address the crisis.

French presidential sources said the virtual meeting would focus on "coordination on the health level" as well as sending a "strong signal" to financial markets over efforts to stabilise the global economy.
Just a day after the 21-day national lockdown started due to the Coronavirus crisis, the air quality has significantly improved in key cities. According to the SAFAR index, while Delhi, Mumbai and Pune's air quality has been in two digits, Ahmedabad's AQI has been slightly higher.

As per the SAFAR index, Delhi's AQI stands at 67 and Mumbai's AQI stands at 79 putting the two cities in the 'satisfactory' category. Pune's Air Quality Index stands at 48 falling under the 'Good' category. Meanwhile, Ahmedabad's AQI stands at 103 keeping the city in the 'moderate' category.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day lockdown in the entire country effective from midnight of March 25 to deal with the spread of coronavirus, saying that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly. The 21-day curfew is applicable to all states, districts, and villages - irrespective of whether they were earlier under curfew or not. The plying of vehicles and other such reduced markedly since Sunday's Janta Curfew.

The Coronavirus Crisis

As of date, India has reported over 650 confirmed positive cases of COVID-19. Out of all the states, Maharashtra has crossed a total of 115 positive cases becoming the highest number of cases detected in the country. Meanwhile, thirteen people have died so far due to the deadly virus. Due to the outbreak, India has been put under a national lockdown for 21 days. Further, India has also closed the India-Pakistan border and restricted passenger movement at the border with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Myanmar.

Read: Kashmir: 48 people who came in contact with COVID-19 patient put in quarantine

Read: Kolkata's AQI improves significantly during 'Janata Curfew'

Presently, there are around 471,311 confirmed cases of COVID-19 which has led to the death of around 21,293 people. Meanwhile, around 114,642 have reportedly been recovered. The hardest-hit region, after China, is Italy, Iran and South Korea, where the number of cases is rising by the hour.

Read: AIMIM MLA & goons abuse and attack doctors amid Coronavirus lockdown; trigger protest

Read: Chetan Bhagat says lockdown isn't the full Coronavirus solution; here's what he proposes
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Yes Bank on March 26 said its board has approved a proposal to raise up to Rs 5,000 crore.

The private lender informed the exchanges that it will raise the additional amount through shares, ADRs, GDRs or convertible bonds and it will be done in one or more tranches.

Yes Bank had earlier raised Rs 10,000 crore from SBI and other banks and financial institutions through sale of equity under its reconstruction plan approved by the government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

Also Read: What the Yes Bank rescue plan actually means

The bank resumed normal operations on March 18 after a moratorium imposed by RBI was lifted.

The bank also said that pursuant to the Yes Bank Reconstruction Scheme 2020, the office of the administrator of the bank, Prashant Kumar, "stands vacated".

Kumar, former SBI CFO, assumed charge as bank's RBI-appointed administrator on March 5, as soon as the board was superseded.

The new Yes Bank board comprises Kumar, Sunil Mehta as Non-Executive Chairman, Mahesh Krishnamurti as Non-Executive Director, Atul Bheda as Non-Executive Director, R Gandhi and Ananth Narayan Gopalakrishnan as Additional Directors appointed by RBI, Partha Pratim Sengupta and Swaminathan Janakiraman as Directors nominated by SBI.








Web Toolbar by Wibiya

OC Transpo has sought to provide leadership in preventing the spread of the Coronavirus.





This includes the cleaning of buses and preventing passengers getting too close to drivers by requiring rear door entry.





So, why aren't they allowing passengers to freely open bus windows like the STO in Gatineau?





A recent article in the Ottawa Citizen asserts that COVID-19 can stay in the air after a person sneezes of coughs for up to three hours!





When we attempted to reach the General Manager to discuss the situation they were not available.





It's up to members of the public to demand further protections from OC Transpo by allowing passengers to open their windows to enable buses to have proper air circulation.





You could get infected with COVID-19 from a person you haven't even seen if OC Transpo continues to lock-up its windows!





Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, attempted to mimic the virus deposited from an infected person onto everyday surfaces in a household or hospital setting, such as through coughing or touching objects.





The tests show that when the virus is carried by the droplets released when someone coughs or sneezes, it remains viable, or able to still infect people, in aerosols for at least three hours.
[March 26, 2020] GoFetch Health Launches Free Pet Telehealth Memberships to Support Pet Owners and Veterinarians Amid COVID-19 Restrictions

Canadian pet technology company GoFetch Health launches free access to its veterinary telemedicine platform, helping connect pet owners with veterinary clinics during the COVID-19 outbreak. Pet owners and veterinarians across Canada can download the app and register free of charge until June 1, 2020. "The veterinary profession is essential to ensuring pet health," says Dr. Adam Little, Chief Medical Officer and Co-Founder of GoFetch Health. "Like many small businesses, local practices are having to adapt to new ways to serve their clients and patients. By making our service free and enabling more veterinary clinics to participate, we hope that every pet owner can access a veterinarian when needed and veterinary practices can continue to serve their clients." GoFetch Health provides two options for pet owners to connect with veterinarians. The first is its live veterinary chat function in which veterinarians and veterinary technicians offer general support, advice, and triage to all pet oners. The second is one-on-one paid virtual video consults with your pet's primary veterinarian, providing pet owners with more in-depth support, treatment options, and ensuring continuity of care.



Veterinarians can set up virtual consultation capabilities within 24 hours enabling them to continue to provide care to their clients, in place of in-person clinic visits in the wake of social distancing and COVID-19. Through the platform, veterinarians can set their own schedules and prices to best serve their clients. "The changes we've seen over the past few weeks have made it increasingly difficult for pet owners to feel confident that their pets will receive the care they may need in the near future," says Dr. Karley Seagrist co-owner of Yaletown Pet Hospital. "We're so happy to see a platform that's open to everyone that can help connect pet parents with veterinarians and build that confidence back up."

The app is available for download in the app store and Google (News - Alert) Play for free until June 1, 2020. For more information, visit https://free.gofetch.ca/. About GoFetch Health GoFetch Health is a Canadian pet technology company that increases affordability and improves access to veterinary medicine through its telemedicine solutions and rewards platform. The company is based out of Vancouver, BC and partners with veterinarians across Canada. GoFetch Health offers support to pet owners at home through its veterinary chat function - a free chat-based service that offers general support, advice, and triage to pet parents - as well as the ability to schedule one on one paid virtual video consults with pet owners' primary veterinarian. In addition, GoFetch Health's $5/month paid members earn 5% cash back on all their vet bills at partner clinics plus additional bonus rewards to spend on their pets. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005152/en/

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Priyanka Chopra put forward questions about coronavirus to World Health Organisation experts and busted some myths about the global pandemic

New Delhi: Actor Priyanka Chopra on Tuesday night through an Instagram Live conversation put forward questions about coronavirus to World Health Organisation (WHO) experts and busted some myths about the global pandemic.

(Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak)

WHO General-Director Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's Technical Lead, were part of the live conversation which Priyanka shared on her Instagram. More than 45,000 fans participated in the session.

"There is so much information circulating about Covid-19. And right now we're all searching for clarity. My friends at @WHO and @glblctzn graciously brought the doctors working on the front lines here to give us answers straight from the experts. Please take some time to watch my IG Live with Dr. Tedros (General-Director at W.H.O.) and Dr Maria Van Kerkhove (Technical Lead for Covid-19) from @WHO, who answered some questions that so many of you sent in," Chopra captioned the post.

Check out the post

Bollywood's 'Desi' girl also asked her fans to spread awareness about the disease and tag their friends and family in the post who are looking for answers and action steps.

PC even posted few questions submitted by the general populace and answers to the same on her Instagram story. The first question came from her husband, Nick Jonas, who also joined in on the conversation.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has written to Chief Ministers of 18 states requesting them to provide basic amenities such as shelter, food and medical support to the workers of West Bengal stranded in their states due to lockdown.

In a letter written to Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, Banerjee wrote that Bengal has many workers-semi skilled and unskilled, working in different parts of the country. Due to complete lockdown in the country for COVID-19 pandemic, many Bengal workers could not travel back and are stuck at different places.

"We have received information that many such workers who are ordinarily resident of Bengal are stuck in your state too. We are getting SOS calls from them. They are generally in groups of 50-100 and can be easily identified by the local administration," West Bengal CM wrote in the letter.

"Since, it is not possible for us to reach any help to them, I take the opportunity to request you to kindly ask your administration to provide them with basic shelter, food and medical support during this period of crisis. We, in Bengal, are taking care of such stuck people in our State," she added.

She wrote that her Chief Secretary will pass on the details of such people to CM Thackeray's Chief Secretary to hasten up this entire process of humanitarian support in this hour of crisis. "May I request you to kindly see for appropriate action," she added.

The West Bengal Chief Minister has written similar letters to other Chief Ministers as well.

The Chief Ministers of 18 States are--Tamil Nadu CM Edappadi K Palaniswami, Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik, Telangana CM K Chandrashekar Rao, Karnatak CM B S Yediyurappa, Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray, Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan, Himachal Pradesh CM Jai Ram Thakur, Punjab CM Captain Amarinder Singh, Uttarakhand CM Trivendra Singh Rawat, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar, Goa CM Pramod Sawant, Gujarat CM Vijay Rupani, Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel, Andhra Pradesh CM Y S Jaganmohan Reddy and Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As the coronavirus continues to rapidly spread throughout New Jersey, many companies and residents want to give back, but arent sure how.

One family in Hopewell is making it easy to find where to donate locally.

Siblings Alexander Huang-Menders, Celeste Huang-Menders, and Christian Huang created the Share Some Care project, which is an online database that allows people throughout to country to locate fire stations, food banks, hospitals and police stations near them that are accepting donations.

For this project, it was extremely important to bring people together, Celeste, a George School (Pa.) sophomore, said. I think the major issue is that with the restrictions of physical interactions, there is a distance between the people that want to help and the people that need help. I dont think people recognize the extent of all of the places that could benefit from the resources.

The project is requesting only new or gently-used supplies that first-line responders could use such as disposable gloves, N95 face masks, and other Personal Protective Equipment as well as food for food banks.

Once users select their local emergency service on the websites interactive map, they are prompted with that branchs contact information. Before making donations, users should contact their target organization to see requested drop-off details as well as needs.

For people that dont know where to donate their supplies, Share Some Care offers to help pair them with a local organization in need.

Something like this helps to show that there are resources available for people that want to use them, Alexander, a junior at Pennington, said. We are really lucky that we were able to do this.

The website launched at the beginning of this week and has already generated traffic nationwide.

Its amazing that this project has taken off so quickly, Alexander said. Ideally we want to get traffic from around the world. People that have seen it have been very encouraging and supportive. I hope that continues and grows even more. In times like these, I think it can really do some good.

Doing some good is nothing new for the Huang family.

Alexander and Celeste have worked together to bring awareness to the refugee crisis nationwide. Theyve worked at refugee camps in Greece and Mexico and have spoken about the crisis across the country.

Once they realized the severity of COVID-19, they knew that it was time to shift focus to that and seeing them jump into action made their father Daniel extremely proud.

One of the things that really heartens me is that theyve realized that in the world we live in today, you can make a change, he said. You dont need to wait for permission. You just do it. If you wait for permission from whoever it might be, things dont get done nearly as quickly. I think that the initiative here was really heartening to see.

If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share.

Have a tip? Tell us.nj.com/tips.

Richard Greco covers Mercer County news for NJ.com and may be reached at rgreco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @Richard_V_Greco. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Meghan Markle's wedding guests were worried about her close friendship with "Suits" co-star Patrick J. Adams, said a royal biographer.

The Duchess of Sussex's role Rachel Zane was the love interest of Adams' role Mike Ross and their on-screen chemistry worked well.

According to royal author Andrew Morton in the book "Meghan: A Hollywood Princess," co-stars' close bond caused wedding guests at the "Suits" actress and Trevor Engelson's wedding in 2011 to raise their eyebrows.

"The first episode of Suits aired on June 23 to generally favorable review and, more importantly, an enthusiastic audience. Cast, crew and the money men at the network were ecstatic, the producers thrilled that their gamble to cast Meghan opposite Patrick had paid off big time, the show's fans buzzing about the couple's on-screen chemistry," Morton narrated.

Their chemistry was reportedly just as lightning off-screen.

Morton said their off-screen chemistry was equally apparent and was uncomfortable, according to guests at Markle and Engelson's wedding, which was held in Jamaica in 2011.

"The two actors clearly developed a bond of familiarity that is invariably the corollary of working up close and personal for so long and so intensely," Morton said.

The former couple decided to get divorced 2 years later. During that time, rumors circulated that the duchess called their marriage off possibly due to dishonesty and lies.

It is a common phenomenon that actors playing as love interests eventually become a real-life item. Examples are Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig and Rachel Weiss.

Also Read: Meghan Markle Controversy: Simon Rex Reportedly Offered $70k to Lie About Dating Her

Adams Was Once Attracted to a Co-Star

Adams himself became attracted to an earlier co-star, Troian Bellisario, who he starred with on the play "Equivocation" in 2009. They dated for a year and then broke up, but Adams wanted to win her back.

After Bellisario landed a role in "Pretty Little Liars", Adams got himself a bit-part and stunned her at the script read-through.

The pair got back together, became engaged in 2014 and got married in 2016.

On Markle and Engelson's Divorce

On her defunct lifestyle blog The Tig, Prince Harry's wife posted a shady quote about hypocrisy which led fans to think she was alluding to Engelson.

Morton claimed that Markle just wanted out of her marriage out of the blue and did not explain her decision to her former husband. Engelson was reportedly taken aback when Markle returned her ring to him.

Markle and Prince Harry met in London 3 years after the divorce and were introduced to each other by a common friend.

Markle's Wedding Guests

Jessica Mulroney's three children were present as bridal attendants in Markle's wedding. She is reportedly Markle's best friend and is a Canada-based fashion stylist who worked for Canada's first lady Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau.

Her group gives a new light to the term power squad from her old college friends to Hollywood A-listers.

Meghan Markle's "Suits" castmate Gabriel Macht was in attendance with his wife, actress Jacinda Barrett. Adams was present with his wife, Bellisario.

Related Article: Meghan Markle's Exes: What Her Past Relationships Say About Her

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 19:12:43|Editor: huaxia

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U.S. President Donald Trump (Front) arrives to address a news conference at the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, March 13, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

Reactions on Trump's policies related to the COVID-19 outbreak range from the passionately opposed to fanatical supporters who take blind faith in his policies.

by Julia Pierrepont III, Heng Huang



LOS ANGELES, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Wracked by a devastating economic shutdown on top of a debilitating coronavirus public health crisis that is just beginning to gain momentum in the United States, Americans are looking for leadership to see them through the crisis.

Reactions on Trump's policies related to the COVID-19 outbreak range from the passionately opposed to fanatical supporters who take blind faith in his policies.

The latest Gallup poll released Tuesday showed that Trump enjoyed a small rally in public support as the country faces the COVID-19 pandemic. Forty-nine percent of U.S. adults, up from 44 percent earlier this month, approve of the job Trump is doing as president.

Historically, a president's job approval has increased when the nation is under threat. Every president from Franklin Roosevelt through George W. Bush saw their approval rating surge at least 10 points after a significant national event of this kind.

Gallup called it a presidential approval rally effect, which occurred when some independents and supporters of the opposing party show heightened support for the commander in chief of the county when in crisis.

Health workers are seen at a drive-through COVID-19 testing location set up by the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Virginia, the United States, March 19, 2020. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)

For many, they are still looking for leadership from the White House.

"He's failed to demonstrate even the most basic understanding of science and how to effectively combat a viral outbreak," said Michael Tiberi, a scientist and optical engineer from Los Angeles, who believes Trump's management style is dangerously inconsistent.

"Trump's supposed to protect the American public, but first he lied and said the virus was a hoax, then he took the opposite extreme of banning all flights from Europe, and now he says he's considering calling for a reversal of all state lockdowns in order to try to boost the economy," Tiberi added.

"That's a downright insane idea," Tiberi said gravely.

Katie Peyree, a homemaker in Oregon in the U.S. Northwest and passionate Trump supporter, dismissed arguments against Trump's policies and ideas. "That's fake news! Anything to make him look bad or cast him in an evil light is being pushed by the major news outlets."

In response to Trump's idea to send everyone back to work in time for Easter to "boost the economy" -- despite the Coronavirus -- attorney Larry Roberts in Lake Forest, California, told Xinhua Wednesday that the idea is easier said than done.

"If you call off mandated lockdowns and self-quarantines and compel everyone to go back to work in cramped offices, then they'll just get sick and go home anyway," said Roberts. "It's not like a microbe gives a damn about 'presidential edicts'."

"How's that going to boost the economy?" he asked dryly.

A poll by Morning Consult, a global survey research company who analyses data by intelligent technology, suggested that Trump's desire to end this period of quarantines and sheltering is out of step with the public's wishes.

A plurality of Americans said they strongly support a "national quarantine," and nearly three-quarters of Americans express at least some support for the idea, according to the poll taken March 20 to 22.

Xinhua asked a few California healthcare workers to weigh in on Trump's handling of the crisis.

"Things are challenging already," said Sarah Hamil, a nursing student at Huntington Hospital who is alarmed at the rate her wards are filling up with new coronavirus patients. "And they are only going to get crazier."

A customer pushes a cart while shopping at a supermarket in Oakland, the United States, March 11, 2020. (Photo by Li Jianguo/Xinhua)

A UCLA medical student who gave her name as Katherine M told Xinhua that she appreciated the effective steps UCLA had taken to protect its students but expressed concern that Trump was dictating on matters outside his expertise.

"Trump doesn't have the authority to reverse state lockdowns that health workers support. Only governors can do that. He should be quiet, shelter in place like the rest of us, and let the real medical and economic experts do what they've been trained to do without his interference."

Pro-Trumper, Krys Stromsted, a fast-food worker in the northwestern state of Idaho, considered the outbreak of no consequence and chalked it all up to a left-wing media conspiracy.

"In 2009, the H1N1 was raging across the U.S.... and there was no mass fear or panic being pushed by our 'non-biased' media, no mass shutdown. Of course, today it's different -- just because Trump is President?" he said.

The New York Stock Exchange and George Washington statue on the Wall Street in New York, the United States, March 24, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

Some say they no longer pay attention to any health announcements from the president on the coronavirus, drawing inspiration instead by healthcare workers across the globe working to stem the tidal wave.

"What we are seeing is that doctors, medical institutions, people of every nationality, of every walk of life, are working together to combat this pandemic," said film and television producer Jeff Most.

"I believe the hoped-for silver-lining in tragic situations like this is that we're able to set aside human divisions and work together as human beings to settle the problems that confront us all. Maybe that way we will all come out of this stronger and more unified globally." 
Linn County campgrounds are closed to the public although boat launches, day use areas and hiking trails are currently open, according to Parks Director Brian Carroll.

Benton County spokeswoman Lilia Neville said parks and natural areas there remain open, but Salmonberry Campground and a fishing cabin on the Alsea River are closed.

The Benton County RV Park at the county fairgrounds is open for business.

We have gated off the campgrounds that we can, Carroll said. At the day use areas, the entrance may be gated, but people can walk in, although they should be aware that most restrooms are closed.

Carroll said some restrooms were going to remain open, but soap dispensers and toilet paper holders were stolen from others, so those restrooms will remain closed.

Popular Clear Lake Resort about 40 miles east of Sweet Home  including the lodge, campgrounds and boat rentals  is closed.

Carroll said large picnic shelters throughout the county parks system are closed per Gov. Kate Browns executive order banning mass gatherings. Also closed are the Linn County Historical Museum and Moyer House in Brownsville.

Carroll said McDowell Creek Falls east of Lebanon is open, but he encourages people to be vigilant about social distancing if they choose to hike the trails there.

I went out this weekend to see how people were behaving, Carroll said. If someone on the trail saw another person, they gave them a wide berth. If people were getting into or out of their cars, they gave each other plenty of space. People were being very respectful of each other.

Carroll said there are plenty of places where people can enjoy the outdoors, such as sitting by a river or reservoir.

Linn County campgrounds were scheduled to open on a partial basis  with blocks of camping spaces  during spring break, Carroll said.

We had some folks camping at River Bend over the weekend, and then they had to leave on Monday, Carroll said.

Because no one knows how long the governors COVID-19 orders will be in place, Carroll said the county is making reservation refunds week by week.

We didnt want to cancel reservations for months out just in case the governor lifts her order in a few weeks, Carroll said. That would really create a problem.

Currently, Linn County is not taking any campground reservations through May. Carroll said if the orders are lifted, the county will immediately begin taking reservations for those months. Reservations for later in the summer are still being accepted.

Carroll said he has a staff of 13 full-time employees and summer staff was about to come on board.

We will be busy with maintenance projects, and we have a large new playground being constructed at Waterloo County Park, Carroll said. Normally, we are swamped with getting parks open this time of year.

Carroll said Cascadia State Park day use and camping spaces and the U.S. Forest Service campgrounds along the South Santiam River near Cascadia are closed.

Linn County parks are funded almost entirely outside the countys general fund budget, with fees and marine and camping tax allocations totaling more than $2 million annually.

This could be a big hit financially, Carroll said.

For more information or for reservation questions, email parks@co.linn.or.us or visit www.linnparks.com.

Our natural areas, parks and trails are open as long as people following social distancing, Benton County's Neville said. We have closed play structures at three parks.

Although the county parks remain open, Neville, like Carroll, encourages social distancing among parks users.

The city of Corvallis has closed the Osborn Aquatic Center and Majestic Theatre to the public through April 28.

All recreation events, activities, classes and rehearsals scheduled by Corvallis Parks and Recreation have been canceled through April 28, including programs offered by the Corvallis Community Center, which is closed for renovation but had been hosting programs at other locations.

Outside organizations that booked these facilities for rental events can cancel without penalty by contacting the Corvallis Parks and Recreation Department at 541-766-6918.

Benton County has taken the following actions:

 The online booking reservation system has been taken down to avoid new reservations.

 All reservations for Salmonberry Campground, Alsea Guard Station and park shelters have been canceled until May 8. This date may be extended.

 All special use permits have been canceled until May 8.

 Reservations that are canceled through the end of May are receiving full refunds, including deposits (if taken).

 Restrooms at Hyak, Beazell, Fort Hoskins, Bellfountain and Alsea Corridor parks and the Clemens and Alsea boat ramps will remain open and will see increased cleaning.

For more information, visit https://www.co.benton.or.us/parks/page/reservations.
MPs have been flooded with distressing evidence from staff forced to carry on going into risky workplaces by their bosses, despite the coronavirus epidemic.

They are protesting at being wrongly labelled key workers  despite being employed by banks, estate agents and non-essential shops  and a lack of protection when they get to offices.

The testimonies reveal staff being ordered to work closely together in small rooms, sometimes with no hand sanitiser, or with no extra cleaning even after colleagues fall ill with the virus.

Rachel Reeves, chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, said its appeal for frontline evidence had triggered more than 1,000 often distressing emails and tweets in just a few days.

Its clear that many businesses are still not doing the right thing, she warned, adding: This must change now. This is a health emergency  it cannot be business as usual.

Workplaces, even those deemed essential, should be doing all they can to ensure that their workers are able to work from home or, if they do have to attend work, that they can undertake social distancing.

And John McDonnell, Labours shadow chancellor, urged the government to shut down firms he accused of ignoring the lockdown, saying: They are putting all our lives at risk by their greed.

The evidence received by Ms Reeves's committee includes:

* People still working at a home furnishings firm. A staff member said: No hand sanitisers provided. No restrictions for customers, and weve had people in buying new nets, curtains, paint and picture frames. Definitely not essential.

Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Show all 12 1 /12 Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Agnetha Septimus, Matthew Septimus, and children Ezra and Nora Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Husband and wife filmmakers, Claire Ince and Ancil McKain pose for a portrait for the series by Shutterstock Staff Photographer, Stephen Lovekin, shot around the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Khadijah Silver and son Eliot Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Anna Beth Rousakis and daughter Mary Rousakis Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Mike Pergola and Denise Pergola with children Henry, Jack, and Will Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Artist Shirley Fuerst Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Jean Davis and Danny Rosenthal, with children Simone, Naomi, and Leah Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Robert E Clark Jr Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Lisa Draho and Josh Zuckerman, with children Ruby and Ava Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Professor and activist Dr Kristin Lawler Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Tom Smith and Laura Ross, with daughters Caroline, Elizabeth, and Abigail Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Callie Lovekin and Lucas Lovekin Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock

* An outsourcing company for high-street bank HSBC, where staff have been told to turn up because there are not enough laptops for home working, or take unpaid leave. A worker revealed: There are around 70 people in a small room, where only a normal amount of cleaning is happening, and people are travelling to the office from all around Manchester on public transport.

* An estate agents, which has categorised staff as "key workers" and told them to continue to go on viewings where sellers will allow them. The MPs were told: Staff that have been diagnosed with coronavirus have gone home with colleagues continuing to work in the same office without cleaning taking place.

* Satellite TV engineers, who are still moving from home to home to fit or service a luxury product not everyone is fortunate to own. One engineer wrote: With a whole family home during a lockdown, it can be hard to ask them to keep their distance, especially for larger families in smaller homes. Customers also do not always respect our boundaries. Yet Michael Gove said last week: If you have a problem with your Sky box, you should not be calling a technician out in order to deal with that.

Ms Reeves warned of a future reckoning, saying: Businesses need to stand by their workers and keep them safe. In time, businesses will have to answer for their decisions during this pandemic and whether they did the right thing.
Downtown San Antonio is normally bustling with tourists roaming the River Walk and visiting sites like the Alamo. The coronavirus pandemic, however, has turned the city's center into an "eerie" and "calm" ghost town.

Two San Antonio photographers captured the empty streets as residents stay indoors to help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Social Democratic Party (PSD) interim Chairman Marcel Ciolacu and Social Democrat MEP Victor Negrescu had a videoconference on Thursday with heads of state and governments, as well as European left-wing party leaders about the measures that must be taken in Europe and nationwide to deal with the coronavirus crisis.

Ciolacu wrote on Facebook, that they presented the measures proposed by PSD and requested a coordinated response to save as many lives and the European economy.Ensuring medical equipment for all member states and developing a common response in the EU for the economic re-launch is a first step, he said.
A woman, who had returned from Europe last week and admitted to a hospital here with symptoms for coronavirus, left the facility for home after stray dogs entered her ward, her family said on Thursday, refuting the administration's claim that she had escaped.

"The claims of the administration that they had tracked her are nothing but lies. We had to take her out of the Chest Disease Hospital at Dalgate at 3 am as there were stray dogs in the ward where she was admitted," a relative of the woman told PTI.

He said the woman had cooperated with the authorities ever since she returned home.

"She was checked at the airport and asked to go home. We kept her in isolation but she developed some symptoms on Tuesday and we called the COVID helpline. An ambulance arrived and she was taken to the CD hospital where she was admitted," he said.

The relative said the woman called home around 2.30 am on Wednesday night, saying she was scared as several stray dogs had entered the ward.

"We tried to convince her to stay but she was a nervous wreck. Finally, we went to hospital and brought her home," he said.

The family contested the claims of the officials that they had tracked her down.

"We took her to SKIMS hospital on our own in the morning around 8.30 am where she is currently admitted," he added.

The family also contested the claims of some doctors at the Chest Disease Hospital that samples were collected from her.

"If they had collected any samples, where are the reports then?" he asked.

The relative said while the government was issuing advisories against revealing the names of those suspected of having the coronavirus, all the details about the woman were leaked to the media.

"You name the locality where she lives and the country she came from. And then expect no one will know who she is. Are they so naive?" he asked.

An officer in the cyber crime department urged people not to reveal identity of coronavirus positive cases -- living or dead -- on social media.

"Please don't share names and pictures of #COVID2019 suspects, positive or fatality. This act of yours attracts legal action. Behave sensibly and responsibly," Kashmir cyber police officer Tahir Ashraf tweeted, adding "Putting such information openly on social media platforms is punishable under law".

After a radio jockey posted on Twitter the alleged escape, Deputy Commissioner of Srinagar Shahid Iqbal Chaudhary had responded by saying "Tracked. Admitted again. Legal action to follow."



The deputy commissioner did not respond to repeated calls to seek his comment on the allegations levelled by the family.

The administration claims that more than 150 persons, accused of hiding travel history, have been traced and admitted to various quarantine facilities.

"Control Room traced 152 undeclared cases of perons returned from UAE, Iran,Hungary,Taiwan,Malysia, Combodia, Italy,Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia,Kazakhstan. Put under quarantine.We continue to request people to come forward and self-report. Help docs,Urself,family & society," Chaudhary said in a tweet.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Trend

As part of measures carried out jointly with the Operational Headquarters under the Cabinet of Ministers to combat the spread of coronavirus Infection (COVID-19), Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) will transport all goods of national importance on Baku-Nakhchivan and Nakhchivan-Baku routes on a priority basis and free of charge, Trend reports referring to AZAL.

All structures of AZAL CJSC continue to work in a strengthened mode and in close contact with government structures.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Photo credit: Drei Marghitas

From Men's Health

Drei Marghitas, 27, says he began coughing a few days after attending a friend's birthday party on February 29. At the time, the novel coronavirus wasn't widespread in Arizonawhere Marghitas lives with his six-week old son and fiancebut he self quarantined in a spare bedroom. The Phoenix resident had read about the novel coronavirus spreading throughout the world and wanted to be cautious.

Marghitas later says he learned that a friend from the birthday party tested positive for COVID-19, and Marghitas wanted to get tested, too. His experience of trying to get tested in Arizonaand having COVID-19has inspired him to plan the launch of a YouTube page with workout videos for people who have temporarily lost their fitness studios or gyms during the pandemic.

The Moment He Got Scared

At a birthday gathering in February, Marghitas shook hands with a friend and they both went on about the party that night. But the Wednesday after that, he noticed he was feeling different:

I had these mild symptomsvery light sore throat, minimal cough, feverjust anything that you've ever experienced when you have a cold. And, you know, I have a one-month-old son, and he doesn't have an immune system yet. Its just me, my fiance and him. And so I said, I'm going to stay in one of the spare bedrooms. I didn't want to put them at risk.

COVID-19 symptoms run the gamut. Some people feel totally normal while others may have trouble breathing and require hospital care. Generally, people experience a dry cough and feverlike in Marghitas' case.

The following morning, I went into Urgent Care with a mask and gloves on. I said, "Hey, Im showing some mild symptoms and Im kind of scared of this whole coronavirus stuff."

They're like, "Yeah, youre probably fine. I'm sure you just have a cold or flu. Coronavirus is not really here."



They took my temperature. They took my blood pressure, and when the doctor came in, they did the regular checkup. I was hesitant to bring up coronavirus because I didn't want to sound silly. It was embarrassing you know? Is this guy crazy?

Story continues

I brought it up anywaymore as a joke just to get the topic of conversation started. She [the doctor] just laughed and was like, "There's no way. It wouldn't be possible because only one person [here] has it."

It really put my mind at ease that everything was fine. I went back home, but I still went back into the room that I was staying in to avoid my family.

Later that night, my friend who I shook hands with at the party posted a video saying he was the second one to have it in Arizona. Obviously, I started getting a lot more concerned because I interacted with him, then got sick 3 or 4 days later. The timeline really added up.

Coronavirus research is emerging. A recent study indicates it takes about 5 days, on average, for patients to experience symptoms after they've been exposed to the virus.

The Hunt for a Test

The next day I started calling around to see where I could get a test. I called the CDC and was on hold for 48 minutes. An employee explained to me that I should use soap to wash my hands and an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

I said, "Hey, I feel sick, and I shook hands with somebody who has coronavirus. What do you mean I should wash my hands? I think its a little too late for that."

She was very nonchalant and told me to contact the Arizona Health Department. I reached out to them and explained the whole story, and a nurse there said that there's a zero percent to almost zero percent chance that I would get the disease caused by the new coronavirus. At first, I felt at ease. Then as the conversation progressed, I realized she didn't have any of the answers that I was asking for. I started to lose faith in the idea that that I hadn't contracted COVID-19.

I don't have a primary care physician, so I called one of the hospitals. They didn't offer a test, so I called another hospital, and another hospital, and another hospital. I eventually called one of the emergency rooms that told me not to go there because I would contaminate everybody. I asked her what I should do.

She said, let me ask you this, "What would you do if you had the flu?"

I responded, "Well Id probably stay home."

"Exactly," she said, explaining I needed to self-quarantine. "Just stay home."

And I tried to explain to her that my workplace found out that I was in direct contact with somebody who was confirmed to have the coronavirus, I was banned for 20 days, and they sent everyone to work from home. Schools are shutting down in the United States. I don't think this is like the flu.

Across America, there's a shortage of COVID-19 tests. Anyone who experiences mild symptoms should self-quarantine, according to the CDC. State health departments set their own requirements for testing using CDC guidelines.

I made 9 or 10 more callsthe CDC, the Arizona Health Department, emergency nurse lines, emergency rooms, and urgent care. Everyone tried to get me off the phone and said to call someone else. I still wanted that test.

Finally, when I called the HonorHealth John C. Lincoln Medical Center in Phoenixeight days after I had started to feel sicksomeone at the emergency nurse line said, "I think it's fair that you know. I think you deserve these answers. What you're saying makes a lot of sense to me, and I'm sorry nobody has helped you."

What Came After



When I got to the hospital, they were still hesitant to test me, but eventually they took me to the emergency room. Everyone who came in was wearing kind of hazmat-like equipment: eye protection, arms covered, full gloves on as they're testing me.

I had been sick for eight days at this point. They come in with this giant Q-tip looking thing thats like three to four times longer than a Q-tip. They shove it all the way up your nose. Ten minutes later, the doctor came back and told me I tested negative for the flu. He said that he contacted the Arizona Health Department, and they made a decision to get me tested.

The test was on a Thursday and on Saturday at 8:30 a.m., I got a phone call from the hospital that I tested positive for the coronavirus. A couple hours later, the Maricopa County Health Department called me and asked how I thought I got it. They sent me an email with follow-up guidelines of what to do.

Marghitas traced his case back to the party, which is helpful for monitoring symptoms and getting tested, but some people may develop COVID-19 without knowing when or how. The novel coronavirus is mainly passed to others through close contact. However, it's possible to get sick by touching contaminated objectslike door handleswhich is why experts warn about the importance of hand washing.

If my friend didn't publicly announce his diagnosis, I would have never gotten tested.

Keep calling and calling and calling. Push the envelope. Know the facts. You're going to get no it's not going to be easy.

Limited testing makes it difficult for sick people to get an official COVID-19 diagnosis. If you suspect you have the novel coronavirus, experts recommend self-quarantining. Here's how.

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In trend with communities around the world that are coming together through balcony or patio events, The Enclave at Round Rock Senior Living wanted to provide their residents with a similar experience. They invited North Austin Music Therapy to visit to not just entertain the residents, but to offer a social, emotional, and physical connection with one another through music. The music therapists played two one-hour sessions and rotated sides of the buildings to ensure everyone could participate.

The staff at The Enclave at Round Rock Senior Living provided each resident with a plastic Easter egg and tasked them with filling it with things from their apartment to create a noise maker. "It was an incredible experience to see everyone come together and contribute to the music," says Shawn McNulty, the community's executive director. "We want residents and team members to focus on what we can do and not what we can't do, so we utilized the nice weather and the apartment balconies to make this happen. The residents had a blast, and it was obvious that this is the kind of happiness the residents, our team members, and our communities need during this terrible crisis."

North Austin Music Therapy provides music therapy to aging adults, as well as those with autism, developmental challenges, and neurological diseases or injuries. On their Facebook page they share they are "bringing the music in, while keeping the germs out  Because social distancing should never mean social isolation."

Meredith Hamons, MT-BC, founder and clinical director of North Austin Music Therapy, shares "We are passionate about serving older adults and have done so for about 10 years. We were honored to be invited to The Enclave at Round Rock Senior Living to provide music therapy to the residents, especially during this global pandemic. Nothing makes us happier than seeing residents still able to engage in music, and we had as much fun as they did!"

North Austin Music Therapy will return to The Enclave at Round Rock Senior Living on April 7 for more music therapy for the residents.

To see video footage, visit The Enclave at Round Rock Senior Living's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TheEnclaveatRoundRockSeniorLiving/

About Spectrum Retirement Communities

The Enclave at Round Rock Senior Living is owned and operated by Spectrum Retirement Communities, LLC.

Spectrum Retirement Communities, LLC, headquartered in Denver, Colo., is a leading developer, owner and operator of Retirement/Independent, Assisted Living and Memory Care communities across the U.S. offering apartment living in highly desirable communities with state-of-the-art amenities, top-notch activities and programs, and best-in-class hospitality to support the lifestyle that seniors desire. For more information, visit www.SpectrumRetirement.com.

SOURCE Spectrum Retirement Communities, LLC

Related Links

http://www.spectrumretirement.com


Prince Charles has tested positive for coronavirus, Clarence House has confirmed.

The Prince of Wales, 71, is in the governments high-risk category because of his age.

A Clarence House spokesman said: He has been displaying mild symptoms but otherwise remains in good health and has been working from home throughout the last few days as usual.

The Duchess of Cornwall has also been tested but does not have the virus. In accordance with Government and medical advice, the Prince and the Duchess are now self-isolating at home in Scotland.

The tests were carried out by the NHS in Aberdeenshire where they met the criteria required for testing.

It is not possible to ascertain from whom the Prince caught the virus owing to the high number of engagements he carried out in his public role during recent weeks.

Charles was with William, Kate, Harry, Meghan and the Queen on 9 March. (Getty Images)

Prince Charles attended a dinner at Mansion House on 12 March. (Eamonn McCormack/PA via AP File)

The couple are understood to be self-isolating separately at Birkhall in Scotland, where they arrived on Sunday. He was tested on Monday.

Concerns for the heir apparent were raised last week when Prince Albert of Monaco became the first royal to test positive for the disease.

They attended the same event in London at the beginning of March.

Prince Albert of Monaco at WaterAid's Water and Climate event in London in March. (PA Images)

Read more: Royal Family postpones more engagements as UK enters lockdown

Charless last public engagement was 12 March, but he has had a number of private meetings since then with Highgrove and Duchy individuals, all of whom have been made aware.

A source said his doctors most conservative estimate was that the prince was contagious on 13 March, according to PA.

They added that Charles has not seen the Queen since then. Prince Philip was not at the palace at the time.

A Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said: Her Majesty The Queen remains in good health.

The Queen last saw The Prince of Wales briefly after the investiture on the morning of 12th March and is following all the appropriate advice with regard to her welfare.

Latest coronavirus news, updates and advice

Live: Follow all the latest updates from the UK and around the world

Story continues

Fact-checker: The number of COVID-19 cases in your local area

Explained: Symptoms, latest advice and how it compares to the flu

Queen Elizabeth left Buckingham Palace on 19 March for Windsor Castle to socially distance herself. (Aaron Chown/PA via AP)

A small number of people living and working at Birkhall are remaining at the residence and self-isolating.

Charles is said to be up and about and not bedridden.

He has spoken to both his sons William and Harry, and the Queen.

His father Prince Philip joined the Queen at Windsor Castle on 19 March, flying down by helicopter from Sandringham.

They are reported to have slimmed down their staff, sending 100 employees home as early as last week.

It comes as Spains death toll overtook Chinas after a sharp rise in cases and experts warned that the US could become a new epicentre of the crisis.

Spain has now recorded 3,434 deaths of people who tested positive for COVID-19. Italy still has the most deaths of any nation in the world, with 6,820.

Donald Trump, the US president, has said he wants to see the country back to work by the Easter weekend, despite the rising number of cases.

Read more: Prince Charles offers tenants three-month rent deferral amid coronavirus pandemic

The World Health Organization said on Tuesday the US has the potential to become the new epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Royal Family has been taking precautions and following government advice since the outbreak of coronavirus in the UK.

At the Commonwealth Day Service on 9 March, the last major royal event before many engagements were postponed, they avoiding shaking hands.

Prince Charles has been seen adopting the namaste greeting instead of shaking hands.
African states have been stepping up efforts to prevent the spread of coronavirus.



Infection rates on the 54-nation continent are still low - 2,700 cases in 46 states.



There are fears that the number will rise rapidly because of cross-infections, overwhelming health services on the mainly poor continent.



In the latest developments:



Uganda has banned all public transport with immediate effect, creating fear and panic in the capital, Kampala. The security forces have shut down businesses in the capital and Kampala's streets are now mainly deserted

Nigeria, Africas most populous state with an estimated population of 200 million, says it will ban all travel in the country, but has not yet indicated from when



In Kenya, East Africas biggest economy, President Uhuru Kenyatta has announced a night-time curfew from Friday

Kenya's president has also taken an 80% pay cut, as he prepares the nation for tough economic times - and has urged other officials to follow suit



Meanwhile, Germany says it will not be paying for six million face masks it had ordered but had not received after they went missing at an airport in Kenya



Back in Nigeria, the government received a donation, including 100,000 face masks, from Chinese billionaire Jack Ma

In South Africa, leading evangelist Andy Buchan says he has tested positive for Covid-19, while local media reports that a man who won 7.4m rand ($426,000; 354,000) in the lottery will have to wait until the nationwide lockdown ends to pick up the money. The three-week shut down starts on Thursday night, and panic-buying is continuing.

Source: BBC









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said during a rare television interview on Thursday that the United States may well be in a recession already, but that it should get the coronavirus under control before getting back to work.

The first order of business will be to get the spread of the virus under control, and then to resume economic activity, Mr. Powell said on NBCs Today. The virus is going to dictate the timetable here.

Mr. Powells comments contrasted with those of President Trump, who has suggested that he wants many Americans to get back to work as soon as Easter, less than three weeks away, and that efforts to slow the spread of the virus by shutting down large parts of the economy should not be worse than the disease itself.

The coronavirus pandemic is inflicting enormous economic damage in the United States, as quarantines close businesses, force workers to stay at home and create uncertainty that has spurred volatility in financial markets. Mr. Powell and his colleagues have been taking aggressive measures to shore up the economy, and he used his first major interview since the crisis began to underline what they are doing  and why.
Armenian, Latin and Greek Orthodox Churches will continue regular celebrations. This follows yesterdays decision by Israel to close the church to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus. For Christian leaders, it is time to intensify prayers whilst protecting people's health.

Jerusalem (AsiaNews)  The Custos of the Holy Land Francesco Patton, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Theophilus II and the Armenian Patriarch Nourahan Manougian issued a joint statement concerning the closing of the Holy Sepulchre.

In it they wish to inform that the celebrations of the Communities, the Greek Orthodox, the Latin and the Armenian will continue regularly, even though for safety reasons and in order to avoid the risk of the diffusion of the COVID-19 infection, the number of participants in the celebrations will be limited to few persons and the Basilica will be accessible during the liturgies only.

Yesterday, Israeli authorities imposed further restrictions to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, closing the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre at 5 pm local time.

The now shuttered church contains the Calvary and the cave where, according to tradition, the lifeless body of Jesus was placed. The site is a major destination for pilgrims, especially during Lent and Easter.

The church's closure, which comes days after Muslim authorities closed the nearby Al-Aqsa mosque compound, is supposed to last a week. We hope it will reopen as soon as possible," said a spokesperson for the local clergy.

The statement by the officials of the three main Churches that own the Basilica goes on to say: We wish to assure that inside the Basilica, the prayers of the three Communities will continue, rather intensify.

The prayers will ask the Heavenly Father the end of the pandemic, the recovery of the sick, the protection of the medical personnel, the wisdom for the Pastors and the Governors and the eternal salvation to those who lost their lives.

We raise this prayer from the very place where, through the sacrifice of His own life on the Calvary and through His Resurrection from the Sepulchre on the third day, the only begotten and beloved Son Jesus Christ, defeated evil, sin and death.
New Delhi [India], Mar 25 (ANI): As the country has been put under complete lockdown for 21 days, several migrants who had come to the national capital for job have now been left jobless and with no hope of returning back to their homes any time soon.



Bhuran Rai, a migrant worker from Bihar, told ANI."For the past 3 days, I have been attempting to go back home. I am now left with no money and have no place to sleep. I need help."

Another migrant worker, Resham from Nepal, said: "I was working in a hotel but since the lockdown, the hotel has been shut down and my employer sent me away without any salary. Now I am left with no money, no food and no place to stay."

"I need help as I want to go back home but there is no bus service available," he added. (ANI)


WASHINGTON  The death of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who vanished more than a decade ago in Iran, is believed to have occurred before the recent outbreak of the coronavirus that has gravely affected Iran and another countries, according to a statement from Levinsons family.

On Wednesday, the U.S. government announced it had concluded that Levinson had died while in the custody of Iran. In an email to his workforce, FBI chief Christopher Wray said the agency wont give up on finding out what happened.

The circumstances and timing of Levinsons death were unclear, but White House national security adviser Robert OBrien said the U.S. believes Levinson may have passed away some time ago. His family said information U.S. officials had received had led them to conclude he was dead. Neither the government nor the family described that information.

The death is believed to have occurred before the recent outbreak of the coronavirus that has gravely affected Iran and another countries, according to a statement from Levinsons family.

The governments acknowledgment of Levinsons death came hours after a White House briefing in which President Trump appeared to equivocate on the news, saying, I wont accept that hes dead.

U.S. officials communicated the news to Levinsons family in a meeting in Washington in recent weeks, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private encounter. The person said the information about Levinson had come from Irans foreign minister.

It is impossible to describe our pain, the familys statement said. Our family will spend the rest of our lives without the most amazing man, a new reality that is inconceivable to us. His grandchildren will never meet him. They will only know him through the stories we tell them.

Levinson disappeared on March 9, 2007, when he was scheduled to meet a source on the Iranian island of Kish. For years, U.S. officials would say only that Levinson was working independently on a private investigation. But a 2013 Associated Press investigation revealed that Levinson had been sent on a mission by CIA analysts who had no authority to run such an operation.

The Trump administration has made it a priority to seek the release of American hostages and prisoners detained overseas. Last week, administration officials touted the release from Lebanon of a New Hampshire restaurant owner jailed on decades-old allegations and the medical furlough of a Navy veteran from an Iranian prison.

The Levinson family thanked multiple U.S. officials for their help, including Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and OBrien, who before his post as national security adviser also served as the State Departments chief hostage negotiator.

But the family statement also said: Those who are responsible for what happened to Bob Levinson, including those in the U.S. government who for many years repeatedly left him behind, will ultimately receive justice for what they have done. We will spend the rest of our lives making sure of this, and the Iranian regime must know we will not be going away.

Iran repeatedly has said that it has no information about Levinson, though U.S. diplomats and investigators have long believed that the was taken by Iranian government agents.

Eric Tucker is an Associated Press writer.
W&M professor creates unique opportunity for students to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptological Society of W&M The members of the Egyptological Society of William & Mary meet once a month to discuss Egyptian hieroglyphic texts. The students take turns reading lines, and then they discuss what they read. by Nathan Warters

Egyptological Society of W&M Associate Professor Jeremy Pope has passed on his enthusiasm for Egyptian hieroglyphs to a group of William & Mary students. They started a club called the Egyptological Society of William & Mary that met monthly at Swem Library and is continuing to meet via video chat. by Nathan Warters

Egyptological Society of W&M Members of the Egyptological Society of William & Mary use reference books to help them translate hieroglyphic texts. by Nathan Warters Photo - of - Hide Caption

Jeremy Pope and seven eager students sat at tables in Swem Librarys Brown Board Room on a Friday afternoon in February and munched on pizza, drank soda and discussed a passage most people couldnt begin to read.

The passage was made up of hieroglyphic symbols arranged in neat lines. Some of the symbols, called lapwing birds, resembled geese or similar fowl, while others depicted fatigued men on their knees sinking into the ground. Others resembled nothing recognizable to the average, modern eye.

The students were there voluntarily. Their academic commitment to Egyptian hieroglyphs ended last semester, but they loved reading and translating the texts so much that they urged Pope, their professor, to work with them on establishing a new club.

I just couldnt imagine having one more semester at William & Mary and not translating hieroglyphs together, said Molly McCue 20.

{{youtube:medium|7yO2gvTrNBY, Egyptological Society of William & Mary}}

After working out the details, one of the students, Madelyn Little 20, came up with the clubs name: The Egyptological Society of William & Mary.

It was sort of deliciously scholarly, Pope quipped.

The club members spent the first part of this semester meeting at Swem, but with classes moved online due to COVID-19, they have begun meeting remotely via the videoconferencing platform Zoom.

Pope, associate professor of history and faculty affiliate in classical studies, has created a unique opportunity for students to learn the Egyptian language at William & Mary. He began teaching an introductory Deciphering Ancient Egypt course in fall 2018. It was the first in a three-course sequence that also includes Deciphering Ancient Egypt: Part 2 and a seminar titled Middle Egyptian Texts.

The courses have been very popular, and the three-course sequence will be available to W&M students again in fall 2020.

Ancient Egypt is the best-preserved of the worlds most ancient cultures, Pope said. Consequently, reading ancient Egyptian texts in their original language is like time travel across thousands of years. So it doesnt surprise me that the subject tends to generate so much excitement.

The first course in 2018 was open to 50 students, and it filled up so quickly there was a waiting list to get in. When that course was over, the number of persons in Virginia who could read hieroglyphs multiplied more than tenfold.

As far as I know, when I began teaching the introductory Deciphering Ancient Egypt course at William & Mary in fall 2018, there were only three people in Virginia who could fully read Egyptian hieroglyphs, and all were professors, Pope said. At the end of that semester, there were 53  and 50 of those were undergraduate students at William & Mary.

Students who are interested in taking the introductory course in fall 2020 will find it cross-listed under anthropology (ANTH 343), classical studies (CLCV 209), history (HIST 278), and religious studies (RELG 278), with 50 seats available.

Taking the introductory course does not obligate students to enroll in the sequel courses over the next two semesters, but a large number of seats in the introductory course will be held specifically for rising sophomores, rising juniors and incoming freshmen in order to maximize that opportunity for as many students as possible.

Pope says there are fewer than a dozen universities in the United States where students can learn the Egyptian language, and the others are all Research I universities like the Ivy League schools.

Of the first 50 students to take the intro course last fall, 30 moved on to the next course and then 10 took the seminar in the third semester. Pope gave those 10 students a hieroglyphic text every few weeks  he calls them Mystery Texts  without telling them anything about its content or time period. The students collaborated with each other outside of class to translate the text together and reconstruct its historical context as if they had discovered it themselves during an excavation.

During class, Pope and the students would translate and discuss each text together. Unlike other languages that require more straightforward translations, Egyptian translations are open for interpretation.

The meanings of the words are not always obvious because its a dead language, Pope said. Its a language that has hardly been spoken by anyone for thousands of years. And so that always adds an extra layer of complication, but were also lacking cultural context.

After that seminar ended, the students approached Pope about continuing the work as a club.

Were all hooked on hieroglyphs, said Riley Aiken 20. It kind of feels like a miracle being able to parse out the thoughts of people from thousands of years ago.

I think often people think of Egypt with this gilded separation, like its a mysterious culture that well never really understand beyond mummies and pictures carved on walls. But its not true. Their language is beautifully grammatically complex, and with it they recorded cultural stories, reflections of life and death, linguistic puns, shopping lists, graffiti, histories and medical texts. With every glyph theres life.

The students formed strong friendships. They have a group text chat where they share jokes and memes about Egyptology.

Its so ridiculously nerdy, but I love that we have our own jokes, McCue said.

Popes enthusiasm for Egyptology is now something shared by others on the William & Mary campus.

When I first learned to read Egyptian, these texts proved to be infinitely more fascinating than I had ever expected, so sharing this language with students at William & Mary and watching them come to a similar realization gives me real joy, Pope said.

The rapport the students have is a large part of the fun. Popes selections of texts make for some entertaining and interesting conversations.

In one recent meeting, the students translated a text called the Excommunication Stela, in which a king expels a group of priests who had confessed to conspiring to kill a man who had committed no crime, and then the king punished the priests by setting them all on fire.

This ancient inscription has received very little attention from scholars so far, Pope said. It raises a number of questions: Whom did the priests conspire to kill and why? Did they actually murder him? We dont even know the identity of the king who punished them, because his name has been carefully erased from the stone. Who erased his name, when and why? There are excellent clues to these mysteries in the metaphors and euphemisms that are used in the text, so it is just waiting for students to perform some careful detective work on it.

When they met, the students took turns reading the mystery text and gave their insights into the translation and context of each line. Pope gave affirmations as each student made a discovery, and he added his own expertise when the occasion called for it.

A lot of it is connecting with the ancient world and not just learning about it but learning what people thought about their own situations and about themselves and about what theyre doing, which I think is really interesting from a personal perspective but also from a more academic perspective, said Kendall Kin 20.

A couple of semesters ago, we were looking at some graffiti that had been done on the pyramids or on the inside of the pyramids. Humans are silly. Humans havent really changed at all over the past 2,000 years, which is very interesting.

Pope is an expert. He is one of three Egyptologists employed at universities in Virginia, but he is the only one who offers courses on the language.

He has done extensive work in the field. He has excavated at Karnak Temple in Egypt, but also much farther south in Sudan, where he is currently an epigraphic consultant for an archaeological project at the ancient site of Jebel Barkal, the location of several temples and pyramids.

The Egyptological Society of William & Mary is an intellectually diverse group. Aiken will be doing post-graduate work in dentistry next year, while another is headed to law school and another has landed a job in finance.

Aiken wrote her term paper last semester on the Ebers Papyrus, a wide-ranging medical treatise that contains one of the earliest discussions of dentistry in world history.

I translated the whole section on dental care from scratch because my reference books came in so late, Aiken said. I finally got the reference books, but it turns out I had translated it fine.

Of the 10 students who continued taking Egyptian language across all three semesters, one of them has already been admitted to several Ph.D. programs in Egyptology, while another traveled to Egypt this past summer for a Monroe Summer Research Project, and still another is planning to pursue a career in Phoenician archaeology.

I know that every time I go to a museum with an Egyptology exhibit that Ill spend inordinate amounts of time in front of those displays trying to read some of the hieroglyphs, Aiken said. Professor Pope gave me the skills to be able to use the reference books and figure out the grammar.

I dont think I will be studying Egyptology in any more official courses, but theoretically, though Im no expert, I can continue translating to my hearts content.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced a nationwide 21-day lockdown starting from March 25 to curb the spread of coronavirus. The nationwide lockdown has received positive reactions from several India Inc leaders who have called it the 'best move'. India Inc leaders took to Twitter to give their two pieces on the lockdown.

Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra, in a tweet, termed the lockdown has "necessary" but expressed concern over the lockdown's negative effects on the homeless, daily wage workers and contract workers. While suggesting a plan to take care of these workers he wrote,"If each of us takes care of the daily rations & essentials of at least 3 less privileged families, it will have an exponential effect but unlike COVID, it'll be a 'good virus.'"

The lockdown's necessary, but will be devastating for the homeless, daily wage earners&contract workers. If each of us takes care of the daily rations&essentials of at least 3 less privileged families, it will have an exponential effect but unlike COVID, it'll be a 'good virus.' - anand mahindra (@anandmahindra) March 25, 2020

Founder of Paytm Vijay Shekhar Sharma was very impressed by the PM's move of initiating a nation-wide lockdown, he called the move "extraordinary" and "best decision for India". To emphasise the importance of social distancing Shekhar has changed his name on Twitter to 'Stay Home, Stay Safe".

Extraordinary resolve @narendramodi , simply the best decision for India. #IndiaFightsCorona - Stay Home, Stay Safe (@vijayshekhar) March 24, 2020

Retweeting the Home Mininstry's guidelines on the 21-day lockdown, OYO Rooms founder Ritesh Agarwal said that the lockdown is the "right decision in the interest of the greater good". He also said that OYO rooms stand committed to support "everyone in need."

A #21Daylockdown is the right decision in the interest of greater good. OYO will do its best to keep its doors open for all those who need these during these testing times https://t.co/psEmnzyO6h (2/2) - Ritesh Agarwal (@riteshagar) March 24, 2020

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the Chairman and Managing Director of Biocon, called the 21-day lockdown 'the best move'. She also requested the people of the country to co-operate with authorities during the lockdown. Mazumdar said, " Police must not be high handed but shd

enforce the curfew through awareness creation."

PM's call for a 21 day lockdown is the best move to contain the spread of covid19 - needs citizens to be disciplined and cooperate. Police must not be high handed but shd enforce the curfew through awareness creation. @PMOIndia - Kiran Mazumdar Shaw (@kiranshaw) March 24, 2020

As India enters Day 2 of the 21-day nationwide lockdown, the total number COVID-19 positive cases has crossed the 600-mark in India.

Also read: Coronavirus in India Live Updates: 65-year-old COVID-19 patient dies in Kashmir; number of deaths rises to 15
Employers and governments and encouraging workers to work from home to avoid contracting coronavirus as the pandemic spreads across the world. (Eloy Martin/Reuters)

Our lives have changed dramatically in just a few weeks because of the coronavirus pandemic. People around the world are quarantined at home, self-isolating and social distancing and in the UK, the public are only allowed to leave their homes under certain circumstances.

Britain is now in lockdown, and all non-essential businesses must close. People may only leave home to exercise once a day, travel to and from work when it is absolutely necessary, shop for essential items and fulfil any medical or care needs. Most people, except for key workers such as medical staff and supermarket employees, are working from home.

The future looks uncertain and a certain amount of anxiety is normal. But what can you do to help reduce stress if you are working at home in isolation?

Many staff will be used to working remotely and will have developed strategies for optimising their performance and well-being from experience, says Dr Paul McLaren, a consultant psychiatrist and medical director who works with City workers at the Priorys Wellbeing Centres in central London.

But the current crisis has brought enforced home working and it is important for bosses to recognise that some employees may find it a lot more difficult than others. We are social creatures and it is easy to forget the feelings of security and calmness that come from just being around other people. How much we need that will vary widely between individuals.

Stay in touch with friends, relatives and colleagues

When self-isolating and working from home, its important to stay in touch with friends, relatives and colleagues to help keep a sense of normality. Social media, Whatsapp or a phone call can help prevent loneliness.

Its also important to talk about what is stressing you out, rather than bottling it up. Whether it is money, work, your health or general anxiety about the future, speaking to someone you trust is important  they may be able to provide advice, or just lend an ear.

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Read more: How to avoid cabin fever when working from home

Stay connected with friends and family, and value them  and its ok to reach out to a mental health professional, says Dr Niall Campbell, a consultant psychiatrist at the Priorys Roehampton Hospital.

As the World Health Organisation says, protect yourself and be protective to others and know that every measure is being taken to save lives and protect the most vulnerable. Focus on positive news  it is there, from the small gesture to the amazing work being done across the world to combat the virus.

Tune out

When working from home, many of us have the TV or radio on in the background. While you might want to keep up-to-date with the news, its important to avoid watching, reading or listening to anything that is going to cause you to feel stressed or anxious.

The sudden and near-constant stream of news reports about an outbreak can cause anyone to feel worried. Instead, seek information updates at specific times during the day once or twice. Not all news is bad, too  there are plenty of feel good stories of communities coming together and people supporting loved ones to feel positive about.

Try mindfulness and relaxation techniques

It can be easier said than done, but taking part in mindful and relaxing activities is important when things feel overwhelming. Even a 10-minute mindfulness session or taking 20 minutes to read a book can help, although it can be a challenge when working from home and looking after children.

Mindfulness is about paying more attention to the present moment  to your own thoughts and feelings, and to the world around you  and can improve your mental wellbeing. Mindfulness, relaxation techniques and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy are all genuinely useful for people who are very anxious, Campbell says.

Read more: Five apps to help you work from home during the coronavirus crisis

There are many apps which people can use. For those who cant leave home, much of it  including accessing therapy  can be done online.

Remember, most people who get Covid-19 are likely to make a full recovery, and thats important. Try to stop the train of thought that will always lead you into a dark tunnel, imagining the worst case scenario. Challenge your negative thoughts. Separate what you can control and what you cant. Stay in the present.

Give yourself a short period each day to think through your worries but then stop and dont allow intrusive thoughts to impact your entire day. Think of negative thoughts as a train that you are getting off. Then give yourself a boost by talking to others, or listening to music, or cooking or doing something that takes up your time in a joyful way.

Be active and do something you enjoy

Theres nothing wrong with hiding under the covers for a day when things seem too much, but its important to try and stay active if you are well enough. Take care of your basic needs and employ helpful coping strategies  ensure rest and respite during work or between shifts, eat sufficient and healthy food and engage in physical activity.

If you can, go for a walk in the sunshine. If not, try a short exercise video at home. Even sitting in your garden or on your balcony is good for a change of scenery. Focus on positive news  it is there, from the small gesture to the amazing work being done across the world to combat the virus, Campbell says.
The chief mufti of Aligarh on Thursday issued an edict to all mutawallis (caretakers) and imams of all mosques in the Uttar Pradesh district to not offer the daily congregational prayers in mosques to contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

In his appeal setting to rest all speculation on the sensitive issue, Maulana Mohamed Khalid Hameed said Muslims should, as a very special temporary measure, refrain from offering the Juma prayers in mosques and instead offer the Zohar (afternoon) prayers on Fridays at their homes.

Also, the Mufti directed all imams to ensure that in all daily prayers, only the imam and the resident caretakers should pray inside the mosque and all other residents of a locality should pray at home.

He, however, mentioned as a rider that for Friday prayers in cases where there is a small mohalla mosque, a limited gathering could be considered provided mandatory precautions for social distancing are strictly followed.

The Mufti made it clear that the edict pertaining to Friday prayers is an extraordinary measure and he had taken this extreme step keeping in mind the unprecedented circumstances.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
BERLIN  Just when it looked like Angela Merkel was going to ride quietly into the sunset, fate intervened.

Two weeks ago, the German leaders biggest worry was finding a successor and a life after politics. Now she finds herself in the center of what many consider the most serious global crisis since World War II.

The coronavirus pandemic is a human tragedy of potentially biblical proportions, former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi warned this week.

For better or worse, Merkel is the only European leader with either the experience or stature to take charge. The European Unions current crop of chieftains  Council President Charles Michel, who spent one term as Belgian prime minister, and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, whose spotty reputation as a German minister precedes her  are both untested and unknown to most Europeans. The European Central Bank, a rock of stability when Draghi was in charge, has developed decidedly shakier legs under Christine Lagarde, his successor.

That leaves Merkel  assuming she doesnt have coronavirus (she was exposed to the virus by a doctor a week ago, but the first two tests she took were negative).

For the woman who steered Europe through the financial panic that nearly brought down the euro and the refugee crisis of 2015, this might seem like familiar territory.

Its not. This time around, the scope of the crisis and the consequences of failure are much greater than anything Merkel has ever dealt with.

The main challenge Merkel faced both during Europes debt crisis and the refugee influx was in convincing her own citizenry of the necessity for action  that is, to save the euro by bailing out Greece & Co. and to accept huge numbers of refugees. In other words, the central question was one of German will. There was never any doubt that Germany could shoulder the burdens or that it would cripple its economy by doing so; the only real unknown was whether Germans would agree.

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Overcoming the economic fallout of the pandemic, however, will depend on factors well beyond Germanys control. Not only has the pandemic paralyzed Europes economy, Germanys biggest export markets are also effectively shuttered for the foreseeable future.

This week, Merkels government mobilized a staggering package of aid measures  a combination of social subsidies, loans and guarantees  worth more than 1 trillion.

In relative terms, the German package exceeds even the dimensions of the $2 trillion bill approved by the U.S. Congress this week.

Though the sums at play are dizzying, the strategy behind them couldnt be more straightforward: to compensate for the sharp drop in economic output  the revenue, profit and wages that grease the economy in normal times.

Thing is, countries cant idle their economies and borrow forever. They simply cant afford to. At some point  as Donald Trump argued this week  the cure risks becoming worse than the disease. At least in economic terms.

No one knows when Germany will reach the point of having to decide between its economic survival and the lives of those most susceptible to coronavirus. Chances are that Merkel will have to make such a call in the coming weeks, however.

In Europe, its up to each individual country to decide if and when to stop listening to the epidemiologists and public health officials arguing for extended lockdowns to flatten the curve of the infected. Yet given Merkels political influence and the importance of Germanys economy to the rest of Europe, many are likely to follow her lead.

The German chancellor will likely face an equally tough  if less fraught in moral terms  choice on Europe in the coming weeks.

With southern Europes economy falling off a cliff amid the crisis, countries from Italy to Spain to Greece face economic ruin. Unlike Germany, they cant afford to plug the holes the crisis has created in their economies with massive borrowing.

This week a group of nine European leaders, led by France, Spain and Italy, called for the issuance of common eurozone debt, so-called corona bonds, to combat the crisis.

Though the letter went to Brussels, it was intended for Berlin.

In effect, the leaders proposal would require Germany to assume liability for the debt of all other eurozone members, something anathema to most Germans.

Merkel has been here before. During the eurozone crisis, she faced repeated calls to introduce eurobonds in order to restore investor confidence in the creditworthiness of countries such as Greece.

Merkel, facing fierce opposition to the idea among her own conservatives, refused to even consider such a step.

Then, as now, opponents of the idea argued that a common debt instrument would leave Germany on the hook for the profligate spending of its neighbors.

Yet many economists consider the eurozones lack of common lending power to be the fatal flaw in the currency unions architecture, exposing it to shocks such as the current one. If Italy and Spain, the eurozones third and fourth largest economies, fall into an economic depression in the wake of the coronavirus crisis  a distinct possibility  the eurozone itself would be in jeopardy. For now, Berlin is relying on the ECB to step into the breach by buying countries bonds, a controversial policy that puts what is ultimately a political decision in the hands of the central bank.

So far, Merkels government has shown no signs of softening its stance on the debt question.

German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier dismissed the latest calls for mutualizing eurozone debt this week as a phantom debate.

As southern Europes economic crisis worsens, however, the demand is becoming more real by the hour.

This would be the proper occasion to introduce eurobonds, directly connected to the coronavirus crisis, former ECB Vice President Vitor Constancio said.

A common criticism of Merkels handling of the eurozone crisis is that her strategy addressed the short-term crisis, not the currencys underlying flaws.

That failure, her critics say, robbed her of a true European legacy.

While Merkel is revered by many on the center left outside of Germany, in particular in the U.S. and U.K., thats mainly because they appreciate her for what shes not: loud, bombastic or obnoxious.

The coronavirus crisis presents the German leader, whose term ends next year, with a final opportunity to push through the elusive deeper European integration most observers say is necessary to preserve both the euro and the European Union in the long term.

Over her long tenure as chancellor, Merkel has repeated time and again that Germanys destiny lies in Europe. Nows her chance to prove it.
From medical news to government advice, and from home-working tools to financial advice and wellbeing tips, The Independent offers no scare stories, no hype  just the in-depth analysis and trusted features you need during an extraordinary situation.

In this podcast, well be answering readers questions, speaking to guests and making the most of our team of journalists around the UK, the US and the world.

On the show today TikTok star and impressionist Meggie Foster joins The Independent's Social Media Editor Ben Kelly to discuss her rise to internet stardom during the Covid-19 lockdown.

For many people around the world lockdown has been a major part of the last few months. In fact weve just passed a remarkable 100 days of these restrictions in the UK.

Meggie, who was furloughed from her full time job, took to TikTok and began lip-syncing politicians' voices in a new wave of internet satire.

You can subscribe to the series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Acast or wherever you listen. Be sure to join the conversation by emailing us at thecoronaviruspodcast@independent.co.uk or using the hashtag #indycoronaviruspodcast on social media.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 22:16:03|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- A spokesperson for China's Ministry of National Defense on Thursday urged the U.S. side to stop taking provocative and dangerous acts to avoid serious damage to the relations between the two countries and the two militaries.

Spokesperson Ren Guoqiang made the remarks while commenting on the operations of the U.S. Navy P-8A reconnaissance aircraft on Feb. 17, which ignored multiple warnings of the Chinese side and approached a Chinese navy fleet conducting routine drills on the high seas.

The reconnaissance lasted for over four hours, and the aircraft's minimum distance to the Chinese fleet was only about 400 meters, Ren said, calling the operations extremely "unprofessional and unsafe."

For a long time, the U.S. side has been conducting close-range and long-lasting surveillance of Chinese ships and aircraft, creating disturbances, said Ren.

The provocative acts of the U.S. side damaged China's security interests and endangered the officers and soldiers of both sides, Ren said, noting that such acts undermined and abused the free navigation rules of international laws.

These acts are the root of maritime safety problems between China and the United States, said Ren.

The Chinese side firmly opposes such moves, Ren said, urging the U.S. side to stop the acts as well as stop discrediting China.
The university is planning, if Government approval is given, to offer drone sprayer training to qualified emergency services drone pilots, to enable them to use spray drones to disinfect COVID-19 infection hotspots in the UK.

Agricultural spray drones have been in use for a number of years in countries such as China, India, and the USA. While European regulations prohibit their use, Harper Adams University is conducting trials, in association with government authorities and other partners, to enable their use for crop protection and weed control within the UK.

China used spray drone systems to disinfect contaminated rural and urban areas in their fight against the coronavirus. They accept that spray drones played an important part in dramatically curtailing the outbreak.

Director of Chinese Investment Connections Ltd. Robert Pearson approached Harper Adams University to ask the institution to share their expertise by providing spray drone training to help fight the pandemic. He said, Ive been working in China with XAG, the worlds leading agricultural drone manufacturer. When COVID-19 took effect, they were at the forefront of preventative action in China and have been continuously disinfecting areas there for the past eight weeks. They have sprayed more than 902 million square metres in 20 Chinese provinces with remarkable results.

I approached Harper Adams as they have extensive experience of using spray drone systems and work closely with both XAG and DJI, and asked them to work with us to develop a rapid solution for disinfecting contaminated areas. Harper Adams's existing collaboration with XAG will be very beneficial in achieving this.

Across the UK, there are 48 police drone teams and 100 in the fire service. These teams are specialists in urban flying which is more demanding than rural applications. The plan is for drone and spray experts at Harper Adams University to develop and run an intensive training course for these operators.

This will enable these already qualified drone pilots to operate spray drones to disinfect contaminated infection hotspots, for example parks, areas outside hospitals, emergency and public transport vehicles, and schools.
World Bank President David Malpass says the board of the financial institution is finalising a package of coronavirus relief valued at up to $160 billion over the next 15 months.

Malpass said this in a statement issued after a G20 leaders call on Thursday.

The goals are to shorten the time to recovery, create conditions for growth, support small and medium enterprises, and help protect the poor and vulnerable, Mr Malpass said.

He added that the health crisis hit close to home, as former World Bank U.S. Executive Director Carole Brookins has died of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The World Bank earlier this month approved 14 billion dollars in loans and grants to bolster coronavirus medical responses, an amount that is included in the 160 billion dollars.

Mr Malpass said the bank now has new COVID-19-related projects underway in 56 countries and is encouraging other multilateral development banks to co-finance follow-up tranches.

World Bank Group entities are restructuring existing projects in 24 countries to direct funds to the health emergency.

Im particularly concerned about poor, densely populated countries such as India, where weak health systems need massively scalable investments in human capital, supplies and infrastructure, Malpass said.

READ ALSO:

We are working hard to provide support through our public and private sector tools.

The International Finance Corp, the World Banks private sector arm, is working on new investments in 300 companies and is extending trade finance and working capital lines of credit, he added.

Mr Malpass and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva on Wednesday urged bilateral creditors to extend debt relief to help the poorest countries deal with the pandemic.

(dpa/NAN)
The following list includes recent reports from the Midland County Sheriff's Office and the Midland Police Department. Compiled by reporter Mitchell Kukulka.

Monday, March 23

9:20 p.m. -- A deputy responded to a car-deer crash in Ingersoll Township.

7:48 p.m. -- A deputy had contact with a 49-year-old City of Coleman woman in reference to a child custody issue. The woman said her 64-year-old estranged husband refused the court ordered supervised child custody visit at his Warren Township residence. The woman left the residence with their child, due to the man not wanting to cooperate with the supervised visit. The woman wanted the issue documented due to their upcoming divorce and court hearings.

1:53 p.m. -- Officers responded to a report of harassing communications in the 2600 block of St. Marys Drive.

1:32 p.m. -- Officers responded to a vehicle crash in the area of Garland Street and Greenway Drive.

1:28 p.m. -- A 49-year-old Lee Township man reported someone tried opening two credit card accounts in his name. The man was instructed how to follow the Midland County Sheriff's Office ID Theft check-sheet; have his Social Security number flagged; and how to contact the credit reporting agencies.

9:54 a.m. -- Officers responded to a vehicle crash in the area of East Ashman Street and Abbott Road.

9:30 a.m. -- Officers responded to a vehicle crash at 901 Joe Mann Boulevard.

7:32 a.m. -- A deputy was dispatched to a Lincoln Township business for a delayed report of a single-vehicle crash that occurred in the Village of Sanford.

1:44 a.m. -- Deputies were dispatched to a Lee Township residence in reference to a verbal dispute between a 40-year-old Lee Township woman and her 35-year-old live-in boyfriend. No assault occurred. The original caller, a 13-year-old Lee Township girl, became disorderly and refused to return to the residence. The girl ran away from the residence and was later located. She was placed in handcuffs, returned to her residence, and later turned over to her 42-year-old Midland father.
The manager of a local amusement center has been cited for keeping the maquinitas operational amid the Emergency Ordinance and Executive Order Guidelines set forth by the City of Laredo, authorities said.

READ MORE: Webb Sheriffs ID man found hanged at Rio Bravo bus stop

On Tuesday, members of the Laredo Police Department narcotics and vice unit assigned to the COVID-19 enforcement detail received information that Bravo Amusement Center in the 7500 block of McPherson Road was open and allowed patrons inside the business to play maquinitas, violating the emergency ordinance, according to police.

LPD set up surveillance at the business. Authorities alleged they observed customers parking their vehicles on the east side and making their way inside the 8-liner establishment through the back door.

Police approached a 45-year-old man who had exited through the rear door. He allegedly gave conflicting information of where he was coming from. He eventually admitted that he had just finished playing the 8-liner machines at the business and had walked out from the back door, according to police.

Officers inspected the business and encountered Nora Idalia Garcilazo, 41. She told police she was the manager on duty. Officers said they observed 30 operational maquinitas and cash inside a small office.

After speaking with the 8-liner employees, they stated to police that they knew the emergency ordinance was in effect due to the coronavirus and knew the business had to close and cease all of its operations, LPD said in a statement.

Police seized a total of $5,712 and 6,000 Mexican pesos, or about $315.

Garcilazo was cited for violation of city ordinance executive order (Amusement Redemption Center Open for Public). Webb County Jail records show Garcilazo was arrested on Jan. 12, 2013, on the charge of gambling promotion. That case was dismissed on Dec. 7, 2015, according to court documents.

U.S. Border Patrol took custody of the 45-year-old male customer since he was in the country illegally.

Due to the threat and highly contagious nature of COVID-19, such public congregations and normal operations of these businesses named specifically in the emergency decree will not be tolerated, LPD stated.

Police said they have deployed adequate patrol personnel to different locations across the city over the past week to specifically address violations of the Mayoral Decree.

READ MORE: City of Laredo confirms 13 total cases of coronavirus

Our LPD COVID-19 Order Enforcement Team with the assistance of our patrol division has stopped at multiple restaurants, bars, supermarkets, salons, public parks and spaces reminding the community about the regulations in place. To date, we have visited over 600 businesses, police stated. LPD wants to thank the Webb County Sheriffs office, Constables Pct. 4 and 2 and the Texas Department of Public Safety for providing assistance.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  The government has repatriated 253 overseas Filipino workers from Kuwait as the Gulf state shuts its international airport to contain the spread of COVID-19.

The Department of Foreign Affairs in a statement announced the return of the Filipino workers Thursday morning.

Since the Kuwait International Airport is closed, the Philippine Embassy arranged a humanitarian flight for the distressed Filipinos from Talha Deportation Center, the Public Authority for Manpower Expatriate Shelter, and the Embassy shelter.

"All 253 Filipinos underwent the appropriate medical protocols and check-up at the airport as required by the DOH Bureau of Quarantine. The repatriates were reminded further to observe strict home quarantine for 14 days," the DFA said.

It added that the evacuees were provided with transportation to their hometowns in Luzon while those who could not go home yet due to the lockdown imposed in some areas were provided with temporary shelter.

Kuwait has recorded 195 confirmed cases of COVID-19, 152 of them are currently under treatment.

Meanwhile, the Philippines has 636 COVID-19 cases. Of this number, 35 have died while 26 have recovered.

President Rodrigo Duterte has placed Luzon under enhanced community quarantine, restricting domestic travel. Several local government units outside Luzon have also shut their borders, but Duterte has made it clear returning Filipinos should be allowed to enter the country.
Medical-preventive measures were implemented at the military units under the fifth military formation of the Armenian army today, as posted on the official website of the news service of the Ministry of Defense of Armenia.

The servicemen were told about how they can protect themselves from the coronavirus and to strictly observe the rules for prevention and hygiene.

The military units and nearby areas were sanitized with special substances, and devices for inspecting and checking body temperature were placed at the entrances to the premises of the military units.
Coronavirus: New Zealand fishers hope to be at sea until lockdown ends

by Amber-Leigh Woolf

March 26,2020 | Source: Stuff

The coronavirus threat in New Zealand is 'like a bad horror film', fishers say, and they're heading to sea to get away from it.



Sanford Fisheries has been deemed an essential service during New Zealand's pending lockdown, and the fishers can't wait to get out to sea.



On Tuesday Taylah Pilcher, a general hand on a fishing trawler, was waiting to board the Interislander to get to Timaru before all domestic travel is banned.



"I never thought I'd be so happy to see work again."



Driving from the far north to Timaru where she will sail from had been daunting, she said.



"I am on the luckier side, and I get to leave land and be away from this, and do my own self-isolation."



Pilcher said she would've wanted to have stayed on land, but now that the country is preparing for lockdown, she is eager to leave.



"It's like a bad horror film," she said.



"My job is basically my everything at the moment."



She felt fortunate to be considered an essential worker in these times, she said.



All those heading out to sea will be tested for the coronavirus before sailing. Until she goes, Pilcher said she must self-isolate.



Six weeks away was a normal time to be out fishing, she said.



If she returned in six weeks to find the country still in lockdown, Pilcher said she could stay on her boat for a break, or go back out to sea.



"Once we're on the boats, we're out there for until the end of the lockdown," she said.



"If the lockdown is still in place we'll go back out."



Pilcher was one of the hundreds of people queuing to get on the Interislander Ferry to the South Island from Wellington on Tuesday morning.



On Tuesday evening, the Government extended their deadline for domestic travel, as New Zealanders struggle to get home due to limited flights and ferry services.



Pilcher said she would keep an eye on what's happening at home.



"We have internet in the boat, and if we're in reception we will still get the news."

 2020 Stuff Limited

Theme(s): Others.
The Morrison governments newly-formed COVID-19 Commission has been called on to break an impasse between stevedoring, logistics and port operators and state governments which threatens to sever Australias global supply chains in a pandemic lockdown.

The Transport and Infrastructure Council comprising Commonwealth and state ministers and local government representatives ministers met on Wednesday to address a historic anomaly in which port operations are not gazetted as essential services.

The new COVID-19 Commission has been called on to resolve an anomaly that could hamper distribution from ports. Credit:Glenn Hunt

The council, led by Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, issued a statement noting the critical role of the freight sector in providing essential food and medicine supplies and other goods.

We, Australias Transport and Infrastructure Ministers, wanted to reassure Australians that supporting freight movements of goods to individuals, businesses and service providers is a high priority for all governments, the statement read.
Do we still know enough about the Sars-Cov-2 virus that has brought world superpowers to their knees? As the question lingered, Spains death toll surpassed that of China, where the virus surfaced late last year. Meanwhile, to mitigate a fallout of the pandemic, the US Senate and the White House reached an agreement on a $2 trillion stimulus package for the US economy, and to help the millions of Americans ravaged by the situation.

US to go for $2 trillion stimulus to boost economy

The Trump administration struck a deal with Senate Democrats and Republicans on an historic rescue package with more than $2 trillion in spending and tax breaks to bolster the hobbled U.S. economy and fund a nationwide effort to stem the coronavirus.

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Heir to throne, Prince Charles tests positive for coronavirus

Prince Charles, the 71-year-old heir to the British throne, has tested positive for coronavirus but is in good health and is now self isolating in Scotland with mild symptoms.

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Higher humidity may slow Covid-19 spread, finds study

Warm and humid weather may combat the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), a new study suggests, arguing that Asian countries experiencing monsoon may see a slowdown in the transmission of the deadly infection that has claimed 10 lives in India and almost 20,000 around the world.

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New York state, California bear the brunt

India-born celebrity chef Floyd Cordoz died of complications from Covid-19 in New York City, the epicentre of the pandemic in the US, as authorities ramped up medical supplies in the city and asked those who left it recently to self-quarantine for 14 days.

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Spain overtakes China virus toll with 3,434 deaths

Spains coronavirus death toll overtook that of China on Wednesday, rising to 3,434 after 738 people died over the past 24 hours, the government said.

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British parliament okays emergency Covid-19 legislation

Britains upper house on Wednesday approved emergency legislation designed to help the Boris Johnson government tackle the coronavirus outbreak, paving the way for the far-reaching bill to become law.

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Chaos after Hubeis lockdown ends

Huge crowds jammed trains and buses in Hubei on Wednesday as people seized their first chance to travel after two months. Strict curbs on daily life are being lifted, allowing people to head home and see loved ones after weeks of separation.

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Indian-origin chef Floyd Cardoz, culinary director of The Bombay Canteen, dies of Covid-19

Indian-origin chef Floyd Cardoz, the culinary director of the restaurant The Bombay Canteen, has passed away in New Jersey. Floyd had tested positive for COVID-19 recently.

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Is Greta Thunberg Covid-19 positive? Likely, she says after Europe trip

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/ -- On 25th March 2020, Dare2Compete, one of India's largest student community, released the rankings of D2C Prestigious B-School Competitions 2020 through social media and their website amid COVID-19, as part of Dare2Compete Awards. On the basis of 13,800+ B-School student votes, Dare2Compete declared this under two segments - Top 20 from votes across All B-Schools and Top 20 from votes across popular 10 B-Schools, the ones that are eligible for majority of the campus engagements.

B-School Competitions, one of the campus engagements from companies, are known to shape the lives of students in different ways by providing learning opportunities beyond the confines of the traditional classroom. Working on case studies, business simulation games, etc. aids students in understanding the corporate environment even before they step into the corporate realm.

Recognizing the efforts taken in organizing competitions and campus engagements, Dare2Compete confers Companies with accolades every year, the rankings of which are disclosed as D2C Prestigious B-School Competitions 2020.

Holding an unwavering stance under both segments, HUL LIME Season 11 grabbed the first place under D2C Prestigious B-School Competitions 2020, for the second year consecutively.

Under All B-Schools segment, Reliance TUP 5.0 held the second place, jumping 3 positions from last year, while the third place was taken by Google Case Challenge 2019. The fourth and the fifth places were held by ICICI Bank Beat the Curve 2019 and Flipkart Wired 2019 Campus Case Challenge 3.0, respectively. Both of them were new entries to this list outperforming the well-known names that slipped in this year's rankings.

As per the student votes from the popular 10 B-Schools comprising IIM A, IIM B, IIM C, IIM L, IIM K, IIM I, XLRI, FMS, MDI & SPJIMR, Aditya Birla Group's Stratos retained its second position this year as well, followed by InvicTAS from TATA Group, a new entrant in this list. ITC Interrobang?! Season 9 and Flipkart Wired 2019 Campus Case Challenge 3.0 came 4th and 5th respectively. Mahindra War Room Season 12 that had secured third place in the rankings of 2019 shifted down to the sixth place closely followed by Asian Paints CANVAS 2019 that saw a jump in its rank this year.

This year marked the entry of many new engagements in these rankings - AB InBev The BUD Challenge and OLA Campus Connect Challenge to name a couple. Focus of many companies have now shifted to doing deep and thought provoking engagements with students to get their mind share.

In another category that recognised B-Schools on the basis of the performance of their students across campus engagements/competitions, IIM Bangalore outperformed all other B-Schools to come 1st as D2C Competitive B-Schools 2020 closely followed by IIM Kozhikode, Indian School of Business (ISB) and MDI Gurgaon.

Dare2Compete also recognized students for their performance across campus engagements. Ameer Iqubal from IIM Bangalore topped the D2C Competitive Leaders 2020 rankings by excelling in close to 13 competitions this year. He was followed by Vishwajit Bhat from IIM Bangalore with 12 competitions under his belt. Top 30 D2C Competitive Leaders 2020 consisted of students from FMS Delhi, IMT Ghaziabad, XLRI, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Shillong, NITIE and other top tier institutions, performed exceptionally well in corporate competitions.

Visit www.dare2compete.com/awards to know more about Dare2Compete Awards 2020 and to view all categories under it.

About Dare2Compete



Dare2Compete is one of the largest student communities across domains. It engages with the students of B-Schools, Engineering Colleges and other colleges with 1 million+ active registrations from across 10,000+ colleges. It is a one-stop-shop to meet the needs of students during their academic journey.

Dare2Compete also enables leading brands to engage with the students' community in the most interactive way to discover, measure and hire the best talent and conceptualizes unique engagements to enhance the company's brand visibility, brand engagement and brand equity across campuses in India.

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1137527/D2C_B_School_Competitions_2020.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Express News Service

KOLLAM: Anupam Mishra IAS, the Kollam as a Sub-Collector skipped the 14-day quarantine period mandated on account of his recent Singapore journey and have reportedly travelled to Lucknow.

Mishra had reached Kerala from Singapore on March 18. "As per preventive measures, he was asked by the health officials to stay self-quarantined and he agreed to the same," said B Abdul Nassar, Kollam District Collector.

When the health officials went for a routine check-up on quarantine patients on Thursday, they found the Sub-Collector's home locked from outside.

"When I contacted him he said he is self-quarantine in Bangalore with his brother, who is a doctor and have claimed that he left the state on the same day when he was asked to stay quarantined. We don't completely believe his statement, as when the police traced his mobile phone his location showed that he is in Lucknow," said the collector.

A report has been submitted to the government regarding the irresponsible step taken by the officer. After further probe as per the instruction of the government action will be initiated against him, said Abdul Nassar.


SPRINGFIELD  A new fund that aims to help nonprofit organizations providing services in response to the new coronavirus was unveiled Thursday by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who said the effort will be led by his sister, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.
As India remains under lockdown for 21 days from March 25, school students will miss out on their studies. Probably this is the time when one can go back to the old saying that home is a childs first school.

During this period, educating children at home will not only keep them busy during the day but will also ensure that they do not miss out on a lot of their syllabus.

To help parents, UNICEF has listed four methods in which one can ensure that the child continues studying. UNICEF shared a graphic on Facebook with the caption, As many schools close to help stop the spread of #coronavirus, here are some ways for parents, teachers and schools to keep children learning.

Online Learning Resources

The concept of online learning is not as common in India but in such testing times it is the best option available.

Renowned educational brands are offering free premium courses. Experts in the field are coming up with resources that are engaging as well as educative. Most of them can be accessed through either a smart phone to a computer.

Home Study Exercises

These are designed to provide an alternative learning system. Home study exercises usually address a students strengths and weaknesses, recognizing special needs.

Radio, podcast or television learning

There are various innovative available now to ensure a smooth virtual learning process. Podcasts are easily available for almost all subjects. Sitting at home and studying can become a bit boring but these podcasts are engaging and is the fun way to learn.

Regular follow ups between teachers and students

It is the responsibility of schools that they ensure regular interactions between teachers and students through video conferencing. These follow ups will motivate students and ensure that he or she is on the right track.
Defense officials have appealed for authorization.

The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine is willing to bring upgrades to Island-class patrol boats received as part of U.S. military assistance.

Ukraine is yet to receive formal authorization from the U.S. side, Defense Express reports, citing sources in the Ministry.

"Such written consent is required, given the need to follow the procedures defined by the United States," the source said.

Read alsoTwo Island-class patrol boats delivered to Odesa (Photo)

It is noted that the upgrades sought are aimed at upping reconnaissance and strike capacities. A number of additional systems are intended to be installed that will improve the ability to detect enemy targets.

Ukraine hopes to get U.S. authorization in the near future.

Funds for such upgrades have been laid in the state defense order 2020.

As UNIAN reported earlier, the Lviv Armored Plant SE, which is part of the Ukroboronprom State Concern, handed to the Ukraine Army another batch of six upgraded T-64 main battle tanks.
ACCRA, March 25 (Xinhua) -- A former Ghanaian ambassador to China has urged his country to emulate the approach adopted by China to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic.

Speaking live on a talk-show on the national television station GTV, Anani Okuminyi Demuyakor, former Ghana's ambassador to China, said it took the Chinese discipline, patriotism, and strong leadership to take the measures that combat the disease in their country.

Demuyakor, who had witnessed China's earlier battle with SARS in 2003, said the strong leadership was what mobilized the resources to put up health facilities in record time to be able to contain the current outbreak.

"One good thing about the Chinese is that when there is a problem, they go into action to find solutions, and that is what they did in this fight," the former ambassador said.

He lauded the Chinese authorities for their bold decision to lock down Wuhan and other cities affected by the pandemic, adding that the citizens also took it as a civic responsibility of adhering to the lock-down.

"So we have to look at the way the Chinese did it, and in that regard, the civic responsibility of citizens is very crucial for Ghanaians," he stated.

He added, "The Chinese saw that they had a crisis on their hands, so they came together to deal with it. You saw retired nurses, retired doctors, military, police who were all volunteering support."

From that experience, he said China was now able to send personnel and logistics to support the fight in other countries, and he urged the leaders of Ghana to take advantage of the experience and data of China to find an early solution to the COVID-19 outbreak in the country.
A top UN official in India has welcomed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision of a 21-day nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus, saying collective efforts are required to overcome "one of the greatest health threats of our lifetime.

Modi on Tuesday announced a nationwide lockdown for three weeks in an attempt to stem the spread of coronavirus in India.

UN Resident Coordinator in India Renata Dessallien welcomed Prime Minister Modi's strategy for a nationwide 21-day lockdown to curtail the spread of the virus, spokesman for the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Stephane Dujarric said Thursday at the virtual daily press briefing.

Dessallien said the UN system in India is fully mobilized and ready to further step up in support of the government of India to fight COVID-19.

She said that she believed that if we work together, we can overcome one of the greatest health threats of our lifetime.

Dujarric said UN agencies are working with the Indian government on preparedness and response measures, disease surveillance, lab and research protocols, risk communications, training on infection prevention and control and cluster containment plans, as well as surveillance and tracking of travellers.

The UN in India remains active and is determined to deliver for the people they serve, especially the most vulnerable and disadvantaged who may be among the hardest hit, Dujarric said in the briefing.

India on Thursday reported 694 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 16 deaths from the deadly disease.

According to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker, the virus has globally infected over 500,000 people and claimed over 22,000 lives.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Saints coach Sean Payton is recovering well from the coronavirus, he said Wednesday in an interview on WWL radio in New Orleans.

Payton tested positive for COVID-19 on March 19, and he said he was "cleared" on Tuesday.

"I'm doing well," he said, adding, "It's been quite a process."

Payton told the radio station that he first felt symptoms on March 15, and he subsequently dealt with flu-like symptoms, a fever and chills.

"The (Centers for Disease Control) basically puts out, 'You have to be three days fever-free', which for me has been more like eight or nine days fever-free, and then also a week from when you first felt symptoms, and I'm closer to 10 days now," Payton said.

"I've been fortunate. You stay inside like everyone's doing, and you find ways to pass the time. (Saint staffers) had a competition committee meeting the other day on teleconference. ...

"I'm feeling a lot better. And unfortunately, my appetite didn't dissipate at all during that time. You know, you watch a lot of Netflix, then you go on to Twitter, and you see everyone else is watching the same shows."

Payton, 56, reported that he attended the Rebel Stakes at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark., the day before he began feeling sick. He said had he known he was carrying COVID-19, he wouldn't have gone to the horse race.

"It's invisible, and we tend to pay attention to how we feel and when we feel OK and we don't see anything," Payton said. "The thing that's troubling is, it's so contagious that it's going to find the people that aren't healthy enough to defend themselves against it. ...

"The reason (social distancing) applies to everybody is everybody can get it. I'm sure a great deal of people have had it and didn't realize they had it. They were healthy enough. Maybe it might have been a month and a half ago. They thought they had the flu, no one was talking about this and it went away."

Story continues

His message to everyone regarding social distancing amid the outbreak: "We try asking nicely and we try saying, 'Hey, look, this is the deal.' And then you still see behavior that makes you upset. Just picture everyone's got a hand grenade on them. How about that? So stay away from everybody."

Payton said of New Orleans, "This city's tough and resilient and we're smart. We've been through so much. Between the oil (spill in 2010), multiple hurricanes since I've been here post-Katrina. We don't have to be just tough, now. We've gotta be a little smart, too."

--Field Level Media
A smart, color-enabled Wi-Fi floodlight doesnt need to be pricey to be good, and WiZ Connecteds BR30 Colors bulb is a case in point. Retailing for a few pennies south of $16, the BR30 Colors floodlight connects to your Wi-Fi network without the need for a bridge, and it supports more than a dozen preset white and color modes, or you can tune it to a hue of your choosing. Capable of being put on a schedule and grouped with other WiZ smart bulbs, the BR30 Colors bulb also boasts a nifty feature that grants some smarts to an otherwise dumb light switch.

Design and specifications

WiZ Connected (which is owned by Signify, the same company behind the mammoth Philips Hue brand) has a few other color and tunable white bulbs in its portfolio in addition to this BR30 model, including the previously reviewed A19 bulb and an RDL6 recessed downlightRemove non-product link.

Rated to last 25,000 hours, the BR30 is equipped with an E26 base that you can screw into a standard light socket. Using the WiZ mobile app, you can tune the bulbs white light from a warm 2,200 degrees Kelvin to a cooler 6,500K (which is equivalent to color temperature of daylight on a hazy day), or it can glow in up to 16 million colors.

This review is part of TechHives coverage of the best smart bulbs where youll find reviews of competing products, plus a buyers guide to the features you should consider when shopping.

Measuring 3.74 inches wide and 5.08 inches long, the WiZ BR30 can emit up to 650 lumens at maximum brightness, so its somewhat dimmer than a 60-watt incandescent, which produces closer to 800 lumens. Still, 650 lumens should be enough to light up a room, a desk, or another type of living or work space.

WiZ says its BR30 Colors is suitable for use in damp locations, such as bathrooms, but it should be installed in a weatherproof luminaire if used outdoors. Its worth noting that some competing BR30 smart bulbs can be installed in outdoor fixtures that do get direct water exposureincluding the IP65-rated LIFX BR30 and LIFX BR30+those bulbs typically cost more. Amazon sells the 1,100-lumen LIFX BR30 for $46, for example, and the LIFX BR30+ for $60. The BR30+ has the same lumen rating as its stablemate, but its designed to improve the night vision of home security cameras that produce infrared light for night vision.

Setup

As with WiZs other Wi-Fi-enabled bulbs, you can set up the BR30 Colors bulb using the WiZ mobile app for iOS and Android. If youre new to the WiZ ecosystem, youll need to set up a home for your lights first, and then add at least one room (such as bedroom or office). You can then select a room and tap the + button in the top-right corner of the app interface to pair a new bulb.

The WiZ app offers a couple of pairing options: a smart pairing process that lets you add several bulbs at once, and a manual pairing process that adds bulbs one at a time. Why would you bother with the manual pairing process versus smart pairing? Easy: the smart pairing process requires that you temporarily switch your dual-band router to 2.4GHz mode only (given that WiZs smart bulbs, like many competing models, cant connect to 5GHz wireless networks), and that might be a bit of a pain depending on your routers configuration tool.

The manual pairing process, on the other hand, involves connecting directly to the bulbs Wi-Fi setup signal, which means you can leave your router configuration alone. I tried pairing the BR30 using both methods and managed to add the bulb within a few minutes.

Features, app support, smart home integration

The WiZ BR30 Colors bulb boasts a wide variety of white and color modes, all of which you can control from the WiZ app. For starters, you get a quartet of white presets, including warm white, daylight, cool white, and night light, or you can pick your own color temperature using a slider. On the color side of things, there are six simple colors (with names such as cozy, relax, plant focus, and TV time,), as well as a color slider for choosing a custom hue.

Ben Patterson/IDG The WiZ Connected BR30 Colors floodlight offers a variety of white and color modes, along with more than a dozen dynamic modes.

You can also try one of the 18 dynamic colors, from candlelight and fireplace to ocean and steampunk. Besides being able to adjust the brightness of the bulbs various dynamic modes, you can also fiddle with the speed of the dynamic effect. For example, you can boost or reduce the flickering effect of the candlelight mode, or you can make the pulsing deep dive mode more soothing or frenetic.

Last but not least, there are a couple of progressive wake-up and bedtime modes, which slowly increase or decrease the brightness of the bulb respectively over a 30-minute period.

Using the WiZ app, you can group the BR30 Colors bulb with other WiZ bulbs in a room, allowing you to turn all of them on or off simultaneously or (if the bulb is grouped with other color-capable WiZ bulbs) change their color modes in unison. You can also record (as WiZ puts it) lighting scenes that you can then play whenever you see fit. The WiZ app lets you put the bulb on a daily schedule, or enable a randomized vacation mode designed to fool strangers into thinking youre at home.

If you have WiZs optional Wi-Fi remote (which weve previously reviewed), you can assign up to four color modes as favorites, which you can activate by pressing one of the four numbered buttons on the remote. Theres also a clever WiZclick feature that lets you switch between the first two favorites by flicking on the bulbs light switch either once or twice, essentially turning a dumb switch into a more or less smart switch.

WiZ supports an impressive number of smart integrations for its bulbs, including Alexa, Google Assistant, IFTTT, Samsung SmartThings, Conrad Connect, Enki, ImperiHome, and Alice. Unfortunately, theres no Apple HomeKit support, but you can assign and activate room scenes using Siri shortcuts.

Bottom line

Easy to set up and use, the affordable, the no-hub BR30 Colors bulb from WiZ Connected is an enticing choice for budget-minded shoppers. Were fans of its many white, color, and dynamic modes, setup is a cinch, and you get plenty of scheduling and scene-setting options, not to mention the neat WiZclick feature.
Steel companies, including those under public sector, are considering to scale down production amid coronavirus outbreak, according to sources.

Sajjan Jindal's JSW Steel has already announced its decision to cut production at its plants.

The industry sources said top management of major players like Tata Steel, JSPL, ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India (AMNS India) and state-owned SAIL and RINL are also discussing similar move.

In many states, movement of raw material needed for Steel making is being impacted due to nationwide lockdown, they added.

Employees in the industry are facing difficulties in reaching their offices.

"There is no purpose of just producing and building up inventory levels. Till when the players will produce and keep on piling the output. They can't stop the blast furnaces which are supposed to function continuously, but reduce production,"a source said.

Blast furnace is a large structure of about 30 metre high at steel plants. It is lined with refractory firebricks that can withstand temperatures to as high as 2,000 celcius.

Once stopped, it takes several months for a steel company to re-start the critical steel making equipment.

During the lockdown, dispatch by railways and roads is also affected.

According to industry sources, local administration is not allowing trucks carrying goods to ply on road.

Steel players have already apprised the ministry about the issues being faced by them and urged to ask local administration to allow movement of important raw material and finished goods.

Those on duty at important plant locations are facing difficulties in getting their passes made by the local administration.

JSW Steel, Tata Steel, JSPL, AMNS India, SAIL and RINL together produce about 45-50 per cent of the country's total steel production annually.

At present, India's total installed crude capacity is at about 140 million tonne per annum.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  San Miguel Corporation beefed up its efforts in helping communities affected by the enhanced community quarantine due to COVID-19.

The Ramon Ang-led conglomerate announced on Thursday it will donate 560,000 kilos of rice as part of its relief efforts to assist communities that are vulnerable to the disease and the effects of the quarantine.

Starting this week, we will also be adding rice to our food donations," Ang said in a statement. "We have been able to source 560,000 kilos of rice. We plan to give 10 kilos per family and through this, we hope to be able to continue to help the most vulnerable among us  people who are out of work and families struggling to eat."

Ang, who is the president and chief operating officer of SMC, also reported that their food donation drive has reached 126,000 families.

SMC provided 1.1 million pieces of canned goods, 695,000 sachets of coffee, 288,000 packs of biscuits, 21,630 servings of its version of nutribun and 24,338 servings of pandesal. It has also donated spreads, dairy milk drinks, and water.

SMCs food donations are being coursed through various channels, including local government units, charitable groups, and church organizations. It has also made direct donations to hospitals and various communities all over Luzon.

LGUs that received food donations from San Miguel include Manila, Caloocan, Las Pinas, Malabon, Pateros, Mandaluyong, Navotas, Marikina, Paranaque, Makati, Pasay, Muntinlupa, Pasig, Quezon City, San Juan, Taguig, and Valenzuela.

Hospital beneficiaries include the Philippine General Hospital, The Medical City, Quirino Memorial Medical Center, Philippine Childrens Medical Center, Las Pinas General Hospital, and the Jose Reyes Memorial Medical Center.

Families under the care of SMCs Better World Tondo, a food bank and learning facility established last year, were also beneficiaries of the food donations.

SMC also utilized its manufacturing facilities to produce 70% ethyl alcohol to address the shortage of hand sanitizers and disinfectants, and is also donating 13,000 units of its own Protect Plus Gold powdered disinfectant for the sanitation of hospitals and government and public facilities.

RELATED: SMC to produce free rubbing alcohol from Ginebra plant

Ang stressed the company, through its San Miguel Foods business, is committed to continue providing food donations to those who need it the most.

Ang also assured the public that the company has the capacity to produce enough food for the country for the next six months.

What we want is for food to be one less worry of vulnerable families, health workers, and front-liners against COVID-19, he said.
A hunt is on for a shirtless shopper who police say deliberately coughed on a supermarket worker during the coronavirus pandemic in New South Wales.

A 35-year-old woman was working at the checkout of a supermarket at Raymond Terrace north of Newcastle, helping customers with the new social distancing rules when the shirtless man and his female partner approached at 7.30pm on Tuesday.

The supermarket had new social distancing markers on the floor to help customers with the new coronavirus rules but the man allegedly approached the counter within the 1.5m allowed and was asked to move back.

Police are hunting for this man who allegedly deliberately coughed on a supermarket worker

An argument broke out before the man deliberately coughed on the female staff member, police said on Thursday.

The shirtless man was pictured on security camera footage wearing cream shorts and black thongs and holding his female partner by the hand.

Police Minister David Elliott, urged the public to dob in the alleged rogue cougher.

'This kind of dangerous behaviour needs to stop immediately. It's potentially putting the lives of workers and their families at risk,' he said on Thursday in a NSW Police statement.

'This isn't a time to practice poor hygiene habits,' he said.

'For a disgusting act like this, you could find yourself charged with common assault and jailed for up to two years.'

Police are investigating and have asked the public to help them find the man.

Police say the man got into an argument with the female staff member who was helping customers with the new social distancing rules

NSW Police have described the man as of Caucasian appearance with a shaved head and a goatee, about 170-180cm tall.

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

If anybody has information about the man they are urged to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

NSW Police reminded the public on their website that severe penalties apply to the new coronavirus rules, called ministerial directions, that cover everything from travel to mass gathering and social distancing.

'The Public Health Act 2010 (NSW) provides NSW Police with the power to enforce these orders,' NSW Police said on their website.

'It is an offence for a person to fail to comply with an order, and severe penalties apply.'

NSW Police said they can issue immediate fines of $1000 for people and $5000 for businesses if they break the ministerial directions.
As of Wednesday, San Antonio Animal Care Services has temporarily stopped its public intake of dogs and cats during the "Stay Home, Work Safe Order" issued by the city and Bexar County.

Stay up to date on the latest coronavirus news with mySA.com:

The city's shelter is asking residents to call 311 if they find a stray animal, the organization said on its Facebook page. ACS officers will continue to answer public safety calls and staff will continue to care for the animals currently at its campus

ACS is also encouraging residents to reconsider surrendering any pet to the shelter during this time. Owner surrenders will be limited and based on capacity. Residents can email acsintake@sanantonio.gov for further information.

Adoption and foster services are still available on an appointment-only basis. For more information, visit sanantonio.gov.

Priscilla Aguirre is a breaking news reporter and general assignment writer. Read her on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | priscilla.aguirre@express-news.net | @CillaAguirre

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:
Regulatory News:

Kering (Paris:KER):

The 2019 Universal Registration Document was filed with the French Financial Markets Authority (AMF) on Thursday, March 26, 2020, under no D.20-0184. It is available free of charge to the public under current regulatory conditions and may be consulted from the Company's website www.kering.com (Finance Regulated Information).

The Universal Registration Document includes the annual financial report, the report of the Board of Directors on corporate governance, the internal control and risk management procedures implemented by the Company and the reports from the Auditors.

The Universal Registration Document also includes updated information relating to the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic.

About Kering

A global Luxury group, Kering manages the development of a series of renowned Houses in Fashion, Leather Goods, Jewelry and Watches: Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Brioni, Boucheron, Pomellato, DoDo, Qeelin, Ulysse Nardin, Girard-Perregaux, as well as Kering Eyewear. By placing creativity at the heart of its strategy, Kering enables its Houses to set new limits in terms of their creative expression while crafting tomorrow's Luxury in a sustainable and responsible way. We capture these beliefs in our signature: "Empowering Imagination". In 2019, Kering had over 38,000 employees and revenue of 15.9 billion.

www.kering.com

Twitter: @KeringGroup

LinkedIn: Kering

Instagram: @kering_official

YouTube: KeringGroup

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005468/en/

Contacts:

Press

Emilie Gargatte +33 (0)1 45 64 61 20 emilie.gargatte@kering.com

Marie de Montreynaud +33 (0)1 45 64 62 53 marie.demontreynaud@kering.com



Analysts/investors

Claire Roblet +33 (0)1 45 64 61 49 claire.roblet@kering.com

Laura Levy +33 (0)1 45 64 60 45 laura.levy@kering.com
Police have been given instructions on how to deal with the public during the current crisis

Police officers who come into contact with people with Covid-19 while not wearing protective equipment are being told they must continue working.

A force-wide email has been sent out to officers giving them instructions to follow after dealing with the public during the strict lockdown aimed at slowing the spread of the virus.

The PSNI is stepping up patrols to enforce the lockdown.

Officers have been told they must continue their duties as normal if they come into contact with someone with coronavirus.

This is even if they are not wearing specialist protective equipment to help protect them from catching Covid-19.

The email states: "Given the change in public health guidance in relation to contact with suspected or known cases, there are a few important points.

"If you have contact with a known or suspected Covid-19 case, without wearing personal protective equipment... the following approach should be followed.

"Decontaminate, wash your hands as above, do not ring NHS 111, you do not need to self-isolate yourself, and continue working.

"Monitor your symptoms. If you develop a new persistent cough or high temperature, then self-isolate and follow the guidelines available on the Public Health Agency website."

One officer said: "It's fair to say people aren't happy about this.

"First of all, we don't have masks, gloves, sanitiser, or anything like that.

"There are specialist teams that get sent out to calls where a person has been identified as having or potentially having coronavirus and they have the proper protective equipment.

"The call handlers are asking screening questions when people ring up, but all it takes is for someone to lie, and then there are those who don't know they have the virus, and a normal crew is sent out.

"Basically, this comes down to the fact that there aren't enough police so they can't afford for people to go off and self-isolate if they have come into contact with the virus.

"We understand the pressures on the emergency services at the moment, we really do, but the orders we're getting simply don't seem to match up to the medical advice."

The officer continued: "There's lots of us live with people who are vulnerable and in the at-risk groups, there's plenty of guys whose wives are pregnant and there are officers who are the sole provider to elderly relatives.

"And that doesn't even take into account the risk to the public if we're walking around carrying the virus and have no idea.

"Boris Johnson has brought in the most extreme measures we've ever seen to try and tackle this, we're being told it's a war and people aren't allowed to go out of their houses, yet police are being told we have to put ourselves and our loved ones at risk."

Assistant Chief Constable Alan Todd said these are "extremely challenging times for the Police Service".

"However, despite this and all the challenges Covid-19 presents, our priority is to keep people safe and protect communities, and that includes our officers and staff, in particular officers and staff on the frontline," he said.

Mr Todd said there is pressure on Personal Protection Equipment (PPE), but "we continue to work to ensure the maximum amount of PPE is available to staff".

"To mitigate the risk to our officers attending calls, we carefully assess each call and where we feel there may be Covid-19-related risks, we have identified dedicated, fully equipped resources in each district to respond to these incidents," he explained.

"All officers have been issued with guidance in line with advice from the Public Health Agency and Executive and expert advice is available.

"In relation to arrests, officers will continue to arrest individuals where this is necessary for public safety and the measures above are in place to enable them to do so."

The Police Federation has already raised concerns at the lack of personal protective equipment available to officers.

Mark Lindsay, who chairs the Police Federation for Northern Ireland has called for the immediate introduction of spit and bite guards to protect officers.
Manufacturers struggled to distribute essential products to many parts of India on the first day of an unprecedented 21-day lockdown to stem the spread of Covid-19, a move that drew praise from the World Health Organisation but left local authorities confused about its enforcement.

Production at many companies ranging from automobile makers to manufacturers of electronic goods have already ground to a halt, but others such as food and consumer goods companies tried to maintain a semblance of normal operations as police stopped transport of essential goods and raw materials, despite government orders to allow them to ply. Amrinder Singh, director of Bonn Industries, one of the top suppliers of bread in north India, said the company has struggled to transport even the food staple.

These incidents are coming to light despite the Prime Minister recognising the role played by the logistics industry as essential service. Still, there are incidences of our trucks being stopped by cops in various check-points, he said. We have also suggested state governments provide special vehicle and points for selling essential goods but it hasnt been considered yet. Along with this, there is a dearth of availability of raw materials due to logistics concerns, Singh said, adding that they are unable to run their plants in the current situation.

Even distribution of medicines have faced problems at several places. Production is on because it is an essential commodity, but transportation of formulations is not happening at the speed and rate it should, said an executive at one of Indias largest drugmakers on condition of anonymity.

We are in talks with authorities but every state has a different point of contact. For some, it is the police, for some district magistrate and so on. So, there is a lot of paperwork, the person added.

Over and above this, restrictions on movement of factory workers and staff members have hampered operations, he added.

Echoing the concerns, a top packaged food maker said that the company was finding it tough to run its plants and warehouses at full capacity.

There are some places where they are allowing it and others where they are not allowing. Wherever they are allowing, we are continuing and in others, we are making representations to the government saying that production of all packaged foods should be considered essential or it will create further chaos, the executive said on condition of anonymity.

In a post on LinkedIn, Vivek Gambhir, managing director of Godrej Consumer Products Ltd, said that the company was increasing manufacturing capacity to ensure ready availability of essential goods, but urged the government to give clear directions to enforcement authorities to stop harassment.
The boutique Jupiter Hotel will become a shelter for homeless people who are at high risk of dying if they contract COVID-19.

The hip hotel on East Burnside Street connected to the restaurant and venue Doug Fir Lounge will open 81 rooms to people who are already in publicly funded shelters and have respiratory issues or other underlying conditions that put them in a high risk category but have not tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

Twelve people have already moved in, and officials expect the hotel to fill up eventually. In addition to people with serious underlying conditions, the other occupants will be people now staying in homeless shelters who show signs of sickness and need to avoid potentially spreading it to other shelter residents.

Jupiter Hotel General Manager Nick Pearson said he heard Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury say on XRAY FM Tuesday morngin she wanted to add hundreds of shelter beds to the homeless services system quickly and by that afternoon he was in talks with officials.

Hotel occupancy rates were plunging, and we had an underutilized asset and the county had an oversized need, said Nick Pearson, Jupiter Hotels general manager. Working together seemed like a no-brainer.

The Jupiter was forced to lay off half its staff last week as cancellation requests piled up and daily occupancy rates dropped to between 7% and 20% for the 148 rooms between both the original location and the annex, said Katie Watkins, the Jupiter Hotels marketing, public relations and brand manager. At the time, Watkins said the Jupiter may have to lay off another 25% of its staff by the end of that week. Already, losses stemming from the coronavirus outbreak had forced the Jupiter and its two restaurants, Hey Love and Doug Fir Lounge, to lay off a combined 150 employees.

The renovated 1962 motor lodge will be repurposed into a space where social service and medical staff can care for people who will be moved out of existing shelters.

Joint Office of Homeless Services Director Marc Jolin said that the Jupiter will have a nurse on siteand a full staff of shelter workers at all times. The three other recently opened shelters also have 24-7 staffing.

The Jupiter Hotel is the first of a rash of temporary shelters targeted specifically for people who are sick. Another shelter is planned that will hold people who have tested positive for COVID-19 but have no home to recover in and dont require hospitalization.

Homeless people are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19 because many have respiratory infections and weakened immune systems from harsh living conditions. They also have few resources to stay hygienic enough to prevent illness and no place to go to recover.

The annex, Jupiter NEXT, which is a separate building next door to the original hotel, will continue to remain open to the public as a hotel. That hotel is following U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention protocols for sanitation and hygiene, according to management.

Jupiter NEXT will also be providing rooms to hospital workers who cant return home at night, either because of a household member with a compromised immune system or other issues.

None of these spaces, including the rooms at Jupiter Hotel, will increase overall shelter capacity. Existing shelters are still open, but many have paused or limited new arrivals to make sure that beds can be placed six feet apart and there is enough room for residents to socially distance.

The city-county Joint Office of Homeless Services opened two city parks properties, the East Portland Community Center and the Charles Jordan Community Center, as well as Metros Oregon Convention Center, to serve as homeless shelters in the past two weeks.

Multnomah County is now trying to hire temporary shelter works. Anyone who is unemployed or could volunteer who has a background in social services, behavioral health or medical training is encouraged to apply.

Jamie Goldberg contributed to this report.

-- Molly Harbarger

mharbarger@oregonian.com | 503-294-5923 | @MollyHarbarger

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
The American health care system might not be equipped for what's next in the coronavirus pandemic if people don't heed warnings from authorities, health officials say.

As the US death toll tops 110, states are ordering more shutdowns. Hospital employees are making their own face masks. And doctors are begging the public to keep their distance from others.

"The bottom line is things will get much worse," said Dr. James Phillips, an assistant professor at George Washington University Hospital.

"We're at a significant risk of overwhelming the number of (hospital) beds we have."

More than 7,000 Americans have been infected with coronavirus, and that number changes by the hour.

Two major factors are fueling this pandemic: the fact that people with no symptoms can easily spread the virus, and problems with testing in the US.

That's why it's critical for everyone -- even those who don't feel sick -- to stay at least 6 feet away from others and avoid social gatherings.

"We're so far behind on testing, there's only one way we can be certain not to transmit the virus and be certain not to get it ourselves. And that is that we need to start treating every person as though they have this," Phillips said.

Similarly, "everyone needs to treat us like we have it, and socially distance ourselves in that manner. Because until we have (adequate) testing, we don't know who has this. And we're not sure when they start spreading it."

You asked, we're answering: Your top coronavirus questions every day

The fight against the virus also has taken an economic toll. The Senate on Wednesday approved a coronavirus relief package that includes paid emergency leave and measures for free testing. The legislation, approved by the House, will go to President Donald Trump to sign.

'History will not forgive us for waiting an hour more'

As the US scrambles to fight the outbreak, states are ordering new shutdowns and restrictions every day.

At least 39 states have shut down schools.

Nevada ordered the closure of all non-essential businesses for 30 days.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order Wednesday that requires at least 50% of a business' employees to work from home.

In Utah, Ohio, New York, New Jersey and Louisiana, customers can't sit in restaurants or bars -- all food must be ordered as takeout.

In Ohio, one bar was padlocked and barricaded for violating the governor's order Sunday and Monday, the Cincinnati Police Department said.

"Not only are you putting the general public at risk, you're putting our officers at risk that had to go in and deal with the individuals that were in violation," Patrol Bureau Commander Paul Neudigate said.

States such as Michigan and New Mexico have limited public gatherings to fewer than 50 people. Oregon put the cap at 25.

Earlier this week, the federal government said Americans should avoid groups of more than 10 people.

In Northern California, about 8 million people have been ordered to shelter in place. The Southern California city of Palm Springs issued a similar mandate.

What's allowed during a shelter-in-place order, and what's not?

"The time for half measures is over," San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said. "History will not forgive us for waiting an hour more."

San Francisco has banned all non-essential travel, including walking, biking, driving or taking public transit.

"Individuals may go on a walk, get exercise, or take a pet outside to go to the bathroom, as long as at least six feet of social distancing is maintained," the city's mandate says.

Those riding public transit must maintain at least six feet of social distancing from other passengers.

"We know these measures will significantly disrupt people's day-to-day lives," San Francisco Mayor London Breed said. "But they are absolutely necessary."

'It will be ugly'

There won't be enough hospital beds, medical staff or equipment to handle the coronavirus outbreak if continues at its current pace, officials say.

"We will have a shortage of ICU beds. It will be ugly," Gov. Cuomo said this week.

New York state has 53,000 hospital beds. Wednesday, Cuomo said the state needs as many as 110,000 beds.

The challenges facing New York are "likely going to happen in the (rest of the) 50 states," said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

Health officials say the US wasn't adequately prepared for this pandemic.

Two years ago, the CDC stopped funding epidemic prevention activities in 39 countries, including China, after the Trump administration refused to reallocate money to a program that started during the government's response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

At that time, former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden said the move "would significantly increase the chance an epidemic will spread without our knowledge and endanger lives in our country and around the world."

In response to the coronavirus outbreak, "we're two months too late in starting to do this," said Dr. Eric Toner, who studies hospital preparedness at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

"I really think this is a fundamental responsibility of government to have acted on this a long time ago."

So now it's up to the public to take precautions and avoid giving and receiving the virus.

"What needs to happen in this country is we need to break the cycle of transmission," CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said. "And it doesn't look like that's happening right now."

Health workers are sewing makeshift masks

In southwest Georgia, Phoebe Putney Health System used six months' worth of supplies less than a week, said Scott Steiner, the hospital group's president and CEO.

"We've got a three-day supply of N95 masks on hand," Steiner said Wednesday. "In order to preserve these, and get them to last longer, we've got a team of people sewing masks together."

He held up a "prototype" made of surgical sheeting that can be placed over a real N95 mask.

"This is what we're going to have to do because we don't know when the next shipment is coming," Steiner said.

Across the country, officials are taking drastic measures in the fight to control coronavirus.

New York state will waive Department of Health regulations on how many beds can be in a hospital room as it tries to double the number of beds.

The state is also reaching out to retired nurses and doctors plus medical and nursing schools to see whether they can help.

And two Navy hospital ships are being deployed along the East Coast to help alleviate the strain on hospitals.

Those ships, the Comfort and Mercy, won't be treating coronavirus patients. Instead, they'll treat other hospital patients so health care workers can concentrate on the growing numbers of coronavirus cases.

The Comfort will likely head to New York, but it will likely take weeks because the ship is undergoing maintenance, Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said.

The Mercy will be ready much sooner, in a matter of days. But the destination is not clear.

"When it's prepared to sail, we will make a determination on where it's going to go." Hoffman said.

Medical equipment providers struggle to keep up

Ventilator manufacturer Hamilton Medical Inc. said it has received hundreds of orders and requests within the past few weeks.

"It is more than we can currently provide," said Kathrin Elsner, team leader of MarCom Ventilators at Hamilton Medical.

Michael Dowling, president and CEO of the Northwell Health, was picked by New York's governor to lead a hospital surge team. He said he wants to purchase as many as 500 ventilators, which can cost as much as $20,000 to $40,000 a machine.

Meanwhile, smaller, rural hospitals across the United States -- which often have no more than 25 beds and just one ventilator -- might be forced to transfer patients to larger facilities if they see a surge in cases.

"Who's at risk? Elderly, low-income, people with high health needs. That is rural America," said Alan Morgan, chief executive officer of the National Rural Health Association.

"You have a high proportion of low-income, elderly people with high health needs. So if you were to have a cluster in a rural community it would turn bad quickly."

Also in rural America, "You've got a shortage of primary care, certainly a shortage of specialty care," Morgan said. "You have a small clinical staff, so you can't afford mistakes."

But with the coronavirus outbreak, overworked employees are more likely to make errors.

"Part of it is just exhausting our personnel," said Dr. David Hill, a pulmonary critical care physician and a spokesman for the American Lung Association. "Health care is complicated, and people make mistakes when they're overworked."
Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International, the world's busiest airport, has turned a runway into a parking lot for grounded aircraft; about 80 per cent of Frankfurt airport workers have had their working hours cut and many now won't go to work at all; Manchester has closed two of its three terminals and short-hop specialist London City Airport is suspending all flights until the end of April. Orly airport near Paris is also closing temporarily.

Airports around the world have become glorified parking lots for planes. Credit:AP

The sudden collapse of air travel triggered by travel restrictions and customer fears of coronavirus is having a severe impact on airport cash flows. The fees they get from airlines have been cut to the bone, as have commercial revenues from services like car-parking. If retail concessions or car rental agents go bust, another source of income could be wiped out. European airport operators estimate that they face a 14 billion euro ($US25.5 billion) hit to revenues.

Like their airline customers, the world's airports are calling on governments for financial assistance. Some help is justified - not least because airports play a vital role in transporting essential medical supplies. But for privatised airports, it could be more difficult to convince authorities that help is merited. International investors who've funded a massive expansion of global airport capacity in recent years may have to make sacrifices too.

Where airports remain in public hands, as in the US, bailouts aren't so controversial: airports are due to get a $US10 billion handout as part of the government's $US2 trillion ($3.3 trillion) rescue plan. Without it, they worry they won't be able to service a combined $US100 billion debt load. A default would push up borrowing costs across the sector.
As the coronavirus outbreak ramps up in the United States, many are watching (or rewatching) the 2011 film Contagion to quell (or fuel) their anxiety. Contagion is about a virus that infects much of the world, much like COVID-19 is currently doing. Upon rewatch, Contagion has quite a few similarities with the current coronavirus pandemic. However, a scientist who advised on the film in 2011 said that its too little, too late. She believes we didnt take Contagion seriously enough when it came out.

Luciana Bozan Barroso and actor Matt Damon attend the Contagion premiere in 2011 | Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

The 2011 pandemic movie is popular again in 2020

Tracey McNamara is a veterinary pathologist and professor of pathology. She recently sat down with Buzzfeed News to talk about her time as a scientific adviser on Contagion. Buzzfeed explained that the Contagion filmmakers reached out to her for advice because she was the veterinarian at the Bronx Zoo who helped discover the West Nile virus. McNamara also was part of the push to get the Department of Defense to investigate the disease.

The scientist isnt too shocked that Contagion has so much renewed interest in 2020. But, she told BuzzFeed that she hopes people watching it now learn something from the 2011 movie. McNamara said;

If people are watching it again, and if federal and state officials are watching it again, I hope theyre realizing that the movie was really about what can happen with a novel pandemic threat, and I think people should have taken it much more seriously.

The veterinary pathologist shared that most viewers didnt take the movie very seriously at the time Contagion was released.

I wish people had paid closer attention to it when the film came out, McNamara lamented.  it really was a warning to the federal government that this could happen and you need to prepare.

A pedestrian walks past a shuttered movie theater in Los Angeles, California | Mario Tama/Getty Images

She related the coronavirus pandemic to her time dealing with the West Nile virus. McNamara says its important for our political leaders to say the right thing. She told BuzzFeed:

Youre going to hear a lot of people making all sorts of proclamations and announcements, and whenever someone says something about a brand-new, previously unknown virus, I think, You should choose your words carefully. You may have to eat them.

Contagion scientific adviser talks about similarities to the coronavirus pandemic

The expert on Contagion continued her thoughts on the parallels between the 2011 film and the current public health crisis. McNamara said:

The other thing that really rang true in that film is when someone at a press conference asks the character who works for the CDC if this virus had been weaponized, and his response is, Mother Nature weaponized it. And thats also very, very real because thats what weve been warning people about for 20 years.

She continued that people shouldnt get too impatient to find a cure to COVID-19. The film Contagion shows a long vaccine development process, as well as a lottery system to decide who gets it first.

That rings true because to get a vaccine to market and approved by the FDA, its a very lengthy process, McNamara said.  I think antivirals will be more important in the short term.

Steven Soderbergh, director of Contagion, at the 68th Venice International Film Festival at Palazzo del Casino in 2011 | Dominique Charriau/WireImage

McNamara also told BuzzFeed what she thinks we all might learn from the COVID-19 outbreak.

I think the lesson that will come out of this is we need to have another look at how we respond to rapidly evolving novel disease threats, she said.
Since the coronavirus outbreak began in January, a rising number of cases around the world has led to an increase in panic and concern. 

Worry has appeared more prevalent in recent days, following the prime ministers announcement on Monday 23 March that the nation was to be placed in lockdown.

Fear has understandably begun shaping peoples behaviour; sales of hand sanitiser gel (recommended by the World Health Organisation as a preventative measure for the coronavirus) spiked 255 per cent in February as the Covid-19 outbreak spread.

Supermarkets including Tesco, Asda and Waitrose have implemented rationing of certain items and social distancing measures in response to customers panic-buying and stockpiling.

Boots confirmed with The Independent that a notable increase in hand sanitiser sales resulted in a limit of two purchases per customer, although the retailer said it does have stock available in its warehouses.

Ocado warned customers they were facing exceptionally high demand for delivery slots, while elsewhere around the world, it has been reported that items like toilet roll are also increasingly scarce as people buy in bulk.

But should you be stockpiling to prepare for self-isolation should you develop symptoms and be unable to leave the house for 14 days straight?

What are consumers stockpiling?

In addition to hand sanitiser, members of the British public are stockpiling other goods including food and medicines.

A number of American Twitter users shared images of empty shelves at Costco supermarkets, seemingly due to fears over Covid-19.

And in the UK Ocado warned customers of high demand. More people than usual seem to be placing particularly large orders.

As a result, delivery slots are selling out quicker than expected, an email sent to customers read.

Ocado emphasised to The Independent that this was a result of a shortage of delivery slots as opposed to food products being in low supply.

But Bruno Monteyne, senior analyst at Bernstein and Tesco Asia supply chain director, said that a major outbreak of the virus could quickly lead to panic buying, empty shelves and food riots.

The objective isnt to scaremonger. On the contrary: the industry has plans to deal with this, Mr Monteyne said.

Yes, it will be chaotic (and expect pictures of empty shelves), but the industry will reduce complexity to keep the country fed.

Other businesses have reported seeing spikes in the buying of medicines and pharmaceutical goods. Shyam Morjaria, superintendent pharmacist at online pharmacy UK Meds, told The Independent there had been an increase in purchases of cough and cold remedies, vitamins, hygiene products and face masks.

Worried-well patients attempt to do everything within their means to protect themselves against the coronavirus outbreak.

Earlier this month, several food giants signed an open letter published by the British Retail Consortium urging customers to be considerate when shopping.

We would ask everyone to be considerate in the way they shop, the letter said.

We understand your concerns but buying more than is needed can sometimes mean that others will be left without. There is enough for everyone if we all work together.

How are businesses responding to reports of stockpiling?

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) says retail companies have not been drastically affected as of yet.

Disruption to supply chains has been limited, and the availability of products remains good, Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the BRC, told The Independent.

Retailers are working closely with their suppliers and monitoring consumer behaviour to anticipate changes in future demand.

Mr Opie added that sales of hand sanitiser have increased due to individuals and businesses making sensible precautions, and retailers are taking necessary steps to meet the rise in demand for certain hygiene products.

Ian Wright CBE, chief executive of the Food and Drink Federation (FDF), agreed that the UK is well-prepared to avoid shortages: At this stage supply chains have experienced disruption but there is no evidence of significant disruption to food supplies.

UK food and drink manufacturers have robust procedures in place.

Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears Show all 16 1 /16 Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears Gondoliers wait for customers in Venice, Italy, Friday, Feb. 28, 2020. Authorities in Italy decided to re-open schools and museums in some of the areas less hard-hit by the coronavirus outbreak in the country which has the most cases outside of Asia, as Italians on Friday yearned for a return to normal life even amid fears that the outbreak could plunge the country's economy into recession. AP Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears Gondoliers wait for customers in Venice, Italy, Friday, Feb. 28, 2020. Authorities in Italy decided to re-open schools and museums in some of the areas less hard-hit by the coronavirus outbreak in the country which has the most cases outside of Asia, as Italians on Friday yearned for a return to normal life even amid fears that the outbreak could plunge the country's economy into recession. AP Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears A man wearing a protective mask walks past the Ponte di Rialto (Rialto Bridge) in Venice, Italy, Friday, Feb. 28, 2020. Authorities in Italy decided to re-open schools and museums in some of the areas less hard-hit by the coronavirus outbreak in the country which has the most cases outside of Asia, as Italians on Friday yearned for a return to normal life even amid fears that the outbreak could plunge the country's economy into recession. AP Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears A gondolier on the Grand Canal as the sun sets in Venice, Italy, Friday, Feb. 28, 2020. Authorities in Italy decided to re-open schools and museums in some of the areas less hard-hit by the coronavirus outbreak in the country which has the most cases outside of Asia, as Italians on Friday yearned for a return to normal life even amid fears that the outbreak could plunge the country's economy into recession. AP Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears A local pulls a trolley as she leaves a street food market in Venice, Saturday, Feb. 29, 2020. A U.S. government advisory urging Americans to reconsider travel to Italy due to the spread of a new virus is the "final blow" to the nation's tourism industry, the head of Italy's hotel federation said Saturday. Venice, which was nearing recovery in the Carnival season following a tourist lull after record flooding in November, saw bookings drop immediately after regional officials canceled the final two days of celebrations this week, unprecedented in modern times. AP Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears Locals wait for a mass at the barely empty San Salvador church in Venice, Sunday, March 1, 2020. A coughing Pope Francis told Italy, pilgrims gathered for the traditional Sunday blessing that he is canceling his participation at a week-long spiritual retreat in the Roman countryside because of a cold. It is the first time in his seven-year papacy that he has missed the spiritual exercises that he initiated early in his pontificate to mark the start of each Lenten season. AP Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears Tourists wearing protective masks take photographs in Venice, Sunday, March 1, 2020. Italian tourism officials are worrying a new virus could do more damage to their industry than the Sept. 11 terror attacks as the country's confirmed cases surpassed 1,000. AP Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears Tourists wearing protective masks look at their smartphones as they have a break at the St. Mark's square in Venice, Sunday, March 1, 2020. Italian tourism officials are worrying a new virus could do more damage to their industry than the Sept. 11 terror attacks as the country's confirmed cases surpassed 1,000. AP Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears A couple stand at the Rialto bridge during a rainy day in Venice, Sunday, March 1, 2020. Italian tourism officials are worrying a new virus could do more damage to their industry than the Sept. 11 terror attacks as the country's confirmed cases surpassed 1,000. AP Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears An empty canal is seen after the spread of coronavirus has caused a decline in the number of tourists in Venice, Italy, March 1, 2020. REUTERS Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears An empty canal is seen after the spread of coronavirus has caused a decline in the number of tourists in Venice, Italy, March 1, 2020. Reuters Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears An empty canal is seen after the spread of coronavirus has caused a decline in the number of tourists in Venice, Italy, March 1, 2020. REUTERS Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears An empty canal is seen after the spread of coronavirus has caused a decline of tourists in Venice, Italy, March 1, 2020. REUTERS Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears An empty water bus after the spread of coronavirus has caused a decline in the number of tourists in Venice, Italy, March 1, 2020. REUTERS Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears Tourists shelter against the rain with umbrellas as they walk in the empty St. Mark's Square during a rainy day in Venice, Sunday, March 1, 2020. Italian tourism officials are worrying a new virus could do more damage to their industry than the Sept. 11 terror attacks. AP Streets of Venice empty due to Coronavirus fears Gondolas are parked on a rainy day in Venice, Sunday, March 1, 2020. Italian tourism officials are worrying a new virus could do more damage to their industry than the Sept. 11 terror attacks. AP

But Markus Kruger, chief economist for commercial data and analytics firm Dun and Bradstreet, explained to The Independent that the continued spread of the coronavirus could have long-term potential impact to businesses, their supply chains and the economy at large.

Data shows that there are 51,000 companies worldwide that source directly from the impacted regions in China, with another five million companies indirectly exposed via Tier 2 supply chain relationships, Mr Kruger said.

South Korea and Italy, and companies are having to assess the potential risk to their supply chain and business operations.

Mr Kruger added that while the situation in China is starting to improve and several factories have re-opened (albeit not working with full capacity), supply chains will remain under stress for several more weeks.

This supply chain disruption comes at a time when UK companies are also dealing with uncertainty around the potential implementation of new tariffs and quotas in UK-EU trade at the end of the Brexit transition period in December, he added.

Several supermarkets have introduced measures such as the rationing of products so that consumers are unable to buy more than they require.

Since a measure was introduced at Sainsburys on 18 March, customers at the supermarket have only been able to buy a maximum of three grocery products and two of the most popular products, including toilet paper, soap and UHT milk.

On Wednesday 8 April, the supermarket announced it had lifted buying restrictions on thousands of products to allow customers to shop for vulnerable people who cannot leave their homes.

Asda announced that customers can only buy up to three items from the food, toiletries and cleaning products aisles, later easing restrictions on chilled food, fruit and vegetables, while Waitrose said individuals can only buy three items at a time, and only two packets of toilet paper in one go.

Supermarkets including Iceland, Sainsburys and Tesco have also introduced dedicated shopping hours for the elderly, vulnerable customers, NHS and social care workers so that they can get all the food and household supplies they need.

So is stockpiling necessary?

On Tuesday 3 March, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance joined Boris Johnson to address the nation over the coronavirus outbreak.

Mr Vallance said members of the public should not resort to panic-buying.

I think the advice is that there is absolutely no reason to be doing any panic buying of any sort or going out and keeping large supplies of things, the chief scientific adviser said.

Clearly there will need to be measures in cases of household quarantine for making sure food is in the right place at the right time but we imagine that could be a rolling case of household quarantine if that measure becomes necessary, and clearly things will need to be in place for care homes and so on if that decision is made.

On the UK governments website, it says that stockpiles are maintained of the most important medicines and protective equipment for healthcare staff who may come into contact with patients with the virus.

Following the implementation of a lockdown across the UK on Monday 23 March, the British Retail Consortium holds fast in the view that shoppers should only buy what they need and refrain from panic-buying.

Retailers are working incredibly hard to keep shops well-stocked and deliveries running as smoothly as possible, said Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the organisation.

In the face of unprecedented demand, we urge everyone to be considerate as buying more than is necessary can sometimes mean that others will be left without.

This is a time for everyone to come together, and we hope everyone will support friends, family and neighbours, particularly those who are elderly or self-isolating, so that everyone can get access to the products they need.

On Wednesday 25 March, Tesco released a statement outlining certain measures it had put into place to ensure all customers are treated fairly.

Customers can only buy three items from every product line and to shop in-store rather than online if customers are able to leave their homes as their online delivery slots are at full capacity.

We have more stock coming into stores every day, with up to double the usual amounts of key essentials arriving  but we need everyones help: please buy only what you need, so that there is enough for everyone, the supermarket said.

A spokesperson for Aldi informed The Independent that all supermarkets share the view that customers should not stockpile because there are enough supplies to go around.

People may worry that if they show symptoms for the coronavirus, theyll be unable to leave their home for 14 days and therefore may run low on household essentials.

In the event of this happening, it may be wise to contact a neighbour who could buy your groceries for you.
Although Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks were closed to the public on Wednesday over concerns regarding spread of the novel coronavirus, work continues to prepare for an eventual opening.

In Yellowstone that means spring road plowing.

We are working to put ourselves in a position to open up, whenever that is, said Cam Sholly, Yellowstone superintendent.

The park was to begin gradually opening on April 17. At the request of surrounding community health officials and the governors of Wyoming and Montana, park officials decided last Tuesday to shut their gates. How long that closure will last is uncertain.

Weve got hundreds and hundreds of seasonal (workers) we normally hire, Sholly noted. We will continue to hire, but delay their start date  depending on when we actually open.

Because of the park closure, visitors are being turned away at the only route thats open year-round  the North Entrance at Gardiner.

We do have the gate staffed, Sholly said. In the first day  its been fairly light traffic.

Residents of the Montana towns of Cooke City and Silver Gate, at the opposite end of the road through the parks North Entrance, along with people doing business in those communities are being allowed to pass through the gate, he added. That privilege will also be given to snowmobilers and backcountry skiers who recreate on national forest lands in the Cooke City area. But there are limited services available in the small mountain towns, Sholly warned, since restaurants and bars have been ordered to close.

Anyone caught lingering in the park between Gardiner and Cooke City can be cited, Sholly pointed out. The road will be regularly patrolled by park rangers.

When the decision is made to reopen, Sholly said the park has sufficient cleaning supplies in storage to disinfect its facilities. Disinfectants and cleaning solutions are some of the items people have been purchasing in bulk since the COVID-19 outbreak has become more serious, leaving store shelves bare.

Prior to deciding to close, Yellowstone had taken steps to limit visitors exposure by closing its visitor center and the Boiling River, a popular hot springs soaking site.

Its important that people recognize that last week, even before the Wyoming and Montana governors put out closures  we had made changes, Sholly said.

Yet people were still visiting Yellowstone, since early spring can be a good time to see grizzly bears and wolves. But health officials were concerned that even small numbers of visitors could spread the coronavirus or add to the stress of keeping store shelves stocked in Gardiner at a time when hoarding has become a problem. There were also fears that any COVID-19 diagnosis would quickly overwhelm the nearby communitys limited health facilities.

Its not a decision we took lightly or alone, Sholly said.
Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Ihor Zhovkva has met with UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine Ms. Osnat Lubrani.

The main issue of the meeting was the support of Ukraine in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, the presidents press service reported.

Ihor Zhovkva informed Osnat Lubrani about the daily work in the Office of the President of Ukraine of the coordination mechanism to counteract coronavirus and the direct efforts of the President to obtain the necessary practical and financial assistance.

Topical issues of further coordination of the work of state authorities with UN agencies on these issues were also discussed.

The deputy head of the Presidents Office thanked the UN representative for the assistance already provided to Ukraine for the purchase of medical equipment in the amount of $160 million.

The COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan announced by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, which envisages the allocation of more than $30 million in aid to Ukraine, was separately noted. In this regard, Zhovkva said that this assistance should be allocated first and foremost to the regions that need it already today.

The deputy head of the Presidents Office called on the UN representative to promote the involvement of the WHOs capacities for coordinating the cooperation of Ukrainian virologists working on the coronavirus vaccine with their foreign partners to consolidate relevant international efforts.

In addition, the parties stressed the need to continue Ukraine's cooperation with the United Nations in order to develop in advance an action plan for the reconstruction of Donbas.

Zhovkva also expressed hope for the further active support by the UN for the reform process in Ukraine, in particular the involvement of the Organization at the highest possible level in the work of Ukraine Reform Conference, which is planned to be held in Lithuania this summer.

The parties agreed to continue active contacts between Ukraine and the UN, in particular at the highest political level.

ish
Three of America's best-known national parks have closed to the public amid the COVID-19 outbreak following fears that they could become become coronavirus hotspots.

Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Great Smoky Mountains all officially closed to the public Tuesday, after rangers struggled to stop thousands of tourists from pouring into the sites amid warm spring weather.

'The National Park Service listened to the concerns from our local partners and, based on current health guidance, temporarily closed the parks,' Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly and Grand Teton acting Superintendent Gopaul Noojibail said in a statement.

The decision to close Yellowstone, the worlds first national park, and neighboring Grand Teton came after pressure from state and local officials. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon were especially vocal about the need to close Yellowstone.

Meanwhile, social distancing wasn't working at Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee, where about 30,000 people lured by good weather, wildflowers and spring break visited each day last week.

Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Great Smoky Mountains all officially closed to the public Tuesday, after rangers struggled to stop thousands of tourists from pouring into the sites. Yellowstone is pictured Tuesday

Yellowstone attracts thousands of visitors, who often crowd close together to take in the park's majestic scenes (file photo)

The visitation that was higher than at the same time last year led to congestion at popular sites like Laurel Falls, Newfound Gap and Cades Cove and prompted calls by local government leaders to close.

Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Great Smoky Mountains join an already long list of national park sites that have suspended visits due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The Statue of Liberty in New York City and Alcatraz in California have already closed to the public.

Meanwhile, Rocky Mountain National Park closed indefinitely on Friday after a local mayor asked Bernhardt to do so to protect Estes Park, a gateway town where park visitors in pursuit of ice cream and souvenirs crowd the sidewalks during nice weather.

Yosemite, whose striking features like Half-Dome draws about 4 million visitors a year, closed indefinitely on Friday at the request of local health officials to all people except park employees, concessionaires and residents with homes inside the park's boundaries.

Crowds of visitors on the wooden walkways at the Midway Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park (file photo)

Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming (pictured) is one of the three parks which closed Tuesday

The entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Cherokee, North Carolina is pictured. About 30,000 people lured by good weather, wildflowers and spring break visited each day last week

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt had promised last week that at parks still open, entrance fees would be temporarily waived to make it easier for people to get outdoors and 'implement some social distancing.' He gave individual park superintendents the power to close or modify operations to adhere to health safety recommendations from the White House and Centers for Disease Control.

Other parks that remain open have closed shuttles, campgrounds, visitor centers and some trails to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Zion National Park in Utah announced Monday it is closing its campgrounds and part of a popular trail called Angel's Landing that remained crowded with people over the weekend.

Officials were concerned that people were not following social distancing guidelines, and worried that the parks could be come coronavirus hot spots (file photo)

The park tweeted on Sunday a picture of the trail taken on Saturday and the caption, 'Practice #SocialDistancing! CDC says to avoid groups larger than 10 and stay 6 feet apart. You can help slow the spread of COVID-19! We do not recommend hiking busy narrow trails (like Angels Landing).'

The top part of the hike that is being closed is bordered by steep drops and ascends some 1,500 feet (457 meters) above the southern Utah park's red-rock cliffs, offering sweeping views. Park officials had previously closed shuttles used to take people through a narrow canyon.

Grand Canyon National Park stopped its popular river trips Tuesday, in line with the suspension of river trips at other national parks such as Big Bend and Canyonlands. Several thousand people apply for about 460 annual permits for the private trips down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon through a lottery system. Commercial trips also are suspended.

Will and Michele Beemer were scheduled to be on the last private river trip to launch in the Grand Canyon on Monday after flying to Arizona from the East Coast but chose to postpone.

'Basically our whole trip went from close friends to people we barely knew,' Will Beemer, 71, said Tuesday. 'We probably would have been the ones potentially at greater danger than the 20-somethings on the trip.'

The only other time Yellowstone has closed to all visitors aside from seasonal shutdowns was when wildfires burned over one-third of the park in 1988, Yellowstone historian Tamsen Emerson Hert said Tuesday. Tourism even continued during World War I and World War II, though the park's hotels closed, she said.

The Yellowstone closure came at the end of its winter season- which officially wrapped on March 15.

An annual program underway to reduce the Yellowstone region's bison population by rounding up and sending some of the animals to slaughter and herd others back into the park would continue as planned, park officials said.
Undelivered Boeing 737 Max planes are parked idly in a Boeing property in Seattle, Washington, on August 13, 2019.

David Ryder/Getty Images

Airlines the world over are seeing their wings clipped by travel bans, airspace closures, and low demand for travel.

European, Asian, and Middle Eastern continue to restrict air travel and make operating flights impossible for some airlines.

Most airlines are scheduled to resume operation in mid-April, with some not planning to take to the skies again until May or June.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Airlines around the world are choosing to ground flights rather than fly empty aircraft as the COVID-19 crisis continues to affect the skies, with some airlines being bound by a government mandate to stay grounded.

Travel bans and airspace closures also have contributed to the temporary suspensions of over 50 airlines, ranging from global national carriers to small regional airlines. While demand for travel is already at a record low, airlines are struggling to find airports to land at with entire nations shutting down their borders in a desperate attempt to prevent an outbreak of the virus that has infected thousands and shown little regard for national boundaries.

With air travel the primary means of the virus' spread, airlines are the first target of nations attempting to protect their citizenry.

European, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries primarily have seen their airlines temporarily shutdown, with some of the world's largest airlines forced to cancel countless flights and leaving travelers rushing to get in the air before it's too late. In the US, airlines have greatly reduced operations but many still operate as the country's airspace remains open.

Take a look at which airlines won't be gracing the world's skies in the near future.

Air Antwerp

A Fokker 50 propeller aircraft similar to the one used by Air Antwerp.

aviation-images.com/Universal Images Group/Getty

Belgium's Air Antwerp announced that it will be canceling all of its flights from March 22 until April 12.

The temporary suspension of operations, the airline stated, is due to measures taken by the Belgian government to restrict travel, especially as the European Union voted to close its external borders.

Story continues

Air Arabia

An Air Arabia Airbus A320.

Reuters

Air Arabia announced the suspension of its operations from March 25 as a United Arab Emirates government directive prohibits passenger flights from arriving in the country.

The Sharjah-based airline did not say when it plans to resume operations.

Air Astana

An Air Astana Boeing 767-300ER.

REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov

Kazakhstan's Air Astana announced the suspension of operations until mid-April following a government state of emergency restricting flights in the country.

The mandate affects all Kazakhstan airlines but Air Astana will be operating limited non-scheduled repatriation flights for residents and citizens.

Air Baltic

An Air Baltic Airbus A220.

Benjamin Zhang/Business Insider

Air Baltic announced that it will suspend all operations as the government of Latvia, where the carrier is based, has decided to largely close its borders to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in its country. The carrier will cease operations from March 17 until April 15, including in Estonia and Lithuania where it has secondary bases.

Air India

An Air India Boeing 777-300ER.

Fabrizio Gandolfo/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty

Air India is temporarily ceasing operations as Indian airspace is closing on March 25, according to a government press release.

The closure affects all of India's airlines and foreign airlines flying to or through the subcontinent.

Air India Express

An Air India Express Boeing 737-800.

Philip Lange / Shutterstock.com

Air India Express is temporarily ceasing operations as Indian airspace is closing on March 25, according to a government press release.

The closure affects all of India's airlines and foreign airlines flying to or through the subcontinent.

Air Madagascar

An Air Madagascar aircraft.

Air Madagascar.

Air Madagascar announced the suspension of all flights as its island homeland attempts to prevent a coronavirus outbreak.

The African airline will be suspending flights for a month between March 20 and April 20.

Air Malta

An Air Malta Airbus A320.

Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto

Air Malta announced on Wednesday that it will be suspending operations beginning just before midnight on Friday until further notice.

The suspension comes as the Maltese government is suspending all commercial flight traffic to the island nation in an attempt to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Air Moldova

An Air Moldova Embraer regional aircraft.

Vytautas Kielaitis / Shutterstock.com

Air Moldova will be suspending operations until April 1, Routes Online reported, per government mandate.

The suspension primarily affects flights from the airline's Chisinau hub to European and Middle Eastern destinations.

Air Serbia

An Air Serbia Airbus A330.

AP

Air Serbia announced the suspension of its operation following restrictions placed on international air traffic from the Serbian government. The airline primarily operates within Europe with one long-haul route between Belgrade and New York.

Air Transat

An Air Transat Airbus A330.

Rebius/Shutterstock

Air Transat announced that all flights will be gradually canceled until April 30. The move comes as the Canadian government and European Union, as well as Caribbean nations served by Air Transat, are closing national borders to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Air Asia

An Air Asia Airbus A320.

MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty

Multiple AirAsia subsidiaries have announced the suspension of services due to multiple travel bans.

AirAsia's Philippines subsidiary announced the cancellation of all international and domestic flights from March 20 to April 14. The move came following a Philippine government directive halting air travel in the country to prevent a coronavirus spread.

AirAsia India will also be suspending operations from March 25 as the Indian government moved to close down domestic airspace.

Austrian Airlines

Austrian Airlines aircraft on the ground in Vienna.

LEONHARD FOEGER/Reuters

Austrian Airlines announced a temporary suspension of flights for a 10-day period starting March 18.

The airline was the first in the Lufthansa Group to entirely suspend operations, with its last flight operating from Chicago to Vienna on Wednesday night.

Avianca

An Avianca Airlines plane is seen at the Monsenor Oscar Arnulfo Romero International Airport in San Luis Talpa.

Reuters

South American carrier Avianca announced the suspension of all flights starting March 25. The carrier is speeding up a previously planned drawdown of service, grounding its passenger fleet until April 12.

Blue Air

A Blue Air Boeing 737-800.

SpaceKris / Shutterstock.com

Romania's Blue Air announced the suspension of all passenger operations as its home country instituted a state of emergency due to the spread of COVID-19. Scheduled flights are expected to resume in mid-April with emergency charter flights operating until then.

Brussels Airlines

Brussels Airlines Airbus A320 aircraft.

Francois Lenoir/Reuters

Brussels Airlines, one of the smallest national airlines in the Lufthansa Group, announced it will be suspending operations between March 21 and April 19.

The suspension comes as the European Union has voted to close external borders and various countries within the political bloc have experienced outbreaks of COVID-19 that have decimated the demand for travel.

Cabo Verde Airlines

A Cabo Verde Airlines Boeing 757.

Fabrizio Gandolfo/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty

Cabo Verde Airlines announced it will be suspending all flights for at least 30 days as its archipelagic homeland attempts to shield itself from the novel coronavirus.

The newly-rebranded airline situated in Cape Verde off of the coast of Africa had recently implemented a strategy based on connecting the continents of North America, South America, Africa, and Europe via Cape Verde.

Cayman Airlines

A Cayman Airways Boeing 737.

Etienne DE MALGLAIVE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Cayman Airways is suspending operations as the Cayman Islands government has announced the closure of Owen Roberts International Airport and Charles Kirkconnell International Airport for international passenger flights from March 22.

The closure will remain in effect until April 12 and affect the majority of Cayman's operations.

Cebu Pacific Air

A Cebu Pacific Air Airbus A320.

Erik de Castro/Reuters

Cebu Pacific Air announced all flights will be canceled between March 19 and April 12. The low-cost airline joins other Philippines airlines in canceling flights in the country per government mandate.

Comair - British Airways

A Comair Boeing 737 in British Airways' livery.

Nadezda Murmakova / Shutterstock.com

South Africa's British Airways franchisee Comair is suspending operations per presidential directive on March 26. Comair along with subsidiary carrier Kulula will be grounding flights until April 19.

Copa Airlines

Copa Airlines Boeing 737 aircraft.

AP

Copa Airlines said in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the airline is planning to reduce capacity by 80% in April. The airline, based in Panama at the crossroads of the Americas, primarily connects passengers transiting between the two continents as well as Central America.

The airline later announced the full suspension of operations per Panamanian government restrictions on international travel. Copa will be grounded until April 22 starting on March 23.

CSA Czech Airlines

A CSA Czech Airlines Airbus A319.

MICHAL CIZEK/AFP/Getty

CSA Czech Airlines announced it will be canceling all flights to its hub in Prague as the Czech government is closing its borders and preventing citizens from traveling abroad.

The government ban in an attempt to prevent an outbreak of the novel coronavirus in the Czech Republic is scheduled to remain in effect from March 16 until April 11.

EgyptAir

An EgyptAir Boeing 777-300ER aircraft.

Reuters

EgyptAir announced the suspension of operations due to Egyptian government closures of airports in the North African country. Egyptian air traffic will be restricted until the end of March.

Emirates

Members of cleaning staff in protective suits board an Emirates Airbus A380 to disinfected it against the coronavirus, in Dubai.

Reuters

Emirates announced that passenger flights from March 25 will be suspended per a UAE government directive prohibiting passenger flights. The Dubai-based mega carrier did not specify when flights will resume.

Etihad Airways

An Etihad Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto/Getty

Etihad Airways announced all passenger flights will be suspended as the UAE attempts to curb the spread of COVID-19 by restricting passenger traffic. The Abu Dhabi-based carrier said the situation will be re-evaluated in two weeks following the mandate taking effect.

FlyOne

A FlyOne Airbus A319.

Markus Mainka / Shutterstock.com

Moldova's FlyOne will be suspending all operations until the end of March, the airline announced on Monday, per a government mandate to restrict air travel.

Flights are scheduled to resume on April 1.

Flydubai

flydubai's Boeing 737 Max 8 grounded.

Lindsey Wasson/Reuters

UAE low-cost carrier Flydubai will be suspending operations per a government mandate restricting air travel in the country. The suspension will remain in effect from March 25 to April 7.

IndiGo

An IndiGo Airbus A320 aircraft is pictured parked at a gate at Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport.

Reuters

Indigo is temporarily ceasing operations as Indian airspace is closing on March 25, according to a government press release. The closure affects all of India's airlines and foreign airlines flying to or through the subcontinent.

Jet2.com

A Jet2.com Airbus A320.

shutterstock/ErnestRose

The UK's Jet2.com announced the suspension of all flights until the end of April. The leisure airline connects secondary cities in the UK with leisure destinations across Europe, notably to Spain where cases of COVID-19 have risen sharply.

Jetstar Airways

A Jetstar Airways Airbus A320 aircraft.

Reuters

Multiple divisions of Asian-Pacific low-cost airline group Jetstar will be suspending operations. Jetstar Asia announced on Wednesday it will be suspending flights for three weeks from March 23 to April 15.

The Singapore-based airline was initially impacted by the initial outbreak of coronavirus as it suspended flights to mainland China and is now citing further travel restrictions imposed by national governments.

Kulula

A Kulula Boeing 737-800.

Francois De Bruyn / Shutterstock.com

South African low-cost carrier Kulula is suspending operations per presidential directive on March 26. Kulula along with parent carrier Comair announced the grounding of flights will last until April 19.

Kuwait Airways

Kuwait Airways signage at Kuwait International Airport.

Gustavo Ferrari/AP

Kuwait Airways announced the indefinite suspension of flights in line with a government mandate banning international flights to Kuwait.

The city-state was among the first in the Middle East to begin restricting access at the start of the COVID-19 spread outside of China, particularly when it reached Iran.

La Compagnie

A La Compagnie Airbus A321neo.

La Compagnie

French boutique airline La Compagnie announced that it would be suspending operations until the president's travel restrictions are lifted. The entirely business-class airline operates two routes from the French cities of Paris and Nice to Newark, New Jersey.

La Compagnie expects to resume operations once the ban expires with one daily flight between Newark and Paris on April 15 while pushing back the launch of seasonal Newark-Nice service until June 1.

Lauda

A Lauda Airbus A320.

LEONHARD FOEGER/Reuters

Ryanair subsidiary Lauda announced the suspension of operations until April 30. The airline's parent company Ryanair has nearly grounded the entirety of its fleet, offering its services for relief flights.

LOT Polish Airlines

A LOT Polish Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Soos Jozsef / Shutterstock.com

LOT Polish Airlines announced the suspension of its operations in Poland and Hungary following a directive from the Polish government to close its borders in an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19. The Polish flag carrier primarily operates flights from a base in Warsaw with a secondary base in Budapest, Hungary.

Flights are planned to cease on March 29 and resume on April 12.

Luxair

A Luxair Embraer regional jet.

Soos Jozsef / Shutterstock.com

Luxembourg's Luxair is suspending flight operations for nearly a month's time starting March 24. The airline's home country sits between France and Germany, where COVID-19 cases began to rise following the virus' spread to Europe via Italy.

Middle Eastern Airlines

A Middle East Airlines Airbus A320.

Mohamed Azakir/Reuters

Lebanon's Middle East Airlines is be suspending operations from March 19, the airline announced, as the Lebanese government attempts to prevent the larger outbreak of coronavirus in its borders.

The number of cases remains low in the country but neighboring Jordan and Israel have already taken drastic measures to prevent outbreaks.

Montenegro Airlines

A Montenegro Airlines Fokker 100.

Fabrizio Gandolfo/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty

Montenegro Airlines will be canceling all flights until April 1, Reuters reported, as its home country attempts to prevent a coronavirus outbreak.

The country is one of many in Europe taking similar actions by restricting access to its borders.

Philippine Airlines

A Philippine Airlines Airbus A330.

Romeo Ranoco/Reuters

Philippine Airlines announced a temporary suspension of all flights until mid-April. Domestic flights had previously been suspended with international flight suspensions taking effect on March 26.

The cancellations are in response to a directive from the Philippine government, which has implemented strict measures regarding travel since the first outbreak in Wuhan, China in an attempt to prevent the spread of the virus.

Porter Airlines

A Porter Airlines Bombardier Dash 8 Q400.

REUTERS/Mark Blinch

Porter Airlines announced that it will be suspending operations until June as Canada and the US agreed to close their border and the Canadian government is advising self-isolation.

The Canadian regional airline primarily operates flights in eastern Canada as well as transborder services from Toronto's Billy Bishop Airport.

Qazaq Airlines

A Qazaq Air Bombardier Dash 8 Q400.

Zhorov Igor / Shutterstock.com

Kazakhstan's Qazaq Air announced the suspension of operations until the end of March following a government state of emergency restricting flights in the country. The mandate affects all Kazakhstan airlines.

Royal Air Maroc

Royal Air Maroc's Boeing 737-800

Nicolas Economou/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Morocco's Royal Air Maroc announced the indefinite suspension of all its flights from March 21. The flag carrier of the North African country, a popular tourist destination, is suspending the flights due to a government mandate.

Royal Jordanian Airlines

A Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto/Getty

Royal Jordanian Airlines announced it would suspend all of its flights from Amman starting on March 17, becoming the first Middle Eastern airline to temporarily cease flying due to the spread of the virus. The suspension will remain in effect until the end of March.

The Jordanian flag carrier was forced to cancel the flights as the kingdom attempts to prevent an outbreak within its borders, the Jerusalem Post reported.

RwandAir

A RwandAir Airbus A330neo aircraft.

REGIS DUVIGNAU/Reuters

Africa's RwandAir announced the suspension of flights for a month's period starting on March 20. The move came following a government mandate restricting flights into the country.

TAME

A TAME Ecuador Airbus aircraft.

Almazoff / Shutterstock.com

Ecuador's TAME announced the suspension of all flights for a two-week period beginning March 17. The South American country has been proactive in restricting international visitors, going as far as to place vehicles on the runway at Guayaquil's main airport to prevent landing aircraft.

SA Express

A South African aircraft.

South African Airways

South Africa's SA Express announced that it will be suspending all of its flights beginning March 18. The state-owned airline did not state when flights would resume.

SpiceJet

A SpiceJet passenger aircraft is seen after it overshoot the runway while landing on Tuesday night at the airport in Mumbai

Reuters

India's SpiceJet is temporarily ceasing operations as Indian airspace is closing on March 25, according to a government press release. The closure affects all of India's airlines and foreign airlines flying to or through the subcontinent.

Starlux

Starlux Airlines.

TYRONE SIU/Reuters

Taiwan's Starlux Airlines is suspending operations, One Mile at a Time reported, as the airline temporarily discontinues its sole route between Taipei and Da Nang, Vietnam.

The newly-established airline had suspended its other routes at the beginning of the outbreak and was down to only one route before the decision was made to suspend the service.

Sunwing Airlines

A Sunwing Airlines Boeing 737-800.

Fabrizio Gandolfo/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty

Canada's Sunwing Airlines has announced that it will be suspending flights between March 17 and April 9.

The suspension comes as Canada is largely closing its borders amid fears of a coronavirus outbreak.

Thai Lion Air

A Thai Lion Air Boeing 737 Max.

AP

Thai Lion Air announced the suspension of flights starting March 25 until mid-April. The move comes following a government mandate restricting both domestic and international flights.

Transavia

A Transavia Airbus A320 passenger jet makes its way on the tarmac before taking off at Orly airport, near Paris.

REUTERS/Charles Platiau

Franco-Dutch low-cost airline Transavia, a member of the Air France-KLM Group, will be suspending operations indefinitely, reported La Tribune.

The bi-national airline group announced a large scale back in operations that saw a reduction of flights for both Air France and KLM, as well as regional airlines offering flights on the airlines' behalf.

Ukraine International Airlines

A Ukraine International Airlines plane pictured in New York's JFK airport in November 2018.

Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Ukraine International Airlines announced all flights across its network will be suspended until April 3, with the exception of chartered repatriation flights. The move comes as the Ukraine government closed its borders to non-residents.

Uzbekistan Airways

An Uzbekistan Airways Airbus A320.

Dmitry Feoktistov/TASS/Getty

Uzbekistan Airways announced that all international flights operated by the airline will be suspended from March 17 until April 5.

The move comes per the Uzbekistan government after the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in the country.

Vistara

A Vistara Airbus A320neo.

Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto/Getty

India's Vistara is temporarily ceasing operations as Indian airspace is closing on March 25, according to a government press release. The closure affects all of India's airlines and foreign airlines flying to or through the subcontinent.

Yemenia

A Yemenia Airbus wide-body aircraft.

SALEH AL-OBEIDI/AFP/Getty

Yemen's Yemenia announced the suspension of flights for a period of two weeks starting March 18.

The suspension came per a Yemeni government mandate restricting flights to the Middle Eastern country.

Airlink

An Airlink Embraer E190 aircraft.

Francois De Bruyn / Shutterstock.com

South Africa's Airlink is suspending operations from March 28 until April 20, according to its website. Domestic services within South Africa, in which the airline specializes, have been greatly impacted by the government implementing three-week travel restrictions lasting into late-April.

EasyJet

easyJet airplanes are pictured at Tegel Airport in Berlin.

Reuters

UK low-cost carrier EasyJet has grounded its entire fleet, the BBC reported, as Europe remains on lockdown. Over 300 of the carrier's planes have been grounded in the UK where cases of the virus are skyrocketing and even affecting the country's leaders and royalty.

Winair

A Winair aircraft in Saint Martin.

Markus Mainka / Shutterstock.com

The Caribbean's Winair has suspended all flights until at least April 6, according to its website. The carrier primarily provides short-haul intra-island flights to various Caribbean islands with a notable base in Dutch Sint Maarten.

Tigerair Australia

A Tigerair Australia Airbus A320.

John Mackintosh / Shutterstock.com

Australian low-cost airline Tigerair Australia is suspending flights entirely as government restrictions impede its operation. The suspension was announced by the airline, a subsidiary of Virgin Australia, on March 31 with no relaunch date as of yet.

SunExpress

A SunExpress Boeing 737-800.

Markus Mainka / Shutterstock.com

Turkey's SunExpress is suspending operations until the end of April. The announcement came as the Turkish government introduced travel restrictions on domestic and international flights affecting numerous airlines in the country.

Bahamasair

A Bahamasair Boeing 737.

Ivan Cholakov / Shutterstock.com

Bahamasair has suspended operations indefinitely, the airline's website reported, in an attempt to mitigate a spread of COVID-19 to the Bahamas. The archipelagic nation just 60 miles from South Florida is a popular tourist destination for North Americans and Europeans, two citizenries heavily affected by the virus.

El Al Israel Airlines

An El Al Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner.

Benthemouse / Shutterstock.com

El Al Israel Airlines is suspending flights between March 27 and April 4, the Israeli flag carrier announced on its website.

The government of Israel has been struggling to contain the novel coronavirus as the country is a popular destination for tourists and religious pilgrims, with numerous travel restrictions being implemented by the government to prevent a worse outbreak.

Harbour Air

Harbour Air seaplanes in Vancouver.

JL IMAGES / Shutterstock.com

Canada's Harbour Air is suspending operations for the entire month of April, according to its website, with plans to relaunch operations on May 4. The move comes as Canada is tightening its self-isolation and stay at home restrictions to prevent a viral outbreak.

Fastjet Zimbabwe

A Fastjet Zimbabwe Airbus A320 aircraft.

InsectWorld / Shutterstock.com

Zimbabwean low-cost carrier Fastjet Zimbabwe is suspending operations until mid-April, the airline announced. FlightGlobal reported that neighboring South Africa's travel restrictions took a large toll on Fastjet's operation and contributed to the suspension.

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You can count on Donald Trump for one thing at least: if theres a bad situation, hell find a way to make it worse.

As the COVID-19 pandemic enters an even more critical phase, the Trump administration is apparently pushing a plan that would waste resources and ramp up the tension at an already tense time for no good purpose.

It emerged on Thursday that the U.S. is looking at placing troops near the border to deter people from sneaking over from Canada and spreading the disease. (Late on Thursday, Washington reportedly dropped the idea in the face of loud objections from the Trudeau government.)

If anything, given the chaotic response to the coronavirus south of the border, it would make more sense for Canada to post soldiers on our side to keep out Americans.

COVID-19 is raging in New York State, and Canadians have more to fear from Americans coming over at Buffalo or Plattsburgh than the U.S. has to fear from Canada.

But posting troops on either side would make no sense at all, certainly not from a public health point of view.

Ever since 9/11 the border has been well-patrolled, on the American side by the U.S. Border Patrol and on the Canadian side by Canadian Border Services. And since last Saturday the border has been closed to all but essential workers and anyone trying to cross between official checkpoints is being turned back.

The border has already been well-secured, in other words, and theres zero evidence that people sneaking over the border in either direction pose a threat.

The Trudeau government was right to push back hard. Aside from the pointlessness of such a move, it would send a terrible signal about how the United States under Trump views its closest ally, neighbour and trading partner.

Both governments have long boasted that the Canada-U.S. border is the longest demilitarized frontier in the world. Its a cornerstone of the relationship and a bedrock assumption behind the cross-border exchange that is fundamental to the well-being of both countries (especially Canada).

Even in the aftermath of 9/11, when the U.S. was on maximum alert against outside threats, it did not militarize its northern border. This is no time to break with that long tradition.

The danger is not so much from a short-term military presence. It comes from the real possibility that the U.S. under Trump will turn inwards even more, thickening the border even after the pandemic eases up.

As Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland noted on Thursday, a border that is as open as possible is vital to Canada for many reasons. Much of our food and vital medical supplies come across the frontier, just to point out the most obvious.

Theres an even bigger Canada-U.S. conflict looming as the pandemic unfolds.

In Canada, were being asked (indeed, told) to accept ever-greater restrictions on our movements in order to flatten the curve and slow the spread of COVID-19. And were being warned this may go on for many weeks, perhaps months.

In Washington, though, President Trump is already agitating to get America open again and raring to go by Easter weekend  a little over two weeks from now.

Hes pushing for a more targeted approach: caring for the most vulnerable while allowing most Americans to get back to work. Hes tweeted that he doesnt want the cure to be worse than the disease, that he isnt willing to put the U.S. economy into deep freeze in the name of stopping a pandemic that he apparently sees as little worse than the common flu.

If this scenario unfolds, Trump could soon be sending millions back to work, spreading the virus just as Canadians continue to huddle indoors and our economy evaporates. Its a formula for chaos and maximum suffering.

Yes, a bad situation all round. And Trump determined to make it even worse.

Read more about:
New Delhi: Close to 800 people who had come in contact with a coronavirus-infected Mohalla Clinic doctor in Delhi have been quarantined at home for 14 days, the Aam Admi Party (AAP) government Said on Thursday (March 26, 2020).

Sharing more information, Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said, A total of 800 people who came in contact with the Mohalla Clinic doctor have been quarantined for 14 days.

Jain said that the Mohalla Clinic doctor and 4 others have been tested positive after they came in contact with an infected woman who returned from Saudi Arabia. The doctor's wife and daughter have also tested positive.

The minister also informed that COVID19 cases in Delhi have risen to 36.

The Shahdara Sub-Divisional Magistrate had on Wednesday directed that those people, who visited or were present at Mohalla Clinic in Mohanpuri area of Maujpur between March 12 and March 18, are being immediately home quarantined for 14 days.

"All those who visited or were present at Mohalla Clinic in Mohanpuri area of Maujpur between 12 March to 18 March are directed to home quarantine for 14 days, after a confirmed coronavirus positive case reported from the clinic," the official said.

According to the Delhi Health official, the clinic has been closed and sanitised.

With six new positive COVID-19 cases reported in the last 24 hours, the total number of positive coronavirus cases in the national capital reached 36 on Thursday.

It may be noted that the Prime Minister, for a second time in a week, on Tuesday evening announced a 21-day countrywide lockdown from midnight due to the outbreak of the coronavirus.

PM Modi stressed that "social distancing" is the only option to deal with the disease, which spreads rapidly. In his televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Modi said that it is vital to break the chain of the disease and experts have said that at least 21 days are needed for it.

The Prime Minister, who had also addressed the nation last week, said the lockdown has drawn a "Lakshman Rekha" in every home and people should stay indoors for their own protection and for that of their families.
*The events in this story as well as the reporting occurred prior to the coronavirus pandemic.

The frightening thought involved a gun and her baby, and it popped into Hayden Grahams mind on an otherwise normal afternoon in September 2019.

Graham was 24, married, a stay-at-home mother of a newborn and a toddler. Shed been crying more often lately, at her home in the quiet Birmingham suburb of Vestavia Hills. She has waist-length hair and a wide smile, the kind of person who prefers wearing floral dresses in happy colors, the kind of mom who fills her Facebook feed with photos of her kids.

But a creeping helplessness had clouded her infant daughters first two months of life. Graham often felt sad and overwhelmed.

Then one Friday afternoon, that terrifying thought: It was a picture in my head, she recalled, of my newborn lying on my chest, and then shooting through her body and killing us.

She was horrified, both at the gruesome thought and at herself for even thinking it. What kind of a mother thinks about something like that?

It was so scary, she said. The whole weekend I was bawling my eyes out, feeling so hopeless.

That evening, she crawled into her husbands lap and he held her while she cried. They talked about how she was feeling. She couldnt bring herself to tell him about the scary thought.

She researched her symptoms online that weekend, looking for professional help that proved hard to find. Alabama ranks dead last in the nation for mental health providers per capita. The problem is so bad that the Alabama House majority leader recently told the governor the state has failed in its responsibilities to care for those needing mental health services.

Graham finally decided to call her doctor. When her OBGYNs office opened Monday morning, she made an appointment for that afternoon.

But what began as call for help eventually spiraled into a worst-case scenario where the Grahams lost custody of their daughters for five agonizing months.

Graham likened it to a waking nightmare: It was the worst experience of my life.

Not alone

Any woman whos been pregnant is familiar with the glucose test for gestational diabetes. Drink a big cup full of sickly-sweet liquid, get your blood tested. Its routine at any OBGYN office.

But while 6 to 9% of pregnant women develop gestational diabetes, three times as many develop pregnancy-related depression or anxiety.

Mental health conditions are considered one of the most common complications of pregnancy, said Dr. Tiffany Moore Simas, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and medical director of Lifeline4Moms, a program that addresses maternal mental health.

They affect upward of 1 in 5 mothers, and thats an average, she said. There are some populations at much higher risk.

And yet doctors are less likely to recognize and treat depression in pregnant and postpartum women than in the general population, according to a study published in the American Medical Associations peer-reviewed journal JAMA Psychiatry.

In recent years, more OBGYNs are screening for pregnancy and childbirth-related mood disorders like postpartum depression. But women fall through the cracks because continuing education on how to diagnose those disorders hasnt caught up with the need, said Moore Simas.

The vast majority of obstetric providers have not been adequately trained to address (pregnancy and postpartum mood disorders), she said. Training guidelines are relatively new, she said, so we have generations of providers who didnt necessarily get trained to do it.

Were in a watershed moment where we have to catch up.

The doctors visit

Graham arrived at her obstetricians Birmingham office with her daughter strapped to her chest in a flower-print baby carrier. Her daughter Beverly, age 2 months, was exclusively breastfed and Graham wasnt sure how long the appointment would last.

Graham was nervous as she sat in the waiting room. She hoped her OB would be able to give her answers and a treatment plan.

A nurse called her back to the exam room. Graham told her OB that shed been crying often and feeling hopeless. Then she told her about the scary thought, the one about hurting her baby and herself.

According to Graham, thats when her doctor stood up, told her she needed to make a few calls, and left the room.

That cant be good, Graham thought.

When her doctor came back, Graham said, she told Graham shed called the Behavioral Health Unit  the psych ward  at nearby St. Vincents East. She said the staff wanted to evaluate Graham in the hospital emergency room. The doctor did not return AL.coms calls requesting comment.

Hospital documents that Graham provided to Al.com show the doctor sent Graham to the hospital with a preliminary diagnosis of suicidal ideation, which is thought or plans of suicide. The doctors notes in Grahams hospital records note that Graham states she has a plan of shooting herself.

Scary thoughts

There is a name in the mental health community for a specific kind of disturbing thought thats common among postpartum women: an intrusive thought. It is frightening and unwanted, but up to 70 percent of pregnant or postpartum women experience intrusive thoughts, said Moore Simas.

Often (doctors) will hear about scary thoughts about hurting self or harming baby, and they immediately jump to worry, she said. But what I dont think most providers appreciate yet is that unwanted or intrusive thoughts are really common.

The vast majority of women will not act on them.

Most women who have intrusive thoughts find them scary and upsetting, she said. Those thoughts are symptoms of something much more serious when they are welcoming or calming to a patient, she said.

It seems clear from the OBs notes in the hospital records that she was concerned Graham could be suicidal. Thats not an unfounded worry. Suicide is the second most common cause of maternal death, accounting for 1 in 5 postpartum deaths.

At the hospital

After the ER, Graham was admitted temporarily as a psych patient at St. Vincents. The hospital declined Al.coms request for comment, citing HIPPA regulations prohibiting medical providers from discussing patient information or verifying that a person was a patient.

The ER doctor who first assessed Graham, according to hospital records, listed symptoms of depression on her chart but noted that she was not suicidal.

Because she wanted her baby to remain with her, and because the psych ward wasnt set up to accommodate a 2-month-old, Graham said she got special permission to be placed in the Women & Children wing.

She learned she would have to stay overnight because the psychiatrist wouldnt be available until the morning.

Her husband, Hudson Graham, arrived at the hospital. He found his wife teary-eyed, he recalled, but she seemed mostly upset that she would need to stay overnight.

You know youre not legally detained, he told her. You can leave.

Hayden told the staff she would like to leave, thinking she could come back the next day when the psychiatrist was available.

But staff told her she couldnt leave, she said. Hudson asked the staff if she was legally detained. The doctor said that could be arranged, they both recalled. Haydens heart sank.

Once she and baby Bev were settled into their room, a sitter arrived. The sitters job was to stay in the room and monitor her around the clock.

In a hospital wing designed for celebrations, joyous new parents and drowsy newborns, Hayden felt embarrassed. She was ashamed that some of the nurses, whod attended her high school, knew why she was there. She wondered if they thought she was crazy.

Later that evening, Hudson went home to be with their toddler.

Hayden spent the long night in the hospital room with her baby and the sitter who was there to make sure she didnt hurt anyone.

She awoke shortly after 5 a.m. to find the hospital psychiatrist standing at her bedside.

The psychiatrist asked Graham questions about whether she planned to hurt or kill herself or anybody else. No, no, Graham said. Then she told the psychiatrist about the scary thought, the one about shooting her baby and herself.

When they were finished, the psychiatrist said she was going to admit Hayden to the psych ward for evaluation.

I told her the same thing Id told the ER doctor, that I cant because my baby is exclusively breastfed, Hayden recalled. She said shed come up with a separate plan and for me to have a blessed day. The whole thing didnt take more than five minutes.

Hudson arrived shortly after, followed by his mother. He learned for the first time about Haydens scary thought.

I definitely took it seriously, he said. But Ive known Hayden for years, and I could tell she didnt plan on acting on it.

A nurse came in and asked Hayden to stay until the psychiatrist approved a treatment plan. The Grahams waited.

Then the attending physician came in and said while she and the psychiatrist recommended Hayden be admitted as a psych patient, there was another option: Hayden could leave the hospital that day with a plan for outpatient treatment with a psychiatrist, a prescription for an anti-depressant and the understanding that Hudson would monitor her 24/7 around the children.

Hudson works from home and said it wouldnt be a problem; Hayden said she was happy with that plan.

But two hours went by and they didnt hear anything.

Hudson and his mother, Leslie Haynes, asked the staff to get the discharge papers ready to sign. Hayden felt ready to go home, happy with what she thought was the treatment plan  Zoloft, outpatient psychiatry treatment and observation by her husband. But papers never came.

Hospital records Hayden provided to Al.com tell a similar story, except that nurses were also trying to contact the doctors about Haydens desire to be discharged. While the treatment plan she wanted is mentioned more than once in doctors notes, it appears her familys increasingly adamant desires to leave raised staff suspicions.

It was a lot of confusion on our end and seemed like confusion on their end, Hudson said. We were very uncertain about why they kept trying to drag out the situation and keep her there longer.

Hayden eventually signed a document saying she was leaving the hospital against medical advice (AMA), a copy of which she showed to Al.com. She said she signed the AMA because she thought that was part of what was needed to go through with the treatment plan she wanted.

As Hayden and her family stepped onto the elevator, according to hospital records, the nurses got word that a psych hold had been ordered for her, meaning she wouldnt be allowed to leave.

But by then it was too late. The elevator doors closed and she was gone.

As Hayden was getting into her car with Hudson and baby Bev, she saw police cars in the hospital parking deck. Nobody stopped or questioned her, she said. She drove to the exit, paid the exit fee, and passed police officers and security guards on her way out.

Losing custody

The Grahams drove to Hudsons mothers house on Lake Martin, still concerned about the police theyd seen in the parking deck and all that had just happened. Hudsons mother, Leslie Haynes, had been stopped on her way out by a security guard.

After they reached Haynes home, Haydens phone rang. It was the neighbor: Why are there police at your house?

What? Graham asked, not sure shed heard right.

There are police and unmarked cars all over your house.

Haynes told Al.com she drove to the house to talk with the police, who told her they were going to put out a public alert for the abducted children unless they could verify they were ok. Haynes said she told police the children hadnt been abducted; they were with their parents. She said the police seemed surprised by that.

Hudson said at that point he felt like he was in a Harrison Ford movie, unjustly accused of a crime.

I was like, what have we done to be chased around by police? he said. We abducted our own kid; is that the story now?

The Grahams met the police and a case worker from the Alabama Department of Human Resources at a relatives house. The case worker handed them a notice requiring them to show up at court the next morning at 8:30 a.m.

They were petrified, Haynes recalled of Hayden and Hudson. It was the most horrific experience. Im 55 years old and I have never in my life gone through anything like that.

The case worker told Hudson that he could stay with their children overnight but Hayden could not.

It was surreal, Hayden said. Id been trying to avoid being away from my baby at the hospital and now its happening anyway.

I felt like I was melting into the floor, I couldnt breathe, my heart was pounding. My worst nightmare was coming true.

Fighting for their children

The court petition filed by DHR said Hayden had left the hospital without hospital knowledge and that she had a plan to shoot her children, something she vehemently denies. The Grahams and Haynes say theyd agreed to the outpatient plan of care and that Hayden was not told about a psych hold before she left the hospital.

The court ordered Hayden to get a psychological evaluation and Hudson to get counseling about the seriousness of postpartum depression. They were both required to attend 12 parenting classes.

The court granted custody of baby Bev and her 2-year-old sister to Hudsons cousin, who lives in the nearby town of Hoover. The Grahams were permitted to see their children only during the day, and only when supervised.

Every morning, Hayden awoke in her house at 5 a.m.

She got dressed quickly so she could drive to the cousins house and arrive by 6 a.m., the earliest she was allowed to see her children. She didnt leave until 10 p.m., when she was legally required to leave.

I told our DHR worker that you can take away legal custody of my children, Hayden said, but that doesnt stop me from being a mom to my kids. She and Hudson completed the required parenting classes in record time, she said.

Hayden said her 2-year-old had been potty-trained before the ordeal but regressed back to diapers when they moved into the cousins house.

She was very independent before, but when (the children) had to move she was very clingy, especially when she would see my husband and I leave, said Hayden. When we had to leave, she would scream.

The months-long custody battle took a toll on her relationship with Hudson, too.

Our marriage was hanging by a thread because of this, she said. There were points I thought, Are we going to work it out?

After a month, her husband was granted unsupervised visits and could stay overnight with the children at his cousins house.

In mid-December, nearly two months after the hospital stay, the court allowed the family to move back home together if Hudsons grandmother moved in with them and constantly monitored Hayden with the children. Hayden said she couldnt walk to the mailbox while carrying her baby without Hudsons grandmother having to come out to the porch to watch them.

On the way home from court, they stopped and got a Christmas tree.

When we moved back home, my 2-year-old was so happy. Ive never seen her that happy in my life, Hayden said. It felt like the light at the end of the tunnel. That is really when my postpartum depression fog started clearing, when we moved home.

Moving on

In February, the Grahams arrived at the courthouse for another hearing, having completed their parenting classes and other requirements.

To court that day Hayden wore a blazer over a t-shirt from the Blue Dot Project, a maternal mental health awareness organization, that read, I survived scary mom thoughts.

She felt prepared but didnt want to get her hopes up.

Her attorneys, DHR workers and court services representatives met with the judge and the case was dismissed.

I was at a loss for words, she said. I couldnt believe it. I started clapping and everyone in the room started clapping. I was so happy.

Its been a month since the Grahams regained full custody, and things are starting to return to normal. Hayden was diagnosed with postpartum depression by a psychologist and psychiatrist and is doing well in outpatient treatment, she said. The kids are thriving and the Grahams relationship is solid.

And yet Hudson is still processing the emotional and financial toll the last five months have taken. He still feels anger at the professionals and the systems he believes failed his wife and family.

It was very scary, he said. To have our kids placed in that jeopardy and my wife and her health in jeopardy, its just an uneasy feeling going forward. Id like to think there are no lingering issues. But now that were finally through it, its something were trying to put in the past.

For Hayden, the experience motivated her to help other women. Shes volunteering with the Alabama chapter of Postpartum Support International, a nonprofit that recently started monthly support meetings for postpartum mothers in the Birmingham area, and also holds meetings in Huntsville.

The organization also offers a free helpline women can call to get connected to counseling and other resources, and a psychiatric consultation line for doctors to get help diagnosing pregnancy-related mood disorders.

Hayden doesnt want women reading her story to be afraid to seek help for pregnancy or postpartum mood disorders. She believes the breakdown in her care came from being misdiagnosed and from poor communication about her treatment options, but feels strongly that women should always try to seek professional help.

If I were talking to my friend, Id tell her dont be afraid to get help, she said. Just make sure you trust your doctor. If not, there are mental health professionals to connect with, and Postpartum Support International has a phone line you can call to find someone in your area.
WASHINGTON  In late January, as China locked down some provinces to contain the spread of the coronavirus, average internet speeds in the country slowed as people who were stuck inside went online more and clogged the networks. In Hubei Province, the epicenter of infections, mobile broadband speeds fell by more than half.

In mid-February, when the virus hit Italy, Germany and Spain, internet speeds in those countries also began to deteriorate.

And last week, as a wave of stay-at-home orders rolled out across the United States, the average time it took to download videos, emails and documents increased as broadband speeds declined 4.9 percent from the previous week, according to Ookla, a broadband speed testing service. Median download speeds dropped 38 percent in San Jose, Calif., and 24 percent in New York, according to Broadband Now, a consumer broadband research site.

Quarantines around the world have made people more reliant on the internet to communicate, work, learn and stay entertained. But as the use of YouTube, Netflix, Zoom videoconferencing, Facebook calls and videogaming has surged to new highs, the stress on internet infrastructure is starting to show in Europe and the United States  and the traffic is probably far from its peak.
Boris Johnson today distanced himself from Home Secretary Priti Patel after she called for the UK borders's to be closed to stop people arriving from coronavirus hotspots.

Downing Street said it was not seeking to seal up Britain's borders in the midst of the pandemic, despite the hardline measure being taken by other nations.

Mrs Patel believes flights from virus hotspots should not be allowed when the country is on lockdown to prevent its spread, The Daily Telegraph reported.

The Home Secretary is seeking support for her plans to stop passengers being able to fly in to the UK from countries with high levels of infections such as Iran, the US and China.

But the Prime Minister's official spokesman today said there were 'no plans to do that'.

He told reporters; 'The level of inward travel into the UK has fallen greatly since the outbreak of the virus and we have seen many transport providers reduce their services.

'The chief medical officer has said that there is no evidence that closing borders would have an effect on the spread of infection.

Home Secretary Priti Patel, pictured in the Commons earlier this week discussing the crisis, is calling for the UK to enforce a travel ban halting passengers arriving from high-risk countries such as Iran, the US and China.

'Separately we are doing everything we can to help British nationals overseas return to the UK.

'As part of this we are working with airlines and other companies to keep travel routes open in order to do this.'

Such a move might lead to tit-for-tat measures at a time when almost a million Britons stuck abroad are trying to get back to the UK.

The lack of a travel ban in the UK is in stark contrast to policies in the EU and the US, which have closed their borders to travellers from many other countries.

Flights headed to the UK from New York, Tehran, Rome and Beijing all took off yesterday.

An estimated 100,000 passengers are still arriving through UK airports each day - around one fifth of the number before the pandemic.

Many of these are Brits returning from abroad, but Government scientific advisers have warned that around 500 coronavirus cases may be linked to foreign nationals coming in to the UK.

While passengers arriving off flights from affected countries are asked to self-isolate for 14 days, there are no means of enforcing this and no health checks are being carried out at UK airports.

A source told The Telegraph: 'We are most concerned about the daily flights from the US and Iran which are coming in on a daily basis.

'We want to stop non-EEA nationals from flying into the UK. The EU is not a problem for the most part because their domestic lockdowns are so severe.'

A source told The Telegraph the government is concerned with airline passengers arriving untested from Iran, China and the US. Currency exchanges and car hire firms were shut at Heathrow Airport today

'There is no doubt that we are going to come under increasing pressure to sort this.

'At the moment anyone can come into the UK as a tourist from Iran. The only limitation is what that country is doing domestically to stop people going to an airport in the first place.'

The departments of health and transport, as well as the Home Office, make decisions about a potential UK flight ban.

The issue is thought to have been raised at a Cabinet committee in response to the pandemic but has yet to be resolved.
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Linkedin Dian Septiari (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 17:03 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d9b6c4 1 World Indonesia,G20,crisis,COVID-19,international-cooperation Free

Ahead of the first Group of 20 Summit to be hosted virtually on Thursday evening, Indonesia called on member countries to create better access to drugs and medical equipment while also protecting vulnerable groups from a possible pandemic-induced global recession.

President Joko Jokowi Widodo is still expected to attend the teleconference, hosted remotely by G20 chairman Saudi Arabia and led by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, although he is still grieving over the passing of his mother on Wednesday. Leaders from the United States, Russia, China and France are also expected to take part in the remote crisis talks.

The President is to be accompanied by Finance Minister Sri Mulyani and Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi, according to the Office of the Coordinating Economic Affairs Minister.

Acting as Indonesias G20 sherpa, the deputy chief for international economic cooperation at the Office of the Coordinating Minister, Rizal Affandi Lukman, attended on Wednesday an online teleconference for drafters of a G20 leaders statement on COVID-19.

Rizal said that the leaders' statement must recommend concrete and actionable steps for handling COVID-19, stressing that any statement would only be beneficial if each G20 member country was committed to working together to contain the pandemic.

On this occasion, Indonesia delivered a number of main points that were recommended to be part of the leaders' statement. First, increasing social protection for vulnerable groups including the elderly, micro, small and medium enterprises and low-wage workers, Rizal said in a statement received on Thursday.

According to the Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises Ministry, Indonesias small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for 99.9 percent of total businesses, employ up to 97 percent of the total workforce and contribute more than 60 percent of the countrys gross domestic product.

Another point Indonesia was prioritizing for the G20 statement was to support and ensure the safety of medical personnel in accordance with World Health Organization standards, urging ease of access to medical supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE).

Indonesia, among many other countries around the world, has been overwhelmed by a lack of PPE, underscored by President Jokowis statement that 180 countries were fending off one another to get the equipment.

Rizal said the government also raised the issue of affordability and availability of vaccines and other medical supplies.

In this case, Indonesia requests that each G20 country will be able to [better] facilitate trade and mobility of drugs and other medical needs, including through the relaxation of export-import procedures, he said.

The global Doctors Without Borders (MSF) previously urged for supplies to be shared across borders according to where the needs were the greatest.

This needs to start with states in Europe sharing their supplies with Italy. It will soon need to extend to other regions that will be hit by this pandemic and whose ability to cope is already compromised, MSF analysis department director Jonathan Whittall said in a statement on Thursday.

Indonesia pointed out, however, that all forms of global financial contributions must still refer to national conditions and priorities. This is in view of differences in domestic needs and priorities of each affected country to mobilize all available resources, Rizal said.

Leaders of the G20 countries are also being called on to commit to creating stronger cooperation to prevent a deeper global economic recession as a result of a prolonged pandemic.

The death toll from the virus, which emerged in China late last year, rose past 21,000, with the number of infections globally closing in on half a million, according to official tallies. An estimated 3 million people have also been forced into lockdown.

Indonesia has supported a proposal from Saudi Arabia to include a social safety net as one of the efforts to protect the poor in the face of COVID-19, especially among developing countries. It also approved Japan's proposal to include a paragraph in which G20 leaders support the Japanese governments announcement to delay the 2020 Olympics as a result of the outbreak.
Millions of employees across the globe are adapting to working from home in an attempt to prevent the spread of coronavirus - but those with children are finding it particularly challenging.

Hoards of parents have been flooding Twitter with hilarious snaps of the creative ways they're juggling looking after their children while working.

One mother tied her children up with clothes, and put on noise-cancelling headphones to avoid listening to their shouts.

Elsewhere, one father, from Canada, placed his laptop in a baby's cot to avoid his son from pressing the keys randomly.

Below, FEMAIL reveal the most creative working from home methods.

People from around the world who are working from home, have taken to Twitter with snaps of their attempts to be productive as their children distract them (Pictured: A father from Canada using his laptop through a cot)

One man believed to be from Nigeria, shared a snap of woman working at her laptop with noise-cancelling headphones after tying her children up

One father, from England, joked that his daughter has been doing his job for the past four days without anyone noticing

Another father, who lives in Scotland, posted a candid snap revealing it's a benefit and drawback working from home with his son

Another mother, from London, joked that getting fresh air as she works is necessary for staying sane while working from home with her kids

Well at least someone is comfortable! One father, who lives in Warwickshire, posted a photo as he attempted to work from home with his daughter on his lap, explaining that she was enjoying the 'perks' of having him at home

A mother who lives in Texas, warned of the dangers of stepping on Lego bricks as her child spread the hazardous toys across the carpet

'Please put the head back on!' Another mother from Canada, said one of her children placed a note asking for their doll to be repaired under the door of her home office

Oregon-based father Damian Radcliffe shared an adorable snap of his son with his cat, revealing he was struggling to know who was more excited that he was working from home

PE lesson for two! One father, from Bath, confessed he had accidentally knocked his son over and punched the ceiling while enjoying a family work out

Parents in India shared a snap of their daughter laying across their laptop, while they tried to work
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Weir Group PLC (WEIR.L), a UK-based company engaged in engineering businesses, said Thursday that it is withdrawing its 2020 guidance issued on 26 February as well as its recommendation to pay a 2019 final dividend, given the level of uncertainty in its main markets due to Covid-19. The group also said it is curtailing all non-essential capital expenditure so that spending in 2020 will now be significantly lower than its prior outlook. The Group's trading in the first two months of the year were in line with its expectations across each of its divisions. However, through March, with the significant reduction in oil prices and escalation of the global Covid-19 pandemic, the external environment has changed rapidly, the company noted. While the Group is now back to full operating capacity in China after its three facilities were forced to shut down in early February, the main impact on its facilities so far has been in the US, UK, South Africa, Peru and Malaysia. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
The closure of the 290 ramp to the outbound Kennedy this spring will require a special detour, using the outbound Dan Ryan Expressway (Interstate 90/94) to connect to the Kennedy by way of the Taylor Street interchange. That ramp will reopen later this year, as will the outbound Ida B. Wells Drive ramp to the outbound Kennedy, which was closed this past winter, IDOT said.
Ultrasound scans and eye checks aboard the International Space Station today are helping doctors understand how the Expedition 62 crew is adapting to microgravity.

Back on Earth, a new crew is in final preparations for its launch next month.

NASA Flight Engineer Jessica Meir spent Tuesday morning on biomedical duty and scanned her leg arteries with an ultrasound device. She also attached electrodes to her neck, thigh and heart for the Vascular Echo study. Flight surgeons on the ground monitor the scans real-time to glimpse a crewmember's heart and blood vessel health in space.

In the afternoon, Meir joined fellow Flight Engineer Andrew Morgan for eye exams. The duo took turns imaging each other's eyes using optical coherence tomography gear commonly found in an eye doctor's office. Eye health in space is important, as some astronauts have reported experiencing vision problems after returning to Earth.

Morgan started the morning swapping out batteries in a device that analyzes the station's atmosphere. Afterward, he tended to hardware for an experiment that seeks to improve the manufacturing process of metallic alloys on Earth.

All three crewmates, including Commander Oleg Skripochka, started the day readying their Soyuz MS-15 crew ship ready for departure on April 17. They performed a fit check of the Soyuz seats they will be sitting in for the three-and-a-half hour ride back to Earth.

Meanwhile, the crew that will replace them is nearing its launch scheduled for April 9 aboard the Soyuz MS-16 crew ship. NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner arrived today at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for final training. The Expedition 63 trio is due to live aboard the station for 195 days with Cassidy as commander.

On-Orbit Status Report

Transparent Alloys-SEBA: The crew successfully exchanged the Transparent Alloys Cartridge. The aim of the Transparent Alloys-SEBA (Solidification along an Eutectic Path in Binary Alloys) experiment is to study the morphological instabilities of directional solidified, transparent binary eutectic alloys under purely diffusive conditions. This experiment provides a real-time observation of the dynamics of eutectic front structures with a micron-scale resolution, over a large (centimetric) space scale, and over long (several 10 hours) periods of time. These observations are strongly sensitive to convective motions in liquid, which, in ordinary conditions on earth, entail a detrimental redistribution of the solute on a scale comparable to the container size. Such convective motions are suppressed in microgravity.

Vascular Echo: The crew performed an ultrasound using ECHO for a resting position session #2. Blood Pressure measurements were also taken. Cardiac and Vessel Structure and Function with Long-Duration Space Flight and Recovery (Vascular Echo) examines changes in blood vessels, and the heart, while the crew members are in space, and then follow their recovery on return to Earth. The results could provide insight into potential countermeasures to help maintain crewmember health, and quality of life for everyone.

Rhodium Space Microbiome: The crew inserted Chamber (s/n 0006) from the SABL incubator into cold stowage. Genomics Investigation of Human Gut Microbiome to Determine Effects of Microgravity Exposures (Rhodium Space Microbiome) examines the effects of spaceflight on the human gut microbiome, a complex community of numerous bacterial species. Developing a better understanding shifts in microbiome diversity and function and how they affect human health and performance may help protect people on future missions. Recent studies have shown a connection between alterations in the structure and function of the gut microbiome and multiple chronic and acute diseases.

Completed Task List Activities:

None

Today's Ground Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

Atmosphere Revitalization System N3 MCA Vacuum Pressure Monitoring Mode Init

Mobile Servicing System (MSS) SpaceX-20 External Cargo Operations

Stow of the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM)

Vascular Echo Resting Ultrasound Scan 125 Minutes

Look Ahead Plan

Wednesday, 3/25 (GMT 085)

Payloads:

Vascular Echo Leg Doppler PDOP Ops (CSA)

AstroPi Micro SD card to SSC (11&19) for OS upgrade (ESA)

MISSE MSC removal and stow (NASA)

PONDS Modules (s/n 1 through 12) install and initiate (NASA)

BFF Procedure Review (NASA)

CGBA4 status chk and Maintenance (NASA)

Rhodium Space Microbiome sample (s/n 0007) into MELFI (NASA)

STaARS kit (s/n 1012) into MELFI (NASA)

Standard Measures Presleep Questionnaire (NASA)

NanoRacks Module-51 Status 3 (NASA)

SPHERES Hardware Consolidate (NASA)

Bartolomeo removal from Dragon trunk (ESA)

Systems:

Dragon Cargo Transfer

74P transfer operations

Thursday, 3/26 (GMT 086)

Payloads:

Radi-N2 Detectors (8) retrieved (COL) and H/O to Russian crew (CSA)

Engineering Heart Tissue (EHT) Media change and fixation (NASA)

Standard Measures Postsleep Questionnaire (NASA)

BFF test print without cells (1 and 2) , and Syringe swap (4) (NASA)

EML Gas Vlv to Close (ESA-Joint)

Systems:

Regen ECLSS operations

SSC Service Pack Queso Ops

SSC2 Reload from Load Image Server

Friday, 3/27 (GMT 087)

Payloads:

Blood Collection (CSA)

BFF hardware uninstall (NASA)

MVP2 Cell-03 Nutrient tube and waste tube replacement (NASA)

Food Acceptability (NASA)

JEM ORU Transfer Interface (JOTI) removal (NASA)

Systems:

SpX-20 EVA Pack

Regen ECLSS operations

SSC Service Pack Queso Ops

Today's Planned Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

Reminder 2 Vascular Echo Resting Ultrasound Scan

Reminder 1 Vascular Echo Leg Doppler Measurement

Soyuz 744 Kazbek Fit Check

JEM Airlock Press

Vascular Echo Ultrasound Echo Unit Setup

TERMINATOR. RSS2 Laptop SW Update.

Preventive Maintenance of SM Ventilation Subsystem. Group 2. Inspection of Air Conditioning System [1, 2]

JEM Airlock Leak Check

Rhodium Space Microbiome US LAB HD Camcorder Video Setup

Rhodium Space Microbiome SABL Sample Removal

Rhodium Space Microbiome MELFI Sample Insertion

Food Acceptability Survey

Vascular Echo CDL Holter Arterial BP Measurement

Vascular Echo Resting Ultrasound Scan 125 Minutes

Installation of jumpers on Broadband Communication System () Video Server

Cargo Transfer to Dragon

iPad iOS Update 1006

Environmental Health System (EHS) - Compound Specific Analyzer-Combustion (CSA-CP) Checkout

Environmental Health System (EHS) Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) Water Recovery System (WRS) Sample Analysis

Inspection and integrity check of Kurs-A cables in DC1

Vascular Echo Ultrasound Echo Unit Stow

PAO Preparation

Public Affairs Office (PAO) High Definition (HD) Config JEM Setup

PAO Preparation

Equipment pre-pack for disposal via Cygnus (NG-13)

Public Affairs Office (PAO) Event in High Definition (HD) - JEM

Transparent Alloys Cartridge Exchange

MISSE-FF MSC Retrieval and Pack Procedure Review

Health Maintenance System (HMS) OCT2 Setup

Health Maintenance System (HMS) OCT2 Prep

Environmental Health System (EHS) Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) Sample Data Record

Weekly check of video recording equipment performance on the ISS RS

Health Maintenance System (HMS) OCT2 Exams

CCE Preparation

High Definition (HD) Config JEM Camera Setup for Crew Choice Event

Crew Choice Event

Reminder 2 Vascular Echo Leg Doppler Measurement



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Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 17:32:02|Editor: huaxia

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A plane carrying Kuwaiti citizens evacuated from abroad arrives at Kuwait International Airport in Farwaniya Governorate, Kuwait, on March 26, 2020. Kuwait reported 13 new COVID-19 cases over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 208, the Health Ministry announced Thursday. (Photo by Asad/Xinhua)

KUWAIT CITY, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Kuwait reported 13 new COVID-19 cases over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 208, the Health Ministry announced Thursday.

At a press conference, the ministry's spokesman Abdullah Al-Sanad said five cases are Kuwaiti citizens who recently returned from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and France, while seven have history of contact with infected patients.

One case is still under investigation, he added.

Out of the 208 cases, 49 have recovered and 159 are receiving treatment including seven still in the ICU, Al-Sanad noted.

The Kuwaiti government has decided to impose a nationwide curfew to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

On March 13, Kuwait suspended all commercial flights. The government has also closed stores, malls and barbershops.
The countrys highest court has agreed to hear the citys appeal of Premier Doug Fords decision to cut the size of council during the 2018 municipal elections.

The Supreme Court of Canada released its decision on the citys application for leave to appeal on Thursday morning.

The city applied to the top court in November as the final step in a case that has pinged back and forth between legal decisions  the provincial move was first overturned by a lower court judge who was later overruled by the Court of Appeal in the provinces favour.

The Supreme Court of Canada only hears a select number of cases each year, typically on issues of significant public and national interest. The city, in its application, argued the constitutional questions raised in this case transcend the specific election in this case and can affect any election in the country.

In 2018, as Toronto was in the midst of its municipal election for members of council and school boards, Fords PC government announced it was slashing the number of wards in Toronto from 47 to 25 without any consultation.

Fords government at the time claimed the change would save taxpayers money and create efficiencies at city hall, which did not materialize as promised.

The decision, the city has argued, caused widespread disruption and confusion, including pitting incumbent councillors against one another and dividing wards in new ways with about double the population. It also meant the city clerk, responsible for administering elections, was suddenly forced to prepare voting machines, ballots and more for an entirely different election in a matter of months.

A legal challenge to the new legislation was launched by a group of candidates, volunteers and voters.

Superior Court Justice Edward Belobaba agreed with them in September 2018 that Bill 5 was unconstitutional and struck it down.

The judge said the government bill violated voters charter rights by creating larger wards that led to worse representation and that of candidates who used the 47-ward structure to decide how and where to run and express themselves politically.

When the province appealed, the Court of Appeal granted a stay of Belobabas decision  essentially allowing the election to proceed under the new ward structure with 25 wards.

Later, a rare five-judge panel overruled Belobabas ruling in favour of the province. That appeal court ruling, however, was split, with three judges in favour and two against.

Writing the dissenting opinion, the panels chair Justice James MacPherson wrote that by reducing the size of City Council from 47 to 25 wards and changing the boundaries of all city wards mid-election, the Act interfered in an unwarranted fashion with the freedom of expression of candidates in a municipal election.

Its not clear when a hearing might be scheduled in Ottawa, with hearings that were set in the coming months currently delayed until June due to the COVID-19 outbreak in Ontario.

Osgoode Hall law professor Bruce Ryder, an expert in constitutional issues, said he is pleased the Supreme Court decided to take on the questions in the case. He said its not about rehashing what happened in the 2018 election.

The importance of the Supreme Court taking it on is about the future, and whether there are any ways in which the integrity of local democracy is protected from provincial interference by the constitution, he said.

The case raises issues about freedom of expression and voting rights and the relationship between the two, he said.

Its not a question of whether the municipality is a creature of the province, as the province keeps arguing  of course thats true, he said. Its once youve created and delegated democratic powers to a subordinate powers, can you then mess with the nature of and the fairness of the electoral process that constitutes that government?

He said he finds that an astonishing proposition made by the Ontario government and glad it will be considered by the top court.

In a statement, Mayor John Tory thanked the citys legal team for advancing the citys interests in the application.

There are serious legal issues to be addressed in this matter and the Mayor is gratified the Court recognized that, the statement said.

Jennifer Hollett, who ran in a downtown ward during the 2018 election and was one of the original applicants challenging the Ford legislation, said she was buoyed by the decision Thursday.

Right now were all looking for our spirits to be lifted  especially being inside with COVID-19  so seeing this news for me this morning was a sigh of relief, she said. And also it just gives me faith that despite all the new concerns and priorities right now we have to stand up and fight for democracy.

She said she plans to take a road trip to Ottawa when the hearing is scheduled.

The fight continues.
Three Oregon hikers who found themselves stranded in a frigid forest overnight were rescued after calling the authorities, who then arrested two of them on outstanding warrants.

A statement from the Tillamook County Sheriffs Office says Steven Harrigan, Natalie Ladu and Alex Meyers planned to hike in the Tillamook Burn area on Tuesday.

The trio parked two vehicles at a locked access gate, entered the forest and at 5.25pm called 911, saying they were 'frozen and unable to move.'

Steven Harrigan, 45, Natalie Ladu, 37, and Alex Meyers, 31, called 911 asking for help on Tuesday after becoming stranded in Oregon's Tillamook Burn area. Two of them were later arrested

First responders launched a search operation and located the missing hikers' footprints shortly before midnight.

More than three hours later, Ladu, Harrigan and Meyers were found unharmed in the woods. No one required medical attention.

The sheriffs office says Harrigan, 45, was arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm while Ladu, 37, was arrested on a Washington County warrant for a parole violation and possession of methamphetamine.

Their third companion, Meyers, 31, was not charged with any crime.

The rescue comes amid the coronavirus outbreak, which has claimed 1,074 lives so far nationwide, including eight in Oregon.

Gov. Kate Brown has urged residents to stay home, unless they had to leave for essential work, grocery shopping or other critical tasks.

People are allowed to go outside to engage in recreational activity, like jogging or hiking, so long as they keep at least six feet away from others.

'Please remember that even if recreating at specified COVID-19 social distancing, that in the event you need rescue or medical assistance, you no longer are social distancing, and you place rescuers at risk and burden an emergency / medical system which is already being taxed,' the sheriffs office said in a statement.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference on the COVID-19 outbreak flanked by Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin (R) and Vice President Mike Pence at the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 25, 2020. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Millions of Personal Protective Items Being Sent to Areas of Greatest Need: Trump

President Donald Trump on Wednesday provided a brief update on critical health supplies amid the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States and said that the country is now conducting more testing than any other in the world.

At a daily White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing, Trump said that the federal government is in the process of shipping some 9.4 million N95 respirators, 20 million surgical masks, 3.1 million face shields, 2.6 million surgical gowns, 14.6 million gloves, and almost 6,000 ventilators to the areas of greatest need.

We sent over the last day 4,000 ventilators to New York, he added.

The president has approved major disaster declarations for New York, California, Washington, Iowa, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. The disaster declarations will allow federal funding to start flowing to state and some local governments, as well as certain private nonprofit organizations.

Trump also said that the United States is doing more testing than anybody by far, adding that he had recently spoken with South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

Theyve done a very good job at testing, Trump said. But we now are doing more testing than anybody by far. We do more in eight days than they do in eight weeks. And we go up on a daily basis exponentially.

On Tuesday, White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that the United States had conducted more testing in the last eight days than South Korea had in eight weeks. At the time, she said the United States was doing about 50,000 to 70,000 tests a day.

The news, the reporters, the media always like to bring South Korea, the president said on Thursday. They [South Korea] called me, they told me its amazing, your testing procedures are amazing. Plus we have a test thats a very high-level test and its a test thats very accurate.

The American Enterprise Institute started a tracker of Americas testing capacity, which is projecting that the United States will conduct 100,000 or more COVID-19 tests per day by March 27.

Ridiculous to Test Entire Population: Trump

One reporter asked the president about the possibility of testing all Americans and quarantining of those who need to be isolated, while allowing the rest to return to work.

We have some big problems but confined to certain high-density areas, Trump said. Why would we test the entire nation of 350 million people?

He noted that a lot of states with lower infection numbers could go back [to work] right now, and they probably will because, at some point in the not too distant future, certain states are going to come off the rolls.

Maybe New York cant and maybe California cant. Maybe the state of Washington cant, although if you look at them, their biggest problem was in one nursing home, he added.

We have the ability to test, we have come a long way from an obsolete, broken system I inherited. We have tested with the best test, far more than anybody else. When I say anybody else, other countries, no country is even close, he said.

But he added, I dont want to test 350 million people. I think its ridiculous.

Self-Swab Tests On The Way

White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Deborah Birx announced on Monday that self-swab COVID-19 tests will be available soon.

The tests will allow people to collect their own samples using a nasal swab while self-isolating. They or someone else would then take the sample to an authorized clinical or drive-through testing site and receive their results that same day, making the process simpler and possibly safer.

Confirmed cases of the CCP virus continue to rise in the United States as testing and access to it improves, and as testing centers work to clear a backlog of samples.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China before it was transmitted worldwide.

The United States has more than 69,000 cases of the CCP virus and more than 1,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University on March 25.

The Coronavirus Task Force is urging all Americans to adhere to the 15 Days to Slow the Spread campaign to urgently reduce the spread of the virus. Trump said on Tuesday that his administration will assess regulations surrounding business activity after the 15 days of recommended social distancing measures.
When thousands of schools across the country went from in-person to online virtually overnight, many questions and concerns were felt by parents of children with special needs and households lacking internet-accessible devices.

One such is Port Neches resident and mother of three Amber Feener, who spent the last several weeks setting up programs and devices for distance learning.

We have one laptop in the house, and it is technically my daughters, Feener told The Enterprise. We are trying our best to do what we can with little cheap phones, because my kids dont have iPhones or Androids, little cheapo LG phones, so some things arent compatible.

Feener said the support by the Port Neches-Groves Independent School District has been instrumental, and constant, but her struggles highlight an issue that is impacting parents across the country as access to technology went from optional to mandatory in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

PN-G was one of the first districts in the region to announce that it would close its doors as precaution against the spread of the coronavirus, which has since led to mandatory closures of all schools in the state.

What families are dealing with is a lack of an internet connection, devices and digital skills, Angela Siefer, the executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance said. So there's three things and some families will have some of those three and sometimes they have none of those three.

For Feener, they have connectivity, but the lack of devices puts stress on a home-schooling environment.

The children  one in kindergarten, one in eighth grade and one in high school  are doing work on their moms phone and on paper copies provided by the schools for those that cant access internet classes.

Her struggle is a window into a nation-wide problem commonly referred too as the digital divide.

According to PEW research analysis, nearly 1 in 5 teenagers in America have difficulty completing homework due to that divide, and those problems become even more pronounced when schools shutter and move online during extraordinary circumstances.

The federal government recently has recognized the problem, calling on internet service providers to pitch in by waiving fees and providing access to digital hotspots.

As the coronavirus outbreak spreads and causes a series of disruptions to the economic, educational, medical, and civic life of our country, it is imperative that Americans stay connected, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said. Broadband will enable them to communicate with their loved ones and doctors, telework, ensure their children can engage in remote learning, and  importantly  take part in the social distancing that will be so critical to limiting the spread of this novel coronavirus.

But while AT&T and others signed the pledge, advocates warn that simply asking companies for their help is not enough.

You, can't rely on the generosity of (internet service providers) forever, Jenna Leventoff, Senior Policy Counsel for consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, said. They are essentially businesses. At some point they're going to need to start making money again.

Groups like Leventoffs are calling on Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to take stricter actions to mandate more affordable access to broadband, during the pandemic and beyond.

But data connectivity is not the only challenge of moving to a distance format in a short time frame.

Students who require special needs, both physical and educational, are federally required to continue receiving equal education opportunities, despite the move to online formats, according to recent guidance released by the Dept. of Education.

District officials say they are prepared to support all students needs.

The district is ready to serve individuals whether it be special-education, ESL, 504, all of those things, Assistant Superintendent Julie Gauthier told The Enterprise. Our people are well aware of it, and families are well aware of it, and we are working on individualized cases. It is not a one-sized fits all approach.

For Feener, whose son has dyslexia, there is only so much support the district can provide.

He needs special attention and he doesnt listen to me on a normal day, much-less trying to teach him doing his homework, Feener said. So that's, you know, one of the biggest issues is he needs different education that I can't provide for him.

Feener said the district has done the most that they can, and that they have resources and counselors available for guidance. But if the closures last much longer than two weeks, she may consider other options like a traditional home school course.

I don't want to lose the district attendance or you know, students or anything, she said. But at the same time my kid's education is way more important.

With districts discussing closures that could last well beyond the current April 3 return date, the lack of technology isnt the only thing causing complications for Feener.

You know, I'm not able to go back to work because the kids are out of school and I gotta be home with them, not have any income, she said. We don't know what we're going to do. We don't know what companies are going to helpfamilies that can't work.

Feener said calls to an unemployment hotline sent her to a website which was down due to the high traffic, as the U.S. sees a historically-high spike due to mass layoffs caused by the pandemic.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, as many as 3.4 million Americans filed new unemployment claims this past week.

My back is against the wall, Feener said. So to keep myself off of all the stress, I try to just sit here with the kids and do more schoolwork and try to keep my mind busy on them and what they need more than what are we going to do.

Despite the struggles, Feener said the districts efforts have been much appreciated.

It is blowing my mind to see how much they are here for (the students) and how much they care and are willing to go above and beyond and make sure that these kids get what they need, she said.

For now, she hopes that people will stay home so that the pandemic can come to an end, and things can at least start to return to normal.

I just, I kind of wish everybody was shut down and just let this pass so we can get over it, she said. But I feel like, you know, the school is doing as much as they can. If this continues I'm sure they'll figure out the next couple steps, as far as what we may be able to do at this point.

isaac.windes@hearstnp.com

twitter.com/isaacdwindes
Amid a sea of questions about school shutdowns, one certainty emerged out of a conference call Wednesday between Pennsylvania education leaders and news reporters: extending the school year past June 30 is not an option.

By statute, we cant extend school past June 30, Education Secretary Pedro Rivera told reporters during the 11 a.m. phone call. Thats actually when schools fiscally close, then we go into the next years fiscal cycle. So no, we cant extend beyond June 30.

Schools have been closed since March 16, after Gov. Tom Wolf announced a shutdown to stem the spread of the coronavirus. Most school districts only have offered review or enrichment material to students since then, which normally would put districts in a bind.

They are legally required to provide 180 days of instruction each school year, which means covering new academic material each day. But that requirement was waived this year because of the unprecedented circumstances of Covid-19.

The waiver relieves the pressure for school districts to make up weeks of academic instruction that are being lost during the school shutdown. But it also means school districts could simply end their school year right now, without trying to offer new instruction.

How likely is it that some school districts would do this?

Rivera said his department would strongly discourage districts from calling it quits and abandoning the final marking period.

By law, school districts are not required to provide instruction, he said, adding: The vast majority of superintendents Ive engaged with are doing something. The question holds merit, but at the end of the dayIve strongly urged continuity of education and if its warranted, we will reach out to school districts individually and flex the state offices power and public influence.

During Wednesdays conference call, reporters were allowed to ask Rivera one question a piece, and Rivera admitted that his answers would be a view from 10,000-feet, since the 700 educational agencies under his department are vastly different and their resources and situations can vary.

A reporter asked about the possibility that schools could be shutdown beyond the April 9 date set by Wolf on Monday.

Rivera said the number of new positive case numbers logged in the coming weeks and an analysis of the geographic spread of the disease across the Commonwealth would determine if school buildings need to remain closed beyond April 9.

Were using the data to make the decision, he said. If trends continue to show an increase in numbers and geography, we possibly could be looking at extended closures, extending the guidelines.

While school buildings are closed, some districts are treading water by offering students review and enrichment material that doesnt attempt to move students forward with new academic material.

Many districts are choosing this option in the short-term because it doesnt kick in a federal requirement to provide all students an equal education. Some districts are concerned that they could face costly litigation if they try to plow forward with new instruction and some students, especially special-education students or English language learners, fall behind because of the limitations of remote education.

Other districts, including Derry Township, have announced plans to resume instructional days, starting March 30, which means their teachers will cover new academic material and try to complete coursework remotely. Students will be graded and receive credit for their work.

For districts who move forward like this, the expectation is that they will reach all students, regardless of learning ability.

The state and federal departments of education have encouraged all districts to move forward with their curriculums, and not get stuck on concerns about running afoul of federal requirements. But those departments also have not offered waivers or concrete assurances that districts will not be penalized if they fall short.

Some superintendents are worried about the prospect of trying to quickly and effectively rewrite individualized education plans for special education students, which can encompass 20 percent of the student population in some districts.

On Wednesday, Rivera said the states 29 intermediate units and Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network (known as PATTAN) are offering resources to districts about remote special education, adaptive technology and instruction to English language learners.

Matthew Stern, the departments deputy secretary for elementary and secondary education said: Were asking districts to make reasonable and appropriate efforts in good faith...Everyone recognizes its not going to be an easy task.

The shift to online or distance learning is going to carry new costs, Rivera admitted, and the state department is trying to shoulder as much of the additional costs as possible. He said they are looking at providing allowances for federal Title 2 money, which is earmarked for activities that strengthen the quality and effectiveness of teachers, principals, and other school leaders.

Rivera said his office also is working with the governor and General Assembly to identify other existing money that could help districts provide additional technical devices to students and generally assist with the sudden transition to distance learning.

When asked about graduation, and what will happen to high school seniors who havent had the chance to fulfill the states requirements for graduation, Rivera wasnt able to provide a specific answer.

Same for career technical students who may be short of requirements for certification.

Rivera said his office immediately recognized the importance of these questions and put together a task force within three days of the Covid-19 shutdown.

Finding answers to those questions, he said, are at the top of the agenda.

Editors Note: This article was updated to attribute a quote to Matthew Stern.

READ: Pa. school districts prepare for possibility of students not returning to classrooms
Royal Mail has said it's still safe for customers to send and receive letters and parcels amid the coronavirus outbreak. (Reuters)

Royal Mail has said people are still safe to continue sending and receiving mail during the coronavirus crisis.

It said COVID-19 cannot survive on the surfaces of letters and parcels, meaning people are safe to handle them providing they continue washing their hands regularly.

Royal Mail said in a statement: Public health authorities have advised people receiving parcels are not at risk of contracting coronavirus. From experience with other coronaviruses, we know that these types of viruses dont survive long on objects, such as letters or parcels.

This complements the highly publicised guidance from public health authorities for people to wash their hands more often than usual using soap and hot water.

Latest coronavirus news, updates and advice

Live: Follow all the latest updates from the UK and around the world

Fact-checker: The number of COVID-19 cases in your local area

Explained: Symptoms, latest advice and how it compares to the flu

The company is continuing to deliver mail to every part of the UK as normal, saying it understands the important role we have to play in helping people to stay connected.

However, it was facing growing discontent from the Communication Workers Union (CWU) on Thursday.

The union said members across the UK have expressed major concerns and anxiety about their safety.

It said: If any CWU member does not feel safe at work through lack of social distancing or personal protective equipment, they should not work.

We will support any individual member or office that takes this position.

This is not a call for workers to take unofficial industrial action, but it is a clear statement on the grounds of health and safety that we will support our members.

Royal Mail has insisted it has introduced a range of new social distancing measures such as one worker per delivery vehicle, not taking peoples signatures upon delivery of parcels and regularly disinfecting its offices.

Coronavirus: what happened today

Story continues

Explainer: How to self-isolate
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 20:35:07|Editor: Liu

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By Ndalimpinga Iita

WINDHOEK, March 26 (Xinhua) -- When Rosa Tobias lost her job as a contract worker in the construction sector in 2018 amid the country's economic downturn, she turned to other trades to make ends meet.

Namibia's economy slowed considerably since 2016, according to the World Bank.

She resorted to selling commodities to learners at a school, and also ran a salon business on weekends in Namibia's capital Windhoek.

Income has been unstable. Tobias hoped things would improve with the projected economic recovery in 2020.

Namibia's economy remained weak in 2019 and was expected to recover during 2020, according to the latest economic outlook report by the Bank of Namibia.

However, the COVID-19 outbreak has shattered her hopes for an improved economy amid uncertain incomes.

Namibia's Ministry of Health and Social Services has confirmed seven coronavirus cases.

The Namibian Government has since resolved for the closure of early childhood development centres and schools.

President Hage Geingob on Tuesday also announced more stringent measures in the fight against COVID-19, declaring a lockdown in the Khomas and Erongo regions.

Since the announcement of such measures, in particular the temporary closure of schools, according to Tobias, she had not managed to find a promising site to trade her commodities, thus incurred significant losses.

The hair salon business activities are also set to be halted from March 27 until April 16 as a result of the lockdown.

"Although the future is uncertain, I was hopeful that things would improve in 2020, and for broader hope economic recovery this year as it was predicted so that we can emerge victorious from the suffering over the past years. But that is all now just a dream," she said, " I am hopeless."

She is not the only one.

Negumbo Mikka drives a taxi, mainly transporting learners and students. But since schools closed, his economic conditions dwindled.

Mikka, 37, is hard to secure business as schools and universities are temporarily closed following the COVID-19 outbreak.

"I have since resorted to transporting people during the day in town. But business is slow. People are avoiding taking public transport to evade close contact. We are disadvantaged," he said.

Like Tobias, Mikka too was hopeful of improved economic growth that would spur his business into prosperity in 2020.

"The current situation is contrary to my set goals. I now have to dig into my savings to pay rent and food as I will not have an income over the coming weeks, life is hard," he added.

Eric Van Zyl, head of sales and research at IJG Holdings at a recently held public forum said that Namibia's economic activities for 2020 were expected to grow by 1.1 per cent.

Meanwhile, the Mikka's vision is to lift himself out of an unsustainable path into growth when things go back to normal.

"I hope all people in Namibia adhere to the precautionary measures set in light of COVID-19 so that we can resume duties post-April 16, and realise our goals," Mikka said.

Local economist Mally Likukela projected that the spread of COVID-19 will negatively impact Namibia's economic growth, as economic activities decline or come to a standstill.

Likukela said that this is attributed to the limited and constrained interaction of people coupled with suspended gatherings as well as lockdown, subsequently affecting business activities and broader socio-economic conditions.

In the interim, the traders committed to adhering to lockdown and other precautionary measures in place to aid in halting further spread of the virus.

"Hopefully things will come back to normal so that we can resume normal business and social routines. We need to earn an income," said Tobias.
Read more: Construction sector among the essential workplaces permitted by Ontario, Quebec

Construction projects for healthcare, residential, commercial, industrial, transit, energy, and the justice sectors were all exempted from the shutdown.

But the order was met with criticism by a couple of trade groups operating in the province, Global Construction Review said.

The Ontario Construction Consortium (OCC) argued that the provincial government should suspend work on construction sites for at least two weeks to keep workers safe.

It makes no sense that you cant have your neighbour over for a cup of coffee yet construction sites are expected to continue operations, said OCC chief executive Phil Gillies in a statement.

The Carpenters District Council of Ontario (CDCO) also called for the government to temporarily halt all construction projects.

The situation which exists on most job sites means that work simply cannot go on as normal, said CDCO executive secretary treasurer Tony Iannuzzi. Many job sites have no facilities for workers to even wash their hands using soap and hot water and social distancing is just not possible.

Global Construction Review reported that construction is one of Canadas largest employers, with over 1.5 million workers.
The British Royal Navy's HMS Tyne shadows the Russian corvette Steregushchiy, in UK waters, in this undated handout obtained March 26, 2020. (Royal Navy/Handout via Reuters)

British Navy Shadows Russian Warships After Spotting Unusually High Levels of Activity

Britains Navy said on Thursday it had shadowed seven Russian warships after detecting high levels of activity by Russian vessels off its coastline.

The Navy has completed a concentrated operation to shadow the Russian warships after unusually high levels of activity in the English Channel and North Sea, the Royal Navy said in a March 26 statement.

The announcement comes as the Royal Navy prepares to help Britains health service and other government departments deal with the response to the CCP virus outbreak.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China before it was transmitted worldwide.

The Royal Navy could be drafted in to help run prisons in England and Wales under emergency plans to combat the outbreak.

Prison bosses are to have the option to call on Navy resources if too many corrections officers fall sick with COVID-19 and are unable to come to work, The Times of London reported.

Other pillars of the British military are also leaning forward amid the outbreak, with the Army helping to convert the ExCeL London conference facility into a pop-up hospital.

The temporary hospital will initially provide up to 500 beds equipped with ventilators and oxygen. If needed, capacity will later increase, ExCel London said in a statement, potentially up to several thousand beds.

.@NHSuk Nightingale opens at ExCeL London next week. We will work with all of the relevant authorities to help see Britain through this unprecedented crisis. Read more here: https://t.co/9ZscDmWYno Stay safe and follow all of the advice. pic.twitter.com/IJyJaGFVae  ExCeL London (@ExCeLLondon) March 25, 2020

Meanwhile, the Royal Navy said that despite the added burden of assisting with COVID-19 efforts, it would not neglect its basic mission.

As the Armed Forces are helping the NHS save lives in the UK, its essential the Navy continues to deliver the tasks we have always performed to help keep Britain safe, said Lieutenant Nick Ward, HMS Tynes Executive Officer.

This is very much part of routine business for HMS Tyne and represents one of the many roles our patrol vessels perform in support of the Royal Navys commitments.

This is our core business and represents an enduring commitment to uphold the security of the UK.

The British Navy said that its intake of new naval recruits would continue but with some parts of the process adapted to accommodate the governments response to the outbreak.

To help ensure the safety of staff and the wider community, Naval Service Careers Advisers in AFCOs have ceased face-to-face interaction, the Navy said in a statement. They will be operating via telephone and digital communications and working to continue to support your application.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-27 00:52:15|Editor: xuxin

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A tuk-tuk driver wearing a mask squeezes disinfectant to wash hand in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, March 26, 2020. Cambodia's Ministry of Health (MoH) said on Thursday that two more persons tested positive for COVID-19, raising the total number of confirmed cases in the kingdom to 98. (Photo by Ou Zhengjin/Xinhua)

PHNOM PENH, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia's Ministry of Health (MoH) said on Thursday that two more persons tested positive for COVID-19, raising the total number of confirmed cases in the kingdom to 98.

The two new patients are Indonesian men, the ministry said in a statement, adding that they traveled to Siem Reap province from Bangkok, Thailand.

"A 41-year-old man and a 44-year-old man tested positive for COVID-19 by the Pasteur Institute of Cambodia and they have been placed under quarantine for treatment at the Siem Reap provincial hospital," it said.

According to the statement, the two men were first tested positive for the virus by Phyathai Hospital in Bangkok, but because they could not afford medical costs there, they traveled to Cambodia for free treatment.

Meanwhile, the statement said that a 34-year-old Swedish man, who had no any symptoms of the COVID-19, tested positive for the COVID-19 by the Pasteur Institute of Cambodia on Thursday, a day after he came to have his health tested for a health certificate.

But without waiting for his test result, the man left Cambodia Wednesday night for Thailand via a Bangkok Airways flight, the statement said, adding that the Swede was not included as a new case for treatment in Cambodia.

To date, 11 of the 98 patients in Cambodia have recovered and been discharged from hospitals, according to the statement.
Help.org, a trusted online resource for individuals who struggle with addiction and their loved ones, has announced the Best Rehab Facilities in San Antonio, Texas for 2020. The informational guide recognizes the top 10 rehab facilities based on cost, treatment options, location, accompanying services and more.

According to recent studies, drug overdose is the leading cause of death among people under age 50. In San Antonio, deaths related to opioid abuse increased significantly from 2011 to 2015. Substance abuse among adolescents is also escalating in San Antonio with 55 percent of high school students reported using alcohol, 38 percent reported using marijuana, 8 percent reported using prescription drugs without a valid prescription, and 2 percent reported using heroin. With the growing need for accessible and high-quality rehab programs, Help.org has developed a unique ranking process to help connect individuals with treatment providers that meet their needs.

The Help.org research team analyzed thousands of facilities across the country and then identified the most cost-effective and highest rated programs in larger cities like San Antonio. Each facility was evaluated based on rehabilitation services, treatment approaches, cost, special programs for unique demographics and ancillary services. The website also provides information about drug use and side effects as well as educational articles. For a detailed listing of the Best Rehab Facilities in San Antonio, Texas please visit https://www.help.org/drug-and-alcohol-rehab-centers-in-san-antonio-tx/

2020 Best Rehab Facilities in San Antonio, Texas (in alphabetical order)

A Turning Point Counseling and Rehab Center

3201 Cherry Ridge Suite B206-1

San Antonio, TX 78230

210-764-3700

Alpha Home

300 East Mulberry Avenue

San Antonio, TX 78212

210-735-3822

Alpha Home

419 East Magnolia Avenue

San Antonio, TX 78212

210-735-3822

Alpha Home Residential

814 Camden Street

San Antonio, TX 78215

Bluebonnet Trails Recovery

1104 Jefferson Street

Seguin, TX 78155

512-863-8968

Guadalupe Regional Medical Center Teddy Buerger Center

1215 East Court Street

Seguin, TX 78155

830-401-1367

Laurel Ridge Treatment Center

17720 Corporate Woods Drive

San Antonio, TX 78259

210-491-9400

Methodist Specialty & Transplant Hospital Inpatient Chemical Dependency Program

8026 Floyd Curl Drive

San Antonio, TX 78229

210-575-8112

The Best Option LLC

3700 Fredericksburg Road Suite 137

San Antonio, TX 78201

210-265-1133

Volunteers of America Texas

6487 Whitby Road Building 12

San Antonio, TX 78240

210-558-0731

ABOUT HELP.ORG

Help.org is an online resource for individuals who struggle with addiction and their loved ones. The website provides the latest research through scientifically proven methods, community recovery resources as well as information about local financial assistance. Help.orgs team of researchers, activists and writers work together with addiction counselors and other professionals to offer useful and accurate resources to help individuals seeking recovery. To learn more, visit https://www.help.org/.
In view of the coronavirus crisis in the country, the Sheher Qazi of Dehradun has appealed to all Muslims to offer namaz (prayer) at their homes instead of gathering at the mosques, especially for the 'Jumma' or Friday prayers.

"This disease is a threat to the entire nation and our state too. It is very important to take all precautions and avoid gatherings in a bid to control its spread. Therefore, I urge all people to offer namaz at their homes with their family members and avoid gathering at mosques till the crisis passes," Mohammad Ahmad Qasmi, Dehradun's Shehar Qazi told ANI.

"This is especially important for the Friday prayers. We should not take this lightly. Therefore, stay inside your houses and do not venture out unless it is for very essential needs or emergency cases," he added.

Uttarakhand has five confirmed cases of coronavirus, including one foreign citizen, as of March 26 afternoon.

The count of coronavirus confirmed cases in India rose to 649 on Thursday, according to the Ministry of Health.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
[March 26, 2020] UiPath launches a pro bono automation project with the Mater Hospital to free up nurses dealing with infection control including Covid-19

Today UiPath is launching a pro bono automation project with the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital. The initiative will see software robots assigned to the Infection Prevention and Control (IPC (News - Alert)) Department at the Mater. This development will significantly reduce the administrative strain placed upon the department by multidrug resistant organisms or viruses such as Covid-19, enabling IPC nurses to spend more time with patients. The project will see the Mater offered free trial robot licenses for the IPC Department until the end of the year. With data being automated through software robots, the information will be processed in a fraction of the current time, disseminating patient results in minutes. It will save the infection control department 3 hours per day, 18 hours per week and 936 hours a year which they can now spend managing the current Covid-19 pandemic. As a result of Covid-19, the Mater expects to receive hundreds of swabs and microbiology tests in the coming months which the software robots can assist in rapid processing. The results can then be distributed to healthcare workers rapidly and essential infection prevention and control measures can be put into action. Jincy Jerry, Assistant Director of Nursing, Infection Prevention and Control, MMUH, said: "Given that IPC nurses spend close to 30% of their day with administrative tasks, for the past few months I have been looking at ways to make software robot part of our daily jobs. With the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding now, it is crucial that all frontline staff are freed up as much as possible to spend time with patients and deal with this outbreak, rather than being in front of computers."



"Not only will automation help with this, but it will also take the strain off the hospital as it continues to process huge amounts of more routine patient data in addition to Covid-19 specific information." "As we've already seen, alongside the public playing their part in physical distancing, fast diagnosis and appropriate self-isolation are crucial to preventing the spread of COVID-19. We're confident that the project we're embarking on will help mitigate the huge strain this outbreak is putting on healthcare organisations - not just in MMUH, but across Ireland."

Mark O'Connor, Public Sector Director Ireland at UiPath, said: "Infection Prevention & Control is critical to help people stay healthy, and while COVID-19 is top of mind, this project will continue to deliver benefits long term. At this time of heightened stress and anxiety, it's vital to free up doctors and nurses' time for patients wherever it can be done." "Robotic process automation minimises, if not removes, the need for people to carry out repetitive, rules-based admin work - speeding up processes and ensuring they're error-free. With a robot for every nurse approach, essential frontline staff will be freed to be nurses and not system administrators, being able to focus more on the quality of care - which can make a real difference when it comes to treating patients in times of need." O'Connor will be hosting a webinar on April 2, 2020 at 10 a.m. EST/3 p.m. BST to discuss Mater's use of automation to respond to Covid-19-related scenarios. To register, visit this link. For more information on UiPath, go to uipath.com. About UiPath UiPath is leading the era of "Automation First" by betting on a robot for each person and allowing robots to learn new skills through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Through free and open training, UiPath brings digital era skills to millions of people around the world, improving business productivity and efficiency, employee engagement, and customer experience. The company's hyper-automation platform combines the number one Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution with a full suite of capabilities, including process mining and analytics, that enable every organization to scale digital business operations at unprecedented speed. The company has already automated millions of repetitive, mind-numbing tasks for businesses and government organizations all over the world, including more than 50% of the Fortune 500 and 8 of the Fortune 10. UiPath has recently been recognised as the top company in The Deloitte (News - Alert) Technology Fast 500 for 2019, a ranking of the fastest growing public and private technology companies in North America, and number 3 in the 2019 Forbes Cloud 100. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005081/en/

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Centre has come out with an Rs 1.7 lakh crore economic package to help the poor tide over the impact of national coronavirus lockdown. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has announced a slew of measures to help poor people, health workers, employees and poor women mitigate the crisis. Sitharaman said that the government intends to ensure food security for these people and put money in their hands.

The Finance Minister listed eight specific sections that will be covered under the cash transfer part of the economic package. These sections include farmers, MNREGA workers, poor widows, pensioners and divyangs, women who have Jan Dhan accounts, beneficiaries of Ujjwala Yojana, women from self help groups (SHGs) dealing with National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM), organised sector workers, and construction workers.

Farmers

The first instalment of cash transfers under PM-KISAN scheme, which offers Rs 6,000 per farmer annually, will be given as a front load to farmers. This means the farmers eligible under the PM-KISAN scheme will get Rs 2,000 in the first week of April. The move will immediately benefit 8.69 crore farmers.

ALSO READ:Coronavirus Live Updates: 42 new COVID-19 cases, 4 deaths in last 24 hours

MGNREGA

Daily wages under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) have been increased from Rs 182 to Rs 202. This wage increase will result in benefits worth Rs 2,000 per worker and will impact 5 crore families.

"In this lockdown period and post that, even for field activities, the local district commissioners are empowered to exempt agricultural work or others, with social distancing norms being respected. Where there is work, they can always do it," FM Sitharaman said on MGNREGA activities during the 21-day nationwide lockdown.

Pensioners, widows and divyangs

A one-time ex-gratia amount of Rs 1,000 will be given to people over 60 years of age, widows and physically handicapped under the economic package. This amount will be given in two instalments over next three months. This is expected to benefit 3 crore poor senior citizens, poor widows and poor divyangs.

ALSO READ:Coronavirus cases in Telangana reach 41

Women Jan Dhan account holders

Government will deposit Rs 500 monthly for the next three months into Jan Dhan accounts held by women. This will benefit 20 crore women Jan Dhan account holders.

Meanwhile, other benefits that do not fall under direct cash transfer have also bee announced.

Ujjwala Scheme beneficiaries

Free LPG cylinder refills will be provided to beneficiaries of Ujjwala scheme for the next three months so that they do not run out of cooking fuel. This will benefit 8.3 crore families.

Women self help groups

The limit for collateral-free loans under National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) has been doubled to Rs 20 lakh. This will impact 7 crore households through 63 lakh SHGs.

ALSO READ:$20 trillion lawsuit against China! US group says coronavirus is bioweapon

Organised sector

Centre will pay the EPF contributions for both of the employer and the employers for the next three months. Both employers and employees contribute 12 per cent each to the EPF account of the employee. This is for establishments which have up to 100 employees, 90 per cent of whom are earning less than Rs 15,000 per month. This will benefit 80 lakh employees and incentivise 4 lakh establishments.

The provident fund scheme regulations will be amended to allow non-refundable advance of 75 per cent of the amount standing to the credit of a member, or three months of wages, whichever is lower. This will benefit 4.8 crore employees registered with the Employee Provident Fund Organisation.

Construction workers

Centre will instruct the states to utilise the welfare fund for building and construction workers formed under a Central Government Act. FM Sitharaman said that the welfare fund has Rs 31,000 crore and 3.5 crore registered workers.

State governments will be directed to use these funds to help these building and construction workers against any economic disruption due to nationwide lockdown.

The states will also be asked to utilise funds under the District Mineral Fund for supplementing and augmenting testing, screening and other measures required to contain coronavirus.

ALSO READ:China reports 1st local COVID-19 case after 3 days; Beijing to divert all international flights
Syrian Army, Civilians Block US Convoy, Force It to Turn Back in Country's Northeast  Reports

Sputnik News

18:58 GMT 25.03.2020(updated 19:16 GMT 25.03.2020)

The standoff is at least the fourth time this month that Syrian troops and angry local residents have forced a US military convoy to retreat from an area of al-Hasakah governorate.

Residents of the village of Hamu, northeastern Syria joined forces with members of the Syrian military in blocking the movement of a US military convoy attempting to pass through their community, Syria's al-Akhbar television channel has reported.

According to the outlet, a US convoy of six vehicles was forced to turn around and head back in the direction it came from after locals and Syrian troops stepped out into the road to block its movement. No injuries were reported.

The report comes just two days after a similar incident, also in the village of Hamu, when a US convoy consisting of 11 vehicles was prevented from moving into the village.

The US military has yet to comment on the alleged incidents.

Earlier this month, media reported that Syrian troops and local residents stopped a US convoy consisting of 7 vehicles as it attempted to pass through the village of Kuzelia, also in al-Hasakah governorate. In that incident, locals reportedly pelted the convoy with stones, and cursed at US soldiers. A similar occurrence reportedly took place in the nearly village of al-Basha on March 6.

The US military moved to consolidate its hold over oil-rich areas of northeastern Syria late last year, moving its forces back from the border with Turkey as Ankara began a short-lived military operation against the US's Syrian Kurdish allies. President Trump has openly justified the need to keep US troops in Syria to "keep the oil."

Last month, Turkish media reported that US troops had begun the construction of a new military base in al-Hasakah near the town of Tell Brak, with the base reported set up to prevent Syrian and Russian forces from reaching the Rmelan oil field.

Control over northeast Syria remains split between the Syrian government, the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, supported by the US, US forces, and the Turkish military.

The Syrian government has repeatedly demanded the withdrawal of all uninvited occupying forces from its territory.

A Sputnik

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Elections Security  $400 million

Distance Learning and Telemedicine (DLT), and Broadband Program  $25 million

Economic Development Administration  $1.5 billion

Department of Justice Grants, Byrne JAG: $850 million

Telehealth  $200 million

Department of Homeland Security  $9.1 million

Public Health Data Surveillance and Infrastructure Modernization  $500 million

State and Local Preparedness Grants  $1.5 billion

Elementary and Secondary Education  $13.5 billion

K-12 State Flexibility Funding  $3 billion

Higher Education  $14.25 billion

Federal Transit Administration (FTA), Transit Infrastructure Grants  $25 billion

Federal Aviation Administration, Airport Improvement Program (AIP)  $10 billion

Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)  $5 billion

Homeless Assistance Grants  $4 billion

The deadline to obtain a Real ID the federally mandated identification that will be needed to board an airplane is now extended until at least September 2021.

The bill includes a massive expansion of unemployment insurance (UI). During the Great Recession when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act extended UI benefits many states were scrambling to update their code and systems to accommodate these changes. What changes, if any, will be needed to make this possible?

Additional state- and local-led funding that is tied to COVID-19 that would include the expansion of telework, digital services and more directly funding COVID-19 response related to public health.

Late Wednesday night, the Senate approved the $2.2 trillion stimulus package titled Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act , which provides $150 billion to states and local government to respond to the pandemic and economic crisis caused by COVID-19. The bill now heads to the U.S. House of Representatives for a vote on Friday.The $150 billion in aid to states and localities in the Coronavirus Relief Fund is mostly allocated by population with a guarantee that each state receives at least $1.25 billion. Additionally, there is $3 billion reserved for U.S. territories and the District of Columbia and $8 billion set aside for tribal governments.The $2 trillion federal stimulus bill also includes $340 billion (in addition to the $150 billion) in emergency supplemental funding of which more than 80 percent ($274 billion) will go directly to states and localities, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee. An analysis of the various funding streams has identified various technology-related opportunities including $400 million in elections security. Here is a breakdown of some of the key funding streams that are either directly related to technology or may incorporate technology as an allowable expense: The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) will provide grants to the States for the 2020 election cycle.The DLT grant program supports rural communities access to telecommunications, audio and video equipment, as well as related advanced technologies for students, teachers and medical professionals. Economic development grants for states and communities suffering economically as a result of COVID-19. Funding to assist state, local, and tribal officers in responding to coronavirus. These funds will go directly to state and local governments and their law enforcement and criminal justice agencies. This is a fairly broad-based use grant that can be used to fund equipment, cars, technology or other-related needs.$200 million for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to support the efforts of health-care providers to address coronavirus by providing telecommunications services, information services, and devices necessary to enable the provision of telehealth services.Funding to address immediate needs for improved interagency coordination for the protection of critical infrastructure nationwide.Funding to invest in better COVID-19 tools and build state and local public health data infrastructure.Designated funding from FEMA for state and local preparedness and response activities.Over $13 billion in formula funding directly to states, to help schools meet the immediate needs of K-12 districts to improve the use of education technology and support distance education.A flexible formula funding to be allocated by states based on the needs of their K-12 districts and their institutions of higher education.Similar to K-12, this funding will be used to meet urgent needs related to coronavirus, and to support institutions as they cope with the immediate effects of coronavirus and school closures.Funding for transit providers, including states and local governments across the country, for operating and capital expenses.Funding to maintain operations at our nations airports including construction, rehabilitation, lighting, signage, etc. CDBG is a flexible program that provides communities and states with funding to provide a wide range of resources to address COVID-19, such as services for senior citizens, the homeless, and public health services.These funds will enable state and local governments to address coronavirus among the homeless population.Beyond the funding streams, there are other implications that may drive technology-related spending or projects including:Government Technology's
More than three dozen members of an Arkansas church congregation have tested positive for the coronavirus, after many attended a children's event at the parish earlier this month.

First Assembly of God Church in Greers Ferry has been hit hard by the outbreak of the deadly disease, which on Tuesday claimed the life of 91-year-old door greeter Bill Burton.

Barton is one of three people who have died in Arkansas as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The state had 355 confirmed cases as of Thursday afternoon.

As of Wednesday evening, 37 members of the First Assembly of God Church in Greers Ferry, Arkansas, have tested positive for the coronavirus

Mark Palenske, a pastor at the church, revealed in a detailed Facebook post Wednesday evening that so far, 37 members of the congregation have tested positive for the respiratory illness, including the cleric and his wife, Dena.

Palenske wrote that several other churchgoers are still waiting for their test results.

Church door greeter Bill Burton, 91, died from the coronavirus Tuesday, becoming the second confirmed fatality in the state

'Many of us are recovering from a long list of symptoms that seem to be common with this virus, and we certainly appreciate the hints of restored health that are headed our way,' wrote the pastor.

According to Palenske's account, between March 6-8, the church hosted a children's ministry event called 'Kids Crusade,' as Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette reported, which he stressed was 'several days before there was even a confirmed case [of coronavirus] in Arkansas.'

Many of the church's 80 members attended the weekend gathering.

The church held its final service on March 11 and canceled all future events before anyone in the parish tested positive.

That same day, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic.

In an earlier post, Palenske revealed that he and his wife have been sick with the virus for the past two weeks, and only in the last few days have they begun showing improvement.

'When something like this Covid-19 virus touches the other side of the world, your first inclination is to assume that time and distance are on your side,' the pastor posted on March 19. 'That false assumption caught up with Dena and I this past week.'

Palenske said his and Dena's symptoms began with a headache, followed by intense body aches and lethargy.

Mark Palenske, a pastor at the church, and his wife, Dena, have been sick for the past two weeks. The couple tested positive for the virus last week

Palenske has been posting updates about the situation at the church on Facebook

'Beyond that we have had to deal with waves of chills, sweating and nausea,' he revealed. 'Dena had a very scary morning a few days ago, which included a seizure of sorts and required hospitalization.'

When the pastor and fellow congregants went to seek medical attention, there were no tests available for them, but Palenske wrote cryptically that they 'pushed the envelope a little' with the aid of a local physician who had 'a very small number of commercial tests' at his disposal.

Palenske emphasized that he could not pinpoint 'where the virus came from.'

'Even though we were the original positives, there are people who have been sick longer than we have,' he said. 'It clearly made its way through a special weekend of childrens ministry at our church.'

As of Thursday there are over 83,000 cases of the virus in the US and over 1,000 deaths

In his most recent update, the pastor paid tribute to the door greeter who lost his battle with the illness on Tuesday morning.

'Bill Barton was the first encounter in our First Assembly experience,' he wrote. 'Each Sunday, the door would be opened for you and a white-haired, well-dressed gentlemen would extend a characteristic smile. It had been his post for years.

'He retired from the position several years ago, but returned after only a few months, saying that he really didnt want to give it up. Our hearts are broken, and his family is feeling his loss deeply.'

The first confirmed fatality related to the coronavirus in Arkansas was a 59-year-old man with underlying health conditions.
Geneva, March 26 : Seeing a very sharp decline in global trade, Roberto Azevedo, director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), has said a global solution is needed to address the global challenge brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a video message posted by the WTO on Wednesday, Azevedo admitted that "this pandemic will inevitably have an enormous impact on the economy, trade, and consequently on jobs and people's well-being", Xinhua reported.

Recalling recent projections on an economic downturn and job losses that are worse than those of the global financial crisis a dozen years ago, Azevedo said WTO would release its trade forecast in a few weeks.

He warned that economists would inevitably foresee "a very sharp decline in trade".

"Trade is what allows for the efficient production and supply of basic goods and services, medical supplies and equipment, food and energy that we all need", he continued, "keeping trade open and investments flowing will be critical to keep shelves plentiful and prices affordable." He underlined that a global response is needed to tackle a global challenge of this pandemic, saying "no country is self-sufficient, no matter how powerful or advanced, it may be." In a press release, Azevedo stressed the importance of transparency with regard to trade-related measures, arguing that it would be particularly useful for many countries that rely on imports for medical supplies.

He set up a task force of experts to monitor the impact of COVID-19 on trade flows and the overall global economy.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, as part of a coalition of 33 attorneys general, Wednesday urged Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Walmart and Craigslist to rigorously monitor price gouging practices by online sellers using their services.

In bipartisan letters issued Wednesday, Raoul and the coalition acknowledged the companies cooperation with states efforts to stop price gouging and asked that online retailers do more to monitor listings by third-party sellers.

At a time when my office could be assisting people who are concerned about how the COVID-19 pandemic will impact their mortgage, rent and student loan debt payments, my office is devoting significant resources to investigating individuals who are attempting to benefit from the public health crisis by putting profits before people, Raoul said. While these online platforms have worked cooperatively with my office to address allegations of price gouging, I encourage them to do more on their own to help us stop this practice, which prevents residents and health care workers from accessing the crucial items needed to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

In the letters, Raoul and the coalition cite several examples of price-gouging on these marketplace platforms, all of which occurred in March. The attorneys general referenced a 2-liter bottle of hand sanitizer listed for $250 on Craigslist, an 8-ounce bottle of hand sanitizer listed for $40 on Facebook Marketplace, and packs of face masks being priced at $40 and $50 on eBay. Raouls office contacted eBay after receiving a complaint about a seller listing a package of toilet tissue for sale for $49,000.

Americans are already worried about their health and the health of their loved ones during this pandemic. They shouldnt also have to worry about being ripped off on the critical supplies they need to get through it, said Abe Scarr, Illinois PIRG Education Fund Director. Were grateful for the leadership of Illinois Attorney General Raoul and 32 attorneys general who joined him in calling for more robust protections on these online marketplaces during this crisis.

Raoul and the coalition encouraged the online marketplace platforms to adopt the following practices to protect consumers from price gouging:

 Prevent exorbitant price increases from occurring in the first place by setting and enforcing price increase limits based on a 90-day average of the items price before an emergency begins.

 Trigger price-gouging protections prior to an emergency declaration, such as when systems detect pending weather events or future possible health risks.

 Create a complaint portal for consumers to report potential price gouging.

Raoul encourages people to report unfair pricing and other unfair business practices connected to the COVID-19 outbreak by visiting the Attorney Generals website.

Joining Raoul in sending the letters are the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming and Puerto Rico.
Stock Market LIVE Updates: Sensex up 300 points, Nifty opens above 8,400-level in opening trade; Rupee opens flat

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Losers now on the bourses are are Yes Bank, Grasim, JSW Steel, Adani Ports and Maruti Suzuki.

IndusInd Bank, Tech Mahindra, Axis Bank, Sun Pharma and HDFC are among major gainers on Nifty.

Sensex is up 243.93 points or 0.85 percent at 28779.71. Nifty is up 53.85 points or 0.6 percent at 8371.70.

Bank of Baroda said it has set up an emergency credit line to provide funds to its existing MSME and corporate borrowers impacted by the outbreak of coronavirus. This follows a similar additional funding facility announced by the country's largest lender State Bank of India for its borrowers, last week.

In these challenging times, the bank is committed to stand by its customers. Keeping in view the hardships faced by various sectors of the economy, we have launched products to take care of immediate liquidity requirement of businesses and retail customers," Indian Bank managing director Padmaja Chunduru told PTI.

Public sector banks with about 80 per cent of banking operation have taken steps to ensure the safety of its staff and uninterrupted banking services to customers.

In a bid to help people and businesses affected in the wake of coronavirus outbreak, state-owned lenders including Indian Bank, Union Bank of India and Bank of Baroda on Wednesday announced special emergency loan products. Besides, other public sector lenders -- Canara Bank, UCO Bank and Indian Overseas Bank -- too announced emergency credit line for customers.

The plan includes direct payments of $1,200 to most American adults and aid to help small businesses pay workers.

US Senate has passed USD 2 trillion Coronavirus stimulus package and sending it to the House.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack zooming nearly 15 percent in the early trade.

The Sensex jumped 683.06 points or 2.39 percent to 29,218.84 while Nifty was up 195.05 points or 2.34 percent to 8,512.90 at around 9.30 AM.

Snapdeal said authorities in various cities, including Delhi, Gurugram and Bengaluru have discussed operating issues with various e-commerce companies.

"We have been assured of the safe and smooth passage of our supply chain and delivery executives by local law enforcement authorities and are resuming our grocery and essentials services later today (Wednesday)," Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said in a statement.

Flipkart, along with rival Amazon India's Pantry service, were suspended temporarily on Wednesday morning as India entered into a 21-day lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.

Amazon said it was working with government authorities to enable it to deliver essential items.

After temporarily suspending operations earlier in the day, Walmart-owned Flipkart will resume its grocery and essentials services after assurance of safe passage of its supply chain and delivery executives by local law enforcement authorities.

Spot gold fell 0.6 percent to $1,604.16 per ounce and US gold futures were up 0.3 percent at $1,639 an ounce.

Gold prices fell on Thursday as investors scurried for liquid cash while awaiting the passage of a $2 trillion dollar US stimulus package to combat the economic impact of the coronavirus epidemic.

By a vote of 96-0 the Senate passed the bill, sending it to the House of Representatives, which could vote sometime this week.

The US Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a $2-trillion bill aimed at helping unemployed workers and industries hurt by the coronavirus pandemic, as well as providing billions of dollars to buy urgently needed medical equipment.

The shares jumped 19.99 percent to Rs 361.40 at around 9.50 AM.

Shares of IndusInd Bank soared nearly 20 percent in the early morning trade on Thursday.

IndusInd Bank remained the top gainer in the Sensex pack zooming nearly 20 percent.

The Sensex zoomed 1055.64 points or 3.70 percent to 29,591.42 while Nifty was up 278.75 points or 3.35 percent to 8,596.60 at around 10 AM.

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures slipped 4 cents, or 0.2 percent, to $24.45, while Brent crude futures rose 12 cents, or 0.4 percent, to $27.51.

Oil prices were mixed on Thursday following three days of gains, with the prospect of rapidly dwindling demand due to coronavirus travel bans and lockdowns offsetting hopes a US $2 trillion emergency stimulus will shore up economic activity.

The programme has offered sums between $1,000 and $750,000 to merchants looking for capital to acquire inventory, expand their product lines and advertise on Amazon.

The worlds largest online retailer notified sellers that its programme known as Amazon Lending would pause repayments beginning Thursday until April 30. Interest would not accrue during that period, it said.

Amazon.com Inc on Wednesday said it temporarily would not require sellers in its marketplace to repay loans it had made to them, as merchants confront the prospect of declining sales during the coronavirus pandemic.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack zooming over 25 percent while Axis Bank jumped over 13 percent.

The Sensex surged 1375.58 percent 4.82 percent to 29,911.36 while Nifty was up 363.30 points or 4.37 percent to 8,681.15 at around 10.15 AM.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack zooming over 30 percent while Axis Bank zoomed over 13 percent.

The Sensex surged 1528.81 points or 5.36 percent to 30,064.59 while Nifty was up 425.40 points or 5.11 percent to 8,743.25 at around 10.20 AM.

Debashish Panda, secretary, department of financial services, reportedly send a letter to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Tuesday asking to consider about moratorium of a few months on equated monthly installments (EMIs), interest and loan repayments and relaxation in the classification of bad loans, said a report in The Economic Times, quoting sources.

In a bid to provide relief to the borrowers amid coronavirus outbreak, the finance ministry reportedly suggested the RBI to consider measures such as moratorium on loan repayments for a few months, said a news report.

The Nifty has climbed 9 percent in the last two sessions as global sentiment improved as governments considered stimulus plans, but the blue-chip index is still down some 30 percent since the start of this year as markets everywhere are pummelled by the crushing impact of the virus on business.

Now the cry for a good domestic package is getting stronger and anticipation is building, he said.

There were some hiccups, but the US has passed the bill, said Neeraj Dewan, director at Quantum Securities in New Delhi.

Shares rose for the third straight session on Thursday, as investors awaited a domestic stimulus to fight the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on an already slowing economy, and the US Senate passed a $2-trillion virus relief bill.

"These delays are endangering lives. All governments need to step up to keep global supply chains open," he said in a statement.

"Air cargo is a vital partner in the global fight against COVID-19. But we are still seeing examples of cargo flights filled with life-saving medical supplies and equipment grounded due to cumbersome and bureaucratic processes to secure slots and operating permits," said IATA's director general and CEO Alexandre de Juniac.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) and its members have renewed their call to governments to take urgent measures to ensure that vital air cargo supply lines remain open, efficient and effective.

In the previous session, the lender's shares ended in the red.

Shares of IndusInd Bank soared nearly 45 percent to Rs 430.95 in the morning trade on Thursday.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack zooming nearly 45 percent while Axis Bank zoomed over 12 percent.

Sensex surged 999.21 points or 3.50 percent to 29,534.99 while Nifty was up 283.60 points or 3.41 percent to 8,601.45 at around 11.30 AM.

The market failed to retain its early morning rally and slipped from the days high while trading in the green.

Sensex zoomed 1231.51 points or 4.32 percent to 29,767.29 while Nifty was up 326.45 points or 3.92 percent to 8,644.30 at around 11.50 AM.

It is expected that the finance minister may announce a much-needed stimulus package in the wake of coronavirus outbreak and subsequent national lockdown for 21 days.

Sensex soared 1483.21 points or 5.20 percent to 30,018.99 and Nifty jumped 396.90 points or 4.77 percent to 8,714.75 at around 12.10 PM.

Market made a sharp recovery in the afternoon trade after reports of Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharamans press conference at 1 pm today.

Economists say the economy is already in recession and the jobless claims report would offer proof of that.

The weekly jobless claims report from the Labor Department on Thursday is set to offer the clearest evidence yet of the coronavirus devastating impact on the economy, which has forced the Federal Reserve to take extraordinary steps and set the US Congress racing to assemble a record $2 trillion stimulus package.

The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits likely raced to as high as a record 4 million last week as strict measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic ground the country to a sudden halt, unleashing a wave of layoffs.

In the morning, the domestic unit opened flat at 75.87 per dollar against Tuesday's close of 75.88.

Rupee jumped 63 paise to 75.25 per dollar during intra-day trade, amid buying seen in the domestic equity market.

In the countryside, where 70 percent of people live and often rely only on cash, banks will likely operate on alternate days and redeploy staff to only allow disbursal of welfare cash to the poor, one of the sources said.

Under the plan, in major cities there would likely be only one bank open every five kilometres, the sources said, declining to be identified as it has not yet been publicly disclosed.

India is still very much a cash society and banks have been exempted from a 21-day lockdown that began this week as they are considered an essential service.

Indias central bank and major lenders are considering shutting down most branches across the country to prevent tens of thousands of employees from getting infected with the coronavirus, four sources familiar with the plan told Reuters.

"Harvesting machinery has come from Punjab and adequate supply of fuel should be made available for them," he said.

The minister said he has instructed district collectors that agriculture work should not be affected due to the lockdown.

The ready reckoner rates, which are prices of a residential property, land or commercial property for a given area, are published on 31 March every year. But now, the revenue department officials are busy in tackling the coronavirus crisis, hence the ready reckoner rates will be published after the state is coronavirus-free, Thorat said in a statement.

Maharashtra Revenue Minister Balasaheb Thorat on Thursday said the publication of ready reckoner rates has been postponed in view of the coronavirus outbreak.

Sensex jumped 1258.04 points or 4.41 percent to 29,793.82 and Nifty jumped 284.85 points or 3.42 percent to 8,602.70 as Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced Rs 1.70 lakh crore relief package.

Sentiments are expected to be upbeat as Investors eagerly wait for stimulus package from India, however coronavirus related developments will also be on Investors radar.

IndusInd bank, Axis bank, HDFC twins and ICICI bank were among the top gainers. IndusInd bank surged more than 47 percent in Thursday's session.

BFSI shares were the top gainer as value buying emerged in fundamentally strong stocks. IndusInd bank, Axis bank, HDFC twins and ICICI bank were among the top gainers.

Sentiments got a boost from reports of India working on a $20 billion package while the US Senate passed a bill of $2 trillion that will help US businessman and workers. Broad based buying was witnessed in the market with all sectors trading in green.

Bulls continued their winning momentum on the Dalal Street gaining more than 4.6 percent amid reports of stimulus packages by large economies in order to soften the economic blow from the lockdown of businesses and offices, said Sundar Sanmukhani, Head of Fundamental Research Desk, Choice Broking.

Sensex was trading 622 points or 2.18 percent at 29,157.78 while Nifty was up 158.15 points or 1.9 percent at 8,476 at around 2 PM.

Market abandoned the gains as Sensex slipped below 30,000-mark soon after Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman unveiled Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief package.

On an overall basis, the Prime Minister and the finance minister deserve a standing ovation for the proactive approach to pass on the much needed benefit to the most vulnerable section of the Indian society, he added.

While the announcements are welcome, the quantum of reliefs maybe a subject matter of discussion. The moot point remains that how fast these reliefs could reach the ultimate beneficiary keeping in mind that there are lot of challenges related to social distancing, said Rastogi.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has made some populist announcements which would give the immediate required relief to the most needy percentage of the Indian population, said Abhishek A Rastogi, partner at Khaitan & Co.

Though the market gave up the gains even as Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief package, the indices regained momentum soon when she said that more measures would be announced later.

Sensex soared 1302.54 percent or 4.56 percent to 29,838.32 while Nifty was up 362.55 points or 4.36 percent at 8,680.40 at around 2.54 pm.

Similarly, the NSE Nifty stood 284.20 points, or 3.42 percent, higher at 8,602.05 at 2.30 pm.

Paring early gains, the 30-share BSE barometer was up 1,055.11 points or 3.70 percent at 29,590.89. It rallied over 1,500 points in the morning session.

After the announcement, Sensex was trading over 1,000 points higher in afternoon session on Wednesday.

Two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown in the wake of coronavirus outbreak, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced Rs 1.7 lakh crore PM Gareeb Kalyan scheme to cushion the impact of the lockdown.

The govt is prioritising. This can go a long way in implementing the lockdown. A deficiency is that the states who have to implement lots of measures have not been given any significant transfer," Vijayakumar added.

Thursday's announcement is a a package for lockdown impacted segments, he said.

Terming the announcement by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as comprehensive to help the poor and vulnerable, VK Vijayakumar, chief investment strategist at Geojit Financial Services, said that with the finance minister having said will look into it regarding packages for the MSMEs, perhaps industry-specific measures are expected to be announced in the next package.

The package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore is about 0.8 percent of the GDP. The collapse of demand, as was being feared by many, looks unlikely. So the period of lockdown may not be extended. These measures, if effectively and quickly implemented, would make the total shutdown more complete. This is the biggest positive for listed companies, Hajra said.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharamans announcements are focused mostly towards rural poor and it is positive for consumers as a theme, said Sujan Hajra, chief economist and executive director, Anand Rathi Shares and Stock Brokers.

What has come as a surprise and significant step towards supporting both small businesses and banks alike, has been the extension of threshold from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 1 crore for reporting delinquency (broad industry expectation was extension to around Rs 5 lakhs), with a potential to actually suspend certain sections of the IBC for six months in case the COVID-19 situation worsens, Suryakumar said.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's relief measures have come as a major relief to MSME and corporates, both in terms of compliance to MCA, Income Tax, GST, etc, as well as relaxation in criteria for bankruptcy in the shor- term, said Meghna Suryakumar, CEO and founder, Crediwatch.

Given the importance of social distancing, home delivery of ration (under PDS) and LPG is the best option but it will need significant ramp up of last mile delivery infrastructure. Local administration has to step up to face this challenge. Penetration of digital payments among poor households is very low so people may start flocking at the banks and business correspondents (BCs) to withdraw money, which will defeat the whole purpose. Home delivery of money though BCs and bank officials needs to be mandated," Thapliyal added.

"An average poor household will receive an additional benefit of Rs 6,800 under PDS, Ujjwala and Jan-Dhan over the next three months. Advance payment of PM-KISAN instalment and ex-gratia on pension (old age, widow and disabled) can increase this to Rs 9,800 per household, assuming that a household is eligible for all these schemes," Thapliyal said.

The Centre has announced a holistic package for poor people in response to coronavirus outbreak, said Mitul Thapliyal, partner, MicroSave Consulting.

"This will hopefully make implementation easier as there will be challenges on account of disruptions and lack of bandwidth caused by lockdown which will also need to be factored in," he said.

The government has used the existing programs such as MGNREGA, Jan Dhan Yojna, Ujwala, Ayushman Bharat, DBT, PDS and other schemes to address the needs of the poor, migrant workers, healthcare workers, senior citizens, daily wagers and other vulnerable groups who are at risk on account of the current pandemic, said Anand Ramanathan, partner, Deloitte India.

The government must be lauded for prioritising the well-being of the health workers. Overall, the government announcements are a step in the right direction to ensure that people do not suffer, Kakkar added.

"The relaxation in compliance combined with relief in EPF will reduce stress and financial burden on businesses. The government should also consider relaxations in NPAs and announcing relief packages to sectors which are worst hit like aviation, tourism etc. before the close of the financial year," said Kakkar.

The announcements made by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will bring much-needed relief to masses by ensuring that people can satisfy their basic needs, said Anuj Kakkar, partner Vriddhi Advisors.

All the sectoral indices ended in the green. BSE Midcap and Smallcap indices rose over 3 percent each.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack soaring over 45 percent. The other major gainers included L&T, Bajaj Finance, Airtel, Bajaj Auto, Kotak Bank and HUL.

The Sensex surged 1,410.99 points or 4.94 percent to 29,946.77 while the broader Nifty was up 323.60 points or 3.89 percent at 8641.45 at close.

Market closed in the green for the third straight session on Thursday as the Nifty ended the March series above 8,600 level.

#Lockdown21 | Britannia says Govt support & intervention required to restore supply chains; imperative that supply chain for food products be restored in entirety pic.twitter.com/BqlzRxcAgq

Similarly, the NSE Nifty stood 284.20 points, or 3.42 percent, higher at 8,602.05 at 2.30 pm.

Paring early gains, the 30-share BSE barometer was up 1,055.11 points or 3.70 percent at 29,590.89. It rallied over 1,500 points in the morning session.

After the announcement, Sensex was trading over 1,000 points higher in afternoon session on Wednesday.

Two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown in the wake of coronavirus outbreak, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced Rs 1.7 lakh crore PM Gareeb Kalyan scheme to cushion the impact of the lockdown.

The govt is prioritising. This can go a long way in implementing the lockdown. A deficiency is that the states who have to implement lots of measures have not been given any significant transfer," Vijayakumar added.

Thursday's announcement is a a package for lockdown impacted segments, he said.

Terming the announcement by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as comprehensive to help the poor and vulnerable, VK Vijayakumar, chief investment strategist at Geojit Financial Services, said that with the finance minister having said will look into it regarding packages for the MSMEs, perhaps industry-specific measures are expected to be announced in the next package.

The package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore is about 0.8 percent of the GDP. The collapse of demand, as was being feared by many, looks unlikely. So the period of lockdown may not be extended. These measures, if effectively and quickly implemented, would make the total shutdown more complete. This is the biggest positive for listed companies, Hajra said.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharamans announcements are focused mostly towards rural poor and it is positive for consumers as a theme, said Sujan Hajra, chief economist and executive director, Anand Rathi Shares and Stock Brokers.

What has come as a surprise and significant step towards supporting both small businesses and banks alike, has been the extension of threshold from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 1 crore for reporting delinquency (broad industry expectation was extension to around Rs 5 lakhs), with a potential to actually suspend certain sections of the IBC for six months in case the COVID-19 situation worsens, Suryakumar said.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's relief measures have come as a major relief to MSME and corporates, both in terms of compliance to MCA, Income Tax, GST, etc, as well as relaxation in criteria for bankruptcy in the shor- term, said Meghna Suryakumar, CEO and founder, Crediwatch.

Given the importance of social distancing, home delivery of ration (under PDS) and LPG is the best option but it will need significant ramp up of last mile delivery infrastructure. Local administration has to step up to face this challenge. Penetration of digital payments among poor households is very low so people may start flocking at the banks and business correspondents (BCs) to withdraw money, which will defeat the whole purpose. Home delivery of money though BCs and bank officials needs to be mandated," Thapliyal added.

"An average poor household will receive an additional benefit of Rs 6,800 under PDS, Ujjwala and Jan-Dhan over the next three months. Advance payment of PM-KISAN instalment and ex-gratia on pension (old age, widow and disabled) can increase this to Rs 9,800 per household, assuming that a household is eligible for all these schemes," Thapliyal said.

The Centre has announced a holistic package for poor people in response to coronavirus outbreak, said Mitul Thapliyal, partner, MicroSave Consulting.

SEBI has decided to give certain further relaxations from compliance to listed companies under SEBI (Listing obligations and disclosure requirements) and from SOP on imposition of fines/other enforcement actions. #IndiaFightsCorona pic.twitter.com/5KmHCbjyjs

"This will hopefully make implementation easier as there will be challenges on account of disruptions and lack of bandwidth caused by lockdown which will also need to be factored in," he said.

The government has used the existing programs such as MGNREGA, Jan Dhan Yojna, Ujwala, Ayushman Bharat, DBT, PDS and other schemes to address the needs of the poor, migrant workers, healthcare workers, senior citizens, daily wagers and other vulnerable groups who are at risk on account of the current pandemic, said Anand Ramanathan, partner, Deloitte India.

The government must be lauded for prioritising the well-being of the health workers. Overall, the government announcements are a step in the right direction to ensure that people do not suffer, Kakkar added.

"The relaxation in compliance combined with relief in EPF will reduce stress and financial burden on businesses. The government should also consider relaxations in NPAs and announcing relief packages to sectors which are worst hit like aviation, tourism etc. before the close of the financial year," said Kakkar.

The announcements made by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will bring much-needed relief to masses by ensuring that people can satisfy their basic needs, said Anuj Kakkar, partner Vriddhi Advisors.

#MarketAtClose | Market ends higher for the 3rd consecutive day; frontliners up 3-6%; Nifty moves 324 points (4%) higher at 8,641 & #Sensex 1,411 points (5%) at 29,947 pic.twitter.com/A5eTaayGQj

All the sectoral indices ended in the green. BSE Midcap and Smallcap indices rose over 3 percent each.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack soaring over 45 percent. The other major gainers included L&T, Bajaj Finance, Airtel, Bajaj Auto, Kotak Bank and HUL.

The Sensex surged 1,410.99 points or 4.94 percent to 29,946.77 while the broader Nifty was up 323.60 points or 3.89 percent at 8641.45 at close.

Market closed in the green for the third straight session on Thursday as the Nifty ended the March series above 8,600 level.

Stock Market LIVE Updates: Market closed in the green for the third straight session on Thursday as the Nifty ended the March series above 8,600 level after the announcement of Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief package by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

The Sensex surged 1,410.99 points or 4.94 percent to 29,946.77 while the broader Nifty was up 323.60 points or 3.89 percent at 8641.45 at close.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack soaring over 45 percent. The other major gainers included L&T, Bajaj Finance, Airtel, Bajaj Auto, Kotak Bank and HUL.

All the sectoral indices ended in the green. BSE Midcap and Smallcap indices rose over 3 percent each.

Sitharaman has announced some very timely relief measures to help Indias poor with the cash transfers, construction workers fund and free rice/wheat distribution, said Akhil Shahani, managing director, The Shahani Group.

"It is also good that she is supporting the true hero's of this coronavirus fight by giving Rs 50 lakh medical insurance cover to health workers. However it would have been good to see additional relief offered to the SME sector beyond 3 month support for the EPF. Many SMEs are struggling to pay salaries and debt interest with no income, an announcement on a moratorium on loan interest payments for a couple of months or a reduction in the loan interest rates charged by banks could have been beneficial," he said.

Also, there could have been a 3 month moratorium on GST collections. A concern also arises as to how the Centre will support this additional burden on its annual Budget, he added.

Market lost its sheen as Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman unveiled Rs 1.7 lakh crore relief package for the country.

Sensex slipped below 30,000-mark while the Nifty was trading above 8,600-level.

Sensex jumped 1258.04 points or 4.41 percent to 29,793.82 and Nifty jumped 284.85 points or 3.42 percent to 8,602.70.



Market staged a comeback after reports of Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharamans press conference at 1 pm today.

It is expected that the Centre would announce a much-needed stimulus package in the wake of coronavirus outbreak and subsequent national lockdown for 21 days.

Sensex zoomed 1231.51 points or 4.32 percent to 29,767.29 while Nifty was up 326.45 points or 3.92 percent to 8,644.30 at around 11.50 AM.



The market failed to retain its early morning rally and slipped from the days high.

Sensex surged 999.21 points or 3.50 percent to 29,534.99 while Nifty was up 283.60 points or 3.41 percent to 8,601.45 at around 11.30 AM.

The bull run continued on Dalal Street in the morning trade on Thursday as Sensex surged 1528.81 points or 5.36 percent to 30,064.59 while Nifty was up 425.40 points or 5.11 percent to 8,743.25 at around 10.20 AM.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack zooming over 30 percent while Axis Bank surged over 13 percent.

The Sensex jumped 683.06 points or 2.39 percent to 29,218.84 while Nifty was up 195.05 points or 2.34 percent to 8,512.90 at around 9.30 AM.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack zooming nearly 15 percent. Other gainers included Axis Bank, Infosys, HDFC, Tech Mahindra, HCL Tech, Bajaj Finance, Bajaj Auto and ICICI Bank.

Sensex up 300 points, Nifty opens above 8,400-level in opening trade; Rupee opens flat

Benchmark indices are trading higher in the pre-opening session with Nifty above 8400.

At 09:01 hrs IST, the Sensex is up 754.68 points or 2.64% at 29290.46, and the Nifty up 84.30 points or 1.01% at 8402.15.

Singapore: Asian stock markets made a cautious start on Thursday following two days of rallies, as investors await the passage and details of a $2 trillion stimulus package in the United States to combat the economic fallout from the coronavirus.

Senate leaders hope to vote on the plan later on Wednesday in Washington, but it still faces criticism. The bill includes a $500 billion fund to help hard-hit industries and a comparable amount for payments up to $3,000 to millions of US families.

It cannot come soon enough, with potentially enormous weekly US initial jobless claims to appear in data due at 1230 GMT.

Australias S&P/ASX 200 index rose 1.5 percent in early tradeits third positive start in as many sessions, but also its most muted. Japans Nikkei fell 2.2%.

Hong Kong futures were 1 percent higher and China A50 futures were up 0.2 percent. MSCIs broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.3 percent.

There has been so much stimulus thrown at this, said Jun Bei Liu, portfolio manager at Tribeca Investment Partners in Sydney. But the positivity related to it is really just sentiment, she said, adding that investors were largely flying blind with so many companies withdrawing earnings guidance. Jobless figures may offer a reality check, she said.

In perhaps an early sign of the fragile mood, the risk-sensitive Australian dollar dropped 1 percent and the safe-haven Japanese yen rose in morning trade.

US stock futures rose 1 percent, following the first back-to-back session rises on Wall Street in over a month.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 2.4 percent and the S&P 500 1.2 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite dropped half a percent following a Nikkei report that Apple was weighing a delay in the launch of its 5G iPhone.

Jobless claims to test bounce

The money at stake in the stimulus bill amounts to nearly half of the $4.7 trillion the US government spends annually.

But it also comes against a backdrop of bad news as the coronavirus spreads and as jobless claims are set to soar, with both expected to test the nascent bounce in markets this week.

California Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters on Wednesday that a million Californians had already applied for jobless benefits this month - a number that knocked stocks from session highs and has analysts bracing for worse to come.

RBC Capital Markets economists had expected a national figure over 1 million in Thursdays data, but say it is now poised to be many multiples of that, as reduced hours across the country drive deep layoffs.

Something in the 5-10 million range for initial jobless claims is quite likely, they wrote in a note.

That compares to a 695,000 peak in 1982. Forecasts in a Reuters poll range from a minimum of 250,000 initial claims, all the way up to 4 million.

Trepidation seemed to put a halt on the US dollars recent softness in currency markets, with the dollar ahead 1 percent against the Antipodean currencies and up 0.6% against the pound.

It slipped 0.3 percent to 110.85 yen.

US crude slipped 1.5 percent to $24.11 per barrel and gold steadied at $1,608.14 per ounce.
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On March 24, 2020, Iraqi National Security Forces officers stopped Azad Shakur, a reporter for the Iraqi Kurdish broadcaster Gali Kurdistan, and seized his belongings for allegedly violating a lockdown imposed to restrict the spread of the COVID-19 virus, according to Shakur, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview, and a report by the Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq, a local press freedom group.

The officers stopped Shakur at a checkpoint in the northeastern Iraqi city of Kirkuk while he was on his way home from the office, he said. Shakur identified himself as a journalist, but security officers confiscated his drivers license, car registration, and press cards, and said they would fine him for violating the curfew, he said.

On March 15, Iraq imposed a curfew initially in Baghdad, but then expanded to cover the entire country, in response to the coronavirus outbreak, according to news reports. Journalists, diplomats, health workers, and other selected groups are exempt from the restrictions, according to those reports.

Shakur told CPJ that he showed the officers a permit from the Kirkuk Police saying that he was entitled to work during curfew hours.

They said they didnt recognize that permit and that they will fine me, because I didnt have a permit from the Kirkuk Operations Command, he said.

Shortly after arriving home, Shakur, whose employer is affiliated with the opposition Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, called a local general to complain about the incident; shortly afterward his license, registration, and press card were sent to his home and the fine was dropped, he told CPJ.

Since Kirkuk was seized by the Iraqi Army in October 2017, it has become very difficult to work here as a Kurdish journalist. We are constantly harassed and, unlike Arabic outlets, we are not invited to cover government events, Shakur told CPJ.
The FBI has used mass lockdowns amid the global coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to promote indoor workouts offered by its fitness app, prompting warnings from privacy advocates.

Making use of the trending #MondayMotivation topic on Twitter, the agency tweeted: Are you looking for tips for indoor workouts? Download the FBIs Physical Fitness Test app to learn proper form for exercises you can do at home like pushups and sit-ups.

The free app is available for download through the FBIs website for both iOS and Android devices, offering users the chance to learn how to train like an agent. It offers video tutorials and guidance on how to pass the agencys fitness test, with requirements for a good score ranging from completing 58 sit-ups in one minute, to running 1.5 miles in less than 9 minutes.

The FBIs website claims the best way to use the app is by enabling location and movement tracking. Use your phones GPS and accelerometer for a more realistic PFT experience, it states.

Privacy advocates were quick to warn users to avoid the app, with digital rights group Fight for the Future tweeting in all-caps: Do not  and we cannot stress this next part enough  download this app.

Non-profit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen warned: Looking to get ripped while ceding your location data to the FBI? Boy, do we have the app for you.

The app has been downloaded more than 10,000 times on Google Play, despite warnings from some reviewers about the potential risks involved.

Really think hard about whether you want to give a law enforcement agency warrant-free access to the GPS on your phone, one reviewer wrote.

Another warned: This app is a Trojan Horse app and absolutely only exists to steal your information. Do not download this app, look at the app permissions ... This is shameful.

In a 2018 press release announcing the apps release, the agency claimed that it does not collect personal user data.

A spokesperson told The Independent: The app does not gather or save any personal information other than what you select for your profile. This information is stored solely on your phone, and it is not transmitted to, or saved by, the FBI.
For Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other comrades in the socialist vanguard of the Democratic Party, the coronavirus epidemic proves that the world needs socialism. For admirers of Western European universal health-care systems, the outbreak proves the need for the United States to build a Western European universal health-care system. (Like Italys?) For Joe Biden, the plague proves that the world needs Joe Biden. It is pretty easy to imagine Joe Biden demanding More cowbell! but that is what every political opportunist is saying right now. Like climate change or that infinitely plastic thing known as national security, the coronavirus epidemic is a policy palimpsest that political entrepreneurs will be writing over forever, or at least until something more convenient comes along. We know how that story goes, because we have heard it so many times before: Al-Qaeda flies airplanes into a building and Arianna Huffington gets to tell you what kind of car to drive.

For the trade protectionists and anti-globalists, the coronavirus epidemic makes the case against free trade. There are anti-trade Buchananites on the right  one of them, a former professor in the nations 67th-best business school named Peter Navarro, is Donald Trumps director of trade and manufacturing policy  and there are fellow travelers on the left, too. Consider the case of Farhad Manjoo, who argues in the New York Times that the shortage of face masks for medical staff exposes a very American set of capitalist pathologies stemming from the rise and inevitable lure of low-cost overseas manufacturing. Borrowing from Benjamin Franklin, he laments, For want of a 75-cent face mask, the kingdom was lost.

There are many problems with that line of analysis, beginning with the fact that notwithstanding the angst and wailing in Washington, the kingdom has not been lost. The United States is experiencing an epidemic for which it was ill-prepared, and our lack of preparation is going to impose a heavy cost. Manjoo sees in this capitalist pathologies. Perhaps. But most of the hospitals in the United States are operated by nonprofits or by government. Must we detect nonprofit pathologies? The federal government, the states, the counties, and the cities have health departments. Few if any of these made anything resembling adequate preparations. Neither have the national health-care systems of the United Kingdom or many European countries. (Canada once again reminds us that North America has one reasonably well-governed country.) To insist that these developments speak to deficiencies in capitalism is not quite right  unless you begin with capitalist pathologies and work your way back from there. It is easy to mistake rhetoric for analysis (writes the former rhetoric teacher), which is how election campaigns work, and much of what is written in the New York Times opinion pages is best understood as a collection of campaign documents.

Story continues

So, what about those surgical masks?

The United States both produces and imports an enormous quantity of paper goods (it is the worlds largest importer of paper, its imports constituting 10.2 percent of the worlds total) and paper-related goods. Americans are employed in high-value paper-goods production, because it costs a great deal to employ American factory workers, and American workers have lots of choices. (As it happens, I have an office in a former paper-goods factory, which is today home to offices for everything from an advertising firm to a filmmaking company, a brewery, and a maker of high-end doggie treats  oh, the carnage!) Georgia-Pacific (thats our friend Charles Koch) manufactures toilet paper in Choctaw County, Ala., and in Plattsburgh, N.Y.; it also makes composite panels and corrugated sheets in Texas (where it employs 2,250 people at a dozen plants), packaging and gypsum products in California, etc.

But most of the worlds medical face masks are made in the so-called Peoples Republic of China and in Taiwan. Most, but not all: When the shortage and the Chinese firms inability to meet demand became apparent, other makers around the world began to step up production. One factory in France suddenly had a half-billion orders; like Amazon and many other companies with competencies that suddenly are in acute demand, it is hiring as fast as it can. Other mask-makers are increasing production, and other firms are getting into the mask-making business. Which is to say: Globalization is working, and markets are working. Capitalism works when you work it.

The question of critical goods and how they are traded during emergencies is a very old one. Most of the worlds major bilateral and multinational trade agreements specify exemptions for products that are deemed critical to national security or other pressing non-economic concerns; indeed, dealing with such questions is a big part of what we have to have such agreements in the first place instead of the one-sentence free-trade treaty: There shall be free trade between x and y. We might be comfortable allowing foreign firms far from Washingtons oversight to manufacture underwear for the Navy, but less trusting when it comes to, say, encryption equipment. (I would hope so: As it turns out, for many years the worlds leading supplier of cryptographic hardware was a front for a ruthless international espionage operation  ours.) Those 10,000-page trade deals that everybody hates are where those details get hashed out.

You will not be surprised to learn that these exceptions are cynically exploited. In 1975, the Swedes sought a special exemption from GATT for sneakers as a matter of national security, arguing that decrease in domestic production has become a critical threat to the emergency planning of Swedens economic defense as an integral part of the countrys security policy. This policy necessitates the maintenance of a minimum domestic production capacity in vital industries. Such a capacity is indispensable in order to secure the provision of essential products necessary to meet basic needs in case of war or other emergency in international relations. Marco Rubio has made roughly the same preposterous argument for restricting imports of sugar, which just happens to benefit an important constituency back home in Florida. Considering the Swedish sneaker gambit, the historical record coolly notes that many of Swedens trading partners expressed doubts as to the justification of these measures under the General Agreement. As they would.

There are risks to relying on overseas suppliers for surgical masks, or for any other good. There also are risks to not tapping overseas suppliers for surgical masks and for other critical goods. An earthquake in Utah can take a factory offline as quickly as a diktat from Beijing. Responsible organizations plan for disruptions in their operations; if they find themselves in the vulnerable position of being reliant upon a single provider for some mission-critical component, they find additional ones. The problem with the medical-mask market is not that U.S. firms buy them from Chinese sources but that they do not also buy them from other sources or have quickly executable plans to acquire them from other sources. International trade is not the problem  it is the solution.

The current shortages are less matters of trade than they are matters of the just in time model of inventory management and operations, which works very well  if things actually get done in time. The current shortages of everything from ventilators to toilet paper are forcing a reevaluation of the risks associated with low inventories. Thats a classic problem of mispricing risk: Businesses immediately realize the savings associated with reductions in the costs of building and operating large warehouses, but the tradeoffs are not given their due because the costs imposed by them are not immediate. Many of the people who say We need to run the government like a business! would not say that if they knew more about the way many American businesses are run. It is worth keeping in mind that Krispy Kreme went bankrupt selling doughnuts to Americans.

A more narrow and more difficult issue than that of international trade is that of trade with China, which groans under the corrupt misgovernment of a single-party gulag state. Trade with China is the right policy for the United States for both economic and national-security reasons: Trade leaves both countries better off in material terms, and the United States is better off with a middle-income China than with a poor and desperate China. While it is wrong to believe that liberal reform in China will come to pass inevitably as a result of its increasing prosperity and its limited economic reforms, almost none of what the United States wants from the U.S.China relationship is easier to get from a poorer China. Even real problems in the economic relationship, the theft of intellectual property prominent among them, are more tractable to Washington when China has more to lose. The problem for the United States is that Washington is lazy and reliably reaches for the wrong weapon  tariffs  because our national leadership lacks the intellectual capacity and long-term political commitment to pursue our interests in an intelligent and productive way.

Our relationship with China has to be managed like our relationship with any other country. In the case of China, there are elevated risks that have to do with the nature of the country and with the nature of the Beijing regime, and we owe it to ourselves to be realistic and clear-eyed about what those are and how they can be most effectively mitigated.

The failure of a New York City hospital operator to stock a sufficient supply of medical masks is not an indictment of the world economic order or capitalist pathologies. It is an indictment of the management of New York City hospitals, and hospitals elsewhere. That is a big enough problem without imagining it to be grander than it is.

But if you play the cowbell, then More cowbell! is what you want to hear.

More from National Review
At this threatening time the public can contribute to the production of vegetables by at least growing in their own compound or on their windowsill





by Professor N.T. Sohan Wijesekera





Scary Times





COVID 19 is still a mystery. We do not know how it came; we cannot recognize its carriers; we do not know how to tame it. We can only hope for the best. The point is, Are we expecting the worst?





Even China and Hong Kong who appear to have had a control, are having a threat of a second wave. Just take a look at the statistics: 60 days for the first 100,000 patients, 10 days for the next 100,000 and 4 days for the last 100,000 shows the speed at which CORONA 19 is spreading. The reasons are quoted as delay in state response and the carelessness of the public. Once the spread takes place then we face the crisis of resources. Even USA and Italy with commendable hospital facilities are grasping for breath.













So it is important for us to be very clear about the danger we are facing, unless we are careful. We must be thankful to the HE and government for their lockdown and associated actions. These are not just difficult times. These are scary times.





***  if we are to ensure a risk free Sinhala and Tamil New Year, then we need to extend the physical lockdown to ensure at least three continuous weeks plus an observation period of one more week

***





In Sri Lanka, we have identified only 100 persons infected with corona virus. This by no means can be a factor to take it easy. In Sri Lanka we do not have wide testing capability. Some argue that the lesser numbers could be either due to the absence of infected, or due to low testing capability, or because testing is limited to an identified group only. Lets hope that it is the first. We have come to the conclusion that a two weeks in self-isolation is worthy of a certificate. How good are the assumptions? I am yet to see a document stating that the immunity would be developed within two weeks. Why not three weeks to be on the safer side allowing the virus and the humans to work within a wider buffer.





These are scary times. Let us make it a 3 weeks shut down. After 14 days of observation, let us release those in immunity centers but we need to keep them in self-isolation for another week. We have only about 550 ICU beds. A simple mathematical back-calculation would show our position with respect to the normal beds and then about the possibility of having dedicated COVID wards. We desperately need to stop the new patients. It is better to be safe than sorry. I do not think that an additional week would starve us to death. I do not think that we need to think of the economy at this point of time. These are scary times, time to take desperate measures. These are not just difficult times.





*** We have come to the conclusion that a two weeks in self-isolation is worthy of a certificate. How good are the assumptions?

***





Growing from Home.





We will have to fall back to our own resilient systems. We must consider our country as a family. We need to find enough food and shelter. Then and only then we can evade the forthcoming desperate situation.





The rice millers say that we have sufficient rice for two months and the next crop is being harvested. We have salt but Sugar will be an issue. It is time to revive our sugar and tree-tapping industry. We need to take steps to harvest more fish from the sea and promote freshwater fishery. Vegetable growers are continuing with the cultivations.





The only way general public can contribute to Rice, sugar, and fish would be through restrained consumption. This is mainly because of the scale of logistics associated with their production. At this threatening time the public can contribute to the production of vegetables by at least growing in their own compound or on their windowsill. Green leaves would be the best and the easiest. Then comes short term crops. Sweet potatoes and Manioc have edible leaves. We need to look at jak and bread fruits, ash plantains and banana. We must convert Working from home to Growing from home. We can overcome a forthcoming food crisis by promoting a cultivation drive.





*** Just like a good school principal musters his teachers and the students, our rulers should ensure a state supervised mechanism that is doing the right for producers, the middle men and the consumers.

***





Goodwill and Justice must be Dictated





The main consideration with regards to the medium to large scale operations such as rice, sugar, fish and vegetables would be the distribution. This must be by ensuring a fair price for the producer and for the consumer. Presently the middle men appear to take advantage. The prices are skyrocketing.





We all know that during times of difficulty, we must be fair and should be fairer than when normalcy prevailed. However, we must expect a normally distributed population and not a distribution skewed towards correct, just and sympathetic attitudes. Humans are selfish and greedy. They like money and will take every opportunity to make money. So at this time of need, the government must step in. The goodwill and justice must be dictated. Just like a good school principal musters his teachers and the students, our rulers should ensure a state supervised mechanism that is doing the right for producers, the middle men and the consumers.





*** The recent messages about the tea as a cure, recommendation of Coriander, Venivelgeta and Peyawa as remedies, Use of Wel-mee and red onions for sore throats etc., hint that.

***





Western and Native





Medicine will be a major problem for the government. If drugs are available, then the distribution of medicine for common illnesses may pose less problems. The doctors and the pharmacists will have to think outside the box and be willing to bend backwards. We have become a group that rely mostly on western medicine though we have a very high faith in our traditional and Ayurveda treatments. Either our media does not know about these systems, or they do not care or the traditional and Ayurveda professionals are not active. The recent messages about the tea as a cure, recommendation of Coriander, Venivelgeta and Peyawa as remedies, Use of Wel-mee and red onions for sore throats etc., hint that there should be a channel for the public to get the inputs other than from western medicine.





Conscious Ignorance and Meta Ignorance





*** We have to have a heart; but when making decisions at critical junctures, the head and the heart must be separated.

***





In this scary situation we need to ensure self-isolation and encourage others to do the same. However, we can see that the government is pleading but still some humanitarian actions make public to panic and crowd at service centers. These humanitarian actions are essential to demonstrate our upbringing, tradition, culture, and concern about other humans, animals and the environment. However, such actions must be taken with care because we do not know about the situation and repercussions. In climate change uncertainty analysis, we call this as conscious ignorance which means that we know about our lack of knowledge and then we have meta ignorance which means that we do not know that we do not know. This is where we have to be careful. Our taskforces must be well balanced. There is no doubt that we need well-disciplined well experienced task executors. We also need educated, and experienced visionaries to foresee the human behavior. The uncertainties of this nature cannot be handled by small groups alone. What is important is that there is a necessity of many sub groups that parallelly work on various angles to allow balanced brainstorming in the main task force.





One can argue that unforeseen situations require trial and error solutions. Yes, there is no argument about it. But the first trial should be by using the vision and experience about the local communities. We have to have a heart; but when making decisions at critical junctures, the head and the heart must be separated.





Issues that lack visibility





We are engrossed in COVID 19. In the meantime, other activities in the surroundings would not rest. We need to carefully evaluate imbalances and repercussions in such systems. Let me give you an example issue that we may have to carefully consider. In urban city centers, near food stores, hotels, restaurants, boutiques etc., there is a huge mice community. When a lengthy lockdown is in place and when these locations are deserted, then from where would the mice get food. We know that mice breed very fast. When mice find out that our stores are closed and deserted, they play havoc in such places, build nests and destroy materials and machinery. Also when the mice do not find food, then what would be their next move. Where will they migrate to find food? This is only an example. There are many more and we should be vigilant. It is simply because if such systems also start creating trouble, then from where would the government get resources to suppress a situation?





*** We are engrossed in COVID 19. In the meantime, other activities in the surroundings would not rest. We need to carefully evaluate imbalances and repercussions in such systems.

***





Our Option





We need to minimize damage. The best damage control measure is self-isolation. The optimum damage control in the best national interest is self-isolation and growing food from home. At the same time the country need to be administered by a competent task force supported by many sub groups covering various expertise. We mist minimize damage in the shortest possible time. I am not a medical doctor. A doctor may be able to provide a more rational solution. However, based on my observations, I am of the opinion that if we are to ensure a risk free Sinhala and Tamil New Year, then we need to extend the physical lockdown to ensure at least three continuous weeks plus an observation period of one more week.









Professor N.T.Sohan Wijesekera is a Senior Professor, University of Moratuwa and he is the Chairman, Construction Industry Development Authority. Read more about him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sohan-wijesekera-a7b59a6a/
Police intervened just in time as a French couple was being robbed at knifepoint in downtown Ho Chi Minh City Wednesday.

A police officer holds Tran Quoc Thinh as another shows the phone he snatched from the French couple (standing) in HCMC's District 1, March 25, 2020. Photo courtesy of HCMC police.

The robber, Trinh Quoc Thinh, 16, snatched the phone from the Frenchwoman after following them during their walk along the September 23rd Park in District 1.

The husband caught and seized Thinh's arm, at which point Thinh brandished a knife threateningly.

As he was about to run away, police officers of the 363 team showed up and took him down. The team is in charge of patrolling the district around the clock.

Thinh has been detained for "property robbery," a charge that could fetch him a jail term of one to five years.

The knife Trinh Quoc Thinh used to threaten the French couple, put next to his hat. Photo by HCMC police.

HCMC received 8.5 million foreign visitors last year, up 14 percent against 2018.
Urmi Jadhav, 40, has been working for 18 years in the financial capital of the country, Mumbai. A community aid organiser for the transgender community, as well as a member of the troupe, Dancing Queens, which recently performed at a popular Delhi nightclub located in a five star hotel, Jadhav has no nest egg: neither a mutual fund portfolio or a medical insurance policy.

For the past two years, Ive worked as a consultant as and when projects come my way. So, my income has been erratic. I dont have money for emergencies. Whatever I earn, I spend in essentials like rent, or food, or medicines.

At present, Jadhav has enough money to pay this months rent. Her income for April was supposed to come from five dance shows that her troupe was slated to perform in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. All shows have been cancelled on account of the coronavirus global pandemic, and the national lockdown announced on March 24.

In an effort to prevent the spread of Sars-CoV-2, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday appealed to all citizens to stay inside their homes till April 14. Already, India has recorded 13 deaths and 649 cases; globally, a lockdown is being seen as the most effective way of breaking the chain of transmitting the virus.

Yet, for many members of the transgender community, the lockdown has specific implications on livelihood and access to medicines like Anti Retroviral Treatment (ART) for Persons living with the Human Immuno Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) or PLHIVs, and those undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) required for gender transitioning. India is home to the worlds third largest population living with HIV, and according to UNAIDS, the prevalence in transgender communities is 3.1% compared to .26% among all adults. Whats more, given their immuno-compromised state, this makes the HIV+ trans community even more vulnerable to Covid-19.

Dr Ishwar Prasad Gilada, a consultant on HIV/AIDS based in Mumbai, said that the biggest problem being faced by PLHIVs is procurement of medicines from ART centres private clinics. We cannot postpone their medicines. If they dont take medicines properly, they become HIV drug-resistant, which means the same medicine wont work for them.

According to Gilada, who has been studying the virus since its outbreak in the 1980s, there are limited therapeutic options available to HIV, which was once a global pandemic killing millions around the world. Drug resistance would mean that mortality and morbidity associated with the disease will increase.

Though the lockdown is a necessary step, Gilada said that as a result of it, supply of medicines may get derailed, mainly due to lack of transport as well as lack of labour / employees involved in the supply chain across different sectors.

While it is advisable to keep a months supply of ART drugs, many cannot afford to, said Chandramukhi, 30, a Hyderabad-based trans rights activist. Part of that reason is that their livelihood has taken a hit due to the pandemic and the national lockdown. According to one study, more than 87% of transpersons are dependent on traditional forms of livelihood like badhai  earning money by giving blessings during private celebrations  begging and sex work; all have come to a stop, community members said.

There are over 52 transwomen who I am in touch with. Several of them are in need of their Anti Retroviral Treatment (ART) medicines. Besides ART medication, persons with HIV/Aids should have healthy food, especially protein. Many of the people Ive spoken to dont earn enough money to stock up on supplies. Some dont even have rice left in their house, said Chandramukhi.

Many are in need of medical care after having undergone gender affirmation surgery recently. Doctors arent being allowed to travel to administer care. They need injections, medical gauze, cotton, and antibiotics, but none of it is reaching them right now, she said.

Telangana declared a lockdown earlier this week with the chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao saying that shoot-at-sight orders may be given if people disobey the lockdown.

Soumya Gupta, a trans rights activist based in Delhi cited Kerala  which announced on Wednesday that it would provide free provision kits comprising rice, pulses, and cooking oil, among other things, to transpersons  as an instance of a government-run scheme that could benefit the community if rolled out nationally. Several members of the community on Wednesday also sent an appeal to the government to ensure that they are provided basic provisions, as their livelihood has taken a hit.

A 22-year-old transwoman based in Noida, who did not wish to divulge her identity, said while she earns money through sex work, she was attending a government-run skills development programme this past month in the hope that she would get a steady source of employment. However, her three-month long course was cut short because of the coronavirus pandemic. Her father is a daily wage worker, while her mother is a domestic worker.

Both of them have been home for the past week, and money is running out, she said.

Shivraj (who goes by his first name), a 22-year-old transman from Odisha, joined a skill development course meant specifically for members of the trans community run by the National Backward Classes Financial Development Corporation, an arm of the ministry of social justice and empowerment. The course aimed to impart training that would help the participants get jobs as retail sales associates. However, the one-and-a-half-month long course was cut short on March 20, following the pandemic. Of the 13 participants, eight are from out of town and cannot head back.

Shaman Gupta, co-chair at Tweet Foundation, a Delhi-based community organisation that aided the government in conducting the training, fears that with the economic slowdown imminent, most would not be able to get placements in companies.

After the training, I was hoping I would get a job, and I would save money to transition. The job market is tough, and its not easy for a transman to get employment, said Shivraj. Im living on hope.
Quiet: A man crosses a nearly empty 5th Avenue in midtown Manhattan during the outbreak in New York City. Photo: REUTERS

New York has become the centre of America's coronavirus outbreak with confirmed cases soaring and a major shortage of hospital beds expected, triggering alarm in the White House.

More than 30,000 people in New York state have tested positive for the virus, accounting for half of all known cases in America and around 5pc of the worldwide total.

The number has doubled since the weekend, partly thanks to increased testing, raising concerns that the state's hospitals are ill-prepared as they brace for further rises. Projections suggest 140,000 hospital beds will be needed to cope with the surge in patients, but just 53,000 are in place. The state is also looking to triple its number of ventilators.

Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor whose daily press conferences are being carried on US-wide television news channels, spelled out the stark statistics yesterday.

"Now is the time to be aggressive and do things you've never done before," he said, warning that hotels, dormitories and former nursing homes may be used for extra hospital beds.

Mr Cuomo, a Democrat, said he thought the number of foreign travellers New York attracts and the closeness with which people live in the city helped explain why the state had far more cases than others in America.

But he also offered a note of optimism. "Our closeness makes us vulnerable... But it's true that your greatest weakness is also your greatest strength," Mr Cuomo said.

New York City accounts for around 18,000 of the state's coronavirus cases. Yesterday, whole swathes of 'the city that never sleeps' had fallen quiet.

In Times Square the lights were blazing, but people were scarce. Ferries that normally shuttle crowds of commuters and tourists around the city of 8.4 million were like ghost ships.

The spike in New York has alarmed Donald Trump's coronavirus taskforce, which late on Tuesday announced that anyone leaving the city must self-quarantine for 14 days.

In Washington, there was a breakthrough on Capitol Hill as senators from both parties announced a deal had been struck on a $2trn (1.8trn) stimulus package.

The legislation amounts to the largest emergency economic bill in US history and is expected to be approved rapidly by both the Senate and the House of Representatives. It includes unprecedented direct payments to Americans, with $1,200 being given to most adults and an extra $500 for each child in a household.

There will be $600 more a week in unemployment benefits for up to four months - a change the Democrats, who have held up votes on the legislation, were seeking.

Mitch McConnell, the most senior Republican in the Senate, said: "At last, we have a deal. This is a wartime level of investment into our nation."

Meanwhile, the German health minister yesterday called for a plan to be agreed by Easter on how to lift the coronavirus lockdown and return to normality.

"We have to deal with the questions of what we are doing here, what all this is doing to us as a society and, above all, how do we get out of it," Jens Spahn told 'Die Zeit' newspaper. "I want to be able to give a good answer by Easter."

The 39-year-old, who has been in charge of Germany's reaction to coronavirus, said he was "irritated by the insistence of those who call for tougher measures".

Instead, he suggested Germany starts to plan "an overall concept for the way out of the crisis" that would see restrictions lifted.

"We are working intensively on this," he said. "How can we protect the elderly, the chronically ill, when public life is starting up again?"

One possibility was to lift restrictions for short periods and reimpose them at intervals to control the spread of the virus, he said.

"I think of accelerating and braking, of a careful balance between personal responsibility and state control.

"The virus is here and it will stay. Perhaps we have to be prepared for certain restrictions over and over again for weeks." ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Visit our Covid-19 vaccine dashboard for updates on the roll out of the vaccination program and the rate of Coronavirus cases Ireland

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
Mike Pompeo

China's ruling Communist Party poses a substantial threat to Americans' health and their way of life, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on March 26, blasting Beijing for the intentional "disinformation campaign" and trying to deflect from its handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Pompeo, a known critic of China, said China's delay in sharing information about the virus had created risks to people worldwide.

"The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses a substantial threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus outbreak clearly has demonstrated," Pompeo told reporters at a State Department news after video conference with his counterparts from G7 countries.

"The CCP also threatens to undermine the free and open order that has underpinned our mutual prosperity and safety in the G7 countries," he said.

Pompeo said, during the meeting, the US urged every country to work together to protect the UN and other organisations from China's malign influence and authoritarianism.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

"We G7 countries must promote our shared values of freedom, sovereignty, good governance, transparency, and accountability, and push the UN to uphold these principles as well," he said.

There was a discussion among the G7 countries about the intentional disinformation campaign that China has been and continues to be engaged in, he said.

"You see it. You see it in the social media. You see it in remarks from senior people inside the Chinese Communist Party talking about whether this was a US brought to China. This is crazy talk," he said.

"Every member of the G7 today saw this disinformation campaign. China now making small sales of product around the world and claiming that they are now the white hat in what has taken place here. This isn't a time for blame; this is a time to solve this global problem. We are focused on that today," Pompeo said.

Every nation that was at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place here, he alleged, amidst the brewing of an anti-China sentiment in the US on the latter's handling of coronavirus.

There are talks in Congress to hold China responsible for the coronavirus outbreak because it hid information. Some of the lawmakers are also calling on China to pay damages to the US and the world.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik introduced a Resolution in the House of Representatives and Senator Josh Hawley in the Senate calling for an international investigation into the Chinese Communist Party's cover-up of the early spread of the coronavirus outbreak.

The Resolution calls on China to pay back all nations impacted due to its intentional, early coverup of the deadly virus.

"The Communist government of China knowingly withheld critical information needed to combat the spread of the Chinese-born COVID-19 and to this day continues to spread lies and disinformation on the origin of the deadly virus," Stefanik said.

"There is no doubt that China's unconscionable decision to orchestrate an elaborate coverup of the wide-ranging and deadly implications of coronavirus led to the death of thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans and climbing. This Resolution calls for China to provide compensation for the harm, loss, and destruction their arrogance brought upon the rest of the world. Simply put  China must, and will, be held accountable," she said.

"Since day one, the Chinese Communist Party intentionally lied to the world about the origin of this pandemic. The CCP was aware of the reality of the virus as early as December but ordered laboratories to destroy samples and forced doctors to keep silent," said Hawley.

"It is time for an international investigation into the role their cover-up played in the spread of this devastating pandemic. The CCP must be held to account for what the world is now suffering," he said.

Congressman Matt Gaetz introduced legislation to prevent any funds appropriated by the US Congress, including coronavirus relief funds, from being distributed to businesses owned by the Chinese government.

"'No CHINA Act' prevents appropriated money, including coronavirus relief funds, from being disbursed to businesses owned by the Chinese government. Chinese corporations operating in America must not be eligible for the upcoming trillion-dollar bailout, now or ever," he said.

Senator John Barrasso said that China had been exposed.

"We cannot allow ourselves ever again to be in any way dependent on China for medicines, for materials, or for minerals," he said.
Air India pilots' unions, IPG an ICPA, have said their members will support the government and will operate any special flight irrespective of the extent of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a joint letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Indian Pilots Guild (IPG) and Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA) said, Air India pilots note with "admiration" the proactive way in which the government has been working round the clock to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

On Tuesday, Prime Modi announced that the entire country would be going under a 21-day lockdown. He said this lockdown is very important for India to fight against novel coronavirus and control its spread.

"Air India as the national carrier has always been proud to fulfill a myriad of diverse and challenging missions, whenever required by the government to fulfill this obligation," the two pilot unions said a joint letter on Wednesday.

The IPG represents Boeing fleet pilots while the ICPA hasits members from the Airbus fleet in the flag carrier.

The national carrier has operated a series of rescue flights including to Wuhan in China, Japan, Milan and Rome in Italy to evacuate Indians stranded at these places.

Besides, Air India operated a relief flight to Tel Aviv to take the Israeli nationals back to their country due to coronavirus outbreak.

Of late, budget carrier SpiceJet announced operating a flight from Delhi to fly 142 Indians to Jodhpur, who were evacuated from Iran following the COVID-19 outbreak there.

Similarly, another no-frills airline, IndiGo has on its part offered the government its aircraft and crew to facilitate transportation of medical equipment within the country.

These announcements came only after the grounding of their entire fleet in the wake of temporary suspension of all commercial flights.

Air India pilots have remained loyal to the company despite all the mismanagement and hardships that are "plaguing" it, the letter said adding "our pilots are ready and willing to go above and beyond to support you in this monumental endeavour".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
SCHENECTADY  Larry Spring has abruptly resigned as Schenectady city schools superintendent.

No reason for the resignation could be determined Wednesday night, and Spring did not attend the meeting. School board members during their meeting Wednesday night unanimously accepted Springs resignation and appointed Aaron Bochniak as acting superintendent.

Spring has led the K-12 district  one of the Capital Region's largest in enrollment  since June 2012.

He was a prominent advocate for more state educational funding for school districts, especially urban systems, as well as for school staff diversity.

Previously: Capital Region schools lack infrastructure for remote learning

Schenectady superintendent salary tops $200,000

Schools chief to file complaint

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

In 2013, Spring filed a complaint on behalf of the Schenectady City School District with the U.S. Education Department's Office of Civil Rights, charging that schools that serve more minority students are less likely to receive their fair share of funding under the Foundation Aid formula.

More than half of students enrolled in the small-city district are black or Hispanic, and the district at the time was facing an annual $60 million shortfall, a gap that has since been reduced to $40 million. Just a few weeks ago, Spring expressed concern that his district was among those rural or high-poverty systems that would face significant difficulties offering online learning during the COVID-19 crisis.

Spring was one of the highest-earning superintendents in the state, with an annual salary that topped $200,000.
Turkey charges 20 Saudis over 2018 Khashoggi murder

Iran Press TV

Wednesday, 25 March 2020 4:21 PM

Turkish prosecutors have charged 20 Saudi nationals, including two former senior aides to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, over the killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

The Istanbul prosecutor's office said in a statement on Wednesday that the former aides, Saud al-Qahtani and Ahmed al-Assiri, were charged with "instigating the deliberate and monstrous killing, causing torment."

The indictment also charged 18 other Saudis, including intelligence operative Maher Mutreb  a companion of bin Salman, forensics expert Salah al-Tubaigy and Fahad al-Balawi, a member of the Saudi royal guard. They face life imprisonment if convicted.

Khashoggi, a former advocate of the Saudi royal court who later became a critic, was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, after he entered the premises to collect documents for his planned wedding to his Turkish fiancee Hatice Cengiz.

According to Turkish officials, Khashoggi was killed and his body was cut into pieces by a 15-man Saudi squad inside the consulate.

The Washington Post, where Khashoggi was a columnist, reported in November 2018 that the CIA had concluded that bin Salman personally ordered the murder.

Ankara has called Khashoggi's killing "premeditated murder," and has pressed the kingdom for information on his dismembered body's whereabouts.

Riyadh initially claimed Khashoggi had left the consulate on October 2. It rejects allegations linking the killing to the crown prince, claiming instead that the murder had been carried out by a "rogue" group.

The Istanbul prosecutor's office said the 20 suspects, who are not in Turkey, would be tried in absentia. It did not give a date for the trial.

Mutreb, Tubaigy and Balawi were among 11 people whom Riyadh had already put on trial.

In December 2019, the Saudi public prosecutor said of the 11 individuals held over Khashoggi's death, five were sentenced to death, three more were sentenced to jail terms totaling 24 years and the remaining three, including Qahtani and Assiri, were exonerated. The acquittal met with global condemnation, with many describing it as a travesty of justice.

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Thousands of cars were stopped at Queensland's borders and a man was arrested as police enforced a lockdown to minimise the risk posed by the novel coronavirus to the state.

The move marked the first time the borders were locked down since the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.

Police swooped on a driver who was stopped at a checkpoint after attempting to cross at the Gold Coast in an alleged stolen ute displaying hand-drawn number plates.

Police said the 43-year-old man was wanted on an outstanding warrant and they allegedly found drugs and other items in the vehicle after it was stopped on the Gold Coast Highway before 3pm on Thursday. He remains in custody.
(CNN) -- An eight month old baby is among five new cases of COVID-19 Uganda reported on Wednesday, bringing the total number to 14 people that have tested positive in the country.

Uganda's Director General of Health Service Dr. Henry Mwebesa in a televised address said among the five new cases are two Chinese nationals who fled an institutional quarantine with four others.

They were found hiding in the West Nile region bordering eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, and will be later charged to court. authorities said.

The other confirmed cases include an eight-month-old whose father had traveled to Kenya the previous week as well as a 63-year-old who arrived in Uganda from Germany.

Another case had no travel history abroad but trades at the border with South Sudan, Mwebesa said.

Uganda has taken stringent steps to try to halt the spread of the virus in the country.

They were one of the first African countries to impose travel restrictions on its citizens and others traveling from 16 countries it said had a high number of cases of coronavirus, including the US and UK.

Health Minister Jane Aceng said those who insist on visiting the East African nation from these countries would have to self-quarantine for 14 days at their own cost at home or at a government facility.

They were also among the first African country to announce a ban on large public gatherings including weddings, church and Jumat services for a period of 30 days.

President Museveni also announced the closure of schools including universities, citing the need to prevent the influx of cases from countries in the East African region.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Eight-month-old baby among five new cases of coronavirus in Uganda"
One in 54 8-year-old children have been identified with autism, according to an analysis of 2016 data published today in CDCs Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) Surveillance Summary.

This is higher than the previous estimate from 2014 data that found a 1 in 59 prevalence among 8-year-olds. The data come from 11 U.S. communities in CDCs Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network. Data from 2016 also show that more children are being evaluated and identified with autism at younger ages. The latest findings draw on data from two separate reports on both eight-year-old and four-year-old children.

Some of the increase in autism prevalence might be due to the way children are identified, diagnosed, and receiving services in their communities, said Stuart Shapira, M.D., Ph.D., associate director for science at CDCs National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. The increase may also reflect reductions in racial differences in identification of autism, as this is the first ADDM Network report to identify black 8-year-olds with autism as having the same rates as white children.

Racial gap reduced but differences remain

Despite improvements in autism identification among black children, the analysis shows differences with other groups continue. Hispanic children are identified with autism at lower rates than black or white children. Also, black and Hispanic children identified with autism received evaluations at older ages than white children. This means black and Hispanic children with autism who do not have intellectual disability might not be identified at the same rates as white children.

Gender differences

Boys were more than four times as likely to be identified with autism as girls. However, girls identified with autism were more likely to have intellectual disability than boys (39% of girls vs. 32% of boys).

Geographic differences in autism prevalence

Autism prevalence in the 11 communities varied widely, from 1.3% in Colorado to 3.1% in New Jersey. This could be due to how autism is being diagnosed and documented. Some communities have a higher concentration of services for children with autism and their families. Also, some communities can review both health and educational records of children, which can lead to more children identified with autism.

Improvements in early identification of autism

A separate report looking at 4-year-old children finds substantial improvements have been made in the number of children who had their first developmental screening by the age of 36 months. According to the report, 84% of 4-year-olds had received a first developmental screening by 36 months of age compared to 74% in the previous report with 2014 data. This is important because the earlier that children are identified with autism, the sooner they can be connected to services that can improve outcomes and lead to a better quality of life.

ADDM Network

CDCs ADDM Network is a tracking system that provides estimates of the prevalence and characteristics of autism among more than 300,000 8-year-old children in 11 communities in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. Data on 4-year-old children come from the Early ADDM Network, which is a subset of communities in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

The ADDM Network is the largest population-based program to monitor autism and the only autism tracking system that examines both health and education records. Because ADDM does not provide a representative sample of the entire United States, the combined prevalence estimates presented in todays analysis cannot be generalized to all children aged 8 years in the United States.

What can parents do?

CDCs Learn the Signs. Act Early program provides parents, childcare professionals, and healthcare providers with free resources, in English and Spanish, to monitor childrens development. The program offers parent-friendly, research-based milestone checklists for children as young as 2 months of age. CDCs Milestone Tracker Mobile App can help parents track their childs development and share the information with their healthcare providers. For more information visit www.cdc.gov/ActEarly.

CDCs National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities is celebrating 20 years of saving babies, helping children, protecting people, and improving health. For more information about our work visit https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/index.html.
Wissam Al Mana, who split from singer Janet Jackson, says he is not linked to Bitcoin trader

A High Court judge has urged Facebook and a billionaire businessman to resolve their differences over his application for information on those behind "fake ads".

Wissam Al Mana, who married pop star Janet Jackson in 2012 but separated from her in 2017, wants to find the identities of those behind the ads.

Mr Al Mana, a UK-based Qatari national, is suing over adverts on Facebook, which he says are wrongly and maliciously using his name and image.

They were published on several occasions from May 2019 by people using the Facebook Ads Tool, he claims. The ads contain a fake news article using sensational headings.

They feature Mr Al Mana's name and image, but wrongly link him to a cryptocurrency auto-trading program called Bitcoin Trader, with which he has nothing to do.

Malicious

The ads were removed following complaints made by Mr Al Mana's representatives, but he is concerned about the publication of future fake ads containing his name and image.

Mr Al Mana wants to sue both Facebook Ireland Ltd, the social media's European HQ, and the parties behind the ads for defamation and malicious falsehood.

He is seeking a court order to force Facebook to disclose details of the people posting the ads, including their internet protocol (IP) addresses.

The application was briefly mentioned before Ms Justice Leonie Reynolds at the High Court yesterday.

Anna Shanley, for Mr Al Mana, said the parties had been in discussions, but there was an issue that remains outstanding.

Ms Justice Reynolds urged the sides to strive to resolve their differences and adjourned the matter for a week. She was prepared to hear an application if the parties could not agree.
The number of Kyiv residents infected with the coronavirus Covid-19 has grown to 40 people, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko.

"In the capital, over the past evening and this morning, the number of people infected with the coronavirus has increased to 40," Klitschko said at a briefing on March 26, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

According to him, the State Institution "Kyiv City Laboratory Center of the Healthy Ministry of Ukraine" informed the city authorities about six more laboratory-confirmed coronavirus cases.

Among the new patients is a 35-year-old woman and five men aged from 28 to 70 years. Four patients have been hospitalized in Oleksandrivska Clinical Hospital, a 70-year-old military man  in a military hospital, and one patient is in self-isolation at home.

iy
A couple takes a "selfie" photo after voting at the Democratic presidential primary at Powderhorn Park Community Center in in Minneapolis, Minn., on Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020. (Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images)

Group Hopes State Supreme Court Forces Minnesota to Provide Data in Election Fraud Investigation

An electoral integrity group that claims tens of thousands have voted illegally in Minnesota is awaiting a state Supreme Court decision in its lawsuit aimed at forcing Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon to release public data from the statewide election database.

I think its quite obvious he doesnt want the public to become aware of how poorly our elections are being run, Andy Cilek, executive director of the Minnesota Voters Alliance (MVA), told The Epoch Times in an interview.

Simons press secretary, Risikat Adesaogun, didnt immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

The wheels of justice turn as both parties keep a close eye on Minnesota, traditionally a stronghold for Democrats.

President Donald Trump, a Republican, came a lot closer to victory in deep-blue Minnesota in 2016 than almost all election handicappers thought possible, losing to Democrat Hillary Clinton by just 1.5 percentage points, or 44,765 votes, out of close to 3 million ballots cast. By contrast, in 2012, incumbent Democrat Barack Obama beat Republican Mitt Romney by a solid 7.7 percentage points, or 225,942 votes, out of more than 2.9 million ballots cast.

The case, Cilek v. Minnesota Secretary of State, is currently under consideration by the Minnesota Supreme Court, which may render a decision within days. Oral arguments took place Oct. 5, 2019.

The Minnesota Voters Alliance sued Simon, a Democrat who took office in 2015, in 2017 after Simons office refused access to non-private government data in the Statewide Voter Registration System, a centralized voter registration database used by the secretary of state and election officials to administer elections in the state. The database contains information on registered voters and previously registered voters.

Claiming the database identified many individuals who were ineligible to vote actually cast ballots, the MVAs suit sought access to complete election records in order to identify what went wrong.

Cilek told The Epoch Times that his groups analysis of limited amounts of publicly available data revealed that there were tens of thousands of voters who have failed eligibility checks after they voted.

It is hoped that having access to the full set of public election records will  better quantify the amount of potential ineligible voting, specifying the failures of election officials to identify and prevent it.

The Ramsey County District Court found that Simons office provided most of the information requested by making available the current statewide public information list. But the secretary failed to hand over data of keen interest to the MVA, particularly with respect to voter statuswhether active, inactive, deleted, challengedand regarding reasons for voter challenges, along with registration, status and voting history information on every Minnesota voter  active, inactive or deleted.

The trial court ruled against Simon, holding that state law presumes government data, including data at issue in this case, [are] public and [the secretary of state] failed to set forth a federal law, state statute or a temporary classification of data that provides that the data requested by [the MVA] [are] not public.

Simon appealed to the Minnesota Court of Appeals, which in April 2019 also ruled against him. That court concluded that the data requested by respondents, and not produced by appellants, are public data.

Allegations of voter fraud are nothing new to Minnesota.

The most famous example from recent times comes from 2008 when Democrat challenger Al Franken initially appeared to lose a hotly contested U.S. Senate race to Republican incumbent Norm Coleman by 725 votes. But Franken refused to concede, and the thin margin triggered an automatic recount.

By April 2009, after a controversial recount process replete with irregularities, Franken eventually prevailed with a 312-vote margin of victory. There were many allegations of voter fraud, including a report by watchdog group Minnesota Majority that found that about 1,100 convicted felons voted unlawfully.

Franken resigned from the Senate on Jan. 2, 2018, after allegations of sexual misconduct were raised against him.
Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa on Thursday asked district administrations to take required stringent measures to ensure people remain at home and do not come out unnecessarily, to control the spread of COVID-19 virus.

Asking officials to strictly enforce the lockdown, he told authorities to even consider arresting those who violate the order and come out unnecessarily.

Yediyurappa held a videoconferencing with Deputy Commissioners of all districts on measures taken to control the spread of COVID-19 and for implementation of the lockdown.

Several senior ministers and top government officials took part in the video conferencing.

"The Chief Minister has clearly instructed the Home Department to enforce lockdown in Bengaluru and other parts of the state strictly," Medical Education Minister K Sudhakar told reporters after the meeting.

Asked whether the Chief Minister has directed police to arrest people who violate the lockdown, he said, "there is no other way. We can't beat them, then how to do it? So some strong measures need to be taken for safety of the people."



Yediyurappa asked the officials to completely restrict unnecessary movement of people and ensure that those involved in suppling essential services don't face any hurdles.

He also directed them to ensure that banks and financial institutions postpone the payment of installments of loan, and also see to it that all essential agricultural equipment, fertilizers and pesticides are made available to farmers.

Asking officials to ensure that private clinics across the state function, Yediyurappa said all essential items should be made available to people near their houses.

"This will not only help people buy necessary items near their houses, but will also benefit small traders and it will also curtail people from going to markets and city centres,"



He said steps should be taken against sale of essential supplies at high costmeasures should taken against selling essential supplies at high cost by misusing the opportunity.

The Chief Minister said adequate funds are available in the PD accounts of all District Deputy Commissioners and asked them to use those funds adequately.

He asked officials to ensure that doctors, paramedics, health practitioners and also civic workers, among others in the front line of fight against COVID-19 don't face any problems and get all safety equipment.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
(@FahadShabbir)

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 26th March, 2020) Moscow condemns the recent terrorist attack in the northeastern region of Mali, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday, adding that the situation in the country demonstrates the need to strengthen international coordination to assist the authorities in the fight against terrorism.

Last week, the Malian army lost 29 servicemen as a result of a terrorist attack in the Gao region. Five others were injured.

"We strongly condemn the latest crime of terrorist forces aimed at destabilizing the situation in Mali and undermining the efforts of the country's leadership to implement the Algerian peace agreement of 2015 ... We express our condolences and sympathy to the families and friends of the victims, we wish a speedy recovery to the victims of this criminal act, we reaffirm our continued support for the leadership and people of Mali in the fight against the terrorist threat," the ministry said in a statement.

The ministry added that the ongoing difficult security situation in the country proved the necessity for further effective international support for the Malian government, which is attempting to stabilize the situation.

Mali was destabilized in 2012 when Tuareg militants seized vast territories in the northern part of the country. The conflict escalated after an Islamist invasion and French involvement. Tensions have significantly de-escalated since then, however, sporadic clashes still occur.
China the earlier hotspot of coronavirus outbreak has provided assistance to 80 countries to battle the disease and international organisations, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Luo Zhaohui said at a press conference. According to reports, China sent medical teams to countries like Iran, Italy, Iraq, Serbia and Cambodia and has held 20 expert video conferences with over 100 countries. Zhaohui in his remark also said that China has shared a diagnosis plan with relevant countries in a timely manner.

Read: Coronavirus Outbreak Likely To Be Contained In Summer, May Reappear In Winter: Reports

During the press meet, Zhaohui also hoped that the special Group of 20 (G20) video summit, which is scheduled to be held on March 26 and will be attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping, will see China send a positive message for working together to defeat COVID-19. the special summit will be the first in the history of G20 and it will be Xi Jinping's first meeting with international leaders since the virus broke out in December last year. Thee video conference will be hosted by Saudi Arabia, the presidency of this year's G20 summit.

Read: Fans Call Out Jofra Archer's 3-yr-old Tweet That Eerily 'predicts' India's 21-day Lockdown

Coronavirus outbreak

COVID-19 has claimed more than 21,200 lives across the world and has infected more than 4,71,000 people globally since it first broke out in December 2019. China was the most affected country until last week, however, Italy and Spain have surpassed it to record the most number of deaths anywhere in the world due to COVID-19. The virus is believed to have originated from a seafood market in China's Wuhan city, the epicentre of the disease, where animals were reportedly being traded illegally.

Read: Chinese President Xi Jinping To Attend Special G20 Leaders' Summit Via Video Call

France and the United States have also joined the list of countries that have recorded more than 1,000 deaths due to coronavirus. Health experts believe that the hotspot could soon shift to the United States, where 1,032 people have died so far, out of the 68,489 confirmed cases that the country has recorded since January 2020.

Read: Sweden Takes Soft Approach In Tackling COVID-19 Compared To Other Countries
One of the biggest projects in The Woodlands Township for the past two years  the ongoing incorporation planning studies  has officially been put on hold to a future time period after concerns stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic have consumed the focus of township staff and leaders.

In a unanimous vote during a virtual meeting of the township board on Wednesday night, the directors decided to defer the process to a future, to-be-determined time, to cease all incorporation planning meetings  which had been happening about twice a month since January 2018  and to not schedule planned public forums to gather feedback on the issue and also provide answers to questions.

Unique entity

The Woodlands is the only township governmental entity in the state of Texas, and officials have been exploring the ins and outs of becoming a city for nearly two years.

In order to place the incorporation question on a ballot for voters, township board members need to do so by Aug. 17 for the November 2020 election. Previously, board members had indicated they would only possibly place the question to voters in a high turnout election, specifically the 2020, 2022 or 2024 elections. To become a city, residents of the township would have to approve two items: whether or not to become a city as well as a maximum property tax rate.

I know I am and the board is acutely aware we all have a common enemy with the COVID-19 virus and all efforts and intentions should be spent rallying our community toward those efforts. Based on the uncertainties created by the international health crisis, I am recommending the township board defer the incorporation planning process at this time. The excellent work on incorporation planning that has been completed to date can be utilized in the future when circumstances warrant the restart of the public communication process, Bunch said. The township has completed the studies and financial analysis associated with incorporation planning. These comprehensive studies have resulted in an operating and financial model that will serve The Woodlands well when incorporation is considered by the community. I propose that we work with the Novak Consulting Group to ensure that we have a finished plan that will endure as a living, executable plan that can be easily updated annually by future boards.

Slow process

The incorporation process had slowed down in recent months, with the board haggling over specifics of the proposed law enforcement model for several months from August, 2019, through January before finally deciding to pursue a hybrid policing model in January. Recently, the board had approved a potential possible maximum property tax rate and was planning a series of public forums and outreach events in April and May.

A future board can complete the community engagement process prior to calling for a ballot initiative. There are too many unknown headwinds facing our country today, and in the near future, our community is not just reeling from COVID-19 business closures, layoffs, event cancellations and stock market crashes, Bunch added. But also decade-lows for oil and gas that creates an a compounding impact on our local community. I do appreciate all the time and efforts the board has put into the planning process the past two and a half years, the excellent work performed by our consultants, the municipal league counsel and as well as the support from our professional staff.

Added uncertainty

Township Director Bruce Rieser said he agreed with Bunchs assessment, and said it was not optimal to pursue incorporation during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I want to make sure we get the tax model (updated), a final report, and we may want to schedule a meeting later in the year just to go over all the conclusions weve come to in the final report so the community sees actually how this works. Ive had questions, Is the financial model still valid? The model is absolutely valid, Rieser said. The biggest piece of the puzzle is our growth projections, and until we have a better idea of a realistic projection of growth or negative growth, it would be irresponsible to continue. It is very clear, No. 1, we are not in position to do any public forums. The only prudent thing for the board to do is defer this.

The Novak Consulting Group, of Cincinnati, Ohio, has been the lead consulting team for the incorporation process since December 2018. There was another consulting group also hired to help  The Matrix Consulting Group and HR Green  however that company had its contracted terminated in December 2018 when Novak took over sole control over the process. The Novak Group is being paid under their current contract until November 2020.

Economic impact

Julia Novak, who took part in the virtual meeting from her home in Ohio, said her team would update any financial models as necessary in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic chaos that it has created. There was no discussion of chanegs to the costs being charged by the Novak Group in light of the cessation of incorporation planning sessions.

Certainly, I dont think anyone has been through anything like this. But, what weve tried to do all along is walk alongside you and be in a position to make modifications as things go along, Novak said. I think we can work with your staff to keep the model up to date and work with you as you deal with the various changing financial circumstances. Well make sure there is a very clear summary report that pulls all the elements of the studies that have been done for you together so that you do have something that stands the test of time and can be updated should a future board decide to take action.

Bunch reiterated that the incorporation issue could still happen in the future, but the time is not this year.

This comprehensive study has put us in an excellent position for future consideration once our community has recovered and a future board determines that the time may be right to be decided at the polls, Bunch concluded. In summary, we still have to finish with the consultants to have (the plan) in a living, breathing executable plan. There is really no reason to have public forums, you cant have them anyway (under county restrictions). I think we put it in a condition where it can be updated and work and leave it for future boards to execute in a year that they are considering a ballot initiative.

jeff.forward@chron.com
With Pune agriculture produce marketing committee (APMC) members not agreeing to the state administrations request to keep their shops at wholesale market in Gultekdi open, Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has roped in farmers to set up markets at designated places across the city.

The farmers have been allowed to set up stalls at 68 places in the city, besides carrying out door-to-door selling of vegetables and fruits. The facility has been operational with the help of co-operative department and Maharashtra state agricultural marketing board (MSAMB) to run weekly markets in the city.

According to Pune mayor Murlidhar Mohol and municipal commissioner Shekhar Gaikwad, the farmers will carry out business keeping in mind the preventive measures, including social distancing. PMC and MSAMB are also reaching out to agricultural producing groups to come forward and start selling their commodities at the markets set up in various localities.

Madhav Jagtap, head of PMC anti-encroachment department and incharge of weekly markets, said, Divisional commissioner Deepak Mhaisekar held a meeting on the issue of vegetable markets and regular supply of essential goods. He suggested to set up weekly markets. District collector Naval Kishor Ram, agricultural commissioner Suhas Divase and Pune APMC administrator BJ Deshmukh were present at the meeting.

Pune APMC to hold meeting with traders on Friday

A Pune APMC officer on condition of anonymity said that a meeting with wholesale traders is called on Friday. He said efforts will be made to convince the traders to reopen markets at Gultekdi. Vilas Bhujbal, Pune APMC traders union president, said, We will take a decision at the meeting on whether to open shops at the wholesale market or not.
Photo: (Photo : pexels/Pixabay)

Babies inside the womb of moms who are smokers experience many side effects. Similarly, so does unborn babies whose fathers smoke. Smoking dad's bad effects on unborn babies could include the child developing asthma by the age of six.

Smoking Harms the Unborn Baby According to Research

A study was conducted at Kaoshiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan, where researchers monitored 756 babies for six years. Around one in four babies were exposed to tobacco smoke while developing inside the womb, and only three mothers smoked.

Results show that 31% of the kids, whose father smoked, developed asthma by six years of age. There were 23% whose fathers who do not smoke but developed asthma.

It was found that kids with fathers who smoke are highly likely to develop asthma, said senior study author Dr. Kuender Yang of the National Defense Medical Center in Taipei.

He added that children whose fathers smoke at least 20 sticks per day have a significantly higher risk of developing asthma than those exposed to less than 20 sticks or none at all.

Smoking Fathers Increase Risk of Asthma to Children

Second-hand smoke received during pregnancy can cause changes in methylation on parts of genes involved in immunity and the development of asthma. Methylation is a chemical code along the DNA strand that influences gene activity.

Upon the extraction of the baby's DNA through their cord blood right after birth, the researchers examined methylation along the DNA strand and found that the more a father smokes, the more methylation increased on stretches of three genes that play a significant role in immunity.

Children who had the most methylation increase had almost twice the chance of becoming asthmatic by age six.

Smoking Father Have No Effect on Allergic Asthma

However, a father smoking during his wife's pregnancy seems not to affect children's sensitivity against allergens. This finding suggests that smoking is not linked to allergic asthma, said Dr. Anvi Joshi, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic Children's Center in Rochester, Minnesota.

Nicotine Gets Passed on to Children

Another study in Plos Biology found that nicotine gets passed onto kids, and even to grandkids. The Director of the Center for Brain Repair at the Florida State University College of Medicine, Pradeep Bhide, Ph.D., led a team of scientists that showed that nicotine could get passed on to three generations when tested on male mice.

They found the same concept as that of asthma wherein nicotine is absorbed into the grandfather's DNA that is passed on to his child, and much later, to the grandchild.

Smoking Before or After Pregnancy is Bad

It is not yet clear how smoking affects the methylation increase in the baby's DNA; however, only one message is clear to parents, said Joshi.

Smoking is bad, no matter before or after the baby is born. Joshi added, saying many parents would decide to quit smoking once the baby is born. But in this study, it shows how smoking affects the unborn child. So it would be best for the family to start quitting smoking even before trying to conceive, Joshi suggests.
Coronavirus has thrown the future of Britains shopping centres into doubt as hundreds of retailers simply stopped paying rent.

With a majority of shops now closed after a lockdown came into force on Monday night, landlords have seen their incomes plummet.

Intu, which owns sites across the country including the Trafford Centre in Manchester and Lakeside in Essex, said it received just 29 per cent of rent that was due on Wednesday  the deadline for payments covering the first quarter of 2020.

Burger King and homeware retailer Dunelm were among the latest companies to announce they would not pay their rent bills this week. Many others have done the same, leaving some landlords struggling to cover the cost of their property loans.

Intu is now in talks with customers to negotiate payment, and with lenders to try and relax the rules on its own multibillion-pound debts.

Intu said it is also in an ongoing dialogue with the government to try to obtain further loans from a state-backed 330bn package unveiled earlier this month.

It comes after the government announced on Monday that businesses would not forfeit their leases if they chose to delay paying rent for the first quarter of the year.

Shopping centres and high streets had already suffered from falling sales in February before the Covid-19 outbreak took hold, according to new official data.

Heavy rains kept shoppers at home, leading to the worst growth in retail sales figures for seven years.

Sales dropped 0.3 per cent in the month and were flat compared to a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics said.

Another big landlord, British Land, said on Thursday that it had suspended dividend payments to shareholders and was taking steps to support its retail tenants by granting rent relief and delays.

Its high street tenants are among those hit hardest by the shutdown.

Karen Johnson, head of retail & wholesale at Barclays Corporate Banking, said the public health emergency had quashed any chance of a springtime bounce-back.

Consumers are now focusing on securing the essentials that they need on a day-to-day basis, so luxury items  including those usually purchased for holidays abroad  fall way down the agenda, Ms Johnson said.

There is potentially light at the end of the tunnel for retailers, given the extent to which people are ready and willing to spend online. However, consumer nervousness is still understandably widespread  so the extent to which online channels can compensate for lost high street spending is yet to be seen.
Washington: The US has strongly condemned the terror attack on a prominent gurdwara in the heart of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying the people of the strife-torn country deserve a future free from the ISIS and other terrorist activity.

At least 25 worshippers were killed and eight others injured when a heavily armed suicide bomber stormed his way into the gurdwara on Wednesday in one of the deadliest attacks on the minority Sikh community in the country.

The Islamic State (IS) terror group, which has targeted Sikhs before in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the attack on the gurdwara as 150 worshippers were inside the building.

"The United States condemns the horrific ISIS-K claimed attack on a Sikh temple and community centre in Kabul this morning which took the lives of more than two dozen innocent people," Pompeo told reporters during a news conference on Wednesday.

The people of Afghanistan deserve a future free from the ISIS-K and other terrorist activity, he said.

"Despite the country's political challenges, the ongoing Afghan peace process remains the primary opportunity for Afghans to come together to negotiate a political settlement and build a unified front against the menace of ISIS-K," Pompeo said.

Acting Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Alice G Wells, tweeted, "The US condemns in the strongest possible terms the horrific ISIS-claimed attack on a Sikh temple and community centre in Kabul today."

"We mourn the deceased and will hold the wounded, their families, and their community close to our hearts," she said.

In an open letter to President Donald Trump, Indian-American attorney Ravi Batra called for elimination of the ISIS by use of "nano nukes".

"The punishment I fear has to be unique. The whole world is in a 'no war' mode, because we are in a 'Covid war' mode to save humanity. Sharing our scientific and medical knowledge, as if it was open source. Our time is too precious to deviate. Millions of lives hang in the balance," he said.

Batra and his family have been tested positive for coronavirus and are in quarantine.

He proposed, "The unique punishment is to identify all ISIS centres, mark them for immediate destruction, and if there be a main one, for that mother load of evil, we go back to WWII decision-making, and for even better reasons now, roll out our 'nano nuke' and eviscerate this evil."
While Ontario is processing thousands of tests for COVID-19, a gap in what data has been reported could be influencing how people react to the pandemic, according to a health communications expert with Ryerson University.

As the Star has previously reported, more than 60 per cent of confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Tuesday dont list how the virus was transmitted, while age and gender are missing for around half of the cases. The province has said that information may be missing because investigations are underway, or because non-Public Health Ontario labs dont receive the same level of detail as tests conducted by Public Health.

But when it comes to looking at how COVID-19 could be affecting us, people are desperately looking for ... some tangible truth, said Dr. Jessica Mudry, an associate professor with Ryerson Universitys school of communication.

We just dont know much about this (virus). We dont know much about how it spreads, how actually virulent it is, Mudry explained in a phone interview with the Star. Gaps in the data are therefore unsatisfying because it is impossible to patch up holes and explain what we dont know about COVID-19.

By nature, people are concerned with their own mortality, Mudry said. If they see themselves interpolated (in the data), then they crack down on their own behaviour and start making choices that would protect them from contracting or spreading the coronavirus.

If they dont see themselves in that data, there is a risk that people will become apathetic and wont feel the need to modify their behaviour. Instead, if there is incomplete information, people may see numbers indicating that the risk to them is low, which could result in them making dangerous decisions.

When you have data gaps, people dont know what to do. They dont know if theyre at risk themselves, Mudry said. Were looking to this data to help us shape our behaviour and answer the question of how worried we should be about the pandemic.

The province has said that the reports are based on information provided by Public Health Ontario labs, as well as certain hospitals that are helping to expand lab testing capacity, said Hayley Chazan, spokesperson for health minister Christine Elliott, in an interview with the Star Tuesday.

While we make every effort to co-ordinate and validate those lab results with the local public health units, in some cases there may be a lag in information sharing at the time of posting, Chazan said.

Dr. Ben Bolker, professor in mathematics, statistics and biology at McMaster University, said its crucial to test as many people as possible to get an accurate view of how many people are infected.

I assume they are pouring huge amounts of resources into increasing our testing capability, and I believe theyre ... probably doing that as fast as they can, he said.

While Bolker is an epidemiological modeller, he stressed that he is not involved in working with Ontarios cases.

The more testing they can do, the better, Bolker said, pointing to aggressive testing in Iceland and the village of Vo, Italy, where researchers tested all 3,000 inhabitants for the virus.

More testing means a fuller picture of the crisis, Bolker said.

The province is testing people who are probably infected, he said, which is great for the medical mission. But it makes it very, very hard to know what the actual ... prevalence (of COVID-19) in the population is.

As far as how Ontario is doing when it comes highlighting the severity of the crisis, Mudry said she thought Ontarios messaging has been a solid 5 out of 10.

Until we can say definitively how the cases in Ontario are being transmitted, then people arent going to do much.

Also lacking is information about community transmission, she said. People are going to go Well, I didnt travel, and I dont know anyone who did, so I am OK.

We forget that taking the bus, walking to the store and buying something, going out for dinner, all constitutes travel at this point if we have (the virus) within our community.

With files from Patty Winsa
North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un sits in his vehicle after arriving at a railway station in Dong Dang, Vietnam, at the border with China, Feb. 26, 2019 file photo. /Reuters-Yonhap



By Jon Herskovitz



North Korean officials have sought urgent help from international contacts to increase coronavirus testing in a nation that could see its dilapidated health care system be crushed by an outbreak, the Financial Times reported.

People familiar with the matter said the requests have come in over the past few weeks, the newspaper reported Thursday, saying it had seen one of the documents requesting aid. At least 590 people have been tested, all of whom arrived from overseas in January and had negative results, it reported, citing one person directly familiar with the situation inside North Korea.



Bordered by China, where the virus originated, and South Korea, which has been among the hardest hit, North Korea claims it has evaded the pandemic with no cases of infection. But diplomats and experts piecing together the clues and who have previously spoken to Bloomberg News see a different picture.





A worker of the Ryongaksan Soap Factory makes disinfectants in Pyongyang, North Korea, March 19. North Korea has been engaged in an intense campaign to guard against COVID-19, though it hasn't officially reported any cases of infection. For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms. /AP-Yonhap
By Trend

The return of Azerbaijani citizens from abroad is carried out within the established schedule, Trend reports referring to the Operational Headquarters under the Cabinet of Ministers.

Preference is given to families with young children, elderly people, people in need of medical care and women.

Those retuning from abroad are quarantined.

To date, about 10,000 Azerbaijani citizens have been returned from different countries by charter flights.

Depending on the capability of the country's quarantine points to receive citizens, it is planned to return 200-400 Azerbaijani citizens from abroad next week and to quarantine them for 14-21 or 21-28 days.

Azerbaijani citizens wishing to enter the territory of Azerbaijan from the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic on the land border with Turkey will be placed in the border regions on Turkeys territory and then they will quarantined in groups for 14-28 days in Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic.

The quarantine of Azerbaijani citizens coming from abroad is compulsory and all citizens are required to strictly observe the special quarantine regime declared in the country.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Jerry-rigged ventilators. Dwindling supplies of N95s and surgical masks. Buckets of bleach instead of sanitizing wipes.

As Hudson Countys coronavirus outbreak accelerates, flooding hospitals with patients struggling with COVID-19, Christ Hospital staff is warning of critical shortages of equipment.

Dr. Tucker Woods, the hospitals chief medical officer, said that the hospital had seen a tidal wave of patients, and was unsure if it had the capacity or equipment for all of them.

Theres a lot of unknowns, he said. Everybodys scared. Theyre stressed.

It definitely is a war zone, said Maxim Casas, an emergency department nurse at Christ. Its controlled chaos."

Like other hospitals across the country, Christ is running critically low on medical equipment, staff said. Of the hospitals 13 ventilators, 10 are being used by COVID-19 patients. Dr. Caitlin Jones, the head of Christs emergency department, said the hospitals administration has reached out to other hospitals and surgical centers looking for ventilators, and was even trying to modify other equipment.

Were also sort of jerry-rigging our other machines to function as ventilators, Jones said.

One week ago, we had quote unquote plenty, Woods said. We could possibly run out today."

Woods said he was reaching out to city and county officials in hopes of easing the hospitals shortages. On Wednesday, Mayor Steve Fulop tweeted that he was meeting with local hospitals to better understand their capacity issues."

Im hoping that well see some relief, Woods said. Itll be the greatest challenge this hospital ever faces.

The outbreak has been exacerbated by a global shortage of protective medical gear. Christ Hospital is roughly a week away from running out of personal protective gear, like masks and gowns, Woods said.

Staff members were reusing masks up to five times, and some people have turned to social media to solicit donations of protective gear.

Were using bleach, were reusing our masks, were keeping them safe for our next shift, said Jones.

Hospital staffers are using a brown paper bag method, said Casas, explaining that employees are bringing in their own masks in paper bags. Like when you send your child to school with a brown paper bag lunch."

Coronavirus test kits are also running critically low. When people with mild symptoms come to the hospital, Woods said, there arent enough tests to confirm whether or not they have COVID-19.

We tell them, Theres a good chance you do have coronavirus,'" Woods said. We have to send them home with a big question mark over their heads.

Patients with these assumed cases are told to self-quarantine at home.

And all three CarePoint Health hospitals  Christ Hospital, Bayonne Medical Center and Hoboken University Medical Center  have run out of sanitizing wipes, Woods said.

We had to buy buckets of bleach (Tuesday), he said.

Hospitals in Hudson County have not yet been hit as badly as those in neighboring Bergen County, the epicenter of the outbreak in New Jersey, which has reported 819 cases as of Wednesday. An administrator at Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck described the situation as horrendous.

But medical staff say its only a matter of time.

If no new ventilators are acquired, then we could have a situation like Italy, Woods said. They had to make tough decisions about who could be pulled off a ventilator.

Were not at that point, he said.

Officials expect the outbreak to accelerate. New Jersey is now second among states in coronavirus cases, with more than 4,400. Only New York has more. On Wednesday, Gov. Phil Murphy announced 736 new cases and 18 new deaths in the state, a sign that the outbreak has still not peaked.

Hudson County has 260 reported cases and four people have died.

Hospitals are also grappling with how to house patients. Some hospitals in the area had put patients in conference rooms, Woods said, and Christ staff said previously unused rooms are being opened.

One factor exacerbating Christs Hospitals capacity issues is its high volume of homeless patients.

Christ Hospital sees a large homeless population, Casas said. Even (if) theyre stable, were really not able to discharge them because theres no way to have them go home and self-quarantine if they dont have a home to live in.

I dont think the hospitals are going to be able to house all the homeless population, she said. Ultimately, they will all be exposed.
MONTREAL, March 25, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Osisko Gold Royalties Ltd (the Company or Osisko) (OR: TSX & NYSE) announces today that following the announcement by Agnico Eagle Mines Limited and Yamana Gold Inc., the operators of the Canadian Malartic Mine, operations at the Canadian Malartic Mine will be ramped down and placed on care and maintenance until April 13, 2020. As instructed, minimal work will take place during that time, in compliance with the most recent Quebec Government order in an effort to contain the COVID-19 virus outbreak.

Sean Roosen, Chair and Chief Executive Officer of the Company declared: Given the outstanding pandemic, we support Agnico, Yamana and all other mine operators in their efforts to put the health and safety of their work force first with a view to contain the virus and thereby flatten the curve as explained by public health authorities across the world. While Osiskos business will be impacted by these measures as metal deliveries and revenues will be temporarily deferred, we are confident that operators will be in a position to progressively resume normal operations when deemed appropriate by Government authorities.

In a context of rapidly evolving news on COVID19, Osisko is monitoring the situation closely and will provide an update as soon as possible on restart of operations.

About Osisko Gold Royalties Ltd



Osisko Gold Royalties Ltd is an intermediate precious metal royalty company focused on the Americas that commenced activities in June 2014. Osisko holds a North American focused portfolio of over 135 royalties, streams and precious metal offtakes. Osiskos portfolio is anchored by its cornerstone asset, a 5% net smelter return royalty on the Canadian Malartic mine, which is the largest gold mine in Canada. Osisko also owns the Cariboo gold project in Canada as well as a portfolio of publicly held resource companies, including a 15.9% interest in Osisko Mining Inc., 17.9% interest in Osisko Metals Incorporated and a 19.9% interest in Falco Resources Ltd.

Story continues

Osiskos head office is located at 1100 Avenue des Canadiens-de Montreal, Suite 300, Montreal, Quebec, H3B 2S2.

For further information, please contact Osisko Gold Royalties Ltd:

Sandeep Singh

President

Tel. (514) 940-0670

ssingh@osiskogr.com

Forward-looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may be deemed forwardlooking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws. These forwardlooking statements, by their nature, require Osisko to make certain assumptions and necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these forwardlooking statements. Forwardlooking statements are not guarantees of performance. These forwardlooking statements, may involve, but are not limited to, the consequence of this suspension of operations at the Canadian Malartic mine on the business and financial conditions of Osisko and the timely resumption of normal operations by mine operators. Words such as may, will, would, could, expect, believe, plan, anticipate, intend, estimate, continue, or the negative or comparable terminology, as well as terms usually used in the future and the conditional, are intended to identify forwardlooking statements. Information contained in forwardlooking statements is based upon certain material assumptions that were applied in drawing a conclusion or making a forecast or projection, including managements perceptions of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other considerations that are believed to be appropriate in the circumstances. Osisko considers its assumptions to be reasonable based on information currently available, but cautions the reader that their assumptions regarding future events, many of which are beyond the control of Osisko, may ultimately prove to be incorrect since they are subject to risks and uncertainties that affect Osisko and its business; Such risks and uncertainties include, among others, risks relating to the ability of exploration activities carried out by Osisko Mining (including drill results) to accurately predict mineralization; errors in Osisko Minings geological modelling; the ability of Osisko Mining to complete further exploration activities, including drilling.

For additional information with respect to these and other factors and assumptions underlying the forwardlooking statements made in this press release, see the section entitled Risk Factors in the most recent Annual Information Form of Osisko which is filed with the Canadian securities commissions and available electronically under Osiskos issuer profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and available electronically under Osiskos issuer profile on EDGAR at www.sec.gov. The forward looking information set forth herein reflects Osiskos expectations as at the date of this press release and is subject to change after such date. Osisko disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forwardlooking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, other than as required by law.
Ford says it wants to reopen five North American assembly plants in April that were closed due to the threat of coronavirus.

The three Detroit automakers suspended production at North American factories March 19 under pressure from the United Auto Workers union, which had concerns about members working closely at work stations and possibly spreading the virus.

Union spokesman Brian Rothenberg said Thursday that the UAW is reviewing Ford's announcement with great concern and caution.

The company says it's aiming to reopen its factory in Hermosillo, Mexico, on April 6, followed by its Dearborn, Michigan, truck plant, Kentucky truck plant in Louisville, the Ohio Assembly Plant near Cleveland, and the Transit van line at the Kansas City plant on April 14.

The company also wants to reopen parts-making plants to feed the assembly factories on the same day.

Ford says in a prepared statement that it will introduce additional safety measures to protect workers, but said it would give details later.

The decision comes as the number of people infected by the virus spikes in Michigan. On Wednesday the state reported t least 2,294 infections and that the number of deaths nearly doubled from 24 to 43.

Two Detroit-area hospital systems said they are caring for more than 1,000 COVID-19 patients at 13 hospitals. At Beaumont Health and Henry Ford Health System, operating rooms were being converted into intensive care units and clinics had been turned into rooms for patients needing other medical care.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is hoping the United States will be reopened by Easter as he weighs how to relax nationwide social-distancing guidelines to put some workers back on the job during the coronavirus outbreak.

Dr Betty Chu, of Henry Ford, predicted an upcoming surge in patients in Michigan, and Beaumont chief executive John Fox called on the state to invoke its power to balance care across eight regions in the state.

The Ford factories, which largely make highly profitable pickup trucks, commercial vans and big SUVs, are key to Ford's financial health.

The Ford F-150 pickup made at the Dearborn Truck plant is the top-selling vehicle in America that's responsible for much of the company's profit.

US automakers book revenue when vehicles are shipped to dealers, so without production, the revenue stream is largely cut off.

The factories were to be closed until March 30, but earlier this week Ford extended that date indefinitely.

Ford has about 56,000 workers represented by the UAW, and some members have been fearful of catching the virus and taking it home to their families.

Two union workers from Fiat Chrysler plants in the Detroit area and Kokomo, Indiana, have died this week from complications due to the virus, but it's not clear whether they got it at the factories or elsewhere.

The effort to reopen the plants comes as Amazon and other large warehouses continue operations, although some of the goods they're distributing are considered essential.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
European supermarkets have got used to dealing with panic buyers.

Purchase limits have become standard for many items.

But now a new issue could be looming.

Suppliers say fresh produce may be about to get scarcer.

The global pandemic is hampering the movement of produce and the people needed to gather crops.

In Spain, Europe's biggest exporter of fruit and vegetables, migrant workers who usually do the picking aren't turning up.

Unions say absentee rates are as high as 50%.

In Kenya, a major supplier of green beans and peas, half of all workers have been sent home.

Not because they're sick but because the industry is unable to ship orders.

Exports from South Africa, another key supplier, will be hit when a 21-day lockdown begins this week.

The supply chain is a problem everywhere.

Truck drivers are in short supply and planes are stuck on the ground.

Kenyan exporters say that's seen air freight costs triple in recent weeks.

Now even longer lasting produce like citrus fruits could be threatened.

That as shipping containers run short due to China's lockdown.

But before any new panic buying starts, Thursday (March 26) also saw words of reassurance.

The boss of UK online supermarket Ocado says people don't have to worry about shortages.

Stuart Rose says there's plenty of food to go around, though he also urged people to make full use of every morsel.
Nine doctors have died in the Philippines from the coronavirus, the country's top medical association said Thursday, as hospitals were overwhelmed and medics complained about a lack of protection on the frontlines. The announcement of the doctors' deaths heightened fears that the scale of the health crisis in the Philippines is much worse than is being officially reported, with the confirmed virus death toll at just 38. The main island of Luzon, home to 55 million people, is in the second week of a lockdown to contain the spread of the disease, but medics are warning there has been a surge in cases. The Philippine Medical Association said a ninth doctor had died of the virus, and that health workers were not getting enough protection. "If it were up to me, test the frontliners first and test them again after seven days. Doctors could be carriers themselves," the association's vice president Benito Atienza told AFP. Three large Manila hospitals announced Wednesday they had reached full capacity and would no longer accept new coronavirus cases. Hundreds of medical staff are also no longer treating patients because they are undergoing 14-day self-quarantines after suspected exposure. "Unless we are able to move the new patients to other hospitals, our healthcare delivery system is going to break down," Medical City said in a statement. The hospital added that patients suspected of having the virus were queuing up for space in intensive care, while more than 130 staff members were in isolation. Makati Med, which has so far seen around 700 cases, said a number of its frontline physicians and nurses were being treated. "As such, we can no longer extend the same degree of care and attention for any additional admission for COVID-19 cases," it added. Just under 2,000 people had been tested for the virus nationwide as of Tuesday.
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(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Antonio Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, has appealed for a cease-fire in all of the worlds war zones, so countries can focus on fighting the coronavirus pandemic. Civilian populations in conflict-ravaged areas face the highest risk of suffering devastating losses from the virus, he said. Refugees and internally displaced people are doubly vulnerable.

Guterres is right, of course: It is terrifying to think of the disease sweeping across, say, Syria, where years of fighting have devastated medical facilities  hospitals are a favorite target of the forces of the dictator Bashar al-Assad, and his Russian and Iranian patrons  and left millions displaced.

Sadly, however, Guterress appeal may not have much if any impact on that case, or for that matter, in many others. But keep your eyes on Yemen, where his intervention could open a window for a settlement of its so far intractable conflict.

Worldwide, relief agencies are bracing for an outbreak in refugee camps, and Guterres is seeking $2 billion for an international humanitarian response. The UN refugee agency estimates that the number of people fleeing conflict exceeds 70 million, the highest level since World War II.

Alas, that number is no more likely to go down now than it was before the epidemic. If anything, some belligerents will use the coronavirus crisis to try and seize the advantage over others. To stick with the example of the Syrian conflict, the Assad regime, having acknowledged the countrys first coronavirus case, could well push still more waves of refugees into Turkey, where the virus has already begun to take a toll.

But if Guterres were to concentrate on Yemen, he might have better luck. There, the belligerents might  just might  be sufficiently exhausted from years of fighting, to the point where he could bring enough pressure on the warring parties and their sponsors to halt the hostilities long enough for a humanitarian intervention to work.

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It is now five years since a coalition of Arab countries launched a bombing campaign in Yemen, the opening salvo in a war that has turned one of the worlds poorest nations into a humanitarian catastrophe. The coalition is led by Saudi Arabia, and its target is a rebel group, known as the Houthis, backed by money, training and arms from Iran.

According to the UNCHRs latest report on Yemen, 24 million people, or 80% of the population, are in need, and more than 3.65 million are displaced. Unlike displaced Syrians, only a small proportion of Yemeni refugees have been able to leave the country; it is hemmed in by the sea on two sides, and its longest land border is with Saudi Arabia.

Yemens heath system was poor before the war began; now, it is barely functional. Add to that widespread malnutrition and water scarcity in much of the country, and you have the perfect setting for an epidemic. Indeed, the country has already endured one  the worlds largest cholera outbreak, in 2018, affected more than a million people, 25% of them children. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control says nearly 3,800 Yemenis have died from the disease.

As yet, Yemen has no official cases of coronavirus, but that means very little. The country is too poorly administered  whether by the Houthis from Sanaa or the internationally-recognized government in the south  for any reliable estimates. Ominously, the Houthis are preemptively blaming their enemies, and especially the United Arab Emirates. Worse yet, Houthi media outlets are parroting the line of their Iranian patrons that the coronavirus is an American biological weapon. On the other hand, the rebel government has taken the precaution of suspending schools and international flights.

Even so, relief agencies working in the country reckon that the spread of the epidemic is only a matter of time. Given their experience in dealing with the cholera crisis, they know the challenges coronavirus will bring. Gutteres himself has said he has great confidence in our ability to adapt, but that sounds very much like whistling past the graveyard.

The secretary-general would better serve his relief staff, and Yemenis, if he spent the next few days pressing the protagonists of the war to put down their weapons and instead prepare for the crisis to come. This would require trips to Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Tehran.

To expect the Iranians, Saudis and Emiratis to do the right thing out of sympathy for the Yemenis would be too much. After all, they were not greatly moved by the cholera outbreak. But Guterres will likely find the leadership of the Arab coalition sympathetic for other reasons. Over the past year, the Saudis and Emiratis have shown a growing desire to exit their expensive, embarrassing Yemeni quagmire. The rebels, too, may welcome a break: Last fall, the Houthis and Saudis both signaled interest in a cease-fire. The UAE began to draw down its troop presence.

The Iranian position is more complicated. Compared with, say, its sponsorship of the Syrian civil war, keeping the Houthis and Saudis at each others throats costs the regime in Tehran very little. But given the scale of the epidemic in Iran, where the death toll has already crossed 2,000, the Islamic Republic might consider a pause in its more malign activities abroad; in propaganda terms, the regime could spin this as evidence of good faith and responsible membership of the international community.

Admittedly, this is asking for quite a lot. But it is a more achievable goal than a global cease-fire.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Bobby Ghosh is a columnist and member of the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board. He writes on foreign affairs, with a special focus on the Middle East and the wider Islamic world.

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion

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Buses operated by the Chandigarh Transport Undertaking have been deployed for delivery of vegetables and fruits on the doorstep as people remained indoors due to a curfew imposed to combat the coronavirus outbreak.

The delivery of essential items began on Thursday, a day after many city residents complained of not receiving supply of vegetables, fruits and dairy products, and blamed the Union Territory administration for failing to address the situation.

"A total of 150 buses will ply in the entire city, villages, slum areas and rehabilitation colonies to deliver vegetables and other essential items," Chandigarh Municipal Corporation Commissioner K K Yadav said.

A 21-day nationwide lockdown to check the spread of the deadly virus, which has infected nearly 650 people in India so far including seven in Chandigarh, came into force on Wednesday.

Moreover, the UT of Chandigarh Administration has imposed curfew in the city to combat coronavirus.

The administration has decided not to give any relaxation in curfew and has announced that it will ensure delivery of milk, vegetables, groceries and medicines on the doorstep through government and private carriers.

Contact numbers of vendors and shopkeepers have been shared by the administration for allowing people to place orders.

However, many of these numbers are non-functional.

"I have been making attempts to contact the vendors and shopkeepers on their numbers provided by the authorities, but either these do not exist or are incorrect," a resident, Sanjeev Kumar, said and claimed that he had not received milk for the past two days.

On Wednesday, the administration had asked vendors to supply vegetables in the city but they exhausted their stocks wherever they reached first for delivery.

The administration has deployed civic and police officials along with vendors in each bus for ensuring smooth delivery.

The delivery of these essentials will be made between 10 am and 1 pm, officials said.

People have to maintain adequate distance with each other for procuring vegetables, they said.

The buses will also be properly sanitised and vendors would wear protective gear while delivering essential items, they said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A feathered dinosaur with massive five inch claws has been discovered by scientists and it was one of the last raptor like dinosaurs before the mass-extinction.

The lightning quick beast had a whiplash-like tail which enabled it to hunt like a cheetah - today's fastest living land animal.

It was found by palaeontologists from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and named Dinebellator after the indigenous people.

Experts from the the State Museum of Pennsylvania have been studying the newly discovered species and say it was one of the 'last of the raptors'.

Dineobellator also had razor sharp teeth and unusually strong forelimbs and legs allowing it to rip its prey to bits, according to study author Steven Jasinski.

Reconstruction of Dineobellator notohesperus and other dinosaurs from the Ojo Alamo Formation at the end of the Cretaceous Period in New Mexico. A feathered dinosaur with massive five inch claws that was one of the 'last raptors' has been discovered by scientists

Dineobellator means 'Navajo Warrior' and the bird like raptor carrying the name was about three and a half feet tall and seven feet long with a big, powerful tail.

It was slightly larger than Velociraptor made famous by Jurassic Park but would have been even more terrifying, according to Jasinski.

He said: 'It would have been a bit longer than a wolf, but would have weighed less, about 50lbs, because it was lightly built for speed and agility.'

It would have used its crescent shaped claws, three on each foot, like talons to pounce on mammals, lizards, birds, fish - and other dinosaurs.

Dineobellator's remains were unearthed in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico - a well known dinosaur graveyard.

They included parts of the skull as well as the ribs, spine and leg and wing bones.

The animal lived 67 million years ago - less than a million years before dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid strike in the Gulf of Mexico.

Dr Jasinski, a palaeontologist at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisberg, said the scar on the hand claw was less than half an inch long.

The team believe it was most likely caused by a fight with another Dineobellator.

'A fight between two of them could happen for a number of reasons, but it seems the two most likely are resources like food, especially if these were pack animals as many believe, or mates, especially between two males.'

Reconstruction of Dineobellator notohesperus standing over a nest. The lightning quick beast had a whiplash-like tail which enabled it to hunt like a cheetah - today's fastest living land animal

Dineobellator's pointed teeth were about an inch long and its claws about five inches, It lived on a floodplain with a mixture of open habitat and forested areas.

Dr Jasinski said they would have had very strong arms and an especially strong grip.

'Features of its tail are also potentially important for understanding its behaviour. Dineobellator had a stiff tail reinforced by rod-like bones and tendons throughout.

'This allowed it to act as a counter-balance and help these dinosaurs run at high speeds,' the palaeontologist said.

The unique tail included vertebrae near the base that curved inwards, increasing agility - and improving predation success.

Dineobellator belonged to a family of theropod dinosaurs called dromaeosaurids - meaning 'running lizards' - from which modern birds descended.

Dineobellator's remains were unearthed in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico - a well known dinosaur graveyard. They included parts of the skull as well as the ribs, spine and leg and wing bones

'These dinosaurs couldn't fly, but were still covered in feathers, which they probably used for sexual or species selection, or for things like camouflage,' said Jasinksi.

'Unlike other known dromaeosaurids, however, Dineobellator had a tail that was highly mobile near its base close to the hips.

'Think of when a cheetah is chasing a gazelle. As the gazelle changes direction, the cheetah's tail whips around, balancing out the cheetah as it changes direction to maintain the pursuit.

'This is similar to what Dineobellator could have done, especially as it chased other dinosaurs and animals, making it especially agile and a very adept pursuit predator.

'We believe Dineobellator probably hunted more of the open habitat in this environment, while the bigger tyrannosaurids would have stayed closer to the forest edge, where they could do more ambushing and less open area pursuit.'

It lived alongside the southern cousin of T Rex - the tyrannosaurid - which would eat it if it could catch it, said Dr Jasinski.

'It probably did not do it often, or really almost ever. Unless one was injured or dying, a tyrannosaurid probably could never have caught one,' he said.

'They would have come in contact and interacted, although its more likely it would be a situation where Dineobellator took down a kill, and the southern tyrannosaur would have scared it off and taken the kill instead.

Photo from the original discovery of Dineobellator notohesperus pointing out the hand claw among other bone fragments. It was found by palaeontologists at the State Museum of Pennsylvania and has been named Dineobellator after the indigenous people of New Mexico where it was found

Dineobellator notohesperus outline and skeletal reconstruction. Dineobellator also had razor sharp teeth and unusually strong forelimbs and legs allowing it to rip its prey to bits, according to study author Steven Jasinski

'Dineobellator would have been a very good hunter. Speed and agility, combined with large claws and small but serrated teeth would make for a deadly animal.

'Single individuals would easily be able to hunt, take down, and kill animals its size and small, so roughly human-sized.'

Combining fast speed with increased agility and strong arms, hands, and feet would also allow these dinosaurs to hunt much larger animals and take down those several times there size, the team predict.

'While they probably wouldn't have gone after animals with impressive defences like the horns of ceratopsids or the body armor of ankylosaurs, they certainly could have gone after large animals like hadrosaurids,' said Jasinski.

They may have also gone after the duck-billed dinosaurs, whose main defence would be staying in large herds.

Dineobellator fills in important missing information for the evolution of dromaeosaurids and dinosaurs just before the extinction event, he said.

'They are cousins to birds, evolving alongside them and taking on many similar characteristics, while also going in a different direction.

Photo of lead author Steven Jasinski conducting field work. One of its claws bore a scar from a fight with one of its kin - probably over food or a mate - it also suffered a rib injury in the attack, which had healed

'Dineobellator helps show us these dinosaurs were still trying out new things, still evolving and changing, even to the bitter end of their time.'

It's full scientific name is Dineobellator notohesperus - which translates as 'Navajo warrior from the Southwest.'

'It is feared that we are currently acting as a large scale extinction event to animals and plants today,' Jasinski warns.

He said humans are causing large-scale extinctions for animals that were doing well before we started changing things.

'Understanding what happened in the past may help us better prepare for the future, or give us clues as to what we should do to try to change things for the better now.'

Following the discovery, Mr Jasinski said he plans to continue field research in New Mexico - with the hope of finding more fossils.

'It was with a lot of searching and a bit of luck that this dinosaur was found weathering out of a small hillside,' he said.

'We do so much hiking and it is easy to overlook something or simply walk on the wrong side of a hill and miss something.

'We hope that the more we search, the better chance we have of finding more of Dineobellator or the other dinosaurs it lived alongside.'

The research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 21:05:52|Editor: zyl

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A healthcare worker observes a test kit after taking a sample from a driver to test for possible COVID-19 infection at a drive-through test station in Lennestadt, Germany, on March 26, 2020. Confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Germany increased by 4,954 within one day to 36,508, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) announced on Thursday. The number of deaths from COVID-19 increased from 149 to 198, according to RKI, the federal government agency and research institute responsible for disease control and prevention. (Photo by Ulrich Hufnagel/Xinhua)

BERLIN, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Germany increased by 4,954 within one day to 36,508, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) announced on Thursday.

The number of deaths from the new coronavirus increased from 149 to 198, according to RKI, the federal government agency and research institute responsible for disease control and prevention.

Almost two-thirds of German citizens are expecting further restrictions to their personal freedom in the fight against the coronavirus, according to a survey by the opinion research institute YouGov on behalf of the German Press Agency (dpa) published on Thursday.

On Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a limited curfew for entire Germany, which banned public gatherings of more than two people for an initial time of two weeks, with exceptions for people in the same household.

In Germany's most populous state, North-Rhine Westphalia, breaches of this rule are punishable with fines of up to 25,000 euros (around 27,400 U.S. dollars) in case of repeated offenses.

On Wednesday, RKI President Lothar Wieler said that "we are at the beginning of the epidemic" and that it would be "completely open how this epidemic will develop." But he was "optimistic" that the measures in Germany would work.

The next RKI press conference to inform about the disease and its spread in Germany is scheduled for Friday morning local time.
A majority of the over 1000 cases reported in Pakistan constitutes of youths falling in the age bracket of 21-30 years, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Health Zafar Mirza has informed, nothing that the trend is contrary to that seen in China.

"24 per cent of the confirmed cases in Pakistan so far are between 21 to 30 years of age. This constitutes a majority of the cases. The pattern is unlike other countries where cases mostly comprise older people," Mirza said during his televised media briefing on Wednesday, as reported by The News International.

Pakistan has reported 1098 cases of the novel coronavirus, including 413 in the southeastern province of Sindh alone, while eight people have died of the infection in the country.

It may be noted that a majority of the over 81,000 cases of coronavirus reported in China constituted of people aged 65 or more.

Speaking to the Pakistani daily, Chief Epidemiologist at the National Institute of Health Dr Rana Safdar said that the higher percentage of the young population in Pakistan as compared to China explains why a majority of the confirmed cases in Pakistan constitute youths.

During his televised address, Mirza further informed that men constitute for 64 per cent of the case, with 36 percent being women. Furthermore, the locally transmitted cases of the virus constitute seven percent of the total cases, while the remaining 93 percent contracted the disease in foreign lands.

Mirza further informed that Pakistan has received over 5000 N-95 masks from China for use by health professionals engaged in the treatment and management of COVID-19 patients. Furthermore, a massive consignment of personal protective equipment from China is expected to arrive on Friday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) COVID-19 Rapid Response Team, Hon. Mintah Akandoh, believes Ghana would not have recorded any case of the global scourge, if the Akufo-Addo government had worked with his earlier suggestion to subject people entering the country through the borders or airport to mandatory quarantine.



To him, our worst fears have been realized with some carriers of the Coronavirus having had contacts with Ghanaians resident in the country, before President Akufo-Addo's directive on mandatory quarantine came into effect.



Speaking on Okay FMs Ade Akye Abia Morning Show, the Ranking Member on Health Committee in Parliament, while commending the Akufo-Addo government for the current measures on mandatory quarantine in place, was emphatic that the NDCs COVID-19 Rapid Response Team was not set up to rival any national body or committee.



the way we are conducting the quarantine, I admire it a lot and that was what I earlier said; the government should have quarantined every traveler after testing them at the airport before they are allowed in. If we had adhered to my suggestion earlier, and we even recorded 1000 cases at the isolation centers, I will not be scared...



If we were able to arrest them at the borders and at the airport and detained them to test them to establish those who are positive and had recorded 1 million cases, I will not be scared, he reiterated.



He feared that with the recorded cases shifting from the vertical to horizontal transmission, "some people who are possible carriers of the virus have already entered into the country and interacted with people, making it more deadly now."



Touching on the recent fumigation exercise at the various market places, the Juaboso lawmaker stressed that though laudable, it must be done regularly.



Some people have also said that the fumigation which took place on Monday was good, whether we have COVID-19 or not, it is important that we regularly engage in such exercise of fumigating our market placesbut the fumigation in principle was a good exercise, Mintah Akandoh added.







A member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) COVID-19 Rapid Response Team, Hon. Mintah Akandoh, believes Ghana would not have recorded any case of the global scourge, if the Akufo-Addo government had worked with his earlier suggestion to subject people entering the country through the borders or airport to mandatory quarantine.



To him, our worst fears have been realized with some carriers of the Coronavirus having had contacts with Ghanaians resident in the country, before President Akufo-Addo's directive on mandatory quarantine came into effect.



Speaking on Okay FMs Ade Akye Abia Morning Show, the Ranking Member on Health Committee in Parliament, while commending the Akufo-Addo government for the current measures on mandatory quarantine in place, was emphatic that the NDCs COVID-19 Rapid Response Team was not set up to rival any national body or committee.



the way we are conducting the quarantine, I admire it a lot and that was what I earlier said; the government should have quarantined every traveler after testing them at the airport before they are allowed in. If we had adhered to my suggestion earlier, and we even recorded 1000 cases at the isolation centers, I will not be scared...



If we were able to arrest them at the borders and at the airport and detained them to test them to establish those who are positive and had recorded 1 million cases, I will not be scared, he reiterated.



He feared that with the recorded cases shifting from the vertical to horizontal transmission, "some people who are possible carriers of the virus have already entered into the country and interacted with people, making it more deadly now."



Touching on the recent fumigation exercise at the various market places, the Juaboso lawmaker stressed that though laudable, it must be done regularly.



Some people have also said that the fumigation which took place on Monday was good, whether we have COVID-19 or not, it is important that we regularly engage in such exercise of fumigating our market placesbut the fumigation in principle was a good exercise, Mintah Akandoh added.

Source: Daniel Adu Darko/Peacefmonline.com/[email protected]









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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At the Realme X50 Pro launch last month, at the end of the event, the company CEO teased a smartwatch, which would be the company's first. Now, during his Ask Madhav series on YouTube, Madhav Sheth has finally shown off what this smartwatch would look like.

Of course, like most Chinese brands, the Realme smartwatch too bears an uncanny resemblance to the Apple Watch.

From what we saw in the video, the Realme smartwatch will feature a square-shaped dial and a black strap. There will probably be more strap options and colour variants.

Though, Sheth pretty much only showed the watch and didn't share any more details than that. All he said was: Its on my wrist, and it will be on yours soon.

While that was all he said about the watch, Sheth also revealed that a purple variant will soon be revealed for the Realme 6 Pro in India.

The CEO also said that the company is also working on its first Bluetooth speakers, which will soon be introduced in the market.
Floyd Cardoz an influential chef of Indian heritage died on Wednesday morning of complications from the coronavirus in New Jersey, at the age of 59.

In a statement to several media outlets Cardoz' company in India, Hunger Inc. Hospitality announced that he died from complications from COVID-19 on Wednesday at Mountainside Medical Center in Montclair, N.J.

On March 17, Cardoz shared that he returned to the US for medical treatment on March 8, writing that he was "feeling feverish."

US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (PDAS) Alice Wells paid tribute to Cardoz, calling him the 'ultimate culinary diplomat.'

"Sad to hear of the passing of acclaimed Indian-American chef @FloydCardoz, the ultimate culinary diplomat. Floyd's restaurants, books, and good-natured TV appearances introduced sumptuous Indian flavours to an American palate and built bridges between our people. Rest in peace," US Ambassador Alice Wells wrote on twitter.

Cardozo was an influential chef who married regional Indian cuisine with French and new American flavours. He opened a string of acclaimed restaurants in both New York and Mumbai -- and became a TV star along the way.

Cardoz was born in what was then Bombay, India, and grew up between that metropolis and his ancestral state of Goa.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
(Alliance News) - The follow is a round-up of share dealings by UK company directors and managers announced on Thursday and not separately reported by Alliance News:







Greggs PLC - Chief Executive Roger Whiteside buys 11,251 shares and Finance Director Richard Hutton buys 4,627 shares, both at GBP15.89, worth GBP252,237, on Wednesday.







Informa PLC - CEO Stephen Carter buys 35,745 shares at 419.65p, worth GBP150,000. Now holds 743,893 shares, and has a total interest of 1.4 million shares. Finance Director Gareth Wright buys 21,836 shares at 455.67p, worth GBP99,500. Now holds 552,130 shares, with a total interest of 1.1 million shares. Back on March 13, Non-Executive Chair Derek Mapp bought more than GBP200,000 worth of shares in the company.







Vistry Group PLC - CEO Greg Fitzgerald 50,520 shares and Judith Fitzgerald buys 2,485 shares, both at GBP5.99, together worth GBP317,500, on Wednesday. Non-Executive Chair Ian Tyler buys 3,544 shares at GBP5.60, worth GBP19,846, on Thursday. Other directors buy about 40,000 shares in total at similar prices on Wednesday and Thursday.







Smart Metering Systems PLC - CEO Alan Foy buys 80,645 shares at 578.29p, worth GBP466,358, on Wednesday. Foy bought GBP2.5 million in shares last week.







GAN PLC - CEO Dermot Smurfit buys 20,000 shares at 130p, worth GBP26,000, on Wednesday. GAN on Wednesday provided a trading update, saying net revenue more than doubled in 2019 to USD30.0 million from USD14.0 million in 2018. It swung to income before tax of USD2.4 million from a USD8.6 million loss. GAN said it is trading in line with board expectation so far in 2020 and remains confident in full-year revenue. "We are extremely fortunate to be an online-only business in the wake of the social distancing mandated by governments around the globe and especially in our key markets of Italy and the United States," Smurfit said.







Manchester & London Investment Trust PLC - Investment Manager Mark Sheppard buys 25,000 shares at GBP5.38, worth GBP134,500, on Thursday. Sheppard also had bought 25,000 shares on Wednesday.







Lindsell Train Investment Trust PLC - Director Michael Lindsell buys 40 shares at GBP830.00, worth GBP33,200, on Tuesday.







TR Property Investment Trust PLC - Non-Executive Director Simon Marrison buys 15,000 shares at GBP2.52 and GBP2.94, worth GBP42,035, on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.







Bellway PLC - Non-Executive Chair Paul Hampden Smith buys 3,924 shares at GBP20.27 and GBP20.29, worth GBP79,569, on Wednesday.







Mincon Group PLC - Non-Executive Director Paul Lynch buys 35,000 shares at 85p, worth GBP29,750, on Wednesday.







Safestore Holdings PLC - Non-Executive Director Ian Krieger buys 10,000 shares at GBP5.34, worth GBP53,387, on Tuesday.







Sirius Real Estate Ltd - CEO Andrew Coombs buys 100,000 shares at GBP0.46, worth GBP46,360, on Tuesday. Now holds 9.1 million shares, 0.9%.







Safestyle UK PLC - Non-Executive Chair Alan Lovell buys 30,000 shares at 20.7p, worth GBP6,210, on Thursday. Now holds 160,000 shares.







BH Global Ltd - Chair Michael Bunbury buys 3,200 shares at GBP15.90, worth GBP50,872, on Wednesday. Now holds 14,200 shares.







Metal Tiger PLC - CEO Michael McNeilly buys 1.3 million at 0.99p, worth GBP12,375, on Wednesday. Now holds 5.2 million, 0.3% of total.







Invesco Perpetual Select Trust PLC - Non-Executive Director Craig Cleland buys 10,000 shares at GBP1.50, worth GBP15,000, on Thursday.







Ruffer Investment Co Ltd - Non Executive Chair Ashe Windham buys 20,000 shares at GBP2.16 to GBP2.18, worth GBP43,485, on Thursday. Now holds 155,000 shares. Windham will retire at the company's annual general meeting in December, and Non-Executive Director Chris Russell will replace.







Wilmington PLC - CEO Mark Milner buys 25,000 shares at 114p, worth GBP28,500, on Thursday. Now holds 45,000 shares.







JPMorgan Smaller Cos Investment Trust PLC - Non-Executive Director Andrew Impey buys 10,000 shares at 179.99p, worth GBP17,999, on Thursday.







By Tom Waite; thomaslwaite@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2020 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
The Arewa Youth Consultative Forum (AYCF), has called for the arrest of David Oyedepo, founder of the Living Faith Church Worldwide, also known as Winners Chapel International.

AYCF national president, Yerima Shettima, via a statement on Wednesday, said Oyedepo is still walking free, despite flouting the federal and state governments ban on large gatherings, over the Coronavirus outbreak.

The statement reads thus;

Read Also: COVID-19: Oyedepo Holds Church Service, Says Plague Cannot Stop Us

Pastor Oyedepo has openly shown not only his disdain for the rule of law but also the value of human life. He has chosen to endanger the lives of many of his innocent followers by deliberately refusing to be guided in face ofthis global pandemic

We therefore challenge Pastor Oyedepo to tell us if he did not take advantage of his closeness to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo in this flagrant disobedience to Nigerian laws and the United Nations Charter on the safety of human lives.

He owes this nation full explanation for being the only Nigerian to indulge in creating a gathering of the Ibadan Canaan magnitude, when the restriction of movement is respected all over world because of the current pandemic.

We therefore share the view of all prominent Nigerians that this Pastor should be promptly arrested for endangering the lives of innocent Nigerians, recklessly using religion as a cover.

We hope the Nigerian security agencies will swing into action so that the prompt arrest of this callous clergyman would serve as a deterrent to others, it read.

AYCF insisted that no Nigerian, regardless of social standing, should get away with endangering anyones life, using religion as a smokescreen for achieving dangerous goals.
New Delhi, March 27 : The Union Tribal Affairs Ministry on Thursday asked states with Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRS) and Eklavya Model Day Boarding Schools (EMDBS) to reschedule their holidays due to the Covid-19 spread threat.

"In view of the contingent situation, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs has issued the following instructions in respect of the Eklavya Model Residential Schools for rescheduling of Holidays in Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRS) and Eklavya Model Day Boarding Schools (EMDBS) funded by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs.

"Summer Holidays to be advanced as a special case and schools to remain shut from 21.03.2020 till 25.05.2020 (65 days) or till further orders whichever is earlier," the Ministry announced.

In the letter, the ministry has also instructed states to ban entry of outsiders on campus for the time being.

"Students appearing in Board Examinations and attending special classes may be retained with due care in the campus. Such students appearing in Board examinations may be sent home soon after completion of respective papers," it read.

Apart from these, the ministry has also asked schools to have special drives to sanitise the school campus including the academic block, hostels and other common areas.

Teachers of these schools can avail the holidays after completion of declaration of results and the results to be communicated to the students by post and sms, it said.
How bad is the shortage of personal protective equipment for doctors and nurses treating COVID-19 patients?

Its so bad that the states emergency stockpile, which state and health care leaders hoped would give them some breathing room, is fast running out. The state has already handed over 100% of the gowns, 95% of the face shields and more than 80% of the sought-after N-95 respirators it had saved in state warehouses.

And the expected surge in COVID-19 victims hasnt even begun yet.

The states emergency supply is intended for just this purpose, augmenting the private sources of vital medical goods in times of crisis. The numbers were large. The state had, for instance, more than 500,000 N-95 respirators.

But the state supply has not been sufficient to solve hospitals own shortages. Virtually every major hospital and health system in the Portland area has warned they are running low.

Respirators and other safety equipment are vital during the pandemic because the virus that causes COVID-19 is so infectious. If doctors and nurses start contracting the virus, they will be out of action at a time when theyre needed most.

The shortage has become a heated issue among workers and management. Executives have asked caregivers to make face masks intended for a single use last all day. Workers and union representatives claim that protective equipment becomes less effective under those circumstances.

The rapid depletion of the states protective equipment was detailed in a new situation status report, which also announced a total of 266 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Oregon. A total of 5,743 Oregonians have been tested for the disease.

As of Wednesday, two more Oregonians died of COVID-19, bringing the total to 10. The state also reported 57 new positive cases, bringing the total to 266. That was the largest number of new positives in in a day since the virus arrived. But some authorities believe the increase stems from stepped up testing in Oregon.

As a percentage of the total number of emergency room patients, suspected COVID-19 patients are on the rise. Of the 266 confirmed cases, at least 75 have been hospitalized and 135 have not. Information was not available on the remaining 56.

The report showed that most of the COVID-19 patients -- 142 -- are female. The single largest age group among the 266 confirmed cases is 60 to 69 year olds, which total 57 cases. Five of the cases are children, ranging from babies to age 19.

Jeff Manning

503-294-7606

jmanning@oregonian.com
A social media post by a Jamia faculty member that spoke about failing students who did not back the protests against the amended citizenship law has led to a huge controversy. On Wednesday, Delhis Jamia Millia Islamia university announced that the faculty member had been suspended and an inquiry ordered.

AP Siddiqui, registrar of the university, issued the suspension order for the teacher. It said the faculty member had tweeted that all students except 15 non-Muslims have been passed as they did not support the Citizenship Amendment Act protests.

The university authorities felt that the social media post incited communal disharmony which is unbecoming of a teacher and against the spirit of the code of conduct. It classified the tweet as a case of serious misconduct

Also Watch | No resistance by people: Delhi Police commissioner on clearing anti-CAA protest sites

Siddiquis order said that the vice chancellor had decided to place Ahmad under suspension with immediate effect pending an inquiry.

Abrar Ahmad, an assistant professor in the department of electrical engineering, however, insisted that his post had been misunderstood and was only meant as satire and not a factual assertion.

Ahmad turned to Facebook to argue that it was a satire to explain how minorities were targeted by CAA and he couldnt have failed anyone since there were no exams.

It was a satire, parody, a co-relation to explain how minorities are being targeted by CAA and it would be as bad as a teacher saying all minority students are failed and have to reappear, he wrote.

He added that no such examination had taken place and thus failing non Muslim students was out of question.

The assistant professor claimed that in a career spanning over a decade there was no case of discrimination against him. He added that the limitation of characters on Twitter may have led to misinterpretation of his post.

Now, since the university has ordered an inquiry in this issue, everything will be clear soon, he added in the Facebook post.
Armenian News - NEWS.am presents a daily digest of top news as of 26.03.2020:

 [UPDATED] Armenia reported the first death from novel coronavirus on Thursday, March 26.

A 72-year-old patient died at the Nork infectious diseases hospital. The patient was diagnosed with double pneumonia, multiple organ failure, respiratory distress syndrome, hypertension and heart rhythm disorder, spokesperson for health ministry Alina Nikoghosyan wrote on Facebook.

Twenty-five new cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in Armenia. The total number has reached 290. 1,440 people have tested negative, and 18 people have already recovered.

Thirty-six coronavirus patients have pneumonia, two of them are critical, Armenian health minister Arsen Torosyan said earlier.

Coronavirus cases have mostly been reported in Yerevan as well as Armavir, Ararat and Kotayk provinces, he said during the press conference on Thursday.

Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan, in turn, noted that three servicemen of the Armenian Armed Forces tested positive for coronavirus.

According to epidemiological studies, the servicemen were previously isolated, which significantly reduced the risk of further spread of the infection, the minister said.

 The Armenian Government has approved a comprehensive program of measures to combat the coronavirus impacts.

Thus the issue has been divided into three parts: in the event of deformation of consumption in the system, a certain decrease in liquidity is observed, and the government should take some measures to neutralize this problem; a group of people who have lost their jobs amid the coronavirus pandemic, and the government must focus and support them; to ensure the protection of socially vulnerable groups of the population

 Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has also spoken about the upcoming Karabakh elections to be held on March 31.

According to him, Armenian observers departing for Karabakh should be tested for coronavirus.

By the way, Karabakh has confirmed no coronavirus cases in the republic.

Artsakh presidential candidate Masis Mayilian has also shared his opinion on the possible postponement of the elections

According to him, being deeply aware of today's challenges that threaten our national security, and considering the life of every citizen of our country an absolute value, he will accept the decision to postpone the elections with understanding.

 Lebanese Armenian has died of coronavirus in Beirut, Arevelk reported.

According to the Lebanese TV company MTV, an hour after the death of the young man, information was circulated that he was infected with a coronavirus. The media also noted that the man suffered from other diseases.

By the way, there are over 488 thousand coronavirus cases confirmed globally. The death toll exceeded 22 thousand and over 117 thousand people have already recovered.

The COVID-19 is affecting 198 countries and territories around the world and one international conveyance.

 The court hearing in the case involving Armenian ex-president Serzh Sargsyan and other officials will not take place today, Sargsyan's lawyer Amram Makinyan told Armenian News-NEWS.am.

The lawyer has earlier filed a motion asking the judge to postpone the hearing that was set for March 26. Ex-president is charged for embezzling one million dollars.
But messages posted on the stores Instagram site call the break-ins frustrating and inconvenient and also mostly disappointing. The messages say the incidents highlight the needs that are in our communities, but also note, theres a neighborhood code of ethics that isnt being honored. We have to take care of each other and it doesnt look like this. We are all connected.
Judy S. Gelles, 75, of Philadelphia, an accomplished artist, photographer, and filmmaker, died Saturday, March 14, of a ruptured brain aneurysm at Pennsylvania Hospital.

Ms. Gelles began her creative journey as a new mother in 1977 when she took a photography class at the Rhode Island School of Design.

She told the teacher she wanted to take the perfect baby photo, said son David. One of her pieces actually shows that. Its a picture of me in my playpen. She was a diarist, documenting her daily life as a young mother and an artist.

Over the next 42 years, she let her curiosity and creativity roam in multimedia art projects that were unique in style and implementation.

Her best known is the Fourth Grade Project, which she conceived while volunteering at George Washington Elementary School. She had kids take pictures of their lives and then write about their lives, said her son. They came alive with the work. No one had ever asked them to talk about their hopes and fears.

One of her signature techniques was wrapping words around the figures pictured in photos.

That style provided the framework for a new venture in 2008, when Ms. Gelles began photographing and interviewing 300 fourth graders in the United States, China, England, India, Israel, Nicaragua, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries. She continued the work until last year.

The principal in the first school she approached barred her from photographing the childrens faces for privacy reasons, so she took pictures from the back. She asked each: Whom do you live with? What do you wish for? What do you worry about?

The answers were inscribed around the youngsters images, forming a visual narrative that showed the private world of children. The idea was for each child to view the work and develop empathy and understanding across cultures.

Nine-year-old children are on the cusp of adolescence, Ms. Gelles said in a 2015 TEDx speech at the University of Pennsylvania. They are able to think critically, and consider relationships to be very important. They are socially conscious, interested in helping others, and openly curious about the world.

The project allows students to learn about others lives in a uniquely personal way and to use the project as a catalyst for their own explorations.

The project, which blossomed into a teaching tool with its own curriculum, will go on a national tour for the next five years. The tour is underwritten by the nonprofit CultureTrust Greater Philadelphia.

In 2016, Ms. Gelles learned that one of the Fourth Grade Project photos was picked for display in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Its definitely an honor to be included in the exhibit, especially for the Fourth Grade Project, because its not your typical frontal portrait, she told The Inquirer.

In another project, Ms. Gelles decided to take a family portrait each year in the same spot when her family visited relatives in Melbourne Beach, Fla.

My grandparents owned a mobile home there and my mother wanted to document the changes in our family over the years, her son said in a eulogy. We all hated standing around as she took the picture.

And we made it hard on her. But she persisted. She was driven, committed, loving, and always pushing all of us creatively with her, on her next move.

Ms. Gelles art is in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In 1986, Ms. Gelles found the World War II letters of her deceased father-in-law, Sidney Gelles, hinting at anti-Semitism he had faced. Since he had never mentioned anti-Semitism, she grew curious and enlisted photographer Marianne Bernstein in a documentary to examine the experience of six Jews who served in the war.

The film, From Philadelphia to the Front, premiered in 2005 at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia and garnered six awards in film festivals.

Born in Somersworth, N.H., she graduated from Somersworth High School at age 16, and Boston University in 1965. She married Dr. Richard J. Gelles in 1971.

Besides her husband and son, she is survived by son Jason nd three grandchildren.

Services were Monday, March 16.

Memorial donations may be made to the Fourth Grade Project of Culture Trust Greater Philadelphia via https://fourthgradeproject.com/donate/.
Wall Street regulators on Thursday filed a complaint against a Rite Aid executive from Marlton who allegedly traded on inside information, selling more than $650,000 in stock before Rite Aids share price dropped one day later.

David Mahan, 58, has worked for Rite Aid since 1984, according to the lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. He has been a regional vice president at Rite Aid since 2003, and reported to executives at Rite Aid headquarters in Camp Hill, Pa.

The SEC alleges that on Jan. 19, 2017, Mahan illegally traded using inside information about Rite Aid, which had agreed to a merger with Walgreens.

Walgreens, headquartered in Deerfield, Ill., is a public company that owns Walgreens, Duane Reade, and Boots retail pharmacy chains. In 2015, Walgreens had agreed to acquire all outstanding shares of Rite Aid for $9 a share in cash, a 48% premium. The transaction was expected to close in early 2017.

According to the SEC complaint, based on the terms of the merger, if the Federal Trade Commission did not approve the deal by Jan. 27, 2017, then Rite Aid and Walgreens would need to agree to extend the end date.

Rite Aid, Walgreens, and investors understood that a delay would likely require divesting additional stores and Walgreens would likely cut the purchase price, the SEC said.

The SEC claims that Mahan got information through his employment on Jan. 18, 2017, that the sale would likely be delayed.

On Jan. 19, 2017, Mahan called his brokerage firm, where he held Rite Aid employee stock options and employer-granted stock. Mahan sold 11,985 shares of Rite Aid stock and exercised 63,675 Rite Aid employee stock options and sold the stock. Mahans Rite Aid shares were sold at prices ranging from $8.61 to $8.62 a share, for a total of $651,604.

The 75,660 total shares constituted all of his Rite Aid holdings.

On Jan. 30, 2017, Rite Aid and Walgreens amended the merger agreement, extending the end date, and the price dropped to $6.50 to $7.00 per share.

By selling before the delay became public, Mahan, who still works for the company, avoided a loss of more than $87,000, the complaint said.

Without admitting or denying the allegations, Mahan has agreed to a final judgment that would order him to repay $87,277, plus interest of $12,107, and a civil penalty of $87,277. The court must approve the settlement.

Mahans lawyers, listed as Amy Carver and Catherine Recker with the Philadelphia firm Welsh & Recker, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Ultimately, the merger never happened, but Walgreens bought about half of Rite Aids stores. Rite Aid is one of the nations leading drugstore chains with fiscal 2018 annual revenues of $21.5 billion.
New Delhi: National carrier Air India will evacuate over 300 Israel nationals from New Delhi and ferry them to Tel Aviv on Friday (March 27, 2020), amid coronavirus outbreak situation which has claimed over 20,000 lives globally. According to reports, Boeing 777 AI-139 planes have been deployed for the evacuation operation.

This comes after the Consulate General of Israel in Mumbai had said that several Israel nationals were looking for a way out from India.

"The team @israelinMumbai is making constant efforts to help and find a solution for the #Israelis that want to reach back to #Israel safely. Here are a few of them that were picked up now by special transportation organized by the consulate taking them to the airport," Consulate General of Israel in Mumbai wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

The team @israelinMumbai is making constant efforts to help & find a solution for the #Israelis that want to reach back to #Israel safely.

Here are few of them that were picked up now by special transportation organized by the consulate taking them to the airport. #21daylockdown pic.twitter.com/XpdhI9JjKo  Israel in Mumbai (@israelinMumbai) March 25, 2020

It is to be noted that Air India has previously performed similar special flight operations to evacuate both Indian and foreign nationals from several countries including China and Italy who were stranded in those countries due to the spread of the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, German nationals who are being evacuated from India amid lockdown underwent security checks at Indira Gandhi International Airport. They will take off from India shortly.

After India announced country-wide lockdown to contain coronavirus spread, countries like Russia, Japan, Germany, and Ukraine are evacuating their nationals, who are stuck here.
Former Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Thursday requested External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to help the Kashmiri students stranded at Indo-Bangladesh border amid the nationwide lockdown. Kashmiri students, stranded at Indo-Bangladesh border, have been told to return to their colleges and universities in the neighboring country.

Taking to Twiiter, Abdullah made an appeal to Jaishankar, asking the latter to intervene with the Government of Bangladesh to assist the students.

Requesting @DrSJaishankar to kindly intervene with the Government of Bangladesh to assist these Kashmiri students as best possible. #StayHome #BreakTheChain #StayHomeSaveLives https://t.co/ZIUR5TwwJc  Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) March 26, 2020

READ: Coronavirus LIVE Updates: Finance Minister announces Rs.1.7 lakh crore relief package

READ: Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti exchange pleasantries, one ex-CM demands other's release

Kashmiri students stranded

A group of 70 students had left for Kashmir after Bangladesh ordered the closure of varsities in the wake of Coronavirus spread. The student said the embassy conveyed to the Bangladesh government and asked the authorities at their Colleges to open hostels for them. The distressed students said it was not safe for them to continue their stay in Bangladesh as there were not enough facilities and other safety measures to deal with the Coronavirus crisis.

We were stranded on roads for two days and on Tuesday evening, we were asked by officials from Indian embassy to return to our colleges in Bangladesh. Despite our pleas, they didnt allow us to enter Indian, said a student.

To mitigate the coronavirus pandemic, Government of India has already suspended all international and domestic flights, besides sealing borders and entry points. Furthermore, the students said Bangladesh will undergo lockdown from Wednesday which will make their stay more difficult.

READ: Omar Abdullah irritated by fake '4G restoration in J&K' circular; hits out

Meanwhile, the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir recorded its first death due to Coronavirus on Thursday. The 65-year old man from Hyderpora, Srinagar had a medical history of diabetes hypertension and obesity. Jammu and Kashmir government spokesperson Rohit Kansal informing about the death on Twitter added another four people who came in contact with the patient also tested positive on Wednesday.

READ: Omar Abdullah makes first strong pitch for Mehbooba Mufti's release; Here's what he said
(Natural News) Carbon dioxide may be used to help produce natural gas from deposits buried deep beneath the Earth. A recent study is proposing that air and carbon dioxide injected into methane ice deposits that are buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico could unlock vast natural energy resources.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) propose injecting large amounts of carbon dioxide and air into deposits of methane hydrate as a means of harvesting methane gas. The latter is an ice like, water-rich chemical compound that forms naturally in high-pressure, low-temperature environments such as under the Arctic permafrost, or deep in the Gulf of Mexico.

Our study shows that you can store carbon dioxide in hydrates and produce energy at the same time, stated lead author Kris Darnell, a doctoral graduate from the UT Austin Jackson School of Geosciences.

Simulating methane gas extraction with computer models

The team at UT Austin hasnt actually extracted any methane gas with carbon dioxide yet. Instead, the team used computer models to simulate what could happen when a mixture of carbon dioxide and air is injected into deposits of methane hydrate. According to the simulation, the air sweeps the methane gas toward a production well. Then, the carbon dioxide gas takes up the space formerly occupied by the methane.

The study isnt the first time that extracting methane from hydrate deposits through pumping carbon dioxide has been proposed. However, earlier attempts have either failed, or produced lackluster results. The new study, with its computer simulations, aimed to crack the physics behind the process to hopefully reveal why the previous attempts failed.

The researchers noted that the process in which one type of molecule trapped in the hydrate  in this case, methane  is replaced with another is a two-stage process. Previously, scientists thought that this was a single simultaneous process. In the new model, nitrogen from the air breaks down the methane hydrate in the first stage. After this, the carbon dioxide crystallizes into a slow-moving wave of carbon dioxide hydrate behind the extracted methane gas.

Less risk of earthquakes, unlike fracking

One benefit of the method proposed by the team is that carbon dioxide hydrate replaces the methane hydrate. Geological disturbances, such as earthquakes, have been an issue with other methods of mining that use the insertion of material into the ground, such as hydraulic fracturing (more commonly known as fracking). With the method introduced by the researchers, the idea is that the carbon dioxide effectively replaces the methane thats being extracted from the hydrate.

By swapping the methane hydrate with CO 2 hydrate, we disturb the (geologic) formation less, lowering the environmental impact, and we make the process energetically more efficient, said co-lead Peter Flemings, a Jackson School professor and senior research scientist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. (Related: Fracking triggers potentially damaging earthquakes, even in areas AWAY from injection sites.)

Methane hydrate as an energy source

Methane hydrate is a gas hydrate, which is a chemical compound wherein gas molecules become trapped inside cages of water ice molecules, rather than chemically bonding with them. The Department of Energy (DOE) and UT Austin are working to study naturally forming methane hydrates with the aim of determining if they could potentially be used as energy sources. Estimates suggest that methane harvested from hydrate deposits found beneath the Gulf of Mexico could power the country for hundreds of years.

With the computer simulations done, Darnell says that the next step is to test the teams findings in the lab. The Jackson School and the UT Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering are currently testing the new method in a specialized facility in the Jackson School, which is one of the few in the world that can store and test methane hydrate.

Sources include:

ScienceDaily.com

USGS.gov
Price gougers in Los Angeles are selling products at drastically inflated prices, including one container of Clorox wipes for $50, one can of Lysol spray for $25 and one roll of toilet paper for $8, a DailyMail.com investigation can reveal.

The opportunistic sellers, taking advantage of the overwhelming demand for cleaning products during the coronavirus shutdown, may fall foul of laws against price gouging during a state of emergency.

Earlier this month California Attorney General Xavier Bercerra vowed to prosecute sellers caught breaking the law, which prohibits businesses hiking prices by more than 10 percent during an emergency.

But DailyMail.com has found sellers on the second hand app LetGo who have been buying up household cleaning products, baby supplies and toilet paper around Los Angeles then reselling them with price hikes of up to 1,400 percent.

Price gougers in Los Angeles are selling products at drastically inflated prices, including one container of Clorox wipes for $50, one can of Lysol spray for $25 and one roll of toilet paper for $8, a DailyMail.com investigation can reveal. Pictured: Erica Shelton, a mom from Torrance, listed one tub of Clorox disinfecting wipes for a whopping $50 on the site earlier this month

One Lynwood-based user on LetGo, Blake Ahmed, took advantage of the scarcity by selling unwrapped, single rolls of toilet paper for $8 each  but with the generous offer of 'Delivery free with purchase of 8 [rolls]'

Sellers on the second hand app LetGo have been buying up household cleaning products, baby supplies and toilet paper around Los Angeles and reselling them with price hikes of up to 1,400%

Stacy Cornette from Simi Valley posted a single 19oz can of Lysol Morning Breeze disinfectant spray for $25, normally $4.92 at Walmart  a gouge of 408 percent.

Erica Shelton, a mom from Torrance, listed one tub of 75 Clorox disinfecting wipes for a whopping $50 on the site earlier this month.

The price for one tub was 1,400 percent higher than the regular price at Target of $9.99 for three tubs. Walmart also usually sells a pack of four tubs for $12.78.

Amos Haley, a photographer based in the Pacific Palisades and whose Instagram is filled with his pictures of half-naked models partying and posing in Southern California, listed a similar single Clorox canister for $37.

A handyman in Chinatown, whose account on the site is called 'Pro Installer', usually sells skimpy bras and panties on the site, but after the coronavirus crisis began, he listed a box of 100 disposable vinyl exam gloves, which usually cost around $10, for $50, and also listed a 10-pack for $20.

A user from Vernon under the handle 'Soda Jerk' listed 100 disposable gloves for an even steeper $60, and a 10-pack for $30.

Toilet paper has also vanished from stores across the country with fights breaking out over the bathroom essential.

One Lynwood-based user on LetGo, Blake Ahmed, took advantage of the scarcity by selling unwrapped, single rolls of toilet paper for $8 each  but with the generous offer of 'Delivery free with purchase of 8 [rolls].'

Another seller, 'Kik', from Fountain Valley, was charging $15 for a six pack of Presto toilet roll on the app.

Pictured: A man wears a facemask while crossing deserted streets in LA

Earlier this month California Attorney General Xavier Bercerra vowed to prosecute sellers caught breaking the law, which prohibits businesses hiking prices by more than 10 percent during an emergency

Over a week ago, LetGo posted a statement on its site promising to 'curb selling practices that may limit equal accessibility to high-demand items'.

'We've temporarily banned the sale of supplies like medical face masks, hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, and toilet paper. We're also prohibiting listings that mention the coronavirus (COVID-19) and promise prevention or a cure,' the March 17 statement said.

But listings of many of the banned products, with massively inflated prices, were still up on its site on Tuesday.

Juan Ramirez of South Gate was selling single pairs of latex gloves for $15, and Los Angeles-based Hugo Mo listed one pack of baby wipes for $15, as well as 'one single box of Kleenex 85 tissues of 3ply' for $10.

Stacy Cornette from Simi Valley posted a single 19oz can of Lysol Morning Breeze disinfectant spray for $25, normally $4.92 at Walmart  a gouge of 408 percent.

LetGo user Lisa from Montebello listed a similar can for $10, more than double its normal price.

In a statement earlier this month, California Attorney General Xavier Bercerra vowed to crack down on price gouging over essentials. 'These price-gouging restrictions make it illegal for businesses to raise the prices of most goods and services by more than 10%,' he said.

Amos Haley, a photographer based in the Pacific Palisades and whose Instagram is filled with his pictures of half-naked models partying and posing in Southern California, listed a similar single Clorox canister for $37

'We've temporarily banned the sale of supplies like medical face masks, hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, and toilet paper. We're also prohibiting listings that mention the coronavirus (COVID-19) and promise prevention or a cure,' the March 17 statement said.

But listings of many of the banned products, with massively inflated prices, were still up on its site on Tuesday

'Those goods and services include but are not limited to emergency supplies, medicine and medical supplies, food and drink.'

LA City Attorney Mike Feuer told DailyMail.com his office has had over 200 reports of price gouging in the last few days.

Feuer's staff found two 1-liter bottles of hand sanitizer for sale for an extortionate $140, and eight half-gallons of bleach for $100. Under California law, price gougers can face up to a year in jail, a $10,000 fine and restitution to consumers.

'Our team has been online and looking for evidence of price gouging,' Feuer said in a statement last week.

'Price gouging of course rips off consumers and wrongfully costs them money. But more than that, the mere listing of a product in an emergency at inflated prices spurs panic, and we all suffer when stores are needlessly in short supply.

'Thanks to dozens of tips from Angelenos on price gouging this past week, we have new investigations open.'

Feuer encouraged city residents to report gougers at LACityAttorney.org or by calling at 213-978-8340. Prices for surgical masks have also rocketed among medical wholesalers.

Gary Keith, a medical supplies reseller in Los Angeles, told DailyMail.com that he usually sells medical-grade N95 surgical masks at $16.40 for a box of 20, and is now refusing to take part in the drastically inflated market with prices increased by 1,363 percent.

Gary Keith, a medical supplies reseller in Los Angeles, told DailyMail.com that he usually sells medical-grade N95 surgical masks at $16.40 for a box of 20, and is now refusing to take part in the drastically inflated market with prices increased by 1,363 percent

New York-based wholesaler Complete Medical Supplies Inc is now selling boxes of 20 N95 masks for a staggering $240, and bags of five masks for $62.50.

In an email sent to resellers, the company acknowledged the prices were 'insane' but said they were making little profit from the masks in the current market.

'We are doing everything possible to continue to supply you with N95 Masks,' CEO Seth Klein wrote. 'Our sell prices are 'insane' as compared to normal prices, BUT I assure you, our costs are 'insane' as well.

'Our profits are low single digits - this is not a profit center.

'We have made the decision to buy these masks, prepay for them and air them into stock in order to help our customers supply their communities with N95 Masks.

'N95 masks are very hard to find, so we will continue to try and find and offer N95 masks daily until we cannot locate any more.'

The company also says it is making a 'large donation' of the masks to four hospitals and fire departments in New York, New Jersey and Florida.
This story was produced as part of a joint effort among Spotlight PA, LNP Media Group, PennLive, PA Post, and WITF to cover how Pennsylvania state government is responding to the coronavirus. Sign up for Spotlight PAs newsletter.

HARRISBURG  Pennsylvania lawmakers approved $50 million in state funding Wednesday to purchase medical equipment and supplies for hospitals, nursing homes, and emergency workers, though its unclear how quickly it can get some of the most in-demand items.

Health systems and nursing homes across the state are pleading for supplies, in particular N95 masks and ventilators, as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases continues to rise exponentially. The situation is expected to deteriorate in the coming weeks.

The legislation now goes to Gov. Tom Wolf. If signed into law, the administration will have the discretion to appropriate the funds and supplies directly to health care systems.

Fifty million [dollars] is a pretty good start, but depending on how long this emergency lasts, and to what level it gets to, there may be need for future assistance, Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman (R., Centre) said after the vote.

Wolf has not requested any other emergency funding for the near future, Corman said. But that could change as the pandemic continues to develop across the state.

As Ive been saying, this is where we are at 4:37 p.m. on Wednesday, Corman said. At 5:15 Wednesday, it might be a whole different place.

The Senate approved the bill during its first-ever remote session, with about 40 lawmakers participating through video software, Corman said. The head of the Senate, Joe Scarnati, said that the upper chamber was transformed into a Zoom Room.

Just completed the first virtual roll call in the history of the PA Senate. The Senate is meeting to consider a number of measures designed to offer relief to Pennsylvanians affected by the COVID-19 coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/z07ABkXCLt  Sen. Ryan P. Aument (@SenatorAument) March 25, 2020

Both the House and Senate considered emergency measures, such as moving the states primary from April 28 to June 2 and making emergency changes to the states unemployment compensation law. All passed.

The proceedings of the Rules Committee, which are usually not seen by the public, were also broadcast from the chamber.

The House held its first remote session Tuesday, with members who arent in leadership allowed to vote by text or email. Still, approximately one third of members came to the Capitol.

House Majority Leader Bryan Cutler (R., Lancaster) said other state legislatures have reached out to Pennsylvania seeking guidance on how they can enact similar temporary rules to find a way to continue to function in these troubling times.

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Michael Brown was the reason I went into journalism. And it was his death that led directly to the most important, and painful, assignment I have ever undertaken.

It began on Friday March 13, when his body suddenly began to shut down bit by bit. He was 91 and had been battling dementia for almost a decade.

I was on my way to the airport when I got the call from my sister. He had passed away just minutes earlier. If I had left a day earlier I would have been there for the ending. Instead I missed the deadline his body had set for him.

He passed away in the early hours of Sunday morning, March 15  the Ides of March, a portent of doom in William Shakespeares Julius Caesar.

The 13-hour flight from Hong Kong to London would offer plenty of time for silent reflection. I sat numb, unable to cry or think.

The backdrop for his death could hardly be worse. I had spent the past few weeks reporting on the coronavirus outbreak. Now it had spread to England. The family home is in London, by now the worst affected part of the country.





But rather than mourn my father I began to realise there was a higher imperative. I had to get my mother out of England. At 86, recovering from cancer, she is extremely vulnerable to this disease. Yet if she remained in London she faced the prospect of up to three months self-isolation in an apartment where she had watched my fathers gradual mental disintegration. I did not want her to endure yet more torment.

Yet I had arrived in London expecting to stay longer. I knew from my mother that there was an acute shortage of face masks and sanitiser, just as there had been in Hong Kong a few weeks earlier.

As my sister and I attended to the insensitive administration of death, we were simultaneously booking flights to Hong Kong. But confirmations evaporated as ever more flights were cancelled.

Our third booking, though, held. London-Doha-Hong Kong.

I knew we had the narrowest of windows to get out. But nothing could happen until we had a death certificate for my father. That finally happened on Wednesday, less than 36 hours before our flight departed.

All my mother wanted to do was mourn the man she had loved for 66 years.

In the new era of social distancing, how do you comfort a grieving mother?

We are told that to win this war, we must keep apart from those we love.

Wrongly or rightly, I was taking her to the other side of the world on a journey inherent with risk. COVID-19, after all, has infected airline passengers.

My mothers neighbour, who is a doctor, came to offer condolences. In passing, she mentioned she was being drafted to a hospital ward that is specifically treating COVID-19 patients. She also confided that she was preparing to fight the virus without an N95 face mask, which offers more protection than regular, disposable ones. We handed her as many of my masks as we could spare, including five N95s. That incident seemed to neatly sum up the National Health Services state of preparedness.

It was a grey, damp morning when my mother and I took a cab to Heathrow airport.

Like so many other people, the driver wasnt wearing a mask.

My sister was joining us. As British passport holders, my sister and mother can enter and stay in Hong Kong for six months without a visa. But our window was narrowing.

A day earlier, the Hong Kong government announced that all arrivals would have to do 14 days self-isolation at home, in hotels or government quarantine centres.

But the check-in staff were confused. A death in the family is both distressing and stressful, and the young woman behind the counter was about to make our day even worse.

She told my mother and sister they wouldnt be boarding the flight because they werent Hong Kong residents. I sat my mother down, bags piled beside her. She looked broken and forlorn. My escape plan was falling apart. She was born in the run-up to World War II, and now in the final years of her life, she was facing dislocation again.

Resignation was now spreading through my body. My sister wasnt giving up, though. A supervisor was called. Eventually he accepted the regulation had been wrongly interpreted by his junior colleague. With an hour before our flight left, we were finally handed our boarding passes.

During this public health emergency your ears are attuned for certain sounds, like a persistent hacking cough. Like the cough coming from the seat one across from my mother. A kind Chinese student near the back of the cabin agreed to swap seats. After a few blunt words from me, the coughing passenger reluctantly put on his face mask.

The risk of bringing my mother to Hong Kong was borne out by a phone call I got from my travel agent a few days later. There had been at least two infected passengers on our flight.

We are now under 14 days of self-isolation in my small but comfortable apartment in a remote secluded corner of Hong Kong. We do twice-daily temperature checks and so far so good.

But as I was writing this, the police paid a visit.

I have been spotted on the roof of my flat, which I am told is a breach of my quarantine regulations. A vigilant but understandably concerned neighbour raised the alarm.

I point out the roof is part of my property. They seem unsure and warn me not to go up again.

A few hours later two health workers wearing visor shields and white protective clothing are at the front door with instructions to move the three of us to a government quarantine centre in Sha Tin.





I explain that we have already been self-isolating in my apartment for four days. Its unclear why they want us to leave. In fact, they seem as bemused and confused as I am.

I explain we are managing fine at home and that it would be best for my mother to remain where she is. I also add that in a few hours time my father is being cremated on the other side of the world, and we were planning to mark the moment with a small ceremony.

By now my mother and sister are in tears. The nightmare that began 10 days earlier seems never-ending.

A public health emergency can bring out the very best and worst in people. In this crisis I have seen both.

The two health workers make a phone call and then without a word return to the street where the van to take us to the centre is parked. The vehicle and its occupants remain there for two more hours. During this time we are left in limbo, unsure what the next minute will bring. I call the Health Department hotline to seek clarification. Its busy  as it has been on the seven other occasions I have tried to call.

We press on with the ceremony, knowing another knock on the door may be imminent.

On the dining room table a small makeshift shrine has taken shape. A photo of dad from his 80th birthday, a lit candle and two small bunches of roses and carnations left at the front door by his wife earlier.

At the exact moment my fathers body was being placed into the cremation chamber, my mother, sister and I held hands listening to the song that we had also requested be played during the service: Bring me sunshine, by the former British comedy duo Morecambe and Wise.

The lyrics include the line in this world where we live, there should be more happiness  words that seem to mock these dark times.

Poignantly my sister has just shown me a letter my father wrote to all three of his children on March 25, 2004, exactly 16 years to the day that he was cremated. It begins, this is a letter to all three of you  something I have never done before  and I probably wont do another of these for a long time. Its a letter of love and thanks from a proud parent.

I hope he thought I did the right thing.
Conor McGregor has pledged to donate 1m for personal protective equipment for frontline healthcare staff fighting the spread of coronavirus.

The UFC star made the promise in reply to a private message allegedly sent from Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe's Twitter account.

Mr Donohoe reportedly messaged the Crumlin fighter to suggest he "give some thought" into how he speaks about social distancing, before congratulating him on his success and wishing his family well.

In the post on Twitter accompanying the images, McGregor wrote: "Thank you sincerely for your message, Minister Paschal Donohoe."

The 31-year-old went on to give his reply, saying he was buying the equipment for "brave" healthcare workers in Leinster hospitals.

"Today I am purchasing myself 1m worth of personal protective equipment to be deployed to all the fighting hospitals in the Leinster region, our most affected region to this date," the post read.

"St James, Mater, Tallaght, Beaumont, Vincent's. Where would we be without these brave men and women I do not know.

"May God bless them and keep them safe! We need more units on the street to enforce this lockdown."

The mixed martial arts star also called for airports and building sites to be closed.

"It has been too lax! I seen yesterday though that this has been given more of a push. I was happy to hear and I am eager to see it in effect," he wrote.

"Building sites should be closed. They are open for what? We can always build again after this. In every way. But we must put health before wealth.

ENCOURAGING

"Bingo halls is not enough. You think a building site canteen is going to separate? Or on-site while working together? The airport situation is currently not good enough also. If not the worst of them all.

"I feel like we are moving in the right way, it just feels to me like it is not all the way. I urge all the way."

In a further tweet last night, McGregor wrote: "18,000 tests completed with a 94pc success rate is an incredibly encouraging statistic.

"Motivation for us all to keep pushing on during these times!"
G20 nations pledged a "united front" Thursday in the fight against coronavirus, saying they were injecting $5 trillion into the global economy to counter the pandemic amid forecasts of a deep recession. US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin joined the emergency videoconference chaired by Saudi Arabia's King Salman, who called for coordinated action while facing pressure to end an oil price war between Riyadh and Moscow that has roiled energy markets. The talks come amid criticism that the G20 has been slow to address the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left more than 21,000 dead worldwide and triggered financial shock waves as more than three billion people are locked down. "We are strongly committed to presenting a united front against this common threat," the leaders said in a joint statement after the summit. "We are injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy, as part of targeted fiscal policy, economic measures, and guarantee schemes to counteract the social, economic and financial impacts of the pandemic." The figure was a sum total of the fiscal stimulus packages adopted by individual G20 states, the Chinese foreign ministry said, adding that Beijing's share amounted to $344 billion. As concerns mount for poorer countries without access to capital markets or adequate health facilities, G20 leaders also pledged to work with bodies such as the International Monetary Fund to deploy a "robust" financial package to support developing nations. "It is our responsibility to extend a helping hand to developing countries and (the) least developed countries," King Salman said. Putin called for a "moratorium" on sanctions during the pandemic, telling G20 leaders it was a matter "of life and death". He did not specify which countries should be earmarked for sanctions relief. Russia has faced numerous rounds of Western sanctions following the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The world's 20 most industrialised countries are scrambling to defend their virus-wracked economies amid forecasts they will likely plunge into a recession. On Wednesday, the financial ratings agency Moody's estimated the G20's overall gross domestic product would contract by 0.5 percent this year, with the US economy shrinking by 2.0 percent and the eurozone by 2.2 percent. - 'Not enough' - "The G20 declaration on the Covid-19 pandemic is a document of global resolve," said Markus Engels, from the Global Solutions Initiative, a network of think tanks. "The lesson the G20 leaders take away from their meeting should be that social and international solidarity must once again be acknowledged as the most important instrument for combating the crisis." But amid warnings that tens of millions of lives could be lost to the virus globally, international aid agency Oxfam said the G20 action was "not enough". "The world's richest governments are still only warming up to the scale of the task," said Chema Vera, Oxfam's interim executive director. "G20 leaders must set a truly ambitious plan... to save lives, including a massive injection of funds into public health around the globe." This week, French President Emmanuel Macron and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping pushed for an emergency G20 summit to limit the impact of the pandemic. The lack of immediate action stood in contrast to the 2008 financial crisis, when the group quickly swung into action to mobilise assistance for vulnerable countries. Talk of global coordination has yet to resonate under Trump's isolationist presidency. On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took aim at China, saying the top diplomats of the Group of Seven agreed with him that Beijing was waging a "disinformation" campaign about the pandemic. At the G7 talks, a day before the G20 summit, Pompeo alleged Beijing was engaged in a social media campaign that included conspiracy theories centring on the US being behind the virus, which was first detected in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan. The G7 failed to agree on a joint declaration amid Pompeo's insistence on labelling the coronavirus as the "Wuhan virus", US media reported. "The US has provided a perfect example of what not to do as the country pushes its 'US-first' ideology to the extreme," said Engels. Crude oil prices -- hammered by the coronavirus outbreak's impact on demand as well as by a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia -- were also expected to be at the centre of the discussions. Riyadh faces pressure from Washington to row back on its decision to hike production and offer the biggest price cuts in two decades, in retaliation for Russia's refusal to tighten supply as the virus sapped demand. On Wednesday, Pompeo urged Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to "rise to the occasion" and "reassure global energy and financial markets". However, the Kremlin said "the oil topic" was off the table. burs-ac/dwo Riyadh faces pressure from Washington to row back on its decision to hike oil production and offer the biggest price cuts in two decades US President Donald Trump will join fellow world leaders at the emergency videoconference French President Emmanuel Macron also took part in the videoconference
Switzerland has become the fifth European country to declare more than 10,000 coronavirus infections after the number of cases jumped by almost 1,000 in the last 24 hours.

The Alpine country's health ministry revealed that 10,714 citizens have been infected this morning, and warned that this number will continue to rise for at least another week. As many as 161 people have died from the virus in the country.

Italy, with 74,386 cases, Spain, with 56,188 cases, Germany, with 40,585 cases, and France, with 25,604 cases have all crossed the 10,000 threshold. Each has a far larger population.

The UK reported 9,642 cases yesterday, but this number is also expected to cross into five figures today.

Switzerland reported almost 1,000 new coronavirus cases today, taking its total to 10,714. Pictured above is a patient in hospital at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland

The country has carried out the most tests for the virus per capita. Pictured above is Geneva airport where many planes have been grounded due to the outbreak

Switzerland, which has tested the most people for COVID-19 per capita, has launched plans to start tracking crowd build-ups through mobile data as it grapples with the outbreak.

Its Italian-speaking southern region of Ticino, which borders hard-hit northern Italy, is the worst-affected of its 26 cantons, with 393 cases per 100,000 people.

Around two-fifths of Switzerland's COVID-19 deaths have occurred in Ticino.

The first case of the new coronavirus was confirmed in Switzerland on February 24.

Since then, '91,400 tests have been carried out for COVID-19, of which 14 percent were positive,' the Federal Office of Public Health said.

Those testing positive have ranged in age from under one to 102, with a median age of 52 years old, and a near-even split of men and women.

Elsewhere, China, Iran and the United States have also passed the five-figure mark, according to the latest World Health Organization situation report on the global pandemic.

This is the arrivals hall of terminal 1 at Geneva airport on March 24, which is near-empty

The number of deaths in Italy has slowed slightly since reaching a peak on March 21

The Swiss government has ordered the closure of schools and all places of leisure, including restaurants, bars and non-food shops.

Last Friday it went further, banning all gatherings of more than five people, while anyone standing closer than two metres to others risks a fine.

'At the moment it would definitely be too early to talk about easing the restrictions', health ministry official Daniel Koch, who is heading the Swiss response, told a press conference in Bern.

'We must first have proof that we have reached the peak of this epidemic - which unfortunately is not yet the case.'

Revelations this week that majority state-owned telecoms operator Swisscom would provide authorities with mobile phone data to monitor if people were adhering to the restrictions on public gatherings sparked an outcry.

But Koch said it was not a question of monitoring population movements in real time, but instead doing 'retrospective analysis'.

Meanwhile some 3,800 to 4,000 troops - 'the totality of the medical forces of the Swiss army' - have been mobilised, said Brigadier General Raynald Droz, chief of staff of the military's joint operations command.

The global number of officially-recorded infections has topped 480,000, with more than 21,800 deaths.
San Francisco Fire Department crews are at the scene of a two-alarm blaze early Thursday morning.

Fire officials said crews were responding to the scene as of 2:41 a.m. at 50 Golden Gate Ave. in the city's Tenderloin neighborhood.
Canadian scientists have developed an innovative new technique that uses artificial intelligence to better define the different sections of the brain in newborns during a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) exam.

The results of this study -- a collaboration between researchers at Montreal's CHU Sainte-Justine children's hospital and the ETS engineering school -- are published today in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

"This is one of the first times that artificial intelligence has been used to better define the different parts of a newborn's brain on an MRI: namely the grey matter, white matter and cerebrospinal fluid," said Dr. Gregory A. Lodygensky, a neonatologist at CHU Sainte-Justine and professor at Universite de Montreal.

"Until today, the tools available were complex, often intermingled and difficult to access," he added.

In collaboration with Professor Jose Dolz, an expert in medical image analysis and machine learning at ETS, the researchers were able to adapt the tools to the specificities of the neonatal setting and then validate them.

This new technique allows babies' brains to be examined quickly, accurately and reliably. Scientists see it as a major asset for supporting research that not only addresses brain development in neonatal care, but also the effectiveness of neuroprotective strategies.

In evaluating a range of tools available in artificial intelligence, CHU Sainte-Justine researchers found that these tools had limitations, particularly with respect to pediatric research. Today's neuroimaging analysis programs are primarily designed to work on "adult" MRIs. The cerebral immaturity of newborns, with an inversion of the contrasts between grey matter and white matter, complicates such analyses.

Inspired by Dolz's most recent work, the researchers proposed an artificial neural network that learns how to efficiently combine information from several MRI sequences. This methodology made it possible to better define the different parts of the brain in the newborn automatically and to establish a new benchmark for this problem.

"We've decided not only to share the results of our study on open source, but also the computer code, so that brain researchers everywhere can take advantage of it, all of which benefits patients," said Dolz.

CHU Sainte-Justine is one of the most important players in the Canadian Neonatal Brain Platform and also has one of the largest neonatal units in Canada specializing in neurodevelopment. As part of the platform, research teams are implementing projects like this one with the aim of improving the long-term health of those newborns who are most vulnerable to brain injury.

"In studies to assess the positive and negative impact of different therapies on the maturation of babies' brains, we need to have the ability to quantify brain structures with certainty and reliability," Lodygensky said. "By offering the scientific community the fruits of all our discoveries, we are helping them, while generating an extraordinary benefit for at-risk newborns."

He added: "We now want to democratize this tool so that it becomes the benchmark for the study of brain structure in newborns around the world. To this end, we are continuing to work on its generalizability -- that is, its use on MRI data acquired in different hospitals."

###

About this study

"Using deep convolutional neural networks for neonatal brain image segmentation" was published March 26, 2020 in Frontiers in Neuroscience. The first author is Yang Ding, PhD, under the direction of Gregory A. Lodygensky. The primary authors are Gregory A. Lodygensky, MD, Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Universite de Montreal and Clinician-Researcher at CHU Sainte-Justine, and Jose Dolz, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Software Engineering and Information Technology at the Ecole de technologie superieure (ETS). The study was supported by the Brain Canada Foundation.

About the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center

The CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center is a leading mother-child research institution affiliated with Universite de Montreal. It brings together more than 210 research investigators, including over 110 clinician-scientists, as well as 450 graduate and postgraduate students focused on finding innovative prevention means, faster and less invasive treatments, as well as personalized approaches to medicine. The Center is part of CHU Sainte-Justine, which is the largest mother-child center in Canada. For more information, go to research.chusj.org.

About ETS

ETS is one of the ten constituents of the University of Quebec network. It trains engineers and researchers recognized for their practical and innovative approach, the development of new technologies and their ability to transfer their knowledge to private enterprise. CSRankings places ETS in the vanguard of the artificial vision branch of artificial intelligence: it ranks first in Quebec and sixth in Canada for scientific publications in this domain. For more information, visit: etsmtl.ca.
The governor of Tokyo has urged residents in the city to stay at home this weekend to prevent an explosion of new cases, as concerns over coronavirus grow in Japan and also Hong Kong.

Yuriko Koike, Tokyos governor, said in an emergency news conference on Wednesday evening that people should avoid unnecessary outings until April 12.

Ms Koike said: To avoid an overshoot in infections, the cooperation of Tokyo residents is critical. I ask you to act with a sense of crisis.

The Japanese capital has become the most-affected part of the country, with 41 cases reported on Wednesday and another 45 announced on Thursday.

More than 250 people have now tested positive for the virus in the city.

Although Japan has not implemented strict restrictions on movements like in other countries, its government is preparing a taskforce to deal with the crisis.

However, Yasutoshi Nishimura, the economy minister, said that the government was not yet thinking of declaring a state of emergency.

Japan has confirmed 1,314 cases and 45 deaths from the illness. These figures exclude the 712 infections and 10 deaths from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was anchored near Tokyo last month.

As a result of the outbreak, the countrys government and the International Olympic Committee have agreed to postpone the Tokyo Olympics by a year to 2021.

Elsewhere, health care experts worry about the spike in the number of coronavirus cases in Hong Kong.

Lam Ching-Choi, a member of Hong Kongs executive council, told local broadcaster RTHK that the government is contemplating measures including a possible ban on gatherings at certain times.

Mr Ching-Choi, who is also a doctor, said Hong Kong was now in a critical period.

Dr Ho Park-leung, head of the University of Hong Kongs Centre For Infection, told local radio that the citys public health system could collapse unless lockdown-style measures were introduced.

He warned that there would be serious consequences without these policies in place.

As of Thursday, Hong Kong had reported 410 coronavirus cases and four deaths.
When hikers returned to UC Davis Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve in 2016, a year after a wildfire swept through its expanse of oak trees and chaparral in Northern California, half of them expected to see a devastated landscape. But pre- and post-hike surveys conducted by the University of California, Davis, reveal that roughly a third returned energized, awed and excited about the changes they saw.

Among the survey responses: "This area is restoring itself." "Awe-inspiring." "Nature is always changing, sometimes sad. Today I felt hopeful."

Results of the survey, published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, indicate that people understand and appreciate the role of fire in natural landscapes more than is perceived.

"People can have really largely positive experiences hiking in a place that has burned," said lead author Alexandra Weill, who conducted the survey while a graduate student researcher in Professor Andrew Latimer's lab in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences. "They engage in it and find it very interesting and surprisingly beautiful. That can be used as a tool in education and outreach as places around us recover from wildfire."

GETTING THE PRESCRIBED BURN MESSAGE

Survey responses were gathered from about 600 people between May 2016 and June 2017. Responses indicate that most participants -- about 70 percent -- were getting the message that prescribed burns can benefit ecosystems and reduce the threat of catastrophic fire.

Survey participants were highly familiar with the narrative of the West's history of fire suppression and fairly familiar with fire topics related to conifer forests. But they were less knowledgeable about fire's history and role in the shrublands and woodlands that dominate much of Northern California.

Several of the state's most devastating recent fires -- the Camp Fire in Paradise, Tubbs and Kinkade fires in Santa Rosa, the Mendocino Complex fire -- were in environments including oak, woodland and chaparral, such as at Stebbins Cold Canyon. Fires in these areas burn differently than those in conifer forests.

This disconnect could indicate a gap in fire outreach and education. Weill suggested that educators and agencies adjust the narrative to reflect people's local landscape.

NUANCED VIEWS

While positive responses were far more common than expected, most people held mixed views regarding effects of the fire. For example: "I know it's good, but it's sad when it's out of control and people lose homes." "I understand [it] needs to happen -- but devastating!"

Such wariness is not surprising but it is illuminating, Weill said.

"People have more nuanced opinions than we give them credit for in understanding positive and negative effects of fire, but also difficulty in reconciling what they know about good fire versus what they see in the news or personal experiences," said Weill.

###

ABOUT STEBBINS COLD CANYON NATURAL RESERVE

Stebbins Cold Canyon is part of the University of California's Natural Reserve System and is operated by UC Davis.

The reserve is currently closed to the public following state and county stay-at-home directives related to COVID-19. (Read the full closure statement on the reserve's website.)

Located about 20 miles west of main campus, university researchers and citizen scientists use the reserve as a field site and outdoor classroom. Seasonal springs provide watering areas for wildlife. When open, a public hiking trail leads roughly 50,000 hikers each year past grasslands, blue oaks, woodlands and chaparral, and up a ridgeline that offers sweeping views of Lake Berryessa. In July 2015, the Wragg Fire burned about 8,050 acres before it was fully contained two weeks later.

This study was funded by the UC Natural Reserve System.

Additional co-authors include Andrew Latimer and Lauren Watson in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday held separate telephonic conversation with Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al Thani and Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan on the coronavirus pandemic.

In their conversation, Modi and the Qatari leader discussed the ongoing developments related to the COVID-19 global pandemic and its social and economic impact, the ministry of external affairs (MEA) said.

"They exchanged notes about the measures taken in their respective countries to contain the spread of the virus," it said.

The prime minister also informed the Emir about the recent regional initiatives among the SAARC countries, and the Virtual Summit among G-20 leaders earlier in the day, it said.

The prime minister thanked al Thani for his personal attention to the welfare of the Indian nationals living and working in Qatar, particularly in the present situation.

On his part, the Emir assured Modi about the safety and welfare of all Indian expatriates in Qatar.

"Both leaders expressed hope that the efforts and the measures being taken to stop the spread of the disease by all affected countries, would yield early and positive results," the MEA said.

About Modi's talks with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, it said the two leaders exchanged information and views on the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation in their respective countries, as well as the steps being taken by their governments to deal with the situation.

"Both leaders emphasised the importance they attach to the strength and richness of the bilateral relationship. They agreed to maintain regular consultations between their officials in the present situation, particularly to ensure continuity of logistical supply lines," the MEA said.

The Crown Prince assured Modi about the welfare of the over 2 million Indians living in the UAE.

The prime minister thanked the Crown Prince for his personal attention to the health and safety of Indian expatriates in the present situation.

"Prime Minister expressed his best wishes for the good health of the Crown Prince and the entire Royal Family as well as all Emirati citizens," the MEA said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A large private student landlord firm is adjusting its policies, having previously refused refunds to students who left their accommodation during the Covid-19 crisis.

However, Uninest, which manages some of the largest student residence complexes in the country, has still not confirmed if it will refund rent to students who felt safer returning to their family homes during the public health emergency.

It has yet to respond to queries submitted by the Irish Examiner over a week ago, when the issue was first reported by renters in its Amnis House complex on Corks Western Road, where weekly rent for the most expensive room is 243, and annual rent for a 38-week college year can top almost 10,000.

In new correspondence with tenants at one of its student complexes in Dublin, Uninest said it is adjusting its policies to best support students and parents on a case-by-case basis.

The firm told one leaseholder that it will be in touch once policies have been adjusted. However, the renter, who pays 11,000 rent a year in his accommodation complex in the capital, said that while the company appears to moving in the right direction, it is not clear if refunds will be provided for those who left their rooms during the Covid-19 crisis.

Uninests position stands in stark contrast to that of University College Cork (UCC), which said it will refund students who have vacated the apartment complexes it manages.

In a statement to students over a week ago, UCC asked students in campus accommodation who were in a position to do so to vacate by March 21 and return home. It said it understood that, for many students, campus accommodation was home.

However, the university is concerned that as the cases of Covid-19 increase across the country, some students in campus accommodation are living away from support networks such as family, relatives, and friends, the university said.

Support networks such as this will be vital to any student should they become unwell as a result of a Covid-19 infection or who may be required to self-isolate.

Students departing campus accommodation as a result of this decision will receive a pro-rata refund of their accommodation fee from March 21 or their date of departure [whichever is the later] for the balance of their contract term.

Residents with a legitimate reason for remaining may do so and Campus Accommodation will remain available to such students for the remainder of this academic year.

Meanwhile in Dublin, more than 350 new living spaces are set to come on stream for homeless services following a collapse in tourist bookings.

A total of 197 en-suite hotel rooms and 160 self-contained apartments have become available for homeless families and individuals.

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Various employees association in Andhra Pradesh on Thursday announced to donate one day salary of their workers, amounting to Rs 100 crore to Chief Minister's Relief Fund (CMRF) to fight a battle against coronavirus epidemic.

"Various employees associations contributed one day salary as donation to Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Relief Fund for fight against COVID 19. The donation from these associations amounts to almost Rs 100 crore.," the state Chief Minister's Office said in a statement.

The representatives from Andhra Pradesh secretariat employees association, state NGOs association, AP revenue services association, RTC employees union, and retired employees association have met with Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy and announced their donation.

The unions' representatives lauded the measures being taken by state government for containing coronavirus spread.

They opined that the services of village volunteers at field level are useful. "At this hour of need, our contribution will be used for fighting the pandemic," they said.

As per Union Health Ministry's latest bulletin, the total number of COVID-19 positive cases has climbed to 649 in the country, including 593 active cases, 42 cured or discharged people and 13 deaths.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Members of media gather at the Diamond Princess cruise ship, operated by Carnival Corp., docked in Yokohama, Japan, on Friday, Feb. 7, 2020.

Cruise lines are among the businesses that have suffered the most fallout from the coronavirus outbreak. And the major ones could get left out of the bailout fund included in the $2 trillion stimulus bill the Senate passed Wednesday night.

The bill allocates $500 billion to distressed businesses that can apply for loans or guarantees from a fund overseen by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. To be eligible for that relief, however, a company must be "created or organized in the United States or under the laws of the United States" and "have significant operations in and a majority of its employees based in the United States."

Several major cruise lines, however, are not incorporated in America. Carnival, for example, is incorporated in Panama, although it has a U.S. entity and a headquarters in Miami. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange. Cruise lines also typically employ many foreign workers on their ships, who can be exempt from U.S. minimum wage requirements.

"My interpretation is that cruise lines may not qualify, but I'm taking a closer look to see whether that is really the case," said Aaron Cutler, a partner in the government relations and public affairs department at influential international law firm Hogan Lovells.

In a statement early Thursday evening, industry trade group Cruise Lines International Association said they are "grateful that more than 30,000 CLIA travel agent members, most of which operate small and medium-sized businesses, can receive much-needed relief under the bill."

"For the more than 421,000 people in the United States whose jobs are supported by the cruise industry, we will continue to work with policymakers to help our community recover from the impact of this pandemic. We congratulate the Administration and Senate Leaders for reaching a historic agreement to address the unprecedented crisis that has gripped our nation and the world," they added.

Royal Caribbean, which is incorporated in Liberia, referred requests for comment to CLIA. Carnival declined to comment. Norwegian Cruises, incorporated in Bermuda, did not respond to a request for comment. Several congressional aides did not return requests for comment, as well.

Unlike restrictions around dividends and buybacks in the stimulus bill, the Treasury Department has no discretion to waive restrictions around whether offshore incorporation exempts a company from relief.

The exclusion of cruise lines from relief would come as a surprise. President Donald Trump has indicated he would help the ailing industry, along with hotels and airlines, which have all bared the brunt of restrictions on travel. Vice President Mike Pence met with executives in the industry earlier this month.

Speaking at a coronavirus task force briefing Thursday, Trump said he liked the idea of cruise lines registering in the U.S. to get aid.

"It's a big business, it's a great business," he said.

"We're going to work very hard on the cruise line business and we're going to figure something out."

The idea of cruise lines registering in the U.S. had been floated earlier in the day by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

Tweet

The industry was ground to halt by the coronavirus pandemic, after a number of outbreaks on ships. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this week said it traced infections to more than 25 cruise ships. Several ships had to quarantine passengers. One Carnival-owned ship, the Grand Princess, was forced to moor off the coast of California when 21 people tested positive for the virus. Another Carnival-owned ship had at least 700 passengers infected, and at least eight died.

Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruises have all suspended operations. The industry has high fixed costs, which means a pause in revenue could have a devastating impact on its balance sheets.

Shares of Carnival, the largest of the three cruise lines by sales, has a market capitalization of $12 billion after its shares have fallen nearly 65% year to date. Norwegian's shares are down 73%, giving it a market cap of $3.3 billion. Royal Caribbean's shares are down 69%, giving it an $8.5 billion market cap.

Still, unlike the airline industry, which was promised relief in the $2 trillion stimulus bill, cruise lines are not considered a pillar of the U.S. economy. And unlike the airline industry, which has a huge national footprint with hubs throughout the country and smaller communities dependent upon flight service, there are only so many U.S. ports.

The industry has found critics in Congress over its safety standards and foreign incorporation.

Last year, Reps. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., and Jeff Fortenberry, R-La., introduced the Cruise Passenger Protection Act, which would require the industry to have a qualified physician and sufficient medical staff on board, as well as elevate reporting requirements for crimes that occur on ships.

Matsui earlier this month called on the chairs of the House Ways and Means Committee and Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure to block a bailout of the industry.

"Unlike American families, corporations that operate foreign-flagged vessels do not pay taxes in the United States," she wrote. "Additionally, pervasive safety and medical shortcomings on vessels have caused numerous Americans harm. "

"Directing federal funding to the cruise industry during a public health crisis will not slow the spread of the coronavirus nor advance passenger safety," she added.

-- CNBC's William Feuer contributed to this report.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - The head of the United Nations told leaders of the worlds 20 major industrialized nations during an emergency virtual summit Thursday that we are at war with a virus  and not winning it despite dramatic measures by countries to seal their borders, shutter businesses and enforce home isolation for well over a quarter of the worlds population.

The unusual video call in lieu of a physical gathering comes as governments around the world stress the importance of social distancing to curb the spread of the highly infectious virus, which has prompted closures, curfews and lockdowns globally.

The Group of 20 nations, criticized for not taking cohesive action against the virus or its economic impact, vowed to work together and said they are collectively injecting more than $4.8 trillion into the global economy to counteract the social and financial impacts of the pandemic.

In a final statement after the meeting, the G20 said they were committed to strengthening the World Health Organizations mandate. They said global action, solidarity and international co-operation were needed more than ever, but made no specific commitments.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful reminder of our interconnectedness and vulnerabilities, the group said. The virus respects no borders.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged G20 leaders to adopt a war-time plan to tackle the pandemic.

It took the world three months to reach 100,000 confirmed cases of infection, he said. The next 100,000 happened in just 12 days. The third took four days. The fourth, just one and a half.

This is exponential growth and only the tip of the iceberg, Guterres said, adding that countries must be able to combine systematic testing, tracing, quarantining and treatment, as well as co-ordinate an exit strategy to keep it suppressed until a vaccine becomes available.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said later that the secretary-general thought the meeting was an important step in the right direction, but theres still a long way to go for truly concerted and effective global leadership in response to this pandemic and its impact.

The WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told the G20 leaders: We are at war with a virus that threatens to tear us apart  if we let it.

He urged leaders to fight without excuses, without regrets, thanking countries that have already taken steps to fight the pandemic and urging them to do more. He also encouraged leaders to unite, saying no country can fight COVID-19 alone.

Saudi Arabia, which is presiding over the G20 this year, opened the meeting with an urgent appeal by King Salman for the worlds most powerful nations to finance the research and development of a vaccine for the virus.

This human crisis requires a global response. The world counts on us to come together and co-operate in order to face this challenge, the Saudi monarch said.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced during the call that the UK was providing additional funding to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is supporting the development of vaccines, bringing its contribution to 250 million pounds ($302 million).

The meeting was not open to the media, and governments and organizations distributed the participants comments after it concluded.

In the video call, world leaders like Indias Narendra Modi, Japans Shinzo Abe and Canadas Justin Trudeau, whose wife has contracted the virus, could be seen in little boxes on a screen seated at desks in photos shared on Twitter by European Council President Charles Michel.

President Donald Trump was shown seated at the end of a long conference table in Washington with other American officials in photos shared on social media by the Saudi Foreign Ministry.

We talked about the problem. And hopefully it wont be a problem for too much longer, Trump said about the call. The United States is working with our friends and partners around the world to stop the spread of the virus.

We discussed how vitally important it is for all of our nations to immediately share information and data. And weve been doing that to a large extent, but well do it even more. Tremendous spirit among all of those countries at 20 countries. ... A tremendous spirit to get this over with.

The meeting also included Chinese President Xi Jinping and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was taking part in the summit from her apartment in Berlin where she is in quarantine after a doctor who gave her a pneumonia vaccine had tested positive for the virus. Two tests on Merkel have come back negative, but shell still need more tests.

Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested setting up a special fund under the IMF that would offer interest-free loans, and he emphasized the need to create green corridors for free movement of supplies and technologies intended to deal with the pandemic. He also proposed a moratorium on sanctions with regard to essential goods.

Putin noted its a matter of life and death, emphasizing the need to get rid of political rubbish.

He did not name any specific country but appeared to refer to U.S. sanctions on Iran, which has been badly hit by the outbreak. Russia has also faced waves of Western sanctions over its 2014 annexation of Ukraines Crimea.

Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte, whose country has been hardest-hit in Europe by COVID-19, said the G20 must use all fiscal and monetary policy tools to safeguard economies, and national responses must be co-ordinated, enhancing their effectiveness.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, whose country has also been hard hit, asked the G20 to work with the WHO and other organizations to do whatever it takes to contain the pandemic. He asked for an unprecedented, robust and large scale response.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on G20 leaders to use all available humanitarian aid financing resources to help Syrians and other people in war-torn regions, who are most disadvantaged by the outbreak.

I invite all countries to participate in the fight against this global health crisis in a just manner until all of humanity can breathe easily, Erdogan said.

The virtual summit additionally included leaders from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, International Labor Organization and others.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva asked G20 leaders for their backing to double the funds $50 billion emergency financing capacity. She said vulnerable households and businesses need targeted financial support to stay afloat and get back to work quickly.

Otherwise it will take years to overcome the effects of widespread bankruptcies and layoffs, she warned. The IMF has said it stands ready to deploy all of its $1 trillion lending capacity, with nearly 80 countries currently requesting help.

Ethiopias government told G20 finance ministers in a call ahead of Thursdays summit that Africa needs a $150 billion emergency financing package due to the impact of the virus.

The global death toll from the virus, which in most cases causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms but for some, especially the elderly and those with existing illnesses, can lead to pneumonia and death, has climbed past 22,000 and the number of infections has surpassed 480,000, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Saudi Arabia has been criticized for rocking oil markets by ramping up production next month and slashing prices to gain market share after Russia refused to extend a production cut agreement. The U.S. has pressed Saudi Arabia to reconsider its current strategy.

The International Labor Organization says nearly 40% of the worlds population has no health insurance or access to national health services and that 55%  or 4 billion people  do not benefit from any form of social protection. It said the current health crisis makes clear that not nearly enough progress has been made by governments in the years since the 2008 financial crisis to expand access to health services, sickness benefits and unemployment protection.

___

Lederer reported from New York. Associated Press writers David Rising in Berlin, Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul, South Korea, Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Mega star Amitabh Bachchan has shared a video in which he cites Chinese experts to claim that coronavirus spreads through flies but the Health Ministry says the virus does not transmit through flies.

In his tweet numbered 3481, Bachchan wrote, "A study in @TheLancet shows that coronavirus lingers on human excreta much longer than in respiratory samples. Come India, we are going to fight this! Use your toilet."



In a video along with the tweet, the 77-year-old actor said, "Today, I want to discuss something really important with you. Our country is fighting coronavirus and you have to play an important role in this fight. Do you know that in a recent study, experts in China have found that coronavirus can survive in human excreta for many weeks.

"Even if somebody recovers from the disease, the virus can survive in his excreta. If a fly sits on that excreta and then sits on vegetables and fruits or etable, this disease can spread further," Bachchan said imploring his 40.7 million followers to be the part of a public movement to fight against the disease and open defecation.

Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretory Ministry of Health, however, dismissed the notion, saying, "I have not seen the tweet but this is an infectious disease and does not spread through flies."



It is the second time that Bachchan, who has been raising awareness about the virus, has attracted criticism for sharing information that many on social media say is unverified and creates confusion and unnecessary fear.

Earlier, during the Janata curfew announcement by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on last Sunday, Bachchan had tweeted an opinion that vibrations from clapping, blowing conch shells would reduce or destroy coronavirus potency as it was 'amavasya', the darkest day of the month, leading to a lot of criticism from social media users.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 26)  Former Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. had undergone testing for the coronavirus disease after arriving home sick from his trip to Spain, his sister Senator Imee Marcos said on Thursday.

"He came back from Spain unwell. Finally got a test 2 nights ago," she told reporters in a text message, saying the test was for COVID-19.

Unconfirmed reports circulated on Wednesday night that the son of former strongman Ferdinand Marcos contracted pneumonia during his trip to Spain and was intubated in a Metro Manila hospital.

The former senator himself denied this, saying he is recuperating well at home.

"I am deeply touched and overwhelmed by your concern over my condition. Don't worry, I am doing ok and contrary to popular belief, I am home on self-quarantine," Marcos said in a statement.

The losing 2016 vice presidential candidate said he was feeling "a little under the weather" a few days ago that's why he opted to get tested, adding he has yet to receive the results. He did not specify what test he underwent.

Imee Marcos also said that she and her 90-year-old mother, former first lady Imelda Marcos, are "OK."

Spain has now seen more deaths from the coronavirus pandemic than any other country except Italy. The nation has recorded 3,647 deaths, pushing it above China in total fatalities. The total number of cases in the country rose to 49,515, putting it fourth in the world, behind China, Italy and the United States, according to data from the COVID-19 tracker of the Johns Hopkins University.

CNN Philippines correspondent Joyce Ilas contributed to this report.
[March 26, 2020] Tech community issues open letter to the Province during COVID-19

Tech CEOs and innovation hubs call for swift action to maintain top talent and jobs

threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic TORONTO, March 26, 2020 /CNW/ - Today, more than 230 CEOs of leading tech enterprises and innovation hubs issued an open letter to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Minister of Finance Rod Phillips and Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade Vic Fedeli on how the province can strengthen Ontario's tech sector during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Ontario's tech and innovation sectors are important sources of well-paying jobs and engines of economic growth in our province. The GTA alone is the fastest-growing global tech market, recently surpassing Washington, Seattle and San Francisco combined  with a total of 241,000 tech industry jobs. Waterloo has the second-highest density of tech startups in North America, and Hamilton tech employment has grown 40% over the past five years. The concentration of tech talent in Ottawa is among the highest in North America, with 9.9% of its workforce employed in this sector  just behind San Francisco. This world-class growth has been supported by successive provincial governments stretching back to the creation of MaRS and Communitech during the Harris government. "Ontario's tech leaders believe the ecosystem needs our provincial government to continue taking immediate and longer-term measures to help companies weather this storm," the letter says. Recommended actions include: Payroll subsidies, tax deferment, and other means to ensure companies retain op talent and jobs;

Increasing and rapidly deploying additional funding through established programs and investment vehicles;

Providing greater grant and program flexibility for companies with an existing funding relationship to the government.



"On behalf of more than 230 tech leaders, we are appealing for swift, targeted support that strengthens Ontario's innovation ecosystem, and helps companies to survive this crisis and drive economic growth and job creation during recovery," said Jason Flick, co-founder and CEO, You.i TV. "To survive this crisis, we need more certainty," said Mallorie Brodie, co-founder and CEO, Bridgit. "By maintaining cash flow, fast-tracking funding and stimulating procurement, startups like ours will be empowered to win in the long run against COVID-19 and lead in the recovery."

On March 20, more than 300 Canadian tech CEOs appealed to the federal government on help for Canada's innovation economy, outlined here . Ontario is well-positioned to influence both immediate and longer-term measures that will preserve as many jobs as possible. According to the open letter sent to Ministers Morneau, Bains and Ng, early- and growth-stage companies struggle to remain cash positive at the best of times, so it's critical that measures be taken quickly and through existing structures, such as CRA, BDC and EDC. Read the open letter to the province . To endorse the letter, add your name here . About Communitech

Communitech was founded in 1997 by a group of entrepreneurs committed to making Waterloo Region a global innovation leader. At the time it was crazy talk, but somehow this community managed to pull it off. Today, Communitech is a public-private innovation hub that supports a community of more than 1,400 companies  from startups to scale-ups to large global players. About Invest Ottawa

Invest Ottawa is the lead economic development agency for knowledge-based industries in Canada's Capital, facilitating economic growth and job creation in the City of Ottawa. Guided by a vision to help realize Ottawa's full potential as a globally-recognized, innovative and future-ready city, and the best place to learn, work, live, and play. Invest Ottawa delivers venture development, global expansion and talent programs and services that catalyze the growth and success of entrepreneurs and firms. About MaRS

MaRS is North America's largest urban innovation hub. A registered non-profit, MaRS supports high-growth startups and scale-ups tackling key issues in health, cleantech, fintech and other sectors. In addition, MaRS convenes all members of the tech ecosystem to drive breakthrough discoveries, grow the economy and make an impact by solving real problems for real people  in Canada and around the world. SOURCE MaRs Discovery District

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Not for distribution to U.S. Newswire Services or for dissemination in the United StatesTORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / March 26, 2020 / Bold Ventures Inc. (TSXV:BOL) (the "Company" or "Bold") is pleased to announce it has signed the formal Option Agreement to acquire the Farwell Gold and Base Metal property ("Farwell").The Farwell claims are located approximately 55 km northwest of Wawa, Ontario. They are road accessible and consist of 103 Cell claims, 6 Multi-Cell claims and 6 Boundary claims comprising approximately 3993 ha or 9867 acres. Wesdome Gold Mines Mishi Open Pit operation, part of the larger Eagle River Complex that includes the Eagle River underground gold mine, lies 5 km south of the Farwell claim group. The Eagle River Mine is situated approximately 25 km to the south of the subject claims (see Bold news release dated January 6, 2020).The Farwell Property exhibits several desirable attributes. It is a large road-accessible property in a proven gold camp with gold-bearing quartz veins in iron formation along the western extension of a major deformation zone. The presence of deformed Timiskaming' style conglomerates along the gold mineralization trend (i.e. Kirkland Lake, Geraldton) is an attractive exploration target. Volcanogenic Massive Sulphide (VMS) mineralization of anomalous copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), lead (Pb) and gold (Au) is associated with a mafic to felsic volcanic sequence.The claims are host to several gold and base metal anomalies and occurrences that have yet to be fully explored. The latest recorded exploration work on the property occurred in 2008. A report and maps describing the property, geology and historical work can be found at www.boldventuresinc.com within the Project Details section, Farwell, Ontario.Bold has the option to earn a 100% interest in the Farwell claims by paying the aggregate sum of $225,000 in cash option payments, issuing an aggregate of 1,650,000 common shares of Bold and completing a total of $1,000,000 of exploration work on the claims over a four year period. On closing, the Company will pay the vendors $20,000 cash and 200,000 shares. The first year's exploration work expenditure is $90,000. The vendors will retain a 3% net smelter royalty in the Farwell Property. Bold will have the right to buy back a 1.5% net smelter royalty in consideration for the payment of $2 million. The Company also has the right of first refusal to purchase the remaining 1.5% NSR. The Option Agreement is subject to TSX Venture Exchange approval. Any common shares issued pursuant to the Option Agreement will be subject to a statutory four month hold period from the date of issuance.For a full description of the Option agreement visit www.boldventuresinc.com and select the Farwell Project Details on the Farwell, Ontario projects page.The Company also announces the closing of the final tranche of its non-brokered private placement that was announced in a Bold news release dated February 5, 2020. The Company placed 300,000 working capital units (the "WC Units") for proceeds of $15,000. Each WC Unit was priced at $0.05 and comprises one (1) common share of the Company and one (1) common share purchase warrant (each a "WC Warrant"), with each WC Warrant entitling the holder to acquire one (1) common share at a price of $0.10 until March 25, 2022. The Company placed an aggregate of 2,745,000 WC Units pursuant to the Offering for total gross proceeds of $137,500. The securities issued pursuant to the final closing are subject to a hold period expiring on July 26, 2020. The proceeds from the Offering will be used for general working capital, property acquisitions, exploration and expenses of the Offering.Bold management and personnel are following the mandated health advisories during the current coronavirus pandemic. The Company is currently planning the 2020 exploration program for the Farwell Project and will monitor the current Covid-19 crisis to ascertain the most appropriate schedule for field activities. The Company and its projects, including the Farwell Gold and Base Metal Project, may be viewed at www.boldventuresinc.com The technical information in this news release was reviewed and approved by Gerald D. White, B.Sc., P. Geo., a qualified person (QP) for the purposes of NI 43-101.About Bold Ventures Inc.The Company explores for Base and Precious metals in Canada. Bold has options to earn a 100% interest in the Farwell Gold Base Metals project located approx. 55km northwest of Wawa, Ontario and the Wilcorp Gold Project located 14 km east northeast of Atikokan, Ontario. Bold and its subsidiary Rencore Resources Ltd. have extensive holdings comprised of over 15 claim groups in and around the Ring of Fire area of the James Bay Lowlands. The Company has also earned a 10% carried interest in all chromite resources and a 40% working interest in all other metals at the Koper Lake Project and has the option to earn an additional 10% carried interest in chromite and 40% of all other metals. The Koper Lake Project is located within the Ring of Fire and directly adjacent to the Eagles Nest nickel-copper massive sulphide deposit currently in the permitting stage.For additional information about Bold Ventures and our projects please visit www.boldventuresinc.com or contact Bold Ventures Inc. at 416-864-1456."David B Graham"David B. GrahamPresident and CEONeither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: This Press Release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made. When used in this document, the words "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements reflect our current views with respect to future events and are subject to such risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause our actual results to differ materially from the statements made, including those factors discussed in filings made by us with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties, such actual results of current exploration programs, the general risks associated wit
A screen shows the logos and trading information for defense contractor Raytheon Co, and United Technologies Corp. on the floor at the NYSE in New York

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department has approved United Technologies Corporation's <UTX.N> planned merger with Raytheon Co <RTN.N>, subject to conditions, the agency said on Thursday.

UTC agreed in June to combine its aerospace business with U.S. contractor Raytheon and create a new company worth about $121 billion, in what would be the sector's biggest ever merger. It won EU antitrust approval earlier in March.

To win U.S. approval, the companies agreed to divest Raytheon's military airborne radios business, including facilities in Indiana and Florida, and UTC's military global positioning systems, including a facility in Connecticut.

The businesses are to be sold to BAE Systems Inc or another buyer approved by the Justice Department.

The companies are the only Defense Department suppliers for military airborne radios and military GPS systems for air and sea, the Justice Department said.

The Justice Department said that the two companies were among the few companies that made components for certain military satellites, including those that warn of missile launches. Because of this, the department also required the companies to sell UTC's big space-based optical systems businesses.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Sandra Maler, Lisa Shumaker and Diane Craft)
In the 2000s, fashion TV was booming. Trinny and Susannah were telling us what not to wear, Gok Wan advised on how to look good naked, Paisean Faisean proposed the way to a woman's heart was through her wardrobe, and Off the Rails sought to make over much of the country.

In the US, controversial series such as The Swan showcased radical transformations involving cosmetic surgery, while Tyra Banks brought us America's Next Top Model (ANTM). Project Runway began in 2004, and spawned a wave of TV hits, including Top Chef and RuPaul's Drag Race - which features judge Carson Kressley, the "fashion savant" of the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

But towards the end of the decade, many series started to die off, due to dwindling ratings and relevance. Perhaps it didn't help that reality shows like ANTM and The City, along with the fictional worlds of Ugly Betty and The Devil Wears Prada, depicted the industry as a fiercely hostile and bitchy one. As Heidi Klum put it in her Project Runway catchphrase: "In fashion, one day you're in the next, you're out!"

Today, however, style shows are enjoying a resurgence - and they appear to have learned a lesson from the new breed of reality programmes ruling the airwaves. While there are still huge audiences for the likes of Love Island and the Real Housewives franchise, many of today's viewers prefer their reality TV served up as comfort food.

The Great British Bake Off has won legions of fans worldwide, providing a cosy respite from the cruelty of its peers. Room to Improve similarly championed a more wholesome kind of reality show for years, and First Dates, Gogglebox and Flirty Dancing have charmed viewers with their gentle warmth.

Netflix has seized on this niche, with home makeover show Tidying Up with Mari Kondo; Nailed It!, a baking contest for terrible cooks; and Terrace House, a largely drama-free Japanese series following a group of strangers in the same beautiful house. Yet the biggest sensation has been its revival of Queer Eye, with an all-new "Fab Five" and an all-new message: "More than a makeover."

BBC One will soon debut You Are What You Wear, its first makeover series since the days of Trinny and Susannah. Hosted by Rylan Clark-Neal, the show has bizarrely enlisted its own "Fabulous Five" - including stylist Darren Kennedy - to help members of the public "look good and feel great". The marketing emphasises that this is a feel-good show, not one where 'frumpy' women sob in fitting rooms while brutally frank hosts prod at their 'saddlebags'.

In the age of body positivity, such appraisals make for uneasy viewing - RTE's latest makeover series The Style Counsellors, which aired in January, earned criticism for its "outdated" discussion around weight loss in the first episode.

Such shows straddle a complicated line between empowering and critiquing their subjects, with many of fashion's ground rules (cinch the waist, elongate the leg, avoid horizontal stripes) designed to make the wearer look thinner. Style shows have struggled to reconcile the uncomfortable truth that many women, raised on conventional standards of beauty, do want to look thinner, even when they know they shouldn't.

Yet where many of Trinny and Susannah's or Gok Wan's subjects ended up looking the same (a waist belt and chunky beads proved to be an irresistible fashion formula), the BBC series promotes a diversity of styles with five different stylists: one favours edgy looks, another prefers megawatt glamour, Darren Kennedy is billed as the expert on classic tailoring, and all are determined to make fashion democratic and inclusive of all sizes.

Video of the Day

That philosophy plays a big part in the latest slate of fashion design shows, too, with contestants that span all ages and backgrounds, and inclusive body representation on the catwalks. Fashion, these shows insist, is not an exclusive club for ultra-wealthy, ultra-thin, ultra-white women.

Tomorrow, the Project Runway duo of Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn launch their competition series, Making the Cut, with two episodes arriving each week on Amazon Prime Video. What distinguishes this show is an impressive $1m prize and the fact that audiences can shop winning looks on Amazon straight after watching them on the catwalk - a detail that can make episodes feel like an hour-long ad for the e-commerce giant.

In January, Netflix premiered Next in Fashion, hosted by Alexa Chung and Queer Eye's Tan France. The winner bagged $250,000 and the chance to stock their collection on Net-A-Porter, where some items have already sold out.

The judges evaluate contestants' ability to "run a global brand" as much as their design talents, and Making the Cut even assigns each designer a professional seamstress (as Gunn explains, "This is not a sewing competition, this is a design competition").

The commercial aspect brings greater realism to the competition: where once contestants were starry-eyed amateurs, almost all of those on Next in Fashion and Making the Cut have their own labels. The focus has shifted from fashion fantasy to business savvy - Making the Cut asks its contestants to design a "runway" look and an "accessible" look for each challenge, which are rigorously critiqued for their selling potential by Naomi Campbell, Carine Roitfeld and designer Joseph Altuzarra.

It marks an interesting shift, swapping bitchiness for business. The contestants are more likely to help with last-minute sewing than attempt workroom sabotage, and although Campbell can still be relied on to deliver biting assessments of unsatisfactory designs, the judges are obsessed with "real women" and wearable clothes.

Where these competitions consistently faltered was in their failure to create real fashion stars, with the exception of Christian Siriano, who won Project Runway's very first season. The prize money may get a label started, but the exposure from these episodes and a collection sold on Amazon is unlikely to turn anyone into the next Altuzarra.

Reality TV allows fashion insiders to connect directly with the viewing public, giving an opportunity to rehab the industry's elitist reputation. Yet in order to do that, they need to be engaging. And unfortunately, with little drama, uninspiring "accessible" designs and unfailingly polite contestants, they fall flat.

Next in Fashion tries to force a storyline when a guest judge walks out, leaving host Tan France in tears. In Making the Cut, Klum recognises the competition is too "snoozy" and attempts to liven things up with a seven-hour challenge deadline. Ultimately, though, the stakes feel oddly low. When a contestant shrugs that it's time to go home, you shrug along with them. There is no nail-biting suspense, no gasp-inducing fashion moment, no stand-out hero to root for because there areno villains.

In a period of quarantine, we'll watch just about anything, but under normal circumstances, the new guard of fashion shows will need to pull their Gucci socks up if they want to cut through the noise.
Several US lawmakers have asked President Donald Trump to use his influence to coordinate a powerful international response to coronavirus pandemic while attending the emergency virtual G20 summit on Thursday.

Saudi Arabia's King Salman will chair the virtual summit of G20 leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Thursday to advance the coordinated response to the novel coronavirus pandemic that has claimed over 21,290 lives and upended life and businesses across the globe.

Saudi Arabia, which currently holds the G20 presidency, last week called for the "virtual summit" following criticism that the powerful group of major economies had been slow to address the global crisis.

In a letter, the Senators asked Trump to work with the world leaders at the emergency meeting to implement an international response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Senators Bob Menendez, Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Patrick Leahy Vice Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs asked Trump to ensure that the US and its partners provide robust political and financial support to the global health and finance institutions working to end the crisis.

"This pandemic is not a challenge that we can face alone; we must work through every multilateral institution in which we participate," wrote the Senators, citing previous coordination efforts following the September 11, 2001 attacks and the 2008 financial crisis.

"We must unite to combat this virus and the lasting impacts it will have on our citizens' health and economic well-being. We must put aside political differences. Now is the time for action," they said.

The letter called for Trump to secure commitments from the G20 leaders to fully resource the World Health Organization and GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, to confront the global health crisis; and the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the multilateral development banks to avert a worldwide financial crisis.

They also called for the G20 to model its response on the 2008 financial crisis.

At a White House conference, Trump told reporters that he was looking forward to the video conference with G20 leaders.

"It will be an interesting call," he said.

Leaders from G20 nations will be joined by representatives from the coronavirus-affected countries like Italy, Spain, Jordan, Singapore, and Switzerland.

Several top international organisations such as the UN, the World Bank, the WHO, the World Trade Organisation, the IMF and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will also participate in the summit titled 'G20 Extraordinary Virtual Leaders' Summit on COVID-19'.

Regional organisations will be represented by Vietnam the Chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), South Africa the Chair of the African Union (AU), the United Arab Emirates the Chair of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Rwanda the Chair of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), according to an official statement.

India is a member nation of the G20 group. The other members include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, France, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UK and the US. Prime Minister Modi will participate in the virtual summit, sources said on Wednesday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will also attend the summit.

The announcement of the summit comes as fears grow that the world economy will plunge into recession due to the coronavirus crisis.

Globally, the death toll from the coronavirus has risen to 21,293 with more than 471,518 cases reported in over 170 countries and territories, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

In an attempt to stem the spread of coronavirus in India, Prime Minister Modi on Tuesday announced a nationwide lockdown for three weeks.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Address to the Nation

March 25, 2020

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Citizens of Russia, friends,

I am reaching out to you on an issue that has become a matter of concern for all of us.

We are witnessing an acute escalation of the coronavirus epidemic on a global scale. The number of new cases continues to grow in many countries. The global economy as a whole is at risk, and is already expected to shrink.

By taking precautionary measures, we have been largely able to prevent the infection from rapidly spreading and limit the incidence rate. However, we have to understand that Russia cannot insulate itself from this threat, simply considering its geography. There are countries along our borders that have already been seriously affected by the epidemic, which means that in all objectivity it is impossible to stop it from spilling over into Russia.

That said, being professional, well organised and proactive is what we can do and are already doing. The lives and health of our citizens is our top priority.

We have mobilised all the capabilities and resources for deploying a system of timely prevention and treatment. I would like to specially address doctors, paramedics, nurses, staff at hospitals, outpatient clinics, rural paramedic centres, ambulance services, and researchers: you are at the forefront of dealing with this situation. My heartfelt gratitude to you for your dedicated efforts.

I would like to ask Russian citizens to listen very carefully to the advice coming from doctors and the authorities. This could make a very big difference at this point in time. This is especially true for the most vulnerable categories of citizens: the elderly and people who have chronic illnesses. Minimising the risks should be a priority for them and all people in general.

There is also the question of the national vote on the amendments to the Constitution, which has been tentatively scheduled for April 22. You know that this is a very serious matter to me. Of course, I will ask you to go to the polling stations to express your opinion on this issue of fundamental and crucial importance to the country and society.

However, as I said before, our absolute priority is the health, life and safety of the people. This is why I believe the vote should be postponed.

We will look at the situation in the regions and throughout the country, and we will rely on the professional opinion and recommendations of doctors and specialists when setting a new date for this vote.

Next, the immediate priority is to prevent the quick spread of this diseases.

Therefore, I declare next week to be an official non-work period while maintaining wages. In other words, the days off will last from Saturday March 28 to Sunday April 5.

Of course, all public infrastructure facilities, including medical facilities, pharmacies, stores, institutions responsible for banking and financial settlements, as well as transport, and ministries and agencies at all levels, will continue working.

As I said, the extended days off are being declared to reduce the speed of the virus spreading.

I am addressing all our citizens. Let us not rely on chance as we tend to do in Russia. Do not think, as we usually do, that this cannot happen to you. It can happen to anyone. And then we will very quickly see what is now happening in many western countries, in Europe and across the ocean, happen here in Russia. We must strictly comply with all the recommendations. We must protect ourselves, our families and friends, and we must adopt a more disciplined and responsible approach. Trust me: the best thing to do now is stay home.

I will now specifically focus on the current socioeconomic situation. Here, we also need to take additional steps, primarily to ensure the social protection of our people, their incomes and jobs, as well as support for small and medium-sized businesses, which employ millions of people.

In this regard, the following priority measures will be implemented.

First, all social protection benefits that our citizens are entitled to, should be renewed automatically over the next six months, with no additional certificates or visits to the authorities needed. For example, if a family is entitled to subsidised housing and utility payments, they will not need to regularly confirm their per capita income to continue receiving this state support.

Please note that all payments to war veterans and home-front workers timed to the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory, 75,000 and 50,000 rubles, respectively, should be made before the May holidays, earlier than usual, in April.

Second, it is essential to support families with children. In the next three months, starting in April, I propose paying all families that are eligible to maternity capital, an additional 5,000 rubles a month for each child up to three years of age.

This support is especially important for families with children who are not attending day-care nurseries or kindergartens, and for parents who are on sick leave or on maternity leave.

Regarding our new support package, I mean benefits for children aged 3 to 7, I now instruct the Government to expedite all organisational arrangements so that eligible families can start receiving these payments not in July, as planned, but a month earlier, in June. I also ask the governors to expedite the transfer of the necessary information from the regional civil registry offices to the tax service. Colleagues, it is fundamentally important to start making these payments. Pay attention to this.

Third, we need to support those on sick leave and people who have lost their jobs. Today, all sick leave payments are calculated based on employees' period of work and salary. As a result, employees, primarily young people, can receive very low sick leave payments. This is, of course, not fair. I suggest the following provision: Sick leave payments should be calculated based on the amount of at least one minimum wage a month. This provision will be in force until the end of the year, and from there we will decide how to proceed depending on the situation.

Just like other countries' economies, the Russian economy is experiencing substantial headwinds due to the effects of the epidemic. And, as I have already said, we need to support those who may lose their jobs.

Today, with the exception of some categories of individuals, maximum monthly unemployment benefit is 8,000 rubles. I suggest increasing it to the minimum wage amount or 12,130 rubles per month.

Fourth, loans taken out by individuals present another risk. Naturally, it is difficult if not downright impossible to completely repay debts when incomes are plunging.

I suggest declaring consumer loan and mortgage holidays. If a person faces a difficult situation, meaning their monthly income declined significantly, by over 30 percent, then they should have the right to temporarily stop debt servicing and reschedule it. It goes without saying that any penalties are out of the question.

I am asking the Bank of Russia to set up a similar loan rescheduling mechanism for self-employed people, too.

If people are unable to repay their debt for objective reasons, they should not be left without options and they should not fall hostage to creditors' claims. We need a bankruptcy process that is fair and not burdensome. I am asking the Government and the parliament to expedite approval of the necessary regulatory changes.

Fifth. Small and medium-sized businesses and micro businesses, especially in the services sector, are now facing objective difficulties due to declining orders and revenue.

These businesses need help to stay open, which means retaining their employees. I would like to address all employers right now: once again, our most crucial task is to ensure stability in the labour market and to prevent a surge in unemployment.

Government assistance will be provided to businesses to deal with this problem.

I propose the following measures to support the enterprises and industries most affected by the current difficult situation.

I believe it is necessary to defer all taxes on small and medium-sized businesses, except for VAT, for the next six months. In addition, micro businesses should also be granted a deferral on their contributions to social insurance funds.

Bank loans held by struggling SMEs and micro businesses must also be deferred for the next six months.

Generally speaking, I am asking the Government and the Central Bank to propose and take additional action to ensure stable lending to the real economy, including through state guarantees and subsidies.

Next. Companies experiencing hardship must be protected from bankruptcy. In this connection, I am proposing a six-month moratorium on bankruptcy claims by creditors against companies and on the recovery of debts and penalties.

Once again, these measures will apply to companies operating in the sectors most affected by the current difficult situation. At the same time, I am instructing the Government to constantly monitor developments and, if necessary, expand and review the list of the industries requiring support.

Sixth. Right now, we must do everything we can to support the incomes of our citizens  especially those employed by small and medium-sized businesses.

In order for these businesses to get additional resources to support their employees, I am proposing to cut their insurance contributions in half, from 30 to 15 percent. This reduced rate will apply to any salary above minimum wage. For those making minimum wage or less for some reason, the rate will remain 30 percent.

I would like to stress that the reduced rate is being introduced not just for several months, not only as an anti-crisis measure, but for the long run. This way we are creating a long-term incentive for employers to increase wages.

Finally, there are two more measures I would like to suggest. Allow me to elaborate.

First, all interest and dividend income that flows from Russia and is transferred abroad into offshore jurisdictions must be taxed properly.

Today, two thirds of these funds, and basically we are talking here about incomes of specific individuals, are taxed at the rate of only 2 percent, thanks to so-called optimization strategies of all kinds. At the same time, people with modest salaries pay an income tax of 13 percent. This is unfair, to say the least.

For this reason, I suggest that those expatriating their income as dividends to foreign accounts should pay a 15 percent tax on these dividends. Of course, we will need to amend Russia's double taxation treaties with some countries. I ask the Government to work this out. If our foreign partners do not accept our proposal, Russia will unilaterally withdraw from these treaties. We will begin with countries that attract substantial resources from Russia, which is a very sensitive issue for our country.

Second, many countries levy income tax on interest earned by individuals from their bank deposits and investments in securities, while Russia does not tax this income at all.

I propose that people with over 1 million rubles in bank deposits and debt securities pay a 13 percent tax on this income. I would like to reiterate that this is not about taxing the deposits themselves but only applying income tax to the interest individuals earn from these investments.

I would like to emphasise that only about one percent of deposit holders will be affected by this initiative. At the same time, Russian banks will still offer attractive deposits with some of the highest returns in the world.

The solutions I am proposing are far from simple. Still, I would like to ask you to treat them with understanding. Let me add that I propose using the budget revenue from these two measures to fund initiatives to support families with children and help people who are unemployed or on sick leave.

People of Russia,

All the measures that are about to be adopted or will be taken in the future will work and will produce results only if we are in it together and recognise the complexity of the current situation. We need the state, society and the people to work together, and we all have to do everything each and every one of us can do.

We have to be mindful that we bear personal responsibility for our close ones, for those who live near us, and who need our help and support. By and large, it is this sense of solidarity that underpins the resilience of our society, as well as an unwavering commitment to mutual assistance and the effectiveness of the response we come up with to overcome the challenge we are facing.

Thank you for your attention.

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The government announced that it will allow eligible Australians who are experiencing financial hardship due to the crisis to access up to $20,000 from their superannuation, in two tranches of $10,000 each. It is the ATOs task to make the determination on early release. This policy is estimated to pull around $25 billion from funds, if 1.35 million Australians availed of the offer.

There may be a need for the funds and the government to look at ways to enable early access and smooth out the ability and capacity of funds to pay, said Tim Jenkins, the convenor of the Actuaries Institute's superannuation practice committee. A possible solution is for the ATO, in addition to making the determination, to distribute the payments to further streamline the process to get money into the hands of those in need quickly. The ATO could then invoice the superannuation funds over the following few months to spread the cash flow impact on funds.

Elayne Grace, Actuaries Institute chief executive, acknowledged the difficult financial decisions the government had to make to balance the short-term health and economic risks to the community against the long-term effect on retirement incomes.

Early access to super will help ameliorate some of the short-term pressures people, their families and their communities face, Grace said. Some of the key issues include liquidity for funds, locking in losses for individual investors before investments have time to recover, and also, if superannuation balances fall to zero, there are issues around insurance. We know large parts of the community have insurance through their super fund. We want people to have access to their funds, to help them through very difficult times, but it is important to know and map the consequences.

The Actuaries Institute would encourage the government to commit to restoring and maintaining the integrity of the retirement income system after the crisis ends.
New Delhi/Bastar, March 26 : In view of the humanitarian crisis that has erupted due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, security agencies are mulling over the option of halting all the counter-insurgency operations against armed Maoists in the Naxal belt of India.

Sources told IANS that the security agencies in Chhattisgarh are exploring the possibility of a "humanitarian ceasefire" as the Covid-19 contagion is spreading in India, with around 700 infected and 14 people dead so far.

However, the top police officer of Naxal operations in Raipur, Inspector General of Police (Bastar range) P. Sundar Raj told IANS said that security forces do not have the authority or mandate to take such decisions.

"I am just a police officer. Bastar Police and security forces here have a mandate to ensure safety to life and property of the people. At present the entire world is fighting against Covid-19. Bastar Police is also committed to fighting this virus," he said.

The IGP said that hygiene is a major issue among Maoists since they all live together in a commune with hardly any healthcare. "There is no social distancing in a commune and the villagers are worried about it at the moment. They are putting not only their lives at risk but endangering the lives of thousands of tribals living in the nearby areas. There is a lot of social pressure over the Maoists to shun violence during this global crisis," he said.

Also, due to the lockdown, the entire system, other than the essential services, outside the Maoist areas, has come to a standstill. "Because of the terror created by the Maoists, it is generally difficult for healthcare workers to work in Naxal areas. Now with the country-wide lockdown, volunteers who are helping with essential services and distribution of relief packages, will find it even more challenging to help the tribals living in the Maoist controlled areas, if Naxals continue their violence," the counter-insurgency specialist said.

Just three days ago, police found bodies of 17 security personnel who had gone missing after an encounter with Maoists in Sukma district of Chhattisgarh.

Ceasefire, Sunder Raj said, is an option when the state launches a war. "The state is not the aggressor or perpetrator of violence here. The state has always desired peace for its citizens. Our endeavour right now is that we maintain peace while fighting the coronavirus together with our healthcare system and essential services to cope with the humanitarian crisis. Now it is up to the Maoists to take a call to shun violence in the greater interest of the humanity," he said.

Incidentally, the Communist Party of the Philippines, in a direct response to the call of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for a global ceasefire between warring parties for the common purpose of fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, has ordered all its commands and units to observe a nationwide ceasefire from March 26 to April 15.

The convener for the new peace process in central India and activist who works with displaced tribals in Chhattisgarh, Shubhranshu Choudhary has also appealed to the government and armed Maoists to observe ceasefire and initiate a peace dialogue through the lockdown.

"Government figures in India say that in the last 20 years, more than 12 thousand people have died in this conflict. In 53 years, about 40 thousand people may have been killed here. I request the Indian government and the Maoists to follow Philippines at the moment. When a tsunami struck in Indonesia in 2004, a ceasefire that started between the rebels and the government in Aceh area, was finally successful in reaching a peace agreement in 2005," Choudhary said.
(Newser)  Americans stuck at home right now have a lot of time on their hands, and if social media is any guide, many appear to be spending it in the bizarre world of "Joe Exotic." That would be the man more formally known as Joseph Maldonado-Passage, who is the subject of a true-life Netflix series called Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. (See the trailer here.) A sample of coverage and what people are saying, but note that the following has some spoiler alerts regarding the outcome of all this.

The basics: Joe is the "Tiger King" of the title, thanks to the roadside zoo he ran in Oklahoma featuring tigers and other big cats. The "murder" refers to the allegation that he hired a hit man to kill a critic named Carole Baskin. But the series is so much more, per Vanity Fair. It "features enough serious plot twists to contend with The Jinx; romantic tragedy; one large-cat owner who claims to be the real-life Scarface; another large-cat owner who seems to carry on a deeply problematic, polygamous relationship with the female interns in his employ; and a cowboy-hat-wearing, Big Lebowski-esque narrator.

Joe is the "Tiger King" of the title, thanks to the roadside zoo he ran in Oklahoma featuring tigers and other big cats. The "murder" refers to the allegation that he hired a hit man to kill a critic named Carole Baskin. But the series is so much more, per Vanity Fair. It "features enough serious plot twists to contend with The Jinx; romantic tragedy; one large-cat owner who claims to be the real-life Scarface; another large-cat owner who seems to carry on a deeply problematic, polygamous relationship with the female interns in his employ; and a cowboy-hat-wearing, Big Lebowski-esque narrator. Another try: The series is indeed "genuinely compulsive viewing," writes Sam Adams at Slate. "Id describe it as like watching a slow-motion car crash, but only if that car crashed into a jet plane and then both tumbled into an oil tanker." You're likely to finish "with a vague feeling of having done something thats not entirely healthy," but these days, anything that keeps our minds occupied is a "blessing."

story continues below

Echoing that: Joe has become a viral sensation, and Harper's Bazaar rounds up some choice examples. One common theme: "Joe Exotic will go down as the man who singlehandedly helped us get through COVID-19," writes one fan.

Joe has become a viral sensation, and Harper's Bazaar rounds up some choice examples. One common theme: "Joe Exotic will go down as the man who singlehandedly helped us get through COVID-19," writes one fan. Spoiler alert: Joe has just filed suit against the government and his former business partner for a total of $94 million related to the charges and investigation that have landed him in prison in Oklahoma for 22 years. Entertainment Tonight has the details.

Joe has just filed suit against the government and his former business partner for a total of $94 million related to the charges and investigation that have landed him in prison in Oklahoma for 22 years. Entertainment Tonight has the details. Another big player: Baskin, Joe's longtime animal-rights nemesis, isn't thrilled with the documentary, calling it "salacious and sensational" in a statement to People. As an example, "they devoted an entire segment to 23-year-old lies and innuendos suggesting I was involved in my husband Dons 1997 disappearance." Yep, that's a whole other thing.

Baskin, Joe's longtime animal-rights nemesis, isn't thrilled with the documentary, calling it "salacious and sensational" in a statement to People. As an example, "they devoted an entire segment to 23-year-old lies and innuendos suggesting I was involved in my husband Dons 1997 disappearance." Yep, that's a whole other thing. More about Joe: New York magazine did a long profile in 2019, and he's also the subject of a six-part podcast.

New York magazine did a long profile in 2019, and he's also the subject of a six-part podcast. A takeaway: In the Vanity Fair piece noted earlier, Julie Miller writes that "beneath all of those circus-ready characters and cartoonish theatrics is a serious message about the number of big cats being bred specifically for use in roadside zoos and pet farms." That message is that the owners of these big cats can be more dangerous than the animals themselves.

(Read more Netflix stories.)
Representative Image

The central government is looking to tackle the coronavirus pandemic with a three-week to three-month long action plan, including a financial package, as per The Economic Times sources.

The plan will include inputs from at least 14 ministries and the state governments to deal with the virus at "various stages of the outbreak," sources told the paper.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the report.

As per the plan, the Centre has ramped up testing, identified testing and quarantine centres across districts, and has a plan for dedicated COVID-19 hospitals for treatment in every district.

A significant financial package for the poor and the unorganised sector will also be announced in a phased manner. "If we do not give money in the hands of the poor they will defy the lockdown," an official said.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

In phase 1, states governments would be expected to dole out two months pension in advance, facilitate extra withdrawal of ration in one-trip, ensure mid-day meals programme despite school closures and provide expectant mothers with dry ration through Aanganwadi workers.

The government is also mulling advance payments through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and PM-KISAN - to be announced over three to six weeks.

Coronavirus India LIVE Updates

The staggered plan will be employed to refrain from exhausting options too early, as "we do not want the epidemic to outlast our ability to intervene," another official added.

The aim is to be "preemptive and early" and "timely and effective", on the health and fiscal sides. Phase 2 will be rolled out depending on the virus trajectory in India and how successful the current lockdown is, officials said.

The government is also awaiting assessment on 'community transmission' and its extent, which sources say will be clearer over the next two weeks. If the numbers keep surging, the government will have to plan for after April 14, which is when the lockdown ends.
Tata Motors Ltd is quoting at Rs 72.1, up 2.63% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. The stock is down 57.55% in last one year as compared to a 23.82% fall in NIFTY and a 37.64% fall in the Nifty Auto index.

Tata Motors Ltd rose for a third straight session today. The stock is quoting at Rs 72.1, up 2.63% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 4.83% on the day, quoting at 8719.2. The Sensex is at 30053.01, up 5.32%. Tata Motors Ltd has dropped around 50.36% in last one month.

Meanwhile, Nifty Auto index of which Tata Motors Ltd is a constituent, has dropped around 28.63% in last one month and is currently quoting at 4936.15, up 3.79% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 422.1 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 824.83 lakh shares in last one month.

The benchmark March futures contract for the stock is quoting at Rs 72.35, up 2.12% on the day. Tata Motors Ltd is down 57.55% in last one year as compared to a 23.82% fall in NIFTY and a 37.64% fall in the Nifty Auto index.

The PE of the stock is 0 based on TTM earnings ending December 19.

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On March 23, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Irans Foreign Ministry exchanged accusations over the COVID-19 pandemic. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had suggested the day before that medicine offered by the U.S. might actually contain the virus itself.

"Secondly, you are accused of producing the virus, he said. I do not know how true this accusation is, but when such an accusation is made, which wise person will ask for your help?"

Khameneis rejection of U.S. aid was echoed on March 23 by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, when he called the American offer one of the biggest lies history.

In response, Pompeo tweeted:

@khamenei_irs fabrications that the U.S. is responsible for the #WuhanVirus put Iranians, Americans, and the rest of the world at risk. Facts matter.

The online war of words continued when Irans Foreign Ministry responded on Twitter:

If @StateDept claims the mounting global questions about US role in #COVID19 pandemic are mere "Iran-made conspiracy theories", then US must answer some of these questions asked by the Global Research.

The ministrys statement is misleading.

Global Research is a well-known clearinghouse for conspiracy theories, such as chemtrails -- the claim that airliner contrails are in fact chemicals being sprayed on an unwitting populace -- as well as anti-vaccine claims and a truly bizarre claim that the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 was somehow connected to the downing of MH17 over Ukraines Donbas region on July 17, 2014.

Also on March 23, Irans state-owned media outlet Press TV published an article on the Pompeo-Khamenei exchange, which contained misleading questions allegedly raised in an article published by Global Research, which itself was an edited version of an article originally published by the Chinese outlet CGTN.

Those questions included the following:

Why did the US withdraw from the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) in 2001? Why did it try to prevent a monitoring mechanism for the execution of the Convention? Is it standing in the way of developing biological weapon for the US?

The United States didnt withdraw from the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and is still a member state. Rather, in 2001, the U.S. withdrew from negotiations on a related enforcement protocol because officials believed inspections were inadequate. They also cited potential problems for legitimate bio-research and private industry.

Another question posed in the Press TV piece referred to the closure of the U.S. Armys biological laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in July 2019. The labs closure was not secret; it was prompted by a U.S. Centers for Disease Control inspection after reports of safety violations.

Iran is among the countries hardest hit by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. On March 22, Medicins Sans Frontieres, the Geneva-based international humanitarian medical NGO, reported that Iran had 20,610 confirmed cases of the virus, the sixth-highest number of cases worldwide, with 1,556 deaths. As of March 26, the number has climbed to 27,017 confirmed cases and 2,077 deaths.

Disinformation may have played a role in exacerbating the situation. On March 9, Polygraph.info reported on a video allegedly taken by pro-regime men kissing a shrine in the Iranian holy city of Qom to show there was nothing to fear from the coronavirus. Some experts said locales like Qom should have been quarantined to protect the populace.

Earlier, Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei had referred to COVID-19 as a so-called virus, and Irans Health Minister Iraj Harirchi dismissed quarantines as a relic of the pre-World War I era of the plague, cholera, stuff like that. The next day, Harirchi announced hed tested positive for the virus.
(RNS)  The Washington National Cathedral will donate thousands of medical masks to two hospitals in the nations capital after discovering a trove of the much-needed protective equipment just feet from where Helen Keller and other prominent Americans lie in the cathedrals underground crypts.

Bought in 2006 as a precaution during an outbreak of the H5N1 flu, also known as bird or avian flu, the more than 5,000 N95 respiratory masks had been forgotten until early this month, when the cathedrals chief stonemason, Joseph Alonso, remembered coming across them in an unfinished area of the crypt level.

Though still in their original packaging, the masks were technically expired, and cathedral staffers first reached out to the manufacturer and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine whether they were safe to use.

Since the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S. last month, mass buying of N95 masks has resulted in a critical shortage at medical centers. Doctors across the country have been reusing masks, along with medical gowns and eye shields, risking spreading the disease to multiple patients or contracting it themselves.

Given the dire situation, Kevin Eckstrom, the chief communications officer at the cathedral, said they were told the decade-old masks were either fine or better than nothing.

On Wednesday (March 25), 3,000 masks will be donated to Georgetown University Hospital and 2,000 will go to Childrens National Hospital in Washington.

When the cathedral reached administrators at the two hospitals, they asked, How quickly can you get them to us? according to Eckstrom.

The cathedral kept fewer than a couple hundred masks, said Eckstrom, for their original purpose: for clergy to wear when visiting vulnerable people who need pastoral care, for cathedral cleaning staff or for staffers dealing with the public during a viral outbreak.

While best known to the public as the stage for funerals for presidents and other high officials, most recently the December 2018 state funeral for President George H.W. Bush, the cathedral is also an Episcopal parish with some 1,400 congregants.

We are not doing many pastoral visits at the moment because of health concerns, said Eckstrom. But if they had to do last rites (a sacramental anointing of the sick) they want to be suited up as best they could be.

This is not the cathedrals first encounter with the pandemic. The bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, was among several Washington clergy who self-quarantined after attending a conference in Louisville, Kentucky, with the pastor of Christ Church in Georgetown, who contracted COVID-19. Budde has since been tested for the virus and declared healthy.

Nor is this the first time Alonso, the stonemason who found the masks, has made headlines. A 35-year veteran of the cathedrals staff, Alonso was integral to the $32 million restoration project that followed a 5.8 magnitude earthquake in 2011. He also placed the final stone on the cathedral when it was officially completed in 1990, after being commissioned in 1893 and begun in 1907.

His latest newsmaking turn, however, was less ceremonial.

Joe is always crawling around every part of the building and knows every nook and cranny, said Eckstrom. If anyone was going to find them, its him.

READ THIS STORY AT RELIGIONNEWS.COM.

Article originally published by Religion News Service. Used with permission.

Photo courtesy: Religion News Service/Danielle E. Thomas/Washington National Cathedral
States are understood to have a general power to legislate for the health, welfare, safety and morals for the people of their state, said Andrew Kent, who teaches constitutional law at Fordham Universitys School of Law.

There might be some exceptions, Mr. Kent and others noted, as in the case of a military invasion or other national emergency, but a pandemic is not one of them. On health matters, the federal governments powers are limited to trying to prevent the spread of contagious diseases into the United States or between states.

That formula, giving each state control over the health, welfare, safety and morals of its residents is woven into countless legal precedents.

An 1873 Supreme Court decision, for example, upheld the right of Louisiana to shut down a private slaughterhouse on the Mississippi River north of New Orleans to control cholera outbreaks.
Former chief statistician Pronab Sen on Thursday said the country's growth in the next two quarters will not be more than 3 per cent due to the lockdown across the country.

In an interview with PTI, Sen further said that due to the ongoing 21-day shutdown, there may be a reduction of about Rs 5 trillion in gross domestic product (GDP). "Due to the complete lockdown across the country for 21 days, the economic growth in the first quarter of the next financial year will be very low. "I don't expect economic growth in next two quarter (of 2020-21) to be more than ...
Danes charge man in plot to kill Iranian opposition member: A 40-year-old Norwegian citizen of Iranian descent has been charged with helping an unnamed Iranian intelligence service carry out a plot on Danish soil to kill an Iranian opposition activist, a prosecutor said. Lise-Lotte Nilas said the man, who was not identified, is suspected of gathering information that, according to the investigation, was to be used to carry out a killing in Denmark. The suspect has denied wrongdoing. He was arrested in Sweden and extradited to Denmark.
South Korea's Kia Motors Corp is considering making face masks at its Chinese factory to help battle the spread of the coronavirus, a spokesman said on Wednesday.

The announcement follows a similar move by Fiat Chrysler, whose CEO Mike Manley said earlier this week that one of the group's plants in Asia would be converted to produce face masks for healthcare workers and would reach a target of one million masks per month in coming weeks.

Kia could make masks at its Yancheng plant after the Chinese government encouraged carmakers to do so, the spokesman said. He declined to comment on possible timing or any manufacturing target.

Kia has suspended production at its Georgia plant in the United States, its Slovakia site and operations in India due to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Chief health officer Jeannette Young has slammed panic buyers that flocked to Dan Murphy's across the country and urged people to practice social distancing.

The scenes on Sunday saw panic buyers clearing out trolley loads of booze after fears sparked that bottle shops would be the next stores to close.

But Dr Young insisted that it was perfectly safe for people to go and vote in an upcoming Queensland council election, as long as they practised social distancing.

Chief health officer Jeannette Young (pictured) has slammed panic buyers across the country that flocked to Dan Murphy's but said it was safe to vote in an upcoming Queensland election if people used social distancing

'There is no risk going to vote on Saturday. I'm more concerned with people going to Dan Murphy's, the scenes I've seen there are appalling,' she told reporters on Thursday.

'Go in, vote, and leave.'

It comes as Queensland moved to shut its borders along with SA, WA, NT and Tasmania.

The Queensland state government also made the decision to close down schools as of next week.

Schools will operate under pupil free days from next week so any parent that is working will still be able to send their children to school.

The shocking scenes on Sunday saw hundreds of people line up for alcohol after Victorian and Sydney officials shut down all non-essential services with many left confused if a bottle shop was considered 'essential'

Queensland Health Minister Steven Miles said the move was necessary to keep medical staff working.

'It's incredibly important that our health staff continue to be able to send their children to school,' he said.

'Modelling by our hospitals suggested if they had been unable to do that it would have potentially impacted on 30 per cent of our health workforce.'

The shocking scenes on Sunday saw hundreds of people line up for alcohol after Victorian and Sydney officials shut down all non-essential services.

The panic comes as Queensland moves to shut down its borders and close schools as of next week

While bottle shops, like supermarkets, are considered an essential services many were left confused by the announcement and flooded their local liquor store.

Thousands of anxious Australians took to social media in search of clarification about whether bottle shops would stay open in Melbourne and Sydney.

'Urgent clarification required: are bottle shops considered an essential service?,' tweeted one man.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Cleveland police officers will help keep the peace at political conventions scheduled for this summer in Milwaukee and Charlotte, returning the favor for security assistance Cleveland got when it hosted the 2016 Republican National Convention.

City Council this week approved sending officers to both conventions. Mayor Frank Jackson signed off on the legislation Wednesday.

But theres one catch: Will the outbreak of COVID-19 coronavirus prompt the Democrats and Republicans to cancel their nominating conventions.

Tentatively, the Democratic National Convention is scheduled for July 13-16 in Milwaukee. But whether it indeed comes to pass will depend in great part on whether the coronavirus outbreak has been tamed.

Democrats continue to plan, but are playing for time, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this week, continuing to organize while also exploring contingency options.

Republicans are planning for their convention Aug. 24-27 in Charlotte, North Carolina. In a statement to Politico this week, Republican National Committee Chief of Staff Richard Walters said the party is fully committed to holding the convention in Charlotte as planned and has not had any substantive conversations about alternative scenarios.

Cleveland will be reimbursed by the federal government for the expenses of sending officers to help with security at the two conventions, according to Safety Services Director Michael McGrath. The city also will be reimbursed for any local expenses, such as overtime that is needed as a result of some officers being out of town.

Nearly 100 law enforcement agencies from across the country helped provide security in Cleveland for the Republican National Convention in 2016. Federal reimbursement tallies for security just for the convention in Cleveland topped $40 million.

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Clevelands government isnt shutting down, although access to services is limited; finding workarounds the challenge
WSE Submission by the Investor of motions to the antimonopoly authorities for consent to take control over the Company

Management Board of Work Service S.A. ("Issuer" or "Company"), with reference to the Current Report No. 12/2020 and 12/2020/K, hereby informs that today the Company received information that on 25 March 2020 Gi INTERNATIONAL S.R.L., wholly owned by Gi Group SpA ("Investor"), submitted three motions to the competent antimonopoly authorities, i.e. the antimonopoly authorities in Poland, Czech Republic and Germany, concerning allowing the Investor to take control over the Company. According to the information provided by the Investor, the Investor is in the process of preparing other motions to the competent antimonopoly authorities, which will be submitted at a later date.

Obtaining the consent of the relevant antimonopoly authorities for the Investor to take control over the Company and its affiliates is one of the conditions precedent to the transaction with the Investor, set out in the investment agreement concluded between the Company and the Investor on 13 February 2020. Legal basis: Article 17(1) MAR _Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council _EU_ No 596/2014 of 16 April 2014 on market abuse _Regulation on market abuse and repealing the Directive 2003/6/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council and Commission Directives 2003/124/EC, 2003/125/EC and 2004/72/EC. Signatures: Iwona Szmitkowska - President of the Management Board Jarosaw Dymitruk - Vice-President of the Management Board
As testing and positive cases of the coronavirus in New Jersey continue to increase, more schools are finding connections to the outbreak.

Schools have continued to report positive tests for the fast-spreading respiratory virus among employees, students and parents.

Gov. Phil Murphy said as of Wednesday the state now has at least 4,402 cases, including 62 deaths. Officials announced 736 new positive tests.

As of Wednesday night, the following schools had reported contact with a person diagnosed with COVID-19. This post will be updated as more cases are announced.

Bergen County

An employee and a parent in the Mahwah Township School District both tested positive for the coronavirus, the district announced in a letter to families.

Cliffside Park School District Superintendent announced a staff member at School #4 tested positive for COVID-19 and a staff member at School #6 was in contact with a family member who tested positive for it. Read the superintendents full letter.

Students and staff from George Washington School in Edgewater were told to quarantine through March 29, after someone from the district tested positive. The school serves pre-K through second grade. The order also applied to Eleanor Van Gelder School students who ride bus #2.

Students and staff at Anna C. Scott School in Leonia were asked to quarantine after a staff member at the elementary school tested positive for the coronavirus. The order lasts through March 27, and also applied to middle school students who attended SACC," an out-of-school program, as well as the staff members who worked in the program.

Essex County

A foreign language teacher at Heritage Middle School in Livingston tested positive and is quarantined. They were at the school through March 11, officials said.

A teacher with the Bloomfield School District tested positive, the district announced.

Four Nutley School District staff members have tested positive for COVID-19. The staff members are in quarantine, officials said. The staff members were present in elementary school buildings up to and including March 13, and with staff only on March 16.

Gloucester County

A staff member at Woodbury Public Schools tested positive, the district announced on March 24. The release said the staff member was present for a Chromebook Distribution to families and students on March 17 and 18, at Cap Paine Gymnasium, though the person was not directly involved in the distribution process. The district is still asking those that were in attendance to take necessary precautions.

Hudson County

Someone who attended a career fair at Harrison High School last week tested positive for COVID-19, the schools principal announced Wednesday. The person began to show symptoms two days after the fair.

Hunterdon County

An employee at Hunterdon Central High has tested positive for COVID-19, the schools superintendent announced. The school has consulted with the Hunterdon County Department of Health, which confirmed the case and the department will contact anyone who is at-risk residing in the region. Those at-risk individuals who reside outside the region will receive notification from their appropriate health department.

Mercer County

The Princeton Health Department announces a confirmed case of coronavirus from an employee of Riverside Elementary School. The employee is not a resident of Princeton and was under under medical supervision. The health department was in the process of identifying and contacting all those who may have come in contact with the infected employee.

Timerberlane Middle School in the Hopewell Valley Regional School District in Pennington announced a teacher had tested positive. They were asymptomatic when last at school.

Middlesex County

Immediate family members of three students within schools in Monroe Township tested positive. One student attends the high school, one student attends the middle school and the third attends one of the elementary schools.

An employee at Middlesex County Vocational and Technical Schools in Perth Amboy tested positive.

Two Edison School District staff members have tested positive for COVID19, one employee works at the Board of Education Office and the other at Lindeneau Elementary School. Persons who were in direct contact with each of the individuals have been contacted and instructed to monitor their daily health, and if they become symptomatic to seek medical attention.

A family member of a student at Walter M. Schirra Elementary School in Old Bridge Township, Middlesex County, tested positive.

Monmouth County

An employee in the Shrewsbury Borough School District tested positive. The employee in question began displaying symptoms on Monday, March 16. The school last held classes on Thursday, March 12, so the district said it was unlikely any students had contact with the employee after he or she was exposed to the respiratory virus.

Students at Freehold Township High School had immediate family members test positive for the coronavirus and have been in self quarantine since last week. The students have not exhibited any symptoms.

Red Bank Regional High School announced a presumptive positive case of the coronavirus for a student on March 11.

Morris County

Two teachers in the Roxbury School District tested positive last week. One teacher works at Lincoln Roosevelt Elementary School, and the other teaches at Eisenhower Middle School and Roxbury High School.

A parent of a Denville student tested positive for the coronavirus, the district said in a release on March 13. The parent and student have been self-quarantined, and the student has not exhibited any symptoms.

The Morris School District announced a member of the household of a Morristown High School student tested positive for the coronavirus, and the student is assumed to be positive as well after developing symptoms. Morristown High School last held classes on March 13, and the student attended classes until the school was closed. The student was exposed to the coronavirus prior to the school closing, so the district has asked students and families to monitor for symptoms. No other cases or symptoms have been reported among the student body.

A nursery school employee at a pre-school associated with the Morristown Jewish Center tested positive March 13. Children and employees were asked to self-quarantine for 14 days.

A Mount Olive Middle School employee has tested positive for the virus, the district announced. The townships health department said it would reach out to individuals who may have been affected.

Passaic County

A West Milford community member tested positive after going on a field trip high school students. The district is contacting all students who attended the boys and girls lacrosse spring training trip to Orlando, Florida from March 12 through March 16.

Three teachers, an instructional assistant, a volunteer and a student from Paterson Public Schools tested positive for the coronavirus, the district announced on Wednesday.

A staffer at Eastern Christian High School, a private school in North Haledon, tested positive for the virus.

A Passaic School District employee tested positive for the virus, the district said. The employee is not assigned to a specific school.

Somerset County

A student at Amesterdam Elementary School in Hillsborough was announced as a positive test on Tuesday. The student last attended classes at the school on March. 13

Union County

The Plainfield Public School District announced a positive case of an employee at Hubbard Middle School. The district will be contacting any at-risk people who live in Plainfield, and those living outside Plainfield will be contacted by other boards of health.

A teacher in the Cranford Public School District tested positive, the district announced. The teacher lives in Monmouth County, according to the districts website.

A staff member at Bayberry School in Watchung tested positive, the district said. The staff member is not a Watchung residents.

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NJ Advance Medias Amanda Hoover contributed to this report.

Chris Ryan may be reached at cryan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ChrisRyan_NJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
An aerial view shows Sunset Boulevard, shortly before sunset, with lighter than normal traffic amidst the CCP virus pandemic in Los Angeles, California, on March 25, 2020. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

A Million Californians File for Unemployment in Less Than 2 Weeks: Newsom

More than a million Californians have filed claims for unemployment insurance in less than two weeks due to layoffs or reduced hours amid the CCP virus pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom said during a March 25 press briefing.

A number of non-essential businesses across California have been forced to temporarily close after Newsom issued a stay-at-home order on March 19 in an effort to slow the spread of the virus, which has so far infected 3,154 people in the state and claimed the lives of 67.

We just passed the one million mark, in terms of the number of claims, just since March 14, Newsom told reporters on Wednesday.

Newsom last week said the California department of unemployment sees 2,000 new claims a day but that two days ago or three days, we saw about 40,000 applications, after that 70,000 applications. Yesterday [March 18] 80,000 unemployment applications. It doubled in a 48 hours period.

At Wednesdays press briefing, Newsom said the $2.2 trillion emergency relief package passed by the Senate will provide additional assistance to those out of work, adding an additional $600 a week on top of that, adding this bill will be very helpful, and its very timely.

The 880-page measure, the third CCP virus response bill produced by Congress, is the largest-ever rescue package in U.S. history. It builds on previous funding efforts focused on vaccines and emergency response, sick and family medical leave for workers, and food aid.

The latest bill includes $350 billion in job retention loans for small businesses that will supply eight weeks of salaries, with loan forgiveness available as long as businesses keep up with overheads and employing their workers. It also includes a $500 billion program for guaranteed, subsidized loans to larger industries, including airlines.

Newsom also announced that four of Americas five biggest banks and more than 200 state-chartered banks and credit unions have committed to 90-day mortgage waivers for those that have been impacted by COVID-19.

Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Citibank, and J.P. Morgan Chase have joined with banks in California to provide forbearance on foreclosures and on mortgage payments, Newsom said, but added that Bank of America did not agree to the same pledge.

Unfortunately, Bank of America did not publicly commit to that, Newsom said. They just committed to 30 days. I hope they will reconsider and join those other banks that are willing to do the right thing by at least extending that commitment to their customers for 90 days.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

Read More Editorial: Giving the Right Name to the Virus Causing a Worldwide Pandemic
Home-testing kits which indicate whether you have ever been infected with the coronavirus will soon be rolled out across the UK, Members of Parliament have been told.

Professor Sharon Peacock, director of the National Infection Service at Public Health England, said the group had developed simple finger-prick tests which could soon be available.

The tests could be available in chemists and online retailers like Amazon once they have been tested by the UK authorities.

However, the UK government's chief medical adviser said the testing process could significantly delay their rollout.

"The one thing worse than no test is a bad test," the UK's Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said.

If effective the tests could mean that thousands of workers can return to normal life much sooner than expected.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

finger prick

Getty

Simple home-testing kits which indicate whether somebody has ever been infected with the coronavirus could soon be available to order in the UK, Members of Parliament have been told.

Professor Sharon Peacock, director of the National Infection Service at Public Health England, told the UK parliament on Wednesday that the group had developed finger-prick tests which establish whether a person has ever been infected with the virus.

Once rolled out, the public will be able to buy the tests via services like Amazon and in high-street pharmacists, Peacock said. Users will carry out the pin-prick test, then send the sample to a laboratory.

She said it would initially allow key workers, particularly NHS staff, to return to work after their illness, as they would have developed immunity to the virus, but confirmed they would be available to the wider population soon afterwards.

Peacock said that the tests were currently being evaluated to confirm whether they worked, which she said would happen by the end of the week, after which "several million" would be rolled out across the country.

"Once we are assured that they do work, they will be rolled out into the community," Peacock told the Health & Science select committee on Wednesday.

Story continues

"Testing the test is a small matter, and I anticipate that it will be done by the end of this week.

"In the near future people will be able to order a test that they can test themselves, or go to Boots, or somewhere similar to have their finger prick test done."

Asked if she meant the tests would be ready for roll-out within days rather than weeks, she said: "Absolutely."

However, the UK's own medical advisers downplayed the possibility of a rapid roll-out, saying that they needed to be properly tested first.

The UK government's Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty told a Downing Street press conference on Wednesday that full testing would need to be completed on the tests first.

"The one thing worse than no test is a bad test," Whitty said.

"I do not think, and I want to be clear, that this is something we'll be ordering from the internet in a matter of weeks."

"We need to go through the evaluation, then the first critical uses, and then spread it out from that point of view. We need to do that in a systematic way."

Business Insider
Amber Heard is seen cuddling up to Elon Musk in the private elevator to Johnny Depp's penthouse in exclusive new images that will drag the Tesla mogul deeper into the couple's explosive legal battle.

Musk insists the 33-year-old actress had already split from Depp by the time they began seeing one another and their relationship didn't become romantic 'until some time later'.

However the Pirates of the Caribbean star accuses the pair of starting an affair one month into his 2015 marriage and has subpoenaed the billionaire for his text messages as part of a $50 million defamation case against Heard.

Now, surveillance camera images obtained by DailyMail.com capture his ex-wife cozying up to Musk as they ride the elevator at the luxury downtown LA apartment complex where she once lived with Depp.

Amber Heard is seen cuddling up to Elon Musk in the private elevator to Johnny Depp's penthouse in exclusive new images that will drag the Tesla mogul deeper into the couple's explosive legal battle

Musk insists the 33-year-old actress had already split from Depp by the time they began seeing one another and their relationship didn't become romantic 'until some time later'

Now, surveillance camera images obtained by DailyMail.com capture his ex-wife cozying up to Musk as they ride the elevator at the luxury downtown LA apartment complex where she once lived with Depp. The Space X inventor, 48, can been seen in one image draping his arms around Heard, who appears to be wearing just a swimsuit and a towel

The Pirates of the Caribbean star accuses the pair of starting an affair one month into his 2015 marriage and has subpoenaed the billionaire for his text messages as part of a $50 million defamation case against Heard

The Space X inventor, 48, can been seen in one image draping his arms around Heard, who appears to be wearing just a swimsuit and what appears to be a towel.

She reciprocates the affection by bending over to place her hands on the leg or waist of Musk, who is in a dark T-shirt and pants or jeans.

There are no timestamps or clues as to when the pictures were taken however security guards have previously gone on record to state that Musk visited Heard on multiple occasions before and after she filed for divorce in May 2016.

Depp, 55, moved out of the Eastern Columbia Building a month after the split but Heard carried on living there until December 2016, DailyMail.com understands.

The Oscar-nominated actor owned five penthouses at the up-scale address, all accessed by the private elevator seen in the images, but later sold them for a combined $10.88 million.

He and Heard agreed to a $7 million divorce settlement in August 2016 and seemed to have put their acrimonious divorce behind them until she penned an op-ed for the Washington Post detailing her experiences as a domestic violence survivor.

The article did not mention Depp by name but he filed for defamation last March, saying it led to speculation that he was the abuser and caused him to lose the role of Captain Jack Sparrow.

There are no timestamps or clues as to when the pictures were taken however security guards have previously gone on record to state that Musk visited Heard on multiple occasions before and after she filed for divorce in May 2016

Depp, 55, moved out of the Eastern Columbia Building (pictured) a month after the split but Heard carried on living there until December 2016, DailyMail.com understands

His legal action further accused Heard of 'spending time in a new relationship' with Musk almost immediately after their wedding in February 2015.

'Only one calendar month after Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard were married - while Mr. Depp was out of the country, filming in March 2015 - Eastern Columbia Building personnel testified that Ms. Heard received Musk ''late at night'' at Mr. Depp's penthouse,' the suit alleges.

'Specifically, Ms. Heard asked staff at the Eastern Columbia Building to give her ''friend Elon'' access to the building's parking garage and the penthouse elevator ''late at night,'' and they testified that they did so.

'Building staff would then see Ms. Heard's ''friend Elon'' leaving the building the next morning.'

Depp doubled down by subpoenaing Musk for any texts, emails, letters or communications he exchanged with Heard during their marriage or anything mentioning alleged incidents of domestic violence.

He specifically wants to know what she told the tech tycoon about the May 21, 2016 blowout fight that resulted in Heard seeking a restraining order, accusing Depp of hurling a phone at her and beating her.

Depp has always argued that he was the victim of an 'elaborate hoax' instigated by his ex-wife, who 'faked' her injuries with makeup

Depp has always argued that he was the victim of an 'elaborate hoax' instigated by his ex-wife, who 'faked' her injuries with makeup.

Around two months after the break-up Heard was linked to Musk in tabloid reports suggesting they spent a weekend together in Miami.

The following April she was photographed holding hands with the dad-of-six, who divorced Westworld actress Talulah Riley in January 2015.

However the relationship was on and off until the couple finally called it quits in 2018.

Heard's lawyers have previously described Depp's allegation of infidelity as 'frivolous' and an attempt to 'silence' the Aquaman actress.

Sources close to Musk described it as 'irrelevant nonsense' and declined to comment beyond reiterating a statement issued by the entrepreneur's rep last March.

'Elon and Amber didn't start seeing each other until May 2016, and even then it was infrequent,' Musk's spokesman said. 'Their relationship didn't become romantic until some time later.'

Sources close to Musk (pictured in Depp's elevator) described it as 'irrelevant nonsense' and declined to comment beyond reiterating a statement issued by the entrepreneur's rep last March

'Elon and Amber didn't start seeing each other until May 2016, and even then it was infrequent,' Musk's spokesman said. 'Their relationship didn't become romantic until some time later'

Musk made a further cameo last week in London's High Court where Depp is also suing News Group Newspapers over a 2018 article in The Sun newspaper that described him as 'wife beater'.

The court was read a text message from Depp to a friend that made an apparent reference to Musk: 'Brother, I'm sorry to even ask but she sucked mollusc's crooked d*** and he gave her some sh**y lawyers.

'I have no mercy left of what I thought was love for this gold-digging, low level, dime-a-dozen mushy, pointless, flappy fish market.'

Actor James Franco is another A-lister caught up in the ex-couple's legal war after he was pictured riding the same elevator with Heard on May, 22, 2016, the night after her infamous dust-up with Depp.

Heard's legal team said Franco once lived in the same apartment complex and was simply taking the elevator at the same time.

But Depp's lawyers hit him with a subpoena last July and want to grill him over what the pair discussed and whether she had any visible bruises.

Caught up: James Franco is being subpoenaed by lawyers for Johnny Depp after video shows that he was with Amber Heard on May 21, 2016 (Heard and Franco above)

Depp and Heard met on the set of The Rum Diary, back in 2011, married four years later  then split in a little over a year amid a slew of blood curdling domestic violence allegations and tabloid headlines.

Heard wrote in her December 2018 op-ed: 'I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture's wrath for women who speak out.'

That prompted Depp to file for defamation in Virginia, where the Washington Post is based, stating: 'Ms. Heard is not a victim of domestic abuse; she is a perpetrator.'

Heard responded with a 300-page filing of her own, cataloging the years of alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of 'the monster'. The case is due to be heard in August.

'Elon Musk and Amber Heard seem not to know that Mr. Depp's penthouse elevator button that says 'M' does not take you to Mars,' Depp's lawyer Adam Waldman said of our exclusive pictures.

'Musk - aka Penthouse Guy - has publicly denied sneaking up to see Ms Heard a month after her marriage to Johnny but that will soon be put to the test, as will her entire abuse hoax.

'As the evidence mounts up, who was where, and knew what, when?'
The mobile operator has refilled balance of doctors and healthcare personnel struggling with coronavirus.

Azercell Telecom LLC, the leading mobile operator of the country, has implemented next social responsibility initiative in the struggle against coronavirus (COVID-19)pandemic. This time, the company provided communication support to healthcare staff who selflessly fulfill their duties by risking their lives in the fight against coronavirus in various hospitals and quarantine centers. Thus, Azercell, making no distinction between its subscribers and the subscribers of the other two operators, uploaded AZN 50 to the balance of over 600 medical workers currently at service. The amount can be used for all services allowed by modern mobile communication (on-net / off-net / international calls, SMS, mobile internet). It is worth noting that the list of healthcare workers was submitted by the Management Union of Medical Territorial Units (TBIB) under the auspices of State Agency on Mandatory Health Insurance.

Notably, the mobile operator allocated 2 million manats to the Fund to Support Fight Against Coronavirus, established by the Decree of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan dated March 19, 2020 to contribute to the preventive measures against COVID-19. Azercell is the first mobile operator, which has provided free calls to the Hotline service of the State Agency on Mandatory Health Insurance (1542). At the same time, the company uploaded the amount of AZN 50 to the balance of active roaming subscribers who are currently in the countries with limited transport conditions with Azerbaijan.

Moreover, Azercell, in cooperation with Regional Development Public Union (RDPU), presented holiday gifts to 5728 low-income families. The project aimed to support the state's social isolation measures to prevent and combat the spread of coronavirus infection. Also, Azercell subscribers gained an opportunity to donate to the Fund to Support Fight Against Coronavirus via Mobile Payment.

Furthermore, the mobile operator offered its subscribers aged above 65 an opportunity to benefit from Azercells customer services without leaving home promises. Paid mobile customer services will be provided free of charge for this group of people. Thus, only in necessary cases, such as SIM-card replacement, the issues will be solved by visiting the premises of the citizens.

Azercell Telecom LLC intends to continue such initiatives to support our society further on.

For more information, please contact [email protected]



The leader of the mobile communication industry, the largest taxpayer and the biggest investor of the non-oil sector of Azerbaijan Azercell Telecom LLC was founded in 1996. Currently, 4.8 million subscribers choose Azercell services. Mobile operator controls 49% of market share; while its geographical coverage constitutes 99.2% (excluding the occupied territories); and population coverage 99.8%. Azercell was the pioneering mobile operator to introduce a number of innovations in Azerbaijan, including GSM technology, advance payment system, mobile internet services, 24/7 call center service (*1111), 7/7 Front Office service, Azercell Express offices, M2M services, technology and pilot version of 5G, mobile, online customer care services and customer services through social media, mobile e-signature service ASAN Imza etc. Rapidly increasing network of Azercell covers nearly 60 regions of the country, including Baku and Absheron peninsula. According to the results of mobile network quality and wireless coverage mapping surveys by international systems, Azercells network demonstrated the best results among the mobile operators of Azerbaijan. Azercell is the only company in Azerbaijan and CIS region which has been awarded Gold Certificate of International Investors in People Standard.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
We've all seen the documentaries that feature scenes of mass migrations on land. Those videos are pretty impressive showing all sorts of animals -- birds, mammals and other creatures -- on the move. What wasn't known was to what extent this was taking place in the deepest parts of our oceans.

That was until now.

Scientists have, for the first time, documented seasonal migrations of fish across the seafloor in deep-sea fish, revealing an important insight that will further scientific understanding of the nature of our planet.

"We are extremely excited about our findings, which demonstrate a previously unobserved level of dynamism in fishes living on the deep sea floor, potentially mirroring the great migrations which are so well characterised in animal systems on land," said Rosanna Milligan, Assistant Professor at Nova Southeastern University, who started the work at the University of Glasgow.

The study -- published today in the Journal of Animal Ecology and led by Nova Southeastern University (NSU) and the University of Glasgow -- analysed more than seven years of deep-sea photographic data from West Africa, linking seasonal patterns in surface-ocean productivity with observed behavioural patterns of fishes at 1,500 metres.

The deep sea -- greater than 200-meters water depth -- covers most of the world's surface. Recent advances in technology and computational power have hugely improved our ability to access and study deep sea ecosystems, but there are still many basic questions that we simply don't have answers to.

This study now provides evidence of cycles of movement across the seafloor in deep-sea fish, with the study authors believing these movements could be happening in other locations across the world's sea floor too.

This work was only possible because of an international collaboration between industry, academia and government, involving more than 10 organisations across Angola, UK and US. It was done using the Deep-ocean Environmental Long-term Observatory System (DELOS).

The DELOS observatories are permanently left in place on the seafloor (1,400 m depth) and house separate instrumentation "modules" containing oceanographic sensors, cameras and more. The modules are periodically recovered for data download and servicing using a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV).

You can learn more about the DELOS project ONLINE.

"The work really adds to our understanding of movement patterns in deep-sea fishes and suggests reasons for their behaviours, Milligan said. "Because we were able to link the abundances of fish observed at the seafloor to satellite-derived estimates of primary productivity, our results suggest that even top-level predators and scavengers in the deep oceans could be affected by changes filtering down from the surface of the ocean."

Dr. David Bailey, Senior Lecturer in Marine Biology at the University of Glasgow's Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, said: "Animal migrations are really important in nature, because when animals move from place to place, they transport energy, carbon and nutrients. We were only able to discover this behaviour because of the collective expertise and decade-long commitment of the Universities and industry partners. These kinds of long-term projects and the datasets they generate are vital to understanding ongoing change in the oceans and how they may be impacted in the future."
Amid the ongoing nationwide lockdown to curb the coronavirus spread, the Rajasthan police has been resorting to diverse measures ranging from arresting people to extralegal ones like making them do sit ups to force them them stay indoors.

The state on Wednesday braved fifth day of the lockdown, which had started for Rajasthan on Sunday, the day the country observed "janata curfew" on the calls of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Markets in various cities and towns of Rajasthan stayed closed and streets wore deserted looks as state authorities resorted to various steps to keep people stay indoors during the lockdown.

In Jaipur alone, police arrested 27 persons till Wednesday for violating lockdown provisions and prohibitory orders under section 144 of the CrPC.

Since March 22, they also seized a total of 831 vehicles, including two wheelers and four wheelers, to dissuade people from venturing out of their homes.

In Kota division, as many as 724 vehicles, including 315 from Jhalawar district and 409 from Bundi district, were seized and 88 challans were slapped against violaters till Wednesday



In Baran district, the authorities have put up several life-size posters, spelling out Ko-Ro-Na as meaning "Koi Road par Na nikle" -- the one described as antidote to the coronavirus sprad by Prime Minister Narndra Modi during his appeal to the people to observe "janata curfew" earlier.

In Kota, police personnel were seen making people do sit ups for venturing out of their homes without reasons.

The stringent measures by police in Jaipur and elsewhere accompanied humanitarian gestures too by both governmental and non-governmental organisation to feed the poor and help the needy.

Sumer Singh, a Jaipur social worker, urged residents to make food packets and send them to different places at scheduled time for their distribution among the poor and hungry.

Narayan Seva Sansthan, a voluntary organization of Udaipur, gave a donation of Rs 2 lakh to the Rajasthan Chief Minister's Relief Fund for combating coronavirus, besides distributing 2000 masks free of cost to the police personnel and the poor.

President of the Sansthan Prashant Aggarwal said that during the nationwide lockdown, 2000 food packets will be distributed every day to the needy ones with the help of police.

Officials of the Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot's ministries have announced a monetary contribution of Rs 3.85 crore to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund.

As of Wednesday, Rs 26 crore had been received by the Chief Minister's Relief Fund for COVID-19.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Favolosa, left, is headed to Florida along with another ship owned by Carnival Corporation. Both have sick people on board amid the COVID-19 pandemic. (Bernd Wuestneck/DPA/AFP via Getty Images)

2 Cruise Ships With Sick People on Board Held Off Florida Shore

Two cruise ships with people on board with influenza-like symptoms are being held off the coast of Florida as the U.S. Coast Guard helped evacuate the sick people from the vessels.

The Coast Guard Captain of the Port, Sector Miami, issued an order Thursday that both vessels need to remain three miles offshore, according to PortMiami.

The ships must refrain from any personnel transfer operations while the Unified Command approves the ships disembarkation plan for the sick crew members, a statement said.

The command includes the Coast Guard, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other agencies.

Pictures later showed first responders evacuating sick crew members ashore. They were being taken to hospitals in the area. The first responders are specially trained to conduct transport of highly infectious disease patients from any point to airports or a designated treatment hospital.

First responders evacuate sick crew members with flu-like symptoms from two cruise ships, the Costa Favolosa and Costa Magica at U.S. Coast Guard station at Port of Miami after the Florida Department of Health reported more than 2,300 confirmed cases of the CCP virus, in Miami, Florida on March 26, 2020. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

The Costa Cruises ships, the Favolosa and the Magica, had roughly 30 cases of flu-like illnesses onboard, a spokesman for Carnival Corporation, which owns Costa, told The Epoch Times in an email earlier in the day.

A Carnival spokesperson told the Miami Herald that passengers that were on the ship disembarked in Guadeloupe and Martinique before flying home. At least eight people who were on board the ships have since tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP virus.

The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Partys coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus, which first appeared in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.

Some 1,009 crew members remain on board the Favolosa and 930 workers remain on board the Magica, the company said.

Symptoms of COVID-19 are similar to the flu and include fever, cough, and shortness of breath.

Members of a cleaning crew are seen while working on a cruse ship at Port of Miami after the Florida Department of Health reported more than 2300 confirmed cases of CCP virus in Miami, Florida on March 26, 2020. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

PortMiami, where the ships are headed, did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement earlier in the week, the port said its operating under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines for preventative measures against the new illness.

It also said that it is accepting cruise ships returning for the next month but will review each ship on a case-by-case basis along with the U.S. Coast Guard and CDC.

Miami-Dade County has been waiving all lay berth fees for home-ported vessels that request to berth alongside the port in the next 30 days. Working with its cruise partners, PortMiami stands ready to provide any additional assistance, it stated.

A third cruise ship is also headed to Florida, Holland Americas Zaandam.

A total of 42 passengers and crew members on board that ship have influenza-like symptoms, the company said this week, out of 1,243 passengers and 586 crew members on board.

The MS Zaandam at sea. (Courtesy of Holland America)

Our intention is to proceed to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for arrival on March 30, however plans are still being finalized. Alternative options also are being developed, it said on Tuesday.

Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale is currently open and operational, according to its website. A unified command had been put into place and cruise ships entering the port require concurrent approvals from a number of agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Coast Guard.

The port didnt respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman told a local outlet that the command would make a decision later on whether to let the ship dock.

Gov. Ron DeSantiss office didnt respond to a request for comment on the three ships.

Cruise lines suspended travel over the pandemic earlier this month but dozens of ships were already out at sea and some have not yet disembarked everyone on board.
The coronavirus pandemic and subsequent economic shutdown will see more than 1 million Australians lose their jobs by November, new analysis suggests.

Figures released by the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre on Tuesday reveal Australias unemployment rate will rocket from 5.1 per cent past the 1992 high of 11.1 per cent as quickly as August before hitting 12.7 per cent in May 2021, the highest level since current unemployment reporting began in 1978.

People line up at Centrelink in Perth this week. Credit:Sharon Smith.

That means by November, 1 million will be out of work, on top of the existing 700,000 unemployed Australians. State by state New South Wales would be the hardest hit with more than 350,000 job losses followed by Victoria with 277,000.

The figures were derived by drilling down to impacts at nearly a job-by-job basis.
Federal prosecutors in 2018 wanted to criminally charge Walmart over the company's opioid sales, but top Trump administration law enforcement officials killed that effort, a bombshell report says.

In a ProPublica article published Wednesday, the investigative journalism outlet reported that prosecutors from the federal Eastern District of Texas over two years had amassed "highly damning evidence" that the world's biggest retailer had filled opioid prescriptions for customers who then died of overdoses  over pharmacists' objections.

Pharmacists working in the state sounded the alarm to Walmart's corporate office, noting that many of the prescriptions were coming from doctors who were running "pill mills," the report said.

But Trump appointees at the Department of Justice squashed the case, the article reports.

Investigators obtained records that showed pharmacists working in Walmarts in other states, including Maine, North Carolina, Kansas and Washington, also voiced concern, citing "hundreds of thousands of suspicious or inappropriate opioid prescriptions," ProPublica reported.

But Walmart, upon learning of those issues, did not stem its opioid distribution. Instead, an opioid compliance manager in an email obtained by investigators said the company should focus on "driving sales," according to ProPublica.

But Walmart at this point had escalated its concerns about the case to the Justice Department, and the investigators were told to stand down, ProPublica's report said.

On Aug. 31, 2018, Walmart received a letter saying that the Justice Department would not prosecute, according to ProPublica, citing a letter from Walmart's lawyer that lays out the chronology of the case.

Prosecutors tried to save their case, meeting in October 2018 with Uttam Dhillon, acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who was floored by the case, the news site reported.

"Jesus Christ," Dhillon, a Trump administration official, reportedly said to prosecutors, including Joe Brown, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, and Heather Rattan, known for prosecuting members of drug cartels. "Why aren't we talking about this as a criminal case?"

The prosecutors then obtained a meeting with the Justice Department, including then-U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and laid out their evidence against the retailer.

Walmart, with 4,756 stores in the United States, poses significant danger to the country, those prosecutors argued, noting that it was a repeat offender, having agreed to a settlement with the DEA seven years earlier in which it had promised to improve its controls over the abuse of opioid prescriptions, according to ProPublica.

Prosecutors now believed they needed to pursue the "extraordinary path of a criminal prosecution," ProPublica reported. Dhillon emphasized at that meeting that Walmart had broken the law and suggested a fine wouldn't harm the company since it "has more money than it knows what to do with," according to the article.

"Not that there's anything wrong with that," Rosenstein responded, according to the report. "We are all capitalists here."

Rosenstein quickly left the meeting and prosecutors' push to revive the criminal case died, the article said.

Afterwards, the Trump administration stymied several other attempts to hold the mega retailer accountable, including prohibiting the prosecution of individual employees and foiling a civil case, ProPublica reported.

Neither the Justice Department nor the Eastern District of Texas immediately responded to a request for comment from CNBC.

In an interview with CNBC, Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove reiterated statements he made to ProPublica. He called the investigation inappropriate and said the company is "disappointed with the improper behavior of a few Texas-based prosecutors who appear to have violated multiple Justice Department rules in the investigation of our company. We continue to work closely with federal and state law enforcement agencies across the country to fight the opioid crisis."

Hargrove added that the ProPublica story does not take into account the measures the company put into place to combat the nation's opioid addiction crisis. "During the period in question," Hargrove said, "Walmart sent over 60,000 leads about potentially concerning prescriptions and doctors to the DEA based on prescriptions that our pharmacists refused to fill."

Walmart denies taking responsibility for the deaths reportedly caused by opioids sold by the company's pharmacies, Hargrove said in follow-up comments to CNBC.

ProPublica reported that in response to Walmart's statement, Brown, the federal prosecutor in Texas, said: "Drug Enforcement Agency investigations of multiple opioid overdose deaths in the Eastern District of Texas resulted in our office opening parallel civil and criminal investigations of Walmart's pharmacy practices."

"These investigations have been handled appropriately, and according to Department of Justice policy. These investigations, which we would typically not confirm or deny, but do so now because of Walmart's statement, continue. Accordingly, it would be inappropriate to comment further on the specific facts of the case."

"Walmart chooses now to attack the investigators, a tried and true method to avoid oversight. We are confident that once all of the facts in this matter are public the hollowness of this criticism will be apparent. It is not the goal of our office to embarrass Walmart. Walmart's behavior in dispensing opioid medication in the middle of a public health crisis should embarrass Walmart."
Nairobi, Kenya  With limited resources and insufficient beds in intensive care units (ICUs), many African governments are looking to prevent the spread of the coronavirus as much as possible. In almost every East African country, cases have been confirmed.

Kenya on Thursday reported its first death from COVID-19, while the total number of confirmed cases in the country rose to 31. All international flights are suspended, and a curfew from 7pm to 5am is in place.

According to the United Nations, the African continent is seeing an extremely rapid evolution of the coronavirus pandemic.

Kenya is known for its matatus  minibuses that often transport more people than they have seats. The vehicles are typically used by millions of Kenyans on a daily basis. But amid fears that the informal network could be a weak link in the fight against the coronavirus, Kenyan authorities have issued a series of directives for matatu companies.

All matatus now have to provide hand-sanitisers for all passengers before entering. Vehicles need to be cleaned twice a day and long-distance operators are asked to keep a detailed list of all their passengers. In order to prevent contamination, Kenyan officials have said that 14-seater matatus will carry only eight passengers, and vehicles that carry more than 30 passengers will carry not more than 60 percent of their capacity.

But with the country not in lockdown, Kenyans continue to go to work, while many people have jobs that cannot be done from home. For some, a day without work would mean a day without food.

In an interview with Kenyan newspaper The Star, Cabinet Secretary for Transport James Macharia said matatu companies have to act now. I have been telling the matatu associations that if this thing hits us hard, there will be nobody to carry. They must invest themselves to ensure their business model is sustained, he said.

And so, among many drivers and matatu touts who are not yet taking precautions, some matatu staffers in Nairobis Westlands matatu terminal are wearing face masks as they disinfect their buses and clean their passengers hands.

Many people will not be able to afford to go to the hospital. And if you cant seek medical attention, you will die. We are taking every measure seriously, said one driver.
New Delhi, March 26 : Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday announced that all the shops, factories and online services associated with essential services can operate 24 hours all week, and no additional license was required for it.

He said e-commerce companies in Delhi could home deliver essential commodities.

Speaking to the media, Kejriwal said the Delhi Police has been asked to allow the person carrying essential items to move without an e-pass.

Amid the outbreak of COVID-19 and the 21-day lockdown to combat the pandemic, Kejriwal announced that all the essential services will remain open during the lockdown, and assured that people who were involved in delivering these services will be allowed to move.

"Online service providers/e-retailers delivering essential services and goods to be allowed. All essential services shops can remain open 24 hours so that there is no rush of people," said Kejriwal, adding he held a meeting with Delhi Police officials and told them to allow such services.

He said the Assistant Commissioners of Police (ACPs) have been tasked with ensuring that all the grocery shops and other utility stores remain open.

"There will be no restriction on e-commerce companies providing essential services. We have also formulated a plan by which we can check if the essential service providers are working at the ground and if they have enough stock or not." He said the Sub Divisional Magistrates (SDM) and ACPs will ensure that all shops in their area providing essential services were open and they have enough stock of essential commodities.

"We have witnessed that the shops which are providing essential services are facing huge crowds and therefore we have decided that shops selling essential items will be allowed to remain open 24/7." Kejriwal said in Delhi, the Central government, the Delhi government, police and the residents were working together to combat this pandemic.

'Most of the people are following the instructions and staying indoor, but we have some cases of violations of the lockdown orders. I will request every resident of Delhi to follow the lockdown order," said Kejriwal.

The chief minister said the government is issuing e-passes to people engaged in manufacturing, transport, and storage of essential items, as well as the people who work in private or government essential services.

"Also, people engaged in the supply and distribution of five basic essential items like milk, vegetables, ration shops, chemists and pharmacists. The helpline number for this is 1031. You can call the helpline number, intimate the authorities regarding the essential services you are engaged in, and you will be issued the e-pass," he added.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
By PTI

DUMKA: A 16-year-old girl has alleged that nine persons raped her in Dumka district, after a friend misguided her to take a shortcut through a jungle, a police officer said on Thursday.

Superintendent of Police Y S Ramesh said raids have been conducted to nab the culprits after the girl, who is currently hospitalised, filed a complaint with the police against the friend and eight others who are not known to her.

In her statement to police, the girl said two of her friends had ferried her to Karudih More under Gopikandar police station area, which is near his village, in a two- wheeler from Dumka town in the afternoon of Tuesday.

She then called up another friend requesting him to take her to the village.

The friend reached the spot in a two-wheeler with another person not known to her, the SP said.

The friend told her that they should take a short cut through a forest claiming that policemen were checking vehicles.

The girl said she found seven men at a spot inside the jungle and they joined her friend and the other person in raping her.

They fled when she fell unconscious. She regained consciousness the next morning, the SP said.

"The statement of the girl was taken at a hospital where she is under treatment," the police officer said.

The age group of the accused is not yet known.
On March 25, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources suspended issuance of most burning permits until further notice due to the coronavirus outbreak. Columbus Fire Chief Randy Koehn is discouraging burning in Dane and Dodge Counties and permits are required in Columbia County.

All DNR burn permits suspended and will no longer be issued (written or electronically). No burning debris piles in barrels, on the ground, grass or wooded areas. Small campfires for warming or cooking are OK but, strongly discouraged; burning debris in a campfire ring is not considered a campfire.

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Check website dnr.wi.gov, keyword fire and the DNR social media for the up-to-date status. DNR will continue to remain in compliance with department leadership mandates and recommendations and will evaluate wildfire and pandemic risks as the situation evolves.
Politics Axios

Democratic leaders have found a mechanism to enable them to bypass an initial Republican filibuster and debate the party's sweeping elections reform bills, according to a new leadership memo obtained by Axios.Why it matters: The strategy is the latest example of how Democrats are seeking new ways to try to bypass Senate procedures that are blocking their agenda. But the ultimate outcome will likely be the same: insufficient support to change the 60-vote threshold needed to pass sweeping voting r
After being slammed for her recent camping trip to Moreton Island with longtime boyfriend Josh Barker, Elyse Knowles tried to explain herself in a series of videos posted to Instagram Stories on Thursday.

The 27-year-old model maintained she wasn't aware of how serious the coronavirus pandemic was when she and Josh set out on their holiday.

'A lot has changed in a week, let alone daily. We were away last week, and it was more so we weren't near anyone,' she began, calling the trip 'really lovely'.

Offering an explanation: After being slammed for her recent camping trip to Moreton Island with longtime boyfriend Josh Barker, Elyse Knowles tried to explain herself in a series of videos posted to Instagram Stories on Thursday

But she said as soon as they became aware of the severity of the situation, they made every effort to return home to Byron Bay.

'As things started to change, we started to know that we needed to be home, and tried to get on earlier ferries, but because we were on an island, we couldn't,' she continued.

'So, we isolated as much as we could, we didn't see anyone, and came back on the ferry when we could.'

Escalating quickly: The 27-year-old model maintained she wasn't aware of how serious the coronavirus pandemic was when she and Josh set out on their holiday

Feeling defensive, Elyse said she had actually come into contact with more people in Byron Bay than she did the entire time she was on Moreton Island.

'Yesterday I had no food in the house, so I went down the street and I probably saw five times as many people as I saw on the whole entire island in Moreton Island,' she added.

She then urged her followers to stay at home 'enjoying each other's company, and just taking a moment to really breathe and relax as much as possible'.

'A lot has changed in a week, let alone daily. We were away last week, and it was more so we weren't near anyone,' she began, calling the trip 'really lovely'

On Wednesday, Elyse shared a happy photo of herself and Josh, 31, during their camping holiday on Instagram, calling it a 'magical week'.

'Magical week watching sunrise to sunset. Camping with loved ones and embracing nature,' she captioned it.

'No earlier ferries so we embraced being near no one. Time to hit the road before the boarders close.'

Heading home: Elyse said as soon as they became aware of the severity of the situation, they made every effort to return home to Byron Bay

Her post prompted many followers to call her out, accusing the couple of being 'insensitive', 'moronic' and 'tone deaf'.

A fired-up Josh responded to critics in a lengthy comment on Elyse's post, accusing them of 'bullying and harassment'.

'So for all you morons that don't know our circumstances, our ferry's [sic] to Moreton we're [sic] booked in January,' he began.

'As things started to change, we started to know that we needed to be home, and tried to get on earlier ferries, but because we were on an island, we couldn't,' she said

'There wasn't a camping ban when we left the mainland a week ago otherwise they wouldn't have let us go, and then when we actually tried to change our ferry to get home earlier "like everyone else on the island" they were fully booked.

'Geez who would have thought a small ferry that runs once a day would have been full... Why doesn't everybody show some respect and love for one another in this time of need and all get together to help each other through it instead of increase levels of hatred and anger towards people that don't deserve it.'

As of Thursday evening, there are 2,725 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia, resulting in 12 deaths.
OROVILLE, Calif. - Tri Counties Bank told Action News Now an employee at the Oroville branch tested positive for the coronavirus and is home in quarantine.

According to Marketing Director Michael Murphy, the employee recently returned from a trip.

The employee was working at the branch from Tuesday, March 10 through Friday, March 13, as well as a half-day on Tuesday the 17.

RELATED: Continuing Coronavirus Coverage

The company is looking through transactions, according to Murphy, to learn who was at the branch when the employee was there.

Murphy said the bank is in contact with Butte County Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and are following proper protocols.

It is unclear if this is one of the four cases confirmed by public health. Lisa Almaguer of public health said she can not confirm a place of employment or any demographics of any confirmed patients.

The Oro Dam Boulevard location closed on March 24 and will be closed through Friday, March 27 to partake in deep cleaning. Both ATMs will remain open at the Oroville location.
[March 26, 2020] CardioQuip MCH-1000 Earns CE Mark Approval

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- CardioQuipTM, LLC, a medical device manufacturer focused on development and commercialization of patient temperature control and cardiovascular perfusion technology announced today it has received CE Mark approval for the MCH-1000TM Modular Cooler-Heater SeriesTM. The MCH-1000 Series of cooler-heaters is now available to European hospital systems fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. A cooler-heater device is used to regulate patient temperature in many types of medical procedures, especially those involving the heart and lungs. Most notably, the MCH-1000 can potentially be used to treat acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) associated with COVID-19 through a treatmentcalled Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO)1. ECMO provides increased systemic oxygen delivery and mitigates ventilator-induced lung injury.



"Landing the CE Mark is a tremendous milestone for CardioQuip," said Doug Platt, CEO. "The approval allows us to offer our technology to major hospitals all over the European Union (EU) at a time when it is greatly needed." The CE Mark confirms that the MCH-1000 meets the Essential Requirements of the Medical Device Directive (93/42/EEC). CardioQuip also received ISO 134385:2016 certification of its quality management system following completion of an audit by BSI, an EU Notified Body. The MCH-1000 received FDA 510(k) clearance in the United States in 2011.

Numerous patient deaths linked to non-tuberculosis mycobacterium (NTM) growth in European manufactured cooler-heaters have highlighted the need for safety and water quality in cooler-heaters. The safety of the MCH-1000's open tank design paired with its simplified cleaning protocol and ease of use have made it the best-selling cooler-heater in the U.S. Market. "We are excited to be in the final stages of agreements with European distribution partners to aide our commercialization efforts and get the MCH-1000 to the EU as quickly as possible," added Platt. For more information on the MCH-1000 and CardioQuip, follow us on Twitter @CardioQuip and LinkedIn or visit https://www.cardioquip.com. 1MacLaren G, Fisher D, Brodie D. Preparing for the Most Critically Ill Patients With COVID-19: The Potential Role of Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation. JAMA. Published online February 19, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.2342 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cardioquip-mch-1000-earns-ce-mark-approval-301030455.html SOURCE CardioQuip, LLC

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Coronavirus FAQ

What is the coronavirus?

The coronavirus outbreak started in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and has spread worldwide. The new virus causes a disease known as COVID-19. The virus is part of a larger family of coronaviruses, which can lead to illnesses ranging from a mild common cold to more severe respiratory diseases such as SARS and MERS.

Who is at risk and what are the symptoms?

Public health experts say the new coronavirus is more contagious than the seasonal flu. The majority of people who become sick experience mild symptoms, but some become more seriously ill. People who contract the virus can develop pneumonia, and some have died. People who are elderly or have underlying medical issues are at greater risk of becoming more severely sick. Symptoms of the virus include a cough, fever and shortness of breath.

What should I do if I develop symptoms?

The North Dakota Department of Health advises that people call their health care provider to tell them about recent travel or exposure, and to follow their guidance. Try to avoid contact with other people in the meantime.

What can I do to prevent the virus from spreading?

The health department advises that people wash their hands with soap and water or an alcohol-based hand sanitizer for at least 20 seconds. People who are sick should stay home from work or school, both to protect themselves and others with whom they would come in contact. Avoid touching your face, cover a cough or sneeze with a tissue or an elbow, clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces, and avoid contact with people who are sick.

Where can I find more information?

People with coronavirus-related questions can call the state health department hotline at 866-207-2880. Those who need medical advice should contact their health care provider.

The health department's online coronavirus page: www.health.nd.gov/coronavirus

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's online coronavirus page: www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov
The Army has approved Remote and Austere Conditions Assignment Incentive Pay (RAC-AIP) for soldiers stationed in Alaska. The pay is authorized for Fort Greely, Fort Wainwright and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, effective Dec. 1, 2019.

Soldiers permanently assigned to Alaska may request RAC-AIP, provided they meet the following eligibility criteria. They must:

Be on active duty. Be in the grade of colonel or below. Be permanently assigned to Alaska from a previous duty station outside of the State of Alaska. Be within 90 days of arrival to Alaska. Agree to serve the prescribed tour length (36, 24 or 12 months). Not have previously received RAC-AIP during the current tour or a previous tour within the last six years. Not be under any Uniform Code of Military Justice process (to include Article 15 or court-martial proceedings) or investigations. Meet Army standards for retention, including physical fitness and body composition at the time of approval and must remain in good standing throughout the AIP tour. Not be permanently non-deployable.

RAC-AIP will be paid in a lump-sum payment and is taxable, with payments based on the soldier's duty location.

Incoming soldiers at Wainwright and Greely without command-sponsored dependents will receive a $2,000 lump sum; those with command-sponsored dependents will get $4,000.

Incoming soldiers without command-sponsored dependents at JBER will receive $1,000; those with command-sponsored dependents will receive $2,000.

The incentive payments are available only to soldiers who reported to Alaska on or after Dec. 1, 2019.

In a news release, Maj. Gen. Peter Andrysiak Jr., head of U.S. Army Alaska (USARAK), said, "Approval of AIP will drastically improve the quality of life for our Arctic Warriors and their families stationed in Alaska through acknowledgment of the challenging conditions and provide additional financial support while serving in the harsh and remote Arctic environment."

The USARAK G-1 will identify eligible soldiers and publicize the information necessary to begin the payment process.

Keep Up With Military Pay Updates

Military pay benefits are constantly changing. Make sure you're up-to-date with everything you've earned. Subscribe to Military.com to receive updates on all of your military pay and benefits, delivered directly to your inbox.
[March 26, 2020] Investor Alert: Warning about work from home scams during COVID-19 crisis

VANCOUVER, March 26, 2020 /CNW/ - The British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) is warning the public about potentially fraudulent ads by companies offering opportunities to work from home as securities traders during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ads state that traders can keep a large percentage of the profits, and they don't need experience or a licence; however, the firms demand payment of fees from would-be traders, and the BCSC believes neither the firms nor fees are legitimate.

In Canada, anyone in the business of trading securities must be registered with the securities regulator in each province or territory where they do business, unless an exemption applies. To become registered, individuals need to meet minimum proficiency standards. The BCSC expects that similar scams will continue to increase as more Canadians are looking for alternative sources of income due to layoffs or requirements to stay home during the COVID-19 crisis. Anyone who has information about these schemes is urged to contact the BCSC Inquiries line at 604-899-6854 or 1-800-373-6393 or to file a complaint online.



The BCSC is also warning investors about companies claiming to have products or services that will prevent, detect or cure COVID-19. At this time, there is no vaccine or natural health product that is authorized to treat or protect against COVID-19. Be cautious of any claims that a company has a solution to help stop the pandemic. Reliable information about COVID-19 is available from the World Health Organization and the Government of Canada .

More information about the BCSC's response to the COVID-19 crisis is available here. About the British Columbia Securities Commission (www.bcsc.bc.ca) The British Columbia Securities Commission is the independent provincial government agency responsible for regulating capital markets in British Columbia through the administration of the Securities Act. Our mission is to protect and promote the public interest by fostering: A securities market that is fair and warrants public confidence

A dynamic and competitive securities industry that provides investment opportunities and access to capital Learn how to protect yourself and become a more informed investor at www.investright.org SOURCE British Columbia Securities Commission

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PHILIPSBURG:--- Airport officials at PJIAE have secured 5,000 (N-95) masks for medical and staff after overcoming impossible odds to get them to St. Maarten.

While doctors and nurses globally, continue to complain about the chronic shortage of protective masks, similar shortages at health care facilities on the island will soon be wiped out  thanks to PJIAE where Airport officials personally met a KLM flight from the Netherlands on Tuesday, with a shipment of masks on board.

According to PJIAE CEO, Mr. Brian Mingo, N-95 protective masks have been obtained with the help of counterpart officials at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands.

The specialized protective masks were ordered by the Airport Authority for its own use more than six weeks ago when the airport began to make its own contingency plans in the event of a worsening scenario regarding the spread of the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19).

Somehow our order of protective masks was delayed because of the worldwide shortage, but when we explained the dire situation that our own medical teams on St. Maarten were finding themselves with a shortage of masks, Schiphol did the generous thing and filled part of our order from their own needed supplies, said Mr. Mingo.

The Airport chief said he was most grateful to Schiphol, not only as a corporate partner to the Airport but also as a supportive company, assisting another company where it can. He appealed to other companies on St. Maarten to follow this example of assisting each other to help contain the spread of the virus on the island.

It is in the best interest of all of us to work together as one by following the instructions of the Prime Minister and government and most of all by following the health practices and especially by practicing social distancing, washing of hands and keeping hands away from our faces, said Mr. Mingo.

He said in the case of the respirator masks for the Health Sector, he believes the medical teams there who are currently in the frontline of treating sick patients and keeping the virus at bay in the isolation units are deserving of any help they can get.

It is possible for some persons to work from home or remain at home and not be exposed, but there are also those persons who, due to the nature of their work, have to be out every day and are facing the risk of infection every day and are also putting their loved-ones and families at risk as a result. Anything we can do to help minimize the risk for them, is not just good corporate citizenship, but just good sense, continued the Airport CEO Mr. Mingo.

Mr. Mingo said while he was able to make good use of his contacts at Schiphol Airport to secure the shipment of face masks for St. Maartens medical personnel, it was also the persistent work of PJIAEs Safety and Security Officer, Mr. Connally Connor and Executive Consultant, Mr. Emile van der Weerd, who did not give up on their attempts to locate the specially designed masks when they were told time and again that none were presently available.

Mr. Connor is also head of the COVID-19 Task Force at PJIAE which we put together in mid- February in anticipation of these developments, said Mr. Mingo. He said with the assistance of Mr. Connor and his team, various protocols have been put into place at PJIAE to protect personnel, visitors, members of the public.

We recently walked the Prime Minister and other government officials through these protocols that we have put in place and she was satisfied that we are taking all the necessary precautionary steps we can to help contain the spread of the virus, at least from this port of entry, continued Mr. Mingo. Among the steps taken at PJIAE:

 Managing the spread and risk of COVID-19 to all passengers and visitors to and from PJIAE including the installation of an isolation unit and 12 new handwash stations.

 Mitigating and managing the impact on the economy of St. Maarten together with the Prime Minister, the EOC and international COVID-19 agencies.

PJIAE Executive Consultant, Mr. Emile van de Weerd said the presentation of protective masks to the St. Maarten Medical Center (SMMC) is really a call to action for other companies on the island to play their part and continue to play their part in a combined effort to contain the COVID-19 for obvious economic and social reasons. He especially appealed to hotel owners and the hospitality sector to follow the example of major hotel chains around the world who have also taken amazing steps to assist their respective communities to contain the spread of COVID-19.

We are already seeing how hospitals and other medical facilities worldwide can quickly become swamped through lack of resources to accommodate large incidents of infections in the community, therefore we have to be especially careful to follow government guidelines and protocols together in a concerted way, said Mr. Emile van de Weerd.

The Airport advisor said the efforts made by Mr. Brian Mingo to secure delivery of the N-95 respirator masks should also not be understated. The CEO was dogged in his determination and motivated us to find a way when it appeared that no way could be found to have them deliver to St. Maarten this week, said Mr. Emile van der Weerd.

Mr. Brian Mingo said of the PJIAE gesture, In the end, we are all in this together. If we can all do our part to keep the spread to a minimum, we can quicker recover and rebuild our airport, our economy, and our St. Maarten, he said.

The Airport chief concluded that the protective masks will be delivered directly to the Ministry of Health (VSA) so that distribution can be centralized in a coordinated and safe way.
Beijing, March 26 : Chinese President Xi Jinping has said China is ready to work with all other parties to step up coordination against COVID-19 and shore up confidence in the international community.

Xi made the remarks on Wednesday during a telephone conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of an extraordinary virtual summit of the Group of 20 (G20) leaders on a coordinated response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Xinhua reported.

The Chinese president noted that Merkel has expressed to the Chinese side sympathies and support, and the German government and various sectors in the country have extended their helping hand in the early days of the outbreak in China, saying that the Chinese people will remember that in their hearts.

Germany is now facing a serious challenge from the epidemic, and the Chinese people feel the same way, said Xi, adding that China firmly supports Germany in its fight against the epidemic and is willing to continue to provide assistance within its capacity.

He also said that the Chinese and German experts have already had video exchanges, and German experts have also travelled to China with the World Health Organization expert team, adding that China is willing to share prevention, control and treatment experience with Germany, strengthen cooperation in vaccine and drug research and development, and contribute to the health and wellbeing of both peoples and global public health security.

"May you lead the German people to overcome the epidemic as soon as possible," Xi said.

Viruses know no borders and are a common challenge faced by humanity, Xi said, adding that no country can stay out of or be immune from the epidemic.

In the battle against the outbreak, China and Germany, as well as China and the European Union (EU) have demonstrated the strength of solidarity and cooperation, and displayed positive energy, Xi said.

Noting that the extraordinary G20 summit is about to be held, Xi said that the Chinese side is ready to work with all sides, including Germany, to step up coordination and speak with one voice to advocate the spirit of sharing the same boat and jointly fight the COVID-19 epidemic, so as to shore up confidence in the international community.

He also proposed that all sides should give consideration to both the present and the long term, coordinate domestic effect and global impact, strengthen macroeconomic policy coordination, stabilize markets, ensure growth, promote employment and people's livelihood, and at the same time push for market opening to ensure openness, stability and safety of the global supply chains.

Xi stressed that the two sides should continue to conduct key political agenda planning, further advance communication and collaboration in various fields, guarantee the stability of China-Germany, China-EU production chains and supply chains, and explore the potential for cooperation in emerging industries, so as to mitigate shocks caused by COVID-19.

For her part, Merkel said as Europe is facing a grim epidemic situation, Germany has been taking decisive measures to contain the outbreak, adding that the German side is grateful for the timely and precious help China has offered, and hopes to cooperate with China in the research and development of vaccines and medicines, so as to set an example of fighting against COVID-19 with solidarity.

The German side advocates that the international community should respect facts, uphold an objective and fair stance, and overcome the outbreak through cooperation, she said.

Merkel called on the G20 members to strengthen coordination and cooperation, support each other, and play a leading role in overcoming the current crisis and stabilizing the global economy.

The German side looks forward to further enhancing Germany-China, EU-China exchanges and cooperation after the pandemic, she said.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
During this coronavirus pandemic, we have been told to protect ourselves and others by practicing social distancing. This means not going out into crowdsno concerts sporting events, and gyms, and stores and restaurants are closing or have limited capacity.

For the most part, we will be at home. After we have cleaned the house, organized closets and drawers, and watched hours of television and video streaming, how about reading a good book? One of the many benefits of reading is that you enter different worlds, meet different people, and leave the worries and cares of your present world behind.

We asked some of our best book lovers, University of Miami librarians, to recommend some of their favorites. In wake of COVID-19, University libraries will be closed but are open online. If you wish to check out items, you can do so digitally. This also includes downloading the Overdrive app on your mobile device.

Roxane Pickens, director of Libraries Learning Commons, described her list of suggested books: These are amazing U.S. writers who show me more of myself and connect me more with the world around meboth real and imagined, she said. Given that the contours of U.S. experience are profoundly complex, I am always appreciative of a writers ability to capture this and move me to laughter, tears, or deep contemplation.

Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America (memoir/essays) by R. Eric Thomas: This is a memoir in essays about growing up and seeing the world differently and often asking oneself if it is worth it since so much seems to be going wrong.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (essays) by Adrienne Maree Brown: A radical self-help and planet-help book, it is designed to shape the futures we want to live in.

The Night Watchman (novel) by Louise Erdrich: Based on the life of the authors grandfather, she tells the story of his work as a night watchman who fought against the dispossession of land from the Native Americans from rural North Dakota to Washington, D. C.

Monument: Poems New and Selected (poetry) by Natasha Trethewey: A collection of poems from this talented poet deals with family history and trauma.

The Measure of Our Lives: A Gathering of Wisdom (quotations) by Toni Morrison, foreword by Zadie Smith: A book that juxtaposes segments from Nobel winner Toni Morrisons body of work, it shapes a story of the writers vision of the world.

Cristina Favretto, head of the Libraries Special Collections

Up in The Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell: I love books about New York City, acknowledged Favretto, and Mitchell, who wrote for the New Yorker in the 30s and 40s, is one of its best and most eloquent raconteurs. The stories may be about a specific place, but they are also about the universal experiences of learning to live in proximity with a wide diversity of people and personalities.

La Storia (History: a Novel) by Elsa Morante: Beautiful and profoundly moving, this is an epic novel about the effects of war through the eyes of an intelligent, wry, and observant child. Although the topic is tragic, the story is filled with luminous and often humorous moments.

Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil: Not just for aficionados of punk, this is a fascinating look at the political and cultural upheavals of the late 1970s through the lens of a group of wildly creative and surprisingly smart misfits.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.: I reread this on a regular basis, and it always reveals wonderful new layers, said Favretto. Its not considered a masterpiece for nothing, folks. If you only read it in high school please, please give it another try.

Martin Tsang, librarian for the Cuban Heritage Collection and curator of Latin American Collections

Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York by Lisandro Perez: I was lucky enough to be taught a graduate seminar class by Professor Perez, which featured some of the early material I am reading in the book and he makes transnational Cuban history come alive in the pages, said Tsang.

Archives of Conjure by Solimar Otero, makes us rethink what constitutes an archive by and for LGBTQ+ and Afro-Latinx practitioners of Atlantic religions and Spiritist traditions. Otero's book explores and expounds on the notion of an archivehow we can include material objects, rituals, and practices such as sewing and beading that create repositories of meaning.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole: I like to reread this book when times get weird, admitted Tsang. The matching of an iconoclast protagonist and its setting in New Orleans is brilliant and the determination to have the novel published posthumously by the author's mother is incredibly poignant.

Ottolenghi Simple: A Cookbook: I am having a lot of fun reading and testing the recipes from this book, Tsang said.

Kelly Miller, associate dean, Learning and Research Services

My area of scholarly expertise is Russian literature, so my first two recommendations are Russian novels in translation, said Miller.

Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, is a study of a man who is trying to decide what to do with his one precious life.

Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, is a novel written for the drawer in the Soviet era that addresses the role of the artist as a spiritual pathfinder and a seeker of truth in a time when the world has turned upside down and lies have become the norm.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, a graphic novel about a young girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, and Trevor Noahs Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood are both good. (Note: Persepolis is also a remarkable film, and Noahs book is available in a wonderful audio book.)

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn: This book has helped me learn strategies for maintaining balance, points out Miller. The book describes the program for the 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course, which is offered regularly at the University of Miami, and which Miller has taken.
Woman Faces 50 Years In Jail For Beating Her 5-Year-Old Son To Death

A Chicago woman has been sentenced to prison for the brutal beating death of her 5-year-old son in 2018.

The 26-year-old woman, Jacqueline Rambert, was sentenced to 50 years in prison on Friday, Associated Press and The Chicago Tribune reported.

Rambert pleaded guilty to child endangerment resulting in death of her son and child endangerment-multiple acts, according to the news outlets. She was sentenced to 50 years for each charge and those sentences will be served concurrently.

Prosecutors dropped a murder charge against her in exchange for her guilty plea.

Rambert also testified against her former boyfriend and co-defendant Tre Henderson, who was convicted on Feb. 13 of first-degree murder for the death of her son, AP reported. Rambert and Henderson were living together at an apartment in Davenport at the time of her sons death.

Her son, JaShawn Russell suffered 17 broken ribs, damage to a number of internal organs and bruises from the top of his head to his ankles after being brutally beaten by Henderson, prosecutors said, AP reported.

At trial, Rambert told the court that Henderson told her to beat her son with a belt after he urinated on himself on April 20. Two days later Henderson brought Bussell to her job and said he fell off the kitchen counter, KWQC reported.

In the days leading up to his death, Bussells condition worsened and he was vomiting and barely had an appetite, Rambert said in court. She also admitted to punching her son on his side, breaking his rib, KWQC reported.

It wasnt until April 27 that Rambert dialed 911 and told an operator that her son was choking and unresponsive at her apartment, KWQC reported.

Bussell was then rushed to a local hospital before being airlifted to University Hospitals in Iowa City, KWQC reported. He died on May 1 of blunt-force injuries to his head.

During the trial, Henderson denied ever striking Bussell, KWQC reported.
As coronavirus cases across the country surge, doctors and hospital personnel are sounding the alarm over a critical shortage of personal protective equipment, including face masks and gloves. Physicians are being asked to ration or reuse masks, and while some companies are donating their stockpiles or mobilizing to make more, health care professionals and lawmakers are begging the federal government to invoke the Defense Production Act to help, likening the shortage of protective gear to being at war with no ammo.

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Over the weekend, The Farewell director Lulu Wang issued a call on Twitter to her more than 67,000 followers: If you live in LA and have any unopened boxes of these masks please DM me. I will make you a cocktail in person when this is all over! When I spoke to Wang over the phone on Wednesday, she told me that she and her friends had collected 1,000 masks and 1,000 gloves so far, with three more donation drop-offs scheduled for this week.

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We discussed her grassroots collection effort, what others can do to help in their communities, and how her famous Nai Nai (grandmother) is handling the crisis in China. The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Rachelle Hampton: Could you tell me more about how this mask drive came about?

Lulu Wang: I definitely cant take credit for the idea. My friend has a sister who is an ER doctor, and the hospital she works at told all of the doctors that they were responsible for getting their own supplies, so that includes masks and gloves and shoe covers and goggles. They would give you a small stipend, but the problem is theyre not available for sale. And the people that are selling them are marking them up at insane percentages.

These doctors were not able to get enough masks, and a lot of them [were] using masks that were not a surgical grade, not using N95 masks, and sometimes having to just reuse the same mask over and over again. I think they were scared. If they treat a patient with [COVID-19], they need to immediately get rid of the mask and put on a new one. Its just really not enough. All I really did was to help amplify that message by putting it on my social media and was really pleased by how many people came through.

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Were you expecting that level of response?

No, I definitely was not expecting so many people to be willing to donate them. I think a lot of people might have a lot of these masks but not realize that they have them. People out there, whether theyre people that work in construction or special effects, probably have them in storage without realizing it. I think it made people realize, Oh, I actually have a lot of these masks and were not using them, so well donate them. As of this weekend, we got like a thousand masks and a thousand pairs of gloves.

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How many people were picking up the supplies? How long did it take to collect all of them?

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It was the night before the lockdown, so I think there were two or three people doing collections before the lockdown at 11:45 or midnight. And then we realized that that was not sustainable because a lot of people who messaged only had like two to five masks, which is still helpfulit all adds upbut its impossible for my friends to drive around. The next day we ended up just doing driveway drop-off donations. People were able to come to the driveway and drop them off. And then this week we have three different locations and times.

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Thats a lot more efficient. It also puts my friends who were collecting less at risk. Its just not sustainable. Thats the frustration, is that the hospitals themselves are not amplifying this message of how much help they really need. And I think if they were publicly talking about this, maybe it would put pressure on the government. I dont have the solution, except to say that its just not sustainable, a few people to do this grassroots, because in all of Los Angeles, theres not enough masks that people have at their home that would sustain [doctors through] this epidemic.

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How much longer are you planning to continue to collect masks?

I think it depends on how we do this week with the drop-off. But I think that theres starting to be better systems in place. Ive heard that hospitals themselves are starting to set up donation drop-off. Hospitals are not so happy about us doing this off the grid because I think its a publicity issue for them.

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Its very tricky because were trying to help, but we dont want to put the jobs of any of the doctors that were helping on the line. Thats a whole other level of frustration and anger. Instead of absolutely screaming for help on the rooftops, [hospitals] dont want the bad press.

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Could you tell me a little bit more about the response youve gotten from the ER doctors who are receiving the supplies?

I think they just feel really grateful because a lot of people in the administration at the hospital were telling them not to use masks. And these are not doctors [telling them not to use masks], these are not trained medical professionals. Theyre executives. Because there is a shortage, they were saying only use N95 masks if you are knowingly treating a [COVID-19] patient. The problem is theres not enough tests, and so its impossible to know who has it.

Doctors have told me that they feel alone in this struggle. They dont feel like anybody cares. I didnt know this before, but my friend whos an ER doctor said a lot of emergency room physicians, particularly in California, are independent contractors, which means they dont work directly for the hospital and they are not on salary. They are hired by a company that is then contracted by the hospital. So these doctors are responsible for their own sick leave, kind of like an Uber driver.

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If theyre sick, they dont get paid. And I think that it was just this feeling of being on the front lines and putting their lives in danger, but nobody actually cares about them staying safe. If they get sick, its not safe for them to treat patients, of course, but they also stop getting paid. They have no way of paying their bills. Its this tricky thing of, like, OK, I have a little bit of a sore throat. Do I stay home so I dont put anyone in danger? But then how do I pay my bills?

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And then on top of that, not having masks or any kind of supplies to stay safe and to keep their patients safe just makes it that much more stressful. The thing that I heard the most was that psychologically, emotionally, it was meaningful that so many people do care about them. It made them feel like they werent alone, and that people care about their safety.

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Do you have any advice for people who want to replicate your collection effort?

I think that its pretty simple. Again, its not sustainable, but any little bit helps. Find a way to collect the masks, whether its having a drop-off location or doing some research to see whether their local hospital is directly taking donations. For me, it was really just using Twitter. Anybody who has a social following to amplify the message. But I think the bigger thing is that we really need to put the pressure on hospitals, but mostly on the government, because the only way to make this sustainable is if the government comes through and helps to make sure that all of the hospitals are properly supplied.

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In your original tweet, you said you would make a cocktail in person for people once this is all over. Are you planning to have a giant cocktail party when this is all over?

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You can tell that I didnt expect that many responses. I thought, well, maybe like 20, a hundred people will have masks, not thousands. Im not sure that I can come through on that promise. But we did joke about doing curbside cocktails because I did that cocktail pop-up like three weeks before all of the outbreaks happened, and we had like 300 people show up. So Barry [Jenkins] and Ive been joking about doing curbside cocktails, so when we make people a cocktail, well just leave it in the driveway. And people will just come through for it.

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Its like, oh, we make like a batch of it, and people will have to just come through with their own cup or something. I dont know that theres a safe way to do cocktails. But yeah, hopefully when we come through, [Black List founder Franklin Leonard] and I will host another one of those pop-up cocktail things and we can celebrate. But until then, everyone should just stay home and stay safe.

How are you handling the coronavirus crisis personally? Are you and Barry self-isolating together?

We just started isolating together yesterday because he was on set for the last year and they just wrapped. When he came back, because he was on set, he self-isolated. And then I was also traveling the last couple of weekends, so I also self-isolated. And once we self-isolated for long enough and both felt OK, thats when we got together. So yeah, were doing OK. I cant speak for him, but I feel really, really, really lucky because Im currently running a writers room [for the series The Expatriates]. I feel lucky that Im able to work from home. Its keeping me busy, and I know a lot of people, including my brother who works in the restaurant business, have lost their jobs. I think thats why, more than ever, I feel like whatever I can do to help to bring awareness, Im trying to do.

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Have any of your projects been affected by this?

Mine has not yet. Before all this happened, we broke off to write our own episodes. There are five writers including me, and Im showrunning, but we were supposed to get back together at the end of the month, which were going to just have to do digitally now. I wouldnt say that its really affected us. Of course, its not the same as being in person, but at least were still able to work on the show together.

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How have your parents and your grandma been responding to the crisis?

A lot of panic, lots of phone calls. My grandma has been isolated much longer, obviously, because the virus hit them first over there [in China]. But I think whats interesting is that were all reading very different news sources. Theres an abundance of information, and its hard to know whats real, even in America. Some of the stuff that my grandma will say, Im like, Grandma, thats not true at all. I think her level of fear is heightened by the news that she reads. And so Im just trying to keep everybody calm but scared enough that everyone stays home.

Even with my parents, Im like, Do not go to Home Depot. Is that really essential? I think we should be scared enough where we stay home, but not so scared that were letting the fear run our lives. Which happens, of course, with parents and grandparents when their kids are not in the same place and this is happening.
Middle East Energy 2020 once again reaffirmed its status as the true global energy platform with a series of energetic and enlightening discussions, coupled with powerful insights from the sectors luminaries during its three-day run at Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) earlier this month.

With energy demand in the Mena region set for annual growth of 6.4 per cent through 2022, the sector faces the dual challenge of meeting demand while moving to low-carbon systems, according to the Energy & Utilities market Outlook Report 2020, produced by Informa Markets, organiser of Middle East Energy.

While industry innovators showcased the latest industry breakthroughs on the main exhibition floor, discussion on how to chart the future of energy was met with vigour during three days of high-profile dialogue with industry changemakers agreeing that the Middle East region is primed to lead the charge against the global challenge.

Our participation at MEE was an eye-opener for us as a company on the latest energy generation and trading products. Our goal was to obtain industry-specific solutions that are relevant to our core business and MEEs well-curated programme and exhaustive speaker list helped us do just that, throwing up a number of key leads, said Wnaguli Charles Wainaina, chief procurement officer, Kenya Electricity Generating Company Limited.

The general consensus was that while clean energy targets and policies are driving desire for change across the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region from a government level, progressive private sector entities, from energy services companies, technology leaders and financial institutions have an increasingly important role to play, according to several industry experts at Middle East Energy.

There is a huge desire to support customers who are into low carbon initiatives and banks are also actively helping customers to transition to low carbon alternatives. Twenty years ago, this was not a focus area but now it very much is with almost 177 billion bonds present globally in sustainable initiatives, said Pri McNair, regional head of Client Coverage, MENAT, HSBC.

With investment in renewable energy investment across Mena on track to surpass $35 billion annually by the end of 2020, McNair outlined how banks such as HSBC are now placing a greater focus on finance solutions for renewable initiatives.

We have what we call green bonds, it is absolutely not dependant on scale or size. If you meet certain principles, you can avail of the financing. The principles are simple: - Is it a green project, are you going to use the proceeds for that project, do you have a decent monitoring framework? As long as you fulfil these requirements, you will get the financing. It is available in the UAE. The size of your project doesn't matter.

Meanwhile, Nasser Saidi, chairman, Clean Energy Business Council (Mena) added that with financing available and an abundance of renewable energy sources, such as solar, the MENA region is primed to make the switch from energy consumers to exporters, adding that ending subsidies would result in greater innovation.

No subsidies would mean there is enhanced revenues which can be put back into renewable energy sources, research and development of renewable energy technologies. The removal of subsidies will also attract the private sector, having a direct impact on energy efficiency, which will be a crucial aspect in the years to come, Saidi told Middle East Energy delegates.

Pradeep Kumar Singh, assistant business development director, Etihad Energy Services Company (ESCO), pointed out that in 2018, there were only three energy services operators in the market but thanks to effective government policies there are now more than 30 companies driving energy efficiency. Singh added: The government is taking very aggressive steps to reduce the overall carbon footprint, and the results are visible.

The free-to-attend conference series and the main exhibition, a technology showcase spread across the events five product sectors  power generation, renewables, transmission & distribution, energy conservation & management, and digitalisation - drew a strong response with visitors thronging the various pavilions and stalls.

Middle East Energy is extremely useful in terms of gathering crucial insights into the industry. Networking with the with the right people and having access to the latest technological innovations in the industry are two other big benefits of being here. My responsibility is promoting the dissemination of renewable and efficient energy in the region and Middle East Energy is a very important stop in understanding the extent of focus on these aspects in the region, said Mohammed Dabbas, senior advisor for the Arab Renewable Energy Commission.

Middle East Energy 2020 also hosted the seventh edition of Future Generation  the ultimate engineering competition which gives university students a unique opportunity to showcase their innovative projects. The competition was split into two categories  postgraduate and undergraduate.

The theme for this year was Future Cities  Digitalisation, Mobility and Sustainability. American University of Sharjah, with its project titled Cooperative Energy Management System for a Micro-WEN Network with Power-to-Gas Energy Storage, was crowned postgraduate winner, while Birla Institute of Technologys project Solar Rover was the undergraduate winner.

Solar Rover aims to shift the focus to solar-powered machines, while rectifying the issue of shadows on machines, which affect the performance. We were grateful to have our final year project selected as a part of this years Future Generation competition, and ecstatic to be declared winners amongst a host of other impressive projects, said Prince Nathaniel Timothy and Amal Thambi Thrikkukaran of the Birla Institue of Technology. This competition has been a great launchpad for us as we have been approached by many companies who have shown an interest in collaborating.

American University of Sharjahs project Cooperative Energy Management System for a Micro-WEN Network with Power-to-Gas Energy Storage, works toward building an energy system that is predominantly or fully renewable for a micro-WEN (micro Water Energy Nexus), and is aimed at remote rural communities that dont have access to a stable electric grid.

Middle East Energy returns for its 46th edition from March 21-23, 2021, under the patronage of HH Sheikh Maktoum Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai Deputy Ruler and was hosted by the UAE Ministry of Energy. - TradeArabia News Service
As many as 800 people have been quarantined for 14 days after they came in contact with a mohalla clinic doctor in Delhi, who was tested positive for the lethal infection, said the state's Health Minister Satyendar Jain.

The Minister informed that a mohalla clinic doctor and four others have tested positive after they came in contact with a woman who returned from Saudi Arabia. The doctor's wife and daughter have also tested positive for lethal infection.

"COVID-19 cases in Delhi have risen to 36. A mohalla clinic doctor and four others have been tested positive after they came in contact with an infected woman who returned from Saudi Arabia. The doctor's wife and daughter have also tested positive," Jain told media here.

According to the Delhi Health Department, 800 people have been quarantined for 14 days as they came in contact with mohalla clinic doctor."A total of 800 people who came in contact with the mohalla clinic doctor have been quarantined for 14 days," he said.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday assured people that the supply of essential commodities will not be hampered at any cost and added that personnel manning shops and engaged in other essential services would be issued E-passes promptly to facilitate their movement in the capital during the 21-day lockdown period.As per Union Health Ministry's latest bulletin, the total number of COVID-19 positive cases has climbed to 649 in the country, including 593 active cases, 42 cured or discharged people and 13 deaths.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Gov. Charlie Baker speaks at Thursday's pandemic briefing.

Governor Frustrated by PPE Shortage: 'Let Us Land the Order'

BOSTON  The governor's frustration on the state's inability to get medical equipment in the middle of the novel coronavirus pandemic spilled over at the end of a 40-minute long news conference on Thursday.

The state has found itself bidding against other states as well as the federal government in trying to find materials, particularly personal protective equipment desperately needed by medical facilities and first-responders.

"The biggest thing I would say is that we are doing everything we can, through an incredibly messy thicket that is enormously frustrating for all of us to try to get them the gear that they deserve and they need," Gov. Charlie Baker said at a press conference live-streamed from Boston. "There are a lot of very compassionate and very brave people here in the commonwealth, who are doing what they can to serve people recognizing and understanding that in this particular area, the entire country is struggling to deliver."

Baker last week called out the president on the federal government outbidding states and blocking access to suppliers. The president has refused so far to use the Defense Production Act, preferring to let private companies work out production needs with the states and other organizations.

"This issue about landing the order is a very significant challenge for every single state, and on every call with the vice president, the president, the coronavirus team in Washington our big message to them is, you got to let us land the order," the governor said. "FEMA has talked about creating a more coordinated approach to this. They talked about it today on the phone call that we had earlier with with the administration. I think this is going to be critical to our ability as a country, never mind as a commonwealth, to get access to the personal protective equipment that people need to actually do this job and do it well."

Secretary of Health and Human Services Marylou Sudders said the state has continued to work the supply chain to increase supplies of personal protective equipment such as N95 masks, gloves and covers.

"As of [Wednesday], we had prepared and shipped out 68 deliveries of PPE to sheriff departments, local fire, police and health-care entities across the commonwealth," she said. "To date between MEMA and DPH, we have sent more than 150 shipments of supplies over the last two weeks."

Deliveries include more than 10,000 swabs to 55 sampling sites on Wednesday, and distributions of more than 20,000 masks and 120,000 pairs of gloves since Sunday.

"But we know we've continued to need to move the supply chain in order for us to have sufficient supplies in the commonwealth," Sudders said. "And since the command center was stood up, we've placed more than $50 million in orders for PPE and are working with suppliers to expedite shipping to the commonwealth."

The state's received about 17 percent of the equipment and materials its requested from the Strategic National Stockpile and third delivery was expected.

Manufacturers are beginning to gear up for production now but it won't happen overnight, the governor said, while a great deal of time and effort is being used to chase down supplies. He's had confirmed orders for millions of pieces of gear "evaporate in front of us."

"I can't tell you how frustrating it is, you know, we now have other orders that are outstanding that are probably "quote unquote" confirmed," he said. "But we've literally got to the point where our basic position is ... until the thing shows up

here in the commonwealth of Massachusetts it doesn't exist. ...

"Our first responders, our health-care workers, everybody deserves to have that gear. And I'm telling you, we're killing ourselves trying to make it happen."

Other news out of the daily briefing included:

 That the administration has submitted a request through the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the president to declare federal disaster assistance for the COVID-19 pandemic. The major disaster declaration would provide the state with federal assistance beyond the state's emergency declaration, such as provide more support and flexibility to communities, monies for public and individual assistance, and unemployment and crisis counseling.

 The Department of Public Health has lifted requirements for staffing levels for hospitals and medical centers recently established by law and the "determination of need" process to allow facilities to invest to expand bed and care capacity.

 Pharmacy technicians may remotely process patient prescriptions, pharmacisists can dispense medication for chronic conditions and pharmacists licensed in good standing in others may operate in Massachusetts.

 There are now 21 laboratories involved in coronavirus testing now that the joint partnership between the state and the Broad Institute was announced last week. Numbers of tests have jumped from 2,000 last week to 20,000 by Wednesday. The governor cautioned that more testing will reveal more positive cases and to continue isolation and sanitary regimens.

 In what may become a model, the Newton Pavilion, a state asset, will be used as a stepped down care facility for Boston's homeless. It will be operated by a consortium of providers including Boston Medical Center, Boston Healthcare and homeless organizations.

"The facility will be used as needed for a range of care needs and potentially treatment for homeless patients. This includes homeless patients who test positive for COVID-19, or awaiting test results. The facility will provide a safe isolated place for people to stay in recover if they don't require hospitalization," the govenor said.

 The DPH is working with the disability community and SEIU Local 1199 for alternatives if a personal care attendent was unable to provide care by partnering with 150 home health agencies to step in if needed. If a person's PCA is unable to come to them, they can call the 1-844-422-6277 hotline for help.

"In Massachusetts, there are just over 36,000 individuals who are MassHealth recipients who have significant disabilities and receive what is referred to as personal care attendant services at home," said Sudders. "In order for these individuals to stay home and not be at risk of placement into a nursing home, they have to have PCA services."
[March 26, 2020] Skillsoft and SumTotal Announce Perspectives 2020 Keynotes and Speakers

Skillsoft and SumTotal Systems today announced that Tara Westover, Shawn Achor, David Meerman Scott, Dr. Heidi Grant, Jez Rose and Lucy Adams will keynote this year's Perspectives. Perspectives 2020 is a digital-first experience, reimagined to responsibly unite attendees during a time of uncertainty. The free, follow-the-sun, 24-hour digital experience will bring together learning and talent professionals, business leaders, learners and university students from across the globe to explore critical issues and immerse in best practices. "These passionate individuals understand the power of learning and the possibilities it unleashes in our world. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we use our expertise to contribute positively to the world," said Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, Skillsoft CMO. "Perspectives is all about providing access to big, but pragmatic, ideas from experts and practitioners to leaders and learners alike. Learning is a lifelong journey - and embraced by the work that our speakers do. Each is a natural extension of our mission: bringing people together in the name of knowledge." Keynotes will be spread throughout the day, and center around the theme of learning as a positive force in a time of persistence. Woven between sessions like head-to-head discussions on industry topics, interactive case studies and specialized content tracks, these keynotes include: - Tara Westover, author of Educated

Tara was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education. Lacking a formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. - Shawn Achor, author of Big Potential and The Happiness Advantage

Did you know that happiness can turn on te learning centers of the brain and increase productivity? Shawn Achor, international bestselling author, former Harvard University Teaching Fellow, and TedTalk rock star, has spent years researching the connection between positive thinking and work success. His research has helped thousands of leaders awaken positive thinking to drive greater creativity, increase energy and focus and grow happiness alongside a remarkable 31 percent productivity boost.



- Heidi Grant, Author, Named Most Influential Management Thinkers Globally

Dr. Heidi Grant, social psychologist and researcher, will explore the mindsets needed to ensure growth. In her talk, Dr. Grant will focus on the "Get Better" mindset, one in which learning is key. In this mindset, we welcome risk and are less afraid of failure, both of which are critical to personal and professional success and resilience. Learn not only how to identify your own mindset, but also determine how your mindset can influence persistence, creativity, and engagement. Create a "Get Better" mindset culture on your team and in your organization. - David Meerman Scott, author of Fanocracy

A Wall Street Journal bestseller, David spotted the real-time marketing revolution in its infancy and has authored five books about it, including The New Rules of Marketing and PR.?With tech-weary and bot-wary people hungry for true human connection, David's latest book Fanocracy shows how the most powerful marketing force is fandom.

- Lucy Adams, founder of Disruptive HR

Founder of Disruptive HR, Lucy Adams most recently oversaw HR at the BBC. Through innovative approaches and fresh perspectives, she helps business leaders and HR professionals around the world lead, engage and develop their leaders differently. - Jez Rose, broadcaster, award-winning writer, speaker and host

Jez Rose lives on the world's first certified carbon neutral honey farm, helping to reverse Britain's honeybee decline. You might recognize him from over 100 appearances on TV and radio! In addition to compelling keynotes, the virtual event offers a blend of pre-recorded, live and simu-live events with main stage and always-on content including: Five content tracks to tailor the learning experience to specific interests

Head-to-head debates on critical industry topics like remote work and upskilling

Interactive case study presentations

Free access to curated learning content for learners and buyers on Skillsoft's Percipio platform

Opportunity to earn unique, digital badges to showcase learnings

Executive tracks and SaaS (News - Alert) user group programs

Product demonstrations and "ask-an-expert" access Perspectives 2020 will be held on May 13 beginning at 9 a.m. AEST in Sydney (7 p.m. EDT on May 12) and ending the day at 4 p.m. PDT in San Francisco (7 p.m. EDT on May 13). Click here to register to attend, or visit www.skillsoft.com/perspectives for more information. About Skillsoft Skillsoft helps companies unlock the potential in their most valuable asset - their people - by delivering engaging content and powerful technology that drives business impact for modern enterprises. Skillsoft comprises three award-winning systems that support learning, performance and success: Skillsoft learning content, the Percipio intelligent learning experience platform and the SumTotal suite for Talent Development. Skillsoft provides a comprehensive selection of cloud-based corporate learning content, including courses, videos, books and other resources on Leadership Development, Business Skills, Digital Transformation, Technology & Developer and Compliance. Percipio's intuitive design engages modern learners and its consumer-led experience assists in accelerating learning. The SumTotal suite delivers measurable impact across the entire employee lifecycle via award-winning technology that powers talent acquisition, learning management and talent management. Skillsoft is trusted by thousands of the world's leading organizations, including many within the Fortune 500. Learn more at www.skillsoft.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005094/en/

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Gun sales have exploded in the United States in the last two weeks as the Covid-19 coronavirus crisis has worsened. People are stocking up on weapons and ammunition, fearing that the pandemic may lead to social unrest. Even in Europe, which has tighter weapons regulations, arms sales are on the rise as well.

Since California, New York and 14 other US states issued Shelter-in-place orders, instructing people to stay in their homes to limit the spread of the coronavirus, gun sales all over the US have shot up.

"We have had about an 800 per cent increase in sales," said David Stone, owner of a gun store in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "I'm getting close to running out."

Fear driving sales

Stone told the French news agency AFP that the majority of the customers rushing to stock up on firearms and ammunition are first-time buyers grabbing anything available.

"It's fear over coronavirus," he said. "I don't understand it myself and I think it's unreasonable."

Several other store owners across the US said they have also seen a surge in sales as people fear social order will unravel if the health and economic crisis caused by Covid-19 escalates.

The Northwest Herald, a local newspaper in Chrystal Lake, Illinois, described a long line of customers waiting outside the Marengo gun shop, its website carrying an ad proclaiming March 1-31 the "month of madness," offering "25 per cent off all used guns". State police said that requests for firearm transfers have increased considerably.

Gun stores managed to stay open

The Illinois lockdown prohibits all public gatherings of any number of people outside a single household or a living unit, closes places of amusement, forbids all but essential travel and establishes social distancing requirements.

Like the French lockdown, the order also closes non-essential services. But firearm and ammunition suppliers and retailers are exempt from the provisions for purposes of safety and security.

According to a statement by the Illinois State Police, the Firearm Services Bureau received a high volume of submissions since Friday, 13 March, according to spokesperson Jacqueline Cepeda, Through 18 March, the FSB had received 18,980 inquiries. The FSB is working to process these requests as efficiently as possible to ensure a timely response.

Stricter controls

In the US, where the right to own a gun is enshrined in the Constitution's Second Amendment, increased gun sales in times of crisis are not unusual. According to the Small Arms Survey, individuals in the US possess over 393 million firearms, of which the vast majority are not registered. The average is 120 weapons for every 100 inhabitants.

In Europe, where gun legislation is much stricter than in the US, the corresponding figure is 5 guns per 100 inhabitants. But, even in Europe, weapons sales are on the rise as the coronavirus crisis deepens.

According to the Reuters news agency, in gun shops in Hungary have been selling between five and ten times more weapons this month than usual. The agency quotes the Czech arms manufacturers association as saying that shop owners have reported rising demand and a double-digit increase in sales.
The Palisades Village shopping center in Pacific Palisades is nearly deserted on Saturday as Californians largely heed the governor's order to stay home as a precaution against spreading the coronavirus. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

The prognosis for restaurants and other retailers forced to close by the novel coronavirus outbreak is so grim that many are expected to skip rent payments April 1. Many may never reopen.

The economic pain  especially for laid-off workers  will be unprecedented.

Although analysts predict a rebound by the end of the year, the new retail landscape may look different from the old one, as mandated closures knock out weak malls and merchants. Online shopping is likely to permanently grab an even bigger share of buyers' money, particularly for groceries because house-bound consumers grew comfortable getting their food picked out by someone else and delivered.

"After the coronavirus effect is over, many of those people who are ordering online right now will continue to do so," said analyst Robin Trantham of real estate data provider CoStar.

For now, though, the outlook is terrible for businesses closed by the pandemic. Landlords face a wave of missed rent payments from tenants who were ordered by public officials to lock their doors to slow the rate of infection.

"We are at the mercy of this virus," said Los Angeles shopkeeper Fraser Ross, who rents two stores on Robertson Boulevard for his chic Kitson brand but doesn't intend to write rent checks next week for his landlords.

"You leased me an area to make retail sales," he plans to tell them. "We are not open, so I am not going to pay rent."

Industry observers expect many tenants such as Ross to invoke provisions in their leases including "force majeure," contract language that excuses them from meeting their financial obligations because of extraordinary circumstances beyond their control. Current circumstances are decidedly unusual for a majority of stores, restaurants and other businesses such as gyms.

"We've never seen on such a large scale, people just staying home," Trantham said.

Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills on Monday is empty as people stay home to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Federal coronavirus relief packages so far haven't addressed commercial rents, Bloomberg reported, but Federal Reserve actions may allow banks to defer mortgage payments, which would give property owners more leeway to delay rent. Disputes between tenants and landlords could soon flood the courts.

Story continues

The largest commercial landlord in Orange County, Irvine Co., told tenants in an email Sunday that they could delay making rent payments for three months but must eventually pay the money without interest over a 12-month period starting next year.

Many retailers in Irvine and elsewhere want more than a rent delay. They want to skip rent for the time they can't operate.

"We're not sending any checks, period," said Andy Nguyen, co-owner of the Afters Ice Cream chain and a tenant of Irvine Co. "We are the ones who are on the front line right now. Taking the hit is not fair."

Nguyen is a partner in about 50 restaurants, including Ground House Burger, Portside Fish Co. and Dough & Arrow cookies. Some are closed, while others are selling takeout and delivery fare.

The stores had more than 600 employees combined, but more than 200 have been let go. Nguyen has dozens of landlords and said Irvine Co. is the only one that offered a rent assistance program to tenants.

"Some landlords have told us no, they have their own bills to pay," he said. "Others havent responded to anyone."

Nguyen predicted that some of his restaurants will reopen. Others won't have enough financial reserves to make it through the disaster.

"We're going to hang on as long as we can," he said. "It's tough."

Another Irvine Co. tenant, upscale Mexican restaurant Red O, is selling groceries, margaritas and even toilet paper at curbside to stay in business. The landlord's rent payment delay "will give us the breathing room we need to stay on our feet," spokesman Robbie Dye said.

Workers light gas lamps at the Palisades Village shopping center in Pacific Palisades on Saturday. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

Rick Caruso, one of Southern California's biggest independent shopping center owners, said he is still figuring out how to best help his tenants, the majority of whom have been closed for several days.

"We frankly don't know what we are going to do yet, but of course we are going to support them," Caruso said in a phone call from his Palisades Village center in Pacific Palisades.

The issue is complicated because, he said, financial concessions should best come from multiple parties, including tenants' insurance companies and the government.

"It's a partnership and the risk needs to be shared," he said. "We certainly are going to do our part."

Caruso said he is keeping all of his company's more than 1,000 employees on the payroll during the shutdown. He also opted to keep his outdoor malls  including the Grove in Los Angeles and the Americana at Brand in Glendale  open to strolling visitors, even though most stores are closed and restaurants are selling food to-go only.

"The lights are bright and the music is on," Caruso said. "We hope people find a little bit of joy in a complicated time. We are happy we can do it."

Forced isolation has made the pandemic in some ways more distressing than other catastrophic events in the past, he said, when people could connect with other suffering people over food and drink.

"As a community, we have gone through a number of crises together  the earthquake, 9/11," Caruso said. "The difference now is we don't have places to come together and feel a sense of warmth and safety. That is one of the things that is hitting me the most personally. I think there is going to be a real eagerness to get back to that."

Formerly quarantined Chinese citizens have resumed gathering in public, much to the interest of analysts and American business leaders, including Starbucks Chief Executive Kevin Johnson. He told CNBC recently that the company's China business is "on the mend" and that it would have 95% of its stores in the country operating by the end of the month, including outlets in hard-hit Hubei province.

"What's happening on the ground in China is reason for objective optimism in the face of the storm," said Spencer Levy, chairman of Americas research for real estate company CBRE.

More than 80% of Chinese shopping centers are open and hotel occupancy is on the rise, Levy said. Demand for big-ticket items such as homes and cars is lagging, but "long queues are lining up to luxury stores and restaurants because of pent-up demand."

He expects a similar pattern will happen in the U.S., but not until many retail businesses go through dark times that are hitting their employees hardest.

"Distress starts at the bottom of the chain and works its way up in missed payments," Levy said. "We need to be here now for the most vulnerable people."

National real estate trade organizations including the International Council of Shopping Centers and the Mortgage Bankers Assn. are working to ensure that the most vulnerable, including the tenants, employees and other parties, are protected immediately and then given the tools to get back on their feet shortly thereafter, Levy said.

He predicted that the the U.S. economy will have "a rough row to hoe" for the next six to eight weeks but would rebound strongly before the end of the year, perhaps even late in the third quarter.

It may be several years before the economy returns to "normal normal," he said, "but it will bounce back faster than a lot of people think."

But will the retail landscape look different then, after the panic is over? Are empty malls going to stay that way as shoppers grown accustomed to keeping their distance from one another decide to keep buying what they need online?

It's too early to know, Levy said, but he doesn't expect a radical shift.

"I will not accept at all that people will stop going to restaurants or gyms or other places" people congregate, he said. "That is not going to happen."

The big shutdown may well, however, accelerate a years-long decline for traditional shopping centers that included record store closures in 2018 and more losses last year. Closures in January and February suggested a new record might come in 2020, according to CoStar.

"Retail was already in a state of flux, and coronavirus is only going to compound those effects," Trantham said.

"Malls are definitely going to be the most impacted," he said, because more than 70% of most mall space is occupied by traditional retail such as apparel stores and department stores. "Those are most impacted by e-commerce."

The vast majority of restaurants will eventually reopen, he said.

The ongoing slow demise of conventional malls that are basically a collection of stores "could clearly be accelerated" by the shutdown, said George Belch, professor of marketing at San Diego State. Malls that have invested heavily in "experiential" features, such as restaurants and activities that give people things to do besides shop, are positioned to survive, he said.

Caruso said people in Southern California will be eager to get back to enjoying themselves when the pandemic has passed.

"The human spirit is built not only to survive but thrive," he said. "The minute there is a signal you can get back to normal life, it will be a celebration."
Washington, D.C., March 25, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Houthi authorities in Yemen today ordered the release of all Baha'i prisoners, along with a pardon for prisoner of conscience Hamed bin Haydara, according to a television broadcast today by Mr. Mahdi al-Mashat, President of the Houthi Supreme Political Council. Mr. Haydara's death sentence was previously upheld on March 22 by an appeals court in Sana'a.

In a statement, the Bahai International Community (BIC) welcomed the announcement, calling for its immediate implementation. They named the six Baha'is to be released, aside from Mr. Haydara, as Mr. Waleed Ayyash, Mr. Akram Ayyash, Mr. Kayvan Ghaderi, Mr. Badiullah Sanai, and Mr. Wael al-Arieghie. The BIC previously described their imprisonment as "religiously motivated," and driven by "baseless charges."

The BIC further advocated for the Houthi authorities to drop charges that were issued in 2018 against over 20 other Baha'is, to return seized assets and properties of members of the Baha'i community, and to allow the functioning of Baha'i institutions in Yemen.

"Like all other Yemeni citizens," the BIC stated, "Bahais should be permitted to practice their faith freely, in keeping with the universal principles of freedom of religion or belief. The Bahais of Yemen have and will continue to contribute to the life of their country and their fellow citizens."

Attachment

James Samimi Farr

US Baha'i Office of Public Affairs

202.833.8990

jsamimifarr@usbnc.org


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Linkedin Ganug Nugroho Adi (The Jakarta Post) Wonogiri  Thu, March 26, 2020 15:31 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d934e1 1 National COVID-19,coronavirus,virus-corona,virus-korona-indonesia,outbreak,Central-Java,mudik,Idul-Fitri,exodus Free

Families residing in Jakarta have started to pack their bags and return to their home towns, including to Wonogiri, Central Java, despite the governments warning for people not to travel home for Idul Fitri this year so as to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The coronavirus has infected at least 790 people across the country as of Thursday at noon and killed 58 in total.

Hesti Winarni, a 43-year-old meatball seller in Jakarta, decided to return to Wonogiri since her business had experienced a decline of sales since the outbreak hit the capital city.

The kids are off from school. Wonogiri is also safer than Jakarta," said Hesti, a resident of Baturetno district.

She was not the only one to return to her home town, as transportation authorities in Wonogiri have recorded about 14,000 people coming into the regency within last week. According to data gathered at the Giri Adipura bus terminal in the regency, as many as 876 buses from Greater Jakarta area carrying a total of 14,140 passengers had arrived in Wonogiri.

Read also: Forget 'mudik' this year, govt tells people as Idul Fitri moves closer

Such an increase in the number of passengers usually only occurs during the Idul Fitri mudik (exodus), said Agus Hasto Purwanto, the head of the bus terminal.

Normally, fewer than 1,000 passengers arrive in Wonogiri every day. However, the number has started to jump in the past few weeks to 2,000 per day, Agus said, adding the number was expected to keep rising until the end of the COVID-19 emergency, possibly in late May.

Wonogiri Regent Joko Sutopo defended peoples decisions to return to their home towns, as most who migrated from the regency work as small vendors and factory workers across Greater Jakarta. They had no option but to go home, he said, as they earned no money during the work-from-home period.

Joko said the administration could prevent the spread of COVID-19 within the region, amid the mass exodus that has been a tradition of the residents.

Were disseminating information [on COVID-19] to neighborhood units [RT] and youth groups in communities. We are not worried because everything is going well as planned, the regent said.

Read also: IYSF scientist praises social distancing policy, urges govt to cancel mudik'

He added that local officials and health facilitators had been actively spreading the information. Health officials would also disinfect train stations and bus terminals, as well as provide hand sanitizer to passengers.

As of Thursday morning, Wonogiri confirmed it had two COVID-19-positive cases. One of the patients has died of the disease, while the other  a Wonogiri-Bogor intercity bus driver  is being treated at Soediran Mangun Sumarso Hospital in the regency.

Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo had urged residents working in Jakarta not to return home and demanded residents in the province not to go to the capital city. "There should be a record of each traveler's health at Central Javas border," he said.

The Transportation Ministry is currently considering a plan to ban this years Idul Fitri mudik, but has yet reached a final decision (trn)
The reality of legacy church: It's not a change but grief challenge (pt 1)

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The biggest mistake I have made in pastoring legacy churches is not understanding the collective grief we are facing. We often misdiagnose grief as being stuck in the past, afraid to change, and weve never done it that way before. So we have invested a lot of time and resources trying to help legacy churches do change management, build consensus around new ideas and encourage them to do things to make them more relevant. And none of that has worked real well.

What if we invested more time talking about and dealing with our grief? Paul gave us that great statement that we do not grieve as people without hope but how do we grieve as a people with hope? I think if we would wrestle with that we would find vibrancy among legacy churches again.

What are we grieving as legacy churches? Obviously a lot of our family members and friends are dying. It happens with such regularity that I often feel its hard to devote my full attention to the needs of families and friends after a death. If you look out at a legacy church on a Sunday morning you will likely see empty pews but that emptiness hasnt come from a mass exodus to contemporary churches, it has come from the deaths of our members and from children growing up and moving out. Those empty pews do not represent the irrelevance of our current ministries; those pews represent the lives of the saints who have gone on to be with the Lord. One way to grieve with hope is to regularly remember the lives of those who have gone before us. Remember the way they served and the joy they brought to our fellowship. And yes, even remember where they sat each Sunday (because we all have our seats!). One of the greatest men I ever had the privilege of pastoring told me after his wife died, I cant imagine coming to church without her. I didnt say, get over it  come to church, I said, I understand, and I spent time with him at his house. Lets acknowledge the grief so many of our folks are experiencing.

Lets also understand the practical side of so many of our family and friends dying. Legacy churches have to grow a lot just to stay even. In the church Im serving we lose about 10 percent of our average attendance to death and health problems each year. So its hard for legacy churches to put impressive growth numbers. We need to change the scorecard for many legacy churches.

So our friends and family are dying and that brings grief. But also, a lot of the ministries we have cherished are dying and that brings another layer of grief. I would encourage you to gather a few leaders of your church and come up with a list of things your church has stopped doing in the last 10 years. I think you would find that to be a pretty long list. Some of those things you might have decided not to do and everyone was ok. with it and some of the things just stopped on their own. But think about the Sunday School classes that have merged or stopped meeting, the decline of social ministries, the loss of children and youth ministries, the changes in denominational relationships and on and on this list goes. At one point all of those things were valued in the church and were a key part of our church life. Now they are gone and we rarely speak of them. Im not arguing that some of those things should have died long ago, were led by the wrong people and several other things. I am saying that there is loss related to all of this and we need to recognize that.

Legacy churches have this collective grief that keeps piling up on us. I have not been to a conference on helping your congregation grieve. The questions that often determine church health are how many baptisms, whats your budget doing, and how many new members do you have. Im not against those questions but I was also like us to talk about how many funerals are you all doing? whats your ministry to folks with dementia and in hospice? and how are you helping the congregation deal with the loss of ministries?

We are to grieve with hope. Too much of our grieving today feels hopeless. I was with a group of senior adults two years ago in an area that I had previously lived. I wanted to find out what churches they attended and what was happening. They attended a range of different churches but they all said in some way the same thing, Our church is dying, and there was a resignation to that as just a fact of life. Heres the thing  I believe legacy churches can find renewed life through grieving with hope. In my next article Ill share some ideas of growing through grief.
SPRINGFIELD -- A city police officer has tested positive for COVID-19.

The officer, whose name and age has not been released, is at home and recovering. It is not known how the officer was infected with the virus, Ryan Walsh, Springfield Police spokesman said on Thursday.

The employee felt symptoms that are indicators of the coronavirus and did self-quarantine until receiving the results of the test, Walsh said.

In our line of work a positive test was inevitable, but Im glad the symptoms are not severe at this time. Im also urging officers to remain calm and stay vigilant with their social distancing and use of personal protective equipment. Their health and well-being is my number one priority, Commissioner Cheryl Clapprood said.

The Board of Health is working with the Police Department to determine if anyone else came in close contact with the officer and should be tested for the virus. All cruisers and areas in the Police Department that the police officer came in contact with will be disinfected, Walsh said.

The announcement comes as the state Department of Health reported there are now 25 deaths from the virus in Massachusetts.

I have spoken to the officer with thoughts and prayers of good health, a speedy recovery and encouragement. Our sentinels of peace play a vital role in our citys well-being - God speed to all of them, Mayor Domenic J. Sarno said.

On Wednesday Clapprood announced masks have been handed out to all officers to be used when they come in close contact with citizens. But she said the Police Department is in short supply and asked anyone who has N95 masks they are not using to call the department to donate them.

The announcement comes a day after Connecticut State Police announced three troopers from barracks in Bridgeport, Lichfield and the Training Academy have tested positive for COVID-19. A recruit from the 129th Training Troop has also tested positive for the coronavirus.

No other officers in Western Massachusetts have reportedly been infected with COVID-19 but a retired Hampden Police officer has a severe case of the disease and is being treated in the Intensive Care Unit at Baystate Medical Center, according to his family.

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25.03.2020 LISTEN

We express our utter disgust and disappointment at Mrs. Jean Mensa and the Electoral Commission for the subtle attempts to twist the arms of the PNC at todays IPAC.

The party regrets the infamous decision by the Electoral Commission to admit a suspended General Secretary of the PNC into an IPAC meeting but choose to use armed police officers to stop the National Chairman from accessing the same meeting

It would be recalled that Mr Mohammed Atik through his Mass Action Committee has been campaigning for and championing a crusade for a new voters register against the PNCs stance of a No New Register. Unfortunately, it appears the EC has found it opportune enough to admit Mohammed Atik into a meeting in which the intended new register is part of the agenda ostensibly for him to support the stance of the Electoral Commission.

The PNC is shocked and dismayed that the Electoral Commission took this shameful decision knowing too well that Mr. Mohammed Atik since his suspension three years ago has not for once represented the PNC at any official event including IPAC meetings.

The party is compelled by this ugly turn of events to distance itself from todays shoddy IPAC meeting and to state unequivocally that the party doesnt submit to whatever took place at the meeting today. It is unheard of that the Electoral Commission which has a longstanding working relationship with the PNC would place a premium on the General Secretary (suspended though) over the National Chairman if not for a self-centered and self-seeking agenda.

For the demeaning treatment meted out to our Chairman at the premises of the Electoral Commission, the party demands an apology from the Electoral Commission and its officials for their scandalous conduct.

....Signed....

Jacob Amoako

(Ag-General Secretary )
A man was shot and killed by the FBI on Tuesday after plotting to blow up a hospital in frustration to government's response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Timothy Wilson, 36, was shot after the FBI attempted to serve him a warrant in Belton, Missouri. Wilson was rushed to a nearby hospital when he died from his injuries.

The FBI had been tracking Wilson for months after they pinpointed him as a potentially violent extremist, driven by racial animus, religious zealotry, and distrust of the government.

FOX4 video

Wilson had planned on using the 'vehicle-borne' explosive mechanism to blow up a hospital near Kansas City.

He purposely targeted a hospital treating people suffering from coronavirus to inflict 'severe harm and mass casualties.'

The FBI says Wilson was armed when they attempted to arrest him. At the time, he was picking up what he thought was a truck bomb but wasn't actually a bomb.

The FBI shot and killed Timothy Wilson, 36, after he planned to blow up a hospital in the Kansas City area due to the slow response to the coronavirus pandemic

Timothy Wilson lived with his grandmother (pictured right) at a house in Belton, Missouri

Wilson was shot and killed by FBI agents while trying to pick up what he thought was a bomb truck at this facility

This sign near a highway in Kansas City asks people to stay home to stop spread of coronavirus

Kansas City has a 30-day mandatory 'stay-at-home' order in place requiring all residents to remain in their homes during that time

According to the agency statement, Wilson grew frustrated with federal government efforts to slow coronavirus and 'decided to accelerate his plan to use a vehicle-born improvised explosive device in an attempt to cause severe harm and mass casualties.'

As of Wednesday March 25, 2.30pm central time, Missouri had 356 cases of coronavirus and eight deaths from the virus, according to the Missouri Health Department.

Kansas City currently has a 'stay at home' order in place to curb the spread of coronavirus.
Rishi Sunak's multi-billion-pound coronavirus bailout has left hundreds of thousands of self-employed workers 'close to a cliff edge'.

The Chancellor unveiled a scheme handing out cash grants worth up to 2,500 a month, in a boost for taxi drivers, musicians, gig economy workers and freelancers.

Many welcomed the move but some have reacted negatively, with roofers, directors, driving instructors and fitness coaches saying it will not help them.

In this image made available by British government because no media allowed into 10 Downing Street because of the coronavirus pandemic, showing Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak holding a digital press conference about the COVID-19 coronavirus, in 10 Downing Street, London today

Roofer Ken Price said he was concerned people were being made to wait until June for the rescue payment.

The 50-year-old Londoner, who also works across the South East, told MailOnline: 'Three months will be hard enough for people who've got money behind them.

'People who are living week to week are going to be in trouble. How many people do you know that can sit at home for two and a half months and not pay their bills?'

He added financial survival during lockdown will depend on 'the goodwill of creditors'.

'It's a wait and see job,' he said. 'Obviously we're in uncharted territory, but it looks like it's going to be a matter of choosing between food and bills.'

'Come April, those bills just won't be paid.'

Driving instructor Rob Cooling echoed Price's concerns, saying that many self-employed people will struggle if they have to wait until June for their money.

Pictured: Rob Cooling, 40, from Nottingham, who runs Apple Driving School, providing lessons to pupils with special needs. 'I think a lot of driving instructors will feel that they could have ridden it out for a month if they were going to get money in April, but if it doesn't surface until the end of June many will struggle,' he said

His firm, Apple Driving School, provides lessons to pupils with special needs.

Mr Cooling, 40, from Nottingham, normally earns around 20,000 a year after tax.

But on Monday he was forced to postpone all of his lessons by at least a month after the Prime Minister announced a lockdown.

Mr Cooling, who has run the school for 15 years, said: 'I love my job and it was very sad to have to cancel.

'I think a lot of driving instructors will feel that they could have ridden it out for a month if they were going to get money in April, but if it doesn't surface until the end of June many will struggle.'

Joe Nutkins earns 13,500 a year through her dog training business. And she has been offered loans from old clients who want to help her during the outbreak.

Joe Nutkins (pictured) earns 13,500 a year through her dog training business. And she has been offered loans from old clients who want to help her during the outbreak

Her company, Dog Training for Essex and Suffolk, is twelve years old and has an annual turnover of around 28,000.

But the 40-year-old now fears that if the money does not come soon enough she will not be able to pay the 700-a-month rent for her businesses.

Joe, who lives with husband Jon, 40, a police community support officer, charges dog owners 140 to attend an 11-week puppy course.

Many pay a 45 deposit and then the full balance later. But since the outbreak began older owners and others that live with vulnerable people have dropped out.

Her income this week was just 200. Every month, she has to earn at least 1,200 a month to pay her 700 rent along with bills, insurance premiums and repayments on a loan she took out for refurbishments.

Joe said: 'When I found out that I wouldn't be able to have classes in person, my anxiety levels went sky high.

'I will need to see if I'm eligible and if this money doesn't come in until June I may still need to apply for a business interruption loan.'

Hannah Murphy is not sure if she will qualify for government help.

The mother of three runs Globe Fit, which provides dance and fitness classes to schools.

Her income after tax is more than 50,000, but this includes dividends from her husband's company.

Hannah Murphy (pictured) is not sure if she will qualify for government help. The mother of three runs Globe Fit, which provides dance and fitness classes to schools

She says she will need to check her accounts to make sure these will not push her over the threshold where the majority of her income does not come from self-employment.

Mrs Murphy usually runs workshops in schools across the country, but these haven't been able to take place since the schools were closed on Friday.

Customers can pay 5 to take part in one of her online classes, but with celebrities like Joe Wicks offering workouts for free, she says she is only making 'pocket money' at the moment.

Mrs Murphy, who lives in Fareham, Hampshire, with husband Tom, 36, a project manager, started Globe Fit seven years ago and works with around 40 freelance instructors, who have been frantically waiting to find out what the Government will do to help them.

Mrs Murphy, 35, said: 'I'm obviously happy to get anything, it is just quite confusing and I think I will need to sit down and work out where I am.'

Ruth Mary Chipperfield, 30, runs Ruth Mary Jewellery, an online jewellery shop from Birmingham, but is concerned that reinvesting her profits in gold since opening the business three years ago means that she isn't entitled to claim on Sunak's scheme.

Ruth Mary Chipperfield (pictured), 30, runs Ruth Mary Jewellery, an online jewellery shop in Birmingham, but is concerned that reinvesting her profits in gold since opening the business three years ago means that she isn't entitled to claim on Sunak's scheme

'I have zero profit as far as the tax returns are concerned. But my overheads still continue,' she told the MailOnline.

She added that 20,000 planned work has 'dried up' since the coronavirus began to rip through the country.

'They may still go ahead after all this but the problem is that my clients' own finances which are drying up too and people are being super cautious.'

The 30-year-old said reinvestments in costly gold means that she is still 'forking out quite a bit.'

'As it's based on profit and not turnover, I won't be entitled to anything.'

Matt Rann, 27, and his wife Annalise, 25, of Portsmouth, who produce personalised photo charms through their business Annalise Jewellery, told the MailOnline that there status as a limited company, and their role as directors, means they will fall through the gaps of the rescue scheme.

Matt Rann, 27, and his wife Annalise, 25, of Portsmouth, (pictured in a family photo) who produce personalised photo charms through their business Annalise Jewellery, told the MailOnline that there status as a limited company, and their role as directors, means they will fall through the gaps of the rescue scheme

He said: 'Sales have dropped for us by about 75-80 per cent. Everything we do is generally bought for birthdays and gifts. It's one of the first things that people knock off if they don't have any money. Jewellery is luxury not a necessity.

'On paper we are employed by our own limited company and paid through a PAYE. As directors we pay ourselves the minimum salary and the rest is dividends.

'We're told we can't furlough ourselves as we are directors, and we can't claim under self-employed as we're not classified as such.

'I think that the government have done a good job and done as much as they can, but it's almost like they have rushed a little bit and haven't worked out the terms and conditions for it and leave a lot of questions open.

'I think it leaves quite a big gap and a lot of people in the same situation as us. We're directors, but not considered self-employed.'

Jess Salamanca, pictured, who started Banana Scoop in June, said that she is unable to claim under Rishi Sunak's new scheme because she has only been operating for 10 months

Some who were poised to start their business have been derailed by the coronavirus outbreak.

Jess Salamanca, founder of Banana Scoop, a dairy-free and vegan ice cream business back in June.

She said that she is unable to claim on Sunak's scheme as she has only been operating for 10 months.

'The problem is they are forgetting about certain people and understand that it's incredibly complex,' she said.

'Those that have been doing their own business for a couple of months will miss the boat on this one.'

Keri Hudson, 30, a social media consultant from Bristol, said it was 'great' that parity of payment had been ensured for most self-employed workers, but added: 'June? Seriously?

'It's ridiculous. It's going to be very difficult for a lot of people. And I can't see why a payment system built into the Self Assessment website would take two months to create.

'I'm sure there are many out-of-work freelance web developers that would be happy to help if the Government are low on resource.'

She added: 'It doesn't really make sense to base the payout on the money a business made as far back as 2016. Surely it should just be based on the 19/20 return - that's a true reflection of lost income.'

Louise Barina, a television production manager who lives in London with her husband Zak, who works for an amateur football organisation, said both of them had lost work after the virus.

Louise Barina, a television production manager who lives in London with her husband Zak, who works for an amateur football organisation, said both of them had lost work at the virus

She added: 'After having spoken to our landlord, he has outright said no, that we can't get a delay on our rent.

'In terms of the payment coming in June, that's really problematic for us as that's obviously three months of payment where we need to find the money for that.'

Casting director Sally McCleery, 39, from Brighton, said: 'Eighty percent is quite generous and we can live on that... our expenses are fairly low and we can live here and not spend too much money.'

But she added she and her partner Iain Jackson, 40, a personal trainer who had also lost almost his entire income, were 'going to have to really watch the pennies until June'.

Others expressed concern that those who registered as self employed after March 2019 would not be able to claim the payments at all.

Casting director Sally McCleery (right, with her partner Iain Jackson, 40), from Brighton, said: 'Eighty percent is quite generous and we can live on that... our expenses are fairly low and we can live here and not spend too much money'

Oli, 31, a construction worker from London with a two-year-old child, said he would have to claim Universal Credit as he had become registered as self employed after the cut-off.

He said: 'It's going to be a case of waiting it out and not letting personal pride get in the way of claiming any of the other benefits for the unemployed.

'I have never claimed or used any Government handouts ever and had a bit of pride about that.'

And there were also fears about how long it would take for self-employed workers and freelancers to recover financially after the crisis - and the Government support - had gone.

Mr Jackson said that while several of his fitness clients had generously paid him for future appointments, that only meant that he would end up without income when he eventually returned to training.

Harriet Morter, 30, a TV producer-director from London has lost four potential jobs as a result of the coronavirus outbreak

'It's helpful that we don't have to pay our tax bill in July but obviously it's not going to help in the long run as we'll just have more tax to pay in January,' Ms McCleery added.

Mr Jackson added: 'That's the impression I got, that any relief we get now they are going to sting us later. Our tax percentage will go up, I'm guessing - that's how they're going to claw the money back. Nothing comes for free does it?'

Meanwhile, Ms Hudson said she was 'not sure' if she'd be able to rebuild her business after the losses she faced due to the outbreak.

'I think a lot of us will have to pick ourselves up and see if there's still demand. For example, I partner with a few co-working spaces to deliver training workshops - who knows whether they'll survive this with no tenants paying rent. It's just a waiting game really!'

'We can't save every job and business': Rishi Sunak's grim warning as he unveils 3bn per month bailout for Britain's self-employed that will give them 80% of their usual income up to 2,500-a-month

Rishi Sunak finally unveiled a multi-billion-pound coronavirus bailout for millions of stricken self-employed workers tonight - but left hundreds of thousands just above a 'cliff edge' cut-off wondering how they will make ends meet.

The Chancellor unveiled a scheme handing out cash grants worth up to 2,500 a month, in a massive boost for taxi drivers, musicians, gig economy workers and freelancers.

But the Treasury later admitted that although the scheme would benefit 3.8million people, there was a black hole of around 200,000 people that it would not cover.

Only people turning a profit of less than 50,000 a year are eligible, meaning those earning anything over that will not be able to claim - potentially affecting professionals like accountants, IT consultants, graphic designers and other success stories.

They could include people who are the sole earner in a family who earns 50,001 and will miss out, while someone turning a 49,999 profit would be covered.

Those who invest their profits in their business, or set themselves up as a limited company and pay themselves via a dividend, will also be ineligible.

Also missing out are those who have set up businesses so recently they have not filed a tax return for the 2018/2019 financial year.

In a report on the measures tonight, regarding the 50,000 profit ceiling, the Institute for Fiscal Studies' (IFS) Stuart Adam and Helen Miller said: 'This means that those who just miss these criteria will get no support despite looking quite similar to some of those who are eligible.'

Saying he knew people were 'worrying about their jobs and incomes', Mr Sunak said: 'You have not been forgotten.'

But at a press conference in Downing Street he also delivered a stark warning that the government 'will not be able to protect every single job or save every single business' as the deadly disease brings the economy grinding to a halt.

And there were immediate questions about the hundreds of thousands of people who will miss out, and why the scheme will not be up and running before June.

Mr Sunak said 95 per cent of those who make most of their earnings from self-employment will be covered, with the 5 per cent not included having an average income of 217,000 a year.

Treasury sources pointed out that those people would be eligible for for income tax and VAT deferments.

Officials have calculated from tax records that 3.8million will be entitled to the payouts, with the typical award likely to be 940. The total costs are estimated at 3billion a month.

A week after announcing a massive rescue package for employees, the Chancellor announced support for those who work for themselves and in the 'gig' economy

Boris Johnson took part in a video call with G20 leaders today as they struggle to coordinate the response to the crisis

Those who are incorporated and pay themselves as an employee will not be covered, as they can claim through the separate scheme the government announced last week.

There will be a grace period of four weeks for people to file tax returns for the last financial year - without which they will not be able to claim.

Unlike the bailout for employees, which is being channelled through businesses in grants, the government money would go directly to individuals.

The small businesses that will miss out 'It seems rushed and has left quite a big gap' Matt Rann, 27, and his wife Annalise, 25, of Portsmouth, run Annalise Jewellery. He said that as it is a limited company and they are directors they will fall through the gaps of the rescue scheme. He said: 'Sales have dropped for us by about 75-80 per cent. Everything we do is generally bought for birthdays and gifts. It's one of the first things that people knock off if they don't have any money. Jewellery is luxury not a necessity. 'On paper we are employed by our own limited company and paid through a PAYE. As directors we pay ourselves the minimum salary and the rest is dividends. 'We're told we can't furlough ourselves as we are directors, and we can't claim under self-employed as we're not classified as such. 'I think that the government have done a good job and done as much as they can, but it's almost like they have rushed a little bit and haven't worked out the terms and conditions for it and leave a lot of questions open. 'I think it leaves quite a big gap and a lot of people in the same situation as us. We're directors, but not considered self-employed.' 'I've been reinvesting my profits, so I won't get help' Ruth Mary Chipperfield, 30, of Birmingham, runs Ruth Mary Jewellery and said as has chosen to reinvest all her profits over the past three years, she won't get help. She said: 'As it's based on profit and not turnover, I won't be entitled to anything. I have zero profit as far as the tax returns are concerned, but my overheads still continue. 'Thankfully I am in a position where my husband is working full time but I'm not sure where the money is coming from. I had 20,000 of leads coming that have all dried up. 'They may still go ahead after all this but the problem is that my clients' own finances are drying up too. People are being super cautious and I get a lot of bespoke work. Up until now 'I've been reinvesting all my profits in my business which is a lot because I pay for gold, so I am forking out quite a bit. 'I wasn't surprised about what they announced. I wasn't expecting to get anything. It makes things tricky, but I'd rather think positively.' Advertisement

Mr Sunak said: 'Despite these extraordinary steps there will be challenging times ahead.

'We will not be able to protect every single job or save every single business.

'But I am confident that the measures we have put in place will support millions of families, businesses and self-employed people to get through this.

'Get through it together and emerge on the other side both stronger and more united.'

In other developments on another fast-moving day of crisis:

The UK death toll jumped to 578 after 113 more fatalities were confirmed across the home nations, making it the darkest day yet in the escalating outbreak;

One of the government's top advisers said the UK's epidemic will get worse before it gets better but could peak by Easter.

Dyson has been handed an order of 10,000 ventilators from the Government - as long as the machines pass early tests.

Retailer Boots begged people not to turn up demanding tests because it has yet to receive any.

Royal aides tried to trace anyone Prince Charles has met in the last fortnight after he tested positive for the disease.

Mr Sunak said: 'The scheme I have announced today is fair.

'It is targeted at those who need it the most and crucially it is deliverable and it provides an unprecedented level of support for self-employed people.'

He said: 'These last 10 days have shaken our country and economy as never before.

'In the last two weeks we have put aside ideology and orthodoxy to mobilise the full power and resources of the British state.

'We have done so in the pursuit of a single goal: To protect people's health and economic security.

'By supporting public services like our NHS, backing businesses and protecting people's jobs and incomes.

'What we have done will I believe stand as one of the most significant economic interventions at any point in the history of the British state and by any government anywhere in the world.'

Mr Sunak admitted the very recently self-employed will not be included in the scheme and must look for welfare support.

He said: 'For those who are very recently self-employed, we cannot operate a scheme like this, there's too much complexity both operationally and fraud risk with that, so we would have to say to those people please look at the extra support we've put into the welfare system to help you at this time.

'But, as I've said, this covers the vast, vast majority of people.'

Treasury sources said 5.75million people fill in a self-assessment tax return.

Of those 1.7million earn less than half their income through self-employment.

A further 200,000 earn too much to be eligible for today's package.

The other 3.8million will be able to access the support.

Asked what people will do for the next three months until the scheme is up and running, sources said some people would have to sign on as unemployed.

Others will be able to take advantage of zero-interest, zero fee loans, or benefit from VAT and business rate reliefs.

In a strong hint of a crackdown on tax breaks for the self-employed after the immediate crisis has passed, Mr Sunak said he would look to address an inconsistency in self-employed contributions in the future when working to 'right the ship' after the crisis.

He cautioned that the scale of the government's bailouts meant that everyone would have to 'chip in' to 'right the ship' later.

He said: 'Rather than be too specific right now about future tax policy, it's just an observation that there's currently an inconsistency in contributions between self-employed and employed.

'And the actions taken today, which is very significant tens of billions of pounds of support for those who are self-employed treating them the same way as those who are employed, it does throw into light the question of consistency and whether that is fair to everybody going forward.

'Especially as when we get through this and are chipping in together to right the ship afterwards making sure everyone is doing their bit as well.

Rishi's rescue: What has the Chancellor announced before? The government's bailout for the economy has been announced in stages, starting with the Budget on March 11. Prior to the self-employed bailout today measures included: The government will cover 80 per cent of wages for companies to keep workers on.

It will pay up to 2,500 a month - equivalent to the UK average wage of 30,000 a year.

VAT bills worth 30billion of VAT bills for the next quarter will be deferred.

A 7billion boost to welfare to 'strengthen the safety net' will be made.

A 1billion boost to housing benefit to help renters;

A 30billion fiscal stimulus in the Budget, including 12billion directly for the fight against coronavirus, with more money for NHS;

Government-backed loan guarantees worth 330billion - equivalent to 15 per cent of GDP. The Treasury will increase this with 'as much capacity as required'

A 20billion package for business including a 12-month rate holiday for all firms in retail, leisure and hospitality sectors, and cash grants of up to 25,000 for smaller companies;

A three-month mortgage holiday for homeowners;

A three-month ban on evictions of renters, and mortgage holiday extended to buy-to-let;

The Bank of England has cut rates twice to a record low of 0.1 per cent. Its quantitative easing scheme - effectively printing money to stimulate the economy - has been expanded to more than 600billio Advertisement

'And I think that is a very fair and reasonable observation to make at this time.'

The measures were welcomed as an improvement by self-employed groups and unions - although some said the delay to getting the scheme up and running could be a big issue.

Toby Harper, of Harper James Solicitors, which works with more than 1,000 businesses and self-employed people across the UK, said the Chancellor's rescue plan failed to treat them fairly by imposing a 50,000 cap on previous profits.

He said: 'There is no doubt that it is much needed support to be provided to people who need it the most. Yes, there are issues with the speed of availability but that is inevitable.

'However, one must question why there is a cap on those who are eligible when the same does not apply to the employed. The chancellor says he is treating the employed and self-employed the same - but he isn't.'

Joanna Elson OBE, chief executive of the Money Advice Trust, which runs Business Debtline, said: 'This new incomes support will come as a relief to the millions of self-employed people whose businesses have been hit by the Coronavirus outbreak  but having to wait until June for payments to come through will cause real hardship for many.

'The Government should introduce a dedicated hardship fund for self-employed people who are struggling in the meantime.

'Nearly every single call we are taking at our Business Debtline service is from self-employed people affected by the impact of coronavirus.

'The electricians, plumbers and taxi drivers we are hearing from, who cannot work from home, are losing money by the hour  and telling them they can try and access Universal Credit is not enough.'

Manchester mayor Andy Burnham suggested the government could hand out a 'blanket' 1,000 payment to 'tide people over'.

'Once again, the Chancellor has shown his ability to listen. This move is welcome & will help millions. But initial feedback says June will be a stretch,' the former Labour MP said.

'Case for an up-front blanket 1k payment in April to tide people over? Just an idea. Could be deducted from the final figure.'

Who will get the self-employment bailout? Treasury sources said 5.75million people fill in a self-assessment tax return. Of those 1.7million earn less than half their income through self-employment. A further 200,000 earn too much to be eligible for today's package. The other 3.8million will be able to access the support. Advertisement

The government has been facing a furious clamour to bring forward a rescue package for the self-employed, with warnings that it is already too late for many who have been unable to pay their bills after swathes of the economy were forced to shut down to curb coronavirus spread.

It emerged yesterday that almost half a million benefit claims have been received over the past nine days.

Around 477,000 claims have been 'processed' since last Tuesday, with 105,000 being made for Universal Credit yesterday.

The unprecedented pressure and volume of new claims has led to delays and people being unable to get through to advisers on the phone.

Boris Johnson said yesterday that while the Government was 'putting our arms around' every worker, he could not guarantee that the self-employed would not face 'any kind of hardship at all'.

But the Prime Minister said he wanted to get 'parity of support' so the self-employed could have similar levels of protection to workers with jobs.

Self-employed 'at higher risk from coronavirus shutdown than employees' The self-employed are at higher risk from the coronavirus chaos than employees, economists have warned. The IFS think-tank said 22 per cent work in sectors that are badly hit, compared to 17 per cent of employees - although the numbers will be lower because there are fewer of them overall. The self-employed are much more likely to work in jobs such as cleaning, hairdressing, performing arts, fitness coaching, or taxi driving. According to the IFS, nearly a million work in sectors that will be mostly shut down. If restrictions were tightened further, 0.8million self-employed workers in the construction sector could also be affected. A further 0.4 million self-employed workers have a child aged up to nine, and no key workers or non-working adults in the household who can provide childcare while schools are closed. Advertisement

Last week Mr Sunak unveiled a plan that would see the state pay up to 80 per cent of the wages of employees if firms agree to keep them on.

However, the package for the self-employed proved far more difficult to assemble, partly due to the range of workers in the bracket. While many have lost their income, others have more work.

Many earn low wages in the hospitality and leisure sectors, but corporate lawyers and barristers on six-figure salaries are also self-employed.

Government sources were also keen to avoid the taxpayer having to support the incomes of people who have other jobs.

One source said: 'With the employee scheme, people are either furloughed or they are not.

'With the self-employed it's different  work may have dried up right now but that might change, and this [lockdown] could go on for months.'

Asked yesterday why the package was taking so long to arrive, Mr Johnson said: 'We have increased universal credit by 1,000 a year.

'We have deferred income tax self-assessments for the self-employed until July, and are deferring VAT until the next quarter. There is also access to Government-financed loans.

'But there are particular complexities of the self-employed that do need to be addressed; they are not all in the same position.'

London mayor Sadiq Khan has said the lack of support for the self-employed has contributed to the numbers travelling into the capital for work despite the lockdown.
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San Francisco, 26 March 2020: TheReport Pre-engineered Building (PEB) Market Analysis Report By Application (Commercial, Industrial), By Region (Americas, MEA, Europe, APAC), Competitive Landscape, And Segment Forecasts, 2019 - 2025

The global pre-engineered building market size is expected to reach USD 30.79 billion by 2025, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc., progressing at a CAGR of 15.5% during the forecast period. Increasing technological advancements in the construction industry coupled with advantages of pre-engineered buildings (PEBs), such as reduced construction time, are estimated to boost product demand over the forecast period.

The adoption of off-site construction for commercial buildings is witnessing significant growth as structures are manufactured in a factory and thus remain unaffected by weather conditions. These structures are manufactured using advanced machinery that aids in reducing material cost, thereby making it cost-effective.

Industry participants undergo integration across value chain by offering turnkey engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) solutions post manufacturing of pre-engineered buildings, which is expected to fuel the demand. However, fluctuating prices of steel are likely to be a significant concern for manufacturers over the forecast period.

The market for pre-engineered buildings is highly competitive on account of existence of a large number of global players. Companies operate through manufacturing facilities at multiple locations with distribution being carried out at several sales locations across operation areas. Furthermore, operations of a few companies in the market are integrated vertically to engage in production and erection of pre-engineered buildings in commercial, industrial, and residential applications.

Access Research Report of Pre-engineered Building Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/pre-engineered-building-peb-market

Further key findings from the report suggest:

Commercial buildings accounted for over 43.0% of the overall revenue in 2017 owing to rising number of new business models, upcoming start-ups, and increasing demand for office spaces

The consumption of the product in industrial buildings is poised to rise at a CAGR of 15.7% in terms of revenue from 2018 to 2025 on account of increasing demand for warehouses and other storage facilities

The market in Rest of Asia Pacific is projected to register revenue growth of 16.9% owing to increasing awareness regarding the use of advanced technologies for construction of commercial and industrial buildings

North America accounted for 27.3% of the global revenue in 2017 on account of reduced construction time and lightweight structure of pre-engineered buildings coupled with surging demand for industrial buildings

Major players in the market are focusing on research & development activities to gain new expertise in steel structures, upgrading products according to revised regulations, and overall project management to obtain competitive edge in the market.

Browse more reports of this category by Grand View Research at: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry/hvac-and-construction-technologies

Grand View Research has segmented the global pre-engineered building market on the basis of application and region:

Pre-engineered Building Application Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025)

Commercial buildings

Industrial buildings

Pre-engineered Building Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025)

North America

Russia

Rest of Europe

China

Japan

Rest of Asia Pacific

Central & South America

Middle East

Africa

Access Press Release of Pre-engineered Building Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-pre-engineered-building-peb-market

About Grand View Research

Grand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.

For More Information:www.grandviewresearch.com
In a message on Sunday, Pastor David Jeremiah questioned the biblical implications of COVID-19 as a sign of biblical prophecy.

Is there a connection between COVID-19 and the End Times? Jeremiah, pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, California, asked in his Sunday sermon, according to The Christian Post.

Are we living in the last days before the return of Jesus Christ? he questioned.

Is all that is happening to us at this moment a sign that the world is coming to an end? How do we know if the coronavirus is a sign?

The founder of Turning Point Radio and Television Ministries defined a biblical sign as an event or a symbol or an object or a place, or a person whose existence indicates something important on God's plan for the future.

While he affirmed Jesus' words of future signs, Jeremiah also acknowledged that Jesus said no one knows the day or hour of His return.

If someone tells you they know when Jesus is coming back, he said, you can tell them absolutely thats not possible.

Jeremiah then points to six signs indicated by Jesus to determine if were in that time.

The signs include deception by false Christs, disputes and warfare among nations, deliverance of believers to tribulation, the defection of false believers and the declaration of the Gospel to the whole world.

Is this a sign of the Second Coming of Christ? I cannot say with any sense of certainty that it is. But neither can I say with any certainty that it is not. It could be the early evidence of number three on Jesus' sign list, the coming of pestilence, Jeremiah urged.

Jesus refers to what will happen at the end of the age as a pestilence (Luke 21:11).

According to Merriam Webster, pestilence is defined as a contagion or infectious epidemic that is virulent and devastating.

That's a pretty good description of what's going on right now, Jeremiah said.

Jesus said this pestilence would arrive like birth pains, he continued. This means that it will increase in frequency and intensity in the time leading up to His return.

He added that increased future outbreaks will impact more people, and be more deadly. This is what the coronavirus threatens to do.

However, Jeremiah clarified that COVID-19 is probably not the pestilence in the Bible because it does not perfectly qualify as a prophetic sign.

I could not stand here and say to you and have any confidence in saying that this is the fulfillment of number three on Jesus sign list of Matthew 24, the pastor asserted. But it surely is a picture of it, isn't it? It surely does remind us that such signs exist, and such things will happen.

COVID-19 serves as a reminder of the vulnerability of everyone; the credibility of the Bible; the uncertainty of life; the scarcity of hope; and finally, the sufficiency of Jesus.

Jesus doesn't just overcome the event. He overcomes the environment where the event happens, he explained.

In these challenging days, we cannot forget what Jesus told us in 2nd Corinthians 12:9, that His grace is sufficient for us. You will find that out during these days, if you haven't found it out already. The sufficiency of Jesus Christ for those who have put their trust in Him will be on display everywhere, Jeremiah added.

He concluded, How uncertain and how precious are our days? I hope we can all use some of this required quiet time to reflect on our lives and give thanks for Gods grace.

In an interview with Megan West of My Faith Votes on Monday, Jeremiah encouraged that God is a breath away, amid anxiety and uncertainty.

There arent any surprises for God. he continued. He didnt get surprised by any of this.

Jeremiah also stressed the importance of controlling ones mental input such as getting into Gods Word, while keeping oneself informed with one condensed report a day instead of inundating oneself with negativity.

This is not the end of the world. Step back, take a deep breath, and get into the Word of God and be reminded that God is in control, he said.

When tempted to focus on the negative, the pastor recommended a positive outlook and take a moment and count our blessings and ask God to hear our gratitude for all that He does for us.

I want to encourage everybody to not let fear become a greater problem than the coronavirus, but trust God, he concluded. The coronavirus is not a big deal to God. Hes able to control this and take in, and were going to come through this better than we were when we came in. In the meantime, we have to be calm and ask Him to give us peace.

Photo courtesy: Getty Images/Dtimiraos

Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer. He is also the co-hosts of the For Your Soul podcast, which seeks to equip the church with biblical truth and sound doctrine. Visit his blog Blessed Are The Forgiven.
Ratepayers north of Brisbane are exposed to millions of dollars of costs to remediate environmental damage from a proposed marina and canal estate on the Caboolture River because of a policy U-turn revealed in previously unseen documents.

The scheme at North Harbour will require dredging of the river, causing increased erosion of its banks, unless more than 10 kilometres are shored up at a total cost of more than $11 million  not including ongoing maintenance or land acquisition.

A model of the proposed marina and canal estate on display in the sales office at North Harbour. Credit:Mark Solomons

Almost all the land involved is in private ownership.

In late 2017, Moreton Bay Regional Council voted through a motion proposed by Cr Peter Flannery to fully underwrite the cost of stabilising, revegetating and maintaining the northern riverbank, at an initial cost of more than $5 million.
A man looks toward the skyline from Bernal Heights Hill in San Francisco on March 16. The city's mayor said Wednesday that the coronavirus crisis could escalate in San Francisco to the degree it has in New York City. (Jeff Chiu/Associated Press)

San Francisco leaders said Wednesday that it was plausible the city could face a crisis similar to that of New York City's and fall short 1,500 ventilators and a 5,000 hospital beds.

It is not even a question as to whether we will need more, Mayor London Breed said during an hourlong news conference.

She said she sent a letter to state and federal government officials making it clear what we need.

"This is not the first time, she said. I hope that they will deliver.

On Wedesday evening, the city was forced to lock down Laguna Honda Hospital, a skilled nursing facility with elderly patients, after four nurses and a staff member tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

Hours earlier, Breed used her news conference to repeatedly ask the public to remain at home and engage in social distancing.

If people fail to do that, she said, authorities may need to turn them or their sick relatives away from hospitals because of shortages, she said.

San Francisco now has confirmed 172 cases of the virus and one death. City officials who spoke at the news conference said social distancing appears to be helping, but the number of cases rises every single day.

Sadly, things are going to get worse, Breed said.

The news conference appeared aimed at countering President Trump and others who contend the stay-home orders are excessive.

I know there are people out there who will lead you to believe our efforts are too aggressive, but I cannot stress enough just how vital they are, said Dr. Grant Colfax, director of health for San Francisco.

A day earlier, Breed used even stronger language in response to Trump.

Why are we still listening to the president? Breed said Tuesday on KGO-TV. I mean, the fact is, we here in our city, throughout states in the United States of America, we have demonstrated, sadly, that we have had to jump into action and make this work without federal government support."

Colfax said the city expects to see a surge of virus cases in less than two weeks. He added that he could not estimate how long it would last.

Story continues

Based on modeling by epidemiologists and infectious-disease experts, it is plausible that we could have a scenario similar to what is playing out in New York this very day, Colfax said. If that happens, our surge capacity will be far exceeded. We will require federal and state assistance. We cannot manage that alone."

The city has been ramping up for the crisis, securing new hospital beds, postponing elective surgeries and acquiring hotel rooms where infected people can isolate.

San Francisco now has 1,300 medical beds and 200 staffed intensive care unit beds, enough for the initial surge, Colfax said.

The city also is preparing to open a new floor at St. Francis Memorial Hospital for coronavirus patients only, with 40 medical beds and eight critical care beds. Plans are afoot to add another 50 to 60 beds by May 1 at another hospital, officials said.

They noted the city is now testing about 400 people a day for the virus with kits aimed at getting 24-hour results.

So far, the city has leased more than 300 hotel rooms, said Trent Rhorer, executive director of the city's human services agency. Infected homeless patients now in hospitals for isolation will be moved into some of those rooms, he said. Leasing also is underway for another 920 rooms.

Rhorer said the city also has ordered enhanced cleaning of single room occupancy hotels and was setting up sanitary stations on the streets for homeless people.

The homeless who are most at risk  those 60 or older and those who have underlying medical conditions  will be given priority for hotel rooms, Rhorer said.

Those who are unable to provide self-care will be moved into a staffed medical shelter, he said.

At Laguna Honda Hospital, operated by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, patients will still have access to the 62-acre campus but will be barred from the hospital.

Only 15 of about 750 patients at the facility have been tested for the virus. None was positive.

The lockdown will remain in place until California lifts its stay-at-home order.




Sharon Kleyne, Founder of Bio Logic Aqua Research

Air Date: 23 March 2020

Guest: Rodrigo L. Romulo, MD, Adjunct Professor at Brown University Program in Infectious Diseases, Providence, Rhode Island; Board Member at Bon Secours Hampton Roads and the General Douglas MacArthur Foundation; Practice at Bayview Infectious Disease Consultants, Chesapeake, Virginia

https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/122421/encore-infectious-disease-101-the-fundamentals-of-controlling-and-fighting-infectious-disease

During the pandemic, Bio Logic Aqua Research Water Life Science will be providing regular updates at http://www.sharonkleynehour.com/Coronavirus.php

*

As the COVID-19 pandemic escalates around the world and threatens to impact lives indefinitely, Rodrigo L. Romulo, M.D., and international infectious disease consultant, and Global Health Olympics inventor Sharon Kleyne teach global health education on Kleyne talk radio.

This threat is unprecedented, says Kleyne, and we must be quick and thorough in our response. Kleyne advises rigorous washing of the face in the morning and at night to remove harmful toxins. She also reminds everyone to wash hands several times a day and make use of disinfectant wipes, especially for surfaces that see high use such as doorknobs, phones and counter spaces.

Romulo agrees, adding that Priority number one should be breaking the chain of transmission of the Coronavirus. Coronavirus is quite the dangerous virus, Romulo continues. It is transmitted as a respiratory droplet expelled from people who have symptoms like coughing & sneezing. The droplets land on surfaces and then can infect others when they touch those surfaces.

As the health crisis escalates, people are practicing self-isolation and sheltering-in-place, and in many locations these practices are now mandatory. China, Italy, Great Britain and India are now locked down, as are the most populous states in the U.S.

Kleyne asks about the impact of pneumonia, which can be one result of contracting COVID-19. What about people dying of pneumonia? Kleyne asks.

Death by pneumonia, says Romulo, is usually the result of a complication of serious illness. It is not a natural consequence. The current virus crisis, Romulo says, encourages us to have a heightened sense of personal hygiene practices like hand washing.

Kleyne, an internationally respected body water evaporation and Water Life Science researcher, also counsels people to take care of their dry eyes during the pandemic and after by supplementing them with Natures Tears EyeMist, the Dry Eye Solution that is 100 percent pure Trade Secret tissue culture grade water containing no chemicals and no additives.

Hydration should always be emphasized just as you say, adds Romulo.

Global Health Olympics educator Kleyne teaches that every organ of the body requires daily supplementation with 100 percent pure water. Drinking enough water every day flushes toxins out of the body.

*

If you would like to listen to the internationally syndicated The Power of Water & Your Health sponsored by Nature's Tears EyeMist on VoiceAmerica and produced by Rose Hong, founder and director of Global Dragon TV in Washington, D.C., featuring Rodrigo L. Romulo, MD, Adjunct Professor at Brown University Program in Infectious Diseases, Providence, Rhode Island; Board Member at Bon Secours Hampton Roads and the General Douglas MacArthur Foundation; Practice at Bayview Infectious Disease Consultants, Chesapeake, Virginia and Global Health Olympics Water Life Science educator and evaporative dry eye researcher Sharon Kleyne as they discuss Coronavirus, infectious disease, proactive care, education, water and evaporation, follow this link: https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/122421/encore-infectious-disease-101-the-fundamentals-of-controlling-and-fighting-infectious-disease

*

If you would like to watch a very brief, entertaining educational film that demonstrates the application of the new Dry Eye Solution technology Natures Tears EyeMist, sponsor of Sharon Kleynes talk radio program, go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0gOr8TB45U
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- The Kent County Health Department wants to field your questions and concerns about the coronavirus.

At 2 p.m. on Friday, March 27, the countys top health officials will hold a virtual town hall over Facebook Live to take your questions about the coronavirus pandemic in real time.

The event will remain as a video on the Kent County Health Departments Facebook page afterward for anyone to view. Those who watch are encouraged to share the information with those who cant, said Kent County Health Department spokesperson Steve Kelso.

The Kent County Health Departments Facebook page can be found here.

Those fielding questions for the health department during the Facebook Live event will be the administrative health officer, Dr. Adam London, Dr. Nirali Bora, medical director, and Brian Hartl, the supervising epidemiologist.

People can submit their questions ahead of the meeting by messaging the Kent County Health Departments Facebook page.

Kelso said the town hall is a good way to answer some of the common questions that the health department is fielding.

We really want to answer as many questions as we can and help folks out, he said.

In a public health emergency, the publics help is critical. We need their help in order to do these things. We want to continue to provide guidance and maybe even some instruction and some layer of comfort.

As Michigan on Thursday closes out its fourth day of most people staying at home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, Kelso said he wanted to remind people to call those more isolated.

According to state data, Kent County has 41 cases of coronavirus as of Thursday afternoon, March 26. One person in the county has died from the virus.

CORONAVIRUS PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus.

Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible. Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home ( door handles, faucets, countertops ) and when you go into places like stores.

Complete coverage of coronavirus in Michigan.

Read more:

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Shut what? The inevitable Las Vegas Casino Closure Takes the Bitter Corona Cake

Published March 26, 2020 by Lee R

With Las Vegas shuttering 24-hour casinos, the problems for employee groups in the casino dependent state reverberate most strongly as well.

Whether you gamble or not, the idea of all the famously 24-hour casinos in Vegas shutting down may well be the farthest possible extension of corona or doomsday logic, but it has indeed happened.

What "Worst Case" Looks Like

The worst case happened when Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak issued what has rapidly emerged as an inevitable order on nonessential Nevada businesses to shut down, including of course the state's 440 licensed casinos. The unprecedented closure freezes Nevadas cash crop by grinding the industry which has become synonymous with the state to a complete halt and leaving tens of thousands of workers without paychecks statewide.

Governor Override

The brave front that peppered the Las Vegas' landscape of various casinos adapted plans for staying open were rendered moot when Sisolak declared Tuesday that all casino operations were to cease at midnight.

Covering Casino Workers

The trades were lobbying for support, with American Gaming Association president and CEO Bill Miller calling for immediate federal aid in response to Sisolaks announcement.

New Rights

One union leader asserted the right of all casino workers to get paid for not working, with Culinary Local 226 Secretary-Treasurer Geoconda Arguello-Kline demanding every Nevada employer pay all of their employees (including part-time workers) and extend healthcare benefits.

Varying Casino Compensation

Meanwhile, well-known casino MGM Resorts submitted its plan for phasing in lay-offs in Las Vegas, providing all furloughed full-time and part-time hourly employees with two weeks of pay during the closures. Other casinos had more equitable initial worker compensation plans, with Las Vegas Sands Corp voluntarily announcing ahead of Sisolaks order that employees would be paid during the closure and that no employee layoffs or furloughs were being considered; and Wynn Resorts Ltd. guaranteeing salary to all employees for 30 days.

Outlook

With casino employees gearing up to insist on payment during work closures in Vegas, requests that would have seemed preposterous only hours earlier suddenly sound humane if not equitable.
The publication raises concerns over the fact that all experts deployed are military, while the entire operation is being coordinated by Russia's defense ministry.

Concerns have arisen in Italian political circles and media about the so-called "humanitarian assistance" that Russia is providing to the country to combat the coronavirus.

That's according to Europeiska Pravda citing Italy's La Stampa.

According to senior sources of the publication, Russia is far from being guided by solely humanitarian motives, but rather pursues its own political and diplomatic interests.

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, the newspaper writes, agreed to accept Russian assistance to "strengthen wonderful personal relations" with Moscow.

However, as the sources of the publication note, 80% of Russian deliveries are "absolutely useless or of little use" for Italy to fight COVID-19, being nothing more than an excuse.

Read alsoRussia, China exploiting coronavirus in geopolitical game

Russia deployed equipment for disinfection of territories and other similar special equipment, while China, for example, delivered medical face masks and mechanical ventilation devices.

The publication raises concerns over the fact that all experts deployed are military, while the entire operation is being coordinated by Russia's defense ministry, not the ministry of health.

All military are high-ranking: generals, colonels, and majors, and "move freely around Italy, a few steps from NATO bases."

"In coronavirus, Putin saw an opportunity to gain a foothold in the Italian political arena, and the Italian prime minister didn't hesitate to support him amid this difficult crisis, accepting all this to consolidate wonderful personal relations with the political side of Moscow," the newspaper writes.
Deputy Prime Minister for the reintegration of temporarily occupied territories, Oleksandr Reznikov, who also represents Ukraine in the political team of the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) on Donbas settlement in Minsk, said that the Advisory Council involving envoys of the unrecognized occupied areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions would not be set up on March 25, as previously planned.

However, the "zrada" [treason]  that's how Ukrainians colloquially brand government moves they believe put national interest at risk  is not off the table. It's just being delayed.

Moreover, it would be too early to suggest that the TCG meeting won't bring any other type of "zrada" in some other plane. Judging by reports of those close to the negotiation process, as well as by controlled leaks on the part of the militants, the political subgroup was supposed to convene via videolink, but the meeting was eventually canceled altogether. The reasons being voiced vary. Militants say that this was due to health issues concerning part of the Ukrainian delegation, which is definitely manipulation. The Ukrainian side, in turn, says that in the current circumstances, making decisions such as on setting up an Advisory Council would simply be wrong. ...

Three days of negotiations, March 24-26, may bring other unpleasant surprises

However, as far as I know, nobody canceled the talks of the military, humanitarian, and economic subgroups. Therefore, three days of negotiations, March 24-26, may bring other unpleasant surprises.

Indeed, perhaps Ukraine will delay the creation of the Advisory Board. But I don't rule out the possibility that new sections for the disengagement of troops will be agreed, which will be disadvantageous for Ukraine. It is very likely that the Russian side will push for the simultaneous opening of crossing checkpoints in Zolote and Shchastia  something that's unacceptable for Ukraine because it is nothing but an attempt by Russia to sell its old - and unfulfilled - obligations at a higher price. After all, they were obliged to open the checkpoint in Zolote regardless of any new ones, but simply in exchange for the withdrawal of troops in this location.

Therefore, I believe certain unpleasant surprises are possible following these talks. And, judging by whether we see them happen, we'll draw conclusions both on further negotiations and the prospects of the Advisory Council being created.

If the Russian side now succeeds in pushing through certain security solutions, this will mean that in the next 30 days, while Ukraine remains under quarantine restrictions, Russian military and political negotiators will boost pressure on Ukraine. That's even despite all the reports claiming that the talks would be suspended... Therefore, it is important for everyone  Ukrainian experts, journalists, and regular citizens who have not yet been engulfed by panic moods over the coronavirus  to carefully monitor all statements regarding the course of the TCG talks and all manipulations by Ukrainian authorities, despite assurances that setting up an Advisory Council is not about recognizing militants as equal actors and legitimizing them. In any case, the main point here is that thanks to this Advisory Council, militants will be recognized as a negotiating party, which was never the case before.

Besides, Oleksiy Reznikov has assured the public that the decision to create the Advisory Council will be made only after the relevant consultations with Germany, France, and the OSCE. However, none of them will be telling Ukraine directly: "do it!" or "don't!"

But, if we analyze the information available in open sources, we will see that at least two parties  German and the OSCE  are already openly hinting to Ukraine that Kyiv shouldn't give up its negotiating positions.

Just look at the OSCE reports over the past year  it is obvious that the Mission started "seeing" much more... Among other things, monitors constantly report on spotted e-warfare systems that only the Russian army has in service. This isn't Soviet equipment, it's Russian-made, which, in fact, proves that Ukraine is fighting with Russia in Donbas, rather than with some militants or "republics".

Remember the statement Angela Merkel voiced following the Normandy summit? She said that the Minsk deal is no frozen substance  it's flexible and it can be transformed. This refers to the part concerning the transfer of control over the state border.

In addition, a statement should be noted of the German Green Party, which openly opposed the creation of this Advisory Council as a platform. They argued that such a step would put behind the brackets the true role of the Russian Federation, which is already openly exploiting the situation that has developed in the world and in our countries.

Quite a lot will depend on how we, ourselves, will interpret the situation

So there are at least two voices that Ukraine can rely on. In any case, we should also read between the lines: all our international partners would be happy if we could become the ones to lift off of them the burden of sanctions. So everything now depends on us and no one else.

There's nothing comforting for Ukraine in France's stance. The French government has clearly outlined its course towards rapprochement with the Russian position.

Meanwhile, we can and should work with the remaining two voices  of Germany and the OSCE. In many ways, everything that's happening in and around the TCG is the art of interpretation. And quite a lot will depend on how we, ourselves, will interpret the situation.

Maria Kucherenko is a project manager at the Center for Civil Society Studies
The world is awash in crude oil, and is slowly running out of places to put it.

Massive, round storage tanks in places like Trieste, Italy, and the United Arab Emirates are filling up. Over 80 huge tankers, each holding up to 80 million gallons, are anchored off Texas, Scotland and elsewhere, with no particular place to go.

The world doesnt need all this oil. The coronavirus pandemic has strangled the worlds economies, silenced factories and grounded airlines, cutting the need for fuel. But Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest producer, is locked in a price war with rival Russia and is determined to keep raising production.

Prices have plummeted.

For the first time in history we are seeing the likelihood that the market will test storage capacity limits within the near future, said Antoine Halff, a founding partner of Kayrros, a market research firm. As storage space becomes harder to find, the prices, which have already fallen more than half this year, could drop even further. And companies could be forced to shut off their wells.

This chaotic mismatch in supply and demand has benefited consumers, who have watched gasoline prices slide lower.
Singapore recently decided to halt the treatment of foreign patients in public and private hospitals there so it can save limited resources to prepare for a possible surge in coronavirus infections among its own citizens. From Wednesday, Hong Kong banned all foreign visitors, including transit passengers. Even Chinese, Taiwanese and Macanese passport holders are banned if they traveled abroad recently. Earlier, Taiwan and Singapore banned all foreign visitors and transiting through its airports. The countries are now viewed as models of effective responses to the coronavirus pandemic.

Korea is virtually alone in sticking solely to quarantine measures while keeping its borders wide open, to say nothing of using taxpayers' money to cover the medical costs of foreign COVID-19 patients who arrive here. At present, some 3,000 people arrive in Korea from Europe and the U.S. every day, and it costs billions of won to cover the costs of testing, temporary lodging and hospitalization if test come out positive. No foreign country has asked the government to do this. The government claims that an effective defense against transmission is to treat everyone equally, but that is nonsense. Banning foreigners would save enormous public resources.

It is not hard to see why the government is doing this. It simply does not want to admit its earlier mistake of not banning Chinese visitors altogether for fear of agitating Beijing and pouring cold water on prospects of Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Seoul. Its logic is that the entire world has banned travelers from Korea, so Korea does not need to enforce any travel bans of its own.

The number of confirmed cases keeps rising rapidly among travelers from Europe and the U.S. This puts enormous strain on the country's medical resources. Yet the government continues stubbornly insists on quarantine measures that are pushing medical workers to the edge. Indeed, it downscaled entry screening of all travelers from Europe on arrival after just two days because there were simply too many of them. The miscalculations simply keep piling up.


Coworking spaces are increasing in popularity thanks to modern facilities and scope for flexibility, Photo Le Toan

The Vietnamese government, among others, is advising people to stay at home. Events have been cancelled, and companies are permitting their staff to work remotely. This is leading to an increasing demand of flexible office spaces where people can still work with enough facilities like they have at the office.

Companies have been familiar with the traditional fit-out style which comprises fixed offices, allocated workstations, and minimal collaborative work zones.

More recently however, the progressive fit-out style has been more known by customers. This model helps to redefine the changing workplace by incorporating more agile or collaborative work zones and possibly no fixed workstations.

Furthermore, the ongoing US-China trade spat and the recent COVID-19 outbreak could further exacerbate the slowdown in global trade and in turn, impact office demand in 2020.

According to Trang Bui, head of markets at JLL Vietnam, fit-out cost is expected to rise.

The heavy reliance on imported materials in markets such as Ho Chi Minh City will continue to contribute to costs because of import duties  and increase the time it takes to complete a fit-out, Bui said.

Flexibility, better experience has driven demand for progressive fit-out style in recent years.

Organisations acknowledge that as work becomes more fluid and employees demand flexibility, their offices should provide a better experience for employees, helping them to attract and retain talent.

Bringing the fight

Despite the real estate market is strongly impacted by COVID-19, the epidemic is imposing less impact to coworking and flexible spaces where investors and developers are positive on the development of this segment.

According to Turochas Fuad, managing director of WeWork in Southeast Asia and South Korea, as a global company WeWork is continuing to monitor the novel coronavirus outbreak closely and has implemented precautionary measures across all locations around the world.

We are adhering to guidance from governments as well as global and local health authorities regarding the proper prevention and management of this issue, Fuad said.

His priority is to protect the health and safety of our members and employees, while maintaining as close to normal operations as possible.

In certain circumstances, including by request of local authorities, we may close buildings or recommend members do not come to work, to protect the safety of our employees, members and the wider community. In Vietnam, all our locations are still open and strictly following precautionary measures, Fuad told VIR.

Tony Suh Heasung, CEO of Hivelab Vina, the operator of Dream Station, a coworking space from South Korea, said that he has not yet faced difficulties in human or finance resources.

However with the complicated situation currently, Dream Station has prepared many solutions to cope with the epidemic and save labours health.

Based on advantages on facilities and services compared with other traditional office space with an attractive promotion programme, Dream Station has aroused interest from many companies that want flexible office spaces. Currently Dream Station has 50 per cent occupancy, and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are dominating the majority of tenants.

The future expanding plan in Hanoi, Heasung said, will not be changed due to COVID-19. However, Hivelab Vina also is preparing for the worst when staff have to work at home.

Meanwhile, Next Story groups spokesperson, who is operating the Kafnu coworking network in Ho Chi Minh City, told VIR that the company business runs as usual. We remain vigilant and take guidance from the local health authorities so that we can ensure that our members continue to have a safe and pleasant visit. We remain committed to Vietnam for the long term and believe in its strong fundamentals and resilience to overcome the current situation, said the source.

Next Story is paying high interest to the safety of its members, guests, and employees.

We are following the guidelines provided by the local health authorities in establishing precautionary measures in Kafnu Ho Chi Minh City. We have also communicated information on epidemic to our members and guests so that they are aware and will monitor their wellbeing, said the source.

Employees, members, and guests who are unwell with any symptoms of fever or respiratory issues are asked to seek medical aid, the source added. Next Story Group marks its entry into Vietnam last July, with the opening of Kafnu Ho Chi Minh City.

Meanwhile Tran Xuan Kien, CEO of Cogo, also remains positive on his business results, based on the fact that tenants of coworking spaces mostly are not coming from retail, manufacturing, and trade, the sectors most impacted by COVID-19.

I have not seen either request to reduce rent from both my landlord and my tenants but if the landlord reduces the rent, we will also reduce for the tenants, Kien said.

Cogo has occupancy of 70 per cent in its system of five offices in Hanoi and it plans to expand its footprint to Ho Chi Minh City and Danang in the coming time.

High potential

The demand of coworking and flexible offices for lease have been developed in Vietnam, especially suitable for startups and SMEs who want to have affordable price but enough facilities offices.

According to Yann Deschamps, head of Workthere Asia-Pacific, the demand for flexible office space in Vietnam will continue to be driven by freelancers, local and international startups, and small corporates.

International startups, digital nomads, and freelancers seeking affordable workplaces could also consider relocating to Vietnam to grow their businesses.

This growing demand both from domestic and overseas occupiers called for a more advanced solution than traditional leasing services, said Deschamps.

Cal Lee, founder and global head of Workthere, also shared that Vietnam has seen phenomenal growth in the flexible workspace sector, with many new venues coming to the market.

At the same time, demand for flexible workspaces continues to grow as more businesses, including startups, SMEs, and even larger corporate companies see the benefits of flexible workspaces over a more traditional lease, Lee said.

In reality coworking space brands will continue to expand their network of systems in Vietnam. Of those, the race for rental prices will no longer be a decisive factor, but any coworking provider who have prominent brands and close connection to a specific group of customers will take the leading position.

With the rapid and broad development of competitors in the market, coworking spaces are no longer a model that only attracts startups and technology companies. A number of large scale groups with hundreds of employees are also gradually moving to work in coworking spaces because of the flexibility, creativity, modern facilities, and good service available.
Coronavirus India: Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has announced a relief package of Rs 1.7 crore for urban and rural poor, including migrant workers. She also announced that the health care workers will be provided with Rs 50 lakh medical insurance.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thurday, March 26, 2020, has announced a relief package for the urban and rural poor in the backdrop of the novel coronavirus or COVID-19 outbreak in India. With an emphasis on a promise that no one will go hungry, the finance minister said that a package worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore is ready for the urban and rural poor who need immediate help, including migrant workers, in addition to a Rs 50 lakh medical insurance cover for health care workers for three months.

Under the Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Ann Yojana, about 80 crore people, about 2/3rds of the Indian population, will be provided 5 kg rice and wheat per person. Arrangements are also made to provide additional 5 kg rice and wheat along with 1 kg pulse.

A provision of direct bank transfers has also been made for the immediate relief of 8.69 crore farmers, who will receive the first instalment of Rs 2000 in the first week of April. There will also be an increase of Rs 2000 per worker on an average as additional income under MGNREGA.

Also Read: Coronavirus in India: Health Ministry confirms 553 positive COVID-19 cases, e-tailers allege police dumped 15,000 liters milk, 10,000 kg vegetables

Below is the complete economic package as announced by FM @nsitharaman pic.twitter.com/3vO6ibPi1C  Poulomi Saha (@PoulomiMSaha) March 26, 2020

A package is ready for the poor who need immediate help like migrant workers and urban and rural poor. No one will go hungry. The package is worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman #coronaviruslockdown pic.twitter.com/7Mb3r4cbBQ  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

There will be Rs 50 lakh insurance per health care worker as a medical insurance cover for them for three months. Hopefully, we would be able to contain the virus in this period: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman pic.twitter.com/SaLbeXULZN  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

8.69 crore farmers to be immediately benefited through Direct cash transfers. Installment of Rs 2000 in the first week of April will be transferred: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman pic.twitter.com/4GUya62zaC  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

About 3 crore people, who come under the category of old age, divyang and pensioners, will be given an additional one-time amount of Rs 1000 in two instalments over 3 months through DBT, thereby eliminating middlemen. The provision of DBT will also be extended to poor widows, Jan Dhan Yojna accounts, Ujjwala scheme, self-help groups of women dealing with DDU livelihood missions, EPFO organised workers, construction workers and district mineral workers.

Also Read: Its fake! Home Ministry says news on 4G restoration in Jammu and Kashmir is wrong

Old age, Divyang, pensioners: 3 crore people covered, one-time amount of additional Rs 1000 in two installments through DBT (hence no middlemen) over 3 months to be given,announces FM Sitharaman pic.twitter.com/8PCSokKzrb  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

The collateral-free loans of Self Help Women Groups, which covers around 7 crore households, has been doubled to Rs 20 lakh to increase money they receive in-hand. About 8.3 crore families under below poverty line, covered under Ujjwala scheme, will be provided with cylinders for 3 months free of cost so that there is no short of cooking medium. 20 crore Jan Dhan Women account holders will also be provided with an amount of Rs 500 per month for the next three months.

The finance minister also announced that the government has decided to pay Employees Provident Fund (EPF) of both employer and employee of establishments with upto 100 employees and earnings of less than Rs 15, 000. This decision will benefit about 4.8 crore workers. State governments have also directed to use the funds allocated to them (Rs 31,000 crore) to provide relief to 3.5 crore-registered construction workers. They have also been requested to use these funds in the facilitation of medical testing, screening and providing health attention.

Also Read: EC permits usage of indelible ink for stamping home quarantine mark

Govt ready to amend the regulation of EPF due to this pandemic so that workers can draw upto 75% non-refundable advance from credit in PF account or 3 months salary, whichever is lower: FM Sitharaman https://t.co/kHfRjlyZNm  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

District Mineral Fund: Central Govt to request State Govts to use this fund to augment medical testing and screening and providing health attention, announces FM Sitharaman https://t.co/7iGkEKLzrN  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

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A touching photo shows the moment a grandfather, 87, was escorted out of a hospital arm-in-arm with an NHS medic after recovering from coronavirus.

Ewart Lockton, from Manchester, had been battling the killer virus and pneumonia at North Manchester Hospital for two weeks.

But he managed to beat the infection and, wearing a face mask, was able to leave the hospital while being supported by a smiling member of staff.

Mr Lockton is now completing his recovery at home with his wife Phyllis.

Ewart Lockton, from Manchester, had been battling coronavirus and pneumonia at North Manchester Hospital for two weeks but has now gone back home

His delighted granddaughter shared a photo of Mr Lockton with a nurse as he left hospital to go home

His delighted granddaughter Sophie Edwards shared the news on her Facebook page, along with a photo of Mr Lockton.

She said: 'We all need to hear some positive stories. This is my 87-year-old grandpa saying goodbye to staff at North Manchester Hospital where he's been for two weeks with covid positive pneumonia.'

She continued: 'He's now finishing his recovery where he belongs, at home with my grandma!

'Thank you to everyone for all their kindness and support through a difficult time and most of all.....thanks to the NHS.'

Thousands reacted to her post, praising the NHS staff for their hard work and giving their best wishes to Mr Lockton.

The 87-year-old's friend Colin Davies also shared a picture of the recovered grandfather on Facebook.

Mr Lockton will complete his recovery at home with his wife Phyllis after spending two weeks at the hospital in Manchester

He said: 'Was delighted to get a phone call from my good friend, 87 year old Ewart Lockton last night.

He has been discharged from North Manchester Hospital where he has been for 2 weeks with Covid Positive Pneumonia.

'He is now completing his recovery at home with his wife Phyllis.

'Great to have some good news at this worrying time.'

It comes as Britain's growing coronavirus death toll today jumped to 477 after Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all confirmed a dozen more fatalities.

England has yet to declare its daily COVID-19 figures but scores more deaths are expected to be announced.

Meanwhile, a grief-stricken son today described the 'pure torture' of watching his 83-year-old mother 'suffocate to death' because of coronavirus and revealed that he now he has to self-isolate from his three children.

Michael Hardy, 47, watched his 83-year-old mother Rachael pass away at Northwich Park Hospital, Harrow, after the killer virus ravaged her lungs and left her gasping for breath.

Mrs Hardy, a former NHS nurse with chronic asthma, had bravely battled coronavirus since March 10 - but her condition worsened violently last week and she died last Friday.
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has dominated news coverage in recent weeks to become one of the most covered events in recent history, producing more than 1.5 million articlesat an average of about 1,400 articles per daysince early January, according to analytics firm NewsWhip.

But COVID-19 has also put journalisms future in peril, as the newspaper industryalready on shaky ground due to years of plummeting ad revenuesfaces yet another economic downturn. As companies in every sector affected by the disaster scale back their advertising budgets, the financial impact of these cuts can be seen in the latest wave of closures and layoffs thatve hit the news publishing world just this week.

Like the 2008 recession, the latest global economic crisis has left many publishers wondering howor iftheyll be able to ride out the pandemic.

Widespread layoffs shake industry

COVID-19 was cited as a reason Playboy Enterprises decided to kill the print edition of its 66-year-old flagship Playboy magazine, which will cease publication after its current Spring issue. San Diego Magazine laid off nearly its entire staff and said it would fold after 72 years. Weekly publication Sacramento News & Review announced its closure and laid off most of its workforce. Seattle-based alt weekly The Stranger suspended its print edition and furloughed more than half of its staff due to the hellscape of unforeseen economic events brought on by the coronavirus. Time Out Group, which publishes 40 magazines in city markets around the world, announced it was temporarily suspending its print editions for an unknown period of time. New England Newspaperswhich publishes the Brattleboro Reformer, Bennington Banner and the Manchester Journalhas slashed its page count and asked staff to take a temporary furlough. Dallas-based publisher D Magazine announced it had laid off 15 employees and implemented salary cuts for all remaining employees.

The news isnt much better abroad. Canadian newspaper company SaltWire Network said its laying off about 40 percent of its workforce and suspending production of its weekly newspapers for at least the next 12 weeks, in light of rapidly changing economic conditions related to COVID-19. Northern Ireland publisher Spectator Newspapers said its paperswhich includes the County Down Spectator, Newtownards Chronicle and the Mourne Observerwere forced to cease publication due to COVID-19. London publisher City AM will shutter its print editions and go online in an effort to cut costs until it becomes viable to print again, with the newspapers entire staff being asked to accept a 50 percent pay cut. London-based JPIMedia, which publishes dozens of newspapers around the UK, is suspending print production of its free papers following a substantial reduction in advertising, leaving major towns such as Milton Keynes without a single newspaper.

News consumption explodes

While the economic fallout has hit print publishers hard, COVID-19 coverage is simultaneously driving an unprecedented sea-change in Americans media consumption habits, with online news traffic and TV viewership surging as more people find themselves isolating at home in light of new social distancing measures.

A report by technology company Parse.ly discovered that the coronavirus pandemic has caused online news sites content views to climb by 60 percent. Web traffic in the U.S. from Facebook to other websites increased by more than 50 percent last week from the week before, according to a New York Times report.

Theres no question COVID-19 coverage is driving this traffic spike. Content mentioning the coronavirus now comprises 15 percent of total daily web traffic, according to the Parse.ly report. NewsWhip found that coronavirus content accounts for about 26 percent of English language content in its database of more than 10 million articles.

Things arent much different in the world of television, where near-constant COVID-19 coverage has resulted in massive viewership and ratings gains. Nielsen predicted that TV viewership would climb 60 percent as Americans tune in en masse for coronavirus-related updates, and estimated that this week, local TV news viewership has been up seven percent for 25 of the largest local markets across the country. Daytime TV viewership alone has seen a spike of 16 percent in recent weeks, according to viewer measurement company Samba TV. On cable, CNN saw ratings skyrocket 193 percent between March 16-20, followed by similar upticks at Fox News and MSNBC (89 percent and 56 percent, respectively).

And yet, these growing audiences have done nothing to stop broadcast and digital news outlets' freefalling ad budgets. Interpublic research firm Magna Global projects the U.S. ad market will decline 2.8 percent this year. Analysts at investment bank Cowen & Co. anticipate that Facebook and Google alone could lose more than $44 billion in ad revenue because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Future uncertain

The coronavirus crisis has placed many media groups in the unusual position of having the audiences theyve always dreamed of, yet with no ad dollars to support them. When it comes to print publishers, subscription sales alone wont save them; in fact, to meet the recent uptick in demand, some are now taking down their paywallsamong them The Atlantic, The New York Times and the Washington Postso readers can get free coronavirus-related heath and news updates. And publisher events, recently seen as a financial lifeline for magazine and newspaper brands, are obviously out.

COVID-19 has caused the public to focus very intently on local news and informationwhich has caused bumps in traffic and digital subscriptions, David Chavern, president and CEO of newspaper trade group the News Media Alliance, told ODwyers. But in a world dominated by Google and Facebook, traffic is not very monetizable, and the increase in digital subscriptions has in no way matched the rapid contraction in the ad markets. News publishers are suffering financially just when the world needs their information the most.

Some had hoped Congress $2 trillion stimulus billthe largest economic rescue measure in historywould provide some much-needed economic relief for local newspapers, the same way its being used to bail out airlines and the hotel industry. In fact, House Speaker Nancy Pelosis earlier proposed version of the bill had provided recovery aid for community newspapers affected by the coronavirus. That provision does not appear in the Senates finalized March 25 bailout package (though it does contain a $75 million provision to support public broadcasting).

Congress should be giving even more to support public and noncommercial media of all kinds. These are highly trusted and essential sources of information that are accessible and available to everyone of all ages, Craig Aaron, co-CEO of nonpartisan press group Free Press Action, told ODwyers. With more support not only will they stay afloat, but they could boost their educational programming, from preschool to high school, while the kids are stuck at home and put more reporters on the beat and on the air. In a crisis like this, journalists are essential workersand our recovery policies need to reflect that reality."

Without Congress' help, it may take financial support from nonprofits, foundations and the private sector to save print and digital journalism. In March, media advocacy group the Local Media Association partnered with journalism nonprofit the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Facebook Journalism Project to provide $1 million in grants to North American newsrooms covering the coronavirus. Some publishers, such as Seattles The Stranger or Vermonts The Williston Observer, have resorted to soliciting for donations to stay afloat.

Steven Waldman, president of journalism nonprofit Report for America, has advocated that the government spend more money on COVID-19-related advertising, which would have the added benefit of educating the public about the pandemic while supporting local news organizations.

David Cohen, president of ad industry trade group the Interactive Advertising Bureau, has suggested that brands purchase ads to run alongside COVID-19-related coverage on credible news sites, in an effort to help support the news industry and help keep Americans informed.

The Stimulus 3 package will help somewhat, particularly for publishers who can be classified as small businesses, and we are currently evaluating what more the federal government could or should do, Chavern said. But we will also have to get back to the problem that the digital ecosystem does not adequately reward quality journalism, and if we want local news and information in the future, that is going to have to be fixed.
Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili.

Market Insight

Increasing legalization of marijuana in different countries is encouraging the growth of legal marijuana market. Thus, the application of legal marijuana in medical sector is witnessing a rapid growth at a global level. Moreover, marijuana oil and hemp seeds are now also being used in personal care products and are found to heal skin conditions including psoriasis, skin rashes, and eczema, which is adding fuel to the growth of the legal marijuana market. Based on the type of the legal marijuana, sativa is dominating the market holding a global market share of 56.3% and is expected to grow substantially over the forecast period. However, Indica segment is expected to account for a steady growth in the legal marijuana market over the forecast period 2016-2024. Researchers are taking efforts to bring out value added products from the cannabis strains, which is contributing in the growth of legal marijuana market. Increasing awareness of the health benefits associated with the legal marijuana is propelling the growth of this market.

Access Full Report Details and Order this Premium Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/legal-marijuana-market-4656

Legal Marijuana Market is projected to reach USD 3.6 billion at a CAGR of 22.03% by the end of forecast period. In North America, legal marijuana is majorly consumed in the U.S. and Canada. North America alone captures 58% market share followed by Canada in the year 2016.

Major Key Players

This report includes a study of strategies such as mergers, acquisitions, and product launches by the major legal marijuana market players. It further includes product portfolios, developments of leading players, which includes

Some of the leading players in the Global Legal Marijuana Market Medicine Man (U.S.), AmeriCann, Inc. (U.S.), Abattis Bioceuticals Corp (Canada), Novus Acquisition & Development (U.S.), GW Pharmaceuticals (U.K.), Canopy Growth (Canada) and Insys Therapeutics (U.S.)

Key Findings

Global Legal Marijuana Market Size is projected to reach USD 4.69 billion by 2024 at a CAGR of 22.03%

RoW likely to experience the highest growth at a rate of 30.18% during the given forecast period majorly in Australia, Turkey and Argentina
Nitish Kumar-led Bihar government has announced a Rs 100 crore relief package to help the poor and daily wage labourers of the state. The state government has also decided to turn schools into shelter homes.

The government has assured it will provide food and temporary shelter for the needy.

Bihar government has also announced Rs 100 crore from the Chief Minister Relief Fund for the migrants stranded in other states.

Bihar has till now reported three confirmed cases of coronavirus and one death.

The total number of positive cases of COVID-19 in India has crossed 600 and 13 deaths.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown starting Wednesday to ensure social distancing to contain the coronavirus spread.

Several migrants, mostly from Bihar have been stranded across the country as all transport systems have been suspended due to the lockdown.

Last week itself, four trains from the Mumbai-Pune region travelled back to Bihar filled with migrants trying to reach home.

Ex-JDU member Prashant Kishor had called out the Nitish Kumar led government accusing them of abandoning thousands of Bihari migrants in other states.

RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav too had requested the Bihar government to help the poor and needy.

Also Read: Prashant Kishor slams Nitish Kumar for inaction over stranded Bihar residents

Also Read: Coronavirus Live Updates: Essentials, medicines to be available 24X7 in Delhi, Maharashtra
Recollections and Reflections

In the spring, just before my homeschooling seminars closed for the summer, my Latin students and I would head to the Basilica of St. Lawrence in Asheville, North Carolina. We would gather in the courtyard outside the church, and I would issue my usual admonitions: Whisper, dont disturb those praying in the side chapel, walk, dont run, and be respectful.

I then divided the students into teams, equipped each team with a Latin dictionary, and turned them loose inside the Basilica, where they engaged in a scavenger hunt, copying down the Latin inscriptions they found there and then translating them. I roamed from team to team, giving a hand with the translations or pointing them to a site they had missed. Most were a little shocked when I pulled open a heavy metal door in the wall, showed them the tomb of Rafael Guastavino, the architect who had designed the Basilica and donated money for its construction, and had them translate the Latin on the coffin.

A stained-glass window in the Basilica of St. Lawrence. (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Some of my students were Roman Catholics, and some were unaffiliated with any religion, but the great majority were devout Protestants, many of them members of the traditional Presbyterian Church in America. On first entering that sanctuary with its statues and paintings, its bank of votive candles, and the handful of people kneeling in prayer in Eucharistic adoration, my Protestant students inevitably paused while they absorbed these strange sights.

Art and Religion: Different Interpretations

Later, they would pepper me with questions: Why were all those candles lit? Do Catholics worship statues? Why are there so many pictures of Mary? Tell me again why that guy is buried in the church?

Religious statuary and paintings have in the past roused conflicts among Christians. In the eighth and ninth centuries, citing the injunction in the Ten Commandments against the worship of graven images, and after Emperor Leo III began banning icons, Byzantine iconoclasts (image breakers) declared war on paintings with human images inside churches and destroyed many works of art. Occasionally, this fierce battle over icons led to bloodshed.

During the Reformation, Protestants practiced a similar iconoclasm, stripping churches of their statues, burning paintings, destroying altars, and smashing stained-glass windows. The cross replaced the crucifix, and white plaster erased various mosaics.

Even today, some take sides in this ancient war. After coming back from Europe, where he had visited a number of churches, a friend told me that he could never belong to a church where the devout kissed their fingers and touched them to a painting, or knelt before a statue of Mary. And certainly its tempting to regard that gesture, or kneeling in prayer before a statue, as idol worship.

Russian Icons

Yet those who engage in these practices are not worshiping the art itself, but what it represents. The Russian Orthodox, for example, have long regarded icons as sacred objects not because of paint and brush, but because these pictures open a window into heaven.

On the online site Russia Beyond the Headline, the article How to Read and Comprehend a Russian Icon by writer Irina Osipova and designer Ekaterina Chipurenko provide a splendid introduction to the art of the icon. Every detail on these wooden panelscolor, perspective, dress, the most insignificant imageserves a purpose and has meaning. Osipova tells us, for example, that the color gray is never used in an icon, as it is a mixture of white and black, symbolic of good and evil. The eyes, the windows to the soul, are deliberately enlarged. We Westerners find icons stilted and strange in part because their artists use reverse perspective, a drawing with vanishing points that are placed outside the painting, creating an illusion that these points are in front of the painting and so focusing the viewers attention on the religious figures depicted.

Russian icon of Christ Pantocrator, late 19th century. Tempera on wood panel. (US-PD)

Western European Religious Art

Like their Russian counterparts, for over a thousand years Western European painters largely devoted themselves to religious themes, producing paintings, statuary, glass, and even volumes of literature like the Book of Kells, psalters, and Bibles, all as objects whose beauty reflected what they took to be the glory of God.

Some of us might consider these artists obsessed by religion, but that was not the case. Nothey lived in a culture we can barely imagine today, an age when faith encompassed all of life, commanding morals, setting out the calendar of feast days, and formalizing cultural rituals ranging from coronations to baptisms, marriages, and funerals.

Book of Kells, Folio 32 v, Christ Enthroned, from Treasures of Irish Art, 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D. From the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, & Trinity College, Dublin. (US-PD)

This art also served to educate a pre-literate people in biblical tales and the life of Christ. Giottos The Kiss of Judas, Gentile da Fabrianos The Adoration of the Magi, The Dead Man Before His Judge by the Master of the Rohan Hours; Jan van Eycks Annunciation, Rogier van der Weydens Deposition: Here were visual stories for king and commoner alike, lessons and carols in paint rather than in music and words. In the last 500 years, the secularization of culture diminished this passion for sacred art.

The Adoration of the Magi by Gentile da Fabriano. (US-PD)

We still see some moderns producing religious worksSt. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Front Royal, Virginia, for instance, boasts four paintings by Henry Wingate depicting scenes from Johns lifebut for the most part, representational artists now turn to landscapes, portraiture, and other subjects rather than exploring religious topics.

Art and Contemplation

Anyonenot just those of a particular religious faithcan use art as a tool to enhance meditation, a focal point for wandering attention. The mysteries found in Giorgiones The Tempest, the beauty of Botticellis Birth of Venus, Rembrandts Self-Portrait, 1629: When we sink into such paintings, they can lead us away from ourselves and into contemplation of the sublime and the beautiful. The Rembrandt Self-Portrait, for instance, might arouse in us thoughts about the triumphs and defeats accompanying a life fully lived.

A self-portrait of Rembrandt, 1659. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Public Domain)

And we neednt visit a gallery to explore this option. Both online and in our libraries, we can find beautiful reproductions worthy of such mediation.

Let me end with a personal example of this power of art. This month found me sitting in a chair in the office of Dr. Hsu, an ear, nose, and throat specialist here in town and a man of excellent reputation. Because I had a growth in my throatthe growth turned out to be real, but harmlessI was nervous. Across the room from me was a handsomely framed reproduction of Millets The Angelus. While awaiting the doctors arrival, I studied that lovely piece: the soft colors, a man and a woman standing in a field, heads bowed in prayer. As my eyes absorbed that painting, a calm came over me.

I found peace.

Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C., Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va. See JeffMinick.com to follow his blog.
MALDI-TOF (matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight) mass spectroscopy is a form of molecular analysis that can be used in forensic investigation to identify remains and estimate the postmortem interval.

MALDI-TOF is known for its high sensitivity and precision, making it an increasingly popular method in forensic science.

Image Credit: Darko Cacic/Shutterstock.com

MADLI-TOF

MALDI was introduced in the 1980s and has since then been applied to a broad range of life sciences, such as medicine and archeology. MALDI imaging allows for simultaneous and direct analysis of endogenous and exogenous molecules in various tissues.

For example, MALDI imaging mass spectroscopy can be applied to proteins characteristic of certain diseases without using target-specific reagents, thereby allowing searches for hundreds of analytes at once. MALDI-TOF can also be applied to genetic information, such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

Postmortem interval (PMI) estimation

Changes to bodies after death, such as rigor mortis, form the bases for estimating the time of death but have been limited by imprecise estimations. MALDI-TOF presents a new method by which PMI can be estimated. Internal organs begin to decay in different time-dependent ways, which means signals will vary by organs.

The MALDI-TOF approach, compared to more traditional methods, uses molecular images and multivariate analyses that can be invaluable for estimating intermediate PMIs. Where applied, MALDI-TOF has found decreasing levels of proteins and peptides in human livers as time passes, consistent with histological changes. Simultaneously, other proteins and peptide markers increased in intensity with decay.

Some of the protein markers identified with MALDI-TOF for PMI estimation were Rho, GTPase-activating protein 24, amine oxidase, and small vasohibin-binding protein. However, there are some drawbacks to this approach. Because decay occurs relatively quickly, few or no peaks were remaining to be identified 144 hours after death.

Further limitations include the preparation process, which must be carried out quickly with no contamination. Furthermore, factors such as variable temperatures may influence decay speed and this the time at which markers disappear.

Forensic paternity testing

The identification of individuals in forensic science is often done based on repeat sequences in nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA sequences but can also be done by SNPs. SNPs are often beneficial because they can be detected in degraded or otherwise poor samples, as is often the case with forensic samples.

One of the approaches to measuring SNPs is through MALDI-TOF, which analyzes the primer extension (PEX) after the genetic sample has been amplified. This is also sometimes referred to as minisequencing. Where tested, MALDI-TOF has been shown to have high precision and throughput when applied to paternity and identification markers.

The main drawbacks of this approach include the high price of MALDI-TOF instruments and the detailed multi-step purifications that need to be carried out before MALDI-TOF when PEX is used.

Criminal profiling

There is also some theorizing that MALDI-TOF can uniquely provide information on a criminals state at the time of a crime. Substances that are produced normally in bodies and present in fingermarks or substances that are being excreted through sweat or have come in contact with fingermarks can be detected with MALDI-TOF and may offer some background.

This criminal profiling, called chemical criminal profiling, aims to show information such as actions before a crime, sex, age, and possibly location during the crime. MALDI-TOF can also be used to identify specific substances, such as blood, to a better degree than many other methods because it directly measures the heam group in blood.

However, there are concerns that this method may only provide circumstantial evidence rather than true molecular evidence. For example, there are several innocent ways a person can end up with similar chemical profiles as a guilty person, such as by using similar products or moving in similar areas.

Sources Li, C. et al. (2017). MALDI-TOF MS as a novel tool for the estimation of postmortem interval in liver tissue samples. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-05216-0

Petkovski, E. et al. (2005). SNPs and MALDI-TOF MS: tools for DNA typing in forensic paternity testing and anthropology. Journal of Forensic Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1520/JFS2004245

Francese, S. (2018). Criminal profiling through MALDI MS-based technologies  breaking barriers towards border-free forensic science. Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1080/00450618.2018.1561949

Further Reading
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 23:41:04|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Here are the latest developments on the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in China:

-- China's civil aviation regulator issued a circular Thursday to further cut international flights as part of efforts to stem the inflow of COVID-19 cases.

All domestic airlines were allowed to operate only one flight to each country per week, while foreign aviation companies should keep only one air route to China and there should be no more than one flight every week for each of the air route to China, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said in a circular that will be effective from March 29.

-- South China's Guangdong Province has demanded all arrivals from overseas to undergo concentrated quarantine and nucleic acid testing (NAT) starting from 6:00 a.m. Friday in a bid to contain the spread of novel coronavirus.

Travelers from overseas, including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, will be quarantined in designated places for 14 days. The quarantine expenses shall be paid by passengers themselves, according to the office of the provincial epidemic prevention and control headquarters.

-- The 4,000-plus military medical professionals that have rushed to aid the battle against the novel coronavirus in central China's city of Wuhan are sticking to their positions until "a full victory is achieved."

The military medics who came to help Wuhan will remain committed to supporting local authorities in fighting coronavirus, treating patients and carrying out scientific research, said Ren Guoqiang, a Defense Ministry spokesperson.

-- Wuhan will suspend group Tomb-sweeping Day activities to prevent mass gatherings and reduce cross-infection of the novel coronavirus.

All funeral homes, cemeteries and columbaria across the city will not allow gathering activities such as collective public offerings, vigil and tomb-sweeping activities earlier than April 30, according to a circular issued by the city's COVID-19 control headquarters Thursday.

-- China hopes the G20 extraordinary virtual leaders' summit on COVID-19 will reinforce solidarity, cooperation and coordination, and boost the confidence as the world is grappling with the novel coronavirus pandemic, Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu said Wednesday.

The summit will be hosted via video by Saudi Arabia, which holds the presidency of the G20 this year.

-- No new domestically transmitted cases of the COVID-19 were reported on the Chinese mainland on Wednesday.

The National Health Commission received reports of 67 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on the Chinese mainland on Wednesday, all of which were imported.

-- Also on Wednesday, six deaths and 58 new suspected cases were reported on the mainland with all the deaths in Hubei Province and all the suspected cases from abroad.

A total of 401 people were discharged from the hospital after recovery, while the number of severe cases decreased by 164 to 1,235.

-- The overall confirmed cases on the mainland had reached 81,285 by the end of Wednesday, including 3,947 patients who were still being treated, 74,051 patients who had been discharged after recovery, and 3,287 people who died of the disease.

-- By the end of Wednesday, 410 confirmed cases including four deaths had been reported in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), 30 confirmed cases in the Macao SAR, and 235 in Taiwan including two deaths.

A total of 106 patients in Hong Kong, 10 in Macao and 29 in Taiwan had been discharged from the hospital after recovery.

-- No new confirmed cases of the COVID-19 were reported Wednesday in Wuhan, the former hardest-hit city in central China's Hubei Province.

-- Commercial flights will resume operations in Wuhan starting on April 8, excluding international flights and those between Wuhan and Beijing, Wang Benju, with the provincial department of transportation, told a press conference on Wednesday.

-- Construction has resumed on 65 airport projects across China, representing more than 80 percent of the country's airport projects under construction, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

-- China has provided assistance to 89 countries and four international organizations to fight against the novel coronavirus.

-- China has issued more than 6,400 force majeure certificates to help companies avoid penalties for not being able to meet contractual obligations amid novel coronavirus outbreak.

-- China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism has signed a cooperation agreement with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to bail out the country's cultural and tourism enterprises hit by the novel coronavirus outbreak.

-- China has strengthened international cooperation in the research and development of vaccines against the novel coronavirus disease.

-- China's 2019 Novel Coronavirus Resource database has recorded more than 4 million downloads, providing data service to users from 152 countries and regions in the world.
Photo: John Merkl

The design world is constantly on the move in San Francisco. Between new collection launches and showroom openings, it can be hard to keep track. Thats why AD PRO has got you covered with all the news you need to know for the week.

Sales

Chairish Hosts Annual Designer Showhouse Sale

Chairishs Designer Showcase Sale is officially back by popular demand. Starting this week, the San Franciscobased home decor marketplace is offering steep price cuts on more than 500 pieces from as many as 20 showhouses, all of which were hand-selected by designers like Pebbles Nix and Jonathan Rachman.

If youve admired the jaw-droppingly beautiful rooms from top showhouses, now is your chance to snag a few pieces hand-selected by leading interior designers for their one-of-a-kind spaces, Anna Brockway, Chairishs cofounder and president, tells AD PRO.

Product Launches

Serena & Lily Launches Summer 2020 Collection

While most of the design scene is currently thinking about social distancing, Serena & Lily has its sights set on summer. This week, the Sausalito-based brand is launching its summer collection, featuring more than 300 new arrivals.

Our summer collection is inspired by lights influence on different times of dayclean light of early summer mornings; noon lights ability to brighten and enhance colors; and evening dusk light muting everything it touches, Kristy Williams, Serena & Lilys chief design officer, tells AD PRO. In addition to introducing new patterns like Beach Bay, Isla, and Beach Club, Serena & Lily is expanding its childrens collection by reimagining customer favorites such as the Riviera Chair and Avalon Daybed in kid-friendly sizes.

Events

ASID California North Takes Its Community Digital

A week after Mayor London Breed ordered residents to shelter in place for the foreseeable future, San Franciscos architecture and design community is creating new ways to connect. This week, the ASIDs California North chapter announced via email that it will begin to offer online learning opportunities. According to the message, ASID CAN will start to share upcoming virtual events with its members. You can join the ASID CAN community and stay updated on future virtual events here.

Story continues

See the video.

Hires

Jason Jones Becomes a Partner at Arcsine

Oakland-based architecture and design firm Arcsine recently tapped Jason Jones as the companys first partner alongside founding principals Adam Winig and Daniel Scovill. Prior to joining Arcsine in 2015, Jones spent over a decade at Gensler, where he focused on highly technical design work. As a partner, Jones will focus on creating solutions to design problems with interesting, technical challenges. Arcsine has also hired Michaela Molleur as the firms intermediate interior designer.

Real Estate

San Francisco Bars Ellis Act Removals in the Wake of COVID-19 Outbreak

San Francisco is taking big steps to protect its tenants during the state-wide shelter-in-place order. Curbed reports no-fault evictions and Ellis Act removals are currently barred as the city is encouraged to stay inside. Mayor Breed made the announcement on Monday, and the order is expected to stay in place until at least mid-April. That being said, landlords can still evict tenants for criminal, health, or safety reasons.

Well-Preserved Marshall Home Hits the Market for $3.9 Million

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a mansion in Berkeleys Claremont Court neighborhood has hit the market for $3.9 million. Built by John A. Marshall and designed by Edward B. Seeley, the 5,421-square-foot-space dates back to 1907. The home boasts seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, and a conservatory, among other amenities.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
A photograph of a Nazi Panzer commander having champagne and caviar with two captured RAF pilots has been found.

Hauptmann von Luck told Sergeants Edward Rodgers and Cyril Bartlam they were 'lucky' to have met him when they were captured, before taking them to a cafe or restaurant in Fecamp, Normandy.

The pair were taken prisoners in June 1940 after their Blenheim bomber was shot down as it covered the evacuation of British troops from the coastal town.

The German commander, who was famous for being gentlemanly, regularly made witty puns on his name when capturing allied troops.

Hauptmann von Luck, left, with captured RAF airmen Sergeants Edward Rodgers, second right, and Cyril Bartlam, first right, at a cafe or restaurant in Fecamp, Normandy, in 1940

Sgts Rodgers (left) and Bartlam (right) remained in custody for five more years. Sgt Rodgers was in the 'Long March' across Poland and Germany when PoWs were moved due to advancing Soviet troops

The stunning picture shows the German commander sitting with his prisoners alongside two bottles of champagne, small plates filled with caviar and a vase of flowers.

In his memoirs, Von Luck writes: '"You are in luck", I greeted them. "You'll be staying with me for the time being".

'Sitting together at the festive table that evening were the officers of my battalion, the successful leader of the 88mm battery, a German U-Boat Officer and the crew of a British bomber, besides the mayor of Fecamp.'

The German officer had been freed by von Luck's men from the town's prison.

On the back of the photo, the following message is written: 'With Tommy flyers at Fecamp, 12 Juni 1940.'

The two British soldiers pictured with German soldiers in Fecamp, France

The image was found by French postman and amateur historian Laurent Viton, who has published them in British magazine Iron Cross.

Days after being captured, Sgts Rodgers and Bartlam were sent off to a German PoW camp.

In the case of Rodgers he ended up in Stalag Luft VI in Lithuania for much of the rest of the war.

During the winter of 1944-45 he was one of hundreds of PoWs sent on a death march west across Poland and Germany as the Russians advanced from the east.

By the time he was liberated in April 1945 he weighed just 7stn.

Brendan Rodgers, the son of the late Sgt Rodgers, said: 'My father told me he had been very lucky to have survived the war and said he had been well treated by the Germans when he was captured but he never mentioned champagne and caviar.

'I have never seen the photo before and was most surprised when I did see it. It is extraordinary but when you learn about the sort of man von Luck was you can understand why.'

Their plane was shot down over Fecamp, Normandy, France

Blenheim bomber plane pictured above. They were in a plane of this model when they were shot down

The editor of Iron Cross, which covers German military history, Andy Saunders, said: 'Hospitality extended towards captured RAF airmen at this stage of the war was not altogether unusual - although I suspect this didnt usually extend to Champagne and caviar!

'Equally, hospitality to ones captives was frequently extended by the British. However, it became less common on both sides as the war progressed and attitudes hardened.

'This photograph, though, is remarkable. These men - adversaries - seem relaxed together. Almost in celebration, and yet the war was then raging at its fiercest.'

After the war Rodgers returned to his home city of Dublin where he worked as a cinema manager.

He married wife Mary in July 1945 and they had four children, one of whom was a daughter he called Valery after the Frenh town where his plane was shot down.

He died in 1986 aged 82.

Sgt Rodgers pictured at his wedding day with his wife Mary in July, 1945, shortly after his release from custody

Bartlam, from Broseley, Shropshire, also survived the war and died in 1997.

Von Luck went on to serve in North Africa, the Russian front and then Normandy again following D-Day.

He was captured by the Russians at Halbe, south of Berlin, in April 1945 and spent four years in a Soviet labour camp.

He died in Hamburg in 1997 aged 86.

The remarkable photos of the pilots with the German commander were colourised by Richard James Molloy and published in the Iron Cross magazine.
Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles is urging New Zealanders to get the message not to visit friends or family - or they will risk extending the lockdown.

Speaking to RNZ's Morning Report, Siouxsie says it is essential that people understand the need to avoid contact with anyone outside their own household.

"People are not understanding - there are no dinner parties, there's no popping over to someone's house for coffee.

"People are the weak points. I'm hearing people say 'oh I'm just gonna go and visit my friend' or 'I'm just gonna go and visit my family'.

"You are in a bubble... our own household is our bubble and you need to stay in your bubble and if you go out of your bubble you're going to pop that bubble and that's going to put us all at risk."

She says the important thing now was for everybody to get the message about how important the lockdown was.

"If they don't get that message our lockdown is gonna be longer than four weeks, because every person that breaks a bubble means that we're gonna need to do this for longer.

"What you mustn't do is assume that we can go with a friend and have dinner or go and pop round to our family's house. That is not allowed."

How to practice safe hygiene when going to the supermarket

Siouxsie says it is understood that people needed to be able to get supplies.

"We can go outside and we can do these things as long as we keep it to essential trips, stay two metres away from people; we can pick up our groceries and things."

Even when picking up goods at the supermarket, there were things people could do to protect themselves and others.

"We want to minimise our time outside the house ... doing a bigger shop - if you can do a bigger shop that would be better, that would allow you leave time for your groceries to sit for a few days.

"We know that the virus can survive on surfaces for up to three days ... on cardboard it's about 24 hours.

"If you're bringing your shopping in you could just leave your non-perishables for a few days before you use them, or you can wipe them down even with just a soapy cloth or something.

"Your fresh things you can, if you're worried about them, just give them ... a little bit of a soapy wash and rinse them off."

"We need to wash our hands as soon as we get back in the house."

Outdoor activities without breaking the bubble

She says people could undertake outdoor activities with those in their household, as long as they avoided anyone who was not in their household.

She says some more dangerous activities should be avoided, however.

"The coastguard are also in bubbles so ... please if you have a boat or you're gonna go surfing don't do those things.

"We don't want you to do anything that's gonna endanger you when we don't have the services there to look after you. Don't make their job - the coastguards' job - more difficult."

She was hopeful the virus in New Zealand would peak soon so the country could return to business as usual, hopefully in the next two to three weeks, possibly four.

"We know that we're running on this sort of two-week timeline where what we're seeing now is what happened two weeks ago, and because there's more Kiwis coming in from overseas the numbers of cases associated with travel will continue to rise.

"We'll also presumably see a number of increases in terms of community transmission but what we're doing now is putting the brakes on and so we should see the benefits of this in hopefully two to three weeks, maybe four weeks."

The other thing that was important was contact tracing for all new cases. Siouxsie says she was confident New Zealand had the capacity to get it right.

"It's just a case of ramping up but also training the people to do it, so I've every confidence that once all the right people are in place that this is something that we can do."

-RNZ
A former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, has asked the federal government to convert the International Cancer Centre along Airport Road in Abuja into an additional facility to isolate patients affected by coronavirus in the country.

Mr Abubakar gave the suggestion in a tweet via his verified handle, @Atiku, on Wednesday.

With the increasing number of coronavirus cases in our country, I wish to make a passionate plea to owners of International Cancer Centre along Airport Road in Abuja to release it to FG for use as an additional facility.

It is empty and isolated and can serve the need. In this time of National Crisis, all hands must be on deck. -AA, he tweeted.

With the increasing number of Coronavirus cases in our country, I wish to make a passionate plea to owners of International Cancer Centre along Airport Road in Abuja to release it to FG for use as an additional facility.  Atiku Abubakar (@atiku) March 25, 2020

It is empty and isolated and can serve the need. In this time of National Crisis, all hands must be on deck. -AA  Atiku Abubakar (@atiku) March 25, 2020

The 2009 multi-billion-naira International Cancer Centre, ICCA, an initiative of former Nigerian First Lady, Turai YarAdua, over time had been transformed into a cowpea farm, a 2017 PREMIUM TIMES investigation showed.

However, in the previous year, a similar investigation done by this newspaper also revealed that the centre has become an oasis for burglars, who frequently carted away power cables worth millions of naira from the centre.

Mr Atiku, in his tweet, explained that the building is empty and can thus be utilised in the current situation as confirmed cases of coronavirus hits 51 in Nigeria.

As at 11:52 p.m. on Wednesday, the federal government announced five additional confirmed cases.

Lagos and the FCT have two new cases respectively and Rivers State confirmed its first index of the Covid-19.

The former vice president, whose son also tested positive to the virus, had earlier urged the federal government to provide N10,000 to 30 million Nigerian households as a measure to enable them to survive as the coronavirus takes a toll on the economy.

According to him, the money would assist Nigerians provide supplements such as foodstuff.

He had also pledged N50 million to support the federal government tackle the scourge.
Researchers led by Osaka University use dimensionality reduction analyses to identify fine-scale differences in the Japanese population, revealing greater population structure than previously thought

Osaka, Japan - Geographically isolated from mainland Eurasia, the island nation of Japan has seen little in the way of population mixing for thousands of years. In fact, after two waves of human migrationone 40,000 years ago from Southeast Asia and one 3,000 years ago from the Korean PeninsulaJapanese people are recognized as a relatively homogeneous and isolated population.

But in a study published in Nature Communications, an international research team led by Osaka University revealed that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to the Japanese population.

"At first glance, the Japanese population appears to be demographically homogenous," says lead author of the study Saori Sakaue. "However, there are obvious cultural and linguistic differences from region to region and from island to island in Japan, leading us to suspect that there may actually be greater population structure than has previously been shown."

Using novel machine-learning methods, the researchers examined the genomic sequences of 170,000 individuals from Japan, looking for minute genetic differences. As it turns out, they were right.

"Dimensionality reduction analyses revealed fine-scale diversity within the Japanese population," explains Sakaue. "Not only did we identify the two main population clusters observed in previous studies, we successfully distinguished eight sub-clusters within one of these populations, confirming that Japanese people are not as homogenous as we previously thought."

Interestingly, the eight sub-clusters correlated with distinct islands located in the Ryukyu region of Japan, some of which are separated by as little as 50 km.

The researchers also successfully illuminated genetic diversity within populations from the United Kingdom, Malaysia, and an Arab cohort, suggesting that the machine-learning approach is also applicable to more complex populations.

They then turned their attention to the implications of their research, particularly the future disease risk prediction of individuals based on their unique genetic profile.

"Given the fine-scale differences within the Japanese population, we were interested in how subtle population differences may affect the genetic prediction of human diseases and complex traits," explains senior author Yukinori Okada. "Using phenome-wide polygenic risk score analyses of 67 complex traits, we confirmed that the sub-structures within the Japanese population did indeed impact disease prediction."

"The results of our study have significant implications for the wider field of individualized medicine, highlighting the importance of a thorough understanding of genetic diversity before embarking on disease prediction."

###

The article, "Dimensionality reduction reveals fine-scale structure in the Japanese population with consequences for polygenic risk prediction," was published in Nature Communications at DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15194-z.

About Osaka University

Osaka University was founded in 1931 as one of the seven imperial universities of Japan and now has expanded to one of Japan's leading comprehensive universities. The University has now embarked on open research revolution from a position as Japan's most innovative university and among the most innovative institutions in the world according to Reuters 2015 Top 100 Innovative Universities and the Nature Index Innovation 2017. The university's ability to innovate from the stage of fundamental research through the creation of useful technology with economic impact stems from its broad disciplinary spectrum.
Delta State, South-south Nigeria, has announced the closure of its borders with other states from Sunday, March 29, as a preventive measure against the novel coronavirus.

There is no suspected or confirmed case of the virus in the state.

The state governor, Ifeanyi Okowa, made the announcement in a statewide broadcast on Thursday.

Mr Okowa said residents in Delta are to stay indoors from April 1 and also all the markets, shops, supermarkets, and businesses are to remain close from the date.

Mr Okowa said the Asaba airport would be closed from Friday, March 27.

The restriction would last for two weeks in the first instance, the governor said.

People working in security, healthcare (pharmacies are to remain open), water, fire, power, and essential departments of media houses, and telecommunications companies are exempted from the restriction, he said.

Exemption

The officials of the agencies or companies that are exempted from the restriction are required to carry valid identification tags to ensure their smooth movement.

Food sellers are to conduct their businesses within the precinct of their homes and are required to strictly adhere to the social distancing rules.

Deltans are advised that there will be increased security presence on the streets and land borders to ensure strict compliance with these directives, Mr Okowa said.

I urge all Deltans to adjust to the new normal and cooperate with the Government and law enforcement agencies. Drastic as these measures may seem, they are for our collective good. At the same time, we must keep on praying to God to save us from the seismic effects of this global pandemic, he added.

So far, Nigeria has a total of 51 confirmed cases and one death. Eight have recovered in the country from the ailment which has killed over 20000.

READ ALSO:

Lagos State has the highest number of confirmed cases in the country with 32 cases, followed by Abuja with 10 cases, Ogun State three, and Ekiti, Oyo Edo, Bauchi Osun and Rivers have one case each.

Most of the cases reported are travellers who have just returned to the country. Other cases are people who have come in contact with infected people.

Some senior government officials like Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, and the Chief of Staff to the President, Abba Kyari have tested positive while others have self-isolated.

Meanwhile, most state governments have directed that some workers stay at home and not report to work.
A New Jersey man who allegedly coughed on a grocery store employee and told her he has coronavirus has been charged with making terrorist threats and could face up to seven years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.

George Falcone was charged on Tuesday after authorities say he "purposefully" coughed on an employee who warned him against standing too closely to a display of prepared food, according to New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir S Grewal.

The statement says that he "allegedly laughed and said he was infected with the coronavirus" before telling two other employees that they are "lucky to have jobs" at the Wegman's store in Manalapan.

He also was charged with obstructing administration of the law and harassment.

Attorney General Grewal said: "These are extremely difficult times in which all of us are called upon to be considerate of each other  not to engage in intimidation and spread fear, as alleged in this case ... Just as we are cracking down on bias offences and those who use the pandemic to fuel hatred and prejudice, we vow to respond swiftly and strongly whenever someone commits a criminal offence that uses the coronavirus to generate panic or discord."

The incident occurred on Sunday, and summonses were issued on Tuesday. Mr Falcone will appear in court at a later date, according to the attorney general.

Mr Falcone's case follows similar terrorism charges against a man in Missouri who police say had filmed himself licking items in a Walmart, then posted video to social media, saying: "Who's afraid of the coronavirus?"

Police in Warrenton say they were alerted to Cody Pfister's video by people in the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK.

The video was posted on 11 March. He was charged with making terrorist threats in the second-degree for after he allegedly "caused a false belief or fear that a condition involving danger to life existed" and acted "with reckless disregard of the risk causing the evacuation, quarantine or closure of any portion" of the store, according to court documents.

In a memo to US attorneys and federal law enforcement on Tuesday, the Justice Department told officials that threats or attempts to spread coronavirus can be considered terrorism.

Covid-19 meets a statutory definition of a biological agent that can be weaponised, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said.

The memo says: "Threats or attempts to use Covid-19 as a weapon against Americans will not be tolerated."

Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project, said that the decision send a "counterproductive and harmful message" during the pandemic response.

"Rather than heeding public health experts' advice to promote public trust in science and reduce prison populations, the Justice Department is threatening to use vague, over-broad, and flawed coercive powers that will make people more afraid to seek care" during the emergency, the ACLU said.
Rishi Sunak will finally unveil a coronavirus bailout for millions of stricken self-employed workers today - with signs they could get cash payments of up to 1,700 a month.

A week after announcing a massive rescue package for employees, the Chancellor is set to go further to stop those who work for themselves and in the 'gig' economy being plunged into poverty by the government's 'social distancing' lockdown.

Boris Johnson said yesterday that the new proposals will offer 'parity' with the eye-watering measures already brought forward to protect other parts of the workforce.

There is speculation that around two million workers could benefit, potentially getting 80 per cent of the net income they declared on previous tax returns, up to a limit of 1,700 a month.

Unlike the bailout for employees, which is being channelled through businesses in grants, the government money would go directly to individuals.

The help is also expected to be means-tested, with those earning over 50,000 not covered to avoid the system being exploited.

In other developments on another fast-moving day of crisis:

Chancellor Rishi Sunak will finally today unveil a coronavirus bailout for millions of stricken self-employed workers.

One of the government's top advisers said the UK's epidemic will get worse before it gets better but could peak by Easter.

Dyson has been handed an order of 10,000 ventilators from the Government - as long as the machines pass early tests.

Retailer Boots begged people not to turn up demanding tests because it has yet to receive any.

Royal aides tried to trace anyone Prince Charles has met in the last fortnight after he tested positive for the disease.

The latest coronavirus figures for the UK showed 9,529 positive tests and a death toll of 465.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak (pictured at a Downing Street press conference last week) will finally unveil a coronavirus bailout for millions of stricken self-employed workers today

Boris Johnson said yesterday that the new proposals will offer 'parity' with the eye-watering measures already brought forward to protect other parts of the workforce

Rishi's rescue: What has the Chancellor already annoounced? The government's bailout for the economy has been announced in stages, starting with the Budget on March 11. The measures so far include: The government will cover 80 per cent of wages for companies to keep workers on.

It will pay up to 2,500 a month - equivalent to the UK average wage of 30,000 a year.

VAT bills worth 30billion of VAT bills for the next quarter will be deferred.

A 7billion boost to welfare to 'strengthen the safety net' will be made.

A 1billion boost to housing benefit to help renters;

A 30billion fiscal stimulus in the Budget, including 12billion directly for the fight against coronavirus, with more money for NHS;

Government-backed loan guarantees worth 330billion - equivalent to 15 per cent of GDP. The Treasury will increase this with 'as much capacity as required'

A 20billion package for business including a 12-month rate holiday for all firms in retail, leisure and hospitality sectors, and cash grants of up to 25,000 for smaller companies;

A three-month mortgage holiday for homeowners;

A three-month ban on evictions of renters, and mortgage holiday extended to buy-to-let;

The Bank of England has cut rates twice to a record low of 0.1 per cent. Its quantitative easing scheme - effectively printing money to stimulate the economy - has been expanded to more than 600billio Advertisement

The government has been facing a furious clamour to bring forward a rescue package for the self-employed, with warnings that it is already too late for many who have been unable to pay their bills after swathes of the economy were forced to shut down to curb coronavirus spread.

It emerged yesterday that almost half a million benefit claims have been received over the past nine days.

Around 477,000 claims have been 'processed' since last Tuesday, with 105,000 being made for Universal Credit yesterday.

The unprecedented pressure and volume of new claims has led to delays and people being unable to get through to advisers on the phone.

Mr Johnson said that while the Government was 'putting our arms around' every worker, he could not guarantee that the self-employed would not face 'any kind of hardship at all'.

But the Prime Minister said he wanted to get 'parity of support' so the self-employed could have similar levels of protection to workers with jobs.

He told the Commons yesterday: 'There are particular difficulties with those who are not on PAYE schemes... I think the whole House understands. We are bringing forward a package to ensure that everybody gets the support that they need.'

Asked what this would involve, he said: 'I cannot, in all candour, promise the House that we will be able to get through this crisis without any kind of hardship at all.'

But he added: 'We will do whatever we can to support the self-employed, just as we are putting our arms around every single employed person in this country.'

Last week Mr Sunak unveiled a plan that would see the state pay up to 80 per cent of the wages of employees if firms agree to keep them on.

But there are, as yet, no measures for the estimated five million self-employed people, who currently have to rely on welfare payments of around 94 a week.

At a press conference in Downing Street later, Mr Sunak is expected to unveil a 'huge' scheme to help subsidise the incomes of self-employed people whose work has evaporated because of the coronavirus.

It will feature a 'bespoke' mix of measures but will include an element of direct income subsidy in the form of non-repayable grants.

Sources acknowledge that it 'won't be direct parity in terms of maths but it will be parity in terms of fairness'.

Self-employed 'at higher risk from coronavirus shutdown than employees' The self-employed are at higher risk from the coronavirus chaos than employees, economists have warned. The IFS think-tank said 22 per cent work in sectors that are badly hit, compared to 17 per cent of employees - although the numbers will be lower because there are fewer of them overall. The self-employed are much more likely to work in jobs such as cleaning, hairdressing, performing arts, fitness coaching, or taxi driving. According to the IFS, nearly a million work in sectors that will be mostly shut down. If restrictions were tightened further, 0.8million self-employed workers in the construction sector could also be affected. A further 0.4 million self-employed workers have a child aged up to nine, and no key workers or non-working adults in the household who can provide childcare while schools are closed. Advertisement

This is partly due to the range of workers in the self-employed bracket. While many have lost their income, others have more work.

Many earn low wages in the hospitality and leisure sectors, but corporate lawyers and barristers on six-figure salaries are also self-employed.

Government sources said that in addition they did not want the taxpayer to have to support the incomes of people who have other jobs.

One source said: 'With the employee scheme, people are either furloughed or they are not. 'With the self-employed it's different  work may have dried up right now but that might change, and this [lockdown] could go on for months.'

The sums involved will be 'huge' because of the scale of the problem and will run to certainly tens of billions.

Mr Sunak has consulted several organisations representing the self-employed over the measures.

A spokesman for one of them, the association of Independent Professionals and the Self Employed, said: 'We're quite optimistic. 'We've been calling for a fund to guarantee the income of most self-employed people who are going to lose out in this crisis.

'We're calling for 80 per cent of the wages of the self-employed, the same as employees, to be protected.' At Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, MPs from all parties lined up to ask what was being done to help the self-employed.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said: 'The self-employed are having to choose whether they go to work or stay at home or face losing their entire livelihood, relying instead on an overstretched welfare system which could pay as little as 94 per week.'

Asked yesterday why the package was taking so long to arrive, Mr Johnson said: 'We have increased universal credit by 1,000 a year.

'We have deferred income tax self-assessments for the self-employed until July, and are deferring VAT until the next quarter. There is also access to Government-financed loans.

'But there are particular complexities of the self-employed that do need to be addressed; they are not all in the same position.'

London mayor Sadiq Khan has said the lack of support for the self-employed has contributed to the numbers travelling into the capital for work despite the lockdown.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank has estimated that one in three people in self-employment  1.7million workers  are at risk of losing their income.
China will temporarily close its border to most foreign travelers, effective at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, to prevent a new outbreak of the coronavirus in the country.

The restriction applies to foreigners holding visas or resident permits, as well as to those holding APEC Business Travel Cards.

"The suspension is a temporary measure that China is compelled to take in light of the outbreak situation and the practices of other countries,"China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement released today."China will stay in close touch with all sides and properly handle personnel exchanges with the rest of the world under the special circumstances."

The ministry said the ban will not affect those with diplomatic, service, courtesy or C visas.

"Foreign nationals coming to China for necessary economic, trade, scientific or technological activities or out of emergency humanitarian needs may apply for visas at Chinese embassies or consulates," it added.

President Donald Trump banned travel from China in late January to stop the spread of the disease, and other countries, including the European Union, have adopted similar restrictions.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, in an interview on CNN on Thursday, blamed the scale of the crisis in the United States and around the world on China, saying the country failed to aggressively deal with the initial outbreak.

"The Chinese did not tell us early to mid-December that there was a crisis of human to human transmission with a new novel coronavirus. That has set the world back six weeks," Navarro said.
TriMets general manager said that fare increases are not on the table or being contemplated as a way to shore up revenue despite plunging ridership and mass regionwide layoffs amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Doug Kelsey, TriMets leader, made those comments Wednesday during the transit agencys first board meeting since COVID-19 was first confirmed in Oregon last month.

There is no fare increase being contemplated, Kelsey said in a video conference call with the TriMet board. Kelsey made the comments in response to questions from two board members about the budget impacts from two significant hits to the agencys budget: plunging ridership and associated fare revenue and layoffs in the tri-county region, which would mean a reduction in payroll taxes paid by employers, the agencys largest revenue piece.

So much remains unclear about TriMet  or other transit agencies financial futures. The Senate was planning to vote Wednesday on a $2 trillion stimulus package, which Kelsey said was thought to include $25 billion for transit agencies.

Kelsey said he was not sure what that means for TriMet. But he said TriMets understanding is whatever happens with the federal bill, transit agencies wont be expected as they normally are to contribute money in order to receive federal money. Local agencies typically must contribute matching money to obtain federal funding for large infrastructure programs such as bus rapid transit or light rail lines.

Otherwise, the agency is in wait and see mode, just like everyone else. I dont think anybody in the world knows the impact right now, Kelsey said of the budgetary effects of social distancing, ridership declines and layoffs on TriMet. He said hes taking a close look at all the budgetary impacts. But the effects of layoffs in the regional economy likely wont lead to lower payroll tax revenue until the next economic quarter.

Im trying to take a six-month lens for planning purposes, he said.

But Kelsey said management is not looking at fare increases as a way to raise revenue and shore up the agencys finances. He also reiterated that a fare increase was not in the agencys upcoming proposed financial year budget.

Fares account for roughly 18% of the agencys budget, according to Kelsey, compared to 60% from employer payroll taxes.

Kelsey said that the agency is looking at all of its options in the short-term, but he is committed to keeping as much of the tri-county bus and light rail network running as long as possible. Ridership has plunged upward of 55%, he said.

He said ridership declines came on the heels of what had been a great February, during which bus and rail ridership were up more than 6% and more than 3% respectively compared to the previous year.

Kelsey said some of that had to do with favorable weather, but TriMet has also expanded service in the past two years with additional money from the Legislatures $5.3 billion transportation package passed in 2017.

In the coming days, weeks and months, Kelsey said the agency would continue to focus on helping its employees and customers feel safe.

He said that many people dont see the level of work being doing behind the scenes to keep the system running and employees safe.

The transit union had said this week that its front-line operators were concerned about the level of preparedness and attention to protecting employees health.

Kelsey said the agency just received a shipment of 600 gallons of hand sanitizer this week, and he said agency officials were expecting to deploy six ultraviolet ray light wands  which he said will be used to kill germs and bacteria on buses as well.

-- Andrew Theen; atheen@oregonian.com; 503-294-4026; @andrewtheen

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Refugees already represent a vulnerable population and have significant deficiencies in areas that health experts have been focusing on to stem the spread of COVID-19.

Social-distancing is not possible in highly congested camps. Sanitation is poor at best and functioning health-care systems are non-existent.

Although there are no reported cases yet and domestic needs are obviously urgent at home, the international community should come together to reduce the risk among refugees.

The UN Refugee Agency has appealed for $33 million to help prevent an outbreak in refugee camps in Greece, Uganda, Mexico, Syria and Bangladesh, among others.

Organizations such as Medecins Sans Frontieres and the International Rescue Committee require more resources as they are working around the clock in both developing and developed countries.

As the IRC has stated, if there was one case in a camp  its a huge problem.
This is the terrifying moment an unlicensed drunk driver veers into oncoming traffic and flips a stolen car, killing two women in south-west Sydney.

Dashcam footage captured the moment Tyron Knodler, 22, drove a stolen Toyota LandCruiser into oncoming traffic on Henry Lawson Drive in Peakhurst in March last year.

The 22-year-old was seen drinking from a stolen bottle of Jim Beam bourbon while behind the wheel and speeding between lanes before the tragic crash.

Tyron Knodler fled the scene after veering a stolen Toyota LandCruiser into a Honda Jazz in Peakhurst in March last year, killing two people

This is the terrifying moment an unlicensed drunk driver veers into oncoming traffic and flips a stolen car

The collision instantly killed Canterbury Girls High School teacher Gayle Gibson and her friend Carol Chambers who was visiting from the Gold Coast.

Ms Gibson's husband Tony Giorgio suffered minor injuries in the crash along with Ms Chamber's partner Kim Alden, who spent a week in hospital with head injuries after the smash.

Knodler appeared at Downing Centre District Court on Thursday where he heard Ms Alden describe the night as the start of her 'living nightmare'.

'The defendant killed the two people I loved most in the world, together at the same time,' she said tearfully via video link from Queensland, Nine News reported.

'I lost my life that day too.'

Meanwhile the 22-year-old escaped the crash with a broken finger.

'I was just trying to see a mate and I thought I was a sick c*** and just driving, too much to drink and boom - I just f***ing tipped the car,' Knodler said in a police video at the time.

He told police 'I think I killed someone' in St George Hospital following the crash.

Knodler has never held a driver's licence, and had been drinking alone in a Padstow Park before the crash

Gayle Gibson was killed in the crash, while her husband Tony Giorgio suffered minor injuries

Ms Alden told the court it was hard enough that 30 people wanting to attend were told they were not allowed due to the coronavirus.

But she said not even having the defendant there was worse and said she wanted Knodler to hear her speak.

The group were out celebrating Ms Alden's birthday before they were due to travel to the Middle East in the same week.

Ms Alden said they'd been out celebrating her birthday ahead of a trip to the Middle East she planned to take with Ms Chambers later that week,

'Carol was my partner, my best friend, my lover, my confidant, my supporter for over 30 years. Now she is dead, for no good reason,' she said.

Dash cam footage captured the moment Tyron Knodler, 22, veered a stolen Toyota LandCruiser into oncoming traffic on Henry Lawson Drive in Peakhurst

Knodler told police he thought he was a 'sick c***' behind the wheel before the crash

Ms Alden has since been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm and said she constantly has suicidal thoughts since the crash.

The 22-year-old is due to be sentenced in May for charges including manslaughter, high range drink driving in a stolen car while unlicensed and failing to stop after a car crash causing death.

Knodler has never held a driver's licence, and had been drinking alone in a Padstow Park coping with family issues before getting behind the wheel.

He blew three-times over the legal limit, and after receiving his reading told police 'not bad aye, f***. That's why I crashed I guess.'
Buckingham Palace has confirmed that the 71-year-old Prince Charles has contracted the dreaded coronavirus. Although critics say that the findings have been very shocking, they call the rest of the abled members of the royal family to step up and help keep the monarchy alive.

However, amid all these, Prince Harry is missing. And many are asking: what is he doing to protect the Queen and her monarchy?

Prince Harry's Status

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have used their official social media account to spread information about the coronavirus. They initially posted the guidelines set by the World Health Organization to remind everyone of the proper way of self-isolation to prevent the further spread of the virus.

The royal couple also praised health professionals and the medical staff all over the world for their hard work, especially at the time of a health crisis.

And yet, an Instagram user criticized the couple. One user wrote, "You should be in the frontline like Will and Kate not sitting give your snippets of sympathy for us poor peasants!!!"

Another one said, "We don't need you telling us this. If you can't find something actually helpful to do, please just stay quiet and enjoy your "private lives," off the taxpayer's bill."

Critics call on Harry to help out, especially now that his father, Prince Charles has tested positive for the coronavirus. Because of her age, the Queen is greatly at risk for contracting the infectious disease as well.

Royal experts believe that it is during this difficult time that all the abled members of the royal family should come together and help out.

Taking On The Bigger Role

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge took the initiative and used their Instagram account to help raise funds for the coronavirus crisis. They provided a link of the charity to which citizens could send their donations. This is in collaboration with the National Emergencies Trust who is helping the most affected citizens because of this outbreak.

Kate and William have also spent the last week visiting the staff at NHS 111 to show their support for essential personnel who continue to provide service despite the risk of exposure to the virus.

"The last few days and weeks have been understandingly concerned with the continuing spread of the virus. But it is in times like this that we just realize how much the NHS represents the best of our country and society -- people from all walks of life are putting together resources and skills for the common good," William said.

Furthermore, being the third in line to the throne, William emphasized the royal family's expressed heartfelt gratitude for all the staff who continue to work round the clock to provide people the health care that they need.

On the other hand, in a statement, Clarence House said that the Prince of Wales continues to be "in good health," though he has been displaying mild symptoms of the disease. Prince Charles has also been working from home in the past couple of weeks following the government advice to stay indoors and possibly in isolation.
A Laredo sector Border Patrol supervisor has tested positive for COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, according to the Laredo chapter of the National Border Patrol Council.

READ MORE: City of Laredo confirms 13 total cases of coronavirus

According to the chapter, the supervisor worked at the Laredo North Border Patrol station as part of the K-9 unit.

A CNN report by Nick Valencia reported that "at least 15 other agents" were sent home to self-quarantine as a result of the positive test.

According to the union, the spouse of the agent tested positive earlier this week. The supervisor, however, worked his normal shift before learning of the news and starting his self-quarantine.

The union also put a notice on their Facebook page asking agents that might have been in contact with the supervisor to contact them for information on safety leave and how to get tested.

CPB issued a statement following the report.

"CBPs highest priority is to ensure the health, safety, and security of the American people and our workforce. CBP has issued guidance to all our employees that outlines the current comprehensive use of Personal Protective Equipment. We are taking every precaution to keep our workforce safe."

The City of Laredo did not confirm the report.

READ MORE: Maquinita remained open during citys coronavirus lockdown

"In order to safeguard legally-protected information, the City of Laredo is not publicly releasing personal or identifiable information regarding any cases as it relates to COVID-19 testing, results, or monitoring," the city wrote in a previous press release.
Dr. Jack Hixson, 96, of Chattanooga, passed away on March 21, 2020.

Dr. Hixson was a member of the Red Bank Baptist Church, where he was a faithful member of the Fellowship Sunday School Class from 1947 until his death.

He was born in Dunlap, Tn., and graduated from Sequatchie County High School. He was a member of the first high school band. After graduation from high school, he attended T.P.I.(now know as Tennessee Tech) where his major was Pre-Dental.

He was called on to serve his country in World War II in the US Navy. He was stationed in the Naval Hospital in Ft. Worth, TX as a hospital corpsman. While in Ft. Worth, he was selected to go to Loyola University Dental School in New Orleans.

Soon after entering dental school, he married Dorthy Sulsar whom he had met in Ft. Worth. They lived in New Orleans until his graduation as a Doctor of Dental Surgery.

After graduating from dental school, he opened his practice of dentistry in Red Bank. His practice was interrupted when he was called upon to serve his country in the US Navy during the Korean Conflict. He was stationed at the Marine Corps Base in Beaufort, SC as a Navy dentist.

Upon completing this tour of service, he reopened his practice in Red Bank. He was a life member of the American Dental Association, the Tennessee Dental Association, and the Chattanooga Area Dental Society. He served in every elective office, concluding his service as president.

He relieved a lot of mouth and jaw pain for his many patients, and caused a lot for the many more fish he caught!

After his retirement, he continued to enjoy fishing, his favorite pastime, and helping his children and grandchildren whenever and wherever they needed him.

Dr Hixson was preceded in death by his wife, Dorthy.

He is survived by his brother, Gene and sister, Gayle Thornton; sons: Steve (Rose) and Mark (Cindy); grandchildren: David (Alishea); Allison (Cheles) Fawver; Drew (Emily) and Kyle; great-granddaughters: Olivia, Abigail and Zoe. Many specials nieces and nephews.

Due to current restrictions, there will be a graveside service for immediate family only. A Celebration of Life will be held later.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to The American Cancer Society or Red Bank Baptist Church.

Visit www.hamiltonfuneraloptions .com to share words of comfort to the family.

Arrangements are by Hamilton Funeral Home & Cremation Services, 4506 Hixson Pike, 423 531-3975.
By AFP

ANKARA: Turkey has so far detained 410 people over "provacative and abusive" social media posts about the coronavirus pandemic, the interior minister said on Wednesday.

Suleyman Soylu also said the ministry had identified 1,748 suspect social media accounts over the past week, 65 percent of which belonged to terror groups including outlawed Kurdish militants and followers of US-based Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen.

He is blamed by Ankara for a failed 2016 coup.

"So far, 410 people have been caught," Suleyman Soylu said in an interview with 24 TV news channel.

"There are those who attempt to provoke ... and abuse the issue" arising from the pandemic, he said, without elaborating.

Turkey has confirmed 44 deaths from the novel coronavirus, while 1,872 cases of infection have been recorded.

Authorities have taken a raft of measures from shutting schools and universities to banning mass prayers.
More must be done to protect the health of vulnerable migrant workers in the UK and overseas who are disproportionately at risk of catching Covid-19, a number of human rights groups and construction associations have warned.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep across the globe  having killed more than 20,000 people to date  concern has been raised among industry and safety experts that thousands of migrant lives are being endangered due to limited health care, poor working conditions and exploitative labour systems.

In the UK, the British Safety Council said migrant workers involved in the gig economy and other less regulated sectors were vulnerable to abusive and unsafe employment practices under the current environment, but have fewer outlets to seek help and keep themselves safe from coronavirus.

The Geneva Council for Rights and Liberties has meanwhile called for urgent action to protect migrants working in the Gulf countries from infection, while Building and Wood Workers International (BWI) has said these groups will likely find themselves pushed to the sidelines during the mounting crisis.

Writing to the World Health Organisation, the Geneva Council warned that migrants caught in cycles of abuse and exploitation in the United Arab Emirates were particularly at risk.

Under the kafala sponsorship labour system, which ties many migrants to their employers, workers are trapped in contracts that limit their access to health care, confine them to overcrowded accommodation and restrict their freedom of movement.

The Geneva Council said these vulnerable workers were more at risk from Covid-19 and should not be treated differently to other groups", adding that "more needs to be done to protect them.

This will require urgent action to stop the ongoing work, especially when it takes place in overcrowded complexes where the infection is easily spread, the organisation added.

Along with Tokyo 2020, which The Independent revealed had ignored requests to investigate mistreatment of workers, Expo 2020 Dubai has found itself scrutinised by human rights groups and construction unions in recent months.

With the event still set to take place in October, the preparation of facilities has heavily relied on migrant labour, the Geneva Council said, but has not been called out for the poor practices and discriminatory treatment of migrant workers.

The organisation urged the WHO to encourage the UAE to protect the health and safety of those individuals continuing to work on Expo 2020 Dubai and other projects, as the rest of country heads into lockdown due to the spread of coronavirus.

The Geneva Council also demanded improved monitoring and screening of workers moving between countries or between jobs.

If workers are forced to move location, region or country for financial or health care reasons, this is likely to mitigate against global efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus, the group said.

BWI, a global construction union, has said that even in countries such as the US, disparities in health care and labour systems meant migrant workers, who are disproportionately employed on zero-hours or short-term contracts that lack proper industry regulation, faced a greater risk of infection compared to their domestic counterparts.

Many migrants are excluded from medical services or afraid to seek them, BWI general secretary Ambet Yuson told The Independent. In the United States, for example, there are many irregular workers who have no access to affordable health care and are reluctant to seek assistance. They are, in effect, on the side-lines; something that has become dangerous to everybody.

We should also keep in mind that migrant workers are needed if we are to cope with the coronavirus. Many migrant workers are working in health care and other vital services. They may be affected by lockdowns and other measures. However, their living environments, if care and conditions are not adequate, may expose them to the virus.

Lawrence Waterman OBE, chairman of the British Safety Council and former head of health and safety for the London Olympics, said migrants continuing to work in the UK gig economy during the coronavirus outbreak are likely to face similar issues.

They certainly are more at risk, if you compare them to the whole working population, he told The Independent. If you start with the vulnerability at work, its not always as safe, secure and regulated. These workers may be expected to cut corners that means they may lack the right protective equipment or find themselves coming into contact with others.

He added that migrant workers are also more vulnerable to abusive employment practices as theyre not as familiar with the systems, while some dont have settled status so dont want to make complaints. Under the current environment, they probably have fewer outlets to help them.

Meanwhile, the United Nations has launched a 1.5 billion global humanitarian response that will combat the spread of coronavirus in the worlds most vulnerable countries.

In cooperation with a number of support agencies, national governments and international NGOs, the UN is set to deliver essential medical equipment and supplies, install hand washing stations and establish humanitarian hubs in countries across the world.

The response plan is set to support refugees, children, exploited woman and migrants in countries already facing humanitarian crises. We must come to the aid of the ultra-vulnerable  millions upon millions of people who are least able to protect themselves, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday.
In its latest round of economic penalties targeting Iran, the US government has imposed fresh sanctions on 20 companies, Iranian officials and individuals with ties to the regimes Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other US-designated terrorist groups.

The US Treasury Department today identified a group of Iran- and Iraq-based targets over their apparent support for the IRGC, its Quds Force foreign arm and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.

Iran employs a web of front companies to fund terrorist groups across the region, siphoning resources away from the Iranian people and prioritizing terrorist proxies over the basic needs of its people, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement today.

The sanctions freeze any US-held assets belonging to the targets and make illegal any transactions between them and American entities.

Among those designated is the Reconstruction Organization of the Holy Shrines in Iraq, which the Treasury Department claims is a front company likely set up for embezzling public donations intended for the construction and maintenance of Shiite shrines in Iraq. Also sanctioned are IRGC officials accused of selling Iranian oil to the Syrian government and smuggling weapons to Yemen and Iraq.

Included in the list of targets is Shaykh Adnan al-Hamidawi, the special operations commander of Kataib Hezbollah, a militia group is accused of a spate of recent rocket attacks against US troops stationed in Iraq. The United States launched retaliatory strikes against Kataib Hezbollahs weapons facilities in mid-March following an attack on Camp Taji that killed two Americans.

The announcement of new sanctions today came as Iran deals with the regions worst coronavirus outbreak. The Donald Trump administration has resisted calls from some world leaders and human rights organizations to ease its maximum pressure campaign, which Tehran says is hampering its ability to contain the virus.

Since mid-February, Iran has recorded more than 29,000 cases of COVID-19, with 2,234 deaths. A government spokesperson warned this week the Islamic Republic could face a second wave of the outbreak if Iranians continue ignoring restrictions on travel.

The White House, meanwhile, has pressed on with its campaign of squeezing Irans oil exports. Earlier this month, it blacklisted more than a dozen companies in the United Arab Emirates, China, Hong Kong and South Africa for allegedly engaging with Irans petrochemical industry.

The newest US sanctions came a day after the family of American hostage Robert Levinson confirmed his death in the regimes custody. The former FBI agent, who disappeared in Iran 13 years ago, is believed to have died sometime before the COVID-19 outbreak in the country.

A spokesperson for the Iranian mission at the United Nations, in a statement on Twitter, denied again today that Tehran had Levinson in its custody.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Great Quest Fertilizer Ltd (TSXV:GQ) (the Company) is pleased to provide an update for shareholders on developments within the Company during the trading halt required by the Change of Business (COB) process.



The COB Transaction

Great Quest continues to work through the COB process as outlined by the TSX Venture. Upon completion of an audit and approval of the information circular it will be shared with shareholders who will vote on the transaction. Approval of the transaction and the change of business by shareholders will allow the acquisition of INCajou to close and the shares of Great Quest to resume trading.

GQ has learned that the cash nature of the cashew processing business, and the accounting of the inventories has complicated the necessary audit of INCajou. The recommendation of the auditors has been to delay the audit and resume after a full cycle of operation, in June 2020. The TSX Venture has agreed to this scenario and has been amenable to working with us throughout the process.

Concurrent Financing

The purchase agreement for INCajou between Bruce McKean and GQ remains in place. Concurrent with the closing of the COB Transaction, the Company is working alongside Akon Legacy Ventures (ALV) of securing financing for the 2020-2021 cashew processing year as referenced in the Press Release dated November 25, 2019 (GQ Executes Definitive Agreement to Acquire 1184700 BC Ltd.)

Trading Halt

Trading in the common shares of the Company remains halted. Trading is expected to remain halted until the audits are complete, and the COB reinstated.

Board Composition and Management

The Company today also announces the resignation of CFO, Jayram Hosanee, following the resignation of directors Bruce McKean and Salma Seetaroo (see press release dated January 16, 2020). The Board of Directors and Management of Great Quest wish to thank Mr. Hosanee for his tremendous contributions to the Company since 2012.

Ms. Seetaroo has also resigned from her post as VP Finance of GQ. As part of an operating agreement between INCajou and GQ, Salma Seetaroo and Jayram Hosanee were responsible for the management of INCajou. The resignations remove the appearance of conflicts of interest between INCajou and GQ going forward. INCajou has therefore terminated its operating agreement. The personnel changes shall not affect the purchase agreement in place and consummation of the proposed merger remains the only planned course of action.

The Company today also announces Paul Bozoki, CPA, MBA, has been appointed Interim Chief Financial Officer following the resignation of Jayram Hosanee.

Cautionary Note

Completion of the COB Transaction is subject to a number of conditions, including but not limited to, Exchange acceptance and disinterested shareholder approval. The COB Transaction cannot close until the required shareholder approval is obtained. There can be no assurance that the COB Transaction will be completed as proposed or at all.

Investors are cautioned that, except as disclosed in the management information circular to be prepared in connection with the COB Transaction, any information released or received with respect to the COB Transaction may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon. Trading in the securities of the Company should be considered highly speculative.

The Exchange has in no way passed upon the merits of the proposed COB Transaction and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this news release.

About Great Quest

Great Quest Fertilizer Ltd. is a Canadian agribusiness company focused on the development of African agricultural mineral projects for local production of farm ready fertilizers. The Companys flagship asset is the Tilemsi Phosphate Project, encompassing 1,206 km in northeastern Mali, containing high quality phosphate resources amenable to use as direct application fertilizer. Great Quest is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol GQ, and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol GQM.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF GREAT QUEST FERTILIZER LTD.

Jed Richardson

President, Chief Executive Officer and Director

Disclaimer for Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains forward-looking statements and information that are based on the beliefs of management and reflect the Companys current expectations. When used in this press release, the words "estimate", "belief", "anticipate", "intend", "expect", "plan", "may" or "should" and the negative of these words or such variations thereon or comparable terminology are intended to identify forward-looking statements and information. The forward-looking statements and information in this press release include information relating to the business plans of the Company and INCAJOU, the Concurrent Financing, the COB Transaction (including Exchange approval and the closing of the COB Transaction) and the board of directors and management of the Company upon completion of the COB Transaction. Such statements and information reflect the current view of the Company. Risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in those forward-looking statements and information.

By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause our actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

Such factors include, among others, the following risks:

there is no assurance that the Concurrent Financing will be completed or as to the actual offering price or gross proceeds to be raised in connection with the Concurrent Financing. In particular, the amount raised may be significantly less than the amounts anticipated as a result of, among other things, market conditions and investor behavior;

there is no assurance that the Company will obtain all requisite approvals for the COB Transaction, including the approval of the Companys disinterested shareholders, or the approval of the Exchange for the COB Transaction and the resulting creation of the new Control Person (which may be conditional upon amendments to the terms of the COB Transaction);





following completion of the COB Transaction, the Company may require additional financing from time to time in order to continue its operations. Financing may not be available when needed or on terms and conditions acceptable to the Company;





new laws or regulations could adversely affect the Companys business and results of operations;

the stock markets have experienced volatility that often has been unrelated to the performance of companies. These fluctuations may adversely affect the price of the Companys securities, regardless of its operating performance.

There are a number of important factors that could cause the Companys actual results to differ materially from those indicated or implied by forward-looking statements and information. Such factors include, among others: currency fluctuations; limited business history of the Company, Privco and INCAJOU; disruptions or changes in the credit or security markets; results of operation activities and development of projects; project cost overruns or unanticipated costs and expenses, fluctuations in commodity prices, and general market and industry conditions.

The Company cautions that the foregoing list of material factors is not exhaustive. When relying on the Companys forward-looking statements and information to make decisions, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. The Company has assumed that the material factors referred to in the previous paragraph will not cause such forward-looking statements and information to differ materially from actual results or events. However, the list of these factors is not exhaustive and is subject to change and there can be no assurance that such assumptions will reflect the actual outcome of such items or factors.

THE FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS PRESS RELEASE REPRESENTS THE EXPECTATIONS OF THE COMPANY AS OF THE DATE OF THIS PRESS RELEASE AND, ACCORDINGLY, IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE AFTER SUCH DATE. READERS SHOULD NOT PLACE UNDUE IMPORTANCE ON FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION AND SHOULD NOT RELY UPON THIS INFORMATION AS OF ANY OTHER DATE. WHILE THE COMPANY MAY ELECT TO, IT DOES NOT UNDERTAKE TO UPDATE THIS INFORMATION AT ANY PARTICULAR TIME EXCEPT AS REQUIRED IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE LAWS.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.
In a time of unprecedented levels of fear and uncertainty, one Dublin mother has named her newborn baby Hope as she looks toward a brighter future.

When Amy Fennell (34) arrived at the Rotunda Hospital on Monday, little did she realise her daughter would arrive three weeks earlier than expected.

While she is "over the moon", the mother of two cannot receive any visitors due to strict measures imposed by the hospital.

Even her husband Mark cannot see his daughter as he is in isolation after recently returning from Britain.

However, despite this far from ideal situation, Ms Fennell is keeping up her spirits and sees Hope as a sign things will get better.

"I think everyone at the moment is clinging onto hope, which is why I felt the name suited perfectly," she said.

"She's doing really great despite being premature and I have to thank my obstetrician who is making this ordeal a whole lot better.

"It's hard not having visitors and I feel especially sorry for my husband who is spending two weeks in isolation.

"It's like I'm jinxed because I was in a similar situation with my son two years ago. At the time there was a bad flu virus going around and the hospital was closed to all visitors.

"I was joking with my husband, saying that I guarantee the same thing would happen again with this coronavirus scare, but little did I realise how serious it would get."

Ms Fennell, who works for Ryanair, added that she and her daughter could be allowed to go home as early as today.

However, there is a possibility it will take up to six weeks before Hope will be able to leave.

"I don't know exactly what's going to happen yet because a newborn practically has no immune system. So there's a chance that she will have to stay in isolation until she gets her vaccinations," she said.

"But I'm keeping focused on the future and the happy life my family and I will have when this is all over."
ALBANY  New Yorks environmental lobby and dozens of local elected leaders are urging Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and legislators to allocate $1 billion for water infrastructure improvements in the 2020-21 state budget, despite the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic.

It is critical that this funding is built upon to meet outstanding water infrastructure needs and emerging threats to water quality, reads a letter signed by NYPIRG, Environmental Advocates and other advocates. Additionally, a similar letter signed by 114 local elected officials was also sent out.

The letters were sent as the state faces a severe budget gap due to the tax revenue losses from coronavirus-related business shutdowns.

Water Funding Letter by rkarlin on Scribd

In his budget proposal, Cuomo called for $500 million in water and sewer funding as part of a $2.5 billion plan dating from the 2017-18 budget.

The governor also called for using money from the $300 million Environmental Protection Fund to help staff the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Similar plans have been floated in past years but rejected by the Legislature, said Elizabeth Moran, environmental policy director for NYPIRG.

There is concern that these raids will remain in place, Moran said of the taking money from the fund for staffing.

The Environmental Protection Fund pays for actions such as buying up land to preserve, upgrading water and sewer systems, waterfront cleanups and controlling invasive species.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

The $2.5 billion initiative, known as the Water Infrastructure Improvement Act grant program, pays for things like septic system replacements, source water protection, and addressing manmade contaminants such as PFOA, PFOS, and 1,4-dioxane, which have in recent years been found in municipal water sources including Hoosick Falls and Cairo. It also includes a program to replace aging lead pipes.

The estimated cost to fully clean up New Yorks aging water and sewer systems is around $80 billion over the next two decades.

It may be difficult, but the pollution goes on, Moran said of the price to cleanup water supplies.

rkarlin@timesunion.com 518 454 5758 @RickKarlinTU

More for you As another community finds PFOS in water, advocates protest regulatory changes

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Gov. Cuomo proposed $500,000 in water and sewer funding. His budget proposal seeks $500 million.
Adrian Younge, left, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (A Tribe Called Quest) at Younge's Linear Labs studio in Highland Park. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, 'Jazz Is Dead' (Linear Labs)

To access the Highland Park recording studio Linear Labs, you have to walk through a combination record store and hair salon and cross a hallway. Behind a heavy, soundproof door, you'll likely find producer, soundtrack composer and sharp-dressed businessman Adrian Younge, who oversaw "Jazz Is Dead," a collection of new music by a groove-oriented roster of intercontinental experts including Roy Ayers, Marcos Valle, Azymuth, Gary Bartz and Brian Jackson.

Alongside his longtime collaborator Ali Shaheed Muhammad (best known as a member of A Tribe Called Quest), Younge has built the analog recording studio of his dreams. The pair, who record and tour as the Midnight Hour, also promote and host a regular Jazz Is Dead live event at the Lodge Room, a second-floor club near the studio that has become one of the central draws of the bustling neighborhood. This symbiotic relationship has helped generate "Jazz Is Dead," which serves as an introduction to a forthcoming series of releases  even as it disproves the premise of its title.

Each of the eight tracks on this stellar compendium features a different legend working with Younge and Muhammad, and many of the pieces gelled before and after sets at the Lodge Room. Opening track "Hey Lover," for example, is a new work by the pair in collaboration with Los Angeles jazz-funk composer and vibraphone player Roy Ayers, who is best known for his Southern California classic, "Everybody Loves the Sunshine."

The second track, "Distant Mode," documents the two producers in the studio with the saxophonist Gary Bartz, who across a life in jazz has worked alongside hundreds of experts including Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, Abbey Lincoln, Eric Dolphy and Art Blakey. Driven by drummer Greg Paul's clattering snare-and-stick rhythm and the Midnight Hour's synth and bass work, Bartz rebuts the jazz-is-dead notion with every saxophone-filtered breath.

Story continues

During a 2018 visit with Younge and Muhammad at Linear Labs, Younge, best known for his searing score for "Luke Cage," described their approach to creation as maintaining the compositional and sonic perspectives of yesterday, but pushing that forward with a new idiom. The studio itself is a wonder of vintage analog gear, and the sound it generates vibrates with that spirit. Younge, in fact, cites a specific production period, from 1968 to 1973, as a model for the Linear Labs sound.

That richness is evident throughout, but for sheer intensity check out "Apocaliptico." Extending across nine minutes, the furious uptempo jam is propelled by the Brazilian jazz-funk band Azymuth, which issued its 1971 debut album during Younge's window of excellence. Among the instruments deployed for the frantic end-of-days workout: drums, fuzz guitar, bass, Fender Rhodes piano, monophonic synthesizer, clavinet and what feels like a warehouse full of drums, shakers and cymbals.

The whole thing, including Marcos Valle's keyboard driven "Nao Saia Da Praca," is over in less than 30 minutes, but with every new listen a tangle of previously unnoticed ideas wend through the measures. Though hardly the most crucial cure we need right now, the promise of the forthcoming "Jazz Is Dead" series is evident throughout.
Last Sunday, the London Times reported on a private event held at the end of February at which leading Conservative government advisor Dominic Cummings explained the UKs coronavirus response. Those present summarised his position as herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad. A senior Conservative source described his view as let old people die.

The Prime Ministers Office denies Cummings made such comments, which align closely with the fascistic conceptions taking root in the Conservative Party and its periphery.

Last month, Cummings was responsible for eugenicist Andrew Sabisky being hired as a special government advisor. Both Sabisky and Cummings share the view that intelligence is overwhelmingly genetically determined, and that much educational effort is therefore wasted.

One of their leading defenders in the press and an advocate of progressive eugenics, Toby Young, was the governments first choice to lead the Office for Students, a national regulatory body. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has made social Darwinist statements himself, and last year a Tory parliamentary candidate said that a group of people living on social security need putting down.

Innumerable posts on social media have drawn the connection between this reactionary ideology and the governments criminally delayed and negligent response to the pandemic in Britain. The phrase #boristhebutcher was the top trending hashtag on Twitter in the UK a week ago. Many of those criticising the governments disastrous original policy of herd immunityallowing the virus to spread through the majority of the population relatively quicklyhave described it as a eugenic experiment.

The dominant concern motivating the policy was to minimise any interruption to the profit-making of the major corporations. And when this proved impracticalwith growing public anger as scientists predicted hundreds of thousands of deaths if the herd immunity plans continuedthe government, including Cummings, shifted policy towards a massive 350 billion corporate credit handout. Nevertheless, while not all those initially advocating a herd immunity strategy advocate eugenics, the strategy and eugenics find fertile soil in the increasingly sociopathic demands of contemporary capitalism.

This was clearly demonstrated by events at University College London (UCL) at the end of February. Just as the Covid-19 virus was developing into a global threat, the university released its Investigation into the London Conference on Intelligence and Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL. Both reports whitewash a eugenics conference hosted by one of the universitys own professors, and the historical inquiry falsifies the history and contemporary influence of the ideology.

In December 2017, the London Student revealed that honorary UCL lecturer James Thompson had been hosting a secretive annual London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) on the universitys campus for four years. The LCI was attended by a collection of pseudo-scientist fascists, white supremacists and eugenicistssome in academic positionspresenting topics such as Admixture in the Americas, The Welfare Trait: How state benefits affect personality, and Evolutionary indicators for explaining cross-country differences in cognitive ability.

Following protests by students and academics, UCL agreed to conduct an investigation, but one designed to prevent any reckoning with what had occurred. The university refused to answer questions from journalists, and Thompson was allowed to move quietly into retirement. The findings of the investigation were initially withheld, which UCL justified by launching another inquiry into the institutions involvement in the development of eugenic ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Now that both reports have been released, the UCLs position is clear. The investigation into the LCI explains that Thompson, when booking university facilities for the conference, did not tick the box indicating that the meeting might be considered controversial and that The remainder of the section of the room booking form asking for event details, including its title, attendees and entry requirements, etc. was not filled in.

In two astounding paragraphs, the report states:

What remains controversial is not the nature of these meetings, which were private events which a member of UCLs honorary faculty is entitled to organise, this being one of the perks of such an honorary position which is usually part of a quid pro quo where honorary status brings advantages to the University in terms of contributions to its educational or research activities [emphasis added].

[Thompsons failure to flag the meeting as controversial] deprived UCL of the opportunity of taking appropriate action to mitigate the risk of reputational damage. A correct answer would be to acknowledge the controversial nature of the topic and speakers, and to note that the organiser hoped the private nature of the meeting would mitigate any potential negative impact [emphasis added].

No mention is made of the fascist white supremacists Emil Kirkegaard, Richard Lynn or Edward Dutton, to name a few, who attended the LCI, despite their work being referenced in the appendices.

The separate Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL makes only fleeting references to the LCI. Its findings and recommendations were considered so inadequate that the majoritynine of the 16 membersof the inquirys own committee refused to sign the chairs main report.

One of the members of this group, professor of the history of biology Joe Cain, explained, I tried really hard to get the London Conference on Intelligence on to the agenda of that committee, but I met with a brick wall. We absolutely should have talked about itbut we just didnt. He said the committee had made no attempt to assess whether eugenicist ideas had influenced teaching at the university. Stating that the fact is we didnt look, he added, Im sure students would let us know if the sort of crazy eugenics you see in the LCI meetings were being taught, but eugenics can also be much more subtle than that.

The inquiry was also criticised for what a dissenting member of the committee, in an anonymous comment to the Guardian, called a tendentious focus on race. The main report admits that commission members disagreed on the meaning and role of race in eugenics. The anonymous member continued, I have no issue with addressing racism, but the fact is that the early eugenicists at UCL were far more focused on targeting people based on things like poverty or disability.

These are incisive comments. The report includes references to disabled and low-income groups, but is focussed on race, as per [its] terms of reference. It leans on the reactionary assumption that eugenic ideology is fundamentally bound up with whiteness and that it originates from racism married to science. The threat of eugenics is to be solved, in part, through efforts to decolonise the curricula in all departments and the opening of a number of paid posts in relevant UCL Centres such as the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation.

This is a fundamental distortion of the history of eugenics and its pernicious role in contemporary politics.

The ideology developed out of a social Darwinist response to the threat of socialism. It gained a significant following in ruling circles in response to intensifying class and inter-imperialist antagonisms, expressed in fears of national deterioration. Eugenics was used to justify inequality and poverty, carry out sterilisations of the disabled and mentally ill, prove national and racial superiority, and, especially in the United States, promote anti-immigration laws. The ideology found its fullest and most devastating expression in the policies of Nazi Germany.

Despite the fact that UCLs report includes a quote from Karl Pearson, a eugenicist professor at the university in the early 20th century, lauding Reichskanzler Hitler, none of this history is explored or raised in warning. To do so would invite questions the ruling class and its institutions are not prepared to answer about links between the persistence of social inequality and national tensions, the revival of fascism and the growing influence of a network of race scientists, eugenicists and social Darwinists amongst the ruling elite.

The universitys actions are proof that this reactionary ideology can be seriously confronted and opposed only from a socialist perspective. The life-threatening actions of the Tory government of Johnson and Cummings in regard to the Covid-19 crisis are proof of the urgent necessity to build that opposition.
Irish unemployment is likely to surge to over 18% by early summer and could take more than a year before it falls back to its pre-crisis level of under 5%  depending on the success of measures to rein in the Covid-19 pandemic here and across the world.

The stark economic outlook by Irelands leading think tank, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), is the first authoritative look at the huge economic damage brought by the pandemic in terms of the sudden surge in joblessness.

The ESRI warns that the economy is facing a shock that could in some parts rival the fallout experienced from the onset of the banking and property crash in 2008, in terms of the speed of the jobs shakeout and the suddenness of the strain it puts on the public finances, as government expenditure soars and its tax revenues plummet.

The jobs shakeout over a very short period hits hard the wholesale and retail trades, and accommodation and food services, sectors which together employed 480,000 people only a few weeks ago, the ESRI report notes.

This speed of change in the fortunes of the domestic and international labour markets is unprecedented, according to research professor Kieran McQuinn and senior research officer Conor OToole, the co-authors of the ESRI report.

The likely increase in Irish unemployment will be substantial in size and rapid in nature, surging to 18% by early summer before falling back to 11% late this year, amid a deep recession as GDP contracts by over 7%, states the report.

Under a benign scenario, Mr McQuinn says unemployment may take to the end of next year to again come close to matching the 4.8% jobless rate posted last month  when just over 120,000 people were on the official unemployment count.

The projections are based on an economic recovery here and overseas in the second half of the year following a lockdown lasting 12 weeks.

But that means if this [rebound] does not occur, then the results will be even more adverse for the domestic economy, according to the authors.

The swiftness of the economic deterioration is unprecedented in modern times and in many respects exceeds that of the financial crisis, says the report.

The scale of the additional spending by the Government and the loss in revenues it suffers from the slump in Vat and income taxes, swiftly puts the public finances back into the red.

The ESRI projects that a small budget surplus in 2019 turns into a deficit of 12.7bn this year, equivalent to a deficit of at least 4.3% of GDP.

Obviously if there is a significant delay in the economic recovery both globally and domestically, then the size of this deficit would also increase as the year progresses, states the authors.
T he chair of the governments business select committee today urged employees to protect employees from spreading the virus amid concerns they are being mistreated.

Rachel Reeves, chair of the business, energy and industrial strategy committee, said she had been inundated with workers worried about their conditions.

She said: From the evidence weve received its clear that many businesses are still not doing the right thing. This must change now. This is a health emergency  it cannot be business as usual. Workplaces, even those deemed essential, should be doing all they can to ensure that their workers are able to work from home or, if they do have to attend work, that they can undertake social distancing.

The Government came forward with an income replacement scheme  there can be no question of workers being, in effect, forced to take annual or sick-leave when they are doing the right thing and keeping themselves safe.

She added: Businesses need to stand by their workers and keep them safe. In time, businesses will have to answer for their decisions during this pandemic and whether they did the right thing.

Reeves committee has received submissions from people working in a wide range of sectors and settings including office-based staff, furniture manufacturers, travel agents, estate agents, law firms, and TV engineers.

Her comments came as two the biggest players in online fashion  Asos and Net-a-Porter  were accused of putting their staff at risk of catching coronavirus today.

The GMB union said that Asos was playing Russian roulette with peoples lives at its warehouse in Barnsley, It claimed workers are concerned that there is not enough social distancing and they are forced to gather to clock in and break for lunch.

Asos said: We totally refute the allegations made by the GMB this morning. They are false, do nothing more than serve to create panic and hysteria in an already uncertain time, and are part of a continuing campaign against us and the recognised union on site, Community. It is simply not true to say we dont have social distancing protocols in place

As directed by the Government, we, along with other online retailers, are ensuring we are striking the right balance between keeping our warehouse operational, for the good of our employees and the wider economy, and maintaining the health and safety of staff, which is always our number one priority.

Luxury fashion retailer Net-a-Porter employs around 550 people at a site in Charlton, south London. GMB said: Whilst the company claims they are encouraging social distancing, the logistics of the warehouse mean that this is simply not possible. Net-a-Porter said it had already stepped up its safety measures and that the site was closing in the coming day.
CLEVELAND  Employers throughout Northeast Ohio are conducting mass layoffs for reasons related to the novel coronavirus, according to filings with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

Many of the layoffs occurred at restaurants, which Gov. Mike DeWines administration ordered closed March 15 except for takeout and delivery, and casinos that were ordered closed about two weeks ago. These and other closings are part of efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Layoffs at Jack Cleveland Casino downtown and Jack Thistledown Racino in North Randall total 1,561, currently the largest mass layoff in Northeast Ohio. (Both locations were filed as one layoff.)

Mass layoffs filed this week were often a result of Ohios Stay-at-Home" order, which closed all businesses except those deemed to be essential. Wright Tool in Barberton told the state it laid off 140 employees because of this order, which took effect Tuesday, the same date of the companys filing.

Such filings result from the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, Act of 1988, governing layoffs of at least 100 people. In Ohio, the threshold is 50 employees. Many workers who are laid off for coronavirus-related reasons are able to collect unemployment insurance because Ohio is instituting a federal option that extends these benefits to workers. WARN notices filed by companies must state whether the mass layoff is related to the coronavirus pandemic.

Such mass layoffs stand to become more common, some experts say. Ohio could lose more than 505,000 jobs, or 10.5% of private sector employment, as part of the economic fallout from the coronavirus, according to an analysis by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, or EPI, in Washington, D.C. The analysis estimates that 14 million jobs nationally could be lost by summer.

Congress was considering a $2 billion coronavirus stimulus package Wednesday that included enhancing unemployment insurance benefits. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, has described the proposed benefits as unemployment insurance on steroids.

Julia Wolfe, a state economic analyst at EPI, and David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the think tank, said federal and state intervention is needed because so many workers are being laid off.

Congress is debating an economic stimulus package around $2 trillion, and if it is targeted enough, it could help mitigate some of these losses, they wrote. Yet even with these measures, many people will still need to remain out of work, potentially for months, in order to stop the viruss spread. In addition to federal action, lawmakers at the state and local level must do everything they can to ensure that these workers and their families do not suffer economically during this time.

Here is a list of some of the coronavirus-related WARN filings from Northeast Ohio:

Chilgo LLC, which has Chilis Grill & Bar restaurants throughout Ohio, including North Olmsted and Macedonia, 331 laid off statewide.

Embassy Suites Cleveland Rockside, 43 laid off.

Firebirds Wood Fire Grill, which has locations throughout Ohio, including Orange, 410 laid off statewide.

Jack Cleveland Casino downtown and Jack Thistledown Racino in North Randall, 1,561 laid off.

Strang Corp., which has Panera Bread restaurants, l05 laid off in Cuyahoga County.

Punch Bowl Social Cleveland, 102 laid off.

Renaissance Cleveland Hotel, 126 laid off.

Calimira LLC, which has Rusty Bucket Restaurant & Tavern restaurants throughout Ohio, including Solon, 910 laid off statewide.

Ultimate Homes, which has locations throughout Ohio, including Brecksville, 62 laid off statewide.

Wright Tool in Barberton, 140 laid off.

More coverage:

Manufacturing workers concerned about safety, but proud to battle coronavirus pandemic

Cuyahoga County public health efforts aim to stave off COVID-19 in long-term care and assisted living facilities

MetroHealth board member Bernie Morenos coronavirus comments on Twitter spark outrage

Coronavirus hits assisted-living, skilled-nursing facilities in NE Ohio
Baghdad, March 26 : The Iraqi Health Ministry has confirmed two more deaths from COVID-19 and 30 new cases, bringing the total number of the infected to 346.

The new cases included nine in the capital Baghdad, six in Sulaimaniyah, four in Karbala and Najaf each, two in Erbil and Muthanna each, and one in provinces of Basra, Kirkuk and Diwaniyah each, the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday, Xinhua reported.

So far, a total of 346 cases have been confirmed in the country, of whom 29 have died and 89 others recovered, according to the statement.

The Iraqi authorities took several measures to contain the outbreak of COVID-19, including imposing a nationwide curfew until March 28.

To help Iraq cope with the spread of COVID-19, a Chinese team of seven experts arrived in Baghdad on March 7.

They are working with their Iraqi counterparts in the fight against the viral respiratory disease, which has largely been under control in China through a nationwide campaign since late January.
Venezuela's foreign minister accused Washington of a coup attempt Thursday after the US Justice Department indicted President Nicolas Maduro for "narco-terrorism."



Jorge Arreaza charged that President Donald Trump was "once more attacking the Venezuelan people and its democratic institutions, using a new form of coup d'etat based on miserable, vulgar and unfounded accusations."



In an extremely rare criminal case against a foreign head of state, the Justice Department indicted Maduro and several of his top ministers after accusing him of leading a cocaine trafficking group called "The Cartel of the Suns.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
NORWALK  Two Norwalk students have partnered with their uncle, a public health professor, to spread information about the coronavirus to their peers.

Alexa Lacomis, a Nathan Hale Middle School sixth-grader, and her sister Audra, a Wolfpit Elementary fourth-grader, have taken on additional work in the last two weeks  since schools were closed amid the coronavirus outbreak  on top of the distance-learning assigned by their teachers.

Alongside their uncle, Anthony Santella, a public health professor at Hofstra University, they created a free coronavirus youth webinar, which they present multiple times a week.

The webinar is meant to provide age-appropriate information to kids on what is an evolving and anxiety-inducing situation.

It originally started because I wanted to make sure the kids in my family had age-appropriate information about what was happening, said Santella, who specializes in infectious disease prevention and control.

Roughly two weeks ago, as the virus was poised to explode in Connecticut, Santella convened a meeting comprised of his nieces, his friends and their children, to discuss the situation. It occurred to Santella then that the children in the room had valid questions that needed answers.

We wondered why school is closing if everyones fine. If our pets could get the coronavirus, Alexa Lacomis said.

Another question we had was why were stores still open if we had to be staying home, Audra Lacomis added.

The meeting turned into a PowerPoint, created by Alexa and Audra, which evolved into a webinar that seeks to answer some of these questions, as well as others.

Some of the most important things for kids to know are to wash your hands multiple times a day, and to use soap more than hand sanitizer, because soap kills more germs, Alexa Lacomis said.

The webinar also explains what a virus is and how it operates; the origins of coronavirus and its spread; treatments and tips to stay healthy; and advice on how to stay connected with family, friends and teachers despite physical distancing.

In addition to using applications like Google Classroom to attend school from home, the Lacomis sisters said they use FaceTime to connect with friends after school.

Beginning the week of March 30, Santella said they will offer the webinar twice weekly for middle and elementary school kids and twice weekly for high school students. The trio plans to continue offering the webinar for a two-month period, through mid-May.

By request, Santella and the Lacomis are also offering the webinar to private groups, including an elementary school in Kansas and a group of mentors and mentees from Big Brothers Big Sisters.

Based on feedback from the roughly 1,000 people who have signed up for the webinar so far, they are continuing to update the presentation. Alexa and Audra Lacomis are including an experiment that shows the effect of soap on the virus. And a segment on the anxiety that the pandemic can cause is also in the works.

Its getting a lot of traction because there is not a lot of content for kids, Santella said. Kids are at home, parents are watching the news, the TV is on, so theyre hearing all these things, like pandemic and quarantine and public health. But those are not things a regular elementary school science lessons covers.

A schedule of meetings and links to register are available at anthonyjsantella.com.

justin.papp@scni.com; @justinjpapp1; 203-842-2586

Correction: In an earlier version of this story, Alexa Lacomis name was misspelled.
The list of the worlds dollar billionaires announced recently by Forbes shows that the number of Vietnamese billionaires has fallen from five to three.

The four Vietnamese billionaires on the list are Pham Nhat Vuong, president of Vingroup, Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, CEO of Vietjet, and Tran Ba Duong, president of Thaco.

Ho Hung Anh, president of Techcombank





Meanwhile, Nguyen Dang Quang, president of Masan Group (MSN), was excluded from the list because of the sharp MSN price reduction from VND80,000 per share to VND48,300.



Ho Hung Anh, president of Techcombank, has also left the group of billionaires as his assets have dropped to $967 million.

The list of the worlds dollar billionaires announced recently by Forbes shows that the number of Vietnamese billionaires has fallen from five to three.

Vuong saw his assets decrease most sharply, roughly $2 billion over the last year. As of March 15, 2020, Vuongs assets had dropped to $5.8 billion.



Enterprises have suffered heavily from Covid-19 and have seen their share prices sliding.



However, it is a big surprise that the prices of shares related to businessman Trinh Van Quyet have soared in the epidemic. FLC, for example, has increased by VND180 to VND3,930 per share, AMD to VND5,200, ROS to VND5,270.



Meanwhile, the price of HAI has increased to VND4,880 per share, KLF to VND2,000 and ART of BOS Securities to VND3,400. All these are the shares belonging to FLC family.



FLC has appointed Bui Hai Huyen, deputy CEO, to the post of CEO since March 19, 2020.



Huong Tran Kieu Dung, former CEO, is still at the post of vice president of FLC. She resigned from the post of CEO in order to focus on the groups general planning and governance in core business fields, especially real estate.



Dung is still president of BOS and president of FLCHomes, the company with charter capital of VND4.16 trillion.



Quoc Cuong Gia Lai is another example showing that businesses can do well during the epidemic. While investors are fleeing from stocks, QCG of Quoc Cuong Gia Lai has seen the price increase by three times. The price of the share rose to VND10,900 per share by the end of March 19.



Since February 25, QCG price has soared by 205 percent from VND3,570 per share.



Meanwhile, Johnathan Hanh Nguyen, dubbed the Branded goods King, has received special attention from the public for his donation activities.



After spending VND10 billion, as estimated by the public, to hire a private jet for his daughter in the UK to return to Vietnam to avoid Covid-19, Nguyen spent VND10 billion to help the government combat the epidemic.



The businessman promised he would donate another VND30 billion, including VND25 billion to combat Covid-19 and VND5 billion to help Mekong Deltas farmers struggling with drought and saline intrusion.

Kim Chi

How much is needed to be listed among the top stock billionaires in Vietnam? In 2009, when the VN Index soared from 324 points to the year's peak of 630 points, the richest stock billionaire had total assets worth over VND9 trillion.
[March 26, 2020] Study Finds Contextual Ads Are More Engaging, Memorable

GumGum, Inc., an artificial intelligence company specializing in solutions for advertising and media, today released new neuroscientific research findings that explain why contextual targeting is an effective digital advertising tactic. The findings come from a study GumGum conducted in partnership with neuroanalytics company SPARK Neuro, which examined how an ad's contextual relevance to content influences consumers. Ads with the most contextual relevance elicited 43% more neural engagement and 2.2 times better ad recall, the study found. It also revealed that contextually relevant ads inspired a statistically significant increase in purchase intent. "We know that contextual targeting done right delivers the reliable results that brands need, especially as the industry searches for solutions in the wake of the cookies' demise," said GumGum CEO Phil Schraeder. "What's significant about these findings is that they clearly show why contextual is so effective: Neural engagement is a big driver of direct response performance, memorability supports branding plays and purchase intent moves the needle for both branding and direct esponse."



As governments place meaningful restrictions on how brands can collect and share user data and major browsers sunset the cookies that have long fueled behavioral targeting, advertisers will need other reliable methods for reaching consumers on the open web. Contextual targeting, which has benefited from major advances in AI-powered content analysis technology, is an obvious choice because of its user data-free nature. Some advertisers still view contextual as old-fashioned, however. The research announced today should dispel those doubts. The global study asked 60 participants aged 18 to 54 from US, UK, and Japan to read six articles on different topics, each of which featured three ads whose relevance to article content ranged from high to low. The highly relevant ads were selected as representative of what a state-of-the-art programmatic contextual targeting system would serve. An array of biometric sensors - including eye tracking, facial coding, and EEG - were used to measure responses to the articles and ads. The combined measurements formed the basis for the study's findings.

"SPARK Neuro's suite of neuroanalytic tracking technologies is like a lie detector test on steroids," Mr. Schraeder said. "We're extremely grateful for the expertise they demonstrated throughout our partnership, which produced a powerful proof that contextual relevance is essential to effective advertising." "When GumGum approached us about this project, we knew it was just the right kind of interesting research question our tech is built to answer," added SPARK Neuro CEO Spencer Gerrol. "We've long been aware of GumGum's leadership in the contextual relevance space so we were enthusiastic about exploring the different ways context influences how people consume digital advertising." To download Cognitextual: A Neuroanalytic Study of Contextual Ad Effectiveness, please visit: gumgum.com/cognitextual About GumGum: GumGum is an artificial intelligence company with a focus on computer vision and natural language processing. Our mission is to solve hard problems across media by teaching machines to understand the world. Since 2008, the company has applied its patented capabilities to serving media-related industries, including advertising and professional sports. For more information, please visit gumgum.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200326005655/en/

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Washington, March 26 (IANS) The US Senate has approved a historic $2 trillion fiscal stimulus package, the in the country's modern history, to try and counter the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

The package was approved on Wednesday night by 96 votes in favour and none against after several days of delays as the Democrats were unable to come to an agreement with the White House over the administration of the funds, reports Efe news.

The bill will now go to the House of Representatives, which on Friday will vote by voice to allow the representatives to vote from their respective quarantines amid limited flights and stay-home orders issued in several states.

It will then be moved to President Donald Trump, who is expected to ratify it immediately.

The $2 trillion stimulus package is almost three times the package implemented during the 2008 financial crisis.

The bill includes $1,200 in one-time direct payments to Americans earning less than $75,000 per year, plus $500 per child under the age of 17.

The stimulus measure provides more than $350 billion in loans to small businesses, and another $250 billion to expand unemployment insurance benefits for people who lose their jobs.

The measure also includes $150 billion for state and local authorities and another $130 billion to strengthen the nation's healthcare system, which in hotspots of the epidemic, such as New York City, is beginning to be overwhelmed.

One of the main bones of contention in the bill was the distribution of $500 billion in loans to businesses hard-hit by the pandemic, including airlines, the hotel industry and cruise lines, with the White House and Republican lawmakers wanting these funds administered exclusively by the Treasury Department.

Calling it an "emergency relief", Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said at the Senate floor earlier in the day that the package will "help the people of this country weather this storm".

The package comes as the number of coronavirus cases in the US has increased to 69,018 with 1,042 deaths, according to the latest update by the Washington-based John Hopkins University.

New York, the epicentre of the outbreak in the country, has reported 280 fatalities 17,856 cases.

--IANS

ksk/
As feuding sides fail to reconcile their differences, deadlock is likely to claim more innocent lives.

Yemens warring parties have welcomed United Nations calls for an immediate truce, as the conflict enters its sixth year.

The UN secretary-general has urged an end to hostilities, to focus on fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

There has been a recent escalation in violence in Yemen, which is already facing the worlds worst humanitarian crisis.

Al Jazeeras Hashem Ahelbarra reports.
Two people are facing attempted murder charges after allegedly refusing to go into quarantine in South Africa, it has emerged.

One of them is a tourist who tested positive for coronavirus while staying in the Kruger National Park but is accused of ignoring orders to self-isolate in his lodge, South African media says.

The other is a salon owner in the city of Ladysmith, who was arrested after 27 people came into contact with him at his workplace and a religious gathering he attended after allegedly refusing to go into quarantine.

South Africa's 57million people are today beginning a nationwide lockdown as the number of cases hit 709, becoming the worst outbreak in Africa.

South Africa is investigating two people who are accused of refusing to go into quarantine (file photo, a health worker unrelated to those cases tests a motorist Johannesburg)

According to TimesLive, the infected tourist is accused of leaving Kruger National Park despite being ordered to remain in his lodge.

Police minister Bheki Cele said the man was tracked down to holiday accommodation and then taken into quarantine in hospital.

'The tourist ignored the instruction and proceeded to St Lucia in KwaZulu-Natal, where he apparently interacted with an unknown number of people,' he said.

Health officials are now desperately trying to trace anyone who might have come into contact with him.

Police are investigating the man under emergency regulations announced by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa.

The second suspect, a 52-year-old salon owner, was ordered to quarantine himself after returning from 'various' other countries, according to The South African.

'On his return on March 18, he was tested positive with Covid-19 and was instructed to self-quarantine for at least 14 days pending the blood results,' a police spokesman said.

'However, he allegedly continued with his business and in doing so disregarded the instructions by a doctor.'

Authorities are seeking 27 people who may have come into contact with him, either at his salon or at a religious service he attended.

South African president Cyril Ramamphosa, pictured in Cape Town last month, has ordered a 21-day lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus

Both suspects are facing charges of attempted murder, South African news outlets reported yesterday.

South Africa currently has 709 confirmed coronavirus cases, with no reported deaths.

The country's health minister Zweli Mkhize has warned that infections are expected to keep rising.

President Ramaphosa himself has tested negative after taking the test as a precautionary measure, his office said today.

The president underwent the test on Tuesday on the advice of physicians and received his results on Wednesday night, a statement said.

Ramaphosa has ordered some of the toughest measures on the continent, including a 21-day lockdown which starts today.

He has also deployed the army to support the police.

Businesses are bracing for the lockdown, with Airlink becoming the latest local airline to suspend flights from midnight on Thursday.

State power utility Eskom has applied for its critical staff to be exempt from the stay at home order so electricity supplies can continue uninterrupted.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called on the federal government on Tuesday to supply ventilators, saying the state is in dire need of tens of thousands of machines to manage the coronavirus outbreak. The state expects to receive about 4,000 ventilators per Vice President Mike Pence.

Why it matters: New York state has become the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic, with 25,665 cases, and Cuomo said time is running out to wait on domestic production of medical supplies.

Cuomo said there are two methods to obtain the ventilators, recommending the U.S. government either use the federal Defense Production Act or that Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar tap into the federal stockpile to provide 20,000 machines.

"I understand the federal government's point that many companies have come forward and said we want to help, and General Motors and Ford and people are willing to get into the ventilator business. It does us no good if they start to create a ventilator in three weeks or four weeks or five weeks. We're looking at an apex of 14 days. ... The [Defense Production Act] can actually help companies because the federal government can say, 'Look, I need you to go into this business. I will contract with you today for x number of ventilators. Here's the startup capital you need.' ... Not to exercise that power is inexplicable to me."

What's happening: The state has 7,000 ventilators and needs 30,000. New York already mandated nonessential businesses close and ordered residents to stay home.

I will take personal responsibility for transporting the ventilators elsewhere in the country after New York reaches its apex, Cuomo said. Ill send ventilators, Ill send health care workers, our professionals.

Editor's note: This story was updated wit Vice President Pence's statement that New York will receive 4,000 ventilators in the next two days.
A group of irate passengers



stranded on the Andhra Pradesh-Telangana border due to the coronavirus lockdown allegedly hurled stones at the police near the Vadapalli checkpoint late on Thursday night, causing head injury to a constable, police said.

State Director General of Police D G Sawang said in a statement that the passengers, who were stranded at the checkpoint after they were denied entry into the state, resorted to a "mob attack" on police personnel.

"They tried to cross the border in violation of the lockdown orders. In the night, they attacked the police and caused injuries. We strongly condemn this," the DGP said.

He said cases would be registered and stern action takenagainst the guilt.

Sawang said the two state governments entered into an agreement to allow the passengers, mostly students, after necessary medical examination.

"We have even arranged special buses for them and made facilities for quarantine. Ignoring all this, they tried to cross the border and also resorted to mob attack on police personnel," the DGP said.

Hundreds of people, who were on their way home in various parts of AP from Hyderabad, were denied entry into the state in view of the restriction on movement of people and vehicles due to the coronavirus lockdown.

While those who agreed to get into a quarantine facility were allowed to come in, others were barred entry.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
NY has become the US epicentre for the pandemic as Governor Cuomo forecasts dire scenarios for the healthcare system.

New York state coronavirus deaths spiked to 385, with 100 new deaths recorded in a single day as Governor Andrew Cuomo warned residents on Thursday that the states situation was increasingly dire. The death toll surged to more than 1,000 nationwide in the United States.

New York had 37,200 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Thursday morning. This was an increase of nearly 6,500 cases from the night before.

Almost any scenario that is realistic will overwhelm the current capacity of the healthcare system, Cuomo said during the briefing.

The peak of the virus is expected to hit the US in about two or three weeks. Cuomo previously projected New York would need roughly 110,000 hospital beds, but now says the state would as many as 140,000.

The governor also called for increased efforts to produce ventilators, necessary medical tools to deal with severe cases of COVID-19.

Makeshift morgues

While most patients with severe cases of COVID-19 need ventilators for three or four days, some have needed them for up to 30 days, according to reports.

We do have people who have been on for quite a period of time, Cuomo said. The longer stays without recovery lead to a higher death rate.

Cuomo said he was considering more drastic measures to contain the spread of the virus, including the closure of main thoroughfares in New York City, as well as certain parks and playgrounds. He has repeatedly called for increase support from the federal government.

Workers construct what is believed to be a makeshift morgue behind a hospital during the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York [Carlo Allegri/Reuters]

Of the total confirmed cases, 5,327 people, or about 14 percent, have been hospitalised and 1,290, or 3.4 percent, are in intensive care units, according to local media outlet Syracuse.com.

We always said this is not going to be over quickly, Cuomo said. I understand people are tired, but I also understand that people in this situation are stepping up to the plate and doing phenomenal work.

Public health officials in the city hunted down beds and medical equipment and called for more doctors and nurses.

A makeshift morgue was set up outside Bellevue Hospital, and the citys police, their ranks dwindling as more fall ill, were told to patrol nearly empty streets to enforce social distancing.

Reckless relief package

In a recognition of the scale of the threat, the US Senate late Wednesday passed an unparalleled $2.2 trillion economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and healthcare systems.

But Cuomo warned the economic toll of the coronavirus outbreak will be dramatic in New York, and castigated federal officials for what he called a failure to address lost revenue in their $2.2 trillion relief package.

The Congressional action, in my opinion, simply failed to address the governmental need, he said. I find it irresponsible. I find it reckless.

Cuomo said the outbreak creates a double whammy of increased state costs and lost revenue of up to $15bn as businesses shutter and workers are laid off. The governor said the state will have to adjust its budget plan for the fiscal year beginning April 1 because revenue figures are so uncertain.

While the relief plan before Congress would send $5bn for COVID-19-related expenses, Cuomo said the larger issue is lost revenue.
At least 25 people were killed Wednesday in an attack on a Sikh-Hindu temple in Afghanistan's capital where worshippers were offering morning prayers, the latest brutal assault claimed by the Islamic State group. The incident, highlighting the country's ongoing violence, came several hours before Afghanistan's National Security Council announced that the Taliban and government officials would hold a historic meeting face-to-face over a prisoner exchange. Along with a raging insurgency, impoverished Afghanistan is reeling from a massive cut in US aid while it struggles with political deadlock and rising coronavirus cases. The Taliban denied any involvement in the latest attack, for which the Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility, according to the SITE intelligence group. Witness Raju Singh Sonny told AFP a man in a police uniform burst into the temple in central Kabul, shot a guard and started attacking worshippers in the main hall. "Several other attackers also entered the building and they were going from room to room shooting people," Sonny said. Only a few thousand Sikhs and Hindus are estimated to reside in what is an overwhelmingly Muslim nation. There were conflicting accounts about how many gunmen were involved, with security sources giving differing numbers, between one and four. At least one attacker was subsequently killed by security forces in an hours-long clearing operation. Anarkali Kaur Honaryar, a Sikh member of the Afghan parliament, told AFP about 150 people had been inside the temple, where several families also live and worshippers gather for morning prayers. "Some people inside the temple are hiding and their phones are off," Honaryar said while the attack was ongoing. Interior ministry spokesman Tariq Arian said 25 civilians had been killed and eight others wounded, while 80 people had been rescued. Graphic images posted online showed several bodies as well as terrified people who appeared to be Sikhs running from the scene. "Such cowardly attacks on the places of religious worship of the minority community, especially at this time of (the coronavirus) pandemic, is reflective of the diabolical mindset of the perpetrators and their backers," the Indian foreign ministry said in a statement. Sikhism and Hinduism are rooted in India. - Afghan leaders' 'failure' - IS has a history of targeting Afghan Sikhs and Hindus. In recent months, the jihadist group has suffered mounting setbacks after being hunted by US and Afghan forces as well as Taliban offensives targeting their fighters, but it still retains the ability to launch major assaults on urban centres. To add to Afghanistan's woes, Washington slashed the amount of aid to the country this week after President Ashraf Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah, who has also proclaimed himself president, failed to resolve their standoff. Following a visit to Kabul, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the US would immediately cut $1 billion and was prepared to pull another $1 billion in 2021. The US and the Taliban signed a deal last month that was supposed to pave the way for talks between the Afghan leadership and the insurgents, but with Kabul unable to agree who is in government, the talks stalled. The issue of the prisoners has been a major sticking point in the weeks since the signing. But on Wednesday Afghanistan's National Security Council said the Taliban and Ghani's government would meet to discuss an initial release of 100 insurgent prisoners by March 31. It is believed that it will be the first time ever that the Islamist extremist Taliban and Ghani's government have met in an official capacity. "To carry out these further discussions, a Taliban team will meet with the government face-to-face in Afghanistan in the coming days," the NSC said. Zalmay Khalilzad, the US negotiator who brokered the US-Taliban deal, confirmed on Twitter that "prisoner releases by both sides will start March 31." "This is a positive development," he said. The United States, hoping to pull its thousands of remaining troops out of Afghanistan to end 18 years of involvement, has said the coronavirus pandemic makes prisoner releases urgent. In Washington on Wednesday, Pompeo called the temple attack "horrific" and reiterated his frustration at the failure to bridge the divide between Ghani and Abdullah. But he said both -- plus Taliban negotiator Mullah Baradar -- were committed to a peaceful solution to end Afghanistan's years of war. Pompeo said it's time for the political process to begin "with all the Afghans coming together around the table." He added: "I'm still optimistic that we can get there."
Mumbai: Averting a default, Air India has secured short-term funds to service Rs 700 crore worth non-convertible debentures due for redemption on Thursday, according to a source.

The debt-laden national carrier's operations and revenue flow have been crippled by coronavirus outbreak, which has also resulted in suspension of domestic and international flights.

On March 23, India Ratings warned that the national carrier may default on the debt payment, given the poor cash flow position after the announcement of the closure of national airspace.

Accordingly, the agency had on the same evening placed the instrument on rating watch with negative outlook.

On Thursday, an airline source told that it has secured the needed amount from banks with government guarantee to pay interest to investors.

The source did not say how much money has been raised or the amount needed to pay.

A reply to a mail sent to an Air India spokesperson for confirmation is awaited.

According to the source, Air India has secured short-term bank loans backed by government guarantee to refinance the entire principal amount of Rs 700 crore of non-convertible debentures.

These NCDs are due for interest payment or redemption on March 26.

The airline needs Rs 30 crore to pay the interest.

The issuer's account was not provided for the same as of March 25, according to India Rating report last evening.

The amount was on rating watch negative since March 23, which reflects delays in funding the designated account as on March 23, as confirmed by the trustee IDBI Trusteeship Services.
In this three-part series, Vietnam Briefing highlights and discusses the tax compliance process when closing down a Representative Office.

A Representative Office (RO) offers a simple and low-cost option for companies seeking to gain a better understanding of the Vietnamese market. As such, this option is among the most common for first-time entrants to the Vietnamese market and often precedes a larger presence within the country.

Due to the limited scope of operations, the mandatory tax and licensing procedures of an RO are often simple compared to those of a wholly foreign-owned company. As an RO cannot generate revenue and is not subject to an audit, most foreign investors assume that they are subject to minimal taxes, thereby not paying attention to bookkeeping and adequate documentation.

However, companies may choose to close down an RO depending on their financial situation or due to non-financial factors such as upgrading into a foreign-owned enterprise in order to expand business activities.

Tax obligations for dissolving an RO

In this article, we look at the tax obligations associated with the dissolution of an RO.

It is common for the ROs chief representative officers (CRO) to think that their tax status is in compliance, as long as they fulfill their statutory obligations on annual reporting, personal income tax (PIT) and social health and unemployment insurances (SHUI) for their employees. That is until they are audited by the tax authorities and receive significant penalties, often due to a lack of required documentation for business expenses.

A tax audit is unlikely unless the authorities suspect the RO is engaging in illegal activities. If nothing is out of place, audits will only happen when the RO goes into dissolution, which may occur years after the RO began operations.

In practice, while an RO is not subject to a declaration of business taxes (like VAT and CIT), they are still required to maintain adequate bookkeeping records as well as supporting documents of business expenses incurred during their operation. This is similar to a companys accounting documentation to support deductible expenses that are claimed.

Tax audit for dissolution

In addition to examining the PIT declaration and remittance status, tax officers also look at the ROs cashbooks, bank statements, and bookkeeping records to review expenses incurred during its operation period.

The expenses are subject to review on a sample basis and the RO will be asked to show relevant supporting documents and provide an adequate explanation to justify the nature of expenses incurred.

If the RO fails to establish the link between the incurred expenses and the ROs operational activities, then it will result in such expenses deemed as additional benefits-in-kind provided to individuals. As per tax authorities, such benefits should be taxed and penalized accordingly.

The common procedures of tax audit for the dissolution of RO are summarized as follows:

Based on our experience of doing tax finalization during the closure of an RO, most of the unpaid taxes and corresponding penalties are imposed on expenses with either insufficient supporting documents or no direct connection with the ROs operations and are therefore treated as deemed personal income.
Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister



Ajit Pawar on Thursday said the government won't tolerate attacks on the police and health workers, who were working hard to contain the spread of coronavirus.

Those guilty of such attacks will be punished as per provisions of law, he added.

The police and citizens should exercise self-restraint and self-discipline, Pawar said.

Citing the example of the Army being roped in to implement the lockdown in the United States, he said, "It is our responsibility to ensure we don't reach that stage."



Despite the 21-day lockdown, essential services are operational, with adequate supply of milk, vegetables, fruits, medicines, food grains and cooking gas, the Deputy Chief Minister said.

"However, crowding at markets is a cause for concern. The local civic bodies should plan the supply of essentials to localities or deliver them at doorsteps," he said.

Such arrangements were made in cities of Baramati and Wai, he added.

NGOs should help senior citizens, students living alone, poor and homeless persons during the lockdown, he said.

Incidents of people travelling in milk vans, running over police personnel with vehicles and attacking health workers, hamper the war against coronavirus, Pawar said.

People should realise the seriousness of the situation and cooperate with the police, he said.

The Deputy Chief Minister also took note of the case, wherein a journalist present at Congress leader Kamal Nath's press conference, tested positive for COVID-19 in Madhya Pradesh.

Elected representatives and journalists in Maharashtra should communicate online and remain safe, Pawar urged.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Government has been accused of rowing back on its promise to protect renters from eviction during the coronavirus crisis.

Last week the Ministry of Housing promised a 'complete ban on evictions' for those unable to work due to the pandemic.

Around five million households in the UK live in private rented accommodation and many of these could struggle to pay the bills if they need to take time off work.

However, this week, the Government's Coronavirus Bill has been criticised as not going far enough to protect these tenants from losing their homes.

Landlords will still be able to serve tenants with eviction notices over the next three months

While the Bill ensures tenants can't be physically removed from their property for the next three months, landlords will still be able to serve them notice to kick them out once the three month period ends.

The new legislation has extended the notice a landlord must give from two months to three  meaning that if a notice was served today, a tenant would have three months before they are evicted.

Shadow housing secretary John Healey said the Bill 'just gives [renters] some extra time to pack their bags'.

Landlords will still be able to serve what are known as 'Section 21' and 'Section 8' notices during this time.

A Section 21 notice allows a landlord to evict tenants from their homes for whatever reason they like, but can't be used during the first six months of the tenancy.

A Section 8 notice allows landlords to evict their tenant inside the fixed term of their tenancy, but can only be used if the tenant has breached their tenancy agreement and where certain conditions are met.

Caitlin Wilkinson, policy manager at campaign group Generation Rent, said: 'This legislation fails to deliver on these promises in every respect.

Some tenants are already struggling to pay rent Tenants are already struggling to pay rent among the coronavirus outbreak, reports have confirmed. Angus Stewart, chief executive of buy-to-let mortgage broker Property Master, said: 'It is early days but we are already hearing from landlords who have tenants saying they will be late with rent payments or who may not be able to pay their rent at all. 'There are reports of tenants whose working hours have been reduced or who work for overseas companies that do not appear to be currently trading.'

'Eviction is the leading cause of homelessness, so the Government must act now to avoid another crisis in three months' time.'

A Ministry of Housing spokesperson said: 'We want to be clear that emergency legislation being brought forward means there can be no evictions as a result of coronavirus for three months.

'The claim that we are rowing back on it is absolute nonsense.

'As soon as legislation is passed, no new possession proceedings will begin  in either the social sector or the private rented sector  for at least the next three months.

'We have the power to extend this notice period if necessary.'

'At the same time, this government is supporting renters through guaranteeing to pay 80 per cent of employee's wages, if their employer cannot afford to pay them while they are on temporary leave, and increased housing benefit.

'We have been clear we will do whatever is needed to support people at this difficult time.'

The Government added that guidance has been issued to judges and bailiffs, meaning that it is highly unlikely that any existing possession proceedings will continue during this period.

This means that if a tenant was due to be kicked out this month for example, they may now get an extension.

I'm a tenant, what should I do?

Citizens Advice expert Rachael Gore

Rachael Gore, senior housing expert at Citizens Advice, has this advice for tenants who are worried about coronavirus: 'If you're struggling to pay rent, talk to your landlord straight away.

'You should explain the situation and could ask for more time to pay or ask to catch up any missed payments by instalments.

'If you can't come to an agreement with your landlord, it's a good idea to pay what you can afford and keep a record of what you offered.

'You should get advice if you can't reach an agreement because there is a risk that your landlord might try to evict you. In most cases, they'd have to give you notice and get a court order in order to make you leave.

'If your income is reduced because of coronavirus, you should check whether you're entitled to sick pay or to claim benefits. If you're already on existing benefits, these might also increase.

'Check your eligibility for both sick pay and benefits on the Citizens Advice website.'
Following an appeal by the President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for the entire nation to observe March 25, as a National Day of Fasting and Prayer against the spread of the COVID-19, many Ghanaians adhered to the appeal.



The Ghana News Agency on Wednesday morning from around the 0600 hours observed a number of spiritual teachings and prayer being led by religious leaders including; Pastors and Imams on various traditional and social media platforms.



Viewers and listeners including; children also joined the prayer by phoning into the studios, all to call for divine intervention to control the pandemic.



Other media platforms also invited gospel musicians to lead the nation in worship and praise songs to create an ambience of reverence.



Mrs Gifty Afenyi-Dadzie, the National Prayer Director of Aglow International, who led a prayer with her team on a number of media platforms, advised that people observed with all seriousness, the preventive measures set by the Ghana Health Service to control the spread of the coronavirus even as they prayed.



She cautioned the public to desist from all unrighteous conducts as she believed the pandemic was allowed by God as a result of the sins of the world.



The Pentecost Church from its Headquarters led by Apostle Rigwell Ato Addison (Retired), engaged the nation in prayer on the topic, God is in control.



He reiterated that God would have mercy on humanity and heal the land, only if humans acknowledged his commandments and surrendered to him in humility.



Every citizen must see him or herself as Ghana, which might have sinned against God and pray for forgiveness and spiritual intervention to control this COVID-19 canker, he said.



The Reverend Dr Stephen Wengam, the Lead Pastor of the Cedar Mountain Chapel on television, said for his part, the nation would not experience any positive change if her people fasted without denying themselves pleasures of immorality and sin.



The nation and the world at large, he said, was sick of greed, immorality, backbiting, political enmity, murder, and other unrighteous deeds, and had to turn away from them with urgency to experience the blessings of God.



Sheikh Muhammed Bagnya, an Imam at the Osu Castle, speaking on television said for Muslims, spiritual solidarity was important, even if the directive did not come from the Muslim leadership.



Things were out of hand in the fight against COVID-19, especially as efforts to get a vaccine for it had proved futile, he said.



So the only option we have, is to turn to God and we Muslims are more than willing to join this fasting and prayer, he added.



Sheikh Bagnya was optimistic that things would change after the pandemic had ended ranging from human attitudes to the economic sector.



Perhaps the COVID-19 is what we have been waiting for to change the nation for the better, he said.



Bishop Charles Agyenasare, the Founder of the Perez Chapel International, on radio beseeched the intervention of God in the fight against the canker, saying, there was impossible compassion in Gods mercy.



He also prayed for God to give the Cabinet and Council of State wisdom to make relevant decisions for the state amid the outbreak and for physical vitality for those who had contracted the Coronavirus.



Archbishop Nicholas Duncan Williams, the Founder of the Action Chapel, also prayed on the radio for God to forgive humans of their iniquities and spare the land of the calamity.



We believers tell the Coronavirus that, proceed no further. Let no mother or father bury his or her child and let no child remain motherless or fatherless because of you in the name of Jesus Christ. Oh God, please provide your nation with divine immunity and exemption from this canker, he prayed.



It will be recalled that, the President addressing the nation on March 21, on the COVID-19 outbreak in Ghana said: Whilst we continue to adhere to these measures and ramp up our efforts to defeat this virus, I urge all of us, also, to seek the face of the Almighty.



So on Wednesday, March 25, I appeal to all Ghanaians, Christians and Muslims, to observe a national day of fasting and prayer. Let us pray to God to protect our nation and save us from this pandemic.



Meanwhile, the President recently on called for the suspension of social gatherings including; church activities to reduce the rate at which the virus was spreading.

Source: GNA









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One wishes things were better, but one has to tell the truth, said the late literary scholar Harold Bloom in a 2003 interview with jazz expert Tom Reney. Thats why I have so many enemies.

Featured in the Summer 2020 issue of Brilliant Corners, this is the first interview not conducted by the journals founding editor, Sascha Feinstein, Ph.D., Robert L. and Charlene Shangraw Professor of English at Lycoming College, although Feinstein edited the piece substantially. Bloom published more than 40 books of criticism during his lifetime (1930-2019) and, at the time of his death, was the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Prodded by Reney, Bloom speaks passionately about poetry and jazz, especially the connection between the poet Hart Crane and the pianist Bud Powell, whom Bloom heard frequently in the 50s and 60s.

In addition to the Bloom interview, the Summer 2020 issue of Brilliant Corners features a trove of poetry and prose from such distinguished writers as Billy Collins, the former Poet Laureate of the United States; Betsy Sholl, the former Poet Laureate of Maine; and Richard Jackson, the recipient of the Slovene Order of Freedom Medal. It also features extensive excerpts from David Rifes forthcoming book, Jazz Fiction: Take Two, which reviews books in this genre published in the 21st century.

Brilliant Corners is a biannual journal that highlights an exceptional collection of literature and art pertaining to jazz. Founded in 1996, the journal bears strong ties to Lycoming College, with contributors such as Feinstein, who serves as the managing editor, and Gary R. Hafer, Ph.D., John P. Graham Teaching Professor of English at Lycoming College, who serves as the production design editor. The publication is funded in part by the College, the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, and private endowments.

A subscription costs $12 per year ($18 for international orders), and checks or money can be sent to Brilliant Corners, Lycoming College, 1 College Place, Williamsport, PA 17701. More information can be found at www.lycoming.edu/BrilliantCorners or on Brilliant Corners Facebook page.
Ogdens Own Distillery is the largest independent distillery in the state. It is known for its spirits including Porters Whiskey and Five Wives Vodka. It boasts of its fine handcrafted liquors. Ogden's liquid store offers on-site tastings at its distillery. Read on to know more about Ogden hours today:

Ogden liquor store hours

Ogden's Own offers tastings between Tuesday to Friday between 12 to 5 pm. It also provides its services on Saturday from 11 am to 3 pm. Moreover, you can call on the number provided on its website to know more details.

Ogden senior hours

Ogden's liquid store hours will remain the same amid the coronavirus outbreak. Moreover, there are no senior hours for the same. For further information, you can visit their website.

Also read: Big Bazaar Open Amid Lockdown: Here's How You Can Check If Your Local Store Is Operational

Also read: Are Food & Grocery Stores Open During India's 21-day Coronavirus Lockdown? Answered

Ogden's Own to make a donation

Recently, Ogden's Own announced that it would donate all the profits that they made in March and April to local staff members and employees of Utahs bar and restaurant community. According to a report, Ogden resident Charlie Trentelman took initiative to encourage the states residents to continue patronizing local restaurants and leaving a big tip with dine-out options. Besides, the independent distillery has extended its charity by offering a line of protection to Utahs residents, hospitals and stores.

It has come to our attention that some have bought our hand sanitizer & are trying to price gouge the public. We DO NOT condone this action & it is entirely unethical. Check out our FB for more info & updated security measures: https://t.co/77W4FunnCR. Be kind & be thoughtful. pic.twitter.com/5FpVp2PSGm  Five Wives Vodka (@FiveWivesVodka) March 25, 2020

Ogden's Own is producing hand sanitizer

After working their part for the restaurant and bar community, Ogdens Own decided to make hand sanitizers. According to a report, the distillery did not have the right type of license for the same. However, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau waived license requirements which stood in the Ogdens way of creating the product.

As per a report, Ogdens Own is selling hand sanitizer bottles for 50 cents per ounce. Moreover, it is allowing other brands to sell hand sanitizer and recommends them to charge 79 cents per ounce. According to the companys social media, the sanitizer comprises of ethyl alcohol (80%), glycerin, hydrogen peroxide, and purified water.

Ogden's Own Distillery will be open tomorrow, 3/21 from 11-3pm @ 3075 Grant Ave, Ogden, UT



Hand sanitizer: We have limited supplies of 2 oz sprays and 8 oz pumps. Limited to one per person or you can bring your own container! #CoronaVirus #Covid19 #CoronaCrisis #SupportLocal pic.twitter.com/3f9VnTFmFn  Five Wives Vodka (@FiveWivesVodka) March 20, 2020

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, it has been prioritizing the supply of sanitizer to medical facilities, medical personnel, and the general public on the first-come, first-serve basis. Recently, due to the limited availability of sprays and pumps, it also offered people to bring their own containers to buy hand sanitizer. To keep you updated, the company will make its further announcements on its social media.

Also read: Europe Stores Set Up Senior Shopping Hours Amid Coronavirus Fears

Also read: Meijer New Store Hours Announced Amidst The Coronavirus Outbreak
The first direct flight between Vietnam and the Czech Republic carried 204 Czech and 82 other European passengers home and tens of tonnes of medical equipment and materials to support COVID-19 prevention and control in the European country.

The flight departed from Hanoi at 8:20am and arrived in Prague at 2:30pm (local time).

The cargo included 64,200 face masks, among others, as gifts to the Czech government and people from the Vietnam  Czech Republic Friendship Association and companies.

Bamboo Airways used a wide-body Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner for the flight.

The same day, the Czech News Agency CTK quoted the countrys Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek as saying that it is the first repatriation flight coordinated at the European level amid the pandemic.

Also on March 25, the CTK quoted Honorary Chairman of the Czech Republic  Vietnam Friendship Association Marcel Winter as saying that the Vietnamese community is the only in the Czech Republic supporting hospitals, rescue teams and people financially in the fight against the epidemic.

He said their actions show they really consider the European nation as their second home.

A youth organisation named Vietup has launched a campaign to make face masks to hand over to hospitals in Prague.

According to Vietup, a number of Vietnamese convenience stores across the country with heart-shaped logos are also providing beverages and snacks for doctors, public security and firefighting forces for free.

In the northern city of Usti nad Labem, the Vietnamese community has raised funds to purchase ventilators for Masaryk hospital.

Meanwhile, the Czech newswire parliamenlisty.cz on March 24 published an article lauding the Vietnamese community for showing solidarity with their hosts during tough times.

It said Vietnamese people at the SAPA commercial centre in Prague has deployed volunteers and sewing machines to produce hundreds of face masks to present to local authorities and people each day.

The author expressed his appreciation for the Vietnamese peoples acts amid the shortage of face masks there, adding that its why national and local news agencies such as Mlada Fronta Dnes and Lidove Noviny are running stories highlighting their solidarity with their hosts.

The Vietnamese community is now the third largest minority group in the Czech Republic./.VNA

Bamboo Airways flight to send European citizens home Bamboo Airways said it will coordinate with the Czech Embassy in Vietnam to operate a special flight from Hanoi to Prague on March 25 to transport European citizens who want to return home.
Photo: Getty Images

In a horrendous example of social distancing, former Bachelor lead Peter Weber was spotted on a very flirty date in Chicago with one of his former contestants, Kelley Flanagan, on Wednesday by TMZ. (A piggyback ride by the shores of Lake Michigan! In this climate?) The date comes after an incredibly tumultuous season for Weber, which concluded earlier this month in spectacular fashion: He proposed to a contestant, ended the engagement with that contestant, started dating another contestant, and then promptly broke up with that contestant. (His mom had a lot to say.) Flanagan, a fan-favorite attorney from Illinois, finished in sixth place this season. Coincidentally, she ran into Weber at a hotel days before the show began filming, which lead to a vast amount of conspiracy theories within Bachelor Nation about the nature of their relationship. This corona-cation wont do them any favors.

During her time on The Bachelor, Flanagan was lauded by viewers for her emotional and professional maturity, especially in comparison to the young, influencer-centric contestant pool she was paired with. Upon her elimination, Flanagan memorably criticized Weber in a farewell interview. I question his intentions because I dont really know what phase he is in life, she said at the time. The four contestants that are left are like little babies. I dont really know who they are. Are you a child or an adult? Clearly he doesnt agree. If hes not able to sit there and make decisive decisions and stuff like that, thats on him. I dont want him to waste my time either.
Baton Rouge, LA -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/26/2020 -- Residents of Louisiana located in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans areas who are looking to purchase backup generators for their homes can find high-quality products at Keefe's AC, Heating & Electrical.



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Keefe's stands out from their competition by offering smart generator systems. These state-of-the-art appliances offer the same protection as commercial generators at standby generator installation costs. Smart generator systems are programmed to automatically switch on in the event of a power outage. They can also handle the electrical load of many major appliances. Families won't be able to feel the difference between using electricity or their backup generator.



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Wyomings known coronavirus cases jumped nearly 70 percent in a little more than 24 hours as the respiratory disease spread its reach across the state.

The known number of cases here has changed sometimes by the hour, but as of 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, there have been 49 identified cases in 10 Wyoming counties. The new cases, which began to be confirmed Tuesday night, include four in Natrona County; four in Teton County; one in Sweetwater County; four in Laramie County; four in Fremont County; one in Carbon County; and one in Albany County.

Details on all of these cases remain unclear; a spokeswoman for the state Health Department said late Wednesday afternoon she didnt have information on all of them. Messages sent to officials in Fremont County, where the previous 10 cases were all linked to an assisted-living facility there, were not returned Wednesday.

Two of the new Natrona County cases were identified in Douglas, at a Memorial Hospital of Converse County clinic. A Casper-Natrona County Health Department official said at a press conference Wednesday that the two new cases had traveled domestically and may have had contact with another known patient. Both patients are Natrona County residents who were tested in Converse County.

The Sweetwater County patient, that areas first, is a Green River man in his 40s who is self-isolating at home. In a statement, the chief nursing officer for the Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County said officials are aware this likely will not be the only case.

In Teton County, where there are now six cases, officials now believe community transmission  meaning spread from person to person within the county  is present there. In a statement, the county health department said two of the new cases were confirmed by a private lab.

The definition of community transmission is having more than one case in a community that are not linked and the source of the infection is unknown, the department wrote. As testing becomes more widely available, more cases can be expected.

The new Cheyenne cases  four of them, bringing the capital citys total to 12  are not family members, according to the city. Leaders there, too, say that the cases signify a trend of community transmission which is best responded to by ensuring social distancing, covering sneezes and coughs, maintain distance of six feet from other individuals, frequent handwashing, and staying home if sick.

The known number of 49 as of 6:30 p.m. is just that  the known number. There is still a national shortage of testing equipment, and thus the state  and hospitals and clinics across Wyoming  is only testing certain high-risk groups. There have been 758 samples run through the state lab, with its daily testing capacity up to as many as 100 samples a day.

The state lab itself has created 2,600 kits to collect the sames  the swabs that go up your nose and the special tubes that take the swab to the lab  thatll be sent across the state. Five hundred more are also being sent out to replenish used supplies, a Health Department spokeswoman said.

Nationally, the numbers are grim and growing ever more so. The New York Times clocks the known cases at over 63,700. More than 900 have died.

Speaking to Natrona County school board members Wednesday night, infectious disease Dr. Mark Dowell said that Wyoming would not be immune to the spread that has infected tens of thousands of Americans.

If you look at whats going on nationally, were at the beginning, he said. And theres no reason to think that were somehow insulated in a bubble.

The advice is the same here as it is all over: Stay home. Dont hoard supplies you dont need. Call your clinic if you have symptoms. Try not to touch your face. Dont rush to the ER unless you cant breathe. Dont go out in public unless you need to, and for no longer than needed. Work from home and let your employees work from home. Wash your hands. Be kind.

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that the Group of Seven powers were united in opposing Chinas coronavirus disinformation, but European allies emphasized cooperation to fight the global pandemic.

Foreign ministers from the major industrialized democracies spoke about the crisis by videoconference, scrapping a meeting scheduled in Pittsburgh, but any hope of showing a common front was eroded by the absence of a joint statement.

Pompeo, a sharp critic of Beijing who has gone on the offensive over what he calls the Wuhan virus, said he shared a common view with the top diplomats of the other G7 countries -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

Every one of the nations that were at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place, Pompeo told reporters.

Pompeo said that China has been and continues to be engaged in a social media campaign that has included conspiracy theories of US involvement.

This is crazy talk, he said.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman infuriated President Donald Trumps administration by suggesting on Twitter that US troops brought the virus to Wuhan, the metropolis where it was first detected late last year.

A spokesman from Chinas foreign ministry said Thursday that China strongly condemned Pompeos comments, including his use of the term Wuhan virus.

This US politician moves counter to the international consensus and continues to stigmatise China, smearing Chinas efforts, trying to use this to shift attention and blame with extremely malicious intent, said Geng Shuang at a press briefing Thursday.

The virus has killed more than 21,000 people globally, but Beijing has appeared to bring it under control and has sent aid overseas -- including 40 tons of medical supplies to US ally Italy, which has the worlds highest death toll.

On Wednesday, Pompeo minimized Chinas efforts and pointed to a US Air Force cargo planes aid delivery to Italy as well as private US charity efforts.

China is now making small sales of product around the world and claiming that they are now the white hat in what has taken place, Pompeo said.

But he also said the United States sought cooperation, including with China. The two countries leaders are set to take part in a virtual summit on the crisis Thursday of the Group of 20 major economies.

We desperately want to work with every country around the world. This is a global pandemic, Pompeo said.

- France warns not to exploit crisis -

German magazine Der Spiegel, quoting anonymous diplomats, said that the joint statement was scuttled by Pompeos insistence that it use the term Wuhan virus -- a formulation frowned upon by medical professionals who say it is stigmatizing.

Pompeo did not deny the report when asked about it, saying that each minister would speak separately but that they had a common understanding on the health and economic crisis caused by the Wuhan virus.

France and Germany issued statements on the G7 talks that made no mention of China. Canada said China was raised in broader discussions.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian underscored the need to combat any attempt to exploit the crisis for political purposes, a statement said, in likely a veiled response to Pompeo.

Le Drian expressed the view that the unity of all in order to effectively combat the pandemic must now take precedence over any other considerations, it said.

France called for the G7 to find ways to assist Africa, warning that both the continents healthcare system and economies were ill-equipped for the global crisis.

Pompeo has accused China of putting the world at risk by initially suppressing news of the virus. Beijing in turn has accused the Trump administration of seeking a scapegoat for its own failures.

sct-bys/rox/rma
Jesse Eisenberg and Clemence Poesy in the movie "Resistance." (IFC Films)

Marcel Marceau, who died in 2007 at age 84, may best be known as a mime. But he was also a heroic Holocaust survivor who, as a young man, helped save hundreds of Jewish children orphaned by the Nazis.

This remarkable period of Marceaus life gets the bio-drama treatment in writer-director Jonathan Jakubowiczs Resistance, a tense and gripping thriller inspired by this World War II-era tale of courage and resolve against one of historys most unthinkable evils.

Jakubowicz (2005s Secuestro Express), who says he lost 400 relatives in the Holocaust, had four relatives on Schindlers List, and experienced anti-Semitism in his native Venezuela (as a result of the latter, he moved to the U.S. in 2006), has crafted a handsome, compassionate, propulsive piece that clearly reflects his deep personal connection to the material.

The film opens in 1938 Munich, Germany, with a gut-punch sequence in which a young Orthodox Jewish girl, Elsbeth (Bella Ramsey), witnesses the death of her parents (Edgar Ramirez, Klara Issova) at the hands of Nazi officers. It unnervingly sets the table for things to come, including Elsbeths later return to the story.

Were then introduced to Marcel Mangel (Jesse Eisenberg), a jaunty Jewish actor and painter living with his family two miles from the German border in Strasbourg, France. Marcel (who would later protectively change his surname to Marceau) works days for his butcher father, Charles (Karl Markovics), while at night he performs a Charlie Chaplin routine in a local cabaret of dubious repute. The traditional Charles, like Marcels mother (Louise Morell) and more devout older brother, Alain (Felix Moati), think Marcel is a selfish and irresponsible clown; Marcel says he must make art, that his body gives him no choice.

Marcel gets his chance to use his creativity for more noble purposes when his activist cousin, Georges (Geza Rohrig), requests his help with a band of Jewish orphans (including Elsbeth) who were diverted from Nazi capture and ensconced in a nearby castle under the care of a group of Jewish Scouts. Marcel is soon entertaining the kids with his pantomime skills, proving to his family that hes not all about himself, and impressing attractive neighbor and Scouts member Emma (Clemence Poesy). His lesson to the children about hiding out in trees will have a nerve-racking payoff down the road.

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But in the fall of 1939, after Germany invades Poland and is headed for France (the Nazis would occupy the nations northern half), Marcel, his family and compatriots escape with the orphans to Limoges in southern France, or the Free Zone. How exactly they made this more than 450-mile journey (we see them leave Strasbourg on foot) or any hardships they may have encountered en route go unseen.

By late 1942, Marcel, Alain, Emma and her sister, Mila (Vica Kerekes), join the French Resistance and travel to Lyon, where, upon arrival, Marcel engages in a terrific scene of derring-do and establishes his cred as a fighter. He also proves an expert passport forger, which will come in quite handy.

The key personification of the Nazis here  aside from Adolf Hitler, seen speechifying in archival footage  comes in the form of sadistic Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie (Matthias Schweighofer), a.k.a the Butcher of Lyon, who meted out torture and murder from his base at the citys grand Hotel Terminus. (Was there ever a more ominous name for a hotel?)

According to Jakubowicz, there is no evidence that Barbie and Marceau ever truly interacted, even though the madman was a Lyon fixture at the time and was involved in rounding up children, among other heinous acts. But Barbies fictionalized historical presence here, emblazoned by a series of super-tense, often horrific moments (and further amplified by Schweighofers disturbingly wicked turn), gives the film an extra-vivid jolt.

Ultimately, Marceau and his fellow resisters must smuggle the orphans out of Lyon and across the Swiss border against all odds. This provides the film, which was deftly shot in the Czech Republic, with one final harrowing scene of escape, daring and ingenuity  all as the Nazis attempt to hunt down our heroes.

Theres also a rather grand-scale, if not wholly needed framing device set in 1945 on a former Nazi rallying grounds in Nuremberg, Germany. In it, Gen. George S. Patton (Ed Harris) introduces 3,000 of his troops to Marceau, who goes on to perform his chalk-faced pantomime for them in his first official public show. (Marceau had actually served as a liaison officer for Patton.)

Although Marceau is the linchpin for the narrative, he and his mime artistry dont overwhelm the story and sometimes even take a backseat to the films many characters and events. If Eisenberg is an unlikely choice for the role given that the actor, who bears a passing resemblance to the young Marceau, is roughly twice as old as his character was at that time, he keeps his familiar acting tics in check while nimbly embodying the famed performer with sparks of talent as well as credible urgency, sympathy and grace.










The Red Cross appealed Thursday for nearly $825 million to help the world's most vulnerable communities face the challenges posed by the new coronavirus pandemic.

It came a day after the United Nations launched its own COVID-19 humanitarian response plan calling for $2 billion to help the world's poorest and most vulnerable people.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said that "while COVID-19 is already a global pandemic, it is still possible to reduce its spread and the number of lives lost by improving access to critical resources."



The Geneva-based organisations launched their joint appeal for 800 million Swiss francs ($823 million dollars, 752 million euros) as the death toll in the global COVID-19 outbreak climbed towards 22,000.

"This pandemic is putting at risk entire health systems, and the situation will worsen in places where those are weak or inexistent," IFRC president Francesco Rocca said in a statement.

"COVID-19 affects everyone equally, but migrants and displaced people, those who are homeless, and those in disaster-prone areas are among those most exposed to infection, least able to access health care, and most impacted by loss of income," he pointed out.

The IFRC is asking for 550 million Swiss francs to support the work of national Red Cross and Red Crescent organisations.

The ICRC meanwhile is seeking 250 million Swiss francs towards its response in conflict areas, its support of medical facilities, and its work to curb the spread of the virus among displaced and detained people.

"The international community must increase support now to the under-resourced communities crippled by conflict," insisted ICRC president Peter Maurer.

"Viruses know no borders; this is a global problem that will only be solved by global action.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
This article originally appeared on the Somerville Patch

SOMERVILLE, MA  Bill Janovitz has a gig scheduled for Saturday. Only it's not where it was supposed to be when he booked the back room of The Burren as part of the Buffalo Tom singer's music series in Somerville's Davis Square. It will be in his makeshift basement studio staring into an iPhone.

And, instead of being in a venue full of bustling bartenders, music crew and restaurant staff, it will be to raise money for the staff of that venue who help fuel the live music industry while that industry is shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic.

On March 21, Janovitz did his first livestream to benefit Boston-area club employees. Playing a collection of songs from the band that was a staple of the alternative music scene in the 1990s  and still plays a handful of shows each year to the glee of its nostalgic-greedy fans  Janovitz said he was able to raise $5,000 from 18,000 Facebook viewers, plus 1,700 more viewers on YouTube.

"I wanted to give something back to them at a time when it means so much," Janovitz, now also a Lexington-based real estate who joked "I might not sell another house for six months either," told Patch this week. "It's not just the musicians. It's all the sound people, the bar staff, the promotion people. They are all out of work too."

Reminder for any interested and/or morbidly bored folks, I will be streaming many live songs at my virtual happy hour today starting around 4:30 EST. It shall begin with a martini demo on Buffalo Tom Facebook page, and full set will be there and here: https://t.co/OBwevQWqgO

 Bill Janovitz (@billjanovitz) March 21, 2020

While millions of Americans fear for their jobs during a nationwide economic shutdown that could last anywhere from weeks to months, musicians have already been feeling that desperate crunch for weeks. Those who tour, or play out locally up to four or five times a week, found all of their shows for the foreseeable canceled within the span of hours two weeks ago as bars and restaurants hurtled toward a state-ordered shutdown.

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For gig workers  most of whom are considered self-employed, personal contractors  there was no immediate unemployment insurance. The valve of income simply closed.

"These moments teach us what we need," said Will Dailey, who had a tour of China and Japan, as well as shows he curates for Harpoon Brewery and Fenway Park, suspended indefinitely. "We need love. We need shelter. We need food. And we need the oil of human art. Everything else  like the stock market  is make believe. This too shall pass. The problem is that none of us know if the industry will exist the way it did before when it does."

To help that industry maintain some sense of itself during this unprecedented time, Dailey has begun a virtual "Isolation Tour" of Boston with "stops" benefiting Great Scott in Allston, the Paradise and Zumix in Boston, Atwood's Tavern, Club Passim, Plough & Stars, Toad and The Sinclair in Cambridge, and The Burren in Somerville.

His said his first three efforts raised a combined $4,400 for the clubs and their workers.

"It ensures that the culture is still there even if the club is not physically open," Dailey said. "How can I go back to these places after this is over, and they have been closed all this time, and ask for shows if I had not been there for them when they were closed?"





While touring artists can use their name and extensive following to help others, as well as themselves, local musicians who might make $150 on a Friday or Saturday night playing to 54-person capacity bar outside of Boston face the challenges of how to pay their own rent and credit card bills.

Amanda Cote, of Leominster, typically plays three or four shows a week in the Worcester and Fitchburg areas, as well as southern New Hampshire.

She admits the initial cancellations were "nothing short of devastating" but felt some relief when some friends from Worcester, Giuliano D'Orazio and Joshua Croke of "Action by Design" #LiveStreamLocal, reached out about being part of their livestream series.

"I instantly said" 'yes,'" said Cote, who played that show on March 19 and now is planning weekly shows on her own Facebook page. "Having several networks of fans and friends to work through was beyond helpful. I made a decent chunk of change and it certainly helped ease some of my own anxieties. I hope everyone that uses this method of 'playing out' for the time being can feel that sense of relief."

The state-mandated closure of bars and restaurants went into effect in the first minute of Saint Patrick's Day  one of the biggest business days of the year for many music venues in Massachusetts. In response, the popular Boston punk band Dropkick Murphys played a livestream "Streaming Up From Boston" show for their Claddagh Fund that drew 5.7 million Facebook viewers. Many local musicians, such as Monica McNamara, of Fitchburg, sent out more intimate Irish messages of hope and comfort through posts on social media.



Dailey, who grew up in Andover, said he is looking to raffle off "Isolation Tour" merchandise, including signed tour posters, to help pay musicians from across the country who may virtually join him for shows. He said his advice for other livestreaming musicians is to keep whatever you are doing a passion project.

"Reach out to a local bar where you might play a lot," Dailey said. "Then have them reach out to their families and community, and promote it like a live show where they can hear an hour of music they would normally hear at that bar on a Friday night. Then maybe you can strike a deal where instead of you taking a cut, you tip them out to give back to their staff that is out of work. Keep it close to your heart."

The musicians said not only do the livestreams help them generate a touch of income, be creative and provide a sense of professional purpose, it also gives them fan feedback from those feeling their own sense of detachment.

"We are missing out on that connection when it's all about keeping your social distance," Janovitz said. "I am a pretty social person. When you do this you find you have this great family following you online. They get to laugh and sing along with you. I find my nerves before one of these shows are just like they are going live on stage. But it feels nice to be connected too.

Janovitz said he went down "the rabbit hole" of audio technology trying to figure out how to best produce the livestream, and initially had an effort that sounded good on Facebook, but more like a "bad cassette tape" on YouTube. He said through trial-and-error he hopes to produce a quality weekly series for as long as it takes until things begin to return to normal.

Looks like we will exceed $4k for local venues and promoters. Next week, Ill perform one again, but likely on FB and Periscope. https://t.co/fNuPcFt6Pm

 Bill Janovitz (@billjanovitz) March 22, 2020

"If we're locked in our houses anyway, there is not much we can do," he determined. "People love watching and listening to music. And there is something about watching something in real time  rather that post a video from some show a year ago  that makes it better. You know the people are out there, and see the comments, and feel connected for that two-hour show."

"Were all aching for some semblance of normalcy," Cote agreed. "It warmed my heart to read all the comments from friends and fans about having their 'night out' with me playing music to them while they were in their own kitchen or living room."

In a time of need, resourceful musicians are finding creative ways to fulfill the needs of their fans, their friends and even themselves.

"It's one of the few things that a lot of musicians do consistently  raise money for causes and other people," Janovitz said. "This is something they can do now where they should not feel bad about raising a little money for themselves too."

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China is ready to work with France for greater coordination and cooperation in the UN, the G20 and other frameworks to promote joint prevention and control and improve global health governance, Chinese President Xi Jinping said during a phone conservation with French President Emmanuel Macron on March 23.

Xi also stressed the necessity to help developing countries and other countries in need to build capacity and to counteract the impact on the global economy. Cooperation, the Chinese President noted, is like sunshine that can drive away the dark clouds of the epidemic.

Standing at the height of global health governance to underline the importance of solidarity and collaboration, the Chinese President has demonstrated the countrys strong determination and faith to work with other countries to fight the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic and safeguard global development.

To promote solidarity and cooperation is a vital responsibility of the international society in combating COVID-19. Solidarity, as WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has repeated called for, shall be the common choice of all countries.

Josep Borrell Fontelles, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy noted that countries must strengthen cooperation because its the crucial moment for upholding multilateralism and jointly fighting COVID-19, and concerted efforts are needed to overcome the common threat of mankind.

In the era of globalization, countries share challenges and responsibilities. They should realize that to protect the health and security of their own people is a contribution to safeguarding global health security, and helping each other with the COVID-19 control efforts is to relive their own burden.

Countries should complement each other in the battle against COVID-19, cooperate vigorously in scientific research, share research data and information, and jointly study and propose coping strategies. Cooperation is an inescapable duty of all countries, and the epidemic tests the sense of responsibility.

To strengthen communication and coordination is essential. The mounting epidemic prevention pressure makes communication and coordination a pressing task of all countries.

In recent days, through video conferences, Chinese medical experts have introduced Chinas experience on COVID-19 fight, and shared the latest research outcomes, information and relevant measures on epidemic prevention and control with their foreign peers from Pacific island countries, Africa, Europe, Eurasia, South Asia, Latin America and Caribbean countries on curbing the COVID-19 pneumonia.

At China's initiative, foreign ministers of China, Japan and South Korea held a special video conference on COVID-19, discussing the joint prevention and control mechanism among the three countries to effectively curb the spread of the epidemic.

The G20 finance ministers and central bank governors discussed with each other on global economy during a televised meeting and agreed to develop a joint G20 Action Plan in response to the pandemic.

Global countries are enhancing communication and collaboration as COVID-19 is spreading fast and has exerted extensive impacts. It conforms to their common interests to propel global cooperation on COVID-19 control and reduce the impact of the pandemic on global economy to the largest extent.

Improving global health governance is an initiative that benefits the future generations. Over the past decades, the world has made notable progress in this respect, but also faced complicated and arduous challenges posed by frequent occurring of infectious diseases. In addition, mass population movement in the era of globalization has made health threats more globalized. Also, the weakness of the global health governance system mirrored by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pneumonia has heightened the urgency of improving global public health governance.

Isolation wont stop the spread of the virus, and no single country is able to meet all challenges on its own. To protect peoples health, countries need to adhere to multilateralism, uphold the principle of wide consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits, and jointly build a community of common health for mankind.

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, noted that We need to save lives now while also improving the way we respond to outbreaks in general. To improve the ability to protect mankind against viruses, countries need to be future-oriented and improve global health governance through joint efforts.

The coronavirus has brought about tough challenges to the human race. To deal with the unknown and huge challenges and mitigate the wide-ranging influence of the epidemic, mankind needs to work together to beat the virus with faith and bravery. We should believe that as long as countries of the world act to hold the principle of a community with a shared future, and cooperate with each other, well surely dispel the clouds of the virus with cooperation and safeguard peoples right to life.
Courtesy, Reddit user ToriLove777

Life during the Coronavirus pandemic has been described as chaotic and even "apocalyptic," but San Antonio neighborhoods are finding ways to get through this unsettling time.

A Northeast Side resident shared a photo of "give and take" free food tables a neighbor set up in a front yard to help residents facing long lines and empty shelves at grocery stores and some without an income. Residents who are able to spare pantry goods and toilet paper have stacked them on the tables for neighbors in need.
A petrol station in Birmingham is the first in Britain to offer fuel for less than 1-a-litre following the oil crash earlier this month.

The Murco garage on the A435 near Kings Heath on Tuesday cut the price of unleaded to 99.7p - the first time it has dropped below 1-a-litre since early 2016.

It follows cuts of up to 12p-a-litre announced by Asda and Morrisons on Monday, which had seen unleaded drop as low as 104p at the respective supermarket forecourts.

However, analysis of average UK prices by the AA has found that the wider fuel industry is continuing to rip-off motorists, with the average cost of a litre of unleaded on Tuesday at 118.7p - some 19p-a-litre more than the Murco filling station.

First 1-a-litre fuel in the UK: This Murco filling station on the A435 near Kings Heath in Birmingham cut the price of unleaded to 99.7p per litre on Tuesday

With oil prices crashing in the last fortnight and wholesale costs for retailers plummeting, fuel commentators have been calling for petrol to drop below the 1-a-litre ceiling in recent days.

The Birmingham filling station has become the first to answer these calls this week, undercutting rivals in a bit to draw increased custom at a time when many Britons are on lockdown due to the coronavirus.

With UK average unleaded prices as high as 125.9p-a-litre in February, it means the Murco forecourt's price is almost 21 per cent less than the highest average in 2020 so far.

An employer at the garage told Birmingham Live that the price of petrol had been cut below 1 per litre on Tuesday, and said it was likely to stay at least as low as that for a while.

He told the local new agency: 'The pandemic is affecting business because it is limited the number of people who are coming out.'

Wholesaler Costco has also cut the price of petrol to 99.9p-a-litre this week, though this is only available to those who pay an annual fee a membership.

When was the last time petrol was less than 1-a-litre?

UK drivers have seen petrol at 1-a-litre only once since the 2008/2009 financial crash.

That came at the end of 2015 and early 2016 when the UK average price of petrol fell as low as 101.80p per litre, but supermarkets were charging less than 1 for unleaded.

Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury's all reduced the price of petrol below 1.

The price of petrol at the Murco station in Birmingham was some 19p-a-litre cheaper than the UK average

Morrisons was one of the retailers to cut the price of petrol below 1-a-litre in December 2015, as this file image shows

Figures show the average price dropped by 10p per litre when unleaded slipped below 1-a-litre in 2015

Average price of petrol is still far too high, says AA

It comes as figures have found that UK fuel retailers are generally failing to match 'unprecedented' pump price cuts announced by two supermarkets earlier this week.

Despite the 12p-a-litre reduction on petrol at Asda and Morrisons filling stations on Monday, average UK unleaded prices have failed to decline at the same rate as rival suppliers continue to make huge profits from motorists, the AA says.

On Tuesday, the day after the huge cuts, the UK's average pump price of petrol had fallen just 1.3p from 119.9p a litre to 118.7p - some 19p more than it is at the Birmingham retailer.

Diesel had dropped 0.8p from 122.6p to 121.8p - more than 7p shy of the cuts by the respective supermarkets. The 1-a-litre Murco station currently sells it for 109.7p - 12.1p a litre less.

This is Money readers have been giving updates on fuel prices in their area.

One reader told us that BP and Shell stations were still charging 126.9p for diesel in Oxford this week, while in Reading - 26 miles down the road - he had filled up at a BP garage for just 116.9p per litre some three weeks earlier.

Another motorist in Coalville near Leicester reporting a Shell garage selling unleaded for 1.35p-a-litre on Friday.

Keeping motorists in the dark: The AA said the UK average price of petrol has barely shifted since Monday when both Asda and Morrisons announced unleaded cuts of up to 12p-a-litre

Motorists filling up at Asda from Monday have been told they will not pay more than 104p per litre of petrol - almost 13p-a-litre less than the UK average pump price.

When the two supermarket cuts were announced, petrol has fallen 1.9p and diesel 1.3p, according to data collated by the motoring group.

The last time fuel prices fell dramatically was during the crash of 2008 leading into 2009.

The average price of petrol slipped by around 2p-a-litre on three successive weekends during October 2008, with the price of petrol dropping below 1-a-litre in the final weekend of the month.

During that time, the wholesale cost of petrol was in fact higher than it is today, analysis shows.

When wholesale unleaded prices bottomed out on Christmas Eve 2008, it fell to 16.6p per litre. So far this week, wholesale petrol has averaged 15.7p per litre, the AA says.

The table of the left shows the decline in the price of fuel in 2008 during the financial crash and the chart on the right shows the comparative drop in the last month

'In 2008, there was almost a race among some petrol stations to see who could get to 1 a litre first  won by two independent stations, one in Scotland and the other in the Midlands. This time, forecourts seem far less keen,' says Luke Bosdet, fuel price spokesman for the motoring group.

'That may be because demand for road fuel has dropped with drivers and consumers heeding the call to stay at home.'

While it might be the case that wholesale costs were higher in 2008 than today, other costs affecting pump prices would have been lower.

For instance, 12 years ago fuel duty wasn't as high as it is today, and VAT was 17.5 per cent, not 20 per cent as it is today.

Morrisons cut the price of petrol by up to 12p-a-litre and diesel by 8p on Monday. This was matched by Asda on the same day

However, providing wholesale costs remain as low as they are at the moment, the average price of petrol should, in theory, be heading towards 1-a-litre across the UK in the 'coming weeks', Bodset and the AA has calculated.

Adding the wholesale price of unleaded, fuel duty (57.95p), VAT and retailer margins of around 9p, the price drivers pay should hit around 99.1p.

While cheaper prices will be welcomed, not all drivers will be able to benefit.

With the Government's current restrictions on people leaving their homes, mainly critical workers commuting to work are likely to be take advantage of cheaper fuel.

Those shopping for essentials, travelling to a location to undertake daily exercise, attending a medical appointment or assisting an elderly or vulnerable person can also, based on the Prime Minister's instructions, potentially fill up with fuel.

'Falling pump prices shouldn't be an incentive to break the 'lockdown' but, where there is a chance to cut costs for beleaguered households whose income has fallen dramatically with coronavirus, it needs to happen,' the AA fuel expert commented.
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The worldwide 3D printing communityis stepping up to alleviate the shortage of medical equipment needed to battle the coronavirus pandemic.

Participants include entrepreneurs and hackers, companies in the 3D printing industry, automobile makers, aircraft manufacturers, universities, and even a shipbuilder.

Some are offering free 3D printer files for download and use. Others are designing equipment. Still others are offering to produce medical equipment for the cost of the materials. Some are offering to connect medical and healthcare organizations to 3D printing facilities.

The 3D printing industry has set up a Discord server for members to discuss or organize printing projects to deal with the pandemic.

There will be a mixture of options, but, at this time, most are trying to assist any way they can, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

Not everything will be free, but its good to see a mixture of options, he told TechNewsWorld.

Life-or-Death Difference

In the United States, GM, Ford and Tesla are planning to produce or assist in producing respirators or ventilators. Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased more than 1,200 ventilators from China, which he is distributing to hospitals.

In other parts of the world, Volkswagen, Nissan, Ferrari and BMW are planning to make medical products using 3D printing.

Aircraft maker Airbus and Spanish state-owned shipbuilder Navantia also are going to 3D print ventilators.

A public spreadsheet enables makers worldwide to crowdsource 3D printing services for components like the oxygen valves.

Ive been watching this for several days now, and its amazing how these people are stepping up, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

The involvement of companies from outside industries, like auto and aircraft manufacturing, shows that these industries are willing to step up and address this critical problem themselves rather than sitting back, hoping someone else will, he told TechNewsWorld.

This will make the difference between life and death to a massive number of people as this pandemic peaks in the United States, and the practices that result could massively reduce the pain of the next pandemic, particularly if the healthcare organizations buy 3D printers and gain the capability to print their supplies, Enderle added.

Many Hands

California-based Airwolf3D has volunteered to 3D print respirator valves and custom medical components for free.

Its also offering remote technical support for medical personnel who want to learn about 3D printing.

The company is charging only for materials at cost, a spokesperson said.

With its large format printer, hotness and heated chambers, Airwolf3D said it can print large parts in engineering-grade materials. It also can manage complex geometries using water soluble support.

The company extrudes its own filament and has an unlimited supply of ABS material, according to the spokesperson.

ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) is a thermoplastic polymer used in injection molding applications.

Airwolf3D said it can produce thousands of units.

Airwolf3D is working with Scripps Health and the University of California at Irvine to fulfill emergency orders for medical equipment.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

Smile Direct Club, a teledentistry company, is offering to turn out medical equipment on demand with its more than 60 HP 3D printers.

Its devoting almost all of the capacity to this effort, said Dan Baker, global head, supply chain.

The company can print, assemble and ship more than 7,500 face shields a day and will begin shipping them shortly, he told TechNewsWorld.

Smile Direct Club also will produce test kit swabs and the replaceable Lowell Makes mask respirator, as soon as it is validated as an alternative to the N95 mask. It will print, assemble and ship the masks nationwide once validation is received.

Barcelona, Spain-based BCN3D will use its 63 3D printers to undertake scientifically validated safe projects to combat the worldwide medical device shortage. People with ideas can contact it at covid19help@bcn3d.com.

China-based architectural 3D printing company Winsun has dispatched 15 3D printed quarantine rooms to Xianning Central Hospital in Hubei Province, just outside Wuhan. Made from urban construction waste, the rooms have their own water and electricity.

A consortium led by Spains Leitat Technology Center, which includes HP, Navantia, and Airbus, has developed a respirator with 3D printable parts. The device alreadyhas been tested in two hospitals using an artificial lung.

Meanwhile, 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys is making 5,000 3D printed full-face shields for healthcare workers, and said the job will be completed Friday.

Stratasys also is offering help in other areas to battle the pandemic.

3D printer manufacturer Roboze is printing 100 respirator valves for free, and has pledged to continue supporting requests for critical medical device components at no charge.

iMakr, a 3D printing reseller, has donated its first run of 3D-printed face shields from its new printing farm in New York to St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx.

Free PPE Face Shield Designs

The Global Center for Medical Innovation on Tuesday published free design files for those who want to produce face shields for healthcare providers.

They had been downloaded 45 times by Wednesday, by small private businesses, to large publicly traded companies, to large government sectors actively engaged in fighting COVID-19, said GCMI Medical Affairs Liaison Emily Blum, M.D.

GCMI is collaborating with the Georgia Institute of Technology to make prototype face shields that are awaiting regulatory approval.

Manufacturers have offered to make GCMI anywhere from 2,000 face shield units up to 100,000 per day, Blum told TechNewsWorld. The ultimate production goal is well over a million face shields a month, at which point GCMI can request special funding for full execution into the market.

GCMI is looking at all options for distribution  free and paid-for.

More than ever, we need people and industries come together to deal with the situation at hand so that we can put it behind us quickly, Tirias McGregor said. I fear that without a nationwide plan, countries  especially the U.S.  are at risk.
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Linkedin Ardila Syakriah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 14:20 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d8d411 1 National #COVID19,COVID-19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,coronavirus,#coronavirus,COVID-19-drugs,chloroquine-drugs,chloroquine,#chloroquine,WHO,#WHO,Indonesia,#Indonesia,Jokowi,#Jokowi Free

Experts are warning the public against panic-buying chloroquine phosphate, an antimalarial drug thought to be a possible treatment for COVID-19, citing the dangerous side effects of the medicine.

Reports have surfaced that people had started to purchase the drug without doctors' prescription after President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo announced last Friday that the government was preparing medicines, including three million doses of chloroquine, which he described as "having been proven to cure COVID-19 in other countries".

Read also: Indonesia starts rapid tests, imports medicines to 'cure' COVID-19, Jokowi says

Maksum Radji, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Indonesia's (UI) School of Pharmacy, said the government must be careful in distributing information about the drug as clinical trials were still underway to measure its effectiveness in treating COVID-19. Even then, any consumption of the drug must be done under a doctors' supervision, he said.

"It's wrong to purchase and consume the drug to prevent catching the virus that causes COVID-19. Chloroquine is a strong drug [...] given its side effects," Maksum told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

He listed the common side effects of chloroquine consumption, including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, breathing difficulties, blurred eyesight, stomach cramps, swollen ankles, tinnitus, weakened muscles and mental disorders.

Nafrialdi from the Clinical Research Support Unit at the UIs School of Medicine said that even doctors would be very cautious when prescribing chloroquine, which would only be used on severe cases, as the side effects could lead to burst blood vessels and heart attacks in extreme instances.

Chloroquine is used as a second-line drug, the experts say, meaning that it would only be used when initial medicines, common ones used to treat COVID-19 patients' clinical symptoms, such as fever, do not produce any satisfying results. Even then, experts are still split over its use in treating the disease.

There are currently no vaccines or antiviral drugs approved for the disease but the World Health Organization is launching a multinational trial to search for potential treatments for the virus, which include chloroquine. Other drugs in its trial are the experimental antiviral remdesivir initially developed to treat the Ebola virus, an HIV drug combination consisting of the lopinavir/ritonavir and the lopinavir/ritonavir plus interferon.

Maksum of UI said that chloroquine was still used in Indonesia, although not as commonly as other antimalarial drugs considering its side effects.

The Post has discovered the drug is being sold on e-commerce platforms in the country.

In Papua, where malaria remains a problem, chloroquine used to be easy to find and purchase, a resident who refused to be named told the Post on Wednesday. Recently the drug had gotten more difficult to obtain, she added, attributing its scarcity to the drug being named a possible treatment for COVID-19.

When reports said that the drug could be used to treat COVID-19 patients, the 55-year-old woman said she consumed the drug every day until she learned about its side effects and that its effectiveness was still being studied.

"No one wants to be infected by the virus," she said.

The woman said that the government had not been distributing essential information for residents in her area to prevent the spread of the virus, prompting her to relay information about the new virus strain that she learned from the media to her neighbors.

Papua has recorded three confirmed COVID-19 cases as of Wednesday, as nationwide cases reach 790 with 58 deaths.

Jokowi said on Monday that the millions of chloroquine doses were produced in the country by state-owned pharmaceutical company PT Kimia Farma and would only be used on COVID-19 patients if doctors deemed it necessary. The company was not available for immediate comment.

"Chloroquine is not a first-line treatment, but a second-line treatment [...] The drug is not an over-the-counter drug, so the consumption must be on doctors orders," Jokowi said, adding to his earlier statements about the drug, which many consider misleading.

Read also: Indonesia produces chloroquine, anti-malaria drug tested as possible treatment for COVID-19

The government's spokesperson for COVID-19 affairs, Achmad Yurianto, has also warned the public that chloroquine was not for prevention purposes and hence must not be consumed at home.

"We ask people, once again, not to purchase, store and consume the drug without a doctor's prescription," Yurianto said.

If Indonesia was to use the drug on its COVID-19 patients, Maksum of UI said the government should participate in the WHO-led clinical trials to study potential COVID-19 treatments so that the results could be part of the WHOs global data.

He cited experts suggesting that chloroquine could disrupt the virus' ability to infiltrate living cells and replicate itself, although emphasizing the need for further studies to prove these early assumptions.

Drug discovery commonly would take years and involve at least three stages, but in cases like COVID-19 that had been declared a global pandemic, conforming to such lengthy steps was impossible, Maksum said.

Experts globally have cautioned people not to resort to self-medication since a man in Arizona, the United States, died after he ingested chloroquine phosphate -- an aquarium cleaning product similar to the drug that had also been named by US President Donald Trump as a potential treatment for COVID-19, Reuters reported.

Trump tweeted about the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, saying it had a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine" -- a claim played down by Americas top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, who said that the therapy must be tested to assure its safety and efficacy.
Advanced temperature control technology to help European hospitals fighting COVID-19 outbreak

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- CardioQuipTM, LLC, a medical device manufacturer focused on development and commercialization of patient temperature control and cardiovascular perfusion technology announced today it has received CE Mark approval for the MCH-1000TM Modular Cooler-Heater SeriesTM. The MCH-1000 Series of cooler-heaters is now available to European hospital systems fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

A cooler-heater device is used to regulate patient temperature in many types of medical procedures, especially those involving the heart and lungs. Most notably, the MCH-1000 can potentially be used to treat acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) associated with COVID-19 through a treatment called Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO)1. ECMO provides increased systemic oxygen delivery and mitigates ventilator-induced lung injury.

"Landing the CE Mark is a tremendous milestone for CardioQuip," said Doug Platt, CEO. "The approval allows us to offer our technology to major hospitals all over the European Union (EU) at a time when it is greatly needed."

The CE Mark confirms that the MCH-1000 meets the Essential Requirements of the Medical Device Directive (93/42/EEC). CardioQuip also received ISO 134385:2016 certification of its quality management system following completion of an audit by BSI, an EU Notified Body. The MCH-1000 received FDA 510(k) clearance in the United States in 2011.

Numerous patient deaths linked to non-tuberculosis mycobacterium (NTM) growth in European manufactured cooler-heaters have highlighted the need for safety and water quality in cooler-heaters. The safety of the MCH-1000's open tank design paired with its simplified cleaning protocol and ease of use have made it the best-selling cooler-heater in the U.S. Market.

"We are excited to be in the final stages of agreements with European distribution partners to aide our commercialization efforts and get the MCH-1000 to the EU as quickly as possible," added Platt.

For more information on the MCH-1000 and CardioQuip, follow us on Twitter @CardioQuip and LinkedIn or visit https://www.cardioquip.com.

1MacLaren G, Fisher D, Brodie D. Preparing for the Most Critically Ill Patients With COVID-19: The Potential Role of Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation. JAMA. Published online February 19, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.2342

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1138123/CardioQuip_Logo.jpg
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey is voting by absentee ballot in the July 14 runoff because of the coronavirus pandemic but opposes legislation to allow absentee voting in all circumstances, saying it could open the door for fraud.

Iveys position drew criticism today from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which said the risks posed by the pandemic illustrate the need to expand voting by mail as an alternative to in-person voting on election day.

Governor Iveys use of the myth of voter fraud as an excuse to prevent Alabamians from having a safe way to vote by mail in future elections is irresponsible, shows a total lack of leadership on a critical issue, and will undermine our democratic process, SPLC deputy legal director Nancy Abudu said in a press release.

The president of the League of Women Voters of Alabama also supports changing the absentee voting law.

Alabama law requires voters applying for an absentee ballot to declare why they cant vote in person. They must check one of the boxes on the application.

Secretary of State John Merrill has advised voters who dont want to vote in person because of concerns about COVID-19 to check the box that says, I have a physical illness or infirmity which prevents my attendance at the polls.

That statement is not true for healthy people who want to vote absentee only because of the coronavirus. But Merrill said state law allows the secretary of state to give absentee voting guidance during a state of emergency.

Amid coronavirus concerns, it is important to remember that Alabamians who are concerned about contracting or spreading an illness have the opportunity to avoid the polls on Election Day by casting an absentee ballot, Merrill said in a press release.

Some Alabama legislators have proposed ending the requirement to give a reason for voting absentee. Merrill supported one such bill in 2017, but it did not pass.

Similar legislation is pending this year, including a bill by Rep. Laura Hall, D-Huntsville. But Ivey said she doesnt support changing the law.

My thought is, if anybody can submit an absentee vote without a valid reason, it raises the potential for voter fraud. And yall, in the middle of a public health crisis, we dont need to open that up and add extra problems to our plate, Ivey said.

Thirty-three states allow absentee voting without requiring a reason, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Other states do this already," said Hall, sponsor of the no-excuse absentee voting bill this year. "Ive not seen any evidence or know of any evidence where the issue of fraud has been an issue."

The governors press office did not immediately respond when asked how the change would create more opportunity for fraud.

Hall said people who want to vote and who have a need to take care of the task before election day should not have to justify that.

If an individual would like to vote that should be enough, Hall said. I think we should remove every barrier that would prevent a person from voting."

Ivey postponed the runoff from March 31 to July 14 because of the pandemic. That came after some local election officials raised concerns, including about the fact that many poll workers are retired people who would be more likely for serious illness from COVID-19 than the general population.

Attorney General Steve Marshall, responding to a request from Merrill, issued an opinion that Ivey had the authority to postpone the election under the states emergency management law.

Hall said the pandemic illustrates the need for alternatives to voting in person on election day, a situation that could arise again after a natural disaster or some other disruptive event.

We could have any other incident that would create the time where this would certainly be important, she said.

Barbara Caddell, president of the League of Women Voters of Alabama, issued a statement supporting a change in the law that would allow absentee voting without a reason.

While postponing the primary run-off addresses the immediate emergency situation, now is the opportune time to look ahead to reforms in the electoral process that would minimize disruptions in the future, Caddell said. 'No-excuse' absentee voting and voting by mail are established methods to allow voting outside a physical polling place. To date, thirty-three states and the District of Columbia permit no excuse absentee voting and/or voting by mail. If Alabama had in place such provisions, the primary run-off could have proceeded on schedule.

Such modifications of our election system require legislative action. Our current health crisis and state of emergency have shown that the time for such action is now, particularly since there are some indications that COVID- 19 could linger and impact the November general election. The League of Women Voters of Alabama urges the Alabama legislature at the very least to pass no-excuse absentee ballot legislation; there are several such bills already introduced. In addition, we urge the legislature to enact mail-in voting provisions, an option that would automatically be available to all registered voters, not just to those who apply for absentee ballots, even if there were no excuse.'
The Central government on Wednesday unveiled an economic package worth Rs 1.7 lakh crores primarily focussed at the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the society.

The Central government on Wednesday unveiled an economic package worth Rs 1.7 lakh crores primarily focussed on the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the society.

In a presser, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Minister of State for Finance Anurag Thakur announced cash doles, subsidies and food grain grants for the poor apart from some moderate measures for the organised sector market. However, the duo did not elaborate on where from the government planned to fund the welfare schemes.

The Finance Minister also kept mum on any further relief measures for lower middle class and the middle class income groups, small shopkeepers and vendors who depend on supply chain movement and direct demand in market to earn their living. Furthermore, the government also did not commit to any relaxations in EMI and credit card payments for medium income households, whose livelihood may be compromised due to the lockdown.

Here are the key takeaways from the economic package announced on Thursday.

A financial package worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore was announced which was divided into two parts: Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Samman Yojna and Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Samman Anna Yojna.

For Food Security

To ensure food security for the poorest, the government announced that all those dependent on the Public Distribution System will receive additional 5 kilograms of wheat/ rice per person per month, and 1 kilogramme of pulse per household.

Additionally, the government will give free LPG cylinders to woman beneficiaries of Ujjwala scheme. 8.3 crore BPL families are expected to benefit from government's decision.

Direct Cash Benefit

The first installment under PM Kisan Samman Nidhi  a DBT scheme of Rs 6,000 yearly pension for small and medium farmers -- will be front loaded, giving immediate benefit to 8.69 crore farmers. This, however, is not an additional dole but an advance payment of the already provisioned for under the scheme.

The government has also announced a wage hike for daily-wage labourers dependent on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA). The current wage of Rs 182 for a day's work has been raised to Rs 202. This will translate into a benefit of Rs 2,000 per family for the entire period of 100 days of employment granted under the scheme.

For senior citizens, widows and differently-abled citizens from the marginal community, the government has provisioned for a one-time dole of Rs 1,000 through direct benefit transfer. This amount will be transferred in two installments over the next three months and is expected to benefit 3 crore people.

Additionally, 20 crore woman Jan Dhan account holders will be given ex-gratia amount of 500 rupees per month for the next three months, to run the affairs of their household.

Miscellaneous

The government will also provide Rs 50 lakh insurance cover to all frontline healthcare workers battling coronavirus for the next three months. ASHA workers, paramedics, doctors, nurses, sanitary workers set to benefit from move.

Collateral-free loans to 63 lakh Women Self-Help Groups to be doubled from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 20 lakh. This will put immediate money in the hands of 7 crore households.

For construction workers, welfare fund for building and construction workers currently having Rs 31 thousand crore will be used. This will benefit 3.5 crore registered workers.

For Organised Sector
People who deliberately cough on emergency workers during the coronavirus outbreak will be jailed for up to two years, prosecutors have warned.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said coughing will be charged as an assault on an emergency worker, or common assault if used against other key workers or members of the public.

The intervention came amid numerous reports of police and shop workers being deliberately coughed on by people claiming to have coronavirus.

Max Hill QC, the director of public prosecutions, said: Emergency workers are more essential than ever as society comes together to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

I am therefore appalled by reports of police officers and other frontline workers being deliberately coughed at by people claiming to have Covid-19.

Let me be very clear: this is a crime and needs to stop. The CPS stands behind emergency and essential workers and will not hesitate to prosecute anybody who threatens them as they go about their vital duties.

Assaults specifically against emergency workers are punishable by up to two years in prison, while common assault has a maximum sentence of six months.

But if the incident is found to be racially or religiously aggravated, the sentence can be increased to two years.

Police have also been given the power to arrest people or fine them up to 960 for breaking coronavirus lockdown rules in England.

Individuals who do not pay a fixed penalty notice under the Regulations could be taken to court, with magistrates able to impose unlimited fines, a Home Office spokesperson said.

Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK Show all 15 1 /15 Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK The usually busy Royal Mile in Edinburgh is empty as people stay away from public areas amid the coronavirus outbreak on 13 March Katielee Arrowsmith/SWNS Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK Ho bart's Amusement Arcade in Westward Ho!, Devon is offering toilet roll and soap as prizes in grabber machines Rob Braddick/SWNS Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK An empty platform at Farringdon Station in London the morning after the Prime Minister said that Covid-19 "is the worst public health crisis for a generation" PA Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK Shopkeepers Asiyah Javed and husband Jawad from Day Today Express, in Stenhousemuir, Falkirk are giving away facemasks, antibacterial hand wash and cleaning wipes to the elderly in a bid to stop the spread of Coronavirus Katielee Arrowsmith/SWNS Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK A usually busy street in Cambridge is empty as people stay away from public areas amid the coronavirus outbreak on 2 March James Linsell-Clark/SWNS Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK A hand sanitiser dispenser is seen inside the stadium during the Premier League match between Manchester United and Manchester City at Old Trafford on 8 March Getty Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK Maaya Indian Kitchen in Milton Keynes is offerig customers a free roll of toilet paper with every takeaway order SWNS Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK Oliver Cooper[L], was sent home from school for selling spurts of handsanitiser to fellow pupils at 50p a time. He poses with mum Jenny Tompkins by their home in Leeds Ashley Pemberton/SWNS Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK Empty toilet paper shelves at a supermarket in London on 12 March EPA Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK A member of the public is swabbed at a drive through Coronavirus testing site set up in a car park in Wolverhampton Getty Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK A passenger wears a protective face mask as she travels on a bus in the City of London AFP/Getty Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK A Southampton fan wears a face mask before the match against Newcastle United on 7 March Reuters Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK A loudspeaker placed in grounds of St Mary's Catholic Church in Broughattin, Dundalk, County Louth ahead of funeral mass later this morning. The loudspeaker has been placed in the grounds after the Catholic Archdiocese said that funerals and weddings should not exceed 100 attendees within the church building PA Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK A hand sanitising station set up outside Cheltenham Racecourse during day four of the Cheltenham Festival on 13 March PA Coronavirus fears lead to empty streets and shelves across UK People wearing protective face masks walk across London Bridge on 11 March AFP/Getty

If an individual continues to refuse to comply, they will be acting unlawfully, and the police may arrest them where deemed proportionate and necessary.

However, in the first instance the police will always apply their common sense and discretion.

The CPS issued its warning over coughing after a 45-year-old man appeared in court for claiming to have coronavirus and coughing at Metropolitan Police officers who were arresting him for another offence.

Darren Rafferty, from Dagenham in London, admitted to three counts of assaulting an emergency worker on Wednesday and will be sentenced at Snaresbrook Crown Court on 1 April.

Another man was jailed after threatening to spit at police officers who asked him why he was out in Blackburn following the lockdown brought in on Monday evening.

David Mott, 40, was jailed for 26 weeks after admitting possession of an offensive weapon, possession of a class B drug and threatening behaviour.

More than 20,000 cases of assaults on emergency workers have been prosecuted since the law came into force in November 2018.

John Apter, chair of the Police Federation of England and Wales, had called for harsh punishments for people coughing on officers during the coronavirus pandemic.

Weve certainly seen some examples of that where my colleagues are targeted by these vile creatures using coronavirus almost as a weapon, it defies belief, he told BBC News on Tuesday.

We need to deal with these idiots and deal with them robustly.
Morningside College and Dordt University announced Wednesday they will shift all courses to online instruction for the remainder of the spring semester, citing concerns over the spread of COVID-19.

As part of this decision, Morningside will close its residential halls at noon April 8, though students are encouraged to move out at their earliest convenience. Students are asked not to return to campus if they or anyone they've been in contact with experience coronavirus symptoms.

Morningside president John Reynders acknowledged some students, due to special circumstances, will not be able to leave campus. The college's Residence Life office will be working to accommodate those individuals.

"Please know that theses decisions were not easily reached, but are in accordance with the recommendations we have received from local, state, national and global leaders," Reynders said in a letter posted Wednesday. "I value each ad every member of this community. It is important to me that Morningside carries out its mission of civic responsibility by doing our part to stop the spread of COVID-19. As such, these actions are necessary to protect your health and well-being."

Students will receive a yet-to-determined refund or credit for vacating residential halls early. Those details will be worked out in the next few weeks.

The private Sioux City college said its May term classes have been canceled. Any junior or senior who hasn't completed a May term before graduating in May will have that requirement waived.

Dordt had initially planned to resume on-campus instruction on April 13, but decided to suspend in-person classes through the end of the semester.

President Erik Hoekstra said Dordt leaders determined that more than one-third of the students at the Sioux Center, Iowa, university would not be able to return to campus, and those who could would need to self-quarantine for 14 days upon their return.

Dordt will host commencement on May 8, but Hoekstra said it is anticipated the event will be a virtual experience.

Morningside and Dordt join a long list of colleges and universities, including Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, that have ended in-person classes this semester due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Infectious disease specialists have warned that COVID-19 can live on the soles of shoes for up to five days, with footwear more likely to carry coronavirus if it has been worn in busy areas like supermarkets, airports or on public transport.

The sole of a shoe is the main breeding ground for bacteria, fungi and viruses, but respiratory droplets carried in the air from a person infected with coronavirus can still land anywhere on the upper part of a shoe like the laces or the heel.

Soles are typically made from durable, synthetic materials like rubber, PVC or leather lined with plastic, all of which carry high levels of bacteria because they are non-porous, meaning they do not allow air, liquid or moisture to pass through.

Australians are becoming increasingly mindful of what is brought inside their homes as the country recorded a spike of 190 cases overnight in New South Wales alone, bringing nationwide infections to 2,793 and the death toll to 12.

Shoes are more likely to carry COVID-19 if they've been worn in busy areas like supermarkets or on public transport (pictured, customers carry bags outside a supermarket in Sydney on March 4, 2020)

HOW LONG CAN COVID-19 SURVIVE ON SURFACES? A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed coronavirus can live on cardboard for 24 hours and on stainless steel and plastic for up to to three days. Studies have shown the virus can remain on synthetic materials used in shoes for as long as five days. Frequently touched surfaces like taps, phone cases, door handles, computer keyboards and toilets should be cleaned using bleach or alcohol solutions of at least 70 percent alcohol. Advertisement

San Diego family doctor Georgine Nanos told Huffington Post Australia the likelihood of footwear carrying COVID-19 increases if it has been worn in heavily populated areas, like offices, shopping centres, trains, buses and airports.

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

Virginia infectious disease specialist Dr Mary E. Schmidt agreed, saying the coronavirus has been shown to live on synthetic surfaces for 'five days or more' by studies on materials closely related to shoe fabrics at room temperature.

These claims have been supported by Kansas City public health specialist Carol Winner, who said shoes made with plastic and other synthetic materials can carry active viruses for days.

Ms Winner said shoes should be left in garages or directly inside the front door.

'The idea is to just not to track them throughout the house,' she told HuffPost.

People who are not working from home and continuing to commute, like healthcare workers and shop assistants, are advised to use one pair of shoes for any time spent out of the house.

Shoes made from canvas, soft fabrics or faux leather should be cleaned in the washing machine on a low temperature cycle. Leather shoes or heavy duty work boots should be cleaned by hand with disinfectant wipes.

Shoes should be left outside or directly inside the front door to avoid trekking germs and bacteria collected on trains or buses through the house (stock image)

WHY YOU NEED TO WASH FRUIT AND VEGETABLES WITH SOAP University of Sydney Associate Professor Timothy Newsome University of Sydney Associate Professor Timothy Newsome specialises in infection, vaccines and virology, and has been watching closely as coronavirus restrictions heighten across Australia. Mr Newsome confirmed that 'every surface is a hazard' when it comes to COVID-19, including fresh produce on supermarket shelves. Mr Newsome told Daily Mail Australia that while the virus can live on most surfaces, people doing their weekly grocery shop should be particularly wary of the fruit and veg aisle as customers are constantly picking up and placing back down items. While it would be 'poor practice' to test 'every avocado for coronavirus', Mr Newsome said people must treat everything they touch as potential sources of contamination. The best course of action is to wash fruit and vegetables with soap as soon as you bring them home, instead of simply relying on the high heat of cooking them to 'kill' the virus. 'Wash them with warm soapy water, just as you do your hands,' Mr Newsome said. Advertisement

Melbourne environmental scientist Nicole Bijlsma previously warned Daily Mail Australia about the dust and allergens shoes can carry into the home.

She said it's best to leave footwear outside or directly inside the door rather than traipsing them through the house.

Nicole Bijlsma is a qualified building biologist based in Melbourne

But when it comes to virus-proofing your home against COVID-19, Ms Bijlsma said it's important to draw the line between keeping things clean and over sanitising surfaces.

'The conundrum is that bacteria are critical for humans - the more bacteria we are exposed to, the stronger out immune response will be,' she said on Thursday.

'It's absolutely justified to disinfect everything in hospital settings and in places where you have high risk individuals, but for most households clinical sanitising will actually reduce bacterial diversity which is counterproductive.'

Regularly washing hands, avoiding touching your face and coughing and sneezing into the crook of your elbow instead of your hand are the best defences we have against the rapid spread of coronavirus, Ms Bijlsma said.


WATERLOO  Police are investigating after someone opened fire on a Waterloo home Thursday morning.

No one was injured, but bullets shattered a storm door at the home at 1425  Mulberry St. and pieced the siding. Officers found spent shell casings in the street outside.

The shooting happened around 10 a.m. Thursday, and it was the third incident of gunfire in recent days.

Another house was hit by bullets during an overnight shooting on Wednesday.

Neighbors called police after hearing gunshots around 11:25 p.m. Wednesday, and officers found the home at 126 Wellington St. had damage to a glass door, a living room window and a bedroom window. Officers also found five .40-caliber spent shell casings at West First and Wellington.

No injuries were reported.

The incident comes after residents in the 3300 block of West Fourth Street reported gunfire around 2:55 a.m. Wednesday. No injuries were reported, and residents later found a bullet hole at an apartment at 3320 W. Fourth.

Photos: Guns in Northeast Iowa crime cases

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A used condom found at the crime scene was used to track down the killer of 16-year old Gabrielle 'Britney' Ujlaky, according to a probable cause statement obtained by Dailymail.com.

Police also found keys on a lanyard with the name 'Britney' on it near the partially clothed and partially covered body of what turned out to be Britney on March 11 in Burner Basin area, about 15 miles outside of Elko, Nevada.

Her longtime friend Bryce Dickey, 18, of Spring Creek, Nevada was arrested for her murder after his and Britney's DNA were found on the used condom.

Prosecutors have charged him with open murder with use of a deadly weapon, or in the alternative, felony murder during sexual assault or attempted sexual assault with use of a deadly weapon.

Student Gabrielle (Britney) Lynn Ujlaky's body was found after going missing. Her friend Bryce Dickey, 18, was cuffed on one count of open murder on Friday

A condom wrapper was found at the crime scene, as well as keys on a lanyard with the name 'Britney' on it and they were used to track down Dickey

Britney was last seen on March 8 in front of Spring Creek High School, Nevada

Ujlaky was last seen on March 8th around 4.30pm outside of Spring Creek High School after telling her father she was getting a ride with longtime family friend, Bryce Dickey.

When Ujlaky didn't come home later that night her family called police who then contacted Dickey.

Dickey told police he dropped off her at the high school and saw her get into a green F-150 Ford pickup truck with a 'pretty tall' while male wearing a cowboy hat and even later provided further details about the mysterious green Ford truck. He told police that it had two stickers on the left rear window and a toolbox in the bed of the truck.

'Britney was this smart girl that everyone liked. She had high morals as far as I knew, she was still a virgin to the best of my knowledge,' a friend told DailyMail.com

Elko police then filed a missing person/runaway report on March 9th requesting information about a green F-150 truck, even setting up a tip line.

The green truck later turned out to be a fabrication, it was Dickey's feeble attempt to mislead investigators.

In subsequent interviews Dickey told police that he had driven around with Ujlaky for about three and a half hours before taking he to Spring Creek High School. He also showed them Snapchat text messages he had to sent to Ujlaky asking if she was OK and where she was at.

According to the probable cause statement, police say, on March 11 a deceased female was found that was partially covered by a tarp and was partially clothed. 'Blood was found near the edge of the roadway with a trail of disturbed earth leading to the body.'

After Ujlaky's body was positively identified on March 13, Dickey was again interviewed at the police station, where detectives notated that some of his statements contradicted earlier statements.

During this interview Dickey described the clothing that Ujlaky was wearing at the time he was with her which matched the clothing she was wearing on her body and confirmed she was in possession of a cell phone and lanyard of keys.

Dickey agreed to voluntarily sign a consent form and provided a DNA sample.

Police went back out to the crime scene again on March 14 where a set of earbuds and a used condom were found. DNA on the condom later tested positive for both Dickey and Ujlaky.

According to a probable cause statement obtained by DailyMail.com, a used condom found at the crime scene was used to track down Dickey

On March 17, the police received the lab results back and found Ujlaky's DNA profile on the exterior of the condom and Dickey's DNA profile was located on the interior of the condom.

Days earlier Dickey denied to police of ever having a sexual relationship with Britney but in a police interview on March 19 when confronted with evidence, he confessed to having sex with her on March 8 with a condom.

Dickey was arrested and search warrants were served on residencies associated with him. Blood was found on a pair of boots and a sweatshirt.

Travis Johnston, 17, of Spring Creek, Nevada and a childhood friend of Dickey's, exclusively told Dailymail.com, 'I'm still in shock over this, I can't believe it.'

Johnston said they all knew each other, 'We come from a small town, everyone knows everyone, Bryce was the type of friend that would give you the shirt off his back. He was as mellow as anyone I've ever met. I just can't believe he killed Britney; he was like her big brother. He never said anything sexual in nature about Britney.

'Britney was this smart girl that everyone liked. She had high morals as far as I knew, she was still a virgin to the best of my knowledge.'

The night Ujlaky went missing on March 8, Johnston said that Dickey called him around 9pm and told him that Ujlaky had been reported missing and wanted to know if he wanted to go out looking for her in the Burner Basin area.

'I told Bryce I couldn't go with him that night because I already had plans,' but now wonders why Bryce wanted to specifically look in the area where her body was found just days later.

Over the course of the next few days Johnston said Dickey didn't have a lot to say about Britney. 'I asked him if he spoke with the police since he was one of the last people to see her the day she disappeared and he told me, 'Yeah I've spoken to the police on several occasions and they are all up in my a**.'

Johnston added the day Dickey was arrested the police pulled a rouse on him, 'The police told Bryce to come down to the station so they can discuss some new information with him about the green truck, so as Bryce drove into the Elko County Sheriff's office he was arrested.'

Johnston said he's still not convinced of his friend who he has known since kindergarten's guilt, 'I want to see more evidence linking him to the murder.'

But then added, 'I guess you really never know someone and what they are capable of.'

Dickey is charged with open murder with use of a deadly weapon, or in the alternative, felony murder during sexual assault or attempted sexual assault with use of a deadly weapon

Britney's body was found partially covered by a tarp and was partially clothed. 'Blood was found near the edge of the roadway with a trail of disturbed earth leading to the body,' the probably cause statement read

Johnston says he still hasn't spoken to the police about his interaction with Dickey.

Another friend of both Britney and Bryce's, Cameron Rand, 19, Elko, Nevada told Dailymail.com,

'The Bryce I knew would have never done this to anyone let alone Britney. But if he did it, the law is the law and he'll need to pay for what he did.'

Ujalky's mother, Alisha Ujlaky told Oxygen.com, 'I'm really, really numb, we are hanging in there by the fingernails.'

'I trusted him impeccably,' she added. 'The betrayal in this is unreal.'

She said she bought Dickey's story about the green Ford pickup, 'hook, line, and sinker.'

She even consoled Dickey at a balloon launch memorial for her daughter just days before his arrest.

'I grabbed his cheeks and I tilted him towards me so he was looking in my eyes, for somebody who can sit there and betray a best friend like that, take her life, then go and celebrate her life with her family, go out looking for her  he is a psychopath.'

Ujlaky's father, James Ujlaky, said he trusted Dickey, and that the two had been friends for years through the rodeo community.

'There's no worse betrayal than this,' James told The Daily Beast. 'Because she really thought he was a good friend.'

'She did trust everybody. She always saw the good. If someone did wrong, she would call you out in front of everybody. She was going to expose you for who you were, come hell or high water.'

'I trusted him impeccably,' Britney's mother said of Dickey. 'The betrayal in this is unreal'

A ribbon reads: 'Justice for Britney Ujlaky' after her body was found

Ujalky's mother, Alisha Ujlaky told Oxygen.com, 'I'm really, really numb, we are hanging in there by the fingernails'

On the day Ujlaky's body was found, March 11 Dickey posted a link to a Go Fund Me page on his Facebook in honor of Britney Ujlaky then again on March 13 he posted again about Britney

'Yesterday, we all received news that made us hit the floor. Around 8 in the morning we all started meeting up at my house to grieve an to mourn Britney's life. Which was taken far too soon. That day I had tears of pain and joy. I wish she could have seen the amount of us that came together to honor you sis. We love you so much. Just know you won't ever be forgotten.'

Friends of Ujlaky's have started to speak out against Dickey without mentioning his now on social media. Britney's good friend Cheyenne Fry wrote,

'I misss you sooooo freaking much brit. You didn't deserve any of the things that happened to you. I miss your laugh and your voice so much I think about you all the time and how I wanna send you all the funny TikToks that we used to laugh at the most I miss seeing you everyday I want you back I want my best friend back!!

'The coward that took you away from me is going to pay and I will make sure that i do all the things we had planned on doing together. You were more than my best friend you were my little sister and I love you so much I really could use one of your hugs right now'.

Dickey is currently being held at the Elko County Jail without bail, he has been assigned a public defender and is awaiting his next court appearance. If convicted of these charges Dickey could face the death penalty.
With no college students in the biology and chemistry labs for the remainder of the semester, there's also no demand for gloves, masks and hand sanitizer.

Where there is demand, however, are the local hospitals and health clinics where doctors, nurses and other health care professionals are on the front lines against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nebraska Wesleyan University and Southeast Community College donated their remaining caches of personal protective equipment and cleaning products this week as testing and treatment of the novel coronavirus continues to expand in the state.

Once enough gloves and hand sanitizer were distributed to the Wesleyan employees who needed them -- including staff in the mail room and business office -- the university donated its remaining supply.

To the Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department and Bryan Health went six cases of nitrile gloves, which science lab and campus safety manager Jennifer Agee said corresponds to roughly 15,000 gloves, as well as disposable lab coats and some 400 fluid ounces of hand sanitizer.

Bryan Health also received laboratory supplies for conduct medical testing, Agee said.
Senior US diplomat Alice Wells on Thursday echoed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call to keep fighting spirits high against the coronavirus pandemic, saying that United States will work alongside India to combat the COVID-19 outbreak.

"We stand united with India and echo Narendra Modi's call to keep up our fighting spirits. The US will work shoulder to shoulder with India to combat the COVID-19 outbreak. Together, we can safeguard our citizens and people everywhere," the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs (SCA) wrote on Twitter quoting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (PDAS) Alice Wells.

On Monday, Senior US diplomat had praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for initiating 'Janata curfew' and applauding workers who are providing essential and emergency services and even risking their own safety in the face of coronavirus outbreak in the country.

"Inspiring to see people across India coming together despite being physically apart to applaud workers on the frontlines combatting COVID-19 Janta Curfew," Alice Wells said.

The Union Health Ministry had on Wednesday reported 606 positive COVID-19 cases in India including 43 foreign nationals. Meanwhile, the US has registered above 60,000 cases and over 800 deaths.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The seriousness of the situation weighs on the face of Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, right, as Dr. Alex Billioux, assistant secretary of the La. Dept. of Health's Office of Public Health, answers a question at a briefing of media members on the state's coronavirus response at the Governor's Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management in Baton Rouge, La., Tuesday, March 24, 2020.
GENESEE COUNTY, MI -- Fifty-seven residents of Genesee, Saginaw and Bay counties have confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to new numbers reported Wednesday, March 25, by health departments in the three counties.

The statistics show the biggest jump in cases reported during the past 24 hours came from Genesee County, which increased from 34 to 46 cases, including 24 that have required hospitalization.

Genesee Countys cases have been equally divided between men and women, and the age group with the highest percentage of the cases (22 percent) has been individuals 70 to 79 years old.

In Saginaw County, nine confirmed coronavirus cases were reported as of Wednesday morning -- an increase of one since yesterday -- while Bay County hasnt reported any new cases since its second case was announced Monday, March 23.

Saginaw County also announced in a news release that public health system partners are adding testing capacity by operating outpatient sampling and screening sites with COVID-19 testing for people with a lab order from their doctor or health care provider.

Lapeer County reported its first case of coronavirus on Tuesday, March 24 and still only had one as of Wednesday.

Genesee County Board of Commissioners Chairman Martin Cousineau said Wednesday that the county has been able to respond so far to needs related to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Everything seems to be going fairly well for us as far as our response to it, Cousineau said. Our main emphasis, aside from taking care of the sick, has been making sure all our citizens (needs) are taken care of."

Cousineau said residents who need assistance with travel, food or medicine should call 211 to connect with United Way of Genesee County or 1-810-257-3422 to connect with county emergency management.

We will make sure (those needs) get taken care, he said. Were having a daily conference and going over any issue so everybody knows what everybody else is doing."

The Saginaw County Health Department announced expanded testing sites in a news release and said residents should contact their health care provider if they have symptoms like fever, cough and shortness of breath so they can be referred to one of them.

Healthcare providers will be assessing patients for risk factors and providing direction on where they can be tested. If you dont have a healthcare provider we strongly encourage people to establish with one in the community, the Saginaw Health Department announcement says.

Great Lakes Bay Health Center began testing on Tuesday, March 24 in the parking lot of the David R. Gamez community health center at 501 Lapeer St. in Saginaw and Covenant hospital started testing Wednesday at the Visiting Nurses Association, 502 S. Hamilton St. in Saginaw.

Patients may also be referred by their provider to a state of Michigan test site, the announcement said.

Across Michigan, the number of people diagnosed with the coronavirus took another big jump Wednesday, reaching 2,295 cases, up from 1,791 the day before.

The number of coronavirus cases in the state has more than doubled in four days, as testing has increased significantly, according to health officials.

Forty-three people in Michigan have died from the virus, according to the states daily update, an increase from 24 reported Tuesday.

Lapeer County reports first coronavirus case; Genesee at 34

Another big jump in Michigan coronavirus numbers: Now at 2,295 cases; 43 deaths
Limits on how much money Australians can spend in tap-and-go payments could be increased as retailers move to avoid cash amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Contactless payments are currently available via Eftpos or mobile up to $100 without a pin.

But the limit could be more than doubled to $250 per transaction to allow customers to visit the shops less and lessen the risk of COVID-19 transmission.

Many major supermarket chains, petrol stations and businesses across the country have already banned or advised against cash payments as a risk mitigation strategy.

Limits on how much money Australians can spend in a tap and go payment could be increased as retailers avoid cash like the plague amid the coronavirus pandemic (stock image)

But a $100 limit has been in place for contactless payments since its introduction because of the potential risk of theft and fraud if a card is stolen.

AusPayNet is the company in charge of co-ordinating cashless payments in Australia by linking the nation's banks and retailers.

The company's CEO, Andy White told Daily Mail Australia they're in discussions with the banks around changing existing limits.

'The payments industry is in advanced discussions on a proposal to raise the limit for contactless card transactions. This will reduce contact with keypads, helping to stop the spread of COVID-19,' Mr White said.

'When people are making essential purchases, it's important to ensure consumer confidence and the industry is working to make sure that we have a consistent customer experience. An announcement is expected in the coming days.'

Retailers including grocery supplier Harris Farm have moved to contactless payments only, refusing to accept cash from customers

But the exact details on what limits would be changed to are still being negotiated among the banks, which would bear the brunt of any consequences around theft or fraud.

A spokesperson for ANZ told 7News the bank wants to ensure all details are ironed out so the transition goes as smoothly as possible.

But he indicated the measures would only be temporary as a method of preventing the further spread of coronavirus.

'The industry as a whole has not yet reached a consensus position on how this will be achieved and what the temporary limit should be,' the spokesperson said.

Proposed changes are working to reduce contact between community members though the process of inputting pins using EFTPOS terminals.

The World Health Organisation issued advice to avoid cash as part of efforts to slow the transmission of COVID-19 earlier this month.

'We would advise people to wash their hands after handling banknotes, and avoid touching their face,' the organisation advised.

'When possible it would also be advisable to use contactless payments to reduce the risk of transmission.'

A 'No cash payment' sign on the doughnut van at the Queen Victoria Markets, in Melbourne

The Australian Medical Association has welcomed the proposal.

The AMA's New South Wales President Dr Keanseng Lim said all efforts to lessen the spread of COVID-19 should be considered.

'Anything that reduces the number of surfaces people are touching and that reduces the chance of transmission must be considered,' Dr Keanseng Lim said.

The change is among a raft of measures being taken by retailers to flatten the curve of the coronavirus spread in Australia.

A proposal is underway to raise limits for contactless card payment transactions

Major supermarket chains Woolworths has already started rolling out protective glass shields at stores protect staff from the growing coronavirus outbreak.

Managing director Claire Peters confirmed on Channel Nine's Today Show on Monday that screens will be rolled out at all stores nationally.

'We've started putting up some screens in order that our team and customers feel safe as they come and shop,' she said.

Screens were installed at Sydney's Town Hall and Kellyville North stores and will be rolled out at other stores nationwide in the coming weeks.
Allied airlift brings urgent medical supplies to the Czech Republic

NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

24 Mar. 2020

Last updated: 25 Mar. 2020 10:59



A cargo plane carrying several tons of medical supplies from China, including vital respirators and millions of facemasks, landed at Pardubice airport on Tuesday night (24-25 March 2020) to help combat the coronavirus.

The AN-124 plane, one of the largest aircraft ever built, landed overnight in the city of Pardubice. The flight was made possible by the NATO-managed Strategic Airlift International Solution, which provides NATO countries participating in the programme with access to heavy transport aircraft. The Czech Government had tasked the mission.

The plane flew from the city of Shenzhen in China with over 100 tons of equipment, including millions of facemasks, goggles and protective suits. This was the second such flight to the Czech Republic. Further flights to the Czech Republic and Slovakia are planned in the coming days, bringing much needed medical supplies. Special procedures were in place to ensure the safety of the aircrew, with no direct contact with ground crews allowed.

The Strategic Airlift International Solution, or SALIS, provides NATO countries with a strategic air transport capability. Nine NATO Allies (Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia) currently participate in the programme, managed by the NATO Support and Procurement Agency. The aircraft is operated by Antonov Logistics SALIS from Leipzig/Halle airport.



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(Natural News) Health officials in California are beginning to issue warnings about how the situation in the Golden State could very soon mirror that of Italy if residents dont obey the states stay at home lockdown orders for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).

In a recent statement, San Mateo County Health Officer Dr. Scott Morrow explained that California is in a grave crisis, and unless everyone does their part and follows the countys shelter-in-place order and the governors Safer at Home order, we will be facing an Italy-type catastrophe very soon.

While Dr. Morrow was referring specifically to San Mateo county, his words resonate across the state as the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) knows no borders. Dr. Grant Colfax, the Director of the Department of Public Health in nearby San Francisco, echoed these sentiments and those of Dr. Morrow in issuing a similar warning that the worst is yet to come.

While there have only been 2,600 confirmed cases of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) in California thus far along with 55 confirmed deaths  this compared to Italys 69,000 confirmed cases and 6,820 confirmed deaths  some say the situation in California could very quickly become like that of Italy if government orders arent followed.

This past Tuesday, California announced 395 new cases of the Chinese Virus (COVID-19) in a single day, compared to 158 new cases the previous Tuesday. There were also 11 new deaths reported this past Tuesday, compared with only three the previous Tuesday.

What this all points to is continued exponential spread of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), with much more to come if it isnt contained. And while officials cant say for sure what the future holds, they worry that even a single asymptomatic superspreader could potentially spread it to large amount of people, igniting a second outbreak.

Its happening right now in New York, says Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco about how an Italy-like Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) situation popped up in the Empire State virtually overnight.

Theyre up against it.

Listen below to The Health Ranger Report as Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, talks about strategies for surviving a gun fight in the event that food wars begin:

Coronavirus isnt the same as normal flu

In Dr. Rutherfords view, the sudden explosion in new Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in Italy is likely due to a failure of the government to act quickly, along with bad luck. Currently, Italys death toll is more than double what was reported in communist China, though we know Chinas numbers were fudged by its dictator, not to mention the fact that Chinese people are reportedly contracting the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) a second time.

So, to avoid a similar situation here in America, some health experts are advising continued restrictions on gatherings and public movement in order to prevent a similar explosion in case numbers and associated deaths.

Dont underestimate this, insists Dr. Maurizio Cecconi, president-elect of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine and coauthor of a new report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that tracked how the first known case of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) entered Italy from Japan.

This is not a normal flu, he adds. This is serious. The percentage of patients that require intensive care admission is high.

Those with the highest risk of developing serious complications from the disease are the elderly and those with preexisting conditions, experts say. If the virus ends up settling deep into the lungs, it could cause breathing failure, septic shock, and multiple organ failure.

To keep up with the latest Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) news, be sure to check out Pandemic.news.

Sources for this article include:

Yahoo.com

NaturalNews.com
Health Minister Simon Harris has warned against people playing "games" over the Covid-19 virus after a man and woman randomly ran up to him on the street and coughed at him.

This happened to me yesterday as I was walking from here to my department and a man and woman on the street thought it was hilarious to cough at me and run-off laughing

Mr Harris warned people about engaging in such irresponsible behaviour, given the large numbers of deaths from the spread of the virus in other countries.

"Can we please as people just look at what's happened in Italy, the European Union, where we're seeing several hundred people a day, dying of the virus that can be deadly to certain people in our population.

When you think particularly older people who are being targeted in relation to this. There seems to be some sort of social media, a game, but it is not a game, it is disgusting, that you will target certain people in your community, generally older people, and go up and cough in their face and video it and have a laugh and run off.

Just think if it was your own granny, grandad, mother, father, your own friends with underlying health conditions like cystic fibrosis.

Mr Harris praised the Irish people's response to the virus emergency. But he warned that such deliberate actions, threatening the health of people, would be handled by the law and authorities.

"Anything like that which takes off on social media will have to be dealt with and with the full rigour of the powers of the state.
People stand outside a bar off Bourbon Street in New Orleans on March 16 after an order from Louisiana's governor to close bars and restaurants. (Chris Graythen / Getty Images)

Despite a stay-at-home order this week from Louisiana's governor, the Rev. Tony Spell was praying over a woman in his Baton Rouge church on Wednesday morning.

God in the name of Jesus, I want you to touch her; I want you to heal her body; I want the spirit of peace and God to go forth with her, the evangelical pastor intoned.

As city and state officials across the country ordered people to remain at home to combat the virus spread, people have been defying those orders: partying on beaches, picnicking in parks and hiking in groups. But Spells Pentecostal services in Baton Rouge, which drew 1,800 people last Sunday, pose a unique challenge in this deeply Christian state where counties are referred to as parishes  one that pits constitutional rights to freedom of religion and speech against efforts to protect public health.

Critics posted a petition online demanding Louisiana officials charge Spell with reckless endangerment. More than 3,900 people have signed it.

Our lives matter! This minister is putting our lives in danger and needs to pay the price! wrote petitioner Van Maulden of Zachary, La.

The stakes are particularly high in Louisiana, where doctors say large gatherings during Mardi Gras last month likely fostered COVID-19, as revelers filled Bourbon Street, caught packed streetcars and marched in parades. It's now spreading faster there than anywhere else in the world, with 1,388 cases and 46 deaths, most of those in New Orleans.

Most infections in this area occurred during Mardi Gras. There was probably a tremendous number of people infected then, probably with no symptoms, said Dr. Brobson Lutz, former director of New Orleans Health Department.

Even before Gov. John Bel Edwards issued a stay-at-home order Sunday, many of the states churches had scaled back, canceling Mass and services. In New Orleans, the Rev. Fred Luter, past president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told worshipers at the mega-church he built after Hurricane Katrina to watch online.

Story continues

I preached to empty seats. They didnt even do that during Katrina, he said last week in the empty church. Its a new day.

In the citys 9th Ward, decimated by Katrina, the Rev. Charles Duplessis had planned to reopen his Mount Nebo Bible Baptist Church on Easter but decided to postpone, instead turning services and Bible study virtual.

Were trying to keep people distancing but also in communication, he said as he stood outside the empty church.

Late Tuesday, about 300 people gathered at Spells Baton Rouge church, Life Tabernacle, where anointed handkerchiefs were passed out to parishioniers.

This is an extreme test brought on us by the spirit of antichrist and the mystery of lawlessness, Spell preached. What good is the church in an hour of peril if the church craters and caves in to the fears and the spirits of torment in our society?"

Spell said his church and others that had remained open in Louisiana should be considered essential during a pandemic. He said no one at his church had tested positive for COVID-19.

Retailers in my city have hundreds of people in there now, Spell said. Why am I being persecuted for my faith and people being refused to go to church whenever you can still go to a retailer?

Spell said police initially told him that if he continued services, the National Guard would disperse them. Local police did not return calls Wednesday, although the chief told CNN that never happened. Gov. Edwards office did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Spell said he had spoken with Tony Perkins, president of the evangelical Family Research Council and one of President Trump's religious advisers, and he has been a big help for us, offering encouragement.

Some of Life Tabernacle's 9,800 members are bused in from half a dozen neighboring parishes. The church has never closed in 60 years, even during floods, Spell said. Theyre a diverse group, hailing from 19 countries. Some who have attended services were afraid of being stigmatized, he said, deemed exposed to COVID, even though people are exposed at these retailers that are still open.

You cannot keep a nation locked up, he said. They are coming to church for hope.
The company signed the MoU with the European Institute of Innovation &Technology (EIT) initiative, Innoenergy, which supports innovation for sustainable energy.

The initial part of the package entails an investment in Infinity of a staged 800,000 ($866,660) at a 66% premium to its last traded stock price. The aim...
The fallout from the coronavirus pandemic escalates. Weekly jobless claims surged to a record-breaking 3.28 million in data released Thursday. The total was well above the previous record of 695,000 in October 1982. To stem the damage, the Senate approved a $2 trillion stimulus bill as part of relief efforts to fight the economic damage from the coronavirus outbreak. Steven Mnuchin, U.S. Treasury secretary, highlights the benefits of the bill. "The good thing about this bill is the president is protecting those people, so you know now with these plans, small businesses hopefully will be able to hire back a lot of those people. Last week they didn't know if they had protections. They didn't have any cash; they had no choice. Now with this bill passed by [the Senate], there are protections. And as I said, hopefully those workers will be rehired but between these three programs, it protects all of American workers. And by the way, lots of big companies do continue to hire for obviously grocery stores, pharmacies, delivery services, these companies are on overtime. So, I know they're hiring people as fast as they can." Three market watchers weighed in on the jobless claims on CNBC.

A 'V' shape rebound

Austan Goolsbee, former White House economic advisor, said perhaps a 'V' shape sequence could occur in the economy. "It's a brutal week. We know it's going to be a brutal week. Let's hope they can get the relief out quickly, because I think it's clear people are going to need relief. I think we're in a circumstance where we just spent $2 trillion. It's not really going to be stimulus in the conventional sense. We're going to take the money and we're going to burn it to keep people warm. And so, we're definitely going to need another round of relief, and when we start to unpack what was in this one -- and it was done so hastily -- there's going to be problems with it. I am a little afraid of, let's call it the political will, the political legitimacy, of these rescues. So, in a way, the fact that this was as abrupt and severe and all in one week as it was is a sign that maybe the ultimate 'V' shape could exist."

More stimulus ahead

Glenn Hubbard, former White House economic advisor, said he agrees with Goolsbee on seeing another round of federal aid. "I think I broadly agree with Austin [Goolsbee], a pandemic is not a typical recession. This was a shutdown of the economy for legitimate health-care reasons. And the purpose of a federal bill at the moment really is a kind of freeze in place, simulate a normal economy, [and] try to keep people attached to jobs, and keep incomes. The recovery bill obviously had to be done quickly so it's not perfect, but I think particularly with small and midsized businesses, it offers important aid, and the strengthening of unemployment insurance is also a very good idea. We're definitely not out of the woods, there are market stressors, there are real economy stressors. And I agree with Austin, there will have to be some sort of follow-up bill. It's more of a true stimulus measure. But so far, I think policy has stepped up to the plate and now the question will be, can it work? Is the implementation there? "

Leveling out the aid
The lives of people on the margins in Germanys capital have been upended as uncertainty about the future grows.

Names marked with an asterisk* have been changed to protect identities.

Berlin, Germany  The past two weeks have been difficult for Diana*, who arrived in Berlin from Switzerland a few months ago.

She was just about making ends meet with a teaching job and some modelling work, when the outbreak of the new coronavirus upended her daily life, making her vulnerable living situation more precarious.

She has been let go from her teaching role and without the backing of a contract, which she says her boss refused to provide, Diana is not sure she will even receive her outstanding paycheque.

She has yet to register in her new city, so accessing social security support is also not an option for the 25-year-old.

Everything happened really quickly, Diana told Al Jazeera. A week before things were shut down, I fell sick, and just after that, my boss told me to come and collect my stuff because I wasnt going to be teaching for five weeks at least. And that was it. Switzerland isnt part of the EU [European Union], and that makes things harder  right now I cant get support from there or from Germany.

Diana contacted a space for which she had once modelled. Located in the east of the city, Karada House has gone from being a queer collaborative art space that holds workshops and events, to a volunteer-led relief collective providing assistance to those who have slipped through the cracks of the countrys welfare system.

In just a couple of weeks, the handful of housebound volunteers  most of whom have never met, have raised nearly 10,000 euros ($11,027) through a crowdfunding campaign.

They have also been connecting volunteers to people in the city in need of food, medical or mental health support.

Beatrice Behn, a volunteer coordinator and artist, told Al Jazeera: We are mostly dealing with young people who have chronic illnesses or are disabled, or those who already have very fragile situations.

Many of them are slipping through the net because they are not German, or because of the citys housing problems. People are desperate to find a flat, so are living in sublets or with semi-legal housing contracts, which means they cant fully register here and access any services.

Alongside neighbourhood groups offering help to those who are sick, elderly or in need of childcare, others provide resources for sex workers, offering video therapy sessions, and work to protect the citys cultural scene, including its clubbing industry and arts community.

Al Jazeera also spoke to a schoolteacher who is concerned that students in his primary school class  mainly from lower economic or minority German backgrounds  may fall behind, so he is doing individual lessons via phone.

Diana, who will use the money she received from Karada to cover some of her monthly rent and food, hopes the solidarity continues.

For Wilhelm Nadolny, the lockdown has meant that every day at the homeless day centre he manages has been different.

Nadolny is the director at Bahnhofsmission Zoologischer Garten, a shelter next to a busy central station.

Its part of Berliner Stadtmission, which for nearly 150 years has been providing assistance to seniors, refugees and children, making it one of the citys oldest social support centres.

Without housing to self-isolate, access to healthcare and limited bathroom facilities, those living on the streets are particularly vulnerable.

According to Berlins first official census on its homeless population published earlier this year, there are nearly 2,000 people living on the streets in the German capital.

Social workers, however, say that the figure should be met with caution as it doesnt include those living on private properties or in abandoned buildings.

With the ban on large gatherings temporarily shutting homeless day centres, Nadolny says they are seeing some new faces.

His 24-hour centre is usually open seven days a week, all year round, and sustained by a number of elderly volunteers.

But elderly volunteers no longer come in, and the centre, which usually supports around 600 people daily, is running on reduced hours with help from a smaller, younger team.

Prior to the pandemic, the main eating area could hold 60 people, including 10 volunteers, and bathroom access was easier.

Now food bags with sandwiches, apples and plums are being handed out from a window and distribution times are staggered to limit human contact.

Everybody here is trying to keep calm and focused. We are washing our hands regularly and using sanitiser, and the shower is being used less. We are taking each day as it comes and doing our best, said Nadolny. We cant say what will be waiting for us next week, or even tomorrow.

190617194147334

Other high-risk Berlin residents are those living in refugee accommodation.

According to state authorities, there are 20,000 people living within 83 shelters, and most have a maximum capacity of 350.

There have so far been 10 positive coronavirus cases emerging from within the citys shelters, with one death.

Across Germany, a reported 21 people living in refugee accommodation have already contracted the virus.

The State Office for Refugee Affairs in Berlin told Al Jazeera that it has implemented a series of measures, including providing information on hygiene and stressing the importance of the quarantine, and a podcast in various languages is being developed.

Activists, however, say more needs to be done to reduce the risks for those living in inadequate shared housing.

A spokeswoman for Women in Exile, a refugee-led grassroots organisation, told Al Jazeera: Its difficult for us to know whats going on. Not enough official material is being translated and theres a lot of fear, but people dont have any alternative.

The pandemic has also increased nationwide calls to close large refugee shelters and house people in safer, cleaner homes.

As residents in the German capital adjust to an indefinite period behind closed doors, those on the front line say community support is needed more than ever.

Its a very human thing to do, to come together as a community in times of crisis and in a way we are going back to the roots right now, which is very good to see because we are all in this together, said Behn, the Karada House volunteer. I think most people have realised that there are no exceptions with the virus, so things now need to change.
LUCKNOW The travellers identified by the health department in Uttar Pradesh have to give their health status every day via Quarantine Tracking App, launched on Thursday.

A request, message and a link to download the app will be sent to all identified travellers, on their mobile numbers. This further needs the traveller to fill their details and then fill their health status/details every day for the next 28 days, said Dr Vikasendu Agrawal, state surveillance officer in the health department.

There are 37,748 travellers identified in the state till now. As per the health department, the identified people will be feeding their health details through a questionnaire and this will inform the command centre about their status. The measure has been taken to control the spread of coronavirus. The state has reported 43 cases till now.

If any traveller reports a health problem, the message will be sent to the control room and the medical team will visit them, from the respective district, said Dr Agrawal.

With over 37,000 identified travellers in Uttar Pradesh, this app will help keep a tab on their health condition. It will also ensure that the health facility reaches them at the earliest, in case they need, said Dr Ved Prakash, HoD, pulmonary and critical care medicine, King Georges Medical University (KGMU).

Using technology will also help the health department to maintain health records of all the travellers and when in need of medical care at the hospital, these records will be of great help, said Dr Sandeep Kapoor, director, health city hospital.

The health official said that this app will also help to track their movement and ensure they follow the protocol of lockdown as they have come from different countries where the virus has affected people in different manners.differently.
It was his second address to the nation in a week. Pointing out that the infection spreads like wildfire, the Indian leader warned: "If we don't handle these 21 days well, then our country, your family will go backwards by 21 years." Citing health experts, Modi said, "India is today at such a stage, where our actions today will determine our ability to reduce the impact of this disaster."

In a televised address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told citizens that the lockdown should be viewed as a type of curfew. "The only way to save ourselves from coronavirus is if we don't leave our homes; whatever happens, we stay at home," he emphasized.

Affecting 1.3 billion people, it will be world's largest lockdown announced since the coronavirus pandemic began its march in countries across the globe.

India imposed a three-week nationwide lockdown from midnight on Tuesday, banning people from leaving their homes as it scrambled to break the chain of transmission of coronavirus in the country.

India's clampdown comes hours after neighboring Nepal began a weeklong lockdown. The stakes in combating coronavirus are high for South Asia, home to one-quarter of the world's population, many of them poor. A decrepit health infrastructure has made these countries nervous about how they will cope if the number of cases begins to spiral.

India's official count of 482 cases and nine deaths is widely believed to be an underestimate due to limited testing that has been carried out. Experts are also skeptical about official claims that there is no community transmission so far and warn that cases of coronavirus have begun spilling from big cities where it came via people who had traveled overseas into small towns.

Nepal has only reported two cases but fears the numbers could rise because thousands of migrant workers who work in India returned home in recent days. Ahead of India's strict clampdown, many people were seen venturing out of their homes despite restrictions that came into effect starting Sunday in place in large parts of the country, including major cities like Mumbai and Delhi.

The country has been slowly pulling its shutters down in recent days -- most big companies have told employees to work from home, large gatherings are banned, shopping malls, businesses educational institutions and tourist sites are shut and even temples have told worshippers to stay away.

The perpetually crowded rail stations and airports are already virtually empty as air and train services are suspended. On social media, most people accepted the need for the lockdown and praised the country's efforts to stop the infection in its tracks.

But even as Modi emphasized the importance of social distancing to break the spread of coronavirus in the country, many pointed out that it was difficult to implement for millions of families who are often crowded into a single room in cramped urban slums.

There are also growing concerns about how tens of millions of poor people who depend on daily wages and have casual jobs will cope with the economic toll of the strict clampdown on their livelihoods.
No new positive coronavirus cases were reported in Midland and Gladwin counties by the state during its daily afternoon update on Thursday. Midland County remains at six positives while Gladwin has two.

One new case was reported for each Bay County (four total) and Isabella County (three total.)

Fred Yanoski, Midland County Public Health director/health officer, said his office is fielding lots of telephone calls from people concerned about things they are hearing.

"There is a lot of concern in the community involving people potentially with coronavirus, people potentially affected by people with coronavirus and people potentially testing positive for coronavirus," Yanoski said.

"There are going to be rumors," he said, adding there will be more positives as testing continues indefinitely.

Thursday's state tally showed 564 new cases with 17 deaths, bringing Michigan's total to 2,856 with 60 deaths.

People who are identified as a close contact with someone who has tested positive will receive instructions from the county health department on how to proceed, Yanoski said.

Yanoski urged people to remain calm, vigilant and continue heeding the recommendations offered by the health experts, which include stay home when possible and especially if you are sick, wash your hands, don't touch your face and follow social distancing.

"People who are asymptomatic that think they were exposed aren't going to get tested, he said.

People who have symptoms (fever, cough, trouble breathing) should call their health provider for medical advice. If he/she isn't available call Mid Michigan Urgent Care in Midland at 989- 633-1350 or Mid Michigan Medical Center's Emergency Department in Midland at 989-839-3100.

Midland County Department of Public Health continues to encourage residents to take precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19:

 Continue to practice social distancing as recommended by Federal, State and Local Officials

 Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth

 Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash

 Disinfect commonly touched surfaces

 Stay home when you are sick

 Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. If soap and water are not readily available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol.

We cannot stress enough how important it is for our community to be diligent in their community mitigation efforts," Yanoski said. "We know that COVID-19 is in our community, and our residents can make a huge impact on slowing the spread of disease by following the recommended precautions."

MidMichigan Health has a COVID-19 informational hotline with a reminder of CDC guidelines and recommendations. The hotline can be reached toll-free at 800-445-7356 or 989-794-7600. Michigan Department of Health and Human Services also has a hotline number for Michigan residents for questions about COVID-19. The number is 1-888-535-6136 and is available seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Residents can also send an e-mail to: COVID19@michigan.gov. E-mails will be answered seven days a week between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.

If you are feeling anxious, stressed, depressed and feel you need to talk to someone, reach out to Community Mental Health for Central Michigan by calling 800-317-0708.
Medicare for All - rather than any incremental Medicare for some program - is the only program that will guarantee delivery of quality healthcare to all Americans at the lowest possible cost. The current COVID-19 crisis highlights our need for this legislation.

To understand this, consider the example of South Korea, a country with a universal single payer healthcare system. Adjacent to China, South Korea - like the U.S. - confirmed its first case on Jan. 20 and experienced an early rapid rise in COVID-19 cases.

South Korea, unlike the U.S., however, provided both the testing kits and the physicians needed to examine patients and administer the tests. South Korea promptly established drive-through testing sites and thus identified those who could infect others. By March 1, the incidence of new cases had peaked and the number of new cases was in decline.

Our federal response to COVID-19, on the other hand, remains unclear. To date, it appears that the government will pay for testing, but not treatment. Thus, Americans facing intensive care will do so at their own cost. Those uninsured or underinsured will either suffer exorbitant medical bills or receive no therapy.

A single-payer system may not have provided ventilators and masks or organized an effective quarantine. It would, however, have speeded our response to COVID-19. Our response has been uncoordinated. We have been slow to determine where and how many cases we have. To date, we can not forecast when the peak incidence of cases will occur, how many persons will be affected and how to respond.

Our state legislature is now considering a bill, the New York Health Act (S.3577) that will provide universal healthcare to all state residents. True, S.3577 will require additional capital both to cover those residents now uninsured and to fund prescription drugs, dental, vision, hearing and long-term care for all, services currently not covered.

However, these costs will be offset by lowered costs of insurance, administration and pharmaceuticals, as well as an end to unconscionable out-of-network billing. Taken together, these costs now consume 30 cents from each dollar we spend on healthcare. Our national politicians often frighten us by saying, Medicare for All will cost us $30 trillion (over 10 years). We just can not afford that! In truth, we now spend nearly $4 trillion nationally for healthcare. Medicare for all may be a bargain.

Many features of S.3577 will benefit COVID-19 patients. Currently, physicians and nurses spend nearly half of their working time performing meaningless administrative tasks dealing with complex billing requirements, preauthorization for procedures and appeals for denials. This time would be better spent working directly with patients. And eliminating all up-front payments, co-pays and deductibles will make medical care more accessible for all.

The New York State Health Act establishes a mechanism for funding healthcare. It allows physicians to practice as they wish (solo, group, institutional) and enables patients to visit the physician of their choice. In truth, it provides both patients and physicians more freedom than does our current free market system, with its networks, formularies and out-of-network billing. Note: NY Health affects only how healthcare is funded - not how it is delivered.

There is no possibility of enacting a single-payer system nationally in the near future. Real healthcare reform, like many other social reforms of earlier generations, must occur first at the state level. Currently all state senators representing the metropolitan area, except for Diane Savino and Andrew Lanza, both of Staten Island, have signed on to the bill. All Staten Island residents should urge them to support S.3577.

(Dr. Marc H. Lavietes is the secretary of the New York Metro Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.)
Beyond prime-time television, however, the disregard for expert guidance being pushed by some conservative and libertarian voices goes further  aimed not simply at proving Fauci wrong but at painting him as an agent of the deep state that Trump has vowed to dismantle. The smear campaign taking root online, and laying the groundwork for Trump to cast aside the experts on his own coronavirus task force, relies centrally on the idea that there is no expertise that rises above partisanship, and that everyone has an agenda.
https://www.aish.com/ci/s/A-Holocaust-Survivor-in-Quarantine.html

During WWII I hid in order to save my life. The quarantine rules are also meant to save lives.

I was born in Ostend, Belgium in 1930, which means I wasn't born yesterday. I was a regular Jewish boy who liked to run around and get into mischief. I had a normal childhood until age 9  that's when the war started. "Normal" included being chased by non-Jewish boys when I left school, shouting "dirty Jew" with hate in their eyes. They would throw my cap on the ground, grab my book bag and kick and punch me. Three kids once attacked me, one with a knife in hand. Luckily, I had learned how to fight from my older brother so I was able to defend myself.

During the war I was hidden in numerous places in order to survive. It started off with an attic of a cafe in Antwerp, across the street from Gestapo headquarters. They used the Belgian police to help them round up Jews: babies, children my age, adults and even the elderly. I was hidden there with my parents and siblings. All day long I had to remain quiet. I couldn't look out the window. I couldn't play. Just sit in the dark, bored and scared.

Eventually my brother found a better hiding place for me on a farm. The farmer took me in because he only had daughters and wanted someone else who could help work on the farm.

Arye Gad Berenbaum on the farm where he hid with the daughters of the farmer

While so many other people perished, including most of my relatives, I was fortunate to have been reunited with my parents after the war. We returned to Antwerp and Brussels and went on with our lives. I met my wife, also a survivor. We married, raised a family and worked together for 50 years in a family business. We always wanted to come to Israel but continued working. Finally, in 1994, my wife came to live in Israel with my 90+ year old mother and I commuted until I finally retired and joined them, our dream come true.

Until recently, I was fully independent; I even drove my own car, a jeep in which I loved taking my children and grandchildren for trips "off the road". But lately I've been feeling my age. I don't see or hear as well, and I can't move as fast as I used to, so I stopped driving. But as a survivor, I didn't let that stop me. I began walking more and doing my shopping closer to home. I love the Machene Yehuda market, the shuk; it reminds me of the many markets where I sold socks.

I get so much joy from my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and love when they visit. It's amazing how my Hebrew has improved even at my age by speaking with them. They are my "Jewish revenge"; the Nazis wanted to kill me but God blessed us with generations living in Israel.

I also like going to shul. After prayers I share a few words with the other gentleman. They constantly seem to be getting younger and younger and I seem to be getting older and older. I believe I'm one of the oldest in the minyan now.

And now, because of the coronavirus, all these simple pleasures must be curtailed. It is dangerous for me to go to shul. My grandchildren and great grandchildren can no longer visit. Machane Yehuda has been shut down because of the pandemic. I must adapt to these changes as well.

When I think about all the current quarantine rules I can't help but compare them to what I had to live through in hiding during the war. I was hiding in order to save my life. The quarantine rules are also meant to save lives. These rules may seem extreme now. It is a big change for many people, a loss of freedom, but they are nothing compared to what we endured when we went into hiding during WWII.

My current quarantine is paradise compared to what I lived through during the war.

The fear of being found out, or ratted on. The utter boredom because we couldn't move or talk all day. One day, two days. One week, two weeks. One month, two monthsI always wondered to myself, when will I be able to go outside and get a bit of fresh air without fear of being caught by the Gestapo?

My current quarantine is paradise compared to what I lived through during the war. I can walk around my house which is located in Jerusalem. In those days I never dreamed that I would survive, let alone be living in the holy city of Jerusalem. I have food to eat with my wife and sunlight entering our windows. I have learned how to use WhatsApp and was even able to watch as my granddaughter did her cooking for Shabbat. I prefer to count my blessings rather than complain.

What worries me is that people don't take the rules of the health ministry seriously enough. Some people ignore them. They don't realize that these are life and death matters. The disease is spreading. We don't want the situation here to be like in other countries around the world.

The first person who died here in Israel from the virus was an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor. Let us honor his memory by heeding the rules of the ministry of health. I beg you. This is the least we can do to save lives. We are living in unusual times and we are all in this together. A bit of inconvenience now will save lives and stop this situation quicker.

I have given up spending time with my grandchildren and great-grandchildren in order to comply with health regulations. I wish everyone would follow those rules. Please don't hang out with friends at the beach. Don't go to the mall. Don't invite all your friends over for a party. Just stay at home and enjoy your immediate family. And don't forget to call your grandparents! Doing all those things might just save their life. AM YISRAEL CHAI!
As novel coronavirus cases continue to spread among the ranks, top officials and health leaders have emphasized that the military must take crucial steps to help stop it, including new health-protection conditions (HPCON) and increased social distancing measures on bases.

But photos taken just last week show troops training side by side or participating in large gatherings amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

Publicly released military photos show service members participating in drill exercises and live-fire training, among other activities that require them to operate in close proximity.

The commanding officer of the USS Green Bay speaks to sailors and Marines during an all-hands call, March 13, 2020. (U.S. Navy/Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Maria G. Llanos)

The U.S. military services began taking precautions as early as March 7. Some services and commands attempted to limit human contact as much as possible with telework and virtual meetings, while others began canceling events and overseas travel. The protective measures even applied to brand-new service members as the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard began screening all new recruits for coronavirus symptoms earlier this month to prevent potential spread throughout the force, officials confirmed to Military.com on March 4.

Related: Tell Us: Is Your Command Doing Enough to Stop the Spread of Coronavirus?

This week, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that, while social distancing may be impossible inside a tank or on a submarine, "If you can avoid putting ... a large number of people in small rooms, you should do it."

Marines fire M4 carbine and M16A4 rifles during a live-fire training range aboard the USS New York, March 20, 2020. (U.S. Marine Corps/Staff Sgt. Patricia A. Morris)

"Hold your meeting outside, and maybe meet in smaller groups," he said at a Pentagon town hall Tuesday. "If you're a young NCO or young officer and you see something that doesn't make sense, raise it privately with your chain of command and say, 'Hey, maybe we should do this differently next time.'"

Esper approved another guidance Wednesday that expands on an earlier 60-day overseas travel prohibition for troops, their accompanying family members and Defense Department personnel.

The new instruction essentially blocks all U.S. personnel from any international travel; those scheduled to return from deployments or overseas tours, rotations and exercises could be stuck in place until late May.

A sailor carries a machine gun mount aboard the USS Bataan, March 19, 2020. (U.S. Marine Corps/Cpl. Gary Jayne III)

Earlier Wednesday, a top Defense Department medical officer stressed that the military, much like the general population, should not downplay the seriousness of the pandemic, which has affected troops, dependents, contractors and DoD civilians.

"Our curve is not flattening, and that's why we went to HPCON-Charlie today, which includes restrictions on large gatherings and includes additional social distancing," said Air Force Brig. Gen. (Dr.) Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, referring to the increased protection level at military installations.

HPCON-C raises health protection measures where the situation encompasses "high morbidity epidemic or contamination," according to a DoD graphic.

An Airman gets coined for excellence during at Cargo City, Kuwait, March 17, 2020. (U.S. Air Force/Tech. Sgt. Alexandre Montes)

"We're stepping through this like everyone else is and adjusting based on the data that's coming in and what we're seeing with our units," Friedrichs said. "[What] I would recommend is, as we step through this, we take the most appropriate precautions today for what we know is happening right now.

"What we don't want to do is build either a false sense of anxiety or concern or a false sense of security. What we know right now is, this is a very significant outbreak. It's a global pandemic. What we need to do is make sure that we're minimizing contact, [and] people are staying home when they can stay home," he said.

The Pentagon on Thursday said it had 280 military cases of coronavirus, an increase of 106 cases since Tuesday. Of those, 15 service members have been hospitalized, it added.

In an interview with Reuters, Esper said that, while the Pentagon will provide broad data on how the virus spreads throughout the ranks, officials will hold back on more granular, mission-specific data in an effort to preserve operational security.

What we want to do is give you aggregated numbers, the secretary told the news outlet Wednesday. But were not going to disaggregate numbers because it could reveal information about where we may be affected at a higher rate than maybe some other places.

-- Gina Harkins contributed to this report.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.

Read more: More Virus Test Kits Will Soon Be on Their Way to Deployed Troops, General Says
Many celebrities are using this 21-day nationwide lockdown period to look back at the past and recall some of their happy memories. Actress Archana Puran Singh took to social media to share a few throwback pictures of a trip with her husband Parmeet Sethi.

The photos are from their trips to London and New York several years ago, when the couple was much younger and head over heels in love with each other.

"Day 2 of #lockdown cleaned out the attic and discovered old (is gold) pictures of @iamparmeetsethi and #me, young and madly in love," she posted alongwith the photos. Take a look:

Archana and Parmeet have been married for 28 years now. They were in a live-in relationship before they got married. They have two sons Aaryamann and Ayushmaan. Having starred in films like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Mohabbatein, the actress has been a judge on several comedy shows, from Comedy Circus to The Kapil Sharma Show.

She is using the self-isolation and social-distancing period to try out various face apps and baby filters and sharing videos to kill time. She wrote, "#selfisolating is bringing out the latent madness #timepass #kucchbhi Please take out all #boriyat by doing random nonsense #apsstyle #ownstyle."

Follow @News18Movies for more
People queue at The Moose Box cafe in Dublin as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has introduced a number of sweeping measures to tackle the coronavirus, including cafes and restaurants limiting themselves to takeaway and delivery only (Brian Lawless/PA)

A major debate to pass further emergency legislation to deal with the coronavirus crisis is under way in the Dail.

The proposals, detailed in the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Bill, will prevent evictions and implement a rent freeze throughout the health crisis.

The emergency measures are part of a major effort by government to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 and the economic consequences of the virus.

The Dail also agreed on Thursday to pause business at 8pm to applaud health workers following a request from the Health Service Executive (HSE).

Let's take a moment, together as a nation, to say thank you to the health care staff who are working tirelessly during this crisis. Tonight at 8pm, applaud from your front door/window to show support. The Dail will also pause to applaud. #Covid19 #Coronavirus #ThankYou pic.twitter.com/RjSNhhY2wk  Roisin Shortall (@RoisinShortall) March 26, 2020

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the emergency legislation is a response to an unprecedented emergency.

Speaking in the Dail, the Taoiseach said: Unfortunately, we cannot stop this virus, but working together we can slow it in its tracks, push it back and put it back in its box.

Our national objective is to suppress the virus and flatten the curve.

We can succeed if everyone takes sustained action  nothing less will do.

Mr Varadkar added: As a doctor, and also as a politician, I know the value of repetition; give advice, the best advice, give it again and keep repeating until it becomes second nature and engraved.

So I want to advise everyone in the public to follow the public health advice, and to keep following these five basic steps, simple steps to protect all of us from the virus.

Today's legislation, to last for the duration of the emergency, will freeze rents, prevent evictions and make it easier for healthcare professionals to re-register and return to work and also enable former members of the Defence Forces to rejoin at the ranks they left.Leo Varadkar

Regular hand washing; coughing etiquette; not touching your face; maintaining physical distance and staying at home if you feel unwell.

Mr Varadkar said there was a positive side to the amount of time spent on planning for Brexit.

He said that the thousands of hours spent on preparing for Brexit leaves Ireland in a better position to deal with major issues.

For the past three-and-a-half years, so much of our political time and energy was taken up by the issue of Brexit, he said.

Who would have thought quite a different crisis would bring our country to a standstill?

But in one sense, this was valuable time, and in other circumstances might be directed at other pressing national issues.

We can all play our part in slowing the spread of #coronavirus. Watch this video to find out all you can do. #ItsInOurHands #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/vgaLt3PNxQ  HSE Ireland (@HSELive) March 26, 2020

He added: Todays legislation, to last for the duration of the emergency, will freeze rents, prevent evictions and make it easier for healthcare professionals to re-register and return to work and also enable former members of the Defence Forces to rejoin at the ranks they left.

The truth is, these are extraordinary times.

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said the people of Ireland continue to face real fear and uncertainty.

Speaking in the Dail, he added: To an extent never seen before, people are subject to major personal restrictions which limit their ability to mix with others, look after family members and go to work.

The measures which we adopted last week and those which we are adopting today are not ones that we would even discuss in normal circumstances.

But clearly, this unprecedented situation has justified, and will continue to justify, an unprecedented response.

Mr Martin also said that Ireland needs a government which can discuss and implement an urgent recovery plan.

People walk past a sign encouraging social distancing in Dublins Phoenix Park as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has introduced a number of sweeping measures to tackle the coronavirus, including restricting all public gatherings to four people.

He called for an introduction of some form of social partnership model.

He added: In Ireland we will need to develop our own national recovery plan to be implemented immediately when social and economic restrictions are significantly lifted.

No-one can be in any doubt that in order to have the funds to pay for social supports, public services and rebuilding jobs, tough decisions will have to be made even with a significantly higher deficit.

We already know about the massive increase in spending which must be implemented.

I believe we need a government which can discuss and implement an urgent recovery plan. In doing this, we should certainly look at the introduction of some form of social partnership model.

This should involve key stakeholders so that there can be real engagement and a true societal response to what will be a plan for our national recovery post-Covid-19.

Green Party leader Eamon Ryan told the Dail that the chief executive of the HSE, Paul Reid, told him during a meeting that they did more in a week to move towards Slaintecare than they would normally do within a year.

Mr Ryan said the resources being pumped into healthcare was an opportunity to invest in the system in every aspect.

He added: At a time of this radical and rapid change, its a chance for us to invest in a health system to bring it in the direction we want, and that will require investment.

Similarly, if we have tens of thousands of workers and hundred of thousands who will be unemployed, we should be looking to really ramping up our public housing programme straight away, as a stimulus to come out of unemployment that may come with this economic downturn.

People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett has called for a rent, mortgage payment and utility bill holiday or amnesty.

Speaking in the Dail, he said: We think that a rent, mortgage payment and utility bill holiday or amnesty for people is a must.

People who cannot work and have lost or will lose income because of this crisis, need the stress of bills, mortgage payments and rents, which in many cases are extortionate, and the potential for arrears, to be removed.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 14:23:11|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- China has strengthened international cooperation in the research and development of vaccines against the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), according to an official Thursday.

Vaccines are key to the fight against the epidemic and it is the right choice to carry out international cooperation as vaccine development is difficult and faces many uncertainties, said Xu Nanping, vice minister of science and technology, at a press conference.

China shared the complete genome sequence of the novel coronavirus with the world once it had been identified, hoping many countries could carry out vaccine research and development at an earlier date, Xu said.

China has adopted five technological approaches in vaccine development and the recombinant adenovirus vector vaccine started its clinical trial on March 16.

All the five approaches are open for international cooperation, which is already underway, the official said.

Some Chinese companies are cooperating with their international counterparts in different approaches to vaccine development. A Chinese company is working with Inovio in the United States on a DNA vaccine; a Chinese company is cooperating with German pharmaceutical company BioNTech on an mRNA vaccine and a Chinese company is working with British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) on a recombinant protein vaccine.

Besides these examples, more international cooperation is on the way, Xu said, adding that China's vaccine development pools global strength and will be shared globally.
Wednesday, March 25, 2020 at 10:38PM

Google Play Movies

Google Play Movies might be trying to lure in more people by offering free ad-supported movies that you can stream. XDA found lines of code in version 4.18.37 of the app's Android version that this feature might be in our immediate future. The announcement message included words like "hundreds of movies" that could be available with "just a few ads." 9to5Google speculates it could be similar to Vudu, which is a movie and TV marketplace on its own but also has a rotating library of free, ad-supported content that can be watched.

The lines of code also show the feature asking users to provide birthdates, perhaps to keep children from watching R-rated films. And it seems there will also be a notification when an ad is in progress when the content is being cast to a Chromecast target. There is no timeline when Google might release this feature. But with the COVID-19 pandemic keeping a lot of us at home, now might be the best time for Google to introduce the feature.
Click here to read the full article.

As American parents scramble to educate their kids at home amid the coronavirus pandemic, its worth asking: How effective are school shutdowns at halting the spread of the disease?

Dr. Isaac Chun-Hai Fung is an infectious-disease epidemiologist Georgia Southern University, and hes published science demonstrating how lengthy school shutdowns can lessen the severity of viral oubreaks. In a 2015 study modeling a potential influenza pandemic, Fung and his co-authors found that closing schools can slow the spread of disease, delay the peak of the outbreak and even reduce the total number of cases.

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Under one scenario his team studied, assuming a highly contagious influenza outbreak, school closure for 84 days could delay the peak for approximately 60 days. This kind of delay is helpful  giving the health system time to brace itself for the full impact of an outbreak, and potentially giving the medical community a head start on developing a vaccine or other treatments that can lessen the reach and severity of the disease.

Rolling Stone reached out to Fung to ask him how this research can inform the current response to the coronavirus outbreak. His short answer is that schools should not reopen quickly, because, we would simply experience another wave of the epidemic.

[Fungs emailed response is presented here as a Q&A for clarity and readability.]

Rolling Stone: Does the math from your flu study inform how long our schools should stay closed? Is 84 days a reasonable guide post?

Dr. Isaac Fang: To answer your question briefly, the concept as explained in my pandemic flu paper will apply to this COVID-19 pandemic  but the exact number or percentage of predicted cases will not, because influenza and SARS-CoV-2 [the coronavirus] are two different viruses. The key message of my paper is not necessarily how quickly we shut down schools. It is the duration of school closure that matters. Whenever we relax social distancing measures, we will see a bounce-back of the cases, unless we are able to completely block all transmission chains and have driven the case number to zero  i.e., extinction of the virus, as in the case of SARS in 2003.

Story continues

So the notion that America should re-open quickly, to save the economy even if the virus is uncontrolled, thats not based on good epidemiology?

To save the U.S. economy, we must control this disease first. That is what China is going to achieve  even if they have already suffered a great deal economically due to COVID-19. That is why [Narendra] Modi asks the whole of India to stay home for three weeks. That is also what Boris Johnson asks the British people to do now. The Americans should take heed.

Is complete control of the virus achievable?

The key question we should ask our political leaders is: What goal do they want to archive against the COVID-19 epidemic.

Do they want to achieve: A) a complete block to all transmission chains and to drive the virus to extinction, as in the SARS epidemic in 2003?

Or B) a slow-down of the spread of the epidemic, so that we can either flatten the curve or delay the peak or both, so that our healthcare system will not be overwhelmed and hopefully wait until we have a vaccine available to the majority of people on earth, or C) protection of the elderly and the medically fragile and a reduction in mortality.

For countries that seem to have driven the epidemic to nearly zero local transmission, as in parts of mainland China today, they have to be always vigilant for imported cases that happen daily. And the economic costs remains huge  for example the loss of tourism-related businesses.

Is that the only option? It seems like most officials in the U.S. are talking about option B, flatten the curve.

We may be able to achieve goal B and thereby achieve goal C at the same time, if we implement social distancing measures at a magnitude that is large enough to reduce local transmission, and for a duration that is long enough. What I fear is that the majority of Americans may be willing to stay home for 2 to 4 weeks, but not more than that. They will then petition their political leaders to reopen schools, and ask businesses to reopen their offices, restaurants and bars. Then, we are going to see another wave of the epidemic soon after.

If the economy reopens, is C  protect the frail and the elderly  still an achievable option?

At the very least, we need to achieve goal C, which will mean that for a very long period of time, the elderly and the medically fragile (such as young kids with leukemia, or young adults with some underlying medical conditions, or people who are immunosuppressed) are going to stay self-isolated for a very long period of time.

If other people in the society decide to resume their business soon  and thereby experience a large epidemic, and many people will be infected  they should be aware that they are putting a large number of old and medically fragile people at risk. Then, we need to find ways to reduce the harm that will be done to the elderly and the medically fragile. For example, we cannot visit the elderly at their nursing homes. We need to find ways to provide economic support to adults with medical conditions because if they go to work, they will put themselves at great risk. We need to find ways to educate kids who have cancer or who are immunosuppressed, because while other kids may be infected and have very mild symptoms, kids with cancer or otherwise immunosuppressed will be at great risk if the epidemic sweeps through their schools.

How do you assess Americas response so far?

Here in the USA, we are not achieving either A, B or C. The public health officials obviously want to achieve both B and C. However, I wonder if the magnitude of social distancing recommendations made by our political leaders, at all levels, are strong enough to achieve B and/or C.

How do you see that playing out?

I think that most Americans are psychologically not prepared for the calamity that is sweeping through their country right now. This lack of imagination, the failure to recognize what happened in China, Iran and Italy, can also happen here, will cost America dearly. Imagine what would happen to the U.S. economy if New York City becomes Wuhan or Milan. And it seems to me that it is going to happen very soon.

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Lisa Zahakos says during a time of crisis when there are shortages of any kind, its kind of scary and you instinctively turn toward others for help.

I was scared and looked to find some peace," said she.

Through social media the physician assistant located people who were hand crafting surgical masks and jumped on board in any way she knew how.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***

This cause spoke to me not only because Im a physician assistant and worked in medicine for 15 years, but because I have always loved things handmade. They leave a little piece of the maker inside. And its truly a gift. Its very special.

Within 48 hours Lisa and a group of kind hearted individuals put their heads together and pooled their resources in order to hand craft face masks that are worn outside the traditional surgical N95 masks.

Registered nurses wear Lisa Zahakos' protective surgical masks over the regulation masks at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. (Courtesy/Lisa Zahakos)

Prior to Lisas endeavor, health care professionals were afforded only one mask per week since theyre not permitted to change them daily because of the shortage.

Youre not supposed to reuse masks for patients. But hospitals were giving them out once a week. My fabric masks cover the real mask and whats so great is that theyre made of 100 percent cotton fabric and they may be washed at home making them a little more sanitary, she says before explaining her masks are meant to cover surgical masks that fit snugly inside.

Lisa also has medical filters on the way through generous donations which will be an even better addition to the fabric masks.

But the true mission is to obtain N95 masks and fully protect our healthcare workers and first responders, she adds.

Lisa stresses the fabric masts are not a replacement for the necessary N95 personal protective wear medical personnel so desperately need. But rather simply a better than nothing, solution that allows them to extend the use of the N95 protective mask.

Its been a connection to fabrication within 72 hours. And its so amazing the way people have been donating fabric with comments like I can hook you up to I have plenty of fabric to send your way, she says.

The talented group produced more than 300 masks so far as a result of locating seamstresses with names like Barbara Gentile, Randy Kato, Tara McManus and Lucy Kontis in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas and Massachusetts, with more than 650 people in two days connecting to Lisas little group that she started in the middle of the night.

I delivered them to the Infectious Disease department at Richmond University Medical Center. And crafters have gotten creative with all sorts of splash prints and patterns including super hero characters too, she continues.

Medical professionals wear Lisa Zahakos' protective surgical mask. (Courtesy/Lisa Zahakos)

She also is providing masks for the COVID-19 unit at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.

Im in tears from the generosity I have seen. From the woman who is hand sewing in between home school and watching her kids, to the now unemployed seamstresses putting their businesses on hold to help this cause. You have come together in such an incredible way. There are so many good people. Today these masks are in the hands of the those who are protecting us. And we can help protect them too.

And in addressing her brave colleagues and friends to our city Police and Fire Departments, she says: I am humbled by you all. You are so brave and so strong. I am truly honored to call you friends and family. I am so proud to be a physician assistant, says she.

Lisa, a PA who worked in interventional cardiology for Dr. Ayman Farid in Tottenville, also is a physician assistant with Staten Island University Hospital, Ocean Breeze.

Her goal is to connect the makers with the wearers  something like a matchmaking service, she says with a chuckle.

Lisas Facebook a group is called Sew Away Corona. Want to help? Folks can also email sewawaycorona@gmail.com

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Madison County has released a map of coronavirus cases in the county ;by zip code.

The county previously had not reported the location of the positive cases except for the recent death of a person in Hamilton.

Madison County reported eight positive COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, up from six Tuesday.

The cases are in the following zip codes:

13104 (Manlius): 1

13035 (Cazenovia): 1

13032 (Canastota): 2

13409 (Munnsville): 2

13346 (Hamilton): 2

Note: These are zip code mailing addresses, not towns.

Some Madison County residents have taken to social media to complain that the county wasnt releasing the location of the cases. Others said the county shouldnt release locations out respect for a persons privacy.

Health department officials decided the map will give people some more information about where the positive cases area while not revealing identifying information about the patient, said Samantha Field, county spokesperson.

Residents should not assume that because a positive case isnt in their zip code that means they dont have to take precautions, Field said. All residents need to remain diligent about social distancing and practicing effective hand washing techniques, she said.

Thanks for visiting Syracuse.com. Quality local journalism has never been more important, and your subscription matters. Not a subscriber yet? Please consider supporting our work.
TEL AVIV, Israel, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- RADWIN (www.radwin.com), the global wireless broadband provider, today announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with Mobax, a leading telecommunications and technology company in South Africa. Mobax will offer RADWIN's comprehensive portfolio of Point-to-Multipoint and Point-to-Point fixed wireless broadband solutions to its extensive base of telecommunication network operators and corporate clients.

Gerhard Bezuidenhout, Managing Director of Mobax stated: "RADWIN has an exciting portfolio with unrivalled reliability and speeds that will enable us to implement fiber-like broadband connectivity to deliver high-value services to our extensive customer-base. This partnership leverages upon RADWIN's wireless broadband technology and the professionalism and high-quality engineering capabilities of Mobax to deliver advanced fixed wireless solutions to existing network operators and corporate clients as well as new potential customers."

Peter Turvey, GM, Middle East and South & East Africa: "We are proud to partner with Mobax who are known throughout the country for their professionalism and expertise in the telecommunications market. This partnership will amplify the reach of RADWIN's beamforming technology to deliver an excellent combination of high-capacity connectivity and robust performance in tough outdoor and non-line-of-sight conditions, while supporting the goals and objectives of Mobax to provide high value services.

About RADWIN

RADWIN is the global provider of broadband wireless solutions that deliver blazing fast broadband with unparalleled reliability. Incorporating cutting-edge technologies, RADWIN's solutions are equipped with powerful OSS tools that support all operational aspects of the network lifecycle and enable operation in the toughest conditions including interference and nLOS.

Deployed in over 170 countries, RADWIN's solutions power applications including backhaul, access, private network connectivity and broadband on the move for rail and metro trains.

Visit: www.radwin.com

About Mobax

Mobax South Africa (Mobax) was established in 2002 and its Headquarters is in Irene, Gauteng. Mobax's core business is the supply of Professional Telecommunications Services and Products to the South African market.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1137617/RADWIN_Mobax.jpg

Contacts:

RADWIN Sales

HQ: +972-3-769-2820

Email: [email protected]

Media Contact

Amanda Azran

Tel: +972-3-766-2904

Email: [email protected]

Mobax

Tel: +27 (0) 12-345-4007 / 08611 MOBAX

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE RADWIN; Mobax
Researchers have suggested that lifting disease prevention measures in Wuhan this month could result in a second wave of coronavirus cases in late August.

In new modelling research published in The Lancet Public Health journal, the authors estimated that lifting control measures in April instead could delay a second peak until October, which would take pressure off health services in following months.

Mathematic modelling was used to simulate the effects of relaxing or pushing the current measures to a later date.

Schools and workplaces in Wuhan have been closed for months to contain the outbreak. But the research comes as Chinese authorities recently announced they would be easing the lockdown to allow people to travel again.

Lead researcher Dr Kiesha Prem, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), said: The unprecedented measures the city of Wuhan has put in place to reduce social contacts in school and the workplace have helped to control the outbreak.

However, the city now needs to be really careful to avoid prematurely lifting physical distancing measures, because that could lead to an earlier secondary peak in cases. But if they relax the restrictions gradually, this is likely to both delay and flatten the peak.

A transmission model was developed using information about how people from different age groups and locations interact with one another to assess their effects on bringing the outbreak of coronavirus under control.

Researchers studied three potential scenarios: no interventions and no holidays, no social distancing but school winter break and lunar new year holidays to continue as normal, and intense infection control measures with schools closed and only essential workers allowed to work.

They also tested the model to see what the impact of lifting control measures would be in a staggered manner and at different stages of the outbreak.

Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Show all 12 1 /12 Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Agnetha Septimus, Matthew Septimus, and children Ezra and Nora Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Husband and wife filmmakers, Claire Ince and Ancil McKain pose for a portrait for the series by Shutterstock Staff Photographer, Stephen Lovekin, shot around the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Khadijah Silver and son Eliot Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Anna Beth Rousakis and daughter Mary Rousakis Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Mike Pergola and Denise Pergola with children Henry, Jack, and Will Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Artist Shirley Fuerst Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Jean Davis and Danny Rosenthal, with children Simone, Naomi, and Leah Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Robert E Clark Jr Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Lisa Draho and Josh Zuckerman, with children Ruby and Ava Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Professor and activist Dr Kristin Lawler Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Tom Smith and Laura Ross, with daughters Caroline, Elizabeth, and Abigail Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock Words at the window: Social isolation and the Coronavirus Callie Lovekin and Lucas Lovekin Stephen Lovekin/REX/Shutterstock

The most effective scenario was the one in which physical distancing measures continued to be enforced, with staggered returns to work from the start of April.

Doing so could potentially reduce the median number of new infections by 24 per cent up until the end of 2020, delaying the second peak until October.

Co-author Dr Yang Liu, also from LSHTM, said results would differ from country to country, but one thing applied everywhere: Physical distancing measures are very useful, and we need to carefully adjust their lifting to avoid subsequent waves of infections when workers and school children return to their normal routine.

If those waves come too quickly, that could overwhelm health systems, Dr Yang added.

The model does not take into account differences in susceptibility between children or that extreme distancing measures may have increased transmission of coronavirus within households in Wuhan.

It also did not assume differences in contact rates on an individual level.

But nevertheless, experts have called the study crucial for policy makers across the world who are trying to determine the effectiveness of physical distancing control measures.

Dr James Gill, honorary clinical lecturer at Warwick Medical School, said: Even recognising that a series of assumptions within the study data have been made to account for unknowns  this model has produced some encouraging results.

The proposals put forward here align with current practices and support the continuation of the quarantine efforts to reduce the case load burden on health infrastructures.

Given the current levels of assumptions already in use for government public health assumptions already in use for government public health responses, it is gratifying to see a reasoned model which may be able to further guide policy makers, he added.

Hopefully this study will allow governments greater clarity in balancing population restrictions against their economic impact given the power demonstrated here.
Another person in Bauchi State has tested positive to coronavirus (COVID-19) virus, state Commissioner for Health, Aliyu Maigoro, disclosed on Thursday.

Updating journalists on the situation in the state, the commissioner said out of 48 samples presented for investigation, result for 38 persons had been received, out of which one tested positive.

He said the state recorded 48 high risk contacts of COVID-19 from March 24 to 26.

News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalled that the state governor, Bala Mohammed, had also tested positive to the virus.

The commissioner said the second case was a 62-year-old man.

The first case has still not shown any symptoms of COVID -19 and the second case will be moved to the management centre for proper management, he said.

Mr Maigoro called on philanthropists and Development partners to support the state in curbing the menace.

READ ALSO:

We call on philanthropists and development partners to support the state in curbing the menace with sophisticated machines and other consumables, he pleaded

Mr Maigoro said the state had also selected General Hospital Bayara as an additional centre for the management of COVID- 19.

Also speaking, Executive Chairman, Bauchi State Primary Healthcare Development Agency, Rilwanu Mohammed, said the state government would involve security outfits in an event of non-compliance with directives on preventive measures, especially on closure of markets.

He advised the public to drink more water and consume citrus fruits as a preventive measure.

(NAN)
French English

Strong order intake and record backlog across all business lines

Significantly strengthened balance sheet

Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium, 26 March 2020 - IBA ( Ion Beam Applications SA , EURONEXT), the worlds leading provider of proton therapy solutions for the treatment of cancer, today announces its consolidated annual results for the 2019 financial year.

FY 2019**

(EUR 000) FY 2018*

(EUR 000) Variance

(EUR 000) Variance

% Proton Therapy and Other Accelerators 228 706 206 958 +21 748 +10.5% Dosimetry 53 846 50 449 + 3 397 6.7% Total Net Sales 282 552 257 407 +25 145 9.8% REBITDA 12 459 13 211 -752 -5.7% % of Sales 4.4% 5.1% REBIT 87 5 662 -5 575 -98.5% % of Sales 0% 2.2% Profit Before Tax 10 766 -894 11 660 N/A % of Sales 3.8% -0.3% NET RESULT 7 610 -4 401 12 011 N/A % of Sales 2.7% -1.7%

* Dosimetry numbers (including RadioMed) re-integrated, following the decision in 2019 to retain the business

** RadioMed numbers integrated for 11 months following its disposal in December 2019

IFRS 16  Leases became effective on January 1, 2019. The effect of this accounting standard at December 31, 2019 is an improvement of REBIT by EUR 0.3m and of REBITDA by EUR 4.9m. The impact on the net result is immaterial

Olivier Legrain, Chief Executive Officer of IBA commented: At IBAs core is our deep, world leading expertise in particle acceleration. This unrivalled understanding combined with more than 30 years of operational application has seen IBA build four robust business lines: Proton Therapy, Dosimetry, Radiopharma and Industrial Solutions.

During 2019 all of these business lines saw a strong order intake which, coupled with significant backlog conversion in the second half, helped IBA to deliver an encouraging rise in Group revenue. The nine rooms sold in Proton Therapy across all major geographies and a record 25 new orders in Other Accelerators contributed to a 10% increase in revenue versus last year. Our Services business also had another excellent year of double digit growth, with this revenue stream continuing to evolve and positively contribute to Group performance.

Pricing pressure on new proton therapy contracts continued to impact as our competitors attempted to gain market share. However, we have continued to take steps to mitigate the impact of this on our margins as we continue to reduce our costs and apply systemic cost control and efficiency measures to achieve sustainable profitability. We are also doing everything possible to look after our global team, our customers and their patients as we continue to confront COVID-19's impact on family lives and business operations.

We have begun 2020 with a strengthened balance sheet and streamlined focus based around three core drivers: know-how, execution and innovation. Our core particle accelerators knowledge is unparalleled, with almost 100,000 patients treated on our proton therapy solutions and over 550 accelerators in operation globally across all of our businesses. Conversion of our record backlog in equipment and services continues and coupled with our good cash position, will allow us to continue to invest in next generation technologies such as FLASH to maintain a highly compelling offering across all of our core markets.

Financial summary *

Total 2019 revenues of EUR 282.6 million, up 10% (2018: EUR 257.4 million). The increase was due to an excellent order intake for Proton Therapy and Other Accelerators, delivery of nine Proton Therapy rooms and a record 25 Other Accelerators to customers and continued high Services revenues and a strong performance for Dosimetry

Equipment and service backlog of EUR 1.1 billion, comprising an equipment backlog for Proton Therapy and Other Accelerators of EUR 379 million at full year 2019 and Proton Therapy services backlog of EUR 744 million

Full year REBIT amounted to EUR 0.1 million vs EUR 5.7 million for the previous year, reflecting gross margin weakness as a result of pricing pressure on new contracts and increased investment in R&D

Total Group profit of EUR 7.6 million, a significant increase versus PY (2018: EUR 4.4 million), as a result of the gain on the disposal of RadioMed

Net debt position of EUR -3 million at the end of 2019** with strong improvement compared to EUR -47.1 million at the end of December 2018 thanks to careful management of working capital

Completion of refinancing of the Companys credit lines, enabling flexibility and future investment in innovative technologies. EUR 37 million undrawn credit lines still available as of today

As of the date of publication of this release, the Company has a gross cash balance of more than EUR 85 million and is net cash positive (unaudited numbers)

Based on the 2019 results and the strong cash position of the company, in line with IBAs dividend policy, the Board of Directors will recommend to the annual general assembly, the distribution of a total dividend of EUR 0.076 per share (approximately EUR 2.3 million), representing a 30% payout on net profit

* The figures for 2018 reintegrate the Dosimetry segment following the decision in 2019 to retain the business

** On like for like basis excluding the impact of new IFRS 16 of EUR 18.1 million

Business summary

Strong order intake across all business lines, including nine Proton Therapy rooms across all major geographies, with the first systems sold in Georgia and Indonesia

Currently 21 PT centers are under construction or installation, comprising 14 Proteus  ONE 1 and seven Proteus  PLUS 1

ONE and seven Proteus PLUS Record year for Other Accelerators with 25 accelerators sold in Asia, Europe and the US, reflecting strong radiopharmaceutical demand, especially in emerging markets, and growing market in accelerator-based sterilization solutions

The Services business continues to grow strongly with double digit growth in both PT and Other Accelerators lines; Services made up almost half of total PT and Other Accelerators revenues in 2019

Streamlined focus on core particle accelerators and dosimetry businesses with sale of RadioMed, the VISICOIL fiducial markers business, to IZI Medical Products LLC in December and decision taken to retain Dosimetry within the Group

Company-wide cost control measures remain in place, while allowing for strategic investments in R&D, to achieve sustained profitability

Continued progress with highly innovative technologies such as Motion Management, ARC therapy and FLASH, with first FLASH irradiations delivered in research mode at UMCG in Groningen, Netherlands and the Rutherford Cancer Centre in Reading, UK, demonstrating IBAs leadership in this novel, non-invasive delivery of ultra-high dose radiation

Multiple collaborations with several leading proton therapy centers in their pioneering research to better understand the mechanisms of FLASH irradiation, including Institut Curie in Paris as well as the University of Pennsylvania to test the feasibility, safety, and effectiveness of delivering a full dose of radiation therapy in a split second

In September Normandy Hadrontherapy, a company in which IBA has a minority interest, launched the co-development of a carbon therapy system in Normandy, France. Hadron therapy using carbon ions functions in the same way as proton therapy, but has the advantage of being particularly effective for the treatment of radiation-resistant tumors

***ENDS***

A conference call to discuss the full year results will be held today at 15:00 CET / 14:00 GMT / 10:00 EDT / 07:00 PDT and can be accessed online at:

http://arkadinemea-events.adobeconnect.com/iba260320/event/registration.html

If you would like to participate in the Q&A, please dial (PIN code 72868170#):

Belgium: +32 2 403 58 16

UK: +44 20 71 94 37 59

NL: +31 207 09 51 19

LU: +352 2 730 01 63

US: +1 64 67 22 49 16

FR: +33 1 72 72 74 03

The presentation will be available on IBAs investor relations website and on:

https://iba-worldwide.com/content/full-year-2019-results-conference-call shortly before the call.

To ensure a timely connection, it is recommended that users register at least 10 minutes prior to the scheduled webcast.

Financial calendar

First Quarter 2020 Business Update 13 May 2020

Annual General Assembly 10 June 2020

First Half 2020 Results 26 August 2020

Third Quarter 2020 Business Update 19 November 2020

About IBA

IBA (Ion Beam Applications S.A.) is a global medical technology company focused on bringing integrated and innovative solutions for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The company is the worldwide technology leader in the field of proton therapy, considered to be the most advanced form of radiation therapy available today. IBAs proton therapy solutions are flexible and adaptable, allowing customers to choose from universal full-scale proton therapy centers as well as compact, single room solutions. In addition, IBA has a radiation dosimetry business and develops particle accelerators for the medical world and industry. Headquartered in Belgium and employing about 1,500 people worldwide, IBA has the largest number of installed proton therapy systems across the world.

IBA is listed on the pan-European stock exchange NYSE EURONEXT (IBA: Reuters IBAB.BR and Bloomberg IBAB.BB).

More information can be found at www.iba-worldwide.com

1 ProteusONE and ProteusPLUS are brand names of Proteus 235

For further information, please contact:

IBA

Soumya Chandramouli

Chief Financial Officer

+32 10 47 58 90

Investorrelations@iba-group.com

Thomas Ralet

Head of Corporate Communication

+32 10 47 58 90

communication@iba-group.com

For media and investor enquiries:

Consilium Strategic Communications

Amber Fennell, Angela Gray, Lucy Featherstone, Lizzie Seeley

+44 (0) 20 3709 5700

IBA@consilium-comms.com





Attachment
BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 26

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

Transshipment of goods from Egypt through Turkish ports exceeded 3.233 million tons from January through February 2020, Turkish Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure told Trend.

The volume of cargo transshipment from Egypt by ships flying the Turkish flag amounted to 379,075 tons, while the ships flying the flags of other countries transported 2,854,322 tons from January through February 2020.

Ships flying the Egyptian flag transported 199 tons of cargo, said the ministry.

During this period, the volume of goods transshipment in transit from Egypt through Turkish ports stood at 273,254 tons.

The volume of cargo transshipment through the ports of Turkey amounted to 62,463,706 tons from January through February 2020.

The volume of cargo handled by ships flying Turkish flag stood at 4,589, 056 tons from January through February 2020.

The volume of cargo transshipment through Turkish ports by ships under the flags of their countries amounted to 2,670, 520 tons, and the ships flying the flags of other countries transported 55,204,130 tons from January through February 2020.

About 12,527, 702 tons of cargo were transported through Turkish ports from January through February 2020.

Cargo transshipment through the ports of Turkey amounted to 29,507,308 tons in February 2020.

The volume of cargo handled by ships under the flag of Turkey amounted to 2,182, 314 tons in February 2020.

The volume of cargo transshipment through ports of Turkey by ships flying the flags of their countries amounted to 1,167,599 tons, and while the ships flying the flags of other countries transported 26,157,395 tons in February 2020.

About 6,378,070 tons of cargo were transported through the ports of Turkey in February 2020.

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Over the past few months YES Bank has seen a rather rapid erosion in both trust and credibility, with its brand value hitting its nadir after the Reserve Bank of India imposed moratorium early this month.

Keen to claw its way back up the trust meter, the bank has released an ad in select print newspapers saying that the worst is now behind them. We start a new journey, backed by Indias best read the advertisements, indicating that the bank was banking on the reputation that its new management was bringing to the table. Interestingly the ads have led to a ...
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 15:32:57|Editor: Yurou

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ULAN BATOR, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia's National Center for Communicable Disease (NCCD) said Thursday that one more Mongolian citizen tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the total number of the confirmed cases in the country to 11.

"One of more than 200 Mongolian citizens who arrived in Mongolia on (a) chartered flight in route of Istanbul-Ulan Bator on last Wednesday night tested positive for the novel coronavirus," Dulmaa Nyamkhuu, head of the NCCD, told a press conference.

Since March 15, Mongolia has started evacuating its citizens from some COVID-19-hit countries, including South Korea, Japan and in Europe on chartered flights.

As of Thursday, a total of 11 people, including a French national and 10 Mongolian citizens, tested positive for COVID-19 in the country, and their conditions have remained stable, according to the NCCD.
Its been less than a week since Rio Giardinieri claimed his coronavirus was cured overnight by an antimalarial drug touted by President Trump and by Fox News, and he has no complaints.

Man, Im alive and kickin, Giardinieri told Yahoo News over the phone on Wednesday. Feeling good.

The 52-year-old said he was finally able to return to his home in Miami Shores, Fla., Tuesday night, after being hospitalized for the coronavirus and pneumonia for about a week. The story of Giardinieris remarkable recovery, which was first reported Monday by a local Fox affiliate in Los Angeles, quickly became the subject of national news  and speculation  after it was picked up by the New York Post and tweeted by Trump, who hailed the news as a great early result from the drug, which has yet to be approved as a treatment for the coronavirus.

Clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine  a drug used to treat malaria and some autoimmune conditions such as lupus  in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin were set to begin in New York on Tuesday, but Trump had been touting the unproven drug combination as a game changer for the coronavirus since last week.

Despite warnings from experts that existing evidence of the drugs effect on coronavirus symptoms is limited and largely anecdotal, Trumps promotion of the prospective treatment has prompted stockpiling, limiting access to the lifesaving drug for lupus patients, and fatally misinformed attempts to self-medicate.

In an attempt to ward off the coronavirus, an Arizona couple in their 60s reportedly ingested chloroquine phosphate, mistaking the aquarium-cleaning ingredient for the antimalarial medication theyd heard the president promoting on television. The mistake proved to be lethal for the man and landed his wife in critical care.

The one thing that scares me to death is people taking these stories and going out and self-diagnosing and self-medicating, said Giardinieri. They cant do that. Theyve got to go to a doctor.

Story continues

President Trump, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, speaks during a coronavirus briefing on Wednesday. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Giardinieri told Yahoo News that since his recovery, hes received messages from many people on social media asking him about how to take hydroxychloroquine. Im like, No, no. You got this wrong. Its a dangerous drug. Dont take this unless its being prescribed and you get your dosage based on your weight and your size and how your body reacts.

Still, he feels its important to let the public know that theres hope out there. There is something out there that can cure you.

Im not a doctor. Im not a scientist. I can only tell you that I have 100 percent belief that this saved my life, he said.

So far, no doctor or hospital official involved in his care has been willing to confirm, or dispute, that belief.

Giardinieri said that about five days before going to the hospital, he began experiencing symptoms beginning with extreme fatigue. Im a guy that sleeps five hours a day  I have my entire adult life, he said, but suddenly he was sleeping 12 to 15 hours at a stretch. He soon developed a fever, a terrible headache and a persistent pain below his shoulder blades.

By the time I got to the hospital, I was diagnosed with pneumonia and COVID-19, Giardinieri said. Though the initial report by Fox 11 Los Angeles stated that he was admitted to Joe DiMaggio Childrens Hospital in Hollywood, Fla., he clarified that he was in fact treated at Memorial Regional Hospital, which is next door and part of the same health care system as Joe DiMaggio. A spokesperson for Memorial Healthcare System told Yahoo News that Giardinieri was never a patient at our pediatric facility, Joe DiMaggio Childrens Hospital. That was reported incorrectly. However, the spokesperson declined to confirm or deny that he had been treated at Memorial Regional, citing HIPAA protections.

The story of Rio Giardinieris remarkable recovery was first reported on Monday by Fox 11 in Los Angeles. (Fox News)

According to the account Giardinieri provided to Yahoo News, doctors never told him his diagnosis of the coronavirus compounded with pneumonia would be fatal, but by Friday hed become convinced that he was unlikely to survive.

It was my feeling based on how it was progressing, how my heart was doing, how my breathing was doing. It was getting shallower and shallower by the day, Giardinieri said. So he began reaching out to family and friends to say goodbye. One friend responded with a text urging him to ask his doctor for hydroxychloroquine, which hed heard about on The Ingraham Angle. Fox News host Laura Ingraham has talked about the Trump-endorsed medication multiple times on her show since last week, even saying that shed happily volunteer to test the drug as a treatment for the coronavirus.

Giardinieri said he asked a nurse about the medication, who then relayed his request to the doctor. Though the physician informed Giardinieri that he could not provide him with the drug, he put him in touch with an infectious disease doctor who, after speaking to Giardinieri on the phone, agreed to authorize the use of hydroxychloroquine. Thirty minutes later, Giardinieri said, a nurse was giving him his first dose in pill form.

The next morning, he says, he woke up completely symptom-free.

In response to requests for confirmation of his account, the hospitals corporate spokesperson told Yahoo News in an email that Memorial Healthcare System is unable to discuss the care that anyone may or may not be receiving at one of our facilities. Doing so is a violation of HIPAA legislation. Our position has been and will always be completely respectful of an individuals right to confidentiality and privacy.

If Mr. Giardinieri chooses to share his information with you, thats his choice, the email continued. We are following CDC guidelines for the care of COVID-19. For more information about the treatment youve referenced, please refer to their website.

The Centers for Disease Control and Preventions website states that there are no US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs specifically for the treatment of patients with COVID-19. However, it notes that hydroxychloroquine has been administered to hospitalized COVID-19 patients on an uncontrolled basis in multiple countries, including in the United States and that the medication is currently under investigation in clinical trials for treatment of patients with mild, moderate, and severe COVID-19.

A packet of tablets containing hydroxychloroquine, a drug that has shown signs of effectiveness against the coronavirus. (Gerard Julian/AFP via Getty Images)

Giardinieri told Yahoo News that he was asked by the hospital not to provide the names of any doctors or other staff who treated him.

They dont want to give credit to the pill. They say it could be in conjunction with other things they were doing, he said. And I understand their position. They dont want to assume liability on something thats not scientifically tested.

Giardinieri said that despite his request for a new coronavirus test, the hospital declined to retest him to confirm that he has, in fact, been cured of the virus. Though hes been discharged from the hospital, he said hes still required by the state to self-quarantine, telling Yahoo News that he had to register with the Florida Department of Health on Wednesday morning. And hes still taking hydroxychloroquine for two more days.

He reiterated that he is not advising anyone to take hydroxychloroquine on their own, and acknowledged the hospitals reluctance to endorse this unproven treatment.

Nonetheless, when asked why he still wanted to tell his story, despite those qualifications, he said, Are you kidding me? When youre facing death and youve had nine days of fever and back pain and headaches and a friend of yours suggests it to you, you ask for it, you take it and within 10 hours youre symptom-free? I think the world needs to know that.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:
Cozumel truck ends up in sea after attempt to pull boat out goes wrong

Cozumel, Q.R.  Emergency personnel attended the call of a vehicle that had been accidentally pulled into the sea Wednesday on the island of Cozumel.

Police and firemen arrived at the north end of the island to find a small Toyota truck nearly completely submerged in water. The case became an emergency after witnesses, who called in the accident, claimed the driver was trapped inside. However, emergency personnel verified that was not the case.

The incident happened around 6:00 p.m. when elements of Civil Protection, firefighters and Police of Quintana Roo went to the boat ramp in the northern area where they were told a truck had sunk in the water.

Emergency personnel immediately begin a rescue mission, however, the cab of the vehicle was empty. A tow truck was called and within several minutes, was able to winch the small truck from the sea onto its flatbed.

The owner of the vehicle, Sebastian R.S., told authorities that he was trying to get a boat out of the water and suddenly his tires skidded and he was unable to stop his truck from entering the water. Sebastian said that once he was in the water, he managed to get out of the cab of the truck, adding that he was not trapped as witnesses had claimed.
BALDWIN -- Local emergency management departments are taking action to help mitigate the spread of the coronavirus in their communities.

Lake County Emergency Management and Homeland Security director Patrick Maddox said although they have not yet declared a state of emergency, they are following the guidelines from the District Health Department No. 10 for dealing with a pandemic.

"We have been working to educate our employees and the public with regard to the coronavirus, and we are monitoring the situation closely as information is changing rapidly," Maddox said.

Precautions recommended by the Centers for Disease Control include:

 Learn about the signs and symptoms of COVID-19. Symptoms include fever, cough, and difficulty breathing.

 If you have respiratory symptoms, stay home. Call your health care provider's office in advance of your visit.

 Regularly clean and disinfect frequently touched surfaces, like doorknobs, keyboards, cell phones and light switches.

 Communicate and reinforce best practices for washing hands and covering coughs and sneezes.

 Be prepared if there is COVID-19 in your household or a disruption of daily activities in your community. For example, maintain a supply of medications, food and other essentials in your house. Consider alternative shopping options, such as curbside pickups or online deliveries.

 Access services as much as possible online or by phone.

In addition, central dispatch operators are being advised to refer callers to informational websites, inform them of the general precautions to take to protect themselves, advise them to go to their primary care doctor if they are feeling ill and provide them with information about the Spectrum Health virtual screening, which may be accessed at (616) 391-2380, Maddox said.

"Since Lake County contracts through Life EMS for ambulance service, dispatchers will be referring callers to their emergency response team, who will conduct screenings when calls are received for assistance," he added. "They are using precautions that were already in place to protect first responders, as well, such as, using proper respiratory equipment, masks, gloves and etc.

In addition, he said, the fire department will be using masks along with their other protective gear, and law enforcement officers will be using masks and gloves and sanitizing their vehicles and equipment regularly.

Lake County Administrator Tobi Lake posted an announcement on the county website March 16, notifying that the courthouse would be closed to the public, but operations within the courthouse would continue via phone and email.

Due to the recent presidential coronavirus guidelines on avoiding social gatherings in groups of more than 10 people, and the closing of the Lake County Courthouse to the public, it is required that all Lake County committees reschedule or postpone any upcoming meetings between now and April 5, the statement read.

Information on how to conduct business with county departments during the closure period, along with additional links to information and updates on the coronavirus can be found at lakecounty- michigan.com.

The Lake County Trial Court announced March 19 that they are closed to the general public except for "essential functions involving health and safety, and constitutional rights."

Access to courtrooms and other spaces is limited to no more than 10 people, including staff, the statement said.

"Courts statewide are taking this step in unison so that we send a clear message to the public that we are taking every possible step to stop the virus while continuing to provide essential services," Chief Judge Mark S. Wickens said.

Michigan Supreme Court Administrative order 2020-2 highlights specific essential functions that will continue. For additional information, call (231) 745-4614.

A message on the Village of Baldwin website stated that the village offices are closed due to the mandatory shelter in place order. They plan to reopen April 13.

In addition, the village council meeting scheduled for April 9 has been rescheduled for 6 p.m., April 14.

Osceola County closures

Osceola County Emergency Management Director Mark Watkins declared a local state of emergency for Osceola County following Governor Gretchen Whitmer's declaration of a state of emergency March 10.

The Osceola County Board of Commissioners closed the courthouse to the public and suspended all nonessential county services until at least April 21 at its meeting March 17.

Reed City City Hall is now closed to the public. Residents are encouraged to use online bill payment or the drop box at city hall, which will be checked regularly Monday through Friday.

In addition, city officials are implementing a plan to hold virtual meetings, city manager Ron Howell said. They have contracted with GoToMeeting, which will allow city council members and the public to join in meetings virtually via a computer or phone.

Information on how to join a virtual meeting will be posted on the city's website at reedcity.org.

To comply with the mandatory shelter in place order issued by Whitmer, Howell said the city staff will be split in half, with half working one day and the other half working the next day.

This will ensure that city services will continue without violating the public order.
He's joined the residents of LA in self-isolating amid the coronavirus pandemic.

And Giovanni Ribisi took extra precautions as he donned a face mask and gloves as he stocked up on supplies at a market in the Los Feliz neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California on Wednesday.

The Sneaky Pete star, 45, headed to the store to grab some groceries before joining partner Emily Ward and their twins Enzo and Maude in the sunshine.

Out and about: Giovanni Ribisi took extra precautions as he donned a face mask and gloves as he stocked up on supplies at a market in Los Angeles, California on Wednesday

Giovanni cut a casual figure for the outing, donning a dark shirt and tan trousers.

He completed his laid-back look with New Balance trainers.

Ensuring his safety was his top priority, he wore a surgical face mask and disposable latex gloves for the shopping trip, before rejoining his family.

He was spotted doting over the twins as he carried a bag full of supplies as Emily and a pal watched on.

Family: The Sneaky Pete star, 45, headed to the store to grab some groceries before joining partner Emily Ward and their twins Enzo and Maude in the sunshine

Giovanni, who last year welcomed twins with interior designer Emily, has been following the advice to obey social distancing amid the concerning spread of coronavirus.

California, as well as Washington and New York have been the hardest hit states, and were declared disaster zones by President Trump.

Earlier on Sunday, the president pledged to send the national guard into the thee states.

The disaster declaration will provide federal assistance for both emergency protective measures and crisis counseling in Washington, the White House said.

Low-key: Giovanni cut a casual figure for the outing, donning a dark shirt and tan trousers

Sweet: He was spotted doting over the twins as he carried a bag full of supplies as Emily and a pal watched on

It is not yet known what will follow for the United States, after Trump hinted that the country could perform a dramatic U-Turn on its lockdown.

He said the US will make a decision at the end of a 15-day period on 'which way we want to go' to fight coronavirus, implying that the country could re-open - just hours after New York City went into lockdown at 8pm on Sunday.

'We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,' he said on Twitter.

Trump appeared to send mixed messages as he wrote the tweet after taking aggressive steps to stem the spread of the deadly virus.
The Ministry of Transport sent an urgent dispatch to the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV) on the suspension of international flights carrying Vietnamese citizens to the Hanoi-based Noi Bai Airport starting from 0:00am on March 26.

Area for health quarantine at Noi Bai Airport

The dispatch, signed by Deputy Transport Minister Le Anh Tuan, explained that the decision is made as quarantine facilities in Hanoi have become overloaded and unable to accommodate more people.

The CAAV is asked to inform all airlines to stop the transport of Vietnamese citizens to the Noi Bai Airport until the end of March 31.

Earlier, the Transport Ministry also sent a dispatch to the CAAV requesting the halt of the transport of Vietnamese from foreign countries to the Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City, starting from 0:00am on March 25 to 31, for the same reason./.
Fresh produce in Europe set to be more scarce as coronavirus strikes FILE PHOTO: Partially emptied shelves are pictured at a Rewe grocery store in Potsdam

By Duncan Miriri and Nigel Hunt

NAIROBI/LONDON (Reuters) - Fresh fruit and vegetables will become increasingly scarce in Europe, suppliers warn, as the coronavirus pandemic hampers the global movement of produce and of the people needed to gather crops.

Governments are looking at ways to ease any shortage, including "green lanes" to allow fresh produce to move quickly across EU borders, recruiting a "shadow army" of harvesters and loosening travel rules for migrant workers.

While Europe's supermarkets say they are still getting most produce, supply pressures are building at source, including in Africa, a key provider of fresh goods, and within Europe.

Stores that are already dealing with hoarding by customers may struggle to keep shelves stocked.

In Kenya, a major supplier of green beans and peas to Europe, half of the workers in the sector have been sent home on mandatory leave because of the industry's inability to ship orders, even as demand from European retailers surge.

"Their (European) stocks are being depleted by the day," said Okisegere Ojepat, chief executive of the Fresh Produce Consortium of Kenya which groups over 200 growers and exporters.

Shipments from another key supplier, South Africa, are becoming more challenging with the country set to begin a 21-day lockdown this week.

"We were in reasonably good shape until earlier this week but now things are becoming very difficult," said Hans Muylaert-Gelein, Managing Director at Fruits Unlimited, a South Africa-based company that exports fruits and vegetables to the UK.

"More and more flights are being grounded so I expect there are going to be big disruptions."

Those planes that are flying are charging more. Operators have tripled the price per kilo of produce to $3 in the past two weeks, said Hosea Machuki, head of the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya representing 117 growers and exporters.

Western supply chains are buckling as problems ranging from a shortage of truck drivers to restrictions on seafarers hit the smooth flow of goods, freight logistics operators say.

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Even longer-lasting produce like citrus fruit, which is normally transported by sea, could be stranded because of the shortage of containers linked to China's shutdown, said Muylaert-Gelein.

"Oranges and lemons, the old ambassadors of Vitamin C, are in high demand. Also roots, carrots, cabbages, anything that has health properties people have stocked up on," he told Reuters.

NOT ENOUGH WORKERS

A shortage of migrant workers also threatens to disrupt production in several top European suppliers including Spain, the biggest exporter of fruit and vegetables in the EU.

Some 16,000 Moroccan seasonal workers, mostly women, were expected to arrive in the Huelva region in Spain to pick strawberries and red fruits under an agreement between the two countries.

Less than half had made it by March 12, as Morocco closed its borders to passenger traffic, said Abdelmounaim Madani, head of the Moroccan job promotion agency ANAPEC. The country's lockdown is due to last until April 20.

Farmers and unions in Spain said the production, processing and export of fruit and vegetables was still going smoothly, although the state of emergency is restricting people's access to farms and packing areas.

Absentee rates were as high as 50% in recent days, said agricultural worker union representative Monica Vega.

Philippe Binard, General Delegate of Freshfel Europe, which represents Europe's fresh produce industry, said the main problem was the lack of seasonal workers, especially for labour-intensive crops like strawberries and asparagus.

The challenges included moving workers from accommodation to farms while maintaining social distancing, he said.

"Before they were collected in a minivan of eight or nine people and then worked the day and then moved back. Now these collective transports are no longer possible."

Binard said supermarkets may move towards selling produce which could be more easily mechanized in the supply chain.

Heinz Schibli runs a farm growing strawberries, raspberries and blackberries in the rolling countryside just south of the Rhine River near Winterthur, Switzerland. All of his crops are destined for the Swiss market.

Typically, he would now have about 30 workers from Slovakia, Romania and Poland working in his fields and greenhouse, either preparing the first strawberries of the season for harvest next month, or getting ready for the new round of planting.

By May, he'll need 70 as harvest season begins in earnest.

So far, only 12 harvest workers have arrived, as those due to come this week have been blocked either by restrictions in their own countries or on transiting Germany and Austria to get to Switzerland.

Given the uncertainty, Schibli is talking with local authorities about enlisting local unemployed people or asylum seekers waiting for their cases to be resolved.

"The worst-case scenario is that we won't be able to plant all the berries that we normally would after the first round is harvested, or that we wouldn't even be able to do the actual harvest," Schibli told Reuters.

The Swiss government on Wednesday announced 20 billion Swiss francs ($20.6 billion) in no- or low-interest loans to help small businesses like Schibli's make it through the coronavirus crisis should their income dry up.

'SHADOW ARMY'

In Germany, whose food sector relies on some 286,000 seasonal workers every year, the agriculture minister has talked with carrier Lufthansa to see if they could be flown in, if they can prove they are not infected.

Other ideas include temporarily easing the time limit for seasonal workers beyond the current 70 days.

France, where farmers forecast a shortage of around 200,000 labourers during the harvest period, has also appealed to newly laid-off workers to help pick fruit and vegetables.

Agriculture Minister Didier Guillaume issued a rallying cry to what he called France's "shadow army".

Border restrictions introduced to stem the spread of the virus also disrupt the movement of produce within the EU, with traffic jams of up to 18 hours at some border points.

The European Commission has urged the 27 EU countries to adopt measures to ensure the free flow of freight along "green lanes" with border crossings lasting no more than 15 minutes.

Norbert Lins, chair of the agriculture committee of the European Parliament, said "green lanes" also had to apply to essential inputs such as feed, fertilisers and plant protection products.

He also called on the EU's executive and member states to find ways to allow some sort of cross-border movement for seasonal workers during the harvest season, even if travel restrictions are still in place.

European food retailers are keeping a close eye on the situation.

A spokesman for the Aldi Nord discount supermarket chain said that in Germany, fruit and vegetable supplies were secure and supply chains were functioning.

"Despite this we are watching the current developments and making a new assessment of the situation from day to day."

A spokeswoman for UK-based food retailer Tesco said she could not comment specifically on fruit and vegetables but in general there had been a surge in demand and there had been some empty shelves as a result.

"We would ask our customers to buy only what they need so that there is enough for everyone," she said in a statement.

($1 = 0.9719 Swiss francs)

(Reporting by Nigel Hunt and Jonathan Saul in London, Duncan Miriri in Nairobi, Ahmed El Jechtimi in Rabat, Sonya Dowsett in Madrid, Phil Blenkinsop in Brussels, Michael Hogan in Hamburg, John Miller and Arnd Wiegmann in Zurich and Gus Trompiz and Sybille de La Hamaide in Paris; Editing by Veronica Brown and Mike Collett-White)
Work has resumed on a Melbourne construction site after being recently shut down when a tradesman was diagnosed with the deadly coronavirus.

The Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) confirmed an employee briefly returned to work earlier this month after arriving back from overseas.

It comes as Victoria recorded its first three deaths from the virus outbreak on Thursday, which took the national death toll to 12.

The man returned home before the government enforced its compulsory 14 day self-isolation rule for returning travellers and visitors which came into effect on March 16.

A Melbourne work site was shut down earlier this month after an employee tested positive to coronavirus after returning from overseas (stock image)

'Upon feeling unwell, he did not return to work and was tested the following day,' a CFMEU statement released on Thursday read.

'After receiving a positive result of COVID-19, he contacted his employer who immediately shut down the site, contacting the DHHS and the CFMEU.'

All staff working on the site were contacted immediately.

Those who were in 'close contact' with the infected employee went into self-isolated quarantine for 14 days and are yet to show any symptoms.

Work has since resumed at the construction site after being cleaned and decontaminated to 'hospital-grade' standards.

The union hasn't revealed the construction company or project site involved or the specific dates of when the infected employee was on site.

The news comes a day after CFMEU Victoria announced the union was doing everything it can to ensure the construction industry remained open during uncertain times as the federal government looks to shut down more services to slow down the spread of the virus.

Construction is currently regarded as an essential service but will leave an additional nine per cent of Victorians out of work if the industry is shut down.

The construction industry is fighting to remain alive during the coronavirus lockdown. Pictured are construction workers obeying the 1.5metre social distancing rules at an on site work meeting in Melbourne

'We have put extreme health and safety measures in place to protect you and our industry,' state secretary John Setka said in a statement.

'There's a lot of misinformation and confusion about this situation  There are a lot of rumours about the construction industry closing down, or being locked down.

'We are doing everything in our power - together with the other construction unions and the employer organisations - to be as proactive in keeping our industry and your jobs safe and secure.

'In the event of an industry lockdown, if it comes to that, we have put into place, together with the employers, an emergency plan, for the members to be able to access some of their funds to get emergency financial relief.

The Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) confirmed an employee briefly returned to work earlier this month after arriving back from overseas (stock image)

The CFMEU has also updated its regulations for work sites, including the 1.5 metre social distance rule now in force.

The union posted a photo of the social distancing rules being followed by Laing O'Rourke workers at an inner Melbourne site in Toorak.

'This is what many sites are doing. If yours isn't taking precautions, then you aren't being looked after,' the Facebook post read.
Denny, 6, faces losing his hard-fought battle against leukaemia after a last-ditch bid for pioneering treatment in the USA had to be abandoned because of the Coronavirus pandemic

A six-year-old boy faces losing his hard-fought battle against leukaemia after a last-ditch bid for pioneering treatment in the USA had to be abandoned because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Family and friends of little Denny Nassy-Cornelious have spent six month trying to raise the 500,000 needed to pay for cutting-edge immune therapy treatment which is his final chance to fight off the cancer.

In just six months they managed to raise 420,000 and were planning for him to fly to the US in as little as four weeks.

But the chances of the youngster from Hastings, East Sussex, beating the horrible disease are now close to non-existent as the world has been turned upside down by the covid-19 pandemic.

Now his family are praying for a miraacle to save the life of the happy little boy who loves Batman and likes to play with Lego.

His heart-broken dad Dave Nassy, a building labourer, said: We are never going to give up.

Family and friends were close to raising the 500,000 needed to pay for cutting-edge immune therapy treatment which is his final chance to fight off the cancer

But the chances of the youngster from Hastings, East Sussex, beating the horrible disease are now close to non-existent as the world has been turned upside down by the covid-19 pandemic

'But we are having to take it one day at a time. Im beside myself. Weve come so far but the coronavirus has stopped us in our tracks.

His aunt Michele Laurens told MailOnline: Its a desperate situation.

Denny had a slim chance of survival even if he had the treatment, about 20 per cent.

But now his chances are close to non-existent because of everything is changing so quickly due to Coronavirus.

We were hoping to take Denny to America in about four-weeks time after he had finished his latest course of chemotherapy.

But what with all the new travel restrictions and the airlines closing down we dont know if we will able to get there, if we will be able to get into the country or if the hospital will still be carrying out the medical trial.

Dennys parents  Marianne and Dave  were hoping to him to the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia in the USA to take part in a clinical trial of CAR-T immune therapy for advanced leukaemia. This treatment for advanced leukaemia is not available in the UK.

His aunt Michele Laurens told MailOnline: Its a desperate situation. Denny had a slim chance of survival even if he had the treatment, about 20 per cent. But now his chances are close to non-existent because of everything is changing so quickly due to Coronavirus'

His heart-broken dad Dave Nassy (pictured with Denny's mum Marieanne Cornelious) added: We are never going to give up. But we are having to take it one day at a time. Im beside myself''

He is currently undergoing chemotherapy at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, Surrey, which specializes in cancer treatment.

Family friend Katie Evans explained: The plan was to get Denny through this four-week intensive treatment whilst raising the remaining 80,000 and then whisk him straight to America.

The consultant has been clear that he doesnt have long left if we dont get that treatment soon.

Now with Coronavirus everywhere, flying restrictions and concerns about traveling safely its unlikely he will be able to leave hospital.

Dennys only hope now is that this treatment  CAR T therapy for patients with CD22 leukaemia - miraculously appears in the UK.

Friend Katie Evans explained: The plan was to get Denny through this four-week intensive treatment whilst raising the remaining 80,000 and then whisk him straight to America. The consultant has been clear that he doesnt have long left if we dont get that treatment soon'

Dennys parents  Marianne and Dave  were hoping to him to the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia in the USA to take part in a clinical trial of CAR-T immune therapy for advanced leukaemia. This treatment is not available in the UK

He is currently undergoing chemotherapy at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, Surrey, which specializes in cancer treatment

Denny has spent more than half of his life in hospital after he was diagnosed with leukaemia when he was three.

He has undergone various treatments, including a stem cell transplant, which have failed to cured him.
Within two days, with $490, Kaiboussi bought three Chromebooks and two Windows 10 laptops, not knowing whod get them. He coordinated with Farnsworth staff, who let him know of three parents who could use computers for their children. He dropped off one at the school for the first parent, and his wife delivered two others, including a Chromebook for Lizette Alvarado, whose daughter is in second grade with one of the Kaiboussi children.
This is the shocking moment a teenager leaps for his life through the window of a moving car to escape a knife attack.

The terrified man dodges repeated thrusts of the deadly blade as he backs away from the two yobs wearing masks during the incident in Leeds.

He then turns tail and runs towards his friend's black Peugeot 107 - diving through the open window into the passenger seat.

The enraged knifeman hacks at the body work of the vehicle before both attackers turn on a second man trying to run away.

The terrified turns tail and runs towards his friend's black Peugeot 107 - diving through the open window into the passenger seat

The enraged knifeman hacks at the body work of the vehicle before both attackers turn on a second man trying to run away

The brutes batter him to the pavement before halting the attack as the car returns - giving their victim the chance to get up and escape.

Seconds later, a second car appears and the driver orders the knifeman and his pal to get in before driving off.

The man they beat up then jumps back in the Peugeot and all three men set off in pursuit of the other car - as bystanders joke and laugh about the brawl.

The running battle was caught on camera in Leeds yesterday as youths attack each other with weapons on Brudenell Road

Cries of 'Put the knife down' are heard at the start of the video but the two men behind the camera later start chuckling over the violence

The footage was captured in Leeds, West Yorkshire outside the landmark Grade Two listed Hyde Park Picture House in Brudenell Road, on Wednesday lunchtime.

Cries of 'Put the knife down' are heard at the start of the video but the two men behind the camera later start chuckling over the violence.

West Yorkshire Police is investigating the incident.
Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  A public defender representing clients in the 1st Judicial District in Santa Fe has tested positive for COVID-19.

The attorney, 48-year-old Jennifer Burrill, was confirmed to have the virus Tuesday night.

In a phone interview Wednesday night, Burrill said she has a sharp pain in her lungs, but few other symptoms. She is at her Santa Fe home with two other family members, but plans to continue working while at home.

Im going to keep working to try to get my clients out of jail, she said, adding that she thinks its outrageous that so many of them  particularly those accused of non-violent offenses  are still there. Its ridiculous that upwards of 50% on the jail population are there for drug and alcohol crimes. Its ridiculous that they are still in jail.

Burrill said she hasnt felt right physically for several weeks now, but she has not run a fever. Her symptoms were a mild headache and cough, but she continued to go to work because she didnt have a fever.

We all kind of go to work and dont feel good sometimes, she said.

She and two other attorneys from the Law Office of the Public Defender tried to get tested March 4 but were turned away because they didnt meet the full criteria for getting tested, she said.

Altogether, she tried to get tested four times, she said, before a test was finally done Sunday morning at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center in Santa Fe. By then, she had a severe cough and was experiencing a sharp pain in her lungs.

She didnt go to work at all this week while awaiting for results.

In a news release, the Law Office of the Public Defender said office administrators were performing a contact history of the attorney, who it did not name, over the past several days. They have been reaching out to people who potentially could have been in contact with the attorney, according to Maggie Shepard, a spokeswoman for the public defenders office.

We will also be doing a deep cleaning of the office, she said.

The news release states that the attorney had limited contact with inmates and court personnel and that the LOPD, located at 301 North Guadalupe in Santa Fe, will remain closed until at least April 12.

Shepard said typically about 50 employees work from the office, including human resources, fiscal and budgetary units.

Those people have mostly been working at home, but we have had attorneys still coming in to get files, Shepard said.

She credited the Santa Fe magistrate court and 1st Judicial District Courts switch to telephonic court hearings, as well as the Santa Fe County jail and the Law Offices of the Public Defender, for taking early preventative measures to reduce the chances of anyone contracting the virus.

Burrill said its critical that more testing gets done.

Its hard to get tested if you dont know someone who has already contracted the virus, she said.

Burrill said she appreciated the steps Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has taken so far to limit the spread, but she needs to do more.

I applaud her for the things she has done to try to flatten the curve, but the reality is her plan for tackling this is missing a key component and thats testing, she said.

Tripp Stelnicki, a spokesman for the governors office, said theres only so much state government can do.

The governor wants to test everyone in New Mexico. We want universal testing. But to do that, we need federal help, and thats not going to happen tomorrow and its not going to happen next week, he said, adding that he was basing his statement on President Donald Trumps rhetoric. To be clear about the governors intention, right now we have to test symptomatic people, and were working to do everything we can on that front.

As for taking steps to reduce the inmate population in the jails, Thats a jail question, not a prison question. Certainly counties can do that but the state doesnt have that leeway, he said. To the extent that we would release people, and Im not an expert on the subject, but I dont think the state can do that.

Stelnicki said that the state is doing everything it can to suppress spread of the virus and the administration hopes anyone who has contracted the virus recovers quickly.

They are in our prayers, he said.

Burrill said other states have made accommodations for releasing jail inmates, such as releasing non-violent offenders, people over 65 years of age or those with less than a year left on their sentence. She criticized government officials in New Mexico for not doing enough.

We have a national crisis, we have a state crisis, and nothing has been done to get non-violent offenders out of jail. If it gets into the jails, and I cant see how it hasnt already, it will spread like wildfire, she said, adding that its almost impossible to keep people away from each other in a densely populated jail. They are sitting ducks.
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Members of President Donald Trump's coronavirus task force hold a press briefing Thursday at the White House as the outbreak continues to expand rapidly in the United States

The crisis has roiled the stock market and ground the economy to a halt amid restrictive measures meant to contain the spread.

On Thursday morning, Trump tweeted that he plans to provide an update at the briefing on the G20's virtual meeting and a teleconference with governors.

Tweet

Trump told U.S. governors in a letter on Thursday that the administration will soon set new guidelines, identifying "high-risk, medium risk and low-risk" counties to help officials decide on "maintaining, increasing or relaxing social distancing and other mitigation measures they have put in place."

The briefing also comes after the Senate passed a $2 trillion economic stimulus bill to help prop up the economy.

The 880-page legislation offers relief to individuals, businesses and health facilities. It includes direct payments to individuals, stronger unemployment insurance, loans and grants to businesses and more healthcare resources for hospitals, states and municipalities.

The House aims to vote on the bill on Friday. It would then go to the president, who has vowed to sign it into law.

Trump initially downplayed the impact of the outbreak but has since changed his tune. Earlier this month, he declared a national emergency, a move that freed up financial resources to assist Americans affected by the health crisis.

Health officials for weeks have been urging Americans to take strong precautions as coronavirus cases multiply. Earlier this month, the WHO declared the outbreak a pandemic, saying it expects "to see the number of cases, the number of deaths and the number of affected countries to climb even higher."

Task force members include Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci and Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli, among others.

The coronavirus, which is believed to have originated in Wuhan, China, has spread to dozens of countries, with more than 480,446 confirmed cases worldwide and at least 21,571 deaths so far, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. There are at least 69,197 cases in the United States and at least 1,046 deaths, according to the latest tallies.

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The north addition of Williams College's $204 million science center project is still under construction.

Worker Associated with Williams Construction Project Tests Positive for COVID-19

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.  An employee of one of the subcontractors on the Williams College's Science Center North Addition project has tested positive for COVID-19, the general contractor Wednesday informed those working at the site.

The college Wednesday said the person in question had not done work on the campus project.

On Wednesday afternoon, other workers were still on the job site, and the college has announced no plans to suspend work on the project.

Barr & Barr Inc., of New York, on Wednesday sent a message to all vendors and subcontractors associated with the project.

The one-page letter quotes a message Barr & Barr received at 7 a.m. Wednesday from Comalli Group, an electrical construction firm with offices in Pittsfield and Albany, N.Y.

"Yesterday, we learned that an employee in our service department tested positive with Covid-19 [sic]," the Comalli letter reads. "He has been in quarantine since Sunday, March 15th.

"Yesterday, out of an abundance of caution we recommended that anyone who had come in contact with this person stay home until Sunday, March 29th. This includes 2 people who have been on the Williams Project, neither of whom is symptomatic."

A Williams spokesperson said the Comalli employee who tested positive works in the firm's service department and had not been on the science center project site.

Additionally, Barr & Barr's letter said a second subcontractor, PDC, "advised one of its field tradesmen has a child at home with flu-like symptoms and the child is being tested."

The PDC worker in question is self-quarantined until the child's test results are back, Barr & Barr said.

The general contractor used the Wednesday letter to remind all on the project about its protocols for preventing spread of the novel coronavirus. Any worker should be tested and self quarantine if he or she: shows or reports flu-like symptoms; has recently been out of the country; or has personal contact with anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19.

"You need to advise Barr & Barr ASAP if any of the above occur," the letter read.

Williams College Director of Media Relations Gregory Shook said the college is constantly reviewing its protocols for maintaining safety at the site.

"We're awaiting a plan from Barr and Barr for what action they would take assuming a positive case on their construction site, as well as a plan showing their actions in response to a more stringent approach from the Governor closing construction sites," Shook wrote Wednesday in reply to an email seeking comment.

Williams College was one of the first major employees in the area to order its employees to find work-from-home alternatives when it announced on March 12 that it was ending in-person classes after March 14 and moving to a remote learning model, sending its students home for the remainder of the semeter.

Although Gov. Charlie Baker on Monday issued an order closing all non-essential businesses in the commonwealth effective noon Tuesday, construction projects  private and public  are on the list of businesses deemed "essential."

The governor's office Wednesday issued guidance to municipalities about the "Essential Services Order" that discussed the status of construction projects and included four pages of guidelines and procedures for contractors must follow.

"The economic disruption and interruption in critical services and functions that could result from halting construction projects abruptly would be felt statewide and not simply in the locality where a particular project sits," wrote Robert C. Ross, the governor's chief legal counsel. "For these reasons, construction projects should continue as long as they observe social distancing protocols and otherwise can continue to operate safely."

Baker was asked about the provision for construction work in his news conference on Tuesday and addressed the topic again on Wednesday afternoon.

"There's no question if people are going to be working on construction, on job sites, they need access to sinks, warm water, hand sanitizer and a commitment to implementing the physical distancing and the social distancing," Baker said on Wednesday. "Local communities had made clear to us that they look forward to ensuring that the sites in their communities that are engaged in activity, live up to those standards and if they don't, they'll do something about it, which is exactly as it should be."

The state's guidelines for construction job sites open with an admonition in all capital letters: "ZERO TOLERANCE FOR SICK WORKERS REPORTING TO WORK. IF YOU ARE SICK, STAY HOME! IF YOU FEEL SICK, GO HOME! IF YOU SEE SOMEONE SICK, SEND THEM HOME!"

It continues to say that prior to every shift, each employee "will self-certify to their supervisor" that they don't have a fever, have not had "close contact" with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 and have not been asked to self-isolate or quarantine by a doctor or local public health official.

Construction workers are required to maintain a 6-foot minimum distance from their co-workers, and "all surfaces should be regularly cleaned, including surfaces, door handles, laptops, etc.," the guidance reads. And each jobsite "should have laminated COVID-19 safety guidelines and handwashing instructions."

In addition, the commonwealth's guidelines state, on Page 4, "A site-specific COVID-19 Officer (who may also be the Health and Safety Officer) shall be designated for every site."

The guidance document -- which is legally mandated for publicly-funded projects -- concludes:

"The approved project Health and Safety Plan shall be modified to require that the contractor's site-specific project COVID-19 Officer submit a written daily report to the owner's representative. The COVID-19 Officer shall certify that the contractor and all subcontractors are in full compliance with these guidelines.

"Any issue of non-compliance with these guidelines shall be a basis for the suspension of work. ..."

Massachusetts Construction COVID-19 Guidance with Letter by iBerkshires.com on Scribd
Scientists are investigating whether coronavirus spread to Italy last year after noticing 'significant' increases in those admitted for pneumonia and flu.

The higher than usual numbers were detected in Milan and Lodi, two of Lombardy's worst hit cities, between October and December.

Adriano Decarli, an epidemiologist at the University of Milan, could not give exact figures but said 'hundreds' more patients had been taken to hospital in the last three months of 2019 with pneumonia and flu-like symptoms, and some of those had died.

Decarli is reviewing the hospital records and other clinical details of those cases, including people who later died at home, to try to understand whether the new coronavirus epidemic had already spread to Italy back then.

A medic checks a woman's temperature on Wednesday at Milan Central Station during the COVID-19 Coronavirus emergency lockdown

Coronavirus infected patients arrive and are transferred by ambulance in Lodi, one of the worst hit cities in Italy

'We want to know if the virus was already here in Italy at the end of 2019, and - if yes - why it remained undetected for a relatively long period so that we could have a clearer picture in case we have to face a second wave of the epidemic,' he said.

The World Health Organization has said the new coronavirus and COVID-19, the respiratory disease it causes, were unknown before the outbreak was first reported in Wuhan, in central China, in December.

Decarli said once his research was concluded, local health authorities might decide to request authorisation to exhume bodies of people with suspect symptoms.

Other experts cast doubt on the hypothesis that the new virus could have been circulating in Europe before the end of 2019.

'I think it extremely unlikely that the virus was present in Europe before January,' said Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at Britain's University of East Anglia who has been tracking the evolving pandemic.

Hunter said that unless Italian scientists get positive results from samples taken and stored at that time, then the suggestion should not be given credence.

He added that, given what we know about how infectious the virus is, and the ratio of patients showing no symptoms compared with those that get sick, 'it is inconceivable that we would not have had a pretty major epidemic in Europe much earlier if these cases had in fact been COVID-19'.

A pharmacist delivers protective masks during the Coronavirus emergency, Codogno, Lodi

Italian Army Alpini corps take a break as they prepare a new hospital in the spaces of the Bergamo Fair, in Bergamo

Italy, which now has the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world, recorded its first case of infection on February 21, though some scientists think the virus began circulating in the country at least a month earlier.

'The virus was already here in the second half of January,' said Massimo Galli, head of the infectious disease unit at Milan's Sacco hospital and a professor at the department of biomedical and clinical sciences at the University of Milan.

He said, however, that the probability of the virus circulating in Italy before January was 'very low'.

Giuseppe Remuzzi, director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, in Milan, said some family doctors in Lombardy had reported unusual cases of pneumonia late last year that now looked potentially suspicious.

A coffin is carried to be aligned with others on the floor in the San Giuseppe church in Seriate, one of the areas worst hit by coronavirus, near Bergamo, Italy

A convoy of military vehicles carrying coffins arrives at the Monumental Cemetery on Thursday

He said among those were several cases of bilateral pneumonia - which means both lungs are affected - in the areas of Gera D'Adda and Crema in late November and December, with high fever, cough, fatigue and difficulty breathing.

'None of these cases have been documented as COVID-19 because there was no evidence yet of the existence of COVID-19,' he said.

Remuzzi said that if evidence of COVID-19 cases in Italy as far back as November was confirmed, this may signal that the virus can go undetected for months.

He said some reports in scientific journals had also led other scientists to question whether the virus may have emerged in China as early as October.
Four countries led by war-ravaged Mali on Wednesday joined the lengthening list of African countries hit by the novel coronavirus as Kenya ordered a curfew and unveiled tax breaks in the fight against the pandemic.

Mali, mired in an eight-year-old conflict, said two nationals who had returned from France had tested positive for the virus.

Libya, another conflict-torn country, as well as the volatile West African state of Guinea-Bissau and Uganda in East Africa also reported their first cases of COVID-19.

More than 2,400 cases were recorded in all of Africa as of Wednesday, according to an AFP tally, with 64 deaths.

Although Africa's toll is far lower than in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, health experts say the world's poorest continent is especially vulnerable to the virus and the figures likely fall far short of the reality.

African states including Nigeria have been adopting increasingly restrictive measures against the invisible peril. By PIUS UTOMI EKPEI (AFP/File)

"We must prepare for the worst (because) we have no idea of the scope of the propagation" in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2018 Nobel Peace laureate Denis Mukwege said Wednesday.

Mukwege called for "large-scale" testing across the vast former Belgian colony of 80 million inhabitants, which reported 48 cases of COVID-19 as of Tuesday, with three deaths.

Poor healthcare infrastructure, weak governance and crowded slums present ideal conditions for the respiratory disease to spread.

Conflict, in particular, is a major factor in aggravating the risk.

Mali is struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency that erupted in the north in 2012 and has since claimed thousands of military and civilian lives.

The government earlier banned commercial flights from virus-stricken countries.

The UN on Wednesday put the spotlight on the Central African Republic (CAR), also gripped by conflict.

CAR "is one of the least prepared countries to face a COVID-19 outbreak, with 2.2 million people already in need of health assistance and about 70 percent of health services provided by humanitarian organisations," the country's coronavirus Global Humanitarian Response Plan warned.

Pay cut for Kenyatta

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta meanwhile ordered a nighttime curfew to curb the spread of the coronavirus, while taking a massive pay cut and unveiling tax breaks to ease the economic impact of the crisis.

South Sudan has ordered a nightly lockdown. Here, passengers from an international flight are given a temperature screening at Juba airport. By Alex McBride (AFP/File)

In a lengthy address to the nation, Kenyatta warned he would not hesitate to take "more drastic measures" if Kenyans did not make efforts to limit the spread of the virus, which has sickened 28 in the country.

African states have been adopting increasingly restrictive measures against the invisible peril.

Senegal and Ivory Coast have declared states of emergency and ordered nighttime curfews, similar to South Sudan, which has ordered a nightly lockdown from 8:00 pm to 6:00 am.

South Africa, the continent's largest economy, is set to enter a lockdown from Thursday.

Screening ahead of South Africa's lockdown to begin on Thursday. By Phill Magakoe (AFP)

Ethiopia announced Wednesday it would free more than 4,000 prisoners to help prevent an outbreak in overcrowded prisons.

The measures will apply to those jailed for "petty crimes" and drug offences or have less than a year remaining on their sentences.

Conditions in Ethiopia's prisons are "harsh and in some cases life-threatening," marred by "gross overcrowding and inadequate food, water, sanitation and medical care," according to the latest annual human rights report on Ethiopia from the US State Department.

'Panic mode'

In the Nigerian capital Abuja, meanwhile, fears spread of coronavirus infection among senior politicians.

A number of state governors as well as Vice President Yemi Osinbajo were in self-isolation after coming into contact with two individuals infected with COVID-19.

According to the president's office and local media, one of them is President Muhammadu Buhari's chief of staff, Abba Kyari, one of Nigeria's most influential figures.

The political elite "is in panic mode following the confirmed case of the chief of staff,"a source close to the presidency said.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 21:45:18|Editor: huaxia

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Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud attends the extraordinary G20 leaders' virtual summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, March 26, 2020. Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud called on Thursday upon the G20 countries to take responsibility for combating the COVID-19 pandemic. (Department of Public Information of Saudi Arabia/Handout via Xinhua)

RIYADH, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud called on Thursday upon the G20 countries to take responsibility for combating the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the opening of the extraordinary G20 leaders' virtual summit, King Salman said that the G20 countries should be responsible for financing research on therapeutics and vaccine against coronavirus.

"The impact of this pandemic has spread to reach the global economy, financial markets, trade, and global supply chains, hampering growth and development and reversing the gains accomplished in the previous years," he said.

The Saudi king said that the Saudi G20 Presidency took the lead and worked with partners and relevant organizations to take all necessary actions in order to contain the spread of COVID-19 and safeguard people's health.

He also emphasized the responsibility of the G20 to extend helping hand to developing countries and least developed countries to enable them to build their capacities and improve their infrastructure to overcome this crisis and its repercussions.
TDT | Manama

Finance and National Economy Minister Shaikh Salman bin Khalifa Al Khalifa directed yesterday the quick implementation of the BD4.3billion economic stimulus package.

The Finance Minister said that this is a top priority to support citizens and the private sector amidst the challenges presented by the coronavirus (COVID-19).

Meanwhile, Shaikh Salman and his GCC counterparts took part yesterday in a video conference to discuss unified efforts to tackle the impact of the coronavirus.

The GCC ministers discussed their countries precautionary measures to prevent a further outbreak of the virus as well as financial requirements to combat COVID-19 and mitigate its economic toll.

The minister highlighted economic and financial repercussions, stressing the continuous flow of trade exchanges between member countries through the border exits as well as means of stimulating economic activities, which were affected due to precautionary measures, and maintaining financial stability
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Former Vice President Joe Biden has unveiled his emergency action plan to save the economy. The plan contains a series of economic and health measures.

The Democratic presidential candidate also took aim at President Donalds response to the Covid-19 global pandemic.

Joe Biden knows that no economic strategy will work if we dont stop the virus, the Biden campaign said.

In recent days, theres been talk that we have to choose between public health and our economy. Thats not just a false choice. Its a dangerous one.

It would be catastrophic to reopen everything without a plan, and then have a spike in cases and shut it all back down. That would just mean more loss of life and economic pain. 

This directly contradicts President Trumps suggestions that the economy should reopen by Easter, defying the advice of medical experts.

Biden also posted a video on YouTube discussing his economic plan.

Weve got to help families weather the storm, Bidens video says.

Watch the video:

Time is of the essence, Biden said. I would call in the major banks and tell them to get those small business loans out the door.

Biden said he would appoint a task force that would answer directly to him. He also promised he would use authority like the Defense Production Act if necessary. President Trump has refused to invoke the act so far.

The Biden campaign welcomed the $2 trillion rescue package agreed by the Senate on Wednesday but emphasized that more would have to be done as the crisis continued.

The bottom line is that Congress will have to keep acting, the campaign said.

This is not the last bill. There will be more. And Joe Biden would do whatever it takes, spend whatever it takes, move heaven and earth to help all the people harmed by this crisis.

Follow Darragh Roche on Twitter
Dominik Obermaier is CTO of HiveMQ.

In IoT, millions of devices are networked together. A secure and reliable connection is essential for this. In an interiew with Elektronik, Dominik Obermaier explains how such a connection is achieved.

When and where did the idea for founding HiveMQ come up?



Dominik Obermaier: Christian Gotz and I got to know each other during our studies at HAW Landshut, where the idea for HiveMQ was born. At that time I was already working on software development projects. My luck was to meet Arlen Nipper, CTO and President of Eurotec in the USA. He invented and introduced the MQTT protocol together with Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM in 1999.



At the same time we had won a project in Italy where we automatically recorded the number of people on trains  the data was to be transmitted via the Internet. It was then that companies started to implement use cases for the Internet of Things and machine-to-machine communication. Analysts predicted a massive connectivity potential in IoT, so we asked ourselves how this could work, because it wouldn't work with the Internet of People, the technology is completely different.

So you decided to use the MQTT protocol?



Obermaier: We immediately thought of MQTT as networking technology  then the standard was also disclosed under a royalty-free license. This allowed us to use the technology for our project in Italy. In the next step we had the idea for a complete product based on the MQTT standard. Initially, we concentrated solely on the project business, but from 2013 on we continued to develop our own product  the HiveMQ MQTT Broker, which enables the fast, efficient and reliable transfer of data to and from networked IoT devices.

With one action we can connect up to 10 million devices 

What does the product look like?



Obermaier: HiveMQ is a server software that is capable of networking millions of IoT devices using MQTT. Our customers install HiveMQ on-premise or in a cloud. IoT devices or cars then exchange data bidirectionally via our MQTT Broker. This sounds trivial at first, but it is very complex and the foundation for the Internet of Things. Wherever I look, I see our software  our customers include many car manufacturers. HiveMQ is also used for Industry 4.0, or in the transportation sector, for example to track and control drones that deliver medical test samples.

HiveMQ is an MQTT broker and client-based messaging platform designed to transfer data to and from connected IoT devices quickly, efficiently, and reliably.

Why do OEMs rely on HiveMQ instead of competing products?



Obermaier: There are of course other manufacturers. In Germany, however, there were hardly any developers for MQTT. In 2014, we were the only ones in Germany besides Software AG to work on standardizing the MQTT protocol. In the meantime it has become an ISO standard and has spread in the industry accordingly. Together with companies like IBM, Software AG and Cisco, we have worked on the standardization of MQTT  we are the smallest company. In this way we have made a name for ourselves in the DACH region, increased attention and were able to win important customers for us.



In addition, our product has some unique selling points. With HiveMQ, up to 10 million devices can be networked simultaneously. In addition, we recognized early, that security is a key factor in networking, so we invested in security features and concepts. Another advantage of our product is flexibility. For example, we had a plug-in interface for our software very early on. This is important for ensuring security but also for mapping customer-specific use cases and is one of the reasons why we have won major customers. However, it is important to have the courage to invest and follow the path consistently.
Ko Min-jung, left, the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, and Oh Se-hoon from the main opposition United Future Party stage one-person election campaigns for the general election in the Gwangjin-B constituency in Seoul, March 11 and 12, respectively. The gap in approval rating between the former spokeswoman to President Moon Jae-in and former Seoul mayor is very close. Courtesy of Ko and Oh's election camps



This is the second in a series on battleground districts for April 15 general election.  ED.



Election result hard to predict with close gap in approval ratings between candidates



By Jung Da-min



A competition between a rookie and a veteran politicians is being held in Seoul's Gwangjin-B district for the April 15 general election.



They are ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) candidate Ko Min-jung, who is a former spokeswoman of President Moon Jae-in, and the main opposition United Future Party's (UFP) Oh Se-hoon, former Seoul mayor from 2006 to 2011.



The situation is, however, not entirely favorable to the veteran Oh, as Gwangjin-B has long been considered home territory for the liberal camp and no candidate from a conservative party has won here since 1996. But it is not that advantageous to Ko as well, as the gap in approval ratings between Ko and Oh is quite close.



According to a survey conducted by Research and Research of 502 eligible voters in the district from March 17 to 18, 43.2 percent of the respondents supported Ko while 40.27 percent preferred Oh. The survey has a 95 percent confidence level with a plus or minus 4.4 percentage point margin of error.



Compared to Oh, Ko's political career is rather short. Ko, 40, was a well-known TV anchorwoman for public broadcaster KBS before joining the election campaign team for then-presidential candidate Moon in 2017. After Moon took office, Ko worked at the public relations team at Cheong Wa Dae as vice spokeswoman and then spokeswoman before resigning from the post in mid-January to run in the general election.



Political watchers say that Ko would need a strategy of emphasizing her party, as the ruling party has a lead in surveys of party approval ratings, with the Research and Research survey showing 39.4 percent suppot for the DPK and 22.8 percent for the UFP.



On the other hand, Oh is advised to promote his career as a long-time politician who could be a presidential contender. Oh, 59, a lawyer-turned-lawmaker, made his political debut in 2000 when he was elected as a lawmaker of the then-main opposition Grand National Party, a predecessor of the UFP. In 2006, he was elected mayor of Seoul and re-elected in 2010. But he resigned from the post in 2011 after losing a referendum on the city's free school lunch program.



As a former spokeswoman for Moon, Ko's election is seen by many as a referendum on the Moon administration. Those supporting the government are expected to vote for her and those against it, for Oh.



In addition to her experience at Cheong Wa Dae, her short political career can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, because some residents worry about the lack of experience while others say they need a fresh figure who breaks from convention.



Oh's experience as Seoul mayor and lawmaker is big advantage. But some point out he has the image of one of the "old boys" in politics, and he also has to overcome Gwangjin-B residents' consistent support for the liberal bloc.



Political watchers also say the candidate who could win young people's votes could be a game changer. According to statistics from the Seoul Metropolitan Government, Gwangjin is the sixth-youngest district among 25 districts in the capital, with the average age of residents being 41.8.



Both candidates presented election promises targeting young people. Oh promised that he would build a "relief" center for those who live alone in studio apartments or multiplex housing units to provide a parcel receiving service. Ko promised that she would build a life-sharing platform called "Gwangjin One Town" for those living alone, which provides shared spaces like a kitchen or a garage and an online platform where people share information.



While some say old voters generally prefer a conservative candidate and young voters pick a liberal one, others say that such a widely known tendency is no longer valid when many young people criticized the Moon government over recent scandals that raised issues of fairness, including allegations of favorable treatment in academic studies of former Justice Minister Cho Kuk's daughter due to her parents' influence.


General Motors announces further crisis measures.

General Motors said on Thursday it would suspend production at its North American factories indefinitely, lay off 6,500 salaried employees and cut executive pay, signaling that the automaker believes that coronavirus will take a serious toll on its business.

We are actively monitoring the situation and the possible impact of the crisis on consumer demand, a G.M. spokesman, David Barnas, said. When we can safely resume production, we will.

G.M. and other automakers shut down their North American plants in the last few days in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus. Most had hoped to restart production next week, but have now scaled back those plans.
Geneva, Switzerland: The UN's health agency has faced criticism in the past for overreacting and for moving too slowly in fighting epidemics, but it has rarely faced as much scrutiny as with the coronavirus pandemic.

The World Health Organization was deemed too alarmist when it faced the H1N1 epidemic in 2009 but five years later, it was accused of dragging its feet in declaring an emergency over the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, which would go on to kill more than 11,000 people.

After that debacle, the WHO reformed and created a rapid response unit that has since helped to tackle two Ebola outbreaks in Democratic Republic of Congo.

And yet, the organisation is once again under fire, with critics saying it did not react quickly or strongly enough to the new coronavirus, which emerged in Wuhan, China, late last year.

The agency has been accused of delaying sounding the alarm for fear of offending Beijing, for waiting too long to declare the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic and for failing to coordinate a coherent international response.

Also, a consensus appears to be emerging on the need to close down public spaces to limit the spread but the WHO has given little guidance on these measures.

"WHO remains surprisingly silent and absent in all of these pragmatic questions," Antoine Flahault, head of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva, wrote in The Lancet medical review, asking: "Is there any orchestra conductor?"

'Enemy of humanity'

However, other commentators have praised WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and his team for giving sound guidance, instead criticising countries for failing to heed the advice.

Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, said the WHO's reaction was "hard to fault", adding that countries like South Korea that followed the advice to test, trace and contain have done better than others.

One of the central planks of criticism is that the WHO waited until March 11, when nearly 120,000 cases had already been registered, to declare the outbreak a pandemic -- a move that truly hit the accelerator on global efforts to rein in the virus.

By that time, the virus, dubbed an "enemy of humanity" by Tedros, had already taken hold in Europe, which soon overtook Asia as the epicentre of the outbreak.

With a dearth of tests, shortages of protective gear for health workers and vital medical equipment like ventilators, health systems even in wealthy nations have been pushed to the breaking point.

In a bid to halt the spread of a pandemic that has already claimed more than 21,000 lives, more than 3 billion people worldwide are now largely confined to their homes and economies have largely ground to a halt, threatening a global recession.

China conundrum

Despite the chaos, and evidence that Chinese officials hid the crisis for weeks and stifled doctors trying to sound the alarm, the WHO has praised Beijing for its early response.

Joseph Amon, a professor of global health at Drexel University in the United States, told AFP it was a "clear mistake and set an early tone by WHO that the epidemic was perhaps not as severe and that the initial response was adequate".

China told the WHO about an unknown form of pneumonia circulating in Wuhan on December 31, 2019. Experts say that if the world had learnt of the problem weeks earlier, it could probably have been reined in.

"If we had known about it then, then that could have made a huge difference," Roland Kao, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, told AFP.

But while experts agree there was certainly much to criticise in China's initial response, many say the WHO was right to highlight what the country got right, including quickly sharing the genetic sequencing of the virus and taking dramatic lockdown measures to slow the spread.

"To alienate China early in the process by pointing out mistakes would have been a mistake," Ann Lindstrand, in charge of WHO's expanded immunisation programme, told AFP, saying Beijing's cooperation was crucial.

"Tedros did the right thing."

Tedros himself has dismissed claims that he and WHO have bowed to Chinese pressure, stressing the collaborative relationship the agency has with its members.

"I don't consider anything that comes from member states as pressure," he told a news conference this month.

Some say the COVID-19 pandemic has actually revealed the opposite problem -- states need to feel pressure from the WHO but the agency simply does not have the power.

"Dr Tedros and WHO are working hard to conduct the orchestra, but the players are not cooperating," said Suerie Moon, the co-director of the Graduate Institute's Global Health Centre.
A former superhead who turned around a string of failing primary schools is suing for more than 200,000 after claiming his excessive workload left him damaged and depressed.

Sir Craig Tunstall was Britains highest paid headteacher, earning 374,000 a year as he ran eight primary schools in south London and was made the public face of plans for a new secondary Free School in September 2016.

However, he was suspended in 2017 amid a Lambeth council fraud investigation and dismissed from his role in February 2018 for gross misconduct.

Sir Craig, 49, who was knighted for services to education in 2014, is suing the council and his former employers, the Gipsy Hill Federation (GHF), which governed the schools.

He claims he faced an excessive workload, overseeing around 600 staff and 4,200 pupils, managing simultaneous Ofsted inspections, building projects and actual or threatened violence towards teachers.

He says he was unlawfully dismissed following a flawed disciplinary process and is now unable to work and plagued by nightmares and depression.

His representative Asela Wijeyaratne said in a written claim at the High Court that he faced a work pressure which was too great... which was injurious to the claimants health.

[He] was given less than a weeks notice before being installed as executive headteacher of a failing school, the lawyer argued.

He had sole responsibility for making wide-ranging structural changes to the management, teaching staff, values and teaching methods.

Sir Craig was hired by the council in May 2002 as headteacher of Kingswood Primary School, helping to lift it out of special measures to a rating of outstanding by 2009. GHF was formed in 2008 by a partnership with Elm Wood Primary School in West Norwood and between 2010 and 2015 Sir Craig took charge of a further six failing schools.

Mr Wijeyaratne accused the council and Sir Craigs employers of negligence, breach of contract and breach of statutory duty and said he should not have been put in charge of the Free School project unless someone took on his existing headteacher duties.

He said Sir Craig had to work long hours, weekends and holidays while helming the project and also handle hostile public reaction to the plans.

When a fraud investigation was launched, Sir Craig was hauled in for questioning in March 2017 without warning, he claims, and sacked the following year after a disciplinary hearing he refused to attend on health grounds. He says he has not yet been told if the council plans to refer the fraud investigation to the police.

Mr Wijeyaratne said the prognosis for his ability to undertake any other type of employment in the future is currently poor. Sir Craig lodged the damages claim at the High Court in November last year, with papers made public this week, and has brought separate employment tribunal proceedings alleging unfair dismissal.
Nearly 50,000 trips were made by residents of the two EU countries worst hit by the coronavirus Covid-19 in the month before the coronavirus emerged as a deadly epidemic in Europe.

Irish Central Statistics Office figures show that 19,700 trips were made by residents of Italy to Ireland during February. More than 26,000 people travelled from Spain.

The first Covid-19 case was recorded in Italy on January 31. Since then more than 7,500 people have died and over 74,000 infections have been confirmed.

The next worst-hit country was Spain from where 26,100 trips were made to Ireland by residents of the country in February. More than 56,000 people have tested positive for the virus and over 4,000 people have died from the disease in Spain.

There were 26,700 trips by people residing in France, the third worst-hit country in the EU. It has more than 25,000 cases confirmed with over 1,300 deaths.

In total, 615,200 trips were made to Ireland in February by people residing around the world. It was the busiest February for inward travel to the country for a number of years.

A total of 282,100 trips were made from people living in Great Britain. There were 38,100 visits made by residents of Germany.

The figures show that 81,300 trips were made by people living in the USA or Canada.

More than 559,000 were made by Irish residents abroad during February.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade advises against all non-essential travel overseas at least until March 29. This advice came into operation for France and Spain in early March.








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In the last days, many researchers have warned about secret, dark plans to purge humanity by using biological agents like the infamous nCovid-19.

One of these researchers, British journalist Davey Gray, has recently suggested that the British government could be implementing a eugenic plan to wipe out a part of the UK population.

In an article published on online newspaper Dorset Eye, Mr Gray affirmed that one of the key themes that stains the Conservative Party is an ulterior motive for eugenics.

When you add piece by piece [UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnsons response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, you are left with only a few options as to why the United Kingdom have opted for a do nothing response, he said. One of the key themes that stains the Conservative Party is an ulterior motive for eugenics. Its a reasonable explanation that must be explored to explain the governments poor response to the countrys outbreak, he added.

In the opinion of the journalist, Johnsons strategy has been suspicious, to say the least. While most of the countries are taking severe measure to stop spreading the virus, UK authorities still look quite calm. Boris response does not compare well with other countries. Nearly every single country that is affected by the outbreak have begun banning social activities, attending school or work and banning flights from devastated regions, he said. The UK government is yet to enforce any means of significant social distancing, with the exception of self-isolation for seven days, even though the virus is reported to last between 14 and 24 days, he mentioned.

Then, Mr Gray explains the implication of what some British experts have called herd immunity. Herd immunity allows a large number of the UK population to catch coronavirus by working its way through the community. It is the view of some medical experts that as a nation most of us will develop an immunity to the disease, he asserted. I agree on the surface the response may appear to help the vulnerable. However, in order to reach a stage of herd immunity we will be sacrificing the most vulnerable and elderly to reach this point, he expressed.

To adopt these policies during a public health crisis is ultimately a trial to put eugenic theories into practice, the journalist warned. It is nothing but an attempt to force a virus through the population, he insisted.

Draw your own conclusions

For more information: https://dorseteye.com/a-eugenics-tory-story-boris-coronavirus-experimentation/
Twenty-five years ago, on March 26th 1995, the provisions implementing the Schengen Agreements, which had been signed 10 years before, entered into force. These provisions included the removal of border controls which marked one of the most tangible achievements of European integration.

SIP / Emmanuel Claude Illustration : the 25th anniversary of the entry into force of the Schengen Agreements SIP / Yves Kortum Jean Asselborn, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs, Minister of Immigration and Asylum SIP Illustration : Schengen

Step by step, the audacious dream of free movement was coming true!

In the meantime, the Schengen acquis has been incorporated into Union law through the Amsterdam Treaty and the Schengen area now covers 26 states among which Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland which are not members of the European Union.

Implementing the rules of the Schengen area means removing border controls within the area and therefore strengthening the controls on its outside borders.

This achievement is now being put to the test.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, borders have been closed, causing enormous backlogs, blocking people who wish to go home, impeding workers commute  many of whom are on the frontline in the fight against the virus  and furthermore complicating the delivery of essential goods, most notably medical supplies and food.

In these difficult times, Luxembourg is doing its utmost to facilitate the movement of cross-border workers and to ensure the continued transport of essential goods.

Today, the lives of many of our fellow citizens depend on the unhindered transit of workers, citizens being repatriated, essential medical supplies and goods.

We need solidarity more than ever, and the rules of the Schengen area provide the framework for cooperation which will enable us to face this unprecedented challenge together. Therefore, I call upon all to restore Schengen without delay. The reintroduction of border controls at our common borders can only be occasional and temporary and must be done in accordance with the Treaties.

Luxembourg calls out for this edifice, which is both the symbol of our Union and freedoms and which has become essential to our solidarity and prosperity, to be preserved.

Press release by the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs
[March 26, 2020] Bardstown Bourbon Company and Moonshine University search for 'World's Top Whiskey Taster'

BARDSTOWN, Ky., March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Bardstown Bourbon Company, 1500 Parkway Drive, is excited to launch an online search for the "World's Top Whiskey Taster," presented by Moonshine University. The contest calls on whiskey lovers, enthusiasts, fans and connoisseurs to compete for a grand prize of $20,000, a scholarship to Moonshine University's Executive Bourbon Steward program, and the opportunity to represent Bardstown Bourbon Company as a Distillery Ambassador at some of the world's most preeminent whiskey festivals in 2021. The competition consists of three phases, starting with an invitation to submit an audition video showcasing the contestants' passion for all things bourbon: PHASE 1  Video Submissions: Submit a 1-minute video to YouTube, Instagram or Facebook and be sure to tag #WorldsTopWhiskeyTaster. Share your submission URL and contact information to BardstownBourbon.com/WTWT. Videos should showcase your passion for bourbon, interest in an ambassadorship and palate prowess. Online video submissions are now being accepted and will be open through June 15, 2020. PHASE 2  Regional Qualifiers: Bardstown Bourbon Company and Moonshine University will select up to 10 submissions per market to compete in live sensory challenges at some of the nation's most prominent bourbon bars. Regional qualifiers will be held in Louisville, Kentucky; Nashville, Tennessee; Indianapolis, Indiana; Chicago, Illinois; San Francisco, California; Miami, Florida; Denver, Colorado; Las Vegas, Nevada; Washington, D.C.; and Dallas, Texas. A complete list of these events will be announced at a future date. PHASE 3  National Finals: One winner from each qualifier will be invited to compete for the top prize and title of "World's Top Whiskey Taster." The final event will take place this fall at Bardstown Bourbon Company in the Bourbon Capital of the world. "Entrants are encouraged to be creative and have fun," said Bardstown Bourbon Company Vice President of Sales & Marketing Herb Heneman. "Tell us what makes your palate as good as it is. Show us things like your favorite bourbon cocktail, your most impressive or underrated pairing, or pick the most amazing bottle in your stash and geek out on it. But most of all, tell us what representing Bardstown Bourbon Company as a Distillery Ambassador would mean to you." Phase 2 contestants will be selected in June and invited to compete in regional competitions featuring bourbon sensory and tasting challenges, such as identifying a bourbon's producer, age, mash-bill and proof, among others. Each conest will be hosted by prominent distillers, journalists and experts from Moonshine University, the creators and curators of the Stave & Thief Society's Executive Bourbon Steward training program in Louisville, Kentucky.



"The challenges contestants will face at these live events will truly put their sensory expertise to the test," said Moonshine University's Director of Spirits Education Colin Blake. "Where many other competitions have showcased mixology skills, this contest is  to my knowledge  the first to put contestants' palates to work. The 'World's Top Whiskey Taster' challenge will ask bourbon lovers to apply much of what we teach in our Executive Bourbon Steward training to practice." The winner from each regional event will then travel to Bardstown Bourbon Company during Bourbon Heritage month in September to compete for the national title.

By the end of the competition, one champion will be crowned and awarded a cash prize of $20,000 with a contract to represent Bardstown Bourbon Company as a Distillery Ambassador at some of the country's top whiskey festivals in 2021, including WhiskyFest and Whiskies of the World. The winner will also receive a scholarship to Moonshine University's Executive Bourbon Steward certification program, and a trip to Bardstown, Kentucky, where they'll blend a custom product with Bourbon Hall of Famer and Bardstown Bourbon Company Master Distiller Steve Nally. "We're looking for people who are all about exploring and sharing their bourbon experience," said Bardstown Bourbon Company National Brand Ambassador Sam Montgomery. "We invite social media bourbon evangelists who are actively snapping and sharing photos of pours and pairings, as well as travelers and bourbon explorers who love to share their tales." Candidates must be at least 21 years old to enter. The winner will be considered an independent contractor of Bardstown Bourbon Company. This prize does not constitute an offer for employment. For full contest rules, terms and conditions, please visit:

BardstownBourbon.com/WTWT/RULES To upload an audition video or for more information, please visit:

BardstownBourbon.com/WTWT Click here for a high-resolution photo. About Bardstown Bourbon Company:

Located in the heart of Bourbon Country on 100 acres of active farmland, Bardstown Bourbon Company is one of the country's most modern and technically advanced whiskey distilleries. Celebrating the art of making high-quality and authentic whiskey, the innovative distillery produces custom rye, whiskey, and bourbon for prominent brands including Jefferson's, High West, Belle Meade, Hirsch, and many others through its one-of-a-kind Collaborative Distilling Program. Bardstown Bourbon Company honors tradition and drives innovation with its exceptional destination experience for visitors, offering the only full-service restaurant located within a distillery on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, The Kitchen and Bar at Bardstown Bourbon Company. The company was founded in 2014 by Peter Loftin . For more information, please visit bardstownbourbon.com or follow us on Facebook and Instagram . About Moonshine University:

Founded by David Dafoe in 2012, Moonshine University is the nation's premier educational distillery and the exclusive educational member of the Kentucky Distillers' Association. Located in the heart of bourbon country, Moonshine University offers comprehensive, hands-on spirits education courses and services to entrepreneurs and professionals from around the world. As of 2019, graduates of this course have gone on to successfully launch 165 distilleries worldwide and counting. Moonshine University also houses the Stave & Thief Society, a comprehensive, hands-on bourbon certification program established to promote Kentucky's distinguished bourbon culture. For more information, please visit moonshineuniversity.com and staveandthief.com. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bardstown-bourbon-company-and-moonshine-university-search-for-worlds-top-whiskey-taster-301030512.html SOURCE Bardstown Bourbon Company

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The US Senate has approved a historic $2 trillion bill to stimulate the sagging US economy.

This is also the largest-ever rescue package in the nations history and provides a lifeline to suffering Americans, depleted hospitals and an economy ravaged by the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19 outbreak.

After weeks of negotiations, the deal thrashed out between Republicans, Democrats and the White House includes cash payments to American taxpayers; several hundred billion dollars in grants and loans to small businesses and core industries; medical equipment to hospitals and unemployment benefits.

The Senate cleared these measures by an overwhelming majority. The bill is now headed next to the House of Representatives, which must also pass it before it goes to President Donald Trump for his signature.

To catch all live updates on the coronavirus pandemic, click here

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

The bill sets aside $250 billion for direct payments to individuals and families, $350 billion in small business loans, $250 billion in unemployment insurance benefits and $500 billion in loans for distressed companies.

Individuals earning less than $75,000 in adjusted gross income would directly receive $1,200 each. Married couples earning up to $150,000 will receive $2,400 and an additional $500 per each child.

The payments would be scaled down by income and phased out entirely at $99,000 for singles and $198,000 for couples without children.

In a major relief to hospitals, the bill provides $130 billion. Cash-strapped state and local governments too will receive a $150 billion lifeline.

Interestingly, the bill has provisions that would block Trump and his family members, as well as other top government officials and members of Congress, from accessing loans or investments from Treasury programmes in the stimulus package.

(With agency inputs)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 17:44:48|Editor: huaxia

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RAMALLAH, March 26 (Xinhua) -- A senior Palestinian official said on Thursday that the Palestinian Authority sent a request to several countries for medical supplies, including testing kits, to combat the spread of COVID-19.

"There is a big shortage of medical supplies, including testing kits and sets, to combat the virus in the Palestinian territories," said Hussein al-Sheikh, minister of civil affairs, in a short press statement.

"Intensive efforts are made by contacting several countries to bring the needed testing kits" to Palestine, he added.

Earlier in the day, the Palestinian government announced that the number of the Palestinians infected with COVID-19 has climbed to 86.
Amid the ongoing chaos across the globe due to the increase in the number of positive cases of novel coronavirus, people across the globe are left with so many questions and doubts in their minds. On Tuesday night, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, announced a nationwide lockdown for 21 days until April 15 in a bid to control the spread of the deadly virus. So between the jigs and reels, many people including the law enforcement officials were unsure of how to tackle the current scenario leading to severe inconvenience in times of an unprecedented crisis.

Recently, e-commerce companies delivering essentials like groceries, medicines and food alleged that they are facing harassment by the police officials and security guards. As per the news reports, the online retailers have called for an urgent intervention from the government on the same. Besides, a huge amount of fresh

produce had to be dumped because of the disruptions, they said. Speaking on the same, K Ganesh, promoter of online platforms like BigBasket, FreshMenu and Portea Medical, said in an interview with NDTV that over the last few days, policemen have abused, assaulted and in one case even arrested a delivery agent leading to huge disruption in their activities.

"Even though the government has taken the right step and has been categorical in exempting essential services and have specified essential services like online delivery of goods, groceries, food, medicines and medical equipment, that message has not gone to the people down the line," Ganesh said. He added, "The cop there

does not know that it's an essential service, he has no mechanism to allow and disallow somebody. In many cases, they are being harsh, they are beating up people. In Kerala, one of our health workers going to service a patient was arrested.

He further said, "People are risking their lives, please don't beat them up. Challan them. If people run away because their colleagues are beaten up, we cannot do anything. Don't beat up people trying to deliver goods and services.

Echoing similar sentiments,popular online grocery retailer Grofers and meat delivery platform FreshToHome, also said they were facing obstructions from local authorities in delivering as they were conforming to the coronavirus lockdown indiscriminately. Founder of Grofers, Saurabh Kumar tweeted that they are facing trouble in getting essentials delivered to people who need them as their warehouses were being asked to shut by the authorities. He wrote, We @grofers are having a lot of trouble getting essentials to people who need them as our warehouses are asked to shut, and trucks and delivery partners are being stopped by the police. We apologise to our customers and are working hard to find a solution. (sic)

We @grofers are having a lot of trouble getting essentials to people who need them as our warehouses are asked to shut, and trucks and delivery partners are being stopped by the police. We apologise to our customers and are working hard to find a solution.  Saurabh Kumar (@theknownface) March 22, 2020

.@grofers warehouses cater to 5000 to 10000 orders daily so for every facility that gets shut we risk that many households venturing out for grocery buying. Hoping sense prevails here. We apologise to our customers again. We are trying our best to get all our facilities up.  Saurabh Kumar (@theknownface) March 23, 2020

He also wrote, Despite assurances that grocery is an essential service and @grofers should continue to operate, police and local authorities continue to shut warehouses. All the proactive initiatives of govt and central authorities is going to waste because of overzealous enforcement agencies. (sic)

Despite assurances that grocery is an essential service and @grofers should continue to operate, police and local authorities continue to shut warehouses. All the proactive initiatives of govt and central authorities is going to waste because of overzealous enforcement agencies.  Saurabh Kumar (@theknownface) March 23, 2020

Adding to that, another e-tailer Freshtohome said, Home Delivery Associates are doing the job of Rashtra Rakshaks, serving a noble cause of delivering food and grocery, but across the country, we are facing hurdles in delivering orders, request you to declare home delivery as an essential service.@PMOIndia. (sic)

Home Delivery Associates are doing the job of Rashtra Rakshaks, serving a noble cause of delivering food and grocery, but across the country, we are facing hurdles in delivering orders, request you to declare home delivery as an essential service.@PMOIndia  Freshtohome - 100% Fresh 0% Chemicals (@myfreshtohome) March 23, 2020

The disruptions have led to severe wastage. In a message to customers, grocery and milk delivery website MilkBasket said it was forced to dump 15,000 litres of milk and 10,000 kg of vegetables. Sadly, it said it will not be able to deliver fresh milk in Gurgaon, Noida and Hyderabad even on Day 2 of the lockdown.

@PMOIndia @cmohry @narendramodi @BJP4Haryana #milkbasket why milkbasket delivery guys are being harassed? Ain't milk and groceries considered as essentials? During the lockdown time, when there is so much of shortage of all the essentials, they had to dump 1000s of litres of milk pic.twitter.com/AnkC3XGMQN  Swati Walia (@Swati_w) March 24, 2020

Besides, the news report further suggested that takeaway restaurants are also facing a similar crackdown. Arjun Jaiswal, founder of Baking Bad, a pizza delivery chain in Delhi NCR, alleged that staff on two-wheelers were caned by the Delhi Police. Jaiswal told NDTV, "In the East of Kailash area in south Delhi, delivery boy riding bikes are being lathi-charged. In Noida, their phones were taken away while they tried to show proof. There is complete chaos."

However, in the wake of the increasing reports of such incidents, the Modi government recently said it was taking necessary steps to ensure smooth delivery of the essentials.

Also, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said, "We will issue e-passes to vegetable-sellers, grocers among others to ensure essential supplies during the lockdown."

Furthermore, Gurgaon and Noida Police also tweeted that they had asked policemen to allow delivery services without causing any hindrance.

#HaryanaPolice has directed all CPs & District SPs to allow movement of essential goods & services including delivery boys of various eCommerce portals like Amazon, BigBasket, Zomato, Swiggy etc & those engaged in homecare treatment of patients@nsvirk @cmohry #CoronaStopKaroNa  Haryana Police (@police_haryana) March 25, 2020

PM Modi, in his televised speech earlier, requested people to refrain from panic-buying and ensured that there will be no shortage of the essentials.
It looks like Haitian International Holdings Limited (HKG:1882) is about to go ex-dividend in the next 4 days. This means that investors who purchase shares on or after the 31st of March will not receive the dividend, which will be paid on the 17th of April.

Haitian International Holdings's next dividend payment will be HK$0.19 per share. Last year, in total, the company distributed HK$0.36 to shareholders. Based on the last year's worth of payments, Haitian International Holdings stock has a trailing yield of around 2.8% on the current share price of HK$14.14. We love seeing companies pay a dividend, but it's also important to be sure that laying the golden eggs isn't going to kill our golden goose! That's why we should always check whether the dividend payments appear sustainable, and if the company is growing.

Check out our latest analysis for Haitian International Holdings

Dividends are typically paid from company earnings. If a company pays more in dividends than it earned in profit, then the dividend could be unsustainable. Fortunately Haitian International Holdings's payout ratio is modest, at just 33% of profit. That said, even highly profitable companies sometimes might not generate enough cash to pay the dividend, which is why we should always check if the dividend is covered by cash flow. Luckily it paid out just 24% of its free cash flow last year.

It's encouraging to see that the dividend is covered by both profit and cash flow. This generally suggests the dividend is sustainable, as long as earnings don't drop precipitously.

Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

SEHK:1882 Historical Dividend Yield March 26th 2020

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Stocks in companies that generate sustainable earnings growth often make the best dividend prospects, as it is easier to lift the dividend when earnings are rising. Investors love dividends, so if earnings fall and the dividend is reduced, expect a stock to be sold off heavily at the same time. This is why it's a relief to see Haitian International Holdings earnings per share are up 6.0% per annum over the last five years. Management have been reinvested more than half of the company's earnings within the business, and the company has been able to grow earnings with this retained capital. Organisations that reinvest heavily in themselves typically get stronger over time, which can bring attractive benefits such as stronger earnings and dividends.

Story continues

The main way most investors will assess a company's dividend prospects is by checking the historical rate of dividend growth. Haitian International Holdings has delivered an average of 16% per year annual increase in its dividend, based on the past ten years of dividend payments. We're glad to see dividends rising alongside earnings over a number of years, which may be a sign the company intends to share the growth with shareholders.

To Sum It Up

Should investors buy Haitian International Holdings for the upcoming dividend? Earnings per share growth has been growing somewhat, and Haitian International Holdings is paying out less than half its earnings and cash flow as dividends. This is interesting for a few reasons, as it suggests management may be reinvesting heavily in the business, but it also provides room to increase the dividend in time. We would prefer to see earnings growing faster, but the best dividend stocks over the long term typically combine significant earnings per share growth with a low payout ratio, and Haitian International Holdings is halfway there. It's a promising combination that should mark this company worthy of closer attention.

While it's tempting to invest in Haitian International Holdings for the dividends alone, you should always be mindful of the risks involved. For example - Haitian International Holdings has 2 warning signs we think you should be aware of.

A common investment mistake is buying the first interesting stock you see. Here you can find a list of promising dividend stocks with a greater than 2% yield and an upcoming dividend.

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.



We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.
Vietnamese people living abroad have been advised to stay calm, practice social distancing and exercise preventive measures against the COVID-19, an official told the Vietnam News Agency on March 25.

People arrive at Van Don International Airport (Quang Ninh) from Europe.

They should check frequent updates on the local situation as well as recommendations by Vietnamese representative missions in their host countries, said Vice Chairman of the State Committee for Overseas Vietnamese Affairs Luong Thanh Nghi.

Besides, they must also cooperate with local authorities and rigorously comply with local regulations and emergency measures to curb the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 that causes the disease, Nghi said, adding that Vietnamese representative missions abroad are ready to support them.

Data shows that about 5.3 million Vietnamese people are residing, working and studying in 130 countries and territories around the globe. They include over 300,000 students at all levels of education and around 600,000 guest workers, mostly in Asia and the Middle East.

Only a handful of Vietnamese people overseas have reportedly been infected with the virus while foreign countries are enforcing various measures to protect their citizens and foreigners, including the provision of free diagnostic testing and treatment for infected people, he noted.

Vietnamese expats have been providing great support for one another during this time, the official continued. Many Vietnamese communities living in the Europe, America and Oceania have contributed to COVID-19 relief efforts by making anti-bacterial masks and donating medical supplies and food to local governments, hospitals and residents.

Vietnamese people in Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia and other countries have donated 100,000 face masks as well as hand sanitiser and protective gear for people in Son Loi commune, Binh Xuyen district in Vinh Phuc province and several hospitals in Hanoi when the outbreak began last month, he added.

In light of the rapidly evolving situation regarding COVID-19, many foreign governments have put in place strict precautionary measures, triggering a surge in the number of Vietnamese returning home.

Many people want to stay close to their families, so it is understandable that Vietnamese people want to be back home for all those reasons, he said.

However, Nghi advised that at this time, Vietnamese people abroad should remain calm and carefully decide whether they should stay back or book flights home since it is the highest risk of infection when travelling on public transports, at airports or on the planes.

Most countries have imposed strict travel restrictions and many airlines have cancelled flights without notice, leaving hundreds of Vietnamese people stranded at foreign airports, he said, noting that some groups of people had to take several connecting flights over six days to get home.

He said thousands of people in Vietnam are on the frontline in the battle against the virus, and struggle everyday to protect others and keep the situation under control.

So if the situation is non-essential, people should refrain from travelling home, he said.

It is also a way to protect yourself and your family and to respond to the call by medical workers and doctors around the world  We stayed at work for you, please stay at home for us, he added.

He further said that to show responsibility for the community and the country, Vietnamese returnees must comply with Vietnams exit and entry rules, fill in health declarations and go into mandatory quarantine.

He expected that they would contribute to the countrys COVID-19 relief efforts through these actions.

As of 10:00am on March 25, a total of 422,614 people have been infected with the coronavirus worldwide, with 18,804 deaths. Vietnam has reported 134 confirmed cases, mostly people arriving from abroad, and no fatality./.VNA
Punjab's first coronavirus patient has been found negative for the infection following a fresh test and will soon be discharged from the hospital, said officials on Thursday.

He was found positive for the infection after returning from Italy early this month and was later shifted to the Guru Nanak Dev Hospital here.

Civil Surgeon Dr Prabhdeep Kaur Johal said the patient, whoearlier had tested positive, has shown significant improvement in his health.

His samples were again tested for coronavirus and his test reports came negative, she said.

Patient, a Hoshiarpur resident, will be discharged shortly, she said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Five more COVID-19 cases in Phuket, including police officer: official total hits 34

PHUKET: Phuket Governor Phakaphong Tavipatana announced today (Mar 26) that five new COVID-19 cases in Phuket have been confirmed, bringing the total number of officially recognised cases of people infected with the COVID-19 coronavirus confirmed in Phuket to 34.

Thursday 26 March 2020, 03:41PM

Five more people in Phuket confirmed with COVID-19. Image: PR Dept

According to the information released this afternoon, health officials have checked 1,284,274 people at the airport and a further 38,327 checked at other ports.

So far 786 people have been put under observation for possible infection of the virus. Of these were five new cases, Governor Phakaphong said.

Of the 786, 688 Persons Under Investigation (PUI) had been checked and gone home. The remaining 96 remain in hospital under observation.

Of those 96 still in hospital, 64 are waiting for test results to confirm whether they have COVID-19.

Governor Phakaphong gave limited details of the new cases announced today as follows:

Case 30. A Swiss man, 64, husband of the Thai business woman reported as COVID positive on Tuesday (see here). He became ill on Mar 20.

Case 31. A British man, 20, a yacht caretaker who arrived Phuket on Mar 19 and became ill on Monday (Mar 23).

Case 32. A Thai woman, 43, a masseuse working in Patong. She was in frequent contact with many tourists from many countries and became ill last Wednesday (Mar 18).

Case 33. A Thai man, 41, a front office staffer of a hotel in Patong, who became ill last Wednesday (Mar 18).

Case 34. A Thai police officer, 23, who was in frequent contact with many tourists from many countries. He became ill on Sunday (Mar 22).
As news organizations across Canada suffer major revenue declines due to the COVID-19 epidemic, and reporting on the quickly shifting story of the virus puts extraordinary demands on the industry, Justin Trudeau offered help Wednesday  but industry leaders said it was nowhere near enough.

A day after newspaper publishers in Quebec and Atlantic Canada laid off hundreds of employees due to the impact of the pandemic on advertising revenues, its more important than ever that Canadians have access to the latest news and information, Trudeau said.

To ensure that journalists can continue to do this vital work, our government is announcing new measures to support them, he said.

Later Wednesday, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault announced that Ottawa would spend $30 million on a COVID-19 awareness advertising campaign, and was moving forward with a previously announced tax credit plan.

Beyond the ad campaign, the lack of an emergency cash infusion for the struggling industry came as a disappointment to John Hinds, president and CEO of News Media Canada.

I think this is our fundamental issue: Were confused, said Hinds, whose association represents print and digital news media members across the country, including Torstar, the Stars parent company.

We hoped he was going to announce something new. Instead, what (the government) did was rehash a couple of announcements that were very good with dealing with the crisis we were facing a year ago, but have nothing to do with the (pandemic-related cash crunch) crisis were facing today.

Bob Cox, publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, was more blunt.

Im profoundly disappointed. The prime minister lied, said Cox, whos also News Media Canada chair.

He stood there and said they were going to have new support for journalism and gave hope to an industry that desperately needs it  (but) didnt announce a single new thing.

The state of print and digital news media made headlines this week when SaltWire Network said it was laying off nearly 40 per cent of its employees  about 240 people  and suspending all weekly newspapers in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador for 12 weeks.

In Quebec, 143 jobs were lost across a co-operative that owns daily newspapers outside of Montreal, including Le Soleil in Quebec City.

Quebec, like Ontario, has declared media an essential service during the pandemic.

In an open letter to readers, SaltWire Network CEO Mark Lever said the business lost nearly two-thirds of its revenue because many advertisers ceasing operations temporarily.

Like many industries and businesses, the economic ripple effect of COVID-19 has hit our local newspaper media industry faster and far more aggressively than we could have ever planned for or anticipated, Lever wrote.

Cox said the journalism industry realizes the effects of COVID-19 on the workforce go well beyond the media.

We didnt expect to be singled out but we also didnt expect to be shunted aside, and thats whats going on here, Cox said, noting the federal program in place to aid the industry still hasnt started operating.

We havent got the (program) money so we dont actually have this cash to operate our businesses (and) until we get that, were screwed, Cox continued.

Were all facing the same extinction level event, as they say, and most of us have looked at our books and said, Its months for us and not necessarily many months before were out of money to pay staff, to operate and keep doing the valuable job the prime minister thanked us for today.

A news release from Canadian Heritage on Wednesday described the media as an indispensable communications link between different levels of government and the public.

The ministry also stated it was taking action to support our publishing and news sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic and that these efforts will help ensure Canadians can continue to get reliable news and information related to COVID-19, so they can make the right decisions to stay healthy and safe.

The Canada Revenue Agency confirmed that the Independent Advisory Board on Eligibility for Journalism Tax Measures had been finalized. The boards role is to make recommendations to the CRA on whether a journalism organization meets certain criteria to qualify for new tax relief measures.

The details of the program were introduced in the November 2019 federal budget.

With files from Canadian Press
By Julia Payne

LONDON (Reuters) - Brent oil futures may be trading at $27 per barrel but oil producers are selling their crude in the physical market at lower prices not seen since the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s.

Most are offloading their oil for below $20 a barrel as the coronavirus pandemic savages demand and global supply rises amid a battle between Saudi Arabia and Russia for market share, according to traders, state oil firms, major refiners and prices quoted in physical markets.

While some crude grades typically sell at a discount to Brent, the market environment is making that gap even wider and other grades that usually cost more than the European benchmark are now cheaper for the most time ever.

The discounting is leaving revenue per barrel at a fraction of the prices factored into many 2020 budgets, which is likely to put even more pressure on government finances in some oil producing countries.

In extreme cases, once discounts and other costs have been applied, the value of some producers' oil is close to $10 a barrel while Venezuela's Merey crude sold for as little as $8 last week, according to Refinitiv data and traders.

While all types of crude have been hit, so-called light and medium sweet grades are the least in demand, meaning the outlook is bleaker for countries such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Nigeria, according to traders in oil from those countries.

Light grades with low density and sulphur are mostly used to make naphtha, gasoline and jet fuel, refined products that are both out of favour because of the economic fallout from the pandemic and also hard to store for long.

While Moscow and Riyadh remain locked in their battle, physical oil traders say a glut might push prices even lower as more countries lock down and trade slows.

This week, Russia got as little as $18 per barrel for its benchmark export grade medium sour Urals while Saudi Arabia was selling its Arab Light in Europe for $16, according to Reuters calculations based on official Saudi prices and Urals deals.

Canada's key Western Canada Select grade was worth $15 a barrel on March 16, the last day of its monthly trading cycle, and will now probably sell closer to $10 if its last discount of $13.6 to the U.S. WTI benchmark is applied.

Story continues

Traders said the pressure on prices and the desire on the part of sellers to offload crude quickly was evident in the way deals were being struck at the moment.

"Normally, we used to discuss cargoes at bid versus offer spreads of around 10 to 20 cents for several weeks before we closed a deal," one trader at a major refining firm said.

"Now, we have bid versus offer spreads of $2 to 3 a barrel and they're done immediately."

DOWNWARD CORRECTIONS

Just last week, analysts and leading traders predicted global oil demand would drop by 10 million barrels per day, or 10% in the next months. A week later, top trading house Vitol said it expected a 20% loss over the next few weeks.

Indian refiners are cutting back on output while European plants are considering closures. Chinese demand is recovering but it's the only bright spot as the United States, which consumes a fifth of the world's fuel, is locking down.

In a sign of the demise of sweet grades, Azeri Light is being priced at about 50 cents below dated Brent, the first time it has ever fallen below the European benchmark. Forties, a North Sea light sour oil, has fallen to $1.65 a barrel below dated Brent, its lowest since 2008.

Gasoline and jet fuel do not store as long as other products due to their high quality, seasonality and additives. Diesel, fuel oil and crude oil, meanwhile, can sit in tanks for years.

"You can't store winter gasoline with the summer version and now is the time when you have to switch. You can't really hold gasoline in tank for longer than six months," said a European crude and products trader.

"Sour grades are more economic right now for refiners but that is only temporary as we will end up with a flood of diesel and fuel oil," he said.

Nigeria, which is the biggest oil producer in Africa and relies on crude for 90% of its foreign exchange earnings, is struggling to sell its mainly light, sweet oil to refiners - despite record price cuts.

Algeria's light, sweet Saharan Blend and Kazakhstan's light, sour grade CPC Blend, meanwhile, are trading at eight-year lows with discounts of $2 and $4 to the price of Brent respectively.

Traders said cargoes of crude for delivery in April had not been hit too badly because many of the deals were struck before the oil market rout, but now prices would only go lower still.

"April was sold quite ahead of time as refiners plan several months in advance but May will not be good. All the grades will need more downward corrections," one trader said.

(Reporting by Julia Payne; Additional reporting by Olga Yagova in Moscow and Shu Zhang in Singapore; Editing by Dmitry Zhdannikov and David Clarke)
Shoppers have been spotted wearing beekeeping suits in a supermarket to protect themselves from coronavirus.

The couple were seen in Countdown Fairy Springs in Rotorua in New Zealand on Wednesday with their suits complete with a face mask and gloves as they stocked up on supplies before the country went into lockdown.

Fellow shopper Naomi Brake told Daily Mail Australia she was shocked to see the couple's dramatic measures.

'It was definitely a bit of a surprise,' she said.

Two shoppers were spotted wearing beekeeping suits to a supermarket in New Zealand to protect themselves from the coronavirus

New Zealand entered a nationwide lockdown from midnight on Wednesday, with many shoppers taking precautions while stocking up on supplies. Pictured: two shoppers wearing face masks arrive at a supermarket in Christchurch

'I didnt notice a lot of people starting or taking photos. The supermarket was limiting the number of people that could go in, so there wasnt a great crowd in there to see.'

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has ordered all Kiwis into an enforced lockdown from Thursday for at least four weeks as the government aims to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

On Thursday, Kiwi health officials confirmed another batch of 78 cases of the virus, taking the country's overall tally to 283.

Of those, 27 have recovered, just seven people currently require hospitalisation, with none requiring treatment in intensive care units.

Unlike Australia, New Zealand is heading into a major clampdown ahead of any loss of life.

Customers queue to enter a supermarket in Christchurch on Wednesday before the lockdown measures were implemented

Schools, universities and non-essential businesses - including restaurants and hairdressers - have been ordered shut, and their workers sent home.

Ms Ardern said despite the clampdown, more Kiwis would catch the virus in the coming weeks.

'The numbers will go up. The modelling suggests we may have several thousand cases. That could be within a 10 to 12 day period,' she said.

'But if we all follow the rules we should then see a difference being made.'

Kiwis have been asked to keep any physical contact to within their household and any nearby close family members - their partners or children only - during the lockdown.

Additionally, Kiwis that live alone can nominate one person to spend time with, to ensure a degree of closeness to those most isolated.

Personal groupings are being referred to as your 'bubble'.

A sign outside an aged care facility in Napier which has been closed due to New Zealand's lockdown measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus

Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles said maintaining the integrity of your bubble is the most important factor.

'You are in a bubble ... and you need to stay in your bubble and if you get out of your bubble you're going to pop that bubble and that's going to put us all at risk,' she told Radio NZ.

'People are the weak points.

'Hand-washing is so, so important. We can go outside, keep it to essential trips and stay two metres away from people ... we need to wash our hands as soon as we get back in the house.'

Civil Defence Emergency Management Director Sarah Stuart-Black said she understood many would be anxious, but urged New Zealanders to settle into a new groove.

'Just take a bit of a breath,' she said.

'We're talking about hanging out at home. You've still got a TV and you've got the water out of the tap and you've got the things in your cupboard.

'We can work through this step by step.'
Wyoming Business Tips for March 30-April 5

A weekly look at issues facing Wyoming business owners and entrepreneurs from the Wyoming Small Business Development Center (SBDC) Network, a collection of business assistance programs at the University of Wyoming.

By Andi Lewis, program manager, Wyoming Procurement Technical Assistance Center

Small businesses in every industry can potentially expand their markets by selling their products or services to government agencies. The official starting point for all contracts valued at more than $25,000 is at https://beta.sam.gov/. Anyone interested in doing business with the federal government can use this system to research active opportunities.

This new website is currently undergoing upgrades as more resources are consolidated into this one location. However, entrepreneurs in Wyoming can find everything they need to search for the right opportunities for their businesses. Each contract opportunity found on the beta website provides the following information:

-- Original contract announcements and updates.

-- Related attachments or external links.

-- Instructions on how to submit a response, offer or proposal.

-- The date on which responses are due.

Other items listed on the website include pre-solicitation, award and sole source notices. You also can learn about upcoming small business events and vendor collaborations. You do need to create a user account if you want to use features, such as saving searches or following notices.

If you would like assistance with beta.sam.gov, an upcoming webinar is a great chance for you to familiarize yourself with the new look, functions and registration process. The April 6 webinar, titled Navigating and Using beta.sam, is open to Wyoming residents at no cost. To register, visit the training section of www.wyomingsbdc.org. You also can reach out to your local adviser for no-cost, confidential assistance at www.wyomingsbdc.org/sign-up.

The Wyoming SBDC Network offers no-cost advising and technical assistance to help Wyoming entrepreneurs think about, launch, grow, reinvent or exit their business. In 2019 alone, the Wyoming SBDC Network helped Wyoming entrepreneurs start 108 new businesses; create or save 3,402 jobs; and bring a capital impact of more than $24 million to the state. The Wyoming SBDC Network is hosted by UW with state funds from the Wyoming Business Council and funded, in part, through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration.

To ask a question, call 1-800-348-5194, email wsbdc@uwyo.edu, or write 1000 E. University Ave., Dept. 3922, Laramie, WY 82071-3922.
Demand for gasoline in the United States fell by 859,000 bpd, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its weekly petroleum status report. According to Reuters, this is the sharpest demand decline since last September.

Total fuel demand also declined, almost 2.1 million bpd last week, as lockdowns begin to weigh on consumption.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported gasoline pumps are sitting idle as people cancel their travel plans amid the worsening coronavirus outbreak that has so far infected more than 68,500 Americans and killed more than 1,000.

The situation is unusual. Gasoline is getting cheaper because of tanking crude oil prices, but drivers in the most car-loving country in the world cannot take advantage of these lower prices because they have to self-isolate at home. The United States consumes about 20 million bpd of oil and products, with gasoline consumption at 9 million bpd.

The worst is yet to come, according to analysts, as expectations are the number infected with Covid-19 will continue to rise for a while, possibly forcing an extension of the social distancing measures that prompted the drop in gasoline consumption.

We would estimate commuting and leisure driving will be down up to 50%, with most impact in the northern states where the virus spreads faster now, a partner in Rystad Energy told Reuters.



Related: Worlds Largest Oil Trader Says Demand Could Plummet By 20 Million Bpd

The global situation for demand is not much better. Vitols chief executive Russell Hardy told Bloomberg earlier this week that the coronavirus pandemic could, at its peak, wipe out as much as 15 to 20 million bpd in global oil demand.

Its pretty huge in terms of anything weve had to deal with before, Vitols chief executive said.

Global oil storage is filling up fast in this context, Reuters reported earlier this week, despite rising costs of storage,--in some cases by as much as 100 percent.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Fianna Fail says people found guilty of deliberately coughing or spitting on anyone during the current crisis should receive a tough conviction.

The party is calling for new legislation to be introduced to tackle the issue.

TD James Lawless says an amendment could be made to current legislation.

As it stands under Section 6 of the Non-fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997 it is an offence to spray, pour or put onto a person blood or any fluid or substance resembling blood, leading a person to believe that they have become infected with disease as a result," he explained.

The amendment I have submitted broadens this definition so that it is not only fluids or substances resembling blood which are covered by the Act.

We have to get very tough on this. We have already heard of one instance of a person who tested positive for COVID-19 deliberately coughing at a frontline health worker  there can be zero tolerance for this.

His comments come as gardai are to be issued with 'spit hoods' to protect them from detainees for the duration of the public health crisis.

It follows a number of incidents where front line workers have been coughed at or spat on during the course of their work.

Gardai say spit hoods will be deployed as a temporary measure for the duration of the coronavirus crisis.

The device covers the entire face of a suspect and stops them spitting at, coughing on or biting officers.

It follows a number of incidents where front line workers have been coughed on or spat at.

An Garda Siochana #InsideTheK working with communities #keepingpeoplesafe

Garda Confidental Phone No 1800 666 111

Crimestoppers 1800 25 00 25#SocialDistancing #PhysicalDistancing #WashYourHands pic.twitter.com/nZ8Svc7W7Z  An Garda Siochana (@GardaTraffic) March 25, 2020

Gardai are investigating one incident at Blanchardstown Hospital in Dublin, where a healthcare worker was spat at deliberately.

Her alleged attacker has since tested positive for Covid-19.

Gardai are calling on people to report any instances where they have been threatened or intimidated by people deliberately coughing and spitting at them.

They said this activity could amount to an offence under the Public Order Act or Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act.

[snippet1]987600[/snippet1]

This story was first published at 9.32am
The Zamfara State House of Assembly has announced the suspension of all activities including plenary sessions until further notice.

The Speaker of the House, Nasiru Magarya, made this known in a statement issued to journalists in Gusau on Thursday by the Public Relations Officer of the Assembly, Mustafa Jafaru-Kaura.

Mr Magarya expressed deep concern over the dreaded coronavirus which is now a global disaster.

He said the Assembly also cancelled all its activities including plenary, committee sittings and oversight functions as part of measures to curtail the spread of the disease in the state.

Though there is no outbreak of the pandemic in the state, we are aware of the concerted efforts made by all relevant stakeholders to ensure that the disease will not get its way to the state.

We commend the efforts of Gov. Bello Matawallen for taking proactive measures aimed at containing the spread of Covid-19 in the state.

With this suspension, members and staff of the House are, therefore, directed to stay at home until further notice, the speaker said.

Mr Magarya urged members to visit their constituencies to re-orientate their people on how to prevent themselves from contracting the disease through basic hygiene.

The speaker assured the state government of the Assemblys readiness to promulgate laws that would enhance good and better health care delivery system.

He urged Muslims to embark on prayers and seek for Allahs intervention over the disease.

(NAN)
West Bengal chief minister is leading people in her state by example and demonstrating how to observe social distancing, while in public spaces, to prevent coronavirus from spreading further in the state that has reported 10 positive cases so far.

A three-minute video of Banerjee instructing vegetable vendors to ensure their customers maintain necessary distance from each other while shopping was posted by news agency ANI. The video also shows Banerjee herself marking the spots where each person should stand in a queue to buy vegetables.

Banerjee is seen with a cloth wrapped around her face with several state and police officials in toe along with media personnel eager to take a picture or film her during the act.

Several onlookers were also eagerly trying to take pictures of the chief minister, who seemed to have stepped out for an unannounced inspection on the streets of a Kolkata market.

Banerjees intervention follows reports of violation of social distancing norms from across the country, mostly by people engaged in panic buying of essentials while the country is in lockdown mode for a three week period, hoping to break the chain of Covid-19 infections.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday reiterated the need to maintain a distance of at least one to 1.5 metres when in the company of people on the streets. Experts have also repeatedly stressed that coming in close proximity to an infected person can lead to disease transmission.

Banerjee seemed to be making a similar point in Bangla as she addressed the vendors and also the onlookers standing behind them.

#WATCH West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee seen directing officials and vendors to practice social distancing, in a market in Kolkata. #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/dwkDbvcraR  ANI (@ANI) March 26, 2020

A health ministry advisory on social distancing defines it as a non-pharmaceutical infection prevention and control intervention implemented to avoid contact between those who are infected with a disease-causing pathogen and those who are not, so as to stop or slow down the rate and extent of disease transmission in a community. This, the ministry adds, eventually leads to a decrease in spread, morbidity and mortality due to the disease.

Even on Thursday, several reports of people violating social distancing rules were received. Police in Karnataka was seen forcefully disbursing a gathering at a Mosque in Belgaum and in Uttar Pradesh, police were seen punishing people violating the lockdown orders.

Mamata Banerjee government also requested chief ministers of several other states to take care of the stranded migrant workers from the state who are facing hardships due to the lockdown
At a time when the entire world is reeling under having to cope up with an unforeseen situation due to a deadly virus, the least we could do is to show compassion to each other. All that it takes is a simple act of kindness and empathy to boost up one's morale during a trying time like this. Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik showed commendable understanding and has announced the payment of four months' advance salary for doctors, nurses and other paramedical staff. Health personnel are the ones who are at a higher risk of contracting this virus as they closely work with the infected people day in and day out.

According to the news reports, the doctors, nurses and all health personnel across the state will receive their salaries in advance for the months of April, May, June and July. The advance payments will be made in the month of April itself, the CM said in a video message. Appreciating the commitment of the medical professionals, Patnaik, in his video message on Twitter, said, "There is no comparison of your (doctors, nurses and other staff) selfless service to the people. I and the people of Odisha are with you and your families. I salute your spirit.

                                 ,     #IndiaFightsCorona pic.twitter.com/Jy3NaZQIio  Naveen Patnaik (@Naveen_Odisha) March 25, 2020

Besides this, he also made an earnest appeal to the people to treat them with utmost affection and respect. He said, "They work day in and day out by sacrificing their comforts. Don't create hurdles for the doctors and hospital staff while they are working hard. We should all appreciate their dedicated service to the people."



Those who do not behave properly with the doctors and other health personnel will be dealt with firmly. I have already directed the police to take action against such persons," Patnaik added. Meanwhile, as per the news reports, the Family and Welfare department of the state has decided to appoint doctors, nurses and paramedical staff, including retired persons, on a contractual basis in different state-run hospitals amid the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. According to a notification, they will be appointed on a short-term contractual basis for three months till June 30, which will be extended if required.

A specialist will get Rs. 5,000 a day, while a medical officer with an MBBS degree will get Rs. 3,000 daily. Staff nurse, laboratory technician, pharmacist and radiographers will receive Rs. 1,000 every day. Odisha is setting a wonderful example of showing solidarity and support to the medical workers who are working day and night, risking and exposing themselves to the novel Coronavirus. Other states should learn by example and soon follow suit.
(Natural News) As Americans continue to live in uncertainty from the emerging Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, their anxiety levels are only likely to increase on news that the countrys biggest e-tailer is about to experience a large workforce shortage.

Amazon and other e- and retailers like Walmart had already announced they were setting up to hire tens of thousands of workers as fewer Americans ventured out to buy products and instead are choosing to order them online.

But now, according to The Sun, Amazon says it is being forced to send a growing number of warehouse workers home after they have been diagnosed with the virus, meaning that as it spreads and more employees are infected, the country is increasingly likely to see a major supply chain disruption.

The Sun reports:

Amazon has reportedly ramped up cleaning measures and sent exposed workers home after the killer coronavirus spread to ten of its warehouses.

COVID-19 cases were confirmed in the companys tenth storehouse this week, infecting employees who are scrambling to deliver goods to millions of locked down Americans, reports say.

Thus far, Amazon warehouse employees working at locations in New York City, Sheperdsville, Ky., and Jacksonville, Fla., have been infected.

In addition, according to other reports, cases have been diagnosed among employees who work at the e-tailers facilities in Texas, Brownstown, Mich., and Oklahoma City.

The Sun also said that the virus has spread to warehouses in Joliet, Ill., Wallingford, Conn., and California.

The Sun, citing the Washington Post, reported that employees are under a great amount of pressure to fulfill a rapidly increasing number of online orders and that as such, they have little time for hand-washing and other hygiene aimed at cutting down on the virus spread.

We hope people whove been laid off will come work with us

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, noted last week that the company would be hiring 100,000 people to handle the surge of orders from the COVID-19 outbreak. In doing so, he portrayed the e-tailer as an essential public resource in times of crisis, according to Fast Company. (Related: They WANT it to spread: Kaiser Permanente theatens to FIRE nurses for wearing N95 masks while treating coronavirus patients.)

Were providing a vital service to people everywhere, especially to those, like the elderly, who are most vulnerable, he wrote in a post on the company blog. People are depending on us.

To compensate for the added workload, the company said it would raise its minimum wage from $15 to $17.

We hope people whove been laid off will come work with us until theyre able to go back to the jobs they had, wrote Bezos.

But, as Fast Company noted further:

[W]orkers at multiple Amazon fulfillment centers in the United States are expressing outrage over what they claim are a lack of safety precautions and intense pressure to hit quotas, echoing complaints of Amazon workers in Europe.

In terms of the coronavirus, every time you walk through the door, youre taking a risk, one worker at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York, where a worker has tested positive for COVID-19, told the financial news site. I mean whats more important, getting peoples things to them or your health?

Another employee who works in Texas showed Fast Company an email advising workers to remain three feet apart, though the CDCs recommendation is six feet to avoid contagion.

Bezos and company managers are downplaying the virus risk to employees, noting they have cut out face-to-face meetings and have ordered millions of face masks for workers.

The problem is two-fold, however. As more Americans avoid stores and order online, Amazons workload has increased dramatically. But at the same time, workers are now becoming infected.

Something has to give, and if we had to bet, wed say its going to be the workforce  which means a huge supply chain disruption is likely coming.

Sources include:

TheSun.com

NaturalNews.com
Tarrytown, NY, March 26, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- Nightfood, Inc. (OTCQB: NGTF), the award-winning ice cream company addressing Americas $50 billion-dollar nighttime snacking problem, announced today that Nightfood ice cream is now available in Shaws and Star Market locations.



A division of Albertsons Companies, one of the largest food and drug retailers in the United States, Shaws and Star Markets operates over 150 stores through most of New England, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island.

Nightfoods nighttime ice cream began appearing on shelves in early March.

The Nightfood brand is available at Shaws and Star Markets in seven flavors, including Midnight Chocolate, Full Moon Vanilla, After Dinner Mint Chip, Cherry Eclipse (cherry ice cream with real cherries and chocolate chips), Milk & Cookie Dough, Bed and Breakfast (maple ice cream with waffle chunks), and Cookies n Dreams.

Were extremely excited for this partnership with Shaws, commented Nightfood CEO Sean Folkson. Well be implementing an aggressive promotional plan to help get us off to a strong start, including in-store initiatives planned shortly after Nightfood hits their shelves. Weve identified awareness campaigns that are really working well in some of our other chains and were going to bring those to Shaws starting on Day 1.

Nightfood is expected to retail at Shaws and Star Market for $4.99 per pint, in line with other premium and better-for-you ice cream brands.

As the Official Ice Cream of the American Pregnancy Association, Nightfood is now the recommended ice cream for over three million pregnant women across the United States. With more calcium, magnesium, protein and fiber than other ice creams, and less sugar, fewer calories, and no artificial sweeteners, Nightfood satisfies ice cream cravings with more of the nutrients pregnant moms need.

Nightfood has been featured recently in major mainstream media outlets such as The Rachael Ray Show, TheBump.com, BabyGaga, The Today Show, Oprah Magazine and more.

About Nightfood Holdings:

Nightfood Holdings, Inc. (OTC: NGTF), owns Nightfood, Inc. and MJ Munchies, Inc.

After manufacturing their first pint in early 2019, Nightfood secured ice cream distribution in multiple Top-10 supermarket chains in the United States, with concentrations in the Carolinas, Mid-Atlantic, the upper Midwest, and New England.

Nightfood ice cream won the 2019 Product of the Year award in the ice cream category in a Kantar survey of over 40,000 consumers. Nightfood was also named Best New Ice Cream in the 2019 World Dairy Innovation Awards.

In February, 2020, it was announced that Nightfood received the endorsement of the American Pregnancy Association as the recommended ice cream for the over three million pregnant women in the United States at any given time. With more calcium, magnesium, zinc, fiber, and protein, and less sugar and a lower glycemic profile, Nightfood is now the Official Ice Cream of the American Pregnancy Association.

Over 80% of Americans snack regularly at night, resulting in an estimated 700M+ nighttime snack occasions weekly, and an annual spend on night snacks of over $50 billion dollars, the majority of it on options that are understood to be both unhealthy, and disruptive to sleep quality.

Scientific research indicates these unhealthy nighttime cravings are driven by human biology. Willpower is also weakest at night, contributing to unhealthy night snacking behavior, and the majority of night snackers report feeling both guilty and out-of-control when it comes to their nighttime snacking.

Because unhealthy night snacking is biologically driven, and not a trend or a fad, management believes the category of nighttime-specific nutrition, which Nightfood is pioneering, will be a billion-dollar category.

MJ Munchies, Inc. was formed in 2018 as a new, wholly owned subsidiary of Nightfood Holdings, Inc. to capitalize on legally compliant opportunities in the CBD and marijuana edibles and related spaces. The Company is seeking licensing opportunities to market such products under the brand name Half-Baked, for which theyve successfully secured trademark rights.

Questions can be directed to investors@Nightfood.com

Forward Looking Statements:

This current press release contains "forward-looking statements," as that term is defined in Section 27A of the United States Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Statements in this press release which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future, including but not limited to, any products sold or cash flow from operations.

Actual results could differ from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to numerous factors. Such factors include, among others, the inherent uncertainties associated with distribution and difficulties associated with obtaining financing on acceptable terms. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release, and we assume no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Although we believe that the beliefs, plans, expectations and intentions contained in this press release are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions will prove to be accurate. Investors should consult all of the information set forth herein and should also refer to the risk factors disclosure outlined in our most recent annual report for our last fiscal year, our quarterly reports, and other periodic reports filed from time-to-time with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Media Contact:

Tim Sullivan

media@Nightfood.com

732-816-0239

Investor Contact:

Stuart Smith

investors@Nightfood.com

888-888-6444, x3




THE son of a High Court judge and his two friends allegedly robbed a Harare cellphone dealer of his four handsets and fatally stabbed him before dumping the corpse in a bush in Ruwa.





Munyaradzi Junior Mawadze (21), who is the son of Masvingo resident judge, Justice Garainesu Mawadze, was on Wednesday arrested together with Elvin Dongo Saungweme (22) and Dylon Balani (22) for murder.





The trio allegedly took the dealer from his trading area near Chicken Slice food court, along Angwa Street, after posing as cellphone buyers before driving to Waterfalls where they robbed him of his four cellphones.

They reportedly stabbed him several times with knife and drove to Ruwa where they dumped his body. The incident occurred on March 12.





Members of the dealers family had reported him missing but the matter came to light when detectives from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Homicide took over the investigations last week.





A team of detectives was then set up to investigate the matter.





The team on Tuesday received information that the dealer was last seen in the company of Mawadze, a first-year law student at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ).





Police launched a manhunt for Mawadze, who was found and arrested in Masvingo.





Police brought him to Harare for further investigations where he reportedly admitted to murdering the dealer.





Sources said Mawadze implicated his two friends before leading the detectives to Ruwa where they had dumped the corpse.





Yesterday police recovered the body that was in a decomposing state and took it to Parirenyatwa Hospital for post-mortem. The three were yesterday still in custody and are expected to appear in court today.





Last month a break-in was reported at the judges Waterfalls residence where the same judges son claimed he was attacked by robbers who stripped the judges official car of its wheels and other components.





The judge also lost US$1 500 and electrical gadgets in the said robbery.




Political and security crises in Iraq have been escalating, and the coronavirus outbreak has recently been added to the list. Meanwhile, news about the dropping oil prices has added fuel to the fire, and Iraqis are all at risk. According to Mazhar Mohammad Saleh, economic affairs adviser to the Iraqi government, 93% of Iraq's budget relies on oil exports.

On March 14, Saleh said, Iraq has lost half of its financial revenues, with oil prices dropping to $30 [per barrel].

According to the 2020 budget draft that the government proposed and awaits voting on in the parliament, the budget is $135 billion, and the deficit amounts to $40 billion. What's worse, the numbers were calculated based on a selling price of $56 per barrel of oil. But this price has been almost halved.

Most of the Iraqi budget goes to the salaries of the 7 million employees as operating expenses. The drop in oil prices will directly affect them, and their only income will be government salaries.

Salam Smeisim, former economic adviser to the Ministry of State for Civil Society Affairs, told Al-Monitor, The dropping oil prices are directly affecting the situation of Iraqis because oil accounts for 93% of the Iraqi budget. Besides, Iraq has a rentier and consumption budget rather than a developmental one. All revenues from oil and other resources feed salaries.

She added, The dwindling revenues lead to dropping salaries and this is a new disaster for Iraqis, in addition to the deficit reaching $51 billion. All these are signs that the Iraqi budget does not follow a financial and economic logic. The salaries and privileges of high-ranking employees range between $7 and $8 billion. The government must cancel these privileges and reduce the salaries so that lower-ranking employees do not bear the brunt.

In an attempt to weather the impact of dropping oil prices, the Iraqi parliamentary Economic and Investment Committee proposed March 12 a series of steps, including halting investment spending and curbing operational spending; making agreements with creditors to delay the settlement of Iraqs local and foreign debt until the financial situation improves; and collecting state debt from the cellphone and telecommunication companies.

The government also proposed halting payment of money to investors in the electricity sector; working on boosting government revenues; supporting the Treasury with the value of the regions exports of crude oil and border outlets; and reviewing exchange rates of the Iraqi Central Bank to secure prices that do not affect citizens and that ensure the salaries of state employees.

Issam al-Jalabi, oil expert and minister of oil in 1987-1990, said in press statements March 9, Iraq will lose billions of dollars because of its loss of huge oil revenues, which will impact the provision of services, medication and food, while the country needs all available funds to face the COVID-19 outbreak.

Outgoing Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi called for measures that can alleviate the impact of dropping oil prices on Iraq. However, his government did not announce these measures or their mechanisms, as it has its hands full with the coronavirus crisis, which has not been allocated an emergency budget. Iraq has been facing an economic crisis since the first day oil prices dropped.

Abdul Mahdi has been trying to reassure Iraqis regarding the dropping oil prices, saying, This is just a bump in the road, and it does not mean our economy is collapsing or that the state is going bankrupt. But his reassurances do not match the warnings of economic experts.

News about dropping oil prices shocked many Iraqis  mostly state employees whose salaries depend on oil revenues  who voiced their concerns on traditional and social media.

State employees and experts in Iraq expect the 2020 financial budget to suffer hugely, and they expressed their concerns about the governments inability to pay salaries in the coming months. This in itself constitutes a new challenge for the Iraqi government, in addition to the political, security and social crises, especially those related to the US-Iranian conflict, the coronavirus outbreak and the ongoing protests in southern Iraq.

The financial revenues that entered Iraq in February amounted to $5 billion, when the selling price of oil was $51 per barrel. But this figure will not enter the Iraqi state budget for March, because of the collapse of the OPEC-Russia agreement to reduce supply.

Iraqis might be in the eye of the storm in the coming months, unless oil prices rise again and the current or transitional government meant to be formed finds solutions for the crisis.
The family of an imprisoned U.S. navy veteran in Iran who was allowed to go on a medical furlough said on Wednesday that he has coronavirus (COVID-19) symptoms and called on the Iranian government to allow him to go home for medical treatment.

In a Tweeter thread on March 26, the Free Michael White campaign said since being released on furlough, White has had symptoms consistent with COVID-19 including fever, fatigue, cough and shortness of breath.

"While he has yet to receive test results, Michael was prescribed hydroxychloroquine over the weekend and was hospitalized today," the tweets said. According to the campaign White is now in a crowded war for coronavirus patients.

The tweets also said that the Governor of California, Bill Richardson, has delivered White family's request directly to senior Iranian officials for an "immediate humanitarian medical evacuation in view of his immune-compromised cancer which makes him even more vulnerable.

In what might be a gesture to Washington, Tehran allowed White to go on furlough on March 19. He is now in the custody of the embassy of Switzerland in Tehran and is not allowed to leave the country. The Swiss embassy represents U.S. interests in Iran.

The Californian navy veteran was arrested in Mashhad in July 2018 while he was visiting his girlfriend in Iran and was held in Vakil-Abad Prison before being allowed to go on furlough.

In March 2019 the Iranian Judiciary sentenced White to thirteen years in prison on alleged charges of "insulting the Supreme Leader Khamenei" and "posting a private photo publicly". The details of the charges were never made public.

"The United States will continue to work for Michael's full release, as well as the release of all wrongfully detained Americans in Iran," a State Department statement said on March 19 after White's release from prison.

The release of former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Robert Levinson was also demanded by the State Department. He disappeared in 2007 and Washington suspected Iran of abducting him but the Levinson family in a March 25 statement have said they have recently received information from U.S. officials that has led them to conclude that he died while in Iranian custody.
SEOUL, March 26 (Reuters) - South Korea's National Pension Service (NPS) will vote for Hanjin Group chairman Walter Cho to keep his board seat in Korean Air's parent firm Hanjin Kal at a shareholders' meeting on Friday, the fund said.

In a statement on Thursday, NPS said it would also approve a board seat for telecoms industry veteran Kim Shin-bae, who was nominated by Cho's sister and an activist fund that opposed Walter Cho.

Hanjin Kal's annual general meeting is expected to be the culmination of an intense proxy fight to decide the group's leader.

NPS, the world's third-largest pension fund, had a stake of 2.9% stake in Hanjin Kal by the end of 2019. (Reporting by Joyce Lee; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
City leaders along the Mississippi Gulf Coast are concerned about the number of Louisiana residents "escaping" to their communities during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report from the Biloxi Sun Herald.

The report says officials are particularly worried about New Orleans residents self-quarantining along the coast because of how fast the virus is spreading in Louisiana, especially throughout the Big Easy.

Travelers from New Orleans to Texas are ordered to quarantine there, Texas governor says

We have major concerns because they have the fastest growing number of cases of this virus and we are the closest to them, Bay St. Louis Mayor Mike Favre told the Sun Herald. Now, we do have a large amount of second homeowners from New Orleans in our community, but we are seeing way more now with Louisiana shutting down.

Vaccine news in your inbox Once a week we'll update you on the progress of COVID-19 vaccinations. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up

Louisiana has 1,795 diagnosed cases of coronavirus as of Wednesday, with 827 of those patients in Orleans Parish, the Louisiana Department of Health said.

+4 Coronavirus spread in Louisiana could mean critical shortage of ventilators Intensive care beds and ventilators are among the most critical needs for the patients most seriously stricken with the coronavirus, and state

As of March 25, health officials reported 377 diagnosed COVID-19 cases in Mississippi.

The Bay St. Louis mayor said he is noticing more cars than normal with Louisiana license plates at grocery stores.

"With them coming over, its saturating the market over here," Favre told the Sun Herald. "With a lot more people, it makes it hard on our people to get the things they need."

Read the full story from the Sun Herald.
Although it is yet to record any positive case for the dreaded coronavirus, Ondo State has continued to suffer losses from Lassa Fever infections.

In March, five more persons lost their lives as a result of the infection, which officials say is still very much endemic in the state.

The death toll had previously risen from 22 to 41.

According to the states Epidemiologist, Stephen Fagbemi, the virus is still very much with us.

He said the cases have dropped so far as the raining season sets in, with fewer cases now reported.

He said within the month of March about 65 cases were reported, which showed a decline in the number of cases earlier reported.

We still have Lassa cases, said Mr Fagbemi. You know we are getting into the rains and we can say this month is not as bad as last month, we thank God for that. But we still have cases. We had about 65 cases in Ondo State in March.

He said the number of deaths had risen to about 46 deaths making the state the leader in terms of the number of deaths from the disease.

The coronavirus seems to have taken over everything, he said. We hope that the personal hygiene of hand washing and other measures will also help in curbing the Lassa virus.

At least for now, nobody is going out, nobody is sun drying garri and other nasty habits. There are some improvements.

Coronavirus

On coronavirus, the epidemiologist said it was better for the citizens to heed the stay at home order as an outbreak of a high magnitude could be disastrous.

Please help us to say Lassa virus is still with us; help us to tell Nigerians to stay at home. It is like the message is not sinking. We dont have to wait until deaths happen before we act,  Mr Fagbemi said.

READ ALSO:

We dont have the resources to take care of many cases of coronavirus. If we have 300 to 400 cases (coronavirus), do you think we will be able to handle that. Let people just stay at home.

Lassa fever cases were earlier confirmed in five more local governments of Ile Oluji/Okeigbo, Idanre, Ifedore, Akoko North East, and Ondo West local government areas.

The disease had earlier been reported in Owo, Ose, Akure North, Akoko South West and Akure South.

Despite the over 300 cases confirmed, about 230 persons have been treated and discharged, while some others are still receiving treatment.

Mr Fagbemi had blamed the deaths on their late arrival at the treatment centre.

The Federal Medical Centre, Owo provides the treatment centre for all cases in the state.
Despite the coronavirus risk, the long-delayed parliamentary elections  whose first round is planned for next Sunday March 29  in Mali will go ahead.

The announcement was made by Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, in a televised address, Wednesday.

He reassured that a scrupulous respect of health measures will be observed.

The government will do everything in its power to ensure that this is so, he said.

Holding parliamentary elections was a key recommendation of the crisis talks held in December to explore non-military solutions to the surge of violence in Mali.

The polls were in initially scheduled for late 2018 following Keitas re-election. But they were postponed several times, with the authorities citing a strike by judges or worsening security.

Malis latest parliamentary elections were held in 2013. Keitas Rally for Mali party won the elections in a ballot.

In his televised address, President Keita announced a number of measures to curb the spread of virus in the country, which has so far recorded two cases, two nationals who had recently returned from France.

The country will enforce a curfew between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. as of this Thursday, and will close land borders.

Freight will still be allowed into the West African state, and markets will remain open, the President said.

Experts fear the country is particularly exposed to an outbreak because of its jihadist conflict, which first broke out in the north in 2012 and has since engulfed the center.

Thousands of soldiers and civilians have died in the conflict, and swathes of Malis territory remain outside state control.
As oil crashes due to the impact of the coronavirus, it's easy to overlook an even more dismal reality for producers: the real prices they're getting for their barrels are worse still.

Having collapsed by about 60 per cent this year, Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude have stabilised at around $US25 a barrel, but the price rout is far deeper for actual cargoes, which are changing hands at large and widening discounts to the global benchmarks. The discounts mean that in the physical market, some crude streams are trading at $US15, $US10 and even as little as $US8 a barrel.

Oil prices in the physical market are weakening as the economic impact of the coronavirus on oil demand cascades through every part of the petroleum industry. Credit:Jessica Shapiro

"The physical market is in pain, and there is more pain to come," said Torbjorn Tornqvist, the co-founder of Gunvor Group, a large trading house. "We will see the full weight of the oversupply in a couple of weeks."

Crude oil in the physical market trades at a premium or discount to Brent, West Texas Intermediate and other benchmarks. At times of surplus, premiums narrow and discounts widen. But the current situation is almost unprecedented, with discounts in some cases at multi-decade highs.
Confirmed cases of COVID-19 continue to grow at a steady rate in British Columbia, with another 66 cases confirmed Thursday afternoon.

During her daily press conference, provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said there are now 725 confirmed cases of the virus in the province. The number of confirmed cases in the Interior Health region jumped by 16, to a total of 62 cases in the health authority. Interior Health and the Ministry of Health will not disclose the location of these cases.

Of the 725 cases in the province, two more patients have been put in hospital since Wednesday, bringing the total hospitalizations to 66, while 26 still remain in the ICU. There have been no new virus-related deaths in B.C. in the past 24 hours. Fourteen people have died from COVID-19 in the province.

As of Thursday, 186 COVID-19 patients have fully recovered.
At least 36 sailors aboard the Navy aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt have now tested positive for the novel coronavirus as of Friday, according to a U.S. official. Navy officials expect the number of sailors infected to continue to grow as the entire ship's crew of 5,000 is tested for the virus during a port visit to Guam.

The carrier arrived in Guam on a previously scheduled port visit that turned out to be very timely because it afforded better facilities to th sailors who tested positive for COVID-19, and will make it easier to test the ship's crew while it is pier side.

Earlier this week the Navy disclosed that three sailors aboard the carrier had tested positive, marking the first time that infections had been detected aboard a U.S. Navy ship at sea. By the time the ship arrived in Guam early Friday, the number of cases had grown to 25 according to a U.S. offiicial.

Tune into ABC at 1 p.m. ET and ABC News Live at 4 p.m. ET every weekday for special coverage of the novel coronavirus with the full ABC News team, including the latest news, context and analysis.

The growing number of positive tests are a major cause of concern to defense officials, as the tight quarters in aircraft carriers hold the potential for even more infections among the ship's crew. That led to the decision to test the entire ship's crew for the virus.

General John Hyten, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters Friday that it is expected that the testing of the ship's crew could take as long as a week.

PHOTO: An F/A-18F Super Hornet launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) March 18, 2020. (U.S. Navy)

"As testing continues, additional positive cases of COVID-19 have been discovered aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt," Admiral Mike Gilday, the chief of naval operations, said in a statement issued Thursday. "We are taking this threat very seriously and are working quickly to identify and isolate positive cases while preventing further spread of the virus aboard the ship."

(MORE: 1st Navy sailors test positive for new coronavirus aboard a ship at sea)

Story continues

He added, "No Sailors have been hospitalized or are seriously ill."

At an earlier Pentagon briefing on Thursday, Thomas Modly, the acting secretary of the Navy, told reporters that the increase in infected sailors would lead to testing of the ship's entire crew.

Modly said the aircraft carrier would remain pierside in the U.S. territory with the crew limited only to the ship's pier. A U.S. official told ABC News that the carrier is expected to arrive in Guam late Thursday.

PHOTO: U.S. Sailors stand aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) March 22, 2020. (U.S. Navy)

"Our medical team aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt is performing testing for the crew consistent with [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidelines, and we are working to increase the rate of testing as much as possible,' Gilday said in his statement.

"Immediate priority will be symptomatic Sailors, those in close contact with Sailors who have tested positive already, and essential watch standers," he continued. "We are isolating those who test positive. Testing will continue as necessary to ensure the health of the entire ship's crew."

MORE: Pentagon halts overseas travel of US troops for 60 days to mitigate spread of coronavirus

Modly had earlier described the symptoms of infected sailors aboard the carrier as being "very mild" -- namely body aches and sore throats.

Gilday said he expected additional positive tests to emerge after the large scale testing of the ship's crew begins and that any sailors who test positive will be transported to U.S. Naval Hospital Guam for further examination. . "We're taking this day by day," he said. "Our top two priorities are taking care of our people and maintaining mission readiness. Both of those go hand in glove."

MORE: US Navy hospital ship departs for Los Angeles amid coronavirus pandemic

Gilday added, "We are confident that our aggressive response will keep USS Theodore Roosevelt able to respond to any crisis in the region."

On Tuesday, Gilday told reporters it was unclear if the sailors became infected with the coronavirus following the ship's most recent port of call in early March to Da Nang, Vietnam.

"It would be difficult to tie down these active cases to that particular port visit," he said . "We've had aircraft flying to and from the ship and so we just don't want to say that it was that particular port visit."

Gilday said that prior to the port call in Vietnam, Navy officials carefully considered whether to proceed with the visit. He noted that at the time of the scheduled port of call there were only 16 cases of COVID-19 -- all of them in northern Vietnam, far from the port located in central Vietnam.

What to know about coronavirus:

How it started and how to protect yourself: coronavirus explained

What to do if you have symptoms: coronavirus symptoms

Tracking the spread in the US and Worldwide: coronavirus map

Careful screening of returning sailors was carried out before they boarded the carrier, which then followed the Navy's new guidance to maintain 14 days at sea following a port of call, officials said.

The first three sailors tested positive 15 days after the port of call.

36 sailors test positive for coronavirus on Navy aircraft carrier originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Rails

Jeff Abrams still remembers the moment his clothing company, Rails, had its first big win. After working for nearly three months on an order of 2,000 shirts for a major retailer, the boxes (which Abrams had hand-labeled) were finally packed, and the trucks were on their way.

Abrams celebrations were cut short, however, when he received a call informing him that the trucks had been robbed and his clothes were nowhere to be found.
By PTI

MUMBAI: Amid the 21-day complete lockdown in the country, the news of New York-based chef Floyd Cardoz's demise, who was the co-owner of The Bombay Canteen, has shocked many.

Cardoz, who tested positive for COVID-19, was in Mumbai until March 8 for the fifth-anniversary celebrations of the restaurant that was attended by more than 200 guests.

In an Instagram post on March 18, Cardoz said that he had admitted himself to hospital in New York since he was feeling feverish.

Gurbaxish Kohli, the vice-president of the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Association of India and president of Hotel and Restaurant Association of Western India, said Cardoz was a good chef and the fraternity will miss him.

Print and television journalist, author, columnist and talk show host Vir Sangvi in his tweet said Cardoz was a legendary chef who taught Americans to respect Indian food with Tabla and who transformed the Mumbai restaurant scene with The Bombay Canteen and OPedroMumbai.

"I interviewed him three weeks ago and still cannot believe he's gone. RIP," Sanghvi tweeted.

RIP @Floyd Cardoz legendary chef who taught Americans to respect Indian food with Tabla & who transformed the Mumbai restaurant scene with @bombaycanteen & @OPedroMumbai.

I interviewed him three weeks ago & still cant believe hes gone https://t.co/dErOCxSIPf  vir sanghvi (@virsanghvi) March 25, 2020

Michelin-starred chef Vineet Bhatia tweeted that it is a huge loss not just to his family and friends but also to the culinary world.

He has contributed immensely and left a huge legacy.

Today, we lost Floyd Cardoz to COVID-19. We lost someone who gave life flavor and zest, bold food, and brought out our humanity. My heart and soul are full with love and sadness for his family as we suffer this loss alongside them. pic.twitter.com/fidRl5U73q  rachael ray (@rachaelray) March 25, 2020

Ahsish Bhasin, executive chef at Leela tweeted that it's a big loss to the industry.

Bollywood actor Mitra Joshi said, "Jesus! I hope you have gotten tested. You know this is quite scary. I mean you met someone three weeks back who has passed away now. Such surreal times we have been living.

Nilanjana Roy tweeted, "Devastating. He was one of the warmest and generous souls, so in love with food, happy to talk about recipes and culinary history."

Devastating. He was one of the most warm and generous souls, so in love with food, happy to talk about recipes and culinary history.  Nilanjana Roy (@nilanjanaroy) March 25, 2020

The government on Tuesday declared a total lockdown for 21 days to curtail the spreading of the virus which has claimed 12 lives so far.

The number of COVID-19 cases has crossed 600 in the country.
A WOMAN was able to celebrate her 100th birthday despite the restrictions imposed by the coronavirus outbreak.

Peggy Green was joined at the Thamesfield nursing home, off Wargrave Road, Henley, by her daughters Lesley Watts, who also lives in the town, and Sally Jenkins, who was visiting from Dorset with her husband Mike.

Mrs Greens other daughter Gay, who lives in Leeds, was unable to join them but briefly chatted with her using the FaceTime mobile app.

The family had been due to have a large celebration at Bix Manor but had to call this off in order to observe the new restrictions on social distancing.

They couldnt meet in any of the homes communal areas so instead enjoyed a picnic in Mrs Greens flat, where staff brought them a cake baked specially for the occasion.

On the morning of the party, the centenarian was delighted to receive a congratulatory card from the Queen and another from the Department of Work and Pensions.

Mrs Watts, of Gravel Hill, said: It was very sad that we had to cancel our original plan because it would have been quite something to get the whole family together.

However, its understandable given whats going on and despite everything we made the most of it and had a wonderful day. We put up balloons and banners and enjoyed each others company.

The staff were incredibly kind and even sang Happy Birthday for her. Mum absolutely loved it and was particularly overwhelmed by her card from the Queen, which she hadnt expected.

Mrs Green, nee Spratt was one of five children and grew up in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, with her parents Douglas and Sheila. The family moved to Sagamore, a large house off Bolney Road, Shiplake, in 1938 as the family feared the Germans would target the coast if war broke out.

They lived there for four years and would often shelter from bombing raids in a partly-submerged storage shed beside the house. To this day, a record of the bombing runs is scrawled on the wall in pencil, although Mrs Green doesnt recall who wrote this.

She met her husband Derek, then a major in the Royal Engineers, in the early Forties and they moved to Torquay in 1942, where they were married. Mr Green was an expert on installing and taking down prefabricated Bailey bridges and travelled the world training soldiers in their use.

The couple were back in Henley by 1945 and Mr Green and his brothers set up Sidney Green & Sons, later Associated Asphalt, at the Highlands Farm industrial estate off Greys Road. He retired as a director in the early Sixties.

The family lived at various addresses, including Remenham Hill and Wharfe Lane, Henley.

Their children were born between 1944 and 1952 and attended St Marys preparatory school in St Andrews Road before going to boarding school.

Mrs Green, who was widowed in 1999, did not work but was a keen watercolour painter and exhibited her work at galleries in London and the Henley area.

She was also a member of the towns flower club and helped to run its NSPCC baby clinics.

She left Henley more than 20 years ago and lived in various locations, including Dorset and Winchester, but returned to be nearer relatives.

She now has seven grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren.

Mrs Watts said: She has always been incredibly creative  art was a big part of her life and she was also very skilled at needlework.

Shes quite a fidget and loved doing up houses, so she moved around quite a bit before she came back here.

She has always valued her independence but she understood the need to be nearer people who can look after her, though shes still in remarkably good health for her age.

We were glad that she could celebrate her 100th birthday surrounded by the people she loves the most and I was pleased that her card from the Queen left such an impression.
Teresa Hazelwood stopped by a Dollar General store in northern Mississippi to get some chips, and soon found herself riding out a suspected tornado in the parking lot and felt it lifting her car. She gripped the steering wheel and prayed.

I just prayed to God, oh please God help me, Hazelwood recalled after storm on March 24. And things was going every which way. I could feel the vehicle move. It lifted, it moved me out of the parking spot. And I just kept praying please God help me.

The suspected tornado heavily damaged the store in Tishomingo and other structures in northern Mississippi and Alabama as a severe storm system crossed the Deep South, authorities said.

Tishomingo Police Chief Mike Kemp told WTVA minor injuries were reported in that community.

National Weather Service meteorologist Mike Johnson said there were reports of widespread tree damage and some structural damage in Tishomingo County, which is in northern Mississippi abutting the Alabama border.

He said the tornado touched down about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Its a pretty compact system that produced the tornado and its moved into parts of Alabama and Tennessee, Johnson said.

The National Weather Service had issued multiple tornado warnings through the early evening, including a tornado emergency for an area of northwest Alabama.

The National Weather Service in Huntsville tweeted shortly before 6 p.m. that TORNADO HAS BEEN REPORTED ON THE GROUND and told residents in an area of Colbert County in north Alabama to seek shelter. That county also abuts the Mississippi state line.

The weather service also said there were preliminary reports of falling debris in the area.

Robert Boyd, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Huntsville, Alabama, said severe weather warnings had been issued for northwest Alabama on Tuesday evening.

Severe weather watches also were posted for parts of Georgia and Tennessee as the storm system moved across the South during the nighttime hours.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to impact an ever-widening group of cities and states, it is challenging media outlets both big and small  not just because it puts pressure on already stretched newsrooms in terms of reporting resources, but because it is also affecting the financial side of the industry, with advertising revenue declines of 20 percent in some cases. How are metropolitan and regional media outlets handling this kind of pressure, while also reporting on one of the biggest stories in recent memory? How are they making sure that their staff are taking care of themselves, even as newsrooms put in long hours  many of them working remotely in large numbers for the first time? This week on CJRs Galley platform, weve been talking with editors and managers at a number of medium-sized newspapers and websites such as the Arizona Republic, Philadelphia Inquirer, Seattle Times, Dallas Morning News, Maine Today, and Salt Lake Tribune to see how they are coping.

Kim Bui, the director of audience innovation at the Arizona Republic, says her organization was cautious about being too alarmist in covering the virus in its initial stages, since the state only had one case. But as the impact of the pandemic started to become obvious, coverage ramped up, and Bui says she and the rest of the newsroom took their cues about what to cover from readers. The good thing about interacting with them is that we know that what they are interested in is the impact on their daily lives, she says. How does this change my work? My kids school? What do I do if I feel sick? Were trying to base coverage off of that for the core team and I and the other news directors assign out impact stories as relevant.

Like a lot of newsrooms, the Dallas Morning News has pivoted from longer-term projects to an all-hands-on-deck approach, says Mike Orren, chief product officer at the Morning News and president of Belo Business Intelligence. But unlike some other outlets that have put all their coronavirus coverage outside the paywall, Orren says the Morning News has only made some of its content free. The paper started out with everything virus-related available, he says, but after a few days, we talked to some of our peers and we found that we werent seeing the same subscription bump they were. So we pivoted and made just the public health content free, meaning that a school closing was free, but a celebritys opinion was in our normal meter.

Related: Journalism Needs a Stimulus. Heres What it Should Look Like

The Salt Lake Tribune is in an even more challenging position than some other outlets, because the paper recently transformed itself into a non-profit enterprise, one of the first to do so. Before COVID-19 struck, we were busy getting the business functions ready, setting up a board of directors, updating the website  then coronavirus and an earthquake last week complicated things. But were still moving ahead, said Jennifer Napier-Pearce, editor of the Tribune. Since we got our nonprofit approval, weve been fundraising so those donations and philanthropy will give us a much-needed cushion right now. But the long-term economic effects of coronavirus remain to be seen. Certainly, much of our advertising involved live events and retail, and those sectors are being hit very hard right now.

Lisa DeSisto is the CEO of Masthead Maine, which owns the Portland Press Herald, Morning Sentinel, Kennebec Journal, Sun Journal and Times Record. She said that even though the groups coronavirus coverage is all free of charge, all the papers have been seeing a significant increase in subscriptions, with many readers saying Your coverage is more vital than ever and I want to support you. However, she also said that because of the decline in advertising, the group is trying to reduce the number of pages in its print editions to save money (all of the chains daily papers moved to digital-only Monday editions earlier this month).

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CJR will be continuing this weeks discussion with a roundtable on Thursday and Friday, involving some or all of the interviewees weve been speaking with, as well as questions from readers of the Lenfest Institutes Solution Set newsletter, written by Joseph Lichterman, and trusted members of the Galley and CJR communities.

Heres more on how newsrooms are handling COVID-19:

Story of a lifetime : Kim Bui said at the Arizona Republic were trying to be as kind as we can, and Ive repeated that leaders need to model the behavior that we expect from others  Sign off, take a break, over-communicate, do video chats as often as you can. Over the weekend I did some origami and wrote some letters. Im trying to remember that this is.extraordinary. This is the story of a lifetime, so we need to pace ourselves through it so we can help people understand the world around them, and how its changing. Steve Greenlee, managing editor of the Portland Press Herald , said Were making it clear that we dont want everyone working 24/7, and well continue to do that. Weve also told our folks that we dont want them putting themselves at risk. No story, no photograph is worth risking your health.

Subscriptions strong : Kati Erwert, senior vice-president of product, marketing, and public service at the Seattle Times, says that readership stats at the paper have been off the charts. Many news stories are seeing two to three times as many unique visitors as they would normally, she says, and in some cases they are at 10 times normal levels. Subscriptions are incredibly strong, trending about two to three times where we normally are at this time, she said. Although the paper has reduced its reliance on advertising to the point where subscriptions now account for 60 percent of revenue, however, Erwert said the drop in ads still has an impact, and the declines are alarming.

Philanthropy matters : Gabriel Escobar, editor and vice-president of the Philadelphia Inquirer LLC, which includes the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer.com, says he isnt concerned about the financial impact of the ad slowdown as a result of the coronavirus. We are owned by the non-profit Lenfest Institute for Journalism so philanthropy is an important part of our present and our future, he says. Katie Erwert of the Seattle Times said being family-owned (the publisher is the fourth generation of the Blethen family to run the paper) is a key differentiator in so many ways. They live here. They work here. The impact to our community is felt deeply because they are of this community.

Texting the news : Bui says the Arizona Republic has been experimenting with a number of different ways of interacting with readers, including a subscription text-messaging service called Subtext. There are now about 500 people using the service, which allows them to get news headlines, but also reply to Republic staffers with their experiences or perspective. We text roughly twice a day, once with case numbers, and then another with something else I think people need to know about, says Bui . Im trying to answer most replies and people really love the one-on-one feeling. I think people are really scared and overwhelmed, so Ive gotten a bunch of comments about how nice it is that we have an upbeat tone. I write it like Im texting my friends.

Other notable stories:

Related: How the COVID Tracking Project fills the public health data gap

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Mathew Ingram is CJRs chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.
* Interactive graphic tracking global spread of coronavirus: open https://tmsnrt.rs/3aIRuz7 in an external browser By Sanjeev Miglani NEW DELHI, March 26 (Reuters) - Three more people infected with coronavirus died overnight in India as the government sought on Thursday to improve basic services to 1.3 billion people locked indoors to slow the spread of the disease. Streets were silent across India's cities and towns on the second day of a three-week, 24 hour shutdown as people heeded Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call not to step out of homes except in emergencies or to buy food and other necessities. Lines of people, wearing masks and some with gloves, could be seen outside small neighbourhood shops in Delhi and Mumbai, among other cities. Trucks were stranded at state borders and public transport was withdrawn. Police have strictly enforced the lockdown even though Modi said essential services would be maintained. Ram Prakash, a shopkeeper in Delhi's Nizamuddin area, said supplies of some essential goods had improved although bottled water was still a problem. "We are still facing supply issues with a few things, but slowly things are getting better, he said. The health ministry said the number of cases of coronavirus had risen to 649, of which 13 had died. The numbers are still small compared with those in China, Italy and Spain, but health experts have warned that the world's second most populous country faces a tidal wave of infections if tough steps are not taken. Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO's top emergencies expert, told a Geneva news conference that with the lockdown in place, India had a window of opportunity to expand testing, surveillance and quarantine facilities and said its success with eliminating polio was an example. "India got rid of polio by breaking it by breaking it down to the village level. All the way through the system, it broke down the problem, it went after the polio virus district by district by district by district. And India won." "If India does the same thing, breaks down the problem, puts in place the measures that are needed, then there is a way out." India has tested 24,254 people as of Wednesday, according to the government run Indian Council of Medical Research, a small number compared to the population. Only recently has the government authorized the private sector and some nongovernmental research laboratories to run the tests for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. HIKERS STRANDED NEAR EVEREST The number of cases rose to 1,102 in neighbouring Pakistan with eight deaths, with most cases in Sindh province that is under a lockdown. But infections in Punjab, the most populous province, are picking up now, government data showed. On Wednesday, Pakistan said it was seeking a fresh $1.4 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help it deal with the economic slowdown from the coronavirus. Pakistan is already on a three-year rescue package that began last year as the country of 208 million people wrestles with a balance-of-payments crisis. In Nepal, authorities were trying to evacuate tourists stranded in different parts of the country due to a nationwide lockdown, bring them to Kathmandu and arrange to send them home, the government said. Shyam Thapa of the Himalayan Expedition company said about 125 foreign hikers were stranded at Lukla, the gateway to Mount Everest. They are safe and have no problem, Thapa told Reuters. Following is the spread of the coronavirus in South Asia's eight nations: Confirmed cases, government figures Pakistan 1,102 India 649 Sri Lanka 102 Afghanistan 84 Bangladesh 39 Maldives 13 Nepal 3 Bhutan 2 TOTAL 1,871 (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Gibran Peshiman in Islamabad, Aftab Ahmad in Delhi and Gopal Sharma in Kathmandu; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
The Senate unveiled an economic relief package as a response to the pandemic of coronavirus. This action came as a relief to people worrying about their income as they must stay at home, which means no work for some. However, it also left many confused.

The plan is yet to be finalized, but let's take a look at its implications and key takeaways.

Loans for Critical Industries

Airlines, tourist agencies, and other critical industries got struck by the pandemic. For this reason, they will get billions in loans, which is to be repaid in due time.

There are some restrictions on the usage of these funds, though. For example, executives won't be able to get raises for the next two years.

Limited Paid Leave

Small businesses have to continue paying salaries to employees forced to stay at home. The Senate plan intends to cap the daily amount that the employer has to pay to $200 maximum.

This Republican decision faced condemnation from the Democrats, though, who argued for significant relief for people having to miss work due to Covid-19.

Loans and Tax Cuts for Businesses

To aid them in paying employees, mortgages, and rents, the Government will get bridge loans for small businesses. As regards to large corporations, they will get temporary tax cuts to overcome the economic downturn.

Taxpayers Get Checks from the Government

When it comes to taxpayers forced to pay income tax, individuals will get amounts according to their earnings. Joint files from married taxpayers and children will also impact the quantities.

This decision differs from the first one proposed by Trump administration, suggesting that $2000 be sent to every citizen in two instalments if the country continued to face an economic crisis.

Extension of the Tax Return Deadline

Although the IRS did not extend the deadline for filing federal taxes in 2020, there will be some measures to make it easier. Individual income tax returns on the level of the federation are due April 15, 2020, as well as extensions.

However, the IRS is giving its taxpayers an extra 90 days, or three months, to pay their tax bills without penalty or interest.

So, the deadline for filing tax returns is still April 15, but you have until July 15 to actually pay the sum. If you aren't capable of doing so within the period, the IRS still offers assistance with payment plans.

Moreover, Americans who withdrew sums of up to $100,000 from their retirement accounts will not suffer typical penalties. There are also chances for deferring student loan payments.

When it comes to tax refunds, they are still processed as usual. So, if you're expecting a refund, file your request for 2019 as soon as possible. There's a possibility of a delay if the situation continues to worsen, but for now, there's none.

If you use an online service for submitting your returns, you can still expect to see your refund within 21 days, and there's also an IRS delivery schedule on their website.

If you still find all this too overwhelming to grasp, apart from the tools offered by the IRS, many independent lawyers can help you.

Such assistance may be the most necessary for businesses. If you own one, don't be afraid to seek out help. As the experts at fariscpa.com say, experts can provide services and advice to help you avoid issues or penalties.

The Bottom Line

From an economic perspective, the central issue lies in the level of disruption the economies are suffering due to containment measures.

The chances are that the global economy will weaken even further, so it's critical for each citizen to understand the implications and try to do their share right. That way, it will be much easier to regain footing once the pandemic is done.
CENTRAL POINT, Ore.  Jackson County says that its partnered with other local groups and governments to make sure the homeless community along the Bear Creek Greenway continues to get food and proper sanitation during the coronavirus outbreak.

"Members of this community are extremely vulnerable in regards to COVID-19 and many have underlying medical conditions," the Jackson County Emergency Operation Center said. "Additionally, many of the service providers that traditionally care for this vulnerable population have shut down to keep their employees safe and to comply with the Governors Order, or are overwhelmed."

Guided by CDC recommendations, the Emergency Operations Center has joined with other partners to bring food and basic sanitation to the homeless.

This week, workers brought portable toilets and handwashing stations to the Greenway. Starting Friday, sack meals will be delivered everyday to people along the path "as opposed to gathering people in one large setting."

The goal is simple; to keep populations residing where they are currently at and to prevent large group settings, where food delivery has typically happened in the past, said Steve Lambert with the Jackson County EOC.

RELATED: Medford gives $35k to local service organizations during coronavirus outbreak

On Tuesday the County passed out fliers to the homeless with information about COVID-19 symptoms and resources, and telling them about the upcoming food deliveries.

Group settings strongly increase the chance of COVID-19 spread. If it were to enter this population, it would likely spread quickly and devastate the community, said Tanya Phillips with Jackson County Public Health.

Law enforcement agencies have also agreed to suspend all "sweep" operations along the Greenway during the current state of emergency, according to Jackson County Sheriff Nate Sickler.

Access contributed a truck and driver to the program for food deliveries, which will be accompanied by a deputy or members of the Medford Police Livability Team. Meanwhile, Mercy Flights has volunteered EMT services alongside the food deliveries three says per week to evaluate the homeless for any COVID-19 symptoms.

The food itself is being produced at the Jackson County Jail by the contractor that currently feeds inmates.

In addition to $5,000 of County funds, the City of Medford contributed $5,000, plus $1,500 from the City of Ashland, $300 from the City of Talent, $300 from the City of Central Point, and $1,000 from the United Way. Jackson County Parks & Sheriffs Office have volunteered staff for the daily deliveries and trash pickup.

Grants requests have also been submitted to Jackson Care Connect, AllCare Health, and the Oregon Community Foundation, according to the County.
The government's economic package, worth Rs 1.7 trillion, to ease the impact of the 21-day lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus was welcomed by opposition parties. However, they described it as "too little" and "inadequate".

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the package on Thursday, which was hailed by PM Narendra Modi as one that will go a long way in ensuring food and livelihood security of the poor. "It is our firm resolve that the poor and vulnerable get all possible help to cope with the testing times," he tweeted. It ...
Hon Abena Osei-Asare, Member of Parliament for Atiwa-East on Wednesday donated some hand washing items to the 12 Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) compounds and three health facilities in the constituency.

The gesture formed part of efforts by the MP to help deal with the threat of the viral disease, coronavirus in the country.

Some of the items donated were 50 veronica buckets, hand sanitizers, tissue paper and washing detergents.

Making the presentation on behalf of the MP, the District Chief Executive (DCE) for the area, Hon Kwabena Panin Nkansah urged authorities at the health centres to ensure people abide by the health guides by the Health Ministry by washing their hands during visits.

The DCE noted that the threat of the viral disease was real.

He therefore urged authorities to ensure strict adherence to all the social distancing measures as well as the hygiene measures at the centres.

Proper hand washing etiquette, Hon Nkansah noted had proven to be the most effective way of preventing the contraction of the viral infection.

He commended the MP for the timely nature of the donation and asked the 15 beneficiary centres to ensure they make optimum use of the items presented.

Receiving the items on behalf of the health directorate, Mrs Vida Effua Afful, District Health Director thanked the MP for the kind gesture.

She also commended the DCE for helping to deliver the items to the 15 centres.

According to her, the threat of the viral disease was making people aware of the hygiene measures, adding that the provision of the items would now help relieve both staff and visitors of the anxiety of not having same to wash their hands.
SAGINAW, MI  New outpatient screening sites offering COVID-19 testing in Saginaw County are opening for people with a lab order from their doctor or health care provider, according to the Saginaw County Health Department.

Covenant HealthCare will offer testing from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day at the Visiting Nurses Association, 502 S. Hamilton St., in Saginaw.

The State of Michigan will offer another outpatient sampling and screening site in Saginaw. Patients referred by their provider to this location will receive the address on their lab order form. This location will be open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day of the week by appointment only.

Great Lakes Bay Health Center began testing on Tuesday, March 24 in the parking lot of the David R. Gamez community health center located at 501 Lapeer St. in Saginaw. Hours of operation will be 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, or until testing supplies run out each day.

If someone is experiencing fever, cough, and shortness of breath, they need to contact their health care provider for possible testing. Healthcare providers will be assessing patients for risk factors and providing direction on where they can be tested. The health department encourages citizens to establish a healthcare provider if they dont have one.

We are trying to expand the number of tests offered in the community to better determine the spread of disease," said Dr. Delicia Pruitt, medical director of the Saginaw County Health Department. "Health Department staff and our public health system partners will conduct contact tracing and monitoring for positive COVID-19 individuals and their contacts. Contact tracing helps make possible earlier diagnosis (often within 72 hours) and getting care to people who need it. The information can also help contain clusters of illness within a particular family or community group.

If a contact of a COVID-19 positive case develops symptoms, the early identification can ensure that they are isolated at home and not spreading the virus to anyone else, Pruitt added. "This helps reduce the number of cases, limits illness transmission, and ultimately, will help save the lives of those most vulnerable to this virus.

As of Wednesday, March 25. there are nine confirmed coronavirus cases in Saginaw County.

The Saginaw County Health Department will continue to perform surveillance of the virus throughout the county, and providing situational updates and guidance to the public, media, and community partners.

Additional COVID-19 information can be obtained from reputable sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov/coronavirus) and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (www.michigan.gov/coronavirus) and the Saginaw County Health Department (www.saginawpublichealth.org).

The Health Departments COVID-19 informational hotline is also available at (989) 758-3828.

For regular updates, follow the Saginaw County Health Department on Facebook.

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Coronavirus cases rise to 57 in Genesee, Saginaw, Bay counties
Providing Advanced Data Capture and Intelligent Document Classification Solutions "Our document classification automation reduces hundreds of work hours associated with both configuration and production workflows and produces superior results compared to other vendor classification solutions by leveraging machine learning, said Noel Flynn, CEO at ancora software.

ancora Software, the industry leader of Business Process Automation including Intelligent Document Classification and Advanced Data Capture solutions is very happy to announce the issue of a new patent (US 10,607,115) for automatic generation of training data for its previously patented Intelligent Document Classification solution.. This new patent addresses a method of automatic acquisition of training data for any document type with minimal or no human intervention.

ancoras Document Classification uses a variety of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to address classification and categorization of documents in such diverse applications as Accounts Payable, Sales Order Automation, Mortgage Loan processing, Auto Dealer Loan processing, Mail Room, Medical Records and data management. This breadth of applications is the result of optimally designed features and algorithms that utilize all available information from the documents to be classified such as the size, the layout, logos or pictures, content and any other attributes of the document, just like a human would do if they were scanning documents on their desk and identifying them. ancora also supports connections to downstream systems to validate and verify the results of classification. The software is designed with the degree of automation that supports the ever-increasing levels of simplicity for the users. ancoras systems take advantage of vector (first generation) PDF documents to bypass OCR and provide unprecedented accuracy of data classification and capture. This results in very high labor savings achieved in all the steps of the document processing workflow. Our largest customer is a financial institution processing over 35 million pages per year with over 900 document types, we are classifying those documents at 98% accuracy.

"Our document classification automation reduces hundreds of work hours associated with both configuration and production workflows and produces superior results compared to other vendor classification solutions by leveraging machine learning, said Noel Flynn, CEO at ancora software. While rules-based approaches are useful for a small number of static document types, only learning-based automated classification offers a solution for more complex classification and separation needs. ancora Document Classification software removes any need to manually identify first, middle and last pages since it analyzes the output of content classification to automatically detect and create rules.

ancoraDocs is available either on premise or as a true multi-tenant cloud service hosted by ancora on Microsoft Azure. It can also be deployed as a hybrid solution, utilizing zero footprint browser-based clients. ancoraDocs is designed to bring simplicity to a market where applications have historically been complex and overpriced, difficult to configure, install, use, and maintain, said Nick Bova, VP of Sales at ancora Software. It can be deployed in a matter of hours or days, not the weeks or months you often see with traditional capture. This helps users start realizing their benefits sooner and produces a faster time to ROI. In addition, it opens the market to SMB organizations, which have historically not been able to take advantage of automated document capture due to the significant costs of getting started.

About ancora Software

ancora Software, Inc. is an innovative provider of Business Process Automation solutions including Intelligent Document Classification and Data Capture. ancoraDocs, our flagship product, was developed to bring simplicity to a technology that historically has been complex, over-priced, and difficult to configure, install, use and maintain. Our Business Process Automation solutions with patented artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies help companies eliminate costly manual steps in their business processes such as; document classification, document analysis, manual data entry, manual filing, etc. Businesses using ancora Software achieve faster and less expensive business process automation and better controls over valuable critical information. Headquartered in San Diego, CA, ancora Software maintains sales and support operations throughout North America and the UK.

For more information about ancora Software, Inc. visit http://www.ancorasoftware.com


As the coronavirus outbreak leads more and more governments to issue stay-at-home orders, Wells Fargo has labeled its call-center workers essential employees and is requiring them to come to work.

On March 17, several California counties issued shelter-in-place orders that directed all non-essential employees to stay at home in order to stem the progress of the coronavirus outbreak. The same day, Wells Fargos head of consumer lending, Mary Mack, sent an email to employees instructing them to come to work, according to a VICE report. The email said that branch, contact center, and operations center employees are considered essential and exempt from the counties orders.

Banks have qualified under several states definition of essential services  but Wells Fargo employees who work at call centers have questioned whether their jobs should be included. Many of the employees who spoke to VICE told the publication that they feared that they might be exposing themselves to COVID-19 at the crowded call centers.
PENNSYLVANIA  According to Gerritys Supermarkets co-owner Joe Fasula, one womans attempt at a prank will cost the store over $35,000 worth of produce.

In a post uploaded to the Gerritys Facebook page on Wednesday, Fasula says that a woman known in the Hanover Township area as a chronic problem in the community entered the Luzerne County store around 2:20 p.m. and proceeded to cough all over the produce section, as well as parts of the bakery, meat case and grocery.

The woman was removed from the store as quickly as possible by Gerritys employees, and Fasula says that hes been in contact with the district attorneys office, which will be aggressively pursuing numerous charges against the woman.

We had no choice but to throw out all product she came in contact with, Fasula said. Working closely with the Hanover Township health inspector, we identified every area that she was in, we disposed of the product and thoroughly cleaned and disinfected everything.

Fasula estimates that over $35,000 worth of goods will have to be thrown away. He added that he is sick to his stomach over the loss of the food.

While it is always a shame when food is wasted, in these times when so many people are worried about the security of our food supply, it is even more disturbing, Fasula said.

The woman involved is not believed to be infected with COVID-19, but Fasula says that they will make every effort to make sure that she is tested.

Related Content:
By Fabian Cambero

SANTIAGO, March 25 (Reuters) - Chile's Codelco, the world's largest copper miner, said on Wednesday it would temporarily suspend construction on some projects in a bid to halt the spread of coronavirus, as the companys unions ratcheted up pressure for more safety measures.

In a statement Codelco said the 15-day suspension applied to remaining work being carried out to make Chuquicamata an underground mine, and projects at an early stage at Rajo Inca and Traspaso Andina.

"This measure has no impact on the production of the respective divisions - which maintain operational continuity with the greatest possible sanitary safeguards - but allows for a decrease in people circulating," Codelco said.

The announcements follow an open letter from the Federation of Copper Workers, an umbrella group for Codelcos unions, demanding the state miner consider a full, preventative quarantine, including halting labor at all mine operations.

The group warned it would take action on its own if the miner did not implement more drastic measures to protect workers immediately.

"We will not rule out a call to our workers ... to walk off the job in an effort to mitigate the impacts (of the outbreak)," the federation said in the statement.

Though many operations have been automated at Chiles largest deposits, mines remain labor-intensive and workers at remote sites in the Andes mountains congregate for meals and transportation, complicating sanitary safeguards.

World top copper producer Chile on Wednesday surpassed 1,000 cases of the virus, among the highest tallies in Latin America.

The outbreak, together with plunging prices for copper, have put Codelco in a tough spot. The company is pushing a 10-year, $40 billion plan to boost output as falling ore grades have put a dent in production.

(Reporting by Fabian Cambero; writing by Aislinn Laing and Dave Sherwood, Editing by Sandra Maler and Sonya Hepinstall)
Leading Malian opposition leader Soumaila Cisse has been kidnapped, the government said Thursday, in a first for a politician of his rank in the war-torn West African state.

A former finance minister and presidential contender, Cisse went missing in jihadist-ridden central Mali on Wednesday afternoon in circumstances that remain unclear.

His Union for the Republic and Democracy (URD) party released a statement later on Wednesday saying Cisse and his team had failed to turn up for an expected appointment and could not be reached by phone.

On Thursday, Malian government spokesman Yaya Sangare released a communique referring to Cisse's disappearance as a "kidnap," without offering further details.

"All the arrangements are being made to find the missing people and return them to their families," the statement said. Two URD party members, who requested anonymity, also told AFP that the politician had been kidnapped.

Mali has been struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency that erupted in the north in 2012, and which has claimed thousands of military and civilian lives. Despite the presence of thousands of French and UN troops, the conflict in Mali has engulfed the centre of the country and spread to neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.

Al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists are active in the area of central Mali where Cisse and his team disappeared. They were in the volatile region to campaign ahead of a parliamentary poll on Sunday, his party said.

The election has long been delayed because of chronic insecurity in the country.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Gary Cohn, once a top aide to President Donald Trump, told CNBC Wednesday that the federal government should go as far as it can to rescue the economy from collapse due to the coronavirus outbreak and that it's not possible to go too far.

"You cannot overreact in this situation," said Cohn, who served as chief economic advisor from 2017-2018. "The job of the executive office and the job of all of Congress right now is to act decisively and act quickly and throw as much money as you can at the situation."

Cohn made the comments during a CNBC Town Hall on Wednesday.

Overnight, the White House and Senate came to terms on a $2 trillion stimulus bill to stunt the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, though the legislation continues to face some opposition in the chamber.

In the legislation, lawmakers carved out $500 billion for the Treasury Department to direct loans, loan guarantees and cash grants to distressed corporations. It also includes a $350 billion program to fund small businesses to prevent layoffs as the economy slides into a downturn. Wall Street has fallen into a deep bear market as investors contemplate the impact that "stay-at-home" and quarantine orders across the country could affect commerce.

As for citizens, officials have proposed distributing cash payments to help blunt the impact of wide-spread layoffs. If approved, individuals could get $1,200 and married couples $2,400, alongside $500 per child. The plan comes with income restrictions.

"Time is of the essence" and there's no time to have people line up at banks, the former Goldman Sachs president said during the discussion.

"This is about getting money to hardworking people tomorrow," Cohn said, "and I don't care if we go to banks, and banks lend against it, or if we go to the big payroll services and tell them to make payroll tomorrow because [the payroll companies] know exactly who they're going to pay it to."

Corporations, particularly those in the travel industry, are seeking government aid in the form of both loans and cash grants to weather lost business due to the fast-spreading disease. Airlines, cruise lines and hotels are in the eye of the storm after a large swaths of consumers and companies have canceled vacations, business trips and conferences.

Public health officials around the globe have been laboring to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, which causes the deadly COVID-19 disease. The illness has been contracted by almost 467,600 people and killed more than 21,000 around the world, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Government leaders in the U.S. have struggled to stop the spread of the coronavirus, which has hit New York state particularly hard along with California, New Jersey and Washington state.
Press Release

26 March 2020

Note: To inform the industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, STR will temporarily publish weekly communication for Mexico based on preliminary data. This preliminary data represents a percentage of STR's total sample for the region. Once monthly processing is complete, data points will likely appear different.

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Mexico's hotel industry showed clear effects of the COVID-19 pandemic with sharp year-over-year declines in the three key performance metrics during the week of 15-21 March 2020, according to preliminary data from STR.

In comparison with the week of 17-23 March 2019, Mexico hotels reported the following:

Occupancy: -54.2% to 30.2%

Average daily rate (ADR): -2.7 to MXN2,655.20

Revenue per available room (RevPAR): -55.4% to MXN801.79

Among data-sufficient markets within Mexico, Mexico City continued to see the steepest decline in RevPAR (-74.2% to MXN454.50), due primarily to the largest drop in occupancy (-70.5% to 20.3%).

The city of Puebla saw absolute occupancy fall below 20% (-62.8% to 17.6%) and also experienced a double-digit decline in ADR (-17.7% to MXN1,101.88).

Mexico's biggest tourist destinations are also feeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic but are still well above the national average in absolute occupancy.

The Mexican Caribbean and Puerto Vallarta are both maintaining an absolute occupancy above 40%. Nevertheless, the Mexican Caribbean saw a steep decline in RevPAR (-48.2% to MXN1,668.65), due to a substantial drop in occupancy (-44.6% to 42.6%). Puerto Vallarta was able to grow ADR slightly (+1.7% to MXN4,182.63) but experienced a decline in occupancy (-44.2% to 44.4%).
As we weigh the costs of self-isolation against the risks of COVID-19, personal health become an important consideration

She knew it wasnt a good idea and her daughter would disapprove. Nonetheless, Barbara Figge Fox, 79, recently went to four stores in Princeton, New Jersey, to shop for canned goods, paper towels, fresh fruit, yogurt, and other items.

I was in panic mode, said Fox, who admitted shes been feeling both agonizing fear and irrational impulsivity because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Susannah Fox, Barbaras daughter, had been warning her exceptionally healthy mother for weeks of the need to stay inside as much as possible and limit contact with other people. Everyone age 60 and older is at high risk of complications from COVID-19 and should adopt these measures, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends.

At one point, when I was pushing her to limit her activities, my mother said defiantly, Well, Im going to die of something, said Susannah, an adviser to health care and technology companies. And I said, Well, thats true, but lets not rush it.

Are precautions of the sort the CDC has endorsed really necessary, even in areas where the new coronavirus doesnt yet appear to be circulating widely? What about disease-free adults in their 60s and 70s? Do they need to worry about going to a restaurant or a friends house for dinner? Are all outside activities ill-advised?

I asked several geriatricians for their advice. All cautioned that what they told me could be upended by unforeseen developments. Indeed, over the past week, the governors of about a dozen statesincluding California, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, and Washingtonhave told residents, and not just older adults, to stay inside, in an aggressive effort to stem the spread of the coronavirus.

Heres what geriatricians think is reasonable, and why, at the moment:

Know the odds. Current warnings were originally based on data from China, which has reported that 80 percent of deaths from COVID-19 occurred among people age 60 and older.

The latest data from the United States was published by the CDC last week. Of 4,226 known COVID-19 cases at the time, people 65 and older were responsible for 80 percent of deaths, 53 percent of intensive care unit admissions and 45 percent of hospital admissions. Those 85 and older suffered the worst outcomes.

Data from China, the U.S., and other countries also indicates that people with illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and lung disease, and those with compromised immune systems, are more likely to become critically ill and die if they become infected. The CDC recommends that these patients stay inside and practice strict precautions.

Whats not yet known: lots of details about the underlying health status of older adults in China and other countries whove died from COVID-19. We just dont have this kind of information yet, said Dr. Carla Perissinotto, associate chief for geriatrics clinical programs at the University of California-San Francisco.

As a result, considerable uncertainty about the true nature of risk remains. Whats clear, however, is that older adults have less robust immune systems and are less able to mount a protective response against the coronavirus.

Exercise more caution. Uncertainty also surrounds the degree to which the coronavirus is circulating in communities across the country because testing has been so limited.

Some people dont develop symptoms. Others wont realize theyve contracted the coronavirus until becoming symptomatic. Both groups may unwittingly transmit the virus, which can live on hard surfaces such as door handles or store shelves for up to 72 hours.

Given how little is known about the extent of the viruss community spread, most physicians suggest erring on the side of caution.

Dr. Michael Wassermans 82-year-old mother, Fern, called him several times recently with questions. Could she go out to dinner with his brother? No, Wasserman said he told her, restaurants are one of the most dangerous places right now for old people. Could she go pick up a prescription at the pharmacy? No, he said, the last place you want to go is a pharmacy or a doctors office where there are sick people next to you. What about the grocery store? No, get deliveries, he urged.

But Wasserman, whos 60 and a triathlete, isnt as strict with himself. Would I go for a walk? Yeah. The way I see it, Im in a gray zone. I can go out, but I have to be careful.

Consider your health. Wasserman isnt alone in making a distinction of this kind. What a number of physicians are saying is, you should consider whether youre frail in assessing your personal risk, said Dr. John Morley, a professor of geriatrics at Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

He ticked off the questions with an acronym of frail. F: Are you consistently fatigued? R, for resilience: Can you climb a flight of stairs? A, for aerobic: Can you walk a block? I, for illnesses: If youve got five or more, thats bad. L, for loss of weight: Thats not good.

Ive been telling people, this is about how healthy you are, not how old you are, said Dr. William Dale, director of the Center for Cancer and Aging Research at City of Hope, a cancer center in Duarte, California.

But even healthy people are becoming sick and, honestly, I think were all trying to figure out how worried to be, Dale said.

Assess risks. Of course, older adults should follow guidance from state and local health departments, as well as the federal government. But the advice varies widely, adding to peoples uncertainty.

I dont think its as simple as Dont go out for all older adults. Social contact is still really important, Perissinotto said. If youre healthy and over 60, with prudence, hand hygiene and being aware of your surroundings, you should still be able to go about some activities, such as taking a walk or visiting with a neighbor while maintaining a safe distance.

Leslie Kernisan, a San Francisco geriatrician and the founder of the geriatrics advice website BetterHealthWhileAging.net, offered several concrete suggestions. If youre going to the store, consider wearing cloth gloves, because viruses dont survive as well on soft surfaces.

Try not to handle your smartphone when youre out of the house. A phone is a hard plastic surface that can easily get contaminated, she said.

If youre worried that older parents arent following rigorous enough precautions, dont lecture them, Kernisan advises. Instead, ask how theyre feeling about the coronavirus. What do they know about it? What plans have they made?

Foster well-being. Asked what was safe for older adults, Dr. Paul Tatum, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Texas-Austins Dell Medical School, focused on factors that contribute to well-being.

It is safe to exercise, and, in fact, its very important to keep exercising, but not at the gym or in large groups, he said. Its safe to get plenty of sleepbut avoid sleeping pills, if possible.

Its safe to prevent worry and take a break from social media and too much news, Tatum said.

Its safe to take care of your spiritual needs in this time, but doing it at a distance is wise. Dont hesitate to reach out to your church or synagogue community and say, Im not able to come in. Can I schedule a few minutes on the phone with someone? Its safe to call your neighbor and say, I need some help.

Judith Graham is a contributing columnist for Kaiser Health News, which originally published this article. KHNs coverage of these topics is supported by The John A. Hartford Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and The SCAN Foundation.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 15:38:56|Editor: Yurou

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KABUL, March 26 (Xinhua) -- At least five police officers and 10 Taliban militants were killed during clashes in two Afghan provinces on Wednesday night, authorities said on Thursday.

In northern Kunduz province, five police officers were killed, three wounded and six went missing after Taliban militants attacked a security checkpoint in Nawabad locality of Imam Sahib district, Mohammad Yousuf Ayoubi, chairman of the provincial council, told Xinhua.

Several militants were also killed and wounded during the clashes that have lasted for hours in northern part of the province, he noted.

In the western Ghor province, Taliban militants stormed several security forces positions in Dawaltyar district, but the security forces backed by the Afghan Air Force responded to the attack, killing 10 Taliban militants and injuring several others, army's Zafar 207 Corps said in a statement.

"Among the killed militants was Qari Raouf, Taliban shadow district chief for Ghor's Lal Wa Sarjangal district," the statement said.

The security forces also found six AK-47 guns and a heavy gun after the fighting, the statement added.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 26

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

The export of jewelry from Turkey to Iran decreased by 56.33 percent from January through February 2020, compared to the same period in 2019, amounting to $232,680, Turkish Trade Ministry told Trend.

The export of jewelry from Turkey to Iran decreased by 61.79 percent in February 2020, compared to February 2019, amounting to $130,550.

The export of jewelry from Turkey to world markets grew by 28 percent from January through February 2020, compared to the same period last year, amounting to $664.298 million.

Jewelry exports from Turkey amounted to 2.3 percent of the country's total exports from January through February 2020.

Turkey exported $ 372.356 million worth jewelry to world markets in February 2020, which is 49.7 percent more than in the same period in 2019.

Turkish jewelry exports amounted to 2.5 percent of the country's total exports in February 2020.

Turkey exported $ 4.248 billion worth of jewelry from February 2019 through February 2020.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
The City of Midland Health Department is currently conducting their investigation on two new confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Midland County, bringing the overall case count to six.

The fifth confirmed case is a female in her 20s that was tested by Midland Health. The patient has been an inpatient at Midland Memorial Hospital since March 20, 2020. She has recovered and is anticipated to be discharged today. The source of exposure is travel related.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has targeted no drop in export value of agricultural products this year, even though the sector was hit hard by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic from the beginning of this year.

Customs officials of Tan Thanh Border Gate check agricultural products before clearance. Viet Nam kept the goal of agricultural export at US$43 billion despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ministry said that exports to China were seeing signs of recovery. As the COVID-19 pandemic was now under control in China, demand for import of agricultural products was expected to increase from next month.

The ministry said that trade via borders with China was normalising, but at a slower speed due to compliance with quarantine rules.

Exports to the US and European Union (EU) might recover from June or July when these countries managed to control the pandemic, while those to Japan and the Republic of Korea was anticipated to increase from June, but the increases would not be rapid.

The ministry kept the goal for agricultural export at US$42 billion in 2020, as set at the beginning of this year. Exports to China were expected to increase by 10 per cent, to ASEAN and other markets by 9 per cent to make up for the declines in export to the US and EU so as to achieve the target.

Achieving this goal was challenging, as the sector was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic from the beginning of this year, the ministry said, adding that it was necessary to develop not only solutions to cope with the impacts of the pandemic but also long-term solutions to promote sustainable agriculture development.

As China cut tariffs on 80 out of 800 food product categories to promote imports so as to meet its domestic demand together with focus on facilitating transport operation, the ministry said that this provided a significant opportunity for Viet Nam to boost export of agricultural products to the neighbouring market in 2020.

The ministry urged firms to focus on processed products and enhancing quality to grasp the opportunity for exports to China, the US and EU when the pandemic was over.

The ministry also urged to the Government to provide agricultural firms with packages of preferential rates to enable them to recover production rapidly. Support should also be provided to logistics and warehouse companies.

Policies for tax and land fee extensions must be issued early, the ministry said.

Agro-forestry-fishery exports totalled US$41.3 billion in 2019, up 3.2 per cent over the previous year but fell short of the target set at $43 billion.

The exports in the first two months of this year were estimated at $5.34 billion, a drop of 2.8 per cent over the same period last year.  VNS

PM orders suspension of signing rice-exporting contracts Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has ordered a halt of signing new rice-exporting contracts, the Government Office said in a latest document concerning this matter.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 17:00:52|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on June 27, 2019 shows a logo of the Group of 20 (G20) summit at the entrance of the media center in Osaka, Japan. (Xinhua/Du Xiaoyi)

--In 1999, G20 was created.

--In 2008, G20 meetings were raised to the level of heads of state and government for better crisis coordination.

--The group accounts for about 86 percent of the gross world product and 75 percent of global trade.

BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend a virtual summit of the Group of 20 (G20) leaders on responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing Thursday.

The summit will be hosted by Saudi Arabia, the G20 Presidency in 2020. Here is a brief introduction of the group and its summits.

Created in 1999, the G20 is a main forum for international cooperation on financial and economic issues. It comprises 19 countries plus the European Union. The countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, Britain, and the United States.

Tourists are seen at the Bund in Shanghai, east China, March 24, 2020. (Photo by Wang Xiang/Xinhua)

The group, home to almost two-thirds of the world's population, accounts for about 86 percent of the gross world product and 75 percent of global trade.

In 2008, against the backdrop of the global financial crisis, the meetings of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors were raised to the level of heads of state and government for better crisis coordination, with the first summit being held in Washington, the United States in the same year.

As an informal forum, the G20 does not have an administrative council or permanent body. Instead, G20 countries take turns to assume presidency and host the summit.

Altogether, a total of 14 G20 summits have been held since 2008. G20 leaders met twice in London and Pittsburgh in 2009, and Toronto and Seoul in 2010. Starting from 2011, the summits have been held once a year in the following places: Cannes, Los Cabos, St Petersburg, Brisbane, Antalya, Hangzhou, Hamburg, Buenos Aires and Osaka.

Tackling economic recession, regulating international financial market, combating tax evasion, and boosting development policy have been some of the main topics of these summits. 
Seeking to ensure none



was forced to starve, the Kerala government's 'Community Kitchens' became operational from Thursday to deliver free food to migrant workers, elderly, and those in home quarantine during the 21-day lockdown declared for fighting the spread of coronavirus.

The initiative is being implemented through Local Self government institutions such as corporations, panchayats, ward-level committees and volunteers.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had on Wednesday announced his government had taken "extensive measures" to ensure that no one was left starving during the lockdown.

"Free meals will be delivered through the community kitchens to the needy and those in home quarantine", Thiruvananthapuram Mayor K Sreekumar said.

"Volunteer groups formed under the leadership of ward counsellors will ensure that elderly people who are living alone have access to food," he said.

Deputy Mayor Rakhi Ravikumar said the corporation would provide food to around 250 people.

The local self government institutions have identified schools or other buildings to prepare food and engaged volunteers with enough safety precautions.

"We have also given strict instructions not to create a crowd of more than five persons while cooking food," a senior official from Malappuram district, where the authorities have opened 104 community kitchens, said.

The officials said those who need food should inform the authorities a day before in order to smoothen the delivery process.

"The delivery is free," Sreekumar said.

In Thiruvnanthapuram, initially, the food will be provided for the homeless people, who have been accommodated in shelter homes by the government after the spread of coronavirus, which has affected over 100 people in the state.

A community kitchen has been opened at a government school in the capital city.

Sunitha, a teacher-cum-volunteer, said in the morning "upama" was prepared while for lunch meals had been prepared.

In Malappuram, the all-women initiative 'Kudumbashree' has launched the 'community ktichen' not only to feed the destitutes but also provide food for the staff of essential services.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Central Bank of Ireland (CBI) has approved the sale of Goodbody Stockbrokers to Bank of China, the last major hurdle to the 155m deal closing.

Goodbody managing director Roy Barrett informed staff of the development yesterday and said he now expects the process to be completed by early summer.

That will end more than two years when the firm has been on, off and back on the sales block. In a message seen by the Irish Independent, Mr Barrett told staff that Bank of China was "equally pleased with this outcome and fully committed to this partnership".

The deal will still require some final regulatory approvals by Chinese authorities - Bank of China's home market - and in the US where Goodbody has a broker-dealer unit registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But the process to secure approval from Goodbody's domestic regulator is seen as the key to moving the sale ahead. An earlier agreed sale to another Chinese group led by Zhong Ze Investments effectively melted away during the lengthy approval process.

The sale to Bank of China was agreed last November following a lengthy and competitive bidding process that also saw bids from Goodbody's traditional rival Davy Stockbrokers and Irish Life owner Great-West Lifeco.

Goodbody is the country's second biggest and oldest stockbroking firm, with a 140-year history and deep roots in Irish corporate life.

It has 300 staff. Its biggest outgoing shareholder is Co Kerry-based financial services group Fexco, which bought what was initially a 75pc stake for 24m from AIB in the wake of the financial crash.

Goodbody's management and staff already owned a 25pc stake and subsequently raised that back up to 49pc.

A sale will now allow Fexco to exit the firm entirely, having last year recouped 23m from Goodbody in a dividend from the stockbroker's proceeds from the sale of the Irish Stock Exchange.

Bank of China's takeover was approved by the Irish competition authority before Christmas. In his message to Goodbody staff, Mr Barrett said: "Being one step closer to being acquired by one of the largest financial institutions in the world is a huge milestone for our company and our people, particularly in what are very challenging times."

He said the transaction is now expected to complete in early summer, with the approval secured from the Central Bank "a critical step in the journey".
The new coronavirus has now spread to all areas of Montgomery County with health officials confirming eight new cases Wednesday afternoon, bumping the total to 31 from 23.

The Montgomery County Public Health District is urging residents to stay home and increase hygiene practices.

We would like to emphasize the importance of staying home if you are able and social distancing, health district officials stated. Regardless of exactly where these patients reside, it is spreading in the community. Increased hygiene practices, like frequent hand washing and surface disinfecting, are imperative.

The health district has been notified of 241 negative and 31 positive test results of county residents with results pending for another 149 residents.

Here are updates on all of Montgomery Countys current cases:

Case 1: A man in his 40s, who lives in northwest Montgomery County, is still hospitalized. He remains in critical condition, but is stable and showing some improvement. He was believed to have become infected with the virus as a result of community spread.

Case 2: A woman in her 40s who lives in southeast Montgomery County. She remains in a hospital in Harris County in critical condition. Her only travel was to New Orleans.

Case 3: A man in his 40s who lives in northwest Montgomery County. He is at home, recovering well. His only travel was to Florida.

More Information Keep clean Wash hands often for 20 seconds and encourage others to do the same. If no soap and water are available, use hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol. Cover coughs and sneezes with a tissue, then throw the tissue away. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands. Disinfect surfaces, buttons, handles, knobs, and other places touched often. Avoid close contact with people who are sick. For more information, please see www.dshs.texas.gov/coronavirus. See More Collapse

Case 4: A woman in her 40s who lives in northwest Montgomery County. She remains at home, doing well. Her case is connected to Case 3.

Case 5: A man in his 50s who lives in southwest Montgomery County. He is in isolation at home. The man had recently traveled to California.

Case 6: A man in his 40s who lives in southwest Montgomery County. He is in isolation at home. The man had recently traveled to California.

Case 7: A woman in her 60s who lives in northwest Montgomery County. She is in isolation at home. She has no recent travel history and no known contact with other patients.

Case 8: A woman in her 40s who lives in southeast Montgomery County. She is in isolation at home. She had recently traveled to Germany.

Case 9: A man in his 50s who lives in southwest Montgomery County. He is hospitalized in critical but stable condition. His travel history is under investigation.

Case 10: A woman in her 50s who lives in southeast Montgomery County. She is in isolation at home. She attended the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo March 8.

Case 11: A man in his 90s who lives in southwest Montgomery County. He is currently hospitalized and has no recent travel history.

Case 12: A man in his 50s who lives in southwest Montgomery County. He is in isolation at home and recently traveled to Brazil.

Case 13: A woman in her 30s who lives in northwest Montgomery County. She is in isolation at home. She has no recent travel history.

Case 14: A woman in her 40s who resides in southwest Montgomery County. Her case is connected to a Smith County where she recently traveled. She at currently at home in isolation.

Case 15: A man in his 40s who has been in northeast Montgomery County for a work-related purpose. He is currently in isolation at his residence. His only recent travel is to Houston.

Case 16: A female teenager, 13-19 years old, who lives in southeast Montgomery County. She is in isolation at her home. She has recently traveled to New Orleans.

Case 17: A woman in her 20s, who lives in northwest Montgomery County. She is in isolation at her home. This is believed to be a case of community spread because she was in close contact with a suspected case.

Case 18: A man in his 50s, who lives in southwest Montgomery County. He is in isolation at his home. He has recently traveled to Chicago.

Case 19: A man in his 50s, who lives in southwest Montgomery County. He is in isolation at his home. He has recently traveled to California.

Case 20: A man in his 30s, who lives in southwest Montgomery County. He is in isolation at home. He has recently traveled to New York.

Case 21: A woman in her 60s, who lives in northeast Montgomery County. She is hospitalized. No recent travel.

Case 22: A woman in her 30s, who lives in northeast Montgomery County. She is in isolation at home. The only recent travel is to Houston.

Case 23: A man in his 50s, who resides in southwest Montgomery County. He is in isolation at home. He has recently traveled to France, Germany and Spain.

Case 24: A woman in her 30s, who lives in southeast Montgomery County. She is in isolation at home. No recent travel.

Case 25: A man in his 40s, who lives in southeast Montgomery County. He is in isolation at home. He has not traveled outside of Texas.

Case 26: A woman in her 80s, who lives in southwest Montgomery County. She is in isolation at home. No recent travel.

Case 27: A man in his 50s, who livs in southwest Montgomery County. His case is still under investigation.

Case 28: A man in his 50s, who lives in southwest Montgomery County. He is in isolation at home. Recent travel to Salt Lake City, Denver, Baltimore and Oakland.

Case 29: A man in his 50s, who resides in southwest Montgomery County. He is in isolation at home. Recent travel to Los Angeles.

Case 30: A man in his 60s who resides in northeast Montgomery County. He is in isolation at home. This case is connected to Case 21.

Case 31: A woman in her 40s, who resides in southwest Montgomery County. Her case is still under investigation. Recent travel to Utah.

cdominguez@hcnonline.com
Two U.S. Destroyers Deploy as U.S. 6th Fleet Remains Vigilant

Navy News Service

Story Number: NNS200325-02

Release Date: 3/25/2020 9:58:00 AM

From U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet Public Affairs

ROTA, Spain (NNS) -- Two forward deployed Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers got underway for regularly scheduled patrols from Rota, Spain in support of regional maritime security, March 22-23.

After taking precautions to ensure the health and safety of their crews, USS Porter (DDG 78) and USS Donald Cook (DDG 75), departed on time from their forward deployed berths in Rota.

"We continue to operate our ships, planes, and submarines throughout the region, being mindful to take appropriate action to protect our people and others," said Vice Adm. Lisa Franchetti, commander, U.S. 6th Fleet. "The health and safety of our Sailors, Marines, Coastguardsmen, civilians, and families, along with that of our allies and partners, remains a top priority."

After completing a weapons onload, Porter deployed on her 8th patrol from Rota; Donald Cook began her 10th patrol. While deployed to the waters around Europe and Africa, the ships will ensure freedom of navigation and serve as part of Europe's comprehensive ballistic missile defense network.

"Donald Cook got under way to ensure regional security and demonstrate commitment to our partners and allies," said Cmdr. Kelly Jones, USS Donald Cook's commanding Officer. "Every day, our crew lives by faith without fear. We have the watch."

Porter and Donald Cook comprise half of the Forward Deployed Naval Forces-Europe destroyers. USS Carney (DDG 64) and USS Ross (DDG 71) comprise the remainder of CTF 65/ DESRON 60.

"Before every ship leaves for patrol, we guarantee they meet the highest standards of readiness," said Capt. Joe Gagliano, commander, Task Force (CTF) 65 and commodore of Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 60. "Porter and Donald Cook are ready to execute missions across the full spectrum of fleet operations, even in this crisis."

Carney is currently circumnavigating Africa and recently participated in a historic port visit to Cape Town, South Africa.

Ross completed her 9th patrol March 14, after sailing as part of the Charles de Gaulle Carrier Strike Group, Task Force (CTF) 473, and operating in the Black Sea with Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania.

On her last patrol in Oct 2019, Donald Cook operated above the Arctic Circle while conducting a routine maritime security patrol, monitoring Russian maritime activity and providing for the ballistic missile defense of Europe.

Porter, Carney, Donald Cook, and Ross demonstrate CTF 65's ability to operate in any maritime environment from the Arctic to the Cape of Good Hope, engaging with our partners, building relationships, and refining our technical and tactical warfare abilities.



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The government has ordered 10,000 medical ventilators designed at breakneck speed by vacuum maker Dyson, founder James Dyson has said, as the country tries to boost the number of devices available to treat coronavirus patients.

The prime minister, in anticipation of cases peaking in Britain in coming weeks, had made an urgent appeal to manufacturers to supply the National Health Service and would also use devices from private hospitals and other sources.

We have received an initial order of 10,000 units from the UK Government which we will supply on an open-book basis, James Dyson said on Wednesday in an email to staff seen by Reuters.

We are also looking at ways of making it available internationally.

The government did not comment on the Dyson email.

Britain had been in talks with over 3,000 businesses about supplying ventilators to quickly increase the health services capacity, prime minister Boris Johnsons spokesman said earlier on Wednesday.

But he stressed that any design would need regulatory approval.

The countrys existing stock of about 5,000-8,000 ventilators is inadequate if cases jump as predicted. The number of coronavirus deaths in Britain rose by 41 to 465 on Wednesday.

Mr Dyson said since receiving a call from Mr Johnson 10 days ago, a large team of engineers at his company had worked solidly to design and build an entirely new ventilator, The CoVent.

It deployed its expertise in air movement, motors, power systems, manufacturing and supply chain gained from its products like air purifiers and fans as well as cleaners to develop the ventilator from scratch.

The company, which revolutionised the vacuum cleaner market with its bagless cyclonic device in the 1990s, said it would work with regulators and government to ensure that the product and the manufacturing process was approved.

Mr Dyson said it was clearly a time of grave international crisis, and he would therefore donate 5,000 units to the international effort, 1,000 of which would go to the United Kingdom.

Separately, British engineer Babcock International Group Plc said it had joined forces with a leading medical equipment company to design and supply thousands of critical care ventilators.

A number of other firms had joined forces to potentially develop and manufacture a ventilator, including Airbus, Smiths Group Plc, Ford Motor Co and McLaren.

Reuters had reported earlier that British industry expected the government to give the go-ahead for an emergency ventilator production plan on Wednesday.

Reuters
Coronavirus: Hezbollah launch emergency plan in Lebanon Over USD 2 mln, aid for Shia areas

(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, MARCH 26 - The Lebanese Shia paramilitary group Hezbollah has begun implementing an emergency plan to deal with the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19.



Six people with the virus have died in the country and 333 people have tested positive for it. The al-Manar television station, under the Iran-linked armed group and political faction, on Thursday morning broadcast an interview with Hashem Safieddin, head of Hezbollah's executive council, in which he announced an allocation of over two million dollars (three and a half billion liras) to deal with the pandemic. The Lebanese government, which Hezbollah has an influential role in, has brought in measures aiming to limit the spread of COVID-19 but has not yet drawn up a social-economic plan to limit the economic and financial repercussions of the crisis. Safieddin said that Hezbollah's plan neither overlaps with the government plan nor does it contradict it. The plan calls for the mobilisation of 24,000 active Hezbollah members: doctors, paramedics, emergency workers, and logistics personnel as part of what they call ''the resistance''. Hezbollah also announced that it had rented private hospitals in Lebanon and equipped them for the emergency, as well as setting up 32 healthcare centers. Hezbollah's activities will be limited to the areas of Lebanon in which the armed group enjoys social support: in the southern part of the country, in the Bekaa Valley, and in Beirut's southern outskirts. Hezbollah is an Islamist group designated a terrorist organization by the US, was founded by Iran's Revolutionary Guards in 1982, and fights on the side of the Syrian government across the border. (ANSAmed).




There is a pattern to the way Irans supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has selected allies throughout his career, said Said A. Arjomand, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who has just finished a book analyzing the rule of the supreme leader. The ayatollah has repeatedly surrounded himself with men lacking an apparent social or political base of their own, men who would be dependent on him, Mr. Arjomand said.

During the presidential campaign of 2005, the supreme leader endorsed Mr. Ahmadinejad because the humble son of a blacksmith appeared to be just such an obscure candidate. But he entered the presidency with a coterie of veterans and ideologues shaped by the Iran-Iraq war who were conservative, religious, largely populist and disdainful of the old guard from the 1979 revolution.

Today, these allies, many of them former midlevel Revolutionary Guard officers in their 50s, run the Interior, Intelligence and Justice Ministries. They also include the commander of the Basij popular militia, the head of the National Security Council and the head of state-run broadcasting. They are aligned with another member of their generation who has emerged as the most important figure in the Khamenei camp, the spiritual leaders son, Mojtaba Khamenei.

Mr. Ahmadinejad has also changed all 30 of the countrys governors, all the city managers and even third- and fourth-level civil servants in important ministries like the Interior Ministry. It was Interior that announced that Mr. Ahmadinejad had won the June 12 election with just 5 percent of the votes counted, analysts pointed out, and it is the Intelligence Ministry that has been rounding up scores of supporters of the reform candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, and other dissidents.

At the same time, Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, Mr. Ahmadinejads spiritual mentor, runs three powerful educational institutions in the holy city of Qum, all spun off from the Haqqani seminary, which teaches that Islam and democracy are incompatible. The ayatollah favors a system that would preserve the post of supreme leader and eliminate elections. The Ahmadinejad administration has provided generous government subsidies to the seminary, and its graduates hold significant government posts nationwide.
WASHINGTON  The House hasnt even voted on a $2 trillion coronavirus economic recovery bill, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi is already pivoting to what she wants in a follow-up relief package that many lawmakers believe will be needed.

Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said Thursday that the next bill to confront the pandemic must include paid family and medical leave for more workers, an increase in food-stamp benefits and more money for states and cities whose budgets are being drained fighting the virus.

She spoke hours after the Senate unanimously passed a $2 trillion stimulus, the largest economic recovery bill in American history. Pelosi said the House would pass the bill Friday with strong bipartisan support.

Pelosi said the next stimulus package should be negotiated with the four corners, Democratic and Republican leadership in both chambers. But her goals are likely to face opposition from the White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who previously called many of Democrats proposals an ideological wish list.

There are so many things that we didnt get in any of these bills yet in a way that we need to, Pelosi said in a Capitol news conference. She set these goals for the next relief package:

Expand paid family and medical leave: Pelosi said she wants a better definition of who qualifies for paid leave under a previous bill that created an extended leave program.

A coronavirus relief bill that President Trump signed March 18 requires employers to provide 10 weeks of paid emergency family leave, of up to $200 a day, for parents caring for a child whose school is closed. Workers must take two weeks of unpaid leave before the program kicks in.

Democrats originally proposed a broader family and medical leave program that would cover people who are sick with the coronavirus, quarantined or caring for an ill family member.

The paid family leave program also includes a major loophole that many Democrats want to close: Companies with at least 500 employees are exempt. They failed during negotiations on the $2 trillion bill, and on Thursday, Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York wrote a letter to 36 large employers urging them to offer paid leave voluntarily.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary leadership, Harris and Gillibrand wrote. We implore you to use your unique position as a leader in the business community to protect our workers and protect our nation.

Increase food-stamp benefits: Republicans blocked Democrats attempt to increase nutrition assistance to low-income families in the $2 trillion package. Pelosi said Democrats want a 15% increase in funding for food stamps at this very fragile time for many families.

More money for state and local governments: Pelosi said the current bill, which provides $150 billion to help states, cities and counties, isnt enough. She said California, like many states, has seen its large budget surplus decimated as the economy slows.

Were just not doing enough for state and local government, Pelosi said. Thats just the way it is.

Stronger workplace-safety protections: Pelosi said its essential to life to strengthen Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules, which could include adding requirements to supply face masks and other protective gear.

Free coronavirus treatment: Pelosi said its not enough that the federal government paid for free testing in a previous relief bill. She said people should be able to get tested and treated without facing a huge deductible or co-payment.

We said free testing, free testing, free testing, Pelosi said. But with free testing is the visit to the doctors office, the treatment that goes with it.

The speaker said she plans to stay in Washington to negotiate the next bill after Fridays vote on the $2 trillion package. Lawmakers are expected to take an extended recess until late April.

McConnell has not laid out GOP priorities for a follow-up bill, though Republicans are expected to keep pushing for a payroll tax cut. McConnell told reporters that the Senate would remain nimble and consider another vote before its recess ends April 20.

Dustin Gardiner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dustin.gardiner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dustingardiner
In whats likely to be his final nomination debate, former Vice President Joe Biden started strong and ended strong when he talked about the coronavirus pandemic. And he did well enough in the rest of the two-hour event Sunday night with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Partly on the strength of that performance, Biden cruised to victory in big-delegate states Florida, Illinois and Arizona on Tuesday night.

Biden had given a solid speech on Thursday laying out a plan for how the government should be responding to the spread of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus  for example, hes urging use of the military to rapidly increase medical capacity  and he seemed ready to implement that plan when he talked about it in the opening segments of the debate. It wasnt just the specifics. His process-based answers, which often compared what the Barack Obama administration had done during emergencies with what President Donald Trump has been doing, may not have been particularly exciting to listen to, but the truth is that its more important for a president to understand how to get things done quickly when necessary than to have ready a specific plan for a current crisis, given that future situations arent easy to predict.(1) The contrast between Biden and Sanders, who reads every situation as an endorsement for his broad policy preferences, played well for Biden. More importantly, the contrast between both candidates and their thoughtful, coherent and reality-based discussion of the pandemic with the incoherent misinformation from Trump couldnt have been stronger.

Not to mention that Biden (and Sanders) were able to show compassion and understanding for people going through tough times, which Trump has shown himself to be incapable of doing.

The rest of the debate was a lot less impressive for Biden, although I agree with those who suspect that all anyone will take away from it is his pledge to name a woman as his running mate. Biden and Sanders spent most of the 85 or so minutes between opening and closing coronavirus segments arguing about long-forgotten positions they took and votes they cast on Social Security, gun control, the Soviet Union and more. Biden inexplicably allowed Sanders to drag him through all this ancient history, much of it sure to be incomprehensible to many voters who had tuned in, instead of simply ignoring the Vermont senator and using his time to lay out his case against Trump.(2)

But most of it wont matter much. Realistically the competitive portion of this nomination fight ended on Super Tuesday back on March 3, with those results confirmed on March 10. Debates can matter in the short run during the primaries and caucuses, but theyre much less important in the general election  let alone a primary debate months before November. Bidens reasonably good performance Sunday night wont prevent Trumps campaign from claiming that hes in cognitive decline, a disgusting smear that was just as untrue before the latest debate as it is afterward. Nor will candidate debates determine the effect of the pandemic on the election. Events, both in hospitals and in the economy, will matter far more than political spin.

Nomination debates are important because theyre part of how political parties use the nomination process to define themselves. Thats happened in this contest, as is clear both from Bidens victory and from the way he is adopting some of the popular policy ideas advocated by the losers, notably Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. (Mike Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, also sought the Democratic presidential nomination and has endorsed Biden.)

Nomination debates are also important early in the process because theyre a convenient way for party actors to see the candidates, including the lesser-known ones, in action, and because media coverage of the debates once the primaries and caucuses begin can give candidates a boost. Now that the nomination has been settled but for the shouting  oy, so much shouting from these two candidates  theres really not much point. Sanders had earned Sundays event, a one-on-one with Biden, but unless theres some massive surprise on Tuesday, theres really no reason for any more debates.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
The number of coronavirus infections closed in on a half-million worldwide Thursday, with both Italy and the U.S. on track to surpass China, and a record-shattering 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in a single week in a stark demonstration of the damage to the world's biggest economy.

Health care systems in Europe and New York buckled under the strain, with Spain's death toll climbing to more than 4,000.

In the U.S., an unprecedented $2.2 trillion economic rescue package to help businesses, hospitals and ordinary Americans make it through the crisis cleared the Senate and is expected to be voted on in the House on Friday. The plan would dispense checks of $1,200 per adult and $500 per child.

At least 2.8 billion people, or more than one-third of the Earth's population, are under severe travel restrictions.

But the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, scolded world leaders for wasting precious time in the fight against the virus that has already killed more than 22,000 people and infected over 480,000, thrown millions out of work and ravaged the world economy.

The time to act was actually more than a month ago or two months ago, he said Wednesday.

We squandered the first window of opportunity. ... This is a second opportunity, which we should not squander and do everything to suppress and control this virus."



In the United States, where deaths passed 1,050 and about 70,000 people were infected, the damage from the widespread economic shutdown was made plain when the number of people applying for unemployment benefits last week was nearly five times the old record, set in 1982.

A political battle, meanwhile, raged between those demanding urgent action for a long siege against the pandemic, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and President Donald Trump.

Trump has expressed hope churches could return to normal by Easter on April 12, and grumbled that our country wasn't built to be shut down apparently concerned that the outbreak's devastating effects on financial markets and employment will harm his re-election chances.

Democrats say Trump is putting the economy ahead of the health and safety of Americans.

"I'd like to say, let's get back to work next Friday, said Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

That'd be wonderful. But it can't be arbitrary. In Brazil, the country's governors are defying President Jair Bolsonaro over his call to reopen schools and businesses, dismissing his argument that the cure of widespread shutdowns is worse than the disease. As of Thursday, the country had more than 2,500 cases and 59 deaths.

New York has emerged as a virus hotspot. The city's mammoth convention center is being turned into a hospital. The state recorded more than 350 deaths.

Spain has become the country in Europe where



the outbreak is spreading the fastest. On Thursday, the Health Ministry reported reported nearly 8,600 new infections and 655 deaths, bringing the total cases to over 56,000 and more than 4,000 fatalities second only to Italy's death toll of about 7,500.

Health Minister Salvador Illa sought to assure Spaniards that government measures to slow the virus were working, telling Parliament that the rises had been smaller than in previous days and indicate a changing trend that brings us to think that we are entering a phase of stabilization.

In Italy, doctors and nurses begged the government to provide more masks, gloves and goggles and urged the public to understand how important onerous social distancing measures really are. Scientists say stopping just one person from getting the virus means scores of others will not become infected down the road.

Help us help you," Dr. Francesca De Gennaro, who heads a small medical clinic in Italy's hard-hit Bergamo region, wrote in an open letter.

The rate of increase in Italy has slowed slightly, noted Dr. Hans Kluge, the head of the WHO's European office. He said officials hope to soon figure out whether lockdown measures in numerous countries have worked.

Germany has had a high number of infections at more than 39,000 people, but just 222 deaths which has widely been attributed to early and aggressive testing, among other factors.

On Thursday, Lothar Wieler, the head of Germany's Robert Koch disease control center, said the country now has the ability to test 500,000 people a week, perhaps the greatest capacity in the world.

European Union leaders were holding their third summit in three weeks on the virus to manage the havoc it is wreaking on their 27 economies.

As the number of deaths in Europe soared past 12,000, Spain extended a state of emergency that will allow it to impose broader lockdowns, while French President Emmanuel Macron launched Operation Resilience, a military-backed response to the crisis.

France began evacuating infected citizens from the northeastern hotspot of Alsace using a special high-speed train.

Britain ordered 10,000 ventilators, working with engineers from Dyson. The government wants to increase its supply of the breathing machines from 8,000 to 30,000.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Authorities in New Zealand have recently confirmed 73 new coronavirus cases and have identified 5 more possible cases. According to reports, this is the highest number to new coronavirus cases In a day to date. New Zealand has reported 283 positive coronavirus cases but no deaths related to the virus so far.

As per reports, New Zealand is in its first full day on alert Level 4 which is the highest possible category. Most people have been ordered to stay indoors in an effort to stop the virus from spreading. The deadly coronavirus pandemic has infected 471,576 people globally and killed more than 21,296 people. 114,694 are said to have recovered from the virus.

State of Emergency

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern has reportedly declared a national emergency in the country. The country will go into a total lockdown for at least one month to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic, she told at a news conference.

Ardern told parliament that midnight March 25 onwards, the country bunkers down for four weeks to try and stop the virus in its tracks and to break the chain. She further added saying that the New Zealander must make no mistake that the crisis was going to get worse before it got better. The country would have a lag and cases will spike for the next week or so, she added. Only thereafter the authorities will begin to know how successful they have been, Jacinda emphasized.

Arden then went on to say that the nationwide lockdown was triggered by early evidence of community transmission of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Ardern strictly made clear that if people had any questions about what they can or cant do, they had to apply a simple principle: Act like they have COVID-19, she declared.

Read: New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern Declares State Of National Emergency Amid COVID-19

Read: COVID-19: New Zealand Sends Emergency Alert To Citizens, Says 'we Are Depending On You'

According to the reports, Ardern warned the citizens that the lockdown will be strictly enforced. All non-essential services, bars, restaurants, cafes, gyms, cinemas, pools, museums, libraries, playgrounds, in-dining services, are all going to be shuttered. Supermarkets, doctors, pharmacies, service stations and access to essential banking services were exempted.

New Zealand government took a drastic measure to slow down the spread of contagion in its initial stages. Therefore, movement restrictions were imposed on all arriving travellers, who are being forced into self-isolation for 14-days. All indoor and outdoor gatherings were strictly banned.

Read: New Zealand Backs Tokyo Olympics Postponement Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

Read: Coronavirus Pandemic Leads To Theatres Being Shut In Australia, New Zealand And Fiji?
Cleaners washing a street in Wuhan, China, with a high-pressure water gun on February 3.

Getty Images

The Chinese city of Wuhan ended its historic lockdown on Wednesday, but experts think the area could see a second wave of coronavirus cases as restrictions lift.

Travelers are already bringing the virus back into Asian countries that have controlled domestic spread, leading to new restrictions in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.

To control new waves of infections, countries and cities may need to impose additional lockdowns.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The 11-week coronavirus lockdown in Wuhan, China, ended Wednesday, allowing residents to leave their homes for periods of time with clearance from a government-sanctioned app.

Shops are beginning to open again, and people are leaving the city en masse. Schools remain closed, and residents are still encouraged to stay home as much as possible, but some people are beginning to congregate in the streets for conversation or games.

Since Wuhan's shutdown began January 23, China has seen a drop-off in its rate of new cases. The country reported no new local infections for the first time March 19. Outside Wuhan, authorities have gradually lifted restrictions over the past two weeks.

Italy imposed similar lockdown measures in March, and many other countries have followed suit. But some experts fear that lifting those restrictions could enable the virus to start spreading all over again.

Lockdowns merely delay an outbreak's peak by about three months, Dr. Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong who researches influenza transmission and control measures, told Business Insider last month.

"What happened in Wuhan and now what's happened in north Italy is not the peak of an epidemic. That's about a month away from the peak," he said. "They are still facing now, most likely, a second wave in one to two months' time. So are they going to shut down again?"

Travelers and asymptomatic people spread new waves of infection

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A passenger returning from London at Hong Kong International Airport on March 17.

Tyrone Siu/Reuters

There are two main ways the virus can make a resurgence as residents emerge from their homes, return to work, take their children to school, and go shopping.

First, a small number of residents who were under lockdown could still have the virus when restrictions lift but not know they're sick. Those people could then spread it, starting a new wave of infections.

Second, international travelers could bring the virus back into the country.

The latter seems to have sparked a surge of new infections in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong's outbreak consisted of just 100 cases at the beginning of March; the city had implemented widespread social distancing, work-from-home rules, public-information campaigns, and high-tech case mapping. On March 2, civil servants went back to their offices. Two weeks later, the city reported a jump to 160 COVID-19 cases.

As residents who had been abroad began returning home, Hong Kong's cases more than doubled. At the end of March, it had reported more than 400 cases of the new coronavirus. As of Wednesday, the city had reached 960 infections.

"This is a pattern playing out across parts of Asia  mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan  that were among the first to tackle the outbreak," the CNN analyst James Griffith wrote on March 23. "All are now introducing new restrictions as a sudden wave of renewed cases begins to crest."

A couple walking past a temperature screening check at Changi International Airport in Singapore on February 27.

Getty Images

Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, said the city had already weathered its first two waves of the virus.

"The first wave was the worries of transmissions from mainland (China), so we have put in a lot of measures," Lam said as the city announced new restrictions, according to CNN. "The second wave was the local transmissions, with those clusters arising from dinners and other things. Now we are facing the third wave."

In late March, Hong Kong sent civil servants back home and implemented testing requirements for anyone entering the city. Lam also requested that bars and restaurants stop selling alcohol. On Wednesday, Hong Kong extended all of its restrictions an additional two weeks, to April 23.

Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore, and Taiwan have all barred nonresidents from entering.

New waves could lead to multiple shutdowns

A man crossing a highway on February 3 in Wuhan.

Getty Images

Almost all new coronavirus cases in mainland China are now coming from people traveling from abroad, including Chinese students returning home.

"Those are now seeding the second wave," Cowling said. "They need to decide whether to do another shutdown."

Along with barring foreigners from entering, some jurisdictions in China have already reimposed business closings shortly after lifting them.

Preventing the importation of new cases will be key to containing the next wave. A study published in the journal Science found that travel restrictions could be effective once a country or territory had controlled the virus' spread within its own communities.

"Chinese provinces and other countries that have successfully halted internal transmission of COVID-19 need to consider carefully how they will manage reinstating travel and mobility to avoid the reintroduction and spread of the disease in their populations," Moritz Kraemer, a lead author on the study, said in a statement.

A medical team from Guizhou province leaving Wuhan on Wednesday.

China Daily via Reuters

Chinese scientists and health experts had previously downplayed the threat of another domestic wave of coronavirus infections, however.

"For me, a second outbreak (of coronavirus), a domestic outbreak in China, wouldn't be a great concern," Cao Wei, the deputy director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, told Reuters on March 18.

But experts have pointed out that the 1918 flu pandemic killed more than 50 million people in three waves. The second was the deadliest.

Once COVID-19 cases begin to rise again in any area, authorities would most likely have to mandate social distancing again  a second lockdown.

"What happened in Wuhan could happen repeatedly to a city," Cowling said.

Holly Secon and Bill Bostock contributed reporting.

Read the original article on Business Insider
- Ghana's COVID-19 cases are now 68 in the country

- This was confirmed via the Twitter handle of the Disease Surveillance Department of the Ghana Health Service

- Two deaths from the 68 cases have been recorded

Our Manifesto: This is what YEN.com.gh believes in

Ghana has now recorded 15 new cases of the deadly Coronavirus as current total cases stand at 68.

However, out of the 68 cases, two deaths have been recorded in the country.

The 15 new cases have been confirmed via the Twitter handle of the Disease Surveillance Department of the Ghana Health Service.

READ ALSO: Asamoah Gyan calls on celebs to give back to society; says govt cannot carry all the burden

As of the morning of March 25, 2020, a total of sixty-eight (68) cases including two (2) deaths have been confirmed. Sixty-six (66) of these confirmed cases are being managed in isolation.

The sudden spike in case incidence is a result of the mandatory quarantine and compulsory testing for all travelers entering Ghana, as directed by President Akufo-Addo.

Overall, 30 of the 68 cases have been reported in the general population with the remaining 38 cases among persons currently under mandatory quarantine.

READ ALSO: Coronavirus: World Bank to soon support selected countries with $14 billion

As of March 25, 2020, a total of 1,030 persons have been put under mandatory quarantine; samples from 863 of them have been tested and 38 have been confirmed positive.

Great majority of the confirmed cases are Ghanaians, who returned home from affected countries. Seven (7) are of other nationalities namely: Norway, Lebanon, China, and UK.

In respect of contact tracing, a total of 829 contacts have been identified and are being tracked.

READ ALSO: Coronavirus: Italian priest dies after giving up his ventilator to another patient

Total of 826 contacts have been enlisted and being tracked. Nineteen (19) people have completed the 14 days of mandatory follow-up.

Meanwhile, the National Chief Imam, Sheikh Osman Nuhu Sharabutu, has declared a two-day fast for all sects of Muslims across the country.

According to the directive, Muslims are to observe the fasting on Wednesday, March 25 to Thursday, March 26, 2020, in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Per a statement from the office of the National Chief Imam, the directive is in line with Islamic doctrine and the directive by President Nana Akufo-Addo.

Only God can save Ghana from the Coronavirus outbreak - Pastor declares | #Yencomgh

Your stories and photos are always welcome. Get interactive via our Facebook page.

Source: YEN.com.gh
Abortions can take place in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy without condition under new laws soon to come into force in Northern Ireland.

Regulations for abortion services in the region have been laid by the UK Government.

The move comes following a landmark law change last October following a private member's bill at Westminster which decriminalised abortion here.

DUP MP Carla Lockhart described the decision by the Government to lay the regulations yesterday as "contemptible", claiming it "ignores the devolution settlement and the overwhelming viewpoint of the Northern Ireland people".

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From March 31, the regulations will allow abortion on request for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy; abortion up to 24 weeks on grounds that continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or girl. Abortion will also be available in cases of severe and fatal foetal anomalies, with no gestational limit.

Amnesty International has welcomed the regulations, but warned that they will fail to keep women safe during the current health emergency.

Grainne Teggart, Amnesty International's NI campaign manager, expressed concern that the guidelines do not permit women to take both abortion pills at home, during a time when Government advice has been against travel in measures to stop the spread of Covid-19.

"The Government's decision not to allow women to self-manage abortions at home during the current health crisis is dangerous and puts women at risk," she said.

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However, anti-abortion campaigners have slammed the regulations as the "wrong course for Northern Ireland".

The Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Dr William Henry, said the NIO's new legal framework "goes too far".

"Today is a deeply sad and worrying moment, as I am sure many will be struck by the contradiction, that at a time we are all taking such drastic measures to preserve life, legislation is introduced to take it," he said.

Care NI chief executive, Nola Leach, said it was a "deeply sad day" for Northern Ireland, adding there will be "considerable anger" at the framework.

"The fact the Northern Ireland Office is proposing a more liberalised law on abortion than the one currently in place in Great Britain adds insult to injury," she said. "Westminster should never have acted to override the devolved Assembly on this issue."
P rince William has issued an impassioned plea for more help for rough sleepers in the life and death emergency during the coronavirus crisis.

The Duke of Cambridge, who praised hero frontline workers and volunteers for their work, said he wants to help 600 more homeless people get off the streets of London by tomorrow.

With millions of people nationwide self-isolating, including his own father Prince Charles, William urged Londoners not to forget those with no homes to go to.

The duke spoke out during a conversation with Mick Clarke, CEO of homeless charity The Passage, of which William is patron, telling him: We are in a life and death fight to help those people living on the streets in this public health emergency.

A homeless woman in London during the lockdown / Evening Standard / eyevine

William, whose telephone call is listed in the Court Circular today, rang Mr Clarke to get an update on the plight of the homeless and stressed he wanted to turn the crisis into a ray of hope for the homeless.

Mr Clarke said: We dont want to get 80 per cent of people off the streets only to return them when this crisis is over. The duke was very keen for us to explore ways to avoid that happening.

William, who is following government advice and self-isolating at home with his family, also thanked hotel chains that have given rooms to the homeless during the crisis.

The Duke of Cambridge / PA

Mr Clarke said: We had 20-minute conservation and he recognised that is a public health emergency for those who are on the streets and in shelters.

So it was good to tell him that everyone in the voluntary sector but also local and central government is doing everything that they can to try and get people off the streets and into places of safety.

Hotel chains have really stepped up and have offered hundreds of places for the homeless.

"The Intercontinental Group including Holiday Inn, have been great But we need more. Clean clothes for those who have been rehoused and mobile phones so we can keep in touch with.

A homeless man in London during the lockdown / Jeremy Selwyn

He added: We have got to ensure there is enough staff to scale up. We have to change the model away from day centres.

The Passage is part of the Homeless Collective group of charities helped by the Evening Standards campaign tackling homelessness.

Williams intervention comes after questions were raised about why Charles, 71, was tested for the virus when displaying mild symptoms when frontline health workers have not been able to get one.

Health minister Edward Argar insisted the heir to the throne had not jumped the queue when he was tested, telling Sky News that Charles had met the criteria.

Charles is said to be in good health and spirits as he recovers at his Scottish retreat Birkhall.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 17:47:01|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Beijing's legislature has started deliberating a draft regulation on ensuring the security of hospitals after a spate of assaults on doctors sparked public outrage.

If passed, the regulation will require large hospitals to set up police offices and introduce security checks to prevent any dangerous objects being taken into hospitals.

It will ban behaviors including insulting and beating medics, making an uproar to disrupt hospital operation, setting up "mourning halls" in hospitals, and other disruptive acts commonly taken by protesting families of deceased patients.

The draft was tabled for deliberation at a session of the Standing Committee of the 15th Beijing Municipal People's Congress on Thursday.

Chen Yong, chair of the Supervisory and Judicial Affairs Committee of the Beijing Municipal People's Congress, said the new regulation responds to the mounting public calls for enhancing the protection of medical staff after the city had seen a spate of violence on medics since last December.

On Dec. 24, a man who was not satisfied with his mother's treatment stabbed and killed a doctor at a Beijing hospital. The attacker was given the death sentence in January.
The latest: Coronavirus case numbers climb

Across the country, the number of those infected with coronavirus is climbing. There are now over 69,000 confirmed cases in the United States - with over 3,000 of those in California.

Senate approves historic $2 trillion stimulus deal amid growing coronavirus fears

The Senate on Wednesday approved a historic, $2 trillion stimulus package to provide a jolt to an economy reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, capping days of intense negotiations that produced one of the most expensive and far-reaching measures Congress has ever considered. It will next go to the House for a vote. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced Wednesday evening ahead of Senate passage that the House will convene at 9 a.m. on Friday to consider the relief package.

Chico City Council votes Mayor Randall Stone out

In a big move, Wednesday night the Chico City Council voted to remove Mayor Randall Stone. At the same time - they voted in council member Ann Schwab as Chico's new mayor. This is not the first time the Chico City Council has attempted to remove Stone. They tried and failed in September.

Shasta County health officials confirm first death due to COVID-19

We have details on the first coronavirus death in Shasta County. Health representatives say the patient was a 75-year-old woman. She tested positive after going to the emergency room Sunday and died Tuesday afternoon. Health officials say they can't release which hospital she died in or where she visited before she was admitted.

Coming up Thursday night in Redding

The Redding City Council will have a meeting tonight at 5:15 p.m. On the docket for the evening? What to do with $2 million from Redding Electric Utility to be issued as rebates to REU customers. The doors to the meeting will be open 30 minutes prior.

Tri Counties Bank Oroville closed after employee test positive for coronavirus

Tri Counties Bank is reporting an employee at the Oroville branch has tested positive for the coronavirus. That person is now home in quarantine - after having recently returned from a trip. A bank marketing director told Action News Now the employee had worked at the branch March 10 through March 13 and a half day March 17. Bank reps are trying to reach customers who may have had contact with that employee. However, the Butte County Public Health Department would not confirm specifics of this case.

People keeping social distance while heading out to park trails

In Redding, parks have seen a lot more foot traffic due to the coronavirus forcing people to isolate. The Redding Recreation Department says it does not have any plans to close the trails or parks, but if they start to see overcrowding that could lead to a shutdown. The city says park staff continues to maintain facilities by cleaning up the bathrooms and taking out the trash.

Butte County Treasurer addresses confusion over tax deadlines

Butte County representatives say there has been confusion surrounding local property tax deadlines. According to the Treasurer and Tax Collector's Office, although federal and state income tax deadlines have been moved, the county deadline of April 10 remains the same. However, for those who are directly impacted, either physically or financially, by the coronavirus, there will be a penalty waiver process offered after the April 10, 2020 deadline.
A decision by the Church World Service (CWS) leadership team to close all of the kit depots in local congregations through May 31 will affect the Church of the Brethrens Material Resources ministry based at the Brethren Service Center in New Windsor, Md. The Material Resources warehouse facility receives, processes, and distributes CWS disaster relief kits.

Said the announcement from Matthew Stevens, director of congregational giving for CWS: Given the heartbreaking realities of COVID-19 and in accordance with CDC guidelines, we are postponing all kit collections and depot activity through May 31st. Weve been getting daily requests for hygiene kits for vulnerable groups. But without collections in the near future, were running out of supplies. On May 11th, well reach out to you again to share what we know and hear your thoughts about how we can continue this ministry in 2020. Ill be praying for you and your community in the days ahead. Lets be in touch in both spirit and word.

CWS kit depots received an email with this announcement on March 24, with the encouragement that churches not host kit assemblies during this time period. A follow-up email will be sent in May with any updates.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 17:46:00|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, March 26 (XInhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday said he appreciates World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus' efforts to advance the global battle against the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a reply letter to Ghebreyesus, Xi said China will continue to provide support for the international community in combating the coronavirus disease.
Jonathan and Jess Taylor are the husband-and-wife team behind aptly named Los Angelesbased design firm Taylor + Taylor. The self-described best friends are raising a family and running a business together, so it makes sense that many of their clients are couples. Its really rewarding to bring our experience as a couple that is perpetually navigating the creative process together into the dialogue and decision-making thats required in design, Jonathan explains.

For a recent project, the Taylors worked with a pair in their mid-30s who had stumbled across an untouched late-midcentury property while they were on a walk in Silver Lake. They had been searching for a real estate investment, so the couple purchased the duplex home from the original contractor who had built the place more than four decades ago.

While the new owners considered moving into one of the two units, they ultimately decided to create a duo of luxury rentals with the help of Taylor + Taylor. We tried to approach it kind of like a boutique hotel, where you weave in themes that continue throughout, but each space is distinct in itself, Jonathan says. Natural maple wood is one of those themes.

This material is on full display with custom cabinetry in the south kitchen in the propertys lower unit. The room opens up to the leafy backyard, so it offers a jungle quality that Jonathan and Jess played off when they imagined the decor. But before they were able to have fun with terrazzo and mustard tones, the team had to figure out how to make the tiny footprint feel bigger. They ended up knocking down a wall and introducing a peninsula that provides the openness the owners wanted.

Kitchen location: The south kitchen resides in a late-midcentury Silver Lake duplex built in 1979, which is located right across from the reservoir in this creative Los Angeles district.

The before: The space was astoundingly dark and dim and almost oppressive, so the first challenge was figuring out the best path to gaining openness and taking advantage of the natural light. It was very segmented, small, and galley-style. It also had the water heater for the whole unit in it, so there was very little functional storage. The ceilings dropped down, as well. It had the ubiquitous '80s built-in fluorescent panel lights that I just despise profoundly, says Jonathan of the original kitchen.

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The inspiration: More than anything the owners had a desire to make it feel open, Jonathan says. They also wanted us to make logistical sense out of this rather small space. The clients were really drawn to the idea that the soul of the home would be brought to light in this process. We tried to celebrate the midcentury origins of the home without going into the really overplayed, Pinterest-esque midcentury elements.

Square footage: 70 square feet

Budget: The homeowners wanted to spend around $100,000 on the kitchen renovation, including design fees, materials, and labor.

Main Ingredients:

Floors: Concrete Collaborative Terrazzo Tile. This flooring was my personal favorite, says Jonathan. I would totally use it in a space in my home. Its these little black chips in a gray cement base that I just think is beautiful and timeless and doesnt feel overly soft.

Cabinets: Custom Maple Wood. This is the kind of space where you cant do cabinetry really well without going custom. There are so many quirks of the space itself that are constraining. The C-shaped shelves we added beneath the uppers, and the floating shelves that are embedded to the wall, were things that we were able to pull off because the cabinetry was custom, explains Jonathan.

Cabinet Finish: Loba on Top!. We often run into challenges with lighter wood, Jonathan admits. Almost any clear coat you put on will become yellow with time. We were really trying to find something that felt ultranatural and that would retain the right color. Theres a product we started working with from Germany thats really fantastic. Its meant to be a floor finish, but we use it as a cabinet finish because its so durable.

Cabinet Pulls: Atlas Homewares It Pulls. The space just wanted to be light and crisp, so these clean-edged pulls had the simplicity we were after, says Jonathan.

Backsplash: Fireclay Mustard Seed Tile. Choosing these minimal, beautiful, utilitarian maple cabinets meant that we could pull in a color that was really unexpected. It works so brilliantly with the black of the floor and the soft neutralness of the maple, Jonathan says.

Counters: Silestone

Paint: Benjamin Moore White Dove. Its the perfect white if youre not going for stark, but you also dont want anything too creamy. Its got a little bit of body to it, Jonathan opines.

Faucet: Brizo Matte White Kitchen Faucet

Appliances: Fisher & Paykel Refrigerator, Summit Appliance Range; Bosch Panel-Ready Dishwasher. Were inclined to use Fisher & Paykel in slimmer spacestheyre useful, minimal, and have a great price point. You get the European functionality, but theyre from New Zealand, Jonathan says. For the stove, we were really constrained because we needed a small, white range, of which there are very few in existence, but we were committed.

Lighting: Cedar & Moss Pendant

Most insane splurge: The custom maple wood cabinetry was the most expensive investment in the kitchen, and Jonathan thinks it was worth it. If you were trying to customize a bunch of creative panels from one of the many upstarts thats making fronts for IKEA bases, you would just end up spending so much time, energy, and money trying to make them fit into a kitchen like this, he says. Custom really is the way to achieve this beautifully fitted cabinetry in a tight space.

Sneakiest save: We tend to push our clients, in this type of project, to go with appliances that allow you to get a real value for your dollar, Jonathan explains. With these mid-range European appliances, youre getting quality and style thats much better than the American equivalents, in my opinion.

The best part: The thing that excites me most in this kitchen is the way the colors and tones play together. I love the starkness of the floors against the airy, natural elements of the cabinets and countertops and the surprising pop of mustard in the backsplash, Jonathan gushes.

What I'd never do again: The integrated hood liner located in the upper cabinetry became a quite complicated aspect of the project because of existing structural elements. Jonathan wishes he wouldve pushed himself and the general contractor to devise a plan for the mechanical details before starting to work.

Final bill: Jonathan and Jess made sure to complete the renovation right under the $100,000 budget.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
Online food delivery service Deliveroo has seen an 80% spike in the number of restaurants using the platform in the last two weeks in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.

More than 100 restaurants have signed up to the Deliveroo service as they transition from dine-in to delivery-only in a bid to keep their businesses going during the pandemic.

To manage this increased demand, Deliveroo has re-assigned teams of people across the business to onboard new restaurant partners and support restaurants who want to carry out deliveries but have no previous experience. The company has also dropped its new-restaurant onboarding fee.

Deliveroo has also published detailed guidance on how restaurants can run delivery-only outlets safely, covering issues such as how to minimise contact, packaging and hygiene best practice.

Deliveroo Ireland general manager Michael Healy said the company was determined to help restaurants continue to be able to offer a service during the crisis.

We are here to deliver for restaurants that want to carry on offering their amazing food to families at home during this difficult time. We are working with restaurants to optimise their operations for delivery, and we are doing everything we can to make sure people still have access to the food they want and need," he said.

Restaurants turning to delivery on Deliveroo in Ireland and throughout the world include large chains, local family favourites and quick takeaways - the majority of which did not perform delivery services until now.

Some of the more well-known Irish brands that have joined Deliveroo include: Elephant & Castle, Mad Egg, Xian, Street Food, Boojum, Musashi, Chimac, Shouk, Bunsen and Umi Falafel.
Theyd rather be on the safe side, she said. And I understand: Theyre scared of whats happening.

Ms. Bauccio rarely leaves the house except to work and interacts only with her husband, she said, who is unemployed and also stays at home. The couple relies on her housekeeping jobs.

Im worrying about paying the mortgage, never mind putting food on the table, she said.

Pay them what you normally would

Professor Cuchara said that compared with other service workers who might come into a house, a cleaner is certainly safer.

They have to worry about infectious disease all the time, she said. I think it seems that theyre the most prepared than all of us to deal with it. Its tough to know where to draw the line. Were doing takeout and delivery and not testing the food workers.

The National Domestic Workers Alliance, an advocacy group, has recommended that house cleaners stop entering private homes for the duration of the crisis to protect themselves and clients.

The kind thing to do, if you are a person of means, is to pay them what you normally would this month knowing that when they will come back to work, they will be happy to come back to your home and continue to build a long-term working relationship together, the organization said in a statement. The best thing for everyones health is stay home to slow the spread of the virus, and that includes supporting domestic workers so that they can stay at home.

A person youre inviting into your most intimate space

Dr. Garg said he had cut down on the risk by providing his own cleaning supplies. He and his family stay seven feet away from the house cleaner as she mops, sweeps and vacuums to keep her  and themselves  safe.
Welcome to another week of financial learning. The whole world has come to a partial standstill due to the outbreak of the Corona Virus.

The virus that started slowly in China has now spread to more than 150 countries across the globe. The economic impact of the pandemic goes beyond the shores of China.

According to Mathieu Vasseux, Head of Financial Services MEA at Oliver Wyman

The ongoing coronavirus epidemic may lead to reduced borrowing and lending, impacting banks that work in corporate and personal finance in Dubai and the Middle East.

Mathieu made this statement after the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) requested that banks implement measures to counteract the effects of Covid-19, including rescheduling loans, offering temporary deferrals on monthly loan payments and reducing fees and commissions.

International Economic Rating agency Moodys Investor Services had this to say about the spread of the Virus in their latest report;

Travel bans to and from affected areas will negatively affect tourism, hospitality, and transportation, as will reduced demand from the curtailment of non-essential travel and other measures,

Ghana recorded its first Corona Virus case more than two weeks ago and currently stands at 132 cases at the time of writing.

The President through a directive has suspended any form of social gathering which has affected churches, schools, funerals, weddings to mention a few.

The directive can affect other sectors in the coming days if it has not even taken place already.

The United States of American government has earmarked over a trillion to fight this pandemic disease. Ghana has 100 million dollars as the budget to curb this menace.

The virus spread has led to total state lockdowns in the UK, Italy, Spain, and a host of other countries globally including South Africa.

Whiles, we fight to eradicate the virus I want to address the impact on the banking sector of Ghana.

NON-PERFORMING LOANS

The first major impact of the spread of this virus and lockdowns is the inability of loan customers to settle their indebtedness as they fall due.

Most customers with monthly repayment structure will begin to have a negative impact spanning from turnover challenges.

Many companies who are into fast-moving commodities have begun to have a downwards turnover trend due to the call for people to stay at home.

Sales have begun to slow down whiles overhead costs remain almost the same.

Revenues of these customers are being impacted seriously especially Schools and churches.

Schools and churches with assets at commercial banks will begin to have difficulties in the coming weeks servicing their loans.

Banks will, therefore, need to quickly move into restructuring mode or start recording high NPLs by the end of March and April.

I have read with a bit of concern about how a section of Ghanaians on Social Media are lambasting some Pastors who initially exercised concerns when the President directed for the partial shutdown of churches.

Some of these churches have taken loans from banks that will require repayment in March and April.

No physical church service will lead to a reduction in revenue to these churches thereby causing defaults.

Their concerns are therefore genuine and should not be rubbished.

However, with technology and innovation, these churches should educate their members to give in support of the running of the ministry.

The slow growth of revenue, suspension of some businesses among others should be of great concern for commercial banks in Ghana as we move to the next stage of the Covid-19 management.

RUN ON BANKS

The second impact of the Covid-19 on the banking sector is the negative deposit growth of financial institutions.

Many Ghanaians have started stocking their homes and wallets with rumors of Accra and Kumasi shutdown.

The more these rumors gain root, the more customers will begin to withdraw their savings from the bank to buy consumables in anticipation of restricted movement.

This will impact negatively the liquidity positions of most banks.

The Central Bank to manage this challenge has reduced the Primary Reserve Requirement from 10 to 8 percent as well as the Capital Conservation Buffer(CCB) for banks from 3 to 1.5 percent.

This is providing more liquidity to the banks and support to critical sectors of the economy as captured in their communication signed by Mrs. Sandra Thompson, Bank of Ghana Secretary on March 20, 2020.

Banks should continue to engage and educate their customers on financial management measures in times like these to manage a possible run on them.

One of such important education is to advise customers against liquidating their investments out of panic. This is a call that I made personally on my YouTube Channel Patrick TV GH.

STAFF RATIONING

The President of Ghana in his directive advised against the public gathering of people not exceeding 25 persons.

This call has led to most banks resorting to staff rationing.

Most branches have divided their staff into two groups with one team working for a week while the other team works from home.

This is a laudable initiative but can negatively affect the business development.

The productivity of staff working from home is obviously very questionable in our setting.

Most of the staff have a family at home hence; divided attention and home-like mood can lead to low productivity.

We are not in normal times and as such, this step is commendable.

UNPLANNED OPERATIONAL EXPENSES

Almost every bank has purchased precautionary and safety items at the various offices to manage the spread of this Virus.

Some of these items are gloves, facemasks, Veronica Buckets, Sanitizers, and Extra detergents.

None of these banks considered these during their budget session.

No matter how small the total costs of these items are, it will influence the P&L of these banks.

Efficiency is therefore needed in the utilization of these items.

The picture is not all gloomy for the banks. Reports have indicated that the Virus will have a positive effect on the usage of digital services like online banking, mobile wallets, etc.

Consumers' desire for digital banking services will most likely increase, forcing many traditional financial institutions to fast-track digital innovation efforts.

As a result, many banks and financial institutions will have to look to fintech firms for assistance in bringing better digital banking solutions to the marketplace.

I will end by advising bank staff to work extra hard in times like these as the revenue of the bank will hit badly by this Virus.

Your life is precious to your employer. Revenue is also important to your employer so work at matching your life to the revenue expected from you.

We are not in normal times but as our President said, this too shall pass!!!

Wash your hands with soap under running water every 30 minutes, use alcohol-based sanitizers periodically, avoid close contact and call the emergency lines should you feel any Covid-19 symptoms.

I wish everyone a wonderful and memorable week, Stay Safe!

Gratis!!!

Patrick Baah Abankwa is a chartered banker with over 6 years of experience in mainstream banking having worked in various capacities. He is currently at the Branch Manager Position of his institution.

He has been a qualified member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, Ghana with a good membership standing since the year 2013.

He also holds EMBA and BA from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science, Technology, and the University of Ghana respectively.

Patrick is the originator of the daily epistle dubbed Savings Tip of the Day which has been running for over a year on WhatsApp and Facebook.

Patrick has also been teaching on the Topics Savings, Investment and Financial Independence for over 2 years and a research fellow for ILAPI Ghana. He runs a financial channel on Youtube by the name Patrick TV Gh and has appeared a couple of times on the business segment of TV3 News 360.

Patrick is into youth facilitation and counselling. He can be contacted via [email protected]

Follow Patrick on the various platforms for more education:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/PatrickTVGh/

Instagram: @PatrickTVGH
The city of Chicago is threatening to arrest or issue $500 fines to people who refuse to comply with the state-wide stay at home order for Illinois during the coronavirus pandemic.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot and acting-police chief Charlie Beck issued the stark warning on Wednesday saying the city would no longer tolerate people congregating in public places.

They vowed to start arresting or issuing $500 citations to those who continued to ignore the state-wide stay at home order, which is in place until April 7 to encourage social distancing.

It comes after large crowds of people were spotted out in public over the weekend, including near Chicago's Lake Michigan, as they took advantage of warmer temperatures.

The city of Chicago is threatening to arrest or issue $500 fines to people who refuse to comply with the state-wide stay at home order for Illinois during the coronavirus pandemic

'This situation is deadly serious and we have to take it seriously,' Lightfoot said.

Beck, the city's interim police superintendent, said the public health orders were not an advisory.

'They are a legal mandate and violation of this legal mandate is a misdemeanor,' he said.

'If you violate it, you are subject to a citation, a fine of up to $500, and if you continue to violate it, you will be subject to physical arrest.'

The mayor went on to say she would force compliance if it came down to it. She said police would be deployed to shut down large gatherings if it comes to it.

'If people don't take this in a serious way in which they must, I'm not going to hesitate to pull every lever at my disposal to force compliance if necessary,' she said.

Large crowds of people were spotted out in public over the weekend, including near Chicago's Lake Michigan (above), as they took advantage of warmer temperatures

The Chicago mayor is now also considering closing down the city's parks and famous lakefront completely

Mayor Lori Lightfoot (left) and acting-police chief Charlie Beck (right) issued the stark warning on Wednesday saying the city would no longer tolerate people congregating in public places

She is now also considering closing down the city's parks and famous lakefront completely.

Lightfoot said the drastic action would come because people are gathering 'like it's just another day' despite the stay at home order.

'We are reminding everyone that while it is acceptable to leave your homes to go on walks near your homes, and to purchase food and other essentials, you have to stay at home as much as possible,' she said.

'You cannot go on long bike rides, walks, runs along the lakefront where you're going to be congregating with lots of other people. The same applies to neighborhood parks, and particularly playgrounds.

'The longer we don't follow this order, the longer this crisis will last, the sicker people will get, and the harder the strain on our healthcare system.'

Across the US, roughly half of the population have been affected by stay-at-home orders in at least 18 states.

The US death toll has now risen to 1,200 with more than 80,000 confirmed cases.

The number of cases in the US has rocketed over the last two weeks
Chennai, March 26 : The 21-day nationwide lockdown to combat COVID-19 will have its impact on those cultivating vegetables, fruits, tea, paddy, flowers, inland fisheries and livestock, farmers in Tamil Nadu said.

"The lock down is impacting various farm operations ranging from cultivation to marketing. The summer cultivation of paddy has been affected for want of labour while harvested perishables like fruits, vegetables and fish in ponds can't be taken to the market for want of transportation in the state," P.R. Pandian, President, Tamil Nadu Federation of All Farmers' Association, told IANS.

He said the major impact will be on farmers of fruits and vegetables and floriculturists, as these are highly perishable items which are not getting the required prices. "These are getting sold at half the rate,'' he added.

According to Pandian, about 15 lakh acres of land in the state under paddy cultivation during the summer are facing losses as they are not able to find labour for various operations.

He said farmers cultivating watermelons across the state are staring at losses as they are not able to harvest and market their produce due to the 21-day lockdown that is in place to prevent the spread of the coronanirus outbreak that has infected over 600 people across the country.

Similarly, groundnuts cultivated in about 8 lakh acres are not being harvested for want of labour in several districts in the state.

The farmers to whom IANS spoke were unanimous in their views that the government has not considered the ground-level situation of such farms before announcing the 21-day lockdown.

Unlike sugarcane crop where harvest can be postponed, fruits, vegetables and tea leaves have to be harvested and sold on time, failing which they would rot.

"Adequate cold storage facilities are not present so that the farmers can store their produce for some days. I have a fish farm but there is no market for now," Pandian said.

"The area under summer paddy cultivation will be about 2 lakh acres in the Cauvery Delta region. Nurseries have been raised and transplantation should happen during the first week of April. Plantation and horticulture will be affected due to the lock down," S. Ranganathan, President, Cauvery Delta Farmers' Welfare Association, told IANS.

The farmers told IANS that sales of vegetables and fruits have been affected in a major way as there is no market within Tamil Nadu or in the neighbouring states like Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

Pandian said each farmer's family should be paid a sum of Rs 10,000 for one month's sustenance.

From the picturesque Theni district, A. Thiruppathi Vasagan, a farmer, told IANS over phone: "It is summer and watermelon consumption would normally be high. But owing to the lockdown and absence of transports, the farmers here are facing a grim situation." According to Vasagan, about 15,000 acres of land will be under vegetable farming in Theni district. He also added that banana farmers will be affected in a big way.

"Banana has to be cut and sent to the market on time failing which it would rot, which in turn is also a health risk. Theni is also known for grape farming and the lockdown will also impact this," Vasagan said.

According to him, the farm labourers have been advised to work maintaining a distance of about 1.5 metres between them.

In the Nilgiris district, the tea and vegetable sectors are badly affected apart from the tourism sector.

"The tea factories have been ordered to shut down. The factories in turn have asked us to stop plucking of tea leaves. Once the leaves are plucked, it has to be sent to the factories for processing," Manjai V Mohan, President, Federation of Tea Crop Cultivators' Association, told IANS over phone from Nilgiris.

According to him, this is going to hit the business in a big way as about 50,000 tonnes of tea are bought by tourists to Ooty every year during the summer season.

He said the tea factories are largely automated and the plucking of leaves could have been allowed maintaining sufficient distance between the workers.

Apart from tea, the Nilgiris district also cultivates vegetables and flowers.

"Owing to the lockdown and absence of labour, vegetables are not being harvested. Further, Bengaluru is the major market for the flowers and in the absence of transportation, flowers are not being sent there resulting in losses for the growers," Mohan added.

According to Pandian, the Central government should pay the farmers Rs 6,000 in one instalment, rather than in three instalments as announced earlier and also write-off farm loans.
Beijing's legislature has started deliberating a draft regulation on ensuring the security of hospitals after a spate of assaults on doctors sparked public outrage.

If passed, the regulation will require large hospitals to set up police offices and introduce security checks to prevent any dangerous objects being taken into hospitals.

It will ban behaviors including insulting and beating medics, making an uproar to disrupt hospital operation, setting up "mourning halls" in hospitals, and other disruptive acts commonly taken by protesting families of deceased patients.

The draft was tabled for deliberation at a session of the Standing Committee of the 15th Beijing Municipal People's Congress on Thursday.

Chen Yong, chair of the Supervisory and Judicial Affairs Committee of the Beijing Municipal People's Congress, said the new regulation responds to the mounting public calls for enhancing the protection of medical staff after the city had seen a spate of violence on medics since last December.

On Dec. 24, a man who was not satisfied with his mother's treatment stabbed and killed a doctor at a Beijing hospital. The attacker was given the death sentence in January.
After frantic SOS calls by the stranded persons, including pregnant women and children, Andhra Pradesh authorities finally agreed to let them in, on the condition that they be shifted to a quarantine facility

Amaravati: Hundreds of people were left stranded at various checkpoints on the Andhra Pradesh- Telangana borders since Wednesday night as authorities refused to let them into the state in view of the coronavirus lockdown, exposing the communication gap and lack of coordination between the authorities of the two states.

After frantic SOS calls by the stranded persons, including pregnant women and children, Andhra Pradesh authorities finally agreed to let them in, on the condition that they be shifted to a quarantine facility.

While those who accepted the government directive were allowed in, others were left at the border points.

As news came in that the student hostels and paying guest facilities were being re-opened in Hyderabad, most of the students chose to turn back.

The Andhra Pradesh government said in a release on Thursday morning that 44 people who came from Hyderabad were shifted to a quarantine facility at Nuzividu.

While some others went back to Hyderabad, over 200 persons who refused to move into quarantine were also being sent back, the release said.

"Only those persons with a 'clean certificate' for valid medical reasons are being permitted to enter into the state. Others will not be allowed under any circumstances," the release added.

It all began since late Wednesday evening when people started reaching the border checkpoint at Garikapadu on the National Highway-64.

They carried a special travel permit issued by police authorities in Hyderabad after student hostels and paying guest facilities were abruptly shut down.

Intervention of the local MLA and Government Whip Samineni Udayabhanu did not help as he blamed lack of coordination between the two states authorities for the situation.

Local Deputy Superintendent of Police Ramana Murthy maintained that since the lockdown was in force and the inter-state borders have been sealed, no vehicle or person could be allowed into the state.

The stranded passengers faced severe hardship as there was no water or food in the vicinity. Also, the panic-stricken passengers were huddled in a group as they awaited some intervention from the higher-ups to end the impasse.

Vijayawada Sub-Collector HM Dhyanachandra visited the spot and said the passengers would be moved to a quarantine facility at Nuzividu, some 40-kilometre away, for isolation and medical examination.

Over 600 people, including a few women and children, set off from Hyderabad in cabs after obtaining special travel permits from the local police.

After a smooth ride up to Garikapadu, the borderline between the two states, the vehicles were stopped at around 3.30 pm, leaving the passengers stranded.

"We are a group of students and have been asked to vacate our hostels. The Hyderabad police gave us special travel permit to return to our native place and accordingly we hired a cab and started our journey this morning. We were blocked at this place as the AP police are unwilling to let us in," a student said.

Another person said he was travelling with his wife, into her ninth month pregnancy, after a medical check-up in Hyderabad. "Despite our situation, the police are not willing to let us travel to our destination," he lamented.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

The local MLA arrived on the scene and took up the stranded passengers' case with the police but to no avail.

"Those who were going to Guntur from Hyderabad were allowed via Piduguralla but here they blocked everything.

There is a clear lack of coordination between the officials of the two states," Udayabhanu said. He said the passengers could be permitted further journey after conducting required thermal screening tests.

The issue was taken to Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy's notice but to no avail, as the officials did not relent.

On Thursday, Guntur district Joint Collector Dinesh Kumar said medical teams were being sent to the border checkpoints to screen the passengers.

"As per rules, the passengers cannot be sent to their villages and they only have to go to a quarantine facility. Only those who agree to this will be allowed into the state," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-03-26 10:37:35|Editor: huaxia

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LISBON, March 25 (Xinhua) -- The last group of passengers on board the cruise ship "MSC Fantasia," stranded in Portugal due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were repatriated to Brazil on Wednesday evening, Portuguese authorities said.

The group of people comprised 39 Brazilian passengers and 239 crew members, according to the Portuguese Ministry of Internal Administration (MAI).

The cruise ship from Brazil arrived in Lisbon early on Sunday with 1,338 passengers on board, mostly from the European Union, Britain, Brazil and Australia.

On Tuesday, 1,015 foreign citizens returned to their countries on four flights -- two flights to Germany, one to Brazil and one to Britain.

Another flight was made on Wednesday afternoon to Marseille, France, which carried 141 people including 61 crew members.

The operations were made in conjunction with several embassies from different countries, said the MAI.

The novel coronavirus has infected 2,995 people in Portugal as of Wednesday, 633 more than the previous day, and resulted in 43 deaths, according to the country's Directorate-General of Health.

Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa declared a 15-day state of emergency on March 18 in a bid to contain the spread of COVID-19.
Leaders of the world's most powerful economies convened on Thursday with the aim of coordinating a global response to the coronavirus, but like millions of employees around the world, they met virtually.

Photos showed President Donald Trump, China's leader, Xi Jinping and France's president Emmanuel Macron among the leaders present on the virtual conference call, which was being hosted remotely by the King of Saudi Arabia.

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau appeared on a screen from his home in Ottawa, where he is in quarantine after his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau caught the virus.

Angela Merkel is also working from home after being treated by a doctor who has since tested positive, although the chancellor's own tests have come back negative.

The unusual video call in lieu of a physical gathering comes as governments around the world stress the importance of social distancing to curb the spread of the highly-infectious virus.

Photos showed President Donald Trump (far right, second row), China's leader, Xi Jinping (bottom right) and France's president Emmanuel Macron among the leaders present on the virtual conference call, which was being hosted remotely by the King of Saudi Arabia

The leaders of the world's most powerful economies were forced to convene virtually on Thursday with the aim of coordinating a global response to the coronavirus

This image shows Trump speaking during the G20 virtual summit on Thursday

The meeting also comes amid criticism that the world's wealthiest countries have not taken enough action to combat the virus or its economic impact globally as people lose their incomes due to closures, curfews and lockdowns.

The Group of 20 nations vowed to work together and said they are collectively injecting more than $4.8trillion into the global economy to counteract the social and financial impacts of the pandemic.

In a final statement after the meeting, the G20 said they were committed to strengthening the World Health Organizations mandate.

They said 'global action, solidarity and international cooperation' were needed more than ever.

'The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful reminder of our interconnectedness and vulnerabilities,' the group said. 'The virus respects no borders.'

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged G20 leaders to adopt a war-time plan to tackle the pandemic.

'It took the world three months to reach 100,000 confirmed cases of infection,' he said.

'The next 100,000 happened in just 12 days. The third took four days. The fourth, just one and a half.'

Saudi King Salman chairs a video call of world leaders from the Group of 20 and other international bodies and organizations, from his office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Thursday

Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the G20 Extraordinary Virtual Leaders' Summit on COVID-19 via video link in Beijing, capital of China, on Thursday

'This is exponential growth and only the tip of the iceberg,' Guterres said, adding that countries must be able to combine systematic testing, tracing, quarantining and treatment, as well as coordinate an exit strategy to keep it suppressed until a vaccine becomes available.

Saudi Arabia, which is presiding over the G20 this year, opened the meeting with an urgent appeal by King Salman for the world's most powerful nations to finance the research and development of a vaccine for the virus, which causes an illness known as COVID-19.

'This human crisis requires a global response. The world counts on us to come together and cooperate in order to face this challenge,' the Saudi monarch said during the virtual summit.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced during the call that the UK was providing additional funding to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is supporting the development of vaccines, bringing its contribution to 250 million pounds ($302million).

The meeting was not open to the media to observe. Governments and organizations distributed the comments of participants after it concluded.

World leaders like India's Narendra Modi, Japan's Shinzo Abe and Trudeau could be seen in little boxes on a screen seated at desks in photos shared on Twitter by European Council President Charles Michel.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a video conference with G20 leaders to discuss the coronavirus disease outbreak at the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, Thursday

The President of the European Council Charles Michel participates in a video call of world leaders from the Group of 20 and other international bodies and organizations on Thursday

Trump was shown seated at the end of a long conference table in Washington with other American officials in photos shared on social media by the Saudi Foreign Ministry.

Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested setting up a special fund under the IMF that would offer interest-free loans, and he emphasized the need to create 'green corridors' for free movement of supplies and technologies intended to deal with the epidemic. He also proposed a moratorium on sanctions with regard to essential goods.

Putin noted 'it's a matter of life and death,' emphasizing the need to get rid of 'political rubbish'.

He did not name any specific country but appeared to refer to US sanctions on Iran, which has been badly hit by the outbreak.

Russia has also faced waves of Western sanctions over its 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimea.

The virtual summit additionally included leaders from the World Health Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, International Labor Organization and others.

A woman wearing face mask walks past a bank electronic board showing the Hong Kong share index at Hong Kong Stock Exchange Thursday

The dining section is closed off at East Side Pockets, a small restaurant near Brown University, Wednesday, in Providence, Rhode Island

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva asked G20 leaders for their backing to double the fund's $50billion emergency financing capacity.

She said vulnerable households and businesses need targeted financial support to stay afloat and get back to work quickly.

'Otherwise it will take years to overcome the effects of widespread bankruptcies and layoffs,' she warned.

The IMF has said it stands 'ready to deploy' all of its $1trillion lending capacity, with nearly 80 countries currently requesting help.

Ethiopia's government told G20 finance ministers in a call ahead of Thursday's summit that Africa needs a $150billion emergency financing package due to the impact of the virus.

The global death toll from the virus has climbed past 22,000 and the number of infections has surpassed 495,000, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.

American Airlines 777's airplanes are parked at Tulsa International Airport Wednesday on Wednesday. American Airlines has 44 out of service airplanes parked at the airport due to a reduced flight schedule because of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic

A pedestrian walks near to the corner between Estafeta (left) and Javier street of the old city, in Pamplona, northern Spain, Wednesday

A group of Indian daily wage laborers walk along an expressway hoping to reach their homes, hundreds of miles away, as the city comes under lockdown in Ghaziabad, on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, on Thursday

Disagreement erupted this week among the Group of 7 leading industrialized democracies, which sparred over whether to call out China as the source of the coronavirus.

The foreign ministers were unable to agree on a US push to identify it as the 'Wuhan virus,' in reference to the city in China where it first appeared. As a result, the group opted against releasing a statement after the call.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has been criticized for rocking oil markets by ramping up production next month and slashing prices to gain market share after Russia refused to extend a production cut agreement.

The US has pressed Saudi Arabia to reconsider it's current strategy.

The International Labor Organization says nearly 40 per cent of the worlds population has no health insurance or access to national health services and that 55 per cent - or 4 billion people - do not benefit from any form of social protection.

It said the current health crisis makes clear that not nearly enough progress has been made by governments in the years since the 2008 financial crisis to expand access to health services, sickness benefits and unemployment protection.
Lucknow, March 26 : The doorstep delivery of essential goods, as announced by the Yogi Adityanath government, may not have manifested itself on the ground yet, but several individuals are now doing their bit to help the lesser fortunate.

People have started reaching out to each other on the social media with help.

Some residents of high-rise apartments in the state capital, have formed WhatsApp groups and one person collects the shopping list of others and then goes out to buy the commodities.

Senior citizens in these buildings, in particular, are being taken care of in this manner.

"By doing this, we make sure that only one person goes out shopping from the building instead of everyone going out. Since majority of the domestic servants have stopped coming to work, we are taking turns to help the senior residents with cleaning and cooking," said Madhuri Arora, one such resident.

Naeem Siddiqui, a Congress leader and a prominent builder of the state capital, has purchased 4,000 kilograms of rice, 1,000 kilograms each of arhar and urad pulses and 10,000 kilograms of flour.

He has posted on Facebook that anyone who knows of any needy person, can inform him and the food grains will be sent to the person.

Siddiqui has also asked people to poll in resources in a similar manner in their respective areas to help the poor.

Arvind Narain, a senior citizen in Prayagraj, is making packets containing one kilogram of flour, 100 ml of oil, assorted vegetables and 250 grams of pulses.

"I make 15 packets every day and put them in the car. I go out to different places and distribute them to labourers who have no money and no work. This is all I can do in these times," he said, Ishrat Ali Pappu, a local politician, is distributing food packets to the homeless.

Vishal Singh, who runs a free-of-cost kitchen for patients' attendants in the King George's Medical University, has doubled the quantity of food being cooked in the kitchen.

"We are offering free food to anyone who comes without questioning his background. Feeding the hungry is our aim and we are doing it," he said.

In two housing societies, the local residents are having an early dinner and the leftover food is them packed and distributed to the homeless.

"Even if one 'chappati' is leftover or a fistful of rice, we pack it up and then two residents go out around 9 p.m to distribute the food. We feel this is the least that we can do for the poor in the lockdown," said Ravish Mehrotra, a resident.
Chris Cook

Lambert & Co. has acquired branding, creative and digital agency Fairly Painless Advertising. The deal marks Lamberts third transaction in the last six months. Terms of the deal, which closed in early March, were not disclosed. Fairly Painless will operate as a division of Lambert, retaining the FP brand (with subtext, a Lambert company). The agencys current team, led by CEO Chris Cook, will remain in place. Founded in 1992, Holland, MI-based Fairly Painless works with both B2B and consumer-facing brands, in such sectors as automotive and manufacturing, consumer products, education, financial services, non-profit and retail. Its services include research, planning and creative services, brand strategy, video production, web development, digital marketing services and ad buying. Fairly Painless is an immediate complement to our clients and team, said Lambert founder and CEO Jeff Lambert.

Hispanicize Wire, a Latinx-owned and operated, multimedia press release distribution service aimed at U.S. Hispanic journalists, influencers and thought leaders, has rebranded as Latinx Newswire. Latinx Newswire chief operating officer Jersain Cruz will continue in his role. The rebranding will differentiate the wire service from its former sister company, Hispanicize Media Group, which was acquired last year by NGL Collective, the multi-platform media company co-founded by actor John Leguizamo. As part of its rebrand, Latinx Newswire has upgraded its website and is planning to launch new services for small business clients and expand its national multimedia website partner. Latinx Newswire will also continue its strategic partnerships with such general market press release wire services such as GlobeNewswire and with Latinx SEO and marketing firm, Hispanic Market Advisors.

Adam Waitkunas

Milldam Public Relations, a Boston-based firm that works with small and midsize technology, energy, telecommunications and facilities companies, is offering a free one-hour communications consultation to mission-critical providers and vendors. The consultation will be handled through the agencys mission-critical crisis communications practice. Milldam says the offer comes in response to the increased reliance on data centers and telecom for such purposes as telecommuting, telemedicine and online takeout and meal delivery services. With the mission-critical industry at the epicenter of this crisis, there is a great opportunity to do good by making certain services available to aid the recovery process, said Milldam Public Relations president Adam Waitkunas.
More than 140 nursing homes in the United States have at least one resident who tested positive for the coronavirus, according to federal government figures released earlier this week, but exactly which homes are affected and where they are, federal officials wont say.

Their refusal to release the information has angered families, industry watchdogs and emergency personnel who say it deprives them of critical information as they try to ensure the safety of nursing home residents, who are among the most vulnerable to the disease.

Thats just not right. Its not ethical. Its not humane, said John BaRoss, who pulled his mother out of a long-term care facility in West Orange, New Jersey, on Friday because he believed she was safer at his home. Families deserve to have the information. Let us have the information, and let us decide.

He started a Facebook group for families weighing similar decisions.

Likewise, emergency responders say the locations of nursing home outbreaks could be essential to their decision-making, leading them to don appropriate protective gear to prevent them from becoming sick or spreading it elsewhere. A nursing home near Newark, New Jersey, had to relocate about 90 residents to another facility Wednesday after coronavirus swept through the home.

Getting the information is super important, said Doug Stern, spokesman for the International Association of Fire Fighters, the labour union representing 320,000 firefighters in the United States and Canada. Once we get the information, we can make sure we take the proper precautions.

While media and public health officials have reported outbreaks of the coronavirus at dozens of nursing homes, many others have not been widely reported.

On Saturday, The Washington Post reported at least 73 outbreaks at nursing homes and other elder care facilities around the nation. That figure was based largely on information from media reports and state officials.

The actual number may have been much higher. On Monday, a news release from Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that regulates nursing homes, said 147 nursing homes had a resident with coronavirus, and that figure included only nursing homes, not elder care facilities.

Citing data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the news release tucked the new figure in the seventh paragraph. The release said although 147 is a small fraction of the over 15,000 nursing homes across the country, given the disproportionate effect on our nations older population, this is a cause for concern.

The Post on Monday requested a list of nursing homes with outbreaks from both the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some care home residents have been transported to hospitals to receive the care they need (Reuters) (REUTERS)

CMS spokesperson Nicole Black referred the question Tuesday to CDC officials.

A CDC spokesman, Scott Pauley, said he was not sure [the list] will be released at this time.

With the onset of coronavirus, many nursing homes and similar facilities have prohibited visitors. Theyre also checking temperatures of residents more frequently and using more masks.

Since nursing homes often house vulnerable people living in close quarters with staff who come and go, it can be a challenge to keep them safe from the virus, experts said; this vulnerability makes it particularly important for nursing homes disclose publicly when they have an outbreak.

In issuing recommended procedures to nursing homes on 13 March, CMS did not specifically instruct nursing homes to tell residents, their families or the public about a coronavirus outbreak. According to some experts, they should have.

Its terrible  people have a right to know where this is happening, said Charlene Harrington, who has studied nursing homes for years and is professor emerita at the University of California San Francisco. Why isnt CMS tracking this? These nursing homes should be made public  so that people have the option to take people out.

Theyre protecting nursing homes here, not patients, she said.

Patients were seen being transported from The Life Care Centre in Kirkland, Washington, to hospitals via ambulances (AP)

Some nursing homes are notifying residents, staff and family members on their own, even without encouragement from federal regulators, and some are clamouring for testing for their residents who exhibit symptoms. But they are not necessarily sharing that information with the public.

Nursing homes in the HCR Manorcare chain have been instructed to notify families of patients by phone when an outbreak has been detected, spokesperson Julie Beckert said. She declined to say how many outbreaks had occurred in the chain.

No, I cannot give that out, Beckert said in an email. It changes a lot with testing and clearing.

Likewise, Genesis, another nursing home chain, said it is notifying residents and families when an outbreak has occurred. Among its 400 locations, it has had outbreaks at 15 homes, involving residents or staff, the company said, but it would not disclose which ones.

Golden Living Centers, another chain, did not respond to a request for information.

In West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican, ordered residents to remain at home Tuesday, spurred by a fast-spreading outbreak at the Sundale Nursing Home in Morgantown, a city of 31,000 on the northern edge of the state.

He said the nursing home infections had spiked to 16 residents and four staff members. Results of 50 additional tests there are still pending, he said, calling the surge alarming. The state has reported 39 people so far with confirmed cases.

Families across America have taken to visiting elderly relatives in care homes via their windows (Reuters) (REUTERS)

We owe so much to so many, but especially to our seniors that have given us guidance beyond belief, Justice said during a live-streamed prayer session Wednesday. This terrible virus, we know, attacks them, and attacks them first and foremost, and those are the ones that we have to look out for in every way.

In New Jersey, dozens of residents were relocated Wednesday from St. Josephs Senior Home in Woodbridge, New Jersey. after several residents were hospitalised with Covid-19, and a number of other residents fell ill. At least a dozen staff members were out sick with respiratory symptoms, state health officials said this week, leaving the nuns that operate the facility unable to care for the residents.

CareOne at Hanover Township, a facility in Whippany, New Jersey, said it received the St. Joseph residents Wednesday, according to a company statement, after moving existing residents to other facilities.

Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said Wednesday it is possible the facility would ultimately close. Sixteen of the states 62 deaths from coronavirus were linked to long-term care facilities, she said.

Robyn Grant, director of public policy at the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, said information about which homes have had an outbreak would be critical for families, especially those deciding where to place a relative.

It would be really important information for consumers, she said. There should be a place where one can go to get this information.

The nations first major coronavirus outbreak began in a nursing home, Life Care Centre of Kirkland, northeast of Seattle. County health officials immediately released the name of the facility, and the nursing homes executive director sent an email alerting relatives. Employees later followed up with calls.

But The Post found many visitors and vendors were not told about the possible infection directly and instead learned it from the news.

A Life Care spokesman has said the home did not have the manpower to call all visitors and was providing information to the media so it would reach the public, and then visitors could seek medical care on their own.

Bridget Parkhill, 54, whose 76-year-old mother is a resident at Life Care, said health officials should publicize the information so friends and relatives can steer clear of nursing homes or monitor their care, and the community can send get-well cards.

The problem is that people arent aware, she said. If they knew that someone tested positive in XYZ nursing home, they would know not to go in there. Information is the only thing thats going to make things better for us.

The initial outbreak at Life Care sickened dozens of people and killed 35, and it served as a warning to thousands of other homes to guard against infection. Notifying the public might also help people pinpoint which nursing homes failed to prepare, she said.

They were given two weeks notice to get their stuff together, she said.

At least 48 firefighters have tested positive for coronavirus, although Stern said he suspects the number is higher because tests are not yet widely available.

In Kirkland, more than 40 firefighters were quarantined  almost half the entire force  and at least one tested positive for the virus.

Florida, home to nearly 700 nursing homes, has not provided the names of nursing homes with positive tests.

Florida Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Mary Mayhew declined to release the names of affected nursing facilities, citing privacy rules, according to media reports.

Agency spokesman Patrick Manderfield did not answer questions last week about why the agency has not released the names. He referred a reporter to the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which referred inquiries Wednesday to the state Department of Health. The department did not immediately respond to a request for the names.

Floridas Department of Health said 40 nursing home residents had tested positive for coronavirus as of Wednesday. Florida had approximately 72,700 people residing in such facilities in 2017, the most recent data available from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-policy nonprofit.

Emergency personnel say it would be helpful to know the names of each nursing home that has had a positive coronavirus test, but they say they are treating vulnerable nursing homes as if they already are infected.

Dispatchers in many areas are screening callers by asking if they have symptoms or have travelled recently outside of the United States. Once they arrive at a scene, as an additional layer of screening, EMTs and paramedics often ask the same questions again. EMTs and firefighters who respond to 911 calls often start their shift by having their temperatures taken. Many nursing homes even take the temperature of emergency medical personnel before they set foot in the door, even for an urgent call.

Hanan Cohen, director of Community Paramedicine for Empress EMS, the 911 provider for New Rochelle, New York, said they were flooded with a thousand coronavirus-related calls from nursing facilities and private residences in the past two weeks alone. The city of more than 78,000 people is 20 miles north of New York City, in Westchester County.

Having knowledge helps you better prepare, he said. But the reality of it is, since day one in New York, weve essentially considered every nursing home response to be a potential Covid-level response. They could be anywhere in the infectious process.

The Washington Post
New Jersey: Ninety-four people in St. Josephs Senior Nursing Home in Woodbridge are suspected to have infected with novel coronavirus. Out of them, 24 have already tested positive, with 70 more expected to have contracted the virus, according to a report by NBC News.

An entire New Jersey nursing home is presumed to be infected with coronavirus, forcing everyone from the facility to be evacuated on Wednesday, officials told NBC News.

At least 24 of 94 residents and patients of St. Josephs Senior Home in Woodbridge, about 20 miles south of Newark, have tested positive for coronavirus and the other 70 clients are also believed to have the virus, authorities said.

The first positive was reported on March 17 and at least one positive test has come back "everyday thereafter," John Hagerty, a spokesman for the city of Woodbridge told NBC News.

While not every patient has been tested, and not all results have returned yet, officials said they had no choice but to assume the worst.

"This is the presumption," Hagerty told NBC News. "That all have been exposed and would be positive."

And several workers at St. Joseph's, including a nun, also tested positive, leaving staffing shortages that forced Wednesday's move, according to CareOne, which runs a chain of senior facilities in New Jersey.

All of the St. Joseph's patients and residents were taken to CareOne at Hanover, in Whippany, about 30 miles away, on Wednesday.

And to make room for the incoming St. Joseph's patients, all 61 people at CareOne had to be moved on Tuesday in a plan by developed state health authorities, a CareOne representative said Wednesday.

Thirty were transported to a CareOne facility in Morristown, 20 to Parsippany, 7 to Livingston and one more was hospitalized for a condition not related to the coronavirus, the CareOne rep.

"So (the St. Joseph's patients) tested positive, so they couldn't co-mingle" with the CareOne Hanover residents, the company rep said.

"The (CareOne) families were understanding. Certainly it was an inconvenience, but this is a national health emergency."
WASHINGTON  This week, the United States Senate passed a relief bill for Americans who are suffering due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the closures associated with it.

The bill, called the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, passed with a unanimous vote in the Senate, and now goes to the House of Representatives for a vote.

The entire cost of the bill would be an estimated $2.2 trillion dollars, the largest such economic relief bill in U.S. history.

Among the investments made in the legislation include:

 $100 billion to hospitals, health care providers, and facilities.

 $425 million in funding for increased access to mental health and addiction treatment

 $3.5 billion for vaccine development.

 $25 million for telemedicine tools for rural patients needing to access their doctors.

 Unemployment insurance for workers impacted by shutdowns caused by COVID-19. People currently receiving unemployment insurance will see an increase of $600 through July 31, which would last for 39 weeks.

 Individuals will receive a $1,200 cash payment not subject to income taxes, or $2,400 for joint filers. It begins to phase out for those making more than $75,000 a year, or $150,000 for joint filers.

 Small businesses or non-profits with fewer than 500 employees will receive Small Business Interruption Loans of up to $10 million guaranteed from the Small Business Administration. Repayment can be deferred for up to one year.

 Medium and large businesses can receive loans, loan guarantees, and other investments through the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

 Direct payroll payments for those in the aviation industry.

 $150 billion for state and local government needs related to housing, education, and childcare. This includes $5 billion for the Community Development Block Grant Program, $33 billion to support childcare providers, schools, and colleges, and $900 million to the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

 A tax relief encouraging employers to implement student loan repayment programs.

In addition to all those relief proposals, $9.5 billion of the aid would go toward a disaster fund helping Michigan farmers experiencing financial losses due to the coronavirus.

Senator Debbie Stabenow said this bill would help Michigans families, workers, and businesses during this crisis.

This pandemic is affecting every family across our state, Stabenow said in a statement. Thats why I have worked hard to make sure we came together in a bipartisan way to address the major public health and economic needs we face. We know that Michigan is strong, and we will weather this crisis together.

Senator Gary Peters contributed the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Act to the bill, which provides unemployment insurance to workers who exhausted their state unemployment benefits and those who would not normally qualify for such benefits, and they could receive those benefits for up to 39 weeks.

Michiganders who arent receiving a paycheck or have lost their jobs because of the Coronavirus pandemic shouldnt have to worry about whether they can pay their bills or put food on the table, Peters said in a statement. Thats why I fought to secure inclusion of my legislation to expand critical unemployment assistance to everyone from small business owners to workers in the gig economy and independent contractors.

The House will vote on the bill on Friday, where it is expected to pass, and that President Donald Trump will sign it into law afterward.
[March 26, 2020] MyTelemedicine Rolls Out Rapid Response Virtual Care Platform for Independent Providers, Practices, Hospitals to Perform Video Visits MCKINNEY, Texas, March 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- MyTelemedicine announced the release of its Rapid Response Virtual Care Platform. This rollout brings expanded capabilities to their already robust telehealth platform, giving doctors, group practices, and hospital systems the ability to consult virtually with their patients. MyTelemedicine's virtual care platform can assist healthcare providers better meet increased demand to manage and treat patients while avoiding the spread of COVID-19. MyTelemedicine's virtual care platform can accommodate anything from an individual provider to a large hospital system with teams of physicians, nurses and other care coordinators. Its self-provisioning technology allows for rapid deployment of a white-labeled, HIPAA- and HITECH-compliant virtual solution in minutes. In addition, its advanced API technology allows healthcare technology companies to seamlessly integrate a telehealth solution, providing their clients a customized experience. "President Trump and the CDC both have emphasized the benefits of telehealth during this global crisis. This initiative will allow healthcare providers, clinics and hospitals to immediately increase their capacity while avoiding unnecessary exposure to contagious viruses by offering virtual consultations," says Rey Colon, Founder and CEO of MyTelemedicine. Currently the MyTelemedicine virtual care platform services over1.5 million members nationwide with 24/7 access to U.S.-licensed doctors and has completed over one hundred thousand(100,000) virtual consultations via phone, email, or video through its proprietary, cloud-based telehealth platform. Last week, MyTelemedicine released a COVID-19 Self-Assessment Tool, offered through their MyTelemedicine website and mobile app Access a Doctor, to help users determine whether they may have contracted the Coronavirus. If the assessment results indicate the likelihood of COVID-19, the user can connect via telephone or video to a health care provider in the company's broad network of U.S. licensed doctors. Those users who do not show signs or symptoms of Coronavirus still have the option to initiate a video or telephonic visit. "Telemedicine is a powerful means to fight the spread of contagious diseases," says Colon. "Doctors can consult with patients in a virtual environment, and people are able to stay safe in their homes, avoiding unnecessary exposure to Coronavirus." About MyTelemedicine

MyTelemedicine developed a proprietary, HIPAA- and HITECH-compliant virtual care platform allows healthcare providers to consult with patients remotely. The digital healthcare technology company's advanced API technology allows third parties to integrate and offer a customized telemedicine experience to support their brand identity. Physicians can perform on-demand consultations with members anywhere via telephone and video technology. Patients get advice, recommendations and a diagnosis, which may include a prescription for common illnesses. For more information please visit www.mytelemedicine.com. Contact:

Yenny Nunez

469.640.6101

236715@email4pr.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mytelemedicine-rolls-out-rapid-response-virtual-care-platform-for-independent-providers-practices-hospitals-to-perform-video-visits-301030300.html SOURCE MyTelemedicine, Inc

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Contagious Solidarity: As Russia Faces Growing COVID-19 Crisis, Independent Activists Gear Up To Help

By Lyubov Chizhova, Aleksandr Litoi, Robert Coalson March 25, 2020

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- Aleksandra Krylenkova is a human rights activist with a long track record. In recent months, she has been campaigning in support of the defendants in the so-called Network (Set) case, a terrorism prosecution that many believe was trumped up by the Federal Security Service. She has also publicized alleged human rights abuses in Ukraine's Crimea region, which was seized by Russia in 2014.

Now, like the rest of the world, Krylenkova is turning her attention to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"I have already spoken to everyone who lives in my part of our building," she told RFE/RL, arguing that for Russia to cope with the rapidly unfolding situation, civil society must play new and more active roles.

She quickly created a group called Covidarnost, a portmanteau word combining COVID with the Russian word for "solidarity." The new organization's slogan is "Solidarity Is Contagious."

The grassroots group -- which includes activists, lawyers, doctors, psychologists, computer programmers, and others -- aims to identify, network, and assist local "initiative groups" around the country. It is developing standardized informational handouts and protocols under which volunteers can safely help the elderly and other vulnerable categories of people through the coronavirus crisis period.

Krylenkova said Covidarnost plans to open a telephone hotline to provide psychological and legal counseling through the crisis period.

Officially, Russia had registered 658 COVID-19 cases and no fatalities as of March 25. However, many in the country are skeptical of the official figures, which seem out of line with the experiences of other countries around the globe. A 37 percent increase in registered pneumonia cases in January further fueled suspicions.

Under the two decades of President Vladimir Putin's rule, Russia's nascent post-Soviet civil society has come under sharp attack. Some independent organizations have been forced to register as "foreign agents" and have been cut off from many key domestic and foreign funding sources. Activists have been harassed, attacked, jailed, and fined across the country.

In addition, Kremlin-friendly pseudo-nongovernmental organizations -- so-called governmental nongovernmental organizations, or GONGOs -- have been set up to marginalize genuine grassroots initiatives.

Projects like Krylenkova's already face "competition" from All Together 2020 (Myvmeste2020), an apparently similar volunteer organization created by the All-Russia Popular Front (ONF), a Kremlin-created vehicle that supports Putin and often acts as a partner to the ruling United Russia party. The All Together 2020 project is a joint effort with the state-friendly nongovernmental Russia-Land Of Possibilities organization that "was created in 2018 at the initiative of President Vladimir Putin" and the Presidential Grant Fund.

Call To Action

In a Facebook post on March 20, Krylenkova argued that people shouldn't rely on mass programs with armies of volunteers under the current circumstances.

"We must all help one another," she wrote. "I have already begun. Join me!"

Others are quickly responding to the challenges as well. Russian Internet portal Mail.ru has created downloadable sample forms for people who are willing to help their neighbors with groceries or medicines. "Let's join together to help," runs the company's call to action.

A neighborhood group in the St. Petersburg region of Chyornaya Rechka has created a similar project, urging the elderly to contact them for help. "We, your neighbors, care about you!" the group's form says.

"Our active team is about 10 people and altogether there are about 30 participants," said organizer Pavel Chuprunov. "Previously we organized garbage clean-ups and election monitoring, and stuff like that. We started our [coronavirus] campaign just recently, and people are responding well, although I personally have only helped two elderly women."

"Each activist has been assigned a residential block," he continued. "The main thing now is to tell the elderly that they have this opportunity to get help. If they use it or not, that is up to them."

Also in St. Petersburg, the legal-aid NGO Agora on March 19 opened a hotline to provide legal assistance in matters arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first few days of the project, more than 150 people have called for consultation. Many of the inquiries are about the conditions of quarantine and the penalties for violating them or about procedures for getting refunds for cancelled travel plans.

In addition, callers have asked about forced hospitalization, freedom-of-speech issues, and questions about the conduct of police officers.

"We had to get involved," Agora spokesman Vadim Meshcheryakov told RFE/RL, "since the pandemic is affecting such a large number of people. We decided to start this project because Russia does not have any centers -- state or private -- to provide legal assistance to citizens."

'Abandoned' In Quarantine

Agora lawyer Stanislav Seleznyov says many of the callers are people in quarantine who feel abandoned without information.

"As a rule, these are people who voluntarily reported themselves and checked into a hospital," Seleznyov said. "Now they are in quarantine and are given no information. Or they are given contradictory information. Some of them gave samples for testing three, four, 10, or 15 days ago and still have no results. They have not been released and they have not been told if their tests came back positive or negative."

Agora is aggregating such information and reporting it to the Health Ministry.

Another grassroots initiative has been an online petition calling for a moratorium on mortgage payments until at least May 20. More than 160,000 people had signed it as of March 25.

"More than 3.5 million of the most economically active Russian citizens cannot remain at home because they are required to make monthly mortgage payments," the petition argues. "Mortgage holidays reduce stress and help people extend their planning horizon so that they can stay home and get through the peak [infection] period."

Another project, Antijob.net, has set itself the task of protecting workers during the COVID-19 pandemic by collecting information about unsustainable working conditions and advocating that people working under "self-employment" or other similar agreements be given legal work contracts and the protections they entail.

"The current situation is grotesque," said project organizer Andrei Malygin. "People who want to do what they can to contain the virus by staying home cannot afford to self-isolate or even to stay home when they are sick or even to get proper rest on the weekends."

On March 20, Internet giant Yandex set a precedent by announcing it would provide financial assistance to its drivers and couriers who are infected or ordered into quarantine.

The Alliance of Doctors and Action are independent associations of medical professionals that have been informing authorities about the lack of preparations in many hospitals, including critical shortages of medical masks.

Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting from St. Petersburg by correspondents Lyubov Chizhova and Aleksandr Litoi of the North Desk of RFE/RL's Russian Service

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/contagious- solidarity-as-russia-faces-growing-covid- 19-crisis-independent-activists- gear-up-to-help/30509363.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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The story of oil company propaganda begins in 1914, with the Ludlow Massacre. In Ludlow, Colorado, a tent city of coal miners went on strike, and officers of the Colorado National Guard and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company responded violently. At least sixty-six people were killed in the conflict, turning popular opinion against John D. Rockefeller Jr., who owned the mine in Ludlow. To recover public trust, Rockefeller hired Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a public relations agent, to peddle falsehoods disguised as objective facts to the press: the strikers were crisis actors; the violence was the fault of labor activist Mother Jones; there was no Ludlow Massacre.

Rockefellers company, Standard Oil, evolved into what is now ExxonMobil, and its original PR strategy remains. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Exxon commissioned scientific reports that documented the potentially catastrophic effects of carbon dioxide emissions. But in the decades that followed, Exxon buried those reports and told the public the opposite: that the science was inconclusive, that regulation would destroy the American economy, and that action on climate change would mostly cause harm.

Exxons public mouthpiece was the press. For more than thirty years, from at least 1972 until at least 2004, the company placed advertorials in the New York Times to cast doubt on the negative effects of fossil fuel emissions. Over the same time span, ExxonMobil gave tens of millions of dollars to think tanks and researchers who denied the science of climate change. Taken in sum, Exxons media shrewdness and its aggressive political lobbying have set back climate action for decadesputting the nation, and the world, dangerously close to a point of no return.

Year by Year

1962

Humble Oil, a subsidiary of what would become Exxon, buys an advertisement in Life magazine reading, Each Day Humble Supplies Enough Energy to Melt Seven Million Tons of Glacier!

1977

Exxon executives learn from James F. Black, a scientist employed by the company, that the practice of burning fossil fuels releases such large amounts of carbon dioxide as to imperil the planet.

1982



Exxons researchers confirm published scientific findings: the level of CO 2 output from fossil fuels could eventually raise the global temperature by up to 3 degrees Celsius.

1989

Spring: An Exxon tanker crashes into a reef, spilling 10.8 million gallons of oil into Alaskas Prince William Sound. The disaster will be the second-largest spill in US history. In the following months, Exxon publishes a number of advertisements in the Times apologizing for the spill and asking readers to reject boycotts.

Summer: Mobil runs its first advertorial on global warming in the Times. It reads in part, Scientists do not agree on the causes and significance of [warming]but many believe theres reason for concernwere hard at work along all these fronts. We live in the greenhouse too.

Fall: The Global Climate Coalition forms with the mission to oppose action against global warming and to advocate for the interests of the fossil fuel industry by promoting doubt about climate science. Exxon is a founding member.

1997

The Kyoto Protocol is signed.

Mobil places an advertorial in the New York Times reading, Lets face it: the science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil.

2007

Exxon pledges to stop funding climate denialist public policy groups; however, a 2015 Guardian investigation showed funding did not stop.

2018

New York State pursues a civil case against ExxonMobil for defrauding investors about the risks of climate change, the first against the company to reach trial. The state asks for as much as $1.6 billion in damages; Exxon wins.

By the Numbers

$ 30 . 9 M



Amount ExxonMobil spent, through 2012, to fund think tanks and researchers who denied aspects of climate change.

$ 2 . 3 M



Minimum amount that ExxonMobil has paid since 2007 to lobbyists and members of Congress opposed to climate change legislation.

80

Percent of scientific studies ExxonMobil conducted internally from 1977 to 2014 that state climate change is man-made.

81

Percent of ExxonMobils advertorials published in the New York Times in the same time frame that cast doubt on the idea that climate change is man-made.

$300M

Exxons annual research budget during the height of the companys climate science research, in the late 1970s to mid-1980s.

16

Years that Mobil placed weekly advertorials in the New York Times. After merging with Exxon in 1999, Mobil reduced advertorial placement in the Times to every other week.

74

Number of television networks and national and local newspapers that have cited Myron Ebell, a leading climate denialist, or published his opinion pieces from 1999 to the present.

$2M

Amount ExxonMobil gave to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank of which Ebell was a director, from 1998 to 2005.

40

Percent of Americans who opposed, in 2009, a significant clean energy bill.

63

Percent of Americans who opposed the same bill after the Heritage Foundation, an ExxonMobil-funded think tank, published a study that misleadingly claimed the bill would increase gas prices to

$4 per gallon.

This article has been updated.

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Moscow, March 26 : Two elderly persons who had tested positive for the coronavirus or COVID-19 have died in Moscow, officials said.

According to reports, the Moscow city health department in a statement said they were also suffering from pneumonia and complications Russia, however, has not confirmed any deaths directly due to coronavirus and it was not immediately clear whether these deaths would be counted in its tally.

Last week, Moscow health authorities announced the death of a woman who had tested positive but later said that an autopsy showed she had died of a blood clot, not the virus.

On Tuesday, the Moscow city health department said an elderly woman who had died at the city's infectious diseases hospital had in fact tested negative and the cause of death was advanced cancer, reports said.

President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday delivered an address to the nation in which he underlined the seriousness of the epidemic, a day after visiting the Moscow hospital where cases are being treated.
The US death toll from the coronavirus pandemic has topped 1,000.

The number of dead in the US rose to 1,041 on Wednesday, with nearly 70,000 people infected with Covid-19.

In recognition of the scale of the threat, the US Senate passed a $2.2 trillion (1.8bn) economic rescue package steering aid to businesses, workers and health care systems.

The Senate passed the vote unanimously despite misgivings on both sides about whether it went far enough or not far enough.

The 880-page measure is the largest economic relief bill in US history.

The rescue package includes a $500bn (420bn) fund to help hard-hit industries and a comparable amount for direct payments of up to $3,000 apiece to millions of US families.

The legislation will also provide $350bn (294bn) for small-business loans, $250bn (210bn) for expanded unemployment aid and at least $100bn (84bn) for hospitals and related health systems.

Donald Trump, the US president, has called for Americans to observe social distancing for 15 days, including staying at home from work and closing bars and restaurants.

However, he has also said our country wasnt built to be shut down and vowed not to allow the cure be worse than the problem.

The president appeared concerned the outbreaks devastating effects on financial markets and employment will harm his chances at re-election later this year.

The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success, Mr Trump tweeted on Wednesday.

Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Show all 15 1 /15 Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A rose is delivered by drone to a woman on Mother's Day in Jounieh, Lebanon AFP/Getty Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Women dance on their balcony as a radio station plays music for a flash mob to raise spirits in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A skeleton stands on a balcony in Frankfurt, Germany AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies The film Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna is projected on a building in Rome AP Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman uses a basket tied to a rope to pull a delivery of groceries up to her balcony in Naples, Italy EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Francesco Cellini plays for his neighbours from the rooftop terrace of his flat block in Rome Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A woman gestures from her balcony in Barcelona EPA Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Cellist Karina Nunez performs for her neighbours at the balcony of her flat in Panama City Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies DJ Nash Petrovic live streams a set from his roof in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies People applaud medical workers from their balconies in Modiin, Israel Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A Brooklyn resident relaxes in a hammock hung on their balcony Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Residents toast during a "safe distance" aperitif time between neighbours in Anderlecht, Belgium Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies Musician Adam Moser plays for neighbours from his balcony in Budapest, Hungary Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man and his son on their balcony in Brooklyn Reuters Coronavirus culture from rooftops, windows and balconies A man sits alone on a roof terrace in Rome Reuters

Democrats argued Mr Trump was prioritising the economy over the health and safety of Americans.

Id like to say, lets get back to work next Friday, said Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Thatd be wonderful. But it cant be arbitrary.
Shinhan Financial Group Chairman Cho Yong-byoung speaks during the general shareholders' meeting at the group headquarters in Seoul, Thursday. / Courtesy of Shinhan Financial Group



By Park Jae-hyuk



Shinhan Financial Group Chairman Cho Yong-byoung was officially reappointed to another three-year term at a general shareholders meeting Thursday, overcoming opposition from the group's largest shareholder, the National Pension Service, and the world's largest proxy advisory service provider Institutional Shareholder Services over his alleged cronyism.



His reappointment has been attributed to Shinhan's satisfying performance throughout his first term.



In 2019, Shinhan maintained its status as the leading banking group with a 3.4 trillion won ($2.7 billion) net profit. The financial group has also enhanced its non-banking business with aggressive M&As while expanding its regional presence in Southeast Asia.



"I appreciate our shareholders and customers allowing me to serve as the chairman once more," he said. "I feel a sense of responsibility for living up to their expectations toward myself and Shinhan."



The chairman vowed to pursue open innovation, as part of efforts to become Asia's leading financial group, moving beyond simply being the biggest banking group in Korea.



"I will pursue openness and flexibility embracing private, public and academic sectors, so as to integrate cutting-edge technologies, extensive knowledge and talented people at Shinhan," he said, indicating that he will hire additional outside experts as he did during his first term.



He said Shinhan will preemptively offer its own innovative financing so that technically-skilled startups and small- and medium-sized enterprises continue their challenges for the future, getting over their present difficulties.



In response to customers who lost their money due to Lime Asset Management's suspension of fund redemptions, Cho apologized to those customers and promised his company will make every effort to restore its credibility.



"As Shinhan Investment announced last week, our group is doing our best to minimize our customer losses and to settle this situation as soon as possible," he said.



The chairman added Shinhan will overcome the current coronavirus crisis based on its resilience.



During the shareholders' meeting, Shinhan also appointed former Bank of Korea Deputy Governor Park Chul as board chairman.


(Natural News) Until a few months ago, Italy conjured up images of beautiful historic cities, amazing food and wine, and a magnificent coastline. Sadly, the relentless march of COVID-19 across that beautiful country has forever tarnished those images. We are now bombarded with scenes of desperate Italian healthcare workers working frantically to save lives, but losing hundreds every day.

Those scenes should serve as a stark warning to other Western countries that COVID-19 is by no means a Chinese virus killing people far away. Experts have warned that mistakes made early on have contributed to the desperate situation Italy now faces, and other countries who blindly repeat those mistakes will face the same consequences. (Related: Italy continues to be pummeled by the coronavirus: Deaths now top that of China, health care system pushed to the limit  is there even an end in sight?)

Italian hospitals and healthcare workers overwhelmed

With its population of just over 60 million, Italy has already lost over 6,000 people to this virus, with no end in sight. The United States, with its population of more than 327 million, risks losing far more of its citizens. Thus far, the American response to the disease has been slow, disjointed and ineffective, with different states handling the situation in completely different ways and no clear direction from above.

Perhaps if the powers that be would pay more attention to the desperate scenes captured in Italian hospitals, they would be more motivated to take the decisive steps needed to stop the virus in its tracks, right now.

The U.K.s Mirror recently reported on the desperate situation in just one Italian hospital:

With the Bergamo hospitals ICU completely full, medics  who are reportedly calling it the Apocalypse  are seen dashing between patients amid the screech of air escaping tubes and alarms beeping trying to keep the infected alive.

The bubbles, which cover the entire head and cause staff great communication difficulties, attempt to equalise the air pressure in the lungs. 

Other footage shows patients on trolleys in wards, with reportedly every available space, including meeting rooms, being used for patients  with staff desperate for other nations to see what is happening and go into complete lock down or face the same.

There have been numerous reports of army vehicles seen moving dozens of coffins out of the city, as hundreds continue to die each day. The virus is spreading out of control, and hospitals across Italy are completely overwhelmed.

And recent reports indicate that the disease does not discriminate. While the virus killed mostly elderly patients in China, people across the age spectrum have been admitted to Italian hospitals in a critical condition, and the mortality rate is staggering.

No, its utterly another thing

Asked by Sky News whether COVID-19 is just like the flu, Dr. Roberto Cosentini said, No, its utterly another thing. More pneumonia than flu its a very severe pneumonia and so its a massive strain for every health system.

He added, Every day we see 50 to 60 patients who come into our emergency department with pneumonia and most of them are so severe they need very high levels of FIO2 or oxygen.

Anesthetist Dr. Lorenzo Grazioli added, I have never felt so stressed in my life.  When you arrive at this point you realise you are not enough. We [have] 100 anaesthetists here, we are doing our best, maybe its not enough.

Doctors in Italy have begged the leaders of other countries to wake up and learn from what has happened to them, before they, too, end up in the same situation.

Stay informed, stay alive. Bookmark Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

Mirror.co.uk

BBC.com
A medical worker examines a patient with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) therapies at a temporary hospital in Jiangxia District in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 25, 2020. (Xinhua/Shen Bohan)





About 3 to 10 per cent of patients who recovered from Covid-19 tested positive again after being discharged from hospital, doctors in Wuhan have found.



Researchers around the world are trying to determine whether recovered patients can still infect people with the coronavirus that causes the disease and if they have developed antibodies offering them immunity to the disease.



Doctors from Tongji hospital in the city, where the disease was first identified, told state broadcaster CCTV that they have found no evidence that the recovered patients became infectious after recovery, based on close observations of their family members and laboratory tests.



In spite of its relatively small sample size, the Tongji hospital research is especially relevant as China now has far more recovered patients than new confirmed cases.



The Chinese mainland, where the disease first emerged last December, has discharged over 90 per cent of its infected patients and around 4,300 confirmed patients are still receiving treatment in hospitals.



The country has reported at least 81,000 cases and more than 3,200 deaths, but most of the new cases have been imported.



Wang Wei, president of Tongji hospital told CCTV's prime-time programme that of the 147 recovered patients they studied, only five  or just over 3 per cent  have tested positive in nucleic acid tests again after recovery.



Meanwhile,?Life Times, a health news outlet affiliated with?People's Daily, reported this week that quarantine facilities in Wuhan have reported that about 5 to 10 per cent of their recovered patients tested positive again.






Tunis: Battles erupted around Tripoli on Wednesday following intensified bombardment of the Libyan capital, defying international pleas for a truce to tackle the coronavirus after the first case was confirmed in the country.

The internationally recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) launched an assault on several fronts early in the day, including an attack on an airbase west of Tripoli, according to both sides.

However, later on Wednesday the Libyan National Army (LNA) of eastern-based commander Khalifa Haftar said its forces moved from repelling the attack to capturing territory near Zuwara, 30 miles (45km) north.

Attacks and counterattacks in Libya continue to inflict further suffering and civilian casualties, the U.N. mission said in a tweet, calling for an immediate halt to the violence.

Residents of Tripoli, seat of the GNA, said the shelling was the worst in weeks, shaking windows in the city centre miles from the front line in the southern suburbs.

We are done in this country. There is a war and we hear clashes all day, fearing a missile will fall near us. Now there is coronavirus. If it spreads in Libya, I think we can only pray, said Issa, 30, a shop owner in Tripoli.

Pro-GNA forces attacked al-Watiya airbase, 125 km (80 miles) west of Tripoli and the closest such facility to the capital in LNA hands, early on Wednesday, leading to intense clashes.

In response to the heaviest bombardments Tripoli has seen, we launched a series of counter attacks against Haftar, Mohamed Geblawi, spokesman for the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a statement.

Geblawi cited what he called indiscriminate shelling by the LNA after both sides had agreed to a ceasefire to tackle the coronavirus.

The escalation in the fighting could spell disaster for Libyas already fragmented and badly stretched health system in handling the coronavirus, after authorities confirmed the first case of the disease late on Tuesday.
During its Annual General Meeting for the financial year 2019 held at the Companys Head office in Seef District on Wednesday 25 th March 2020, Shareholders of Bahrain Kuwait Insurance Company (BSC) approved the Board of Directors recommendation to distribute a cash dividend of 15% (BD 2,140,349) of the paid-up capital, excluding treasury shares.

The General Assembly also approved the rest of agenda items of this meeting. Finally, the General Assembly approved the appointment of Mr. Khalid Saoud Alhasan, Shawqi Ali Fakroo, Dr. Emad Jawad Bukhamseen, Mr. Bijan Khosrowshahi, Mr.Thamer Ebrahim Arab and Mr. Mubarak Al Ayyar as representatives of the Board for the

financial period (2020-2022). Also, the AGM approved the election of Mr. Murad Ali Murad , Mr. Hasan Mohamed Zainalabedin, Mr. Mohamed Ebrahim Zainal and Mohamed Ahmed Alrayes to this new Board for the same period.



Mr. Murad Ali Murad  the Chairman stated in his report the challenges being faced by the insurance industry during the year 2019 and the importance of using technology to keep pace with modern developments in the field of insurance.

He also added that business plan for the next three years has been approved by the Board, aiming to increase productivity in addition to maximizing investment income and cost-saving in order to maintain the leading position in the insurance market in the Kingdom of

Bahrain.



Mr. Murad Ali Murad explained the rationale behind the decrease in the company's profits compared to the year before. The following extraordinary expenses/provisions incurred by the company during the year, say (1) VAT on UPR of policies issued in 2018 and in force in 2019 which were not collected from customers (2) the compensation paid to the employees on the voluntary early retirement program (3) the increase in technical reserves based on the external actuarys recommendation report.



Mr. Murad added that that the international rating agency A.M. Best has affirmed the credit rating of the company A- with stable outlook after reviewing the companys performance in 2019. This rating reflects the companys stability and the ability to meet all its financial obligations.



Mr. Ebrahim Alrayes  the CEO said that the fierce competition in the market has become a major concern for companies operating in the sector, especially in the motor and medical insurances. As for the financial results, the company achieved net premium revenue of BD 33.3 million, compared to BD 31.7 million in the previous year, recording a growth of 5%. The loss ratio also improved, as it decreased from 76.8% to 73.6%. It reflected positively in technical profits which increased by 14% from BD 1.95 million in 2018 to BD 2.22 million in 2019.



On the other hand, Mr. Alrayes mentioned that the company gives great importance to the development within the company, whether through training of individuals or through developing services and finding new products. As for the future outlook, Mr. Alrayes said that despite the instability of political and economic conditions in the world in general, we expected the company to achieve better results considering the fact that in 2019, it incurred some extraordinary expenses and an increase in insurance reserves that had a direct impact on profits.

In addition, the companys business plan aims towards limiting the increase in expenses. However, we must take into account the impact of the outbreak of COVID 19 in the global economy in general and Bahrain in particular.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 26, 2020 16:40 657 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206d98590 4 National COVID-19,coronavirus,outbreak,virus-corona,virus-korona-indonesia,Nadiem-Makarim,Education-and-Culture-Ministry,volunteers Free

Education and Culture Minister Nadiem Makarim is calling on the general public and university students across the country to join efforts to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our country is currently at war against an invisible enemy that is moving fast and threatening human lives. Therefore, Im asking all people to join the fight to defeat this enemy, Nadiem said during a video conference with student volunteers on COVID-19 matters in Jakarta on Thursday, as quoted by Antara news agency.

The student volunteers would be assigned to various tasks involved with preventing and managing the disease.

Read also: Education minister Nadiem Makarim calls on people to stay at home

The minister said he felt touched after hearing that about 15,000 student volunteers were signing up for the program. I highly appreciate it, he said.

Apart from mobilizing university students, the ministry also took other measures regarding COVID-19, including preparing laboratories to test more samples from people suspected of contracting COVID-19 and turning some of its facilities into isolation wards.

There are currently 13 medical schools and 13 educational hospitals appointed by the Health Ministry to be COVID-19 test labs, the minister said. He added that the lack of extensive and systematic testing to screen for the disease would allow the virus to spread uncontrollably.

He said his ministry had also prepared an educational hospital to be ready to treat COVID-19 patients.

Read also: Indonesia scraps national exams due to COVID-19

The ministry is also planning to use dormitories owned by the Education Quality Assurance Agency and the Educators Development and Empowerment Center as isolation wards for patients under surveillance and general monitoring for COVID-19. Such facilities have a total capacity of 18,000 beds.

To help curb COVID-19 transmission, Nadiem had issued a ministerial regulation on Tuesday canceling national exams and prohibiting any form of examination that would require students to gather. (aly)